I have been following Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a collaborative effort between Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers[1]Creative Commons. 7 June 2011. Creative Commons & the Association of Educational Publishers to establish a common learning resources framework. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27603 . … Continue reading , with some interest as I start to look at SIL.org and potential services and resources offered through SIL.org are merged with the larger world of well described data.
https://youtu.be/-1QEkA9qbwA
SIL has a long tradition of providing linguistic training. With the digital revolution, it only seems right that these training resources would be described appropriately in the educational arena. It will be interesting to look at LRMI as it develops over the next few months. And then to think about applying it in the context of Drupal.
Creative Commons. 7 June 2011. Creative Commons & the Association of Educational Publishers to establish a common learning resources framework. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27603 . [Accessed: 27 November 2011] [Link]
I have been looking for a decent coding application for OS X. I don’t do it fulltime. And I want something intuitive to use, simple to discover the workflows in, and has syntax highlighting. I do CSS, xHtml and am getting into some PHP. I don’t favor Aquamacs‘ command-line-like interface when saving documents.
Over the past several months I have been wrestling with academic expression on the web. I have been trying to think through what it should look like. What do I want my footprint to be? How do I want to participate in the discussions I am involved in? Part of the struggle has been with content distribution v.s. content publishing. In using the web as a content distribution platform the web technology question looks more like "how are we going to arrange these PDFs". Where as the web publishing question looks more like blog posts published directly to web browser oriented venues. Academic writing has traditionally been the written discussion between professionals in various pursuits of life. But as the web has shaped how we communicate academia must (and is) consider how it is going to participate in the discussion. If social media and its various forms are where the discussion is happening then how is academia going to stay relevant or connected? This is most relevant in the area of citations and links. These questions are not just relevant for the individual but are also relevant to academic institutions like, SIL International, Linguistic Society of America, Academy of the Sciences, etc.
Should be considering is that in a world where academic writing is reduced, where is their place. The LSA has a journal, Language, which I enjoy reading. But are they the center of academic thought that they once were? is their presentation of knowledge really the medium of use today?
While I agree that the web is radically changing the way information is decimated. I doubt that the structure of argumentation will change. We may have to find new ways of expressing the points of the argument but an argument will still have points. So, till our professors stop making us write papers, and allow us to tweet our contradictions, and assertions of scientific fact.... How to build an argument and how to write a paper are still important.
I have come across some interesting resources. One of them reminded me of something taught in my undergraduate degree. My philosophy professor made us learn an outline for paper writing which has proven most helpful.
Here is the original outline
1:Issue:What is integration
2. Position: for integration
+3. Argument 1: social pluses -4. Objection 1 social negatives +5. Reply 1: with out the negatives of life are we really preparing students for life
-15. Objection to the position: Separation -16. Argument for the objection to the position: separation is necessary for lower salaries on school budgets +17. Objection to the objection to the position: -18. Reply to the Argument for the objection to the position: Even with a higher budgets on salaries lowering the student to teacher ratio and paying more would help all student overall.
This argument still needed to demonstrate the dichotomy of a paragraph.
Introduction :: why should the reader read this? - the grab. Definition :: What are you talking about? Relationship to higher-level thought :: how does this relate to what the reader knows? Conclusion :: what does your claim imply? Transition :: What question does this lead us to ask?In this outline he showed that one needs a
Proposition
Some supporting elements
Some supporting elements
Some supporting elements
Then to strengthen the argument a counter proposition is needed.
One could choose to be very crafty and make the counter argument a counter to one of the supporting elements of the original proposition. But regardless of the quality of the counter proposition, it still needs several supporting elements.
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
Then the author needs some discourse to deconstruct the counter supporting elements and explain why they are not valid contradictions supporting the counter position. During this discourse the opposing opinion is clearly presented. Eventually, this discourse will then refute the counter proposition. At which time a second counter proposition is needed.
Second counter proposition
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
Element supporting counter position
More discourse.... and the process repeats itself until a point is proven or considered well laid out.
The importance of the point in explaining the opposing side better than the opposing side can, was recently brought back into focus as I read a post by Nagesh Belludi [1]Nagesh Belludi. 12 December 2008. [Effective Arguments] Explain Your Opponent’s Perspective. [Accessed: 11 November 2011] … Continue reading . Recently I have also encountered several works of interest regarding academic discourse. The following presentation from Beyond the PDF [2]Anita de Waard, Paul Thompson, Maria Liakata, Raheel Nawaz and Sophia Ananiadou. Comparing scientific discourse annotation schemes for enhanced knowledge extraction. Paper presented at the Beyond the … Continue reading Has a really good break down in the first 10 minutes of the presentation on the discourse structure of an academic paper.
From time to time, I read an academic paper, or journal article which really shines. It is engaging, it tells a compelling story, presents new insights and knowledge, and it brings me to a new conclusion or awareness of my surroundings.
I recently had the pleasure of reading a paper by Alexandre François, on some phonology aspects of a language he was doing research in. [3] Alexandre François. 2010. Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral of Hiw: resolving the ambiguity of a complex segment. Phonology Vol. 27 (3):393-434. DOI:10.1017/S0952675710000205 [Link] He did a marvelous job at presenting an issue, the evidence to be considered, and then also the propositions and the objections. He brought the reader with him as he explained the issues. The level of background knowledge needed was minimized, yet this work was not focused on presenting just the background issues and story. It is a recommended read if you are interested in phonology sorts of things, but also if you are interested in looking at the presentation of argumentation.
Anita de Waard, Paul Thompson, Maria Liakata, Raheel Nawaz and Sophia Ananiadou. Comparing scientific discourse annotation schemes for enhanced knowledge extraction. Paper presented at the Beyond the PDF Workshop: January 19-21, 2011 University of California San Diego. [Accessed 8 November 2011] https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/workshop-papers/comparing-scientific-discourse-annotation [Abstract] [YouTube Video]
Alexandre François. 2010. Phonotactics and the prestopped velar lateral of Hiw: resolving the ambiguity of a complex segment. Phonology Vol. 27 (3):393-434. DOI:10.1017/S0952675710000205 [Link]
While I was in Malaysia, I had the honor to meet and talk to quite a bit with Professor Emeritus Howard McKaughan. We talked a about his linguistics based work in Mexico, the Philippines, and in Malaysia. He can tell stories, interesting stories.
Howard - Story Telling
There is something unique about his generation of Americans (currently in their 80s and 90s). It is their ability to craft and tell stories. I feel that this is a cultural point I don’t have. It could be because I am third culture, or because I talk to much of the macro-details, or it might simply be because I am long winded. Continue reading →
I know I am bit late to the party, but I just updated to OS X 10.6.6. I have been resisting the App Store for ages. (I am doing a slide scanning project with Nikon CoolScan scanners, whose drivers require OS X 10.6 and lower.) But I needed to re-install Developer Tools and my OS disk was scratched. – A real pain. So I had to download 10.6.6 to get the new development tools to work. And a part of the package I get the App Store. So I might as well check it out. It is a real pain to use.
There is no way to save an app I am interested in purchasing but am not going to purchase right now. – This is a feature in the iTunes store.
No feature for saving interesting apps.
The search algorithm for apps does not help me get the apps I want. – I thought I would try a search for a metadata editing tool. Some apps which I know are in the Apple App Store, and this is their primary function are not showing up.Disappointing.
One of the things I enjoy is reading about the licenses that CC has retired. Usually they do great job of explaining why they are retiring the license. Understanding these use cases and their context is a really informative view on society.
One interesting retired license is the Sampling+ License. They did a really good job of explaining why they were retiring the license. One of the interesting exercise they talk about was how they had to go through the machine readable description to describe the license — basically mapping out the assertions.
Sound+ is interesting because it is targeted for sound. It makes me wonder if sound/audio can still be licensed under Creative Commons if it is not protected by copyright.
I have a reason to use WordPress as a front end and Google Spreadsheet as a backend. I have been looking high and low for a plugin which would allow me to pull content from the spreadsheet and then edit it in the WordPress interface, save it back to the Google Spreadsheet. The advantage to this would be that as record in my spreadsheet would go into a single row, that I could then spice up the UI a bit to make things logical for users. – No luck.
Many people maintain dynamic content on Google Documents or hold volatile data on Google Spreadsheets. These change when collaborators save an update or users submit a form. Occasionally, one may wish to embed the contents of one’s Google Documents or Spreadsheets in a post or page to reflect the latest updates on one’s blog. This plugin seeks to provide this functionality without using an <iframe>. In addition, it caches contents of the Google Documents or Spreadsheets to speed up page loading.
First of all it can allow you to easily convert a link to a document so that it uses Google Docs as the viewer. Secondly, it provides a method of embedding certain document types directly into your post or page.
Fetches a published Google Spreadsheet using a [gdoc key=""] WordPress shortcode, then renders it as an HTML table, embedded in your blog post or page. The only required parameter is key, which specifies the document you’d like to retrieve. Optionally, you can also strip a certain number of rows (e.g., strip=”3″ omits the top 3 rows of the spreadsheet) and you can supply a table summary,
and customized class value.
Google Doc Embedderhttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-document-embedder/
Google Doc Embedder lets you embed several types of files into your WordPress pages using the Google Docs Viewer – allowing inline viewing (and optional downloading) of the following file types, with no Flash or PDF browser plug-ins required.
None of these things did what I really wanted. So, I kept looking. Eventually I found this Publishing Google docs to your blog, which talks about taking a GoogleDocs Writer document and letting it be the data for your post. But I wanted Spread sheet stuff.
Then I found HOW TO: USE GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS AS A DATA SOURCE IN WORDPRESS from 2008 (part 2). That is like a century ago. I am not sure there were even WP Custom Posts around then. But this source only tells one how to get data out of Google Spread Sheets (and I think that Google Spread Sheets have updated since then too).
There was one hopeful solution. That is PhpGrid and the phpGrid Lite WordPress Plugin (on Extend). I think I could take my whole data model and apply it inside of PhpGrid and not need Google Spread sheet.
phpGrid Lite WordPress Plugin is based on phpGrid Lite, a free version of phpGrid. phpGrid is a simple and fully customizable PHP control for generating data-bound, AJAX, PHP datagrid.
Grid-based editing, create, read, update and delete (CRUD), are the most common operations for web developers. With phpGrid web-based data editing is easy. Even with little programming background, one can develop professional looking, AJAX-enabled PHP datagrids in just a few minutes.
Finally, I did find out about GoogleDoc’s Data APIby reading Saving Form Data to Google Spreadsheets Using PHP and the Google Docs API by far IN space WEB+, but I just want to plug something in and it to work. So this solution got pushed no further. (And they were using an older, depreciated version of the API).
The other day I was looking at a UN website and one of the pages which showed some promise was full of Lorem ipsum. Strange cause it was a live website.
I set up another WordPress site and I wanted to transfer what I had written there to this site, so that all my writings would be together. This would include comments, links and attached media, and metadata about the post.
What I want a transfer plugin to do.
So I looked for a WordPress Plugin to do that. I found two (and as it is when I find more than one I have to test it out and write-up the results.):
Xpost: Cross-post was the first plugin I found and it seemed to have a lot of really nice features.
Transfer: the main difference between the two based on author description is that this one said that it also transferred images attached with the post.
So I tried Transfer first.
Transfer
However, when I installed Transfer, it said that it could not find the Zend Framework… Warning: require_once(Zend/XmlRpc/Client.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home1/public_html/username/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/transfer/library/Aperto/XmlRpc.php on line 3Path values changed to protect the innocent.
The plugin requires that one download Zend Framework Minimal (http://framework.zend.com/download/latest) and put the Zend folder under /wp-content/plugins/transfer/library/
I did this and I would get the WordPress white screen of death. I was told that this white screen of death was because my provider terminated a process (I had maxed out my user’s memory allocation) This white screen happens on one of my installs but not on another under a different user… so, not sure what is going on – Neither WP install would transfer the post. To get around the white screen of death I had to de-activate the plugin by editing the database.
I had initially failed to read the install requirement for Zend, so I found another solution for adding Zend to wordpress.
So I knew I needed to install the Zend Framework, I am sorta surprised that Dreamhost, my hosting provider did not have Zend set up on my server in a way that WordPress was automatically going to detect it. Oh, well is there a plugin for that? – Uh, yes there are like a gilzillion! So I went with the first one: Zend Framework [or also in WP-Extend]. I loaded it and then added the helpful code found in the online WordPress forums.
Go to your wp-config and paste this right after * @package WordPress part and before // ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** Zend Framework **/
function add_include_path ($path)
{
foreach (func_get_args() AS $path)
{
if (!file_exists($path) OR (file_exists($path) && filetype($path) !== 'dir'))
{
trigger_error("Include path '{$path}' not exists", E_USER_WARNING);
continue;
}
After I did both of these things all of my errors went away.
I did try a second plugin, WP-ZFF Zend Framework Full for installing the Zend Framework, this one said that the plugin would modify the include path so I thought that could use this without modifying wp-config.php but the plugin failed on import so I deleted it.
So in the sad case I that I was not able to get Transfer to work I moved on and decided to try Xpost.
Xpost
Xpost [on WP-Extend] was a breeze to set up and I actually got it working for a simple post. However, I was not able to select the target category in the master WP install, from the writer’s WP install (The test post I used just when to the default category).
Xpost not getting categories available on the master WP install.
The box just says categories loading. This seems to be a problem reported by Nigel and by gulliver.
The test image was not transferred to the media library of the master WP install from the writer’s WP install. Additionally, if the category of the post is changed in the Master WP install, then the writer’s WP install loses track of the post. This is only temporary… If the writer tries to cross-post the post again, then the This results in the writer not being able to update the post. (Red error message is shown.) But if the writer tries a second time then the original post in the Master WP install is found, and updated. Including the “removed” category. However, this “removed” category was intentionally moved by the editor on the Master WP install. So this creates a bit of a conflict. BTW: It would be nice to be able to select a special custom post type for imports.
It seems that Xpost was designed to broadcast out rather that to ingest.
