Monthly Archives: April 2010

Wish List for Desire2Learn, Part 2

In addition to the items I listed a couple of weeks ago, I’d like to be able to do the following in D2L:

  • see attachments when I’m grading discussions
  • collapse discussion topics in the Forums & Topics List, so that only the title is visible (not the description), and I can scroll through them faster to find the ones with unread messages

Links for 2010-04-23 [delicious.com]

Video: “Bayeux Tapestry”

Video:  “Bayeux Tapestry

Alternatives to Ning

As I wrote the other day, Ning will be phasing out their free service.  Today I ran across a few lists of alternatives:

Links for 2010-04-16 [delicious.com]

  • Current search results are more analogous to receiving a bibliography than a sourced report. For each query, Cpedia algorithmically summarizes and clusters the ideas on the web and uses this to generate a report. We do the heavy lifting of removing all the repetition, so that unique and novel content surfaces. Just as Wikipedia uses the effort of a large number of people to edit a topic, we combine all the documents written about an idea on the web to generate one article.
  • Welcome to Linklist—a new way to collect, organize, and share lists with links.
  • DidDone is a search engine with access to millions of information from different websites and with results giving the user more options to searches on the Internet. With DidDone Search you can search for images and news too. Initially, the search will be available with the DidDone version in English and Portuguese and later in other languages for different countries around the world.
  • Cadmus is a real-time service that manages your stream (Twitter, FriendFeed and RSS) by displaying the most relevant content since the last time you checked in. It helps you get caught up on what you have missed.
  • You can search, or download manual online for free, it is a downloadable user manuals, instruction and owners guide pdf book
  • Mark up, fill out, and collaborate on PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and web pages… for free!
  • Yebol’s mission is to build human-like world’s knowledge base and provide knowledge based search (semantics) and services.

No More Ning for Educators

Yesterday, Ning‘s new CEO made the following announcement in the creator‘s forum:

We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

I know I’m not the only educator who will have to start looking for a new application to use for classes and professional development.

(Thanks to Laura Nicosia for pointing out the announcement in Facebook.)

Links for 2010-04-15 [delicious.com]

Wish List for Desire2Learn, Part 1

Colorado’s community colleges switched from Blackboard to Desire2Learn (D2L) this semester, so I’ve been using it since January.  There are a lot of things I like better about D2L, particularly how much easier it is to reorder items and how it’s possible to give individual students “special access” to turn in assignments late.

However, I’d like to be able to

  • make more than one topic in Content or another feature invisible or visible at the same time
  • stay where I posted a reply in a discussion topic rather than ending up back at the top of the page
  • make comments when grading discussions
  • automatically send news items as email messages
  • put text in a module
  • create a link to a module rather than just a topic
  • find restrictions for visibility and availabity and the Save buttons in the same place in all functions

Video: “Forward D2L email to external email account”

Video:  “Forward D2L email to external email account

Links for 2010-04-01 [delicious.com]