Disqus - Latest Comments for Tony Hirst

Re: GeoTweets – Inviting your network into the classroom

Tony Hirst — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:41:10 -0000

What a wonderful activity :-)

Not wanting to spoil the fun, there is a possible link in here to talking about how technology might go about extracting and plotting the location automatically - e.g. http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012696.html
and as soon as I get it working properly (hopefully later today)
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/geotwitterous

I know the level of this is all wrong, but here's how Google are thinking about how to find complete addresses from partial ones to improve their local search/Google maps search engine:

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=1022

Re: YouTube’s Slow Drift Toward Enlightenment

Tony Hirst — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:47:22 -0000

Hi Dan
I've been tinkering with various ways of making OpenLearn content from the Open University available in a portable way ( http://feedlearning.com ) and I've also had a go at the UC Berkeley youtube video lectures.

In particular, here's a way of browsing the UCB youtube playlisted coursers, as a well as searching and viewing all their youtube video lectures:
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012375.html

tony

Re: Howcast: Instructional How-To Videos

Tony Hirst — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:17:27 -0000

A couple of issues I have with the growing number of instructional video sites are there incomplete coverage, and knowing which one to go to for a particular class of video (for example http://www.ivideosongs.com/ for musical instrument tutorials)...

... which is why maintain and use a custom search engine - "How Do I?" - that works over all the instructional video sites I come across: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/howdoi

Re: Google Maps: Recent My Maps Browser

Tony Hirst — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:12:39 -0000

A couple of days ago, I put together a Yahoo pipe that lets you use a Google MyMap as a crude geoblogging interface.

The pipe will produce a (geo)RSS feed from the "View in Google Earth" kml output of the mymap, and also have a go at adding a publications date and link/URL for each 'post'.
There's a brief write up of the hcak, along with a link to the PIpe, at http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012936.html

Re: Facebook education app gets funding

Tony Hirst — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:41:40 -0000

I'm part of a team that has been developing a Course Profiles Facebook app ( http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010855.html ) for a particular institution - The Open University, the UK's distance education university.

The avenue we're keen to explore is the extent to which 'public' social networks can be used to provide additional forms of support for our home study students, who are spread across the UK (and indeed, across the world).

So as with the other apps, we support 'find a study buddy' functionality, 'friends on a course' and course comment walls.

We're also offering support in the app for people taking OpenLearn open educational courses - http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn - so you can add an OpenLearn course unit to your profile if you want to. Again, the idea here is to help broker social networks amongst learners where physical colocation is all but ruled out, unlike the situation in trad universities where you sit in lectures with your peers.

On the topic of daily activity, if a distance learner makes use of the app once a week, then we max out at 14% daily active....

Re: They said it couldn't happen

Tony Hirst — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:49:32 -0000

"everyone uses it in a different way"

More than that - individuals use it in many different ways...

Re: WebCite

Tony Hirst — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 05:35:21 -0000

Here's a 2p thought...

Journal papers etc are atomic in that, whilst they do rely on previous literature and cite it, they also work as standalone documents.

Blog posts are more conversational, and a lot of the context is lost if the reader is not aware of the stuff round the edges - the content of previous posts, the content of posts that are linked to etc?

Re: I'm not an expert

Tony Hirst — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:46:19 -0000

I try to make sure my blog and presentations on slideshare are completely opaque to most people, so i can pretend that I've been publishing my ideas out there in the open, happy in the knowledge that no-one will understand a word of it... But then, I didn't even get nominated for the edublog awards, so maybe that approach doesn't work either?

Re: Travel coordinates: blogging across the map

Tony Hirst — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:54:03 -0000

Hi
I've posted a utility that will generate the geoRSS url for a mymaps 'geoblog' given the URL of the 'View in google earth' kml file URL from a MyMap:

http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/maps/

Re: Travel coordinates: blogging across the map

Tony Hirst — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:18:09 -0000

No probs - if you can think of ways I can make it easier/more useful, please let me know.

eg I'll try to add a feature that generates a tinyurl of the rss feed over the weekend...

Re: My del.icio.us bookmarks for 2008-04-01

Tony Hirst — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:07:07 -0000

I've popped a couple of bookmarklets up at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/iPaper/ to make it easier to view docs on arbitrary web pages using scribd's ipaper... If a pdf or a doc is linked to from a public (nonauthenticated) web page, the bookmarklets will either rewrite the link to point to an online view of the doc on the scribd site, or embed the doc using flash ipaper in the current web page...

Re: 2007/10/03/berkeley-youtube/

Tony Hirst — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:26:32 -0000

Here's a Facebook app that integrates allows you to search and play UCB Video Lectures within Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id...

It builds on this Grazr UCB video search'n'play widget: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blog/010633.html

tony

Re: 2007/10/04/grazr-20/

Tony Hirst — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:07:54 -0000

Please ignore the vitriol in the above post... been a long day and I was frustrated with things breaking...

Grazr has saved me so much time over the last year, I don't think I could so much development without it!

Re: 2007/10/03/berkeley-youtube/

Tony Hirst — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:09:37 -0000

Here's an update on the use of feeds and Grazr widgets to display UC Berkeley video lectures - a feed that lets you browse their playlisted courses, as well as search over all their youtube uploaded video courses. I'll facebookify it if i get a spare 20 mins somewhen!

http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012375.html

tony

ps as far as Facebook goes, the first proper app was Curse Profiles ( http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010855.html ). There are a couple more on the drawing board...

tony

Re: 2007/04/27/obama-twitter/

Tony Hirst — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:17:55 -0000

I was playing with a twitter/yahoo pipes/google maps mashup today that displays your tweets (or those of the people you follow on twitter) on a google map, after passing the twitter feed through a geo-coding yahoo pipe.

A comment suggested if you visualise Obama's twitter feed in this way, you can see how he's ringing up the miles... see the map here: http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012712.html