factline ist Partner des EU-Projektes Food & Fecundity (6. EU-Rahmenprogramm für Forschung, Technologische Entwicklung und Demonstration, Thematische Priorität 5: Lebensmittelqualität und sicherheit. Diesbezüglich haben wir heute ein Email von der FFG bekommen:

"....Ich freue mich, Ihnen mitteilen zu dürfen, dass die Success Story für as Projekt Food and Fecundity nun fertiggestellt wurde......"

Doch lesen Sie selbst: Success Story: Lebensmittel & Fruchtbarkeit

ePortfolios are collections of personal information about a learner that represent accomplishments, goals, experiences, and other personalized records that a learner can present to schools, employers, or other entities. Typical uses of ePortfolios go beyond the traditional concept of a transcript to include applying for jobs, designing personalized learning, and tracking career planning.

Wir freuen uns mitteilen zu können, dass wir den Release FCS 2.6.2 am Dienstag den 29. Mai auf unsere und ihre Server raufgeladen haben. Für wenige Sekunden wurden die Server upgedated. DNeben zahlreichen Bugfixes gibt es eine Reihe von neuen Features

In Kürze seien die wichtigsten erwähnt:

• Plattform Cloning Funktionalität: sAdmins können ab jetzt gesamte Plattformen inklusive Struktur, Inhalten und Usergruppen beliebig oft vervielfältigen (Szenario bspw: ausgehend von einem Muster-E-Portfolio könnenmi wenigan Handgriffen idente Plattformen für verschiedene UserInnen angelegt werden.
• RSS: Services und Folder sowie Latest Changes werden im RSS 2.0-Format zur Verfügung gestellt. Ein präzises Berechtigungssystem erlaubt auf Token-Basis die punktegenaue Syndizierung von Inhalten.
• Zusätzlich kann FCS als RSS-Aggregator fungieren
  

• Ajaxifizierung der Kommentare mit dem Ziel der Vereinfachung und Beschleunigung.
• tinyMCE wurde als WYSIWYG-Editor mit Zusatzfunktionen wie zbsp. factInclude integriert und ersetzt den bisherigen  Editor.
• Edit Include als eine Include-Option
• Session keep alive, d.h. sie können das Session Timeout (bisher 30 Minuten) damit umgehen
  
• Ajaxifizierung für die Boxen der linken Sidebar: ermöglicht schnelles Öffnen/Schließen ohne Neuladen der Seite.
• Multiple set permissions in Verzeichnissen (new folder action).

Below you’ll find a quote from a very favorable review of a new technology – namely Trampoline’s SONAR – that promises to introduce a paradigmatic shift in the way organizations and their employees can make use of information and knowledge – what they do is in fact not so new but there is at least no other application around, except to some extent I see System One in the race tough they lack – as far as I know – social networking capability. If you click the link you’ll find a description of an amazing concept and piece of software. I really like the idea of making things visible – done automagically by tools. But and that’s the reason I’m pointing you there: this entire approach makes only sense if you believe there is a hidden truth that only needs to be unveiled by some magic.

Trampoline: Harnessing Social Behavior in the Enterprise: “Trampoline’s SONAR platform brings a fresh approach to information management, by harnessing the social behaviour that occurs within organizations. SONAR plugs into the corporate network and connects to existing systems, including email servers, contact databases and document stores. It analyses this data to map social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise”
Read/Write Web

On the contrary I think Social Software or Enterprise 2.0 is – at least not only – not about making things visible via decoding meaning and/or social action but essentially about enabling an organizational framework that supports collaboration based on people, objects and the needs of those people on an individual level. To get there you need a change in mindsets first, proper tools that help you to associate on purpose and only eventually tools that make the hidden things visible. Paradoxically by the same token, however, I think those tools – the social software ones – need to support making things visible and invisible at the same time.

I myself wouldn’t trust the data-mining tools of the SONAR kind if I were a knowledge worker. I’d like to be in control and like to freely choose what is in/visible. In German I’d call the impressive SONAR Rasterfahndung (dragnet investigation) which has a rather bad connotation. Somehow this tool is some kind of travesty of the visions of social software by turning some of the basic principles into toolsets of control. Sounds like the old Foucauldian dispositif (thanks to Martin for the link) – a net of un/spoken discourses, institutions, tools, and laws – creates and analyzes the “You” newly from the perspective of the social networking analysis.

Der Artikel beginnt mit dem Hinweis, dass ePortfolios "immer mehr zu einem unverzichtbaren Begleiter beim Lebenslangen Lernen" werden. Ich höre die Botschaft, allein, mir fehlen die konkreten Beispiele! Auch Peter Baumgartner beschreibt mehr das Potenzial von ePortfolios, als dass er bereits von ihrem Einsatz berichten kann. (Jochen Robes, Weiterbildungsblog )

Incoming transmission from the development department:

Well, here we go folks. After a hard month of heavy discussion and painful testing and debugging under time pressure (as well as some development or course :) ), we are finally here - in a position to state that RSS is successfully integrated with the FCS internal mechanics and user interfaces. That was a needed and long awaited step - as they say, the web 2.0-fication of our system.

Ill try to make a short overview of what lives behind the fancy RSS buttons. We had to merge our versioning and permission systems with the mechanics of "subscribing" to a feed, the end result being as they call it "Enterprise readiness" of FCS. One of the notable achievements was having the possibility to have private feeds, using Apache's HTTP authentication engine routed through our FCS user database.

Another thing worth emphasizing is the great effort that had to be put in optimizing the performance, and making the comments feed-ed as part of the feed with an appropriate display... the analyze (explain) of the SQL query that was used to achieve that is 73 rows long. So we are close to the record for the most complex SQL query :). The result though is what was expected - it works, and works fast enough for the current stage of our database.

I think ill stop here before I get too technical. Thanks to everybody that helped in the tough process and of course to all the fish too. :)

Boyan & Ivo.

End of transmission;