I got the family genealogy site up in skeletal fashion. Enough to know that it basically works. I can’t wait to get it fleshed out and get more people adding to it as time goes by. At the suggestion of a cousin of mine I used phpGedView to manage the gedcom files on the site. So far I am very pleased.
I have got the genealogy site that I talked about in Online Genealogy. It is located at www.miller-genealogy.us although right now it is only a message which talks about the site before redirecting any visitors back to this site.
I will report progress on the site development here as it progresses . . . slowly.
It is not new to approach a human problem by looking a natural phenomenon to find ideas. We have heard of the cockle-bur inspiring the invention of Velcro. Erin Brewer has looked to biology to find some interesting ideas on how to solve the teacher-bandwidth problem as we attempt to reach wider audiences with our instruction. The question is, can we foster communities that have the benefits of self-organizing communities and symbiotic relationships?
I don’t know the answer to that, but if the answer is yes then I think we have a very powerful tool for increasing our teacher bandwidth.
What is the value of technology in teaching? I suspect that more than making teaching intrinsically better through technology the thing that we can look forward to gaining through technology in education is the economies of scale. The teaching may not be much better than it was before from an individual standpoint, but being able to spread education and expand collaboration may make the education of mankind much better.
This was a very interesting study. Erin has promised to get the paper up on the web. When I know where it is I will post a link to the paper if anyone is interested after reading my thoughts from the paper. I promise that what I have written here will not spoil the information in the paper.
I have a Gmail invitation available if anyone is interested.
I have been thinking about how to effectively use the internet to work with other people in my family on the same line from different locations. I have thought about using a wiki structure. I am now thinking that it should be based on some widely used genealogy software such as Personal Ancestral File so that the web pages can be easily converted to offline editable forms.
The next consideration I thought about was ensuring the integrity of the information being added to the files. That is as easy to ensure online as offline if you limit the people who can contribute to the people you know who participate in genealogy offline already. The problem is that I expect the list of names to grow and converge with other lines so that new people would like to participate who I don’t know. If I open it up to unknown users I have to find a way to know if someone is playing a prank on me or really interested in adding to my genealogy file. Actually I know that very few people would waste their time playing a prank on my genealogy, but I do not want people adding information if the information is based on poor research. I think that the solution is to require logon credentials and only allow people to log on if they can prove a connection to the line. This will give them a vested interest in keeping the information as accurate as possible. The logins would be simple and not designed for security, but we would also be able to trace who was entering information and contact them if the information was consistently suspect.
I really enjoyed Alan’s Best Quote (Today) About HTML. It was worth a laugh but it also got me thinking about the value of code validation. That is a concept that is at the forefront of my mind right now because I just re-designed my website and as I did so I made sure that it would validate as good XHTML. Ironically the only pages that did not pass as valid XHTML were my blogs because of some built-in numerical id tags – apparently id tags cannot be numerical to validate. One thing that I can say from going through that process is that getting your code to validate forces you to really think about what you are doing, how you are doing it and why you choose the things that you do. That is probably more valuable to me than the fact that I have validated code.
As for Microsoft, they don’t care to write good HTML, but where’s the incentive for them? I had to tweak my code after it validated to keep IE from displaying it incorrectly. Why write good code if you are busy supplying a browser that cannot interpret the code correctly?
As something of a technophile I applaud the launch of the first privately developed space ship.(Manned Private Craft Reaches Space in a Milestone for Flight)Now I am left to wonder “What do we expect to gain from this accomplishment?” I have no doubt that we will learn some useful things and come out ahead in some way from this, but I would love to hear what people expect from the push to privatize the space “industry.”