Month: January 2009

In one of my [current projects ” title=”” />I am publishing the results (in blog form) of the first assessment of my use of e-learning that I have ever formally tried. The majority of the questions use the Likert scale (where respondees are asked to rank their response to a statement along the scale of Strongly-agree to Strongly disagree) and I want to present the results with pie charts like this one. I could use Excel and export the charts, as gif images, for upload to my blog, but that’s not very Web 2.0! So instead I thought I’d use the Google Chart API instead. And here is an example of what can be achieved with a small bit of HTML magic.

The Google Chart API is a web service: you provide some information about the chart you want and it generates and returns a GIF image of the chart. The URL for the chart shown in this post is http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350×150&chd=t:60,40&cht=p&chl=Strongly Agree|Strongly Disagree. To embed a chart in an HTML document, just use the Chart API URL as the src attribute of an image as in:

&lt!– Use of & in the src attribute to stand for the & in the URL
is not a spelling mistake!
You have to use the HTML entity in order to be able to embed &
in the URL! –>
<img alt="Sample chart"
src=”http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350×150
&chd=t:60,40
&cht=p
&aongly Agree|Strongly Disagree” />

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p>Clearly, some familiarity with HTML is required to fully exploit this feature, but it’s well worth a look. Plus if you have a number of similar charts to produce, as my report will, you’ll probably find copy, paste and tweek to be much quicker than anything you could do with traditional desktop tools.

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2009. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

This (partial) history of the Internet (from Arpanet to Internet) has been created as a show case for a German student’s diploma project to develop a visual language for electronic communication called PICOL. I picked it up from Lee Lefever at CommonCraft. The video itself is hosted at VIMEO. I may us it in my upcoming module on Comunications for the Internet.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2696386&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

 Today, just as I sat down to eat my lunch of a bowl of soup and a sandwich, the fire alarm went off in Fulton house. It wasn’t a drill, but it wasn’t a fire either! Apparently, a fire detector has been sited too near to a steam outlet in one of the kitchens. Nonetheless, we all had to stand around outside in the cold until the alarm had been cancelled by the fire brigade. My soup was almost cold when I got back to it.