CogBlogged from ‘September, 2003’

According to the pre-eminent source, there are only 10 known web sightings of the myterious person who calls himself “Biff Cantrell” (Google for “Biff Cantrell”). How come his home address is unknown? All messages sent to biff@zippy.com are bounced back? Does anyone know Biff? Seen him? Please have him call home.

Our iincentive program for getting people in our system to contribute items to the Maricopa Learning eXchange ends tonight at midnight (and starts up again for the next round one minute later). See more about The Great Package Race. What we are doing is tracking all items contributed over a 6 month period and awarding software prizes to the college that contributes to most as well as to most prolific individual contributers. Like many students, it seems like our folks are waiting until the last minute. To make it interesting, we are hiding the scoreboard in the last 24 hours. This is a topic for a future post, but it has been rather frustrating to find that an offer of software packages (25 license copies of Adobe stuff is nothing to sneeze at) is no incentive to some of our colleges, and the bulk of things coming in are the [...]

For the last two years, most of my web work has been deploying Cascading Style Sheets (one CSS styles several hundred web pages across our main

Sigh. You get pretty excited, your tail wags, when you get an email notifcation of comments to one of your blog entries. You jump up and down when it is a batch of 4. However, like recently and more recently, we have recieved undesirable spam in this blog’s comments. How generous for “mNeuron” to provide commentary to this blog’s entries on Online Faculty development and our MLX web-based trackback tool. Good old Mr. Nueron provided for each entry a related comprehensive list of links to sites to purchase body supplements such as phentermine, viagra, and more! It moves me to think how generous people like mNeuron are. Sadly, the comments shared by “m” have been completely disintegrated. If it is not obvious, the previous paragraph has been brought to you by the notion of scarcasm, comments cutting to the bone since the early 1400s. So to cut this one off [...]

Anyone RSS-ing or surfing the education weblog scenes (e.g. Weblogg-ed) know that educator weblogs are catching on as a quiet revolution. And it is happening here in our system, a quiet revolution thaking place in and under the radar. Out at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, their home-grown eportfolio system features a blog tool, and last we heard, they had over 250 active faculty and student folios and some creative uses of the blogs. Word spread after some demos at our September Online Learning Group meeting. A media staff member at Phoenix College shared her blog used for an outside project that is documenting a digital video production. Another faculty at South Mountain Community College has been using for some time Blogger for her English students to create Web folios. A team of faculty support staff at Phoenix College are using a blog I set up for them to document development of [...]

I enjoy accidental discoveries (the title for this entry, Scott, is no metaphor reference to fences). The search form on a weblog is very handy service for site visitors to find content you may have written. But it has an extra hidden value for MovableType (MT) authors. Once you have more than a handful of blog entries, going back to add/correct to a previously written post may involve a hunt and seek scroll through the listings of previous blog entries. However, if you are already logged in to your MT account, the results of the plain old search tool on your blog provides an extra treat- the “edit” link.

A news source from Kansas City has taken on News RSS Syndication with feeds down to 20 feeds for various news interest areas. They are making use of our RSS to JavaScript script running on their own server and offering the code to allow other sites to inline synidcate the InfoZine News. infoZine headlines can provide a valuable resource to your web site’s visitors, instantly make your site more dynamic and all at no cost to you. RSS syndication is spreading wildly (this is a good thing)

Last weekend I built a fence around a vegetable garden in our yard. I am not really much of a craftsman, but this project came out pretty nice. Working with the hands got me thinking about (reaching for the metaphor) building things out of learning objects. I have harped before that there has been way too much emphasis on the creation of the “repositories” and the piles of meta-data, and the search tools- and almost nothing on the craft, the art, the magic, of building something out of the things inside the collections. Last week at one of our faculty instructional technology meetings, we were trying to get some commitment to taking on the learning object issue. There was the usual tired, over-trodden attempts at definitions, a lot of shrugging, and then the often worded desire for some sort of magic, point and click tools that would assemble LOs into [...]

Wow. In a very un-MERLOT-ian scheduling coup, we have the opening session (right after Wayne Hodgins! October 14) for a presentation at the NMC Online Conference on Learning Objects. For those that missed the MERLOT 2003 presentation, this is your chance to see it during this conference, except now we get to add the razzle-dazzle (sound) as the conference format is via Macromedia Breeze. This is the return of Lora and Boris, and their blogging adventures on learning objects in their discipline. The presentations are made available to conference attendees to view any time– Brian, D’Arcy, and myself get to then be available at a scheduled time for a live chat.

Well there are spammers and then there are goofballs you have nothing better to do then send juvenile comments to my blog. This dog lifts a leg on Mike and Alec. Congratulations to “michael farrell” and “Alec” for their Oxford English command of the written word (congrats also for being added to the banned IPs for CDB and having their clever words buried in this dog’s back yard, under those old tennis shoes and the dead squirrel). Revel in the wisdom of these modern Shakespeares: