CogBlogged from ‘October, 2003’

Okay, first session at the League for Innovation conference, this one from Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College titled “Weaving Critical Thnking into Online Courses”. Okay, we wade through the cheeese-head jokes, a lot of background on WITC, their mission, their learning acadamies… still waiting 30 minutes in to get to the Critical Thinking. The college does have a plan for every course to have online ‘component’ by 2006 (current system in Blackboard). Developed a critical thinking curriculum through their Facilitating the Future Gathering, an online course for faculty. Oh, apparently all the content is inside Blackboard, so nothing the world at large can benefit from. Damn CMS padlocked silos.

Well here I am in Milwaukee, for the 4-day 2003 Conference on Information Technology Presented by the League for Innovation– this is te big daddy conference on technology on community colleges. You can count on about 30 simultaneous sessions, enough to make you dizzy, and interaction with a few thousand other community college types. I will try and do some conference blogging- it can become quite a chore to take on. I’ll be eyeballing others here from the blog circuit, I know that Randy is here and we will meet up Monday. The Hilton Milwaukee has some of that big, old, hotel class. I was excited to hear they have internet and wireless in the rooms, although apparently they stuck me on the wrong side of the building for wireless (although I asked). The wired is a nice option for highspeed until GASP! It is $9.95 per day. Crikie! hotels [...]

Finally. This is the last of four conference presentations assembled this month, the dog and pony show marathon is almost done. Supporting Faculty Innovation with Maricopa Learning Grant$ is a second presentation I am involved in at the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Milwaukee. Wow this one was finished with almost 36 hours to spare, almost a record! This one is an overview of the internal grants program my office manages, the Maricopa Learning Grants, which is currently in its 5th year, or according to the conference blurb: The Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI) coordinates an internal grants program that awards over $180,000 each year to improve, advance, and enrich student learning at the ten Maricopa Community Colleges. Learn about the variety of grant projects and their outcomes, and how the process is supported. This session will describe the program and its impact and will [...]

Sometimes you can click yourselves into the most fun, obscure, un-googled parts of the web, such as Rune Johansen’s portfolio. Pure serendipitous fun. Okay, the music grates, but the pictures I gather are pictures of the home life of people in the far flung parts of Norway. There are great detailed shots of objetcs (they have some ornate pot holders), people posing in their favorite rooms… my favorite is the round headed guy frames by a triangular shaped peak behind his head and the bright pastel house against the pale sky. And the guy in the blue socks, with his antlers on. And the Gene Simmons poster. And… By way of anders by way of jill by way of my NetNewsWire….

Faithful CDB readers get this early glimpse at Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery), a presentation for Monday, October 20, at the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Milwaukee. This is less a technical presentation and more about the strategies we have used to (try and) build up our collection, as well as some words from faculty who are using the MLX. My co-presener, Charlene Thiessen, is a faculty member from GateWay Community College who has been one of our local MLX advocates. Our program blurb reads: The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources that support learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges, represented as mysterious wrapped “packages”, from a Flash animation for a chemistry lab to a faculty development program. See how we tripled our collection with a friendly competition for software prizes. Learn how we [...]

I am just trying to flesh out a new idea for the Maricopa Learning eXchange. Since we have now real stories of how our faculty are using and modifying MLX content. I am hoping we can set up some new tools that can allow someone to create a new MLX item, and add that it is related to or derived from another MLX package. For example, from our video interviews, we had an Estrella Mountain adjunct faculty (Marylyn) who teaches economics who described how she used the human organs supply and demand lesson package developed at Chandler-Gilbert, but in doing so, Marylyn had added some new components. We would like it if people like Marylyn could ultimately post a new MLX item to describe how the existing one was adopted and perhaps modified. A tool for showing relationships would recognize use and re-use…

Wow, once you start tinkering with code, the worm can opens up. I made a few more adjustments to the RSS to JS demo due to the worminess of RSS 2.0 versus 1.0. After comments in yesterday’s announced fix, I became aware that the code would not deal successfully with RSS 2.0 feeds that use <guid> for the item’s url and where <pubDate> is used to give the date the item was posted. A few more logic checks and i think we have these bases covered, noting that the date/time format for <pubDate> (RSS 2.0) is different from <dc:date> (RSS 1.0). Also I added something that makes inserts a “no title” string if there is no <title> listed for an item (seems like this happens with Radio feeds often??) Hopefully that will tide this script over for a while… “The worms crawl in thw worms crawl out, they turn your [...]

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to Jay Allen, for those 40 hours of blogged sleepless programming that produced MT-Blacklist – A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin. The war againt spammers has been ratched-up considerably with this new valuable tool (it is beta, but works sweet so far). It allows easy maintaince of your blacklist, deleting from a link in the nortication email, protection for both comments and Trackback, and no tinkering is needed with MT source orr your templates. It protects as many blogs on your site as you select. Oh happy day. I am eager to watch the crap appear in my blacklist log rather than my blog. Of course, spammers will just find some other crack to exploit, you can count on it.

We always need more search engines, eh? Here is Blloogz which has no “about screen” but apparently walks many blogs to fuel the search tool. Not being sure, if this cogdog was “bloogz-ed”, we added our URL to the crawl. Searches produces long lists, but page loads were a bit on the slow side, some hitting it looks like of a stats.php file. Or maybe it is everyone on the net lookign for Arnold jokes. Anyhow, some interesting stuff came up on a search on learning object: 2905 results. Gulp. In an un-Google fashion, you cannot have phrase searches, so you getg results that have both “learning” and “object” though there is some sort of relevancy ranking at work. The “posts” links on results ae supposed to find posts by the same blog author in the Bloogz archive. <tiphat>tip of the blog hat to EduBlog Insights</tiphat> P.S. The title for [...]

In response to observed, unexpected behavior, I made a minor tweak to our PHP script that does the RSS to JS magic, using JavaScript to embed RSS content in any page. The probllem was on the simple way I was naming my cache files (the RSS parser I use creates cache files to ease the load on your server)- previously it based the cache file on just the path and file name of the RSS feed, so in some cases people were getting feeds from other sites (bad). Now cache files are based on the entire URL, as to make them unique. The change would not likely affect someone running our PHP script to generate feeds from their own sites- it is more of a problem like ours, where when I cleaned the cache directory, I saw nearly 500 cache files. Your mileage may vary.