CogBlogged from ‘October, 2003’

A nicely done article on looking at your web pages with a different mind-set. Check out Boxes and Arrows: Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design. Typicallly B&A has some high brow articles, e.g. “Semiotics: A Primer for Designers”, stuff for people labled “information architects”, but now and then you find some down to earth, practical ones like this one on color. A unique palette based on colors found in nature can get you out of the World Wide Web color rut and help create a more memorable website. Well illustrated, with real examples, I think it is time to comb through some landscape photos and look for some new color sets.

Perched up at MIT, Phil Long is a key instructional visioneer, and in a recent Syllabus column he writes TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places. It’s a nice general overview of TB, yes, but Phil seems to not see as wide as we do by focusing only on what Trackback means in the blog world– ignoring what D’Arcy, Brian, and I have been pushing since March 2003 [1, 2, 3]- using Trackback to connect a collection of Learning Objects with the external contexts where they are described or used. Trackback is still an under-utilized, under-explored, and thankfully under-exploited (by spammers) simple technology. <tiphat>tip of the blog hat to Scott Leslie</tiphat>

There is almost nothing more cliche than a Field of Dreams metaphor “If you build it, they will come”, but it is all so fitting for those that get glaze-eyed at the potential of building a Learning Object Repository (ugh, I despise the connotations of the “R-word”). But I can guarantee you, that if you build it, they likely will not come, and if they do the pace will be one that gives you heartburn into the night. However, do not despair. What follows is a tale of our efforts of growing our own collection, the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) story. And what we have tried, including saying “please”, bringing out the dogs and ponies, bribery, competition, and good old fashioned nagging.

The blog concept is continuing to spread in our system. I know two of our colleges are looking at setting up a MovableType environment for both faculty use as well as committee communication. I am looking for examples of sites hosting more than ahandful of MT blog sites to identify any relevant issues for scaling. I have previously set up 28 accounts for a workshop and found that when all of the group tried to log in together, the system bogged down (it might be due to the PII Linux host we are sitting on now). But more importantlly, I really wish there were some better tools for managing/creating multiple accounts. It was downtight tedious to mind numbing to manually create all the accounts and enter the info in about 6 different screens. So if anyone is hosting say 15 or more MT blogs now, can you drop me an [...]

it is getting worse. Now are these messages that arrive as comments to an old blog entry: We live in strange times, but someday I think we will look back on all of this and marvel at how crazy it was. God, I hope so. I sure wouldn’t want this insanity to become the norm. All very nice, pithy, and completely irrelevant, What “Dave: is really trying to do is insert his own URL into the text of MY page, and “enhance” his own Google ranking (note to Dave- I will not re-reprint your URL): IP Address: 24.101.161.185 Name: Generic Xxxxx Email Address: Dave@Dave.net URL: http://www.xxxxxx.com/ No dice dave. You have been eviscerated. Go spam yourself.