CogBlogged from ‘November, 2003’

Last Friday I did a demo of Apple’s iChat/iSight for two-way desktop video conferencing. This was for a group of faculty and staff who attended our Ocotillo Online Learning Group (OLG) meeting, an open monthly event held at different colleges within the Maricopa system. Like any technology demo, it had its highs and not so highs, manly some connections where the internet was not cooperating and the bandwidth not sufficient for full quality video or sometimes the audio was muffled. But the demo did demonstrate the ease of video chats, and we heard some different ideas how people are using this technology now.

Another twist by the blog comment-spamming “community”. In a twice submitted comment to 2 unrelated posts on my MovableType blogs, “Peter” blog-spams: Great comments guys. Peter <a href=”http://www.fda.gov/”>FDA</a> As if Peter was trying to get me to toss the US Food and Drug Administration into my MT-Blacklist?? Or Peter is just getting his cockroach fingers warmed up to the spam game. I guess there is a nano-chance Peter actually works for the FDA, lacks an FDA email address, and actually meant to say twice “Great Comments guys” (to posts which had no comments). Regardless, Peter the blog-spamming cockroach shows his colors: (1) Two exactly worded, un-relevant comment posts, submitted within 60 seconds of each other; (2) A toss away email address (3) He is wasting my time Surprisingly, a traceroute on the IP peter used does nto disappear into an anonymizer in Asia, but ends up at an Internet company [...]

It’s been many weeks, maybe months, since I updated the CDB sidebar “Google of the Week (GotW), so today was as good a day as any. Also, I added GotW as a category archive with requisite RSS feed. The GotW appears in the CDB sidebar, using MovableType’s built in API to Google, in essence, a syndicated form of a Google search result. Since I have quoted Edward Abbey twice recently– (1) (2), it was fitting, at least to me, to provide some googled results to sites that features Abbey quotes on writing: http://www.google.com/search?q=edward+abbey+quotes+writing Happy Googling

It was bound to happen, once the interest in electronic portfolios has bubbled widely, the big Course Management Monoliths would bring them in under their hoods. I am not at EDCUASE (hardly seems to be any blogging from there? trying a feedster search now- hey who put all those banner ads in there?), and this is just a PR post, but coming soon, to a CMS near you… WebCT Demos New Open Source Portfolio PowerLink at EDUCAUSE 2003: WebCT, maker of the world’s most flexible and widely used higher education e-learning solutions, this week will demonstrate a new PowerLink for WebCT Vista(TM) that enables the transfer of student files from WebCT Vista-powered courses to open source electronic portfolios. These files will then become part of a permanent personal record that students can selectively share with peers, professors and employers over their lifetime. This new PowerLink for WebCT Vista is being [...]

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, English professor at University of Maryland, blogs about comment blogging a different mode of effective participation in the blog world simply by using the comment space of other weblog. Kirschenbaum cites how François Lachance effectively is part of the world of blogging without his having his own blog. Presumably François has in mind something like this. I take his point, and think I can predict the range of theoretical positions such a “blog” (should we call it a comment blog?) might be said to occupy: this is blogging in the margins, distributed blogging at the interstices of the discourse network. François appears on no one’s blogroll, his entries are not tracked by blogdex or weblogs.com or similar sites. He is an utter non-entity in the standard ecological renderings of the blogosphere, yet he unquestionably has a presence “here.” This is precisely, and even more eloquently stated, the [...]

Later today I am doing a risky demo at our Ocotillo Online learning Group Meeting. Most technology is a risky in demo mode– here I am showing off the two-way desktop video capability of Apple’s iSight/iChatAV. I’ve got a good number of people, both in the Phoenix area and scattered across the US, Canada, even New Zealand, that I hope to “call up” live– the meeting location is ideal- the Estrella Mountain Community College’s Center for Teaching and Learning is a state of the art facility, with a “presenter in the round” set up and 4 large projection screens in the room. One of my colleagues across town plans to carry his laptop and iSight and go over live to a biology lab (their campus has wireless net all over) where they talked about doing a live dissection (after lunch?). Another colleague will describe how they have used the iSight [...]

Some interesting ideas at the IA Think blog on PowerPoint and Idea Development including the often linked (and still a riot) PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address. But this post is not just another lambast at the results sometimes called “no power and no point”– the author has a valid wonder about the value of thinking only by bullet points: In my experience PowerPoint bullets are often authored in leu of written narrative. That is, rather than writing a report and summarizing key points using PowerPoint, PowerPoint is the report. A question, I think, that is raise by this: Does reliance on bullet points (over written narrative) lead to less idea development? Hence the rise of the weblog, where while the appearance is sometimes the focus, it is usually on the writing, the ideas, the connections between them, and the power of one individual to reach a wider audience (wider [...]

One of my main reasons for using MovableType (MT) for blogging is that most of the blogs I read that seemed well designed, structurally and graphically, had MT under the hood. And the pages produced are clean HTML, even XHTML validat-able, and the templates use CSS sensibly too (as opposed to osme other blogs that are still publishing cruft table-laden HTML, full of extraneous divitis, font tags, etc). But while they look great on screen, full of nice colors, MT blogs do not print well, especially if you opt for the cool grey background/white text style sheet (e.g. “stormy”). Ironic isn’t it? An appication named “MovableType” is missing a key element to make it printable. Sadly, it is a fact, that despite our “modern” digital age, a lot of web pages are printed. So in this post, I will describe how to add a print style sheet to your MT [...]

This one should grow.. RSS in Government: In this site, we’ll monitor creative uses of RSS to provide information to the public above government information and services…. There seems to be a connection or at least a lot of content from the Utah State Library site that has a great RSS tutorial but they seem to be collecting feeds from several other government agencies. And there are some experiments going on to send content out RSS content by email using “bloglet” (not any relation to Pigle). Lastly, another web site completely running in MovableType. <tiphat>tip of the blog hat to Lockergnome</tiphat>

Maybe a bit ambitous to call this a complete revision, but today I ran the second iteration of our weblogging workshop, or BlogShop 2.0 for a group of 20 faculty and staff at Phoenix College. Pretty much the sections for using MovableType are the same, but I spent some more time trying to illustrate with more examples the potential of blogs in education.