CogDogBlog

This year marks a number of ten year anniversaries for the web site we created in December 1993 for my office, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI). This ran on a humble Macintosh SE/30 sitting on a table in the hallway– the very first web server in our organization, running what was then [...]

Another squirrely thing about MovableType right out of the box is that the category archive templates it create is more or less a never-ending appending of your posts to a long scrolling archive. It hardly seems useful once you have blogged say 10, 20 entries in a category, much less if you have written long [...]

More changes I forgot in the MovableType structure of CDB. Previously, when I had a poor grasp on MT templates, I had separate index templates for each of my category RSS feeds, thinking there was not a way to generalize that. This was sloppy, requiring new templates for every category I decided to add, and [...]

This rightfully belongs with the recent barking on Repository Follies– a few weeks back Scott Leslie made reference to “Best Faculty-level presentation on Learning Objects from the last 18 months”– a vintage 2002 keynote by William Horton titled “Don’t Bother Me With Learning Objects! I’ve Got a Course to Teach!, a worthwhile 4.3 Mb PDF:
http://www.designingwbt.com/content/madison/objectkeynote.pdf
As [...]

A new year. Time to look around the house and tidy up. I had grandiose plans for some new weblog features here at CDB, but like many year-end resolutions, fell a bit short.
One thing I did (and partially messed up) was to change the URL and location of the individual archives created by MovableType. [...]

As a brighter followup to the repository folly, I am excited by an event planned next week by a lead faculty member in the Nutrition area at one of our colleges.
As she explained, there are not a large number of faculty in this discipline across of colleges and many of the classroom teachers are adjunct [...]

By rule, I usually avoid use of the “R-word” (repository, too close to the “S-word”), but wanted to launch, here just a few notches into a new calendar, my pessimism on the aspirations of those creating these magical collections of “learning objects.” The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information [...]

Ahhh, there is nothing like literate, thoughtful email feedback… if only it happened more often than Arizona blizzards.
For more than 9 years, we have gotten a stream of emails via our free, online Writing HTML Tutorial, most coming from lesson 12 where we teach you how to write a hyperlink that triggers an email. [...]

I spent too much of today fiddling around with setting up a wiki on our new Jade server. This was at the request of one of our most intrpeid and adventurous faculty members, one I hooked on HTML in 1994, roped into blogs last year, and he’s already to push the envelope out past [...]

Dave’s got an interesting round-up at the OPML corral, “Share your OMPL”.. Yikes, another acronym! If you dig a bit deeper it comes up as Outline Processer Markup Language , now that is much more clear! Huh?
Think of of it as a way to use XML to represent outline forms of content, which if [...]