CogBlogged from ‘February, 2004’

No, Willie Nelson did not pen this song, but I think Alan Cooper may have been an influence ;-) And this old song has been eating a lot of my time and productivity this week. But here is the moral first- Programmers are brilliant, intelligent people in their areas of expertise, but for the most part (ducking to avoid the lobbed rotten vegetables), they should never be allowed to lead or do web design for use by any normal humans (e.g. potential site visitors).

Rumors are that elusive character, Biff Cantrell, will be appearing at the New Media Consortium Spring Online Conference (March 8-11, 2004). The NMC Series of Online Conferences is a new form of meetings based on social computing concepts and delivered entirely online through a collaboration with NMC partners iCohere and Macromedia. The unique environment allows the NMC to explore emerging topics with participants attending from their home or office as their schedules permit, yet still interacting and participating in significant ways. The Spring 2004 Online Conference will focus on three tracks: Digital Rights Management/ Creative Commons Licensing Learning Applications for Blogs & RSS Focus on Excellence: Innovative Ideas & Applications I attended and presented at the first NMC online conference last October (the theme was Learning Objects), and having attended (and often tuned out) of other online conferences, found the format of this one very useful and flexible. Best of [...]

Alas, the blog go around. Apparently Amy is…. sniff….. sniff.. sad about our recent barking on her “Re-name RSS contest”. On her latest update (wow, “Elert” and “Newsfeed” have moved up on “Grapevine”) Amy sobs: Also, “Grapevine” was recently excoriated in the geek-oriented weblog CogDogBlog. Sadly, this is yet another example of how some software developers really don’t seem to be able to grasp that the rest of the world doesn’t think like them… Oh what a wretched cruel, sad, horrible, nastly, mean world it is! I am such a horrible geek! Eeeeeek! I would despise a world where others think like me. Scary The net environment, for the matter, life, is what it is for the plurality of opinions. And glory be for weblogs that allow us to express the opinions. But the point still stands- “Grapevine” or “Elert” or “Bealzebubblegumjouce” does not make the concept of accessing information [...]

Just getting bounced around RSS-space is Phil Long’s Syllabus Feb 2004 column on TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places . Some are saying tat it explains Trackback well, but to be honest, you cannot really understand it until you use it. We are glad that Phil is giving TrackBack some limelight (waiting for those to chime in its open-ness to spam and ill-use). However, his idea on using Tb as a content aggregator has me scratching my head, (emphasis added): The approach taken was to suggest that someone might start a dedicated TrackBack blog on a particular topic. This special blog would not be used by the owner of the blog to wax poetic on topics of his or her choice, but become a repository dedicated to a single topic. For example, imagine a site, which collects Weblog posts about the Civil War. Anyone interested in reading about the Civil [...]

Amy Gahran, publisher of CONTENTIOUS (all caps) thinks RSS is confusing because of the acronym. So she is running a “contest” aimed to “rename” RSS (this dog thinks the cat, er, meme, is out of the bag). So here is the update on the “front-runners”, and judge for yourself how much the label affects the intuitivity of using RSS: 1. Grapevine 2. Feed 3. efeed 4. newsFeed 5. SiteFeed 6. WebFeed 7. DeskFeed 8. Elert 9. Flashfeed 10. Really Simple Sharing 11. Relay 12. Snipple 13. WebWire 14. Webstract So catch the latest news on Amy’s Grapevine! Works great, eh? Soon she will change her e-mail tagline to read: GET ANNOUNCEMENTS BY GRAPEVINE! If you prefer to read about new CONTENTIOUS postings in your Grapevine reader, rather than by e-mail, subscribe to my Grapevine in your grapevine reader: http://blog.contentious.com/index.rdf Much more clear to the newbies! About the only thing going [...]

I am behind in citing a package of the week, but some of the freshest include: Let Excel Track Your Attendance for You!!, SCC Online Weather Station, Online Learning: What Students Should Know, and Nutrition Learning Exercise. A few interesting things shaking out over at the Maricopa Learning eXchange. A faculty member who coordinates service learning projects at his college got the idea about using an MLX special collection to have a convenient way of organizing the reports and descriptions of the projects.

Today was the deadline for the first week’s assignments in the online “Web-Based Teaching and Learning” course I am co-teaching. Just like students, the assignments are coming in with deadline skidmarks, but they are coming in, We had nearly 100 messages in the welcome/ intros and some good discussion about principles of online learning.

One of the theories (myth?) for learning objects is that their cataloging is there to support re-use. But just making piles of objects in repositories does not intrinsically motivate re-use. About a year ago (BB before blogging, so the first mention was after the fact) I tinkered one afternoon with adding the MovableType Trackback mechanism to every item in the Maricopa Learning eXchange. We have presented this idea and a few scenarios to the LOVCOP, Merlot 2003 Conference, NMC Online conference. but not seen any traction out there. So I am pitching this again, as an idea, and an acronym, Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (LORA) (did you really think that I chose a name for a fictitious faculty member out of the big book of names! I had a plan! Now try and guess what BORIS stands for ;-) The concept is this. Billy grabs an a 3D molecule object [...]

UIh-oh, I am going to be busy now. From Ben Hammersley by way of Stephan Downes (who is a cat-person) comes a reference to Dogster ( “catster.com” is registered but no site is there!). Welcome to Dogster …where every dog has a webpage. Dogster lets you view and save photos of dogs, search by breed, size, name, hometown and more! Search by Friendliest, Newest or Site Favorites. See who is Dog of the Week, read the dog advice column I Like it Ruff, or check out the Barking Dog Newswire. If that’s not enough, click Random Order and sniff virtual butt all day. Read about maintaining paw in who is the spoiler? you or me? – the newest entry in I Like It Ruff and congratulations Woodstock you’re Dog of the Week. Finally, a special bark out to Singapore who is now the biggest contingency outside of North America! Bark [...]

I hardly blink while deleting all of the unsolicited crap that hits the e-mail inbox. But just as a throwback, I got a flier in my postal mail at work for “everything you need to know in an intensive 2-day seminar!”: Centrifugal Pumps: Troubleshoot and Maintain Centrifugal Pumps- Learn How to Reduce the Amount of Electricity it Takes to Run Your Pumps! Learn the inside information on why and how pumps are designed. Examines all of the elements of centrifugal pumps. Topics will cover how pumps work and how to calculate energy costs for your pump. The real design differences between major pump types. Plus how to properly install, care for, and troubleshoot a pump. And the picture on the cover sure looks like active learning. Alas, my director did not want to approve this training. And here I have been pumping a lot of #@&$ lately!