CogDogBlog

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]