CogBlogged from ‘February, 2004’

While opportunistic greed vultures are circling over RSS, the used blog sales men have set up their hawkster wares down on the corner. Witness BlogToRiche$.com: Imagine earning an additional income, or more, by doing what you are already doing…BLOGGING! That’s right, I’ve outlined the basic techniques of how to use your Blog to make money! And guess what? It’s simple and profitable. I’ve done it. Heck, I’m doing it as we speak. I’ve taught hundreds upon hundreds of others how to do it too, why not you? Order Now! Before Midnight! Quick, Opus (for diehard Bloom County fans)! If you order now, you also get the turnip twaddler AND the kitchen salad shooter!! But let’s turn the volume back up on the sales pitch….. *Read the ACTUAL introduction from the book!)… Up until recently, blogs were considered to be underground and untapped by the world of money-making opportunities. Hard-core bloggers [...]

Wow, XPLANA’s Interface Impact When Developing and Teaching Online Courses : When using graphics in a course, it is imperative that the graphics match the subject matter they are being presented with. When graphics are either inappropriate (meaning that they either do not correspond with the subject matter or they are culturally biased) they are distracting to learners… I attempt to make the interface more user-friendly by adhering to instructional design models. Material can be presented in a logical order by clearly identifying learning goals, behavioral objectives, and learning strategies. Next week’s exciting revelation: “The Sky is Blue! (Except at Night when it is Kind of Black!” Karma?.Nary a link, nary an example, and all the substance of a campaign speech. Clara sez, “Where’s the Beef?”

Time to be honest. For being immersed in instructional technology for 12 years, I have yet to teach online. I’ve taught classroom computer courses (Director / Animation), created and delivered lots of workshops, developed a batch of online self-paced tutorials… but never a for-real online course. So I grabbed the opportunity when colleagues from one of our colleges asked me to team teach CIS 236, “Web Based Teaching and Learning”- an online course designed mostly for faculty to learn more about online teaching. The course was pretty much created, and I am leaning a great deal on Kurt as the experienced teacher. Our students are full time and part-time faculty from several of our colleges, some I know, many I do not, some have quite a bit of online / hybrid course teaching experience. Therefore, I am the sheep posing in a fur costume ;-) The course is delivered in [...]

While on the phone today with Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, he suggested I take a look at the latest issue of Syllabus– it was sitting on my “maybe I will read some dead trees” pile, but lo and behold, on page 36 is a screen shot from the presentation I did with buddies Brian and D’Arcy for the October 2003 NMC Online Conference on Learning Objects. This was our Connecting Learning Objects with RSS, TrackBack, and Weblogs “show”, using Macromedia Breeze for an audio narrated presentation (and real images and voices for our pseudo-characters, Boris and Lora). The NMC conference was one of the better and active one of these types of events, and I am not just saying that because we were part of it. It was rather active, and Larry said that people were using the site, posting to the boards, for weeks after [...]

We had a burst of interest after our October 2002 Electronic Portfolio Dialogue Day, but there has been a long lapse in our efforts, with some fall out from a not so great experience with an external project. But just in about the last 3 days, we have started a new experiment, running a test version of the ePortfolio tool developed at one of our colleges, Chandler-Gilbert Community College. The faculty and students at Chandler-Gilbert have really taken to wide use of this home grown tool, and it is very much widely accepted for s simple reason– it is easy to use. See their collection of sample eportfolios.. It offers a rather flexible method of creating document/page types including a welcome page, collections pages (collections of documents or web links), slide show pages, a formatted (e.g. HTML) or regular document page (e.g. Word, PowerPoint), a calendar. Users can create any [...]

It will take a few more days to compile notes, but the reaction and participation at our Ocotillo Online Learning Group this past Friday was very positive. This was obviously brand new territory for many of our faculty, and we had to clarify a bit on what are blogs, why are they different form discussion boards, etc. Fortunately the 4 demos we had set up from our own faculty and staff who have stuck some toes into the blog waters, made it much more clear, or at least opened some eyes to this is a new technology to explore. However, the highlight was that one of our presenters using blogs on a course-wide scale, Anthropology instructor Rick Effland, actually brought with him 3 of his students who has been using MovableType for his class (see student blog listings). The energy these young people brought to the meeting was refreshing, to [...]

I’ve been holding back the itch to gripe about how hard it still is to get the people in our system to squeeze a few minutes out of their day to share ideas and materials that already exist in the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) (past gripes 1, 2, 3 … There have been a few bright signs, contributions by new people, a group of Nutrition faculty that have added 28 new teaching resources in a month, an interest form another faculty that wants to post all of the Service Learning projects done at his college…. good signs. On the flip side, our group of Blackboard technical leaders totally ignored my suggestion to share student/faculty support materials in the MLX. I even cobbled together a sample special collection of ones we already have. Silence. They continue to manage documents by sending e-mail attachments. I have decided to call this phenomena “Email [...]

We have compiled more of the products / ideas from the 61 faculty and staff who participated in the January 30 Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day . This was hands-down one of the most high energy and active ones of the sessions we have run in a long time. Unlike many other workshops and sessions, we managed to limit the “lecture” part (Peter Samis’ presentation) to 1 hour, and the bulk of the time was in group activities. So what we have posted this week includes….

As we predicted, the time is ticking on the young, naive open-ness of RSS; witness the gathering vultures circling overhead. Greed, chasing of a dollar, and even the smallest crack are an open invitation for the party-crashers who will usurp everything that is open and collaborative just for a few shiny pennies. RSS: It’s Not Just for Bloggers Anymore Yup, the viagra pushers are game too. Is Ad-Supported RSS the Next Big Thing? Next biggest things since pop-up porno? portals? push-technology? RSS Is The New News “RSS (alternatively Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is the new way sites and blogs distribute content. You probably already know this. But here’s something you may not know: How to make money in RSS software.” How virtuous, what an epitaph that would make. Buy & Sell RSS Ads Place your ad in RSS feeds throughout the web. Reach users who read content [...]

As the blog turns… Since our MovableType move last month to a new server, a shiny Apple XServe, I’d been noticing that email notifications of trackbacks and comments reported not the IP address of the person who had sent the comment/trackback, but the IP address of the server itself. Hard to block spam roaches by IPs that way! Worse, when I checked the MovableType activity log, all entries were credited to an access from that same IP. Even weirder, the Apache access log was recording correct IPs but the Apache error log was reporting, again, the clients’ IP as the server address. Checked that all of the Apache modules were activated. No change. Ran a PHP script on this server and another Wintel/Linux box that echos the client’s IP/hostname- worked on Linux, not on the Apple server. “Walter” on the Apple support forums as well as D’Arcy suggested turning off [...]