CogBlogged from ‘March, 2004’

Months of pleading, cajoling, nagging our folks to contribute to the Maricopa Learning eXchange produced a fair stream of new items, but the 2 days prior to the close of our “Great Package Race” is when most of the action takes place. This is where we tabulate for a 6 month period how many MLX items each of our colleges have sent as well as a list of the top individual contributers. We use our New Media Consortium software discounts to purchase 3 software prizes (multi-license versions of Adobe and Macromedia products) for the top college producers– we tally the college totals, and normalize by a top secret scaling factor based on the full time employee count of each college and an incentive factor that favors multiple contributers per college. The current scores show 5 of our sites have been most active, some with perhaps more than 35 in the [...]

About every three-four works, my non-friend John leaves a message offering his services from “Credit Foundation of America”. His recorded voice has a faux concern about why I have not called him back regarding their debt consolidation services (did I ever tell anyone I needed this? noooooo. Do I now John? Noooooo. Why does he call me? I do not knoooooooow. Well, “John”, I did not call you but registered 4 -5 complaints on the DoNotCall site which has gotten me nowhere, nor has a web complaint to the FTC. Now I find from some digging that “John” and his sleazy other johns get away with this somehow at claiming non-profit status. Jim Loy offers a solution to get them off your back, but talk about your roaches?

I think that SciencePORT is a directory/search site of RSS feeds in the sciences. It is hard to tell since the “About” link is just a bunch of links to RSS aggregator downloads. Well it does have “bugs” on the logo and a BETA stamp. Nuff said. But they have a directory structure that lists feeds, and for each they pull top 5 headlines. Lora is sad that there are no Geology feeds, though she knows of a few. Talk about a serendipitic web? I was scanning The Shifted Librarian’s blog as I had commented there last week and was curious about any follow-up (sigh, this is a problem of following “conversations” among blogs). Anyhow, there was a person named “Olaf” who provided the SciencePORT URL. Click. I was there. I’ve said it to others, but if you rely only on the results of a Google search, you are missing [...]

We are coming into Week 7 of our 12 week faculty course, Web Based Teaching, and thanks to the return of my co-teacher, we are mostly caught up on back grading of assignments. We had to provide some mea-culpas as our stated turn around on grading had lapsed– a good part as I had to learn how to fumble my way through the WebCT grading. This seems to me a whole lot of clicking. Click Manage Course. Click View Some Students. Click Deselect All Students. Click the 3 students I need to enter grades on. Scroll 3-4 screen widths to the right to find the item. Click Edit. Enter scores. Click Update. Now I am stuck seeing just these three students. Now have to select :View All Students form the top menu to get the full class view. I can do this, but each “click” is another CGI script processed. [...]

Dogs get rather excited easily. Just jangle your car keys and they are all over you for a ride. Reach down for your shoes, and they are halfway out the door, leash in mouth. I have seen the same in the blog community over the announcement of the US Labor Department’s offer of a free copy of “EZ Reusable Objects” EZ Reusable Objects will let agencies build Web-based e-learning courses, said Peter Gallagher, president of Development InfoStructure. The Arlington, Va., IT consulting firm helped Labor build the application. EZRO is an example of the resource-sharing model of how companies, agencies and the open-source software community can collaborate and build apps, Gallagher said today at FOSE 2004 in Washington. So here goes the excitement- free authoring tool! Builds magical things out of learning objects! SCORM! 508 Compliant! Woo hoo! But is anyone scratching the surface? Slogan to the contrary, “Content” is [...]

Forgot the semantic web, I have bumped into (again) the serendipitic web, the place you find things not be slick relationships, but just blind, frivolous stumbling. My RSS feed pile led me to James Farmer’s pleased post of stumbling Google into what he liked as a definition of RSS. While James got there my a search on “RSS definition”. I nudged him to go a bit father into Google’s dictionary using the search string define:RSS, which leads to definitions also for Rural Stewardship Scheme, Rastriya Seva Sangh, and even Radio Science Subsystem. But a wondering led me to see how Google would “define” my friend Biff, or a search on define:Biff. Woah, of course to “Biff” is to crash a mountain bike or “to take a foil; also known as soil sampling”. But a strange definition, “When a thrown Tomahawk does not stick in the Target Face” got me into [...]

Woo-hoo! Elise’s Learning Movable Type blog has a fantastic set of useful tips, template tweaks, etc, a;; cleanly explained and illustrated for the MovableType blog crowd. I just spent an hour fixing up some CogDogBlog issues that escaped notice or care, thanks to Elise. Problems with Default Style Templates took care of a number of side nav bar issues where contain spilled out and dribbled down to the bottom of the blog. And her code for Recent Comments also cleaned up some side bar issues. I’ll be back for more tips.

Another task that has had its wheels fallen off was my plan to highlight different Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) packages of merit. We should be ramping up the loading dock, as we are nearing in the last week of our “Great MLX Package Race” incentive program (offering software prizes for college and individual contributions). But here we try to re-attach the wheel with MLX Package #1158, “Are You AFRAID of Databases?”, along with a story, and a dash or sarcastic irony…

I do not want to go out on a limb, but I think we have done something for the first time- a combination of two technologiies I have had my paws in this year, electronic portfolios and RSS. It reminds me of a trip to the Lee’s Ferry crossing of the Grand Canyon, when the muddy waters of the Paria River mixed turbulently with the green flow of the main Colorado River (see 2 rivers mixing). Please do not give me an credit, this is all the creative programming of Audree Thurman, who was developed the Chandler-Gilbert MyEport tool that she has also installed on our server as the Maricopa eP. She had already combined two other streams of technology into this system, an electronic portfolio with a weblog capability. But now another tributary joins the mix. See the details in Aud’s own eP weblog. This syndication publishes updates from [...]

Following Stephen Downes’ recent announcement, I was eager to tune into the webcast for the March 29-30 EduSource Learning Objects Summit– the agenda seems a fair mix of high level overview (yea!) and a pile of technical acronym soup sessions (pass the bowl to someone else). The Canadians really have their act together as far as collaborative approaches to educational technology issues, well at least from the perspective down here in the province of Arizona. But like most of my attempts to reach or just see the summit of Mt. Hood, what starts our as a clear sunny day ends up in the clouds when you start up the mountain. The front page of the main site reads: Note that registration is free but required. For those participants who will view via webcasting only, registration is not required. but on the technical info page it says: Registration is required for [...]