CogBlogged from ‘March, 2004’

This blog, as well as our RSS2JS service and our eportfolio server all took an unintended four day holiday. Last week was Spring break for our system, and our admin offices close on Thursday and Friday of that week. Our building had a planned electrical outage planned for Thursday AM to test a new back up generator (apparently it worked fine), but it meant all the servers (4) in our office blipped off. We had tested them previously to ensure they would reboot when the power came up (changes in the BIOS settings for the Linux boxes), but something flaky happened with the web services on the XServe that hosts this site. I am still out of town so was just hoping things would spring back to life. Well 3 out of 4 did okay. Hopefully no-one’s sites went kerflooie without the RSS feeds. That’s the way the web bounces.

Okay, it is less than an hour before I leave for time Spring Break R&R and a box full of precious archives lands in our office- brochures, posters, memos from the last 2)+ years of our Maricopa Community College Honors Forums. Among this is a March 1983 visit : 1982-1983 HONORS FORUM“Technology: Its Impact on the Individual and Society”Captain Grace Murray Hopper, USNR“Mother of COBOL:, Computer Expert U.S. Naval Captain Grace Murray Hopper has spent more than 30 years working closely with the development of computers and computer languages… As a senior programmer for Sperry, she worked on the development of Univac I, Her interest in computer language sent her to the first meeting of CODASYL, with a strong interest in the developemnt of COBOL. She has served on the ANSI X3.4 committee on the standardization of computer languages.” Also in the box id a thick yellow handout of computer [...]

Sometimes technology is just playing around. I am guilty of that for the last 45 minutes. But with a curious interest in the now fringe-world of “moblogging” (mobile blogs, or accessing blogs via mobile phones), I stumbled across WinkSite, which allows anyone to create a web site / blog that is accessible via a phone-like device, as well as an emulator via a web browser. “Why would anyone do this?” The age old reply to that famous dog question is, “because they can”. Before the details, though here is the credit string. I started reading about the interesting social phenomena of camera phones “Oh My! News by Million Camera Phones” posted by Brian, which he nicely credits to the source at Smart Mobs, and skimming around there, realized that I needed Howard Rheingold in my aggregator (ker-plunk), and right below the syndication links at

Ahhhh, Spring time is almost here in the northern hemisphere (though here in Phoenix we have already experienced 90 degrees F for more than a week). This is a favorite time of year in the Sonoran Desert, as those precious relatively small, but important amounts of December, January rain, cause a burst of color as cacti and desert wild flowers burst into a raging riot of colors, even if for just a few weeks. We have desert landscaping at our home, not a lick of grass nor any time spent pushing a lawnmower, and last weekend, while tending the gardens (pulling weeds) metaphors began wafting through my mind…..

Since I barked about needing an Idiot’s Guide to Meta-Data, I have had some productive on and off blog posts with some folks that are a step above me in meta-awareness. Thanks to Sarah, who sent a link to the CETIS Draft Guide to Meta Data which shines some light on what some of the acronym soup organizations are up to. I still find documents like these laden with technical jargon- it stars out right away with schema, elements, and standards… all I am looking for is something that would also provide a sidebar with a written scenario of how some of this stuff might be used. Tell me a Metadata story, even if the ending is not happy. But seriously, the CETIS document is a nice read. Also Scott’s comments on my Yeti-Data sighting post and a later phone conversation has me understanding the playing field a bit more. [...]

This slipped off my “to-do” list, and fell into the crevice behind my desk ;-) Back in February, I mentioned our Online Learning Group meeting where we had some local demos of how some of our faculty are starting to use weblogs. Well, I forgot to come back and post the notes from that meeting, but here ya go. The most ambitious roll-out was Anthropology instructor Rick Effland (Mesa Community College) who was creating assignments for his students in “Buried Cities / Lost Tribes” (probably the most cleverly named course in our system!) where they were to write reflections on their class learnings, and student blogs were linked as co-horts using RSS feeds from other student bloggers. I am sure Rick and his students would get a kick out of some visitors dropping comments in ;-) hint hint hint Beyond Rick and the others who shared their experience at this [...]

Found at and hereby atriibuted to elearnspace comes this beautful grpahics and post from Stephen VanDyke on How News Travels on the Internet: I read the Wired article Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious, and thought it was informative. But it seemed to be lacking the big picture view of how the news travels. The Blog Epidemic Analyzer was also amusing and showed how attribution is underrated, but it too seemed sorely lacking cohesion, nor was it a very new topic. So I thought to myself: “Hey this isn’t all that complicated, I should make a visual diagram to illustrate this”. And this infographic was born. Here’s how I see news travel, I think it’s a pretty self-explanatory graphic, plus I’m too lazy to do a proper write up. Infer as you wish, maybe I will become the “source” one of these days. Like the driving directions you get sometimes from [...]

I’ve made some noise here and there about the value of meta-data, not that I do not believe it in it nor do I think it does not exist, but mainly, I have yet to see the applied use beyond searching. Out of last week’s NMC Spring 2004 Online Conference, someone asked me, “Well doesn’t the Maricopa Learning eXchange have meta-data?” Heck yes, the MLX Packing slip metaphor is meta-data, we just do not make a big deal about it or even identify it as such. For that matter, just about any system that is built on a database has its own unique meta-data in the fields that make up the database. So what? So just for grins and because Monday was quiet, I spent about 45 minutes creating Dublin Core XML.RDF meta data representations of all 800+ items in the MLX. I think. Well, I did not have to [...]

On the ‘net anything can be anything. Or not. You might think http://www.learningobjects.com/ might be something related to learning objects, but in reality what they do is: enhance the overall learning experience by addressing the needs of key stakeholders at each step in the learning lifecycle, from planning through to delivery, assessment and reporting. Huh? Do you need a degree to write phlaff like that? Is that the random word generator gone off kilter? Buzzword bingo with no winner? Actually they create Blackboard add-ons, those lego-like building blocks. Since my big left toe is a learning object why not? “Everything, daaahling is a learning object.”

The natives are restless and rumbling among the online web teaching course I am co-teaching this semester. One student’s self-evaluation referred to the “hostile” environment (a weeks worth of angry posts to the discussion board). There are a number of factors I am accepting my role in: * It is a course taught previously by someone else, and I had made a bad assumption that this would be more faciiltating existing content. But we are having to re-do or modify much of the content as we go. * I did not do nearly enough (or any) prep back in the fall, especially on getting familiar in new environment (WebCT) and even for this college, they were testing a newer version of WebCT than is in production * Underestimating the range of experiences / skills in the class * Grossly underestimating the complexity of the WebCT tools. it took one of [...]