CogBlogged from ‘May, 2004’

Nice…. “Blogs and RSS- Tools for Creating, Collecting, and Sharing Ideas Online” , presented as a WebQuest: “Learn about tools that will forever change the way you gather information online and separate the online publishing from the technical hurdles typically associated with running a web site” This has your basic components of a webquest, a task, process, evaluation, littered with resources (a number point back to this dog) and activity templates… you will also find easy to follow steps for creating and beginning a Blogger blog. An better yet, this sprung up right in our backyard in Phoenix- it was created by Trevor Ettenborough ( who judging by his feedroll, either teachers or works at a local school district- how about an “about” statement for your blog) for a local conference for k-12 educators- the AzTEA 3rd Annual WOW conference. Nice!

Joe Moxley, English faculty at the University of South Florida created Teaching Wiki, rolling with a good set of examples and specific ideas of how teachers and students might (and are) using wikis: Teaching Wiki aspires to be a community for college-level faculty. We imagine our primary audience to be faculty who are interested in writing instruction, perhaps technorhetorians but (as we invoke the wiki way here), we invite all college faculty and instructors to be wikiteachers with us. Whizzing quickly past the usual “what a wiki is”, this site has major sections on “Invitation to Use Teaching Wiki”, “Suggested Wikis for Student Writing”, “Wiki Software, Issues,& Philosophy”, “Wicked Wikis > Examples of Interesting Wikis”, “Wikis about Teaching with Wikis”, “Examples of Classroom Wikis”, and the age old question, “Why Wiki When I Can Blog?” Wikis are climbing the hype curve quickly.

Spreading to a blog near you: 1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Okay, here goes. I have a copy of Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil that I picked up for $1 at a thrift store in Payson, Arizona. I find it comical. Following the instructions to the letter, I get: A neighborhood game of soccer is far healthier than anything on the screen. Okay. Transharmonic, eh? What happens now? Will someone reading this spread the meme? Please do. I followed it from mr RSS reader here then to here and here to here (way down at the bottom) and finally got to some summary from David Harris at Salon: I’ve come across this everywhere and thought I might have a look at some of the [...]

Maybe people tire of blogging not because of lack of things to write about, but Interface Fatigue?? Back and forth from the MovableType editing screens, wating for those CGIs to pop, makes one s-l-e-e-p-y… Another stumbling along the blog roads came up with a link to a new desktop editor for MT bloggers- Zempt. I can say that my blogging is much easier, not necessarily more witty, using ecto (on Mac OSX) as an editor rather than the labor and duress of the MT web interface. Wow, do I love ecto- let me count the ways…. it manages the file uploads, autogenerates thumbnails for images, allows short hand HTML editing and colored syntax in edit mode, and you can do even more than you can via MovableType’s web editor (e.g. real previewing, multiple category assignment form the first edit, send pings, etc). Ahh, just noticed there is a beta of [...]

And now for something completely irrelevant, but dear our heart (see our blog top tagline): Found at Red Ferret’s Dog Blog by way of Smartmobs. But what serendipity again. The Red Ferret Journal is rich with images and cool toys. Better furl it now. The Ferret is a weblog which looks at gadgets, software, web sites and trivia in what is hopefully a fun and offbeat way… We pride ourselves on two things: a) giving early warning on potentially important new technologies and trends and b) on digging out the weirdest, silliest and most arcane news from around the world. Right up our alley! Already found what looks like a good tool to share, Plans: A Free Web Calendar…

May will be “MLX” month. Or “Mad Mad Mad” month. We will be madly tinkering to try and ready an open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). It has not been of lack of interest that has kept this from happening, but shortage of time, staff (we are a team of 1.5 developers and plenty of other projects lined up in addition), and mostly, nightmares of having to actively support software development, something I have no experience or great desire to take on. So this will be a first, semi-informal outline of ideas for “openMLX”, a request/offer/plea for those interested to get involved (maybe a sanity check). We will be working on a first prototype from one of our test servers, and run a test MLX for another department in our area, and (paws crossed), some sort of announcement at the June 2004 New Media Consortium Summer Conference [...]

“Scissors, Scotch Tape, Post-its, Magic Markers and Colorforms: “LO-Tec” Tools (and Toys) for Creating Learning Objects” has been getting some blog echos [here, here, there...] but once again, I take on the role of Clara Peller and ask, “Where’s the Beef?” When we will stop the endless harping on creating metadata and do something with it? While I am a glutton for the catchy title and metaphors, I fail to see anything in the article that is about creating the objects or creating content with the objects. This, folks, is all about “Lo-Tec” Tools/Toys for creating Metadata — descriptions of stuff that will come together to create content. It is like talking about talking about learning objects…. I am still scratching my snout trying to figure out, “Who sits down in the creative process for learning content and describes all the assets first?” It is like planning a major film [...]

We crave feedback, right? That is the tickle bloggers get when there is email notification that someone has posted a comment. That is the reason why we build commenting features into system. It is what we look for in our online courses. It is what sends the blood boiling when spammers use this channel to try and push various body supplements. Is there anyone out there getting too much feedback? Doubtful. But I bet most of you have been blessed with the two words that, well say it all, when the writer seems lost for the right kind of Hallmark phrase, and they resort to: From: “Cxxxx Txxxxx” <CTxxxxxy@xxxxxx.xxx> Date: May 4, 2004 8:22:51 AM MST To: <alan.levine at xxmail.maricopa.edu> Subject: hi from lesson 12 u suk Gosh one hardly knows what to say. This is generated in lesson 12 of our Writing HTML tutorial, where we provide instructions on [...]

Actually, my weekend adventure was not influenced at all by Dan Gillmor’s post One Reason Bloggers Need to Get Out More , but I thought I would not give him credit anyhow ;-) Getting out is good for the mind, soul, and body, so Sunday morning, from our escape hideaway on Strawberry Arizona, I mounted my mountain bike and cruised down the forest road to the bottom of Fossil Creek Canyon… oh, I forgot to mention that the vertical drop in 5 miles of road is a bit over 2000 feet! Going down, was, well a breeze, coming up was… well a grind. But purifying. See some of the pix and even a little video clip! Got to keep the balance going of blog, dog, and Sunday, a whole lotta cog.

Just like wildflowers or weeds, springing up across the net are more services to help you use RSS in your web sites. FeedSweep just came on the scene, in time to help Amy sweep her “webfeeds”: Anyone that wants to syndicate RSS and Atom feeds on their web sites would be well-served to take a look at FeedSweep, a new free service provided by Howell Developments. The only JavaScript-based system I’m aware of that provides support for parsing Atom Feeds, and in addition, the only one I know of that will let you fully customize CSS style. Also comes with an easy configuration for novice web masters. Aggregates multiple feeds, actually caches (most of the JavaScript-based services don’t, to my knowledge) and comes with a bunch of pre-made styles! Oh, and I wrote it, but I don’t feel shameless for mentioning it because it is IN FACT, free. As someone [...]