CogBlogged from ‘June, 2004’

The dog has not died, but the author has been offline following the NMC 2004 Summer conference in Vancouver, taking advantage of the launch point for some relaxing travel to Vancouver Island and the tremendous Rocky Mountains south of Jasper, Alberta. It is just a short stopover in Phoenix to change clothes, repack for a few more days of R&R up in Strawberry, AZ. But just to whet your appetites, for those beyond the literal handful of attendees at my session for the NMC Summer Conference, here is what you missed as far as New Directions for the Maricopa Learning eXchange. The gate is open, we have our first iteration (rough as it is) of a clone of the MLX, an “openMLX” that will reside at the 24/7 Test Bed: http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx247/ – what you can do, our blog audience at this point, is to actually create an account, and make [...]

Another installment on the There is a Niche for Everything on the Net: Urinal Dot Net (I was googling to find the SeaBus Terminal in Vancouver and this was result #2…. why? Only Google Knows)

Just saw this at the NMC 2004 5 minutes of Fame- a nifty app for creation of interactive timelines- presentation is via Flash (of course), but data driven by XML. Created by the Center for Educational Resources at Johns Hopkins, the Timeline Creator is a freebie for downloading and provides what looks like a simple interface for buildling timelines. Might the timelines be consider “learning objects”? What the heck not?

It’s been more than a day since our Small Technologies Loosely Joined session and Brian, D’Arcy and I are pleasantly amazed that 35+ turned out for the last session of the day, put up with a small cramped room with not enough electrical outlets, and a zany activity of task work in 3 contrived groups. So it went as planned, a messy, noisy chaotic session. The noise was really too loud to do much video chatting, but the technology worked great on the UBC wireless; I managed to connect with Pat Delaney in Shanghai and Gerry Paille in Fort St John. I know that Brian was also video chatting with Catie Gynn. As predicted in went in (constructive) unintended directions. Very against the grain, if you peered in the room, you would have seen the Centralists working in small (decentralized) groups, some ding wiki work, some blogging, some iChatting, others [...]

Sigh, the dog has been a lazy conference blogger, too much scenery in Vancouver, good food and drink, to have enough energy to continually blog the sessions, Fortunately, others are feverishly at it, see the blog aggregator created by Stephen Downes. NMC continues to he my favorite confence for the people who come, for the stuff they show, for not being overly scheduled on back to back to back sessions… it is a conference just is always done with class, and they seem to have fun. The opening keynote by Henry Jenkins was right on with a different take on media convergence- it is not convering to a box, but tthrough people. See the notes jotted nicely by Roland. Also on the new-must-check-back list are Henry’s sites on education arcade related to gaming and education and Technology Review both of which are pretty much blog-like in nature. more later, hardly [...]

James Farmer has shared an interesting idea of building a collection of audio “readings” of articles, and Stephen Downes has taken the idea and ran it as an online audio jukebox. I’m not much of an avid reader of academic articles, so I let is slide into the “neat idea but no time to bother” category– but did have the same thought Todd at Big IDEA had — why not let a computer’s text to speech capability to the grunt work? Sure computer voices are stilted, but surely better than my “um” laden streams, and who has time to sit and record? Knowing that Mac OSX has the ability built in to readily read any text, a little tap of the Google led me to VoiceBox, a $20 app that can use this built in ability to save a selection of “read” text to a .AIF file. And it offers [...]

Holy _____! Over at Open Artifact, Randy Brown has neatly sewn together a neat package: phpWiki inside and integrated with his new WordPress blog, so it more or less operates as a cohesive site and sharing the WP database. It addresses some of the issues of trying to tie into wikis which typically have their own rather stark interface and contextually void navigation. I now have a wiki which makes use of the existing CSS rules I use within WordPress; it fits nicely within that interface container. ewiki makes use of one table and it is housed within the WordPress database. With some additional mods to the underlying PHP, it should be capable to create a tight integration between both wiki and weblog functionality; making use of the same user authentication scheme is the first need which comes to mind. The new features, add-ons, and ideas popping out in WordPress [...]

No, it is not Potted Meat Food Product, just down the shelf… Wikis: The Next Frontier for Spammers? Wiki maintainers can expect an increase in spam after a webmaster newsletter highlighted the effectiveness of Wiki spam in raising a site’s Google ranking. WebProNews described how a webmaster improved his rank in a search engine optimization (SEO) contest using links in Wiki “sandboxes” – pages where users are urged to test drive the format and learn how to use it. All kinds of body enhancement products, hormones, elongation devices, chemicals, mortgage deals, ebay tips– all now veering for your wikis! Head for the hills!

We’re closely watching the NMC 2004 presentation on “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” wiki, checking the changes.. but beyond a few individuals, it is a pretty quiet place. Okay, so I wrote a bit harshly on Martin for his own thoughts on the Pieces, but hey, I was bored! I fessed up and then commented a dozen roses. Yes, bored! We’ve had a good response from folks out there writing their own blog entries for the session, with some nice things said. Great! But we picked a silly process that should falsely polarize and provoke folks (Centralists, DeCetntalists, and Fence Sitters), and I have been hoping to stir things up a bit, some of it at Martin;s expense. But what the #*$& wiki is going on? What we were really hoping would happen is that all you folks out there would jump in the wiki, and really muck around with the [...]

Got the call today from our Legal Department and they approve our plan for GPL licensing of an open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (good thing cause we have been doing it anyhow). In fact, our legal counsel was impressed with “how clearly and humanly understandable the license was written” (that is the point). The question I cannot answer, which maybe someone can chime in on is, how can we set out a “requirement” that the original graphic logo remain in tact and that future instances of openMLX-es will have a regular credit statement and back link to the original? Can one attach conditions to a GPL? My response was that we do not need something as strong as a condition, that we could make it a “strong” request, but nothing with teeth, and that most places that might try and use this would be respectful of those [...]