CogBlogged from ‘June, 2004’

After yesterday’s online audio LearningTimes session with the Australian Flexible Learning folks, I am again impressed with the fluid exchanges possible with the Elluminate Virtual Classroom– I lost count, but there may have been at least 30 participants not only from Australia, but Denmark (it was 2:00 AM for her) and I believe Brazil. The whole thing is archived for playback at LearningTImes, and you can listen to it and count my “umms” They think I am some sort of “expert” in “RSS, Blogging and What it Means for Teaching and Learning”– hey I just started this stuff a little over a year ago! A point hard to make is that there are not really levels of experts– there are informal networked communities of peers I learn from, get ideas from, steal from, on a regular basis. Anyhow, it is a lot of ground to cover in a one hour [...]

Do you hate registering to read online news from the New York Times, Washington Post, etc? I do think this service may last long, but it is interesting to monitor what BugMeNot causes in terms of disruptive patterns in the technology landscape. Will the lawyers swoop in? Will the Times start trying to block the accounts? Will it ruin paid services? Will it not make much of any difference? I am more interested to see the social patterns that ripple out that anything else… bugmenot.com Common sense isn’t. Bypass Compulsory Web Registration Basically, it is a database of usernames and password you can use to access these login required web sites without submitting your own (fake?) information. There is even a bookmarklet to make it a once click operation. Is it ethically justifiable to do this? You’ll have to find your own way there my friend. However, there is an [...]

Diffusing through blogspace, beyond our control, goes an upcoming “presentation” at the June 2004 NMC Conference, what we have cobbled together is called “Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” that I am doing with colleagues Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman. Here I will talk a bit about what we have in store, and idly speculate on what may happen. But first and foremost, what we are doing is hopefully blowing the sides out of the box labeled “Dull Conference Presentation”– for those there in Vancouver, come and get a seat early because this will be hands on and likely out of control. But you do not need a bus ticket to participate, we have set up a loosely joined set of technologies (wikis+blogs+chat) that will allow anyone online to step up and actively participate, and the gates are open now. Read on…

Thanks for the comments that have helped identify some minor and not so minor issues with our new Feed to Javascript site. See below for updates! Some updates for folks that have implemented their own versions of this: A few early versions had a typo where the MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR was defined (it said MAGPIE_DIR). Most problems with cache files not being created are permissions related- the web server must be able to write to the directory where you want cache files stored. If it cannot find this directory, it tries to create a new one named “cache” within the same directory the magpie include libraries reside. The easiest thing to do is to create a directory inside here named “cache” and make sure its privileges are set to the web server can create new files inside of it. And as David Carter-Tod pointed out, Magpie is caching the requests for the [...]

Tired: Doing a google on your own name. Wired: Reading a Googlism on your own name. Expired: Looking up your name in a phone book. What is Googlism? The best why to find out is to explore, but more or less, it uses the “collective” wisdom of the Google API to extract a list of statements found about a given name. (Tip of the blog hat to Bryan Bell). It is meaningless, strange, not of any identified use… but fascinating. Among my own bizarre namesakes: alan levine is a recognized leader in marketing alan levine is a business manager at law engineering and environmental services alan levine is chair alan levine is the director of marketing alan levine is director alan levine is a balding man in his late forties dresses quite well and has a new rolex watch on his wrist alan levine is struggling to say something positive [...]