CogBlogged from ‘August, 2004’

I’ve not read much on Skype until I noticed via Joi Ito that a Mac version was out. Heck, I did not even know what it did! It appears to be a simple way to have audio conversations via the net, and even 3,4 way conversations. The trouble is I don’t have anyone to Skype with! If you have Skyped, let me know your handle, or Skype me at cogdogblog. Aren’t new verbs fun?

In a world where human behavior is in accordance to PT Barnum’s laws, we all would be using Internet Explorer. I am afraid we live in that world. I waste more time trying to fix CSS problems in IE than I care for. Why cannot those Microsoft engineers build a browser that follows Web Standards? Anyhow, 90 minutes today was shot chasing down the Peekaboo bug for our Ocotillo Wikis- this is the effect where only in IE browsers, the first view of a web page much of the content is blanked out for perhaps 1/3 to 2/3 of the screen, scrolloing down and up often reveals it. Who knows why it happens? I finally dug out a fix, thanks to the folks at Position is Everything- for the class that contains the content blinking out, in this case class=wikitext, I add this to CSS: /* Fix the Peekabo Bug [...]

Last night, my friend and colleague Tom Foster invited be as a “guest expert” (hah!) for a class he is teaching at Arizona State University, “Social and Ethical Issues in Educational Media”. The students were all K-12 teachers, librarians, and media specialists, and they had amazing, heroic energy for a group who had worked all day with kids, then put up with technology stuff from 5-9 PM. The class had already reviewed issues in Copyright and Fair Use, and Tom asked be to take the turn from the messages of what they cannot do in terms of using media found on the web, to one of, what they can do. So I took a cue from Brian Lamb, and set up the who workshop in a wiki, Finding (and Using!) Good Free Stuff. I have been a fan of Brian’s approach at UBC of making the wki his presentation outline [...]

In preparation for a mid September Grand Canyon trip, this past Sunday I completed the unofficial, unsanctioned CogDogBlog triathalon, which will not be covered on NBC or commented on by Bob Costas. The event included: A two mile mountain bike ride to Camelback Mountain A grueling ascent and descent of Camelback on the Cholla Trail (1200 feet gain in 1.5 miles). Bike ride back home for 5 hours of back breaking yard work. The yard work is not just lazily pushing around a lawnmower knocking over docile green grass– let me tell you a bit about the so-called “soil” in Phoenix. Below surface is invariably a layer of near cement hard layer of caliche, the calcium carbonate hardening created by our water and soil chemistry. And if you think that plants in the desert are slow growing weak species, I need to tell you about the 9 foot high cactus [...]

The CogDog will be doing a lot more running around for the time being. It is not just the zaniness of semester start up, but I am feeling the loss of a valuable part-time student programmer who has been with MCLI for 5 years. This reduces my technology staff from 1.5 to 1.0, and that 1.0 is… ahem, moi. Colen was the third student we have taken on here, and it was a given that he would move on at anytime. He has been the principle programming and database support behind the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), the online application and review system for our Learning Grants program, and some new online apps for our Faculty Professional Growth applications. Plus he handled the processing of our digital photos, the maintenance of a number of web sites, and he did the admin on a bunch of Linux test servers. And a lot [...]

In another of our self-serving web celebrations, August 2004 marked the 10th year since we created the DirectorWeb, a resource site for users of Macromedia Director. We have an irregular scrapbook of the site showing some its evolution– this was an early lesson on that in the rush to create new content, iin web site development we rarely keep records of the work, and there ought to be a more portfolio practice embedded there. Launched well before Macromedia had their own web site, for many years DirectorWeb was our number one trafficked web site, mainly for people using our search interface to the Direct-L listserv. I put a good amount of time into this because Director was my main multimedia development tool through the 1990s, and had the good fortune, thanks to the exposure of this site, to get in on the beta test for the first release of Shockwave [...]

Wow. That’s about all, i can comment. Wow. The newest EDCAUSE Review has not one, but two top notch articles on things near and dear to the CogDog, blogs and wikis. These are so good I am ready to print them, something I almost never do (at least to stop that annoying Educause web design of having the graphi of the cover bounce with every page scroll). In Educational Blogging Stephen Downes not only provides a wide and detailed view of weblogs and educators who are doing it well, but he hits the stride of the article in a most appropriate manner It opens not with a definition of weblogs or a proclamation that it will revolutionize education, but he opens with a real story, something meaningful, a description of Institut St-Joseph where elementary schools have been active blog portfolio creators for quite some time: This last group of students, [...]

I am just testing the Windows version of ecto, the MovableType desktop editor. I am offering it to our newbie bloggers in the interest of making it easier for them to edit their Ocotillo Action Group blogs.. It is about the same as the Mac version, different panes, buttons in different places, and the buttons for the HTML seem a little more simple to use (though I am in passionate love with the Mc version… I would blog 40% less if I had to use the web interface). The preview alone is worth it, not to mention the user definable shortcuts, setting multiple categories at your whim, the image uploading tools… And boy am I excited to see the new Pantherized version in the hopper! This is a draft in Rich Text editing mode. One can switch from Rich to HTML and back indefinitely… Note the highlighted square in the [...]

… when it takes less time to find a department’s web page via Google than navigating the main site itself.

It’s energizing to have an eager workshop audience…. today I demo-ed our Maricopa ePortfolio system for the new interns in our Faculty In Progress Program (FIPP). After a presentation on portfolio-ing by one of our experts from Mesa Community College. I showed them a mocked up fake ePort, and then we just created new content on the fly. They were ecstatic at how easy the system was to use, yet flexible to be a container for a wide variety of content types. Every time they asked, “How would you do ______?”, there was a feature to answer them. Yup, it can be archived to a ZIP and put on CD. Yup, you can restrict portfolio pages by password. Yup, you can change the page colors at any time. And they really liked not needing to know any HTML to create this content. Sweet. As an experiment, I had asked my [...]