CogBlogged from ‘September, 2004’

Our system recently issued a policy that to drive any vehicles for school purposes, one would have to pass an online Defensive Driving course. I logged on recently to take care of this requirement but also to look at the design factors. It was very well done instructional design, following the ADDIE formula to a “T”. There were objectives, and a table of contents, and practice, and a cute character to lead us through the content (crash test dummy), it had some Flash animations, and pop up windows with extra information. It was classic, the way it has been taught in all the schools. It had a good mix of media, and generated a pretty color certificate when I was done. So do I have a beef? Well, yes. It was so textbook, it was boring and predictable. Despite the Flash animations, clean graphics, the basic navigation was Next button. [...]

With some regular motion in the learning space, maybe every other lunar conjunction there is a sharp increase in attempts to define learning objects. David Davies has been at it with echos here and there. Personally, my attention span goes into day dream mode as the level of definition attempts grows, but I accept that it is the inevitable step one takes on a journey from exposure to this term. Some stay on this narrow road a long time while others get around to saying, it is not the specifications of the road that matter, but the destination (or just a good trip). Me, I am heading for the mountains. Among the clatter in my RSS I came across “Moving from theory to practice in the design of web-based learning using a learning object approach” from the E-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology: This paper describes the design of a [...]

Hardly Hollywood, but I’ve been focussed this week in the MCLI movie studio (e.g. my G4 TiBook). We are preparing an online opening for our Ocotillo Action Groups that will include some video welcome messages from our faculty co-chairs… as an introduction of their efforts this year and a teaser to invite people from Maricopa to join in some asynchronous discussion board activity. This meant setting up not only the video sessions with 8 faculty, but we decided to add greetings from our chancellor, 2 vice chancellors, and a dean, so over the last two weeks I was setting up the lights and camera (Canon GL/1) in at settings in our office, the administrative offices on the top floor, at a college site, and one pair that decided it was appropriate to film at the Desert Botanical Garden (mid day it was about 105 degrees). This week it was logging [...]

Attention everyone in IP 221.*.*.* and 60.*.*.* – you have been banned from our Ocotillo wikis. Sorry if you are accidently in that group, but place the blame on 221.198.73.159, 60.25.119.199, 221.196.57.131 and who has been repeatedly inserting into our wikis a mangle of URLs to strange Asian URLs, and a handful of other IPs hidden behind anonymizer blankets. I am tired, so until convinced otherwise, I am applying broadly unfair IP bans. I very much suspect wikis are doomed- they are even easier than blogs to spam. It is easy to spot now, since there is light legit activity on these new wikis as they have yet to be revealed. Maybe the wiki communities that may form may cleanse the crap themselves. Anyone with some detective skills knows where this wiki spamming cockroach lives? 9  so-6-2-0.mp2.phoenix1.level3.net (4.68.113.253)  15.875 ms  18.685 ms  28.546 ms 10  as-0-0.bbr1.losangeles1.level3.net (64.159.1.30)  30.025 ms  29.89 ms  24.605 ms 11  so-7-0-0.gar1.losangeles1.level3.net (209.247.9.214)  29.413 ms  32.15 ms  22.944 ms [...]

I cannot breathe! The feeds are swirling! Snatding on the shoulders of giants, Brian Lamb and David Wiley (imitation and flattery apply here) I mixed up my furl bookmarks and flickr photos with the cogdog feeds and voila! the uber feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog This just rocks! I have just skimmed the surface of feed burner, but they are doing this rip-mix-blend stuff up right. Just provide them the URLs for your blog RSS, other bookmark services, and flickr info, and you get a feed where stuiff from all 3 is combined. And that looks like the tip of the rss-berg. You get stats. You can tweak the feeds. It attempts to make a HTML viewable version of the feed (mine is plunk full of HTML… hmm). But this is it, this is another excellent example of small pieces, nicely joined! PS you have to like a cool site with an attitude [...]

Scanning the horizons of my RSS reads… XPlanazine had this new one on A Discussion with the UT TeleCampus about Learning Objects (note to XPlanazine- how about using the blog title in your template TITLE tag; it makes for more laborious furl-ing)… Jennifer Rees and Michael Anderson of UT (University of Texas) Telecampus discuss an innovative, large-scale project that required the expansion and development of learning objects. Interest and discussion in learning objects has picked up considerable steam in the last year, Jennifer Rees points out, which has resulted in the circulation of multiple definitions of what constitutes a learning object. Most agree that the learning object is a small, digital, accessible, transferable packet of information. From there the definitions vary and may include something as simple as what we call an information object – such as a jpeg or gif – to a learning object as complex as a [...]

More fun for Greg at Blogdigger ;-) My colleague Brian Lamb shared some nifty web resources for a class he is teaching at University of British Columbia. Remember, Rip-Mix-Burn… Specifically, he has created (rip) a Bloggdigger Group (a collection of chosen RSS feeds), that is itself turned into an RSS feed (mix), and is embedded into his web site with our Feed2JS service that allows the compilation of the mixture to be inserted into the site (burn). See it in action: http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/textologies/links.html Nice use of “small pieces” Once in place, he has an ever, self-updating collection of resources, and it is unique to his purpose. Sweet. And a tip of the blog hat to Greg at Blogdigger for rolling out new features. Keep ‘em coming!

Yesterday I was listening to a Electronic Portfolios Virtual Community of Practice chat session that swam around on the issues of “Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants” and motivators for students to engage in eport activity. On reflection, I think the group under estimates the sheer power of having a personal publishing platform, especially if there is a viable feedback mechamism. The power is having a voice and the feedback is reinforcement that your voice has been heard. And the reinforcement grows when the feedback comes from unexpected places, or the far nether reaches of the Internet. This is of course, my own unscientific pontification… but it is also my experience. Just tonight I felt the sheer ecstasy of feedback from afar. I’ve mentioned Writing HTML tutorial (“The Volcano Lessons”) which is still generating feedback to us, and has been doing so since it was forst hung in August 1994. It’s [...]

From a recent comment blog spam cleansed this morning. I think the spam author needs his own product (spammers URL intentionaly deleted) prozac http://anxietyXXXXXXX.xxx/ Blackmail Error: Send $200 to Bill Gates or your computer will get so messed up it will never work again. prozac online Jim, it’s Grace at the bank. I checked your Christmas Club account. You don’t have five-hundred dollars. You have fifty. Sorry, computer foul-up! – “The Rockford Files” prozac Blackmail Error: Send $200 to Bill Gates or your computer will get so messed up it will never work again. Error! Error! Mr Smith! I need more prozac!

Sigh. The wiki euphoria may be short lived. I’ve just wiped out a pile of link insertions from a pile of weird Chinese web sites from some of our Ocotillo wikis. Sure, I can remove them and ad some IPs to the banned list, but that approach surely will not scale. Over the weekend, there were a few blog spam roaches that scurried in under the radar for a new blog site still being tinkered. I am rather satisfied with my spam-free months on this blog, and need to extend my method to these other sites. And then there is a wretched POS web site I will not dignify with a link that D’Arcy shared. For 5o clams, you can spam like the best of the supplement and casino gang: Xxxxxxx is a Windows-based mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites [...]