CogBlogged from ‘October, 2004’

As some of locals will be saying, “Kia Ora”…. This blog is about to be flipped. In about 10 hours I am on my way to Auckland, New Zealand for 3 weeks of invited workshops primarily at my hosts at UNITEC with other visits scheduled to Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Waikato Institute of Technology, and Manukau Institute of Technology. Some of this has been continued communication with colleagues I met during my sabbatical visit in 2000. Time to synchronize watches, either by my personal World Clock or this quick hack effort: < ?php $now = time(); echo "Phoenix Time: ” . date(“M d Y, h:i a”, $now) . “Auckland Time ” . date(“M d Y, h:i a”, $now + 20 * 3600); ?> With this time there, I shall not be actively blogging here, but will be on my inverted CogDogBlog located on a UNITEC server, or the CogDog(kiwi)Blog. [...]

Wow, how do some of the key pioneers of the web have time to fun for elected positions in Arizona? Among the piles of colorful signs crowding every street corner, I have seen some familiar names pop out on the ballot for November 2… Is Eric Meyer, who’s books and web sites have paved the way for many like me to learn CSS– is he running for the Scottsdale School Board? And wow… can Tim Bray, the architect of XML and many other ideas that power the web be running for the Central Arizona Water Conservation District? Amazing ;-) Among the other names there- did that Bush guy or Kerry dude have anything to do with the web?? Get out there and vote for your favorite, web gurus or not…

flickr foto Cog (No Dog) Railwayavailable on my flickr This technology pulled us up 25% grades to the top of Pikes Peak, Colorado aboard the Cog Railway. Yes, the camera has safely returned to Arizona, all 130 photos in tact. Whew! Not much time to process them with 2 more days left before our next adventure. This is at 14,100 feet atop Pikes Peak, outside of Colorado Springs. Lacking time or energy to hike 13 miles to the top, we rode the “Cog Railway” (there is a connection, eh?) to the top, played in the snow, drank coffee, ate the weird donuts, bought the t-shirt, and were on our way to further adventures.

Actually, my vacation time in Colorado did wonders to revive my spirits after 4 days at the EDUCAUSE 2004 conference. I’ve grumbled before about the sour irony that the dominant mode of communication in our field of instructional technology (or pretty much all other conference gatherings) is the very unwired, tired…. 50 minute lecture to a passive audience. I have reached my saturation point with the format. <disclaimer>This is not to say I have any brilliant alternative ideas hanging around nor that I could better plan a professional gathering for 8000 people </disclaimer>, But to watch during the breaks about 7000 of them huddled around their laptops, cell phones, PDAs (that includes me) sure says something is not so exciting if we cannot tear ourselves away from email. And do not even get me started with the silly circus of the vendor hall. Yikes. Also, wouldn’t you think at a [...]

Just returned home from 5 days of being a sightseeing fool up and down the Rocky Mountains following last week’s EDUCAUSE conference in Denver. I’ve got a big of pile photos to flickr up, but it will be delayed following a harrowing experience having accidently leaving my digital camera at a restaurant in Colorado Springs, and not hearing from the restaurant until we were way up in Boulder. Thankfully, a friend there is express mailing the camera to my office. I’d given up for lost photos from Idaho Springs, the Tommyknocker brewery tour, the “Oh My Gawd Road”, Georgetown, the Cog Railway ride to Pikes Peak, and the awesome sunset at Garden of the Gods. Missing will also be today’s excursion to the fabulous Estes Park and Rocky National Park, likely some of the most breathtaking scenery I’ve seen in a while. Whew! Back to work tomorrow, digging through the [...]

This blog will go into a period of non-activity the next few days as I work on a project requiring me to pretend to be a tourist in the Rocky Mountains. There will not be anything else posted on “project mini vacation”

It happens.

This session will explore learning space design principles as a way to enhance and transform teaching and learning with technology. The principles acknowledge changes in our understanding of student cognition and faculty roles in the learning process. Well-configured Learning spaces make it possible for faculty and students to engage in active learning, thereby enhancing learning outcomes. – Philip Long (MIT) and Christopher Johnson (University of Arizone) (Alan’s quips in italic.)

Sakai is delivering an integrated open-source framework comprising an enterprise portal, a course management system, and a tool portability profile as a standard for writing future tools that can extend this core set of educational applications. Learn what Sakai has achieved and its direction for the future. http://www.sakaiproject.org/ My comments: If I recall, Sakai is based on the UM Chef project, and “Sakai” is the name of a cook “named ‘Iron Chef’ form some cooking show…. (?) I came to see what all the Sakai buzz is about. So did the 150+ 250 others sitting on the ballroom floor for this session– no one realized this would be a popular session???. Again another presentation that is 90% word slides, background info– where is the beef? the demo? that’s what we want to see, we can read bullet points online. It is like a “meta-presentation” – it is information about a [...]

Eeek. It is coming to my attention via email, comments, trackbacks, server logs, that more people than My mom are reading this blog (actually she doesn’t know about it). Beyond scaring the ____ out of me, I felt it appropriate to say that my writing here is almost exclusively for my own uses, to track my ideas and projects as I tend to forget things quite easily. If someone else gets something out of it, especially those nice Canadians (you know who you are ;-), great. However, many things I write are my own conjecture, may be exaggerated or wrong, and will be full of typos. You can bet on it. So question everything I write, and please do not confuse me with an “expert”– I am just another of the many millions out there on the net trying to find their way. There, I feel better.