CogBlogged from ‘December, 2004’

After 3 or 4 extensions, December 8 is the final deadline I have set in the sand for our 4th and final Great Maricopa Learning eXchange Package Race. As outlined in previous presentations, we set up an incentive program to entice people in our system to contribute their learning activities, teaching materials, project summaries to the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). We merely tracked contributions within a set date range, a rather simple database exercise and provide software prizes to the top producers. We obtained software by begging some vendors (thanks much to Macromedia, Anystream, and Apple) or using our New Media Consortium (NMC) software discounts to obtain others. We started out awarding prizes to our colleges that contributed the most new items within a set period Nov 2002 – Feb 2003 expecting to do this as a one time affair. However, after noting a severe drop off in contributions right [...]

Unanswered Nitpicky Technical Wonderment Number 894: Why do people put HTML tags inside content within a web page’s <TITLE>….</TITLE> tags? Why would one want line breaks in a title bar string, and what is used in browser history and even RSS Feeds? Why http://audiences.blogspot.com/? Why http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1735546,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532 (well, if the ASP error ever is fixed, you might find a title tag of “<br><br><br><br><br><br> PC Magazine” Why?

Ouch, can you feel the pain, of faculty, students, tired techies… The servers hosting the Blackboard Enterprise system 6 of our colleges share had some sort of “cataclysmic” failure of the SAN- the data storage. It has been down and out about 2 weeks before finals. Ouch. I am not directly involved with Blackboard in our system, but it did mean it is unavailable for a few days while scrambling goes on to notify students. get replacement hardware, and try and resurrect the databases. I know there are folks out there pulling all nighters to get the system back, but you can bet that some work or materials are going to be lost Judging from the emails flying around, folks on both the instructional and technical sides of the house are being understanding, creating work-arounds, but it may serve to create some ripples of distrust. Maybe it will be a [...]

I am a bit amazed I never thought of this earlier… the primary use for CogDogBlog is pure selfish- tracking things or projects so I can have a record I can find later. More often than not, i am trying to remember a site or reference from a few months/years back, and the only way to look for it is go to my, ahem, overloaded main page, and using the search form. But in the last 15 minutes, I wrote a quick little JavaScript that allows me to do a quick search and bypass the main page. Actually I ripped it pretty much from the Google Browser Buttons, which does a quick Google search on any highlighted text for a page in view, or if no text is selected, provides a pop up box to type in the search words. A dull beam of light said tonight– “hey, I could [...]

For those who have swirled around the blog-verse a while, the question of “what is a blog?” may feel archaic. But there are more than not who are just stumbling into it, especially now having been

Bloggers can start feeling like their voice is powerful, but the power may be vaporized in the face of multibillion dollar companies. Jason Kottke, who has had a great running fascination with Ken Jenning’s wild Jeopardy marathon, apparently is being threatened by Sony (who owns the show and likely 1/3 of the planet) is spanking Kotke for posting some audio spoilers to the last show. Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world. One of the reasons for the silence is that my legal difficulties with Sony about the whole Ken Jennings thing have yet to be resolved. I can’t say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org. As an individual weblogger with relatively limited financial and legal resources, [...]

If you think I get overly torqued about spammers, poor web site from big entities and doofus customer service is right up there as well. I continually deal with some online banking and bill paying service that works marvelously, and yet fight others (hello CitiBank) that offer “service” that is browser dependent or completely dysfunctional. I can be a little patient with sites that do not work, having generated plenty of my own systems that have (fixable) glitches, and GASP typos. But when I think of big entities with armies of programmers who still set up sites that are designed by apparently blind monkeys or ones that force me to use a specific kind of computer and browser… well that is not so good. But the worst, worst, worst, are the “customer” service that yield more email chain flaff than the worst phone menu, or just do not listen or [...]

I just made an update to our RSS Feed2JS service and free code. This changes will not break any current use, just adds some new options for some of the parameters, including: David Carter-Tod suggested a new line of code that allows the output to use the Atom fields for encoded content. I am not sure what that really is, but can guess it allows Feed2JS to display full HTML content. For other flavors of RSS, if the description content has HTML encased by [<[CDATA ... ]], the full HTML can be now displayed by setting the value of html=a. Note that if you use the option to truncate output to a specified nubmer fo characters, this will be ignored (I did not want any broken HTML). And thanks to Bruce Silver for suggested a feature that would allow the links from item names to be loaded in a specified [...]

The self-proclaimed “grandmother” of electronic portfolios, Helen Barrett has likely the most comprehensive set of resources on her main web site plus her E-Portfolios for Learning blog. Not so evident on the front page of site is a fantastic resource where she has taken the same portfolio content and used it in 22 different eportfolio systems– this is detailed specifically at Versions of my Online Portfolios. I am exploring different online portfolio systems, free web server space or other strategies for developing online electronic portfolios. My purpose is to find options that are most appropriate for high schools and average individuals who are not associated with a higher education institution. Below are the versions that I have developed so far. Each one includes a reflection on how I developed the original portfolio content using an Excel Spreadsheet, using comments to record my reflections on why I selected each of the [...]

Some recent online discussions on motivation and eportfolios reminded me of an experience back in October at the EDUCAUSE conference…. well actually it had nothing to do with the conference. Towards the conference, I needed to get out to the airport (which seems to be located somewhere in Nebraska) since my wife was flying in on an evening flight as we had plans for some Colorado sightseeing. I managed to misunderstand the concierge’s information that airport shuttles ran every fifteen minutes– well they did except I missed that the schedule ends at 4:00 PM. There was no way a called shuttle would get me to the airport on time, so I had to knuckle under my own mistake, and ride out in a taxi… a $50 lesson. But hey, make the best of it, right? This is how I got to meet Benoit the taxi driver. He was not the [...]