CogBlogged from ‘December, 2004’

Last evening I had a digital photo portrait taken by a local photographer but I doubt it will be flattering enough to land on my flickr collection… I never saw the photographer, but I have been aware of where they set up their studios. Yes, I managed to have a snapshot taken of not only me, but my license plate by photo radar. It was extremely stupid on my part, as I am well aware of their typical set up spots on my drive home… but last night, my mind was a bit distracted while driving down Osborn. This is a prime 25 mph spot, and I usually try to remember to keep it in 3rd gear, but I was likely thinking about a project and zoomed past the bright flash and POOF! I was zapped. Guilty. I’ll likely donate a future weekend day to driving school. Again. But this [...]

Yawn… I almost forgot, Today through Friday is the Open Source Summit right in my own backyard in Scottsdale, and what a list of heavy hitters are on the docket. It kind of feels like peeking through the fence at an exclusive country club, marveling at all the shiny, pretty people. The Open Source Summit truly is a seminal event for education. It is designed to explore the concept of “open source” for clearer understanding and to discuss the impact of open source in education. Individuals who are making decisions about campus applications — including Presidents, Deans, and CIOs — will benefit from the candid discussions about the possibilities that open source provides for the education institution and better learning outcomes. There is a “white paper” [163k pdf] that looks pretty. Nice formatting. I was keen on going, especially with keynotes by John Seely Brown… until I saw the registration [...]

Another open system bites the dust. Well, maybe I am caving in a bit to the wiki url spammers but as it is the sites we set up are completely useless wikis as they pile up with pages of links to URLs with names so horrific I get a slimy feeling just reading them. Thanks to the roach spewing crap, it was the 163 nasty URLS at a time from gprs-232-69.scs-900.ru that tossed me over the edge, our wikis are now READ-ONLY, and we have set up editor passwords that will allow the people we wish to participate to edit our sites. Sadly for UseMod, this is applied wiki-wide. I am shopping for some wiki software to implement down the road that will hopefully offer more page level permissions. I did play with my own UseMod hack that would provide a configurable threshold number of URLs that could be posted [...]

It’s been a while since I browsed some of the new electronic portfolios that have been growing this semester on our Maricopa eP site. But I am liking what is starting to pop up… Dale Doubleday, our Ocotillo ePortfolio Action Group co-chair, has had her ART289 (Computer Illustration) students post to their ePs examples of their work, and use the weblog feature to invite a place for commentary. See “~*~ILluStrAt!On GaLlErY~*~ “, and the commentary section this student has set up. Or Steve has a wide range of photos posted, as does Sarahi. One can see that there has been some structure suggested by the instructor, but the students take some of their own divergent means to represent their work. A more comprehensive type of portfolio has been created as an entire overview of the Storytelling INstitute at South Mountain Community College. which include a wide range of resources, information [...]

Over the waters at Auricle, Derek again provocatively asks who will drive the next wave of learning technology trends: In my recent Auricle article A filling station model of e-learning? I suggested that integrated mobile multimedia players and communication devices could be the ‘googly’ which catches advocates of centralized e-learning solutions unawares. So are the major proprietary interests responding to this? Apparently not. But … At least one vendor has now pitched in to this space. If you really can’t bear to be away from your Blackboard calendar, announcements, and course content, and you’ve got a mainstream PDA, then ArcStream Solutions’ BlackboardToGo apparently wants to be your ‘filling station’. He is asking to compare these solutions, which are not cheap, to the raging excitement over “podcasting” a technology meme barely 8 weeks old, but spreading like wildfire. I have no grand insight, but my gut says that things like IM, [...]