CogBlogged from ‘January, 2005’

(with apologies to Meg’s “What We’re Doing When We Blog”)… Discussions of “folksonomy” are meme-ing across the blog-space and I am disappointed that it is yet another round of issues being encamped in dichotomies. I am picturing something like a “Meta Data Professional Wrestling Smackdown” (imagine a deep booming voice, not mine as no signs of any string of “ummmms”) bellowing: Are You Ready to RUMBLE! IN THIS CORNER, weighing in at a taut 115 pounds, dressed in horn rimmed glasses and a bone chilling righteous stare, we have the CONTROLLED VOCABULARIAN, where the only meta data is well constructed, precise, and strictly defined by a coven! IN THE OTHER CORNER, weighing in a a dripping wet 110 pounds, dressed in tie-dyed colors, cargo shorts, and 10 year old Birkenstocks, we have the FREE FORM SOCIAL TAGGER, where the wisdom of the crowd rises meta-data above all to a pure [...]

Today was one of those technical gambles that actually, sort of worked! This morning, the EDUCUASE/NLII Meeting in New Orleans had a general session where the New Media Consortium provided a 5 Minutes of Fame overview of their just released Horizon Report (I was lucky to be among some great colleagues on thei Adivsory Board for this year’s version). Anyhow, Larry Johnson had asked me to do a part at the session to talk about the report’s coverage of “Ubiquitous Wireless”– and I offered the challenge of doing a remote presentation since I would not be attending the meeting in New Orleans – I offered to give Skype a go, and he was asking for a safe guard back up via BreezeLive (scratched that as I had no time to prepare), and in the end we settled on using iChatA/V between by desktop here in Arizona and Cyprien Lomas’ laptop [...]

My hands are quivering. The DTs are starting. I have photos to upload… and Flickr has sent the database for a massage? Will all the tags be rubbed down as well? Will there be vibrant toenail polish? Will the bunions be sanded? An herbal wrap? Oh well, I guess I can find something else to do. You have to like a company with a quirky attitude and that can make fun of itself. Can you imagine a Windows update reporting back, “Sorry but the operating system is in therapy today, please return and speak respectfully to it tomorrow. It is dealing with issues of inadequacy and acceptance by others.”

I’m into some crazy stuff. If you told me even last year I’d be having a 1 hour, clear, voice conversation over the net to a colleague in Finland, I would check to see what medications you were missing. But today, I was interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina from Finland, where he was the mix master and actually recording the session for a future SkypeCast. I almost forgot the novelty of the technology, as it did not drop out once. Of course, then he had to tell me I was a second interview after he had a session with Stephen Downes, so barring some editing magic that can assemble my words more coherently, by comparison, I am going to be the one sounding like an Arizona dirt farmer. Skype works, works well, is free, and that is enough of a cool factor for me. But tomorrow morning is something [...]

Feedback is a mixed bag, and one lessons I may have learned is that you are never going to please an audience as wide as the one on the web. So among the many places we collect feedback, some recent ones have just caught my eye. First, from our Writing HTML tutorial, we have more than 3500 feedback messages assembled over the last 10 years. And we do not just keep the nice ones, added soon will be today’s gem: I hate your projects that you let mingus use I think that they are pointless and they really have no reason for being availuable to students who dont know what they are doing????? So if I were you I would take it out. Sorry, you are not me, and your opinion is in a small minority, so as they say, “fuggedaboudit”. Next, one of my favorite Maricopa Learning eXchange packages [...]

I admit it- the web has ruined my ability to read long papers. Okay, that is a cop out. But like conference presentations that are 90% background and bullets, in reading published papers, I get the twitch very quickly if I cannot find the concrete, the stuff I can see, touch, click, feel, experience. Hence Feasibility of Course Development Based on Learning Objects: Research Analysis of Three Case Studies: Learning objects offer potential for cost and time savings (Downes, 2000; Hodgins, 2003;Wiley, 2002c). However are these benefits being realized in current practices? This investigation examines the course development implications of a learning object approach to the design and production of online courses. This paper presents three case studies that seek to maximize the use of freely available and reusable learning objects in their course design. The three case studies originated in different university-level disciplines – Nursing, Business and English writing. [...]

I spent my Saturday in school, not furthering my education, but paying my penance for zipping by a photo rador van last month. That’s right, I did an 8 hour course from the National Safety Council, in lieu of paying the full fine, going to court. Sitting in a cramped hot hotel conference room with 50 other “violators” (and paying $120 for the pleasure) was the best option to wipe the ticket from my record. In some ways, you have to feel for the task before the instructor- they certainly have a class of the most highly unmotivated students with a baaaaaad attitude. They have to come across with the authority temporarily invested in them, with a quasi military gusto. There are pages of statistics and state law to read, flip charts to flip, and poorly acted videos to fill time with. Like a previously blogged experience in an online [...]

What are the odds? Amy Gaharan has just announced her joining the Professional Bloggers Association (PBA): the practice of being a consulting blogger-for hire, or operating a weblog with a functioning revenue model that goes beyond Google Ads Now it would be easy to take potshots, to throw darts, to provide snickering insinuations about the beginning of the PBA tour and its bowling connotations. But that would not be very professional. No, actually I am announcing the formation of the Amateur Bloggers Association (ABA), for people who blog not for revenue, not for status, or not even as an assigned responsibility, but just because we are personally motivated, passionately imbued, missing our medication, or just plain compulsive about cats or robots or Marvin the Martian or the band FloogerNozzle. This group does not care if others consider a “blog is terrible” as blogging is in the eye (or RSS reader) [...]

Oh, I feel like a bad net citizen. Either due to my own code blunders, or someone else’s overly aggressive page reloads or some force of the moon, our Feed2JS site has been banned from accessing del.icio.us feeds. Sorry about that folks, but you cannot display these feeds through our site. This is what you will see. This only affects feeds from del.icio.us. I’ve been in communication with the del.icio.us folks and it is confirmed that they were getting repeated requests through our site for either randomly generated feeds or repeated non-cached requests. It’s their site, and if they want top ban us they can, and I support it. I am researching some new approaches that can try and throttle repeated requests (any ideas, PHP pros out there?) and I need to look more closely at Magpie’s caching or where it may slip up. One avenue that may have been [...]

Google has spoken: Web links tagged with rel=nofollow shall not get PageRank. A grand rejoicing has been heard across the land. Well, at least from my office. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. This means that blog owners can update their software/temnplates so that any URL inserted into a comment field/Trackback ping will not be followed or counted by Google’s indexing spider. Do you hear that, spam roaches, the incentive is Gone. Go away. Die. Then eat s**t, Or do it in any order. Over the next days, I will eb updating every MT blog [...]