CogBlogged from ‘February, 2005’

I am drowning in things to do, things I would like to do, and things I have to do. My workload is more or less double what it was 6 months ago since losing the expertise of Colen, who worked 5 years for us doing part-time programming support and developing much of the MLX and our two other major online application/review systems. Thus the development of the openMLX drags to a slow grind, well, actually, it has not budged since December. Right now, I am administering and programming new pieces of both our online Learning Grants system and an online faculty professional growth application/review system. New things drop in like 12 event and online registration sites in Spring semester alone or a request to shoot and edit videos for faculty nominated for the NISOD awards. There is a presenter proposal system running now for our Ocotillo Retreat. And hanging out [...]

One of my colleagues has gotten bit severely by the weblog / RSS fever— this is a good thing. Shelley teaches English at Mesa Community College and is experimenting this semester with having her student review resources via Bloglines, and she is crafting an extra credit assignment for them to post entries in the Bloglines weblog (not the greatest blog tool, but good enough for a start). Today she sent me an e-mail describing what she had created, with an attachment of her assignment. Since she has a good sense of humor, and I am just so tired of people in our system only sharing via e-mail (the syndrome I refer to as “e-mail attachment disorder”), I relied with this message: WARNING WARNING This email program has returned the message to you as the owner of the account prefers that all such items be sent as URL links to content [...]

Our local telephone service provide, Qwest, has these smarmy tv commercials with customers gushing how great the Qwest “Spirit of Service” is. I will not be starring in any of these soon. Regular CDB readers will know we periodically bark and growl about bad online customer service, so here is chapter 22 in the novel. Three times in a 30 day span our home telephone service wigged out and went dead. It is no longer a big deal since we average one cell phone per occupant. And Qwest was fairly good at dispatching a repair person in a timely manner. The issue was that we are not home when the service person arrives, and although my adult step-son is very responsible at handling the service people, on the last two calls I made a simple request when I placed the order– I wanted the repair person to call me on [...]

I owe my sarcastic streak to a boyhood influence of MAD magazine – the codebook to becoming a solid porcupine internet citizen. But Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover site is an over the top homage to friends of movie spoofs, Roger Kaputnik, Spy vs Spy, and the fold in covers. The site goes as far as to include scanned magazine covers back to 1952– now that is fan-atacism:

My web site submission multi-tool, which rolls a selected set of JavaScript submission tools into one, has hit its tenth tool. Thanks to those who have made recent suggestions. This means, you can build your own browser bookmark submission tool that includes all or any from: Furl del.icio.us Frassle Connotea Bag of URLs CiteULike Simpy Linkroll Blogmarks OpenBM How more can there be? I will add them only if the site includes a JavaScript browser bookmark tool. Finally, for those interested in the PHP code that makes the tool work (it is not very complex), it is now available for free, under a GPL license.

Day number 578 without an iPod… No, I have no intent to start regular podcasts, enough other people with velvety FM radio D.J. type voices that never say “ummm” are at it already. There is no time to jump into this endeavor. But never say never. On the other hand, twice or more or in the last week. I have included references to .mp3 files in a blog entry, and there is no reason those could not be made podcast-able. So to investigate what it would take, should ever a leap month appear in my calendar, here is a simple recap of how easy it was to add the proper RSS tags to my MovableType blog to make it “podcast” ready. All you really need is Brandon Fuller’s MT-Enclosures Movable Type Plugin: Audio blogging is starting to take off. Currently, Movable Type has no support for audio blogs so I [...]

Oh dear, I have a spelling and grammatical error on the introduction of a web page. It is the end of civilization as we know it, and it exemplifies how horribly inadequate, shameful, and without merir the entire US educational system really is. I must humbly apologize to all my US fellow educators, as my errant typo has apparently signified the death sentence of all ideas, accomplishments from south of the Canadian border. This is according to an email feedback message that flew in today: I find it interesting and quite disturbing that a community college student or employee is unable to spell basic English words. What does that tell you about the US education system? Just that it will never attain the international recognition that Canada enjoys in this field. You have numerous spelling errors on the listed web page. And, I’m not talking about long or complicated words. [...]

A few weeks ago I was audio interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina, a 1 hour plus session between me in Arizona and Teemu in Finland that was remarkably clear, had no dropouts. In an almost heroic effort, Teemu edited this to a pod/webcast, painstakingly removing my frequent “umms” as well as abstracting my free form meanders to a coherent set of possible ed tech futures. Thjis is now posted on a new site FLOSSE (Free/Libre and Open Source SoftwarE) which is a “posse” FLOSSE Posse is a group blog consisting of members of Free and Open Source Software Association (VOPE) from Finland. We will carry out reportage of FLOSS and Open Content in Education. The interview is now available at: http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=future-of-floss-in-education-interview-with-alan-levine or the direct audio: http://flosse.dicole.org/media/podcasts/Flosse_posse-Alan_Levine_20050124.mp3 Considered the list of heavy hitters to come in the next interviews, I am humbled and honored to be the first one posted. [...]

Just wrapping up from today’s event “ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty” with our excellent guest Helen Barrett, and it was a rousing success. Wish I could have been blogging it all, but other duties called. Helen gave an outstanding overview of the eportfolio landscape, and hammering the not so subltu or semantic differences between assessment for learning versus assessment of learning, and where eportfolios sit. One of the two major highlights, beyond Helen’s expertise and storytelling weaving, was our panel discussion with 5 Maricopa students eportfolio experiences to share. Rather than summarizing, I am noting that by early next week, I will have the 50+ minute audio available as an mp3 cast (it is processing now in Audcacity). Okay, that was too easy– here is a 12Mb audio mp3 stream of the panel: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/eport05/student_panel.mp3 I also have lots of pictures, and the progress [...]

Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) intends to do for the community college level what MIT’s Open Courseware offers for upper division courses- free, open content courses you can use in whole or part. Free with Creative Commons licensing. The first 8 courses are available from their gallery: The pilot grant open content initiative, Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets), was initiated in March of 2004 under the leadership of Vivian ‘Vivie’ Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning at Foothill College. “Open” content refers to material that is freely available for use by faculty, students, and self-learners. The Sofia finalists include the following content contributed by faculty from five California Community Colleges: Creative Typography, by Carolyn Brown, Foothill College; Introduction to Java Programming, Steven Gilbert, Orange Coast College; Elementary Statistics, by Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, De Anza College; Physical Geography, by Allison Lenkeit, Foothill College; Musicianship, by Don [...]