CogBlogged from ‘July, 2005’

Just by publishing this gack, the Chronicle of Higher Education shows its speaks with an accent of digital immigrants. “So Dr. Brontosaurus, it is 10 minutes before the end of the Jurassic Period, what are you going to do?” “Nothing… why should I?.”

I am sitting here in Cincinnati, Kentucky (Yes, Ohio, the airport has left the state) waiting to go home after the 4 day intense almost boot camp experience of the EDUCAUSE Instructional Technology Leadership Program 2005. And the experience was more intense for the participants than us “faculty” presenters. The vagaries of air flight have afforded me the pleasure of extra time in Kentucky as the remnants of Hurricane Dennis have apparently tossed off schedules, and my flight to Phoenix is delayed 2 hours. This following the late arrival of the flight from State College which offered the thrill of approaching the runway and 1q00 feet above the ground abruptly lifting back up in the air for another go round (something about “equipment timing malfunction”). But enough travel dribble. Like most similar programs, I would argue the real benefit of the EDUCAUSE experience was the people met, the shared experiences, [...]

I love it- four spam roaches exterminated with one deft motion: Also quickly added the wplicense plug-in, an easy way to puff up your WP blog with a Creative Commons license, and it comes with a free whiff of AJAX!

Audree, the brilliant programmer behind the system used at Chandler-Gilbert Community College as well as the version we share with the rest of Maricopa is rolling out some exciting new features for this software. How about a wiki inside an ePort? Audree has rolled into the eport system a version of UseMod wiki. She just gave me access to the test server, and the most interesting aspect is the inclusion of a Wiki creation tool. Just like the other “pages” in the MyePort software, the owner can create as many wikis as they decide. What is slixk ia that for each Wiki set up, the eportfolio author can elect from different wiki permissions: Only the eportfolio owner can edit- perhaps use for simple page construction, or maybe brainstorming a list of goals, or… The eportfolio owner can elect to give editing access to only users on the eportfolio system Maybe [...]

If you have been blown away my zooming around Google Maps, the possibilities of combing that data with other data is starting to become wonderfully dizzying. Crime data and Google Maps. Housing and Google Maps. Well here is another one– gCensus nicely combines US census data and Google Maps. As you zoom and pan you way around the country, the site dynamically generates population, land area, water area data for the map in view. So as you zoom and pan around, the data changes with the map. So for example, jumping to the map pin for Phoenix, we see that it clears the 3 million mark in population with more than 1.2 million housing units (at the rate the houses are popping up here, that should be one of those spinning odometers). On the other hand, my hideaway in Strawberry, AZ is a place of a few orders of magnitude [...]

I recently got an email notification that a peer review has been done of a former project that is available in MERLOT. While it is listed as being loaded there in 2002, actually Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was developed as a CD-ROM in 1996 and converted to the web in 1997. Although I’ve not even thought about NRU in a long time, I think the old Shockwave version might actually still run (Yup it does! and I even remembered some of the hidden cheats in the game- but wow, is it crude and pixelly). It’s approach was an unabashed rip-off of Myst. Actually, it was one of my favorite projects- the outgrowth of an idea to have teams of students and a faculty member work as a team to create some educational content using a movie-making metaphor (see the Studio 1151 Press Release). This is not meant to poke fun [...]

This morning I turned the CogDogBlog firehouse of instructional technology for my opening presentation at the EDUCAUSE Instructional Technology Leadership Program 2005 held at Penn State University. I was asked to cover emerging technologies and issues of instructional design. Firstly, and I started off saying this, I was rather intimidated as the level of expertise in the participants included people with more tech skills than me, and certainly much more instructional design skills. This looks like at the opening a really powerful institute- it is a pilot as a professional development program for people in the Instructional Technology arena. There are 50 participants from all over, and they have been pre-assigned to 10 teams. During the 4 days here, they will be working on a “Making the Case” group project. I missed the opening activity yesterday, a personality inventory based on a Native American medicine wheel that was done by [...]

I am coming off of 10 days of rest, travel, and not doing much blogging, reading, or doing anything more significant than lying in a hammock. But I am not back in the office as tomorrow morning I fly to Penn State University for the EDUCAUSE Instructional Technology Leadership Program- this is a pilot of a new program meant to be professional development for folks i the instructional technology and instructional design fields. I am slated to do a presentation Monday morning on “Living at the Crossroads: Where Instructional Technology and Instructional Design Meet”, which is not available as it is still being concocted on the plane flight east. The blurb reads: As an Instructional Technologist my disclaimer sometimes reads, “I am not an Instructional Designer, but I play one on the Internet”. You can be the most effective support for faculty and learners in your system if you can [...]

While I was offline for 4 days, I returned to find only 400+ email messages in the inbox. Of these, more than 300 were spam. Thunderbird does an okay job of spam filtering, but I still had to comb through and mark more than 150 new Junk sources. On our slow 26 Kbps dial up here at the cabin, it took an agonizingly slow time to process, and in fact, I just let it work about 20 minutes to clear out the cruft. On the other hand, updating my 100 or so RSS feeds in NetNewsWire took about only 60 seconds to update, even on the slow connection. This difference, in getting information of value to time and effort spent getting it, is remarkable. I need e-mail and rely on it for important communication, but the process of getting to it, while affected by a slow network access here, is [...]

The blog was still the last week as this was some vacation time- first a few days to check on our cabin in Strawberry. The threat from the Cave Creek Complex fire, which burned more than 240,000 acres of wilderness area, decreased for the small communities up here. This time. So with that, my wife and I piled into the VW Bug and headed to a family wedding just outside Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado. There and back, we managed to cover 1700 miles in 4 days, and much of that time was just saying “Wow” at the beauty of the mountains in southwestern Colorado. Pictures may be coming (but not while on the slow dial-up here), but some highlights included: * Eating breakfast out of the cooler at a truck stop near Joseph City, Arizona. Busy place for 6:00 AM. * Heading north on US 191 across the [...]