CogBlogged from ‘September, 2005’

My 1995 Nissan pickup has 125,000 miles under its wheels and I’d like to see more flip by. For sometime we’ve been hearing this occasional squeak/squeal coming from either the belts or the wheels, it is intermittent and hard to associate with specific events. We’ve asked our mechanic to check it out, trying to describe it accurately as “like a teak kettle across the room just getting ready to whistle” but they can never seem to reproduce the sound. Of course, I am hearing it almost every day driving home, so last night I had a (what I thought) was brilliant flash- I was carrying my iRiver MP3 player/recorder, so I just turned it on and held it outside the window as I drove around my neighborhood. There’s a lot of wind noise, but I am hoping enough of the squeak is there to play for our mechanic… her it [...]

For some reason this morning, NetNewsWire Lite (my desktop OS X RSS reader) was slow in updating the feeds, so I started poking around the interface. In the bottom left I noticed a small double arrow control labeled “default”, and I thought… “what does this do?”: Why it’s a menu! What does it do?: It’s styles! So my displayed stories in the lower right pane need not be plain text, but pretty formatted news: strong>OrangeSquish News Style 15 Petals News Style So while this has no educational or information value, it’s fun to find little things to occupy the brain and feed the curiosity. Does it matter that you can format the display of news feed? Does it make you more “productive” or crank up your “ROI”? Maybe not, but without little trinkets like these, and a desire to be visually stimulated, we’d all be using lynx on green phosphorous [...]

Wow, looking back on previous blog posts, I have had a grouchy streaks of barks and growls. Tonight, I am taking the blue pill and maybe readers can look forward for maybe a few weeks of happy posts. I hope it is extra strength!

If any readers really think I know what the _____ I am doing with web server technology, please let this morning’s adventure convince you otherwise. By one fell swoop/click, I managed to knock this whole server out of whack. I was trying to do set up a temporary ftp access so a colleague could transmit some large audio files. Without thinking, I was monkeying around with the file server settings and applied a wrong group name as owner of my entire web directory. Worse, some directories that needed to be writable were not. I managed to fix what I thought was most last night, only to wake up from home, check the server status remotely, and saw that it was MIA. On restarting here, it ran into all kinds of dead-ends, and I think there was a lot of traffic and feverish reloading as the net traffic lights on the [...]

The newest mind-blowing add on for del.icio.us users must be Revealacious billed as “revealing the way you use del.icio.us”: Revealicious is a set of graphic visualisations for your del.icio.us account that allow you to browse, search and select tags, as well as viewing posts matching them. * SpaceNav (demo), which allows you to explore the structure of your tags in a rather recreative manner. * TagsCloud (demo), which is an interactive and enhanced version of the tagscloud available in del.icio.us * Grouper (demo), which is an experimental interface for grouping and working with tags. More or less, you plug in your del.icio.us account details, and this site provides some interesting graphic tools to “reveal” relationships in your tagging methodology (or lack thereof?). On a quick toor, SpaceNav, provides an interactive view of how your tags are inter-related, so starting with my tag for “blogging” Rollovers on the small dots in [...]

I’ve been guilty of this several times over, but its easy to fall into the Field of Dreams Syndrome (FoDS) by focusing on the construction of the place (“build a virtual community and they will come”). I’ve rambled before about this, that if you look at real communities of people, it is just more than the coors of the walls they hang out at; and I remain firmly convinced that we under-focus on the social aspects of the “community” and over-focus on the place. So last Thursday I was in a meeting, and missed the big webcast launch of the Apple Digital Campus Exchange. Look at all the things the “place” required- registering in advance, downloading a special application (cast stream), logging in at a set time. I arrived a little over an hour late and must have missed the show: As you can see, I actually left it open [...]

It seems you cannot find an educational technology blog, publication, presentation these days that do not somehow mention or directly address the NetGeneration learners (and most roads linking to a great EDUCAUSE e-publication). This is a Good Thing… to a degree. I find two things lately tickling my critical bones– (1) Recognizing is just a start; what are the actions to take, and are we really changing our educational practice, or just singing along with the chorus? and (2) I am a bit wary of applying the notions with a broad brush, and forgetting when dealing with human behaviors, we always deal with a spectrum of qualities. But first a story… and this is why this resonates with some many people is that we either live with or know someone who is a Living Research Subject of a NetGen person. A colleague recently shared her story of her youngest daughter [...]

Regular CDB readers (or new ones) know I can hardly type one paragraph without creating at least 6 typos. I am sorry, I opted out of keyboarding class in high school (spending my adult years typing was not in my road map). I cannot type and thus my spelling goes out the window. Sure recent applications have built in spell checkers or little red line underlines for mistakes, but the fixes require more or less launching other mini apps to fix. I recall hearing about the built in Dictionary for OS X 10.4 and how it is available for most applications. And wow, it just worked slicky on that last post! The chances of me spelling “Curmedgeon” correctly was about 15%. Up to know I will admit my first reach for a mispelled word is to toss it into Google, and wait for the But then is two app switches [...]

Hey, want to do me and the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) a favor? Would you like to see something positive actually come out of comments? Read on. The set up might be long, but bear with me. I’d like to convince some of our faculty the worth of sharing their work, their efforts online, rather than locking reports up in a file cabinet. Our office coordinates a faculty professional growth program for Maricopa- the funds and programs are managed by our faculty and reps from the campuses, and MCLI (that’s us) provides logistical support. One of the ways we have done so is to put all the program information online (it used to be in a thick wad of paper for some reason referred to as “The Green Book”. We introduced some new consistency in program applications by converting variously formatted Word documents and even carbon forms to MS Word [...]

The add-ons for Google Maps seem as vast and wide as the places you can click and swoop through there, especially once you go past the First Google Map Thing (finding your own house). A nice example is the Google Areometer, which allows you to click to place points on a map, and once a shape is enclosed, it calculates the area. I cannot help but wonder of the applications for teaching geography, some cool math lessons, generating images for reports, etc. You get the area measured in square meters, hectacres, square kilomoeters, acres, square feet, square miles: On a very quick and dirty go-around, a clicked a zone around the map area of Grand Canyon National Park: Obviously, my points area bit off but my mapped area estimates the park size at about 950,000 acres or 380,000 hectacres (what the heck is a hectacre??). How’d I do? Doing a [...]