CogBlogged from ‘September, 2005’

The kiwis have a great expression about being able to fix anything with some number 8 bailing wire, sort of the down under flavor of duct tape. I just spent about 90 minutes cobbling together what I hope to be a framework for supporting audio content across a number of our content sites. I’ve yet to join the merry gang of Podcasting Is The Greatest Thing Since ________, but I do so a value of adding more audio content to our site, capturing events, meetings, interviews etc. This will be a hasty and haphazard explanation of what I did, cause I really want to get home and have some dinner ;-) First of all, I will be capturing the audio on the cheap, plopping down a new iRiver iFP 799 MP3 recorded (1 Gb model with external line and input ports). It’s a love hate relationship -I love being able [...]

I’m still drowning in a flotsam of un-done tasks, but I was glad I shoved by a little bit of time to check our Leigh Blackall and Sean FitzGerald’s presentation for Cool Results: Engaging Clients in E-learning hosted by LearningTimes Australia. It’s well worth a look, or at least tossing a bookmark at and coming back to. I did not have time (cough) to listen to the full 2.5 hour recorded Elluminate session, but it’s there waiting. Titled “Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools”, the content provided hits the ground on all good points: * Excellent collection of resources on social netowrking tools etc, your smorgasboard of small pieces loosely joined * The way presented is so appropriate- posted on a part of free hosted wikispaces site (I first learned about wikispaces from Leigh’s blog, and have put it to some use over the last year). Stack this up next [...]

flickr fotothe sandwichavailable on dotpolka’s flickr another fine photo from the flickr creative commons collection The 3rd installment of What’s on my plate is a double decker thick sandwich, two major events happening Friday, at two different locations. Like an overeater, I am swearing it was unavoidable, I just had to take on both sides of the sandwich… and one of those halves contains a home grown pickel that tastes like flickr! A few months ago what is happening this Friday seemed reasonable… time will tell soon. We are holding two very different, large events for the Maricopa system, both billed as “options” for the kickoff for Ocotillo activities this year (Ocotillo is our instructional technology initiatives).

Let me begin this story by saying, the despite a recent experience, I love my Apple computers, past, present, and hopefully future. My work flows in Apple colors, where I do all my development, and use other systems to deal with how the other pitiful 95% of the web sees my content. I know less about the company, nor care, nor am a Steve-fanatic, nor tune into the latest fad-casts and likely have some fantasy concept that its a cool place full of cool people who just spend all day making cool stuff. I rarely dwell on it, as it does not mean much to my daily work. That’s the shiny skin of the Apple. Some recent actions have my wonder about my naive picture. A number of months ago, New Media Consortium leader Larry Johnson invited me to “co-blog” within a newly developed Apple/Education thing called the Apple Digital [...]

While editing some images in PhotoShop this morning, my home iBook (2002 vintage) went belly-up; the screen went to vertical bars and all attempts to restart produced no startup screen, no spinning of the drive. Realizing it is likely a significant hardware failure, I checked my AppleCare warranty and saw I had only 7 more days until it expired! I’ll be dropping it off to the IC unit at the Phoenix Apple Store this morning. I’ve had 5 personal Macs since 1989, and another handful and a half at work, and this is the first time I’ve experienced a total meltdown. So here is your warning, go home and get a good backup (and do it again next month); I have some partial backups but am already fretting about some files, photos, and a pile of tunes that will either be lost or need to be resurrected. Update: The Apple [...]

flickr foto Nov_04_I-Ate-This-Squaredavailable on lenny’s flickr (not my meal, but found in the flickr Creative Commons By Attribution collection) Getting back to documenting what’s been sitting on my project plate, is a heaping pile of … well, not the cholesteral special in this Creative Commons flickr photo, but a heaping pile of mySQL, PHP, and some seatr of the pants programming… and the birth of a new thing we call the “Ocotillo Cortex”. We have to start this back to May 2005 for our year end edtech fest, the Ocotillo Retreat. Our theme was related to “Lost in Technology” and sported a GPS metaphor sprinkled everywhere. This had even more database behind the web than previous events, and it was cooking well. We created an online demo session presenter form, so all those details went to a database that fueled the session list of 46 sessions This too was cross [...]

Mmmmm….feeds… in an eportfolio…. mmmmm… Audree has released another new exciting feature for the MyEport software used at her Chandler-Gilbert Community College and the Maricopa wide service we host for the rest of our system. It has had already for months or more, the ability to syndicate content out from an a publish eportfolio (e.g. to enable easy tracking of specific eportfolios). Now it features the ability to embed content from external feeds into an eportfolio page (see the details and examples listed in the latest enhancememnts). There are two ways of doing this- one is the ability to add one or more feeds as a sidebar to any desired eportfolio page. For example, that rascal guide to the MLX, Biff Cantrell, has a aidebar feed of new MLX items on his main entry page and a collection page, but is side bar syndicating this very blog in his own [...]

What a nice surprise this morning when a colleague mentioned Helen Barrett, the “grandmother of eportfolios” was just down the hall! She is here one day to do an eportfolio/Taskstream workshop with our Teacher Education program. Being in need of some good audio speakers for her demo, I loaned her my Harmon Kardon Sound Sticks, so the room was rocking to music when I left. We are fortunate to have Helen as a guest speaker last February for our ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty which was a rousing success all around. She is the world guru on eports and a great colleague.

… which is a good thing. Steven Johnson‘s book Everything Bad Is Good For You has been out, and blogged about, for a while. I finally had a chance to read it over Labor Day, and have come away amazed at how fresh a view it is on pop culture, games, and even reality TV. If you know anyone struggling with making that connection between games and learning, they need to read the book. I had actually recommended it (before reading, go figure) for a reading in our Honors Program leaders, since the theme this year is Pop Culture. So we had a copy laying around the office, so I grabbed it before leaving for a long 4 day weekend. I am not going to try and summarize/recapsulate the entire book, but a main premise is that the knee jerk reaction of looking at kids playing shoot-em up video games, [...]

I would not suggest that higher education institutions need to operate like CNN, but I find it fascinating to read Elliot Masie’s observations of how CNN dealt with the flow of content and information in the wake of Hurrican Katrina. In CNN Newsroom in the Midst of Katrina – “Rapid Development… Content Objects… Learning Implications”: There were some incredible learnings and observations as I quietly watched the news gathering and assembly process and interviewed the Learning team at CNN. Many of these items relate directly to how organizations will be assembling content in the near future. The question is, will educational institutions be one of these organizations? Below I have take some of Maise’s descriptions of CNN and put them besides a gross and likely over generalized observation of higher education. Yes, there are numerous exceptions and counter examples to every one of my points, but as a whole, when [...]