CogBlogged from ‘March, 2006’

I feel like I just finished a double marathon. Kind of like the trendy “speed dating” events (no first hand experience here), I spent two hours this morning doing demos at Rio Salado College, the Maricopa college that specializes in online learning. Inspired by a session at the EDUCAUSE ELI 2006 Conference where presenters used Blogger and an online survey, Rio’s VP of Academic Affairs, created a survey for their faculty (using SurveyMonkey) and asked for comments via a blogger site, to gauge their faculty’s awareness and use of many of the current technologies she saw and heard about at the conference. The results indicated a moderate general awareness of all of the technologies listed, but not a great amount of expertise in any one. They made a grouping into four categories: 1. Informational/Relational: Skype, MySpace, Friendster 2. Journaling/Publishing: Blogging, YouTube, Flickr 3. Syndication/Resource Management: RSS, Tags, Social Bookmarking 4. [...]

On a very off topic note, for well over a year, I have been dealing with an annoying, dry hacking cough. I’ve seen my general practitioner, and went through ineffective treatment for mild allergies and asthma. For the last 5 months, I have been to a pulmonary specialist and we have tried ruling out an ACE inhibitor I was taking (tried 2 alternatives), treatment of acid-reflux, done a stomach scan, tried about 3 other medicines. I like this doc- he’s aggressive, sarcastic, and yanked the chain when he called my other doc’s office and got put on hold for 6 minutes. But I am starting to call him “Aflac” as he flits form one treatment to another, assuring me he will stick with this until the cough is gone. But now, he is thinking acid-reflux again and is asking me to try yet another pill for 2 weeks and give [...]

Still catching up with piles of unread RSS fed stories, reams of email, I am happily taking in a few new web things that have popped up around the Maricopa web neighborhood. Out at Paradise Valley Community College, they have set up a WordPress.com site for a book club – they are posting descriptions of some current books, inviting comments as discussion, and posting book related events. Nicely done, and a pleasing template. While I have written about setting up podcast feeds for digital stories done at our MCLI LearnShops, my colleague and D-story teacher Cheryl Colan has posted digital stories done last semester by her students at Phoenix College, one of which I believe won a top prize at a California film festival. Wow, these stories are great. I saw them back in December, but check them out now in iPod format. And my long time colleague, Karen Schwalm, [...]

Just when you think you have exhausted all the oddly strange things people have cooked up in a blog, comes along just one more. One Red Paper Clip is documenting the North American (?) Dream: My name is Kyle MacDonald. I started with one red paperclip on July 12th, 2005 and I am making a series of trades for bigger or better things until I get a house. My current item up for trade is one recording contract. You can read current offers here. Do you want a recording contract? Please contact me with your offer at (oneredpaperclip@gmail.com) or phone (514-833-3980). I live in Montreal Canada but will go anywhere in the world for the right offer. – (click on pictures below for stories about each trade.) Only on the web can you get away with this. I love the strangeness of it, as well as the only way I [...]

Interspersed among the many nice comments to my “By Maricopa / Hello NMC” post, was one comment that ended up addressing directly with the writer, rather than in the comment stream. Gemma had commented (likely via the first place to write) about her displeasure that I had used a screen shot and a link to her LJ site as one of my examples of “blogs as diaries” in my 2005 presentation on “More Than Cat Diaries”: You never asked for my permission to put a screenshot of my site up on your presentation on online diaries. You never asked for my permission to link to my site. Whether you read it or not is not the issue here. My site is as private as I can make it and I do not appreciate the fact that you’ve used it without so much as even letting me know, and then put [...]

Please, let’s take the high road, and ignore any literal, body action interpretations of this title. My pending transition from Maricopa to NMC is likely to occupy much of my blog space, considering this is a transition from my first “real” job to my second. Here is a very odd thing about Maricopa. People stay here a long time. I remember retirement parties and years of service recognition in the 30, 35 (heck maybe even 40 for Jim Devere) years. That is a healthy sign of an organization, right? Well, as I was ramping up to turning in my notice, I searched high and low among my employee manuals, policy manuals, HR Department web sites… I could find nothing that provides the instructions on how to resign. There was stuff on retiring, dying, taking a leave of absence, getting fired, appealing getting fired, appealing the appeal for getting fired etc, [...]

flickr foto Fir and Snowavailable on my flickr I’ve just returned from a week’s hideaway at our cabin in Strawberry, AZ. I deliberately left the computers at home, and this was my longest offline experience in 5 or 6 years. The first few days were a bit shakey, and the sweats and convulsions were intense. I kid you all (the 5 people who read this blog); there was no adverse reaction, and I loved being free of the keyboard, web, and email chains. We ate linke royalty, read books, watched movies, sat in the hit tub, took the dog for runs in the snow, and just plain unwound. I cannot even state for sure why we came back home. This photo is of a fir we planted in our front yard about 2 years ago. We arrived a few days after the storm of the winter, which plopped maybe 35 [...]

This is a quiet Spring Break week at Maricopa (faculty are off the whole week, staff work MOnday to Wednesday), and I am heaving a rock into the waters, sending some ripples out. Change is all around out there (including Arizona getting in some places, 4 feet of snow in one weekend) and I am ready for some myself. After fourteen years of doing technology “stuff” here at Maricopa, I am making a break to run with a new pack… I have been offered (and accepted today) an excellent opportunity to join the New Media Consortium, where I will be something like “Director of Technology Resources and Member Services”. Whatever the title (like what does “Instructional technologist” really mean?, I’ll take something like “web geek”) , it is exciting to be joining a Great Organization doing Cool Stuff. Oh, and I get to work from home. This has not been [...]

I like using internet tools. I hate taking care of servers. Today has been a bad jinxed day. Is that more Alberta voodoo? For one thing, I loathe turning off web sites that are still accessible or even actually used. I have some web pages that first popped up more than 12 years ago. But I did have to retire one site today. Back in 2000, I did some experimental work with (then) Macromedia Director and its Multi User Server (MUS) technology allowing me to create a couple of multi-user multimedia applications. But now, my multi user projects are now dead. The MUS allowed for environments to be created that could be shared by multiple users, so I had developed on simulation that allowed multiple people to control the variables in an ideal gas law experiment (chemistry, we all remember PV=NRT right?): Ideal Gas Law Game Designed for introductory chemistry [...]

Dress it up with ad talk like “Dominate Any Market”, but to me Super Blog Submitter Pro is nothing short of spammers delight. Is this a virtuous, noble, make your Mom proud, business or what: The VooDooBlogger software is amazing in every respect! … Imagine creating entire blog farms in a matter of hours instead of months! … How would you like to setup a brand new domain and instantly have 1000′s of 100% OnTopic, Keyword Specific Targeted Oneway Backlinks within minutes. Not days, not hours… MINUTES. THE MOST ADVANCED SOFTWARE OF IT’S TYPE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. 100X MORE POWERFUL THAN COMPETITORS WHO SELL FOR $850 AND STILL MAKE YOU DO MOST OF THE WORK. NOT ONLY CAN YOU MASS CREATE UNIQUE BLOG ACCOUNTS THAT LAST, BUT YOU ARE ALSO ABLE TO GO BACK AT ANY TIME AND MASS POST TO ALL BLOGS YOU HAVE CREATED, OR EVEN MASS [...]