Search Results for 'Pondering the Blog Change' ↓

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Curtis This is the last week of my first semester teaching ds106; Jim Groom has reminded my plenty about what a marathon push this is for both student and teacher. Their blogs have fallen quiet as (I hope) they are going full metal on their final projects. Before doing any philosophical ear waxing on tyhe experience, two meta-ish things have bobbed up repeatedly as a means of looking at the work we are all doing. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the assignments or the branded #life spirit of it all. One of the pleasant (or least negative) aspects of this course is that we really do not spend much fi any time teaching software. You would think we’d have to cover a lot of grounds with students doing photography, visual design, audio recording and editing, video work, remixing… [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by michael.heiss Given the rising tide/trend of electronic books, for a number of months I’ve been pondering how to make our NMC publications available in an ebook format. With the push of an iThing it looked like ePub was the format to aim for. It is after all, a standard (or is it a guideline). My experience suggests it is a muddy place, much depends on the devices that access the content (oi the browser wars of the 1990s), but this is a stream of what I’ve figured out so far. I will pre-amble that I have almost no expertise in this- its just what I figured out by head-banging attempts to produce an ePub. I’ll foreshadow the hint that I am excited about the just released Anthologize tool for generating electronic texts but it’s too early to tell on that one. First, I tried [...]

Many times I have said, er boasted, that pretty much form the time I started this ed tech computer work, I’ve made it a habit to give away, for free, just about anything I’ve made. I do believe it comes back to you. And it has, in the forms of invitations to visit some wonderful islands like Iceland, New Zealand (a second time), Australia (twice too!)… as well as spawning a world sprawling network of connections that might never have happened otherwise. This came about in my very early years, as I discovered the joy of finding/mining for nifty desktop applications, HyperCard source code, etc on the Info-Mac ftp server then at Stanford (long live sumex-aim!). And I was lobbying my bits into the free space from the time of setting up my first gopher and web servers at Maricopa. I tossed things onto my old grey home page, and [...]

You can never have too much online community building (activity), but do you wonder about how many online community places there will be? Liking going from a nice scattering of small rural communities to big bustling cities, are we headed down the road to sprawling Megalopoli. I am criticizing none of these efforts, nor their idea/concept. As I begin my new duties with the NMC, I am going to be involved with creating/promoting, invigorating online communities. Will I add more to the map? There is Academic Commons. And Education Commons. Places with history like Tapped In. From “down under” is TALO. And (no snarky comments today), Apple’s Education Exchange. Billions and billions of ‘em. There are regional ones (by state, by school, by department). Some have put up the plywood over the windows, like Washington’s Learning Space. And the places like PLATO? (Side note: as an undergraduate student in the [...]

While driving to work today, i felt like I had forgotten it was some sort of national, regional holiday like Drive To Work With Your Brakes On Day (which can also be celebrated by attempting to send messages via Morse code by tapping on your brakes). Of course, with only 2.5 days of commute left (as the new work commute will be down my hallway). I may be celebrating something different on Friday. I must be boring everyone with this stream of things about leaving the job at Maricopa, I think I am yawning myself. It’s been pretty self-absorbed and I’ve been unable to tap into cool things happening like the HigherEd BlogCon (counting on the screen casts being available later). I’m also rummaging, pondering, how the blogging here may change or not in my new role. I got some things that have been simmering for a while about self [...]

“Email listservs are the place on the internet for lively and active online communities…” well, it was something I might have said in 1989, 1992, or even 1995. Pondering where listservs are now, I quickly reached for a dinosaur metaphor, but felt that is rather cliche, so I dud around WikiPedia and found the story of the Quagga, an extinct variety of the zebra. But how is the Quagga relevant? A recent discussion of “blogs vs lists” on the ITForum list reinforced the reason just why 2 years ago I dropped every listserv subscription once I found I get much more information, more quickly, from a wider variety of sources, make more professional (and interesting) connections via the blog-space and RSS. But the discussion on ITForum caught me off guard by some very naive to off-base (IMHO) opinions of blogs. Today I posted: Wow. I’ve not read ITForum in a [...]

I’m mulling over what many other quicker, maybe wiser, colleagues have done, and migrate my blog software from MovableType 2.661 to WordPress 1.5. It’s not critical, not urgent, but I feel it nagging at me. Last week I dumped a chunk of time trying to get all the perl pieces in place to use the captcha plugin for MT (actually mainly for other blogs on my server). Trying to get the perl pieces in place for this plugin was a headache and a half. Tried to cpan the need GD.pm modules. First I was missing some sort of Test.pm modules…. oops, that was a missing piece of CPAN.pm that needed to be downloaded. GD needs the gdlib 2.0.8 or higher… and that was something I failed at via cpan and manually install. I did manage to install gdlib using fink via FinkCommander on this Xserve, but the hard part with [...]