CogBlogged Tagged ‘projects’

Rising like a bullet up the record charts of Instructional Technology Issues this year is Learning Space Design, with a lot of good stuff coming out of the EDUCAUSE ELI initiative and the July/September 2005 issue of EDUCAUSE Review. It’s timely here at Maricopa, having last year passed a very large bond election for major construction at our 10 colleges, which was a factor in our having hosted our own Ocotillo Learning Spaces Day here recently, September 16. It is the challenge of creating physical structures that may last 30 years, when the activities, tools, that are used within have a much shorter frequency of change. Will we build buildings like we did in the 1990s? On September 16, we had about 120 folks from teams sent by our 10 colleges have a full day’s worth of focus on the topic. It was very well received, appreciated. Sp part of [...]

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).

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 [...]

flickr fotoBrunchavailable on adrian’s flickr Turnovers, fruit, muffins, eggs. Juice.(Another fine free image from the flickr Creative Commons By Attribution collection. So for the first installment here on what’s been on my plate project-wise, we are grabbing a couple of related items that support dynamic calendar information for our site and registration for events. The whole point was to make it so we were not manually editing date-specific content on our project web pages, so as events passed, they would roll off the “upcoming” items list. We’ve had a mySQL powered event calendar running for our MCLI web sites since before 2000. The basic premise is a structure that provides the descriptive info (title, dates, times, locations, contact names, URLs) and a way so each calendar item is “tagged” or associated with a different project area, and as well provide a way of looking at all events.

As summer winds down and the school year ramps up, I’ve been trying to refine a bit of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined approach we created last year for our Ocotillo instructional technology initiatives… For those irregular readers, Ocotillo is a faculty led program that attemps to drive technology agendas here, having been around in various forms since 1987. Last year was the first for a new “Action Group” structure revolving around 4 broad focus areas: Learning Objects, ePortfolios, Hybrid Course Structures, and Emerging Technologies. Each group is lead by a pair of faculty co-chairs who research issues, plan activities and workshops, etc for all 10 colleges in our system. For more, see our March 2005 presentation at the Innovations 2005 Conference. Or see the first year summary report. Last year, we tried hard to convince the groups to use a suite of open source tools we strung together with [...]

Today was time to knuckle down and get some work done. I am about 80% done moving an entire nested web site with connected database to a new server (this is going from a Linux running on a PC platform to our enterprise web server), and trying to get all the walls, roofs, and floors swapped without anyone even seeing a thing. The first step was moving all the databases from one mySQL server to another. It’s pretty easy to do dumps of the databases as a text file of SQL statements- I did it quickly in phpMyAdmin. Most of the ones less than 2 Mb then loaded easily into the new database server (also using phpMyAdmin) but the bigger ones (one is more than 6 Mb) had to be done command line. Not too bad. Created the new accounts on the new mySQl server. Changed my connection scripts on [...]

I am convinced all of my software projects are perpetually in progress, but that never lets me stop from spitting out a new one. As a preface and someone who has worked with them seriously only a few years, I am deeply in techno love with database-driven web sites, notably the object of my affection being mySQL. There seems to be no limit what one can do (well my technical skills can be limiting) and to reshape information in ways not possible in the static pre-life. But enough warbling. This is the latest creation.

Furl and del.icio.us have lots of company- there seems to be no end in sight for the number of new sites offering a place for social bookmarking. I have just added two new tools of note (for a total of 15!) to my Multipost Bookmarklet Tool which allows you to select which services you use and be able to do one click posting via a custom bookmarklet tool. The tools and some more then detailed narrative how I tumbled into them… * Scuttle, which is the main public site for the open source social bookmark tool that allows web site owners to build their own social bookmark sites. I found this as I followed a trackback on a recent entry to something at Todd’s Big IDEA blog at Zane State College. And this connection would not really had been possible if I were one of the purists who thinks comments [...]

We’re one week away from my biggest yearly event responsibility, our annual Ocotillo Retreat. These go back before I started at Maricopa, though my first week on the job was the 1992 retreat at Mormon Lake, AZ. For those not familiar with Ocotillo (go ahead, try and pronounce it ;-) it is our long standing organization that is a faculty driven, grassroots thinktank for addressing issues (or just stirring them up) about instructional technology. Learn more about the history from a March 2005 presentation, or see the plant behind the metaphor. The retreat format has been as organic as the metaphor, sometimes a brainstorming / planning event held out of town, to mini conference formats held at our colleges with more open participation. It’s been my organizational responsibility since 1996, meaning conceptualizing, coordinating logisitics, etc. I am extremely stoked and excited for this year’s event, it will be a blockbuster.