240 Posts from 2003

Uncategorized

“Building the MLX…” presentation

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

Faithful CDB readers get this early glimpse at Building an Innovation Collection (with a bit of Competition and Bribery), a presentation for Monday, October 20, at the League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology in Milwaukee.

This is less a technical presentation and more about the strategies we have used to (try and) build up our collection, as well as some words from faculty who are using the MLX.

My co-presener, Charlene Thiessen, is a faculty member from GateWay Community College who has been one of our local MLX advocates. Our program blurb reads:

The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources that support learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges, represented as mysterious wrapped “packages”, from a Flash animation for a chemistry lab to a faculty development program. See how we tripled our collection with a friendly competition for software prizes. Learn how we are syndicating content with RSS news feeds.

As part of this…

Uncategorized

Derivative or Relating MLX Packages

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

I am just trying to flesh out a new idea for the Maricopa Learning eXchange. Since we have now real stories of how our faculty are using and modifying MLX content. I am hoping we can set up some new tools that can allow someone to create a new MLX item, and add that it is related to or derived from another MLX package.

For example, from our video interviews, we had an Estrella Mountain adjunct faculty (Marylyn) who teaches economics who described how she used the human organs supply and demand lesson package developed at Chandler-Gilbert, but in doing so, Marylyn had added some new components. We would like it if people like Marylyn could ultimately post a new MLX item to describe how the existing one was adopted and perhaps modified.

A tool for showing relationships would recognize use and re-use…

Blog Pile

More Fixes for RSS2JS

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

Wow, once you start tinkering with code, the worm can opens up. I made a few more adjustments to the RSS to JS demo due to the worminess of RSS 2.0 versus 1.0. After comments in yesterday’s announced fix, I became aware that the code would not deal successfully with RSS 2.0 feeds that use […]

Uncategorized

Jay Allen for Saint: MT-Blacklist Plugin

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to Jay Allen, for those 40 hours of blogged sleepless programming that produced MT-Blacklist – A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin. The war againt spammers has been ratched-up considerably with this new valuable tool (it is beta, but works sweet so far). It allows easy maintaince of your blacklist, deleting […]

Uncategorized

Those low down dirty Bloogz

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

We always need more search engines, eh? Here is Blloogz which has no “about screen” but apparently walks many blogs to fuel the search tool. Not being sure, if this cogdog was “bloogz-ed”, we added our URL to the crawl. Searches produces long lists, but page loads were a bit on the slow side, some […]

Blog Pile

RSS2JS Script Fix

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

In response to observed, unexpected behavior, I made a minor tweak to our PHP script that does the RSS to JS magic, using JavaScript to embed RSS content in any page. The probllem was on the simple way I was naming my cache files (the RSS parser I use creates cache files to ease the […]

Blog Pile

Notes from the Road: Under the Big Sierra Peaks

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

Barely relevant to the rest of this blog, what follows are the collections of thoughts that brewed, frothed, fermented, distilled during a weeken of travel. On the heels of a trip to Columbus for the NLII Focus Session on Learning Objects, I actually returned home to Phoenix, but weirdly enough did not exit with baggage to my car to go home as normal.

Nope, the trip was not over, it was a plane change for a flight to Reno, Nevada, on route to a friend’s wedding Saturday in Mammoth Lakes, California.

Uncategorized

Learning Objects: Focused Now? Blurry?

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

What follows, or rambles are some thoughts on today’s NLII Focus Session (October 10, 2003) at Ohio State. I should say now that the best part of these events are getting to meet colleagues face to face, and without a doubt the attendance of 60 were all people I respect and value their varied work in this weird arena.

However, bottom line, I am not sure I have anything more in focus on learning objects.Frankly I thik it is a mistake to focus on them. They are not as important as the learning activities we can create from them.

Maybe it was a mistake to buy for the plane ride a copy of James Bishop’s “Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist” a review of the life and works of my favorite acidic writer, Edward Abbey. In addition, I did miss the last 2 hours to catch a plane so I could be at a wedding tomorrow in Mammoth Lakes.

So….

Uncategorized

Blog Spam sneaks under the Wire

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

Well I feel safer having implemented my blog-spam defense perimeter but apparently there are still some pesky cockroaches sniffing around the edges. Here is another one for those keeping their blog spam filters up to date: IP Address: 219.141.115.94 Name: gifts Email Address: gifts-catalog@yahoo.com add to the banned domains: lstor(dot)com with a variety of un=related […]

Uncategorized

Learning Objects: Believe It or Not!

Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog CogDog The Blog on

Here is a sneaky dog’s first peek at Learning Objects: Believe It or Not!, the gist of what I am presenting 1:00 PM Friday as part of the “Learning Objects Lounge” at the EDUCAUSE/NLII Focus Session on Learning Objects. Please do not alert the lawyers for the Ripley’s enterprise. It was an irresistable metaphor. Actually […]