I asked for it. I got it. Some good, healthy, swift kicks regarding yesterdays 2 part frothy rants on This Ain’t No Blogging (parts 1 and 2), both via comments and trackbacks. Thanks Scott, Dan. Stephen, James, David, Rino (I think, I cannot read Norwegian), Brian, Tom and everyone else who decides to pile on. […]
As hoped, I already got some bark backs on “This A’int No Blogging” Part 1: If a Blog Falls in the Woods…. And as rightfully pointed out, comments are not all there is to being part of the blogging community- see the well thought comments just made by Stephen Downes — noting the pitfalls of […]
I am going to write something in this first of two posts that I bet (and hope) a lot of people will disagree with. I want that. I want to hear your dissent. That is what this stuff is about. Here it is, I make my own artificial distinction between publishing a weblog and the […]
Recently bouncing around a few edublogs are echos of Liz Lawley’s MT Courseware 3.1 is coming: The announcement about new features in the upcoming MT3.1 release has gotten me excited about revising my courseware for this fall. In particular, the multi-blog option (“A plugin which allows you to include template content from one weblog in […]
I’ve been using my CDB Bloglines site mainly to run a master copy of my regular RSS feeds (keep my home and work computers in synch). But playing with grouping of feeds, I’ve found some new tricks to play with.
I had just been dumping all feeds into one Bloglines folder, organized alphabetically. I run them on the sidebar of the main entry to CogDogBlog— yes, “blogrolls” are like, so, 2002, but I have used it myself numerous times to share the URL of a blog I read. And when I visit new blogs, I very much like to scan who they read and it has helped me to uncover new blogs. It was the low tech Friend of a Friend approach.
Anyhow, Bloglines provides a JavaScript cut and paste that puts my current RSS list on the blog page. I had noticed James does something similar, but his generated feed has labeled groups, which is what I found Bloglines does for you know for the different folders you create on the BL site. So I made a few general feed categories.
But the fun stuff came when trying to use this with my desktop RSS reader…
As far as course management systems, the Maricopa system has quite the diversity for course management systems- 2 colleges using WebCT (moving Fall 2004 to a shared Enterprise server), 6 using Blackboard, 1 using MIDAS, a derivative of the Anlon product, and 1 developing a brand new LMS/CMS to pilot this fall. We saw this […]
Tom Hoffman, blogther (=”blog+author”, eh?) of Tuttle SVC wrote today about an interest in two-person interfaces:
What occurred to me is that there are lots of jobs in real life where you have two people collaboratively operating one machine or even one set of data on paper, but I can’t think of a single pc-based application, outside of games, where two people are working on two computers on a real-time collaborative task. SubEthaEdit, I suppose, but that’s a relatively simple case. I’m not talking about having a conversation; I’m thinking about some kind of serious data manipulation. More like a pilot/co-pilot relationship. Gunner and loader, that kind of thing. I’m not saying it is a problem, but it is kinda weird if you think about it.
I wanted to share something I worked on a few clicks back, but sadly, his blog lacks comments (?) so maybe someone who knows him can send this.
During my sabbatical in 2000, I spent two months at Northern Arizona University (in summer, Flagstaff is a heavenly escape from the Phoenix desert) working on some experimental multi-user web applications, using an early version of the Shockwave multi-user server (MUS). Maybe Tom would categorize these as “games”, but it was nostalgic to think about them, and rewarding to see that code from 2000 still runs (despite that macromedia no longer even mentions MUS).
Basically, the MUS is a desktop application running on a computer plugged into the net, and is set up to “broker” small messages sent back and forth from remote users using a graphic interface authored in Macromedia Director. This functionality is pretty much totally eclipsed by the server communication layers available to Flash developers, but this was done in the pre-Flash era.
But to get to the good stuff, I created two prototype web applications designed for teaching basic chemistry, and they are environments where more than one person, from different places on the net, can share the same virtual environment.
In the Ideal Gas Law application, the goal is to adjust the temperature, number of gas molecules, and the volume of a chamber to try and achieve a specified pressure (hey, we all remember PV=nRT?). The idea is that in the multiuser environment, if I decide to decrease the volume by moving in the right wall of the chamber, the changes I make are seen in near real time by Tom on his computer. And if he changes the temperature, I see the effect– because we are two people sharing the same interface:
flickr foto Pass the Suflur, Pleaseavailable on my flickr Most folks who have been to the Vancouver waterfront have likely marveled at this yellow mound- a ferry ride, a lot of pixels, and some cropping got me a nice closeup. I have dinkered away a bit more time than I would have preferred to set […]
flickr foto On the Waterfrontavailable on my flickr A nice day in the harbour of bustling Ucluelet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Remarkly, when I told Canadians I visited Ucluelet (which took a week to learn the correct pronounciation), they invariable smiled and said, “Ah, Tofino” (which, while nearby, is a completely different […]
I hold Stephen Downes as the uber edu-blogger- and givne his following, when he mentions one of our sites like he did today, the comments come flying in, the Trackback meter spikes… and as an un-intended sign of the ripples in the net, the spammers swarm in like a bunch of vultures in meth. I […]
