… would likely program my current project more efficiently. This is one of those textbook examples of how not to build software, but in then end, good enough will (hopefully) be good enough. I am working an updates to an online application system we developed last year for one of our professional growth programs (where […]
Yet another exmaple to show that weblogs can be more than just a place for teen diaries and cat fetishes, Steven Cohen has hoisted a presentation into Blogger format- see “Staying Ahead of Your Patrons With Weblogs and RSS”. Is it anything different than a garden variety PowerPoint slide show? No, not in terms of […]
Worrisome. I just got Movable Type (2.661) comment spam on entries in one of my blogs where the database has been set via comment closing routines to turn the allow comments to the value that closes them. How is it possible for the roach to sneak in? I had hoped that was a complete shutoff. […]
Liz Lawly recently shared a great collection of edublogger’s explanations for why they blog:
I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over and over again. So here’s what I give people who ask me this, in an attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia. It’s not all about personal confessionals. Really.
These are great, useful, but in a way, like asking devout Apple users “Why they use a Mac?” I am curious about the flip side, why academics do NOT blog, what keeps them from it, what are the barriers, perceived or real?
I’ve been musing on this for a while, as I have created blogs for teachers and techies in our system that have various life spans from weeks to months. It is also curious in light of interests in our system in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), sprouting from the Carnegie Foundation’s movement— where a central tenet is being “public with our work as scholarly teachers” — what could be more than public than a blog?
And while the buzz is high among edu-techies for electronic portfolios, the prospect of an easy to use, comprehensive, portable, enterprise life long tool is on the 8 to never year horizon (don’t bark back about the ones in existence, I know about them, I know about the successful systems in place, but they are not near mainstream). So you can sit back and wait for the perfect tool or do something NOW which can catalog your accomplishments, projects, reflections, artifacts — a blog.
Following is mostly my own conjecture and speculation on why the blog updatke is slow, and is part of a later to be summary of how our faculty leaders are doing with using the blogs+wikis+discussion boards to document our Ocotillo project.
Among the chaff of email spam are a few gems. Here is one from Ian in Spain who has figured out how to leverage RSS, blogs, and Feed2JS to generate a dynamic site: Hi Your rss2js service is first class. I love the code generator and the service itself – what a great job! I […]
Woah, nellie! I had no idea when I clicked a link that said, “do not, I REPEAT, do not go here” (the old teacher reports read “Alan does not listen well to instructions”) that I’d find this wildly fantastic flickr graph tool: Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It […]
A “web good dog” to Will Richardson for sharing a link to his Learning Times presentation– see Now THAT Was Fun…and Educational (What a Concept!). His blogging/RSS presentation is available for FREE as a streaming audio narrated show, where he is able to talk over and demo things like Bloglines, etc. But the cool thing […]
A tale of two sequential spam emails, in sequential order. First was philosophical spam (one does not see too many of these): Both the material and spiritual worlds are full of opulence, beauty and knowledge, but the spiritual realm is more magnificent due to its being full of knowledge, bliss and eternity. The material creations […]
This really happened. I promise. While biking home tonight, I came up on what I took to be a father riding along side a boy, perhaps 10 or younger. As my speed was greater, as I approached, Dad swung out far to the left, so I had to pass between the two. Dad says How […]
For the last 12 years at maricopa, my e-mail signature has been “Was Geologist, Now Technologist” a Readers Digest condensed version of my tale of transforming from a graduate student in Geology to a techie at Maricopa. Last night, I attended an event at Arizona State University, for one night of flashback nostalgia. The event […]
