More irrelevant updates on the home landscaping projects… when we bought our house in 1997, landscaping was a process of adding plants (as there was almost nothing growing here except for a few trees)… 8 years later we are in the process of taking out as much of the desert plants we put in… have […]

My self-imposed sentence of hard labor is not over. The next phase of our backyard landscaping project involved a delivery of 20 tons of 3/8 inch minus coral granite on our driveway. This is everything that passes through the finest sieve at the rock quarry (folks in the know just call it “minus”), so it […]

This week is our system’s Spring Break, and even us administrative grunts get Thursday and Friday off. I tacked on a day off Wednesday, and how am I and Mrs. CogDogBlog relaxing? We are re-landscaping the back yard, hauling sand, rock, and brick, moving hard desert earth, yanking out of control cacti, extending a brick […]

I had 5 minutes of technical glory today, where I felt like I mastered the machine. The rest of the day I may have been under its thumb, where I belong. Readers may note that a few weeks back I was dealing with some strange web server activity every Saturday morning that managed to take […]

My colleagues and I had another full on day of absorbing and observing at MIT. the night before, our host and contact Phil Long took us to an outstanding Afghan restaurant in Cambridge, called Helmand. Friday started with a bit of blue sky, but the snow did not wait long to start its thing. In […]

I’ve been in the sub-arctic zone known as “Boston” since Wednesday (hey, it is 85 degrees back home!) for some visits at MIT. Yes, that MIT. This was set up partly to learn more about the iCampus initiative thanks to a gracious invitation from Phil Long at last fall’s EDUCAUSE conference. I am here with […]

My editor is breathing down my back (considering it is like 15 degrees this morning in New York City, that may not be a bad thing). No, I am behind on writing my technology column for the Spring 2005 issue of our publication, the mcli Forum . I need some help 😉 The article will […]

Today was our presentation on our “Ocotillo” project titled Maricopa’s Ocotillo Evolves Again: 18 Years of Faculty Led Instructional Technology Initiatives: Since 1987, Ocotillo has been a faculty led initiative to promote the effective use of instructional technology. Like its desert plant metaphor, Ocotillo has evolved again into four new action groups, leading a range […]

Whew! I found a stellar presentation session today…. all hope is not lost . Margaret Hvatum and Gayla Stewart from St Louis Community College presented “Computer Hacking as an Educational Tool” (no web links ;-):

For education to happen, students must be interested and engaged in the subject material. Computer hacking interests students and motvates them to read, do research, talk in class, and present their findings on hackers. Since both white-hat and blach-hat hackers exist, students also learn to develop their own value systems as the class explores the topics of hackers, what they do, illegal versus immoral behaviors, and appropriate versus inappropriate use of technology.

More or less, this is an excellent approach for a freshman new student experience course, where they learn some literacy, research, and writing skills. What was also good about this session was that it was only half lecture format, as the second half, participants engaged in a scnerio activity that had as look at different viewpoints on the issue of hacking.

Some notes follow…