I continue to put my pennies in a piggy bank towards a future iPod. Until then, in scanning more and more RSS feeds that contain references to the audio enclosures, I am bothered/irked/annoyed by the scant details available to the summary in an RSS Reader: My Views on the Cheese Curdling Controversy Today’s podcast on […]
flickr foto I Can Snow If I Want Toavailable on my flickr The thermometer is pegging 35+ degrees, but snow is falling in nice big clumps this morning at our cabin in Strawberry. A big wet storm is sitting on top of Arizona, the second in a week (I am convinced somehow our weather delivery […]
Submitted for the Colophon of the Week (once I look up a definition of what the heck a colophon is), from the Newsdesigner blog: This site was coded with rudimentary HTML, PHP, CSS and BEER. The 3-column CSS layout was adapted from one found at Position Is Everything. BBEdit helped wrangle the alphabet soup, and […]
My latest 25 cent investment from the Pine Arizona Senior Center Thrift Store is “The Road Ahead” by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson. Far from being my hero, I was curious where the road he envisioned back in 1995 actually went. I’ve not read much yet, but flipping through, I have to grudgingly admit […]
I forgot who’s WordPress blog I was surfing this morning, but a mouse hover over their RSS link turned the cursor to a question mark, and clicking the link actually auto subscribed that feed to me aggregator. The link was written differently than the typical link: feed://www.somedude.com/blog/feed/ That is correct, note the feed:// protocol on […]
… 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 […]
