Okay, it is less than an hour before I leave for time Spring Break R&R and a box full of precious archives lands in our office- brochures, posters, memos from the last 2)+ years of our Maricopa Community College Honors Forums. Among this is a March 1983 visit : 1982-1983 HONORS FORUM“Technology: Its Impact on […]
Sometimes technology is just playing around. I am guilty of that for the last 45 minutes. But with a curious interest in the now fringe-world of “moblogging” (mobile blogs, or accessing blogs via mobile phones), I stumbled across WinkSite, which allows anyone to create a web site / blog that is accessible via a phone-like device, as well as an emulator via a web browser.
“Why would anyone do this?” The age old reply to that famous dog question is, “because they can”.
Before the details, though here is the credit string. I started reading about the interesting social phenomena of camera phones “Oh My! News by Million Camera Phones” posted by Brian, which he nicely credits to the source at Smart Mobs, and skimming around there, realized that I needed Howard Rheingold in my aggregator (ker-plunk), and right below the syndication links at Smart Mobs is this curious link to WinkSite, and there went the next 3/4 hour, setting up a new WinkSite for CDB (note this URL does not seem to get you there in Safari browser, you may have to manually enter the wiinksite id 3719).
I added an image link to winksite via what is now getting a link heavy right side nav bar to the CDB dog house…
Ahhhh, Spring time is almost here in the northern hemisphere (though here in Phoenix we have already experienced 90 degrees F for more than a week). This is a favorite time of year in the Sonoran Desert, as those precious relatively small, but important amounts of December, January rain, cause a burst of color as cacti and desert wild flowers burst into a raging riot of colors, even if for just a few weeks.
We have desert landscaping at our home, not a lick of grass nor any time spent pushing a lawnmower, and last weekend, while tending the gardens (pulling weeds) metaphors began wafting through my mind…..
Since I barked about needing an Idiot’s Guide to Meta-Data, I have had some productive on and off blog posts with some folks that are a step above me in meta-awareness. Thanks to Sarah, who sent a link to the CETIS Draft Guide to Meta Data which shines some light on what some of the […]
This slipped off my “to-do” list, and fell into the crevice behind my desk 😉 Back in February, I mentioned our Online Learning Group meeting where we had some local demos of how some of our faculty are starting to use weblogs. Well, I forgot to come back and post the notes from that meeting, […]
Found at and hereby atriibuted to elearnspace comes this beautful grpahics and post from Stephen VanDyke on How News Travels on the Internet: I read the Wired article Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious, and thought it was informative. But it seemed to be lacking the big picture view of how the news travels. The Blog […]
I’ve made some noise here and there about the value of meta-data, not that I do not believe it in it nor do I think it does not exist, but mainly, I have yet to see the applied use beyond searching. Out of last week’s NMC Spring 2004 Online Conference, someone asked me, “Well doesn’t […]
On the ‘net anything can be anything. Or not. You might think http://www.learningobjects.com/ might be something related to learning objects, but in reality what they do is: enhance the overall learning experience by addressing the needs of key stakeholders at each step in the learning lifecycle, from planning through to delivery, assessment and reporting. Huh? […]
The natives are restless and rumbling among the online web teaching course I am co-teaching this semester. One student’s self-evaluation referred to the “hostile” environment (a weeks worth of angry posts to the discussion board). There are a number of factors I am accepting my role in: * It is a course taught previously by […]
The New Media Consortium Spring 2004 Online Conference was come and gone this week. I am still favorable of the format, and its mix of streaming presentations, asynchronous discussions, and live chat sessions- most online conferences throw so many sessions and event son the pile that you get overloaded. The NMC ones have had a nice balance, though the participation in this recent one was much less active than the first one in October 2003.
Anyhow, my keynote on “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” was there, it turned out to be a 52 minute guided tour of the MLX by that energetic tour guide, Biff Cantrell. I am thinking now it was way long, but I wanted to represent all of the facets and features inside and around the MLX, from our promotion efforts, to IP issues, from hardware to software, from TrackBack to RSS. That is the thing about an online conference is you do not see the audience, so you cannot tell if they are bored, reading their email, blogging, or in a trance. You just let a presentation fly, like an arrow lofted in the air, and sometimes you hit the mark and sometimes you miss.
Maybe the jury is till out, but I have installed a copy of this presentation on our site, so if you have an hour to kill (actually with Breeze you can easily pick your way through the show), go take Captain Biff’s Tour of the MLX. Again, Macromedia Breeze does an amazing job of taking a 70 MB PowerPoint and making it something viewable as a streaming media presentation even on a 56k dial-up.
