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The Ray of MLX Hope: Nutrition Faculty

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As a brighter followup to the repository folly, I am excited by an event planned next week by a lead faculty member in the Nutrition area at one of our colleges.

As she explained, there are not a large number of faculty in this discipline across of colleges and many of the classroom teachers are adjunct faculty, so as a group, they were interested in creating a collection of sharable teaching resources they could all draw from as needed. “Wow maybe we should build….. nahhh, it already exists!” Luckily, Maureen actually reads the emails I blitz about the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). and she was willing and interested to arrange a discipline focused effort to build a collection that would be useful in her field..

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Repository Folly…

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By rule, I usually avoid use of the “R-word” (repository, too close to the “S-word”), but wanted to launch, here just a few notches into a new calendar, my pessimism on the aspirations of those creating these magical collections of “learning objects.” The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used. They pay lip service to the concept but the action is not there. A bigger folly is that they would have the gumption to complete a “meta-data” form on top of that.

I am more convinced is that the loop is far from closed as we lack anything that can easily build meaningful things from these R-places. We have piles of meta-data on top of objects… and that is about all.

But following the pessimism is maybe a small ray of sunshine (next post).

This is fueled largely by the lack of response (or glacial speed thereof) of contributions to our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). Back in October I outlined a rather long list of the various efforts and strategies we have put in place to convince our folks to help build the MLX.

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How Shapers of Your Future Write

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Ahhh, there is nothing like literate, thoughtful email feedback… if only it happened more often than Arizona blizzards. For more than 9 years, we have gotten a stream of emails via our free, online Writing HTML Tutorial, most coming from lesson 12 where we teach you how to write a hyperlink that triggers an email. […]

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Wiki Up (southeast of Wikieup)

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I spent too much of today fiddling around with setting up a wiki on our new Jade server. This was at the request of one of our most intrpeid and adventurous faculty members, one I hooked on HTML in 1994, roped into blogs last year, and he’s already to push the envelope out past Mars. […]

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Updated jClicker- web slide show template (free too!)

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Finally got around to some revamps to a web slide show template I’ve been rolling for a few years, the “jClicker” (little “j” is for JavaScript). We do many many photos for our many events at work, and this has been a very handy way to organize photos into a slide show format. The main site includes a step-by-step construction guide.

Basically, all one has to do is to assemble your image files (any web format), write some captions and edit one text file to control the settings and define the order of the slide show. Previously, one had to actually write incrementing numbers for the lists (arrays) manage the image files, menus names, and captions, but a email from a user generated a beautiful idea– just have a running self-incrementing counter (javascript- “i++;) before each section that lists the next slides image file, menu name, and caption. Now deleting, adding, or re-arranging the slide order is a trivial cut and paste, whereas previously one who have to re-order all the data.

A key feature since the first version is that every slide page also pre-loads the next image for a smoother slide to slide flow.

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Coming Soon: “ecto”, son of Kung-Log

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I’ve raved before about Kung-Log, Adriaan Tijsseling’s amazingly sleek Mac OXS application for doing just about all the MovableType composing and editing. Change is on the way and it is good- Adriaan is at work on a new version, re-named “ecto”. In fact, I am “ecto”-ing this entry now in beta version 0.1.5, and it […]

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Ari’s Big List of Blog Search Engines

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Ari Paparo assembled a longer than you might expected list of web search tools for specifically searching weblogs and/or RSS feeds. My new theory on blogging is that whenever I can’t find a particular piece of information on Google I should just create it myself. What’s the point of all this easy-to-use publishing technology if […]

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Now X-Serving for 2004… Jade Has Moved

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No addresses or URLs have been shuffled, but today I finally managed to move our ‘Jade’ server (if anyone has caught notice, all machines in my area are domain named after minerals… my G4 laptop is ‘Topaz’, my beige PC is “Pyrite’, there is an old Mac named ‘Sphalerite’ acting as a mulit-user server for […]

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Reading Time: “The Map that Changed the World”

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This slow time has allowed a rare luxury: finishing a good book.

On one forgotten trip a few months back, thumbing through the schlock selections at some airport bookstore, one caught my attention because of a geology cross-section on the cover. Simon Winchester’s “The Map that Changed the World” is the riveting story of William Smith, truly the “father of modern geology.” (Michelle hopefully has a copy 😉