As the blog turns… Since our MovableType move last month to a new server, a shiny Apple XServe, I’d been noticing that email notifications of trackbacks and comments reported not the IP address of the person who had sent the comment/trackback, but the IP address of the server itself. Hard to block spam roaches by […]
According to Amy Gahran, RSS needs a better name. These are suggestions for a new colloquial name for RSS, since acronyms are inherently geeky and tend to alienate nontechnical people. The intention of this contest is to come up with a common-usage term that will help make RSS more accessible to a mass audience – […]
I’ve just taken a brief look at PubSub following some mentions at the RSS Winterfest. This service takes a different angle on aggregating feeds, almost “Downse-ian” like EduRSS in that you can track among thousands (they say) of RSS feeds for particular keyword searches. And the results are presented to you via RSS! PubSub lets […]
Previously on CDB, on the doubts of “Learning object repositories”… “The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used”. Now a different slant. I had lunch recently with a colleague working on a new grant funded project– creating discipline-specific “learning objects” and yes, their […]
Just took a quick at Furl, a new web site for organizing bookmarks centrally (tip of the blog hat to Seb). The concept is not new at all, but I have found most of these sorts (e.g. BackFlip) too tedious to maintain. It’s gotta be simple. Bookmarks/favorites in web browsers have hardly evolved since Mosaic. […]
On its own, blogging is nicely permeating among some of our faculty. At this Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting, we have 4 demos of different ways weblogs are currently in use at Maricopa.
A brief preview for those who cannot be at Phoenix College Friday…
One of my procrastinated pending projects was updating our Learning English Electronically (LEE) CD-ROM software, a still well-used English Grammar coded with Macromedia Director 5.0 in 1998 and updated last in 2000. I had read some time ago that Director Apps needed to be authored in at least version 8.5.1 to run in Windows XP […]
Trying another “new aiming to be regular” CDB feature, highlighting an interesting “”package” from the Maricopa Learning eXchange. This is is special because it is not a “reusable learning object” (RLO) but a ‘reusable idea object” (RIO?) Maybe we can breed a whole raft of meaningless acronyms, like RCA (re-usable classroom activity), RCS (reusable communication strategy), RCP (reusable class project), etc. But again I digress.
This one is also special because it comes from a long time veteran teacher, both a passionate teacher in class and online, someone with an uncanny knack to truly reach and touch her students, and someone who excels and doing effective things with rather simple but effective strategies. I recall these computer workshops Donna and I did back in the mid 1990s, typically in those computer classrooms where the participants were more or less huddled behind monitors- she brought out a classroom technique she called “mouse up” to get their attention. Simple, effective, (and fun). . But again I digress.
Anyhow, Donna has shared an introductory activity she uses as the first bulletin board assignment in her online classes. Rather than a dry, “introduce yourself, what you do, what are your interests” sort of thing, she has applied this activity called The View from Where I Sit (an in this vein of RIOs, she learned this one from another faculty member at a summer workshop).
The energy was electric yesterday at our system’s first introduction to “Pachyderm” at our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day. The reaction to the potential of Pachyderm and the level of participation in the afternoon activities were beyond our wildest expectations. Much had to do with the enthusiasm guest speaker Peter Samis […]
Microsoft provides this “hard to believe someone wrote it seriously and they were not smoking crack” Knowledge Base article Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks..
In a nutshell, the smart folks in Redmind suggest that you type all in the browser address field rather than actually touching your mouse on those dangerous hyperlinks:
…a malicious user could create a link to a deceptive (spoofed) Web site that displays the address, or URL, to a legitimate Web site in the Status bar, Address bar, and Title bar. This article describes steps that you can take to help mitigate this issue and to help you to identify a deceptive (spoofed) Web site or URL.
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.
Can you imagine how popular the web would be if this was how Tim Berners-Lee designed it from the start? Heck, we’d still be using Gopher…
