Work

My big summer project this year was to act as the chair of a newly formed "eLearning Discovery Working Group", with the mandate to begin to identify what eLearning means at The University of Calgary. We were tasked by the CIO to find out what is involved with providing, supporting, and using eLearning tools in whatever ways are necessary to enable the activities of our students, instructors, and staff.

Over the summer, we began to build an inventory of eLearning tools - both centrally provided, and distributed and ad-hoc tools, to start to form a picture of what eLearning looks like to our University community. The inventory is extremely coarse, and we know we've missed huge swaths of activity on campus. But we had to start with something.

I'm changing roles on campus, switching from being an educational technology consultant and instructional designer in the Teaching & Learning Centre, to an IT Partner. I'll be officially part of the IT department, and will be working closely with the TLC and additional units. We'll be fleshing out the details in the coming days and weeks, but it's going to be a fun process. For the first part of the process, I'll still be in the same office at the TLC, so while things will be changing, they will also be rather familiar.

It looks like the University of Calgary is planning a series of TEDx events: TEDxUofC - the first one being next week, just days after the TEDxYYC event.

After previously saying I wouldn't go to a TEDx event because of the way they're set up, I'm happy to post that they don't have to be that way.

Registration for TEDxUofC is open, and cheap. Students get in for $5. Everyone else gets in for $10. It doesn't get cheaper than that. And there's no "how awesome are you?" filter on the registration. You prove your awesomeness by showing up.

trying to figure out how to describe various options to faculty members. this diagram's been flashing in my head for awhile now. it's rough, but it's a start.

Sometime after upgrading our copy of MediaWiki from the antique version I'd had to run, to the shiny latest version, I noticed (well, some of the wiki users noticed first…) that there were some borked characters - accented French characters, Mandarin characters, and fancy schmancy "smart quotes" were displaying as gobbledygook gibberish text. Smelled like a UTF8-related issue - IIRC, MediaWiki switched the front end of the web app to be UTF8, but my database was languishing behind in krufty latin1 encoding. oops.

I've been trying to get BuddyPress working on my WPMU installation that uses MultiDB for database partitioning. It's been cranky, but I just realized I'm a complete idiot because I was overlooking the obvious (and drop dead simple) fix.

BuddyPress was acting up because it was creating tables in each blog's database tableset. But MultiDB makes it easy to declare tables as belonging to a shared global database, so they don't get recreated for each blog and are common across the entire service.

I was asked to give a presentation for the From Courses to Dis/Course online conference last week, and chose the topic of identity as it relates to openness. My session, Identity in the Open Classroom, was a fun (for me, anyway) exploration of the issues, and I think served the purpose of framing discussion.

Here's the video of the recording from the session:

the full chat transcript for the session is available, as well as the full Elluminate session recording.

I've been running a copy of WordPress MultiUser for over a year now. Comment spam hasn't been much of a problem, thanks to Akismet, but if I leave site registration open (so students and faculty can create new accounts and blogs), the evil spammers find it and start sending their bots en masse.

I tried a few plugins, with varying levels of success. There's an interesting one that attempts to limit registrations to a specific country, but it falsely reported some valid users as not being in Canada. Captchas work, but also block some valid users (and the signup captcha plugin I'd been using is possibly abandoned).

So, I did some quick googling, and came across the page on the WordPress Codex about using .htaccess files to stop comment spam. I made some modifications to the technique, and am now running it on UCalgaryBlogs.ca with apparent success. The apache logs show the bot attacks are still in full force, but not a single one has gotten through in order to register. And valid users have been able to get through. That's pretty promising.

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The group of WPMU rockstars at UBC's OLT just whipped up a fantastic new plugin for administrators of a WPMU site to get a feel for the growth of the community. It generates a graph to display growth in numbers of blog posts and comments over time, and uses the Google Data Visualization API to let you interactively define data ranges to be graphed.

Here's the growth of UCalgaryBlogs.ca graphed for the last 2 semesters:

I'm working with a class of 250+ geology undergrads, split up into 53 groups. They're using a WordPress site to publish online presentations as the product of a semester-long group project. I'm using the great WP-Sentry plugin to let them collaboratively author the pages without worrying about other students in the class being able to edit their work (I know - but it makes them more comfortable so it's a good thing to add).

I tried the promising new iPhone / iPod Touch app "Blackboard Learning" hoping to have a cool and efficient way to connect to Blackboard from my pocket computer. No such luck. There's always something in the way of making the LMS experience fun...

Error

Your institution is blocking Sync for the iPhone.

Doh.

I don't know if this is a version mismatch - are we running the wrong version of Blackboard? - or if it's just a new building block that needs to get rolled out on campus. Either way, frustration.

I've been running a copy of the excellent Feed2JS RSS feed embedder script on one of our servers for a few years(!) now. It's a great way to embed any RSS feed onto any web page. The problem is that it's a little too attractive to some of the more leecherly and unsavoury members of teh intarwebs. I occasionally take a peek at who's using the script, and have found SEO tweakers, gambling sites, porn sites, warez, etc... all using it to aggregate their stuff together. That's fine, but download your own copy rather than stuffing my server's logs and cache directories with your crap.