I took the text of Obama's speech from the 2008 DNC and fed it through Wordle.net to generate a word cloud to visualize common words. It'll be interesting to compare with McCain's speech next week...

Merlin Mann wrote a great post called "Social Networks: The Case for a Social Network Pause Button", where he suggests we need a few more states of engagement with social network applications as a way to manage the deluge of data.

I've got a better solution. Walk away. Do something else. Here's my social network pause button, and it's extremely effective:

It pauses everything. No inbox. No RSS. No IM. No friend requests. No followers. No super-pokes. No zombie bites. No updates. No is... Nothing but me, my bike, and the wind.

I was going to write up a post describing how to use the cool FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress to syndicate external content into a blog, and republish it in the context of a class or group. But, of course, Jim Groom has beaten me to the punch, and done a much more thorough job of documenting the process than I would/could have done. So, yet again, I'll just refer to Jim's work. What I can do is provide a demonstrating workflow to show how FeedWordPress could be used to pull content from one blog into others in the context of a group, project, or class.

I just upgraded to wp-mollom 0.6.0 and it has a bunch of additions and fixes. If anyone has problems with it, please let me know asap.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find where I heard a specific sentence about peace and peacefulness. I’m pretty sure it was triggered by this lost interview with John Lennon, although the exact quote isn’t in it. Either way, it’s a very powerful presentation of a student’s illicit interview with Lennon in 1969.

In my last post, I wrote about page 61 in Teaching as a Subversive Activity - where Postman and Weingartner asked the readers to contribute their questions to help shape an inquiry-based education, in response to their initial question "What is worth knowing?"

And now, I'm wondering... If you're reading this...

What is worth knowing to you? What are the important questions? What are the unimportant questions that should still be asked?

I've been reading Postman and Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (more info), and I'm finding myself extremely drawn into it. It's the kind of book that I may have read as an undergrad, but just wasn't ready for. It's the kind of book where you need to be ready to really engage with it before it makes sense. And it's the kind of book that has me rethinking pretty much everything, and seeing new patterns everywhere. The book was written before I was born, and published only a few months before I was. But it feels so intrinsically relevant and important today - maybe moreso now than in 1969.

Mollom's been doing a simply outstanding job of blocking spam lately, after the warm-up period. Unfortunately, it appears to be doing a bang-up job of blocking legitimate, breathing humans who are trying (and failing) to comment. I'm moving antispam back to Akismet for awhile, and am hoping it's just a growing pain for Mollom - I really like the system and design, but can't have valid people frustrated when they try to post comments. For now, it's back to moderating comments through Akismet...

Cole wrote a post about how his Twitter network helped him solve a problem. His blog suddenly decided to stop accepting comments, and he wasn't sure how that happened, or how to fix it. I was just going to post this as a comment on his blog, but, well, it's still not accepting comments ;-) (and I apologize if this post comes across as snarky - not intended to - it's just a pre-caffeinated response to a blog, first thing in the morning...)

I said I'd share what I've done in setting up ucalgaryblogs.ca, and instead of waiting for The Mother of All Blog Posts, I'm going to break it up into a few parts. In Part 1, I'll talk about some of the mu-plugins I added. Some are really cool, some are just shiny...

Basically, start with a fresh copy of WordPress Multiuser. I'm running 2.6 on ucalgaryblogs.ca. Then, add the following bits into the wp-content/mu-plugins directory.

I've been slowly tweaking the WPMU install that drives ucalgaryblogs.ca - it's not quite ready for prime time, but it's darned close.

It's now got:

• multiple blogs per user, and multiple users per blog
• subdomain hosting for each blog (i.e., myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca)
• domain mapping - want to use your own custom domain? want myblog.com to point to the blog you've got at myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca? there's a setting for that, and then you just have to tell me what domain you want me to tell the webserver to respond to.
• multilingual admin interface. English. French. Spanish. Chinese. Klingon. Well, I still haven't found the Klingon.po file for WordPress, but once I do... *shakesfist*
• over 100 themes, most of which are customizable. Want a photoblog? Got it covered. Newsletter? Done. Research project? Sure thing.
• 500MB of upload space quota per user. This could be increased if needed.
• Sitewide tag cloud and archives - want to find out who else is writing about mitochondrial RNA? Just hit the tag...
• Blog directory listing all blogs in the system (currently, some test blogs, and the UC Dinos Football Blog! WOOHOO!)
• A handy-dandy blog manager bar at the top of all pages - if you're logged in, it gives you easy access to anything you want to do. If you're not logged in, it gives you an easy place to login from, from any page on the ucalgaryblogs.ca service.
• Lots of other great WordPress goodies, like podcast serving, editing from your iPhone or iPod Touch, great visual editor for posts (with spel chekker, too!) and collaborative blogs with multiple authors.

But, there are still a few things on my todo list before I consider it fully ready for prime time:

I'm working through Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman. I hadn't read it before, and am seriously kicking myself for that. Some quick notes and quotes from the first couple of chapters. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1968, published in 1969, and reads as though it was crafted in 2008.

3 problems that require schools to remake themselves into training centers for subversion:

Communications Revolution or Media Change: