I (still) spend a fair amount of time thinking about the learning object repositories work that was done back at the turn of the century. A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side).

I think it's fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically. The only content that was added to CAREO was done under the auspices of Large Projects and/or Institutions. Individuals, by and large, didn't spend much time with it, or its ilk. Why is that? Why have other applications and platforms gone on to be much more successful, by any definition of the word? Well, here are some reasons:

I just enabled FeedBurner caching/serving of my blog's RSS feed. The goal is to dramatically decrease the load on the server by redirecting RSS requests through FeedBurner's server rather than mine (well, Dreamhost's). Google just bought FeedBurner, so they're not going anywhere. I'm trusting in Google not to do anything evil. I can always pull the plug on them and take control of the feed if needed.

Another bonus (for me, anyway) is an estimate of stats - how many folks are subscribed to the feed. That's always been a total crap shoot, with nothing more than edumacated guesses and darkened dartboards providing numbers. Now I might get a better idea, and am braced for the emphatic "5 subscribers" that it will be flashing at me shortly.

Shortly after I made the switch from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2, I started thinking about the various apps and hosting providers I've used to run my blog. I actually had to mine the archives to remember it all, because it's changed a lot. Over the last 5 (or 6, depending on how it's measured) years, I've used 6 different applications, on 4 different hosting providers. That speaks volumes about interoperability, making it easy enough to move to a completely different weblog applications on 5 separate occasions. Sure, there was some data altered and URLs adjusted, but all posts and comments made the transition successfully each time.

This was my shuffle-ized playlist for the morning ride and cooldown. There isn't a radio station on the planet (satellite or terrestrial) that would have put a playlist like this together.

It looks pretty eclectic, but the tracks all worked amazingly well against each other.

Actually, this is just one of the many reasons why I love Aperture. Non-destructive, interactive image adjustments. I don't use adjustments very often, but when I do, they're absolutely amazing. I had to hunt through my library to find images that had many adjustments made to them - most of my images are used as they were taken in-camera, with only minor RAW tweaks. But, occasionally, an image needs some extra love. Two recent examples are a lightning strike I was lucky enough to catch last night, and my son's team photo for his T-ball team.

I've been asked to contribute to a series of short briefing papers for use by administration, in identifying and planning for trends in higher education. There are some obvious trends (social software - go to them, instead of making them come to us; open content; remix culture; personal publishing and the PLE; etc...) but I'm wondering about any non-obvious trends that people might be seeing. Anything surprising happening on other campuses? Are things like mobile access really starting to take off (esp. in Canada, where mobile internet charges are so unbelievably expensive)?

Not bad. Even before the iPhone hit the streets, Microsoft pushes out their clone. Too bad they lost the form factor. It'd be hard to fit that sucker in a pocket...

Photo by sorenshaman

I kid. A little. I want a multi-touch tactile interface. Now.

I've been trying. Really trying. I just can't find a way to "get" what all of the SecondLife hype is about. I mean, yeah, it's cool. It's fun. It's a really interesting and diverse metaverse. It's a blast to create and buy stuff, and customize an avatar, and fly around islands. I get that part of it.

But, for education, it largely doesn't change much over the existing and available tools. I could see it if you were working on a collaboratively designed architecture project. Or perhaps some theatre or alternate reality exploration of literature.

The latest National Geographic came in the mail today. I find it a little ironic that a magazine that's had such a strong bent toward showcasing the effects of global warming is printed on dead trees and trucked around the world to be delivered into our mailboxes, but whatever...

When I get a fresh new NG, I have a ritual I follow.

1. act all giddy and excited, like a kid with a new present
2. carefully peel the brown wrapper off, so as to not rip the precious cargo inside. mention a little louder than is necessary that it's a National Geographic, so any observers don't get any ideas about what kind of magazine I'm subscribing to that requires a brown wrapper...
3. inhale. deeply. pause. aaaaaaaaaahhhh... the ink smell, mixed with the off-gassing paper. so, that's why they kill trees and ship this stuff around the planet...
4. peruse the cover. always an awesome photograph. try to figure out where the photo was taken. if feeling really geeky, try to figure out how they got the shot. if feeling really cocky, try to figure out if I could have gotten that shot. wonder what it would be like to work on a NG shoot...
5. scan the topics listed on the cover. the ones obscuring the photograph.
6. take 10-30 seconds to scan the table of contents. get an idea of what's inside.
7. flip past the Cialis/Levitra/Ensomnublis/Viagra/Erectomax ads that fill the first section of the magazine with multiple full-page spreads. gee, I wonder what the prime demographic for this magazine is...
8. examine every single page, looking only at the photographs. repeat step 4 for each photograph. this will take an hour or two. wonder what the hell they were thinking when selecting at least 3 photos that should have been marked as "Reject" in Aperture. (the motion-blurred flying birds with blurry ice field in the background is the prime candidate this time around - they were trying to be artistic. it would have worked, had the pan managed to get the bird in sharp focus, but it didn't...) The polar bear shaking off water is one of the best catches of this issue. wow. Knowing that the bear charged the photographer seconds after the shot was taken just makes it so much better. Some of the wide-angle shots of meltwater reservoirs on top of the ice are pretty amazing, too.
9. if any articles look really interesting, go back and read them.
10. wonder why NG isn't just a photo magazine. by FAR the best part of the magazine. the articles are great, too, but they take up paper that would be better allocated to more photos...
11. come back to the issue several times over the next month, slowly working through all articles, letters, sidebars. revisiting every photograph. wondering how freaking cool it would be to work on a NG shoot.
12. put the magazine away for "safe keeping" never to open it again once the next one comes in.

As much as I love NG, I really think I'd prefer an online-only subscription. With access to high-resolution photographs and galleries, I'd be more than satisified. And it would save countless trees, prevent tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, conserve fossil fuels, etc...

Want to work at the Teaching & Learning Centre? We're hiring. It's a tenure track position, working on coordinating our major teaching workshops.

photo by small ape

My blog often has fits of sucktacular performance. After digging around, and bugging DreamHost support for some ideas, I've made some progress.

I had been running wp-cache to enable file-based caching, thinking that would help optimize performance of the site (fewer database calls should equal better performance) - except that DreamHost apparently uses NFS-mounted storage for accounts. As a result, filesystem access is a bit laggy, so the file-based caching was actually (apparently) slowing the site down (as suggested by 4+1 ways to speed up wordpress). Disabled wp-cache and set define('WP_CACHE', false); in wp-config.php

With all of this Web 2.0 activity still building, I've been thinking about Cory Doctorow's concept of whuffie or social currency (from his great short story Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) quite a bit. The idea being that you can "pay" others with a mythical currency based on reputation, not gold. Those with high reputations (creators of cool stuff, humanitarians, or *shudder* American Idle) gather whuffie, which they can use to purchase stuff. Those with low reputations (eBay scammers, spammers, or *ideally* American Idle) have less whuffie, and have to struggle to gain reputation in order to move back up the whuffie ladder.