It took a bit longer than it did the last time I switched (I'm older now, I guess), but I think my transition to the Dvorak keyboard is nearly complete. I now "think" in Dvorak - my fingers are naturally finding the right keys without any intervention. Most of the time. Occasionally I have to pause to think about where a letter is - mostly when entering passwords or shell commands.

Structured Blogging was just updated to version 1.pre13, and one of the changes is apparently a new content type (well, it may have been in 1.pre12 - I skipped a version) that supports a structured review of a journal article.

This could be quite useful in academic blogging. Imagine a spider that crawls the blogs of your students (or of students and professors across the 'sphere), indexing journal article reviews. It could make it very easy to share notes and thoughts on an article, or to create a distributed journal bibliography for communities of practice...

Ted posted a great piece on suburban sprawl in Calgary, with references to the Sierra Club's research. I agree that Calgarians are afflicted with the "Don't fence me in" syndrome. A city with the geographical area of Orange County, but a population of only 1 million people. Calgary has approximately 10% the population density of New York City. About 20% the density of San Francisco. About a quarter the density of Vancouver. (comparison of various population densities)

Ultimate Tag Warrior provided a really handy way to tag posts in WordPress, by just entering tags into a text field ala del.icio.us or Flickr.

But, it uses its own tags database, meaning external tools like Flock, MarsEdit, Ecto, etc... are unable to tag new posts. And I get to do some funkery each time I update the K2 theme to match the latest and greatest beta.

So, I just spent a couple of hours this evening manually migrating UTW tags to be stored in stock WordPress Categories. I would have played around with some SQL to do it, but would rather do some mindless copy/pastery in front of the tube.

James Farmer just pushed the Nonscholae.org website, which was born from the "learning to swim" discussion in the edublogosphere a few weeks back. From the site:

nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.

Non scholae sed vitae discimus
We learn, not for school, but for life - Seneca, Epistulae

We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools. As educators, we should be familiarising learners with these technologies, supporting and facilitating their responsible use and equipping our students with the skills to keep them safe and savvy in the online world.

Every now and then, I remember about the great search application called Kartoo. It's a flash UI on top of a bunch of search engines, and does some really interesting things with the aggregated search results. The coolest (and most visible) thing is the "concept map" view of search results - and this display doubles as an on-the-fly social network diagram.

For example, I just did a quick ego search (don't laugh - you do it too. fess up!) for "darcynorman.net" to see what kind of diagram came up. I was surprised by how on the mark it is. The diagram is a good starting point (although far from comprehensive) for getting an idea about what interesting bits I published (since only those will be linked to by others), and you get a rough idea of my immediate social network. The display is paged, which is unfortunate and counterintuitive (since you can zoom and pan the diagram, and pagination only makes sense for text lists...). Here's a screenshot of the second "page" of results mapped out:

I spent about 2 minutes playing with Moodle today, in response to a question from Gord about how to add resources to a course. He started adding a resource yesterday, but wasn't sure how to finish the process (it was a website link, and he wasn't sure which fields were mandatory and which were optional). So I log in with the temporarily-shared administrative account, navigate to the course, and open the "add resource" panel.

If Apple has decided to replace "Power-" with "Mac-", and add "- Pro", ala "MacBook Pro", does that mean we're going to see a "MacMac Pro" as the new Intel-powered desktop?

Here's hoping the new naming scheme isn't taken too literally... :-)

I've been watching way too much of The Incredibles since Christmas (finally got a DVD player, and Evan's a huge Pixar fan already), and all I can picture when I think about the mythical MacMac Pro is this.

I've been given the opportunity to reflect some more on the nature of portfolios, and on the differences between "portfolios" and "dossiers". I last wrote about ePortfolios vs. dossiers last month. This morning I got to see a presentation on a Very Important Project that is building a "Teaching Dossier" system as part of its offerings. I'm not going to name the project, because the exact implementation is irrelevant - it's the concept of the dossier that is off the mark.

In my continued activities as the designated CMS Twiddler for the Learning Commons, I'm putting together a site for a client that will serve as both a "traditional" website (but they can edit through a browser), and a "community" site, with blogs, forums, resource databases and the like. I was playing with both Drupal 4.6.x and the betas of 4.7 (now up to beta 3), and I've found a combination of modules that will let us do pretty much exactly what we had planned on.

Since updating this blog to WP 2.0, the WP-Cache plugin has stopped working as it had been (i.e., it's not doing anything anymore), and the performance of either WordPress or MySQL has been incredibly sucktacular. It can take over 30 seconds to generate a page. Requests are occasionally timing out. This just ain't right.

I thought it might be a GoDaddy issue - they've had database performance issues in the past. But they assure me that everything is running fine. One of the downsides of using a hosting service is that I kinda have to take them at their word.

Moodle. It's fun to say, and fun to play around with. I've spent a good part of the day playing with Moodle to set it up for use on a project. Well, that's a lie. I spent maybe 10 minutes to set it up, and the rest of the time messing around with modules, themes, courses, lessons and activities to see what it can do.

In my early experimentation, it seems like an amazing and flexible LMS. Looks like it will be able to do everything we need for this project, and I'd be surprised if it couldn't be tasked as the campus LMS as well. Lots of institutional and political reasons why that won't happen any time soon, but the software feels pretty close to ready. I know Athabasca is running their campus on Moodle (and ELGG), and I'm wondering what they're finding about large-scale deployment of Moodle...