I was interviewed yesterday by Reg Sherren for a piece that aired on CBC's The National on Earth Day 2010. It didn't turn out as bad as I feared, but he had me read the blog post he found, and the result sounded a bit stiff and scripted. Still, I think it worked out OK. The bit starring your humble and unqualified blogger starts about 2 minutes into the clip:
I'm going to have to try hard to stop obsessing over numbers and metrics. Whatever. Here's the morning ride:
The squiggly lines on the graphs were basically the same as yesterday's. Elevation was reversed, and speeds were slightly higher.
It's strange - just knowing the ride was being tracked, I kept pushing a little harder. Not sure that's a good thing, first thing in the morning. But, blowing off nearly 1300 calories before breakfast was a surprise...
It looks like most of my training for the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer will be during my regular commutes to and from work. I've decided to treat the afternoon ride as a training ride, adding some hill climbing and trying to maintain speed.
I picked up a copy of the Cyclometer app for the iPhone today (thanks to a tip from Doug Springer) - it's a very slick app that uses GPS to track the ride. Not entirely unique, but the implementation is very well done. I like that it doesn't rely on a website to store the data, as well. It does suck up a fair amount of juice from the iPhone battery - 12% in the 38 minutes of my ride home. Also, I don't use any of the display info or remote controls while riding - I don't have an iPhone handlebar mount, so just start the app and toss it in the bag under my saddle. Seems to get strong enough GPS signal through the canvas, and I don't have to worry as much about it sliding off, or getting wet, or otherwise schmutzed...
I'd seen a photograph a couple of years ago, taken by Atto Kim over 8 hours in Times Square. It stuck with me, how people and traffic dissolved leaving only stationary buildings and traces of humanity. It wasn't dehumanizing, it was more of a merging of humanity and architecture. If I remember correctly, Kim used a few panes of welding glass mounted over the lens of his camera to block almost all of the light. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I read the article on his series, or saw the photo originally. Google searching turns up snippets, but not the description of process that I vaguely remember.
Amazing, surreal photographs through what look like tiny aperture long exposures of people and places. Crowds blur into smoke monsters.
ALEXEY TITARENKO | PHOTOGRAPHY.
I'm not sure how he managed such long exposures in what are obviously daylight photos, but I've been planning on experimenting with welding glass to try long exposure shots even with lots of light...
Too much spam garbage was leaking into wiki.ucalgary.ca so I wanted to beef up the antispam strategy a bit. Currently, the antispam setup is:
I followed some of the excellent instructions on the UMassWiki on tweaking antispam extensions and config: UMassWiki:Blocking Spam In Mediawiki - UMassWiki. (note there's a problem with the current version of Bb2ext - the Bad Behavior Extra extension - that is easily fixed by following the instructions on the talk page for that extension)
Ning's new boss announced that free Ning communities are gone. Not a big deal. It's a company, and they're free to do what they want. I'm guessing they'll just piss off their users, and the few people that pony up cash to stay will not be enough to keep the company afloat. Add Ning to the deadpool. That's the risk of using a third-party-hosted service. It can disappear or change, and there's not a thing you can do about it.
I started gathering some links to some good examples of engaging online interfaces to museum, library, historical and organizational collections, and figured it would be handy to post the growing list online as well.
Any other really good examples of these kinds of collections made available online? Ideally with interfaces that make it possible to view the collections in great detail, to reuse parts of the collection in new works, and/ to integrate with external resources.
I've been thinking about the distinction between filtering and curation lately. "Social media" is described as bringing a form of curation to the internet, when it is really providing layers of filtration. What's the difference? Filtering is crap detection, wheat-from-chaff separation. Useful and important, but only the first step of curation. Curation is when a knowledgeable expert crafts an experience based on their understanding of context, in order to guide others through a collection. Curation is so much more than simple crap detection. Examples?
As the final requirement in the Conceptualizing Educational Technology course I took in W2010, I had to write a position paper on a topic of my choosing. I've been thinking about Gardner Campbell's piece in EDUCAUSE Review, and wanted to dig a little deeper in that direction. The end result is still a bit rough (I polished it off early so I could submit it before leaving on vacation, and the APA formatting is likely utter shyte), and I had to skip entire sections I'd written in my head (I wanted to write about the obvious model demonstrated by Downes and Siemens in the Massive Open Online Course on Connectivism, but ran out of room and wanted to start with the examples of first steps before jumping into the "BYPASS THE INSTITUTION" angle).
Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (1993). Computer support for knowledge-building communities. Journal of the learning sciences. 3(3). pp 265-283.
…the classroom needs to foster transformational thought, on the part of both students and teachers, and that the best way to do this is to replace classroom-bred discourse patterns with those having more immediate and natural extensions to the real world, patterns whereby ideas are conceived, responded to, reframed, and set in historical context. Our goal is to create communication systems in which the relations between what is said and what is written, between immediate and broader audiences, and between what is created in the here and now and archived are intimately related and natural extensions of school-based activities, much as these processes are intertwined and natural extensions of activities conducted in scholarly disciplines.
Postman, N. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. Random House.
Dewey expressed that the role an individual is assigned in an environment – what he is permitted to do – is what the individual learns In other words, the medium itself, i.e. the environment, is the message. ‘Message’ here means the perception you are allowed to build, the attitudes you are enticed to assume the sensitivities you are encouraged to develop – almost all of the things you learn to see and feel and value. You learn than because your environment is organized in such a way that it permits or encourages or insists that you learn them.