a discussion board post for my “conceptualizing edtech” course, archived for posterity. It was written for an audience (fellow students in the course) that may not have much background in living online, so I settled for using terminology they may have seen before. It’s also supposed to be a brief post, so I didn’t go into anywhere near the depth I could/should have…

Three pressing challenges for learners in creating and using technology in an educational context.

1. control and ownership

If we learn what we do, then we can extend this philosophy to educational technology. Students are now able to “do” their own technical infrastructure, meaning they can be in control of what they use, how they use it, why, where, and for whom. This shift toward being able to manage a personal cyberinfrastructure sets up students to be able to function far more effectively on their own, without needing the constraints necessary for institutionally provided and supported infrastructure.

Rereading Alan's post on his blog hiatus, where he takes a month off of posting on his blog to comment elsewhere, I was struck (as always) by the patterns in activity he described. I decided to take a closer peek at the activity on my own blog - I've been thinking a lot about discourse analysis lately, so it's at least partially non-navel-gazing.

Here's the graph for the first few years of life for my blog. It started out as a private, personal outboard brain, then kind of took off with a life of its own.

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.

The Blackboard discussion board system is really quite amazing, in that it couldn't have been designed any worse. It is easily the most awkward, clumsy, and deliberately obtuse discussion board software I've ever used.

There aren't many things in life that are more fun than using the Blackboard discussion board system. But if we find any, they'll be dutifully documented here.

That's pretty scary. And the article sounds pretty accurate.

While there is a public perception that cyclists are usually the cause of accidents between cars and bikes, an analysis of Toronto police collision reports shows otherwise: The most common type of crash in this study involved a motorist entering an intersection and either failing to stop properly or proceeding before it was safe to do so. The second most common crash type involved a motorist overtaking unsafely. The third involved a motorist opening a door onto an oncoming cyclist. The study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents in this study.

I was really excited that a TEDx event was being planned for Calgary. I was looking forward to TEDxYYC, and was planning to attend and help out in any way that I could. The website for the event went live today, so I went to register.

I got to the registration form. Except it's not a registration form. It's an application-to-register form. okaaaaaay... That's unusual...

I proceed to fill the form in.

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.

In setting up WPMU sites for classes, I often wind up using the Text widget to add a bunch of important links - login, Dashboard, Add Post, Add Page, etc... to each site. Manually. I finally decided to save some time and just write a plugin that provides a generic widget to give the links on any site that uses it.

If you're not logged in, it provides a link to login:

I wrote this for an assignment in the Conceptualizing Educational Technology grad course I’m taking. I figure it’s worth planting my flag publicly as well…

“Educational Technology” is one of those terms that makes me squirm. I’m not comfortable with any of the definitions of it, primarily because they posit that “educational technology” is a separate, different thing that somehow needs to be integrated (somehow) into the “real” education. It positions technology as being “hard” and needing “experts” and “support” in order to be used by mere mortals. It raises the anxiety to a level that scares many people away. They don’t have time for “educational technology.” Or they don’t have the training. Or the budget. Or the support. Or the infrastructure. Or any of a long list of things that are suggested (explicitly and implicitly) by defining something like “educational technology.” It also aligns with the notion of a consumer-based society - educational technology is something to be produced in a laboratory somewhere, to be consumed in the classroom.

I slapped the Flip video camera onto the bike for this morning’s ride. Here’s the 43 minute ride, compressed into 5 minutes of video.

I'm trying the rating features baked into the latest version of the PollDaddy plugin. It looks pretty cool - you can set it to allow rating of posts, pages, and even comments. Not sure how it'll be used, or if it will be useful at all, but there it is. Rate away. If you have nothing better to do...

A great manifesto. 43 guiding principles to live by. (via David Gillespie)

My faves:

6. capture accidents
12. keep moving
13. slow down
14. don't be cool
20. be careful to take risks
32. listen carefully
33. take field trips
38. explore the other edge (everyone crowds the leading edge...)