I went for a quick walk around campus at lunch, and dragged along the camera to get some shots of the leaves turning colour. Sometimes this campus can be really beautiful. We may not have a rose garden or a nude beach (or any other kind of beach) but it’s pretty nice sometimes.
Apparently, I’m on a quest to become the unofficial UCalgary photographer… :-)
Read MoreiUofC.com is a community forum site created by students at UCalgary, offering a central off-campus student-managed place for students to share information about classes. It’s currently a rather empty shell, with forums created for every class. As students find out about it, it’s starting to slowly grow.
iUfoC.com Screenshot
The thing that blows me away about this “web *.0” stuff is that students are willing to take on large scale efforts completely on their own. Set up an open wiki, and students create tons of pages about what’s important to them. Open up a forum system, and they fill it with topics important to them. If these tools had been provided by The University, would students be interested? It’s awesome that the students don’t need to wait for The University - they can come up with solutions as effective (or moreso) on their own. Power to the people. Right on.
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I had the pleasure of attending a presentation/workshop by Craig E. Nelson this morning. The Teaching & Learning Centre hosted the event, which brought faculty members from the various sides of campus together to discuss critical thinking and implications on pedagogy.
It was a really interesting session, with Craig telling stories and modelling effective use of the strategies and activities he was talking about (and getting us to talk about). My takeaway points from the session:
Read MoreThe U of C’s connection to the commercial internet has been packet shaped for years. Back in the Napster days, they added something that makes any file ending in “.mp3” be transferred at about 2 bytes per second. The shaping filters have slowly been added to, winding up with something that basically says “is this file some form of media? then it’s going to be slow…”
The latest case in point - I just tried to watch Stephen Downes’ video commentary on his Group/Network whiteboard braindump. After about 25 minutes of downloading, I’ve managed to view the first 35 seconds of the video.
Read MoreI’ve been trying to find an answer to this, but haven’t found anything definitive either way. Occasionally, I want to bring my Canon XT DSLR along when riding my bike. I might want to photograph something on campus at work, or along the path.
So, the question is - is it safe to pack the XT inside a compact LowePro case, and stuff that in a pannier? It seems pretty secure, but I wonder about vibrations from the ride (about half an hour, ranging from 20-60 km/h, depending on weather, traffic, blood sugar…)
Read MoreLarry Sanger announced his organization’s intention to create a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia, with a different community/moderation model. Instead of just letting everyone create and edit pages, there will be a new class of citizens called “experts” who get final say. The rest of us are demoted to “unwashed masses”.
From Larry Sanger’s essay “Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge”:
According to one source, there are over one billion (a thousand million) people on the Internet. That means there must be tens of millions of intellectuals online–I mean educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly. Tens of millions of intellectuals can work together, if they so choose.
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My brother has a house in Phuket, Thailand, so I’ve been trying to follow news on this week’s coup to see what’s going on. I had no idea there was an ongoing corruption scandal of that magnitude. It seems unclear whether this coup was a good or bad thing. Some people say it’s bad because it’s “against democracy” - others say it’s good because it gives a chance to reboot a democracy after cleaning out the garbage first.
Read MoreI passed the 1000 km mark half way into my ride home today. Since I started riding in July, I’ve now ridden over 1000 km just commuting to and from work, broken into 80 equal 12.54 km trips. That’s roughly equivalent to riding from Calgary to Vancouver, even when accounting for vertical climb (92m per ride). I’m feeling better than I have in years, and am probably in the best physical shape I’ve been in since high school (although you couldn’t tell by looking).
Read MoreI’ve been using TextMate for about a week now, and while it’s almost universally an incredible piece of magical software, I have been keeping a list of things that could use tweaking (you know, to make it even magicaller).
Thanks to Scott for linking to this in his del.icious.net linkstream. It’s a nearly-year-old article about implementing a “learning object repository” using the Small Pieces philosophy. For me, the takeaway message was a reinforcement of something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately.
My feeling is that the Capital R “Object” Repositories beloved of systems designers of the old fashioned IMS school are rapidly losing currency in higher education, but - bizarrely - gaining credibility among decision-makers in the schools sector.
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TextMade is my current favorite text editor. But, while editing some files on our main Drupal server, I noticed it was leaving some ghost files around. The filenames were all prefixed with “._” so they didn’t show up in the Finder, or in normal ls -l lists. From the text that was displayed in Drupal, it looks like it was storing things like cursor position and text selection in a file that was edited by TextMate.
I seem to be the only person on the planet not getting into the whole Talk Like a Pirate thing. I’ve got a problem glorifying piracy. The world has enough pirates right now.
I know I’m overreacting, and being overly sensitive about this. But, what’s next? Talk like a rapist day? Talk like a murderer? Kidnapper? I mean, those are all pirate-related activities. How about Talk Like a Decent Human Being Day? I’d be up for that one…
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