Father’s Day came early at my house. And Christmas. And my birthday. And Kwanzaa. For the next several years. Janice got me my Canon Digital Rebel XT today. What a sweet camera.
We sprung for the Canon XT, with spare battery, vertical grip, case, UV filter, and some other goodies I’m forgetting at the moment. Not sure if/when/how I’ll use the vertical grip, but the extra battery will come in handy. I’ve attached the UV filter as a permanent fixture, if nothing else than to protect the lense.
I’m sitting in the Comox airport (it’s actually quite a nice little airport, with wifi and everything) relaxing after the BCCampus ETUG 2006 workshop/session/mini-conference in Courtenay BC. North Island College was really gorgeous - lush, green, giant trees all over the place, and nicely designed buildings on campus. It even has a cool giant totem pole!
After the morning sessions today, I was arm-twisted into spending the afternoon in the beach (or was I the one doing the arm-twisting?) - had a blast hanging out with Keira and Harry, exploring Goose Spit beach in Comox (nice name, btw). I wound up taking something like 50 photographs, but culled that quite a bit. My faves are online of course…
Scott is demoing BCCampus ’ SOLR application for sharing online learning resources in the province of BC. I’m really liking the tie-ins with Creative Commons licensing, making it easy for content creators to safely share their stuff.
Here’s a screenshot of the cool “Browse All Creative Commons Resources” utility, ala Flickrlilli et. al.
BCCampus SOLR Creative Commons Browser: a screenshot taken of the SOLR BCCampus repository ’s Creative Commons browsing interface.
Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.
The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.
Brian managed to swing me an invite to co-host his Social Software session at the BCCampus Spring Workshop on Educational Technologies 2006, which will be held at North Island College in beautiful downtown Courtenay BC. (actually, I’ve never been to Courtenay/Comox, so am looking forward to seeing the area - I’m flying in on a Beech 1900D, so that leg of the trip should be interesting).
The session should be fun. Brian and I are going to demo a few concepts of social software (Web 2.0 gack) and then turn the reigns over to the participants. We’ll be using SocialLearning.ca as the “hub” to bring together activities like tagging, bookmarking, blogging, and commenting. I really like the approach, especially with a concrete piece of the web bringing it together. It should make the freaky concepts of decentralized social aggregate tag clouds a bit easier to grok.
Of the three, only TinyMCE has an official 4.7 compatible release.
The first two produce absolutely horrid markup. TinyMCE used to be as spectacularly invalid/nonsemantic as the others, but it’s received a LOT of love recently and its markup is actually pretty decent now.
I took another look at the current dev. build of Flock, and it’s definitely getting closer to a final release. The quality is noticably better than previous builds - I don’t get the spinning beachball of memory thrashing hell I got before.
There is only one nit I have left to pick with Flock. It’s got the best rich text editor of all of the standalone blog posting apps I’ve tried (and I’ve tried a LOT) - except for the lack of an ability to sort and/or filter categories for application to a post before publishing.
My folks handed down their collection of cameras that has grown on one of the shelves in their house. The collection included some really amazing (to me) cameras, which are completely removed from the digital compose-in-viewfinder-automatic-everything cameras that everyone has now.
The budding collection includes:
Kodak Vigilant Six - 16, with Verichrome Film
Zeiss Ikon Ikonta Kompur Rapid, with GE Lightmeter, both in leather cases
Toyoca mini camera, with original packaging, documentation, and leather case
Canon Canonet QL17 G-III QL, with flash and leather case
Six-20 Brownie
Braun Paxette Super II SL, with leather case
Sunpak GT3 Flash, in original packaging
Olympus Trip 35, in original packaging, with leather carrying pouch case
I have to do some Googling to find out more about these cameras. I absolutely love several of them - the Vigilant, Zeiss Ikon and Brownie are amazing. Actually, they’re all amazing. The Canonet has a rangefinder built in. The Braun is incredibly detailed. They are all built like tanks.
OK. I think I’ve just about gotten things closer to “feeling” right for me here. I was just fiddling with the Image and img_assist , and the drupalimage TinyMCE plugin, and finally got them all behaving as expected. Now, I can post an image to the blog while writing an entry, and it goes one step further than what WordPress did.
Drupal will create a completely independent “Image” content node, with full title/description/tag “metadata” and add it to an Image Gallery for later browsing and reuse. It’s not just a file slapped in a folder on a server. It’s a file slapped in a folder, with a bunch of supporting content and metadata to help organize it. That is so much more powerful/flexible than the straight “upload image” used by other blog apps.
I’ve been using a cheap mini tripod for a couple of years now. It’s small enough that it can be attached to the carrying case for my little point-and-shoot, so I’ve always got it. I don’t use it very often (maybe once a month?) but when I need a more stable shot, it sure comes in handy. It’s always with me (well, with my camera) so I never have to say “Crap! I wish I had a little bendy tripod for this!”
One of the big reasons I had for making the switch to Drupal is the great “Book” content type. It allows structuring of individual pages into a navigation hierarchy, and generates the “table of contents” and inter/page navigation automatically. I wanted to use it for writing longer articles, and wish I’d had it in place to use for the Interface 2006 ePortfolio background information article .
Initially, I wrote up the background article in a wiki, thinking it might be handy if others were able to edit. But, nobody has, and I think the article is less useful/usable as One Long Page Of Stuff. It would make more sense in smaller, bite-sized pieces that could be individually linked. Smaller granularity, allowing for reuse or something equally wishful.
Drupal - the software that runs the online community of practice
Other ePortfolio Software
Apple iWeb (an extremely easy and powerful website authoring and publishing program which could be an effective part of an ePortfolio authoring system)
On Teaching Dossiers - a blog post describing “Teaching Dossiers” and how they are different from ePortfolios
Associations and Articles
Open Source Portfolio Initiative The Open Source Portfolio Initiative is a group of individuals and organizations collaborating on the development of open source e-portfolio software.
Educause e-Portfolio Library An extensive collection of papers, articles, PowerPoint presentations, resources, and examples of e-portfolios.
The Electronic Portfolio Consortium The Electronic Portfolio Consortium is interested in the development of academic e-portfolio software systems and establishing standards for them.
