Stephen Downes is hosting a keynote at BCEdOnline 2006 (Thursday April 20, 2:45-3:45pm) and was gracious enough to invite Brian and myself to take a ride on his coattails to join him on stage for the keynote. I’m going to fly into Vancouver just for the day (and will try to be as awake as possible during the keynote).
We’re planning to do something rather less conventional. Not quite an “un-keynote” - but more of a discussion or fireside chat, directed by the audience. It’d be pretty presumptuous not to tap into the audience for an event like this, so an open discussion-slash-Q&A session seemed more fitting. Likely not quite to the level of managed chaos that we were able to achieve for the Social Software Salon, perhaps more akin to the Edublogger Hootenanny.
My bike has been collecting dust in the garage for almost 2 years. I used to ride all the time - even commuting to the University back when I worked in the Faculty of Nursing. But, I’ve been succesfully avoiding riding it (or doing any other real physical activity, really) for far too long. 2 days of Easter-related binge eating pushed me over the edge, so I pumped up the tires and went for a ride around the community.
I just updated the TLC’s copy of Drupal, used to host 10 Drupal-powered websites, to the latest Drupal 4.7 RC3 build. Upgrading the code took under 2 minutes (SSH into the server, curl the updated code down onto the server, then tar -xzf and move the appropriate files into place). Add another 5 minutes to run the update.php script on each site, and you’ve got 10 Drupal sites updated in 7 minutes flat.
Just testing out the latest build of the Performancing for Firefox extension - a fully-featured weblog manager built into Firefox. And it’s free.
I had to stop using it a while back because it was behaving oddly (character spacing in the text editor was wonky enough to make it unusable) but it’s behaving perfectly now. Not sure if it was the latest Firefox update, or a rogue extension, but whatever was causing the misbehaviour, it’s all good now.
I played with the new Google Calendar yesterday (great timing - we had just finished a meeting at the TLC where we were throwing ideas around to improve our timesheet and project tracking systems, and a calendar UI was high on the list).
At first, I thought it was just a web based iCal knockoff. But, I just played a bit more, and now I realize it’s a web based Newton Calendar knockoff. That’s meant as a very high compliment. Maybe, 10 years later, we’re ready to get back into data soups and intelligent assistants…
Peregrine falcons have been nesting on a ledge high on the exterior of the Library Tower at the University of Calgary for almost a decade. They’ve returned each year, but failed to nest in 2004 and 2005. As I was heading for the bus with Evan after work yesterday, we heard one of the falcons screeching from a nearby poplar tree. Evan hadn’t heard a bird that sounded like that before, so we got to have a nice talk about falcons while walking to the bus stop.
I took this over the weekend at the Butterfield Acres Easter Egg Hunt. Evan had a blast. And, Wordpress (or Godaddy) is acting up, so I just needed to post something to see if I get errors. Regardless, it’s a pretty cool photo.
Sami IMed me this morning, and in part of the conversation mentioned this post he wrote, advocating for the WP developers to migrate from managing their own CMS codebase to using Drupal as the foundation of WordPress. Sounds pretty radical, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Drupal has evolved into a really kick-ass CMS, and we really don’t need a bunch of reinvented wheels rolling around in Web 2.0 space.
I’ve been thinking about what some of the possible implications of this various “2.0” stuff might be on Universities (or, I guess, on academic institutions in general). Likely nothing too earthshattering here, just some thoughts that were sparked over the weekend while thinking about the upcoming BCEdOnline fireside chat we’re planning.
Disclaimer: This blog entry is written by myself as an individual, not as a representative of the University of Calgary. I’m not advocating for anything here, just thinking out loud about what some of the implications might be if some trends continue for another 5/10/20 years.
It’s a busy time for edtech conferences online. First, HigherEdBlogCon is running, now Cole Camplese and friends are putting on a shindig at Penn State, and sharing it with all of us!
Cole sent me a link to their Teaching & Learning with Technology Symposium website - a Wordpress site running a nice K2 theme. How cool is that, for a campus-wide symposium at a huge university to be driving the online resource for the event in an open source blogging app? The agenda for the event looks pretty interesting. Everything from the usual suspects to “The Strategies of a Dog Who Finally Caught the Car” - sounds like Alan might have had an influence :-)
So, I mentioned that the combination of my shiny new Samson C01U and Audacity (pick a current branch and version) is a bit, well, cantankerous on my Mac. It frustratingly works just fine on the Windows boxes in our lab, but on my desktop and Powerbook much cajoling and incantations are required. Almost ready to break out the chicken entrails…
One thing that I noticed, which seems to help a fraction of a percent, is that the Samson USB mic is a 16 bit sample source. Audacity’s default is a 32 bit sample source. Not sure if that makes a real difference, since 16x2=32, but I set that bit in Audacity, and I think it works at least 3% more often than it did before (which means it works about 4% of the time now).
