I just about spaced and missed this online conference on “blogging” in higher education: HigherEdBlogCon 2006 (thanks for the reminder, Brian!)
The first round of online events (April 3-7 - right now!) is on the teaching implications of blogging. Topics like case studies, integration with LMS, blogs as personal learning environments, information literacy, etc…
I’ve been struggling with how to best manage the constant flow of non-critical information that flows around me. RSS feeds. Email. Technorati references. Podcasts. The list goes on. I am going to try an experiment for a couple of weeks, prompted by a reinstall of the OS on my Powerbook.
Yesterday, before leaving the office, I fired up Software Update to grab the latest 10.4.6 update on both my desktop and ‘book. Came in this morning to find the G5 ready to go, but the Powerbook was sitting with an “Installer failed” type of message. I rebooted both, but the ‘book wouldn’t come back. So, I nuked it and reinstalled after wiping the drive.
Janice treated us to a night’s stay at the historic Banff Springs Hotel this weekend. We spent the day Saturday doing some winter hiking at Johnston Canyon (everyone else had crampons and poles, we had runners…), then “doing Banff” for the afternoon, followed by a swim in the Banff Springs Hotel pool. We all had a blast. After supper, Evan and I explored the “castle” - finding all kinds of cool rooms to check out. The hotel complex is absolutely amazing. It’s some of the oldest architecture in western Canada, but there is absolutely no sign of decay or “oldness” to it. The whole place feels like a living castle. This is where the Queen stays when she’s in the area. Likely not in the room we had, with no view, and right next to the noisy old elevators, but in the same postal code.
A showcase of selected Pachyderm presentations has been assembled, showing several completely different types of content being presented using the Pachyderm 2.0 authoring software.
Some really good stuff in there - I’m drawn for some reason to the second item on the list…
If you’re looking for some ideas of what can be done in Pachyderm 2.0, this is a good start. If you’re looking to see the various screen types in action, it’s also good for that…
The groundbreaking ceremony for the new Campus Calgary Digital Library building was held this morning. Judging from the attendance, lots of people are interested in the project, or the free cake. It’s going to be much more effective, having all library-related, and supporting services in one building. The Teaching & Learning Centre (nee Learning Commons) will be moving there when the building opens in 2008, along with various Library services, Information Technology, the Nickel Art Museum, and several other units.
I’ll be giving an “Intro to Podcasting” workshop/presentation/session on Wednesday April 19th here at the Learning CommonsTeaching & Learning Centre. I’ve only got an hour, and it will be an “intro” session, so I’ll follow Levine’s Law and start with the demo. Then, I’ll stick with the demo, showing different tools used to create, publish, subscribe, and listen to podcasts. I’m hoping to keep the session rather informal, with some audience participation. I’ll be recruiting some “volunteers” from the audience to create a podcast right then and there. Should be fun.
I put together an album of the top 20 “most interesting” photos that I’ve uploaded. Some good ones in there, and some strange photos that have bubbled up as “interesting” to Flickrites. I’ll try to keep this album loosely in sync with the top 20 most interesting photos from my collection.
I also put together a (somewhat larger, and unsorted) album of my personal favorites from the images I’ve uploaded to Flickr. Not necessarily the best photos from a technical standpoint, but most interesting to me. I’ll be massaging this album as I feel like.
I’ll be attending Interface 2006, the Alberta provincial distance education conference. It’s in Lethbridge this year, so a few of us will be making the trip south. This will be my first Interface conference, so I’m not really sure what to expect, but it sounds like it’s a pretty good event. I’ve got a proposal in to present on the ePortfolio project we’re working on, so if that’s accepted I’ll be sharing the stage with Patti while we show what we’ve come up with so far.
The BlogBridge folks rolled out a cool update to their RSS reader. The biggest addition is a very handy search tool, strongly inspired by Spotlight. Here’s a sample of a quick search to find any posts in any of my feeds which have been published since yesterday, and contain the word “podcasting”:
Now that’s just plain cool. It was technically possible by creating SmartFeeds in previous versions, but that was a clunky process that wasn’t well suited to ad-hoc on-the-fly searches. They’ve been working on some UI refinements to remove or rethink or hide the geekier things, which is a good thing.
I just went through my email inbox and nuked over 4500 messages. All since January 2005. Anything important is either archived as a project file, or available through the magical wondrousnes of The Goog.
I’d been letting messages just stay in my inbox, using Spotlight and Smart Folders to find stuff easily, but over the last few days the U of C’s webmail client has been warning me (via a friendly BLINKING RED MESSAGE) that inboxes with over 5000 messages are bad, ‘mkay? So, I took the hint and nuked all kinds of stuff. Everything from “status update - February 2005” to various random ping messages.
Our fancy schmancy new Power Mac Quad G5 boxes were released to us this morning. 20" Cinema Displays, too. These bad boys have 4 x 2.5GHz G5 cores, adding up to 10GHz of raw power under the hood. Sure, there’s some overhead in spreading stuff over the different chips, and some software won’t take advantage of it, but having that much CPU power sitting ready is pretty sweet.
I just about spaced and missed this online conference on “blogging” in higher education: HigherEdBlogCon 2006 (thanks for the reminder, Brian!)
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Our fancy schmancy new Power Mac Quad G5 boxes were released to us this morning. 20" Cinema Displays, too. These bad boys have 4 x 2.5GHz G5 cores, adding up to 10GHz of raw power under the hood. Sure, there’s some overhead in spreading stuff over the different chips, and some software won’t take advantage of it, but having that much CPU power sitting ready is pretty sweet.