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’m trying to quickly check in from home, but the browser on my home machine is acting up and refusing to access websites. I guess that’s forgivable - I’m still running my (otherwise) trusty old PowerMacintosh 8600/300 running MacOS 9.1. Before you laugh, this bad boy was literally the fastest personal computer in Calgary for a few weeks when I got it, and I paid more for this system than many people pay for cars.
It’s the end of an era. The Learning Commons is no more. It’d be dramatic, if we weren’t just changing the name to the “Teaching and Learning Centre”. It’s a little less pretentious, and should require less explanation about what we do. It’s a shorter web domain name, too - just “tlc.ucalgary.ca”. Maybe we should have thrown a “2.0” in there for buzzword compliance :-)
I’m so sick and tired of people and companies slapping “Web 2.0” stickers on their websites/products/blogs/resumes to show how kewl and innovative they are. I saw a website for a design company that mentions “Web 2.0” a whopping 5 times on their home page alone, and once more in the title of the page. I get it. You’re innovative. I should worship you.
Here’s an idea. Just do cool stuff. Be innovative. Stop trying to brag your ass off by buzzwordifying everything. It’s starting to come across like some kind of high school clique - jocks, preps, bangers, and the “Web 2.0” gang. If you’re not in the Web 2.0 Gang, you suck. Whatever. I was an outcast then, and I’m happy to be one now.
I just checked in on Josie’smap of Edubloggers, and has it ever grown! There are now 347 people around the world identifying themselves as “edubloggers”. The pattern of distribution is interesting, too. Most of Europe and North America are saturated. Africa is basically unrepresented, and northern Asia (including all of Russia) is blank.
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.