Christa McAuliffe was to be the first schoolteacher in space, sent up as a payload specialist. She’s the one most remembered, but all seven crewmembers were lost in that tragic accident. I still shudder thinking of the ride they must have had, trapped in the cockpit as it fell to the water…
I just put the almost-finishing touches on a presentation I’ll be giving to folks in the Faculty of Education tomorrow. The topic? It’s basically a tour of things like wikis, weblogs, RSS and podcasting, with a presentation at the beginning, some live demos, and some hands-on time. Essentially “The Read/Write Web 101”
I merged a couple of my other presentations (intro to weblogs and intro to wiki) and added some refinements. It’s grown to 105 slides, which sounds scary, but there isn’t a bullet point in the bunch, and most slides are only on the Big Screen to give a background while I talk about something. I’m guessing the presentation will run between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on audience participation. We’ve got a 3-hour slot, and would like to have as much “hands-on” time as possible.
Brian’s asking for comments to help build a presentation tonight. I’m cutting it awfully close to the wire (the presentation starts in just over an hour) but hopefully another trackback will help…
What is most significant about the emergence of blogs and/or wikis?
The biggest thing about these self-publishing tools is that they’re self-publishing, natch. You don’t need to be a geek to be able to publish to the ’net anymore - and this stuff has the potential to “fix” the web, which was supposed to be a dynamic network of linked content published by individuals, but got co-opted into a variation of the TV broadcast model, with users sitting in front of glowing screens receiving the content that The Man wants to feed them (picture a scene from Max Headroom or something). Instead, we can effectively publish our own content, with whatever authority we can muster. Individuals are just as able as companies (large and small) - as an example, this blog currently has a Google rank of 6, which is higher ranked than some companies. That would have been impossible without easy and effective self-publishing tools.
Not sure if I can cross off one of my 43Things - which is to write a novel. Apparently I’m an accomplished pulp sci fi author. I’ve since moved on from writing about cats, though…
Seriously, though - be sure to check out Alan Levine and Brian Lamb’s latest wild and wacky presentation: Beyond The Blog. They’ve put the online resources up already, in the form of a Flickr album. Alan’s sheer bliss at stretching metaphors shows through in spades, along with Brian’s literary sarcasm ;-)
Man, does THIS take me back. C64 Games Online - a collection of old games from the Commodore 64, ported to java as applets. I have no idea how many hours I wastedspent playing these games as a kid.
I just updated my copy of Blogbridge to the latest weekly (2.12) and in this version they threw the switch on OPML publishing of folders/guides of feeds. I took a couple of minutes to gather my education-related subscriptions into one guide, and tried publishing it as OPML.
It contains 102115 feeds of edubloggy goodness. There are some stale feeds that I just can’t bring myself to delete (you know, in case they ever post something). If you’re using an aggregator that groks live OPML feeds, just subscribe to the URL. If you’re using anything else, you may need to download the OPML and manually import it.
There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept - forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.”
This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I’d suggest that the alternatives be considered.
Yojimbo 1.0 was just released - by Bare Bones Software (the folks that make the kick-ass editor BBEdit), and it looks like the best personal content manager I’ve used. DevonThink is overly complicated, and Notational Velocity is a little to simple (but that is also its strength).
Yojimbo takes the best of both approaches, and distills it all into a simple (but powerful) interface on top of some powerful (and elegant) features.
I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hell™ - regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc…
I’m going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.
I’m pretty sure my hardware is retalliating against the new Conservative regime.
The XServe that drives weblogs.ucalgary.ca, wiki.ucalgary.ca, and pachyderm.ucalgary.ca just went south. Refuses to boot now. It’s a cluster node, so we’re trying to find a video card to see wtf is going on…
Update: OK. We found a trusty old ATI Rage 128 card, slapped it into the XServe, and booted that sucker up. It was spending a looooooong time on the boot spinning pinwheel screen - assuming it’s checking the disk here. It had to chew through ~50GB of data, so that took awhile. Then, it wanted to update firmware, so we did. It’s now fully patched, and apparently running OK. It’s seeming awfully slow, though. It’s not a RAM thing, with 5GB of the good stuff in there. It just took over a minute to connect via SSH. Definitely need to look into that. Perhaps AFTER the big afternoon presentation that relies on the software running on this server…
Well, not sure if it’s an “extreme failure” or just a failure of a LaCie Big Disk Extreme. Either way, my shiny new 500GB backup drive decided to go on strike yesterday. Maybe the most depressing day of the year got to it. Maybe it thought, as a 500GB drive, that it should have been doing more exciting things than just backing up my crap.
I was copying over the latest MySQL dumps from our production servers, and got an interesting error - “write error” - meaning, of course, that the file could not be copied to the BDE. Mwaaaaah? So I fire up Disk Utility, and it greets me with this:
