I listened to Stephen Downes’ ITI keynote (and here in AAC AudioBook format) on the commute (first half last night, second half this morning, thanks to the wonders of AudioBook ;-) )
It was quite a good presentation. Some of it might be considered common knowledge (open is good), but this particular audience may not have heard the message before (or, they may have needed the extra “open in elearning is good” ).
Read MoreExcellent! Stephen Downes just released a recording of his keynote from David Wiley’s latest ITI shindig at Utah State University. There’s also a PowerPoint version, if you swing that way. Downloading the .mp3 now, so I can drop it onto my iPod for the commute…
UPDATE: I just converted Stephen’s big honking .mp3 file into a handy AudioBook AAC format for use in iTunes or an iPod. It’s about half the size of the .mp3, and supports bookmarking, in case you don’t feel like sitting there for an hour… It also has an album cover….
Read MoreI’ve been surfing some of the weblogs I subscribe to, poking through their blogrolls for gems I may have missed. I’m amazed at how some weblog designs are so overly complex that it can take me a minute or two of scanning a page just to find the “subscribe” link. One site I looked at had a grand total of 469 hyperlinks on the main page alone. Many were blogroll items, bookmark links etc. But they overwhelm the reader with so much superfluous data that it’s difficult to find the simple single link you’re looking for…
Read MoreI’ve been reading through the wiki pages for Brian Lamb’s presentation on wikis etc. at David Wiley’s recent ITI conference. Excellent excellent reading. Brian has done an awesome job as usual in gathering supporting resources. Man, if I could just borrow his brain for a while, I’d have my Master’s thesis done ;-) (but that’s another story).
Anyway, Brian linked to a post by Jon Udell: Collaborative Knowledge Gardening - basically on how the role of metadata is effectively shifting, and less formally described strategies are showing the promise of being more effective. He compares tools like Flickr.com, which uses “bags of keywords” to the more conventional strategies of complex taxonomies.
Read MoreI’ve just been playing around with some Wordpress plugins. There is a cool one that gathers a list of related posts for any post, and displays them when viewing an individual post entry (go ahead and view the page for this entry - look down - see that list?).
I’ve also dropped in plugins to highlight instances of words matching parameters from search engines, to make it easier to find what you were looking for in Google or whatnot.
Read MoreJust finished the demo of Myst IV: Revelation. Holy crap. It’s the rich environment of the original Myst, combined with interactivity and live 3D rendering from a high-end first-person-shooter. Wow. You start off on a platform over a lake, and the water is actually moving, with waves and ripples, toward a waterfall, where it accelerates and pours over the edge. And the moon is high over your head (and you can actually look up to see it) complete with atmospheric effects and awesome sound effects (and music by Peter Gabriel). It looks and sounds like the pre-rendered snapshot views of Myst, but it’s all dynamic and live. Amazing.
Read MoreThis must be the Big Month Of Changes for me… After switching my weblog from Blosxom to Wordpress, I’m also switching RSS readers from NetNewsWire to Shrook 2. I really like the implementation of smart folders in Shrook, and the way it handles column-display of RSS items is pretty sweet.
It’s also got subscription syncing between multiple computers (subscriptions and read items) so that may come in very handy!
Anyway, I’ll probably post another week-in-the-life-of entries in a week or so.
Read MoreI just realized something… Of the 3 weblogs we had set up for the “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” session at NMC2004, only the “Centralists” weblog is still alive… Hmmm…
Read MoreI know, I know… I said I wasn’t planning on switching any time soon… What can I say? I was reading through the Wordpress site, looking at the docs, etc… and thought it looked very compelling. Kinda like MovableType done out in the open.
Anyway… I really liked the layout and functionality of my Blosxom weblog, so I’ll be slowly migrating this Wordpress site to match that.
Sorry for any inconvenience with the move. Google will catch up in a couple days…
Read MoreI’m not planning on leaving Blosxom any time soon, but if I was to switch (again), I’d move to Wordpress. It’s getting to be a great package, with solid plans and active development.
Assuming I ever decide to switch, there is a HOWTO describing how to get posts from Blosxom (individual .txt files in folders) into Wordpress (MySQL). It involves a custom Blosxom flavour that spits out a standard MovableType export file, which can be read by Wordpress (and many other weblog packages, actually).
Read MoreWow. Now I just need to transfer down to Florida State University, and I can get myself a free copy of iTunes, along with the option to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store for just $0.99 per track!
What an amazing stroke of contractual genius on the part of FSU, making these otherwise unavailable tools available for their students. Oh. Wait a minute… Looks like Apple must have signed similar deals with The Rest Of The World, because I just found both iTunes (whoah - even with a download link) and the iTMS available for the rest of us as well! Looks like I won’t have to sell the house and pack up the family to move to Florida after all…
Read MoreWow. This looks awesome. iLingo Language translation application. It comes with something like 450 phrases in a bunch of languages, and uses the iPod Notes feature to provide a handy translator. It even somehow links to audio versions of phrases. Could be handy if walking in a foreign country, and really need to pronounce “Please, sir, where may I find a toilet?” in a hurry…
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