Evan and I headed downtown for the finish of Stage 5 of the Tour of Alberta (along with several thousand others). What an amazing event, and a fantastic finish. Hopefully this isn’t just a one-off - it would be incredible to see it come back next year, with some mountain stages (the 1 mountain stage that had been planned was rerouted because of the June flooding in Alberta - hopefully next year’s route would include a stage over Highwood Pass and maybe through the Rockies).
We’re about to launch a “small scale pilot” in Desire2Learn, for the semester that starts Monday. The goal was to keep it small and manageable, because we don’t have integration with PeopleSoft for managing enrolment data yet.
28 registrar-provided courses, with many sections. 5,181 enrolments for 4,069 participating students (and growing). Small scale… The largest course is just shy of 1,000 students.
I managed to stay (mostly) offline for (most of) the last week. Didn’t even check RSS feeds. Here’s some tabs that caught my attention while checking in over high-test caffeine this morning (in roughly-chronological order of tab-opening)…
OMNI Reboot: Edible Memories (potentially interesting overlap with Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312 and the ingestion of non-terrestrial microbes…)
Flickr is upgrading the crap out of its iOS app, after a few acquisitions. Just in time for iOS7 to include the same functionality but without tying people to a third party hosting service…
This comes in handy, and I have to google it every time I need it12. So, here’s a copy for reference later…
mysqlcheck --repair --use-frm --all-databases
Run it as root, with MySQL running. It’ll repair every table in every database. Give it time to chew for awhile. It spews out the status of every table as it works. Here’s what it found with my FeverËš database tables (which now work just fine):
But napster didn’t disrupt music. It disrupted the previous business model for distributing recorded music content. Musicians still exist. People still write/play/perform/record/buy/download music. The workflow has changed. The people who control the pipelines have changed.
Digital technologies are disrupting the current business model(s) for distributing educational content. And that’s a great thing. $500 worth of required textbooks for a single course is just plain messed up. Academic journals charging researchers hundreds or thousands of dollars to gain access to research funded by public institutions, also messed up.
The University of Calgary invites applications for a full-time tenure track academic position at the Director rank, commencing October 1, 2013 (or as soon as possible). The successful candidate will be appointed Director of the Educational Development Unit (EDU) of the Institute for Teaching and Learning. This position presents an exciting opportunity to take a leadership role in shaping a core element in a uniquely integrated approach to building teaching and learning capacity in an innovative and forward looking institution.
Since we’re adopting Desire2Learn, the UofC sent a few folks to the annual Desire2Learn Fusion conference - the timing was extremely fortuitous, with the conference starting about a month after we signed the contract. I’d never been to a D2L conference before, so wasn’t sure really what to expect. Looking at the conference schedule ahead of time, it looked pretty interesting - and would have many sessions that promised to cover some of the extremely-rapid-deployment adoption cycle we’re faced with.
The big spike on the far left? Google Reader. Still counting for almost 77% of RSS-related accesses to my blog. Except no humans can see what it’s still indexing using GReader…
Google Reader appears to be a zombie process, obediently and tirelessly indexing RSS feeds, oblivious to the fact that nobody will be able to view the product of its work…
I treat my Desktop as “stuff I’m working on right now” and file things away into project folders after I’m done actually working on them. I also use 3 different computers, and a couple of iOS devices. How to sync this active-work area across all? This would work with any other file sync tool1.
It’s an easy trick, based on one I found on Lifehacker2. It’s also not necessary - it’s trivial to just leave the active-work files in the Dropbox directory, but then you have to go digging every. single. time…3
I pop over to Google occasionally, but for about 90+% of my searching, DDG has it covered. Without the creepy overly-attached-girlfriend google tracking…
From the posting: