Blog Posts

20 billion pixels of Mars

Mars Gigapixel Panorama - Curiosity rover: Martian solar days 136-149 in The World

the perfect day of skiing at nakiska

I started off snowboarding. That didn’t work out too well. Reverted to skis so I could keep up with Evan. What a fantastic day…

reclaim your rss feed reader

So Google is killing Reader:

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favourite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

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moocs vs. innovative learning experiences

I’ve been uncomfortable about the MOOC hype. There are a few reasons, ranging from the neoliberal commodification and privatization of education, to the extension of largely passive didactic pedagogies.

Basically, it’s an emphasis on education-as-content, and an exercise in the controlled dissemination of that content¹. Students learn through receiving access to content in the context of a course.

Sounds familiar.

wait. we’re innovating. there are better graphics now.

where to see eLearning innovation in western canada?

I don’t have funding for this (yet), but my boss suggested a road trip to see what the state of the art is at other institutions. I proposed a school to visit, and was gently nudged toward restricting things to just western canada for some strange reason…

so.

where would you visit in western canada, and why. I need to make the case to visit some institutions to see really cool/kickass/innovative stuff.

thoughts on real change in education

maybe not education, but more of “learning and collaborating”.

moocs get all of the press (this year). they’re massive. they’re online. they’re funded.

but, under the cover, they’re not really all that innovative. they still involve students taking courses from experts, almost always by watching (or maybe reading) lectures. occasionally, by making stuff. but that’s not necessary.

the biggest issues with moocs appear to involve how to integrate them into the existing structures - how do people get credit for them? who pays for them? who controls the content of the courses? what is the role of institutions? etc… blah blah blah. boring.

martin weller on disrupting disruption

Disruptors are not concerned about your specific problem, they only have blanket solutions. They don’t worry about making something useful, only about sounding revolutionary. Disruption is about ego. You see disruption appeals to people because it’s revolutionary, elite, new, sexy. Just being useful or practical looks all dowdy besides glamorous disruption.

So, everything has to be disruptive, a game-changer, a revolution, an all-encompassing tsunami of change. It can’t just be useful in a particular context. That educause piece judges OERs a failure precisely because they are not disruptive. That tells you more about the author than it does about OERs - in their world only disruption matters. Take the OER based TESSA project. Useful? Undoutedly. Disruptive? Probably not. So, who cares about it, right? We should aim higher than getting well paid speaking gigs for middle-aged men with goatees who skateboard to work.

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apropos of nothing…

yeah. it’s going to be a fun year.

PONG 2013

With the recent rash of video games / books / poems / tweets converted into blockbuster summer movies, I put together a package to pitch to the studios. I think it’s going to be pretty awesome.

source photos provided by NASA. seriously.

the one where my son chats with an astronaut. in space.

Commander Chris Hadfield is in space, orbiting earth in the International Space Station. Today, he did an AMA on Reddit. You know. As astronauts who are IN SPACE tend to do. So, we gave it a shot, and Evan asked a question:

My 10yo son asks:
“Do you need special computers to work up there?”
also, he was very impressed with the night photo of Calgary you posted - we could see our house :-)

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online content producers timeline

I’ve been thinking about the Posterous shutdown, and about previous large-hosted-service shutdowns, going all the way back go Geocities. I think I’ve been so deep in the host-your-own-stuff world that I haven’t been seeing the larger context. Just because I host my stuff, and just because most of the people I know host some (or most) of their stuff, doesn’t mean that the rest of the online population does the same thing. But, how far out of whack are my feelings about the commonality of people managing their own stuff?

why you need to host your own stuff

“Use Posterous,” they said. “It’s easy. Just write your posts there. No need to run your own blog.”

Today, Posterous announced they’ll shut down in 3 months.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Posterous will no longer be available to either view or edit. Boom. Gone.