Blog Posts

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.

PONG Poster

source photos provided by NASA. seriously.

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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?

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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.

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Norman's Law of eLearning Tool Convergence

Maybe more of a theory than a law, but still:

Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached.

They start out small and open. Then, as more people adopt them and the tool is extended to meet the additional requirements of the growing community of users, eventually things like access management and digital rights start getting integrated. Boil the frog. Boom. LMS.

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on automated "anti-plagiarism" tools

I was asked this morning for my take on Turnitin and other anti-plagiarism tools. Here’s the response I sent1 - may as well share with the rest of the class… The usual disclaimer likely applies: I don’t speak for the University. I could easily be wrong about the institutional policy implications, etc…

There have been some instructors who use Turnitin in an attempt to reduce plagiarism. It’s not foolproof, and raises a couple of issues:

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Abject Outage: Day 4

We continue our intensive coverage of what has now become known as The Great Abject Outage of Aught Thirteen.

It has now been 4 days since Brian Lamb closed down his Internet newsletter, or Webb-Log, leaving only this cryptic message:

Screen Shot 2013 02 12 at 8 04 41 AM

509 BANDWIDTH LIMIT EXCEEDED.

There was no further explanation. Cryptographic and steganographic analysis of the message have turned up no clues. There is no indication of what is meant by the number “509”. Is it a prophesy of the number of days until Mr. Lamb will return? A portion of a numbered Swiss bank account? An area code? If so, it suggests that Lamb and his followers may be hiding in the Cascade mountains of America, a short drive south from his last known hideout.

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