I’d been getting nervous, seeing the storage on our Hippie Hosting Co-op server filling up. We were over 80% full, with less than 18GB left until we were in serious trouble. So, I did some digging. I was getting ready to start deleting some of the bigger video files in my web hosting account, to make space. Turns out, that wasn’t necessary.
I use this to find directories that have lots of stuff in them:
Read MoreRob asked about the app I use for tracking my rides. I’ve been using Cyclemeter since April 2010, and have found it to be pretty much ideal for what I do. I don’t want to have all of my ride data stored on a third party server (insert tinfoil hat conspiracy here, or, failing that, something grumbling about people monetizing my life). I like that Cyclemeter stores the activity data on my phone, and only exports it when I want it to, in the formats I choose. For instance, here’s a view of the weekly data, going back to April 2010:
Read MoreCentennial hootenanny. We went on the hottest day of the year, with near record crowds. Didn’t buy a deep fried Oreo…
Evan and I rode from Canmore to Banff today, on the great pathway through the mountains. Not bad for a 9 year old…
I’d initially accidentally typed that we’d ridden from Cochrane to Banff. Oops. That would be a great ride, and maybe we’ll do that in a few years. But this was just Canmore (at the Banff Park gates) to the town of Banff…
From George’s great open letter:
I propose that the top 10 Canadian universities convene a meeting to plan a MOOC response that helps us to build our competence in this space. We already have universities devoted to online learning such as Athabasca University (disclaimer: that’s where I hang out) and Thompson Rivers. Partner with those systems as design and delivery partners as they have developed the technical infrastructure and pedagogical expertise for online learning. Even a small allocation of $5-10 million by assembled universities would produce a significant impact and increase the profile of Canadian higher education.
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the iGoogle service let people put together rich dashboard-style home pages, with widgets sucking data from various places into one handy location. Great stuff. I know lots of people use it as their home page, and use it daily.
But, Google has decided it’s (almost) time to kill it, turning it off in November 2013.
I shifted off of a hosted homepage long ago, because I didn’t like the idea of feeding the tracking databases every time I opened a browser. So I set up a vintage 1997-style static homepage, but with some live data widgets powered by Feed2JS.
Read MoreWent for a really good bike ride with @ppival this morning, starting near the Springbank airport, heading out toward Bragg Creek, then back to Cochrane and Springbank. Lots of hills. Not ugly countryside, either… (photos are a bit wonky, because I was shooting with my iPhone, without stopping, on a ride that averaged 28km/…)
Read MoreWhat a consultant-ish title. Anyway. The working group I’ve been chairing since last summer (it even has its own tag here on my blog) has been doing a bunch of stuff (i.e., “engagements”) to talk to people on campus (i.e., “stakeholders”) to find out what they need from eLearning in general and in an LMS specifically (i.e., “high level needs documentation”).
The first report, focusing on documenting the LMS engagement itself (surveys, focus groups, vendor demos, etc…) is now final, and has been published to the website. There will be 2 additional reports published before September - the first will update our documentation of stuff we do on campus to facilitate and support eLearning (i.e., “eLearning Inventory”), and the second will try to crunch through the data, mush it into the community’s needs and hopefully make some sense out of it all (i.e., “eLearning technology analysis”). Another group, spun out of the General Faculties Council, will be working on an eLearning strategy for the University, and we’ll be feeding our reports to them to help inform the process.
Read MoreGot to head out for a quick bike ride this afternoon. I only had an hour or so, so stayed pretty close to home. There’s some really great riding near my house…
There are now over 170 sites hosted on the Hippie Hosting Co-op server. Most are low traffic, low resources sites, with a handful of big sites.
The folks with big sites are paying more than the nominal fee, so it all works out. I was surprised to see how few large sites there are on the server. I was also surprised to only be #3 on the list. This whole Reclaim project wants to suck up drive space…
Read MoreThe University’s campus wiki, wiki.ucalgary.ca, is still run as a semi-stealth pilot project. This seems strange, after running it for 7 and a half years (first edit, December 11, 2004), but it’s something I initially snuck onto a server, and it kind of grew from there. It’s still running on an aging and borrowed/scrounged server, and I’m supporting it in my spare time. Which means, it’s basically self-supporting. Which is fine, because the people that have been doing awesome stuff with it are a pretty self-supporting group. I’m working on getting the wiki adopted by IT so it will be properly managed, but that process takes time.
Read MoreI’ve been messing around with hosting my own videos, but that’s one area where the third party services have the functionality nailed. They magically transcode video file formats. They create thumbnails. They provided embeds to make it easy to use the video. But, Jim posted about how he’s having to take on some copyfighting, because YouTube is bending over for some pretty outrageous false copyright claims. The only way to prevent a third party from misusing your content is to not use a third party.
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