When driving in an active school zone, with school buses and kids in the area, you find yourself behind a cyclist. He is only going 35km/h in the marked 30km/h zone, and is riding in the middle of the lane (the other lane is for parking, and has cars and buses etc… along it). What do you do?
a) Realize that you are speeding, slow down to 30km/h, and continue as though nobody shat in your breakfast. Which is nice, because it’s a beautiful spring morning.
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Jim Groom, at TEDxNYC1, on apocalypse/zombie/crisis narratives, and communities creating together.
yeah. I didn’t think I’d be linking to a TED video either. But come on. Jim Groom. Animated GIFs. Bronies! ↩︎
In the Reclaim project, I’ve been struggling to find a way to properly access my files from anywhere - Dropbox has that problem solved handily.
I’ve been watching ownCloud for awhile, and it’s getting to the point where it’s just about ready to use as a self-hosted Dropbox replacement. Previous versions had web- and webDAV interfaces, but didn’t have the ability to sync files to each computer I use. The web interface worked, but was too awkward to actually use for anything. And using webDAV directly was so frustratingly slow that it was basically a non-option (saving a large file to webDAV has to upload the entire file each time you hit command+s, which can lock up the application you’re using until it’s done. not fun).
Read MoreWe had a good group of riders for a nice “gentleman’s ride” out to Cochrane and back, via Big Hill Springs. It’s a hard ride because of the hills (and headwind) but is totally worth it.
In some cases, “ed-tech” is shorthand for some very cool tech,. In some cases, “education” is just shorthand for a category within a larger app market. Sometimes all this talk about a definition of “ed-tech” prompts a great conversation about what we mean by learning in a mobile, networked world. And sometimes when we talk about “ed-tech,” we’re still talking about crappy tech and crappy education and crappy pedagogy and crappy outcomes.
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half-baked post alert
This is nothing new, but I’ve been internally coming back to it often enough that it’s worth saying out loud.
We’ve been working on identifying and documenting the needs of our campus community, with respect to an eLearning environment - with the unspoken goal of finding The One True Tool that will serve everyone’s needs. The further-unspoken-message being that everyone is (or should be) fundamentally the same, and that by finding and encouraging a single set of “best practices” that we’ll be able to help the lesser-able (i.e., different) people to adapt (i.e., conform). There are reasons to encourage conformity - it’s easier to support, easier to implement, cleaner to put into an RFP, etc…
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Best. Mother’s Day card. EVAR. I’m guessing they were working on similes in school that day…
Read MoreI just saw this amazing tool mentioned on BikeCalgary - an interactive map that lets you plot your bike commute route and then display bike-related incidents (I won’t call them accidents, because they’re not).
Turns out, my commuting route has only had 2 reported incidents in the last several years - both on a narrow stretch that causes me constant grief with drivers thinking they need to pass me even though it’s not safe to do so.
Read Moregreat video on city biking, by kona bikes (who made the bike that really got me back into biking big time )
so good. ride a bike. polar bears are epic.
Read MoreDave Winer linked to an interesting post by Om Malik linking to an article on burning out by Marissa Mayer. How’s that for a linktribution chain?
They are talking specifically about corporate and startup culture, but the discussion got me thinking about universities in general, and edtech specifically. What is it about edtech that feels so burnout-inducing?
Read MoreThe tech vision video for project glass was released today. The technology looks interesting, if a bit creepy.
But what hits me is that this isn’t about augmenting your reality. It’s about augmenting google’s documentation of everything you do, so they can mine it to sell to advertisers. The implications of a service actively monitoring and interacting and documenting and monetizing everything I do and say are just mind boggling.
Read MoreI’ve been pretty mindful about avoiding trackers on my site. I don’t use an external web analytics package (I do have the apache logs, crunched by AWStats, but nothing anywhere near the level of a Google Analytics or even WordPress Stats tracking). But, websites connect to other websites. That’s kind of their job. And other websites track stuff. So, even a website that doesn’t directly track people, by using YouTube videos and other hosted media, exposes people’s activity to those who track them.
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