I just posted the 1000th photo to my photoblog . The milestone doesn’t really mean anything, but I’m a little surprised that I’ve been able to keep posting daily there for 2 and a half years. I’ve now been doing the photo-a-day project for 3 and a half years, starting in 2007 . Who knew? It’s pretty appropriate that 1000 was taken while riding home, along the Bow River.
Read MoreBill pulls responses to 3 recent articles (and I’d argue a fourth - the Bill Gates “education is the web” thing ) together with a single sentence:
> Just to emphasize, whenever anyone talks about “delivering” education, the implication is that learning is a passive activity that can be brought to people - in other words, getting us back into “consuming” mode.
Learning is active. There’s no getting around that. Therefore, an effective education involves much more than simple content distribution. Framing education as being a series of exercises in content consumption (no matter how great the content may be) doesn’t serve anyone well. It’s also not as simple as grafting on a layer of social networking on top of content. Education and learning are so much more than that.
Read MoreI just updated the excellent Relevanssi search index plugin (it makes the search feature of WordPress actually WORK, with relevant results rather than the lame built-in search). It reports on the top words in the search index. I’m a little surprised at the results (but, looking over the words in just this short post, I probably shouldn’t be…).
I’m kinda surprised that “awesome” isn’t high up that list…
Read MoreWith the CEO of Google declaring privacy as a thing of the past (along with Zuckerberg and Facebook), how do we reconcile that with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 12:
>Article 12.
>
>No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
The kinds of social policies described by Google’s CEO haven’t worked out very well in the past.
Read MoreRaj Boora just posted some thoughts on setting up a courseblog with a prof., and they echo many of the same things I’ve found on my campus:
let’s understand that students are as likely to be blogging for the class as they are to be pulling their own teeth – they are going to do it because they need to. You might get the odd student who is really digging it and wants to keep reflecting on it once the class is over, but for most, like pulling teeth, they are only going to jump the hoop once. Thirdly, even though blogging has this aura of being able to put the student at the center of the learning experience, it is still very much the case where students are told what to write and how to write it. It still almost has to be this way in order to create a level field on which the student work can be assessed. Finally… if we know that the students are not going to become bloggers on topic X, and we know that they are unlikely to have a portfolio (yet) where the entries that they do make can become part of a greater whole, why not start them with the most baby step of blogging… commenting.
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Alec posted a link to an article about a presentation made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Technomy conference (the article was a repost based on the original ReadWriteWeb article on the presentation). It includes gems such as:
If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go.
which ties into my thinking about triangulating disparate bits of gathered information to build comprehensive profiles on anyone.
Read MoreI just had an epiphany (or a moment of Duh! depending on perspective)
I’ve been thinking of the University as a Really Big School with bajillions of faculty and students who are mostly interested in maintaining the status quo (or in not taking risks, which has the same effect).
What if, instead, I ignore the status quo and think of the University as a small school, full of a small group of faculty and students who want to work together to try something new?
Read MoreI could watch this video all day. The fluid, organic flow of people and machines through the streets of San Francisco in 1905 - before the big fire. There’s something mesmerizing about the way everyone is able to move together. No ring roads. No interchanges. No streetlights. No bike lanes. Just a fluid, organic flow of humanity. I lost count of near-miss collisions, though…
Update: Looks like the video got yanked from YouTube due to copyright issues on the audio. Awesome. So, here’s the version direct from the Prelinger Archives:
I’ve been crafting a fine tinfoil hat in response to thinking more about pervasive third party tracking. And I realized I had been a total hypocrite since I was still running Wordpress.com stats on my blogs. Even though it was “anonymous,” it adds to the pile of third-party data that is tracked for online activity. I’ve now disabled tracking from Wordpress.com stats - and with that, I think, there are no third party trackers tied to my blogs. There could be something through a plugin or something, but nothing I’ve added.
Read MoreThe Wall Street Journal has been on a roll, looking at privacy online. The latest article looks at the trackers, bugs, beacons, and cookies used by various websites to monitor you (and then share that data). For example, the simple site dictionary.com tracks a fair bit of data about visitors:
234 activity trackers. To look up the definition of a word.
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