Blog Posts

Strange corporate imagery

I don’t understand what Telus is trying to say with this image. Do they have mad tongue skillz? Giggidy.

Fully supported hosted Eduglu is coming! | Eduglu — Drupal Social Learning Platform

I haven’t had a chance to check it out since the initial announcement, but it looks like it’s progressing nicely. A social network application built entirely using Drupal and a set of modules.

Eduglu Alpha 2 is available now. I’ll have to grab a copy when I’m back in the office next week…

Now, how to reconcile this with my disdain for the concept of the PLN? Because Eduglu isn’t claiming to be the whole widget. It’s a way to connect various sources of content, published by various people, distributed across the internet, and then use that in the context of a class. Where the magic really happens.

Jim Groom on individual control of data

The Reverend is back from another trip slaying the Montauk Monster. And he’s back in fine form.

>Point is, the open web is not a convenience we need to evolve, it is a public good we need to preserve and foster. You cannot do that when it’s all been accounted for and the gig is up— if “open and free is an ideology” then isn’t “closed and expensive” just as ideological as well—and shouldn’t the two be in deep struggle on a larger stage? Rather, what’s happening, is the one is trying to subsume the other under cloud of night and terminological uncertainty. The LIS standard that’s been announced makes systemwide integration easier perhaps, but does it give people control over their identities and data? Does it promote a sense of one’s space and value on the web in real time? Does it deliver on the idea of a Personal Learning Network on the open web undergirded by syndication and community? These things are integral to teaching and learning on the web right now, and they have little, if anything, to do with an LMS, or so it seems to me.

new minimalist theme

I just switched my blog’s theme to Vigilance (after using Thesis for awhile). I’ve hacked Vigilance a bit, to make the content area wider, and nuke the sidebar (well, really the sidebar just displays underneath the content div) and a few other things (like telling it not to show the author - I’m the only person that posts here - and turning off some of the comment-specific logic and display.

Doesn’t get much more minimal than this. No banner images. No sidebars. Wide content. No fuss. Exactly what I want.

more Papers love

I’ve been slowly working on my MSc research proposal. Still far to early to post any of it online, but it’s starting to take shape. I’m using Papers to gather journal articles for reference as I’m working. Today, I added 33 articles to the stack, on top of the 63 I’ve already gathered. That’s not manageable. But Papers has some great tools to help cut through stuff quickly. I can sort the articles by the number of citations they have, which pushes “important” articles up to the top of the list. Then I can work through them all more effectively, without worrying about missing anything important.

hail

a surprisingly strong system just blew through the city. tornado warnings. severe thunderstorm warnings. flooding. 2-inch-wide chunks of ice falling from the sky. It’ll be a fun ride home…

Update: The U of C rooftop greenhouse was pretty much destroyed by the storm. yikes!

Greenhouse photo by Tannis McCartney

bumper car chaser

I don’t have any footage of unicorns to serve as a proper chaser for driving the depressing funk away after the last few posts. This will have to do. Not much more fun than bumper cars. Even more fun, now that The Boy™ is old enough to handle his own car…

bumper cars from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

methane apocolypse?

From a cheery article on Helium.com:

The bottom line: BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years.

The oil giant drilled down miles into a geologically unstable region and may have set the stage for the eventual premature release of a methane mega-bubble

Lots of scary tidbits in an article on a planetary extinction apocalypse event - although with questionable reliability - and then this:

playing with the BigBlueButton

After yesterday’s big announcement, I thought I should give BigBlueButton another look. An open source alternative is pretty attractive, now that the others are all absorbed into the Bborg.

I played around trying to get BBB to install in my Ubuntu Server VM in VirtualBox, but made the mistake of updating Ubuntu to 10.0.4, while BBB only works on 9.0.4. Oops. But BBB provides a VM disk image, making the process of setting up a fresh VM server absolutely trivial.

Typical usage

A typical month’s worth of 3G network usage. A 500MB & 200 minutes plan should be fine.

the last ebook

I’ve bought 2 ebooks. One for Kindle, one for iBooks. I can’t seem to force myself to use the kindle app long enough to finish DIYU. On the other hand, I’m really enjoying Medium Raw in iBooks.

But I can’t imagine I’ll be “buying” another ebook for a long time. They’re awkward. The digital tools that would make digital books worth the hassle, most notably copy and paste, are disabled via DRM.

photo from the ride

Edwin Santiago, the official photographer for the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer posted about 43 bajillion photos shot during the ride. I found one of myself while on the bike:

Looks like most of the official shots were taken near the end of the pack, with the photographer hitching a ride with the support cars, and occasionally from the front group. I was somewhere in between, so managed to avoid photography for most of the ride :-)