How’s this for a first kick at the cat? Huge gaps, but I’m trying to avoid writing a 200 page definition full of acronyms and words requiring further definition…
Personally, I’m not a fan of the word “cyberinfrastructure” as it seems to make people glaze over in its made-up-wordness. But, it appears to have some legs. Whatever. I guess the next best thing to having a word that doesn’t suck, is having a crappy word with a half decent definition…
I’m riding in the Ride to Conquer Cancer again this year. It’s a 2 day, 200km ride south of Calgary through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, June 26-27, 2010. Last year, we were able to raise nearly $7 MILLION for the Alberta Cancer foundation. I’m hoping we can top it this year. But I need your help.
Please sponsor me for the Ride. Every dollar helps. Every donation $10 and over gets a receipt for tax purposes (in Canada, anyway).
I just wastedspent the evening training the Faces feature of Aperture 3. Wow. It can’t put a name to a face automatically, but as you teach it, it’s spooky how well it does finding photos of people. I’ve been sitting here giggling at all of the photos I’d forgotten of people I care about. Great stuff.
What amazes me is how few pixels it seems to need to be able to recognize a face. It’s finding faces in group shots (of course), in crowds at hockey and football games (even if the shot is a wide angle photo with hundreds of people in it). It even finds faces in photographs pinned to the wall in the background of photos. Fun with recursion. It could also be a bit scary as a latent crowd identification system - but The Man has this stuff already…
a discussion board post for my “conceptualizing edtech” course, archived for posterity. It was written for an audience (fellow students in the course) that may not have much background in living online, so I settled for using terminology they may have seen before. It’s also supposed to be a brief post, so I didn’t go into anywhere near the depth I could/should have…
Three pressing challenges for learners in creating and using technology in an educational context.
1. control and ownership
If we learn what we do, then we can extend this philosophy to educational technology. Students are now able to “do” their own technical infrastructure, meaning they can be in control of what they use, how they use it, why, where, and for whom. This shift toward being able to manage a personal cyberinfrastructure sets up students to be able to function far more effectively on their own, without needing the constraints necessary for institutionally provided and supported infrastructure.
Rereading Alan’s post on his blog hiatus, where he takes a month off of posting on his blog to comment elsewhere, I was struck (as always) by the patterns in activity he described. I decided to take a closer peek at the activity on my own blog - I’ve been thinking a lot about discourse analysis lately, so it’s at least partially non-navel-gazing.
Here’s the graph for the first few years of life for my blog. It started out as a private, personal outboard brain, then kind of took off with a life of its own.
After previously saying I wouldn’t go to a TEDx event because of the way they’re set up, I’m happy to post that they don’t have to be that way.
Registration for TEDxUofC is open, and cheap. Students get in for $5. Everyone else gets in for $10. It doesn’t get cheaper than that. And there’s no “how awesome are you?” filter on the registration. You prove your awesomeness by showing up.
The Blackboard discussion board system is really quite amazing, in that it couldn’t have been designed any worse. It is easily the most awkward, clumsy, and deliberately obtuse discussion board software I’ve ever used.
There aren’t many things in life that are more fun than using the Blackboard discussion board system. But if we find any, they’ll be dutifully documented here.
While there is a public perception that cyclists are usually the cause of accidents between cars and bikes, an analysis of Toronto police collision reports shows otherwise: The most common type of crash in this study involved a motorist entering an intersection and either failing to stop properly or proceeding before it was safe to do so. The second most common crash type involved a motorist overtaking unsafely. The third involved a motorist opening a door onto an oncoming cyclist. The study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents in this study.
I was really excited that a TEDx event was being planned for Calgary. I was looking forward to TEDxYYC, and was planning to attend and help out in any way that I could. The website for the event went live today, so I went to register.
I got to the registration form. Except it’s not a registration form. It’s an application-to-register form. okaaaaaay… That’s unusual…
trying to figure out how to describe various options to faculty members. this diagram’s been flashing in my head for awhile now. it’s rough, but it’s a start.
In setting up WPMU sites for classes, I often wind up using the Text widget to add a bunch of important links - login, Dashboard, Add Post, Add Page, etc… to each site. Manually. I finally decided to save some time and just write a plugin that provides a generic widget to give the links on any site that uses it.
If you’re not logged in, it provides a link to login:
