How do you connect to people online? from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.
(Link to video, for the RSS folks)
I had to cut back on the scope quite a bit to keep it to a 15 minute length. This could have easily turned into an epic documentary… Lots of very difficult decisions.
Thank you SO much to everyone for the contributions.
Read MoreJaymie Koroluk asked the twitterverse about the proper spelling of “eLearning”.
I responded back, a bit snarkily:
@jaymiek learning. There is no e.
It’s too much to describe in 140 characters. But I can’t stand the “e” in eLearning. (I can’t stand the “m” in mLearning, either.)
It’s just learning. The “e” is counter-productive. It forces people to focus on the technology. To see it as separate. As an isolated thing that must somehow be fit into the regular flow of teaching and learning.
Read MoreI just heard about TEDxYYC - an independently organized TED-like event to be held right here in Calgary. This should be awesome. I can’t wait.
I have no idea how many people will be able to make it. From poking around on the internets, it sounds like it might be held in the Karo warehouse, with room for ~100 folks. Possibly on Jan. 22, 2010.
If there’s anything I can do to help get TEDxYYC off the ground, count me in.
Read MoreOn UCalgaryBlogs, I’d modified the adminbar to include a link to the current site’s dashboard if a person was logged in, making it easy to get to the members-only side of WordPress without having to go through My Blogs and finding the right blog, then mousing over the pop-out “Dashboard” link. Most people never found that, and it’s not very intuitive.
So, I hacked in a hard-coded link to Dashboard in bp-core-adminbar.php. This worked, but meant I had to remember to re-hack the file after running a BuddyPress update. I forgot to do that right after I ran the last upgrade, and got emails from users asking WTF?
If you haven’t watched Lessig’s fantastic, passionate keynote yet, watch it.
(link to the video, in case it gets stripped from the RSS)
It’s worth it, if for no other reason than to get your own Certificate of Entitlement, signed by Lawrence Lessig:
Scott Leslie posted a link to Charter for Compassion, and I can’t think of a better thing to support. Compassion is so painfully lacking in the world today. It needs to be universal. We are all connected.
This is something I struggle with as well. I need to try harder. A LOT harder. Compassion is essential. Compassion is active. I can’t imagine leaving my son a world that lacks real compassion.
Read MoreI’m taking a graduate level course on Technology & Society, and for my Big Term Assignment, I’ve decided to try something a little non-traditional. Taking a page out of Alan Levine’s great playbook, I’d like to ask people to respond to a simple question:
How do YOU connect online?
More info is available over on the project website - but the short version is that I need people to respond to the question, however they interpret it, in whatever format they’re comfortable responding. I will assemble the responses into a narrative which will be published on November 30, 2009.
Read MoreI was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It’s really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.
(in case the video doesn’t show up in the RSS feed, here’s the link)
If you can read this, then the move to a new server at CanadianWebHosting.com is complete. They had to disable SSH on the existing servers because of an apparent hack attempt, so I asked to be moved to a server that had SSH available. They moved stuff over the weekend, and DNS took a bit to propagate. But relatively painless…
(sorry for the banal feed noise - I needed a post published on the new server so I could test DNS propagation - and if I post a bunch of these, I might catch up to The Reverend, now that he’s gone all Bob Villa…)
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I just posed this question on Twitter, but thought I’d try posting it here as well, in case there are different people reading each stream…
How is the nature of connection between people online different from “traditional” offline connections? How, really, do they differ?
I’m hoping to tease out some real, perceived, and possibly false differences between internet connections and traditional connections between people, for a project as part of the Technology & Society course I’m taking. I’m not meaning TCP/IP connections, or ethernet, but how people are able to connect, interact, communicate, engage, etc… online as opposed to offline.
Read MoreI finally got my invite to Google Wave, and it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Google’s in a bit of a hard spot, because they have to live up to some insanely strong hype that was created by non-Google folks about how Google Wave Will Change The World! Google Wave Will Kill Blackboard/Windows/BinLaden/WorldHunger. Sure, there was some hype sparked by Google themselves, but most of the unrealistic stuff was spun by people dreaming about what Wave could possibly do, in some mythical Wave-enabled future.
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I’ve been having a heck of a time battling sploggers at UCalgaryBlogs.ca - roaches that create accounts and blogs so they can foist their spam links to game Google (thanks for providing spammers with such a powerful incentive, Google).
There’s an option in WordPress Multiuser to ban email domains - provide the domains, one per line, into a text box, and it will reject any roaches trying to create accounts from those domains.
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