Thanks to a tip from David Esrati (who I’m not going to link to from this post because I’m taunting spammers and don’t want to inflict collateral damage on him), I’m testing out WP-SpamFree which is a really interesting antispam plugin for WordPress. I’ve used Akismet and Mollom before, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with externally hosted antispam systems. For some reason, I’m just not completely comfortable with relying on another server for this. I’d used Spam Karma 2 with great success, but since that went defunct I abandoned it as well.
They just (vaguely) announced the route for this year’s Ride to Conquer Cancer event. Looks like we’ll be leaving from the south end of Calgary (I’m guessing the parking lot at Spruce Meadows, but I could be wrong), heading briefly west then south along the Cowboy Trail on highway 22. The overnight camp is at Bar U Ranch near Longview. On day 2, we go another 100km (or so) south - finishing the ride at the Sierra West Ranch near Pincher Creek.
I just spent a few minutes updating my podcast subscriptions - I haven’t really listened to podcasts for several months, and want to get back into more curated audio presentations, as opposed to the relentless randomness of Shuffle Mode music playlists.
I decided my previous set of subscriptions were essentially a self constructed echo chamber. I had subscribed to several edu-podcasts, all talking about various interpretations of the same issues. I need to break out of the echo chamber, so I unsubscribed from most of them (sorry - nothing personal). I added several music related podcasts, and a couple talk radio shows.
It’s been awhile since I logged into SecondLife. I updated my app and fired it up today, after talking with Patti about possibly holding a TLC session in SecondLife to help expose faculty to the concept. I don’t want to be championing it, but many faculty are curious, and a guided tour might be helpful. I decided my previous avatars - a Cylon Centurion and a Dark Wraith - were maybe a bit far from what I need to look like when talking with faculty. So I updated my avatar to something I can relate to.
Yesterday, I found a post from a student on a code-sharing forum. My gut reaction was that it was an attempt at plagiarism. I made a comment on Twitter along those lines, and got some pushback. Isn’t that just student-centric networking? Isn’t the student just using their network as part of their learning?
Here’s the post:
At first blush, that doesn’t seem so bad. The student is posting a question, asking for feedback. If this was on their own blog, I may not have thought twice about it. Sure, they’re asking for a full solution, rather than a more generalized “what angle should I take in solving this?” but as long as they cite where the solution came from, that may not be academic misconduct (but likely is, given the “solve this assignment for me” phrasing).
I spend a depressing amount of time cleaning up after Microsoft. Specifically, cleaning up the “helpful” HTML code generated by MS Word and/or Internet Exploder on Windows when people copy content from MS Word and paste it into a WYSIWYG editor in Internet Explorer. Helpful, in that it tries (and fails so spectacularly that it boggles my mind how such a “feature” was designed) and more often than not completely borks whatever website is the unsuspecting recipient of the control-V-of-death.
The group of WPMU rockstars at UBC’s OLT just whipped up a fantastic new plugin for administrators of a WPMU site to get a feel for the growth of the community. It generates a graph to display growth in numbers of blog posts and comments over time, and uses the Google Data Visualization API to let you interactively define data ranges to be graphed.
Here’s the growth of UCalgaryBlogs.ca graphed for the last 2 semesters:
I love Creative Commons. Because I tagged my photos with a CC license, a small and local magazine found some of my photographs, and was able to use them in a recent issue. I didn’t make a penny, and it didn’t cost them a penny. But they were able to find good images for what they needed, and I get to say my photos are in a magazine. Win/win.
I’m working with a class of 250+ geology undergrads, split up into 53 groups. They’re using a WordPress site to publish online presentations as the product of a semester-long group project. I’m using the great WP-Sentry plugin to let them collaboratively author the pages without worrying about other students in the class being able to edit their work (I know - but it makes them more comfortable so it’s a good thing to add).
I tried the promising new iPhone / iPod Touch app “Blackboard Learning” hoping to have a cool and efficient way to connect to Blackboard from my pocket computer. No such luck. There’s always something in the way of making the LMS experience fun…
Error
Your institution is blocking Sync for the iPhone.
Doh.
I don’t know if this is a version mismatch - are we running the wrong version of Blackboard? - or if it’s just a new building block that needs to get rolled out on campus. Either way, frustration.
Jim Groom linked to a post by Patrick Murray-John with an interesting summary of the activity on UMWBlogs.org - and I was curious about what activity patterns are on UCalgaryBlogs.ca - so I fired up Sequel Pro and dug around in the raw data stored by the blog_activity plugin in the wp_post_activity and wp_comment_activity tables. The tables include aggregate and anonymous activity data for the last month.
There is a relatively new Reports plugin that could do much of this in an automated way, but it only supports generating activity reports for individual users or blogs, not aggregate reports.
Thanks to a tip from David Esrati (who I’m not going to link to from this post because I’m taunting spammers and don’t want to inflict collateral damage on him), I’m testing out WP-SpamFree which is a really interesting antispam plugin for WordPress. I’ve used Akismet and Mollom before, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with externally hosted antispam systems. For some reason, I’m just not completely comfortable with relying on another server for this. I’d used Spam Karma 2 with great success, but since that went defunct I abandoned it as well.
I just spent a few minutes updating my podcast subscriptions - I haven’t really listened to podcasts for several months, and want to get back into more curated audio presentations, as opposed to the relentless randomness of Shuffle Mode music playlists.
