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.
I’m torn on whether to split the Links posts from the main feed. Is it too noisy? Do the Links posts drown out the “real” posts? Does that matter?
I’m really just pulling the daily links here to make a single place for me to search stuff - posts, links, etc… - so I suppose there’s no real reason to have the Links posts also going out on the main feed for the blog. Asides are already completely separate (don’t show on main page, don’t show in main feed, having a separate feed just for them) so it’d be pretty easy to set Link posts up to do the same.
I’ve been running a copy of the excellent Feed2JS RSS feed embedder script on one of our servers for a few years(!) now. It’s a great way to embed any RSS feed onto any web page. The problem is that it’s a little too attractive to some of the more leecherly and unsavoury members of teh intarwebs. I occasionally take a peek at who’s using the script, and have found SEO tweakers, gambling sites, porn sites, warez, etc… all using it to aggregate their stuff together. That’s fine, but download your own copy rather than stuffing my server’s logs and cache directories with your crap.
I’ve switched themes on my blog. Again. And, once more, I just yanked an off-the-shelf theme and slightly tweaked the CSS to make it do what I want.
Before (left), using the excellent Journalist theme, and after (right) using the Magazine Basic theme:
They’re both good, so why switch? I was messing around with Magazine Basic for a blog at the Teaching & Learning Centre, where we needed a more magazine or newspaper feel to it. And was struck by how much I liked the theme. I like that it’s very clean, but polished. It only shows excerpts for the last few articles on the front page, and will show small versions of images if they’re available for a post. I like that it’s not purely river-of-posts - there’s no “Older Posts” link on the front page. Once things trickle off the front, they’re accessed via the category and tag pages. No humans use the “Older Posts” stuff, and googlebot has a full index of the site, so that design was redundant clutter anyway. I like that full posts aren’t on the front page - that means more posts are visible at a glance, and most people won’t even notice because they’re coming from Google (directly to a post anyway) or RSS.
Jim’s recent post including the drive-in intermission clip made me think about the last time I watched a movie in a drive-in. It was 1980, and my family packed into the Olds Custom Cruiser station wagon to head out to the Corral Drive-In. My sister and I got to stretch out in the back of the car to watch the movie in comfort. We’d do that pretty regularly. I remember back when the sound came from a box that fit onto the window of the car - before they got all fancy with their own mini radio stations for the audio.
