Blog Posts

will be back

I’ve scheduled email autoresponders, updated my voicemail, disabled blog comments. I’m now out of the office until Dec. 8, and will be offline for almost the entire time. See you on the other side.

the voice of reason

It’s a really damned scary place, where I’m the one speaking calmly and acting as the voice of reason. It’s happened rather more frequently than I’m comfortable with lately, both online and off.

I don’t know if it’s “the economy”, or the shorter days, or something else, but some people seem to have collectively lost their sense of rationality and humour.

If you read a post by someone online, don’t jump immediately to paint them as EVIL! if they’re saying something you don’t like or agree with. Take some time. Maybe only a few seconds. Breathe. Try to imagine what’s going on from the other person’s perspective. Do they have valid reasons for saying what they’re saying? Could they really be doing the right thing, but you perceive it as EVIL! because you don’t have all of the facts? Could they really be intending to say something else, but are being misinterpreted due to a language or context gap?

WordCamp Education Vancouver 2009

The website for Northern Voice 2009 just went live, so the date for WordCamp Education Vancouver 2009 is set. Thursday, February 19, 2009 in Vancouver - the day before Northern Voice (which runs February 20-21 in Vancouver - BE THERE!).

The venue for WordCamp Education hasn’t been set yet, but we’ll find a place either on the main UBC campus or downtown. Or at a pub somewhere… hmm…

what should I read while offline?

I’m dropping offline soon for a couple of weeks on a family vacation. I’m bringing a book or two, but want to stuff some blog posts and articles that I’ve probably neglected onto my iPod for more in-depth reading. I’m planning on using Instapaper to bring offline copies of stuff so I can read it anywhere.

What should I bring? What is the most important article or post that you’d recommend for offline reading? Doesn’t have to be related to education, or technology, or anything in particular.

Is Flutter a CCK for WordPress?

Following a thread through some blog posts this morning - I started at The Reverend’s post about Martha’s documentation of her hacking on WPMU, including a description of a WordPress plugin I hadn’t heard of before - Flutter.

Damn. The Rev’s gonna love this.

One of the things I LOVE about Drupal is the fantastic CCK plugin that lets me create compound structured content types without hacking the database or writing code. Things like Events. Profiles. Pretty much anything that can be stored as database records.

content is not enough

Brian wrote a great post about the focus on content creation in the open education movement. There were some great comments on that post - some arguing (correctly, IMO) that there isn’t enough great content available.

But even that misses the point, I fear.

Content is the least important part of education. What is far more important is what takes place between and among the students. The activities of the community of learners. What they actually DO with the content and with each other.

UCalgaryBlogs.ca Redesign

I’ve been meaning to redesign the main site at UCalgaryBlogs.ca for awhile now - the Edublogs Clean theme isn’t intended to be dropped in as a stock theme, but as a starting point for hacking something tailor-made. The Edu-Clean theme is available as part of the fantastic Premium WPMUDev subscription - and it certainly helped me get UCalgaryBlogs.ca off the ground quickly.

Edu-Clean has bugged me because it hijacks the front page by using home.php, rather than using a page template to render the front page. The annoying part of this technique is that it makes it difficult to list blog posts within that site - so news updates posted on the main blog only show up on the “latest posts” widget, and then disappear from sight when they roll off the bottom of the widget.

on the insanity of an automaker bailout

The proposed US bailout of greedy financial institutions is crazy enough, but now there’s talk of bailing out the automakers? What in hell happened to the free market? US automakers are in trouble because they build shitty products that people don’t want to buy. And they haven’t retooled fast enough, as others have. Toyota’s not looking for a bailout, they’re just making better products. Honda’s doing OK. etc…

A US automaker bailout is just the government declaring “we know our products are shit, and we think you should keep buying them, so we’re going to subsidize the morons that run the companies.”

Walking tour of University of Calgary Campus

Back in the heady early days of podcasting - all the way back in 2005 - one of the first use cases of the technology was to create “walking tours” where a narrator could guide students through a tour of an area. When video podcasting became possible, it would make the guided tours more effective because you could show supplemental or orienteering images to support the narration.

Fast forward to 2008, and the TLC just produced a walking tour of the U of C campus, featuring Julie Walker, a naturalist and hiking guide with the University of Calgary Outdoor Centre.

scott leslie on how sharing works

Scott Leslie just published a fantastic description of how sharing really works - and how institutions/organizations/etc… miss the real value of sharing. You can’t plan to share, you can’t define parameters, you can’t write specifications and requirements and interoperability guidelines.

All you can do is share what you do. Share what you create. Share what you care about. And, possibly, some time, someone else will benefit.

But if you plan/specify/define the parameters of sharing (what is shared? with whom? for how long? in which contexts? etc…) then the value of the thing is lost.

there's a theramin in my iPod!

I just found a new Coolest iPod Application. Theramin-ator. A multitouch theramin. On my iPod. Fracking awesome. I just spent the last half an hour playing with it, and it’s pretty sweet. Especially once you start getting the hang of the multi-touch controls. You drag a finger (or fingers) around on the “control pad” to simulate moving through the theramin’s fields. Horizontal axis is frequency, vertical is volume. Frequency ranges from a skull-rattling 40Hz to a brain-melting 2000Hz. Volume goes to 11, natch. And you can tweak the properties of the theramin while playing - pitch range, waveform, etc… Very cool.

photo used by CBC News

It’s a sad story, but still pretty cool that one of my photos (released under a CC:by license) was used by CBC News. I got a call this afternoon from the reporter asking if they could use the photo. I said of course, and started to explain CC:by, when she commented that she knows about Creative Commons and just likes to notify people when they use photos. So she went above and beyond (she could have just used the Flickr mail feature) and looked up my office phone number to ask me directly.