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 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.
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.
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.
I had the distinct pleasure of introducing Dr. Leslie Reid this morning, for her presentation “Creating Team Projects that Work in Large Classes: Redesigning a Large Science ‘Service’ Course” - part of the Teaching & Learning Centre’s 10th anniversary series of presentations. She talks about her experience in redesigning a large class (300 students with 13 weeks of lectures) into a format based on group projects (250 students with 6 weeks of lectures and 6 weeks of group work).
It sounds like there might be a critical mass of education-minded folk at Northern Voice 2009 (Vancouver, February 2009), and I’d be more than happy to coordinate a WordCamp gathering before or after the conference. So, of the folks that are going to NV, how many would be interested in attending a WordCamp Education shindig?
I did a test this morning to check out how well the video recording gear we have would work for recording a presentation tomorrow. The gear works great - it records directly to DVD so I can just walk away with a nice shiny disk after the presentation is over.
But that’s not what this post is about. This DVD, that I made, containing no DRM and no copyright, triggers the evil DRM software that’s baked into the operating system that I use. I had the DVD program running in the background, and went to take a screenshot of something else - and was rewarded with a warning dialog:
I got word back from Akismet that using it on UCalgaryBlogs.ca to protect all of the blogs hosted there falls under the free license, despite the wording on their website that suggests it’s an enterprise use. This means I’m now able to protect all blogs on the service with Akismet, without requiring a Captcha challenge.
The current version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress installs just fine in the mu-plugins directory, meaning each blog automatically gets protected, without any configuration or setup. The Akismet key can be hardcoded into the plugin file, and when that is done, all configuration interface magically disappears from the wp-admin interface. Easy peasy.
Yahoo! Mexico posted a photo I took last halloween on the front page of their site. That’s pretty cool. Almost 6,000 people have clicked through to view the photo page today alone, making it now my most viewed photo on Flickr.
The mummy was back again this year, and I got a shot of it with a wider angle lens.
I keep being surprised by how much fun I still have with photography, especially after almost 2 years of shooting every single day. Shooting silly things, not worrying about perfection or production quality. Experimenting. Having fun. Although sometimes it feels like I just keep shooting the same boring things over and over again, if I step back and look at the photographs, there is so much that I love about them. Sure, many people and things are recurring in many photographs. But that’s part of the fun. Seeing the same thing at different times, from different angles.
If we have to talk about PLE (Personal Learning Environments) (blech. why does every damned thing need a name and/or acronym?), can we at least not define it to death?
“PLE” is a verb, not a noun.
“PLE” is something you do, not something you have. It’s an action, not a thing. It’s a way of interacting with others, not a way of “getting personalized learning.”
You can’t go out and set up your PLE. You are part of your PLE. You have it already. You can’t seek to personalize your learning - if your learning isn’t already personalized, you’re not learning.
