I’d experimented with the Structured Blogging plugin for WordPress almost 3 years ago. It’s a way to add structured, complex data to regular blog posts, and provides both human- and machine-readable versions of the content in order to support aggregation and syndication of the data by any service that supports it. The plugin adds a bunch of extra types of posts, from generic reviews and events, to more specific formats such as Journal Article and Book. Those two formats would be extremely useful to any student (or faculty member) who is collecting notes on academic research for use in their studies.
One of the profs using UCalgaryBlogs.ca was asking if there was a way to show the “audit trail” for a blog posts. If she’s having students write stuff, and needs it in by a given date (say, an assignment deadline), she’d like a way to know if a post was saved before the deadline, or updated after it. It’s easy for people to futz around with the “published on” date for a post…
Evan got a remote controlled monster pickup truck for his birthday. The first thing we did with it was strap on the Flip Ultra video camera and take it for a drive (bungee corded onto the bed of the pickup - after removing the plastic “roll cage” it ships with). Having no compulsions about high quality video production, or high definition video quality, is a very liberating and fun place to be :-)
With my recent thinking about openness, I’ve found myself starting to channel an internal devil’s advocate voice… This post does not represent my personal beliefs, but if we’re going to talk about open education, we need to explore all sides of it…
Is truly open education a desirable goal? Is the eradication of all barriers to access something that would have positive outcomes? If we follow open education in one logical direction - where every individual is able to tailor their own educational experience in breadth, depth, and scope, will we be able to make sense of the products of such experiences? Degrees and diplomas, at least in the conventional sense, would become diluted to the point of being essentially meaningless. If each individual can for all intents and purposes be their own university, how do we properly value this? Can everyone claim to have an open PhD from MeU?
The UCalgaryBlogs.ca publishing platform has really only been active for the last month, with real faculty and students using it. In that month, it’s already seen more activity, in terms of blog posts written, than weblogs.ucalgary.ca has seen in over 3.5 years of activity.
1600 posts.
In one month.
30 days.
And it really hasn’t been launched very publicly on campus yet. I can’t wait to see what people do with this stuff…
Some off the cuff (on the bike) rambling about some thoughts about what open education is - open content, open access and open accreditation. This is hopefully rock bottom with respect to video production quality - but at least you get to come along for some of my ride home…
I’ve always loved Heritage Park. I worked there for a few summers in the early 90’s, and met my wife on the job. The Park always has a magical timeless quality that seems so comfortable to me. I took Evan there for a couple of hours this afternoon, and he really enjoyed seeing (and doing) how things were done a century ago.
I stopped to record a quick stream-of-thought rant about openness and the institution. My opinions are my own, not my employers, etc… Please don’t fire me.
And, yes, I know that I said “thousands of years” - I meant “hundreds…” or “a long time”. Whatever.
One of the use-cases for UCalgaryBlogs.ca is for a class to integrate external resources such as OpenLearn courses, or potentially anything that has an RSS feed, to be ingested into the class blogsite. Currently, there are 2 scenarios possible for doing this, each with their own specific benefits, but neither quite matching what I think would make for a more powerful way to contextualize these external resources within the activities of a course.
I wasn’t convinced that we needed a “campus blogging platform” here at UCalgary. I’d tried to set up one before, at weblogs.ucalgary.ca , and watched it basically wither on the vine for 3 years. Little activity, except in small bursts when used in a class. Almost no individual involvement or ownership. Not interesting or relevant to anyone.
I’d decided that a “campus blogging platform” was the wrong tack. Why not just send people to other services that provide the software, for free. Services like wordpress.com or edublogs.org or blogger.com or typepad.com etc… They all provide the functionality, hosting, and support, without any intervention by a “campus”.
I’d guess that the applications, and their arrangement on the menu screens, tells a fair bit about a person. I’ve been slowly gathering a frighteningly long list of apps - games, utilities…
My current favorite add-on apps? Twinkle. Wurdle. X-Plane. Cube Runner. Asphalt. Countdown. Line Rider. Seismometer. And the shortcut to Google Reader.
