I picked up a Flip Ultra video camera this weekend, and one of the things I wanted to try was strapping it to my bike helmet to record my morning commute, just to see what it looked like. So, I dorked myself up a bit by attaching the Flip to my helmet via a handy dandy bungee cord, and recorded the morning ride. It’s a bit stomach-churning in spots, because of head motion swinging the camera all over the place, but it’s pretty close to being there…
All of the cool kids are playing with the shiny new fancy tag cloudifier over at Wordle. It is shiny. I think this is the best visualization of my del.icio.us tag cloud that I’ve seen. I think I might try to whip up a poster to slap on the office wall or something. I’ve got a vector-based PDF version just itching to rasterize onto some huge chunk of papyrus…
That’s like riding from Calgary to Vancouver and back. Or Calgary to Thunder Bay. Heck, I could have ridden from Calgary to San Francisco, with over 400km to spare. hmmm….
I’ve been riding my bike as primary transportation on my commute for a couple of years now (started really doing it again in 2006, after a few years of not riding very much). I ride just over 28km per day, every weekday, so have managed to rack up the kilometers pretty quickly. I had set a target for myself to ride 3,500km in 2008, trying to beat my 3,100km ridden in 2007. Looks like I’m on track to blow that away, and might hit 4,000km if I’m able to keep going. That’d be like riding from Calgary to Quebec City. Or to New York…
Read MoreI’ve been deep in thought, planning a set of resources to support a community project, and have been struggling with how to best position these resources to best reflect a dynamic, engaged, face-to-face set of communities.
My initial reaction was that the communities need to exist first face-to-face, and that any online resources are supplementary and intended simply to continue and extend their conversations. The online resources are not the community. I think this part is pretty obvious.
Read MoreThis is a response to Cole Camplese’s great post “Should it all be Miscellaneous” - which was, itself, a response to the Penn State Web Conference (which, in turn, sounds like it was a fantastic gathering of PSU folks).
Go read Cole’s post before reading any further. It’s worth it. I’ll wait.
Really. I’ll wait. Go read it. Seriously.
OK. You’re back. Took long enough. Great post, eh? Here are my thoughts in response:
Read MoreI’ve been looking for something to fill this need for awhile now, but haven’t found a decent solution.
We’ve got students coming to class with web-enabled devices (laptops, iPod Touch, iPhone, smart phones, etc…) and it makes sense to take advantage of this stuff wherever possible. Instead of making students buy and lug around yet another piece of gear, I’m looking for an effective way to provide assessment and response functionality via a web browser.
Read Morecan’t stand unicorns. this’ll have to do…
Last night, I nuked my blog. At first, I was just doing it to make a point, but I quickly reached a point where I was almost convinced I was going to leave it nuked. I was going to toss the albatross overboard, and start fresh.
But then I got an email from someone I’ve never met (although I’ve exchanged a few emails with him over the years). He convinced me to put the blog back up.
Read MoreOn thinking about edupunk, it strikes me that I’ve been drawn to a group of people that have embodied it for years. People that are open. That prefer to DIY. People who share, remix, mashup, and generally operate in the spirit of what is now being called edupunk. Here are my edupunk heroes, who inspire me every day (in no particular order). There are lots of other people that inspire me constantly, but when I think EDUPUNK, these are the people that really push me.
Read MoreInstead of talking about edupunk, or philosophizing about what defines punk culture, Alec just went ahead and lived it. His EC&I 831 course was serious hardcore edupunk, before the term was coined.
He ran a grad course, completely in the open. He invited a whole bunch of people to join the class, where students and guests discussed and explored ideas and strategies, and shared the combined output. He modeled some serious DIY chops, drawing on more free (and non-free) bits of tech than I could track, and pushing the students into the driver’s seat as part of the process.
Read MoreJim’s been talking about edupunk a fair bit lately (starting with the killer post The Glass Bees, then Permapunk and finally tying in the awesome Murder, Madness, Mayhem wikipedia project), and Jen wrote up a piece that dovetails nicely into the concept. There’s something about the edupunk concept that is resonating deeply in me.
It’s a movement away from what has become of the mainstream edtech community - a collection of commercial products produced by large companies. Edupunk is the opposite of that. It’s DIY. It’s hardcore. It’s not monetized. It’s not trademarked. It’s not press-released. It’s not on an upgrade cycle. It’s not enterprise. It’s not shrinkwrapped.
Read MoreThere’s been much handwringing about the “edublogosphere” not flocking to follow self-proclaimed leaders. That people are disgusted because other people don’t clamor to follow someone else’s lead because they say they are leading something. I’m not going to link, or point fingers, or name names. I’m going to keep this post short, because I could very easily devolve into full-on rant mode.
Leadership is earned, not taken. You’re not a leader just because you say so. People shouldn’t be compelled to follow you just because you make a bunch of noise. If you are a leader, people will follow you. If you’re not a leader, they won’t. Get over it.
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