I just got back from Michael Geist’s inspiring presentation “Why Copyright?” - where he laid out some of the issues relating to copyright, open access, sharing, reusing, mashups, and a long list of implications for the potentially pending Canadian DMCA.
It felt like there was much agreement among the faculty and staff who were present for Dr. Geist’s presentation. When he was talking about the need for, and the power of, open access, many heads were nodding. People were agreeing, and it felt like we might be about ready to start moving forward on some Open Content (if not all the way to Open Education) initiatives. I’ve got some ideas that I want to incubate for a bit longer, but I’ll be following up with faculty members to see what we can do to move in that direction.
I just took a quick peek at the “Top Posts & Pages” stats for my blog, as calculated by the WordPress.com Stats system. I had it run the numbers for my most popular posts of all time, and was both surprised and dejected. Apparently, this is not an edublog after all.
I’m actually not sure what kind of blog this is - my most popular post of all time was a comment on potential political/police entrapment of protestors. Followed, way back, by a stupid post on how (the then newly released) Google Maps could see my house. There are a couple of posts with source code or tips. One on MediaWiki. At #19, the first post that might be interpretted as educational in nature - talking about podcasting.
Apparently, my Twitter account became the primary stress test for the cool Tweetcloud service, which crunches through every tweet posted for a given account, and generates a cloud of words ranked by frequency. Although I’ve been posting to Twitter like a madman today, they were actually able to get it to crunch my account:
The 2008/366photos project just hit the 1/4 mark. Just over 91 days in. I’ve been surprised at the number of edu-folk that decided to try the photo-a-day challenge this year. It’s fun, interesting, frustrating, challenging, and sometimes really difficult trying to come up with at least one photograph every day that doesn’t suck (or, hopefully, is interesting and/or good).
So now, we’ve got 40 people in the 366photos group. Currently there are over 1800 photos in the pool. There are likely many photos that are part of the project that aren’t included in the pool (for myself, several are marked as “friends and family” only, because they are photos of my son and/or his cousins).
I’m firmly in the @injenuity “The Network is People” camp. And I freaking LOVE my network.
I’ve been experiencing an annoying glitch on my MacBook Pro since upgrading to MacOSX 10.5 - nothing serious, but occasionally it’d bug me. What happened was, if I opened a Finder window to /Users - it would show every user’s home directory except mine. I mean, I know it’s there, because all of my files are there. And if I used Terminal or remote SSH login, the directory was certainly there, as were all of my files. If I used Finder’s Go to Folder command (Command + Shift + G) I could enter “/Users/dnorman” and all was well.
I think I’m going to like the new media management and gallery system… Multiple file uploads, automatic image resizing (although it looks like my server doesn’t have enough RAM to crunch 8MP photos?) and embeddable galleries? Nice. Wonder if it works…
[gallery]
Yeah. GD or ImageMagick or whatever is used on the server to resize completely barfed on the original 8MP photos I tried to insert - they weren’t resized, so the full photos were embedded on the page. I’ll have to see if there’s a workaround, or just use smaller source images…
WordPress 2.5 went gold this morning, and I figured I’d go ahead and upgrade my blogs.
The very first thing I did was back. everything. up. Files, data, configuration. I used rsync to send everything to my desktop box on campus, where it will be further automatically backed up by Time Machine to an external drive. You can never have too many backups. Not that anything ever goes wrong…
Then, I upgraded the relatively simple mindfulseeing.com photoblog - no problems at all. WP 2.5 seemed happy on my server, and there weren’t any issues with the upgrade process. Now to try it on my main blog…
I am by no means an expert, but have been commuting by bike for awhile now. I’ve learned some tricks that might come in handy for others who are starting (or thinking of starting) to commute by bike.
Start slow. Don’t rush it when you first start out. Take your time. Pick a day or week where it won’t matter too much if you’re a bit late, or if you get delayed a bit. Initially, you’ll need some time to figure out the route and get used to the routine. Starting slow lets you get into the groove without trying to push yourself too hard.
I found a link to Nexus in my reader this morning thanks to a post from Information Aesthetics, and decided to check it out. It’s an app for Facebook that graphs out a member’s network, indicating connections and clusters. Here’s my network:
Moving the mouse over any dot within the Nexus app highlights that person, and their connections. It’s pretty easy to see things like the University of Calgary folks (the lines of dots in the middle), the Northern Voice folks (on the left side, mostly), family members and old high school friends (the unconnected mini-networks outside the main circle).
I’m going to be showing some videos to faculty members who have participated in our Inquiry Through Blended Learning program. I get 20-30 minutes, during a wrap-up lunch on Friday. But I’m stumped. I could easily just show a TED talk (or two, if edited for time) but… what you YOU show, considering the audience is made up of faculty members from a wide range of disciplines, but are brought together by a common interest in inquiry and blended learning?
Focal length is the factor determining how much “zoom” you get when taking a photo. Larger numbers mean longer lenses, meaning closer zoom. But, if you have a couple of lenses, it’s sometimes hard (at least initially) to figure out which lens to use for which shot. With a point-and-shoot, it’s easy, because there’s only one lens, and it’s built in. The only control you have is over the level of zoom. With a DSLR, you can swap the lenses out, which gives a great deal of flexibility, but means you need to put some thought into what range of focal lengths you want to have handy.
This evening, while riding home from work, I was involved in my first ever bike vs. car door incident. As I was approaching a red light, a driver decided it would be a great idea to open his door without looking. I had maybe 1 second to react, swerved left, and was thrown from my bike as it bounced off another car. If I hadn’t been able to react quickly enough, I would have crashed square into his open door at about 20km/h. I pictured myself being thrown onto the trunk of the taxi cab in the next lane, and was trying to pick my spot on the trunk to minimize damage to me. Thankfully, I was somehow able to stop before hitting the cab (have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE disk brakes?) and wound up just being thrown to the ground as I hit the cab. Thankfully all traffic was stopped, because it was at a red light. Who opens their door at a red light?
I just got back from Michael Geist’s inspiring presentation “Why Copyright?” - where he laid out some of the issues relating to copyright, open access, sharing, reusing, mashups, and a long list of implications for the potentially pending Canadian DMCA.
