I learned long ago, that when given the opportunity to do anything with Brian, I should jump on it. Doesn’t matter where, or what. Just do it. It’ll be interesting, or at least fun. Most likely, it’ll be both, in spades.
I was handed the chance to do something fun with Brian as part of the welcome reception for the Canadian eLearning 2007 Conference in Edmonton next week. It’s something new for the conference - entertainment as part of the welcome reception. What to do? People will be eating/drinking/talking, so a full-on presentation wouldn’t go over very well. What to do… What to do… How about an Online Video Party?
I was just in a meeting with some folks in our campus IT department, where we were trying to figure out what the official University of Calgary supported podcasting solution would be. We were basically trying to decide if we should jump onto iTunesU in a big way, or roll our own service.
iTunesU is a really strong choice, in that all of the infrastructure bits are handled. No drive space to worry about, no backups to remember. Everything just works. But, it’s outside of our control, and is rather strongly Apple-branded. Even though it’s not an exclusive arrangement, and the content can/should be in multiple formats, it’s hard to sell that combo to people who are either
I just conducted some exhaustive and scientific research, trying to gather more information about iPhone availability in Canada as the big US release date approaches.
OK. Some clarification. By “exhaustive” I mean “I did a lap around Market Mall and poked my head into the Rogers and Fido shops” and by “scientific” I mean “I asked them ‘so… iPhone much?’”
Regardless… The typical response was something like “eye phone? no.” That is, when I got a response at all.
I (still) spend a fair amount of time thinking about the learning object repositories work that was done back at the turn of the century. A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side).
I think it’s fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically. The only content that was added to CAREO was done under the auspices of Large Projects and/or Institutions. Individuals, by and large, didn’t spend much time with it, or its ilk. Why is that? Why have other applications and platforms gone on to be much more successful, by any definition of the word? Well, here are some reasons:
I just enabled FeedBurner caching/serving of my blog’s RSS feed. The goal is to dramatically decrease the load on the server by redirecting RSS requests through FeedBurner’s server rather than mine (well, Dreamhost’s). Google just bought FeedBurner, so they’re not going anywhere. I’m trusting in Google not to do anything evil. I can always pull the plug on them and take control of the feed if needed.
Another bonus (for me, anyway) is an estimate of stats - how many folks are subscribed to the feed. That’s always been a total crap shoot, with nothing more than edumacated guesses and darkened dartboards providing numbers. Now I might get a better idea, and am braced for the emphatic “5 subscribers” that it will be flashing at me shortly.
Shortly after I made the switch from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2, I started thinking about the various apps and hosting providers I’ve used to run my blog. I actually had to mine the archives to remember it all, because it’s changed a lot. Over the last 5 (or 6, depending on how it’s measured) years, I’ve used 6 different applications, on 4 different hosting providers. That speaks volumes about interoperability, making it easy enough to move to a completely different weblog applications on 5 separate occasions. Sure, there was some data altered and URLs adjusted, but all posts and comments made the transition successfully each time.
This was my shuffle-ized playlist for the morning ride and cooldown. There isn’t a radio station on the planet (satellite or terrestrial) that would have put a playlist like this together.
It looks pretty eclectic, but the tracks all worked amazingly well against each other.
Actually, this is just one of the many reasons why I love Aperture. Non-destructive, interactive image adjustments. I don’t use adjustments very often, but when I do, they’re absolutely amazing. I had to hunt through my library to find images that had many adjustments made to them - most of my images are used as they were taken in-camera, with only minor RAW tweaks. But, occasionally, an image needs some extra love. Two recent examples are a lightning strike I was lucky enough to catch last night, and my son’s team photo for his T-ball team.
I’ve been asked to contribute to a series of short briefing papers for use by administration, in identifying and planning for trends in higher education. There are some obvious trends (social software - go to them, instead of making them come to us; open content; remix culture; personal publishing and the PLE; etc…) but I’m wondering about any non-obvious trends that people might be seeing. Anything surprising happening on other campuses? Are things like mobile access really starting to take off (esp. in Canada, where mobile internet charges are so unbelievably expensive)?
Not bad. Even before the iPhone hit the streets, Microsoft pushes out their clone. Too bad they lost the form factor. It’d be hard to fit that sucker in a pocket…
I’ve been trying. Really trying. I just can’t find a way to “get” what all of the SecondLife hype is about. I mean, yeah, it’s cool. It’s fun. It’s a really interesting and diverse metaverse. It’s a blast to create and buy stuff, and customize an avatar, and fly around islands. I get that part of it.
But, for education, it largely doesn’t change much over the existing and available tools. I could see it if you were working on a collaboratively designed architecture project. Or perhaps some theatre or alternate reality exploration of literature.
