It’s always bugged me a bit that my SL avatar was a plain-vanilla human. I mean, here’s this awesome metaverse, where the rules of physics don’t apply, and you can change your appearance at will. And I was walking around, looking much like I do in real life. How creative and interesting.
So, today while watching Stephen work his magic on a panel on SecondLife, in SecondLife (ooh. recursion!) I went shopping for a new avatar. I don’t have time to create an avatar at the moment, and for some reason have a few thousand Lindenbucks in my account. So I went hunting for a prefab avatar that I could live with. I was initially wanting to be a disembodied singularity or something entirely Other. But then I stumbled across the Battlestar Galactica Centurion, from the original 1978 classic series. Perfect.
Efficiently whiteboard dynamic content without cross-unit channels. Distinctively implement plug-and-play manufactured products with open-source innovation. Proactively integrate goal-oriented paradigms before best-of-breed internal or “organic” sources. Energistically network multimedia based markets rather than diverse convergence. Enthusiastically implement wireless web services without standards compliant platforms. Globally embrace enterprise-wide ROI rather than cross-unit applications.
Compellingly expedite prospective imperatives and worldwide results. Efficiently aggregate pandemic partnerships via client-centered e-services. Professionally matrix high-payoff methods of empowerment via out-of-the-box niche markets. Compellingly scale ubiquitous opportunities after customer directed benefits. Enthusiastically foster principle-centered sources without economically sound technologies. Continually disintermediate resource maximizing testing procedures whereas low-risk high-yield mindshare. Enthusiastically architect just in time ROI before ubiquitous core competencies. Assertively provide access to interdependent intellectual capital through 24/365 benefits. Assertively create wireless initiatives vis-a-vis accurate information.
I’ve been using Drupal for my blog for just over a year now, and it’s been a really great platform to work in. I use it pretty much all day for projects at the U of C as well. But it just feels a bit lacking in the area of managing a personal blog, compared with WordPress which is built solely for that purpose.
I’ve been missing things like email subscriptions to comments, and some of the other niceties that WordPress has had nailed for a long time, but are missing in Drupal.
I gave a presentation this morning as part of Faculty Technology Days 2007. I was asked a few weeks ago if I’d like to talk about weblogs and wikis, and I couldn’t come up a reason why not, so they slotted me in. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about weblogs, wikis, academic publishing, and being Open, Connected and Social. So I decided to try to subvert my presentation slightly, into a more open-content-is-good kind of talk (but still based on blogs and wikis for much of it). What better way to do that, than to present directly from a wiki? It’s worked very well for Brian Lamb - all of his presentations are wiki-driven.
I’ve been posting to my blog far less frequently than ever before, in the entire history of this blog. Why is that? I’m still busy doing stuff. I’m still active in all the same places. The only shift lately is that I’ve also been much more active in social networking sites, specifically Twitter and Facebook.
Now, both Twitter and Facebook are essentially social networking systems. They are about forming and building connections between people, rather than publishing content. So, that shouldn’t have an impact on my posts here.
I didn’t think Calgary was ready for this, but apparently I was wrong. Thanks to an email from Sami, I see that the first ever BarCamp Calgary is scheduled to take place on May 26, 2007, at the University of Calgary main campus. This is a type of event I’ve REALLY wanted to have here in Calgary, and it’s great to see there are a whole bunch of people interested in making it happen. Looking at the list of Campers on the event page, I only recognize a couple of the names. Maybe the Calgary blogosphere is more robust than Ive been guessing?
Apparently Sitemeter, one of the services I use to track stats about visitors and activity here, recently started inserting cookies for an advertising company. These cookies are essentially spyware, used to track visitors across the internet by matching up that cookie on each site that is visited.
I’ve disabled Sitemeter, and won’t be going back. I’ve been very happy with them for the last few years, but sneaking spyware onto visitors is not cool. StatCounter has pledged to not do that, so I’ll be using them, alongside Google Analytics. (it could be argued that Google could be tracking visitors in a similar pattern of spyware cookies - not sure how I feel about that, but at least they’re relatively up front about it, being an online ad company. Sitemeter just silently changed the rules…)
I was asked a while back if I was interested in giving a presentation to the MacLearningEnvironments.org group. At first, my reaction was “sure, but what on earth would I talk about?” After some thought, an initial plan was to do an updated version of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined presentation I had the pleasure of doing way back in 2004 (with Brian and Alan). What would that have looked like if it was done in 2007? How would the changes in those long 3 years have affected things?
I’ve been using eXe for some project work lately, and thought it might be handy to do a quick and dirty screencast of what it’s like to author content using eXe. It’s an open source, cross platform website authoring tool that uses some of the same patterns that Pachyderm does - structured content with pedagogical templates. Except it generates plain vanilla html (and SCORM, and IMS CP, etc…)
The screencast is just over 19 minutes (sorry for going on so long) and weighs in as a 27MB file.
I’ve been forcing myself to keep thinking about (and rethinking) the concept of EduGlu - a set of tools and/or practices that would more effectively support distributed online publishing while maintaining the sense of group and community needed to make this stuff more meaningful in an educational context. I waver back and forth, between building The One True �berapp To Aggregate Them All, and a more freeform, organic, barebones directory.
You have a head for ideas - and you are good at improving systems. Logical and strategic, you prefer for everything in your life to be organized. You tend to be a bit skeptical. You're both critical of yourself and of others. Independent and stubborn, you tend to only befriend those who are a lot like you.
