This morning, while riding toward campus on a nicely packed bus, with Arcade Fire cranked up and my notebook open in front of me, I had a thought about EduGlu. I was thinking about something completely unrelated, when it just popped into my head, crystal clear.
The solution to the problem of distributed, decentralized, heterogeneous online publishing tools used by students is not to build a monolithic überapp to aggregate them all. There is no One Ring to bind them all. If the problem is “how do faculty and students keep track of content published by people (students, each other, etc…) that they care about?”, the answer is “We already do that. With RSS and feedreeders.”
You’d never know it by looking out the window, but it feels like a whole bunch of changes are in the works this season. Personally, professionally, and more broadly. Some quick backstory - after co-unkeynoting at the BCEdOnline 2006 conference with Brian and Stephen, we wound up at a local pub to debrief and just hang out. It sounds corny, but that conversation became one of the cornerstones I keep coming back to when thinking about what I’m doing, and where I’m going. (oddly enough, Dave Matthews just came on my iPod with “Where are you going?” Man, how I love the uncanny psychic shuffle mode…)
I just read a post on the O’Reilly Digital Media Blog about a prolific photographer named Gary Winogrand. I hadn’t heard of him before, but the guy shot well over 300,000 photos during his career, all on film.
“You don’t learn anything from repeating what you know, in affect, so I keep trying to make (the process) uncertain. The nature of the photographic process - it is about failure. Most everything I do doesn’t quite make it. The failures can be intelligent; nothing ventured nothing gained. Hopefully you’re risking failing every time you make a frame.”
I just found out via a Twitter post that Kathy Sierra, the author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, which I read religiously, has been receiving a series of threats. Cyberbullying, even death threats. Threats of violence. To the point that she had to back out of presenting a session at the ETech conference, and is canceling all public engagements.
[ED - I removed a paragraph that could be perceived as inflammatory. I wasn’t trying to imply that any specific individual(s) made a death threat, only that some had been named in Kathy’s post.]
I started riding again this morning. I’d been on my butt for far too long, and almost 2 weeks of constant eating and relaxing on tropical beaches didn’t help by any means. I’m not going to be hardcore. There’s some craptastic weather scheduled for tonight, and the next couple of days, so I’ll likely wuss out and bus it if it’s white out. But at least I started.
I picked up a bike computer on the weekend, so I don’t have to track stuff manually (or through my blog). It turns out that the ride is actually farther than what Google Earth calculated. It’s just a hair over 13km, as opposed to the 12.54km I’d thought it was.
It was pointed out to me in a recent email exchange that it’s a little odd that I don’t have a cell phone.
There. I said it. I don’t have a cell phone.
My wife has one, for work, but I don’t have one. Never have.
Why?
The cell telcos in Canada basically suck. By design. Every transaction with the phone is intended, designed, counted on, to suck cash from my pockets into theirs.
We got back into Calgary early this morning (possibly the last flight to land at YYC for the night). Maui is great. A little more developed than I’d have liked (CostCo™ and Wal-Mart™ don’t fit into my ideal mental image of relaxing tropical islands) but we had a blast nonetheless. Photos are now on Flickr, and I will try to do a braindump about the trip so I don’t forget the details.
I’m heading out of town on vacation for a few days. Offline. No phone. No internet. No Flickr. No RSS. I’ll have to settle for sun, sand, and mai tais. I’m going as far as disabling comments on my blog while I’m away, because I don’t want to have to even think about punting spam before Google indexes it. There shall be no spam while I’m on vacation.
I’ll see you on the 21st! I’m sure I’ll have a couple photos to post to Flickr. Maybe even an entire set or two.
On Monday, I attended a memorial for a family member that passed away recently (part of the reason I was in a bit of a funk during Northern Voice). It was the culmination of a long illness, but was still a shock.
At the memorial, a friend of hers stood up to say some words. Not a bad speech, and a nice gesture. They had met while working to pass some legislation to protect self employed individuals in the province. I talked with him after the service, at the reception upstairs. And then he did something that really unsettled me. He handed me his card. He is a politician, working he crowd for support. I saw him handing out cards around the room, making sure to talk to everyone at every table.
I’ve been meaning to make the time to put together some reflections on Northern Voice 2007 before the memories start to do that thing that memories do. Life intervened, and so here I am, almost a week afterward, trying to remember with as much clarity as I can muster, the defining moments of NV2007 (for me).
First, the openness and generosity of the Lamb/McPhee family continually blows me away. I had the pleasure of imposing on them while I was staying in Vancouver, and I truly felt (feel) like I’m a member of the family. As H. put it “You’re a Lamb boy, but you’re slow because you like the Stampeders.”
It sounds like the dreaded Moose Fever has afflicted nearly everyone who attended Northern Voice 2007. Some nasty flu bug got circulated through the cavernous halls of the Forestry building at UBC, infecting everyone there, then being carried across the continent as the attendees returned home. I had my flu shot before Christmas, so I wasn’t completely laid out (as many folks apparently were), but it still sucks pretty badly.
I’m feeling MUCH better than I was on Monday and Tuesday. I may even risk heading into the office on Thursday, since I’ve got a fair number of deadlines that got summarily blown away this week. Thank the gods for Tylenol Cold & Flu liquid medicine.
I’ve been off-blog for a few days, and haven’t had a chance to deal with this yet. I received a couple of email from folks saying they were having difficulty commenting on my blog. I thought maybe Akismet might be blocking them, so I’ve just switched back to a Drupal 5 development snapshot of Spam.module. Yes, it’s a continuing ongoing saga of switching back and forth between Akismet and Spam.module. Hopefully this solves the comment problem without subjecting this blog to a torrential spamstorm.