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.
I just finished presenting a session with Jim Groom called “More than just a blog” where we where showing some things we’ve done with WordPress and Drupal that might be a little outside the box for a pure blogging platform. Jim’s done some really amazing and cool things with WPMU at MWU.
The session was a total blast for me. It evolved into a pretty lively discussion that wandered around a very wide range of topics - I hope it wasn’t too scattered.
I’m sitting in the kitchen here at Casa del Lamb, and we’re bashing around some ideas for mashups and cool ways to display data for MooseCamp and Northern Voice. We just had (what I think is) a really cool idea. What if we could take the OPML file from the planet.northernvoice.ca aggregator (which contains a reference to many/most of the blogs representing the people attending the conference), and run some analysis on that to figure out what the relationships and subgroups are within the larger group of Northern Voice Attendees.
Still obsessing about warmer/sandier places. And I did not take these photos - they are photos I’ve seen in my various Flickr feeds. All I did was hit the “Fave” button on them (someone complemented me on the great whale photos I’ve been taking - that won’t happen until next month…)
Anyway, she’s coordinating an online seminar through SCoPE titled “Blogging to enhance learning experiences” - it’s a moodle community with a fair amount of activity (and many familiar faces). It runs from February 12-25, so it’s already under way.
Definitely worth checking out. I’ll be mostly lurking, but will try to participate in the buildup to Northern Voice (our session is on the 24th)
Naturally, the first thing I’d try to do with Pipes is to mock up something like Eduglu - taking feeds associated with a group of individuals and merging them into one place. The concept, from an educational standpoint, would theoretically make it feasible for students and/or teachers to monitor relevant online activities for an entire class, without having to hunt out each person’s various feeds.
It’s not quite there yet, though. Currently, the concept of Filters is rather borked in Pipes. If you’re dealing with a homogeneous set of feeds in a Fetch, it works fine, but as you add different kinds of feeds, the parameters for filtering go all wonky (is it filtering based on Category? dc:topic? Title? Description? Something else?)
Maybe Eduglu is just a set of metapipes? LifeHacker gives a thorough howto for creating a personal überfeed from all of your separate feeds, complete with sorting and filtering.
I just got off the line with Cole, Alan and Brad - the ETS edtech crüe at PSU, where we recorded an episode of ETSTalk. I babbled for a bit about what I do here (and it was likely as clear to them as to me :-) ), then we talked a bit about innovations and the need to build concrete stepping stones to help people grok new stuff. I mentioned some of the projects I’m working on with faculty and off-campus folks, and we talked about reasons behind blogging (with me narcissistically remembering the story of how I started blogging, because of course everyone is so interested in that. rivetting stuff…)
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