social learning, open education, and petty battles with rivals over power and money…
From the monthly archives:
I’ve been letting a lot of noteworthy stuff slide this week, but this post on gaming by Bryan Alexander is too juicy to pass up. He’s roused to indignation by a dismissive essay by Christine Rosen in the New Atlantis, one that Bryan describes as “a sort of swirling, congealing swarm of complaints that [...]
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In the course of one of those meetings that makes me feel so damn lucky to be working at a university, I got turned on to txtkit. Checking out the site itself induced a case of cognitive vertigo, spinning more wildly the deeper I looked:
txtkit is an Open Source visual text mining tool for [...]
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I was pleasantly surprised when a friend sent me a link to a Livejournal site run by UBC students. Websnob that I am, I’ve never spent much time with Livejournal, but judging by the activity on the site it’s more successful in fostering online community than most of the attempts to do so [...]
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I’m sure that we’ll be finding some small bugs over the next week or so, but based on my initial pass the transition to new system and server seems to have gone better than I could have hoped.
A long, detailed, mawkish and embarassing tribute thanking everyone involved is called for, but is presently impossible (am [...]
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This post is for people who use the Weblogs@UBC service.
Hello again, UBC bloggers! This is a reminder for the upgrade to MT3.1 scheduled on August 19th/20th. Starting at 10pm PST on Friday, Aug. 19th, you will NOT be able to log in to Movable Type on careo server. Because of this, you will also NOT [...]
Some fairly pedestrian posts have prompted some amazing comments. I find myself unable to offer these welcome visitors the appropriate hospitality (in part due to other pressures, mostly because I’m not quite sure how to respond adequately), but I wanted to at least point at some of the recent comment strings, which contain some [...]
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A quick follow-up to yesterday’s meandering post… Jeff McClurken commented that it’s a bit too easy to posit all students as comfortable with social software, when an apparent majority of them are not embracing these technologies. My experience with students at UBC supports Jeff’s assertion — I recently gave two weblog workshops to [...]
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A throwaway line in one of yesterday’s posts (”There’s an unmistakable energy out in the community right now, and I feel sorry for the people in our field who have yet to jack into it”), prompted a couple of comments which, as is common on this page, were more provocative than the putative original content.
D’Arcy [...]
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One of the best pieces of personal news I received over the past month was re-appointment as instructor for Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing, a course offered as part of UBC’s Master of Educational Technology program.
Teaching the course last year was among the most challenging and rewarding professional experiences that I’ve [...]
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Gotta give some serious kudos to James Farmer for his stellar work with the edublogs.org project. Open source goodness, community-based support, and an ongoing conversation among educators. It only takes a few seconds to be up and blogging with a nifty URL and ad-free hosting. This service opens up a lot of space [...]
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In-Flux