I just got this exciting news delivered to my RSS reader:
Coming: Beta Geminorum (22 hours away)
Beta Geminorum is 33.7 light years away and only 22 hours from the outer surface of your light cone – your ever-growing sphere of potential causality – which began its expansion from Earth on September 04 1970.
You can get your own light cone updates if you are also given to flights of interstellar frivolity.
This weblog has not enjoyed the protection of the MT-Blacklist plugin for a few weeks… I hadn’t bugged my host about it because he obviously has bigger fish to fry these days, and I knew he’d get around to it eventually…
Imagine my reaction when I checked my email this morning — before my first cup of java, no less — and saw three hundred and fifty email notifications of blog spam intruding on my cozy little lovenest of online educational blatherings… Alan and D’Arcy refer to these scum-sucking spammers as roaches, but this seemed more on the order of a plague of locusts. (Or maybe a preview of this summer’s impending attack of the Cicadas.)
I was about to go into my template and remove my comments field entirely when I realized that the MT-Blacklist plugin had been reinstalled, and some very nice person had already taken out the trash on my behalf.
But I think this episode represents more than a pointless tale ending in anti-climax. The lovely dream of open spaces online is clearly under threat:
You see, the problem with open systems is that they are easy to abuse. For the most part, manual damage can be controlled thanks to social pressure and sheer volume of good people, but automatical damage, as inflicted by bots may become intolerable. The reason why we have so much email spam these days is because of the wonderful openness of the SMTP, mail transfer protocol. Because it was open, license-free, and easy to implement, it became the killer app of the all-pervasive Internet these days. But openness also has vulnerabilities, and as with anything popular, people are abusing it right now.
I am not worried about people trying to destroy wikis. That would be too easy to protect against. But I am worried about bots that would roam around, and change the text or a link slightly to destroy links to competition, or to add Googlejuice for someone. Would it be possible to notice every single change on your wiki, and check every single outgoing link? Considering that most Wikis don’t even provide an RSS or Atom feed it may be difficult to keep track on what is really happening. I have two open Wikis which I administer – and I’m having trouble coping with them already. Especially smaller wikis may be in trouble, as their administration have no tools to combat a dedicated spambot.
This train of thought is straining my already bleak mood. Move along folks, nothing to be seen here…
The latest awe-inspiring contribution by Otis Fodder to the cultural commons:
Comfort Stand is a not-for-profit internet-only community driven label where all releases are free for download with artwork and liner notes.
Having no business model or profit motive we strive to bring you recordings that we find interesting, compelling and downright enjoyable. We are not genre-specific and feature material from well known performers to those loud unknown kids down your block.
Comfort Stand artists retain all rights to their recordings (and all artists have 100% creative control over their work). It is a label run by artists for artists.
Because of the uncommercial ideology of Comfort Stand there are no banners, popups, spam and you don’t have to register yourself to download the music you like. We are simply a platform for musicians who like to create music for people who like to listen to music.
Via SharpeWorld.
First thing this morning, for reasons yet unclear to me, I subjected a group of very nice people to the dreaded introduction to learning objects presentation, puppet show, and dance… The talk was hosted by UBC’s cross-town rivals at Kwantlen University College. At the outset, most of the attendees admitted to scant awareness and only slightly more curiosity about this topic called learning objects.
And who could blame them? Not I. I’ve made my antipathy to the poetic abyss rotting at the core of the learning object vision clear enough in the past, and I recycled that rant today (I always enjoy delivering it, and the audience usually seems to enjoy hearing it). In doing so, I bemoaned the fact that the dreaded appellation “learning object” appears in my job title.
In this joyous spirit of self-flagellation I tirelessly wailed away in my hairshirt, time limits be damned, the seminar room my private confessional. I might have went on for a few hours, I think… I feel kind of fuzzy.
After a few digressions on subjects including (but not limited to) William James’ epistemic philosophy, how I learned that serrano peppers are hotter than jalapenos, why the Doobie Brothers were always pretty awful (especially in the Michael McDonald period), how much I like black labrador retrievers, and describing some joint pain I’ve been experiencing, I got around to talking about RSS readers.
I gave a quick demo of NetNewsWire, and walked through how one scans through the listing of subscribed feeds on the sidebar down to previewing an individual entry… More or less by chance, I happened upon this posting at George Siemens’ elearnspace, which excerpted the following in the newsreader preview window:
Seductive-Augmentation Effect: “Seductive augmentations are interesting yet unimportant words, sounds, photos, graphics, and video that are added to instructional materials. In some situations, these augmentations hurt learning. In other words, they make it less likely that learners will learn the main points of the instructional material.”
One of the audience members who had not yet left nor fallen asleep pointed out that this passage was relevant to the topic of my presentation. Once I ascertained he was referring to learning objects, I had no choice but to agree.
I would happily trade the term “seductive augmentation” for “learning objects”. It’s far more provocative, more exciting. And I would love to change my job title to “seductive augmentation expert”. It would be much easier to try and explain to my grandmother.
I suppose most people would assume I worked in the cosmetic surgery business…
UBC has posted a position for an ePortfolio Community of Practice Coordinator. Michelle Lamberson, Office of Learning Technology’s Director has posted the full job description and application instructions on her weblog.
This position is quite similar to my own — my own beat is learning objects and personal publishing tools — so I’ll add my bit to underline how attractive this position could be to the right person. It’s a unique opportunity to work with a broad range of stakeholders within and outside the University. OLT is relatively new, but Michelle has done a great job in building a very talented team. I’m really excited by some of the things that are bubbling away here, and the coming months should be most interesting. In short, an amazing place to work.
Another reason to keep an eye on the weblogs. Bryan Alexander alerts me to a short case study I wrote about UBC’s use of wikis for Syllabus magazine. The piece is a fairly straight-ahead (and ruthlessly shortened) description of how some user communities here have taken the form and used it to serve their own purposes… To me that’s the remarkable part about this experiment — these groups didn’t need anyone to tell them what to do with the wiki space or how they should do it… they created their own structures and processes.
For those of you who are interested, an expanded (but far from complete) list of UBC applications.
Nothing would be more fun than to ramble on at length about this subject, further aggrandizing myself. Tragically, I am staring down an array of deadlines…
Photo reportage at high speed through the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster area. Alternately provocative, trenchant, amusing and depressing.
A simple use of html and digital images that hits more powerfully than scores of more complex and tangled web presentations.
Via Libraries & Learning, a program here at UBC that gets it right:
As an expansion of the directed studies option offered by most departments, this program allows senior undergraduate students to initiate and coordinate small, collaborative, group learning experiences. The UBC proposal is modeled on an established student-directed seminar program at the University of California at Berkeley.
Student Directed Seminars create one avenue through which undergraduate students can become active participants in a UBC community of learners. Student coordinators have the unique opportunity of working closely with a member of faculty to explore a topic. Participants, as members of a self-directed group, also have a high degree of control over their own learning experience.
I see that one of the seminars is on Multimedia Practice in Education.
More: Student-led seminar offers fresh take on television news.
The half-dozen or so readers of this page know that I am prone to what Martha Whitehead referred to as the bloggin’ blues:
I’d been thinking about the ol’ millstone. I’ve found that neglecting your blog is like being at a meeting with people you don’t really know. You haven’t said anything for a while… you start to feel it’s too late to add any more comments, what you said was probably dumb anyway, you might as well slink out the door while nobody’s looking…
The odd part for me is that I rarely neglect my weblog from an absence of post-worthy material… more often it’s a sense that I have no meaningful commentary to add to the big stories of the day, or that somebody (or everybody) else has already said what needs to be said.
To that end, I am prepared to declare my experiment with Furl to be a personal success. The process of capturing a worthy link is sufficiently streamlined for me to do it regularly, and quoting, commenting and categorizing are all simple to maintain. “Furled” links are stored in my searchable archive, and what’s even better is that in most cases Furl actually copies the linked page itself, giving me a backup if the original goes offline.
So unless something else comes along, from now on the “In-Flux” section will function as my primary means of tracking and disseminating useful resources. The weblog postings will likely continue to chart a more idiosyncratic path… So if you follow this page for news on digital learning resources or personal publishing tools, I recommend you add the inFlux RSS feed to your newsreader. Those of you who insist on gathering your information via the web browser are invited to scan the scrolling links on the sidebar.
