• 
  Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010!

  ---

• Search for:

• Pages

  • About
    • Colophon
    • Contact
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Presentations
  • Archives
    • Recent Comments
    • Shared Items
  • Asides
  • Photography
  • WordPress
    • Akismet Credit Inserter
    • Post Revision Display

• Categories

  • aside
  • digital photography sessions
  • fun
  • general
  • photography
  • work

• Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
  

This is a demo.

I just put the almost-finishing touches on a presentation I’ll be giving to folks in the Faculty of Education tomorrow. The topic? It’s basically a tour of things like wikis, weblogs, RSS and podcasting, with a presentation at the beginning, some live demos, and some hands-on time. Essentially “The Read/Write Web 101″

I merged a couple of my other presentations (intro to weblogs and intro to wiki) and added some refinements. It’s grown to 105 slides, which sounds scary, but there isn’t a bullet point in the bunch, and most slides are only on the Big Screen to give a background while I talk about something. I’m guessing the presentation will run between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on audience participation. We’ve got a 3-hour slot, and would like to have as much “hands-on” time as possible.

I’ll be trying to record the audio of the presentation (using my iPod and Belkin microphone), and will try to create an online version. During the session, I’ll be demonstrating wiki page editing, blog posting, and podcast recording/publishing/subscribing – so there may be some noise in my RSS feeds on Friday morning.

I’ve got whatever killer chest cold that’s going around the city, and feel like death, so I’m not sure if I’ll be in top form. But I’ll give it a shot, regardless…

Brian’s asking for comments to help build a presentation tonight. I’m cutting it awfully close to the wire (the presentation starts in just over an hour) but hopefully another trackback will help…

What is most significant about the emergence of blogs and/or wikis?

The biggest thing about these self-publishing tools is that they’re self-publishing, natch. You don’t need to be a geek to be able to publish to the ‘net anymore – and this stuff has the potential to “fix” the web, which was supposed to be a dynamic network of linked content published by individuals, but got co-opted into a variation of the TV broadcast model, with users sitting in front of glowing screens receiving the content that The Man wants to feed them (picture a scene from Max Headroom or something). Instead, we can effectively publish our own content, with whatever authority we can muster. Individuals are just as able as companies (large and small) – as an example, this blog currently has a Google rank of 6, which is higher ranked than some companies. That would have been impossible without easy and effective self-publishing tools.

In your mind, what is most misunderstood (or little understood) about these tools?

That they make you interesting. They don’t. It’s just a tool to help publish content. Just because you have a blog, doesn’t mean anyone cares. On the flipside, however, if you are even remotely interesting (or at least not completely boring), I can guarantee that no matter how narrow your area of interest, there are others online searching out blogs about it…

Are blogs and wikis evolving into something else?

Blogs and wikis (and mashups, and other stuff) are all just baby steps. To what? I have no idea. I have a hunch that Gibson may have been onto something (for good or bad) with his concepts of pervasive online communities. These types of things become possible once the tools evolve a little.

What are the implications of these publishing tools on ideas, public opinion and free speech?

Well, I can answer this from personal (recent) experience. It’s really easy to say something stupid. And thanks to the wonders of RSS, people find out about it in a hurry. And it’s not undoable (there is no Delete key on the internet). It’s not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind before posting your innermost ramblings and stuff like that…

What are a few of your essential blog reads or wiki communities?

Abject Learning, of course Actually, I’m currently subscribed to 115 “edublogs” (loosely defined), most of which I consider essential reading. (OPML for these feeds) Won’t name names on who gets the coveted 5-Star rating in Blogbridge (yet)…

Anything else?

Just that his whole read/write web thing is pretty cool. I seriously doubt I’d be as effective at making connections between emerging concepts/projects/people as I am with access to the “blogosphere” (gack). Just relax, Neo. There is no blog.

My Life, My Blog, My So Called Diary

Originally uploaded by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006.

Not sure if I can cross off one of my 43Things – which is to write a novel. Apparently I’m an accomplished pulp sci fi author. I’ve since moved on from writing about cats, though…

Seriously, though – be sure to check out Alan Levine and Brian Lamb’s latest wild and wacky presentation: Beyond The Blog. They’ve put the online resources up already, in the form of a Flickr album. Alan’s sheer bliss at stretching metaphors shows through in spades, along with Brian’s literary sarcasm

Update: Crap. I just saw on Brian’s blog that this presentation is not yet released. Oops. Leigh and Stephen already blogged it, so I just assumed it was out. Sorry, mi amigos!

Man, does THIS take me back. C64 Games Online – a collection of old games from the Commodore 64, ported to java as applets. I have no idea how many hours I wastedspent playing these games as a kid.

My faves:

• Commando
• Ghostbusters
• Blue Max
• Spy vs. Spy
• Commando II
• Pitfall
• Pitstop
• Falcon Patrol
• Leaderboard Golf – spent DAYS playing this with my dad and brother…
• Kick Start II
• Beach Head – Level 3
• Pole Position
• Kick Start – Off-Road Simulator
• Operation Wolf
• Batman Part II:The Caped Crusader
• Rampage
• Attack of the Mutant Camels
• Rick Dangerous II

It’s odd, because I was remembering the graphics as not totally sucking. I guess it’s not bad for a 2MHz processor and 64KB of RAM though…

I just updated my copy of Blogbridge to the latest weekly (2.12) and in this version they threw the switch on OPML publishing of folders/guides of feeds. I took a couple of minutes to gather my education-related subscriptions into one guide, and tried publishing it as OPML.

D’Arcy’s Wild and Wacky Edublogs Reading List

It contains 102115 feeds of edubloggy goodness. There are some stale feeds that I just can’t bring myself to delete (you know, in case they ever post something). If you’re using an aggregator that groks live OPML feeds, just subscribe to the URL. If you’re using anything else, you may need to download the OPML and manually import it.

No guarantees that I’ll keep the list up to date, but it’s easy enough to do that it shouldn’t be a problem (unlike the iPodder.org educational directory, which is a tedious pain in the ass to maintain – which is why I’ve neglected it for months)

There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept – forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.”

This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I’d suggest that the alternatives be considered.

1. Don’t publish the content (status quo). This somehow feels like a tighter lock-down than publishing into iTMS.
2. Publish on your own. People are doing this. It’s hard to scale, though. Apple’s offering infrastructure and systems that would be hard to replicate. It is possible, of course, as shown by MIT OpenCourseWare.
3. Create a new iTunes + iTMS clone, perhaps open source, that could be used. Technically possible. Is it worth the effort and resources to do this, though? I’m not sure.

And, I haven’t seen anything requiring exclusive distribution “rights” being granted to Apple. The content remains property of the university, who is of course free to repackage and republish to their heart’s content. Don’t like iTunes? Write your own client. Don’t like AAC? Convert a copy to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or Real or WMA or whatever. Don’t want the only online copy of the file to be served from Cupertino? Stick a copy on your own server, and provide some kind of service to let people access it.

From what I see, and I have no insider info (so I could of course be wrong), all the iTunes U. service offers is an option for publishing media easily, into the most popular (legal) online content distribution system on the planet.

I’m stepping out on a limb here, but if Apple provided a website front-end, and the option to use MP3 as the file format, would the objections remain? It’s not as simple as “Commercial/proprietary systems suck!” – the option, for many, is to not be able to effectively share content at all. Apple isn’t intending to restrict, they’re attempting to enable.

Update: I just talked with someone at Apple who would know – and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok – you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now).

Yojimbo 1.0 was just released – by Bare Bones Software (the folks that make the kick-ass editor BBEdit), and it looks like the best personal content manager I’ve used. DevonThink is overly complicated, and Notational Velocity is a little to simple (but that is also its strength).

Yojimbo takes the best of both approaches, and distills it all into a simple (but powerful) interface on top of some powerful (and elegant) features.

I’ll be playing with it more over the next few days, but it looks like I’ll be putting in for a license…

I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hell™ – regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc…

I’m going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.

There are some issues, like the perceived lock-in to the iPod, and the need to have iTunes on the desktop. Both aspects have some very strong arguments both for and against, which I’m not going to rehash now (but am giving them a lot of thought, and Brian’s given it a go already).

One thing I’d like to know is how to integrate the iTMS as a part of a larger ecosystem – it can’t be an exclusive engagement, so there would be nothing preventing a campus from also producing .mp3 versions of appropriate files and hosting them in a non-iTMS solution for the non-iTunes-using, non-iPod-toting, or Linux-using crowds.

I’m pretty sure my hardware is retalliating against the new Conservative regime.

The XServe that drives weblogs.ucalgary.ca, wiki.ucalgary.ca, and pachyderm.ucalgary.ca just went south. Refuses to boot now. It’s a cluster node, so we’re trying to find a video card to see wtf is going on…

Update: OK. We found a trusty old ATI Rage 128 card, slapped it into the XServe, and booted that sucker up. It was spending a looooooong time on the boot spinning pinwheel screen – assuming it’s checking the disk here. It had to chew through ~50GB of data, so that took awhile. Then, it wanted to update firmware, so we did. It’s now fully patched, and apparently running OK. It’s seeming awfully slow, though. It’s not a RAM thing, with 5GB of the good stuff in there. It just took over a minute to connect via SSH. Definitely need to look into that. Perhaps AFTER the big afternoon presentation that relies on the software running on this server…

← Previous Page — Next Page →