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Not sure how to take this… I’m either an annoying do-gooder, or a loud furball…

Qui-Gon Jinn 66% Chewbacca 65% Darth Maul 61% Mace Windu 60% Lando Calrissian 60% R2-D2 60% Boba Fett 58% Han Solo 58% Obi-Wan Kenobi 54% Luke Skywalker 54%

Overall, you’re a pretty well balanced person. But maybe you focus a little too much on the here and now. Think about the future before its too late.

(This list displays the top 10 results out of a possible 21 characters)
Click here to take the “Which Star Wars character am I?” quiz…

I just conducted some exhaustive and scientific research, trying to gather more information about iPhone availability in Canada as the big US release date approaches.

OK. Some clarification. By “exhaustive” I mean “I did a lap around Market Mall and poked my head into the Rogers and Fido shops” and by “scientific” I mean “I asked them ’so… iPhone much?’”

Regardless… The typical response was something like “eye phone? no.” That is, when I got a response at all.

So, I’m assuming this means one of 3 things:

1. no iPhone in Canada anytime soon
2. iPhone in Canada is pending, under a veil of secrecy enforced by threat of bodily harm to family pets
3. clerks in cellphone shops are utterly clueless.

Personally, my money is split evenly on 1 and 3. I’d love to be wrong. I’d love to get my grubby little mitts on one of those suckers ASAP to start playing with what could be done for teaching and learning with a fully functional portable and mobile computer…

I (still) spend a fair amount of time thinking about the learning object repositories work that was done back at the turn of the century. A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side).

I think it’s fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically. The only content that was added to CAREO was done under the auspices of Large Projects and/or Institutions. Individuals, by and large, didn’t spend much time with it, or its ilk. Why is that? Why have other applications and platforms gone on to be much more successful, by any definition of the word? Well, here are some reasons:

1. Sharing. With all of the talk about interoperability, all that really happened was some loose agreement that “metadata is important, for some reason, and that people will want to write lots and lots of stuff to describe every resource, for some reason.” We wound up with a bunch of quasi-standardized metadata, but no real way to share it – sure, there was the OAI. That’s a pretty powerful end-user strategy.
2. API. The closest the Learning Object Repositories got to an API would be either OAI or EduSource. Name 3 apps that you use today that use either or both of those. Both are rather cumbersome to implement, and not too mashup-friendly. Nowadays, as David Wiley is fond of saying, people “just use RSS”. Sure, you can add other APIs if needed (atom? custom?), but RSS is good enough for most interaction between systems.
3. Social. Sure, CAREO had a threaded discussions feature, and a wiki for every resource in its database, but without PEOPLE, it was just a bunch more empty web pages. One of the lessons I’ve learned from David Wiley’s recent presentations is that we should be leveraging what people are already doing, where they are already doing it. Don’t make them come to CAREO to comment on something. Let them comment on del.icio.us, or digg, or wherever. And work on ways to tie those conversations together. That’s not to say that this functionality isn’t necessary, but that it shouldn’t be exclusionary. Play well with others (see points 1 and 2 above).

I’ve mentioned before that much of the functionality of a “learning object repository” could be implemented for free with Google and del.icio.us. That’s a bit facetious, but not that far off the mark. I’m seeing some recent stuff that is really promising. Most recently, fOUnd It, from the Open University. It’s just a Pligg install. That’s it. But it lets people add resources (”news items”) that can be tagged, referencing any web page. And it supports rating/reputation (thumbs up/down, promoting to front page, etc…) and discussions. This takes care of 99% of CAREO’s functionality. For free. And, because it’s not a Learning Object Repository project, there are more developers working on it (because it’s more generalizable – there is NO need to build special apps just for education).

Or, you could just grab a copy of Drupal, install a couple of modules, and have a learning objects community site that could connect with del.icio.us, flickr, or any other app/platform that supports RSS. And have full-on blogging, forums, etc… for free, out of the box. Without any focus on metadata, or interoperability, or any of those other helpful things that just get in the way of individuals connecting. If we’d just waited 5 years, the “learning object repository” work would have been completely different, and would have been able to focus on important stuff, like content and context.

I just enabled FeedBurner caching/serving of my blog’s RSS feed. The goal is to dramatically decrease the load on the server by redirecting RSS requests through FeedBurner’s server rather than mine (well, Dreamhost’s). Google just bought FeedBurner, so they’re not going anywhere. I’m trusting in Google not to do anything evil. I can always pull the plug on them and take control of the feed if needed.

Another bonus (for me, anyway) is an estimate of stats – how many folks are subscribed to the feed. That’s always been a total crap shoot, with nothing more than edumacated guesses and darkened dartboards providing numbers. Now I might get a better idea, and am braced for the emphatic “5 subscribers” that it will be flashing at me shortly.

I apologize in advance for any RSS noise as this kicks in. Hopefully it won’t republish all posts in the feed, but if it does, “mark all as read” or in Google Reader parlance “shift+a”.

Shortly after I made the switch from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2, I started thinking about the various apps and hosting providers I’ve used to run my blog. I actually had to mine the archives to remember it all, because it’s changed a lot. Over the last 5 (or 6, depending on how it’s measured) years, I’ve used 6 different applications, on 4 different hosting providers. That speaks volumes about interoperability, making it easy enough to move to a completely different weblog applications on 5 separate occasions. Sure, there was some data altered and URLs adjusted, but all posts and comments made the transition successfully each time.

I’ve now been on WordPress 2 for just over a month, and have no plans to change weblog applications again (although I’ve said that 5 times before…) I may still be changing hosting providers, if Dreamhost doesn’t work out (it’s going pretty well, and the company is really nice to work with, but they’ve been having a LOT of issues lately. Cats in ur serverz or something…)

This was my shuffle-ized playlist for the morning ride and cooldown. There isn’t a radio station on the planet (satellite or terrestrial) that would have put a playlist like this together.

It looks pretty eclectic, but the tracks all worked amazingly well against each other.

Actually, this is just one of the many reasons why I love Aperture. Non-destructive, interactive image adjustments. I don’t use adjustments very often, but when I do, they’re absolutely amazing. I had to hunt through my library to find images that had many adjustments made to them – most of my images are used as they were taken in-camera, with only minor RAW tweaks. But, occasionally, an image needs some extra love. Two recent examples are a lightning strike I was lucky enough to catch last night, and my son’s team photo for his T-ball team.

The lightning strike was taken on the spur of the moment, without any prep or composition. I just fired off a bunch of shots, hoping to get lucky enough to catch some lightning. Exposure was off. Contrast was off. Tweaking a handful of sliders in the Aperture adjustments HUD turned the image at top left into the image at top right. Much more dramatic, but not unfaithful to what I saw. All I did was drop the exposure a bit, and bump up contrast. Easy enough, and because it is an interactive adjustment, it took maybe 20 seconds to do.

The other is my son’s T-ball team photo, which was unfortunately shot with the sun as a backdrop. Way overexposed, with too little contrast. Again, some minor tweaks of the Highlights and Shadows tool, and I got an almost usable image.

The best part is, all adjustments are nondestructive. I can easily modify any of the adjustments without having to futz about with file management or layers. I can toggle exposure adjustment to see how it affects contrast or white balance. I can easily toggle between unmodified Master and tweaked Version views to see the difference easily. Very cool. This one took me quite a bit longer – maybe 2 minutes – before I was happy enough (or realized that was as good as it would get).

I don’t use it a lot, but when I do, I sure appreciate the nondestructive adjustments. Although I shoot RAW almost exclusively, these nondestructive adjustments work just fine for any file format Aperture can read, including JPEG. You get less data to work with in JPEG, but you can still take advantage of the adjustments.

I’ve been asked to contribute to a series of short briefing papers for use by administration, in identifying and planning for trends in higher education. There are some obvious trends (social software – go to them, instead of making them come to us; open content; remix culture; personal publishing and the PLE; etc…) but I’m wondering about any non-obvious trends that people might be seeing. Anything surprising happening on other campuses? Are things like mobile access really starting to take off (esp. in Canada, where mobile internet charges are so unbelievably expensive)?

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