• 
  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
  

Just a quick post to say, once again, how much I fracking LOVE Aperture. I shot some sunlight poking through the clouds, in what was an amazing and inspiring scene. But when looking at the RAW files, they looked a bit flat. Dull colours, no “pop” and not at all what I remembered. Less than one minute later, and Aperture 2 let me tweak it very easily to match almost exactly what I remember seeing. Below is the before and after versions of the photo:

My tweaking involved clicking some checkboxes, and dragging a couple of sliders. Easy peasy:

• Auto Exposure adjustment (camera exposure was a bit high because of the directish sunlight, so Auto Exp. dropped it down a bit by -0.27)
• Auto levels (B&W)
• Black point adjusted higher (to 7.56) (crushed the blacks a bit, dropping some of the details in the trees and houses to make them more silhouette)
• Contrast nudged up +0.04 (to give a bit more punch to the sunlight coming through)
• Definition nudged up +0.09 (again, more punch to the sunlight, and helped with the edge definition of the trees, and defined the shapes of the clouds a bit more)
• Saturation set to 1.18 (brought out the colour in the clouds, and some of the orange above the treetops)
• Vibrancy +0.51 (refined the clouds and orange light)
• Highlights +18.9 (dropped contrast in the brightest parts, bringing back some details in the brightly lit cloud portions)

That’s it. 2 checkboxes and 6 sliders, all done as fully interactive realtime adjustments. It took me 15 times longer to write this blog post (and make before/after image) than it did to tweak the photo in the first place.

I just got this spam on my blog – it got through Akismet, as so many spams do lately, but it’s worth posting (at least in image form so the spammer doesn’t get any juice from it):

And, yeah. I hit the “Spam” button to file this in /dev/null even if the guy was honest(ish). I’m assuming he just ripped the text out of Wikipedia or something, and used it without proper linktribution…

I’ve been looking for a way to export a Moodle course in a format that can be ingested in another standards-compliant LMS. The obvious choices are SCORM or IMS-CP.

But, neither are supported as export formats from Moodle. Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. It’s a one-way trip. Content can check in, but it can never leave.

If Blackboard did that, there would be villagers marching in the streets with torches in hand. The Blackboard SCORM import/export stuff might not be perfect, but at least they try to let people move content out.

With Moodle, it’s currently a vendor lock-in proposition. The only saving grace is that the vendor just happens to be an open source project. But it’s still lock-in.

I’m really hoping I’m missing something obvious, but having the only information about SCORM exporting on the Moodle website be a few comments in the forums (one of which jokes “why would you want to leave Moodle?”) isn’t exactly comforting. Standards are only good if they’re used bidirectionally. Standards used to promote lock-in are nothing but tools of oppression. OK. So it’s not as dire as that, but you get my point.

photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

Bike more, drive less. And parties ensue...

There’s much wringing of hands about the announcement from Apple that the iPhone (and iPod Touch) would not be getting Flash in the foreseeable future. I’m actually pretty happy that Flash isn’t on the way. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good Flash website or video as much as the next guy.

But try this: on your Mac, open Activity Monitor. Let it process for a few seconds to get a baseline reading. Then, open a Flash website. Watch the change in Activity Monitor. On my 8-core Xeon Mac Pro system, a Flash website easily chews through 50% of a 3 GHz core – over a gigahertz of CPU without breaking a sweat.

That’s more CPU than is available on my iPod Touch, which only sports an embedded 400MHz Arm chip and 128MB of RAM. And, even if the Touch could muster up the horsepower to run a Flash site, it would suck the battery dry pretty quickly, and crank out more heat than would be healthy for the little device.

No Flash? No big deal. I don’t think it’s an evil conspiracy, nor a ploy to force Adobe to cater to Apple. It’s a decision based on something very simple and pragmatic: adding Flash would detract from the overall iPhone / iPod Touch user experience. People would start complaining about crappy battery performance, overheating iPhones, and sluggish UI responses. Better to just say no to Flash (at least in the current incarnation) and find a better way. For video, the iPhone chipset can handily decode higher quality (but non-Flash) video without breaking a sweat.

I’m hopeful that tomorrow’s SDK announcement is going to bring some very cool stuff. I’m also hopeful that whatever apps are made available (even if Flash is one of them) that I won’t have to worry about battery life when running them.

Chris posted a question on Twitter today asking for people to send him images representing our PLE (Personal Learning Environment). I sent back a flip, sarcastic response pointing to this photo set, saying that is what my PLE is. I didn’t think much more about it, but then I read later that Chris was taken aback by my (and others’) response. That surprised me, but caused me to take a step back to think about what my PLE really is, and what it would look like if I were to describe it to someone else.

My PLE is in a constant state of flux. My previous response to Chris was that my “PLE is people” (alluding to Soylent Green) – it’s a sarcastic shorthand that I use to mean that the exact technologies that are in use at any particular point in time don’t matter as much as the fact that it is people being connected through them. Tools come and go constantly, and the only constant is that the people are the important part of the equation. At that level, my PLE looks like this:

I admit that the image is way oversimplified, but the exact incantations of magic varies dramatically over time. For me, it began as BBS over 300 BAUD modems, extending over FidoNet to let me reach people in other cities. When I started my undergrad program, my PLE was listservs and gopher sites. Eventually, my PLE was listservs and community websites. It has occasionally included intense periods of instant messaging and video conferencing (with full screen video conferences combined with VNC screen sharing). This eventually evolved to what my current PLE looks like today:

Even this diagram is quite oversimplified. The “communities” item is a shorthand for things like project websites, open source project sites, wikis, BaseCamp, etc…

One of the things that I’ve had trouble with is defining what is in my PLE and what isn’t – it varies so rapidly based on context. Even within something like Twitter, there are people whom I consider part of a learning environment, and others are there for social value. They are both valid, but does that make Twitter a PLE tool or something else? Same with blogs. I follow a whole bunch of blogs – many I consider critical to my personal learning environment, but many are there for entertainment, distraction, or social value. Defining “blogs” as PLE or not-PLE isn’t a clean distinction. Even the core PLE blogs vary in content from day to day, so I can’t even provide a list of blog URLs to say “this is my definitive set of PLE-enable blogs that I follow”.

In the end, I sincerely do not mean to belittle or de-emphasize the genuine questions about PLEs – I just struggle to provide a concrete description of something that is by its very nature organic, dynamic, responsive, and intensely, individually unique.

I think the more important question involves the philosophy and strategies that make various tools effective (or not) as part of the “magic happens” cloud that helps connect people. I’m not sure what the concise definition would be, but I believe that it is strongly based on real, meaningful discussions as opposed to static publishing. I believe that it involves community and real involvement and interaction between members of the community. Tools that enable these kinds of interactions are viable candidates for inclusion in a PLE – but even that definition is so vague as to be essentially meaningless.

Update: I generated a new diagram with TouchGraph.com to show how my blog (which is my digital identity) fits into the context of my PLE.

I just recorded a (very) quick and dirty screencast to demo the EduGlu sandbox prototype that was put together in Drupal. It’s a 23 minute session, and clocks in at 28 MB. I probably rambled a bit more than I should have, but you’ll get the idea…

(The Anarchy Media Player displays a smallish video embedded on this post, but you can download the video to view at 640×480 if you want to try to read the tiny text in the screencast)

EduGlu Screencast

Download EduGlu Screencast

Scott threw a suggestion onto Twitter this morning that has been percolating for a few hours.

It just hit me. CANHEIT is here at UCalgary in June.

I can arrange meeting space here on campus. If anyone’s interested in a face-to-face Eduglu/Social:Learn/Web 2.0 in higher ed meetup, how does The University of Calgary in June 2008 sound? Maybe Thursday June 19th? Something during the conference proper? The week before or after? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Update: After some gentle prodding from Scott, I realize that an incrementalist approach, which is what a CANHEIT session would be, is not sufficient. We need to kick out the jams in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the context of CANHEIT – even if the session was before or after the conference, it would be coloured by Commercial Enterprise IT agenda. Wrong.

I’m withdrawing my offer to host a CANHEIT session, in favour of a standalone event wherever – it could still be at UCalgary if that works out, but it sounds like things would be much more radical and powerful if we were able to impose on Brian’s hospitality at UBC:OLT.

← Previous Page