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I’ve been collecting some links to interesting educational simulations to show faculty members. There’s some great stuff out there. The list is NOT comprehensive, and I’m not including LOTS of great simulations. This is just the list I give to faculty members asking about effective educational simulations.

• Sharkrunners (a Discovery Channel simulation for biology – tracking sharks using real data)
• Mediated Cultures World Simulator (really cool non-technical geocultural simulation – thanks to Alan Levine for sharing the link to this one!)
• Physics simulations by the University of Colorado at Boulder (thanks to Jennifer Jones for sharing this link!)
• Social Simulator Project (tries to simulate what a person with autism experiences)
• Play2Train (emergency and disaster response simulation built in SecondLife)
• Breathing Earth (displays realtime global demographic data)
• Karma Tycoon (run your own non-profit organization, single- or multi-player)

I spend a lot of time “being there” in various online places. I blog, I twitter, I post photos to Flickr, etc yadda yadda. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow, and planning on “being there” in the more traditional sense. I’ll be unplugging from the net as much as I can.

I’m not unplugging from my Network – many of the people in my Network are going to be there in person. I’m just deciding to not distract myself by constantly “checking in.”

I’m not bringing a laptop. I’m bringing my camera, my iPod, and my Moleskine (and some clothes).

I’m going to be there. I’m not going to be liveblogging the conference. I’m not going to be posting photos. I’m going to try not to post to twitter. I’ll plug back in when I get back. But, for the 3 days I’m there, I’m going to be there.

WordPress 2.5 comes with a fantastic media manager, offering the ability to automatically resize an uploaded image into thumbnail and medium sizes as well as offering the original file. I’ve used this feature a bunch, both on this blog and my photoblog. I didn’t really think much of it, but just noticed today that the resized images were much less saturated than the originals. Here is a comparison of the same image, one resized by WordPress 2.5.1 (left), the other by Preview.app (right):

The shift in saturation is pretty obvious. For some images, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But I want to use WordPress to manage the files in my photoblog, so fracking up the saturation of a photograph is pretty bad. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to convince the PHP image resizing code to not suck the soul out of the images. No can do.

The easy fix? Just use the “original size” option so WordPress doesn’t mess with the file, and resize it before uploading. I’ll be using Aperture to pump out 800 pixel wide photographs before uploading them to mindfulseeing.com

I was involved with two sessions at this year’s Faculty Technology Days conference on campus. The first one was a keynote panel on “Social Networking in the Academy” and the second was “Weblogs as Personal Repositories.”

Social Networking in the Academy

When we were planning the Social Networking panel, we realized that some of the faculty members might not be familiar with social networking, or with some of the aspects or implications of it, so we thought it would be a good idea to start the 2-hour panel session with a brief introduction to the topic so we were all on similar pages. Being the geek in the group, I volunteered to take that on. I wound up giving about a wiki-powered 25 minute intro to social networking (what it is, what it means, some samples, etc…).

This was followed by Paul showing some of the really cool stuff the library is doing with social networking (specifically, the Facebook groups for MacKimmie and Health Sciences libraries, and ad campaigns). Those librarians, I tell you. Always doing cool stuff to make their resources easily available to students and faculty…

Maria spoke about some of the issues she sees, specifically pertaining to compelling students to publish and engage in a highly commercialized and privacy-invasive environment. Maria also asked one of her grad students, Todd Andre, to join the panel, and it was great to hear some of the perspectives from the other side (as opposed to just making educated guesses).

After taking a few minutes for the participants to warm up, the session turned into a great discussion about social networking, covering a pretty broad range of topics. We talked about the geek stuff. We talked about intellectual property. Creepy Treehouse. Digital identity. Network as People. It was a really fun, interesting, and vibrant discussion. And we could have used another 2 hours because we had to wrap it up just as people were really getting into it.

Paul streamed the whole thing live via UStreamTV, and the video archive is still there.

Weblogs as Personal Repositories

It seems like every year, I get designated to “do a talk on blogging.” Usually, I try to focus on the reasons to do it – the network effects, contributing to the community, etc… This year, I decided to appeal to people’s sense of pragmatism. Blogging primarily as an outboard brain, for organizing and searching information that is important to you. And, secondarily, as a way to share information with others.

I think that was the right angle to take, but I’m not sure my implementation worked out very well. It’s still a pretty broad topic. I tried to do as much live demo as possible, showing concrete examples of how it works. I also created 2 blogs (one on WordPress.com and one on Blogger.com) to show what that looks like. The resources and links were all powered by a wiki page as well. Another form of outboard brain, but I used an institutional variation for this one.

I think the session went well. It wasn’t stellar, but I think people at the bare minimum got that blogging as an activity of documentation and organization can be an important way to manage the volume of information we have to deal with. If even one of them winds up starting a new blog, I’ll consider the session a success.

I just installed the development version of the monotone theme over on my mindfulseeing.com photoblog. What a cool theme. It adapts the colours of the post page based on the colour palette used in the first image on a post. AND, it provides a great archives page with thumbnails from each post. Very cool. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for in a photoblog theme.

Because it’s not an officially released theme (yet) you have to check it out via the subversion repository, but that’s a pretty simple call to svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/

Here’s a snapshot of the post page, with background colour pulled automagically from the photograph:

And, the archives page with date selector:

 

Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for the tip, and Automattic for creating the theme!

Update: The monotone theme uses a function called image_scrape() which does some cool stuff for the post display on the web, but had the nasty side effect of yanking images from the RSS feed. I fixed my copy of functions.php to avoid the problem, and allow full images in the feed. Here is my trivial modification to the image_scrape() function:

// remove image tag from post_content for display
function image_scrape($entry) {
	// don't scrape the image for the feed
	if (is_feed()) { return $entry; }
	//remove image tag
	$entry = preg_replace('/<img [^/>]*src=(\"|\').+?(\1)[^>]*\/*>/','', $entry); /* */
	//remove any empty tags left by the scrape.
	$entry = str_replace('<p> </p>', '', $entry);
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
	return $entry;
}

I’ve been prepping some resources to use during the Faculty Technology Days session on Social Networking tomorrow. How to best show what the Network is? What do the connections between people look like? Then, this morning, I see a post by Clarence Fisher describing Tweetwheel. It’s a cool little web application for generating a display of the people in the Twitter Network for a given account. Here’s mine:

Very cool.

had to disable “allow notifications from other blogs (trackbacks and pingbacks)” because of the sheer volume of trackback spam that was getting through Akismet. Thanks for escalating the arms race, frackers.

I’m working on a project that partially involves the development of a website in Drupal to act as a directory of people who have graduated from a given University. Seems easy. I went into the project thinking it would be a trivial application of Taxonomies, or maybe some generic CCK fields.

Nope. Turns out the problem is much more difficult and complex than I initially thought.

Taxonomies won’t work, because of the need to tie a number of values together, namely the year the degree was awarded (say, “1992″), the type of degree (say, “BSc”), the specialization of the degree (say, “Zoology”), and the granting institution (say, “University of Calgary”).

That could be an easy thing to solve with CCK – just add four text fields. Done.

BUT – people can earn more than one degree. Of different types, in different years, from different institutions.

Taxonomies fail. Generic CCK fields fail.

What I came up with is a new CCK field type, cryptically named “University Degrees”, that defines the four values that describe a degree. This solves the problem quite tidily, and supports multiple values, predefined valid sets of values, and can integrate with Views to be used as filters and sorting fields.

In building this module, I leaned heavily on a couple of web pages (CCK Sample and What is the Content Construction Kit?) that describe how parts of the module should work, and provided some sample code. In the spirit of contributing back what I learned, I’m going to document the module to help others needing to do similar things.
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