Archive for June, 2008

I’ve been following Spore since I saw the first demo at TED. I remember playing SimCity back in the day (on my Amiga 1000!), and SimEarth, and the other variants, and have really been looking forward to Spore. It’s really a universe simulator, where players interact at various scales separated by orders of magnitude. The... »

I’ve been working on organizing a project I’ve called “Learning Communities” here at UCalgary. It’s still a bit amorphous, but that’s actually part of the plan. What I’m going to do is offer resources and support to any communities on campus so that they can effectively get together and share what they’re doing. I’ll... »

I had a meeting with a prof last week about a very interesting project she wants to set up (to run the course as a series of blog posts resulting in a science magazine published by the students – I’ll write more on that later). During the discussion of the project, we got to... »

I’m listening to the EdTechPosse podcast 4.3, and they’re talking a bit about “edupunk”. I fired a few comments into Twitter, but wanted to flesh them out a little more. “Edupunk” is not about a bunch of middle-aged geeks reliving their youth. Back in the day, I was much too much of a dork to... »

I’m not sure what to make of this. According to the Associated Press, The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online. - Seth Sutel, AP And they provide commercial (and... »

I picked up a Flip Ultra video camera this weekend, and one of the things I wanted to try was strapping it to my bike helmet to record my morning commute, just to see what it looked like. So, I dorked myself up a bit by attaching the Flip to my helmet via a... »

All of the cool kids are playing with the shiny new fancy tag cloudifier over at Wordle. It is shiny. I think this is the best visualization of my del.icio.us tag cloud that I’ve seen. I think I might try to whip up a poster to slap on the office wall or something. I’ve... »

That’s like riding from Calgary to Vancouver and back. Or Calgary to Thunder Bay. Heck, I could have ridden from Calgary to San Francisco, with over 400km to spare. hmmm…. I’ve been riding my bike as primary transportation on my commute for a couple of years now (started really doing it again in 2006, after... »

I’ve been deep in thought, planning a set of resources to support a community project, and have been struggling with how to best position these resources to best reflect a dynamic, engaged, face-to-face set of communities. My initial reaction was that the communities need to exist first face-to-face, and that any online resources are supplementary... »

This is a response to Cole Camplese’s great post “Should it all be Miscellaneous” – which was, itself, a response to the Penn State Web Conference (which, in turn, sounds like it was a fantastic gathering of PSU folks). Go read Cole’s post before reading any further. It’s worth it. I’ll wait. Really. I’ll wait. Go... »