• 
  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
  

I’ve scheduled email autoresponders, updated my voicemail, disabled blog comments. I’m now out of the office until Dec. 8, and will be offline for almost the entire time. See you on the other side.

It’s a really damned scary place, where I’m the one speaking calmly and acting as the voice of reason. It’s happened rather more frequently than I’m comfortable with lately, both online and off.

I don’t know if it’s “the economy”, or the shorter days, or something else, but some people seem to have collectively lost their sense of rationality and humour.

If you read a post by someone online, don’t jump immediately to paint them as EVIL! if they’re saying something you don’t like or agree with. Take some time. Maybe only a few seconds. Breathe. Try to imagine what’s going on from the other person’s perspective. Do they have valid reasons for saying what they’re saying? Could they really be doing the right thing, but you perceive it as EVIL! because you don’t have all of the facts? Could they really be intending to say something else, but are being misinterpreted due to a language or context gap?

The first step toward effective communication isn’t kneejerk reactionism. It isn’t polarizing pigeonholing. It’s trying to figure out what the other person (or people) are REALLY saying, and why. Then, and ONLY then, is a productive response even possible.

I’ve seen this kind of reactionary kneejerk evilcasting so many times. Usually, it’s Apple (and Jobs) cast as EVIL! because of DRM or something else (but, seriously, HDCP in the new MacBooks? WTF? It’s really tempting to cast THAT as EVIL! but again, I don’t have all of the facts…)

But now it seems as though the kneejerkism is spreading, and it’s not productive. It’s harmful. It’s corrosive.

We all just need to chill the hell out. Breathe. Think before reacting.

The website for Northern Voice 2009 just went live, so the date for WordCamp Education Vancouver 2009 is set. Thursday, February 19, 2009 in Vancouver – the day before Northern Voice (which runs February 20-21 in Vancouver – BE THERE!).

The venue for WordCamp Education hasn’t been set yet, but we’ll find a place either on the main UBC campus or downtown. Or at a pub somewhere… hmm…

More details will be posted as soon as they’re known. But if you want to come play with a bunch of education-minded Wordpress folk, be sure to reserve the day.

I’m dropping offline soon for a couple of weeks on a family vacation. I’m bringing a book or two, but want to stuff some blog posts and articles that I’ve probably neglected onto my iPod for more in-depth reading. I’m planning on using Instapaper to bring offline copies of stuff so I can read it anywhere.

What should I bring? What is the most important article or post that you’d recommend for offline reading? Doesn’t have to be related to education, or technology, or anything in particular.

What would you bring?

Following a thread through some blog posts this morning – I started at The Reverend’s post about Martha’s documentation of her hacking on WPMU, including a description of a WordPress plugin I hadn’t heard of before – Flutter.

Damn. The Rev’s gonna love this.

One of the things I LOVE about Drupal is the fantastic CCK plugin that lets me create compound structured content types without hacking the database or writing code. Things like Events. Profiles. Pretty much anything that can be stored as database records.

Flutter appears to do most of what I use CCK for. It’s a bit of a hack on top of WordPress’s custom fields design, but whatever. I really don’t care how it works under the hood. It works. And it’s really nice. You can create any number of custom content types, groups that can contain any number of fields – and the fields can be simple text strings, long text chunks, images, audio, dates… Very cool.

So far, the only thing I’ve found really missing from what I use in CCK is the idea of linking nodes (or posts or pages – I haven’t seen a way to select a page or post as a field in another – but that’s not fatal – tags and categories can make up for some of that).

I’ll be playing with Flutter over the next few weeks. I think this might go a LONG way to implementing some of the things I’ve been thinking about wrt WordPress as a course blogging and publishing platform – WITHOUT HAVING TO WRITE CODE.

I love that. Thanks to Martha and Jim for the heads up on Flutter!

Update: doh. Looks like Flutter does some unpleasant things to the main Write Post interface as well – it was wrapping this post to a set width, making it look ickyier than usual. hrm…

yeah. definitely not quite ready for prime time. but still, something worth keeping a close eye on. this could really make some interesting things possible with wordpress…

Update 2: the evil russian spammers seem to REALLY like this post, so I’ve closed comments. Sorry. stupid russian spammers…

Brian wrote a great post about the focus on content creation in the open education movement. There were some great comments on that post – some arguing (correctly, IMO) that there isn’t enough great content available.

But even that misses the point, I fear.

Content is the least important part of education. What is far more important is what takes place between and among the students. The activities of the community of learners. What they actually DO with the content and with each other.

Great content IS important, but only if there is also a functioning and active community working together to learn, create and share. Otherwise, all that takes place is content dissemination. And that’s not education, open or otherwise.

Content Dissemination

or active community of learners

I’ve been meaning to redesign the main site at UCalgaryBlogs.ca for awhile now – the Edublogs Clean theme isn’t intended to be dropped in as a stock theme, but as a starting point for hacking something tailor-made. The Edu-Clean theme is available as part of the fantastic Premium WPMUDev subscription – and it certainly helped me get UCalgaryBlogs.ca off the ground quickly.

Edu-Clean has bugged me because it hijacks the front page by using home.php, rather than using a page template to render the front page. The annoying part of this technique is that it makes it difficult to list blog posts within that site – so news updates posted on the main blog only show up on the “latest posts” widget, and then disappear from sight when they roll off the bottom of the widget.

And, the Edu-Clean theme, while looking fantastic and being very well designed and polished, is really just the Edublogs theme. So, my straight reuse of the graphics and styles was a bit confusing (I had a couple people mention “oh, that’s edublogs. I know that.” – um. no. it’s not, but it’s using the same theme… confusing…)

So, today I decided to sit down and hack the best parts of Edu-Clean out, and graft them into a copy of the sweet and flexible Carrington theme.

I’ll post a description of what I did, why, and where, but for now it’s basically working. It’s still very much a work in progress (I’m thinking it’s a little busy, but I like the focus on community, content and function rather than marketing). The other nice thing that the use of page templates allows is the WordPress front page setting – I can set the front page to be rendered by a static template, and set the “real” blog to be displayed at another page on the blog – Site News, for example. Much better, IMO.

Here’s the previous design, powered by the elegant Edu-Clean theme:

And the redesign, based on Carrington:

I’m certainly no designer, but I like that the featured content is right up front, rather than marketing info about the service. It’s also much easier to spot the login info (if not logged in) and stuff you can do (list of your blogs, etc…) without having to scroll down.

I’ll be tweaking it, but I think it’s a keeper.

I’m not sure why people put miles-long blogrolls on every page of their blogs. Sure, have a “links” page. But every single page containing a list of all the blogs you read? Some apparently several hundred long? Page bloat. Just because there’s a widget for Blogroll doesn’t mean you need to use it. On every page of your site. All they’re doing is making your site harder to navigate, take longer to load, and completely messing up utilities like Google Blogsearch’s “Incoming Links” (which is part of the WordPress dashboard – now rendered useless because every site with my blog in their blogroll now lists tonnes of pages linking to my site, even when the posts have nothing to do with me or my blog.)

holy CRAP have the spammers ever cranked things up a knotch. Fracking spammers. almost all are being blocked at the gates, but it’s frustrating think of all that wasted energy (electrical and individual)…

I was interviewed yesterday for a CBC Radio News report that was on the air this morning. We talked for about 15 minutes, and most of it hit the cutting room floor. But at least the bits that got broadcast weren’t too embarrassing…

CBC Radio News – Bikes in Calgary

Update: apparently they used different clips of the interview in different newscasts. Hopefully the others were less tattoo-centric and more pro-bike-safety

Next Page →