Archive for February, 2009
another tedious sunrise over the Bow River, seen from Silver Springs, along the Bowmont Natural Pathway.
The view of Mount Kidd from our room at the Delta Kananaskis. Could definitely get used to waking up to this view.
I tempted fate by running a Time Machine backup on my laptop on Friday. I got back from the mountains, slapped in the card from the camera to check out the shots in Aperture, and got a corrupt database warning half way through the import. Hopefully the backup is OK…
We went skating on the rink at Kananaskis Village, between Family Day activities at the hotel.
we built an airplane out of tinkertoys. it’s a bit rickety, but the prop and landing gear actually work.
I just pushed the latest version of the WP-Sentry plugin out to general use on UCalgaryBlogs.ca – any site can now enable it to have the ability to create groups and to set the audience for posts and pages. A site admin can create groups and put members of the site into any number of groups – which can also be hierarchically arranged – and then the members can decide who should be allowed to see the posts that they publish.
A workgroup could post updates that only group members can see (so a flood of group meeting notes doesn’t flood a blogsite used in a class of 300 students), or students could write posts on sensitive topics without worrying about it leaking out onto the open internet and into their permanent record.
The plugin is very well designed, and is easy to use. I’m going to be setting up a few sites using it as a means of managing information flow within large classes. One nice feature of the plugin is that it gives the ability to select multiple groups as the audience for a post, and to add individual member access, so you could invite someone in to view content without granting them full group member status. Very nice.
So far, the only suggestion that I could think to make would be some way to provide a list of groups (a group directory page) that links to a page listing content published in a given group – a group home page.
I know there are people for whom the idea of “private” blogging makes them break out in hives. But there are valid cases for providing safe places for students to publish content without worrying about public exposure, and this is a fantastic solution to that problem.
Update: It hit me, shortly after hitting “Publish” on this post, that the WP-Sentry plugin would be a perfect fit for the other plugin I’m playing with – WordPress-Wiki – which allows for wiki editing of pages and posts by members of a WordPress site, but without needing to delve into geeky MediaWiki syntax. It tracks revisions, allows diffing of changes between revisions, and generates the table of contents based on the headings in the content in the same way that MediaWiki does. All the fun of wiki, without the geeky stuff or pain.
WP-Sentry + WordPress-Wiki, when combined, would let people create private (or public, or any variant in between) wikis for workgroups, as part of their regular blog or website publishing workflow. No extra software to learn, no new syntax, no new jargon. Just an extra couple of checkboxes and widgets to twiddle when publishing a post to determine who gets to see the thing, and whether it should be wiki. Very cool stuff, and it could become a powerful tool as part of a course blogsite.
the emergency exit on the bus this morning. I don’t think I’d be able to reach it in an emergency, but it’s comforting to know it’s there.
I’ve been looking at various options for student response systems – primarily clickers – and have been quite frustrated at how that market is set up. I wouldn’t be able to recommend use of those, in good conscience, given the recurring costs. It also seems a little strange to compel students to buy a specific piece of hardware to perform the task, when they (almost) all have laptops and/or smartphones in their hands anyway.
Why not just use a browser-based polling system to solicit and collect student responses during class? Ideally, it should be easy for the prof/instructor/TA/teacher to add new questions on the fly, which appears to be a weakness in the current web-based polling systems. But it feels like a much more productive approach, rather than sinking money into vendor-locked hardware that students have to pay to unlock each semester.
This isn’t the first time I’ve looked at web based systems to handle student responses and feedback. Last summer I was looking for something to fit the bill, and didn’t find anything that really did what is needed – a simple, frictionless, flexible app that lets profs (or anyone else) ask a question (or a series of questions) and gather responses in realtime, and also allow on-the-fly modification and posting of new questions.
It seems to me that something like PollDaddy, TooFast or PollEverywhere (which allows response via SMS and the web) may be more appropriate, but even these aren’t quite what’s needed.
[polldaddy poll=1364276]
The gravel and sand has been largely blown onto the side of the road, keeping the bike route well gritted. I usually ride on the left edge of this strip, and move over into it as needed – it can be a bit sketchy riding in it, as it sometimes piles up unexpectedly, grabbing at the front tire as you plow through it.
Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Facebook and the disambiguation of relationships
Relationships are more than artificial pigeonholes. Rex, at Savage Minds, compares Facebook (and by extension Web 2.0) identities and relationships to those of indigenous vs. colonial cultures.
Facebook subsumes face-to-face relationships, in other words, in a way similar to the way that governments subsume indigenous identities. Or at least the identities of Papua New Guinean ‘landowners’ that I study. In both cases, an institution identified people as being unambiguously one type or another for the purposes of granting them access to resources and certain types of moral recognition. I think many of the criticisms that people have made of the deforming effects of state recognition on indigenous people could in principle be applied to people on Facebook—although of course the stakes are infinitely lower in the case of Facebook.
and
Insofar as indigenous critiques of pathological state systems of recognition are a particular example of a more general criticism of the way that living breathing lifeworlds are formalized—or rather, how the living and breathing world has little solidified models of itself drifting around within it in complexly reflective ways. We might start thinking about the performative nature of these identities: how a new occasion to classify people as friends suddenly makes us rethink not just whether someone is a friend, but what that category means. Perhaps there will someday be computers with databases so massive and logic so fuzzy they will be able to intuit that I want Jim to see photos of my weekend hike, but not Sarah. But in the meantime perhaps we need someone to write a critique of the corrosive bureaucratic imagining of friendship that Facebook promotes. Or perhaps we need an expose of the way that its mechanisms are constantly being detourned by the communities that are constantly appropriating it.
The lens with which we view ourselves, and our relationships with others, colours our perception of both. If that lens imposes a bureaucratic structure, we pigeonhole people into appropriate boxes, without the fluidity and organic nature we might otherwise see.