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  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!

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All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.

- John Dewey, Democracy and Education

I wonder what Dewey would have thought of the LMS…

I’ve been farting around with a Manfrotto Super Clamp to attach a camera to my bike to experiment with techniques to document the Ride to Conquer Cancer. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to try, but I’m getting closer to something that I’m happy with.

Here’s the first half of my ride home from UCalgary campus through the streets of NW Calgary – sped up about 3x. I was averaging between 30-40km/h for this portion of the ride.

(video doesn’t show up in RSS feed. grumble.)

I still have a few things to figure out – the clamp isn’t quite level, so I need to MacGuyver a way to level the thing so the footage isn’t all leaning to one side – but it’s getting close.

Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.

- John Dewey, 1916, Democracy and Education

The quote is almost 100 years old. I wonder what Dewey would have thought about the Internet, email, IM, blogs, and tweets…

I was asked to give a presentation for the From Courses to Dis/Course online conference last week, and chose the topic of identity as it relates to openness. My session, Identity in the Open Classroom, was a fun (for me, anyway) exploration of the issues, and I think served the purpose of framing discussion.

Here’s the video of the recording from the session:

the full chat transcript for the session is available, as well as the full Elluminate session recording.

and the slide that wound up framing much of the question and answer portion:

I’ve been running a copy of WordPress MultiUser for over a year now. Comment spam hasn’t been much of a problem, thanks to Akismet, but if I leave site registration open (so students and faculty can create new accounts and blogs), the evil spammers find it and start sending their bots en masse.

I tried a few plugins, with varying levels of success. There’s an interesting one that attempts to limit registrations to a specific country, but it falsely reported some valid users as not being in Canada. Captchas work, but also block some valid users (and the signup captcha plugin I’d been using is possibly abandoned).

So, I did some quick googling, and came across the page on the WordPress Codex about using .htaccess files to stop comment spam. I made some modifications to the technique, and am now running it on UCalgaryBlogs.ca with apparent success. The apache logs show the bot attacks are still in full force, but not a single one has gotten through in order to register. And valid users have been able to get through. That’s pretty promising.

Read more

I guessed at the starting point before, and was wrong. Looks like the Alberta ride starts at the Deerfoot Casino, then must head down Deerfoot to 22X then west to 22 before shooting south.

Here’s the route, complete with the elevation profile:

Elevation Gain: 1555 meters
Elevation Loss: 1392 meters

I’d tried WP-SpamFree before as the antispam system here, but something was wonky (I think Apache wasn’t properly serving the javascript file or something). I’ve tweaked, and updated, and it appears to be working now. Testing much?