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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 full game starts at the single cell stage, evolving up through multicellular life, eventually up to group and society, and finally planetary and galactic scales. What a great way to show interconnections between the various disciplines? Biochemistry through cellular biology through zoology through ecology through sociology through planetary biology and astrophysics. In a format that can be jumped into by anyone, including kids. Especially kids. What would happen if kids are able to develop a sense of these interactions and interdependencies at various scales?

I downloaded (and purchased) the full Spore Creature Creator - it’s the demo app to showcase some of the technology that will be in the final game. It lets you create creatures using a set of biological widgets, and the behaviour and charactistics of the creature are developed based on the properties of the components selected.

I put together a quick creature to see what the full demo would do, and it’s really pretty cool just how detailed the creature is. Based on the limbs and body size, the thing as a believable gate and stance. Based on the head, jaw, and body shape, it has a realistic voice - able to call and roar.

I’m REALLY looking forward to the full game.

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 facilitate meetings, find guest speakers, search for resources, organize presentations, or whatever else is needed for these communities to share the interesting things they’re doing (or want to be doing) on campus.

The project has been directly inspired by two existing projects that have been extremely successful. First, is Cole Camplese’s really amazing Community Hubs project at Penn State. The PSU ETS team has rolled out support for 13 communities that have been identified (so far) across the various PSU campuses. The communities share resources in both face-to-face sessions, and through the website created by ETS just for that community. Support and services are provided as needed. And, the activities culminate as sessions in the annual TLT Symposium conference at PSU. I haven’t been lucky enough to attend one of the Symposia, but from all accounts they sound like incredibly powerful events that solidify the physical and tangible sense of community, resulting in a highly effective professional development programme for PSU faculty and staff.

The other primary inspiration has been Jennifer Jones‘ work with Viral Professional Development at Bellingham Technical College. This is an equally inspiring project, where resources are provided and shared, and the professional development activities are really run by the faculty members themselves through a series of “play and learn” sessions. Instructors play with new tools, discuss pedagogy and techniques, and explore together in a safe environment before trying what they’ve learned in their own classes. By putting the faculty members themselves in the driver’s seats, Jen has been able to model and reinforce some amazingly powerful strategies - with a very strong pull from the grassroots levels of the institution.

So, how have these two radically different projects inspired what I’m trying to set up here at UCalgary? I really want to borrow heavily from the PSU model, where resources and support are offered to a wide variety of communities. I love that these communities are primarily face-to-face, and that the discussions are extended through websites provided by ETS. And the annual TLT Symposium is definitely something I’m going to try to get going here as well - taking the learning communities and providing them a showcase to gather and share not only with each other but with others who may be interested.

And, I want to take the grassroots and viral nature of Jen’s VPD work, and try to scale that across a fairly sizable campus. The most direct way I’m going to try this is by not predefining the communities. I’m going to handpick one or two just to get things going, but will work hard to make it easy for faculty members (and staff, and grad students, and possibly others) to identify, create, organize and join their own learning communities on any topic. And I’ll work hard to find resources to support all of these communities. Ideally, these communities will be about more than just technology - I’d love to see learning communities form around topics such as “large enrollment classes” and “storytelling” - with several technology-related topics also forming. I’m hoping to keep things extremely flexible, open, and organic, so there may be overlap between various communities (technologically and/or pedagogically).

Is it going to be successful? It’s way too early to tell. It could fly like a lead balloon. But, I think it’s important to try to put as much of an effort into providing effective professional development for our faculty as is possible, so it’s worth a shot.

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 handy dandy bungee cord, and recorded the morning ride. It’s a bit stomach-churning in spots, because of head motion swinging the camera all over the place, but it’s pretty close to being there…

I’m still trying to whip up a flash version of the video for proper embedding, but in the meantime, here’s a QuickTime version.

Update: there’s now a Flash Video version of the movie posted to Vimeo.com. I still haven’t been able to get Google Video to play nicely though…

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 a few years of not riding very much). I ride just over 28km per day, every weekday, so have managed to rack up the kilometers pretty quickly. I had set a target for myself to ride 3,500km in 2008, trying to beat my 3,100km ridden in 2007. Looks like I’m on track to blow that away, and might hit 4,000km if I’m able to keep going. That’d be like riding from Calgary to Quebec City. Or to New York…

I’ve ridden through blizzards, monsoons, hail, lightning, and the regular traffic filled with aggressive and psychotic drivers.

But I wouldn’t give it up. I’m so much happier riding. The smells of spring. The sounds of the birds. That would all be missed if I was trapped in a bus or car. It’s just so much better to be riding. And, I’m in the best physical shape of my adult life - I’ve lost almost 30 pounds from my all-time fatass peak. Feeling great! Here’s hoping I can do another 2,000km in 2008

Jim’s been talking about edupunk a fair bit lately (starting with the killer post The Glass Bees, then Permapunk and finally tying in the awesome Murder, Madness, Mayhem wikipedia project), and Jen wrote up a piece that dovetails nicely into the concept. There’s something about the edupunk concept that is resonating deeply in me.

It’s a movement away from what has become of the mainstream edtech community - a collection of commercial products produced by large companies. Edupunk is the opposite of that. It’s DIY. It’s hardcore. It’s not monetized. It’s not trademarked. It’s not press-released. It’s not on an upgrade cycle. It’s not enterprise. It’s not shrinkwrapped.

It’s about individuals being able to craft their own tools, to plan their own agendas, and to determine their own destinies. It’s about individuals being able to participate, to collaborate, to contribute, without boundaries or barriers.

And it’s not new. The early days of the “edublogosphere” had a definite edupunk vibe to it. Long before that, we had seen edupunk, and it was awesome. I remember when Hypercard was commonplace. When teachers and students would regularly build and adapt their own interactive applications, games, and databases to support classroom activities. Without fanfare or infrastructure or strategic planning or budgets. When Hypercard was killed, it was an end of a renaissance era of DIY edtech.

But, the key to edupunk is that it is not about technology.

It’s about a culture, a way of thinking, a philosophy. It’s about DIY. Lego is edupunk. Chalk is edupunk. A bunch of kids exploring a junkyard is edupunk. A kid dismantling a CD player to see what makes it tick is edupunk.

I’m not about to suggest that technology isn’t important or relevant to edupunk - of course it is. But only as an enabling piece of infrastructure. Technology can empower individuals, amplify actions, and connect communities. But without the edupunk philosophy underlying it all, it’s just a bunch of technology. Uninteresting and irrelevant.

One of the coolest classrooms I’ve ever been in is the Engineering Design Lab at the University of Calgary. It’s a classroom from the outside, but is really nothing but rows of workbenches, armed with any tools and materials imaginable. Drawers full of Lego for building prototypes. Cabinets full of Mechano for piecing together simple machines. A full machine shop for building more complex ones. It’s a place where the students are not only allowed, but encouraged to explore and create. Working in groups to create and solve problems. Critical thinking. Inquiry. Experiential. And it is the most hardcore edupunk class I’ve seen.

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)

Stephen ran a cool line of command line goodness to crunch out a list of the most commonly run commands he runs in Terminal.

The code he ran is:

% history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

Hey, that’s pretty cool. Crunches through the shell history, spits out a list of commands, groups them by uniqueness and sorts them by number of occurrences.

I ran it on the 3 systems I use most often:

  84 ssh
  80 ls
  65 cd
  50 exit
  33 sudo
  19 rm
  16 mate
  11 httrack
  10 more
   9 curl

    287 ls
    227 cd
     61 curl
     51 rm
     50 tar
     48 cp
     43 emacs
     42 pci
     24 more
     24 exit

    317 ls
    215 cd
    120 rm
     47 nano
     47 mv
     36 curl
     33 more
     27 exit
     25 unzip
     20 cp

On my Desktop, I’m mostly hopping off to other systems via SSH, or editing config stuff (sudo and mate - the command line interface for TextMate). On webapps3, I’m administering a bunch of Drupal sites, so there’s a lot of grabbing stuff via wget and curl, dealing with tarballs, and editing config files. On darcynorman.net I’m mostly updating WordPress, moving files around, and (before WP 2.5) updating plugins and themes.

I’m more than a little surprised that man didn’t show up in the top 10 list on any of these systems…

It’s kind of interesting, to me at least, how each system I use has a different fingerprint of activity.

You can tell it’s springtime in Calgary when you wake up to this:

And then after you get to work, you check Dashboard Weather and find this:

Up to +7˚C today, then up to +22˚C this weekend. At least the surprise dump of white stuff will melt quickly… It was a really fun ride to work this morning. Maybe too much fun. I’ve got street slicks on my bike, so didn’t have much traction. Going up hills was interesting. And I had to stop repeatedly to clear snow from inside the fenders, from off of the handlebars, off of my jacket and helmet. And had to constantly wipe the giant flakes from my glasses so I could see where I was going. I avoided the busiest street portion of the ride, ducking through a park instead. No need to take unnecessary risks…

The 2008/366photos project just hit the 1/4 mark. Just over 91 days in. I’ve been surprised at the number of edu-folk that decided to try the photo-a-day challenge this year. It’s fun, interesting, frustrating, challenging, and sometimes really difficult trying to come up with at least one photograph every day that doesn’t suck (or, hopefully, is interesting and/or good).

So now, we’ve got 40 people in the 366photos group. Currently there are over 1800 photos in the pool. There are likely many photos that are part of the project that aren’t included in the pool (for myself, several are marked as “friends and family” only, because they are photos of my son and/or his cousins).

That blows me away. And there are some really, REALLY good photos in there. It’s pretty cool to see people trying new things. Watching Michael play with off-camera flashes. Jen and Brian getting comfortable with their new toy. Stephen capturing winter in New Brunswick. Alan catching the cool stuff around Strawberry (and beyond). I’m not going to go through and list all 40 members but it’s been very cool watching what people come up with!

To be clear, though, this is not the only photo-a-day challenge group on Flickr. There’s a 365photos group, 366 2008, Project 365+1, 366 of 2008, and any number of other similar groups. There are probably thousands of people just on Flickr doing the project.

But what is so cool about our own little 366photos project, is that it’s composed almost entirely of edu-folks. A little community-within-a-community, of people trying something new and working (intentionally or otherwise) to improve their abilities and contribute content to the group. That’s awesome.

I am by no means an expert, but have been commuting by bike for awhile now. I’ve learned some tricks that might come in handy for others who are starting (or thinking of starting) to commute by bike.

1. Start slow. Don’t rush it when you first start out. Take your time. Pick a day or week where it won’t matter too much if you’re a bit late, or if you get delayed a bit. Initially, you’ll need some time to figure out the route and get used to the routine. Starting slow lets you get into the groove without trying to push yourself too hard.
2. Plan your route. I poured over the Calgary bike route map to find my route. I fired up Google Earth to plot it out, and check elevations - you’ll want to avoid hills as much as possible, especially as you get started. Don’t plan your route as a car driver - think about parks, pathways, and other places that are accessible to bikes but not cars. Also, think about places you’ll want to ride through on the way. I’ve added about 3km to my regular ride because it takes me through quieter residential streets, and along a beautiful valley pathway instead of along a busy and stinky street. Worth it.
3. Prepare your bike. If it’s a new bike, make sure you’ve got the essentials - lights (headlight, tail light), reflectors, fenders, rear rack, paniers. If it’s an old bike, make sure everything’s in working order. I added a barebones speedometer, and find the odometer is a great motivating tool - knowing how many km I’ve gone in a trip, and how many in a year - really helps keep me moving forward.
4. Maintain your bike. Pick up some oil, and keep the bike lubricated. Keep the bike clean - road grime is evil, evil stuff. This is even more important in colder climates where the salty slush gets on everything and rusts the bike out. Keeping it clean and dry prevents that a bit. Keeping things lubed prevents some of the rust and wear on moving parts. Make sure bolts are tight, and that the quick-release on the wheels hasn’t slipped (I’ve had both front and rear wheels pop off on my old bike because I forgot to check them periodically).
5. Dress for the ride. I’m currently carrying 3 jackets - usually one or two on me, the rest in my panier. I wear a cotton hoodie if it’s cold, and if it’s REALLY cold I wear a MEC windproof shell on top of that. If things warm up a bit, I’ve got a lighter hoodie I can switch to. Layers are helpful - especially once you start to warm up after a couple of km into the ride.
6. Ditch the toe baskets. My Kona bike came with these silly little baskets on the pedals. At first, I thought I liked them because it was kinda like the toe clips, without the expensive shoes. But they’re really, really annoying. Imagine riding on snow or ice, with your toe out of the basket, and the basket itself dragging in the snow beneath you. One of mine actually got ripped off the pedal as I rode through some deeper snow (I pull my feet out of the baskets in case I go down in snow and ice, which meant for most of the winter the baskets were just annoying). Toe clips are a different story - they’re unobtrusive, and can actually help you pedal by letting you pull up in addition to pushing down. I don’t use toe clips though…
7. I don’t ride with a backpack or a messenger bag. Everything goes into one of my paniers (2 15 year old MEC paniers). In the right one, I put my “big boy clothes” to change into when I get to work. My iPod gets folded into my pants there, and my camera gets stowed on top of my clothes. My left panier is for my jackets, shoes, and my lunch. Using the paniers means I don’t have to worry about the backpack-sweat-puddles, but it also means I don’t lug my laptop to and from work. I leave the laptop at home, and use a desktop at work. I have my iPod Touch for everywhere in between. My paniers are old enough that the water resistant coating is long gone. So I use kitchen garbage bags to line the inside, keeping everything nice and dry even in very wet weather.
8. Ride safe. This should be #1, but you get the idea. Don’t be in such a rush that you are tempted to do stupid things like cut across traffic. Obey stop signs and traffic signals. Take the lane wherever possible. If you don’t ride safe, you’ll eventually regret it. Even if you are unscathed, you’re making things worse for bikers overall by riding like a jackass. Car drivers already hate us, and they don’t need more reasons to try to mow us down.
9. Plan for the weather. If it’s REALLY cold (-15˚C or colder), I wear my insulated hiking boots and 2 pairs of socks. If it’s just a bit chilly (0˚C - -15˚C) I just wear 2 pairs of socks and a pair of light Solomon shoes (which are really nicely ventilated). If it’s below 0˚C, I wear my thick hoodie and my MEC windproof shell to keep warm (and they do keep me VERY warm). Above zero, and it’s fine with just a single pair of socks and the hoodie. Above +5˚C and I switch to the light hoodie. I also have waterproof rainpants, but don’t pack them unless the forecast suggests it will rain while I ride. If it’s colder than -5˚C, I just wear my MEC pants. Warmer, and I try to switch to shorts.
10. Have fun! If it’s not fun, why are you doing it? Biking can be a total blast, if you do it safely. Being able to whip down a hill at over 50km/h is a rush that is hard to beat. Being able to out-accelerate a car at a green light is just plain fun. Riding along a river, hearing the birds and sounds of nature…

    Update: thought of a few more tips:

11. Plan a cool-off period after you get to the destination. If you have a 9am meeting, plan to get there at least half an hour early so you have a chance to cool down and get cleaned up and changed first.
12. Gloves. I always wear gloves. If it’s cool out, I wear a pair of thin(ish) leather work gloves. They cut the wind right out, and my hands stay warm. If it’s downright COLD, I wear a pair of insulated gloves (the ones I wear skiing etc…). If it’s warmer, I wear a pair of meshback fingerless riding gloves. I wear gloves partially in case I wipe out - grinding my palms into gravel isn’t something I’d look forward to, so a bit of protection is a good thing.
13. This one’s a bit morbid - but I always have ID on me, not just in my panier. My wallet is always in my pocket. If I wipe out, and for some reason can’t communicate, it’s important that my identification is readily available. Haven’t needed it yet, but the last thing I want is to wind up in a hospital (or worse) unidentified. It’s not a fear of getting hurt while riding - I have ID on me all the time. Hmmm… This is a pretty dark revelation…
14. Keep a spare pair of shoes at work if possible. Eventually, you’re going to get soaked while riding. If you don’t have clean/dry shoes to change into, you’re going to make that squish-squish sound when you walk into the Big Staff Meeting…
15. Carry a cloth to wipe sweat off with. It sounds nasty, but riding can be sweaty business. Having a cloth to sop it up with means you’re more comfortable.
16. Get a decent helmet. I had been using a crappy old Bell V1 black bucket, like the one that saved my life about 15 years ago. I decided to replace it, and got an inexpensive Nakamura (maybe $35 at Sport Chek) - it fits so much better, is maybe half the weight, is adjustable, and has much better ventilation. The better fit means that if I go down, it will stay in place - which is the whole point of a helmet.

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