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After thinking about Quest for Fire, I realize that another of the most formative movies for me was 1984’s The Iceman. The body of a prehistoric man was found frozen in ice, but still alive. He’s placed in a zoo-like containment room at an arctic research facility (filmed in Churchill Manitoba, no less) where he can be studied. Another fascinating movie, not because of special effects or high budget, but because of story. Any movie involving a prehistoric man singing along to Neil Young has to be OK…

The movie was about alienation. About belonging. About finding out who you are, and where you need to be. It was about human nature. It was about fear. And mythology. It was about standing up for what you believe in. And also a little about anthropology.

I remember watching and rewatching this movie several times, mesmerized by the details. And knowing that a high budget version of the movie would have lost almost everything that made this movie great.

Inspired by Jim’s description of one of his 10 formative movies, I realized that one of the movies that’s had the most impact on me is Quest for Fire. The 1981 Canadian anthropological movie about 4 separate tribes of homo erectus, neanderthal and homo sapiens, and their interactions.

I remember being absolutely fascinated by the movie, watching it dozens of times (it was one of the early movies offered on our fancy new SuperChannel Cable Movie Channel when I was a kid). I haven’t thought explicitly about the movie in years, but have realized that it’s really affected me by helping to viscerally see and empathize with the various cultures depicted.

Quest for Fire was so powerful to me, because it was so real. It didn’t feel like fiction. It felt like what we would now call embedded reportage. Following the story, without shaping it. (of course the story was shaped - it’s a work of fiction - but it doesn’t FEEL like a work of fiction) It made anthropology, evolution, natural selection, adaptation, and so many other concepts clear and alive.

It showed how science isn’t a separate thing - it is the world around us. It is us.

I just bought the movie, and have been waiting for it to finish downloading from iTunes so I can rewatch it. Looking forward to it!

I’ve been feeling in a photographic rut lately. It seems like all of my photos look the same. They’re of the same thing. They’re all of things I’ve photographed before. Same. Similar. Again. Repeat. Done it. been there. Oh, that again. Gottit…

I just popped onto the Photography tab of my blog, and it hit me - although things feel strongly similar, there is variation and diversity. And sometimes repetition of similar photographs and subjects tells a story in and of itself.

I’ve got a prof using a WordPress site to manage some really active discussions in his course. He’d really like to be able to list all comments posted by each user, as part of the assessment rubric for the course.

I’ve found LOTS of “recent comments” and “popular posts” plugins, and some requests for similar “list all comments for a given user” functionality, but haven’t been able to find anything that fits the bill.

Ideally, the solution would list all contributors to a blog (everyone with accounts), with links to a page (or pages) that lists all of their posts, their pages, and comments.

Any suggestions? Do I get to write another plugin?

Michael Wesch just posted an amazing reflection on his experience in the classroom. He’s frustrated by the lack of engagement, the scattered engagement. The education through “soul murder.”

My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.

and, BINGO!

They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed. There is literally something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.

I’d missed the news, but the latest version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress includes some tasty stats. As with all things statistical, there’s a few ways to read the numbers, and there are some anomalies (ferinstance, it claims I had a few days of over 1000 ham i.e., valid comments per day and that’s just plain wrong) but the spam stats feel roughly right. They’re not dramatically different from what I was seeing under Mollom, except nobody gets inflicted with Captcha using Akismet.

Thanksgiving is here. And I have lots to be thankful for, including (but not limited to):

1. I’ve got an awesome family, full of love and happiness.
2. Evan is growing up to be an amazing, inspiring young man.
3. Dad laughed at the doctors that gave him 6 months to live. Over a decade ago. He’s still going strong, for 73.
4. I have friends that I admire, respect, and look up to, and who know this.
5. As I hit 39, I’m in the best physical, mental and emotional shape of my entire life, and it feels great.

I’d experimented with the Structured Blogging plugin for WordPress almost 3 years ago. It’s a way to add structured, complex data to regular blog posts, and provides both human- and machine-readable versions of the content in order to support aggregation and syndication of the data by any service that supports it. The plugin adds a bunch of extra types of posts, from generic reviews and events, to more specific formats such as Journal Article and Book. Those two formats would be extremely useful to any student (or faculty member) who is collecting notes on academic research for use in their studies.

The Journal Article and Book formats also integrate with services to automatically look up reference data. For example, while writing a review of an article in Nature, all I would have to do is enter the article title and click “Lookup: PubMed” - and the rest of the data was automatically queried and entered into the article review.

Similar features are available for books (via Amazon.com). And some formats also provide star ratings as additional fields, making ranking and reviewing items very simple.

Sure, it could be argued that the implementation is somewhat hackish - it replaces the rich text editor, and stores XML in the post content - but it works. That’s really all that matters.

Unfortunately, the Structured Blogging project appears to be defunct. The website has been abandoned, and the WordPress plugin hasn’t been updated since March 2007. The WordPress plugin still works, though, but for how long?

Hopefully, the promise of structured blogging and microformats won’t be abandoned outright. The decentralized, flexible nature of these complex content types has some really interesting implications on distributed publishing and recontextualization of information. It would be a shame to have that completely disappear.

One of the profs using UCalgaryBlogs.ca was asking if there was a way to show the “audit trail” for a blog posts. If she’s having students write stuff, and needs it in by a given date (say, an assignment deadline), she’d like a way to know if a post was saved before the deadline, or updated after it. It’s easy for people to futz around with the “published on” date for a post…

So, I did some poking around, looking for plugins or tricks to expose the revision display list without having to send the prof to the blog’s admin UI every time she wanted to look at the info.

I couldn’t find anything, so I asked a question on the WordPress support forum. On a tip from Otto42, I poked around with the wp_list_post_revisions() function. Looks exactly like what I need. So it was pretty simple to write a basic plugin that adds a Filter such that the list gets generated and appended to every post displayed on a blog that uses the plugin. If you’re logged in, and have proper privileges, you’ll also get a link to view the revisions directly. If not, you just get to see that the revisions exist.

I had to copy the wp_list_post_revisions() function and modify it a bit in the plugin, so it behaved as needed. Nothing too major, but the WordPress function relies on echo to dump the list directly, and I needed to modify it to return a string to append to the blog post. Easy peasy.

And so, post-revision-display is born. Install and activate it on your blog, and your posts will automagically generate and display the list of revisions as an audit trail, with no futzing about with themes and hardcoding stuff. Here’s what the audit trail looks like:

Download the plugin here (for now - I’m trying to get it added to WordPress.org/extend/plugins…)

With my recent thinking about openness, I’ve found myself starting to channel an internal devil’s advocate voice… This post does not represent my personal beliefs, but if we’re going to talk about open education, we need to explore all sides of it…

Is truly open education a desirable goal? Is the eradication of all barriers to access something that would have positive outcomes? If we follow open education in one logical direction - where every individual is able to tailor their own educational experience in breadth, depth, and scope, will we be able to make sense of the products of such experiences? Degrees and diplomas, at least in the conventional sense, would become diluted to the point of being essentially meaningless. If each individual can for all intents and purposes be their own university, how do we properly value this? Can everyone claim to have an open PhD from MeU?

One way to value and make sense of such a truly open education would be to shift from institution-based credentials (degrees, diplomas, certificates) to performance-based credentials (portfolios, professional boards, guilds). That’s not a simple shift, but there are precedents - medicine and law operate in similar ways now.

Then there are the arguments against educational and cultural imperialism. If the primary producers and arbiters of open education are in the West, then promotion of these resources into other contexts is tantamount to (gently) forcing Western philosophy and ideology on other cultures. Those who refuse to adopt the resources are branded as backward, and those who do adopt them are assimilated.

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