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September 30, 2004

Blogology : member initiated discussions

In the general blogging framework, the owner of the blog has a unique position ... s/he and s/he alone can create a top level post.

While this is useful from an editorial, didactic, and perhaps pendantic point of view, this onesidedness undercuts the community benefits.

Which blogging tools out there support member initiated discussions? Slashdot seems to have that feature. What are others.

Which discussion and bbs tooks have a bloglike appearance ? Or is appearance not that important for threaded discussions.

Posted by sjc at 2:36 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

Playlist : Boogie Pimps Somebody to Love

The cosmic thread continues to spin. After following Patti Smith's PL to Grace Slick to the Boogie Pimps and downloading their iTunes remix album, I went to Amazon. There were two more remix albums, one similar, one completely different, so I n-clicked my way through the two albums, plus some other recommendations, and now have the British mix album "Saltshaker Remix" and the German album "Salt Shaker Remix". You figure.

Both have the Radio Edit. And that's the last point in common.

The Radio Edit is straight (!) Jefferson Airplane remix. By itself a great club mix.

The German mix brings the Hunter Thompson "Fear and Loathing" monolog to most of the tracks. The Enlish mix omits him.

Boogie Pimps
Somebody to Love
(Saltshaker Remix)
Includes CD-Rom Video
Data Records (London)
No catalog number

Boogie Pimps
somebody to love
(salt shaker remix)
Superstar (Warner, Germany)
LC 12639

Posted by sjc at 7:18 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2004

Office of the Future : Beijing

Zhang Benyu, a research associate at the Microsoft lab in Beijing works on his computer in a company lounge, in this photo taken in June. Microsoft is not the only multinational company to use China as a base for research and development. In recent years hundreds of them have set up laboratories here and Chinese officials claim the number is growing by 200 a year. Photo: NY Times, September 14, 2004.

Article: Corporations tap China's talent pool, New York Times News Service, Beijing, Tuesday, Sep 14, 2004,Page 12, online at

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2004/09/14/2003202887

Posted by sjc at 2:18 PM | Comments (0)

Conversations with Lita

Lita, is a chatbot.

"[H]er personality is very much a mixture of many people, ordinary people like you and me. She chats, listens, learns and improves her character accordingly. The more she interacts, the more her character develops. As you have probably figured out so far, Lita is a chat bot. But hey, she's no Einstein. The plan was never to make her smarter than you and me. The plan was her to blend in among the users of ICQ without giving away that she was a robot."

(Note: Ananova who's face we've borrowed is not a bot, but a news reader, converting text to speech.)

Posted by sjc at 2:03 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2004

Blogging at UVM ... Elements of Blogging Style

One of the nice features of something like MT is it's ability to accomodate a variety of styles. Dottocomu.Com is a nice clean layout with photos, etc. A simple BBCNews "trick" of using consistent image size and simple html text flow (image align=right versus align=left), produces a nice newspaper or magazine column layout.

Joi Ito shows another rif on MT style, this time in a two column format.

(Note: "Dottocomu" is romanized Japanese pronunciation of the phrase "dot com" - the final "u" being silent as is the general case.)

Posted by sjc at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2004

Playlist : Pirates and Pinafores

I had a chance to drop by Borders today and see what they had in the way of D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan productions. Of the four "highlight series", they had - if I remember right - Iolanthe?, Pinafore, Pirates, and Yoeman of the Guard. So I settled for HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. I would have preferred Mikado to the Pirates, but you get what you can get.

Posted by sjc at 7:39 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2004

Playlist : The Moon Reflected in Er-quan

Another find at Downtown Disks, "The Moon Reflected in Er-quan" consists of 15 tracks featuring the Ehru (Zhang Ruei, Master) and the Ensemble of China Opera and Dance Drama Theatre (Zhang Fu-quan, Conductor). The pieces range from folksongs, modern songs, and several movements from concertos.

I've only heard snippets so far, too much work.

Posted by sjc at 8:55 PM | Comments (0)

Less is more for university websites

Gerry McGovern writes in her article Less is more for university websites:

Universities are growing websites like mushrooms, and have an amazing capacity to publish large quantities of irrelevant and confusing content.

On the surface, this seems like a valid criticism - it is hard to find things on a univesity web site, through probably no harder than to find it when it was published as a 400 page "catalog."

It be that university websites would be easier to use if they followed the google model and encouraged the users to "search" rather than trying "sort" the site. What is it that users want, anyway ? And which two of them want the same thing ?

Posted by sjc at 6:04 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2004

Playlist : I Want My 80's Box

Found a copy of "I Want my 80's Box" at Downtown Disks, 3 CD's. A strange mix of songs mostly forgotten. No Talking Heads, no Cowboy Junkies, no B-52s. Not the collection I would have necessarily made. Not the collection KTel would have made. But hey.

It comes across as mostly MTV pop. Still fun.

Posted by sjc at 6:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2004

FarkThis : Non verbal communication in Blogspace

John is in San Diego attending XX and has said he would blog the event as a "trip report."

I checked his site this morning to see if he had a safe trip, and found an entry point to fark [*]. Being a newbie, I misunder stood the comment Photoshop this hotel room view to be a link to a view from his hotel room.

Wrong. It's an entrypoint to a discussion carried out via photoshop manipulation of a particular hotel room vista. As with any conversation, some folks are more "there" than others.

And a healthy post-literary antidote to the idea that blogs are about about writing and reading.

[*] If you are reading this after today, use this entry for Saturday, September 18.

Posted by sjc at 8:21 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2004

Blog and Tell : Safari versus FireFox

I've noticed that when one is editing an entry in FireFox, the "Entry Body" field has several buttons [B] [i] [U] [URL] that don't appear when using Safari. These buttons provide an easy way for lite-markup. ([B] refers to "bold" and not "blink".)

Posted by sjc at 3:14 PM | Comments (0)

Learning Ecologies : Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games

Educause Review, September / October 2004, focuses on "New Tools for Back-to-School" Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games."

• Educational Blogging: Stephen Downes, observes "Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn't really about writing at all; that's just the end poing of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. Mut more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you, your culture, you community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the contend and with the authors of what you have read - reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting. If a student has nothing to blog about, it is not because he or she has nothing to write about or has a boring life. It is because the student has not yet stretched out to the large world, has not yet learned to meaningfully engage in a community. For blogging in education to be a success, this first bust be embraced and encouraged."

• Going Nomadic: Learning in Higher Education: Bryan Alexander explores the learning infrastucture associated with mobile devices. He uses the term "m-learning" to describe this, though "moblogging" or "keitai" migh help link this article wtih Stephen Downes's.

• Wide Open Spaces : Wikis Ready or Not: Brian Lamb begins by recalling Tim Berners-Lee's lament: "I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit. And I started saying 'interactive,' and then I read in the media that the Web was great because it was "interactive," meaning you could click. This was not what I meant by interactivity." Wiki's address this issue by allowing anyone to edit any wiki-page. A dangerous idea.

Stephen Downes is a Senior Researcher with the E-Learning Research Group, National Research Council, Canada, Moncton, New Brunswick.

Brian Alexander is codirector o of the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College.

Brian Lamb is a project coordinator with the Office of Learning Technology at The University of British Columbia.

Posted by sjc at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)

Learning Ecologies : Cafe Physics

MIT's TEAL Project aims "to merge lecture, recitations, and hands-on laboratory experience into a technologically and collaboratively rich experience for incoming freshmen. Students will gather in groups of nine, with twelve or so such groups in a common area, for five hours per week. The students will be exposed to a mixture of instruction, laboratory work with desktop experiments, and collaborative work in smaller groups of three, in a computer rich environment (one networked laptop per three students, with data acquisition links between laptop and experiments)."

This project builds on 1993 RPI's Studio Calculus Project. "In the Fall of 1993, Joe Ecker and 45 students participated in RPI's firstStudio Calculus course. Each day in Calculus students were involvedin 5 basic activities: short discussions(to introduce new material or tomotivate an upcoming activity and by students telling about theirapproach and experiences in one of the following four activities);paperand pencil activities where students work problems immediately afterJoe introduces new material;take time to think activities usually basedon worksheets with students working in small groups to discover conceptsand problem solving techniques on their own;Maple activities by small groups that allow students to discover fundamental concepts, and help studentsunderstand important ideas in calculus; and peer teaching activitieswhereby students in one group that have mastered one of the preceding threeactivities help other small groups to get the point." [The Rensselaer Studio Course Model].

It also resembles the Virginia Tech Math Emporium Project (QuickTimeVR required). Here the introductory classroom is presented as an element of a community of learning model ... campus life communities, instruction/research communities, collaborative learning environments, outreach communities (such as the Blackburg Electronic Village).

Posted by sjc at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

The Great Flying Chaos Learning Circus

In The Great Flying Chaos Learning Circus: Interactively Rich and Informationally Diverse Techniques, TR Young writes "I would like to lay out the basic elements of a syllabus which embodies the advantages of hypertext and the format of www as grounding for a postmodern pedagogy." He then offers a catalog of techniques, technologies, and approaches to turn staid

The Great Flying Chaos Learning Circus: Interactively Rich and Informationally Diverse Techniques, T.R. Young, The Red Feather Institute, Summer, 1998,

Posted by sjc at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

Playlist : Somebody to Love

Last night, Classic Vermont played another violin concerto by Chevalier St. George, the 3rd in 3 days. St. George is a composer I first began hearing peieces of on "From the Top," and I've wondered "Who is this guy, anyway?" My first stop wasn't Google, but iTunes; iTunes didn't hear of him either.

So instead, hyperlinking took over, and I stumbled across the celebrity playlists. While browsing Patti Smith's list, I shifted gear to Grace Slick the Jefferson Airplane, with the final result that I've added 9 tracks of "Somebody to Love" to my playlist. 1 by the Airplane, 5 by Boogie Pimps, 2 by Wilson Picket, and 1 by Sanford Burton.

Posted by sjc at 6:05 AM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2004

読み物　：　舞妓

平成生まれ１５歳の舞妓さん、京都でデビュー

http://www.asahi.com/top/update/photonews/0913/OSK200409130029.html

Posted by sjc at 6:05 PM | Comments (0)

The world's shortest blog

The World's Shortest Blog" is devoted to one question. "How many times have you been arrested, Mr. President?"

Via: labadaud.com

Posted by sjc at 3:25 PM | Comments (0)

Jon Bellum TLI (phpWebThings)

Jon Bellum, College of Education, is using phpWebThings as a course portal for his TLI Assessment and Evaluation course.

phpWebThings "is [...] an automated web site that is easy for the webmaster to manipulate while still being secure and functional. Each user can submit comments to discuss Articles, News, Downloads similar to many other systems. The main features include: All Modular design, Web Based Admin, User Login, News System, User Messages, Downloads, FAQs, Contact Area, Links, User and Authors edit, an Integrated Banner Ad system, Internal Search Engine, Support for 20 languages, Comments option in Polls, lot of themes, File Manager, Download Manager, FAQ Manager, Categorized Articles and many, many more friendly functions. phpWebThings is written 100% in PHP."

Jon estimates that it took him 5 minutes to install on zoo.

Jon can also be found at KungPaoSquirrel.Com .

Posted by sjc at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

Squarespace : Multi Author Multi Page Collaborations

Anthony Casalena thinks his Squarespace fills a gap in Web publishing. "You've got two options if you want to publish on the Internet in a managed way: Blogs, which are ultra-simple and one page only, or, if you're a business, you can get a high-end content management product that will cost you $5,000 to $10,000 and take five programmers to implement. Squarespace is the middle ground." He points to overcrowded one-page sites as what's wrong with blogging today: "People publish everything using a blog and it's too much, it creates a mess on the sides of the page. A multi-page Web site is a good idea a lot of the time. Squarespace lets you manage pages, pictures, books you're reading and journal entries."

Source: Squarespace Lets Users Manage Multi-Page Web Sites, Andrea Caumont, Washington Post, Monday, September 13, 2004. E05. URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17038-2004Sep12

Posted by sjc at 8:51 AM | Comments (0)

Playlist : Renée Fleming

1. Renée Fleming - Handel Arias, Renée Fleming, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment & Harry Bicket, iTunes purchased music, 2004. 17 tracks

2. Schubert Leider, Renée Fleming & Christoph Eschenbach, iTunes purchased music, 2000. 14 tracks.

Posted by sjc at 6:23 AM | Comments (0)

Playlist : Japanese Traditional Music

1. Koto Music of Japan, Zumi-Kai Original Instrumental Group, LaserLight, Delta Music, Santa Monica, California, 1993. 5 tracks: Rokudan, Midare, Godan-kinuta, Chidori, Haru no kyoku.

2. Japan: Traditional vocal and Instrumental Music (Shokuhachi, Biwa, Koto, Shamisan), Ensemble Nipponia, Nonesuch, Warner Communicatios, New York, 1977. 8 tracks: Kumoi Jishi, Ozatsuma, Ogi no Mato, Edo Lullaby, Godan ginuta, Esashi Oiwake, Mushi no Aikata, Azuma Jishi.

Posted by sjc at 6:17 AM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2004

Now hear this again.

Macworld.Co.UK, reports reports that REM guitarist Peter Buck is an iPod obsessive. Bassist Mike Mills said of Buck: "[H]e loves the iPod because it gives him a chance to go through thousands of records that he hasn't played for the last 20 years." -- Macworld staff, Monday - September 13, 2004

Posted by sjc at 6:24 PM | Comments (0)

Now hear this

extremeipod.com notes that Adam Curry has created a project called iPodder that combines RSS feeds to synchronize content, including files, with a small application to load that content to your iPod.

URL: http://www.extremeipod.com/print_article/0,2043,a=135067,00.asp

Posted by sjc at 9:27 AM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2004

Back-to-School Blogging

Web logs help news students prepare for campus life.
Chronicle of Higher Education
September 3, 2004
http://www.chronicle.com/infotech/

Free, Web-based tools like Xanga and LiveJournal, which allow users to easily create their own blogs, have attracted a large following among high-school and college students. At institutions like Davidson, enterprising students have used the popularity of the medium to create thriving communities in which incoming freshmen meet to exchange practical questions, personal information, movie recommendations, and jokes.

Administrators say the sites constitute an important new trend: Students who grow up using the Web as a social tool can now ask their peers, instead of college officials, for counseling on the process of preparing for college. The colleges are't about to get rid of their orientation sessions, but officials say freshmen who use the Internet for college planning may become more self-reliant students.

Resources:

This article: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i02/02a03501.htm (Subscription required)

Davidson Student Weblog: http://www.livejournal.com/community/davidsoncollege

LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/

Xanga, the weblog community: http://www.xanga.com/

YahooGroups, supporting student created discussion groups at University of Washington in St. Louis, http://groups.yahoo.com

Posted by sjc at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2004

MT Installation

MovableType 3.11 was installed last week, and we are now in the process of familiarizing ourselves with the way it works.

The basics are here ... now

1. Is syntax important?

   Yes, indeed. If you mistype html syntax in a blog, the whole thing breaks. One example is when I omitted a close-quote in a url. Omitting this close-quote broke the ability to add comments to the blog! Yes, MT allows you to do powerful things and make big mistakes.

   HINT: Each blog entry page has a preview button. Use it wisely!

2. How do I create categories?

   Initially, MT was set up so that I could not create new categories. I found out, however, that I could go to the permissions area and give myself those permissions ... and maybe even give them (or take them away) from other people.

3. How do I import a blog from another blog?

4. How do I manage my style sheet? What do I do if I create a real mess ?

5. What is a template and how can it affect my site ?

Posted by sjc at 7:44 PM | Comments (0)

Huh ? Where are my edits going ?

After fixing the problem with missing quotation marks, I went to view this site. It seemed to have become resistant to updating.. All I could view was the first posting, and the beginning of the second one.

Looking closely, however, I noticed that there were other formatting issues, missing lines between posts, etc. So I began to wonder. What else has changed ?

Can it be the addition of "categories" ? Yes ! If I remove the categories from the postings, the subsequent posting. Somehow the fact that I can create what appear to be global categories breaks the blog for some reason.

Hmm.

Posted by sjc at 3:01 PM | Comments (0)

Into the blogosphere

beginning here, going where(ever), and hopefully keeping track of where we've been.

Posted by sjc at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)