lanrikun

I will share a URL down the road as right now the students have not even gone to their first class, so it is a bunch of blank blogs. What is interesting is their college's tech staff did figure a way (through some custom Java programming) to have an admin tool generate new blogs via manipulating the mySQL database, avoiding the chore of manual MT blog creation, and something about authenticating against their LDAP

Also, this likely will not happen again. the ePortfolio is on a new server, and we had neglected to place a robots exclusion rule on the web site-- I really do not want Google crawling student and faculty eportfolios, so we are excluding all robots until someone thinks of a reason not to worry about this (and I am questioning about how well robots obey the rules)

Thanks to the great folks at UNITEC I will have this server as not only home for blogging this experience, but also hosting local versions of software running here, including Feed2JS, the Maricopa ePortfolio, the MLX, and more. This should be popping up in the next 6-9 weeks

This got me thinking a bit around social tagging and horizontal classification (or “folksonomies”, if your stomach is strong enough). When someone chooses to use a particular tag to describe a resource, that decision is typically made spontaneously, with little or no consideration behind it (this is more true of flickr than del.icio.us). The factors that influence this decision reflect what the resource being tagged means to the individual tagging i

What we have added new to this MLX feature, is that to add an item to a special collection, you no longer have to provide a cryptic abbreviation code- we have made options for special collections to be "publicly" visible when packages are created, and adding an MLX item to a special collection is now just a click of a check box

One content chunk I have already re-used from another site is an 8-part illustrated authoring guide- rather than a series of posts or static HTML, I have a PHP template and a collage of content files, making it easy to deploy for different blog sites. It was rather critical for this group of new bloggers to provide concise directions for authoring, and what you see is an evoluation of our BlogShop

Our pdf writer pdfMachine converts a print stream from an application directly into a PDF. Once you have installed the pdf writer, open your document that you want to convert, then click “print”, select the “Broadgun pdfMachine printer” and that’s it

The MLX Great Package Race ended with a flurry, with about 100 new packages flooding in the last 36 hours. On one hand this is good as we now have more than 900 items inside the warehouse, but I am hoping to get out of the incentive program as it really should not be necessary. Fortunately, some of my late, just before midnight posters were watching the scoreboard, as Lori and Laura both pointed to some problems in my database query logic (the perils of date/time comparisons）.

The cogdog has been busy, and hopes to be back barking soon. As a reprieve of insane early heat and sun in Phoenix (97 in late March is a bit much, and early), we have enjoyed a rare outbreak of weather with a few days of major, very much needed rain. Up here in my mountain escape, we got more than 2 inches in 3 days, almost more than we have received since January 2004

Months of pleading, cajoling, nagging our folks to contribute to the Maricopa Learning eXchange produced a fair stream of new items, but the 2 days prior to the close of our "Great Package Race" is when most of the action takes place. This is where we tabulate for a 6 month period how many MLX items each of our colleges have sent as well as a list of the top individual contributers

Our office has sponsored institutional registration, so that any faculty, staff, or student in our system can register for free to attend the conference. Last year, we sent more than 100 people, so the fur was raised on my back when I got word that only 31 had signed up (and 1/3 were those in my online class where it was required). So I added a new tool to my repertoire of getting people to participate in our activities- "shaming by email". It actually worked

I have to say it worked well. I got about 15 questions answered thoughtfully by Brian in about an hour of time. I was able to save the transcript from the session, and pretty much copy paste it into Word, edit it down, and Voila! a draft, and a happy editor

On the flip side, our group of Blackboard technical leaders totally ignored my suggestion to share student/faculty support materials in the MLX. I even cobbled together a sample special collection of ones we already have. Silence. They continue to manage documents by sending e-mail attachments. I have decided to call this phenomena "Email Attachment Disorder", where the symptoms include a complete reliance on pushing out fat attachments that have no capacity to be searched, archived, or readily recovered in any systematic way

Anyhow, our work goes on. Though we gripe, we will not give up, and we will just wait for people to wake up and join this century. Despite the griping, we do get word the MLX items are getting use, re-use, and awareness. It is challenging because the lead technology people we work with are not even getting close to an understanding of new ways of managing content, RSS is a foreign word, etc

You cannot exactly see it from the agenda, but part of the workshop activities in the afternoon involves the attendees developing sharing their teaching lessons that involve themes of Civic Responsibility, and then they will be adding these to the MLX to create a sharable library of resources

However, the real cool stuff will be when the students actually start their writing. From a project long ago (1996) when we hand rolled perl base discussion forums for these kinds of courses, the students are very conversant and thoughtful writers