Monthly Archive for February, 2006

http://www.educateinnovate.com/

Got an email today from an old blogosphere pal, Greg Ritter, who had gone AWOL back in 2004, that he has started blogging again. Greg, the Associate Director of Research & Development at Blackboard, is part of a new initiative there to start blogging. (I can almost sense the rotten tomatoes flying at the back of my head right now - one nice thing about having comments broken for now is that the knee jerk reactions can happen elesewhere.) Anyways, I plan to add it to my aggregator for now and will reserve judgement until there’s more to judge. Who knows, you might be surprised - I have faith that Greg gets this stuff enough that he can have a positive influence and maybe create an authentic forum for exchange with that company. - SWL

Out of fear that I will have 100 years of bad luck, here’s my response to D’Arcy’s tagging me:

Four jobs I’ve had
- dishwasher
- burger flipper
- knowledge carpenter
- strawberry picker (not in this order!)

Four movies I can (and do) watch over and over
- Taxi Driver
- Cool Hand Luke
- Slapshot
- My side of the Mountain

Four places I’ve lived
- Montreal, Quebec
- London, Ontario
- Cardiff, Wales
- Banff, Alberta

Four TV shows I(’ve) love(d)
- James Burke’s Connections
- Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective
- Made In Britain (Tim Roth’s first part)
- reGenesis (oh please bring it back!)

Four places I’ve vacationed
- the canyons of Utah
- the mountains of Wales
- Prague
- Australia

Four of my favorite dishes
- Pad Thai (almost anywhere, just love the stuff)
- the medallions of Buffalo tenderloin at the Banff Springs
- my Mum’s roast beef and yorkshire pudding
- my wife’s mac and cheese

Four sites I visit daily
- bloglines
- google
- umm, is there anywhere else?

Four places I would rather be right now
- right here
- right now
- the forest
- the ocean

Four books (or series) I love
- Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle (though I actually think Cryptonomicon said it better, in less words)
- anything by Richard Powers, but especially The Goldbug Variations (and Gain!)
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
- Don Delillo, White Noise

Four video games I can (and do or did) play over and over
- never really played video game except for an intense period of blowing things up in Doom

Four bloggers I am tagging
- NOT! This dies here.

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm

Thanks to Alan and John Arle for pointing to this presentation by Dr. Kathy D. Munoz and Joan Van Duzer of Humboldt State University which provides some comparative data of a course delivered through both Moodle and Blackboard. Student satisfaction and performance are fairly similar between the two environments, with a slight preference for Moodle, and the real differences seem to come out when the instructor/developer satisfaction is taken into account too. While Blackboard is hailed for the strength of its gradebook, it’s built-in survey tool and for seeming easier off the mark to beginners, the presentation then lists a whole host of advantages and satisfactions that emerged over time with Moodle. - SWL

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/

Plenty good reads in the latest Ariadne magazine, the 10th anniversary edition, including pieces by Lorcan Dempsey and Clifford Lynch. Although Ariadne aims to be a “web magazine for information professionals in archives, libraries and museums” I always find at least a couple of articles directly relating to (if not directly referring to) issues in elearning. - SWL

http://www.desire2learn.com/news/newsdetails_21.asp

An announcement from the CLOE project that they have adopted Desire2Learn as their repository technology. CLOE is significant as a Canadian project for early on investigating different models of ‘exchange’ to motivate faculty and institutions to participate in sharing networks. Will be interesting to see this once it has been deployed. - SWL

Like Alan, I have fairly low expectations of the shwag you get at most conferences, but props (and a link, so my tarrif paid in full) to webnames.ca for one of the best giveaways yet - a nalgene bottle (yeah, I know, if I was really cool I would have a photo embedded here of the nalgene bottle, but you do know what one looks like, right?). There are water fountains everywhere, and after the night last night, what a godsend! - SWL

What can I say, even if I get nothing from the enitre conference, which seems extremely unlikely, having dinner last night with D’Arcy and Alan at Brian and Keira’s place (and making a new friend) has made the trip more than worthwhile.

The festivites continued on into this morning (literally) as Alan, Brian, D’Arcy and I hosted a bit of an open discussion on ‘blogs and education’ (check Brian’s blog for the resulting wiki and likely a recording too). In honor of the edubloggers hootenany I performed a little live set of blogging ejaculatives - you can hear El Guapo’s revenge on the 3 amigos at a file I hosted on my ELGG site (which I was going to discuss but the discussion had so much steam there ended up being no time or need to!). Enjoy (or cringe as the case may be). - SWL

http://bceln.blogspot.com/2006/01/
about-electronic-brainstorm-wild-ideas_31.html

Kudos to the BC Electronic Library Network for trying the interesting experiment of using Blogger as a mechanism to facilitate collectively brainstorming by their members. As I understand the model, staff from the participating partner libraries are invited to either comment on posts, or log into Blogger using accounts that ELN has set up for them that can make new posts on the main brainstorming blog, all of which will be fed into the larger Strategic Planning process. Nice model for a consortia to use as it keeps it open and public but hopefully still provides some autonomy and flow. Will be interesting to see how it works, and at the very least may be a step in exposing some additional librarians to the technology (not that most of them need this, we are lucky to have an amazingly sophisticated bunch in our province.) - SWL