Monthly Archive for March, 2007

http://www.rheostatics.ca/#final

About 2 weeks ago I was driving along with the radio tuned to CBC, listening to an awesome cover of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere. Now that tune has always been a favourite Canadian classic, and from the voice singing the harmonies, even before the announcer came back on, I knew right away it was the Rheostatics, one of my all time favourite Canadian acts (as it turned out, accompanying another old time favourite, The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir). I had it cranked all the way up, and as the song ended the announcer came on to say we’d be hearing lots more Rheostatics leading up to their final concert, March 30, at Massey Hall.

I was gutshot, almost drove off the road. I mean, it’s not necessarily a surprise when I thought about it, they are all a couple of years older than me, all have families now, and have been making music and touring for over 20 years now. But it broke my heart - they were a young band with a cult album when I first started to go see them at shows in London, Ontario during my undergrad days, and I’ve probably seen them 8 times over the years. Each show was magic; the Rheostatics are one of those bands that, while they might not have the hugest fan base, have an extremely dedicated one, and live shows were like a communion. I will really miss them.

For your listening pleasure, if you’ve never heard them, a few excerpts of some of my favourite Rheos’ tunes

• Christopher
• Record Body Count
• Legal Age Life at Variety Store

http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/i-overview/

Via a post by Michael Roy at the Wesleyan Academic Commons site comes mention of this interesting project that I thought for sure would get a reaction in the edublogging crowd, both for the topic and for its format.

The topic - “How do institutions–social, civic, educational–transform in response to and in order to promote new kinds of learning in the information age?” Rather than take a straight-ahead run at more conventional notions of ‘institutions’ I think they helpfully start by modifying the usual definition towards asking the question “What would it mean to start with a definition that emphasized social networks and the processes of creating those networks?”

The format - apparently a new Wordpress blogging plugin (code name Comment Press) which allows commenters to add feedback on a paragraph by paragraph-basis in a form that resembles a conversational thread. Well worth the read. - SWL

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nessman/430434707/

So a little more on Trailfire - I mentioned in the first post that you can set it to see ‘marks’ on any page that others have added to their own trails. I have that setting turned on, and got this pleasant surprise while in Google Reader this morning - someone had added a mark to this page with all of the Google Reader hotkeys in it, so now with a simple mouse over I get annotated help on this page. While I am not totally thrilled with where Trailfire places the tiny icons on the page indicating that a mark already exists (they sometimes obscure the content) the potential for adding in-context help to any web page or application, unfacilitated by the page owner themselves, seems quite useful, and certainly makes my learning the Google Reader hotkeys all that easier. - SWL

P.S. - Alan, thanks again for the Muntandina tracks from Magnatune; bringing a huge ray of sunshine to a grey Wet Coast day.

http://trailfire.com/

I am kind of surprised to not have seen this come through my aggregator yet as it’s the kind of thing I thought the connectivist and open education crowd would be quite excited about. Maybe I just missed it, or maybe that just shows how clued out I am. Anyways, when I stumbled on this app the other day it was quite exciting as it’s something I’ve been seeking for a while.

Trailfire is a Firefox extension which allows you to easily create ‘trails’ through the web. ‘Trails’ are in essence sequences of webpages which can be annotated and can be shared with others. For instance, here’s is a trail I just created showing some of the applications I’ve found for creating trails online (how recursive!). Here’s another example, a trail on ‘elearning’ by someone called Ideanoth, and here’s another someone built to take you through learning CSS.

Each node in a trail, called a mark (and really just equivalent to a unique URL) can also receive comments from other users, so you can start to build up a bit of a threaded discussion around the nodes in a trail, and in addition, you can set the trailfire extension to show you any other marks from other users that have been set against any webpage. So all of a sudden, you can start to see how a specific resource can show up in multiple frames of reference.

Have a look; I think you could find fault with the interface and parts of the implementation, but I know the idea of being able to model how I’ve learned something by laying down trails that can then serve as the basis both for discussion and as starting templates for others’ trails really appeals to me as a way to ‘teach’ on the open web. - SWL

http://www.letelizabethspeak.ca/

Apologies for the non-edtech topic, but this is the only soapbox I have, and this is an issue that matters to me.

I strongly urge any Canadian readers, regardless of political affiliation, to visit the URL above and sign the petition urging the major Canadian TV networks to include the leader of the federal Green Party in the next leaders debate.

While we don’t yet know the date of the next election, everyone knows its going to happen at some not-too-distant point, and at a time when the major political parties in Canada are making increasing political hay out of environmental issues (yet doing little to address them) it is unconscionable that the leader of the Green Party be excluded from future debates.

Call me retrograde, call me old school, call me a neanderthal, I don’t care; I have not given up on either the concept or the practice of a Canadian federal government, as frustrating and ineffective as it can be, nor do I believe there is currently any other forum for the 4 leaders to engage that receives as much attention as the national televised debates. So please, lend your name to a more inclusive debate. - SWL

http://30boxes.com/boxed

30boxed is a handy little service - give it a feed (why, give it multiple feeds!), and it will place all the items on a calendar. Say, for instance, if you wanted a simple way to visually track all of your students’ blog postings against a single calendar… - SWL

(Avast, me hearties, this is the last of the pirate postings. Just be glad they weren’t podcasts

So the other ‘mashups’ itch I’ve been wanting to scratch recently revolves around events listings, specifically a list of ed tech conferences that’s been around for a few years. Now before ye raise the topsails and give chase, hear me out - the landlubber who created and maintains this list every year is to be much praised, as I have done so in the past, as are the folks at CIDER for posting it as HTML.

But in this age of participatory media and user generated content, does it make any sense for lists like these to get created and maintained by one person, in a Word document?

Aye, you say, but it was probably the easiest tool at hand for what was a selfless act of giving back to the community. Right you are; but howseabout I shows ya how to take this page, database-enable it and allow others to add to new events to it in about 5 minutes with free, easy-to-use web-based tools. Come aboard all ye who’s coming aboard… Continue reading ‘Heave ho, scallywags, there’s events listings o’er thar to liberate’

Ahoy mateys, so that “moose fever” - turned into pneumonia for me! On top of which my entire family got sick too. But we’re finally over that now, so time to break the silence and set sail on the seas of end-user mashups.

As much as I felt some small discouragement with the NV mashups workshop because of certain technologies blowing up during the session and us not sticking with a more hands-on format, I have not given up on the dream of exploring mashups for non-programmers and have continued on, scratching a few of my personal itches.

Continue reading ‘Back on my feet and ready to sail the seas of trapped information, ya scurvy dogs!’