http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/267980257/

For those of you who have tried to access something on edtechpost over the last few days but have got error messages, my sincere apologies, but oh what a week I’ve had. All the more frustrating because of the number of posts I’ve wanted to write, which I will return to shortly, but before that, a brief digression…

Complaining about web hosts is dull, but for the record, I have left Canada web hosting (who also operate the site Synergy web services) because of the absolutely atrocious service I have suffered at their hands. The irony is that I had made the decision to leave about a month ago after suffering through yet another technology change on their part, one that not only degraded the services the offered, but in the process of the change over wiped out 2 weeks of blog entries. (For this I was told it was “my fault”.)

Unfortunately, I did not make the site live on the new host quickly enough, and last weekend the sys admins at Canada web hosting felt they were justified in taking down everything in my home directory because of one apparently mis-behaving PMwiki script. When I got back from being away, I promptly called them, apologized for any difficulty with that script and assured them that they could remove it from the server. 3 days passed (and over 6 hours of being on hold with their help desk) and they never did remove the scripts. And never returned any calls. The only solution they offered me was a backup of my database (which took 4 days to happen). The site still remains totally unavailable to web traffic, even for simple static HTML pages. No discussion, no attempt to problem solve. No refund (they basically are claiming as theirs the last 4 months of payments on my hosting contract). I never even got to talk to anyone who had a clue of why the service had been yanked or how to restore it - their 1st level call centre folks had neither technical ability nor access, and they refused to pass me through to the “senior systems administrators” who had mysteriously made this judgement.

Live and learn, I guess. I chose them because they were a B.C.-based company who offered what seemed to be at the time an inexpensive hosting solution for my blog and other web apps. And really, I should have jumped ship a long time ago. Having done it now, I realize it is not that hard to do and wouldn’t have put it off nearly this long. The other lesson - to not rely on any hosting companies backup solution for my sites, because they still own the backup. My site is my site, and even if you are going to kick me off your server, you have no right to keep it hostage for 5 days. End of rant. Sorry. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming… - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/267980256/

http://www.webducate.net/dragster.php

The most successful thing I think I’ve ever published on this blog was the simple “matrix of blog uses in education” that I posted in 2003. It has been translated numerous times and I see it referred to lots of place on the web. It’s always been really gratifying to see the novel ways people re-used it. About 2 years ago I wrote about one of the re-uses that really tickled my fancy, a Flash-based version that allowed users to drag and drop different “uses” onto a matrix. It seemed like a really useful tool for facilitating discussion.

I also mused at the time to its creator, Tony Lowe, how my ultimate goal had been some sort of wiki-like implementation of the “matrix” - I think the various dimensions of use have held up pretty well, but 5 years later I can think of a whole host of new uses to add, and there are likely more that others could add which I have never imagined.

So you can imagine my real delight when an email showed up from Tony that he had built a new version that allowed just this! Now, instead of just dragging the pre-existing set of uses onto the matrix, multiple users can define new ones and position these too. Very cool.

But what is ultimately far more important is that Tony has done this within a new service that he has developed call Dragster.  Dragster is a web-based authoring tool for creating different Flash-based drag-and-drop exercises. While it does not remove all the effort in creating these (check out some of the anatmoy examples to see how complex they can get), compared to the alternative, doing this from scratch in Flash, Drgaster offers a fairly simple to use (and relatively inexpensive, at about $100/year) way to quickly author these types of Flash animations which can often run into the $1000s of dollars when done on their own. The resulting animations can be downloaded and used in any environment you choose.

Am I shill for writing up this app because someone re-used some of my content? Or is this instead an example of a really smart and authentic “marketing 2.0″ effort, that tries to add value to the ongoing blog conversation and entice bloggers to try products by actually re-using and re-mixing their open content? I’ll let you be the judge. All I can say is, anyone else wants to take something I’ve created and build on it, I will certainly give you some of my precious attention. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/268488026/

http://blip.tv/file/796357

This post has been a while in the making (recent outtages notwithstanding) so you may already have followed Brian’s exhortations and viewed the video of this talk. But if not, do so. I promise you, it is worth it.

I “met” Gardner online through Brian and for a few years followed his writings and explorations in teaching through his blog. Oddly (for it seems a bit odd to me) I feel like we started to get to know each other a little bit better in twitter, and indeed Gardner’s open letter to me when I left twitter for a few months played no small part in bringing me back. And as with so many people I’ve been fortunate to connect with online, I hoped we could meet. When I found out he was coming to do a talk at UBC in March, I knew I had to make the trek.

I was not disappointed. Gardner’s talk literally transported me back to my own origins with computing and the web, fresh from a Graduate degree in Critical and Cultural Theory, and helped me remember why I chose to do what I do. Using poetry as a way to understand computing actually goes past my original understanding of computers as “symbolic shifting devices.” As I think Gardner persuasively argues, computing/poetry goes beyond simply mapping one thing to another, that the very act of juxtaposing which they enable/use so well helps bring to light “mappingness,” awareness of the possibility of creating new meaning and understanding through juxtaposing disparate things/words/ideas.

But even if “computing as poetry” doesn’t resonate for you, I think what is even more significant is that Gardner is asking you to choose the metaphor you use to understand computing, the metaphor you are choosing to understand how you are using computing in learning (because metaphors you use, yes you do). I do not hear him arguing that computing must be understood as poetry, but instead, that using poetry as a metaphor for computing can propel us to higher and better uses of computers, especially as regards their uses in learning.

This anti-determinism really resonates with me - it is not that using “computational thinking” or other metaphors to describe computing is “wrong,” but do they result in us then building/adopting/modifying/using computers and technology in the ways that we want? The ways we talk about and conceptualize what we are doing have a profound effect on what we then do, and I see Gardner’s talk as a clarion call to all of us in the profession to become conscious of the metaphors we are using to think about computing and how these effect the results, and to choose ones which describe the highest conception of what could be. For as Gardner had me quote from Robert Frost during the talk:

Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deeper and deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be judged for whether any original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost; be it in art, politics, school, church, business, love, or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career. Strongly spent is synonymous with kept.

But don’t rely on my interpretation (all misinterpretations herein are obviously my own) - go listen for yourself, and hopefully be transformed. I know for me, it was well worth the effort, that it is one of those events that I will keep coming back to, going over, savouring and turning around in my head to tease out ever more flavour. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/270237688/

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/CMS+Conversion+Tools

One of my main gigs is running a repository service to help faculty here in BC share online course content. As I have likely lamented far too many times, the bane of my existence is the uneven support for content interoperability across the various course management systems. At last count we had at least 6 flavours in the province in which ideally the content work, and certainly would love it if it’d work with others even. So while I personally believe CMS are increasingly bankrupt as a model for online education and continue to work with others to demonstrate new ways of teaching and learning online, my reality is that the content I am asked to help share is almost exclusively CMS-based, and moreover built directly inside the CMS, thus somewhat reliant on the vendors to provide easy and open ways for getting it out. Yeah right.

We come at this issue from many different directions trying to improve it. We built a “best practice” wiki to encourage people in the province to share their tricks and tips on how to work with CMS and still get content out “cleanly.” We are looking at some content “convertors” as part of the repository framework to clean up some of the exports into better formats (a dicey proposition at best). We’re experimenting with a “harvestor” that will grab CMS content not through the API but by spidering course sites.

Along these lines, I have put together this wiki page to collect together whatever CMS content export/conversion tools I can find, mostly for the CMS flavours at play in the province, but not totally limited to.

And I’d like to invite you to play. There are multiple ways to contribute to this - if you have a wikispaces account, I will gladly add you to the site. If instead you are a del.icio.us user, simply tag any resource you think appropriate with “cms_migration” (or even just send it my way with the “for:nessman” tag). Am I duplicating effort here? Please tell me if you know of another good collection of CMS conversion tools. I have no need to re-invent the wheel here, just trying to give people as many options as possible. Please also tell me if I am barking up any wrong trees with my assessment of what CMS already work well (or not) with each other - I get sporadic access to any of these, and the situation often changes with versions etc. If you can think of a better way to do this, I’m all ears for that too. - SWL