Blogging in the Classroom
October 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
An NYU professor demanded that her journalism student not blog about class. This brings up some interesting questions and debate. Are conversations and discussions in classrooms private? Initially I would have thought “absolutely not, blogging is 100% OK from the classroom”.
After reading the article, the topic is much more grey. In my classroom, there really aren’t any topics that would be sensitive (I teach Web Programming). However, an ethics class could see students proposing opinions or debating ideas from tenuous positions that would they would either choose to be silent on or be greatly embarrassed if revealed publicly.
With all this in mind, I think NYU has the right policy and that is to allow the faculty member to decide for themselves on a class by class basis.
I will say though, that the specific instance in this article is much more black and white. This professor felt threatened and lashed out inappropriately. It did appear that her stance was softening a bit over time though. Good to see she has potential to learn…
Tags: blog, blogging, classroom, higher education, journalism, nyu
WordPress For iPhone
July 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The WordPress iPhone application has been released. It seems to work well. It supports the following features:
- basic blogging
- tagging
- categories
- password protecting posts
- adding images from phone or camera
- local drafts
A couple of significant restrictions:
- no rich text editing
- can’t add an image to a post adding an image to a post automatically puts it at the end
- no landscape mode
Tags: blog, blogging, iphone, wordpress
Great New Emerging Blogs
May 24, 2006 | 23 Comments
Over the last few months a few friends and colleagues have started their own blogs. Since then each has put out some fantastic articles and I wanted to take an opportunity to summarize why these are great blogs and highlight my favorite three stories from each.
Ken’s TEK
Ken is my manager at Plymouth State University. His history of forward thinking in the higher education technology space has continued to keep PSU out in front of the University System of NH’s other schools as well as many other higher education institutions. Trust me, I’m not just saying this because he’s my boss, when Ken finally gets a full handle on blogging, we’ll look back on his stories as clear indicators on what is what with higher education technology.
Pomp, Circumstance and Gonfalons
In response to a perceived lack of grandeur during the 2004 Plymouth graduation Ken suggested addition of gonfalons which went over amazingly in 2005. They were again used successfully in 2006. He explains the significance of gonfalons in this article.
Google Trends - Veeerrrryyy Interesting
A great use case for another one of Google’s sweet tools.
SunGardHE Summit Snap Shots
Images from our hugely successful trip to Summit 2006.
Ken has a pile of other great articles on identity management, business intelligence, vodcasts, online education, and more.
Changing gears, this is Randy’s second run at OS. His first incarnation was pretty cool, but this new one blows that old one away. I just hope if this one goes away, all the content doesn’t go with it… again… Randy is a DC comic book loving geek through and through. Me being a Marvel guy, this gives me some great insight on how the lesser half of the comic world thinks.
Seremuppety
An amazingly hilarious parody of Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity done with muppets.
Important Survival Information!
One of the …
Superman: A true Hero will fly again! and Superman’s New Look
Randy is far more excited about the new Superman movie than I am. I appreciate his level of enthusiasm, it is what has kept me paying attention to this movie.
Why is there nothing about Infinite Crisis on his blog yet?
Watersedge
Dan Bramer is the newest in this crowd, but shows great potential. Dan grasps new ideas quickly and is able to convert them into entertaining and insightful ways. Currently there is a lot of WebCT info that is finally being documented. I can’t wait to see what he does when he’s tasked with supporting Luminis and Oracle HTMLdb ongoing.
Tracking Flights in 3D with Google Earth
How flippin’ sweet is this?!? Google Earth is such an awesome application. I love when people take advantage of this application as a platform for additional functionality.
WebCT: The 6 day work week
Here’s Dan flexing his capable WebCT muscles. An insightful extract of previously unmined data.
Dan-a-thon: Disclaimer
An amusing defensive stance after being a key component of one of the most fun trips I’ve ever been on in my life. Dan drove our group through Disney at a break-neck pace, allowing us to see more than we would have expected on such a short trip.
I have to throw an honorable mention to his first story though, Ode to the ‘Construction Guy’, go read this it’s funny as hell.
So, that’s my summary. Check these blogs out and I hope you enjoy them half as much as I do. As for you three, if you’re reading this, keep up the good work.
Tags: blogging, blogs, business intelligence, comic books, comics, daniel bramer, firefly, gonfalon, gonfalons, Google Earth, higher education, identity management, jpss whedon, ken kochien, ken's tek, online education, optimal stupidity, randy szabadics, seremuppety, serenity, summit, sungard, sungardhe, superman, vodcasts, watersedge, webct
FeedBurner
May 18, 2006 | 5 Comments
Reading an article about Blog optimization yesterday (I lost the link…), I was pointed at a service called FeedBurner. Basically you install a plugin that takes over managing your RSS feed. So, you’re thinking, “I have an RSS feed, it works, who cares?” Well I thought the same thing and this is what sparked my curiosity.
It turns out FeedBurner rocks!
Before I go to far into why I love this service, first let me say, it is a breeze to install and enable. So, not trying it out is just plain lazy. If you don’t like it, come back and tell me why in the comments, but anyway, it’s easy to install so have at it.
The first of the two main features I like is getting statistics on who’s reading and clicking through to my stuff from feeds. The graphs are pretty and I now have an idea about readership through readers.
The second is the cool stuff they can add to the bottom of articles in feeds. Open up your reader and look at my feed. Along the bottom are some links like “Add a Comment”, “Email This”, “Digg This!”, etc. You can have FeedBurner add all kinds of sweet stuff to your articles, these are called FeedFlares.
My final comment on the service is that the overall style of the interface they use is awesome. Their help text is personable and entertaining while pointing useful things out and giving great help.
Tags: aggregate, blog, blogging, feed, feed burner, feedburner, feedflare, plugin, rss, wordpress
Great Stats
March 23, 2006 | 1 Comment
It turns out I love stats. I’m sometimes amazed at how many different statistics I poke at on a regular basis.
Inside of Wordpress I use the phenomenal bsuite. Basically this keeps track of my individual story reads, incoming search terms, as well as tagging my posts and building related story references at the bottom of each post. If you run Wordpress, get bsuite, it rules.
There are more general web like stats that are often needed. For example, user browser, screen resolution, country of origin, time of day traffic, broken links, adword conversion, etc. These things are all handled superbly by Google Analytics.
Sometimes however, I want to compare my overall stance with other blogs on the net. For this I (like most) turn to Technorati. They do a great job of ranking known blogs on the internet both in general and based on certain tags or keywords. It’s good to know where you stand, but even better to have others to compare against.
Finally, my favorite site of all: Alexa. Alexa is an Amazon property which ranks the top few million websites. For the top 100,000, they provide detailed traffic analysis and graphs. While working for a major internet company, I became very familiar with Alexa as a daily tool to measure our success against our competition. Especially in internet advertising, traffic is important.
Ken recently pointed me at Pub Sub as another site to check out stats on my blog, but overall I find many of the numbers here questionable. Compare some blogs you are familiar with and I think you’ll see my complaints clearly.
If anyone has any other great stats packages or web services they know and follow, let me know. I’m always looking to feed this strange addiction.
Tags: advertising, adwords, alexa, blog, blogging, bsuite, google, google analytics, internet advertising, plugin, plugins, pubsub, statistics, technorati, web, web development, web statistics, wordpress
Import Remote RSS in WordPress
March 7, 2006 | 13 Comments
The delivered WordPress import utility for RSS is a little annoying in that it requires you to provide a file. Who actually downloads a copy of an RSS feed to their desktop?
Anyway, when we began alpha testing WordPress MU for deployment at Plymouth State, we realized we needed a version of the importer that would allow a user to simply give a URL of their RSS and have it work.
This is simply a modification of the existing RSS importer, a majority of the code is outwardly taken from that. This will work for both WordPress and WordPress MU.
- Download this PHP file.
- Drop it in your wp-admin/import/ directory.
- Go to the Import link in your admin interface.
- Celebrate!
Please use this plugin at your own risk, no warranties or guarantees are implied with usage!
Tags: blog, blogging, importer, plugin, plugins, rss, rss importer, wordpress, wordpress mu
Rocketboom, A Video Blog Worth Watching
December 15, 2005 | 9 Comments
A while ago Ken got excited about the prospect of vodcasting or vlogging or video blogging. He even tried one of his own (more in parody than earnest).
Yesterday he introduced me to Rocketboom which is an example of this technology. Finally I have a reason to be interested in video blogging. Amanda Congdon deliveres this technology heavy ultra modern vlog daily. Her delivery and expressiveness is quite engaging. She provides what I’d consider a video version of the types of things you may find daily on Digg or Slashdot.
Although, I’m pretty sure not everyone could pull this off. Certainly the fact that Amanda is easy to look at adds to the appeal…
Tags: amanda congdon, blog, blogging, digg, Newsy Goodness, rocketboom, slashdot, technology, video, video blog, vlog, vlogging, vodcast, vodcasting