Shortening URLs has become a really popular service in conjunction with Twitter and text messaging growing in popularity. I’ve wanted to play around with URL shorteners for awhile now. To be honest I don’t trust that bit.ly or t.co or is.gd will be around forever and while I can’t guarantee that anything I DIY will - Read More -
I’ve been in search of a decent low cost video streaming solution for a long time now. It doesn’t take long playing with Ustream and Livestream to realize that while the software running those systems is extremely user friendly and convenient, the ads they run are obnoxious and intrusive. The premium subscription for both of those services also totals over $10,000 a year, so I’m not their target market by a long shot. I blogged a bit about this when I was setting up DS106TV and we eventually settled on Justin.TV, forgoing the attractive offline rotation of Livestream because Justin was the only service that had just one single ad at the beginning of the stream and no interruptions thereafter. - Read More -
We’re in the process of redesigning the layout and look of UMW Blogs and one of the features Martha Burtis has added is a stream of the 5 latests posts from the entire network. The plugin is pulling the user’s Gravatar along with the title, author, a character-limited description, and link to read the full post. Gravatars are built into WordPress and have been for awhile and it’s adds quite a bit of personality to the design to feature them in the stream. - Read More -
It’s *hard* to learn this way; in fact, it’s *harder* than going to college. The educational system as it is currently structured is intended to offer a set of short cuts – access to qualified practitioners, creation of custom peer networks, guided and scaffolded practice – for a certain price. The system isn’t (as suggested in Kamenetz’s booklet) about imposing sets of restrictions and making things more expensive. It’s about offering the greatest reach in the shortest time. It allows those willing and able to invest themselves full-time to master the basics of a discipline relatively quickly, so they can obtain employment and begin the real learning they will need to undertake in order to become expert.
Stephen Downes has an excellent point by point dissection of the inaccuracies and fallacies of Anya Kamenetz’s new e-book The Edupunk’s Guide in response to a discussion on the IDC listserv. I urge you to go read that critique right now because it’s incredibly thoughtful and comprehensive. - Read More -
I grew up in a small town called Fairborn, Ohio and we didn’t move to Virginia until 1993. I can remember my only interactions with a computer around that time being the one my dad had at work (he was a minister of a church) and how I loved to play Wheel of Fortune. Having access to programs and information meant getting a physical disk and having the computer read it to load the program. I can also remember us having a Tandy computer at home and being able to load games on their like bowling which used the letters on the screen to animate a ball and pins. - Read More -
One of the greatest geek features of WordPress 3.0 is custom post types. Custom post types takes WordPress from just a simple blog/page CMS to literally anything you want it to be. Instead of drafting a “post” you can create a “video” with it’s own attributes like “actors”, “director”, etc. Combined with some fancy custom field work and you can build a backend system for a website tailored specifically for whatever the content of the site is instead of tailoring the content of your site to fit into a blog or page format. If you’re willing to dive into a new level of geek, hold my hand and come along, it’s not as difficult as it sounds.
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