I broke down this past weekend and bought a cheap MP3 player ($70 Canadian for 128MB flash based player which doubles as a USB drive), mainly to listen to all the podcasts I’ve been listening to. This has made me a much more productive person, since I can now walk around the house while listening to my daily dose of 2 hours of podcasts. But I actually found a use today that justifies the expense as a teaching tool. In my grade 11 biology classes, we were talking about bioaccumulation and bioamplification of pollutants. I had heard a short report on CBC Radio‘s Quirks and Quarks about chemicals that were found in the fatty tissue of polar bears, and mentioned it briefly in class. I found that the report I had heard, along with the past few seasons of Q … Continue reading »

**Argggghhhh** was a vague approximation of the thought going through my brain earlier today. We had some problems on the server where MovableType serves as the CMS that runs the web sites for the classes I teach. When I tried to add a new post for an assignment, it just gave me a series of errors in the scripts. I can only assume this means that the script files were corrupted, or even worse that the data files have become corrupted! In the former case, a reinstall will probably fix the problem. In the latter case, I can only hope there is a good set of all my work on the backup. I’m going to assume for now that the former — that is, corruption of the script files — is the cause. This leads me to the question of … Continue reading »

Apple has just unveiled its newest iPod, the iPod Photo. Santa, if you are reading this blog, forget everything else on my list (except for the new flat-screen iMac!) UPDATE – I just saw that Darcy Norman is also lusting in his heart for the photo iPod, but he also has a link leading to a post on reBeLog quoting a press release from Apple officially announcing that the iTunes Music Store will open in Canada sometime in November. So long, Napster!

I am just putting the finishing touches on my Writing HTML presentation that I will be using in a workshop this evening with some Canada World Youth volunteers who are in North Battleford for a couple of months. I am using Eric Meyer’s brilliant S5 presentation system. I am impressed not only by its power and portability, but for its utter simplicity; great looking presentation can be prepared using only text editing software! UPDATE – the workshop seemed to go well, and several students were intrigued by the presentation system. It provides a good motivation for them to learn HTML and CSS, so I promised that I would review it with some of them once we have finished those topics (more workshops on Oct. 20 and Oct. 27). I consider the presentation as a work in progress, and there are … Continue reading »

Perhaps you first came to know of this by sense a disturbance in the force. I’m not sure what is happening, but slashdot appears to be down (Server Error 503 – Service Not Available). This leads to the dilemma of where one should post the news, since normally this sort of outage is newsworthy on slashdot. And I realize the futility in putting a link to a website that appears to be down. Maybe all the traffic from here will overload their server, resulting in what I like to call the stigmergicweb effect. ;^) UPDATE: They are back up, and the universe is in balance once again!

Wow! Eric Meyer has created a new way of putting together slide presentations. Or maybe I should say that he has put together a way of putting together presentations using the well established technologies of XHTML, CSS and Javascript. This is timely news as I am putting together a slide show to introduce a workshop later this week. I have two basic criticisms of most slide presentation systems. First is the need to have an overly elaborate tool in order to create a simple slide show. Powerpoint is far too much tool for at least 90% of the users (according to what I’ve seen). This relates to my second criticism, which is that presenters often tend to focus on creating a slick presentation rather than an effective one. As the saying goes, power corrupts but powerpoint corrupts absolutely! But with … Continue reading »

I have been reading quite a few blogs talking about podcasting in the past 2 weeks. Maybe its just the meme-of-the-month, but I enjoy listening to bloggers even more than reading them — the social presence is just so much greater when I can hear someone. Besides, now that blogging is apparently getting mainstream attention from the New York Times, I need something more bleeding edge to maintain my geek status. If you haven’t heard of podcasting, Dave Winer sums it up nicely on the Trade Secrets blog (Trade Secrets is the Dave’s collaborative podcast with Adam Curry): Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately. Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading … Continue reading »

In his recent article/posting entitled How Technology Will Destroy Schools, David Wiley discusses the obselence of schools in an age of instant access to any information. Admittedly, we aren’t there yet, but I think that we are getting closer. In some parts of the world, for some people, and for the right kind of information, instant access to information is already a reality. I agree with David on his analysis of the nature of the conflict: I think it has something to do with ingrained notions of what consitutes “academic subjects” and what constitutes “cheating.” In coming years this debate over the role of augmenting technologies will heat up significantly. I am already starting to feel like much of what I am teaching is obsolete and really unnecessary for a student who has a decent speed internet connection and a … Continue reading »

Abbot and Costello at the Computer Store :: Ha – this one gave me a good morning chuckle when I dearly needed it.