Via Weblogs in Higher Ed comes this terrific tutorial on using Bloglines: betterdays » Blog Archive » Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday) This includes many screenshots, and covers how to set up a Bloglines account, how to subscribe to feeds by pasting in the RSS/Atom feed, by pasting in the site URL, subscribing to blogspot/xanga/livejournal blogs, how to subscribe to feedster RSS feeds, Flickr feeds, news sites or pretty much anything that has an RSS feed. Quick subscription via Bloglines bookmarklets are also demonstrated. I’ve tried explaing Bloglines and RSS to people before. Right now, I think this guide is the best place to send people first.

Slashdot is reporting on Room-Temperature, Small-Scale Fusion at UCLA. Update – Wired has picked up the story

One of my favourite blogs, CogDogBlog, has moved over to WordPress. In describing the migration, Alan Levine said: Shazam! That was too friggin easy. The power, the interface, and the features I am just scraping at are exciting, almost like discovering blogging anew. I should have done this long ago! Yep – that sums up my experience moving over to WordPress a while back. And I’ve found that once you get used to the PHP based templates, WP is just as tweakable as MT, and a whole lot more hackable. Welcome aboard, Alan – I’m sure you’ll have a great experience.

MLBlogs : Official Affiliate : Unofficial Opinions Now you can follow along the boys of summer by reading about them in the blogs of summer. I haven’t seen it linked from the main Major League Ball page, but Major League Ball has set up a blogging site for baseball fans, supported by SixApart. From what I’ve seen, it looks like a MLB branded version of TypePad, including some customized templates so that fans can identify with their favourite teams. So far, it looks like the blogs are mostly MLB reporters, but there are some other standouts including a professional groundskeeper, a ball collector, and even Tommy LaSorda is blogging (with comments on – now there’s courage!) I can’t think of a better community of interest than baseball fans. If there’s one thing that baseball fans love more than watching baseball, … Continue reading »

There are a few writers in the ed-tech world that I can count on for writing something that just gets my brain in a resonating hum, and David Wiley has done it again::iterating toward openness – Freire, the Matrix, and Scalability To be honest, I suppose the resonance I found in this post is second hand, since it describes David’s resonance with a presentation recently at AERA in Montreal. The presenter, who goes unnamed but I would sure like to know who it was: connected Freire’s ideas of oppression and the transparency of systems of control to the Matrix, and then went on to analogize the work we educators are called to do with unplugging people from the Matrix. Wow – Freire and the Matrix together at last. This sounds like a good combination to me. The heart of Freire’s … Continue reading »

Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia::I’ve seen links to this in a few places, and I just wanted to do my part to increasing the page rank for when someone Googles for “Adobe Macromedia acquisition“. Call it Google-bombing if you will – I just can’t resist someone who translates Adobe’s corporate double-speak about why they acquired Macromedia into: Dude, we just bought the only significant competitor to several of our flagship applications. We didn’t buy Macromedia, we bought the market. Read for yourself – it just gets better!

When I was a youth, we would hang out at the mall. Today’s youth are spending their time in a social venue that many parents and teachers may be unaware of, so I’m really glad to see that Alec Couros and Dan Schellenberg have put together a terrific compendium of CyberBullying Resources (worth bookmarking). Alec has also made a cyberbullying presentation available online in Keynote, PowerPoint and PDF formats.

drupal.org | Community plumbing After six months of development, the Drupal team is proud to announce the Drupal 4.6.0 release! Just in time for the ID-COP site development – the timing couldn’t be better.

I’m sitting in a lecture about inclusion in schools (more on that later, I hope) but thanks to the wonder of wireless I’ve just been reading Will’s post on Boring Content, Boring Schools. I’m glad he focuses on a specific kind of boredom that is a problem. The bigger sense here, for me at least, is the frustration that we continue to do what we’ve done for the last 100 years, deliver the curriculum we’ve been handed, the one that was written long before her teacher even met Tess. The one developed not to turn Tess into a lifelong learner but to insure that she passes the test. The one that says that her interests take a back seat to the interests of the state. I’m not saying there aren’t skills she needs to learn, but to be honest, I … Continue reading »

I was in Saskatoon today, and had a chance to drop in on Rick Schwier to talk over a few projects and ideas. While we were at it, I turned on my iRiver to record another Rob and Rick podcast. This was recorded straight into the built-in mic on the iRiver with no post production, but the sound quality is pretty decent! Without further delay – StigmergicWeb podcast # 9 (another Rob and Rick show). We spent a lot of time talking about academic publishing, academic blogging and how they fit together (short summary – we’re not sure if they do yet). Show references: id-cop.ca Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology Stephen Downes David Wiley Alec Couros D’Arcy Norman Postscript – about 5 minutes after we finished the show, Rick’s brand spankin’ new Mac G5 showed up. Sweet!