This is my first post in WordPress and I think that it will take some time getting used to it. My previous Drupal installation was very good, but a bit of overkill for a plain blogging site. The spammers were getting pretty bad too. During the past three days I was getting three comment spam messages on the server every minute. James Farmer has told me that akismet should solve any comment spam issues in WP, so I’ll have to check it out.
I’ve also reconfigured my SuprGlu public aggregator to reflect more learning feeds since Stephen has announced his hiatus and I know that Jay is trying to set up something to replace Stephen’s Edu_RSS.
For anyone using an RSS feedreader, you may have to resubscribe to the new feeds. They’re shown on the top right of the page. It will take some time to work out any bugs on this site, so please bear with me.
Moving to WordPress
On Monday, March 6th, I’m moving this website and blog to a new WordPress installation. The URL will remain the same.
There will be a different look and structure, but all of the previous posts will be carried over and permalinks will work. I’ve been testing it this week with Tantramar Interactive and everything seems to work fine. We even think that the RSS feeds will continue to work, but just in case – you may lose this blog in your aggregator. If you subscribe to my blog feed (jarche.com/blog/1/feed) you might have some difficulties, though we are re-pointing these feeds. If you subscribe to the main feed (jarche.com/rss.xml) you should be OK. There will be only one main feed on the new site, plus a comment feed (something new for me).
I will also be closing off comments as of Monday morning, so that we can transfer all of the data.
This is post #700 and after two years I figure that it’s time for a change. I’ll try to keep these transfers down to every two years ;-)
Update: It’s Monday morning and the comment function is now disabled. It’s good timing because this site has been under “comment spam” attack from IP address 195.225.176.160 for the past 48 hours.
Bloggers’ Rules
I’m currently in Jay Cross’s Informl Unworkshop and we are discussing some guidelines for bloggers. From Dave Pollard’s front page is this great advice:
Blog readers want to see more:
- original research, surveys etc.
- original, well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion (most readers prefer these consistent with their own views)
- benchmarks, quantitative analysis
- personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant “aha” graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content
Blog writers want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- ‘thank you’ comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs
Update: This was quickly posted while listening to the unworkshop, so perhaps I should add some commentary, especially since Stephen has picked it up. I would think that one blogger could not address ALL of the readers’ wants nor could every reader give writers everything that they want. I think that the “reader wants” show how varied are the demands of this worldwide audience, and why sites like BoingBoing are so popular. This site will never be in the top 10,000 blogs of the world, but there are some points about reader wants that make sense for my particular situation, such as — original research; personal stories; relevant graphics; first-hand accounts. Anyway, I think that Dave has made a thought-provoking list.
A new threat for our universities?
From Daniel Lemire is this news from the Guardian (is it news to our academic institutions?) that China is looking at becoming an exporter of degrees, attracting students to study in China where it will be cheaper than here. Today, many Western universities are exporters of degrees to Asian students. One strategy of traditional universities is to create online degree programs. Daniel makes a couple of conclusions about this tactic:
However, before online degrees become a distinct exportable good, you need to have your local students freely choosing the web instead of the classroom. Asians are not going to buy degrees your local population doesn’t value dearly.
I really think China can reverse its status as far as education goes, and by doing so, hurt badly Western Universities in the long run. I don’t think online degrees are going to be a viable escape for Western Universities. If China goes ahead with its plans to become an education provider, it will hurt, no matter what!
I’m sure that there will be a growing demand for online degrees, it’s just that a cheaper alternative may make for a more competitive marketplace.
As if changing demographics weren’t enough of a challenge, now it seems that China will be taking some of the international students that our universities are starting to depend upon for sustainable revenue. The world is flattening and direct competitors are now half way around the world. I wonder if our boys will go to university in China and learn Mandarin at the same time.
Copyright – a model for a previous era?
I’ve been reading the OpenBusiness blog for a while, trying to get a handle on copyright, which I’ve previously described as being important for our society and our economy. This article, via OpenBusiness, in The Times, is a good start in describing the big issues:
Economists tell us that, as the marginal costs of reproduction shrink, so should unit value. People still want physical books, but the only reason to restrict the digital reproduction of music and film today is to support artists, or — more to the point — to make money. The attempt to use restricted access as a business model in the face of this gigantic change seems not only unethical, but increasingly impractical.
…
So we need to examine new models for funding creative works — to address the question of how cultural producers will survive under the new paradigm. New approaches to copyright and reproduction are not just necessary, but inevitable. Copyright — the right of a creator to control the reproduction of a work and to sell this control to others — is a legal device that was designed for an earlier social/technological moment.
Life as a Free Agent
I read Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation just before I started working for myself and would recommend it to anyone else looking at making the leap to freelancing.
After almost three years, here’s a partial list of what being a free agent means to me:
10. Doing my own tech support
9. Only working seven days a week
8. Paying cash & avoiding monthly payments
7. Time for exercise and reading
6. Lots of short breaks, but no long holidays
5. Getting asked to volunteer more
4. Seeing more of my banker
3. Seeing more of my family
2. Looking forward to Mondays
1. Creating my own opportunities
Aliant Highspeed and NetAssistant
About six months ago I wrote about the difference between advertised and actual Internet connection speeds from my service provider, Aliant (a Bell Canada company). This post gets quite a few hits so I checked the links to make sure that they’re up to date.
I found that Aliant’s speed check is no longer web-based and now requires a 9MB download of a program (motivesb.exe). I haven’t downloaded this software, which might slow down my computer, and I’m wondering if this is as benign as Aliant says on their website:>
Net Assistant* is a FREE service that delivers leading edge self-healing tools directly to your desk top. These tools automatically detect possible issues on your computer that may cause problems accessing the Internet, sending/receiving emails or browsing Web sites, and enables you to fix them easily.
UK ‘s JISC Recommends Open Source in Higher Education
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which represents higher education institutions in the UK, has released a briefing paper that strongly supports open source software for education. JISC’s Development Director stated:
JISC sees open source software as an important component in developing a sustainable ICT infrastructure for UK higher and further education. This briefing paper sets out JISC’s position clearly, providing institutions with the information they need to make informed choices. JISC also emphasizes the separate but complementary role of open standards which is key to enabling institutions to integrate both open source and commercial products in their ICT infrastructure according to their priorities, needs and available budgets.
Canada does not appear to have a similar type of organisation and so it seems that we will go on spending more money on technology and less on learning.
Jury Duty 2006
Just received a summons for jury duty today. Not sure if I should be pleased to be doing my civic duty or perturbed that I’m going to be missing five days of work. I’m not a dentist, lawyer, veterinarian etc., so I’m not officially ineligible to serve as a juror. As a self-employed consultant, five days of lost productivity is significant. Maybe it’ll just mean working on my business at night, unless we’re sequestered in some motel where I’m not allowed Internet access. But then, as Admiral Nelson once said [which I had to memorise], “Duty is the great business of a sea-officer; all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it may be.” And it will be painful, as jurors are only compensated $40 per day of duty, less than a teenager flipping burgers.
The summons has raised some issues that I never really gave much time to consider. Why is a dentist ineligible to serve, when most people have a choice of dentists and one dentist being out of the office would not create significant harm to society? The same goes for doctors and veterinarians. I can understand a busy surgeon being exempt, but what about the family practitioner whose office is only open two or three days a week? I also consider my own work history. During my 21 years of active military service I was exempt from jury duty. Other than those periods when I was deployed, I could easily have taken off a week without degrading the operational capacity of the armed forces. There are many desk-bound military personnel who could do the same.
I’m wondering if our justice system needs to get out of the industrial era, “one size fits all”, approach to jury duty. Wouldn’t it make more sense not to provide blanket exemptions for professions, other than those in the justice system itself? I also feel that the $40 per day allowance is a visable indicator of how little our government values jury duty.
Quotable Comments on Learning
Here is a random selection of some quotes that I’ve been collecting. This collection is one example of why I focus my efforts on informal learning rather than more formalised education.
“… curriculum is a solution to a problem we created.” —Brian Alger
“No generation in history has ever been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age.” —David Warlick
“The claim is that if educators invested a fraction of the energy on stimulating the students’ enjoyment of learning that they now spend in trying to transmit information we could achieve much better results.” —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” —Albert Einstein
“Play is ever more important to skill development and professional competence. Yet our schools do not tolerate, much less teach, play.” —Nine Shift
“After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” —John Taylor Gatto