Yeah, the first point was more about micro changes, the third part has more to do with architecture. I think there is a danger of making changes that are “too big” especially when you know where you ago going, because you flesh everything out before testing. The thing that I’m trying to get at is smaller and smaller circles when it comes to the doing things and then testing that they work.

(Although I guess the problem you discuss in your third point plays into this, too. You often don’t know the best factoring/oo-design from the start so maybe there’s no way to avoid making it up as you go along and eventually doing a ground-up re-design once your feature-space is better fleshed-out)

The next revolution is a revolution of education, that will be made possible by the use of virtual reality technology.

Until that revolution occurs, NOTHING will change. Don’t waste your time.

first, hope NYC is amazing.

and…
i agree with andrei, you know this. just reflect again and again on your definition of success. not on what would be ‘nice’ but on what you want as much as you want your breath.

Before I switch to Google+, just wanted to make sure we can still do all the business stuff, all the way around!

Thanks?? Does anyone know??

Before I switch to Google+, just wanted to make sure we can still do all the business stuff, all the way around!

Thanks?? Does anyone know??

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Kindly visit below website and click on yellow button and help to feed hunger.It’s totally free,please visit.

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I agree that a lack of promotion is a big factor of there being less adoption, but I believe that it combines with the lack of a hook.

I do think though that it can be successful in a Facebook sense just because of all the internal interactions that are needed on campus. MUG groups, clubs, student societies and others could all benefit from having their own space. For instance if it got to the point where a typical student had 2 profs using it for their courses, then it will become a part of student’s daily workflow to get students interacting over other topics on it.

UBC Blogs / Buddypress was not successful in the “social” network sense I don’t think we really thought it could be everyone is on FB. I believe it could be successful for course work, Jeff Miller’s course last year using a standalone install showed that this term he will be using UBC Blogs. There has also been 0 promotion of the features and of how to use BP, the CTLT has done a great job promoting usage of blogs wikis in classes but I have not seen a single workshop that introduced users to the features in BP and how they could be used in a course.

I think it was worth it though just for the activity stream features on the homepage which showcases how vibrant the platform is.

We are hoping to add a few more features that might make it more attractive this summer.

I can also see (once they have enough data) Google autosuggesting groups and perhaps suggesting changing your current groups. Something like: “We’ve noticed that you haven’t spoken to Bob in a long time and that he now lives in San Francisco, do you want to add him to your far away acquaintances group”

@Eastwood I didn’t like it on my mom’s netbook either, although I don’t know if that was the OS or the lack of computing power. Hopefully they also tweaked it a lot. I’ll try it out in a month or so when the rest of life settles down a bit

How we can use Add User Widget in two languages ? We are working in a multilingual BP site and need to have this widget in both languages, Spanish / English.

I can provide you the Spanish translation, in fact already have translates all string to Spanish.

Regards,

Subscribe to post comments: <?php post_comments_feed_link($link_text = ''); ?>

(The example showed how to wrap an image.)

David
My Site

Your Presentation at Jump Start was very thought provoking and an essential topic for first year students. Would you be interested in presenting this workshop at the CLASS Conference? Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Very direct
Very clear
Very intentional

d.

After 30 days you can reward yourself for being awesome (beers or maybe an all-nighter on the PS) then reassess and see if you want to continue with trying to keep the habit.

I agree that this post is dismissive and oversimplified. It was a brain-dump and the ideas could have been expressed much more elegantly.

I truly believe that through the work that you and others do, we can help to stop this kind of thing from happening. Stupid is also a loaded word, “culturally bankrupt” may be a better one for what I want to describe?

That being said, I still think the central idea of a war stands. Pockets of resistance are thriving, however, many corporations are actively trying to squash them. Education is rife with such examples. So is the food industry (look at how the word “organic” is slowly starting to lose meaning). The work you do is effective because the corporate influence hasn’t struck as deep as they want it to. But what about in 400 years time? If you don’t do a good enough job now there will be no community left to nurture and celebrate.

Of course (and maybe it didn’t come through as strongly as I intended in the post) I believe that you will do a good enough job! The work you do is exactly the kind of thing needed to ensure that the nightmare portrayed in Distopia does not happen. You are one of the people that leaves me full of hope. I simply want to motivate all of us to fight as hard as we possibly can.

Thinking people are stupid is one of the easiest ways to shoot yourself in the foot if you want to have a meaningful conversation with them. That’s what I learned at the SFU Dialogue program, and it’s one tool in my back pocket to hack corporate influence. I’m probably highly biased in my take on this, because I have to believe what I do — which boils down to celebrating and nurturing community — isn’t hopeless.

I also completely agree that education is the answer. Because we cannot force parents to take a licensing test before having children (although sometimes I think we should…), the alternative is to intervene in the public education system.

I am so intrigued to watch the movie to see what might happen!

My own definition of intelligence (as alluded to in the second last paragraph) is cognitive ability including the ability to maintain health (yours and the people/planet around you) as well as the ability to act toward others with compassion. As far as I am concerned if one is not able to look after oneself or other people/things, then one cannot be deemed intelligent.

As for those in poverty and oppression, I think that one of the many root causes of that poverty and oppression is how little credit others give them for their own intelligence and ability to survive and adapt to their harsh conditions.

Now, the use of a narrative and central theme for learning throughout a full degree, I find that EXTREMELY interesting. Thanks Andre for sparking my thoughts around this topic.

It’s great to see your personal journey through the themes. I now need to focus on thinking about what I’ll do with Hummingbird604.com – suggestions welcome! I’ll end up following your lead with TwentyTen, as you suggested. But personalizing it to me.

The idea that we’ve come to suggest is to have several courses that focus on specific issues and students register for the one they want to “solve”. It will be open to students from other faculties as well in order to have a wider pool of knowledge to draw on. Instructors will be there to facilitate and guide but the students are suppose to define the problem, draw/share their expertise, design a project and actually make it into reality.

Of course, I don’t know if it will actually happen. It was discussed just before the last term of the last Dean.

I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

@Raul: Sorry that I kind of left it up to you to watch the video. I have a myriad of crazy ways that this can be applied swimming around in my head. The problem is that I think applications depends on specific context. I’ll try and do a bit of a series on actual implementation soon. For now I just want to get across the fact that video games are a reasonable place to turn when looking for better teaching strategies.

I know that you spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage your students and that is awesome. I think though that video games could offer good heuristics for those not willing to invest that time or effort.

@Jeff: I agree completely. I think the motivation to want to play the game comes from how it is framed. If WoW was framed as “a game where you run similar but slightly different missions over and over again with minimal rewards for each run” nobody would want to play it.

I love your post on education. It speaks to my notion of side quests! As for needing the whole system to change… I don’t think so. I think the best way to do it is lobby those above, while slowly helping the professors and staff at ground level to change as much as they can in order to provide the best environment for their students.

@Cory, yeah Evoke itself was not what I imagined it to be. My point around Evoke was simply that if you try really hard you can make it look like doing research and blogging is actually a fun experience.

@Nicole I’m very much on the same page. All it would take would be some creative curriculum design and maybe a WordPress plugin or two, lets see what we can do over the summer…

On leveling up: I think one of the reasons games work so well is that they provide some _real_ incentive to perform those repetitive tasks. Leveling up an MMO character allows you to win battles, which is fun. Who doesn’t like winning? It also lets you to fill your role (warrior, healer, etc.) better, and a lot of the enjoyment in MMORPGs is from filling a role. It’s a pretty nice feeling to be needed and appreciated by your peers.

On storylines: It’s true that games usually involve epic quests to solve problems of enormous magnitude, but in my opinion, this is not what makes the story entertaining. It’s the setting, and the interactions the characters have with each other that make a good story. I couldn’t care less whether I’m saving the world from Darkspawn, or advancing a civil and sustainable society. As long as there are interesting companions with compelling stories, I’ll be entertained.

On EVOKE: I signed up for EVOKE the week it started, and was really disappointed. Now, I can be a cynical guy sometimes (buzzwords make me gag), but I was willing to put that aside and really get into the game as long as it provided a fun ARG experience. I was imagining puzzles, or an online scavenger hunt with clues that the community could work on.
Instead, it asked me to go study “social innovators”, then come back and blog about it. My “reward” would be a little badge on my profile.
… That’s not fun! It’s not challenging, and it’s not what I would call a “game”.

Anyway, good thought-provoking blog post.

I would argue that another point you might’ve missed is that you WANT to have to play the game.

There are also too many people who I argue aren’t in university to learn, but to simply get the degree and move on. If we can change that mindset, it’d be a huge plus.

I recently did a post on education you can read here. http://bit.ly/coLbgx

My last point is that it would take an entire community to make this move forward. There are some professors that openly admit to having taught the same way they did years ago.

That has to change.

I’ll have to admit that while I really really liked this post, having to watch the TED talks to get the point across left me wanting more of your ideas of how we can change the system.

In my own teaching (at UBC too) I have tried to vary the repetitive tasks. I have worked hard to engage my students with learning online technologies (and I have YOU to thank for some really great suggestions).

My question to you would be – what are the lessons YOU have distilled from McGonigal’s TED talk (and the other video, which I’m about to watch).

I’ll be also very honest in that I’m 350% skeptical of any TED talk. Despite the fact that people seem to see TED talks as “mind-blowing”, most of the time, whenever I’ve seen a TED talk, I’ve seen very little that blows my mind. I suppose that’s the skeptic in me

Thanks again for this post, it’s very refreshing and sparks some thoughts for the teacher in me. I *adore* teaching. And I want to be a better educator, every day. Your post challenges me to think about ways to become a better professor, and for that, I thank you.

As for emailing my professor that is a good idea, but not a scalable solution for me considering my number of courses and for her, considering the number of students she has.

1. Server space. Even at a small institution, the space fills up quickly. If your servers are hosted with Blackboard, they start you with 20G of space… my very small 2 year college is using 60G as of now. Every bit of space is more money, so older courses are going to be archived and taken off the server.

2. Functionality. I have complaints from both students and instructors if they see last semester’s classes. It crowds their course menu (particularly for instructors who may be teaching 5 courses a semester… a few semesters and they are wading through English 101s trying to find this semester’s course).

Bottom line… if you see something you want to keep as reference material, download and save it.

Have you ever thought about emailing your professor and asking her for her examples again? I’m sure she would be thrilled to know that you paid attention and found her materials valuable.

The Power of Now I found completely changed the way that I view the world. I highly recommend it.

I found all of the other books useful as well, although each takes time and effort to implement the suggestions given in them and I’ve come a long way in some areas, but am still struggling in others.

Just wondering–did you find all of those books useful? Or?

I’ve kinda moved away from the world of aggregators. I find they provide too much content. At the moment, my main source of information is Google Reader. I do still use iGoogle, but I use it in conjunction with Google Tasks and Calendar to help me keep track of projects etc.

@SeigeA: I think that balancing the people around you is very important. Although it is good to have those that have the same interests as you around as motivation, it is also really good to have differing viewpoints. In life we need people to challenge us almost as much as we need people to support us. The best friends of course are the ones that can do both (Jocelyn Ling and Matt Corker are good examples in my life).

@Tyler using a pointer did not triple my speed, although it did increase it. The tripling came from hard practice reading (reading faster than you are able to until you get used to reading at that speed). It is a difficult process, but very worth it. I’ve got a book on it that you can lend if you ever want to give it a go.

I suggest you learn more about how patents are written and read the actual patent rather than relying on press coverage, which often gets it wrong. Patents can be tough to decipher, but I think if you compare the specific claims to what you see elsehwere (for instance, the Han video), you’ll understand the difference.

Also important: The title of your post is a lie. Apple’s patent is legal. No law has been broken. You may not regard it as valid, but that does not mean it is illegal.