June 18, 2012
Dropbox to kill off public folders?
Don Reisinger,
CNet News.com, June 17, 2012.
Dropbox will become a lot less useful to me and many other people if it follows through on its plan to eliminate public folders. The public folder was especially useful as it allowed people to have what amounted to their own web server for files and such. I can only imagine what sort of pressures (or contorted business models) led to Dropbox thinking it should eliminate its most useful feature.
The future of higher education and other imponderables
George Siemens,
elearnspace, June 16, 2012.
George Siemens introduces the next open online course(aka MOOC though some people don't like the term) that we are participating in (by 'we' I mean George and myself, Dave Cormier and Bonnie Stewart, the Gates Foundation, EDUCAUSE, Desire2Learn, UBC, SOLAR, CETI, and a spare kitchen sink we found by the roadside). It will be short and intense, quite unlike our previous effort. George writes, "Today, the university as a system is under the microscope. It is now the entity that we no longer understand. We need to adopt a researcher’s mindset in coming to understand what is happening to higher education and what type of system today’s society needs." Everyone wants disruptive change, he writes, which isn't going to appen in such a large and entrenched system. Maybe so. But for my part, I do intend to be disruptive, and to let the change fall where it may.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Connectivism, Traditional and Online Courses, EDUCAUSE]
Blogging Like a Blogger
L.M. Orchard,
blog.lmorchard.com, June 16, 2012.
L.M. Orchard - who is shuttering his long-celebrated 0xDECAFBAD blog after 12 years of goodness - talks about wanting to blog like a blogger, not like a hacker. He was using Jekyll and Disqus for blogging and comments, but blogging involved a long commit process, much like upgrading open source code. Blogging on WordPress, by contrast, was dead simple. This I totally understand - but I will say, I wish hacking were like blogging. I've gotten started on SourceForge, and gotten started on Git, but it's a major effort to keep code updated. I want to just write my code, click 'submit' and forget.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Web Logs, Google, Open Source, Blogger, Hackers]
10 Digital Timelines
Fien Danniau,
Instituut voor Publieksgeschiedenis , June 14, 2012.
This is a good review of ten timeline applications; I spent an enjoyable few minutes looking at them. I'm not even slightly tempted to import all my photos and video into Facebook but have often thought of having a timeline of my own (this handmade version doesn't have the same magic and is a pain to keep up). I agree that Tiki Toki is the best of the bunch - but it's still not everything I want.
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