Polar Bear in No Snow

Dear Google,

When you treat special characters such as underscores, colons, and hyphens as a space, you corrupt my search for a single term into multiple terms, aka not what I sought, so I get too many useless results. Function names, class names, or file names ought to be treated as a single word not several words. Even when I place quotes around them you treat it as two concurrent words not a single word.

Please correct your algorithms or at least give me the option to have your product…

• Is it Live or is it Internet? Experimental Estimates of the Effects of Online Instruction on Student Learning
  “This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same….

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ to get one decent camera lens.

Ask me anything

I was in the 1980s.

Ask me anything

Not in the slightest.

Ask me anything

Control the minds of others.

Ask me anything

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/sneezypb

Steve Johnson, suitably pseudo anonymous, I think.

Ask me anything

• http://library.blackboard.com/docs/support/supportsvcguide.pdf
  Official dead dates for Blackboard products. CE/Vista end of life is Jan 2013 according to this.

• Class Differences: Online Education in the United States, 2010 | The Sloan Consortium
• LMS Transition Beyond Vista » Blog Archive » Blackboard Vista Usage Survey Results
  ‘Next, we asked faculty to rank the importance of each tool or feature in Vista, from “not used” to “very important” as way of helping us understand what teaching and learning features we should scrutinize most closely in our review of the next generation LMSes.’

A while ago, there was some kind of difficulty understanding why we (the DBAs) and another group were unable to read the same words yet not draw the same conclusion. The words in bold are what I wrote on my white board explaining why there was a difficulty.

Communication

• Vocabulary
  • Standards: Words have agreed upon meanings which we refer to as the definition. However, the same word can have different meanings depending on context. Therefore we need…
  • Experience: Past usage by self…

I listened in on the first town hall meeting for our USG LMS Transition Task Force on Thursday. There are 3 more town halls this week and a final one December 9th. It sounds like the task force is looking for what items are non-negotiable, extremely important, nice to have. Here are the non-negotiable items from the list. Here are my thoughts.

• Security: Agree. Student data is critical information to keep away from those who ought not see it while giving access to those who should. I would…

• What should we do with tools to make them great? « Online Sapiens
• News: Teaching Online Professors … Online - Inside Higher Ed
  Will colleges and universities buy online courses designed to train the instructors who teach online courses? … As more traditional institutions look to scale up their online offerings, Pearson — which already sells some pre-packaged courses, as well as textbooks and online learning platforms — sees demand for training rising.
• News: Technology and the…

Recently, Patrick asked how many geeky teeshirts do I have? I have 17 unique shirts. (Bought multiples of a few.)

Bruce asked how many have a picture on Facebook? He had posted many of the pictures of me and most of those involve a geeky teeshirt.

Thinkgeek Shirts

got root?

/Everyone stand back/ I know regular expressions

You Are Dumb in binary

Rays cast from this shirt travel at over 670,000,000 MPH

Do or do not. There…

• Performance at Any Scale
  “Ehcache is an open source, standards-based cache used to boost performance, offload the database and simplify scalability. Ehcache is robust, proven and full-featured, which has made it the most popular Java-based cache with 100,000’s of production deployments.”

I don’t mean annoying things we could do without, like complaints about grades or being stuck in traffic. I mean things that we thought we couldn’t live without but which it turns out we can. I mean things that held such great promise for happiness,…

• No related posts.

• Video: Face-Off—Moodle v. Blackboard - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
  Blackboard solvency depends on customers buying into a number of their products not just the LMS. Next big things are mobile and analytics.

Are people in the United States more insular? Is technology getting in the way of us being able to communicate? Why is technology breaking up marriages according to NPR? The line which stood out to me is:

But opportunity is a key predictor of infidelity, and social media have increased opportunity exponentially.

Just 10 minutes before this aired on NPR, I was talking to George about my Dorm, Major, or Race post. The biggest factor as to the friends we make is opportunity. Kids going to…

At work we are being asked to enter the amount of time we spend on certain activities into an online form. This is ostensibly so some people can get a handle on where people at my level (the bottom) can get better a sense of where we are putting our efforts. Yet, we are not supposed to go to any great effort to track what we do. (I think the assumption is we already know on what we spend our time.)

It makes me wonder though if anyone planning this anticipated the Hawthorne effect? By putting…

• The Past And Future Of Information Empires : NPR
• Early Warning System in Blackboard | Valencia’s Moving to BB9 Blog
• In Downturn, More Return to College Without Basic Computer Skills - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
  “Online education can help laid-off workers learn new skills. But before they can even dream about getting a degree, some must clear a much more basic hurdle: learning how to use a computer.”

• Welcome - glad you joined us! - Learning Platform Review - UMassOnline - Confluence
• 7 Things You Should Know About LMS Alternatives | EDUCAUSE
  Just because we pick an LMS doesn’t mean everyone will use it for 100% of online work. We will do more and more integrations. “Alternatives to conventional LMSs include social bookmarking tools, document sharing applications, social networking sites, timeline tools, and media options available in the cloud. Institutions or individual faculty…

The answer to the differences between the wiki and browserchecker.xml according to Blackboard? It is very much intentional to leave unsupported browsers in the browserchecker.xml just in case those unsupported browsers do still work.

Also in the answer was that in general only the two most recent stable browsers will be kept as supported. Since IE8 is the most recent, IE7 should also be kept. To have deprecated IE7 would mean something really bad was found with it as only one browser is…

• Blackboard security research paper has been released - Online24
  “The research was performed on Blackboard release 8, still one of the most used versions. Currently the most up to date version is release 9.1. They’ve made some progress with version 9.1, but there’s still a long way to go.” This is what millions of dollars on testing for security gets clients?

Sir Ken Robinson, who has the great TED talk on how education kills creativity, has a new one. A key concept is divergent thinking, an essential capacity of creativity, is the ability to see multiple answers or approaches. Education appears to kill off divergent thinking. Creativity is important to problem solving.

I had not considered the big risk for public education is the degree is not a guarantee of a good job. Certainly, people warned me my degree was useless for getting a job in the…

The below text is from a ticket I opened with Blackboard this morning.

I used this unix command to dump a list of all supported browsers from the browserchecker.xml.

grep -A 1 ‘supported=”true”‘ serverconfs/browserchecker.xml | grep descript | awk -F> ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F< ‘{print $1}’

The list of supported browsers does not match the list of supported browsers at Supported Technologies Vista 8.0 SP4+Re-Release which means users of unsupported browsers are not getting alerted to the…