Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Several things of interest to folks who are generally interesting:
Fellow Torontonians who have an interest in looking upwards with the aid of powerful, optical apparatus might be interested in the public viewing opportunities being made available by the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill. (Also, I’d love an excuse to make an evening of it, so you should let me know.) It would be interesting! The DDO houses Canada’s largest telescope (a not-paltry-at-all-really-thank-you-very-much 1.88 metres of aperture feeding a reflector assembly and eventually the hungry, hungry brain connected to the retina in one of your lucky eyes), and until mid-October, will be hosting Saturday (math- and jargon-decaffeinated) lectures followed by public viewings. The price is $10 for adults, $5 for impressionable youth, and adult fare can include one free ticket for such a youth, so, really, it’s peanuts for the cosmos. The talk schedule and ticket information are available here. Events: through to October 17.
Next, for those of you who want to attend a TED conference in person but have lost your last $6000 in the seat-cushions of your private jet and can’t be bothered to fish them out, consider taking a look at TEDx, a brand-compatible way to have the full, engaged TED experience, but without the money maybe, even. In all seriousness, the program is essentially a toolkit that TED puts out for groups (like schools, libraries, nerds like me, etc.) to present the talks recorded at the official venues and facilitate the cerebral orgy that needs must follow. I hosted something like this at home in January 2008 (calling it TED-Local, clever me), and while going through official channels was probably unnecessary for something of that size and ambition, more intense folks than I have taken it to the next level, nay, to the max. TEDxTO, like TED, is full, but, also like TED, will provide a webcast so that we can watch its cognoscenti watch TED’s cognoscenti, and then talk about it (the TEDxTO cognoscenti, that is—if we wish to form a sub-sub cognoscenti, that’s our prerogative, and we can thereafter discuss the discussions about the presenters, and even present those discussions ourselves in the form of a webcast, if we want; it’s fractal). Admittedly, there are also 13 fresh speakers hosted just by TEDxTO, so the process isn’t wholly without added value. I will be going to this meet-up, and folks should join me. (Thanks, Stian, as ever, for hooking me up.) Event: September 10, hazily from 12:00 through 9:00.
Posted by Danny on Monday, May 25, 2009 at 3:38 pm
This is all Stian’s fault.
Students of the University of Toronto are probably familiar with MyAccess, a sort of meta-webpage that pops up when they want to access normally restricted and proprietary resources (journal databases like JSTOR or Eric, for example) and allows them to log into those websites using their individual UofT passwords. Essentially, we need to prove that we’re associated with the university, and then, if the university has purchased a subscription to the resource, we get access.
Normally, the process involves finding the specific resource by going through our library website, into a directory of eResources, and then navigating to the one we want. This can be particularly tiresome if we’ve found a specific article that we’d like to read through an aggregate search engine like Google Scholar, because we can sit and sadly paw at the database displaying precisely the resource we’d like to access, but in order to convince it that we’re legitimate, we need to leave, log into the UofT Library page, and then find our way back again. This annoyed Stian and inspired him to put together a dandy little bookmarklet which pulls up the MyAccess interface for a web-based resource regardless of whether you’ve navigated there through the UofT library system (and gives you a plain 404 not-found error if you try to use it on a resource that we don’t subscribe to). It’s very, very convenient for snapping up articles found during broad-sweeping Google Scholar searches, and can be a fun toy to try when you find yourself in a restricted space as a result of general browsing. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Friday, March 20, 2009 at 2:51 am
I haven’t tried it, but Second Life sounds a great deal like the forsoothing and *emoting* experience of my Ultima Online role-playing crowd from years and years ago, except without the opportunity to be virtually sodomised by roving bands of semi-literates wielding cheerfully rendered implements of medieval can-opening and firey death. It’s probable that the semi-literates persist, though I’m sure that sodomy of any sort is now at least restricted to consensual zones.
It’s been almost six years since my back was wholly divested of the UO monkey, and though I’ve found other online vices to supplant it and erode my academic viability, Second Life came up in my research for Clare Brett’s Educational Applications of Computer-Mediated Communication course last term. The article talked about virtual classroom environments being built and coördinated with university instructors to facilitate seminars and broadcast lectures—something that struck me as tremendously groovy and mitigates somewhat the picture of the silver-fox furry sitting among other virtual students. The picture on the top of p22 shows a group of students participating in a virtual seminar attached to a Harvard Law course, where apparently the video from the real-life seminar room is broadcast to groups of students in the virtual environment. It would be amazing if this was happening in real-time, with a corresponding portal in the real-life seminar room open into the Second-Life seminar, allowing for full two-way interaction (though I have no idea if this is how it worked, and suspect that it would be too bandwidth intensive under the restraints of present technology). With this in mind, and hearing Stian describe the micro-communities that formed from the broader ecosystem of his Wiley Wiki experience, I started doodling an interface pipe-dream upon which I shall presently expound. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 6:33 pm
As I acquaint myself with WordPress’ levers, pulleys, and screws, I’m haphazardly contributing to a directory of links you can find south (at time of writing) of my biography on the left-hand column. My intention was to devote a section entirely to Open Education links and then gradually introduce them (and the concept of open education itself) to you, patient readers, over the course and career of this ’blog. In typical fashion, however, Stian Håklev just brought together much more information that I would have mastered in the next few months, and presented it with nearly TED-like production value to a largely awed and enthusiastic crowd of our OISE professors. So, uh, you should read his ’blog.
I will still gradually introduce many of these resources myself, largely because I am myself gradually exploring them for the first time and find that they are less daunting if approached more leisurely (this is my pedagogical gambit to avoid a Semelean tan). For those of you with interest in the topic and even less expertise than me, just bear in mind that others have tread here first and if you’d like to move more quickly, Stian is your man. The fast track starts here.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 