SPAJDE

Just a test of a blogfeed in Farpenny.org

It's not fashionable to include the Almighty or any variation thereof in discussions of scientific inquiry, unless, of course, like Steven Weinberg, you're using a discussion of scientific inquiry as a platform to propound your own atheism. Frankly, I don't care a pig's situpon for fashion. You can see that, though subtly, in my attire. I am not loud about my faith and doubt, but neither am I timid. And I'm as happy to enlarge on my acceptance of evolution when confronted at church as I am to assert my devotion to the Maker when challenged in school.

This paper was submitted July 21, 2005 as my final paper for MDDE 601, Center for Distance Education, Athabasca University. This version corrects language and detail.

Thanks to a little real time help in the Drupal forums, our little anonymous user access glitch has been fixed. Just needed to rebuild node access in post settings.

I think this will work.

I was getting duplicate entries. Turns out my database needed resequencing. We'd gone back to node 1, so everything but the third attempt failed. The third attempt to make an entry succeeded because there was no node 3. Must have deleted it at some point.

Working on a tip in the Drupal forums, I've reset the sequence manually in the database. This entry should take, but I'm not sure whether it will be 77 or 78. My bets are on 78. I think the sequence table records the last entered node.

It seems like every time I update or upgrade, I have trouble setting up TinyMCE. There are too many things to tweak.

How things have changed!

About a year and a half ago, I first ventured into the mad and addictive world of online interaction, first as a student in the MDE programme through Athabasca University, then as a participant in elgg.net, and finally as owner-operator of a pile of open source-powered websites.

Things got really out of hand. The degree, the elgg community, the software and my little Web garden took over my life. If I wasn't studying, I was writing. If I wasn't writing, I was installing a website or tweaking a file or battling a bug. Family life suffered. Work suffered. I grew disenchanted with my career as an overseas English teacher. I lost students. I hardly cared.

Ben Werdmuller, one of the Elgg duo, informs me that things are pretty much as I expected. Use of images off other sites involves copyright violation and "bandwidth theft".

Copyright is a notion I'm familiar with. Bandwidth and the affects of its use by site visitors and "digital borrowers" are new to me. I certainly don't want to be guilty of taxing someone's account. I know I wouldn't appreciate having my account taxed. For the moment that's not an issue for my sites; I have far more bandwidth than I currently need. A popular site, or a site with popular resources, could really be pinching the bytes, though.

In my Course Portal I've been "borrowing" images off other sites to illustrate the units in my online adaptations of textbooks. I have policy statements posted on the portal homepage and all "offending" course homepages (Off-site Images , Online Adaptations).

If the authors or publishers of the textbooks whose work I've been adapting chose to come after me about reproducing any or all of their content, I might be in trouble. At the least, I'd probably have to delete a lot of typing in the form of Moodle lessons. As the respective policy statement explains, use of the adaptations is contingent on purchase of the original material. The adaptations exist to save time marking. The lessons automatically mark and tally the exercises. Students get instant feedback on their work and I don't have to check work that is designed for binary assessment. This means that interactive time can be spent on productive rather than procedural interaction.

Some would even argue that states of mind--even leaps of the imagination--are similarly quantized. There is rarely a continuous transition from one idea or state to the next. (As Einstein said, "There comes a point where the mind takes a leap--call it intuition or what you will--and comes out on a higher plane of knowledge.") K.C. Cole, First You Build a Cloud, p. 120, par. 1