Posts from 2011

Testing markdown

Just installed extended php-markdown plugin and this post is written in markdown as a test.

Here’s some emphasisstrong emphasis and code.

  • A bulleted list

  • another item

  • A numbered list

  • another item

The code:

Just installed extended [php-markdown](http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/)

plugin and this post is written in markdown as a test.

Here's some *emphasis* **strong emphasis** and `code`.

* A bulleted list
* another item

1. A numbered list  
2. another item

I’ve turned off the visual editor but WordPress still shows the simple HTML icons. is there anyway to change these so that they insert markdown rather than HTML?

Uncategorised

My Top 10 Tools of 2010-11

Sculpture at the Business School, University of Hull.

Two heads are better than one.

Helen Davies, one of our Learning Support Team, has put out a call for the annual top 10 tools at Swansea University. A now annual survey that was inspired by Jane Hart’s long-running survey.

As I’ve just come out of a busy teaching term, my list reflects the tools that have dominated my course preparation, delivery and assessment.

  1. My browser (Firefox or Chome used about equally!)
  2. Blackboard – I practically live there in term time!
  3. Camtasia Studio for Mac — the easiest way to do lecture capture screencasts live!
  4. Learning Objects Podcast Tool — the easiest way (in Blackboard) to get your screencasts and lectures on-line.
  5. iPhone – + iTunes for podcasts and screencasts, vital for my own personal learning.
  6. cpjobling.me — my own hosted domain!
  7. WordPress — I’ve moved my blog over from Blogger this year.
  8. DokuWiki — quite a lot of my course materials live here
  9. Perltrees — great for sharing and presenting web sites 10.Diigo — superset of Delicious.

Order is roughly in the order of amount of time spent in each one.

Just outside the top 10 I’d put my Echo smart pen (still has lot of potential I think) and my new Kindle which I’ve used extensively for my own education this year! I also spend an awful lot of time in email and MS Office but not I suspect because it makes me more productive. I’ve just switched from Entourage on the Mac to ThunderBird.

Reflecting on the academic year as a whole I’d say that some of my previous top 10 have dropped out of the charts mostly because of lack of time. However, slideshare, twitter (tweetdeck), facebook, google reader, and google docs still have an important role in my work.

During the PLENK course twitter, facebook, flickr and Moodle made a big contribution to my PLE, but I’ve found myself using social networks less and less as the pressures of teaching and to a lesser extent admin have taken over in 2010-11.

One to watch: Wolfram Alpha and the associated iPhone/iPad apps.

Uncategorised

New developments

I’ve just launched a new blog called Crispy Development in which I hope to document my various open-source projects that are hosted on GitHub. This is likely to be on the technical side, and is mostly to help me plan, document and remember stuff. But it may be of interest to someone.

Uncategorised

You've got an "ology"?

Zaid Ali Alsagoff shared his discovery of schoology.com at last week’s Wednesday presentation on #CCK11 so I’ve posted the link in a blog post “You’ve got an “Ology”? on the Swansea Learning Lab community blog. We also discussed lecture capture at a pan-Wales meeting today, and I included a postscript about the CCK11 model of meeting capture with Elluminate.

Brits of a certain age, will need no explanation for the title of this post. By way of explanation, for my younger and oversees readers, I include this video, a classic TV ad starring Maureen Lipmann, from before British Telecom became BT,

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-GABNfhQ1U]

Uncategorised

Don Knuth at the IET

Don Knuth, another of my heroes, recently gave the 2011 Turing Lecture at the IET in Savoy Place using an interesting approach: “Ask me Anything!”. I wish I’d been there.

Turing Lecture 2011: An evening with Don Knuth – all questions answered

Professor Don Knuth

This years Turing Lecture is delivered by Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.   2011-01-26 00:00:00.0 IT Channel

>> go to webcast >> recommend to friend

In London, Don was struggling with a cough but manfully answered all the questions. A week later, he repeated the performance at Machester and seems much more relaxed — not only in his dress. So there is clearly some benefit to being up north (if on the wrong side of the Pennines).

Uncategorised

Networked Blogs ~ CCK11 (test)

I saw Downes’ commentary Networked Blogs ~ CCK11 on the CCK11 discussion page which talks about someone who suggested in the CCK11 Facebook group that NetworkedBlogs could syndicate from my Blog to the CCK11 group. So I thought I’d set it up as a trial. If it has worked, this post should appear on my Facebook wall, in my Twitter stream and in the CCK11 group.

This may not be so useful if the NetworkedBlogs app only works in the FB walled garden because, as Downes says in a comment to his original thread on getting RSS feeds out of Facebook for syndication into the CCK11 MOOC: “This is the major problem with Facebook – data goes in, but it never comes out.”

Uncategorised

Techno-glut

I’ve been gorging on new technology this week. It all started with Episode 6 of Doug Crockford’s “Crockford on JavaScript“, an excellent series of evening Yahoo! technical talks that on the history of programming and the JavaScript language that originally ran between January and March 2010. Episode 6, “Loopage”, recorded last August, is a sequel of sorts that covers the JavaScript event-loop, (one of my heros) Grace Murray Hopper, and the problems of concurrency and network latency.

The JavaScript even-loop is an important part of the web browser and it is now available on the server courtesy of Google’s open-source V8 JavaScript engine, developed for Chrome, and the new Node.js library. Following this I watched several other episodes of the collection of technical talks from the YUI Theatre collection, including interesting a couple of talks on the benefits of running JavaScript on the server and client, node.js itself, HTML5, and YUI3. There’s a nice retrospective of the YUI Theatre collection for 2010 in net.tuts+ and a good series of screencasts by Pedro Teixeira on a new site called NodeTuts.

Yahoo! may be suffering from an identity crisis at the top, but its team of web developers and JavaScript evangelists are second to none and the quality of their offerings on the Yahoo! Tech Dev web site and YUI theatre are excellent. Tech heads should go along and expect to spend a while there. Highly recommended.

My personal highlights (in some kind of thematic order are):

There are so many more to watch that I’m in nerd heaven.

Uncategorised

Moved

I have moved my blog using the instructions How to Move from blogger to wordpress with permanent 301 redirection provided by Aaslin Sathrak on SenseHow.com.

In outline, I created a special template page on http://blog.cpjobling.org that redirects to a special WordPress page. This page interprets the redirected URL and finds the reference to the original blogger page permalink that was stored in the page metadata when I exported my blogger pages to WordPress. This is used to look-up the wordpress permalink for the relocated page and then WordPress is asked to issue an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently reponse that tells Google and others that the original blogger URL has now moved to WordPress. If all works well, I’ll be changing the title of this blog to Fresh and Crispy in a week or so. In the meantime, please let me know if you find any broken links.

Uncategorised