Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Learning and advancement through blogging

I've been reading Dan Saffer blog about his experience on the MA Interaction design course in Carnegie Mellon for a while now. And I just caught his post about his interview by elearningpost.com.

Anyway I wanted to write a comment to Dan, but felt I had lots more to say and should bother him too much about it all. Oh its also good to see he now provides his rss feed in complete form. Wish more moveable type users would do this. Anyhow I'm going to pick through a few things in the interview.

Why do you blog your course?
In a way, it's about justifying the personal and actual expense of leaving work and going back to school: something I could point to and say, see, that's why I'm doing this, this is what I learned. This is why it was worth it. – Exactly…I really believe students are empowered by blogs because it not only gives them a voice but allows them to compare experiences with others in simular situations. See it would be great to have my interaction students commenting back all the time while Dan and others commented on the interaction blog. I know Dan's doing a MA and my students are doing BA but that shouldnt make a difference. In broader aspects blogs are great for justifing work to yourself. I look back through my blog and cant believe the amount of projects I have running and I can always check up on there progress even years later.

Didnt know Dan's class had a project blog. He finds it more useful than email, but I wonder if he finds instant messager useful too? I see lots of equals with my students wanting to setup there own website. For any of my students reading, read between the lines…

Has blogging helped you increase your learning network?
Dan brings up some healthy problems with blogging generally. The whole problem with quoting and citing is one so difficult to solve. I tend to say who dropped the idea or quote, but not too much because yes it can get really stupid. Only a couple of times in the interaction blog have students quoted me, and they tend to be Ian said today. As a open lecturer, I'm not that worred about students taking a little credit for something I suggest but it all depends on the situation. On the RSS comment thing, its a problem but I feel the barrier to entry is just right. Someone needs to change from RSS reader to web browser so they can write a comment. Most wankers wont be bothered to comment, while those who do really wanted to, and will leave something interesting to read.

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New CSS candidate recommended specs

Some progress from CSS 2.1 to CSS 3 is happening in the W3c.

Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 revision 1
This spec describes CSS 2.1, a revision of CSS 2 that removes rarely implemented features and adds a few new ones including media-specific style sheets, content positioning, table layout, features for internationalization and some properties related to user interface. It also fixes a few bugs in the CSS2 spec “the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's 'style' attribute and a new calculation of the “clip” property”. Features removed iunclude text-shadow, display: marker, display: compact, and content: uri tag.

CSS Print Profile
This module “defines a subset of Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 [CSS2] and CSS3 module: Paged Media [PAGEMEDIA] specifically for printing to low-cost devices. It is designed for printing from mobile devices, where it is not feasible or desirable to install a printer-specific driver, and for situations were some variability between the device's view of the document and the formatting of the output is acceptable.”
CSS3 Paged Media Module
This module “describes the page model that partitions a flow into pages. It builds on the CSS3 Box model module and introduces and defines the page model and paged media. It adds functionality for pagination, page margins, headers and footers, image orientation. Finally it extends generated content for the purpose of cross-references with page numbers.”

All this comes days after the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group posted the fifth public working draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2.

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Munich struggling with open source

Birch dropped me this small article from a local newspaper near him in Minneapolis. Its basicly about Munich's problems with opensourve software and how Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is enjoying the fact there having problems. He makes the point that governments who change for political reasons are free to do so. While those who choose the software for business reasons stick with Microsoft. I'm not quite buying it, but we shall see as more and more governments make these critial decisions.

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Project is currently dead. Will not be back.

Had a quick look around my xbox bookmarks and found out that the Dreamix project is now dead. I was quite shocked at this because it had so much going for it a while back. Oh well we shall see if Xbox media centre moves into the area of PVR's.

I am however very interested in Xlink messager which creates a tunnel between two or more? xboxes so they can play games together or share media?

Also found Xbox tribe and xbins today which is useful for finding compiled versions of xbmp and xbmc. And I've been following a thread about HD Windows media on the Xbox. I tried to get the Matrix revolutions high defination version working on my xbox along time ago and I also had huge syncing and fps problems. But as some one said what do you expect for a 733mhz machine. Not even my 1.33mhz laptop can play it correctly, saying that the xbox has a much beefer graphics card. Also reminds me to look for a Matroska dll for xbmplayer.

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Joining up, the obvious choice

I'm starting to question the reasons why I decided to give each year group I teach a blog. If you check out the 1st year interaction blog you can clearly see lots of useful information and ideas. Its also been used as a general notice board at the moment for arrangements and planning. Which is fine, just interesting to see happening. Those who dont blog are either not that bothered and usually dont turn up to my lessons too much or dont have a easily available blogger.
Have a look at the 2nd year interaction blog and its windy city. Very few posts and little in the way of interest, no offense to HarryT or Paulo of course. So i'm thinking join them up. It would be trivial to do, as all blogs are stored on the filesystem as text files. The hardest part would be arranging categories and telling everyone the new xmlrpc address. I could redirect everything else though. Or even with the intiative of people.rave.ac.uk – I could finally offload the blogs to a real place?

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The Freedom of Information Act

Been working hard at college on the Freedom of information site. Its now coming close to completion, its a shame because I had a few things I needed to do to make it a complete job.

  1. Unlimited OPML transformation – so you can click on each outline and go down a level, only seen it done using Javascript not standard XHTML and CSS
  2. Word ML to XHTML – Microsoft's own XSL transformation is pretty good but first up only works on the Beta 2 of Word ML and its bloody HUGE
  3. Word ML to PDF – Chris was planning to do this with XSL-FO, but we couldnt even imagine the nightmare to do it. Plus you can now buy one which does it

Ideally I would have liked to done something like this. But it wasnt going to happen… The main crutux of the matter is that no matter what happens the xml which word or anything turns out will be nasty only because the staff have no idea how to create well structured office documents.

Been reading Practical RDF as well by the way, liking XML/RDF cant wait to get something I can use it for.

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Hacking the Library

XML.com has made some changes it would seem. With the topics ranging from managing personal media collections to XMLTV. Should be interesting to see the results of the changes, as they were doing quite well already. Maybe the webservices.xml.com will be more business like.

XML is well on its way to becoming a mature, ubiquitous technology. The pace of standardization has not slowed, but the time where applications took a back seat to new core technologies is coming to an end. At XML.com we want to focus more on the application space, particularly personal information management, a vibrant area of XML application development. To that end, today Kendall Clark begins a new column, “Hacking the Library”, which will focus on problems of personal information, especially those related to the digital media lifestyle.

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Mob-Blogging from another view

Aibos view of living room

Ok I'm sorry but sometimes I read about the progress of mobblogging and i'm not exactly as thrilled as I when I first heard about it. But this is a whole different matter. I'm loving the idea. Instead of mobblogging yourself, why not let your robot dog do the hard work. And it makes so much sense, cant believe people havent thought about it before. Whuffie takes most of the photos.

welcome to the world's first and only “roblog”. currently, a sony aibo robot dog and a er1 / tablet pc based robot post automatically to this site throughout the day, and once and awhile a human (phillip m. torrone) does as well. roomba to be added this weekend.

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Reasons why blojsom is the way forward

Blojsom

Blojsom uses the Atom API – which has caused a huge divide in the community. Alongside the older blogger and metaweblog API's. So its pretty much forward looking. I havent spent enough time looking at it but there seems to be a few good applications already, even if there only demos.

People have started writing plugins – Yeah its not exactly the moveabletype community but you know what its the start of things? By the way, has every mac user gone nuts for ecto? And I need to try out NetNewsWire's Atom beta.

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