Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Leaders Blogging. Some significant blogging news: As many readers are aware, I'm an instructor at Red River College in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). Several years ago, in my blogging enthusiasm, I tried to initiate a culture of blogging to encourage knowledge sharing. It failed (in the sense that I couldn't convince anyone to start blogging). Recently, RRC hired a new President - Jeff Zabudsky. I'm pleased that he has taken up blogging as a means of communicating with college staff: his blog, the RSS feed. I think it's an excellent way of compressing organizational knowledge flow (and adding a backflow dimension). Thankfully, openness is becoming a more common occurrence in business and society. I believe the defining trait of our generation is openness...not information/knowledge expansion. I'm not aware of any other president of a large academic institution (RRC has 32,000 enrolments) who is blogging - are you? I've opened comments...please leave information on any academic leaders who you know of that blog. [elearnspace] 6:17:27 PM  comment []  Trackback []     The Loneliest Mystery of the Deep. For the last 12 years, a single solitary whale whose vocalizations match no known living species has been tracked across the Northeast Pacific. Its wanderings match no known migratory patterns of any living whale species. Its vocalizations have also subtly deepened over the years, indicating that the whale is maturing and ageing. And, during the entire 12 year span that it has been tracked, it has been calling out for contact from others of its own kind. It has received no answer. Nor will it ever. [kuro5hin.org] 6:17:05 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Date for new Harry Potter book revealed. The sixth Harry Potter book will hit the shops on July 16 next year, the publisher Bloomsbury has announced. [Telegraph News | Breaking News] 6:11:13 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Why Students Struggle When Pressure Is On. Psychologists are reporting that intense exam pressure is actually more likely to impair the performance of very good students than mediocre ones. By By BENEDICT CAREY. [NYT > Health] 6:10:46 PM  comment []  Trackback []     OpenOffice 2.0 Preview Available. UPDATED The OpenOffice folks are giving the world peek-plus at version 2.0, which looks pretty snazzy. Of course, the Mac OS X version is still basically missing in action. At the rate things are going, it'll never be close to ready for prime time, much less at parity with the other versions. UPDATE: More from The Inquirer. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 6:10:14 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Searching the Web for Copycats. Here's a useful application of the Google API: Copyscape, a free service that can find Web sites plagiarizing your content. The service takes any URL as input, looking for a suspicious number of matching words on other sites. Most hits for Workbench came from sites and aggregators making legitimate use of my RSS feed. Copyscape found several plagiarists of my book Sams Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 24 Hours, using the first chapter as input. The service might be too fast on the trigger: Another suspected copywronger was a person who quoted one of my jokes as his .SIG. [Workbench] 6:09:30 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Great feature in the New York Times this morning about Slab City, a lawless, rentless, taxless community of 3,000 who bring their RVs and trailers to an abandoned military base in the Mojave Desert: Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea. The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years. A site has been created to work on Slab City's trash problem: Some residents of Slab City talk bad about this website, and our growing group of trash haters. Take a good look at the photo on the right, and keep in mind that the same people who stuff trash into any empty bus, are the same ones who are against our efforts to clean up the area. [Workbench] 6:08:03 PM  comment []  Trackback []     How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading. A new program is rooted in the view of autism as an alternative form of brain wiring, rather than a devastating disorder. By By AMY HARMON. [NYT > Education] 6:07:02 PM  comment []  Trackback []     On Laziness. On Laziness -- "There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it."     -- Mary Wilson Little [From Quotes of the Day - The Quotations Page.] [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog] 6:06:30 PM  comment []  Trackback []

© Copyright 2005 Gail Marsella. Last update: 1/2/2005; 5:51:58 AM.

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