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    

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    

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    

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