All posts by dispar

bloggers, Blogging, comment-fishing, opinions, ramblings, rants

Comment-Fishing: Think It Through

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As I notice that provocative and opinionated pronouncements are more likely to garner feedback than carefully crafted balanced thoughts, I’ll say it like this: bloggers should think before they blog! :-S

What I really mean to rant about is that the part of blogging I dislike the most is time-sensitivity. Knee-jerk reactions are great for blogging and I do believe in RERO. But there’s a point at which people seem to care too much about posting at the right time. Some even want to be the first person to blog a given issue. Is it the blogging equivalent of scooping??

Ok, ok, I’m about as guilty as anyone else. Partly because I have long lists of things I want to talk about and there are some cool streams of consciousness effects in the bringing of current issues in the same conversations. This is, in fact, where blogging is most interactive, IMHO.

Sheesh! Can’t people just think, once in a while?

Blogging, social butterfly effect, social networking, social networks, Yulblog

"It's A Small World After All" (Blogging Edition)

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Blogging is fun. Among the neat effects of blogging is that, though bloggers aren’t at all alike, they tend to be “like-minded people,” despite striking individual differences.

Cases in point, from last night.

Went to an event organized through Montreal Linkup, an event organisation system with obscure ties to Craigslist. At one point Saib, one of the participants, was talking about a blog post he had read. Turns out, he was describing my ramblings (and open letter) about Montreal culture and the Linkup system. I did feel quite proud. Not that he had read my post (or that he remembered anything about it), but that the post had exactly the kind of effect I wanted. Though blogging can feel awkward in my case, and I often feel like I’m writing in a vacuum (for several reasons, feedback to my entries has been extremely limited), it leads to those situations where different parts of your life are linked.

Also present at the Linkup event was Shiraz, a fellow YulBlogger. Thanks to the Yulblog Confessions from the August YulBlog gathering, I had went on Shiraz’s blog and even used her technique of blogging different topics in the same post, right here. Before the Linkup event, I didn’t know Shiraz personally, but chances are now that we might link to each other.

Which is a major issue among bloggers. Been thinking about it myself, thanks in part to Sylvain Carle (yet another YulBlogger). And it has influenced my blogging philosophy (whether I notice it or not). No wonder network analysis has been growing steadily. (Man! Do I love putting my academic hat in the middle of my ramblings…)

On occasion, I will insert as many outgoing links in my blog entries as possible. Several reasons for this practise, including the fact that it’s easier to find links if they’re on my blog. But there might be more of a wish to get comments from other bloggers by teasing them with links to their blogs (thanks to pings and trackbacks).

Yes, posting about blogging is allegedly uncool, and linking to your own entries seems silly. But I’m having fun doing this… 🙂

In fact, if you think this whole blog is lame, do comment here! 😉

academic podcasting, eLearning

Podcasting Profs

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My good friend Philippe Lemay is being interviewed by national media about his newfangled podcast-teaching methods. Here’s a short summary (in French):

Quand le prof vit aux îles de la Madeleine

Thanks in part to podcasting (and ProfCast), Philippe can teach in Montreal from his home in the Magdalen Islands. The implications are rather profound, especially for “remote regions” («régions éloignées»), the economic development of which often becomes politically significant. Granted, such solutions aren’t typically for just everyone and relying on technology for social change is often a risky proposition. But technology does bring hope to a lot of people.

academic models, constructivism, course management systems, humour, Moodle, pedagogy, Québec, relativism, Spoofs, teaching and learning

Teaching Reforms and Humour

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A funny spoof (in French) on education reforms in Quebec since 1960.
L’enseignement à travers les époques – 🙂 & < – by adamsofineti

The “current” buzzphrase in Quebec is «approche par compétences», which could roughly be described as a “performance-oriented approach to learning” or, somewhat more generally, “objective-oriented learning.” The main conceptual tools used in this approach come from socio-constructivism, at least officially.

It’s never a good strategy to make fun of colleagues but I can help but be amazed by how a conference presentation on «approche par compétences» manages to not say anything substantial on the subject. Here’s an iTunes link to that presentation. I’m sure professor Marie-Françoise Legendre is a very thoughtful scholar and that this MP3 version of her talk doesn’t do justice to her presentation, but there’s something about some of these approaches which just, honestly, makes me laugh.

Funnily enough, my father was trained by Jean Piaget who is sometimes associated with constructivist approaches to learning. (In fact, my relativistic/holistic approach to life and anthropology probably relates very directly to some indirect influences from Piaget.) And my favourite Course Management System, Moodle, mentions (social) constructivism and constructionism in its philosophy statement. Many of the pedagogical principles labeled by those buzzphrases are widely accepted and I do personally tend to accept them. At the same time, some pedagogical practises allegedly based on these principles seems almost absurd to me and several colleagues.

An interesting situation, if not a rare one.

Academia, academic publishing

Refworks and RefGrab-It

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The more I learn about RefWorks and their recent developments, the more impressed I get at how clueful those people are. Latest feature,  RefGrab-It, a browser bookmarklet to directly import references from pages that include Digital Objects Identifiers (DOIs), relevant RSS feeds, or ISBNs. Now that some journal publishers (such as Blackwell/Synergy) are enhancing their online offerings with features such as reference lists and alerts for article citations (“alert me when this article is cited”), things can become fun in academic publishing.

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Good Customer Service: Netflix

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Sure, no company’s customer service is ever perfect but I like what Netflix has done.

As I’m back in Montreal and Netflix (unfortunately) doesn’t ship to Canada, I put my Netflix account on hold. It used to be that you could do just that from your account page but, these days, you need to send a message to customer service. Which I did and they suspended my account right away. I sent back the last DVD I had received from them and had put myself a note for when the hold would be lifted.

Because the PDA on which I had noted this date died on me, I didn’t notice that the date for my account reactivation had come by and, this morning, I received messages from Netflix telling me that my account was active again, that I was charged the regular fees, and that a movie would soon be sent to my address in Massachusetts. Oops! I should have changed my reactivation date! My mistake! Too late! Let’s hope I can push it back and not receive a DVD at an address where I’m not…

So I sent a message back to customer service. Not only did they reply quite fast and put a new hold on my account but they actually credited my credit card account for the fees that they had automatically taken from it. Sure, it makes a lot of sense to do just that. But many companies would only reimburse you if you complained, threatened to sue, and made a big fuss about it. So, it’s surprisingly nice to not have to go into a fit for a small thing like this.

Again, really, it’s not much. But it proves that Netflix got it: you don’t get good business if you constantly try to nickel and dime your customers.

So, thank you, Netflix!

humour

Ne brisez pas la chaîne!

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Ah! Ça fait du bien de rire un coup!

À la fin d’un message contenant une de ces blagues typiques sur les hommes et les femmes:

Envoyez simplement ce message a au moins 5 millions de personnes de votre entourage… Cette chaîne a été commencée en 1625 avant ma belle-soeur par un moine moldave passionne d’informatique à la paroisse de St-Poal-de-Martres au Portugal dans le but de sauver Thérèse, une petite fille gravement malade. Aujourd’hui cette petite fille a 378 ans et elle est atteinte d’un cancer des testicules et d’une fièvre affreuse de la glande thyroïde contractée lors d’un viol par un cerf en période de brame en foret de Rambouillet a proximité d’une marre souillée par des déchets radioactifs malencontreusement tombes d’un avion furtif… De plus, lors d’un safari en Afrique du Sud, avec Nouvelles Frontières, elle s’est fait bouffer un genou et  une oreille par un panda importé d’Himalaya en visitant le zoo de Johannesburg.

Alors, s’il vous plait, pour elle, ne brisez pas cette chaîne!
Vous êtes son seul espoir de guérison et en plus, cela vous portera chance.Comme par exemple a ce jeune Irlandais qui, en 1912, fit suivre ce message par SMS. Dans la semaine, il se vit offrir une place pour une croisière inaugurale sur un superbe transatlantique britannique le "P’tit Annick". Lors de ce voyage il découvrit les frissons de l’amour et les bienfaits de la natation.

Ne gardez surtout pas ce message dans votre ordinateur plus de 16 minutes sans quoi la malédiction s’acharnera sur vous jusqu’au retour des bernaches a cou roux. (et non a Kourou).il y a un peu plus de 2000 ans, un homme reçut ce message sur son ordinateur portable.Comme sa batterie était vide et qu’il ne pouvait pas la recharger vu qu’il n’y avait pas encore d’électricité a cette époque, il fut crucifie avec des clous rouilles et comme si cela ne suffisait pas, on lui mit sur la tête une couronne de piquants qui font mal. Ça fait tout de même réfléchir, alors n’hésitez plus !

Renvoyez ce message à tous vos amis. Cela leur portera chance, a vie. Chaque fois qu’ils iront aux toilettes, il y aura encore du papier. Chaque fois qu’ils achèteront des saucisses à la volaille,ils bénéficieront de 20 centimes d’euros de réduction immédiate à la caisse. Chaque fois qu’ils mangeront des moules, il n’y aura pas de petits crabes dedans (sauf pour ceux qui aiment bien). Chaque fois qu’il y aura Céline Dion à la radio, le téléphone sonnera.Enfin, ils seront désormais exempts de répondre à tous les messages chaînes qui nous foutent les boules! Si vous le faites, en plus,! vous recevrez prochainement un bon de réduction de 25 % valable dans tout le catalogue des 3 Cuisses (sauf pages 323 à 332) et moi, je recevrai un bon de parrainage.

Ce message a déjà fait 759 874 236 587 686 fois le tour du monde.

Pour Thérèse, pour vous, pour moi, pour tous vos amis, ne brisez pas cette chaîne.

Merci

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Advice to New Mac OS X User

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My reply to Martine Pagé’s post about her transition to Mac OS X.

Funnily enough, I moved in the other direction (I needed a dirt-cheap computer), back in late December. Still miss my 2001 iBook (500MHz, 384MB RAM) and Mac OS X.

One thing I noticed (and was mentioned by others, elsewhere) is that Flock is much less of a resource hog on Mac OS X than on XP. No idea why. Though I never had issues with Firefox on OSX, I had switched to Flock and this made my transition to XP less fun. Safari can be a great tool, especially if you use one of OSX’s best-kept secrets: Services.

Ah, Services! The best tools for compulsive writers. You know, those menu items like "Summarize," available in pretty much all Cocoa apps and several Carbon apps. They also include support for the system-wide multi-lingual spellchecker (a fantastic tool for us, bilingual writers). Be sure to check out some of these, especially WordService. And once you start using Nisus Thesaurus, you’ll wonder how you did without it.

Perhaps the main trick with the Mac, mentioned in several comments here, is to only use the mouse when you really have to. Especially if you use the Mac to write, at any length. Use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. Luckily, they’re very consistent across the system so you’ll be used to them in no time. When you’re writing, shortcuts are much more efficient than any kind of mouse movement. And you can usually apply shortcuts to any menu item. Menus are there to find out about features or to reach some of the lesser used features of an app.

Writing, on the Mac, is really pleasurable with the right tools. My favourite writing tools overall are outliners. Yes, there are outliners on any platform. But Mac OS X users arguably have a much better selection than anybody else. (What is widely recognized as the best outliner on Windows has been discontinued a number of years ago and doesn’t support any XML format.) If you’re interested in outlining, be sure to check ATPO. If you’re not yet into outlining, you might want to give OmniOutliner a try (IIRC, it comes preinstalled on new Macs as a trial version).

Another thing you might want to do is check out the wealth of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open-Source Software) on Mac OS X. Not only are most Linux projects also available on OSX but there are very high-quality projects made especially for Mac OS X. These tend to be über-productivity apps (i.e., efficient software for actual work) like the TeXShop TeX editor and the BibDesk bibliography manager. Or academic apps like TAMS Analyzer. But there are more "mainstream" apps like the Camino browser (mentioned here) and the TextWrangler text editor. To be honest, I almost never bought software for Mac OS X because so much of what I needed was already available for free.

Mac OS X is also a very cool geek platform. While the Mac OS turned us long-time users away from CLIs, Mac OS X integrates GUI and CLI elements extremely well. More often than not, I had a Terminal window open to do quick manipulations on files and processes. As any Unix geek knows, the shell is often the best place to accomplish real work.

I guess I’m writing this more out of nostalgia for my days working on Macs than to give you specific advice. There’s clearly a lot to say about Mac OS X.

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Blogging, blogging systems, blogging tools

Windows Live Writer Test

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As WLW seems to be the first standalone blog editor to support Blogger Beta, a short test is in order.

Although, I do prefer Qumana and ecto, at least for the interface.

One thing that we really need is a blog tool that has access to our browser histories. That way, we could quickly insert links directly from the editor.

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Concordia, Concordia University, Teaching

Rule Concordia, Concordia Rule the Waves

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[Drafted this on October 19, 2006. My resolution is to procrastinate less… 😉 ]

Despite the title, this is not about "ruling" anything. And it’s not about Britain. But it is about Concordia. In part.

Been spending some time at Concordia University recently. As it’s the next place where I’ll be teaching, I tend to think of it as "my university."

I feel as if my enthusiasm for this university will not waver for a while. It really is a pretty interesting place for the type of work I enjoy doing. Not the only place where I can be happy, possibly not even the best place. But I like Concordia and I’m not afraid to say it.

I’ve been thinking about what I like about Concordia. A fairly good example is that today (October 19, 2006), I spent an hour and twenty minutes talking about pedagogical issues with Olivia Rovinescu, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning Services. Sure, almost any university or college has equivalent services. Some of these centres are actually very useful. But this isn’t about comparison. It’s about satisfaction. I’m getting exactly the type of help I want. As it’s usually easier to complain about what we don’t get than to rejoice at what we do get, I think it’s very important to say such things when we do get good service.

My status at Concordia is quite precarious, at this point. To be very precise, I’m a PTF, part-time faculty. We do have a strong association, which means that we do get better conditions than many part-time lecturers at other institutions, but our status still isn’t anything like full-time, tenure-track professors. Which has a lot of advantages, actually. For instance, we don’t need to do any committee work, we can easily teach at different institutions, we don’t depend on the PTR committee, our research is free of some of the administrative burdens of constant evaluation, we need not know the intricacies of advising bureaucracy, students and administrators see us primarily as instructors/teachers, we can teach before having finished a Ph.D. (or, in some cases, even before the end of the master’s degree), we’re free to refuse teaching contracts without any penalty, and we get a fairly simple point system for professional advancement. On the other hand, we get fewer of the amenities afforded tenured professors and we may not have our contracts renewed year after year (even though some lecturers have become "fixtures" in their departments and can assume that they will regularly get work every semester, if they want it).

[I guess I stopped writing because I didn’t want to go too deeply on the moaning mode. Since then, I’ve thought about different issues and I now see my passion for teaching in a new light. I’ll surely post about that as well as about pedagogical philosophies, Frank McCourt, Radio Open Source on technology in education, my father’s experience as a teacher and educational psychologist, etc.]