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September 6, 2010

The Contrite Round Up – 8/24ish to 9/5

I knew it would happen.

I made a sad-sack Round Up wondering where all my peeps went and then I vanished last week when the blogs blew up. It’s not that I abandoned you, I was super busy putting the final touches on some outreach documents we’ve been working on. I know, I know – it’s not an excuse. All the same it’s been great to come back to the blog roll and see a bunch of new faces. I’ve gotten kind of lazy about hoping up on the soap box before I get into the blogs and I miss abusing my power here so let me thumb through the news and see what I can rant about…

Well there was my favorite Arizonan, Jan Brewer, having a fantastic meltdown. I’ve pretty much said all I can say about her and stay employed. It’s not like Footenotes is FootenotesonJanBrewersterrifyingrisetopowerinwayssarahpalincouldonlydreamof.com so I’ll leave it at that. But seriously, her poll numbers actually climbed afterward.

On a slightly less catty note, folks are starting to take notice of the impending disaster students loans are going to be for us. This handy chart does a little explaining of the shape we’re in and makes for a quick read. At this point I don’t even look at my student loan statements, I just put them in a shoebox and quietly wait for the apocalypse. I’m sure after my dissertation gets published and I start getting royalty checks from the movie they’re going to make about me while I was writing it everything will be fine.

Ok, enough – let’s talk about blogs before we all get bummed out!

First off – Tim Wilson’s @twilson long slow project to teach us French has started to pay off. Another francophone blog popped up! I’m excited to see so many languages turn up around the Commons, it even looks like an Italian language blog is in the works out there. Speaking of Italian, I noticed a new blog crop up – Beniamina Cassetta’s @beniamina A Cosa Stai Pensando / What’s on your mind? With posts alternating between two languages it’s great see the French set with some competition now. Beniamina had some pretty nice things to say about the Commons too and we’re glad to have you!

Maura Smale @msmale returned to the blogs to share some changes that have come to your library. The big three article archives messed around with their interfaces and Maura walks us through them. There’s a little note at the end about librarians lighting torches and storming JSTOR, check it out.

Resident Elluminate expert Adam Wandt @Awandt has been interviewed by the Elluminate folks. As you will recall he walked us through his experience with the software right here on the Commons.

Of course you can’t mention Elluminate now without thinking of BlackBoard. The folks over at BlackBoard took out the checkbook and snatched up a good thing when they saw it. Everyone has their own opinion of the education behemoth – Sarah Morgano @Sarah_Morgano gave us hers. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Helldriver @helldriver had been on hiatus, but returned this week with a prolific post about Demolition Hammer. I don’t know who this guy is but I imagine he must have the most fantastic record collection in New York. Usually I try and say a little something about a Helldriver post and then realize that I’m totally inarticulate when talking about music and feel like a putz so I’m going to leave this one alone. All the same it’s good to have you back.

Finally Michael Smith also returned with a great post about the art of watching the police. Seems as though there have been a crop of stories in the news lately about people getting arrested for doing this very thing. Naturally a quick Google search fails me for the recent things I was thinking of but I assure you it’s happening. Not that that’s assuring…

Anyways, it’s great to have everyone back and welcome new faces! Here’s hoping this semester is our best yet on the Commons. See ya next week.

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July 19, 2010

The Round-Up Where I Realized Summer is Almost Over – 6/12-6/18

Sorry, I guess that was a bummer of a headline. Think of it as a wake-up call, the beach will never be warmer. Seriously.

Things started off this week with some big news from Anthony Picciano’s @apicciano blog about education media giant Blackboard acquiring Elluminate. If Elluminate sounds familiar to you that’s because our very own Adam Wandt @awandt blogged about using it quite a bit last semester. While Adam had a pretty positive experience with the platform, I’ll be curious to see what Blackboard decides to do with it. My hope is that they leave it alone and let the Elluminate team continue to develop it, but I suspect it’s something they want to integrate into the Blackboard portal itself. I can see where it’s clearly a smart move for both companies; Elluminate gets a bunch of cash and Blackboard gets a better feature in their suite, but you know…*cough*…there have been some problems with BB’s stability and I wonder how well it’ll take to something like Elluminate if the two concepts are put together. And that’s not even touching on some of Tony’s greater concerns about centralization that should probably have all of our eyebrows perked a little more.

Michael Smith @MSmith posted some more of his work, this week reflecting on art in the age of catastrophe. I hate to play armchair critic, and wince a little when I go back and look at times when I’ve tried to publicly have an opinion on art, so I’ll just say that I really like what you did there. As someone who came of age in the late 90s rest assured that the insulation of padded foam on everything lingered well past the ‘everything is going to kill you’ 80’s. To that end I can’t help but feel like my generation of artists lack a certain appreciation for danger.

After a too long hiatus Helldriver @helldriver returns. It’s hard to write about music, especially in way that does it any justice, but this blog always delivers. Often it’s the insight drawn from writing on music that resonates the most, such as:

But in a broader sense, what’s happened to the 55 is indicative of what’s happened to New York City as a whole, which for the last couple of decades has been busy draining itself of all its wonderfully garish “local” color, and repackaging itself as one more franchise in a global urban chain store, drawing liberally on its own myths to manufacture a brand identity.

I couldn’t have said it better. To be fair, that’s not the moral of the story so do read on, but New York and I are in a fight this week.

That being said, run – don’t walk – and catch up on what’s going on at York College’s ‘Boot Camp’. This project is awesome and I hope to see more about on the Commons. It’s a great idea and I hope as our community here grows we’ll see more projects similar to this appear across CUNY.

And finally, from the Community Team come two posts you should definitely check out. Sarah Morgano @Sarah_Morgano posted to Commons Connections and gave us a handy guide to adding users to your blogs. Scott Voth @scottvoth posted to Wiki Wrangler about the Apture plug-in that allows readers to stay on your site while browsing links from your blog instead of being directed away.

There’s the week that was on the blogs. I mean it people, go out and play. It’ll be back in the classroom before you know it.

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April 17, 2010

This Week on ‘Days of our Blogs’

That was corny. Every Saturday I sit here trying to be clever in the title and then lose hope, just suffer with me.

What a week though! Things kicked off with the triumphant return of Helldriver. I had high hopes for our nascent music blog on the Commons and they’ve been exceeded. The post was a lovely piece about catching up with Miles Davis thanks to some unnamed British angle on WKCR. After reading it I went and dug through the CD books to pull out whatever Miles I had left after the various moves across New York over the years. Let this be a lesson to us all, just clear off a Saturday and get all of those old discs into iTunes or whatever you use because there’s nothing more heartbreaking than learning that most of your jazz collection is scratched up beyond repair. I did manage find my pristine copy of ‘On The Corner‘ and got to spend some time with one of the more vilified albums of his career. Thanks for that Helldriver.

Michael Smith over at the York College Comm Tech blog had a great post up explaining some of the finer points of Fair Use in the aural and visual worlds. I hadn’t ever considered how exactly students in the arts went about accounting for their sources in their work and it was nice to get some insight there. I’m hoping someone pops up in the comments to explain how they’ve worked around Fair Use and citation in their own personal experience.

Michael Oman-Reagan at My God, it’s Full of Macs! appears again. Looks like Apple had the nerve to censor a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. I told you last week there was something Sarah Palin-y about Macs.

Scott Voth checked in again this week to highlight some features on the wiki that can help everyone make the most out of BlackBoard. I’m tempted to make some kind of BlackBoard joke here because…well you know…but I’m afraid these folks might have my hide. If you haven’t spent a lot of time with the ‘Wiki‘ feature of the Commons BE NOT AFRAID! Seriously, go play, you’re not going to break anything. It’s pretty cool what everyone else is building over there and the more you put in the more you’ll get out.

Jeremy Rafal from Occasioanl Introspections on the World made two visits this week. The first of which was an awesome call out on a beverage tax ad. Plus, let’s take a moment to really enjoy how creepy that ad is. Seriously, go watch it. It reminds me a lot of these great ads that were being run by the good people at the High Fructose Corn Syrup lobby about a year ago:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl9vZYj-aJ4[/youtube]

I wonder if the actors are Equity?

The week wraps up with Anthony Picciano at Tony’s Thoughts pointing us to an article from the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman. It’s a timely read in the wake of the teacher cuts coming down the line and the spat of whole schools being fired in the name of reform. Maybe we need a government bail-out of the education industry. I sure could use 700 billion.

Till next week!

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March 27, 2010

Weekly Round-Up!

What a difference a week makes. Last week we were just happy to get some legislation so we could have bee hives in New York and now, as of today, I think I might possibly have insurance, or something. Or something happened at the White House and now I’m getting insurance, or I’ll have insurance in 2011, or if I go back in time I can get my parents’ insurance while I’m an undergrad which means I won’t have to do all of those awful things I did to pay for getting my wisdom teeth removed.

Snap out of it.

The health care bill did not go unnoticed here on the Commons this week. Jeremy Rafal over at ‘occasional introspections on the world‘ had a lot to say on it and towards the end had a lot of suggestions. It was all well and good until he started talking about how we need to exercise more and think about preventative health-care, not just “health care”. Sorry Mac, I can’t blog and jog at the same time, but congrats to OIotW for kicking up the most conversation in the comments this week!

Stepping out of the tall grass (maybe), we got a great post from Helen Keier this week on her blog ‘On the Board‘. I started to read it and then realized it as about Blackboard and thought, “well Blackboard is always down anyways so what’s the point…”and gave up. No, I kid, it’s a fabulous piece about using the tired ‘…but Blackboard wasn’t working’ as the perfect excuse to miss assignments. She’s totally, one-hundred percent right about students using that tired line to get out of projects, and I hope everyone takes a look at her blog. BB has come leaps and bounds and is playing an enormous role in bringing technology to the classroom. It’s awesome we have someone in the Commons Community who has such a passion for it and hopefully we can reach out to her for more thoughts on Blackboard and it’s place at CUNY.

That being said, Maura Smale made a great post this week about getting her course set up on WordPress and watching her students turn into pro-bloggers. It’s an excellent, excellent post talking about how she’s running her course and a must read for anyone curious about bringing WordPress into the classroom.

Finally, I want to wrap up this week with the Developmental Psych Cohort 09 blog again. It’s obviously being written for a closed audience, but everytime I check in there it’s like overhearing the most random snippets at a party. This week from them brings us:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfd5g8Y_Jqo&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

It’s almost art.

See you next week!