Technology

Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School‘s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that shows up in Second Life.

Nesson has an interesting blog post about how it all works, but she also answered questions from the audience about why it works:

As a distance learning environment it’s head and shoulders above anything else because of levels and types of interactions possible versus any previous tool.

It’s a poor format for lectures, but a great format for discussions, so it really encourages conversation and discourse.

It’s a community that exists independent of the class meeting. In here we have much more of those liminal times when people are just hanging out. …We have more opportunities for interaction.

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.

— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.

Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?

Students love IM. They love Google. They love FaceBook. What does your courseware matter to them?

It’s really titled Social Software for Teaching & Learning, and I’m here with John Martin, who’s deeply involved with our learning management system and portfolio efforts (especially as both of these are subject to change real soon now).

Aside: CMS = content management system, LMS = learning management system. Let’s please never call an LMS a CMS…please?

On the schedule is…

• Social Software in the Classroom: Happy Marriage or Clash of Cultures? (Eric Gordon, Emerson)
• Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World (Rebecca Nesson, Harvard)
• Electronic Constructivism: Inspiring and Motivating Students with Thought Provoking Questions and Emerging Technologies (Dr. Maureen Brown Yoder, Lesley University)
• Social Computing Tools in the Curriculum (Katie Livingston Vale, MIT)

PHP iCalendar solves a couple problems I’m working on, but I needed a solution to fix the duration display for Gcal-managed ICS calendars.

As it turns out, a fix can be found in the forums, and the trick is to insert the following code in functions/ical_parser.php.

case 'DURATION':
	if (($first_duration == TRUE) && (!stristr($field, '=DURATION'))) {
		ereg ('^P([0-9]{1,2}[W])?([0-9]{1,2}[D])?([T]{0,1})?([0-9]{1,2}[H])?([0-9]{1,2}[M])?([0-9]{1,}[S])?', $data, $duration); 
	
		$weeks = str_replace('W', '', $duration[1]);
		$days = str_replace('D', '', $duration[2]);
		$hours = str_replace('H', '', $duration[4]);
		$minutes = str_replace('M', '', $duration[5]);
		$seconds = str_replace('S', '', $duration[6]);
		
		// Convert seconds to hours, minutes, and seconds
		if ($seconds > 60) {
			$rem_seconds = $seconds % 60;
			$minutes = $minutes + (($seconds - $rem_seconds) / 60);
			$seconds = $rem_seconds;
		}
		if ($minutes > 60) {
			$rem_minutes = $minutes % 60;
			$hours = $hours + (($minutes - $rem_minutes) / 60);
			$minutes = $rem_minutes;
		}
		
		$the_duration = ($weeks * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7) + ($days * 60 * 60 * 24) + ($hours * 60 * 60) + ($minutes * 60) + ($seconds);
		$first_duration = FALSE;
	}
	break;

Hopefully this gets worked into the baseline with the next release.

Brian Mann calls Adium “one of the best multi-network [IM] clients ever.” Tim Bray says it has a “wonderful user interface,” while also naming IM generally “an essential business tool.” Eric Meyer, meanwhile, exclaims “Adium is my new chat buddy.”

What’s so great about Adium? Gaim is the engine behind the scenes, but the face of the application is XHTML and CSS. Wit Meyer:

The entirety of an Adium chat window is an XHTML document that’s being dynamically updated via DOM scripting—all of it pumped through WebKit, of course. In creating a message theme, you define what markup will be used, and write CSS to style it. You can even define variants on your theme by writing additional style sheets.

So with all that, how can I not look at it?

I needed a quick, perhaps even sloppy way to output an array as XML. Some Googling turned up a few tools, including Simon Willison’s XmlWriter, Johnny Brochard’s Array 2 XML, Roger Veciana Associative array to XML, and Gijs van Tulder’s Array to XML. Finally, Gijs also pointed me to the XML_Serializer PEAR Package.

In an example of how even the smallest barriers can turn people away, I completely ignored the two possible solutions at PHP Classes, because navigating and using the site sucks. I passed on Willison’s function because, well, it didn’t look like it would do enough of what I wanted. Despite Gijs’ recommendation of the PEAR module, I was happy enough to use his array_to_xml function, as it did what I needed and required the lest work for the moment. I may revisit XML_Serializer sometime, but…

Peter Gulutzan, author of SQL Performance Tuning, writes in The Full-Text Stuff That We Didn’t Put In The Manual about the particulars of word boundaries, index structure, boolean searching, exact phrase searching, and stopwords, as well as offering a few articles for further reading (Ian Gilfillan’s “Using Fulltext Index in MySQL”, Sergei Golubchik’s “MySQL Fulltext Search”, Joe Stump’s “MySQL FULLTEXT Searching”). It’s one of a number of articles in the MySQL Tech Resources collection.

All my searching seems to confirm my hazy memory that my olf NewerTech FireWire 2 Go card does indeed support target disk mode, but the old “hold T while booting” trick doesn’t seem to be working. Another shady part of my memory is that the key command was different, but what is it? Either Google is failing me, or it really isn’t online anywhere. Help?

ZDnet’s David Berlind complains that upgrades are painful:

Upgrading to new systems is one of the most painful things you can possibly do. If you’re a vendor of desktop/notebook systems, it also represents that point where you can keep or lose a customer. Today, most system vendors have pretty much nothing from a technology point of view that “encourages” loyalty. Upgrading from an old Dell to a new Dell is no easier than upgrading to a system from a competing vendor. The system vendor that figures out how to make it less painful to upgrade to their own systems than to their competitors’ is the one that will get more loyalty out of their customers.

Of course Apple’s been doing this for a while with their Migration Assistant tool.

• memcached, a “highly effective caching daemon, …designed to decrease database load in dynamic web applications,” and the related PHP functions
• pspell PHP functions related to aspell and this pspell overview from Zend
• http_build_query, duh?
• current connected mysql threads * unix load average = system busy; reduce operations when $system_busy > $x

When Dan Cat gets cagey, and people are talking about mysterious map buttons in Flickr a guy has to wonder…is this why the lines between Dan’s hobby and day job are so blurry?

update: Ryan Eby points out that the map is live!