strangely entangled

In a moment of fashion/geek weakness, I ordered an Evolution jacket from ScotteVest a couple weeks ago. According to UPS, it should arrive sometime today. I’ve never had the best of luck with UPS. How is it that they can ship a package across the country without difficulty, but are stymied by an apartment “buzzer” security system? I called them to point out that we have a 24 hr concierge in our building, so hopefully the driver will leave the package with him.

I’ll make sure to post a review and take some photos of the new jacket when it arrives. I don’t think I’m going to get much of a chance to wear it though, the temperature is supposed to hit 10 C in Vancouver today.

Oh my. I came across this by way of the fine folks at the io9 sci-fi blog. Originally posted at Number Six’s er, Tricia Helfer’s blog.

Nat and I attended Northern Voice in Vancouver this past weekend. All in all it was a pretty good conference, although I didn’t care much for the MooseCamp sessions on the Friday (with the exception of the excellent Wiki session, which I only caught part of).

For me, the best session by far was the Saturday afternoon “Blogs in Education” session. As I am doing web2.0-ish contract work for a BC university (and I’m a recent grad too), I found the session to be very relevant and the speakers were obviously very passionate about using open source technologies to further learning.

The gist of the presentation was that traditional learning management systems like WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, and Desire2Learn, can be replaced by custom solutions built on open-source technologies like Wordpress-mu and Drupal. One of the examples presented was a setup where each student in a class has their own blog, and the professor runs an RSS aggregator which pulls all of the blog posts together into a single “classroom discussion”.

While I was impressed with the possibilities, I do think that the presenters were a bit overzealous in their presentation of these tools. Every single presentation involved an hypothetical English or other Arts class. Where are the solutions for science students? Blogging and forums are useful to a point, but we often find it hard to discuss classroom work online because doing so requires the ability to share equations and other mathematical expressions, and so far the web just really isn’t good at that yet.

Still, I’m intrigued by the potential of these tools.