August, 2010


31
Aug 10

Open Courseware Participants

This is just a gentle reminder to everyone interested in open access materials, and in some fashion in open access education, that there is now an easy way to search the expanding offerings: Open Courseware Search. As the site itself notes, the following offerings are searched:

  1. School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins (institution:jhsph)
  2. MIT (institution:mit)
  3. Notre Dame (institution:nd)
  4. The Open University UK (institution: openuniversity)
  5. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (institution:politecnicamadrid), Spanish courses
  6. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (institution:stanford)
  7. Delft University of Technology (institution:tudelft), English and Dutch courses
  8. UMass Boston (institution:umass)
  9. The University of Tokyo (institution:utokyo), both English and Japanese OCW collections
  10. Yale University (institution:yale)

My own university is, I think, moving to a more open model for its course content offerings. I see this as a real opportunity to make available content I have developed to a wider audience. I think the real value of a campus environment is not exclusivity of content but the potential for interaction.


31
Aug 10

Creating ePub files with Pages

The Apple Knowledge Base has a terrific, and easy to follow, article on how to output ePub files out of the iWork Pages application.


28
Aug 10

LAX

11:00: Up and down the terminal. Up and down.

11: 30: No amount of eye drops will soothe my eyes.

Midnight. I’m pacing the length of the terminal to keep myself awake.

12:30 In Terminal five, or is it six? Of LAX people move about line the notes of a complex melody. Fast and slow. Here all direction. And there none.

Heard while boarding my flight to Lafayette:

“I done had myself a day.”


26
Aug 10

Books on Making and Makers at Tor.com

The good folks at Tor have put together a list of “books, manuals, catalogs, etc. [that] are hard to find, but if you are willing to do a little extra work, there are a whole host of amazing DIY and makers texts out there not available in your corner bookstore. Some of these are catalogs; some are just obscure. All are intriguing and heartily recommended by our contributors.” Here’s the link.


26
Aug 10

Scientists spend more time in analysis than humanists. Data is just a blob from which one discerns patterns. They don’t particularly love it the way a literary scholar loves novels.


24
Aug 10

I almost understood the formula that accompanied this quote. Yes. I did.

A is a renormalized Markov version of this matrix.


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22
Aug 10

Maker stamps in France were first imposed as a means of quality control in the mid 1600s. Not required until 1740s, they fell out if use when the guilds were abolished in 1793.


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Aug 10


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21
Aug 10

Some Links to Remember for Later

ProfHacker on “Simple, Powerful Uses for Google Books”: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Simple-Powerful-Uses-for/26185/

Git for the lazy: http://www.spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_the_lazy

ProfHacker on “Checklist for an Open CourseWare Semester”: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Checklist-for-an-Open/26317/

HomeBrew is an alternative to MacPorts: http://abhinay.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/macports-to-homebrew-new-packaging-system-for-mac-os-x/

Aptana Studio bills itself as “the world’s leading IDE for building open web applications”: http://www.aptana.org/products/studio2


20
Aug 10

Berger’s Talk

Visualization => sonification.