Mar

30

On Patents

Filed Under Blackboard Vista | Leave a Comment

News of the USPTO reexamination results of the Blackboard ‘0138 patent hit Slashdot yesterday. Naturally, both Desire2Learn and Blackboard are cautiously claiming victory. Certainly, as this is a draft and not the final decision, the next 60 days could result in significant changes to this preliminary decision. We will just have to wait and see.

How this plays out over the next couple months out to be interesting indeed.

Mar

29

National Debt

Filed Under Gov't & Politics | Leave a Comment

Saw a graph showing the United States national debt color coded by presidential party. The intent is to illustrate how Republican presidents are the big spenders.

Unfortunately, all too many Americans believe presidential candidates when they claim they will do some action or another. The farce is the President of the United States sends a wishlist of priorities to Congress (the State of the Union). It is Congress which sets the actual budget by passing appropriation bills. Congress has no obligation to include anything the President asks to be in the bill. The President can only veto each bill which usually contain budgets for hundreds of departments.

In my opinion, the chart ought to show who holds the majority of the houses of Congress (red for Republican, blue for Democrats, purple for one of each).

Mar

24

Wrong Number

Filed Under Blackboard Vista, Humor / Weird | Leave a Comment

A ticket our Blackboard technical support manager marked as really urgent was picked up by another technical support person who left a note about calling me. Except, the familiar phone number called wasn’t my office number or even my cell number. Nope, it is the office number at my previous job. Yup. I have not worked there in over two years. Yet, no one at WebCT or Blackboard has updated my contact information so Blackboard employees can find me. Isn’t the whole point of having my phone number to be able to call me? It is okay. As it is the end of the work day I was headed home anyway.
:)

Sorry, Andy, if they left a message….

Mar

22

Fall in Love With Cyberbullying

Filed Under Interweb | Leave a Comment

Kentucky’s Bill HB775 would require those operating web sites or blogs or message boards in the state to enforce a policy to collect legal names, postal addresses, and email addresses to use the service. The legal name would, of course, be posted on the web site. Should the poster cross someone else, then the operators have to hand over to the victim the identity of the poster. First offense at not having the poster’s identity is $500 ($1,000 each thereafter).

A policy to collect the information doesn’t mean the users of the web site must actually provide the information. Though it seems like this law is pointless unless it means the web site must force users to provide the information.

Any universities running a system like Blackboard Learning System Vista or CE editions (possibly others) probably would need to disable anonymous postings in the discussion board. The legal name of the poster would need to be visible. So, the system could not use nicknames the person would be addressed by in a face to face setting.

Universities typically have major difficulty getting students to correctly maintain their postal addresses. This is why many are turning to direct deposit of excess checks and email. This way the school avoids mail returns on thousands of addresses.

Mar

19

Tale of Defeating the Crazy Woman

Filed Under Interweb | Leave a Comment

Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual.

So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring out how to be a parent for the first time. Well, a crazy woman set up a ‘blog” which hotlinks images from Mojan’s blog and falsely represents the child in the photos. Ick. I offered to help with this identity theft issue.

Once upon a time, I was annoyed with people taking images from my last employer’s web site. Since I was the campus web designer, I created an image which said, “All your image are belong to VSU.” Also, as the web server administrator, I figured out how to defeat hotlinking with .htaccess by using mod_rewrite to give them my annoyance rather than their content. For the next couple days I watched the perpetrators try and figure out what was wrong. The hate mail I got was fantastic! I recommended Mojan do the same. When she agreed, I went researching to do what I did once upon a time. This is the .htaccess file I recommended she try.

# Basics
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

# Condition is true for any host other yours
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mojansami\.com/ [nc]

# What to change gif, jpg, png to which target. In this case does not exist.
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://mojansami.com/images/stolenpic.jpg [nc]

My directions were not all that specific. So the next thing I know, her site is sporting an Internal Server Error. *headdesk* She used Dreamweaver to create the .htaccess file and upload it to her site. She reported the file she uploaded disappeared. Eventually, it did occur to me to look for the error.log and see what it said. The log complained about DOCTYPE in the .htaccess file in the home directory. A file which did not show in the FTP listing. So, replacing the bad .htaccess file with a blank one fixed the Internal Server Error.

The .htaccess file in the right place, of course, resolved the issue with the crazy woman hotlinking.

Nothing can fix the pain of another person committing identity theft against you or your loved ones. I really hope Mojan doesn’t become discouraged and abandon blogging entirely. Between moderation and authentication she might find a better balance.

Do you have any stories of online identity theft?

Mar

13

File Conversion

Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment

Zamzar came in useful today. Someone sent a WordPerfect document. My Windows XP didn’t know what to do with it, so I found Zamzar off my del.icio.us bookmarks and sent the file for conversion.

I was able to open the file no problem.

Fantastic!

I can see lots of uses for this sort of thing. For instance, students submitting papers for assignments in various formats.

Mar

9

Dance Lessons, Anyone?

Filed Under Education | Leave a Comment

The modest proposal of having students help teachers learn to dance makes an interesting point. Suggesting the learners do not want to learn is an easy way to avoid the real problem.

I hear from higher education faculty, students are unmotivated and fail to see the importance of learning. I hear from academic technical support at the campuses my project supports, faculty members are unmotivated and fail to see the importance of technology.

Certainly, I ought not allow myself to think of students as unwilling to learn, faculty members unwilling to use technology, and academic technical support unwilling to help the faculty. Empathy is one of those right brain skills I should be using.

Mar

8

Study Groups Violate Academic Integrity?

Filed Under Interweb, University | 2 Comments

Maybe I need to add a “What were they thinking?” category?

A student created a Facebook group for chemistry students to ask peers for help. As these students already collaborate face-to-face in a study room and use official tutoring services, this was just replicating this online. The students claim to just be helping each other.

So why was the professor upset enough to ask for the student to be expelled? I think it boils down to:

  1. The Internet is used by cheaters.
  2. An invite talked about posting solutions.

Probably like all other cases I’ve seen there is more to the story than what is being reported.

Mar

7

Not Black Enough

Filed Under Race / Racism | 2 Comments

Because of racial profiling, I get false positive screened for extra security screening in airports. So, I need to look more African American. Some suggestions so far:

  • Grow out my hair and wear it in an afro / dreadlocks / cornrows.
  • Clothing improvements: baggy jeans, Jordans, tall teeshirt or sports jersey, one stud earing, chain, gold watch, diamond cut grill.

Any other suggestions?

When my ticket is purchased by my employer, I don’t have any problems. So, I only need to worry about this for personal trips. :)

Mar

5

Page View Metric Dying

Filed Under Blackboard Vista, GeorgiaVIEW, Metrics / Statistics | Leave a Comment

First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page.

What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value of the property. The assumption around attention is the longer someone spends on a web site, the more money that site gains in advertisement revenue. The rationale being users who barely glance at pages and spend little time on the site are not going to click ads. Does this really mean users who linger and spend large amounts of time on the site are going to click more ads?

This means to me attention is just another contrived metric which doesn’t measure what is really sought. I guess advertisement companies and the hosts brandishing them really do not want to report the click through rates?

My web browsing habits skew the attention metric way higher than it ought to be. First, I have a tendency to open several items in a window and leave them lingering. While my eyes spent a minute looking the content, the page spent minutes to hours in a window… waiting for the opportunity. Second, I actively block images from advertisement sources and block Flash except when required.

As a DBA, page views also has debatable usefulness. On the one hand we could use it because it represents a count of objects requiring calls to the database and rendering by application and web server code. Hits represent all requests for all content, simple or complex, so is more inclusive. Bandwidth throughput represents how much data is sucked out or pushed into the systems.

We DBAs also provide supporting information to the project leaders. Currently they look at the number of users or classrooms who have been active throughout the term. Attention could provide another perspective to enhance the overall picture of how much use our systems get.

Cat Finnegan, who conducts research with GeorgiaVIEW tracking data, measures learning effectiveness. To me, that is the ultimate point of this project. If students are learning with the system, then it is successful. If we can change how we do things to help them learn better, then we ought to make that change. If another product can help students learn better, then that is the system we ought to use.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is a single useful metric. Hits, unique users, page views, attention, bandwith, active users, etc., all tell me provide a nuanced view of what is happening. I’ve used them all for different purposes.

Next Page →

Clicky Web Analytics