Category: Work


  • False Panacea

    I ran across Jon Udell’s post on The once and future university which pointed to Mike Caulfield’s post with the video (Transcript). Technology, I think, is a false Panacea. The role of information technology is to better aggregate information for whatever it is we do. Such aggregation draws disparate sources together, but the sources fail…

  • At the BbWorld Developers’ Conference (Thursday afternoon and Friday morning after BbWorld), there was a session by John Fontaine called What the Heck is a Hotfix? (PPT,audio recording). I’d been meaning to go look for this at the Bb Connections web site where the conference presentations were uploaded. However, I found this through a Bb…

  • Cotton Pickin’ Candy, originally uploaded by Ezra F.

  • Previously I have seen usability describing ease of using a web site. These four essences of usability are interesting. I believe that to satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs: Availability: A site that’s unreachable, for any reason, is useless. Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to…

  • Someone brought a baby. There are lots of strange noises from women making baby speak. The only thing I understood from all of that was, “Do we have a new employee?” Get ’em started young, I guess. Teach ’em to be good employees before they learn to talk back.

  • Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. This is part two in a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). Part one covered automation of…

  • Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). I wrote the bit about tracking…

  • I am home from the Tennessee Baha’i School. I enjoyed the weekend. Meeting new people is not something I’d normally place high on my list. However, I have yet to go to a Baha’i conference or weekend school where I did not come away feeling happy to have met all those I did. Naturally, since…

  • One of my co-workers says about tracking, “One of the big selling points to [Blackboard] Vista is the wealth of tracking data for auditing, grade challenges, and catching cheaters.” Certainly, Reports and Tracking in Blackboard’s Vista 3 is one of the more favorite tools. So making sure the data gets there is critically important. The…