Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: single

  • Monopoly Fears

    Something brought up my abandoned Friendster blog, which had a link to fiftymillimeter which used to be my favorite photography site by people in Athens prior to me even moving here. Why “used to be”? Well over a year ago, they stopped posting to the site. Sad, I know. Still, I was curious, Where are…

  • Nature Photography Day

    June 15th is Nature Photography Day (and Father’s Day). Take your kids and grandkids on a nature trek and give them a single-use camera to use. Then print some of their photos and present them, in a mat or frame, to those young photographers. Pick something in nature that you’ve never photographed before, and then…

  • Trust and Transparency

    One of the books I am reading, Gut Feelings, made a statement: Transparency and trust are two sides of the same coin. without much elaboration. To place the statement in context, Gerd Gigerenzer was writing about moral systems. Specifically, how the Ten Commandments was so effective because it they are so simple. The American tax…

  • Better: Closed or Resolved

    I just read: Clients are receiving responses to and closures of long-outstanding tickets. In the past quarter we’ve reduced the number of outstanding tickets by 15% (1500 tickets). We closed several tickets because it was decided no resolution was ever going to be provided after the ticket was open for 6 months without the tier…

  • Ticket Inbox Zero

    Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…

  • Has Anything Changed?

    The previous post regarding the FBI checking on whether a photographer was Middle Eastern reminded me…. The Civil Rights Movement occurred before I was born. However, my parents were afflicted by blatantly racist laws which continued for decades. State anti-miscegenation law [1] at the time prohibited White females from marrying outside of their race. Since…

  • Page View Metric Dying

    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…

  • Blackboard Won Suit Against D2L

    Blackboard acquired patent ‘138 and brought a lawsuit against Desire2Learn. I would say 80-90% of the commentary about this case has been from anti-Blackboard crowd with about 90% of the rest from the let’s-wait-and-see crowd. Blackboard very much has been mum on the subject. I do not recall a blog of a single Blackboard supporter…

  • Using An LMS As a Network Drive

    Ran across a video describing how to get the WebDAV info in CE6 (aka Blackboard Vista 4 Lite) for the purpose of using CE6 as a network drive. The narrator says this is a good idea because if the site has good policies, then backups are being made. In the event of a site disaster,…