Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: user interface

  • TED Talk: Picking apart the puzzle of racism in elections

    By Nate Silver A less than convincing point… The list of states with voters reporting a racial bias only well matches the Obama-Clinton difference map because Nate draws the audience to the states he’s picking on: Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia (5 hits). He totally ignores the strong race bias in South Carolina, […]

  • Smart Boys

    George and I talked about this some last night. Nature vs Nurture… I tend to think of both as bottlenecks for human development. The debate about which does more to me makes as much sense as debating which is better for a web application: Apache or MySQL? Both are involved and affect the end results. […]

  • Session Oddities

    One of the clients we host complained about losing their session. Blackboard recommended we switch how our load balancer is handling the session persistence. Before agreeing to do that, we decided to use Blackboard’s script to determine if there is a problem before trying to fix something which may or may not exist. An acceptable […]

  • Losing My Mind

    CPR/AED training requires time on the floor rescuing dummies. Objects in pockets, like my Digital Elph, interfere with rescuing dummies. Digital cameras on desks without supervision have a tendency to disappear. (Not so much from coworkers kleptomania but from my distractions.) So I put it in my work backpack.  Today is the First Day of […]

  • Blame It on Oprah

    Ev said, “To those asking: Site slowness today had nothing to do with @Oprah.” Social networks are amusing and fun at times. I’m just a fan of moderation. Too much of anything will ruin it. Ever since Twitter became the new Golden Tool of PR, I knew it would be a matter of time. Friends and […]

  • Blackboard iPhone App

    People have been contacting me all day about the Blackboard iPhone App. Both Blackboard and the Chronicle of Higher Education posted blogs about its release. Blackboard + iPhone = Learning on the Go (Blackboard) Blackboard Releases iPhone Application (Chronicle.com) I find it interesting Jessica mentioned a Georgia student is the inspiration in the Bb blog […]

  • Flickr Search

    Flickr has millions of photos. (Maybe billions.) Many of these photos are tagged. One can look at all the photos with a tag. Every tag has a built in RSS feed. However, to view a combination of tags, one needs to search for the two tags. Athens tag – which includes Athens, Greece and Athens, […]

  • LMS Security

    This morning there was a flurry of effort to locate an article called “Hacking WebCT.” My coworker was able to locate it. We were disappointed.  The main points of the article were: Lazy administrators make compromising user accounts easy. Lazy instructors make getting questions for assessments easy. These apply to any LMS. So, here is some […]

  • Information Should Be Free

    Mark Guzdial makes the point teachers add value to the learning process. Normally, I would agree. However, I got hung up on a misquote from a Walter Isaacson article How to Save Your Newspaper in TIME offering micropayments as the solution to newspapers finding a working model to survive since advertisements are not the right one. Mark said it […]

  • Blackboard Learn Password Changes

    Normally when presenting the opportunity to change a password, a user is required to provide the current password in addition to the new. It ensures the one changing the password already knows the password.  According to Olaf Ritman, Blackboard Academic Suite 6, 7, 8 and Learn 9 ignore asking for the current password. Can anyone with […]