User:Rayc/Learning Blog

This learning blog was started by me, a custodian, in an attempt to see if the concept is useful enough to allow an exemption from the long standing tradition of disallowing blogs on wikimedia projects. I'm also going to bring this up at the colloquium to see if we want to delete these kind of things, so this page's live might be very short.

19:56, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm written and defended my thesis, and now I'm back. Of course it takes a while to get active again in this place, but I'll seek out what's been going on and help out. Of immediate interest to me is some more links I found, free science videos and patient initiated medical research.

02:11, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
Oh, my, I haven't written for a while. The next program I downloaded was skype and then mozphone. They are both VoIP apps. Skpye has great voice quality and enough bandwidth to pump video through, using a P2P technology. Mozphone relies on *, and has a 3 to 5 second delay in sound that is annoying. The difference: Mozphone's code is published and Skype's isn't. Thus for some of the FOSS partisans, Mozphone is better. I judge things on functionality and cost. Skype works much better and is free, just not in the philosophical sense.

On the other side, people are perpetually posting links to open courseware sites over the wiki saying could I import this? Could we use that? Open courseware use a CC license, we use a GDFL. Our stuff can be used commercially, theirs can't. They are both part of the open education movement. It's just we can't talk to each other because one day we hope that someone else will make money off of our work.

I've also floated the idea that we start searching youtube for educational videos. That was shot down that youtube's copyright control wasn't good enough to be sure that we weren't linking to copyrighted work.

It's times like this I want to say, "License aren't important! Whether you can see code isn't important! Ignore all rules, we are try to educate!" Unfortunately, education seems to come in second to being free. License and copylefts are the way to be free. I just hope Wikiveristy doesn't turns into one giant link farm to unfree sites that can help people much better then we can.

22:02, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Back to class for me, so yet again I'll be a bit busy. I've been now playing around with art of illiusion, as it is alway helpful to know how to do 3D animation. Check out my take on the logo. I think I found another person interested in the test and quiz problem. He seems to want a much larger overhall than what I've been proposing. The code from sp wikipedia works, but at the expence of all other hiddin class divs. It might be just a fluke, but I would like to have both working. In other news,

I've been listening to the wikipodcast and wondering if wikio could get off the ground here. We'll need acess to skype. Which bring me to my last point, I'm thinking that I'm going to start building user categories for experence with certain programs. Off to do that now.

03:52, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Having a bit to much fun with the Stellerarium software. Have no idea how I could use it, but I find the scripts informative. I could write up a short point by point list to get a person to download it, and run a script, and then the script to take over as the astronomy lesson from their. I've seen scripts are possible on Google Earth, and probably on a bunch of free to download programs. First steps in moving some of the education onto a non-wiki platform.

However, first I am going to start becoming a monobook hacker, something that this wiki really needs. Of to the mediawiki to learn about that!

06:24, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
I've transformed the ping pong code into an actual working test, El Salón de Clase quizI. It's a giant pain to code, though. On the plus side, 6 people now have tried to use ABCD, and one actually wrote a modification for plants. Bit of a change around wikiversity. The Browse now looks pretty, another strong contributer has started to the astronomy pages. Bloom-clock restarted. Also, broke 1000 pages. I wanted to put that google earth "for educators" link somewhere, but haven't found a good place to put it.

20:14, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Guess blogs are ok. A little progress in the quiz code. Ping pong works, but random order doesn't want to assign anything but text to the sorting variables. There is also some talk of banning the open proxies, all 1024 of them each month. They should set it so that the meta wiki block all open proxies for all projects.

20:24, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
Saw that people were using blogs to document there learning experiences on wikiversity. I can remember something to that effect in the project description, but can't remember if it was on site or off site.

Currently experimenting with the ping-pong flash test concept. Weakness is that people still can see from previewing the link what the answer is. Would love to see a way of setting a variable without editing, but would settle for a way of randomly shuffling the answers to a question so that it is not always "B". I'm going to give the spanish department some help and model the first ping pong test as a Spanish vocab test.

Some software work also. Software testing is reviewing my comment on becoming a software testing department for programs use on site, not just in the real world. Teh astronomy project is wondering what the fair use criteria is for star pictures from aliadin software, and I still want to build that central database of free software for educational uses somewhere.