Jeff Longland

Have arrived at BbWorld’08 in Las Vegas. Overwhelmed by everything that is Las Vegas, but for now, the focus is on BbWorld’08 and the DevCon’08. I’m going to make a concerted effort to blog all the sessions I attend, so with that - have to go register and make my way down to the Michael Wesch keynote. But first, a coffee.

While searching for log4j Chainsaw updates re: VFS support, I came across a post on Oliver’s blog (initial author of Chainsaw) that related to an issue I came across a few years ago. My post to the log4j-users mailing list was related to concerns about log4j socket appenders potentially deadlocking the application server - in this case, WebLogic 8.1. A few months later Oliver encountered the problem - which is what I stumbled upon today. So the point of this post? Don’t use socket appenders on a production system - although I thoroughly advocate their use on dev/qa environments. The other point, it’s a small world after all.

I have a couple of presentations/events coming up over the next couple of months:

• Spring Perspectives 2007 - Running through the WebCT Jungle: Tips and Tricks: This session will march deep into the WebCT jungle - learn how you can use WebCT as a central point-of-access for course content, assessments, grades management, library resources, and Turnitin.com. The session will include demonstrations of new active learning tools such as blogs, journals, peer review, and student contributions. Come and learn how to survive in the WebCT jungle! I’m looking forward to working CCR’s Run Through the Jungle into this one!
• Summer Teaching with Technology Institute - The focus of this Institute is to highlight the essential knowledge and skills required for the integration of technology into either your face-to-face or distance courses. Participants need not have any experience with instructional technologies to attend; they need only to have an interest in how technology can enhance their curricula.

I’ve previously posted about McGill’s Instructional Scenarios Wiki, but it deserved another link - it’s focused on WebCT Vista, but good nonetheless. And this morning, via the blogosphere, I discovered the University of Manitoba’s New Technologies for Teaching and Learning wiki. Great stuff!

I’ve been meaning to post this for a loooooong while, but always forget. Below is a recording of a session I co-presented last spring (May 2006) about extending WebCT. When we initially put together the session, we were expecting to provide more coverage for blogs/wikis/web 2.0, but as it turns out, you can only fit so much content into an hour… lesson learned. I can only listen to the first 2 minutes because after that, I cringe at the sound of my own voice… and my laugh…. and my comments… and I’m learning why some people might be against recording their lectures. Hopefully I’ll have another crack at a similar session sometime in the future to cover *everything* that’s changed in less than a year - and to improve my presentation abilities.

Edit: I tried to embed my the video here, but WPMU appears to chop out object or embed tags. So instead, I’ll have to provide a link: Extending WebCT with Turnitin, Publisher Content, and Emerging Technologies