I was a hardcore Star Trek geek as a kid. Who wasn’t, really? Captain Kirk going all maverick on the galaxy, finding cool new planets, and nailing hot alien babes. Space is cool! I think I watched every episode at least a couple dozen times - yay syndicated reruns - but for some reason it’s the first motion picture version of the franchise (released in 1979) that really affected me.

V’Ger.

Holy crap. The Voyager space probe, damaged and worn. And pissed off, looking for its creator.

So, we fire off some probes into space. We don’t have the technology to really track them, or communicate with them. 300 years later, one is found by a mechanical civilization, and taken in as an injured entity. Repaired, as well as it could be, then sent home. Hindsight makes it pretty clear that this is at least the precursor to the Borg storylines - mechanical civilizations, attempts to communicate with them, etc…

It brought up all kinds of issues that have nothing to do with science fiction - do we have a responsibility to the things we create? What does it mean to be “the creator”? What does this mean with respect to religion, theology and belief in general?

The effects in the movie are completely laughable - the psychedelic optical effects are stunningly lame compared to the film resolution digital effects of today - but the premise of the movie struck me as profound. Our actions have consequences - they may be far in the future, far away, in ways unimaginable to us now, but our actions have consequences.

Of course, the movie franchise has been mind-blowingly inconsistent. Basically, the even-numbered movies were pretty good (KHANNNNNNN!!!!! KHAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!!), the odd-numbered movies pretty much sucked, but they all feel like bubblegum pop filler. V’Ger was a game changer though.

After thinking about Quest for Fire, I realize that another of the most formative movies for me was 1984’s The Iceman. The body of a prehistoric man was found frozen in ice, but still alive. He’s placed in a zoo-like containment room at an arctic research facility (filmed in Churchill Manitoba, no less) where he can be studied. Another fascinating movie, not because of special effects or high budget, but because of story. Any movie involving a prehistoric man singing along to Neil Young has to be OK…

The movie was about alienation. About belonging. About finding out who you are, and where you need to be. It was about human nature. It was about fear. And mythology. It was about standing up for what you believe in. And also a little about anthropology.

I remember watching and rewatching this movie several times, mesmerized by the details. And knowing that a high budget version of the movie would have lost almost everything that made this movie great.

Inspired by Jim’s description of one of his 10 formative movies, I realized that one of the movies that’s had the most impact on me is Quest for Fire. The 1981 Canadian anthropological movie about 4 separate tribes of homo erectus, neanderthal and homo sapiens, and their interactions.

I remember being absolutely fascinated by the movie, watching it dozens of times (it was one of the early movies offered on our fancy new SuperChannel Cable Movie Channel when I was a kid). I haven’t thought explicitly about the movie in years, but have realized that it’s really affected me by helping to viscerally see and empathize with the various cultures depicted.

Quest for Fire was so powerful to me, because it was so real. It didn’t feel like fiction. It felt like what we would now call embedded reportage. Following the story, without shaping it. (of course the story was shaped - it’s a work of fiction - but it doesn’t FEEL like a work of fiction) It made anthropology, evolution, natural selection, adaptation, and so many other concepts clear and alive.

It showed how science isn’t a separate thing - it is the world around us. It is us.

I just bought the movie, and have been waiting for it to finish downloading from iTunes so I can rewatch it. Looking forward to it!

I’ve been feeling in a photographic rut lately. It seems like all of my photos look the same. They’re of the same thing. They’re all of things I’ve photographed before. Same. Similar. Again. Repeat. Done it. been there. Oh, that again. Gottit…

I just popped onto the Photography tab of my blog, and it hit me - although things feel strongly similar, there is variation and diversity. And sometimes repetition of similar photographs and subjects tells a story in and of itself.

the last 12 photos

I’ve disabled WP-Super-Cache on UCalgaryBlogs.ca because it was doing quirky things like showing the anonymous front page after someone logged in, etc… And, with our low load and mostly logged in users, it really wasn’t necessary.

Except for the RSS feeds used to generate the Recent Posts and Recent Comments sections on the front page of the site. Without WP-Super-Cache enabled, the front page (and ONLY the front page) took glacial epochs to load, as the RSS feeds were generated, parsed, and embedded. I wanted to be able to cache the feeds, without having to throw the switch on caching the entire site.

Then it hit me - it’s trivial to set up a cron job to curl the feeds to static files periodically, and then I could just use those static files to generate the Recent blocks on the front page. Duh…

So, I modified the crontab on the server to add these two lines:

*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/curl "http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/wpmu-feed/" > /home/commons/webdata/ucalgaryblogs.ca/postsfeed.xml
*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/curl "http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/wpmu-feed/comments/" > /home/commons/webdata/ucalgaryblogs.ca/commentsfeed.xml

So, every 15 minutes, the sitewide Recent Posts and Recent Comments feeds are updated. I use the static files to generate the display on the front page, using the web-visible URLs for the files at http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/postsfeed.xml and http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/commentsfeed.xml respectively.

Sometimes, it’s easier to just pull out another tool from the server toolbox, rather than trying to find a way to do it within WordPress all the time…

I’ve got a prof using a WordPress site to manage some really active discussions in his course. He’d really like to be able to list all comments posted by each user, as part of the assessment rubric for the course.

I’ve found LOTS of “recent comments” and “popular posts” plugins, and some requests for similar “list all comments for a given user” functionality, but haven’t been able to find anything that fits the bill.

Ideally, the solution would list all contributors to a blog (everyone with accounts), with links to a page (or pages) that lists all of their posts, their pages, and comments.

Any suggestions? Do I get to write another plugin?

I had a discussion with King Chung Huang and Paul Pival this morning, about one of King’s current research projects. He’s working on the topic of context and identity - what it would mean from both institutional and individual perspectives, if our digital identities and contexts were pulled out of the silos of Blackboard, email, and other isolated and closed systems. What would it mean if every person, group, and place has a URL, which is aware of contexts (institutional, academic, geographical, temporal, etc…) and is also able to gather and provide lists of relevant resources.

A Person would have what is essentially a profile (name, role, contact info, interests, courses, websites, etc…), a Group would describe its type (department, faculty, course, session, club, etc…) as well as lists of relevant bits of info (uses a wiki, has a Blackboard course, meets at this location at this time, has these members, etc…). And Places would describe physical locations, knowing which resources are available, where they are, which Persons and Groups are interested in the Place, as well as scheduling information, etc… (hmm… do we need a fourth primitive type of Time?)

At first blush, it felt like a “portal” problem. Set up a personal Pageflakes or Netvibes page, dropping in some relevant widgets and links. Everyone can customize their own page, and a directory could be created to help discover people, groups, and places.

But that approach loses any real meaning of the contexts. It’s just a dumb content display utility, without being aware of the meaning of the contexts of the content, or of the relationships between people, groups and places.

We talked for awhile, and came to the realization that there is a missing fundamental concept. One that describes the identity and context, and ties the relevant bits of salient info together in a way that can then be used to build novel applications.

Currently, a prof sets up a Blackboard course. They add content to the course. They add Links to various bits. But none of this stuff really knows the context - just that it’s some text that’s been pasted into a container within Blackboard. A prof could spend a lot of time and effort building up a course site in Blackboard, only to kill it at the end of the semester. (sure, it could be cloned, but again that’s context-unaware).

What if the course was just a Group, set up with its own identity and context, and aware of various bits of information. Is Called Mythical Course 301. Has Course ID of MYTHCRSE301. Has Professor… Has TAs… Has Blackboard Course… Uses Wiki at… Podcasts available at… Meets MWF 1000-1050 at ST148…

The idea that Paul came up with is that this is related to the mythical EduGlu concept, but as a necessary first step that is currently missing. Right now, there would be much manual labour to set up an EduGlu service to aggregate activity that happens as part of the practice of teaching and learning. What if we could take advantage of the contexts of Person, Group, and Place to automate that process? We could pull sets of RSS feeds into the aggregator, apply some processing, and export different formats for use in different contexts. Map views. Calendar views. Timeline views. Analysis of individual and group contributions. Interaction analysis. etc…

But, is there some tool, application or platform that is currently able to handle this abstracted concept of context - of Person, Group and Place - that can be used to create a flexible *cough*portal*ahem* to manage and display the torrents of centralized and decentralized information?

Michael Wesch just posted an amazing reflection on his experience in the classroom. He’s frustrated by the lack of engagement, the scattered engagement. The education through “soul murder.”

My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.

and, BINGO!

They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed. There is literally something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.

I’d missed the news, but the latest version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress includes some tasty stats. As with all things statistical, there’s a few ways to read the numbers, and there are some anomalies (ferinstance, it claims I had a few days of over 1000 ham i.e., valid comments per day and that’s just plain wrong) but the spam stats feel roughly right. They’re not dramatically different from what I was seeing under Mollom, except nobody gets inflicted with Captcha using Akismet.

Akismet history graph

Thanksgiving is here. And I have lots to be thankful for, including (but not limited to):

1. I’ve got an awesome family, full of love and happiness.
2. Evan is growing up to be an amazing, inspiring young man.
3. Dad laughed at the doctors that gave him 6 months to live. Over a decade ago. He’s still going strong, for 73.
4. I have friends that I admire, respect, and look up to, and who know this.
5. As I hit 39, I’m in the best physical, mental and emotional shape of my entire life, and it feels great.