I’ve been getting errors trying to get to websites all afternoon. I was just about to call our IT team and yell at them about the Internet connection, but I’m guessing now that it might be because there’s a major power outage in parts of US and Canada.
From Keeping the Net Neutral from Salon:
Imagine if you called 1-800-L.L.-Bean and your phone company said, ‘Sorry, we’re not going to connect your call because we have a deal with Land’s End.’” For telephone service, that would be preposterous; the phone company is prevented both by laws and by customer outrage from limiting your calls to specific phone numbers.
But Waldron says that on the broadband Internet, customers enjoy no such protections. If your cable company decides it wants to sign a deal with Land’s End and stop you from visiting L.L. Bean’s Web site, it’s free to do so — what are you going to do, find a new cable company?
Worth thinking about.
For more reading on this issue, check out the Larry Lessig interview in Scientific American, or Lessig’s book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.
SharpReader, which I enjoy using immensely, has started leaking memory like a sieve with release 0.9.2. It was already a memory hog, sucking up more than 60 megs of memory regularly, but with 0.9.2, it began sucking up every last bit of available memory. Sigh. I emailed Luke this morning, but in the meantime I have an unusable aggregator and miss my feeds. Rolling back to version 0.9.1.3 alleviated the problem leakage problem . . . but 50-75 megs of memory is still too much for an aggregator to use.
So I’m shopping around for a new aggregator for Windows. Someone at the MERLOT conference recommended Awasu, but it appears their freebie version doesn’t include support for importing subscriptions from an OPML file, and I don’t feel like paying just to find out whether it can handle the 150+ subscriptions better than SharpReader.
Recommendations?
UPDATE (5:00pm): I purged an enormous amount (thousands) of old posts from SharpReader and that brought it’s memory footprint down to about 54 megs. Could it be that SharpReader is loading the entire feed for each subscription into memory?!? That would be crazy! Yet it appears that the amount of memory SharpReader consumes is somehow related to the number of posts in each feed. :-/
Jason Kottke has fallen prey to the siren’s lure of the “human readability” argument:
“If hardcore developers of RSS readers and authoring tools are the only ones technically savvy enough to understand RSS files, the pool of potential memes is limited by the size and narrow focus (not to mention, for the most part, gender) of that group. But if the format is fairly human readable (more like HTML 3.2 markup than, say, Perl code), you’re going to get more people from different backgrounds hacking away at it.”
I posted a pretty extensive response on Jason’s blog, which for my loyal readers (both of you), I have repeated here.
This MERLOT conference is the first time I’ve tried weblogging the sessions I attend. Here’s a couple of observations about this practice.
First, it’s friggin’ hard. I’m not accustomed to taking such copious notes during presentations. I was always the kind of student (and conference participant) that took very few notes. Of course I didn’t have a laptop when I was a student, and typing about 110 words a minute helps. Personally, I find that note-taking decreases my attention and retention. Clearly that’s not the case for everyone, but I find myself less focused on understanding and more focused on recording.
Second, don’t take the notes in your browser. I suppose the advantage to this is you can save several times during the presentation so your readers can get a semi-live update. But weblogs aren’t IRC, so I think it’s totally legit to post your session notes at the end of the session. I’ve seen too many people complain about losing their session notes because the browser crashed or whatever. I just use EditPad (a Notepad replacement), so I don’t have to worry about browser crashes, wifi hiccups, etc.
I will probably not record notes for all the sessions I attend today. I’m going to focus on understanding, not recording. There’s plenty of other people blogging the conference. :-)
EdNA — Education Network Australia
began in 95 to facilitate collaboration across territories in Australia
EdNA online portal resulted out of need to facilitate collaboration
http://www.edna.edu.au
This MERLOT session addresses the re-engineering of EdNA. Great focus on the use of RSS to syndicate content from their portal.
Beyond Learning Objects: Towards the Educational Semantic Web
Terry Anderson, Athabasca University
Notes on this MERLOT session follow…
Using MERLOT in Faculty Development Initiatives: Dreams and Nightmares Re-visited.
[will add presenter names later]
This session was run as a collaborative brainstorming discussion. A lot of time was spent on the “nightmares” (failures, problems, etc.), about 40 minutes, and only about 20 minutes on the dreams.
Notes follow. . .
Douglas MacLeod, Netera Alliance
David Porter, NewMIC
Notes on the opening MERLOT session follow . . .
So I’m sitting in the morning plenary session at MERLOT wondering if there’s a back channel, e.g. an IRC channel or chat room, for the wireless users at this conference?