Running with Scissors

Do you remember this game? I found this on a site called Widgetbox. I just cut and paste some javascript code, just like when you plug in a YouTube video, and boom! – instant time machine. :)

I guess the only logical thing to do now is to create an arcade page on this blog…

37 Signals, the web software group responsible for Basecamp, Backpack, and other web-based project/business/life management and productivity software has published a book of short essays titled Getting Real (calling it a “book” might be a bit of a stretch in a way – some of the essays are very short). The book centers on their company design philosophy of “less is more.”

While the book is centered on the topic of creating web applications, at its heart it really speaks to a design and development process that can be applied to almost anything. I really like these essays because their design philosophy dovetails nicely into the iterative development model we have been using in DTLT over the past few years. Go quick, be agile, keep flexible, make things for your audience, learn from your mistakes, lather, rinse, repeat.

You can read the book online for free, or purchase a hard copy or PDF by visiting this page.

Sure, everyone complains about the weather, but who ever does anything about it?

Well some folks at UNC have taken this idea and applied it to Blackboard, developing a cool new tool for BBd users (even lowly Blackboard BASIC users like me!).

bFree is a Blackboard course content extractor developed by the University of North Carolina’s Information Technology Services. bFree opens Blackboard archive files and allows you to save the content as a stand alone web site or set of files. In essence – it easily frees all the content that is otherwise trapped in the Blackboard system.

Experimenting with one of my old BBd courses, I first used the course archive tool in the BBd Control Panel to create the course archive.zip file. Once that was done, I used bFree to extract the archive to a web site right to my desktop. No muss, no fuss. I put the web site up on my server so you can take a look at what gets created.

Things to love about this project:

• Available via Creative Commons 2.5 Non-Commercial Share-Alike license
• Works with ALL levels of Blackboard – including Blackboard Basic
• Uses CSS in the web pages it creates which allows end users to further modify the look, style and feel of the web pages if needed.
• Development is expected to continue on the tool over the coming months to work on the extraction of other types of content.
• Most importantly, it lets you get YOUR content out of a proprietary, closed system!

This is a great example of open innovation in Higher Education – thanks so much to the folks at UNC for sharing it with all of us.

Our media guru, Andy Rush, often posts interesting music videos on his blog, And He Blogs. One that he posted that I really liked was of the band OK Go doing some intricate choreography on treadmills. The creativity of this video was the totally unique vision here. If you have not seen it, take a look.

I found one yesterday that falls into that same theme – totally unique.

Mute Math has produced a video for their song “Typical” where they shot it backwards, and then play it back forward. So you get unique results like paint flying off of someone.

Enjoy, Andy. :)