December 25th, 2008
The world is a bizarre, strange place. It’s easy to forget just how different people and the places they inhabit can be.
Me and the wife are spending the Holiday Season with my inlaws in San Diego, and it’s been a while since I was last here. Things are weird.
Traffic rules apply only to vehicles that cost less than $20,000. Road speeds are enforced by aircraft (or so the roadside signs would have me believe). Shopping trolleys (’carts’) have fixed rear wheels which makes the supermarket experience eerily alike road traffic. There is no such thing as salad cream. Strangers look at me suspiciously when I hold the door open for them. No-one checks my bags when I walk out of a store, but someone shouts ‘HI! WELCOME TO SPROUTS!’ or similar when I walk in. People back-up their cars before looking backwards. The roads here are wider than some roads in England are long. It doesn’t really cost any more to eat out than to eat in.
If I’m permitted to wield a camera at some point I’ll grab some visual evidence of the weirdness. Most of it is pretty entertaining.
Tags: Travel
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October 25th, 2008
Out in the badlands with my wife to see my family and have a barbeque social event type happening. Brought the Eeepc along for mobile computation needs such as blogging and playing games :). Might even do some hacking this afternoon if I get bored. I’ve been writing a small game in python to keep myself amused and stay in practice with the python, and of course there is the new twitpress to work on too.
One wife, one I
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October 8th, 2008
But no Blog Today.
I’m a bad blogger. I’m much more interested in other people than myself and so tend to spend more time reading blogs than writing them. But spending two days at MoodleMootAU really brought my internal Web2.0 back to a strong simmer if not a rolling boil.
The moot was fantastic. Motivated, passionate people talking about things they really believed in. Open source in action. We were gathered to discuss, share and learn about Moodle. Part of my current employment involves maintaining and to a certain extent managing a few small Moodle installations, so I had a pretty good excuse to attend.
You can just about make me out in this photo (I’m on the far left, third row, wearing black), here, and a particularly unattractive one here. (I can’t embed the pictures as the photographer has maintained full copyright 
).
Of particular interest to me was the high amount of Twitter usage. Half the laptops open during any given talk had Twitter.com open, and I suspect some portion of the others had some kind of twitter-enabled app running. It’s nice to see educators embracing any kind of modern technology, but I find their adoption of a mobile social tool that epitomises Web2.0 as strongly as twitter very promising.
The moot included a competition to use an EeePC produce a Moodle course within 90 minutes, with the course that best embodied the “social constructionist pedagogy” that Moodle strives to enable and promote winning one of the EeePCs. My entry was chosen as one of the winners, so hopefully I’ll be receiving an awesomely diminutive laptop in a couple of weeks time. As one of the few entrants that actually used an EeePC rather than a ‘full size’ laptop in the competition, I have to admit I do feel like I deserve the prize.
A hot photo of me and my co-conspirator from the competition.
Tom and glamourous assistant
Tags: eeepc, elearning, Moodle, MoodleMoot, moodlemootau, web2.0
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