Posted on December 31, 2011 by danspira
Time for the year-end wrap-up / navel contemplation… let’s start with some general statistics and then move to a more behind-the-scenes / things-to-do perspective: Sum it up According to WordPress, enough people visited this blog this year to fill up Madison Square Garden three times… but most of them did not come to read about [...]
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Posted on November 4, 2011 by danspira
This post wasn’t written today. You’re reading something that’s been sitting, for over a month, in a backlog of incomplete blog posts (backblog?) that I’m nurturing in private and slowly-but-surely “releasing into the wild” of potential public view. If you’re looking for a way to improve your writing skills, this approach may work for you, too. What’s Does the Process [...]
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Posted on October 31, 2011 by danspira
Sweeping up the egg shells left behind in the nest by their messy hatchlings, my folks will periodically give me boxes full of ”my stuff” to take away from the basement room where I once lived, a couple of decades ago. Most of it I will toss away (must… resist… urge… to… re-archive… into… another… basement….), although some of [...]
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Posted on August 19, 2011 by danspira
“My repugnance to the writing table becomes daily and hourly more deadly and insurmountable. In place of this has come on a canine appetite for reading. And I indulge it, because I see in it a relief against the taedium senectutis; a lamp to lighten my path through the dreary wilderness of time before me, [...]
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Posted on August 13, 2011 by danspira
(This post is dedicated to my friends who are Maximizers… you know who you are… and to the fact that it’s time to choose courses for the upcoming semester of my M.Ed Instructional Design program while contemplating lots of work-related travel…) We all know the expression, but when is the last time you took a [...]
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Posted on August 3, 2011 by danspira
A software algorithm suggested that I write a post on this topic. Upon clicking “Publish” on my posting last week, WordPress.com ran some sort of automated semantic analysis of this blog and gave me the following helpful message: Need an idea for your next post? Choose a prompt to start a new post: Is your personality [...]
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Posted on June 21, 2011 by danspira
One of my Pandora stations has become so well-groomed that it (almost) always plays a song that I enjoy, even songs that I haven’t heard before. I’m reaching the point where I willing to toss out my hoard of mp3s and surrender to Pandora’s algorithm. I’ve also noticed that, every so often, the algorithm tries something a bit outside [...]
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Posted on January 2, 2011 by danspira
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 43,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj [...]
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Posted on October 8, 2010 by danspira
A quiet blogger is NOT a thinking blogger. A quiet blogger is either (a) a lapsed blogger, or (b) a blogger engaged in lots of other writing, outside the blog. In this case, my excuse is graduate school. Good news: I’m about half-way towards having some letters to hide… M.Ed INSDSG (Master in Education, Instructional Design) Better [...]
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Posted on August 30, 2010 by danspira
Every week my computer is taken hostage by either Apple, Oracle (Java), Microsoft or Adobe, to update some piece of software. Every. Single. Week. If I don’t comply and let it install, my computer’s performance degrades… especially if I delay on those Microsoft updates. Every week I have several ideas for a blog post, but [...]
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Posted on March 7, 2010 by danspira
If nothing else, we are the masters of our own discretionary effort.
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Posted on December 2, 2009 by danspira
Just came across this article about creating more effective e-learning discussion forums: If You Build It, They Will Come: Building Learning Communities Through Threaded Discussions by Susan Edelstein and Jason Edwards The authors put together a nice little rubric that could apply equally well for social media, i.e., it could be used to judge the quality of [...]
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