RSS Feed for Tags in YouTube

Here is a cool thing I discovered recently, and please forgive me if it is already common knowledge. There is a little hack for getting RSS feeds for tags on YouTube, and it goes like this:

 http://youtube.com/rss/tag/randomtag.rss (where randomtag is the tag you want to aggregate)

Here are two examples of this tag-based feed. Andy Rush has put together some very cool screencasts for UMW Blogs which are appropriately tagged umwblogs. So, when you include http://youtube.com/rss/tag/umwblogs.rss in some kind of an RSS reader or aggregator you get the following:

cac.ophony.org » Now You Too Can Be An Instructional Technologist!

Posted 21 hours ago

I get to tell Jewish jokes because I’m Jewish. I get to tell snob jokes because I’m a historian. I also get to tell instructional technologist jokes because I’m the Project Manager for Digital Learning (aka, “Blog Guy”) at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.

So, I’ll let out a little secret: here’s where we get all those phrases we throw around that make most normal people feel like there’s a whole world out there they’ll never understand. (hat tip Barbara Sawhill)

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cac.ophony.org » Continuously Communicating

Posted 6 days ago

Imagine a nanny texting her young ward in the next room to ask, “Juice or Milk?” Imagine a young girl awakened in the middle of the night by her father’s video-chat invitation from Mumbai. Imagine a young man so isolated that the idea of being in the same city as his girlfriend is considered too much commitment. Shocked yet?

Probably not. Still, these are some of the tidbits from our wacky wired world that take center stage in Continuous City, a recent multimedia piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music created by the tech-savvy Builder’s Association. According to its marketing tagline, …

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cac.ophony.org » Read All About it!: The Schwartz Institute Profiled in Change Magazine

Posted 8 days ago

We here at the Institute are very excited about this bit of publicity: the current issue of Change Magazine, published in cooperation with The Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching, features a profile of the Schwartz Institute written by Fara Warner, whom some of you may remember from last year’s Symposium. Fara’s article, entitled “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility” is a lengthy, in-depth discussion of the Institute and the tremendously varied work that we do here at Baruch College. Take a look. Here’s a snippet:

The Institute
To understand how the Institute was created—and has grown into a …

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cac.ophony.org » Audience or Interlocutors?

Posted 8 days ago

A lot of what Bernard L. Schwartz said about audience awareness last week resonated with me. He mentioned the significance of both transmission and reception in the communication act, stressing the latter as being perhaps too often overlooked. Listening attentively is a skill; hearing what the speaker intends you to hear is also a skill.

As teachers, we’re usually concerned with both transmission and reception; we want to make our presentations clear, our questions thought-provoking, our assignments challenging, and our evaluation encouraging. In many ways, teaching is a performance, and to deliver it effectively we work on our presentation skills. …

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cac.ophony.org » New Audience = Changed Message?

Posted 11 days ago

Fresh off of the Institutes’s conversation with Bernard L. Schwartz and planning for the next Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction, I have found myself to be highly attentive to issues of audience in communication. I am fascinated by how these issues are playing out on the political scene during Barack Obama’s transition into his role as President Elect. His audience has substantially changed from the democratic base and undecided voters to the nation. However, I keep asking the question, has his message changed?

I think back to what usually happens in elections, when soon after winning and taking …

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WPMu Ed » Blogging WordPress as a CMS

Posted 14 days ago

Martha Burtis is back in action at UMW, and she returns to us with a project that I am following with great anticipation: blogging WordPress as a CMS. As she notes in her introductory post on the topic:

It often seemed…that when push came to shove, there was always something that prevented WP from being the right CMS solution. Although I think I’ve always suspected that with the right mix of plugins and the right theme, the problems could be surmounted.

And what she will be doing is going through her conceptualization of WP as CMS including, though not limited to, …

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WPMu Ed » Cloning the UMW Blogs Empire

Posted 15 days ago

This Thursday I’ll be heading down to Longwood University to do a workshop on Web 2.0, blogging, and the like. Liz Kocevar-Weidinger of the Greenwood library at Longwood saw a few of us from UMW present last year on the work we’ve doing, and she invited us down. I caught up with her at the EDUCAUSE conference, and I inquired whether they have a blogging platform of any kind they are working from currently, and they don’t. So, as Gardner and I charged during our presentation, why can’t we do this together?! Why can’t UMW help Longwood? We are both public …

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cac.ophony.org » The Constitution of Articles: Our Surface Errors, Ourselves…

Posted 15 days ago

I am disturbed by the degree to which grammar errors can be destiny, out of proportion to their actual context. For example, should someone who can design a wind tunnel or a life-saving evacuation system or build a robot end up failing an exit exam from a technical college because he or she has made too many grammatical errors? What if that student has only been speaking English for 4 or 5 years? While nobody would deny that the student should and must continue to improve his English, shouldn’t his engineering skills take precedence at a technical college? I’m sure that …

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WPMu Ed » FeedWordPress Widget: If you blog it, it is no dream

Posted 15 days ago

Less than a week after blogging my wish for a widget that would allow people to add links to their sites (no matter where they are hosted, they just need a valid feed), which in turn would be automatically entered into FeedWordPress and make the population of an aggregation site simple…it has arrived in the form of the Add Links Widget. Disco!!!

Thanks to Andre Malan and Vince Ng, who conceptualized and executed this widget beautifully, the widget works fine and I have included it three places so far:

And on the UMW Blogs Clubs and Organizations blog, so that … [Link]

andremalan.net » UBC WordPress development out in the open

Posted 17 days ago


photo credit: bionicteaching

At OLT we have decided to make our steps to develop the WordPress Multi-user platform into a university content publishing platform more prominent, so as to encourage sharing and collaboration. Before this we were all writing about our development on different blogs dispursed around the internet, but now we will all be putting our thoughts, ideas and code in one place. OLT WordPress Development now lives on the UBC Blogs site at blogs.ubc.ca/development. It is sparse at the moment, but once all of the developers are contributing their work it should fill out quite quickly. …

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cac.ophony.org » Misunderstanding about Cultural Misunderstanding

Posted 18 days ago

Some of you probably know that Baruch College has been ranked as the most ethnically diverse campus in the U.S. by this year’s Princeton Review. Working at the campus that has the most diverse student body in the nation, we often come across difficulties in cross-cultural communication, the topic which Szidonia’s last posting illuminated beautifully. I also have been working with many international students in Great Works, who make their extra effort to cope with the linguistic and cultural predicaments that they face. Having come from Korea, I can particularly relate to Asian students with their nervousness and discomfort in the …

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cac.ophony.org » Thinking Behind a Redesign

Posted 19 days ago

I recently implemented a new design for the homepage for our installation of WordPress MultiUserBlogs@Baruch.

I tried to accomplish a few things with this redesign. Mostly, I wanted to update the look of the site… the previous version was a bit clunky, a bit 2003 1999, and I didn’t feel it was popping. As I usually say when Mikhail critiques my design (which is often): I’m no great aesthete, and certainly not a graphic artist. But I think this version is markedly better, cleaner, and more inviting. 2008. 2009, even.

The inviting part is really the key, because …

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WPMu Ed » FeedWordPress: A Widget Wish

Posted 20 days ago

The whole syndication-oriented architecture (feed-frenzied learning) many have been playing with using WordPress Multi-User has been moving along pretty well for us at UMW. With the help of just a couple of plugins we have been able to generate a single feed for tags and/or categories throughout UMW Blogs (using the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin for WPMu), and we are then able to republish these sitewide feeds in any blog using FeedWordPress. Moreover, it provides us with the ability to incorporate and re-publish sites with RSS feeds that are outside the UMW Blogs environment. All very cool, EDUGLU here we come, …

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cac.ophony.org » The Frame Strategy

Posted 21 days ago

In Engaging Ideas, John Bean discusses “the frame strategy” for use with small groups. “Using this strategy, the instructor gives students a mapping sentence that predicts the shape of a short essay but not the content. Students have to create content topic sentences to head each predicted section and develop a supporting argument for each one. Often the instructor can include in the task a blank tree diagram or an outline indicating the slots that students’ ideas must fit”

This sounds very interesting to me, but rather challenging. Even though he provides an example, I still can’t quite envision how to …

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cac.ophony.org » “Songs of freedom kept coming…”

Posted 3 weeks ago

Remember Wyclef Jean’s “If I Was President”?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watching the video now, I can’t help but think about how much of the song and the imagery both predicts and falls short of our current moment. It presents the idea of a Black man as president as a desirable possibility paired with the worry that it may ultimately be dangerous for the person elected. So, the chorus makes me kind of… nervous. However, the song has to be historicized: it was released around the time of the last presidential election, which had a totally different …

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cac.ophony.org » Come on up for the Rising

Posted 4 weeks ago

A lot of people are talking about how President Elect Obama and his team ran a virtually flawless campaign from start to finish. I’d like to briefly reflect on one aspect of the campaign – music. Music has always been a powerful form of communication. The right song can define a movement, a generation, and even a campaign. Howard Wolfson (Communications Director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign) noted in a NY Times Opinion piece published on Monday November 3:

“Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop’ set the modern standard for campaign songs when Bill Clinton adopted it as his own in …

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WPMu Ed » UMW Blogs Support Vidoes Now Embeddable

Posted 4 weeks ago

A couple of months ago I promised I would take the flash videos (published as .swf files) and upload them to Blip.tv so that others could use them freely and embed them elsewhere at will. I finally got around to doing this, and if you need some quick videos overviews for all of the tabs in the administrative backend of WordPress 2.6+ you can see all of them here. They are licensed as public domain, so rip and steal as needed.

Below is a list of the supported videos uploaded along with links to the video:

WordPress 2.6: Overview of the … [Link]

WPMu Ed » Installing WPMu on cheap, external webhosting

Posted 4 weeks ago

James farmer has posted a great tutorial over at WPMu.org that takes you through the steps of setting up a WordPress Multi-User installation on a cheap, external webhosting service. He focuses on one webhosting service in particular for the demonstration, but most use CPanel and his instructions work pretty much across the board. That said, it is a good idea, no matter who you use, to find out whether they are cool with WPMu and dynamic subdomains–which I strongly recommend. Also, I would use this as a test space, running a full version for 7 bucks a month may be a …

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WPMu Ed » UMW Blogs loves Akismet

Posted 4 weeks ago

nullAfter reading this post by D’Arcy about how easy and free it is to get Akismet up and running for WordPress Multi-User, I finally decided to take the plunge and replace the developmentally languishing Spam Karma 2 with Akismet–I’ll miss you SK2! The setup was easy, and putting the link in the footer (which guarantees us a free educational copy) was dead simple thanks to D’Arcy’s second WordPress plugin (did I ever mention how insanely elated I am to have this guy working in the WPMu realm?). For the last 24 hours Akismet has been running as the only spam filtering …

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cac.ophony.org » Post Election Thoughts

Posted 4 weeks ago

As we all recover from the remarkable events of the past hours, days, and weeks, and begin to look forward at what a President Barack Hussein Obama might mean for the United States and the world, I find the appropriate tone elusive. My faith in Obama as a leader is buoyed by the following: amidst the pervasive bloviating about the historical nature of this election, with the pundits and commentators falling all over themselves to proclaim a post-racial America, to muse about the Black Camelot, to argue that the election of someone they as recently as yesterday proclaimed a “socialist” means …

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cac.ophony.org » Post Election Thoughts

Posted 4 weeks ago

As we all recover from the remarkable events of the past hours, days, and weeks, and begin to look forward at what a President Barack Hussein Obama might mean for the United States and the world, I find it difficult to strike the proper tone. My faith in Obama as a leader is buoyed by the following: amidst the pervasive bloviating about the historical nature of this election, with the pundits and commentators falling all over themselves to proclaim a post-racial America, to muse about the Black Camelot, to argue that the election of someone they as recently as yesterday proclaimed …

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cac.ophony.org » Our sweet liberal conceit

Posted 4 weeks ago

If any of you were toning down your politics in the classroom, there’s no need to bother. Apparently “professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.” To read more on how impossible it is to change the mind of anyone over 15 and learn about the new book, Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities, by A. Lee Fritschler, click here .

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cac.ophony.org » Well, here we are at last.

Posted 4 weeks ago

I remember thinking right after the ‘06 elections, “Man, this is going to be a long presidential campaign.” And indeed it has been. Remember the folksy appeal of Huckabee? The “3AM” advert by the Clintons? Remember Mitt Romney’s headline speech addressing his Mormonism a la (he hoped) JFK on his Catholicism? Remember either exalting or (like me) fainting with fear and incredulity as a little fraud named Giuliani led in the national polls?

One thing that sticks out to me here at the end is that the person ahead in the polls is the person with the most complicated message. Obama …

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cac.ophony.org » Information overload! (or, the election is driving me crazy!)

Posted 5 weeks ago

Do you remember when there were only two state owned TV channels and they mostly showed footage of the old First of May Parades, or Russian movies about a romantic love affair between a brave female tractor driver and a burly construction worker who made up four hundred percent of his production norm? You don’t remember? Ok, so maybe you did not grow up in Eastern Europe. Now, information is bombarding us form all directions, and it is hard to resist checking your email multiple times a day, reading news, not just daily but hourly, and, if you are …

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cac.ophony.org » Joe, Joe, Joe,….Joe

Posted 5 weeks ago

One of my students said to me the other day that she did not want to watch the presidential debates anymore because the only thing you see is a repeat of the message again and again. And she thought the “whole Joe thing is just the last straw, I mean is everyone named Joe?” It is true that through the three debates we have seen the central messages of each candidate come back time and again and the use of in-depth argumentation seems to be less of a sticking point. We have also heard of Joe Six-pack, Joe Biden, Joe McCain, …

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WPMu Ed » A long list of Universities using WPMu

Posted 5 weeks ago

Dave Lester did a fine job of compiling a long list of Universities that are using WPMu in one capacity or another. It’s a great list, and there are at least 40 institutions on there I had no idea about. Add to this list the work Mario Núñez-Molina did last year and add a few additions to his list and you may very well have over 100 institutions using this application. And as the recent comment on his post suggest from the University of Melbourne, there are probably a heck of a lot of international universities that are using this … [Link]

WPMu Ed » Clubs and Organizations on UMW Blogs

Posted 5 weeks ago

One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.

So, why not aggregate all the announcements into one space and make things easy …

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cac.ophony.org » Critical thinking and text books

Posted 5 weeks ago

I recently led a workshop in an intro class where all the readings are from a textbook. These are frequently used in Sociology and Anthropology and I assume other disciplines as well. I myself never had textbooks when I was in college, and I’ve never used them to teach with. Frankly, I find them bland and overwhelming. They seem to present boiled down and flattened information as a series of facts.

To my credit I came up with an in-class exercise based on a segment of a chapter that allowed students to enter the content imaginatively, and I think it was …

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WPMu Ed » UMW Blogs has its first mapped (sub)domain

Posted 5 weeks ago

I have blogged regularly about mapping domains on WordPress Mulit-User for over a year now. And it is with great pleasure that I announce the first instance of a mapped domain on UMW Blogs (which is actually a mapped subdomain). UMW’s pioneering History department has decided to create a site on UMW Blogs to build an information/community site for their department which will provide the latest news, announcements, and events for current students, alumni, etc. They have a Bluehost account where they do a lot of their own departmental experimentation http://umwhistory.org), and they—more specifically Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken—wanted to know …

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cac.ophony.org » Seniors and Communication Technology

Posted 5 weeks ago

A few weekends ago I schlepped to Florida to celebrate my grandmother’s 99th birthday. Being almost a century old, her vision and hearing is just not what it used to be, which makes communicating with others quite difficult for her. However, I was amazed by how much technology is available for her and other seniors (and other visually- and hearing-impaired folks). She had a hearing aid, which is pretty standard, but also a special phone with large numbers and a light that flashes when someone calls in case she doesn’t hear it ring.

The two pieces of technology that really blew …

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WPMu Ed » A Semantic UMW Blogs

Posted 5 weeks ago

Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application. What he has been doing is scraping the available data from the uber RSS feed of public blogs from the UMW Blogs Tags Site, and pulling it into a suite of semantic web tools provided by MIT’s Simile project (namely Exhibit and Timeline).

“Why?” you ask. Well Hondo, because these tools provide the means to visualize and connect the activity on UMW Blogs in new ways, …

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cac.ophony.org » PowerPoint in Literature Classes?

Posted 6 weeks ago

It was a pleasure attending last Wednesday’s staff meeting. In addition to the usual yummy sandwiches and cookies, I was particularly impressed by Tom’s VOCAT demonstration and our discussion on whether the use of Micro PowerPoint and technology in general opens up new possibilities or sets the limits of our analytical thinking skills. It is probably not an either-or question. Since Kate, Luke, David, Mikhail, Deborah, and Anthony have already elaborated on this topic through their recent postings, it won’t be necessary to reiterate the points they already made. There seems to be a general consensus that “PP” is a kind …

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cac.ophony.org » You know, it’s cultural….

Posted 6 weeks ago

I am not saying this just to make Mikhail happy about assigning me the Accounting Department in my first year at Schwartz, but I really am enjoying working there. I had my misgivings early on, especially about the students treating me as a second-class citizen, a “fellow” who apparently has no clue about accounting, thus no need to pay attention to her. What I have been experiencing, however, is a great deal of gratitude on their part and a sense of appreciation that, at times, makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, I tell them, I am only doing my …

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cac.ophony.org » reCAPTCHA: The Essence of a Distributed Knowledge Network

Posted 6 weeks ago

We’ve all come across a CAPTCHA, a challenge response test that web sites give viewers who are trying to register for an account, leave a comment, or perform some other task that might be vulnerable to spammers or bots. They are useful because they can differentiate human from machine (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart… don’t ask me how “turing” became a “P” in that acronym).

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a …

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WPMu Ed » Embed RSS Plugin for WordPress

Posted 6 weeks ago

This is a re-blog of Mario Núñez-Molina’s post that points to a plugin called cets_EmbedRSS that allows you to embed an RSS feed into a post or page in WordPress (and WPMu) easily (and easily is the key here because the aggr plugin does something like this already). It puts an RSS icon in the TinyMCE editor, and from there it’s simply copy, paste and configure a feed. I have it loaded on the bava, so let’s give it a whirl:

screening: “The Big Lebowski” October 21, 2008 “Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the … [Link]

cac.ophony.org » Communication, the MTA and You!

Posted 6 weeks ago

Has anyone else noticed the new signs on the subway? For the second time in two years, the MTA is conducting a survey of its riders. I don’t remember seeing the signs when they were doing the survey the first time around, but it was apparently some time in 2007, and they wanted to know what suggestions we had for making the subway system better. You can go to to their website and see the results — what they call the “Rider Report Card.”

Now the MTA wants to know exactly how and why we New Yorkers get around the city. …

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cac.ophony.org » And Now to Lighten Things Up

Posted 6 weeks ago

The annual Alfred E. Smith dinner took place on Thursday night at the Waldorf in NYC. This is a big fund raising dinner for Catholic Charities, named after 4-term NY Governor Al Smith (and one-time presidential nominee). It’s a tradition for presidential candidates to attend the event and roast each other, and Senators McCain and Obama did not disappoint. This made for some great sound bites for the media. If you didn’t get a chance to hear each candidate’s entire speech, take some time to view them.

While I …

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WPMu Ed » No longer banned from DC: WordCamp Ed 2008

Posted 6 weeks ago

Well, after some grovelling to my special lady friend and some unveiled threats from the Bionic Teacher, I decided it might be in the interest of my personal health to attend WordCamp Ed DC, which David Lester has brilliantly conceived and organized (kudos). Such an event holds some powerful possibilities for the educational community using WordPress, and it may very well be the shot heard around the world from a growing red tide of EDUPUNK revolutionaries. I’m fired up to think and share with so many fellow travellers.

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cac.ophony.org » I’m Not Lovin’ It.

Posted 7 weeks ago

I’m starting to get a little bit worried about the rash of strangely written and borderline grammatically incorrect advertising slogans in the media. This is especially true of fast food advertisements. The slogan that bothers me the most is McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it.” I understand how dropping the g makes the slogan less impersonal and more relaxed, but the lowercase i really irks me. What’s the point?

Other celebrated and effective examples include Apple’s classic “Think different,” and their more recent description of the new iPod touch as “The funnest iPod ever.” Even the Obama campaign’s “Change …

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WPMu Ed » Beyond the eye: A Virtual Art Exhibit via EduBlogs RUM

Posted 7 weeks ago

Mario A. Núñez Molina just posted about the virtual component of a photo art exhibit for an art class happening at the library of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Now, there are a number of remarkable photographs (I’ll reproduce a few below withou permission, slap my wrist if this proves bad), and the virtual installment of this exhibit is well worth your time. But what’s strikes me just as much is that all the photos for the exhibit have been uploaded to Flickr, and are re-presented in an exhibit blog using a few snazzy Flickr plugins (they have …

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cac.ophony.org » The Deadly Grip of Tradition

Posted 7 weeks ago

Over the last two or so decades, research in composition and rhetoric has challenged a number of traditional, “common sense” ideas about writing pedagogy. The emphasis on process over product is one example. Another, quite familiar one is the shift away from the tired old structure of the academic expository essay with its requisite introduction (which contains the thesis statement), body and conclusion. The thinking here is that this form with its three rigidly defined constituent parts is 1) not necessarily conducive to original, critical thinking and is therefore counterproductive to effective arguing, and 2) scarcely found anywhere else other than …

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WPMu Ed » Syndicate, syndicate, syndicate the semester away

Posted 7 weeks ago

Sevilla in de nait
photo credit: Criterion

For the first part of this semester I was in over my head with UMW Blogs. We had come up with the idea (through covert communication with other schools not to be named ;) ) to use FeedWordPress as a syndicating engine. Quite simply, that students create their own blogs and tag posts for their respective courses, which would automatically republish them in an aggregating course blog.

For example, Sue Fernsebner’s History 299 course would tag relevant posts 08fern299, and those posts would be automatically re-posted in the course blog. How are they re-posted automatically? Well, …

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andremalan.net » Swurl, get your act together!

Posted 8 weeks ago

I really, really want Swurl to be something useful. For those who do not know what Swurl is, is a lifestreaming app that does a beautiful job of displaying all of your internet activity in one place. The timeline view of Swurl is facinating, it really does a great job of visually representing your online life in a pretty calendar. I find myself taking pictures and uploading them, just to make my Swurl look prettier. Not only does Swurl do a good job of displaying your life, but it also discovers your friends in other social networks and keeps a list …

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cac.ophony.org » Teaching Grammar Effectively

Posted 8 weeks ago

I’m currently teaching an English course whose main learning objective is to improve written and oral communication skills of international students. Basically this translates into ESL instruction. In fact, the school puts tremendous emphasis on ‘correctness.’ I try to incorporate a grammar component into almost every written and oral assignment. At this point, despite the fact that we have spent the first 4 weeks on most fundamental topics – subject verb agreement, run-ons, fragments, and sentence structure – my students are making egregious numbers of mistakes in their papers. I certainly understand that they’re grappling with lots of new issues on …

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cac.ophony.org » A Picture is Worth…

Posted 8 weeks ago

In my teaching I have found that students can sometimes be surprisingly credulous about what is being communicated to them by images, whether it’s conveyed by a doctored photo or in the nonverbal message sent by a carefully selected image accompanying a story. Even my friends who should know better do not always think as critically about images as they might about text.

Here’s an example. As soon as Sarah Palin got selected as McCain’s running mate, I started getting emails circulating this photo of her:

My first thought was, “how can a middle-aged woman who’s borne several children …

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cac.ophony.org » Communication and the Campaign

Posted 8 weeks ago

If Barack Obama is elected President on November 4th, it will be in large part because of the sophisticated way his campaign has communicated with the American public.

I was in Michigan this past weekend, and drove past the “North Oakland County Victory Office” of the McCain Campaign, just west of Pontiac, twenty miles north of Detroit. A placard near the street read “Get your McCain-Palin lawn signs here!” The building looked like a small bait shop, set back from the road, in the middle of a big parking lot with few cars. No one seemed to be there. On a …

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cac.ophony.org » Fortune Cookie Wisdom

Posted 8 weeks ago

After an MSG-laden meal of Chinese food recently, I opened up my fortune cookie to find the following words: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

Now, while this was not technically a fortune revealing my life’s destiny, the words on the little scrap of paper did offer guidance for future endeavors: to be succinct and precise in one’s use of language. This is valuable advice for those struggling to improve their writing and oral communication skills (or their campaigns for electoral office).

This advice is also, apparently, quite old. I’ve …

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cac.ophony.org » With Flamenco on my mind

Posted 9 weeks ago

Flamenco is on my mind a whole lot, actually, increasingly so. As with most things significant in my life, Flamenco was an accident, unforeseen and unplanned; I did not know much about the dance when I began learning it about five years ago. Since then, it has become my main way for taking trips outside the academic bubble.

Besides functioning as my escape-mechanism, however, Flamenco serves me as metaphor for pedagogical praxis as well. My students tend to get a kick out of the …

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WPMu Ed » Syndication-Oriented Architecture, or a Feed Frenzied Framework!

Posted 9 weeks ago

Jon Udell has mentioned the idea of Syndication-Oriented Architecture a couple of times over the the last year of so. One of the things I’ve been trying to spell outabout UMW Blog is how it in many ways is trying to approximate a Syndication-Oriented Architechture using a very hodgepodge collection of plugins and widgets.

What does this mean? Well, for me it means that a university publishing platform shouldn’t only be limited to the sites created within that system (in our case WordPres Multi-User), but rather should be able to incorporate work that students and faculty may be doing on other, …

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cac.ophony.org » Deep Attention and Hyper Attention

Posted 9 weeks ago

Reading David’s posting on online reading and watching the McLuhan interview clip led me to ask myself a series of questions. What will our future students in classroom be like? Will they be significantly different from what we have now? What comes next after the X, Y, and Z generations? If the average attention span of “TV audience” is 4-5 minutes, what is the number for the Internet generation?

In light of the media’s role in the ongoing generational shift, I found N. Katherine Hayles’s article “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” in the 2007 Profession

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Username as a Tag
What’s more, if you want to aggregate by a user on YouTube, you can just substitute their account username for a tag (seems that YouTube treats the username as a tag). For example, http://youtube.com/rss/tag/jimgroom.rss will bring the latest videos from my account.

Related posts

2 Responses to “RSS Feed for Tags in YouTube”


  1. 1 Mary-Kathryn Jan 19th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    Ah! I finally found you! As a willing captive of Dr. Foss’ Brit Lit Since 1800 class, I have you to thank for the Wiki thingy I’m learning to do. It looks like it’s going to be fun–even if I do type with three fingers. :o)

  2. 2 jimgroom Jan 20th, 2008 at 4:23 pm

    Mary-Kathryn,

    So you are lucky enough to be taking a class with the inimitable Chris Foss, also known as “Hot Sauce.” He rules. And while I may be partly to blame for the wiki, like Frankenstein that monster has moved far beyond and simple ideas of ownership and responsibility on anyone mortal’s part. Last I heard, it is being hosted somewhere in the jungles of South America, having found its mate :)

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Polls

What are your five favorite film adaptations of a Stephen King novel or story?

  • The Shining (1980) by Stanley Kubrick (23%, 34 Votes)
  • Shawshank Redemption (1994) by Frank Darabont (21%, 32 Votes)
  • Stand by Me (1986) by Rob Reiner (18%, 27 Votes)
  • Misery (1990) by Rob Reiner (17%, 25 Votes)
  • The Green Mile (1999) by Frank Darabont (13%, 19 Votes)
  • Carrie (1976) by Brian DePalma (11%, 17 Votes)
  • The Dead Zone (1983) by David Cronenberg (8%, 12 Votes)
  • Creepshow (1982) by George Romero (5%, 7 Votes)
  • Pet Cemetary (1989) by Mary Lambert (5%, 7 Votes)
  • The Mist (2007) by Frank Darabont (4%, 6 Votes)
  • Firestarter (1984) by Mark L. Lester (3%, 4 Votes)
  • The Running Man (1987) by Paul Michael Glaser (3%, 4 Votes)
  • Cujo (1983) by Lewis Teague (2%, 3 Votes)
  • Christine (1983) by John Carpenter (2%, 3 Votes)
  • Children of the Corn (1984) Fritz Kiersch (2%, 3 Votes)
  • Cat's Eye (1985) by Lewis Teague (1%, 2 Votes)
  • Dreamcatcher (2003) by Lawrence Kasdan (1%, 2 Votes)
  • Maximum Overdrive (1986) by Stephen King (1%, 2 Votes)
  • The Lawnmower Man (1992) by Brett Leonard (I imagine Stephen King would suggest this should not be on the list) (1%, 2 Votes)
  • Dolores Claibourne (1995) by Taylor Hackford (1%, 2 Votes)
  • The Dark Half (1993) by George Romero (1%, 2 Votes)
  • Apt Pupil (1998) by Bryan Singer (1%, 1 Votes)
  • Thinner (1996) by Tom Holland (1%, 1 Votes)
  • Needful Things (1993) by Fraser Clarke Heston (1%, 1 Votes)
  • Silver Bullet (1985) by Daniel Attias (1%, 1 Votes)
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