Rocket Science

When I created the pie charts for yesterday’s post, it took me much longer than it should have to find how to enter the titles on the pie charts.

The answer…open the Formatting Palette from the View Menu.

I could change all sorts of formatting options by clicking on the chart or viewing the chart toolbar…but I couldn’t change all of them that way. To do that, I needed to open up the Formatting Palette.

Thanks again, Microsoft.

I wrote two posts about use of the term “OER”. Here’s the one I’ve chosen to publish.

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I’m at OER10 in the UK–and I have a big concern.

I’m concerned that educators and researchers are using OER (Open Educational Resources) as if it’s the silver bullet to solving all of the problems we have with using technology to enhance teaching and learning.

I know my friend David Wiley has written on OERs as the new learning object–or maybe put more precisely that OERs can overcome many of the challenges that plagued the “learning object” movement. (And David knows a bit about learning objects, he did his dissertation on the subject and has been a worldwide thought leader in the field.) I’m pretty sure that David understands the difference (I used to work with him at COSL).

But I’m concerned that most folks are just using OER as a replacement for “learning objects”, and that we’re still not focusing on the “right” thing. Instead we’ve got a new word du jour.

Really, it’s about learning.

One of the things that bugs me is when an organizer who’s scheduling an international conference call uses the wrong timezone when he/she sends out the invitation.

Right now, it’s Daylight Savings Time in much of the United States, which means if you’re in the Eastern timezone it’s Eastern Daylight Time or EDT.

A couple weeks ago, I got a conference call invitation that listed…

Friday at 8am PST / 9am MST/ 10am CST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT / 5pm CET / 1am AUS

Um, am I really supposed to do the math to adjust the Standard time listings for Daylight Savings time? Or do I have to do a conversion to get the actual time?

Similarly it’s Summer time in Europe (CEST versus CET). And the UK is not on GMT for the summer, so the time you list there is one hour different than the actual time in the UK. Also, if I remember correctly there are multiple timezones in Australia, and there isn’t an AUS timezone.

The international groups that I meet with tend to publish one time and the timezone and leave it to individuals to figure out what their time is using a site like http://timeanddate.com. I wish more people would do that, or take extra care in putting out this information.

/rant off

–1 week later edition.

This happened last Monday.

Imagine this, I’m the first car stopped at red light in the right lane. The lane next to me is empty. A taxi pulls up behind me. He proceeds to pull around me and then turn right in front of me at the red light.

Yep, drivers in Boston are that obnoxious.

I really need to drive a clunker and not worry about insurance and “accidentally” hit the gas in situations like this.

…as to stores local to me…

I got these 3 spam messages yesterday…