Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
HighEdWeb 2014 at Portland is now a week gone. As is the case with most HighEdWeb it did a good job of balancing professional development, meeting new people, and getting to know the locale. Charles Fulton and I gave a talk on improving your website without nuking it from orbit. The presentation focused on using tools … Read more
My Lafayette (https://my.lafayette.edu) went responsive on October 15, 2014, which means it now works equally well on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. This should come as welcome news to anyone who ever growled/cursed/cried in frustration while pinch/zooming site in their phone’s web browser. We also made a number of other smaller, but useful, improvements to … Read more
Registration is now open for Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2015 at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. The event starts on Monday, January 5th with our traditional code/documentation sprint (which admittedly tends to be less a sprint, and more a “let’s get organized” session) followed by formal Hack/Doc on Tuesday, January 6 through Thursday, January … Read more
The Collaborative Liberal Arts Project’s first ever Moodle User Group meeting was held June 23-24, 2014 at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. It was followed by our traditional Summer Moodle Hack/doc Fest. Getting there was an adventure in and of itself — Charles Fulton (Lafayette College) and I took the train from New York … Read more
The last book on my 2014 summer reading list, and the one I didn’t get to finish. Consider Phlebas is the first novel in Banks’ Culture series of novels. It’s a morally ambiguous space opera in which its namesake civilization — the Culture — is a post-scarcity, trans-human, machine intelligence-led empire. Daniel Landau, a CLAMP colleague at Reed College, … Read more
Humanity has made it to the stars, but only by hitching a ride with the fish-like Shoal aliens, who have a monopoloy on faster-than-light travel. The first book was filled with ancient mysteries, post-human monstrocities, and a touch of FTL battles. The second dealt with the theft of an FTL starship and the efforts to … Read more
Book 2 of the Fall Revolution by Ken MacLeod revels in political discourse and post-human speculation as it bounces between a far future with robust artificial intelligence, cloning, planetary colonization and the more mundane world of Scotland, circa 1975.
A long-running tradition at Hack/Doc are our lunchtime presentations. These are 15-30 minute Moodle-related presentations in which presenters talk about projects they’ve been working on, cool things they’ve learned, or new code they’ve written. Past topics have included LAE Grader, WordPress and Moodle integration via LTI, and Moodle theming. If you’re going to be at … Read more
When I was a kid I used to love going to summer camp. Usually it was 4-H campaign, where I’d spend a week in Beemerville, NJ building model rockets, though I also went to Space Camp. Twice. Yes, I was a big nerd. Thirty-odd years later, I’m still a big nerd, but instead of building … Read more