Category: Blog
Like a kid in a candy store
Now that I have more free time, I’ve been getting back into Second Life again. I also want to get back into Open Simulator, but it’s sort of hard to know where to start. A few years ago I tried a few different Hypergrid instances, and they were okay, but not mind blowing, so I’m…
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MSEd
As of 12:00 AM on May 5, 2023, I officially graduated with a Master of Science in Education degree in Instructional Systems Technology, or MSEd in IST for the sake of brevity. I began working on the degree at the height of the pandemic lockdowns in August 2020, and by taking two classes a semester…
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Taking notes with Obsidian
For a few years now, I’ve been using Obsidian to keep a daily journal, and it’s been great. It has a lot of options that I’ve never explored or needed but something came up recently and I wanted to find out how to connect Obsidian to Zotero. An online search using DuckDuckGo returned an unexpected…
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Business continuity planning
For the past 20+ years I’ve worked at a large public university in the American Midwest, and over the years I’ve picked up “other duties as assigned.” These are duties that don’t take up all of my time, but are good to work on when things are slow. One of these duties is business continuity…
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The End is Near!
A recent email from a former classmate reminded me I should update my academic portfolio. It also made me want to figure out how many classes I’ve taken, how many more I need to take, and when I might graduate. A quick perusal of the unofficial transcript enabled me to update my academic portfolio. In…
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Vacation and school
Last week I took a week off from work to mentally prepare myself for going back to school, which started this week. I didn’t do anything spectacular for vacation, other than staying home and doing a bit of cleaning. The heat wave we’ve been having kept me inside most days, where I would plop down…
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Long Live the Classic Editor
When logging into a WordPress blog, the user is first shown the Dashboard, which usually includes links to posts about WordPress. This morning, most of those posts had to do with the announcement that support for the Classic Editor plugin has been extended to 2022, and possibly beyond. In 2018, when WordPress came out with…
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Not All Candy
Are you hungry? Here’s a bowl of candy. Help yourself. Oh, I should probably warn you about them first. I’m not sure how it happened, but some of the candies are poisonous and’ll kill you. Pretty quickly, too. I mean, you’ll probably be fine. It’s a huge bowl and there’s gotta be hundreds of candies…
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A second look at Second Life
Since starting work on my master’s degree, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about Second Life, the online virtual world that once seemed to hold so much promise. Back in the day, I used to be a member, but eventually left because it was no longer this new, shiny, interesting thing. Last October, I…
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Muddying the waters
I had hoped to write this third R511 blog this past weekend, but life intervened. The heat went out in my house on Saturday, so I spent most of the day dealing with getting that fixed. Then while I was studying on Sunday, my mother called to say the apartment next to hers caught fire.…
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EDUC-R511 Instructional Technology Foundations
This will be sort of interesting. This semester, one of my professors wants us to blog about our thoughts on the assigned readings instead of discussing them in Canvas. The posts for the class will all be put in the same category to them easy to find. It gives me an excuse to write some…
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Academic portfolio
Many years ago, during the recession that started in 2008, I started going back to school to earn a TESOL certificate. I was thinking about this the other day when explaining to someone that I started working on a master’s degree this year. It seemed interesting that I started going back to school again in…
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