The blog begins to solidify.

Been reading a whole bunch about social computing today, particularily on how to encourage interaction in a group online. At work we're developing an online course about medical terminology, which has typically involved massive amounts of rote memorization. Some of that memorization is necessary; there's room, though, for critical thinking and expansion of ideas. However, there probably won't be as much testing on the critical thinking. So the question here is, how to get students interested in interacting with each other and sharing their knowledge when the topic material doesn't really encourage dialogue as much as other courses? I've got some ideas... posting them on the development site as we go.

I'm still not sure what this blog is, by the way. I notice there's a lot of social-computing blogs out there, and part of me thinks I'd like to go that route, but I feel I'm still at the sponge stage of my knowledge development: still learning what's out there, what's been done; I have thoughts but nothing to judge them by. Plus I would like to have space to ramble now and then about non-work-related topics, and whine about being very tired today, and if this was a purely work-related site I couldn't do that.

What's next, then? Political rants? I could go on about US vs. Canadian differences... that'll be a good topic someday. Links to other sites? Check out Show and Tell Music, a collection of record cover art. If you feel like being disturbed, go to "Christian cover art" and listen to the MP3 by "Lil' Markie", which is positively freakish. Let's just say it puts a new spin on Phil Collins' "Mama".

Oh, so I also finally changed the graphics on this site to something other than the default, having at last settled on a usable blogname. Guess I might as well flip the switch and make 'er live. I did notice an interesting bug in Blogger when using Safari 1.2: when you edit the CSS, sometimes when you save or preview the CSS, it nukes ALL the CSS in the file after the change you just made. Isn't that nice?