In my move from Blogger.com to this self-hosted WordPress there are a couple of things that I have had to do that I thought would be worth documenting. These fall into the general headings of Comments, Permalinks, Feeds, and Categories and Tags. Comments. I was using disqus.com as my commenting system. There’s a WordPress plugin for this but to move the threads to the new blog I had to use the URL mapping method.

I’m planning to move Fresh and Crispyy to this blog on the 1st March 2011. Consider this an early warning. Inspired by Jim Groom’s Digital Story Telling Course (DS106), I purchased this domain and it hosts my own WordPress blog. I’ve already exported my posts from Blogger.com and moved my disqus.com discussion threads over. Now it only remains to cut the cord. Until the cut-off point, I’ll be blogging in both places in parallel.

I’ve just imported my posts from Fresh and Crispy on Blogspot using the WordPress Blogger blogs importer tool. Seems to have worked fine, but the comments in disqus.com where not carried over. I wonder if i) disqus.com can be used to manage comments in WordPress ii) If not, can comments be exported? In any case, I’m not yet ready to cut the cord! Answers i) Yes there’s a disqus plugin for wordpress and there’s a domain transfer tool.

Back in November, member of my social network Alan Cann asked me to participate in a project he was doing with the International Centre for Guidance Studies for the Research Information Network on Social Media for researchers. A few days later, I met online in Skype Chat with researcher Konstantia Dimitrou and we discussed my attitudes to social networking and its use in my teaching and scholarship. The report Social Media: A Guide for Researchers has now been released and you can read part of what I had to say on page 38 and in full on the Web at http://www.

During this first couple of weeks of the new teaching term I’ve been experimenting with using screen capture software as a means of capturing my lectures. Using nothing more than the built-in microphone on my Macbook Pro and an educational license for Camtasia Studio, I’ve been able to capture several lectures live in the lecture room. When I plug my Mac into the LCD projector, the screen resolution changes to super VGA (1024 x 768 pixels).

Tara Brabazon, writing today for the Times Higher, provides a useful analysis of the common mistakes students make when submitting assignment work and suggests ways that we in academia could improve the first year experience. Her 20-point check list of what students do wrong and how lecturers react to those errors should be published in every student handbook. See this Amp at http://bit.ly/iid0ME

I’ve just installed the new TweetdDeck app for Google Chrome and like what I see so far. It takes the “that’s so obvious, why wasn’t it done before” idea of combining (TweetDeck calls this blending) all your feeds into three columns. Home: for all your identities and the people they follow across all of your social networks; Me: for mentions of your social identities and posts to your facebook newsfeeds; and Inbox: for direct messages.

Last year, I bought a Livescribe Echo Smart Pen with the hope that it would be useful in teaching. Well, here the result of my first attempt to use it “in anger”. I used the pen to write out a solution to one of the problems from my module EGLM03 Modern Control Systems while recording a narrative of what I was doing. The pen recorded the pen movement on the special notepaper and matched the movement to the audio.

Welcome to the blogging exercise ICCT class of 2011. Please leave the link to your new blog in the comments.

A couple of small things: I’ve created an open public Diigo group for Connectivism and Connected Knowledge 2011 which you can use to share useful bookmarks (http://groups.diigo.com/group/cck_2011) and a team Pearltree (http://pear.ly/JgB5). I won’t have much time to contribute to CCK11, but I’m hoping that my network will help me by curating the must see resources that I might not have time to do for myself. As Karen Stephenson (cited in Siemens 2005) says:

A couple of small things: I’ve created an open public Diigo group for Connectivism and Connected Knowledge 2011 which you can use to share useful bookmarks (http://groups.diigo.com/group/cck_2011) and a team Pearltree (http://pear.ly/JgB5). I won’t have much time to contribute to CCK11, but I’m hoping that my network will help me by curating the must see resources that I might not have time to do for myself. As Karen Stephenson (cited in Siemens 2005) says:

This is my new blog. Created as part of Assignment 1 of week 1 of Digital Storytelling 2010. It is hosted on Cast Iron Code and the domain cpjobling.me is registered with godaddy.com.