Graham Glass, etc.

Christmas comes early

I decided to splurge on some fun toys from ThinkGeek, the kinds of things that I would have loved as a kid (and still love as an adult).

Here's a photo of one of my new toys: Glowing Jellyfish:

EDU 2.0: Code Base Statistics

For fun, I ran "rake stats" on the edu 2.0 "Ruby on Rails" codebase to get some statistics.

Here's the outcome:

• 16,500 lines of code
• 309 classes (139 controllers, 142 models, 28 libraries)
• 1881 methods
• 6 methods per class on average
• 6 lines of code per method on average

One trend I noticed is towards making controllers responsible for a particular facet of a model. For example, we used to have a single controller that supported all the operations on a teacher's class, but now we have about 10 controllers, one which supports student attendance, another which supports the gradebook, and another which supports the teacher's view of the class forum, etc.

The codebase could be improved some more, but I think it's already pretty lean and mean. In another post, I'll contrast the edu 2.0 code base statistics against those from Moodle and Sakai.

Olafur Eliasson

I saw an exhibition of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson today at the San Francisco Museum of Art. His creations ranged from a beautiful crystalline walkway to a mesmerizing wall of light.

Here are a couple of photos I took of the crystalline walkway with my iPhone. First, a side view:

Second, the roof:

 

My New Desktop Graphic

Profit and Competition

I believe that both profit and competition must be present in order for a service to be provided efficiently, because:

• Profit provides a strong incentive for people to provide a service and for investors to fund the its development and execution.
• Competition provides a strong incentive for providers to reduce the cost and/or increase the quality of a service.

I don't know of any counterexamples - do you?

edu 2.0 passes the 6000 member mark

The last month of edu 2.0 progress has been particularly satisfying, as we added another 1,000 members as well as some key new features.

Here are some of the site statistics taken from our internal dashboard:

• A new community game "daily quest" was added.
• The gradebook was improved to support weighted categories.
• Thousands of new educational resources have been added by our community.
• 700+ classes are now under development by teachers in our community.
• 2,000+ teachers are registered members of the site.
• 3,400+ students are enrolled in classes hosted on our site.
• 150+ interest groups have been created and over 1,900 members have joined these groups.
• 110,000+ messages have been exchanged between our members.
• 20,000+ chat messages have been sent on our chat system.
• Hundreds of minor enhancements were made.

Up until now we haven't done any marketing because we wanted to wait until the site matured. And although we still have tons of features in the pipeline, I think it's far enough along to start promoting the site. So next month will be the first "marketing month" for us!

 

Blogfesors

I'm in Puerto Rico right now and looking forward to presenting at the Blogfesors 2008 conference. There should be 100+ blogging professors there, and we're going to be talking all about the use of technology and social tools in education. My own presentation is going to cover both edu 2.0 and my ideas about how to fundamentally improve education systems.

Yum!

Check out this matte-black Ferrari 599 Fiorano:

Beautiful Art from Neural Networks

Check this out:

Ron Paul featured on Colbert Show

Ron Paul featured on Colbert show:

As Colbert says, "it would be funny if it weren't so sad"....