Month: June 2009

Managing your privacy on Facebook

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Facebook’s privacy settings can be managed in a very detailed manner, but setting them up correctly can be confusing to new members. It is not at all obvious that you have any control over what people see of your personal information.

Put your friends into lists

To get started with taking back control over your personal life, take a moment to consider what privacy levels you might need. There may be items you may be comfortable with your family seeing but not friends, and vice-versa, such as photos of yourself uploaded by your friends. You’ll be grouping people into lists that will allow or prevent them to see specific items. Typical lists you might consider making would be “family”, “friends”, “acquaintances”, “coworkers”, “party animals”, etc.

Click “All Friends” under the Friends menu in the blue stripe up top.

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Playing futurologist: small consequences of technological changes

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Although some great books [1 and 2] have been written about the huge changes being wrought on society and culture by the digital revolution, it’s just as interesting to speculate about the smaller consequences of the adoption of new technology. Here are some of the ones I’ve noticed, but perhaps you will have your own to add. Please jump in and comment!

Item: Records have given way to CD’s which have given way to digital music streaming and downloads

  • The 70 minute CD-length album format has no real reason to exist anymore. There is no longer a reason to group unrelated tracks together in any particular way. We could even go back to the lengthy psychedelic and progressive rock tracks, if anyone wanted to hear them. Tracks can be sold grouped with hundreds of others or individually.
  • You can’t really give CD’s as wrapped gifts anymore, at least not to people under 60. Who wants that junk cluttering up their house?
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IE8: Navigation to the webpage was cancelled

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With the advent of IE 8, I started getting calls about a new error when accessing our learning management system.

“Navigation to the webpage was cancelled.”

This error can be caused by many things, but in this case, I believe it has to do with the fact that the LMS has both secure and insecure assets in the frameset. Unfortunately, many times messages will come up asking people whether they want to view both types, and they will click “no” without knowing that the page requires them to function.

Since I can’t ever really know what is going on with a user’s home computer’s security setup, I simply tell them to reset their Internet Explorer to its default settings.

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A SCORM-Ready Template: Part 6A. Adapt the SCORM template for Moodle

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The HTML SCORM template works with Moodle, but it needs a few modifications to work perfectly.

  • Server side include statements in the content pages must be replaced with the real code
  • The closing javascript on buttons in the navbar needs to be modified from “top.window.close()” to “window.close” because of the Moodle uses a different learning activity window structure than our own in-house LMS.


I’ve made these changes and created a “Moodleized” version of the template for you to download:

DOWNLOAD MOODLE VERSION OF TEMPLATE

This template is an unscored activity and should just mark itself complete. I will soon be posting one that will allow scored interactions on each page as well.

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