On Friday, a number of us were discussing the upcoming draconian cuts that University will have to make: another $25 million on top of the $17 million already made for next year (on top of the $25 million over the last couple of years). I spent the weekend reading and generally trying to escape. I read all of the new Harry Potter. The editing doesn't seem as good this time around. It's probably getting harder to get Rowling to make cuts and tighten up language as she has become a mega-star writer. Still a great read.
This morning, I attended a meeting about an on-line science education program I drafted a course proposal for a couple of years ago. The program got funded, finally, and now they're looking for people to actually develop and teach on-line courses to create an on-lin science education master's degree program. The plan is to teach the course using the Prometheus system, which UMass Online uses. It does all of the abominable things that these 'learning management systems' do. It re-implements proprietary email and other standard internet protocols internally, rather than using the standard protocols and allowing people to choose clients. It claims to be platform agnostic, but a bunch of the 'features' only work with Windows. It uses frames, which is a horrible mistake and means that you can't have a friendly interface no matter what else you do.
The worst thing that the learning management systems all do is reify the distinction between students and professors. It's possible to change all the default options and create an environment that is not so rigid and disempowering, but all of the defaults assume that's what you'll want. And all of the support staff assume that's how you'll do it. If I actually have to develop a course using the system, I'll probably just create a series of outlinks to wiki pages.
I heard thunder this afternoon, so Plato and I went out to investigate. I had checked the weather channel and from the static radar image, it looked like there was a line of thunderstorms pushing in from the west. When we got out, however, I could hear thunder to the west, but clouds weren't moving east. There were some low clouds moving west, but the higher storm clouds were moving south. Evidently, there was a north-south line of thunderstorms moving south. Plato and I watched the clouds and saw some lightning. When the storm broke, we ducked inside and watched through the windows. It rained hard for a few minutes and then the sun started to shine again.
This evening, Howard Dean supporters met to watch the announcement of his intention to run for President. He calls it the 
Great American Restoration. It was a good speech that hit all the right notes with me. In spite of it just being a tape, the audience clapped and cheered throughout the speech. Afterwards, there was some question about how to organize further. Several of us tried to convince folks to just sign up through meetup.com. A couple of old guys were skeptical: they wanted someone to just type in the list of addresses. Sigh... Such a list is bound to have errors and be impossible to maintain effectively: you'll quickly end up with several individual copies of the list, each of which has unique errors and omissions. Some people seemingly can't be convinced that these errors can be avoided by using a system that lets people subscribe themselves.