Tag Archives: Blaaawg

Blogitus Interruptus

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Sorry for the lack of blaaawgifying the past couple of days, I was in a Bob Pike Bootcamp for work the last two days, and was totally wiped by the time I got back home.

But, you might say, didn’t you just get done doing that whole Bob Pike thing.

Uh yuop! you are correct, sir.

The powers that be would like our whole department to be certifiable certified Participant-Centered Facilitators (or some such series of initials), and the pre-requisite requirement for such a certification is to take the Bootcamp, have advanced training, take an assessment and have a classroom facilitation observed and assessed.  I’m doing the steps in a cha-cha-cha fashion, in that the advanced training took place before the bootcamp.

So the last two days were like remedial training for the event that took place two-weeks ago (oh and I took the test already too, scored 90% on it too!)

The training was repetitious for me, but fresh, new and exciting for the other participants, which made it fun for me.  Which is really one of the benefits of a participant-centered (PC) approach.  In a PC classroom, an experienced practitioner of the topic is treated as a resource, instead of a member of the audience.  The acolytes can tap into the experience and knowledge of the more experienced.  It works the other way as well, the vim and vigor of the fresh young faces, refreshes the tired old soldiers into rethinking/reshaping the worn-in pathways of the veteran.

Think about that approach, next time your involved in a class that expects you to sit in your seat and listen, until the time for questions come.  Or wants to by-pass your experiences in order to trot out the speakers talking points.  The PC approach is more than capable of providing a structure for getting those points across, it does so in a manner that honors the participant, and respects his experience.

I’ll have more to share in a few more posts, perhaps giving y’all a way to put participant-centered into your vocabulary, and change the way you share your knowledge with others.

Gig’em Horns!!!

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or something like that…

Blogging will be light this afternoon and evening (I know… I know, why should today be any different) as the family ventures to Blogospeer Central for a get-together-geek-out-bbq-feast-football extravaganza.

I’m slowly being surrounded by Aggies, last night we ate hot-wings and played board games with our new pals, Michael and Natalie and their sweet young boys. Food was delicious and we had a good time playing balderdash and compatibility. We are trying the ‘power of the pack‘ with toddlers, since their boys seem to act nice and peaceful when they are around our large brood. We sent one of our pack leaders, Brenna, to a friends house for the night, so the rehabilitation may have been limited. Here at Casa de Stueve, we rehabilitate toddlers and train parents. *guffaw*
Another reason for light blogging, I’m teaching Sunday School in the morning, so I need to finish prepping for that, and get organized so we can get out the door early in the morning. We are also on tap to bring breakfast so I need to get prepped for that.

But looking forward to an afternoon geek-out, BBQ and Aggie Football!!!! (though I still love Oregon State – No one licks our Beavers!!!!)

New Plugins

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heart of loveFirst off the stack is the NET Bible plugin. This will allow me to type John 3:16 and WP will automagically translate that to a link that point to the NET bible at bible.org. So I can type some things and then randomly comment that this applies to Numbers 10:20 and be on my way without having to make a long drawn out process of going to the site, making the search, copying the link, and then making the link in my post. So… let’s see if it woiks!

Coherence / Coherencia Next, the Page Links To plugin is a simple thing, but makes it easy to create ‘links to’ other areas of your websites, and have them appear on the WordPress page list, so that it looks nice.  I needed it to better incorporate my Flickr Photo Gallery into the pages of this site.  I found the tip at the Glued Ideas Support Forum, which incidentally has created this great theme.

Also installed Ultimate Tag Warrior because I loves me some tags.  Tags are a great way to interconnect  your various posts by applying your own ‘tag’ to each post.  Then look and see how they interconnect by looking at a tag cloud.  I’ve got none of that working at the moment, but UTW seems to have all the options I’d need to get a good tags folksnomy working lickity-split.

Don't make me, Mama! Finally, I’ve installed EditNPlace.  This allows the quick update/edit of a post from the main page without having to go back to the backend, and then to the manage tab, then find the post.  I can quickly (through the magic of AJAX) click and edit the raw text of the entry and then save it.  Good for catching typos, or adjusting the layout real quick, etc… Had something like it for comments on Misplaced Keys, which was handy too.

That does it for this episode of What Plugin have you done for me lately…

re-found…

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One of the things about blogging that I enjoy is the addition of a blogroll. One of the things I *don’t* like about blogs is exceedlingly huge and log blogrolls. (Also the technical aspects of using blogrolling.com or other service to host your blogroll, and the hit your site takes when that service goes down) At Misplaced Keys I had moved to my own blogrolling system, using Yoshi’s Link List Module for Expression Engine. It worked great, and allowed me to page through my blogroll in a nice consise way.

The problem was, that I didn’t, and have lost touch with a lot of my favorite blogs that I used to read semi-regularly, and replaced that variety with a list of daily reads, that largely regurgiate the same topics in different ways. So it is quite nice that since I’ve switch over and imported my LONG list to find some unread treasures along the way. (Along with quite a few dead and duplicate links that need to be trimmed…)

This morning I re-found The Irvins which is the blog of Tim Irvins who writes on quite a few topics, and whose grasp of Grace always inspires me. I read this post on The Altar Call that just seems to make sense, and recall that many of the people sitting in pews are opposed to the scandal of grace. Read more of Tim’s stuff, and I think you’ll agree, he has his head on straight.

Peace.