Food for Thought, e-Cobblers

Dan Balzar makes a provocative statement that inspires me to listen to a Green Room podcast again. He says, "You can't cobble together a bunch of little pieces, and that makes a good course" (Seven Revelations about e-Learning, The Green Room, Episode 28 [that's episode 28, regardless of the "38" in the URL], July 16, 2007)....

I've done, gone and listened again to find that Dan, talking about point number five, namely: how instructional elements can "get lost in translation" from one educational context to another; gives the example of "learning objects," which he concludes "have not been as popular as we thought they'd be." Well, I've alway considered the term "learning objects" an oxymoron, and never thought they'd be popular for adult learners, though perhaps they would be as work-saving devices for educators too busy to learn to craft, compose and contextualize their own educational materials.

After all, what can an object learn, anyway - or, more accurately perhaps, what educational roles might fungible digital parts suit?

Postscript: I've imported this post:Food for Thought, e-Cobblers; along with the all the rest of the posts, comments and labels in pab's potpourri to date, to the LTD Project Blog (2007.08.07). I invite you to continue browsing and commenting on posts and updates there.

Rogue Background Color: Twitches and Twiddles

A day or so ago, the color of the banner on one of my Blogger blogs, displayed using the same template as this one (as of date of publication), suddenly changed color for no apparent reason.

I was too busy to start mucking about with templates at the time. I still am, but the color is one that masks the title and possibly the subtitle of the blog, making them virtually unreadable - unless you squint your eyes (more) to detect minute differences in hue and tone between the rogue background and default text colors.

I've already saved the entire template of that blog to disk, Now I'm writing up this trouble-shooting report in this blog, which I've chosen for convenience as well as similarity of templates. The only thing I can find in the template that approximates the rogue color is:

name="titlecolor" description="Post Title Color"
type="color" default="#c60" value="#cc6600"

However, a preview after twiddling that color to FFFFFF showed no change in the banner background. So it's back to the drawing board. I'll try Blogger help....

Nope, there's too much info. to digest there, among help, help groups and cross-linked sites. So I got out the DigitalColor Meter (Mac OS X: App's: Utilities) and measured the banner background (RGB As Hex Value, 8-bit). It turns out to be 996600. However, that's nowhere in the template. Well, back to Blogger Help Center or, better yet, Help Group, I guess.