One of these mornings...

From a message on my Blended Learning and Instruction comment wall (BL&I), I learned that the iCal event I'd collected from BL&I over the weekend had failed to optimize itself into my local time zone (JST). Though the new event was visible in desktop views (Day/Week/Month) at 13:30 JST, 2009.03.28, hidden in the background was the event's actual UTC (GMT), and accurate JST calculations of starting and ending times. Need I add that I missed the event?

[caption id="attachment_44" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Event displayed at 13:30 JST, 2009.03.28"][/caption]

Since I recalled that WiZiQ featuring recordings, I re-drilled the BL&I website (Ning) from top to announcements, to events, to the one I'd missed, and looked for a link to or mention of a recording. Though there was nothing like that visible on-site, there was a WiZiQ sign-in box barely peeking around the edge of my browser window (Safari default size, about a hand-span in breadth).

So after dredging up a suitable mail address and password for the WiZiQ site, and logging in, I found just what I'd been looking for, a "View Recording" button in the center of the window!

The story continues from there, ...:

I tried to "View [the] Recording" (rectangular button below the Tags, Embed[ding] Code, and URL; above). However, the first four out of five times I tried, after successful sign in to WiziQ. I got messages displaying, "You are not authorized to view this recording." Much to my surprise, as I was returning to that recording page to collect evidence of what was going on, it finally loaded! I'm looking forward to watching the show now, and wondering whether anyone can explain the flukiness of access to the recording of it.

(comment yet to appear on WiZiQ,

Integrating Technology into the Classroom Using Moodle and Wikis)

... and resumes here, well, actually, resumed as a draft posted in Safari, and continues now in Firefox:

I started this post in Safari, and got as far as pasting in an overt URL and typing the page of the WiZiQ page (above). In Visual editing mode, twice I tried to insert the link, covered by the display text I'd selected. However, after the page background faded, the link dialog box never un-faded, , and all page controls below the bloxi URL became useless. The only option was to reload at the browser control level, hoping the auto-save had done its thing.

Fortunately it had, but paragraph divisions between default formatted passages (aligned left) above and below the block quotation and reference weren't appearing in the post display, not even in Firefox, until after I came back and hand-encoded them in HTML view. Whenever I get through a troublesome online session like that, I wonder whether ordinary learners or run-of-the-mill site visitors would ever go through all the bother, or ever come back again, much less tell you about it.