intodimensions.com

I selected CutLine recently for the site and so far I’ve done… drumroll… nothing to it. Even the pictures at the tope are the standard ones. That will change at some point, I’ll put some new graphics at the top, tweak a few things with the style, and play around with the stuff in the sidebar. Don’t expect any big changes though, I’d like to keep this very simple.

Not much and everything at once. Both Crystal and I have been very busy with CENTIMETERCUBE and Shufflegazine. We’ve both promised to try to get better at writing here on the site but let’s see how it goes.

I just realized that this blog is almost four years old by now. First post is from September 2004. Imagine that. Crystal and I had all kinds of grand plans for this blog when we moved to the UAE in 2005 but not much of that came true, probably because we were just too busy with other things. I will try to do better and post some things here regularly, but can’t make any promises.

I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5. Apparently the theme we were using is not compatible so I’ve got to either fix it or find a new one. Oh well, the new version seems very nice.

We were gone to Oman over the weekend and when we checked our site when we had just came back, the home page said it had been “hacked”.

We’re now upgraded to the latest WordPress but some things from the old site doesn’t work yet so it’ll be a while before it’s all back. The content is all here though.

In addition to using Flickr we’re going to start posting photos ourselves on the Photos page.

Crystal has started a blog of her own (and I guess I’ll pitch in some) at http://emiratesadventure.blogspot.com. It’s primarily intended as a way to keep in touch with our families at home but I’m sure it’ll find other uses as well.

Concerning this site I have some plans for what I’ll do with it but it’ll be a while before I get around to doing anything substantial about it. So until then I will keep posting on various issues, but probably less than I have been doing.

Update: As of 18 September 2005 we’ve moved the blog from the location mentioned above to this site.

Statement of Research Interest
Magnus Nystedt
April 2005

I believe research is a critical part of teaching, on virtually any level, in virtually any setting. As a teacher you have to keep evolving, growing, and learning yourself about your topic, and you do that in part by doing research.

I believe in doing research that aids in my teaching, which feeds on what I do in my classroom, and that involves my students in some way. It is my experience that students appreciate being involved in their teachers’ activities outside the classroom, and it gives teachers exiting opportunities to form their curriculum. This might involve students helping out with literature searches or data collection. It’s a symbiotic relationship that is well worth exploring further.

I believe research can be valuable almost regardless of what form it takes and what outlet it’s aimed at. A well-crafted research paper accepted in a high-ranking academic journal can be just as important as a presentation to a local conference in terms of adding to your body of knowledge. The characteristics of the research are more important than the outlet.

Finally, I believe that in my particular subject-area, the most interesting topics to research are to be found at the fringes, where it intersects with other areas. If you look at my previous research projects you will find they span subject-areas, such as information systems, teaching and learning. It’s in those areas where the most exciting new knowledge is to be found, in my experience.

I ran the site through the Gematriculator and it came out as follows:

I got this idea from Gunnar Wolf who compared Linux distribution sites with the Gematriculator. Which was the distro-site with the highest percentage good? Debian with 89% good! Which was the most evil distro? Gentoo with 58% evil!

[posted with ecto]

It seems like whenever I am looking to do something with my site, either it’s already done in WordPress somewhere or there’s a plugin or “hack” available. The WordPress development team and community is a wonderful and helpful place.

This morning I was thinking about adding a function to the site so that you could print pages in a format suited for printing. Many sites have a little button on each page that says Print or something and that brings up a re-formatted page. I was assuming I had to do the same with my site and went looking through WordPress support.

A few seconds of looking and there was the answer - I don’t have to do anything! WordPress automatically re-formats pages when they’re printed. And it’s pretty straight-forward to change the print-layout by editing the print.css file.

[posted with ecto]