So I had this really cool idea this morning to look at the activity in the teaching wiki and compare it to data from my PhD. I thought it would be interesting to see when students where working (eg time of day, day of week, etc). The biggest problem is remembering how I did all the analyses of the data. The email lists I used for my PhD had all the timestamps in a nice time format which was set to the current time. The wiki, on the other hand, uses a unix format with time set at UTC. My first analysis had most of the work occurring during the night which totally confused me until I realised that I didn’t work at any time in the wiki during the wee hours of the day. All I can say is that I’m glad I know how to use excel otherwise I’d have thrown this idea out.

Which reminds me of how much trouble I had setting up WordPress. The time setting was in UTC. And for the life of me, I could not find where to reset it to my local time. I don’t know how may times I went searching for it, only to find it directly below the UTC time setting. The page was telling me, but I wasn’t listening. How often do we not see what is on a page? Are we really listening to the web?

I’ve long suspected that we do not really take in what is on our screen, that we only scan what’s there. Someone once told me that we only see what’s in bold, particularly on blog posts. Does that mean we trivialise context?