I Blog Therefore I am…

This is the new hub for Alan Levine’s activities as instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, AZ, replacing the mid 90s vintage home page, kept at:

http://dommy.com/alan/

Maybe I am new at blogging (as is everyone), but I have been hammering at the web since October 1993. Our MCLI web site has been in continuous “on” mode since then racking up stats. I’ve been commenting and sharing web sites since 1994 via our Bag of URLs and Web’s Eye View. In 2000, I more or less blogged by hand for a 6 month sabbatical from Arizona to New Zealand and Australia.

And in these past X years the focus has been on using the web in the realm of learning- it was a July 1994 conference presentation that we pitched the notion of using the web as a hypertext learning environment. And a 1994 workshop designed to show teachers how to create learning content with HTML that became the Writing HTML tutorial.

“But what the #^$% is ‘cogdogblog’?

Actually nothing.

The hardest part of setting up this site (installing Movable Type was not even that bad) was picking a catchy name! All the good ones in my field like Serious Instructional Technology, EdTechPost, and elearningpost were taken.

So I have opted for a meaningless name. Well there is meaning for me…

The cog (actually the chain-ring from my mountain bike) is for my interest in bicycling, a sensible alternative to road-rage. A bicycle is a wonderfully designed machine for its task. But more than that, a cog is a simple but effective device that can fit together easily with other similar devices, an apt metaphor for Internet protocols such as HTML, RSS, XML… So all of the areas of CDB are cogs themselves in a larger machine.

As for the next part, there is nothing more reliable, loyal, and playful as a dog, and that is how the web should be (unfortunately it seems full of dog crap). My companians and buddies past and present include Dominoe, Fudge, Skamper, and curently Mickey and Cadu.

Hence CogDogBlog. It does not even rhyme, unless you affect a bad Boston accent.

One more thing. As an acronym “CDB” brought me back to the favorite childhood book “C-D-B” written by William Steig. If you have never enjoyed this book, be a kid again, see this excerpt from Amazon.com, and learn how to point, guess, and laugh.

C-D-Blog?

D Blog S A B-S Blog.

O, S N-D!

Blog Birthdays

Just because I can, using my own WP-Posted Today plugin, here is what was blogged on every April 19 here (hah none of them reference the big event).

There are 24 posts previously published on April 19th

• 2023
  • 20 Laps on the Blog Train Blogging, that’s so 2007, right? Actually for me it’s 2003 because that was the year, on this very day, that this pile of posts spit out its first one. That’s a big fat who cares, 2-0. Please no cards or flowers. I have put to use my own WordPress little plugin to list all the […]
• 2022
  • For #OER 22 Me and a Penguin Want You To… I dare you. I double dog penguin dare you to contribute a story for my True Stories of Openness (formerly known as Amazing) aka Magic Acts of Web Serendipity… First conjured up long long ago (2009) at a conference far far away (Open Ed in Vancouver “Crossing the Chasm” was the theme), deploying not light […]
• 2019
  • One Day / Two Online Presentations Of all days, yesterday, happened as a convergence of doing presentations at two different conferences. Fortunately, I was able to do all from the comfort of home as they were online ones. In my late morning I did a session at the 2019 Technology, Colleges and Community (TCC) conference, which amazingly is the 24th one, […]
• 2017
  • After ~50 Years, I Learn to Tie My Shoes I’ve had loose shoe laces all my life. For a number of years I never even tied my tennis shoes, wearing them like slippers. I lost count how many friends. stranges would make a point to ask, “Did you know your shoes are untied?” I have a memory as a kid, maybe 4 or 5, […]
• 2016
  • Life With Dog; Hey This Data Collection is Creepy / Hey This Data Collection is Cool It’s almost been two weeks since I brought home Felix, a two year old Australian Shepherd / Catahoula mix, from the Payson, AZ Human Society. My routines now are adjusted to walks, feeding, and giving attention. None of this is any kind of problem, this dog is so sweet and playful. I love him dearly. […]
  • Literally [Ear] Buddies: Virtually Connecting at #OER16 Today Virtually Connecting hosted it’s one session at the OER16 Conference in Edinburgh. We typically would have done more, but Virtually Connecting has a pile of sessions at the overlapping OLCInnovate Conference. I leaped at the chance to host today’s one with keynoters Jim Groom and Catherine Cronin. Jim of course I have known and […]
  • Welcome to Slack with Slackin I’ve been fortunate/privileged/lucky/happy in my work to have that room to follow my curiosity. I might say that a lot of my activity seems to have unstated goals, in determinate objectives, and often outcomeless outcomes. That I dig. Okay. In my wandering work for the Creative Commons project, I skyped a few weeks ago with […]
• 2011
  • The Last Hurrah-zon Preso cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by WanderingtheWorld (www.LostManProject.com) I’m in California for both R&R but also to fulfill a presentation obligation I made back in the end of 2010, for the Mt Diablo Chapter of the ASTD on the 2011 Horizon Report. This was a fun, high energy and wired group […]
• 2010
  • That Two Timing XML File cc licensed flickr photo shared by mastrobiggo Technically, it was OMPL, but who cares what the ML it is– I’ve got a tip to share on how I’ve been using one single file to drive two dynamic resources. This is hardly in the realm of Tony Hirst mashup magic, but here it goes… Since we […]
• 2009
  • Hash Tags, Trash Tags, Hack Tags cc licensed flickr photo by Zervas One can hardly read a twitter stream these days without tripping over a boat load of hash tags (for those knot sure of what twitter is or what hash tags are, please go check out Oprah or some other oracle, I am not feeling like explaining everything…). First of […]
• 2008
  • My iPod Will Not Crash Your Airplane My iPod Will Not Crash Your Airplane by cogdogblog posted 19 Apr ’08, 11.14pm MDT PST on flickr I’m getting more acute to the silly rules that we take on like mild sheep. Supposedly, any electrical device with an on/off switch can cause havoc on a jet’s navigation. What kind of engineers do they have […]
  • Worst Interface Designers Are The Access Gougers The Worst Interface Designers Stand Between You and the Net by cogdogblog posted 19 Apr ’08, 6.08pm MDT PST on flickr This was the entire visible form trying to log into the Sherton’s wireless- lacking the remaining fields and forms, there is no way a Mac user on Firefox can "Belong". The form is chomped […]
• 2007
  • To Quote a Spammer ozsgdcfp uvxjfloe yndvqk igctj nzvbsfod hqzploatu evsbkytc Yeah right, “omcv nxpy”, I could not agree more, there is nothing sweeter than the sound of comment blog spam frying in the moderation queue. Would you like some Grey Poupon on that?
• 2006
  • Second Life Staff Meeting Yes, I was in my home office, but yesterday NMC had a meeting together in Second Life: We all our wearing our “official” shirts, but it may take some guesswork to identify the players. Most communication in SL is via a text chat, where anyone in proximity can see what you have to “say”. Chat […]
  • Odeo Me About Podcasts I am seeking some more voices to use as demos for my podcast presentation next week (it will be shared, but of course first it must be created). The focus is “Podcasting on the Cheap” how to do this with free/cheap readily available tools. If anyone has time, like less than 3 minutes, can you […]
  • i m noob The blogging has been and will be sporadic, as I am learning to crawl, then walk in my new role with the NMC. Yes, I am a newbie. It’s like thinking you are proficient on the lake, and you realize when you show up for the group trip, that your expertise with the pedal boats […]
• 2005
  • The New Phone Book is Here! The New Phone Book is Here! flickr foto The New Phone Book is Here! The New Phone Book is Here!available on my flickr Taking a cue from the quote in Steve Martin’s The Jerk, “here” is actually our recycling container. Can you believe in this age of dwindling natural resources and internet based information, that we get dumped on our door […]
• 2003
  • Making the RSS Feeds Even More Useful With some help from “Lora” (my psuedonym), we learn how the MLX has added custom, dymamic RSS feeds that directly match a search result.
  • And Boris then TBs the Same Object Meet my second learning object blogger, Boris the humanities teacher. He also finds the same correlation meter blogged by Lora, and ads an entry to his own blog- essentially he has a different use for the same LO. And thus, one object in our collection can be networked to places where it is referenced: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cgi-bin/tb.cgi?__mode=list&tb_id=278
  • Lora TrackBacks an Object So first Lora, searches our MLX and then uses her MT Bookmarklet to ping a Correlation Meter that she can use in teaching about the correlation coefficient. She writes a blog entry…
  • BackTrack to TrackBack http://www.movabletype.org/mt/trackback/55
  • Meet Lora.. Lora’s geology objects was the first psuedo blog I created in MT to demonstrate a site in which w person is harnessing the LO/RSS notion in one field. Lora is a Geology insutrctor, and here she has set up MovableType to accept RSS Feeds form our Maricopa Learning eXchange. Later she adds additional feeds from […]
  • About Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) There is a rather long history to this project (see articles from 2000 here and here)– but its main purpose is to provide an easily accessible collection of innovative practices and projects developed at the Maricopa Community Colleges. This year we have moved on several different fronts to build the collection up, from sponsoring a […]
  • I Blog Therefore I am… This is the new hub for Alan Levine’s activities as instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, AZ, replacing the mid 90s vintage home page, kept at: http://dommy.com/alan/ Maybe I am new at blogging (as is everyone), but I have been hammering at the web since October 1993. Our MCLI web site has […]

Featured Image: Screenshot of this blog circa 2006

If this kind of stuff has value, please support me by tossing a one time PayPal kibble or monthly on Patreon