CogBlogged from ‘April, 2004’

Doing double duty with the Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference (Tues-Thursday) and a Pachyderm Project meeting in San Francisco (Wed-Friday). I read today in a tourist mag, that only out of towners refer to this place as “Frisco” or “San Fran” and that the proper local name is “San Francisco” or “The City”. The New Media Consortium has assembled an awesome group of educational and museum collaborators to build what should be a revolutionary tool for building elegant content from learning objects. Maricopa is not an official member on the grant funded projects, I am just riding on the coat-tails of others, standing on the shoulders of giants, etc. The past few months has been a torrid pitch of developing user scenarios, converting them to requirements, and sorting through all of that to reach the specs for the software. The final requirements docs are more than 100 pages [...]

For the plane flight reading from Phoenix to San Francisco, I grabbed a copy of Popular Science (the last time I read it was a preview of a new TR7, “the Shape of Things to Come”). I thought it interesting that column right under the letters to the editors reads: From the Blogs… Last month, over 250 Web logs linked to popsci.com. A Sample:… And then it includes two quotes and links from weblogs that reference the magazine. Essentially, this print publication is listing Trackbacks! Curiouser and curiouser.

The Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference is 2/3 over, with one more day of events tomorrow. I’ve had less then available time to participate for reasons to be blogged below, but leave it to say, I am representing Arizona at a virtual conference hosted in Hawaii while I am at a meeting in San Francisco. The platform for TCC2004 is the Learning Times site and I have to see it is a well designed and organized site for a conference. The major hurdle for international online conferences is getting the right time for synchronous events, and LT handles this nicely (although their time zone menu preference lacks an option for Arizona, which as an oddball entity, dies not follow daylight savings time, so we bounce between 2 time zones). LT also does some automatic relating of content from different parts of the site, and allows participants to attach [...]

Holy Calendars, Batman! April 19 marks one year to the birth of CDB, starting from first post, “I Blog Therefore I Am…” In one year, there have been 347 posts, 341 comments (probably 1000 more spam-ments caught my the MT Blacklist plugin), and likely 678 typos. Do the math. It has been interesting to see what raises a response and what does not. Some of my most cleverly titled and penned prose has gone quietly into the ether (net?) while often silly, off the cuff stuff gets a pile of responses. No pattern at all except a lack of a pattern. Back in December, I wrote of being curious “Where Have All the Bloggers Gone?” and noted that many of my favorite bloggers seem to have fallen silent at the one year mark of their blog-activity. Now I cannot pinpoint a reason why a blog would suddenly cease a year [...]

I am curious if other educators have heard this from students newly introduced to weblogs- from the interviews I did last week for a photoblogging presentation and at other times, I have heard more than one student refer to a blog hosting web site such as TypePad, Blogger, Buzznet, as “The Blog”– like it were a singular entity (or a movie monster), e.g. “The first time I was introduced to The Blog I was thinking….” We started using The Blog in our english course to write reflections…” Maybe it is just my failing memory, but it seems recurrent, and seems to symbolize that a student’s experience with one particular blog site becomes in their mind, everything there is to blogging. Maybe it is juts a phase. Maybe it is a nice short hand. Coming to a neighborhood near you… THE BLOG!!!!! On a side note, the Breezed version fo my [...]

Some folks Down Under apparently have honored us by naming a park (almost) after CogDogBlog. Colleague Michael Coghlan writes from Adelaide of “Cobdogloa Station Caravan Park“: The Cobdogla Station Caravan Park is a privately owned caravan park nestled on the backwaters adjacent to the River Murray in the Riverland of South Australia. Cobdogla is an easy 3 hour drive from Adelaide and Mildura. It is 5km from Barmera which is one of the six major towns off the Sturt Highway near the Victorian border. The entire park is planted with landscaped lawns and garden beds and most sites are shaded by trees. It is very picturesque and tranquil. As translation, a “caravan” is not a string of nomads on camels, but an RV, recreation vehicle, or camper. A “station” is one of those large, gazillion acre ranches that stretch across many parts of the country. Good on ya, ‘mates! Just [...]

My presentation on PhotoBlogging at the Teaching in the Community Colleges 2004 Online Conference is inching along- tomorrow is the big sprint to wrap up all the audio for the Breeze Presentation. Biff is out of town, so I will have to wing it alone. I have a tape of digitized audio from a group of students I interviewed who are using Buzznet in their photo-imaging course this semester. There are some great views on this technology in their audio. I am asking conference attendees, after seeing the presentation, to upload via email or mobile phone, and image of themselves “where they sit” for accessing the conference. To seed the pot, I have been asking friends and colleagues (and now anyone reading this post) to contribute an image, even if they will not be participating in the conference. It looks like the Ozzies and the Kiwis are taking the lead, [...]

The party from the January RSS Winterfest seems to be lingering on- but I am not festive. I get daily emails notifying me of changes on their site, which I am not following nor interested in. Four freakin’ times I used the link on their messages to set up email notifications to “never” . But “never” must mean something different to the folks from Social Text since the emails just a keep a’ comin’ in. Like clokcwork. Like a steady drip. Or water torture. I wrote yesterday a polite request to stop to their support email address. It was acknowledged quickly and promised that I would not get any more emails. There must have been a disclaimer in very small white text as today…. From: notify-noreply@socialtext.com Subject: Recent Changes In RSS Winterfest Workspace Date: April 14, 2004 12:57:55 AM MST To: xxxxxx.xxxxxxx@xxxxxl.maricopa.edu Alan Levine, The following pages in RSS Winterfest [...]

I have two presentations looming for the April 20-22 Teaching in the Community Colleges 2004 Online Conference, both related to creating online content out of primarily digital images. The wraps are still up, the ink is wet, and the typos run freely, but it is falling into place nicely. I am fishing for some folks that might be interesting in testing my set up and posting a few images, so if you really have nothing better to do this week, and do not mind posting a picture of yourself in the place you do computer work, just let me know. Mostly done is “Students Communicating Visually: Publishing Digital Photos with the jClicker Slide Show” about the use of our jClicker slide show template by a class of computer graphics / digital photography students. Well heck, that one is pretty much done, so go ahead and take a peek. Just do [...]