CogBlogged from ‘August, 2004’

I told myself I would stop my critical writing mode kick, but am not listening. The RSS readers this morning brought in a Radiant Marketing link with interviews from the three of the Cluetrain dudes on the “future of blogging”. Normally I would pass on something from a “Marketing Group” where the tag line is “Internet Marketing Ideas for the Rest of Us”. My first thought (which can be wrong) is that it reeks of “get-rich-by-selling-crap-on-eBay” or “bulk-email-will-let-you-retire-in-the-Caribbean”. I have not spent much time poking around this blog, so consider it a knee jerk reaction… but actually the interviews from this site have some decent quotes, such as this one from Doc Searles: By conceiving the Net as a place, a commons, something you go “on” rather than “through,” we can save it from draconian regulation and preserve it as an environment where speech and markets are equally free. So [...]

Sifting through the EDU_RSS feeds this evening, I found this reference: Bots, blogs and news aggregators The brilliant Marcus P. Zillman has compiled a free 20-page whitepaper on Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators (PDF). Good stuff. I’m working on a similar effort for a new Social Media blog I’m about to announce. Sounded tempting. I’ve picked up some good resources via Zillman’s site. Follow the bounding link first to: http://zillman.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_zillman_archive.html#109240955500039693: This edition of Current Awareness Happenings on the Internet by Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. August 16, 2004 V2N33 discusses my latest white paper titled Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators. Click on the below audio posting to hear an audio by Marcus P. Zillman on this latest white paper. View the site that discusses and makes available this free white paper: Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators http://www.BotsBlogs.com/ Okay, following instructions, I click over to: http://www.BotsBlogs.com/ where the lead lines read: [...]

(I am reaching for an all-time obscure title for this entry). Out of curiosity, I followed a link from a TrackBack notification to this entry on Rino’s Blog (in dutch): Weblogs voor studenten OK, we zijn het er na de posts van Alan Levine , Scott Leslie, Sybilla, Pierre, en ondergetekende en de bijbehorende kommentaren zo’n beetje over eens dat: weblogs zonder kommentaar optie een belangrijk deel van hun funktionaliteit missen, zeker in. Without any knowledge of Dutch (sadly, as the folks over there are quite able to ready my English blog). I am wondering what was said in the entry on “Weblogs voor studenten” Not much heavy lifting needed to guess this is something related to “Weblogs for Students”. Just for grins, i decided to put this through the Dutch to English language translation from WorldLingo, which helpfully produces: Web-unwieldly one for students OKAY, we are there it after [...]

flickr foto Is Someone Calling Us?available on my flickr Cadu and Mickey hear the sound of a bag of potato chips being opened… 3 miles away! It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to your blog, but when the dogs have wandering attention, what is one to do? That’s okay as Mickey (right) has given us full consent to use him as our CDB logo (but wow, does he have a tough lawyer). His sister (left) is still negotiating. Yes, I am toying with posting another MT blog entry directly from my flickr site.

I was a commuter today- a one day trip fro Phoenix to San Francisco for the NMC Horizon Project meeting… I am rather humbled and honored to be a part of a group of heavy hitters in the instructional technology realm- Phil Long from MIT (we first crossed paths at the TLTGroup‘s mid 1990s summer conferences in sultry Phoenix), Diana Oblinger from EDUCAUSE (long friend of Maricopa and guest speaker here, she is brilliant), Lev Golnick of Case Western (we go back to some email exchanges like 10 years ago when he did a sabbatical at ASU), Ruth Sabean from UCLA (we worked on some eportfolios efforts recently), Cyprien Lomas (NLII fellow and another from the great crew at UBC, Cyprian pops in via iChat and says “Hi from Vienna!”), Peter Samis (“Dr.Pachyderm” and another guest of Maricopa), and more were there…. and little ole me from a community college. [...]

It’s been a while since I updated my data files for the nifty Flash mapping app- IndyJunior. This application reads coordinate data from an XML file, and maps locations and current geographic location. Check out the CDB travel maps for 2003 and 2004. By turning the template for this MT page from a *.html to a *.php, I was able to create a year by year IndyJunior map, and a menu to switch the data files for different years. It is a matter of creating the location.xml files with names according to year, locations2003.xml and locations2004.xml, and then making the new index.php page be able to build a menu from an array of available years, and spit the appropriate year into the OBJECT tag parameters. Oops, I see I need to get a newer version of Indy- lots of new features! Makes me want to learn more Flash (if there [...]

I’ve been mildly curious about some of the new attempts at making RSS feeds more human readable at first click- rather than seeing ugly XML code, these “new” feed displays use CSS (Style sheets) and some sort of magical transform method called XSLT — basically it means if you click a link that points to an XML file, it has some nicer formatting applied. I want to believe. The problem is that I think a lot of folks doing this are not widely testing, because while it has pretty formatting on a PC with MSIE, or perhaps Mozilla/Firefox on Mac or Windows, it works. I’ve seen less then stellar appearance on Safari, which I had assumed (wrongly) was one of the more standards compliant browsers. Is it a limit of Safari? Am I doomed to switching browsers? But then I peeked at a feed from a Blogger site, on Safari, [...]

Taking some blindfolded tosses into the wiki pond, I am going to see if this stuff really works. It comes up in many circles, discussions of online course development, learning objects, and just today in the digital storytelling workshop: Where can I find sources of free media (images, audio, video)? This is usually in the context of having to provide vague answers to questions about “what I can or cannot do” in terms of copyright. Our usual advice is where-ever possible, go for original acquired assets or use the free stuff that is “out there”. The rise of Creative Commons is starting to open some great doors (i have made good use of OpSound for multimedia soundtracks) as well as the things housed at the Internet Archive. Anyhow, to address these repeated requests, I am setting up a wiki page as a reference for free MediaSources:. http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/objects/wiki?MediaSources Since this sort [...]

I’m spending the bulk of this week helping out at a 40 hour “learnshop” our office sponsors for faculty, this one is on Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Classroom (ingore the June dates, this was so popular it has been repeated). Facilitators Linda Hicks and Rachel Woodburn have been co-teaching a course in Digital Storytelling at Scottsdale COmmunity College for a few years, and it is a raging success (see our interview with the duo in the Spring 2004 mcli Forum) both here in Arizona and where they have taken it on the road in Australia and New Zealand. This version is for 12 faculty to learn the process of finding, crafting, and producing a digital story, crammed into a week. The first two days have been on developing the story, refining it, storyboarding, collecting physical assets. The process used works wonderfully, especially the time provided as a group for [...]

Phil Ringnalda provides a surgical view of the new MSN blog pages- beyond the wonderfully dense details, I loved this quote: The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech bloggers was to use extremely clean (X)HTML, but given the apparent total lack of a corporate culture believing that code is poetry, at least when it comes to HTML, there was little hope of that. It might be possible to persuade Microsoft tools to produce valid HTML, but judging by what mostly comes out of them, they must think of HTML as a hot dog factory, where nobody in their right mind would ever look inside. (my emphasis) Hah! This rang a little closer to home as one of our colleges announced a preview of their new website proffered by Microsoft Content Management tools. It looks pretty, but under the [...]