CogBlogged from ‘October, 2004’

flickr foto Volcano Types Diagramavailable on my flickr Volcanos are often classified by plotting their degree of “explosiveness” (y axis) and height of the erpution column (x axis)…. the largest and most dangerous eruptions have high values of both. Roll over each type for examples. Note- this example is here is purely for showing how flickr can be used to create “hotspot” learning objects…. my geology knowledge is extremely rusty! Want to create a simple “learning object” (whatever you believe that means…)? Flickr offers a slick, little known means to add “hotspots” to images, so you can create labeled diagrams, or document a process where parts of the image can be labeled by notes that pop up. I saw this recently in something Brian shared that shows a flickr image that through this method, demonstrates the process for making a pie. At first I missed the significance, as I thought [...]

In his October 2004 Wired article “Point. Shoot. Kiss It Good-Bye”, David Weinberger paints us the problem that comes with the joy of digital photography: As our hard drives fill up with thousands then tens and hundreds of thousands of digital snapshots, we’re all going to face the same basic challenges as the Bettmann Archive. Of course, you won’t haul 19 semitrailers full of your decaying family photos into cold storage, as the Bettmann did in 2001. But you can expect to go clicking through folder after folder of pixelated images, trying to find the one where Aunt Rose put on a silly inflatable life preserver in the summer of 1999. He then goes in to describe how Corbis is tagging their digital archive- with the skills of a professional metadata tagger, something few of us have or even care to bother with. Adding keyword tags to images allow the [...]

Today I picked up a copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. I found it in a thrift store in the small town of Pine, Arizona. It set me back 10 cents. For another dime I got a book from the mid 1970s full of funny predictions for the 21st century… according to a Rand prediction listed on the cover page, by 2004 we should have already Genetic Manipuation (maybe), Large-Scale ocean framing and mining (is that commercial fishing?), household robots for routine chores (where is mine?), automated highways (is that photo radar?)… But back to McLuhan… It is the book that’s making history– and hysteria– with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and the twentieth century. Now I am not much of an academic or follower of literature, and you will find me tossing references here to Shlabucky’s Theory of Cognitive [...]

Their vision is far and reaching at the Internet Scout- I’ve been getting their reviews of web sites for at least 5 years. I just got a notice that they recently featured a blurb on one of our sites, the Interactive FlipSite– this made me laugh since I think we created this in 1998, most likely created in Director 5.0. It simulates a faculty member of ours flipping a coin once every 5 seconds for a year– actually we created a pre define data set of randomly generated 6 million plus 1′s and 0s each representing a different flip. The trick in getting the current flip was to calculates the offset in time from the current date and time from January 1, and then find the appropriate data in the giant set. There was a bit more trickery to set up tools for running queries and experiments on the data. [...]

Sigh. It is no wonder no work is going on this morning. Our Asian wikis spammers returned, this time not only spamming our pages, but creating their own… and this time leaving a veiled threat of a message: Please do not delete. I send this message only one time, in order to introduce some China website. IF you delete, I will publish every day. There is only one problem, my Chinese spamming guest… your web sites have zero or even negative relevance to our educational oriented wikis. What do links to suppliers of electronics, fireworks. linens, camping equipment, fishing gear…. have any freaking connection with Learning Objects? Well, now you have another problem China spammer. Try and figure it out.

Everywhere you look on the internet the spammers are crapping and leaving their fetid roach turds. Last Spring, I did a presentation at the online TCC04 Conference on PhotoBlogging “Publish and Build Communities Around Digital Images”. In that session I described how one can post photos to such sites, and created a special and open photoblog at buzznet so people from the conference, around the world, could post their photos. But guess who came to play? Roaches. Roaches. 19 of ‘em. From a comment notification on the Buzznet photoblog , I saw that this gallery had been crapped on 19 times with screen shots of your typical spam offerings- cheap mortgages, bank account frauds, and various chemical offerings. Is there no end? How many other open spaces on the net need to be crapped on til we all get mad as hell? Needless to say, I have removed the open [...]

I actually managed to grab a few hourts the last few days to focus on the openMLX, the supposed open source version of our Maricopa Learning eXchange. We have a “de-Maricopized” version running (this does not have the latest changes), but I am doing the new developments on another copy of the MLX. This works well, as once I can bang them on the R&D version, I just merely copy the updated .php and assorted files to the other versions. All of the customization is carried in an external configuration file. There is some deadline pressure mounting, as I hope to have a copy of it running in Auckland for my November visit to new Zealand (check out the inverted CDB!) as well as another grant funded project group in our building that has some good needs for their own MLX. Today’s work was re-routing the method for generating the [...]

Based on the descriptions elsewhere, in addition to the web bookmark service Furl I am starting to also use the social bookmarking site del.icio.us – the latter for its rip-mix use of free form “:tags” to collect bookmarks made bu other del.icio.us-ers (sidebar, I enjoy “furling” sites but do you say “del.icio.us-ing” a site?). In addtion to these, I also toss new sites into a collection I’ve been compiling since the mid 1990s, our “Bag of URLs”. I like using the one click bookmarkley/browser bar tools provided by furl and del.icio.us (you can add a site to either collection with one click on your browser toolbar), and I even cribbed a tool for my own use on our Bag site- this nice thing is that highlighted block of text from the page in view is transferred to the description field (for our bag site) or furl’s “clipping” field. These tools [...]

Finally, we are starting to see some signs of activity on our Maricopa ePortfolio site. Originally developed at and for faculty and students at one our colleges, Chandler-Gilbert Community College, the developer has graciously shared it on a server in our office that is open to everyone at our 9 other colleges. It has been sitting there, ready to serve since last Spring. Few takers. But now things are picking up. Some Computer Graphic Art Students at Phoenix College are just getting started setting up a first batch of student ePs. Another one of our colleges is holding a faculty demo alter this month. And our Ocotillo ePortfolios Action Group will be sharing this widely in their upcoming activities. And Helen Barrett, the “grandmother” of electronic portfolios (her words) has been one of our most active guest users in creating a comprehensive eP in a short period of time– this [...]

Wow, a side benefit to the iPhoto to flickr plugin is that it grabs the metadata iPhoto stores for the images, as I noticed images such as the giant Fred Flinstone I had uploaded this was had been (correctly) identifies as having been taken with an Olympus 4040 digital camera. This is good meta data- it is automatically created (no tag typing, or 2 page form completions) and it is transparently and appropriately used when the “object” (my image) moves from one environment (my computer) to another (to flickr). And then you click the link for the camera name, and you get all the freakin meta data! This is provided as part of EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data file format that is nicely handled by iPhoto. Does that make sense? Metadata ought to be completely in the background. Transparent to the user. Is that the tack taken by “learning objects”? [...]