CogBlogged from ‘November, 2004’

I’m about halfway through my three week visit to Auckland New Zealand for an ambitious series of workshops at several schools here, and am bouncing between my regular CogDogBlog and its flipped over variant here CogDog(kiwi)Blog as well as two (or more) flickr sites. I may be losing track of where I leave my dribbles of ideas. One thing that has gone well has been providing all of my workshop materials and presentations in wiki format. For one thing, the “quick quick” comes in handy for producing them minutes before a session starts. But more than that, I have tried to give participants a good amount of hands on in the wiki activities, and from the feedback I overhear, there will be a level of interest/demand for access to wikis after I leave. I got a chance to dabble more with UseMod settings, and tweaked some to allow me to [...]

flickr foto Not So Yummyavailable on my flickr I cannot get past the smell when the Marmite lid opens- how do the kiwis stand it? As Richard calls, it “axel grease” (but then again, he likes it) I have yet to really develop my taste for this stuff. I doubt I ever will. This is just for a quick demo of posting a weblog entry from my flickr account. Love these small pieces of technology.

Pity the poor Teaching Wiki. Buried in s-p-a-m. Beyond the vast WIkiPedia with legions of rabid followers, most little wikis are doomed. Doomed. Doooooomed. Yours may be next.

Here I talked about loving flickr and a few hour later I cannot log in- all attempts are bounced back to the home, un-logged in screen. Flushed the cache, cookies, been tried another browser. Where is the love back? Unrequited? Is it just me? Does it hate my latest pictures? Sigh…. love is so complex. Later… Doh, never mind. Apparently I was still logged in to flickr. But something was till flooey as normally if I am logged in an go to the main flickr page, it bops me to my personal flickr page. In fact, the only way I got back in was to click the “new member request” link and then click the “Yours” link at the top. I think there is some cooke malfeasance going on!

The tagging features of flickr have taken the next step- elevating results of a display of shared photo tags to other relavant tag sets (see tag relatedness features). For example, the flickr wide tags for where I am right now to more specific results as well as related topics. How does it do this? You have me, but from my own I think it is doing some matching based on photos with multiple tags applied. Now one can take one varied paths in flickr-space. Starting at the kind of plants in my front yard leads me to a country where the plants are “spicier” to kinds of places you might stay while traveling to where I might end up at the end of the night to what I definitely am not a fan of to… This is pretty wild. I just love flickr. I do.

(Taking a break from my current Kiwi blogging action, cannot stay away). In Learning Objects: A Practical Definition Rory McGreal takes a somewhat noble effort to wrestle the learning object monster. I was looking for that grail like singular uber definition. Is it there? I love reading things like: LOs are sometimes defined as being educational resources that can be employed in technology-supported learning. With appropriate metadata descriptions, they can be modular units that can be assembled together to form lessons and courses. I sure wish someone out there could point me to some real examples of such lessons that have been snapped together lego like fashion. I see these things in the same vein as Sasquatch, Nessie, and the Yeti– all you get are big headlines and fuzzy photos. And we must hail the mighty meta-data: In order to search for and find LOs, which might be ideal for [...]