CogBlogged from ‘May, 2005’

I find my life is full of metaphors, some fit well, others may be a stretch. Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, I celebrated by doing yard work. Actually, after days of sitting at a computer, there is something very rewarding about doing sweaty, manual labor, doing something with your hands. On Sunday, we took down a 30 foot tree in our yard that was messy and blocking the vegetable garden, and on Monday, we took down a dead mesquite tree at my mother in law’s house. There is nothing like the power of a chainsaw in your hands… well it is better when the saw works well. I bought one a year or two ago when we needed to do some clearing up at our cabin, and the last few times using the saw, it has been a real test of patience. The chain gets dull, falls off, jams, [...]

Furl and del.icio.us have lots of company- there seems to be no end in sight for the number of new sites offering a place for social bookmarking. I have just added two new tools of note (for a total of 15!) to my Multipost Bookmarklet Tool which allows you to select which services you use and be able to do one click posting via a custom bookmarklet tool. The tools and some more then detailed narrative how I tumbled into them… * Scuttle, which is the main public site for the open source social bookmark tool that allows web site owners to build their own social bookmark sites. I found this as I followed a trackback on a recent entry to something at Todd’s Big IDEA blog at Zane State College. And this connection would not really had been possible if I were one of the purists who thinks comments [...]

The internet is seemingly infinite and I love gems that lie out there in the long tail of the long tail. From that obscure zone where a few people find vitality comes the blog “WordPerfect for DOS Updated”, so rock in in your special niche of DOS lovers, filling a void no big software support sites would bother.

I’ve not had any luck starting any memes. And I expect my streak will continue. But I am curious if perhaps others would share via comments or in their own sites, What was your “Blog-Ha” Moment? (Blog Aha!) What was it the triggered the 10,000 watt light bulb going off in your head that screamed, “Wow! There is something really powerful about this way of expression” A good collection of these mini stories would be useful when doing the “Intro to Blogs 101″ type workshops. It relates to my recent wonderings about the wisdom of starting new faculty bloggers with writing in empty blogs vs reading existing ones. Or it may just be interesting. My Own Blag-ha The meme will surely be lame since I do not have a precise starting point (it was before I started blogging!)… I cannot recall exactly a big light going off. I know that [...]

I’m asking for some help to anyone out there. Next month, I have a presentation at the NMC 2005 Summer Conference where I want to show how blog software can be used for web publishing beyond the public conception of “online diaries”… I am looking for web sites, or pieces of them that are published with blog software but maybe at first glance do not look like a blog. I’ll be drawing from my own examples, but that is limited and maybe egotistical. These include: * The Low Threshold Application (LTA) site was created really as a concept to show that blog software can create a site equivalent (or better) content-wise than the original one spun by hand in something like Front Page, but is much easier to publish and includes a comment system not present in the original. This is my primary example, and I will show the tweaks [...]

A recent headline in the business section our local paper was headlined “Technology Transforms Classrooms”. It was about the use of personal response systems those devices where students use small wireless “clickers” to send a response to a central sensor that can do things like display summative statistics or store them for analysis. Now I have used them a bit for some of our workshops and events (WebDev 2001, Ocotillo Retreat 2003) and am very favorable of them for getting some engagement from the audience. The energy level of the room gets rather high when used well. So I am not saying PRS is a bad technology. But look carefully again at the photo above in the scan form the newspaper article. The headlines uses the word transforms. What is in the image? A single teacher, the source of learning, is standing, arms crossed, lecturing, in front a passive audience [...]

As a follow-up to the Emerging Trends workshops at San Diego State University earlier this week, I was asked by participant who had just created new blog sites, “How do we find each others blogs” and by the planners, “Hey Alan, you’re an RSS guru, how can we syndicate them into one place?”. So I was charged up to find an answer. One level worth doing, and quite easy to do, is to set up a Bloglines account so the new blogs can at least be browsed in one place. I tried to demonstrate that this is one approach teachers can do to either create a resource collection for students (gathering relevant RSS sources in their discipline or project area) OR to aggregate blogs created by students. The hitch with bloglines is having another email address available if you do not wish to mix it up with other sets of [...]

Let’s give a big “good on ya, ‘mate!” for the Australia’s ABC Radio National site for offering a ton of their audio in mp3 / podcast format. You can poke around the site and find them, or see the listng of the podcast URLs I googled to I Love Radio.org. This discovery was totally web serendipity… I get an email ding every time someone adds a link to the list of sites using Feed2JS and typically I don’t click as the submission form actually verifies there is a valid use on the site. But for some reason I followed a link to the MovingLines Seasons Change page (it is a wiki… interesting) which used Feed2JS to list some of the Radio National Podcast feed links. Let’s see… the Canadian CBC is doing podcasts, the BBC has ‘em, yet the NPR does not but is “surveying” to understand what people think [...]

Via a recent blog comment I was led by link curiosity to Leigh Blackall’s Teach and Learn Online blog which comes to us from the Blue Mountains of Australia (hence the blue template theme??). From his site, I found a nifty free wiki space called… WikiSpaces where amoung other things like blended learning wikis I found a wiki for Buffalo wings. There’s some nice features here, and each new wiki gets its own URL. Nice. Leigh also has some “screencasts” such as Using Bloglines to Capture NewsFeeds and Stay in Touch With Learning and Using Blogger to Create a Web Journal though here it looks like Leigh is providing the audio to be played while following his well illustrated screen guides. This is just a quick skim, but I’m gonna load his blog on the news reader and follow along for a while. Good on ya!

I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Fetch, the Mac OSX ftp tool is released version 5.0, and it finally supports sftp, needed for most of my web transfer work these days. I’ve used string of flaky, bizarre named sftp apps over he last 3 years (CyberDuck, Fugu, and none of them were as reliable as old Fetch was for plain ftp. Most of them mucked up file permissions, had strange 2 pane interfaces, and just sometimes wigged out. IN Fetch, you drag and drop just like your desktop, and it works. I have used Fetch for ftp so long I barely remember when I started, likely perhaps back in 1992, 1993 when it was software provided by Jim Matthews at Dartmouth College. I remember using it to plunder the great resources provided by the Stanford Info-Mac ftp site. Check out the “backstory” as it turns out Jim’s winnings [...]