CogBlogged from ‘May, 2005’

Blogging (for me) is a stream of consciousness, not a definitive final answer, but something evolving. In my recent playing with screencasts I leaped to pitching it as another flavor of digital storytelling… but driving in today I was thinking it was a wrong leap… what Jon Udell has done so brilliantly with his screencasts is to provide a low intensive way (audio narrated over streaming flash screen captured activity) of doing guided tours of software, web sites, etc… and in a way much more effective than writing about it or creating FAQs, etc. Screencasts, in his vein, are really just that- a broadcast of some screen action. I am not trying to hammer out or argue over defintiions, but in my attempts to use the same/similar tools for telling a story , it sort of works, but bleeds into other terrains beyond screen action. Hey it was just a [...]

Robin Good asks, “RSS Ads: Should We Push Unrequested Advertisements Into RSS Pull?” No commentary needed here. Nope. Nada. Go away.

I should be working on other things, but I get a technology bug under my skin. After publishing my first screencast and getting some quick feedback, some of my own, I wanted to take myself to task and do something beyong screencasting as just tours of software. Creating “How-tos” for using RSS, or a course management system, or some other technology is fine, but it is not all that interesting to me. What is more interesting is using technology to create stories, compelling things. In this entry, I will share a quick digital story I created with simple tools, and in a short time frame (shorter if were not for my own boneheaded blunders). I deliberately created the basic slide show in PowerPoint, not because I love it, but because it is prevalent.

Don’t be confused by a stretched attempt to create a clever title, tilting back to the 1969 movie by Sydney Pollack. And I am not advocating violence… For a fun romp, see what else pops up on Google for this search: * They Shoot Horses but Vaccinate Dogs Immune deficiency diseases in animals – are they caused by vaccination? * They Shoot Horses Do Not They? a hillbilly art rock band from Vancouver. * They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? an abortion article in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages I wander way off point, as Google prompts me to do. But back to where I started. Tomorrow is our big technology extravaganza, our Ocotillo Retreat 2005: Lost in Technology and we cleared 215 in online reservations. What I do not get is how people cannot see past the mode of lecture as presentation for professional sharing. Despite our clear indication on [...]

After posting about my first (sloppy) screencast, I emailed Jon Udell via his blog to ask about his tools. An impressive sidenote- he responded directly less than 2 hours after I sent, as compared to a feedback form on say a phone company or other mega corporate site staffed with hundreds where they reply with an automated message teling you someone will respond in 72 hours… and that reply is for the most part cut and paste flaff. Anyhow, Jon uses Camtasia Studio 2 as well, writing: For most stuff I’m using Camtasia Studio, which enables me to do a fair amount of editing (not as much or as easily as I’d like) and produce pretty well-compressed SWF. WME is fine for capture, about as effective as Camtasia, but obviously lacks the editing and SWF production aspects. I hadn’t heard about Swish, that’s good to know about. Ultimately there are [...]

Just short of 3 weeks converted from my old MovableType blog to this new one running WordPress, and I got my first slice of comment spam. Ewwww, it is pretty smelly, but it just slide easily off the moderation queue into the dung heap. I’ve waited to implement more WP anti-spam plugins, waiting to see how long the comment spam roaches would take to get their tiny feet over here. Perhaps I should offer a prize to this lucky first intruder, except they are smashed under the steel shank of my spam stompin’ boots. Again, the built in comment moderation of WP is very effective. If you’ve never been written a legit comment to my blog, you are put into the waiting room, and I can quickly deal with a whole pile of roaches from one screen. Spam roaches, so predictable. A defense is to be more unpredictable as a [...]

A new web technology is tickling my antennae. I hardly know enough about Ajax (bit WikiPedia does) to write about it. In my nutshell, it allows you to create interactive web pages or web pages with navigation that can change content within the page without doing a fresh HTTP request (a.k.a loading a new URL) in the browser. In the webspace, there is an over dominance of web sites (think online shopping, your course management system) that involve a series of web forms that are filled out, submitted, another page of forms appears that must be filled out, submitted, etc. It gets rather tedious for all those server transactions, and on a user experience end, it interrupts the thought process, or we have gotten so used to it, we expect to be interrupted. Something like Ajax and the in page editing tools of flickr can be the signposts for the [...]

To learn, do. So to better understand how flickr groups work (sidenote- something on the net has “arrived” when I do not have to hyperlink its mention, when I write “flickr” it hardly seems necessary to lin k it to http://flickr.com/, see also Google) I decided to create a new flickr group. Flickr groups allow members to post images from their individual collections to the group pool, and create discussions about the images or topics. Why? The groups are another lesser known social layer of flickr. Are teachers using them? Is there some lesser than obvious way to use groups as a learning tool? I have no answers, but questions, so it calls for exploring. So first off all, like many things in flickr, it is bonehead easy to create a new flickr group. You go to the groups page (a top navigation link on all pages) and… click on [...]

I guess the world needs a few more sites to post and share web site bookmarks. The newest flavor that came our way from a reader is Feedmarker, which is the newest blade in my Web Site Submission Multitool bringing the total here to 13. Also, someone asked about adding Wists, the site tool that allows you to pick images to associate with a submitted site. Unfortunately, the JavaScript bookmark tool from wists is rather long and exotic (the other 13 are similar enough to share the same code of parsing the title, URL, description, etc).

Something unusual happened in the NBA this year. The game actually got exciting. There is action, points are being scored. I went to a Phoenix Suns game about 3 years ago (someone felt bad because they forgot to show up for a meeting and offered to share me his ticket, I encouraged him to miss meetings more often) — and it was a dull, listless affair. I swear fans were reading newspapers, balancing their checkbooks, cleaning their fingernails, during a game that was lucky to hit the high 80s in points. That went out the window this year with the unexpected run by our Phoenix Suns. There is scoring, enthusiasm, passing, youth, and a sense, even if it not true, that they actually enjoy the game. And the selfless and electric play by Steve Nash is just one more reason to love Canada. Yet all year long, the naysayers kept [...]