CogBlogged from ‘May, 2005’

Holy _____. Flickr has done it again, rolling some cool interface features. First of all, great news for folks like Stephen, flickr photos are no longer rendered in Flash, but in DHTML; see From Flash to DHTML (on some pages!). Also, they have expanded the in-page editing to the Blog This and Send button functionalities. This is in my “steal this interface” pile of things to do as the editing of Flickr titles and captions are cleverly done in the display page, and not requiring a 1990s web editing notion of clicking to another web page, filling out a form, clicking a submit, and then clicking back to see your results. In-page editing rocks. But the biggest thing IMHO, is that now Flickr notes, the hotspots one can add to images, now can take hyperlinks in the note, so think about a whole hyperlink series of flickry things! See Emerging [...]

Since I am up in Strawberry on my 28 kbps straw to the internet, I will not be able to grab this cast, but from the description, looks worth a listen (as well as the Y.uk? blog itself: “Well the answer is – Why Not or Y.not? I guess it is a tongue in cheek response to the tagging sites like del.icio.us. We will be posting views on up to the minute emergent technologies in education and examples of practitioners using them in the classroom.). See Skype interview with Tim Rylands, the teacher who uses MYST in his classroom– excuse my lasziness in grabbing the full post: Suddenly it’s cool to learn. Earlier this month CNN ran a story about how an English teacher was leading the world in his use of gaming in class – after only 2 hours of this appearing, he was inundated with hundreds of mails [...]

From a recent email discussion came a request for a simple “howto” for using bitTorrent. I’ve been peripherally  interested in BT for a while, mentioning it in my Harry Mudd Future Peeking presentation. So with much better things to with my time, I whipped up this ad for a book not yet in stores: If we could side step the whinges people have about this being the bane of illegal activity and the realm of black t-shirt clad teenage pirates, and just look with interest at this creative shift in the way information can be distributed, isn’t it exciting? I’d been toying with doing some experimentation on using bitTorrrent for sharing digital stories- people are expending great effort to produce fantastic personal narratives, but the file size is unwieldy for sharing… what do you think? I’ve got some content lined up, and as soon as I have read the book [...]

This weekend my wife and I are taking care of a friend’s 10 year old daughter, and in just 24 hours it has been a mind opening opportunity to see how she uses/absorbs technology among other things- to a 10 year old, it seems like everything is fascinating and worth exploring (where do we lose that feeling?). The current item of occupation is her Canon PowerShot A95 digital camera, something she has had likely for a month. It is amazing to watch her manipulate and click through what is an amazing array of iconic menu of movie shooting options (that can be displayed in something like 15 languages), and the speed and flexibility she whizzes around. In fact, as she was engrossed in shooting 90 second digital movie clips of our dog, she showed me how she can take a still photo of Cadu, and then in the camera, record [...]

So it was time to put my money where my snout was… After waffling about screencasting, I decided to give it a go. Downloading the Windows Media Encoder was not too bad. I played a bit, not really sure of the various settings for the encoding. Anyhow, I recorded an 11 minute quick attempt at showing wide range of RSS feeds we provide in the Maricopa Learning eXchange, and then how you can copy them over to our Feed2JS site, create a cut and paste JavaScript, and then put them into a site. I sketched out my topics, figured out which URLs to have open in Firefox (you have to love tabbed browsing, apparently that has not boarded the cluetrain in the MSIE shop), and gave it a go. I am not nearly as smooth as Jn Udell, and one of my demo links was kafloooey (bad), but oh well. [...]

flickr foto Do I Have To Sacrifce A Virgin To Install Windows Software?available on my flickr Just out of curiosity, I attempted to install the Windows “Photo Story 3″ on my Dell laptop. I was unsuccessful at convincing Microsoft Windows that I was using Microsoft Windows despite extracting my secret password from the sticker on the bottom of my laptop. This is the stupidest, cruelest, and obviously not user tested outside of the Microsoft lab isntaller I have ever seen. I throw my hands up in frustration and return to my Powerbook, which I do not have to convince its operating system that it is an actual operating system. Since expressing my interest in screencasting I decided it was time to download the Windows Media Encoder. That went fine. But while there, I saw on the left a link for Microsoft Photo Story 3 billed as something: Create slideshows using [...]

If you’ve not been tapping into some of the screencasts being published by Jon Udell, you are missing out on a great phenomena achieved with free desktop software. This under 3 minute piece documents very clearly the power of a simple JavaScript / bookmarklet tool for managing web site password logins. But the subject, while neat, is not the subject. Udells method of communicating technical topics is reaching and making sense to a wider audience (see Movies of Software). Without a doubt his documentary showing the evolutun and de-evolution of a WikiPedia page– Heavy metal umlaut must be the academy award winning feature of this genre. He makes the wiki come alive. I’d be curious to know more of Udell’s method, not the technology. Is he a one take wonder? Does he script, outline? Part of what he does well is explain things clearly, not overly explained, evenly, and with [...]

He’s baaaaaaaaaaack. That Biff Cantrell dude who chalked up a March 2004 hour long Breezed tour of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). He chopped out a lot of stuff, updated some images and links, and created a mini tour of the different kinds of RSS feeds in the MLX as a demo for the May 17 Ocotillo retreat called RSS for Syndicating Maricopa Learning eXchange Content to Other Web Sites: Over the last few years, we have done much publicity to solicit new content for the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). We have built in a number of features to the MLX that deploy RSS, or Really Simple Syndication (and XML published format of information) that allows other Maricopa web sites to create a dynamic window, displayed in their own web site, to a particular subset of MLX content. The ahem, mighty wind can be heard via http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/show/ocotillo05/

We’re one week away from my biggest yearly event responsibility, our annual Ocotillo Retreat. These go back before I started at Maricopa, though my first week on the job was the 1992 retreat at Mormon Lake, AZ. For those not familiar with Ocotillo (go ahead, try and pronounce it ;-) it is our long standing organization that is a faculty driven, grassroots thinktank for addressing issues (or just stirring them up) about instructional technology. Learn more about the history from a March 2005 presentation, or see the plant behind the metaphor. The retreat format has been as organic as the metaphor, sometimes a brainstorming / planning event held out of town, to mini conference formats held at our colleges with more open participation. It’s been my organizational responsibility since 1996, meaning conceptualizing, coordinating logisitics, etc. I am extremely stoked and excited for this year’s event, it will be a blockbuster.

flickr foto Road 1 Skin 0available on my flickr This is trivial as far as road rash– just my mental record of what it means when you are learning to bicycle with cleated shoes…. I keep meaning to write some relative posts about my recent work, but keep getting distracted by every day antics. And there are metaphors everywhere you look, I cannot spit without hitting a metaphor. Okay this one is about change. I advocate strongly the need to be open to change, to re-invent one self, to drop a technology when something better rolls along… yet there are places in my life I am ironically, inexplicably resistant to change. For the last 25 years I have been mildly to moderately actively riding bicycles, not a racer, not a cross country endurance mania, but just enjoying getting out on an open road, and being moving only on my own [...]