CogBlogged from ‘November, 2005’

Once they were mighty vessels of communication, plowing the Internet waters of the 1980s, 1990s. Yes, the big ships labeled “Listservs” were the place for social networking then, information exchange. I’ve remarked before about listservs being on the Quagga Trail and I keep my subscriptions to the barest minimum. Today, after posting replying to something on the New Media Consortium members list (which does still provide me good technical and project information, and is not very noisy), I was noticing again the typical pattern on a listserv: Some one from someplace posts a question about a technology or a project or asks for input… And the replies come tumbling in like a cascade: Unsubscribe followed shortly by: Please remove me from the list and then someone contributed Remove which was thus echoed with Take me off this list Oh, excuse me, the captain just called us to come and look [...]

I feel like I have almost nothing of an immune system, some of this I acknowledge to being diabetic, and maybe the rest to some strong voodoo. I think someone could sneeze in New Jersey and I would end up with a cold in Arizona. Anyhow, the viruses got shared at our home over Thanksgiving, everyone else gets better in 2 days, and I end up laid up for about 5 hacking and sniffling. It ain’t pretty. But wokr still gets done, getting our online registration ready for our biggest Maricopa event coming up in January, getting our online newsletter ready for a first rollout next week, rallying some participation on next week’s NMC Online Conference in Educational Gaming. Speaking of the NMC conference, check out the animated Larry Johnson, an eerie kind of Max Headroom experience. Our office will be sponsoring registration in the NMC Conference for some folks [...]

I am still liking the Glu. It seems SuprGlu is gaining some traction (judging from seeing other Glu-ers out there, Jay Cross, Tim Lauer, Scottish Educators, I am sure there are many more) and some new features (judging from poking around the site). My CogDogBlog RipMixGlu Feed File now has a few more RSS things tossed in the glue pot: As you can see, one feature is you can now edit the Style Sheet (which is inserted in the HEAD of the source, like Blogger), so you are not stuck with the giant collection of three, count’em, three available templates. With some poking around the source, you can figure out the structure, and I just pulled some images and font classes from my main blog to have some thematic coordination. There is no reason you could not roll your own custom templates. But that is eye candy. SuprGlu now (well [...]

I cannot believe how lucky I am to get so many valuable offers for everything un-imaginable– people I do not even know are nice enough to personally email me with great things to improve my life: You’ve been nominated, Thanks to a private nomination, you are now eligable to obtain an official University Degree. Obtain a prosperous future, increase money-earning power, and the enjoy the prestige that comes with having the career position you’ve always dreamed of. The degree will be awarded to you based on your present knowledge and life experience, bachelors, masters, phd and more are available. If you are serious about this, please call us back ASAP at 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx Sincerely, Andrew Xxxxxxxx – MBA, PhD – MBA, PhD -Admissions Officer Wow, I can get an official University degree! And just to think of all those years I wasted attending classes, writing papers, doing research, and paying tuition, [...]

Trying to make a doctor appointment, I am on hold, and what music comes piping in? It is Led Zeppelin doing Whole Lotta Love, not some muzaked version (I had an elevator experience with a Muzakized Stairway to Heaven). Yup, Dr G’s office phone is rockin’: You need coolin’, baby, I’m not foolin’, I’m gonna send you back to schoolin’, Way down inside honey, you need it, It hardly fits the waiting room experience at the office. I am 1000% sure if you call my office and get put on hold, it won’t be Led Zep and it will be mind numbingly soothing. Nov 30, 2005 Update: On a later call, it was the 16 minute version of “Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I heard almost the whole trippy song.

I’m under my own gun for getting all of our articles ready for the December 5, 2005 planned release of our MCLI iForum– as alluded to earlier, this is going to be a 100% online publication replacing the print/web publication we’d been doing since 2001 (and an earlier version back to 1993). To do this, I’ve been sweating hard with hammer and anvil on a WordPress publishing platform to pull this off. To set things up, I started by recasting the Spring 2005 last issue onto the new “iForum” site (the little i is a rip on “interactive”). What you can see now is this last issue (eventually all past issues will be moved over to make a nice searchable archive). Compare the old and new (well those are not all that different). Some of the newer articles are there if you dig around, but that is an exercise left [...]

We arrived Saturday at our cabin in Strawberry, AZ, for a 3 day weekend, to relax, and sample the freezing night time temperatures (if you have Sahara like images of Arizona, think again, we pegged in the low 20s F last night). Anyhow, on picking up the local paper, I noticed that last night the Pine Community Center was featuring a storytelling event called Tellebration! and pictured there was Ricardo Provencio, one of our storytelling faculty at South Mountain Community College’s Storytelling institute and also listed was Liz Warren, the faculty colleague who developed the idea for our Hero’s Journey web site. Tellebration is a worldwide event schedueld the weekend before American Thanksgiving, and the main site lists more that 160 places world wide where people gathered to hear local storytellers (though this community seemed to not have its event listed, this is a small town atmosphere in Pine ;-). [...]

Here are some web site gripes I’ve been storing up. These are not meant as criticisms of the work and content people are posting, but things that may affect the usefulness, usability, or even return visits to your sites. First up, you as the person who created a web site for yourself, for your organization, are the best at knowing what your site is about, its purpose. Everybody else is going to be guessing at first glance. I have seen more than a few web sites, where my Blink level experience does not give me a clue as to what a site is. But even worse, when I am sharing a web site with others, and especially when I am tagging and adding sites to my del.icio.us collection, if I cannot locate a 1-2 sentence explanation of the site, it makes it pain down in the nether regions to do [...]

For well over a year, we have had a fantastic electronic portfolio software sitting idly for faculty, staff, and students here at Maricopa to put to use. This is the same MyEport developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College by the brilliant Audree Thurman. It has uncommons features of blogs inside an eport, RSS all over the place, embedding of RSS feed content in pages, automatic streaming media, podcast generation, wiki page types, quizzes and polls, and more. At Chandler-Gilbert Community College the have actually extended the functionality there to be the editing platform for their college web site, what they call a “webport” so that individuals have the editing control over department and program web pages vis some friendly easy tools. But I digress. This semester there has been a steady increase of eport account creation by students, especially a lot of Art students from Phoenix College and Paradise Valley Community [...]

How do I love the Spam Karma 2 WordPress Plug-in, let me count the ways. How about 695? Which is the net catch so far. It hardly ever misses, and catches most with my even having to lift a finger or click a mouse. If you are running a WordPress blog and not using SK2, you are missing out big time. It is a work of technical art. But sometimes when dumping the trash (they look so pathetic snared in the traps), I find a spam attempt that is almost worth a snicker. The eloquence of these words just blew me away: Having to choose one from the many possible gambling online poker video virtual sites on net have truely become a difficult task these days. Select gambling online poker video virtual http://xxxxxxx.xxxxxxx.com gambling online poker video virtual and the choice will be obvious. The most exciting site gambling online [...]