CogBlogged from ‘January, 2006’

flickr foto Phone Dudeavailable on flickr On of 250 images that popped in my slide show The closing sessions of the EDUCAUSE ELI conference was the New Media Consortium’s release of the 2006 Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies. This was the second year I was on the advisory board, and this year we notched it up quite a bit by doing all of our collaboration on a wiki at MIT. This site will continue to be open so more resources can be added and more conversations can take place on issues about these horizon items. The format for sharing these is the NMC’s famous “Five Minutes of Fame” format, where, no surprise, you get 5 minutes to present, and if you get over, you get “gonged” and must exit the stage. It’s quite a feat to condense a presentation into 5 minutes. Each of us who was asked to present [...]

flickr foto Yes! This is IT!available on my flickr Brian and Alan celebrate finding the mecca of fish tacos. Photo credit and good company from Bryan Alexander Ultimate, penultimate, ultra-ultimate… we found the holy grail at Blue Water Seafood in San Diego. Brian and I celebrated the fruits of our presentation labor here with fabulously fresh swordfish and mahi-mahi tacos. . Yes, to all those who asked us during the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, we took this quest very seriously. It’s all in the sauce!

Ouch, trying to cover a full day’s EDUCAUSE ELI activity in one blog and I made a glaring omission. Steve and his students Liz and Dean did a 5 star presentation on using wikis to empower student learning — I think EDUCAUSE needs to encourage much, much more of having students participate or lead in doing these sessions. It changes the whole dynamic to hear the student perspective first-hand, and having spent some time with both of these students during evening outings, I’m impressed with what they have to say and what they do. These economics students engaged in a semester long communication exchange using wikis, and in a self-organizing, open approach. The presentation was also constructed in a wiki collaboratively between Steve and his two students, and Liz and Dean constructed their own analysis of the experience. Sections include: * Most learning occurs where? * How Have Instructors Traditionally [...]

I’ve more or less resigned myself that I have little interest in doing intensive (or any) blog note-taking at conferences. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of recording it for yourself and others, but it ends up feeling a bit like being one of the transcribing monks (the one with bad fingers). Besides, in these days, any presentation worth a shout ought to have the bulk of their important content posted somewhere. And being late, and since dealing with an abnormally long time to upload photos to flickr, this is an abbreviated feedback on the EDUCAUSE ELI conference. Again, the “ultimate” (right adjective, Brian?) highlights have been spent with fellow bloggers Bryan Alexander, Brian Lamb, Gardner Campbell, and more. The face to face grand dicussions, be that inside the conference lunch, or riding the trolley to Old Town, are priceless. Bryan’s wry observations are gems, like noting [...]

TACO HOUSE! Originally uploaded by larowebr. Brian and I had a filled room for our session on Beyond Blogs. It was a blast and we were honored to have a great audience, many of them bloggers we’ve only had virtual connections to… but since I am trying to listen t other sesstions, the post game recap will follow later, including reocrded audio, photos, aluminum hats, glu’d pages, maybe even some blogmentary from participants. The search is still on for the penultimate fish taco.

Engage Me or Enrage Me: Education Today’s Digital Native Learners Marc Prensky Games2Train [ed: I heard Prensky's message several years ago-- the message is good, but not all that different. He has a strong message, does it with passion, shows on the screen a lot of "bumper sticker" statements. We're almost 45 minutes in, maybe 50 slides, and... well it's all "students are different from their teachers, they learn by engagement, and games can do this". It seems ironic with all of his work and messages over the years, there are really just handfuls of examples where this is applied. It's not necessarily or at all his fault... our institutions are moving just too damn slow or not at all... and somewhere under this, there might be some fear.] Start with Game “Battle of the Brains”, joke about 2 shower heads in hotel room (“remember when shaving only used 2 [...]

Obligatory Conference Bag Shot Originally uploaded by cogdogblog. Sunny San Diego, fresh ocean breeze, how much better can it get? I slipped into town this afternoon for the EDUCAUSE ELI Annual conference, picked up the bag, and performed a past ritual. But bags aside, it’s off to a galactic start. I met up Brian Lamb this afternonn and we mulled over our session for tomorrow. Actually we ended up talking about other stuff, feeling like this was pretty un-rehearsable, and just recorded some ancillary audio to add at a later date. The strategic planning continued over liquid assets at a nearby establishment, before appearing at the conference eopening reception. Already a highlight is getting to meet F2F with two bloggers I respect, read, and steal links from: Gardner Campbell (not to be confused with author Campbell D. Gardner) and Bryan Alexander who bears an uncanny resemblence to author Dr. Brian [...]

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Originally uploaded by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006. The word has sneaked out a bit earlier than Brian and I had planned on the flickr-housed presentation we are doing Monday at the EDUCAUSE ELI meeting in San Diego. Beyond the Blog: ready For Prime Time was pitched at a look at where weblogs have gone since (slightly?) passing the novelty “aren’t the just sad teen diaries” stage, as well as their edges diffusing into other sorts of interesting social software. Actualy the title and 2 sentences were all we had until maybe last week, when we started cranking together an outline using Writely which to me is utterly, insanely great. Somewhere we tooled up the idea of doing a sci fi theme, and then down this silly road of creating some mock book covers, loosely (hopefully extremely loosely, and meant as respectful satire) based [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve had to waste time dealing with comment spammers, thanks to Dr Dave and Spam Karma 2 plugin for WordPress. However, on oneof my other WP blogs today, the number of spam roaches squeaking under SK2 has been disturnbing. Some tricks ntoed are: (1) They are embedding only one URL, and usually that is the form field. So no slaps for excessive link count (2) They are masking their spam URLs with services like TinyURL (3) The comment text, usually gibberish, is somewhat relevant to the topic of the post. So they are finding some ways around SK2. I’ve escalated the defenses by using the Sk2 Moderate PLugin (a plugin for a plugin!), that applies the WP options for discussion moderation if something passes by SK2. This means, I can check the boxes: # An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below) [...]

It’s my aim for our MCLI events to have as much content as possible be a part of our web sites, as well asfor those looking back at it, for those who were not in attendance. Even with speed-haste audio/video editing (not aided by a delay in getting source video), it took a while to get all of it posted our Faculty Convocation keynote presentation by Dr. Vincent Tnto on Promoting Student Success. We already have the digital photos from the day, but now we have audio and video. We got a DVD of the presentation from Maricopa College Television group who did the filming. It took more than 3 hours using Handbrake (which by the way, now has a Windows version) to rip the movie to a QuickTime .mp4 file (617 Mb!). I had thought there was a way to rip just the audio, but could not find it. [...]