CogBlogged from ‘February, 2006’

flickr foto DSC01365 It has been 130 days since it has rained in Phoenix. One Hundred And Thirty. That stretches back to mid-October that we experienced the odd phenomena of water falling from the sky. It has been four months of blue sky, sunshine, lies by weather forecasters, and a complete bust on the snow season in Flagstaff. Sure it may be pleasant to always go outside to sunshine and warm weather, but ticking in the back of the mind is f-i-r-e…. this is going to be a colossal fire season in this state, one of the first times that there is going to be high danger of major fires both in the burnt desert lowlands and the tinderbox forest. Earlier this month, the February Fire burned more than 4000 acres just a few miles form our little hamlet of Strawberry– this was one of the earliest forest fires ever [...]

A few months back I started having some problems with my SamrtDisk Firelite portable FireWire drive… I keep all of my working documents on here, a mirror of my web site, as I shuttle it between home and work computers. After two failures, where Disk Warrior managed to save the day, I ordered a new one, as it had served me well for at least 2 years. The new shiny drive came, I copied my data to it, and thought I was back in business. Over the last few days, I noted the drive would not mount reliably on attaching the firewire cable. In fact, to even get it to light up, I had to severely bend the connection in the back of the drive hard to the side, just enough to get it to mount. Fearing a mechanical issue with the drive’s ports, I started copying files back to [...]

So while some are not happy with the broad label of “walled garden”, I am growing increasingly annoyed at the complete lack of anything substantive, or half substantive, or a sketch on a dirty napkin of just what this Apple iTunes U is all about. As far as I know, it is very vaporous. At first I was encouraged because 20 minutes after filling out an interest form, I was called by an Apple rep, and thought, “hey, inside track!” The biggest challenge in our sprawling, decentralized organization, has been trying to solicit some leadership to advocate a direction, to maybe…. provide… leadership? As stands, the typical Maricopa path is about 10 different, overlapping directions. This is a chance to act as a system, so we may end up with 1 unified representation (as Maricopa) or fragmented (10+ different representations). So I have asked this rep, emailed, voicemailed, cc:ed our [...]

I might have presented a shorter presentation. My timing was not on cue at today’s Podcasting, Schmodcasting demo at GateWay Community College, but we had a full room, folks were wide-eyed, and asking questions. Or they are just nice people. During the session, I had the iRiver running, so have made a huge, “umm”-filled recording (27 Mb 14.9 Mb, Stephen Downes challenged me to trim the file) available at: http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dl/podcast-gatewaycc-060227.mp3. To demo the use of small pieces, I blog about this recording (and the shorter live recording demo) in my CogDogBlogLab (Blogger) which I have connected to FeedBurner for auto generating the podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogbloglab Woah, is this all nested! In addition, I did a brief demo of recording with the iRiver (I have a second unit, which is useful). Unfortunately, I did not get deep into the demos on using Odeo (though I did play Gardner’s recorded greeting, thanks for [...]

Some time last year, I posted some of the deep, mysterious questions I came up with while at the airport. Having traveled a bit recently, a few more have risen in my mind: * The Southwest Cattle Call: If you have never flown Southwest Airlines you have missed out on the fun of getting your seat assignment as no seats are assigned– you get, according to the time you check in, assigned to either group “A”, “B”, or “C”. They are called in that order, so your seat depends how far up in the line you are behind the corrals at the gate. So the game is, how many minutes before a flight departs will the first person jump into line, causing the stampeded to fall in behind? Is it 20 minutes? 30? 40? The trick for successful Southwesterners, is of course, using their online print a boarding pass which [...]

I give my utmost appreciation and web shout out to Brian, Cole, and Darren for ideas harked in my call for help on podcast demos scheduled for Monday and Wednesday of this week at 2 of our colleges. What I’ve done for my organizational sanity as well as to provide some links for those in attendance, was to build a WikiSpaces site with 5 main sections I vainly open to cover: http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/podcasting The graphic, which has no linked relevance, was created at Hetemeel.com’s Dynamic Image site something I serendipty stumbled upon– you can have any text you like appear as if written by Einstein, and it creates a dynamic image. Anyhow, since I had to create my handouts before I left town last week, I just made the front page, did a one page handout with the URLs, and have been madly swashing in the rest, likely going up to [...]

More idle, internet-less ramblings while sitting on the plane… Anyhow, I’ve flipped through a bunch of magazines lately. One thing I like to do is look at the use of visuals in communicating a message, especially advertisements. Long long ago, when I taught a computer animation class (we were using Director 5.0 if that gives a time frame), I asked my students on a regular basis to clips ads for a notebook. I asked them to analyze the ads for use of graphic elements such as colors, fonts, perspective, layering, lines, balance of text, tone of message, use of metaphor, clarity of message, etc. Even in animation, it helps to have a grasp of the effective (or non effective) use of visuals to say somemthing and that is what ads need to do. Now I really no nothing about advertising, so you can dismiss this opinion right away, but I [...]

In preparation for next week’s series of demos on podcasts, I’ve downloaded likely more than I have in the last 10 months. The sheer number of them is turning out to be more staggering than I thought. Content varies, production quality varies, all according to typical distribution curves. I am listening to a bunch flying on the plane from Austin back home to Phoenix, cringing while looking at the pretty clouds. Why cringing? I am listening to one that is supposed to be one in more than 100 of a series of tips in a particular subject (I am not specifying the feed as it really does not matter). I guess this one has some sort of following because there is a whole lot of upfront stuff that is hard to swallow as a first time listener. Out of a podcast that is a shade over 10 minutes, it is [...]

flickr foto Presentation Interruptusavailable on my flickr Here at the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting in Austin, I was doing a reprise of the 5 Minutes of Fame session at EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. This was supposedly highlighting the NMC Horizon Report section on "Phones in Their Pocket" — the report suggesting cell phone technology is in the 2-3 year horizon for becoming more broadly used in education. Less a report than being a bit goofy, I arrange for my presentation to be interrupted by a cell phone call (has thay ever happened to anyone else?) – where I am trying to handle a crashed server situation with someone at the other end– who turns out to have the name "Mom". The transcript and a link to some of the background flickr photo slide shows are available in the back blog. Thanks to Barbara Truman for sharing the photo… I [...]

flickr foto Capitol Gated 2available on my flickr I am here for a first time visit, to Austin, Texas, for the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting a one day plus dinner gathering of a number of brilliant and creative reps from various new media centers across the US. I just love so much hanging out with fellow people who do similar (but interestingly different) kinds of work in education. The Arizonan is in town, so any rain has scattered to the netherlands, and it was a gloriously bright day, and I took advantage of an hour to walk around and snap a few photos. There are some exciting new projects brewing at NMC and we will hear more about it tomorrow at the full day discussions. Darn, that music from 6th street is sounding great even up here on the 17th floor of the hotel. I should be out [...]