CogBlogged from ‘December, 2006’

Who remembers the crazy of web badges in the mid 1990s… “Top 5%”! Back at Maricopa, I had slapped together my “stinking web badges” page (wow what old stuff). Got a new one today, but I am humbly flattered… This stinking web dog blog got listed as one of the top 100 educational educational blogs from the Online Education Database, in the company of many bloggers I look up to. Badges are back! Maybe coming back soon too are the blink tag and title tag animations.

We’re doing a live event in Second Life this afternoon. Yes, we will all sit in rows of chairs, and listen passively to a lecture… no wait a minute, that’s what some people think happens in there. Actually what is happening is that Henry Jenkins is making a first official in world appearance in visiting the Teen Grid, where the Global Kids Island is hosting an event, A World Fit for Children Festival – teams of kids have attended seminars (in Second Life) from UNICEF on world issues, and the kids are building exhibits with their ideas for solutions. Nope, there is nothing novel there, is their doubters? No one is creating?. Anyhow, Jenkins will bed doing an audio address to the students on “We’re not playing around here!: The pedagogical potential of computer and video games”, interspersed with some times for… dancing. We at NMC are helping out by [...]

For more than a year I have turned repeatedly to flickr’s creative commons search to locate images for presentations and projects. It never has failed to provide a large number of choices of powerful images to use. The problem is the search tools on flickr are one of their less elegant designed interfaces. You first have to browser/pick via a type of license, and then search. It’s hardly efficient. For a long while, I used FlickrLilli, which provided a single search interface with some buttons/menus to narrow to the appropriate CC license types. But ohhhhhh, that Lilli just got slower and slower to load/respond. Darn popularity! Well, here is a new kid that offers even more! flickrCC This is from the “about” portion.. OK, so I should put more time into documentation, right? I wrote flickrCC so I could easily find photos on flickr that were released under the creative [...]

Most bloggers want comments, eh? After jumping through account forms, questionably readable captchas, how much is one’s spirit to comment crushed when a site mis-labels it as spam, and eats the entire comment. I was unable to overcome these obstacles yesterday. This started when I read Graham Atwell’s post on Creativity costs money in Second Life… there is sure a lot of bandwagon hopping recently with heavy jumping on both pro and con wagons. And I have my own biases as well having been involved a year in SL activity with NMC. So, respecting Graham’s previous writings, I spent some time, actually too much time entering my comments in his blog. There are multiple buttons on the web form- am I Anonymous/Join, Login, or just plain old Submit? So on first submit, I got bonked as it said I entered the wrong captcha. That’s strange, as it was moderately readable, [...]

I was a fence sitter on the value of coComment, which in theory allows you to track the comments you make on other web sites, blogs together. Interesting concept, yet often marginal execution, and today, frustration, as the browser wheel spun and spun and spun waiting for coComment to do whatever it does behind the scenes. Perhaps it was an issue with the extension and FireFox 2, but I’ve seen its add-on presence to the comment forms on blogs I bark back at, and I have been commenting rather frequently, yet it shows my last one as done on October 1st. Sorry, but when the thang does not work, and then when it chugs down my browser, the value to expended energy ratio starts getting asymptotic to 0.

Many times I have said, er boasted, that pretty much form the time I started this ed tech computer work, I’ve made it a habit to give away, for free, just about anything I’ve made. I do believe it comes back to you. And it has, in the forms of invitations to visit some wonderful islands like Iceland, New Zealand (a second time), Australia (twice too!)… as well as spawning a world sprawling network of connections that might never have happened otherwise. This came about in my very early years, as I discovered the joy of finding/mining for nifty desktop applications, HyperCard source code, etc on the Info-Mac ftp server then at Stanford (long live sumex-aim!). And I was lobbying my bits into the free space from the time of setting up my first gopher and web servers at Maricopa. I tossed things onto my old grey home page, and [...]

Having successfully moved the entire CogDogBlog site– Lock Stock, And Kibble– to a new home at DreamHost, I started to look at my other online satellites. Since sometime back in say, 1997, I hoisted a personal domain I used for my now retired web consulting business, and also used for personal email and blogging. But wait a minute, my new DreamHost package at only $8 a month included hosting of multiple domains, a humongous amount of disk space (the whole CDB empire is maybe 300 Mb and I got 200 Gb to start with), it made alot of sense to dump my old host which was abut $20/month. So it took maybe 2 hours this morning to ftp the 600 Mb of old content over, almost no time to export MySQl databases and to re-import them at the new site, but what really blew me away was when I changed [...]

Since I mentioned in passing about Pachyderm, I recalled I have a small published example for those who have yet to see what it can do– this was for a panel session at the Pachyderm Users Conference, where I was asked to give some “expert” tips. I have “expert” in “quotes” since I know just enough Pachyderm t teach the basics. But I leaned back, and pulled together 3 tips, and rather than showing software in Powerpoint (again, one one of the more banal uses of PPPPPPPowerpoint), I did mine in Pachyderm itself. The demos included: Breaking Out of the Box – most images imported into Pachyderm end up as rectilinear shape (squares, squares, squares). By exploting the default white background of Pachy screens, simple cropping out of backgrounds or rotations plus drop shadows in PhotoShop add a whole lot more interest. Leveling Out audio with the Levelator – I [...]

Arggh. This is the second time I am writing this post as I inadvertantly forgot to open a new tab for a Google search. Poof! went a complete draft! Thanks to Pat D for reminding me of an owed post about an Audacity workshop I did last week. This was a hands-on workshop for the NMC 2006 Pachyderm Users Conference in Austin. For those who are elephant un-aware, Pachyderm is an open source Flash content creation tool that grew out of one developed for museums, and through a grant shepherded by NMC, has grown into a more robust tool for the wider education community. So there are Pachyderm screen templates where you can attach audio, and it works quite well to create context around some detailed content using perhaps the voice of an artist, an expert, or even member of the public’s response. So we most highly recommend using the [...]

Well Scott, since you asked for it, a few weeks late, I did a hasty screencast this morning of poking through my Google Reader feeds, not as quickly as D’Arcy did with his use of Blogbridge. But I did pick up on Dr. Norman’s method, and got me a copy of iShowU which seems to do a nifty job of screen/audio recording on Mac OSX — it does not save as Flash, but I crunched it a bit in QuickTime Pro to knock off some MB weight (for a smaller dimension movie, I switched my screen res to 800×600 and did full screen at that set). My Google Reader Screencast [10.3 Mb, 6:03] I am still utterly humbled at the masters of screencasting — it is very much an art to not only get a great recording, but to orchestrate it so as to be interesting, not a fumbling mumbling [...]