CogBlogged from ‘February, 2007’

Although being rather involved in NMC’s Second Life and Virtual Worlds endeavors, I’ve yet to find or blog much on the experience there over the last 9 months or so. My SL namesake will turn 1 year old in a few months, though in many ways I feel still like a puppy (“In Second Life, everyone knows I am a Dog!”). This is not one of the foaming praises of SL as the Web 3.0 nirvana That Will Solve Many Problems and Transform Education As We Know It– yet at the same time, I am not interesting in the pissy dart tossing from the opposite sidelines where the naysayers guild hangs out. Over the last XX years in dabbling in technology, I have stuck with a strategy of not being too decisive on something that is new and offers potential. And in the last year I have had more powerful [...]

While I was not blogging here last week did not mean I was not spitting posts elsewhere ;-) For my planned trip next October to Australia, I took Nancy’s Chocolate laced advice to blog the trip by setting up on WordPress.com yet another blog outlet, CogDogRoo. My plan is to not only blog the trip, but all the advanced prep I will do (putting this in public may hold me accountable). And this was my first flavor inside hosted WordPress, and it sure is familiar, yet not quite the wide open lab you get with your own version of WP… on the other hand, for a site you can set up for free, blog, and use a lot of built-in tools without touching code, MySQL, plugins, etc, its pretty sweet. And curse anyone who finds my old blog post about not blogging elsewhere. Despite those intentions, I have more WordPress [...]

I ended up taking more than a week off on my self-proclaimed time for writing elsewhere as a commenter only, not posting any new posts here. I really enjoyed the experience and it seemed to resonate with others. My tracks in cocomment indicate 51 different places I left my mark, not really all that huge an agenda, as this was really squeezed in between way too many edge of the shelf projects. So maybe the whole thing was an excuse to be lazy, eh? I did have some things I would have blogged about, would have liked to, but was not burning in loss that I was not writing them. I did not get to write about all the great activity that was happening at the Northern Voice conference, which served well, as I have been insanely jealous I could not be there this year (plans are in motion to [...]

It was almost a year ago I reflected (not the first, not the last), on the subtle power of blog commenting, which to me is still as vital a part of the ecosystem as pounding out new posts (or incessant barking). I was just nicely reminded of this by a comment on a 3 year old flickr photo. At the same time, I am rather cranky at missing out on the colleagues and activity at this year’s Northern Voice conference, one of the highlights of last year’s conference circuit. Grumble, darn schedule…. Just for grins, I ran the query I did last year to credit by frequent commenters since January 1, 2006 SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE comment_date > '2006-01-01' GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC Wow, so here is a big thanks to my frequent commenters! Alan   228 D'Arcy Norman  79 Gardner  60 Scott Leslie  29 [...]

Wow, I really hope PPTExchange is a parody, please say it is so… Are you the kind of person who writes their thoughts down in PowerPoint? Did you ever think that your presentations might be worth sharing -or even worth money? We’re exactly those people, and we thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a marketplace where all of our PPT decks could be put on display for others, and exchanged, and even sold? Let’s see, my answers would be “no”, “sharing yes, money– are you on crack?”, and “no”. Yes, you can MONETIZE those bullet slides. I predict this domain will be for sale within 18 months.

Workshopping Itavailable on flickr “Who is taking a picture of me?” This during my last presentation at UNITEC. This 3+ year old photo was recently discovered by Karen (partially in the left side), and was taken in one of the workshops I did during a visit to New Zealand in November 2004. This workshop, or BlogShop, was your run of the mill introduction to blogging, and I had the participants run out to Blogger and create their own blogs, on the spot. Some how Karem found the photo and took the time to write a nice comment, where she shared that she has been blogging since and having her students blog as well. She blogs as Karen’s Blog on her teaching and travels, did her own version of a blog workshop as Taking control: How can blogs support students in their language learning?, has a shared blog with some colleagues [...]

Disclaimer: I work for NMC… We are running our Spring NMC Online Conference with a theme that originally floated through the 2007 Horizon Report, what at one time we were calling “The Small Video”. Just in the last few months, I’ve been tracking how much more prevalent the use of video has become as a media form in the blogs I read, witness the viralness of the Web 2.0 video that has bounced around. Some of it may be the technology, the ability to upload, store, share video in accessible format, but on an optimist side, I see more happening on the creative end, so that more individuals are making worthy, compelling short videos, and sharing/tagging them. While there are still scads of really bad stuff, I am also seeing more than the easy to snicker at genre of diet coke and menthos flicks. And just there in the sidelines, [...]

I found a new cartoon tag line for this blog, on the front page at Live in the Deliirious Cool (no idea what the site is)… I’ll let them bear the brunt of re-use of a published newspaper cartoon. There are two dogs talking, one says, “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.” Sounds like a plan to me.

The plans are just in the draft stage, but I’ve gotten an awesome invitation from the Australian Flexible Learning Network to do a speaking tour of the Australia capitol capital cities in October 2007. In this case, I’d be having to fill some rather large, chocolate filled shoes, as this year’s speaker for the series was the incredible Nancy White (see her Australian October blog for coverage). That is rather intimidating to do as a follow-up act. I guess there is some benefit in playing hard to get– about 3 times in the last two years, they asked me to participate in an online conference, and it was always in conflict with other commitments, so this time, they went for the Vito Carleone level offer. Well, I almost had to refuse, as October is really pinched between 2 NMC conferences, and I really lack accumulated leave time to be down [...]

Here is a cheap but useful trick for you WordPress bloggers- don’t sap your readers with 10 mile long URLs. If you use the Permalink option to publish your posts based on the date, time, generally it turns a long title blog post like above into something horrible like: http://cogdogblog.com/2007/02/14/pimp-up-your-wordpress-guru -status-trimming-those-long-title-posts-with-slugs That is butt ugly and pretty much says to anyone with some slightly advanced WP skills… “I am a n00b”. All it takes is to create a shorter link portion is an edit in the Post Slug box, one or two words that capture the essence of the post and voila! A tidier URL, in this case, http://cogdogblog.com/2007/02/14/slugs There, you can now help reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed by the web, by reducing the transmission of extraneous text characters. Make your URLs shorter today!