CogBlogged from ‘March, 2007’

Today’s Office posted 20 Mar ’07, 4.36pm MDT PST on flickr Right in the middle of IM-ing, checking a streaming audio connection in Second Life, my internet connection blinked out. Qwest said, "There are outages on your area" and with an estimated fix time of "a few hours", I trucked down to the Scottsdale Public Library to try and sip the free wireless here to get some work done The speed is kind of poky at times, but its a great service they offer here. Maybe I should stop this nonsense and do something like read a book? It really struck me how lost I was with my tether to the net severed. I am posting this to flickr via carrier pigeon ;-)

We’re less than 2 days out from the NMC Spring 2007 Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video, and an awesome array of sessions ins lining up quite nicely. Registration is still open and it gives you at least 60 days post conference access to all materials and archived Elluminate sessions. Yes, you can browse the program, but as a public service, I have compressed all the main words of all the sessions into this Session Title MashDown: Webvideo Politics Web 2.0 Online Learning Film Festival How Video Podcasting Changed My Teaching Life We’re Getting Cinema Studies Production Culture Gaming Learning Web Early 2007 Evocative Spaces Aesthetic Grabs Mediating Dubai Making Memorable Machinima NINA More Less Virtual Exhibitionism Leisure Suit 21st Century You YouTube Singular Plural Creative Expression Collaborative networks Future Learning Beyond Podcasts Contextualizing Media iPod Digital Video Common Good Ideas Help Find Material Want Video [...]

The Twitter update WP plugin has not worked for months so was pleased to see that Alex King, veteran pluing author, has released Twitter Tools, that updates Twiiter when you post a new entry, but can also pull in your tweets to a Wp blog as a sidebar, and optionally publish a pile of your tweets as a post (not sure why I’d do that). Twitter is hot and sexy now, and seems to work rather intermittently; Im comes and goes, the web site sometimes is pretty laggy. Internet fame can be an iceberg to your shiny ship. this is merely a tweet test to see if this blog post makes it over to http://twitter.com/cogdog/

Leigh is…. but I am not… blocked in China. The Great Firewall of China is a site to test URLs if they are ones being censored by the Chinese government. I guess I am not being subversive enough. [The Aim] of this website is to be a watchdog and keep track of which and how many or how many times sites are censored. Help to keep the censorship transparent. Each blocked website will automatically be added to the great firewall on the homepage.

That was wild. After composing the last post on wiki stuff, I decided to try ou Send2Wiki, where I managed to post my blog entry in Italian!. Amazing! But ick, a flickr page… does not send very well.

Leigh Blackall has some great rumblings on his Vision for Wikieducator, starting with the rant: The problem with wikis is that they require people to remember to contribute, stop what they’re doing, go to the wiki, click edit and retype what they wrote somewhere else already, such as in a blog, email, or other media upload somewhere else. I really hate it when I upload an image to my preferred image host (Flickr) then have to re-upload it if I want to use it in a wiki. And what about this blog post? As I write I’m thinking about how I might put it on the wikieducator discussion pages I’m involved in… I think I’ll just add a link there and point to this post. Wikis are generally messy, chaotic, and unless you have a Wiki General overseeing it, the sites end up being useful to more or less they [...]

Compared to this guy, in twitter-chips, I am a hermit in the woods. Does John Edwards keep up with his small group of friends? Does he have a designated staff twitter-er? More idle banter, while I have little meaningful to blog these days. But the twitter buzz train is rolling. I get a handful of notices of twitter-ness from folks I know (and a bunch I don’t know. On a good day I am selective) My twittering is in short bursts, and I keep forgetting to be a frequent tweeter. And I hear more and more about folks who are discovering useful bits of info by checking their friends tweets. I am still warm to the use of this tool, and am not bothered at a lack of a Big Educational Use in Capital Letters. There is something there, there, said the rabbit. Actually, I just like saying, “twitter”.

Ouch. The first day back at work after an extended time offline. Is there anything else that dangerously might be an influence on the decision to devote time to not being online? I am taking a stand and saying no, even as I drown in un-replied urgent emails, mark as “read” hundreds of RSS feed item, quickly stomp out web site emergencies, pretend to be there for conference calls half listened to, and accept promised tasks done in a seat of the pants manner. I’m just going to stand here and accept the price for 3 1/2 blissful days not with my face planted in a laptop. Then I am going to try to act like I mean it. I’d write more, but I am late for an online meeting.

I’m in Denver 2.5 days for an NMC Directors and Board meeting, with a rather packed schedule leaving little moments for blogging. Well, I have about 10 waiting from my hotel room to do a 1o minute Second Life / NMC overview for a group of maybe 60 participants at the university of MIchigan. You can be in many places at the same time, but never quite all together. So what would be travel w/o a few mishaps? Mine have been minor considering that some people have flights out of icy climates, and others, like a person at the meeting arrrived w/o his luggage. Mine was boarding the small cramped US Airways jet in Phoenix, only to settle in and hear them inform us that there is a problem with one of the tires; so we had to all deplane while the rolled out the biggest can of Fix-O-Flat I [...]

So the blog post title is aimed for the cheap reaction (“no, don’t go there”). But it is true, I had breakfast today. And it was a chance to meet someone whom I’ve corresponded through mostly blog comments, going back to August, another runner who had found my sad tale of marathon attemptage. So we talked running, and life in other countries, and digital cameras. As it turns out, he was just back from Panama and headed soon back to South America. “Oh, I was just reading about the big canal project in Panama,” I said, knowing he did writing for the engineering trades. “Did you read that in Wired?” he asked. “Yes, I did.” “Well I wrote that story.” And it is true. But back to the point of my silly cheap post title. There is so much fear flying about internet behavior. Yes, there are real predators, and [...]