CogBlogged from ‘April, 2007’

Bumblebee posted 3 Sep ’06, 6.10pm MDT PST on flickr In the real life can be strange too department… We’ve recently been helping my mother-in-law clean up her cluttered yard and garage. She offered to let us take about 3/4 of a cord of firewood she had purchased for her small outdoor fireplace, and we can use the wood up at our cabin. While loading it from the side of the house, we kept dodging these huge hovering black bumblebees who seemed disturbed abut movement of the wood pile. There did not seem to be any nests buried in there, but 3 or 4 of them just kept hovering a bit too close for comfort. We drove the wood about 25 miles to store at our house until our next trip, and were sure we had left those bees behind in Chandler. So imagine our surprise when yesterday we noticed [...]

Doh! Sound of blog remorse! In writing about the CNI Horizon Project presentation, I was remiss in leaving out one of the coolest discoveries — that Vicki Davis (coolcatteacher in georgia) and 4 other secondary school teachers in Austria, Bangladesh, China, and Australia are doing another fabulous Flat Classroom project — and this one they are having the student groups research and write about the future of education, technology, and society using as a framework the 2007 Horizon Report. Check it out at http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com/ It’s just getting started this week, but we’re very excited to see this unfold. They are using WikiSpaces, blogs, RSS, del.icio.us, Ning, grazr, twitter… and more to work on their projects. And as a P.S. — the way I found this project was via a link in Vicki’s twitter stream … so that is one of several Positives Outcomes From Twiiter just in the last 2 [...]

Have you heard just enough plaff about twitter the 2007 web love child? I have experienced and seen enough others experience the twitter cycle: “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of… who in their right mind would be doing that?” “Okay… if Xxxxxx and Yyyyyyy think this is cool, I will give it a try.” “I’ve added a few entries, but I don;t get it” “Woah.. now that I have a set of friends, I am tapping in to all kinds of valuable cross conversations… like when I found a link to X” “I cannot stop tweeting. I am obsessed. I need a therapy group.” Maybe not, but twitter is something that only reveals its value in use, and it is not the first casual uses that make it sink in. No, its not the next Great Web Tool That Will Save Education… but there is something [...]

Yesterday was a eventful day at the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting. My travel arrangements for this conference were pretty tricky — I got in my truck and drove 20 miles downtown to Phoenix. No lost luggage. This was my first ever attendance at a CNI conference; a different flavor of colleagues, so I got to meet a lot of new folks in the library and information architecture fields. My hats off to Clifford Lynch and colleagues who arrange a program that is interesting, not dense with too many sessions, and leaves room for the critical hallway meetings. And there is the touch of Cliff’s Roadmap, which provides a wonderful context for the 2 day meeting. A highlight was getting to co-present with co-conspirators Bryan Alexander and Cyprien Lomas. We did a session on the NMC’s Horizon Report, of which they were both involved as advisory board members, What’s in [...]

Found via an inbound ping: It looks like Stephen Downes is writing in new new tongues – http://www.edu2do.com/oldaily

Trying my hand at conference blogging, here at the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting in Phoenix (Hey, my flight here was a 20 minute drive from home). Can I blog faster tan Bryan Alexander? Heck no. This first session of the breakouts is from Ann Lally head of digital Initiatives at University of Washington, and Carolyn Dunford, a former students now at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Their project began with some 2005 data from OCLC that reported ony 2% of information searches began at the web sites of libraries (!), while 89% started at search engines. Recognizing the high number of Google results that linked to WikiPedia, they developed an idea to insert links into WikiPedia articles to content or resources that UW has knowledge of or has in their digital collections. Beagin with a content analysis of the strengths of the UW holdings, and then review WikiPedia articles to [...]

In education, and technology, but no different from most other fields, we sure can get mired in definitions. It seems… that the mere fact of identifying something with a TLA (Three Letter Acronym), that it exists. Like last Decemberm when I got invited to be on the planning committee for the EDUCAUSE ELI Focus Session on Immersive Learning Environments, in conversations about said ILEs, I tried pot stirring early in our teleconference meetings by posing the question, “Is there really something that is an ILE”? No one felt like playing, so we went on the merry way, so that they included virtual worlds, simulations, remote controlled instruments, computer games, and heck why not the world famous card game of Kaiser? “Immersive” can be mighty broad. it’s not that I have an bsession to nail down definitions, but I am not sure that I can say what is an ILE and [...]

Hey, I just finished my 2006 summer project! When I joined NMC, I projected having a public version of a new web site ready by September. I lied. Or grossly underestimated. Or lied. But this morning we flipped the switch and lit up the tree. I could blog about all details of this process (and should have) but that might take me another year. And I’d rather get some work done. But in a snapshot, and some more bits to be written up in subsequent days/weeks/months/whenever… The project was taking a pure static, 1999 vintage site, with is clear gif spacers, tables, but basic style sheets to something “2.0″ish. The old site was quite consistent in design, a credit to the non web developer staff who carried out the design for the last 5 years by replication. But it suffered from the pigeon holes of its fixed navigation set, had [...]

I really do not want to learn a new web programming language. In my first round, through the late 1990s, it was perl, than I made the jump to doing my web stuff in PHP. Now of course, the rage and sexy code is done in Ruby — any slick new web site that moves and grooves like Basecamp smells like Ruby. And recently )and this will show that I am not on the edge of everything) I finally signed up for an account on last.fm (have not done much yet), but that was one of the most elegant interfaces I have clicked through in a while. But hey, I was into Ruby in the 1990s ;-) See my Shockwave Ruby’s Art pad which still works after all these years (okay in OSX you have to lauch Safari in Rosetta mode to even try). Yeah, that was done in Ruby.

Quickly. Little time to blog. A year ago today was my first day on the job at NMC, just a year gone by and so many things have happened. It reminds me of the old Lorne Green A,lpo commercials where hs says something like: Hi. I’m Lorne Greene. And this is my pal, CogDog. You know, CogDog has been doing NMC work for one year- that’s 114 to you and me. You know why he looks so young and healthy? Because CogDog is an Alpo dog. Alpo is 100% meat and meat by-products, and not a speck of cereal. Alpo keeps your dog happy, healthy and frisky. Isn’t that right, CogDog, huh? Yep, a lot goes on in one blog year. NMC Conferences. Second Life. MacArthur project. Travel. Marcus trainings. A long, almost done project of NMC Web 2.0. An endless list of new colleagues. Travel. Conference Tagging. Podcasts. Streaming [...]