CogBlogged from ‘May, 2007’

Being There posted 17 May ’07, 7.47pm MDT PST on flickr Title is a nod to colleagues in the audience who are film buffs. Is anyone a fan of Chance the Gardner? www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/ My metaphor may land askew (not the first time), but as a simple person thrust into a strange new world by sheer circumstance, maybe he was foreshadowing web 2.0– and his child like basic perspectives is what so engaged people around him. In thinking about this session, I kept returning to the value and power of “being there” with all of this exploding technology. Today was my main presentation for Faculty Academy titled Being There: nets, tweets, avatars… in which I blitzed the audience with 71 slides, mostly flickr’s creative commons licensed images matching my warped metaphors, where I aimed to paint a picture of the distributed and perhaps unfamiliar online social or community space such as [...]

Hmmm. seems to be some blockages or bottlenecks in public network here at Faculty Academy- cannot post to twitter, tweets are getting munched in the network. Attempting to tweet via blog post. Update: The local network here was not to blame. Twitter itself has been/is very flaky. That darn cat messing with the server was cute once, now it is annoying as twitter ignores posted updates. The crowd is hopping to Jaiku

Live from Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington… Barbara Ganley is tasking us about how we use web technology– responding to some of the opening panel remarks of reluctance to blogging about their project. She asks us What is the correlation between your own personal use of web technologies and the way you use them in classroom? Her start- “Slow-blogging” a Course- a reaction to her students urge to accomplish work as quickly and directly as possible. “My students are getting awards for this work, getting jobs– ‘bringing the house down’.” Blogging as the process – “To Send Letters to the self”. Failing publicly is okay, in front of my students, my readers “who kindly pick me up out of the mud”. Slow blogging is both “powerless and pleasurable” Expresses difficulty of presenting about a blog on a flat screen “I wish I could be one, have hypertext in [...]

I’ve landed safely for Faculty Academy 2007 here at University of Mary Washington. For 2 years, I’ve watched and listened remotely to podcasts, secretly desiring to be a part of this amazing series of events (and still trying to figure out how the heck Gardner managed last year to get Jon Udell to be a keynote, which is on the par of getting Pete Townsend to play at your kids bar mitzvah). Do you ever really know what to say when someone asks, “how was your flight?” – in nearly every case, I plan for mine to be un-eventful. This trip was an all day event form Phoenix- I thought I was early to the airport, but the lines at Continental (oops, forgot to print my passes last night) were slow and full of “special cases”. The TSA experience was certainly memorable- apparently, the units at Phoenix Terminal 2 are [...]

Iris Color Explosion posted 13 May ’07, 8.10am MDT PST on flickr At our cabni in Strawberry, AZ, the annual spring eruption of bearded irises seems even more glorious then ever. Just where would we be without you?…

It was posted a while ago, and was well recommended, but on last Friday’s flight home from San Jose, I finally got a chance, and to be humbled, by Gardner Campbell’s Kemp Symposium keynote “Apt Numbers, or, Sense Variously Drawn Out””. Magically weaving together his genuinely expressed love of music and Milton, and his concept of the “last lecture”, Gardner cast a spell that lifted me even higher over the California mountains lying below. It is a podcast most highly recommended, worthy saving, and savoring. I cannot stop gushing praise. For some, a presentation is a series of slides, or some stream of consciousness talking points– this was really artfully planned and spoken. Tune in, and… Come on the amazing journey, And learn all you should know. With this crafted session in mind, I am rather intimidated to bring my ramblings to University of Mary Washington next week. I’ll be [...]

Check out dotSUB “Any film in any language”. Now I am inferring the site from a short visit, and there is no “about” page; even the “help” page yields only: We’re Working on Help In the meantime, please send us an email at help@dostub.com. But hey, it’s all good, it’s all beta. What I could infer from poking around is very cool. This is a site where the web videos sit already captioned in one language– and site users then add translations for others, ranging from Arabic, Byelorussion, … down to Tagalog and Telugu. The drop down menu for languages gives an estimate as to how much has been translated. So sitting at the top is the Commoncraft “RSS in Plain English” video which, through this site, can be RSS forlart enkelt or RSS in Common ‘Norwegian’? — I think the translation is the word English” in Norwegian which is [...]

It’s good to see a bit more of attribution by linking, or coined here as “Linktribution” in blog posts. Yet, I find it somewhat funny, and a bit disconcerting, that people are so rapid blogging that they are just attributing it back to some other blog post that is referring to another blog post … So I am sometimes collecting examples of long back link chains. So in today’s activity, there is a lot of folks blogging about the Map of Online Communities – its a gem and a half, and you betcha its appearing in one or all of my upcoming presentations. Map of Online Communities by Randall Munroe, Linktribution to xkcd Isn’t it a beauty? And its being blogged back and forth. I saw about 10 mentions i my RSS reader in the last 3 days (my first encounter came via a Tweet from D’Arcy). But follow this [...]

I can count on one paw the number of articles I’ve read on Slate. I am definitely thinking this rag is worth it best virtual fish wrapping, and mostly is a waste of web code and server electricity. They are not alone, but lobbing the criticisms at Twitter like in What Are You Doing? The allure of Twitter, the latest Web sensation are as simplistic and thoughtful as catching fish in a barrel with a shotgun. Of course you can dismiss its potential by culling off the easy to find fluff tweets like “listening to Curious George in the background while drinking terroir coffee whose headquarters happen to be 5 minutes away” and “Just recovered from a night of playing WoW.” Yep, that is enough dedicated journalism and thoughtful research. Yep. You could just as easily condemn all journalism but reviewing the best articles from The National Enquirer. You could [...]

In this way, twitter has a kinship with flickr, in terms of having a wisecracking interface: I bet this kittie’s name is “Bill”. Back at Maricopa, we had a computer tech in the 1990s named Bill whose method of fixing a computer was to pop open the case and whack the hard drive with a screwdriver (ok, he did it once, I thought it was strange, but I think he fixed it). Cats in the server Grrrrrrrrrowwwwwwl.