CogBlogged from ‘January, 2008’

My current report card might read, “Alan needs to improve his attention and focus at professional conferences, and perhaps work on a more positive attitude” On the heels of the 2008 ELI EDUCAUSE annual conference in San Antonio, it’s time to reflect once again on the conference experience. Be reminded, this is my own take, and should be taken with a house sized grain of salt (or on the rocks, with lots of tequila). My most long standing barking threads has been the staleness of the professional conference format. This goes way back to the 1990s with all those sessions with an expert standing at a lectern, speaking to a passive audience constrained in rows of seats, that we need to MAKE A CHANGE in education, and the horribly trite phrase of “the sage on the stage becomes the guide on the side”. (Flickr photo by AndiH) The audience would [...]

A Fracking Understatement posted 31 Jan ’08, 8.30am MST PST on flickr Twitter is surely loosing fans left and right, and really ought to be sharing more info than this crappy screen. Heck, I;’d rather see the cat in the server picture. I know! It was the severe twittering at the ELI EDUCAUSE conference that did in the system (yeah right). Someone (Google? Yahoo) buy these guys and get them more servers or pipes or magic pixie dust. My habit is suffering, I might have to resort yo doing work. Twitter, get yer _____ together. The vultures are circling.

I’m woefully, no utterly, no massively badly behind on any sense of conference blogging at EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, but am eager for some plan time tomorrow to support back posting from the plane

No, the title is not a bad TSA joke (are there any good ones?), but a lovingly statement of joy for yet another cool photo tool. Piclens has been around a while but only for Safari on Max OS X, but now it works as an extension for Firefox on Mac or Windows. Piclens turns web pages from many photo services (flickr, Picassa, Facebook, MySpace, and more) into a stunning slide show, like iPhoto in a cool black turtleneck sweater. If you are on a site it supports (Flickr, Picassa, Photobucket, facebook, many more), a small triangle appears on a mouseover of an image. When you click the triangle, the image (and all linked images from the page) appear in a slideshow format: And a grid on the bottom lets you swing in more sets of images if you have a lot. When you click a single image, you can [...]

It has been a loooooong time since I looked at the Demotivational Posters from Despair, which I can remember from way back when the web was young and we spun HTML by hand. For a lover of sarcasm, this is one of the highest art forms, taking potshots at those motivational posters the PHBes put up in the office to “inpsire” your widget production. For some lost brain neuron snappage, I peeked back and plucked a few fun ones: Intimidation: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent, but you’d be a fool to withhold that from your superiors. Nothing like being the BIG dog!

Plenty of Instructions at the Alamo posted 7 Nov ’06, 9.40am MST PST on flickr Do quiet non smoking men only have to remove their hats? Why do women get to keep their hats on? Can we take pictures? This sign from the Alamo hopefully is not hung at the ELI conference venue. Tomorrow (or is it later today, I sure blew a bunch of time on twitter) I am bound for San Antonio for the EDUCAUSE ELI Annual Conference. This has become one of my favorite yearly events, much more human scale than the large circus of the EDUCAUSE main conference in October. In many ways it feels like our NMC Summer Conference, and this one is better ’cause I dont have to run anything, I just get to show up. But it’s valuable all because of the people who come to this conference, almost all of my favorite [...]

Ignore the Numbers? posted 24 Jan ’08, 2.26pm MST PST on flickr If Hasbro is strategic, they might do something smart to acknowledge almost 50,000 game players of Scrabulous. Or if they listen to lawyers and PHBs, they will piss of 50k people. I’m one. Cluetrain, anyone? Crikies, they can likely run the whole company off of selling Star Wars and Pokeman stuff, or will they stick it to word geeks?

Liar posted 24 Jan ’08, 12.49pm MST PST on flickr The web site istwitterdown.com is a big fat liar You cannot trust any web sites. Definitely not mine either. iscogdogdogblogfullofcrap.com? Yes

A while back I was excited to tinker with CommentPress, a WordPress template geared towards a format for online papers — see CommentPressing NMC Paper on Evolution of Communication. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, what CP offers is the feature for site visitors to attach comments at the paragraph level– this is all riding on a blog platform, but produces something rather not blog-like… well, sort of blog like. We did a trial for this at NMC for a white paper we had released in November; the first iteration of the online paper was via drupal on our main web site, where each chapter was done inside a drupal book content, so that each chapter was commentable. It works, but… as a CommentPress version, the comments can be more granular in context of the paper, and we picked up a lot of good comment activity [...]

So many social networks, so little time… I do not know about you, humble blog reader, but I have truly lost track of all the social networking sites I have signed up for over the last few years. I am using the term “social networking” sites loosely, maybe they are social software, maybe they are Web 2.0 apps, but what I am talking about are accounts I have set up for some specific purpose that have some component of connecting my actions with those of others, be they a large pool of strangers or people I designate as “in my network”. I was thinking about these web sites, my account covered with dust and cobwebs, from my attention neglect. Some are really good sites, some are “so-so” or just not essential. I don’t have a pattern or method, but being in a reflective mood today, i started thinking about my [...]