CogBlogged from ‘January, 2008’

A long, long, long time ago (maybe not in a galaxy far, far away, it is about 90 miles from where I sit), maybe 2003, 2004, while in my role at Maricopa, I was doing workshops and trying to promote the potential of blogging (how novel, eh?). I created an online set of resources I called “BlogShop” …. = Blog + Workshop. It was hosted in MovableType on a server I ran at Maricopa at jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/blogshop : And that server has been 404 for over 2 years since I left my job there- praise the powers that be.. or rather Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine, I can access versions of all the content from Apr 2004-June 2006 or say enter the content (and link around) from one of the snapshots. I am still very far from the point of this post, but I always need to underscore, [...]

Photorealism Inside a Virtual World? posted 15 Jan ’08, 11.08pm MST PST on flickr Mix your worlds– this is from an event today we held in Second Life (114 people showed up in this place where "no one is ever around") — a demo of a Virtual Reality Room. This is a clever implementation of a Cubic Panoramic photo format, the basic construct of a QuickTime VR scene, and you can wrap it in a giant space inside Second Life. So here is our group of 40 some folks — this is a photograph from inside of Second Life (this was the second demo) perched like little toys on the round platform, completely enveloped by this scene of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago, or the "big shiny bean". You can move around or move your view around and explore an amazing amount of rich detail. it is quite [...]

I scan a lot of stuff via my networks, news readers, twitters, email… mostly it is just a humongous pile of disconnected bits, and sometimes, sometimes, strands come together to make sense. Huh? In the way back, the way way back of human memory storage I recall Ewan McIntosh writing about some new tool he was excited about called dopplr… I did not even recall what it did, but I get so much useful info out of his blog, that his mentioning of it registered something in my brain. About a week or so ago, another colleague I respect very much, Scott Leslie wrote some tweets and a blog post wondering if there was some web.0 tool that would make it easy to see what conferences colleagues in his net work were attending in the future. He took a stab at upcoming.org but was unsure if that did what he [...]

A Single Purpose Useful Web Site posted 12 Jan ’08, 9.16pm MST PST on flickr It exists solely to answer the deep question istwitterdown.com/

On my tale of switching media player plugins, D’Arcy’s comment about troubles with the Anarchy Media Player preview got my thinking, why be stuck with the lame graphic the plugin provides? Just make your own, and replace the vid-play.gif file inside /wp-content/plugins/anarachy-media/images — here is a test to see how mone looks- this is the default player if you do not provide a media image: Paddy the Wombat movie Isn’t that nice than:

Note to readers- mostly tedious details on WordPress nuts and bolts to follow- click next for the usual shallow barking and whining) WordPress Plugins are awefully powerful to let you easily add/subtract functionality form your own hosted WP site. But sometimes, they become a marriage that may be difficult to extricate yourself. For the NMC Campus Observer, our WP powered site for our Second Life antics, since its inception on March 2006, I had used PodPress, a rather full featured plugin to handle the embedding of audio, sometimes video. It has a huge list of features, and if you have ever looked, adds a lot os “stuff” to your pages. It has a lot of updates, and each replacement is a not so moderate upload of scads of files. Adding the audio/video content is not done via editing your content, but via a separate editing pane. But more problematic, I’ve [...]

A D- For Twitter Interface Design posted 11 Jan ’08, 8.29am MST PST on flickr I challenge anyone to convince me they can regularly use this drop down menu in twitter to send direct messages. Try it yourself. This interface item contains all of the people I follow, but it is presented in some random order. How the #*%@ can I find anyone? How much effort would it really take the bird cage programmers to add a freakin sort() command? Give me alpha order or give me Jaiku? Pownce? ?? This is criminally negligent interface design and earns a big fat Bloom County Pffffffffffft frfrom me.

It’s been almost a month since I blogged about the Chronicle of Higher Education, the “flagship” of the ivory tower had published on their web site misinformation that it had scooped from some other blog sites on a story about the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. The Chronicle wrote on December 17 that the 2007 report was “released last week” when it was published on January 21, 2007 at the annual EDUCAUSE/ELI Conference, where I am fairly sure I recall there were Chronicle reporters in attendance. I duly noted this in a comment. Apparently, the Chronicle website, labeled at the top as “The Wired Campus” does not get or pay attention to comments on its site, does not monitor blog trackback, does not use web 2.0 tools to monitor references to their stories from elsewhere on the internet. Man, are those ivory walls thick! I bet wireless signals cannot penetrate. My [...]

I leave it to Phillie Casablanca to issue the Twitter Commandments now available in pretty flickr form– to jump into parody mode, “I Give You These 15…. 10 Twitter Commandments”: I too think “commandment” is a bit strong, but the metaphor is not the point. And again, if you believe there are absolute “right” and “wrong” ways to be in this web land, then I may have some beachfront Arizona property to sell you. You make your own rules. But pay heed, less the Angel of Twitter Death (dressed as a pretty blue bird) may come knocking at your door. Let My Twitters Go! Okay, enough 10 Cs. I have two of my own tips to share here. The first has to deal with the disparity of some twitter back and forths. If @johndoe follows me but I am not reciprocating (perhaps I don’t know John?). If he tweets at [...]

Finally Get to Meet Cole posted 9 Jan ’08, 8.52pm MST PST on flickr I’ve "known" Cole Camplese for a number of years, though we had yet to meet… He came to speak at Maricopa last May, and wouldn’t you know it, the same week i was at University of Mary Washington. So our "knowing" each other is that way of crossing paths in blogs, wikis, email, del.icio.us, mutual colleagues in common etc. But today, I can cross this one off the list, because we got to meet as he spoke again at Maricopa, today at Mesa Community College on"Opportunities for Digital Expression". Cole is so connected to many powerful ed tech ideas and programs (geez, Google him and he occupies the entire first page of results), and today he spoke of the strategies and successes they have had at Penn State University, using his concepts of building on the [...]