CogBlogged from ‘February, 2008’

Stretched Out posted 12 Feb ’08, 12.00am MST PST on flickr Fresa uses my laptop bag for a pillow Just to be clear, Fresa said, “Start blogging again” so the gates are opening….

It’s been about a week since I launched this year’s week of no blogging / only commenting. This is hardly an exact, precise activity, and I am honored by the wide range of incoming links (the non spam variety, of course). So according to coComment, I posted 57 comments this week, admittedly a lot were on flickr- but they count, right? Of course no one has caught on that this is my twisted devious plot to escape coming up with something to blog for a week, right? Just run around and drop comments elsewhere. Maybe it could be a month… So if I was a proper academic or researcher, I might have some grand conclusion to postulate here, something bullet-point worthy. Nada. To be honest, it is less to discover any grand theory. I recognize how powerful it is when I get a legit comment, and this is my way [...]

This is the third year I am doing my roughly annual tradition of taking a week with the blog posting on this site put on “mute” (or muzzle) as I will take all my writing to blog via the comment space of other sites. This is the notion of “comment blogging” I found long ago, and something I hope helps to underscore the power and benefit of putting your energy into participating in the blogs of others, of making it an active social process. If all we did was post on our own, we’d just all be the screaming fanatics on the corner. So I first did this in 2006 and it served, among many things, to be a good spring board for going to my first Norther Voice Conference in ’06 Last year in February I hoisted my week of blog abstinence and I always feel energized at the [...]

It’s been a while since I barked about the clumsiness of LinkedIn but just had another one of those near deaths by lame interface design. But before that, i am still trying to fathom what LinkedIn offers beyond the ability to just link. It seems utterly recursive with no ending condition to stop the loop. I am sure I am missing the supreme benefit, and get tripped up by their spurious claims of benefit. But the cart is getting ahead of the dog and we are barreling down a steep grade…

January Crop of 366 photos posted 1 Feb ’08, 10.20pm MST PST on flickr One month down for the year’s pledge of 366 daily photos posted to flickr (plus one into February), 8.1% done! This has been so much fun to do; making time and effort each day to think visually, and look for novel things to snap pictures of. And I’m glad to say it truly ash been one a day, no backfilling (okay a few were at 2am the next day). D’Arcy started something incredible as there are 35 others in the pool!

My WiLD SeLF posted 1 Feb ’08, 8.59pm MST PST on flickr Attractive, eh? I made this with www.buildyourwildself.com/ a site apparently sponsored my the New York Zoo and Aquarium, more likely aimed at kids than people my age. its a flash based avatar creation web app, you starte with basic choices of adding hair, eyes, mouth, etc, all human variations, but as you go down the list, the choices become a bit more "animalistic" Linktribution to Chris Betcha

This past tuesday was the official release of the NMC 2008 Horizon Report like we do every year at the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference (hey Chronicle, that is TUESDAY, JANUARY 29 2008!). The full report is available, for free, as a 256k Creative Commons sprinkled PDF. Please download and share pervasively. As somewhat of an experiment, it was actually posted more than a week earlier on the Horizon Wiki, where in fact, all of the Horizon Project’s work has been there, in the open, from the start of this year’s process in August 2007. Not one blogger picked up on the early listing of the shortlist, the 12 finalists. But a number of y’all did find the PDF last week and started biting into it… and we like that. We are not obsessed of keeping a shroud of secrecy on the report before we let it loose at ELI. We had [...]

If I am not President, I sure am on the Board of Directors of the Bryan Alexander Fan Club. So it becomes even more amazing when he wants to dine with me before his workshop and get feedback on his plans for the session he did at the EDUCAUSE ELI conference on Web 2.0 Storytelling. Bryan has such range in his expertise and real literary and knowledge depth, while my last read might have been a lame Stephen King retread. But that’s beside the point. Somehow I was able to get myself in the door of Bryan’s session as a helper, so I was an interloper. Despite my rants of a need to change the lecture mode in conference sessions, Bryan is one I can easily sit back and listen to because he brings such original ideas, out of the norm examples, and a thoughtful framework, that it is a [...]