CogBlogged from ‘March, 2008’

It was with a smile I just saw the title in my RSS reader that I knew that another initial skeptic, George Siemens, had followed the path I charted in April 2007 as the Twitter Life Cycle. I have seen so many people, myself at front of the list, first see twitter and remark, “That i the stupidest thing I have ever seen on the web (well maybe after the hamsters)… who in their right mind would waste time doing this?”. If they stay at it long enough, they climb the curve above, perhaps on a different slope and maybe not alway at a plateau. But I lost track of how many colleagues I have seen who have done this. So George’s post today inspired by to create a wiki where others can join the honorary list of People Who Climbed the Twitter Curve. So add your name today at: [...]

photo credit: ekai Don’t miss out on the 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups – early registration ends this Sunday. Stop reading (or at least skim), and register now. This is another one of the NMC’s online conferences, and to fit with the theme, we are even mashing up our venues between the 3D world of Second Life and the web environment of Adobe Connect. At least four sessions, plus the opening reception and a mashup showcase (including a screening of student created mashup video) will take place in Second Life — but all Second Life sessions will also be streamed live to Connect, so you can pick where to attend. With events taking place April 1-3 including keynote speakers Wayne Hodgins (Director of Worldwide Learning Strategies at Autodesk) on The Future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup and Susan Smith Nash (eLearning Queen!) on Educational Uses of Mashups. See the [...]

It’s well over a week that my first experience attending SXSW Interactive ended, and a blog post is just wriggling out. I wavered, wafted, and decided on a different, lazy (lame) strategy… to just soak it all in and write something prophetic later. Well, this will likely fall short on most accounts. And this is also a year when I am trying a few conferences out of the normal education technology realm, so I was wanting to be more reflective and… okay, I am lazy. The idea of doing detailed sessions posts was not all attractive; earlier in my blogging I would try and do session blogging, but am not enthralled at being a stenographer. Second, I decided on a new tech strategy- I left the laptop in the hotel, and “lugged” (meaning slipped it in a pocket), my new iPod Touch. The hangup there was the wireless network at [...]

The comment stream is a raging torrent (121+) to Al Upton’s dire situation of his miniLegend bloggers being squashed by the government– what is telling now are comments from the miniLegends themselves (un-edited):

That Was Bowling by cogdogblog posted 15 Mar ’08, 1.46pm MDT PST on flickr "That’s a pretty…. wild style of guitar playing, how’d you learn that?" "That was bowling" "Yeah, bowling.. I could tell" I’m digging the British Invasion exhibit at the Museum of Music, Infotainment Island, in Second Life at slurl.com/secondlife/Infotainment%20Island/65/228/43 Join us 9:00 AM PT Monday March 17, as Bucky Barkley gives us a demo of the museum for the NMC Campus Teachers Buzz session. MMmmmmmmmmy Generation! And if you don’t dig The Who, they have the Beatles, Stones, Animals, Dave Clark Five, and more old rockers.

Sometime last year before my trip to Australia, I discovered the amazing work Al Upton was doing with year 3 students at at Adelaide Australia primary school. The 8 and 9 year old “miniLegends” were blogging, doing creative writing, and getting a fabulous experience in web technology. So it was exciting this year when Al put out a call via twitter for educators around the world to be “coaches” for this year’s miniLegends, asking people to adopt one students and agree to provide regular comments/feedback. Besides signing up myself, I echoed the call and a bunch of folks, particularly my colleagues here in Arizona, stepped right up. Al had written before how he had taught students how to be safe online and how he had gotten written permission from parents of all the kids. Let me repeat this- the parents supported this program. And like many people who had followed [...]

My SXSW blogging will likely be after the fact- lots to cover. The plan to use the iPod Touch works in theory, but wireless access has been sporadic. FWIW Pocketweets has been unusable (never posts) Hahlo.com and iTweets.net better

Steven Johson and Henry Jenkins by cogdogblog posted 8 Mar ’08, 7.41pm MST PST on flickr Opening remarks by Steve Johnson and Henry Jenkins were excellent! What a killer lineup! And look, no Powerpoint! It was just Steve and Henry having a conversation in front of maybe1000 people. Jenkins is just so articulate in a plain speak approach and also very passionate about media, youth, technology, creativity. Johnson is also poignant and draws from an obvious great well of experience in digital culture. I am struggling to remember all the quotes (rummaging for a few tweets): Johnson says TV like Lost and The Wired show that TV is not as bad as we thought it was getting (calls “The Wired ‘Hill Street Blues’ on steriods- asks Jenkins which he likes better. Now asks the audience- mixed response. Jenkins: “The Wired is best show in the box; Lost is best show [...]

Late in the afternoon I lurked in the session on “Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs” a panel session with Tony Walsh (Phantom Compass), Dan Hon (Six to Start), Dee Cook (addlepated.net) all people involved with creating top shelf ARGs (look it up yourself). It seemed the audience was pretty knowledgeable about Alternate Reality Games, and the session covered ground on some of the successes of ones like ilovebees and World Without Oil. The intent was to talk about how what works well in video games can be used in ARGs. There was a bit of discussion about the numbers of players (not remembering exactly) and some questioning about how many of them were active. Someone in the audience wanted to know the business case/benefit for runnning one. Another question was about the implications of ARGs that are so real people think that someone is really missing or [...]

My first day on the ground at SXSW- a conference on a Texas sized scale! The Austin convention center is a massive city. Early notes- they are really organized with staff and helpful people every step of the way trough registration; only took about 12 minutes to move through long line. Double bonus points because after your badge, you go elsewhere to get the program and the schwag bag… but you can come back later to get the bag, you dont have to lug it around (thanks to tip from Christene who I met in line). My bummer is this morning my trusty Canon PowerShot seemed to have powered up in my pocket and jammed the optics. I can only shoot in Digital Macro mode. Crikies! Okay, first panel session on Filching Design: When the Shoe Fits with Skip Baney (Apple), Lindsay Simon (Google), and Luke Wroblewski (LukeW Design/Yahoo). First [...]