CogBlogged from ‘June, 2008’

It’s been frequently noted that the response effect of twitter is not a simple matter of opening an account and yelling for help; as a new tweeter you get the tree-falling silently effect. That said, I feel overwhelmingly fortunate to put out a single request and get a string of responses. With this, and despite the annoying flitterings of the service, I must admit to my good friend and colleague Scott Leslie, that I’m not quite ready to lead a charge to another ship. And even more warming, is that in the replies to my question today, I only know half of the responders. That’s right, people I don’t know are trying to help me! One pitfall can be squeezing a complex request into 140 characters… i like the thought process of stripping it down to the bare essentials, lose the articles, commas, spelled out “and”s and get clever with [...]

Hordes of edubloggers and more are descending on San Antonio for the NECC 2008 show (“the National Educational Computing Conference, the world’s largest educational technology conference for teachers and technology coordinators”). They will be a’blogging, twittering, flickring, tagging, ning-ing… see Vicki Davis’ coverage plan via netvibes. Colleagues like Hey Jude Judy O’Connell are winging in from Sydney. It’s not on my gig list, but will keep tuned via all the channels. I got a bit reflective, and remembered going to NECC 1995, when I was only 2 years into the instructional technology game, and green as can be. I cannot exactly remember how I chose to go to, but bet a large part was because it was in Baltimore, and I got to be a tourist in my home town. And I actually found my original notes from that conference which were kind of humorous to read. I remember being [...]

Setting Up Gigapan by cogdogblog posted 22 Jun ’08, 8.37pm MDT PST on flickr I set out today to give a test ride to a new camera device, the GigaPan, a computer controlled camera mount designed to make large detailed images of landscapes and such. However, it;s a long story, but I am without my spare battery and charger for my Cabon Powershot (left it in some hotel on the east coast), so I did not have juice for a panorama. This spot is on the edge of the Mogollon Rim looking south over the town of Pine, Arizona. I will return when I have juice! I am fairly sure I would lose my own head were it not attached. Sometime earlier this year, I lost the battery charger that came with my Canon SD800, and had a generic one purchased at Best Buy (I had ordered an original Canon [...]

While swapping google map locations with my new buddy Rowan, I notice a few new buttons on Google Maps- you can now see embedded links to WikiPedia articles about places and links to photos (enable under the More button), plus there is a direct link to view a map location in Google Earth. So being the curious type, I zoomed in on my location near Strawberry, and explored…

CDB readers know my affinity for stories of web serendipity; strange or wonderful connections made that otherwise would have not happened without this “internet” thing- here’s another gem. I’ve forgotten where I first stumbled across on slideshare Power Point 20th Anniversary Cinderella. In 19 slides of lengthly bullet points, inscrutable charts, and exposition, it tells the well-known fairy tale in all the ways we know that PowerPoint can be used to numb an audience. | View | Upload your own Last summer when I was assembling my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, it struck me that for a section on How Do I Come Up with a Story Idea, it would be a fun way of showing a non-example of how one should tell a multimedia story. In doing the 50 Ways as a presentation, showing Cinderella.PPT never fails to get the audience rolling in laughter- the [...]

The subtitle might be, “Curse You Twitter For Letting Me Down”. Or much worse than, “curse you”. But actually, its more of a shrug. As much as I like poking fun at flickr’s flakiness, it does not cause me loss of sleep or hair, as pretty much it is not truly essential to me work/life. But more than that, the vagaries of external sites can either break your heart or spurn you into adrenaline mode to find a fix or just … I promote the use of such tools, but its not the foundation I build my sand castles in, and the hard lesson is that the sand can shift under your feet. What can you do? Cry? Pray? Drink? What should follow here is a bit of sharing of two social media sites that flopped on me surrounding the 2008 NMC Summer Conference. But first a bit on the [...]

No Blog No Read by cogdogblog posted 20 Jun ’08, 9.11am MDT PST on flickr With travel and being busy at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference, my blog posting sputtered off between June 7 and 14 with no posts, and my stats show the consequences. Interesting as there is lag in readership? Peak was on June 9 and then the drop off. If you dont post, people don’t read. Seems simple enough But today I am crawling back into action, as it were, with no idea what may emerge. When in a rut, I often do as I am today, blog something directly from flickr, as it takes minimal effort.

The Bridge by cogdogblog posted 28 Oct ’07, 8.29pm MDT PST on flickr Sydney If you are in Sydney July 19, how about meeting up with myself and NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith? We are traveling down under July 5-20 as we launch a new Horizon.au project with a meeting in Melbourne (a Horizon Report focused on education technology in Australia) and we are visiting lovely Sydney on the last leg of our trip. On our last day, a few people are gathering to (weather allowing) do a beach walk organized by Sean Fitzgerald and then Angela Thomas is arranging a dinner in the evening somewhere in Darling Harbour. If you are interested in either, leave a comment here or email me (cogdogblog at gmail dot com) and we’ll keep you posted of plans. We’ve had a few banterings on Facebook, but her is the semi-official plan– this [...]

Button for Jim Groom by cogdogblog posted 15 Jun ’08, 7.54pm MDT PST on flickr Her ya go, Reverend Jim, fresh off the Photoshop machine, courtesy of a "punk rock saved my life" pin found at Wooden Shoes Books and Records on 4th Street in Philly. As if we needed more blog fluff for edupunk, but I could not resist doing some Photoshoppery. FWIW, the CogDogBlog machine is in sputtering mode following the full tilt experience of the 2008 NMC Summer Conference at Princeton. There’s a lot of back blogging to do from that event, and we have some great media to share soon on the NMC web site — but it was a fantasmic experience, and at the same time, I lacked the will, drive, energy to be blogging, and even the photos are a few days lagging. I’m doing some R&R a few days in Philadelphia and visiting [...]

Just quickly came across a link to Wordle, a tag cloud generating site, which provides some interesting layout options for visual display of tag clouds- generated form text cut and paste into the tool or via a del.icio.us account. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Here is a quick one based on my del.icio.us account: With a layout option of random orientation… linktribution to information aesthetics