CogBlogged from ‘August, 2008’

“Library” and “Gaming” were words that you likely saw rarely paired years ago. I was a library junkie as a kid, loved wandering stacks, walking out with piles of books, but it’s hard to shake the imprint that it was a place were the main noises you heard were were “Shhhhh” not “boing!” It’s hardly news to hear of a public library experimenting game setups to attract people to come, stay, be part of a library. A google on “public Library” and “wii” brings in.. oh… 383,000 results (no I have not looked at them all!). Is that astounding or ordinary? Is that yet another one of those fun measures I like to use to suggest the scale of the size of the net? I had a fabulous time in at the "Gaming in Libraries’" session of the Midwest Library Technology Conference, where they not only talked about games, they [...]

mod of flickr creative commons image: Diner Sign by D.F. Shapinsky (pingnews) That’s the camp title I came up for my short invited presentation this Saturday at WordCamp San Francisco. My blurb is: Among the 100+ million/gazillion blogs estimated that are “out there” quite a few belong to educators using several flavors of WordPress. Edublogs.org (WordPress MultiUser) alone provides free blogs to nearly 200,000 educators. The spread goes far beyond teachers blogging their experience. We’ll start with an appetizer of ways we at the NMC have tinkered with the WordPress recipe to power full featured websites. Moving on to the main buffet, we’ll sample ways WordPress is used to provide university hosted blogging services for students, as a place for elementary age students to stories, as electronic portfolios, as electronic publishing platforms, as nifty plugins that connect learning resources, as alternatives for course management systems, as resources for home schooled [...]

Dem Fancee iPhoners ar Fer Citee Folks? by cogdogblog posted 11 Aug ’08, 9.13am MDT PST on flickr I guess usn folkz that lives out here in da sticks cant get no iphones, heck we cant even get close to an Ai-Tee-N-Tee store. How the heckus kan I find dem fancy fones if I izz too far from da city? Gotta love the design of an interface that gives you feedback it does not permit. No, you have to HATE that. See, when the blogging is slow, I just splatter stuff directly from flickr. That’s what happens when you are lost in the frontier being the 50 mile radius of the AT&T magic circles.

No Respect for Stupid Spammers by cogdogblog posted 11 Aug ’08, 8.41am MDT PST on flickr Important URLs (mine) and unimportant ones (spammers) deliberately blurred. All other identification left readable intentionally Well, I doubt I would ever use the word "respect" in proximity of "spammer", but I am at least a tiny bit less turned to growl mode when a spam message shows some originality or cleverness. But stupid attempts at spam comment link insertion are just showing off how low the intelligence factor is among the bottom dwelling roaches, the very bowels of the blog ecosphere. So as an attempt at gaining access to my approval queue, "Tongsi" supposedly from Thailand, puts a lot of thought into my post on Warngling WordPress Multiuser to share this very powerful insight: WordPress MU is a clone of wordpress.com Really? What are the odds of that? As a WordPress user for 5 [...]

Cloud computing is the looming buzz word. All these magical “apps in the cloud” sound exciting… until the cloud fizzles on you. In June, we switched our email service over to the Google Enterprise version for Education, and until this morning at 11:04am PDT I was a happy camper. My IMAP email connection was failing to connect from the desktop. When I went to the web version I got a 502 server error. I then IM-ed the office in Austin to see if they were able to access email. Everyone there is okay. I tried another computer. I rebooted. I thought of prayer, but stopped short. Then I called the customer support number (11:30am) and spoke to someone who confirmed there were some intermittent outages, and I was assured their engineers were working on it. No problem, not having email for a short while was nice. Just for grins and [...]

Talking To Myself From an iPod to an Avatar in a Virtual World by cogdogblog posted 6 Aug ’08, 2.49pm MDT PST on flickr What does it mean if I am sending text messages from my iPhone to my second avatar in Second Life? It could mean some sort of techno-psychotic meltdown as my world coalesces to a virtual set of barbershop mirrors. Nope, I was testing AjaxLife, a web based client for communicating to other avatars in Second Life– which you can now do via an iPhone/iPod Touch. blog.ajaxlife.net/2008/08/iphones/ CDB and Zoraster had a grand time of utter babble as I was trying to get the photos to post a story n NMC Virtual Worlds: virtualworlds.nmc.org/2008/08/06/second-life-iphone/ I am taking a break soon from all this insanity!

Cant Get No (GraphJammin’) by cogdogblog posted 5 Aug ’08, 5.04pm MDT PST on flickr As a followup to my deeply philsophical blog post on the Tigger versus Eeyore Debate, I slaved for minutes in Excel to produce this visual. I sent it off to GraphJam a while ago, but I guess it did not make the cut. Now I feel like Eeyore.

There’s just somethings you don’t think of going together, but the web never fails to unveil, almost on a daily basis, an example of some use you would not have imagined the day before. So when Coop was visiting this weekend, she told me about a local group of Arizona folks participating in the 100 Pushup Challenge (we even did a practice set of the training under “less then ideal” beverage influences). This is a “program” for people to try and do something they doubt they can do- 100 consecutive pushups: Think there’s no way you could do this? I think you can! All you need is a good plan, plenty of discipline and about 30 minutes a week to achieve this goal! No doubt some of you can already do 50 consecutive push ups, but let’s face it, you’re in a big minority. Most of you reading this won’t [...]

As noted with much excitement last week, I am going to WordCamp August 16. It all got notched up a bit now when I got an email from Matt (yes that ma.tt – what a URL! I looked into getting al.an but the Dutch refused to go for such a short domain). Anyhow (with a nudge from James who is skipping out on my offer to buy him a beer in San Francisco), Matt asked me to do a presentation on WordPress and education. Do you think any educators use WordPress? I thought so. Some Reverend may tell me of 1500 examples at UMW. It is a short preso, (15-25 minutes), but I am casting my plea out onto the waters for some folks to share their most favorite, compelling uses of WordPress in education. Not just “a teacher has a blog” but something unique, like the whole saga of [...]

Lots of new iPhone/iPod apps for accessing Flickr. Using now Exposure from connected flow (same folks that make iPhoto/aperature export plugin). Blogging from iPod for the fun of it!