CogBlogged from ‘September, 2008’

What a Dumpling by cogdogblog posted 20 Sep ’08, 8.09pm MDT PST on flickr Just one piece of dinner at at JC’s restaurant in Shanghai It’s been a whirlwind week for my first visit to Shanghai (an Asia while I am at it) to participate and speak at the Learning 2.008 Conference at the Shanghai Community International School. The blogging has been light because (a) I’ve had more fun taking photos; (b) it was a busy 2.5 days of full on conference activity; and (c) and I seem to have come down with another travel induced variant of the CogDogWog that had me a year ago coughing like a barking dog across Australia. So like some of the scrumptious chinese meals we’ve had, like last night,.where dish after dish of steamed dumplings, stir fried meat, exotically prepared vegetables are plopped onto a giant lazy susan, here are a few random [...]

Jeff Watching Jakes film Brian by cogdogblog posted 18 Sep ’08, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr Learning 2.008 EduBloggerCon (Shanghai) www.edubloggercon.com/Learning+2.008+Edubloggercon Before the opening of the Learning 2.008 conference, a group of conference attendees and other local bloggers met up for breakfast and conversation about out favorite topic. Not only were there pictures and conversation, Jeff Utecht was also ustreaming the session and the 20+ so remote participants who were rather active in being part of the discussions. Following this, I met up with Robert, a journalism teacher here at Fudan University, who was introduced to me by Pat Delaney, and we spent a few hours together over lunch and walking around the French Concession area, and discussing blogging, etc. In the evening, we ambled over to the Shanghai International School for the opening of Learning 2.008 http://learning2cn.ning.com/ conference with the 10 Minute TED Style talks– twas a fun series [...]

Curious Beggar by cogdogblog posted 17 Sep ’08, 5.16pm MDT PST on flickr This little guy was curious about the gigapan I had set up to do this shot gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=9189 I gestured to take a picture and he smiled, then he stuck his hand out for change. Now I was stuck, except the only thing in my wallet were 100 Yuan bills! I had to comply, so ran to a drink stand to buy some water to get him some change, He is kind of cute One of the more fascination aspects of being inn China has been watching people and their faces. Some of the faces are so somber, some so expressive. Without any understanding of the language, it’s fun to try and guess their conversations, as you see people laughing, arguing, chatting, playing games… Today was another wandering day in the city, taking a cab down to the [...]

Fresh Delivery by cogdogblog posted 16 Sep ’08, 1.06pm MDT PST on flickr Old Town, Shanghai Hello from here, a long way from there. It’s the second morning here in Shanghai, and my mind is already reeling, less so from the travel and wear and tear from the sardine transport of United Airlines Economy class, and more so from the feeling, reassuring, of how different other parts of the world are from what we call home. I have two days ahead of the Learning 2.008 conference which brought me here, to try and “see” a teeming city of perhaps 24 million people. Yesterday, conference organizer and generous Shanghai veteran Jeff Utecht took me, and fellow presenters Clarence Fisher and Brian Crosby on a morning tour of his old “neighborhood” which included a walk through what is coyly map labeled “Old Town” which truly is not the glass scraper part of [...]

Headed for China 1.0 by cogdogblog posted 14 Sep ’08, 10.36am MDT PST on flickr Chinatown in San Francisco is always a fun place to "visit" but in a few hours I am headed for the real deal or China 1.0, boarding a plane at SFO that will teleport me directly (well 12 hours directly) to Shanghai, where later in the week I am attending/participating in the Learning 2.008 conference. Excited is an understatement for my first visit to Asia, and this is leg 1 of 3. Following this is a week in Hong Kong and another one in Japan. And no jokes about how they adore dogs in China, ok? And for some reason I cannot pass the irony that the entrance here to Chinatown is on “Bush” street, where the welcome sign is “Do not walk” ;-) Look for the volume of photo flow to escalate from me– [...]

Well, “anything” is loosely termed. I run about 6 different MediaWiki sites for the NMC, and I have to remind myself alot that the software is a huge black box (it works super) and I am pretty sure the things I have done tap maybe 8% of what it is capable of doing. One of the limits is the kind of content you can put in the editing pane. Sure you can add additional tags you want to allow, but even a security lazy bum like me is not interesting in allowing any person to add <script> tags in there. Danger, Danger, MediaWiki Robinson! So in prepping some new things for the wiki that we have reset for the 2009 NMC Horizon Project– we don’t delete the old stuff or hide them in edits; each year I migrate content to its own namespace, e.g. http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Horizon2007:Main_Page and http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Horizon2008:Main_Page. I’d like to [...]

Doh! I wrote this two days ago and forgot to click publish! n00b! It’s the first week of classes for the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course and I am already lapsing behind. As a Massively Open Online Course, maybe I cna get lost in the crowd of 2000 gazillion students. Would you believe a dog ate my homework? Despite my success at gaming the school system on high school and college (meant- learning how to take standardized tests well), I’ve become a sloppy lazy learner in my adult years. I have a lot of trouble with structured courses because… everything I have learned in my last 16 years on the ed tech field has been through what my teachers are going to call Connectivism- I learned what I needed, when I needed, from networked sources. I did miss the first emails, overlooking I had to sign up to get them. [...]

Oh yeah, it does pay to give stuff away! Or at least to put half baked ideas “out there”. After just posting late last night about my crude 5 card flickr story demo I lamented the problems in code I had in easily getting random flickr photos from a given tag, John Krutsch emailed and offered some code to do what I needed more elegantly. I was going through gyrations to pull photos from an RSS feed, which meant I could only grab newer pix; John’s code scavenges all the photos by cleverly parsing the results of the flickr search results. I plunked in all his code and got all of the duct tape in place and was stunned that I did not have my usual round of 20 PHP typos in a row. It did work as advertised, though I notice every time it had to do the search, [...]

Wow are my PHP coding pencils dull, but I’ve had some fun last 2 nights getting them back (we’ll see how sharp they really). I have a really crude, ugly, unformatted demo of a tool I want to use later this month for a session at the Learning 2.008 conference. So I am asking (a) for feedback on the idea I think is brilliant may not be; (b) contribution of some content by simple tagging. This blog post will wander a bit on concept and sometimes take a nose dive into code but may surface again. I’ve been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora‘s workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative [...]

Rashmi’s Vote Did Not Help by cogdogblog posted 6 Sep ’08, 10.58am MDT PST on flickr Sigh. I did not win the MacBook Air in the Slideshare Best Presentation Contest, and did not even get close with what only I thought was clever as The Last PowerPoint. And how sad for Guy Kawasaki, I don’t think he ever received the important subliminal messages I left for him. Even rashmi’s vote was not big enough to get me on the marquee. Oh well, it was fun trying. I blame my misfortune squarely on the bad mojo in PowerPoint. It might be the last time I use it myself..