CogBlogged from ‘October, 2008’

More iPhone love. If you cannot stand it, go read a blog post about Android. I just gave Recorder for iPhone a quick test and it so rocks! For 99 cents, the price of a sappy Abba song in iTunes (or a Led Zeppelin anthem, just to be fair), I have an audio recorder on my iPhone: It could not be easier to use. You click the big giant button labeled “record”- you even get the levels as a visual display as you record: When you are done (yes, do you remember step 1, click the red button??), you can then email the audio file if you wish, but better! You can sync it via wireless to your computer- when you activate the sync feature, it gives a local network address you can pull up in a web browser, and see a directory of your audio files on the phone: [...]

I’m so proud of my big (cause she’s 6 years older) little (cause she is shorter than me) sister who has taken up blogging in the best way. Having just retired from 30+ years of governemtn work, she and her husband are off on a real adventure. Having been active sail boat explorers up and down the Chesapeake Bay, they, along with Bailey the Sheltie, have left the confines of the bay, and are going to be living on their 38 foot sail boat and going down the Atlantic coast and over to the Bahamas or where-ever their curiosity takes them. But what is cool is that Harriet has taken up blogging their expedition as a WordPress.com blog: Every day she has been posting updates of their travels, where they stayed, who they met, and lots of photos, even a Google Map with pins marking their progress. I think she [...]

Talk about dusting off my memory neurons; one of my first real rock concert experiences was seeing ACDC at some giant venue in DC. The “boys” from down under are still kicking- just found via mashable something really wacky and thus of interest here at CogDogBlog- the first rock video played out in an Excel spreadsheet: AC/DC smashes through your firewall with real rock ‘n’ roll! Download the spreadsheet to watch the Rock N Roll Train video in all it’s Low Definition™ glory! I had to stop what I was doing (eating donner) to try it out. Argghhhh it of course does not work on Mac OSX. Went to my PC. Argghhhh OpenOffice had issues too. But if it worked, it would be something like the video: And you can pretty much watch videos of their entire new album at http://www.acdc.com/acdc101/ While I am nostalgic, and still smile at Angus [...]

image based on Creative Commons licensed flickr photo by Kevin Lim The next NMC Virtual Symposium is Nov 4-6, but early registration ends tomorrow, so don’t miss out. Rock the Academy, the twelfth in the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia, will explore the kinds of ideas and activities that are changing the shape of education today. Creative Commons flickr Photo by Kevin Lim Revolutionary practices are breaking apart old models of teaching and learning; students are using new tools to construct meaning and contribute to the design of their own education; teachers are sharing the power that has traditionally been theirs alone. Examples of unconventional, yet highly effective, methods of teaching and learning may be found in pockets all over the world, at all levels of education. When the multitude of examples are taken together, we begin to sense a profound change in the making that will alter our concept [...]

I just noticed on uploading a really short video to flickr that the buttons at the top provides an embed code for copy pasting code to put in your own web site. It’s probablt been there forever, and everyone else on the planet knows it, but it just fell into my radar today. Sometimes, it is really fine to be on the dull not bleeding edge. For what it’s worth, in its full cinematic glory, a magna opus in 36 seconds, Windy Day in Strawberry… and look hard for the trans-character tension overlain by a hero mythic subversion ethos (trying to fake film talk, this is just point and shoot video of things blowing in the wind). Oh cool, the ending of the video provides a comment link. Hey! Wow, it would be nice to have a non-spam comment. Yep. Sure would be nice. No, not you “Aunty” Social you [...]

I had some code fun in September creating the Five Card Stories site, which provides a simple activity in visual storytelling by making a visitor select from five rounds of randomly chosen images to string together as a story told only in pictures — now the source code is available from Google Code (I would have liked to call it alpha version 0.0000001). I designed it somewhat general, as I had two different ways I thought of getting images- one from pulling ones from a given tag in flickr and the other were taken from ones submitted at the Learning 2.008 Conference in a ning forum. The source code provides what you need to run the flickr version. On my site, there are now 516 photos people have tagged to share and as I write this, there are 290 stories that people have created and saved on the site– alot [...]

Linktributions Ahoy? by cogdogblog posted 21 Oct ’08, 5.27pm MDT PST on flickr Are more people using "my made-up term? Will it some-day make it as a Word of the Year? (hah, down ego, down….) I got a nice little tweet from @eemann who discovered linktribution and Google now finds about 1400 instances– though I am sure about 800 are from my own blog, and another 580 are from people’s blogs where my trackbacks have landed there, but that leaves maybe 20 people who picked it up. Long-tail meme? I still assert the power of the simple mighty tiny link. Likewise, I am franchising out to twitterbution given a twitter shout out and/or a link to a tweet-status when someone gives you something worthy via twitter. Already has 34 of them! Or is it thanking them via twitter? I dunno. Send your link love today. Everyone loves inbound links, so [...]

more the engrish! This might be in Texas.

flickr cc licensed photo by Kevin Steele I grew up immersed in, surrounded by, bombarded by television. As much as I complain about the generalizations of the “digital natives” I accept that somehow the absorption I had in television as the primary source of media must have shaped me. Somehow. I saw a lot of TV. Somehow blatantly obvious, television as I knew it is long dead. And that’s okay. Growing up in Baltimore, my mom told me I learned my numbers from the TV Guide; fortunately, in Baltimore, the major network channels were 2, 11, and 13, so I guess I learned addition from there as well. I watched a lot of cartoons, a lot of Bugs Bunny, and perhaps I was seeded for a future in Arizona based on the landscapes the Roadrunner ran through. When I was diagnosed diabetic at age 7, my grandmother offered a reward- [...]

Found via a comment on an earlier post, Hugh Garry has a short video with footage shot at a music festival, overlain with a “narration” form his tweets at the event, converted via Speech to Text: As described there, Whilst making Shoot The Summer I’ve been thinking a lot about the capabilities of the mobile in film making and story telling. I Twittered my thoughts at the Cambridge Folk Festival then converted it to audio using my Mac’s text to audio recognition software. I then dropped it over clips filmed on my mobile phone. The results are quite interesting. It’s really not that complex a task, and to me, would make for an interesting assignment for a film/media class. More details at Telling Stories with Twitter. Add to the interesting pile, Shoot the Summer: ‘Shoot The Summer’ is a film documenting a summer of festivals shot entirely on mobile phones. [...]