CogBlogged from ‘June, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by misterbisson Yep my internet grandchildren, Old CogDog remembers when e-mail was pretty much it for everything on online activity, long before junk mail, phishing, spam, twitter, facebook. blogs, heck before the web. It;s refreshing when something nice just lands in thr box, and makes you pause and smile. Today’s gift: Hi Alan, I am a secretary at [Xxxxxx], and a bit of a tech geek, so I have been following your blog since you presented at our [school]. Anyway, I am sure you have already seen this, but on the off chance you haven’t… This site will compare bing and google search results side by side. http://www.furia.com/code/bg/bg.cgi I picture the shy secretary secretly tweeting and blogging, and the fact that this person decided to share something forward the old fashioned way, well heck, it’s just making me smile. As I wrote in the reply: [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That keynote speaker, is he talking to me? Yep. In his ED-MEDIA presentation on Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment, slide 14, Stephen describes the process that is at the core of his activity (16,000+ posts since 2001!), which he named in honor of little ole me as ARRFF: or Aggregate, Remix, Repurpose, Feed Forward. Stephen was firing on all pistons, and had some great lines on the difference between complicated things and complex things, mesh networks versus star networks, the mystery of the hidden flash animation, the myth of solitary autonomy, some things about butterflies and more. You can catch the audio on his site at http://www.downes.ca/presentation/225 ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF!

I pulled out all the Hawaii in yer eye themes for the latest incarnation of my dog and dog show, presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the EDMEDIA 2009 conference (all links mentioned in the show are just a scroll away from that link) It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference: Hawaii 50+ Ways the trailer Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic? I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve been saying that annotating maps is one of the most under-used edtech tools, given the wonderful capabilities one can do (for free) in Google MyMaps– Gmaps are more than finding driving locations to the nearest sushi bar. The fact that you can mark up anywhere in the world with information you pin on a map, is (to me) astounding, but I’m kind of a map nerd. I’ve done a number of these maps for various reasons, but don’t always go back to them. But woah, my not so serious maps of places where people get Starbucks staff to say the word “large” (rather than foo foo ‘venti’) has like 18,000 views! That’s insane. Open public maps are fine for projects and such, but it means that people have license to remove your description (I saw one conference map where someone placed the [...]

This is my (shameless) pitch for some material for an upcoming presentation for the August 2009 OpenEd conference… also at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories modified from an original January 1935 issue found at the archive from Galactic Central Amazing Stories of Openness While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “Amazing Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and I ask you to share your own. While open courseware is important, there is much more that happens to us as individuals as we break old conventions and actually freely share our content online. I want to help promote the [...]

A few weeks ago twitter and some blogs were all a’ gushing about the demo of Google Wave like it was the new Shimmer, maybe even more than a dessert and a floor wax. I tweeted some snark about the hype — a bit foolishly since I had not seen the demo. I failed to heed my own warnings of judging a technology from the outside (well, I cannot help but be from outside, since all I have to go on is an 80 minute demo). Until today on the flight to Hawaii, when I watched the whole demo on my iPhone. I’m surprised the plane held steady with the number of times my jaw dropped or I yelled, “wow”. So I cannot do much except say wow– but–but–but if the wave does break (in the positive surfer sense), this could be a huge game changer. Not only does it [...]

It’s been 8 years since I have been able to say directly “Happy Father’s Day”, and 2001 was not the best one as Dad was in the middle of his 6 month bout with cancer. For a man who had some many names/nicknames– “Morris”, “Mike”, “Mickey”, “Blackie”– by any other name mattered not for the man I knew as Dad. A man who was not one for saying a lot in spoken words, he was almost a different person in the written form (those old fashioned things called “letters”), one thing was always sure is how proud he was of me and how much support he gave me for whatever choices I made in life, even the ones he did not understand. That kind of un-conditional love is the hallmark of Dad-dom. From his tribute I created after his death in August 2001, I never tire of the old 8mm [...]

Since it is already a week in the rear view mirror, this ought to be my last post about the 2009 NMC Summer Conference. Heck, it’s time to start thinking about 2010. However I wanted to record, primarily for my own sake, while fresh in my mind a recap of the social media tools we used (and other related factors) for our conference. I resisted using the title of “report card” ;-) cc licensed flickr photo shared by alumroot Most of this follows what we provided for attendees as our “conference tech tools”. Previously, On NMC…. For background, in the 3 previous NMC conferences I have been involved with since starting my job there in 2006- we’ve done mainly a “tag this conference” approach where we ask people to tag photos, web sites, blog posts e.g. 2006, 2007, 2008 where I cobbled together some summary pages using mainly my own [...]

In two days will be lifting off from Phoenix towards Honolulu for the 2009 ED-MEDIA conference which means I have 48 hours of presentation prep (actually more since I don’t present til Wednesday). I am doing another spin of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story again using hand coded RSS and CoolIris to run the show. I hear from folks who want easier ways to run presos in CoolIris (if you missed that boat, get the cool Firefox add on)- and there are more options now, including running it from a set of photos on your desktop, and likely the easiest, IMHO, is to create a flickr set and view that in CoolIris. A recent tweak I found, which adds zero to the presentation itself, but I could not resist, is the new ability to add your own custom logo to the CoolIris menu bar: This is just [...]

One dog tired blog trend here is kicking the cat about whether “blogging is dead”. After last week’s 2009 NMC Summer Conference, I have a resurgent optimism for the old long form (that is greater than 140 characters). cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog After our 2008 conference at Princeton, I was interested in finding a more coherent way of archiving or capturing the synopsis of the conference sessions- my dream would haveing at least one blogger doing it per session, but as a trial run this time, I decided to opt for inviting three “dedicated” bloggers to cover the plenary sessions (keynotes and the NMC Five Minutes of Fame). The draw would be a front row seat with electricity and a hard wire ethernet- if you are experiencing most conferences these days, you know that the norm (especially in hotel venues) is crappy wireless and about 3 public [...]