CogBlogged from ‘June, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog She called last week while I was traveling, and I must admit in the middle of a conference dinner when Mom called, I pushed her to voicemail. And then there was the rush of getting home and getting caught up in all the "stuff" that I realized without a high tech reminder I might not remember to call Mom. And of course, none of that really matters when I talk to her- she is the same as she ever was. Go Mom. Mom reads the blog but her method of commenting is calling me on the phone to tell me her comment. Mom can be 1.0, that’s fine. But I keep telling her I am writing for her, and to skip all the techno mumbo jumbo. Here’s your blog post, Mom!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was more than enough fun to co-author an EDUCAUSE Review paper with Bryan Alexander, but more fun to run a workshop on it at the 2009 NMC Summer Conference. We had a really active group of participants, and certainly no lightweights, as there is some pressure trying to stand up and tell something new to people like Gardner Campbell, Chris Lott, Nick Noakes, Phil Long, etc. What we did not have was enough time. Bryan and I had tossed together a long list of ideas which we tried to whittle down to the wiki page for the workshop: Before the workshop, we asked participants if they did not have them already, to have accounts on twitter, flickr, voicethread, glogster, xtranormal. As an experiment as we went around the room doing normal self intros, we asked them to also tweet an intro using [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I did this previously (see www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/831736263/ and www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/831736873/in/photostream/) by setting up my little Canon IXY and this new Canon EOS T1i face to face and in timer shutter mode. Cameras at 10 micropaces! So if you feel like you know something pretty well, what is there in restarting? I’ve been happy for 2 years doing most of my flickr photography with my little pocket Canon cameras: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’d not touched my digital SLR (a first generation Digital Rebel) in a long time, although a few months ago I did spring for a f1.4 50mm lens. But it was a pre-conference photography workshop at last week’s NMC Conference that hinted it was time to go back, relearn, We spent about 7 hours with Bill Frakes and Don Henderson making photos at Point Lobos. It was not really a [...]

Sure I want the newer camera and video capabilities. I want a compass. I want the 32Gb of space. I want the speeeeeeeeed. But like others who find the notion of an “upgrade” for buying the most recent model an interesting term….. apparently the pirates known as AT&T want to Ssssssuck more money out of the Apple love. I went to check how I could buy an iPhone. The “early upgrade” fee of $18 which is really $36 which is really $236 if you are a sap who owns a 3G. That $299 iPhone 3GS will cost me $499. It is explained really clearly: As a valued AT&T customer, AT&T can offer you an early iPhone upgrade with a new 2-yr commitment and an $18 upgrade fee. You may qualify for a standard iPhone upgrade on 01/19/2010. In the spirit of Tom Woodard, I am close captioning this for the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As you may know, after seeing her speak in 2008 at SXSW and WordCamp, I was rather determined to invite Kathy Sierra to keynote the 2009 NMC Summer Conference. I was a fan long before this as a follower of her blog Creating Passionate Users. I had donea parady of her graphic style in my Twitter Life Cycle which she did kindly acknowledge by comment or twitter. When I was at WordCamp, I had a chance to ask Matt Mullenweg how he managed to get her as a speaker, he told me all their communication was done via twitter direct message. So I thought it was worth a try and did manage to get her agreement (via twitter, it was about 5 DMs to send me her abstract) to come to NMC 2009 in Monterey.. I knew she was a different kind of [...]

moar funny pictures

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I took a pit stop on the way to Monterey for NMC2009 to grab some GigaPan scenes near Fisherman’s Wharf. What a lovely clear sunny day it was. First was a shot from the beach catching a lot of the crazy cold water swimmers: Yes, I got myself in the image…. Next, I took the walkway that extends from the end of Van Ness Avenue that curves out into the water, offering two great views – one of the city Skyline: I have one more (still slowly rendering) looking the other way sweeping from the Golden Gate to Alcatraz. These ones are not big because it was really worth only 3 rows of images, and the sweeps are wide (about 180 degrees, so there is that warped distortion. Still, the scenes are rich with detail. I hope to do a few down here [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Pug Father LMS. CMS. LCMS. La La La La La. Will they be toppled by a Wave? I feel rather blessed I have not had much responsibility or even been inside a Course Management System for a looooooong time. I aonnot say I find them inherently evil, but more inherently stupid. It’s been a while since I ranted on it, but after all this time the mere fact that the main organizational unit of a “learning system” not being the learning, nor the learner, but the course– is just plain programming design laziness It’s done that way because it is easier to put learning into neat mailbox slots, ones that can be tidily emptied at the end of a term. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Dean Terry The concept reminds me of the specious things very common n Phoenix called Master Planned [...]

It can be pretty: cc licensed flickr photo shared by prgibbs Our flags do it in the breeze cc licensed flickr photo shared by ladybugbkt It can be exciting! cc licensed flickr photo shared by (nz)dave It is a sign of old fashioned social networking cc licensed flickr photo shared by striatic It defines how information moves through media cc licensed flickr photo shared by mdezemery That’s all I know right now, or at least all that is not speculation.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My First Tweet is supposed to find your first chirped status, but it apparently fails if you have gone past the 3000 mark. There used to be a way to manually page back through your twitter archive by munging the page=XX value of the old URLs… but they took that away. So where do old tweets go? Nowhere, they still exist– but for whatever reasons, twitter.com does not provide access to them. So I searched my blog for references to URLs where I may have linked tweets, searching on http://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/ and thus found a reference to likely one of my first, as I started tweeting in late January 2007 — the URL still works but HTF can you find it from twitter’s interface? Bottom line- your old tweets are there, hung in suspended animation. Free the tweets! Free the tweets? Old Tweet lives [...]