CogBlogged from ‘November, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Darko Pevec While I acknowledge the value (and usually am responsible for) being able to publish archived recordings of webinars, I must admit the grand total of recorded webinars that I have gone back to watch is… (drum roll, counters flipping) Zero. Partly its laziness, but I never seem to carve the time to go back and watch webinar re-runs. I fully expect people to reply in comment form, and let me know they do, so I am not discounting the value. I was more wondering what the viewings are on re-runs. I took a peek at the stats on some of our recent Connect Webinars, and saw later view counts of between 2 and 12, roughly about 10% of the original audience sizes. Actually that’s not bad; the archives extend your audience to 110% of those show who participated (or at least logged [...]

Follow me through this path of incongruities. We live in this hyper-connected modern age, where larger than every managed before information is retrievable, sharable, around the world. All that Did You Know stuff. Standing at the precipice of the Web of Data possibly soon accessible via one of those hand flying Minority Report interfaces. Perhaps. The fly in the ointment, the kink in the gear shafts, is that, it feels, like almost on a daily basis, I face an increasing amount of inefficiencies in the things we have to deal with in daily life. Perhaps it is just taking longer, but I see so many places that are not taking advantage of all the savings of time, money, and human effort the cool tools can offer. Look at Exhibit “A”… This is a scan of a piece of paper that is a xerox copy of my immunizations as a child, [...]

Nothing is more sweeter than the serendipity of finding something online that grabs a breath from you, and such that you drop what you are doing to dig deeper. This has only happened to me, oh, estimating (counting on fingers…) maybe 18672 times. One more. A day or so ago, on scanning the flow of tweets, I saw this message from Roland Tanglao Who knows why one tweet grabs your mouse as opposed to another? But with that I was fallen into a fun time of exploring the noticings site which taps into many of my interests- flickrs+daily photos+geolocation+a bit of gaming, with a simple premise “the game of noticing the world around you” The elegant aspect of noticin.gs is that it has cleverly simple rules. Your goal is to notice details, objects, interesting things, lost items in your surroundings. Take a photo, post to flickr, geo-tag the location, and [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by MikeOliveri I spew a lot of words (and typos) through this blog, but I’ve always harbored idyllic dreams of writing something…. more. But the epic idea has failed to materialize, so I am taking another interesting route by signing up for National Writing Novel Month or as most of the in crowd know as, NaNoWriMo. The basic premise is you write 50,000 words of a draft novel in 30 days, but track your progress in the NaNoWriMo web site, which employs almost every social media and support system one can think of– and it is massive. Its not with some expectation to toss out the 50k words and soon be sitting pretty on the Oprah show with the new novel, its (seems) more about just the exercise and rigor of regular writing towards a goal– not all that different from the sport I really [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Xuilla It’s like pissing in an ocean of piss I’m probably over-saturating, but until I can figure out something useful to do in Google Wave, its more fun to piss on all the silliness I see about it. I peek in every few days, and mostly I see Google Waves talking about Google Wave. Yawn. So far the main use is some place to have back and forth conversations, nothing any more novel than the email it is supposed to replace, listservs, web boards, twitter, etc. Or a place for people to try toss in media or various widget like things. Its a mess. Also, I’ve noted the version available to the public is not the same one featured in the 80 minute preview video. For example, we have no tool to “split” a conversation, so we are stuck with simply reply and tack [...]

    cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog and cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been a week since returning from Barcelona, where I was like 5 Yahtzees in a row luck enough to be a part of the Open EdTech 2009 summit co-organized by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). I remember hearing the raves of the 2008 meeting from my colleagues that got to go. This was actually my first trip to Europe since attending a Geology conference in Germany back in 1990. It seems patently obvious, but was slightly eye widening in a place where (a) there is visible history going back 3 or 4 times the history of the US and (b) the driving distance proximity of different speaking and culturally’historically countries makes for a different feel than we get in what can seem like ironically isolated vastness [...]