16 Posts from November 2009

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Webinar Re-runs?

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 […]

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Suffer Me No Inefficiency

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. […]

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Write 50k 30d

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 […]

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Pissing on the Wave

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 […]

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Barcelona Reflections: Paella of Culture, Architecture, and Open Education

Barcelona Reflected     Strolling Past a Building of Bones
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 of our large country, where it takes a multiple day trip to get to a different culture.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Even for a small example is this city’s monument sized honor of Christopher Columbus, being the place where he gave his “report card” to Isabella and Ferdinand after his first foray into America, while over here, he is either painted as cartoon schoolbook hero or a villainous fraud.