CogBlogged from ‘December, 2009’

I’m slow to change some things…. I have had the same self modded theme on CogDogBlog since November 2005 (see the last face lift), so 4+ years later, I felt it was time to toy with some new digs. But I am impulsive (I can speed shop with the best of them), so I looked at about 3 themes, and liked the approach of Patrick’s hoPE theme as it uses a flickr gadget to display my own photos in the upper right. I’ll kick this one around the yard a bit, tweak some sidebars, and give it my usual theme hacking. Look for the next make over in 2014….

I regret I don’t know Russian since I cannot read about 60% of my blog comments, but among the rest, I get so many nice things that people say! It really warms my heart that people can be so kind, they even say things that are not relevant to my blog posts. Your website came up in my research and I’m taken by what you have composed on this topic. I am presently extending my research and thus cannot contribute further, yet, I have bookmarked your web site and will be returning to keep up with any incoming updates. Just love it and thanks for admitting my remark. Wow, that is so generic for you to say that sentence you wrote as a sentence. But I am so saddened your research is so daunting that you cannot return. Maybe I will be returning to the lovey site you linked with [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by alicepopkorn That title may not stick for this post, it may connote something of a religious message. Which it is not. I rarely do blog posts by request, but with the right reason and carrot, I may respond (see below). For the benefit of Donors Choose, a project I love supporting (see last year’s story), I oblige- they asked for a post about something in 2009 that “give me home for the future of American education” (I quibble to a minor degree at the focus on ‘American’ — we have a world wide problem). So to start at the opposite end. A former colleague I saw today over lunch, someone well versed in the statistics, was lamenting the “news” that Arizona, the state where I live, pay taxes, etc, is now ranked dead last, 50th, in the US on what we spend on education. [...]

Via the vast richness of the Stoyrtelling twitter stream, I picked up today a link to FlickrPoet a rather neat built on flickr tool. FlickrPoet allows you to enter a block of text, be it a poet or your last evaluation report, and it builds a visual representation of the words with photos from flickr. Try it now at http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/ — it is similar but again different from Phrasr. Here’s a quick one I assembled using a classic poem tongue-twister from my youth: A Skunk Sat on a Stump. The Skunk Thunk the Stump Stunk. And the Stump Thunk the Skunk Stunk. It’s a fun, nifty tool, kids!

I’ve had fun following D’Arcy Norman‘s tweets as he experiments with an old Pentax film camera he got from his Dad. It got me thinking that I’ve had a string of cameras, but have never bothered to document my camera history. Not that anyone would care,, this is a blog post for me as an audience. With some fiddling in flickr I was able to find the number of photos I took for cameras that are matched when you upload photos(find the camera, do a search on that model, than change the search results to search your own photos, check the number at the bottom of the search results). I start with the genesis of my interest in photography, when in my last semester at University of Delaware (1986), needing an art elective, i chose a photography (a darkroom course). I cannot even remember why I chose it, but it [...]

What a strange honor- Tom Woodward twitter shared that this humble blog has been filtered in his school district So take that, all those people who told/tell me to “grow up”… I am an adult now! I have this certificate to prove it. cogdogblog.com is characterized as adult And the way my brain works with connections, I could not help but flashback to watching TV growing up in Baltimore, where a local catchphrase was from a commercial for plastic sofa cover, where a bunch of kids are jumping up and down on a couch. An announcer voice booms in, “Hey, kids, get off that furniture, what are you trying to do, ruin it?” And with great irony, that announcer, local celeb Royal Parker, was the father of one of the kids i went to school with. Just for fun, to set the stage, check out the hip opening to the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by davisayer There are some grand mysteries that are still un-resolved, Mr Owl… Over at the neatly named The Clever Sheep blog I came across Rodd Lucier’s eager idea YELP! to try and score a landing as a Twitter trending topic: Maybe it’s just the hundreds of teacher-learners I follow on Twitter, but it seems to me that there is no other group making such widespread use of this micro-blogging platform for personal and professional learning. Well I have no data, but given the gazllions of people who are out there, and vapid celebrities with 4,000,000 (sheep? not so clever) followers… well I am hard pressed to really believe that educators are one of the highest percentage users of twitter– studies have “shown” that professors dont tweet and teens dont tweet, hmm who does? I don’t discount that there is a very strong, vibrant semi [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ruben Bos I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory). But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one): The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by gamp Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry: BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, “Knowing what we do about automobiles, we set out to answer the question: What would cars look like if we set out to invent them today?” That is exactly the right question, and one that every US car maker should be asking him or herself. The world of cars has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our cars bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the vehicles we take for granted. It’s perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Ford’s Locus Bayou office over the past two [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Matt Stratton I’m kind of glad they retired the Verizon guy or maybe because I don’t watch TV I don’t see him anymore. One Onion scented site suggests he got a brain tumor that had nothing to do with the phone while others report there are very strict rules as to how a Verizon Dude should be in public. But I digress. This year I’ve taken on hosting a number of free webinars for NMC, our monthly Adobe First Mondays and our sort of monthly Connect@NMC sessions. In many ways they are fun to do because they are live, and I improv a lot. On the other hand, dealing with the vagaries of VOIP audio can break your heart. Because we have a cultural history of being able to pick up a phone, call someone, and be able to hear the full flow of [...]