CogBlogged from ‘May, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by gianΩmerz I’m regretting not getting started my series on WordPress 3.0 and custom content types; a big chunk remains to be explained, but that has to wait till after a few days of vacation. But there was something Jim Groom mentioned that I was going to tackle later, but can inset now; it’s a powerful piece that’s been there quietly, that I used on the MIDEA site– Child Themes. In all of my WordPress work I find a theme I like, download it, and then start ripping it to shreds. This makes it near impossible to update if the theme later changes. Children take care of that. What happens is that you download the Perfect Uber Theme and install it. But rather than start tinkering, you make another directory in the theme directory, call it something memorably like “Child of Bava” (mine is called [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by TakenByTina My previous post just outlined the kinds of things I put into a new site created with a beta version of WordPress 3 (I started with the first beta and honestly, it had more polish than most finished products) – I actually did not tell you much. Now it’s time to get out and start hacking. In this post, I’ll detail what I did to create three content types on the MIDEA site. You will see code, raw PHP out in the open. While there is an excellent plugin for creating custom content types (I did try it out and also parsed through the code to see what it did), it only did about 15% of what I wanted. Creating the content types are easy. But the plugin does nothing to help you add the form elements to create, edit the extra meta [...]

I’ve been happily tinkering with the beta version of WordPress 3, down in the bowels of the code, mixing unmarked vials of PHP over open flames, etc for a brand new NMC site. The main thing I have been working on are exploiting the feature to create my own types of content with their own properties. Essentially up to know you could create two kinds of content- posts and pages, with pretty much the same feature. Any additional descriptors one wanted to add needed to be done via custom fields. The idea is now, I could create a kind of content, say to build an encyclopedia of dogs, and use all of the WordPress features to make an entry (title, post/content, tags). But to my Dog content type, I could also add additional fields, like radio buttons to classify them by “small”, “medium”, or “large”, a field to enter a [...]

What was I thinking? Back in January, when asked for a description for a keynote I am giving in a few weeks, I had this crystal clear idea of what I was going to do. The crystal has fuzzed. I need help. Well, I am stretching the truth. I have some focus, but want to do what sometimes works to cast a call for examples I can cite/borrow/steal. I hesitate to call it “crowdsourcing” it’s more like “quartetsourcing”. Let me try to explain it. There are some people hard at work out there aiming to “change education” “reform schools” etc- big huge monumental tasks. Kind of like “Let’s pick up the Himalayas and put them next to Florida”. Other radicals suggest we need a dramatic loud revolution, a burn down the house kind of approach. Good luck with that. I am a believer that we can generate a large amount [...]

It feels like an old song to me (nothing wrong with classics), but open content or open education IMHO is not solely focused on the things- the courseware, the things shared – its more about the spirit of sharing openly, and how that multiplies, sometimes on its own accord. This is but a tiny example, but remember, everything in this world is made of very tiny (sub-atomic) stuff. Stephen Ridgeway, from all the way in New South Wales Australia, tweeted a link to a video he made explaining how to use my Flickr CC Attribution helper – a browser script that embeds easy to copy attribution text to creative commons licensed flickr images: So, without me asking, Stephen has created a nice how to that adds some value to the thing I created. So think about if everyone who used shared online content created something as an add-on like this. [...]

Hey Bud, you gotta see what’s on my Air Stash… just don’t let Mr Hand get the SSID… It’s hard not to reach for this metaphor with something called the “Air Stash“. My NMC colleague Keene Haywood told me about this a few weeks ago. It’s described as a “wireless flash drive” for your iPhone/iPad, but I think of it also as an ad hoc networked shared drive. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The device is about the dimensions of a classic iPod, with a USB prong on one end, and a slot on the other for an SD card. What you do is connect it by USB to your computer, insert the memory card. On your computer, you just copy the files you want to share, load it up with videos, music, word docs, PDFs, spreadsheet files… You just need the computer to move files onto the [...]

You gotta tweet what you ask for. I believe I am mixing my metaphors, or just babbling at the end of a full weekend, in denial of the looming Monday ahead. That’s what makes it nice to have something novel to play with. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve known Jared Bendis since the 2003 NMC Summer Conference, when I was just an attendee, and he’s a super creative guy who just does not fit in any box (like his side line of Silly Services). He’s presented at just about every NMC Five Minutes of Fame and always does something extraordinary presenting at our online conferences, one of the few people I know who can pull off doing a one (or zero) slide presentation. I keep digressing. I’ve been seeing Jared’s tweet’s over last few weeks about his first iPhone/iPad apps going through the AppleStore review. I chirped [...]

After a two hour into the wind and dodge the speedboats kayak excursion on Apache Lake… this is good. Damn good. The desert heat here is just starting to slowly simmer, just a tease of the oven baked temps you will see here in a few weeks. But it’s a somewhat cool breeze blowing at 5:30pm. I’m sitting in spot 3S at Burnt Corral Campground; I think that means it us 3rd from the worst spots; not many options when you arrive on a Saturday afternoon; the prime lake front spots are long filled, crowded with large tents, beach chairs, about 1000 kids, boom boxes. it’s camp-ish, like people bringing the suburbs into the desert. Normally I would not opt for this as a destination; it’s just a place to sleep tonight before a visit tomorrow morning to Tonto National Monument, where I have a spot for one of the [...]

Jon Breitenbucher invited me back again to do a remote (via Skype) presentation on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the week-long Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program he and his crew run at the College of Wooster (by the way, they are rocking with wordpress multiuser there). When I did this last year, it was one of the best sessions I’ve had; a lot because Jon’s team had prepped the faculty, so they already had done some pre-work to pick their story idea. The way we run it is I do the presentation first thing in the morning (wich was really early here on the west coast time!), the faculty spend about 3 hours working with the tools. We then convene after they are done, and they get to talk about what they were able to create (or the problems they had). This time around, I used [...]

Some colleagues out there are group reading the hip all the cool kids hot edu WTF book, Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education . I’m game since a bunch of my buddies have mentions in there. However, in my Amazon shopping, I am stumped about the pricing of a print, tree killing, air fouling future landfill filling dead tree book being only 18 cents more than the kindle version. As much as I like digital, and read other books on the kindle apps on my iThings, I splurged the 18 cents to get something I can annotate in, or i if need be, burn this winter for heat. Please Riiiiiiiiiiiiicky, can you ‘splain?