CogBlogged from ‘June, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by JoseJose I read this morning via Shareable about a growing movement called “Crop Mobs” – rather sounding as much like barn raising, it speaks to people with a shared interest doing things as groups rather than isolated individuals. As described in Shareable…. In the fall of 2008 a group of 11 young farmers living and working in North Carolina’s Triangle Region got together to talk about issues facing young farmers –things like healthcare, wages, access to land. As they talked, one young farmer, Adah Frase, squirmed in her seat before deciding to speak up. “I’m tired of sitting in meetings just talking about things. It feels like a waste of my time. Why can’t we go out and work while we meet rather than just sitting around a table?” Frase believed you could build stronger relationships with people by working side by side rather [...]

It was an all day journey to get home from Canada (Edmonton to Minneapolis to Phoenix by plane, then drive to Strawberry), and after dumping the bags and shredding the junk mail, I got distracted. Two hours later, I realized it was late. But if you have not heard, flickr has a preview of a new layout for your photo pages – bigger images, and some movement of buttons and sidebar stuff. It’s refreshing. To activate it on your own photos, go to http://flickr.com/photobetaoptin/. Then I realized that changes in the structure of the page would hose my CC Attribution Helper script, which as a browser script, hangs its code threads on the internal page structure, which is significantly different when you lift the hood. If you are among the small percentage who has not heard of this script (yeah right, more likely the other way around), what it does [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yesterday I was on stage as the opening act for the 2010 Canadian eLearning Conference hosted at the University of Alberta, with a new show I had conjured “Join the Secret Revolution”. The presentation is on slideshare (where you can see the notes for the slides); I have an audio recording but it is trapped on my iPhone and need some time to transfer it over. The revolution is now recorded and is also included in the slideshare below. Join the Secret Revolution View more presentations from Alan Levine. The idea was spawned by the rEvolution theme of the conference, and I thought I could have some fun looking at ways one could take on what seems like huge challenges (“We Must Change Education!”) and not be flaming radicals (“Burn the mother down” through smaller scale actions in what we do as people [...]

I’ve not been able to directly say Happy Father’s Day since 2001; that year I think I was on the road in Australia and he was home in Florida hanging out with cancer, before passing away in August. I had brought him  an Aussie belt cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My mom ended up sending it back to me in a box of other special items, and I’ve worm that belt almost out in the last 9 years. So given a lack of direct communication, I spent an hour riffling through old photos and memories… Our lawn was a source of pride for Dad, and after years of various push mowers (and I did my own fair share of pushing), one of his dreams came true when he bought himself this little riding mower. IN fact, his email address included “lawnman” in it. Dad did sure enjoy eating [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Man, how delinquent have I been at cogdogblog.com — I don’t ride my bike, I still dont have a dog, and all I got is a blog. Oh well Har. Some Cog-Dog-Blog. I had my bike out maybe 4 times last year. And I’ve not had a dog for years, weakly blaming it on my travel schedule. It’s time to get back to the source. Tonight, I took the cobweb covered mountain bike out of the shed, pumped up the tires, applied lube, and took it out for a test spin. My loathing for running is well documented but I got a taste of why I liked biking- its under my own power still, but I cover ground– when running, it takes a long time to go a mile, but weeeee, on a bike, in a flash. I got Cog. I’m thinking of [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’m just back from a vintage road trip that included a stop in Flagstaff, the I-40 trans desert drive to Anaheim, a week in Disneyland for the 2010 NMC Summer Conference, a return loop through Las Vegas– with the next highlight specifically a trip to St George Utah to visit a good friend and colleague, Carl Berger. Carl is one of the true gems in our field, and I could wax on long on his accomplishments, but there is plenty of that on his emeritus profile at the University of Michigan or his page as an NMC Fellow. I was lucky to have met Carl in 2002 when we brought him in to Maricopa for one of the Ocotillo Technology Visioning forums we ran back then– he was a friend and long time colleague of then Maricopa Vice Chancellor Ron Bleed. cc licensed [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by JanneM You can barely spit anymore and not hit a blog or twitter message with someone announcing their new eBook. My hats are off to people who go down that long road of writing- it definitely takes a lot to write something in long form; I by no means am saying we don’t need more ideas written. Do we need so much of it in eBook format? I am thinking about a list of half/unread eBooks lurking in my kindle app now… unlike the ones sitting on my bookshelf, there is no real reminder of my half read efforts. I cannot help but wonder if so many eBooks being put out in the stream might go undigested, barely read. More than that- what exactly does one gain by publishing their work in eBook format, besides riding some carpet tails of the device fad. Can [...]

I mean c’mon, if you are going to the effort to run bots to spam and phish me, at least try to be convincing! The CogDog judge gives this a -1 for effort and a 0 for originality. How many hours were sent crafting: To: undisclosed recipients; Subject: our Email ID has been awarded 1,000,000.00 GBP in the TOBACCO PROMO send your Names… Country… Age… The most disturbing thing is that even this indecipherable, obviously a phony email will still probably fool some percentage of the receivers of the message. That is really sad,

cc licensed flickr photo shared by StayRAW In the previous posts in this series of using the new WordPress 3 Custom Post Types (I keep calling them custom content types, same thing), I overviewed the plans for the MIDEA web site, we set up the places to create the new content types, and diverged into some set up magic using child themes. That was the easy stuff. Now I get into the parts I had to more or less invent on my own (well, with some good leg ups from others)- how to add all of the form field elements to my new content types so I could add extra information to them. This are fields for say, my Organization content types, to have a field to enter their web site address, latitude/longitude for doing some mapping, etc. Now I did this all in custom code, and as hopefully I [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Getting some of the essentials ready for my upcoming road trip. If it’s June, it must mean I am not home. In fact, I am supposed to be in my car in a few minutes. This next leg is a car expedition, which at first sounded like a reprieve from flying. I need to be in Anaheim Sunday to be ready for next week’s 2010 NMC Summer Conference, but am taking a slow route. I’m heading to Flagstaff tonight to visit my friend Mike, and hope to lollygag in Flag some on Saturday, and get to Needles or Barstow CA, and onto Anaheim the next day. After the conference, I am planning to take a northern detour through Lost Wages and on to St George Utah to visit Carl Berger, and maybe we can do some photography at Zion National Park, home finally [...]