CogBlogged from ‘August, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cobalt123 The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! For someone who spent their first 27 years where the sky was the roof of the world, Willa Cather’s words are ones that truly paint the immensity of the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Larry Johnson It’s been a week since I got back from my London Calling trip– I was wondering what sort of prophetic paragraphs I could write, or somehow to try and distill all the senses and sounds of such a place into words. I #fail. So down below I have lopped in my pile of media- flickr photos, some place tagging in a Google Map, and a video of my obligatory Abbey Road crosswalk walk. In my time, I walked as much as possible- I did easily figure out navigating the city via the Tube, but there is something about being in cities and seeing them afoot that I enjoy best. Highlights? Many- photographing the city at night (out past midnight with larry the first night, jat lag, what jet lag? see his great photos); wandering into a pub and finding the sport on [...]

A tin full of stuff. Scout knife. Cuff links. Engraved bracelet. Puzzle game. A tin full of my Dad’s stuff. It’s just stuff. But it was my Dad’s stuff. Friday marked the day nine years ago Morris Levine left this earth. You don’t forget your loved ones, but their presence ebbs and flows without much regular pattern, except twice a year. First is May, for his birthday, a day I wish I could have back again to celebrate, and late August (2 days ago), the day I wish I could give back again. Can it be nine years? I try cycling back to where I was, who I was, what mattered in August 2001. There was no user’s guide (and if there was I would not have read it anyhow) for dealing with your parent’s death, especially when it was the cancerous impending one that just unravels in front of [...]

Tweetbeat Firsthand hovers somewhere between subtly amazing and “meh”. But I’ve giving it a whirl. What it is, is a browser plugin/extension (works with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari… there is some irony about the other browser shrinking in the mist of obscurity). What it does is to figure out in the text of a web page, the name of something that has a twitter account, and it places a little “t” icon into the web page. For example, on a recent post here about open courses, Tweetbeat identifies George Siemens from the text in my article: (I cannot explain its ability to identify George Siemens as having a twitter account but miss Stephen Downes (@downes– it opens the door for some George vs Stephen fun, but let’s move on). So it lets me know, when looking at web content, who the companies and people are with twitter accounts. That’s not [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jenny P. If we just lived our lives out by setting, pursuing, and meeting objectives, what a sterile world it would be. Here;s to what you learn when you are not expecting too, and for surfing by serendipity. Serendipity is following the curious post titles in your RSS reader, leading my to Andy Rush sharing his discovery of a utility called Evom (well that was a nice find there– ). But since Andy played around with the backwards spelling things– I thought it would be fun to write a bit of my comments in reverse text. Now I thought I did this in BBEdit before, but I think I did something insane like a grep search to put each letter on a separate line, a reverse line sort, and a search and replace on the line return characters. Surel;y someone has created something like [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jase The Bass I have an addiction. It involves…. cameras. Since 2008, I’ve been in a flickr group of people sharing daily photos; we are now at 500. No one is in charge, no one makes rules. I’ve also been participating in the dailyshoot version since November 2009. I cannot stop. My day is wrong if I am not finding imagery in it, and then reflecting on it later in the day (or at 2am in the evening). But every time I do this process, every day, I am either stretching my ability on photography or creatively trying to write captions to make my photos fit the themes. It is daily creation, and as a metronome in my life, it is a steady creative click. I’m using this loosely as a metaphor for learning in at least two upcoming presentations, so I’m casting a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate. So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity. It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure… The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was told London was rainy and gray, but so far (apply jinx here), the weather has been stunning. This is just a brief bit to say, “Yo London”– this is my first visit to the UK and the first few days have gone by in a blur. A growing photo set is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157624634053489/ There was not too much of a jet lag blur arriving early Sunday, getting the train from Heathrow to Paddington Station, and then to the hotel we used on Southbank. The next day it was on the move again, riding the train to Bristol, where Monday was an NMC meeting day with the folks at futurelab, where we found a lot of collaboration points, and a mind opening view to a wide array of creative projects that have come out of that old warehouse by the waterfront. Then [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ~Aphrodite After all these years (this march will be the 7th) I still love flickr most of all what has become Web 2.0 – the Vancouver crew that fortunately failed on Game Never Ending (that explains the .gne extensions on some of the flickr URLs) for it right on social media, long before we had a name for it. And for me, it was the social tagging that lit a fire that continues to flame. I’m not going to wax on about all the ways tagging enables ways to share, find, connect, externally republish photos (oops, that’s a little wax), but there has been something I’ve noticed yet forgotten about. I tag my own photos, well some.many of us do. We know where it was taken, we have some internal scheme for organizing (photos from a conference with s shared tag, photos to be [...]

I found the site that creates these fun ID cards a while ago (it probably came from the Generator Blog), but yes, I am a card carrying Agent. I might be armed. Or pawed. Of course this may not quite as good as Scott Leslie‘s real business card that says “Shit Disturber”.