CogBlogged from ‘August, 2010’

UPDATE Jan 6 2012: While the code should still work, I have disabled this approach on my own blog, instead using the Sharing tool built into the JetPack plugin. Twitter has created a new widget that makes it more friendly to provide a tweet this button from your own web sites, blogs, etc. The benefit is that it pops a window up with the twitter functionality, so you are not sending people from the web site. See the announcement from the twitter blog to learn more. The tweetbutton creation widget makes it easy to generate the code, and has a umber of options to choose from for the appearance of the button and what gets prefilled in the tweet (plus with their new url shortener t.co is one letter shorter than competitors!). The sample code includes a Javascript link to the library that provides the functionality- <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="none" [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by boskizzi Disclaimer. I have nothing but utmost respect and admiration for the people who are stretching (literally) the concepts of what is a “course” by experimenting with the form of an “open course”, one with a set of students taking it for traditional credit,. but potentially more, maybe thousands (?) who can participate by the generosity (or interests) of people running the course. It is so much Dave-like to read Dave Cormier saying why he does it: I freely contribute my time to some courses, and am paid to teach others. I ‘believe’ that working in the open makes my own work better, gives me broader access to other people’s idea and, well, i find it fun. It tears at the silo-ed nature of courses, it aims to melt the walls enough to leverage the power of networked learning. The latest issue of EDUCAUSE [...]

Thanks to Alec Couros for tweeting about this video, that plays with an interesting style of fast cutting disparate video segments by their connection over words. It’s an interesting exercise to follow the visual/video representation of words in such quick jumps. Apparently this was done as support for a new episode of RadioLab (one of my favorite podcasts, yes, old fashioned subscribe and download automagically, the way we did it back in 2006) Following the credits, this is one of many fascinating videos and visual sites created by everynone, and I found myself falling down various rabbit holes to Routines or the multiple viewpoints done as Four Corners of Health Insurance. Despite some claims, there’s no end to the magic and creativity of the internet. Nothing even close to the end. Please keep the lights on.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by bitzcelt Elwood: It’s 106 miles to get this sidebar coded, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Jake: Hit it. I have no idea why I opened this way except for Jim Groom Inspiration. But to jive my code chops, there’s nothing more energizing than doing a little hack and chop coding in WordPress. Today I was again doing some sidebar fine tuning on the NMC MIDEA web site (previously covered in my almost done series on doing custom post types in WordPress 3.0). It was one of those “oh this might take 20 minute” deals that ended up going a bit longer. but like Jake and Elwood, when you gotta go to Chicago, you drop the sunglasses and hit it. And this is pretty simple, and most likely there is a plugin [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Will Pate (the irony of this photo is it pre-dates twitter!) We’re trying out a new strategy/approach/technology for our communication via twitter for NMC. Up to know, for an organization, we have the typical approach of having an “official” account @newmediac (Neil M. Cameron got there first – you have to roll with that; my thinking of “newmediac” = new media + maniac). For our twitter account I use Twitter Tools in our WordPress sites and TwitterFeed for our drupal site to push certain content out. I’ve also set it up with HootSuite to provide a way for other NMC staff to send messages out (HootSuite allows us to do this w/o sharing the account password and to schedule tweets, yes three are a number of other tools to do this). This works, but it is an approach of having one entity to represent [...]

I have a few upcoming presentations where I plan to use Five Card Flickr Stories so was compelled to try and toss a few more code tweaks onto the bin. The newest is an ability, when a story is published, to see for one one photo, all the other stories that it appears in. So for example, looking at this story, “all me”: Below the image credits is a new set of thumbnails- so you can click any of them to see, oh, all the stories that used that fun photo of Nancy White: This was more to see if this was potentially interesting/useful. My ideal was to have the links as hover notes over the story images, but my CSS chops fell short… can always try later. It’s my code and I’ll change if I want to…. Other options would be to create a gallery listing to list in [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by michael.heiss Given the rising tide/trend of electronic books, for a number of months I’ve been pondering how to make our NMC publications available in an ebook format. With the push of an iThing it looked like ePub was the format to aim for. It is after all, a standard (or is it a guideline). My experience suggests it is a muddy place, much depends on the devices that access the content (oi the browser wars of the 1990s), but this is a stream of what I’ve figured out so far. I will pre-amble that I have almost no expertise in this- its just what I figured out by head-banging attempts to produce an ePub. I’ll foreshadow the hint that I am excited about the just released Anthologize tool for generating electronic texts but it’s too early to tell on that one. First, I tried [...]

Sometimes you have trips with very well defined and choreographed itineraries, where you know what is/should be happening down to some overly detailed level of detail. This week has not been one of those, it’s been more of going with the flow. And that’s ok. A planned trip to visit friends in Monterey was built around an invitation to co-present some new Amazing Stories in San Jose but the session took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and did not happen, so now I have a new presentation’s worth of materials sitting in the wings (and thanks to people like Silvia for tossing me even newer and more Amazing ones). So for my time hanging out in Monterey, with visions of chasing Steinbeck or Eastwood planted in my mind, little did I expect to end up participating in a wedding. You see, my friends, who must be about the most gracious [...]