CogBlogged from ‘October, 2010’

Dean is talking again about sharing. Heck it’s in his name so its perfect, and worth listening when he says/tweets “I have something to share(ski)”. Take 25 minutes and watch his video Sharing: The Moral Imperative created pre-conference keynote for the 2010 K-12 Online Conference: The kinds of stories Dean shares ought to be moving more and more from exception to norm. But another thread stuck out for me. Dean share(ski)-ed Dan Meyer’s path from experimenting with blogs as a form of mental outboarding (thinking out loud) to the explosion that happened around Dan’s sharing of his math graphing videos — Graphing Stories. George Couros, an elementary school principle, wrote an entry in his own blog about an activity his school put on, one that he in fact borrowed from elsewhere, but others were moved by the outcomes George shared about Identity Day so that schools from far away took [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There I stood, semi-conscious, waiting for the clerk at the Walgreens in Payson, AZ to finish entering the insurance info for the precious cold medicine– the magic pills I was counting on relieving the past 5 days of stupor from a cold that followed me home from Spain. Finishing entering whatever numbers it takes to bring down the prices to my co-pay, Sarah smiled, thanked me for my patience, and added, “Isn’t this weather now lovely? Not so hot, not cold- I so enjoy this ‘in between’ time.” You know as well as I that many times in these exchanges those on either side give a perfunctory, “How are you doing?” or “Have a great day”, but this felt really genuine. So I smiled back and said “I love this time of year too, though I’m ready to be sitting in front of [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Naughty Prata I barely watch anything on my home TV screen (I don’t get a signal nor any cable, so its for DVDs only), so I’m not quite up to speed on the latest technology for 3-D video but it is a technology we try and track for the NMC Horizon project. About the 3D film I’ve seen in the theaters was Avatar (saw it twice) and have to admit the 3D added something that grew better as you noticed it less, it was not like the gratuitous flyouts of shovels and guns that marked the cheesier and older 3d movies I saw longer ago. The current issue of Wired magazine (18.10) (I get the dead tree version in my mailbox, I am now a throwback) got my brain spinning a little bit simply from the Rants section. I cannot say why it [...]

Note: Updated December 7, 2010 for use of new theme…. Nothing like a little WordPress hacking to get back in action. A few months ago I registered the domain barkingdog.me as a place intended to set up a photo gallery, but decided today to finally get around to hanging something for real there. My goals were to have a clean site with ginormous images, and also something that would be little fuss to add. On my NMC work in creating the MIDEA site I had set up an account to have access to the Graph Paper Press themes — yes, these are paid for themes, but are very elegant and sophisticated. I did moderate hacking to the Modularity theme for the MIDEA site, but was liking their photo gallery themes, and landed on Widescreen Fullscreen. With a few hours tweaking and adding one moderate hunk of code, I have what [...]

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by jerebu Plagiarism in the act of conducting what is offered as original work (school essays, magazine columns,) is obviously, a Wrong Thing. I’m not aiming to talk about lifting in that sense, but there are places, perhaps, where perhaps one might feel okay to condone it? Maybe even do it yourself? Do you doubt me? Will you send Copyright Cops to my door? It works brilliantly in movies, where one movie, I am guessing the intent, plays homage to a classic by passing a reference to a previous work, perhaps even lifting it entirely. It is a tribute, not something meant to pass off as original. And it would be destroyed with the film equivalent of a footnote, eh? Lacking a big mental file database of movie bits in my head, I’m surprised when I make the connection. It becomes [...]

modified from Wikimedia Commons public domain image I am not blogging about not blogging about not blogging… but dangerously close seeing the last post dated September 30. Last night I closed had my two week round the world loop, and yes, some 140 years later, I have some speed advantages over Mr Fogg, who to rely on steamers and railways to win his 80 day wager. But he got rich on his trip; I came home tired and sick– having eluded catching a cold the entire time, much of in enclosed space of planes recirculating other people’s exhalations. While riding the bus from the Phoenix airport terminal to long term parking, I calculated via my TripIt tracking that between September 22 and October 6 I traveled 29,118 miles by plane. It was (a) a nutty way to see the world because I did not see a whole lot of it; [...]