CogBlogged from ‘November, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was during last year’s visit when my Mom asked me, full of both innocence and curiosity, to explain Twitter to her- we had a good time after I seeded the request for an explanation out to my contacts, and did they ever respond. We captured that conversation in audio a year ago — see Twitter in Mom English. This year was the follow-up…. a few months ago, thinking a bit of a nicer version of ShitMyDadSays, I decided to create a Twitter account for Mom, and then I would try and tweet some of the funny or insightful (or both) things she says during our weekly phone calls. You can follow here via @alycecookie. So tonight, I sat her down to show her how it worked. I showed her the cookie icon I added, and the bio I made up for her: [...]

If you’ve clicked by my 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell Story you will know I have told the same old dog story 50+ times, so it was a refreshing suprise when I got an email tonight from Claudia Ceraso describing a novel way she used Dominoe’s flickr set as a way to have her students create their own stories based solely on what they cold imagine from the photo set. I have shared with my teen and young adult students your Dominoe story. I simply showed them the slideshow without the text and told them it was part of a real life story. I asked them to write and here is the result: four stories -some done collaboratively, some not. I should have recorded the brainstorming we had after seeing your pics projected in an IWB. Their first reaction was to talk about feelings and a potential sad ending [...]

It was one year ago today I did my first @dailyshoot assignment. I give my tip of the blog hat to D’Arcy Norman for turning me on to this. The theme one year ago was “water”, and was assignment #12 cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog From the start I enjoyed the play part of the assignment- one could go literal (and I often do) and take a photo of a glass of water or a puddle or a lake…, but here I tweak on the notion of Arizona being a dry place (the broken box) and also this being the place where the water supply comes in my house. One year later, today, the theme was @dailyshoot 2010/11/24: Illustrate the process or thought of traveling today, possibly by documenting your own travels. #ds374 As I am not traveling today, I took the suggestion for “thinking of traveling” but [...]

I cannot help it. I have tried (somewhat, well rather tepidly) to embrace the Facebook fervor (because <scarequote>Everyone is there</scarequote>). I do not begrudge all the time people spend there (well I do a little). It’s my instincts that keeps my fur up, and a faint acrid foul smell that I detect. Facebook seems like Augustus Gloop as it just keeps sucking up more and more of the internet inside the blue wall from which no other web service can ever see again. Like this. On the Facebook iPhone app is an innocuous labeled “Sync”. What does it sync? Well I peeked. It says: Add Facebook profile pictured and links to contacts That seems reasonable- I can get people’s pictures in my iPhone contacts, not super critical, but it sounds reasonable. What you likely miss noting on this screen is the bi0directional arrow between MY contacts and the mysterous blue [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Pink Sherbet Photography Yesterday Martin Weller, in the midst of writing his book on Digital Scholarship, wrote up a narrative of his day to track his working day and uses of technology. In the summary, he notes the mix of personal and work lives intertwingling while he does this from home, and how much of the technology is not strictly sexy, and in some ways, so mundane they start to merge into his real desktop (my metaphor): What does this digital scholarship snapshot tell us? Firstly, it’s quite traditional. This is partly because I am writing a book, but it is also representative. I didn’t spend the day overlaying different data formats or creating a musical mashup, or anything exciting like that, I spent it writing. Related to this the technology used is fairly simple – there are no specialist tools in use here. [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On last year’s visit, Mom was caught up in reading the Wired issue on "Vanished" www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4139016457/ But she and I agree, the Boob issue sadly shows the poor decision to pander to low brow tastes. I have no problem with seeing boobs, but if they cannot sell magazines based on the strength of their writing, well, they have lost the game. And they have lost the 2 subscriptions I was paying for. It’s not the display of breasts that bother me. The editorial stretch to make it a theme of an article on bio technology was made by real boobs, and the gratuitous inside shoots just reinforced the magazine’ aim to go for an audience of drooling pre teen boys. Wired itself is 18 years old, but acts like 12. As spelled out in SlashGear Wired Makes a Boob of Itself. This is [...]

The best thing in my email box today, or maybe this month, was a message from Michael at the University of Cape Town: Hi, Last year your ‘Amazing Stories of Openness‘ provided excellent fuel for our campaign for open scholarship at the University of Cape Town. I now have an amazing story of openness to share with you! It would be great to add it to your collection, if you are still curating it. One of our open educational resources contributors had her shared content picked up by a journal in Spain. As a result, her work has been published in the Journal and translated to Spanish. This is a great case for the open sharing of academic work as openness here led to the publishing of a journal article. See the blog post below for the details. http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct/2010/11/12/from-uct-opencontent-to-a-journal-article And like the other stories (plus the set added in 2010), [...]

I’m going to warn you of something incredulous. Later. But first, today’s 0.001% thought out message: A tweet is in the eye of the beholder, so just to be clear, I fully subscribe to the power of what a retweet can do, and to a slightly lesser degree, nod to the effectiveness of a quick method of agreement registered by committing an act of “liking” which used to be “becoming a fan” and is also construed as “recommending” and given the Facebook rate of churn, in two weeks will be some other expression. But as I become a GOM (Grumpy Old Man), I am seeing a trend perhaps of less reading and less writing. And there is nothing anyone can really do about it, the giant boulder is rolling down the hill. This is just my own periscope, but from where I sit there is less blogging going on, I [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I cannot believe I missed the exact date maybe 2 weeks ago, but it was 40 years ago in late October I was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic. The story is a good one. One day, out of the blue, I woke up and told my Mom I did not want to go to school, that I had a stomach ache. This alone was odd, since I was a school loving geek. I cannot even remember what compelled me to lie, but it may have been the last one I tried. She scared me because she said, "Oh if you are sick, we are going to see Doctor Kramer." And I was scared cause I was sure they would unveil my deception. What I did not know was that Mam had been tracking some symptoms- excessive thirst, strange eating patterns, some bed [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Horia Varlan When a discussion veers into debates of definitions of terms, my yawn reflex usually kicks into gear, so its with some trepidation (and concerns of comments lambasting my hypocrisy so I am claiming it now). Like many I get muddy whether I cam referring to something as “social media” versus “social networking”, and usually lean on the former using the latter around media (flickr, youtube, slideshare, etc). I got a bit of clarity (but a third leg of the definition stool to deal with) from Ben Parr’s recent Mashable column Facebook, Twitter and The Two Branches of Social Media (which sits under the banner of Mashable Social Media… sigh). He opens with the observation that most people easily see Facebook as a social network (it has to be, now that a movie has been made, eh?), where it gets more iffy with [...]