CogBlogged from ‘November, 2010’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by WorldIslandInfo.com and as requested link to http://www.futuristmovies.com/ I almost stopped writing, as this image just makes me want to be in a world where presentations are this exciting. Frankly, now coming up on 18 years in the ed tech game, the differences from the experience of my very first educational conference to my most recent is perhaps better quality projectors. We still stand up and point at slides of Japan and work our audience up into a lather, right? While I’ve been in agreement with Martin long before he even posted about being done with conferencing — I too sport a GUILTY sign for really not doing a whole lot about this, besides the yearly whinge blog post on this topic. There definitely has to be a better model than the One with The Slides in front of the Ones in the Seats for [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by RaGardner4 It was overly grand ambition (or stupid ass planning) that got me thinking I could do NaNoWriMo again this year. I’m bailing. And of course I do not need to apologize (especially as most likely no one will even notice). I’ve already got enough on the plate every day, with training for a half marathon, doing my photography dailyshoot and daily 365/2010 photos, where the heck was 1667 words per day gonna come from? Well, I could do it, but at this point I feel like I’d be just spraying words for the sake of it. While I had a few good writing spurts. my story of a dog’s eyed view of humanity was just not feeling like much of anything. I did reach my goal to tinker with WordPress and to try out Patrick’s nifty riff on Anthologize (I was publishing ePub [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Roberto Rizzato ►pix jockey◄ Facebook resident Let’s stop politely nodding and play lip service to sharing content. Let’s stop doing sort of sharing, like sort of pregnant. You do or you don’t. And save the trotted our excuses, “most people don’t know about creative commons”, “the default is turned off”. It’s bull, lazy bull turds, and its time to turn it up way past 11. Frankly, if all a site does is trot out creative commons like little stickers pasted on for decoration, its like one of those “save the planet” bumper stickers hanging on the bumper of a Hummer. Look at all the great content on ITConversations, my favorite source for tech podcasts. Their content pages do not even indicate a creative commons license (example). If you lift the hood and peek at the source code, you can find however the RDF code [...]

I so so much dig blog posts from Clay Burrell like his weaving a less than glowing Blackboard experience into a story The Tailor – A Parable. He pulls zero punches but also brings his point home in oblique creative ways. While I was pretty sure what a parable was, a check in was worth it- do people still whinge about Wikipedia because these feels pretty damn good for an explanation? The word “parable” comes from the Greek “παραβολή” (parabolē), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed. A parable is a short tale that illustrates universal truth, one of the simplest of narratives. It sketches a setting, describes an action, and shows the results. It [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve milked this story plenty of times before- during a 2007 workshop in Tasmania, I used as an example of the power of unexpected connections, someone the year before had commented on a flickr photo I had tagged as “unknown” and told me the kind of flower it was– what was amazing was the woman who did this was in the workshop (here I am telling it again in video, where you will here about 20 times the word “amazing”.) This just happened again today- out of the blue, un-asked for (and not even tagged or captioned with a request to help learn about the subject), flickr user “Sculpture Kris” added a comment to this photo of a sculpture I saw in Rochester, Minnesota. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog telling me a lot more about “Boy on a Dolphin” then I [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by chotda That is some tasty looking spam sushi, but not as good as this gem that was sparkling like a cubic zirconia in my inbox. The beauty was the letter was attached as a PDF and allegedly referred to a manufactured relative with my last name: Dear Levine, I will like to seek your help in a business proposal , which although is sensitive by nature and not what I should discuss with someone I don’t know and have not met using a medium such as this but I do not have a choice. Well desperate times call for desperate spammers. After the warm personal greeting, how could I not read on? I am Mr. Xxxxxx Xxxxx, personal account manager of late Dr. Norman Levine, who died of a cardiac arrest a few years ago leaving behind a large sum of money with a [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On Saturday I drove down the hill to meet up with some of my former Maricopa colleagues at the TEDxPHX, the local independent TED event. If it were not for the CybersalonAZ pals, I might not have gone. Previously, I made have thumbed my nose at what looks like an elite crowd among the TEDdies. Lats year I had tried to get tickets to the TEDx in Austin, and you had to fill out an application I guess yo see if you were hip enough to be allowed inside the ropes (I was not). The Phoenix version had no such application (maybe we’re not hip enough); you just had to get word early enough to buy tickets (though I saw people were still abel to get them last week). cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This event was held at the PBS [...]

It has been more than three years since I did the first iteration of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (that was October 15, 2007 in Hobart, Tasmania). It’s been on my mind for months to recast the site into a new version. Much of the information needs updates, some of the tools have fallen off the vine– it was time for a fresh coat of paint. I got the perfect driving inspiration when a colleague asked me to do a version of the workshop for the 2010 Museum Computer Network Conference a week ago, in Austin. I had nailed down a new wikispaces site and got most of the structure set up in time for the conference, and the new home is at http://www.mcn.edu/mcn-2010-austin. It has the three parts of the story making process (Outline a story Idea, Find Media, and Pick a Tool). I have my [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by zenobia_joy Against every sane, rational, “I’m so over committed I’m gonna explode” thought, I have decided to plunge my hand again into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the challenge where aspiring, and maybe aspired, writers take on the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel over a one month time span. I have always liked writing, but had never done anything substantial or larger than a long blog post, so it was one of those items I listed long ago on 43 Things. I had heard of NaNoWriMo, and it seemed analogous to running a marathon — a goal you keep telling yourself you cannot do– until you try. Last year I made my 50,000 mark (I burned a lot of adjectives up in the process), finished, and got through about 1 1/2 rounds of later edits before hanging it out to dry (see [...]