CogBlogged from ‘December, 2010’

Oh yawn, its that time of year when people start reflecting on their belly button lint and drawing out their highlights of 2010. Fair enough, it’s a worthy practice, but quite often, to me, it ends up feeling like reading those 3 page holiday letters from Aunt Edna (who you barely know) and her 13 kids and 29 grand kids, and all about who won the ribbon at the fair and who is on the middle school table tennis club. But if you cannot fully heckle them, why not join them? As you may know (likely now) I live in a small town. Not very much happens in cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog but occasionally someone knocks on the door. A few weeks back, taking a break from the book tour, cc licensed flickr photo shared by PaDumBumPsh stopped by to hang out. We had a lot of [...]

I’m cooking up a presentation for February I am calling (Not So Stupid) Browser Tricks – a ittle nod to Letterman’s shtick with pets. The premise is to show 10, maybe 12 things you can do with common web tools (or ones less well known) that do something, that, when you show someone else, would cause them to whistle and say, “coooooool”. Or something like that. This one may not make the list, but there is vein of things that are possible when you can get a site that generates geolocated information in Google’s KML format (Keyhole Markup Language) (bonus points for those that know where the “K” came from). One example that I played with before was getting a KML feed for your Foursquare checkin activity (not that I do that) (much) and make a google map of it in two steps. And that is where the trick is- [...]

In doing some prep for a future presentation (this is almost historic in my modus operendi of procastination, as it is almost 2 months away from now), I revisited a seminal 2008 Roger Ebert post on How to Read a Movie. He shares a number of ideas I am thinking might have potential for ds106, and I am doing nothing but taking his ideas and trying to put a cherry on the top. There are a few things here I am resonating with, but it comes out of a lesson Ebert got from a colleague. It is even instructive how the ideas shared- it has a metaphor, and a suggestion, but was a germ of an idea left to Ebert to carry out: This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago’s Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Andreas Kristensson I am stepping inside the CogDog Laboratory today to conduct some experiments in… oh who am I kidding? I am just idly watching snow fall out the window, and thinking of things to try out online. Okay, for you loyal reader of this blog (not the use of singular noun), and the odd non-spammer who actually sites down and writes a comment, I am speaking to you. I am running this completely unscientific experiment to explore what the differences in response or to things I put out there: As a blog post (this here thing) in twitter on facebook To make it fair, I am turning off the automatic sending of this blog post out on twitter. And I am doing this also to test out my up to now un-liking of Facebook. Of course in a blog, I can expound on [...]

google image search on Brave New World I just finished reading one of The Great Books I Was Supposed to Read in High School– Huxley’s Brave New World. The catch phrase is usually along the lines of “a vision of a dystopian future.” This seems a rather ironic statement given the conversation in the latter part of book between The Controller and John the Savage, that what it took this society to creation it’s utopia was squeezing out most of the things we value- independent thought, appreciation of art, solitary moments of reflection, history, the scientific method. This reading was done the old fashioned way, an aBook (analog book), that I folded down corners, scribbled notes, and spilled coffee on… cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog More irony- my caption on this photo when I bought the book indicates I already was pre-programmed with the catch phrase: A new [...]

Modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by One Thousand Words A few weeks ago I got a redemption code from Apple for a free move rental from iTunes– I chose to use it to watch Inception (I’m still resonating or reverberating with this movie, so this is not a review). It’s that “rental” in the sense you have 30 days to watch it, and once you start, you have 24 hours to finish. Those are conditions I’ve not tried on before- mostly for movies I go to the little library in Pine, Arizona, where I get to hold the disks for like 3 weeks, and I can watch them whenever the heck I want. But this is the taste of the new future of movie watching, where you do not get discs, just the flickr form the cloud. While utterly conveniently, I am struck by the absence of what [...]

I’m ambiholidayous- I’ll celebrate anything. While growing up in a Jewish home in Baltimore, we had Hannukah this time of year. At the same time, one of my Dad’s favorite activities was taking me for a walk in the neighborhood to see the decorated houses– ours never had the lights and doo-dads, but we liked to see how other people lit their homes up. cc licensed flickr photo shared by StarrGazr Our favorite was a house that actually had no lights- it was square, and white, and had a flat roof that sloped backward, and the family would drap this giant red bow down the front- and it looked like a giant wrapped present. We would also visit a friend of the family (I never did figure out the connection) but the Bentes would always have the brightly lit Christmas tree and snack food like steamed shrimp. They also thought [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by crowdive At first it was just one stray. Then another. Make it three or four. Now they see each other, and its a herd, movement… stampede? cc licensed flickr photo shared by crowdive Yup, there are MOOCs on the moooooove. Okay, enough of the bovine innuendos. But what is one to make in a slight uptick in talk of Massive Online Open Courses? One might feel like it is a rising tide, but it doesn’t register a blip in google trends. The M George Siemens had a really good set of questions in What’s Wrong with (M)OOCs? I like that George put the parens around the “M”- its been a question of mine about the “massive” part. It’s interesting toi have large numbers in an open course, especially when it triggers international network effects like CCK08 and PLENK2010 had — but is it really [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My Mom is too much… too much goodness. She loves giving little presents. This big boxed arrived via FedEx; in it were some holiday gifts for a friend’s son, but Mom also stuffed it full of kitchen gadgets she claimed were laying arounf un-used in her kitchen. And since she visited here last month, she knew a lot of things I lacked. And I could not help but be reminded of the holidays when I was a kid. When Mom would ask what I wanted for a gift (singular), my little kid brain came up with what I thought was a clever strategy to get more out of the deal– I would ask for a "Big Box Full of a Whole Lotta Little Toys." And Mom would always deliver- a box full of individually wrapped toy cars, books, puzzles, games… and so once [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Serenae You gotta like the Jim Groom strategy- run off to the good life in Italy, and let people like Tom Woodward go craxy coming up with ideas to use in Jim’s ds106 course (Tom is on FIRE, see his latest activity ideas). My, that fence is getting painted nicely. Who knows if the paint will stick? Its getting infectious. I was thinking tonight about one of my favorite flickr mashuo tools- Pimpampum’s phrasr. You start by entering/pasting in a text box a phrase, and it creates an interface where you can try to illustrated each word with an image selected from flickr. You get about 16 images to choose from, or can just skip the word (like what would you pick form “the”?). So here’s an easy one- make a phrasr from a song. Pick a favorite song. Better if not common. I [...]