CogBlogged from ‘December, 2010’

There is absolutely nothing novel or prophetic about talking about smartphones (a word I loathe to use, but heck, I can live finally with “Web 2.0″) as potentially replacing computers as a primary device. I got to try it out this weekend. This was not a planned exercise. After visiting friends in Phoenix this weekend, I returned home (a 2 hour drive normally, extended to 5 due to highway closure) and was dismayed to realize I had left my backpack at the restaurant where I attended a holiday party. Dismayed is a #&@^* understatement. In that pack was my MacBookPro, my iPad, my DSLR (and extra lens), my portable hard drive with my photo archive (THAT was backed up before I left)…. I was able to call the restaurant 10 minutes before they closed, and they assured me the backpack was found and could be picked up. Still. I was [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You cannot escape the psychedelic aura of ds106. Photo challenge- find the aura of ds106 where you live.

In lieu of not having much other material to post here, I could not let the pre ds106 fun pass with a little playing with the most useful, erduite, scholarly web 2.0 tool… or see it at http://blabberize.com/view/id/351885. Like Xtranormal, most of the stuff one creates with Blabberize is pure nutbar crazy (but fun), yet, every now and then, someone out there actully creates something usefiul with these tools. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. So… to add to Jim’s story here. At nights, on the weekends, I live a different life…. Where can you take it? There is a lot of imagery out there to use…

cc licensed flickr photo shared by roboppy No one (admits) liking spam, the electronic kind nor the meat food product… well there are fans of the latter, more than the former. Instead of just complaining I seek to make use of the stuff. For a while I was trying to pull bits out and tweet them under the secret name of @spamstories But like most of my meme efforts, it died a quiet lonely death. I began thinking of spam again in light of ds106 What can we do with all the stuff? cc licensed flickr photo shared by isinoid So I began thinking with today’s spam gem: My name is Captain Matthew Stamford of the US Marine corps stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan, I found some money stashed in a couple of barrels while on patrol ($2,000,000.00) I need someone to help me move it to a safer place, please [...]

In the pre-launch fury for the ds106 Digital Storytelling Open Course, I thought it would be fun (and easy to set up) to create a new place on the Five Card Flickr Stories site for us to play. Want to have a go at making a story? Head over to http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/play.php?suit=ds106. I’m curious to see if people can go beyond the literal caption making approach that most make when they save their stories. Want to add to the pool? Just tag photos in flickr as ds106. A caveat is you should do this for new photos, because of the way the API works, I am not able to (very easily) go back in time to fetch older photos. So start sharing weird photos of stuff now with the class tag. I thought of making a special tag just for five card ds106 stories, but figured Jim will have us madly [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by dchrisoh This year I fell out of NaNoWriMo only 12 days in, and it was a good thing. I could sense form where I was, that my attempt at writing a World According to Dogs novel was maybe at best, a not original idea and not welle executed. But failing writing about dogs, I’m into some good reading some books, here in my Kindle app, in the “dog vein” I want to credit John King for his comment that led me to read the marvelous, yet bittersweet, Timbuktu. In that story, told by the world wise “Mr Bones” we find the dog seeing a parting of the ways with his estranged, yet dog-loved, human companion, the mentally off kilter. homeless, and dying, Willy G Christmas. It was a quick read, yet like a coat of dried mud, I cannot quite shake it. It is, [...]

What hath Jim Groom wrought? A few spare body parts, some electricity, whilring dials, and some hunchbacked assistant… ds106 The Mad Open Online Course is Alive! So it’s not even place, it’s three weeks out, why are all my colleagues, friends madly in their labs, and doing of all things, retro 1990s techno things like animated gifs? Now anyone can create an sloppy animated gif (like me)- it was this site @jimgroom first tweeted If We Don;t Remember Me that set this up as an art form It is not just anything animated, it is a key selection of subtle movement from a single scene of a movie, placed in the ancient package of an animated gif, that makes it come alive. So what beter source then the original monster creation? is there anything more freaky than Colin Clive‘s portrayal of the manic doctor? In that opening scene, his head [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by klynslis Someone in my twitter flow, I cannot recall who, tweeted in angst asking if anyone has had a good webinar experience in Adobe Connect. The subtext was clear- he/she had a lousy experience, and wonders if te problem is the technology. Heck, I do this all the time. I have b and m-ed about those WebEx sessions where they dont let the audience see or chat with each other. I am not about to become a raging fan-boy of Connect, but having used it over the last few years to run at least 30 or more sessions for NMC (Our regular Connect@NMC sessions a year of Adobe First Mondays, MIDEA webinars, and other scattered sessions and live meetings), I have some sense of what has worked well for us. It’s not iron clad, and I will first start out by saying that all [...]

I have signed up for more open courses and barely participated in all of them- but I am aiming to break my mold with just off the press bavadelicious announcement from Jim Groom that he would be leading an online and open course version of his ds106 Digital Storytelling course at University of Mary Washington. Yes, I am a card carrying OCDU (Open Course Drop Out). For now. You will find the new course being formed over the next few weeks at http://ds106.us/ and darned if there is not a sweet integration of MediaWiki with the same TwentyTen theme, I have been so accustomed to seeing butt ugly MediaWiki sites that I stopped using them myself. So I registered my blog at ds106.us (easier than any other course registration I did in college) (yes, I recall walking around Arizona State University, standing in registration lines with a piece of paper [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by h.koppdelaney “There is this to be said for walking: It’s the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.”– Edward Abbey Zooming down the road at 60 miles per hour, squatting on your rear haunches like an Abbey frog, you may get where you are going fast, but you are pretty much separated from the environment you are passing through. You are breathing rarified processed air, the temperature is artificially maintained, the sounds of the world are drowned out by the motor and music. Slow it down. Get out of the car. Ride a bike, you are moving slower, but you are not adding carbon to the atmosphere. You are getting some health gains, you see more detail, a house you [...]