CogBlogged from ‘January, 2011’

I am trying to restrain the time sink that might become participating in ds106 radio, but it is easy to get sucked into the vortex. I made a little audio mashup the other not and dropped it in the bin, but you never know exactly where it goes from there- part of that is the magic spontaneity of it all. So here goes a story. You’d have to be hard pressed to be a male youth who grew up radiated by 1970s movie/tv culture and not be able to summon up at anytime a quote from the one, the only…. Dirty Harry. I refuse to count the calculated “Make my day” line, and am more akin to the Harry Calahan lip sneer: Swell. But of all the rats, punks, street dirtbags, frubby politicians, loonies, corrupt cops that Harry tangled with, none could measure up to one dark, twisted, tormented, evil, [...]

On Friday, I am headed down to Scottsdale Community College’s Techtools day. I presented there a few years ago, and this year, they are bringing in the big gun, Bryan Alexander, as keynote. I opted to toss in a session, and hence this thing: The premise (or promise or lack there of of both is: The future will be browsed! I’ll share ten lesser known techniques or web tools you can use in your web browser to may impress your friends and co-workers, or make you more powerful on the web. Know them all? Share yours! My idea was to show a sampling of stuff I use regularly or every now and then in my web browser- the kind of thing that is either something you did not know, say Google Docs could do, or some other web tool that did something unique in the “tool” sense. It is a [...]

I’m tickled, not ecstatic rolling on the floor, about the response among the ds106 participants in creating examples of mini stories using the tools from 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I’ve always wanted to have more examples to include, and ds106 provides, abides, subsidizes…What is really cool is that they seem to be covering every tool, even the obscure ones. I’ll be combing through them all soon, and will be rolling into the new version of the site I need to round out over the next months. Part of the new model is making it easier for people to add directly to the site. In tribute, I whipped together a comic with gnomz, which has been around a long, long time (gnmoz can be wonky, the embed is not working so I did a full page screen grab with Aviary) Full comic is at http://en.gnomz.com/227499-50-nuggets.html

cc licensed flickr photo shared by leo_irakliotis When Jim Groom hatched the Digital Story open course I bet he never envisioned the wonderfully weird, wild, and open free form radio happening these past few days at radio ds106. It would look like utter chaos to anyone looking in, which is good, cause it is. It was Grant Potter’s genius that launched the madness, string together dropbox, playlist generator, streaming Icecast server, and likely other bits of duct tape. Pretty much anyone can upload any kind of mp3 audio file, and many are stringing together mini sets of songs. People are mixing music, mashups, clips from shows, movies, ed tech talks. I missed the first bits while on the road last week, just saw the tweets flying by, but it does not take much to get sucked into the vortex cc licensed flickr photo shared by robpatrick I had this half [...]

It seemed a little odd for week 3′s ds106 assignment to be about 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story, but there is no way I would just do just another Dominoe story. I was flailing around for an idea, and the story just happened while wandering about. Here is a Vuvox Collage story about a boomerang at DFW airport (link to view directly). Vuvox can be quirky, but the media on a scroll line and its editing features are a nice change from the usual stuff. As usual I got the unusual music from ccMixter– “PEACE” by rocavaco (feat. the world) http://ccmixter.org/files/rocavaco/26369

cc licensed flickr photo shared by dannyphyo Take a long nap, Jack, Make a big snore, Elanor. Dont need to be awake, Jake, Just listen to me. Eek, time slipped away and I was not paying attention to ds106 assignment 3 referring to 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I’m excited to see what people create ’cause it means I will have a bunch of new examples to add to the site. A caveat, I’ve been dragging my paws on updating that site. Well, I did start with a new one, but it is not filled out — I have a new design that will be (hopefully) better organized/structured, and offer more routes in to have people contribute. But alas, it is about 48 short, but FYI can be found at http://50ways.wikispaces.com. As is, the old one is most complete, but keep in mind that some of descriptions [...]

(Image: grandmother computer, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 25031050@N06′s photostream) WARNING: NOSTALGIC INTERNET WARBLING AHEAD! If you were there in the heady first days of the graphic web, when there was but one browser, there was an easy way to know what was worth looking at on the web- there was a simple daily, human edited source. One web page covered it all. No search engines, no social networking. It was so new, that anything (almost) was worth checking out, and ne could keep a relatively small number of key sites in a mental list. You know how that went. Very quickly the volume expanded so much it could not be contained on a page. Manually. Is that happening with MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Someone will shoot me down on that, and I dont think it is, but there are now more than a handful happening, [...]

We have a transmission from Agent 19 that The Secret Revolution will be soon not so secretly spreading its word: http://secretrevolution.us/secret/36/ What’s this about? Go to the link, damnit. Please. Pretty please. This is a second calling for people who, while wishing for the Big Changes in Education, are doing it at their own level, either inside or just outside of the official lines. How can you help? Share a story http://bit.ly/secretrevolution (hoping in my most fervent ways to get a small fraction of the response Alec Couros does) Beter question, why should you care? (a.k.a. “WTF?”) See Prop Up the Revolution

This might come up in ds106 as an assignment- creating animated trips through Google Streetview. Jim Groom tried to take credit for “inventing: it last year, but I am not stepping into that dog pit again. Well maybe I am— as I had done one in 2008, grabbing screen shots of Google Streetview’s trip down the “crookedest street in the world”, Lombard Street in San Francisco, in what I called Street View Movies. Other variations I recall was a flickr group back in 2005, where rather than animating your neighborhood (because Street View was not invented yet), but using google maps to mark up the neighborhood you grew up in, and sharing it– see http://cogdogblog.com/2010/03/22/memory-mapping/. The point is that maps are a rich terrain to used to create or spawn stories, and can be a diversion from doing videos. I only mention because I recently found a nifty tool that [...]

Continuing on the chicken theme? Only the little kind. cc licensed flickr photo shared by atxryan It’s been almost a month since the sky fell on delicious.com. In news that spread at retweet speed, a leaked screenshot from a Yahoo inside briefing had listed the social bookmarking site delicious as being in the chopping block. Or is it chopped? And so ensued the frenzy. cc licensed flickr photo shared by jcolman A literal export rush ensued as people aimed to export their tagged history, many of them rushing to dump them into diigo. This included me. I am guilt of frenzy feeding. Or at least nibbling. The sky had certainly fallen, and the clucking ensued. What will we do! Hurry! Export! Import! Sign up! My tags! My Tags! And then this was followed by the glut of posts about “alternative social bookmarking services.” Alec Couros, in the method he does [...]