CogBlogged from ‘January, 2011’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by FatMandy The other half of this week’s ds106 assignment is to experiment with amping up the Campbellian locker decor of your blog– this is fitting for the participants new to blogging, and probably something others revisit every now and them (unless some mad tyrant tries to tell you what template to use on your blog). There are only about 12,749 plugins to check out ;-) Add to that the almost infinite number of widget codes you can slap into your sidenbar widgets (just use the Text widget, it can accomodate javascript and other goodies). While this is a good thing for blog crafters to explore; I’d add a bit of caution not to go zany nuts (like installing 12, 749 plugins). There is a performance overhead on plugins and sidebar cruft- especially anything that has to connect to a third party site. Each plugin [...]

Bear with me on a metaphorical stretch. Seat belts are not required, but we will practice our breathing. Wikimedia CC licensed image As a kid, I always liked being in the water- I never enjoyed swimming per se, but I loved seeing how far I could go, how many laps I could do, underwater in one breath. The more I tried it, the longer I was able to stay under. Push, push, while the heart beats pound like bass drums in your brain, logic saying “go up go up” but the will saying “just a few more strokes”. Not that I set any world records, but this sense of just trying a little bit harder, and getting the reward of stretching… I may have forgotten the meta level of that experience. This was the metaphor I found myself coming back to for assignment 2 of ds106, in reviewing Gardner Campbell’s [...]

My humble apologies- Two weeks ago I asked for recommendations for beach reading and got a great list– and I started one not on the list! I have a good reason- it was a Christmas present from one of my longest known best friends, who wrote inside of it: I hope you still find time to read for the pure enjoyment of it. And that was something I had not done enough of last year. And I am enjoying the book so much, I am writing about while only half way through. The book is Mario Vargas’ LLosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and it is a riot, just the pleasurable reading my doctor should have ordered. I’ll butcher it by trying to describe the plot, but Llosa paints a colorful picture of life in Lima, Peru with the interwoven soap operatic like of young Mario, dreaming of being a [...]

And here we go! ds106 is off the ground with week 1′s assignment, a post with typical Groomian oomph (‘this ain;t like your mama’s MOOC”). We are to do any kind of short story about something that happened recently. I was toying with some tech and came up with a half baked idea to try, but before the “making of” extras, let’s watch the feature, in which I have a conversation about why on my recent glorious trip to Hawaii, I managed to avoid taking any photos of the wild chickens. Okay, I broke the first rule and went over, it is 3 minutes wrong. Sue me. See, the rules in ds106 are to make your own! And now for the rest of the story…. I was reading somewhere earlier that Apple has a version of Facetime that you can use on your desktop to do Facetime calls to an [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ouyea… “That’s for kids.” “It’s just a game.” “Cute. Now let me know when you do something academically valuable.” “Grow up.” “(I can’t do that, people will laugh).” With senseless violence becoming a sad norm, with the weight of a world dying of overheating or exterminating its own biosphere, with a future dimmed of optimism, can there be a more timely place than now to truly embrace the power of play? Sure, we can recall the warm memory of a time without the boundaries of possible, when we did not electronic toys but something as simple as a box cc licensed flickr photo shared by Speedboat Professionally we can give nodding ascent to the notion that a sense of play is good, but then we wrap it in scarequotes, and make sure no one is looking, before we revert to our adult responsibilities. I [...]

Almost as much as grey page backgrounds, under construction barricades, and nested HTML tables, few things define the web of the 1990s as the animated GIF. It’s been rewarding and nostalgic to see the wave of resurgence in the lead up to the ds106 open course that should lift off this week. It’s been fun to watch all the variations people are trying ***before the course even starts*** name one course anywhere, online or down your lecture hall, that has people doing assignments before they are assigned, before the course even starts. People are using different methods, tool, and sharing their recipes. The best kinds of assignments to me are ones where there is more than one way to complete them. That is certainly turned up to 11. I’ve played mine out too. It’s not really a place to criticize, but I’d think the point is not just to animate [...]

by  Kaptain Kobold  I sit in the Vino Volo wine bar at the Oakland airport milking the last minutes from a vacation tacked onto the holiday break…. Who would want this to end? I am buying another ticket to Denial Land. Where did I miss the line to stand in for the life of idle independent wealth? Oh well. There is one more air flight, one more two hour drive, a load of laundry, and a nights sleep between me and the reality of 2011. No. I am not wasting time here with tired resolutions (I find they work better as secret bets with one self).   by  marceline  Yet I can see in the hazy Mississippi mist (imagined) ahead are The Crossroads (R. Johnson, 1936).  Maybe it’s that white guy approaching 50 thing that ends up with me looking pathetic in a red convertible. No. But I feel as though I [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Anonymous9000 A few days ago, I pushed out an Unscientific Experiment in Recommendations; I asked in three different places (a) this blog; (b) twitter; and (c) Facebook three different requests for reccommendations: I am Looking for a Quality Photo Tripod Adios iPhone / AT&T Hello Android / Verizon? (maybe) – asking for what is best Verizon Android phone for iPhone lover Beach Reading for my vacation to Hawaai Below is a quick Google spreadsheet with the results. A quick summary: I got the most responses for books (26) followed by the Verizon phone (14), and least for the tripod (5). I got the most responses in twitter (24), followed by Facebook (13), and last was the blog (8) The responses came quickest to twitter I’m still sorting through the response, which totaled together, is respectable. It’s interesting to compare, as in twitter, its put [...]

Cheddar cheese is yellow and melts nicely to make sandwiches. Bacon has the ability to arouse the dead with its delicious smell and to drive Canadians bonkers. Desire is stacked in favor of the bacon, except– They’re under pressure from health nuts, vegans and pig lovers to eat soy food product. It takes guts to eat bacon, and even though the asymmetrical nature of challenging the status quo is in their favor, often we find we’re short on strips of pig flesh. … and then the cheese prevails. We tend to write in a consistent form; it’s a fun exercise to try someone else’s style on for size. Above is a parody (with appropriate respect to the brief, metaphoric blogging style of Seth Godin (original post Insurgents and incumbents). Why do this? Writing is at its core the simplest, yet most creative, form of storytelling. How do we shape ideas, [...]

By sheer accident I stumbled across the google search results display that matches results to a timeline, here is a technology timeline This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search on technology. From the results, on the left side bar, click the link for timeline. Now you can adjust the time range, or change the search terms, this time, say I wanted to create a search history timeline for China It could be an interesting activity/exercise to create other timelines. Google embeds surprising functional bits i search results. Looking to calculate a currency exchange? Just google “currency exchange” and you get a widget calculator right there. Have you found other embedded tools in search results? Thanks for the surprise serendipity (as if there were any [...]