CogBlogged from ‘February, 2011’

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That photo was one I crafted in November when my Mom visited, and I tried to get her in the same pose as her high school graduation photo. After this past week’s fun of getting my Mom to talk live on ds106 radio, it was fun to see the NoiseProf’s remix of her voice (taking mine out of the mix) tossed with D’Arcy Norman’s spooky guitar sounds and Todd’s mix with Joe Strummer plus Marshal McLuhan on backup. I could not help but want to remix the remix- taking NoiseProfessor’s audio, chopping a few clips out, and layering it on top of some of my own library of rock music with reference to mothers… So here ya go A Remix of Remix of Cogdog’s Mom

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ailatan With a relaxing day of nothing definite to do, I decided to poke around the corners of the blog house and clean up some dust gathered in the corners of my theme. Themes that predate WordPress 3, like mine, do not take advantage of the newer menu editing options. Old school themes were typically set up to turn Pages into menus, for example mine is wedged inside the header.php template: <ul class="menu"> <li class="<?php if ( is_home() or is_archive() or is_single() or is_paged() or is_search() or (function_exists('is_tag') and is_tag()) ) { ?>current_page_item<?php } else { ?>page_item<?php } ?>"><a title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Da Blog</a></li> <?php wp_list_pages('depth=1&title_li=&include=1358,887,2929,1620'); ?> </ul> where I have picked the pages listed by their id numbers to appear. This is rather tedious to edit and manage, and I also ran into issues because I [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I know zero about business, but in some alternate universe where I was teaching a course in business practices, there is an entire syllabus full of materials from Yahoo on how not to be successful. Look at their portfolio of successes with acquisitions, as painfully outlined in the 37signals sad tale of What Happens After Yahoo Acquires You (the answer seems to be, “they mis-manage/ignore you, then shut down your service. Take the money and run”). Previously, I marveled at their lack of communications or effort to build a business out of delicious, the largest social network of web bookmarkers that will ever likely be in one place. Yahoo sat on this network for years, and did not do thing one to leverage any gain for their so-called business. Look at their blog! No news since thier December “Please buy [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by fotoandrew This is a slight twist on the ds106 Sound Effects Story assignment- a short story done with only audio effects. Rather than use ones from a library, I mixed together a set of voice-less sounds I made or got from my surroundings. The story first.. The Keys All of the sounds were recorded on my iPhone using the expensive and complicated (not, it is 99 cents) Griffin iTalk app. These included: Keys being picked up (rattled too) form table. House door opeing, foot steps, opening of car door, starting of car engine. Closing of car door. Ocean waves crashing (recorded earlier this week in St Petersburg) Plunking in water sound (made by dropping a bar of soap in a toilet) It’s a five sound story!

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk Round up yer wiki-ing, pardner! I just got early word that wikispaces is expanding their program of ad-free fully featured wikis that was up to now offered only for K-12, and making it available for higher education too. We’re taking it to the next level. Our great ad-free, private, Plus-featured wikis are now free to higher education, as well. With this whole new audience for our wikis, we’re extending our commitment to give away 2 million total free wikis for education. The features in these free educational wikis normally cost $50 per year, but are completely free when used for K-12 or higher education. That means wikis for teachers, students, professors, researchers, librarians — anyone and everyone using their wikis in K-12 or higher education. So spread the word and let’s achieve something great together. If you’re using [...]

Here’s a new assignment for your ds10ers; put your Mom on the radio. I have an unfair advantage that my Mom is (a) alive and (b) a good sport. On her annual visits to Strawberry AZ for Thanksgiving, she has let herself be recorded on how to use her Twitter account or her previous amazement at people tweeting to her. On my two day visit to her home in south Florida, I brought the ds106 radio station booth with me, and was determined to have her do a live appearance on the waves. Well, actually I did not say anything about the radio until we started broadcasting, I just said I wanted to record her telling stories. Here’s the archive of our fun time: CogDog’s Mom on ds106 radio (audio) So this was totally unstructured. I rolled in with a bit of Herb Alpert, since I recall this tantalizing album [...]

Definitions of “purpose” center on reaching a goal, terminal end, desired result, perhaps a mythical castle in the sky. That does not seem right education, we should want always to go farther. And I wonder if we’re trapped too much, especially in citing what’s wrong, in too easily framing education as school. Maybe it was schooled into us. I am intrigued/encouraged by tradition-bucking advocates of a DIY approach to education. It injects a sense of looking at education in a non-19th century view. An ethos of people learning on their own is an Over All Good Thing. We need more of that, in and outside of formal education. Yet, I grapple with this. A DIY approach works perfectly when Y knows exactly what I is to D. When you need to fix a flat bike tire or a stop leaky toilet tank, a wealth of free, open, and useful resources [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Derek K. Miller I had way, way too much fun (as if there is really such a measurement) with my presentation yesterday for the ITC 2011 conference here in Florida. On the beach. Under the sun. Maybe it was because this was all brand new material- or just it was because I got to talk about my favorite subject, photography. I called this “Through The Lens” and you can find the various bits and links and slides and audio at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/itc11. Thru the Lens View more presentations from Alan Levine. Through the Lens (audio) The things I tried to aim for were some really weak metaphor comparisons between both mechanics of cameras (aperture as being breadth of attention, shutter speed as time spent, iso as sensitivity) and the artistic ends (snapshots versus good photos, cropping, composition) etc and learning. I [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was my honor and sheer fun joy to be invited by Mike Caulfield to KKeene State College today to bring a new interation of the Secret Revolution. In fact, Mike and his crew at the CELT had made it the theme of their Faculty Technology Showcase. I pulled out the stops in this session, adding all new content to the version I had done last summer in Edmonton, and included the “gimmicks” of the computer voice, my “inner techno soul” who talked back to me using the command line generation tool. I added this time the “hacking” of my presentation also including some entity sending tweets out of my account, using the Keynote Tweet app/modification I wrote up that again makes this a viable option for Keynote and twitter. Slides are posted The Secret Revolution (Keene State College) View [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by arnoKath All of this creativity is doing crazy things to my heartbeat…. damn you ds106 and your flow of wildness! ds106 revving my heart