CogBlogged from ‘April, 2011’

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Alissa Osumi Expectations keep piling up in the apartment of my mind Like piles of someone elses dirty clothes. Dirty jeans, socks in odd numbered collections, flannel shirts, a polka dotted party dress (not mine), torn jeans, a tuxedo (no way), a leisure suit (maybe). I keep stuffing them back in the closet, tossing over the balcony at night, leaving them in front of the empty 4G unit. AC/DC Concert t-shirts, black bikini, wrinkled travel slacks. Wedding gown (used once), surfer shorts (used too much), cowboy duds, napkins, towels, boxer shorts with cartoons. Big plastic bagfulls I drop in the Goodwill dumpster. Some of that stuff might just be my size.

I had fun going overboard on making this promo video for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story This was created for today’s keynote at the Learning Connections District Champions meeting in Toronto. When Deb invited me to speak she asked me to do a video she could use to summarize the workshop after it ended. I really should have just turned on the web cam and blabbed away, and I might have been done in an hour. But I had this half idea to piece together a message from it using the tools themselves, so I wrote a script, and assigned tools for each line. For the tools that have audio or video capability, I use it directly; otherwise, I made voice-overs in iMovie. To capture the animated/bviudeo segments, I did screen capture with iShowU. The slides for today’s session are posted on Slideshare 50 Ways Workshop for [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog While settling in at the conference I was speaking in at York University today, I peeked at this cute book my host Deb Kitchener had at her seat. “It’s a Book” (it might set you back $8 on Amazon) is a cute read, and while looking for a link, I saw that the publisher had a really nicely done animated version on YouTube Alas, they squashed the mouse’s closing line from the book! Damned censors! You will have to read the book to get clued.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Half Chinese It’s been illuminating scanning the posts the UMW ds106 students are writing in their “advice to future ds06ers” assignment. Most acknowledge the incredible amount of work and time the class took, and then counter with something along the lines “it was so worth it.” I’m not sure what they put in the water on campus in Fredericksburg, but they have a lot of intense, motivated students, the kind in other places teachers might hope to have just a hand full in class. And here is something else I don’t think Jim and Martha have written about, but Jim as relayed to me- no (or almost no) students have dropped out of the 3 sections. Is that remarkable to anyone else? I know from my years in the community college system, you could just count on having half, one third [...]

Woah, it is ending? ds106 is almost over? Sigh. Well, sincr i have blog posts dribbled over the last few months, I thought about organizing it a bit better here in the doghouse- it’s not quite archiving, but it does feel like the suitcase needs help to get closed. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by demandaj What I talk about below in likely un-reproducible code is what I did to generate http://cogdogblog.com/tag/ds106 Doing this has been part of some other WordPress tinkering around here. The current template here has 2 widgetized sidebars, and I shifted the rightmost one to be the “standard” one that appears on all pages. The left side one, by default, will have blog related things, but I also now use it on a few templates to create more relevant bits. To allow for a new widget, I edited my functions,php template [...]

There was no reason for this besides an opportunity to go over the top Watch live video from ds106tv on Justin.tv (Consider yourself fortunate if you do NOT get the mustard ad…..) Some Jim had to annihilate his network, I could not help but obey the force of mockery and go out and TNT some ds106 blogs. Of course, not one bit is meant to be taken seriously. Except for the honest praise about CogDogBlog. I realized I missed by oen blogBirthday- April 19 marked the 8th year of barking and playing. So be warned, ignore your blog, and it might go kaboom.

This morning I got to be a part of the EDUCAUSE Mobile Sprint, a five day, webinar-based event focused on mobile technology. When they first approached me with words like “keynote” / “presentation”, I declined as I have a huge amount of prep for events end of this week and next. Plus, I am no expert on mobile tech. Sure I use and love my iThings, but… But Catherine Yang and Julie Little came back, offering a format that would not involve slide decks and a ton of upfront prep. I salute their team for pushing hard on the webinar format. And today’s kickoff session for the week turned out to be fun, me being paired with someone who actually is doing work in the field, Joanne Kossuth at Olin College. The EDUCAUSErs had formed broad questions, and asked us each to pick images/slides to background our remarks. My first [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by fs999 There is a tad bit of smugness of people dissing the cloud after last week’s Amazon EC2 #fail. I respect you a lot Doug, but on reading this: Having recently considered moving this blog to Amazon EC2 because it’s ‘never down’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Bluehost may be slower at serving up content than it used to be but at least it’s never completely failed me. Outsourcing via set-it-and-forget-it only works if you’ve got a backup plan. I cannot say that Amazon EC2′s selling point is “it’s never down”- and I bet sooner or later, whether you Bluehost, Dreamhost, Toasthost, or live off of that old PC server running in the basement, sooner or later (it could be years or seconds), you will be let down. Count on it. Amazon’s problem is that it ran so [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Like this tulip, lingering languidly long after its prime, I am giving up the 473 day photo string of participating in the Daily Shoot. After 15 months of being faithful, I am giving it a rest. Part of it is just not feeling the drive or stretch to complete the assignments, which, frankly is making me feel hypocritical considering I have been using it as an example of successful informal learning. But like others, I am feeling a bit of weariness with the repetition of recent assignments: April 24, 2011, #524″ “Make a photograph that features the horizon” March 27, 2011, #497: “The horizon can be a strong composition element. Make a photograph that emphasizes the horizon today.” and at least twice more in the older history Or: April 21, 2011, #522: “Make a photograph that features water today.” March [...]

OMG, it is the last stretch of ds106, finals! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Late last night, in a fit of energy, I decided to finish out my fandom assignment. Rather than blabbing all about it first, like usual, I share first “The Last Man on Earth is Not So Lonely” (note, the audio may have been flagged by the Onerous YouTube Content Sniffer, so I may ened up self hosting it here, nyeh nyeh). The question is, how can the Last Man on Earth be all that lonely, when there are not only two others (versions of the same movie), but also because the Man ends up meeting a Woman, having a dog for a companion, and outside are a bunch of vampires/”family”/zombies eager to play?. I got to thinking about this after watching I Am Legend on a plane flight earlier this year. [...]