CogBlogged from ‘May, 2011’

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by *w* cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by arsheffield People I greatly respect (and I repeat, am not criticizing their choices), D’Arcy, Boone, Stephen are on a mission to do as much as possible to free themselves of “corporate silos”, e.g., they prefer to reclaim all of their online content to their own space. What I like most about the interwebs, is that it is a place we get to have choices, we can go to silos or dance halls (or beaches or bottom of the ocean or the surface of the moon), that as a benign (I hope) system of communication, it does not impose its will on us, it ought to be the reverse. Once again, I salute them for their dedication, but I am not in complete agreement that I want to do [...]

I remain stumped by thus niggling issue on my iPhone. I ask now, Bug or Feature? So I come across a YouTube video embedded in a blog: When I click to view, I am moved to a video player, but there is nothing that let’s me see or share the video URL It is completely iHidden. However, when viewed in the YouTube app, found only via some trial and error searching This player has a bookmark and share icon: The sharing method is circa 1997- email. This is rather lane for the company that prides itself on it’s interface. -1 Apple.

As someone dear to us has yelled before, “I WANT TO KNOW! I WANT TO KNOW!!!!!” The mystery is un-shrouded, whether it is Peter Rowan or Rowan Peter. Or is it that simple? I hear crickets from down under.

It’s beena while since I played with dotSUB, the crowdsource site for translating video captions into other languages. I decided to givre it a play with the video I made last month for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story. I first uploaded the video to dotSub. I thne noticed that it had an option to import a caption file (which I dont have in the proper format). But… I know that YouTube can do a fair job of filling in captions if you can provide it a text version of the script. And I had a script made when I made the movie (I did have to go back and re-edit, a the narrator went off script a lot- that was me). And YouTube does an okay job, some of the timing is a little off: But it offers the option to download the caption file… which I [...]

Here is a new toy to play with- announcing Pechaflickr, the pecha kucha + battle decks + flickr mashup. Type in a tag, click “play”, and you will be served up 20 random flickr photos, displayed each for 20 seconds. The idea is to have people practice the art of improv to a set of never before seen images, and try to make sense of it. I owe the idea to Giulia Forsyth, who days before 2011 Northern Voice tweeted me asking if there was some way to make Five Card Flickr do something like this. My first, lame response was going to be: Yeah, do 5 Card flickr 4 times ;-) But I thought this might be fun to do. My first round was a build off of the same code that I wrote for 5 Card Flickr, because all of the image data for the tags read in [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Moving this drafting table out here to California got me thinking of my Dad again. I found this table among the piles of stuff in our basement. Since leaving home for college, I had asked him for it, and have taken it everywhere I have gone, drove it across the US in my 73 Ford Maverick- you can actually see it poking out of the back seat of the car in this photo of my dog Dominoe: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A few years ago, I refinished the drafting table (ironically, or amazingly, this photo was used as part of a photoshop tutorial) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What I knew of this table was that my Dad used it when he took a correspondence course to get a [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by spablab A colleague recently shared a link to this Reuters story Is surfing the Internet altering your brain?. My degrees in Geology hardly qualify me to refute brain scientists, but my common sense really wrankles at suggestions such as: “We’re seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills,” Small told Reuters in a telephone interview …. He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners. “The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others,” said Small. [...]

The cryptic math is meant to communicate that over the last 2 days (48 hours), I have presented 3 times online 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (if you do the math you get a bad pi). Last night was a presentation for Dean Shareski‘s ECMP 355 Course (no web site?), which I believe is a University of Regina course for pre-service teachers, “Computers in the Classroom”. And I did two more ones today for the Powerful Learning Practice group from El Paso that Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach and Will Richardson leave. I gotta give Sheryl and hear team a to of credit in providing tech support to these teachers; they had them ALL verify and test their voice connection before I started, and rally provided a lot of energy to the back channel. All the participants were highly active, and took on my game of story prompts, this time [...]

Today’s supposed digital story is an experiment in creating animated GIFs, which is totally legal in counting as a story! I did this by using the consecutive shooting mode on my Canon T1i, then importing into PhotoShop (“import as Stack” under scripts in File menu), and finally using the animation palette to do final tweaks. Just remember, don’t look a GIF horse in the eye. The greatest GIF you can give another is the purity of your attention. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today ? Today is a GIF. That’s why we call it the bava Guilt: the GIF that keeps on giving.. A friend is a GIF you give yourself. Quotes lifted (and slightly edited) from http://www.coolnsmart.com/gift_quotes/

I was behind the wheel all day (and then some) last night to go from Strawberry AZ to northern CA, and cruised I-40, paralleling the ghost highway of Route 66. Somewhere near the Oatman turnoff (a worthy side trip if you every are in the area and want to see a funky place), I stopped to check the load in the back of truck, and could not resist singing in front of this sign (and hence a Blabberize) Okay, is this a story? as much so as an animated GIF, eh? But think, if you did a series of Blabberizes, you could narrate a two character story. Hmmm. So who’s with the story a day? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? This trip is my training for the Odyssey trip that starts in a month – stay tuned at http://cogdogblog.com/odyssey. During the long stretches I listened to music, heard about 5 shows of [...]