CogBlogged from ‘October, 2011’

Take a fine trip down south, maybe just a wee bit of adventure. Meet our local friendly folks who just want to say “hi”. You will squeal with excitement. This is a minimalist travel poster assignment for ds106, though not quite minimal in graphic design, maybe concept?. In photoshop I use the Cutout filter to give it a more graphic look and feel.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dean Shareski has been running a wonderful example of learning by doing/sharing/reflecting in his personal learning project to learn how to play a guitar. There’s a lot of things I like about what he is doing: As a teacher, he is doing the same project he is asking his students to do. I cannot say how powerful this is, it is the thing Jim Groom has done all along in his digital storytelling courses (even before ds106) and was something I always respected Barbara Ganley for doing when she was teaching writing at Middlebury College. This changes the entire student/teacher dynamic. Learning is happening in public. Dean is showing the example of examining what he is doing by putting it out in public. Not the final project, but the process. This ought to happen all the time. The network is [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Crossing into the 10,000+ mile range of this trip, I am having a blurry epiphany, whatever the heck that means. I set out on the trip with a goal of “seeing what this country is really about”. While I have traveled far, I in actuality see just the tiinest sliver of a sliver, and most of that is out the car window. But I am feeling a growing restlessness with the amount of “sameness” one sees everywhere. Yes, many of us rant about the plethora of Big Box strips that ring our cities but also our small towns. Just exactly where is this place? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It is everywhere. It is the Plastification of America, the spreading of sameness because it is comfortable, familiar, safe. I’m feeling there is something corrupting in [...]

Based in the recommendation of David Kernohan I bought a copy and devoured “Things the Grandchildren Should Know”, the life obstacle overcoming journey of Mark Oliver Everett, the man behind The Eels. Before David played a long set of Eels, my limited by very satisfying exposure was the haunting Novocaine for the Soul, a frequent player in my shuffle. Everett was lost in what rolls off as a dysfunctional family- withdrawn father scientist, absent attention mother, and a sister who moved through every flavor of abuse before killing herself. He lost all of his family as his success climbed, and it was music that saved and drove him. I cannot say it was quite as Vonnegut like as some reviewers say, but I can see a bit why the flitting and sardonic writing style might suggest it. But I am no literary critic. Maybe I am, as I just used [...]

In checking out some of the student visual design work for ds106 (which the CUNY students are really going far and powerful with), I could not resist one more Macguffin. A better real estate decision could have avoided dealing with that whole building full of freaks. Thinking again on the idea of a regular challenge of a “Daily Creative”, this one took me all of 15 minutes from idea to screen capture to plastering text on in photoshop. Writing the blog post may have been the most time consuming (and most important). These Macguffins are addictive indeed.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That photo was from my 2007 trip around Australia; I always thought that pattern in the desert looked like the shape of a dog. LUcky for me I made the effort a few days ago yo visit Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, as this was a first time in person meeting. She’s quite the force of energy in many good ways, but good for me in that she offered me a chance to speak at one of her PLP Network events on November 29 in Melbourne, Australia. This means I have to get home before Thanksgiving so I can leave again ;-) So I am looking at time, cause it is a shame to get a trip all the way there and not spend some time looking around. For sure I will visit my ds106 radio cicada casting friend Rowan Peter in melbourne, [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Wavy1 This has been beyond my expectations as a response to my call for help to keep Feed2JS going. I actually had never looked much to see where it was being used (D’Arcy would claim its mostly spam), since the site does not track anything (working on a log to count the number of feed cached each day, estimated at 15,000) but Google reports 190,000 results for a search string that indicate usage from the main server alone. Then there were the messages people shared when donating to help with the server costs. I’ve been collecting the advice, suggestions, offers etc, and after a really helpful discussion yesterday with Scott Leslie, can outline a few plans for the future. They are ones in which I am asking for some help, especially in advancing the code development. But first as [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 105 Miles Driven: 9856 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 17 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 2 Money spent on gas: $2678 Cheapest gas price: $3.25/gallon (Fredericksburg, VA). Highest gas price: $5.64/gallon (1.39/liter) (Wawa, ON). Amount of time required to drive 47 miles from Falls Church VA to Baltimore DC: 2.5 hours (frustration: infinite) Photos posted: 2154 (that is an average of 20.5 per day) Number of books read: 11 (Most recent: Cloud Atlas) Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 9 Number of nights camping: 16 Number of visits to Hyperion Espresso in Fredericksburg: 4 (almost every day) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Among the scattered notes scribbled illegibly in my journal, tapped into the app on my phone, and mainly swirling through my head was the image of the quiet powerful earth moving force of the Salmon River I saw in northern Idaho. I had followed this route along highway 95 after camping in the national Forest outside of New Meadows. As noted before, with some irony I was traveling part of the route I was reading in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Not too far north of New Meadows, the highway rounded a bend and started dipping down, following the route of a churning creek, maybe 15-20 feet wide, but like most of the waters I had seen in Wyoming, Colorado, and the mountain west, running wild with the large amount of melt off of later summer snow. The [...]

I am calling this one a Four Icon MacGuffin Challenge – mashing up the Four Icon Challenge with Messing with the MacGuffin