CogBlogged in ‘2012’

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog pre-post script: On re-reading this is chaotic and not even close to a full wrap experience of an intense event, and I feel like I left more out than I described. Sigh, blogging about blogging or blogging about not blogging well… It’s hard to blog the experience of last week’s Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington because there is so much to try and encapsulate, and I’m left with “it was teh awesome”. Some here is the random brain dump. Or maybe it will be all photos. My first experience at faculty Academy was as a speaker in 2007 and 5 years later I find myself on the other side as one of the team at UMW putting on the conference. Then, like now, it is a conference that does not overwhelm you as a conference, there ids [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Duncan Brown (Cradlehall) It’s not quite the odyssey of last year but I am starting tomorrow on a string of summer travel- my gracious thanks to Jim Groom and the DTLT crew at UMW for their flexibility in letting me roam and work at the same time. I am of course over the next 10 weeks co-directing Camp Magic Macguffin with Martha Burtis, the online summer class for ds106. I was brought in by the camp’s holding company to bring some sense of stability to the wackiness that went on last year. There will be no head shaving this year. So here is the plan…. May 23-June 14: Vancouver- I am headed there tomorrow, predominantly to spend some time at UBC with Brian Lamb and Novak Rogic’s team to learn more about their successes with the wiki as a community [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by bernat… Today was the third time I was invited to do a remote presentation of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the Wooster College Faculty Fellows Program. Since Jon and Matt visited UMW a few weeks back, we had a good chance to talk about some different ways to structure the session, and it worked well. I suggested we try presenting via Google Hangout, but the google docs presenter in there is fine for screen viewing, but too small for projection, so we went low tech, and used Hangout to see each other, and had them advance my slides on a second screen there. Here’s da slides, with embedded movies This time I spent much less time talking about the tools, and front loaded with some discussion of the shape of stories, e.g. the Kurt Vonnegut [...]

I’m thinking of Jerry’s note this morning (happy to see him signed up for Camp Magic Macguffin) “@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project. — Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012 With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting slip the time spent creating for class, itself the self-renewal I need as much as oxygen. Seeing Scottlo Warhol his Second Life self in a followup to Leelzebub’s own effort had me eager to try the tutorial. But alas I am photoshopless until the new order comes in, and that was way more than I wanted to bite off and try in GIMP. So I went for the next best thing, doing an animated GIF. When I visited the National Cryptologic Museum on Saturday I enjoyed watching the machine that had a computer controlled arm [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by febbrile This is about as close as I might get to a reflection on my first round of teaching an on site section of ds106 at the University of Mary Washington- the class had barely wrapped and we were off into prep for Faculty Academy, and this week, ds106 cranks up for its summer iteration. I dropped the ball on my audio reflections leaving about 4 recordings sitting high and dry. Not to mention it is 2am and I have an online presentation to deliver at 9am. But if I don’t blog it now, I might lose it all, given (another pending blog post) a summer of travel that starts in less than 48 hours. Enough prelude, get to it, Levine! First of all, this was about the first time since the mid 1990s that I was teaching a [...]

Lost in the shuffle of activity last week was a May 18 milestone; that day marked 20 years of my edtech career, the day I started my job as “programmer analyst/instructional systems” at the Maricopa Community Colleges. Wow was I green, but also a sponge. After my immersion of system culture at an Ocotillo retreat the first weekend, I was off to San Francisco to learn bout this new video technology called QuickTime. They left me alone that first summer, with my Quadra 900 as I immersed myself learning about HyperCard, gopher, videodiscs, etc. I could go even more Old Man with memories but I will stop. I do have to say much of what we have now, including a hand held mobile device for publishing to a web (from a taco shop) which was then a future… I might have never guessed to be. That alone gives me a [...]

If you are looking for a post about MOOCs or techie stuff, come back another day. Today was… well I don’t have to say much beyond Motherless children have a hard time When the mother is gone Motherless children have a hard time When the mother is gone Motherless children have a hard time There’s all that weeping and all that crying Motherless children have a hard time When the mother is gone My Mom passed away in late August of last year, in the middle of my road trip odyssey, transforming it from a plan to visit her in November to having to see her lowered into the ground in September and then cleaning out her house. Today was Matzevah, being the date my sisters and I had picked to unveil the tombstone marker for her, adjacent to the ones for my Dad and my brother at the old [...]

Things are shaping up nicely for the summer course of ds106 I am co-teaching with Martha Burtis, we have been super busy supervising and doing a lot of the work at Camp Magic Mcguffin. If you have every mused about trying to take ds106 as an open participant, this is perhaps the best time, during the summer, to come to camp, and let your creativity go wild. Go check out our welcome video and see the special info we provide for online open participants (yes Lisa Lane, we have a tag for you;-). We were excited to hear that canmpers are already getting into the spirit, Lee has already done and created a first camper submitted assignment. So I wandered down to the shored of Lake Macguffin to see how the cleanup was going. It is still off limits while the crews finish the work, after emptying the lake, and [...]

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by hans s Based on the recommendation of Barbara Ganley (one of whom I would recommend following recommendations thereof) for the past few weeks I’ve been dabbling in Cowbird, an online storytelling platform that center heavily on photography as well as original writing. Cowbird is one of several inspiring projects by artist Jonathan Harris (if you have not spent time there before, check out We Feel Fine, The Whale Hunt, and 10×10). Tagged as “a witness to life”, Cowbird is described as Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story. Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Phil Romans Still back logging the Slices of Life audio reflections on my first round of teaching ds106, parsing back here to the last week of February, 2012. Slices of Life 15: The Leap We start first after class on Monday Feb 27. Today’s class was easy because I did not have to do anything- this was time set aside for work on their group audio projects, creating a radio show (see work for week 7). I am no accepting excuses for not turning in work by the Sunday deadline or missing class. One student who said he missed last class “because his roommates asked him to dinner”. I said wow, it must have been some awesome dinner, where did you go? He said, “The dining hall” Me: “You missed my class for dining hall food? Seriously? You have [...]