Dear Chrome Browser,

Despite our early leaps for joy I am sorry, but to quote BB King, The Thrill is Gone. Despite your spryness in startup and the slickness of the location/search bar, this relationship is just not working out. You have more than lost your shine.

You have really let me down. I cannot go on like this.

How? Do we have to keep going through your faults?

Ok, if you insist.

Today you just broke me with your penchant for inserting unwanted HTML cruft in a simple copy paste. Geez, if I wanted that, I’d be using MS Word. This has gone on again and again, as I work on a Wikispaces blog. Let’s say i want to copy a snippet of formatted text to another document (which works on every other browser as a format-preserved copy)

It’s just a heading and a bullet point. Yet, pasted into a new wiki page editor, it has something extra.. when I go to the wiki source, I see all kinds of <span> cruft:

==<span style="font-size: 1.4em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 5px;">**1) How might this technology be relevant to the educational sector you know best?**</span>== 
* <span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 3em; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0.5em;">your response here</span>

When the source it is copied from is simply

==**1) How might this technology be relevant to the educational sector you know best?**==
* your response here

WTF with the extra stuff?

But before you go blaming Wikispaces, take this one on- I copied some text from my plain text editor (BBEdit) into a text field of a web site I wrote. Upon submission of the form, the content kept breaking, breaking (I have a routine that converts all URLs to hyperlink HTML). It worked perfectly in all the other browsers, but YOU inserted stray linefeeds that were not in the source.

Sure, there are extensions that make it possible for me to copy text unformatted- but I want some of the format– just what is in the source. And just for the spite of it, when I did enable the unformatted text copy extension– it broke the WordPress editor’s ability to add a hyperlink (the URL pasted into the tool was discarded and it used the highlighted text instead; which is useless)

Speaking of extensions, oh my. Although you list all kinds of Extensions (and it was slick how you made Greasemonkey compatible), I found many of them would just stop working after a while, forcing a restart to rejuvenate them.

You want more? My, the techies created you, but don;t you think you can manage to handle an RSS or XML URL without barfing? Safari has had rendering in the browser pane for years. You give me text and I have to view source to see the content.

I’m sorry Chrome, but its over. I’m back with Firefox, and on the OS X dock I use Safari, Camino, Opera for keeping me logged into my multiple accounts. None of them have put me through the hoops you have done to me… You’ve been cast off my dock.

Browsers are fluid, and the relationships are always in flux, so don’t take it personally. Maybe you’ll get your act together, but I’ll need some assurance you’ve really worked through your issues.

I just cannot take any more heartbreak with my content. Please don’t beg me to come back, it’s not dignified.

Take care of yourself, I am sure you can find another who does not mind your ways. But it ain;t me.

CogDog

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

For someone who spent their first 27 years where the sky was the roof of the world, Willa Cather’s words are ones that truly paint the immensity of the western sky (from the New Mexico landscape she describes in Death Comes for the Archbishop).

I sit here now on my floor for the night sky that shows more lights than I had ever imagined growing up in Maryland, a place where I really can see the Milky Way.

It’s one thing to talk about it, another to feel the immense blue arc of a sky in the western places where the land feels flattened beneath it- my first taste was the open-ness under the South Dakota sky in 1987, and almost anytime I drive north to the high desert of Arizona:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

That Cather sky roof is raised even higher by one of the summer thunderstorm clouds

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

So what’s with all this waxing about clouds and skies? It’s that space it creates, its that smallness you feel as one person, yet it reeks of possibility and opportunity– it is the essence, for me, of everything when we talk of Openness.

In education, this feels like its being talked about more. It hit the mid-range timeline of this year’s Horizon Report, it was the theme of the EDUCAUSE Review summer edition, people are running and talking more of open courses– and all of this is good, but to me, openness, or rather Openness- goes way beyond the sky roof of courses, open resources, licenses, etc.

It is the Sky! The Sky! what I thought I aimed for at the 2009 Open Education Conference with the first Amazing Stories show– actually it was Nancy White’s words that still ring for me, her very last words in a video recorded for her story:

Openness. is not really about the resources, its an attitude.

Even more than an attitude, it’s a mindset, it’s a way fo being without having to think about it- the colleagues I know who live and work this way do it just as natural as breathing. They live under the Big Sky. The Sky! The sky!

Enter today when George Siemens shared this sad tale on Openness- but only it is closed. The Chronicle of Higher Education, that bastion of… well whatever, but they had interviewed George and Stephen Downes and others for their article on open courses– Online, Bigger Classes May Be Better Classes.

An article published on the open web about open courses… is closed behind a pay wall. Subscribers only. Those of us who live under the Big Sky of Openness get 90 words- and then the article is truncated in mid-sentence.

The absurdity is stunning, and even if they wake up Monday and read the memo and change this– it still painfully shows that a lot of people don’t “get” Nancy White’s attitude.

They don’t live under the Big Sky. They don’t even know it is there.

But rather than ridiculing them (well I guess it’s too late), I want to bundle them up out of their cloistered East Coast Roof Sky, drive them out beyond the plains, and have them breathe that Big Sky. You don’t even know a thing about it, till you found your neck craning back, lost in it’s reach and height, from the floor of Willa Cather’s earth.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by HeatherKaiser

The sky-ness of it all was brought out by a recent re-re-re-re-reading of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire , his May chapter (“Cliffrose and Bayonets”) when he surveys his “garden”. That is a euphemism for the entire stretch of land out the front of his trailer.

It probably means nothing if you’ve never stood under the Big Sky in the open desert, but if you have, you’ll know exactly what this feels like.

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna; life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Not only love, much more flowers best in openness and freedom. It’s not that complex.

You just need to look at the sky. The sky! The sky!

Understanding openness and its opposite, is as simple as “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”

You are free to live in your world under the roof of a sky, but I prefer and have chosen to live on the floor under the Big Sky.

It’s been a week since I got back from my London Calling trip– I was wondering what sort of prophetic paragraphs I could write, or somehow to try and distill all the senses and sounds of such a place into words. I #fail.

So down below I have lopped in my pile of media- flickr photos, some place tagging in a Google Map, and a video of my obligatory Abbey Road crosswalk walk.

In my time, I walked as much as possible- I did easily figure out navigating the city via the Tube, but there is something about being in cities and seeing them afoot that I enjoy best. Highlights? Many- photographing the city at night (out past midnight with larry the first night, jat lag, what jet lag? see his great photos); wandering into a pub and finding the sport on TV was diving, watching the night lights of the city turn on from a river boat bar, visiting futurelab in Bristol, river boat ride to London Tower Bridge (perfect lighting) and Greenwich, seeing Babbage’s brain at the Science museum, a fun meetup at Slu and Lettuce arranged by @GianninaRossini, plus meeting Matt Jukes and Rachel Bruce there too, doing my Beatles walk, getting tossed out of the London Geological Society, gins and tonics, Indian food, meeting André Avorio (thanks for a twitter introduced by Barbara Dieu), seeing Prom 47 at Royal Albert Hall (getting slightly lost walking back at 1am), meeting up and seeing the Tate and Soho with Josie Fraser, the British Museum…. well saying it like that filled the space.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions on my Dog Calling London wiki- I annotated with what I followed up on. Here is a Google Map with a number of my stops:

View London Dog Calling in a larger map

And my photos are flickr-set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157624634053489/

Last, what is essentially fan’s pilgrimage, I made it a point to go out and visit Abbey Road, the place the fab Four did that famous walk across the street. It’s chock full of people like me, taking photos, walking back and forth, as well as ordinary people just trying to get somewhere. I made a gaffe by not bringing something to write with, as they allow, even encourage people to sign the white wall out in front.

They even offer the The Crossing a web site that runs a live web cam pointing at the spot. If you go there the same day, you can find your own footage– I did that the night after my visit, and used software to grab a recording of my little segments, and mixed it into this little video:

That was a fun one to edit.

London is huge, epic, and has more museums per capita than maybe anywhere- how can one person take it all in? In small bits, and then get the taste to return.

I hope to do that.

A tin full of stuff. Scout knife. Cuff links. Engraved bracelet. Puzzle game.

A tin full of my Dad’s stuff.

It’s just stuff.

But it was my Dad’s stuff.

Friday marked the day nine years ago Morris Levine left this earth. You don’t forget your loved ones, but their presence ebbs and flows without much regular pattern, except twice a year. First is May, for his birthday, a day I wish I could have back again to celebrate, and late August (2 days ago), the day I wish I could give back again.

Can it be nine years? I try cycling back to where I was, who I was, what mattered in August 2001. There was no user’s guide (and if there was I would not have read it anyhow) for dealing with your parent’s death, especially when it was the cancerous impending one that just unravels in front of you. My way to deal with this time was to tell his story, in a web site, started before he passed away, and finished afterward. My way is to do write something, photograph something on these two days a year.

Nine years? I play with math. I am now the age my Dad was in 1974. He still had another 15 or 18 years of work before retiring. He was in his rhythm of cutting the grass and washing the car. It was maybe a year after the oil embargos; I remember him waiting in line to buy gas that was suddenly much more expensive that before (but insanely cheap compared to now).

But those are just the snapshot bits I have as watching him as an 11 year old kid. What did I know of his thoughts? Dreams? Hopes? Worries? I have the hardest time trying to imagine my father as a man the same age I am now. I cannot warp time like that.

So the stuff in the can came from my Mom after Dad died. I don;t know why, but it helps just to open that box every now and then and look at it.

There was something else in there- his last wallet. Hah, what can define a man more than his wallet? It is something that sits close to him every day . I don’t think I had looked at it before; it looked empty. But flipping it open, I found some artifacts in the back pocket

He has my business card from the job at I held at the time (at Maricopa Community Colleges) with his familiar, careful block letter writing (something I did not inherit) with my cell phone number at the time. There his his Lee County Library card- he got a lot of joy in retirement volunteering at the library. That’s what I knew of that time, but did I know what that joy was about? Did we ever talk about it?

And then the hand written piece of paper with my coordinates from the year before, in 2000 when I had my sabbatical visit toi New Zealand and Australia, and more or less blogged it (before there was blog software, this was hand writing HTML posts and uploading photos every day) on my own web site http://dommy.com/az2nzau.

He followed my web site continuously from his home in Florida, even printing it off into a thick folder, a paper archive of a web version of a trip. It’s one of those things he did that silently spoke in volumes.

There again, that hand writing, so… Dad-like. Most of his communications to me were in hand written letters, pages and pages where he expressed himself more comfortably than talkin— wait a minute, now I know something perhaps I did get from him.

We did talk though on the phone, and in the Arizona portion of my life (after 1987) we had this tradition of me calling him (in jest) “Old Man” and him calling me “Junior”. That I can feel, in my ears, in my heart,

So now I sit here trying to unravel that time for him has stopped, frozen in memories, photos, words, a tin full of stuff, yet for me it flows on, to some place I cannot yet see. I will, in time, like he did.

What it is, is a browser plugin/extension (works with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari… there is some irony about the other browser shrinking in the mist of obscurity).

What it does is to figure out in the text of a web page, the name of something that has a twitter account, and it places a little “t” icon into the web page. For example, on a recent post here about open courses, Tweetbeat identifies George Siemens from the text in my article:

(I cannot explain its ability to identify George Siemens as having a twitter account but miss Stephen Downes (@downes– it opens the door for some George vs Stephen fun, but let’s move on).

So it lets me know, when looking at web content, who the companies and people are with twitter accounts. That’s not really compelling. But what is– is when you hover over the “t”, and it loads the latest tweets from that person:

Hmmm, that gets more interesting. Gets me activity streams on people and companies in any web content. Then from the Tweetbeat box, if you click share–

So this uses the new Twitter Tweet this functionally to say “I am tweeting about seeing George’s twitter stuff in this web page.”

One more click- where it says “learn more at Kosmix” — gets you to an entire page about George that seems to be assembled from many bits of Georgeness out there- from Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Howcast, Google Blog Search, and more:

Semantic or not?

Well that’s all nice for George, but what about me?

My listing in Kosmix seems to mash me up with a baseball player and a doctor from Louisiana… I do a little better searching for CogDog, but its still awry. (I am looking at the ads and wondering about my cousin Larry (Levine) and his polyester pants… but Alisha Levine is lookin’ HOT.

I guess it pays to be George

I’m not 100% on the long term value for using Tweetbeat Firsthand, but the relationships it draws, even when not 100% correct, is an interest way to link by assumption or known relationship.

What do you think? Keep or eject?

If we just lived our lives out by setting, pursuing, and meeting objectives, what a sterile world it would be. Here;s to what you learn when you are not expecting too, and for surfing by serendipity.

Serendipity is following the curious post titles in your RSS reader, leading my to Andy Rush sharing his discovery of a utility called Evom (well that was a nice find there– ).

But since Andy played around with the backwards spelling things– I thought it would be fun to write a bit of my comments in reverse text.

Now I thought I did this in BBEdit before, but I think I did something insane like a grep search to put each letter on a separate line, a reverse line sort, and a search and replace on the line return characters.

Surel;y someone has created something like that already– googled a bit on on reverse text generator, and what do you know? The first hit is Lucky-

The Reverse Text Generator does not only backward, but also Flipped, and Upside Down:

So playing with my opening sentence, I can do things like:

.ytipidneres yb gnifrus rof dna ,oot gnitcepxe ton era uoy nehw nrael uoy tahw ot s;ereH .eb dluow ti dlrow elirets a tahw ,sevitcejbo gniteem dna ,gniusrup ,gnittes yb tuo sevil ruo devil tsuj ew fI

or

Fi ew tsuj devil ruo sevil tuo yb gnittes, gniusrup, dna gniteem sevitcejbo, tahw a elirets dlrow ti dluow eb. Ereh;s ot tahw uoy nrael nehw uoy era ton gnitcepxe oot, dna rof gnifrus yb ytipidneres.

and the ever useful

˙ʎʇıdıpuǝɹǝs ʎq ƃuıɟɹns ɹoɟ puɐ ‘ooʇ ƃuıʇɔǝdxǝ ʇou ǝɹɐ noʎ uǝɥʍ uɹɐǝן noʎ ʇɐɥʍ oʇ s؛ǝɹǝɥ ˙ǝq pןnoʍ ʇı pןɹoʍ ǝןıɹǝʇs ɐ ʇɐɥʍ ‘sǝʌıʇɔǝɾqo ƃuıʇǝǝɯ puɐ ‘ƃuınsɹnd ‘ƃuıʇʇǝs ʎq ʇno sǝʌıן ɹno pǝʌıן ʇsnɾ ǝʍ ɟı

And this is just one of 20 free tools in the TextMechanic’s toolbox- a lot of them extremely useful.

So a little bit of goofing off, and I find something like this.

As Rick Schwier said…

But more so, it always sends a ripple down the spine, when I stare at this screen and knowing I am looking at a doorway to the infinite– not that the internet is really infinite, but relative to what I can know, see touch of it– it might as well be.

And there is infinitely more to know and find than what I can store in that grey spongy mass upstairs.

Goofing off is part of my method. And blecch to all my grade school teachers who scolded me for that.

Bleccch.

I ride the InfiniVerse.

I have an addiction.

It involves…. cameras.

Since 2008, I’ve been in a flickr group of people sharing daily photos; we are now at 500. No one is in charge, no one makes rules. I’ve also been participating in the dailyshoot version since November 2009.

I cannot stop. My day is wrong if I am not finding imagery in it, and then reflecting on it later in the day (or at 2am in the evening).

But every time I do this process, every day, I am either stretching my ability on photography or creatively trying to write captions to make my photos fit the themes. It is daily creation, and as a metronome in my life, it is a steady creative click.

I’m using this loosely as a metaphor for learning in at least two upcoming presentations, so I’m casting a call (again) for help. No, Dean “I Always Cooperate” Shareski, I am not making you do another another video

The first one I am up for is the KU Village Online Conference next month- an online conference run by Kaplan University, and I am sharing the stage with people like Alec Couros (who is everywhere and anywhere and fabulous) and Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth has one of the best twitter icons and and shared stuff).

The conference is September 20 – 23, 2010– and the blurb reads

Here at the KU Village, we can get to know each other in the Village Square, share our ideas about teaching and learning at the conference events, and learn about emerging technologies that will change the virtual and site-based classroom experiences as we wander in the Greenhouse. It’s our time, so let’s have some fun and share the experience!

The theme of KU Village 2010 is “Connect, Communicate, and Collaborate.” KU Village 2010 will provide presentations on the following topics:

* Standards for academic excellence
* Innovations in the classroom
* Collaborative teaching techniques and initiatives
* Global learning and diversity
* Commitment to educational values and student support
* Technology tools and applications

You can register at http://www.kuvillage.org/ (it is free if you work for Kaplan University, US$95 for everyone else).

Okay. My session is loosely titled Say It in Photos, and in part of it, I am wanting to talk about what happens to people when they decided to take on doing a Photo a Day project.

So I am seeking a few testimonials or stories of what the experience of doing this has meant for people– please drop a few words for me at http://bit.ly/dailyphoto-stories.

I’ll also be doing a bit of five card flickr stories for them… if you want to add a few photos into the mix, just tag some new ones in flickr as fiveku and people will start making stories (or you can, it’s open).

Thanks.

It’s been about 24 hours I’ve been back from my week in London (and it took another 24 hours to do all the travel stops to do that). I have a dog blog back load of stuff to post, but I seem to be having trouble with the bulldozer I hired to clean off my work plate.

So here it is in little dribs and drabs. At the Slug and Lettuce meetup organized by @Gia, I was fortunate to talk to Leon Cych (@eyebeam) who does some fascinating work in gaming and education. He showed a nifty little iPhone app that I like especially for its simplicity.

It is called the Random Activity Generator (or RAG). It sets up everything in a DO – AS structure…

The “DO” is a topic or concept that a person might be asked to demonstrate as an activity. The “AS” is the way in which a person must try to present it. So you simply shake the iPhone, and you get an assignment like:

“Do the twelve times table as a rhyming couplet”

The green arrow offers a web link to more information on either side of the “Do/As” line- links to WikiPedia for reference or YouTube videos to demonstrate a process.

Maybe that would go…

Twelve times one is an easy one on the shelf
It’s 12 Since anything times one is itself.

If you do twelve times two it’s a simple chore
As doing this one gets you twenty four

Or another shake gets you…

I will leave this one as an exercise to the reader

Technically its a really simple app. But I like it because

• it leads to being creative.
• It is a technology tool that sets up an activity that is not done in technology. The app gives you something to do, but it is not done in the app. So you might have to act it out in front of a group, or maybe you would build the act in say a pecha kucha form, or something else.
• It is inherently social- you would do the activity in front of other people.
• The format lends itself to further research- if you do not fully know the “do” or the “act” (I had to look up rhyming couplet to be sure), it calls for further inquiry.

It’s a great recipe. The web site has a great set of video examples of how people have “done the RAG” http://theragis.us/

I was told London was rainy and gray, but so far (apply jinx here), the weather has been stunning. This is just a brief bit to say, “Yo London”– this is my first visit to the UK and the first few days have gone by in a blur. A growing photo set is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157624634053489/

There was not too much of a jet lag blur arriving early Sunday, getting the train from Heathrow to Paddington Station, and then to the hotel we used on Southbank. The next day it was on the move again, riding the train to Bristol, where Monday was an NMC meeting day with the folks at futurelab, where we found a lot of collaboration points, and a mind opening view to a wide array of creative projects that have come out of that old warehouse by the waterfront.

Then Tuesday it was back to London, and mid day grays gave way to some stunning evening light for some photos of the London Tower Bridge (above) and then a nice nighttime boat ride to Greenwich and back.

Yesterday I had time to pay a visit to the Museum of London, and filled my head with more than i knew before of city history, and I played around as well with their nifty iPhone augmented reality app (“Street Museum”) which provides geolocated historic photos that overlay on the present view– a fab way to marry the past to the present. I got my taste of riding the Tube (very well organized and easy) and have had my sampling of English breakfasts and warm ale.

We also got a stop at the London Science Museum, where we took in the history of computing exhibit, where i was surprised/amused to see Charles Babbage’s brain sitting in a jar atop one of the examples of his Difference Machines that had been built from his designs.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

it was also neat to see in an exhibit on plastics (might there be an industry supporter? oops) – an example of RepRap- a 3D printer technology we’ve featured before in NMC horizon Reports

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Today is one more move to a different hotel over the river- the NMC part of the trip is done, and I have three more days to explore and gawk like a tourist.

I’m open to more ideas (they have been super helpful so far) — shared via my wiki http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/LondonCalling

If you are in London and want to say hi, there is a meetup at Slug and Lettuce on 5 Lisle Street tonight at 6pm organized by @GianninaRossini.

This is a quick one cause I still see blue skies out there! Time to go bark around town.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

After all these years (this march will be the 7th) I still love flickr most of all what has become Web 2.0 – the Vancouver crew that fortunately failed on Game Never Ending (that explains the .gne extensions on some of the flickr URLs) for it right on social media, long before we had a name for it.

And for me, it was the social tagging that lit a fire that continues to flame. I’m not going to wax on about all the ways tagging enables ways to share, find, connect, externally republish photos (oops, that’s a little wax), but there has been something I’ve noticed yet forgotten about.

I tag my own photos, well some.many of us do. We know where it was taken, we have some internal scheme for organizing (photos from a conference with s shared tag, photos to be pushed to a web site, photos form your daily photo project).

But if I find one of your photos, and want to use tags to pool or group it with the same tag I am using– for the most part, I cannot add tags to your photos. Well, I could, if you had modified your permissions from the default, as mine are:

I typically notice this in the Spring, when I prepare our social media aspects for the NMC Summer conference. Typically, there are no tagged photos, so I like to start with ones from the city the conference is held in. But How can I get tagged photos for a city I’ve not been to? What I try is to ask our conference hosts tot do some for me. But if I search in flickr, most of the creative commons photos I find, which are set to be openly used through the license, most are not open for me to add, say an nmc2011 tag

Because its not the default, and people mostly are not aware if it.

But if you live in ir have photos of Madison, Wisconsin, please tag tag tag some local photos nmc2011).

If you believe in openness and sharing, and you participate in flickr, shouldn’t you open your photos to be tggged by others?

If you tag why not let yourself be tagged?

I find it interesting to see what others tag my photos (I see notice of this in the RSS feed for my flickr activity). Wouldn’t it be illustrative to see what descriptive words other people see in your photos, perhaps themes, metaphors you do not see yourself? Wouldn’t it expand the findability of images via tags if others could do the work for you?

Sure, I guess someone would look at my photo of myself and tag it “dorkbutt” or “loser” but you can remove those. That, to me, is an edge case. Well, maybe it is a pretty regular tag applied by others to my photos.

And until most of the flickr userbase follows my wishes (dreaming), wouldn’t it be useful if flickr allowed an advance search for photos that are open to be tagged? I can think of all kinds of interesting activities and apps that could work off of that.

Let yourself be tagged, just modify your account settings. Open up your photos to community tagging…