Search Results for 'Friends with the IT Guys' ↓

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by entrelec No one denies the power of story. We are wired for storytelling. It’s the world’s oldest tradition. It’s what makes us human. It matters for game designers. It produces results in business. People who market brands and specialize in SEO are storytellers. And now I reach for the sure to please images of cave paintings. I’m on board with all of this. It’s been in my bag of interests long before ds106, before 50+ Ways, before even the stuff did at Maricopa, it might have to go all the way back to Go Dog Go. I just wonder, after all the nodding and assenting is done, in looking at a lot of published things, in reading blogs, in just seeing how people communicate online, if they really do take on storytelling? I also see in working with my [...]

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 is [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by i k o I can’t write a blog post until I wrangle with the headline. I mull that over before I even sit down to write. or that is all I have and I hope an idea flows from there. The title is key as any basic journalism or copywriting class will tell you, or as written deftly at copyblogger “Don’t Read This or the Kitty Get’s It!”: Let’s get started. What is the primary purpose of any piece of writing that you put out online — whether a blog post, a networking email, a sales letter or a tutorial? For starters, to get what you’ve written read, right? Makes sense. So, what’s the primary purpose of your headline, your graphics, your fonts, and every other part of the content? The simple, surprising answer is… To get the first [...]

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yesterday, within a few hours driving, I went from seeing the highest elevation in the lower 48 states, My Whitney (14,505 feet) to standing at the lowest surface elevation, Badwater Basin in Death Valley (-282 feet). These two points are about 100 miles distant on a map, from glacial above tree line alpine to desert (It was not today, but in 1989 that I stood at the top of Whitney How do I measure up to such extremes? Life will tell. This is for today’s ds106 Daily Create – "Merge two photos of contrasting place together" Originals: www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6713415929/in/photostream www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6713478105 I stretched the Death Valley to try and align the ridge lines, and the foreground scenes. This trip was necessary for some reasons not needed to blog about, but ended up being just shy of 2000 miles of travel in 6 days- almost [...]

Just some quick catchup on stops in Saskatoon and last night here in Winnipeg where people not only opened their opens, filled my tunny, but wanted to get their first experience broadcasting on ds106 radio. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Last Friday it was at Rick Schwier’s home in Saskatoon along with Rob Wall, one of my long web friends I got to meet for the first time that day. Rick had seen my tweet about getting great green chili in Colorado, and he aimed to top it with his home-made, and I must say, it was right up there, with bonus points for being made there. After geeking a bit with the StoryBox, I asked if they wanted to go on the radio- I was sure Rob did given his long run doing the Ed Tech Posse podcast. I am trying recall here, but [...]

Damn, Canada is a big place. I’m 10 days in, and thought maybe I was 1/3 the way, but looking at this map (pink is where I have been, green where I think I am going) I am lucky if I have traversed a quarter of the Great Baconated North. Heck, Looking at where I am now in Calgary, I am not even east of where I started in Arizona! Beyond the weekly stats, the blogging here has been light, I know (and my Mom has told me so on the phone). The results are clear, no blogging and the peeps go away: One obvious insight so far is when I was at home how much time I got to not only blog, but also to read and stay in tune with my networks. With some days of being on the road 8, 10 hours, and then wanting to spend [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s a few weeks gone by in the rear view mirror, but like last year I wanted to post some notes from the social media aspects we wove into the 2010 NMC Summer Conference. Our host this year was USC, but we had the conference in Anaheim at the Disney Resort. If you want just the headlines, I;d say Twitter Was Big (No Surprise) but this year with More Insights, Photosharing Was Slightly Down, Conference Blogging is a Win, and There’s No Match For Being There. Pathable Social Media Site  This was the second year we use the service offered by  Pathable that provides a platform for connecting and communicating with other attendees. We are able to create accounts for all conference attendees via an API from our own custom registration system, and it transfers some of their user profile information from our drupal [...]

Damn. I thought if I kept my head down low enough, I’d avoid being tagged by the “Seven things you don’t know about me” meme. My plan was working perfectly, and out of nowhere, whap! Rob Wall smacks me. Seriously, if there is such a thing around this blog taken as serious– I enjoy reading the way people I know or follow take this on. No I do not believe in chain letter like tragedies as a motivator, I am compelled to dig through the past and find something interesting. Oops not much there. First, I cannot repeat any of the Five Things I posted in 2006. Maybe the next meme will be six or eight or twenty-three. So for what its not worth, here it goes… The first car I owned was a frackin blue Pinto, 70′s vintage. My friends from high school drove more muscular Pontiacs and Novas [...]

It’s well over a week that my first experience attending SXSW Interactive ended, and a blog post is just wriggling out. I wavered, wafted, and decided on a different, lazy (lame) strategy… to just soak it all in and write something prophetic later. Well, this will likely fall short on most accounts. And this is also a year when I am trying a few conferences out of the normal education technology realm, so I was wanting to be more reflective and… okay, I am lazy. The idea of doing detailed sessions posts was not all attractive; earlier in my blogging I would try and do session blogging, but am not enthralled at being a stenographer. Second, I decided on a new tech strategy- I left the laptop in the hotel, and “lugged” (meaning slipped it in a pocket), my new iPod Touch. The hangup there was the wireless network at [...]

The blog was still the last week as this was some vacation time- first a few days to check on our cabin in Strawberry. The threat from the Cave Creek Complex fire, which burned more than 240,000 acres of wilderness area, decreased for the small communities up here. This time. So with that, my wife and I piled into the VW Bug and headed to a family wedding just outside Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado. There and back, we managed to cover 1700 miles in 4 days, and much of that time was just saying “Wow” at the beauty of the mountains in southwestern Colorado. Pictures may be coming (but not while on the slow dial-up here), but some highlights included: * Eating breakfast out of the cooler at a truck stop near Joseph City, Arizona. Busy place for 6:00 AM. * Heading north on US 191 across the [...]