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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Randy Pertiet I forgot my own birthday. No, not the human me, the blog me. Yesterday this pile of crud turned 10 years old. like Lorne Green would say in an Alpo commercial, “That’s 79 for you and me!”. The first blog post here was I Blog Therefor I Am… on April 19, 2003. Then this blog was run in Movable Type likely running on an Apple X-Server sitting outside my office at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The launch fanfare only I would notice was: This is the new hub for Alan Levine’s activities as instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, AZ, replacing the mid 90s vintage home page, kept at: http://dommy.com/alan/ from there commencing to explain the name of the blog, ending up with connection to a favorite storyboook: C-D-Blog? D Blog S A B-S Blog. O, [...]

My class of ds106 UMW students are off and running. If anyone sees them, tell them to keep going. The semester start pulls at both ends for me. It’s exciting to bring a new group of (now 26) into the fold; at the same time it is daunting to realize that they are starting from scratch, that its going to take a range of time for them to get to the part of really writing and creating they ways we hope they do. This week, that time span was for some… one day. To say this is an amazing group is an understatement. It’s not all of them, a few are still grappling with setting up domains, social media accounts, and probably wondering what they have gotten themselves into. I can say a year ago, when I introduced class to my students, there was some awareness of twitter, but for [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Capture Queen ™ I find myself surprised to see people expecting rules and structure when not explicitly there- are we that “trained” to act by rules and expect rule makers? Huh? I am talking about the Daily Shoot, man. Frequent CDB readers will know I am an addict to the daily camer assignments- I’ve done 432 of ‘em (hey, did you know you get your own gallery on THEIR site? cool!) I love the challenge, and have ventured that is a supreme model of informal learning, of learning by doing, of working the 10,000 hour gig. But I hear whinging (maybe I have muttered it myself) when assignments are repeated, even people saying it has caused them to quit. For example water- it was featured in number 9, number 51, number 293, number 479. Keep in mind that just because YOU [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Giampaolo Macorig

cc licensed flickr photo shared by KE-TA I cannot claim organization as one of my attributes, but have had an interesting process the last few months in getting a tad closer to being more organized in my digital photography. The 12,000+ photos in flickr accumulated since March 2004 are but the tip of a glacier looming in a plastic box in my closet that contains maybe 80 CDs/DVDs with digital photos back to 1999. For the last few years I have taken a lazy approach– I had in my disk a copy of Apple’s Aperture which I knew subconsciously was the “right” way to go (part of my typical strategy of DWDD- Do What D’Arcy Does), but my lazy forte into the software left me bewildered. So I’d been importing into iPhoto, doing basic editing there or more complex external in PhotoShop, exporting to flickr, and periodically archiving the photos [...]

As a rule (and you know how rules go), the editorial team at CogDogBlog does not delve into political posts, we are too busy pursuing weird web sites and complaining about important things. And certainly the current political election has been an ultra marathon, and I, will miss the finish line while I am in Iceland (despite people sending me that clever CNN video, I am not the one voter who tipped the campaign, and damn that woman with the crutch and the goat herder are mad at me!). No, we do not endorse candidates here. Though I can say I would prefer a president with a well-honed looking into the future pose. As I have already said, by policy we do not discuss political issues here. But to think about that future to stare in, I am having trouble grasping that it might include the insertion into the seat [...]

I am far from alone being in individual ramrodded by a company that takes your money for a service it does not provide. But these dinosaurs are in denial of the asteroids raining down on them, as the net empowers us to put their evil deeds into the light. This is my little experiment to see if a single, frustrated, beaten down customer can take on a giant smelly pirate. Help me out my casting foul words and links their way. Hence, I am here to tell you the tale of the Alltel Pirates and how they have me chained to their brig. Oh how foolish I was to fall for their ship! Mock up of Alltel.com site plus pirate face from cc licensed flickr photo Pirate Phobia. In summary: The wireless internet service my organization pays monthly fees for has failed to connect, repeatedly disconnected, or has been wrongly [...]

So while some are not happy with the broad label of “walled garden”, I am growing increasingly annoyed at the complete lack of anything substantive, or half substantive, or a sketch on a dirty napkin of just what this Apple iTunes U is all about. As far as I know, it is very vaporous. At first I was encouraged because 20 minutes after filling out an interest form, I was called by an Apple rep, and thought, “hey, inside track!” The biggest challenge in our sprawling, decentralized organization, has been trying to solicit some leadership to advocate a direction, to maybe…. provide… leadership? As stands, the typical Maricopa path is about 10 different, overlapping directions. This is a chance to act as a system, so we may end up with 1 unified representation (as Maricopa) or fragmented (10+ different representations). So I have asked this rep, emailed, voicemailed, cc:ed our [...]

Holy Calendars, Batman! April 19 marks one year to the birth of CDB, starting from first post, “I Blog Therefore I Am…” In one year, there have been 347 posts, 341 comments (probably 1000 more spam-ments caught my the MT Blacklist plugin), and likely 678 typos. Do the math. It has been interesting to see what raises a response and what does not. Some of my most cleverly titled and penned prose has gone quietly into the ether (net?) while often silly, off the cuff stuff gets a pile of responses. No pattern at all except a lack of a pattern. Back in December, I wrote of being curious “Where Have All the Bloggers Gone?” and noted that many of my favorite bloggers seem to have fallen silent at the one year mark of their blog-activity. Now I cannot pinpoint a reason why a blog would suddenly cease a year [...]