Search Results for 'When Using the Web is the Reflex' ↓

or perhaps the subtitle is “A Funny Thing Happened On My Way Through the Image Search” cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Jin_sama Maybe the philosophical question hinges on how thirsty one is… welcome to what happens when the rabbit hole falls under your foot. So I am wanting to write a blog post about last night’s broadcast of the radio stories created by my ds106 students. I cannot write until I find a creative commons image first. I had in my mind one of those 1940-1950s photos of a family gathered around the radio. I usually rely on Compfight to find ones in flickr, but its less useful for phrase search. I wandered over to Google Image Search on gather around the radio where I get what I sought easy- among 29,000,000 results: Let’s see what I can find to re-use. I flip open [...]

Blue Fire. by tesla1000 posted 16 May ’06, 12.49pm MDT PST on flickr Miles Waldrons T.C. Clintlightning@aol.com Like the web first did about 12 years ago, Twitter seems to have jumped an inflection point from something weird and for geeks only… to something else. Who would of thought? I did not when I first tweeted in 2007 (thanks once again @colecamplese), but like the web, had this tingling sensation (hindsight 20/20 specs on) that there was something there. On one of my recent drives back and forth across the desert/mountain transition between home and Phoenix, I started thinking of some of the interesting phenomena that happen in the …. (ugh don’t use this word,, no, no, resist…) ….the…. “twittosphere”. Eavesdropping on Half Conversations. This happens when you are looking at your stream, and you find yourself curious about the halves of conversation you are hearing (half from one party you [...]

modified from cc flickr photo by JTony I want a law named after me ;-) Call this CogDog’s Law of Web Tools: The “best” tool is the one I am currently using the most. This played out earlier this week during Howard Rheingold’s session for the CCK08 session. While he was talking about his new social media tool, in a back channel, people were talking about wikis. “Question- what is the best free wiki site?” “I like wikispaces- it has great tools for embedding media.” “PBWiki has the best editing features.” “WetPaint is very cool.” It is a bit of a silly pursuit that there is an absolute “best” internet tool– ou might as well go to Home Depot and hear the same conversations in the power tool aisle: “I only by Dewault- they have the best power supplies and have been most durable on my drilling sites. Besides, it [...]

Are Blogs Are Dead my photo of Nancy White’s graphic facilitation at Northern Voice 2008 (do I have to attribute by own photo? why not?) Lacking no editorial oversight beyond themselves and opinions of their 2 readers, one thing a blogger can do is change their mind. And back again. Last week I asserted, that despite some valley wag’s wired opinion, blogging was not dead. Actually I don’t change one bit of my barking at the Wired puff piece. And more recently Nick Carr asked Who killed the blogosphere? Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there’s good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would [...]

In looking for interesting technologies, sometimes you have to forge past what at looks like something hardly relevant to education, much the case with what I think is a powerful form of web video technology in Veeple. I stumpled upon this literally about two links of some casual wandering down my RSS feeds. As an aside, I just love accidental finds. Leaving this for a future post, if you are a tech blogger, you want to be able to discover things that are not all covered on all the big named tech blogs like Mashable, engadget, etc which seem to carry the same stories. You want to find things not many have looked at (its nearly impossible to be “first”, but the web is wide enough to be new for your readers). Oh, now this is sounding like a different blog post. Back to Veeple- it is a cloud-based video [...]

Yes, we know that Google has become the appliance of the web. If it were to go out, it would be on the scale (well not really) of losing electric or water. And while some may bemoan that students’ first thought to research is to Google-it, I find myself curious that often people ask me questions that are painfully easily google-able. Ok, I am in too deep, my natural reflex when I don’t know something, cant find something, need to get an example is command-k; type; return which is the sequence to put my cursor on the Google search field in Firefox, enter my keywords, and go. This is nothing new, I can remember dealing with this, actually much more, in the late 1990s. Often, it is a request for technologies for doing X. I found, or at least I thought it was more useful in the fishing versus nugget [...]

I confess I am a web tool junkie. Surely everybody who’s had to deal with me on a project was heard something like, “why don’t we use a wiki for that?” or “why not tag the resource links on del.iciou.us?” or “ewwww, a listserv, that is so 1980s”. It’s a reflex, likely annoying. If I am doing a presentation about some technology, 99% of the time I am trying to figure out a way to use that technology as the presentation platform– like October;s one for the K12 Online Conference — can it really make sense to talk about a virtual world application by bullet slides in PowerPoint? Ugh. So, I remain firm that as educational technology leaders, we need to show the way by actions, experiment, draw others in to the tool corral at Ed Tech Home Depot. Yet, I am taken back how often people I would envision [...]

Does anyone still look up number, business names in a big thick yellow pages phone book? Is that still the first reflex when a net connected computer is in reach? Two recent observations indicate that for many folks, not just techies, but Jane and Joe Citizen, the web is becoming the reflex. We have a new site up for a regional theatre festival our colleges are hosting — it is a hugely complex multi-day event, with maybe 1000 attendees. I got 3 concerne email messages lasy night (rightfully so) as the address I had for the main conference hotel site was listed as 523 West Peoria Ave when it is actually 2523 (I hacked off the leading “2″!). Note what these emailers said a similar statement to this one (my emphasis added): On the hotel information page for the program, the hotel’s address is incorrectly listed as 532 W. Peoria [...]