CogBlogged under ‘Rants’

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by foxypar4 On December 14, 2012, Clara-Belle, Daisy, Elsie, Moonbeam, Bessie, and a small group of bovine thought leaders will gather in Des Moines to discuss the future of CHEESEs in online dairy production. The approach of this one-day intensive summit brings Elsie and Moonbeam back to the subject of CHEESEs, and the imminent return of CHEESE CHEESE. A CHEESE is not a thing. A CHEESE is a strategy. What we say about CHEESEs cannot possibly contain their drama, banality, incessance, and proliferation. The CHEESE is a variant beast — placental, emergent, alienating, enveloping, sometimes thriving, sometimes dead, sometimes reborn. There is also nothing about a CHEESE that can be contained. Try as they might, CHEESE-makers like Borden, Kraft, and Tilamook cannot keep their CHEESEs to themselves, because when we join a CHEESE, it is not to learn new curds, new whey, [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Pete Prodoehl I truly love the evolution and use of the ds106 assignment collection – we have almost 100 assignments to choose from each in the Visual and Design sections, all of them created by ds106 participants, and even rated by them for difficulty. A downside is, well, some of them lend themselves to be done rather easily. Some of them, like What People Think I Do or Zombify Yourself are done simply by going to a web site and clicking a few buttons. You can satisfy the minimum of the requirements in an expedient fashion. Or we have seen many ways people have used a wide range of graphic editing tools to complete the Color Splash Assignment versus other students who complete the assignment using an iPhone app. Martha and I wonder how to deal with this not [...]

(or if you are not linking the web you are just squatting on it) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by mccun934 I’m part of a session at next month’s Open Education Conference on Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of DS106 thatb was suggested by Julià Minguillón and also has Brian Lamb and Jim Groom in the mix. Each participant in the course has to create a digital identity and a personal infrastructure (her own domain, blog, twitter, flickr, youtube and other web 2.0 services) and then start producing and sharing content, but also meta-content: new assignments, tutorials and how-tos, ranking or commenting on other participants’ creations, and so. The result is a huge collection of resources (and users), connected to each other, which may be difficult to grasp for newcomers (and teachers as well), especially when the number of users and resources increases [...]

and covering up our questionable practices… It’s been a few days since I fanned the flames of how a big time edu consultant was republishing from other bloggers as their own. Its so easy to sweep your shit crap poop Numero 2 under the rug. It just smells a bit, but most people just walk around and pretend it is not there. Thats old news already. They dismantled their industry news where this occurred and in the best of slick covers, have completely skipped being open about this. I am betting they canned their wordpress developers (?)/ The word I got in a comment was: “We have asked the company that manages our website to remove the (Feed WordPress) syndication technology that was updating the news channel. The feed has been turned off as it pertains to several blog sites due to technological errors in attribution when the plugin was [...]

I don’t becaue I have an outdoor brain — http://cogdogblog.com/2005/09/30/ (wow that was a blog heavy day). It has been a long time since I nodded when reading (maybe it was listening to) the IT Conversations podcast where Jon Udell spoke about his notion of narrating the work we do (I was also listening because he was talking to a colleague Hilary Mason who is now a big shot in the tech world). The fulcrum of my talk last week at the Open Education Conference was observable work. I first started thinking about this back in 2002, when I included this Dave Winer excerpt in my review of Radio UserLand: We’ve been using this tool since November, internally at UserLand. We shipped Radio 8 with it. When we switched over our workgroup productivity soared. All of a sudden people could narrate their work. Watch Jake as he reports his progress [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by cobalt123 I am hoping the FCC can spray this one down. I am not hopeful. Every three weeks or so, Rachel, a recording, calls from random numbers around the US. She must get around. She keeps telling me this is the last time to get this offer from Card Member Services to lower the rate on my credit card. She pretty much has take over for Cathy, who has been at this since 2008 When I wait to speak to a representative, as just happened an hour ago, I request to be taken off their calling list, Then they hang up on me. I’ve had about 20 of these this year, and each time I dutifully file a complaint at http://donotcall.gov. I have never done business with this company, and from what I understand, the government should be able [...]

Can the movement to try and make things open also make the simplest act of sharing that more complicated? Do we really need licenses and legal language on everything? Are there not things out there that implicitly we share (air?). I’m going to likely land way off mark here. I fully understand the reasons for people asking the questions that came below, but it almost seems to leap right over what should be obvious. What? This started with (and this is the second or third time someone has asked) when Clint LaLonde asked @cogdog @jimgroom I’m working on a blog post about bit.ly/yIqPm8 are those assignments cc licensed? Can’t seem to find info on site — Clint Lalonde (@clintlalonde) August 7, 2012 And yes, there are no explicit licenses or usage statements attached to the ds106 assignment site or the individual assignments. They have been contributed to the site via [...]

As part of our video section os ds106 we have our students watch part two of Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix so they have an appreciation for the common borrowing of cinematic elements as well as to help them question the notion of “originality” (we ask thema s well to look at Raiders of the Lost Archive) I rarely go to the movie theaters, but I do enjoy the experience of going especially with friends. I like the movie experience, it brings back a lot of fond memories (seeing the premier of Jaws the weekend before out beach vacation, umping out of the chair at the end of the first Friday the 13th…). However I gotta say after my movie experience today, I am not feeling a lot of ferver for the potential of mainstream movies to be storytelling. I decided today to more or less pick a random [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by thebassoonist12 If a classroom can be flipped to make better use of time and group processes, why are we not flipping more things? I’ve spent three days in Austin attending a conference in the same model going back how Ook ran them in 2500 BC. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by WorldIslandInfo.com Rooms with front lecterns, screens full o’ powerpoint, partially full of passive participants mostly reading email or facebooking, badges, Big Name Keynotes, vendor booths, they only critical missing piece was the Dreaded Conference Chicken. A lot of us acknowledge this irony of traveling long and far to ignore someone in the front of the room, that the best interactions happen in the breaks and the evening socials, the stuff that is not part of the agenda– then (excuse what might be an expletive) WHY [...]

Disappointed with people I consider online peers who are up in arms about #OpenBadges & #ConnectedLearning. As if ideas are ‘owned’. Gah. — Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw) March 6, 2012 I am fairly sure I can draw the dots as to what Doug is Gah-ing about. Badge bashing is flashing about, but it was hardly “up in arms” when some people noted that the DML splash with Connected Learning did not seem to mention a great deal of prior work in this area. I thought this was something we learn early, but a little of this goes a long way. (FYI, the graphic is from Soul Kahn’s ep- okay, I did not find creative commons, but I did buy the album, if anything for the Alec Baldwin song). It’s not that I see people like Siemens, Downes, Courus seeking anything but a reasonable nod to their work. Anyone who has invested, [...]