CogBlogged Tagged ‘dog’s eye view’

I really do not mind Starbucks as an establishment. They are comfy places and serve my favorite drinks, yes at inflated prices, but I succumb. My own, silly pet peeve is that stupid language thing when you order a drink. I want a “big” drink, so I describe it as “large”, and they say, “Venti”. That is just plain stupid. WTF is “venti”? “Tall” is “small”? C’mon, speak English will ya? So my new silly travel game is to try and make Starbucks Speak English. It goes like this. Order your drink, using real descriptive terms, “Small”, “medium”, “Large”. When they respond, “Venti?”, respond with, “no ‘Large’. If you can get them to say the real size, then you win! And we subvert StarbuckSpeak one franchise at a time. So if you are successful, or heck, just of you try, then add a coffee cup pin to this Google Map [...]

My first presentation today at the eLearning Guild conference was “I’m Busy Enough.. What do I Need a Second Life For?” a tact I took as I expected SL was rather outside the realm of focus for this conference. Well, that was not fully correct, as there was a fair amount of awareness here of virtual worlds and Second Life, but when I asked the audience of 50 or so how many had Sl accounts, there were maybe 5, 7 hands raised. A number of others let me know they were there because “it sounded nothing like the other sessions my employer told me to attend” or “we’ll never use it at work but I want to know what I am missing”.

I’ve been self chained inside the Hilton in Orlando for 3 mights now. Tomorrow I make my break for the border, over the fence, and will run for the airport. This is mostly my own doing. I am here for the eLearning Guild 2008 Annual Gathering. I have learned that “eLearning” is an umbrella term for online training, etc in the private sector, things like “corporate virtual universities” etc so it is a different crowd and conference from the typical education ones I have attended. Maybe its different. Folks here are quite nice, met ones from insurance companies, police departments, and others that work for the eCompanies that create eLearning. I’d say it is noteworthy where there are a number of sessions and products claiming to address the problem of eLearning being “boring”. I’m here at the invite of Mark Oehlert, whom I have crossed paths online– he has an [...]

I cannot even remember what I was doing poking around San Francisco with Google Maps, but I was looking around The City with the Street View option turned on it was along a stretch of a street I notice that as I move around, I was following the same car. This makes sense as the images are taken from a special camera mounted on top of a vehicle. And then a flash- I could navigate around with this camera and collect still frames.. or do a screen capture. and make a movie. I call my first effort “The Streetview(s) of San Francisco” as I took a spin down Lombard Street, the “Crookedest Street in the World” I did this in about 20 minutes on My MacBookPro. Located Lombard Street on Google Maps with Street View turned on Opened up iShowU, the Mac app for capturing screen action onto QuickTime. Set [...]

+ = I have documented the hungry actions of the squirrels who raid my bird feeders and again. Fresa, the cutest beagle in the world just gets wild when she spots the squirrel, and gets riles up in chase/hunt mode. As I just got my Canon Powershot back from repair, I was equipped today to get a video of her squealing chase sequence. Whats even funnier, is hours later, as I play this video and upload to YouTube, every time she hears her own baying sound on the video, she gets wired up again and runs outside to look for squirrel prey. I am not sure if the squirrels got the message, they keep coming back.

A majority of my blog posts are spontaneous spurts, yet sometimes, an idea takes root somewhere in the gray matter, and just sits there quietly demanding to be let out. This one has been rattling around, and tonight demands to see that publish button clicked. So there is a strand here, some storytelling, and a cliche metaphor to be trotted out. This in many ways a commentary on the work we do in this poorly defined field I’ll call “Instructional Technology”. I think it was triggered by Laura’s post on Fear 2.5: Afterthoughts following the excellent session she and colleagues did at EDUCAUSE ELI 2008. She openly shares her fear: A fear I have that I don’t think I articulated was a fear of being irrelevant and unnecessary. How important is my position, really, to the institution as a whole? If my position disappeared, would anyone really notice? Most of [...]

Caveat Emptor- this blog post has nothing to do with technology, learning, spam, WordPress, twitter, or the other junk that makes up the focus here. Its just about what I did with a tree. I could make a stretch and leap to something about learning objects, re-usable content… but that can be an exercise left for the reader. Now that I am living in Strawberry Arizona, a small town in the middle of a National Forest, at 6000 feet elevation, a number of environment differences are obvious. First, form where I lived before in Scottsdale, the city has a progressive recycling program- paper, cans, bottles, plastic go in a big giant can, it disappears, and we assume it is all recycled. That story is another blog post. But in a small town, recycling, transporting, etc is likely cost prohibitive. There is a collection for aluminum can at the fire station, [...]

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 [...]

Sometime last year before my trip to Australia, I discovered the amazing work Al Upton was doing with year 3 students at at Adelaide Australia primary school. The 8 and 9 year old “miniLegends” were blogging, doing creative writing, and getting a fabulous experience in web technology. So it was exciting this year when Al put out a call via twitter for educators around the world to be “coaches” for this year’s miniLegends, asking people to adopt one students and agree to provide regular comments/feedback. Besides signing up myself, I echoed the call and a bunch of folks, particularly my colleagues here in Arizona, stepped right up. Al had written before how he had taught students how to be safe online and how he had gotten written permission from parents of all the kids. Let me repeat this- the parents supported this program. And like many people who had followed [...]

My SXSW blogging will likely be after the fact- lots to cover. The plan to use the iPod Touch works in theory, but wireless access has been sporadic. FWIW Pocketweets has been unusable (never posts) Hahlo.com and iTweets.net better