CogBlogged Tagged ‘dog’s eye view’

My current report card might read, “Alan needs to improve his attention and focus at professional conferences, and perhaps work on a more positive attitude” On the heels of the 2008 ELI EDUCAUSE annual conference in San Antonio, it’s time to reflect once again on the conference experience. Be reminded, this is my own take, and should be taken with a house sized grain of salt (or on the rocks, with lots of tequila). My most long standing barking threads has been the staleness of the professional conference format. This goes way back to the 1990s with all those sessions with an expert standing at a lectern, speaking to a passive audience constrained in rows of seats, that we need to MAKE A CHANGE in education, and the horribly trite phrase of “the sage on the stage becomes the guide on the side”. (Flickr photo by AndiH) The audience would [...]

No, the title is not a bad TSA joke (are there any good ones?), but a lovingly statement of joy for yet another cool photo tool. Piclens has been around a while but only for Safari on Max OS X, but now it works as an extension for Firefox on Mac or Windows. Piclens turns web pages from many photo services (flickr, Picassa, Facebook, MySpace, and more) into a stunning slide show, like iPhoto in a cool black turtleneck sweater. If you are on a site it supports (Flickr, Picassa, Photobucket, facebook, many more), a small triangle appears on a mouseover of an image. When you click the triangle, the image (and all linked images from the page) appear in a slideshow format: And a grid on the bottom lets you swing in more sets of images if you have a lot. When you click a single image, you can [...]

So many social networks, so little time… I do not know about you, humble blog reader, but I have truly lost track of all the social networking sites I have signed up for over the last few years. I am using the term “social networking” sites loosely, maybe they are social software, maybe they are Web 2.0 apps, but what I am talking about are accounts I have set up for some specific purpose that have some component of connecting my actions with those of others, be they a large pool of strangers or people I designate as “in my network”. I was thinking about these web sites, my account covered with dust and cobwebs, from my attention neglect. Some are really good sites, some are “so-so” or just not essential. I don’t have a pattern or method, but being in a reflective mood today, i started thinking about my [...]

A long, long, long time ago (maybe not in a galaxy far, far away, it is about 90 miles from where I sit), maybe 2003, 2004, while in my role at Maricopa, I was doing workshops and trying to promote the potential of blogging (how novel, eh?). I created an online set of resources I called “BlogShop” …. = Blog + Workshop. It was hosted in MovableType on a server I ran at Maricopa at jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/blogshop : And that server has been 404 for over 2 years since I left my job there- praise the powers that be.. or rather Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine, I can access versions of all the content from Apr 2004-June 2006 or say enter the content (and link around) from one of the snapshots. I am still very far from the point of this post, but I always need to underscore, [...]

I scan a lot of stuff via my networks, news readers, twitters, email… mostly it is just a humongous pile of disconnected bits, and sometimes, sometimes, strands come together to make sense. Huh? In the way back, the way way back of human memory storage I recall Ewan McIntosh writing about some new tool he was excited about called dopplr… I did not even recall what it did, but I get so much useful info out of his blog, that his mentioning of it registered something in my brain. About a week or so ago, another colleague I respect very much, Scott Leslie wrote some tweets and a blog post wondering if there was some web.0 tool that would make it easy to see what conferences colleagues in his net work were attending in the future. He took a stab at upcoming.org but was unsure if that did what he [...]

I’m on a video spree tonight; playing around with the goofy squirrel movie got me thinking about another video I slapped together last May for a presentation I did at University of Mary Washington- this was the first go around for “Being There” which turned out in some ways to be “Alan’s Favorite Things and Odd Stuff on the Web”. I had this one slide and effort to make a connection between teaching and cover bands. I actually got so carried away by the video I made to emphasize the point, it was later it dawned on me that maybe while fun, it sort of was a stretch from the supposed topic- a pitfall when you get hooked on media. Here I tried to make the connection between teaching and cover bands. If you go to a bar and the music is a Beatles cover band, you pretty much expect [...]

Yesterday I dutifully filled the bird feeders for all the numerous finches, jays, acorn wood peckers that I imagine are pretty hungry in the cold winter up on the Mogollon Rim, Arizona. As i was working today, out my window about 3 feet away, I watched this gray suited thug empty the feeder in about 15 minutes, and grabbed a video on my Canon PowerShot shooting through the window. I cannot explain why I bothered to edit or even post this, just felt like it. Music is from the Internet Archive’s 78RPM Collection, Ernest Thompson – Red Wing (April 15, 1924). Hmmm, perhaps I need a predator…

Get it?

This falls into the category of “curiosities raised from idle web wandering”. I just noticed after not looking at it for a while at how much stuff (or crud or crap) I have running down the sidebar of this blog. Its stuff I pretty much ignore, as likely do others. I do get some self enjoyment out of my Clustrmap, which accumulates stats on visitors and where in the world they come form (or where in the world is their IP number assigned). As a cheapskate, I have the free version, loaded with Google Ads. Those are alos things I can look at and totally ignore. Any AdSense micro-payments I may have clicked/contributed were likely accidental faux clicks. But I’m looking at the ads on my clustr map, and wondering how they are selected? On a normal web site, I gather there is some top secret algorithm that analyzes the [...]

Just came across TryPhone a site that offers web based interactive interfaces for a wide range of mobile phones. Seems a great way to see the features. And in the spirit of good embed-ness, you can put any of this in a web page. So before I do this, my own backl story. I have always been years behind in the latest phone tech. I use mine mainly for… calls, plus some photo/upload to flickr and a few posts to twitter. I am definitely a phone lagger. But believe me, after trying an iphone in the Apple Store last August in Chicago, the tempation has been hard to ignore. You want one, admit it. I want one, I admit it. So with some shame I mus admit that when offered to get a work paid iphone… I actually turned it down (for now). Why? Well, my previous one just died, [...]