The premise is we all know the Internet is “big” but forget how dwarfing a scale it is to an individual, drawing the parallel to the sense of scale one gets when standing art the edge of the Grand Canyon. Rather than throwing stats and charts, I instead use some stories of my own experiences that aim to show how incomprehensible the sale is.

Yes, this is some recycled material from my Being There talks, but I think its still a necessary message. Or fun to fo.

There is a ustream recording of all the great opening talks from the Learning 2.008 conference.

Just one piece of dinner at at JC’s restaurant in Shanghai

It’s been a whirlwind week for my first visit to Shanghai (an Asia while I am at it) to participate and speak at the Learning 2.008 Conference at the Shanghai Community International School. The blogging has been light because (a) I’ve had more fun taking photos; (b) it was a busy 2.5 days of full on conference activity; and (c) and I seem to have come down with another travel induced variant of the CogDogWog that had me a year ago coughing like a barking dog across Australia.

So like some of the scrumptious chinese meals we’ve had, like last night,.where dish after dish of steamed dumplings, stir fried meat, exotically prepared vegetables are plopped onto a giant lazy susan, here are a few random dishes of impressions from being Shanghai’d for a week.

The race of cars, bicycles, scooters in the streets is just an amazing procession. I love watching the crazy chaotic flow, the daredevil moves, when some guy smoking a cigarette on a scooter laden with pipe waves to you inside the taxicab, is just a reminder of the flow of life in this city.

The range of contrasts here is staggering; in ultra modern shiny skyscrapers looming over wobbly tenements, the bright western stores versus the small stalls just around the corner, smiling happy kids and beggars in the street with babies on the sidewalk… its staggering.

Then there are the amazing faces one sees here; old, yound, sad, happy, deeply engrossed in discussion, tired, worn, shifty.. everything. A real treat was walking the park across the way and seeing people doing all kidns of exercises, stretches, tai chi, taking care of their prize birds, playing fast badminton without a net….

International School teachers are a fascinating, vibrant set of digital citizens; forsaking the norms of western life to teach in places like New Delhi, Saigon, Bangkok. It was fun to see them struggle to answer the question, “So where are you from?” as it has many layers. Living far from family, they are really wired in terms of communication technologies, but seem to struggle like teachers all over with how to integrate the flood of new technologies in their teaching.

If you are looking to get some adventure, to see the world, and from what I have heard, to bank some serious money in savings (they typically having living expenses paid for), these school are hungry for teachers. I find myself regretting I never took up the travel bug when I was in my 20s, but then again, its not always a young person’s world; there are plenty here who have made a life of seeing/teaching the world.

Internet connectivity here is a real dice roll. It goes from okay to a standstill, and sties often need to be multiply reloaded or given up on. Wikis seems hard to get to, but I was happy flickr seemed open. The staff at the hosting school performed a heroic task to re-align their bandwidth from multiple schools, and the audience of 500+ must have taxed the capabilities. Then we were told that the school had actually put a bunch of generators in action when the electricity was suddenly cut one day (this seems to be nothing unusual).

How off yet wonderful it was to have to go around the world to meet for the first time great teacher/educators like David Jakes, David Warlick, Clarence Fisher, Ewan McIntosh, and Brian Crosby. And we really missed you, Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, who had some unexpected health challenges which prevented her travel here.

I was able to shoot 3 gigapan scenes, one on the busy commercial area of Nanjiing Street, a look across the river from the Bund to the skyscrapers of Pudong, and one at the SCIS school for my workshop there. The camera rig certainly got some curious stares from the locals.

During the conference I had fun with my three sessions; there was Telling Stories with Photos on the Cave Wall, and always, people liked the 50+ Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, and seemed to enjoy the 5 card photo story tool I cobbled together. I am hoping to sometime soon package up the code as open source to share. And at least one woman I spoke to goot hooked on 5 Card Nancy.

It was also fun to do a demo and hear the interest in the GigaPan rig on my session on Creating and Exploring Big Wide Images- and folks were eager to play around in the final image and appear multiple times.

And I was pleased to get a big participatory crowd in discussion on my session on the Horizon report and we had some notes captured on the presentation wiki.

The other fun part was the opening session where the guest presenters were asked to do “inspirational” 10 minute talks in TED style. I had fun doing a bit of recycled material with my “Internet is Big” and stories of some of the unlikely connections that have come my way. Fortunately it was ustreamed and recorded:

Maybe fortunately! I’ve not seen the video yet (way too slow here).

I very much enjoyed the conference format style, mixing things up with unconference sessions, and how much you saw people sitting around at all times engaged in conversation.

And it was a lot of fun to see how the organizers involved the school kids as tech support, the “Geek Squad” made of both high school and middle aged kids running around in their red shirts to provide suppoty and emergency equipment deliveries.

And while I can feel rather “ning-ed” out at times, as a platform, the conference site worked great to be dynamic, media rich, and a lot of people were actively posting notes.

So I have one more hazy afternoon left in Shanghai, headed out soon for some sightseeing with David Jakes and Brian Crosby, and then tomorrow it is on to leg 2 of the CogDogBlog Asia 2008 Tour with a stop in Hong Kong.

Learning 2.008 EduBloggerCon (Shanghai)
www.edubloggercon.com/Learning+2.008+Edubloggercon

Before the opening of the Learning 2.008 conference, a group of conference attendees and other local bloggers met up for breakfast and conversation about out favorite topic. Not only were there pictures and conversation, Jeff Utecht was also ustreaming the session and the 20+ so remote participants who were rather active in being part of the discussions.

Following this, I met up with Robert, a journalism teacher here at Fudan University, who was introduced to me by Pat Delaney, and we spent a few hours together over lunch and walking around the French Concession area, and discussing blogging, etc.

In the evening, we ambled over to the Shanghai International School for the opening of Learning 2.008 http://learning2cn.ning.com/ conference with the 10 Minute TED Style talks– twas a fun series to be part of and to watch… It was all ustreamed and recorded.

Today, I ran my Telling Stories with Pictures session, kind of loosely flowing, but lots of folks in a tiny classroom

Just announced on the conference site!

Important Announcement: On Saturday, the local Shanghai Government has informed us that they will be doing an air-raid siren test. Based on past experience, this will be very loud and will start at approximately 10:00 a.m. It should be finished in 30-40 seconds. Ear plugs recommended.

You never know what will happen ;-) What an active conference!

This little guy was curious about the gigapan I had set up to do this shot
gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=9189

He is kind of cute

One of the more fascination aspects of being inn China has been watching people and their faces. Some of the faces are so somber, some so expressive. Without any understanding of the language, it’s fun to try and guess their conversations, as you see people laughing, arguing, chatting, playing games…

Today was another wandering day in the city, taking a cab down to the area close to the “Bund”, the waterfront here with the views of the massive skyscrapers across the river, and area which, we were told was empty of anything until the mid 1990s. I was joined by Clarence Fiasher, Brian Crosby, and Julie Lindsay, who then went on her own mission to buy a saxophone…

We walked down the heavy commercial (like new style) of East Nanjing Street, a pediestrian wide way of store after store of that weird mixed Western and Chinese commerce. It was another area full of people who want to be friends and sell you a Rolex (I am estimating there are 5 billion such watches in this country), bags, shoes, fake iPods, DVDs. Swatting them away ranges from annoying to sometimes fun. Their tactics are horrible but its also sad to see people having this as the best opportunity to make some money.

I got a pretty good Gigapan of this scene of East Nanjing Street
http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=9161

One cheery guy in a tan shirt who wanted me to see his “store” I waved off by saying we were going to lunch and I’d see him later. What a surprise 2 hours later as he returned and he was there smiling, and got me in a bear bug greeting. We laughed when I said I did not need anything.

Clarence and I did like another 90 minute wander up and down the side streets, where you are away from the shiny stuff, not haggled, happily ignored by people zooming around on their business, and the “Stores” are really almost stalls of amazing specialty from a hinge store to a caulk store to several wire stores, places selling fresh fish, pig parts, bowls of live snakes…

In the evening we met up with Jeff Utecht and more of the conference gang, getting to meet in person finally David Warlick and David Jakes, and a fantastic chinese dinner followed by what I have heard is the legendary foot massage.

This morning we are off to a local event, and EduBloggerCon Shanghai
http://www.edubloggercon.com/Learning+2.008+Edubloggercon

and the Learning 2.008 conference opens tonight where I and my colleagues are supposed to do a 10 minute “TED” style talk of something “inspirational” to teachers.

This blog post will wander a bit on concept and sometimes take a nose dive into code but may surface again.

I’ve been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora‘s workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative work, from all things, of old Nancy cartoons. Using the Five-Card Nancy web version of Scott’s original card game, Ruben conducts an exercise in visual story weaving.

Basically, you get a shuffled deck of five panels from different Nancy cartoons, and you have to pick one at a time to, in five steps, produce a coherent story, or at least die laughing trying. The point is to make connections and discuss the reasons for the choice.

The idea that has been brewing is to create a web tool that works the same, but rather than drawing from a pool of Nancy cartoons (no offense to the Nancy-holics), draw from a pool of images, say in flickr– this is different slightly from the Flickr Tell a Story in 5 Frames, but presents another way of facing the challenge of telling a story in images only.

Right now, I have about 95 photos (all mine) tagged 5cardflickr. I have a really simple demo interface for trying this activity; you get dealt 5 photos, click the one you want, and then you get another draw of 5 new ones.

The pool, of course, is pretty limited (for now), but at the end, you should have a 5 photo story, and then I made it so you can save it, add a title, and some commentary. All of this is stored in the database to have links to stories, etc.

A really crude example (hey I am just testing) here is called Phone a Friend:

so each story has its own URL, http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/show.php?id=10.

Now I have the pieces in place, and can in the next few days, put a prettier face on it.

Getting the images from flickr was more roundabout than I thought. What I was dreaming was something that allowed my code to ffetch a random image with a given tag. At first I thought this was a job for phpFlickr (which I did set up and tinker with like 2 years ago), but as far as I could see, there were no flickr API hooks for doing that (but it is just as likely I missed it).

So I did find some code that sort of does what I was looking for using RSS feeds from flickr and the old magpieRSS parser, which I knew well from my Feed2JS work. The sample code was kind of wonky, but I cleaned it up and got it working for the feed on my tag.

But this is hardly random; what you are getting is a random photo from the last 20 that have been tagged, since RSS feeds just track that much.

So here is the thing I ask- to tag some photos with the 5cardflickr tag; however, they must be newer than a few days ago, as otherwise, they wont bubble to the top of the feed. And don’t go hog wild, since with feed caching and not zinging the feed a gazillion times, I am only going to get the 20 newest every hour.

Forget this! New code allows any photo, new or old, to make it into the mix!

To create some parameters for pictures to work in this context, my suggestion is to look for photos that fit one of my themes:

• a single person alone
• 2 or more people interacting
• an expression of emotion
• a mode of transportation
• a public place
• an everyday object
• an animal

And of course, these should be images you release under creative commons; my script will grab the link to the original and provide attribution when it is displayed.

I’ve set this up in a generalized way so I could create, say another, site that works the same but for a different tag.

But there’s more.

I knew ahead of time that in Shanghai for the Learning 2.008 conference, I could not rely on flickr being seen through the not so great walls of firewall. So from the outset, I knew I would need a different approach to collect the images. My Grand Idea was that before the conference, I could get some of the registered participants to share photos that fit the same categories.

As the conference site is done in ning, this would mean people attending should have accounts. So created a ning group within the conference site, the Telling Stories with Pictures Pool– and within that group I made a discussion area for each of my listed photo categories (see above), and asked people to upload or provide links to pictures.

Response has been okay and picking up. As the conference’s online portions are open, I can see no reason why people not going to Shanghai could not join the site (yes, another #^&$ing ning site).

As the way pictures are attached is not neatly suited for RSS, I’ll likely do some manual harvesting for the images (basically just need a URL for the image and a person to credit).

But the cool part is the way I set this up, I can create a new site that works the same, but just hits a different database table for the ning images.

Yep, this is crude, but I am hoping it achieves a goal of generating an activity to help people explore their visual skills of creativity. If not, oh well, its generated an activity for me to sharpen up my rusty PHP code skills.

Of course, if this idea is any good, what it really needs is a slick Ruby On Rails underbelly, a sprinkling of Ajax, and publishing final stories as flash… an exercise I will leave for the reader ;-)