This year I fell out of NaNoWriMo only 12 days in, and it was a good thing. I could sense form where I was, that my attempt at writing a World According to Dogs novel was maybe at best, a not original idea and not welle executed.

But failing writing about dogs, I’m into some good reading some books, here in my Kindle app, in the “dog vein”

I want to credit John King for his comment that led me to read the marvelous, yet bittersweet, Timbuktu.

In that story, told by the world wise “Mr Bones” we find the dog seeing a parting of the ways with his estranged, yet dog-loved, human companion, the mentally off kilter. homeless, and dying, Willy G Christmas. It was a quick read, yet like a coat of dried mud, I cannot quite shake it. It is, in its unusual way, a love story.

Willy is a stream of conscious firehose, at the end overloaded with all of the world he has taken in (here’s my kindle saved clipping)

Understanding. That’s what I’m after, chum. The key to the puzzle, the secret formula after four-plus decades of groping in the dark. And still, all this stuff keeps getting in my way. Even as I breathe my last, I’m choking on it. Useless bits of knowledge, unwanted memories, dandelion fluff. It’s all flit and fume.

That sense is very familiar for me now!

The second dog point of view book I have just started is Beautiful Joe An Autobiography of a Dog (gotta like the $0.00 price). It’s the tale of an abused dog, and it was published back in 1873!

A quote clipped from the opening, on humans and animals (though make a modern gender switch for that use of “manly” to be “humanly”:

Kindness to the animal kingdom is the first, or a first principle in the growth of true philanthropy. Young Lincoln once waded across a half-frozen river to rescue a dog, and stopped in a walk with a statesman to put back a bird that had fallen out of its nest. Such a heart was trained to be a leader of men, and to be crucified for a cause. The conscience that runs to the call of an animal in distress is girding itself with power to do manly work in the world.

I’m liking the reading now more than the writing…. Got any more recommendations for dog authored books?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by betta design

If you’ve clicked by my 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell Story you will know I have told the same old dog story 50+ times, so it was a refreshing suprise when I got an email tonight from Claudia Ceraso describing a novel way she used Dominoe’s flickr set as a way to have her students create their own stories based solely on what they cold imagine from the photo set.

I have shared with my teen and young adult students your Dominoe story. I simply showed them the slideshow without the text and told them it was part of a real life story. I asked them to write and here is the result: four stories -some done collaboratively, some not.

I should have recorded the brainstorming we had after seeing your pics projected in an IWB. Their first reaction was to talk about feelings and a potential sad ending to the story. They explained they associated the colours of the leaves with sad feelings. Interesting.

They haven’t seen the real one yet, unless they were curious enough to click around and get to the youtube version. I’ll tell them next class.

Pretty simple and creative way to use the same pictures for some different versions of the story- some have Dominoe found, some run away, some all the way to Arizona. You can find the stories Claudia’s students created at http://corpus.wikispaces.com/tag/view/sample39.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

If Dominoe were around, I am sure she would wag her stubby tail wildly in joy to know students in Buenos Aires, Argentina were being creative with her photos.

I’ve milked this story plenty of times before- during a 2007 workshop in Tasmania, I used as an example of the power of unexpected connections, someone the year before had commented on a flickr photo I had tagged as “unknown” and told me the kind of flower it was– what was amazing was the woman who did this was in the workshop (here I am telling it again in video, where you will here about 20 times the word “amazing”.)

This just happened again today- out of the blue, un-asked for (and not even tagged or captioned with a request to help learn about the subject), flickr user “Sculpture Kris” added a comment to this photo of a sculpture I saw in Rochester, Minnesota.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

telling me a lot more about “Boy on a Dolphin” then I knew before:

And ironically, there was a previous work by the artist, Girl with a Dolphin in London, that I bet I walked right past when I visited the London Tower Bridge in August.

Now this is really tiny, this is not open education or anything that will Reform Education as We Know It, but I am (flipping through thesaurus for some other word than “amazing”)… astounded that people may seek out photos in flickr of things they have information on, and share them like this. Sculpture Kris did more than just comment, he/she researched the other photos on flickr, and added the Youtube video of another version of the Boy/Dolphin sculpture elsewhere in London (tactfully in front of a Mercedes Benz dealership?)

which then leads via related videos to a clip of a movie with Sophia Loren (and if you go further you are deep down a line of tangents that I am not taking responsibility for).

But back to this example- perhaps this could be an interesting exercise for classes learning about Web 2.0 tech / social media? Seek a shared piece of media posted in a site like flickr in a topic area that you know or are interested in, do some research to share some information, and post it as a comment. Comment some learning forward?

I have someone who regularly mines my flickr stream for photos that he posts to WikiPedia articles he helps author, and always lets me know when it is used; I end up reading the article, and damn if I end up learning something new. Again.

So I will use the “A” word again. Among the river of social media and the crap that comes across our TV news– we can use a whole lot more Amazing Stories (my self plugs for 2009 and 2010 versions of Amazing Stories of Sharing).

They are small things to do, yet powerful… and contagious.

Thanks Sculpture Kris, for the spark of my day.

I barely watch anything on my home TV screen (I don’t get a signal nor any cable, so its for DVDs only), so I’m not quite up to speed on the latest technology for 3-D video but it is a technology we try and track for the NMC Horizon project.

About the 3D film I’ve seen in the theaters was Avatar (saw it twice) and have to admit the 3D added something that grew better as you noticed it less, it was not like the gratuitous flyouts of shovels and guns that marked the cheesier and older 3d movies I saw longer ago.

The current issue of Wired magazine (18.10) (I get the dead tree version in my mailbox, I am now a throwback) got my brain spinning a little bit simply from the Rants section. I cannot say why it got me thinking, but I find its better to play it out than figure it out.

There were comments to the past Will Ferrel cover issue on the future in a column, Does Every Film Need to be in 3-D?.

One reader wrote

3-D is annoying and cumbersome and adds nothing to the story or plot.

I was nodding in agreement, but then thought longer- how does foley add directly to the plot? or makeup? or lighting? One might argue that they do so indirectly, but really are all about the recipe that mixes together to create the context for a plot to take place.

It got me thinking of a young Australian I met on one of my flights recently, He was in construction, as a plasterer, but talked excitedly about working on the set of a movie being shot on the Gold Coast of Australia that was using Avatar-like technology. He shrugged off “all I did was build steps for a scene”– and one could ask again, what does this guys plaster have to do with the plot?

I don’t think you can dismiss 3-D because it is not part of the plot.

Another comment in Wired:

Come back and talk to me when you have a universal standard and I don’t have to wear any damned glasses.

I agree that putting on the glasses adds to the sense of looking at something rather than being in the space, but there needs to be some device to generate the visual offset that creates the 3D affect. Again, during Avatar, I pretty much forgot I was wearing glasses.

But what I started thinking about that what we have seen so far is not really much 3-D, like maybe 2.4-D (?). What we get is looking at a 2-D screen where some elements appear to poke out and move towards me slightly, but its really not going too far out from the 2-D plane.

Now to me, a 3-D experience would be I am sitting in the middle of my living room, and the scenes would take place all around me- in front, to the sides,m behind, like sound can do now. And maybe I could navigate my way to different scenes?

But that again is not all that different from some of the 3-D game experiences. The thing about a movie (or a book) is that there is a narrative trail, a direct we follow or are lead. Most of the time it is in chronological sequence though this has been cleverly hacked. That narrative element seems important to me, even if allowed branching, because that is what makes it a story.

So I am trying to speculate what a plot would look like if it really was a full 3d experience.

That is as far as I got.

I remain on the skeptical side and seeing it like others as more of a gimmick; I am quite fine with a well developed story on a 2-D screen (or page)– they always work well when they can suspend your beliefs that being the power of story.

but hey, I would not mind being wrong at all. Bring it on 3-D… maybe it will convince me to sign up for cable.

modified from an original January 1935 issue found at the archive from Galactic Central

Amazing Stories of Openness
While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “Amazing Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and I ask you to share your own.

While open courseware is important, there is much more that happens to us as individuals as we break old conventions and actually freely share our content online.

I want to help promote the concept of wide open sharing by highlighting examples of Amazing Stories of Openness– things that people have gained from that were initiated from putting something they made, wrote into the open space of the web, stories of things that would not have ever happened without this space.

What the heck am I talking about? My own examples include ones outlined in Only on the Web:

• An HTML tutorial I shared in the mid 1990s was voluntarily translated into Icelandic by a teacher in Isafudor, later leading to be being invited to Reykjavik to run a workshop for teachers.
• A German rock band named “The Sea Level” found an old photo in my web site of the sea level sign in Death Valley– they used it for the cover of their CD and I got a copy of it!
• During a workshop in Tasmania, Australia, I was telling the audience about the amazing thing on flickr where I had posted photos of flowers labeled “Unknown flower” and people on their own found the photo and helped identify it. I chose one at random, and the person who had commented on my photo was sitting in the room!

This is the Tom Sawyer Fence Painting School of building presentations! I’m looking for your stories to tell to an audience at the August 2009 Open Ed Conference in Vancouver. If you complete the google form below (or find it directly at http://bit.ly/amazingstories) I’ll respond ASAP and hopefully we can set up a way for you to share your story (if not I have to build a presentation around just my own stories, yecchh).

How about it? It does not have to be super amazing, it might just be a colleague you discovered via open content, or a project that happened because of commons interests, or maybe something even more amazing.

Pixton Version of this Call For Stories

Thanks!

Maybe two months from now will mark the 15th year I have been on the web. This will be October 29, exactly at 10:30am, 15 years to the minute when I inserted a floppy disk labeled “Mosaic” (in perhaps a Mac Quadra 900) that my Maricopa colleague Jim Walters had handed me, and had said, just with a smile, “Try this”.

Profound moment indeed.

In all this time, I have never lost a shred of excitement over those crazy serendipity happenings, connections, opportunities, that present themselves only because the web was there. Things that would not have happened otherwise, in that creepy parallel universe where there is no internet, no world wide web.

So I am going to toss out a few and see if others pick up and share there own. My stipulation is that each story much have a link to an artifact of the story. Cause if there ain’t a link, its not a web.

I have tons of stories, but will keep it to three.

How do You Say HTML in Icelandic?
One of my early successful web projects was Writing HTML — dating back to 1994– a tutorial on old school web content creation, where you could learn tags, linking, etc while building a fake web page about Volcanoes. Sometime in the mid 1990s I got an email from a teacher in Iceland asking if was okay to translate the lessons into his language. The entire package was always available for free download and re-use, so I said “sure” and warned Gudjon that there were like 120 files inside of it that would need translation.

I forgot about it, but months later, I got an email that said here it is – http://thor.vma.is/tut/ and wow, I could recognize by content in shape, but “NÁMSEFNISGERÐ Í HTML” read like:

Þegar þú ert búinn með námskeiðið getur þú gert röð samtengdra vefsíða um hvaða efni sem er og sett það upp með forsniðnum texta, myndum, og vefstiklum (e. Hyperlink) í aðrar síður á Internetinu

That is only part of the story. In 1999, Gudjon recommended me to a colleague in Reykjavik, and in June I was flying there to give workshops to a group of social studies teachers. After that part, I was on a small plane flying to Isafudor to meet Gudjon for the first time.

From me posting web pages Arizona to meeting a colleague at his home near the arctic circle in Iceland? Only by the web did this happen.

My Death Valley Photo As German Rock Band Album Art
I refuse to be convinced that you gain by locking up and protecting your “intellectual property”, and my mode of operation from my first steps onto the web were very simple- give my stuff away. Cause you get things back, and better than tangible are incredible experiences that can make you look like a wide eyed babe.

Back in 1988, when I was a grad student in the Geology program at Arizona State University, I had some wonderful “commutes” to the area I was studying for my Masters these near Bishop, California. One route I took was across Death Valley, and even then, long before a digitqal camera was even a glimmer of an idea for me, I was taking photos of weird signs… in this case, my car, a 1973 Ford Maverick, parked in front of the sign in Death Valley that said “Sea Level”:

Years later, when I had access to tools in my job at Maricopa, I scanned the photo and dropped it somewhere in the pile of my 1990s vintage “home page”. Interestingly enough, it was the file name of my photo, sea-level.jpg that enabled a German rock band to find my image — the name of their band was The Sea Level. And they were interested in using my photo as cover art for their next CD.

I was maybe a bit skeptical, but had nothing to lose by shipping them off a higher res version of my photo. And darned, if months later, did I get en envelope of a music CD with a familiar photo on the cover:

Only on the web would a German band find a photo for their music from an obscure directory of a web geek in Arizona.

Unidentified Arizona Flowers Spotted in Tasmania
I still have to question whether this last story could have really happened, but I was there, and it did.

I have a part of a presentation called Being There in that Unevenly Distributed Future where I try to make a pitch that on our human scale we cannot really grasp the immense size and breadth of the net. Its on a scale beyond our senses, like the physical scale of one puny human at the Grand Canyon. So I shared a few examples that are, I hope, more appreciable than talking about “millions of blog posts per day”.

I am doing this presentation at the first stop of my October 2007 Australia tour for a group of educators gathered in Hobart, Tasmania. I tell them of this little trick I learned on flickr– as I enjoy taking macro shots of flowers, I really am terrible at identifying them. So by accident, I learned if I use the words “unknown flower” or “unidentified flower” in a description, that often people seek these out and will tell you, in the comments what the species is.

So I have a preset flickr search string that pulls up maybe 13 phorts from my stream that have that as a description/ So in Tasmania, I scroll up and down thatr page and decide to use an orange one as an example.

I tell the audience how I posted the image and a someone named “Kirsty S” commented, “I suspect it is a ranunculus.”

Here I am in Tasmania telling this story (I could have picked any of 12 other photos) and a hand goes up halfway back of the room and a woman says, “That was me! I am Kirsty S”.

I am sure my heart stopped a beat.

Or twelve.

The odds of this seem astounding to me. But I was there, and so was Kirsty S

Only on the web could have this connection happened.

It is these stories that keep me going, and hoping for more.

So what are your “only on the web” wild stories?

photo credit: *TreMichLan*

When you send an email (and it does not bounce back) you likely have the assumption it got to the intended person. If they never respond, do you begin conjuring stories? “Why did he ignore my request?” … “I hate companies that don’t reply to consumer”… “I guess she does not like me”…

Well there are some dark dead ends of the internet where information goes to never return. Many domains for email addresses have one address that all messages go to if the server cannot find an account- the “catch-all” address. Or it just goes to a trash canned named dev-null.

I monitor one of these accounts for NMC. Maybe every two weeks I sift it to find if there is something that was mis-addressed. Alot of it is spam, but there is a whole pile of dead email letters that are simply mis-addressed. There are organizatioons with domains close to “nmc.org” – one is a National Midwifery Council and the other is a church, so there is a mishmosh of mis-sent medical/religious emails that go unanswered (we have contacted these organizations several times ti let them know, but they nver responded either).

So I am wondering, casually, what are the stories of this mis-sent messages to the dead letter mail box? What happens because no one responds?

photo credit: charlie cravero

from: wanda
to: fmartin@nmc.org
date: Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 7:42 AM
subject: address change

Hi Freddie,
Per your request, this is being sent so that you will have my correct e-mail address!

Have a great day.
Wanda

So Freddie never replies, never says thank you. Does Wanda care? She should since Freddie requested something, Wanda provided, and Freddie ignore? Is Freddie important or just a casual contact? What if Freddie is in love with Wanda and now lacks her email address?

from: Beth A.
to: jjarvis@nmc.org
date: Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 7:13 AM
subject: hey

Hey, I may end up working back in St. Albans come this fall!

Beth
Surgical Clinical Office Assistant
Pediatric Surgery & Pediatric Neurosurgery

What happens when Beth shows up to St Albans and runs into JJarvis who obviously was not excited that she was returning? Does she ignore JJarvis? Talk behind his back? What was their connection?

from: becky
to: bjarrett@nmc.org
date: Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 7:07 AM
subject: budget for sage

Hi Beth,
Hope you are able to be refreshed! May the Spirit wash over you like an ocean wave…. well maybe not that forceful…. a gentle ocean wave…

Looking at C3 budget… I was wondering what amount you would like for the Sages next year?

We are encouraged to make a dream budget….I will need a response by September 16…

THANKS!!
Becky

And Becky is left to wonder why Beth has not submitted a budget amount. Does the spirit washing sooth this over? Beth is going to miss the deadline and Becky… may just shrug and say. more money for someone else?

from: Human Resources
to: bshoemaker@nmc.org
date: Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 9:56 AM
subject: REMINDER: ALEXIA M H has requested a reference from you

To Brent Shoemaker:
This is a reminder email about a previously sent reference request. This is the last email notification you will receive regarding this request.

ALEXIA M H has applied for a position at Xxxxx County Schools and has listed you as a reference.

Please take a few minutes to fill out our confidential electronic reference form.

The form must be completed by 08/25/2008. Thank you for your assistance.

Brent has been ignoring these requests from HR and today is his deadline to give a reference request for Alexia. Will she get the job without Brent’s help? What if she does? What if she does not? What happens when Brent wants a favor from Alexia?

from: fletcher
to: spencer@nmc.org
date: Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 7:26 PM
subject: Bulletin info

I don’t know which one of you fine brothers is in charge of this, but I noticed that the Wednesday AM coffee group is meeting at “The Friendly Bean Above” – take the “Above” out of the name.

Are people going to miss the coffee group due to the typo in the bulletin? What does Fletcher think that Spencer is not responding to his efforts to improve the information in the bulletin? Will coffee will spilled? Will resentment bubble?

to: trweaver@nmc.org
date: Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 6:54 PM
subject: blood test results, please

Hi Tammy,

Last time I was in, there was a blood draw to test the thyroid levels and white blood cell count. Could you please send me the results by email? You can verify it’s really me by phone, 907-xxx-xxxx, or my cell is xxx-xxxx. Thanks a bunch – enjoy your weekend.

Rain Wade

How does Rain feel without her blood test results? Is she going to be less interested in Tammy’s weeked as her requests for personal information are ignored? What are the results of the blood tests?

So keep this in mind next time you email someone and they don’t respond. Maybe they never got it because the message was mis-addressed.

Or maybe they really do hate you guts.