CogBlogged Tagged ‘wide world of blog’

Perhaps your head is exploding with all the new stuff coming out of every electronic orifice. It might be useful to consider how you go about getting your dose? Maybe it’s RSS, it might be clicking every link shared by a Jedi master, or slogging through the plaff of twitter, heck it might even be from a magazine. I have a technique that never fails to give me a lift (when it works), yet I can hardly claim it is reproducible. It’s equivalent to kicking over a rock when hiking just to see what might be hiding underneath, when you find something cool (or just as not, squishy) in an expected place. For a while I have been saying I should keep track of all the useful or interesting things I have found online by sheer serendipity. The best part is the surprise factor, and that it is very likely [...]

OMG, my sides are aching from laughter, just me and my web browser and the GraphJam site which is taglined “Pop cullture for people in cubicles”. People submit Excel generated charts and graphs that illustrate sayings, song topics, or just relationships of things from history or modern life (Found this in the latest issue of WiRed). So the pithy old saying about “thinking my old man was some dumb until I turned 29 and realized how much he learned by then” becomes GraphJammed: more graph humor and song chart memes

On July 5, while most of America is recovering form whatever it is they do to themselves the day before, I’ll be strapped into a plane 15 hours to fly to Australia. Yes, despite whatever happened, whomever I coughed on, on my visit there last October they are letting me come back. modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin This trip is with my NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith as we go first to Melbourne to launch a new flavor of the NMC’s Horizon Project, working with a new advisory board of Australian and New Zealand educators on Horizon.au,. Out of this effort, we are producing later this year a Horizon Report specifically focused on emerging technology relevant to education in this region. We are also going to Brisbane and Sydney, visiting in all, the 5 NMC member organizations in Australia: RMIT, University of Melbourne, [...]

How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it: Nothing special about the photo (except it had the word “drafting table” in it), just one of several thousand sitting in my bin. I keep an RSS feed for my flickr comments so I know when someone writes something (so I can respond, or just so my ego can get a small stroke), and a day ago came this cryptic comment from a joe:allam: Expect your views of this picture to go up drastically in the next few days. Sure enough, when I went to check, it was up to 82, far above the normal [...]

Don’t ask why, but this snapshot I got a few weeks ago while Skyping with Bryan Alexander, or known to some as “Dr Nemo” reminds me of the mashup I did a few years ago after meeting Doug Engelbart with a screen shot of him from the “Mother of All Demos” Doesn’t Dr Nemo like rather futuristic? Or maybe I just hope someday I can get my beard to be that cool.

It is an understatement, but I was extremely ecstatic when I got an email in January from Jeff Utecht asking me if I’d be interested in speaking at the Learning 2.008 Conference in Shanghai. Must details got fuzzy as I thought about going to China. So I paused an appropriate amount of milliseconds before replying with my “hell yes” message. Last year was the first iteration of the conference, and I remember reading bits of the blog coverage, and liking the different ideas they had packed into that first version. I was just listening to Jeff’s podcast with Ken Carroll: Learning 2.008 Podcast and am liking even more they ways they are trying to make this a different kind of format, with mixes of un-conference activities, hands on experiences, some Second Life-age, no paper, every session recorded/podcasted, and lots of social interaction. Oh, and they are asking the 8 presenters [...]

It’s been frequently noted that the response effect of twitter is not a simple matter of opening an account and yelling for help; as a new tweeter you get the tree-falling silently effect. That said, I feel overwhelmingly fortunate to put out a single request and get a string of responses. With this, and despite the annoying flitterings of the service, I must admit to my good friend and colleague Scott Leslie, that I’m not quite ready to lead a charge to another ship. And even more warming, is that in the replies to my question today, I only know half of the responders. That’s right, people I don’t know are trying to help me! One pitfall can be squeezing a complex request into 140 characters… i like the thought process of stripping it down to the bare essentials, lose the articles, commas, spelled out “and”s and get clever with [...]

Yesterday I wrote of the power of using twitter as a “CallOut” to get help or participation or just say, “Hey, we’re hanging out over at this cool web place.” And late last night, another example twittered my way- getting a tweet from both Sue Waters and Al Upton. Al does these fantastic web blogging projects with 3rd grade (or properly Year 3) students at Glenelg School in Adelaid, Australia. For his second year of his miniLegends project (those would be his students, see what they did in 2007), Al is asking for edubloggers to become miniLegend Mentors for this year’s students more or less picking a young blogger and agreeing to reglular comment on their blog. If you’re an educational blogger of any kind (or visitor) and would like to ‘mentor a mini’ then please leave a comment on THIS page saying who you would like to be connected [...]

Blog comment spam is one thing, but when you get an email like: Hello Alan, I’ve been reading Cogdogblog and I love the work you are putting out. My name is Xxxxx xxxxxx. I work with Xxxx XXXXX Xxxx in Xxxxxx, Xxxxx. I would love the opportunity to chat with you about potential partnership opportunities. We are always looking for new ways to raise awareness and engage new audiences. This could be a great way for us to come together to spread the word about issues we both care about. : ; [snip] It ought to seem genuine. Wow, this person is a long time blog reader? Wow, they are with some cool company in Xxxxxx. Might be my big breal! Hold the bus! The writer’s job title is something like “Viral Media Outreach”. Makes me a bit suspicious… Hmm… And yeah, I del.icio.us tagged something from the same outfit [...]

Just when you think you have exhausted all the oddly strange things people have cooked up in a blog, comes along just one more. One Red Paper Clip is documenting the North American (?) Dream: My name is Kyle MacDonald. I started with one red paperclip on July 12th, 2005 and I am making a series of trades for bigger or better things until I get a house. My current item up for trade is one recording contract. You can read current offers here. Do you want a recording contract? Please contact me with your offer at (oneredpaperclip@gmail.com) or phone (514-833-3980). I live in Montreal Canada but will go anywhere in the world for the right offer. – (click on pictures below for stories about each trade.) Only on the web can you get away with this. I love the strangeness of it, as well as the only way I [...]