Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Just came across the nifty MT Plugin: OtherBlog. This allows MovableTyple blogs to be able to include content on the same server. Plugin based way of including posts/info from other blogs on the same installation. I've yet to even try it, but I can already think about our BlogShop a way to provide a "super-blog" that would assemble content from the blogs of participants in the workshop (assuming they actually continue posting content after the workshop;-) But there could be other uses, but need to let it distill a bit on my brain. If you are hosting more than one blog on a server, it has potential for bridging content. <tiphat>tip of the blog hat to IDBlog </tiphat> Following up from last month (nobody is tracking me) for this 13th year of daily photos I am trying to do my cleanup and review each month, thus saving me hours of labor in December. Yeah right. Hello tracker? January was perfect, February, even with it's extra day had a 2 day gap. I chalk that up to the long travel Cori and did in the middle of the month to get from Regina to Strawberry, where we spent a quiet time just enjoying the house, the trees, and a wee trip to this place with a stream in the bottom of some ditch. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564358697 2020/366/50 Grasping the Inner Gorge flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Heck there's a decent little canyon just following the road west out of town. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564144986 Last Light in Fossil Creek Canyon flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) But there's as much joy in the small details too; this vehicle track in the field across from out house, at a low angle looks like Alpine peaks https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49563446478 2020/366/43 Faux Alpine flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This rock from our yard went on a little international travel for a class activity on the Networked Narratives course I co-teach. It was a half brained idea but it worked a bit. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49563951831 2020/366/44 A Rock to Share flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And also right in the middle was a delightful Valentine's date night https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564173822 2020/366/45 Valentines Date Night flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) There were not as many cooking / food photos in this month, but there was a celebration of break making. I remain so tickled I can conjure delicious egg bread (Challah) from flour, egg, yeast, and a dab of sugar. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49509116852 2020/366/39 Not Bad For Six Cups of Flour, Egg, Yeast, and Sugar flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And finally, a bit of optimism emerging from the retreating snow in the front yard. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49606017392 2020/366/58 Winter Survivor flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) So February brings the daily count to 60 days done in 2020; I've got 58 dailies, the perfect year of 366/366 won't happen, but it will still be a great run of photos. How's your daily habit? Featured Image: screenshot of part of the February batch of photos in my flickr 2020/366 photos album. My new blog post category might be "Enough Of the Web Nostalgia" where this one can be filed. Trust me, I am excitedly peering into the future! I took the Amazing/True Stories of Openness for it's last hurrah ride, back to the Open Education Conference where it started in 2009. It was perched in the schedule as a pre-recorded presentation, and I appreciate Brian B for at least watching and commenting. I framed it on the site as "OpenEd, Are there still Amazing Stories of Openness Fourteen Years Later?" and while I garnered a few more, the sentiment seemed to be.... YAWN. But I had fun making a video, that counts for something? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgvWIb735c8 But in a way, I I tried to summarize, the Amazingness of spontaneous connections maybe not be so amazing any more, it happens a lot, perhaps in nano-doses through the reply and like buttons in social media. So this schtick is going to be shelved, buried, and not resurrected again. That does not mean the stories will go anywhere, i will just let them accumulate dust off in the corner of my pile of sites. Does it still happen? Hell yes, I keep getting things that are like gentle echoes of blog posts from say, discovering the legend of Baker Bill from a building sign spotted in 2015 (a comment came in 3 months ago, 2023). Or even this one, a 2011 photo of some stuff my Mom lifted from restaurants is being used in a Grade 3 school book. https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog/111406886274659321 This is the weird, small, quirky internet I came for and am still immersed in. That's my story. Thanks to all who have chimed in over the years, and thanks to the Open Education Conference for putting out the welcome mat. I have to solidly comment their entire team for running a highly energetic and well done online conference. It is possible! Get ready for the 2024 OpenEd- a hybrid conference that I promise I will not dig up the stories again, I promise! Featured Image: Digging For Information flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license my modifications, cropped and added screen shot of my presentation video. No AI was used in the mashing up of this image! Burying the Amazing Stories for good! There are people, likely those trying to make a buck off of RSS, who would like to measure how much "hit" there is from information syndicated as RSS Feeds, consumed, and hopefully clicked at. Checking your web server log for access of the RSS URL do not mean much, as they are continually hit by aggregators, and give no indication if the content is accessed. Not being a server dude, I have no idea to the answer to this question, but I was just wondering what the web server logs indicate fora referrer when a link is generated from a desktop aggregator? (the web server log records every server request, and is able to record the URL a visitor was before they clicked a link to end of on your site). I believe there is something recorded when a refer comes from a browser bookmark, but what does a click from an RSS aggregator report to the web server? If there is nothing recorded, what would it take to develop a "standard" that could share this tidbit? And then there is an unknown factor of referrers from web-based aggregators such as BlogLines, which would have have the standard web referrer recorded?? it is just a half baked thought that came while I am waiting here for my car to get fixed-- I am not fixated on gathering stats like those, but can see how it would be useful in, not just the business context, to know where your web audiences are coming from. It's been a contention of mine that the majority of people who access and use web sites are largely invisible, they rarely enter form the "front door", and they use, ignore, disagree, share your content, and you never know they are there. The number of people who leave comments, or contact the webmaster email is likely tiny compared to the total users. It is a strange lesson to realize you are trying to design information for this unknown, silent audience... Analyzing your web server log reveals some surprising information on visitor page views, time spent on the site, what search terms brought them to your site, what their web browser and operating systems are (and the useless details like a majority of your visitors are from a town in Virginia) If you are serious about your audience and designing content, you ought to be a student of your web server log (not to confused with weblog). There are great, free tools for webmasters to provide this, such as AWstats (we use it) and the venerable Analog (which I think I used back in 1995!). One of my favorite pieces of the ds106 fleet of awesome is The Daily Create - something we built together last year to provide a platform for regular creative challenges. While we use it within the ds106 courses taught at UMW, it is a low overhead way for people to participate in our (non-bovine) online community/course. While one the road yesterday, I picked up some tweets started with George Couros who seemed to be pondering doing something similar https://twitter.com/gcouros/status/261196939691954176 which as Giulia Forsythe noted was pretty much what we have built. This led to a stream of tweets of enthusiasm, and I was even starting to say we could build a clone site pretty easy. In fact, part of me is interested in seeing if we can make the site into a Wordpress theme/plugin package, which is certainly doable but will require some making some hard coded bits generalizable and configurable. And while my memory cells were fuzzy at the time, Dr Garcia was right that she had suggested this early, with an idea perhaps of overlaying a way of tagging the challenges to maybe organize them into groups for different age students. https://twitter.com/DrGarcia/status/261244219534999552 Yet, on reflecting and getting input form others, I fall back a bit to wondering what is it about the current site that prevents it being used by any level? Yes, there are some assignments (telling a story about car keys) that would cause challenges. There are alos likely other issus on schools where using services like flickr, youtube are blocked. But we do not have a massive amount of activity; we get more responses when we do a photo Daily Create, like 12-50, but when we do video or audio, we generally see a handful of responses- what is the value of splitting this even more? I see the main value in seeing more interpretations of the assignments, not splintering them into say, Middle School Daily Create and Slovenian Lawyer Daily Create sites. So my question is, would some of those who expressed interest in this perhaps want to help us review the upcoming challenges and see what it would take to modify them as to not make them impossible for younger students to do? And really, when I think about it, this is the framing teachers always do for their students- they could easily recast the challenges in a more age appropriate way. Or by adding new ones to the mix . I am not dismissing the idea, but because it is going to take some development time for which I may not have nor are getting paid to do, I have to ask why not find a way for one site to work for more people rather than creating copy sites that are relatively similar? Also, I have to say, the one kind of challenge I would like to add but has baffled me is something that is written. There is no way for our site to easily aggregate stuff written at remote web sites, and I cannot think of something that is like a YouTube or flickr of Written Things. About the best might be something that is submitted via a form to the Daily Create site. It has to be something we can have a widget or gadget to easily display, like the ones we use fot the services currently supported (and if there is a viable alternative for soundcloud that provides an embedded player based on tags, I am keen to know). I am wide open to ideas here, and am not trying to clutch on to the Daily Create, but I might need to hear a stronger case as to why a separate site is needed. Today was the rockin' launch of the NMC Campus opened virtually in Second Life. After much morning prep, we ran two different 2 hour sessions, at 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM PST. I am working on a new NMC site that should server as the primary news outlet (read as blog published, podcast enhanced, tagged, and flickr syndication encrustated). The agenda was posted at the main "teleport" entry: (more…) Kids from Hiroshima by cogdogblog posted 1 Oct '08, 10.04am MDT PST on flickr This cute group if school kids today asked me to help them practice their English while I was visiting Kinkakuji Temple in Kyoto. It went something like... "Excuse me! Excuse me" (little voices rang out). "Hello, My name is Miko" said one reading from his script. "What is your name?" "My name is Alan" I replied. "We are from Hiroshima," said Miko, "where do you live?" "I live in America, in Arizona" "Will you sign our book?" And there I was signing my name in 4 of their books, and then they gave me a present: flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2904163089/ flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2905009782/ flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2905012480/ It was such a sweet moment. I felt famous for 45 seconds. I opted to author this first in medium because that's where people like "Richard" hang out. And yes "dick" is a bad word, but is also a nickname for "Richard" In which some annoyance over email spam likely descends into likely foul language ranting... and yes “dick” is a poor choice of language, but if you act like one… My blog turns 13 years old in a few weeks. Since 2003, I have paid for web hosting, done my own development, and remain an independent, non-ad supported minor ranter on the web. I can remember a time on the web where putting your email address on a page was a good idea. I still do, in a way, which thus means, the regular flow of unsolicited offers to put ads on my site or to do guest blog posts. There are, however, no ads on my site, and each and all typo ridden 4618 blog posts have been authored by moi. That does not stop email offers. So I have this (left image) clearly displayed on my front page. The “treatment” is a blog post, tagged cockroach, where I mock their email. If you decide it’s okay to crap in my inbox, than you have granted me a license to mock your message. Okay, I know that they are not even reading my blog before sending the solicitations. It’s done en masse. But does that really justify… being a dick? The strategy of email blasts is lifted right out of the late night 1970 Ronco TV ads I fondly remember (where is my Pocket Fisherman?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egx7QzjvNBY The idea is if you convert something like a fraction of 1% of the viewers to actual sales, you come out ahead. And in TV, this probably worked. If you were the other 99%, well, you just waited til it was over. And what did you expect? You are watching TV at 3am. Your records might need a vacuum cleaner. But reading my email, I am sitting here doing my work; it’s not 3am, your dick email is in my inbox, and I am not helpless. And that is the flaw in your social media strategy. If you piss off 99% of the people you send email, 99% of the people are going to associate the name of your startup as “Dick, Inc.” Most are sane enough to delete and move on. But some will tweet it, share it, and heck, some foolish enough to waste time blogging about it. This, we get to Richard. Who crapped in my inbox this morning. [caption id="attachment_55351" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Dickmail. URLs and company names blurred by me.[/caption] Right away, “Richard” I have a problem with your message. It is written with your name in it, as if you are writing, but it comes from some one named Sebastian. That’s a dick give away. But really, it is this affectionate greeting Hey Guys Now maybe you are trying to be “cool” and yes “guys” might be seen as a colloquialism for all kinds of people. If you paid more to your social media strategists, they might have even done that mail merge trick where they insert my name in the greeting. But “Hey Guys”? First of all, I am entity of 1 (not counting multiple personalities including 8 fake twitter accounts). What if I am woman? Have you another version that is “Hey Ladies”? Before I have even gotten to your pitch, you have 2 strikes in your email, and you are out. But let’s continue. Richard, CEO & cofounder of Studypool here. I am a college dropout who started studypool while attending Tatnall High School in Wilmington DE. I was reaching out to see if you guys would be interested in posting a guest blog post on our behalf?—?3 tip guide to successfully creating a startup in DE. Again, “Richard” why is your email coming from someone named “Sebastian Almnes”? And you keep calling me “guys”? Who suggested this bro-proach would be effective? And why the poop would you ever think I would want a blog post on my site about startups in Delaware? Have you seen how many blog post tips I have written startups? Let me help you out. Zero a.k.a none a.k.a. 0. Studypool is an online marketplace that connects student with tutors on a per question basis. We’ve raised a few million $$ from top investors in silicon valley and have been growing quickly. In a year 1/2 since launching we’ve helped over 1 Million students and have 40K tutors. I could do a lot of grammatical nitpicking on your inconsistent capitalization and poor writing style, but hey, you came from a rough background. And I am no grammar queen. But are these numbers supposed to impress me? How? If you are doing that well, why are you spamming bloggers? All this says is “We are burning through cash fast, and are resorting to spamming bloggers. Help! They are going to re-possess the espresso maker!” If you guys are interested please feel free to reach out, I think it would be a great read for your readers as well as we’d be happy to share it with our users. There you go again, the third time you call one person “guys”- that’s a triple dick move. Since you are pitching me content that has no freaking connection at all to what I publish, this tells me a lot about how you “think.” Impressive. I know nothing about business and startups, but a better strategy would be to develop a really strong product that truly helps people, get it in their hands, and let them speak for you. Develop a reputation of genuine care, over time. Resorting to the late night TV ad strategy just exposes your company as desperate. Best, Richard a.k.a “Dick”. Congratulations, “Richard”, you are now inducted to my mail spam hall of shame?—?because that’s what these “guys” here do at CogDogBlog. If you send me your postal address, I will order you this mug. UPDATE Mar 31, 2016 I don't want to use the nug either; on reflection, I decided to blur out any reference to the company name in the screenshot of the email. It's not important and seems ****-ish to identify the company. Top / Featured Image: I do NOT recommend searching Google Images for the word dick (oddly enough, certain current presidential candidates show up frequently). But I did like the image of this mug from This is Why I'm Broke (a win for the URL). So I did some play with X-Ray Goggles to rewrite the page, and screenshotted it. New reference for web design CSS junkies, and a nice example to demonstrate web pages need not be collections of boxes: The Elements of Typographic Style Apple to the Web: Robert Bringhurst's book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer's bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field... In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, I have structured this website to step through Bringhurst's working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS. The future is considered with coverage of CSS3, and practicality is ever present with workarounds, alternatives and compromises for less able browsers. It's a work under progress, and as a nice touch, the author is providing an RSS feed for updates. But it has an air or elegance, and a look of "this is not your typical web page". Now I am pretty far from a typographer (and today Janet in our office informed me in a page layout just what a "violator" is), but I find the explanations are really worthwhile, making the bridge when necessary from print to web design principles. You do need some modicum to substantial amount of CSS knowledge. The one thing I am completely mystified is the use of Flash to create the front cover and the logo on every page. It does no animation or interactivity, and I can only guess the author wanted to protect the look, as it ought to be easy enough to render what is there in CSS. Tip of the blog hat to elarningpost. CDB readers may know of the struggles written here to solicit Maricopa people to share their instructional materials and teaching ideas in our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) which is at almost 1100 items. Our efforts have included bribery and competition, but have yet to embrace physical threats. If I had a buck for every time someone told me "I am going to take some time next month to get you some MLX items" I'd be retired on my own private island. Out of those 1100, probably 200 are there as direct result of online reports to other electronic systems, maybe 60 are things we have entered in other people's names so we could populate web sites with content (see how the winners of the Innovation of the Year program are pumped from the MLX to its own site). The same goes for an ePortfolio platform, developed at one of our colleges, that we have had running for more than a year. The take up for a free system has been, well sluggish, with 45 published titles sitting there (counting one of mine and one by some guy named "Biff") So let's here it for surprises from unexpected places. A few days ago I got an email: John Arle suggested I contact you. I am an adjunct at Phoenix College and my MGT276/Human Resources course will be fully online this coming Fall. I am interested in building a package for the MLX warehouse. John has indicated that this has many purposes including helping me market the course as it will be searchable on Google. If you don't mind, could you reply when you get the chance and let me know what I need to do in order to get this process started? And if I need any approvals from my dept chair I can get that going as well. I'm sure she'll be supportive. One last question. I also found something called Maricopa ePortfolio, which appears to be separate from MLX. Is that true? What are the differences, do you know? Should I build both? I responded with some URLs for our getting started materials in both the MLX and the Maricopa eP, and let her know it was all self service. In less than 2 days, she had already produced a nicely formed eportfolio for her class materials, and then she listed this as an item in the MLX: I just wanted to let you know that I set up both my ePortfolio and MLX sites and to compliment you and your team. These sites are very user friendly! I couldn't believe how easy it was to set these up. And I'm very pleased with the results. Just wanted to say "thanks" and "kudos" to you. If you have any feedback on what I've done, please feel free. I've pasted my links below. http://eport.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/published/j/is/jiskiyan/home/1/ http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/mine.php?id=585 I just have to say wow. An adjunct faculty has done more in 2 days than... well a lot of other, full time, experienced faculty. Wow, and thank you Jill for restoring some of my faith. In the November 2008 issue of Wired (which I am reading in old fashioned analog form, reading it on a plane flight), Paul Boutin suggests the blog is dead. 404. Deep Freeze. Passe. SO 2004. Not only Tired, but Long Expired. Kill Your Blog. Still posting like 2004? Well knock it off. There are chirpier ways to get your word out. Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug. Writing a weblog today isn't the brightest idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self experssionism and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns drown out the authentic voices. of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter. Grrrrrrrr. Bleccch. What dog turds I smell there. I have strong guttural reaction to this incredibly glib, shallow analysis of a complex environment, of something which even an author in a glossy magazine cannot claim to have seen enough of to make such a sweeping statement. But it speaks more to a reason why we should blog more, and spend more time to write meaningful content, that does more that sprays 140 characters, that persists more than a quick Scoble tweet crack high. This is a call to bloggers to announce, "I'm not dead yet! In fact, I feel pretty good! I might take a long reflective walk..." Boutin goes on to describe how few individual bloggers are in the Technorati Top 100 or how most top Google searches are rarely now from individual blogs. The crucial mistake here is in the broad assumption that it is every blogger's goal to be at the top of some list. It is surprising in a magazine edited by the author of the Long Tail, that a column would suggest the only focus of the blogosphere is to try to get to the small head. When blogging was young, enthusiasm rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic... The odds of your clever entry appearing high on that list? Basically zero. The odds of that being my goal? Extremely low. That is about the narrowest view of the web I have seen. And it also suggests that the personal blog is the only form of expression; essentially missing the revolution that has happened in web design for small and media firms, where blog software is being used to power all kinds fo web sites, not just celebrity stalking or political ramps. I am still remembering a dazed feeling at the August 2008 WordCamp that there were about 400 people there who were all engaged in somehow using a blog platform to generate the online presence from everything to companies to needle work societies. I met numerous "web designers" who were really WordPress users. Or how an increasing number of educational organizations are exploiting the platform for an explosion of expression, creativity, sharing, discourse-- that lasts. But that strays the point. It's only a small number of people needing some sort of ego fulfilment, the quick drug users high, of getting noticed. People blog because they have something to express, not because they expect millions of viewers (well 10 would be nice for many of us). Another factor is that my blog is my blog. I maintain all the content; although it is hosted somewhere else, I have all my media, database backups, templates, I am my archive, It is my hub. It is me. These starry eyed twitter stars have no chance of permanence, tweets are not archived for their entire history, Facebook Haz Ur Stuff Not Urs-- if your online existence is scattered in the social software space, you don't necessarily have your stuff. it is subject to fickle economics, buyout, etc. But there is something that is stronger than, that; I am truly the Master of My Own Domain Name. Now do not get me wrong; I am massively 'out there" on my flickr activities and do enjoy and get a lot out of the twitterspace... but I cannot fathom how it can really be the future vehicle for creative expression, meaningful dialogue that will stand up for some length of time. Brian recently wrote about the demise of old media, the layoffs of newspapers, the move from print to digital, He went on to lament the loss of thoughtful expression, research and writing as papers go digital. I first had a reaction to that as the medium itself should not dictate that any of that can change. It's more about the institutions that might be able to carry such traditions, and I thiok Brian's concern was that as these organizations need to find ways to thrive, compete in the new spaces, that the old traditions may go out the window. To me, this is where large groups of individuals can make a difference. For every Jason Calacanis giving up his A-list blog for the quick-verse (as cited by Boutin), there has to be hundreds, thousands of small timer folks like you and me who don't care how high our technorati rating is, who don't write looking in the mirror to admire their reflection, but write to reflect on their being, their soul, things deeper and more important than stroking their ego, who care more about the concepts of slow blogging, of long deep thoughts by people like Barbara Ganley, Chris Lott, Clay Burell (whose A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist is on eof the most moving multipage blog posts I have ever read). This IS happening, and just because Scoble doesn't see it or it is not in some Gawker headline, does not mean it does not exist, does not impact. I am tired of this portrayal of the head of the long tail as being the only thing that matters. That issi bullshit. We don't have to give in completely to the new short form. We can carry on the traditions of the fading media business. And because we are not spitting them out in snack sized snippets, because we maintain our own content in its original form, blogging is more alive than ever. Go out there, shut the lid, and write something out on paper. Compose a post, a story, a deep reflection. Save it as a draft. Re-read, and re-write, Dig deeper for your links than the first Google hit. Write for yourself, read others, comment others, write more. You will have your own record rather than a string of flip bird chirp comments. I relish my blog posts form 4 years ago; I really have no affection for a tweet I made last week. Despite rumors to the contrary, in my blog, blogging ain't dead yet. In fact, I feel pretty good.... We spotted a new Learning Objects White Paper posted in Macromedia's Learning Object Development Center. Written by New Media Consortium CEO Larry Johnson: Elusive Vision: Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy,’ÄÝexplores the drivers, enablers and mediators in the’ÄÝlearning object economy.’ÄÝ Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium,’ÄÝdescribes and analyzes a’ÄÝsummit of international learning objects experts.’ÄÝ I still need some time to digest the paper, [800k PDF ], includes the output of a group of LO heavyweights (Hodgins, Carey, Masie... where are Wiley and Downes? likely duking it out ;-) who gathered in San Francisco in September 2002. (more…) My self-imposed sentence of hard labor is not over. The next phase of our backyard landscaping project involved a delivery of 20 tons of 3/8 inch minus coral granite on our driveway. This is everything that passes through the finest sieve at the rock quarry (folks in the know just call it "minus"), so it is pretty much sand. Landscaping in arid Arizona should not involve grass (though many people try to replicate Midwest/ East Coast greens here). In the 7 years we have owned our house, we have had two deliveries of crushed granite and one of rounded "river rock" gravel that has been moved by wheel barrow front and back. Where has it gone? This latest effort is meant to provide a more level look to the back-- because of poor drainage we could not extend much of our cement deck, so we needed a more porous surface. So since the big pink pile was dumped Tuesday, my wife and I have spent 2 hours the last 2 nights shoveling and hauling sand. Our neighbor across the street mentioned something about "why break your backs? Just hire some guys at $10 an hour to haul it." The remark has stuck with me-- it's not that we cannot afford to hire help, but we have this silly pride in doing work ourselves. Is that like some old Puritan work ethic? We enjoy the physical exertion, especially after a full day of desk jobs. This has no direct relevance to anything blogged here, but then again, there is something to the "do it hands on" approach rather than taking the easy way out and just paying someone to do the work, be it tons of sand or technology. Or not.... ask my back in a few days. Are there really neat lines of cause/effect action in the possibility place the internet, 2021 warts and all, still provides? My best experiences there are ones that could never be anticipated. The antidote to artificial intelligence and algorithmic forces are the human especially the quirky ones, that cannot be GANned or blockchained or predicted. An evening tweet leads me to a blog post that flicks on that idea light, and an hour of late night coding yields: It starts with the tweet: https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/1376376572215693314 that leads to reading the post https://blog.flickr.net/en/2021/03/23/george-oates-returns-to-revitalize-the-flickr-commons/ Which leads me to be trying out an idea... https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1376421248335441921 As it turns out, because of the beauty of the flickr api method to search for photos, one has many ways to modify what is returned, including a parameter in_commons to return only photos from the Flickr Commons. Getting this to work meant adding one more advanced checkbox option to limit results: The results are wonderfully unpredictable. Give it a try! And it also works in "Heather" mode (named for the teacher who suggested the idea) where you can create a pechaflickr run where you see the images, but must guess the tag. Are you up to that challenge? This was the first update to pechaflickr I've made since 2017, yet, it still works. This is the best of the web that a provider of a web service gives enough hand holds that I can make it do something it was not built for. And this is a mashup of a mashup- the whole idea of pechaflickr matches pechakucha with powerpoint karaoke mixed in with flickr and now mashed up with the flickr commons. The code itself is a duct tape special mashup using the phpFlickr library to get stuff from flickr and the Vegas Javascript code to run the slideshow. Pechaflickr works well too in any video conference environment where you can share a screen. I have done it for years in Google Hangouts (RIP) and it does fine in Zoom too. I do ask folks to share via a friendly form any way they use pechaflickr, got a nice set of messages today via twitter. https://twitter.com/ProfTucker/status/1376571911560331267 https://twitter.com/ProfTucker/status/1376572438205501440 Just a bit of experience. If you share something openly on the web, it's likely more folks will benefit than you might ever know. To me, that is a positive result. It means your stuff is more useful than you might guess/know. I just am excited that pechaflickr still can do it's stuff some ten years after I hatched the idea. Featured Image: A mashup of my own logo (just helvetica font colored text) with Watermelon eating contest - Leesburg" flickr photo by State Library and Archives of Florida https://flickr.com/photos/floridamemory/19481804090 shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons). How can you resist a clown photo? The party from the January RSS Winterfest seems to be lingering on- but I am not festive. I get daily emails notifying me of changes on their site, which I am not following nor interested in. Four freakin' times I used the link on their messages to set up email notifications to "never" . But "never" must mean something different to the folks from Social Text since the emails just a keep a' comin' in. Like clokcwork. Like a steady drip. Or water torture. I wrote yesterday a polite request to stop to their support email address. It was acknowledged quickly and promised that I would not get any more emails. There must have been a disclaimer in very small white text as today.... From: notify-noreply@socialtext.com Subject: Recent Changes In RSS Winterfest Workspace Date: April 14, 2004 12:57:55 AM MST To: xxxxxx.xxxxxxx@xxxxxl.maricopa.edu Alan Levine, The following pages in RSS Winterfest have recently changed: Great RSS Tools Hey http://www.socialtext.net/rss-winterfest/index.cgi?great_rss_tools_hey (by user7204 on 2004-04-12 22:53:42 GMT) Great RSS Tools http://www.socialtext.net/rss-winterfest/index.cgi?great_rss_tools (by user7204 on 2004-04-12 22:55:54 GMT) RSS and Weblogs in Public Relations http://www.socialtext.net/rss-winterfest/index.cgi?rss_and_weblogs_in_public_relations (by user7201 on 2004-04-14 07:57:41 GMT) -- To stop receiving or change how often you receive emails about changes to RSS Winterfest, go to: http://www.socialtext.net/rss-winterfest/index.cgi?action=preferences_settings&preferences_class_id=email_notify It just refuses to stop..... I wish I was saying this about the enthusiasm for RSS, but no. This is really pissing me off, and the kinds of non service that drives me to drooling fits of rage. They are in this dog's dog house. So here it is for the folks at Social Text, a free ticket for a ride on a train. Get it? Limited editions of this holistic and cleanly book are available! This is for a brand new ds106 Design Assignment: Weird Book Room: The Abebooks Weird Book Room lists a collection of titles so farcical you would think they are made up, but they are not. "Grandma's Dead: Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals", "Beyond Leaf Raking ", and "Goats: Homeopathic Remedies" are all actual book titles -- "finest source of everything that's bizarre, odd and downright weird in books." Your assignment is to design the cover of a book title so weird that it will look like it will fit right in to the Weird Book Room. Be sure to include a little bit of jacket blurb for your blog post where you include your designed book cover. Go weird! This all started with the tweet: https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/222938332945063936 And I could not help my curiosity to scan the titles at the Abebooks Weird Book Room Each of them might be a story unto itself, but I could not help but be happy, Neil. So happy to make this into a ds106 assignment and develop my own book title. So the premise of Zen and Toilet Cleaning is that the rhythmic and circulations of every day bathroom cleaning are ones the resonate with the holy cycle of spiritual zonoids, as depicted in the A'Alahyak Temple. You can achieve a higher state of wah with a brush in your hand and your minds eye open. Learn these techniques in a simple but aproachable style as writtemn by the author, a leading Flush Master What book will you put on the shelf? cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by SpreadTheMagic C'mon folks, I have been politely asking, nudging, nagging, and frankly, INTERNET YOU ARE LETTING ME DOWN on participating in my StoryBox Project. The imperial gloves are coming off, cause the excuses are poop. I'm out here on the road, going town to town with my open PirateBox, setting up easy ways for you to add even if you do not cross paths with me ( as easy as emailing me an attachment). Are you all to busy filling in your Google+ circles? I need your help. I will repeat my plea. I... NEED... YOUR.... HELP! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGsVvL8LWT8 To be fair, a number of folks (a small number) (a less than digits on two paws number) have stepped up to the plate, and to them, I express my gratitude and vow they will be spared the next rounds of TNT. To date, what I have collected so far includes: audio recordings: 7 documents: 4 drawings: 6 graphics: 3 music: 9 photos: 40 videos: 12 This is an okay start, but its been 2 weeks now, and I want more, a whole lot more. You know what you are doing to me? see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz! Yeah, it is so bad, I am lowering myself to lolcats. This is not a good sign. Before I start naming names, I am going to give the open window a bit more time- all of the info on the project and how to participate are at http://cogdogblog.com/storybox. For some of you, I am coming in person, and am going to knock on your door, turn you upside down, and shake the stories out of you. Others can expect some direct email harassment and twitter shaming. Don't be tweeting about the project and not tossing me some files. The gloves are more than off, they are flushed down the toilet. Please note that this message is 100% tongue in check, I am just doing the regular drum beat in an effort to attract attention. Please note that the disclaimer above was inserted without my knowledge. There are no tongues in no cheeks; this is going to just keep escalating until I get a full StoryBox. I want you.... This blog post title likely makes no sense. I must have typed it in and backspaced it out eight times. Maybe nine. And if I can pull together what feels like disparate strands of ideas, that too would be an accomplishment. More likely a good breeze will send it flittering. Would you like more rambling pre-ambling? Strand One: Who is "Ed Tech"? One strand starts by pulling a thread from the academy of critical writing of Audrey Watters. That thread being the history of educational technology, aka. ed-tech is wrong, biased (or worse), a debacle, ignored by Silicon Valley eduprenuers, and most recently, a fabricated imaginary. Ed-tech is not without intent, never neutral, and itself infused with stories behind the glitz of apps: How do the stories we tell about the history and the future of education (and education technology) shape our beliefs about teaching and learning — the beliefs of educators, as well as those of the general public?http://hackeducation.com/2020/06/21/imaginary If you are looking for a "but" here you won't find it. Audrey's work is legend. And like many of the connections I've had in this work, we've not just passed in tweets and blog posts. Audrey showed up in 2012 at a SXSW session I did on my Storybox. I've been fortunate that two photos of her taken at smaller meetings were for a while her portrait photos. And once she and Kin gave me a personal tour of their then location in Hermosa Beach. A thing I appreciate about her writing and speaking is that her ideas are strongly expressed. https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/1275669894516834306 https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/1275904271536414721 So a story I wonder about is-- who is this "Ed Tech" (aka edtech, or is it ed-tech)? Is what I do "edtech"? I've never care for the labels, though I have had a job title of "instructional technologist" 1992-2006 at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The definitions you find for edtech might appear to be neutral, but once past Wikipedia, most are found on the sites of edtech companies or the money-making side of things. With no existence in literature before 1960, "educational technology" itself peaked in 1972. Google Ngram Viewer for "educational technology and "edtech" 1950-2008) Once might picture the bumps in "edtech" near 1970 with the era of mainframe computing and 1980 with the rise of microcomputers. But that inflection at 1990? Yep, the World Wide Web as it was known then, with a 1997 peak suggesting the Time When People First Saw The Web as a Way to Make a Buck. That's a story I am making. Having established I've Never Been an EdTech Guy, I might just have to share a badge. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1275924216269815808 And a thing about stories I relish are the many small ones that might recede in memory, when somehow the re-emerge as like a forgotten seed you dropped in the garden. In writing here about that title I had at Maricopa, I was rummaging through my flickr photos searching on "instructional technology" and found this. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14174490025 The Elegance of a Type Written Thank You Letter flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license This came after an online session I did with students in the NY6 Instructional Technology Apprenticeship Program (ITAP) newyork6.org/itap. One of the NY6 people who had invited me, Ted Fondak, typed a story-filled thank you letter on an old IBM Selectric I and mailed it to me. That's the kind of edtech I'm into. Fringe. Odd. Personal. Can't/Won't Make a Buck Off It. Strand Two: If EdTech History Does Not Appear in a Published Book, Does it Make a Sound? This strand involves someone else I've known for gobs of time, Martin Weller, who beyond the online interactions I've been fortunate to visit at his home, walked the dogs, saw his local castle and pub. Martin has a 25 Year thing going. His series of blog posts on 25 Years of Edtech grew into a book. And yup, he's doing the same with his current perspective on 25 Years at the Open University. Heck there might be 23 more books up his sleeve. I totally respect what he's doing and how. He does not claim to be the All Seeing Oracle of Edtech history, what he's sharing is his experience having been there. It's history and story and history and story. A few weeks ago I heard from Nate Angell in a Slack discussion that the OLCInnovate conference that happened last week included sessions with keynoters Maha Bali and Martin Weller where the activity as some semi-chronous Hypothes.is annotations of their writing. I was just a wee bit curious, so followed a link that had setup to annotate the intro to 25 Years of Ed Tech. I was early, there was but one annotation Nate had done as a starter. Those always seem like good opportunities to sneak in early. I am pretty sure I was the first outsider marking up the text. This sentence triggered one of my responses: Looking back 25 years starts in 1994, when the web was just about to garner mainstream attention.Introduction, 25 Years of Ed Tech by Martin Weller There's nothing to argue with. And while I did not know Martin at the time, I was there. While at Maricopa, in 1993 I first set up a web server for the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (see it circa 1996). And in early 1994 I did my first web "thing" that got seen more outside than from within, an HTML tutorial called Writing HTML. I agree it makes a sensible starting spot. But the thing it started me on thinking about. What enabled me, hired at Maricopa in 1992 with rather minimal experience as a "programmer analyst/instructional systems" to be encouraged to investigate, develop, share new technology like that early web, was a system and culture in place there. For a long time. Hence my annotation. The history misses a big chunk that was present at the place I started by edtech career (1992), maybe because it was at a community college. I entered on the tailing end of a long, rarely mention systemic approach to technology, going back to mainframe systems for automation and synchronizing in the mid 1980s, to starting faculty computer literacy projects in the late 1980s.An early project I did in that 1994 year was putting online a backward and forward looking collaborative report on the system's efforts, "It's a River, Not a Lake" - the original site gone but in the wayback and my own archives Description.There's a lot more history buried than in books. This was among a ew itches that needed to be scratched as a blog post. It's that no one person, or book, really houses all the history. I feel there's more missing than known, and much it in the kind of lived experiences Martin draws upon. And I know deeply there is a vast amount of edtech history at Maricopa that remains largely un-noticed. My part there was on the latter end of visionary leadership and a learning/teaching focused strategy. A future post (pending some nitpicky resurrecting of content from a set of wikis gone underground) will be about a desert plant metaphor. Revisiting the past can be just nostalgia, but there's more. It's not to see things were better than or that some previous group had things all figured out. It's that "the stories we tell about the history and the future of education (and education technology) shape our beliefs about teaching and learning." Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/31779966377 Let Me Tell You Kids a Few Stories.... flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I just took a quick spin through MSNBC's Spectra which is sort of like, no not really, like a visual news/feed reader. You pick news "channels" (chosen by MSNBC not you) they are color coded (by MSNBC not you), and the headlines spin by you in a cyclical spiral. I guess it might be hypnotizing. The description is a little bit full of grandeur and fluff: Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet. So the headlines swirl by in a colorful display. I keep clicking the little cards in the spiral, but that does nothing, I have to either wait til they spill out on the bottom, or grab a slider to move through them. The "human body interaction" is quite a stretch. You activate your web cam, and if you wave more move a colored object in front of the camera, you see those stories. So maybe if I want US headlines I have to remember to wear my pink t-shirt or have a green card handy to wave to get tech news. The most lacking feature... it does not seem to remember the channels you pick. So if I return tomorrow, I have to pick the channels all over again. I can save stories to my "aggregator" but they vanish when I close the window. What's the use? Okay, I have barely a cup of coffee in me and am critical. The visualization effort is interesting, but I fail to see a reason beyond news eye candy to use this. Next? The title is almost Kafka-esque, maybe? No? Well, I actually send a tea bag by old snail mail to someone I do not know, in Russia. This all started with a photo I posted to flickr, showing one of the last plain black tea bags I must have bought for my Mom's visit in maybe 2008 cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine To me, it is just one of those markers I like to remember visually. But I got a flickr mail message: I saw your photo with the teabag and wonder if it is possible to receive the teatag (tea label) from this serie to my collection by post. I have over 14 thousands of the tea labels but i'm sure i don't have the label from this brand in my collection yet and i've never seen it in Russia before. Thanks in advance! Wish U all the best! Marina And sure enough, Marina does have a web site with thousands of tags from tea bags (note, the site only seems to work in Firefox, I did let her know I could not view it in Chrome) I sent the last 2 tea bags I had; I hope Marina samples the tea, although I always thought Safeway plain black tea was nothing to knock your socks off with. I also included a notecard with one of my photos (it's the snow covered daffodil you can see in her photo above). Why does this matter? Maybe the act is small, but it's the connection, generated by open sharing, helping someone in a way not possible before the open web, whom I would have never crossed paths with-- this is the stuff we need to be caring about. The unexpected. The serendipity. Lose that, and the web, the world gets a whole lot less interesting. It's almost... well I should do my own dog food consumption task and make a video for True Stories of Open Sharing. Justin had a good question about organizing his content, wanting a way to easily show just the things he publishes for his Daily Create. This is a job for Categories (to be fair, it could be done jut the same with tags, there’s not a significant difference between them). I wanted to experiment with showing this via an audio screen cast, which demonstrates how to create categories, how to update existing posts to be included in new categories, how to use them on a new post, how to find the URL for you category page, and how to add a menu item to point to your category. FYI I made this on my iPad with Explain Everything, made screenshots, annotated them, recorded audio, and upload directly to YouTube. That was easy! Expired Passively sitting in the glow of an overhead projector watching a presenter read words from a yellowed transparency. Tired Passively sitting in the glow of an LCD projector watching a presenter read words from a PowerPoint word slide. Wired Actively twittering in the glow of a laptop listening to a presenter read words in a You Tube video. I kid you not. Watch the slides being read to you. "Here's the Web 2.0 Explosion! heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh" It's been a while since I've gotten riled up by blog comment spam roaches, especially true since SpamKarma is doing a real bang up job of stopping them before they get far into my WordPress site. But wow.'. check out Tom Coates' PlasticBag post On Cillit Bang and a new low for marketers..., a detailed narrative of tracking down a completely inappropriate comment posting by cleaning product spambloggers to a personal story of Tom's writing about his long lost father. I never had the stamina or drive or guts to get to the source as Tom has brilliantly done (eventually phoning the perpetrators, and daring them to respond/explain). But his words slice to the heart of my own emotion about "people" who exploit "web 2.0" - maybe it is the Read/Write/Spam Web? It is more than well worth reading... The fake weblogs that pretend to be real are almost bad enough - it's an attempt to muddy the reality of a community with the fantasy world that they need to flog cleaning products and make it seem glamourous or exciting. But someone out there - associated with one marketing group or another - is also keen to directly stick their dirty little hands in the cookie jars of well-meaning, honourable people. They're quite happy to pollute or destroy the value of the enterprise for everyone else if they can derive even the tiniest return from it. I'm going to give them the benfit of the doubt and say that this whole enterprise is based on clumsiness and stupidity rather than evil, but we have to make a stand and make it clear to these people that if you live by the sword you die by the sword. It's not good enough for just these marketing people to realise that they've screwed up and damaged the brands they were associated with - we have to keep making examples of them to stop other clumsy organisations viewing our self-created territories as nothing more than sales opportunities. Do not lie to us because we will expose you. Be honourable, or we will erase you. And all anyone will see when they search on Google for your products is that there is no depth to which you will not stoop to get another few bottles into someone's shopping basket. (emphasis added). Wow. Them's good strong words. And it also says do not be just a silent victim of this sort of action, point it out, publicize abusers, hang them out in the light for others to see. So if spamvertising is your business, take some time on what glorious stories you will tell your grandchildren about how you made the world a better place, or you contributed to some greater good, or even led an honorable life by sticking your spamroach tentacles into those innocent cookie jars. That is a puny life indeed. Modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by One Thousand Words A few weeks ago I got a redemption code from Apple for a free move rental from iTunes-- I chose to use it to watch Inception (I'm still resonating or reverberating with this movie, so this is not a review). It's that "rental" in the sense you have 30 days to watch it, and once you start, you have 24 hours to finish. Those are conditions I've not tried on before- mostly for movies I go to the little library in Pine, Arizona, where I get to hold the disks for like 3 weeks, and I can watch them whenever the heck I want. But this is the taste of the new future of movie watching, where you do not get discs, just the flickr form the cloud. While utterly conveniently, I am struck by the absence of what I crave in getting a DVD- all the Extras on the disc. I see these are going the way of VHS and 8-tracks. cc licensed flickr photo shared by NightRPStar You see, once I watch a movie, if it was not entirely a stinker, I look to see what else they have added to the disc. Saddest are the ones where all you get are "Scene Selections", "Trailers", or "Photo Albums". No I crave for the commentary track, where you can get the perspective on the movie preferably from a director or producer. I liked those in the series like The Wire or Six Feet Under, you got a variety of perspectives, sometimes writers, sometimes actors (Probably the worst was the bits by Arnold Schwarzenegger on Terminator 2, where all he did was gloat about his presence or how he lobbied to keep his action scene in- totally self serving). I will literally watch the movie again, just to get the "making of" or insight into the ideas behind the movie. I live for that. I dig the out-takes, the deleted scenes, the documentaries about set location, special effects, musical score development... I'd guess we get these on DVDs as an inducement to buy the package. Or the recognition that there is a lot of room on a normal disc to beef up the content. Or maybe it builds more buy-in to come back for more? So my worry is now once movie shifts to online distribution, wither go the Extras? Will it be something we have to pay extra for? Or will it fall by the way side? Or the other way to look at is that the "extras" a reno longer a movie studio carefully picks out and controls- maybe it is all the user commentary generated in distributed places, the videos people upload to YouTube, the mashups, the discussions in IMDb? Am I the only one worried about losing this stuff? cc licensed flickr photo shared by Horia Varlan When a discussion veers into debates of definitions of terms, my yawn reflex usually kicks into gear, so its with some trepidation (and concerns of comments lambasting my hypocrisy so I am claiming it now). Like many I get muddy whether I cam referring to something as "social media" versus "social networking", and usually lean on the former using the latter around media (flickr, youtube, slideshare, etc). I got a bit of clarity (but a third leg of the definition stool to deal with) from Ben Parr's recent Mashable column Facebook, Twitter and The Two Branches of Social Media (which sits under the banner of Mashable Social Media... sigh). He opens with the observation that most people easily see Facebook as a social network (it has to be, now that a movie has been made, eh?), where it gets more iffy with twitter, which is in many ways social networkish, but then again not: People have used the terms "social media" and "social network" almost interchangeably over the years. It's inaccurate to say that they're the same thing, though. In fact, I argue that social networking is a branch of social media, and can itself be further broken down into two distinct branches "” the social network and the information network. It's with this distinction that I attempt to explain the relationship between Facebook and Twitter, and why I believe they are not destined for a clash of the titans. Instead, they represent two different sides of the same coin. Parr observes that the basic practice in each are the same, "statusing" -stating what you are doing at the moment, but cites the significant different in that social connections in Facebook are totally reciprocal (if I am Jane's friend, then she is mine), where it can be hugely asymmetrical in twitter. He then references a really fascinating Korean research paper (slideshare below) that has some really interesting visualizations of the research they did, where they conclude that the information sharing on twitter has more affinity to news media than social networking. What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? View more presentations from Haewoon Kwak. Yet, I am not ready to latch on to adding Yet One More Definition to the mix, as Parr proposes an "Information Network" (don't all networks transmit information?) The concept of an information network is a more recent phenomenon. Information networks are about leveraging different networks to distribute and consume information. While they may utilize an array social media tools in order to find, curate or deliver content, they focus less on what's happening in your social graph and more on information you want. Twitter may be the best example of an information network, but YouTube (video), Flickr (photos) and Digg (news) are information networks as well. And now my definition barf reflex kicks in. " Information networks are about leveraging different networks to distribute and consume information" Isn't that just the more general definition of a network? I also got my fur raised a little during today's run, listening to an ITConversations podcast on Geostreams by Twitter's "Director of Geo" Othman Laraki. He was citing several of the well known events where the action of communication in Twitter has generated action on a quick or large scale- the word of the student jailed in Egypt, the coming together in Haiti for hurricane relief, reporting on California wild fires. Yet Laraki kept referring to a lot of this phenomena as "self-organizing" behavior, which did not seem exactly right. Or maybe it is. I consult WikiPedia: Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning. This globally coherent pattern appears from the local interaction of the elements that makes up the system, thus the organization is achieved in a way that is parallel (all the elements act at the same time) and distributed (no element is a coordinator). So people all tweeting news of an event, a disaster, is of course not coordinated, and unplanned. And maybe a pattern is observed, but is it really organization-- does the pattern appear on its own? The article suggests a subtle difference with Emergence: In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. And now I am completely over mushed with definitions, and heave a collective yawn. I am sure some philosophical expert will weight in with something profound (please do). I find the definitions less interesting than the results or the ideas such actions spawn. So there is is, I pawed around a bit with definitions, and now am going for a nap. cc licensed flickr photo shared by betta design cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by saamiblog For this week's change11 it is becoming much more clear with Dave's posting of the presentation he did for Alec Corous's class. The idea of the noble nomad, alone, surviving, self directed... becomes romanticized (maybe not standing in front of a tent with a reindeer dressed like an elf). I am hearing Dave and he is not urging us to be nomads but having nomadic tendencies or traits. It reminds me a bit of how when we do those Myers-briggs test, it is easy to say I am an Introvert (I was always high on the I). It helped greatly in the 1990s when our office had done this and the facilitator describing these as moving targets and just what our natural tendency is- so as someone who feels a more confortable energy state as an introvert. This does not preclude me from being extroverted, and in fact, I do it frequently. It is not a binding state. And thus I am finding my way to a similar state to think about taking a Nomadic approach to work/life, and it has nothing to do with walking alone across the desert. To me it mostly means seizing the day, taking the initiative, the D part of DIYing it. Not waiting for the system to give, but reaching in, making paths. It runs counter to most every structure of traditional education which is usually provided to learners hence transmission. And now I get Dave's model of rhizomaticism: And now I see- Dave is saying "You need to create an ecology, a garden, around these things. You need to create restrictions - broad restrictions for where you want this plant to go." I'm catching up with you, Obi Wan Dave. Where do we find the ways of making those broad structures that allow rhizomes to do their thing inside a garden that has such porous walls. As long as roots are not severed, all is well, and all will eb well... in the garden. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcPQ9gww_qc I use the term "people" rather loosely: What is scarier is that somewhere out there is someone who would actually reply. Ahhh, the smell of spam frying in the junk mail folder. Sizzzzzzle..... I'm just emerging out of the internet hole. Stand back, this is Yet Another Post Laden With Nostalgia and a rally for self documentation. Feel free to go back to stroking through social media. It started with a silly tweet. Meaningless. Just word play. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/804013980582748160 Good friends like Dave Cormier and George Siemens pounced right in. Just like old times. Bit ti was Ronald who opened the door to the internet hole (unintentionally, of course) https://twitter.com/ronald_2008/status/804023345616457728 The neurons in my head, fired up by association, jumped to maybe one of my favorite moments in a favorite (old) Star Trek Episode ("I, Mudd"). The crew of the Enterprise, and the buffoon Harry Mudd have to outsmart a planet of robots who have trapped them (how prescient). They destriy the robots with a stream of illogic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlMegqgGORY After tweeting it back to Ronald, the neurons kept lighting up, back to 2005 when I did a keynote for the TCC Online Conference... and I managed to use Harcourt Fenton Mudd as my metaphor. The title was “Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future”. Thus I started digging through my archives, old blogs, my web history of my years at the Maricopa Community College stored on a 40Gb Firewire drive, the Wayback Machine. The conference was run by Jonathan Finkelstein and crew at Learning Times, done likely n the original Elluminate platform. That archive is long gone. But I did blog it, April 21, 2005. On my blog. That URL won't break, as long as I am breathing. What I found on my hard drive was: A directory of the slide images (I just put them up as a flickr album) An mp3 audio file that I recorded from one of those early mp3 recorders (I think it was an iRiver device) I was rather surprised to find a rather detailed storyboard for my talk (PDF). I have not been that organized... for 11 years. I also had an email from conference organizer Bert Kimura (who is still running the same conference, check it out in April 2017), where he edited my description: "Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future" ~ Where it (or IT) is for Educators ~ Predictions of the future are easily analyzed in hindsight and ought to be skeptically questioned -- you will have to tune into this session to see the connection with an old Star Trek episode. However, author William Gibson's insightful quote, "The future is here. It is just not widely distributed yet" is the framework I use to peek at the future. For the use of technology in teaching and learning, where is this "not widely distributed future?" I am not sure, but in this session, we will take some guesses at places you may find the future. The present form of the web was visible, but not widely distributed in 1992. Is there something of this scale already here? Will text messaging displace email as a communication mode? We will look at the drivers of consumer used technologies that become disruptive? For example, digital cameras have taken the lead in the consumer photo market and MP3 players are re-shaping the music industry. And how about those multitude of technology gadget web sites? Are small pieces of "loosely" joined technologies (often open source) displacing large comprehensive commercial tools? The future is here and it (or IT) is not. Explore hands-on some of the interesting "social" and connection technologies such as "tags", RSS, wikis, podcasts, and perhaps whatever else pops up between now and the conference. Harry Mudd was just the prop, the framework I used for the topics was the "Wired, Tired, Expired" thing that Wired magazine did (maybe they still do, its been years since I read an issue). I would have an example for a future-important technology, starting with the old ("expired"), the waning ("tired"), and a blank for "wired"-- so I could ask the audience for guesses. Here's a few, take some guesses? [caption id="attachment_63642" align="aligncenter" width="600"] What is wired?[/caption] I have to say, 11 years later, that I was darn clever. So this afternoon I said to myself, "Self... I bet you could pop open iMovie and sync those slides to the audio in a snap" Watch that "Self" dude. It took maybe two hours. I made it worse because there were spots in the talk where I did live demos of flickr (it was only a year old but I was crazy abut it) and Google Maps (also relatively new), so I did some quick photoshop work to reconstruct old screens. But now... Harry Mudd lives! The whole talk, lovingly assembled from my own archival bits and bobs. https://vimeo.com/193827280 The audio quality is a bit topped out, and oh, do I say "um" alot. But it was fun trip. The answer to "LP" -- "CD" is... iPod, fist generation. And I include an example from this "professor" I heard about from Penn State named Cole Camplese who was doing student assessments on an iPod. And who did I learn about this guy from? Someone from SUNY named Michael Feldstein. [caption id="attachment_63646" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Podcasts will be HUGE![/caption] I'm pretty excited about RSS and wikis, and I give credit for being informed to "this guy in Canada named Stephen Downes". How were my guesses into the future? Totally near hot and mostly miss. I talked about the iPod device, speculated about a video one, but never got close to mobile phones. I mentioned Skype for audio calls across the internet, but never mentioned video (despite the fact I had played with this thing called CU-See-Me). I was favorable of RSS Readers, which made me on target for maybe 8 years. Bloglines! I saw the "wired" thing after learning management systems as the wiki. Hah. [caption id="attachment_63647" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Loving my feeds in NetNewsWire, and a credit to Will Richardson[/caption] And I see a lot of image attribution, good dog. But it's not about being right, its about what you can fathom and share at the time. I'm pretty proud of my thinking 11 years ago, and smiled at some promising technologies that are now dim memories (Ourmedia?) Watch out for the Harry Mudd (aka me). Everything he says is a lie. A faculty colleague from one of our colleges emailed recently from an institute up in the northwest, asking for recommendations he could share on online professional development opportunities for faculty. I have somewhat limited experience myself with the TCC Online conferences and some ones from the Australian Flexible Learning programs I did a few clicks back. I dredged through some of my bag of links collection for people who do great wok in this area like Tom March. The Computers in Writing Online Conference hosted at Kairosnews blipped across my readers a lot lately. And with a bit of Googling and I dredged up another dozen or so. But I thought, what a tedious manual process. This is the place for social software. Maybe it could be a big meme, or even a medium sized one. So I went and delicious-ed them all using my custom tag of edpdonline, which is now available at http://del.icio.us/tag/edpdonline. So this is where the social part comes in. I am sure there are many more that ought to be on this list. I you have attended a recent online conference or training for teachers that you would recommend to a friend, how about loading it into del.icio.us and tagging with my keyword? I've also tossed into a WordPress Page on this blog using Feed2JS to display the latest bunch. C'mon and join my meme. I've never had one that did more than crawl or tremor. But it makes sense as this is the sort of collective intelligence (borrowed from that recent presentation by Henry Jenkins, I like the phrase) that ought to be done in social spaces, rather than hundreds of time by individuals upon request. Okay, none of y'all are dog enough to step up to the digital a story a day in may task, but this dog is going for the full ride. There is so much to choose from in the ds106 assignments submitted by participants, and if that is not enough, there is some place with like 30 or 40 tools you can use. For today, while sitting on a train from Vermont to the Largish Apple, I sat admiring the wet landscape, and decided to return to one of the most creative assignments (and made by a UMW student)- making a story from the titles of songs in an audio playlist. I had done this before, so I upped it a bit by pulling small bits from each song to go along with the flow. Being here on the road, and thinking about the longer trip ahead this summer, here is Stay/Go/Road Stay/Go/Road Playlist Story I just can't stop the SPLOT, which has been into my blog veins since late 2014. Speaking of late November, that was when I got a kind email from Daniel Villar Onrubia asking to guest author an article on online infrastructures for open education for the EDUTEC Journal he is co-editing. As he has been familiar with my quote unquote work Daniel did suggest a few topics like Domain of One's Own, the Networked Narratives course, and yes SPLOTs. These are things I collaborated with or talked about with Daniel when he was at Coventry University's Disruptive Media Learning Lab. I have blabbed more than enough on SPLOTs and let the idea simmer for a while... and the pilot light went out. But after seeing some more of the innovative ways Jessica Motherwell MacFarlane has been recently using TRU Collector at the OpenETC the light flickered on as I got thinking that there was a bit of a story in looking at that one SPLOT, TRU Collector. Because it really started out rather simple in early 2015 as a way to collect sample found images from an open license workshop to having much more going for it in 2023. I believe there is something key about what was really a practical choice in the beginning to build SPLOTs as themes built on WordPress- I did not have to design a full application, and the improvements and advances in the WordPress core (put aside your feelings about the Block Editor, okay, please?) means my SPLOTs have been able to keep running. More than that, though, it means that while not required to use the SPLOT, if a site creator has some understanding of the ways WordPress manages information (pages/vs posts, the dual taxonomies, adding functionality with plugins, even changing the default chronological post front door... well you can bend this SPLOT tool even more to your whims. I was not thinking as much about the technical stuff (though I have a hard time avoiding), but how the ideas for the current version came not from me, but folks like Daniel (who suggested adding the rich text editor for longer writing, and the ways it can be used as a directory of a class or a conference attendees, his Coventry colleague Lauren Heywood who's idea evolved to be the way the Customize can be used to tailor the submission form to fit the audience it was being used for. And even more recently, Jessica's method of having students use a secret code as a tag for their work led to making it so certain views can be sorted differently than the default blog reverse chronology. You see all of these ideas that flowed into the version would never have been there if it was only left to me to dream up. But there was more, I went back to some stuff I read long ago about Eric von Hipple's concept of a User Innovation Toolkit (was that idea from Jon Udell?), more from the world of manufacturing: Toolkits for user innovation is an emerging alternative approach in which manufacturers actually abandon the attempt to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need-related aspects of product and service development to users. von Hippel, Eric; Katz, Ralph (July 2002). "Shifting Innovation to Users via Toolkits" And more nerves went firing to some things I recall Gardner Campbell framing Marshall McLuhan's medium/message idea by the idea of that something "just a tool" like a hammer really becomes something different when it is in the hands of a person, it is a new tool, a "Hammerhand": So no “just a tool,” since a HammerHand is something quite different from a hammer or a hand, or a hammer in a hand. It’s one of those small but powerful points that can make one see the designed built world, a world full of builders and designers (i.e., human beings), as something much less inert and “external” than it might otherwise appear. It can also make one feel slightly deranged, perhaps usefully so, when one proceeds through the quotidian details (so-called) of a life full of tasks and taskings. http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/doug-engelbart-transcontextualist/ So now I am more interested in the relationship of a tool/hammer like TRU Collector when it is in the hands of an educator. The best tools are not just a tool, and they are also not mega systems that browbeat our creativity into form box submission (hello LMS), and even worse when they are black box AI labeled things which we cannot even perceive their nature. And now I need help. If you have ever used the TRU Collector SPLOT for a class, a project, an organization, or even just to build something for yourself, I am trying to collect examples of them to (a) show the wide variety of creative uses it has but also (b) to pry open what this interplay with tool and educator hand means for our inventiveness. For maybe a post Prompt in the Box era. Would I go an email a bunch of questions to some folks? Make a form? Set up interviews? And then I got one of those whacky ideas. I came up the idea of showing the affordances of this Simplest Possible Learning Online Tool by using TRU Collector itself as the collector of information... woah Neo! And thus, I built in maybe 2 hours... The TRU Collector Collector And yes, there is a SPLOT hammer on the front cover. https://splot.ca/collecting-collector/ I ask you to share any use(s) of TRU Collector.(sorry fans of TRU Writer, I love that SPLOT too, but I am focussing solely on Collector!) I set up the default detail entry with some questions as headers, but whatever you feel like writing is a help for me. And because TRU Collector asks for images, I suggested finding an image of a metaphor for what kind of tool TRU Collector is for you. Fun, eh? Can you help? Please? Check out my hastily made site and click the share button. Again, I thought I was back sliding to my old standby SPLOT love, but really some new ideas are bubbling. It is a deeper (maybe) look at what edtech tools ought to be, not what we are foisted upon. Thanks Anne-Marie Scott for making some suggestions and sharing this thought: Edtech is not a tool. Pedagogy and technology are not mutually exclusive; they are entangled and mutually shaping. This is a fancy way of saying learning and teaching can be bent out of shape by technology and we can bend technology out of shape for learning and teaching purposes. Anne-Marie Scott https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/procurement-aka-the-crack-in-everything-that-lets-the-bullshit-in/ Entangled up in SPLOT (is there a Dylan remix happening in the background?) Again, please SPLOT with me! Got a hammer or a hammerhand? Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/12168288534 Alike / Not Alike / Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Kim'n'Cris Knight The Headless ds106 Experiment is mostly over, in the never really over way of ds106. I had a great time, we saw a nice wave of new energetic folks come into the fold, and we ended with a big bang of a project that was not even in the plans. You will most likely never read about this in the New York Times, Slate, Fast Company, The Chronicle of Higher Education, not even the Weekly World News. That's fine by me. This post has sprawled far past the reasonable bit size attention span length everyone seem so acknowledge. I planned to close with this, but for TLDR or whatever it is-- Massive online learning in numbers does not interest me at all; what does is massive amounts of creative effort by perhaps a small core of participants and a lovely long tail of activity by a larger number. To recap the original idea... Since January 2011 ds106 has been taught at University of Mary Washington (UMW) and other institutions as a course for credit but also has at the same time been open to participants from the web (learn more about ds106). However, for someone new to ds106 as an open participant, it has not been very clear what they can do (we've made some suggestions as a starting point). Because UMW is not offering a formal course for Fall 2013, I had a thought"“ what if we set up a syllabus based on the previous iterations of class, set the weekly assignments as scheduled posts, and invited people to participate in it as a course w/o a teacher? It was not simply copy old posts and republish... I greatly underestimated what it would take to remove the parts of previous UMW classes that was specific to them, take out wording that says "required". About halfway in I started trying to add a weekly video, arttcle link, etc as an "inspiration"... sometimes toed to the topic, sometimes just more general. So we have a complete syllabus of the experience. More on a plan for this later. (more…) It's after 11:00PM, hours after co-leading a 6+ hour pre-conference workshop at the 2016 DML Conference, and my adrenaline is still pumping. And feeling a bit daunted in how to summarize this, an off the cuff tweet sort of says it: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/783863754844884992 Or maybe the GIF that you cannot see in the featured image at the top of the post? Hmm, I made about 8 GIFs for this workshop, and they all weigh in around 3-4 MB. You want that GIF, I got it here. Sometime back in March of this year (?) Justin Reich emailed and asked if I was interested in doing a workshop together at the conference. His idea was to pick up on the ideas that ran through the 2014 DML Open course on Connected Courses with a hands on approach to doing it. Heck yeah! This blog post will ramble on a while, but you can just peel off here and see what we did. It's all there, you can do all the stuff we tried in today's workshop. For no real pedagogical reason, and having come off planning to run a DS106 class with a Western theme that did not register enough students where I thought I was going to teach it, my mind was still on Westerns. And for some reason the title of John Ford's movie How The West Was Won jumped into my brain as "how web is won". And The next thing I was doing was mashing up the original movie poster to this: It's in fun but it's also how I think the ideal kind of connected course should work- just like the way the internet works, a distributed network of connections, a place that no entity owns outright, and where individuals create and own their small nodes within. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] It dawned on my last week when I was madly stitching this together, that we were actually modeling the design of the open courses I have been part of, aka ds106. What most "big MOOCs" try to do is give the same course experience to all participants, all 900,000 of them. The way DS106 works often is that there is a class somewhere of registered, tuition paying students who take the course. We offer as an option for anyone else openly to participate, give access to the syllabus and assignments. Then we see usually some exciting overlap an boundary loosening. But we are not giving open participants the same experience as those who registered and payed. We give the content but the content is not the course. Those students, our our students today not only get Justin and I in the room, but each other. There is interaction, body language, conversations that I suggest have value. And they get the added benefit of the input of those open participants. So in the same way, I offered everyone reading this post, or later seeing a tweet, access to the entire curriculum. You out there on the internet, can try and do everything we tried to do in the room today. It's harder to do alone, right? You should have come to DML and our workshop! But here is everything (including probably typos) -- http://connectedcourses.stateu.org. You might notice I built this site at StateU.org. Yes, this is dog fooding (Tim set it up so this account will not disappear in 30 days) (right Tim?). The main site itself is not even Wordpress, but one of the super useful HTML5up.net themes. Plus about 12 Wordpress installs. Plus maybe 9 GIFs. The key to how we would do this only came in the last few weeks. And it was a post by Tim Owens in the Reclaim Hosting Community about "prefab/template Wordpress installs" that unlocked it. As much as I love love Wordpress, a new blog owners first experience is this blank post screen inside a rather confusing array of the Wordpress Dashboard, and a plain boring site called "My Blog". With some awareness of what I knew Tim had done, there was some way to provide users a starting point, like a prebuilt Wordpress site that they could then jump in and tinker with. When I asked Tim, he said this was definitely doable in their "StateU" site. This is what we used in the workshop. The funny thing is today, people kept asking "Where is State U"? Will StateU keep my work alive? I mean, the site does look like a University: It's an insanely great idea Reclaim Hosting developed. And it's free, open to anyone to use-- they made it for running workshops to introduce people to the possibilities of a domain of their own. When you click that Get Started Button (you can do it right now), after authenticating with Google, Facebook, or a LinkedIn account, you then get to choose a subdomain of StateU (so technically you are getting a Subdomain of Your Own) like loneranger.stateu.org. But what you do get is a digital space you can play arounf with for 30 day. You can install not only a Wordpress site, but like 60 other kinds of things form various wikis to URL shorteners to Bulletin Boards to photo galleries to CMS's like Omeka, or heck even drupal. Or if you are a fan of Brian Lamb, you can slap up your own version Moodle. As it calls itself, it's a sandbox.... for 30 days. It's not a place to build your course site, but maybe to explore web apps you might want to use. But if you do build something amazing, Reclaim Hosting will help you migrate it to a regular account. For our workshop we did only... Wordpress. but with Tim's help, when you click the Wordpress icon to install it, in addition to a plain vanilla boring My Blog default Wordpress, you get these prebuilt versions of the tools I have been working on the last few years: All of these are things I have available as installable Wordpress Themes. If you want to run the SPLOT Writer tool I built at Thompson Rivers University, you can get the theme and a long set of instructions from https://github.com/cogdog/truwriter. You will have to install a Wordpress instance, then add two themes, then install a few plugins, then create a special user account, then configure the options for the tool. With the StateU you get all of that done for you with the Wordpress install. What I had to do on StateU was set up the fully functioning template sites, send the info to Tim Owens at Reclaim Hosting, and usually in a about 10 seconds, he added it to the list of options you see above. What I did for each "seed" site was to create 1-3 bits of sample content, and in one of them would be detailed instructions on what they would need to change on their own site. THEN I would use my own template, and create a demo site, with some amount of customization to show maybe what the first iterative step might be. What we offered was way more than we could cover in a workshop. I always believe in blasting people with possibilities and hope that come back to it. I apologized for that like 99 times today. But I do not see Workshops being limited to what you do in the room (like teaching), but having all of this online, my hope us to plant ideas that the participants, or anyone else, might explore more deeply later. Justin and I sent out a survey to our registered participant to find their interests and an idea what their experiences were with tech and teaching online. This was extremely helpful, because, as I found, most of what we did was really new and foreign to many of them. We had maybe a balance of 20% big ideas, why teach connected, exploring existing connected courses, connecting with twitter that was masterfully led by Justin. And we had a powerful yet diverse audience, not all higher ed folks. The flow for the hands on part was first getting people set up on StateU.org. As part of this, I had everyone put one of those vanilla plain Wordpress sites at the root of their subdomains. We did not do much with this, I wanted them to do a first install, and learn to navigate between State U and their installed sites (and let them know when they have a domain, they can install lots of Wordpresses and Moodles, nut just one). One lesson (of many) learned. I was confusing a lot of people because there is the dashboard of their Wordpress sites (for each site) but also the dashboard of StateU (technically a cpanel). How did we get around that? A lot of hands on repetition, they learned by working through it. Several times. Then we offered five things they could experiment with (we covered about 60%?). Each one includes a small bit if description of what the thing does, links to see where other people have put it to use, a link to a demo that I made using the same installer on StateU, and a bit of lengthly detail on how to use it. These are the prebuilt installs our participants had access to today, and you can as well if you explore StateU.org: Image Pool SPLOT "Build a place for your class to build and organize a shared collection of images, without logins. Y'all also get features to require source and attribution as well as submission via email." SPLOT Writer "Create a site for submission of media enabled writing-- for essays, creative writing, a journal, or other places to toss around written words. It sure looks pretty too." Course Hub "Build a course aggregation hub to corral all of the activity published in a distributed course network." (the Feed Wordpress powered hub) The Daily Blank "Wake up an make something every day! Automatically publish a small challenge every day where responses are submitted via twitter." A DS106 Assignment Bank "Barn raise a pile of assignments or challenges where responses are submitted and attached as examples; users can rate items as well as submit their own." Now it's after midnight, I've been trying to explain today, and it's feeling way short of the experience of the room. But go check out what we did today -- http://connectedcourses.stateu.org/. But maybe my favorite part was creating 8 animated GIFs from one 3 minute trailer from How the West Was Won (I did 5 just last night). Like... I so adore Maria Popova's Brain Pickings though she is so prolific, my reading is always lagging. But the weekly summary in my email, jaunted me to read The American Scholar: Emerson’s Superb Speech on the Life of the Mind, the Art of Creative Reading, and the Building Blocks of Genius. The reason being the influence of my 10th grade English teacher, Mrs Kershman. [caption id="attachment_47416" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Mrs Kershman, scan of 1981 Milestone, my high school yearbook. Anyone want to come after me for copyright violation?[/caption] What was it in her teaching style that woke up my curiosity? English was always a class I cruised through by just putting a lot of words down on paper. But that did not fly with Mrs K. She drove us hard to think critically about writing and reading. It was our reading of Emerson's Self-Reliance in Mrs Kershman's class that lit my fire to start to rail against the norms I saw of high school, my suburban experience, my mostly unformed life to that point. It was the gateway my 16 year old self did not even know it sought. An essay. By some guy who leaved 100 years before me. Who would have thought? That recent issue of Brain Pickings opens with "Long before our era’s foundational theories of how creativity works, Emerson argues that the fertile mind is one which connects the seemingly disconnected:" To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. Yes! We start with facts, and little bits of curiosities, our observations-- and later, maybe years, maybe decades, maybe days, we connect, tie together "discovering roots running under ground" -- was Emerson... a Rhizomatic? was he part of #rhizo1837? Also quoted was Emerson's disdain for "pseudo-intellectualism" Colleges.. can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. He would have no disdain for the modern educational system, eh? I noticed that there was a hyperlink in Brain Pickings for Emerson's Essays and Lectures (woah lectures, aren;t they like passé?) labeled "free download." Yep on Amazon, you can download this for the price of $0.00. On the Amazon page it says: This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Converted to digital by a community of volunteers. I'll assume there was some connectivity in that community. Why are these volunteers not acting as (I cringe at even pasting in this word, a word that will never leave my lips)... teacherpreneurs, the thing to do according to the New York Times? Thank you "community of volunteers" -- I looked around a little bit to see if I could find out who did this. Searching on that as a term gets you... a lot of non-relevant links. I will just call them CoV. So I have my downloaded copy of Emerson's essays to pour through again, maybe that joy of discovery form 10th grade can "kindle" (bad joke) a few flames? Maybe I should do some reading in a federated wiki (that was bait for you, Mike Caulfield, but it is the ideal thing to do read along notes). Only on page 2 of the forward, I am already highlighting like mad. Emerson's son described how his father put together his lectures: All through his life he kept a journal. This book, he said, was his 'Savings Bank.' The thoughts thus received and garnered in his journals were indexed, and a great many of them appeared in his published works. They were religiously set down just as they came, in no particular order except chronological, but later they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked into a lecture or discourse, and, after having in this capacity undergone repeated testing and rearranging, were finally carefully sifted and more rigidly pruned, and were printed as essays. Sounds like Ralph Waldo started this process with something like blogging or a commonplace book. Connecting the disconnected. That does not mean all disconnected are connected, but maybe the more disconnections you have the more potential there is for connection. Maybe. The last bit I note from the forward, Emerson died April 27, 1882, that would be exactly 81 years before I finally arrived. Much to late to catch an Emerson lecture, but primed just right to come across his book, for free due to the affordances of the grandest system for connecting the disconnected. Thanks again CoV. And RWE. Top / Featured Image Credit: flickr photo by Dennis Valente http://flickr.com/photos/dotnetsensei/11247054275 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license 91%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?Mingle2 - mingle Thanks to Rob (linktribution), I have exact data on the problem. My blogging here has been sporadic due to blogging directed elsewhere... After our week long conference held in Second Life (I hear you snickering out there)... I was blogged out having tried to blog the summaries of events over at the NMC Campus Observer, at least the 9 hours worth of a 12 hour schedule per day I was present. It was another 2 days of catch up, editing recorded audio, syncing a few slideshare sessions, pushing about 500 images to flickr... Yes, whether you nod with Forbes.com that everyone in Second Life is a loser or sweep broadly with brush strokes that it's "just cyber sex and gambling", we feel it is important to actually give this environment a good run before dismissing it so candidly. So we ran eight days of activities-- and in contrast to many conferences, 9 out of 10 sessions were active, with people participating in activities, making things- almost no mumbling over slideshows. Rather than just taking polarized stance on the value of voice chat (technology which just became final days before the event), we used it extensively, and found it to be a mixed bag of blessings and downsides- when it worked, it was valuable- it opened up communication channels, and in most sessions at most 1-2 people could not get it to at least a point where they could hear. At the same time, we realize it is not fair to assume everyone present has the ability to hear audio-- but it does not translate into abandoning voice communication. There was significant emergent behaviors, such as several times where people spontaneously started transcribing in chat if it became clear that an audience member could not hear the audio. There was a sense of "play" here at the same time we covered serious topics, and at every session I detected a level of energy far beyond what you get in those beige hotel session rooms, nestled in those tight rows. And when you hear feedback like: Lttle did I know when I took a week's vacation to attend I would be entering a new world that would put me in creative overdrive, make me stop and ponder my life's goals, and open my eyes to the possibilities of a whole new direction I would never have dreamed. I was already excited about SL and the possibilities.. I'm taking the red pill tonight, no problem! I say there is something there there. This feeds into a theme I have had the last few months, where I get a bit riled when I come across sweeping generalizations applied to rather complex diverse systems, mainyl web technologies, but more broadly, networked environments. How can anyone truly ascertain that X technology is universally Y? Who really has that kind if breadth of experience to survey something that is on a daily expansion growth? But I digressed from the start of this post... Blog addiction? Does it lead to harder stuff? Is there a program? I think i can stop.... and I will... for tonight... well, for the next hour.. maybe.... Pontification on the meteoric popularity of Flickr is a common past time-- and it makes all the sense in the world of network hubs, preferential attachment, link fitness, etc (see Thinking About Links...). Flickr was hardly the first photoblog site (I danced a bit with fotolog and buzznet before flickr even hit the seen) but flickr's design and myriad of uses have made it the Google of the bunch. Well earned. I was also thinking of some of the blog "memes" that have passed around, those ideas that spread virally across a social network (What's a neme?). Recent examples include: * Your personality in 25 links (A-Z): What web sites pop in your browser for each letter of the alphabet? * 40 questions about 2004 : personal reflections (who has time to answer all of those?) * My Not So Greatest Playlist : create a party shuffle (random mix) from your digital music collection. * Grab Book Page 23 Sentence 5 : greab the nearest book you are reading and share the 5th sentence from page 23. Is there a purpose to this? They are fun and perhaps revealing when put into a larger pool. Why are some bigger and more rampant? It has all to do with the amount of exposure they get on hubs, and perhaps how simple they are to join/add to. I was willing to cut and paste a 10 song list but less eager to write out responses to 40 questions. Which brings me back to flickr. It's free form tagging tied to visual, personal images make it the über center for creating memes that are easy to join. What are flickr memes? Just follow the tags. * Photos of road signs. * Photos of cemetaries. * The 2004 election meme. * Photos of Eclipses. * Storytelling. * Heck, even overweight cats have a meme! The number of memes here is mind boggling (if your mind is boggled by memes)- and it is so easy to pitch into a flickr meme. The immense number of internal flickr links as well as the valuable ways you can tie your web sites in and out of flickr are key at making it grow into one of those network hubs that are so critical to scale free networks. The last time I was home for a Presidential Election was 1996, when the other Clinton won. Oh I definitely voted in every election by mail-in ballot. Let's peel those elections off... [caption id="attachment_62328" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Oh another candidate for the 2000 President[/caption] In 2000, I was in the third leg of my 6 month sabbatical from the Maricopa Community Colleges, in Canberra Australia. According to my pre-blogging blog, on Tuesday of that week while the race of Bush vs Gore went down to the wire, was actually a quasi Australian holiday, another horse race the Melbourne Cup. The night before I had watched the hilarious movie The Dish with my host "Big" Allan. [caption id="attachment_62329" align="aligncenter" width="630"] In 2000, these Aussies trusted an American![/caption] That day at the office where I was visiting at the Canberra Institute of Technology, we had a party, and I was put to work to pick the slips for the office pool. [caption id="attachment_62330" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Celestial Show, you let me down[/caption] I put $5 on a 100:1 long shot... who ran exactly to the odds. Dead last. Like Gore. The 2004 Election took place in the middle of a 3 week visit to Auckland New Zealand, where I did a string of workshops for UNITEC and other schools. On the drives into the UNITEC campus with my host Richard, I remember being struck at how much the news on the Auckland radio was dominated by stories from America. I could not recall a time when New Zealand was front page news where I lived. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Public Domain Dedication Creative Commons ( CC0 ) license[/caption] A second Bush term went down just like that dirty old tennis shoe smelling "savoury yeast extract". For the next election I continued my stream of Out of the Country for Presidential Elections, it was the first week of my month long stay in Iceland, where I got to house site, take care of a dog, and count horses. And a few other things. But I do have a blog post confirming that I did vote. And while Obama made history, on the day of his election I was showing of my Wordpress sweatshirt, and ironically one of the photos most commonly used by catfishing scammers for their fake profiles. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I celebrated by enjoying the fruit my home town is named after, Jarðarber. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] And talk about synchronicity! According to my flickr caption, November 4 was the first birthday of Skinna, the Icelandic sheepdog I was looking after: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] She did not know what to make of my singing, but did appreciate getting extra amounts of her favorite treat- dried fish skin For the next Obama election I was in Vermont, and while technically not out of the country like the previous three Presidential elections, it is a place unique enough to feel just a bit out of America. I was about 9000 miles that year into round the country travel, including the five months I lived in Fredericksburg. That election week I was visiting Barbara Ganley, and it was there I decided to not head out to the Canadian Maritimes (which would have been like 900 miles from where I was, and instead headed home to hug a cactus. So it was a pivotal time for me at least. According to my flickr archive, on election day 2012 I was observing the polls in Ripton, Vermont: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] As you can see, Vermonters like Bryan Alexander take their voting seriously [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I could have dug in the way before the internet way back machine-- during the 1988 Presidential election I was in a remote area north of Bishop California doing field work for my Geology MS theses. Without a blog, and a smattering og photos, all I have is this false color photo of a little oasis I camped at called "Fish Slough": The day after the election I drove into Bishop to restock on food supplies, and the way I got the news was not twitter, or email, but by radio. Bush had demolished Dukakis, and I felt relieved to go back to the off the grid wonders of a place called "The Volcanic Tableland". Looking ahead, my November 6, 2016 photos will be right at home here in Jarðarber Strawberry, Arizona, hopefully watching that terrible apprentice get fired. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkVOz7r2pYU Top / Featured Image: Public domain image of the Bill Clinton / Bob Dole debate during the 1996 elections. The image is from Wikimedia Commons. I've barely had time to breathe much less update all of my WordPress powered sites, but noticed today one small feature I've been waiting for... I was actually, for no logical reason, setting up one more new WP powered web site for NMC, not quite ready for prime time. But what is cool is the plugins page now informs you when a plugin has a newer version available: Until now you would have to check each plug-in home page to check. Nice. Other goodies lurk under the hood- tags for posts built in -- and it looks like it will import tags from old plugins (like Bunny's technorati tags I have used a bit) and some other enhancements for dealing with blog post URLs. For CogDogBlog, the changeover is easy, as the Dreamhost one click upgrades make it a no brainer; my corral of NMC blogs will take the old manual approach, unless I can channel D'Arcy's suggestion of using Subversion. Beyond a few postcards, I was prepared to leave the quirky little Area 51 themed cafe in Nevada without any UFO or alien shlock. Then I glanced on the shelf and spotted a CD - Kenny Texeira's "Groom Lake" labeled as "The official Rock 'n Roll song about Area 51". I am quite sure the secret government agencies that house all the captured aliens do provide official sanctions on music. But I could not resist picking up a copy in honor of a blogging dude named Groom, though paying $7 for a CD with a single track on it is as much a monetary abduction as any. The musician is apparently a session dude from LA and not heavily invested in the paranormal. Let's hope he is not invested in legal takedowns of his music. [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/groom-lake.mp3"][/audio] Sing along with Kenny: Motion sensors buried in the sand Invisible lasers bordering the land A sonic boom from above Mushroom clouds forming from the dust. There's no excuses, but it's no surprise How the government can issue all those lies 45 years ago, the desert of New Mexico How long will the truth take, oh, in Groom Lake. ET highway is route 375 Paranormal visits lighting up the sky The Cammo dudes are out in force The Janet Jets will never change it's course. Emigrant Valley, had no idea A Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel would appear Aviation frequencies, Classified, you cannot see How long will the truth take. Groom Lake, They hold the keys to the future Why don't they understand Groom Lake, We must explore into the future It's time we had a say. Solid gold. Groom Lake is actually a dried lake, a salt flat in south central Nevada located south of US Highway 375- it is used as a runway for bombers at the Nellis Bombing Range Test Site. It is near the Groom Range Mountains, where gold and silver was discovered in the 1860s, named after the Groome Lead Mines Limited company that financed some of the mining operations. It's also the name of a movie starring William Shatner, among his "finest" work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTXPmSkyZ5Y This precious CD is soon to be mailed to a Groom in Fredericksburg, Virginia. How long will the truth take, the truth at Groom Lake? Top/Featured Image Credit: cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by cogdogblog: http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/16809783940 I spent 3 weeks in June 2012 in Vancouver (never a bad destination) in large part to learn from the great tech gurus at UBC. I was reminded of something I did during that experience that somehow never got blogged. It started with a fantastic, impromptu twitter exchange started today by Mike Caulfield TWEET DELETED! (Too bad Mike is a tweet-deleter. He said something really interesting here.) In that time I was very interested in the publishing model combination of MediaWiki and Wordpress, and more about the success of UBC Wiki as well, and had interviewed several key players there. But the secret weapon, and maybe something I had not seen many other places, was something Brian Lamb had been talking about for years (I have a blog post from 2004 referencing it) -- Will Engel -- a.k.a. The Wiki Gardener. Will has an information organizational mindset and tends, prunes, transplants the UBC wiki. he shared much about his role, perspective, and the workings of the UBC Wiki in a 38 minute audio interview I had recorded... but sadly never posted. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Here is is, better late than never blogged... I might have done some work with MediaWiki when I was at Maricopa, and then cut my teeth on it more in 2007 and 2008 when I set one up for the NMC Horizon Project work (they database seems disconnected; again the Internet Archive saves the day). Before I showed up at NMC, in 2006, they had used a hosted one at MIT, still there. MediaWiki is powerful, but such large beast to take on, and most installations use about 20% of its capability. I probably did not go much farther, but dug into extensions and even wrote my own for embedding RSS feeds (there are lots of options, the typical MediaWiki issue, lots of options). The biggest revelation was getting a grasp on transclusion, the ability to include one wiki page content in another (and another). This provides a means of a modular construction, because when the source is updated, all changes are propagated to other pages that include them. Some simple things I recall doing are navigation, footers, (getting fuzzy). I am now employing that same concept on my Wikispaces sites (that's another post). In 2012, I was working on projects at UMW, where we were using the Wiki Embed Plugin that allowed content from a mediawiki to be dynamically published to a wordpress site; same concept-- if the wiki changes, the wordpress content changes. We used it moderately in ds106; the wiki is actually more of a document source area where we would compose our syllabi and many of the tips that are part of the ds106 handbook. This was written up in The Little Wiki Engine That Could. The larger idea for documentation is that the same content could be put on multiple wordpress sites, so common tasks, like maybe creating Wordpress menus, could be written up in the wiki, but included in any course page that needed it. They use it on a larger scale on UMW Blogs. Anyhow, I learned much about the UBC strategy and architecture from this conversation with Will. Sorry it took so long to post! I might have a few more interviews lingering in the archives. Featured Image: Wiki Gardener flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Sigh, it used to be an every day thing to not only do a DS106 Daily Create but blog how it was done (e.g. backtrack to 2017 on Shatnering a song). But given tomorrow's Reclaim Open conference session celebrating the DS06 Daily Create at noon EST on "Remix is #4Life: We We all Love the Daily Create and You Should Too" (it's the mid day break from te blogathon sessions, this is a live stream) -- its timely to get back to the roots of not only creating but splaining what yo be creating. TDC5041 was a classic (e.g. recycled) Daily Create: #tdc5041 #ds106 #WildDS106 Make a Poster for An ‘Add a New Daily Create’ Campaign created actually by what was once a twitter account for a cow @anycow (legend): Give it a good slogan, a better picture and make an unforgettable impression on the public with your poster. https://daily.ds106.us/tdc5041/ A poster can be many/any style, but my association goes to the WW2 style posters, e.g. thye genre of propoganda posters. In the way they do, Daily Creates can bleed over and back from the DS106 Assignment Bank- like this one to create a DS106 Propoganda Poster I guess from the name of a student I remember was almost the second year of DS106. Lost in the shuffle, the beauty of the assignment bank was how it aggregated responses from participant blogs, but also blog posts that included a writeup of how they did it. Looking for ideas, I reached OMG DOES IT STILL WORK? for Google images with search for open licensed results on "propoganda poster" (it works even with my typo. Google Image search for propaganda posters, openly licensed https://www.google.com/search?q=propoganda+poster&tbs=sur%3Acl&udm=2 Yes there are all the "Yes We Can" but one jumped out for personal reasons, second image on the second row: A military recruitment poster reading "Even a dog enlists, why not you?" for World War I (1914-1916) chromolithograph by Mildred T. Moody. Original public domain image from Wikipedia. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons It's almost perfect. But I wanted to remove the "Enlists" and insert "ADDS A TDC". I started in PhotoShop, but could not find a good enough font match, so what I did do was copy past all the letters needed to phrase this- the only one missing was a "C" but that was easily done by editing a "G". But that makes the text too wide. SO I went in deeper, and pulled the margins out, and starting copy pasting the letters to make the bottom work. What I have looks a bit messy: Stretching the image to make wider, will need to fill the gap. But here is my one dip into AI, I use the photoshop selection using the inner parts of the image with the color on the left and right, and use the Generate Fill option to insert matching colors. I end up using this often in Photoshop for photos that maybe are not the right aspect ratio, it does a decent job of filling in backgrounds. I deleted the red Market St address, and just added the daily create URL for adding a new TDC, just old Arial black was close enough for me. Adding a web address in text Last was doing a little shift-select to create place behind the dog to paste in a screen shot of the Add a Daily Create screen, using the Multiple layer style and opacity at 45 to superimpose on the background flames. Learning to Mask in photoshop was and is a game changer. Masking a layer to insert some screen shot behind the dog Thus, done! My poster thus posted in Mastodon a reply: https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/115476495264681711 This was maybe 45 minutes or less of mucking around, but so much more satisfying that taking what a GenAI vending machine spits out at you. I Remix, Therefore I Am. Featured Image: Making flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license Frequent readers may know I have been a fan of the iRiver tiny MP3 players for their recording capability. I had purchased two for us in my last job, and just from a meeting last week, saw that another colleague at Maricopa had purchased one for doing some audio recording. See, the folks at iRiver ought to know how vast and powerful an influence I am ;-) I was eager to get one for my new job at the NMC- I very much like doing informal audio interviews. Browsing the iRiver iFP 700 series lines, I was dismayed at how many were no longer available, not at Amazon, nore at the iRiver store itself. I managed to get an order in for an iFP-795 (500 Mb) that was sold only as a bundle with a waterproof kit. But I had some problems with my new credit card (another long story about call-centers around the world that mangle new address changes). By the time I had fixed the issue with my card, the item was gone: Despite the preceding page which indicates it was in stock: It seems very much that the iFP line is being phased out. Worse yet, the new T10 players, with their slick candy colors and maybe even, improved interfaces, are only compatible (for models sold in the US and Europe) with Windows XP. This is not very clear at all from the specs page, where Mac is listed, and the details are hidden in asterisked foot notes. So if you are thinking about an iRiver, and are on a Mac, get one fast or you are left to ebay as the source (well I guess I could have gotten the T10, boot camp booted into Windoze and .... nahhhhhhh, too much trouble). iRiver- great little devices, terrible user interface, inconsistent web site, and poor choice in marketing strategy. I've always valued a new issue of EDUCAUSE REVIEW -- not only is it cleanly published, tastefully illustrated, it typically features a number of excellently written articles in my field. It's got a comfortable feel in your hands, not to heavy like a scholarly jouurnal, and very readable, but not light and fluffy like a grocery store glitz magazine. But in looking at the November/December 2005 issue online I'm struck by some new features showing that the publication is becoming more blog-like: First of, all the publication features an RSS feed. Stick it in your aggregator, and you will be able to jump to the newest articles before reading a review by Stephen Downes (well, you will need to read fast). One note to EDUCAUSE, and for others adding RSS feeds- please run them through a validator -- the current ER feed has several problems (I was just peeking at the source and noted the invalid date formats). RSS needs to be very structured, and in some applications, will not be nerely as forgving as browsers are of HTML. Next! Each articles has a comment feature. Nice- allow the readers to interact with the author, and each another. Lastly, you are nothing, blog or publication-wise, without some awesome content, and I cannot say enough praise-worthy things about Gardner Cambell's essay There's Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education. He hits all the high notes- explanatory detail, compelling arguments, relevant links, and a great scenario that sets the stage. I'm looking forward to hearing the podcast version. This is a must read / must listen for anyone trying to wrap their minds around podcasting. So publications becoming more blog-like, blogs becoming more journal-like, new life forms evolving. I'm again at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport for another jaunt out of town. I recalled reading somewhere online a few weeks ago that the airport was offering free wireless, not the pay through your nose service that was there before. Sure enough, flipping open the laptop, there it is: This is a welcome change from a place where small pizzas are 10 bucks, bottled water $2, etc. Free! Free Wireless! How cool. "The new wireless Internet service will allow travelers to sit in comfort as they log on to check their e-mail or even look at the latest headlines from their home town," said Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon. "It's part of our on-going commitment to making Phoenix a great place not only to visit, but to do business." Heck, if I lived in the city, Phil may have won my vote with just this move. Update: Make that free web. They apparently block ports for chat, mail clients, etc. Phil? That vote? Well, it's still better than nothing. Hey kids, do you know what tomorrow is (well it already is in New Zealand, those futurists). Yes, it is October 6. What's special about that? October 6... is 10/6 meaning a day to celebrate ds106 So tomorrow, your make a photo showing your 106ness, maybe you in your kickstarter t-shirt or make something that says 106 - hey there is an assignment for that! Heck do it at 1:06 am or pm. Uplaod your photos to flickr and tag them "106day" yep, that's the number. Go on ds106radio. Get your friend, mother, dog to start a ds106 blog. Need more ideas? I have almost 160 of 'em (I passed 106 and while ago) It's our day. Continuing on the chicken theme? Only the little kind. It's been almost a month since the sky fell on delicious.com. In news that spread at retweet speed, a leaked screenshot from a Yahoo inside briefing had listed the social bookmarking site delicious as being in the chopping block. Or is it chopped? And so ensued the frenzy. cc licensed flickr photo shared by jcolman A literal export rush ensued as people aimed to export their tagged history, many of them rushing to dump them into diigo. This included me. I am guilt of frenzy feeding. Or at least nibbling. The sky had certainly fallen, and the clucking ensued. What will we do! Hurry! Export! Import! Sign up! My tags! My Tags! And then this was followed by the glut of posts about "alternative social bookmarking services." Alec Couros, in the method he does well, convened a massive google doc editing process to produce a list of suggestions (man does he have rabid followers) . I found most of the frenzy to be missing, the most key point to delicious. That there are two realms of consideration. If your use of delicious was purely individual, and you sought out an alternative, many of the suggestions would do well, from pinboard to Mr Magoo. There are scads of them. Heck, you might was well go back to using your browser ones. But that is the bottom rung of the bag of gold that is delicious. At least to me. cc licensed flickr photo shared by luc legay You cannot take your network, and its sharing effects with you. Yes, for myself, I rely on searching delcious as a primary research tool to track web sites. But my larger interest is in the collaborative features of tagging (by conference, class, project), by re-publishing that on web sites, by the sharing of links via for: tags and email. I relied on my network of fellow taggers as yet another stream of golden information. Should I just bail at the first clucking of storm clouds? You cannot take that with you to pinboard. Even diigo, which, I would agree with has some compelling features in its groups and annotations, and has many great educator groups, yet it feels about 9 times as heavy as delicious. There is some of a network effect there, but it must be orders of magnitude less than delicious. I find the neglecting of recognizing the network effects and focusing on just "Alternative tools" to be short sighted, and the mad rush was premature. Yes, I accept that services will come and go. Before I used delicious, I was a relatively early user of furl (who else furled first?), which was purchased (ultimately by diigo, woah- my link goes there http://furl.net/user/cogdog). But long before, I was doing home grown link sharing/organizing in a home grown system I built at Maricopa, the Bag of URLs (that one is mostly gone, the link is a bit from the Internet Archive, but it is missing the lovely graphic of a URL coming out of a shopping bag). It was strung together with HTML and perl, and set up so I could take submissions and publish new "issues" on a periodic basis. I ammassed thousands of annotated links, and even made it searchable with some long forgotten unix indexing software (glimpse? gais?) I know tools will come and go. But you do not get that network effect as easily. In fact, I am not sure any current or future social bookmarking tool can ever gain the network power of the delicious one. Not being a business person, I may stand on shaky ground, but Yahoo, which is looking more and more like smug brontosaurs sauntering around and 10 minutes before the end of the Jurassic era, has provide a textbook case of how to f*** up an internet bag of gold. Piss it away. Not tend to it. First of all, for all the time they had and developed delicious, they did not appear to do one thing to build anything that leveraged the delicious network. Maybe they did some analysis of activity, but as a business, they did not appear to do one thing to create something that made or led them to money. Everything google does ties into feeding their revenue stream, be it ads or improving their search engoine (perhaps this is what Yahoo was doing, but thats a battle they can barely claim a bronze medal for). Second, where was their company message after the rumor erupted? Where is the Yahoo stance on the issue? There are flaffing about embarrassment over a secret revealed. There is one moldy blog post on delicious (the most recent and it is over a month old) offering luke warm re-assurance and a BUY ME please prayer. It was not an optimistic sign. Contrast this to say the proactive stance Skype did after their week long outage in December. Their CEO was out in front, they took responsibility, and offered information ot their users (and woot! $1 of credit). It is not even clear today what Yahoo's corporate message is on delicious. It is the sound of a link dying in space. To me, they look like blundering fools. Yahoos. Bufoons. Poop heads. So whats to become of this? Well, I have not altered my delicious activity one bit. For something that the sky fell on, it works fine. It's not like they will just shut the lights out without notice Mag.nolia style. There will always be time to move when the bottom falls out. I have faith that either everyone who fell asleep at the leadership desk at Yahoo will wake up, or a real player will step in. I am hoping amm msy stuff, all my shared tags, all my web sites that ride on them, will still work. Yeah. I may eat crow one day, but its better than running around like a diarrhetic chicken. The internet makes it even more easy to fall in a line and march into the sea. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Ric e Ette PS In my haste to click publish, I forgot to add the next logical wave of panic/worry- see Doc Searls on What if flickr fails? again, I am more worried about the loss of the flickr network/community if it "fails" or if there are moves to self-hosted flickr-like sites. Featured Image: Chicken Little flickr photo by atxryan shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license It was pretty much another curious link click of serendipity last May that led me to Stewart Mader's Wiki/Blog Using Wiki in Education. I gotta like a domain he chose that is "wiki" spelled backwards http://www.ikiw.org/. Today Stewart is unveiling his new book/web site project Using Wiki in Education, headlined there as "A Wiki-Based Book". I got a sneak peek a few days ago, and am rather excited to see this work go out. It includes 10 in depth case studies of educators who are using wikis in the classroom: It contains 10 case studies written by teachers that describe how they're using the wiki to transform courses and engage today's students in a range of environments including high school, small college, major research university, online/distance learning and research lab. This is the first book to focus specifically on the wiki in education and be developed and published using a wiki, so it actively demonstrates the tool in action. On the site, two chapters are free for anyone, and US$19 gets you access to read, download PDF, and help co-edit a last chapter. Each month, another chapter will be released as free. It's great content for those interested in learning more about educator beast practices, but to me even more interesting as an experiment in a new publishing mode. Learn more in Chaoter 1: Four Letter Words: how wiki and edit are making the Internet a better learning tool (available now for free). This book is intended to help you better understand how a wiki can transform what you do for the better. Through a compilation of case studies you'll see how different wiki tools have been applied to a variety of situations - from a major research university to a small liberal arts college, from open source to web-hosted and enterprise tools, from a high school technology course to a college freshman writing program. The first of these case studies illustrates how a wiki has been applied to a world-wide educational website to enable a growing community direct access to contribute and edit content. It also tells the story of how I became interested in the wiki. Go now! http://www.wikiineducation.com/ The ds106 assignment for what comes below is "Return to the Scene of the Crime": Take a photo from the past that you took in a particular location. Return to that stop, and take another picture, "framing" the original within the current view. The whole premise is to find an old photo, return to the location, and create a new one where you are holding the photo and lining it up with the scene. It is a nifty mixing of analog in the digital space. I'd done some toying with this same technique after discovering the flickr Look into the Past grpup, which does overlays of historic photos over current scenes- I had done a few around my home town of Strawberry and neighboring Pine, AZ. First of all, a wide angle lens is essential. It need not be a DSLR, but you need a wide angle to fit the whole photo in. I used my Canon 10-20mm zoon. But there is a whole lot more, as Giulia led me to in her iteration of the assignment, connecintg to the Dear Photograph site. The extra level here is doing the story part, of writing a memory of the photo as if you were talking to it. While at Mom's house doing the cleanup, I came across a number of photos of Mom, Dad, and even me around this house. So off I went... cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, Could Dad have been much happier relaxing in his easy chair, having retired to Florida in 1990- afte dreaming of it for many years? But you left this world in 2001, and your chair was moved out of the photo. Mom got a new one... and now that one too shall disappear. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, Was I really that skinny, young, and punk faced in the 1990s? Did I really sport a mullet? As my first visit to the place Mom and Dad retired to, it took some getting used to as they had left the house I had grown up in since the age of 2. This new place was... so nice, so new... so Florida. But they sure loved it and thats what counts the most. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, A thing I share with both Mom and Dad is the joy of working in my yard. And this place in Fort Myers they sure made their own. I am pretty sure my Mom spotted some orchids at some other place, and she lifted a few to grow in the tree behind her. This would have been? 1997, so their Florida place had long been made their home. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, I was a bit incredulous that my parents would slice the top off of a store bought pineapple, soak it a few days in a wate dish, and later plant it in the back yard of their place in Fort Myers. My disbelief was disbanded the day I tried the sweet pleasure of a fresh pineapple! Sometime later, strangers cam by and stole some of the pineapples, so I was pleasantly surprised to find one with a nice fruit hanging on it! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So go find some old photos of a place you can get into now, and do this assignment! Whew, finally got around to cleaning out my Google Reader. Not to say that I actually "read" them all, but sifted through, and Shift-A'd through some feeds with 100+ unread items lurking. Of course, this screenshot may imply that I don't subscribe to anything. By the time I publish this post, the sidebar will start puffing out. But there is some satisfaction in fooling myself that I have absorbed all this information from the 50 or 60 sites I subscribe to. And actually the last thing I did read (and Shared) was Will's pointing to a stunning example of what can be done with the new features of Google's MyMaps -- the Route 66 history tour. I've not even sniffed out the shiny new Goog-tool, but my gut says that maps as an authoring tool are going to be very powerful for educators (or anyone trying to create a map that organizes and links to information -- kind of what Joe Lambert has been doing with Storymapping As close as the song gets to Twin Arrows is "Winona", a lonely stop a few lumps of metal short of Meteor Crater... You see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico Flagstaff, Arizona don't forget Winona Get your Kicks, on Route Google MyMaps! [caption id="attachment_9754" align="aligncenter" width="360"] modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by Katie Tegtmeyer: http://flickr.com/photos/katietegtmeyer/471513151/[/caption] Muzzled. Self. http://twitter.com/dkernohan/status/255302652299210752 Why? There's plenty of other things to blog about. Plenty.