Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Trying to teach and old RSS feed some new tricks? At first RollUp seemed like a nifty idea- build a customized collection of RSS feeds into one site, theoretically coalescing a pile of feeds into one sensible pile. And that becomes a web page you can customize some layout- colors, fonts. And then that single collection itself can be re-syndicated, it having its own RSS feed URL. A way of repacking feeds sounded interesting. I created an account, tossed in a few instructional technology feeds from my RSS reader's collection, to create CogDogBlog's Rolled Up Feeds and its RSS / Syndication URL. I had first thought it would combine feeds by date, but it just seems to append one blog's feed right after another. Worse, it has a multiple page display set up, but you are limited to "next", "back", with no indication of how many pages there are nor any Google-like way to jump to page 4 rather than single clicking through there. I cannot see anything RollUp does that I'm in lovely Vancouver, BC. I had heard their winter was one of record setting rainfall, so coming from the Arizona desert where we've had the opposite problem (111 days and counting), I was enchanted by the notion of seeing the spectacle of water falling from the sky. No deal. Stepping off the plane was a glorious polaroid filter blue sky and lovely snow capped mountains for a backdrop (sorry words only, I took some time off from snapping photos). It was a wonderful relaxing day at the hospitable Lamb homestead. Tomorrow we are slated with other colleagues for a Social Software Salon @ UBC (do not picture lavish hair stylists applying folksonomic tag gel). Friday is a "Edublogger Hootenany" session at the Northern Voice Moosecamp, and Saturday, the main Northern Voice event. This is going to be a fantastic gathering and I plan to cross off a lot of names of Bloggers I've Always Wanted to Meet List. Even more eerie is sitting at Brian's dining room table, laptops 30 inches apart, as he deftly taps out another blog entry and I work on this one. Maybe I should send him a Skype call. I'll have to wait, he is Skyping his dad in Hong Kong. This might be called Life 2.0. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by The Rocketeer This may be a niche case but I am just making note for myself. If you ever feel the urge to change the Permalinks setting on your Wordpress site, keep in mind you will break any old external links that point to it.. meaning if for years you have publish posts as: http://www.myradbutlongwindedblog.org/2008/02/14//told-siemens-about-a-thing-called-moocs Changing to the more compact form enabled in recent updates, you can get away with a change that will make the sam post link: http://www.myradbutlongwindedblog.org/told-siemens-about-a-thing-called-moocs Meaning we can clean up a few characters by removing the date/time cruft in the URL. This is fine for our blog, but anyone who has ever linked to that old post will now get some friendly 404 Not Found screen. There is a fix, and I recently helped Giulia fix this on her blog. Some of her old posts I saw in the ds106 archives such as http://gforsythe.ca/2011/12/24/picturing-prufrock were rendered not found as she changed her URL structure to be http://gforsythe.ca/picturing-prufrock I fixed all of her posts in one line of code (or codish) text - the magic is in the .htaccess file on the root of the server. This helps rewrite URLs to be more public pretty- actually wordpress urls look something more like: http://gforsythe.ca/index.php?p=245 where 245 is a database ID. The rules of htaccess allow web urls to be interpreted from how the browser sends them to what the server expects. It allows humans to use readable URLs and machines to use uglier ones. The one I needed I found via 10 Awesome .htaccess Hacks for Wordpress: RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://gforsythe.ca/$4 The first part instructs the web server to return a permanent redirect (301) to find anything that has the three numbered structure (e.g. yyyy/mm/dd/) and find all the stuff that comes after that (.*) - every set of patters in (...) corresponds to variables we can use in the result-- $1 $2 $3 are the year, month, day respectively, and $4 is the string of the url we want to preserve. Yeah, it looks like gibberish. But it is possible to clean up from a permalink change. It just takes a magic hat. I was in conversation this week with the folks concocting an AI flavored DS106 making use of the remarkable monster spawned of Michael Branson Smith of a generated Dr Oblivion All I can say is try it. But there was a round of group fatigue, ennui, fill in another synonym towards AI. We are not deniers of what it might do, nor disbelievers, nor buy in to the gleefully swallow your inevitable future pill. My response, was along with experimenting, poking around the edges, is my own self prescribed potion. Mock it. And this hing I was going to fill on blog about, well heck, when I checked that link, I had already done so, and explained in full while reached no for a prompt box but my bag of SPLOT tricks. Hence https://cogdogblog.com/2023/12/sadly-robotic-metaphors/ That was my own reaction to witnessing the sameness of the generated imagery used to published stuff about generated content. Why is it always robots? So i was blogged, and tooted, and sent a few friends. Alas, it sits there, a sie designed to make it easy to share media, a short bit of text, without any logins of asking of identity, the very hallmark of The Thing Known As SPLOT, always in the weird mystery realm. The SPLOT? billboard remixed from The two RV Gypsies traveled from New Mexico to Benson, Arizona May 15, 2015 Alas, my idea was resonated with... well, just me. But it fits with my AI self therapy, when I find a terrible overhyped thought piece, I glance at the imagery, and chances are there are robots, or humaniod technobots, or giant brains plugged into glowing blue screens. I have thought I should collect a boat load of these images, and run them though one of those color averaging programs. I am fairly sure it is in the range of Electro Screen Blue. The "prompt" for this post came somewhat from a joyous Mastodon post from my creative pal Jason Toal (hey draggin!) with a return to blog post 18 months in the making. I'm patient Jason, but a good sight to see a signal light in my Feed Reader. It's a small part of a honest reflexive where I am and what I value post-- Love is in the Mail. The thing that caught my attention was this mention of an upcoming workshop, and a hyperlink (anyone remember them?) to the info on the workshop. I should mention, because it ties in nicely with my first reflection that I have an upcoming ‘micro course offering’ for BCCampus called, Please Share with the Class — Creating Online Gallery and Portfolio Spaces in which I will be discussing how to create an online media gallery or portfolio for educators, so this this seems like the perfect opportunity to both promote the event and demonstrate some of my techniques. https://jasontoal.ca/the-love-is-in-the-mail/ Being an uncarable curious link clicker, the BCcampus FLO weeklong Microcourse: Despite the recent growth in online and hybrid modes of teaching, many learning management systems lack simple and elegant ways for students to share, collaborate on, and discuss their multimedia assignments. Join this free one-week Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) MicroCourse to learn about different methods for managing media collections in hybrid learning environments. In this course you will explore platforms such as WordPress, GitHub, SPLOTs, and Notion and focus on enhancing participant engagement and fostering a sense of community by: Examining simple tools for sharing media Contributing simple multimedia works such as text, images, and documents to different platforms Developing a space to facilitate student collaboration Creating a gallery or portfolio to showcase student work https://bccampus.ca/event/flo-microcourse-please-share-with-the-class-creating-online-gallery-and-portfolio-spaces/ Being a bit biased, I'm inclined so say go with SPLOT, but I trust Jason has valuable offerings and much hands on goodness with those other strange tools. That's why the SPLOT theme used for Sadly Robotic Metaphors is the ever trusty TRU-Collector. I've put it to my own uses at least 10 times, if not more. You wanna see some case examples, and no just mine? I will again put the use of the powerful Docsify This to embed the most current set of examples of places the SPLOT is used: Bear with me as I foam about content transclusion happening, as list of examples above comes from a master list in the TRU Collector Github repo. You see, whenever I update that source, the embedded content above and also on the SPLOT info page for the theme are also updated.Automatically. Yeah, I too want to make the Indie web easy, but a foundation of how the web works goes a long way. I digress. Again. I've done all kinds of these collection sites. I believe in the concept. But just setting them up does not usually guarantee much action. The more effective use of these is within a class or workshop process, where participants have a motivation to share in the SPLOT. I used it for as a group reporting tool for a workshop activity for the Mural UDG project, and collected 145 responses. In community work for the OpenETC shared WordPress emporium I set one up as a place for community members to share sites made by other people that inspired them. It got 18, and likely 16 were ones I submitted. Maybe my ideas and tools for collecting response are rubbish. Maybe everyone is fatigued, overloaded, too busy. But I am thinking about Eamon Costello's call for OER 24, Not Me, Not Mine, Not Myself. In one sense Open Education is just giving. It is not something to make us feel clever or superior. It is not even something to make us feel good. Indeed, a lot of the time it might make us feel uncomfortable. It may be giving students “opportunities to unpack their cherished worldviews and ‘comfort zones’ in order to deconstruct the ways in which they have learned to see, feel, and act” (Zembylas , 2015). But its promise is that once we give something we get something. It is the hope that we can gain some release from that which we think we cannot do without. It is the promise of liberation from whatever it is we hold too tightly; of education as the practice of freedom (Hooks, 1996). https://altc.alt.ac.uk/blog/2024/01/oer-2022-not-me-not-mine-not-myself/ (emphasis added by me) Alright, I'd love to have more people join in my little play game of collecting crappy AI generated images representing AI. But I don't need the validation. That's where I got to by the end of this though wander. I make and do these things because i mattero me, and playfully mocking the hype keeps my head above the swirling water. Whatever you do that works for you, I applaud. Now where can I find some of these craptatsic images. I got a place to plop them. Featured Image: A grid of randomly sorted feature images from my Sadly Robotic Metaphors SPLOT. I manually installed a no longer available plugin to generate this via a non-linked page. People are hating on WordPress but if you can do this in your hanky static generator or newsletter platform without coding, all the better on you. As far as rights, these AI generative images are in license limbo. I don't do a wacksock of presentations these days. When I do, I like running them on the web, from the web, a la SPLOT fashion. But I did/do like the approach of being able to send out tweets during presentations, something I figured out in 2011 with Keynote Tweet. To be clear, I did not invent or build this, all I have done is over the years, as twitter keeps changing their API authentication, figure out how to keep it working. I just poke around the engine with a flashlight. I gave up a few years ago, as in later operating systems, Apple took away the methods the script was able to talk to Keynote. It was busted. (I think @bennettscience was working on a way to do it from Google Slides). For reasons I won't bore you with, for the software I use to manage photos. I still work in an old OS (Mavericks, the one that came with my 2013 MacBookPro). For the work I do, I have yet to be stopped from doing my work because of something in Some New Mountain Named OS. Yes I know it's a BAD thing to be doing (my latest research says I can upgrade, but I don't want to monkey with things in the middle of teaching and projects). The only machine I can test on is my even older (2009) machine running Yosemite. It's main duty is playing music through my stereo. A few months ago, I heard from @amywebb who was interested in having it work in the current Mac OS. Whatever I offered had no success for her. Until yesterday. Amy emailed me a suggestion she got from an Apple engineer for a small change in the script. I made the changes and went to the Yosemite machine to test it out. I put this text in Keynote's presenter notes for an old deck: I launched the new Keynote Tweet app, started the show, and Huzzah: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/959882946067939329 Success (in Yosemite). I sent the app to Amy, we wrestled a bit with the ZIP, and then I gave instructions on how to modify her existing script. Then there was some issue on her machine with the path to the twurl app, but she says it works. But until I, or someone else, can verify, I am not 100% sure. So I created a new app, and updated the instructions for anyone willing to try it out, look for details at https://github.com/cogdog/Keynote-Tweet. If you previously set up twurl, you should be ok. You might want to test the use of twurl from the command line. I provided the text of the script there; the easiest way to build the app is to compile it yourself by copying to the Script Editor app. We will hold off any further celebrations until someone else can confirm it works. No guarantee. Updated Feb 11, 2018 There is an error/goof in that first version, namely that your command line interface knows where twurl is, but Apple Script needs full paths. An updated version now has the most typical installed location, but if you want to built it from scratch and make sure you have the right path, here is some info to hopefully get you Keynote Tweeting. I'm not sure what to call the breed of web tools that enable you to draw in content from other web X.0 sites automatically-- some call them lifestream (maybe not, wikipedia lands you somewhere else) more like http://lifestreamblog.com/. Swurl is a new one and I am liking its elegance. I get my requisite custom URL and give it my username at a few web services, then I can toss in some customization like colors, banners... I just plopped the image I use from this blog: What is less subtle is that there are no links to see more pages.... as you scroll down content keeps coming in, the river of stuff, like it has no end. Also, what I really liked, is that snce I gave it my accounts, some which have been used for a long time like flickr and del.icio.us, it goes way back in my internet life. I am looking at my tabs, and wondering what the heck it might have grabbed from 2001 especially since flickr was around only since 2004. (more…) creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by mariateresa toledo When I started last August to develop a Wordpress Theme that would provide the functionality of the ds106 Assignment Bank, I told Jim Groom that I thought I could get it ready in a month. By December, I thought I could wrap it up first week of January. So here I am in April... It's not done, software is never done... but I wanted for so long to make it ready for others to try. So here it is. To make a site like you can download all you need from It's time to stop tinkering and let some people try it out. At this point, I am so close to it, I wonder if it makes sense to others, or if it will come across as something too complex to set up. The whole goal was to make it something that could be configured from a theme options interface Essentially, you define what it is inside the bank. In DS106 it was assignments, but you get to name it. I call 'em Things. And for your Things you define what Types of Things there in (in DS106 there were Design Assignments, Visual Assignments etc. So the main index shown above is an interface to the Types of Things. Inside each Type of Thing.. you find the Things! And each Thing has the features of a DS106 Assignment (and more). People who do a Thing can have their example syndicated in if you set up Feed Wordpress (and it can be set to use an aggregator in the Bank itself, or from an external one, like DS106). Or not at all [caption id="attachment_29147" align="alignnone" width="500"] Syndication Options[/caption] You can also have a form for people to add examples If you allow people to submit things, you have options to define a Creative Commons license for all Things, or to let the individual select (or not even have Creative Commons be part of the scene) One of the bigger technical hurdles was figuring out how to implement the Wordpress media uploaded to allow one to add images for the icons of the types of things. Boom! And the last chunk was filling out what is a pretty long scrolling summary of the theme options [caption id="attachment_29151" align="alignnone" width="500"] Documentation for and inside the theme options[/caption] and the additional information in the Readme. The docs are pretty much a first draft and very likely rife with typos. Before I go back into it, I want to float what I have now and see if people can set it up. I probably will record a screen cast of a total set up from scratch... but you know how I am with the timelines. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by wyliepoon Anyhow, the Assignment Bank Theme is open, wide open https://github.com/cogdog/ds106bank It's six o'clock PM, the outside solar lighting (aka the sun) has turned off, the temperature outside has warmed up from *&#^ing cold (where Fahrenheit and Celsius converge), we are cozy inside with warm drinks, silly movies, and completely unplugged, diverged from the w-o-r-k stuff. Cold? Hardly with proper gear and Cori to share in a walk amongst our trees, snow drifts, fox tracks, and vivid sunset light. And this Christmas eve converges with the seventh night of Hanukkah. There must be something to things coming together and spreading out at the same time. These words feel like they are slipping towards the kind of year end summaries / reflections many are doing. I diverge. This is merely a moment before the next and after the last. More [maybe] to come this week (that's a plan) to catch up on photos not sent to flickr, blog posts in the draft-space of my head, and just be out of the usual convergence spaces. That both divergence and convergence can co-exist for and in us (complexities that are out of reach of un-natural algorithmic pseudo telligence) says much, much that rises above the noise. We are tuning in to light and space for a while. There is always interesting light out there... Featured Image: "Menorah lights on third night of Hanukkah with Christmas tree lights in background", photo by me, Alan Levine, which when he aches up on Flickr uploads will be put into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. If Hanukkah and Christmas can converge what's stopping anything else? Did you know that airlines can take your money for tickets, and then keep it when their own delays cause you to miss connections? There is a word for that. Did you know they can ignore requests for customer service? Not reply to messages they acknowledge they will? Did you know that the Bush administration has putt handcuffs on the Department of Transportation's ability to respond to consumer complaints? Sure DOT says file a complaint online, but in September 2007 according to New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg this is an empty pursuit: The Secretary of Transportation has the authority to regulate airlines and issue fines up to $2,500 to carriers for violations of federal airline consumer protection rules. But the Bush Administration has chosen to limit the number of passenger complaints DOT can follow up on. Claiming budgetary shortfalls, the DOT only follows up on complaints related to discrimination and handicap accessibility. Most complaints are simply logged and reported monthly. So this is a CogDog effort to smoke some response out of an airline who has taken my money, cost me another $900 to get home, and then, after ignoring most of my contact requests, says it is all my fault. We will see about that. What follows, for documentation, is a letter I am sending by registered mail to Icelandair, who in my mind, has committed theft. I do not expect to see one cent of my money. They have all the lawyers and fine print stacked up against me. But the game has changed and many businesses do not get the fact that they can no longer stomp on consumers and trust that no one hears about it. Companies need to know that they are transparent, and we have collective/connective tools to shine lights on the rats. --------------------------------------------- Monday, December 29, 2008 Icelandair North America 5950 Symphony Woods Rd Ste 410 Columbia, MD 21044 Cc: Better Business Bureau, U.S. Department of Transportation Aviation Consumer Protection Division, GetSatisfaction.com To whom it may concern, I am writing seeking resolution to a series of incidents beyond my control including late arrival and baggage delivery of an Icelandair flight on November 29 that caused me to miss two connections and required me to pay out of pocket $917.50 for a ticket to get home plus losing $158.04 for a prepaid hotel I was unable to use due to these delays. In summary and detail below: Icelandair has pocketed money I paid for two unused tickets for flights missed that were not my fault. We have a word in America for taking money. Icelandair's customer service has been abysmal in (a) lacking a phone number for customers to call for service and (b) a pattern of repeated ignoring requests for customer service submitted via their web form and by e-mail. I am asking in writing for a refund of $1075 as a minimum response to a terrible sequence of poor customer service. My next stop may be small claims court. My roundtrip from Phoenix to Reykjavik was purchased via expedia (ticket 108 7376269300) included legs of US domestic travel on US Airways and American Airlines, and according to these airlines, all fees ($1204.30 total) were paid to Icelandair for these tickets. I departed from Reykjavik on November 29 on flight 631 scheduled to arrive at Logan International airport in Boston at 5:50PM, which as planned should have left me enough time to make my 7:40PM flight from Logan to JFK on American Eagle. The attached message I received from Harpa Johnaasdottir documents the late arrival of flight 631 by 23 minutes. Officials at other airlines I have asked have said that Icelandair being late on arrival by any amount holds responsibility for me missing connections. I did not exit the plane until 6:25PM. Bags did not emerge in baggage claim until 6:35PM, and my own did not come out until 6:45PM. It took at least 10 minutes to exit US customs as there was a single long line at least 45 persons ahead of me. At approximately 6:55PM I took my bag down the hall to the transfer station so it could be sent to American Eagle. Please note that the attendant for Icelandair was absent from their post, and it took some talking to an agent from another airline who agreed to transfer my bag. I was told to wait for bus 11 to take me from Terminal E to B, and exited at 7:00PM to see that bus pull away (I would have been aboard that bus had your employee been at their post). I waited another 14 minutes as many buses came and went. I ran to the ticket counter for American Eagle to find the lights had been turned off and the gate agents were gone. I attempted to board electronically at 7:18PM (see attached receipt) was not allowed to get a boarding pass or get aboard my flight to JFK. Because of the delays I missed my 7:40PM flight to JFK as well as my next day scheduled flight at 6:15am on US Airways (flight 15). The only way I could get home was to purchase a ticket from the US Airways counter in Boston for the next morning that cost me an extra $917.50. Because the US Airways ticket I had was purchased from Icelandair, they could not issue me a ticket change. I returned to the International Terminal at Logan to seek an Icelandair staff person, but the counter was closed. I used my computer to log onto your web site for customer service (http://www.icelandair.us/information/about-icelandair/contact-us/) which lacks a phone number to call for assistance. The only form of contact was a web form there, where I submitted a message Nov 30 (item number 138307) for which I never got a response. On December 10, I called your reservations line (1-800-223-5500) where the operator was most unhelpful, claiming there was no phone number for customer service, and only could provide an email address, to whom I wrote the attached message on December 11. I received one response from Harpa Johnnsdottir (attached, Dec 17) claiming that there was sufficient time for me to make my connection, and implying it was my fault for missing it. I am an experienced international travel, and have never had problems making connections at Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore airports. I replied to this message on December 17 (attached) with a detailed chronology as detailed in this letter, and have not gotten a response. Another message submitted to your web service form, acknowledged on Dec 18 (item number 140011) has also been ignored. I have contacted American Airlines, US Airways, expedia, and Icelandair seeking a response, and everyone points at someone else. Bottom line- I paid my money to Icelandair for tickets I could not use due to delays of Icelandair; I was forced to pay much more for a ticket to get home; Icelandair has kept this money and offered only one token apology; and Icelandair has demonstrated a repeated pattern of ignoring customer requests for service. I regret this experience has tainted a wonderful month I spent in Iceland, and while I do plan to return, I will seek any way other than Icelandair to get there. This entire sad tale has been posted on my website and shared with every consumer agency I can find: http://cogdogblog.com/2008/12/29/icelandair-took-my-money Please do the right thing and provide more than empty apologies. Regards Alan Levine --------------------------------------------- UPDATE Jan 5 2009: (partial) Victory! Victory! Victory! Icelandair is now offering to refund $400 for my unused original tickets, Yay! Surely of interest to no one, but I've been fortunate to enjoy a rather lazy extended piece of time, 6 days wrapped around Thanksgiving at our Arizona mountain hideaway in Strawberry (yes readers, Arizona is not a swath of Arabian windswept desert, but have places with trees and weather). I had sworn our elevation was 6000 feet from a local topo map, but was sadly informed via my GPs that we site at 5620 feet. Yep. winter weather rolled in today with morning hail, snow, and rain, and we are warmed by a fire in our wood stove. And this is primitive, as the occasional internet access is at a whopping 26 kbs via dlal up. It makes 'surfing' a completely different experience lots of patience and paddling required. After a return home last week from the 3 weeks of great but intensive workshops in New Zealand (23 of 'em), I am hoping this is enough to recharge for December- lots of projects and pending tasks, not to mention the arduous series of office holiday parties. Oh well, one more day of bliss. Ahhhhhhh Loser At the end of the K12 Online Conferennce fireside chat last week, I was asked for a closing remark for one "recommendation" to educators facing the firehose of new technologies. Not prepared for this ahead of time, the first thing my mind fled to were two flickr images I used in a presentation a while back... as it seems I might use this as a reference, I am repurposing them here. So my "message" was to face the future with a sense of wide-eyed wonder rather then dread.... Facing the Future Linktribute: Flickr image by Eisenvater ... with a sense of dread? Or, Facing the Future Linktribute: Flickr image by John Pawley ... with a sense of wonder? Okay, it is simple, naive, cheery, and a bumper-sticker like philosophy statement-- but honestly, it has been the way I have approached technology my entire career. As we predicted, the time is ticking on the young, naive open-ness of RSS; witness the gathering vultures circling overhead. Greed, chasing of a dollar, and even the smallest crack are an open invitation for the party-crashers who will usurp everything that is open and collaborative just for a few shiny pennies. RSS: It's Not Just for Bloggers Anymore Yup, the viagra pushers are game too. Is Ad-Supported RSS the Next Big Thing? Next biggest things since pop-up porno? portals? push-technology? RSS Is The New News "RSS (alternatively Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is the new way sites and blogs distribute content. You probably already know this. But here’s something you may not know: How to make money in RSS software." How virtuous, what an epitaph that would make. Buy & Sell RSS Ads Place your ad in RSS feeds throughout the web. Reach users who read content in RSS aggregators. What not just spit in their cereal bowl? Kick sand in their face? Monetize your RSS feed. Maintain total control over the ads placed in your feed. Expose all of your content via premium RSS feeds. Monetize this, eh? Circling, circling, circling... here come the vultures. More Vultures... (more…) It has been a really, really, really long time since I have been so excited, almost giddy, about a conference experience. Maybe going back to the first Open Education ones, or better yet, to the Northern Voice conferences 10 years ago. Perhaps I wrote conferences off, but last week's Digital Media and Learning conference held on the campus at University of California Irvine flipped that assertion off. While I did enjoy going to the DML conference last year in Los Angeles, but coming from from this one I felt different, almost electrified (so much I first wrote this post with a gazillion typos, now it may only have a zillion). So it makes me wonder what is that essence that does makes the experience so exciting? I can guess. It's a combination of things that maybe you can only glimpse at in hindsight. Being there did get me thinking to some of my first conference experiences. There was always the excitement about the travel, but then I focused completely on the program schedule, checking out the details on the keynotes and figuring out what sessions sounded interesting. But meeting people was soooooo awkward. It meant speaking to strangers after some mutual glancing at the name tag. This was pre-smartphone (the technical pre--Cambrian era), so I might pull out a laptop to look like I was busy (aka reading email). Or actually really early on, we would line up at computer kiosks ... to read email. It changes everything having connective experiences with people before the conference via networks, be it social media, blogs, doing hangouts together. When I saw someone like George Station, whom I never met in person, we had lots to talk about right away. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Spending time together in person just mutually enhances both kinds of connection. Or there is Jane Van Galen, whom I really know only through twitter as @jvg and some pass crossing via DS06 but I do know now she works with my good friend Todd Conaway who recently took a job at the university where Jane teachers. I could rattle off 10 more examples, but this is already going to be a looooooong post. Unlike my early conference experiences, I found now the sessions and the program are almost incidental to everything else in the spaces between. Like saying "hello" to a person waiting with you in the coffee line. "Where are you from?..." This happened meeting Russell in line at In N Out Burger, who does amazing work at the Holocaust Museum. A passing joke at a table over the precious wall outlets with a young woman (yikes I forgot her name) who smiled saying something like "it pays off to be nice", starting a round of "where are you from", turning into meeting Evan who is from Arizona State University. Or when you end up at a dinner table with people you don't know, and getting into a great story exchange of "How I got into computer science" with Morgan (she was an astrophysicist who needed to compute!) or... yikes, here come all the stories. A conference now to me is a huge potentially serendipity engine that plays off of, and amplifies, the valuable of connections in the online space. But not on its own. Not just by going to a conference. You initiate a things. That's my seven paragraph introduction. In the "old days" I might have been blogging every session I went to, here I am now with one giant über post of highlights. So here it goes in pretty much chronological order, knowingly I will miss out on huge chunks, Crafting Connected Courses Pre-Conference Workshop [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The workshop I did with Justin Reich has been blogged here already so I won't re-hash it. Much. We had about 17 participants, and the best part was hearing, from our opening "interview each other" session, what the range of interests were, far being "courses" or higher-ed only. We pushed them hard, and they kept with us., I packed more into the materials then we covered, but all of it is hanging out there for anyone else to play with, reuse at connectedcourses.stateu.org. A big thanks to Reclaim Hosting especially Tim Owens here for working with me on the setup. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/783863754844884992 Maybe this is what got me started with good energy at DML. Being with a group of interesting, enthusiastic, but also questioning, people for a full day? How often do we get to do that back where we work? I've not delivered a workshop since February, so maybe I had a surplus of adrenalin fused enthusiasm, but I felt almost off the hook with unhinged energy. I was a tad irreverent and sarcastic. But wow, was it ever fun (well I have little idea of it was mutual, but it seemed so). Me? Excited About a Keynote? I am admittedly a bit jaded on keynote presentations (unless I am giving one) (and I have not had an ask since June 2014, so...). I enter them with pretty low expectations. I do like to sit near the front so at least I can try for photos. I'm marginally aware of Constance Steinkuehler's work in games-- my one experience listening to her speak was when I working for at NM. We had her as a keynote for an online conference... when we were doing them in Second Life. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] While I do understand how people see value, possibility in games for/in learning, it has not been a strong interest of mine. I may not have even read the abstract for What is the Intellectual Culture of Games? and would guess it was 'Games... research... literacy... studies...' Did my world get rocked? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I'm not going to recap since you should just go watch the recording yourself. But to coin a phrase she summarized a "massive" amount of career research that sliced way deeper than the typical media summaries of "games are bad for us!" "games will change everything" -- really sensible insights into what literacies are really elevated from not just the games themselves, but asking questions of context. That was interesting, but it was really the latter part where Constance moved to the societal impact of technology in education, the old images of kid in a class watching TV as reifying a mono culture, and really hammering that hard question of how education is part of a privilege "gamed" system that perpetuates a treadmill of young black men into jail. Yes, she called out the race issue. And challenged education to maybe put 10% of their effort into really doing something about it (I am paraphrasing somewhat from memory). I feel reverberations. The second standout message was from her experience as a White House advisor in education, how she saw the work as an endless series of meetings, and making intros. But it was her framing of how we should not be trapped into the belief we cannot change it, that change is "not done be executive memos from the top" but how a relatively small number of people, organized, can leverage the communications channel. So many people were tweeting the best bits, all I could come up with was "Wow" https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/784076498537893888 I don't know if I can really explain it, but this was the first keynote in a while I was leaning forward from the edge of my seat. And maybe it was her low key, personal presence, making light of a few times she lost track, and the off the cuff reference to the current political situation. But in all of her talk, she radiated an energy of whol body enthusiasm. It reminded me some of when I first heard Jane McGonical at SWSW in 2008-- the thing I remember the most was McGonical was so excited to share that literally her body was bouncing, almost dancing. I've seen too many stiff corpses on the podium. Not at DML. Fun Things Happen When You Choose a Random Session [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] In contrast to my first conferences where I tried to pick sessions of interest based on titles, often I try a counter-intuitive tactic. I pick one either randomly, or one that might be my last one chosen on basis of interest, or one where I know nothing about the presenters so I can maybe expand my network. We can miss out when we stay only in our cone of interests. The real reason I walked into the room for Get Creative with Coding: Dance, Sports, and Other Interests? I was eager to say hello to Gardner Campbell and catch up. He was in the room. Heck I sat down next to him not even know the topic of the session. This one was about Scratch, a technology I again have a surface awareness of, but never really took even a shallow dive. But this one specifically was on their Coding for All project. At first glance you might think by this name that it is another GLORY BE TO CODE, ALL PEOPLE MUST CODE, but it's more than coding for the sake of coding... well let their site say it: The Coding for All project brings together an interdisciplinary research team from the MIT Media Lab, the Digital Media and Learning Hub at University of California Irvine, and Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to develop new online tools and activities to engage more young people in developing computational fluency, particularly youth from groups currently underrepresented in computing. "Computational fluency" may be taken as fluent in computers, but I read it in being able to use those things for larger purposes. The session was really about getting experiences with Scratch Microworlds (I cannot find a general link, but in the session I followed a handout link for one with musical instruments). So Scratch is this visual programming language, with variables, loop, logic structures, event driven actions, etc. But jumping into Scratch itself opens the door to a lot of things to fiddle with. All much too many at once for a new users. So Microworlds bring people into a technical environment, but via a smaller entrance step. The concept of a MicroWorld is it starts set of "sprite" objects and a reduced set of Scratch tools. Not a blank screen and All The Tools. It encourages you to start clicking things together, and seemingly in a way that leads you, after getting a few things to make noise or animate, to explore the capabilities just under the hood (e.g. changing the menu options for actions). But eventually you run against its limits, and then you open the project in full Scratch. I am sure there is an edu-academic term for this. Scaffolding? Anyhow Gardner and I both started poking with the musical instruments and talking as we figured things out. I'm a bit more aware of the idea of events as drivers of screen action (e.g. do something when it is clicked, or when a key is pressed), and pointed them out to him, but he figured out the feature to record a sound and then use that as a sound effect (as well as other advanced audio tools), and showed it to me. I love that DML designed these hands on sessions as 90 minutes. And that the presenters (in this one at least) set us loose very quickly into hands on exploration. And most DML sessions are led by multiple people. The room kind of erupted with sounds and shouts of glee. We had about 30 minutes of open discussion at the end. I noted the amplification power of us doing this physically in the same space, the way we feed off of each others energy, and naturally turn to the person next to see what they are doing or to show what I learned. But what I am left with is the power of coding as a means to express and do something, not coding for coding's sake or to get some badge. And I left with a brimming amount of joy for getting this much out of a session I normally would have walked past. Hanging Around a Virtually Connecting Session We had a number of Virtually Connecting things happening at DML. The June 2015 conference was one somewhat early in our first year of doing this. That seems like a long time ago! There can be a bit of uncertainty at the onsite end. Sometimes, the people we work with are able to schedule us a room, but other times we just have to scout a location. Claudia Sullivan from DML knew of our schedule, but the site does not have many, if any meeting rooms. She did suggest one unscheduled room set up as a charging station. For the first one we had planned, where Mia Zamora was the onsite buddy, I wanted to be available to do tech support.. and just watch. But the room we wanted to use was packed with people and noisy! So we quickly convened to a session room (this was the 30 minutes at the end of the lunch break), and we eventually got booted out. Our onsite guests with Mia included George Station (he may have crashed), Kate Green, and Christian Friedlich. We had all rushed back after grabbing our In-N-Out burgers, and you can see how animated they were. [caption id="attachment_62055" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A very chatty animated crew![/caption] You can watch the full recording, I feel bad that Christian did not get many words in (but he sure did later that day in the ignite talks...) I did not have a role here, I just wanted to be around for support. I did like the way Mia came in with a question that pushed the first bits of conversation from reporting on sessions to a richer level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj0OJ8VKsFM Sometimes You Just Sit Around a Table and Good Stuff Happens I may have my timelines crossed, but I think we all went outside for a breather after our session. Or maybe it was later in the day. Mia and I planned to talk, because over the summer we had started plans for working on an open course/experience with DML on narrative that originally was going to start in August as a leadup for the conference. When things do not happen, it can be fortunate. we both ran short on time, as did our DML contacts, so we decided to aim for after the new year. But Mia and I wanted to pick up our brainstorming. Well, it was idea, after idea, and we got so excited (and probably loud) a few people wandered over to ask what the heck we were talking about. After explaining most were like "I want in!" Mia and I had another conversation like this the next day, and just out of a casual conversation with Remi Kalir the day before, another possibility clicked in. Yes, I am being vague. On purpose. You will just have to wait. All I can show you is a box of fries that have nothing to do with the project. Nothing. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Presenting in Hybrid Mode about Virtually Connecting I was also part of a 30 minute (that is fast!) presentation Virtually Connecting as a Model for Transformative Learning with Mia Zamora and Andrea Rehn on site plus Maha Bali, Rebecca Hogue, Nadine Abdoulmag, and Autumm Caines coming in virtually. Lots of things could go wrong with all the variables in doing this, especially the unknowns of shared wireless network access, and we always worry about audio feedback. We had a few weeks of back on forth on the way to run this presentation. Someone suggested slides, and I pushed back some "why do we need slides? can't we run this conversationally, like we do Virtually Connecting?", but in the end... I was wrong. The slides turned out to really help pace us. I could not help myself but go in and dress up the slides. If you are going to do slides, IMHO, make those photos full screen. There's a lot to consider when presenting to a room with some presenters coming in via Google Hangout. There is worry about audio feedback. Fortunately it was a small room, and there was no microphone. But the wire for house sound did not connect, and by the time a media tech showed up, I had pulled out my little emergency backup speakers. But more than that, how can this be done with one projector? We had the Google Hangout so the audience could see and hear the virtual speakers, but how to show the slides? My approach was to screen share the slides in the hangout, and then, as the initiator of the hangout, do some swapping of camera views from mine (the slides) to Maha, Rebecca, Autumm, and Nadine when they spoke. For speakers in the room, I left the slides on the view. So I was kind of directing shots at a sports event. There is a trick when using Google slides. You cannot do normal presentation view, because when to goes full screen, you lose access to your Hangout. What works is to open the slides in a new window, and use the option under Present for Presenter View. A controller pops up in one window, and the slides play, but only filling the window, not the screen. In the Hangout, I use the Screen Sharing tool, and select the window that my slides are in. It did work, although there is a bit of delay while I move the hangout to the slidedeck to advance the slide. But I think it worked pretty well, I tried flipping the camera view a lot, and also stepping through the faces of the other virtual folks while another was talking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKyLz601vCo And here I have been talking about the tech and have not ever mentioned the talk. I thought we did well to have seven speakers talk in 30 minutes, plus we had time at the end for a few questions/comments. Virtually Connecting Hangout Number Two We scheduled another Virtually Connecting session after our presentation, with the idea anyone interested could watch us run a "regular" one, kind of fishtank mode. Perhaps we did not communicate it clearly, or the end was rushed, or they got all they wanted, but no one showed up beyond the guests we were expecting. I do take any photos, but know it was a fabulous talk with Kim Jaxson and Jonathan Worth (Gardner Campbell popped in too). Helen DeWaard was our virtual buddy host, as usual running things, and calmly, to a very smooth level. He heard about sessions on Maker spaces and had some stories of those sessions when the audience is really really really tiny (I recalled one conference where I was the whole audience) (and the session was brilliant). Jonathan went on a grand riff about his struggle to use session's framing of "brokering" and "leveraging" in the context if networked relationships. It was good conversation, as always it is in Virtually Connecting. Check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flJwNrSeJIk Igniting the Ignite Talks [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I love how DML ended both days with rounds of Ignite talks, the timed slide advancing ones that are crafted to expose an audience to a lot of ideas in a short period of time. And is fun. These were great talks, you can watch them all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjRvG5LCu2Y But the photo above is something I alluded to a few people on site and later in twitter- the role Gardner Campbell played in being more than an emcee, but a host. The Ignite host typically aims to rev up the crowd. I remember last year there was some guy who did it who was loud... but just loud. I am not even looking it up to see who it was, and sorry Dude if I offend you. But that bit of emcee action seemed more about the emcee, the way I saw Garner work, it was to elevate the presenters, not himself. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I did not listen in to what Gardner said to his "crew". I just watched the energy as he was talking to them. You may know that Gardner brings a "show" sensibility to something like this- he has done radio, he has done theater, he has done his own crowd moving keynotes. I imagine for most Ignite speakers, if not all, this mode of presenting is even more nerve wracking then just talking in front of people. There is the pace, and needing to get on and off stage fluidly, and "OMG what if I mess up!". Robin DeRose whispered to me, "I hope I do not throw up" (she did not). So again, I do not know what was being said (that is Gardner's blog post!) (cough!) (cough!), but it appeared he was encouraging, getting them to be both calm and excited. He brought people together to rally over this thing they would do individually, but also collectively. My hunch is, normally, Ignote speakers are left to sit there and just dwell on the pressure and how nervous they might feel. But here, as far as I can see, he did something to make them get out of that space, together as a group. Look at their expressions: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] This was all before the camera went on. Gardner did pull out a "thing" where he tried really really really hard to get an audience full of tired, most introverted educators to stand up and dance. Dance. In public. Maybe half to three quarters took part. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The talks were fantastic, but to me, it was watching this part develop, was even more special. And this was just day one... Another Day, Another Virtually Connecting Session This one was again one that was not mine to run, it was Robin DeRosa's. But Mia and I were continuing the discussion of our Big Idea, and we took the same room they were using. Talking loudly again. A lot of people were wearing their Hypothes.is shirts this day... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Here is where those small conversational bits leap up. The night before at dinner I was catching up with Remi Kalir, he spoke of his recent wedding, and then I was asking what his wife did (it's cool). And today, what he told me plugged right into The Project in a Big Way, and then as Mia and explained it, Remi got more and more excepted and roped in (and it would have continued if the Victual Connecting session did not have to start). But this small bit reminds me of the sometimes complex yet wonderful way the online connections can grow unexpectedly more valuable in person, and then back out again. I stayed only long enough to capture a photo... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] That's Robin DeRosa hosting with guests Nicole Mirra, Remi Kalir, Jeremy Dean and Joe Dillon. It's watchable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UhmNbUDRuw The Conversation: Starring Henry Jenkins and Jose Antonio Vargas I really enjoy the switch from the main session from a one person keynote to the conversation style of Digital Dreamers: Jose Antonio Vargas talks with Henry Jenkins. Literally, the two of them on stage in easy chairs, chatting. This also took me back to that 2008 SXSW I was at, and Jenkins was in a conversation format then with Steven Johnson talking about the complexity of narrative in shows like Lost and The Wire. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Henry Jenkins makes for interesting photos because of the intensity of his face, which is of course, overwhelmed by what he has to say. I honestly admit not knowing anything about Jose Antonio Vargas -- until today. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Sent to the US by his mother at age 12 from the Philippines, Vargas worked his way into journalism at the Washington Post, doing eventually election coverage. He talked about recognizing in the early days of social media, when Facebook, YouTube were relatively new, that he saw many undocumented people "outing" themselves in these spaces. It provided a way to assert their placeless place in America. Vargas was dealing with his own situation that he kept hidden. So he outed himself too, digitally, as a dreamer. And then he spoke of the long road to earn a "documented" status and asked a question I'd never thought of-- for everyone born here, what do we do yo earn our documented status? The answer is of course, "nothing" we do not have to. It's baked in. I got a whole list of sites / Vargas documentaries to dig into now. Like Define American a site aimed to use "the power of story to transcend politics and shift the conversation about immigrants, identity, and citizenship in a changing America." And the new site for #EmergingUS that is aiming to help America see it's future: We’re used to conversations about race in Black and White, but a new America is emerging: one that is more multi-ethnic, more immigrant, more colorful than ever before. 55 percent of the total U.S. population growth of the last 50 years is due to Latino and Asian immigrants, according to Pew Research Center. Immigrants and their descendants will constitute 88 percent of overall population growth in the next 50 years. At an unprecedented time when White Americans are an emerging racial minority?—?and the movement for Black lives has galvanized millions?—?immigration, yet again, is at the root of America’s transformation. But the public space where we tell our stories?—?the news media?—?isn’t keeping up. And, too often, when these stories are told, they lack the necessary nuance and context. As our country’s demographics shift, we need to change the way we talk about ourselves. We need to change the language and images we use to tell our stories and frame our narratives. This brought home an image I had from my first day in Irvine. The lady who owned the Airbnb I stayed at suggested a nearby international supermarket as a good place for lunch (she was right). She had told me it was owned by Iranians, but catered to a wide range of cultures- Chinese, Indian, South African. As I sat outside eating my gyro, surrounded by a lot of brown faces, speaking both English and other tongues, the obvious set in. I've of course heard it. But I was seeing, and among what America is going to be like in a generation or two. And the America of the Republican election is a fleeting demographic, much as they might hate it (I don't). Yes, I know. Duh. I knew this, I read of it, but sitting in the middle of it in Southern California... really brought home how much change this country is in for. But Vargas comes at from a holistic view. He expressed some caution about some situations where he suggested people may reach for the racist accusation to quickly. And so he sough to understand white America through a documentary (I have it cued but yet to watch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zjj1PmJcRM There was a lot more to this conversation (and I have left out all the stuff Henry Jenkins said, that is a sin of omission) (Later) -- I remember this video Jenkins shared about the identification of Superman as an "undocumented alien" a fantastic remix of pop culture into an important modern context. It's out there to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2UWiRiDKMM But again, both main sessions of the conference, to me, went out of the park. In a good, ridiculously not fitting baseball analogy way. But Wait, There Were More Ignites The Ignite sessions on day two were as powerful as day one. I saw the similar before coaching efforts by Gardner (less effort to get us dancing, probably to many people's relief). This post is going on way too long, so I don't have much commentary, except again, I was "blown away" by the variety and intensity of the talks. Remi Kalir set the pace strong with an affirmation of annotation. A white guy rapped about teaching kids with shows the Fresh Prince of Belair era to an incredibly brave person reveal and call to action by Kate Green. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I took a lot of photos of Nick, for some reason, which of course, lends itself to GIFdom... [caption id="attachment_62075" align="aligncenter" width="480"] Nick Ross, the Fresh Prince of DML Ignites[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] And look how well they move together! The audience had fun indeed, but can you guess what their experience was like? And Then What? After this long brain dump, I perhaps wonder if I have even come close to communicating what the event meant to me. How does a conference experience jump over the ordinary? I can just hypothesize. Having one is not guaranteed just by going, it's also what you bring, what you are open to trying, listening, extending... well yes, I am making up a list. As I have had these peak experiences before, I also wonder how that in-person level of energy can flow into, or be picked up post conference. And there is a plan being hatched out there that might try. Stay tuned. The wire is vibrating... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: The sign in the registration area at the DML 2016 conference. If you look closely you will realize that it is made of lego pieces, a lot of lego pieces. That is the craftwork of DML's Jamieson Pond aka "One Cool Guy". This is my flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/29517417574 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Ben Rimes has coined a clever new ds106 assignment that plays with visual mashups - in Fantasy TED Talks you are given free reign to: Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their "essential truth" that has come to be known as TED Talks. And Ben has gone that extra A-Game step to provide several starting examples and a template to work from. Power. Who would I want to bring on stage to TED? Hmm, think heavy hitters-- Maybe HG Wells? Einstein? Babe Ruth? Lincoln? Moses? Nah, I went for dogs: Lassie on Self Awareness: Lassie looks back at a life in acting (a body of work as a faithful companion) and shares the pain suppressed bue to her having to overcome her gone through a transpecies operation having been born a cat. She shares the eternal beauty of knowing your inner cat. Think of the struggle of having to rescue Timmy from the well knowing that internally, her natural instinct would be to lick her claws. The tags for this assignment are VisualAssignments & VisualAssignments316. Put yourself or your hero on the TED stage and craft their 18 minute opus. For the making of this one, I found in flickr quite a few Lassie like dogs, using this one because of her elegant tie: cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by tehzeta I actually found the perfect image by searching compfight on cat dog for this image of a dog wearing a cat costume: cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by NiteLynx To make it more in line with the store, I inserted a collie with a face in the right direction into this graphic (using the lasso selection tool and using Edit-Paste Special->Paste Into, making the canvas larger, and adding some text: cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by prendography On Ben's template, I used the magic brush to paint out the speaker on stage, and inserted my collie. For the screen, I used the polygon selection tool, again the Paste Into command, and then Image-Transform-Distort to reshape the image into the corners of the blank screen. Will 2007 be the year noted for the explosion of use for web video? Was it 2006? We just completed a 2 day conference on this at NMC, and I have this dreadful pile of great content I feel like I should get into and start discovering on my own. As soon as I can find that leap day, a secret un-committed 24 hours per week I can sneak into the calendar, maybe "Webday" can be inserted without much notice right before "Thursday"? In our conference, the platform that worked the best for pushing web video out in Elluminate ( as a web tour) was content from YouTube. So surprise at all consider their value measured in GoogleDollars. But is it easy to find educational content in YouTube? As category or tag, its a mixed bag as to what surfaces as "educational". So enter a new site, TeacherTube which is almost a dead ringer for YouTube in all aspects, except they are aiming to be purely content for/by educators. Is it a piece of the Googleplex? Doesn't appear so as a whois search leads to a webhost in Houston. Is it sanctioned by Google? Cannot tell. I've not yet taken much time to sniff out the content, but the front page looks like it might be a rich source. Will it be more free of the curft and crud at YouTube? Will the comments be less incendiary? Time will tell. But let me know what you think... is it worthy to have as its own silo? Beth has some screencasts there (and see her excellent Screencasting Primer)... I tried to load my wobbly google reader screencast but the upload speeds on my satellite connection pooped out on me. Or now as I try to even get back to the TeacherTube page I cannot even connect this morning. A linktribution goes to David Warlick. Nice find! Talking About Machinima posted 12 Aug '07, 11.49pm MDT PST on flickr NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life, Aug 12-18, 2007 I know folks are rather polarized in terms of being wildly excited about Second Life or being totally dismissive of it. Rather than just pontificating or bikcering about it, I'm more excited to be a part of giving it an experimental full bore run -- this is is something the NMC can and does do. So this week, we are running an entire conference in the world of Second Life, our Symposium on Creativity. Today we opened it with a round of our "studio" sessions (more below), and a reception at our newly designed "NMC Conference Center". It was not without snafus. At the time for our studio classes to start, suddenly no one was able to teleport (transport) from one place to another. A number of people ignored, or missed emails this week about registering their avatars with our participant list, so they could not get in. This stuff happens at RL conferences too- registrations get lost, baggage gets waylaid, we end up in the wrong city (maybe not, that is a joke for John Ittelson), but its not like we blast the whole concept of a conference, right? Life happens, you roll. When we first started talking about this earlier in the summer, I was pushing for a format completely devoid of "presentations" - I was pitching something that was all hands on. This did not completely pan out, but the spirit remains, and most of our presenters are cooperating by stepping out of the pure presentation mode box. At least that's how the proposals read. But we did keep this notion in the concept of our studio classes -- these are led by some of the masters in SL in areas of building, machinima, virtual photography, fashion design, and teaching. But rather than instructor led, participants get the basics to be creative in these areas, and are charged to spend the week on creating something, with the mentors available at scheduled time to assist. But the real action happens tomorrow, when the first full day of events happen, with breakouts, a keynote, some entertainment, all your typical conference stuff, except we are all home in our PJs with our avatars flying around and chatting. I have to say for just half day's worth of working this, I'm worn out; so when we have schedules next week that run from 8am to 8pm, we'll see how much fun it is. I think it will be. I could barely ignore an appearance of a new site called Inside a Dog, a new site from Victoria, Australia aimed at promoting youth reading and interesting in writing and those lovely old fashioned portable content devices called "books". But what a clever web theme (yes, I am biased)- that a program all the way in Australia will build it around a quip of a US comic. Gosh, over here, the equivalent program might be a drab acronym or something corny like "Reading 2.0". When was the last time something here was built around an Aussie pop culture reference (aside from the crocodile hunter guy)? Lintribution to HeyJude When Tom Woodward tweets something “might be a good #ds106 assignment”, he usually does not stop there http://t.co/oXnzUDewTQ #ds106 illustrating strange google autocompletes — Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 30, 2013 He goes ahead and tries it cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward and makes it into a ds106 Assignment (and blogs it, natch) Illustrating Odd Autocompletes: Google Autocomplete is an oracle with strange powers to bring oddities into your life. This assignment asks you to seek out that randomness. Start with a strong phrase (things like "I hate . . ." or "I love . . . " seem to work well.) and run through the alphabet looking for really odd autocompletes. When you find a good one, screen capture it and create an illustration that represents the search string. I tried a number o false starts, and got what I wanted by starting with “why do they” and got to starting “pi”, when I spotted “Why do they pierce cows”– my MOOCmocking radar went on. So I found a creative commons licensed image of a cow (now too hard, used google image search with advanced image for “free to use share modify”), but I wanted a closeup of the nose, Cow 0945 was perfect. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Lars Pistasj A similar search for “nose piercing” got me one from Wikipedia licensed the same This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, photo by User:Nicor I decided to update the cow’s tag to a relevant “106″. Meaning? MOOCs are all pivoted and beleaguered these days, so we can expect UdaXsarians to try anything to bling up the “lousy products” Kudos to Tom for following through, and keep in mind the many ideas like the ds106 Assignment Bank, the Remix Machine, and many of the classic assignments came from his cranium. flickr foto Rocket's Readyavailable on flickr Today was NASA's third time this week hoping on good weather for the liftoff of the Space Shuttle. How cool it went smoothly on July 4! I was among 70 avatars watching the coverage live from the International Space Flight Museum in Second Life (they capped the attendance at 70). You can catch some of it via snapshots I loaded into a flickr slide show, and if you like, you can listen to the audio that came from NASA during the 20 minutes or so I was there (I turned on my WireTap Pro to record all sound coming into my computer, there might be some background 'tap-tap' from Second Life's chat interface). The whole experience was unlike any other I can remember in terms of the communal excitement. Sure, there was the Apollo 11 lift off and moon landing I watched on black and white TV in my parent's living room, and there were the elementary school assemblies where we would gather to watch the astronauts splash down. But today was just like a volcano of excitement-- maybe because there were a lot of space fans here, but maybe, just maybe, because via Second Life, I shared the eperience vividly with 70 people... whom I do not even know. And yes, I have scavenged my own posting elsewhere, despite my best wishes, I find myself also blogging over at the NMC Campus Observer...just until we recruit some writers to share the load. It was getting tedious, even with my own multi-site bookmarklet tool, to load web sites I have scanned into both furl and del.icio.us-- especially as Firefox seemed to 60% of the time lose track of the Furl content. It's nothing wrong with Furl, I like the service, and it has most of the hooks I need... I just am trying to shave some minutes and keystrokes form my life. I've been more intrigued and using more often del.icio.us, so I decided to make it my primary dumping ground. There are more interesting ways people are writing applications that tap into it. My concern was that I would lose all the sites I had tracked earlier in Furl. But have no fear, Underdog, the Internet is here. Some quick googling got me to Anything Else's (and read aloud the URL ;-) Furl to Delicious tools. Skipping the pythion stuff (I am not nerdy enough), I downloaded the Windows executable, and ran it on my Dell. From a stark but functional command line, it prompted me for my account names and passwords, and began to chug away... It moved more than 260 sites from Furl, and used my Furl categories as del.icio.us ones.. and it created its own tag of furl2delicous that shows all the sites that made the move. Clever programmer, that means he can use the wider tag to see all the ones that anyone has moved with his tool. I love it when the tools can move data to and from these systems-- that is some of the simple stuff that I suppose Derek Morrison is after. How deftly can you move your course from one locked down megabuck Course Management System to another? Yes, of course the data is more complex..but than again it has all that IMS meta data that has been honed for the last 15 year. But I stray from my point on a tangent, and I am already lat to head home for dinner. I'm just a happy single site bookmarker... for now. I'm reading along side Bryan Alexander and others in his "near-future" science fiction reading "club" (is it a club? a group?). What does one do in a reading group? I guess you read! Outlining the reasons for joining along and the braided stream of connections to his choice of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife may make it many scrolls before I even get to the book. Bryan published his first post at his 52% depth gauge into the book. I'm almost at the same level in the tank, just about ready to go into chapter 24, I am 55.8% into it. One of the many reasons the book relates to me is where it is set; in the arid southwest, some in Las Vegas, but mostly centered in a near future Phoenix where water is scarce, and where I have lived since 1987. Having come here to study Geology, that might be part of my own interest in how this place even works as major city in a place lacking water in place. The interest may have started in my love of the King of Desert rats (that's an honorable term) Edward Abbey, where the extremes of the desert and his disdain (but acceptance) of urbanization mingle, sometimes monkey wrenching - the idea of environmentalists possibly blowing up the damn creating Lake Powell (or Lake Foul as Hayduke would call it) happens at another dam in the book (though not for the same reasons). The precedent was a 1981 stunt by Earth First where they unfurled a 300 foot poster simulation of a crack on Glen Canyon Dam. Abbey's writings likely led me to Charles Bowden; my Geology interests got me to John McPhee's Basin and Range, perhaps one of the most approachable things to read and learn about Geologists. That took me to McPhee's Encounter of the Archdruid which gets to the heart of the battle between environmentalists wishing to keep rivers free and those in the 1960s who sought to contain, control, and manage them for power and delivering water to cities built in places that could sustain populations otherwise. McPhee's book is how two opponents on the issue, the Sierra Club's David Brower and the Bureau of Reclamations Floyd Dominy go on a river trip together in the Colorado River through Glen Canyon, what is now buried by Lake Powell. It's startling to think of people with completely polar opinions on an issue to spend that much time together listening to each other. It almost sounds like non-fiction. But nothing I have read provides more insight to understanding the water issues in the American southwest is Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert My weather beaten copy has written inside a date of 1990, right in the middle of my Geology grad school era at Arizona State University. I cannot recommend a book more highly. The recipe for what plays out as the plot of The Water Knife is outlined by Reisner: A land that few people knew first hand in the mid 1900s, remote and distant from the east coast. Battling bureaucracies and big egos at work at the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers The dividing of water flowing through the Colorado River by decree of the 1922 Colorado River Compact between the 7 states that the river flows through. The allocations were based on water flow of of an era of unusually high flow and climate conditions different from now. The states are now allowed by that law the same amount of water, but the supply is much less. It's no surprise that Cadillac Desert is mentioned so referentially in The Water Knife, multiple times. Characters have valuable first editions. When Mike Ratan offers his copy to young Maria, he describes it, "It's kind of how we got where we are now... I think people should start with this. It's the bible when it comes to water." And its even more telling when Maria refuses the book. Her condition is so desperate, she has no need to understand history. She rejects history: She glared at him. "I don't need books about how things used to be. Everybody talks about how things used to be, I need a book about how I'm supposed to live now. Unless you got a book like that, I don't need the weight." She flicked her hand at the thing, lying in the counter. "I mean, seriously. It's paper." A week or so before he chose The Water Knife, Bryan included me on an email to a few people where he shared: Very interesting futures work around Phoenix: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303815839_Designing_an_Experiential_Scenario_The_People_Who_Vanished "The name Hohokam is an O’odham word meaning “the people who vanished” (Mays & Gorokhovich, 2010). Being an oral culture, it is unknown what they called themselves. So a question which we hoped to evoke for participants at Emerge became: “could the people of today’s Phoenix be the next to vanish from the valley?”" While there is a citation there, my memory of what I had known about the Hohokam, was that the O’odham meant "All Used Up" (that is used in The Water Knife too as well as Wikipedia), so my reply (not that this is an expertise of mine) was: They might check their research better. What I remember (and look it up in Wikipedia) is the word Hohokam was derived from means "used up". Their culture was not just in the Valley of the sun, it reached well into southern Arizona, past Tucson, including the massive structure still standing at Casa Grande, and north almost to Flagstaff. Their culture, from like 800-1300 or 1400 grew from agricultural to city centers sophisticated, with established trade with other cultures, there are ball courts. The canal systems Howard describes were all created with hand tools, and I've heard they have grades that drop only inches per mile, irrigating off of the Salt River. The climate then was likely different from now; that bone dry river you see now in Phoenix flowed much more regularly. I don't think you can compare the modern to the ancient living. Temperatures are several degrees warmer year to year from the effect of all the concrete and asphalt covering the land. Plus people several hundred years ago did not complain about the heat in social media, they adapted ;-) They weren't the only cultures to vanish in the southwest, high civilizations also vanished without known reasons from the Pueblo cultures of northern AZ and New Mexico, including Chaco Canyon. It's still debated if it was climate change (long term drought?), there were theories that the effort in building cleared major forests, and changed erosional patterns' or maybe it was disease that spread rampantly, or maybe it was just good old fashioned violence. Las Vegas probably has more to worry about than Phoenix; they are having to spend billions to re-engineer their pumping system from a dropping Lake Mead; I heard a news story that at least Vegas was able to reduce consumption by 40%. I am not expert, and I only skimmed their article, but more homework might be in order. It was not one tribe vanishing from Phoenix, it was a broader crises. Still could happen, though. Keep in mind that there were about 400 years between the disappearance of the Hohokam and the arrival of Mormon settles who "discovered" their canals. That story about Lake Mead having to build a "third straw" comes in to play to in the Water Knife. Despite all my reading into the issues of water supply, I must admit I really like my long hot showers (well when I am not home because my hot water heater is small, and does not last too long). I sometimes get lost in thought, and I am pretty sure some of my best ideas from the few months I was on fellowship at Thompson Rivers University in 2014-2015... came from the shower. Sometimes I step back and wonder about how easy it is to take for granted a large amount of clean, and when we want, warm, water pouring out of the wall. What if we lived in a time where that was an unreasonable luxury? While staying last year in an AirBnB in Chicago, the older apartment's shower felt like a possible setting for a time when the water... stopped. I had made a really short video, but I noticed I had not published it.. until tonight. What would it be like, to be... waterless? https://vimeo.com/177027215 I did write Bryan at that time, because I was wondering if he knew of any science fiction of a time when water was not plentiful. He recommended a short story called The Tamarisk Hunter with a link to a podcast audiobook version: “The Tamarisk Hunter” originally appeared in the environmental journal High Country News. It was inspired by the only thing that really matters in the Western U.S. — water. Tamarisk or Salt Cedar are one of those many times when people thought it was a good idea to introduce a plant species that becomes an invasive horror story. They have invaded and crowded out native plants in every southwestern river system, and they consume a huge amount of water. The story again was a near future time when water was scarce, states fought over rights, and seems like a precursor to the Water Knife. And there is a good reason... the author of the Tamarisk Hunter was this person named... Paolo Bacigalupi (also available on Paolo's site). And Bacigalupi references his earlier work in The Water Knife when Angel tells Lucy: You know that tamarisk hunters, in the old days, would always share water when they met each other on the Colorado? But the connection with this book goes deeper. Last summer while visiting my friends in Paonia, we were discussion science fiction, and I brought up this story--- my hosts Ken and Oogie knew the story before I finished describing it. Even more, they knew the author, because Paolo lives in the same small town. they said he does a lot of his writing in the local hangout, Revolution Brewery. That's all my prelude to The Water Knife. But I am loving this book for many reasons- it's in a setting I know well, so when they mention an area known as "PV" I know they are talking about Paradise Valley. The suburban Phoenix, though in part ruins in the story, are places I am familiar with. The chapter swirls through three characters that are not connected in the beginning, though as the story spins, we know there is a connection. None of them seem too likely a heroic character, and they in a way all feel doomed (I am only 55.8% through). The very book title is interesting if you pick at it. What is a "water knife"? Obviously a knife made of water would be useless. But we know soon it is a name for what Angel does for water boss Catherine Case in Vegas, he literally cuts the water supply of other places (blowing up canals, destroying a water plant, or just killing people in the business) to bolster the supply for Vegas. But think again- he does not cut the water, he cuts all the things, people that provide the water. And Angel denies what he is (as a cover? confuser?): "Water knives don't exist," he said. "That's just something people talk about. It's a myth, right? Like the chupacabra. It's just something people make up so they can have a bogeyman to blame when shit goes wrong." I love that he uses chupacabra ("goat sucker") a word I learned about while in Puerto Rico, where the story likely originated from: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The setting is not a distant low water future like Dune -- it is so close it could be... now. But not all. The design of the "arcology" structures, the reclaiming of water in a way to sustain life for a smaller number of (privileged) people (made possible by water knifing the supplies of those left outside). While plausible, the arcology is still conceptual. And again, there is a local connection- the concept of a self contained sustainable architecture comes right from the ideas of Paolo Soleri, who used it to describe his ideas for Arcosanti (halfway between Phoenix and Flagstaff). [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by CodyR under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Are you following the lines? The ideas of Paolo Soleri are used by author Paolo Bacigalupi. There are "data glasses" used to identify people, again, near futuristic. The digital water meters at sinks. The ClearSac for the less fortunate to turn urine into water (it sounds like it was partly effective). An ecstasy-like drug called "Bubble". I like how they talk disparaging of Arizona people as "Zoners"-- in reality it's a term I remember people in Sn Diego calling all the people from here who go there for vacation, though they call us "Zonies". What does not seem implausible is the quasi breakdown of social order in light of environmental crises, the diminishing national power as states do things like use militias to keep the "waterless" (mostly the Texans apparently driven out by hurricanes and sea floor rising). It seems interesting that Las vegas would turn out to be a power player, perhaps driven to be more "Scrappy" by having maybe the least access to water. You think that Catherine Case is the real power player, but it takes a while to realize that the real power holders and the ones to fear are "Calis" or Californians. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] This fits into the story of water history of Cadillac Desert, and you read of the schemes that have drained Mono Lake for moving water 300 miles to Los Angeles (and of course the movie Chinatown). Lucy gives Angel a lecture on this: California. Those people know how to play the game. Los Angeles, San Diego. The Imperial Valley companies. These people know how to fight for water. It's in their veins. Their blood. They've been killing places for water for five generations. They're good at it. And this is what makes the book so good to me- it's a novel, it's a near future, but it completely is in sync with the history of water in the southwest, its division by a likely uneasy "pact" between the states that shared the water, and how that might crumble when the water drastically is decreased. I've not read how this happened, and there probably is no inciting event. This is not a future story driven by an aliens from outer space or an asteroid, it is not even an apocalypse because it just happens gradually. That's what makes it realistic science fiction. Also, with 44.2% to go, I have no idea what is going to happen. I am thinking it's not going to end happily. But I'm hooked on this book. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: I went to my own flickr photos, I had a few possible photos of mud cracks in dry lake beds, but when I searched on "dry" for some reason this one of an old water fixture, rusty, disconnected, called to me. You ought to listen to those calls. This is in the back of my friend's restaurant, the Randall House in Pine, AZ (if you like the web site, thanks), and the photo is on flickr https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14522849444 and shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Cocomment is an interesting web technology that does some neat things but perhaps is not so wide it used to reach a next level of progress. It acts as a service of sorts, to tackle the age old (or 3 year old) problem of not knowing what happens to the "conversations" you leave as comments distributed on other blogs. It aims to register your commenting in a way that allows you to track it. On first iteration, it required you to click a JavaScript bookmark tool for every new comment you posted. ( forgot to do this 9 out of 10 times. Then I got clued into a Firefox Greasemonkey script that automated it. I worked well for a few weeks, then Cocomment changed and the script got more wonky. Then following a clue from Amy G, I found coComment has developed its own Firefox extension that sits in the bottom of your browser, works reliably, and gives you a visual clue when your cocomment streams have some new additions: Cocomment tracks your comments, and those by other cocommenters who are in the same conversation in a public page, e.g. http://www.cocomment.com/comments/cogdog. I have it as an RSS feed in my aggregator too, but as you can see, my own stream is pretty much my comments and the ever prolific Gardner Campbell, a.k.a Dr. Glu (another story). So in the hand of a few users, you do not yet have (or I do not have) the Wisdom of Crowds thang. Gardner is a grand commenter, with zest, irony, insight, and clever references, he comments all over the web... and he uses cocomment to syndicate his external activity in the top of the sidebar of his Gardner Writes blog There is a new feature, where cocomment lists your "neighbours" (apparently this is a British feature?) - the co-comment pages of other users who have commented on the same conversations: Potentially, it might provide that hop, skip, click way to find interesting content and people the same way surfing del.icio.us taggers does. And "tag!" you're it, you can now "tag" your co-comments (I have not even wrapped my head around how/why I might do that:) Bottom line, cocomment does something neat, it aims to connect a strand of external content that are usually not connected, it is evolving new features, yet I am just not absolutely sure if it is finding the "sweet spot", the so-called Tipping Point into Something Really Big (That Might Even Be Bought By Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/.....). But I am using it, keeping an eye on it. Dress it up with ad talk like "Dominate Any Market", but to me Super Blog Submitter Pro is nothing short of spammers delight. Is this a virtuous, noble, make your Mom proud, business or what: The VooDooBlogger software is amazing in every respect! ... Imagine creating entire blog farms in a matter of hours instead of months! ... How would you like to setup a brand new domain and instantly have 1000's of 100% OnTopic, Keyword Specific Targeted Oneway Backlinks within minutes. Not days, not hours... MINUTES. THE MOST ADVANCED SOFTWARE OF IT'S TYPE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. 100X MORE POWERFUL THAN COMPETITORS WHO SELL FOR $850 AND STILL MAKE YOU DO MOST OF THE WORK. NOT ONLY CAN YOU MASS CREATE UNIQUE BLOG ACCOUNTS THAT LAST, BUT YOU ARE ALSO ABLE TO GO BACK AT ANY TIME AND MASS POST TO ALL BLOGS YOU HAVE CREATED, OR EVEN MASS POST TO SMALLER BLOG CLUSTERS THAT YOU HAVE CREATED! YOU DECIDE.... ALMOST TOTAL AUTOMATION IN CREATING NEW BLOG ACCOUNTS, OR BLOGS CREATED USING VARIATIONS OF YOUR PERSONAL INPUT, AND ALL BLOGS CREATED WITH THE CORRECT SETTINGS PRE-INSTALLED TO MAXIMIZE BLOG/PING PROJECTS. Or, better known as, "We Be Spam" or "Spam Out of the Can:. Not that I was looking for it, just cleaning out a pile of roaches that got stuck in Spam Karma 2, and noticed a number of URLs linking back to this roach farm. I forgot what I was looking for in my flickr photos, but the browser tab has been open to this one for a while. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6131267058 A Book About Me flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license "A Book About Me" would have been published (by crayon) in 1971, as I gather a second grade assignment. That would have been in Ms. Foreman's class. I was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in October 1970 (which means this year coming up on a 50 year mark). In this book, apparently I shared some of my daily routines. This was amongst the boxes of memories my Mom had saved, the flick photo published in September 2011 means this was found when my sisters and I cleaned out her house after she passed away the month before. I must have scanned a few pages, the caption in the flickr photo leads to what I had published then on Issu (I had not even known I had an account there). There seems to be no embed options, but for some page turning fun, see https://issuu.com/cogdog/docs/book-about-me. Warning- Contains illustrations of me peeing, that's for urine testing purposes. If I can make out my crude writing, this is reference to the pre-blood testing era when diabetics had to do urine testing: In the morning I make. I don't make in the cup.A half hour later, I make in a cup.(Levine, 1971, pp1-2) "Making" is urinating. In those days you would first empty your bladder, ten collect a sample so it was relative more recent into a cup, and then follow with the little Clinitest science kit. Then I test. First my Acetone then my Sugar Acetone is a test for ketones, something that signified problems at both very high and very low sugar levels. This test was a dip stick and compare to a color chart. For sugar, it was ten drops of water plus 2 of urine, then drop in the tablet that fizzed and turned a color to indicate a relative measure of blood sugar (it was approximate as what ends up in the urine is relevant to blood sugar some time previously). One would hope for blue, Negative, or low. Not Orange, which was High. After I test dady [Daddy] gives my insulin. Today he tried my stoach [stomach]. He missed.(Levine, 1971, p3) The insulin was by injection. I seriously doubt my Dad missed. He may have joked some, to calm me (or himself). Then I have breakfast. I have a big breakfast.(Levine, 1971, p4) Not much different than 2020! After I eat, I brush my teeth. I wash my hands.(Levine, 1971, p5) Taking care of the germs. And the teeth. I am pretty sure there was more to the story. Maybe I did not scan the full book, but maybe I was saving up for a sequel. Anyhow, I may have to add this to my publication list. There's no copyright in the book. Featured Image: A scan of the "book" published (by me) on Issu. Consider it public domain. Why not? The diagnosis is likely on the spectrum of an obsession. In the buildup to the first open version of the open digital storytelling course, the one, the only, DS106, I first saw a sign with a 106 on it. I noticed it. It was so long ago that what I was doing at the time was... running, training for a half marathon (I did and I still do hate running). I saw a 106 marker on the canal trail in Mesa, Arizona and took a picture December 18, 2010, adding in some color saturation effect. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2010/365/349 Psychic 106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] This was 11 days after Jim Groom had openly blogged the idea of running ds106 as an open and online experiment, so 106 was on my mind. That's where it started. I've seen (and stayed in a few) hotel room 106's [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Behind the #ds106 Door flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] I've stopped at lot of highway mile markers [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Though I walk through the #ds106 of the valley of death... flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] I note them when I test my blood sugar [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Bleeding ds106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Sometimes I just make them out of objects (or act like some mysterious entity does it) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]106 Juniper Berries flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] They appear on license plates [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]License to do DS106 in British Columbia flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] You start looking at street addresses, and when you starting seeing 100, 104... you start preparing to find a 106 [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]The Door to 106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] You find them on dials [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]The Zenith At La Posada is Fixed on #DS106 Radio flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] I also made this into a DS106 assignment. So it's been 7 and a half years since that first 106 photo and I find, when I'm out, my secondary senses are usually noticing signs and addresses and license plates, as my brain seems tuned into looking for that pattern. I think there is something to that noticing. It was one of the things I heard often after our DS106 photo activities (e.g. the "Photo Safari") and daily creates is that participants just started paying more attention to the every day world around them. They started looking for converging lines and patterns in carpet and fonts on signs and creative window reflections. Maybe there are some research studies out there about such benefits. There was one I came across recently-- The daily digital practice as a form of self-care: Using photography for everyday well-being, but I think more about what it means for the brain, the thinking to be paying more attention to the world around us. More like Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking: A Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation who became more aware of things she missed walking around New York City by spending time walking with various specialists. Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer. Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see—if only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. That's a bit closer to what I think my habit does, but I am wondering too about activities where you ask people to be attuned to one pattern, be it a course number or a word, and just spend time setting the brain to always be looking for that in the world. This came to mind again listening to Bonni Stachowiak in her own episode of the Teaching in Higher Education podcast talk about her fascination with the number 208... in episode 208 (as it happens I am getting interviewed by Bonni this week). so I am not the only one who gets obsessed with a number. I bet there's 106 different ideas for this kind of noticing activity... or is it just a weird obsession? Featured Image: screen shot of my flickr photos tagged 106 all photos by me in my flick account and I happily toss into the public domain under Creative Commons CC0 In consulting You Show participants on their site organization, I am trying to help them see there are more opportunities for the front page than the long river of reverse chronological ordered posts. Many themes (like the Virtue Theme on the You Show) give you an option to display posts from a category, rather than just the newest. I helped Franzi today flip hers using the stick Twenty Fourteen Theme; there is an option in the Customizer to put posts tagged "featured" in the front magazine style layout. For themes that do not provide this, I have gone the route of customizing the Wordpress Loop query used on the front page. A non hacking route is the Category Excluder from Theme Customizer plugin which lets you choose which categories not to display on the front page. This capability becomes very useful on Feed Wordpress type aggregation hubs because the inflow of posts is so high (hopefully) that a river of new posts is not useful. My strategy is to recommend that people who are admins on the site do some curating-by editing aggregated posts to add a category (or tag), they can create a set of "featured" posts (viewable via the Category Archive view). I was never able to get the Connected Courses folks to grasp this idea; maybe no one wanted that responsibility. I did try using a rating plugin on the ETMOOC hub that enabled a "highest rated" view but not too many people voted. As a site admin, it helps to do this via a category process because it forces you to regularly review incoming stuff. I set it up on the You Show site, we have a category called "Highlight Reel" we can add to posts: But the process for getting to the posts to add the category was.. tedious. In an archive view, there is no way to edit that post, and because the links in the syndication hub go out to the site, it is not an option to view the post, and then click the "Edit" button in the admin bar. Some themes add an "edit" link in the templates so you can do this, but Virtue does not. It's a pretty easy thing to add, if you can find the write template file (this varies from theme to theme, in Virtue, it was in /templates/content). The thing you want to add is the wordpress function edit_post_link. There are options you can use on that function to add spans and or css classes, but at it's simplest, somewhere in the loop where it is spitting out content for each post, add something like: What this does is add an "edit" link next to each post that can only be seen by users that are logged in with post editing privileges (Editor, Admin, etc). Visitors to the site will not see them. These helps some, because if I see a post on the flow I'd like to feature, I just: Click the Edit Post link In the editor, click the category to add Update the post It's not bad, but still seems 3 steps when all we need to do is to add a category. So I hacked something in. I will need a way to send from the clicked link a variable that identifies the post ID number I am updating. In my (child) theme functions.php, I do need a function that allows Wordpress to understand extra URL parameters. For my site, I am using ones already created for the signup form: /* ----- add allowable url parameter for urls */ add_filter('query_vars', 'youshow_parameter_queryvars' ); function youshow_parameter_queryvars( $qvars ) // allow parameters to be passed in wordpress query strings { $qvars[] = 'pid'; // when we need to pass a post id return $qvars; } This means I can send to a Wordpress URL something like: http://www.mysite.org/feature-this/?pid=23 And my custom template for this page named Feature This has some logic it can act on. Next, I made a function that can put the link to mark a post as featured, and make it so only people logged in with editing privileges can see (and click) on it. function get_highlight_post_link ( $post_id, $toolslug = 'feature-this' ) { // only for editors and above if ( current_user_can('publish_pages') ) { return (' [Feature This]'); } } I send the function get_highlight_post_link() a value for the post I want to affect. By default, the link will be to a page on my site with a url / slug name of feature-this. And it opens in a new window so I don't lose my place This is solely so I can add this to my templates. By making it a function, I can use it more than one template. In my theme, I find the part of the code that echoes the meta data below a post, and add in: ... (meta data theme stuff like date, comments, categories) Now... (if anyone is still with me). I create a page that has the slug name (url) of feature-this which means if I create and upload a new theme template named page-feature-this I can put in stuff that only is used on the one page. The way to do this is to copy the basic page.php template for your theme, and rename it page-feature-this. Put this code at the top: The energy was electric yesterday at our system's first introduction to "Pachyderm" at our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day. The reaction to the potential of Pachyderm and the level of participation in the afternoon activities were beyond our wildest expectations. Much had to do with the enthusiasm guest speaker Peter Samis brought with him from SFMOMA and his demonstration with examples from Pachyderm products Making Sense of Modern Art and Ansel Adams at 100 . Quite a few of our participants said that they may have briefly skimmed these sites previously when we announced this event, the presentation by Peter that highlighted the power of framing questions and context around a concept, and connecting it to other contextual layered screens, really made it click. We had our concerns about faculty from Math, Chemistry, Economics, Medical Transcription, Reading, English, Biology, etc connecting with rich content about art. They did. We had them do an initial activity with Pachyderm storyboards using as content the art work on display from the Paradise Valley Community College Buxton Art Collection. They not only were willing to do this, we almost had to forcefully get them to stop the activity. Things to be posted in the next weeks include Peter's presentation, event photos, the video of Warren Buxton with the stories about his art collection, samples of the storyboards produced by the participants, and the ideas they generated in their discipline discussion groups. We avoided spiral paths down to definitions of "learning objects", "re-usable", meta-data, etc, and instead generated ideas on the potential and content ideas for what could be done in a Pachyderm environment. Here's the news for the Pachy programming team. Our faculty want to use this very much. Next week. Earlier if possible ;-) The elephant is soaring. One dog tired blog trend here is kicking the cat about whether "blogging is dead". After last week's 2009 NMC Summer Conference, I have a resurgent optimism for the old long form (that is greater than 140 characters). cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog After our 2008 conference at Princeton, I was interested in finding a more coherent way of archiving or capturing the synopsis of the conference sessions- my dream would haveing at least one blogger doing it per session, but as a trial run this time, I decided to opt for inviting three "dedicated" bloggers to cover the plenary sessions (keynotes and the NMC Five Minutes of Fame). The draw would be a front row seat with electricity and a hard wire ethernet- if you are experiencing most conferences these days, you know that the norm (especially in hotel venues) is crappy wireless and about 3 public outlets per auditorium. It seemed like an okay carrot. I also tossed in a TweetUp Badge (woohoo, big spender). We developed a rigorous, peer reviewed process for selecting our Conference Bloggers-- I looked at the registration list and picked three people I liked and respected-- Chris Lott (http://chrislott.org/) Leslie-Madsen Brooks (http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/) Gardner Campbell (http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1) I did not give them much guidance or rules- I was not asking for rah rah and I chose them because they are critical people who are not afraid to write against the flow. I emailed them: If you are interested, just let me know. It's not an expectation that you blog lavish praise for the sessions (we expect them to be great enough to speak for themselves); we just want to increase the amount of social media sharing of the event activities, and having some regular blogging is a piece of that strategy. I did not expect them to be scribes, but they all managed to provide an amazing amount of recording of the speakers, and much more with prolific linking and embedded photos. And they were tweeting. I would guess they were all worn out at the end of the sessions. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But my oh my, I am still completely bowled over at hoe much they added to the experience by doing more than just summarizing. I expected both praise and criticism on the writeups for Kathy Sierra's opening keynote on Creating Passionate Learners: http://chrislott.org/story/nmc-2009-creating-passionate-learners-kathy-s... http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/2009/06/live-blogging-kathy-sierra-cre... http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=785 http://chrislott.org/story/more-on-creating-passionate-learners-with-kat... http://chrislott.org/story/the-value-of-the-stump-speech/ There is an amazing comment thread, a little heated at points, following Chris's post on More on Creating Passionate Users... with Kathy herself chiming in: Really, Chris and Jim, if you're going to insist on being all *thoughtful* in your criticism, the internet might implode. Feels like I've slipped into a parallel universe where people make honest critiques, and actually care that the person they're criticizing understands their perspective (and that it's not personal). Weird. So"¦ thank-you for giving me new things to consider, and helping me strengthen the things I care about. My gosh it feels like the good old blog days of 2005! Long rambling posts, back and forth darting comments, and look! Actual compound sentences not bounded by tweet-length mindsets. This continued in the posts about Friday;s keynote by Marco Torres: http://chrislott.org/story/marco-torres-keynote-nmc-2009/ http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=791 http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/2009/06/liveblog-marco-torres-at-new-m... http://chrislott.org/story/more-on-marco-torres-nmc-2009-keynote/ What I really liked is that our bloggers played off of each other's, interconnecting the posts even more. But wait, there's more. I did not ask them to be scribes, but look at the incredible detail tracked on the Five Minutes of Fame sessioon (10 mini presentations in an hour) and the Centers of Excellence Awards: http://chrislott.org/story/five-minutes-of-fame-nmc-2009/ http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/2009/06/liveblogging-another-new-media... http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=799 http://chrislott.org/story/nmc-2009-center-of-excellence-award/ http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=803 But the real gem was the coverage by Chris and Gardner (Leslie had to leave early for another commitment) for the closing tribute session to Doug Engelbart, where he was presented the NMC Fellows award. http://chrislott.org/story/nmc-2009-a-tribute-to-doug-engelbart/ http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=803 cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I knew how much this moment meant to Gardner- to call Engelbart a "hero" for him is a massive understatement. I glanced over a few times at Dr Glu during the session - instead of scrambling to type at the keyboard, he was taking it all in with what I guess was a tsunami of emotion. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I cannot tell you my likly three blog readers (including Mom, hi!) what an epic post Gardner created in NMC 2009 Closing Plenary: Dreams About How The World Could Be-- seriously, this is easily one of the best blog posts I have ever read. Several times Doug covers his face in genuine humility. Can he be the person they're describing? Certainly he did not do his work alone. But of all the great seers and doers of the nascent information age, Doug's achievement is the most singular, the most to be driven by a single imagination. And yet his imagination was never the point. Always, the goal was to enable us to identify, harness, and raise our collective IQ. The idea was to augment human intellects one by one, but by means of a fine tracing of mental and spiritual connections from which would emerge a true "capability infrastructure" to prepare us for the dangers, questions, and opportunities we would encounter as civilization continues to develop. Doug thought at scale. He understood that a car is not simply a faster tricycle. He had faith that an augmented intellect, joined to millions of other augmented intellects, could clarify individual thought even as it empowered vast new modes of thinking, new modes of complex understanding that could grasp intricately meaningful symbols as quickly and comprehensively as we can recognize a loved one's face. For Doug, computers are the tools we have invented in our quest for a new language, even a meta-language. A manner of speaking that can move us through the enmiring complexities of our shared lives and dreams, and thus help us to use those complex lives and dreams wisely instead of being their puppets or victims. My oh my- I would describe this is poetry. And a big thanks goes to my three colleagues for demonstrating to me, at least for this moment, that the power of the long blog post still stands up. And they did all this for a good seat and an orange twitter tag? I don't think so. Flip down the tweetdeck and blog something today- posts like these stand tests of time. 20080423 Foto by ghbrett posted 23 Apr '08, 8.51am MDT PST on flickr Snap of me as camera man during Virtual Worlds panel at Internet2 Spring Member Mtg. CD Barkley (aka Alan Levine) giving his presentation in character in world. George Brett, the photographer here, had invited me to be a panelist on a virtual worlds session at the Spring 2008 Internet2 Meeting in Arlington... and I participated remotely from home in Strawberry Arizona. George was the camera man and microphone for my "presence". It was after I agreed to participate that he mentioned the session started at 8:45 AM. That's fine, I told him, I wake up early. No, that is 8:45 AM on the Easr Coast, Gah! I had to wake at 5:00 AM to comb my fur. I was the goofy avatar among some big VWorld names like Michael Rowe from IBM and Mark McCahill from Croquet. I had but 10 minutes to blab about how NMC got into Second Life, what we've learned, some observations about people's "attachment" to avatars, the notion that what happens in the space is more important than having a pretty space, blah blah blah. Michael Rowe spoke before me and did a good dismissal of Powerpoint, and then I came on w/o any slides or prepared notes. With this last round of conferences, I am so much more dog tired of people tying their sessions completely to slides, even when they are pretty slides. If I can read your words, bullets on screen, you are wasting my time by giving me information I can consume online. I am tired of monotone reading. Presentation is a good smidgen of performance, and man, have I been to some bad shows lately. I did about 4 sessions last week that were more conversational, and I am trying to avoid talking *to* the slides. I am invested in imagery, but am trying to get out of the bind my making them the drum I row the boat too. Your audience will appreciate and grok your message much more if you come across as a human, and if you dont read the damn slides to them. Anyhow, that was a rant off the track. Thanks again George for setting this up! This presentation was almost a month ago, and is pretty much (at least for now) the cap of my TRU Fellowship, but we just got ahold of the video. Brian Lamb and I were invited to do a live streamed presentation from the University of Victoria (thanks for setting it up, Valerie Irvine). This was the end of a series of webinars for Open Education Week that were coordinated by BC Campus (and thanks to Clint Lalonde for making it happen). The title of our talk “The Open Web (a) Lost (b) Reclaimed (c) Co-claimed (d) All of the above?” was meant to get at what we see as un-necessary dichotomies in ed tech (and also to poke at multiple choice). This was the landscape setting to talk about the work we did at TRU during my stint, both the SPLOT tools and the You Show open seminar. We started by describing the assertion that there is an open web that was lost (an excuse for me to slip in Another Web Bites the Dust). But the real catalyst for what were conversations Brian and I had at our branch office at the Fox and Hound, was the observation by Martin Weller: But I don’t see such a big change 2010-2015 – which is not to say lots hasn’t happened. In specific areas I’m sure people will say “assessment has changed radically” or similar, but I don’t feel there has been this major social technological change that has then impacted upon education. It’s been a case of making the existing things better, bigger, more world-controlling. So does this mean we are due another major change soon? Or do we we enter a period now of settling down, of existing stuff expanding? We went through the multiple choices in the title, by reviewing the idea of Reclaiming the Web or my middle of the road idea of Co-Claiming the Web. In the Challenges of Open Education pointed out some of the side taking we saw when our friend (and You Show Star) D’Arcy Norman blogged about the False Dichotomy of LMS vs the Open Web (agreed that the dichotomy is not only false, but not needed). For the TRU work, we started with an overview of the SPLOT Tools and The You Show. We ended with examples of what TRU folks did with these tools and in the You Show. As blogged earlier, we did our presentation inside a WordPress site, meaning the presentation is itself the resource (chuck full of links). Brian and I also teased and set things up with a bit of role play via twitter, in which we seemed to be taking un-necessary sides ourselves, and play arguing. Some thought it a bit much, but I say pfffffft it was a performance before the show. Has it really been a month since I left TRU? There are some stray bits I still hope to do; the SPLOT tools all need a bit of documentation in the github repos, I went through the still syndicating hub of the You Show and one clicked posts to add to the highlight reel (hey, there is even a post to describe how that is done). And then there are the papers I hope to write… well there are some notes on paper. Portions of this presentation will feed into one Brian and I hope to present November at the 2015 Open Education conference in Vancouver. Yep, stuff is never quite done. As mentioned, we got the keys to the video archive: Note: the video seems to have disappeared, probably best for all! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/7155294657 Open Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Of the things I hang on my personal Google home page (well you cannot see it beyond a snapshot, but, it is how you can create a mashup of content from many sources, feeds, photos, gmail, search tools. totally customizable), my favorite is the flickr photo wallet module. Very simply, everytime you go "home" you see a random photo from yours (or any other) flickr account. I've tried a few, but most of them do not reach back to all of your photos. So my memory game is to glance at the page when it loads and try to remember where or what the picture is from (I recently crossed the 2000 photo count, no big compared to others, but goes back to 2004). This one stumped me- I could not tell what it was, where it was from. Was it insects? Sushi? Some bad conference buffet? Dog doo? Nope- had to check the original it was amber like "gum", hard mineral like products from New Zealand Kauri trees, from my visit to the Kauri Museum in 2004. So this is maybe a stretch, but a collection of mystery photos posted to a particular flickr account, tag, set, could be a fun educational activity, where a random one is syndicated to a page, be it this way, or via a flickr badge. It's time to get all wide-eyed and get started on my August project- to recast the ds106 Assignment Bank into a wordpress theme that would have the functionality built into it for people to create other kinds of sites with the same features. The first step was to create the development site, which shall remain in the wide open so you can watch it grow/implode -- it is live now with nothing on it at http://bank.ds106.us/. The code will go soon to github as well. The things that need to be done are: Pull out a lot of things that are hard coded (the types of assignments, etc) and turn them into theme options. This would mean you can fill in the names of things like "Pastry", "Algebra" and have them appear as main types of assignments. Create other theme options, like even figuring out of what they are called "Assignments" should be customizable, a logo field to upload, CSS options like icons for the assignment types, options to allow new assignments to be set to published or draft Cleanup or re-do the theme style. What we have now is built from a 960css grid theme, but there is a pile of slapped on CSS that might need untangling. The other option (and how I might be leaning), si to start with a clean The difference between the photo above and trying to get help from twitter is that there are no dogs on the inside of the door. A new twitter account created for an upcoming educational project in Mexico-- essentially does not exist beyond the limits of looking at the account. Yet I get bombarded daily by spammy bot accounts that seem to be able to go in and out the door as often as they please. UPDATE: Oh dear. I may have made an internet dog poop of myself. I believe I was searching on a typo of that account! I strike out all my rant below, and leave ot hear for legacy of how stupid I can be. The account @AgoraUgD was created on May 27, it has as seeds of proof 29 tweets sent out by me, it is following 89 others, has 22 followers. It has favorites, retweeted, been retweeted. These are all the things that are supposed to indicate It's a Real Person Behind The Account. I am following the Twitter Rules as well as what twitter describes as best practices. Oh yes, you can see the account. If you know it's there. But the tell tale of the problem is that the account does not show up in search [caption id="attachment_43420" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Why do you not find my tweets., @twitter?[/caption] So I investigate Why am I Missing From Search?. I am NOT viewing only Top results. My tweets are not protected. I have confirmed my email address; there is no red warning of email issues. My name and bio is filled out: [caption id="attachment_43422" align="aligncenter" width="418"] What, twitter, you no like my name? My bio? Is it my deodorant?[/caption] I am using Twitter actively (see numbers above) I am Tweeting, Retweeting, and mentioning regularly to gain resonance amongst my followers so that search results are up to date for my account yet I am still locked out of search. So I go to the twitter help section. They ask How Can I Help? I go to Search. I click Report a Problem and somehow miss the blue box notice: Our support team reviews reports about bugs and broken features. Though we cannot respond to individual reports, the information provided helps us make Twitter better for everyone. We appreciate your help! But hey, maybe someone actually is behind the door. I report the problem. This is the end of the line: I cannot tell you how warm I feel that I am helping make twitter better everyone. What about me? I tweet out at the locked door. https://twitter.com/AgoraUdG/status/604354881072201728 I'll try some tweets from my regular account https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/605032814258606081 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/605220560449077248 I look to the twitter support account. Look at what they are spending their time on https://twitter.com/Support/status/604286155501133824 https://twitter.com/Support/status/603274521706041344 https://twitter.com/Support/status/601447408233422848 So I have a technical issue with twitter. I have followed ever suggestion (and then some). And I am still locked out. I know I am just some small meaningless crumb of a user in their quest to grow for the sake of growth. My issue pales among others on their list. Does anyone have an inside twitter pipeline? Because the ability for our faculty development project to effectively use twitter is now in doubt. To me, today, twitter seems more to serve the needs of bots and marketers. I... do.... not... matter... but spammers and bots do? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Feature image credit: flickr photo by Tobyotter http://flickr.com/photos/78428166@N00/3637231166 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Because she shares and gives so much when asked, I took it seriously to respond to Amy Burvall's request https://twitter.com/amyburvall/status/467711924063334401 A video would be me blabbing generalities. Pass. I got the idea a few days ago to represent them as done possibly my favorite DS106 related activity, re-editing old posters to generate new messages (most fervently for MOOC Mocking). It brings together design principles, visual metaphors mixed with the tech skills of removing backgrounds and re-shaping the original content. Plus sarcasm. I grabbed a few retro style posters while waiting for my plane to leave Phoenix on Friday, and did a few of these on the plane, the rest tonight. Submitted for your approval, Amy, Five Not Necessarily Comprehensive Points about Creativity (1) Noticing Details [caption id="attachment_30487" align="aligncenter" width="390"] Based on an Eye Hygiene medical poster from Medical Posters as Art from the New Scientist (click image for bigger version)[/caption] One of the thing I have enjoyed most in our ds106 activities are things that help students notice the details in their world or media they have never paid attention to. The Daily Create tasks and things like the Photo Safari (Visual Unit), and Design Safari (Design Unit) in-directly result in students looking for details of light, converging lines, shadows, shape, texture, font, white space that they usually have not noticed before. We start with listening exercises in Audio for them to fine tune their ears to what works in audio radio shows (Unit 4 listening to audio). In the expanded audio unit they enter the world of manuafactored sounds, or foley. When we do video, we do not start with software, but with learning how to read video (understand cinematic techniques) and what has especially worked well is the Look, Listen, Analyze activity where the watch a movie scene without audio to notice the camera work, then to listen without the visuals to understand the use of sounds, and a third time together to synthesize them together again. "Noticing" may be the most under valued aspect of creating, it means tuning your senses to the way effective media is assembled, and to better appreciate the parts that work well enough to not be noticed. (2) Be Your Own Creative Authority [caption id="attachment_30490" align="aligncenter" width="340"] Modified from the Chicago Transit Authority poster from Vintage Posters Chicago (click image for larger version)[/caption] This image drew me on two message levels, the idea that there is a lot of congestion of ideas (what everyone is doing)-- being creative really means moving to a different plane, of going opposite, or just running differently from the crowd. But the bottom of the original poster, which read "Chicago Transit Authority" got me thinking about what it means to be your own authority (not expert) on creativity, but really, listening to and doing what moves you. Okay, it sounds patently vague. But it's the spirit of the message I give my students that they are free to do an assignment in a different way or idea than I wrote it up in IF they can rationalize it, and that what they creative serves the same creative goals. What merit is there in doing an assignment the way I tell them? If they can show me creative skills by doing the opposite, what more can I ask for? (3) Tinker With Expectations [caption id="attachment_30491" align="aligncenter" width="326"] Based on Attack of the 50ft Woman poster found in Wikimedia Commons (click image to see full size version)[/caption] This idea follows on (2) but it focuses on the elements of storytelling (covered in unit 3 of ds106 and a number of my Storytelling presentations). The plot element we crave in movies (Sixth Sense like) is what makes a story dig deep, the Mystery Box of JJ Abrams. What good is a movie if we follow the sage advise of "tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them?) The un-expected turns is to me, the best element of storytelling, and the one we use least on education. (4) Create With Others [caption id="attachment_30493" align="aligncenter" width="433"] (click image to see larger version)[/caption] Based on Which Family Reads Together Poster found at All That is Interesting Library Posters. What energizes the open course energy of ds106 is when people are doing similar work in a similar frame of time. I did assemble/compile all of our materials into a standalone course but I bet very few people have taken it on themselves to motor through on their own. Creativity happens together. I try to liken to the energy in an art studio (something I do not really know first hand, so I am projecting wildly) where people are working in proximity to each other, but often not communicating or noticing each other. There is a energy effect of creating in proximity, and the twitter+blog fueled activity in ds106 to me approximates some of that co-creative atmosphere. (5) Share! [caption id="attachment_30494" align="aligncenter" width="331"] Based on Vote poster from Celebration of Vintage and Retro Design from Smashing Magazine (click to see larger version)[/caption] Well yes, sharing is obvious, and to me, a personal blog is the best (thought not a required) means to do it. But there is more to it than just sharing your stuff ("there is all my stuff on my blog") - sharing is also celebrating the work of others (e.g. to share what inSPIRES you) but also to share by giving constructive feedback in other people's blogs. Well there you go Amy, five ideas represented in remixed vintage posters. I can say I have seen you practice all of these (and more). You can grab them all from my dropbox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KDPUTyDyQ It's your birthday today Mom, and all I got you was a blog post. Again. I bet you are making cookies, as you do on Sundays. I would call... but I cannot. And no one can enjoy those chocolate chip cookies and what was more valuable, the gift of a bag of your cookies. Mom would have been 86 today. I must have done the subtraction 3 times, 2015-1929, thinking the number was not right. It must be more. It was right. Four years since the last time I could call Mom for a birthday greeting. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] She loved Herb Alpert's music. In that photo is one of the 1960s vintage tables I remember from the living room of our house in Baltimore. The tables were there when we cleaned out her house in 2011. Back at home in Strawberry, I have maybe six of the Herb Alpert LPs that she still had in her house, the ones that were on the shelves in our wood paneled basement family room, the one with the Zenith tube record player. Maybe I need to sit down and listen to them all. In one of our recorded conversations, she told me, in sequence, about her enjoyment of the Herb Alpert music's beat and her reason for baking and sharing cookies. [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/cookies-herb-alpert.mp3"][/audio] I'd like to picture her dancing on that beach with Herb and the band. Happy 86th, Mom. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog By request, today I did a presentation on 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story via Skype to a group of faculty at the College of Wooster (Ohio). To do this they had my Skype video on one screen and the other had a web browser open with my series of "slides" as web pages open in Firefox tabs (see the presentation materials). It's a little tricky because I cant see the audience too well and cannot even see the screen they are watching. But it went great- Jon Breitenbucher et al had done a fantastic job of setting this up by having the participants already fleshed out story ideas. At first I thought the local story prompt I gave them was going flat, but they picked it up crazy. So the prompt was about an unlikely person spotted eating pizza at a local joint (Matsos). They group came up with this story: * the unusual person was Dick Cheney * the owner Matsos, a guy named "Spiro" came out and serenaded Mt Cheney with operatic music * People were watching for a reaction, following the action on twitter... * But Cheney started choking on his pasta.... And as usual I left them with an assignment to try and wrap that up. What worked well today was the group then spent a few hours working on their own stories, and they even had a lot of them posted on their group blog (and a few of them ran with the Dick Cheney story! see this excellent one done in Pixton) by the time I returned a few hours later. We got then to talk about their experience-- but they really wanted more time to work with the tools. This was fun! I'm pleased with some of the changes I made following a few iterations of the show earlier this month on the East Coast-- especially Cole Camplese's suggestion to use more of the educational examples rather than blasting them with the Dominoe story all over again. But it was really the good design of the things around the workshop by Jon's team at Wooster that made this go well. I've been mildly curious about some of the new attempts at making RSS feeds more human readable at first click- rather than seeing ugly XML code, these "new" feed displays use CSS (Style sheets) and some sort of magical transform method called XSLT -- basically it means if you click a link that points to an XML file, it has some nicer formatting applied. I want to believe. The problem is that I think a lot of folks doing this are not widely testing, because while it has pretty formatting on a PC with MSIE, or perhaps Mozilla/Firefox on Mac or Windows, it works. I've seen less then stellar appearance on Safari, which I had assumed (wrongly) was one of the more standards compliant browsers. Is it a limit of Safari? Am I doomed to switching browsers? But then I peeked at a feed from a Blogger site, on Safari, and it had the feed + CSS + XSLT cooking. So what have they done right? (more…) You can feed anything you want at any Wordpress blog You can feed anything you want at any Wordpress blog Right on the URL, tack on "feed" Syndicated almost anything you need You can feed anything you want at any Wordpress blog Bear with me on Chapter 156 of my Wordpress love. And for RSS. Wordpress offers so many ways to syndicate content. Feed by blog. Category. Author. Single Post. Comments. Custom Post Types. Multiple categories. On and On. And a new one I did not know exist until today. For the Elements of Networked Narratives site I was wanting to add a feed for the posts Mia Zamora writes on the DML Central site, available here http://dmlcentral.net/person/mia-c-zamora/. There is a list of posts on her profile page, but no RSS feed for her posts. No author feed. Well I know why, because I inspect the main DML feed http://dmlcentral.net/feed and see that they are all authored in Wordpress by Mimi Cruz who manages the site. It looks like they might use a category or tag to pull her feeds together, but I cannot see it in the RSS source: I feel close to a dead end. Then I go back to the Wordpress Codex for Built-in Feeds and find: Search results can also have their own feed. Here is the format: http://example.com/?s=searchterm&feed=rss2 So I play with a search that pulls up her post (good thing for Mia having a unique name) http://dmlcentral.net/?s=zamora And bingo! I can make that search string a feed http://dmlcentral.net/?s=zamora&feed=rss2 I never knew that was possible! And this adds a whole new dimension to what is possible to syndicate from Wordpress, beyond tags and categories... Anything you can construct as a search can be made into a Feed at Wordpress's Restaurant... And I walked in, I sat down, they gave me a piece of paper that said: "Kid, See the psychiatrist in room 404." I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to feed. I want to feed! I want to see posts and tags and pics and posts in my aggregator! Feed old, new posts! I Mean: Feed. Feed!" And I started jumpin' up and down, yellin' "FEED! FEED!" and he started Jumpin' up and down with me, and we was both jumpin' up and down, yellin', "FEED! RSS! FEED! FEED!" and the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, Sent me down the hall, said "You're our boy". Didn't feel too good about it. Actually I do feel good about it. Top / Featured Image: My own mashup of Arlo Guthrie's classic album, it's cover Wordpress and RSS logos, all likely subject to copyright infringement, created as both commentary, parody, and with love for this song (which I have purchased before). Sue me. My memory may be operating at guess level here. The Office Wall Jacks Back in 1992, my first year as an instructional technologist* at the Maricopa Community Colleges, for exact reasons I forget, I was giving what now I know are subdomain names for all of the computers in our office. The how/why goes further back than my era, when a system-wide effort happened (late 1980s?) to connect every office, room, class space across the ten college district (spanning the large spread of Phoenix) to a common network. All the wiring was standardized, with colleges connected to each other then by high speed microwave network. What it meant when I walked into my new office in 1992, that there were communication jacks for phone and ... data. I believe there were 4 jacks, one for phone. The others could be activated for data. Written on the jacks were it's assigned IP address (this was before networks did dynamic allocation of addresses). Again I forget why, perhaps it was something about sharing files between our office computers (mostly but not all Apple) that there was a reason I assigned named addresses for everyone's machine that mapped to their address their machine was plugged into. The system domain was (and is of course) maricopa.edu. Each college was then was a subdomain- Scottsdale Community College was sc.maricopa.edu, Mesa Community College was mc.maricopa.edu, South Mountain Community College was smc.maricopa.edu. Working at district office, we had our own subdomain- dist.maricopa.edu. My office within the building, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction had it's own sub-sub domain-- mcli.dist.maricopa.edu. When it came to naming the computers in our office, maybe 15 of them? we were down to sub-sub-sub domains, or machinename.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu. Mineral Names As the office "tech" person, I just submitted a request to our IT department to map the name to an IP addressed. But how to pick names? I resorted to the field I had eft to take on this job; I had been a graduate student in Geology at Arizona State University. I decided to use mineral names. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/25382195359 Arizona "Diamonds" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Somewhere in my old files I must have a list but now I can only guess. I think our office manager's computer was quartz.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu and someone else was galena.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu maybe mica.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu. I do remember the ones in my own office (I had been set up in a space with like 3 internet ports. My high end (then) machine, a Mac Quadra 900, I named topaz.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu. Topaz is just below diamond and corundum on Mohs hardness scale (checks in at 8) and also makes for gem quality crystals. I had in my office a small vial of ones I had collected a few years ago at Topaz Mountain, Utah. As my own inside joke, the Windows PC in my office was dubbed pyrite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu - go figure it out. Naming machines after minerals is not all that significant, but it did come into play when I found out that these addresses could, if settings were turned on, make them accessible as internet addressable machines. It seems so quaint, but more or less I could plug a computer into our network, make a request to IT, and have that computer be an internet server. See how innocent the early 1990s were? I can imagine network administrators now shuddering at the thought. That was 1992. AppleSharing Everyone in our office worked on Apple computers. Those would be running Mac OS Classic System 7. Software was installed from floppy disks. Brontosauruses roamed the field between the office and the freeway (just kidding; but it was that long ago). When I started, there was a mac set up running as shared server for a ESL project that was being done in HyperCard. I am guessing it was done for the group of ASU instructional designers in the office collaborating on it as well as some of the project leads at Glendale Community College. It was made available on the network via AppleShare. Because Maricopa had this common network, thus available to any Apple computer, I saw some opportunity to do even more sharing of resources, materials, etc, as a service since we supported faculty and projects across the system. I found an article I wrote for our October 1992 newsletter, The Labyrinth. You will find an image of the kinds of network connection used (an adapter from the Mac's printer port). The MCLI public file server was created for resource sharing. It includes programs developed here at the Center as well as items downloaded from electronic bulletin boards. For information regarding the MCLI public file server, please look at the "About MCLI File server" document. The current items are listed in detail in a plain text document. To date, this includes:* HyperCard stacks and development tools* a screen-capture utility* QuickTime movies* a full-featured desktop calculator* a teacher's grading program* the Internet resources mentioned in this issue* and much more.In the future, we will be posting an expanded, all electronic version of the Labyrinth. Explore the many resources available just beyond your desk! In that first year I was scouring apps, programs, resources likely via public ftp sites (they were a big thing once) and trying to organize them as a means to share. It was organizing stuff in a directory of file folders, made public. "This makes copying of files, especially large ones, much easier than using floppy disks. At MCLI, we have our project collaborators post their files on our server (this was how the other authors in this issue submitted their articles). We can give them quick turn-around time while avoiding the travel-time of driving to the District office." Woosh, there goes a pterodactyl flying overhead! Here is what it took to connect in those days (not long after the invention of the wheel). As archaic as this is, just know it set the stage- an office computer was easily turned into a public file server for anyone on the Maricopa network (and you will see there was a "private" server mount for our office that required a login). Hello, Gopher A problem in this setup might be glaring at you. Our office was Apple-Centric, but the entire Maricopa district was mixed Apple OS and PC (aka Microsoft, there were people then not even up to Windows); and at each college, it was a mixed platform as well. The article above mentioned that PC users could connect to the Apple file server with a special hardware card, but that was not widely available. The solution (and name) came from the University of Minnesota. It was launched in 1991, just a year before I started at Maricopa. Gopher was in many ways something forgotten that laid the groundwork for the web (read more about the days when Gopher Ruled the Internet). It might seem archaic now compare to the web we know and take for granted, but Gopher took what was an activity of logging in to different internet servers and services (e.g. ftp) and bridging them through one interface. It was a menu driven internet experience, folders and files. A Gopher server offered a first entry as a list of options to "go" into. You might click a items number from a command line interface, or click in a visual interface. But each item could be: A new list of options A file to open/download (read text, download image, audio, video)Here is the magic- a link to a different Gopher server (or perhaps another internet service, like an ftp server) You would then travel and explore by going down gopher holes! Sometimes backing out. But Gopher was and still is, an internet protocol. There are some folks still at keeping them going, and there are places to explore the experience via a web browser as well as the the aptly named Overbite Project. I might have heard about Gopher on a listserv or seen mention of it on the ftp sites I was exploring. The first stage was spent exploring, but then when I came across something that would let me turn an office computer into a server I could manage, the light bulbs went off. This solved the platform issue of sharing resources via AppleShare, since gopher servers could be accessed via both Macs and PCs. And at the time, all Maricopa Employees actually did email on a VAX based system - more or less command line to launch something called All in One, of the days when we talked about "sending an A1". I do not know what I used, but I turned an office Mac II into an MCLI gopher server. To do this, I had to give it a subdomain name so others could find it. A logical name might have been gopher.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu but for some reason I stuck with geology naming. Maybe to differentiate from office machines named after minerals, I went to using Geological formations from the Grand Canyon. Thus, the gopher server I set up was available via tapeats.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu, named for the Tapeats Sandstone, a key layer as it is in the first in the flat lying sedimentary formations that site above the older, contorted metamorphic basement, a great expanse of time marked by the Grand Unconformity. You see, the Tapeats marked a significant change in the earth record. I was ambitious. I found in my old files a terribly low quality image of the server, I can tell it is sitting on the edge of my desk in front of the windows (outside, a stegosaurus stares off into the distance). This was likely taken with the first generation digital camera, an Apple QuickTake. I decided to make the Gopher Server pretty much a mirror of what I had set up on the Apple Server. I was writing about Gopher in February 1993, again in our MCLI newsletter (I should we printed these and sent them out to all employees via interoffice mail). These images show the structure from a VAX text only interface Text interface from the VAX system all Maricopa employees would use to get email. I believe arrow keys would move up and down the list, and pressing RETURN here would take me into item 3, another list of gopher options for "Into the Internet" I don't have the contenta available, this would have mapped to the folder file structure on that Mac II, with some special syntax on a text file name likely used to indicate a link to Gopher Server. I imagine "Into the Internet" had external gopher holes as well as downloads of Gopher, WAIS, FTP client software, maybe a copy of The Whole Internet Catalog?. The "Labyrinth-Forum" would have maybe text or maybe PDF. We supported a district wide math project under "Maricopa Math Resources" "MCLI Resources" would include handouts and other projects developed by our office. "Ocotillo" was the system wide faculty-led technology planning and exploration program (this will be a whole raft of future posts). I tried to organize interesting software for both Apple and "IBM" (aka PC) computers. The same gopher server structure in the Apple client, TurboGopher. Just double click an item to go down a hole. But there I was maybe in late 1992 with my first public internet server. I wrote about in in February 1993 was what I saw as the place worth using to explore online spaces. The very last sentence I wrote then indicates I was aware of the web, actually then we spoke if it in the full World Wide Web or WWW nomenclature. Client applications for Gopher include TurboGopher for the Macintosh, "DOSgofer" for IBM/PC, and "Gopher v1.3.2" for the NeXT. These are available from the MCLI Public file server, in the "Into the Internet" folder. Look in the MCLI Public file server for more information on other Internet tools such as WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) and WWW (World Wide Web).http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/labyforum/Feb93/Feb93L7.html This suggests in early 1993 I had read of the WWW and likely had tried a text based interface, but I did not get on board until a wonderfully fateful exchange happened in October. That's another post. Postscript Given the dire now I've been thinking a lot of my early web years, not really as to get all nostalgic, but just charting how it all got started for me. I almost accidentally fell into the early web in 1993, and that has enabled just about everything I did since. But that was enabled by the history and culture of the visionary leaders and faculty who preceded me at the Maricopa Community Colleges. I have no grand plans here of a b*** just wanting to write a series of connected posts, though not necessarily n chronological order. The working blog tag is thewebandme (yes it has syntax issues) and I may be back tagging related posts. Bottom Stuff *actually my first title was "Programmer Analyst/Instructional Systems" That has no pizazz. Featured Image: A Photoshop combination of MCLI Server "Farm" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) (and the flickr notes still work!) superimposed on 2012 Tucson Gem & Mineral Show 46.JPG Wikimedia Commons photo by Simeon87 shared under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. The connection is I attended a few times the Tucson mineral show while a Geology graduate student, prior to my jump into education and technology. Oh, it's all connected if you go down enough gopher holes. (more…) public domain image from Wikimedia Commons I strive not to be one of those travelers who whine about their travel woes. On a return trip a month ago, a delay out of Buffalo left me with an unplanned overnight stat in Chicago, and I played it out as an adventure game. That was a return home from a pleasure trip. But it's a bit different when you are outward bound for another country, for doing some income raising work. And as much as I think that eventually all service providers, airlines will fork you over, it does not make it acceptable to be treated like crap. My recent experience with US Airways is that when they screw up, you will pay your own money for their f***ups and they will blame it on someone else. I did not even book my travel with US Failways, it was with United, but there is some sort of code share thing. I ought to have seen it as an open last Friday when I showed up at the United Terminal in Phoenix, only to look more closely and see I was off by one terminal. And then the fun begins. There is fog in San Francisco, where I have a connection form Phoenix for a flight to Tokyo. Oi, what was I thinking booking an international connection through SFO? Even without delays, getting from a domestic flight to international means walking out of one building and security check point and having to play the TSA tickle me silly game twice. So my flight was subject to an ATC (Air Traffic Control) delay. This meant a 2 hour delayed departure. I held some naive childlike vision that they look at all the passengers on the Phoenix plane who were hoping to make that connection (I counted 4 within my immediate seat area), and maybe try and make sure their plans are not screwed up. I thought that on an 1 hour flight over the Pacific there was a bit of wiggle room to make up for waiting for passengers. By the time I landed at SFO, my flight status app said my connecting flight had left... 5 minutes early. So not only did they trash my dream of nice people looking out for passengers, they motherfrackers left EARLY? And then you know how when you get off the plane, there usually a gate agent who can tell you where to go and what to do? Nada. There was no one from US Airways there to assist. Do we go to the gate for the flight we missed? to the ticket counter? To the Fish market? I gambled that all the flight statuses were wrong, and trucked to the international terminal, rushed through security, and found my plane long gone. I asked in the United Club (where I no longer have status) for help, and some nice ladies looked things up, but told me they could not change anything because it was a US Airways ticket. So much for "code sharing" which means is a code word for "you are screwed if we mess up cause our systems each speak Sanskrit to each other". So I shuffled to the US Airways ticket counter where a rather tired woman wearing the "I so do not love my job face" told me the best she could do, to replace the direct flight from San Francisco to Tokyo was to book me the next day on a 6:30am flight to Seattle where I could get a connection to Japan. Nothing I could do, right? I asked about compensation for a hotel, she handed me a pink slip with a number to call where I could book a hotel at a "discounted rate". Just to summarize, cause this is only partly the story, I paid for a ticket, I showed up extra early for my flight from Phoenix, US Airways flight delays so I miss my connection, they don't even do one thing to try and help my make the connection, and then I HAVE TO PAY FOR A FRIGGING HOTEL CAUSE THEY MESSED UP?" That makes perfect sense, can I have another one of those fragrant brown hot pads tossed on my head? I thought I would give twitter a yell, and although @USAirways responded quickly with a request to follow so they could DM< I found that all they do os ask for a flight confirmation and look up info on the web like any other monkey can do. Or they tell me to call a phone number to speak to an agent. The first of two complaints I filed shows a classic case of How To Treat Customers Like They Are a Nuisance Messages taught in the business school class "If You Crap on Customers They Take They Business Elsewhere": Dear Mr. Levine: Thank you for your recent correspondence to Customer Relations at US Airways. I apologize for the delay in our response time. Recent weather issues all over the country have increased our volumes, causing a delay in our response time. We are, however, working as quickly and efficiently as possible to assist our customers. Thank you for your patience during this time. I'm sorry you were delayed on your flight to San Francisco. Our records show your flight was delayed due to Air Traffic Control (ATC). Air Traffic delays can be the result of weather or congestion at your destination or origin city, or weather enroute. These delays are similar to freeway congestion where an earlier situation can cause delays long after the initial incident has been cleared. When these kinds of issues occur Air Traffic Control will decrease the number of take-offs and landings which they believe can be safely allowed. This can cause backups in flight schedules for the remainder of the day. Although it may appear as though flights of another airline are unaffected, this is because other flights have been held back or cancelled to free up the airport space and help control traffic. In these types of situations, ATC determines the flow of traffic. I realize this must have been disappointing and can shape your impression of our company. However, the delay of Flight 403 was not within our control and no compensation is due. Additionally, to clarify our policies, US Airways will not provide hotel accommodations when a flight is delayed, cancelled or causes a missed connection due to circumstances beyond our control, such as weather or Air Traffic Control decisions. I am also sorry that your experience with our San Francisco Representative was unsatisfactory. It is disappointing to know our employees failed to provide the level of service you expected. This matter will be reviewed with the San Francisco Manager so the issues can be addressed internally. I sincerely apologize when your bag didn't arrive with you in San Francisco and for the trouble it caused. The details you have provided will be instrumental in helping us improve our service. Based on your comments, we could have done a better job of assisting you, and I assure you the necessary steps will be taken to help prevent a recurrence. We know that you have many choices when it comes to traveling, and we thank you for choosing US Airways. Sincerely, Amber Long (emphasis on stupid statements are marked in bold) Dear Amber, Can you read between the lines of my three finger salute? I will choose US Airways only when some hillbilly with a shotgun against my head forces me too. Alan But here is the kicker. When Ms Grumpy Pants at the US Failways desk at SFO rebooked my flight, I asked her explicitly wil be bags be sent to my final destination, since I was now booked on a United flight to Seattle and a Nippon Airways flight to Tokyo. "Oh yes," she said, "just keep your original claim tag and I will call down stairs to make sure your bags are moved." Sadly, she must have gotten some grave personal news, 'cause when my plane landed some 36+ hours later in Tokyo, an ANA agent on the ramp had my name on a sign and told me that my baggage was delayed... it was never put on the plane when I left San Francisco, and it was still there. I have to say that the ANA baggage desk people in Tokyo where empathetic, thorough, and apologize profusely for the problem. When I told them I had not clothes for a business trip and I had been wearing what I was in for 2 days, they offered my Â¥3000 in compensation, and while not really enough to buy a shirt later, it was a gesture. It was not even ANA airlines fault. My luggage finally arrived Monday night cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog thanks to a 90 mile delivery by ANA. Now here, I thought that US Airways had some liability. After all, their own gate agent screwed up. But noooooooo, US Failways can only pass the blame: Dear Mr. Levine: Thank you for contacting US Airways. Your email was forwarded by Customer Relations for our review of the baggage related concerns you've described. I apologize for the length of time it took for us to address your email. Your tracing file with All Nippon Airways (NRTNH97376) indicates your baggage has been returned to you and the file is closed. Please accept my personal apology for the inconvenience experienced and for any confusion over the disposition of this matter. It is by a mutually observed agreement among airlines that the customer's final carrier receiving preliminary notification of loss, damage or delay, traces for and handles any subsequent claim to its conclusion. This is done to expedite processing, regardless of where the mishandling occurred. Accordingly, please contact ANA for compensation. I am confident they will handle your claim in the most efficient and equitable manner possible, as we would do if your itinerary or circumstances were reversed. Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to provide clarification in this matter. I sincerely hope we have an opportunity to restore your confidence in our service. Sincerely, Melanie Reed Specialist, Baggage Resolution Central Baggage Resolution Office I would not bet on any restored confidence Melanie. Nope. I feel crapped on and then stomped by US Failways, and will never never never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever book a flight with them. Never ever. There is a difference between what a business is obligated to do by rules and making a customer feel valued. US Airways accomplishes te former but not the latter. They just keep tossing the cowpies my way. Yum. It felt time to play a Four Icon Challenge assignment in ds106. it's always hard to know if you make these too challenging or too easy, I am thinking this one is the latter. My approach, as I usually cannot recall movies all that well, is to watch some YouTube clips to remind me of key scenes. I scribble down icon ideas in a text file, and run some image searches for icons/comics, even real photos with clean backgrounds that might work. Not being up to being as meticulous as Michael B Smith, after sizing the images to a similar vertical scale in PhotoShop, applied the Smudge Stick effect to each one for a more graphic design: I am still not quite as sneaky clever as Martha was in the challenge. What say ye? My experiences with the bottom feeding world of catfishing has wiggled and slithered from weird to worse. Last week a message came to my flickr mail from someone claiming to be a producer of a national TV talk show (I'm leaving the name out, but it's one of the big ones) saying that they were working on a story about someone scammed by a persona using my photos. I say here "claiming" because in this alternative world you have to almost question the reality of everything and everyone. But they provided an email address with a TV network in it. I found the person in LinkedIn. Maybe legit. Sometimes I expect a reverse scam by a fake victim. That's what this stuff does. As in every message like this I responded with an offer to prove the source of any photos and a link to my page of resources. They sent a photo that was obviously me, but I could not place it. In the photo I was in a classroom (whiteboard visible) next to someone, but it was cropped vertically like a mobile phone photo. And kind of blurry. I was not sure the photo was mine. Reverse image searches did nothing, but with some awareness of my own clothes, and when my beard was shaggier I was able to find it from a series of conferences/workshops I did on an overseas trip a few years ago. The scammer had cropped out the colleague I was standing next to. But that was me and my colleague at that conference. Years ago. Now this TV rep is asking me to come on the show, for some kind of big reveal, claiming that the victim needs proof that I am not the person they have been taken in by. Apparently (I am told) the victim has sent a large sum of money to the person using my photo. I have negative desire to be on a TV talk show. I have a line with catfishing victims. I am sorry they got scammed and their trust toyed with. I am willing to provide the source of any photos victims might share. I do not get involved with their stories. I've had some who still confuse me with the fake persona they were taken in by. I've been threatened with harm from ones who think I am the scammer. My wife has been targeted. I do not get involved with their stories. I explained this to the TV show person. I am not interested in being involved. I do not want my name involved. Next I got a longer message filled with guilt and shame; they said that I am the only one who can clarify the truth for this victim. Now every other victim who has contacted me has already crashed through to a realization when they see my photos as the originals. The victims are confused, embarrassed but they have become aware on their own. It's not my responsibility to prove who I am not. And this TV show person is now trying to portray me as culpable. And it pisses me off. Face it- TV people care about one thing- sensationalizing any story to get ratings. Who knows what happens if I were to go on camera? Do they make me out to me the scammer? What if the victim does not believe I am who I am? What happens to my family? What happens to me ethical standing? What if the show makes me out to be "that guy" who... I don't even have an answer for that. All I know they show has used tactics of manipulation, shame and guilt for their own ends. They don't get me. I do not get involved with their stories. So I am not going on this show. I shared photos of myself on flickr. Someone else lifted my photos to create fake accounts. No TV for me. PS. I owe so much to my wife Cori for helping me think this through as well as putting up with the weird characters who show up online bearing my photo as their own. Featured Image: A slight manipulation of a vintage TV pixabay image by Alexander Antropov. The cord was edited in PhotoShop to not be plugged in, but laying on the floor, the wall paper copied to cover it, and the original plug in the image was covered by the electric outlet pixabay image by Open ClipArt Vectors. My pal Todd Conaway invited me to be a speaker at his school, Yavapai College, in Prescott, where they are running a three day faculty institute (Todd claims when he started, this event ran fo 6 days, that is hard core!). Yavapai is a multi campus system that serves the county of the same name. I faintly recall attending a regional conference at this campus in the mid 1990s when I was a young mullett headed kid at Maricopa, but I hardly recognized it. I was told they had a major buildout since then. It's quite modern with a lot of well done architectural design touches, and reflects much fo the college's focus on community and fitness. Todd asked me to do a round of Amazing True Stories of Openness- the audience was really into it, but I think I may have had more fun then they did. This was a brand new version, with new stories collected, and a bit more background as a set up on the original idea for the web envisioned by its creator, Tim Berners-Lee. The slides and resources are available true-stories-of-openness-yavapai-collegefrom Alan Levine By sheer web search accident, I stumbled on to Andy M's Yahoo Pipe for putting your twitter followers locations on a map: The numbers ar enot a count per country, but a number on the list of 100, and you can pop from one pin to the next in a cheap world tour. Note that it maps 100 of your followers, so no hopes Scoble et al for popping 25000 pins on a map. And I am not sure if these are the 100 most recent or just the random way twitter lists your followers. And although it says you can embed this in your blog, doing so with JavaScript requires plain text insertion of your username and password, a definite no no unless you like eating phish. You can make it a iGoogle widget. This is less of an interest in using this Pipe and more of a reminder (note to self, not a freaking resolution) to learn more about Yahoo Pipes (so I can more partly understand what the hell Tony Hirst cooks up in his kitchen), Note- I wrote a bit of this while I was waiting for a highway to re-open... It looks like I have offline time for some slow blogging. I am writing this from the front seat of my car, stuck in a highway closure on Arizona Highway 87, whose nickname is the "Beeline Highway". The bees are not moving fast today, there is an accident up ahead, and the highway is a parking lot of strangers thrown together. There is the usual flitting around, craning necks, and people who don't know each other talking like they don't. There is no spot to do a turn around on this mountain highway, and what else can one do? As much as I might complain, I am guessing someone up ahead is having a much much worse day, likely the worse of their life. While here I have time to reflect on the experience a few days ago of attending the Program for the Future event in San Jose, designed to honor the 40th anniversary of a computer historic event known as the "Mother of all Demos" (I prefer to to acronymize it like someone else did in a presentation as "MOAD"). If you have never seen the video of what Doug Engelbart and his SRI team did in San Francisco, stop now and go watch the video. Watch it twice, or more... As I said in our presentation, back in 1968 I missed the Mother Demo; I was only 5 and was likely watching the Flintstones instead. But I wonder (and have been asking others) what is happening today in our tech world that might have such an impact. Or what someone who is 5 now might be seeing 40 years from now. What this live demo did was demonstrate almost countless features of the modern computer interface in a time when computing meant mainframes, punch cards, and teletypes. Engelbart's peers saw no reason for a computer screen-- but I think he showed them wrong. Engelbart seems most credited for invention of the mouse (which was actually co-created with Bill English), but when you look at the demo, that is not even a significant aspect of the NLS system. He had two way video conferencing (al a Skype). Live co-editing of documents (Google Docs), cut and paste of text, a flexible menu structure, and more. I am always curious about the meaning of the chalkboard in this photo of what is written "5->3" The Program for the Future was meant however to convene people around Engelbarts concepts of collective intelligence, which again he outlined long before it reached buzzword status about a year or two ago. The hopes for the event were to stimulate research, development, advancement of these ideas, and there were certainly plenty of heavy hitters in the crowd. (more…) flickr foto DSC01365 It has been 130 days since it has rained in Phoenix. One Hundred And Thirty. That stretches back to mid-October that we experienced the odd phenomena of water falling from the sky. It has been four months of blue sky, sunshine, lies by weather forecasters, and a complete bust on the snow season in Flagstaff. Sure it may be pleasant to always go outside to sunshine and warm weather, but ticking in the back of the mind is f-i-r-e.... this is going to be a colossal fire season in this state, one of the first times that there is going to be high danger of major fires both in the burnt desert lowlands and the tinderbox forest. Earlier this month, the February Fire burned more than 4000 acres just a few miles form our little hamlet of Strawberry-- this was one of the earliest forest fires ever (usually they start in June). In 2004 the Willow Fire burned over 100,000 acres, engulfing the Mazaztal Wilderness Area, and about one major river system away from approaching our cabin. In 2002 it was the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, the biggest in the state, that ate up more than 450,000 acres. Some predictions suggest we may not even see appreciable precipitation until the summer, and we may very well likely see simultaneous fires in the state on the scale of the big ones in the last few years. So who is hogging all the moisture! We need it bad. It's been nothing but sun and virga (the rain that falls but never touches the earth). Serious Gulls They Have Here in Vancouver by cogdogblog posted 21 Feb '08, 12.17am MST PST on flickr Gonna give the gulls something to worry about, I landed today in Vancouver, in an early landing move of Operation Northern Voice. My role is to represent the blogging interests of the Great Unknown Canadian Southern Province of Arizona. Ahh, its great to be back in one of my most favorite cities! Spent a great afternoon visiting with my cousin, walking and talking, and a scrumptious seafood dinner high on the hills of West Vancouver. Words are failing to capture how excited I am and looking forward to this year's Northern Voice, the best conference on the continent. Strap on your tiki shirts for tomorrow's opening night party. And protect your Canadian Seagulls from The Dog. I admit it. I still regularly review content RSS feeds in that archaic, pre-twitter-is-all-i-need thing called a "Feed Reader". Me and 3 other holdouts. Go ahead, call me a throw back. Recently, in using Google Reader, I am seeing signs that the Great Google is subtly slipping in more social network features, that have me wondering if Google is becoming more like Facebook is becoming more like Twitter? Is the bird wagging the Goog? Blog experimentation notice- I am trying the Lightbox 2 plugin switched to z-Lightview to embed images... clicking will load in an overlay to see full size... if it works. Oddly enough, we have the most unlikely technology prognosticator, Conan O'Brien, to credit for peeking ahead to YouTwitFace and oddly enough, despite the Google -YouTube Connection; the Big G is not part of the acronym. But they are doing things in the space, all of which may be a tease once the Wave crashes on shore (or ends up being just a pond ripple no one notices). First of all, Google has been expanding the notion of a profile, which has been in the services region a while, but never been clear what one does with it. As far as other social media profiles, the Google one is rather start for now- mine has my icon, a feed of flickr photos and links I picked. Google has some quirky questions that are not clear what the use is (maybe pure fun or their evil harvesting of our beings? but the examples were funny). Is there any use for this? Dunno. Something I still can't find on Google well yeah, an honest answer might give them ideas, but for now I list my car keys and lost youth. Snark is plentiful. My superpower. Yeah very useful. I listed blogging since no one does it anymore, blogs are dead, yadda yadda. Interests open ended, kind of facebook-ish. I would guess some connections could happen here It all rather pales (for now) in comparison to say the fun new service card.ly -- I whipped this up in about 8 minutes http://card.ly/cogdog. I am guessing there are Bigger Plans out there. But back to Google Reader. They now provide some social networking hooked on the piece of reader that allows you to pick stories to "share"- this has always seemed a useful educator tool as you can pick among the pile of feeds you read to mix and match stories you think are relevant- you can share them via a URL or an RSS feed or even widgets for your blogs. They've added 4 "Styles" which are pretty lame- just cartoon banners, but would expect user defined themes are near: But now, the people you associate as contacts or enable via the sharing- you can see an aggregated view of what they are sharing, and add comments as well. That is sort of interesting, as you can then follow what other people are sharing. But they have also added a twitter/facebook status like "notes" feature so you can just blurt out stuff to the emptiness of web space: I'm not yet seeing a whole lot of "there" there unless people start using this; maybe the future Wave is being able to do this for any piece of web content? And lastly is the new "Liking" feature- where as you go through stories in Reader, you can one click (or shortcut "l") to attach a Facebook-like stamp on news stories. You've always been able to indicate "Liking" by sharing or starring, but now-- "Liking is Public" so the reader stories feature of a count of how many times it has been Liked and even list the Likers. Hmm, like others out there, the value here is a mixed one. A new story has fewer likers. Like none at first. Maybe we should get points for being the first Liker. But what does it say? Its a quasi vote, and Google can weave some ad magic with knowing what stories are more liked. I guess with the New Age notion of friendship being just a click on a strangers profile (friends online with people we'd never have a friendship with in real life) so is "liking" now a throw away opinion. I'm not sure where Google is going with all this, but I bet they have a plan somewhere. What do you think?