Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Our center has a posted opening for an Instructional Designer position working with projects listed on the main MCLI web site. If this sparks any interest, be sure to apply directly to the Maricopa HR department. Any resumes or materials sent to me will be automatically trashed, and I cannot provide any more information than what is in the job description and what you can find out about us on the web. I will share an important note. This position is NOT one of designing instructional materials nor is it a technology developer/designer position. This is a leadership position, one of managing programs, coordinating large projects within and outside of our system, being a consultant to our colleges and faculty groups. This is not a position creating web pages, designing course materials, developing training materials for Blackboard etc. The instructional design background is critical for being grounded in learning theory and the practice of teaching. This is not a position for designing instructional materials. Why would I be so annoyingly repetitive? We've gone through this hire a number of times over the years (some folks have moved on, a few times we never filled, a few did not work out), and over the years the pool has gotten very shallow on people with the strong ID background and overflowing with people selling their skills in PowerPoint, PhotoShop, WebCT, HTML, DreamWeaver. This is not a technology job, though basic skills in technology (e.g. communication, research, etc) are desired. Despite the warnings, it's a great place to work, there lots of new projects to tackle, it always changes, and Maricopa is a fantastic organization to b e a part of. Oh, the opening closes on July 28, so polish up those ID resumes. Tagging is in. You're It! From tagging web sites to bookmarks, to photos it is changing the way we look at and organize large globs of information. It is spreading to other content, like news, music, movies, heck, maybe even learning content... Yes, folksonomy is hip and happening, eveolving and causing disruption. However, it thrives in the examples above where there is a large base of users to add to the tag pile, to self-correct, to make it come alive. Tagging down in the tail is another story. Yes, tagging it is not a magic bullet and may not be an instant success. But I believe in what it might offer. I set up an experiment a few weeks ago. A colleague has asked for a recommended list of "online professional development" opportunities for faculty, and rather than just cooking up a list and emailing or posting as a static web page ("Oh, that is so web 1.0"), I decided to try setting up a special del.icio.us tag of edponline and invite others to add to the list. Collective intelligence should make this a rich soup. It started okay, Tim Lauer and Seb Fiedler added items. But something went awry as another person started tagging all sorts of stuff (podcasting links, educational tech articles) to the mix, and it got kind of cloudy, muddy, even slightly polluted. I am not casting shame on this person nor looking for an apology, and I think it is highly likely that things were mis-tagged in the haste of adding sites (I am guilty of this more times than I will admit). In a larger participatory pool this noise would be group corrected or drowned out by more signal. This is how WikiPedia works (thousands of eyes checking content) but my little wiki is encrusted with spam, dead end links, and virtual tumbleweeds blowing by. Just tagging alone will not make social software work, it is the action and participation of others than work the magic. My little del.icio.us tag experiment is so far down the long tail of activity there, it cannot be distinguished from the horizontal axis. But when you are talking about or trying to get a tagging scheme in motion, you should keep in mind the dynamics of the level of potential participation- just setting it up is not enough. The tag mud and the sadder examples of tag spam are part of the give and take, the ying-yang of what the net environment offers. You cannot have the richness of good open content without some of the muck in the undercarriage. I am not sure if one really needs a big audience to make tagging successful, but it may take a threshold of active taggers. I stand near the front of the line of people who think that the news and publishing business is perched on the edge of looming change that will undermine them as much (or more) than the recording and film industry have faced. This is hardly "news". But there is this ramping eagerness to be the "first" to report news, that it might be better to be first to report a story rather than the first to report a "good" (or even "correct") story. An isolated incident; ut of some weird curiosity, because I rarely rush to news stories, I noticed that Dean Shareski had retweeted a story that Tiger Woods was seriously injured in a car crash. BULLETIN -- REPORT: FAMED GOLFER TIGER WOODS SERIOUSLY INJURED AFTER CRASH NEAR FLORIDA HOME. I am not a golf fan, but I was more curious about the account reporting this story, BreakingNews. A story today on the gather site seems to be commending BreakingNews for being 45 minutes faster to report this story than CNN: the question seems to be now, why did it take CNN 45 minutes to report three little lines when BNO News reported in almost immediately? Where did most people hear that Tiger Woods was okay? Twitter. Twitter will soon out trump many news reporters (and for some people already has) in real-time story reporting. The problem is that most of this breaking news reporting was wrong, and wrong for hours. Tiger's "seriously injured" turned out to be barely hurt at all, and the "crash near florida home" apparently involved his car hitting a fire hydrant as he was exiting his driveway. Now a good chunk of this wrongness was due to bad information in the press releases from the state agencies. But what is happening, si that "breaking news" is not confirmed news, not fact-checked news, and very well, as in this case, might be dead wrong. There is no stopping this gold rush to be wrong with any rumor of a "trending" story, but I am going to consider that very likely most breaking news is broken. The bigger question is; how will we be able to confirm news stories anymore, since the reporting parties are no longer checking them. Breaking News or Broken News? Who knows? I am in no way defending the old way of reporting news, as that has gone by the way side; I am wondering what emerges as the new form. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Man, how delinquent have I been at cogdogblog.com -- I don't ride my bike, I still dont have a dog, and all I got is a blog. Oh well Har. Some Cog-Dog-Blog. I had my bike out maybe 4 times last year. And I've not had a dog for years, weakly blaming it on my travel schedule. It's time to get back to the source. Tonight, I took the cobweb covered mountain bike out of the shed, pumped up the tires, applied lube, and took it out for a test spin. My loathing for running is well documented but I got a taste of why I liked biking- its under my own power still, but I cover ground-- when running, it takes a long time to go a mile, but weeeee, on a bike, in a flash. I got Cog. I'm thinking of getting back into road biking too. Now about that Dog... look for an update in July. At least I hung on to the Blog. Without digging too much into the reasons why (that's code for "I don't know why") one headache with running Wordpress Multisite is that even users who have administrative privileges on their own site, any embed code, javascript put into the editor is stripped on publishing. Only Site Network admins can insert JavaScript. Why? I said, don't ask me. It just happens. And you really do not want to make a bunch of people having those god-like powers just to paste in a widget? But this means when I converted the Virtually Connecting site to multisite (so they could have a separate site for the ePatients folks and maybe more spawns??), this tiny annoyance rears its head. The problematic one is the TimeBuddy event widget we add to event pages, when you get the widget, you grab some embed code like below. This is actually for a different event, but it's the same approach, you select the local time zone, when it starts, and the widget displays the time converted to the local time for the person visiting the page, and a countdown timer: If you run a standalone Wordpress site, any editor can cut and paste the HTML into an editor. They can do it in mutltisite, but on saving it strips out the Javascript tags and renders the rest as mungey looking code. Mostly what happens is someone with the Network admin powers creates the page with the widget, and then maybe some other person, trying to be helpful and edit a typo in the page, saves it, and the widget is wrecked. So Jane Network Admin goes back in, and manually fixes it. Lather, rinse, repeat. The way around this is to add to a theme the functions to use a Shortcode rather than raw HTML embed. I made one for Virtually Connecting (and now also for my Networked Narratives course site). So you still get the full Timebuddy embed code: Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comTime converter at worldtimebuddy.com And what you need to do is extract everything in the URL Maybe it's even more complicated, but that's how it goes. But if you are running Wordpress Multisite for Other People, you might find yourself making a fleet of shortcodes to get around the embed limits. Featured image: Pixabay photo by smacdonaldmiller shared into the public domain using CC0 Somewhere out there a man in Iceland will smile. I’ve never met, known, or contacted him, but from a Mastodon repost by Joe Murphy, Baldour wrote delightfully about a precious (in terms of value) habit that made me smile: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/112127447270321395 Somewhere this blog may light up an RSS reader in Iceland or maybe Poland or St Louis. I will never know. And that is the right write space, to be writing here, not for comments (but hallo Tom) or reposts or anything but just for my own self fulfillment. Welcome to the blog navel gazing, the blog’s oldest topic profession, blogging about blogging or blogging about non blogging. If you just write on LinkedIn, shrug, I guess it can work as much as if it was scribbling in a paper journal. The unfamiliar is where I sit now, a seat that I used to seek, maybe crave, wedged into the vinyl cushion of 14F right shoulder pressed to a plastic wall, a portal view to cloud tops under a single hued sky. Yep, on a plane. Writing offline in a Google doc. This was 6, 8, 10 years ago the familiar. I got caught up in the thrill of travel, the airport takes, that I was off doing this as my work. Whether its pandemic echoes or just the extra tree rings in my trunk, it’s now, thankfully unfamiliar. Somewhat unsettling. I will just say it and leave a guessed explanation to simmer up. I am overly fortunate to be up in these clouds, and there will be fortuitous things that come from this, but it just does not feel like it did once. I see colleagues who still revel in it, the running through airports and selfies in the cabin; I don’t fault them at all, but I can’t really tap into that. It’s unfamiliar. Not that any kind of *phobia has crept in, I just feel more centered at home where it used to be the opposite. I crave my Ursa time with Cori, our walks to see the minute changes in our property as a result of our efforts to turn our acreage into a more natural habitat. Just one of many new trees Cori and I have added to our property. We have forest plans! This pic will be shared under CC0 when I get around to uploading to flickr. Into the time / space distortion machine I go. With camera, with blog, with mind. I’ve blathered on far too long, without marqueeing my destination. Maybe I will spare you, if there is a you, it’s just me here now at the keyboard. There might be a parallel here to that disembodied sensation of presenting in an online video session. You can only imagine an audience, a reader, but you get no or only trace sense back that anyone is there. Or if they are there, they are not far away in a different window. Did you see how I went off track? That’s my style no AI generator can generate. Yet. Thar be mountain peaks poking through the clouds, a metaphor lurking, photo by me looking out the window, once added to Flickr will be shared into the public domain using CC0 So… right now I am headed from home pin in Saskatchewan to Vancouver but that’s not the destination. I then reverse in a long jump to London and then… to Cork, Ireland!!! WTF is with me? I should relish this trip! Or mustard it, I actually do not relish relish. I missed getting to see Ireland in 2018 after OER18 because of a problem that came up with my vision after the conference in Bristol. Yes I will be at OER24 next week, the first in person one I have been at since 2018 (Bristol) and 2014 before that (Newcastle). I remember the locations well. I would not typically travel just for a conference (nothing against OERXX they are amongst my better experiences). No, my OEGlobal colleagues decided our globally distributed team could use a few days of in person meetings to get more focused planning and ideating than our online meetings. There is also a gathering of our Board members too. So it’s all strategic. It will be of course most fulfilling to reconnect with the UK+ community and colleagues here; I do have to remember from my October trip to Edmonton for our conference, that for all my belief that we can and do have meaningful experiences online, there is a warmer sense being in a real room. I’ve not felt much that I have to present say to a conference audience, I am craving more being in the audience. But note I am doing something unusual in a 5 minute slot, that I am sure will leave my work colleagues perplexed. Some of the lethargy too is knowing my brain that plans and criticizes said plans may very well likely over estimate what the body that carried it around can still withstand. The physical energy lately has waned some and there have been a few unblogged health “things” — not wanting to label issues. But seeing the changes and loss too in my peer circle, that constant undertone of feeling my finiteness, even though not anywhere near it, is imaginable. Oh what an uplifting post! I need to insert a cute animal picture or a happy cup of coffee one. Felix sez you are going where? This too will end up as CC0 in Flickr And then I can maybe just leave this nattering out of the blog publish screen, but— I’ve gone this far, I believe more in just sending it out to the echo less space, maybe the ripples can reach a guy in Iceland. And if not, no matter. The ripples go out and sometimes if you are lucky they come back, but that’s not the reason for generating them. Hey Baldour! Sometime recently we passed another milestone in the 10th year of continuous web presence by our Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction. In Spring of 1994 we were doing support for faculty at South Mountain Community College in helping them get started with a local "center" for teaching, learning, and technology-- we had convinced the college to donate space for an "Educational Technology Center", a small room in the back of the library (now realized as robust, staffed, and established Teaching and Learning Center located in the Computer Commons). We dragged down a few computers, publicized some workshops in the Spring of 2004. most of them lightly attended. I had been using HTML for a few months, and thought it could be a great way for faculty to create hyperlinked multimedia content, especially since it could be tossed on a little old floppy disk. Se in creating a workshop on basic HTML, it made sense to actually do it as a web site.... Wow, look at that fancy logo- the little Mosaic browser logo, defty done drop shadows (the old way in channels in PhotoShop 3.0)... Anyhow, as you can see in a later snapshot of this stone age web page, we ran through 8 lessons of basic HTML headers, paragraphs, lists, images, hyperlinks-- and this has all nicely evolved into the current version with now 30 lessons (which is overdue for an overhaul into teaching CSS, some day....) and translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and even Icelandic. We've gotten lots of mileage from the "Volcano" tutorial ( the HTML lessons are a building series of tasks culminating in a web site about Volcanoes), more than 3400 email messages of feedback, and a few arrive almost every day, form just about every internet domain you can think of. Ten years and still clickin' I calculate multiple years have passed since I recorded an EdTech Cover Song where I lamely rewrote lyrics, munged some chords, to be dumb enough to post online my bad talent. But I love the act of rewriting lyrics, all on my own, no LLMs in the mix. Just to get the cringing out of the way, I did this out of pure joy and fun of my long lasting professional and personal friendship with Terry Green. I recorded a podcast with Terry about his Way More Famous podcast, Gettin' Air for an upcoming episode of the one I edit as OE Global Voices. Since I don't have his backing, I cannot use his regular music, the toe thumping spounds of Gettin Air by Chixdiggit. So I thought, why not blow some dust from the acoustic guitar and play my own version of the riff using the chords from Ultimate Guitar Tabs. This was maybe two takes to do. https://soundcloud.com/cogdog/gettin-terry-by-alandigsit Thanks Terry for being my podcast hero and good sport pal. I'm editing! I will publish your episode sometime before the sun burns out. And now maybe I will not let the guitar get as dusty again. Maybe. Featured Image: Remix of the Gettin' Air home on VoicEd radio, with a wee bit of remixing of Bryan Mathers logo. I changed the text of the page using the old Browser Inspector Rewrite trick. On updating my 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story site, I am trying to fill in more examples where I was lacking more than just my repeated Dominoe Story. In Looking for ones created with the comic tool gnomz (which are pretty sparse) I dug way back and found one D'Arcy did in 2005, and then said doh! I had done one myself - Aren't They Just Diaries which pops up relevant again as people claim blog deaths. This was a setup I did for a 2005 NMC Summer Conference presentation More Than Cat-Diaries: Publishing with Weblogs where, yes, in 2005 I was trying to make a case that blogware was a powerful publishing platform (and that site was the most extensive mangling I have every done with a blogger template, and that was not trivial!). And um, ahem, this is my sideways stance again to say that if you keep blogging, and just just spray your updates to ephemeral fail whale prone social service sites; you are your own archive - http://cogdogblog.com/2005/06/01/comic-thang/ Here is the old gnomz comic: Mmmmm, another mutated strand of 5 things meme got batted my way from Alisa. I've got a lukewarm thing about such things. Over the years I have never forwarded those email things which warned an anvil would drop from the sky on this coyote if I failed to forward. Well, maybe it did. But I'll play only because Alisa is so cool and knows my favorite cocktail ;-) So her rules are: 1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages). 2. Open the book to page 123. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the next three sentences (sentences 6-9). 5. Tag five people. Okay, so I'll start by saying that I had to change the rules. I just had to blaze a new path. Do things my way or the highway. (Insert your own Cliché here) I'll try it your way, @soul4real! though it will reveal what a literary noob I am as Go Dog Go and CDB barely clock above 20 pages ;-) Since my office is chaos, it was easy to pluck three books from the random stacks. Let's see if I can count sentences.... rummaging and counting sentences.... Ah, I like this one! After a long silence he yawned, then said, "We're using another shadowless thing." "What's that"? "Words." The only clue is the story takes place in the outdoors of Oregon. One not used was O'Henry's Short Stories (hah, I paid 10 cents for it in a thrift store; on Amazon it is 14 cents!) - the sentences landing there almost sounded like a geology book. The other not used was Edward Abbey's Brave Cowboy which I would have easily taken since he is one of my favorite authors (my copy of Desert Solitaire is in shreds), but the first sentence was one of those free flowing like a desert wash in flash flood ones- literally a paragraph. Now the hard part- who do I want to inflict this upon? Should I pass the meme on? Will people just groan and mutter foul words about me when they get tagged? Oh well. I'll pick some from my Google reader with no real logic of choice. Jim Groom cause he is sure to be eclectic and reads big thick (and remembers them) Scott Leslie ditto- I saw all the books in his basement office, so I know he has a stack, And I bet he hates memes more than me. Sue Waters just because I know she reads every trackback ping, likes memes, and is just a fun person who has gobs of people she can spread this to. Rachel Smith cause I know she wants to post something on her new blog site. Chris Lott cause he needs a light hearted break from blogging about PLEs and imagine he has an Alaskan scale sized book collection. I am guessing he will roll his eyes at the meme thing too. I guess there was a theme to my selection, they are all from people who blog from the west coast of their continents. There. I have done the dirty deed. I fund this post lingering in the drafts. Next week's will be hard to document! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 112 Miles Driven: 10,859 Most Recent 1000 mile marker: 10,000 miles, just west of Richmond, VA Number of States/Provinces driven in: 21 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 2 Money spent on gas: $2934 Cheapest gas price: $3.08/gallon (FOuntain Inn, SC). Highest gas price: $5.64/gallon (1.39/liter) (Wawa, ON). Photos posted: 3241 (that is an average of 20.9 per day) Most scenic foliage drive: Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of books read: 12 (Most recent: Things the Grandchildren Should Know) Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 12 Number of nights camping: 18 Number of un,non,anti conference family reunions attended: 1 Bavastock! Most unexpected activities: Riding a tractor on the Durnin Farm, Helping a friend of a friend move in Nashville, and one other I have to keep private. Most depressing shell of a city: Danville VA cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of new forms of transportation: 4 (paddleboard, Jet Ski, 4 wheel Quad, tractor) Best Beach Walk: Batchawana Bay Provincial Park Friend/Relatives Homes Visited/Mooched Upon: 30 Best Bike Ride: Canmore to Banff and back with D'Arcy Norman. Most Recent Bike Ride: Virginia Beach Best Town Name: Fracking, Pennsylvania Number of friends known online met for first time: 21 (most recently added Pat aka @loonyhiker) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Laundry Stops: 13 Number of Times Timmmmy Boy made me laugh with "Tell mw about my eyes": 30? 40? Number of Breweries Visited: 7 (Glenwood Canyon Brewery (CO), Revolution Brewing, Paonia CO; Laughing Dog Brewing, Sandpoint ID; Grizzly Paw, Canmore AB; Steamwhistle, Toronto ON; Ottos, State College PA). Best Campground and Experience (likely never to be knocked off this list): Canoeing to Wallace Island, BC with Scott Leslie; Least Impressive: Haag Cove, Washington Best Campground on a Week Night: First Landing State Park on the beach in Virginia Beach Worst Campground on a Weekend Night: First Landing State Park on the beach in Virginia Beach (when the Loud family sets up next to me) Number of dogs met: 32 (Most recent: Fido in Nashville TN) Number of ds106 radio broadcasts with new people: 10 (most recent with Tom Woodward in Richmond VA) Number of Super Late Night ds106 Broadcasts That Were Totally Worth It: All of them. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of things shared in StoryBox: 891 (where are your contributions?) Biggest Dumper of StoryBox content in one dump: Jim Groom Most Consistent Contributor over span of StoryBox: Giulia Forsythe Number of remixes created with StoryBox content: 2 Number of Storybox Public Appearances: 33 Number of StoryBox demos: 2 (September 23 at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; September 28 at University of Mary Washington) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've tried to shedding much attention on OpenAI CEO drama. But after hearing whiffs of vapor about some Q star thing and the Amazon rolls out some other AI hooplah named... Q there is only one recourse. Mocking. https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog/111486010587288239 That's right, I haken back to my childhood adoration of the original James Bond flicks (I am solid Commery all the way down). I remember having a plastic James Bond briefcase full of gadgets and tha that shot a rubber dart from the side. I still have a toy Aston Martin that at the press of a button ejects a plastic figure through the roof. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/34715377692 Mini Bond flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And all that cool technology device weaponry is due to the natural intelligence of Quartermaster aka Q. I could not resist temptation over lunch to quickly rollout another iteration of a fun random generator housed under Edtechaphors named for the Edtech metaphor mixer inspired by Sir Metaphor Martin Weller. I fiddled with the code Martin originally found to create a Generator for Martin which I've made a handful of variants, the newest being Everyone is Rolling out an AI Named Q https://cogdog.github.io/edtechaphors/q/ Without too much technical spin, the generators are set up with word list arrays that can loosly be swapped to fill in blanks of sentences. You can see it if HTML and Javascript does not make you squeamish. One array is product and platform names (that's where Anaconda Enterprise came from), and a few other arrays of various AI jargon like "neuromorphic computing". The jargon came from sources like Google's Machine Language glossary, lists of platforms, and assorted lists of terms What is fun about this generator code is that pulling from random word arrays is just one level, there are also an array of different sentence patterns each with a few blanks that can be filled with random words from the arrays. The sentence patterns I used were lifted from a few movie quotes selections "Need I remind you, 007, that you have a license to kill, not to break the traffic laws.""Explosive alarm clock, guaranteed never to wake up anybody who uses it.""I answer directly to m. I also have a mortgage. And two cats to feed.""Don’t touch that! That’s my lunch.""I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of earl grey than you can do in a year in the field.""There are only about six people in the world who could set up fail-safes like this.""It’s called the future, so get used to it." various quote sites My Q bot can spit out gems like: There are only about six people in the world who could set up a generative adversarial network like this. Don’t touch mini-descent! That’s my activation function. I can do more damage on my positional encoding sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of backpropagation than NVIDIA can do with translational invariance in the field. It’s called LaMDA, so get used to it. Need I remind you, TensorFlow, that you have a license to chain-of-thought prompting, not to break the bounding box. https://cogdog.github.io/edtechaphors/q/ What does this achieve? Not much beyond my own amusement, and also creating something from a bit of remixing of previous efforts and tweaking OPC (other people's.code). And ChatGPT et al had no role at all. As Q would say to that silly chatbox screen: "You're Not Here To Think. You're Here To Do What I Tell You."The original Q Featured Image: Zero Generative AI used Here. james-bond-q-gadgets flickr photo by tnssofres shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified with Photoshop Palette Knife filter overlain with single frame image from Amazon Q announcement screen video. The eclectic Woody Allen has had many romantic encounters, on and off screen. How could he ever forget his lively yet draining down under love affair? I was going to make a new assignment for the #ds106 GIFfest, but sometimes it is more fun to make the GIF fit, in this case making it slip in facetiously under Michael Branson Smith's I'll Love You Forever: Help that cinematic love last for eternity by turning it into an animated GIF. There is a good and growing set of GIFable tasks, time now to fill in with examples. So far RIFF a GIF is in the lead. These starry eyed lovers first met at sunset on a brushy hill top north of Adelaide, he the pasty white skinned American burning under the solar flares, she the bouncy yet quixotic marsupial who did not pull punches. They loved, they fought, and mostly just danced around their own emotional issues. It really was more of a spectacle. We could not help but watch as the sparks flew, not knowing if either was worth cheering on. Maybe it was like rubbernecking a road wreck. Lasting for eternity? Love is fleeting for these two, but the moment? Forever. I could hardly resist after discovering the clip (via Open Culture) from Woody's 1966 appearance on the apparently circus themed British show Hippodrome (it was the 1960s after all). Just look at those biceps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPqvqPIGFts cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today's ds106 Daily Create was "Take a photo of a personal object in an unusual location" -- and I started the day rummaging for objects of my Dad I have around here. This is a tooned photo of the old wooden level that was in his garage in Florida. I brought it home after we cleaned out the house when Mom passed in 2011. My hammock here in Strawberry, which usually exists to catch debris from the juniper trees, reminds me of one of my earliest memories with Dad, not that I remember myself but have seen it many times in the old family (silent) 8mm videos. In the late 1980s I worked briefly at a camera shop and had the home movies converted to VHS, and later while I worked at Maricopa, I used an analog to digital converted to make a few clips. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB9hZKriU6g This 13 seconds scene in the green hammock is at the house on Ridgewood Avenue (the home I do not remember since we moved when i was 2) holding me as an infant. His joyous smile in that silent film is huge, where you can see him mouth "Say Cheese". I cannot quite make out what he said before that. But it's that smile of his that makes me smile now. Twelve years ago was last I got to wish my Dad happy Father's Day directly to him. In his honor I organized my tool shed, but stopped short of washing the truck. Some things to make me remember Dad. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine My own hammock. I ought to use it more. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine That old wooden level. You do not find tools made like this anymore. What could be more symbol of the reliability, trust, perseverance of my Dad, then a level? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Dad was not a gas man on the grill, he was all charcoal. He was always trying some new method- a metal chimney I recall, but the one that sticks out in my mind is that rather than using bellows to blow air on the coals, he had a dedicated hair dryer. That was my Dad, out there blow drying the barbecue. Funny as it was... it worked. Then there was the time he was grilling a steak for visiting company. I was out there watching. As he flipped it, the steak slipped off and fell on the grass. He just grabbed it, tossed on back on the grill, turned to me and said, "that's special seasoning". cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I have a few of his tools in my shed, I thought I had more. But this worn screw driver is definitely a Dad Artifact. They don't make wooden handle tools anymore do they? Look how worn this one is-- I remember the sheath that always slipped down. It's been held a lot. That's a sign and story of time the acrylic handles never tell. I recall him using it to pry open paint cans, And that's how I use it too. The loss of parents is something that never really heals completely. But it would be more of a loss if I did not have all these memories and stories. I hold these artifacts dear as all of them. In some sense they are just objects, and pretty worn ones, but they are the gateway to much more. Cherish Dads and their artifacts. Wow, a question today from a Google Hangout with Chris Lott's class keeps grinding away at my brain. He invited me as a guest to his class from the University of Alaska Fairbanks ED F654 : “Digital Citizenship” & Intellectual Property. This was an interesting mix of students from all over Alaska and beyond; thanks Erin, D'Arcy, Linnea, Noelle, Philip, Tatiana, and Valerie for listening and asking. Chris asked me to talk about how sharing has been good for me (my free form association goes to Garett Morris' SNL character Chico Escuela), why embrace openness, DS 106, and some on my new Creative Commons project. But as he promised, it was a free form conversation. This post is not a summary, but since it was a hangout on air, there is an archive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7t70aNWb0 No, this post is about a question that Linnea put into the chat: Do you feel you own what you share? Since I had talked much about my own bloggings, I told them that the question was hard and deserved a blog post. Now they are holding me to that https://twitter.com/boris_dog/status/753413677856927745 I talked some in circles in the hangout, and even on sitting with it longer, I am baffled somewhat how to answer. There is a lot to unpack - the very idea of "ownership" Or do we really even own ideas?), and why we would even fuss about ownership might suggest an attachment of monetary value to the shared thing. Or is it really about wanting to get credit? Can we get credit without staking ownership? Frankly the idea of owning ideas, even digital media, has little meaning to me. Yes, I may invest time in making, writing, but knowing how remixed everything is, how could I ever claim something shred sprung from the center of my forehead? So things I share, ideas I write about, I don't feel I can, or even want to use the idea of "ownership" like containment, like laying claim. I may make a claim if my moment with that thing when I blog about it, but if it is shared, what place does any notion of "owning" have? My primary things shared are digital photos on flickr more than 50,000 since 2004. Talking about a digital object takes you into the copyright example of why loaning / selling a purchased physical book does not violate the law because no new copy has been made. A friend and colleague, photographer Jonathan Worth makes a great distinction between the printed photograph as an artifact versus its representation as a digital image. We need to think about the idea of the image as being active. Our main challenge is to redefine the medium and understand that we are going through the second paradigm shift for photography as the image breaks away from the artifact (the first paradigm shift occurred when photography broke away from painting). We must recognize that there is a difference between a printed photography, which is an artifact, and digital screen-based photograph, which is an image comprised of ones and zeroes. "The artifact is fixed in time and it looks backwards; it has a provenance," says Worth. "The digital image is unhitched from time and space and it looks out. Artifacts and images are widely different and students need to understand why. If students aren't engaged in that dialogue, then they are ill-equipped to deal with the the contemporary photography world." from Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century: Educators Share Thoughts and Assignments By Michelle Bogre Ownership is for artifacts, and the stuff I shared digitally is totally "unhitched from time and space". For me, then, the idea of ownership of what I share does not work. That makes it even easier to share. And Chris's students are definitely well engaged in this dialogue, thanks for having me visit. Top / Featured Image: I looked among my own flickr images for something to use for this post; one was a metal street cover from Richmond labeled DOMINION, another one from a long ago of an avatar of me in Second Life looking over empty land (I thought I could play with the idea of owning virtual land). But I went back to the Google Image Search (with settings set to licensed for re-use) on ownership and this image of mechanical child figure playing with blocks jumped right out of the page. Why? I don't know. It's a screen shot from the Creative Commons licensed short film Benefits of Co-operative Economy and Co-ownership Networks and the supporting site Epsos.de. I only watched the intro, but the exploration into ideas of co-ownership might be interesting to the class I spoke to. Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_X5wu8gGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK7bEqZ76_E On the drive home from VCU today, Gardner's wife Alice was sharing some research she was doing on old music manuscripts, some of which had markups written on them. She asked if we knew where the word "rubric" comes from - as we should, since rubrics are those necessary instruments (to some) for teaching. Well, as it turns out it comes from a word meaning "red" for the annotation of documents-- from Wikpedia, the etymology Root: Red, red ochre, red ink. Usage: Rubric refers to decorative text or instructions in medieval documents that were penned in red ink. or from the Oxford Dictionary: late Middle English rubrish (originally referring to a heading, section of text, etc., written in red for distinctiveness), from Old French rubriche, from Latin rubrica (terra) 'red (earth or ocher as writing material)', from the base of rubeus 'red'; the later spelling is influenced by the Latin form. So a word meant to provide sections or directions in a document to the magic instrument of assessment, or again from Wikipedia: In modern education circles, rubrics have recently (and misleadingly) come to refer to an assessment tool. The first usage of the term in this new sense is from the mid-1990s, but scholarly articles from that time do not explain why the term was co-opted. Perhaps rubrics are seen to act, in both cases, as metadata added to text to indicate what constitutes a successful use of that text. But enough definitions, my free form association went to little Danny in the Shining muttering repeatedly "redrum" and the message he writes for his mom IN RED INK. And that if you spell RUBRIC backwards... you still get RUBRIC (in my world). Or maybe KUBRICK. It's all connected. I could not let go of this until I did a little mashup video. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. Rubric. And it circles back to this little metaphor I spotted in the stairwell at VCU. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Test & Drain. Yep. Four years ago today, it was just another one on part of my 15,000 mile "Odyssey" Road trip. I was leaving Welland Ontario after a very special one week visit with Giulia Forsythe. I called my Mom (in Florida) in the morning for our usual quick touching base calls, just another call where we teased each other and laughed. I met Kim Gill for lunch in Oshwa, east of Ontario, after doing a little bit of walking around a lake side park that had a view of the Darlington Nuclear Reactor. Before leaving Oshwa, I remembered to get a postcard and mail to Mom- I was doing a project of sending her a post card from every state and province I visited. Sure I had a lot of Ontario left (I was going at least to Montreal, with dreams of getting out to the Maritimes). I actually stopped at The Big Apple in Colborne. How can you do a road trip and not stop to see a giant sized apple statue? I also had a booboo trying to back away from a gas pump, and put a dent in the side of my truck. The dent and blue paint from the cement pole are still there. I arrived in Belleville at the home of ds106 friend and colleague Andy Forgrave. I planned for just another August 28 to be in Montreal, but in the evening we met with his colleague (Doug?) for dinner in town. And that's where this August 27 turned out to be like no other, because during the dinner I got a phone call from my sister, who was frantically screaming "Mom is gone!" I've written the Cookielove story elsewhere, but here, four years later, the memory both feels far and close. So what to do, except write Another Blog Post About a Deceased Relative. It's for me, how I keep their story alive by telling them to myself. And so I reach into the old photos... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] There they are in their 1960s clothes, Dad with his sideburns and bright tie, Mom with her "silver" hair color and heavy eye shadow. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] From a visit to my sisters house in Baltimore, maybe 1994? Then I could count on the hugs being something on the eternal supply line. In the middle of your family times, you do not ponder them ever not being available. They are Just Always There. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Hah! How many people got hot tubbing with their Mom. She was not a fan of the tub here in Strawberry, this was one of a few times she obliged. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Yep a selfie before they had a name, in May of 2005. I had a small 35mm pocket camera this was taken with. I think this was the time my ex and I brought her Mom to visit mine on Sanibel Island, in Florida. Both moms are gone. But I am not done with you, August 27. On this day in 2001, exactly ten years before Mom's heart suddenly gave out on her, my Dad gave in to his dance with cancer. He was diagnosed in March, so invasive in his stomach and nearby organs there was no treatment. For his birthday in May, I visited in the hospital and once more in early August 2001. Dad was himself, but he was also decaying, you could see it in his struggle to pay attention. I cannot even begin to respect what families have to go through day by day in watching a loved one do this long dance to death. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I do not know what I am laughing like a goofball here maybe in 1968, but my memories of Dad are wallpapered with seeing him working with the barbecue grill, or pushing the lawnmower around the yard, or preparing the above the ground pool for winter, or washing his car religiously every Saturday or walking out of the big waves on the beach in Ocean City Maryland. I think about him doing this stuff, alone with his thoughts, intent on the task... and I find myself doing this while working a shovel in my own yard, or focused on my barbecue grill. But I do not wear shorts like that. [caption width="480" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I bet I do not need to tell you this was 1976, the proud Bar Mitvvah parents. The Big Party was a huge deal, likely the largest event they ever planned. I am sure I knew almost nothing about what it took them to organize it. All I knew was that they thought of me unconditionally as maybe The Most Important Person in the World (I am hopeful they did the same for my sisters). You do not get that from everyone, or anyone it feels like. "Unconditional"? That sounds so archaic. But it becomes as assured as the earth you stand on, as much as you know the sun will appear and warm the world every August 27. It's not a day of sadness, it's just another August 27 where I thank them for everything. Just another openly licensed photo I can use... Top / Featured Image Credits: flickr photo by mararie http://flickr.com/photos/mararie/6715436855 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license Tweet while you keynote... note: if you have updated to the Mavericks version of OSX the app will not work. Thank Apple for restricting the amount of Apple Script capability... see Chris Long's efforts. Our best recommendation is use Keynote '09 if you want to auto tweet If you create presentations in Apple's Keynote, here is the ticket to add some twitter punch to your presentations- a script that can automatically send out tweets when you change slides. Your audience will wonder how you managed to tweet so much while presenting. Practice your humble smile. I first wrote up the method of how to do this back in February 2011 -- since then twitter has changed their authorization scheme, plus the retirement of the AP1 1.0 broke the original app written by Toby Harris. It was actually just a minor edit needed in the applescript, but leave it to a dog to figure it out. Here quickly are some more modern steps for setting it up. It looks a tad geeky, and you will have to enter the world of command line. If this scares you, take two Powerpoints and don't call me in the morning. This was recently written up an screencast by John Greenwood, so you could easily follow his steps too (see below for his video). First, the under the hood stuff, you are going to install into your OS a little but of code called twurl, which is a command line interface that sends out commands to twitter (see the twurl readme for some more handy things you can do with it). To do this, you need to find and open a Terminal window (it is an application usually inside your Utilities folder). From the command line, enter sudo gem i twurl "“source http://rubygems.org a command to install twurl (you will ahem need to be connected to the internet). Use of sudo requires you to enter your login password, it allows you to do anything to your system. You next have to go to (and log in with your twitter credentials) to the developer site https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new. Here you will create a new "app" which really means, you are just going to set up something so twurl on your computer can communicate to twitter through your account. [caption id="attachment_25529" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Creating a keynote twitter app.[/caption] The information here does not matter much since no one really sees it, but create a name like Jenny's Keynote Tweet Machine, use your blog URL or some URL. Guess wildly at the captcha, and create the application. You are not done. One more setting. Click the Settings tab and change Application type to Read and Write. And then click Update. That is all the information twitter needs fro you, but you need two key pieces of information fro twitter. Click on the Details tab, and copy the two cryptic looking mumbo jumbo strings for Consumer key and Consumer secret (no screenshot here since... some of this is secret). I like to toss them in a text file. I then will contruct in this text file (or you can do this in terminal if you are a deft copy paster) twurl authorize "“consumer-key CONSUMERKEYMUMBOJUMBO "“consumer-secret SECRETKEYJUMBOMUMBO This does need to be exact, make sure you do not have any weird extra characters in the keys. Now go to your Terminal app, and paste that entire command string and press Return/Enter. Terminal will respond with a really long super duper mumbo jumbo URL- copy it exactly, and paste in your web browser. This will bring up the Twitter authorization screen. which you really should approve (otherwise, why are you even doing this?). It will return to you a pin number, which you know copy, paste back into Terminal, and press RETURN/Enter. That is the magic connection. It is a good idea to do a command line test first to make sure twurl is operational. In Terminal, type: twurl -d 'status=Making sure twurl works because @cogdog told me to do this' /1.1/statuses/update.json This is telling twurl to create a tweet for you. Note the location of the quotes, they are important here! If this does not work, and you have previously set up twurl before, you may have conflicting apps- see the twurl documentation for Changing Your Default Profile. By now you should be ready to try some keynote tweeting. First use the View options in keynote o make visible the speaker notes. For each slide you want a tweet to go out, wrap the text of the tweet int [twitter].....[/twitter] tags. URLs ought to be shortened, but I suggest you test the length of the tweet, and allow for any prefacing of hashtags. And you do not have to send a tweet for every slide, it can look a bit offensive on twitter to be firing off like a kid with their first fireworks. You should next download the revised Keynote Tweet 2.5 app (see my post on the mods needed to be changed in AppleScript to get it to work). And admire the new icon made for it by John Greenwood. Launch the Keynote Tweet application. It gives a little bit of explanation, and then offers a field where you can insert a hash tag or other string you want to be sent with each tweet. Put your Keynote in presentation mode, and tweet away (be sure to quit the Keynote Tweet application when you are done just to make sure you do not inadvertently send out more tweets). If you prefer to learn from a video, check out a new screen cast tutorial by John Greenwood And there you go, Tweet and Toot away! Update Nov 17, 2014 Thomas Brady shared the script modifications he says is working in the latest Keynote in Yosemite OS. I cannot modify the script until I upgrade (Mavericks Applescript is not liking it). You will have to launch AppleScript, then open Keynote AutoTweet, and replace the scripts with what is below. Then you can compile it to save. If anyone can test this, and let us know it works, it gives hope for those who wish to present and tweet together. display dialog ¬ "I will tweet anything between [twitter][/twitter] tags in your notes while you're presenting. Use the menu to quit this script when you're finished." with title ¬ "Keynote Tweet" with icon caution ¬ buttons {"Begin"} ¬ default button "Begin" on idle tell application "System Events" set okflag to (exists (some process whose name is "Keynote")) end tell if okflag then tell application "Keynote" if playing is true then set slideNotes to get presenter notes of current slide of first document if slideNotes is not equal to "" then set leftCoord to offset of "[twitter]" in slideNotes set rightCoord to offset of "[/twitter]" in slideNotes if leftCoord is greater than 0 and rightCoord is greater than 0 then set tweet to get characters (leftCoord + 7) thru (rightCoord - 1) of slideNotes as string if tweet is not equal to "" and tweet is not equal to "][" then if extras is not equal to "" then set tweet to tweet & " " & extras if tweet is not equal to lastTweet then -- display dialog tweet buttons "Okay" default button "Okay" do shell script "/usr/bin/t update \"" & tweet & "\"" set lastTweet to tweet end if end if end if end if end if return 1 end tell end if end idle UPDATE Nov 18, 2014: Again, since I cannot test this, I am thinking a portion of Thomas's script is specific to the setup on his machine where it calls the shell script. Borrowing from the older script, I am trying to guess if this will work: if tweet is not equal to lastTweet then set twitter_status to quoted form of ("status=" & tweet) do shell script "twurl -d " & twitter_status & " /1.1/statuses/update.json" set lastTweet to tweet end if Featured Image: modified from cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Jacob Whittaker: http://flickr.com/photos/jacobwhittaker/2902947614/ It has nothing to do with the Mothership Google, but Googley Eyes are useful for sock puppets. Via the Firehose of Links Known as Alec Courous, I found myself diverted https://twitter.com/courosa/status/402583589037961216 I find Googlify is a sophisticated technological tool (free of "Big Data" and pivoted moocs) for adding this effect to an animated GIF which you cannot enjoy since this is a snapshot. But the site allows you to add this effect to any published animated GIF I decided to give it a go with one I made of axe wielding Bryan Alexander when I visited him in May 2011 Loading the URL for this GIF in the Googlify site, and the site deconstructs the GIF into frames, each allowing you to add a googley eye and change its location, spacing, size, etc. [caption id="attachment_27619" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for the big googley)[/caption] and it re-renders as a new GIF: Ain't he googley eyed? Why do this? Because you can. Again, seeing a GIF broken down into frames allows you better to understand how it generates animation (right?) UPDATE November 19, 2013: This is now a ds106 assignment! Start doing googly eyed GIFs The western landscape is full of emptiness, vast stretches of drab land, interrupted by deep canyons or sheer mountains, and infrequent water. My reasons for recently watching The Painted Desert was largely because it was set in an area close to where I live. I had it queued on Amazon Prime; a lesser quality version is available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4Mtus-HUB0 It's hardly a great movie, and in many ways left me puzzled (or more "Meh"), a lot to things that seemed missing or inconsistent. But that said, if you cannot find something of interest to write about, well... I'll leave the summary to IMDb Western pardners Jeff and Cash find a baby boy in an otherwise deserted emigrants' camp, and clash over which is to be "father." They are still bitterly feuding years later when they own adjacent ranches. Bill, the foundling whom Cash has raised to young manhood, wants to end the feud and extends an olive branch toward Jeff, who now has a lovely daughter. But during a mining venture, the bitterness escalates. Is Bill to be set against his own adoptive father? Sound (and not) I noted it was an old movie (1931) and frankly in the first few minutes, I was wondering if it was a silent movie. Nothing is said as Jeff and Cash come across an abandoned wagon. I almost expect Chaplin gesticulations and cue cards. Actually the only sound seems to be the spoken lines and what was recorded on the set. There is no music. There are parts where between dialogue is a ghostly static, no wind blowing, or ambient sounds. One might chalk this up to being an old movie, but somewhere I read someone mentioning earlier movies that did much better with audio. Two Notes and Thats It? The movie opens (1:05) and I think there is one more scene (9:05) where a notebook with handwriting is used to fill in the plot. [caption id="attachment_52545" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The notebook is used t indicate the passage of time at 9:05[/caption] It feels like it was an idea that just got dropped. Or maybe after the gap in time as brought to the present, it was not necessary? It feels like a rickety bridge built over a plot gap. Gaps in Character Development Since this is the part of #western106 that we think about characters, I found most of the ones in this movie stiff, thin, or just not built enough for me to care or be interested in. The movie is built on this conflict between Jeff and Cash, apparently they traveled together to the West, apparently with a joint plan to work together (never hinted at). The whole scene where they find the baby feels fill of gaps too. They come up to a wagon, hear a baby crying, they take him, and are riding off in like 4 minutes. It's left to wonder what happened at that site, they did not even investigate. The timing feels wrong. This is a hinge for the characters in the movie, their fighting over Bill in their lives (the grown man from the baby). They have some comedic moments with the baby, and then there seems to be no comedy in the rest of the movie. Then they have this big blow up near the water hole, that just seems to come out of nowhere. Up to this point there was nothing to indicate these were not best buddies, and now they are viscously bickering (over whether to stay at the water hole?, and Cash rides off with the baby as a shield. Then we get a note, and a return to the water hole. Because the lighting is exactly the same, there's not much sense of time passage except for there are a lot fo buildings around the watering hole, and Jeff is there with a young lady. Somehow we have to figure out it is her daughter. The mother? maybe I was not paying full attention, but how these two people came to live there? We just jumped 20 years. In her first scene, Mary Ellen Cameron (played by Helen Twelvetrees seems like a rootin' tootin' wester gal, she pulls out her shotgun ready to defend her Dad's land, but a few minutes later she is more or less pushed aside from the action by Brett, and the rest of the movie, she's more of a eyelash bashing bimbo. Brett makes a big move on her, for some reason she takes up with Bill; there is no lead up to that as a romance. It just sort of happens out of the blue). The Gable Effect and Boy oh Boyd [caption id="attachment_52547" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Clark Gable as Rance Brett[/caption] This movie seems to be most well known for being the first talking movie role for Clark Gable, and is said to be the role that rocketed his career. His is the character that seems to have the most oomph and feel to it, and the most western grizzled cowboy type. Jeff and Cash seem to speak more flatly. I lost track of where I read it, Gable had no horse riding experience before this movie. The Brett character does work for being a man of mystery, he's "from Montana" on his way to New Mexico, but for what? He's got this affection for Jeff's daughter Mary Ellen. He makes a strong flirting move early, but then he is never that bold later. This is important because it creates the tension with Bill (the grown found baby) I was not even sure who the actor was til I looked it up, but Gable does have a strong screen presence. The bigger role in the movie was William Boyd playing Bill Holbrook (wondering if Holbrook as chosen for the name of the town closest to the Painted Desert?). His character is potentially the most interesting, because he turns agains Cash you raise him and made efforts to try and broker piece with Cash's old nemesis, Jeff. Why Bill wants this is not clear. Boyd had a hugely successful career in Westerns playing Hopalong Cassidy starting in the mid 1930s. The Landscape [caption id="attachment_52548" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The Arizona landscape gets only a few glances at scene changes[/caption] The movie is named, set in, and filmed in the Painted Desert of north central Arizona and adjacent areas. It's interesting to see the pastel colored land rendered in black and white, which might add a bit of starkness to it. [caption id="attachment_52549" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The precious watering hole[/caption] The mystical watering hole (made up I think) is a key element, as well as the presence of mine-able minerals. There are a few scenes out in the landscape, but it does not feel as much of a presence as the films of John Ford. They seem to be in a really remote location; Jeff's refusal to let Cash water his cattle a the watering hole requires a 27 mile re-route, but for being remote, they sure seem to be very close to a populated town (which I do not think is named). There is the complete mine set build and destroyed. Apparently some crew were injured during the blasts done for that scene. Oops. The Unexpected For a western this movie is missing the tropes of Really Bad Guys, bank robberies, gunfights, fistfights, jumping from trains, and dealings with Indians. In the scene where Jeff and daughter get ready, they do the classic putting their ear to the ground. This is where it should turn to a marauding band of Indians, but surprise! It's cattle. Then we have this rising tension of Cash bringing his cattle in, but as a suprirse there is a whooping band of horsemen who drive the cattle away. The sounds they are making sound like Indian war cries, but ti turns out tis just Bill and (??) we have no idea who else helped him. No Indians appear in this movie. No Mexicans either. It's a White and White movie. Really the movie is just this long lived (and little explained) animosity between the men in the beginning who found a baby. It's almost more of a family drama, just set in the Painted Desert. There's Probably More I lost some interest and attention over the last 1/3 of the movie, and maybe even noticed the credits rolling before I knew it was over. The gaps and things that feel missing from this movie seem to have more to do with the behind the scenes actions of the movie studios and production companies. From one of the reviewers on IMDb, titled "It's Not All There" The Painted Desert was one of the last features to be produced by Pathé in 1930 before being taken over by RKO, and one of the first to be released by the emerging RKO-Pathé Distributing Corporation. After its initial release it was put back on the shelf, supposedly never to be seen again. During this time four key action sequences were removed to be used as stock footage in later RKO films, among them the 1938 re-make also titled The Painted Desert. In 1955 the RKO library was sold to C&C Television Corporation for TV syndication, primarily on CBS affiliated stations, and both versions of The Painted Desert were in the package. 35MM source material for these 16mm television prints was missing all of the deleted footage, so that what remained, and all that viewers have been able to see for the last fifty years, was a lot of talk, and practically no action. The sequences which are missing are most of the cattle stampede at the beginning of the film, a wagon hi-jacking and subsequent stampede into the canyon mid-way into the film, an attempted, but unsuccessful wagon hi-jacking soon afterwards, and the big mine explosion and resultant landslide that destroys the mining camp further on. (Two very impressive shots from this last sequence can be found in Republic's Red River Valley (1936).) Frustratingly, the results of these events are shown, and much talked about, but the events themselves are nowhere to be seen. The version shown on Turner Classic Movies, though of superior visual quality, having been derived from the surviving original 35MM material, is still missing these key sequences, though no mention is made of it on the air. It makes sense now that it's not even clear what the "movie" is as it can get picked over and re-arranged by movie studios. It even gives some pause to think all that happens to get that movie on the screen, and it has as much to do with the business as the writing, directing, etc. Not a great western, but still found a few things worth looking into. I am just all the time appreciating IMDb more and more. It looks like any other web site, but when you peek under the corners, there is a whole raft of things it is doing with data. Like the Connections section where I note that The Road to Perdition makes a reference to this movie. I remember IMDb being around from my early days on the web in 1993. I was thinking of it reading Adam Croom's post on something about blockchains and data, but he makes an interesting metaphor from IMDb: Let’s start first with credits. Specifically movie credits. Arguably, the website my wife, Katie, goes to most often is the International Movie Database (IMDB) website. When we watch a movie, 20 minutes into the film, without fail, she will whip out her phone and pull up the IMDB page for the movie. Most recently, we were at the movie watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens (I promise, no spoilers). A scene comes on with the General Hux character. She thinks she’s seen him somewhere so she’s searching on IMDB. A-ha! Domhnail Gleeson. He was in a Black Mirror episode, she tells me. My facial-name recognition is about as good as a goldfish, so I have no idea what she’s talking about, but she goes on to explain the exact episode that he was in. And suddenly we have pulled this information together as network; something in which we can relate to and empathize with based off of our previous relationship with other texts. Arguably, the number one value to the user in the social network is this: a way to organize and interact with their network which is made up of these disparate connections that have taken place over time. So those in the film industry, including actors, gather credits and over time these credits start to build up a collective body of work. I can interact with these credits and try to put together my own interpretation of who this actor is and how they have developed over time based on different variables. Box office smasher or flop? Lead role or supporting? Who was the producer? Was it an independent film? Is this actor more dramatic or comedic? These are all a bit of judgements on my part, as the interpreter, because, ultimately a credit is a credit is a credit. The credit is fairly neutral. It got me nostalgic because I remember an interesting bit of history sitting on the IMDb site, that it actually pre-dated the web starting within a newsgroup. I found the note on IMDb, but the current page is truncated, it seems. This is where I open my multi-tool and open the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find the version of the page I recall. It's like being a web archeologist. I am gently dusting off the fine dust on this page with a soft brush, and there it is- the first time this great site went on the web, it was on a server at Cardiff University in Wales: The first web version of the database went live on the servers at Cardiff University in Wales. There is a fun bit of e-mail dating back to those days between web interface author, Rob Hartill, and Col Needham, both impressed when the web interface got 100 accesses in a single day. In recent years, the IMDb website has been serving over 2.5 billion accesses from over 57 million visitors every month. Imagine that, another huge internet innovation birthed in higher education. Back when it really was an internet frontier, the Wild Wild Web. Yep, there's gold again, bags, pans of it... though the site that pretty picture came from seems more web snake oil sales than driving herds of packets across the plains. Oh well. Top / Featured Image: Screen capture from The Painted Desert (1931) found on YouTube - this is the early scene where Rance Brett (right, Clark Gable) meets Jeff Cameron (left, J. Farrell MacDonald) Since I am on the extreme margin of involvement of course management systems at Maricopa, I've not intensively followed the latest CMS stuff, but hear that Sakai is bubbling and there is even more spots of interest on the adoption of Moodle. Leon at Y.uk? emailed about 2 new Moodle articles on his blog, "Innovative Practitioners and Moodle" Listen to our latest two casts from innovators in education Ian Usher and Drew Buddie. as well as "Skype interview with Miles Berry about Moodle": If you have wondered about Moodle and how it is being used in schools - listen to our third podcast over Skype with Miles Berry of St Ives School in Haslemere Surrey. Apparently there is a Moodle gathering coming up called MoodleMoot (the rate of Moodle word creation is peaking, it is just such a fun word. Do you fell that little giggle when saying the name of your current mega dollor CMS? Do warm feelings flow through your veins?). In addition, there was an very interesting poster presentation by someone from Humboldt State University at last week's NMC 2005 Summer Conference: A Comparison of Satisfaction with Open Source (Moodle) and Commercial LMS Software What are the respective advantages of commercial learning management system (LMS) software and an opensource alternative? Courses at Humboldt State University, California State University Chico, and San Francisco State University were each offered to students using Moodle and the host campus' commercial software. This side-by-side comparison of Moodle with Blackboard and WebCT during fall 2004 resulted in feedback from the instructors, developers, and students on satisfaction levels with each LMS. Humboldt, a Blackboard site, is now apparently offering both Moodle and Bb side by side at http://cdc.humboldt.edu/lms/. I was able to track down most of the data and slides presented in the poster at http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm. More or less there is more student satisfaction with Moodle, though I am not statistics savvy enough to be affirmative. What is not there was a resolution passed by their student body, "RESOLUTION IN SUPPORT OF HUMBOLDT STATE UNIVERSITY CONVERTING BLACKBOARD, THE CURRENT ONLINE LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (LMS) TO MOODLE" (March 21, 2005). Apparently, given the large numbers of "Whereas's", Humboldt students are rather outspoken (other California colleague agreed with the active nature of this school). The presenter noted their Bb contact goes for a while longer, so no sudden moved are needed, but reported the support needed for Moodle was rather low. These would by Chinese curse equivalent of interesting times for big CMS stockholders, eh? UPDATE Check out New Zealand's Moodle For Schools site (thanks Richard E for the ichat message!) The Open Source Courseware Initiative New Zealand (OSCINZ) is a e-Learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) project that aims to develop and implement a unique New Zealand learning management system (LMS), based on quality open source code provided (and tested) by leading educational providers. As part of the testing of this LMS we are currently offering a number of "fee free" courses for secondary school students and are listed on the left. They are all foundation level courses and completely online. Call me fickle, but despite some recent barking about the new social bookmark site Jots, I am romping back to del.icio.us for my primary bookmarking. Ttecnically, I am using my multi-bookmark tool to post to del.icio.us, Furl, and our Bag of URLs site... Furl since I have a big pile there not elsewhere, the "Bag" since I use it to send links to a list within our system. But I am back to del.icio.us for its ease of tagging via the bookmark tool- not only does it nicely auto complete tags when typed in, it also makes using my previous tags a one clikc suggestio, and it offers a decent set of suggested tags perhaps used by others. So for example, I just dumped in the Google Sightseeing site, a fun place that catalogs interesting things that have been found in the Satellite views of Google Maps... (more…) My family calendar, now on Google, reminds me that tomorrow is the day my mother's father passed away, in 1957, years before I was even born. I guess you can say he would have been something like 112 years old. I hardly know much about Harry. He emigrated from Poland in the early part of the 1990s. If I understand right, he might my mother Ida, herself a Lithuanian immigrant, through some local Baltimore matchmaker. That's how things were done then. He was a shoemaker, and my mother, her mother, her three sisters and one brother grew up in a house above the shop on Aisquith Street in Baltimore. Harry must have been scrappy to support his family through the Depression, an era my Mom (born in 1929) does not remember except through the normal playful eyes of a child. Harry, and his son Harvey (my uncle) apparently lost their hair before they were 20. Some genes I am happy passed me by. Harry was also apparently fond of practical jokes, and played cards in the back of his shop. He did run numbers at one time, and apparently got in trouble with the law, and stopped. He would bring home a live carp from the market that stayed in the bathtub, until it was prepped for eating. That's not much to go on- I have some audio I recorded with my Mom in 2008: Mom describes her father I've got some scans of photos from Mom's scrapbook- there are very few photos of the parents, most are of the kids in my Mom's family. It does say something that they saw the value of photos in the late 1920s... [caption id="attachment_28972" align="aligncenter" width="329"] That's Harry (dandy hat!- holding my Mom as a baby, 1929. Might that be Patterson Park, near where they lived?[/caption] [caption id="attachment_28973" align="aligncenter" width="271"] Aisquith Stree6 (1935) - my mom and her sisters with a neighbor. There are very few photos that show the neighborhood (her house now is an empty lot according to Google Streetview). The sign behind has an address for a street that ends in "nklin" -- the nearest I could find was "Conkling St, a mile east[/caption] [caption id="attachment_28974" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A note from Mom about her Dad rigging up a hose from the second floor of their house so the kids could play in the water. That;s Mom (right, age 5), her sisters Dorothy (left) and Ruth (behind)[/caption] It isn't much, and I feel the family stories get more faded as the voices who can tell them are gone. What is it about my Grandpa Harry that is in me? And even with this, it feels like peering through a very thick distorted piece of glass to understand what it was like to live in the 1930s, a world we see as sepia, but would have been full color, rich audio fidelity. (cross posted from 106tricks.net just because I am so excited about tonight's ds106 in class activity) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOaP2myiWPs This is the result of tonight's in class ds106 challenge. As we are starting audio, I did a little explanation of the role of the foley artist in film and radio. Students formed 5 groups, and each group was charged with creating sound effects for a specified 30 second segment of Charlie Chaplin's In the Lion's Cage. They could use any props in the room or their own body. I played the video back with the sound muted, and asked the groups to perform the effects live. The video above was edited to overlay the audio I recorded. They did pretty damn good for only have 15 minutes to plan their sounds. My only small disappointment was a lack of a Willhelm Scream. My thanks for Scott Lockman with whom a skype conversation the other night generated the idea for this activity. A few weeks ago twitter and some blogs were all a' gushing about the demo of Google Wave like it was the new Shimmer, maybe even more than a dessert and a floor wax. I tweeted some snark about the hype -- a bit foolishly since I had not seen the demo. I failed to heed my own warnings of judging a technology from the outside (well, I cannot help but be from outside, since all I have to go on is an 80 minute demo). Until today on the flight to Hawaii, when I watched the whole demo on my iPhone. I'm surprised the plane held steady with the number of times my jaw dropped or I yelled, "wow". So I cannot do much except say wow-- but--but--but if the wave does break (in the positive surfer sense), this could be a huge game changer. Not only does it change email and communication as Rasmussen proposes in the beginning ("what if we were to invent email today?") -- it could be the end of the static web as we know it. Now of course, with web 2.0 we think it is really not static, but the web on wave looks a whole lot different than what we have now- this very blog post becomes a conversation that is always being updated, edited. There is also this sense of information, communication becoming free of the technology boxes we have them now- so the same content can be modified, edited, discussed via a browser, phone, blog, wave client, some remote programmed bot.. It could change the sense of what we think of as documents, as they become distributed yet connected-- the piece about people working simultaneously yet in a chained publish model (pieces of one wave are updated causing instant propagate changes where-ever that web is used. The notion of playing back a wave goes way being watching a video of MediaWiki updates-- did you catch the small piece about just playing back a single person's contributions? Doesn't this have some compelling interest for assessment, to be able to track a single student's contributions to a larger group project? Is Google Wave the manifestation of those long ago (for me dead) dreams of reusable learning objects-- but with much more? Another piece that just jazzed me was both presenters manipulating and marking up a Google Map together. This has been one missing piece of Google Maps / Earth- the social layer that we see in virtual worlds. With wave, we can be co-exploring (or heck field trips) in maps, maybe Earth? Things maybe to be added or I missed include: I saw them adding users o a Wave one at a time. I'd like to see an ability to define groups, and groups made o groups, so you could mass add people together. Or perhaps you tag contacts, and assemble them that way. It wasn't clear what kinds of permission layers you can add- it looks like everything is editable. If that is the case (and I am not sure I mind), then-- everything becomes a Wiki (and conversely, as someone else suggested, wikis as we know them go the way of the doodoo bird). What if a wave is "complete" can it be frozen as a final product? What if I want to let Jane and Nancy edit, but only let Harvey view a wave (or maybe harvey can only comment, but not edit). Waving seemed fine for 2, 3, 5 people-- what happens when 100s are in one? 1000s? So I have sipped the wavy cool-aid, and it is now factoring into plans for a major new NMC collaboration site I will be charged with designing this year. While this is all exciting for the technogeek in me, the bigger question is -- is it too much a cognitive leap for people to jump form their inbox? Is it too complex for people to grok? What will be the big feaure, app that will make people drop the fears to try hopping on a surf board and get on a real wave? I am paddling out there to see.... Utterly amazing, and stupefyingly depressing... Less than 9 minutes after posting Metering Social Bookmarking Services, the inbox registered a quick response... from a casino splog: who obviously did not read my instructions: So who can get a high score (pills, porn, and casino, and other cockroach infested sites do not count)? The roaches are all caught in SpamKarma2 where they cannot leave their fetid footprints. The site is control-clicked sent t Splog Reporter. Does this all really do anything? The latest Wired (not online yet, but I got one in the mail) has a long article on Splogs, and little glimmer of hope beyond more captchas, challenges, and things that punish legitimate commenters. All of this tip-toes around a root cause. The reward system for links, one that rewards sploggers in more money than you or I could hope to ever earn in a month, is in the form of Google Rank, the very thing that makes Google the wonder that it is. Who can really call them on the carpet? Hold their feet to the fire? Why is there not a method of punishing companies that benefit from illicit link rank inflation? Some sort of internet law of physics suggests anything that works for a greater good for the internet population is open enough to be exploited b those seeking personal gain (email spam, comment spam,. Can one exist without allowing the other? But, wow, faster than I can run a mile, the asion folks have read my blog, and taken the time to post a link. How nice. If that is not progress, then... I'm trying to be the relentless dog who will not drop the bone. Believe it, you cannot find everything on the web, and in this case, what I find on the web is something repeated so much, that people accept it as truth. I am calling agents of information literacy to help me find the grail. Back in May I wrote about trying to locate the source of a statement that is repeated so much, I had heard it, and accepted it as something that somewhere had a research basis- it is some variation of: Research at 3M Corporation concluded that we process visuals 60000 times faster than text. Go ahead, google jockeys, see if you can get anything beyond this: I traced this back to a PDF published at 3M (on a web page that exists now only in the internet archive, everyone stop and bow in honor towards the archive), where the only citation reference reads: Did you know that visual aids have been found to improve learning by up to 400 percent? Did you realize that we can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text? Would you guess that the average person only remembers about a fifth of what they hear?These findings from behavioral research confirm our daily experience: we rely on all our senses to bring ideas and concepts to life. (my emphasis added) That is it- the basis for this oft repeated assertion is usually cited as 3M, and the reference there is the vague, "These findings from behavioral research" -- Where is this research? Where? Where? I've asked a few librarians, who dug, but found no bone. I contacted 3M through their contact form, and very nice lady named Mary responded and we went back and forth. She wrote a month later and said there was someone in the office that had the answer in a document, and she would send it when this person returned from vacation. I thought I was close! The document she sent me? It was that same PDF I found on the web myself. I cannot let this go. There is a lesson to be learned here about what is fact and what appears to be fact by sheer repetition. I fully believe there is a research paper somewhere that supports this assertion, though I actually seriously doubt the hard fact of the 60,000 times number. So how do I make this happen? I am going to post it to Snopes.com. I will tweet it out. I will email some more librarians. I will try the strength of my weak ties. Maybe I will offer money? I cannot let go of this. I won't. Help me? Here's the deal. I don't have 60,000 bones in the bank- but I will put fur in the game-- I will pay the first person to send me the source of this research $60.00! I am asking not only for the citation, but the research paper itself or at least the content. How many more cute dog pictures will it take? https://flickr.com/photos/kthxbye/3693382629 what's that? flickr photo by timofeic shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license UPDATE: July 7, 2012 A great flurry activity of response to this post and a round of direct emails to colleagues. The $60 prize awaits. A number of people sent me the link for the Polishing Presentations document (2001) that is usually cited in publications. As I have blogged about the frist time around - this is not a credible reference since it only parrots the assertion and mentions it as "findings from behavioral research". Several people pointed me to what looks like related research from the University of Minnesota published in 1986 as Persuasion and the Role of Visual Presentation Support: The UM/3M Study maybe the first was a tweet from Karla Cross who later suggested tracking down the lead author, Doug Vogel https://twitter.com/KarlaCross1/status/221282446589693952 And Doug did respond to my email request and replied: The research that I did as a PhD student at the U. of Minnesota was involved with persuasion and the working paper that you found is actually the most complete description of the work (even beyond that which was ultimatedly reported in my thesis). I have not seen the 2001 3M publication but my research had nothing to do with visual processing speed. cheers, doug This paper alone opens another worm hole to explore, its often repeated conclusion: Presentations using visual aids were found to be 43% MORE PERSUASIVE than unaided presentations. Can the original research, which was tightly bound around a study of graduate students responding to a pitch for a seminar presented to them in VHS and overhead transparencies and measuring how many of them signed up, really be this globally extended as a "fact"? I dont question the original work, but again, once something gets repeated... well, there you go, again. If anyone is close to the prize, it is Darren Kuropatwa who went to the extremes in his research (and introduced me to the interesting search tool http://millionshort.com/ which performs searches after stripping out the most popular sources so you can zero in on the obscure... Darren unearths notes form a presentation by Jenn Manalo, Sr. Product Specialist, 3M Corp. (31 August 1998) where she repeats the magic chorus: So good visuals benefit not only the audience but the organization and presenter as well. This is because of increased productivity and effectiveness, enhanced professional image of the presenter, and a generally more attentive audience."Humans can process an outstanding amount of visual information. Actually, we can process at 60,000 times faster than text." Before you get too excited, she also cites the Vogel et al paper above but includes the faulted re-iteration (emphasized below) of Dale's Cone of Experienced In creating effective presentations, we all know visuals can be of great assistance. According to research findings, visual aids help increase persuasiveness of presentations by as much as 43%. People remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and 50% of what they see and hear. Furthermore, the use of colors can accelerate learning, retention, and recall by 55% to 73%; increase comprehension by up to 73%; and sell (products and ideas) more effectively by 50% to 85%. UPDATE: July 7 (later in the day!): I've been spraying the request everywhere, Google+, LinkedIn, even (ew), Facebook. Emails have been send to Dennis Profitt as well as speaker/author Lynnell Burmark, who publishes this statement and uses the 60000 statement on her web site. Just in! A reply from Dennis Proffit at UVA who suggests the processing time of visual and text information should be about the same: Hum"¦ This seems an odd claim. The minimal time required to identify whether an animal is present in a natural scene is 150ms. See: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/089892901564234This is about the time required to identify a letter or a very familiar word. I suspect the claim is a deduction from physiology. Text is processed in central vision, and thus, engages fewer photoreceptors than do pictures. One might argue that the recognition process for reading goes a bit deeper into association areas in the temporal lobe than does pattern recognition. But, based upon what I know from behavioral research, the comparison does not make much sense. Both picture and text processing vary with the familiarity with and complexity of the presented material, making direct comparison hard. I also located vis LinkedIN (first time I used it to locate a contact) Carlos Abler, a research and content strategist at 3M. I was not going to pay for LinkedIn's internal email thing, but I sent a tweet: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/221642555924819968 UPDATE (July 27, 2012): No winners. People keep emailing me the link to the 3M PDF brochure on Polishing Your Presentations which I've already clearly stated above is not a credible citation since it merely repeats the claim w/o citing the research. Via a comment on Darren Kuropatawa's post from Wesley Fryer, I got in touch with Obi Wan Bernie Dodge, who knocked down this claim a few clicks back (and perhaps it was the back of the envelope calculation on nerve transmission speed that produced the 60,000 number?) https://twitter.com/berniedodge/status/229074134511017984 Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/mekin/281791343 Catch it if you can flickr photo by timekin shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license Yesterday I added two new mirror sites for Feed2JS, bringing the full list of mirrors to seven. The two new kids on the block include: OpenGUI serving feeds from California Astra Systems serving feeds from somewhere in the U.K. All sites have been updated to the same functionality (latest update; al;l are listed as the full frenzy history) as the central hosted one (version 1.5 since I started numbering). I need to come up with a better way of sending code updates, as now I am just uploading them to the various sites. I know one molecule next to nothing about managing software projects beyond my own stuff, so it is being made up as I go. I do have things organized that once given ftp access to a new mirror site, I can get one running and tested in about 15 minutes. FWIW, we provide all the code one needs to run this on your own server which gives you th functionality of the service, and a simple build a feed form. What the mirrorse have beyond this is a site that has all the sections and pieces of the main site, and those spiffy orange and blue colors. While mulling over how to move Feed2JS to a more stable, friendly, supported home, especially sparked by the comments by David, I am thinking a whole new framework is in order. Don;t worry, I will leave the legacy... er, curent code as is. My own prime directive is not to break anyone's previously constructed pasted JavaScript, so no parameters have changed name or purpose since 2004, or whenever it was I rolled this out. But David's comments hit home, that having a handful, 10, 20, 50 other sites one could use to generate a feed, were not really "mirrors" as I called them, suggesting if one doesn't work, the code would tried the next... they are more like dumb clones. I re-called that I had done some test cases, and got working, a time out script, so if a server did not respond (e.g. like when the Maricopa site blinks out) it responds with a JavaScript alert, and an option to abort or keep on trying. But it would get tricky to send the request to another site in this case, given the logic flow I had set up. But... This would seem like the perfect time to roll out some AJAX implementation. This might mean that, JS code could seek out the server and parsed RSS content, and display it to a specified part of a page. But let's say, it got no response... well, perhaps the JS could contain 3 or 5 alternative sites that ti could send the same parameter string to... then it could keep trying. And there should be some way to put a status indicator in the page's place where the outpit goes. I've only done minimal AJAX but it seems, like the right way to go. Anyone have any thoughts?? The downside is it would take a bit more cutting and pasting, as AJAX calls for a suite of JS code that needs to be in a web page's content, or linked to a library somewhere. I worry about something that might be more robust functional wise, versus something that might be more challenging to use. Help? This was just another one of those stories where someone made use of one of my public domain flickr photos shared under CC0. If you follow the typical convention as taught in those woekshops, this means you can use an image, and not even need to give credit. Just grab and go. But that's what a man named Thierry in Belgium did. https://cogdogblog.com/2021/11/open-as-in-dog-treats-with-insects-and-spent-barley-grain/ He not only took the photo from flickr, he took the time to contact me and offer thanks, letting me know he was using Felix's photo on the web site for his product-- dog treats made from insects and spent barely grain. Yum. Four years later, aka yesterday, Thierry contacted me again letting me know that after much effort and sweat, his business did not succeed, and he had left it in the hands of someone else. Why did he bother to do this? Why does one even have to ask, it's a human thing to do. And like originally when he contacted me, he offered to show me around "if I was ever in Belgium." This little story bounces in my mind after tuning in last week to the Creative Commons announcement od their new CC Signals framework/project as some means for content owners to "signal" their preference on how material is used by GenAI-- a "new social contract." It sounds virtuous and has nice icons. I can't say I see by any means what possibility there is for such reciprocity to happen, given the Big Guns have pretty much ridden the train of "we will hoover everything". Doug Belshaw said pretty much more succinctly than what I might conjure. To me, CC licenses were pretty much a preference signal though mostly the way I heard people talk about them was the idea that a license offered some kind of "protection" of their stuff. Slap on a CC BY-NC to stop commercial use. So I still hear language of the idea that when people share, they have some expectation of such reciprocity. I have naively for my entire edtech career taken the other route- when I share, I expect nothing in return. No money. No credit. Hence most of my 70k flickr photos are CC0. That way, when I receive a thanks, or someone letting me know where/how the use my photos, it's a bonus (and it happens a lot). I don't take photos to be compensated, so I do not even care if someone takes my photos and makes money. Heck, I have seen a few of 'em with a price sticker on Alamy. If some sucker pays for a photo they can get for free from my flickr account, well that's nothing to me. I have gotten more professionally and in just the kinds of connections from the Thierry's on the internet that exceed anything I might have gotten by trying to project my stuff. Yeah, I believe in the fairy tale kind of commons, laugh away at me. I'm not here to take a side on CC Signals, I am not even sure enough what it is, and I will follow it with interest but am still not clear what can come from it. Me, I will just keep foolishly giving away every single thing I have made and shared online. I don't need to put out requests or have expectations for reciprocity, I prefer it when real people just do it because its the right thing to do. And I make all the efforts to extend reciprocity when I benefit from someone else's work. I'd rather be naive then greedy. Featured Image: I'm Alone With My Big Thoughts flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Go ahead, take my photo! Use it w/o attribution! Sell ***** with it. Train your LLM with it. Have fun. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by hey mr glen The worst kind of blog post opens with some sort of apology for not blogging. It's a good thing I am not doing that correctly? Because the only one I should every be sorry to ius myself, my personal audience of me who reads what I write. And if I don;t read, I think I still know what's going on. The passage of time being quick, rapid, dizzying, seems an understatement. If you see my lost time, and those 9000 pair of unmatched socks, and the pile of car/house/gate keys, and that 1971 Hank Aaron baseball card, please let me know. One thing that seem to have fallen off my track are photography. The daily habit is hung out on the line. But really, who am I answering to? I more or less did regular daily photos since 2007. I'm on sabbatical. Actually, i seem to be doing more with the iPhone, which is not to say I am hanging the DSLR up. Not in the least. It is still one of the things I enjoy the most, and had a fun resurge today. I went up for a rainy day rendezvous with my sisters (who are in the Baltimore area) and we had a great day at the National Portrait Gallery / Smithsonian Art Museum, conjoined museums which makes it interesting to pass from one to the next. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I never thought much about a portraits being of interest, but I was rather intrigued by the micro stories of biography you get there, one person per painting/photo/statue, each an invite to go more. Like Bucky Fuller, what is inside the geodesic head? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Anyhow, that thing of photography I enjoy most is finding some interesting frame of detail. Blogging to has gone a bot ragged. But I'll be f****ed if I am going to blog about not blogging. Next. The days go fast at DTLT at University of Mary Washington, and the pace is frenetic. I could not be at a better place. Some of y'all seemed to have missed the memo; I have not been here just teaching ds106, I am on full time at UMW. And yes, teaching ds106 - what a ride that is now into the last week. I've got a backload of reflections. I have a truckload of "things I would like to do better". I am super impressed with the output of many of my students, yet still struggle to feel good about the way I have been structuring the class time. Getting the engagement level on that stage has been frustrating for me, and a number of the students seem in it for just doing the assignments, getting the grade. Where's the "#4life" in that? The exciting thing has been crafting the new ds106 Remix machine, and starting to plan with my summer collaborator, Martha Burtis, on the ds106 online summer course we will co-teach starting in (yikes!) about a month. But let's keep that glass half full. New on the to do list is doing more biking. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The country roads around here have been wonderful diversions of exploring, if a bit wanting on decent shoulders and lanes, once you get away from the traffic, there are tons of quiet back roads. But I am getting in gear here- I signed up to do a 100 mile ride in late August with D'Arcy Norman up in Banff, so I have some serious training to do. I maye even retool the old "I Hate Running" blog - that URL still works for a biking blog. Other things on the horizon will be a 3 week extended visit to Vancouver, to pilfer the minds at UBC on their uses of Mediawiki, plus to hang out with the East Van gang (Will the Soundlab still be around, Jason?) as well as getting to hang with Bryan Jackson and hopefully Scott Leslie. And attend Northern Voice. And then! I've got a green light to work.teach remotely in July, so I am headed back to my home in Strawberry for a repsite, and to clean the weeds. In the yard. I find some pangs of thinking back to a year ago, when I was ramping up my year of freedom, and in Junem when I started the 6 month road odyssey. I've not progressed much, if any, with what to do, if anything, from that experience. Writing a "book" makes me yawn. But I have a ton of media, not to mention the 3 tons of media in the StoryBox. I have been dabbling some with Jux to publish some bits and some (unblogged) (yet) dabbling with a year later's reflection in Cowbird. Time. Where are you? I know you are out there. Sorry? Nah. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6 Inside the Photo If you engage in daily or at least regular bouts of photography, it can be easier to find interesting topics when traveling as you are constantly being bombarded with new visuals. But back at home, you may have to get inventive to find interesting subjects. I’m starting in my sixth year of doing a daily photography regime. I have a small home (less than 1000 square feet) on a small propert (1/3 of an acre). Even when I think I have run out of things to photograph, I find new details, angles, shadows, perspectives. I bet I used things around my home for more than 1000 of these photos (uh oh now someone will ask me to verify that). One tried and true method is isolating an interesting object. In this case, I was looking at the mounds of new new on my deck, and wondered if I could have some fun with my old toy Matchbox cars making it look like they were driving across snowy terrain. Those actually were ok, but not interesting. So let the mind relax. And in this case it was internal reflection on all the news of the looming US financial deadline of the Fiscal Cliff – it’s a metaphor, so why not play with it? So I found myself balancing my miniature cars and trucks off the edge of my patio table. In this case, the dangling vehicle is a beat up red pickup truck, appropriate since I drive an older (not quite this beat up) Ford F-150. This little car is one I had as a kid. I banged them around so much, at one point my sister helped me repaint them, so it looks even more ragged. And like Congress, this truck is perched in an un-drivable position, both wheels off the ground. We could extend the metaphor even more by speculating about the lack of a driver. This photo works again by using a wide open aperture doing the shallow depth of field effect to blur out the background. I actually tried a few different views on different sides of the table, it’s one thing to know that you will get the DOF blur, but I have been paying more attention to seeing what happens with different things in the background. One shot had too much empty bright light. In this case the background of my beige deck railing and the greenery seen through makes for an effective abstract background. And although I am not always deliberately thinking about it, as its become part of the way I compose my shots, this is classic rule of thirds placement, with the trucks path being on the lower third and its horizontal position on the right third. I just installed the RuleOfThirds bookmark tool in my browser, and am planning to have my photo students use it to examine images. It’s worth seeing where it works and where it doesn’t I am not ironclad about it, it’s not a law, but there is a sound aspect of balance of subject interest you create my putting your subject on the grid and letting the larger empty space fill the rest: I’m not surprised that I hit the thirds often without making that the goal. This photo expresses the joy of my nifty 50, the f/1.4 50mm Canon lens -not only its amazing depth of field effects when wide open, but its clarity. It’s the lens I use 95% of the time. I adore that lens. You cannot get photos like this with an automatic camera or a mobile phone. You need the lens. And an awareness of what aperture does. So when i am stuck, I look at the objects around my house, and experiment with placing them in sometimes unexpected contexts, like today- I took this little horn ornament that hangs on my bird feeder, and inserted it into the snow: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog and wrote a tiny miniature caption to make it a story, “One of Our Tuba Players in Missing” Maybe its just me, but I find it worth while to also try and be as creative with my photo titles and captions as the photos themselves. It’s a way to turn your photo into more than a picture, or to add a sense of intrigue, mystery, or just whimsey. For my red Matchbox car parked on the cliff, I was almost tempted to reach for a reference to Thelma and Louise. Your house is full of objects, look at your kitchen utensils, the knick knacks on your shelves, thing sin your desk drawer, tools in the shed, books on the shelf– there are entire sub worlds in your home to explore through the lens. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by PetitPlat - Stephanie Kilgast (in dolly mood) Anyone who does stuff knows you do stuff by doing it. Eh? Last night while I was visiting Alec Couros he asked me why there was no image in the right side of the header of my blog. Hmmm, maybe it is your browser, Alec? Nope, Chrome and Safari and Firefox were giving me a grey box too. Maybe it was the caching on my blog- deleted it. Nope. Now it is looking grim, maybe it is time to shop for another theme template. 30 minutes looking at other themes, and then contemplating all of the custom things I have hung on this one. Then I looked at the Developer console in chrome and noticed an error flag on something related to "href$=.mp3" That looked like something related to the WP-Audio plugin I use to convert links to MP3 files to an audio player, or as I blogged earlier, a "non crappy WordPress audio player". Deactivating the plugin did not fix the situation. Digging deeper, I looked back to the WordPress page for the plugin- quite a few bug reports of the plugin being broken. That is what I was seeing- it did nothing at all, did not render the audio player from a hyperlink. Then I followed one link from a problem report to what turned out to be the fix -- I had to edit a file within the plugin, chainging wpaudio.min.js to edit href$=.mp3 and replace with href$=".mp3". This fixed the audio player... and now my banner images (also JavaScript) too were appearing. So the error caused in the plugin stopped execution so the player for the slide show never loaded. One thing leads to another, but I only found the answer by trying a few things, and following some reasonable trails, not just by wild googling. Actually I just wanted to let anyone know who uses the WP-Audio plugin about this fix since it is a post here that gets a good number of views. But also, it was my only confirmation of the joys of digging into (and out of) a tech problem. I did this one DIM. If you do not want to tinker with code editing, I have a copy of the updated wpaudio.min.js file you can download and replace in your plugin area. I've been grateful for the deluxe accommodations that has been provided for my fourth month visit at Thompson Rivers University. I'm on the fancy floor of suites, above 10 floors of student residences. The floor I am on (I think) they run out of their Hospitality program, so there are students in that program working here too. There's a lot of passing back and forth as I come and go, but obviously I am not a student. Among all the Big Things we deal with daily, how often to appreciate the small things, exchanges that people do? [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by JD Hancock[/caption] I see regularly on the elevator two tall young men on my same floor. I asked them once what they were studying. "Business." So I always ask them "how's business?" (ugh). One day they will likely be tycoons. One late night returning to my room, reaching for my key card I apparently dropped 2 credit cards in the hallway. The next day at lunch, I had a major panic when I went to pay for my meal and the cards were not in the regular spot. I returned to my room to start the process of calling the banks, and the young lady at the desk stopped and said, "I have something for you." Stephanie (now I say hi all the time) handed me an envelope with my cards in them. The manager on the night shift found them outside my room on her nightly rounds. Heading up the elevator yesterday, a young man and woman boarded; he was eating from a small box of candy. I smiled and asked, "Does that help with studying?" (it's exam week). He laughed and said, "I need all the energy I can get for studying." His friend snorted and said, "Studying? You've been studying movies all week!" There's Cathy who cleans my room; she knows my coffee habits now, and supplies me with extra. I also know now that she likes the snow. Sunday I went out for a short (cold) walk to seek my daily photos. Walking back into the lobby, the young man at the desk asked if he could see my camera. We talked photography, and he showed me some of his photos he had stored on his phone. He asked about how he might learn to use his DSLR as he said he had no idea of how to use the settings (I think he said he has a Canon D60, I have a 7D), we talked lenses. I asked him if he shoots in Program mode, and started to explain how I shoot in aperture priority. He asked he would understand better if I showed him what I was talking about. Sometime soon Sandeep will text me and we will go on a photo walk. Let me be clear that I am a card carrying introvert, and so talking to people I do not know is going uphill against my personal comfort inertia. And so you can listen to your self talk a lot and stay there. It's not really hard to do, make eye contact, smile, ask a question. My break in my routine happened a number of years ago when I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. At that time I actually had to get work clothes dry cleaned, and noticed when I went into the local shop what a barrier the counter could be. I'd notice customers in line, mostly white, drop off bags of stuff, never stopping yakking on their phones, never acknowledging the mostly young Hispanic women behind the counter. Never making eye contact. Never acknowledging another person. It happens more than not. Acknowledgement, recognition of others matter so much, even more in online interaction. People get so little of it, we get our micro reassurance when some one clicks a blue button. Don't get me wrong, I am not chatting up every customer service I come in contact with. But just looking them in the eye, thanking, even an eye brow raise when the person in front of you is being a jerk... you might be surprised at the effect. The littler things indeed matter. Well at least to me. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by JD Hancock[/caption] (I love this set of "Little Dudes" photos I found on flickr ; I am pretty sure I have used the dog walking in a book one before in a presentation) Just when you thought where the You Show was headed (well we doubt you thought that, but it sounds good), something unexpected happens in Episode 5 The idea for this emerged from conversations Brian and had during the latter week of the Audio unit. We fully accepted that the pace of the You Show was blistering, and only a handful of people even started audio, while others were still finding their pace in their blogs. In addition, this week at TRU is Reading Week, and while there are no classes, faculty and staff do have extra scheduled professional development activities. So we thought, let’s change0up our schedule, in fact, let’s do something to suggest that it has been suspended a week, hence the name of Episode 5 as “Technical Difficulties” (double entendre intended). In fact, since this week Tannis Morgan was visiting from the Justice Institute of British Columbia, I imagined the idea that she would be this “Consultant from Vancouver” brought in to shake things up at the You Show. The script ended up pretty easy to write, in fact I wrote it a few hours before we planned the shoot. The set was again the Innovation Lab in Open Learning, with the orange wall being the “set” and the table with computers being the tech booth. We start with what is supposed to be a cheesy video intro, as supposedly we are starting the video unit: For the intro waves and lightning backdrop, I used a clip of an After Effects demo with a green screen clip of computer modeled projector. The audio is a track of Brian and I talking over music from an Epic Trailer Music YouTube video. The premise was that Brian and Alan start as normal, then Tannis would bust in the room. In the moment, we thought of having a hand written sign on the door that she would rip off as she came in, and even toss at us. cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The shoot was set up to film Brian and I as normal with my iPad, but have a second high end video camera set up by Jon Fulton to be the wide shot. Jon even set up Tannis with a lav mic so we got good sound from her. And the idea was as she ranted at us for being amateur (I insisted on a line “This is a media injustice” in reference to where Tannis works), that the real technical guys, Jon and Bob Byrne, would walk in setting up lights and equipment. Those guys are pro, they did it perfectly, Bob even flashing the lights on us before we were dismissed to wardrobe. They even replaced the hand made sign on the door with a more professional one. The Consultant from Vancouver interrupts the You Show In this scene she tips over the iPad camera (so it flips upward briefly showing the ceiling, before switching to camera 2. In between I used some brief cutaways to have different views shown. Gesturing to the clowns in the booth Tannis would then gesture to “the clowns in the booth”, the tech guys, and send them out to coffee; which they do. This is part of the evolution of the characters; the tech guys get less and less necessary, soon perhaps to be made redundant. The video then just goes to an old time “Technical Difficulties” clip which had some great music which was extending under the closing credits. Brian’s son Harry who usually participates, had just shown up after we finished, so I suggested he come in curious, and just roll up the sign from the door. It could not have been executed much better. We did about 2 or 3 walk throughs, poor Tannis had the most required lines. Much of what Brian and I do are made up on the spot. But everything you see there was done in one take. You can see a bit more behind the scenes action via the outtakes And Episode 6 will have to return with a whole new format… Technically, this weekend, I was un-employed. Last week I was cleaning my office at Maricopa, digitizing old silly artifacts, tossing files, and trying to organize 14 years of web sites. Thursday, was an open house at our office, and I was overwhelmed by the people who paraded by to wish me well. And many gave nice cards, faux ocotillo, a clean mug, and other fun stuff. There's never been so many people in my quiet office nor ever so much hugging and emotion. Thanks to everyone who came by, called, or e-mailed. On Friday, I turned in my keys and badge at the front desk of the Maricopa District Office, a place I "habituated" for almost 14 years. I had started in 1992 , a naive, geology graduate school dropout with some amount of technical skills on computers. What a long road it was! My last official duty was an Ocotillo Online Learning Group Meeting at Paradise Valley Community College. My colleague, Sidne, made a fun hast and crowned me "Wizard of MCLI". But now for the next part... Tonorrow morning, my morning commute is 15 feet down the hall, as I report to "work" my first day for the New Media Consortium. I am still doing some set up, organizing the home office, waiting for Qwest to come with the phone/fax/high speed internet lines, and rigging up the new MacBookPro. I've not really pushed the new Intel/Mac. It is clean, and responsive (then again, I have yet to install PhotoShop. Then again, the other computer at home is a 700 MhZ iBook, which I manage to do a lot of PhotoShop work). The trackpad is a bit racy, gotta adjust. The magnetic attachment for the power supply is just damn brilliant (a few months ago, my dog go started under the desk and took off at full speed wrapped around a power cord-- I barely managed to catch a flying iBook)- note the A/C "brick" us about 130% the size of the older one. The optical drive is a hair slower to spin up. But on the flip side, the machine boots up fast, sucks in photos in iPhoto like a rocket, and I have the "beta" version of Boot Camp prepped so I can boot in Windows XP if the mood should hit me (I need to wait later in the week to get my hands on a Windows install disk). I am currently running a copy of OpenOffice which is actually amazingly familiar for the other software they replace. And I forgot how many little things I had rigged on my old PowerBook at Maricopa. Virtual hosting for my web sites so I could run web apps local from the desktop. Browser bookmarks (I actually tossed about 80% of the old ones, Google and del.icio.us make them rather obsolete), RSS reader. Oddball utilities. I got a new palm (a basic Zire 22, calendar and lists, about all I do on a PDA) and am using it with iCal which I had not bothered to do before. Gotta figure a reasonale way to move maybe 5 Gb of music from the iBook used with my Shuffle, or just re-digitize a smaller set of songs. Oh! FrontRow and the remote are cool, though all I did was look through a few photos. Oh, gotta buy a copy of BBEdit. But there are just the little things. This week, I hope to immerse myself into my new role (I have a 2 day trip to Austin for my "orientation", maybe NMC "boot camp". Oi, two disconnected 'boot camp' references in adjacent paragraphs). I am also giving some deeper thought to the role, and focus of this blog. It surely will continue, but may likely be outside the scope of the day job, and definitely is an activity I do off the NMC clock. Or maybe I will find a different range of topics (Dogs Only? Today I actually got our Labrador, Cadu, to catch a frisbee, an amazing accomplishment!) I've been wanting to revisit its purpose, maybe spend a few weeks doing a Mission Statement (just kidding). Yup, I am a weekend in limbo, detached, and floating along. But it has been a nice ride so far, and like a raft trip, you can get eager when you see the river bend around a canyon wall, not seeing where it goes. Is there a roar of a class V rapid ahead? Or more riffles? Or a long calm stretch? Only the river of time knows. I bristle slightly when I reads something that seems to conflate Open Textbooks and Open Educational Resources (OER). Only slightly. The success of open textbooks, not only for what they are providing and creating benefits to students, is that it finally is something the wider swath of academia has awakened to. So the bristling matters not. But to be, the pinnacle of open content reuse, be it maybe almost pedestrian, is the digital image. Perhaps because digital photos are made in great abundance, that we have great splashless reservoirs of open licensed images to draw from, that there is nothing too exciting to crow about. The volume of shared open photos, does it support or counter the reusability paradox? Why not issue a shrug from Second Life? (yes, the relevance referees can throw a flag on this play) https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/437092560 Shrug flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) No answers here, you have just waded through the meandering intro a blog post here trickles out. One of the sad downfalls of internet content, maybe due to the bidirectional link, is a means to finding where content is reused. My colleague Scott Leslie once spent some time trying to ponder how this might be done (did you ever find it, Scott?). I got a whiff of it today. It's a good odor. I have written before how I use the (free level) service of pixsy in the way maybe it was not created for. The usual purpose is for photographers to track down unauthorized use of their photos so they can issue legal claims of copyright violation. I know of this first hand from a current project. I used a flickr photo for a web page that was licensed CC BY and as I usually do I provided attribution. But I had made on another site, what I thought was a development space, a copy of the content in a different platform, a prototype that was not used. What I forgot was that the platform was open. The photographer tracked it down with pixsy and threatened legal action because the image was un attributed. That's not my way of using pixsy. Since my flickr photos are largely all licensed public domain, there's no need for it. But because I like to maintain a collection of my photos that are reused as a flickr album, I use the level of pixsy I get a a Flickr Pro member (it monitors 1000 photos, how does it pick?? I dunno) to sometimes go in and see what it has found in its scans of the internet. My pixsy page And just to document I am not in this for issuing takedown notices... I plan to never use the 10 takedown notices I get in pixsy If I browse the 5953 matches, I can see a preview of the image, and an indication of where it was most recently found: You can see that it tracks the date my photo of insulin bottles appeared on another site (Feb 7, 2021), the country where the site is hosted, and even some categorizing of sector. This is just the beginning. Clicking the image yields more: I can see the name of the web page it appears on, the URL for the page as well as the direct link to the image (which I can smell from the URL that it's a WordPress site). The pair of images are the one used on the site (left) and my original (right). That little slide lets you compare the two, which you can see might come into play if the image as been re-edited. Now we get to the info on my original image: Pixsy knows the image came from flickr, the date it was uploaded there. But wait, scroll down. Of the more information (which you can see how much money I make from this) is the link for me to jump to the original. I don't need to go there to recognize my own photo. But I will use this information to go there, and if not done so already, I add this image to my collection/album of reused photos. I usually add a comment to indicate where it was spotted. Follow the photo to see all of this. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/22753934382 2014/365/307 Eight Bottles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I am rather "chuffed" as they say in the UK that my photo of my insulin bottles was used by a student author in an undergraduate biology research journal. My small beef is that the attribution (labeled "Source") just goes to the results of a Creative Commons search result that produces a broken image and no information. Uncle Alan's recommendation for attribution is to go upstream of the search results to the source. But that matters nada to me. Actually I could go nuts and issue a pixsy takedown notice as this photo happens to be CC BY and it is not attributed. That is not how I play this game. So I could spend maybe years wading through and finding all the 5953 reuses... but what a minute! That one photo was tracked in 75 different sites! That's a bit mind bending, humbling, and yes, a wee bit ego stroking. But I'm not about to go look up all 75 (well not tonight). But every few months I peek in here, as you do find some nice human reuse of photos (in blogs) and yes, commercial uses. It's a interesting foray to see how widely (or not) attribution is done. And again, it's rewarding that images are attributed when they are published under public domain. This flies in the face of the mantra of "public domain meaning you do not have to attribute it." Always. Be. Attributing. Moreso, whatever reverse searching gyroscopes are at work here are damn impressive. But use it for good reuse checking, not for spitting out takedowns. Unless that's your thing. It's not mine. It does so that the reuse of photos is much much more than I will ever know. Does that make by cringe at all the money I am not making from them? Nope. That's not my game. Featured Image: Yes, if I played by the Rules of Licenses, I would not have to attribute my own photo. If that is your logic, consider what your non actions say to a reader. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5570582660 2011/365/87 Narcissus 210 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I feel father comfortable swimming in HTML and writing the stuff by hand (I thought at one time everyone would learn to write HTML). It never tops being refreshing to learn one more trick. This started with a Mastodon post by Bracken Mosbacker: https://ruby.social/@bracken/113834316064337070 It reminded me that I have many times in the last few years I have seen Google search results return links like this, e.g. usually the top (non GenAI) result links to a source with that longer URL and it scrolls to and highlights the text e.g. when I was searching for some information on putting down laminate flooring, Google decided to give me a highlighted sentence. I usually shrugged it off, as usually I wanted the source URL, not this one with all the gobbledy gook on the end. But @bracken's post made me think there was a potential use here. If you are building your own web pages, using the old anchor link provided this, or later I learned any element with an id=XXXXXX CSS declaration could be a hook that you could link directly to. This ability thought suggests you can make a link to goes directly (i.e. what they used to call a "deep link") to specific chunk of text in any web page. I did a quick text a very manual way, I used the parameter Bracken shared, and manually created a scroll-to link in one of my posts. This required copying the text, running it through a tool that URLencodes text and adding the :~:text= on the end of my URL and adding the encoded text part. That's a lot of work. I started to think I would need to build a Javascript booklet to create this for a selected portion of the page, but when I replied with that, Bracken gave me the keys to the shop. https://ruby.social/@bracken/113840432527241378 It's actually in the contextual menu when you select a chunk of text and choose "Select link to highlight" I have seen that before, but it never clicked what it meant. I went down many scrolls to one of my posts, used the contextual menu to create a link relevant to anyone running Feed WordPress on how to general OPML files. This gets very interesting- it's one thing to share a link to a resource, but why not link to maybe a key sentence in it? That surely has potential for educators! I thought maybe you could do something to make a link to perhaps the alternative text for an image, e.g. you could deep link to an image but not give away the location with text. That does not work. It seems the text has to be something on a page. I then thought what about having a hidden message in a page, you know, white text on a white background. You could then make a link to reveals that quite easily. Also I was spinning through some kind of DS106is creative challenge, that is a bit like blackout poetry but you could have a series of these links to different web page that highlights key lines that together make a poem. I decided to now go through and make that example now, so I give someone a free idea to pursue. There is much much more you can do with Text Fragments as spelled out in the MDN docs -- note what I did with my links Linking a whole section of text by indicating the start word and end word Linking to locations of one word where it is preceded or followed by another word Link to separate words in the same document In your own web pages, you can include CSS to control the colors used for highlights This is only a quick play, but this looks like a useful web trick to have in one's pocket. Featured Image: Mine. Again. Linked Across the Shadows flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I've been trying to use coComment, the tool that allows you to keep a record of your "distributed" blog conversations-- by activating a bookmark when commenting elsewhere, coComment stores it on their site,a dn then submits it normally to the blog you are jabbering about. This way you can track conversations by visiting your coComment page (or by using its own RSS feed). Here is a peek at my little bit of coCommeting: This saves the trouble of having to remember to return to a blog entry to see if anyone responded to your stellar remarks, and avoids having to get email reminders (and not all blogs even offer than as an option). The nice thing is in the view there or via RSS you can track the other responses, not just your own. Actually I am getting more use out of my coComment RSS feed in my aggregator, I have visited the web version maybe 2 or 3 times. I like it so far, but... I cannot always remember to hit the JavaScript bookmarklet tool to activate the coComment feature. My first two weeks my success rate was about 40%, and maybe now I am up to 60% or 70%. I would think this is a prime target for some clever coder to create a FireFox Greasemonkey script that would make it automatic (I know nothing about the monkey writing). I too am wondering about whether it makes sense to coComment my own comments on my own blog, since it has its own comment RSS. I am trying to coComment but am having trouble coRemember to coActivate the coTool. Maybe I need some coDependence. Since I'll be on the road alot soon, I'm doubtful I will get to play on the next Dr. Oblivion round of ds106, but while I have time, I wanted to dip my paws again into animated GIF creations. Now having done a few, I am trying to think more ahead of time what might work, or what actions might be isolated, or what seends have that cycle of motion that might work. I'm really keen for looking at eye motion or expression changes that can be lifted out. For tonight's experiment, in this pair if animated GIFS ("jiffs") I am aiming to put two characters in parallel, two that are trying to out con the others. This is from the poker scene early in The Sting (1973). Harry Gondorff, played by Paul Newman, is working to hook Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) into a much larger con. Gondorff knows that Lonnegan cheats by stacking decks, but he puts up mis-directions by his early fumbling around, so he looks like a goof. This is the last game, where the stakes have gone high; Gondorff has been outplaying Lonnegan, who is frustrated, and urges his henchman to plant a fixed deck where Gondorff is dealt four threes while Lonnegan has four nines. The money gets piled on the table, and it is time to show his cards. Lonnegan smugly puts his 4 nines down; Gondorff then shows-- Four Jacks! I love how Shaw plays Lonnegan so rigidly. He cannot get mad and call Gondorff for cheating since he cheated first! He is furiousm but also reeling, out conned....He is stung! This series is actually from 12 frames where there are quick cuts in between (showing the observers), but I've isolated Lonnegan. There is one frame where the only motion is his upraised eyebrow, so I held the sequence longer here, then flipped frames quicker for the part where he is fumbling to find his wallet (which Gondorff had slyly lifted earlier). I love the game within a game within a game play of this movie. Here is the whole scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfB-ZG_nvbo I used the beta version MPEG Streamclip which lets you grab video directly form YouTube. There is something squirrely in how it saves frames, after one save, it acts like you want to do another of the same frame. This one was assembled in Photoshop CS5. Hordes of edubloggers and more are descending on San Antonio for the NECC 2008 show ("the National Educational Computing Conference, the world's largest educational technology conference for teachers and technology coordinators"). They will be a'blogging, twittering, flickring, tagging, ning-ing... see Vicki Davis' coverage plan via netvibes. Colleagues like Hey Jude Judy O'Connell are winging in from Sydney. It's not on my gig list, but will keep tuned via all the channels. I got a bit reflective, and remembered going to NECC 1995, when I was only 2 years into the instructional technology game, and green as can be. I cannot exactly remember how I chose to go to, but bet a large part was because it was in Baltimore, and I got to be a tourist in my home town. And I actually found my original notes from that conference which were kind of humorous to read. I remember being excited to have met Helen Barrett for the first time, and there she was really doing innovative early work in electronic portfolio concepts. I recall we made a solid connection, but strangely enough, my cryptic notes only mention "PaperPort Scanner $300". ?? If blogs existed then mine would have included this rant on "boring sessions" I will slip comatose if I attend another session where a presenter boldly proclaims "The Sage on the Stage must give away to the Guide on the Side" and then proceeds to turn down the lights, flip on the projector, and monotonely lectures to a nodding choir. Too much HyperCard... where is the cutting edge? anyone can write a home page, big deal. There was also a lot of discussions of internet connectivity; remember this was pre web hype days. It's not in my notes, but I remember a funny titled session, "If I SLIP and fall on my PPP, will it hurt?" Anyhow, if you are going to NECC, be sure to pry a little bit of time to peek around San antonio, which is a whole lore more than the River Walk. Having adopted a dog has changed my daily routines, all for the better. I have data - our daily walks, medium in the morning, long in later afternoon, short at night, have taken my daily walking from less than 1 mile per day to over 5 on average. Each time I put on Felix's leash, I wonder outloud, "what route should we walk today? We did the loop past the mailbox yesterday, and we've done the Cleonna Road route the last 3 nights..." While I cannot understand Felix's cerebral response, I am going to project my ideas and say that dogs do not really care about the route. They could walk the same exact route 3 times a day and never get bored. That's because, without the nuisance of the human intellect, their entire being is in tune with, intrigued by, and continually observing their surroundings. We higher order evolved beings, however, spend so little time paying attention to what is literally under our feet, in front of our eyes. On each walk, the light is always different, the contrast, the shadows. The vegetation changes, the pink wild flowers are in their prime, but with each day, the lupine wild flowers are starting to go. While I have noted their presence, I have started looking for the places they dominate, here this morning, an old jeep trail in the forest, the flowers have taken over the road. [caption id="attachment_56290" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The lupine have reclaimed an old road.[/caption] Just notice the shapes of branches, it looks different at different times of days. [caption id="attachment_56291" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Just a dead tree leaning? Majestic[/caption] Each step we take, crunching small rocks into tinier ones, smushing tiny ones into soil, each step plays a small role in changing the landscape. The best part is going ahead, not back. It's not all nature. Each house I pass, different. Many of them empty, as most are vacation homes. Some with manicured yards, others overgrown with grass and weeds, some with odd sculuptures or tacky signs. Just the walk around the block are so many details it will take a life time of dog walks to see them all. And I would still fall short of "all". A funny thing happened two days ago. We walked the neighborhoods up the hill on the opposite side of Fossil Creek road (our main road, it bisects a valley, I leave on the north side). Rounding a corner on the farthest reach where we could go, Felix and I met Christy, who turns out to be a dog trainer. She took an active interest in Felix, and invite me over yesterday to learn more about him and to offer some tips (she's an agility trainer and a dog food expert). I've already alluded to how much opposite advice you can get from dog "experts", a reminder for how to critically think about any expert's proclamations. We were talking about local veterinarians as I must make a choice soon. I mentioned the one that three different friends with dogs strongly recommended. Christy's face crinkled a bit- her favorite vet was the one the others said to avoid, Dr. G is old school (his office is a barn) and she had bad experiences with the ones my friends liked. And while we turn to opinions, how often to we have to deal with sorting out things like this? [caption id="attachment_56293" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The diversity of opinion[/caption] Having a new dog is fun. And rewarding. And it's making me see my local world a tad differently. And anytime I can offer advice to someone (not that they always ask for it), my advice is now G.A.D. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/724082895732662273 Top / Featured Image: This morning's dog walk with Felix, he is always teaching me about observing the world around us. Not yet uploaded to flickr, but when it is, you bet your best dog bone this will be licensed Creative Commons BY-attribution. Is anyone else dizzy at the rate of new web-based tools/services with tinges of RSS, social software, open-ness? It's a Good Thing, but it seems like there are 3 or 4 or 12 a week. The latest is the coyly named Remember the Milk: Achieve Domestic Bliss. Never forget the milk (or anything else) again. Remember The Milk is the easiest and best way to manage your to-do lists online. Here are just a few of the reasons why it's so cool: * Features galore. Sharing, publishing, notes... we've got it all. * Get reminded. Receive reminders via email, instant messenger, and SMS. * It's free. Hard to believe, we know, but it's true. So its a service for creating todo lists, looks like with items that are tagged for free-form categorizing, multiple modes for sending reminders, and hooks for creating shared lists (that's all guess work from the features list-- I did not even have time to play with it). I'm trying to get my office to consider doing this for project/event management, we drown in paper, clipboards, single owned server files... But the name and logo are just too cool. Much better than other tired clichés. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Supposedly businesses are getting more "green" and focused on not wasting resources. Supposedly. In my postal mail were two examples that say to me, that it is far more "efficient" for them to waste paper, postage, delivery time to send me irrelevant crap. Magazines, in some sense maybe a dying breed, have long annoyed me with their aggressive renewal tactics- sending me messages warning me that my subscription is in danger of running out-- when I know for a fact my renewal date is 7 months away. The fill their publications with those wasteful subscription cards. Today MacWorld is warning me again how is is my LAST chance to renew "before the early renewal discount ends" OH DEAR. But my subscription also is good through June 2010, so what do I gain my letting them have my money 8 months before I really need to send it? Their message gets even more out of whack, "Mailing repeat notices only increases our costs for paper, printing, and postage." So wait a minute- it is MY fault they are wasting resources? I never requested monthly mail message warnings that my subscription runs out the middle of next year. Magazines, wake up. Especially tech ones. You could do a completely paperless, postageless renewal process online. In these cases, I for one, am ready to welcome the death of the print business, as they are just acting... stupid. The next gem is grom my insurance company, letting my know all the benefits of their mail order perscriptions-- "You've probabaly heard about the convenience and value of getting medications in three-month supplies. With RightSourceRx, Humana's prescription home-delivery service, the pharamacy comes to you." Yeah, Humana, I;'ve heard about it- I HAVE BEEN USING IT FOR 3 YEAR YOU CORPORATE NINNY So it is more efficient for them to waste "paper, printing, and postage" to tell me all about a service they should know I use. Thus it is better for companies to waste resources, and use those wasted resources how I can not waste resources. I wish I could go to business school and learn this kind of ass-backward logic. I am forgetting who's blog post I read recently asking about doing blog posts by email... ah yes, thank for Inoreader, it was JR Dingwal who mentioned this in a new post about revitalizing blogging. Part of me was tempted to respond to JR and say Try Posterous! (old timer internet joke) Posterous was a nifty early aughts service aimed at making posting east, with the most useful route being posting via email. It was bought by Twitter and shelved. Heck, the domain is there (Twitter is so dumb it does not even redirect the url) waiting for something to be rebuilt. Hello, 2008? https://cogdogblog.com/2008/08/posterous/ Now I found also in my flickr memory drawer that back in 2010 Chris Lott ran something through posterous called Ye Olde Motley Readers (bless you for the millionth time, Wayback Machine) where open participants could post by email in a shared reading of James Joyce's the Dubliners. "Motley Readers Postcards (outbox)" flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4345462650shared into the public domain using (CC0) I digress. But I do remember WordPress having this capability via maybe the Jetpack plugin (which weighs like 90 gazillion internet pounds, but I still use it). I could not find it on any of its plugin pages... but did find a useful trick from Jetpack Central on how to find, turn on and off, all the modules in the Big Ship Jetpack. You just tack on to the end of your WordPress site /wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack_modules and boom! I found the long list and activated post by email. It generates for you a special, secret (as in do not put it on your blog post) email address you can use to write an actual blog post by email. There are a bunch of features you can use to include via shortcodes, like adding categories, etc. I do not see how to add a featured image, but that can be done after post (or I could use the shortcode to post as a draft). Heck, I am doing it right now (maybe, will know after clicking send). This is about as easy as possible to be blogging, or blogging about blogging, oir blogging about not blogging or blogging about JR or.... Featured Image: (added post publication, this could possible be remedied on one of those plugins that makes the first image in a post the featured image) (also for future reference, the post arrives as a Classic Block). https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4345462650 Motley Readers Postcards (outbox) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Throw a party, in 2025 Flickr announces the arrival of Creative Commons version 4.0 licenses (cough, 12 years in the works?). I'd seen the announcement banner on flickr, though gave it no notice (especially since I use CC0 on my own photos, no versions needed). That is until I spotted a note from Sarah Honeychurch in the Reclaim Hosting Discord channel. Does anyone else use @cogdog flickr attribution bookmarklet? It's stopped working for my most recent uploads and I think it might be connected to flickr changing their cc licenses from 2.0 to 4.0 ... She is referring to the Flickr CC Attribution Helper my own little tool I built and used since 2009. It's old web school- when viewing at a Flickr image, say some random photo of a dog. The CC Attribution Helper creates a browser bookmarklet tool, so I just click, and it opens a window with a few different kinds of attribution strings I can copy in one click (this one creates cut and paste for WordPress, plus an HTML and a text only version). Flickr CC attribution helper in action. From view of a flickr page, click on bookmarklet tool, up poops window, click on attribution text, copy, and go. I had not noticed any issue since I mostly use my own photos, which again are not affected by license versions. But when I changed one of my photos to a CC 4.0 license, I could definitely see the helper was stalllng out. I had to shake the dust off of my crude Javascript code, but the functions in my cc-attributor.js functions, that the generation depending on knowing the codes the flickr api uses for licenses. Until now, these were 0-10 for various licenses and public domain, and 0 being nasty copyrighted. When I checked the flickr api documentation, I only saw the codes listed for 0-10. So I ran a test on the API for flickr.photos.getInfo (kudos to flickr that I can make test API calls right here), I spotted a a return ode of 11 for a photo I had changed to CC BY 4.0. I was able to find the new codes (11-16) by testing via flickr.photos.licenses.getAvailable (note I contacted flickr support and the have updated the info in flickr.photos.licenses.getInfo to now include all of the new license codes. Mumbo jumbo code fluey, but I added some code to check for license codes above 10 to make them use 4.0 and the old ones in 0-10 return 2.0. a.k.a. it now works. Here is what the flickr cc attribution helper provides for a CC BY 2.0 licensed photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/8309241012 Four flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license And for one now published under CC BY 4.0 https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54618573132 Four For Two (and all) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license If you have been using the flickr cc attribution helper, you might need to clean your browsers cached files to get the new javascript code or as I did do a shift refresh on the file itself. The tool is still a bit crude, it was built with different versions needed to do old WordPress image with captions or Markdown, and you have to pick a desired size for images. One day I might modernize the interface. But the things works for me, and I use it almost every day I am using flickr photos, which is like almost every day. And I smile when Is attribution strings I recognize from it on other people's sites. I wrote the attribution in my interpretation of good TASL wording but being on GitHub, if you want to customize the output, you can fork and go (some folks have). I had to dig back into the history but I did a first version in May 2009 using Greasemonkey scripts to modify the flickr page itself to insert attribution text (I am pretty sure Scott Leslie suggested that approach). Looks like the old userscripts.org domain points to a dance site. C'est La Web. That did mean every time flickr changed its interface, I had to update my scripts, which depending on the structure of the page's DOM. That propelled me in 2014 to make the current version, hosted in GitHub (yeah Dave, I know the horrors of GitHub, one day...) that provdes through a public link https://code.cog.dog/flickr-cc-helper/ a way to choose your options for output, and it generates the drag and drop link to put the tool on your browser bookmarks bar. It feels good to keep the tool alive, just for my own self satisfaction-- and regular use. That's it, Flickr is now 4.0 on CC attributing and the helper tool isn in step. Featured Image: Another of my Four themed photos attributed here with the flicks cc attribution helper. Four Lines flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) In Executing Learning Objects, Resurrecting Sharing and Reuse, Scott Leslie takes some well thought shots at the sacred cow term of "learning objects" (and his animation of the "execution" could use more blood, guts, and squeals). As part of a workshop for the BC Educational Technology Users Group, Scott has nicely posted his materials in wiki fashion (he is now an alumni of the Brian Lamb School of Wiki Presenting, I signed up more than a year ago and the thought of "power" and "pointing" has never reached any proximity).... as Scott writes: I began the session with a formal execution of the term "learning object" which you can see at the link above (feel free to reuse this - maybe if it's played enough times the term will finally die off).... As I go on to explain, it's not the concepts the term was supposed to foster that I object to so much as the term itself, as it has left many an instructor panicked and struggling to understand what it means, as if it were something radically different from the learning content they are already producing. How succinctly and clearly said! Bravo! My own quibble is with his line: Though I do actually disagree with Alan that LOs are simply links and all we need is referatories, but that's likely another post Since Scott's blog appears to lack comment function (another roach roach victory?) I disagree with his summation of my position, and I think we are in the same camp. I never proposed or advocated that learning objects should only be links in a referatory (heck, I built my own non-referatory)- I was observing that when I visited a number of said "learning object" collections, the vast majority are not those little re-usable plug and play chunks of content, but simply links to web sites. I do not see objects, a see hyperlinks. While I find interesting content and technology via those links, I hardly consider them "objects" and really struggle with seeing how a web site "object" (I even found a reference once to "HTML objects", yikes!) really has much or any "re-use" capability besides linking. The bottom line is that even with Scott's workshop list of learning object examples-- they are singular content chunks, can any of them be pieced together? (I realize he wanted to have participants look at different objects and 'evaluate' them)... beyond the Connexions project, I fail to find any compelling learning content that has been constructed by non-technical people by assembling together so-called objects, be they web sites, Java things, or "any digital asset used for learning". I am waiting, but still see the picture of useful learning content built from learning objects as nothing more than fuzzy photos of Sasquatch. I'd love to be wrong, I really would. I just do not believe that labeling every digital asset a "learning object" enables anything beyond creating piles of digital assets, no matter how intricately meta-tagged they are. If I were king, any project for fostering learning objects must have a larger proportion of its scope be on the content creation from objects, not the cataloging of the iddy biddy pieces. Anyhow I went of the deep tangential end. There are not enough blog words to describe how much I respect and appreciate the thoughtful work of my colleague up in Victoria. We're closely watching the NMC 2004 presentation on "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" wiki, checking the changes.. but beyond a few individuals, it is a pretty quiet place. Okay, so I wrote a bit harshly on Martin for his own thoughts on the Pieces, but hey, I was bored! I fessed up and then commented a dozen roses. Yes, bored! We've had a good response from folks out there writing their own blog entries for the session, with some nice things said. Great! But we picked a silly process that should falsely polarize and provoke folks (Centralists, DeCetntalists, and Fence Sitters), and I have been hoping to stir things up a bit, some of it at Martin;s expense. But what the #*$& wiki is going on? What we were really hoping would happen is that all you folks out there would jump in the wiki, and really muck around with the content! It is there, ripe, just lurking under that Edit Text of This Page link. It's like a fresh coat of paint on the walls of a large building in tough urban neighborhood, at the intersection of 3 rival gangs' territory. A hardware supply truck takes the corner too fast, the back flies open, and a few cases of free spray paint land at the base of the walls! Why would the walls stay blank??? We do acknowledge Gerry's comments that June is a slow time (vacations, other conferences, summer sessions in the northern hemisphere, yup- and thanks Gerry for being one person to grab the spray paint). But... What hope is there for skeptical faculty and wide eyed students to latch on to wikis if the technical folks out there (yes, you geeks reading this stuff) are stepping softly in the wiki? Stop being so damned nice and polite, take a cut at the wiki! Here is a hint- you will be able to do much more spray painting in the wiki if you do it before or after the session- things could get wonky when a lot of people are trying to edit wiki pages at once. So grab a can, shake it up, and start spraying! What are you staring at? Get on over to the Pieces! Completely unrelated to technology... Today, after two months of excuses and ignoring the messages from Mirror Mirror on the Wall, I got back on the bicycle for my 11 mile commute to work. And today's weather was so... optimal? Here in Phoenix we are expecting a record high of 112 F, and once you add in the summer moisture lurking in the air, plus the car fumes it feels something like 192 degrees. Actually the morning was quite comfortable, at 6 AM it was only 87 and believe it or not, that felt cool while the sun was still hiding on the horizon. This morning I was only cut off twice by large SUVs, drivers completely oblivious to anyone in their wake, about an average rate. And a bonus- I had an opportunity to deal with a driver who was convinced the world was his ash tray-- waiting at a red light to cross a busy intersection, I could see the driver of a van waiting to turn left was almost at the end of his cigarette. Surely enough, we dropped his smoking butt 18 inches from where I was standing, and I got to say, "Excuse me! Excuse me! I think you dropped something, do you want it back?" I cannot repeat his reply. The real test is the ride home, when it will still be about 110, the road radiating enough heat to cook a meatloaf. If there are no blog posts tomorrow, I might have disappeared into the hot asphalt. Seriously, I do some of my best thinking while pedaling, and feel great about stretching my brain, getting some aerobic activity, and not using up natural resources. And the real test- will I ride tomorrow? As a Canadian wanna-be, I've jumped early to register for the Feb 10-11, 2006 Northern Voice conference in Vancouver. This definitely fits the bill of an active, not-a-lecture-format conference as opposed to the other edtech fetes that just bore me into a coma. I was envious to only read of last year's first offering. I plan to be representing the Canadian Province of Arizona proud home of the wild Jackalope: