Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
A majority of my blog posts are spontaneous spurts, yet sometimes, an idea takes root somewhere in the gray matter, and just sits there quietly demanding to be let out. This one has been rattling around, and tonight demands to see that publish button clicked. So there is a strand here, some storytelling, and a cliche metaphor to be trotted out. This in many ways a commentary on the work we do in this poorly defined field I'll call "Instructional Technology". I think it was triggered by Laura's post on Fear 2.5: Afterthoughts following the excellent session she and colleagues did at EDUCAUSE ELI 2008. She openly shares her fear: A fear I have that I don't think I articulated was a fear of being irrelevant and unnecessary. How important is my position, really, to the institution as a whole? If my position disappeared, would anyone really notice? Most of the faculty that reach out to me are really just asking for tech support. They want to know how to perform certain tasks in Blackboard. They want to know how to edit a web site. They don't tend to ask the bigger questions: what is appropriate technology for me to use to achieve my goals, how should I use x to help my students learn. So it was hear I started thinking of an old metaphor... Chicken nuggets, hush puppies creative commons licensed photo image by jumbledpie and aking myelf, "Are people like Laura stuck creating and serving fish nuggets... rather then in the fish teaching business?" Kaylen teaches Ian to fish creative commons licensed photo image by dbang Yes, its an old cliche (and comes equipped with optional funny alternative). I thought I read that it is a variation from Chinese philosopher Kuan-tzu who said "if you give a man a fishing pole he will be able to feed himself for a lifetime" though the popular one (and I took some liberty to not make fishing just a male sport) is lyrical Give a person a fish; you have fed them for today. Teach a person to fish; and you have fed them for a lifetime. Need an example? Course Management Systems are huge fish nugget factories. And we spend a lot of time, effort, money keeping the assembly lines moving. Fishing? Most things web 2.0. But that does not really get at the core. What Laura got to in her post (I think) was the frustration of a role where ones skills and talents are seemingly downgraded by The System or not really allowed to flourish due to the needs to keep the nuggets moving. I've had a lot of fortune avoiding being on the nugget racket. I will roll it back a bit via a bit of story. I am nor horrified to be saying things like, "Back when I started...". This too was triggered by an experience back in February when at the Northern Voice 2008 Conference I shared a hotel room with Jim Groom, that in itself is several riotous stories, but Mr Groom is an amazing source of positive manic energy. For some reason, after late hours of NV partying we'd come back to the hotel and stay up even longer talking movies and web and this weird "field" we are in. Jim was curious about the old web projects I did at Maricopa (whew they are still there, dont trash 'em Colen!), so I trotted out a few of them, like Negative Reinforcement University. I described what a unique and special role I had there as an "Instructional Technologist" because at a district, central level of a distributed multi-college system, I was not doing direct how-to software training or supporting Blackboard--- it was really a role to do R&D in technology, find ways to get faculty to experiment with them, and to so degree, try to nudge the big ship. I did almost no training workshops. As he was curious, I trotted out my old job description (which for some bizarre reason he opened his presentation the next day with?), and ironically, I believe it was writing in the 1980s, it still holds up nicely, not that I typically consulted it: Consults with faculty and staff in developing instructional uses of technologies; researches, analyzes and evaluates new technologies for potential applications in instruction; promotes the implementation of technological innovations; creates demonstrations of instructional applications of technologies; plans, coordinates and conducts special topics workshops in the use of technologies in instruction for faculty, staff or conferences; arranges and schedules new technologies demonstrations and workshops by vendors; provides assistance to faculty, staff and administrators who have instructional technology needs; publicizes and promotes services, resources and activities of the Center. Yet I got thinking even farther back when I was first hired in 1992- its another long story but I almost blind luck stumbled into the first job at Maricopa as something like "Programmer Analyst/Instructional Systems" whatever that meant. What I had was a bit of teaching experience and using computers in my research a a geology graduate student. I am still not exactly sure why they hired this green kid (29). My boss at the time claimed it was because I wore an earring to the interview. So the office I walked into, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, had several people working there as "Instructional Designers" -- and I admit I had never heard of such a thing (I was coming out of a dead end career as a professional graduate student in the sciences). "Instructional Designers"? it sounded so... so... industrial, like there is a huge factory out there stamping out .. learning nuggets. They all had PhDs and had spent years memorizing learning style inventories and theories of meta-cognition (I guess, and I am saying this totally tongue in cheek- I have a lot of respect for people who focus on the question of "how we learn"). And I was a lowly technologist-- "just a technologist". One ID in particular I worked with was pretty clear with her disdain, and to her the great goal of her work was to create paper "job aids" WTF was that? he uttered it like I was an idiot not to know what the hell a "job aid" was. My sarcastic mind muttered something about a hand being involved, but I kept my head down, as the politics of the office were not important nor was I invsted in battling this b****. Yet I would get lots of "designs" that were lavishly formatted documents in well tabbed notebooks that were all well structured, with clearly labeled Objectives and Closing Question Checking Said Objectives, it was exciting as reading the ingredients of a cereal box. So I would nibble around the edges like, "We want them to go to this path first, but rather than make it the only option, what if the other options are presented, but there is a puzzle that requires the desired path to solve?" I looked to ditch the cheesy clip art and add real photos. And at the same time I was mesmerized by these new tools I was discovering daily (the Stanford Info-Mac FTP site was gold sumex-aim yeah!). I was reaching myself to fish with HyperCard, Director, by building, creating, tinkering, and tapping into the fishing communities-- email listservs, Gopher. I discovered this joy of creating something from nothing, of getting ideas or code from others. I had some lucky breaks, stumbled early into the web, and found a way to connect with faculty I worked with by avoiding jargon. My boss and I tried to re-write my job description, and each effort, the Big HR machine would bat it back to the same level I was at. So giving up, I got appointed to the Instructional Technologist position, which apparently was written for one person in the 1980s (Thanks Jim for blazing the path, same guy who handed my a floppy disc in 1993 labeled "Mosaic"). And at tat level I was more responsible for running projects, working with admins, coordination all of our Ocotillo programs. Oh planning that first large retreat gave my stomach fits. The thing I loved most about this position was I had tremendous latitude to explore and try new technologies (I am fairly sure no one knew what the heck I was doing), and not only look for fishing opportunities, but looking for different bodies of water to fish in. Interestingly enough in 2005, I was part of a group working with EDUCAUSE who ran a first Instructional Technologist development program at Penn State University. Oh mu god what hell we put those poor people through! It was way over stuffed, designed by committee. It was there I met Vidya from Trinity University. The point was to better develop these position as leadership ones. So I wandered down my own story path, just blabbing about the stuff I did. The point is.... well, a I look around, read, what many of my colleagues do-- it sure seems like a lot of nugget production. Do we foster an environment of "learned helplessness" among the faculty we support by most of our work being workshops on the tools rather than the craft? I've heard recently professionals mutter things like "Oh I can never learn to edit wikis correctly" You have to try really hard to break a wiki. And along these lines, I was part of some technology conversations with UBC faculty and I just relished watching my colleague Brian's face contort when someone says, "how do I use twitter in my class?" He'd say in his sweet flip matter, "I am not going to answer that" -- not because he doesn't want to help, but because he wants to teach fishing, not toss them nuggets. You don't find a freaking "job aid" that gives you a 8 step recipe to use twitter in your economics class-- you spend some time in the environment, and let the affordances linger with your content area, and then maybe, you develop an idea that makes sense. The great modelers I see, like Barbara Ganley, Gardner Campbell- dont rely on their tech staff to give them a recipe, they bring in their domain of knowing what they want to teach, they tinker with the fishing rods and bait, and they create a use of the tool based on a hunch, an idea rooted in their areas of interest. So you ought to ask, "Hey Mr Complainer, how do you move from being a nugget dispenser to being a fishing coach?" Good question! I am so glad you asked that question! (this are the diversions people do w/o wanting to answer). Most likely many people are in a position that is traditionally producing nuggets. So it will take some time, perseverance, luck, creativity. My thought is you do a lot of small things. You dont try to blow everyone's hair back with Web 2.0, but go for something small that can have a quick payoff. And its not that you cannot help people learn how to use the tools, but just enough to get started. help them learn the other ways to tap into knowledge (googling, tagging in del.icio.us, being public about knot knowing how to do something and just asking for it). Toss 'em something that might help on a personal level- be it flickr or doodle or diigo or heck, Blabberize. it means less formal training, less workshops, and more learning by doing. It means using these tools a much as possible in our processes, so they become part of a fabric, not something strange and exotic. Heck nuggets can be better with a good sprinkling of hot sauce! I am not pretending to have the answers here, but am eager to know if I am just ranting, stuck on a metaphor, or what? So would you rather be teaching fishing or tossing nuggets? Via David Weinberger's blog, came a reference to a time eating web site. Blufr ("bruising your ego one blff at a time") is more or less a true or false game at various "facts" form Answers.com-- the addictive hook is tat each "way" / "no way" right answer bumps you points, you can post links to the content to various bookmark services, and more in the bucket of Web X.0-is add-ons. Of course, you can get a high score just by guessing (50% chance of being right in any standard-ized test), but still, with each answer, comes, "just one more.... just one more..." And they even have this hook of offering a cut and paste snippet to embed a hook into any blog: Powered by Answers.com: free online dictionary and more And I could swear I saw Bryan Alexander's photo randomly appear in the top left. And speaking of this, I am wondering if anyone has done an ultimate list of all these cool X.0 sites that have riffed on flickr's "drop the 'e' and be cool" spelling meme? flickr blufr hitchikr bickr frappr mappr wickr More? Dear Blog, I've been gone so long you are not familiar with who I am? Who, but myself, can I hold up for blame? Have you forsaken me for another, given my inattention? Stephen has already dropped the Wiley E Coyote anvil sized hint. Yet, as we have talked before, fewer things are lamer than blogging about not blogging, yet I shall do so anyhow. That's the thing, my sweet blog software, you waiting patiently with an empty "Add New Post" form-- is that unlike any other places we put our name on in the web, this is the one where we establish all the rules and therefore break them. And that, on this day of USA celebration of our quasi independence (freedom to fill up shopping carts at Walmart, freedom to clog up the cmapgrounds with atvs and generators, freedom to shoot incendiary devices over bone dry forests...), here is to our Blogindependence- freedom to change our themes, freedom to shut of comments, heck even freedom to just go dark. I just did a tally on the June calendar- I was home for almost 9 days. For July, I am here for 31. And so my excuses for neglecting you, dear blog, are nil. Judge for yourself.... http://aralbalkan.com/ :-0 thought there is cool stuff here like FlashAid Maybe I barked and whined about podcasting, that does not mean I'm not interested in audio! I am trying to give Skype another round of tests, but cannot find anyone I know with a skype account. Is anyone up to some internet telephone tag? I'll try to keep the application open the next few days, and I can by skyped as cogdogblog. Woof Woof! If you've not been tapping into some of the screencasts being published by Jon Udell, you are missing out on a great phenomena achieved with free desktop software. This under 3 minute piece documents very clearly the power of a simple JavaScript / bookmarklet tool for managing web site password logins. But the subject, while neat, is not the subject. Udells method of communicating technical topics is reaching and making sense to a wider audience (see Movies of Software). Without a doubt his documentary showing the evolutun and de-evolution of a WikiPedia page-- Heavy metal umlaut must be the academy award winning feature of this genre. He makes the wiki come alive. I'd be curious to know more of Udell's method, not the technology. Is he a one take wonder? Does he script, outline? Part of what he does well is explain things clearly, not overly explained, evenly, and with sometimes a sense of wonder, without becoming a gushing "this is so cool". What I am curious about is-- where are all the imitators? And bigger then that, this technology / methodology can certainly be used for more things than just showing how technology works... I am game to find some spare bits of time soon to take a swing at doing some simple digital stories using this approach (and now I've gone and tipped my hand, poor poker player am I). This blog, as well as our RSS2JS service and our eportfolio server all took an unintended four day holiday. Last week was Spring break for our system, and our admin offices close on Thursday and Friday of that week. Our building had a planned electrical outage planned for Thursday AM to test a new back up generator (apparently it worked fine), but it meant all the servers (4) in our office blipped off. We had tested them previously to ensure they would reboot when the power came up (changes in the BIOS settings for the Linux boxes), but something flaky happened with the web services on the XServe that hosts this site. I am still out of town so was just hoping things would spring back to life. Well 3 out of 4 did okay. Hopefully no-one's sites went kerflooie without the RSS feeds. That's the way the web bounces. cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by noii's Since Michael Branson Smith's ds106 class is moving into the audio portion of the course, I devised a new assignment for the audio section. And this is something I need as well in my own adventure to find the Center of the Internet. So here is the gist of the assignment. Like some people use special whistles to attract birds, your task is to create an 30 second or less audio file that might be used to "call" a particular character from a movie, tv, or real life. It cannot feature voices, but sounds only. Share a description why this sound would be attractive to the character (be inventive, write a story about it). So in my case, I am desperately trying to attract the attention of Dr Oliver, the character who is driving ds106 students on a Journey to the Center of the Internet. Looking at this character in the videos: My sense is he likes the sound of martinis being mixed and people fawning about him ar cocktail parties. Here is my Bird Call for Dr. Oliver: Dr Oliver Bird Call My recipe was to search for "cocktail" at Freesound.org. I downloaded 2 files, one of a martini being mixed and another of ambient sounds at a party. I import both tracks into Audacity- sliding the party audio to the right (using the Time Shift Tool, double arrow icon). I selected the party music out to 30 seconds, then use the trim tool to delete all the other parts of it I don't want. I wanted some overlap with the party sound to fade in and out- in this case I use the "Envelope Tool" (2nd icon top row of the tools) which allows me to adjust sounds levels in the audio by placing hinge marks: So what sounds can you mix/create to make a Bird Call for a character? How would you call Dr Oliver? Can you please try this or any other ds106 assignment to get his attention? Please? CALLING DR. OLIVER!!!!! cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was not until I was done with placing these last stepping stones for my walkway, that I noticed that my playfulness with the angled rocks created an HTML tag. My yard now has italic text and will ruin the layout of the rest of the neighborhood since I did not close my tag. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog "Alan hope this finds you well. Jack passed away quietly on Friday, Feb 1, at 7 am." In one short email message, a doorway sadly closed. Jack was my neighbor here in Strawberry. With the last few years of my traveling and his health challenges, I've not seen Jack for quite some time. Like I am not even sure when the last time was. The email came from Jim, his son-in-law, who in that "it's a small world irony", we had a connection in that he works at one of the Maricopa Community Colleges. In that photo above, I had written in November 2010: @dailyshoot: 2010/11/11: Facades give buildings their public face. Make a photo of a building's facade today that tells its story. #ds361 My next door neighbor's house has an appropriate natural, weathered, and rustic exterior -- which is almost how I'd describe it's owner, Jack (but adding the part of being very warm inside). Jack is an original resident of this neighboorhood in Strawberry, and built his own home in the early 1970 from a kit that was delivered to the property. Actually my house was the same kit, and he knew the people that built my place as well. What kind of era was that when people built their own homes? That's surely gone. I enjoy the few times a year I get to see Jack and hear his stories. And hopefully no one will ever get a crazy idea to paint this natural facade. From the time my ex and I bought out place as a second home, Jack was always to shout out a friendly "howdy neighbor" when he saw us. It mattered not that he was someone who was an original land owner bought and built his house from that kit, and we were but another in a string of city dwellers who sought a refuge in the mountains. I only have fragments of memories, and can only recall bits of stories he would tell, of years working as (?) a machine repairman for the electric company. Like often, I find scattered bits in my flickr stream, never complete full stories, but enough to rekindle them. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The lots here are small, mine a third of an acre, no different in scale from ones in the typical suburbs of Phoenix. But we have mountains, deep blue skies, towering pines, quiet spaces, strange animals that pass through. I think of Jack as that lost breed of western types, people who worked hard doing real work (with their hands), fixing things - not paying people to fix them, spending long time out in the elements, skin leathered dry, weathered like those watchful juniper trees: cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog but who readily break into a smile and would never blink in hesitation to offer a hand moving a heavy rock or lend a tool or spare a cup of flour. Mostly, he liked to just chat, I remember most of the conversations in the space between our homes, or sitting on his porch. I am not sure I even saw the inside of his house beyond the front room. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog He built his home in the mid 1970s, he described how it was delivered in parts, trusses, wall frames, beams, etc. The people who built my house got the same kit (I cannot remember the brand name, I know it was not Sears, I recall something like 'homecraft"). I see quite a few of them here, usually identifiable by their basic shape. People which built them had options for the direction they built it- I am pretty sure my back door is intended as a front one, and the layout in Jack's is a bit different, as he described they were able to customize the room spacings, plus he has an addition in the back. He asked me once if I noticed the double main beam below my house, which I had. He described how the people who built it started work and realized the beam was starting to rotate, so they had to install a second more secure one. He talked about when they were working on the back deck, and left a cooler outside, and were awoken to the sounds of a bear who had picked up the color and smashed it open. He talked about his dog chasing off mountain lions from the property. He talked about his work driving down the rickety road to the bottom of Fossil Creek Canyon to do maintenance on the old Childs power plant. In his back yard was a giant dish, from the earliest days of trying to get "connected" up here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2365542142/ Now it looks like something you might use to listen to the sounds of Jupiter. Something of pride was his old school Dodge pickup, which has been parked in the driveway as long as I have been here, but he kept in tuneup shape himself. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog When I called him 2 years ago to inform him how a small accident with hot stove ashes had burned the grass between our houses cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog he just laughed and said, "well, at least the grass won't need cutting". I know over the last 5 or so years, he dealt a lot more with health issues, and had many trips to the hospital in Phoenix. He talked as though he would rather be up here much more than in the city. He'd lost his first wife many years ago, and a friendship with her best friend (Marie had also lost her husband) became a new relationship for them both. I am now rather dis-satisfied with how little I can remember of the details from his stories, and the typical remorse of not relishing time or capturing those stories settles in. I few story fragments to cobble together. That's sad, but I am grateful for the bits of Jack I did get to experience. They do not seem to make people like Jack any more. Since returning here in December, I was looking forward to catching up, more likely in the Spring when I'd usually see him. There goes that possibility. Howdy Jack, I will miss you. I think of you out in thees grand open Arizona spaces, relishing the big sun and whatever challenge was at hand. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Lars Plougmann I'm ready. Once again, with the best intentions, I have signed up for a George and Stephen (and others more now) Massively Open Online Course, Personal Learning Environments, Networks, and Knowledge 2010 (PLENK2010). My track record is poor, I easily let this stuff slide off of the radar. I'm a MOOCDO. But they have done a good job of re-assuring people that they don't have to try and grapple it all. And all is a lot. I get dizzy when I look at that discussion forum, and by the time I scroll down to the form field at the bottom of a long page, I'm empty of thoughts. Week 1 is an introduction to PLEs and PLNs and msy be just the first bowl of acronym soup. Having complained plenty about the meaningless of some of the terminology, I am aiming to keep the mind slightly ajar, if not wide open. Among the readings I took in on this week's there and back trip to Boise, was Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems by Scott Wilson, et al, which sets a rather strong contrast between the enterprise learning systems (VLEs in the UK / LMSes here) and the personal learning environment. It was an interesting and worthy notion to make the VLE/LMS as a "dominant design", which in the end of the reading, is not really a desirable title to carry: The primary characteristic of a dominant design is that, once it emerges, innovative activity is directed to improving the process by which the dominant design is delivered rather than exploring alternatives. Or, in other words, once established in dominance, such systems tend to operate in modes that maintain their dominant position. That certainly seems to ring true of a certain large company who's nick name is comprised of two duplicate letters. This was thee paper that published The PLE Diagram, which originally was posted in a January 2005 blog post by Scott Wilson. This might be the mother of all PLE Diagrams (as carefully catalogued by Scott Leslie). I can remember seeing this diagram and being excited, because all of the things in the boxes, and more so, the lines between them, was where I was focused on, all of our Small Pieces Loosely Joined kool-aid. I am sure I used The Diagram in several presentations. It's the middle of the diagram that bothers me, the amorphous blob with the PLE label. Perhaps more fitting was the Networked Teacher (or fill in with student) diagram by Alec Couros with the person in the center. People talk about PLEs like it is a thing, a definable object, but its not. In this paper, it almost sounds like it is defined as being everything the VLE is not (?). It was helpful to re-read this original paper, because the authors make it abundantly clear that the PLE is not a thing: The critical design flaws inherent in today's learning systems can be addressed through adopting a new design pattern that shifts emphasis away from the isolated experience of the modular VLE. We characterize this new pattern a Personal Learning Environment, although unlike the VLE this is primarily a pattern concerned with the practices of users in learning with diverse technologies, rather than a category of software. That makes more sense to me than most other readings-- "primarily a pattern concerned with the practices of users in learning with diverse technologies." For me, the PLE is everything behind all the floating bubbles and lines, it is the entire space in the bounds of the diagram, the PLE is the entire internet (and things beyond?). Why have just a few bubbles when your learning environment can be the entire enchilada? cc licensed flickr photo shared by jurvetson That's my PLE. But back to the dominant design paper-- what I was hoping for and did not get, were some ideas how dominant designs are overturned. Some are just not budging (their example of the QWERTY keyboard), but others are un-dominant (Betamax losing out to VHS? Neither are viable now). And I listen with empathy to emails from colleagues of horror stories they deal with their dominantly designed systems- uphill battles just to create content, down times, content lost or mangled by the time it gets to the screen, limits on what it can do-- they seem, rather dominated. They seem to spend more time working to fit their needs to the allowances of the system, rather than the system serving them. Enough of this dominant design! Time for something new! #plenk2010 For quite some time, I've interacted via blogs et al with Gardner Campbell, but today was the first time I've heard him present... and there he is a virtuoso. At the NMC Regional Conference, his session was on "The Allegory Efffect: Metaphoric Immersion in Croquet and Second Life", where he put a nice connection between learning theory, literature, and the strange space of virtual worlds. We will soon have a copy of Gardner's powerpoint posted to the conference presentation collection, and below you will find a 50 minute segment of audio from his session (I was late to start recording): http://media.nmc.org/2006/11/allegory-effect.mp3 [14.6 Mb MP3, 51:04] Gardner set a great model of presentation by first offering an open wiki for backchannel... and demonstrated his teaching approach by having volunteers from the audience read aloud some of the literature quotes he tied to his main points. Maybe this is small, but by itself, changes the dynamic of a presentation. And lastly, he jogged us into action by a small group activity, where we had to find 3 observations of our physical space and creatively tie them together as a metaphor. His cleverness showed in the look at Second Life by flipping Vygotsky's statements of play as finding alienation in real situations to to: Primary paradox of Second Life is that a person operates with a real meaning in an alienated situation" - flips Vyotsky. And he reached my literary level with a quote from the great philosopher known as Pooh, with the story of tracking an unknown monster until realizing, with a prompt, who really put the tracks in the snow. There was a good amount of active discussion in the room as we discussed the limitations imposed by Course Management Systems, the notions of "play" and social interaction, recursion, etc, most of which is already fading in my memory banks. A top notch session and a Gardner original. In a last 2024 spurt of Jim Groom #BlogOrDie spirit (hey, bava, where is THE post on that?) more of a small but interesting observation I had (gulp) a month or go on a visit to my doctor. I have to say as well how much I appreciate finding Dr B. While the Canada healthcare I have been blessed with since moving here in 2018 is fantastic, finding a doctor taking on patients was not easy (no resemblance to the featured image, more on that below). This was semi-routine to example some bumps on my knew I was fairly sure were a flare up of warts which I had not seen for like 50 years. So there was a bit of scraping with a scalpel to be done. Dr B. entered with an aide and a younger medical student who my doctor was supervising. I was asked, and consented to let Doctor in Training S do the procedure. I was struck by the influence of Dr B being able to supportively suggest how to do the steps, the small tricks that would help Future Dr S do this correctly, and even a small bit of humor. I know little about medical school but can likely underestimating how much more there is to passing the big tests, memorizing many things. This seemed to me the most critical part of learning, that could only be approximated in a book or video or demonstration. Future Dr S has to know how to do this with a live person, on her own, day in and day out, with only a hundred fold more skills to weave into her tools, plus manage the interpersonal interaction. There's much more to being a doctor that I feel I take for granted. And not totally a swipe towards the Thing That is Changing Everybody's Work, as next visit Dr B told me about and asked to use something called HeidiHealth that transcribed our conversation into notes she could review, rather than spending time doing a lot of manual entry. Finally, as someone who grew up watching Marcus Welby on TV, plus ER, and having older white haired doctors, there is a life point where you walk into a new doctor and notice the first time that they are younger than you, maybe significantly. That is just a small note, nothing dramatic, and you move on from it. But the first awareness stands out. But just wanted to acknowledge that moment of seeing powerful, in the field, teaching, in the moment. I made sure to say something about this to Dr B and Future Dr S. Where else in the world to you see that happen? (I get daily stories myself from my Cori) Featured Image: Sure anyone could slap a prompt into a GenAI tool and gotten a picture spat back. Where's the art in that? The google offers plenty of open-licensed images on a search for Lego doctor (a trick from my old Image Seek Toolkit) such as Female Doctor flickr photo by Nursing Schools Near Me shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. This one only came up when I added Female to the search terms, and still very few, many were figures of NASA figures (Doctors yes). Biases were built in long before GenAI wobbled along. It's easily taken the 20+ years I have known Dean Shareski to figure out the secret to be on his podcast -- I had to be a Canadian, which is something I finally accomplished in September 2019. The big moment for my fame happened April 22, when we met at the Hive Coffee Shop on Main Street in Moose Jaw (which now has a new name I forget) to record an episode of his CanadianEd Leadership podcast. https://youtu.be/kleS3XGJnMM?si=xzeIbLMFAWc3pSJi (locals may notice that at about 21 minutes into the show when a stream of people walk in the background by as part of the Tunnels of Moose Jaw tour) This was actually a re-do as one we had recorded earlier online something glitched with the audio, just as well because I think this conversation was better. Besides, it was an excuse to meet up in town. We got to talking about my work at Open Education Global, banter about of course GenAI, the state as it were of social media, that there's still goodness on the 'net, how I got to Moose Jaw from Arizona, and a good chunk of how we really first connected, on digital (and non) storytelling. If you make it to the last question you will find I've been a a place in Saskatchewan that Dean (a native) has not been. I've known Dean online through first the edtech bloggers to sometime in the mid or early 2000s, there really was a gold era then of Canadian ed tech folks I was fortunate to connect with through really just blogs, like for instance Dean, Rob Wall, and Alec Couros, way ahead of the curve on podcasting, had a long run of the EdTech Posse podcast "talking about education, especially from a Saskatchewan point of view." Sometime in 2006? 2007, definitely in 2008, Dean would email me with a requests be be a guest in his course at University of Regina to do talks on digital storytelling. The routine was an email would arrive from Dean with a subject line of "Me Again with a Favour?" Would that have been in the days of Elluminate? nope I think it was Skype and ustream.tv. I know I did one in 2008 while I was working remotely (for NMC) while house sitting in Iceland. It might have been this one or earlier that one of his students was Cori Saas, now my wife, she too then an active teacher blogger I connected with in the era. https://cogdogblog.com/2008/11/50-ways-in-moose-jaw/ Actually on the transCanada segment of my 2011 CogDogOdyssey road trip, on crossing Saskatchewan, I got to visit and stay wth all three of the original EdTech Posse folks. Here I had Dean do a Young Me/Now Me photo thing (was that a Ze Frank routine?) on that visit. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6048133165 Goofy Young Me flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license Dean was Canadian nice and gracious in talking about my various storytelling projects over the years. When he asked one that was a stand out for me, I was pleased to hear in response that he still makes use of Pechaflickr, heck it's been too long since I tried it (yup, it still works). I'm not sure I had too much profound to say on Dean's show, but at least it was not all just the old web geezers show. Conversations, especially at coffee shops or as we also have done here on walks, are really the best kinds of connections one can have. The stuff we did than still matters now, just in a different, a more evolved, and often unanticipated context. We both agree on the value of storying. Let's coffee meet again, Dean, ok? The best thing is knowing I cracked the code ;-) Featured Image: Unlocked flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license with irony a photo taken when I lived in Arizona and knew not the code. Community Weed Picking by cogdogblog posted 5 Oct '08, 1.11am MDT PST on flickr As I was waiting for the airport shuttle van, my friend and host here in Japan, Bert, pointed out one more item of Japanese culture- posted in the notice board of his apartment is a flyer letting him know when he has to show up with the rest of the building residents to participate in weed picking. This odd sense of collective duty is pretty foreign to an American, but I am not making fun of it. It is just a different way, and as we talked about it, we thought about the creation of more "ownership" or our shared environment, of the social networking and community building that happens when you pick weeds with your neighbors. At home, we stay behind our fenced in yards or inside our air conditioned boxes glued to a TV. Maybe it is "WeedSourcing"? My culture is not your culture and that is okay. How does one blog a blogging conference? However you feel like doing it! It's Friday, time for Moose Camp at Northern Voice 2008 and I am convinced every conference should launch with a tiki bar party. So the Waldorf Hotel was packed with bloggers of all varieties. Got to hang out with Jim Groom, Chris Lott (first time meeting) Jennifer Jones (ditto), Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, of which I should link to their blogs but am feeling lazy. It was a great time, am a bit too tired to try and recant the evening... so instead I am trying a new approach (as suggested by Nick Noakes) to attempt Voice Thread blogging the conference. We'll see how that goes, but be sure to liberally comment. A fun highlight was the open mike where bloggers who had signed up on the wiki shared/read a wide range of blog posts, poetry etc they had chosen to share. I volunteered my Northern Voice story of 2008 involving the series of events following Nancy White's presentation. But I tell ya, I was topped by Scott Leslie's poem, which I grabbed a recording of on my camera as video (waiting permission to share). Bring on the moose! I saw Mikhail's effort of telling the story of The Shining in 6 Frames in response to Jim Groom's explanation of this as an activity used in his digital storytelling class. But c'mon, how many other ways do you mix up Jack with an Ax, Jack in the Ice, Jack in the Bar, jack poking his head through the wall, Jack as Woody Allen (oaky, Mikhail, that was clever and rule bending) ? Yawwwwwwwn I was looking for some different angles on the story. Some made up ones. For me, the Shining was a story about a boy, his toys, and his boundless love for a Dad who gave him more and more toys. Nice guys by Sebastián-Dario posted 26 Oct '08, 7.57pm MDT PST on flickr Cachorritos de Lila You can hardly glance at twitter or open your RSS feeds these days without reading about zombies. WTF? Lumbering flesheaters are somehow fashionable? Time magazine gushes about them. The New York Times loves 'em. Jane Austen now embraces them. Education Technologists are suspect of becoming them. Enough zombies! I am yawning. We need more cute puppies. That will set things right. I heed your call, Mike Caulfield, to be part of the Federated Library Project. Partly because of respect for Mike (and that I bailed on doing a FedWiki thing i August), partly because Alyson is boarding for 100 posts, partly because this might call for some neat Wordpress tinkering. Many people scratch their heads at Mike's ideas, causing him some angst (not enough to cool his jets), because, I think, they seek they way to plug it into what they do. In my experience from last year's FedWiki "Happenings" I see a lot of people approach FedWiki the way they think of wikis and collaborative writing, in the shared convergence of many people working towards One Thing. To me, it has always been the opposite, FedWiki is not for converging, but diverging, like notecards (Federated Index Cards), and then hopefully re-assembling, re-combining, but likely in something other than FedWiki. That's my own Private Universe concept. And no, I have not felt the Big Light Bulb go on about how I would use FedWiki. But its been my experience to not expect a new technology or idea to broadcast what it can do for my interests; its on me to explore and remember a lot of things, mingle them, and somewhere down the line, it then, hopefully, jumps up as the Thing to Use. I'm okay with not knowing now how I might use it. What's interesting about what Mike is asking people to do is putting the cart before the federated horse. He's asking people to make a series of stub posts in a Wordpress blog, each a single idea, like a card or a Ward (that's what I wish we called it) in a FedWiki. Mike needs some raw material, that will be used in some yet to be developed mechanism. I thought at first he was talking about using Wordpress as a front end for writing to a FedWiki, but if I can see through the tea leaves, he may be conjuring a way to have Wordpress somehow work as a FedWiki itself. He did something like this in tumblr (yikes I cannot find it). So I have set myself up a play site on Wordpress.com https://cogdogflp.wordpress.com/. The idea (I think) is not to summarize web sites or articles, but just ideas. In light of reclaiming my social bookmarking, I am scrolling back through my bookmarks on pinboard for material that might expand into a FLP thing. First one I wrote was around the image of the very first web server, the NeXT station Tim Berners-Lee tinkered with as the only web server in March of 1989. There are connectors there with my presentation metaphors around the influence on him of a Victorian era book called Enquire Within. And just to show these are not connected (yet), the next one was a bit on JJ Cale's $50 Guitar based on a post I had bookmarked. The part where this threads out was I looked for a link for Harmony Guitars and landed on an "unofficial" but comprehensive database of Harmony Guitars that included a mention of Cale's hacked guitar but also linked me to the H162 model that Cale had "re-crafted". This is info not in the original article I found. This is the part from Mike's request I am trying to think about: Write for reuse in this space. What you post should be easy for others to reuse on their site with modifications. So no posts trying to prove a personal point or narratives that wouldn’t make sense out of someone else’s mouth. You are contributing words to your wiki that someone else can use with minimal modification. This does turn inside out our usual reflexes in wiki, where many people converge onto one place. I don't know where the train is going, but that's okay. I trust the engineer. Top / Featured Image Credit: My own image taken before boarding the Bullet Train in Tokyo -- flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2908880241 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I've done a handful of web projects this year where it made sense to store data in Google Spreadsheets, and then use a bit of PHP code to make them be dynamically displayed on a web site. In many cases, these are tables of data that are parsed and presented nicely in the web site, but for a few NMC projects, it made sense as a way for a staff person to update data on our web pages w/o having to touch the pages. As a first example, I am cleaning up an older WordPress site I use for logging my running/training; in the past, I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop for keeping a run log and then manually transferred the totals/averages/graphs to my web site by pasting into some text files (they are embedded with a PHP include). It worked, but it did have that tedious manual smell for something that should be more automated. It seemed to make sense to transfer the spreadsheet to a Google Doc. I'm not going to detail all the bits in there, but essentially, for every run, I enter a distance and time on the appropriate date line, and the sheet calculates total/averages per week and on a final summary page. This is just the data; I have another sheet that is just the table for the weekly totals of miles and time spent running; from here I can simply use Google's built-in Publish Chart which provides a URL to embed this graphic: This is subtle but powerful-- this is an image, but not an image- as the data changes, so will the graphic. So I know longer have to manually make a graphic and upload it to my web site; I can simply use the HTML The other piece uses Google's ability to publish a worksheet as CSV- this is data you can then parse on your web site. So I have a sheet that simply does averages/totals for my running log: To access this data, I click the Share button and select Publish As Web Page The options in the top make it so the published data is made current whenever I request it; in the bottom I select the option to have it published as CSV (comma separated value), and I select just the spreadsheet I need. Thus, this URL always gives me the data on the spreadsheet in a form I can use in my code.... this bit takes some PHP savvy to manage, but I use the same logic almost everywhere. I use this on the sidebar of my blog to display an up to date listing of my totals. In my WordPress sidebar, I use a statement to bring in the code from an external file named totals.php that sits inside my theme directory: I could have simply inserted the code into my sidebar template, but going modular like this makes it easier to separate code from format... The basic logic is using the php file command to read int a remote file, which puts the contents into an array; where each array item is one line of data. // get the CSV data as an array from the remote URL $lines = file('http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tMIPDwydKpay-5Oq0_G769w&single=true&gid=0&output=csv'); // get rid of header row $headers = array_shift($lines); // Loop through data- therer is only one line hear foreach ($lines as $line) { $ldata = explode(',', trim($line)); // split row to its own array of elements if ($ldata[0] == '') break; // an empty line means we are done, so exit the foreach loop // now we can just output the information as an HTML list, referencing the appropriate array items echo 'Total Miles Biking ' . $ldata[0] . 'Total Miles Running ' . $ldata[1] . 'Total Hours Running ' . $ldata[2] . 'Ave Pace Running ' . $ldata[3] . ''; } And what is cool is there does not seem to be much of an impact of hitting Google each time. It must be 'a caching. Good stuff. This is pretty simple example. I am running some more complex examples on the NMC Virtual Worlds site where the reason to do this was to have a larger amount of tabular data be displayed in a more readable fashion on our web site-- and to make it so someone other than me can be in charge of keeping the data up to date bu simply editing a Google doc (note that a spreadsheet used for this purpose must be public viewable, so don't mix in any company secrets in there). So for example, our Clients listing is coming from a google spreadsheet, and the parsing tests the existence of certain items to format the output-- e.g. if the organization URL column has a value, we echo the name as a hyperlink; if we have the coordinates of their land in Second Life, we add a teleport link. The code that generates this page also sorts it on output. This one technically is not hitting the spreadsheet every time.... I set this up so a unix cron (a timed script) calls every hour a PHP script which generates the formatted content as a text file on the web server, so the web page actually just reads it in via an include statement... this is a simple form of caching. Another page has actually two chunks of data that are generated from different spreadsheets. Out current land availability page lists plots of Second Life land available from NMC for rental. The main body content is a list of land with the output formatted around data in a spreadsheet. And the current land prices on the right side come form another sheet- this way we can make adjustments to the web page at any time simply by editing a spreadsheet, and never touch the web page- again it works like this: Every hour a cron script on the server calls a PHP script. The PHP script reads in CSV data, sucks it into an array (one line as an item), marches through items, and parses each item as an array representing the cells, and outputs the formatted as HTML to a small text file. The WordPress page simply uses an include statement to display the content (I use the Exec-PHP plugin to be able to run statements in a page). I am thinking more and more how I can use this process.... Of course, this is all baby stuff compared to the masterful data wrangling by the Jedi Master Tony Hirst.... Sometimes you have trips with very well defined and choreographed itineraries, where you know what is/should be happening down to some overly detailed level of detail. This week has not been one of those, it's been more of going with the flow. And that's ok. A planned trip to visit friends in Monterey was built around an invitation to co-present some new Amazing Stories in San Jose but the session took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and did not happen, so now I have a new presentation's worth of materials sitting in the wings (and thanks to people like Silvia for tossing me even newer and more Amazing ones). So for my time hanging out in Monterey, with visions of chasing Steinbeck or Eastwood planted in my mind, little did I expect to end up participating in a wedding. You see, my friends, who must be about the most gracious and welcoming in terms of opening up their home, befriended a family who was here for a wedding, and some of the bride's family had been camped at their place for almost two weeks. John volunteered himself, his son, and now me, to be part of the "A/V" crew, setting up a sound system for the ceremony and shooting some candid photos during the rehearsal and the main event. Heck, the closest I came to bringing formal wear was long pants (jeans). And cowboy boots. I had to borrow a belt. What seemed remarkable, and honestly should not seem so, was how equally gracious this family was in welcoming someone they did not know to such a pivotal family extravaganza. And these was no ordinary family, or maybe in some ways it was- I came away with something enriched in terms of what a modern American family could be. From what I could count and map mentally, both sets of parents on each side had been remarried, so there were at least parental units (you really did need a program and maybe a John Madden diagram to chart them)... and they all got long- not just in the way ex-spouses might tolerate each other, but in a genuine, down to earth, honest manner. And what an ethnic stew- there were strands of Korean, Caucasian, Japanese, Hispanic, and probably more I could only guess at. It really meant nothing. And also reassuring, in this world where I mingle with a lot of new people on a daily basis in the somewhat removed online world, here was a chance to socialize in the ordinary face to face manner (though most people had mobiles out and in use at various times- and fortunately not updating facebook status not at the I Do moment). Had this trip not happened, I would not have had some great conversations with a talented musician who is also a self employed programmer, and gave some great insight into a city in the middle of the country I would have never before had much interest in even knowing about. And yes, as someone on the dissolved end of one marriage, I aimed to to keep my own cynicism in check, especially for a day when the hopes are at the high plane all hopes should be (and should live forever). Just because many marriages don't make it the 50+ years my parents had, does not preclude this very one from being on that path. Many do, but it's just not really news. Without our high hopes and dreams what would we be? Or where would we dream of going? So despite the fact I did not "get much work done" on my weekdays here, and I did take advantage of any of the available attractions here, I cannot think of a better way to have spent the last few days, just going with the flow of unexpected activities. Just going with the flow has been more than ok. Like Duvall's Kilgore, who said "there's nothing like napalm in the morning", for a web geek, there's nothing like a bit of curious fiddling with code to make something work. Today's feat was finagling a MediaWiki extension to display a Google Calendar in our sites. I've been using GCal for a year to manage our Second Life events, and Google provides the cut and past code to put in other sides, like our WordPress blog - but MediaWiki is not going to be happy with some <iframe> code, so on some searching I found reference to one on the CouchSurfing Wiki - yet was discouraged that their demo was busted: Going back to the Google search well, I came on the listing of same code in the MediaWiki collection and it suggested that the calendar ID entered in the tags had changed. So there was hope. Setting up MediaWiki extensions is not nuclear physics, but it is a far cry from "plug-in" or "widgets". You have to copy some PHP code, upload it to the server, hand edit the MW settings file (and hope you did not chop a semi colon- a blank page is a sure sign of a typo in an extension). The next tricky part was getting the right ID for our calendar. It looks like an email address, but at first it seemed like it had to be the primary calendar on an account, and the one I set up was actually a secondary calendar. It is there in the Calendar settings, under details- the text where it declares the calender ID: Ahhh, but there is more subtlety- in the tags you (hand code) in MediaWii, you have to swap the "@" for its url encoded entity, "%40", so adding it to my mediawiki page is as intuitive as: um25dbsm7uuis774tb5ualldmk%40group.calendar.google.com But wait there is more-- the default layout was rather.. pinched, so to make it wider, I had to go into the extension source code, and bump up the height and width for the iframe tags. But in the end, and now that I know, it is easy... well, sort of. I have an embedded calendar now for two different SL events, one is ours from NMC, and the other is one maintained by Bruce Summerville in Sydney, who hand adds them to a public calendar when people advertise them on the SL Educators listserv. http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/NMC_Campus_Calender http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/SLED_Calender Smell the napalm! Robin Good asks, "RSS Ads: Should We Push Unrequested Advertisements Into RSS Pull?" No commentary needed here. Nope. Nada. Go away. I am calling this one a Four Icon MacGuffin Challenge - mashing up the Four Icon Challenge with Messing with the MacGuffin Please do not adjust your sets... but do keep dialed in to http://ds106.us/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIJ-FsZ_K5g THERE WILL NEVER BE A TEST! Long before "Web 2.0", "social software", the big web buzzword was "portals"-- A portal, or enterprise information portal (EIP), is a Web site that integrates an organization's knowledge base and all related applications into a single user-customizable environment. This environment acts as a one-stop shop, or "gateway," for users' information and system needs. So it was with a bit of cynicism when a GSFSE (Google Search For Something Else) landed me on Zimbio a home of "portals" or "community sites about specific topics". But these are not your Grandpa's Enterprise Portals of say... 4 years ago; these are sites fueled by RSS, aggregation, etc... maybe even (can I really write this?)... "Portals 2.0" Gasp. From a quick glance, it looks like these Zimbio sites offer special interest groups some tools to build a community site that is able to pull content from RSS sources, photos from image sites like flickr, Webshots, built in keyword tracker tools that yank content from Google and Yahoo, tossing in IM, chat, discussion forums, all which mmix on a group customized "home page"... AND, spit it all back out as an RSS feed and an OPML of the site's sources. Not bad, at all. Yikes. Small Pieces. Joined. So, for example, there is the People's Guide to Global Warming featuring bookmarked web sites, headlines from 3 RSS feed sources, latest entries by keyword from blogs (tracked by Sphere, a blog search engine), a group shared image gallery, a group blog, news headlines from by keyword search from Yahoo and Topix, images syndicated by tag from flickr, and keyword searches linked from Google. And that's all on the front page. And as a tap for my friend and colleague at UBC, there is a Zimbio community for Guitar Lessons, and it has a similar, but slightly different set of tools- the images here are syndicated from Webshots, and different sources are used for the feeds. So maybe it's nothing revolutionary, but this is not the multimillion dollar enterprise software from 5 years ago, it is free, hosted, and powered by underlying open standard technology. It could be an ideal aggregation platform or home base for a project or topical interest group. What could be next? Is it Push 2.0? Top 5% of All Web Sites 2.0 (let's not forget stinking web badges!)? Blink Tag 2.0? Has everyone had a sufficient amount of time over the last year gazing into the grids of Zoom et al live sessions? Can we do anything differently? I've been pushing this with an experiment in my community engagement work for Open Education Global, trying all my tricks and methods to get activity going in our Discourse powered community space. We had success there with the November 2020 annual conference but that's a case when there is a compelling reason to go to an online space. My newest effort is a semi to unstructured program of professional growth activities planned with the CCCOER node of OE Global. In years past, they scheduled webinar style workshops over the summer, which is more or less what they do during the year but I was approached for ideas how to do something over the this summer that would use our asynchronous community space. They had done the right thing in member meetings and communications in soliciting areas of interest, with the results including an overall theme of Open Pedagogy practices with specifics in Getting started with Open Pedagogy in small but significant ways Connecting the UN Sustainable Development Goals with Open PedagogyHow Open Pedagogy can support Equity Diversity and InclusionBuilding Interactivity (specifically H5P) I volunteered for the last one ... because of course I have stuff to draw from. I tried to pitch a concept where our volunteer facilitators take on one of these to lead, and create a question, launch an activity, start a discussion with a prompt maybe every week or 2. Set up asynchronously, any one interested could do them self paced. But also we could take on topics, questions, areas of interests spontaneously when they came up. So it's pretty messy. My colleagues coined it The Summer Open Pedagogy Adventure with the hidden tagline of "Alan's weird concept". It's all there sitting in the public https://connect.oeglobal.org/c/open-pd/summer-adventure/47 The pinned topic is the introduction. Self explanatory, or not? This is set up so our facilitators can create a top level topic, but anyone who creates an account can reply/participate in any discussion. We had great activity in the introductions, people shared their summer project plans, their pet photos, and some cooking ones. But there was also great back and forth about one participants questions on use of content in their OER. And this group always excels in the resource sharing, so there is a good set of ones being collected for Open Pedagogy. Because the topic list grows, I created a fixed set of topic tags, so we could group things together, like all topics related to open pedagogy or the interactivity ones (starting with the H5P series). Their group wanted to have a few synchronous sessions, these are set up every 2 weeks. I'd hoped they could be check in ones, but my sinking feeling is that's what our organizers will focus on. Because synchronous is familiar. Structured. I'm trying to push at the margins here, and am encouraged somewhat by getting a few responses in the mix. But I think my idea is still out of the bell curve of expectations of webinars, workshops, presentations. I am not sure my colleagues grasp my idea. This is hardly the first time. More likely I am just to darn impatient. I so believe in the power of messy learning, doing what makes you curious, challenged, or just in front of you. I also hold on to that it's just a matter of initiating enough activity (meaning Alan gets those Discourse messages about me overpopulating a topic) to create momentum. It's also an issue as the only communication we have told about this is via the CCCOER mailing list. I am less in trust of the Big Broadcast messages and find more effective is the private, one to one invitations. In the dwindling era of blog reading I consider this far from a broadcast. Or I can just being incessant about talking about this. So I ask anyone interested in trying this, telling me I am a wingnut, or wanting to do open pedagogy development in an open messy way to join the activity. Just go to OEG Connect and log in or make an account (or contact me privately, I have a link that lets you create an account and bypass the moderation step). Go to the Summer Adventure and wade in. Or bring others. One opportunity came up was when a colleague referred us to a presentation about the Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap -- a workshop developed by Christina Riehman-Murphy and Bryan McGeary at Penn State University aimed at helping faculty plan an Open Pedagogy project. They provided an overview at this week's webinar (because webinars) but more importantly, agreed to provide the four parts of their process typically done in a face to face workshop in the asynchronous format we are running. All parts will be grouped by tag. We just launched the first part in this series, the opening part which has the participant develop the scope of their Open Pedagogy project which asks you to think about the scope of your open pedagogy project. You’ll be thinking about your values and goals, your capacity, and the actual project itself. It’s important to focus on the why of your project before you focus on the what of your project. You can do your work in the complete workbook. Just download and make a copy for yourself. The idea then is to respond with questions, offer perspectives on your work-- you know conversations? Back and forth? That's how I hoped this would work. Maybe it's not right calling this professional development. It is to me learning in the may the internet (theoretically works) and mostly how I have learned almost everything about my craft. What will it take to get some more people to venture into the adventure? It's open.... and messy. Which can be beautiful. https://flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/3199296759 Light chaos flickr photo by kevin dooley shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by volperic Late night fiddling, don't ask why-- I was doing my photo editing and saw nothing on #ds106 radio, so set out to play somethimg from iTunes. For some reason, Nicecast no longer allows me to select an application as a source (Maybe because I installed Audio Hijack), so I switched by rig to Ladiocast, especially since the ds106 radio status page was not updating at all. Previously, I found I could manually push updates to the metadata via Ladiocast, but this seems manual and tedious. I mused before searching https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/318276056631107584 Searching on "itunes metadata script ladiocast" I then easily found a nifty Applescript for Ladiocast Automation. It's pretty easy to see what it does; polls itunes for a new song, and if it is different from the last, it updates the meta data thingie in Ladiocast. The other feature I like is that it tests if iTunes has stopped playing, and if so, it plays a short playlist (as a signoff audio) and stops the stream. This means, you could set up a show as a playlist, let it rip, and go outside or sleep, and it will end gracefully (no snorecasts). First I made a short recording to be the signoff, and added to a new itunes playlist "radio off" Radio Signoff I then looked at the script and decided to fiddle-- it would be nice to add something to the meta data beyond the song title, like a #ds106radio tag, etc. So I modded the script to provide text input to add an option meta data prefix, and suffix. set lastName to "" set lastArtist to "" set lastAlbum to "" set currentState to "" set thePrefix to the text returned of (display dialog "Starting text for stream e.g. '@cogdog playing'" default answer "") if thePrefix is not "" then set thePrefix to thePrefix & " " set theSuffix to the text returned of (display dialog "Ending text for stream, e.g. 'LIVE on #ds106radio'" default answer "") if theSuffix is not "" then set theSuffix to theSuffix & " " tell application "iTunes" repeat set currentState to player state if currentState is stopped then play playlist "radio off" delay 10 tell application "LadioCast" disconnect 1 end tell exit repeat else set trackName to name of current track set trackArtist to artist of current track set trackAlbum to album of current track if trackName is not lastName or trackArtist is not lastArtist or trackAlbum is not lastAlbum then set lastName to trackName set lastArtist to trackArtist set lastAlbum to trackAlbum tell application "LadioCast" set metadata song to thePrefix & "'" & trackArtist & " - " & trackName & "'" & theSuffix end tell end if end if delay 15 end repeat end tell I saved it as well as a stand along app if you do not want to script fiddle. The idea is you would start a stream, run a playlist as audio, and then launch this app to manage the metadata pushing. itunes ladiocast metadater (55k ZIP download) When you start up the app, you can add the prefix and suffix (it is optional) and the script automagically updates the Ladiocast metadata (and looks like triggers the update too) It does work, though I wonder if i ends up a bit twitter spammy if I include my handle or hash tags Anyhow, this is just a bit of fiddling 'n futzing. Maybe its of use to someone. Composed while offline 14 hours on a trans pacific flight... While I playfully gasta-cated at OER24 for folks to put on the Get Federated t-shirt, I knew then and more now that it’s not going to be for everyone. Get Federated T-shirt by me, CC BY– Text in Georgia Font Fediverse logo proposal by Eukombos (CC0) "It's too complicated reigns". Where to Go? Hence the ongoing gnashing of “where to be”? The “professional” pulse of LinkedIn (I’m a bit gutted to see folks who have left their own blogs to home there). The great sea of email newsletter? The light up your Starter Pack of bluesky? It's become a mad rush to go Sky. Buying into the meta trio of InstaThreadBook? https://flickr.com/photos/dclmeyer/38454409930 DIRECTION flickr photo by akahawkeyefan shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license I fault no one for making their choices, or taking the post and spray the same stuff everywhere idea. I get the sensibility, especially if your source is your own microspace. Frankly (why am I using that expression so much? It sounds like an old man tweed dusted phrase), I desire to not have that many scroll spaces. The blog, this here one, had to be central and first for me. I consider most other as exhaust. I'm making a turn to put my energies back to work here rather than falling again for Cousin Elon's Farm. And like the Great Cory D citing the Ulysess Pact after so many iterations of enshittified web dust biting rounds, I am not going to pony up to another masters house. Sure the skies look happy blue.Tell me- how are y'all gonna pay when they want something more than users? I am quite liking the smallness of the fediverse which, as many spaces potentially offer, that original sixth sense proprioception of accidentally bumping into (in the good way) people you don’t know. If you seek push button simpleness and algorithmic drip feeds, there are plenty of options. Actually what I relish about the fediverse is the non simplicity— that gets internet fled with confusion but if you discount the possibility to learn nuance, non obvious paths, than you are discounting your own human ability to learn, adapt. I have plenty of minor gripes in Mastodon. I am never more that 40% confident that a private message is just that (why does the button say “Publish”. And for all the increased proportion of Mastodonners posting images with alt text, why is it so hard to access it in a copiable form (in the web client). Being Fragmented One of the oddest wraps is that as you take on more fediverse tools, you actually end up fragmenting your identity. It’s all connected and interminable, but on every service/instance, you are a new identity. Bug or Feature? Huh? Okay, my main and longest lived identity is here where I started, in Mastodon, as @cogdog@cosocial.ca And note again the power of fedispace. I started on mastodon.social then jumped to social.fossdle.org and finally where I am now. The jumps were pretty easy to do (plus one for Mastodon). Yet my ActivityPub enabled WordPress blog posts as @topdog@cogdogblog.com Anything I post there goes to a different and smaller number of followers (not that I look or count much) (okay I looked, 12). I am fragmented. Really the only sensible approach I have found is to repost stuff from my WordPress identity under my main. It probably looks like vanity self tooting. Shrug Note that I still have running an IFTTT thing that listens to my RSS feed and posts to my main Mastodon account. I’ve not figure out which I prefer so they are both in play. But wait, here are more fragments. I’ve been doing some photo posting to pixelfed as @cogdog@pixelfed.social -- that’s Another me! I am looking at putting more of my photo energy here and leaving the IG behind. And confusion happens here. I can follow a mastodon account in Pixelfed, like Darcy Norman @dnorman@social.ds106.us and where I see only his posts that include images. Then flip to Mastodon where I can follow any pixelfed accounts to see the newest photos. Indeed it all interworks fluidly. As ActivityPub should and does. But to connect mine or at least coordinate, in mastodon I follow my pixelfed feed and the boost new photos. It can be confusing. https://mastodon.ie/@mtechman/113471741547817296 This will happen if I decide to toss my @cogdog self into any other federated service. I will have yet another account somewhere. Don’t think I am pining for some kind of fediverse account ID system, it might be technically feasible, but just noting that being federated means fragmenting of ourselves (solvable) but also being not in one giant vat of other users — what the sky people seem to crave, but swirling from and to smaller ponds. It might look too complex, but again, isn’t find your way through complexity the leveling up of learning we want you to see others do? I’m all for federation, and can call up the poem (maybe) (likely not) if requested (hardly likely), and accept the fragmentation as more feature than bug. Embrace the non simplicity. Stay Federated. Don't fall for the Shtick. Featured Image: My own photo. No need for extruded generated images. The world is full of metaphors, why just give in to the chat box? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/28006378394 Distributed Grids flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license flickr foto Hybrid Courses Matrixavailable on my flickr Our Ocotillo Hybrid Courses Action Group chair Shelly Rodrigo went wildly over the top with a "Matrix" theme for her demo on the group's efforts this year... with red pills and blue pills for those faculty considering the plunge into hybrid courses. But I cannot help but mention the fantasic effort Shelly did with sharing! She went for a total Matrix theme here: Take the RED Pill You stay in wonderland and we show you how deep the hybrid learning goes. Take the BLUE Pill The learning ends. You wake up in your office and believe whatever you want. I love it! Maybe for our evaluation purposes we will chart the number of blue pills and th enumber of read pills versus.... = Anybody But Yankees Bottom of the eighth, and things are going well. My bias is rooted in my childhood heros circa 1970 and 1983 When Bryan Alexander tweeted his dislike of ET, I could not help but play with him... Hence... Who else does he side with? The Orcs? Jame Gumb? Freddy Krueger? jack Torrance? Lex Luthor? Gollum? Just kidding, Ax-man, you know I dig your style. I'd like to think it's rather clear if anyone glances at this blog that despite it's title, it does not sell dog products, and definitely is not in the genre of home improvement tips. Plus, there is a clear statement on the bottom of every page. The exact statement is: Here I bark and growl about the web, edtech, photography, and other stuff that gets under my fur (more...). Send those e-cards and e-letters to cogdogblog at gmail dot com -- except requests for requests to post links, ads, guest articles, or product reviews. I don't do that stuff. If you bug me you get the treatment. When someone I've never heard of, never communicated with, emails with a gushing statement of how much they love my blog and wanting to know if they can write guests posts or if I will put links to their sites in my posts, well I know that they have actually never even looked at my blog. Like Glen. Last week, Glen cold-emailed me. I came across your site while looking for resources for our next blog and I knew I had to reach out immediately, kudos on a fantastic blog. I can't wait to see what kind of resources my random pile of posts might be of use, but I bet you will tell me in the next sentence, now that you've hit me with the ego boosting first greeting. My name is Glen, and I'm reaching out on behalf of a growing home interiors business who operates in the same marketplace as Houzz and Made. Oh, yeah, Glen. My blog is all about home interiors. Perhaps you can summarize all of my posts you found about this industry? This month, we're looking to secure sponsorship placements with five prominent blogs and your site jumped straight to the top of our list. Your list must be pretty thin if you are reaching down into mine and it surfaces to the top. I cannot imagine the 4 runners up. Would you also be willing to accept link placements on pre-existing content on your site? Perhaps you would like to read that little note at the bottom of every blog page that says I don't do guest posts? Or link placements? Or maybe your deep research can dig up how often that occurs here? Please let me know if this is something you're interested in discussing further. Please accept my non-response as a not interested. That is what most human beings with functioning cerebral cortexes would do. But for Glen's sake, I just decided to trash and ignore his action that clearly violates the FCC CAN-SPAM act. I asked my audience for suggestions. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1049451950222249984 The votes are in. https://twitter.com/ericlikness/status/1049456310364921856 Especially when there is the rancid follow-up: Hi Alan, I reached out last week but haven't heard back. I wanted to see if there was an opportunity to sponsor a post on your site. Please see my initial email below. Best wishes, Glen I think I shall just reply with a link to this post. Activate the sprayer! Featured Image: This image is published under Creative Commons CC BY-SA because of the license in the original image it was based on. It was modified by adding my own logo (CC BY-SA by Bryan Mathers) and some extra label text to FLIT Spray Can 1.jpg a Wikimedia Commons image by Andreas Franzkowiak licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA A little over a year ago, someone new entered as an open participant in ds106: I'm working this summer as a grant researcher, and part of the project I'm working with has to do with innovations in education. Partway through my project, I stumbled across a blog called The Tech Savvy Educator, and I continued stumbling onto Jim Groom"˜s Digital Storytelling class (Mr. Groom magically found and responded to my first blog post before I'd even told anyone that I was making a blog, I'm assuming through some kind of back-link-sensor or quite possibly MAGIC). Following the discovery of the Digital Storytelling (ds106) class, I proceeded to basically do the class, reading the essays, watching the videos, figuring out how to register and manufacture the blog-object you're viewing right now. And I started having all of these huge hits for teaching in the fall, like using shared documents to teach research paper writing and format style, and using blogs, wikis and flickr accounts by a fictional character (or characters) to teach creative writing Brian really came on early 2012 with his introduction of his Bagman character, an exemplar of someone carrying a theme or character through multiple assignments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=4xUITZopO5w I was very excited to get an email from Brian this week sharing the news that he would be teaching a digital storytelling course at University of Michigan starting in early 2013, and it would be connected with ds106. He specifically asked for tips for teaching the course. For reference, I have been part of ds106 as an open participant (in 2011), taught it as an in person class (Spring 2012), and an online class (Summer 2012 and currently Fall 2012)... that is me experience, not expertise. My notes are spread across a few places, a category of my teaching related ds106 notes, audio reflections from Spring 2012, the web site for that same course and the summer "camp" version. So what can I tell Prof Bagman? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by andessurvivor I guess this is the part after the preamble where I actually try to answer the question. First, everyone that teaches the class is going to have their own method, syllabus, outcomes etc. That sounds obvious, but is what still makes ds106 radically different from other large, massed, big courses- all others aim to replicate the same experience for all participants. What we do at University of Mary Washington, ends up being the hub of the front of the main site ds106.us, but taught elsewhere, be it York College, Kennesaw State University, Temple University Japan are actually overlapping on the elements of ds106 and their own on the ground courses. And this does not even address the surrounding cloud of open online participants who pick and choose their own levels of participation. What it means is there is no single "ds106 course" but more or less some messy Venn diagram, where the lines between classes participating is porous and blurred. The other aspect I am still formulating is developing my own persona or character as a teacher. I struggled with this my first time around; I knew my presence would not and should not be the way Jim Groom teaches, and even noted the way Scott Lockman describes his class presence as performance, even "vaudeville". It comes with time and experience (I actually had not done classroom teaching in 12 years before last Spring). I am rather confident knowing some of Brian's experience that this is something he has a feel for. It's not that the classroom is a broadway show, but there is some element of show time to doing it, even online. The way we run the class at University of Mary Washington is intense. The usual feedback is how much work the class was (coupled with how much it was worth it), and that it is "way more work than other 100 level courses." But the students stay in it, mostly. And put a lot of time into it. Why? We collected some of this as an end assignment for our summer class where students wrote their last "letter home" with advice for future ds106 students. So we make this clear upfront. Jim was always excellent in his over the top scare email sent to registered students before the class starts. I might be getting better, since I had about 8 students drop (and 6 added). I actually said that I was trying to talk them out of the class. But letting the students know early, even before the class is started, how much work it is helps them set their expectation. It may also be setting them up to try harder? One of the biggest challenges in doing ds106 is getting students set up in their domains, installing wordpress, and then being able to get functional in their ability to use their blog well. There are a lot of mechanics to cover. If you teach a ds106 class, you do not have to have students do the entire "manage a personal cyberinfrastucture"- they can easily do all work on a hosted space like Wordpress.com, Blogspot, tumblr. That is a call on how important it is for your students to learn this bit of managing their digital selves (this is a key outcome for our class). Last Spring, because we were having students register their own domains and arrange their own web hosting, it was really 3 weeks into the semester before all of then were set up, and then they ended up being at different levels of proficiency- even 5 or 6 weeks into the semester, I was commenting and reminding some students about linking and embedding media. I am not sure if there is a better way to streamline this- a simpler tool or having all students use the same? But this semester we have greatly accelerate this process via the support of UMW and its IT department for the Domain of One's Own project. We are set up now to register domains for students and set them up on a web hosting platform that we manage (and students get for free)- and I had 3/4 of my students set up and using their wordpress sites in 2 days. Tis greatly shortened the time spent on mechanics. Martha and I came up with the idea of devoting the first two weeks to what we called ds106 Bootcamp, where we made assignments mostly focussed on things that would get them writing posts, using tags and categories, customizing their sites with themes and plugins, and understanding how to embed media. As we have done it at UMW, there is a balanced sense of both structure and lack of structure and largely we are also inventing and tweaking the course as we go. One of the most pleasing things I found in my first round of teaching was how little I have to do in terms of teaching students how to use software. This is because we actually do not prescribe that students use specific software- for doing their graphics work, they are free to use commercial copies of PhotoShop if they own it, but also refer them to open source tools like GIMP and web-base ones like Aviary (see our ds106 Handbook section on Tools). We have a comprensive archive of past ds106 syllabi now for 6 different semesters (including 2 summer sessions) -- and one of my current projects is to harvest all the material from them (recorded presentations, recommended readings/videos) into a generic syllabus for someone like an open participant o pick and choose the things to do that they prefer. What has been most impressive is in ds206 is how adept our students have been at figuring out the tools. They struggle with it, yes, but they also are able to seek their own answers, or reach out to ask for help. I could very well be wrong, but I think we often underestimate this in our students, or maybe need to provide more places for them to struggle a bit- that notion I ascribe to of UMW History Prof Jeff McClurken about wanting to make his students "uncomfortable but not paralyzed". My hunch is often we over structure things, and waste a lot of time doing cook book recipes. It was this kind of thinking that led my colleague Martha Burtis and I (we each teach our own sections of ds106, but we work together to plan all assignments, so our sections are in parallel) to come up with a challenge assignment in our second week. We actually gave our students the assignment to create an animated GIF but purposefully did not tell them how to do this. We wanted them to take on the challenge of discovery. We each spend a lot of time both preparing and providing feedback. I cannot overstate how important that contact is, even more so in an online class. Here in week 4 I am trying to keep up with the task of reading all and commenting on most of my students blog posts. I know that will tail off as we get into more complex assignments (reviewing video work takes a lot more time than visual assignments), but also that the students and the open participant community pick up on commenting. Google Reader is essential for keeping up to date with the student blogs. Sp students need to know they are not writing into an empty space. Commenting is key glue, eb it acknowledgement of work, suggestions for improvement, critical evaluation, or just providing something fun or relating it. All of our students work is what is done in their blogs- we do not do any quizzes or tests in ds106 at UMW. The same goes for twitter- we made an early assignment to include a twitter message and reply they got. If comments are glue, twitter is the electricity then generates nerve impulses. If you cna get your students bouncing not only to you, but each other in this space, it goes a long way. They learn it is not only a place to get answers, but a space to have conversations, to have some fun, to be more connected. But you as the instructor are the key hub in the network, so I am keeping a steady pulse of calling out students positive efforts, or drawing in my own connections to comment or tweets to students. The last thing I ever want to to is require X number of comments or tweets per week. If you as the instructor are monitoring the blog comments and twitter streams, you will have a good sense of who is present and who is not, just the same as you can gauge their participating in class. Setting up counts makes it seem more like a primary school measure. I expect my students to gauge for themselves how active they are-- giving them hints like that there is a URL for a twitter search to show an individual's activity in a hash tag stream, and setting up RSS feeds for comments on student blogs (well if they are using Wordpress, you can do this). Be a drill sergeant on due dates. I was way too lax my first times through, I bought almost all excuses. No mas. The load of reviewing student work gets crazy when you have to rewind to the expectations of two weeks ago. Tis semester we are trying out using our LMS, Canvas, as only a gradebook, where student have to enter a URL for their required weekly assingment. This has a deadline, plus it gives students s sense of where they stand on the course. Maybe this seems obvious, but the work should be fun. We use a heavy dose of humor in ds106, be it in the play of animated GIFs, wearing goody hats in Google Hangouts, or creating fake summer camps. This is not limited to ds106 as a "creative course"; I see a place for play in everything. Witness Jim Groom Art. And it should be fun for the instructors. (and it is if they do the same work). It was one of the things that impressed me about Jim Groom's first ds106 classes (even before it was an open course) as well as earlier in the game by people like Barbara Ganley -- that teachers are seen doing the same work / assignments the students do. One one hand, it gives them a better understanding of what is being asked of students, but more so, it does something to enhance or even flatten the student/teacher relationship... that it is not an instructor telling the students "You need to do this" but students hearing and seeing-- "We are all going to do this..." Encourage and generate free form riffing. This might not always pan out, but a combination of instigating and inviting others in generates a dynamic and energetic environment. This has happened ins ds106 when somehow one idea gets propagated out, more like a small scale meme. This happens often in ds106, like with Slide Guy or early on with Bags of Gold remixes. How to do this is yet to be quantified, but I bet you do not see it in any Coursera class. What helped in my in-person class was chunking the time into discrete segments especially for doing things like our "rapid prototyping" activities- giving students something to make or produce in 15 or 20 minutes. We did photo challenges and how Michael Branson Smith started his current class with a challenge of shadow pictures. One of the more amazing stories was how in Spring of 2012, a former student gave us a design challenge related to Valentine's Day - something we added on the fly to our class that week. Maybe my highlight in the Spring was the audio activity I did to have my students learn Foley techniques by making them create sounds in real time for a silent movie. The whole dynamic and energy of the room changes when I stop talking and the students start doing. I did this with having them use groups to share project ideas, to teach a technique in class. The worst classes were ones where I stood up in the front of the room and talked. This again is patently obvious (until you find yourself in the front of the room talking). What's hard is breaking students of their assignment focus mentality. They come to you with 12, 13, 15 years of experience of doing what it takes to get the points for the grade. That is what we teach in school. We have criteria for our assignments, and things that get produced for grades. Ot can take time and a lot of repeating to have students do more than post something that says "Here is My Assignment". The get really focused on producing the product, and what we emphasize is that more important is that they share the idea and thinking behind what they created AND that they narrate the process. Some students take along time to stop writing like they are filling a blue book. Again and again, I encourage them to think about doing assignments in a novel way, that they can do things opposite tot he assignment if they make it interesting and can explain it. We try to create a sense in students that their work is not isolated. In most school work, the only audience is a teacher. In ds106 we have a start by being in public publishing space, but we are always triyng to have students be aware of the connections to other works, be it looking at examples in the Assignments Collection or seeing the best of work, the in[SPIRE] site. But its more than that- having students understand how tagging can group media in sites like flickr Youtube, is a key skill, as well as having them understand how to manipulate URLs to generate links to related (or not) content. It takes a while, sometimes forever, for students to find a blog voice. Not only that, with no experience in writing for the web, they typically do not provide the context for what they are doing. If the assignment is to make a photo that illustrates an idea of "tension" often we see a post titles "Tension Photo" and just a picture. Again and again I leave comments asking them if that single post was ll anyone saw from their blog, would they even understand what the picture is meant for? I am constantly reminding to link to the assignment, to restate it, to expand on their choices for they way they responded to the assignment. Just doing the assignment is not enough. We ask them to blog like champs. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by andessurvivor SO does this help? I dont know, I hope Professor Bagman can give a thumbs up. And we are excited to see what he does in ds106 with his new course. I may be pre-emptive, but am hoping again to try blogging the Northern Voice conference experience in images and audio using VoiceThread, like I did last year. Uploaded images (or ones sucked in from flickr) can then easily be augmented with audio, and if you create a free VT account, you can chime in as well. You can find this year's version at http://voicethread.com/share/355040/ I also have another new toy to try in the mix, but am keeping this one secret until I try it. I'm looking for Mooses blogging! cc licensed flickr photo shared by zenobia_joy Against every sane, rational, "I'm so over committed I'm gonna explode" thought, I have decided to plunge my hand again into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the challenge where aspiring, and maybe aspired, writers take on the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel over a one month time span. I have always liked writing, but had never done anything substantial or larger than a long blog post, so it was one of those items I listed long ago on 43 Things. I had heard of NaNoWriMo, and it seemed analogous to running a marathon -- a goal you keep telling yourself you cannot do-- until you try. Last year I made my 50,000 mark (I burned a lot of adjectives up in the process), finished, and got through about 1 1/2 rounds of later edits before hanging it out to dry (see reflections on 2009). It never got discovered, I never got a book deal, and I still have a day job (none of these were primary aspirations, but heck, I'd not mind being surprised). The typical way one does this is mostly solitary- you write and write and write in most commonly a word processor (I did), and you update your NaNoWriMo site with your word count. There's really no vehicle (by design I think) where your novel goes; that one is up to you. Yes, they do offer a lot of tools to make friends and there are local discussion boards where there are options to meet up with other writers in your 'hood. I was fence sitting this year-- if I follow my running my running analogy, I ran the marathon once, finished, and never will do THAT again. But writing was a mental challenge that can be taken on, IMHO, easier than physical ones. IT'S IN YOUR HEAD. So I decided to do it this year to play more with the How I write more than the Drivel I Do Write. I decided I would not use Word this year, but do the writing in a blog to see how it works as a composition platform. I got myself the idea I could use it as one more Opportunity to Monkey with Wordpress, and add some code in to do word counts and progress. And since the Anthologize plugin came out a few months ago, it would be a new experiment in publishing to ePub and/or HTML. Even better, just last weak Patrick Murray-John offered up his new extension of Anthologize geared to publish NaNoWriMo content. My writing site is now fluttering in the open breeze at http://nano.dommy.com/ Like my running efforts, writing in the open becomes another impetus to finish as you don't want to bee seen failing in public. Below I will outline some of the tinkering I have done in Wordpress over the last 2 days to get myself set up. I'll say my novel really is not novel and idea, I am a Dog is the working title and it purports to be the insider view to the Canine world fur Humans to get past their naive assumptions of the dog-verse. I actually am so far hoping a plot emerges. But this was less about trying to Write a Great Story but just to try and also run some technical experiments. I did the automatic WordPress install on my Dreamhost-ed site, and pawed through the themes it provided, settling on the sparse Journalist theme. The code bits I hacked first was finding a way to add a word count to each post, and a method of summing the total words written. It ought to be a few database queries. After consulting the GoogleVerse, I found that MySQL has no function to count words, but I did find a blog that had a method for listing posts and word counts, and as the author says: MySQL doesn't have a built-in word count function for MySQL, but as with every other unanswered question, some smart guy on the blogosphere already answered how to use MySQL to get a Word Count. It's a little bit of a hack- a query that first sums the character length of a text column's contents and subtracts from it the character length of the same text with blank spaces replaced by null characters -- e.g. a word is defined by blank space. SELECT SUM( LENGTH(name) - LENGTH(REPLACE(name, ' ', ''))+1) FROM table First I would need a function that would return the word count for a single post, so I could add to the meta content for each post: In my functions.php template, I added my new function- it merely takes an id as a parameter and runs the word count query on the database using the Wordpress function to run a raw query, function nano_get_post_word_count($id) { global $wpdb; // get word count for a single post $word_count = $wpdb->get_results(" SELECT SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ' ', ''))+1) AS 'wordcount' FROM $wpdb->posts where `post_type` = 'post' and `ID`=" . $id, ARRAY_A ); return($word_count[0]['wordcount']); } I then monkeyed the part of the templates that output the author and date/time of post publishing to be more on line with what I need (not referring to posts)-- I lost the original part of template, but this is what produces the example above printf(__("%d words written by %s on %s",'journalist-13'), nano_get_post_word_count(get_the_ID()), get_the_author(), get_the_time('F jS, Y g:i a')); I use my own custom function to generate the word count for an individual post. The next part was to do something to create a running total of all words written across all published posts, put into my side bar. I could have done the calculation every time the sidebar loaded, but that seemed un-needed as the number would change only when a change was made, so I went for a cheap cache method. Again, modding the functions.php template, I first add a hook that will be called when a post is saved. // Use the save_post action to update word counts add_action( 'save_post', 'nano_save_post', 5, 2 ); This will call my own private function nano_save_post whenever anything is published or updated. The database query is similar, but we run it across all published posts. The last part is a way to write to a text file on my server. I've obscured my own path, put it is a directory named YYYY inside wp-content that contains writable file named XXXXX. it would likely be more sensible to stuff it ins a meta field of the database, and maybe I will get around to that later. function nano_save_post() { global $wpdb; // custom query to events whose end dates are greater than the current time stamp $total_word_count = $wpdb->get_results(" SELECT SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ' ', ''))+1) AS 'Totalcount' FROM $wpdb->posts where `post_type` = 'post' and `post_status` = 'publish'", ARRAY_A ); // update the file with the total word count $DATAFILE = fopen(TEMPLATEPATH . '/../../YYY/XXXXX',"w+"); fwrite($DATAFILE, $total_word_count[0]['Totalcount']) or die(" failed writing $DATAFILE"); fclose($DATAFILE); } And the last part is some code for the sidebar to put a count and display a percentage for progress value. I came across this Simple CSS shiny progress bar technique to add a fancy progress bar that will change as my word count increases: The progress bar calls for some CSS to be added to the style sheet, but the working parts are in the sidebar.php template. We simply get the contents of our cached wordcount file ($wordcount) convert it to a percent ($wordpercent), and use the values in the output: out of 50,000 words written (% done) Gardner Campbell gets interviewed by Jon Udell for ITCoversations... I am all gushing like I know a celebrity. Congrats to Dr Glu! It's been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches... mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up. You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you-- especially if the body of the comment is: Nice Post! The tell-tale is the effort to place URLs to un-wanted sites (and DO NOT CLICK and VISIT any of those URLs)... what these cretins are trying to do is to increase their Google Ranking by spreading links on other pages. The MTBlacklist allows one click de-spamming, removal of the bad comment, and adding the URL to the Blacklist for future protection. It had been a while since I went to the Comment Spam Clearninghouse and added the Latest Master Blacklist file to our Blacklist and Woah Neo! there was about 340 we were short. Meanwhile, tonight's cockroach droppings indcluded 12 URLs not on the Masterlist, and a traceroute found the offending source IP (205.177.122.2) a customer of BtNAccess- time will tell if a meesage to their abuse line will yield one squashed roach. Hey, it's a tiny post, just like 2004 days. Short. Sweet. If you are actually reading this post, not just clicking a like button, you hopefully notice a bit more "zip" to it? Like a purring sports car engine. Like... ...being now hosted in Reclaim Cloud. It was maybe a year or more ago, when Reclaim Hosting announced their Reclaim Press (I tihnk that's what it was called) service, an optimized WordPress hosting, I of course raised my hand for a beta. I thought maybe I would do a small site as a test, maybe my calling card at cog.dog. It would be risky to move this whole CogDogBlog barge that has been slopping on bits and bobs since 2005. Then I got distracted. Then when I was undistracted, I thought, why not? WTF? Why not move the most important (to me) web site in the universe? I contacted the Reclaim gurus, and we had some question over the nearly 17 Gb heft of its files. With assistance, I managed to knock of some mammoth unneeded log files and then with some archiving of some other hanging blobs https://cogdogblog.com/2025/04/cleaning-up-moving-piles-around-the-webhouse/ I got it down to a more svelte... 13 Gb? Taylor Jadin took it from there scheduling Monday as a transition time, He suggested "not blogging" which was really really hard to do ;-) And then it was done. It's now a sporty race car, eh? It's born to blog. And now, it is cloud-injected with... okay I will stop the automobile metaphors. I have a load of big posts to unload. Zooooooooom. Featured Image: Funny, again, I have a perfect photo in my own public domain collection of 70k photos. Why do I need to render some sadly robotic cartoon-ish car? MG or Truck? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) (Truth- I would always take the truck, I am Red Dog 4 Life) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This audio recording was created (by request) for Matt Henderson a Manitoba teacher a number of us met this summer at the UnPlug'd Conference. Matt, who has done his own projects with creating a school based FM radio station, asked us for some help with a presentation he did Friday where he wanted to include some perspective on ds106 radio. So with some gentle nudging from @drgarcia, a group of us celebrating the last night of the Open Education 2012 conference in Vancouver gathered in a key back room of The SoundLab to records this one take "rockumentary" for Matt. With gentle music provided by @noiseprofessor, speakers included @grantpotter @cogdog (me) and @bryanjack ds106radio rockumentary Enjoy. And it is now on the radio station... More goodness for the radio station is at http://bit.ly/ds106radioinfo I'm reading a book right now. You know the interface design? A written work of ideas, printed to granular containers of text (called "pages") with an intuitive navigation system. Yet I am thinking in the back of my mind the recent discussions a bunch of us are having about the History of Hypertext led by Mike Caulfield and Ward Cunningham, examining it though the web/mind-bending concept of a Federated Wiki. The second FedWiki Happening, not even happening yet, has already opened up reams of history and connected ideas I've not followed before. It got me going a bit nostalgic on HyperCard, not only a direct influence on Tim Berners-Lee's first concepts for the web, but also, the first instantiation of what Ward built before the wiki. The first Wiki Wiki was a stack. I'm reading a copy of a book Brian Lamb loaned to me-- Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian. King has a serious and humorous approach to highlighting how Native American / First Nation people (or are not) portrayed in culture. [caption id="attachment_40292" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King[/caption] Reading this is great. I can do this without the internet, without electricity (if there is daylight), and anywhere I go. But because my mind seems hungry for the connections that cannot fit in the text, this is what happens. On page 32 King has just been listing how Indians were part of the entertainment scene of the late 1800s, in things like Wild Bill Cody's shows, and speculates that for people like Sitting Bull, Gabriel Dumont, Geronimo being in the show might have been a positive or an exploitive experience. King writes: The pageantry of the Wild West shows, along with four centuries of visual and written recordings of Native people, came together in the twentieth century's most famous Indian image, James Earle Fraser's 1915 sculpture The End of the Trail... I don't know how many people know the sculpture itself or its story, but most everyone recognizes the image of a dejected Indian holding a spear while he slumps over his equally dejected horse. The idea seems to be that both rider and horse have run out of time and space and are poised on the edge of oblivion. I don't know the sculpture (or at least know it by name), but find it quickly [caption id="attachment_40294" align="aligncenter" width="630"] "End of the Trail (Wisconsin) September 2013 02" by Shawn Conrad[/caption] as well as more about James Earle Fraser who also designed the Indian / Buffalo Nickel. I got the gist of what King is writing about in terms of this image, but I do not see it. But as an author, he does more than provide the encyclopedic information about a sculpture. "But if you look at the sculpture a second time, you can easily reason that the horse is resisting. Its front legs are braced and its back legs are dug in. American expansion be damned. This pony is not about to go gentle into that good night. Such a reading might be expanded to re-imagine our doleful Indian as a tired Indian, who, at any moment, will wake up refreshed, lift up his spear, and ride off into the twenty-first century and beyond." King, pp 32-33 A few pages later King writes about Will Rogers; I had no idea Rogers was of Cherokee Indian descent as King writes. But I learn more, how Rogers failed as a cowboy in Argentina. In writing about the ways Indians are shown on film, he tells me of an early 1990s movie Indian Chauncey Yellow Robe, who spoke clearly about the issue in the third conference of The Society of American Indians in 1913 (I could easily locate everal hyperlinks worth adding to this sentence. You try): "'We see the Indian,' Yellow Robe Said. 'He is pictured in the lowest degree of humanity. He is exhibited in every motion picture theater in the country. We see the Indian, in his full native costume, stamped on the five-dollar bills as a reminder of his savagery. We see a monument of the Indian in New York Harbor as a memorial of his vanishing race. The Indian wants no memorial monument, for he is not yet dead. The name of the North American Indian will not be forgotten as long as the rivers flow and the hills and mountain stand, and though we have progressed, we have not vanished.'" -- King p 36 King himself recognizes that there is a connected idea left hanging in text, what is this five dollar bill featuring an Indian. He writes of finding a fie dollar silver certificate in circulating from 1899 to 1914 (when the Indian was replaced by Lincoln). The Indian was a man named Running Antelope. Wow. Found it at the World Banknotes and Coin site. It took me 45 seconds to find that. But King adds of the back story, how the artists tried to insist that Running Antelope, a Lokata wear a Pawnee headdress, another tribe, and one mot friendly then with the Lakota. He says the artists of the five dollar bill did the "logical" thing, mashup them up, the 1899 equivalent of Photoshopping. King writes about, besides Will Rogers, the only other Indian actor who has a Hollywood star, Jay Silverheels who my generation knows best from his role as Tonto to the Lone Ranger. The first Indian on tv I remember seeing was the one who cried in the Keep American Beautiful commercial.. except that Iron Eyes Cody was really an Italian actor named Espera Oscar de Corti from Louisiana. And King writes to the conflict about the Tonto character, in many ways an accomplishment as Indian and Cowboy were partner, even though Tonto spoke in child like language and dressed like a cartoon indian. He talks about the idea of one day Tonto maybe just going off to do his own gig: I'll even admit that there are those of us who fantasized that Tonto would, one day, shoot the Ranger for cause and ride off into the sunset by himself. Or, as Lyle Lovett imagines in his song "If I Had a Boat," Tonto might tell the Ranger to kiss his ass as Tonto leaves the Wild West behind, buys a boat, and goes off on his own adventure. Wait a minute. A Lyle Lovett song? If I am off on my Nicholas Car island, or away on my Internet Amish sabbatical, what if I do not know the song? I'm not away. And so I hyper transport myself to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpM8FjO4Vko I can easily find the lyrics The mystery masked man was smart He got himself a Tonto 'Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free But Tonto he was smarter And one day said kemo sabe Kiss my ass I bought a boat I'm going out to sea And if I had a boat I'd go out on the ocean And if I had a pony I'd ride him on my boat And we could all together Go out on the ocean Me upon my pony on my boat The stuff on the internet help provide what cannot be wedged into a printed book. So here is the thing, a resource like Wikipedia, or Khan Academy videos, or an OER, provides a vast array of information. But it is not an education, it's not an interpretation of the idea like King has done, whether he is "right" or "wrong" matters not. But King is someone with lived experiences that helps me frame my own ideas, and not take them off the shelf like downloading an app. I want both of these, the bags of gold of information and the ideas that put them into a context. Something like a book has, inherent in them, potential links reaching out to information beyond the original form. It invited me, if I am listening, to look to fill in what is not directly presented to me. It turns me from a passive reader into a bit of an information explorer. But I do not need someone to build me a magical machine of hypertext. I do not need a new web tool or an app. I have everything I need in a wide open searchable web. I just have to do it, not expect it to be done for me. It's my personal hyperidea system. I like it. Top / featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain image by Lennert B. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by alee_04 The suitcases are packed with winter clothes and secured. Computer gear? Check. Camera Stuff? Ditto. Guitar? Got it. Medical supplies (well what my lame oh insurance will provide)? Yep. iPod? Loaded. Having been home a whole five days after two weeks in New Zealand, I'm off again. This time? a ROAD TRIP! Tomorrow I start on a 1900 mile journey to Kamloops British Columbia. With assistance from Brian Lamb, I have been granted a four month fellowship as an Open Learning Scholar at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). What am I doing? From the letter of acceptance, the goal of the research award is (1) to bring research expertise to TRU to support the reinvigoration of research and scholarly work into open, distance, and online learning at TRU-OL. (2) to further enhance the vibrancy and diversity of the research community at TRU-OL and TRU generally Got it? Stay tuned. I'll be working with Brian on a bunch of web site projects, probably some wiki ones, doing some PD in storytelling and connected/open courses... and whatever else we cook up. I found Brian sitting on a strong limb of the organizational chart tree: atop a box of innovation. I'm coming show what "BC" stands for https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/522555842663809024 Seriously, I am really honored by this opportunity and eager to work at one place rather than juggling 5 disparate projects, and have funding for 4 solid months. I'll also get some opportunities to visit a few other BC institutions, and to hang out in the Vancouver area over the holidays. I'm also slated to be on a panel presentation at the January 2015 MLA conference in Vancouver. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Vicki & Chuck Rogers Of course, I am following convention by leaving Arizona in the winter to go to Canada. Oh well, there will be beaches after. I'm taking a week to drive up there, it's along trip, but I am hoping to not have too many madcap driving marathon days and to enjoy parts along the way. I've got plans lined up to visit friends / colleagues along the way (a.k.a freeloading) not unlike my previous travels. It's a bit sad to leave my cozy home in Strawberry, AZ, but as Arnold says, I'l be baaaaaaaaaaaaack (in the Spriiiiiiiiiiiiing). Red Dog is ready to roll! Let's go! creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You're tooling along in your Model T SPLOT on the Internet Superhighway, and the tire goes flat, needing an update. Are you gonna wait for a tow truck, a helpful stranger to stop and help, or get out the jack to do it yourself? I've seen in most cases, that people who have gone through all the steps to set up a SPLOT site in WordPress quite often are still driving the original version installed. There was nothing wrong with that, until last December, for sites where themes are automatically updated. The parent themes that TRU Writer and TRU Collector are based on were both updated by their developer. Some of the updates were to add some Gutenberg capability (which has no effect on these), but a few other display changes had the ill-fated effect to break the child SPLOT themes. The fixes were not too difficult to change. But since the child themes are ones manually uploaded, there only way to get them changed is with some changing of lug nuts and lifting the site up on the jack (metaphor fail is happening now). It was a situation we had hoped the one-click cpanel installers at Reclaim Hosting would manage for sites created there, but apparently there is an Installatron bug stopping the updates from being triggered (have no fear, Tim is on it!). I've tried a few different approaches to this update issue, none has been idea. One was the WP-Pusher plugin route, which actually works, but I think almost no one besides me has tried. As much as I want a more automated way to do this, I think it's still worth knowing how to get the wrench out when you need to, if anything, to understand what is happening when it is done for you. Having written all the steps, and noting the complexity, I insert a shrug here, as I expect most readers will glaze over in horror at the idea of replacing server files. public domain image from the US Library of Congress The Plugin Way If you add one of the SPLOT themes to a site through the WordPress dashboard, the recommend route is via downloading a ZIP version of the theme from it's home in GitHub - that's the green Clone or Download button from one like https://github.com/cogdog/tru-collector. In the WordPress dashboard, under Appearance -> Themes you can add a new theme by uploading a zip file, activating, and off you go to the SPLOT races. That is unless you try to repeat that step as an update- you cannot do it the same way in native WordPress. That's where the Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades plugin comes in handy; it overcomes this limitation and let's you update an uploaded theme with a new zip version. There is a hitch. Always. So if you did install this theme from Reclaim Hosting, it's in a directory of your site named tru-collector. But when you download the theme from GitHub, it comes as a file named tru-collector-master.zip and when uploaded, WordPress will think it's a new theme name tru-collector-master. Mayhem and confusion will follow. The newly added theme likely will work, but you will have lost all your settings. You may curse SPLOTs and me. So a trick is needed. Once you have a downloaded copy of tru-collector-master.zip on your own computer, expand the zip. Rename the directory tru-collector-master to be tru-collector. Then Compress, zip again. When you upload the theme as tru-collector.zip with the Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades plugin, your site will be updated. Joy will be shouted. But wait, what if you don't know what it's secret name is in your WordPress site? Get your sleuthing hat on. In Appearances - > Themes hover over the icon for TRU Collector and click Theme Details. The clue is in the URL, if you see: http://*****.*****/wp-admin/themes.php?theme=tru-collector You will have to change the name of the zip file. If it says http://*****.*****/wp-admin/themes.php?theme=tru-collector-master you do not. Is this a trick that will impress your friends and family? Likely not. A new electrical control board just installed to take the place of the old manual one. In the airport control room. Washington D.C. municipal airport public domain image from the US Library of Congress The Roll Up Your Sleeves and Upload Way This is the way me and your grandpa set up themes in the early oughts. We did it my shovels and file transfer protocol. I'm not sure how many people even know how to use ftp/sftp to move files to their domain. But it can also be done via cpanel using the File Manager tool. Either way, you have to know/remember where your SPLOT is installed in your hosting directory. In the Reclaim Hosting cpanel, first to to My Applications and find your SPLOT. Click the wrench icon for settings, then the Files & Data tab below. Finding the installation location for a Reclaim Hosting installed WordPress site Below the password and database prefix settings, you will see a list of all the installed WordPress files. At the top of the list is the directory location you need to start your file uploading expedition. Finding the directory location of the installed WordPress files Now you could write this down on a piece of paper (and you will need to do that, or remember it, if you are fishing through the directory structure with an ftp/sftp tool). But in cpanel, if you click that link, it will take you right there in the cpanel File Manager. Smart, eh? This is where you chose to install the site when you first made it; likely somewhere in your home or public_html directory it another directory named for your domain/subdomain. If you get there, you will see the root level of your WordPress install. You are close to the right place. I'm in the bowels of my domain, inside the main directory of a WordPress install. Kind of homey. We need to drill down a bit more. First double-click wp-content to go down one level, then themes to go one more. Now you will see a list of directories for your theme. Double click the one that matches the SPLOT theme you are updating. You are looking now at all the theme files. The contents of the TRU Writer theme directory You can use the Upload button to upload the new theme files. It does not let you upload directories, so a slightly tedious way is to open each directory, and upload it's appropriate files, including the main theme file. Or you can go up one level to the themes directory, and upload a zip file containing all the theme files. Again, you want to make sure that the ZIP name and the directory it creates match the name of the theme directory currently in place. Once the ZIP file is there, use the File Manager options for Extract, to expand all the files on the server. Greasy Hands and Bruised Knuckles Just writing this sounds maybe more complex than it really is. For the first time doing this, maybe it's worth downloading or duplicating the existing theme directory first. Or if things get messed up, know how to contact your web host support and request a restore from the backup. As much as it would be nice to have this all shiny one button click update, I always see value in doing it directly, just to have a better understanding of all the working parts in your site. I'm probably out there on the edge of the bell shaped distribution curve on this preference. I'm hopeful the Reclaim Hosting updater script will eventually kick into gear, that's likely the route with the fewest pot holes. Updates (on updating!) I should have known they would fix it quickly. It looks like Tim Owens has fixed the Reclaim Hosting cpanel installer scripts to that new sites created with their one-click installs are both getting the newest version of TRU Writer and TRU Collector (I have confirmed this on my own testing), but also, that existing sites installed this way would get automatic updates. As if you need another reason to be hosting with Reclaim Hosting... there it is. Featured Image: Added SPLOT logo to public domain image Chamlee [fixing tire] from the Library of Congress. The funny thing was when I went there to look for images, I got this one on a server error message. It is perfect. Not yet available in any stores! iPod Flea commercial I'm working now in a FleaCast. (Another fine Kotke remaidered link) Sometimes I spot things in my information flows that just feels like I have something akin to spidey sense, not the sensation of danger, but the sensation of, let's call it "web woah." I claim no accuracy nor super power (c.g. relevance). I felt that when I read a post by Terry Godier about his novel idea and implementation of Current, an RSS Reader that looks like it breaks the mold of how we read feeds. https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/116270505804472903 I still have not yet tried Current yet, hey I get distracted. I saw positive replies from Frederic Graver who did try it, as well as a note from Doug Belshaw who was not crazy about it being Mac only. In fact Doug, who seems to build things while he sleeps, ended up creating his own variant he calls Stream. Maybe one reason I perhaps peaked interest is I am not quite sure I have the same issue Terry described: I started building Current before I had the words for why. The impulse was simpler than a philosophy: every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn't. That reading the internet was a task. That articles were items to be processed. That falling behind was a failure state. I didn't have a name for this yet. I just knew I wanted a reader that didn't make me feel like I owed it something. https://www.terrygodier.com/current He names it as a phantom obligation. It looks like Current has a means to generate a whack sack of feed content from variably rated flows into a more coherent flow for reading, with feeds have user defined "velocities" and variable life times. I get that, its saying not ever post that comes in to your reader has the same weight of importance. His rationale is just plain sane. And I have no criticism I have never felt that obligation of need to get to "Feed Read Zero". I leave my reader chock full of unread stuff that eventually slides away. Once in a while if I feel like being tody, heck I just mark them all read. Reset. But maybe my reading habits are different. I subscribe to I don't even know how many feeds upwards towards 200? But I do not look at all that flow at once. Nor do I go through source by source and read them all. My reading is more like... different sized puddles, because I organize them into folders that are loosely topic oriented. Look at how many I have unread and I have zero stress. Folders in my Inoreader Most of the folders I rarely glance at, the main one is "top shelf" and those are the friends and colleagues blogs I do want to read much more frequently. This is a variant I think of a strategy from Alec Couros I followed long ago for that Bird Name Social Media site that was popular 10 years ago. Alec had blogged about (when he used to blog) that he would follow like 10s of thousands of accounts but did not read them, he would focus on a twitter list, of the ones that were most important to him. I still do that in Mastodon, I almost never look at the full flow. The other folders are ones I just glance at time to time, but often just let them flow by. If I find something important, I typically bookmark in Pinboard, but I have no angst about leaving the unreads pile up, heck it does get to quadruple digits sometime. And eventually they flow down the pipe. I am not saying I do this any better or smarter that Terry or Doug, and we all have different sources we are tracking. I just do not feel the same obligation, and have some uncertainty whether I need a new flow/current/stream. At the same time, I have yet to try Current, and it could change my approach completely. Maybe I have some reluctance of tailoring a new reading approach when I find my current one is ok. There may likely be a future post where I rip this one to shreds for my idiocy. That's always a string possibility. I'm looking at my puddles of feeds, maybe a current would be a good thing. Still, it was refreshing to read the clarity to the design decisions Terry made. To be blog-tinued. Featured Image: 2017/365/45 A Sunset Fell into a Puddle and Flowed Away Downstream flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This is less about the reasons why an app knows where I am and more how I/we are resigned to this as a new norm. And that yes, I do knowingly click the AGREE button to allow this to happen. I'm guilty. Yes, right now I am sitting in Australia. It's beautiful. I have posted photos to Instagram with my phone's settings to never share location information. That only naively implies they are not storing this info or using it for Instagram's own ad-driven raison d'être. Or, since I do not use Facebook, they are using other means to gather my location from other inferred means (a.k.a those data analytics so many worship). I've noted how the sponsored ads (that I scroll over quickly so hope I do not mistakenly click) in the last 2 weeks have been serving up ads for Australian stuff. [caption id="attachment_65386" align="aligncenter" width="750"] If Instagram really knew me, they would know I've already been to Wilson's Prom[/caption] They admit this point blank, under the guise of "staying true to the spirit of the Instagram community" (WTF does that mean? What does it mean when the owner, manager, and sole proprietor of a community defines its spirit? ): I am not making any huge revelation. If I wanted to avoid having Instagram show me "ads of interest" to me (if they really knew me they would show no ads) I should just not use it. I am guilty of laziness. It's not about in or out of a social media garden being a more moral stand, it's more wondering at what many of us have settled into as a norm. And there it is staring me point blank in my face. I did not tell Instagram explicitly that I am in Australia, but it knows I am here from tracking me. The "spirit of the Instagram" community must also be "do not tell use how you they get and use information from "web sites and apps I visit". The creepy factor has been totally normalized. And any boasts of transparency are a shimmering pile of fraud poop. Featured Image: Conversation flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I can hear a dated 1960s beat from the back of my brain... something to rev up the blog again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkYYE6hmjg Yet different lyrics? The SPLOT goes on, the SPLOT goes on I keep pushing updates to the repos. La de da de de, la de da de da MOOCs was once the rage, uh huh History has turned the page, uh huh The pandemic, the current thing, uh huh Zoom classes are our newborn king, uh huh The SPLOT goes on, the SPLOT goes on I keep pushing updates to the repos. La de da de de, la de da de da Yes, as if there's anything else to blog about, but here, some 5+ years after they emerged, I'm still dabbling, poking in the SPLOT zone (the site needs some updates, and I'm thinking of tossing in there my WordPress calling card themes, as they get lots of use as other things). More often than not, the ideas for new, changed, features in SPLOTs come from people using the themes. That happened in several of the examples listed below. I put out an offer for requests during #pressedconf20... but got no calls. Even with a new SPLOT that is not even based in WordPress. Tweets have been deleted, still in the Internet Archive In the last few weeks, SPLOTs have gotten some good use, especially how TRU-Collector was used during, the OER20 conference (for which the theme got some new features rolled in), I've found a few folks pickup and run with the SPLOTbox, and a few new instances of folks (including) me, putting SPLOTs to use for assembling collections of COVID-19 stories. From time to time my internal beat suggests the SPLOT time is done, c'mon Levine move on to something new, just shelve 'em, but then the rhythm section kicks in a crashing NO. The SPLOT goes on. La de da de de, la de da de da.. Who's Who at OER20? https://oer20.socialbingo.oerconf.org/ People's images and names intentionally blurred When one of the organizers of the OER20 conference (which turned the corner from in person to online event in snap of time) asked about new SPLOT features, I could not refuse, especially as it was Daniel Villar-Onrubia, who as put many a SPLOT to creative use. He sought to make the TRU Collector theme into a place where conference participants could introduce themselves, and by the end, 168 had done so (a good percentage as over 1000 had registered). The idea Daniel had was play on that subdomain of "socialbingo" where participants could add comments on posted introductions. That called for rolling in a feature I had just baked into the TRU Writer SPLOT, an option so people submitting an introduction could opt in to include their email address (not publicly displayed) and indicate if they wanted email notice of comments. Of course this is built into "regular" WordPress but takes some under the hood machinations as no one logs in or gets associated with an entry. Another part was adding a theme option so the editing field in the form could provide starter content, in this case to structure the information sought for in an introduction. The response was quite fast (especially with a small bug that we found and fixed on first day). In watching the site, I was bothered by something I've seen before- that it can take sometimes a long bit of time before a page load of images to appear- it sits grey and blank a while. I did some digging into the parent Fukasawa theme and found it was done deliberately in some theme javascript. Note: 2 days after publishing this I noticed that my own collector sites were not loading any images! I found out an update to the parent Fukasawa theme changed much of the javascript, was loading faster, and this approach described below of overriding the parent theme script was not worth the rish of future site breakage, so the code stuff below is now removed. C'est la code! There's a combination in js/global.js of the theme's setup of it's masonry layout, plus a delay to set off a fade in opacity. There is a place to put some extra code when the setup of the masonry is done: $grid.on( 'layoutComplete', function() { $( '.posts' ).css( 'opacity', 1 ); } ); I did some jigging to have a TRU Collector site display a "loading" animation until it's ready to show, providing some better visual feedback (it even uses the Customer set "name" for the type of things show, for this site, it's 'intros'). on the site, this is animated! To do this, I had to have the main template for the home page and archives index.php start with showing the animated GIF. <pre> <?php // get from customizer the name of the plural version of items $nav_label = get_trucollector_collection_plural_item(); ?> <div id="loading"> <div id="spinner"> <img src="<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri(); ?>/images/loading.gif" alt="Loading..."><br /> Loading <?php echo $nav_label;?> </div> </div> </pre> The trickier part is having the child theme override the parent theme javascript, for one that had an extra line for where the setup is complete. I made a copy of global.js from the parent theme into the child theme, and changed the bit of code above to have an extra line to hide the div that contains the animation: $grid.on( 'layoutComplete', function() { $( '.posts' ).css( 'opacity', 1 ); $("#loading").hide(); } ); Then in the part of the child theme that enqueues it's scripts and styles, we do this dance to de-activate global.js in the parent theme and use the one instead that's in the child. // we override the parent theme global.js so we can use one that hides loading animation wp_dequeue_script( 'fukasawa_global' ); wp_deregister_script( 'fukasawa_global' ); wp_enqueue_script('trucollector_global', get_stylesheet_directory_uri().'/js/global.js', array( 'jquery', 'masonry', 'imagesloaded', 'fukasawa_flexslider' ), '', true ); That's probably way more detail than you might want to know for just having an animation appear, and disappear. The SPLOT goes on. La de da de de, la de da de da... It's also worth mentioning one of the sites I am most proud of for putting SPLOTs in play is the main #femedtech web site (running TRU Writer) http://femedtech.net/ and the quilt project that was so wonderfully made for and storied (TRU Collector) led so caringly by Frances Bell. You can see there how Anne-Marie Scott changed up things with an alternate front page and even more clever, putting H5P into good use too. The SPLOT goes on. La de da de de, la de da de da.. SPLOTs for COVID-19 Stories Again a nod here goes to Daniel Villar Onrubia, he told me of a TRU Collector themed site created for the UNIMED project's idea to collect stories "to bridge the gap between education as usual and our new goal of flattening the curve": https://onlineresilience.uni-med.net/ I found this idea a refreshing option in the flood of so many lists and lists of lists of "pivot" guides. Plus it features approaches from institutions in parts of the world other than North America and Europe. This webspace aims at collecting experiences, stories, ideas, emerging needs, quick fixes, or long term plans put in place by the UNIMED members and the larger community in response to the change brought by the COVID-19 emergency, in terms of online teaching and virtual approaches to international mobility and cooperation. https://onlineresilience.uni-med.net/about/ I was looking for something similar in new work I have just started with Open Education Global aiming to better connect members. And why not start with something that is on everybody's minds? I have a thing for collecting stories and decided to launch a small trial site of "Extraordinary Stories of Educator Responses" testing it from the splot site http://splot.ca/extraordinary I came up the idea of having one site to collect all kinds of stories, but building landing pages and categories for specific subcollections, the first for the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER) as an activity for an early April online meeting. After learning of the related activity for OER4covid: the OER support group for educators during covid19, I thought a collection for them appropriate, so see this entry point https://splot.ca/extraordinary/oer4covid-stories/ and have a general stories entry for any others. Each landing or collection page has a custom greeting and call for contributions, plus using the Display Posts plugin, a list of five random shared stores, and a button link to see the category view for that collection. https://splot.ca/extraordinary/cccoer-stories/ None of this is SPLOT specific, just using built in WordPress capabilities for alternative front pages, and ties to the categories set up for the site. It's easy to add more, if anyone wants a set in the mix. I am also working with the part of OE Global focused on open education in Latin America parts of the world (OE LATAM), to add a new section for their stories. This got me thinking of the language issues of a global focused site, and how I loathe making it an english language focus. As a short term approach, I am using a Google Translate plugin to at least provide a user selected option in the sidebar for languages and have it set to default to use the language set as a user preference in the browser. This means, if your prefered language is Spanish, the site should automatically do a translation to Spanish. And yes, I admit there are large problems counting on Google's translations, but maybe it gets us a bit more down the line? I don't know, I am just trying here. If there are more languages I should enable, please tell me! As an aside, I am hard at working looking to make the SPLOT themes work with the internationalization features of WordPress; this will ultimately require some help in doing the English to ______ translation files. It's insanely complex to encode all output the theme does with the proper functions to manage internalization. But it's happening. One thing I am finding worth having for any SPLOT (or for that matter any WordPress site) is something that adds the OpenGraph tags needed to generate better entries when link to your site are shared in twitter and that BookFace site. While you get some of that in the JetPack plugin, I am liking the advanced features in the Open Graph and Twitter Cards Tags plugin (like a default image if a post lacks a featured image). The SPLOT goes on. La de da de de, la de da de da... And I'm excited to see a few others putting SPLOTs to use for the same idea. Check out: Grinnellians in the Time of Coronavirus (Grinnell College) using TRU Writer Live Together Learn Together Stories from the LCC Community in the COVID19 Pandemic (Lansing Community College) using both TRU Writer for written stories and SPLOTbox for voices, sounds, and movement stories. Morris Pelzel is behind the Grinnell site, and he had a question filed as an issue (the best way to go) about TRU Writer and how [at the time] it required a featured image. This had come up before when someone questioned some place I had claimed TRU Writer favored the written form. So a new feature is in place, thanks to Mo's question, so a site owner can make the images (and/or the attribution) fields not used at all, optional, or required: This is in play now here https://splot.ca/writer/2020/771 And just in the semi-regular rounds of searching for the phrases I use in the SPLOT footers, I located the Quarantine Library using the SPLOTbox theme asking for recordings of " yourself reading something — your own original work or that of another writer—from any genre and any time period that relates to the theme of quarantine. Original musical compositions are also welcome!" http://electrolibrary.org/quarantine/ This is pretty fantastic, and it pretty much convinces me that... The SPLOT goes on. La de da de de, la de da de da... Featured Image: A heavily re-edited parody of an ATCO 45rpm record , the featured image on a YouTube video of Sonny and Cher's "And The Beat Goes On." Likely not fully legal, oh well, it's pandemic times. And I bet as a kid I bought this 45. Maybe. That first heady phase of the first round of DS106, back to December 2010, before Jim Groom's first class very started, set the stage for the creative riffing ethos that is part of this crazy space. Like free form music jamming, it is taking something someone else has played, not as a theft labeled copyright act of stealing, but using as a base to do something slightly different and new. Novel? It's sort of how species like us evolved from proto mollusks in the mud. Follow this chain. Earlier this week, DS106 student at UMW @Gorgon_Chest (that's what I know of him as an ID, cool) did a response to the daily create about "Make a Loesje poster (extra points for a western theme or message)" https://twitter.com/Gorgon_Chest/status/701423305836761088 The funny thing is what he did is probably not quite the style as shown in the examples, but that's the point of ds106, you, as creator, have the right to do something completely different from the assignment if (a) it's interesting; and (b) it's justified somewhere (hopefully in his/her blog). How many other classes are you given liberty to not follow the letter of the assignment? Anyway, the placing of a Martin Luther King quote atop a photo of Sam Elliot's "The Stranger" cowboy character from The Big Lebowski reminded me totally of the classic DS106 Triple Troll Quote assignment (and itself riffed/lifted from Know Your Meme): Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure... This way, nothing about your image is correct, and you’re trolling fans of all three characters at once. Classic DS106 indeed. It gives you room to riff on popular culture, and play on truth and perception, by putting together more or less information incorrectly (in an assignment-y construct) in a way that at first glance might be legit, but with just a little bit of critical analysis, should be seen as a false one. And the real beauty is not just putting together three random bits, but in a way so there is a theme to it all. My first riff was to turn this into a new Daily Create that will go live Thursday (this link will work after it goes live at 5:00am EST http://daily.ds106.us/tdc1509/) (Wordpress Scheduled Posts FTW). But then I saw when open DS106 participant Terry Greene posted today: https://twitter.com/greeneterry/status/702125769380724737 He was doing this for the Triple Troll Quotes assignment, but I really thought it would be fun to re-do the assignment as he did, with rock stars. Take a photo of one rock star/band, overlay the lyrics of another star/band's music, and attribute it to a third. I gave myself 20 minutes to do mine: Got the connection? The lyric is from the closing stanza of one of the most popular rock songs ever (and one I loathe for its bloatiness). The photo is the band Spirit, who had a burst of popularity in the late 1960s (supposedly Jimi Hendrix opened for them at Woodstock). Yet the opening of Led Zeppelin's cash crop song (hundreds of millions made off of it) is rather similar to a much less popular song by Spirit called "Taurus", and it's still being sorted out. Heck, it's even a game: So that's my two elements- I attributed the lyric to bluesman and songwriter virtuoso Willie Dixon-- because quite a few of Led Zeppelin's other songs have a lot of resemblance to ones by Dixon and others. (who never shared the royalties). Side note, because of the magical way DS106 Assignment Bank works, I csan associate my response here with both assignments! And so, the riff on the Daily Create by @Gorgon_Chest crossed with the assignment response by Terry Greene, now morphs into a new DS106 Assignment: This does not happen in any tightly instructional designed LMS hosted assignment graded by robots. This happens on the open web in DS106. What are you waiting for? Make some triple quote art, damnit. Top / Featured Image: For the idea on riffing, I started with Google Image Search (licensed for reuse filter, the one buried 2 clicks away from the public interface, sigh) on "guitar riff". The vast majority are the typical screen shot from a youtube video of "some bearded kid in his bedroom teaching you a rock song" But just below the fold was this awesome photo of a yellow suited Elvis with a dog's head, "elvis presley guitar mutt" a public domain image from pixabay. Winning riff. Yesterday, my cousin and I were watching a bit of early silent films on TV, and I mentioned something about it being a very different form of film than modern. David went on to highlight the use of a single camera, not moving. He then mentioned that when he was working on his PhD in Education (1970 from Arizona State University, and yes, he remains a die hard Sun Devils fan) -- that he did some work in educational technology, I think he even said he worked on a "minor". That made me curious about what was "cutting edge" back then. He talked about video, and how he did some early stop motion video with humongous cameras. David also described things people were doing with printed text in making texts or activities that had a non-linear design (if you answer this, go to page X). Yeah, print. And this was the time when the cutting edge of technology, right out of the bowling alley, came on the scene-- overhead projectors! I was compelled to tweet this, along with what David described as "same as it ever was" that researchers were very concerned about the fear teachers had of using something like a 16mm projector: A reply came in from Kim, citing that 16mm projectors were scary! And I had a brain synapse spark or something, because I had the memory surge from back in fifth grade- when the scrawny kid version of Alan did exactly that, operated the 16mm projector. My school did something now that I never would have cited then as being innovative, but thinking about it, the folks at Bedford Elementary were just that. This is maybe 1973, and a few kids, including me, got to me on "A/V" crew. There was a small closet with carts that held things like opaque projectors, film strips, super 8 loops, and the two big guns, 16mm projectors. The A/V crew were charged with knowing how to use the equipment, and bringing it to teachers who requested use of them, as well as operating them for teachers. When I got to 5th grade, I was the lead person for this team, which also meant that it was me who had to set up the projectors when we had a school assembly. It was definitely this machine, a Graflax (though ours did not have the Dharma Initiative logo) The task was threading the film from the front reel through the machine, and onto the take up reel in back, and the key was making sure you got the right sized "loop" right above where it went down in front of the lamp. Doing this for a class was pressure enough, but getting ti right for an assembly when everyone was watching? Well you did not want to screw up. There was time when that know it all math teacher, Mr Fike, tried to adjust something in the middle of a showing, and kept screwing up... he finally let me step in and fix it. When I think about it, maybe it was not huge, but my school, teachers, principals, gave an appropriate amount of responsibility to us kids. When we went into the classroom with a machine, the teachers were looking to us to be the ones who knew what to do with them. This was some profound start on my tech career, and I had completely forgotten about it until now. Also forgotten was in middle school, where I joined Stage Crew, and became the kid who operated the lights for the plays we did, yanking down those big switches, and throwing the spots on. Again, giving kids responsibility is a huge learning boost as well as confidence. I wish I could thank my elementary school! Go Bedford Bees! 4:00 PM by cogdogblog posted 27 Nov '08, 9.08am MST PST on flickr That means another glorious aristict sunset in Iceland. On this day of giving thanks, I give mine for this world, and all that it unveils, from a simple un-assuming sky, to unexpected treasures you were not asking for, to perhaps a place where people do not exert violence on each other. Maybe its only a theory. I aim for optimism.