Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
It's felt like maybe as long as a week since I blogged something about SPLOTs... that's a long span ;-) But in that time I have been doing some major banging on the tubes and pedals to add big new features to the SPLOTbox theme. This theme was one of the later ones done, and maybe has not had as many uptakes as others. It allows people who visit your own box site to add, without need of any accounts or personal information disclosed, media in a number of formats: YouTube video (via url)Vimeo video (via url)Internet Archive audio or video (via url) feature requested by Daniel VillarAdobe Spark video (via url) feature requested by Dave QuinnAdobe Spark Page (via url) feature requested by Dave Quinn.mp3, .m4a, .ogg audio via url or upload What people have done includes the open web video interviews on the OWLTEH project site, and the MURSLeads Author Interview Series. Maybe my favorite example, led by JR Dingwell at University of Saskatoon, was a project for a Geology class where students curated and added context to earth science videos (this is spawning an idea for me in the upcoming 2019 version of Networked Narratives). Since there is quite a bit of info on the form where media is shared, including an site owner option to enable the rich text editor, a feature I have wanting to add is for people to generate previews of their items before they submit it. I had recently added this to the TRU Collector SPLOT for images (see the long bloggy notes). This is done by having a button on the form that generates a preview version of the web content using a lightbox overlay (so we stay on the same page). This is achieved using the last free version of fancybox which seems to work fine. It called for adding a few more hidden form field elements added, because it all has to be accessed in page via jQuery. The SPOTbox presented a complication, since there are media embeds done via native WordPress automatic embeds, and a pile of custom code I wrote to embed Internet Archive and Adobe Spark content. There is no way I could find in JavaScript to access the wordpress functions needed to make it work. So I had to resort to a multiple form submission process. Visitor enters form data, and clicks a "Check Info" button.This takes care of the form validation (checks for missing required items) but it also store as hidden form field elements the embed code.Once it passes verification, a new Preview button and the final Submit button are now activated. It means on the first load of the form, only the Check Info button will work. On first pass through, the Preview and Submit Item buttons are greyed out and their click function disabled. After passing the error checking, the buttons are enabled (but since they are way at the bottom, I was able to add a "preview" hyperlink in the message box. Feedback after the form processes the info; the preview link works from here too. Wow it was several days, one of them with some cussing, to get all the preview parts working (one major hangup was my own typo). But what you get is this overlay, which is formatted like the actual theme, and has embedded media: The preview of a SPLOTbox submission form in an overlay of the form page. There are some tricks to doing this- using moment.js to get the current date. I went rather far down a whole because it even has what looks like the Previous item / Next Item links with real titles (it looked out of balance with these as blanks). Just for an idea what it took... I wrote a new function that return an array of the titles of two random posts: function splotbox_get_two_items() { // set arguments for WP_Query on published posts to get 2 at random $args = array( 'post_type' => 'post', 'post_status' => 'publish', 'posts_per_page' => 2, 'orderby' => 'rand' ); // It's time! get some posts $rand_posts = get_posts( $args ); // see if we got anything and if so, that we got 2 items if ($rand_posts and count($rand_posts) == 2) { foreach ( $rand_posts as $apost ) { $rand_titles[] = $apost->post_title; } return ($rand_titles); } else { // just in case we did not get enough return (array('It came from Canada!', 'SPLOT is your Best Friend') ); } } In the web form, I then need to pass these as a hidden field item, so I need to turn the array into a string. I am using "|" as an array delimiter, just in case a title has a comma in it. <input type="hidden" id="wRandTitles" value="<?php echo implode( '|', $wRandTitles)?>" /> There are a lot of hijinks in the lightbox_preview.js file that generates the overlay content. Just to generate this part we need to parse this string back into an array: // make array from the two random titles var wrand_titles = $('#wRandTitles').val().split("|"); And to put content on the preview that looks like the actual display (note te onClick bits to disable the hyperlink: wOutput += '</ul><div class="post-nav fleft"><a class="post-nav-prev" href="#" onClick="return false;"><p>Previous Item</p><h4>' + wrand_titles[0] + '</h4></a><a class="post-nav-next" href="#" onClick="return false;"><p>Next Item</p><h4>' + wrand_titles[1] + '</h4></a></div> And if that seems like a lot, you should see what it takes to get the categories from the form checkboxes. I'll spare the code gore. What about giving it a try? I have the new version of the theme humming along on SPLOT central - the new form features are there on the Share Media form. One of the features that started here and went out to other SPLOTs was the template and code to display a linked list of items by the type of open license indicated when people add content (if this featured is not used, then this page is much briefer!) A listing of the licenses used by media on site, each linked to an archive view, and includes in the list the number of items that have that license -- see http://splot.ca/box/licensed/ Relatively new is that it only lists the licenses that have been used so far (and note that because of the content here, we include the YouTube Standard license). What I found out not too long ago, was because of the intricacies of WordPress pagination from a Page template, well, the archives were not working if you had more than 10. That is now fixed. I also added a new [licensed] shortcode, that can generate the same kind of index, but in a widget (or anywhere else you want it). It's down there in the footer of the demo site. The same index of licenses generated in a footer widget using [licensed] The last change is a bit of a Gutenberg influenced issue- the new editor has no effect on the front end rich text editor (because it's still Classic!). But a few years back, the theme author changed the way different post format types are composes, mainly by a certain format of URL above the more tag. I think a reason is because before he used metaboxes which are now kind of killed by Gutenberg. But I saw in a tweet where Dave Quinn lost an embedded media, because I think of the extra comment tags Gutenberg adds. I decided to change out the way my theme finds the media URL (it is stored as custom post data), so it's not dependent on the post format (the old formats should still work). This is a minor detail I sweated a bit through that 99.99999999% of the world will never notice. One more unseen thing I started doing in this SPLOT and will extend to others- I have a ton of custom code sitting in my functions.php file of the theme, several hundred lines. Although I read that there's no performance gain, breaking it up into smaller include files might make it less unwieldy to edit. So the SPLOTbox functions.php file is quite simple now: // Growing up to segmenting a long functions.php into more bite sized bits! require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/setup.php'); require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/admin-options.php'); require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/autologin.php'); require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/customizer.php'); require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/license.php'); require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/media.php'); require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/splot-plugins.php'); require_once( __DIR__ . '/includes/tools.php'); I have to say that SPLOTbox is a pretty damn fined SPLOT, even if only a handful of people use it. I am hoping in NetNarr to have students contribute their own produced audio content, or perhaps I might have them do a curation of video assignment like the Geology example above. Got an itch for a new SPLOT? Give the Box a try! Oh, the 11.5 setting is because this is version 1.5- get it? Featured Image: I overlaid some screenshots of the SPLOTbox demo site atop a pixabay image by Free-Photos shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. One of the best aspects about my current project working on a Creative Commons Certification is that the timeline for the project extends to September 2017... in other places, I'd be in some fats track to build something or pick a technology, and I'd be in some frantic grasping at PersonalizedAPIBlockchainBedgeBots. Soon, very soon, I hope to have the platform to begin the open sharing of the project's development; we have a commitment to do this in a Crazy open method, so much that it inspired a deliberately ironic 4 letter acronym for the Open Education 2016 Conference in November. Meanwhile, by blog will, and always will, be the fertilized garden raw open sewage of ideas. A certification carries some (or ought to) weight of assuredness, validity. A lot of the technical infrastructures in play seem to focus on the validity of the thing being issued, that one can count on that badge/thing being definitely issued by an authority and not just ad hominenly chained together. But that is verifying a transaction. I am more interested in the thing having some value. Why would something from Creative Commons have a value? Is it because of some cryptic encoded 9000 bit hash string that cannot be cracked? No, it's because we have trust in Creative Commons as an organization, one built layer by layer over time by experiences. That there are people we trust that trust them. That they, as an organization, have a long and visible track record of doing good work in the world. Saying it is "just reputation" is true, but it is also looking at a beautiful stone monolith in the Canyonlands country, and saying "it is just a bunch of sand grains". So if Creative Commons (the organization) (as if I can really speak for them) is going to put their name on certifying people have a reasonable knowledge/application understanding/practice of Creative Commons, then they want to be just as sure that a system granting these is not to cranking out certificates willy nilly. At the same time, doing something that that has this kind of validation, in the certification processes we have been looking at, can be labor intense, that there is a review layer that is hard to automate. And people would like (I think) to go through some kind of process that is perhaps part or all online, that can be done relatively quickly, AND has meaning. That's a lot. A lot of certification is done by examination. A lot. Let's take a diversion. This morning I am reading some web sites about dog training, and one of them, at the end of the "content" offered a link to "take a quiz and earn a Certification of Attendance!" (the exclamation mark is critical). I land on this site ProProfs that offers quiz/training tools-- "1,214,000+ businesses, educators and students trust our tools for building & testing knowledge!". There are smiling, happy clip art perfect people taking quizzes! [caption id="attachment_57735" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Getting quizzed and tested could not look more fun![/caption] One of their types of "solutions" was labeled "Certifications" and there is even a bit of a sampler you can take (I give them credit for the demos). I took a Horticulture Certification Quiz, and no surprise, having missed all the classes, that in my 5 item quiz, I got only 20% correct. But there is a certificate: Would this certification mean a whole lot more if the number was 100%? Would it mean a whole lot more if it had the name and seal of Creative Commons on it? (that's rhetorical). But let's say it does mean something- what is this approach showing I can do? Here are my results: [caption id="attachment_57737" align="aligncenter" width="238"] Details of my IHA certification quiz (click to see the challenges I faced)[/caption] Okay, this is just a demo. But I have waded through some online certifications that have quizzes at this level. Asking some recall type questions might be able to show that I have waded through some body of content, but what we truly are certifying here is my ability to recall information on a quiz. Yet. There is a body of work (out there somewhere, I am not going looking for it) on how to design multiple choice exams that are above the level if fact recall, that do demonstrate some reasoning skills. Why are so few quizzes done this way? (that is rhetorical too). But... This is not going where you think it is. I can see a certain bit of foundational knowledge of Creative Commons- the history, the rationale, the variety of licenses, that might be provided by some series of readings, videos, small activities, and yes, tested somehow with a multiple choice type exam. Maybe it it augmented by some individual provided links to demonstrations of their work in the world, showing their application of Creative Commons ethos and practice. What if rather than saying Creative Commons is certifying me in these areas, what if the system allowed me some ways to assert it myself, to say, "I understand and apply Creative Commons"? This is something that could be done in a self-paced mode, that people could earn some kind of validation of their assertion. A-Cert oneself? For many people this would serve their purpose to have some kind of credit thing earned. It does not guarantee any review from Creative Commons, except sanctioning the process. They are not assuring the world that everyone who passes is some kind of expert, but that if they did all the stuff that are in its requirements, then the person out to be proficient. Then what would be a Creative Commons certification would build on this, a series of perhaps face to face, or hybrid, or facilitated online sessions of higher level practice, that would have a layer of review (and/or peer review). This might be something that carries a small fee for review, or some pay as you see fit model, because the review part takes time of people. Or there is another level of certification for trainers, that requires a performance review. I see a multi-tiered approach to this certification-- but to have value, real value, it has to be done on something that is a meaningful and performance-based activities. That is worth certifying. Top / Featured Image: I began by searching Google Images (with the settings for licensed for re-use, of course, of course) on the word "assert" just curious to see what showed up. It was one of the more inexplicable collections I have seen, and for some reason, a lot of photos of what looks like castle turrets. I clicked on the page option for this image I used, and landed on the Wikpedia page for San Andrés, an Olmec archaeological site on the Mexican gulf coast, right in the "crook" of the arm. This image is a drawing made by user "Madman2001" of a print on a cylinder seal, and the bird figure is "speaking" something that includes the glyph of "3 Ajaw" (this is the thing with 3 beaks, rings, above what looks like the letter C and a backwards E). I don;t know why i am digging this deep into the background of an image, but that's happens when you have curiosity. The entire image source is a Creative Commons licensed Wikimedia Commons image Finally, we are starting to see some signs of activity on our Maricopa ePortfolio site. Originally developed at and for faculty and students at one our colleges, Chandler-Gilbert Community College, the developer has graciously shared it on a server in our office that is open to everyone at our 9 other colleges. It has been sitting there, ready to serve since last Spring. Few takers. But now things are picking up. Some Computer Graphic Art Students at Phoenix College are just getting started setting up a first batch of student ePs. Another one of our colleges is holding a faculty demo alter this month. And our Ocotillo ePortfolios Action Group will be sharing this widely in their upcoming activities. And Helen Barrett, the "grandmother" of electronic portfolios (her words) has been one of our most active guest users in creating a comprehensive eP in a short period of time-- this is great as Helen will be visiting Maricopa in February 2005 for an ePortfolio Dialogue Day. And I decided to get off my lazy behind and put some new content in my own eP, building a new collection in about 25 minutes with articles I have written the last few years for our internal publication. Someone e-mail Biff Cantrell, as his eP is pretty dusty. Good action is brewing. Just posted the web version of our once per semester publication, the mcli Forum which our office has been publishing in print and paper since 1993 (before 2000 it was the Labyrinth-Forum). We have a mixture of faculty, guest, and our own staff authored articles that highlight teaching, learning, assessment, and technology efforts at Maricopa. The Spring 2004 mcli Forum features articles on Building a Community for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The MIL Model A Story About Teaching Digital Storytelling at Scottsdale Community College Applying Early Brain Research Drinking Tea Down Under: A Summer Cultural Experience A Psychology Delegation in South Africa and updates on mcli programs: Adjunct Faculty Professional Growth The Arts Faculty Development Faculty In Progress Program Faculty Professional Growth Honors Learning Grants Maricopa CARES Ocotillo This publication was one of my first and favorite forays into web design by CSS-- though it is still a clunk of HTML tables and CSS formatting--, and finely matches the print version (in addition to hypertext, and sometimes including more content than can fit in the paper version). From the exported version (Word format), re-processing the images, and marking up as HTML, it is about a 5-7 hour process, which would be even longer without some templates and easy search and replace features of BBEdit (I will never stop singing the praise of BBEdit's grep across multiple files). The highly touted (well maybe in my mind) right side feature of the CDB site, Google of the Week is actually a poor person's RSS feed, probably one of the easiest ways to syndicate content is to link to a search that produces a customized query result. This week, just to highlight the silliness of definitions, we feature a google on learning object definition. What do 4700+ results tell us? Not much. Or too much? (more…) Somewhere out there a man in Iceland will smile. I’ve never met, known, or contacted him, but from a Mastodon repost by Joe Murphy, Baldour wrote delightfully about a precious (in terms of value) habit that made me smile: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/112127447270321395 Somewhere this blog may light up an RSS reader in Iceland or maybe Poland or St Louis. I will never know. And that is the right write space, to be writing here, not for comments (but hallo Tom) or reposts or anything but just for my own self fulfillment. Welcome to the blog navel gazing, the blog’s oldest topic profession, blogging about blogging or blogging about non blogging. If you just write on LinkedIn, shrug, I guess it can work as much as if it was scribbling in a paper journal. The unfamiliar is where I sit now, a seat that I used to seek, maybe crave, wedged into the vinyl cushion of 14F right shoulder pressed to a plastic wall, a portal view to cloud tops under a single hued sky. Yep, on a plane. Writing offline in a Google doc. This was 6, 8, 10 years ago the familiar. I got caught up in the thrill of travel, the airport takes, that I was off doing this as my work. Whether its pandemic echoes or just the extra tree rings in my trunk, it’s now, thankfully unfamiliar. Somewhat unsettling. I will just say it and leave a guessed explanation to simmer up. I am overly fortunate to be up in these clouds, and there will be fortuitous things that come from this, but it just does not feel like it did once. I see colleagues who still revel in it, the running through airports and selfies in the cabin; I don’t fault them at all, but I can’t really tap into that. It’s unfamiliar. Not that any kind of *phobia has crept in, I just feel more centered at home where it used to be the opposite. I crave my Ursa time with Cori, our walks to see the minute changes in our property as a result of our efforts to turn our acreage into a more natural habitat. Just one of many new trees Cori and I have added to our property. We have forest plans! This pic will be shared under CC0 when I get around to uploading to flickr. Into the time / space distortion machine I go. With camera, with blog, with mind. I’ve blathered on far too long, without marqueeing my destination. Maybe I will spare you, if there is a you, it’s just me here now at the keyboard. There might be a parallel here to that disembodied sensation of presenting in an online video session. You can only imagine an audience, a reader, but you get no or only trace sense back that anyone is there. Or if they are there, they are not far away in a different window. Did you see how I went off track? That’s my style no AI generator can generate. Yet. Thar be mountain peaks poking through the clouds, a metaphor lurking, photo by me looking out the window, once added to Flickr will be shared into the public domain using CC0 So… right now I am headed from home pin in Saskatchewan to Vancouver but that’s not the destination. I then reverse in a long jump to London and then… to Cork, Ireland!!! WTF is with me? I should relish this trip! Or mustard it, I actually do not relish relish. I missed getting to see Ireland in 2018 after OER18 because of a problem that came up with my vision after the conference in Bristol. Yes I will be at OER24 next week, the first in person one I have been at since 2018 (Bristol) and 2014 before that (Newcastle). I remember the locations well. I would not typically travel just for a conference (nothing against OERXX they are amongst my better experiences). No, my OEGlobal colleagues decided our globally distributed team could use a few days of in person meetings to get more focused planning and ideating than our online meetings. There is also a gathering of our Board members too. So it’s all strategic. It will be of course most fulfilling to reconnect with the UK+ community and colleagues here; I do have to remember from my October trip to Edmonton for our conference, that for all my belief that we can and do have meaningful experiences online, there is a warmer sense being in a real room. I’ve not felt much that I have to present say to a conference audience, I am craving more being in the audience. But note I am doing something unusual in a 5 minute slot, that I am sure will leave my work colleagues perplexed. Some of the lethargy too is knowing my brain that plans and criticizes said plans may very well likely over estimate what the body that carried it around can still withstand. The physical energy lately has waned some and there have been a few unblogged health “things” — not wanting to label issues. But seeing the changes and loss too in my peer circle, that constant undertone of feeling my finiteness, even though not anywhere near it, is imaginable. Oh what an uplifting post! I need to insert a cute animal picture or a happy cup of coffee one. Felix sez you are going where? This too will end up as CC0 in Flickr And then I can maybe just leave this nattering out of the blog publish screen, but— I’ve gone this far, I believe more in just sending it out to the echo less space, maybe the ripples can reach a guy in Iceland. And if not, no matter. The ripples go out and sometimes if you are lucky they come back, but that’s not the reason for generating them. Hey Baldour! I've been thinking of starting a blog, but have hesitated because who really wants to read what goes on in my head and in my classroom? Or maybe not just schools, maybe its society. When teachers pop out of university system, sent on a mission to shape young minds, the factory products have been stamped with an internal message that what's in their own mind is not of interest. Kevin Honeycut retweeted a message from a teacher I guess was in one of his recent sessions: https://twitter.com/MissKeffer/status/572127053765586945 Emeri was listening, so in her first post There's a Place For Us, she writes I attended a mind blowing talk with Kevin Honeycutt last week and he made a very convincing point about teachers telling our stories. I've been thinking of starting a blog, but have hesitated because who really wants to read what goes on in my head and in my classroom? Kevin really made me think: if I don't put it out there, no one can read it. And if I do just go for it and start posting, maybe, just maybe, someone will come across it and find something of use or some inspiration on a tough day. I peeked at the post. That sentence really stuck out to me- how does our educational system complete its task with someone coming out thinking their ideas are not worth reading about? I looked at that post. It had 3 recommends on Google+ and zero comments. Someone had to change that. So try this. Let Miss Keffer know that her ideas are worth reading. Turn this thing around. Heck, maybe you have something to write in your own blog today. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As usual, stats through last Thursday posted a tad late! These week includes the gap of time during my falling into a rabbit hole of internet fiction Number of days on the road: 119 Miles Driven: 11,035 Most Recent 1000 mile marker: 11,000 miles, east of Nashville, TN on October 21 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 21 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 4 Money spent on gas: $2934 Cheapest gas price: $3.08/gallon (FOuntain Inn, SC). Highest gas price: $5.64/gallon (1.39/liter) (Wawa, ON). Photos posted: 2360 (that is an average of 19.8 per day) Most scenic foliage drive: Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. Number of books read: 12 (Most recent: Things the Grandchildren Should Know) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 12 Number of nights camping: 18 Number of un,non,anti conference family reunions attended: 1 Bavastock! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Most unexpected activities: Riding a tractor on the Durnin Farm, Helping a friend of a friend move in Nashville, and one other I have to keep private. Most depressing shell of a city: Danville VA Number of times spent helping a friend of a friend move: 1 (thats what happens when you drive a truck) Number of new forms of transportation: 4 (paddleboard, Jet Ski, 4 wheel Quad, tractor) Best Beach Walk: Batchawana Bay Provincial Park Number of times I was really kidnapped : 0 Number of places I faked being at during the search for Center of the Internet: 3 Number of blog posts written during search for Center of the Internet: 8 Number of videos created for search for Center of the Internet: 7 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlplXh8pTxc Closest I got to finding the Center of the Internet: who knows? Amount of fun I had trying to find the Center of the Internet: infinite Friend/Relatives Homes Visited/Mooched Upon: 30 Best Bike Ride: Canmore to Banff and back with D'Arcy Norman. Most Recent Bike Ride: Virginia Beach Best Town Name: Fracking, Pennsylvania Number of friends known online met for first time: 21 (most recently added Pat aka @loonyhiker) Laundry Stops: 14 Number of Breweries Visited: 7 (Glenwood Canyon Brewery (CO), Revolution Brewing, Paonia CO; Laughing Dog Brewing, Sandpoint ID; Grizzly Paw, Canmore AB; Steamwhistle, Toronto ON; Ottos, State College PA). Number of ds106 radio broadcasts with new people: 10 (most recent with Tom Woodward in Richmond VA) Number of Super Late Night ds106 Broadcasts That Were Totally Worth It: All of them. Number of things shared in StoryBox: 887 (where are your contributions?) audio recordings: 118 documents: 14 graphics: 19 music: 35 photos: 574 videos: 122 remixes: 3 animated GIFs: 2 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Biggest Dumper of StoryBox content in one dump: Jim Groom Most Consistent Contributor over span of StoryBox: Giulia Forsythe Number of Storybox Public Appearances: 36 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of StoryBox demos: 3 (September 23 at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; September 28 at University of Mary Washington, October 21 at Brock University) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Be happy...! posted 18 May '06, 7.59am MDT PST on flickr ...because life is now! Don't wait for things like this to destroy your happiness. A storytelling moment for the kids at Hummingbird together with kids from our community base, performed by our theatrical director, Valdilene. I would say many of my blog posts are rants and complaints, so its only in the sense of balance to once in a while take the blue pill, and write about something "nice." So I thinking of my trip next week across the border (Canadian, eh) for the Northern Voice conference and other Vancouver destinations. But I remember my mobile phone plan is "national"- it stops at the border. I knew my carrier, Alltel, had a North American plan that did reach Van Rock City, though it was at least another $20 a month. So I just called to find out what was possible, and was blessed to speak with a ray of sunshine named "Sheena". When I explained it, she suggested I can switch to the more expensive plan today, which was great timing as the last day of the cycle, so there would be no pro-rated charges, and then flip the plan back when I got home. That's right, Alltel lets you change plans like you-- change your underwear; well maybe that's not the best metaphor-- but at no cost. I said to Sheena, "You rock!" and she laughed."Most people I deal with on the phone are not happy at all and use rather different language." And she then says when I return and switch my plan, it would be different since my plan is so old. Oh, this sounded like bad news. "No, get this! " says Sheena, "For the same $39 per month, in the newer plan, you get 100 more minutes over month, and unlimited on weekend" And now I told her she was an angel. She then entered my change of address, chit chatted about Arizona versus where she was (somewhere in Florida). It sounds so disgustingly hallmarky pithy, but just a more happy attitude makes all the difference when dealing with people, whether on the phone, on the street, or online. Ain't that nice? It's really not that difficult. If you can rationalize being part of an enterprise that profits from the sale of hate ads... provides a space for external entities to promulgate recruitment programs aimed at undermining our culture... can take millions of dollars aimed at influencing a political election... can compel media producers to create click bait hidden headlines... encourages the petri dish of spreadable hoaxes because it adds to the bottom line of data gorging... has an insanely profitable bottom line as a surveillance business based on what you give it for free... If you can rationalize all of that, and more, and still console yourself that somehow your own actions, data are not part of the above... well insert cliché of availability of cheap Arizona ocean front property. I live in Arizona, and I know where the ocean is. If you rationalize being part of supporting and supplying a surveillance business because "it's the only way to stay in touch with people" and resort to poor grandma or Aunt Bertha who would be cut off, well you are part of tossing their identity and data under the bus as well. You are discounting their intellect to possible communicate any other way and you are slacking off on assisting them. Just because it's "easy". Or "convenient". Humans communicated long before this company existed and they will after it crumbles. The numbers are big, but not immune; from John Lancester's You Are The Product (my emphasis added): Perhaps the biggest potential threat to Facebook is that its users might go off it. Two billion monthly active users is a lot of people, and the ‘network effects’ – the scale of the connectivity – are, obviously, extraordinary. But there are other internet companies which connect people on the same scale – Snapchat has 166 million daily users, Twitter 328 million monthly users – and as we’ve seen in the disappearance of Myspace, the onetime leader in social media, when people change their minds about a service, they can go off it hard and fast. For that reason, were it to be generally understood that Facebook’s business model is based on surveillance, the company would be in danger. How can you ignore the obvious extend of its business model? That there is a space for alternatives? Be part of that threat. Leave. Now. On the back of this card: Download your data. Delete (do not deactivate) permanently Do not wait for some benevolent entity do this for you; make it happen directly https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/908488158215413761 Or just keep believing your rationalizations. Featured Image: Color modified and evil logo superimposed on Wikimedia Commons photo Exit Sign Above Australian Door released into the public domain. JamStudio is a nifty online music mixer where you can compose and publish your own tunes. You put music keys on the score, select instruments, set tempo, etc: You can create multiple "pages" of music; I just played quickly to create two "originals" (hah, just quick futzing around): Cowboy Glitter [448k MP3] Rain on the Road [568l MP3] See this video for how it works: You can play around with it for free, to save as MP3 (which are emailed to you as links), you have to get a $10/month account, but there is a 10 day full feature trial period. However, I did notice at the bottom (which ugh is flash, so you cannot copy text to paste as a description), they offer free accounts for teachers and students, which might be a useful for schools lacking music instruments?? Wanna Jam? You can do it w/o any music knowledge, as I can clearly demonstrate my lack thereof; if you have some, you can do a lot better! For the second audio assignment this week for our UMW students in ds106, they are asked to get their toes wet in some audio editing by the assignment for creating a bumper for ds106 radio. Just in case you do not know, ds106 is the only online course, massive or not, that has its own radio station. Take that ya big money MOOCs! As defined in the 'pedia, a bumper is: a brief announcement, usually two to 15 seconds that can contain a voice over, placed between a pause in the program and its commercial break, and vice versa. The host, the program announcer or a continuity announcer states the title (if any) of the presentation, the name of the program, and the broadcast or cable network, though not necessarily in that order. That gives a lot of room to play with. I played around with a mix of stuff tonight, using bits I already had, adding some voice overs, and some minor Audacity editing. Starting more simpler, a ds106 Mexican Radio bumper is a clip from my own cover version of the Wall of Voodoo song, one I always associate with the word radio. I added a bed layer of the opening riffs. Also pretty much just a cut, while searching my computer for the clip above, I found one I did a year ago, taking a bit of live radio I had recorded when Jim Groom actually did a live broadcast from an airplane- his conversation with the stewardess was priceless (again, I had the music already in from Mexican Radio). Next, I rummaged with a midi version of Beck's song Loser, thinking it would be over the top to call out the losers who do not listen to ds106 radio: The other clip is a segment from Family Guy I found just be searching on the "such a lower" phrase in YouTube. This one only took some trims and fiddling with the envelope tool to adjust levels. I used some effects on my voice, Shift Pitch and one of the audio distortion ones to add some echo. Finally, I thought about the phrase I sometimes use in closing a broadcast, of "I like this place" - it fit well with, for some reason I cannot say why, with a clip of typewriter sounds that was sent to my StoryBox, and the Radiohead song "Everything in its Right Place" There ya go, a four pack of bumpers. They might not be epic, but they were fun to make! I am eager to see the ones our students make and to add them to the radio station. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by epicbeer What is generating the seismic waves? Perhaps it is the thundering of hooves. https://twitter.com/dkernohan/status/255302652299210752 The month has ended...plus c'est la même chose It's too easy to make fun of, way easy. I am looking for a different tack, as much fun as the snark is, it really does not contribute much. Well, it is so damn fun. The new Canvas Network looks fresh. Heck, my friends are teaching there. The Gender in Comics course has one of the best trailers ever. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u--VPKbovjA So among my other wonderings https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/264052417853792257 is again what we mean by open? Yes, the welcome mat is out, the entry way is inviting... cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent) But what is inside the door does not flow out the same door. In Coursera, the honor code means not blogging about your work, somewhat of a seen necessity when you start grading work. Or is it? On a more general front, the MOOC is Vegas, what happens in the MOOC stays in the MOOC. There are no RSS feeds for the class. You cannot lurk without going through the door. When the MOOC ends so does the stuff. You cannot wander in later and marvel at the stuff on the walls. You are tacked to its drum like schedule. And if you step inside the door and go "woah, this place is not for me"- well then you are labeled a "dropout" (a term I continue to assert is meaningless and inappropriate in this space). But maybe these are not really all that bad. The opportunity being given. I must admit in my most recent MISBLAOW (MOOC I Started But Left After One Week), it was impressive at the number and locations around the world where people were tapping into the course. This is a true service and benefit, though I have the question of how video lectures of people reading content is really going to play in parts of the the world where connectivity is not what it is in Palo Alto. And is this really the best learning we can give the world? Lectures, machine grading, and multiple guess? Really? Check the century on your digital watch, Socrates. It more than nothing, yet far short of what is possible. Last I wonder about all this new found focus on the "Course" as the unit of sharing, the mega monolith. wandering farther from "Small Pieces Loosely Joined". You get the course (if you register) (yes it is free) (but you have to register) the whole course and nothing but the course. If Openness was the value, would not all of these resources, perhaps after the graded/certified/badged course has ended, be put out into the wide open? Why is no one talking about OERs from MOOCs? Because it is a commodity, and there is a scramble to make this a business, the stench of investment cash waffles over you like the smell of manure you catch driving through a new suburb carved out of farm land. Anyone up for #moocvember cause I think the pigs will be doing the same run in a month. So run, piggy, run, cause you are going to fall behind. Yet. In someways this is shaking things up. Larger numbers of people are looking seriously at online learning than ever before. The practice ought to change and improve with time. Old approaches may fall behind. There has been a lot of crappy online offerings going on way before MOOC mania. While it is farcical and provocative at the same time, I am happy to be here for all the curses the interestingness brings. But 'scuse me while I focus on the greatest thing going on that is not a MOOC. Howdy May day for all those dancing around the poles. My dance was for getting the last few photos uploaded tonight to for another perfect month of daily photo action seen in the album and blogged like the months south of April-- that's 120 on the 120th day of the year, April 30, 2026. The 2026/365 Collection hits 120 on April 30. I spot a few of my custom t-shirts , and yes snow and dogs on it, old wood, skies of northern and other lights, the usual wood patterns, even a cat. But let's hand it over, as the world capitulates more each minute, to ChatGPT to see what kind of drippy summary it can conspire. It took a whole (not) of prompt engeering to send Here are 30 photos taken in April. This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in April. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest. Add extra zest and exuberance to your writing. Here is the prosaicness: April arrives like a switch flipped with a grin, not fully spring yet, but definitely done pretending it’s winter. Snow retreats into scraps while grass and mud claim the middle ground, and the light gets theatrical: halos around the sun, a sudden aurora cameo, skies that can’t decide between steel and silk. The usual prairie artifacts are still here, splintered boards, rusted bolts, fence lines stretching like sentences without punctuation, but now they feel less like relics and more like props in a set being reset. Life pushes in from every angle: dogs in mid-romp and mid-thought, birds slicing the air in formation, a cat inspecting plumbing like it’s a personal project, even a soccer ball abandoned as if the game just paused itself. People step closer to the lens this month, smiling, holding up small finds, wearing their days a bit more openly. And then there are the delightful curveballs: a memory card like a tiny black monolith, a giant “house volume” knob that looks ready to turn the whole scene up, a shirt declaring “ai;dr” like a wink at the act of documenting it all. April feels curious, awake, slightly chaotic, and very alive, as if the world is stretching its limbs and saying, alright, let’s get on with it. The poet loriat ChatGPT waxes on my 30 daily photos Note that it missed complete the mockery of the ai;dr shirt with "a shirt declaring “ai;dr” like a wink at the act of documenting it all" - no I am casting share your way, ChatGPT. May is already in gear, so no looking back now, heading for another perfect month of daily photos, that is north of fourth. Featured Image: Go North flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Like what the world needs is Yet Another Blog Post Defining Openness... (ir in my case, another post about SPLOTs masquerading as another topic?). But the wisps of this have been flitting around back to Open Education Week (when I thought, "why just do this for a week?") but as well in anticipation of the OER19 conference happening now when colleague Frances Bell and Lorna Campbell (has anyone picked up on the ringing of the bell there?) have been putting a SPLOT to fantastic use at #femedtech. For the longer timer, and for many people, Open is about the stuff. Piles of it. Canine Tourist Shot flickr photo by M J M shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license Long ago it was learning objects. Then it was open content, OERs, open courses, open textbooks. Stuff shared is good, it's raw material. More recently we've seen broader perspectives about the practice- open pedagogy, and that other p word that rhymes with axis. For the longest time, I was more interested in the stories, the serendipity that happens when openness is an attitude. Stop me before I resort to a useless Venn Diagram. But it circled me back to a concept Jon Udell wrote about, that rather than specific solutions, technologies are better done as innovation toolkits (I doubt MOOCs got there): There’s a reason I keep finding novel uses for these trailing-edge technologies. I see them not as closed products and services, but rather as toolkits that invite their users to adapt and extend them. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel calls such things “user innovation toolkits” — products or services that, while being used for their intended purposes, also enable their users to express unanticipated intents and find ways to realize them.https://blog.jonudell.net/2013/10/11/moocs-need-to-be-user-innovation-toolkits/ My very early forays into educational technology in the early 1990s (yup, I am not old) landed be into the first one that had this essence- it was a tool I could use to make tools for others to use to express unanticipated intents. Yes, Hypercard. You see, at one tool level, it provided an intuitive, graphic interface for people to easily make hyperlinked multimedia content, without doing one bit of code. At the same time, once I learned some of the underlying script language, I found I could use the one tool to very meta-like, make more tools for the educators I worked with, but not as me making the content for them. Things that they might use to open unanticipated intents. I've tried to make the case that, in a similar way, WordPress as a tool does this on the web. A WordPress Stack? From it's usual interface, WordPress allows people to not only write blog posts / content, but do so in a way that's easy to use links/media, and have as built in bonuses, more complex things like taxonomies, search, RSS feeds. And like previously learning HyperScript, for me becoming versatile on not just the underlying PHP/mySQL/JQuery but also the Wordpress "stack", I was able to start building in that tool, what are now tools for people to do other things. Tada, we have arrived at the topic. Maybe, as I tried to cleverly GIF for this post's featured image, it's more nested series of tooling around... We have these tools of PHP/mySQLThey are used to make this WordPress ToolWhich I used to make some WordPress Themes that are toolsWhich other people use to do things I never anticipated Whew, I am not really in the stuff of open business. First Came the Acronym The origin story has been established, but in late 2014 when I showed up in Kamloops BC for a four month open fellowship at Thompson Rivers University, Brian Lamb already had one project idea in mind. But he layed out the Smallest Possible Learning Online Tool acronym first. https://twitter.com/brlamb/status/527223001482133504 Two drivers were important, the first being the idea of small, single or focused tools, rather then mega ones. One impetus for the early TRU Writer was something we both knew- for faculty wanting to have students publish online essay/article assignments, having to teach them the whole WordPress interface (the rows of buttons, menus and a blank Hello World) was often a barrier, when maybe what they needed was just an editor. The second was BC concern over student identity/data sending them to web tools hosted in the US when the Patriot Act could potentially be used to use that data. The question Brian posed was- is it always necessary to have students create accounts or use their personal identifiers to publish online; could that be a choice of the author? The ways we saw it being used were for classes where students have writing assignments, e.g. like ENGL 4790 at TRU as well as a series of Biology classes like BIOL 421 at the University of Northern British Columbia and a Douglas College class on Superheroes. An early excellent example was the L21C Law course at TRU (some rich comment activity happened there). Oh and there was a UBC research methods class that used TRU Writer as well. While at TRU I was also thinking of a way for online journals to be done, with a review / approval process. This was while working with a prof there in an open journal publishing tool that was cumbersome (required uploads of Word docs), it hinged in the expertise on one admin technical person who had left, and frankly, it was rather ugly. I made a prototype of the journal, using the content from the ugly system (not sure anything came from that). But we did get one set up for an undergraduate research journal at TRU that looks like it was used for a few years. I took the idea more recently as a way for my NetNarr and Graduate Research students to publish their work in a site that looked like a journal. I put TRU Writer to work for the UDG Agora project where faculty shared the final reports on their innovation projects in a site called Comparte (with custom feature for Spanish language and other inputs). But then, the uses I did not expect. Tanya Elias took the anonymity features to create When I Needed Help (no longer online, see bits in the the Internet Archive), a place for domestic violence victims to share stories. Someone at Wesleyan is using it as a place (I think) to put references for a course or project. The iTeach project at Charles Sturt University features faculty projects. Tannis Morgan uses it as an open place to share OERs in languages other than English. And at Coventry University, they use it as a place for a conference to accept and publish presentation submissions. And of course just seeing a lot of action this week at OER19, the #femedtech project has made it the front of their web site, where anyone is invited to share thought pieces (or media) about themes of equality, diversity and inclusion. In many of these cases, seeing the novel uses has generated ideas to flow back into the WordPress theme that powers them- like having a way to provide a later editing feature, better handling of media, an editing flow for submissions. A Media Collector Becomes Another Way to Publish/Share Content The TRU Collector started also with the fellowship at Thompson Rivers University, coming directly from a need from two instructional designers preparing a workshop on finding open licensed images. It seemed sensible to have a place where people could share the images along with info on where it was found and what the licenses were on them (this first site is still alive). Again we saw some useful way faculty could use it or students to find and share photos related to Canadian Geography, examples in Biology, or for History of Art. Another site collects images for an advertising course; a very curious one is a collection of antique ads with inappropriate captions. Others use them as event photo sharing spots e.g. for OER18, the OpenMed project, or just for personal interest. Really, the original idea focused on collections of images. In the unexpected category was an idea by Daniel Villar-Onrubia at Coventry University where one course created a student directory (they chose what to post, it's not public; a later version was done for a conference he organized). This led to new feature to allow the ordering of content to be alphabetical, rather then most recent first. It also gave me the idea to have an option to use a rich text editor, so longer pieces could be written, almost more like a variation of TRU Writer. And this in turn led to newer features like a means to preview content before submitting. And a very compelling concept was Samantha Clarke's Compendium of Bothersome Beasties (again from Coventry University, what's in the air there, the ideas keep coming) as a tool for self-reflection and formative assessment done in a novel way. I often use the Collector myself in workshops where people are sharing media they created or researched. I put it into use for the Mural UDG project as the Acumulador -- a way for workshop teams to submit the results of different stages of their projects. A different variant happened from a request in twitter from creative high school teacher David Theriault- rather than just a collection of images, we sought a workshop mode for having a prompt that people can reply to with images, but then reveal them later. Of course, Maslow's hammer is a SPLOT. Pixabay Image by Stevepb shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 enhanced with the official SPLOT logo Coming up with a prototype was more about knowing some of the workings of WordPress. It was changing the front of the site to be a static page rather than the usual flow of content, and hiding with CSS some of the post navigation links. (full details available). This bit of experimentation came to mind for the current Networked Narratives class where we wanted students to share some image media and write a bit of descriptions. I went the same route as for the one for David; I made the front of the site a "Mission" page that got replaced with new ones each time. Hiding the results was not important; in fact, I put the really slick WP-Tiles plugin to display the submissions in a nice gallery like view (it uses the WordPress categories to display different mission responses). See the mission page for the Meme making assignment we did. The "Currently in the Collection" is done via the WP-Tiles shortcode. I'm pretty psyched about what can be done with this plugin, it makes for a different way to display site content than what the theme provides out of the box. For example, one could have a more pinterest style front for a TRU Writer site. In a way, I have been using the TRU Collector as a different variation of the DS106 Assignment Bank theme (technically another SPLOT). Check out the Somni Porta for an upcoming assignment. And there is a somewhat funny story behind the name of the site. In keeping with the Alchemy theme of NetNarr, I asked Laura Gibbs for some kind of Latin-y / Folklore-ish name for this collector- she helped with the naming of the Labyrinthus part of the main site. Based on my DM-ed vague description she suggested Somni Speculum or "Dream Mirror". To me, it sounded mysterious, and fitting for the way we have before had a Mirror World as part of the experience. That lasted not long, as my wife and several other female colleagues warned me of the association of a speculum from the medical use. Yow. That would have been terrible. Laura agreed with me that "porta" or "door" was more viable. The mirror was discarded. Lesson learned again, check your metaphors! I don;t know if I really achieved anything with this long post, beyond the usual SPLOT celebrating. I am rather stuck on them, and always find uses for them in my projects (there is a Daily and a Bank for Ontario Extend). If you hire me for a project, don't be surprised when I pull out my SPLOT card. But I do think there is something Von Hipple like about the variations people have done with SPLOTs, again, "products or services that, while being used for their intended purposes, also enable their users to express unanticipated intents and find ways to realize them." That's the magic space of Open I like to operate in. Featured Image: My wife Cori is to credit for idea of word playing on Magritte's Treachery of Images "this is not a pipe" as "this is a tool" when it's more. I had a version I had done a few years back for the UDG Agora Project ("This is not a computer" on an image of an iPad): That became a base for making into an animated GIF; text translation done via Google. Images mostly CC licensed PNGs from PNG ALL cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine The ds106 radio has been silent for 2 days. The station doors were locked shut, lights off, and only faint sounds of scurrying and muffled electrical tools were heard. But as reported by Grant Potter, the ice weasels were successful in rebuilding a newer and more flexible system. Some new features in the Airtime software are making me reconsider the previous approach to managing the scheduled content, the stuff that plays if there is no live broadcast. In that approach, I had divided each day into 8 hour blocks, and asked people to go in each week and populate it with content. This has worked well the last few months- I know that Bill Smith, Andy Forgrave, Christina Hendricks (and maybe others) were pitching in. But the tedious part was having to fill in content every week. The new station software allows us to not only schedule blocks of time to repeat, but now we can have the content within it repeat as well. I've done a few tests, and it works. For example, I put in a show on Sunday afternoons (PST) when Phoenix's NPR station KJZZ runs The Low Down Blues Show with Bob Corritore, And repeated content can be a playlist or a smart block. So I am thinking about asking people to make up and manage some playlists or smart blocks, and suggest times they would like to see it play. This way, they do not have to go in and fiddle with content, but can just update a playlist (or upload new stuff with proper metadata for smart blocks to work). For example, let's say Dr Garcia wants to run a two hour playlist of Muppets songs, she just needs to make a playlist or smart block (these are better because they can be random), and we can have this always be in the cue on Thursdays at 10pm. Or she can just have a GNA playlist she manages, and whenever she wants to change it, the next time her scheduled block comes up, we hear the new playlist. Its still not quite worked out, but if you do have a desire to plan maybe 2 or more hours of content as a playlist, or want to have a particular radio show cross cast at a certain time, let me know. For now, I have turned off the ability to edit the calendar as we test this out. But also, we need help repopulating the music library! Because the shelves were cleaned out by those ice weasels. Bless the weasels. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Zack Dowell I've been still mentally energy catching up after the sprint marathon that is running our Symposium on Mashups last week and thuse am delinquent on sharing what an over-the-top session Jim Groom and Tom Woodward did on Welcome to the People's Republic of Non-Programistan -- including fake accents for 30 minutes -- catch the Connect recording but more, so catch the zany metaphor they carried out at http://bionicteaching.com/ihatecode. But heck, I dont even need to blog much, check out Tony Hirst's in kind response To Comrades in Non-Programistan - A Message from Feedistan. And oh, I am just crazed rocking to the first video Tony included- DataPortability- Get Your Data Out: Not to mention Fair(y) Use Tale[s] (oh what a mashup!). All Hail Feedistan! cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by maistora I'm in the darkness, literally and figuratively. I started to write a very depressing, whingy, what the beelp and I doing in life post, and frankly, I bored myself. There you go. There I blog. Really, I have no illumination save the laptop charged up in my truck earlier; I had come to Baltimore Saturday, planning to have some R&R at my sister's house near the Baltimore airport (she and her husband are off on a sailing adventure); this being a decent stop over before I get on a plane tomorrow to spend some time back at my root center in Strawberry, AZ. It was Friday night in Fredericksburg out for a later dinner with GNA and Tim, when we witnessed the micro-burst type storm that ripped through as far as I know, northern Virginia and Maryland, maybe more. Driving up Saturday, I found a lot of areas without traffic lights, and had an adventure finding a gas station that had electricity. What a think tether of civilization we live on defined by electricity. I guess the storm was just as bar od worse in Baltimore, as there was no power at my sister's place, one of maybe 400,000 homes in the Baltimore area affected (that is about a third of what the local utility serves). Anyhow, for the last 24 hours, at night I try to keep cool in the basement (it's pushing 100 degrees F with humidity), in the day, try to hang out in air conditioned public places. There's no ice to be found and I heard last night while cooling off in a bar that all local hotels in this area are booked. But in the long run, compared to what people around the world deal with, this is a first world inconvenience. I am wearing that hat. Yet. It's more than that. Personally I've felt a stretch of wheel spinning and focus unfocussing. So I look to this blog, my long friend humble CogDogBlog, to be a place for me to wrench some, to dig down to the bone, and find my center and fire again. I'm aiming back to my place of sanctuary, my tiny house in the Arizona Mountains, to tend the small patch of land and also tend the work I am doing, and tend myself. And get out of the dark. Of course, a good start would be if BG&E turned the power on right now. But I should not wait on outside agents, I am looking in myself. Turning on the power... And just like that, I hear rain falling, and a cool wind blowing in the open screen door to this un-cooled house. A fresh wind, a sign... I will take that to mean something. [caption id="attachment_9314" align="alignleft" width="194"] (image and license belong to James Gurney)[/caption] Can the movement to try and make things open also make the simplest act of sharing that more complicated? Do we really need licenses and legal language on everything? Are there not things out there that implicitly we share (air?). I'm going to likely land way off mark here. I fully understand the reasons for people asking the questions that came below, but it almost seems to leap right over what should be obvious. What? This started with (and this is the second or third time someone has asked) when Clint LaLonde asked https://twitter.com/clintlalonde/status/232940839440117760 And yes, there are no explicit licenses or usage statements attached to the ds106 assignment site or the individual assignments. They have been contributed to the site via a web form, so I wonder if anyone who shares an idea this way (much the same way we add comments to web sites, to we attach licenses there?) has to think about putting a license on their ideas? Just look at a random ds106 assignment http://assignments.ds106.us/randomassignment. Does that really need a license on it for you to share? Plus, as Jim noted, many assignments are borrowed from elsewhere: https://twitter.com/jimgroom/status/233185866762293248 Look. I understand the desire to make things sharable, and people would like to see more things inside nicely organized boxes of resources. Believe me, I have built those collections myself. It makes sense. But do we have to attach legalese to everything? Aren't we filled with so much "No signs" around (rather then "signs of knowing") that we do not recognize when it implies "yes"? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Aren't there things that are intuitively sharable? Like ideas? Sez the man puffing on the cigarette-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evnNy541L9Q Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone. Ideas are in the air. They are for everyone. Do we need little signs to reassure people the air is ok? Is that what it takes to be "open" is to have licenses on everything? I'm just asking. FWIW- On the OER Commons site where CLint started his journey, under Conditions for Use, I consider our ds106 Resource as being "No Strings Attached" No restrictions on your remixing, redistributing, or making derivative works. Give credit to the author, as required. Includes Public Domain, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons Public Domain, and any item that explicitly says no restrictions. (my emphasis added). To address that portion, I've augmented our About page to include: We should say that all of the assignments listed here have been shared freely by participants or just people interested in ds106. Many of them are ideas borrowed from others. While we do not attach any specific license to an assignment, all of them are shared implicitly with no restrictions. That said, it is worth crediting the person who submitted the assignment and linking back to the url where it is found. I'll take one of these, please. You can have a lot of faith in the sensible writing of Danny Goodman, who long ago for me threw all kinds of new light on HyperCard, and later JavaScript... My job in this book is to translate the gobbledygook spouted by all sides of the email wars into language that any email user can understand. My main goal is to snap email users out of their passive roles, waiting for others to solve the "email problem." The real power, it turns out, lies in all of our hands On the other hand, I do have several thousdand fabulous offers from Nigeria for free enlargement and enhancement of my .... creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Tuesday brought a glorious blue sky day to go into Auckland again, today to do sessions at Auckland University of Technology. My contact/host today was Thom Cochrane, who like Claire Donald yesterday, I first got to know in my 2004 visit to UNITEC (my scheduling of return flight was bad in that I missed by one day seeing Mark Northover, whom I've known from previous visits and has also come here to Arizona). We met up with Thom in his regular spot to start his day, a hip coffee shop named "Remedy" down on Queen Street. Today's brew was a long black. Very strong. The first session was one not exactly done before, but drew on parts of Being On/Of The Web and Beyond the MOOC Hyper: Open Connected Courses. Thpm's title as he posted it, Affordances of the Open Web This spoke to me to draw in a bit of Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Objects to talk about affordances from a design sense- the way the design of real world things suggest their function (and give feedback). This led me to start with a collection flickr tagged photos of shower interfaces that seem to require a bit too much text to describe how to use them. I used a set of quotes about open from Nancy White ("openness is an attitude") and Davide Wiley ("open facilitates the unexpected"), but new this time around, added one from Catherine Cronin's ALTC talk Navigating the Marvellous: Openness in Education: "...Although we can connect and interact within both physical spaces and bounded online spaces, we cannot easily share what we are doing with a wider audience, nor can we invite our networks into our learning community. The message remains: what we do here is separate from all else we do. Formal learning is divorced from rather than integrated with informal learning practices and networks." Then it was trying my arm wave about the distributed network structure designed by the internet creators, and how ds106 and other "connected course" leverage that model - it is what the web is made of. There's also the thing where I show sequence of simple symbols leading into I pose these as questions to see what people come up with; I suggest that much of what we see as online, even open learning as a lock at the entrance door, even be it just a login. Then it was a flyby of a collection of open distributed aggregated courses, leaving with an arm twist to participate in Connected Courses. Then it was a break for lunch and conversation. Thom gave me a tour of the center he runs at AUT that supports a lot of experimentation and development in mobile and social technologies. I'm not sure I got a cleat answer why his computer was quarantined creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It might not be representative, but I've been noticing at these events that during meals people tend to stand and talk in small groups. It's not for a lack of chairs, but my hunch is they enjoy moving around and talking in groups. Just a guess. I enjoyed listening to Dee (?) who is and works with Maori projects in mobile/social media. She told me all through their history, the Maori were quick adopters of new technologies and shared that the usage rates of mobile technology is very high across the Maori people. I was curious if there were any non mainstream social spaces that were popular, but it sounds like Facebook is the big player there. After lunch, I did 2 more hours of Storythinking > StoryMaking > Storytelling This might be one of the talks I've done the most. I had always thought I would get tired doing a talk over and over, but it's never quite the same, and these last few have gotten something added. removed, refined each time. I've added more video examples to show the elements of storytelling, and have to admit, that while I have seen them many times, now, the Google Nexus one and the Budweiser Puppy one still hits me emotionally. That is the thing people pick up on when I compare two examples. But you know what also works really well? The first element I talk about is the importance of a powerful opening, "a once upon a time" that pulls you in, and Frederick Brown's Knock is a gem, plus it shows a story can be just 2 sentences AND it shows the power of an unexpected twist. I totally owe this one to Bryan Alexander. There was a lot of really good discussion and commentary from the group. After going through the idea of stories having a shape, I ask how that story shape might play out in other forms of communication. I often ask about using that structure in an email or a presentation. There was a really good one shared by (??) Abbie (he said it was a nickname) a graduate student who said he used an approach like a story shape in the way he framed feedback to students. Wow, I am using that one in the future. Like tomorrow. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog We did a round of pechaflickr with maybe 28 people participating. They chose the tag "vampire" and it did not disappoint! Two people got stumped when an airplane showed up (it's a British fighter jet). It's really fun to be able to give them examples from their own participation about adding elements to the shared story not in the photos, and how people do (or do not) manage the handoff when the photos change. Another full day, another great group of educators met. I return here Thursday for more. And at the end of day? Ahhhhhh creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'm not sure as a kid if I ever uttered the "I want to grow up to be a cowboy" line (maybe Mom listened to Waylon and Willie). How would a suburban Baltimore kid in the 1970s even get the idea? Easy. TV. I'm digging back in the memory layers for what I might have known of in terms of Westerns, for my second post in response to Western106 Unit 1 - What do westerns mean to me? I am hoping when people do this they do not use the school reflex and try yo figure out what a teacher wants (e.g. looking it up somewhere to find some cut and paste answer). I am hoping people just draw on their own experiences and influences with Westerns as a starting point. Then, after spending maybe 15 weeks digging into them, creating art around them, they can look back at this entry viewpoint... and hopefully be somewhere else. This is exactly what Mrs Kershman did in our 10th grade English class... the first day, she had us write any kind of essay, which she collected. We then spent a year reading literature, writing, learning research, and we worked on a final essay. She handed back our first essay... we could be either horrified / proud of how little we knew about writing going in and how much we learned since then. So do not try to find an impressive or academic sounding answer. Just write what you know about Westerns from your life so far. Thus tonight I went into the closet... to find these cowboy and Indian figures from my childhood. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] These are heavy metal (probably toxic) figures that look hand painted. I was told a friend of my parents gave them to me, but I always remember then being wrapped in kleenex in a box... that I was always too young to play with them (?). But here I am now, some 47 years later, pulling them out of the box. Absolutely what influenced me as a kid as television. I vaguely remember seeing the old Lone Ranger TV series (Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels) and of course Bonanza the theme song, and flames burning through the map etched in my mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsypUGOyhz4 Who knew there were lyrics? My family watched Big Valley (young Lee Majors before he went bionic), maybe Alias Smith and Jones, Little House on the Prairie, and Grizzly Adams. I think my parents watched Gunsmoke, to me as a kid it was more soap opera. Oh yes, the Brady Bunch went to a Ghost Town (Marsha, Marsha, Marsha). I saw that for sure. I watched the John Wayne movies, many times seeing True Grit, but also The Cowboys (oh how could you be such a bad character, Bruce Dern?), The Searchers, many more probably. My feasts were Saturday Warner Brother cartoons, and for all the Coyote and Road Runner Cartoons I watched, I wonder if I really connected the colorful rather Arizona-ish landscape for where I might ultimately live? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd_41tM6H2Y The Keep America Beautiful Campaign PSA with the crying Indian remains a vivid bit of story in the size of a commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dmtkxm9yQY I've used it before to talk about the arc of a short story. Books? I am stumped to remember reading Westerns. Some would but Last of the Mohicans in the Western pile. Maybe the Hardy Boys went west? There had to be more, but I remember TV shows and movies more. As a teen and young adult, I definitely gravitated to the lone figure who takes a stand against the norm, fights for the common person, thus the appeal of the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns but actually more Outlaw Josey Wales, and likely my favorite, the somewhat mystical High Plains Drifter (which I have re-watched at least twice in the last year) and the later Unforgiven. I've used this story before, but in my 9th grade English class we studied westerns (so I should remember some literature). I do remember Miss Walker telling us we were going to go to the movie theater to see a new western film. So imagine our surprise when our bus pulls up to a theater showing this film! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP_1T4ilm8M We thought it was a mistake. but Miss Walker just smiled and said, "Watch." She knew, and thus know I can conjure Space Westerns. And easily Star Trek, which I watched ALOT of (thanks to my sisters) was a western, not only in some of its locales for the plots, but as a whole. You can find the original announcement for the Star Wars pilot in the New York Times from 1986: ''The Cage,'' the first pilot episode made in 1964 for the television series ''Star Trek,'' will be shown beginning Aug. 7 at the Museum of Broadcasting, 1 East 53d Street. The episode, made in black and white, featured Jeffrey Hunter in the role of Captain Pike, commander of the starship Enterprise. It was written by Gene Roddenberry, creator of the television series, and has never been shown publicly in its entirety. The episode, which also starred Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, was initially rejected by WNBC-TV. In 1965, at the request of the network, a second pilot show, called ''Where No Man Has Gone Before,'' was made. Mr. Hunter was unavailable to repeat his role and William Shatner was cast as Captain Kirk. The series, which has been referred to as a space western by its creator, was then accepted by the network. Imagine being able to say you were there for that premiere. I am fairly sure I saw Jeremiah Johnson in the movie theater (worth a re-watch) plus Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid many times on TV. I thought Westworld was just too wildly retro-future. Again there is more. It was after I had moved to Arizona, one one of my early solo trips out to the high desert for my Geology research, that somehow I had picked up a copy of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. It had a profound influence on my, so much I am fairly sure I read everyone of his novels and short story collections. Abbey's novels are definitely not pulp fiction westerns, the characters are generally highly flawed outcasts. But they always rung true to me for an ethos of this harsh land. Novels like Fire on the Mountain and definitely The Brave Cowboy pit the iconic western figure as being lost in the modern world. That tale of Jack Burns escaping up Sandia Mountain in Albuquerque is maybe my favorite Abbey novel- I blogged about it (pre-ds106) in October 2010 and came back a few months later in DS106 when I used it for the 10 minute video film analysis assignment, blogged as Jack Burns is the last Cowboy https://youtu.be/LKeoY6_WCSI This assignment will be back when we get to video in Western106. The funniest Abbey anecdote is that on one of my Mom's visits I was rather surprised that my little old Jewish mother had pulled one of his novels off my shelf and devoured it in like 3 days. And what a surprise that after she passed away, at her home I found a whole shelf of Edward Abbey books. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] This is about as much as I can remember in one sitting. If I had to speculate, the idea of the west I had absorbed through movies, TV, and the road runner as a kid is something that called in my 20s when I was rather eager to reset my East coast life for something more... wide open and unknown. Most of the examples I listed come from the stereo typical male, outcast loner, someone who desired nor fit into mainstream society, who was self-contained, self-sufficient, but also who was driven by a sense of fairness and doing the right thing. The gun thing did not transfer. Although I live in Arizona, and have done a small amount of target shooting, I have no gun. And I seriously doubt I could actually use one on another being short of extreme. Who knows? Much of this was what inspired me to want to do a DS106 about westerns. But not in the sense of reinforcing just the western genres I was familiar with... I feel like the more we push beyond those limits, we will find that it goes far and wide as a genre. This just went farther today. In the morning, as I was trying to warm up sitting in front of my heater, I started combing through Amazon prime and added about 50 of its 420+ available films to my watchlist). I had noticed a few odd titles https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/687675376978366464 Paul Bond tweeted a reply about a western / horror comic https://twitter.com/phb256/status/687682194966315009 Si maybe there is a sub-genre / flavor we can explore in Western106? https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/687683758271545344 Vampire cowboys? Yeah https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/687690343655981057 There is a lot more I found at IMDb just be messing around with it's genre URLs https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/687690499432431616 And I can watch Curse of the Undead on YouTube! https://twitter.com/phb256/status/687691690233184256 Let's see how many places we can ride this western genre. In retrospect, the early days of the web were pretty much a wild west frontier... and like the old west, it's disappearing by "advancement", population, and profiteers. Now this is a western riff to play with... the Wild Wild Web! Top / Featured Image Credit: flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/23760296514 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license What feels like a month later, I'm still back blogging some of my experience at Mozfest in London. My ears perked up when someone mentioned something about SourceFabric being at Mozfest. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/393733063542583296 Why? Because they are the folks that produce Airtime the open source software we use to manage ds106 Radio. I spoke to a few of the folks at the opening night Science Fair, especially Daniel James who works on the Airtime documentation and community. I shared our challenges in having a way to easily signify when a live broadcast is one, and he showed me where in our software is the API we could call, and where in the airtime code this is generated. I got the idea that we could figure out a way to hack this in, and he said they would be glad to help (this is on my task list!) The next day, I came back with some more questions, and they asked me to do an interview with Daniel, which he broadcast live in their station and I broadcast at the same time on ds106 radio. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine https://soundcloud.com/sourcefabric/interview-with-alan-levine-of I did a post interview with Daniel, but alas, using Papaya, did not pre-think a way to record. At the time unconnected, I had seen the first night a woman walking around with a jacket that appeared have lights on the back that were micro-computer controlled: cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine But it was not to later when I saw a group of school kids interviewing her that I got the interesting scoop cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine The jacket not only had an Arduino controller to make the lights flashed, but she also had in the jacket a wireless receiver, and the idea was that if there was an internet connection, the jacket could connect to an Airtime radio station, and the patterns of the lights would be controlled by what was playing on the streaming radio. It was as she suggested, a way to visualize music. https://soundcloud.com/cogdogroo/lisa-lang-explains-her-jacket So I tracked Lisa down later and managed to record a short interview where she explained more about the technology (it comes from a group that makes lights for bicyclers in Berlin where she lives, so they are more visible). The LED bulbs are big, and also water proof, and low temperature. The Airtime folks were very interested in what we are doing with ds106 Radio (well it is pretty darn interesting, right?). I offered to write up some info about it, and have not gotten around to doing that. There is some general info on the ds106 site including ds106 rockumentary recorded by GNA Garcia and Friends as well as a nice video created by Wes Fryer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl0N-zLCGow But you know what? There is a lot of history there, going back to the original @jimgroom tweet that set things in motion, and all of the special things that have happened and were shared. I have an idea, if others will participate, to start an open Google Doc with as much history as I can put together, and tap people to help fill it out. What do you think? Anyone game? Hey! Have you heard about this new cool thing called "blogging"? Well, shucks, it looks like the folks down at Blackboard central have stumbled on to it! Innovation! Yup, with all the expertise and license bucks piled up down there, they have set up "The Blackboard Weblog" at ... Blogger.com? http://www.blackboardblog.blogspot.com/ And all those Bbig Bbad Bbroad misspellings down in Bbaltimore are intentional. Bbbbbbbbbloggin' Have fun with this one, James! flickr foto Presentation Interruptusavailable on my flickr Here at the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting in Austin, I was doing a reprise of the 5 Minutes of Fame session at EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. This was supposedly highlighting the NMC Horizon Report section on "Phones in Their Pocket" -- the report suggesting cell phone technology is in the 2-3 year horizon for becoming more broadly used in education. Less a report than being a bit goofy, I arrange for my presentation to be interrupted by a cell phone call (has thay ever happened to anyone else?) - where I am trying to handle a crashed server situation with someone at the other end-- who turns out to have the name "Mom". The transcript and a link to some of the background flickr photo slide shows are available in the back blog. Thanks to Barbara Truman for sharing the photo... I usually try to position myself behind the camera rather in front, so thanks again! Mom calls again in the middle of a presentation! Even with spam fighting plugins, on a daily basis, I am spending time I'd rather be doing sometime constructive, and deleting, moderating, click through the relentless barrage of blog comment spam. I am feeling like the dutch boy and I am getting weary of trying to hold back the dam. The killer was one that came in on an NMC site purporting to be from a "blog" with a url like education DOT blogslog DOT info that the only "education" seemed to be strange studies of less than main line video clips: I really dont think blacklists do much, but if you bother to hope otherise, ban this IP, source of this crap spewing site 74.86.186.66 Over the last three weeks, all of my blogs have been getting spam, from random or at least non repeating (spoofed?) IPs that all look like: <strong>How to Choose the Right Home Builder...</strong> How to Choose the Right Home Builder Building your own home is one of life's turning points. Who would pass up the excitement of putting up their very own abode? Everyone wants to build a home according to his or her taste and style.... I can guarantee none of my blogs are about building houses, but whomever the SpamMaster is, all of the content looks like this- an opening title in <strong>...</strong> tags, then a few lines of crap. Repeatedly, and apparently in total vain, I have blogged openly that the Great God Google has some responsibility here. Why? It is the pursuit of Google Page Rank and the methodology that gets sites to appear on Google tat is the 10000% motivation for comment spammers- they will do everything possible to force a URL into any open orifice of a web site, meaning any form that will manage to post a link to a web site. The more links into a Evil Crap Ass Site a spammer can generate, the more page rank the links form there get. Google creates ALL of the incentive for blog spam, and from what I can see, has done absolutely zero to do something about it. With all their gazillions of dollars, skyrocketing stock prices, legions of brilliant technical staff... the sit on their collective hands (or whatever happens at the GooglePlex) while tens? more of thousands of individual bloggers are over run with what is basically a frontal assault attack on their personal publishing space. If I were a new blogger, and got the crap I mention above in my blog on my passionate topic, be it education or knitting or fishing or exotic race cars... I would be quick to give up. It's time someone holds Google's feet to some fire. I dont have that kind of power, but what the bleepity bleep bleep bleep BLEEP is it going to take? Google, I love your search and tools, but your monetary incentive providing to blog spammers is killing the love. It's rather simple to me- remove the incentive / reward for spammers, and their activity goes away (or elsewhere). Google has enough intellectual prowess to create some amazing pieces of technology, but I've not seen one bit of that go into stomping out this menace. Oh, well I should give credit for the impressive "nofollow" tag (yeah, like that did anything). Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Am I the only one incensed? I feel I am alone, howling at the moon. In vain. Grrrrrrr. Was hoping for a happy blog post day, but the rain of spam has killed that. Oi. My clever blog post title generator is not really jelling this morning (the unArtificial quasiIntelligence needs more coffee). The VHS tape for #ReclaimOpen 2023 has reached the end spool, and people are dusting their blogs off to reflect on the tri-part questions of the Open Web: How We Got There, Where We Are, and We Could Go. I was not on the ground there and only caught bits on reruns (apparently my generated spawn crashed the scene). From Jon Udell's post in Mastodon, I was invigorated by Mo Pelzel's thoughts on Whence and Whither the Web: Some Thoughts on Reclaim Open, e.g. ...when it comes to appreciating the sheer magic of the hyperlink. To this day I have not lost the sense of wonder about this marvelous invention. https://morrispelzel.com/uncategorized/whence-and-whither-the-web-some-thoughts-on-reclaim-open/ and teaching me the wonderful concept of anamnesis, -- "refers to 'making present again,' or experiencing the meaning of past events as being fully present." This circles back to something that has been floating as a write worthy topic, and how delightful it is to upend and bend around what you thinks is right. Let a new tape roll. 1. Web as Documents Ages ago (months) amongst noticing the drying up of colleagues blog posts in my reader and noticing how many were sharing their content in the various social spaces, I was bit taken back. Many resources I saw being created, activities, collections of things, that I typically would have thought people would publish as good ole durable web pages or something in a blog powered platform-- were, arggh, shared as Google Docs. Docs. Don't get me wrong, I love me the use of the shared document. But really, it is the marginal evolution of the Word Processor. I know why people reach for them - it's easy to use (who wants to WRITE HTML??) (me), it publishes to the web, and its the environment their work places them for large chunks of the day. Yet, the creation of doc hosted web pages rings of "being on the web but not of the web" (Have you ever done view source on a Google doc?, can you really grasp the content and meaning it's un-HTML a melange of JavaScript?). Here's some beef: Those web addresses it creates, like (this is a fake one) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pGhX4uWZLJYsyo78nAydlZQ10Z8rBT-QutlYZXugly4U/edit?usp=sharing You cannot even foresee what the link leads to from its URL, not its source (e.g. a domain name) nor any kind of file name that suggests its relevant. Is it really durable? Will it be around in 10 years? 3? 2? Where does it fit into a larger work? It's just another piece of paper hanging out in some Drive. Can the author easily find it (I know the shape of my drive, without search, I'd never find a thing) You have given it to Google, who is notorious for giving and then taking things away. Besides, how are they mining it? I thought I had more. But when I think of the Open Web as the place of where we "got there", is a Web of Documents really going to be anything more than a google sized pile of free floating papers, only findable by... its search? Is this just on the web but not very web like in spirit? Yeah, I did not really have well developed case there, just some disgruntlement and seeing an increasing abandonment of creating web content as the kind of web content I know and love, the kind you can inspect as source and learn something or understand how it is constructed. Hence the blog post never congealed. 2. The Doc Web I did a complete turn around on my chewing of sour web games when I stumbled across this piece on The Doc Web, published in some thing called "Lens" (c.f. the web as an infinite space that seems to be boundless), even filed in a section called Escape the Algorithm "Remote corners of the internet—through the eyes of its finest explorers" That speaks to me as a rabbit holer. This article completely undermined my so called "beef" ?No one would mistake a word processor for the front page of the internet, not unless their computer is nothing more than a typewriter. A hammer is not a portal, and Google Docs, the word processor of our time, is nothing more than a hammer to the nail of language. Right?Slow down. Google Docs may wear the clothing of a tool, but their affordances teem over, making them so much more. After all, you're reading this doc right now, and as far as I know I'm not using a typewriter, and you're not looking over my shoulder. This doc is public, and so are countless others. These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige. But they form an impossibly large dark web, a web that is dark not as a result of overt obfuscation but because of a softer approach to publishing. I call this space the “doc web,” and these are its axioms. https://lensmag.xyz/story/the-doc-web It's Axioms knock down my disdain bit by bit. What I saw as a negative in the obfuscation of the web address at foretelling its content, hits on the magic of storytelling, with the element of surprise. An invitation to explore without knowing what's ahead. And it really range true with the fantastic linked list of examples in Axiom 5, where it shows you the fantastic ways some utterly creative souls have subverted the usual "documentness" of the way 99.9% of use use Google Docs (like ye olde Word Processor) and have created some insanely enjoyable web corners. Just glance: Just an image of the linked examples in Axiom 5 of The Doc Web. Aren't these invitations for a curious mind? I leave it for you to discover, but these are mind blowing examples of web ingenuity subverting the document concept: A choose your own adventure game sure you can twine this, but in a doc format... it works A crazy animated map MADE IN A SPREADSHEET (with some nods to the web ancient DS106 Spreadsheet Invasion Assignment by Tom Woodward) 51 pages of one work of fan fiction A spreadsheet of one person's daily poetry act billed as a "mixtape" I love this kind of stuff. This shows that despite the age of our algorithmic AI wielding web T-Rex's, there are all kinds of creative mammal scurrying around in the web underbrush. I can dig this Web of Docs. 3. It Was Pages All Along Speaking of the web that was- we always talked about the web as "pages" (skeuomorphing as much as "dialing" a phone) -- the construct of them with formatting "tags" is very much taken from the old document producing methods that pre-date the web. And smack my own head in memories- it very much was the need for "publishing" documents in a shared format got me on the web in 1993. In my work then at the central faculty development office at the Maricopa Community Colleges, I was eager to provide across our large system means for people to yes, share resources, but also, our published journal which had been going out in campus mail on paper. I was driven then to find digital ways to share so much information I saw in paper. And while we had a system wide shared AppleTalk network for mac users, half of the system was on Windows PCs. Until late 1993, I had been making a lot of effort to make resources available on a Gopher server (a Mac II plugged into the network). I went through some extraordinary (and laborious) efforts once to publish our journal as a HypeCard stack and convert it with some app to Toolbook (which ran on windows). It worked... but was really ugly to do. In that time I had come across the early text based World Wide Web (as it had to be said them) browsers, you'd have to enter a number on a command line to follow a hyperlink, and most of what I saw was papers of some physics lab in Switzerland. It was not "clicking" yet. Then, like many lightning bolts I had, a wise figure intervened. In October 1993 I was visiting Phoenix College for a tech showcase event, and a great colleague named Jim Walters, very wizard like, handing me a floppy disc upon which he had written "MOSAIC". All he said was, "Hey Alan, you like the internet, try this." This was always a powerful lesson- Jim was not trying to techsplain to me or show off his vast experience, he handed me an invitation to explore. He made a judgement call that this might be of interest. That of course changed everything. That the web was navigable in this first visual web browser my clicking links, and it included images, even crude audio/video, was a mind opener. And then when I came across the NCSA Guide to HTML. I saw that with a simple text editor, I could create rich media content, that could be connected to other places with this magic href tags-- and best of all, it was in a format that both Mac and PC computers could navigate the same content. In about two weeks of getting that floppy disc, I came across software that would let me run a public web server from a Mac SE/30 plugged into an ethernet port on my office, and I was off on this journey. And the bigger light was, yes, I had some know how to set up a web server, but the fact that web pages crafted in HTML could actually be shared on floppy discs or local media, meant that I could help faculty learn to create their own web media documents, etc, becoming maybe my first somewhat successful web project beyond my institution, Writing HTML. And that still rings to me, here 30 years after my first web server, that the act of writing the web, not just clicking buttons in an interface, or at least conceptually understanding how the href tag works, is the magic light in all the mix. The very fact, that through mostly a tactile act of writing a tag, I can create a linked connection from my blog here, to say Mo's post is completely what the open web was and still is about. The link. And Writing Links is an act of generosity for both the linkee and the reader. A web of Documents or the Doc Web? It does not matter, it's all webbed. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15600165983 Taking Notes on Our Conversation flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY-ND ) flickr photo shared by mtneer_man I had thought of this (and then forgot) the last time I taught DS106. It seemed like a good idea to ask students as they worked through the process to keep on their site a running collection of the tools and media sources they found were the most useful. Have I done that? Not really, I cannot say I have really done more than tagging things as ds106 in diigo (673 things) … hey I have been a little organized by co-tagging e.g. ds106 and design (120 things), ds106 and visual (49 things). Now I have a reason. Gail asked me for it. cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I have really enjoyed meeting Gail, an Open Learning Instructional Designer (she says we met at ETUG on 2011, my memory dims again). She has been among our most avid You Show participants as her blog shows. Plus she and her husband Joseph regaled a few of us with a gourmet night of Trinidad food and music. Over a goodbye sushi lunch today, she was complimenting Brian and I on the teaching design of the You Show, but she also said that between the emails, videos, web sites, she sometimes got confused where information was. She does have a point. The organization of the web site was shifting as we added to it. She asked if I have a list of all the important tools she should know about. Oi, making lists. I’m just not much a listmaker. Okay, but a first thing is to go through the You Show Units and look for some useful links worth putting on a list; I hung them off of a right side menu: But that’s different. My task here is to start a list of the tools I use on a frequent basis in my web and media work. It wont be exhaustive (I may get tired of assembling it). But this would seem like something a portfolio should have, probably better as a static page (?). On My Computer This won’t help a lot of people, but regular software I use include on my Mac Book Pro (and am lazy on linking, and not including everything): Adobe Photoshop for graphics and animated GIFs – yes I pay the monthly fee, I got a cloud subscription for $10 a month. I can use GIMP but its always cumbersome. Aperture for managing digital photos – yes Apple is no longer updating, but I will stick with it until it does not work. Audacity for audio – I am happy with all I can do with open source. iMovie for video editing – I can make it do almost anything I need for most projects, sure I would rather use Final Cut Pro, but have not yet met the thing that will drive me there. MPEG Stream Clip – really handy for trimming videos so I dont have always import larger clips into iMovie BBEdit – my go to text and HTML editor since like 1993. “Software that doesn’t suck” The Levelator- handy for evening audio where levels are inconsistent. QuickTime Player 7 – the old version lets you do a lot more than the one you get in the OS Fetch – may favorite FTP program. It has a running dog. Finding /Working with Media on the Web Compfight for finding creative commons licensed images in flickr BigHugeLabs does all kinds of cool things with images, can tap directly to flickr Clipping Magic – helps remove backgrounds from images (I keep forgetting about this but its handy) Cloud Convert – convert between almost any media types Flickr CC Attribution Helper for getting cut and paste attribution, I built it for me. Tin-Eye Reverse Image Search helps find where else on the web the same image might be Google Image Search — with presets for licensed for reuse — see my post for how to set this up FreeSound for sound effects ccMixter for unique creative commons licensed music SaveFrom.Net – the best YouTube (and vimeo) video downloader, so you can get video in mp4 file format. Other Web Wrenches and Spanners Wayback Machine – essential for finding content from web sites that have disappeared Wayback Machine – essential for finding content form web sites that have disappeared Diigo – I try to be organized in tagging stuff. I try. DropItTo.me lets you create a public way for people to put files in your Drop Box. PHP Functions interactively run PHP functions to test results. Text Mechanic handy tools for working with text- randomizing, revering, flipping, and more Mozilla Goggles lets you remix, re-edit any web page, useful for making spoofs of sites. World Time Clock tools for planning events where you can create links to convert time zones. Who is Hosting This? gives info about the web host of a site DNSStuff dealing with internet domains and such. FaxZero – amazingly sometimes you need to send faxes. You can do two pages for free RSS Feed Validator Well that’s a start. I combed through my browser bookmarks for things I seem to use on some regular basis. I skipped a bunch of obvious productivity things like DropBox, Evernote, Word, Skype. What’s on your list? This is just plain cool, perhaps not essentially useful but plainly cool. Amaztype Amaztype is using Amazon web services. Created by Keita Kitamura & Yugo Nakamura for Tha Ltd. Well that does not exactly explain it. You type in a keyword search for Amazon (US, Japan, UK, Canada) for books or music by either title or author. So what's the big deal? Well the results pop up as the graphics icons of the book/album cover. So what? Well as the icons appear, the are laid out to form the letters of your search. For example, I did a US book title search for "Dog" and get this result: That's cute, right? But then click on any cover, and you get a zoom in and some meta-data: And the "more info" leads you to one of the more classic works of fiction ;-) Well, it is just plain neat... I baked banana bread tonight; I am eating warm slice of it right now. Big deal, eh? A year ago I could not say this. One day I saw again the pile of brown bananas I had let linger on the counter too long. In a surprise move, I googled "banana bread recipe". There's only 3,000,000 results. My rough rule for trying new recipes is choosing one with the smallest list of ingredients and the fewest steps. Joy's Easy Banana Bread recipe fit the bill, and it worked. The question with recipes, and quick solutions in general, to me is, "Is this a bounding box or a starting point?" As I iterate with recipes, I end up annotating them: [caption id="attachment_64469" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Marked up recipe[/caption] First of all, being diabetic, I replace the 1 cup of sugar with Stevia; but the ratio is 3:1, so it's marked as 1/3 cup Stevia. Joy put 1 egg on the ingredients, but I like mine moist, so I tried 2, and that's my regular approach now. Maybe I'll bump to 3 soon. Joy called for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, but the first time I made it the only baking soda was a box of unknown vintage in the fridge. But several reviewers of Joy's Easy Banana Bread suggest using baking powder over soad, and that I had. Boom, augment that recipe. Finally, all on my own I started adding crushed walnuts to the mix. That recipe is pretty marked up. I prefer to use the same approach in all my work. Don't take recipes for rigid rules. If you want to discuss this more, come on over. I have a few slices of banana bread left over. And it's goooooood. Featured image: The banana bread I made tonight from my annotated recipe- From Three Mushy Bananas.. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) For expanding my metabolic horizons, I am working on a 57 Chevy. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine For at least 3 times in the last 5 years I've been fortunate to participate in the Baruch College Schwartz Institute Symposium, a rather unique event in bringing together people from both the academic and business communities to share ideas on communication. It is that mix where I get to meet people outside the usual circles, and the conversational set up up the days, that I look forward to. This year was even more a draw because Barbara Ganley was on the agenda t lead a workshop, and I had already planned to visit her home in Vermont a few days before. But ti got better when she asked me two weeks ago if I could step in to co-facilitate her workshop on storytelling as the colleague she was working with had to back out. There is no scientific instrument accurate enough to measure the small gap of nano-time it took me to say yes. I've been a friend. blog/photo buddy, and colleague for years, but have never presented together. I fondly recall the first time meeting with Barbara when we were both invited speakers for the 2007 Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington (also my first time in the glow of the Reverend Jim). Wow, that was long ago. Twitter was brand new. Blogging was still something people did. This was maybe the first time I presented without any media. I loved that. The title for the session already on the schedule was "Story and Re-story in the Age of 'Shape-Shifting Portfolio People'"- which I admit I still may not full understand. The shape shifting stuff refers to work by James Gee, which more or less characterizes the "new" modern worker (?) It precludes the forced division of natives/immigrants, yet I was a bit quick to jump in when people at the event start referring to "understanding the kids" or "reaching our young workers" like they are some other species. The plan for our workshop was packed, a lot to cover in 75 minutes. But the focus was to find an activity to get people into a personal storytelling mode, but more than that, to understand the value of listening. With all the tossing around of storytelling in X (where x= business, teaching, data, whatever)- what seems missing is that more often you are telling someone else's story, not your own. And the approach, motivation differs when that happens. IN addition, you want to get to the stories that cause a reaction in people, where they lean forward, laugh, participate. Barbara and I saw this was needed in the morning discussions, where there was a prompt to tell a narraive about the time we learned something. More than half the people at out table, could not hone on on a specific story "moment" (as Barbara would later eloquently describe) "a time when I did something". They got general, talking about "building bridges" or "the need to nurture better thinking". You know what folks, there is an "I" in Story. So, the original outline Barbara sent me had an opening prompt of telling a story about something in their pocket or wallet. I suggested we use the prompt we have had a ton of success with in ds106, the keychain story, first done as a Daily Create (early 2011 submitted by @noiseprofessor)- tell a story about something on your keychain. The beauty of this simple prompt is that is something people take out and hold, but the story is always something that starts with a symbol and leads to something broader, be it about a charm on the chain, a key to a car, house, or something else. But not wanting to assume everyone had a keychain, I suggested if not, use a piece of jewelry, something in their wallet. Actually before I gave them the prompt, we let them know they would be getting in groups of four, and would have to tell a 2 minute personal story. The key thing was listening, I told them, because they would have to use information from other stories in their group. As a guide (this from Barbara's experience), they should aim to make sure they have 3 key sentences- the opening (a hook, something that grabs you), and the end. You really need to have an idea where you want to take people. And something in the middle to build that arc off of. And we set them loose. First a 3 minute free write to organize their ideas cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine and then each having two minutes to tell the story to their group (I love the new ttp://e.ggtimer.com/ site I found that morning - just write the URL you want for time, e.g. http://e.ggtimer.com/2minutes). And the room exploded in energy cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Literally, the energy of the room transformed from the passiveness of sitting in seats listening to a speaker to an eruption. I asked them later to share what they observed in body language- the lean ins, the laughter, one group jumped up and performed. But mostly, it got people right to telling a story about themselves. And all it took was a simple, silly prompt. So te next round, led by Barbara was the unexpected twist- they were charged with retelling the story of the person to their right, to not lose the essence of the story. But we added a twist, a remix if you will, an element they had to add to the story. We had printed cards with the remix and put them under people's chairs, they each got one of the following. Leave something out from the original story without losing the story. Add a metaphor to the story. Add an element of mystery or suspense to the story. End the story with a question. Tell the story as a fable or allegory. Relocate the story to another part of the world without losing the story. Start the story with a provocative hook. Tell the story to someone from a country you have never visited. Tell the story in the first person. Tell the story from a perspective of someone from the opposite gender. Tell the story in reverse chronological order. Create more conflict or tension than was in the original story. Add something unexpected to the original story. Tell the story as part of a sales pitch. Place the story in a different era. Open the story with the ending. We noticed that the retold stories seemed to be done mire quickly then the originals. Draw some conclusions. We had planned for small group discussions about what they observed, but could tell they wanted to have a larger conversation, so we opened up the mics for people to share about their experience. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine There was a remark about the difference of telling someone else's story in front of them, the effort to remain true. Some groups had differing opinions on how one story deviated from the original. But the key outcome was we got a group of 100+ people telling a story from the heart, not their heads, and they freaking loved that, like they had never done such a thing. There is more to debrief from this workshop, but it was a highlight of mine that will glow for a long while, for many reasons. And it cannot be left unsaid as a tribute to Mikhail Gershovich, the warmth and respect his colleagues have for him- this being the 10th Symposium he has masterminded, and actually his last as he is making a big life move to LA. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Mikhail is a friend and an increadible thinker and organizer. The range of things he has been a part of, all with some seed ties to the Symposium, are impressive- cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine During my weeklong visit to Fairbanks Alaska I was fortunate to have met and been asked for a podcast interview with Chris Malmberg, who does this "Digital Beards" series for the University of Alaska Fairbanks eLearning and Distance Education group. Here I am for Digital Beards 10 "“ Alan Levine, DS106, and the Internet We had a nice lunch before this at... oi, I forgot already the name of the locals place we had lunch at, but it was great. We were talking about trying to define the internet, and he had this great rant at how it was like one of those action figure toys you never know exactly what will open up or turn itself into when you press some random button. It sounds silly now, but it totally made sense at the time. I tried to do this for a daily create which was to "draw the internet" (ignore more messup of the hand) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Anyhow we actually talked about beards in the beginning of the podcast, and just when you thought it would be just two guys talking about not shaving, we digressed into the shape of ummms, but then found our way to talking about ds106. While he was recording, I was broadcasting it live to ds106radio, but you get the whole thing in his edit above, down to the last "ds106 radio FOR LIFE" at the end. I really enjoyed meeting Chris and this fun conversation. He is a creative writer and I gotta like a guy who's tagline is "an educator and a clown" cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by Mikey G Ottawa/Street…: http://flickr.com/photos/mikeygottawa/400926090/ I started this blog in 2012 for the first ds106 class I taught at the University of Mary Washington– mainly to be using the same web hosting (then on Cast Iron Coding) my students were using. It has hoisted some class materials for that semester, but mostly since then has idled as a place to occasionally test some WordPress thingies. Starting now (late August 2013), I plan to redeploy it, blast the exterior, and recraft it for creative work as a participant in the Headless ds106 class that has just started. Right now it has a kind of shlocky looking Twenty Eleven theme, so a first fix will some new paint and landscaping: The current ugly look for this site Plus a redo of the menus… Posts here will be in a Headless Tricks category to be fed to the ds106 site. Yeah, that’s what I need… one more blog. If you have been under a rock, buried in email, or not paying attention, a core group of renegade devoted headless ds106ers are pursing art, information, and history of the mysterious and poorly understood GIFaChrome camera. You can find the most current information at http://gifachrome.com/. I have been in contact today with an operative only known to me as “BB” who has managed to sneak his way inside the laboratory (it is too dangerous to reveal the exact location, we believe it might be Armenia or Bulgaria), to at least get us a snapshot of the plans for a new model, the GIFaChrome 300cx, perhaps the most advanced model yet. As far as our leads and research indicates the core functionality of this new camera is the same, but might have some enhanced #D or infrared capabilities. BB was able to steal a schematic diagram for the 300cx. The exactly technology behind this eludes us, but we have some of the top people on the case. Maybe you can help- if you can identify any of these parts or their sources, or any related information, please contact me below. More news later. BB has promised more photos once he gets to his safe house Just one more Slide Guy. Because who would not want to slide on a voyage with Raquel Welch. cc licensed flickr photo shared by tourist_on_earth I've written previously (not that I remembered, I had to use my own blog search) on the challenge of tag juggling when one's tagging habits have sprawled so much one wonders how many can they keep in the air. And its been something we've been discussing for the tagging we ask people to do for the Horizon Project... can they remember the tag? Will they remember the tag? Will they tag? My delicious tags are messy, and rather than clean them up, I just keep sweeping them under the rug, and nudging the door so maybe the guests wont notice my lack of tidy tag keeping. Bu I just lapsed into the more severe case I now coin- Tagnesia- the loss of memory of a tag you have used in the past. I had come across this great flickr set of Academic Evolution images that Gideon Burton makes for his blog of the same name. They are quite useful for future presentations/blog posts, and I knew I had tagged a few before in delicious... and.... I.. could... not... remember.... my..... own tag. Blackness. I got dizzy. Short of breath. I tried browsing the list but it was so long. I tried guessing but failed. So I thought I could backdoor and find one site I had already tagged, it was called.... ummmm.... what was it? Yes! It was buy a woman who's flickr name began with an ?? "L"? or was it "P"? Not good. But I did remember that she had published her collection as a book on Lulu and I had bought the book! It was in my living room on the shelf... no on the coffee table... no it WAS on the shelf. That's it! It is called "Interesting Snippets" Now I have to Google to find it. And there it is! So now, I know I have a secret trick. Oh if I can only remember what it was? I do remember, If I tag this site again, the delicious firefox extension will pull up my previous tagged entry! It does, and now I see the tag I was looking for! It is my own tag 4presos http://delicious.com/cogdog/4presos I found my forgotten tag. Maybe there is Joy in Tagville, tonight. But wait. No! Nooooooooooooooooooooo. The new site I was ready to tag? I HAD TAGGED IT BACK IN MARCH! I have Tagnesia. It's not the first time I lost my head, hopefully not the last. But DS106 is an infectious lovely parasite that for a few of us... well at least me, is something I cannot shake. Heck it got me buying a poncho on Amazon to play my part. I've had a blast doing up nine, count em, nine mashup western106 videos, all the time sharpening my own video chops https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gewrFgO8vk4&list=PLDYiiVgwnVx5WHVtliXkjtYfKHXGePg6z So this is notice I am kind of hanging up (but not dumping, please read on) this idea of running an open course a western version of DS106. It's not feasible to keep this pace up (I spent like 7 hours on it Sunday), especially as I have a pile of web work (that pays my bills) to attend to. Plus I have an upcoming month long full time project in February with Antonio Vantaggiato at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, and another major long term project starting in March. Yes, we stirred up some good excitement, tweeting, and blogging about it. Heck, my good long time friend Cheryl Colan dusted off her blog to sign up (look at her recent glorious GIF post). But the load of rolling out all of the details of the course is a ridiculous task. I've done it before. Twice. And the DS106 Open Course is pretty much the map of it all, available anytime. I doubt anyone is crazy enough to take it all on. I doubt too many people want or even need all of this produced. DS106 does not need another course, it just needs some stuff going on to gather around. And what people are rallying about is the Daily Create. This ain't no quitting or folding up the MOOC and going home. Let's call it picking a new trail in the territory. I'll continue populating (and doing many) of the Daily Creates. Little do you know how fun it is to come up with them, and there is a good supply of them in the barn, thanks to many folks, especially Sandy Brown Jensen. It's a good way for people to be in the creative mix, and some folks really take them a long way in blog posts. I'll do at least the High Noon Radio show through the end of January, maybe beyond. That does not take much to do, beyond the futzing, and a lot of people signed up to be guests. You want to do a class? Follow along with, participate, and support the students in Paul Bond's class -- follow his course and do the assignments he puts out at http://ds106tal.es. There is another new DS106 class from Colorado University Denver that just hitched to the DS106 syndication bus, so there will be ore activity from that group. Heck people will still do stuff in twitter. I don't think people need me cranking out goofy videos and long assignment posts to do a Western106. All I am doing is getting off the horse in front, and joining the rest of the mob behind. This ain't adios. Top / Featured Image Credit: My photo. yeah, all mine. But it can be yours too, I give it all away, I license my life as CC-BY Hordes of edubloggers and more are descending on San Antonio for the NECC 2008 show ("the National Educational Computing Conference, the world's largest educational technology conference for teachers and technology coordinators"). They will be a'blogging, twittering, flickring, tagging, ning-ing... see Vicki Davis' coverage plan via netvibes. Colleagues like Hey Jude Judy O'Connell are winging in from Sydney. It's not on my gig list, but will keep tuned via all the channels. I got a bit reflective, and remembered going to NECC 1995, when I was only 2 years into the instructional technology game, and green as can be. I cannot exactly remember how I chose to go to, but bet a large part was because it was in Baltimore, and I got to be a tourist in my home town. And I actually found my original notes from that conference which were kind of humorous to read. I remember being excited to have met Helen Barrett for the first time, and there she was really doing innovative early work in electronic portfolio concepts. I recall we made a solid connection, but strangely enough, my cryptic notes only mention "PaperPort Scanner $300". ?? If blogs existed then mine would have included this rant on "boring sessions" I will slip comatose if I attend another session where a presenter boldly proclaims "The Sage on the Stage must give away to the Guide on the Side" and then proceeds to turn down the lights, flip on the projector, and monotonely lectures to a nodding choir. Too much HyperCard... where is the cutting edge? anyone can write a home page, big deal. There was also a lot of discussions of internet connectivity; remember this was pre web hype days. It's not in my notes, but I remember a funny titled session, "If I SLIP and fall on my PPP, will it hurt?" Anyhow, if you are going to NECC, be sure to pry a little bit of time to peek around San antonio, which is a whole lore more than the River Walk. Stretched Out posted 12 Feb '08, 12.00am MST PST on flickr Fresa uses my laptop bag for a pillow Just to be clear, Fresa said, "Start blogging again" so the gates are opening.... flickr foto This Old Phoneavailable on my flickr This may shatter my reputation as a techie, but I have hung on to this Nokia phone since 2001-- I really am not a huge mobile phone user, and I come it at max maybe 150 minutes a month. All this phone does is enable me to make phone calls (shocking), though in fits of boredom, I have played "Snake" on it. As you may notice, it has been sporting a lovely bit of duct tape to keep the battery connected. But Old Nokie is now retired, and I am sending this phone via my new Motoroloa V10, a camera phone that I used to take this picture. Actually, I first got a Nokia 6225i but never got it to send pictures nor could anyone at the store or the tech support line. Hint- never buy a new phone at the store where it is so new, the employee do not know how to use it. I am now using phone technology that ahs been around for 2-3 years. I guess I am a phone Luddite or Lagger. I bare my soul in being not much of a techie in terms of cell phones. That said, having snapped a few camera phone photos and emailing to friends and directly to flickr via their easy access, I am rather startled that I cannot easily find many or any examples of this simple and readily available technology in a context of learning. Oh sure, plenty of us (self included) write about its potential, but where are the examples? People are writing about citizen journalism but where are the citizen Photojournalists? The cases where students are using phone technology as reporting devices? We have in wide distribution a simple technology tool that would allow students to be roving reporters, or to gather field data (observations of natural or man made phenmomena) or documentation or projects or ... I am thinking of things like coverage of the 2004 wildfires in Southern California or the BBC's News program of Your Pictures, Your News. But it need not be news that is the sort of data collected / reported by phone. Maybe I have missed it, but isn't this a ripe and rich area for teachers to tap into as a learning tool? I am sure they are out there, hidden beyond the reach of Google way out there on the Long Tail... Yesterday I co-presented as part of four amigos for MacLearning Environments on (Many, Too Many?) Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Open, Connected, and Social. This was carried out via Elluminate hosted at the University of Calgary. The players were D'Arcy Norman, Brian Lamb, myself, and Jim Groom and we had a nice peppy crowd show up there. When we brainstormed our topic, we ended up nostalgic and reflective of a show three of us did way back in 2004 on connecting decentralized web content with RSS -- "Small Pieces Loosely Joined"-- and almost laughing at how primitive some of the tools were back then! But the approach still rings true for us, maybe even more so today, that the path is not with large controlled systems, but the use, re-use, of separate systems and tools that we can connect using powerful underlying protocols like RSS and OPML. The approach for discussing this was we each took 4 corners/topics, and wrote up some stuff on a wiki site-- with D'Arcy screensharing,, and clicking the visuals as we bantered. Jim was first, talking up the blog+wiki or bliki or ??? combining his folks are doing at University of Mary Washington. Next, DJ Lamb was on to groove on mashups. D'Arcy was showing some eye opening new things he was going with BlogBridges library to pursue the elusive EduGlu concept. For some bizarre reason, I opted to take on Social Connectivity. For my piece, I did not even aim to cover all that is possible on social software or social networking tools (15 minutes on the clock) - instead took a bit to contrast my experience in creating connections between LinkedIn and Twitter. And because it is hot, not exactly a quick leap to connect to education, I chose to focus on the intrigue and curiosity of twitter. As hopefully seen as a nod of appreciation to the style of Kathy Sierra, I did a cheap knock-off graph: which I have both experienced and continue yo watch others go through. This is meant not to be a precise prediction, but I see it is a helpful way to remember to approach technologies with an open mind before jumping to conclusions (not that I have that perfected!) When I first heard about twitter, it reminded me of the Dullest Blog in The World, but my spark was following Cole's line of interest and experimentation. So I quickly talked over some of the growing list of twitter viewing/publishing tools and interesting things people are doing with twitter. Wow, the library in nearby Casa Grande Arizona has rigged a library RSS feed that auto twits. Twittervision is hypnotic and becomes yet anther net-addiction. John Edwards has 2228 friends. Andy Carvins ponders if twitter can save lives? Churches are tweeting while others look at ways to use it to monitor server status. In the end, I diagnose myself with SNF: This was a really great jam session for the 4 of us (and let's give El Guapo a hand for chiming in from the audience! He's an amigo. We all got a lot out of planning and discussion, and thinking of what the small pieces approach might mean. It's not a panacea, not a magic bullet, but seems an intriguing and appropriate way to think of content, information flow going to the next decimal point in history. My colleagues and I had another full on day of absorbing and observing at MIT. the night before, our host and contact Phil Long took us to an outstanding Afghan restaurant in Cambridge, called Helmand. Friday started with a bit of blue sky, but the snow did not wait long to start its thing. In the morning we met with Ben Brophy who is working on the user interface and design guides for the Sakai project, the open source course management system being developed by Indiana, Michigan, Stanford, and a bunch of other heavyweight universities. You cannot tell a whole lot about a system in a quick demo, but I can vouch it exists, that many great minds and hands are working on it. The gradebook is just being worked on, but we saw a bit of course content, the discussion boards, the "MyWorkspace" portal like view. There is much to be done interface-wide (IMHO) as it feels very much a document and list hierarchy so no more or less different from current CMS-es. MIT is doing this in pilot phase, as they have Stellar, their home grown CMS that has been around long enough to build a good sized user base. They are not jumping in as quickly as what we hear about Michigan and Indiana, where they have done the full leap into Sakai for current students. I do wonder if these enterprise systems are an incremental change from what we have now; yes I full understand the potential for add-ins once Sakai is ready for prime time, but for institutions like ours that lack the horsepower to do the integration/conversion of atop university, if the gains will be seen as worth the leap of change. Next we visited with Kurt Fendt and sat in on a discussion with his students in the Comparative Media Studies Group. They have an interesting media management system called MetaMedia which is a web database of images, documents, videos, sounds files etc mostly for content in the Humanities. Based on open standards, the Metamedia framework allows the formation of learner communities across disciplines and distances and ensures interoperability with a wide range of current and future media resources. In MetaMedia, users can create their own "collections" by selecting from icons in subject "archives", thus building personal collections of media. From here, people can add comments and build discussions with others around the digital artifacts, and these are then tools of reflection used to support a wide range of Humanities research projects. People can also upload their own media, with manually entered meta data via a web form. It has a bit of an eportfolio and a "rip mix" feel, I asked about the potential of folksonomy like tags for informal connections. Next it was a dash over to the Media Lab where we met with some folks involved in projects in the Human Dynamics Group . After a quick overview of some of the projects, we sat in for a bit of a "class" which has not your sterotypical sitting in rows inside a box of a room. We were more in a lounge/studio part of the building, sitting on soft couches, listening to one of the group members sharing the results of his research project. And it was not a lecture, as it became a forum of interaction, as people freely tossed out ideas, comments, suggestions. This project was in the Reality Mining Project and was fascinating! In vague detail, it involved providing students a cell phone that had been re-programmed to send information about its location and activities back to a central server, so there was continual data gathering of physical location, and algorithms applied to make good guesses about what sorts of activities the cell phone owner was doing. But it also used Bluetooth to find out what other enabled users were in proximity, so there is a whole layer of social dynamics and group interaction that can be extrapolated from the data. The Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest academic mobile phone projects in the US. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations. We are currently capturing communication, proximity, location, and activity data from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of this academic year. Such rich data about complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. It is our hope that this research will help us explore research questions including: * How do incoming students' social networks evolve over time? * How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives? * Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data? * How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning? It was mind-blowing, and we hated to leave, but we were shuttled off to another session where the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature faculty were being given an overview of electronic portfolios. The interesting thing here is that it is a relatively unknown concept here, so they are at the place of trying to figure out what kind of eport they need (assessment, showcase, etc) and looking at what others are doing. The discussions seemed a bit tilted toward the assessment type portfolio (I did toss out the question for them to think who the eport is for- the student or the institution, or both). We shared some of our Ocotillo work in eportfolios as well as the things we got from our recent eportfolio dialogue day. It is very odd to think that we are a bit ahead of MIT ;-) The do have an installation of the Open Source Portfolio system. The last stop was in the Lego Learning Lab in the lower part of the Media Lab where we heard a bit from Oren who is in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group (love the name) in trying to understand how kids can learn abstract thinking or mathematical thinking from a set of simple blocks, lights, and other effects. It is some very cool stuff, the whole place is a giant "what if" studio of technology, learnig, human behavior. Beyond seeing a few cutting edge things, the real outcome here was meeting some people in person, and more so, getting a sense of how innovation and experimentation play out here. On one hand, there are your standard square classrooms, auditorium lecture halls, and blacKboards covered in chalk with Calculus, but many other places that have the chaotic studio / lab type environment that seems to faciliate exploration. And the shear brain power radiating across the campus is dizzying. We also set up some agreements for some cooperation on the iCampus project which offers us access to some interesting interactive web contral-able experiments and simulation applications developed at MIT. And to top it off, we had a fantastic seafood dinner in North End (The Daily Catch) and were surrounded by a buzz of thick, loud, Bostonian accents. Well, not exactly true. I made it up for the purposes of sensationalism. I have a fair idea what Technorati does at a conceptual level, and used it in the past for things like conferences where bloggers may actually use the same tag. Their data lets us know the blogosphere is expanding at a rate that will soon encompass the edge of the universe where the lingua franca is not English. I cannot say I use it on much of a regular basis, but shyly admit I have my own vanity feed as it is rather interesting when a blogger you never heard of is writing about to linking to you. For all the blogging effort, our egos need regular feeding, I admit it. Actually I like checking in on these remote connections, as it is a social network capability that did not exist BB (before blogging). But mostly, my technorati feed is a mishmosh of mostly blogs that perhaps have a link in their sidebar (and what happens that triggers a fresh TechnoPing?) I get some things popping up that are from blog posts that are months old, and some that make a trip twice. So the whole thing is a bit mysterious and shrouded in techno fog. I seem to get a better set by looking at the Dashboard of my WordPress blog. So I am not criticizing Technorati, nor am I sullen because I am not in the Top 100, 1000, 10000 or 10000000000. I just do not even partly understand what it does, but my feed does seem to stagger around like it was on something. Maybe it's just me. Last week was the third leg of a 3 week cross country trip by train. I was not planning to be part of a ds106 radio show project for the summer 2013 5 week madcap section of ds106 Jim Groom is teaching. But this idea got in my head, in that ds106 way that I know I will put aside almost everything else (eating, sleeping, doing productive so called work) until I got it out of my system. Submitted for your approval, To Serve Learners, was created in about 2 days with audio assists from Giulia Forsythe, Brian Short, Rochelle Lockridge, Brian Bennett, and Jim Groom. This was edited completely during the 32 hour train trip from Chicago to Flagstaff, AZ. https://soundcloud.com/cogdog/to-serve-learners My first thought was a redo of the William Shatner freakout Nightmare at 20,000 Ft recast for my trip by railroad, but got lost on figuring out what the monster would be doing to the train from the outside. Sometimes you have to let the idea simmer. Or just go cold. The big idea came out of the blue (actually when I was looking for episode scripts). To Serve Man always ranked as my one of my all time episodes, for the hook that you should have seen coming but did not. But it also plays into our hopes and expectations for magic solutions to complex problems... maybe some friendly 9 foot tall creepy headed aliens might help? For just their altruistic spirit? Yeah, just walk onto that spaceship for the promise of a better planet. I found a full script online, and set about re-writing in a Google Doc, with the idea I would invite other open participants to help write and record (you can find this script and working notes). And the premise, my one, was to change it up so the aliens were not from outer space, but from outside education: The aliens in this case are from Silicon Valley and the galaxy of Business Innovation, the UdaXerians, and they arrive unexpectedly at an EDUCAUSE conference with all the answers to educational problems, via their superior technology. Educators are enthralled with the massive potential and cost savings, and are eager to accept the Udaxerians pledge to serve learners everywhere, for free. The skeptical are ignored, but one woman finds a tablet device left behind, and is able to hack to to find out what the "To Serve Learners" app is-- the real thing the Udaxerians are seeking- what powers their systems are the minds and personal data of people crammed full of MOOC courses. But most of education blindly goes aboard the MOOC ship, with promises of a Perfect Pedgagy at the San Jose headquarters, and no one can hear her cry-- "IT'S A COOKBOOK" For reference, the original version (no longer available) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x80j7it Working at Dr Garcia's learning center at Oakton Community College, I found it took way longer to write the script-- because as I started comparing the script to the video, there were significant differences, first noted in Serling's opening and closing remarks, but entire sections were changed. I assume the script is a first draft. So it ended up talking maybe 3 or four hours of transcribing/re-writing. It was fun, though I wish I had found Draft a cool new web writing all that allows you to embed a video/audio and transcribe in the same space. I put a call out on twitter (dead link alert, curse you musktoid) https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/342280235456282624 https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/342821152495898625 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7j7JgjIcNc (click to see full size) A challenge of Audacity in dealing with so many small bits is keeping track of the tracks. Ideally every different bit should be its own track (especially when you get some sound in mono or at different sample rates). I started with tracks for different kinds of audio (music, sound effects, characters) but just started using them willy nilly. You can squeeze tracks together vertically using the little divider line between tracks to see more on a view. But it is pretty essential to assemble the project in time, from left to right. If you go back and try editing or inserting into tracks, it can messup the timing later down the track. At some point near the end I was fiddling and managed to really munge things up- I had to save the project as a new file, extract the new bits, and modify the last saved version (save often! save often!) My tactic was to keep a scratch Audacity file open to import my clips into, then edit or select the parts needed, and copy to the main. I aim to layer my sounds so there is never isolate dialogue without some kind of ambient sound, I got the throbbing of the spaceship from the original, and used some other sound effects to be the machine noise for the technical lab. A part I could have done more with was the EDUCAUSE audience sound; I used some random crowd sounds that Rochelle had found on Freesound, they are actually in non English languages, but is not exactly the sound for a conference audience. To mix them up, I sometimes layered 2 or three tracks, and messed around with the levels using the Envelope tool. I could not isolate the bridge and dramatic music of the original (well worth listening to the way they used music), so I used repeatedly this track Ice Demon from the ever useful Incompetech royalty free music collection. Other audio credits include (I hope I got them all) Twilight Zone Opening Theme (Grant Potter sent me an mp3 but can be extracted from this YouTube vlide) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVSRm80WzZk We've Got to Get Out of This Place (The Animals) - 1.5 seconds used to represent when Chanbers drops his iPod in the opening sequence, get it? I have the tune but it of course is on the tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxNEiZhpinY Click the start button and computer starting (machine news for lab and for start-up of video) http://www.freesound.org/people/Zabuhailo/sounds/146957/ RG Wall Punch (opening scene when Chambers is frustrated) http://www.freesound.org/people/cmusounddesign/sounds/95839/ Footsteps ( http://www.freesound.org/people/jmdh/sounds/178990/ Ice Demon (dramatic music, used in background of Chambers' narration and musica bridges) http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1200061 Door close (used when Pat Brody enters the lab) http://www.freesound.org/people/THE_bizniss/sounds/53269/ Laptop keyboard (used when Pat Brody explains her decoding) http://www.freesound.org/people/guitarguy1985/sounds/52052/ Large Crowd Chatter (background at EDUCASE conference) http://www.freesound.org/people/Kyster/sounds/124027/ Crowd in Opera Lobby (background at EDUCASE conference) http://www.freesound.org/people/makosan/sounds/34709/ VCR Tone (misc electronic noise for start of decoding device) http://www.freesound.org/people/AMPUL/sounds/29719/ Lab Sound http://www.freesound.org/people/heatfuse/sounds/13302/ Light Switches (subtle, in second lab scene as Chambers is shutting off machines) http://www.freesound.org/people/klangfabrik/sounds/117788/ Takeoff airplanes (when Chambers is taken away at end) http://www.freesound.org/people/mario1298/sounds/155787/ Computer Lab 1: The sounds from the computer lab I work. People walking by, me typing, and the continuous hum of the printer. http://www.freesound.org/people/shewbox/sounds/59868/ Okay, so once again I am mocking MOOCs. They are so mockable. And Cole Camplese might get his shorts twisted over it (dude you know it's not a cookbook). I am not saying that the MOOC companies are out to eat us literally. But it's worth considering-- before we buy into all the promise-- what are their motives? What are we ceding? Finally, to illustrate the brilliance of the original show's writing, and something I did not notice until I was poring over the script. In explaining how she was trying to decode the book, Pat Brody explained: I'm studying their language. I remember a professor of mine told me that language reflects the basic assumptions of the people who use it. And therein, snuck in the script, is the real plot, how we read language and may miss the basic assumptions of the people using it, in this case, Serling played with the implied meaning of the word "serve" (though critics of the plot make some hay about the same double meaning being part of the alien's language). Last week, we gave our online students an activity on Copyright and Fair Use: Do the Right Thing, which I have also recently posted in the Maricopa Learning eXchange: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=1264 The subject merits almost an entire course in itself, but we boiled it down to sending them to to excellent web tutorials: (1) Intellectual Property Law: Why Should I Care?- Carlos And Eddie in 'Rock Machine' is a nicely designed site geared for students based on the story of the antics of two cartoon drawn college students. (2) University of Texas Copyright Tutorial has a great wealth of information found inside the UT Crash Course on Copyright They were to review each site, take the simple online quiz from each, and post a discussion board message about their "scoires" and what they learned. Unfortunately, it seems we needed to spell out very specific questions for them to respond to besides "I liked the site". However, our follow-up activity this week is soaring like an eagle! We have invited a guest expert, an associate dean of instruction from one of our colleges that has probably the most experience in this area. Dr. Mary Lou Mosley participated a few years back (as the only rep from a community college) in a national task force of educators and copyright holders to develop fair use guidelines for educators. She has a great presentation online called "©opyright Doesn't Mean "Copy it Outright!". The activity was for them to pose two specific questions (related to the course or content they teach) on copyright, fair use, intellectual property-- Mary Lou offered to visit the discussion area once on three days this week. This is also turning out to be a great example of the power of using the internet to bring in remote experts-- typically people think of doing this as live chat sessions, but with our smaller class size and schedules, synchronous meeting is not feasible. Some questions already posed: (more…) An issue on a site leads to a solution that almost no one besides me can figure out, so we go at it again. Now there is happiness (infer). One of the more confusing aspects of running Wordpress as multi-site is the meaning of the role of Administrator. On a self-hosted single Wordpress site, as the administrator, you are god-like. You can do anything, you can install themes & plugins, you can use any kind of HTML in your posts. That's what people expect as having that role. But in multisite, that god-like power is only for the Network Administrator(s) who also have the ability to add users across the system and create new sites. But as person who is an Administrator of a single site (not the Network Admin) you are more like a Junior Administrator-- you can only enable plugins and themes the Network Admin has made available. It's really not the same role. There is one more crucial frustrating limit. As a site / junior admin within a Multisite network, like anyone else (Editor, author), you are limited into what kind of HTML you can use in a post-- you cannot include JavaScript, iframes, more or less any HTML based embed codes from other sites. These are what Wordpress calls "unfiltered HTML" and are stripped out when a post is saved. "But why? I am an administrator on my site?" users will (rightfully ask). Well, Junior, you are actually not a full administrator. The answer (and I am making some broad guesses) is security. The way multisite is developed seems to be for big networks where one copy of Wordpress might be running hundreds, thousands of sites. Naked Javascript and embed codes are potentially sources of hacks that can be injected. If you are running that many sites, a hack on one affects them all. What has often happened to me, is that as a network admin, I author a page/post with some Javascript or an iframe in it, publish, and it works. But maybe another user on the site who is an admin or en editor, spots a typo in the post (nothing related to the code I added), fixes it, and when they save it, the embeds or script code is borked-- because it is stripped out. You can find a wide range of ways around this, all seems a bit kind of hackish to me. Not all multisite instances re designed for hosting blogs for a community; for many of my projects or sites such as ds106, it benefits from sharing themes, plugins, the user database for maybe 2-5 maybe 7 sites. IMHO it would be nice as a person who sets up a multisite to choose whether to apply this limitation. That's the scene setting, now the plot. I lend a hand or two with the Virtually Connecting site, which until a few months ago, was a single site. When Rebecca Hogue asked about creating a second site for the ePatients arm of VC, using the same theme and plugins, it seemed to make sense at the time to convert the primary site to multisite (in hindsight I might have just added a second site, but you go 20/20 hindsight). That went smoothly so we have one sister site http://epatients.virtuallyconnecting.org/. We have a number of people who create blog posts for events, about 23 on the site, most are editor or author roles. And now we get to the first problem I did not anticipate. For out live events we generate a World Time Buddy event widget: [caption id="attachment_64388" align="aligncenter" width="630"] sample Time Buddy Widget[/caption] I really like this thing, It presents the time of the event on top, and converts to the bottom one which represents the time on whatever zone a visitor is in (plus a nice countdown thing on the right). An author for a post like the upcoming one for the Creative Commons Summit might add a few of these. So an author goes to the World Time Buddy Events Widget maker, sets the time zone for where the conference is taking place, sets the start date and time.... [caption id="attachment_64389" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Setting the World Time Buddy event widget options[/caption] ... then they copy this embed code: Time converter at worldtimebuddy.com Time converter at worldtimebuddy.com Now if I or another Network Admin uses this embed code, it looks fine. But if someone with a different author rule creates the post, or edits one of my numerous typos, when they save it, the embed code that worked for me disappears. It confuses everybody in the mix. So I decided to help. One way around the limitations of unfiltered HTML is to create a Wordpress shortcode, kind of like a way to tell a post or page when it is rendered to swap out a place holder for the embed code with the real real. Looking at the embed code, the part that is needed is in the src=".." and actually just the part after .js?. My first effort to "help" people was tell them to generate the widget code at the Timebuddy site, and copy the part of that src=".." string as the value in the shortcode I made for params, or [timebuddy params="h=6167865&md=4/28/2017&mt=14.50&ml=1.00&sts=0&sln=0&wt=ew-ltc"] I did some testing, broke a few things, and then got it working. This is code I added to the theme's functions.php (actually it is a child theme, always do child themes, always do child themes, always do child themes...): /* ----- shortcode to time buddy widget -------- */ add_shortcode("timebuddy", "do_vc_timebuddy"); function do_vc_timebuddy ( $atts ) { // generate a Timebuddy widget because WP strips script tags extract( shortcode_atts( array( "params" => ""), $atts ) ); if ( empty( $params ) ) { return "Missing parameter! set params=\"xxxxx\" from the Timebuddy generated embed code for src=\" e.g. params=\"h=2643743&md=2/24/2017&mt=19.50&ml=1.00&sts=0&sln=0&wt=ew-ltc\" after the \"?\""; } else { return 'Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comTime converter at worldtimebuddy.com'; } } I used it a few times and tried to explain in our Slack how to use my "neat" trick. Everyone just nodded and just did it they way they did before. Yanking a part of a URL out of some HTML blobs was a bit steep for most humans. So that idea lead to another. What works for people is copying the embed code from Time Buddy and pasting the whole shebang in the editor. My idea was to add a button to the Wordpress editor that would pop open a dialog box, that someone could paste in the embed code, and I run some code that converts it to the shortcode. I have done a few mods to the wordpress editor (called TinyMCE) for other projects, sometimes with a plugin. I poked around the internet and the best explanation for what I was doing came in a post from Gavick Pro (it actually did way more than I needed so I skipped a bunch. I first had to figure out how to get the embed code in via Javascript and to yank out the part I needed for the shortcode, so I mocked up a real simple HTML test file: Timebuddy test Enter the Timebuddy Widget Event code Try it With a bit of fiddling I got it to work. Next, I went to figure out how to roll this into the Wordpress interface, adding more or less a small plugin to the editor. In researching I found out that TinyMCE has it's own built in pop up window manager that is cleaner than a standard Javascript prompt one. This code goes into my Wordpress child theme functions.php, it more or less tells Wordpress to add a button to the editor. /* ----- editor buttons for time buddy widget -------- */ add_action('admin_head', 'timebuddy_buttons'); function timebuddy_buttons() { add_filter( "mce_external_plugins", "timebuddy_add_buttons" ); add_filter( 'mce_buttons', 'timebuddy_register_buttons' ); } function timebuddy_add_buttons( $plugin_array ) { $plugin_array['timebuddy'] = get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/timebuddy_widget.js'; return $plugin_array; } function timebuddy_register_buttons( $buttons ) { array_push( $buttons, 'timebuddy'); return $buttons; } The real work is done in the Javascript code that sites in the js directory of the theme as timebuddy_widget.js: (function() { tinymce.PluginManager.add('timebuddy', function( editor, url ) { editor.addButton( 'timebuddy', { text: 'TB', icon: false, onclick: function() { editor.windowManager.open( { title: 'World Timebuddy Event Widget', body: [{ type: 'textbox', name: 'code', label: 'Paste Code' }], onsubmit: function( e ) { if ( e.data.code.indexOf('class="wtb-ew-v1"') !== -1) { pstart = e.data.code.indexOf('.js?') + 4; pend = e.data.code.indexOf('script>') - 4; editor.insertContent( '[timebuddy params="' + e.data.code.substring(pstart, pend) + '"]'); } else { editor.windowManager.alert('Sorry, that does not seem to be a valid Timebuddy Event Widget code.'); return false; } } }); } }); }); })(); I could have gotten fancy and made the button an icon, but TB seems to work well. Sooooo, now any author in the site can generate the Timebuddy Event Widget, copy the whole clump of HTML embed code. In the Virtually Connecting site, they click the TB button, and paste in that clump: And when they click ok, they get the shortcode that will make the widget appear when published And now it works more closely to the way people would expect it to. That was a bit of a longish overview of what it took to add one little button. But as always, in going from one thing to another, I learned a few new tricks. Now just to be clear, this is wired into my theme; I guess if I really had my stuff together, I would roll all of this int a plugin. Maybe next week, I need to flip that record and hear the rest of The FIXX... Featured image: 1983-05-09 'Reach The Beach' by The Fixx [Japan JVC for U.S. MCA Records Pressing] flickr photo by Wishbook shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license -- cropped to emphasize the title of track 1. I remember a lot of these songs coming through the early years of MTV I spent a few hours in the New York Public Library archives, down in the basement, combing through piles of uncatalogued photographs. In one dusty corner was a box marked "Unpublished Bay Watch Set Shots". Leafing through photos from guest appearances, I was surprised to identify a shot of Bryan Alexander. On the back, notes said: "Alexander played part of herbert Rosenstein, a walmart sales executive who has a dangerous fall from a surfboard in which he was an encounter with a romantic seal" The script is in the box too, but it is highly damaged from what appear to be large coffee spills. I’m not here today to foment insurrection (maybe tomorrow), but this the time to mark another orbital round. A loop that is round, but not back to the original start. More spiral. My sister's card came timed exactly right offering wishes of mailing Baltimore steamed crabs. And I missed the call with my little big sister (will catch you tomorrow). A perfect evening was ramen and sushi at Mitsu cafe in Moose Jaw with my darling Cori. Laughs and coffee and plans for camping and tree planting and just reveling in our portable universe. And then we got a surprise call, singing and talks of a summer visit from the Laramie cousins. Also gifted today was a shot of cortisone in each wrist courtesy of Dr Hand and waiting now for Pain to take a vacation. What more does a person need? I’d been pondering some kind of spreadsheet with a place to enter mine and my Dad’s birthdays so I could calculate for say for my age now how old was I when Dad was my current age, etc. I guess I should just vibe code it, but I refuse. I will mull the idea more before giving it a try. Or not. I don’t know if there is a name for this number but now I have done the same number of solar revolutions as the 2 digit year I started. The best gift is just being here to write and remember and make plans and keep on going, and for ***** sake be careful near cliff edges Jim and everyone else I care about. I’m here to keep playing Twister, thanks Judy for this backyard memory. I spot dad observing from his lawn chair. circa 1968 maybe, me ignoring the game while our neighbors the Lawsons playing Twister I’m here for me all the loops I can swing, here on this weird planet with my true love. 63 and out. Not. Featured Image: 2014/365/18 Lunar Orbit flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Barclay Maybe y'all have shrugged and dropped back into Facebook timelines, Google Plus Circles, or Twitter chats. I am not letting go of being Pissed Off at Google for dropping the depth charges on Google Reader. So made I cannot even spell annihilation https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/354386515696164866 Google's claim is they "Do No Evil" -- but what constitutes evil just be in the eye of the beholder. They could have frozen reader, or just made it possible not to add to it-- but Google has completely deleted it from the fabric of the web, leaving a gaping hole. To someone who loves data, destroying it might just be... Evil-ish. I was fortunate ro have taken the steps to do a complete download of my Google Reader archive before the Google dropped their Non Evil Bomb of Data Destruction using the Reader is Dead toolset. Just for comparison, the Takeout archive I ran from Google itself was about 180 Mb of data. the one from Reader is Dead was 10 Gb. And you though Nixon had a big gap with 18 minutes of missing tape. What I have essentially is a copy of the data of every site I ever read in Google Reader, since December 1, 2006 -- in fact, I found my blog post from that first date-- Google Reader I am in Love. Google had tracked everything I had Read in Reader, Shared in Reader, and Favorited in Reader-- and they just tossed that in the trash. Dead Data. If that not Evil, then it is Mean, Childish, and at least Fucking Rude for Google to just delete. But now I at least can access to it via that archive and the newer Zombie Reader tool- this is sheer brilliance, and at least gives us a bit of a way to say FUCK YOU GOOGLE. Having gotten all my data out of Google Reader, the next step was to do something with it. I wrote a simple tool to dump data given an item ID, which let me do spot checks that the archived data was complete. A more complete browsing UI was needed, but this proved to be slow going. It's not a hard task per se, but the idea of re-implementing something that I worked on for 5 years didn't seem that appealing. It then occurred to me that Reader is a canonical single page application: once the initial HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. payload is delivered, all other data is loaded via relatively straightforward HTTP calls that return JSON (this made adding basic offline support relatively easy back in 2007). Therefore if I served the archived data in the same JSON format, then I should be able to browse it using Reader's own JavaScript and CSS. Thankfully this all occurred to me the day before the Reader shutdown, thus I had a chance to save a copy of Reader's JavaScript, CSS, images, and basic HTML scaffolding. The Zombie Reader Tools brings back my entire Google Reader history! Wow Audrey Watters, I sure hope you grabbed your archiv, because in much less time, you had read 4 times as many things as I had https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/351918882161831936 Here is my Zombie Reader that I as able to load into a web browser and use: [caption id="attachment_23290" align="aligncenter" width="500"] (click image for full size)[/caption] Google had axed the sharing features back in 2011, but this tool is still able to yield some 50,000 items people in my network had shared in their reader use: [caption id="attachment_23291" align="aligncenter" width="500"] (click image for full size)[/caption] I can move through my feeds and folders, back in time, starting with the last bits of things I read in my edtech feeds at the end if June 2013: [caption id="attachment_23292" align="aligncenter" width="500"] (click image to see full size)[/caption] The tool lets me go to the beginning of time, the first feeds I read in November 2006, from none other at Gardner Campbell- the source is something from a Regional NMC conference I had set up as a early feed in exploring Reader: or a classic Kotke in a dated way doing something recursive with another old school tool And an older Abject post from Brian Lamb, he was at the races... The Zombie Archive has the records of things I read from blogs that do not exist anymore. Maybe one limit I can see now is I cannot search the archive (that would take a lot of muscle to do in Javascript), but I am assured at least knowing that a giant store of data is there (it is all XML file .json data files). If anything, this is sobering to realize how much data Google was storing just from reader activity- 10 Gb for one persons habits over 7 years. This was made possible to extract using public APIs and tools brilliantly written by Mihai Parparita-- and keep in mind, this is much more data that Google itself was releasing in its own Takeout tool (of course holding back my data is not Evil) (nor is throwing it away). And even large question is- did Google really delete all this data or did they just take it offline? cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Pete Morawski Thanks again Mihai! At least this Dog is a Walking Zombie, and able to at least walk around knowing I have my pile of data.