Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Last weekend I built a fence around a vegetable garden in our yard. I am not really much of a craftsman, but this project came out pretty nice. Working with the hands got me thinking about (reaching for the metaphor) building things out of learning objects. I have harped before that there has been way too much emphasis on the creation of the "repositories" and the piles of meta-data, and the search tools- and almost nothing on the craft, the art, the magic, of building something out of the things inside the collections. Last week at one of our faculty instructional technology meetings, we were trying to get some commitment to taking on the learning object issue. There was the usual tired, over-trodden attempts at definitions, a lot of shrugging, and then the often worded desire for some sort of magic, point and click tools that would assemble LOs into meaningful learning activities. As the line goes in the hilarious Australian comedy The Castle: "Dreamin'!" But as I worked on that fence I thought about what an un-realistic, un-attainable, expectation this dream places on technology... (more…) For those that have beeing following (or not) the Learning Object experiment's here (see Back to TrackBack), we have applied the MovableType Trackback concept to every item in the Maricopa Learning eXchange. With some time to tinker today, I cooked up a new trackback summary tool that allows one to check out the trackbacks across our site. It is ugly, ugly code, a very un-elegant hack, but it is a concept that can illustrate (maybe) what the potnetial is for TrackBack and Learning Objects. So what? (more…) This blog will go into a period of non-activity the next few days as I work on a project requiring me to pretend to be a tourist in the Rocky Mountains. There will not be anything else posted on "project mini vacation" Scott Leslie recently wrote about using Rollup to put together a super feed of his favorite educablogger's furl and deli.icio,us feeds: lots of folks have separate Furl and del.icio.us sites/feeds. I've been subscribing to one or two of them in the past, but wanted to get all the ed tech bloggers' bookmark feeds in one place. So off I went to Rollup.org, where I created a new RSS feed that rolled up the Furl or del.icio.us RSS feeds from Alan, Brian Lamb, James Farmer, Greg Ritter, George Siemens, Trey Martindale, Harold Jarche, Will Richardson, D'Arcy Norman and myself. I would have added more, but these were all I could find. So the handy thing about this is that I can subscribe to one feed in my bloglines account and see all the URLs collected by all these brainy folks. which is syndicating from http://rollup.org/rollup/rollup.php?id=495 So we can say Scott is doing some new ripping and mixing of feeds, stuff we like to see. I'm not very familiar with what RollUp does-- it sounds like what Blogdigger spins out as well- the nifty thing Blogdigger does that no other web-based RSS tool does is to save a cache or history of past entries that have come through-- do old items in Rollup fall off the edge of the Roll? I think Bloglines keeps a record as well (true?)The downside of Blogdigger is the lag sometimes 24 hours, for new content to appear. The other thing I noticed peeking at the source is that Rollup seems to mal-parse the Furl pubDate fields (you can guess that is happening if dates appear as December 1969) and seems to mis the Furl descriptions tags... but wait a mjinute, I peeked at the source of my own Furl RSS and see that Furl lumps many things it;s own RSS 1.0 custom fields (which is perfectly XML valid) but note that odd </description> tags that have no opener: <item> <title>Radio X-Factor: Podcasting University</title> <link>http://www.furl.net/forward.jsp?id=1374192</link> <description /> <category>social tech</category> <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=1374192</guid> <pubDate>Fri, 26 Nov 2004 16:49:12 GMT</pubDate> <furl:rating>3</furl:rating> <furl:clipping>Think of Podcasting as something like a Tivo for your iPod (though it isn't exactly like that). </furl:clipping> </item> which looks a little less than kosher to me. I am trying to make a point that mixing and recasting RSS can be a tricky thing, and have to admit that Feedburner does a rather elegant job of translating different RSS formats to a clean format. Actually my use of Feedburner was purely an experiment to what they did- I cannot say it really has a grand penultimate purpose. That said, my using Furl has really not been in the interest of publishing anything important to others- it is my own source for tracking relevant sites that I can come back to and search later. It is purely selfish, It does seem a bit weird at first that others would be interested in my furling, as it is pretty much without pattern-- weeks of intense furling to ones of no action at all. And then I even use del.icio.us to a lesser extent, more out of a curiosity and some experiments to find links to some more off beat corners of the net. I am more interested in the mixing and matching of collective bookmarking both here, and the amazon-like recommending feature of Furl ("People who furled this site also furled...."). So although Scott lumps me in the "brainy" category, I pretty much do a lot of tapping into other's links and tagged sites as well. But there is also a huge amount of serendipity when you find interesting links one or two clicks off of these initial forays. I've not had any luck starting any memes. And I expect my streak will continue. But I am curious if perhaps others would share via comments or in their own sites, What was your "Blog-Ha" Moment? (Blog Aha!) What was it the triggered the 10,000 watt light bulb going off in your head that screamed, "Wow! There is something really powerful about this way of expression" A good collection of these mini stories would be useful when doing the "Intro to Blogs 101" type workshops. It relates to my recent wonderings about the wisdom of starting new faculty bloggers with writing in empty blogs vs reading existing ones. Or it may just be interesting. My Own Blag-ha The meme will surely be lame since I do not have a precise starting point (it was before I started blogging!)... I cannot recall exactly a big light going off. I know that sometime in 2002 I noticed that two key sites I read a lot for instructional technology, OLDaily and Serious Instructional Technology (editor note 2025! This was an early early blog by David Carter-Tod who later inspired me to create Feed2JS. And I visited him in 2011 in Blacksburg) were organized in this newest stuff first but archived format. I vague recall creating a site at Userland powered editthispage.com but never doing anything with it. So the moment was really in the reading of other blogs and connecting that they were published with tools themselves in a web page that clicked for me. My reading expanded as I connected with colleagues Brian Lamb and D'Arcy Norman who were both blogging then in MovableType. It clicked that it looked like software that was bone simple to use, so it might have potential for faculty and students to create content without bothering with HTML and web editors. And the built in search, archiving, and comments were something one does not get by hand coding their web pages. As my blog circles expanded, I found the blogs I favored the most in terms of both style, variety, and content were MT published ones, so that lead me in April 2003 to hoist my own. It was much after the fact that it dawned on me that I had actually blogged for 6 months back in 2000 when I did a sabbatical in Arizona, New Zealand, and Australia (see from .az to .nz & .au), posting almost daily entries, links, and photos. But that was all by tedious hand coding. So step up-- what was your own "Blog-Ha" moment or moments? Featured Image: File:Aha White BlueBG.png Wikimedia Commons image by user Roselvthompson shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Last week I had the pleasure of getting a lesson in Audio Recording and Microphones 101 from Gardner Campbell. Thanks Dr Glu for spending some time to clue me in, this was purely selfish on my knowledge seeking side, but I am sharing the audio recording for anyone who cares. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/dr-microphone.mp3 [35:19 min, 24.3 mp3] What follows are just some of the many references Gardner mentioned. It only dawned on me after having set up a time to chat, that I was going to be editing this and posting it as a podcast, and then thinking- "Gardner will learn how sloppy I am on my audio editing..." -- the truth is there are audio experts out there that will hear every pop, crack, clip, and there are others for whom those might was well by the whistling of bats (which most humans do no hear). We had decided to talk via Skype, and my plan was to use Ambrosia Software's WireTap Pro to record both the audio (WireTap can capture all sound coming in or coming out of a Mac). Some of the goofiness in the beginning was some stumbling as I tried different things to get a better connection. I had tried first on my old 700 Mhz iBook, where the audio was dropping out, and Gardner sounded.. well, a bit in a stupor (which he was not). Thinking it was bandwidth, I switched the connection from wireless to me wired connection (I have a fast DSL connection for the home office, routed both for wired and wireless). Not much better. So I tried again, switching computers to the newer MacBookPro-- and shazam! great sound. The old iBook may need to be put to mild surfing use from now on. Since Audacity does not yet run on the Intel Macs, and I was lazy to restart the MBP to Windows to edit there, I just imported the WireTap recording into Garage Band... which may not have the most full fledged audio editing tools, but wow is it fun to use. There was at least an hour's divergence into assembling opening music. I also noted my audio inputs (me on my USB headset microphone) and outputs (Gardner through Skype) were not even, so I ended up adjusting the levels for each of our speaking turns. I need to find the right balance (drop the input levels on my microphone) for future use. This is probably a case where the better approach is a 3 way Skype, where the third party is an extra computer that just records the other t2 parties. Garage Band/iTunes also does a nice job of compressing, getting 35 minutes down to 24 Mb (saving at 96 kbs stereo). It is an extra step- from Garage Band it is Save to iTunes (where my music is AAC), and then I use iTunes to convert to MP3. Mentioned Sites: Sound Projects C3 Microphone Marantz PMD 671 Portable Recorder Edirol R1 Portable Digital Recorder Rode NT5 Matched Pair Cardioid Condenser Microphones Giant Squid Microphones iRiver iAudio U3 BLUE Snowball Microphones University of Mary Washngton's ProfCast IT Conversations Wiki Audio Processing File Formats and Encoding Uncle Doug's Audio Tips Transom Audio Field Recording Equipment Guide I'm bringing ds106 to the 2013 TCC Online Conference (the 18th Annual "Technology, Colleges and Community" Online Conference). This keynote session (look at my along side Terry Anderson, I cannot wait for some of his trademark jokes) is listed as Dim the Lights: The ds106 Show. My original thought was to build a presentation metaphor around the weekly live Google Hangout shows I have been running for my ds106 class at UMW. Dim the lights, cue the music, roll the open credits"¦ but the ds106 show is not one where the audience just sits quietly in their seats. You will not only learn how this open online course in digital storytelling works, but have a chance to try a few of the creative challenges and assignments we give to our students. Digital storytelling 106 (ds106) offers a versatile opportunity to create a learning community. This open online course in digital storytelling is part of a networked architecture built of participants' own blogs to which our web site subscribes and shares back content published by individuals. Special features of ds106 include an open assignment bank that participants populate, a daily creative challenge, and even its own internet-based radio station. You can tune in to the show at any time; we are located at http://ds106.us/ on your Internet dial. After watching the archive of the keynote Jim Groom performed yesterday for the Ohio State Innovate conference, I was energized maybe to amp it up a little bit. Not that I can do the Bava on stage act (NOBODY can, did you catch his movie references and the ponies?)-- but I have an idea to bring some heat to my presentation-- it may be the most unhinged thing I have ever done. So instead of the 1960s talk show theme I have been trying to emulate in my ds106 show Hangouts (black and white, and me in a tie)- I am thinking a little more ahead, maybe to 1978-- and hence I am up til 2:30am making a poster: [caption id="attachment_19425" align="aligncenter" width="331"] (click to see all the detail of this fine poster, check it out![/caption] Howard will make an appearance for sure. If you want to catch this conference, register before April 2 to get the early bird rate. I have a long history with TCC- I first met Bert Kimura at a League for Innovation Conference in 2003 (Milawauke it was). Bert was very gracious and invited me to be a part of the conference planning team. This conference had already been going a long time; it started in 1995. I am thinking they did it then on 28k modems. In 2004 I did a TCC presentation on photoblogging, Publish and Build Communities Around Digital Images -- I was promoting a service called Buzznet, but mentioned one that i had just started dabbling in in March 2004, one with the odd vowel missing name of "flickr". The next year, bert invited me to do a keynote-- it was all about the unevenly distributed future, etc, and for some reason, I maintained a metaphor based on a character from Star Trek -- Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There is even an audio recording -- I think this is the one I had to do from a San Francisco hotel where I was at a meeting. I was doing this in the hallway, talking to my laptop, and all of a sudden another meeting room emptied and the hall was full of people chattering, and I think the audience even heard the sounds if toilets flushing in the bathroom. I never stopped talking. Bert has been a great friend and colleague- he tok me hiking when I was in Hawaii in 2004 cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog and he hosted me for a week in Japan for a visit in 2008 cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So it was an easy yes when he asked me to keynote this year's TCC conference. If you are not at the conference, you will be aware of it via what I have planned, and you will asking yourself, what the heck is Alan doing? I do not have the answer yet, except it is going to be loud and over the top. You have been warned. I hope I don't become the second known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy presentation ratings. cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Pug Father LMS. CMS. LCMS. La La La La La. Will they be toppled by a Wave? I feel rather blessed I have not had much responsibility or even been inside a Course Management System for a looooooong time. I aonnot say I find them inherently evil, but more inherently stupid. It's been a while since I ranted on it, but after all this time the mere fact that the main organizational unit of a "learning system" not being the learning, nor the learner, but the course-- is just plain programming design laziness It's done that way because it is easier to put learning into neat mailbox slots, ones that can be tidily emptied at the end of a term. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Dean Terry The concept reminds me of the specious things very common n Phoenix called Master Planned Communities. This are housing developments of factory stamped homes, surrounded by walls, and fronted by a security gate. Residents agree to live in these places and not violate the rules by painting their homes from a non-approved palette or using unofficial roof shingle or not even putting a bench in their front yard (this was a news story in Phoenix a few years ago). People in these places walk around and spy on their neighbors to report acts of non conformirty. I cannot really associate any sense of "community" in the real world like this except for the WG kind (Walled Garden). The sheer irony of Course Management Systems, and my own minor guilt, is that I had a hand in ushering them in to the Maricopa Communty College system in the late 1990s. I saw these new things coming out (remember "Web Course in a Box"? Yep. Ms PacCMS ate them long ago) at the same time I was seeing the futility of thnking faculty could author their own web pages (I tried to shine a light). These early systems had a lot of potential, I thought, for teachers to create web spaces for learning through a simpler interface. Had blog software been there, I would have gone down a different path. And in those days, the people making Course Management Systems were these young hip academics coming out of Cornell and University of British Columbia. They were the precedents to Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Heck, I once even managed in 2000 to get Matt Pitinsky (then Blackboard CEO) and Murray Goldberg (then WebCT CEO and founder) to speak head to head at a Maricopa Ocotillo Retreat. It was actually rather civil, and they agreed with each other more than disagreed. Fast forward to know, where these companies company seem woefully short of user admiration, maybe even hated on campuses more than the Redmond Orcs. What an accomplishment. The best attribute they can claim over the Open Source / Small Pieces Web 2.0 Joined approach is... "a gradebook". A gradebook. What an expensive and unwieldy gradebook. Last February, I attended an WordCamp-ed in Vancouver, and was pleasantly startled to see (a) so many people show up; and (b) how many were from places setting up institutionally serving instances of WordPress MultiUser, something un heard of a year earlier except at a few bleeding edge schools. The discussions skirted into infrastructure, management, identity, and I recalled having a brief tinge of deja vu that I brushed off. No, Clover, it could not be happening. I am not saying that WordPress is the.... the... (I am not going to use the noun) "farm resident" that are moving into the Big House, but what an creepy thing that would be. It was a source of great satisfaction to him, he said-and, he was sure, to all others present-to feel that a long period of mistrust and misunderstanding had now come to an end. There had been a time-not that he, or any of the present company, had shared such sentiments-but there had been a time when the respected proprietors of Animal Farm had been regarded, he would not say with hostility, but perhaps with a certain measure of misgiving, by their human neighbours. Unfortunate incidents had occurred, mistaken ideas had been current. It had been felt that the existence of a farm owned and operated by pigs was somehow abnormal and was liable to have an unsettling effect in the neighbourhood. Too many farmers had assumed, without due enquiry, that on such a farm a spirit of licence and indiscipline would prevail. They had been nervous about the effects upon their own animals, or even upon their human employees. But all such doubts were now dispelled. Today he and his friends had visited Animal Farm and inspected every inch of it with their own eyes, and what did they find? Not only the most up-to-date methods, but a discipline and an orderliness which should be an example to all farmers everywhere. He believed that he was right in saying that the lower animals on Animal Farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the county. Indeed, he and his fellow-visitors today had observed many features which they intended to introduce on their own farms immediately. ALL LEARNING SYSTEMS ARE EQUAL. BUT SOME LEARNING SYSTEMS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS I am just playing this out as a metaphor, not claiming the WordPress will be the pigs walking on hind legs drinking beer with the Farrmer. Nope. But should the Farmer be replaced or die what would happen down on the farm? Post script- I wrote this post in ecto the desktop blog editor than can post to many blog platforms; I used to to write most of the post while on a plane. I'd not used it in a few years, but like its ability to compose, preview, and use many other nifty tools (e.g. a url copied is automatically inserted into the right field when you use the link tool) While there are at least 20 or more different social bookmark tools out there, I am pretty much committed and hooked on del.icio.us. It has that no frills but highly functional interface, but mainly because it has so many subtle features that are easy to overlook, even if you have been a regular user. It is subtly powerful, in a way that many people do not see. So I cam going to cover three "next level" things you can do in del.icio.us, two of which I had not even checked out before last week. I am sure there are more treasures in there, and remember that just about everything... no make that everything displayed in del.icio.us has an associated RSS feed. (more…) Been thinking of movies to flip the McGuffin on for this week's hot ds106 assignment, Messing with the McGuffin: Wikipedia defines the MacGuffin as "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction." For this assignment forever change the plot of a movie, tv show, etc. by changing a single line of dialogue. Put this new line of dialogue below a screen-cap of the moment in the movie you're changing. So if Luke had just slept off the binge, he would have awoken a happy well adjusted man, not eaten 50 eggs, etc... and we'd have a dull-ass movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3CPz21NzUc What we have here is a failure to MacGuffin-ate. I just added a small feature to our RSS to JS demo, the site that demonstrates a bone-simple (even humans can do this with their bare hands) way to take a known RSS feed and have it displayed inside any web page. This new feature is a simple web form that allows you to enter the URL for any RSS feed, select the various options our demo script provides, and voila! magic- it can do a preview version of the output and... (but wait, if you order before midnight tonight, you get a bonus feature!) it will spit out the snippet of JavaScript you need to paste into your web page. (more…) The Legend of Colton H. Bryant was a book that Barbara Ganley recommended when I was in the first legs of my road odyssey, because of its setting in Wyoming where I was traversing. Of course, I had to follow the suggestion, and had downloaded it to my Kindle on my iPad... where it languished until months later, where I finished it in south Florida, the opposite of rural Wyoming in almost every measure. Alexandra Fuller's writing is both as sparse and vast as the setting of this story- it is a true story involving the tragic accident that took a young man's life. It is interesting in that the "story" is almost an anticlimactic bit at the near end- in fact the whole book is more or less the building of the character, through a vignette of smaller stories. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It is more or less painting the landscape and the culture of Wyoming. Colton is not heroic, except in his eccentricities and finding his own ways through life, smiling with an axe in his foot or ending most exchanges with the "he-he-he" laugh. They say Wyoming is like a small town with a really long main street. That is why, for all appearances of emptiness and live-and-let-live ethos, the state has a small town's propensity for taking care of its own. You have only to see the notice in a post office announcing an illness or death to see what iti is to live in a small-town state=-- the casseroles and meatloaves and cakes and the people bringing in your hay, feeding your horses. It's enough to restore your belief in humanity. Or it was the lessons learned from Colton's father, e.g. the chapter "Bill's Philosophy of Hunting". Bill Bryant made it clear to Preston and Colton almsot to this extreme: if you shot a skunk, he'd better find you eating skunk steak for the better part of the next week and wearing a skunk hat all winter... Bill Bryan also made it clear to his boys that if you brought something into this hard, short-summered, scarcely covered world, or if you were lucky enough to be put in charge of land or a hunting permit, it was yours to take double care of. This wasn't fat city like California or New York where some welfare group was going to come along and rescue your responsibilities if you didn't take care of them. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And thus it was as a young man with a family, Colton was left with a limited range of work- on the drilling rigs. I'm left with this awareness of the money drive for profit in this business pushes operations to operations of great risk- the company that owned the rig where Colton dies bragged about its "low cost structure"-- and we, at the end of the gas pumps and gas heat coming into our houses, lost sight of that there are people at there in the frigid Wyoming winters doing risky work for little pay. The thread through the story which holds it all together is the bond of friendship between Colton and his buddy, Jake, a thread that continues after Colton is in the ground. "Mind over matter," said Colton. Jake laughed. "I coulda told you that." "I dont mind," said Colton, "so it don't matter" cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I found this read less of a "good story" and more powerful as a piece that is able to capture the spirit of the land there, and its direct influence on people who live there. We may live "on the land" or think we "own land", but we forget how it really shapes us. The sky over Flagstaff Arizona today was actually crystal clear, but if you had appropriate x-ray glasses on you may have spotted some tag clouds, sprinkled with some Canadian flair. Is that too vague an opening blog post? Okay, today I had the sheer pleasure and honor to co-present, and that verb is used loosely, because it was really more of a free form "jam" with my colleague Brian Lamb at the Northern Arizona University E-Learning Institute. We were asked to brig on the "social software firehose". Brian and I invariably have much fun in this process, mostly because we generally cook up something novel and new (and partially risky). Brian landed in Phoenix yesterday, and after a critical planing meeting at my favorite New Mexican style lunch spot in Scottsdale, we chugged up the I-17 hill (well I did show the back road around New River) to Flagstaff, idly catching up, dodging lane changing 18-wheelers. In the evening we were treated to a discussive dinner at the Beaver Street Brewery with our host Don Carter and colleague Shelley Henson form Utah State and the local Irish Red AND seeing the Suns win Game 1.... and there was a little bit of late night wiki-del.icio.us bashing for today's sessions. And the morning prep was enhanced by a trip to the greatest coffee shop in the region (there are lots of referential photos, but uploading them to flickr via the 24 kbs dial-up connection from our cabin would take way too long). Okay, that was 4 paragraphs of stalling without any links to the work we supposedly did today. Our first morning session was a hands on session on Rip, Mix, Feed - Reloaded: Social Software and Learning which has several remixes of past work. But this was our plan to have participants get some quick and direct experience in the realm of social bookmarking and photosharing using 1 and 2 of our long standing social software apps. The wiki link above was not the "show" at all; it was more as the link repository for folks to come back to... our "cunning plan" was a bit different and revealed as a tag cloud now seen after the fact at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/nau06/workshop.html -- the cloud here was produced by participants tag activity using a shared account we created at http://del.icio.us/naukeynote/. The activity was really a quick launch into del.icio.us and asking the crowd to lock and load tag any sites they could find or remember related to their interests in social software. The exercise was more the have them do some tagging and using the rendered tag view (thanks to the cool template from Brian's team at UBC, some time ago I had mis-commented on Brians's blog wondering why it was different from delicious's own tool, but once I clicked on a tag it hit me in the face.) The tags and sites tagged were accumulated by the activity of the 25-25 participants- they caught on quickly. We riffed a bit more on how this can be sued in in an academic realm. Gears were shifted quickly, and we had to move more quickly through the flickr activity. Here we had them log on to another demo flickr account (5 bonus points to anyone who can find the presentation used first for this account). It was a breeze through of flickr tags, comments, pools, annotations, and the golden virtue of the Creative Commons flickr pool. Then we had them use the uber cool flikcrlilli search to find an interesting photo (note to world- this site does not work in Internet Explorer and is case example number 1543 in "Why Would Anyone Actually Use Such an INferior, Bug Holed POS?" But I digress). The wild thing was as a demo we had them do a search on Creative Commons images tagged with "Flagstaff" and in the first 10 images topped as flicker interestingness were 3 by Dawn... who was sitting in the audience! Too cool. And she has great photos, check 'em out. The net world is too big and too small. Anyhow, we had them use the flickr Post to blog (using toss away Blogger sites http://cogdoghouse.blogspot.com and http://flickrparty.blogspot.com) so they could make the leap on how flickr is a Small Piece Loosely Joined to Blogger--if you look at the sidebars of those sites, they use the del.icio.us JavaScript tools to syndicate the links form the earlier activity, yet another Join. Whew! But wait, there was more-- as the final crushing blow, we tossed it all into SuprGlu http://haukeynote.suprglu.com And that was the morning. After a break we moved into our plenary session on this mouthful... "Connected Learners - Leveraging the Power of Social Software Used Outside of Formal Learning (Wikis, Blogs, and Other Online Collaboration Tools)"... this presentation was another one we tried to steer via a tag cloud generated in less than 24 hours-- http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/nau06/keynote.html. I am blog-tired to do a recap, but we did cover a lot of goovy ground. Our plan for this one was to open wot a blank wiki page, and say, "how do you like our presentation?" The plan was to have one of us steer and talk from the set of resources under the tag cloud, while the other fill out the wiki with notes, but it was a bit much to stay up on the latter, so what was filled was about 1/3 of the show. It was a great gig, and ended up taken some spontaneous turns, which was the intension. There were good questions we likely partially answered at best, but this audience was engaged and motivated (or had plenty of coffee for the last day of a conference). But now that Brian and I are done, and relaxing at Strawberry (and late for headed out to the local pub), I must say what a powerful and humbling thing it is to have an opportunity to work with great colleagues and to get asked to come up with these crazy ideas (I think that is what you asked for Don, right? eh?). So a fitting close was this flickr image blogged from the morning session: The folksonomy - contralled vocabulary debates surge and sputter... Recently David Weinberger went "back and forth" on this: This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you'll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as "pcforum05," not "pcf", "pcf05" or "Esther's thang." Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies. A common assumption in this discussions is that the aim of tagging is the action of many to try and organize the un-organizable (web content). I see many more variations, and the success of flickr points to the important of tags but perhaps smaller groups of people aiming to tag a more discrete set of content. So what if my choice of a tag doe snot match up to what 96% of the tagging population uses-- if it is important to me, or useful to a group I work with, then things are good. When I tag my photos with "flowers" it is to help me find pictures of my own desert flower photos, and I may use that to send a slide show or to syndicate the images to some other page... here I am not tagging to organize the rest of the net, just my tiny corner. For another project, my own simple 3 tag structure allows my to use flickr to populate different areas of a web site. My wayward point is when we tag, we are not necessarily trying to chart the entire internet, just stuff that is relevant. And Weinberger gets to it in his following post on 2x2 folksonomies by trying to put the tagging services in a 2 day axis of public vs private tags on one axis, and tagging "my stuff" vs "everyone's stuff" on another, and that helps clarify that there is not just simple, all inclusive "tagging". And the field is getting crowded. There is a new del.icio.us look alike, del.irio.us (and are we soon to see de.siro.us, de.mentio.us, de.liveran.ce (plays banjo music while you tag, "Tag like a pig!"?? ) and an open source Scuttle... who, of any of these, will rise to be the Google of social bookmark sites? Found surfing RSS feeds of someone else's del.icio.us tagged bag... If you've not come across the beta of Google's new feature, take a peek at Google Suggest, which works like autocomplete by responding with common/popular search queries based on the first few letters you type in the search field. What do you think? Dose of good, evil, or apathy? Anyhow, Adam Stiles opened up the JavaScript scope to detail how this works.. Google's Suggest feature is lighting up the blogosphere these days. It functions as like autocomplete for your search box, where Google attempts to determine what you are searching for and gives you suggestions. Web tinkerer that I am, I had to dig in a little and see how this works. At its simplest, Google Suggest is javascript code that looks at what you are typing in the Google search box. When you press a key, GS phones home and passes the current contents of the search box. The server returns some suggestions are then displayed to the user. The javascript code is a little obfuscated, more to keep the size down than to obscure the contents. Good hacks abound! One of my main reasons for using MovableType (MT) for blogging is that most of the blogs I read that seemed well designed, structurally and graphically, had MT under the hood. And the pages produced are clean HTML, even XHTML validat-able, and the templates use CSS sensibly too (as opposed to osme other blogs that are still publishing cruft table-laden HTML, full of extraneous divitis, font tags, etc). But while they look great on screen, full of nice colors, MT blogs do not print well, especially if you opt for the cool grey background/white text style sheet (e.g. "stormy"). Ironic isn't it? An appication named "MovableType" is missing a key element to make it printable. Sadly, it is a fact, that despite our "modern" digital age, a lot of web pages are printed. So in this post, I will describe how to add a print style sheet to your MT blog so that when the pretty pages are printed, they come out readable. And this is without needing a "print friendly" icon, just the brawn and power of CSS. This came into play when I ran the workshop yesterday, our the "blogshop", as I wanted to provide paper handouts for the step-by-step instruction sections... (more…) Someone has to make the donuts dailies every day, and few do it better than Terry The Baker Greene (who does it with sauce). This is close to Terry's method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYRurPB4WA0 Or as he 9x9x25-ed: If I were asked to name the top 2 things that have helped me to not only develop and hone my abilities as an educational technologist, but also lead me down rabbit holes that have crafted my attitudes and values and love for this whole ed-tech thing, here is what I would answer without hesitation: 1. Doing Dailies. 2. Making Dailies. What he is talking about are the Ontario Daily Extend activities, something I helped set up for the project (and Terry took off with it). This is a spawn of the DS106 Daily Create which is now in its 6th year of continuous operation. Each day the web site publishes a new thing, and you respond by replying to a special twitter account with a hashtag specific for that day. This gives things like a way to show all your contributions in a unique URL as well as offering a leaderboard (many people just happen to be competitive). The idea of (what I call) Daily _______s are offering a small, daily challenge that can be done quickly, but also, in some way make you try something new- be it a media creation technology, a learning resource, or just something experimental. It also is useful for people new to twitter, it gives a meaning and purpose for tweeting, and then experience with how tweets, hashtags, replies all work. Part of the success (IMHO) is that the stakes are really low here. When I teach (like putting one into NetNarr as The Daily Alchemy) I ask my students to do 3 per week. They get to choose. I don't grade on what they do, I grade on how they document their approach. This means, as I also do in DS106, that I do not care how you do it- and I encourage students to break rules, do the opposite, as long as they do something interesting. I find students love this at first, and somewhere around the 2/3 portion of the course, it begins to turn into a chore (when I usually dial back the required number). I also make ut a requirement for them to add 1 or 2 dailies of their own, since all sites feature a public submission form (e.g for DS106). And what Terry knows, and other people who have helped keep the dailies running (Mariana Funes took over the DS106 ones for a few long stretches, and now runs her own Daily Stillness) and Bill Genereux who is currently filling the DS106 supply, is that the most fun is creating daily challenges for others. Every person who does this brings their own creativity into play. Mariana would tease me that mine were too easy (and I thought hers sometimes complex). Terry fills his with the kind of humor and playful creativity he brings to all his work. I always loved the times when some weird tweet, or random stumble across a weird generator site, or some other thing would light up the "that would make a great daily". Making these donuts dailies is a huge reward! For more about how much I think this is the better than donuts, see some past presentations: Doing It Daily (Maricopa Teaching with Technology Conference, 2015) Doing the Daily Create (Riding the Wave of Change conference, 2014) All of these spawn sites are made possible by the generalized WordPress theme I made, called The Daily Blank. I've spawned myself the following iterations- I am making a case for it on nearly every project. The (new) DS106 Daily Create DS106 spawn of the original TDC Daily Digital Alchemy for the Networked Narratives open course Daily Extend for the eCampus Ontario Expanding Capacity project The Daily Opener Mural UDG Project at the University of Guadalajara UdG Agora Daily Try The You Show Daily (not active) I love the dailies maybe as much as Terry! This is my another of nine posts for the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 challenge. Featured Image: Men making donuts at the Sugar Crest Donuts Company in Portland, Oregon (3724233708).jpg Wikimedia Commons image shared into the public domain. I'm thinking a lot about my plan to be on the road 4 months starting in June- I've carved out a corner of the blog site here to be my record for what I call my "odyssey" (one positive outcome is I can consistently spell that word correctly) -- http://cogdogblog.com/odyssey. While I could have made a separate site somewhere else, this is my home damnit, and there's no reason not to have it be where I focus my energy. Since I am dotting in my map with people to visit, most of whom I have known only or first online, I came up with an idea for something to do on this trip, collecting a new collection of Amazing Stories of Sharing. This has been something I've created twice for presentations; the first at the Open Education Conference in 2009 (well, it was Amazing Stories of Openness than, but close enough). I collected videos from a few people I got to talk to directly (at a conference) but most were done via Skype video, and all were stories people shared that represent positive outcomes about openly sharing their work on the net: I assembled them into my CoolIris semi-hack approach, which worked great in presentation mode as I could randomly pick any of them out (although the web page also has mp4 versions of each story also viewable via a playlist). What might have been most fun was hacking up comic covers for the story themes: And then I did a repeat on 2010 http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/amazing10/ But thinking now, I am going to see people... in their homes, and it would be fun to collect a new round of stories. So if my truck rolls into your town, you can expect me to ask you to share a story-- something that happened expectedly, or something that surprised you, just because you shared something on the internet. It need not be monumental, but just something that AMAZES you. I'm hoping people will be okay with putting these online (I will ask) For this collection, I am looking at using a posterous site (in case I do any posting from my iPhone)-- I nabbed http://amazingstories.posterous.com (which I may switch to be listed on my domain). I can then use its feed to bring in or maybe repost via FeedWordPress to my blog. As I don't have a video camera now beyond the iPhone, my T1i, or my small pocket camera, I'd be interested in recommendations for (inexpensive) video camera that would be suitable for this kind of interviewing. So between now and the time I see some of you on this trip, make sure you are sharing openly and seeing some amazing things happen. I'll be asking you about it... I should have never left the TV on. Oh, How Could ??? How the ^#%$& Did the spirit of ever end up in an ad for freakin' mini-vans? what kind of happened? Help me understand, ! flickr foto MessPodavailable on my flickr Every transfer of my iPod to and from my pocket or backpack results in this twisted spaghetti mess of ear bud cable. I guess I should just never remove it from my head? I'd like to have back number of cumulative hours spent untangling the ear bud cables on my iPod. And this picture is s aimple version of what usually emerges from my backpack. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog First image made with the iPhone app Diptic (http://www.dipticapp.com/) to create multipane images from phone photos. I grabbed two of my own photos from flickr and upped them to my phone. The side images are from the same photo, just displaced to make for a framing effect Originals www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4704886736/ www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4704240965/ Diptic is an iPhone app to make "diptychs" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diptych You can choose from any photos on the phone, and a number of layout styles from 2-3 panels for doing before and afters or collages. Once a picture is placed you can pan and zoom it to fill the frame, and also do some basic editing (colors) for the photos and the frames. It's got some neat potential for $1.99 Hello WordPress editor, has it really been 24 days since cracking you open here at el cogdogblog dot com? Indeed yes. With the world ongoing plodding into now a regular incertitude I have found myself stuck on several fronts, the daily photo habot has sputtered into a bi-weekly catch-up. So what else is there to blog about beyond the old saw of blogging about blogging (or the equivalent of blogging about not blogging). What sometimes worked in the past was to start writing without a plan in mind. That's also maybe like just putting the car into drive and let it lurch where it wants to go. Clunk. Just sticking a post in the ground here to say, it's still my home. I am weighing the value of where I invest other energies. Is it time to hang up the tweeting shoes and take up the tooting ones? Get back to the blog, says the imaginary Greek Chorus. An internet home for 19 years that no one can co-opt but me. I am thinking maybe there has been too much energy pushed elsewhere, that should come back home here to roost. I am not here to make a case for the power of this act, despite how many have let it slide for playing the status gaming favoriting with emoji click a thon. I am here to write outloud again. At least maybe more than 2 posts a month. Not that anyone is counting. Well I am. I can. Breathe. Again. Hello, blog home. It's me. Even not saying much here is better than spewing elsewhere. Home. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/13369614505 Anyone Home? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Hammock as rain gauge by cogdogblog posted 20 Aug '08, 12.11am MDT PST on flickr Lots of rain in Strawberry this summer; the hammock has been used more to catch water that to catch naps. photo taken with iphone and uploaded with Mobile Fotos app- awesome! it automatically geo locates! The photo here is not the real subject of this post, but yes, my hammock is a bit messy and not all that inviting. What was cool is that I took the photo on my new iPhone, and as I was testing the Mobile Fotos app I purchased ($2.99) for uploading directly to flickr, I was excited to see an option to geocode it with my current location. This is the first built in geo-tagging camera I have ever had. Okay, the accuracy is off by 1/4 mile for this particular photo, but darn close. And automatic. My idea for this remix is likely better than the execution. The FineBros has a brilliant series of Kids React videos where modern youth try to make sense of past culture, toys, and technology. They seem to average like 9 kazillion views per video; I'm lucky if I hit double digits. In some research for internet of the mid 1990s I found "Teens React to the Internet of the 1990s" http://youtu.be/d0mg9DxvfZE where they make fun and mock the earnest kids and primitive internet technology of the 1996 vide0, The Kids' Guide to the Internet http://youtu.be/A81IwlDeV6c The latter video is pretty laughable, with the hair, the dead pan Smart Kids explaining how the internet works, and the cheesy screen tours. My idea was to see if I could extract reaction clips of the kids in the 1996 videos saying things like "that's so cooool" and "wow that's amazing" and have them react to smaller inset clips of the hip modern kids. What I ended up with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS4fzQWU4OI Once I started, I found that there was much less if a selection of the reaction shots in the 1990s kids, but I made about 6 sequences; I think the last one works the best. This was done in iMovie mostly putting in the top track with the Picture in Picture settings the utterances of the teens, playing over the 1990s kids. I try to line things up, then split the clips so I can mute one audio track. The intro has the opening from the 1990s music with the music of the modern teens, and then the other way around for the closing credits. Both of those clips on YouTube have copyright statements. I am blatantly violating that. Because I am making something new. Because copyright as executed in 2015 is more laughable, more outmoded, than some cheesy kids in the 1990s. Because I can. I sure regret not having time to make the Instructional Technology Institute at Utah State University apparently well orchestrated by David Wiley and nicely blogged by others. The blog buzz is good from folks I know and trust. I've got some blog scraping to catch up on. Some wishes: Earlier Notice. It was announced like in the early summer-- I already had plans for the time period, but for educators in general, we need some long lead time line up travel $, begging and scraping the desk draws for loose change. More Stuff Online. Just a schedule as PDF? Thanks to the ever vigilent Stephen Downes, there was almost word for word coverage [1], [2], [3] but conferences (IMHO) out to leave some sort of electronic footprint for prosperity. Something Different. This is my own conference peeve, but I am sure in search of some other format for our professional gatherings than the conference presentations/keynote scenario- this is the 50 minute lecture paradigm delivered over and over. Even online conferences tend to mimic this format. Isn't there any other mode to engage constructive gatherings? Most conference attendees attest that the most productive things happen in the hallway conversations or the beer soaked post mortems. How do make these the primary activity? I cannot say I have the answer to the Something Different wish nor am I suggesting this conference was the same as all others (especially since I was playing at the beach while this one took place.) But surely, surely, surely ("Stop calling me 'Shirley'"), there is some other way to have a professional gathering to discuss the exciting work we are doing that is NOT a series of lectures to passive audiences. most people over 30 have trouble grasping why would want digital version of yourself posted 15 Dec '06, 6.51am MST PST on flickr There used to be all this talk of the "digital divide" and it was between the haves & the have-nots in terms of what they could afford. But I think there is an even bigger gulf in mindset between the generations. It's the difference between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" as per Rupert Murdoch www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/322112273/ I adore this image because I think it gives you a spark of one reason why you might want a digital version of yourself. It's from SecondLife. Someone has set up a place there where, when your second life character walks in, it's appears as if it's surrounded by the real life place. There's already talk of "˜virtual tourism' thanks to Google Earth. Imagine when that's combined with this type of graphics so you can explore real life places virtually. In fact it's already happening. A friend told me how they visited Miami recently and one of the guys they were travelling with really knew his way around the roads, shortcuts and all. Even though it was his first visit to Miami, he knew his way round "˜cos he'd played Grand Theft Auto!!! Image from Flickr CC www.flickr.com/photos/eyefood/149368986/ thanks to Kisa Naumova Quote from www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/business/yourmoney/10frenzy.ht... I've tagged, used, and admired these collections of imagery, ideas, and references compiled in flickr by Lynnette - recently organized as a mega collection of Interesting Snippets: This is my personal dumping ground for various cool quotes, the odd stat, as slides to talk around when describing how things are changing online and in media & communications generally. They're in no particular order. I create them as much for fun as anything as I'm fascinated by this whole field, but luckily I have a job that lets me spend a little time on it too (thank you Isobar!). Wow, I am glad too! There is a lot here to like in the vein of powerful, visual communication. All of these "slides" use powerful images, all of them re-used from the flickr Creative Commons collection, all credited to their owner. It is the antithesis to DeathByPowerPoint Like this one-- I recognize the avatar profile of Kisa Naumova. The image alone is powerful, but combined with a compelling quote, and annotated, references in the caption, it is both a valuable standalone message (like to blog about), or one could pull these together into your own mix. If you looked at this form, there is no reason why you could not do an entire amount of blogging on the flickr vehicle, then remix your own collections into these sets. I am thinking of using these as models of something I might be able to whip into a workshop activity. But this collection is incredible, awesome, stellar, just totally fab in its depth and breadth- there are 229 ones in here... and it seems to be growing.. So a tip of the blog hat to Lynetter for an vast treasure chest of snippets. Hi there CogDogBlog readers. Alan went outside and has been gone a while, but he left his laptop open. I see him blogging here all the time and thought I would give it a try. Yes, I am Felix. Maybe you have seen one of my 600 photos Alan has posted on flickr this year? Every time I look up, he has a camera in my face. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] So I first made an account for myself in his blog. Easy peasy. Wordpress is simpler than chewing bones. Now I am combing through his tweets and saw this message when Alan said something about taking me for a walk. https://twitter.com/podehaye/status/812042411509694465 Hey Paul-Oliver! I have way more than one follower, my twitter account HAS 24! There's not much action in my stream. I can only tweet when Alan leaves the room and if his phone is unlocked. But I have this laptop open and the whole internet lays open before me! What if I could rig up a bot thing that could tweet out each time he posts a photo of me to flickr? The photos are all tagged "felix". I bet I could do something with ifttt -- dogs get logical expressions, BTW-- like "If I sit down and look pitifully bored, then Alan will get me a bone from the freezer." But I cannot use Alan's flickr login as a trigger; I don't know his password, and he is already logged into IFTTT with his credentials. Thinking... Is that a squirrel outside? FOCUS FELIX, FOCUS! Okay, I wonder if I can get to his flickr photos via RSS. Almost no one gets RSS, but me and Alan do. But oh, does flickr make its feeds hard to find! You have to dig and dig... But I go to his flickr page, and since he is logged in, way on the right side, under the nebulous More menu, I click Edit [caption id="attachment_63853" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Of course! Clicking the mysterious "Edit" item sends you down into the old basement of flickr[/caption] And ZOMG! I chase my tail around. This is cool. It's like doing time travel to the way flickr looked in 2009! Check it out... But this page is old fashioned page, so it's only about two scrolls to the bottom, where I can smell a rare flickr RSS feed. Mighty rare. [caption id="attachment_63855" align="aligncenter" width="630"] It's like finding where in the yard I buried a good bone.[/caption] And this is the feed for all of his photos https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=37996646802@N01&lang=en-us&format=rss_200 But I don't want to tweet all his boring photos of leaves and rocks and old toys, I just want my photos. When I google for Flickr RSS Feeds I get to some API spec page in their Garden. Then I paw around the links and look at the spec for Public Feeds -- there is a query string parameter for tags. Hmmm. Tags are really really powerful. I am just going to put on my URL guessing hat (oh yeah, I don't wear hats. IT'S A METAHPHOR HUMANS!). I slip in a &tags=felix into the URL https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=37996646802@N01&lang=en-us&tags=felix&format=rss_200 And bingo! I can see in the RSS Feed (so easy to read!) That its just photos of me. This is the best feed in flickr. It's like raw yummy meat. I am a smart dog and do not want to leave any cookie crumbs, so Open a new incognito window in Chrome; this way I am not using Alan's cookies nor leaving my own. I do have to create an IFTTT account, but that's easy. And I know where I can find my mail in Alan's messy gmail pile. Creating applets is easier than knocking over a box of cereal! My IF condition uses RSS, and I enter that yummy feed For the THEN, I use the twitter one for doing a tweet with a photo (making sure I am already logged in to twitter), and I can then use the information the feed provides to populate my tweet, like the title of the photo EntryTitle and for the image, the aptly name EntryImageURL (you don't need a degree to figure out that). [caption id="attachment_63858" align="aligncenter" width="479"] The THEN part of the game- send a tweet[/caption] Well, that was it. I heard Alan's tell-tale footsteps outside, so quickly closed by incognito window, and resumed my usual position of sleeping on the couch. I had to wait a few hours until Alan looked over and took my photo (I tried to look pathetically bored), and was glad to see he sent it to flickr right away. An hour later while he was in the bathroom (what does he do in there for that long? Humans are weird..) I was able to refresh my twitter page. Sweeeeeet! https://twitter.com/felixadog/status/812087143371837440 The photo he had posted to his flickr account and tagged felix was tweeted out to my account. Genius! Now I am tweeting automatically! I just have to get him to take more photos of me. That is easy. Hooking together things on the web is so easy if you got some ideas how it all works together. Maybe it's the impeding headless ds106 course coming next month, or maybe it's just the phases of the moon, but I felt the rekindled urge to experimenting once again with making animated GIFs from a sequence of still photos. This happens in two ways: (1) I anticipate an action sequence, and deliberately take a series of multiple exposures; or (2) I happen to take 2 or more photos where the subject moves a slight bit, and in looking at them in Aperture, I flick back and forth between them until it says... "GIF" Here was a clear case of #2- when my pal Jonah visited, we stopped at a viewpoint of Mormon Lake, and I took 2 self photos of us with my iPhone, and it was just fun to make this simplest 2 frame GIF. Now I know my pal Sandy Jensen Brown has an aversion to GIFs, but to me this captures a fun moment in a way that feels more alive then the images. The method is the same as I have written up since the first one I tried using Photoshop (CS5.5- I had a hard time trying to show Mikhail how to do this in 6, the menu items have changed). Use Files -> Scripts -> Load Files into Stack.. This places each image in its own layer. I chose the option to "Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images" if it is something that does not move much, this can help reduce the jitter. This creates a file with all the image sin layers, to get them on the timeline, open the Animation window, and from the right side, select "Make Frames from Layers". This puts each layer in as an animation frame. Fiddle. I sometimes have to revers the sequence, and then go through frame by frame and adjust the cropping. I also adjust the interframe delay. Save for Web/Devices- make sure the format is GIF, then resize to save disk size (usually 500px wide for my blog theme). I also reduce the colors to try and make the file smaller. Under 1 Mb is good, under 500k is judo master. Here is one where I took a series of photos intentionally for this, documenting two guys in Jerome Arizona who were walking a rope above a concrete landing below. This guy fell but landed gracefully: So yes, I could have shot a video and recorded it all, but that's easy. As a repeated series of images allows the viewer to see the motion broken down into steps. Hmm not sure why the uploaded GIF is showing a ghosting artifact on that last frame. Last, a series of photos again not meant for GIFing, but when I see them, it says this might make an animated progression, my kayaking through a stretch that kind of makes it look like I know what I am doing (not). As I recall reading before, this type of media sits in an interesting (at least to me) zone between a photo and a video. Rev up your LP of "Who's Next": I'm readin' feeds And when I want to read blogs, I'm going mobile Well I'm gonna find a blog on wheels, see how it feels, Goin' mobile Keep me feeding Actually not, as my mobile phone does not much more than allow phone calls and taking blurry photos. Oh, I can send messages to twitter. But someday, someday, I will have a real phone, that can do things like get web content and read QR codes- those bar codes which can link mobiles to web content. I got interested in them a bit when I stumbled across Semapedia, a web tool for putting bar codes in the world that link locations to info in Wikipedia. Today I got a link (was it from RSS, twitter? who knows any more) to Brent Schlenker's post onn publishing a conference guide that had embedded QR codes (Brent is actually a local here in Phoenix and we keep meaning to meet up for coffee). Anyhow, like ne link leading to the next and the next, I saw his blog had its own QR code from Feed2Mobile - a free service that converts blog feeds to mobile friendly format, and provides the QR code to put on your site (presumably so phones can grab the feed??). So now, CogDogBlog's weighty sidebar has new bling, the Feed2Mobile code, which also provides a link to the version of my feed as it will appear on an equipped mobile device. So while I like a worthy mobile device reader, I am getting mildly interested in how web content is being "embedded" elsewhere than just a browser on a computer. The excuses for not playing this week are worn thin. While lighting my wood stove, it did not take much of a leap to hear “Light My Fire” in my head, but maybe a more bluesy acoustic version. None of the tabs I found felt right, so I startet varying some of the chords. I really like just running rhythm so I left a wide open patch for someone to riff in some solo or maybe a harmonica (or a tuba?). Or do something about my vocals, please. The tabs I found had the chorus as Am / F#m plus a few capo options, but I was not liking them, so I just started switching it up- I really like the ringing sound of an Am7 – I tried doing the bar on three strings for the F#m, but found I liked what I think is a D5 – and normal 3 finger triangle D, nut leave the top (E) string open. I was playing with also trilling the 6th string G back on top of it. So that’s the verse, and what I think is behind the long organ and guitar solos (maybe, I lost track while strumming to the Doors version). The chorus was fine in the tab I used. G – A – D “Come on Baby Light My Fire” twice. I did a variation on the open G of moving my finger from the 1st string 3rd fret (the high G) to the second string 3rd fret (adding a “D”). I also tossed in the Dsus4 back to D cause it was like the first variation I learned (I think it was Boston “More Than a Feeling”) and it sounds good. The last line switches to G – D- E – E7 (“Try to set the night on FIRE”). I doodled up a sketch of my own chords used here: My goals again are to try and find my own variations on songs I like, not just mimic them. Maybe its because I am bad at mimic-ing them! But I like that 2 chord Am7 – D5 riff, it has a maybe Santana-ish feel to it. And that is my fire in the soundcloud widget ;-) It’s lit. Another task that has had its wheels fallen off was my plan to highlight different Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) packages of merit. We should be ramping up the loading dock, as we are nearing in the last week of our "Great MLX Package Race" incentive program (offering software prizes for college and individual contributions). But here we try to re-attach the wheel with MLX Package #1158, "Are You AFRAID of Databases?", along with a story, and a dash or sarcastic irony... (more…) I saw Martin Weller's tweet out for a randomizing text generator: https://twitter.com/mweller/status/1175765514842509312 He got lots of replies (which is what make twitter useful when often it can not be), though many were just offering tools, not necessarily web producing ones (cough Excel). Were I not busy with other tasks Sunday, I would have liked to not only a suggestion, but better yet, to whip up a prototype. I had pretty much done what Martin asked for with my Make a MOOC generator. It's done in PHP though, so likely knocks out for being "idiot proof". I was pretty sure the way that one works, though (a few arrays to hold the list of phrases and a constructor that pulled that at random), could be done all in Javascript in an HTML file. By then Martin had gotten one going using a web tool I love, glitch, and he already blogged it (one of many reasons I respect and like Martin). It works, so I could have just moved on to the day. To me it's a bit scrunched on a phone, and I could not help but wonder if it could be done another way. I gave myself an hour over breakfast to put the edtechaphor together: I've been using Bootstrap already for another project, so it's fresh in my mind. It not only gives you everything in a single index.html file (loading the scripts and styles via hosted libraries) but a lot of styles, grids, components to put into the mix. This just uses the jumbotron for the metaphor and a button. I added to be fancy a background using the fantastic (also remotely hosted) Backstretch.js which magically fills the background with a specified image. Just for fun, I searched for open licensed images on terms crazy machine and one near the top was one by my photo friend Michael Coghlan! A Drumming and Bell Ringing Machine flickr photo by mikecogh shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license The whole thing (meaning one HTML file and the background image) is on github so it can be used, forked, but also as above, hosted there. I just put the custom styles and scripts right into the HTML file. A "proper" coder might have insisted on storing them in external folders tucked under an assets directory. Poo. As far as how it works, the functionality is tucked into the bottom of the HTML file in a script tag. I went to the source of Martin's glitch code to get the array of phrases he used, but hey, the function was there too that assembled it on his site, so I borrowed it too (rewriting little bit to use jQuery). function generate() { // lifted somewhat from https://glitch.com/~spark-chipmunk // arrays of metaphors- if a single quote, a apostrophe needed, enter as \' let metaphor = ['baking a cake', 'a houseplant', 'running a marathon', 'raising a puppy', 'quantum physics', 'visiting an unknown country','the history of porcelain manufacture','the development of New York graffiti styles','the Corn Laws','the Loch Ness monster myth','the CB radio craze of the 70s','the Gargoyles of the Notre Dame','an all you can eat “Around the world” buffet','the growth of interest in vinyl records','a comfortable old coat','knitting','Homers The Iliad','gardening','the ecosystem of a small island','your favourite film','the structure of a typical horror film', 'chasing a cat', 'finding a big stick', 'a local castle', 'real hockey']; // arrays of tech- if a single quote, a apostrophe needed, enter as \' let tech = ['learning analytics', 'VLE', 'blockchain', 'OER', 'MOOCs', 'personalised learning','Artificial Intelligence','open textbooks','automated assessment','MCQs','digital natives','connectivism','blogging','plagiarism detection sites','lecture capture','Flipped Learning','Facebook','academics use of Twitter','open access publishing','mobile learning','learning styles','LMS','e-portfolios','Wikipedia','student-generated content']; let options = [`Use ${metaphor[random(metaphor)]} as a metaphor for ${tech[random(tech)]}. `, `How is ${metaphor[random(metaphor)]} an analogy for ${tech[random(tech)]}?`, `What does ${metaphor[random(metaphor)]} tell us about ${tech[random(tech)]}?`, ] let randomWord = Math.floor(Math.random() * options.length); $('#metaphorical').html(options[randomWord]); } So there are 2 arrays for the possible choices of metaphors and technology. The only gotcha is making sure there are no apostrophes inside (if so use \'). I added a few for fun. What I do like are the array of "options" which offers 3 different ways to construct the sentences. So what generate() does is randomly pick one of the 3 options, and in those, it inserts a random analogy and a random tech. It puts it into the h1 header with an id of metaphorical (which starts empty). Then to make it work, we call the generate() function when the page loads and each time the button is clicked. After I tweeted the link Martin's way, in a flash he had it running in a subdomain. https://twitter.com/mweller/status/1176516472123854848 And properly updated with a background image of the super dog Teilo. Then the fun begins. https://twitter.com/slowtech2000/status/1176528995980075009 https://twitter.com/greeneterry/status/1176523844451995650 https://twitter.com/ammienoot/status/1176598867296575489 You cannot go too wrong with stuff that generates random stuff. That's what's in my transcript. Give Martin's generator a spin at http://metaphor.edtechie.net/ -- and if you want to make your own, just grab the code and spin it up. Updates Now Martin can generate in German! https://twitter.com/eBildungslabor/status/1179319927288864768 Featured Image: Image by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay (sort of public domain license) modified with Wikimedia Commons image Martin Guitar Logo also public domain. I believe the old saying is true - "[Blogging] insanity is writing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" like maybe someone actually reading it (?). But heck, I'm not in this for the clicks, it's my blog, and I'll retell it if I want to. It's about a guitar I bought in high school and how it went on to better things https://cogdogblog.com/2008/03/telecaster/ In fact I spotted once an entry in my old savings account passbook the 1980 entry that was likely the withdrawal I made to buy the Telecaster from a classified ad in the Baltimore Sun. My 1980 finances, old school bank passbook. The withdrawal on September 29, 1980 likely was for a musical item purchase. Long blog post short, the lovely instrument ended up in the hands of my high school best friend's son, who definitely put it to better use than I ever would. Kevin just texted me a video, and you can see it appear at the 4 second mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ejAbh7fQmw I like how this story panned out. In 2015 from some fit of nostalgia I reached again for a Tele. I was in LA for maybe a DML conference? and when visiting my good friend MIkhail Gershoviz, when he offered to take me to a local guitar shop, I splurged and bought a new modern Fender Telecaster Deluxe. I rode home to Arizona with it on a train. It was maybe one of those tweeted photos, that spun another story of generosity, when another ed tech guitar friend, Adam Croom, offered to send me his old Vox practice amp. The foam in the photo is from its shipping box! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/19543051475 You Think We Look Pretty Good Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license I have kept this Tele. Generosity flowed. When posting this new one, David Kernohan and Irwin Devries both, without even me asking or them telling, mailed me effects pedals. https://cogdogblog.com/2024/01/stomp-delay-pedal/ Yet, I really do not do much except notice the dust collecting in it. One day. As it goes, I was relaying the story in our regualar "ketchup" calls with Gardner Campbell, and he unfolded his own "Telecaster in the basement" story. So now we have a plan for our next call to bust out our Telecasters. Closing the loop, or maybe letting it endlessly loop, I went into the "music room" and tried to recreate my 1980 Telecaster pose with a 2025 recreation, and GIFfing them together, the old DS106 photogif way. Transitioned GIF fade from 1980ish Me and the Telecaster flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) with a selfie taken today (2025) So yeah, there could be another Telecaster post yet. Blog insanity is mine, better than the other options. Featured Image: Tele flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license This is for @pumpkiny, trapped in an edupreneur conference full of MOOC hustlers... I could go for that, so who is going to be the 2000-teens version of Anita Bryant? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ld8DQkC6po "He's not a talking bird, he's a thinking bird. He thinks MOOC" Sorry, MOOC mocking helps me stay sane. Today should be an international holiday, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Theodor Geisel. Yawn? Better we should have said, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Suess, that's right today is the Suessentennial. Who cannot connect with a favorite child hood read? Therefore a re-iteration of an earlier post on this dog's favorite Suess book (scratch your heads hard to figure out this one!).... (more…) According to Molly's Web Design and Development Personality Indicators: Frustrated with the range of attitudes and opinions I deal with as a standards-oriented educator, I've decided to begin a project (very) loosely based on the Meyers-Briggs personality indicators. So, dear readers, I'm hoping you'll help me add and refine my categories, but I'm off to a start with the following... There are not a 100 questions to respond to, just a self-assessment; so I am somewhere in the land of: TTLM. Trying To Learn More. In this category are the good men and women who might still be serving it up Old Skool but are open to learning, open to growth yet struggling with standards related concepts and the snakepit of browser challenges of contemporary Web design and development. These brave souls are not in the majority, but they are to be lauded and assisted for their willingness to venture forth and expand their horizons. and SAVD. Standards Aware Visual Designer. These people are designing with standards in mind - creating beautiful sites for the screen, working toward achieving accessible sites, examining usability and human factors, and very possibly beginning or already designing for alternative devices and media types. A very rare breed, and if you are reading this post it's very highly likely you're either one your own fine self, know all their names or have Zeldman's personal phone number memorized. Now what? Do I get Zeldman's number? And who's gonna admit to being OFAD? Labels are good for.... well.... soup cans. Just for fun, I added a rather small feature to the Feed2JS script/service; Curt Whittaker had emailed requesting: It would be nice if the script could have alternate text if there are no items in the current feed. For example, we are looking to use this for our Calendar of Events - see http://test.sou.edu. Some days there are no events, and I want to say so rather than have just a blank box. It is actually quite easy thing to toss in the mix (just spit out "no items for this feed" if the Magpie parser returns a zero count item array), so it is now there- you can verify by tossing in the URL for the an empty item feed I made. Also, since we do get a handful of "how do I make it do X?" type requests that are too specialized to make it into the final, I created a list of "mods" small script changes that have been requested. How much is Feed2JS being used since released May 24, 2004? Well the examples page lists 19 sites that have bothered to share their use of this free service. We know there is more out there... so step up and sign up, eh? To show, I added code to the examples page that counts the number of cached feeds sitting on our server- as of today, there are 15990! which at least suggests parsing and spitting back that many feeds. That was much more than I expected. Note that some time down the road when I am house cleaning, I'll likely dump the cache directory to reset it. Wow. That is a lot of action. We'll have some more data soon when we finish setting up AWstats to analyse the web server log. Readers know how affectionate and enamored I am of flickr but the feelings are just as gooey for ecto, the desktop blog editing tool for Mac OSX and Windows. In fact, it is one of the very few software titles out there that I shelled out some shareware $ for. Without a doubt, I would blog less and use less media if I was forced to use the web editing interfaces. I use ecto to edit about 8 different weblogs, mostly MovableType, but I have also successfully tested it for a Blogger hosted site. It has way too many features to gush on about, but the HTML shortcuts are a godsend, the previews save me from a large number of embarrassing typos (not all of them ;-), the new image and media uploading/attachingg by drag and drop in version 2 of ecto are just a gem and a half. And there are little things I find by accident, such as the Amazon search I just used in a previous post -- a keyword search tool that can help me build a link to relevant books and other things available from Amazon without ever having to visit Amazon or use my web browser. For that last post, where I wanted to reference a book, (1) I merely entered the title (and author's last name since the title search would not be specific); (2) clicked search; and (3) highlighted the result and clicked "insert link". Not only does ecto build a proper link to the book's page at Amazon, it inserts an icon of the book cover into my blog post. This is the beauty of open APIs that Amazon and the flickr people are pioneering. It is why they will be strong net hubs. It is why I love 'em (figuratively ;-) Sunny San Diego, fresh ocean breeze, how much better can it get? I slipped into town this afternoon for the EDUCAUSE ELI Annual conference, picked up the bag, and performed a past ritual. But bags aside, it's off to a galactic start. I met up Brian Lamb this afternonn and we mulled over our session for tomorrow. Actually we ended up talking about other stuff, feeling like this was pretty un-rehearsable, and just recorded some ancillary audio to add at a later date. The strategic planning continued over liquid assets at a nearby establishment, before appearing at the conference eopening reception. Already a highlight is getting to meet F2F with two bloggers I respect, read, and steal links from: Gardner Campbell (not to be confused with author Campbell D. Gardner) and Bryan Alexander who bears an uncanny resemblence to author Dr. Brian Alexander Strutgasky. It's an honor to be among this crowd, and it was very cool to know and greet so many other colleagues here. It's a good buzz so far. We joined a group of 10 others trolley-ing it out to Old Town San Diego for a fun meal, though this was not the night for the penultimate fish taco. Featured Image: Obligatory Conference Bag Shot flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Keep out the comment spam bots! On the receiving end of much internet spam roach droppings, I understand the use of captchas, those random letter combos generated as graphics, intended to keep out the automated spam bots on web submission forms. I have used them myself. So I like them when the work for me, but oi! I cringe when I have poured my eneergy into writing the perfect comment and eager to see it posted, and Zam! I am forced to squint at some obscure twisted set of letters and punch the into the box. It really does short circuit the connection experience you just made with a blog writer and your communication. It completely drops a trap door open on your usability experience. But okay, necessary, small evils we can live with. What I do not like living with are crappy captchas, the ones that make you work hard to decipher, like this one: While this one is rather legible in terms of the numbers/letters you can see (as opposed to some of those twisted ones on Blogger and elsewhere), if I did not bother to read the caption, I would not have thought there were five characters to monkey type in the form it sure looks like C484 to me. And don't you wonder on these things: What if I get it WRONG? Does it eat my comment, does it put my IP address on a bad list? (I know the answer, but it is not obvious to the victim) Sigh, one more thing 98% of the web needs to jump through hoops for due to the abuse of its open-ness by link spam harvesters. This could all change in a heart beat or two, if Google woke up, smelled the spam, and took away the incentives that link rank creates. Ouch, I keep dreaming. I could have done something in those four, make it, five, make it several college years, when wonderful offers like today's email spam brings: Obtaining a DIPLOMA has never been so easy! Call today and find out how you could get your DIPLOMA from a highly credible college, Full Transcripts, A Letter of Recommendations, and even honors. 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx No required tests, classes, books, or interviews. Diplomas are available include but are not limited to: Bachelors, Masters, MBA, and Doctorate (PhD). Available in any field of your choice. Everyone is approved, Never is anyone turned down. Total Confidentiality assured. Call Today get a DIPLOMA within days!!! 24 hours a day, 7 days a week including Sunday and Holidays. What a fool I was, all I ever got was a diploma, and I could have gotten a DIPLOMA, and rather than studying, reading, working, I could have been out on the beach. Do people really go for this? What kind of person will actually think this is worth calling a number and giving them your credit card info? How crazy is that? Rock on, PT Barnum, rock on. It was way overdue, but now our Feed2JS service and downloadable code now offers support for RSS feeds that contain links to podcast media-- this means any RSS feed with RSS "enclosures" can now be rendered in any web page using our cut and paste code. Through a simple patch to the MagpieRSS parser library, and some new code under the hood, any media link found in an RSS enclosure, will be displayed with a "Play MP3" button or "Play m4a" button for an enhanced podcast item. A bit of effort may be needed to do the right thing with style sheets, but that's all on you. It's all rather new, and I hope it does not cause havoc. Now available at http://feed2js.org/ I did not discover the barfing flickr panda just followe dlinks in my gReader from sites like Mashable. The panda provides a different way to Explore flickr, the 500 most "interesting" photos as identified by the magical algorithm. The Panda just seems to be a new way to vew them; just sit and watch as new photos are upchucked: There is a bit more information, but no explanation, in Of Pandas and Rainbows. To some people, Explore is the ultimate beauty contest. It's the pinnacle of Flickr, the achievement of achievements. They fret and conspire and worry, and actually get angry and frustrated, when their perfectly fine photos, never "get into" Explore. Except it's basically random. No matter how artificially "interesting" you try to make your photos (Explore photos are selected via Flickr's "Interestingness Algorithm", affectionately known as the "Magic Donkey"), Explore is still only 500+ images each day. And each day on Flickr, there are more than five thousand photos uploaded each minute. That's each minute. So to help these poor souls, to shed some light on the mysteries and myths of Explore, a Group was formed. "The Secrets of Explore". A clearinghouse of info to clear up the nonsense, to spread some fact jelly over fiction bread. And of course, it has its very own blinky graphic. This artwork might go blinky for the cause as well, but it's also an homage, a bit of a congrats and thank you, to the fine Flickr volunteers who risk their sanity, to tell TruthToExplore(tm). Why pandas, you ask? Why pandas vomiting rainbows? That's a whole other secret. Holy cow, if I thought the internet was big. Swallow this line again: And each day on Flickr, there are more than five thousand photos uploaded each minute. I like the mystery. Take your best guess- what does the barfing panda symbolize? And is he/she really barfing? I collect stories of unexpected things that happen to people when they share what they create in the open. They used to be amazing, but after a copyright slap, they are true. The only time I usually add is when I get a chance to present the stories; there is (ahem) (cough) (ahem) an easy way to share... but. Well, people are busy, I know. So I'll be adding one more of my own soon. I start with the end- this new cover of an issue of the biology journal Cell features an image remixed from one of my open licensed photos: That's my Dad's drafting table! In 2008 I posted a photo of the table to flickr https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2503159959 Finished Stain Project flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This drafting table was used by my Dad in the 1950s. He had not finished college, and while working as a bricklayer. he enrolled in a correspondence course in Construction Cost Estimation. I wrote before, with a little audio assist from my Mom, how I considered my Dad a successful distance learner. No MOOC dropout was he; after getting his certificate, he went into the field for Baltimore Contractors and then spent the rest of his career doing this kind of work for the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mom did not seem to remember the drafting table, but I had found it in the basement, took ti when I moved to Arizona, and have taken it everywhere I have lived. In the photo above in 2008, I had sanded and restained it, and put the photo on flickr. I got a cryptic comment there warning me that my vies were about to go up, and later was told why -- that image was used as part of a PhotoShop tutorial on PSDTUTS The tutorial is pretty amazing, there is a lot before my table appears, but the author shows how to import a 3D model into PhotoShop, and manipulate the model data to generate a realistic looking blueprint image. He than shows how to make it look like a real piece of paper (with subtle shadows, folds, drapes) laid across my drafting table photo. That would have been enough there. But then I got a request via email from Khanh Huy Bui who asked to use the table in an image he was preparing for the cover of Cell (he has a research article in there which I am sure I would not understand). The work he did in Photoshop is amazing too, it really captures the detail of paper, shadow, etc. And there you go, my dad uses this table to get through his studies, I cart of off, post a photo of it in flickr, it gets in a photoshop tutorial (and the commenter was right, it has like 5800 views), and now it's the cover of a biology research journal. You cannot expect these things to happen when you share; if you do, it's the wrong reason to share. And usually it's the things you share that you least expect to be of interest that for some cosmic reason, are of interest to someone else. I cannot guarantee at all if you start sharing your photos and stuff that one of these stories will happen to you. All you do is increase the potential energy some infinitesimal amount that it might happen. But what I can guarantee is this- if you never openly, share your creations, you will never experience one of these stories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcfircjooc And if you do not want something amazing to happen like this, well... Too bad. Sad. Got a true story? I'm interested. Always. I know my Dad would just love seeing that journal cover with his old table on it. He might not understand the crazy path, but he would appreciate it. And that is the best story of them all. UPDATE February 8, 2014 How did I miss this? In going through my folders (on the computer) of old photos and scans, I found Dad's certificate from this program! It must have been in the files at my Mom's house: Dad's certificate from April, 1955 He graduated from the Chicago Technical College in April 19, 1955 with this diploma in Plan Reading, Estimating and Building Superintendence. Chicago Tech closed in the 1970s but they have been doing this kind of extension course work going back to 1915; I found a few ads in Google Books. The answer to his education was there all the time. It's back. It's dark, reflective, you are looking into it. It looks "off". CCO image from Pikrepo But it's not. It's looking at you. Is it? This is the 2020 iteration of a recast Network Narratives, the course I've co-taught (completely remotely) at Kean University with Mia Zamora. Things are different this time around, start with the intro that leads you to the new site. Here's what it's about. Through my own fascination with the dystopian future as now series Black Mirror, I convinced Mia to borrow it as a metaphor (I used the Nosedive episode as a class project when I taught solo in 2018). The metaphor really jumped when I caught this video of series genius creator Charlie Brooker describing where the name cam from. It's brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2YPxSDIoPE I also very much wanted to weave in the Black Mirror Writers Room activity that was done at Mozfest last year- I only knew of this via Anne-Marie Scott's post from her experience in the workshop. It also wove in well as Mia and I wanted as well to have students appreciate the brilliance of the Screening Surveillance short films (very much part of the same genre) and hopefully tie in a remote class visit with sava saheli singh. What we are aiming for is an examination of issues of digital citizenship, participatory culture, networked learning, and identity, leading to the creation of networked narrative type stories that can look into them along maybe the same kind of approach as the ones listed above. We noticed last year when we attempted to engage students in looking at issues of privacy, tracking, surveillance, that often the result (even sometimes for ourselves) is a kind of melancholy sense of helplessness "what can we really do?" (we did ask them to creatively imagine in their final projects possible ways of light through the dark). And if you've watched a few Black Mirror episodes, some are so dark they leave you rather... as they say over yonder... "gutted". But in an excellent essay about the series at the Verge, I like how they suggest that the narrative is changing, and maybe, not as utterly dystopian. That's why I suggested one possible sub title of "Not Necessarily Dystopia". It leaves room for participants to go darker, but it need not be that way. We've changed up some things this time around, first by launching a new course site at http://netmirror.arganee.world Twitter will be a part but not as central, we'll engage in some activities around understanding network and participatory culture again using the #netnarr hashtag. As an interest crossover, Mia is asking students in her other course on Ethnic American Literature to use the same tag (their theme is "What does it Mean to be American") https://twitter.com/MiaZamoraPhD/status/1222313688541147136 And as much as I love the syndicated course approach, I was eager to try the more in house approach of having the students write as authors on the course blog. This takes a chunk of setup away from setting up and fiddling with a blog, and just focus on writing. I'm also eager to push more use of Hypothes.is - we have had the periodic use as most academics do to have participants do shared annotation of readings. I really want to have them as well to think about how it's different as a public, but less visible, conversation space than social media. And I really keep holding hopes of getting some students to consider what a network narrative could be like that maybe hopped across the web in the annotation layer. It strikes me as a way of participating, but less visibly, in networked publics. As before, the class meets in a regular (well it is in a new building) classroom at Kean University, with Mia in the room. As me on a screen with them for 3 hours was not always effective, we have a new format. The first half I will be out of the room as the class discusses weekly readings (students will each sign up to lead a session, suggest more readings, and organize a presentation/discussion activity). I suggested rather than just have me trying to listen remotely, that it could be more interesting for the students to collaboratively recap the highlights, with tweets and or some group note taking on the whiteboard. It may not have a name, but maybe it's "Recap for Alan". I will come in to help lead the "do" part of class where we engage with activities, maybe make some media, explore some network tools, etc. There's more on the table, we have a working overview of what will be happening by topic (kind of like our previous "spines"). This time around will be less trying to get all the activity in gory detail on the site, we have a new flavor to the weekly posts with them happening the day after class- Mia will post on the class discussion and what we are asking the students to do that week. Mine will be an overview and resources for the hands on activities. I anticipate our long standing friends (Hi Kevin! Hi Wendy) who followed before as open participants might say, "what about us?" We will still have lots of places for you to jump in and mingle, but it's less about trying to design a full parallel experience. Like this week, we invite folks to join in our first Annotation as Discussion activity, a page on our site rigged to open up with Hypothes.is enabled. I had some fun on the little splash site with a CSS animation technique I found in CodePen that replicates the opening title sequence of Black Mirror (I tossed in a background image with Backstretch and a second bit of text, and an old fashioned HTTP-Refresh for redirection). Also on the Do Something New front, for the new site, maybe the first time ever, I am using the default WordPress theme, the new Twenty Twenty. I was intrigued as it's development involved my favorite theme designer, Anders Norén, and it was built atop his Chaplin theme which I used last year on a few sites. I know plenty of my colleagues whinge about the WordPress block editor, but I'm all in. The most recent version of WordPress has a lot of blocks that make it compelling, groups, and flexible columns, full width bleed blocks, better control over colors and backgrounds... I'm having fun pushing to around. To me it does a lot of things people end up wielding in those visual builders that end up turning your site into a tower of shortcodes. Anyhow, that's about a week in to this course. #NetNarr is a bit new, a bit dark, but not necessarily dystopian. And fun to be a part of. Featured Image: Image used for NetMirror course page based on portion of cracked glass CC0 Pixrepo image (darkened) superimposed on Pixabay image of surveillance camera by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke plus distorted previous Netnarr logo. I thought it was time to try the ds106 Wiggler Spectroscopy assignment: Take two photos of the same subject from slightly different angles. Merge the two photos into a single looped, animated gif to create a wiggle stereoscopic image that simulates 3-D. I decided to use my pal Spike, the metal dog in my front yard, taking about 4 pairs of photos. As ti turned out, my angle of different between each pair was a bit too much, but some of the ones that were similar in angle had enough different to make it interesting: and from the other side... I made mine in Photoshop by using the File -> Scripts -> Import into Stacks command, using the option to align objects- this has the effect of keeping Spike mostly motionless but animating the background. Usually I have to do some futzing back and forth from the timeline view to the frames view in the Animation window. I select all the icons and set the animation speed to the quickest option (0.1s), Keeping the size at 500pixels wide, and 64 colors for the GIF options kept the files small (under 300k each). Wiggling is fun! Spike is just happy to wiggle all day because.... what else is there to do? Inside the Photo Photos taken on January 1 are important to me as they are the start of a new daily photo set/album on flickr, a practice I have done every year back TO 2008. For this first day of the new year I traveled from Vancouver to Victoria via BC Ferries. It was the fourth in a row, maybe five, of clear blue sky days here. The color of the red container ship contrasting with the deep blue water yelled to me PHOTO! PHOTO! This was the best of maybe 7 or 8 I took of the ship, which I ultimately (here) framed to make the ship seem separate from everything, just showing the edge of the pier. One might say the ship is the subject (the red color is what stands out) but it could also be the expanse of open water filling the foreground, right? The editing included a bit of cropping to move the horizon higher than the original and also to trim a bit of the extra pier showing on the right. I did a bit it of adding saturation to the reds to make the ship stand out (using the color editor in Aperture). I experimented with some HDR filters, but I did not like the grainy effect that put in the sky, so instead I bumped the orange colors, increased the overall saturation. So there’s not a whole lot of complexity here- instinct suggested the ship would make a good shot, and some waiting to catch the best late afternoon light angle on it. The post edits are mild, it pretty much was how I thought I saw it… but more intense by isolating the ship from the rest of the world around it (cranes on the pier, other ships). Photography is as much in what you remove from photos as what you include. This morning's unwanted, unwarranted, un-necessary e-mail virus bounceback count = 127 mass deleted. Let's talk with Symantec's email message, sent personally to me: (more…) I keep recording the audio "skyperview" and "iRiverView" interviews I am doing for the upcoming article I am not yet writing, and have 21 now in the collection: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/podcast.html Most of these were colleagues I cornered with my mp3 recorder, as well as a few more audio devices So added to the list: * Eric Feinblatt and Michael Feldstein-- from the SUNY system, we were having a Skype conversation so I just tagged on the interview http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/eric_and_michael.mp3 * Shelley Rodrigo-- English faculty at Mesa Community College (one of the 10 Maricopas) when she dropped by my office to chat about her work with our Ocotillo Hybrid Structures action group. She's one energetic teacher! http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/shelley_rodrigo.mp3 * Cheryl Colan-- wears many hats as a part time Media Technician at Phoenix College (another Maricopa), part time web designer for me at MCLI, as well as a talented digital video editor and digital storytelling expert. She had an iPod borrowed from another faculty member along with the Belkin attachment mmicrophone... we got audio, but I'm not impressed with the sound quality. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/cheryl_colan.mp3 * Roger Yohe-- Faculty Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Estrella Mountain Community College (yes, another Maricopa site). This was interesting. We were using his school's Wimba server for an online audio meeting that had Roger on the west side of town, myself in Tempe, Jim Patterson in North Phoenix, and John Arle from central Phoenix. I would have recorded it directly into my WireTapPro, but Wimba hung by Mac browser, and I had to shift to the Dell laptop. So this audio was transmitted via Wimba but recorded with my little trusty iRiver mp3 recorder. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/roger_yohe.mp3 * Maureen Zimmerman -- Nutrition faculty at Mesa Community College, but on loan to our office as Director Iand my boss). Recorded with the iRiver in her office. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/maureen_zimmerman.mp3