Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Poking around the site, I found what is more or less some evolving documentation of the ITConversation software and recording process (that would said as "pro SESS" by by northern neighbors ;-) as a wiki document- see IT Conversations Wiki for things like AudioProcessing, IT Conversations in Education, File Formats, Encoders, Bit Rates and More, and much more. Cool. Oops, don't let the spammers know about this. I am drowning in things to do, things I would like to do, and things I have to do. My workload is more or less double what it was 6 months ago since losing the expertise of Colen, who worked 5 years for us doing part-time programming support and developing much of the MLX and our two other major online application/review systems. Thus the development of the openMLX drags to a slow grind, well, actually, it has not budged since December. Right now, I am administering and programming new pieces of both our online Learning Grants system and an online faculty professional growth application/review system. New things drop in like 12 event and online registration sites in Spring semester alone or a request to shoot and edit videos for faculty nominated for the NISOD awards. There is a presenter proposal system running now for our Ocotillo Retreat. And hanging out there this week are two presentations to be done for conference travel next week. I am trying to figure out why my Jade server craps out every Saturday. On every front I am repelling spam. I am told for 'political reasons', our district office is unable to add new full time positions, so although we have the funds for it, and have written a proposal, it was rejected last summer when our office requested a full time programming support position be added. While I have great expertise available from Cheryl, again in a part-time position, the road for training in our labyrinth of web systems is a long steep climb. Just venting off some steam. A leap month would be nice. I am ready to dump all of this technology stuff and go to work raking leaves or painting houses. It was just last week my MacBookPro came back from its two week vacation to replace its fan and logic board. And now today, its screen is dimmed to about 2% of its brightness, so much that I thought it was blanks and resorted to the resetting of PRAM, PMUs, etc. It was only by an accidental tilt under the light I could make out the dim background image and desk top icons, I cannot even locate the mouse. My guess is the screen backlight is now shot, and that means another trip to the shop. Heck, I might be ready for a Dell. No, not quite that bad. But that is nothing on the crap-around I am getting from Huhges on my diminishing satellite net connection. I cannot describe in words how much I regret signing up with them. If you are considering their service, RUN, do not walk, but RUN elsewhere. I mean it. They have the WORST service, twisted vile support-less customer support, and a web site set of tools that are 10 years behind in web service technology. My first night up here at the cabin, connectivity was good; I ran their speed test, which yielded 1000 kbs download and 192 kbs upload, which I considered about a C- considering I am paying for a service that advertises as 1500/1000 speeds. After a lovely night of rain, in the morning, our speeds were noticeably slow to non-existent. All of the modem diagnostics panned out, a 91% signal, etc. However, several attempts to run the speed test failed on the upload test with HTTP errors in the java test app. This makes sense as the speed was likely so slow that it never sent the data. So off it was to customer support, via their live chat. I got someone quickly, but of course the chat was slow because of my sub dial-up speed connection, and the tech asked me to enter all oh my ID info I had already plugged into the web form that launched the chat. So after 15 minutes of exchange to reiterate the problem, she insisted I download an application to "assist" the speed test. Ugh, it was Windows only, which necessitated firing up the MacBookPro in Windows XP. This took about 15 minutes, as I had to go through that gawd awful sequence of entering a 26 character WEP key, which as usually takes 4 tries to get it entered twice. Okay, so we go through the download of some LCCU utility, run it through Explorer, change a bunch of settings in IE, and we get the speed test thingy to work. So what do we learn? My speeds are now 845kbs download and 10 kbs upload, which is barely uploading at all. And at this point she says I need to call customer support on their voice line!!! I waster an hour and 15 minutes in chat support to learn what I knew, my download speeds were slow. So it was a call to customer support, hold music. This guy wants me to run the speed test. I run the test. Of course, it fails with the same error. He has me read all of the settings from my control panel on the satellite modem. He wants me to fiddle with my router. I carefully explain that 36 hours ago everything worked fine, so why do I have to fiddle with my computer when nothing has changed? He offers to escalate my problem to a higher level of tech support, where upon I am transferred to a hold music pattern, where after 25 minutes I have has enough. Ok, so just to rule out my wireless router, I plug the ethernet into my laptop. Same result. Hours later, I give the chat support another try. Same routine. This guy tries to tell me I need to download a version of Java. How does that make a difference when the Java applet has run successfully, loads successfully and obviously fails to respond. He can only tell me again to call voice support, hence the seventh circler of voice support hell. While on hold, again I run the speed test. Woo-hoo, I actually get a result.... and it is an abysmal 746/8 kbs, the lowers rate yet. I could get a faster connection with tin cans and strings. So here it is again, calling across the ocean, where I have to again confirm my name, email, customer ID, mother's blood type, and they offer to transfer me to my escalated technical support. I am now in my 45th minute of waiting, having heard the same hold song 22 times. I am ready to strangle something. Let me repeat to anyone out there, but no means SHOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER GIVING ANY MONEY OR BUSINESS TO HUGHES! THEY ARE CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT EVIL TWISTED AND I HOPE A METEOR LANDS ON THEIR CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS OR A SWARM OF FLESH EATING MAGGOTS APPEARS IN THEIR EXECUTIVE WASHROOMS!!!!!!!!!! I might also go for being a fry cook. Update: This morning, I test my connection, and the speeds have returned to the previous levels. Does this mean I had to make any changes to my computer, network, configuration? No. Does it mean they solved my problem by addressing it? No. I am just glad I do not have to spend another chunk of my life listening to the Hughes Hold Muzak. Thinking I was on a roll of good fortune, I flipped the MBP open, but it's still got a dimmed, useless screen. Tomorrow, I'll be seeing if I can hook it to an external monitor or booting it in Target Disk mode so I can yank a fresh copy of my data, and take it bake to the clinic. I previously blabbed that Twitter had done a full reverse cycle to its first impression in 2007 of being "that's the stupidest thing I ever heard of"-- I was wrong. https://cogdogblog.com/2023/10/the-life-cycle-as-it-should-returns-to-where-it-started/ The stupid levels have gone much lower, like DEFCON -1. I don't need to say much. And I am not the first to lament the ultimate lameness how in so many places there is this way of referencing the platform... I won't even say it here, but see the reddit thread for No Stupid Questions and I think Wonkette has the winning title... if this is the Associated Press's Style Book, I will refrain from being in style. Everytime I see it in a post or article, I am torn between giggling and spitting up breakfast. And is there possibly anyone on the internet who does not know of this patently junior league goofball attempt at branding and really needs the "formerly known as" tail stream? On this blog Twitter is and was only called Twitter. Like it matters. Featured Image: Hidden X flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license [caption id="attachment_34259" align="alignnone" width="500"] creative commons licensed wikimedia commons image by Housing Works Thrift Shops[/caption] While RSS is still a dying technology, I offer some insight into its innards. If the mundane details of feed data make you queasy, carry on. If you want to know what's going on under the hood of your blog and the Connected Courses syndication hub, then trudge on. This started with a reasonable request from Liz Dorland, a colleague I've known since my mullet headed days at Maricopa https://twitter.com/ldinstl_chimera/status/509178366356766720 So here is the thing, the list of all syndicated blogs on the site is automatically generated from the RSS feed for each blog, so the title of the blog and the link are ones provided by the blog itself. There are two main parts of an RSS feed- there is the "Channel" information, which describes the source of the site, and the "items: which are typically all the data of the blog posts. The channel information for this here blog looks like: CogDogBlog http://cogdogblog.com Alan Levine Barks Here Mon, 08 Sep 2014 15:20:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.2 It's all XML data organized into tags. Whenever Feed Wordpress checks a site for new content, it grabs the information listed in the <title>...</title> tag and the <link>...</link>. If the title of a blog changes then Feed Wordpress updates it in the database of the aggregator site. This way the blog name and its URL are dynamic, if they change on the source site, the aggregator gets the change (people do rename blogs!). These are the information bits the script I wrote to generate the list of blogs and links. So if an RSS feed does not provide good information, that shows up. In the case of Liz's Blog, the feed information for the channel is... well... messed up. fubar http://www.hastac.org/blog/feed/884 en Notice that the title is blank. Even worse the link tag has the wrong URL- it should be the URL for her blog is http://www.hastac.org/blog/884/ but the link tag value in the RSS feed is the one for the RSS feed itself. I cannot do much about bad RSS information (except make drupal jokes). But Feed Wordpress offers a way to override the lack of good information. The default setting for the feed information is Update automatically from feed, but I can change the blog title and the link to be manually entered, so here I am entering the correct information. But do not let me rest too much on my Wordpress Snobbery-- it's feeds are a bit clunky too. The source name for a tag of category comes in, like for Brian Lamb's blog where he is using a "connected courses" tag as Abject » connected courses I'd sooner see this as "Abject tagged 'connected courses'" But worse, the link which should point to his tag archive, instead points to the root of his entire blog. This is why I modified the script to point to all of the posts on the Connected Courses site syndicated from each blog (this is essentially an author archive, where the author is Brian's blog). If your blog's name is horribly wrong, I can be coaxed into editing it like I did Liz's. Frankly I hope someone notifies the HASTAC site about the foulups in their RSS feeds. I don't think developers really care that much about the quality of the channel feed data. But I thought maybe one person out there might want to know the nuts and bolts on the blog names and links. And hey- did you notice we added a link to download an OPML file? That is a way you can import al of the Connected Course blogs into an RSS Reader, a much better way to navigate the fire hose (someone tell Google this is useful) (that ship has sailed). cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This audio recording was created (by request) for Matt Henderson a Manitoba teacher a number of us met this summer at the UnPlug'd Conference. Matt, who has done his own projects with creating a school based FM radio station, asked us for some help with a presentation he did Friday where he wanted to include some perspective on ds106 radio. So with some gentle nudging from @drgarcia, a group of us celebrating the last night of the Open Education 2012 conference in Vancouver gathered in a key back room of The SoundLab to records this one take "rockumentary" for Matt. With gentle music provided by @noiseprofessor, speakers included @grantpotter @cogdog (me) and @bryanjack ds106radio rockumentary Enjoy. And it is now on the radio station... More goodness for the radio station is at http://bit.ly/ds106radioinfo Last month I did some of my family history unraveling in honor of my Aunt Dorothy's birthday, as she is the last living sibling of my Mom. The 1934 family photo of all five got me thinking of my mother's brother, Harvey, the only boy. My mom in front (age 5), with her brother Harvey leaning on her (age 9), and older sister Ruth in back (age 13). The expressions in these photos match my Mom's stories when I asked her what it was like to grow up in the Depression. They were poor, but for her, she described not knowing the hard times, she was just a kid playing in the Baltimore neighborhood. Her father made do as a shoemaker (I suppose always in need) who supplemented income with some gambling (?). He was industrious, he rigged up some kind of water spray gizmo for the kids in summer, he made his own beer, was known for his pickled tomatoes, and he just liked fixing things around the house. My curiosity leads from my Uncle Harvey, whom all I know of is he served in the Navy in World War II. I have but one dim memory of him sitting on the 1970s vintage green couch in our family living room. I was no more than 5. He was completely bald; my Mom had said he lost all his hair suddenly at age 19. I grew up fearing this happening, and when I hit 20 with a full head of hair, I felt like I had cheated this fortune. Yet here, in my research, I find photos of Uncle Harvey older with hair, so there goes the way of stories, either told or remembered differently than fact. Who's hallucinating or making things up? But also in memory, sitting on the couch with my uncle was his wife, my Aunt Doris. Here too the details are fuzzy, a remember blond hair, a very warm loving face, and kindliness. And one more thing, I am fairly sure my Aunt Doris got me started collecting toy Matchbox cars, those cas metal models that came in cardboard boxes. I ended up with maybe 120-150 of them, many dinged up from heavy play, a few bearing paint added. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/28870031353 2016/366/249 Let's Hop in the MG 1100 and go for a Long Trip! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4217998600 2009/365/360 Well Used Toys flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I still have the yearly catalogue books, where as a kid, you would pick out ones to covet and ask for, but also track ones in your own collection. The oldest one I have from 1968 fits with the timing I remember spending with Aunt Doris, she would bring a new catalogue book or new car on every visit. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/24655793236 Matchbox 1968 Catalog flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Here is some of the analytics I was collecting that first year. The handwriting looks like my Mom's style, showing my collection grew from 39 in August to 57 in September, all interesting as this was far from any gift occasions (my birthday is in April), maybe it was gifts for my entering first grade? I think it was just this kindly Aunt. But also in 1968 (and I do not remember, just found out in later research), that Uncle Harvey passed away, from I vaguely recall, leukemia. What did not settle in was that he was only 42 at the time. And so I feel like a saw my Aunt Doris only a few times after she was widowed. It was much later, as an adult that my Mom shared that Harvey's other siblings and his mother did not approve of his marriage. I am remembering that my Mom was ostracized because she stood up for her sister-in-law, and there were many years of distance in the family. Much of this is conjecture and fragmented memories. But this thinking of the scattered shreds of family stories made me wonder how much I could find out about my Aunt Doris as no one is left alive who knows the stories. But yo get to here, I have to start with my uncle. Uncle Harvey I have a few bits of data from a brief time when I paid for an Ancestry.com account to confirm Harvey was born March 15, 1925 in Baltimore. In some audio recordings I made with Mom on a visit in 2009 for her 80th birthday, she mentions that in the small house her family lived in on Asquith Street there were four bedrooms on the 2nd floor, one for her parents, one for her grandmother Sarah, one that mom and her 3 sisters had to share, and Harvey got his own room because he was the only boy. She also shared that Harvey worked briefly in a printing shop before he enlisted in the Navy, Mom said he volunteered and served on a ship that was stationed in the Pacific, but he did not see active war duty.. Ancestry.com did reveal my Uncle's service record and that he enlisted August 2, 1943, thus when he was only 18. When we cleaned my mom's house I found what must have been Harvey's enlistment photo: Uncle Harvey flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license The two documents I found a Ancestry are navy personnel change forms, indicating Harvey served on Landing Ship, Tank (LST) vessels designed for amphibious troop landings in the Pacific theater. This first one suggests he served on LST-610 which saw service starting April 19, 1944-- was he in training before? This implies he was part of this ship's operation in the Western Caroline Islands operation (Capture and occupation of southern Palau Islands). The SV6 designation on the bottom section refers to the V-6 classification for enlisted seamen as "Naval Enlisted Reserve-General Duties" (reference similar discussions in History Hub). His rating of "SM3c" refers to a seaman rank of Signalman 3rd Class or a "specialist in visual communications" with stripes: This "muster roll" documents that Harvey was transferred to LST-736 in October 17, 1944 that was deployed in operations at Leyte landings (the Philippines), 18 October to 6 November 1944. Given the dates, this transfer happened in the Pacific. LST-736 saw action as well in Manila Bay-Bicol operations (Zambales-Subic Bay, 29 to 30 January 1945) and Okinawa Gunto operation (Assault and occupation of Okinawa Gunto, 1 April to 18 June 1945). My Mom has a photo of Uncle Harvey dated 1945, from the Palm Trees is this a base in the Pacific? Or some return to base in maybe San Diego? In August 2022 I did some early play with AI image improvement and colorizing with GFP-GAN on this photo (compare below). Original and AI improved photo of Uncle Harvey, dated 1945 in my mom's photo album I am not sure if I can match the location, but the improvement does bring him to life a little-- and at age 20 here with full hair intact! Another fun artifact is this typewritten (and sister annotated) letter to Harvey from my Mom, who might have been 15 or 16 at te time (it lacks a date). But my Mom is such a teen here! In this photo, LST-736 is the middle ship unloading in Okinawa April 1945, for all I know he might be in the photo. Image from NavSourceOnline for LST-736, caption indicates original source as "US Navy photo from the collections of the US Naval Historical Center." It was likely this operation that Harvey picked up a non-functional Japanese rifle, it sat in my parent's basement for years as a token they said he took from his service. I admit being a bit fascinated with a gun (a knowledgeable friend confirmed it could not shoot) and regret not keeping it. The next change file I found is dated April 30, 1946 documenting Harvey was transferred from LST-892 to "ComWesSeaFron"-- meaning Commander, Western Sea Frontier which was responsible for the Pacific coast of the US to Alaska. First this suggests I do not have the paperwork when he was assigned to LST-892, this photo of the ship from NavSourceOnline indicates in the description that it was taken "in San Francisco Bay returning from duty in the Far East, probably 9 April 1946-- as it displays a homeward bound pennant." NavSourceOnline Photo of LST 892 That's where the trail ends for what I could find from my Uncle's Navy service. My audio recordings with my mom mention that after he returned, Harvey went back to work "in the printing business" but nothing else. Where did he live? The only later photo I have is one my Aunt Dorothy (Harey's youngest sister) shared when I visited her in 2012. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/8173791233 Uncle Harvey flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license He's hanging out at some Baltimore swimming pool...what is that box sitting next to him? Zooming in... Cropped detail from Uncle Harvey flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license It looks like a radio! I run it though an image search and locate it in Radiomuseum (wow, a great discovery, not for future) as a Zenith 6G001ZYX Universal which was manufactured in 1947, so this photo is sometime after? All I have from Ancestry is Uncle Harvey died in Baltimore, March 13 ,1968 at age 42. Searches for an obituary return nothing. Finding Aunt Doris All I knew of Harvey's wife was her first name, but the Ancestry.com record indicated her name was Doris L. Cohen, born 1934 and died 2003. Seaching on her name and Baltimore as a keyword landed my luckily in the detailed ancestry research of someone else named Benjamin Bark. And Doris Cohen was in one branch of this family tree: What I see here is that my Aunt Doris remarried to a Gordon Spence, and given they had a son named Edward born in 1970, this was not long after Uncle Harvey passed away... was this why my mother's family were angry at her? And Edward would be only 7 years younger than me. I did more digging and located an email address for him. He is alive, living in Balimore, and would know more about my Aunt Doris, his mother. Maybe he has photos? What the heck, I wrote an email with subject line "Possible Family Connection?" My name is Alan and I grew up in Baltimore. I found your email address while I was doing some internet genealogy research. I am pretty sure that your mother, Doris L. Cohen was married to my uncle, Harvey Herondorf, before she married your father. The info I found was in someone else's genealogy, Doris is listed at number 10 here https://bjbark.com/pdf_rpt/Berman%20Gen%20Rpt.pdf Harvey died in 1968 when I was only 5, and I just have faint but happy memories of Aunt Doris. I remember she gave me the first of many matchbox toy cars, a few I still have https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/28870031353 If your mother was my Aunt Doris, I am just curious to know anything more about her, and maybe interested if you have any old photos. Again, both me and my older sisters remember her fondly. email to Doris's son Alas, I have not heard anything, so this is where my search stops. For now. Generating Doris I am loathe to resort to AI image generators, but was impressed wih ones I saw somewhere in a post? link? from Ian O'Byrne where he was using Playground to make rather realistic photos... let's see what it could do to render an image of my Aunt Doris. Wha I envisioned was her soft smiling face, blond hair sone up in 1960s style, bending down to give a young boy (me) a gift of a matchbox car, maybe outside he front of our red brick suburban house. In 1968 she would have been 34. So my first attempt was: AI Generated image from Playground.com from prompt "Soft edged photography of smiling face of 34 year old blond haired woman wearing flower print dress, handing small gift to 5 year old black haired boy, 1960s style, kodachrome colors, norman rockwell style" It has those elements, but hardly matches my memory. She looks more like she is 14. I tried a few more, but they got even more awful. To get something close to the age I imagined I had to push the age into 50. Trying to get the background right did not exactly generate what I remembered. Sometimes the boy showed up as a man. Sometimes the aunt looked like she was 12. So I can only proudly claim that I suck at generating images by AI. In fact, I do not want to be good at it. In the last ditch effort, I figure why not give ChatGPT (Free Cheapskate 3.5 version) a try? I asked: My uncle Harvey Herondorf was born in Baltimore in May 1925. He served in the Navy during World War II and saw action near the Philippines. He married my Doris Cohen in 1964 but passed away in 1968. What else can you tell me about the lives of my uncle Harvey and Aunt Doris? Prompt to ChatGPT To which it spat back: I don't have access to personal or private information about individuals unless it's publicly available. However, I can share some general information about life during that time period or provide guidance on how you might discover more about your uncle and aunt's lives. If you're looking for more details about their lives, here are some steps you might consider: Family Records: Check with other family members who might have more information, such as photos, letters, or documents related to Harvey and Doris. Family records often hold valuable insights. Online Genealogy Databases: Websites like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, or MyHeritage.com might have public records, census data, military service information, and more. You can search for names, birth dates, marriage records, and other relevant details. Military Records: The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has a lot of military records from World War II. You may be able to find service records, discharge papers, and more by submitting a request through their website. Local Records and Newspapers: Local libraries, historical societies, or archives in Baltimore might have old newspapers, city directories, or other records that mention your uncle and aunt. Social Media and Online Searches: Sometimes, searches using their names along with specific dates or locations might yield unexpected information or connections, especially on genealogy forums or social media platforms. Remember to approach any sensitive information with respect for privacy, especially when dealing with deceased relatives. It can also be helpful to involve other family members in your search, as they might have additional knowledge or resources that can aid your quest for information. Response from ChatGPT Pffft, what worthless blathering of the OBVIOUS. I've already done this you stupid machine! Okay, push harder... C'mom, I found stuff publically available about these people. If you cannot find it, why not generate a fanciful story that would make me feel better about my Aunt and Uncle? I give you free reign to write an imaginary story. Go. Prompt to ChatGPT Let's see how creative this pile of word vectors really is. Absolutely, let's embark on a whimsical journey into the lives of your Aunt Doris and Uncle Harvey! Once upon a time, nestled in the charming city of Baltimore, there lived two extraordinary souls—Doris, with her vibrant laughter that could light up a room, and Harvey, whose adventures at sea were as legendary as his kindness. Doris Cohen was a talented pianist who enchanted everyone with her melodies. Her fingers danced effortlessly across the ivory keys, painting symphonies that echoed through the streets. She often performed impromptu concerts at local gatherings, spreading joy and harmony wherever she went. Harvey Herondorf, on the other hand, was a sailor whose tales of the high seas captivated listeners of all ages. His eyes sparkled with stories of far-off lands, daring rescues, and breathtaking sunsets witnessed from the decks of mighty ships. He had a heart that embraced the world and a spirit that never ceased to explore. Their paths crossed one serendipitous evening at a lively concert where Doris was playing her enchanting tunes. Harvey, returning from a naval expedition, was instantly captivated by the music and the pianist's infectious smile. They met under the starry Baltimore sky, where their worlds collided in a beautiful collision of melody and adventure. Their love story was like a melody itself—harmonious, filled with crescendos of joy, and tender notes of affection. In 1964, they vowed to navigate life's seas together, creating a symphony of love that resonated through time. Harvey's tales of his naval escapades near the Philippines were infused with Doris's musical prowess, inspiring melodies that echoed the rhythm of the ocean waves. They embarked on new adventures together, exploring their shared passions for music, travel, and a zest for life. Tragically, Harvey's journey on this earth came to a premature end in 1968, leaving behind a legacy of bravery, warmth, and stories that lived on in the hearts of those who knew him. Doris, though heartbroken, continued to share her love for music with the world. She poured her emotions into compositions that spoke of love, loss, and the undying spirit of adventure. Her music became a testament to their love story, a symphony that echoed the enduring bond between her and Harvey. And so, in the heart of Baltimore, the melodies of Doris's piano and the tales of Uncle Harvey's adventures continued to intertwine, weaving a tale of love and courage that inspired generations to come. Response from ChatGPT Ewwww. It sounds like it has been trained on bad Hallmark movies. Oh well. I'd rather do my own rabbit holing investigations and using my real, if sparse, memories, than bother wih synthetic BS. Maybe I'll just play with the old Matchbox cars and appreciate this Aunt I barely remember. Featured Image: AI Generated Image from Playground.com... do withitwhatyoulike! from prompt Finally! A test site now proves that Radio/UserLand weblogs are TrackBack enabled. And it works! Got Trackback? Yup! My blog entry here was created by using the MovableType bookmarklet tool that automatically dissected the test source, found the embedded RDF TrackBack data, and provided the ping address directly to my blog editing environment. The proof of my ping should be registered right here It work, and it works across different blog systems. This opens the door for maybe a lot more TrackBack activity... (more…) Bryan Alexander writes of Web 2.0 network ecology stories and wonders about the phenomena of discovery, re-use of digital media. He shares examples of photos he has taken, shared have seen positive, maybe unintended use by others, as well as the joy of connecting with people beyond his current circle of connections (which is not small by any means). The two examples he shares are alone well worth reading his post, and I have no doubts that many readers here have had a similar story themselves. My own version is how my own (pre-web, scanned, on 3 links down from an old home page) photo: was discovered by a rock band in Germany, who asked if they could use it on their CD. A few months later, I had the disc in my hands: Not exactly that this matters in any important social context, but the mere fact that sharing it somewhere, linked me with someone else. This is the kool-aid of the web that has sustained me for the last 14 years. But my favorite is that a photo I took as a mere curious oddity of graffiti etched into a prickly pear cactus in Hawaii, was discovered, and I found out there is an entire group f people who are devoted to vegefitti. Who wudda thunk? One might ask, "neat, but so what? What's the big deal?" This is what makes the web a web, the tiny, mighty, all powerful link. Maybe this swirls around the intense discussion and activity this week over at the Connectivism Conference. I was way too immersed in projects this week to do more than catch a few bits. And not being a theorist or having a deep jar of references to refer to, I cannot answer those big questions about Knowledge. But the notion of being connected, thinking connected, and craving more all resonate with me. And it brings me back to the thoughful questions in the closing of Bryan's post: How are we acculturating these practices? Is this sort of social object networking part of information literacy, media literacy? How often does popular culture represent this practice in tv news, search scenes in movies? And academia, from scholarly bibliography practices to general pedagogy, from The Chronicle to advising grad students, how are we making, sharing, digesting such stories? I don;t have the answers, but my own list of significant aspects are: We expect to search. Searching is innate to discovery. We not only expect to search, but to find. The shear power of hyperlinking is what fuels Google, and each link we add (spammers aside) adds to the collecgive value of Google's results. Link like a mad person. Linking is giving credit. Linking is good. Pay particular attention, oh ye online versions of articles that do not provide contextual links. It pays us all to share. Good Things Happen When You Share is not just a kindergarten aphorism. When you give away media like photos, videos, music etc, the world generally gives back. It sounds Hallmarky, but if you do it enough, it boomerangs on you. Apply Creative Commons liberally. Incessantly. And tel others. Let thme know how easy it is to find free great content w/o having to pay some media horder. Writing about it yourself. Just the act of Bryan's sharing his experience tinkers the "me too" bone in me, and may have others give cause to think. Reflection is wonderful, sharing it others even better. This can be blogging, but may also just be commenting. It's all the stuff about the participating part of the .0 web stuff. Communicate with media. Bryan's examples really come from images. People resonate with images, connect. And online tools like flickr make it bone simple to do. We are loking for more than words, we talk now in pictures frequently, and just in the last few months, the sheer number of people blogging in the form of shared video has exploded. Think in metaphors. Images really lend themselves to the form of communicating by metaphor, not alway literal meaning. Deeper levels of thinking happened because we interpret visual content, not just consume it. Think About Capturing Moments. I get the impression Bryan travels with his camera, phone ready to take those in the moment images. it may never be used, but you'll never pass that indelible moment and regret not being able to capture and share it. It is the new notebook. So go out there. Share, Link, and Repeat. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Johan Rd When will that MOOC[cow] finally hump over the Gartner peak and slide down to its valley of disillusionment? Is it after the last article published the cites the birth of MOOCism to the Stanford AI class? Might there actually be something out there beyond the EdXCourseraUdacity complex? Continuing the MOOC Mythology is a media created idea that it represents some sort of single entity answer, a fix for something allegedly broken. What is missing is the realization that open courses are experiments, and as Steven Johnson points out in Where Good Ideas Come From, that said ideas come from making mistakes: ... error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path thatr leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. [Lee] de Forest was wrong about the utility of a gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hot upon something that was genuinely useful Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore. And there might be a bit much too glee and cluck-cluck I told you so over Coursera's wobbles with a course that an instructor quit over frustrations with lack of student engagement or the Georgia Tech Fundamentals of Online Education (FOE) that failed to deal with a fundamental of online education (which became a foe). These are no more marks of failure for online education than over countless courses that fail and fumble that we never hear about because they fizzle inside walls we do not see. This is a failure to see MOOCs as a space to experiment and as some sort of cheap answer to how education works (or doesn't depending on your press card). At the same time, just folding up the FOE course and not rolling with it, using it as an opportunity to learn from a mistake, that is a fatal choice. What better a way to show that technology is not infallible, that as teachers, creators we can rise above a bad experience? What is the lesson taught in giving up? (that is an optional essay left for the reader) Last year when Jim and I were teaching ds106, in te first week, nearly all of our student's blogs were hacked. Did we fold? Did we sweep it under the carpet? No, we made it part of the course. Somewhere out here, the Coursera Film class I enrolled in is maybe into week 3. I've not checked in since the first week, and am well on my way to be among the 98% who Sign Up But Don't Last a Week. And yes, I am responsible for my own not learning. But for a course design not to be doing much deal with this effect, is a serious flaw. In any "real" course, the instructor, the institution has a stake in students succeeding, and are proactive in reaching out to students who stop coming to class. Right? For all of their humping of Big Data and touting Just The Enrollment Numbers, the Big Three are missing out seriously on using their own data to be smarter about supporting learners, even if it is an automated email bot. But right now, the model is totally a Field of Dreams approach. And the ending here has no Hollywood Magic. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Stuck in Customs Beyond the reach of the Times, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, beyond the bright lights of the TED stage, out where venture capital funders and Friedman do not dirty their oxford shoes, are places where the real experimentation and groundbreaking is happening. This is being done by people motivated by making learning happen better, not more cheaply or more massively, or more trendily. These are just few I know of. I am sure there are more out there. Pedagogy First http://pedagogyfirst.org/wppf12/ Lisa Lane is a tireless leader for this effort to help teachers become versatile in online teaching. The platform is not funded by gobs of Gates Money or some custom software, Lisa and her crew keep a wordpress site running with her own roll of scotch tape, and use a variety of web based tools to facilitate the class (It is one thing I do glance at in Facebook). The Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class, an open online class, will begin again in September 2013.. The class is free, offered by the Program for Online Teaching (not an accredited institution), run by volunteer faculty and participants, and open to everyone. We offer a certificate for those who fulfill the syllabus requirements, and open participation for anyone not interested in the certificate... Our in-house program differs considerably from other certification programs in that it emphasizes pedagogy over tool use. Our philosophy is that technology tools should always be at the command of the instructor's pedagogy, and not the other way around. It is similar to other programs in that it requires significant time spent working in the online environment itself. PHUBU: Phonar For Us By Us https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102809428854478622002 I wrote last summer about Jonathan Worth's open photography course efforts at Coventry University, both phonar and picbod being examples closes to ds106 in being rooted with a class but extending their reach far via the invitation for people around he world to participate in the classes projects, and partaking of the impressive list of professional photographers Jonathan taps into. An amazing and perhaps in hindsight, not unsurprising thing happened, the Coventry students who had experienced this form of class demanded a similar format for their final program requirement: Phonar ended 2012 like a supertanker trying to stop at traffic lights. Messily and with significant momentum. So much momentum in fact that the same students who you've seen submit to the will-of-open in both phonar2012 and picbod have demanded that their next class be open too. But better; designed by them, for them and supported by those people formally referred to as "˜teachers'. So what does this mean? It means that most of the projects you've seen grow in #phonar2012 will evolve (in some cases mutate) into Final Major Projects in 2013... Phonar for Us By Us (#Phubu) will run in Google communities and has been designed by the students. The program is structured to be a live and open workshop which everyone can take part in. They've ditched one onsite member of staff in favour of re-allocating those resources to hire three off-site mentors and a series of guest speakers (which you can book one-on-one time with). The Google community/website is to act as a pinboard and support network for us all "“ which means we'd love for you to come along with us on this next leg of the journey. Is this not astounding? In your garden variety MegaBuck MOOC, 98% of the people are never heard from again; here the students not only finished, they said, we want more. They demanded an open course. If I was in some sort of media business, I'd be all over this story. But can anything exemplify more the experimental spirit than the crew at Coventry has done here? Did they say, "Sorry that is not in our business plan?" No they picked up and said, "Yeah man, let's do it." ETMOOC http://etmooc.org/ The Educational Technology and Media MOOC being steered by Alec Couros is way on the edge of the spectrum of being a "course" it is way more community. Forging the usual "This is the Way Courses Have Been Done Since The Plow Was Invented" pace of a new topic a week, the structure is topics being spread over a 2 week period. Participants tap in to different parts of it, via twitter, a Google Community, and their own blogs that are syndicated into the main site. The course is developed with a weak "˜centre'. While etmooc.org will provide a level of aggregation, detail, and direction, the majority of interactions are likely to occur within groups & networks, facilitated through various online spaces & services. Participants are strongly encouraged to develop their own reflective, learning spaces. We're hoping that every learner in #etmooc creates and maintains their own blog for continuous reflection, creativity, and resource sharing. Sharing and network participation are essential for the success of all learners in #etmooc. Thus, we'll be needing you to share your knowledge, to support and encourage others, and to participate in meaningful conversations. Together, we"ll make #etmooc a valuable learning experience for all participants. The reach of the class has been impressive, both in numbers and geography, but mostly in that a good number, maybe even the majority, are people who are not the usual bunch of ed tech heat seekers; there a many practicing teachers taking their first steps into being part of an online networked experience. Oh, and pretty much all of the teaching is done by volunteers for each section, not some single YaleHarvardMITStanford prof with a video camera. Nor did this cost 50 thousand clams to create. And you cannot feel like you dropped out of ETMOOC since you can drop in anywhere. The spirit of welcome, inclusiveness here is infectious. Introduction to Guitar http://talonsrockband.wordpress.com/ Bryan Jackson has already run an open high school class in philosophy, and now he is opening up his guitar class at Gleneagle Secondary school in Vancouver. In a basic hosted Wordpress web site, he has a place for his high school students and anyone else interested to post their recordings, videos, and writings about elearning to play guitar. There is a loose curriculum, but open participants can jump in and out easily. And a semantic distinction, it is not a class that teaches guitar but one where you can learn guitar. If you're a guitar player who's just starting out, or a seasoned six string slinger who is looking to document and share what they've come to know about their instrument and making music, we'd love to have just a bit of information to start out. Interested non-credit online participants are welcome to register as authors on the blog by filling out the form below; from there you can comment on existing posts, or submit an artifact of your own learning (or instruction) as your own assignment. There are no minimums, and no apologies for open-online learners in Introduction to Guitar: do as much or as little as you like. Already people are sharing stories of their guitars, taking tracks recorded by one participant and layering their accompaniment on top. How much easier could it be to open up a course? A free hosted platform, invite people in? Who needs $6,000,000? Leuphana Digital School http://digital.leuphana.de/ I know of almsot nothing about this except having stumbled on it via a mention in twitter. Just look at the tagline "global learning in teams". This new program introduces a fresh, unique approach to collaborative learning "“ a university project open to participants from all over the world, regardless of where they live and what they do. Participants are working in multi-disciplinary teams. Leading scholars and experts guide and support teams in creating their own vision of an "˜Ideal City of the 21st Century'. Our first online course has started. More participants than ever expected are working on their concepts for an Ideal City. You still have the chance to register as a Supporter for our first open online course. Supporters have access to the content in our Library and can participate in all forum discussions, but are not part of the assignment cycles. Join peers from more than 100 countries and support them in their project to plan and conceive their own Ideal City. Again, I have no idea what is happening in this class, but the idea that they are not just in an open class, but working on real projects, says to me this is of interest. Anyone got some inside info on this class? ds106 http://ds106.us/ Did you think I would really forget to mention maybe the most important example (to me)? I tried to write about in EDUCUASE the key feature of ds106, unlike every other MOOC on the block, is that there is no single ds106 experience. It is not a single course. There is the class taught at UMW (mine), but others at University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and York College/CUNY plus the open participants who pick and choose what they want to do within ds106. In my mind, this is a networked structure that is of the same stuff the web is made of, and more web like way of growing than duplication/replication. I've not really heard anyone else that seems to think that is important, ds106 is barely mentioned by our colleagues writing the Big Book o' MOOC. I guess ds106 just some sort of corner freak show. It is certainly not fodder for Serious Thought. And I like that. Because I know my students this semester and others in ds106 are kicking some creative butt. They are making the web, not just slurping it. All of the examples I pulled above seem to be more questions of the form of online learning, not magic bullet answers, that is the place of experiments. And that's where the big ideas will come from. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine My second day at Skidmore College this week was set to do a workshop; I offered to do a version of 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story planning to tap into for the first time the new collection of mobile apps I am working on with help from Darren Kuropatwa. The idea for the workshop came right from the semi-weekly video chats I have with Darren-- the material bits are at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/Skidmore+Storytelling. About 20 showed up, faculty and staff not only from Skidmore College, but also from the "New York 6", Union College and Hamilton College, and Colgate University I believe were represented. As I prefer to start with an activity, I relied on the trusty pechaflickr but for a very good reason. I set it up for a round where each person would go once. The tag choice is the fun part, and we had one that generated perhaps some of the best (meaning outlandish) images https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/446301870844170242 Following the story and overview of the site, I introduced was a first time activity that I cam super pleased with (starting with (c) at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/Skidmore+Storytelling). They formed 4 groups of 4-5 people. Each group was tasked to watch a round of pechflickr with 5 images, up for 30 seconds each- the room agreed on the tag "Creativity" for every one to use. The first round was for people individually to write the outline of a story that is based on the 5 images. Then as a group, they shared and were asked to come up with a group story that they would work on. The plan was to put their idea in shared Google doc, do some searches on media to add, and then ask people to on their open create a story with different tools. That grand plan was to see what happened when people tell the same story in different tools. It did not quite go that way... and i ma glad. The groups really got into the discussion of the story idea, they used the story spine in the doc to make a shape of the story cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine And they preferred to collaborate as a group on doing stories together. I cannot argue with that. In fact, they spent just about all the time on the story process, and did not even get to the tools. Here's a bit of the sound of the room: [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/skidmore-50ways.mp3"][/audio] One group did go that far, and even did somerging I never thought off; the used Balabberize for one part, exported it as a movie, and imported that into an animoto - two tools in one story. Argh Animoto only gives you embed code for your own movie? Sigh. Go watch Group 3's production http://animoto.com/play/I1NvtkdZK1x6vlXjq8YBpg That is a win in my book- spending the time on developing the story over tool fiddling. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Yes, we know that Google has become the appliance of the web. If it were to go out, it would be on the scale (well not really) of losing electric or water. And while some may bemoan that students' first thought to research is to Google-it, I find myself curious that often people ask me questions that are painfully easily google-able. Ok, I am in too deep, my natural reflex when I don't know something, cant find something, need to get an example is command-k; type; return which is the sequence to put my cursor on the Google search field in Firefox, enter my keywords, and go. This is nothing new, I can remember dealing with this, actually much more, in the late 1990s. Often, it is a request for technologies for doing X. I found, or at least I thought it was more useful in the fishing versus nugget sense, to not just use Google to find and answer and parrot it back (like I really knew it), but to email back a URL string that had the search embedded. So why do people call or email questions that are so easily found DIY on Google? As an example, and not to pick on the person that asked, I got a comment on the blog from someone who had seen my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story presentation at a conference, and was asking for the URL as it was not listed on this blog. Feeling Lucky? http://www.google.com/search?q=50+web+2.0+ways+tell+story And it's more than knowing how to slap keywords in a search field, that is so Google 1.0. Climb the power curve by using quotes, + to force a match and - to remove and ... well, I may be looking for stuff from the PBS web site in math but not algebra And the next level is setting up a GoogleAlert (not to be confused with Google Alerts) for regular updates of content that might be changing, grabbing that as an RSS feed so you can scan in an RSS reader. So I expect I will continue to get google-able questions and will provide google links as answers. It's been 2 few weeks since we released the first online version of our MCLI iForum publication (see the background info blogged nearby). We are hoping to push the publication envelope to go completely online (the print button is in the reader's hands) and using WordPress as a publishing platform. Our timing was not optimal as it was during the ramp up to finals week here. However, even with the blatant red "i", and what we thought were obvious invitations to respond to articles via the comments field, the response has been... well... not much. A major justification we prepared for this move to online publishing was the ability for readers to connect with authors (all comment notifications are sent to all credited authors, and we offer per-article email subscriptions to comment updates). So I wonder... is it a fear of commenting? of making the first comment? Maybe the articles are not that interesting? Maybe everyone is out shopping right now? Regardless, it would very much help if we had more article comments, to demonstrate to our authors how online publishing works, and to provide some stats for some of our internal critics who would prefer to stay with an old, expensive, mono-content, time-intesnsive, non-interactive print version. As a favor, as a cheap holiday present for our authors, please find an article in the iForum, and send a comment. Comment spam roaches need not respond. We have Spam Karma 2 standing on patrol. Along with a big old steel toed boot. Please? Comments here? I JUST FINISHED READING A BOOK? Can I get a badge? As much as I enjoy reading, I am a pathetic xMOOC-like reader- I keep signing up and rarely complete. I have at least 3 books on a table at home with a bookmark in the middle, and on my various apps, at least 5 partly read ones. Oh well. Last night I closed the last page on Lazy B by Sandra Day O'Connor (yes former Supreme Court Justice and first woman in that seat) and her brother Alan Day. I invested 25 cents on it at a thrift store in Pine, Arizona, because of the subtitle "Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest", hoping it would provide some realistic insight into the Western106 experience. Done. It's her family's experience, going back to her grandfather H.C. Day, of settling, cattle ranching, and living in a rugged ranch area of now public lands that straddle the Arizona / New Mexico border. The interest is because of this being my home turf, and a place I have visited, not too far north of where my friend Karen Fasimpaur lives now. It highlights to me what a narrow slice of history is the stereotypical western in films, and what the films leave out is that people lived across many changes that transformed that image in real life. In about 100 years, from 1880 when H.C. claimed public land (not highly desirable due to arid conditions) when people were encouraged to ranch in the new land from the Gasden Purchase, to the time when so much was changed, and the ranching on public land had become so micromanaged by government (glossing over a lot of facets of the use/abuse of land by us people). The hook was there on the first review (before the book) by Jill Ker Conway: Sandra Day O'Connor and her brother, H. Alan. Day, have taken all of the themes of the conventional Western narrative- the roundup, the wild horses, cattle and cattle stampedes, the rattlesnakes, the natural disasters like flash floods, and the colorful figures of cowboys- and transposed them from the usual narrative of the isolated, rootless male figure of the Western into the story of three generations of a family and their relationship to an arid and beautiful expanse of land on the border between Arizona and New Mexico. It's a story of what the land taught them and what it takes to survive under the extremes of drought and distance. What you find is the life is much less glamorous and much much more physically/mentally demanding work than the movies would ever suggest. The rewards seem almost meager, but you get a sense of bonds between people, the cowhands Rastus and Bug Quinn who essentially spent lives as family members of the Day's, and also of addressing all the things a western rancher cannot control- not just weather and critters, but the change of life around them. Nothing stays as static as the time period stereotyped in westerns. This is not a summary of the book, by any means, just a bit of appreciation for the reading of it. I have a few dog eared pages with underlines on sentences (I do like writing in my own books). There is a lot of detail of day to day living- mending fences, fixing water pumps, baking biscuits, and the gear of cowboys. I learn the high heel on my boots are not a fashion thing, but to keep the boot in the stirrup. Boots are expensive if they are custom-made or made from special leather. They can be the most comfortable footwear you can wear or the most uncomfortable. I know that well! My well worn 8 year old Lariats are the most comfortable ever; I have a black newer pair in my closet that are the former. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Shirts are almost always long-sleeved, The sleeves give some measure of protection from scratching by thorns when riding through brush, and also give protection from the sun. The best way to tell a real cowboy from a dude is to look for very suntanned hands and face and very pale skin on all other parts of the body. No self-respecting cowboy will take his shirt off to get a tan. And more on the attributes of cowboys: The cowboys did whatever job was required, They met the unexpected as though they'd known it all along. They never complained, and they made the best of everything along the way. Those who completed an entire roundup had a real sense of accomplishment. Most who did it realized thet had experienced something few people have a chance to do and something that few people are capable of doing. Well those quotes were all about cowboys- the real meat of the book is the spirit of O'Connor's parents who kept the family, the ranch, and all these people affiliated with it going through the 20th century, DA and MO as they were called. Her father was not easy on them at all, rather demanding and had high expectations, yet provide the three children a sense of the value of work, play (he liked his card games), interest in the external world (family discussions), and support for them to do what they chose in the world (sending Sandra to Stanford). O'Connor affirms that he paths in life to and beyond the Supreme Court were built upon these life lessons. The value system we learned was simple and unsophisticated and the product of necessity. What counted was competence and the ability to do whatever was required to maintain the ranch operation in good working order-- the livestock, the equipment, the buildings, wells, fences, and vehicles. Verbal skills were less important than the ability to know and understand how things work in the physical world. Personal qualities of honesty, dependability, competence, and good humor were valued most. A basic instinct in both animals and people is that of territoriality. We want to belong to a place familiar to us. If we have such a place, we are part of it and it is part of us. This real west was a blink in time. It's gone. But at least we have some shared memory of it. What will our current blink of time look like to the ones who come next? I don't know, but I do know my territory- I am part of it, and it is part of me. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo of the Lazy B region shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured image: A photo I just took of a book on a table ;-) I license it totally for any purpose, wondering what it is I can license. This might be Chapter 57 of my tool brigade-- I have known peripherally about LibraryThing for a while, and did play a while ago with a pale cousin named Reader2.. but holy #@^@%, Does LibraryThing (hereto-after referred to as LT) rock as a powerful social net app. It starts in email.. someone on the NMC Directors Listserv (email list for all contacts we have with NMC members) posted a request: I'm working on a subcommittee preparing for university accreditation and trying to think about what's on and even over the horizon in regard to technology and pedagogy. What do you think I should read? Are there a couple of books or articles or reports that jump into mind that you could share? Like, right now I happen to be looking at Oblinger and Oblinger's Educating the Net Generation (Educause 2005). Are there recent works like that or even older classics that you'd recommend to help us look into, plan for, and perhaps even facilitate the future of technology-enhanced learning? I'm doing some "break" reading and would appreciate any suggestions. And in come replies with suggestions, maybe 14 messages. But where does this knowledge go that is dumped into the email-o-sphere? It flows past our attention manic eyes on the inbox, and dribbles out the end to oblivion, never really quite useful, retrievable again. We talk of "web 2.0", this is like Information Management 0.2. So I thought of ways we can try and better capture and cultivate the same information. At first I thought of a unique tag in del.icio.us, but that involves the task of searching for appropriate links-- is it in Amazon or the author's web site? And then my memory cells chipped in on LT... Like any great social web app, there are many subtle layers yet to be discovered, but here briefly is what LT does- it makes it drop dead easy to create your virtual bookshelf, all the books you want to manage, search, tag, share. And via your selections and tags, aggregated across the broader swath of LT users, you get referrals, suggestions, based on the tagging, rating, and collecting habits of thousands of others. But wait, there's more. First of all, entering a new book is a matter of putting keywords from the title and or the author into a search field. LT uses Amazon as well as almost 80 other catalogs to quickly pull up a series of matches, listed by title and cover icon. You just click the one you want to add to your colllection, and maybe toss on some tags. So it took me less than 30 minutes to add 23 books to my LT collection, just by copy/pasting the titles from the emails sent in today. It is fast, and easy. and LT is lovingly sprinkled with the fresh interface features of Ajax. My catolog can be viewed by images from the covers or a list format: and the small set of tags I entered start to create a cloud effect: but the amazing things happen when you see how LT connects you to collections of others (like presenting the catalogs of others who have similar titles marked), or by looking at the details of say one book, Malcom Gladwell's Blink: You get tons of librarian type info on the left, ISBNs, covers, editions, etc. There is a tag cloud based on what others have tagged the same book (more than 2000 people have included this book), and if I follow the tag for intuition, I get links to users that use this tag, books that are most frequently tagged with this, and another tag cloud of related links. And tons more. even better for discovery is a listing of related titles as "Book recommendations" meaning LT defines a relationship based on the tagging habits of those other 2000 users, and presents a long list of related books, so I might end up looking at Flow : the psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and with one click I can add this to my collection! This does not necessarily mean I own it, but I may just mark it as a resource. All book entries allow you to rate them on a 1-5 scale and add comments. And there is RSS and linkable syndication all over the place-- those are for my most recently added books. But wait, there's more. I don't want to be solely responsible for maintaining a collection, where's the crowd and wisdom? So LT allows me to create a group I can invite others to join, i this case one I called NMC Reading List. If I can persuade those colleagues on the listserv to try this site, they can join this same group, and we end up with a shared pool of resources based on the activities of everyone on this group (and there are discussion areas and RSS and tag clouds and...) For more active groups, check out the ones for Bloggers, Tea Drinkers, Science Fiction Fans, even Colbert Nation book fans. There is much more to LibraryThing, but I am enticed by that sweet spot of providing me a personal organizational/information management gain, and the additive bonus of when this same information can be harnessed across others on the site. And htis takes me back a bit to my Maricopa days, where one of our college's centers had a web site of book recommendations- they hired students to scan book covers, and manually create HTML pages for a web collection. With LibraryThing, it takes much less time and offers much more discoverability paths than the old ways. I'm hooked on LT. Help! Please. I am taking 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story on a spurt of road shows over next 2 months- Barcuch College, Penn State University, Salem State College, and online version for Wooster College, and then a session at Ed-Media. Gulp, am I becoming one of those shlock presenters that milks a show til it wont bleed anymore? I hope not. The entire presentation mode is going to change, and I am rolling in some new secret pieces. In the next 2 weeks, the content is going through a sweep-- links checked, 4 dead tools dropped, and several to be added. Currently I am down to 63 (from 64), but have at least another 5 I could add. Recently added are Prezi the sweeping swoopy cool presenter too (see example) and Pixton- a rather powerful comic creator (see new example). I could use some input, and you can leave comments here or use the discussion tabs on any of the 50 Ways wikispaces pages (I check them via RSS so I will get your comments quickly): Sure, if you have more tools to suggest, I'll consider them. But remember the criteria- they must be web based, platform agnostic, free, and able to mix at least two forms of media (text, pictures, video, images) into some thing that can be played back on the web. I've not done too many recent updates to the list of sources where people can find creative commons of un-restricted usage media sites- what is missing from http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryMedia?? I'd like more examples, especially ones that are relevant to educators for the Tools page. I have plenty for VoiceThread and Animoto, and am looking for examples from some of the more obscure tools. Thanks in advance! I've been tinkering a bit with the site here- getting into adding new MovableType templates and moving commonly used code pieces into modules, but more or less, this is mild hacking away until it works. The additions include some new categories: * MLX - about the Maricopa Learning eXchange) * RSS - all the stuff posted about using RSS and the experiments we have done around here * Using MovableType tips and other things we learn along the way. All categories, of course, have their own RSS feeds. This was in tandem with moving the top navigation from a series of horizontally spreading links, to a drop down menu navigation for going to the categories. This in turn led to adding more pieces, and some of these in turn caused even more dribbles of changes... (more…) I've seen it for a little while but just noticed more carefully that flickr has redesigned the results of its search. Previously you only got 10 results per page that required scrolling to review. Now you get a layout of smaller previews-- and this is what is neat- the bigger you make your page, the more results you get per page (so go full screen on that Cinema Display). But even better- there is a little "i" in the lower right corner that when you click it, provides in a lightbox overlay, a bigger preview, numbers of views, tags, dates taken-- and if you are searching flickr wide, you can filter out that photographer from the results (I would guess if you think their photos are irrelevant or in appropriate or ...?). This was the search for my old dog friend among my photos It's small, maybe even overdue, but helpful. Of course, I still do my creative commons search on compfight and wish they would copy this preview overlay! But hey I don't get this. I made (what I think is) this awesome Firefox Greasemonkey script that adds a full cut and paste code to provide a fully attributed, captioned link in blog posts. I use it all the time, and there's only 105 downloads for something that can reduce the back and forth copy pasting of giving attribution from like 7 steps to one. WTF? Even more pathetic I am the only fan ;-) Here's how it works. Any flickr image that has a creative commons license will display a copyable block of HTML code: Where by copying and then pasting the code- you get the 500pixel image, a link to the original, and a caption with links for the image and creator-- e.g. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I thought that was pretty damned handy! Try it out yourself http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49395 I've made some noise here and there about the value of meta-data, not that I do not believe it in it nor do I think it does not exist, but mainly, I have yet to see the applied use beyond searching. Out of last week's NMC Spring 2004 Online Conference, someone asked me, "Well doesn't the Maricopa Learning eXchange have meta-data?" Heck yes, the MLX Packing slip metaphor is meta-data, we just do not make a big deal about it or even identify it as such. For that matter, just about any system that is built on a database has its own unique meta-data in the fields that make up the database. So what? So just for grins and because Monday was quiet, I spent about 45 minutes creating Dublin Core XML.RDF meta data representations of all 800+ items in the MLX. I think. Well, I did not have to do it 800 times, just one new template. Each MLX packing slip has way down on the bottom, a link to its meta-data in Dublinc Core format. Or simply, you can take any MLX URL such as: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=127 and modify the URL to see the lovely DC XML data (differences shown in bold): http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip_dc.php?item=127 I had a nice iChat across the seas to David Davies, and he suggested the notion of embedding the DC descriptors in the MLX RSS feeds. This would be trivial since we already use an RSS 1.0 generator, and I can add dc: tags to the output. Actually a few are in the already, namely: <dc:subject>...</dc:subject> <dc:creator>...</dc:creator> <dc:date>...</dc:date> But I am still wondering, why the #$&* I would do this- as most people using RSS now are engulfed in a world only needing title, link, and description data. I spent the bulk of the morning trying to get an implementation up of an OAI harvester script, which in theory would allows some great huge monolithic learning object entity to include our puny little collection in their federated searches. I am close, although it involved creating a duplicate data table to run the cross-over from the MLX data structure to the fields this OAI implementor requires (without diving in and re-writing their query code). If anyone has a readable copy of Thick Headed Lunkers Guide to Meta Data For Totally Idiotic People (the version that has acronyms spelled out), I will pay a premium price for it. I recently wrote of some JavaScript glue-ing I did to create a tool that allows my to take any web page in view, and submit it with one click to Furl, del.icio.us, Connotea, and our own Bag of URLs (see A Cup of Connotea: A New del.icio.us Flavor of Social Bookmarking (and now a 4 in 1 bookmark tool)). Since then, I've gotten a pile of e-mail requests (well actually 2) for help in constructing different variations ("I just want Furl and del.icio.us"), which seemed enough justification to sit down and spin a PHP tool that allows you to select any combination of these 4 into one tool, all your own. Meet the DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker. Are there other web site submission sites that out to be tossed into this virtual Leatherman? Update: I should not have whipped this up so fast, there is some slop. I have revised the tool to provide an input field to accept del.icio.us usernames, and cleaned up a JavaScript gotcha that was messing up Firefox. The problem child browser now is Internet Explorer, and right now, it does not work in IE (cursing their JS implementation). I'll have to defer this to later. Update: I've got it working now (maybe) having tested on Safari, Firefox, IE 5.2, NetScape 7 (Mac) and Firefox, NetScape 7, and IE 6 (Windows). I've taken a second stab at converting the elegant, Creative Commons licensed static HTML themes from HTML5 UP and baking it into a Wordpress calling card theme. The first one I did was based on the Dimension theme, and got a nice tweet from Dan who just put it to use https://twitter.com/dpzuberbier/status/904370799230021637 The need for that one originally was to have something at the top of Wordpress multisite suite for Mariana Funes, but I've been more interested in offering this for people just starting their Own Domains. The idea is to think of a domain as not just one blog, but a collection of sites. It makes sense to put a landing page or calling card at the top, not just a blog (ignore my own example! Do as I say, not as...). This was what I put into place for the Ontario Extend effort to start people with domains with a simple site that they should outgrow soon. That was the case when @Nursekilliam jumped in with my Wp-Dimension theme (leading to useful updates). Then she DM-ed and said she really liked the Big Picture theme from HTML5 UP. I offered no promise, but was curious what it would take to do a second creation of a theme from the HTML UP template. Voila! See the live demo . The theme may have a bit too much animation and parallax for some, but doing this was my own challenge. Now that it is done (first beta version on GItHUb now) I'm happy as the Wordpress version is to me, more flexible than the original. This is because the HTML5 Up theme is hard coded to a fixed number of sections in the page, and hard coded in the style sheets. The top of the site, the intro, is all designed with the Wordpress Customizer. The default background image of Kamloops is easily changed with the Header Image option in the Customizer; and that means one could upload many images, and use the setting to a random one is displayed on every page load. And rather than having a fixed set of social media icons in the footer, my theme makes use of a plugin for creating social media menu items, where the choice, order, and links are all set in the Customizer. But the real flex is in the sections below the top intro section, they are all simple Wordpress Posts, with the order of appearance a user option. By using large sized image as a a featured image, generates output where content / background slide in as an animation, and have a simple block text of title (post title) and a small bit of content. They are automatically alternated in left/right orientation. And you can create longer content, whatever you can get in a blog post, but creating one that lacks a featured image. This gives room for whatever content, media you can cram in a post. I even added a sneaky way to create a Wordpress gallery, then modify the shortcode name, and BOOM! You get the animation / slideshow version you see in the original html theme. [caption id="attachment_64932" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The HTML5 UP animated gallery can be rendered in Wordpress via a special shortcode[/caption] But see it all in action at http://lab.cogdogblog.com/bigpicture/#content. The second one was easier in some aspects; I already had code I could copy from the first theme for setting up the Customizer, adding the post metaboxes. The structure of the theme is simple: Header template (header.php) Footer template (footer.php) index template (header.php) A functions template (functions.php) This theme took a bit of gymnastics to set up the IDs for each section, building menus out of that, and dynamically writing CSS in the top of the template. There's probably more fancy pants programming ways to this! But it's beta, baby. Give it a spin. Loaded documentation here too. Featured Image: It comes as a default header image for the new theme, it's mine! Where the Rivers Meet flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I've mentioned it more than once here, but maybe the best thing I have done to put some serendipity wonder into the daily web browsing experience is installing the Library of Congress Free to Use extension. What it does is simple- each time I open a new tab in Chrome, rather than the white screen of nothing, I get a random public domain image from the Library of Congress. I just noticed on the extension page (was it there before?) that it credits Junior Fellow Flynn Shannon as the creator of the extension, and better yet, there is an old fashioned blog post where Flynn shares the back story of where the idea came from, and how it was made (and just for grins Tony Hirst, Flynn made use of Jupyter Notebooks). And even better was reading that Flynn is a student at Kenyon College, where I will be doing a June workshop. Quite often I stop in curiosity at the expressions on old time photos, or the interesting scenery, or just a wonder about what was happening in that photo. I learned early if I do not click the bottom bar that links to the LOC page, the image disappears, and you cannot find it again. So I've had a few sitting as open tabs for weeks now. Like this one, I just wondered what the story was. Becky Edelson [i.e., Edelsohn] taken from jail (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) Who was Becky Edelson, and what kind of criminal was she? From the LOC entry page: Photograph shows Rebecca Edelsohn (c. 1889 or 1892-1973) after her arrest for attempting to hold an open air mass meeting in Fountain Square, Tarrytown, New York on May 30, without a permit. Edelsohn and fellow I.W.W. members were protesting labor violence in Ludlow, Colorado and went to Tarrytown to denounce John D. Rockefeller, Jr.Becky Edelson [i.e., Edelsohn] taken from jail (Library of Congress) As usual I find way more interesting things in the Flickr Commons entries for these images, because of the comments people share to add to the information about the photo. Becky was noted as going on a 50+ hour hunger strike as part of this Labor dispute. This other image in the series adds even more interest, with the expressions on the observers and imagining the verbal abuse likely being tossed her way: Becky Edelson [i.e., Edelsohn] under arrest -- Tarrytown (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) A commenter on the photo stated 8 years ago he has started a Wikipedia article on her; it's rather filled out now. Apparently Becky Edelson was the first female hunger striker. She railed against John D. Rockefeller in his home town, calling him a mass murder in court: She denounced the charges as politically motivated, and scornfully dismissed the court as illegitimate: "This town is owned by John D. Rockefeller. We don't expect justice here.Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becky_Edelsohn She'd not think much of justice these days in Washington, D.C. eh? This was some winding rabbit holes from just a random image in an open browser tab. That's just one. The stern look of the guy driving this boat made my step and wander down the click hole too. Pugh of the "Disturber" (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) How could you not be curious about a picture titled "Pugh of the 'Disturber'"? But here's the thing, the metadata info from the LOC entry is a bit... boring. All it shares is that "Photo shows James A. Pugh in his motorboat Disturber III". But in the flickr image, the comments lead to a story of how Pugh took this thing to court to get a boating prize. But even better, in flickr someone added hotspots with labels that made me spit coffee: Pugh of the "Disturber" (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) But also, on the right side, one more hotspot indicates the date of the negative as September 5, 1911. I wondered how Pugh of the Disturber would look with color, so see the different applied by the ColorizeSG site Comparison before and after using https://colourise.sg/#colorize Does Pugh look ever more of a Disturber in color? A different kind of curiosity came in one of today's open tabs- I knew the location as Venice of course Library of Congress Public Domain image The entry dates the image as 1890-1900 but also curiously (and without any more story) "Image shows two Italian Carabinieri soldiers in a boat, possibly accompanying detainees." I had a different thought here- could I possibly locate a modern image of this same location? I did a search on Street View Venice, and found one of those lush Google sites. and where the map interfaces were darkened and covered with "for development purposes only". I've seen this on my own project sites that once used the Google Maps API; if you do not five them a credit card now, they limit your use and stiff you with this effect. It seemed, well ironic. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1123980890290388994 It's pretty bad when Google cannot load its own maps, right? If Google clicked on the Do You Own This Website? link they might have to figure some **** out. Maybe Google's credit card is busted? Under certain circumstances, a darkened map, or 'negative' Street View image, watermarked with the text "for development purposes only", may be displayed. This behavior typically indicates issues with either an API key or billing. In order to use Google Maps Platform products, billing must be enabled on your account, and all requests must include a valid API key. I was able to get a screenshot of what looked like the same tall church tower in the background: Ghosty image from the broken Google Site I picked that name of what I thought was the church from the map ( on that site (I was wrong, it was not Frari), but spent my lunch running up and down the canals in Streetview, and darned if I did not find the location (the dome is new since 1890, but the buildings on both sides of the canal match): I consider this a match! The church is actually Chiesa di San Geremia. Now let's see if I can align them.... [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] Not exact, but close enough for this dog. I have more open tabs, but maybe I will save them for another time. But having the the Library of Congress Free to Use extension in my daily routine gives me just enough things to chase down the rabbit hole and save me from making angry gifs about politicians. Give it a try, if only for coming across public domain images you likely won't see elsewhere. Featured Image: Appropriately I opened a new browser tab hoping to find something to use for a featured image and found the Library of Congress public domain photo Erie Foreign Car Parts multi-statue sign, angle 1, Mohawk Street, Whitesboro, New York. I decided to edit the ERIE letters into my own. crafted from Library of Congress public domain image cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Scott Maxworthy It's almost ready to share. I've been working on and off since August (a project I thought I could do in a month) on turning the ds106 Assignment Bank into a customizable Wordpress theme that could be used for any kind of collection of "Things to Do". But I've done all I can, and just squashed a few nagging details and formatting. A big one over the last 2 days was updating from using as a parent theme the previous WP-Bootstrap theme (based on Bootstrap 2) to the most current one based on Boostrap 3. If that sounds like gobbledy goop, do not worry. The parent theme provides the base functionality of the site, and I am using one based on Twitter Bootstrap "the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web." The previous WP-Bootstrap had all kinds of crazy option panels, and the new version is much leaner, makes better use of LESS. The downside was having to do a lot of manual changes to my templates, because the many of the spans, divs, etc have changed. Enough blah, let's first look at the exterior and interior, the former you can see as well at http://bank.ds106.us (the content is of course silly filler). (more…) This is the newest Dominoe story created in a tool so new and exciting I don't have a category. I heard of Zooburst first in March 2010 at the NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning when Craig Kapp did one of the most outstanding presentations I'd seen anywhere, a session on the Augmented Reality projects he has done in a year at NYU (see the presentation materials, including a YouTube video of the whole session). We've also been pegging Zooburst it as an example in the recent NMC Horizon Reports. It is a web-based content creation tool for making a 3D story that pops up on a page when viewed on the screen. You can have 10 pages in a story, each with a caption. Even viewed on the web it is impressive, you can spin the book around and view it from different angles. Any object can have a thought associated with it (click an "!" and you get a comic bubble). The authoring interface is well designed, and fairly easy to use; it takes some practice to learn how to place and move objects. What is clever is that it is connected to an Open Clip Art vector library which offers a nice selection of objects, characters to use. In addition you can upload your own images- I made a few dog characters by masking the background out of my Dominoe photos and saving as PNGs with transparent background. It remembers objects you have used so you can re-use them in subsequent pages. I spent about 90 minutes making my AR version of my oft told story, most of that learning how to move things around. Also, I found that you have 10 pages to work with, and given my story has 18 frames, I did some combining-- I dont see this as a problem, I like the creative challenge of working in a limit. But the magic happens when you flip the view into Screen mode as shown in the top photo. You just need to print out a page with the augmented reality marker. When you hold the symbol up to your web cam, the box on the paper appears to flip open, the book opens up and your story is now there in 3D, you can move the paper around to move the characters. So here is the Augmented Reality version of the Dominoe story which, nicely, you can also embed in a web page: This was a bit intoxicating to explore, and I need to pull back and consider why this might be an effective approach beyond the WOW factor... but WOW is pretty good, right? This is just in time, as in about 5 and a half hours I am doing a 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story session via Skype to a group of teachers at the College of Wooster. Update: I heard from Craig, and the next version of Zooburst is going to have no page limit and some nifty new features, like the ability to record audio for your characters to speak with! If you are excited about this, come to the June 2010 NMC Summer Conference where Craig is doing a pre-conference workshop on Augmented Reality in the Classroom cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by rmelgares The next phase of closing down the Feed2JS service is done (the lights go out on the server by June 2, 2013). In a sort of reclaim effort, I moved the home of the code from Google Code to github. I am extremely green behind the ears with github, but have been wanted to understand and experience the shared environment first hand for a while. I basically set up a repository, and pushed a copy of the current code there. I found Konrad Lawson's series on profhacker a very gentle way to get started -- and I was impressed with the codeschool interactive lesson on trygit. Here's the new home for feed2js code I hope to move the source code for some of my other projects here soon. The next step is to set up instructions on how to intall it on your own server, with the info for setting it up so only domains you designate can use it as well as a list of alternative services that can replace Feed2JS. A personal instance of Feed2JS can easily run on any shared web host, and I hope to experiment with an AMI package to run on Amazon EC2. Maybe. Then I will be adding a notice link to the bottom of all output feeds (along with instructions on how to suppress the message). I am still sure many sites wont notice, but the script will spin to oblivion after the end of May. I may point the domain to github or it may just fall off to my DNS host for a while. I'm keeping the domain. Unless someone wants to make a sweet offer for it. For what it's worth, I did some searching to find similar free services, there are plenty of options, including 2 that [cough] [cough] are obviously running [cough][cough] my same code w/o giving credit [cough][cough]. Viva open source! I am not mad, in fact, it makes me think they should pick up some of the traffic. And I gotta love the name RSS Dog, go dawg go! Feedroll (Their code looks rather familiar) FeedSweep JavaScript RSS/ATOM Newsfeed Widget Jawfish JS Ticker RSS Dog RSS to Java (it is Javscript and looks a lot like Feed2JS) RSS-to-JavaScript.com Surfing Waves Free RSS Widget WebRSS Wytheville Community College News Service Shutting down... cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by docpi Come to San Diego, October 17-18 for the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis: The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of the symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space for practitioner reports, demonstrations, and discussions. We are honored to announce that Ward Cunningham, the inventor and host of the original WikiWikiWeb, will present the opening keynote talk at WikiSym 2005. Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to WikiSym 2005! I hope someone buys them a style sheet ;-) A big draw might be the presence of Ward Cunningham, the grandfather of all wikis. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My return home Friday was a 10 day, 1500 mile loop originally planned to cross through all of the Four Corners States. Sorry Utah, I ended up cutting you out, but I still love your sandstone canyon lands. This was somewhat of a dress rehearsal for a similar length drive I will take in mid October to get to Kamloops, BC for a start of a 4 month fellowship at Thompson Rivers University. This trip gave me chance to see how it feels behind the wheel for so long (the drive home is usually a long marathon, 520 miles stretched over 13 hours), but also to see how things worked packing gear without the camper shell on my truck. Red Dog wants to roll open, as a big dog should. No boxes on his back. (more…) This will likely be a first and last blog entry referencing politics. I might be judged as apathetic, but I do my research quietly, make my decisions, and vote, without foaming at the mouth or making it an obsession. However, after some hasty mulling, I decided to share my summary of the political scene. We are in blandville. It is like going for ice cream and finding the 31 flavors are slight variations of vanilla. it is like a small town bar where they boast, "we have both kinds of music- 'Country' AND 'Western'". I feel like I am Charlie Brown listening to his teacher say, "Wahhh wahh waaaah wahh wahhh wahh wahhhh. Wah wahhh waaaaaaah waaah waaaah wawahhhh." It's hardly limited to the nationals- our local city councils, state elections are operating at the same level, but usually with less class and much less polish. I am not apathetic, I am numb. Anesthetized. I cannot say it bothers me as there are plenty of other things to absorb my energy, but politics is down past the bottom of the list. Yes, I would like some Vanilla number 16--- no make that Vanilla number 9-- in a cup-- no in a .... oh never mind. Give me a free hour and there goes another new RSS Feed. Since 1996, we have been accumulating some 4000 interesting web sites in our web's eye view bag of urls. Essentially the format for the content is a site title, URL, and description (does that sound like RSS or what?) The site has an entire back end admin system where any visitor can submit a site via our drop it in the bag form. New items go into a temp holding area, until we can review them. The added feature now posts approved sites to the new Bag of URLs RSS feed. (more…) A break in the usual technical gobbledygook and assorted rantings for a not so small personal announcement... As a matter of fact, it's as big as life... Cori did say "yes" [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/92 She Said Yes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] If there is any doubt to the question, it's one of marriage. Something I had vowed 10 years ago to never do again. I'm so happy to be wrong. I've known Cori Saas through blogs, storymaking, teaching for quite a while. A year or more ago, we grew more close over our shared love of photography, of sun on wires and stuff. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/94 When We Meet Under the Arizona Sun flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Lady With Lenses flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Yet there's much more, so much that our own phrase uttered again is "we fit". [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Feet Over the Mogollon Rim flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] So it late May, I'm loading up Red Dog (with Felix, 'natch) for a trip to move Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan where we will make a new home together. This is not goodbye to Strawberry, this place will be ours too (a friend will be renting and watching it for a while). Cori visited last week and our time in this place certainly means we will be back. A lot. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Our Forest Walks flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] But yes, after many years of being a wanna be Canadian, I'm going north of the border to aim at being one. Look at Canada! There will be many stories to be held, and told, that's for sure. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]With the Last Rock... flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] We are looking north and it looks lovely... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/100 Chases Light flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Featured Image: Two Too Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Below are some resources likely to me mentioned/shown in class tonight when we spend time reviewing (and doing) video. Classic and Modern audio/video from the Internet Archive It’s all free, and the collection is vast. Try browsing the collections or searching. Note that there may be some variety in the types of video formats available- your best choice will be mp4. Internet Archive Moving Image Collection http://www.archive.org/details/movies Prelinger commercials – old time ads http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_commercials RCA 16mm sound projector (sample video entry) http://www.archive.org/details/RCA16mmS1958 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Lego Version- hey here is a project idea!) http://www.archive.org/details/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrailInLegoFlv Internet Archive Audio Collection – look for the old time radio shows and live music collection http://www.archive.org/details/audio 78 RPMs and Cylinder Collection- useul for the silent movie era assignment http://www.archive.org/details/78rpm Alexander’s Ragtime Band (sample audio entry) http://www.archive.org/details/AlexandersRagtimeBand Other Audio Sources ccMixter http://ccmixter.org Jamendo http://www.jamendo.com/ Video Tutorials Apple iMovie tutorials http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/ About.com Desktop Video http://desktopvideo.about.com/od/imovietutorials/iMovie_Tutorials_Learn_How_to_Edit_Videos_in_Apple_iMovie.htm Windos Movie Maker Live: Getting Started http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-movie-maker-get-started 7 Tutorials http://www.7tutorials.com/windows-live-movie-maker With Brian's announcement that Gardner Campbell is visiting Vancouver this week (shucks, wish I could have extended the stay another week... or forever), I remain tickled at the shelf life of my silly graphic there-- and more so that Gardner even sometimes refers to himself as "Dr Glu". These were from a series of images I created for the so called "Fish Tacos" Beyond the Blog session Brian and did at EDUCAUSE ELI in 2006. Somehow we got on this train of doing a Science Fiction flavor (yes, we did wear foil hats for this presentation) and is really among the most favorite collaborations I have done-- we did the whole presentation via flickr along with some creepy sci fi music Brian fished out of the mysterious place he finds weird sounds (we had people coming in asking us to turn it off, so it was effective). I got on this idea of doing knock off of cheap paperback book covers, and mixing up the names of them or the authors to honor (we hoped) our colleagues, so see who you can identify in the set-- last year I had used VoiceThread to pull that flickr set into a show-- so drop by and leave some comments for the Good Dr. Glu. Travel safe, Dr Glu.... (Hey EduGlu Band-- he needs a theme song...) Don't let people tease you for wearing jorts, they are just a useful pair of shorts, expanding the life of their predecessors. And they are also now supported by the SPLOTbox theme, not necessarily the greatest improvement to my wordpress theme stable, but worth doing. Especially because it came from a happy user of SPLOTbox, Suzanne from Lansing Community College who puts the theme to great use as Starscapes, a showcase of student creativity and innovation projects at LCC. https://starscapes.openlcc.net/presentations/ Suzanne wrote about another issue but had noted that last year students had submitted video URLS for "YouTube shorts" but they did not embed. These are old man YouTube's attempt, maybe, to be hip like that other video site with the clock sound. I think I had noticed them when a video I uploaded ended up with a "shorts" URL. Now yes, these videos will autoembed fine in WordPress like any other YouTube video, but the SPLOTbox theme depends on some URL matching patterns to identify a submitted URL as a media form it supports (the code is by no means elegant, but, shrug, what am I, some AI generative code machine? Nope). So it was a quick fix to the media sensing code, which is now in action at the SPLOTbox demo site. Got a SPLOTbox site to update? See the docs. I've not done much updates to SPLOTs, so it warms my heart to hear from Suzanne how it is useful for the LCC program: We have our first in person student research fair Wednesday and Thursday and have less than 20 students registered (before Covid we had over 100), but the online website I set up has already gotten more entries than usual at this time in the semester. Thank you so much for creating the SPLOTbox! I love it and it is so much fun to see the student work streaming in each semester.We got this comment from a student when we moved the event online."This is so cool! I love it that I can still look through the posts, even past the event dates" Suzanne feedback on SPLOTbox SPLOTbox always had a special feel to it, as it was maybe the most configurable SPLOT (choose which services to support) and even the built in audio recorded works fairly well. I'm not sure anyone caught on to the idea of how it could be a deployed as a podcast publishing site, most people these days seem to rely on hosted third party sites, when really, WordPress still does it all, Anyone else using SPLOTS? I'm still open to making changes, even trying to build new ones. But until then, they are as fitting as a comfortable of of jean shorts, where your jorts with pride! Featured Image: Jorts flickr photo by indieinterviews shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by me to sport the SPLOT logo. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Andreas Kristensson I am stepping inside the CogDog Laboratory today to conduct some experiments in... oh who am I kidding? I am just idly watching snow fall out the window, and thinking of things to try out online. Okay, for you loyal reader of this blog (not the use of singular noun), and the odd non-spammer who actually sites down and writes a comment, I am speaking to you. I am running this completely unscientific experiment to explore what the differences in response or to things I put out there: As a blog post (this here thing) in twitter on facebook To make it fair, I am turning off the automatic sending of this blog post out on twitter. And I am doing this also to test out my up to now un-liking of Facebook. Of course in a blog, I can expound on and on ad infinitum... whereas the other two are the short and shorter forms. My test is to ask for recommendations for three things. This is safe, as ideally, there is a core of people out there with knowledge or experience with these things. So here we go, as I pipette in some volatile fluids and warm the beaker over a bunsen burner.... I am Looking for a Quality Photo Tripod Up until now, for my long exposure photos, night shots, etc, I have used a really cheap, old video tripod. I am seeking something lower than the pro level but higher than basic consumer level. The needs are to be able to do steady photos using my Canon T1i (or whatever camera I might buy next) and using my current big lens, the 300m L IS. It's not super heavy, and the most I would add now is maybe an extender. This is the lens cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'd like a tripod that is not super monstrous to lug around. So what model/brand of camera tripod would you recommend for me? Adios iPhone / AT&T Hello Android / Verizon? (maybe) I really love my iPhone 4, and it is with heavy heart (and a boat load of apps) that I consider a big change. It's really about the network-- today I sit at home with my cable internet down (at best I get a little over 1 Mbps download speed), and I am using my Verizon MiFi card, and am seeing speeds of 1.3 - 1.8 Mbps! I then checked the coverage maps, and it shows Verizon has my little town blanketed in 3G data/voice, and more importantly, on the drive down AZ 87 that I use to go to Phoenix, there are just a few small dead spots. With AT&T on the other hand, they do not even own a tower near where I live- I am on a nebulous "partner" tower, and at best get Edge connectivity for data, and a lot of dropped calls. When I drive to Phoenix, there are actually only 2 short stretches (2-3 miles) along AZ 87 between Payson and Phoenix that I can even get a data or phone signal. "More bars in more places"? What a load of horse dung. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And I have been thinking that for my tech work at NMC, where everyone else has an iPhone, someone ought to be exploring the other platforms. I can still use most of my apps on the iPad. Putting aside the regular monthly rumor, I am mildly considering after the first of the year, jumping ship. So my question is, were I to go to Android/Verizon, what phone should an iPhone lover get? Beach Reading On Sunday, I am off for an extra week of vacation, an idyllic week on Kauai (yes, you should feel extremely sorry for me, someone has to go there, ok?). So what novel should I pack for the time away? I want something to take my mind away from the normal routine. I like some action, suspense, mild sci-fi, irony, satire... well that is not very specific, eh? cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So in a more open category, send me some paperback beach reading novel suggestions! Thanks. The lab is open. Last week was long, I am sure there were 16 days crammed into it. This included flying to Atlanta for the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference, presenting twice on Monday, exiting early Tuesday to hop a flight to Dallas, and being part of a trio running a 3 day workshop. After a late Friday night arrival at home, I am fairly sure my wife stacked me in the back of the pickup truck with the rest of our gear for a weekend escape to our cabin. The computer was not touched until late Sunday. That's a roundabout way of saying I was not blogging. Well, I had something itching to blog, then I deleted, then I itched, then I shut the lid on the computer. Sometimes it benefits to let an idea sit and ferment, or die of neglect. We'll see which is the advisable course. This has to do with some reaction to the release last week of the 2007 NMC Horizon Report, that was blogged after our presentation at the ELI conference where 175 crammed a room we were told to expect 60. By the time I got to Dallas, I got a report from our office that more than 1300 copies had been downloaded from our site. But numbers don't mean much. There were the 20+ colleagues I rant into at ELI who gushed about how they cannot keep copies of the past reports on their shelves. But anecdotes don't mean much. A few of the folks involved with the project were taken aback some by some backlash on a few ed tech blogs (check Technorati for the most current) -- for some people, they felt like there was nothing really revolutionary about the 6 Horizon technologies, that they were not really all that exciting or even were passé. For those individuals. This is not all that surprising, as some similar things echoed during the work of the advisory board that generated 200+ items we put on the table, and helped vote them down the funnel to a set of 6-- people felt like the horizons were not near enough, but they made the same mistake (in my mind) that others were doing... they were confusing their own horizons as educational technology innovators for those of the audience the report is intended for - mainstream technology users and decision makers at educational institutions. That is a different horizon. If one is looking for futuristic cutting edge technology predictions, take a ski trip down the end of a Gartner Group curve, or any of a number of other future peering technical crystal balls (and really far ones by 2150, "Remaining fideisms have diluted into agnostic mysticism; true fideists dwindle"). The Horizon Report is not trying to predict the wild wooly future, it is trying to outline what is going to be viable on a broader use scale (meaning not just the innovators and early adopters) in the near future. And the process is not meant to be "right". Heck, in 2004 the near term horizon included SVG graphics, which was left in the dust by the spread of Flash. But it really was grounded in the information available at the time (hint- this is a place where the web audience can participate, but filling in the wiki for the "Where are they now" pages) So yes, for those in the middle of the technology game, who are immersed this stuff daily, there might not be anything revolutionary about the list. Time to Adoption 4-5 Years: The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming Time to Adoption 2-3 Years: Mobile Phones Virtual Worlds Time to Adoption One Year or Less: User-Generated Content Social Networking So the Horizon Report is not an attempt of declaring which technologies are technically viable today, but when these ones might be used broadly at educational organizations. Let's be real- technologies of wide adoption and use at our organization now include email, web browsers and web search, classroom projection systems, desktop office software, course management systems-- hardly anything sexy at all. We're in the process of analyzing data from a December 2006 survey of NMC member organizations, but I can share now that less than a third report they are hosting blog software or wiki software, and across their population, the estimate the usage of such tools is about the 10% level. And for anyone who has gotten some idea that their is some dark hand pulling puppet strings on this effort, they have missed the point that NMC provides the process and the summary writing for the report- the ideas, the voting, the decisions are made by the 30 or so members of our advisory board which this year had a more international representation then ever before. And the entire process, the ideas generated, the 12 finalists, are all documented openly in our wiki. In fact, our board never met in a meeting or a teleconference call- all communication and work was done by email and the wiki. What did not work this year was some experimentation with the reblog concept -- the idea of using a system of a web-based aggregator and having people on the project occasionally jump in and mark sites to post to a new blog site... I got the Horizon reblog set up, but never cajoled someone into helping the reblogging. I accept that it really takes a bit of effort to spend time doing that, and after a while, i admit, I dropped the ball myself. We had some more luck with using a special del.icio.us tag to mark sites relevant to this year's work, racking up some 230 sites at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07 ... though I might have tagged about 80% of them. But using this along with derivative tags when we narrowed down the list like for user generated content or educational gaming saved a lot of time in tracking resources, more so than cutting and pasting to a document or even a wiki page. I cannot think of a bigger information management saver at a minimal time cost than using a browser bookmark to mark and tag a web resource. Yet, I am convinced, even among people in the educational technology field, that the number of active taggers is rather low. I'd be curious if there is some research on this. I'm pleased that we got these URLs in the final report-- and there is no reason to stop or why more of y'all cannot jump in the tagging. Operators are standing by! Like now. Use hz07 plus/minus socialnetworking, user_generated, mobile, virtual_worlds, educational_games, scholarship. And this can continue to grow, which is something we are working with our advisory board on-- the report comes out once a year, and is well received, but what can be done to sustain more discussion, research, etc to review how these play out-- e.g. make it a year round activity, not a snapshot in January. So I don't care of people do not agree with the report, and actually I look forward to dissent because that means discussion and thrashing of ideas. This is where the ideas grow. You don't like the 6- put your ideas on the table. Disagree with the timelines? Show us why. Show us the examples that show the timeline is much closer. Your own individual techno horizons are likely to be here but not evenly distributed. I have been nursing a small, un-stated, un-announced, un=tweeted media project. It occurred to me that this is an interesting way of being creative. Just do something. Don't make a splash. It's a secret. Or it is a "recondite" project: This word has been in steady decline since it's peak in 1850 Oh, yes, the project. I got carried away. I've been a big fan of the katexic newsletter since it first started. Each issue includes a "WORD" always new words to me, with its etymology, examples of use in literature. I decided a few weeks ago to play with doing my own visual definitions. Spend maybe 20 minutes max doing it, the scale of a DS106 Daily Create. Here is a storify of the four I have done [View the story "Visualizing Katexic Words" on Storify] Of course it's only now on writing this post, that I see on the web site, that each WORD already has an image chosen by the publisher. And even better, you can get a random WORD - now that is something one can use as a creative prompts Still, it does not negate this wee little project (as I imagine John Johnston saying in his lilting accent). It's mine. And having written this, I have busted my abstruse project. Oh well. This seems like a thing I should end with those string of "thought" questions that close the Profhacker posts. How about you? Do you have a secret project? What are your favorite resources for secret projects? Where do you share your recondite ideas? Please share in the comments. Top / Featured Image: A remix of the public domain Wikipedia photo Shimer comping 66 Recondite with the logo from the Katexic web site. Just for fun, I did a Google Image search on "recondite" (with results set to ones licensed for reuse), and this one was near top of the heap. The image is described as "Comprehensive exam at Shimer College in Mt. Carroll" and the bookish and exam based form of education in 1966 is both familiar and looks antiquated. For even more irony, Shimer College is described in Wikipedia as "a liberal arts college in Chicago, Illinois, best known for its small discussion classes and Great Books curriculum. With fewer than 150 students, Shimer is one of the smallest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Shimer was founded in 1853, and adopted the current curriculum in 1950." Could that be more fitting for a post about katexic? Even with all the crap and doom on the internet, it still acts magically to me. Wow, and some people think I have an edgy tone in this here blog, especially towards the sacred cow of reusable learning objects, which frankly after several years of looking at, thinking at, I just still do not buy. Yes, RLOs are R.I.P and I have questions lke If All The Learning Objects Are Web Pages Who Needs a Repository? Then yesterday, I stumbled across the Artichoke blog, where a posts on Mr Ed the talking horse on those Digital Learning Objects and Dear Horse God, about those Digital Learning Objects, the Artichoke takes some nice big bites: You cannot earjack a conversation between card-carrying members of the MoE digerati "A-list" at the moment without picking up terms like Learning Management Systems and Digital Learning Object. These terms are tossed like Brassica sprouts into the (e) conversations of the digerati with a facility and confidence that belies the fact that these resources and design environments are contentious, as yet not well defined, and often do not support contemporary understandings of meaningful learning environments... When I question the digerati it seems that learning management systems are all about managing content for consumption, and digital learning objects all about creating the content for consumption. ... Perhaps it is in the various representations, and misrepresentations of learning, within these conversations about LMS and DLO's that underlie the bewilderment, amongst the educators I work with, over what a digital learning object looks like. Ouch, sharp bark at the establishment, we like it! I have been holding back, waiting, just waiting, for the Horse God to stamp her hoof for once about Digital Learning Objects. Because it didn't seem to matter how many times I searched the Kia ora and welcome to Te PÄtaka Matihiko Our Digital Storehouse site, I just didn't get it. I couldn't understand why a seemingly retro notion of "knowledge as an object thinking" was being celebrated with such (e) froth and (e) frenzy by our pro constructivism Ministry of Education. Sweet web serendipity, indeed. The funny thing is the tangle trail to finding this blog from New Zealand. I was surfing my RSS feeds, and a post by Albert Ip had a quoted comment to his blog containing the artichoke link... so I just took a peek. It's this kind f serendipity that maybe fluff like Web 2.0 might enable, but does not create. Casual links, curiosity, discovery... those are the gems on the web. Of course, I am a fan of most things Kiwi ;-) This week I tried the free ServerMojo service which provides reports of uptime for your web servers (or databases) or pings you when they are down. The cool thing is you can get alerts the old fashioned grandma way (email) or as direct messages via twitter (which can then be pushed your phone). So ServerMojo periodically pings your servers and reports and whether the ping comes back. I had 2 twitter DMs today noting a 3 hours when CogDogBlog went belly up, one message when it went down and another when it returned: Maybe I am better off not knowing? Oh well. I have two servers set- one is CogDogBlog and the other is the NMC web site - I plan to do another for the NMC MySQL service because it did get overloaded twice in the last few months. You also get some basic uptime charts: So far its a nifty service at a niftier price. $0. Doing the photo a day for the 2009/365 photos group is not all that much an effort; it has become more of a daily habit than regular dental care (don't tell Dr Fow!). What almost takes more effort is keeping my count organized; I am naming them all this year with a title of 2009/365/x where "x" is the day number of the year, but I keep managing to get that off count, and as well, I just swept through my photo set on day 103 and found 105 photos (looks like I double dipped twice). I upload from iPhoto (yes an older version) using the Connected Flow flickr exporter, which allows me to tag them with my own 2009/365 tag and add the photo to my set and the group. There was a discussion a few photos back in the group on also creating a photo blog site for ones collection. My first thought was No way! Not another blog post thing to do, but I did seek out (and find) a solution that I am able to do this with just one click of effort. One click to make a blog, that works. I mean that, just one click. So I set up my photo blog site as a free one on WordPress.com which is my tongue twisting CogDogPhotoBlog I am using the amazing zen-like Monotone theme -- it is geared for a photoblog, and each entry has a background that is color matched to a dominant color on your photo, so each post may have a different color background. It also re-sizes it's one column based on the image width. Like many things I have found success with, it is an idea I copied from D'Arcy ;-) But here is the easy part. Since I am already posting my photos to flickr, I just use flickr's built in capability to publish directly to a blog. I set up my flickr account to publish to this wordpress.com site, and made a template simplified from the "large" layout: {photo_desc} The only downside is the max width size I can do is 500px, the default image size on a flickr page. I decided I could live with that rather than doing manual posting. So once I post my flickr image daily, my one step is to go to that pic in flickr, and select the blog from the Blog This icon over the image: This is about as easy as running a blog can be, right? The Monotone template also creates a nice archive view as well: So far the only extra effort has been in making some changes when I have had t back fill photos (like after my 10 days offline). The Quick Edit option in the newest version of Wordpress makes it easy to do this quikcly to change the publication date (this gets them in the correct order too). Blogging is like sooooooooo hard. Not. Life presents memory triggers usually, mostly, without any expectation. Tonight is our first winter storm in northern Arizona, with sub freezing temperatures expected, maybe even snow. On my morning rounds in the yard, I was stunned to see new roses and buds on the bush. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I know they won't make the night, so I thought "why not cut them?" Then I thought, "I never put flowers out in my house." I then went recursive, where the exit condition was a pair of scissors. In the house I am looking around; I have no vases. Looking around my utility closet I spot at the back of my top shelf I shiny cylinder. Yes, it's a thermos I have never used. And it has an Internet 2 logo on it. Then I remember. It was 2011, and I had visited George Brett in Falls Church. One of the saddest things of 2015 was getting the news that George passed away after a long illness I am sure he fought valiantly. George was Chief Information Architect at Internet 2 for almost 10 years -- did he give me a thermos in 2011? I remember I had a cough, and George was generous with medicine. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] That does not register. I think the thermos goes back to 2008, something George sent as an appreciation for being a remote panelist on virtual worlds at an Internet 2 Spring meeting. George was so keen for wild ideas, he let me preset as a dog in Second Life. Those were the days. Thats what passed for innovation. And for some reason, I have had that un-used Internet 2 thermos sitting around for 7 years. Until I found a need for it today. Because of an accidental rose. It's a nice thermos. I should fill it with a smooth warm beverage, go for a walk in the woods, and remember George's wit and kind nature. Maybe travel with a small talisman. Many things intertwined and connected, by the barest of circumstances. Here's to you, George. [caption width="480" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image credits. That's a combo of two of my own photos, one taken today of the flowers and my laptop -- flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/22741473786 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license -- and a photo of George I took on a visit in 2011 -- flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6176690500 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've been in New York City a few days, a city who's lively pulse is fed by the incredible density of people crammed on a small island, so many languages, so many shapes, colors, that you cannot even parse it all. It may not be all peace, love, and harmony, but in the span of a city block, you can easily share the space with ones from 25 different countries, and at least, on the surface, they all respect each others right to be here. It's just how it is. But it was shame, embarrassment, and anger I felt walking through two different protests on May Day, seeing the "Boycott Arizona signs", one in Union Square, one down by the US courthouse, a building enshrined with the epitaphs of the basic human rights that (are supposed to) be our foundation. It was shame, because of the rights people were exercising that seem to be eroding in my home state of Arizona, a place where the state representatives, leaders have taken a position of sanctioning, enacting a law that, to me, tramples on the rights of people living there. I removed my Phoenix Suns cap. I did not want to be identified with Arizona. Just off shore, Lady Liberty stands confused, wondering if Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Now bears an asterisk, a clause, that says, "unless you enter the Arizona door." The things I love about Arizona are its grandeur cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog places that feel large, expansive, on scale that dwarfs humanity. I like the open sky and spaces, the gazillion stars in the night skies, the freaky survivalist plants that thrive and flower in water starved deserts. To me, the land is so different, I dance in its weirdness. I'm not ready to say I want to move from here, because I like my home and local friends (plus the economy of course leaves little choice in mobility). But I am mad. The governer, our legistlature, has enacted a knee ass jerk response to a problem that asks for intelligent solutions, not palyground antics. Yes, there are some people who cross the Arizona border and do bad things here (darn that California border!!). But the measures enacted by the nimwits at the state house, instead, puts an antire swath of innocent, law abiding people in fear of being singled out for to "show me your papers". That is wrong, and that is not what any framer of the country had in mind, and I would think Lady Liberty is dropping a tear or two. The "law" says police offices are to ask for papers for people possible suspected of being illegal immigrants, Since they don;t have training materials, I created this little simulation: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I would like someone to try the exercise, and then write a short essay how this task is done without profiling. IN fact, I want more. I want our governor, or legislatures who voted on this, to be put before a video camera in a van, driven to a corner on Phoenix,m and indicate who they would ask for paoers, and explain why. Explain it to me. Explain it to our state. Explain it to the world,. for whom now, Arizona, maybe known as the "Grand Canyon State" may now be known as a pathetic joke as the "Grand Police State". This is wrong. Tell them, tell everyone. There is a window of time, where maybe some sanity can be done, in reversion this shameful act. This is wrong, and I am ashamed of this place. I mean c'mon, if you are going to the effort to run bots to spam and phish me, at least try to be convincing! The CogDog judge gives this a -1 for effort and a 0 for originality. How many hours were sent crafting: To: undisclosed recipients; Subject: our Email ID has been awarded 1,000,000.00 GBP in the TOBACCO PROMO send your Names... Country... Age... The most disturbing thing is that even this indecipherable, obviously a phony email will still probably fool some percentage of the receivers of the message. That is really sad, There is almost nothing more cliche than a Field of Dreams metaphor "If you build it, they will come", but it is all so fitting for those that get glaze-eyed at the potential of building a Learning Object Repository (ugh, I despise the connotations of the "R-word"). But I can guarantee you, that if you build it, they likely will not come, and if they do the pace will be one that gives you heartburn into the night. However, do not despair. What follows is a tale of our efforts of growing our own collection, the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) story. And what we have tried, including saying "please", bringing out the dogs and ponies, bribery, competition, and good old fashioned nagging. (more…) flickr foto You Have Been Warned!available on my flickr I was too scard to take a photo of this fearsome fish. This hand made sign from a local aquarium (Acuario Cet-Mar) in Puerta Peñasco, Mexico, might be part of a new WordPress theme that may be applied here ;-) My friends told me stories of some tourist fool previously who disregarded the sign and found out how much the dog snapper fish does bite. It really was not easy to get a good picture, but the big fish with the bad reputation has some sad puppy eyes. The weekend in Mexico was just what the doctor ordered, lots of sun, R&R, and no conputers or interent. The beach, ocean kayaking, the cervezas, and jumbo shrimp for every meal were highlights, not to mention the view parasailing. See the rest of the flickr-ed evidence. The summer online version of ds106 that Martha Burtis and I are teaching is off like a rocket- but there is no reason why you cannot jump on board; just head over to Camp Magic Macguffin and follow the right side link to sign up. There is no worry about coming in later, although our bunk house groups are coalescing and currently bonding, kum bah ya-ing. As a point of notice (or to help me sort out my own blog personality disorder), I will be doing any assignment work right from here, the home blog, under the ds106 tag. However, as part of the storytelling of the storytelling course, I decided to play with a video blog, hosted under tumblr, but mounted here under the subdomain, macguffin.cogdogblog.com: I have noticed, and came across a few references to it elsewhere in the google-verse, that tumblr blogs are rather long cached, and feeds may not update for like 12 hours. I cannot locate any official statement on that, but I have noticed a lag between the posts and the feed. I am primarily doing it as a video blog for my reports from camp. If you followed ds106 last year, you know there was a lot of weird shit that went down, with revolutions, kidnappings, banishment, chainsaws.... weird. The whole premise of this year is to bring a sense of calmness and safety to a fun camp experience, all about artistic creativity and self-actualization. Rainbows and unicorns are our mascot, even if there is a counselor running around with a hatchet, and apparently Uncle Hector is loose in the woods. @mikeberta FYI a large crate addressed to you on camp loading dock from Cryogenics Inc. Its busted open, Uncle Hector IS LOOSE IN THE WOODS— Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 1, 2012 SO far, I have had to fly to Canada for my orientation with the camp holding company, CVI, and met our operations manager, Mr E (odd dude). The made me do some sort of survival things in the woods, which I guess I passed, and then I was dropped back in camp last night with some mystery package I am instructed to give to Marco, the facilities guy. My curiosity got the better of me, and I peeked inside the package, and have been suffering intense headaches since then. But our campers are right on target, our UMW students are up and blogging, we have had some great campfire discussions (especially the last one with Bryan Alexander) that have worked out well with the live broadcasting and auto archiving of Google Hangouts. We've handed out some camp badges, yes BADGES, BADGES, we got bad ass badges! See the bottom of the week 2 newsletter for our campers of the week, and Martha has even gone and made a flickr group so anyone can make and give out badges. We know that Counselor Doodlebug has been sending some out as well, like: cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe I think things are going well, there are a few anonymous notes whining "where is Jim Groom?" - and Jim and I have chatted much of the time- he really wants to be a camper and work on hos bead necklaces and sand paintings. It's time for a new change of ds106, don;t you want to be part of the merriness? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xrqm2Q5NtM And remember, ds106 is the place to come this summer as a break from those silly old MOOCs! And remember, NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN THIS SUMMER, NOTHING! Wow, I need some rest, tomorrow is another busy days, chasing campers and keeping tabs on the counselors. We hear there might be some ruckus between bunks four and five. WolframAlpha Knows It All by cogdogblog posted 16 May '09, 8.44am MDT PST on flickr This is one smart thing! I now know that the meaning life has no quantity ;-) I've ignored following most of the pre-release on There was a significant drop in weblogging activity this evening, starving Stephen's MERLOT conference feed, as D'Arcy, Scott, Brian, Greg, Stephen, Bruce, Alan (plus Michelle but she may not want her blog linked... but we know where it is ;-) downed some ales and swapped stories over at... um... what was the name of that bar? Luckily, no one was geeky enough to bring a laptop. The recent T.H.E. Journal article 20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have has already bounced around the blogs I scan, many with some strong opinions about the value or lack value in such a list. The Edtech Posse Podcast #3 gave it a thorough roundup, and I concur with their skepticism about such lists which are narrowly focused on tools rather than the craft. I am not writing strictly about the list but cannot resist a few barks... When it first passed through my feed reader I passed up looking deeper-- Come on, is it truly essential to know how to use a Zip disk? I have a whole drawer full of dusty zips. Much of the "skills" listed are going to have a shelf life of maybe another year or two. What is more important are the skills in being able to re-skill oneself or to move away from "mastery" to knowing where to find fellow practitioners. There was a gaping hole in terms of the social networking tools, the personal creation tools, the information consumption skills that are to me much more important, much more relevant now than how to create a spreadsheet to average numbers. (more…) It's rare I feel like passing on something forwarded via e-mail, but this message form my colleague Jan in Melbourne is too good to pass up. Look carefully at the double meanings in these URLs (all real and well meaning): Make sure you don't make the same mistake when setting up your web page. It's not always easy choosing the right domain name... but you can't do much worse than these people. First there is "Who Represents?" - a database for agencies to the rich and famous: http://www.whorepresents.com Second is the Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views: http://www.expertsexchange.com Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island: http://www.penisland.net Need a therapist? Try: http://www.therapistfinder.com Finally we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales: http://www.molestationnursery.com And my own story... my personal domain dommy.com is named for my first canine friend, a dalmation named Dominoe that a former room-mate nicknamed "Dommy". One day I got an email from a self-proclaimed "dominatrix" who informed me that in her world, "dommy" means "Dominant Mommy". But I guess that world is pretty small, as in 7 years, no one else has made that mistake in seeking services ;-) So look closely at your domain choices! Have someone else look at it sideways. Whew, this is fun! Without much effort, I have added another 5 interviews, each under 5 minutes, for my upcoming article on digital net audio, You can find all 11 and (more as I add 'em) on the mcli Forum Spring 2005 Podcast. Joining the crowd, and rounding out some of the gender gap thanks to this morning's call for help, are: * D'Arcy Norman, University of Calgary * Sherri Vokey, University of Nevada - Las Vegas * Bert Kimura, Osaka Gakuin University (Japan) * Susan Smith Nash, Excelsior College (New York) and Xplanazine writer * Sue Lister, Ontaria Canada (she made it easy by sending my a URL for her own podcast response to my questions) I'll be gathering a few more through the end of next week (I am on break through March 21)-- now looking to widen the geographic reach (although I've chatted to Japan just today). This is so easy to do, especially after a few are done. Call up on Skype / iChat, hit record in WireTapPro, ask the questions, save as MP3, import into Audacity, delete the gaps and umms, and then export again to more compressed MP3 (I am doing a 32 bitrate- I may have been able to go lower, but the files sizes are now a reasonable 600-1100k). Look at me, the iPodless Podcaster... Interesting that all 11 I spoke to have an iPod, and a number of them had 2 or 3. Most are making use of podcast content. We are getting some interesting ideas on how it might be used for learning. I have started also asking more about the possibilities for students being the content creators as a first order thought is in the vein of the faculty as broadcaster. Will Richardson pointed out something I had not thought of-- as you listen there is no way to make notes or even "bookmark" the audio for details worth coming back to. And Susan Smith Nash emphasized the importance of a well written text summary of audio content. Good stuff comin' in via the digital air waves. Let me know if you have 5 minutes to spare the week of March 21 and I'll give you a Skype call. Thanks to everyone for playing.