Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
We're getting some great responses and interest in a second student panel we assembled in the last two weeks. Back in February 25, 2005, we had a 5 member panel for our ePortfolio Dialogue Day. For that one we even managed to capture and post the audio from the 55 minnute session. The following Friday (March 4, 2005), our Ocotillo Online Learning Group (OLG) convened a panel discussion with 12 Maricopa students, from 4 different colleges, to share their Student Voices about learning in online or hybrid courses. Unfortunately we did not get our request for recording in on time (no podcasts, sorry), but thanks to the detailed notes of Randi in our office, we have a nice set of student quotes and suggestions in our meeting notes. Online courses [produce better learning environments]. You have to teach yourself to learn what you need to know. You pay more attention and are more focused. Content, online vs. in class, is there more material online or do you lose something? Does the textbook enrich the learning experience? "The textbook becomes like a third learning tool, not the best tool. As an extrovert, one night a week in person is good, but the discussion board is great." "There are some classes where I have never used the book. Feedback from the instructors in important." How many feel like they have lost something in hybrid and online courses? No students indicated that they had lost anything by not being in the classroom. One student thought that the add in material was excessive. If the instructor does not use the discussion board than the students miss out. See the rest of the notes and quotes... These student voices were fresh, honest, and clear that they want flexible learning, and are willing to put extra effort in. Some colleagues are pegging one of the best blogging genres, blogging about blogging or writing about writing. Kate Bowles started a wave with lamenting the weight work related writing, Martin Weller cues the Fab Four , Alyson Indrus is focused on writing writing, and while it's more indirect, D'Arcy Norman's observation of Apocalyptic Chic is another call to Get Back to the Blog. When the ideas are sputtering, though (well there are un written drafts in my head), there's always one reliable target... the past. This came directly into my RSS inbox (sort of a retro joke there) in another installment of Jay Hoffman's History of the Web project (check out the timeline too), with 1995 Was The Most Important Year For The Web. There's numbers to support that 1995 was a web inflection point, the drastic 180º turn of Microsoft when Uncle Bill's early dismissal of the web became a "Let's Dominate It", but Jay dives deeper: So what happened? What made Microsoft, the most dominant force in the technological landscape, suddenly scared of a threat they had barely registered just a year earlier. What made online service providers, major media publications, large government organizations and everyday people sit up, take notice, and open up their web browsers? 1995 is the story of the many people that believed in the web and fought for its future. It was the year it moved outside the huddled spaces of universities and research labs and into the imaginations of everyday people who imbued it with purpose and set it loose on to the world.As is often the case, the story of 1995 doesn’t start in 1995. It starts a few years earlier, when the seeds of the consumer web first took root. Which is, as you might imagine, where we will begin as well. You get the interactions of two different forces of the web's early climate, the WWW Wizards gathering at some outfit called "O'Reilly" with the Web's daddy meeting up with the graphical browser wunderkid. There's a lot more, like the two stanford computer science geeks who felt like they should organize the web. Did they? More than that I was there, or had been for already two years. In late 1995 I was using this web based slide deck (hand coded HTML all the way) to talk about the web, though still hedging some bets, maybe, by referring to the other bits of the internet that had earlier promise: My crude Photoshopping in 1995 of I am guessing my own photo of a place in Arizona I rode on my bicycle. Drop shadows took some work then! I thought it was clever to put Al Gore's glimmering vision of a "Information Superhighway" next to a highway I saw being built near Scottsdale. Well now it is the Loop 101, but in 1995 there were simply overpasses over non-existing roads in the desert. The superhighway might be coming... Hoffman writes about the home-spun flavor of the 1995 web: It’s not necessarily easy to create a website. It requires, at the bare minimum, a knowledge of the HTML markup language, and the ability to host these HTML files in such a way that they can be read by web browsers. It takes a bit of work. But anyone with the tools and some time can do it. In 1995, the web was flooded with new websites. Remember, there were hundreds going up every day. Some of these were large commercial endeavors. Others were the creative brainchildren of wildly unique creators like Jamie Levy. Most of them were built by ordinary people. They were basic and loosely connected and sometimes about TV shows or movies or nothing at all. Maybe even you built one of these.https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/complete-history/1995-was-the-most-important-year-for-the-web/ I did! More than one. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine (bless the Archive/support the archive) has an impressive amount of my own web history, though it's first grab was in 1996. The rise and decline of my web enterprise at the Maricopa Community Colleges; I stopped tending it in 2006, and it was swept off the public web in 2015. In all of it's stark HTML table font-tag infested layout, here was my web pile of 1996: I had some vision about revisiting these old sites, but (yawn there goes the last reader), and much I had forgotten. In the mix are things I was trying to do to help others create web content, my efforts to get all of the information about our center and it's projects, reports with versions all available in web content. With the aid of my first student programmer Kurt, we had several resource sites where content was added via forms, crawled/indexed and made searchable. That was too it's downfile, as this was all done with the "database" being a flat text world writable file that perl scripts would would add information too. That's why the IT department took everything offline in 2015, parts of it were a security swamp hole that I never considered in 1995 (as much as having my work email address on every single page). That's the price of the web taking off. Since there was little awareness much less oversight of web page content, I could get away with my [so-called] clever footer sarcasm. "There are three kinds of lies-- lies, damn lies, and [server] statistics-- paraphrased from Mark Twain (1835-1910)[Server] Statistics are like lampposts: they are good to lean on, but they don't shed much light. -- paraphrased from Robert Storm-Petersen (1882-1946)~~~legally said, "these pages are not an official publication of the maricopa community college district. we are not responsible for information reached through a link displayed here. our content may be used only with written permission."~~~stylistically boasted, "we do not make much noise about it, but we do use features best viewed in a real browser or one of the wanna-bes. furthermore, this site is evolving not under construction" If I will pick one thing out of the pile to hook into 1995, it's my written piece for the MCLI Labyrinth, the technology side of an internal publication our office put out starting in 1992. This in fact was an early impetus in 1993 to learn HTML. We wrote the Labyrinth aimed at publication for print, sent out by campus mail and maybe just announced via text based VAX email. At the time I was looking for ways to electronically distributing it; I had done text only versions on a gopher server I first experimented with (running on a Mac II). I was making plans to make versions in HyperCard for Mac users and then an exported version finagled into Toolbook, all sitting on a file server anyone in the district could connect to. It was way too much work. Then in October 1993 a colleague named Jim Walters handed me that floppy disk labeled Mosaic, and soon after finding the NCSA HTML Tutorial as well as MacHTTP server software I could plug into the network and run a web server, I tossed all that approach aside for HTML publishing. Thus here is my "I was here and making on the web in 1995" proof. I spotted those guys from Stanford: Yahoo from Stanford University is a great starting points Not only is it comprehensive, fast, and up-to-date, but it is also searchable.http://www.yahoo.com/ And even then, before I knew people there, CUNY was being innovative: CUNY Multimedia Initiative is an incentive program to encourage faculty to experiment with the latest in multimedia technology.http://www.cuny.edu/multimedia/multimedia.html(link goes to 1996 wayback machine archive, it's worth reading!) And there was some organization named EduCom with an online magazine named EduCom Review at http://www.educom.edu/web/edreview.html (sadly, no shreds in the WayBack machine, sad face) I wonder if they will last? That's more than enough web nostalgia for today, maybe for a while. My ability to do this thought hinges well on the alchemy of the Internet Archive as well as my own wisdom to save my own copies of almost every web thing I made, letting me reclaim to my own domain what previous employers have slashed. What's next to write about? Featured Image: Yahoo! Homepage in 1995 flickr photo by Yahoo Inc shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified to make wider image and adding text to the search box "the web in 2019". Two weeks ago I was in Vancouver for the ETUG Fall 2014 Workshop, what a great gathering and with their un-conference format, a refreshing experience from the typical conference grueling treadmill present-o-rama format. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] I was not sure I would stand up an pitch a session, but I was sort of prepared, I had brought the Storybox. It has been sitting idly since my return from New Zealand (a good sign was the battery still carried enough charge to last through my session). There was not much trouble getting this group interested. I did less planning, and pretty much gave them the challenge to log on and figure it out. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] I ended up collecting about 18 files, not bad for a quick session. The energy did fuel me, so I decided (although just acted on it 2 days ago) to clean out archive the content from New Zealand, and reset it for stops in Canada. I'd like to see that sketch, Jason! https://twitter.com/draggin/status/532971914999119873/ Still, I remain on the fence about keeping the stuff in the box (which is what makes it a time capsule) or to put it online so folks can access it. This time I flipped a coin and chose the latter. Because I just love this media explorer I am using this time around; I made one especially for this current round. This is Infinite Grid Pro in action What I like about this jQuery powered media display is that many media files can be explored; as you click and drag around, the media thumbnails fill in, so it does feel a bit infinite (and its randomized). Plus I have categories for different kinds of media- photos, audio, video, documents, and new this time around-- Animated GIFs. You may notice I have 62 pieces of media listed- that's because I have to include at least 9 items for each categort, so I had to pad a few with older stuff. I am overdue a writeup on all the changes I did for this version of the StoryBox. I completely replaced the entire stock interface of the PirateBox (you can learn how to set up your own at http://piratebox.cc/) using the Treble theme I have used on several sites (I wisely bought a multiple site license). There's a whole lot that went into this, moving the web content to the USB drive (so its easier to update), putting in place a small python wiki, and a crazy assemblage of shell scripts and local PHP code I set up to prepare all of the media. This even included digging into some PHP text functions to overlay file names on the thumbnail icons. That's a post for another day. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It's still just cool. It's interesting to get smidgens of insight into how people link to your blog. For a window of time last week I saw an interesting pattern (when was traveling and missed out on the week of celebrity deaths). Look at the keyword searches people used in Google to get to CogDogBlog: It's all Farrah all the day in the keyword search box linking to my mention of her poster and how it reflected the TV age I grew up in which is now gone. Even more curious is that I paged through 10 pages of Google search results and could not find one link to my blog. People are diving in deep! May they find what they seek... In the "I am not sure why people should care (but there are 80 people on Facebook who say they do) department-- the latests news on my fight to escape the clutches of my mobile internet provider's contract is that Alltel still has me in their brig. I'd like to say that I have a hunch/wish/belief that the internet campaign including the Facebook group started by Devon and the emails submitted by friends/colleagues is having some effect. While in Austin last week, I got a call from Rick at Alltel... I actually enjoyed the part (after my 4 hours spent on hold and getting disconnected from "customer service") that I had the office put him o hold and then tell him I would get back to him. Little petty victories, take 'em where you can. So when I called back, Rick, who is with some higher than phone tree support level in "customer care", was very apologetic and had spoken to the techs that had "handled" my case. I was tihnking at first that perhaps the net campaign was working since they called on my NMC number, not the mobile number that I had been using to call them. Maybe they had to investigate from my campaign trail who I worked for-- but then there was the Doh! reflex, as the office number is the one where the billing goes to. Anyhow, Rick felt confident that a newer model USB modem would solve my issue and he was going to send me a new one for free. He assured me it would work on Mac OS. He could not "comment" or offer anything on my basic issue of being treated poorly and not given an option to escape a contract that Alltel had not provided their end of the deal. So I may get anew gizmo, but am still bound and gagged by their contract. IN the end, if the damn thing works I might be content, but I wills till toss as much light on the atrocious treatment I got and recommend people take their business elsewhere. But my hunc is that all the wireless providers are Stinky Pirates, so its a matter of finding the one that is less evil. With that I hope to get this blog back to its usual technical barkings. flickr foto Holding Handsavailable on flickr A fascinating sculpture outside a Department of Education building in Calgary My other web experiment today for the NMC Conference is setting up a page to provide some persuasion and aggregation for my goal of having participants "Tag This Conference". The site I set up: http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php is aggregating the public tags of nmc2006 from Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio,us... and is using 3 different services for doing so. For flick, I use the JavaScript Flickr badge to display all photos tagged with nmc2006 (of which there are a grand total of 2, both mine planted as seeds. For technorati, to catch all posts tagged with nmc2006, I am using a freshly installed copy of Feed2JS using the php include method (don;t look to sponge feeds off of this server, the publc script is not loaded here). And for del.icio.us, something different... I used tagalicious a PHP script that is very similar as it also uses the MagpieRSS parser, so that bit is shared with Feed2JS. Again, very little is there since no one is tagging. Boy, I hope they do. And the picture here? I tried to find an icon for "tag" and got some strange, unsuitable for public audience images in Flickr, and I recalled the photos I took of these cool statues in downtown Calgary when I was passing through in June 2004. I had not loaded them into flickr, so I quickly did. They are very cool, and the hands touching were the metaphor I was looking for.... let's play TAG! tag! T-A-G! tag? A D- For Twitter Interface Design posted 11 Jan '08, 8.29am MST PST on flickr I challenge anyone to convince me they can regularly use this drop down menu in twitter to send direct messages. Try it yourself. This interface item contains all of the people I follow, but it is presented in some random order. How the #*%@ can I find anyone? How much effort would it really take the bird cage programmers to add a freakin sort() command? Give me alpha order or give me Jaiku? Pownce? ?? This is criminally negligent interface design and earns a big fat Bloom County Pffffffffffft frfrom me. In light of the scandal, the stench of pocketed dirty money at the MIT Media Lab, it's time I confess an act of fakery of actually no consequence (or to be honest only a shred of relevance). I remember the incident well, but the timing eludes me as I found no flickr photos of the events around it (meaning it pre-dates 2004) nor any blog post (before 2003). The visits I do remember to MIT were in 2005 (I got to present there) and 2006 (an NMC meeting my first year working for them). This was before those visits. What I do remember was when I was then working as in instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. I got sent to a conference in Boston, not presenting, and frankly, I remember it being on the periphery of of interests. I have a vague recollection that it was one of the League For Innovation conferences, its Innovations one. I know I presented at one in New York City in 2005 about the Maricopa Ocotillo project (there's a link to an old wiki that's dead, so.. more archiving to do some day), but for some reason I was sent to one in Boston. I did find an old post whinging about being offered conference room internet connectivity for $750 and that in itself leading to a forward thinking comment from Stephen Downes. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1172689581118017536 But I am letting myself be diverted. Yet my faulty human RAM told me I was in Boston, in the early 2000s, for a conference. It's not like an organization with innovation in its name would have a web archive of it's past presentations, but hey. Who needs them, I got the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, so I plugged in a 2002 archive link, and ZOOM! I found a page for the Innovations 2002 Conference in Boston that was March 15-17, 2002. Innovation! 2002! Boston! This organization in 2019 will have no record of this event. But the Wayback Machine delivers. I was a tad bored at the conference. So I played hooky for a day, looked up the trains, and figured out how to get to Cambridge to maybe stroll around MIT. The place loomed big especially for the place known as the Media Lab. Where Negroponte ruled. Iconic Building 7 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I know it was late fall or early spring as I remember needing my warm leather jacket; this detail comes in later. And it was raining when I emerged at the Cambridge stop for MIT. I had no idea what I was doing, and felt quite a bit out of my element, me just some instructional technologist at a community college. I saw a building to explore and get out of the rain. As it happens, I walked into the Media Lab. I went down some stairs and hear noise from a room. I walked in. It was a big high space, dark but with lots of flashing lights. There were people milling around exhibits of various projects, like a big tech show demo session (what the boring conference lacked). I remember just walking around, watching, listening, tech projects I guessed where by MIT students. It was rather fun to have stumbled into this. After a bit I wandered up the stairs to a hallway (I think I really needed a restroom). A chipper lady with a clipboard asked me how I was enjoying the demos, and reminded me that were more at the _______ building she gestured down the hallway. I said thanks, and then she looked me up and down. I was wearing likely jeans, t-shirt, and a worn brown leather jacket. No name tag. She looked at her clipboard, and asked me my name. I provided it. After sternly scanning the list, she informed me that these demos were only for donors to the Media Lab. And obvious to all in the hallway, that was not me. I apologized, and beat a hasty exit. I think I ran for the train back downtown. So on my first visit to MIT, I crashed the Media Lab, and got tossed out of an event for their funders. If anything, it smacked of a true academic class distinction; who was I, some yokel from a Community College in a leather jacket? I always thought this was a humorous story; this week, I am ironically a bit proud of my accidental Media Lab crashing. Featured Image: mysteryman flickr photo by mossimoinc shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license There is room on the internet for everything not on the internet. My sister emailed a link to a site with a scanned copy of the brochure for a 1973 Ford Maverick. So what? This was the car I drove out to Arizona when I moved there in 1987 with my dog Dominoe, flipping the odometer in Albuquerque, the one that did a few trips to Bishop, California for my Geology field work. So nostalgic. I got $350 trade-in on it in 1989 towards a Chevy s-10 pickup. I've seen one old Maverick tooling round Payson, AZ. For no real compelling reason, I decided to meld my own, old green Maverick Grabber into one of the pages from the ad, using every photo of it I could find in my flickr stream. [caption id="attachment_19171" align="alignnone" width="500"] click to see the full glory of the 1907os[/caption] There might be a 1970s theme style assignment here worth putting into the ds106 assignment bank, but for now, it's purely my own nostalgia. This was the car whose 1980s photo in Death Valley found its way onto a German band's CD cover, all via that expansive internet. Alas the band is gone, their web site now used for some travel agency. Such a fluid fickle thing that web, someone out there ought to maintain it. You. And I. Enough surfers, likers, curators... need more web makers. Always. I love the cleverness of Ken Rodoff's description of the teacher you don't want to be in "an unexamined summer". I'd say more, but don't want to give it away. linkribution across the seas to Graham Wegner nag posted 24 Mar '06, 3.02pm MST PST on flickr Dorset how I love being one Seems the obvious choice for a ds106 bumper sticker A double dose of WordPress pressure from Jerry and Andy (at NMC Summer Conference). Where is the Reverend when you need him? Had fun hanging out in Indy with Gardner, Jerry, Andy, Martha and Jen of the UMW Gang. They run at the same high level of fun energy I saw at faculty Academy. And Dr Glu had some serious fun at the jam! a.k.a "What to do in the boarding area when there is no free wireless..." As a public service, I am here to expose some of the great puzzles of the species humanus nomadus moderni. (1) Coffee. Is Starbucks truly as superior to say the brew bubbling at Cinnabun, Nathans, or Burger King? When I say "truly superior" I mean enough to warrant a 7 fold increase in the line length? I heard the guy in the TSA mutter as he glanced over at the snaking line, "I wish I could have little bit of that 5 buck coffee flow". I am guessing the TSA rate is a bit lower than the Starbucks profit margin. (2) Rented Headsets. I am utterly amazed at the sheer volume of passengers that will fork over 5 bucks (at least they could splurge on the coffee before boarding) to "rent" headphones for a video rental.. when any $3 pair of portable headphones can jack into the mini plug for free. There must be some sort of oxygen depletion or herding behavior at work. (3) Automation. Airport bathrooms are pretty much like 20 years ago watching the Jetsons. It would be nice to have a little bit of delay in the automatic toilet flushing after one is.... ahem, done with business. That great "sucking" sound almost makes me feel like I'm getting slurped down the tube. And automatic faucets... is this the demise of the do it yourself ethos? I can only imagine more automation going on around the toliet paper dispenser... okay, let's not go there. (4) Moving Sidewalks. We pay money to cram ourselves into human steerage compartments for several hours, and then present the option to suffer more atrophy? Where is that pioneer spirit, people who rode covered wagons across a roadless Western Wilderness? ... oh, yes, I will take fries with that.. yes, super size me. (5) Smiles. For hordes of people either embarking on a grand adventure vacation or returning home from a rigorous business trip, there sure are not many happy looking people in airports. Just getting out on the roads beyond the white curb line with this surly crowd is enough to keep me riding the train. (6) Mechanics. Will the jet engines stall if my tray table is not clasped? Will a hazard light flash if my bag is not stored under the seat? Wow, these 25 year old jets are sophisticated! (7) Prices. Is the cost of shipping mozzarella cheese past security gates that expensive to warrant a $6 personal pan pizza? It must be the only good stuff that gets cooked here. (8) .... No time to write more. They are starting to the pre-boarding call, and although I in group 8, I am going hover around the gate to compete in the race to the seats. I'm allowed to brag a bit, right? Word came via email that a WordPress site I built last year for BC Corrections (hosted by and working with folks the Justice Institute of British Columbia) won a bronze prize from the Horizon Interactive Awards. I wrote several posts about the making of the BC Corrections Leadership site: https://corrleader.jibc.ca/ Sometime in early 2019 I heard from the project manager, Al, that he submitted the for an award. "Oh, that's nice, I thought." Then, Al emailed last week with the bronze news, this site did win an award in the Training/E-Learning category. That's very nice. It's at listed there under the "C" winners: So there were some 800 entries for Horizon Interactive Awards in 2018. And it looks like a lot of awards are given out across like 30 categories. But it still means something, right? I am proud of the way my colleague Peter and I could build upon a metaphor of maps and terrains and what functionality I could wrangle of the WordPress Total theme, some plugins for creating reusable blocks of content as well as Advanced Custom Fields, and a free contact form plugin that I could pass some parameters to prefill fields. I got a lot of JIBC CTLI support from Dennis Yip, especially for dealing with plugin requests and uploading of static content to a hosted web directory. Still, the best part of this project was designing the CorrLeader Navigator -- something that was barely a wish from the project spec for a means to make easily available what was new on the site: The idea is that the WordPress API is used to populate this mini HTML site with JSON driven data snapshot for all the content (it's about 1Mb of data but it's cached on the static site), and a means for any visitor to filter the content by categories and resource type. The secret sauce is that it can save these preferences on your device without leaving a single, trackable cookie; it's all local storage, which never leaves the device. I kind of thought this would be of a lot of interest, but maybe I never really explained it well enough. I tried. But even without it being noticed, for me it was a valuable exercise to build (and I owe Tom a thanks again for help with the ajax requests). While the project wrapped up in late November and likely much leadership development put on the racks for this ________ pandemic, there has been interest, and for the last two months I have gotten some work adding a set of new resources and self-paced training modules on the site. It's all bronzy! Featured Image: Most definitely not the most kosher re-use, but I fall on the knees of parody and obvious non-commercial use of a Monopoly game card, remixed to change the message of the "You Won 2nd Prize in a Beauty Contest: Collect $10" found in some forgotten corner of pinterist. Get out in front of this meme or get out of the way! Beyond Cat Breading lies the bizarre space of Jim Groom Breading: This started with the almost incomprehensible Cat Breading ds106 assignment: The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist"”each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)" From this article in Complex's Pop Culture section So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat's face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it. Now the Cat Bread Purists will likely insist the true art requires real cats and real pieces of bread, no Photoshopping. Phoooey. As Jim was describing this assignment to his ds106 class tonight, I was watching on the live stream, and it occurred to me that the most appropriate things to do was to put Jim's face into a piece of bread. That was pretty easy to do- a bit of lassoing of his mug, shrinking the selection area, feathering, and cutting the hole in the bread, which I tweeted out as this image. Just for giggles. But thinking about how to use this in the assignments, do I make a new one for Jim Groom Breading? Nah... I just need to convince the viewer that this is a cat! I just found a photo of a cat: and placed it on the top layer of my masterpiece. Some removal of the tip half, and then setting the layer style of the whiskers to "Lighten" got me closer to the needed but I still ended up using the eraser tool brush mode to get rid of more cat, and then some levels tweaking made the whiskers pop out a bit more. That Jim, breaded, and on krazy kat. This assignment is only worth 1 star, which is what a slap a cat into the bread in Photoshop would rate, but I took it up a notch. What can you bread? If you want to have a go with this, I am sharing the photoshop file which has the whiskers and other parts in separate layers so you can put someone else into the bread mix. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/bread.psd (2.7 Mb PSD) Since it is already a week in the rear view mirror, this ought to be my last post about the 2009 NMC Summer Conference. Heck, it's time to start thinking about 2010. However I wanted to record, primarily for my own sake, while fresh in my mind a recap of the social media tools we used (and other related factors) for our conference. I resisted using the title of "report card" ;-) cc licensed flickr photo shared by alumroot Most of this follows what we provided for attendees as our "conference tech tools". Previously, On NMC.... For background, in the 3 previous NMC conferences I have been involved with since starting my job there in 2006- we've done mainly a "tag this conference" approach where we ask people to tag photos, web sites, blog posts e.g. 2006, 2007, 2008 where I cobbled together some summary pages using mainly my own Feed2JS code. Last year at Princeton, we added a Google Map for people to geotag their home location, an invitation to share photos of the number "15" (it was the NMC's 15th anniversary) that got rolled into a NMC@15 video, and a chance to sign up for 15 minutes of studio time on the John Lennon Bus to create a package of sharable music loops. Twitter was definitely on an upswing (but not near the use we saw this year), and we had a TwitterCamp display set up Those went okay, we always get a solid core of photographers tagging and posting pictures to flickr. And although we had some people tweeting from sessions, to me it seemed like we were missing an opportunity but not having a perhaps more organized approach to having our conference audience help "cover" or document the conference. A dream would be to know for sure there was one or more persons in each session blogging and sharing it so we had a record or artifact of all sessions. So on to what we tried this year... (this is gonna be a long scroller) (more…) I can hardly resist the ds106 call to Remix and Album Cover: Find an iconic album cover and remix it to represent a something different. It can be a play on the title, the image, the aesthetic, genre, etc. See the visual example featuring Snoop Dog and Dr Dre as Chronic Youth (a play on Sonic Youth's album cover Goo). There is a whole google search results page of sources of album art, e.g. http://albumart.org/. This one was done in about 20 minutes, harkening back to the 1970s Rock Era of ds106: It's hard to find a die with a 0 on the side! Based on Bad Company's Straight Shooter, songs on ds106 Company's GIF Animator features: "Good Giffin' Gone Bad" "“ 3:35 "Feel Like Makin' Mashups" "“ 5:12 "Dailyshoot No More" "“ 3:59 "Scottlo Star" "“ 6:16 "Deal With the Bava" "“ 5:01 "Wild Fire Haiku" "“ 4:32 "Macguffa" "“ 3:41 [9] "Call on MBS" "“ 6:03 Not for sale in any store! If you order before midnight, we also include the bedstand black light. Our iincentive program for getting people in our system to contribute items to the Maricopa Learning eXchange ends tonight at midnight (and starts up again for the next round one minute later). See more about The Great Package Race. What we are doing is tracking all items contributed over a 6 month period and awarding software prizes to the college that contributes to most as well as to most prolific individual contributers. Like many students, it seems like our folks are waiting until the last minute. To make it interesting, we are hiding the scoreboard in the last 24 hours. This is a topic for a future post, but it has been rather frustrating to find that an offer of software packages (25 license copies of Adobe stuff is nothing to sneeze at) is no incentive to some of our colleges, and the bulk of things coming in are the results of a minority of inspired inviduals (usually one per campus) at our colleges. Nor is a pesonal copy of Macromedia StudioMX much of a reason either. Time. Patience. Perseverence.... my Dad used to say... Results to be posted tomorrow When John Pederson (or "Balki Bartokomous"?) launches a softie like this https://twitter.com/ijohnpederson/status/646833331045163008 how can I resist the urge to remix? Not only are the reaction shots brilliant., but the whistler's facial contortions are priceless. This was about 25 minutes of iMovie twiddling, it's so easy a cat could do it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W911hqU9qeI I downloaded the Amazing Whistling Guy video (using the browser add on from best downloader ever, SaveFrom.net) and a shorter clip of Dean Shareski. Here's the iMovie work area: I put both clips in the timeline together. I then separate the audio track from the whistler, and slide that under Dean, and remove the rest of the whistling video. Next I pull a clip of a reaction shot into the top video track and mute its video, to start making cut away shots. After the first cut away, I split the clip, and then find the next segment, split it and repeat, until I have all the cutaway shots. I slide them down the track to be reactions to Dean's lines. The audio setting for Dean's track is set to reduce the volume of other tracks, essentially ducking him over the whistlers. A few more bits for titles, publish to YouTube, tweet, and it's in the can, Stan. Count this as ds106 work because it and I are #4life Top / Featured Image credit: Found at Top Dog Training Help. Google images sez its licensed for re-use; the site sez nothing. Google must be right. I keep a TV on mainly as having some background sound so it's not so empty in this apartment. I was not even watching what I left on, my the tone... the frequency of the actress was so brash, yet alluring. And thus I fell into a Mae West rabbit hole. How little of this amazing persona I knew; I probably had some image of black and white film featuring a fast talking woman dangling a cigarette. I used to eat in a diner in Tempe, AZ called "Mae's West". And that was about it. But TCM had showing I'm No Angel, her 1933 film with Cary Grant. In which she is a totally dominating figure, especially in attitude. [caption id="attachment_38455" align="aligncenter" width="500"] She's no Angel[/caption] I actually caught the tail end of the movie, the courtroom scene. I got distracted from the info on the intertubes. To this day, West is known for her one liners, wisecracks, and blatant sexuality in an era that was not exactly receptive to that type of behavior on the stage and screen. In fact, West was arrested in 1926 for writing a play simply called Sex. The trial which followed that arrest is probably what inspired West to include a courtroom scene in I'm No Angel in which she takes over and cross-examines the witnesses, something she probably wished she could have done in her own situation. Who was this woman, who is writing plays called "Sex" in the mid 1920s? I did watch the courtroom scene, and she not only has the wise lines, her affect and body language totally dominate. You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.-- Mae West I am curious about this incident, track down a link to a 1927 Boston Globe article on it. Avast, it's a Proquest abstract. You have to either buy or log in as a subscriber to see a newspaper article from 1927? Not me. I ask for help. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/539646144620421120 Jeffery Keefer comes through in like 12 minutes flat. The article has almost nothing in it. It does not even mention Mae West, just that a judge let the 22 accused cast members waive examination to they could perform the show that evening. I'm tempted to screenshot the article just to thumb by nose at copyright. But those lawyers.... There's a much better article in the New York Examiner which I can not only read, I can quote from: Actress Mae West called it a joke when police charged into Daly's 63rd Street Theatre during her risque comedy-drama "Sex" - about a hooker angling to marry a rich man - and arrested the entire cast for indecent public performance. The thirty-four year old native Brooklynite and her cast found themselves hauled off to the Jefferson Market Jail at 425 6th Avenue. The five foot tall West, best known for her sassy wit and her double entendres, sat in her holding cell and laughed still more at the hypocrisy. Her show had been hugely popular for almost a year before the NYPD raided them. 325,000 people, including top cops and their wives, had already seen the play. This is what society concerned itself about in the 1920s... The trial dragged on for nearly three months. She was prosecuted for "corrupting the morals of youth." West stated that her play was artistic; her attorney added that "Sex" was a morally instructive drama. But Judge George Donnellan, who presided over the case, said that a guilty verdict would be more fitting. On April 19, 1927, after they had deliberated for six hours, the jury returned with their guilty verdict. She was sentenced to ten days in the Welfare Island Prison (now Roosevelt Island) and fined $500. Inside the prison, West was impressed by her fellow prisoners' life stories; she secretly took notes on her surroundings, which she later used as basis for all her future characters. Upon her release after eight days (she got two days off for good behavior), she commented to a reporter, "If I wanted local color, I sure got it in that place." I find an "official" web site which is clean and polished: Her Wikipedia article is so dense with information (138 footnotes, take that Boston Globe), I'm not even sure where to start. An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.-- Mae West That resonated with me over the notion of courses that talk about stuff versus courses that DO stuff. Maybe the thing I find most mind blowing is the Mae West NYC blog, which has been publishing rather in depth articles since 2004. Ten years. Thank you for reading, sending questions, and posting comments during this past decade. The other day we entertained 1,223 visitors. The Mae West Blog was started ten years ago in July 2004. You are reading the 3058th blog post. Unlike many blogs, which draw upon reprinted content from a newspaper or a magazine and/ or summaries, links, or photos, the mainstay of this blog is its fresh material focused on the life and career of Mae West, herself an American original. Look at almost any post, say Mae West: Arrested Decay (January 8, 2008), I found as part of my search on this flap over Mae's audacious play. Bear with me a long quote; can anyone not see this as incredible non peer reviewed research? MAE WEST was famously jailed at Jefferson Market Jail in Greenwich Village [once located between Greenwich Lane and West Tenth Street], and tried at Jefferson Market Police Court in 1927. By 1927, the PRISON housed only female felons — — and, making the best use of her incarceration, the Broadway star took notes on the inmates and used this material in her play "Diamond Lil." Mae especially admired Lulu, an experienced stick-up woman in her cell. "It really takes a lot of nerve to hold up a man," the awed actress told a news man who covered the trial. "If I wanted local color, I sure got it in that place." Misinformed people have spread the incorrect assumption that Mae West was in the tall, modernized Women's House of Detention. Not only was the House of Detention not around in 1927, since it was designed during the Prohibition Era, it would look quite unlike the elaborate nineteenth century jail, which beautifully matched the rest of the judicial complex. [The left foreground area shows a low-rise masonry market building designed by Douglas Smith in 1883.] People who make this mistake include actor David Duchovny, whose motion picture "House of D" [2004] paid homage to the former correctional facility [erected 1931, Sloan and Robertson, architects; demolished 1974]. When I interviewed the Yale-educated actor, he proudly told me Mae West had been locked up there. I winced. This blog has been publishing articles like this for 10 freaking years. Wow. Woah, Neo. Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.-- Mae West She wrote her own plays, in the 1920s was a supported of both women's liberation and gay rights (from Wikipedia). A rather extraordinary person. Jane Mast. Even after 15 years of cogdogblogging there's nothing like the smell of a blog post about blogging in the morning. I'm thinking today of the people entering into the blog network of Ontario Extend. Some obviously are not new to web writing, but I'd best in many cases, seated in front of that keyboard, many wonder, "Just what am I doing here?" Little b That's a good question, but I was prompted today, as often, by the blogs of others. And for me, more often than not, it's been a colleague named Jim Groom who has grey blog beard hairs, writing about blogging, Jim himself was jogged to write by yet another blogger named John Cricthlow who write about Small b blogging, where one writes more themselves and a smaller circle than aiming to get "thousands of views" It’s a virtuous cycle of making interesting connections while also being a way to clarify and strengthen my own ideas. I’m not reaching a big audience by any measure but the direct impact and benefit is material. Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”. And remember that you are your own audience! Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. Ideas that can evolve and grow as your thinking and audience grows. As I wrote in my comment on Jim's blog (more on the C below) there's not much more traditional in blogging than blogging about blogging. Yet the benefits are not apparent when starting out. You might wondering, "Why am I doing this?" and "Does anyone care about this?" My position is that blogging is primarily for me, that's little b style. It has become engrained as the way I think and work. One of the early pieces that nailed it for me is Cory Doctorow's My Blog My Outboard Brain -- a blog post from 2002 that is still sitting at the original URL it was published at. It actually bothers me not to blog about something rattling around in my head. Another aspect of this, that I will pull up any time talking about blogging, is Jon Udell's concept of "narrating" our work. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2012/366/103 Jon Udell in Mid Thought flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] "Since then I’ve spoken a few times about the idea that by narrating our work, we can perhaps restore some of what was lost when factories and then offices made work opaque and not easily observable. Software developers are in the vanguard of this reintegration, because our work processes as well as our work processes are fully mediated by digital networks. But it can happen in other lines of work too, and I’m sure it will." — “Data-driven career discovery” (Jon Udell blog) It’s been clear to me for a long time that the participant/narrator, armed with easy-to-use Web publishing technology (aka blog tools), will be a key player on every professional and civic team. A couple of years ago I sketched out how blog narrative can work as a professional project management tool. — “The participant/narrator: owning the role” (Jon Udell, formerly published at InfoWorld) Another metaphor I often reach for is a DVD. Much of what we do in school feels like the movie on the disk- the paper, the project, the presentation, we focus on the final end product. But my favorite part of DVDs was always all the other stuff, the extras- the director's commentary, the out takes, the location mini documentary, the story of the making of the movie. I see blogging as providing that too. Most of my teaching often works like Ontario Extend, where I ask my students to write about their work in their own blogs, that I then syndicate to a course hub. My classes are often about creating media; I don't grade them on the artistic merit of what they make; I grade them on how they write about the ideas behind their products, the influences, the media sources, and how they made it. Ask them to write Extras. It takes them weeks or more to grasp this idea. They start writing like it's a drop box, "here's my assignment." But I see huge leaps in writing about their work, as shown in my most recent Networked Narratives class. Like Vanessa: It’s already May, where the semester ends and students like myself start reflecting back to what was learned and taught. I still remember the feeling of “what did I get myself into?” when walking into class. It was cool that my Professor lives in another state but the work that was announced was gave me the “hibby jibbys”. But while the weeks continued and I was trying hard to understand the work presented, I started to enjoy it. You can see that from my first blog to my latest, my attempt has improved and I have found ways to make it as interesting as I can for my readers (even if its only fro my Professor) Doing the weekly blogs helped me in remembering what was done on the prior class. Also, it gave me the freedom to comment on the project. If I did or did not enjoy it. And Tiffany: The end of the semester has finally arrived and it has been a long but insightful ride. This class was initially an elective that I took just because it was one of the only classes available. I was a little skeptical about it at first but I am so glad that I stuck it out the whole semester. I learned so many things and became much more tech savvy then I would have been had I not taken this class. There was a lot of things to get through so assignments more stressful then other’s but I still found it all very fun! One of the many things we had to accomplish was weekly blog posts. This is where we practically vented about our weekly assignments but also where we were able to put our new skills to use and make our blog posts fun. I learned how to link, add videos, and just make a blog site that makes someone want to look at it and where it grabs there attention. Every week whether it was a meme, digital redlining or bots, I was able to use my experience to bring my blog post to life and show my hard work of the week. In a course where blogging happens they start using this word "last": https://twitter.com/Espen4lyfe/status/996734296051343361 https://twitter.com/SgDenny2/status/996383439745142786 which leads me to wonder what it takes to help students, and maybe faculty doing an experience to earn a PD bump, how "little b" becomes part of their regular process. Big C The big C is for Commenting. Back in "the day" it was the rage, as pre-social media networks, it really was the primary channel for conversation between folks. Commenting is pretty critical to new bloggers. It helps with fight the feeling of isolation. It's really important for new bloggers to feel heard. I learned early on co-teaching with Jim Groom the importance of being a comment rocket engine with students. What I abhor is setting some rubric-ized formula of asking them to do X comments a week. That sounds like a chore. I have worked through several iterations of encouraging commenting; often students in a course feel lost looking at a syndication hub of 25 posts. I have done a practice of putting them in groups of 4 as a "comment group" where they are just looking at a more manageable number of blogs. I ask them to not only offer constructive comments, but to use it as a way of studying how other people write and design their blogs, like it's a field trip. And to reflect on what they learn from their peer comments. In my recent class, either by sub conscious design or mental lapse, I did not make a commenting requirement. I wanted to see what might happen if they got comments from me if it would trigger an ct of turn about... well it did not really happen. Still in forming a professional network, commenting remains a critical part; I just ported over and re-edited a web page I had written for DS106 and moved it to Ontario Extends as On Constructive Commenting [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]an old design 02 flickr photo by hecpara shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license[/caption] What is a Constructive Comment? It should be more than “Nice work” or “I agree”. A good comment is maybe a few sentences, and includes useful feedback or suggestion for improvement. You can explain why you like what was written or agree. Or explain why you disagree. You can offer relevant contexts or links. Or offer additional resources or links that might benefit the writer. For every bit of opinion you might start writing, think of including an “and…” statement. : : : When you comment, show that you are listening. Respond to specific parts of what the author wrote. As a form of acknowledgement, when someone replies specifically to a point, it means they are listening. Do not be the commenter who just uses it as a means to talk about their own stuff. Still I know people reach first for social media to converse. But that ends up detached from a blog post, from what it relates to. A constructive comment is a generous gift, and I am pretty confident, the more you give, the more you get. I'm looking forward to both a lot of little b and Big C in Ontario Extend. Featured Image: Composite of little b and big C pixabay images both by geralt shared into public domain using Creative Commons CC0 superimposed on keyboard photo by Airman st Class Greg Nash shared into the public domain as a work of the US Government. I spent too much of today fiddling around with setting up a wiki on our new Jade server. This was at the request of one of our most intrpeid and adventurous faculty members, one I hooked on HTML in 1994, roped into blogs last year, and he's already to push the envelope out past Mars. The obliqure reference in the post title is that I am about 150 miles southeast of the aptly named small Arizona town of "Wikieup" on the wild highway between Phoenix and Las Vegas. There are about 1000 various wiki systems to choose from, and it is hard to know one from another, and today I played with OddMuse, a descendent of UseMod-- it seemed to be one that had some flexibility for features like RSS and rolling as a weblog. Most of it was fiddling with a new style sheet for formatting, and going back and forth on a bunch of settings. The scripts are not that hairy, but there are a pile of settings to twiddle and the whole writing mode is different in wiki-space. I am not quite ready to unveil the wrapper, as there is actually nothing but goofy content. I see that it is very careful to set up a very clear structure and entry to wiki's. More to come. For an upcoming presentation, I was doing some random clicking at Blogger to find some tacky or "bad" blog examples (they are out there, stuff you's not want to be on screen when the boss wanders in). It's sad how many URLs there are wasted by lik spammers who create Blogger.com sites just to spam them selves. See example but for **** sake, do not click any of their insipidly pathetic links. Spammer, spam thyself. More from the weird web department... can anyone guess who's remaindered links I am plundering?? Anyhow, as a DOG themed corner of the web and a techie, I gave some serious perusal of Pet's Mobility: PetsMobility™ Network, Inc. (PetsMobility™) is a wireless communications company that will be providing innovative wireless communication products and services to the rapidly growing multi-billion dollar pet market segment... PetsMobility™ has the first ever Cellular Telephone for pets and will provide a full range of wireless communication hardware and accessories for the pet industry... The patent pending PetsMobility™ PetsCell TM will be compatible with existing cellular and satellite GPS technology. The PetsCell™ will allow pet owners to talk to their pets as well as allowing owners to request assistance should they become incapacitated and require help. In addition, and perhaps more valuable, pet owners will have a piece of mind that if their pet is lost and someone finds their pet wandering the streets, with a simple press of a button on the PetsCell™, the auto dial function will dial the owners home alerting the owner to retrieve their pet. (emphasis added) Wow, as a pet owner I thought I had a "piece" of my own mind already. So not only does Fido get their own phone number, you can call and chat with him/her any time. But what do I think if I get a busy signal? Should I opt for call waiting for the dog? It does not say if the dog gets voicemail, a camera phone, games, etc or if the dog's phone is web ready. Only the best will do. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine They come unexpectedly, unscheduled, unobtrusively. An email from a stranger. A comment on a blog that is shockingly written by a person, not some shoe selling bot. And yesterday, a comment on the flickr photo above. It's obviously a screenshot, but I had a hard time remembering the context I had posted a screenshot of a blog for http://lapazfarm.homeschooljournal.net/. My hunch it was for a presentation, but one of the shortcomings of the flickr mobile app is I cannot see the adjacent photos in the stream. BUt yes, the comment, on a 5 year old posted image: Hey look, that's my mom's blog .-. Comments to me, at least ones not from spambots, are an opening for a conversation. How enjoyable, meaningful, are conversations where you open with a message to someone, and they never respond? I reply: It's a small Internet world. I can't recall what this was for, probably a presentation I did on how people documented their interests in blogs. How was mom's home schooling for you? And the writer loops back: It was great. I'm in college now, doing well in my classes, and definitely wouldn't be here without her schooling. And to me, this 3 message conversation reminds me of the Amazingness of what happens when we do connect/share between people. It might not be the kind I would add as an Amazing Story of Open Sharing (although I could instigate something since I plan to be in Fairbanks in October, that's yet another story). And that's the thing, it's those micro-connections that are maybe more important than the ones that make you say "Woah", the instances we may overlook, and forget, that I firmly believe hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times a day, almost un-noticed among what "trends" or gets huffposted. But I was curious about the original context, and now I see it. I used the LaPaz Homeschooling Journal site as an example I did for a 2008 Wordcamp San Francisco talk, where I was asked to do something on Wordpress and Education. This became It's All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner: cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I bet I was making a nod to another famous restaurant. This was 2008, maybe that later Eocene era of the web. But then there was some of the first multiuser sites- UMW Blogs, UBC Blogs, University of Calgary Blogs, Blogs @ Baruch (not surprisingly all involving edtech friends/colleagues); blogs as eportfolios, teachers' blogs, class blogs, publishing journals via blogs, informational sites, plugins for educational blog sites, and the idea that apps or tools could be built on the Wordpress platform. It's interesting to look back at the early examples, and see where that trajectory has gone-- those 2008 vintage blogs still "look" bloggy, but the ideas there have continued the arc, and ... well here I am gushing about Wordpress and forgetting the initial story here. The LaPaz Home School Journal is a stunning resource for not only home schooling parents, but any teacher. They share lesson ideas, materials, strategies, that reach across subjects-- history, math, teaching strategies as simple and elegant as bulletin boards (the real kinds with pins and paper), and outlining the thinking for activities for the coming year. Just wandering around this blog of open sharing, gives me that giddy teetering at the edge of the Grand Canyon feeling of having a wonderful amount of infinity open to me. It's what gives me hope among the fear and worry and concern. And all it took was one person, making a tiny connection back to me... that is how the web we care for cares for us. There are the links we make to stuff and things and ideas, and cat videos, but the ones that bring it home are created purposefully, and without provocation/expectation, by someone I do not even know. Magic may be imaginary, but this is a close enough proximity for me. Thank you, frainger* * a new word introduced to me by a ds106 participant, it's in the dictionary I got tired of checking my twitter settings to see if the link to download my archive was available. I gave up. After all I do have thinkup running. Then I saw martin Hawksey tweet that he got his https://twitter.com/mhawksey/status/291659649160200192 Woah, if Martin got his, where was mine? ha ha. I jogged to my twitter account settings, and lo and behold (what the heck does that mean? what a cliché ) and the link was there: Like Martin, I got my email response quickly, and followed the link to download. I was not sure what I would get. I big old spreadsheet? Giant machine readable XML file? Woah, no, it is actually a completely self contained miniature web site, that even runs locally from your desktop, and, from what I can see, all JavaScript driven. Yup run locally, and you get it all: 34,700 some tweets. On my laptop. You get graphs, monthly stats, even the search works! That's right, you can do on your desktop what you cannot do on twitter.com and search your own tweets. It had all the tweets from that first one right up to the one right before I clicked the download button. Even better, the time/date link take you back to the original tweet. I went all the way back in time, to January 2007: And sure enough, I cam see my very first (and second, and third, and three thousand forty third) tweet: https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/4886463 My next thought, why not just upload it to my server? It is after all, mine. The Twitter download email warns: Your archive may contain sensitive content, so please keep that in mind before sharing it with anyone. which seems weird since it has already seen the light of day. Who has secret tweets? I'm no wife cheating congressman. So I set up a subdomain, and now my tweets are at http://tweets.cogdogblog.com/. Im interested to learn more how this is put together. It looks like all of the content is in monthly archives as both JSON and CSV files. It is after all, a snapshot. I am curious how it is updated- do I just add the new data files? Is there a master index somewhere? (I have not even looked). It would be nice if there was an incremental update as a download. I'm smart, I will just wait for Martin to figure out an update scheme https://twitter.com/mhawksey/status/291667292998234112 I feel so reclaimish. Update (24 hours later) Well there goes Martin, genius. He created a google script which is able to keep the archive updated, and mine is set in motion. Genius. You know, like "two great tastes that go together great" (uh oh repeat metaphor alert) the end of August is the end of 3 month run of DS106 Daily Creates that were also set up as an activity for MYFest22. The latter was a 3 month series of “recharge and renewal experiences” coordinated by Equity Unbound facilitated by a most wonderful and un-motley crew. I was invited to help with generating some creative activities, leveraging perhaps stuff from DS106. I had overly ambitious hopes to toss in a "bank like activity" site, a bit like the Make Bank I crafted with Mia Zamora for NetNarr. I saw some possibility of making it something any of the session conveners might use to post activities, challenges, in this space that offers not only the opportunity for participants to publish activities (like the original DS106 Assignment bank is a place for students to create assignments), but also a place for responses to be attached. Actually I did start setting up a site, but in a familiar tune, and also what drove my participating in MyFest low, was a lack of time. And I was unsuccessful at being able to explain the concept... maybe I needed to do it via Zoom. I did want to provide something for creative/fun opportunities that did not require zoom sessions and chunks of time. Much of MyFest was zooming (and is organized thus around a calendar), and while I went to one or two great sessions, I started June with optimism to generate an asynchronous wave of activity. https://myfest.equityunbound.org/theme-stream/wellbeing-joy/daily-creative-habit/ That's where it made sense (at least to me) since I was already volunteering to keep the site publishing new stuff, was using the DS106 Daily Creates (which runs all on its own momentum, now 10 years without missing a beat) but inviting MYFest participants to join in. Because the daily creates really have no rules or "right way" to do them, it makes for an opportunity to interpret a challenge as it speaks to you. Parts is Parts My reference to Frank Perdue here might fly nowhere, but I get it. And that's how DS106 exists, an outlier... This is what went into setting up the MyFest22 / DS106 Daily Create parallel-a-thon. (1) First was explaining the offering in a post on the MYFest site. It's a bit buried in the site, as it ends up under "Ongoing" where through the navigation of monthly offerings and in the Joy and Wellbeing theme grouping. (2) Because the Daily Create runs from a SPLOT theme I made, I knew I could change one of the theme options to add to the daily tweeted versions the #MYFest22 hashtag (which means it likely dominated the tags) (yup it did). (3) We encouraged participation via twitter, but it's never required. I set up a Slack channel in the participant space, and added an RSS thingie (is it in add on? integration) to publish an entry there whenever the Daily Create site updated (every day!). Automated! The RSS Feed https://daily.ds106.us/feed pushed a new post magically (well not so magically) to the MYFest22 Slack #daily-creating channel I tried various levels of sharing my thoughts when I did one. But it also provided a space for people to post a response w/o forcing them to tweet. A few folks did Slack only, some did both. I thought it could potentially seed some side discussion, which it did. The Slack analytics show for June 1 to now that 40 participants joined the channel (16 posted) and there was a total of 727 messages posted (that;s like 90 from the RSS add on). So there you go, stats. (4) Part of the feature set of the Daily Blank WordPress theme is it provides a shortcode a site owner can use to generate a leaderboard, the main site one is set to show activity for the current year. For fun, or generate interest, I made a MYFest leaderboard, which shows all activity since June 1. It is as simple as this: [[dailyleaders showbars="1" barstyle="2" since="2022-06-01"]] The MYFest22 Daily Create Leaderboard Now this includes anyone who tweeted a Daily Create response, whether they were in MYFest or not (there was also a section of a DS106 class running over the summer). This is the beauty of DS106 that it is overlapping not segmented. When August 30 slides by, I will save the HTML version of the chart to freeze it in time. The usual suspects who do the Daily Create regularly are at the top (@NomadWarMachine, @grammasheri, @dogtrax, @ronald_2008 have all been dedicated participants for years) but I'm proud to see MYFest participant Heather or @HAKretschmer sitting high on the list. She was very active and really took to also creating new really creative challenges (10 added). That's very DS106 spirited. And a hat tip to recent participation Christina Hendricks, who has DS106 experience from way back (that was when she was on sabbatical down under, I recall). Note that all those links go to a Daily Create URL that acts as a profile of responses by one person. Like a portfolio of sorts. Or something. Shrug So it was not a huge amount activity but that was the point of MYFest, to choose what one wants to do. My experience is that people either get DS106 (and hence the core group of people who never stop) or the don't. The DS106 Daily Create has gone it's daily run every single day since January 8, 2012. Do the math and think all the things that climbed the hype curve and have troughed since. The current site has accumulated, september 1, 2015 31223 responses to 2557 Daily Creates by 1359 people (plus more in the previous version of this site). And DS106 iself keeps going. It is not owned by any institution (hosting generously provided by Reclaim Hosting), it has been used by a range of media courses at different institutions since 2011. No one is actually in charge of it. Think of the rise and fall of MOOCs in this time, which are still the subject of so many academic research papers. From what I know no one at all has ever studied / researched DS106. The main site still aggregates blogposts from participants, and has an archive even of the majority of blogs that are dead. There is a body of participant activity in almost 97000 aggregated blog posts, all date/time stamped. I'd think there is something there to research, but my bias is strong. So I can only assume that no one takes it seriously or that its too strange or cult like. The Daily Create, though, that is a thing I cannot let go. I go back to it's inspiration, the Daily Shoot that was a web site created by James Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark publishing daily challenges for photographers, tweeting it out, and people responding in twitter where the tweets were syndicated back in to the site-- exactly the format rolled into the Daily Create. But it's description gets to the act of daily creativity: Photography is an art and a craft. Getting better at both requires practice—lots of practice. The Daily Shoot is a simple daily routine to motivate and inspire you to practice your photography, and share your results! It’s not a contest and there are no prizes. It's simply about encouraging you to pick up your camera and make photographs.....Two suggestions: First, don't short change yourself by responding to an assignment with an old picture. Get out there and make something new and fresh. Second, while it's easy to take lots of shots, choose your best one to link to with your tweet. Choosing your best exercises your editing skills, and that's valuable too.That's it. There aren't any other rules. You aren't going to get demerits if you miss a few days, nor will you get gold stars for doing every assignment. We're just here to help you with a little nudge every day. The rest is up to you!The old Daily Shoot That's driven my own Daily Photography habit since 2008 (rarely ever going 365 for 365) and my love of the DS106 Daily create. And here is my secret. The best part of the Daily Create is making up challenges. The majority are contributed by others (ahem.cough, anyone can add one), but my joy is seeing how people interpret and create based on a prompt I made. The MyFest22 parallel run for the Daily Create ends the last day in August but the DS106 engine keeps going. There is little like this any more on the internet, and being part of it, fills for me, much more than webinars, the MYFest theme of joy and creativity. Join in any time. Create some art daily, damnit. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/31008598367 Parallel Colorverses flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Psss, there are ways to do online conferences that do not require The Zoom. It sounds unlikely, but I have been part of two Twitter based WordPress in education conferences cooked up by Pat Lockley, PressEd versions I've been a part of in 2018, in 2019, and in 2020. So when Pat messaged about looking at another one he was running, Hey Pressto! I had full intentions of sending in something. Then I forgot. But I managed to remember 2 days before the deadline. I decided to avoid presenting about SPLOTs again, (and Frances Bell and Lorna Campbell did more than enough in their #femedtech session) and decided to focus on a few tinkerings I have done using the WordPress API for some tasks. It's not that I have a big expertise in APIs, but that I could show, with a little bit of experimenting. how to create external sites that could pull in information from WordPress sites for specific purposes. Thus, a few days before Thursday I was populating Tweetdeck with scheduled tweets for my 15 minute/tweet spot on Doing Small Things With the WordPress API. I've archived the "slides" as it were not, at my Best of Show site (where I hang presentations). I pretty muh skipped trying to explain APIs and show more how 3 things I have done with the WordPress one went from really simple to quite a but more complex. The sites presented ncluded: The random quotes cycling on the home URL of a WordPress Multisite http://arganee.world, meant to be mysterious and to have something if anyone pried about the URLs used for Networld Narratives Adding endpoints to the TRU Collector SPLOT allowing it to be the source for sites offering random images (random splot and random splot glitched). I saw possibilities of creating a version of pechaflickr that could draw from images stored in one of these Collector sites) (one of the many ideas in my head I've yet to pry time to do). And the last was using the WordPress API to offer a lightweight "navigator" to a rich media site where a visitor could preserve the options for viewing (categories, custom post types) as settings stored as local storage, rather than nasty data cookies. I thought this was kind of a Big Deal but really did not get much uptake or interest... maybe my blog post was too full of code and metaphors) As it turns out I was on a phone call during my time, but that's the beauty of these twitter-based conferences, the show goes on. And yes, it's quite different, but you do get interaction and feedback. It's always good to know when I do some fiddling to find John Johnston Has Done It Before https://twitter.com/johnjohnston/status/1309435661217411072 And as usual, Tom Woodward was way to humble on how much he helped me with the projects I demoed. https://twitter.com/twoodwar/status/1309446817537576962 https://flickr.com/photos/76074333@N00/318034222 Introduction to monstering flickr photo by WorldIslandInfo.com shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Yes, it's not quite the same having an audience in a room or a zoom pace walking your slides, but these twitter-based conferences are worth checking out. There is a lot of ideas and content you can interact with at any time. And you can do other things while presenting. Can't we use more of that, now even more than ever? Featured Image: I spotted this unsplash photo by Andrew Ridley for use in another project and recognized the tiles of the building featured in the 99 Percent Invisible episode on Instant Gramification for some reason, it felt right to use it. I added 15 twitter symbols to represent my tweets Logo Twitter Icon Symbol from Free Icon PNGs and finally the funky mascot from the Hey Pressto! site. A number of our Maricopa colleges have their own faculty support centers for faculty development and technology infusion... we try and build some collaboration amongst them. Three of them now have been or are starting to, use weblogs to publish resources and events of interest tot heir faculty, actually all hosted in this very MovableType blog host. You can see the RSS feeds from all three listed at our Ocotillo College Centers web site and two of them have on their blogs, the RSS feeds from the Maricopa Learning eXchange that list just the contributions from their respective sites, e.g. the weblog for the South Mountain Community College Teaching & Learning Center is able to synidcate in tis right side bar, the most recent MLX packages from South Mountain. RSS can go in circles like that (hey, like a dog chasing its own tail??? maybe not). Actually we had set up blog sites for two other of our college centers, but they did not stick, or stay up with adding content, and the blogs went bouncing across the plains like a tumbleweed. In a competitive system like ours, when they see the other three highlighted on our site (and here), I suspect they may want to get back in the blog game. It underscores my notion, that blogging is not effective if you just dabble, or play with it a little bit- it is an endeavor that calls for dogged persistence, relentless effort, obsessive/compulsive tendencies. Woah! I found out today my old Shockwave projects can breathe again! I cut my multimedia teeth in the 1990s on Macromedia Director. I was happy in the early part of that decade pounding around HyperCard and then came along a project (something to do with Study Skills) that required a lot of animation and there was this software box on the shelf that sounded promising. I never produced or created as much in those Director days. It was the first time I fell into a full blown online social space, the Direct-L listserv (hey it still exists!). I still have some scarred flesh somewhere from some guy named G Gordon III at Virginia Tech who flamed my seriously. It took 3 months from that scorching before I felt okay to post. But around that same time, 1994, I was excited at the hypertext potential of the early early barebones web. So after seeing my buddy Marvyn H create a public Director FTP site (the "shared cast" at Houston Community Colleges), I decided to open a public web site, the Director Web at Maricopa. (actually, when it started it was the Director Page). At the time, Macromedia did not even have a corporate web site. (more…) cc licensed flickr photo shared by MikeOliveri I spew a lot of words (and typos) through this blog, but I've always harbored idyllic dreams of writing something.... more. But the epic idea has failed to materialize, so I am taking another interesting route by signing up for National Writing Novel Month or as most of the in crowd know as, NaNoWriMo. The basic premise is you write 50,000 words of a draft novel in 30 days, but track your progress in the NaNoWriMo web site, which employs almost every social media and support system one can think of-- and it is massive. Its not with some expectation to toss out the 50k words and soon be sitting pretty on the Oprah show with the new novel, its (seems) more about just the exercise and rigor of regular writing towards a goal-- not all that different from the sport I really don't like. So almost on impulse, when I noted through twitter yesterday that some colleagues where "Wrimos", without too much thought I signed up. I've got about 3700 words in, a little behind the chart pace, but the idea is just write write write, and get the 50k words out, then edit in December. I'm not ready to reveal the topic yet, as it is somewhat unfolding with the words. I first started to go down a path of something more typical to what goes here (and yes, the first idea involved dogs), but decided to try something really different from what goes here. And I also wanted to see from the inside how the features on the NaNoWriMo site work for someone who is a participant. I have a over all concept, gimmick, and arc, and it was a quarter baked idea that had a genesis to something that happened a whole ago, but even in the first rounds of word dumps, I am liking how it is growing as it goes. To be continued.... maybe once I get to 25k I'll lift the corner of the lid a bit... cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Phil Romans Still back logging the Slices of Life audio reflections on my first round of teaching ds106, parsing back here to the last week of February, 2012. Slices of Life 15: The Leap We start first after class on Monday Feb 27. Today's class was easy because I did not have to do anything- this was time set aside for work on their group audio projects, creating a radio show (see work for week 7). I am no accepting excuses for not turning in work by the Sunday deadline or missing class. One student who said he missed last class "because his roommates asked him to dinner". I said wow, it must have been some awesome dinner, where did you go? He said, "The dining hall" Me: "You missed my class for dining hall food? Seriously? You have to show up, you gotta be there (for life)" Each group has to turn in audio for shows the Monday after spring break, but to keep them on task, I am requiring for Wednesday's class, that they need to prepare a 15 second bumper, one commercial and 5 minute preview and add the links to a class wiki page I only id one bit of leading, a quick demo on using the Audacity envelope tool for adjusting levels, something I thought was key to dealing with multiple tracks. I did not have this video at the time, but it will be useful going forward http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2J2iSfWaDs After this, the bulk of class was the students working in their groups, I just walked around and listened- or just got out of the way, and all groups zeroed in on their show idea by the end of class. Activity level was high. Five minutes before the end of class, I called out each group to say on the spot what their show was about. These are the show topics: Call in show on embarrassing stories and pet peeves (sort of a vox populi?) Science jokes Post apocalypse radio show Call in show from the wild people sharing bucket lists advice from drunk people (done before, I warned them to make it structured!) For me, this was a welcome break from having to design class/activities. For them, they got to do stuff the whole class. ------- cut to Wednesday -------- 8< -------------- I thought I was recording, but the red button was not clicked; and even after redoing, Siri seems to think while talking that I want her, and she turns off my recorder app. Amateur hour(s). But it is a rainy day, the sky is crying. Yet this is a giddy slice! This was another great class for me, this day of the leap year, where the time rounding errors yields us every 4 years, a day to lump it together for extra time. Tonight I will upload their bumpers to ds106radio (they are still there as of May 2012) Best week I have taught, because they are doing stuff. Might do a bit of singing in the rain, I am so excited to see the energy in class tonight. [caption id="attachment_24706" align="aligncenter" width="370"] Created with the foley.com newspaper clipping generator[/caption] It's not sure what this portends for next week, these headless courses appearing. Keep your eye and web browser open to http://ds106.us/category/the-site/fall-2013-headless/ where on Monday, at one minute past midnight, the first week's worth of content will appear for the Headless ds106 Course. The person not teaching this class, a.k.a. I. Crane, has texted us to remind you that this course is not going to provide a detailed list of instructions each week that you need to dutifully follow. Crane will make no vide lectures, nor will appear in twitter, nor will issue grades. See how useless a headless teacher can be? The first two weeks is settle in and get acquainted time, with bits to ponder the foundations of ds106 -- creating and owning your person digital space, and getting yourself into the ds106 blogging habit. not that we can penalize you with grades or drop you from class, but being a #4life ds106er means more than just making a GIF or an image and slapping it up on twitter or Google+ -- use your digital space to write about what you create, your process (both conceptual and technological). And try and spend time giving feedback and acknowledgement to others. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by (OvO) Mama said I'd lose my head If it wasn't fastened on. Today I guess it wasn't 'Cause while playing with my cousin It fell off and rolled away And now its gone. And I can't look for it 'Cause my eyes are in it, And I can't call to it 'Cause my mouth is on it (Couldn't hear me anyway 'Cause my ears are on it), Can't even think about it 'Cause my brain is in it. So I guess I'll sit down On this rock And rest for just a minute"¦ Shel Silverstein, "The Loser" OH NOES NOT DEFINITIONS! Fear not, it's not happening. But today during the blog-star-studded-most-of-them-self-deprecating hangout on "Open Pedagogy Open Discussion #YearOfOpen" (see the resource doc too) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmPmZEhy3Lc Mike Caulfield made an interesting comment about openness and the metaphor of "permeability" which raises my Geology sensors (Maybe 5 years of undergraduate and 6 in graduate study of might come into play) https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/856607965490499584 I think Mike credited Alec Couros, and I recall Alec saying/writing this too. It's funny because in trying to track this down (I did not spend enough time swimming it upstream, Mike) I find people writing about Alec using porosity and permeable interchangeably. Because Mike deletes tweets, he makes me screenshot his reply: [caption id="attachment_64396" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Mikes tweets may vanish in the future, so you get a pic[/caption] I'm not that quick, Mike. But it's come up before, when Sheila MacNeil blogged about her porosity and even mentioned an event called The Porous University-- where the opening graphic has an illustration of permeability. My Geology is rusty, but I'm going to try and and explain some Geology basics. Permeability and Porosity are related, but not interchangeable. As the reflexes go[oogle] Mike will appreciate how crappy the results are: Well maybe nor so bad, the first result is rather textbooky, and in re-reading, it mostly gets it right: Two separate characteristics of rocks control how effective they are as aquifers: Porosity is a measure of how much of a rock is open space. This space can be between grains or within cracks or cavities of the rock. Permeability is a measure of the ease with which a fluid (water in this case) can move through a porous rock. This is how textbooks do it. Define it. But after reading this, can you really get to why they are or are not interchangeable? So forget you Google. U so weak. I went into my office and pulled off what is likely my all time favorite textbook, Earth (third ed) by Frank Press and Raymond Siever, 1982 [caption id="attachment_64398" align="aligncenter" width="630"] My prized possession of Earth by Press and Siever[/caption] This was the textbook I bought in maybe 1982 after my first year of studies at the University of Delaware, when I realized I did not want to be a Computer Science major (yes, irony) and I decided to try a Geology course in my sophomore year. Press and Siever was the text. I have no idea what it cost then, I am guessing maybe $45-$60? It's now only worth $25 new. Mine is worth even less on the resale market because it's full of my highlights and notes. You see, I fell so much in love with Geology that I read and marked up the entire textbook although we were assigned maybe half of it. I digress into story. I open Press and Siever to the index, and find porosity listed on pages 136-137 (that kids is how we searched in the old days). Now, before I insert the next image, I am looking at the front page and it says: No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise copied for public or private use, without permission from the author This I will use as perhaps the most complete opposite definition of "open" as one can find. I am sorely tempted to reproduce a position as a phonographic recording; instead I am going to blatantly break the copyright laws right here because they are stupid. You can tell W.H. Freeman where to find me if you want the bounty. [caption id="attachment_64399" align="aligncenter" width="630"] My illegal reproduction of a portion of 2 pages of a textbook I payed for in 1982, used here for educational purposes only.[/caption] This property by which solids allow fluids to pass through them is permeability. Sands are permeable; hard compacted muds and shales are not. The permeability depends largely on the amount of pore spaces between the grains or crystals ofthe rick, it's porosity... Because in some rocks the pores are all connected to give an easy path and in others the pores are disconnected and do not allow any exit, not all porous rocks are equally permeable. Clay particles in some sandstones obstruct paths of flow between many pore spaces in some sandstones and so may significantly decrease their permeability. Sands and sandstones have a lot of open space (porosity) because the ar emade of uniformly sized rounds sand grounds. Think of stacking bowling balls, and all the space in between. Clays and shales are made of parallel layers, like pages in a book, so the amount of space (porosity) is low. [caption id="attachment_64400" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons[/caption] But not all sandstones are made of uniformly sized materials, if they are poorly sorted, meaning a mixture of bigger and smaller grains, the space, or porosity, is lower. So when you say porosity it really means just the volumetric measure of open space. If you want a metaphor, maybe this is measure of "openness" in terms of 5Rs. But when you say permeability you are talking about the ease of moving something through that space, and while the amount of space is a factor, others influence whether that can happen. Specifically that could mean if the spaces are well interconnected, like pathways, like networks? Maybe that is practice or pedagogy? Or maybe it's just porosity and permeability. But do me a favor, do not use these words interchangeably. I might toss a definition at you. Featured Image: "Aquifère Darcy perméabilité" Wikimedia Commons image by Lamiot shared under CC BY-SA Maybe some readers are all over RSS and massive amounts of syndication of content, but I am jazzed whenever I discover some small, useful, time saving way to make use of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined. Using free web content services like flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati that can travel the RSS road to dynamically update content elsewhere, moving from static hand spun web pages to live ones, is powerful stuff. So here is a roadmap of a change I set up in about 30 minutes time to rescue some stale links. This approach is something teachers can easily do to populate their own web sites with new web resources for their students, and can be done so efficiently, and without much effort. It fits in to an instructors own discovery process of resources, and boils down to: (1) Find interesting sites (2) Bookmark (using browser tool link) to del.icio.us (3) Tag it with a special identifier (4) Create a cut and paste Feed to Javascript code (5) Past to Web page(s) By repeating 1+2, the pages in (5) are auto updated. It is no great Einsteinian leap, but cannot imagine where there is not a goldrush stampede of faculty using this approach. So back to my situation. Our web site for the Ocotillo Online Learning Group has pretty much a stock template for all of the internally linked pages in that site. When I set it up, I did so in a manner so that a box of content on the left side navigation bar representing a collection of new web resources, was generated from a single external text file. Without getting too techie, the PHP technology we use for all of our web pages allows me to create a place in all documents that says, "Take all the contents of this external file, and stick it right here". The benefit of a PHP include is if I update the little text file, all changes that reference it are updated. So my original plan was every now and then I would manually update this file, and there would be a "see more" link to a larger set of web site links. The pitfall to this approach is I either get lazy, or run out of time to keep doing all this manual editing. Thus, the links that were listed as "new" were pretty much 2 years old. So I had a brief flash of light. Or maybe it was just an extra jolt of coffee. I already do a lot of site bookmarking on my collection of my del.icio.us bookmarks. I could just start tagging stuff I wanted on my OLG site with a tag of... olg in addition to other tags L might add like "teaching", "code", "ajax", "technology", "socialtech", etc... in my normal review of web sites, and extra click using the del.icio.us bookmark tool files sites into a special OLG category. Now a link to this collection is a start, but we can do more. If I copy the RSS feed URL for this tag collection, and then take it over to Feed2JS, I can build a cut an paste JavaScript line of "code" that will generate a simple list of say the ten most recent marked sites. Just by putting this JavaScript code created by Feed2JS: View RSS feed into a text file named new.inc I can have the dynamic feed of new sites inserted into my web pages (the formatting is controlled by some extra CSS styles, but that is not essential. In all the pages I want this on the sidebar, all I need to have in my HTML code is: I also add to my new.inc file an extra link for "more resources" page that goes to another new page that now uses the same construct, but displays the most recent 20 bookmarked sites, and includes the item descriptions. Now if all of this sounds complicated, it's only because I've tried to over explain. but think about this- once set up, you can use the Feed2JS code on any number of web pages, be they PHP, ASP, CFM, HTML, home page, Blogger template, Blackbaord/WebCT site... And if you set up tags for say your different classes you are teaching, as you find new resource sites relevant to these classes, you can tag appropriately, and the most recent items will be automatically published to your different course web pages. It is simple, and elegant, or at least I think so. Being able to update numerous web sites via the basic act of bookmarking and tagging in a collection, and having different subsets of content being "pushed" out as new content to other web sites... well it is just sweet music to me. so.... @jimgroom @timmmmyboy a gentle reminder, in case you need design help with this is.gd/7kCbd5 #ds106 #pleeeez— Lisa M. Lane (@LisaMLane) April 6, 2012 You may feel ignored as you have been asking a while, but it has not gone unheard. I've spent an afternoon climbing around the underbelly of the ds106 Wordpress database, and am still not quite at the magic place where I can connect the feeds that are syndicated via Feedwordpress and the tags it applies on incoming posts. Until I can do that last mile, I at least have a starting point: The issue is part of a larger one where for now the process of adding feeds to ds106 is manual, and it is there we usually enter a tag for class sections (this applies the tag to all syndicated posts). The open online participants currently do not have a tag, so to test, I manually added it to Lisa's posterous blog, my blog, Jim's blog, and Giulia's (this will only affect new posts coming in) -- and should point at: http://ds106.us/tag/openonline It *seems* to be picking up some other posts tagged "open" (??), and you may be able to get your posts there if you add this tag to your ds106 posts. I hope to work through the database understanding so we can modify any ds106 syndicated feed with this tag, as well as back tag older content (no promises, the wordpress tagging structure is a labyrinthian route). If someone has better experience in working with the way FeedWordPress stores its information, pleas let me know, I just thrashing around in the bowels with a dim flashlight. I can see that FWP adds all syndicated sites to the wordpress links, and that link ID is used internally to connect to the feed via meta data "syndication_source_uri" -- I am just not finding the right connections to the post_tag setting. I am a database whacker not hacker not stacker. Just wanted to let you know Lisa, we are on it.... cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Rocketeer Who ever thought the word "repository" was a good idea? C'mon, nearly every one's connotations go elsewhere and sure, I'm going to be encouraged to go add something (or fond something) I created to something that sounds like something that goes up your butt? But I digress. I always hated that term. Last month Stephen Downes wrote in response to some discussions about JISC Repositories a post about his reasoning for running as much of his online resources on his own servers (Not the Institutional Web Server)- in one bullet point he said: my online work has also outlived most every initiative that has been created to provide a 'permanent' home for such work; projects in Canada like CAREO and eduSource are now history. I'm sure people in Britain can create their own list of shuttered initiatives. I'm rather proud that the one and only "R" like thing I created, the Maricopa Learning eXchange, launched in 2010, is actually still running there at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx. I think it is less to do that it is anything great, and more the fact that not many people there likely no about it or care, so it just keeps humming along. Actually, it's more likely to do with the fact that after I left Maricopa in 2006, sometime a year or a half later, they hired back in a full time role, Colen Wilson, who had worked for me as a student program and did much of the back end work for the MLX. So thanks, Colen for keeping the lights on. The last "What's New" was 2004... Probably the best explanation about the MLX came from a presentation we did back in 2004 for the NMC (before I worked there). In building the MLX we purposely steered clear of focusing on metadata and prescriptions for the content -essentially, we created a place to house information about anything someone at Maricopa might have created for learning, from a word template to a full blown program, using the metaphors of a brown shipping package, which could be big or small, and was described by a "packing slip" (our clever cover up for meta data). So there's not a huge amount of things there, maybe 1800, and most of the content in the last few years came because we rigged another online system Colen largely built, an internal grants and a faculty professional growth program, so that when people submitted reports online to those systems, we cross listed them in the MLX. There you go Stephen, not all repositories are shuttered. But more likely cause the MLX is just some old PHP and MySQL code quietly humming on a server directory no one looks at. For some reason, my old code still humming along there makes me smile. In fact, the big daddy might be MERLOT which seems to be always adding new stuff, but hey, they have funding and staff. Heck MERLOT still list a project I did on the mid 1990s that they added to MERLOT in 2000, and what do you know, old Research Methods still lind of works. I got nudged to posting this via a post by John Robertson raising the question if reusable learning objects (RLOs) and open educations resources (OERs) are different. It was interesting to read and rummage through some of the past, and honestly while the differences are important to some people like John, it hinges a lot on your definitions, and for me, it seems another toh-MAY-toh TOH-mah-toh argument... I honestly don't care what you call 'em, and care more that more people share any way they can. So cheers to old suppositories, may they continue to rise and.... I better stop. Today there was a glut of comments in my Google Reader subscription for What Can You Do With flickr? part of the session I did in October for the K12 Online Conference, so being always in need of some ego brushes, it was pretty cool to get a long string of them -- did someone do a workshop or something, referring to it? IN reading them, I found something else had happened-- I was getting my 15 picoseconds of web fame! This flickr photo had been spotted in the popular regions of del.icio.us: with something like 200 taggings recorded. But why now? Ahhh, for the first time, I got a serious Digg. I was Dugg. Been Dugged. How cool: But oh, that crowd who comment in Digg is nasty! They hold no punches, not a very friendly scene. just what I was thinking, what's the point of posting this? If this guy likes Flickr, he's gonna **** himself when he discovers YouTube and Google Earth. Seriously, welcome to several years ago. Lame. I thought everyone on Flickr knew about notes and tags. There is this nifty button that you can click to bury lame posts as this I just pulled the harsh ones, and there was some balance. But it's a lesson that you need to not take this stuff personal out in these highly trafficked places, like the comments that spew down YouTube, etc. This is a Digg Effect, and kind of interesting how these micro energy pockets emerge and fade. I'm glad to have had my 15 and can safely retreat inside the doghouse to lick my wounds. UPDATE: later the same day Much of my assumptions here were just that and pretty much wrong. Thanks to replies on the wordpress forum to my request from catacuastic, it looks like Wordpress is not doing any native resizing (just cropping the original voa CSS) and its more complicated than I guessed to resize. Best suggestion still is ti upload the proper display size of your GIF (keep this size in mind when you create it). The Wordpress media uploader does a lot of work under the hood- when you upload an image, it automatically creates at least 3 different sized versions of your original- a thumbnail (usually 150x150px), a medium size (usually 300px x 300px), and large (1024px x 1024px): plus it keeps your original size. All of these are available when you go to upload and add an image to a post. The medium size is frankly small, and I always change (and recommend) that you make this the width of the column that contains your post so it fills the space- this is why you see a lot of new blog with tiny pictures in them (well the newer themes are pretty good at sizing an image to the full width of the image is bigger). It does this fine with JPG and PNG images, but sadly, it does not resize the images if you upload an animated GIF. So if you create an animated GIF that is like 500px wide, upload it to wordpress, and add it to your post, what you get is an animated single frame image. An unanimated GIF is a sad thing ineed. The trick is to know the size of your blog's main column width, create the GIFs in that size, upload to wordpress, and use the original size when you insert it into your post. I wrote this up as a tip in the ds106 handbook along with a screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU3Xv1rrDUQ At almost 7000 views it is one of the most viewed of my sad collection of YouTube videos, and that, IMHO says that this is a problem in Wordpress. The thing is... I have noticed that the Wordpress media uploader does know how to generate an animated thumbnail sized version of animated gifs, because they are animated in the media library. Why does it not create all of the sizes? Hallo Wordpress? To document this, I looked at the library for the Collaborative GIF story site, where all of the uploaded media are animated GIFs. However, I noticed that they are not all animated as thumbnails -- specifically, the animated gif thumbnails are generated only up GIFs that are smaller in width than the medium size (in this case 300px). So for animated GIFs that are smaller than 300px in width, Wordpress generates an animated version of it as a thumbnail, but if the original is bigger, it does not generate an animated version in thumbnail size. This seems (ahem) curiously inconsistent. To make this more clear, I did some screen recordings of the media gallery, imported them into PhotoShop to make some animated GIF demonstrating this phenomena: Original animated GIF smaller than the WP image size (300px) [caption id="attachment_27744" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click the gif to see a bigger version)[/caption] Original animated GIF bigger than the WP image size (300px) [caption id="attachment_27745" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click the gif to see a bigger version)[/caption] So Wordpress is quite capable of generating different sized versions of an animated GIF, but it does not do so like other kinds of uploaded imager. Given the obvious popularity of animated gifs (cough tumblr) Wordpress ought to make this more consistent and easier on their users who do not grok the way media sizes work. UPDATE (5 minutes later): The Animate GIF resize plugin seems to address this issue.. but IMHO this functionality should not require a plugin. UPDATE (15 minutes later): Put a request in to Wordpress forums.... I don't know the words, but am ready to make them up. Apple, grant me the serenity to accept the firmware I cannot change; courage to update the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Maybe not. This morning, I installed the latest firmware update for my MacBookPro, and worked through the morning. Over lunch, I began installation of a new copy of Adobe Creative Suite. Disk one went fine, but after inserting disk 2, the fan and disk spun, and then lapsed into silence. A long silence. No muse clicks would do a thing. So I forced a bard reboot (apple-contril-power), held down the mouse key to eject the Adobe disk. Still frozen. No clicks would do a thing. Insert the OSX Install DVD, another hard reboot, hold the "c" to boot from the CD. Whew, at least the system worked here. Ran the Disk Utilities and it fixed an "Illegal Name" red line under "Checking Catalog". Fixed that. I thought. Reboot again. Nada. Froze city. Tried to boot again with my Disk Warrior, but had managed to put in a another, non system disk, so it booted as normal. Rats, I'd be doing ti again. But wait a minute, the mouse and icons are responding! It is alive!? What am I doing now? Blogging from my iBook as I back up all my files to DVD-R. I could find nothing on the Apple Support discussions (update- see below). Do I go on like this 90 minute exercise never happened? My only wild guess is some interference from my Bluetooth mouse, which is ow off? That does not even seem to make sense. Serenity, anyone? Update: Based on comments below, I found the culprit is Adobe CS2, especially Version Cue and possible Acrobat. Not that one could easily determine so from Adobe's or Apple's site. I had heaps of install trouble with the Adobe installer- one the second try (to get PhotoShop installed), again the installer just froze down my screen after insterion of disk 4. the software did actually get installed, but the little nidbits of files needed to activate my software did not. Online and phone activation failed, so I had to call and have someone read me FTP coordinates to download some cryptic files. This has been way too hard. I was asked by a colleague to answer a question no one can really answer without extreme powers of omniscience. They wanted as much as I could share about the breadth of H5P use across Canada. In a week! Likely it was because of my involvement with the BCcampus H5P Kitchen project one of the best work I have gotten to do, but also the kitchen doors closed a few years back. From that I got to do a handful of presentations/workshops. And I've tried a few times to stir up some discussion activity in the OEGlobal community space even trying to put the Kitchen on wheels as a self-service food truck metaphor for a workshop. I have to keep saying that beyond the H5P allure of interactive practice activities with rich feedback, and if its your gig, potential reporting to LMSes, the ultimate beauty of H5P content is that it's one of the few OER types not limited to a platform. H5P is portable, HTML5 standard content, and comes with (potentially if people fill in the form) baked in metadata/media atribution and is easily reusable. It's one of the purest forms of OER in my book. Still I don't know everything, hence what I provided is illustrated like the image above as a canada shaped H5P logo with lots of holes in it. I combed through my own notes, emails, and reached out to a number of colleagues. Rather than organizing geographically my headings are more around broad multi-institutional / provincial support, the development of "hubs" or H5P Studios, Campus. Institution level responses, noteworthy examples, and individual expertise. What is notable is a lack of any kind of Canada-wide Hub/Studio for sharing and reusing H5P (the H5P OER hub is still a 98%) so more or less, outside of the voluminous and wonderful collection from eCampusOntario H5P Studio, they are scattered from ocean to mountain to prairie to woodland to ocean. Much H5P is housed in Pressbooks titles, but they are again dispersed. Or they are tucked away in Canvas/Moodle/Brightspace/Blackboard, et al. Remember again before I reveal the link-- I missed more than I documented, ref sins of omission. Hence this document is open to edits/comments/spitballs. Okay you can see my hole filled report as an editable google doc. Please edit, voraciously. There's my tattered map of H5P territories. PS: I am noting WordPress's "AI Assistant" which just slapped me in it's review: The post provides a detailed account of H5P usage in Canada, highlighting the author's involvement in the BCcampus H5P Kitchen project and their efforts to promote H5P in various communities. The post emphasizes the portability and reusability of H5P content as one of its key advantages in open educational resources (OER). The author acknowledges that their report may have omissions and invites others to edit and contribute to it. Overall, the post effectively conveys the author's experience and perspective on H5P usage in Canada. It would be helpful to readers if the post included specific examples of noteworthy H5P projects or institutions using H5P. Additionally, linking to more resources or case studies about H5P implementation in Canada could enhance the post's value to readers. Actions to improve the post: 1. Add specific examples of noteworthy H5P projects or institutions in Canada. 2. Include more links to relevant resources or case studies about H5P implementation in Canada. WordPress AI Assistant Dude, all you ask for is in the google doc link. Pftttttt. Updates (Nov 27, 2023) I emailed and thanked everyone I reached out too, hope they jump in the doc (Nov 27, 2023) Stephen Downes is very nice, he reads the entire internet every day. https://www.downes.ca/post/75829 (Nov 27, 2023) I posted a call too in OEG Connect https://connect.oeglobal.org/t/h5p-across-canada-and-heck-the-globe-too/6043 Featured Image: The H5P logo cut out by an.outline shape of Canada, painted with a brush to appear to be full of holes, image created by Alan Levine., licensed CC-BY cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You can always count on someone sooner or later warning about the dangers of what you put online since "one day someone will google your past". I've already blogged about this fear, and how ridiculous the concept is if you spin it around to the suggestion-- it thus says we should all aim to construct false personas of perfection online, so that one day when I am seeking a job, my employer will look back and find 27 years of clean living. Who in their right mind will weigh your current achievements with the same consideration as what you were doing 20 years ago? It makes no sense to me, So I decided to create my own Falsebook presence as a model for others to do- only generate perfect representations online of them "because one day someone will google your past." C'mon, create your false profile today cause someone is gonna be searching it and you want to look pristine! Gerry Hanely, head MERLOT "wine steward"- said a theme was "connecting learning repositories". Interesting, eh? Can you think of an acronym that fits there? It begins with an R.... Keynote: "Leading from Both Ends"- Doug MacLeod from Netcetera to talk about eduSourceCanada. Introduced "Donut Object Repositories" Tim Horton's- a chain of thousands of franchises across Canada. (more…) Podcasting has been an interesting phenomena to observe. It really did not exist a year ago, and has been riding like a bullet up the technology charts, most recently fueled by inclusion of its features in Apple's iTunes. It's all good. I've been trying to sample more from a variety of sources, mostly on my idle time of bicycle commuting or running. I'm hard pressed to say if I would really devote the time to them other wise. The best for my interests has been far the offerings of ITConversations, mainly due to the quality of the productions, but more so, the quality of the personalities I can choose to listen to. What I do not buy is the "subscription" model because I cannot say I have found a source I would want to listen to most of the content most of the time. I do not do that with radio I listen to, web sites I visit, the few TV shows I watch-- I am not a fan of any one channel. I The problem with the podcast "model" is that the content provider is claiming they know what I want to listen to (or assuming I am a rabid fan). Fortunately, there is some interesting tinkering going on that gets around this publisher chooses mentality, where individuals are able to select file sources and rip-mix-cast their own audiocasts. For the howtos, see "Use Del.icio.us to create customised podcas"t. The approach involves first setting up your own unique del.icio.us tag. As you come across MP3 URLs, either favorites found elsewhere or your own casts, you bookmark them with this delicious tag. Then, you can take that RSS feed provided by del.ico.us for your tagset, and run it through Feedburner which will then feed it with proper RSS enclosures as a genuine podcast. And at a minimum, the URL for your delicious tagset becomes a menu selection for those that just want to pick and choose MP3s rather than subscribe. If you do start tagging the feed URLs this way, do the world a favor and write a brief description in the "extended" field so someone can have an idea what the cast is all about. As an examnple, see how Jon Udell delicious-izes his podcasts and his shorter sound bite segments. Each of these has its own RSS which could be Feedburned to be a podcast. So that is about dis-aggregating podcast feeds into new feeds. The other side of the coin is that one is stuck with the whole MP3 feed, start to finish, cheesy intro music to the one little 45 second bit you need 35 minutes and 20 seconds into a show. You cannot search, or easily scan. And you cannot easily link to that particular segment. Again, guru Jon Udell has shown that technically there is a method for linking to specific segments within an MP3, but this has yet to be exploited developed into a less geek friendly approach. But its more than just being able to link to specific audio targets. The aspect of a podcast (or really a web hosted mp3) is that it is a one way media transmission, which is like... so 2003, sooooooo Web 1.0. What would be interesting is if I could not only reference say specific sound targets in a stream, but I could use that to create something new with my own audio inserted annotations. So I could link to segments of say some podcast about Web 2.0 technologies, and rather than being limited to listening start to finish and perhaps remembering things I want to comment on and write up as a blog post-- I could pause the playback, bring up my own podcast recorder software that-does-not-exist, press "reference" segment so it includes a bookmark reference to the specific source, and then I can record my own remarks. This would be Web 2.0, this would be a way to build layers of content. This would be interesting. So be wary of content that comes in a one size for all approach. The mantra for digital content should be tools for disaggregation, mixing, adding, and republishing as something new. It's not even the Net Generation any more, it is the Tivo generation. Ask for it. Expect it. C'mon, podcasting is already 11 months old.... ancient.... Update: Thanks to a tip from Tim Lauer, it appears that del.icio.us can do RSS enclosure feeds (and a whole lot more) without needing to run it through Feedburner -- see http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/06/casting_the_net.html. It's a work in progress, but check out this version of the TRU Writer SPLOT that is no longer tied to the original's Radcliffe theme (hit the write menu item to try it). All SPLOTs are single purpose tools, most built as WordPress themes stuffed with custom functionality... technically they are child themes that utilize an existing theme for the core site functions and appearance. Long ago, someone asked if they could be done as a plug-in, and I said "no" because of how much work they had to do- create back end admin options, generate and process form data, and present content out of the normal blog post scope. Like often... I decided to take this on again via a request from colleagues Daniel Villar and Lauren Heywood from Coventry University DMLL, who have made some of the most wide and varied use of SPLOTs. This new site is not quite plugin yet, but what I have done is remove all of the functionality from the child theme templates, it's all in code. This means, I was able to take the child theme, and apply it in a different parent, and It Works (as much as I could test so far). These are the files in the TRU Writer SPLOT theme, there is functionality baked into header, footer, archive, and various page templates, and thus tied to the parent theme. Files in the TRU Writer Theme The test version has moved everything into functions, so it has no dependence on the parent theme beyond rendering content. Files in the test theme It was more than cut and paste code. The pages templates used to render the access code form and the form for writing had all the form elements and logic intertwined into the template (peek at it). Now, the writing form is embedded into any normal page by adding this to the content: [writerform] This I knew was possible form all of the various WordPress form plugins out there. But still to work out the logic of the hidden author user account, required doing much more with WordPress hooks to do various redirects and checks before the content appears (template_redirect is my hook friend). I ran into endless duplicate header errors. I end up checking a few things, there are query parameters sent to deal with the random link and the one to get the special edit link to send via email, but also it needs to identify if a page to be rendered is one of the two special ones with forms in them. Previously I had done this by checking the page template (or worse, assuming that the pages were always /write and /desk). Now I have a function that looks for pages with the shortcodes used to render the forms ($pattern is either [writerdesk] or [writerform]). There are cases (the second optional parameter) where I need to return an array element for displaying these as a form, see below) function truwriter_find_pages ( $pattern = '[]', $for_menu = false ) { /* find all pages with pattern passed (meant for finding desk and writing form pages based on shortcode passed */ // get all pages $seekpages = get_pages(); // if we are building a menu, insert the menu selector $foundpages = ($for_menu) ? array(0 => 'Select Page') : array(); foreach ( $seekpages as $p ) { if ( strpos( $p->post_content, $pattern ) !== false) { $foundpages[$p->ID] = $p->post_title; } } return ($foundpages); } I can also check the returned results, an empty array means no pages are using the shortcode. The plugin will create a simple page with the shortcodes if none exist. But it also means that the pages are not limited to specific URLs - I even made this change in the regular version of TRU Writer. So you can create any page, and then it is selected as a theme option to identify it. Both this new version and the standard TRU Writer now include a theme option to identify pages used for the two form pages. But also to change was the way something published was rendered, as extra information is added in the SPLOT. In the original version, it's just coded into the single.php template. To pull it out, we have to hook into the call for generating the_content to add info to the output. // filter content on writing page so we do not submit the page content if form is submitted add_filter( 'the_content', 'truwriter_mod_content' ); function truwriter_mod_content( $content ) { if ( is_single() && in_the_loop() && is_main_query() ) { global $post; // additional content for single views // add before content notice for previews $precontent = ( is_preview() ) ? 'This is a preview of your entry. Wwhen finished reviwing, close this window/tab to return to the writing form. Then make any changes and click "Revise Draft" again or if it is ready, click Final Publish.' : ''; $postcontent = ''; $wAuthor = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'wAuthor', 1 ); if ( truwriter_option('show_footer' ) ) { $wFooter = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'wFooter', 1 ); if ($wFooter) $postcontent .= '' . make_clickable( $wFooter ) . ''; } $postcontent .= '' . truwriter_meta_title() . 'Author: ' . $wAuthor . ' Published: ' . get_the_time( get_option('date_format'), $post->ID ) . ' Word Count: ' . str_word_count( get_the_content()) . ''; // output estimated reading time if we are using plugin $postcontent .= truwriter_get_reading_time('Reading time:', ''); // show the request edit link button if they have provided an email and post is published if ( get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'wEmail', 1 ) and get_post_status() == 'publish' ) { $postcontent .= 'Edit Link: (emailed to author) Request Now '; } if ( truwriter_option( 'use_cc' ) != 'none' ) { $postcontent .= 'Rights: '; // get the license code, either define for site or post meta for user assigned $cc_code = ( truwriter_option( 'use_cc' ) == 'site') ? truwriter_option( 'cc_site' ) : get_post_meta($post->ID, 'wLicense', true); $postcontent .= truwriter_license_html( $cc_code, $wAuthor, get_the_time( "Y", $post->ID ) ) . ''; } if ( truwriter_option('show_tweet_button') ) { $postcontent .= 'Share: To break my own languishing of writing here (to which nobody notices), I reach for the bloggers oldest topic, blogging about blogging. Right? And so I reach back, way back, to my own Pre-Cambrian blogging era, the first post, to which, true to form, I pun[t] on the descriptive title for what I think might be a clever play on words. And frankly, because my own site, has everything written here neatly (well ignore the dusty corners, and the bent nails) organized by time, in one click I can dial back to my first blogged words. These words here shall not be the last. I missed out much of the DS106 Radio Summer Camp even because of previously made plans for a family vacation. I did manage from the road to crash in on the Jim Groom closing plenary panel, spun in Groomian vibrance as "Blog or Die." It was not just a bunch of old grey bloggers wringing their hands (but good to see folks like Tom Woodward, Christina Hendricks, Tim Clark, et al), but I leave it to you to decide/enjoy/cringe --the recording is available along with everything else from summer camp week. One thing I thought I said was something like, I can't explain it, but it's the writing out loud that makes me feel best, the part of the process before I click "Publish", not what happens after. Anything after is bonus. To show a lack of "back in the day" nostalgia I deliberately left out a reference to the 2010 Northern Voice Blogs Are dead session (old blog post full of dead links) I was part of with Chris Lott and Brian Lamb. Yet, I glance back at those times we were posting multiple times a day, or banging out posts right after a conference session. My reaction time now is on the scale of weeks? Months? Again, nobody counts. I've enjoyed a rather long series of mastodon volleys with George Station and Kate Bowles, who share different experiences, cultures, they find in Bluesky vs Mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@harmonygritz/113058897295518458 I can't even capture it here, especially since I've decided I don't want more than one social media space. My colleagues, who I respect (and read their blogs long ago), are looking much in these spaces for connection, community, conversation, and also like many of us, in the post twitter diaspora blues. And while I put into some kind of spoken poetry my call to Get Federated I have few expectations that the hurdle of entry in Mastodon versus the bird like familiarity of the Blue Sky interface and the ease of Threading if you are already aboard Instagram, can be overcome. I've resigned myself to the disaggregated nature of the net, which it always was. It's going to be many places. At this point, I don't feel right putting my chips in another company owned tent. I resolve to be MO (back end of FOMO). It does seem though that the Mike Caulfield's brilliant essay about the stream and garden in 2024 shows big giant torrents streams, and maybe just a few islands of small (web) gardens, not that it was never a choice that was one or the other. But the gardening is where I feel best. Still, I remain convinced of the value of tossing out my own bits right here. The same network effects of them cast out like small radio signals, or seeds of potential serendipity, still happen. Just as recently as this: https://cogdogblog.com/2024/08/amazing-back-to-phenix/ And a followup mastodon post tagged #smallweb by a writer named Mike Grindle I never knew before, sent me spinning on this unprobable connection. Mike came back at this as a sign of the value of this act, in his post telling his side of the story, The Blogosphere Lives! An image in a post from 2016 ended up in the eyes of its creator in 2024 via a share on a relatively tiny platform from a guy who lives across the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, no algorithm - only humans - played any part. Alan later wrote about the experience in a post, and it sounds like he and Jeffrey (who may also be writing about this soon) are now in regular contact via email. To me, it shows what happens when you regularly write, publish, share and hyperlink into the void that is the web: the void speaks back. https://mikegrindle.com/posts/blogosphere While these kind of amazing stories (someone should collect them!) perhaps do not need the blogosphere, I think putting out your stuff on a link that will live as ling as you do or care to make them live, is a stronger spark to create that serendipity. And as much as many pin the future on AI powered search, the thing I like about the old faulty web search is, that sometimes, you get results you were not really looking for, but they turn out to be interesting, There is something to some slop in results. I'm happy to sift the river for a fleck of gold. For social media spaces, I am less looking for being caught up in conversations and debate, I am looking for them to serve me the links outward to people, sites, stories, I would not find otherwise. I am seeking the interesting outliers, not the trends. The unexpected, the novel, the new, the heart and pulse of the #smallweb not the Big Mall. Maybe I should write a blog post. Or many. It's time to shake the dust off. Not dead yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqxqwxMf6V4 Blog or die? I choose blog. Always. Featured Image: A 100% Non-Generative image. Mine. Shared into the public domain. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/31670214514 The Dead, Frozen End of Everything flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to Jay Allen, for those 40 hours of blogged sleepless programming that produced MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin. The war againt spammers has been ratched-up considerably with this new valuable tool (it is beta, but works sweet so far). It allows easy maintaince of your blacklist, deleting from a link in the nortication email, protection for both comments and Trackback, and no tinkering is needed with MT source orr your templates. It protects as many blogs on your site as you select. Oh happy day. I am eager to watch the crap appear in my blacklist log rather than my blog. Of course, spammers will just find some other crack to exploit, you can count on it. An aspect if blogging I find essential is shying away from a "please the world" view, meaning stepping out on limbs, and thus sometimes, being outright foolish, wrong, even "stupid". And I welcome being called on my shit. So sometimes, or often, I spout something before thinking it through. So here is my public service for showing there is no harm in doing something stupid. And this is much more likely to happen in the fire-aim-ready world of twitter. So today, I caught wind of a few folks, like Cole, suggesting people take another look at the "other" twitter, Pownce, where I barked back I was just being a smart-ass. And not really thinking of aiming it Cole's way, it was more on a string of comments I usually get when I post some gripe when twitter is down. They usually go like, "Twitter stinks! Lets have everyone go over to X!" Yes, twitter does blink out a lot, I've had my share of eaten tweets, and aberrant behavior. But its not about an alternative that is "better" because it is only "better" because of the people there, not because it has 3 more features, cooler buttons, a cuter cat, fewer crashes or some other attribute. Social software is not about the software, folks. But as Cole responds rightfully so, I was awfully knee jerk and yeah, harsh. And darn, he is right. After all my blabbing on "Being There", I was not even eating my own dog food. So thanks Cole, for calling me on that. This was especially paw in mouth when I realize that it was Cole's early blogging more than a year ago, that got me taking a loser look at the potential of twitter. So I am now offering my dog-plogies for barking off the deep end. It happens. It will happen again. It was just shy of 16 years ago (Homer's math was wrong) that I dove into WordPress on this here blog. I still make Homer head-slapping type mistakes. Here's today's edition. Maybe you do not know this. but WordPress does it's best to connect the name for a post if there is not an exact match. What? Well I take my `cogdogblog.com` and add on homer. There is no direct page at http://cogdogblog.com/homer but see what happens. Or even good old http://cogdogblog.com/doh. Try it on your site, can WordPress guess something close or are you sent to room 404? Maybe it helps to have a lot of posts to search through? Kind of neat, eh? I'm jumping ahead. But one thing you should know about WordPress is the secret door to log in (if you nuke that WordPress meta widget which usually provides a login link, I always nuke that) is to tack on /wp-admin to your blog URL. Some time ago I thought I discover it was easier to use http://mywordpresscoolsite.com/admin It always worked, and I have been using it as a footer link in the Network Narratives site so students have an easy way to log in to blog there. One of my students messaged today about a problem on the site, where the login link was http://netmirror21.arganee.world/admin Hi Alan, when I click on the link to login to NetNarr, it takes me to a blog post labeled “Admin Oye”. The first thing I do is check if the link works. Oh uh, he is right! http://netmirror21.arganee.world/admin Sure enough, rather than going to the login page, it lands on a blog post that had admin in it's title-- which, the same way WordPress acted with my homer doh links tries it's batch to match based on title. It lands on a post that has "admin" in the title. My little "trick" only works if there are no posts on a site with "admin" in the title, WordPress goes to the closest match... /wp-admin. So my "trick" is actually no good. So here is the thing. I make mistakes and goofs in not only WordPress but almost all of my technical tasks on a several times a day frequency. But what happens is I invariably learn more for finding the reasons why and addressing them, then if I got it "right" in the first place. That's Homer Simpson-c logic. The more you "doh" the more you end up knowing. And were it not for the silly idea for this blog post's image, did I land on a 2004 blog post reminding me that I attended an Honors Forum Lecture featuring a writer from the Simpsons. My blog, my outboard brain. Featured Image: A meme made with ImgFlip Meme Generator (try and unravel the licenses of meme images) https://imgflip.com/i/55poi9