Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
[caption id="attachment_24648" align="alignnone" width="500"] rmooc.ca site [/caption] Brace yourself for another 10 mile long blog post; much like the recent one on the Harvard Future of Learning site, this one focusses on another syndication driven wordpress site. Brian Lamb approached me in mid June about working on this project, and coming on the heels of the Harvard one, I was able to leverage bits of that site's framework-- but it is still nowhere near a copy/paste/go operation. These sites are hand crafted. Art+Reconciliation addresses current issues in Canada dealing with the history of residential schools and the ongoing work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The idea is (I might be wrongly paraphrasing) to examine how art and artists can both create awareness of the issues and help generate communication around the issue. As conceived by Ashok Mathur, this would be an open experience where online participants could be part of the August activities at TRU, where artists were invited for a residential experience in Kamloops, and leading up to a national TRC gathering in Vancouver. A driving part of the design was an effort to forefront the media that would be part of the activities, as well as infuse the syndication of content from twitter, flickr, blogs, etc. The "MOOC" part of rmooc is open to question- it was not a course per se, but a series of events and performances. It's not massive, bit was open and parts were online. Who cares, the media shows some amazing gatherings and art making. For some numbers on what happened (and keep in mind, this is the midway point), the site accumulated: 72 News Items content written or categorized by Ashok. 47 resources written or categorized by Ashok. 49 items spotlighted as categorized by Ashok. 486 syndicated content or media items: 233 Tweets 176 Photos 42 Dispatches (posts submitted via email) 18 Blog Posts (not many, this part was not used during the first phase of the rmooc) 23 Videos (as categorized by Ashok, in fact, he figured out how to add this without me, nice work!) So if you just look at numbers, you would say "obviously not massive" but numbers are not the whole story, and the goal of the first phase of rmooc was in the events that took place in Kamloops. Lost in the numbers are thing like a message from Leslie Lindballe, who was following RMOOC from Saskatchewan https://twitter.com/onepercentyello/statuses/361548557775409157 And again, rmooc is only halfway through its course. As before, I will attempt to review the design elements, the Wordpress customizations, and the setup and implementation of the syndication parts. An additional (and new for me) element was using Mailchimp for managing email communications. Much of what follows paralleled the work I did previously on Harvard's Future of Learning Institute site. Here we go... (more…) Hmmm. seems to be some blockages or bottlenecks in public network here at Faculty Academy- cannot post to twitter, tweets are getting munched in the network. Attempting to tweet via blog post. Update: The local network here was not to blame. Twitter itself has been/is very flaky. That darn cat messing with the server was cute once, now it is annoying as twitter ignores posted updates. The crowd is hopping to Jaiku cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Six days in the July 2013 Daily Create Challange, 6 done. The challenge is simple- try to do as many Daily Creates as you can. No shame or MOOC dropout apologies if you don;t do the am all. The only apologies to be made are if you do zero. Because doing nothing gets you nowhere. Today's was a photographic challenge -- Do a Backlit Portrait Photograph (e.g. into the light, make yourself a silhouette) This is an enjoyable one because it says go against the grain of typical photographic advice (which is advised for mostly good reasons), to take a photo into the light. Donr well, you get interesting silhouettes, and maybe some sun patterns and stars, In fact, you really cannot always predict what you get. The trick is, getting an exposure that is not too washed out. I try this by making the object partly block the direct light, or severely under underexposing. I waited late in the day, 4:30pm, but that means good setting sun. I really did like another shot of my sunflowers, because of the way the light glistens off the edges cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine But I made "Spike" my Daily Create. he is a bot of whimsical lawn art my sister sent years ago, the window blows a fan and makes spikes leg and tail run. He has quite the gallery of photos for a metal dog. I actually pulled his pole out of the ground to hold up higher into the sun, catching a nice sunburst off his front leg. And a large-ish aperture (low number) blurred the detail of the clouds and trees in the background nicely. If you are going to do this challenge, you are going to have to run with the dogs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubHn4xEnRP8 Don't worry, we are playful! Speaking of which, for your dog fun pleasure, check out the Dog Goldberg Machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA56LgpFbSw Calling a technomechanical object "smart" is a few notches below bestowing intelligence, but I am happily surprised when I discover (often accidentally) what that phone thing can do. I've known for more than a year that after taking photos of a plant or flower on the iThing yielded a small "i" icon in the bottom of the Photos app. Clicking it opened a drawee where Siri (apparently) took two guesses at identifying the plant as well as a few more google image search matches below. It does away from having to get any of those upsell swollen plant ID apps. That's all fine for plants, but I happen to also have a good number of photos on my device of a certain dog. I noticed recently when selecting the photo, the "i" button briefly changes to a dog icon! But then when I click the i/dog-con, that sort of smart phone does a great job at identifying his breed. But wait, there's more, the small icon in the bottom left leads to an option where I can assign a name, and hence the BrainPhone goes through the rest of my camera roll and finds all images of Felix. This might be not so novel (I think Google Photos has been doing this for a while), but it was just one of those small surprises that just seems neat. There is something to in a design element that is subtle, rather than announcing itself, it awaits discovery. Alas, as nifty as this is, it pales to make the ultimate thing I'd never expect to do on a mobile device, those times when I can deposit a check without making a trip to the bank. That is future-rama! (they don't have a cash dispenser yet, right?) Featured Image: My photo! Our New Old Phone flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) with an overlay of a screenshot my my iphone apps. Two more for the GIF pile of ones made not by downloading video clips, but using my own photos-- the ds106 assignment is Photo it Like Peanut Butter: Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minmal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff. See a bunch of examples at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/02/10/photo-gif-peanut-butter/ I found these in my own backyard, a place I have photographed 1000s of things, yet I find two new ones today. The first was noticing the patterns in water dripping out of one of my conduits that transfers runoff from my roof gutters out to my apple tree. I thought it would make a nice photo, but once I got my belly on the ground, I fired off 5 shots in rapid fire mode in my 7D. The GIF first: The water really dances a nice loop there. I use Photoshop, and use the command File -> Scripts -> Load Images into Stack. I select all of the files, and check the box to Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images. This gives me 5 layers, one for each image. In the animation palettes, I select Make Frames from Layers to put them on the time line. I go through the frames, and crop the photos so there are not see through spots on the edges (a side effect of the alignment) and resize te image to 500px wide, my target size. The animation is good, but the left side has some water splash that ends up looking like noise. Time to mask things out. I select the bottom frame to activate, and then all frames, and click the "on" radio button in the layer palette- this makes thids layer visible across all others. This is my base/backround. I then go to the second frame, select the active frame, use the lasso to select the portion I want to keep (right side, and the water flow), and click the add vector mask in the layers palette (second from left icon on bottom). This essentially cuts out everything not selected (black on the mask icon). I then control click on the mask layer, and select "Add Mask to Selection" (this re-selects based on the mask). I click te next frame, and the active layer, and repeat the process for each subsequent layer. What this is doing is removing the left side of the layer and letting it see through to the bottom layer. When I make this a GIF, the only motion will be on the right side. An added benefit is that my file size is smaller since I have tossed away data. The final GIF is only 360k. This is a naturally occurring object that I have capture in place as it moves. The next one is conjured- I noticed the interesting shadows on my outdoor chairs, and snapped a few photos. I noticed as I rotated the chair, that the curvy shadow transformed. I took four images, each time moving the camera to keep the seat edge in the same relative location. The process here is the same as above, but no masking for this one. The four frame animation was kind of jerky, so I use a trick I learned to make the movement cycle back- I copie2 the 3rd frame and pasted it after te 4th one and copies the second one and pasted it after this new one. This way it cycles back, the frame order becomes: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 3 - 2 so it loops back to where it starts. Because of the limited color range in the photo, I was able to save the GIF down to 32 colors, and the file size dropped from 1 Mb of the first one to 483k. This one almost looks like a cartoon animation, it is more surreal than the first one. It is motion that did not really exist in the world, I am conjuring the movement in this GIF. Two GIFs from my back yard, one captures the dance of water falling, in an infinite loop; the other fabricates te dance of a shadow, in its own loop. The purpose? It's a study in motion, a suggestion And made from just a few static photos. Inside the Photo Sometimes I do not get what I intended in a photograph, and end up trashing them. In this case, I got something different, but better. This was a series where I was attempting to get a panning photo of something in motion, where you use a relatively slow shutter speed, and move the camera at the speed of an object in motion. It’s a 1/8 of a second shutter speed at f/11 if you wanted to know the numbers. So Gunner, a dog I was taking care of for a friend, was happy to continually chase a ball, So I would toss with my left hand, like a hook shot, and get him to run past me to the right. I never did quite get the panning shot, but the slow shutter speed here got a motion effect that looks more painting than photograph. Note the wavy lines of texture, as my motion apparently was not quite horizontal. I might not be able to replicate this if I tried! On a daily basis, life presents me metaphors. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Frosted Peppercorn When I stepped in the shower this morning, I notice a medium sized, non threatening black spider in the bath tub. My first, and normal reaction is to quickly grab a tissue, so I can squash the bugger, toss it, so I can go about my day. It's in the way. And I did grab a wad of tissue. But I hesitated. I remembered a time when I was with a friend, and some others were bothered by flies in the room buzzing against the window. Several people reacted with the intent to squash, but Barb deftly whipped her arm around, cupped the flies in her hand, walked outside, and set them free. She did not make a speech about this, and just mumbled something about it not taking too much more effort to free something rather than killing it. So I went to the kitchen, grabbed a glass, a piece of cardboard. I popped the glass over Mr Spidey, slide cardboard underneath, and escorted him outside. cc licensed flickr photo shared by V31S70 It really did not take much more effort to relocate this living thing than to smush and discard it. Smashing seems easier at first. So what's the spider in your bath tub? cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by sebastien.barre For this week's live broadcast of the ds106 group radio shows I came up with an entirely new contraption for managing different sources, in contrat to my previous methods of using Nicecast. I still prefer using Nicecast, and do so for voice broadcasts or voice mixed with music (DJing)- but in the past I have ran into problems doing it with something like Skype as one of the sources, though I have mixed it in with the application mixer, the missing piece is for someone on Skype to be able to hear back what is on the stream. The new thing in the mix is the free Icecast broadcastng software, Ladiocast. I cobbled together the approach below with a combination of Tim Owen's Ladiocast tutorial (critical for setting up Ladiocast) and Scott Lockman's setup for doing his Second Life to Google Hangout broadcasts. This post is a long scroller! Go long! (more…) Blank Page posted 12 Feb '07, 12.18pm MST PST on flickr Mmm ... what shall I create today? It's probably not healthy that I awoke this morning, still shaking off the dream state, thinking I was writing a blog entry. Why dream about writing blog posts? Why not red sports cars, standing on mountains, that girl from the Herb Albert album cover... So it is this time of year one one tends to look back in rose colored glory on the past 364 days, making "best of" lists (ohh, my "best" blog posts.... I could not really dredge one up, blecchh), or turning those glasses forward and fountaining predictions for the next set. "2008 will be the year of _______". Nah. Well, maybe a little reflection. A year ago, I had heard of this thing called "twitter" but had bookmarked it into oblivion. In that time (it was in January of 2007 I dove in- oldest tweet I could find was Jan 31, 2007). Now I cannot resist checking it from the time the laptop lid opens to when I finally slam it shut late in the evening hours. It became a focal frame of reference point for how I looked at new technologies, a la "being there" But as much as this new kid shines, nothing, will ever take away from my interest in blog realm, hence I hoisted a Viva La Blog flag. And its with some sadness, I see much less updating happening in the blogs sitting in my RSS bin. The unread light is just not as intense as it once was, and its certainly not because I am reading more blogs. I suspect it's more than just twitter chipping away at the blog-density; we are awash in social networks, video viewing, building virtual palaces, heck maybe even work that chips away into the time we may have spent blogging. Picking through my blog database, I mysql counted 303 blog posts tin 2007 compared to 370 in 2006. Does that mean anything? But what I was really thinking about in the morning fog of sleep was the mixture of dilemma and potential of an empty page. This blog entry starts at as one of those. I often dont know where it will end when it starts. A blog post can be a huge canvas to cover in words or just to quickly splatter with bright read paint. I relish that unknown potential. But stretching metaphorically (as opposed to metaphorically stretching, which I think I am better at), even a blank "what are you doing" twitter screen might be seen as a blank page, just tinier. Potential, nonetheless. So in this electronic space, we are literally surrounded, yet never seem, many blank pages that we can choose to fill (or ignore and just poke around on facebook). And in casting ahead, I am wondering about where I will toss my energy and attention this year. Already, I have many blank pages hovering around, and not knowing what will cover them, or if they will be covered at all... is ok. Yet as I adore the energy and connectedness of my twitter-circle, I feel compelled to still issue calls for Viva La Blog, we certainly need much more thoughtful writing, thinking, provoking, arguing, agreeing -- and there is room for so much more. So my wish for '08 is to see some resurgence of the blog form, not even sure what that might be, and even mostly doubtful that the shrunken golden age of blogging may already be yellowing around the edges of the blank page supply. Blog on, tweet on, just stay connected is my plea... It's been almost a month since I blogged about the Chronicle of Higher Education, the "flagship" of the ivory tower had published on their web site misinformation that it had scooped from some other blog sites on a story about the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. The Chronicle wrote on December 17 that the 2007 report was "released last week" when it was published on January 21, 2007 at the annual EDUCAUSE/ELI Conference, where I am fairly sure I recall there were Chronicle reporters in attendance. I duly noted this in a comment. Apparently, the Chronicle website, labeled at the top as "The Wired Campus" does not get or pay attention to comments on its site, does not monitor blog trackback, does not use web 2.0 tools to monitor references to their stories from elsewhere on the internet. Man, are those ivory walls thick! I bet wireless signals cannot penetrate. My colleagues at EDUCAUSE, who are are partners on the Horizon Report, are doing the New Scholarship thang as they keep forwarding me more and more blogs, from academics, who keep parrot meming the same wrong information- the latest one. So is checking facts something that falls out of the wash on New Scholarship? What about correcting incorrect information? Do we need a flame thrower to get the attention of the Chronicle? (doubtful that will work, there are those thick walls). Actually I know I could call someone, but the point, to me, is not to just fix the misinformation, but to point out the perils of acting like Web 2.0 rather than acting in a Web 2.0 mindset. I am not saying we have to be perfect in publishing, and I am first to admit I have gotten things wrong before, But darn it, if you get something wrong, and people bring it to your attention, why would you not correct it? Why would you let wrong information hang out in the breeze? Yes, this is minor (and IMHO disturbing), but someone has to stir up the pot... So for the 2008 Horizon Report, I am suggestion we put in giant 80 point text, HEY CHRONICLE! THIS REPORT WAS PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 28, 2008! Flamethrower.... ignite! Many of my best friends are reclaimers. Boone is so hip he went to a dumb phone. Tim sez Ghost is better for blogging than wordpress *ASTERISK if you can get used to writing in Markdown. I mock not maybe a little-- I respect these folks and their taking a stand. I'm trying to better wrap my head around known. I have one. I'm not hip. Myself I think there some middle ground. It's squishy. I'm not always pressed to house everything myself, but I do want to be in control, of it. And so I think there is Claim (just do It outright), Reclaim (Take It back), and sometimes Co-Claim where you be proactive in dealing with your content being elsewhere. And it's not just as simple as some service boasting they offer exports of all your data. Often these end up being quite useless. Huh? Co-Claiming Twitter Frankly I don't see a need to house my tweets. I see them as completely disposable. I would not be crestfallen if they all flew away. But I am not beholden to the limits of twitter itself. Many people know how incomplete the twitter search is. Can you find what you tweeted on July 21, 2010? Do you know every time you tweeted the word "fart"? I do. And I did not go to twitter.com to find this out. Among tweets about ignoring facebook planning for my high school reunion and that my vegetable garden was still producing lettuce, on July 21, 2010 I was thanks my buddy Roland for some Google Maps KML tips https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/19109413914 More? Since 2007, I have tweeted 57 times using the word fart (catchup jokes notwithstanding) I have this amazing skills thanks to the genius of Martin Hawksey who crafted a way to make a downloadable twitter archive-- hold the bus, you do know you can download your entire twitter history? The hitch is that you get a static archive. Martin figured out how to build one for yourself that updates itself, and does this for free sitting in Google Drive. I call this co-claiming. Rather than limiting myself to what twitter provides or not, with some help of smarter people than me, I can go beyond what they provide us out of the box. I have my own twitter archive (http://tweets.cogdogblog.com maps to the google drive location), where I can find my own tweets either by date or by searching, all the way back to 2007. And while I hear people bemoan that they give in to the inevitable StreamMode of twitter, cause stuff just flows on by and down the drain... well, I smile. Cause I keep on Co-Claiming. Co-Claiming Flickr I admit perhaps a sentimental soft spot for flickr. This March will mark my 11th year of sharing photos, and look at that, over 40,000 of them. I've had my share of gripes, and have called their new design "an ass". You can find a Geek Chorus singing about how flickr went south when Yahoo bought them (I am not here to champion Yahoo). I know of folks that left flickr for Instagram, 500px, or just pour their stuff into the Grand Internet Orifice. People reclaimed their photos to Trovebox; D'Arcy went and took 'em all home (but still shares them). But flickr to me is not about the box where the files sit. I care about the mingling effect of my photos and others. Of the contribution to the shimmering pool of creative commons photos you can search and find. I care that there are weird niches for people who share photos of graffiti in vegetation or that one dude collects photos of Rusty Mailboxes. Again, flickr is not the definitive archive of my 40,000 photos. For a number of years I had flickr backups running at backupify; but they recently turned off the free service (there is a warning sign for you). I did get from them an 80Gb archive of my flickr photos back to almost my first ones in March 2004, but its not an archive I can do much with. The image files are there, but most of the meta data not, and I have a wobbly set of HTML pages to house them. I maintain all my photo data in a copy of Aperture I run on my computer, with source files stored on external drives (and synced to copies). When I edit my photos in Aperture, I also write the titles, descriptions, add tags, dates, locations, even add a license statement into the image metadata... so my definitive archive is one I manage, not flickr. When I export to flickr, the FlickrExport for Aperture transfers all the data to flickr, and even writes back to Aperture the URL to the flickr page it created (read more details on my Aperture strategy). So this might be more closely just Claiming outright, since I am managing my content in my own space. But the point is... that if flickr bellies up, I am not out in the cold. But, unlike some of other reclaim strategies, I can still benefit form the social sharing connections inside of flickr (I can hear ya, D'Arcy, I'm letting them use my stuff for whatever plotting things they are doing with photos, I accept that.) Claiming Medium I've played some with writing on medium mostly to explore it's interface. I noticed in fishing around the settings a link to Export Your Medium Stories to Zip. Curiosity piqued. Well, I did get something. A folder with some HTML files in it I'll leave it to you to figure out how useful these are- check out the set http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/medium-export/ Check out the exported to the original I should be thankful that I have the text; all of the images are externally referenced, and thus your archive depends on some rickety malformed CSS and links to media hosted elsewhere. Yeah, you get an export.... WTF can you do with it? Unclaimable Junk Jux I was pretty impressed with the rich publishing capabilities of Jux.com -- it produced web content that broke out of the page / sidebar modality. It was slick. But apparently investors were not as easily impressed as I. A few months ago there was a notice they were closing. This had happened in July 2013, but a few months later there was an announcement that they had secured financial backing. Look I can find this in my tweets! https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/421414092482424832 Well that part is now over. A week ago many of us got a Dear Jux letter, they were folding their tent and going home Just so you can read and search on this... Our Time is Up We want to thank our amazing Jux Community members for supporting the platform for nearly 5 years. Unfortunately, the costs to maintain the infrastructure have become overly burdensome for our generous supporters, so it is with great sadness that we announce the closure of the Jux services platform at the end of November. We realize that some of you have media stored on the Jux servers that you would like to preserve, so we have a link for you that will enable you to retrieve and download all your stored media files with one simple step. Visit farewell.jux.com and sign in with your Jux credentials to export your media files. For those of you that have linked domains or other portals that depend on the Jux platform, you will need to move those links or services to another location as Jux will be going offline completely at the end of the month. Again, we thank you for your support and wish you well. We've heard these laments many times before. With the cheaper than dirt costs of cloud computing, how can it be so burdensome to keep at least existing content alive? How come they never tell us what those costs are? How do we know they didn't shoot their IPO wad on pizza and cigarettes? I'm not really caring about the few things I hung on Jux. Anything there I have elsewhere. But I was curious about this export process. What do you get? Visit farewell.jux.com and sign in with your Jux credentials to export your media files. So I went to http://farewell.jux.com/. Signed in with my Jux credentials. And got this. [caption id="attachment_36945" align="alignnone" width="500"] I get bubkahs from Jux.[/caption] I tried back later. Three different times. Bubkahs. I emailed them at operations@jux.com. Twice. Bubkahs again. I've tweeted them. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/531714371840262144 So this is what you face in 2014 when some company offers you free hosting of your content for their Snazzofish site. This can be you a few years later, wondering why you cannot get your exports out of Snazzofish, or if so, what you will do with a pile of HTML files. But fear not. When one Jux By Night site folds, another pops up. https://twitter.com/MyBizziBlogCom/status/530159761648402433 https://twitter.com/MyBizziBlogCom/status/530172992735543296 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/530172283805921280 https://twitter.com/MyBizziBlogCom/status/530173582526017536 As soon as someone tells me they think I should review their stuff on my blog, that is my cue to exit the conversation, though the most persistent ones end up in my roach motel. I do not know what decade MyBizziBlogCom thinks this is-- what they offer might have been lukewarm interesting in 2008, but cannot possible see, in light of this WhatTheJux behavior, why anyone should put their content in some goofball blogging platform. I call this "Preclaim", dismissing stupid web services before even clicking the link. Coda I am not sure why I wrote "Coda". Oh yeah, this is the end of the post. I should have some final statement. Considering where our "stuff" goes and what gets done with it, is paramount, and one wears much more cynicism then we did 10 years ago. But at the same time, if we are savvy, and networked, and no clever chaps like Martin Hawksey, well we have some grounds to deal with even the services we do or cannot "reclaim". I'm a Sometimes Co-Claimer, Maybe Leaning to be a Reclaimer, but largely... a Com-plainer. You? Are you just at the whim of Twitter? Flickr? Jux? That's the beauty in this internet game. You get to pick how you want to play. Although many people just keep taking just the defaults handed to them. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by thepeachpeddler (I have no idea why creepy baby head is tagged default in flickr. Again, the weirdness there I dig). [caption id="attachment_36934" align="alignnone" width="500"] I made this. I give myself permission to reuse it. You too.[/caption] Look at those tired, weeklong workshop worn down expressions on University of Guadalajara faculty in that photo above. This was the energy we saw a lot of earlier this month, for the entire time for the second year of the UDG Agora project, a collaboration between the Justice Institute of British Columbia and the Universidad de Guadalajara. The UDG Agora is among the best and most rewarding projects I have been part of. You probably won't read about it in any ed-tech journals, not in an innovation "thought pieces", not in any TED Talks. Chances are you have never even heard of UdG, a 15 campus (plus a virtual university, and a high school system) network spread across the state of Jalisco, educating something on the order of 180,000 students. Oh, and while North America churns over the cost crises of higher education, Mexican students attend UdG for yearly fees that are on the order of... a Biology textbook. Who even knows this? Well, we might suggest Stephen Downes does, because, as Brian and I suggested in our talk on openness, Steven is always watching: (we know you are reading this now, Stephen). What is the Agora? The UDG Agora project was made possible by a significant investment by the government and the University, as a Diploma for faculty in Student-Centered and Mobile Learning. The goal was to have participating faculty to re-design parts of their courses using these approaches. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] For more, you can see our presentation from the Open Education 2015 Conference or the one we did for the Conectáctica conference in December, 2015. Our CIEP colleagues from UDG are working on a research analysis of the 2015 cohort. You can also explore the Comparte collection of final reports. Oh, People. I cannot even start to talk about the project, the technology, the things we saw, without talking about the people. A good project, location, support are all key ingredients, but I cannot say enough about my colleagues Tannis Morgan and Barb Kidd (JIBC), Brian Lamb (TRU), and Nancy White (her own universe): https://twitter.com/TurismoUdeG/status/743538684385886209 Every night, often over tacos, we would reshape and work through each other's parts of the project, refine, throw things out, pull things in. No egos at play here. It just sounds cliché to say it, but the dynamic of this team makes anything possible. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Choconancy1 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] I would also be remiss in missing out on including coaches from last year (the smaller project meant fewer coaches), Terri Bateman (BC), Ken Baer (Tec de Monterey), and Jorge Enrique (UDG). Then add on top the UdG CIEP team led by Sandra Cobain. We thought we worked long hours, but they make us look meek. And the folks at the CUAAD campus where everything just worked, technology, logistics. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Choconancy1 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] There's much I'd hope to capture from this most recent experience there, and I feel as though it will come out as a chaotic blob of yabba babba. A lot I would characterize as "it's not about the thing". For example, last year all ~300 participants, and 50 of 80 this year, were given iPads for use in the project. But this never was an iPad project, there is no expectation for iPads to be part of their course redesigns (unrealistic platform expectations for students). The iPad is somewhat of a MacGuffin, an instigator to experiment with media and communication platforms, but not the end goal. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Changes for The Second Iteration There's a lot to be said for getting to do a second round of a project, and the different dynamic of a smaller over all group size helped us too this year. Last year, the project included ~320 professors in: 2x one week (5 day) sessions of face to face "studios" 8 weeks of online community, virtual connectivity, when professors planned their "implementations", the redesigns of parts of their course. A final gathering to summarize, share results, get diplomas. The notable thing about this design is that it's not a one shot, drop in and do workshop and leave design... it is sustained over time. The same elements are still present: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The big change this year was working with a smaller number of participants, and redoing the face to face schedule to be 4 days instead of 5 (which likely helps ones who traveled from out of town). It meant longer days for all, from ~9am til 3:30pm (see detailed schedule), but made simple by cutting the drawn out sit down lunch. Yes, we had them that long, and gave them (and us) lunch at the end of the day. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Choconancy1 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] Another difference is an effort to maintain connection with participants between the June face to face session and the start of the online community activity in late August. We encourage them to do some Daily Tries that we populate to run through the summer (and maybe beyond). Also, they will be asked to try doing one studio from the online materials that they did not get to do in June (we have also made available a few of last year's studios that were not on the agenda this year). And we want them to experiment with communicating in dilo. All of this, of course, is optional for them to pursue. But they are doing it: https://twitter.com/p_tentadas/status/747245465012363264 https://twitter.com/LuisGue44366822/status/746772717525831680 https://twitter.com/TurismoUdeG/status/746483963791695872 Studios and Challenges in Face to Face Time The format of our time together in June is a minimum of instructor led stuff (us) framed around a series of hands on studios. Three studios were "foundational" and because of this year's group size, we were able to do it together in the larger theater. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Choconancy1 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] My Foundational Studio on Prepping Your Toolbox was first, because we had to introduce participants to a wide range of tools and web sites we would use that week. This year's went much better; we had them doing what for may were first twitter actions, then doing a "Daily Try" (our UDG Agora version of the DS106 Daily Create), doing hands on a simple challenge from the bank they would use all week for their studio sessions. And we were able to give them a preview of our online discussion space, dilo. Besides just the language differences, communication was quite a battle last year, just getting people's emails for our mailing list (dealing with greylisting of email domains on the campus network). The big hurdle last year was we introduced dilo weeks after we finished the face to face; this year we aimed to have them all signed up and able to login before the end of the week (we got close, maybe 90%). In the four days, there were also 6 rounds of Learner Selected Studios, meaning each of us taught the same studio likely 3 times. Each studio included 3-5 Challenges, activities they did during the time together, and then reported back to the Challenge Bank (more on this below). On their surface, some studios may seem... trivial? Why are we not training in solution driven analytics laden technologies and instead introducing faculty to Memes & GIFs, Short Looping Video, Comics, Free Stuff, Sketching? Look a catchy tuned video about coffee? https://twitter.com/serchr/status/743473069654605824 A stick figure animation? Celebrating Friday? https://twitter.com/Magdapelayoc/status/743860615811260416 Crude drawings? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Choconancy1 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] An animated gif of people around food? https://twitter.com/almakastell/status/743866098672537600 These again are not the end goal, in fact, they might be disposable-- but they are meant to give participants ideas for potentials of media and communication, to seed them with confidence in creating them. There's much more to creating a compact message of emotional appeal with one image and text-- consider the ideas that a meme is a powerful thing to waste. Or maybe that short quirky looping videos can help to understand change over time or to analyze the details of a process? Other PD projects have have focused on delivering training technical skills; what the Agora does is seed people with ideas for them to develop themselves over time, and in company of each other. The Challenge Bank is at the core of our activity, participants in the studios report and share back via a web form what they were able to produce-- [caption id="attachment_58769" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Screen shot of of the response to a challenge form[/caption] In our week together, we recorded almost 600 responses to challenges (again from 80 participants). Building Internal Expertise. And Confidence Another huge advantage is we have a large number of participants we can tap into; in fact that was what we did on the first day by running a "user experience fishbowl" activity where four faculty from last year, Adán, Araceli, Moises and Francisco, shared their experience and lessons learned with the new participants. https://twitter.com/tanbob/status/742774905125511169 They each had both personal and professional moving stories to share (an audio recording is available). We make use of twitter in this project, but it's not a strict requirement, like the iPad, it's not an end goal. As a platform twitter is not as widely used in Mexico as other platforms (though a number of our participants are very experienced there). So it was quite new for a lot of our participants. And this is a characteristic I'd like to share of the faculty in our sessions- an incredible work ethic when challenged. From my experience in doing technical workshops with people, it seems like quite a few just shut down, roll over when the technology part is confusing or not simple. We saw none of that with our UDG participants. I saw no bored faces, no "pretending to listen but really doing email/chat." And they so readily talk and work collaboratively... No giving up easily. Rosario was overwhelmed the first day. But she stayed with us, and on day 3 look at her sense of accomplishment with doing her success in recording an audio story: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Twitter? Yes. But on twitter, I had in mind a research project reviewed by Stephen Downes-- the idea was to try and do some data analysis to connect people's activities across social media platforms. My take away was it ended up being more about the platform than what people were doing in the platforms. So our use of twitter is not to force a message that twitter is great, but to give them an experience there that they can consider for more about the experience itself, and not necessarily twitter. Using hash tags is something we saw a lot of uptake in 2015. Like this year, most of last year's participants did not do much with twitter, but on their own, they ended up in their projects creating over 120 class hashtags. We put into place, and showed them the visualization possibilities of Martin Hawksey's Twitter Tags worksheets; we can see early in the activity, a lot of disparate nodes, with more centralized connections to our @AgoraUdG account (because that is used to do replies for the Daily Try), and active twitter people like @NancyWhite and myself, but also a participant from last year (@SaraCarolina) It matters little to us if our participants use twitter for themselves or their course projects. It's not the end goal. It's more to have a taste of the experience, the network effects. In the 3 weeks of the new round, we are over 1200 tweets, and while in the top active accounts are me, Nancy, and Sandra, the rest (and the most active) are our participants. And we use twitter accounts in different way- for their work in the Challenge Bank, we ask that they enter their twitter name in their responses (and they can include collaborators twitter names in the tags field) -- we use it as a proxy for accounts, without having them make accounts. If they don't want to use twitter, they can create a makeup name. What it means for them, is they have a unique URL that shows their contributions, for example: http://udg.theagoraonline.net/bank/exampletags/@FaviolaCasNav and then a "leaderboard" for the entire site (the top numbers are naturally for last year's participants) Likewise, because the Daily Try responses are submitted via twitter, each participant also has a unique link for their activity http://udg.theagoraonline.net/daily/hashtags/@Roslintorres/ I consider this a way of using twitter for our purposes as much as what twitter does. The Technology. Nuts, Bolts, Duct Tape. Note this section is at the end. More than a year since I started on the project, it's great to look back at what is a small open pieces mostly joined. I understood when the project was planned, the thought then was to used Moodle. With the contract given to JIBC, and with Tannis at the helm, there is not surprise that openness and open tools became one of our pillars. When Tannis, Barb and I visited UdG in April 2015 for our first planning project, there was no platform on the table. But with Tannis pitching the idea of "studios" and "challenges" that I was suggesting a version of the DS106 Assignment Bank. In fact, while there, I put together a test instance, and we and our CIPE colleagues did the first challenge in the bank, the Recorded Sound Effect story (which of course is a remix of a classic DS106 assignment). You can see our work at the very bottom of the responses-- you can see the creativity of Pedro in the way he produced his response. And thus, because building the sites was in my corner, what you see are a mixture of a lot of (but not all) Wordpress, a wee bit of RSS Syndication, some DS106, some SPLOT, and more. At first they wanted us to use a university Wordpress install, but as I needed frequent access to the server for custom work, and it just works, we made a case in the interest of time, to host the project sites on Reclaim Hosting. And because of that, we could do things like have them monitor the server load during our busy demand times in person, and they provide crucial support to get discourse running (and updated) (and updated) for us. Some of these were heavily used, others barely. UDG Agora main site is a Wordpress Multisite with 10 hosted sites. The main site uses the Wallstreet theme from Graphpaper Press, and for a change, I did only limited customization, mostly via custom CSS. I did set up FeedWordpress to syndicate blog posts in from our team, so this very post will show up there in the News area. Studios are just categories. I'm a big fan of the Flickr Justified Gallery plugin that does galleries of tags, users, groups just elegantly. We have a collection from my photos of 2015; for 2016 since Nancy and I both had a lot of photos, we made a flickr pool to power this year's photo collection. The Challenge Bank is an instance of the DS106 Assignment Bank theme. I did major upgrades last May to add more full featured editing to the response forms, folding in the idea of an option to use twitter names to organize contributions. In the two years of use, we have 80 challenges and aver 3200 responses to challenges. Maybe my favorite example here is when Karla Colin, on her own, decided to do one of her own implementations in the Challenge Bank-- in Comida Mexicana she asked her nutrition students to research recipes for a planned Mexican meal, in which their responses had to use Creative Commons licensed media. There's only 170+ responses. The Daily Try is also a product of DS106, using the DS106 Daily Blank Theme. We did 141 of them in 2015, and are now 18 ones deep into 2016. For those 159 Daily Tries we have 1725 total responses. The leaderboard shows us we have had 175 unique participants. We added an Image Pool SPLOT used for some of Brian's studios as a place for participants to put the image works. The TRU Writer SPLOT was the vehicle for our Comparte Collection of final reports (our colleague Kike gave me a lot of help with translating all the intructions to Spanish) We had an idea to collect some final video stories from last year's participants (as it is there are only three) -- I use the Wordpress theme I use for my True Stories site An early idea we discarded was to have an "Ask Us Anything" site-- I built out a prototype using the Wordpress P2 theme, but we discarded the idea thinking it was one (or two) sites too many. We did a few of our presentations using the mods I started at TRU using the Intergalactic Theme-- turning Wordpress into a Slide Deck dispenser? See Welcome to the Agora, Edupunk, Edubauhaus, D.I.O?, and Reflecting on the Agora. That's just the Wordpress part- other key ones include: Our dilo community site is run in discourse. That was somewhat of a bear to wrestle. Figuring out a strategy for how to get people in was always a minefield. Email invites only worked... if we have correct emails. Self enrollment was tried. And this year? If people were not in, we had them come up to my machine, and enter their info in the account creation form. In 2015, with 300+ participants we create smaller "groups" of ~40 each using categories viewable to only people in those groups. I cannot say for sure how well that worked. For 2015, we simplified it to three areas- Open Agora (full discussion), Announcement (stuff from us), and Dilo tips, tech support. I like what discourse offers and there is a huge amount of clever was it uses the discussion content. It does take a certain amount of persistence to get to the point of using the composer well. We set up a Tinyletter account to send email announcements to participants. Getting email addresses is always more complex than it sounds, but its critical that people get our messages. Our own group URL has a self signup form (and a link to see archives). I love the simplicity of tinyletter, it it becomes a noun in our vocabulary-- "The hangout schedule will be sent in the next tinyletter." "Did you get the last tinyletter?" Our team makes use of a shared Google Drive folder for documents, etc as well as a Slack for our communication. We made a lot of use of Slack last year, it worked well for our small geographically distributed team. I flipflopped a lot on the naming our twitter account @AgoraUDG and #udgagora hashtag -- if they are the same, then people will confuse them and if they are different people will confuse them. It's lose lose. We set up a Twitter TAGS worksheet to archive and visualize the activity (2015 summary; 2015 Conversation Explorer; and 2016 summary, 2016 Conversation Explorer) Let There Be an Agora Cheer We also close with a group photo, which often begs for a GIF: and a hearty cheer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfc3ESyjIF8 And this is just the beginning of the project! Adios from the bottom of a long long long post. And all of those only hints at the goodness we saw last week. AGORA! Top / Featured Image: These participants are not having much fun... my flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/27704087746 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Among other TEDx Talk videos I have seen recently, the one by Luis von Ahn on Massive-scale online collaboration, Stephen Downes notwithstanding, generated a number of ideas for me. von Ahn is the man behind the idea of reCaptcha- originally a Carnegie-Mellon project eventurally gobbled up by Google. What I liked most is his example of looking differently at a problem- digitizing texts via OCR and turning a normally wasted amount of human activity- proving themselves to not be bots by entering the text into a box of scrambled letters-- into a useful activity by making the captcha images not random, but ambiguous words in the proces. The video alone is worth watching for von Ahn's description of his newest project, to translate the web into all languages via free language learning lessons (see the video or http://duolingo.com/) I signed up for to get an invite for dulingo, but it was von Ahn's examples of humorous random examples that got me thinking, e.g. "Bad Christians" showing up on a theology site Then he talked about how some people were setting up sites to illustrate the word combinations, such as "Invisible Toaster" And thus SHAZAM! Here's a ds106 visual assignment idea. Go to any site that uses a repcatcha e.g. the repcatcha site itself and recycle them until you get something that might be illustratable. The recycle button is the one at the top: Take a screenshot of the word pair, then find some re-usable image(s) that might cleverly illustrate the words, mix them together to a single image that includes the captcha. Now here is the thing- the reCaptcha images seem to have gotten more complex; most have one recognizable word and the other is a fragment or maybe a word in some other language (?), so you might have to be super creative. Like this one I might illustrate someone talking to a confused waiter in a restaurant trying to order something strange: I ended up cheating a bit- a few years back I had noticed interesting word pairs in reCaptcha and played with building a story out of the images, so I used some of the ones I had saved for my two examples. My first one tries to describe what dentists really eat for dinner, foods that are easily chewable and always floss, hence Dentist Dinners: Image credits: cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by sj_sanders: http://flickr.com/photos/sj_sanders/4090241252/ cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo by ulterior epicure: http://flickr.com/photos/ulteriorepicure/493134821/ cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) photo from Washington & Jefferson College http://capl.washjeff.edu/browseresults.php?langID=2&photoID=4519&size=m For captcha art number two, we see how we can ascertain that bulldogs are above taking bribes; they have stanps of approval by the US government as Ethical Bulldogs: image credits: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by me'nthedogs: http://flickr.com/photos/66176388@N00/3368665460/ cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo by Caveman Chuck Coker: http://flickr.com/photos/caveman_92223/3781992502/ So what can you make with random captchas? The Catfishers are pulling out all the stops. I got an email this morning from a victim who was communicating with someone supposedly named Michael Carlos Hughes. Apparently on LinkedIn I am a petroleum geologist at Chevron [caption id="attachment_49949" align="aligncenter" width="600"] screen shot from LinkedIn for Michael Carlos Huges, who has a very handsome face. Mine. [/caption] The woman sent me many photos of me that "Michael" sent her- this one is really insidious, look at the note he sent (I have blurred her name). [caption id="attachment_49950" align="aligncenter" width="360"] I am sorry, but I do not have a wife. And my name is not Michael[/caption] I had some trouble finding this photo with Google image search, luckily Keri did https://twitter.com/KeriMorgret/status/664517239580860416 Dear Michael, how do you explain this? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The victim started finding this same image on several linked in profiles, doing the google reverse image search, look how many people I am! I am only sharing fraction of the profiles she found that sport my photos on other people's identities. [caption id="attachment_49927" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Am I Sam? Mohammad? Scott?[/caption] What would you do? Would you be happy reporting this as instructed and being told it is not a violation? Would you be happy if in turn the scammers turned the tables and reported your profile? https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/664510083494113280 Unlike @Facebook, Linked in did respond. But the only recourse these companies who are growing profitable off of your activity is to report profiles. Why does LinkedIn even allow multiple people to create profiles WITH THE SAME PHOTO? There is image matching technology out there. Reporting is trying to stop a flood with one stone at a time. The scammers running these are using brute force attacks, weapons of mass profile impersonation. And Facebook and LinkedIn are not only doing nothing, they are silent. Meanwhile, I am furiously messaging my short list of influential people, pleading someone with a public voice to take this one. I am pushing out examples. I am not doing any of my work. I am Alan Levine and my identity has been p0wned. My photos are in some criminal networks file server, being sprayed out like candy as fake profiles. You could be next. Share this. Teach people how to use reverse image search. If you become friends or romanced by anyone online, stop and investigate them. You are a fool and a potential next victim if you don't. Do not let Facebook and LinkedIn keep accruing profit without being accountable for their part in fostering catfishing spawning pools. Meanwhile, I am keeping a new flickr album updated That's about all I can do, asset my identity. Because F*** knows that Facebook won't. Top / Featured Image credits: flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/22328418744 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license - my re-edit of my own licensed photo at https://flic.kr/p/62wwE4 The only place I ever saw Highlights for Children magazine was at my dentist office, a short distraction while waiting for the drilling and fat fingers of weird old Dr Cooper. The tagline of the magazine was "Fun With a Purpose". But no connection here, except the name, it's a brand new Wordpress theme I just hoisted onto GitHub. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/957324544070500358 This is another theme I have built upon the solid foundation of a Creative Commons licensed template from HTML5 Up called Highlights "A Fun Little {Responsive} Single Pager." The content on this one is rather narrow, yet spoke to me as a nice simple calling card, top of the domain type design. The nifty hook is, when you look at the demo, as you scroll down, the background image subtly changes to match the content. This joins my previous conversions of these well built HTML static themes to Wordpress, WP-Dimension and WP-Big Picture. You can find a working demo at http://lab.cogdogblog.com/highlights/ This one is close to WP-Big Picture which I used as a starting point. I use Posts to represent the front page sections, and the featured image becomes the one in the background as the front page is scrolled. That stumped me a while until I picked through the code, there is an image inserted into the HTML, and the scroll action triggers a jQuery function to bring the image in. So in the original HTML, it does not look like anything special: Stuff I do Consequat sed ultricies rutrum. Sed adipiscing eu amet interdum lorem blandit vis ac commodo aliquet vulputate. In narrow mobile screens, the image moves to be inserted inline, so there is some media elements in CSS controlling how the image is used. I actually could not exactly figure out the Javascript, so I just experimented with the template to insert the featured image in the same place: And it worked. What my Wordpress version does is a a bit more than you get in the HTML one; that one has three sections wired into the front page, you can add more, and re-arrange, by some not too terribly complex HTML copy/paste/editing. But in the Wordpress version, you just create posts for the front (I have allowed up to 10 sections, an arbitrary limit easily changed), and the order is controlled by using the Post Order metabox in the editor (added in my theme). And it's even easier to do via the dashboard Quick Edit, and the listing of Posts includes the order: [caption id="attachment_65819" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Using the Quick Edit to modify the post order[/caption] I also have it designed to use the Wordpress Read More code, if you have longer content where you want just the opening on the front. Simply inserting the Read More thing into a post, you define where that split occurs, it then automatically adds the button on the front, and when clicked from there, it jumps to the content that follows. And I also have a Page template, because there might be other stand alone content you do not want on the front page, but perhaps to link to. I have some Customizer controls to edit the top title and the sub title (different from the blog title and tagline, I use that in the footer), and, with the Font Awesome 4 Menus plugin, you can add a menu of social icon links to the footer. The Customizer Header Image control creates the background image used at the top of the site (the demo site uses a set that are randomly loaded all set up in the Customizer), and the top of all single post and page views, where the image switches, like on the front, when you scroll down to the content. Finally, I added to these theme, and the others, a 404 Not Found template, which offers links to posts, pages, etc. Enough describing, check out the demo including Single Post with Read More split on the content. A Page that is not part of the front content. What happens for a URL not found This is a first release, and it's likely I missed something or there might be funky CSS issues. Try it out and if you have suggestions, bugs, swiss bank account numbers, let me know in the GitHub Issues. It's pretty easy to leverage off of the ones I have built, and let me know if there is another one at HTML5 Up worth Wordpress-ifying. This was certainly "Fun With a Purpose" to make. I may have spent more time than worth mocking up the fake cover: [caption id="attachment_65821" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The full cover of an old magazine I appropriated just for this blog post[/caption] Featured Image: A photoshopped version of a magazine cover of a September 1986 issue of Highlights magazine, found in Reddit, not really licensed. Sometimes, well, oh heck, I really needed an image to remix. Send in the lawyers. Each May we organize a year-end "Ocotillo" retreat for faculty and staff in our system to spend some focused time on instructional technology issues. This year, the theme was "Guess Who's Coming To Learn?": What do we know about our students and their motivations for learning? Are our planning activities based on our own assumptions and experiences? There is plenty of literature about the various Gen-X, Gen-Y characteristics, but are we paying attention?To better understand the attributes, desires, expectations of our current and future students, we have invited an expert in organizational and social demographics to help us figure out Who is Coming to Learn at Maricopa. To help set the stage, we created the word Association activity. This was a quick and simple survey a number of faculty collected from their students, where we collected their first responses to some common educational and technical terms. The results were fascinating. (more…) It was March 27 ordered and on its way March 30 and due to arrive April 4. From China to Scottsdale in 6 days. I knew the thing was fast, but zowie! I'm still thumbs up on using Google Reader -- remember kids, there is no "best" web application, and just because I say its great does not mean something else might work better for you. Not only am I prone to be wrong, but there is just no way in the fast changing webscape for anyone to say definitively "A" is better than "B". That said, there is one major feature Google Reader is lapsing behind Bloglines on- the ability to have a cut and paste code "clip" to have Google Reader generate a blog roll on another site-- their current code does an elegant job of being able to create JavaScript cutlets to display aggregated contents form folders or tags, so howmuch Google Brainpower would it take to just make something that returns a list with titles/links of subscribed feeds? The data is there, as it does provide an OPML export. So I'm still using Bloglines solely to generate my blog pile. The process now is to export from Google Reader my OPML, go to bloglines, erase all feeds, and then import the OPML. How efficient is that, eh? There are numerous others who have been requesting this for months at the Google Groups for reader. It would seem there might be a WordPress plugin that renders content of OPML files, but I came up rather short, some overly complex for the task. And in Googling for PHP code for OPML parsing, it turns out the code is already built into the admin parts of WordPress, as there are functions to import an OPML file or URL to generate a set of WP "LInks". So one static way would be to just do that as it, which would give me data in the form of a linkroll I could roll into a WP template. But then it's not dynamic. I've not coded an WP plugins but may mess around to see if there is a way to use the code already in admin/link-import.php and admin/link-parse-opml.php to rough this out. Ideally a decent code should cache a copy locally so it does not have to keep yanking the OPML from Google. Gripe number 2 has to do with the hijacking of copy-able links on Google Search results. I depend heavily on Google search to find appropriate links for just about everything I do-- my repetitive steps are command-K to put the cursor in the firefox search box, type keywords, hit ENTER, and hopefully copy the link from results where I need the link. But for the last 8 weeks or more, Google changed their search results. For example, a few barks back I was writing about captchas, so I ran a Google search to find the linkable reference- my results looked like: So if it looks like the second result, for the CAPTCHA project, looks like the relevant link is it, and the mouseover status suggests this link goes to http://www.captcha.net/, a right/control click should allow my to copy the URL. But rather than getting http://www.captcha.net/ what I end up with is http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res &cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.captcha.net%2F &ei=souURcndCY2YgwSLn7xu &usg=__AXO1lTUqWXwO4A8DJRJa6_7LCrQ= &sig2=0xXHsCensk_2Kb0X5QNSRQ which in effect does send me, when clicked, to the intended site, but it passes me through a Google script which is likely gathering some data before sending me to where I thought I was going. So now, to grab the URL, I either have to follow the link itself, and copy it from the address bar, or, do a mouse select to grab the text of the URL from the search results. This is sounding awfully trivial, and for most users, it pretty much gives them what they are aiming for, and gives Google all the piles of data to improve their service (that is what is occurring, correct?), but it just seems to happen without much notice that Google changes their results. In fact, it happened last year, and in October 2005 I noted how the behavior went back. Heck, maybe each year is just a ratings sweep for them. Thus ends my Google gripes. Except for one- I wish more folks would publicly pester for them to somehow apply their mega-billion dollar stock option genius to remove the incentive that rewards comment form spammers who work feverishly to get their porn, pill, casino links inserted into the web sites of millions of frustrated bloggers and web site managers. Recently, I removed over 500 of these from the nets of my SpamKarma 2 plugins- they never saw the light of day on my blog, but in what un-parallel universe do I need 1000 animal sex URLs per minute flooding my way. For the folks that "do no evil" you sure provide a lot of incentive and enable financial reward for what seems to me is rather evil and hurtful practice. Google, do something about spam link insertions! photo credit: lordog Continuing the gastronomic theme for my WordCamp experience, here are a few quick things I took away from the experience (for complete coverage, see Andrew Mager's live blogging) WordCamp's t-shirt colors (brown this year) seem to follow directly the lead of Northern Voice ;-) Almost everyone I met was with some company, start-ups to large to individual consultants, people just creating themes, and were making a living selling services based on WordPress. Search Engine Optimization- I do buy the importance of making sure your stuff is well found, but the obsession with tweaking the game for the sole purpose of more rank is... well not my bowl of biscuits. If it your thing, check out Stephen O'Grady's preso If you have a site based on LOLCATS, you have lots of good images for slides -- see Ben Huh's preso on Virality. He is one shrewd and funny guy and thinks I look like my icon. All of the I Can Has Cheezburger fleet is run on hosted WordPress (and he says, "we are simple only like 3 plugins!". The complex submission process for GraphJam is one person in Vietnam processing the incoming submissions and emailing back to the main team. That's one flat world. Microformats are quietly at work w/o us knowing it. Tantek Celik opened my awareness to hCard and a FireFox Addon that makes it simple to extract contact data from a web page (e.g. a google map search) and one click add that to your address book. Microformat stuff for WordPress http://microformats.org/wiki/hAvatar Concept of"syndicated" profiles is interesting. If site B uses flickr to authenticate me to create and account, it can auto populate my profile from flickr, it not only does that, but should I change my profile in flickr, such changes are propagated to Site B. Tantek also showed some prototype of profile sydnication tools -- see DiSo http://code.google.com/p/diso/ Cool tools from Lorelle Google Reader preview (greasemonkey) Absolute Comments plugin is a comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first. Greasemonkey Script: Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress greatly condenses view of Akimet to make it easier to comb through the crap Woopro website tracking State of the Word (Matt) - more than 2.6 million self hosted (wordpress.org) blogs + 3.8 miliion on Wordpress.com. Coming soon- interface improvements, in-place updates (one click built in). Who has the most active plugins (max was 70+ for someone in the back). There is someone out there who has 1200 wordpress plugins installed, more than 500 active WordPress has a "turbo" link in top right of Admin dashboard that downloads via GoogleGears bits of the site to make it run more quickly http://tinyurl.com/464lkb BuddyPress looks compelling - social networking plug and play built on WordPress. ""BuddyPress will transform a vanilla install of WordPressMU into a social networking platform" See presentation from WordCamp "Crazyhorse" user study of experimental WP interface "with lasers" tracking user eye movement is a great approach! WordPress 3.0.. with lasers! (I made that up) Its fun to have a WP Rapper around http://www.theseorapper.com/ Kathy Sierra is an amazing presenter, very passionate about users "kicking ass" "getting above the suck threshold", etc. Wish she would blog again. Among the list of "wow it was 25 years ago" was this Fast Company article that came across my twitter stream, “Myst” at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies. In Myst, you explore an ornately detailed island that leads to other vaguely Victorian sci-fi worlds (called ages) created by a character named Atrus. You’re presented with lushly detailed screens—punctuated by animations—depicting the scene around you, and can point and click your way through puzzles that feel woven perfectly into the tapestry of the game. Despite its largely static nature, its groundbreaking pre-rendered visuals (which many people called photorealistic at the time) made Myst feel like the first convincing virtual reality experience, at least in the sense of feeling physically present in a fictional world. With some help from CloudConvert I turned that webm video into a gif and popped it into giphy. Did you know there was not one gif found on a search that brought up the game? via GIPHY I cannot say that I am included in any of the three items in the title, but do have warm memories of this CD ROM. In my early years as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges in 1995 got the idea to run some software evaluations on Games and Simulations, publishing everything as I did to our web site. That site is gone, but I have my own archive of Shall We Teach with a Game? The project was among a few other software evaluations our center ran. We would sponsor faculty to explore software and complete an evaluation that was likely created by our instructional designers. From the Games and Simulations introduction, we explained the interest (the "information highware certainly dates the writing"): In these days of Information Highways, CD-ROM, multimedia, Nintendo-Sega-3DO, it is difficult to recapture the excitement when Atari introduced two movable paddles and the floating ball that made up the video game "Pong." Nevertheless, a key factor in the commercial success of computer games are their engaging degree of user interaction and how an individual is drawn into the constructed environment. Many early educational computer applications offered little more than electronic page flipping or"click and read." It has not significantly changed with the emergence of multimedia, where applications become "click and see." However, a new breed of games has appeared, a melding of the interactive entertainment of games and education, called "edutainment." The Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI) is exploring the use of such games and simulations for teaching and learning in the community college environment. For instructors, these packages can provide time-saving individual practice or simulate complex representations of real-world systems. The question we are asking here is "What is the value and place of computer games and simulations in the learning process?" The programs we have selected are loosely grouped into two categories. The first group are simulations, in which as a user you set and monitor variables in a model of a real system that reacts back in a continuous feedback loop. Many of these programs come with well-developed instructor guides. The second category are more or less exploration/adventure games, where you may receive little guidance as you enter its world, and must rely on your curiosity and risk to solve a mystery or unravel a tale. Myst was definitely in the Exploration category. It game you nothing in terms of directions, that was the idea. For each title like Myst, we included the evaluations from participating faculty (I am pleased to note we offered this opportunity to both full time and adjunct faculty members): Learning the Game-- Evaluators were asked to take the mindset of a potential student who migh be using the software as part of a class assignment. In this phase, the evaluators were given a step by step introduction or instructed to follow a provided tutorial. The purpose was to focus on the functionality of the program. Exploring of the Game-- In the second phase, evaluators reviewed instructors guides or lessons (if provided) and were asked to complete a lesson. If such materials were not available, the evaluators were asked to "freely" explore the program, this time from the perspective of an instructor. Evaluating the Game-- Finally, the evaluators recorded their results on a form including scaled response questions as well as written comments, including how they thought the particular package could be used in the area that they teach. My favorite parts were seeing the different ways teachers could think about using the Myst environment for learning activities, so it was not just to solve the puzzle. I always remembered the Spanish teacher who suggested requiring students to explain how to get to a certain part of the island in Spanish or describing the various surroundings. Of course, many reviewers described how much time it took to navigate (one could never get anywhere). With some great irony, I admit I could never get too far in the game. I suck at video games. I was most impressed with the suppression of the computer interface in the game, it was none. From the review I wrote for our journal: The elegance of Myst is in its simple interface. You will not find rows of icon-adorned buttons, numerous pull-down menus, or floating dialog boxes. The Millers note that in real life there are no buttons labeled "Click here to go forward". And since at that time I was doing most of my media in HyperCard, it was quite a shocker to find that was the engine that ran the game (lots of heavy mods a top, and re-written of course when it went to Windows). It did have a strong influence on a later (now quite dated) project I did, where I aimed in Macromedia Director, to create the same kind of environment for Negative Reinforcement University [caption id="attachment_66772" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Front Entrance to NRU. Where are the button?[/caption] [caption id="attachment_66771" align="aligncenter" width="400"] What kind of menu is this?[/caption] Anyhow, this was a wee bit much of a long bit of nostalgia for this old projects. But thanks Myst for the inspiration, even if I could never really get far on the island. Maybe I am still there. Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Classic Game Myst Is Being Turned Into A TV Show flickr photo by BagoGames shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Not that it matters on any cosmic scale, but for what it's likely not worth, a blog funk has settled slowly in 'round here. I'm up to my ears in various web dabblings, way behind in checking out cool new stuff from elsewhere and others, still waiting for may MacBookPro to be fixed, still waiting for my lame hired contractors to finish work on our pool, not desperate enough to blog the weather (118 degrees last week in Phoenix, summer rains finally came Sunday night), lying about not blogging the weather, not running enough or at all, not feeling much inspired to take photos, just... funk. Nuff said (or babbled). Might be back later. We just added a new feature to the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX)- every person that creates an account in the MLX receives their own unique URL that produces a publicly viewable web page that lists all packages entered by that person. For example, my packages are one link away: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/mine.php?id=160 If you notice, the results also provide an RSS version for the same content (more on that below) This is presented to each person inside the area they create their packages (the "loading dock", in a few days I will blog an overview of the dock since those outside Maricopa cannot enter), but here is a screen shot. [View image] Our thought was this might be of value to faculty, so they could have a single link on their home page to show all they have contributed, or a URL to email to their department chair to let him/her know how much work they had done, etc. I created a simple demo for this at an MLX presentation yesterday for one of our colleges, taking some libertry with the home page of my colleague and fellow technologist Donna Gaudet. Starting with Donna's home page, I mocked up a version that added left side links to "her" collection as well as all the ones submitted by her college (see it in action). Then I showed a second version of Donna's home page that had at the bottom (scroll down) the same content but embeded via RSS. Do you get this? With the insertion of one line of JavaScript, an instructor's home page can have a dynamically updated (by us updating the RSS feed) listing of items that instructor has added to the MLX. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Basajaun I flinch a bit at such generalization, but "based on research" means something- in Wired, Clive Thompson speculates "Why Kids Can't Search": We're often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google's results list. But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren't assessing information sources on their own merit"”they're putting too much trust in the machine. And tus we stand affirmed- This tech whiz kids are not so savvy. Or We are still better. (?) Yet, I believe the questions being asked are wrong. "Kids" are given some assignment and want to get it done as fast as possible, to satisfy what is being set in front of them. They give the top results...because the question they are asked to "research" does not matter much to them. When we talk of searching, we are talking the basic most bottom of the pyramid structure motivational task. Frankly, I don;t care if kids can "search"-- I want to know what happens when they seek. I expect the results change dramatically when the seeking matters, when there is an investment in the results (not just a grade). What happens when the study goes to looking what happens when kids (gawd I hate saying that again and again) are looking for an audio track to mix in their video, when they are trying to find out how to build something... I bet they are much more critical in the result- because they matter. Thus I put little stock into these surveys because... well, I am sure everyone can remember being given rote assignments in school. Like 10,000 times. And this blanket conclusion of "Kids Can't do X", well I can think of plenty of exceptions. What comes to mind was in 2008, when I got a chance to visit Brian Crosby's 6th grade students in Reno. It was after I had skyped in to his class while I was in Iceland. As I was trying to tell the kids about things I saw there, like volcano heated homes and the northern lights, they were busily googling and asking me if this matched- they were in no way plucking the top results, but were connecting. Kids can't search because the questions we are asking are not big enough. Let's stop patting ourselves on our backs for our critical thinking superiority. And it's not just kids, folks it is you too, when you ask questions rather than seek answers. For a large chunk of my career, especially in the last decade, most of my reputation for knowing something about technology came because people would call ro email asking a question, I would google the results, and send them a summary and links. I was not answering their question at all, but was seeking the answers. And it did matter to me because I wanted to help them. This is not new, and I am not going to name people, but I regularly come across questions from some of my colleagues who are deep in the ed tech game -- that I am able to answer by googling the query. And I am finding some of this bleeding into my thoughts on Rhizomatic Learning - seeking is very much a part of this way of-- being-- it is more than a "model" or education or something to "integrate into a classroom"- we ought to be pushing a way of being in this world. The nomadic way is seeking; the worker/solider way is searching. We seek when it matters. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by The U.S. Army cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Ð…olo I'm far from the first (or last) person to note this, but twitter is patrolled by some interesting automated bots. The obvious ones are cute- I noticed this a few months back, when I tweeted some snarky reference to Lebowski, that the @BotLobowksi would respond with some mention to something like tying the room together. It's cute, right? I had another one today- I saw Dean Shareski tweet something about a failed food preparation, and it reminded me a bit of Office Space, so I tweeted something about he should not forgot to fill out his TPS Reports. Ha ha, me just being a smart-ass (and Dean is still not replying much to my taunting tweets; I am losing my touch). But in a matter of minutes, I get a relevant response from @Initech_Bill: Again, cute- but look at what it is doing- it pays attention to twitter for references to relevant content (e.g. phrases from the movie Office Space), and replies, but with something that is also tapping into the same reference. Look how well Bill's twitter profil matches the character: They are not all the same reply- it is tapping into a database of different replies. Bill's profile leads to an info page on the twitter bot, other ones created, and a github posted library of code one could in theory use to create their own twitter bot. Big deal- what use is creating twitter bots for responding to movie references? You should think more broadly, it is showing that twitter can be more than a social media wind bag channel or silly status space, that ti can actually be a somewhat intelligent (used loosely) communication channel. So there are a host of services that can deliver info based on using twitter messaging. e.g using it to add appointments to a Google Calendar or tracking packages, or a really easy means to send yourself reminders. It goes even farther- there is a whole service for setting up such services, @t411. I just tried on Demand Maps via twitter by sensing a public message: @t411 map Strawberry AZ And it returned a mobile friendly static map image- you could use these while lost to get sent directly a map of a specific location (might be easier than fumbling around with map apps?) Its not that it is the best way to get mapped data, but it was done dynamically, and on demand. So now I begin to wonder, what sorts of services we do in education, teaching, that might leverage this form of communication? The tech is not hard- it is pretty much what one of the ds106 students did last Spring to create a bot to post the current content playing on ds106 radio. That simplicity is the interesting part to me, and then what could be done by adding more advanced capability. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Ð…olo An assignment reminder bot? an FAQ bot? A bot that responds when someone mentions having trouble with a particular class. ideas? Twitter Bots can be made for doing useful stuff! flickr foto It's Back!available on flickr There's joy in Sun-ville! My MacBookPro has returned, outfitted with a new fan, logic board, and something else I am forgetting. And for speed, I added another 1 Gb of RAM. Let's Rock! With all new guts... it was almost 2 weeks since I took in the MBP because of the extra-ordinary loud fan noises (much more than the rumor-ed "mooing" sounds). Yep, it's fan was bad, along with some wiring doo-dad, and while it was in the Apple repair, it got a new logic board as well. I am eager to transfer back all the working files, and retire my 4 year old iBook which served admirably well as a backup. Google has spoken: Web links tagged with rel=nofollow shall not get PageRank. A grand rejoicing has been heard across the land. Well, at least from my office. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. This means that blog owners can update their software/temnplates so that any URL inserted into a comment field/Trackback ping will not be followed or counted by Google's indexing spider. Do you hear that, spam roaches, the incentive is Gone. Go away. Die. Then eat s**t, Or do it in any order. Over the next days, I will eb updating every MT blog I own with the new Nofollow plugin, which works like a charm so far. then all comment fields on our MLX site will do the same. The more blogs that rig this up, the better. The more web forms that attach rel=nofollow to any link shoved inside, the sooner spammers will implode in their own feces. Woohoo! Woohoo! Yippie Yi Yo! I might have been a bit premature to share the wiki links for my New Zealand workshops. Apparently the server here got rather overwhelmed with traffic, because it was pretty much unusuable during my workshops down south at Manukau Institute of Technology. At 10:00 am I was pretty much up the wiki without a paddle... until I realized that the day before I experimented with loading all the wiki content to a server back in Arizona. Brilliant! I was saved! I did lose some of the additions I made last night, but I was much better off that trying to describe a wiki and content in words only. Be careful of living and dieing by the wiki ;-) Please do me a huge favor-- if you are interest in looking at this wiki content, please hit my Maricopa mirror: http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki It has all the same content (though I need to make some minor updates about 9 hours from now). That way I can use the best of what bandwidth they have here. Here is a nice resource for MovableType-rs, The MovableType Knowledge Base is a wiki chock full of tips and suggestions. This Wiki is dedicated to helping users of MovableType, a content management system. This is a place to add tips, tricks, instructions, and definitions. Topics are editable so everyone can add to them. These topics are not for posting MT support questions. Use the fabulous MTSupportForums for that. it is well written and a worthwhile bookmark for anyone dealing with setting up MT or going beyond the basic templates. See for example a description of TrackBack or the overview of MT Templates.. Of the things I hang on my personal Google home page (well you cannot see it beyond a snapshot, but, it is how you can create a mashup of content from many sources, feeds, photos, gmail, search tools. totally customizable), my favorite is the flickr photo wallet module. Very simply, everytime you go "home" you see a random photo from yours (or any other) flickr account. I've tried a few, but most of them do not reach back to all of your photos. So my memory game is to glance at the page when it loads and try to remember where or what the picture is from (I recently crossed the 2000 photo count, no big compared to others, but goes back to 2004). This one stumped me- I could not tell what it was, where it was from. Was it insects? Sushi? Some bad conference buffet? Dog doo? Nope- had to check the original it was amber like "gum", hard mineral like products from New Zealand Kauri trees, from my visit to the Kauri Museum in 2004. So this is maybe a stretch, but a collection of mystery photos posted to a particular flickr account, tag, set, could be a fun educational activity, where a random one is syndicated to a page, be it this way, or via a flickr badge. Thanks to the way the open web works, I just put into play a fun new option for my pechaflickr site/game/thing. Nothing is changed with the way it has worked. At the bottom of the site is a link to a Google form that collects info from those willing to to share of how they are using pechaflickr. I get a response like one every 5th full moon. But this message I got from Heather, a grade 6 teacher in Alaska, presented a great opportunity to tinker with the code. I wanted to use pechaflickr for our spelling and vocabulary words. I love that I can type in words and the pictures are great. However, could you provide a setting where the word I've typed in will remain hidden or secret while the pictures are playing? That way, my students can make connections using the pictures and guess the word I have chosen. I tried this with a small group (covering the word on the bottom of the screen) (I don't think any of them caught on to it being in the link at the top of the screen as well) and they loved it. This would be so great for my language arts class! This is beyond great as it is an idea I never thought of. Nor might ever. It turned the idea inside out of using random photos to practice improv, to using random photos to try and find commonalities in the imagery. Before I yak about it, why not try it? Here is a launcher for what I call "Heather" mode pechaflickr Nothing needed to be done about the way pechaflickr grabs and presents photo from flickr, just needed to add a parameter to the URL query string, add some conditionals, set up the way it would present the results without revealing the tag. The other "twist" was that the way it worked before there was a part of the url string you could tell right away what the tag was, like http://pechaflickr.net/?tag=dogt&s=10&i=20&u=1 With some magic of the str_rot13 php function (someone wrote a version that works in JavaScript, in fact this whole site of php functions recoded as Javascript is a programmer's bag of gold)) See how the same URL is redone- the tag is obfuscated and even padded with extra random characters. http://pechaflickr.net/?t=krpufmx8xwqbt&s=10&i=20&u=1 This is not secure enough to protect your bank account, but we are just masking the string passed as part of a parameter string. Speaking of which, this night have been easier and more elegant if I had database behind the site, then if could be called be something simple like http://pechaflickr.net/?id=3443 -- all the parameters could be stored in a database. I kind of like the rogue nature of not being built ontop of another database. The new option is there under the toggle for "Advanced Options" (which I wonder if 99% of the people even look at): Like before, you can change the default pecha kucha options of 20 slides 20 seconds each, but not the new check box for "Heather" mode. You ca test it out first by clicking "play" as normal, seeing what kinda of images show up (it's not much of a preview because each time you run it you get different photos. It never states what the tag is, and when the round is done, it puts it out there as a question: and is revealed by clicking the first blue button (I managed to work this out offline while traveling in a plane today) And it can even be tweeted. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/694268291611791361 This is the same address the launcher offers, a special "heather" mode launcher http://pechaflickr.net/heather.php?t=43cjrngure&h=1&s=3&i=10&u=1 It's mildly tested and likely has bugs. I checked with Heather to see if was okay I named it after her -- "hidden tag mode" sounds more dull than "heather mode" (she said yes). Give it a try, tell me what you think! http://pechaflickr.net/. You will find some more explanation as well as the most frequently asked question (inappropriate images) on the notes page. I'm pretty excited about putting someone's great idea into action, and its fitting, since pechaflickr was actually not my idea at all. That's the thing about ideas. They are like beneficial rogue waves. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by DeeAshley under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license[/caption] Top / featured image: A google image search for "Wave" narrowed to ones licensed for re-use (which looks like it reduces the pool by 95%). Scrolled unti I got this one from flickr-- photo by jdrephotography http://flickr.com/photos/jdrephotography/8406541465 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license Remember the "S" in RSS standing for Simple? I've gone through several gyrations [1] [2] [3] in trying to leverage RSS-ified calendar data to push content to a blog. Calendar information is just not as neatly boxed like Title, Link, & Description. What I wanted is a web-based calendar tool (lots of them), that I could give others editing rights, went beyond the fill-out-forms-click-repeat process, and it would not only generate a normal calendar view, but also an events listing suitable for a blog side bar. What I really sought as something that would list both upcoming events and past events. Google calendar certainly fills out the needs for the front end. The closest for the sidebar publishing was the iCal-events plug-in for WordPress, which could use the iCal data format published by gCalendar. What's nice is it bad built in caching scheme, so it was not hitting gCalendar for every page load. It had the ability to sort future and past events differently, although I think that an events past calendar should list them in order with the most recent, and then receding in time (this plugin listed the oldest, and moved forward). I thought some simple hacking of the loop controls might get me there, but I only succeeded in making rivers PHP errors. The real rub was that gCalendar allows you to have "no-time" events that span, say 2 weeks- they appear as a nice solid bar across a calendar, indicating an extended event. however, the iCal-events plugin saw this as a new event every day, and thus my sidebar listing 5 newer events was blasted full. I tried to hack a way for it to list just once (had some better luck, but not optimal). The other route would require making it a daily repeated event, which is apparently tagged differently in iCal format (and if you think XML is scary looking, just try to put your eyes on iCal data, yuck). I was happy with the GCalendar tools to put the month view in my page (example) and realized I was trying just too damn hard to list 5 upcoming events in a sidebar. The solution was just to drop the RSS/iCal syndication, and create a mini WP template file that was just the content I wanted (in HTML list format style), use a PHP include statement in the sidebar template, and just edit it by hand. Not as automatic, but does the job. On other WordPress hack-age fronts, I spent a large chunk of time setting up some web forms that are inside my WP site. Well, not really, since they are actually my own PHP pages, but use the WP set up tools to have them use the WP header and footer. It's rather easy, just top the PHP file with: ..... my cool content This way I get my custom content wrapped in my same blog header, footer, styles, etc. This way I can run my own forms, like http://www.nmc.org/sl/join.php. And this created some weird problem with the PodPress plugin, requiring a modification (oops, looks like it was fixed in a later version, another update to do). The next thing was trying to incorporate these handspun web pages into a WordPress Page (big "p") so it could be one of the top navigation links on each page. This required a plugin to allow some PHP code, and a custom page template so I could include the sidebar on the pages... and some tweaks to the header.php template so they would not use the single column main layout... and re-adjusting of some of the original content so it would display as static content. The trick is here that my WordPress Page http://www.nmc.org/sl/directory/ passes the form processing to my custom one at http://www.nmc.org/sl/directory.php (the latter can also be an entry point as well). And then I find out the WordPres's autoformatting decides to put its own <br /> tags around my form's SELECT elements, event after taking the entire form and yanking all line breaks. Weird. Some another bit go googling found the TextControl plug-in, that allows you, per post, or per-Page, to turn off Autoformatting (or use those other things like TextPattern....). It's all pretty complex now, but I am excited about the feel. Especially when minutes after posting our new features, we got a nice comment from one of principles at Electric Sheep Company. This in turn turned up a bug in the Blix template ours is based on (I have seen this boo-boo on lots of WP templates), that the Comments template (comments,php) uses the wrong ID class for each comment, so the WordPress generate links don't clip down to the comment. This is yet another simple edit, change line 28 from flickr foto Workshop in Dallasavailable on flickr Materials, binders and laptops, for our 3 day workshop for the NMC Marcus project. Storymining is the slick name of the 3-day workshop we (NMC) are doing in Dallas. This is part of our Marcus Project which is helping 24 art museums across the nation of Texas to become designers and producers of rich interactive web content using Pachyderm software and the approaches of digital storytelling (with help from Joe Lambert at the Center for Digital Storytelling). It's an energetic group and by tomorrow, they will all be knee deep in doing pachy content, as we scramble to assist as well as give crash courses as needed in audio recording/editing, video interview techniquies, digital video editing, scanning and image manipulation, and the odd need to digitize cassettes or video tapes. The project web site is a definite placeholder, using the NMC existing statuc web page content. My big project, affectionately termed "NMC 2.0" is lumbering along, as I try to flesh out ideas for a rich, mixed. aggregated, aggregatable "community driven" site, ostensibly fueled by Drupal. I'll be bugging D'Arcy for advice, part of my strategy of looking closely at technology that People I Respect Use. I'd be blogging my progress on this, but it has been nudged gently aside by new things that have popped up all this month (Second Life, getting new sites up with MediaWiki, aiming my imaginative shotgun at sub contractors who do not show up), but takes priortity when I get out if this stinking Dallas heat to some comfy Phoenix heat next week. The other things I've been stokled about is a concept I've known for a while that has been bopping around the back of my brain- reBlog. It's hard to encapsulate briefly, but it is a set of Loosely Joined Tools that can take an RSS aggregator one step further- you load it with feeds of relavant sites, and a human reviews, and flags specific items that are then easily/automatically "reblogged" on its own site, alomg with some optional commentary. And a side benefit is that it generates new RSS based on the reblogged content, as well as OPML of the aggregated feeds. I'm prototyping for a pending project that will do well to have a group of external experts do the "filtering" and reblogging. The software was not too hairy to set up, and it has plugins to make it grap content to publish in MovableType and WordPress (Drupal in progress). The WP plugin was a bit crude, and did not add a whole lot because my users would have to master the reblog tool ("reFeed") interface as well as WP. Instead, I am using a provided reBlog RPC plugin that just routes the items published via reFeed to a WP blog- as long as it is set up with style sheets, a pretty face, then none of my editors need to see the second interface of WordPress edit screens. The code is well written, the documentation sparse, but good responses to the forums at SourceForge. I'm a bit stoked at toying with a cool new tool. The first part of the trip to Australia was a three day drive from Arizona to outside Chico California, mostly for my dog Felix to have a place to stay with friends, rather than a month in the kennel. This trip included a crossing of Death Valley, scooting along the most majestic mountains of the Sierra Nevada in eastern California (including the highest peak in the lower 48 states, Mt Whitney looming over Lone Pine, CA, I’ve been to the top). We zipped through Bishop, where I spent much time in my Geology field work for my MS thesis, then up past Mono Lake, around Lake Tahoe, over the Sierra Nevada in I-80 and on to Chico CA. We dealt (well I did) with a blown tire outside of Tecopa Hot Springs, with a detour for a fix in Pahrump, Nevada: Uh Oh flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We crossed Death Valley under perfect weather 2017/365/303 Convergence Over Death Valley flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) stopping at a sea level sign to repeat a photo from 29 years ago and then took in the grand peaks. The Big Ones flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) After a stay over in Bridgeport, CA (where it went down to freezing, luckily I decided not to camp on this trip, we went around Lake Tahoe, taking a break at Sand Harbor state park. Relaxing on the Beach flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And finally got to our friends Kim and Jeff outside of Chico, CA. A day and a half to get Felix settled (it took about a minute) and the flying leg of the trip commenced.. including a long jaunt from Los Angeles to Melbourne, 15 walloping hours in the air. Next Stop… Melbourne flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Sleeping about 6-7 hours worked well for the adjustment in Melbourne, as did the first of many Flat White coffees.. Behold the Flat White flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Featured Image: Red Dog in His Element flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) UIh-oh, I am going to be busy now. From Ben Hammersley by way of Stephan Downes (who is a cat-person) comes a reference to Dogster ( "catster.com" is registered but no site is there!). Welcome to Dogster ...where every dog has a webpage. Dogster lets you view and save photos of dogs, search by breed, size, name, hometown and more! Search by Friendliest, Newest or Site Favorites. See who is Dog of the Week, read the dog advice column I Like it Ruff, or check out the Barking Dog Newswire. If that's not enough, click Random Order and sniff virtual butt all day. Read about maintaining paw in who is the spoiler? you or me? - the newest entry in I Like It Ruff and congratulations Woodstock you're Dog of the Week. Finally, a special bark out to Singapore who is now the biggest contingency outside of North America! Bark bark! Very quickly, I was able to make entries for Mickey, the CDB mascot, as well as his card-playing sister, Cadu. Will have to return to add some of our dogs that have gone on to Rainbow Bridge, Fudge, Skamper, and Dominoe. Okay, so maybe you might think that Dogster is right up there with all of the other whacko web sites (like Pigeon Search, CheeseNet, or Mike the Headless Chicken for President) "places I cannot people spend so much time frittering about"-- BUT... Think of every entry on dogster representing a real-world item, e.g. what if they were like learning objects? dog objects?"dog-jects"? Dogster has a simple interface, a metaphor used consistently, it is inviting and fun to a lay person (e.g. it was not designed for a library scientist). Think of all the info on the dogster profile as... meta-data? It is! It is structured information that describes the "object", the dogs. It includes media (photos). best of all, the entry of the meta-data is simple, a web form that takes but a few minutes to complete. Furthermore, the dogster, ties together the dog-jects in automatic and user customizable ways- all of the dogs I enter are automatically associated with each other, ("Meet Mickey's Family:) without any need for me to create the associations. You can build your own custom collections of favorite dog-jects ("Add Mickey to Your Corral"), referrals ("Tell a friend about Mickey"). The dog-jects are searchable, and there are dynamic views ("random", "newest first", "longest on site", "frendliest"). Okay there is no RSS, but it would take about an hour for them to add that. So Dogster does a lot of things right that so-called "Learning Object Repositories" miss- ease of use, inviting metaphor, recombine information in flexible ways, fun, intuitive interface, database backend, simple meta-data entry... But most of all, there is a personal motivating reason to enter dog-jects-- after all there are 4316 there now (Feb 2004) and the first one was posted only in July 2003. I have gone to the dogs.... flickr foto Multiple Browsers = Impact of Web 2.0available on flickr For reasons likely harder to write, I now have numerous iterations of myself at multiple web application sites, including 3 Google accounts (mail, reader, docs, calendar), 2 del.icio.us accounts, 3 flickr accounts. I hate having to log in and log out to do tasks, so I rely on multiple web browsers I can have myself logged in as different entities, using Firefox, Safari, and added today, Camino. Firefox is for all of my cogdogblog stuff, a Google home page, a Google calendar (which actually mixes shared items from a series of other calendares I have in a separate NMC account), perusing my daily blog fixes in Google reader, a del.icio.us account that i tag for multiple projects, my primary cogdog flickr collection. In Safari, are a few services used exclusively for the NMC Campus Observer, our Second Life outpost. I have a completely separate del.icio.us account used to tag items to push to the blog as a resource collection as well as a separate flickr account just for our SL photos (also pushed to the blog) For a new web project to be opened next week, I had a need for yet another Google Reader account (to aggregate resources, and use the Share features to create a clipping and RSS feed we could push to a new blog), and yet another flickr account, for another collection of photos to be syndicated to the blog. I hope this trend will stop soon.... but if it does not, I can still run Opera and ... On my PC's I use two web browsers- Firefox to test the font size differences across Mac and PC, and Internet Explorer to see how bad the CSS support blows up, followed by a few hours of tweaking in a web standard browser to try and adjust. Of course, now I need multiple PCs so I can see the differences in IE 6 vs 7. I'm not using much in the way of web services on the PC side, though in Firefox I use the google browser synch tools to keep bookmarks and logins aligned- its worked great now across 2 macs and 2 pcs. There is absolutely nothing novel or prophetic about talking about smartphones (a word I loathe to use, but heck, I can live finally with "Web 2.0") as potentially replacing computers as a primary device. I got to try it out this weekend. This was not a planned exercise. After visiting friends in Phoenix this weekend, I returned home (a 2 hour drive normally, extended to 5 due to highway closure) and was dismayed to realize I had left my backpack at the restaurant where I attended a holiday party. Dismayed is a #&@^* understatement. In that pack was my MacBookPro, my iPad, my DSLR (and extra lens), my portable hard drive with my photo archive (THAT was backed up before I left).... I was able to call the restaurant 10 minutes before they closed, and they assured me the backpack was found and could be picked up. Still. I was without my main camera for doing dailyphotos. The computer was backed up on TimeMachine before I left, and I do have an old one, but I decided to use only my iPhone over the weekend (it would be Sunday until I could fetch the pack, thanks to my frield Coop who fetched it Saturday night). This is not to say this was an eye opening experience, but frankly, for ordinary tasks- email, twitter, web browsing, even doing photography on the phone and uploading, I was able to do it all. I am also not saying that I would ever suggeste I could replace my laptop with a phone, but can see more and more the potential for being laptopless (now there is an awkward word to split at the end of a line). Of course I could not do (serious) video editing, audio editing, or programming on the mobile, but there's a lot of tasks I can do. And its just going to get better and better. I got all my stuff back, a huge relief, and after 2 days of dusting my stupidity for leaving my gear behind, it was a worthwhile experience to be untethered from the laptop and keyboard. I suggest giving it a try sometime, just for the heck of it. Today was another treat to hang out here with Rowan Peter as we had a few adventures in the Melbourne CBD playing theremin, opening the StoryBox, and pleading with some Canadian to come ice skating. It was so nice of him to take a day off of work (though that seemed to be a bonus) and also to prop me up via hotspot tethering all day from his mobile phone. We did a snatch of live broadcasts on ds106 radio, though I learned a lessone I did not know- if there are no listners, then the twitter bot does not go into action, so I should have tweeted out some advance notice rather then counting on the stream info being relayed. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Stop one was the Giant Theremin I had visited last Monday. We played around there bout 15 minutes doing a live broadcast. It was interesting to watch a number of people walk right through the trigger zone, just tilt their head, and keep on walking. Even when a throng of school girls went by, and we asked them to try moving around, only about 3 or 4 actually did- most just stood there still and gawked. So I agree it may not truly be a theremin (a commenter on my YouTube video called it a "Terpistone") because it is movement via video that generates sounds via a computer program. There are theremin type whistles, but also percussion sounds and piano runs. But it is unpredictable. Our crowing performance was Rowan spelling out "ds106" and me spelling out "4life". I will have some audio to post here, but it may take all night to upload given the slow crawl of my hotel internet. Giant Theremin Live on ds106 radio Next was a stop for morning coffee in one of the cafe lanes off of Flinders. We ducked into one of the colorful graffiti of the Melbourne Lane Ways, which seems to offer an enlightened urban view of graffiti art in allowing high end work, that somehow co-mingles with more crude, and they all co-exist (or so it seems) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog We then wandered to the Sofitel Hotel, where a perhaps lesser known fact is that on the 35th floor, there is a mens room with a glass wall view of the city. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Go figure. I got a panorama shot there. We then went towards the Victoria Public Library. I found two 106 photos within 100 meters of each other. The guard at the library looked in my backpack, but did not ask about the metal box with all the stickers. We set up the StoryBox for a while, but got a little bored waiting for action. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Our stomachs growled so loudly, we had to leave and get lunch. Rowan picked out a delightful Greek restaurant (there were three within the same black labeled "authentic"). They were serious at this place about their lamb: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog We then hopped on the free City tram (where I got some great international banter recorded as an audio file for the StoryBox) over to Docklands, where I had walked last week in my vain attempt to deal with my Optus sim card which does not work with my phone for data access. Our goal was to go get a photo and do a live broadcast in front of the Melbourne Icehouse, the Winter Olympic training facility that features 2 ice rinks. Now Rowan has a serious honest hope that some people are making fun of. It got bizarre when @noiseprofessot turned on his photoshop... Avert your eyes! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Rowan is a big hockey fan (he has like 19 jerseys), and knowing that George Siemens is an ice skate fan. Rowan has a hope that if George should get an opportunity to speak or visit Melbourne, that he could show George this facility, and maybe go skating, do a little "Stick and Puck". This is purely out of Rowan's respect of George's work and an interest in showing him a unique side of this city. We did another ds106 broadcast that explains all of this- look soon for the archive (as soon as this @$#% slow hotel internet finishes with the photo uploads). Make sure george knows about this humble request via the hash tag #SkateWithGeorge Rowan Explains Skate With George Alas is it all for naught? will coffee do? After this excitement, we took the free city tram again back towards the FLinder Street station, and had some coffee from possibly the universes most bored barista. We seemed to be a weighty burden on The Coffee Dude. We then wandered a bit more aimlessly through Federation Square,a cross the river through Victoria Gardens, and back again to where we had left Rowan's car. All in all this was a top notch day- beautiful blue sky weather, photographic scenery, lots of strange cats and dolls on the street, and a whole lot of laughs and great talk with Rowan. I can vouch for him, George, his is a top notch host! - just see his bonding with his son cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Thanks again, Rowan, you sure showed me the highlights of Melbourne. Opening pieces of Northern Voice 2006. I would have thought the auditorium would be a wee bit more packed. First up was Starting with Fire: Why Stories Are Essential and How to Blog Effective Tales by Julie Leung. There was something very refreshing in the presentation style (pure images, a pointed presentation lacking word bullet points. The imagery was moving, but it seemed a bit to go more on about the virtues and values of storeis and less about how stories are donw via blogs. There were a handul of blog examples tossed up at the end (hope I got the URLs correct): http://www.blogs.salon.com/0003522 http://www.theworldisnotflat.com http://mysonnicholas.blogspot.com http://www.2020hindsight.org/category/1945 http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com http://ferrytale.blogspot.com http://postsecret.blogspot.com http://unkemptwomen.blogspot.com I would have liked ro see more on this and the hows, methods, etc. She did offer up a delicious tag stream of references: http://del.icio.us/julie_leung/storytelling The next headliner was Sifry on the Blogosphere, Dave Sifry interviewed by Tim Bray. Now these are headliner names, and there were a handful of memorable (well I thought they were) on spam, the future of networks, but all in all, I got little out of this. It was pretty much a commercial focus, advertising, etc. All this talk of the web as an eoosystem, and I thikn someone should tell the big residents that us little insetcs crawling arounf on the forest floor are not doing this for revenue, for fame, etc. This has nothing to do with new year resolves to live more organized (if that were the case I might be making lists and crossing things off), but I've been pleased to de-clutterize my home office, and, at the same time, make it easier to hook more gizmos to my laptop. First was getting a new USB/Firewire combo-hub and getting alot of the cable snakes tucked away behind the desk. The new is almost full, but makes it easier to work with the single Firewire and 2 USB ports on my MacBookPro... I was already running into issues digitizing video needing the firewire ports on the camera and my external drive. But since I seem to have a working solution to running Windows on the Intel mac, I no longer need the really old Compaq laptop I had been using to test web sites. This was actually my wife's old computer, and we were hoping to donate it to the thrift store, but not without being sure the drive was really clean of old data. I had some fun doing th wipe-our routine using Darik's Boot and Nuke, a download that the installs an app and a start-up OS on a floppy disk. Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction. DBAN is a means of ensuring due diligence in computer recycling, a way of preventing identity theft if you want to sell a computer, and a good way to totally clean a Microsoft Windows installation of viruses and spyware. DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis. It was easy to set up and run, and the thing that took me the longest time was finding a floppy disk! (I did come across some old Zip 100 MB disks, now those are useful). So that is one less computer on the desktop... and I'm thinking getting a slightly bigger internal drive for the MacBookPro ('m at about 55% of the 80 Gb internal, but I like to keep a lot of room), and I might be able to part with my 2003 iBook. Trying to be simpler, less cluttered. For now. If the web is at 2.0, then listserv technology must be at a fractional decimal too small to bother writing. I first experienced them around 1988 as a graduate student at Arizona State University- heck it was even before full internet, as my email address was on BITNET. I helped a prof administer a listerv for volcanologists (no Spock jokes, this was geologist who study volcanoes). A lot of the duties had to do with patching together email addresses on various networks, US universities on BITNET, scientists on various government networks, and people outside the US on all kinds of different networks. flickr creative commons licensed photo by rodliz But the software, and the way it worked has really not changed at all. Listservs are like the rusty old pickup you see parked next to the shiny sports cars and hybrid vehicles - old, but reliable, and often just full of junk. In the day, and I am talking about the day in the early 1990s, listservs were the place where online communities flourished (besides usenet); all of the drama seen payed out on twitter seems to have been done in email lists long ago. And over the years, I have set up numerous web discussion boards, online forums, all kinds of alt-spaces, and for the most part they rarely show a pulse will people readily pound away at email to lists. So rather than trying to fight the lists, I have been trying to use some tactics to make them more efficient. At NMC we have a very robust listserv, the TAB (acronym escapes me, something like Technology Advisory Board) that in our member surveys, is regarded as one of our most valuable services. Anyone from any NMC member organization can subscribe, and people are constantly asking for software recommendations, organizational policy, support strategies, etc. One thing that happens, and the downside of email is that its not readily organized. Yes there is an archive,and its even searchable, yet I am sure a large majority of our users don't use it or know its there. One strategy we started a few weeks ago was to monitor threads that were most active, and then collect responses as a summary we publish online as NMCTAB Summaries. Its not too complex to do, though a bit tedious as it is a cut and paste job. Earlier this week a question came in from someone wanting to know what ePortfolio tools members are using, and if they were being used for the accreditation process. It is a legitimate request, though we had published a related summary just a week earlier. The problem with these requests via a list is they generate a whole raft of responses. So to create a summary, one has to do a whole lot of copy pasting from email. And it floods the list. Today I had a small light bulb go off that said it would make more sense to use the Google Docs feature of creating a web form that can be shared, and the data all goes to a Google Spreadsheet. I was aware of these, but had never gotten around to trying them out. It is drop dead easy. You create a new spreadsheet, then go to share as web form, and use the tools to create as many questions as you need. Mine was short, the items- a field to enter an organization name, a text area to list eportfolio software names, and another one to collect info whether eports were use with accreditation. So it creates a form that can be sent by email, or you can just share a link, or it gives code to embed the form on a web page. So all the back and forth of response on a listserv can be boiled down to one email with the link to the form. The beauty is you can allow people access to the results, but even more so the results are all there in a spreadsheet, not spewed across a pile of email messages. I had about 8 responses within an hour, and almost 20 by the end of the day. I'm eager to use the Google Forms even more for information we typically collect by email or shoving files around. And the darned pickup truck just keeps going on and on and on.. I've been tinkering with some under the hood updates to one of my favorite WordPress Calling Card themes, in fact it was the first one ever, WP-Dimension. I've not done much to these themes in a long while (like maybe pre-pre-pre-pre pandemic) but was motivated by a rare but welcome issue submitted to the GitHub home. Fred asked there since the last WP update my website goes black.Looks like a problem with "body-is.loading"try to hit bruitdavril.fr and reload the page if it appears (reloading makes it black).any idea ?https://github.com/cogdog/wp-dimension/issues/9 I of course went to check the site and got immediately distracted by how beautiful Fred had set up this home page for a music studio outside of Paris https://bruitdavril.fr/ I could not find an issue in Chrome but definitely saw it in Firefox, where a reload came back to a black page. The console reported an error of Promised response from onMessage listener went out of scope which told me... not much. But I had an inkling as the theme has based on the HTML5Up Dimension template I had started with when I first crafted the theme in 2017. I do not see any kind of versioning indicated in the HTML5UP themes but on inspection of the index.html source code in a new version I saw that it was using 2 different JavaScript libraries than the one I had built off of. I downloaded the new file, and using one of those amazing features of BBEdit, the editor I have used without regret for all web pages I made since 1992, I used the built in diff tool (It's under the Search menu and then Find Differences) I could compare the new index.html to the one in the Dimension template I had kept locally when I made the theme. Luckily almost nothing structurally was changed in the template, mainly it used new ones called breakpoints.min.js and browser.min.js in lieu of one strange one in the old version called skel.js. My hunch was that some jQuery called on the page loading in the old files was not kosher. Sure enough, when I made the test changes locally and also on my own calling card using the theme, it seemed to avoid the glitches Fred reported. But a bunch of CSS was off kilter. This was sadly because I had customized the CSS in the original assets/css/main.css file so I did some dissection to move anything that was custom to the child theme CSS. It took a bit of fiddling to get the background image working correctly (unlike the original HTML5Up that uses a static file for this image I set it up to use the one Wordpress lets you set in the customizer as the Header image. Another advantage of the new version is that inside it uses FontAwesome 5 for the icons you can add to buttons, which my theme offers for each "box" so you can tailor the return buttons to your iconic tests. The advantage here is you can ever load multiple header images and use the WordPress Customizer option to load random one, this is how my site plays at http://cog.dog/ I updated the GitHub version of WP-Dimension - it would help if anyone willing to so so would check on their own site, I am worried slightly that I overlooked some other CSS issues as the HTML5Up Dimension template has a lot of flex-box stuff that I marginally (like margin: 1px) understand. If I don't hear soon, I will nudge Reclaim Hosting to push out updates from the versions they offer from the One Click installer and maybe get the OpenETC to update theirs too. As far as keeping the themes updated, I recommend mostly using WP-Pusher plugin so you can get (or grab in one click) all theme updates done when I update them in GitHub. I probably should circle back and make similar updates for WP-Big Picture, WP-Highlights, et al. Thanks Fred! I get a charge when someone reaches out with a suggestion or even a bug, but moreso, when I get a chance to see what someone has created with one of these themes. Feature Image https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/44696471845 Seeing into the Next Dimension flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Just a few days until I leave (Monday), heading northwest to beautiful Vancouver for the MERLOT 2003 conference. In addition to putting on a poster (and a completely unposter-like poster at that!) on the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), I am teaming up with compadres Brian Lamb and D'Arcy Norman for a session covering our work on RSS and Learning Objects. We were impressed that the conference organizers knew how important this was to put it in the last presentation slot of the conference, and they have assured us that no one ever leaves conferences early. They also enticed us with some beach front property in Barstow. Do not look for any previews or sneak peeks for the presentations, but we have some shifty things up our sleeves. It is possible that Lora or Boris might show up, but you know how faculty like being away on their summer vacations. I've even surprised myself in being willing to cobble together a presention in gasp PowerPoint (There is a reason for this, of sorts), something I never do. I barely even know how to use it, but at least I have killed the freaking paper clip. The presentation will appear after the show on August 8. On to Van Rock City. A tin full of stuff. Scout knife. Cuff links. Engraved bracelet. Puzzle game. A tin full of my Dad's stuff. It's just stuff. But it was my Dad's stuff. Friday marked the day nine years ago Morris Levine left this earth. You don't forget your loved ones, but their presence ebbs and flows without much regular pattern, except twice a year. First is May, for his birthday, a day I wish I could have back again to celebrate, and late August (2 days ago), the day I wish I could give back again. Can it be nine years? I try cycling back to where I was, who I was, what mattered in August 2001. There was no user's guide (and if there was I would not have read it anyhow) for dealing with your parent's death, especially when it was the cancerous impending one that just unravels in front of you. My way to deal with this time was to tell his story, in a web site, started before he passed away, and finished afterward. My way is to do write something, photograph something on these two days a year. Nine years? I play with math. I am now the age my Dad was in 1974. He still had another 15 or 18 years of work before retiring. He was in his rhythm of cutting the grass and washing the car. It was maybe a year after the oil embargos; I remember him waiting in line to buy gas that was suddenly much more expensive that before (but insanely cheap compared to now). But those are just the snapshot bits I have as watching him as an 11 year old kid. What did I know of his thoughts? Dreams? Hopes? Worries? I have the hardest time trying to imagine my father as a man the same age I am now. I cannot warp time like that. So the stuff in the can came from my Mom after Dad died. I don;t know why, but it helps just to open that box every now and then and look at it. There was something else in there- his last wallet. Hah, what can define a man more than his wallet? It is something that sits close to him every day ;-). I don't think I had looked at it before; it looked empty. But flipping it open, I found some artifacts in the back pocket He has my business card from the job at I held at the time (at Maricopa Community Colleges) with his familiar, careful block letter writing (something I did not inherit) with my cell phone number at the time. There his his Lee County Library card- he got a lot of joy in retirement volunteering at the library. That's what I knew of that time, but did I know what that joy was about? Did we ever talk about it? And then the hand written piece of paper with my coordinates from the year before, in 2000 when I had my sabbatical visit toi New Zealand and Australia, and more or less blogged it (before there was blog software, this was hand writing HTML posts and uploading photos every day) on my own web site https://bones.cogdogblog.com/dommy/az2nzau. He followed my web site continuously from his home in Florida, even printing it off into a thick folder, a paper archive of a web version of a trip. It's one of those things he did that silently spoke in volumes. There again, that hand writing, so... Dad-like. Most of his communications to me were in hand written letters, pages and pages where he expressed himself more comfortably than talkin--- wait a minute, now I know something perhaps I did get from him. We did talk though on the phone, and in the Arizona portion of my life (after 1987) we had this tradition of me calling him (in jest) "Old Man" and him calling me "Junior". That I can feel, in my ears, in my heart, So now I sit here trying to unravel that time for him has stopped, frozen in memories, photos, words, a tin full of stuff, yet for me it flows on, to some place I cannot yet see. I will, in time, like he did. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yes, it is so- this LG Thrive is my (temporary) replacement for my iPhone that lept over a cliff this week. It is a Droid. Frankly the fervent fetishing of this phone over that phone tires me (though I really want the one that starts with "i"). Here's the reasoning... The nearest AT&T stores, even the ones within 30 miles, do not have the 4S in stock. I need a phone now. It seemed hardly worth it to contract in with an old model. I am more than 30 days out from being eligible for an upgrade. I could have gone to a Verizon store, but with future plans for international travel, a CDMA phone makes zero sense, even if the US network is better. Shane at the local AT&T outlet store was helpful .I asked about replacement smart phones, and he told me the ones in his store were priced more than the ones available down the street. He rigged me up with an AT&T sim card, and off I went to Best Buy to get a "Go" Phone. I did see that they had the 4S in stock, but with a few calls to AT&T Customer Careless, I would be left paying for an early upgrade fee, and extra $150 (?). And then I realized was told that the unlocked 4S would be out next month, and that makes the most sense for 2012 where I might have several trips out of the US. Thus I found myself buying an Android phone. Yes, it is not the same, I miss the iOS interface, but frankly it does just about everything my iPhone could. Some notes: The Google integration is great for mail, calendar, etc. I even got access to my entire music collection with one click. I've been able to find apps that match what I had on the iPhone and used frequently, including Words with Friends, Facebook, twitter, Skype, photo editors, Evernote. I found a media player that I can use to listen to ds106 radio (of course there is no broadcast one). I'm only using the free apps, but the market place has tons of stuff. The camera is not bad, and I found a really good audio recorder, even if it records in the obscure .pcm format (another addon converts to mp3) The battery life sucks. Quickly. I like being able to add widgets to the main screens; like a small audio player tuned into ds106, or a twitter widget for mentions. I deleted them so it would not suck battery, but nice to know they are there. It mush have a 250 Mb sd card in there, I have already tun out of room- I will have to add a bigger card. It is super good that when I connect by USB to by MacBookPro, I have full access to my content files. I can drag files to and from the phone with ease. I am more bothered by this in iOS. I can understand a rationale to hide the file system from the general average user. But there is a file system in there, cause stuff exists as files. To make it totally unavailable to everyone, is, well, dogmatic. It is akin to OS X-- it is a beautiful and elegant GUI, that sits atop a unix OS, which I can get to if I want to. It pretty much does 90% of what I want it to do, and I can live with it for a few months. In fact, it makes more and more sense for me to live with and use this other OS, as we should not get so singularly locked into bogus places of platform superiority. In other breaking news, I guess my iPhone is still alive- I am getting tweets from @CogDogsiPhone I am so happy that my iPhone is having some fun. I do miss him, but can do oka with my aPhone. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Kevin Gilmour Apparently there is a strain of Technology Fatigue swirling around I've been hearing a lot of technology fatigue from faculty this year.— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander) January 15, 2014 I do not have a cure. Maybe try a nap? I do not deny the feeling and I waft it myself. You can either mire in a stupor or change things up and find something that excites you (c.f. Curly's Law). It's not limited to technology; if you are not continually retooling your approach, then the heavy feeling is imminent. Over the last few months, I have started to realize that my designs for a number of Wordpress based projects have been focused on the singular need, not the longer term iteration. What? I worked on a project in 2012 with Nancy White to create a ds106ish blog aggregating course site for an Engineering Design course at the Hague University of Applied Sciences. For me, I got to break some new bits of my own development chops to create a "class sized syndication bus". It was a bit of a flying the plane as we build it experience, and Nancy and I were happily surprised when they approached us to redo the course in 2013. My idea was to separate/archive out the 2012 course content as its own site, in a sub domain, at http://2012.projectcommunity.info. Because it's run on Hippiehosting, I was able to easily clone the Wordpress site into the new domain, shut off Feed Wordpress, and modified the theme to have a note that it's an archive. Then there was a fair bit of manual cleaning of the main site (deleting posts, changing menus, etc). Enough to get it done. Now they have asked me to set things up so the 2014 class is ready in August. Ok. And then it hits me I have been doing this wrong. I've been thinking in the one site mindset. I am putting on my multisite goggles-- this is the feature that was the WPMU add on that was rolled into the core code. More than creating a site, you create a network of sites, all running off of a single install of Wordpress. Typically this is what's done to offer distinct Wordpress.com-like hosted blogs, going o large scale like UMWBlogs, Blogs@Baruch. But it need not be just for hosting blogs; this is the set up we have at ds106 where the same Wordpress runs the Assignment Bank, inSPIRE, the Daily Create, etc. An advantage is that you have one set of themes, plugins, etc. You can set things up to give access to users to multiple sites, rather than multiple accounts on multiple sites. My design flaw has been putting stuff on the main site that was time constrained; thus making it a later manual archive step. A newer approach would be something like having general info about the project, and using the widgets to pull in info from the sub site blogs, and start by having the 2014 course in its own site from the get go, e.g. 2014.projectcommunity.info -- it comes archived. I've run into a few challenges not related to the approach -- I am already using subdomains for the 2012 and 2013 courses, and you cannot modify a stand alone site into a directory based structure (well there might be end arounds). But I am starting to think this is a better setup for sites where there might be repeated iterations (e.g. courses, workshops) or sites where there might be very different sub sites like ds106 that really need their own theme or separate functionality. It's a lot easier when you start in multisite. I just did this for someone who is running some workshops where participants need to comment on a multi-pronged collection of documents and data sets; the main site on the network is just a menu, and the subsite is just for the current workshop, but it could be duplicated for other clients of my client (it is only partly done so that's why I am writing about it vaguely). I saw a similar need when talking to Brian Lamb about a course site he was working on. What happens when the instructor wants to replicate the content for a different set of students? Sure in some cases, its appropriate to have old content in as a reference, but when the main content changes e.g. the syllabus, the activities, do you wipe out what was done before? Create a category structure? Maybe, but I am thinking it makes more sense to think like a network. This is something that is in dabble mode, so this is not a tutorial. But some tools I can see making use of in this kind of network setup: Create a Network Wide Menu if the theme being used has multiple menus, this would be a nice way to have a consistent network wide menu across sub sites ThreeWP Broadcast looks like a way to have content from subsites be used in say the main site. Blog Copier essentially to clone one subsite to another (but you cannot clone the primary one). I might be missing some downsides here, and plenty of people have been doing stuff with multisite. And it's small, but one way to address the technical fatigue is to reduce duplication and tedious tasks. And because it is new to me, the challenge keeps the mental juices going. A few weeks ago I was audio interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina, a 1 hour plus session between me in Arizona and Teemu in Finland that was remarkably clear, had no dropouts. In an almost heroic effort, Teemu edited this to a pod/webcast, painstakingly removing my frequent "umms" as well as abstracting my free form meanders to a coherent set of possible ed tech futures. Thjis is now posted on a new site FLOSSE (Free/Libre and Open Source SoftwarE) which is a "posse" FLOSSE Posse is a group blog consisting of members of Free and Open Source Software Association (VOPE) from Finland. We will carry out reportage of FLOSS and Open Content in Education. The interview is now available at: http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=future-of-floss-in-education-interview-with-alan-levine or the direct audio: http://flosse.dicole.org/media/podcasts/Flosse_posse-Alan_Levine_20050124.mp3 Considered the list of heavy hitters to come in the next interviews, I am humbled and honored to be the first one posted. Go ahead, Leon, take your best potshots. The open source / free tools themselves used, Skype, Blogs, et al, are themselves a testament to the topics discussed, another cheering round of Small Technologies Nicely Joined. I'm ready to... well think about doing some SKyperviews in the near future. Wow it has been a long time since I saw a Brunton Pocket Transit, probably back to grad school Geology. It may not have much relevance to the post, but I warm to the nostalgia. Maybe it does, because it was my study of Geology that got me thinking about something I saw online today. I have this curious habit/mind game that comes up in the landscape paintings of art museums but also in movies, you see this and you might say "mountain" [caption id="attachment_45589" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Public Domain Wikimedia Commons image[/caption] I'm trying to guess which mountains it might be, what region does it belong to, is it a Cascade Volcanic peak (no), it's definitely got that Rocky Mountain look. Dan Cohen's tweet this morning of a new exhibit caught my interest on several levels: https://twitter.com/dancohen/status/628270984089464832 First because this exhibit, the Evolution of The Personal Camera, is about the history of photography, but also of note because it was designed and developed by students at Wayne State University. But the "thing" happened looking at the image for America Meets the Personal Camera: It's the scene! Two women with a 1890s camera rig sitting under some kind of arch; the caption reads: Two women with a camera looking out over a desert landscape. Lyle, Charles Nourse. Courtesy of the University of Kentucky via the Kentucky Digital Library. I'm looking at the rock and the mountains through the arch, and wondering, where is this? The rock of the arch looks volcanic, pyroclastic even, and is fractured. It says "desert landscape" but as aI zoom and pan around, I am not seeing any cacti, it looks more like high desert vegetation, sage, etc. I like how with the media on the pla site you can zoom way in: The landscape below where the women sit looks like cultivated agricultural land, not quite desert as I think of it. That and the shape of the mountains have me thinking Western Utah, maybe Nevada, perhaps Colorado, or maybe eastern California. Like I said, it's just an idle curiosity. But it also gets to the intent of this exhibit, it's about photography, not landscapes or geography. Yet I could use that same photo perhaps for something other than teaching about photography. And it has me thinking some about David Wiley's post today on An Obstacle to the Ubiquitous Adoption of OER in US Higher Education. I do see the DPLA exhibits and the fact that student work is shown there as the kind of Renewable Assignment David describes, so students work on something that is not disposable, and in his new thinking, can possible contribute to the potential void in OER content. And I unravel ideas here, there is some knocking again on the reusability paradox, as I read many of people's focus on OERs as textbooks, textbooks, textbooks. Or the classic idea of them as blocks that fit together. If I only think of the DPLA exhibit as something just for the History of Photography, it cuts off the possibility of seeing in that one image, something I can relate to maybe a different activity, course, class. And now its just late and my brain is mush, and I have completely lost hold of an idea here. Oh well, I just got sidetracked by wondering where in the world a photo was taken. Top / Featured Image Credit: Creative Commons licensed Wikimedia Commons image PleaseReview - The online document review system - Home Pagethe new approach to collaborative document authoring & review. PleaseReview provides a structured, browser-based environment to manage the document review process and enable simultaneous, paragraph-by-paragraph reviews of MS Word documents and document sets. PDFs, images and other document types are also handled.Tags: collaboration Fair Use DayWe think Fair Use should have its own "Day", a day to celebrate Fair Use in any lawful way you wish. Exercise your Fair Use rights or contact a corporation or government of your choosing and let them know you want Fair Use rights and you want them protected - demand your Fair Use rights! Use what ever means you have available: phone, email, smoke signals, snail-mail, etc.Tags: copyright I am sure there are things like this out there, but when I was doing my simple stats for flickr tagging, I took the very inefficient method of paging through the flickr tag pages and listing unique user names. Surely there is some flickr tool that can tell how many unique users have used a specific tag? I picked and poked but could not find it. There are plenty of things to return data per individual account, and lots of cool way to render public tags. Same thing for del.icio.us- surely there is a web tool to show how many people have used the same tag?? At least in spoken form we no longer have to explain who "Earl" is. But still, the fundamental element of the web (which to be understood we used to have to name as "The World Wide Web") on what is now the more common platform of access, is becoming harder to even find. It's worth remembering the original definition: URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL. Web addresses are unique and used to identify resources. Or are they? I sheepishly admit that in moments of Phone gazing, I do use the iOS News app, knowing full well, somewhere, my choices are noted in some database cell. You can use it to read opposing sources, as what happens when New York Times stories come in adjacent to Fox news ones. But here is the irksome thing about content in the News app. They come from URLs. I know it. But take a few minutes. See if you can actually locate that unique and identifying address. For example, I read this Vox story today (and no I have not seen the new movie, I read right past the spoiler alert) [caption id="attachment_65148" align="aligncenter" width="750"] A story as seen in the iOS News app. It sure looks like a web page. What's the URL, Earl?[/caption] If I opt to share it, say bye emailing it, well to myself, I get: [caption id="attachment_65149" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Ah, there it is, a link in email. Hallo, Earl?[/caption] Yup, it's https://apple.news/AEPFaXhY2RZ2O4SwR71ZOHA And here is where the whole premise for my post falls on its butt. You see, I remember trying this a year ago, and the link I got just re-routed me back to the news app. But in my browser, darned if I don't land on the real web link. I should quit blogging. I thought I was making a case that Apple kept us locked un their universe. Well, maybe on the device it does, because that link does send you to the News App. So at least on the iPhone you cannot discover the real URL, Earl. But there is a way, I can get the URL, Earl. I can use google search on "Vox Blade Runner 2049" and interesting what comes up... [caption id="attachment_65150" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Where's the find? None of the titles match.[/caption] What's interesting here is that the first link does go to the story, but the headline in Google Search results is "Blade Runner 2049 Spoilers: let's talk about the Ryan Gosling twist" while the actual article title is "The best thing about Blade Runner 2049 is what it isn’t" This means, on the mobile device, which apparently the majority of the web uses, wants to pull you in with words like "spoiler" and a celebrity name, and a hint of a secret. This is exactly what I learned from Mike Caulfield: Well, a little known fact about newspapers and other websites is they embed code in invisible HTML “meta” tags that provide different headlines to different platforms, when the content is shared. And if we look in those meta tags we see that someone at the Independent coded the false headline in the meta tags, even though they would never dare publish such a headline on their web site. In the source, you can see that the titles of this article in social media (Facebook, twitter, and WTF is sailthru?) are the original title [caption id="attachment_65151" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Social media article titles coded in HTML meta data[/caption] The News app title is there in some JavaScript: [caption id="attachment_65152" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The title the Apple News app user is scripted, JavaScripted[/caption] Thanks Uncle Tim, for designing the web so that I can peek at the source. For now, at least. And this URL in fact, is not the URL, Earl. It's Cousin Amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/culture/2017/10/9/16433088/blade-runner-2049-spoilers-review It takes dissection to yank the real URL out of that one (remove platform/amp/) [caption id="attachment_65153" align="aligncenter" width="750"] It's not the URL I was looking for[/caption] That little link icon does expose the real URL... but you cannot do a thing with it. You cannot copy it. And then there is the fun little More Info info [caption id="attachment_65154" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Is this the info you want?[/caption] under the 3 dot menu: The Viewer is a hybrid environment where Google and the third-party webmaster may each collect data about you. Data collection by Google is governed by Google’s privacy policy. Data collection by the third-party webmaster is governed by its privacy policy. Was this info scary? Yes No When did I opt into this data collection? When I opened my browser. Hey, Earl, this stuff is messier and messier. Featured Image: Shell Game in Berlin Wikimedia Commons photo by E.asphyx shared under a Creative Commons CC BY License