cogdogblog

I Blog Therefore I am...

This is the new hub for Alan Levine's activities as instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, AZ, replacing the mid 90s vintage home page, kept at:
http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/

Maybe I am new at blogging (as is everyone), but I have been hammering at the web since October 1993. Our MCLI web site has been in continuous "on" mode since then racking up stats. I've been commenting and sharing web sites since 1994 via our Bag of URLs and Web's Eye View. In 2000, I more or less blogged by hand for a 6 month sabbatical from Arizona to New Zealand and Australia.

And in these past X years the focus has been on using the web in the realm of learning- it was a July 1994 conference presentation that we pitched the notion of using the web as a hypertext learning environment. And a 1994 workshop designed to show teachers how to create learning content with HTML that became the Writing HTML tutorial.

"But what the #^$% is 'cogdogblog'?
Actually nothing.

The hardest part of setting up this site (installing Movable Type was not even that bad) was picking a catchy name! All the good ones in my field like Serious Instructional Technology, EdTechPost, and elearningpost were taken.

So I have opted for a meaningless name. Well there is meaning for me...

The cog (actually the chain-ring from my mountain bike) is for my interest in bicycling, a sensible alternative to road-rage. A bicycle is a wonderfully designed machine for its task. But more than that, a cog is a simple but effective device that can fit together easily with other similar devices, an apt metaphor for Internet protocols such as HTML, RSS, XML... So all of the areas of CDB are cogs themselves in a larger machine.

As for the next part, there is nothing more reliable, loyal, and playful as a dog, and that is how the web should be (unfortuantely it seems full of dog crap). My companians and buddies past and present include Dominoe, Fudge, Skamper, and curently Mickey and Cadu.

Hence CogDogBlog. It does not even rhyme, unless you affect a bad Boston accent.

One more thing. As an acronym "CDB" brought me back to the favorite childhood book "C-D-B" written by William Steig. If you have never enjoyed this book, be a kid again, see this excerpt from Amazon.com, and learn how to point, guess, and laugh.

C-D-Blog?

D Blog S A B-S Blog.

O, S N-D!