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CogDog The Blog

An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

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emoH ekiL ecalP oN s’erehT

In my story of Dorothy getting bored in Kansas, I wanted to have a way for her to go back to Oz, and the easiest way would be via the Play It Backward, Jack ds106 assignment: Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don’t they? So take a video of something […]

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She Would Rather Party in Oz

Why was Dorothy so set n going back to drab, black and white Kansas? Was Auntie Em that much of the life of the party? If the truth were told, she would have expressed her desire to hang out with those wild Munchkins: As part of my evolving Dorothy story, this is the ds106 Truthful […]

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GIFing the Streets of Liberal

On my trek home earlier this month, I picked off of the map a route in Kansas that would take me through the near Texas border town of “Liberal” – which I read on a plaque has nothing to do with politics– it was in reference to the sharing of water liberally by the first settler.

It’s created draw of interest is being where Dorothy’s house (a replica thereof) sits so there is a lot of Oz-ification


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

There are a number of Dorothy statues on the streets. I was intrigued of some over the shoulder photos as maybe she gazed wistfully at a fun shriner convention across the street:


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This lead me to do a series of rapid shots in succession to get the blur of traffic going by Dorothy, which I molded into animated gifs.

This is the ds106 Photo It Like Peanut Butter Assignment (created by yours truly):

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/

And this became the seed of an idea I wanted to do as an extended story that spans multiple assignments, the task I am asking my students to do for their final project.

These were all done the same way. The photos were taken in the camera mode on my Canon 7D that does sequential shots as long as I hold the shutter. The idea is to get a lot and not move the camera much (a tripod would be a smart way to go).

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Fuzzy Memory of Aunt Bebe

Aren’t I cute in my blue tuxedo? That is me and my Aunt “Bebe” at the time of my Bar Mitzvah, in May of 1976. I had no clue, and I wonder if she did, that in 7 months she would be dead from cancer. Attached to the side of her refrigerator was Mom’s Big […]

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Openness Beyond the Course Container

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by 2493â„¢ With no sign of any waning of MOOC Hysteria, it seems like a “course” is of course the only way of convening educators online. There is some stampeded going to create more MOOCs or various anagram soups of MOONs OOs, MOOS, whatever. Alec Couros […]

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Thank the Unicorns that Keep ds106 Humming

Last night we had an unfortunate outage at umwdomains, the hosting for ds106 students at the University of Mary Washington. With this being finals week, students working feverishly to finish projects and reflections, twitter was never so lit up with activity. Let’s give some appreciation to people like Tim Owens who was working on this […]