Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Almost 10 years ago I fell into likely a vain pursuit of any shred of fact to support the contention that "humans process visual information 60,000 times faster than text." And despite trying every approach I could conjure, including offering a cash prize, the trail ran cold back to 1982 (all the blogged efforts are corralled by the 60000x tag). I tend to forget about it. When a subject line appears in the inbox, maybe once a year, I first speculate that someone found it. I might have to open the checkbox and shell out the promised $60. Once came last week, but it was another researcher in pursuit, who wrote: Pardon the inbox invasion, but I came across your seasoned blog post about how we supposedly process images 60000X faster. I've been trying to find the 3M study too for this book I'm writing. I found the same pdfs and no reference/citation to the original research. (no surprise at all)I didn't want anything, only a thank you for doing this sleuthing back in 2012, documenting your investigation and keeping the blog post live in 2022. Wish more people in tech were like you in this respect. Your blog post will be one of my references for this chapter on data visualization. I assured her that this was hardly an inbox invasion. But it will likely never die because it just rolls off the screen so easily. It's has the essence of something.... truthy. One outcome of this is I keep my antennae open to other such utterances. One came my way a week or so ago, I think it was a link from Stephen Downes OLDaily to a Poynter article (are these things articles? posts? who cares?) about communicating in video-- To tell stronger stories, don’t narrate the video. Explain it. It has an interesting premise- that our tendency to want to narrate a video scene (as its easy to do) might actually compete with the ability for a viewer to understand it. Author Al Tompkins contends that the narration is more effective when it explains the scene. I might quibble with the notion that there is a "truth" in the explanation, but I think it's more about giving the scene context beyond what is depicted visually. And hey, we know that humans can process those visuals 60,000 time faster than--- hold it. The part that I am jumping on now is where one of "those" truthy statements are made under the heading "Hang on, a little bit of visual theory" Ann Marie Seward Barry, associate professor of communication at Boston College, cited a study by the Educational Foundation of the American Association of Advertising Agencies that shows that even when we see images on television, we usually don’t understand them.Barry writes, “Even when we watch television, we misunderstand approximately 30% of what is shown to us. Our emotional state, our mindset at the time and our experience all seem to conspire against our seeing things as they really are. We go about our lives, however, mostly assuming that what we see really ‘is,’ as if there were no intermediary process.”https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/to-tell-stronger-stories-dont-narrate-the-video-explain-it/ I bristle when a "study" is referenced without any references. But here it is asserted as fact as some kind of universal law that we misunderstand 30% of what we watch on television. Right away I was questioning, for what do we even mean by "television"? The network based tightly programmed flavor of TV I watched in the 1970s and 1980s hardly is the same medium as what we absorb now as video on screens. It took a few rounds of searching in Google Scholar to locate the source. Why do web writers not apply the most basic feature of web writing-- the humble link? The journal version I found at Sage Viewer Miscomprehension of Televised Communication: Selected Findings (Jacoby and Hpyer, 1982) but of course, PAYWALL. Search, and search again, I found the same title at ResearchGate where I could at least read what looks like as scanned print pages (the date is listed as January 2000, but maybe it's a reprint as the article has 1982?? It's not grey as it states it was uploaded by one of the co-authors (Jacoby) in 2014. Regardless, here I can read the full study. You too. If I understand correctly, in the early 1980s, they got 200+ participants to sit in a room at a shopping mall to watch on a VHS tape played to a TV two thirty second advertisements or excerpts from news shows. They then answered a 6 item quiz on factual recall. All of the methodology is explained and not terribly unreasonable, but one is left to wonder how that same 30% result from 1981 is extrapolated to something like a tweeted news clip seen on a smart phone in 2022? One might say the format makes no difference. I am not a media excerpt enough to declare the level of validity, but I would not want to rest my case on this. Would you? The point makes sense and we ought to question how much people walk away from video content with the same full understanding we put into it when we produce it. And the inferences from Gestalt theory offer some useful consideration points: Probably the most important Gestalt concept is the theory that in any visual display there is always one element that will be perceived as the object. Everything else is perceived as background. In television, we clutter our screens with information we think will appeal to viewers. In fact, the brain is not able to process so much information.https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/to-tell-stronger-stories-dont-narrate-the-video-explain-it/ Why hello chryon. The article does give me some pause to think about the relationship of visuals in a video and what is said along with them. But I can't feel good about this bold proclamation of a 30% miscomprehension rate across the board. And I certainly suspect that the percentage of comprehension across the human board of video content is likely low. This is quite different from the 60000 times faster claim, as that one lacked any kind of real research to support it. For the 30% misunderstood claim, it's more of a matter if the research study behind it is even applicable. Again, I am not on the firmest of grounds with my questions, but I do enjoy the digging into and finding the threads back to original sources, which seems to be just something writers or snazzy presentation makers don't have time to do. What say you? Will you stand confidently on that 30% plank? Featured Image: CC0 image of retro TV on street from Pixnio modified by Alan Levine with superimposing of 30% image from Pixabay by TheDigitalArtist... your guess is as good as mine as to what license that makes, but CC0 seems close enough. Awesome is the new WordPress app for blogging from an iDevice. Writing from iPod Touch on my home wireless. "If I only had a phone..." Note: Republishing in web as TwitterTools did not relay this post sent from iPod I cannot claim this was an Urgent/Important task, but my curiosity got the better of me... I made a new bookmarklet tool that allows me to run a search against my furl-ed sites either by entering the search terms or by highlighting the words in any web mouse-selectable content. This avoids having to load a search interface , and may save me seconds of precious time ;-) Like I said, it was just a fun little programming task. See the new Furl Search Maker: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/furl_search_maker.php to create your own, another in the set including the Multi-Site Submission Tool Maker, and the MovableType Search Bookmarklet. This one is just out of the hatch, and not widely tested beyond my own browser(s). A friend and colleague from Melbourne (.au) recently e-mailed some humorous recollections marking the 10th anniversary of NCSA Mosaic. "Does that make you feel old?" (more…) This is curious and interesting- Everbody Posting is a blog set up to use the e-mail to post functionality of Blogger so that anyone can send a post via e-mail. Is it sort of a Wikified blog? A public wall open to graffiti? A Spam target (the email address is presented as an image to discourage auto scavenging, wonder if that will hold). How many "U Suk" messages will appear? Will it contain real conversation or just people playing? Who knows? That's what makes it interesting. See the details on what Everybody Posting is all about... Here's a game I play on the web. There are metric tonnes of sights that gather curious / interesting / weird stories be it mentalfloss, neatorama, Random Good Stuff, Holy Kaw... It must be a business, track eyeballs for advertisers, make stuff spreadable, hoping it hits the viral google juiced jackpot. Pretty much they sift it from elsewhere, but at least for the most part they are good about putting at the bottom a link to the source. The game I like playing (because of my low level of amusement or lack of literacy pursuits) is to walk back and see how many sites I can click through until it hits a source of someone who actually posted it themselves. Maybe I need a hobby. I had an example saved in a folder that I accidentally tracked, and have been hoping another chain would reveal itself today. It's funny how the tracks go. First, Alec Couros tweeted out a link to a blog post from one of the #tiegrad students who was present for a web storytelling session I did for them last week. https://twitter.com/courosa/status/565961478792957954 Heidi's Story Time post had some reflections I appreciate, and as well a shared creative activity she has done in teaching her students spelling. It's really a super idea. But the image she included as a link for that activity was worth following, and sent me on a journey down the web hole, a link for abandoned cars in Belgium, leading to a post on Boredpanda (one I had not heard of, it is a big internet) The story has 95,000 facebook likes. These spooky apocalyptic images are not a scene from “Walking Dead”, they were actually taken at one of the biggest car cemeteries in the world – the Chatillion Car Graveyard, Belgium. According to an urban legend these cars were left behind by US soldiers from World War II, who could not ship them back to the US so they decided to hide them in a forest until they could come back and retrieve them. The locals disagree and say that it’s simply an old car dump of vehicles made after the WWII. At one point there were four car graveyards in Chatillon with as many as 500 retro vehicles. Unfortunately, most of the cars were stolen or removed by the locals and due to environmental issues the whole graveyards was cleared in 2010. The photos are stunning, and while Bored, that Panda does provide clear attribution for the photos (although I did not seem to find the photo below in the site it was attributed to and they also seem to have cropped out her watermark, compare) But the Bored Panda post does give a "h/t amusing planet" (a site with a tag line "Amazing Places. Wonderful People. Weird Stuff") for this post on Chatillon Car Graveyard in Belgium (December 19, 2012) This post asserts the story that the cars were abandoned by US soldiers in World War II. The layout is different different photo selection. it was shared 91 times on flickr, 126 +1s on Google Plus, and 2500 shares in facebook. Because data matters. Again photo credit is provided by link. All of the photos I saw from flickr were marked "All Rights Reserved" so I must guess / hope that Amusing Planet and Bored Panda and 9whatever site comes next) either got permission for use of the photo or paid for use?? The Amusing Planet site gives credit to a Behance gallery The Car Graveyard by Stefan Beernaert, who I might gather took the photos (and added the "bonus" feature of bikini topped models). it has 1871 views and 21 appreciations. This site links to some other photographer's site called foantje, an exhibit there (with ominous background music( called "Vroem Vroem". The photos are all ©2015 and visitors to the site are welcomed: This site is not responsible for any accidents or problems caused by the information and pictures on this site. Exploring is dangerous and I would never advise anyone to do this hobby. And here I am out of trail. I am not even sure this was a trail. It's not at all like the sites are the same, some are collections of photos of these cars by multiple persons, some just one photographer's collection. Each has slightly different (or none) background story, none again exactly a like. I do find it interesting to trace sources back from the link honey pot sites. Often you find interesting sidelights. I try to avoid giving reference to the kinds of sites at the top of the chain (and if they have any tracking cruft in their URLs I remove them). This is what I do. I walk the web. top / featured image credit cc licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by James C. O'Sullivan: http://flickr.com/photos/jameschristopherosullivan/5877854211 It's a new word for me (go ahead and giggle you Brits), but I have just finished listening to one of those things that happen fairly regularly in ds106, but can slip by you in the fast flow of all the activity. Mariana Funes aka The ds106 Shrink has been a force of awesomeness since coming into ds106 this summer from Martin Weller's H817 course, She has taken a lead in promoting the ds106 Google+ Community (of which I was lukewarm). For every call I put out for volunteers, she is pulling off an Arnold Horshack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cDAqrywsHE While waiting for some files to load or some database to launch I scrolled through the ds106 tweets from the last day, and found this solo Google Hangout Mariana did-- she has been restricted this week from using the computer because of RSI... but that sure did not stop her. And demonstrating the best aspects of ds106ness, she stepped out of her comfort zone to try something new, audio blogging. I was guessing, and she conformed it, the first time I have heard her voice. mariana, please do this more often! What I value in listening to her audio blog (which reminds me of Scottlo's Slices of Life audio reflections) is how deeply, and connectedly (yes I know that is not really a word) she is approaching her ds106 work. Everything is full of meaning, and thoughtfulness, and... well I could gush on, but I am so moved by her motivation to be part of ds106, that RSI is no match for Mariana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAFQYbCAjmo Yeah, take that RSI! Towards the end, she focuses on a topic I have wondered about- the way that as "grown up/mature/professional" people, we get to this place of heavy self censorship of our creative side. We don't share drafts. We don't want to be embarrassed or seen with less than baked ideas. We become programmed to projecting just our shiniest bits, the left are kept under wraps (those are all my words, not hers). But she shows how she is going up against her own tendency, pushing at her own boundaries. Her inventiveness to say- "This physical challenge is keeping me from using my computer but it sure as BLEEP is not keeping me from using my mind." And this is what I love about ds106, it is the stretch that people do beyond their own expectations. Her words, are in fact, better than mine, and I leave you with her explanation, to her, what storytelling is about: ... when it's not about a polished product, but it is about sharing of yourself with other people who share your love of story. flickr foto No Photoshop At Allavailable on my flickr This looks like something one does by compositing and feather-edging layers in PhotoShop, but I can vouch that this is an un-retouched photo. The view is looking in the window of the Strawberry Schoolhouse (the oldest standing school house in Arizona!), and I thought the light shining in both windows as well as the reflection on the right might be interesting. I am the blob in the middle. I love shots like this where you sense that there might be something special (often not). One aspect of traditional film photograpy is the process of visualizing the image in your mind, and the delayed gratification (or disgust) when you finally see the print-- there is something magical in that lag time between seeing it in your mind and then in your hand. On the other hand, I have not plopped a roll of film in a camera for more than 4 years, and going digital means often taking lots of photos. I tried to stress this in my workshops, that you ought to exploit digital cameras by taking lots of pictures, and looking for interesting angles, reflections, altering viewpoints etc. There is no reason not to, I had a bit of that film experience since I just snapped this shot when we parked near the Strawberry Schoolhouse for a walk we took last week. I love the shots one can get of the one room school house against a deep blue polarized sky, but in this case, something about the light coming on the opposite window caught me eye, as well as the reflection. but I pretty much snapped it and forgot about it. What a cool surprise when the camera caught me in the middle of the interior (left) and the refected exterior- my first thought was - did I layer this in PhotoShop? Nope, it was all camera, some interesting light, and a whole lotta luck. It just takes repetition for new habits to become ingrained ones. That seems logical, but heck, in 2018, logic is not what it used to be (let's save this tangent for an offline rant). For this week's (actually it is last weeks I think) 9x9x25 I am sharing my own effort to be as diligent as I can in including alt descriptions in my online use of images. There's part of it that is just the right thing to do, something that really does not expend much effort. But I will also clue you in that it gives some pause and some thought to what you are conveying in an image. I got a bit fueled up for this in June as I learned about a lot of PR made about twitter including the ability to add alt descriptions to text, that would make twitter content more clear to people with impaired vision). Still twitter does not make it easy. As a user of twitter you need to opt in among a series of almost hidden settings to turn on the functionality to edit image descriptions. This alone, I bet, by not making accessibility features on the default, means that 99% of twitter users will never even be able to do it. I think a lot people should jump in twitter to change this. Heck I spoke up in January https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/948926365478273024 But why would they listen to me. So I have been doing my best to add descriptions to tweeted images, on my mobile device, and when using tweetdeck on the laptop. I've also been taking care to add them when uploading images to blog posts. It's not about describing the image in inordinate details, but as I understand, what it takes to replace the content in an image with suitable, brief text. As I have done this, I sometimes find it's okay to leave a blank alt="" tag if my writing already explains something, e.g. if it's not essential to understanding to replace the image, just filling with repetitive task must me a huge annoyance to anyone accessing the web view a screen reader. And FYI, I am no expert on doing this "right" I am figuring out as I go. A lot of my posts are screenshots of tech screens, that have a lot of detail. Looking at the one just published, I don't see a need to use alt="" text when there is a caption: [caption id="attachment_67001" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Row of apps available as featured installs, with red box around icons for TRU Collector and TRU Writer[/caption] Or for this image of a admin screen: My HTML looks like: It's hard to know how well I am describing these. Well actually not. WebAim provides instructions for OS X users to turn on Voiceover features where you can experience the web as someone w/o good eyesight (I assume there are ways for people with other OSes to find a way, that's your googling to do). I challenge you to learn the commands (all keyboard) and try it for an hour. Or five minutes. I struggled much to get the hang, well it took maybe 45 minutes, but I still flailed at getting the cursor to move to next elements. Just for fun, I went through my own tweets, and here are two in a row that include image descriptions I entered in Tweetdeck. First listen to the recording of tweets being read: [audio mp3="https://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/reading-two-tweets.mp3"][/audio] Then see if they conveyed what was in them. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1060168164275838976 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1060166739416223746 But here are things I am missing doing. When my blog tweets a new blog post, the image it is using (via open graph tags) are not coming through with alt descriptions. I guess it's okay as they are not strictly necessary? https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1060597864584359937 But I notice that for images I uploaded as a featured image, I have not been adding the alt text (BAD COGDOG). So I have done it with the image on this one as a test to see of the alt text goes with it. Yet, thinking about the replacement of information, I am unsure if featured images that show up as twitter card images really need replacement. Thoughts? I generally insert my featured images, with full credit, and alt descriptions if needed, at the bottom of my posts. And as I have found, others too, that even with twitter's added functionality, they do not apply to animated GIFS. So no reaction gifs for the visually impaired. It's unbelievable challenging to navigate the web by voice reader only. Maybe it's worth doing a challenge to put on opaque glasses and try it for an extended period of time. Maybe if the powers that be did it in twitter, they might make image descriptions a featured just turned on. I challenge them to explain to anyone, why it is not. Here are two tweets for you to figure out. IN audio only (and darn it took me another 15 minutes to fumble the navigation in Voiceover!) [audio mp3="https://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/more-tweets-read.mp3"][/audio] There are the links if really curious. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1042403026168950786 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1042840436711350272 Twitter, you can do better easy. Update: No Image:Alt Description for JetPack Tweeted Posts The featured image for this post has alt text defined: A youngish teen boy watches in the mirror as he shaves for the first time. But this is not sent out with the tweet by the JetPack Plugin's Open Graph feature. The Open Graph spec has a tag for og:image:alt: A description of what is in the image (not a caption). If the page specifies an og:image it should specify og:image:alt. But this is not being provided by JetPack, here are the Open Graph tags for this post I'm submitting a message to the Jetpack support forums. Wish me luck. This is another of nine posts for the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 challenge. Featured Image: I have used this one before, but I love it too much... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]First time shaving flickr photo by Antiporda Productions shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine At 3:18 am june 14, 2013, the annoying presence of IamTalkyTina, documented previously in my confessed creation story, has disappeared completely. An intense Rim to Rim Grand Canyon hike, 24 miles hiked in 18 hours, 11000 feet of elevation gain/loss, did the trick. The doll is gone. I am whole. Her sing song yibber yabber voice droned on for the 7 hours of descent via the North Kaibab trail. All that talk of her "True Friends" and "Open Friends" and "People Like Me (or else)" and how offended she was by the "Nasty Mean Word" was a constant nuisance and distraction to the peacefulness of that place. The nocturnal birds, cicadas humming, the thundering sound fo Roaring Springs and rushing waters of Bright Angel Creek tried to drown her out, and yet still she went on and on, yabbering, spinning her head, those window shade blinks of the soulless eyes staring at me. But, perched on my backpack, she was not paying attention to the low hanging wires of the Black Bridge as I walked across that metal structure after 3AM, and FWOOP! She was knocked off by a support wire, last heard screaming as the Colorado River swept here away, downstream. maybe perhaps to wash up waterlogged and creepy in a few years time at Lake Mead or ripped apart by bored river trout. Listen in: imtalkytina disappears into the colorado river After that... sweet silence. She is gone. Now you may have seen tweets and comments from "her" or someone pretending to be her (I am looking at you Ben Rimes and perhaps his doppleganger alt, Brian Bennett, and @dkernohan). But those are the pre-programmed remnants of the AI bot she forced me code for her. This morning I finally found the backdoor password into the codebase (it was "Dollsg3tLuvWithInt1mid@tion") and was able to invoke to self destruct module every good programmer thinks of). The destruction was total and complete. As you can see it was effective- the @iamtalkyyina twitter account is gone: [caption id="attachment_21951" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] as is the web site and domain: [caption id="attachment_21952" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] [caption id="attachment_21953" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] If you believe you are still seeing remnants of her activity, clear your cache. If you think you are still seeing communications, well then, you might have to dig deeper and dig your own psyche as it is likely creating the false signs. Her lasting power if suggestion is THAT stronger. Ask Erich Streator, see how he was "loved" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj2nRvmnoKI I for one, see nothing, and am free of the Creepy Doll Curse. The feeling is tremendous. All it took was a 24 mile hike over 18 hours. I am not sure if you need to go through such Exercism to drive out the Creepy Dolls, but it is possible. See how good this trip was. As for me, I feel great, and the internet is free of that nuisance. 4ever. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by KLK Photos I've been un-employed a week, and still soaking in the incredible response to my announcement and road plans... and now there are even more dots on the map to connect. That adventure will start sometime in June. I have yet to spend a day on the couch or even to sit around and watch movies. My biggest current project is sanding and painting my two decks; the smaller one has already taken much longer than anticipated just to get to the point of painting (tomorrow). But that does not mean I am vanishing from my edtech interests. I'm still doing my stuff for ds106, even now setting up some times for a show ida tomorrow for ds106 radio. I'll be part of a rowdy panel on this at Northern Voice as well as doing another solo presentation (a version of Looking Through the Lens). (more…) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by recompose Woah. (tap tap tap) [clears throat] Is this thing on? Yes, the red light is on. Welcome back. We took a nap here at cogdogblog for a few hours last night but still had stuff to write about. And we usually tell our students in ds106 that the server being down is not something that should keep them from creating, that there are end arounds, that we need to know how to fish for cache. So I blogged over at my quiet little Wordpress.com Laboratory (after tossing on a more modern theme) an example for one of the newest assignments in our two week unit on Remix/Mashups. In some earlier conversations with Jonathan Worth at phonar, we brainstormed the idea of on online media "recycle bin" - a place where students would upload media that was collected/created but not ended up being used for their earlier assignment work, the digital rubbish that falls to the kitchen floor and hides under the counters. I had looked about for a web site that would allow anonymous uploading and downloading of media (drop.io used to do this so well), and minus.com seemed really close, but the invite to upload never seemed to point people right to our bin. So I set up a more rube goldberg 2 part method- a dropitto.me site for uploading media (password is "photos4life" you can still put stuff there, no guarantee how long it wil take me to process). These go to a dropbox account I set up (a new one not connected to my regular account, set up under a guest account on my MacBookPro). Every 2 weeks I copied media out of there and uploaded to minus. Currently we have over 150 images, audio and a few videos at http://minus.com/mvKXzhhcO it is easy to download from there and you get a decent preview: The remix/mashup assignment, Recycle The Media is : Your task for this assignment is to mashup at least 7 different pieces of this media to make a new story, and use at least 2 different types (e.g. audio and image, image and video). The story most likely would be done as a video, but see if you can make these different kinds of media make sense as the content. What kind of recycled story can you make out of this cast off media? Martha and I gave our students the option to do this one as part of their 7 stars requirement of mashup assignments or to incorporate at least 5 of these media in their other mashup work. That is the long preamble to my post over at my sidecar blog on Cat? A Recycled ds106 Media Assignment, my own attempt at a story made of only bits of this recycled media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMZatWyKp6Y assembled in iMovie. I am curious to see how the students approach this, the hard part (which I did not exactly take on) is avoid doing a literal interpretation of the media. It takes some time to scroll up and down the media bin to find things that are either related or might be sequenced. Going against the grain, playing against expectations, is where the real gravy is in this creative meal. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Richy Schley: http://flickr.com/photos/wanderlinse/5397674268/ Checking all of the meters, spinning a few dials… ah there we are, signal. It has been a week since we launched the Headless ds106 course and on seeing the posts that have come in, the burst in twitter activity, I am pretty happy about the level of activity. More than that, it is very exciting to see a new crop of open participants who have all the signs of being bitten by the #4life virus. I was just thinking that it would be useful to track some weekly stats, because there is nothing I enjoy better than the smell of analytics in the morning. No it does seem useful to chart some data, so I hope to update a spreadsheet to show by week the number of blogs listed, the total number of posts, and a weekly summary of twitter activity (the latter coming from our use of Martin Hawksey’s tracking spreadsheets). In about 30 minutes, the work for week 2 will be published. This is still in many ways a startup phase. For people new to ds106, we suggest digging into the features of your blog platform, and trying some things to customize it, exploring themes, plugins,. widgets, menus, categories. We cannot give much direct instruction here, because how you do this hinges on your choice of platform. We also go to explore some of the framework and idea for this course, the importance of the concept of a personal cyber infrastructure, and ask you to consider the ideas for this laid out in talks and papers by Gardner Campbell. And maybe try to answer the age old question about “Bags of Gold”. But thats the summary of the class stuff. My own work is a bit wrapped up in making sure those parts of the machine are working, but I also dod my own stuff this week to change up the look and function of this blog – covered in Tweaking the Theme, originally set up for course materials the first time I taught ds106. I also completed five daily creates this week, and wrote up some background info on each of them. I am not going to respond much to the videos we put up for this week… I’ve done this already in times past. There are certainly others we could have put there; but the idea is to have you do some reflection, and sharing on what art (or ART) means to you. This course is about making art, and in a few weeks we will tap into a powerful message Tim Owens shared the first year of open ds106– We Are All Artists. Many people have trouble with this assertion. I did for a while. No not me, I am not an artist. I cant create. I’m not good at ______. We are all good at that negative self talk, sometimes rationalized as keeping oneself humble. If anything, I hope you find ds106 a place to comfortable play out against those assertions. I will say that if you are looking for more resources and inspiration, a few places I rely on include: Swiss Miss http://www.swiss-miss.com/ Open Culture http://www.openculture.com/ Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/ Hardly a complete list… bust stay tuned for some ideas I have about list of links. Okay, it’s almost ready to flip the Headless Assignment to week 2. There shall be more Daily Creates to do! In fact, there is one we hope everybody does. I've been still mentally energy catching up after the sprint marathon that is running our Symposium on Mashups last week and thuse am delinquent on sharing what an over-the-top session Jim Groom and Tom Woodward did on Welcome to the People's Republic of Non-Programistan -- including fake accents for 30 minutes -- catch the Connect recording but more, so catch the zany metaphor they carried out at http://bionicteaching.com/ihatecode. But heck, I dont even need to blog much, check out Tony Hirst's in kind response To Comrades in Non-Programistan - A Message from Feedistan. And oh, I am just crazed rocking to the first video Tony included- DataPortability- Get Your Data Out: Not to mention Fair(y) Use Tale[s] (oh what a mashup!). All Hail Feedistan! On the first leg of my flight from Phoenix to Aspen, I've listened to Malcolm Gladwell's ITConversations podcast on Human Nature. Author of the popular Blink and Tipping Point books, Malcolm Gladwell seems in voice to to find a great way to bring about data, research, and human nature to an interesting place. In this session he is talking about mistakes organizations made by doing extensive field tests of new products (Herman Miller's Aeron chairs, New Coke, making strategic decisions based on these tests, only to find in execution, they are dead wrong for how people really feel. The Aeron chair, Herman Miller's most successful and profitable chair, was meticulously designed to address a wide array of office chair problems (you would be amazed at how complex a simple chair and its use is). In their test with people who should be attracted (modern designers)-- it was disliked consistently. The people responsible for buying chairs for companies hated it too. But it persevered, and was/is a raging success. He highlights some os in the execution of the tests, as Pepsi tipped the scales of their "Pepsi Challenge" by having people only do a sip taste test (the results are different when subjects have to drink a full can of a sweeter cola), and how the tests are foiled when the identification is not between 2 different products, but telling which one is different between 2 samples of Product A and one of Product B. And did extensive internal, conclusive tests of their New Coke, that flopped like a dropped anvil when released as a product. The point (I think) made is that human preferences are not a fixed permanent entity. And when we are asked to explain choices, it can even affect our initial preference knowing we are asked to rationalize it. Furthermore, Gladwell argues that when presented with things that are very new, novel, and innovative, his research shows that when in an unsure place of judgment, human nature's first reaction is to go negative on it. I find this rather fascinating in education, given an increasing desire to "assess", "measure", "evaluate" learners perceptions of materials and their learning in general, that we too, like Coke and Herman Miller, may get caught up in the permanence of these human expressed perceptions, which may turn out to be more fluid. I know this makes things more complex, but that is the realm of human nature and preferences. I also lack an answers, but it should give some second thought to those immediate post event, post learning "measures" which are charted up so nicely and convincing. Preferences are fleeting... that's what I took away. This dog gives it 4 paws up. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine February 13 is World Radio Day and ds106 is on it! Check it out! Tweet it Out! Broadcast it out! It's your internet! Keep it Free! cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine If you lived through an era of music on LPs to CDs to now MP3s, you may be experiencing a syndrome I have felt myself... you're listening nicely to a song on your digital music player, and your past patterns of listening to the order of songs on a fixed medium cause you to expect the next song on an album to show up, and BAM! You get a different song by a different artist! I deem this syndrome Audiosequentialdisruptus. Like I might be listening to my collection of ancient rock songs-- I get to the end of Baba O'Riley on Who's Next, and my mind is fully expecting to launch into the next track. But instead of sliding into Bargain I get, unexpectedly, the Clash belting out Magnificent Seven! My audio sequencing has been disrupted! It is a bit dis-orienting! You even begin to sing the next song and end of horribly mis-matched. You've been programmed to receive music in a fixed order, and that whole world has been rip-mixed / mashed up to a more random stew. But how random are the mixes? On my iPod Shuffle, I regularly do the Autofill to get a mix (which provides some secret weighting according to my ratings), and I play it usually in shuffle mode, but at least a few times I have gotten three songs in a row by the same artist. The new iTunes 5.x offers a new "smart playlist" that has a slide to adjust a preference to give more or less probability of getting two tracks in a row from the same album.... I'l be trying it out. Still the algorithm of shuffling seems mysterious, and I am wondering if the technology inside is some sort of Flinstones type contraption of some little bird inside manually pulling songs from a playlist. More randomness, good thing or not? Go ahead and criticize for raving about an upcoming conference my new employer is hosting-- but regardless I would still be excited about this week's NMC Conference on Personal Broadcasting, taking place April 26 and 27 online via LearningTimes: At the leading edge of a wave that will last for the next several years and beyond, personal broadcasting, which uses informally produced personal audio and video content as a form of personal expression and as a means of information delivery, is rapidly expanding into academe as small, easy-to-use devices increasingly allow people to capture and share personal experiences, information, and events. From podcasting to video blogging (vlogging), personal broadcasting has clearly begun to impact campuses and museum audiences significantly. With roots in text-based media (personal websites and blogs), personal broadcasting of audio and video material is a natural outgrowth of a popular trend made possible by increasingly more capable portable tools. The two day program is jam packed with real world pod/vid casting practitioners and goes far beyond the nuts and bolts of the technology. Okay, I am trying to build up the conference in a big way by heaping on the superlatives. I will relish being in the conference for the full two days, something I rarely managed before. My session, still under... ahem... wraps... is Podcasting On the Cheap, aiming to highlight some of the clever ways teachers are using the free and available tools out there. I am very grateful already to the many of you blog readers who answered my call for an Odeo recorded greeting -- Cole, Gardner, Karen, Tim, Chris, Arvind, Suzanne, Paul, Darren, and lovely Lucy (with the Boston accent!).... yes, this will be part of Levine's Law of starting with a demo (this is available now as an Odeo Podcast), and the rest of the slides and links are coming soon to a wiki yet to be named. But my piece is small compared to the caliber of the other presenters. There are some nifty features rolled into the LearningTimes site used for the conference. They have many places where participants can call in a toll free number and leave a short recording that is added to the discussion boards and session descriptions as audio flash files. We have also crafted up an avatar "soapbox" -- using the phone in set up, anyone can leave an audio stream that becomes, until the next caller, the voice of an animated avatar (it's mouth moves and it animates as the audio plays back in the browser): Okay, it is a little silly (and yes, there are male avatars), but it fits the theme of making the broadcasting "personal". There's still time to register,, operators are standing by ;-) A true story. A NASA scientist who has a long career in using satellite imagery to study earth landforms is hired to teach a Structural Geology course at a university near where he works, Goddard Space Flight Center. He is currently participating in the authoring/editing of a new textbook on Geomorphology. He creates an assignment where each student in the class is given one satellite image and it's location. Their task is to write up the background research on the geology of the region in the image. Ultimately, their work is credited as part of a published book. This is clearly an example of what David Wiley has championed as a "renewable assessment" as opposed to the more typical disposable assignment. George Veletsianos just published How do faculty benefit from renewable assignments? on the BC Campus news site. I love this framing and use it often in talks; everyone knows the odor of disposable assignments. That example above? I was a student in that Geology class at the University of Maryland. It happened in 1984. The NASA teacher was Paul D Lowman, who had quite a long "maverick" career at NASA. Lowman who passed away in 2001 after like 40+ years as a NASA scientist. I don't remember him too well, he had a good sense of humor, but was also serious. And he definitely was cut from a different mold than other university professors. I don't have any memory of the exact assignment. I don't have any artifacts from this long ago. What I do remember is each students each got a photo print of a Landsat image, with likely a label with the location or the name of the Geological Feature (I was pretty sure I had the print, but alas it eludes me). I imagine I did all my research at the University Library, or maybe we got to go to a NASA one. Most likely I turned in a paper written on a typewriter. There likely were typos. The book was published three years later as Geomorphology from Space: A Global Overview of Regional Landforms - as a NASA publication it's in the public domain, and you can grab a 76 Mb version of it. It's an OER, right? My project was the Pine Mountain Thrust located in the Kentucky/Tennessee region of the Appalachian Mountains. In the book it is featured on pages 58-59. [caption id="attachment_65544" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Description page for the Pine Mountain Thrust. As a student I did some of the background research that appears here.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_65543" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Landsat Mosaic image of the Pine Mountain Thrust, Plate T-13. Look at all that geology![/caption] As a contributor I have my own physical copy of the book and when I opened it I found the letter I got when it was mailed to me: [caption id="attachment_65545" align="aligncenter" width="760"] My personal letter from NASA that accompanied the book I received as part of my work in a renewable assessment.[/caption] And as promised, you can see me and my fellow students mentioned in the credits on page 707: [caption id="attachment_65546" align="aligncenter" width="660"] I'm listed in the credits! [/caption] So the idea is really not new and I am sure it was done many times before Dr Lowman did it. The thing is... most everything I see as an example of this idea is on the order of writing a piece of a textbook, be it an open one or something in Wikipedia. Those are the only kinds I see in George and David's (and others) writing about the idea. The exception I see are some really great student produced videos David described that were done in 2007: An early version of this assignment back in 2007 brought you Kennedy and Nixon debating the merits of blogs and wikis, Rick Noblenski: Blasting Caps Expert and Wiki Advocate, and a father and son confrontation over District Policies Regarding Blogs and Wikis The Kennedy Nixon one is brilliant, with JFK arguing for wikis and Tricky Dick advocating blogs. Wait this is so good I am going to embed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsFU3sAlPx4 But these seem almost the exception as everything is aimed at Stuff That's Like A Textbook. It's not easy making assignments that are not responding to an essay question. I saw David struggle a bit with that first hand when I was part of the Creative Commons Certification project and we were trying to develop activities to show one's application of CC in the world. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Working Hard at Making Renewable Assessments flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] I missed the photos where David was almost in anguish trying to come up with ideas. I wrote more on this as The Challenge of Non-Disposable Assignments. I'm not claiming to have an superior expertise on this, but have had my hand in plenty of ones you will find in places like the DS106 Assignment Bank and the UDG Agora Challenge Bank where all activities had to produce something visible to the world at a URL. Again it's not easy to do something other than writing parts of textbooks and articles. Heck, I did that in 1984 ;-) But I think there is a lot of room for a broader range of renewable assignments. Featured Image: That's my own copy of Geomorphology from Space: A Global Overview of Regional Landforms, as a NASA / US Government publication it is in the public domain with no copyright restrictions How is that for Apple listening? A day after I threaten to drive my GMC truck over a blue toothless mouse, the Mac OS 10.4.7 update contains an update to improve bluetooth communication with mouse devices! So far so good, as the mouse has been able to have activated 100% of the time (about 7 connections on the OSX side and 2 on the XP side of my MacBookPro). It does lose its connection still if it is not tickled every ow and then. And even better, you can now rig your trackpad settings so a two finger tap and click act like a right mouse click (found at mac OSX Hints). inside System Preferences, go to Keyboard and Mouse, and then Trackpad settings. Enable the checkbox for tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click. Enabling Use Two fingers for scroll is also handy. I'm curious to see if this works on the XP side of the machine. Two finger tap and click is a bit weird, but good to know when a mouse starts rebelling against you. Update: No luck on the XP side. My Bluetooth mouse could not be recognized (well it was once, so I am batting .500), and the two finger trackpad muse click did nothing. So back out rolled the Logitech USB mouse, plugged it in, and it works. Seems to be the best bet. Indeed, this post is a test. With the move of this olde barge of a blog from Reclaim Hosting's shared hosting to Reclaim Cloud, the WordPress Activity Pub seems not to by firing out via @barking@cogdogblog.com in Mastodon. On the publishing side, I see the WordPress wheels spinning in the process, but it never completes. I see a post published in the WordPress list of posts, but nuttin' gets tooted. Also, it's fun to rummage in my own flicker pool for anything matching "test", many of which I forgot and can be reminded about again --the effort to give uploaded images context with titles, descriptions, tags pays off years later. So I am trying again, in vain hope that the rocket will fly. I feel like that cow out there saying, "huh?" 10, 9, 8, 7, .... Featured Image. Mine. From a drive across one of the loneliest highways in what was America, and not the one most people mention. All in the rear view mirror. Testing Cattle flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Ouch, can you feel the pain, of faculty, students, tired techies... The servers hosting the Blackboard Enterprise system 6 of our colleges share had some sort of "cataclysmic" failure of the SAN- the data storage. It has been down and out about 2 weeks before finals. Ouch. I am not directly involved with Blackboard in our system, but it did mean it is unavailable for a few days while scrambling goes on to notify students. get replacement hardware, and try and resurrect the databases. I know there are folks out there pulling all nighters to get the system back, but you can bet that some work or materials are going to be lost Judging from the emails flying around, folks on both the instructional and technical sides of the house are being understanding, creating work-arounds, but it may serve to create some ripples of distrust. Maybe it will be a lesson for some that will learn to not rely on faith that the technology will run perfectly all the time. Like most things mechanical, it is prone to failure, and if all your teaching materials sit on one server, and is not anywhere else in your reach, well, you are on thin ice. There are valid Murphy-like laws I have dealt with mostly for presentations-- the network will go down for a web demo (do you have an offline way to show the same info?), the key projector cable will have vanished (do you have a spare?), the set up did not provide a speaker cable for your video files (do you have mini speakers?), or you may have a typo in your PowerPoint (Can you make a joke of it? turn it into a lesson?) I often start my technology demos with a disclaimer: Before I begin, my expectation is that the technology I will show you will likely fail. If it does fail, than I have met my expectations. If it does not fail, well, than I have exceeded my expectations. Quite often we expect technology and people using it to be perfect, so allowing for or even inviting imperfection at the outset can set a stage of relief from over stated expectations. Perfection is highly over-rated. Profound statement ahead. The web is made of links. Except when they don't work. This trail all began with a throw away tweet: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1438234424835989506 Yes, I have that old blogger habit of looking through old posts or using them as my (cue the operatic swelling music)... Knowledge Management System. So often, "or mansy days" as the typo-prone tweeter does, I can't find what I once linked to. Thanks to the Wayback Machine Chrome Extension I am at least not stuck in room 404, I at least can find copies, sometimes just remnants in the Internet Archive. Bless. This. Machine. In a twitter response my friend Ken Bauer suggested that Jim Groom had some kind of solution. And that did remind me that yes, Jim, who occasionally blogs (;-) did have something I remember on his blog where dead links appeared crossed out. It did not take long to find a sample post where that happens: Signs of a dead link on Jim Groom's blog I can see on inspecting the HTML that the hyperlink has a class="broken_link" in it- my guess is some kind of plugin that tests links slips in the class name. It at least gives me as reader an indication that the link has left the web. With a little bit of guessing I am pretty sure it is the Broken Link Checker plugin which does what it says but as well "Makes broken links display differently in posts". My curiosity itch got to me thinking that if this plugin does all the leg work to find all links in a blog, test them, and change the class name of a hyperlink with a foul URL, maybe I could modify it to make it link to a Wayback Machine link. I know from experience that if you take the link in Jim's post http://rusc.uoc.edu/index.php/rusc/article/view/27 and preceded it with https://web.archive.org/web/*/ you get a link that shows all of it's entries in the Wayback machine, or https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://rusc.uoc.edu/index.php/rusc/article/view/27 My optimism dimmed a little when I saw how many files there were in the plugin! My strategy was to find where in all this mess class name of "broken_link" is inserted. This is where my love of BBEdit comes in because I can search for "broken_link" across the entire directory of the plugin. Very quickly I found a function highlight_broken_link inside includes/any-post.php that looks like where the action happens. I have nowhere near an understanding of how this plugin works, but conceptually: Some routine does a parsing of all posts, extracts all urls inside link tagsEach unique url is externally checked if it returns an http status code indicating the link works (or not)The plugin thus keeps its own database table of all links and statusWhen a post is displayed, a hook from this plugin is called when the content is requested by WordPressAll links in the post are looked up, and if it one that has been reported dead, on output the class="broken_link" is added to the markup This is clever because it is never changing the markup of the original post, all the changes happen when it is displayed. Here is that function in the Broken Link Checker plugin that modifies the CSS. function highlight_broken_link( $link, $broken_link_urls ) { if ( ! in_array( $link['href'], $broken_link_urls ) ) { //Link not broken = return the original link tag return $link['#raw']; } //Add 'broken_link' to the 'class' attribute (unless already present). if ( $this->plugin_conf->options['mark_broken_links'] ) { if ( isset( $link['class'] ) ) { $classes = explode( ' ', $link['class'] ); if ( ! in_array( 'broken_link', $classes ) ) { $classes[] = 'broken_link'; $link['class'] = implode( ' ', $classes ); } } else { $link['class'] = 'broken_link'; } } //Nofollow the link (unless it's already nofollow'ed) if ( $this->plugin_conf->options['nofollow_broken_links'] ) { if ( isset( $link['rel'] ) ) { $relations = explode( ' ', $link['rel'] ); if ( ! in_array( 'nofollow', $relations ) ) { $relations[] = 'nofollow'; $link['rel'] = implode( ' ', $relations ); } } else { $link['rel'] = 'nofollow'; } } return $link; } I thought about changing the class name to something different for my purposes for creating a redirect tag, but it matters not. I can just change the CSS to indicate it is a Wayback Machine redirect. I have to figure out how to change the link. With some more digging, I figure out to put this after the part of the highlight_broken_link function that modifies the CSS: $link['href'] = 'https://web.archive.org/web/*/' . $link['href']; The $link variable contains all parts of the hyperlink, so I am just changing its value at display time to insert ahead of it that part that calls in the WayBack machine. There is one tweak I need to make this work- that is that $link comes into the function the typical way: function highlight_broken_link( $link, $broken_link_urls ) { This is pass by value. I can use it in my function but I cannot change it. A small change makes it come in as pass by reference that allows my function to change it: function highlight_broken_link( &$link, $broken_link_urls ) { As a sidebar, I have for a while been cleverly indicating all links on my blog with an icon inserted before the link to indicate it goes to the Wayback machine. a[href*="web.archive.org/web"] { padding: 0px 0 0px 22px; background: transparent url(https://cogdogblog.com/images/social/archive.png) no-repeat center left; } I decide to use it to indicate even more that a link is not only dead, but being redirected to the Wayback machine. Interestingly I did not find any CSS in the code, but there is an option of the plugin to change the style of the broken_link class. The original plugin simple, just a change of the text to have a line through it. With some testing I make it different- change color to red, and use my method of inserting an icon in front: This was just a change in the plugin options (core/init.php) from: 'broken_link_css'=> ".broken_link, a.broken_link {\n\ttext-decoration: line-through;\n}", to 'broken_link_css'=> ".broken_link, a.broken_link {\n\tcolor:red;\n\ttext-decoration: line-through;\n\tpadding: 0px 0 0px 22px;\n\tbackground:transparent url(" . plugin_dir_url( __DIR__ ) . "images/archive.png) no-repeat center left;\n}", There is a little bit of trickery to reference an image file stored in plugin directory. So in about 2 hours I have it working on a test WordPress. But no one can see it. So the next test is trying on a demo site with just 1 post in it, made specifically to have dead links. More success! http://secretrevolution.us/demo/2021/09/16/oh-my-the-links/ I am rather cautious to try it here on the Big Ship CogDogBlog, it has over 5000 posts. What it if breaks the boat? But no gain without an adventure. The Broken Link Checker found about 35,000 unique URLs in blog posts! https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1438619757272571904 I let it go all night and maybe it got half done https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1438875773717336066 And now, push 48 hours, it is down to 5000 urls left to test. It seems to do a nice job of running in the background. Even so, the work has just begun. I have been checking in and finding plenty of deadlinks are my own typos. Or Malformed links. And then it looks like a lot of photo sites, Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash block the remote checking I do, so I am getting returns of 403 forbidden. These can all by marked as ok in the Broken Link Checker interface, so they will not appear with the redirect link. But all in all it is working. I have made a fork of the original plugin that is now on GitHub at https://github.com/cogdog/broken-link-checker It's hardly am update or new version. I cannot claim this plugin as mine since really I changed maybe 5 lines of code. I am not sure if the original developers would want to fold in my changes. This has been fun to work through, thanks Ken for nudging me down the road. And as Jim blogged in response (hey this kid blogger has some promise...), archiving and such is a Sisyphean Labor of Link Love. I got 5000+ links to comb through. But my blog is gonna be cleaner and I will have accomplished myself the wishful dream I tossed out as tweet in the wind. I can do my part to tend my own garden of links- whether others let their stuff rot is on them. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/33758778781 Who Broke the Internet? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'm back almost a week from an incredible and intense and fantastic three week trip to Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong -- all pretty much enabled by network connections among nice people. So much happened I had to make a spreadsheet to help me organize the sessions I did at least 30 workshops, presentations, consultations, and class visits. Beyond the snafus of US Failways on the trip over, catching and somehow warding off the Cog Dog Cough Wog in week 1, keeping tabs on my ds106 class-- the blogging fell off the table. I'm not sure I am ready to be the Roving Presentation Dude. I'm worn flat. A number of sessions were re-purposed, but never carbon copies, and most of them evolved along the way- many variations of Web Storytelling sessions from 20 minutes to 3 hour workshops, morphing into one on Elements of Storytelling (what works), the tools stuff (50 Ways, Five Card Flickr Stories, pechaflickr, ds106); another one where the code name was "The Web is a Groovy Place" with flavors to include the True Stories of Openness or the value of Sharing in a Networked Environment; a new one on visual metaphors and strategies for finding photos, and a string of brand new workshops / class activities. For a fresh change of environment, I did more stuff with k-12 on this trip than usual, everything from doing a storytelling activity with 2nd graders to a 6th grade math activity to discussing internet culture with 10th graders, not to mention the interaction with the 130+ international students and teachers who were part of the Flat Classroom Conference. (more…) flickr foto Nov_04_I-Ate-This-Squaredavailable on lenny's flickr (not my meal, but found in the flickr Creative Commons By Attribution collection) Getting back to documenting what's been sitting on my project plate, is a heaping pile of ... well, not the cholesteral special in this Creative Commons flickr photo, but a heaping pile of mySQL, PHP, and some seatr of the pants programming... and the birth of a new thing we call the "Ocotillo Cortex". We have to start this back to May 2005 for our year end edtech fest, the Ocotillo Retreat. Our theme was related to "Lost in Technology" and sported a GPS metaphor sprinkled everywhere. This had even more database behind the web than previous events, and it was cooking well. We created an online demo session presenter form, so all those details went to a database that fueled the session list of 46 sessions This too was cross hooked to that all sessions were cross entered in the Maricopa Learning eXchange, so say Stan's session on Earth Science Power Points had a corresponding MLX slip, where he could hang more links and power point files. (more…) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by foxypar4 On December 14, 2012, Clara-Belle, Daisy, Elsie, Moonbeam, Bessie, and a small group of bovine thought leaders will gather in Des Moines to discuss the future of CHEESEs in online dairy production. The approach of this one-day intensive summit brings Elsie and Moonbeam back to the subject of CHEESEs, and the imminent return of CHEESE CHEESE. A CHEESE is not a thing. A CHEESE is a strategy. What we say about CHEESEs cannot possibly contain their drama, banality, incessance, and proliferation. The CHEESE is a variant beast -- placental, emergent, alienating, enveloping, sometimes thriving, sometimes dead, sometimes reborn. There is also nothing about a CHEESE that can be contained. Try as they might, CHEESE-makers like Borden, Kraft, and Tilamook cannot keep their CHEESEs to themselves, because when we join a CHEESE, it is not to learn new curds, new whey, new knowledge, it is to learn new cheesemaking. Entering a CHEESE is entering Wonderland -- where modes of cheese making are turned sideways and on their heads -- and we walk away CHEESEified. “There is a relational aspect to cheese making.” There’s an invisible network (or potential network) underneath every cheese making community. The best CHEESEs make the networks patent. The worst CHEESEs are neutered, lost slices that float unabsolved in the ether as capital “L” cheese making, abstract and decontextualized. CHEESEification: to harness (in an instant) the power of a nodal network for cheese making. Rather than creating a barn to grown a herd, CHEESEification relies on nodes to power a cheese making activity (or assignment). CHEESEification also refers to a cheeseogical approach inspired by CHEESEs that is unleashed in an otherwise closed or small-format cheese production. Chris Friend writes, in cheese making as Performance: CHEESE Pedagogy and On-ground Classes "The promise of CHEESEs lies not in what the format lets us do, but in what the format lets us question: Where does cheese making happen? What are the requirements of effective collaboration? How can assessment become more authentic? How much structure and direction are best in a classroom?" These questions stir and circle back upon themselves in endless repetition as we and everyone grapples with what the CHEESE is and what it does. These are important questions, exactly the right ones at exactly the right time; but there’s a deeper one that underlies our conversation. The question that needs tending to now, as the furor around CHEESEs builds to a roar. Are organized attempts to harness cheese making always and necessarily frustrated? Does cheese making happen modally at all? Is cheese making the demesne of any institution, organization, or formal community; or does it happen regardless of these, unmonitored, unfettered, uncontrolled, and does the rise of the CHEESE point to this? Have we created CHEESEs, or have we just discovered them, emerging from their pens, where they’ve always lived? Is it, as Melba (tag 344) writes, that “ there is nothing outside the CHEESE "Without threatening to spin into intellectual nihilism (or relativism), we need to worry for the entire enterprise of dairy production, to be unnerved in order to uncover what’s going on now." And not now this year. But now exactly this moment. Because just this second something is awry. True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. ~ Tom Robbins Young Macdonald writes" The analysis, remixing, and socially engaged construction of personally relevant cheeseedge -- often happens when the agricultural framework is disrupted, diverted, or left in the dust." Many hackles are rightly raised by the ubiquity of this word “disruption”, and its implications for the business of higher dairy production; but the best CHEESEs do not deal in the bourgeois concept of disruption, they deal in a very real rupture that is confusing to us all. Something convulsive. A monstrous birth. The CHEESE is a dialectic. It invites us in with a curled finger, as sinister as it is salient. Cheese making isn’t (and has never really been) in the hands of yuppies, stay at home moms, agricultural extensions, corporations, Say Cheese magazine, the Chronicle of Higher dDiry Production. It’s in the hands of Connie, and cows like her. The ones who come fully alive to cheese making without being told when and where it’s going to happen, without being placed obediently in a field like a sheep. The ones who throw wide the barnyard doors, who hack farming, or learn by reflecting on the flurry of input in their everyday lives; as Connie says, “cheese making … where life happens.” We are all dairy masters, and our barnyard is the universe. To attend chiefly to the trough or barnyard while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine barnyard standing in a cow-yard at last. ~ Henry David Moocow While we’ve all focused our consternation on how CHEESEs may take down the walls of agribusiness, or how they may represent the CHEESEDonalds of dairy production, we are missing the most important, and most frightening, potential of CHEESEs. They force us to reconsider the very fabric of how we think about cheese making -- its occurrence, emergence, habitat, and administration. From August 12th to August 18th, 2012, Hybrid Cheesology ran CHEESE CHEESE, a now infamous mini-CHEESE, meta-CHEESE, CHEESE about CHEESEs that garnered not only a good bit of attention for its efforts, but also built a lasting community of inquiry that remains curious about emerging ideas of CHEESEification, the place of mini- and micro-CHEESEs, and the implementation of open cheese making environments in traditional higher ed. classrooms. As well, CHEESE CHEESE set a precedent for CHEESEish conversations about CHEESEs, and spurred us to think deeply about where online dairy production is headed. It would be easy to contend, at this early stage in their evolution, that every CHEESE has been a CHEESE about CHEESEs -- that every CHEESE is a meta-CHEESE, a CHEESE CHEESE. The early connectivist CHEESEs pioneered by folks like Bessy Siemens and Stephen Moownes were, whether explicitly or implicitly, exploring the form, the pedagogy, and the process of CHEESEs. At the same time, we were unaware of anyone who had done a CHEESE unflinchingly trained on the CHEESE phenomenon. A CHEESE that explored unhesitatingly -- even a bit recklessly -- the potential, pitfalls, drawbacks, and advantages of this approach to teaching and cheese making. CHEESE CHEESE aimed to expose all of us to the grand experiment of CHEESEs by having us participate directly in that grand experiment, albeit in a concentrated, one-week format. (And there was mighty participation. Jolly Molly created this interactive graph of tweet volume on the #CHEESECHEESE hashtag.) Rather than a knee-jerk critical reaction to the march of the CHEESEs, we encouraged participants to inhabit the CHEESE, exploring its pedagogical potential as an exercise in >discernment but not judgment. For one week beginning January 6, 2013, CHEESE CHEESE will return for a continued examination of the CHEESE phenomenon, now grown well beyond a rising surge into a more perfect storm. This new iteration, which we’re fondly calling CHEESE CHEESE [squared], will inspect not only the broadened landscape of CHEESEs (including Tilamook’s swelling presence and government cheese, Borden’s flash mob-style on-ground tastings, and the rise of LMS-based CHEESEs like Instructure’s Kraft.net), but also will turn the lens on itself, repurposing and remixing the original course and the conversations and artifacts that arose from within the course. CHEESE CHEESE will be housed once more within the Cheddar LMS, fueled by the ongoing discussions of the CHEESE CHEESE community, and also nourished by ideas freshly harvested from the December CHEESE Summit. There is no good or evil inherent in a CHEESE, only in what it will or will not unleash. We must stop thinking of dairy production as requiring stringent modes and constructs, and embrace it as invention, metamorphosis, deformation, and reinvention. This is the territory of the inventor always, the territory of the pugnacious and irreverent. cheese making in CHEESEs should be cohesive, not divided, and it must happen multi-nodally. The parsing of cheese making that formal dairy production has always relied on will give way to something, if not holistic, then simultaneous, distributed, alive in more than one place at a time. If the best CHEESEs show us that cheese making is networked, and that it has always been, then cheese making is more rampant than we've accounted for. NOTE: This is a parody (check out the links though, they are real (mostly) and relevant (sort of)!). Any resemblance to real cows or people who actually make food for a living is unintentional. For the real dynamic of CogDogs and MOOCows refer to this documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-13md4Czq88 More and more I have needed a Mac OSX SFTP client for moving web content to various servers- we have knocked off open FTP on all of our web servers, and I need it now for loading content to SourceForge. Pity that my long friend Fetch, used since the early 1990s, has yet to jump up to SFTP. It has been a road of trying a bunch of different apps, none of which was reliable (many do odd things with file permissions). On the scrap heap is: The Truck: Transmit it worked ok (I recall) but was funly with permissions, and you had to pay for it. The Captain: Captain FTP yes shareware, not much-- my programmer Colen uses it but claims it has quirks. The Dud: MacSFTP- could never use the demo, the download was already expired The Duck: CyberDuck - Free and a cool icon... I had gotten use out of the Duck last few months, but it overwrites file permissions, you cannot upload a multiple selection of files, and it takes a minutes to register the first transsfer. Worse, every transfer seemed to want me to click to allow a transmission. It never would connect to sourceForge's server. And today I think I found the winner-- Fugu from the University of Michigan. It is free, has a clean interface, and works well without mucking up permissions. I am still not crazy about two-paned transfer interfaces (I like dragging and dropping from the desktop to.from Fetch)... but that is just a matter of adjustment. A few clicks back I had played with a test Blogdigger collection - this is a service that allows you to take a pile of web/RSS feeds, and then have that itself be able to collapse into its own feed- an uber feed if you will. My test was to build up a collection of RSS feeds from known Learning Objects sites, and is Blogdiggered at: http://groups.blogdigger.com/learningobjects. A few notes and quibbles: (1) They have redesigned the layout, some improvement. (2) There are 986 items listed as returns from 10 sources. (3) I had listed a feed from EdNA but it does not appear to be learning objects but news about instructional technology. So that would has slid off my list. If someone wants to fix this, see below. (4) There are two search fields- very confusing. The top one searches all of Blogdigger, but there is a second search form in the little blue area in the middle that allows me to search within by collection (this is good) as well as Blogdigger wide. What we have here is a need to stamp out an abolish redundancy! The top search form is un-necessary. (5) The search within a group is neat, because it allows you to save that search as its own URL, such as this one within my LO collection for the word "math" http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?q=math&search=1&id=252 But why cannot the XML link now reflect this as a filter? And worse there is no link that takes me back to the primary collection. This is B-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-d navigation. Still, I like the concept, and am optimistic they can adjust the output templates to address the quibbles above. I very much like what this does to repurpose a collection of feeds into a new purpose. Oh, again, the invitation is open- if someone out there wants to add an RSS feed for a Learning Object collection, there is a link in the lower right. The password is the 4 letter name of the little building block metaphor that some apply to LOs (all lowercase, Jeeves!). My mind works by strange associations, free formed links, connecting, unconnecting, often ending up in the neural equivalent of "page not found". So on reading this tweet in the Connected Courses twitter flow: https://twitter.com/jeremybwilliams/status/508853779706683392 the phrase "Beyond the LMS" led me to thinking of the fantasmic novel by Philip K Dick (openly available on the web) and had me spending 20 minutes remixing a cover of the book: (with apologies to PKD fans, do you know what they call themselves?) Because beyond the LMS, beyond all this stuff... is the open, free linking web, always has been. Just watch out for those wubs, willya? Here is a summary of tweaking made for the prototype of the theme to make a ds106 assignment bank for your own uses. I managed to do this Friday afternoon while waiting for my truck to be serviced; I have to return tomorrow, so maybe the Ford dealership in Star Valley, Arizona is good for coding. They do have a dog there named "Lucky". On the index page for all assignment types, i added counts for the number of assignments within each type, for now just in brackets nest to the name: [caption id="attachment_24737" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image to see full size)[/caption] I'm starting to get a better handle inside of the way wordpress taxonomies work (fancy geek name for the data that includes tags and categories). $assignmenttypes = get_terms( 'assignmenttypes', array( 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC', 'hide_empty'=> 0, ) ); Here, assignmentypes is a custom taxonomy to include the names of all the kinds of assignments ("Music", "Gardening", "Cooking") - here we need to run a query to get them as data objects that we loop through to build the index. Eventually, it will be a theme option for how to order them, perhaps alphabetically, perhaps by order added, perhaps even by the number of assignments within each. Speaking fo that, I was able to get a way to count the number of custom post types within each taxonomy term, so we can put a count next to each: foreach ($assignmenttypes as $atype) { // get the number of post types that use this term $items = get_objects_in_term( $atype->term_id, 'assignmenttypes'); echo '(icon here) ' . $atype->name . ' [' . count($items) . ']' . $atype->description . ''; } Each assignmenttype is an object from which we can use for output, so $atype->slug helps us build the url, $atype->name the title, $atype->description the info added as a description (like a category). The function get_objects_in_term provides a way to get the number of things that use that term as an array, so we can echo the number with a count() call. In the interest of the different ways the site might be used, and to allow easy editing of the introduction text, I changed up how I was templating this one. Before I made it the front of the site using it in a front-page.php template. Instead now, it is a simple page template (page-front.php). If used as the entry to the site, you would create a new page, and select this as a template. Then in the Wordpress Reading settings, you would use the option to set the home of the site to a static page (this one). [caption id="attachment_24738" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image for full size)[/caption] What this means is you could have an index of all the assignments as an ordinary wordpress page, not necessarily the front of the site; the index could be a normal blog flow (say for a course site that would have the assignment bank as an interior feature). This also means the introduction and even title is something you would enter as normal page content. I also thought it will be useful for this screen, and maybe widgets elsewhere, to start making some shortcodes so you could each the number of assignments, number of examples in the bank. These are easy to do in the functions.php file: /*************** SHORT CODES *****************/ // short code for number of assignments in the bank add_shortcode('thingcount', 'getThingCount'); function getThingCount() { return wp_count_posts('assignments')->publish; } // short code for number of examples in the bank add_shortcode('examplecount', 'getExampleCount'); function getExampleCount() { return wp_count_posts('examples')->publish; } Yes, the layouts are not too stylized now and are ripe with placeholders for things like icons: [caption id="attachment_24739" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image for full size)[/caption] I am thinking of leaving it pretty un-styled, but set up classes so it would be easy to add your own CSS. Or maybe set up something in the Theme Customization API for styling things like the divs for each assignment, or maybe a system for having preset sub theme styles or ... I would like to have a customization option for the size of the icons. I have a one size added as one created for each upload for both the index page and the individual assignment page; as a them option, you could then define the shapes/sizes of the icons (and also the width of social media embeds). Now, I have to dive into some means to have the assignment submission form working... This is one in a series of posts documenting the creating of a Wordpress theme that can give you a version of the ds106 Assignment Bank for your own purposes. (leaving as a placeholder for some AI generated excuses for not blogging). The draft has been in my head! Yes, with last weekend being Mother's Day, celebrating was held here Saturday at home here that we call "Ursa Acres" or "Ursa" or just often "the universe." There was home cooked food, family, flowers, and cards. I've written more than a few posts about my mom, who I am more than sure would have loved and welcomed like her own, my Cori. Mom's photo is smiling at us both now, from the family photo wall in our dining room. But this post is solely to celebrate the mom that I live and love, Cori, who was a heroic single parent before I met her, and whose compassionate, generous, and always on radiant love I can see shaped her daughter. She has that same level of love too (more of the tough firm love) with her high school students, being one of those teachers who student gravitate to, because she gives so much and also, wont put up with any of your s*** (from me either). There are the crowds of previous students now out in this world, who still call, message, ask for help, share photos of their new babies. And how did we continue the Mother's day weekend? Well on Sunday we were both in our work jeans, hands in the dirt, swatting misquitos, out in our field planting a few hundred new trees. It was eight plus hours followed by a few more of stiff and soreness.. and pure joy. Cori and I both say often how we do not know anyone else who would be part of this crazy dream we have to "rewild" our 16 acre rural property. We are creating a landscape by not doing certain things (cutting grass), letting the land go/grow, transplanting stuff growing on what part of the property to another, shoving poplar cuttings into the ground with the small change they might root. https://cogdogblog.com/2025/01/land-love-loving-land-and-letting-go-to-grow/ We plan to turn much of the open space into a forest, here in the unlikely setting of the open Saskatchewan prairie, whe mostly trees have been cut to clear for planting, or when they are planted they are in a single line of trees on the perimeter of a house. Our mode is never as neat as straight lines, it's all curves and tangles. I am again so happy to love someone who loves be back so fiercely, who is a dedicated advocate for justice and students and the environment. My mom would adore this one. Ahh, the universe. That was our name for the feeling when we first spent time together, a place where it felt like the entire world faded to the distance, leaving us in a universe... on a porch in a suburban lot. We touch and feel that universe all the time. The photo above? That one Cori gets the credit, from one of the nights recently where we stopped what we were doing to go outside and take in the northern lights. And Cori's keen eye caught the stars of Ursa Major, like dipper pouring light downward on us. Greetings from our universe, it's just pure joy to be here. I love you, Cori. This post is for you, darling ;-) Featured Image: Ursa and Northern Lights by Cori Saas, shared with me and I bet everyone else. Since the photo was portrait orientation, it was set on a black background to better fit the featured image format, and then filled in using a bit of Photoshop Generative Fill (see I do use a wee bit of AI). cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Gary Denness I did something dumb on the internet. I should have known better. I should not have clicked. I should not have filled out the form. But, I did. The thing is, when you are cruising through the z-space, your 99.99% vigilance is not always quite good enough. Fortunately, the stakes are minuscule and the only thing damaged is my intuition. Previously, I had written about discovering, enjoying the old book, Sands of the Kalahari, and I wondered that it sure seemed something ripe for hollywood treatment. In fact, it was made into a movie in 1965, but seems hard to locate a (legal) copy. Amazon had it listed for I guess a re-release on DVD, but it was not available until August... I want it now! So... errr.... I clean googling the film title along with words like "online", "free" There is a large grey colored slice of google for watching movies online. I saw a few links clearly saying, "Watch Sands of the Kalahari Online for free", and oddly curious, I clicked. There are a swatch of URLs, domains with the results, and if you dig through the muck, after a path of ad-laden pages, you end up more or less on a handful of sites that supposedly have the goods. Curiosity got me. I ended up at a site called Cineble.com which offers "The most convenient way to watch movies starts here. Watch the movies you love"“ from the newest releases to the all-time classics"“ anytime, anywhere." (Note for web site creators, a link to an About page that just offers mailing adress is NOT A F*****ING ABOUTRPAGE -- thats another rant) And what they do is not in itself bad, and probably, it is one of a gabillion similar outfits trying to shake the money tree for the interest in streaming films. It's their sneaky way of getting you in the font door, before jumping out and saying "GOCTHYA" that I take issue with. Cute doll is cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Shain Erin The site told me for a trial account (not mentioning ow long the trial was, turns out, the judge is speedy), I needed to provide a credit card so they could verify my home was in the US, that I would not be charged for anything. That's a warning sign folks, don't be a jackass like me- only use your credit card if you are actually intending to buy something. But I jumped into the dark scary house anyhow. It got worse, as once I got inside Cineble, the movie I thought would be able to see, was not even there! Oh well, I thought lesson learned. Until I got an email letting me know that my "trial" account would expire in 5 days: Your free Premium trial will expire on May. 15, 2011. If you are happy with Cineble Premium, your membership will conveniently renew at $49.95 per month unless cancelled. HOLY BAT SHIT! If I don't cancel, these ghouls are going to ding my credit card 50 clams a month! So of course I went back to the the Cineble Fun House online and followed the trails up the creaky staircase to cancel my account. Get this. Stand by. TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT ONLINE THEY WERE GOING TO CHARGE MY CREDIT CARD $0.99 To do it for free, I would have to call someone on the telephone. What do you think, if I call, will they complete the conversation in less than 60 second, or just might.. might... they try to up sell me? Sure, I can spare $0.99 but there is a principle here. The main one is that it is clear where I live: cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by raindog But I was travelling, and had no interest in giving them a chance to steal more time from me. So I payed the $0.99 Yet. I was not done. I would exact my mico-revenge. I contacted my credit card company and told them not to honor the payment. And to their credit, Chase probably spent $75 worth of effort to not pay me $0.99 fool fee. I'd like to think that they did not pay the demons at Cineble.com, but I guess they just took it as a loss. Yep, I am a fool. I fell. A fool. Just keep in mind, behind many lovely, seemingly sensible web fronts, there are people behind it like this cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Shain Erin I can't stop going back for more GraphJams. I am wearing my GraphJammies eating peanut butter and GraphJam sandwiches. But I am waiting for my own submission to be portrayed, based on a recent blog post of my own. But for now, cue up that CD track that starts with scratchy vinyl sounds and get the funk toes tapping: more graph humor and song chart memes GraphJam even give you the video! GraphJam! (Where It's At!) GraphJam! (Where It's At!) GraphJam! (Where It's At!) While checking out some office supply items, the first bulleted one made me take a second look: Yeah, you could pay for the change but what actually arrives in the brown package left on your doorstep? Oh twitter, Audrey truly wants to be verified https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/906187941147549696 She has tried several times. In protest I am taking the bold move of adding my own signal of un-verifiability to my twitter name (and I loathe emojis) As if anything in twitter really matters.... Feature Image: Photoshop modified from Wikimedia Commons image by JJ12880 shared under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. If cropped above, enjoy here... flickr foto Flickr-ed Magazine: Wiki Wiki Worldavailable on my flickr More flickr fun! The Flickr Magazine Cover allows you to turn any flickr photo into your own cover. Why? Because you can? More flickr fun... Use Magazine Cover to turn a flickr photo into a magazine cover of your own title! And just to show I can do something not related to dogs, I plucked my own photo of the Wiki Wiki bus taken last June in Hawaii. Toss together equal portions of luck, fortunate, serendipity, and a sorely needed dose of genuine humanity all went into the mix of the most current episode I am just blessed to click buttons for the OEG Voices Podcast I have been doing for Open Education Global. This was easily more than just a podcast, this was a moment of sheer positivity that seems more rare these days. I don't think most of my colleagues truly grasped how powerful a thing we had made possible, simply by offering an invitation to talk, without script or structure. I've already alluded to this episode in my rush of excitement to be part of a series of live, unstructured events for Open Education Week. On the middle day of the week, that just so happened to be International Women's Day, we had coordinated a conversation with Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies, made possible by librarians Paola Corti and Mira Buist-Zhuk (I remain in awe of Mira for her super heroic translation skills to go back and forth between me in English and in Ukrainian for Tetiana). I had suggested setting this up maybe 2 weeks prior in an email to Paolo who had invited Tetiana who had said she would be there "if she had sufficient electricity." Let that one sink in. Now I am tempted to describe it all over again, but it's more or less been blogged already by me, and you get as well the full audio of course, transcripts in English and Ukrainian, but mostly, take the time to listen to Tetiana tell how she and her colleagues managed to keep their university mission alive through a war time invasion-- just a year ago. https://podcast.oeglobal.org/2023/03/22/voices-51/ Just to summarize, just three weeks after bombs fell on Dnipro, Tetiana and her colleagues put into operation a crisis plan developed during the pandemic, organized how to provide all kinds of support, including course, library, and research, and she and her staff were at their library just 3 weeks later carrying out this heroic effort. And it was not like Open Education had to swoop in to offer the OER goodies as a new offering of benevolence; Tetiana and the Scientific library had been practicing, facilitating open access publishing, OER awareness since 2009. I could not be more honored to just have this time, and in fact, after an hour when I offered and out, Tetiana wanted to keep talking. After I had published the episode, I drafted an email of thanks to Tetiana, relying on Google Translate to try and turn my words into Ukrainian. She replied (in turn I think by translation): Hello, dear Alan!You made me and my family extremely happy people late last night! In my previous life (before the war), I would never have thought that I would be a part of such a wonderful international project. In addition, you created a very cozy and friendly atmosphere in which I, as a guest, felt very comfortable. At the beginning of the meeting, I was very nervous because: firstly, I didn't have such experience in recording; secondly, I didn't have time to prepare; and thirdly, I didn't know what questions you would ask me. But your kindness and sincere support, the enormous help of Paola and Mira, as well as the pleasant faces of Marcela and the other participants in your online studio, removed all barriers. Thank you very much, Alan!You, along with Paola and Mira, gave me wonderful emotions! Alan, my colleagues and I (librarians, teachers, researchers) are also very interested in creating opportunities for collaboration. I would be happy to bring your suggestions to them. I look forward to it. Thank you very, very much to you, your friends in the studio, your family and everyone who supports Ukrainians in this terrible war. Your help is invaluable. email from Tetiana Kolesnykova I remain firmly convinced that open education is often too focused on the stuff- the resources, licenses, courses, platforms, when really, the most important factors are just being able to have human conversations and connections like these. Just sit down and say ??????. Featured Image: My own combination (no artificial intelligence even allowed) of a screenshot of the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies web site, a screenshot of the zoom session where we recorded the podcast, and 2011/365/63 On The Air flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I'm sure someone who knows more about HDR or High Dynamic Range will shoot my stuff down, but I ran a fun photo experiment today (FWIW probably the best HDR tutorial is from Stuck in Customs). Basically it is a way to enhance photos that have a rane of dark and light values that are beyond what your camera sensor can handle. If you have every taken a photo of a tree in the foreground and the background is washed out, well there was too much light for the sensor to deal with. in HDR you generally take multiple exposures, one exact, one over exposed one underexposed, and combine them in software to get the full range in one image. So today, i was taking a photo walk and took a shot of a darkish road and noted how the mountains in the background were washed out. I wanted to see if I could do the HDR effect from one image. Because OI shoot in RAW, there is a lot of range you can push the exposure adjustment; I made a copy (in Aperture) at 2 stops over exposed (bottom), and 2 stops under exposed (right): [caption id="attachment_18480" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size image)[/caption] I expored them as JPEGs, and loaded them in Photomatix Pro (you can also try this in PhotoShop). Now I futzed with the Tone Mapping setting so much I forget the adjustments, I think I took the "Painterly" preset as a start. The how is nto as critical, just that I was able to make an image that had more range then the normal exposure, especially for the sky and distance mountain ridges. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It's a nifty approach you can keep in your back pocket- some folks do it all the time...I'm looking at you, Carl Berger, mostly in fondness because you turned me on to it when we walked in Zion National Park: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I forget about trying HDR. I am sure its better to run the series of exposures originally in the camera so you really get the range, but I was curious here to see if I could do it all in software. Again, if you are into this, I cant say enough about the images and tutorial from http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial/ If you create content in any system, you likely have ways of organizing them into, say WordPress Categories. This is nothing new under the sun. But the typical organization is rather tree like, creating links to drill down, then out. There is an alternative interface, you have likely seen it. I'm not sure what the fancy design name is, but more or less all the information is present on a view, and you can click tabs/categories to filter them, all without leaving the page. I'm working on an eCampusOntario project to try an organizational scheme like this, we like the interface on the UBC Arts ISIT Nifty Teaching Tools. The tabs let you filter the list of tools, they even animate sliding in and out. Nifty. It's also in play on the Berg Builds site, that presents a giant collection of domains of ones owns created by teachers and students at Muhlenberg College. The UBC site is WordPress, Berg Builds is done with an HTML5Up template. The thing doing the work under the hood (and I know this because I Read Source HTML) is the jQuery Isotope library. Just for fun, see what one can do with elements from the Periodic Table demo on the front page or the other examples of isotope in action. I used something similar on my own (sorely needing an update) portfolio to present my work projects. This is a static HTML template... I think this one used some code called Mixitup (it came with the template). I've been asked how one does this in WordPress. I have seen it bundled with visual themes, stuff one builds with Visual Bakery. I spent a chunk of time looking at a bunch of plugins... try looking for Grid Plugins, reviews like these. A bunch of them are pay for plugins. For my project I need it to work with custom post types, and most of the ones I looked at that becomes a "Pro" feature. And the free ones I played with looked kind of ... not pretty. So I dug some more- I found a WordPress plugin in github, and sure it says [RETIRED] and it's been there like 4 years, but why not give it a try? I think this is what's in use on the UBC site. While I do not have a public working demo, I did get it working on my local development ... on a version of a TRU Writer SPLOT. The plugin has some options to select the post type, and how to filter, and it produces a shortcode, which can go into a page. Keep in mind that these views are changing all without leaving the page or reloading. It is simply filtering. On a SPLOT site this could possible replace the front page, if this was the way you wanted to organize the content. I did find one thing I did not like with the plugin (and you can see it on the UBC site)- when you click a tab there is no visual indicator of the active view. If you notice in my GIF there is a light gray background for the active tabs, that is my little bit of added code, and I am able to do it without even editing the plugin. So first we need in our style sheet something to indicate the color: #filters li.fselected { background-color: #ededed; } That's it! Then you need to create and extra javascript script file that can sit in your theme directory (since I work with child themes, adding these are easy). This came pretty much from some answers in the usual place. (function ($) { "use strict"; $(function () { // set the first tab to be selected $( "#filters li" ).first().addClass("fselected"); // Set up the click event for showing the selected tab // h/t https://stackoverflow.com/a/4901583/2418186 $( "#filters li" ).click( function() { if( $(this).is('.fselected') ) { $(this).removeClass( "fselected" ); } else { $( "#filters li.fselected" ).removeClass( "fselected" ); $(this).addClass( "fselected" ); } }); }); }(jQuery)); It just adds the .fselected class to the first tab on loading (See All), and then it will remove it and add to any clicked tab after that. So I put this in a place on my child theme like js/tools.js and in my functions.php I just need to enqueue it. add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'mytheme_enqueue_stuff'); function mytheme_enqueue_stuff() { wp_enqueue_script( 'tools' , get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/tools.js', '' , '', TRUE ); } I'm liking I was able to improve the functionality without needing to hack the plugin (that might happen down the line). But so far on my project I have it working smoothly on two different pages, working with custom post types and filtering by custom taxonomies. Who needs PRO plugins? Featured Image: Image by Thomas Wolter from Pixabay Documentation ... chore or joy, or neither? I've been wanting to put the nifty Docsify-This publishing tool made by Paul Hibbitts into play. Amongst my sprawl of Github projects are the SPLOT WordPress themes each with a rather sprawling in its own rights README file that includes my efforts at splotware documentation (look at this monster). I had built in my themes a place to include the documentation, via a tab of the themes' options panel. The documentation portion of the TRU Collector theme's README converted to HTML inside the options panel. I would run the Markdown content of the Readme through a command line pandoc to convert it to HTML, which then required some search and replace to make the remote image links work. This was then all included into this panel with a PHP include command. To jump to the chase, I have been able to replace this with an iframe that embeds the current version of the README on the fly (currently the entire README but I have a plan scope it). But the key thing is it is done without any of these middling steps. Much better! The entire Readme is rendered on the fly as an iframe embed inside my theme's options panel. It worked, but was tedious, and I slipped often in updating it when I made small changes. The docs were sloppy, doc. I had been following, not really keeping up, with some impressive dynamic web publishing (including course templates) Paul Hibbitts was sharing via Github. He began sharing was to render markdown content live via this docsify thing made to render markdown content as web pretty versions, on the fly. From Paul's earlier efforts, a first experiment was forking a Github repo to here and I was able to make my own site that could render all my SPLOT docs in one site and each one linked to a standalone,linkable version of each one (example, example, example). My base site acts as a "service" that can render any Github markdown as a pretty, even if simple, web page, by passing a URL as a parameter. What Paul is doing now with this at https://docsify-this.net/ is offering it as a mini web service that saves you the effort of forking and customizing. Plus he seems to be adding new features, display options every other day. This Web app, built using the magical documentation site generator Docsify and the Docsify Open Publishing Starter Kit, provides a quick way to display Markdown files as standalone Web pages (also perfect for embedding) without needing to setup your own Website. All you need is a publicly available Markdown file and pass that URL to https://docsify-this.net. Try it out below!https://docsify-this.net Somewhere recently I read a post about suggestions for more useful/effective software READMEs, and I know I have jammed too much in mine. I have a plan to split out the detailed long documentation into its own separate markdown file, and leave the README as more of an overview of the code. With the flexibility of Docsify-This it will be easy to change my embed to point to a markdown file of just the relevant docs about the theme. Now this may sound obscure or not all that relevant beyond my Github/SPLOT/techno nattering mumblings (someone's blog rust is showing). If you maybe look at some of the examples Docsify This and maybe Paul's template kit, I hope you can see this is a versatile means to put together a small public web site, all for free using Github. Give it a spin, doc, at https://docsify-this.net/ Featured Image: An image of a noble looking explorer statue inside a book store in Puerto Rico, a wisde documenter indeed. The image Book Explorer flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license was modified by me to include an overlay of the SPLOT logo, same license applies. Today marks a new phase in my work plate, as my part time contract work in community engagement last year with Open Education Global is now a full time gig. I've not had that since 2012. Since then, I have been fortunate to land a long series of paid consulting (that dirty word) work with overlapping projects, teaching, web building, workshops, and speaking. Thankfully this came my way via friends and colleagues, so I did not have to shill myself much. Inspired by my more successful self employed friend and colleague, Bryan Alexander, sometimes I published a [whimsical] company report, last in 2018. Late 2019 and early 2020 were really lean for my work, then things piled on. I don't think there was a pandemic correlation, it just happened. One of those was an offer from Paul Stacey to help OE Global develop more online connectivity and community development, as well as assist with their online conference. I've been fortunate to get multiple contracts this past year with BCcampus, working with Clint Lalonde on the H5P Kitchen project and also getting a community facilitator work for the OpenETC (Ed Tech Co-operative). All of this work has a common theme of community building, though I have to wonder if my chops are really any good. I've had my questions because this kind of work always takes much longer and more effort than you might guess, plus I am a fantastic self-critic. Oh and also mixed in there was continuing course and content development via JIBC for various programs in Corrections (hah, there was stuff that still needs to be blogged). Before the self-employed phase (2012-2021) there was the first career phase, let's say the "Job" phase, with fourteen years as an instructional technologist for the Maricopa Community Colleges (1992-2006) and then five years as Vice President Community/CTO for the New Media Consortium (2006-2011). Next was The Intermission, a step into the great wide open with a 15,000 mile road trip and a year plus without having to work. At some point after I had to get the income train running, which was the start of the Not So Dirty Consultant Phase (2012-2021). I have a wonderful group of colleagues now at OE Global, we work remotely together from Canada, the US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Slovenia, and South Africa. Yes, a lot of Zoom and Slack. OE Global has its series of long running activities including its annual conference, the Open Education Awards of Excellence, Open Education Week, plus the "nodes" of open education efforts in Spanish speaking countries (OELATAM) and the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER). My work continues efforts at community engagement, including instigating activity in OEG Connect, really trying to build more activity between events, but also, creating more connectivity among members. I'm really trying to get more interest, engagement in asynchronous ways, which to me seems sensible as a Something Other Than Zoom Screens, but also in formats that are more flexible with time and location spreads. I'd hope to light this up for CCCOER with a Summer Open Pedagogy Adventure, the part of OE Global that has maybe the most well developed and activity community, as an alternative to the more typical series of online workshops. I'm still working at getting the concept of less structured professional development. My most recent idea that got a wee bit of traction (can always use more) was attempting to organize a Three Days of Focus "mini event", spawning open asynchronous conversations on specific topics. All of the OEG Connect stuff is wide open, there are no velvet ropes of membership. I'm also working with Wayne Macintosh and Dave Lane at OERu on an interesting concept of syndicating one of their open courses to be offered under OE Global. And I also would like to summon up more activity at OEG with web annotation- I am rather surprised at how little awareness of this I have been finding in my new perch. And I continue to enjoy talking to open educators for our OEG Voices Podcast. While we are promoting the work and ideas of others, I have to admit selfishly these are really a chance for me to learn from the conversations. And Yikes, I have 6 episodes in the queue to edit and publish. This is only part of the new role, I have a big goal now to hone their membership model and create more ongoing relations with members as well as building out the membership. There's a lot of new territory for me- I still love my SPLOT ed tech tinkering, and while my contract has ended for the community building at the OpenETC, I am staying plugged in there. The H5P work ioth BCcampus has blurred over as well to areas of effort at OE Global. Hello from the first day on the job. First J-O-B in a while. It's a new phase. Look out. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/21670674523 The Arena flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license For quite some time, I've interacted via blogs et al with Gardner Campbell, but today was the first time I've heard him present... and there he is a virtuoso. At the NMC Regional Conference, his session was on "The Allegory Efffect: Metaphoric Immersion in Croquet and Second Life", where he put a nice connection between learning theory, literature, and the strange space of virtual worlds. We will soon have a copy of Gardner's powerpoint posted to the conference presentation collection, and below you will find a 50 minute segment of audio from his session (I was late to start recording): http://media.nmc.org/2006/11/allegory-effect.mp3 [14.6 Mb MP3, 51:04] Gardner set a great model of presentation by first offering an open wiki for backchannel... and demonstrated his teaching approach by having volunteers from the audience read aloud some of the literature quotes he tied to his main points. Maybe this is small, but by itself, changes the dynamic of a presentation. And lastly, he jogged us into action by a small group activity, where we had to find 3 observations of our physical space and creatively tie them together as a metaphor. His cleverness showed in the look at Second Life by flipping Vygotsky's statements of play as finding alienation in real situations to to: Primary paradox of Second Life is that a person operates with a real meaning in an alienated situation" - flips Vyotsky. And he reached my literary level with a quote from the great philosopher known as Pooh, with the story of tracking an unknown monster until realizing, with a prompt, who really put the tracks in the snow. There was a good amount of active discussion in the room as we discussed the limitations imposed by Course Management Systems, the notions of "play" and social interaction, recursion, etc, most of which is already fading in my memory banks. A top notch session and a Gardner original. I feel moderately good about our experiment of "tagging" the NMC Summer Conference this year. We put it in the printed program that we were asking participants to tag blog posts, flickr photos, and del.icio.us bookmarks with an "official" tag of nmc2006. I used a local copy of Feed2JS and flickr's Javascript badge to bring them together into one page at http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php. I was going to SuprGlu 'em too, but had trouble getting to their site the night before the conference. So how did it go? Well, of course, I had a fair bit in there since it was my idea and I wanted it seeded with "stuff." And I appreciate the numbers of people who did jump in. The aggregation is quite nice. In summary: Tagging with Technorati is the most complex of them all. Unless you have added a plugin to your blog software, getting the content o appear involves embedding a hypertext link with a "rel=tag" attribute, so it is a manual process for many blogs, problematic for public hosted ones where there are not options to install Technorati plugins. But even that is not enough. Without a blog set up that pings the big T, you have to go there and manually ping them. So it can be more of a hurdle to get blog posts tagged. Maybe I should have tried a feed from a Google blog search or a feedster search. See the blog posts tagged with nmc2006. Flickr certainly wins the ease of tagging award (or at least ties for first place.) Lots of people were taking photos, and I am hoping they are waiting until they get home to post photos and tag (although, when I left Cleveland this morning, there were more than 250 photos tagged with nmc2006). I was happily surprised that people were tagging conference related web sites with del.icio.us. There were lots of URLs mentioned in sessions, posters, print materials, and I am guessing we may have tagged 10% of what might possibly have been tagged. The downside is not being sure of some of the sites being tagged as the relevance to our conference is not clear (or it just may be I was in a session that mentioned the "Plants Have Feelings Too" site). I do have some concerns about tag pollution, and am getting ready to look at using Scuttle to create an in house NMC collection of tagged sites. Are there Scuttle users out there? I am aware that Todd at Zane State and Tim Lauer have implementations, but I''d like to learn more about the ins and outs of running an islanded version of del.icio.us. All in all, I am pleased, but I am eager to see how we can get participation from more than a few type A taggers like those mentioned below (and anyone else I have overlooked, sorry, I am tired). A big tagged thanks to the folks that did pitching in- blogs from Using Wiki in Education, Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile, Pandaemonium, InfoCult; flickr photos from NickN, DCrutchley, BrettBixler, NickJS, JHildreth, Carl Berger (lots from Carl), MidiMan; bookmarks from toddjensen, landisb, bmcmurray, nnoakes, and in0urbrain. So we had some fair tagging activity, but it is still a small group currently playing the game. Update: Now I have it all SuprGlu'd together at http://nmc.suprglu.com/ which also includes the podcast feed from the conference. Bonus learning! The podcast feeds in SuprGlu point to the audio file URL; you can use the del.icio.us PlayTagger code if you add it to the SuprGlu Static Content area-- this way, your MP3 links will be embedded with a nice little Flash player: cc licensed flickr photo shared by [phil h] I'm a huge fan of CoolIris, the browser plugin that turns media content into an amazing flowing virtual wall. It is hands down one of the best ways to explore flickr or YouTube searches, since results are not limited to one page, it becomes endless flow. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Since February, I have been crafting a lot of my presentations in the CoolIris format, using the form of RSS to drive the content I pick- see my documentation on Tricking Out CoolIris as a Presentation Tool as well as the step by step instructions posted by Doug Belshaw. The reason it works for me is the way I can associate "slides" with a URL so I can jump out to a web page and easily return to the presentation- or it is seamless to jump around. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I pretty much modeled my work using the example CoolIris has for Enabling Your Site with RSS which again I have used for a strings presentations since February 2009, and in most of them I had embedded FLV video which worked flawlessly... until sometime in late May. It was about the time I upgraded to Flash 10 that I noticed (and was told by Dean Shareski) that the embedded videos no longer worked. They status icon just pun endlessly and the video never played. Video for YouTube played fine. Dean had sent a link acknowledging this on the CoolIris Bug page which has since been removed. The CoolIris discussion forums had a number of people asking about this with a whole range of suggested work arounds that never worked. In testing I I have confirmed that it fails on: Mac OSX with Flash 10 in Safari (3 and 4) Firefox (3 and 3,5) Windows Vista with Flash 10 in Internet Explorer 7 However, it does work in Windows Vista with Flash 9 in Firefox 3.0 For my most recent presentation, I did an end around by linking out to a web page to play flash video, which works, but is not optimum. Tonight, I nailed and squashed the bug to the wall. I outlined this in fill detail to bugs@cooliris.com. Let's see if they acknowledge it. I found the bug when using their test feed linked under "self help". I nabbed the RSS feed their example used, since the embedded FLV worked perfectly there. I had modeled my MediaRSS for embedding FLV content after their example listed under step 1: As their example suggests and their documentation states Note: The URLS can be relative (i.e. images/photo.jpg) or absolute (i.e. http://anysite/images/photo.jpg). So I started looking at their sample RSS test feed where the FLV video did work, and first was baffled since the format they used was nowhere near the example; the XML structure was different and text was encoded in CDATA format. So I first copied this into my own MediaRSS and replicated the format. Nope video still worked. In a whim, I wrote the URL path for the FLV content as a full URL. Bingo it worked. Bug found- relative path URLs do not work in the MediaRSS file. My original MediaRSS was the same as the basic Their Generation stick around for the smashing end.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY which is the format that fails to load. However, if I recoded it: Their Generation stick around for the smashing end.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY I'm here for the first check mark for my effort of counter Tsundoku or reducing that pile on unfinished books. This is hardly a book report or detailed analysis, really I could just say, I'm done" and move on to the next. As an eager web fan boy, I put my order in for Tim Berner-Lee's book This is for Everyone. Given the web has been the arc of my career, and ow much I enjoy back stories and "the making of" style of writing, I had high hopes to learn more into how the web came to be, and the thinkings of the man who made it happen. That photo of the book in my hand was outside the Indigo store in Regina where I picked it up September 24, 2025, and four days later I was in. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54819354533 This is For Everyone (and Me) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Who the *#&#$ am I to be a critic, especially of a knighted hero? I should stop now. But I got to the last page feeling a little less lifted but also just feeling a bit less filled on the story. This I phrase my post with the promise that called to me in the early 1990s and I can still hear its echos, that the Web IS for Everyone, yet in 2026, it has a taste of WAS. It's not inevitable. Right? I got some important facts and some insights, the influence of TBL's parents, the CERN environment, the sheer power of the humble hyperlinks, the reach and growth of the web over time, but I found many parts of the history written more in a string of events in the neutral tone of a Wikipedia article (the story of the rise of Yahoo, Google, the infighting of the "browser wars"). One part that stayed with me was TBL's description of how distributed the research at CERN was, with different projects all using custom document systems. But a key description I read was how he found there the place to get answers from CERn folks was... a place tey gathered for coffee. From This is for Everyone I think TBL does elevate this as maybe a metaphor or aspect of the web he designed, there is a social or at least a human connection element at play here. For some reason, this is something that really stands out in my reading. The author writes the history summary of hypertext, acknowledging of course Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, Ted Nelson and Xanadu, Doug Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos, Bill Atkinson's creation of HyperCard for Apple, and I guess it is interest when he follows with an admission that it is a "potted history": So there is your potted history of hypertext - except at the time I was almost totally unaware of these developments! When I was conceptualizing the web as an information-wrangling tool, I had never heard of Ted Nelson nor Douglas Engelbart, and I had never used HyperCard. TBL shares that he got "connected" to hypertext via a colleague who shared with him Transactions on Computer Systems 1998 issue titled "Hypertext on Hypertext"- rather ground breaking that it was distributed with a floppy disk of executable demos if hypertext. With some digging I found this issue in the ACM archives and with more digging a short demo of the interactive part of Hypertext on Hypertext. See more stuff from this issue for the very curious in Hypertext Research: The Development of HyperTIES (Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg I had really high hopes to read about a story I latched on a while ago, how as a boy, young TBL discovered in his parent's library, a Victorian book of practical information called Enquire Within Upon Everything (Project Gutenberg link). I found a quote of a quote that I believe came from his earlier book Weaving the Web (likely more of the story I expected here) where the original web weaver wrote: With its title of suggestive magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Tim Berners-Lee Yes, but the inspirational bit I hoped to hear more of was how Enquire Within Upon Everything was organized- from the Editor's Preface Like a house, every paragraph in "Enquire Within" has its number,—and the Index is the Directory which will explain what Facts, Hints, and Instructions inhabit that number. For, if it be not a misnomer, we are prompted to say that "Enquire Within" is peopled with hundreds of ladies and gentlemen, who have approved of the plan of the work, and contributed something to its store of useful information. There they are, waiting to be questioned, and ready to reply. Within each page some one lives to answer for the correctness of the information imparted, just as certainly as where, in the window of a dwelling, you see a paper directing you to "Enquire Within," some one is there to answer you. .... Well! there they live—always at home. Knock at their doors—Enquire Within. No Fees to Pay!! https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10766/10766-h/10766-h.htm#section2 This was significant when I read this in 2014 or so. The book was essentially a nexus of information you find via the old school style of hyperlink, "to learn more go to page 446" But on re-reading this now, the phrasing that the knowledge sections were like homes with addresses that were managed/maintained by individuals. TBL mentions it in his first chapter, amongst the descriptions of his parents who were both academics immersed in the first age of computers, colleagues of Alan Turing. The mention of this book that I thought was pivotal is one sparse sentence: Also on the shelves, as would later prove relevant, was a fussy Victorian manual of practical household tasks, entitled Enquire Within Upon Everything Later in the description of his first effort to connect disparate information at CERN just that he named the program Enquire Within "short for Enquire within Upon Everything, that book in my parents' bookcase." So here I am reading this book, and how much TBL talks about the powerful concept of hyperlinks to connect disparate information, yet... there are almost no links even as URLs in the book. I do not find one until page 345, and really not necessarily anything more important than the rest of the text (plus the URL is one I would never expect a human to enter in the browser). It took until page 345 for a URL to show up. Somewhere in the book TBL describes his long series of writings on the w3c.org web site as Design Issues for the Web I believe suggesting it his writings for 35 years in the same place, maybe the first blog. Oh and I am wrong above, here o page 273 is a URL https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/ I had never come across this body of writing before. So perhaps it is my own personal over expansion of that old Enquire Within Upin Everything, that maybe set up up to expect a book about the web to be a bit more like the web. It's no different from a lot of reading now, where writing with hyperlinks seems a dying art, why should I not expect anything other than Just looking Stuff Up as I read. I thought maybe as an appendix there might be some key links, but alas no. Maybe that's more on the lap of the publisher. And really what the focus of the book is really un the subtitle, the "unfinished story" of the web. I am absolutely in awe of the tiring travel, speaking, organizing TBL has devoted his life for. He has more faith than I right now on how AI is going to play that web out, he's hopeful for more open and web caring systems that do not seem to be the one dominating right now. I smiled a bit as his idea of AI being a friendly assistant who helps us with mundane tasks, and indeed TBL calls his "Charlie" (another dude like Claude?). It’s good to see in the closing pages a strong support for the fediverse and Mastodon. That’s quite something for a TBL endorsement. He's also hoping a lot more folks will take up Solid, the idea of us maintaining and controlling or data in safe "pods". It sounds ideal, and TBL is hopeful the early adopters can lift it like the first of us (that was me) you sat down and created stuff with HTML. The comparison seems a larger leap to me. But I ought to do more and take a peek. I will say throughout This is for Everyone that TBL expresses his dream of open access to the web he spawned and one that empowers individuals, not corporations. That it still has the spirit of that CERN coffee room (at a global scale) and even as the book of wonders I construed Enquire Within to be. I had known for a while that something was wrong with the web. What was intended to be a tool for creativity and collaboration had become divisive, polarizing and toxic. I had often talked publicly of the two Cs of the web: creativity and collaboration. After 2016, I began to talk of a third C: compassion. I was greatly concerned that the human element of the web was beginning to disappear. In its place we had large, faceless systems which spied on and manipulated the user. opening to Chapter 13, Design Issues, of This is For Everyone And it has always felt to me, from my first hypertext click in 1992 that This Was for Everyone. Let's see about seeing it live longer as an IS. For us, and for what has been an amazing journey from the tunnels of particle collider to here. Featured Image: 2025/365/267 This is For Me! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) superimposed atop Which Web Might This Be? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I double dare ya. With a cherry on top. Whipped cream too. It's just around the corner, the flip of the monthly calendar, but so soon, The University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy will be happening- May 16 & 17 here in Fredericksburg. Let's see- you will get a keynote by David Darts, an NYU Art professor who will bring forth issues on digital media, copyright, and cultural complexities. The guy behind the PirateBox, I am eager to have him autograph the one I have. But wait, there's more- featured presentations by the Canadians! Giulia Forsythe will be Drawing Conclusions in her talk on visual literacy and Grant Potter wil be sharing ideas on tinkering -it's connection to learnin, and the possibilities created via the "adjacent possible". But wait, there's more- an opening "Carnival" of hands on sessions on web radio stations (Grant Potter showing ds106 radio), live video streaming (Andy Rushaw and Jim Groom showing the DTLT "kit"), Visual Notaking (practice your own skills led by Giulia Forsythe), and 3D Printing (Tim Owens and the MakerBot). But wait, there's a lot more - 2 days of panels and sessions by faculty at UMW, sharing a wide range of innovations in teaching, learning, and technology. This ain't no buzzword flipping, this is the real deal. You are not left bludgeoned by powerpoint nor will will you be inclined to be heads down in email. But wait, there's more- you get fed! And not conference chicken! But wait, there's more- a lively party at Casa Bava. What's it like? Not exactly disco lights, but the energy and fever will be high http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt12SiN_4Ks So how much would you pay to attend an awesome conference? $800? Seriously? What kind of excuse will you make? You live in Europe? Pshaw, its a short hop. You are busy saving baby seals? Do it next week. What could possibly be a justification to miss out on FA12? Get this- Faculty Academy's registration fees are..... $0.00 for not only UMW faculty and staff, but anyone from the educational community. So what are you waiting for? go now and register. Are you still here? Are you INSANE? Go register, willya? Okay, for me this is exciting, because I am attending Faculty Academy for the first time as an insider, having joined DTLT and UMW in March of this year. My last Faculty Academy experience was 5 years ago, when I was an invited speaker - Wow, that post was a stream of conscious, the event being meeting for the first tome Barbara Ganley as well as getting to see the UMW crew of Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Steve Greenlaw, Jeff McClurken, Patrick Murray-John, Chip German, and of course Gardner Campbell who reached out and gave me the Caravan welcome, the start of a friendship I cannot put enough value on. This was a pivotal presentation for me, maybe one of the first times as a featured presenter, but also in assembling material for a talk on "Being There" that I find I still draw upon many years later. But it was not about my stuff that I recall Faculty Academy, it was the buzz and camaraderie of the people here, many of whom I am getting to know anew as colleagues. It was a conference that stands out from the other conferences. So for me, its sort fo coming home in a way. but for you-- I do not buy any excuses. Get to thee Faculty Academy! I expect you. No excuses accepted. None. Functional Simple Web Design by cogdogblog posted 27 Nov '08, 11.00pm MST PST on flickr No frills, but in zero clicks, goingtorain.com/ gives you your local weather forecast (detects location via IP address). Maybe it is the start of some new minimalistic zen of web design... Linktribution to Mashable.com I don't know the words, but am ready to make them up. Apple, grant me the serenity to accept the firmware I cannot change; courage to update the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Maybe not. This morning, I installed the latest firmware update for my MacBookPro, and worked through the morning. Over lunch, I began installation of a new copy of Adobe Creative Suite. Disk one went fine, but after inserting disk 2, the fan and disk spun, and then lapsed into silence. A long silence. No muse clicks would do a thing. So I forced a bard reboot (apple-contril-power), held down the mouse key to eject the Adobe disk. Still frozen. No clicks would do a thing. Insert the OSX Install DVD, another hard reboot, hold the "c" to boot from the CD. Whew, at least the system worked here. Ran the Disk Utilities and it fixed an "Illegal Name" red line under "Checking Catalog". Fixed that. I thought. Reboot again. Nada. Froze city. Tried to boot again with my Disk Warrior, but had managed to put in a another, non system disk, so it booted as normal. Rats, I'd be doing ti again. But wait a minute, the mouse and icons are responding! It is alive!? What am I doing now? Blogging from my iBook as I back up all my files to DVD-R. I could find nothing on the Apple Support discussions (update- see below). Do I go on like this 90 minute exercise never happened? My only wild guess is some interference from my Bluetooth mouse, which is ow off? That does not even seem to make sense. Serenity, anyone? Update: Based on comments below, I found the culprit is Adobe CS2, especially Version Cue and possible Acrobat. Not that one could easily determine so from Adobe's or Apple's site. I had heaps of install trouble with the Adobe installer- one the second try (to get PhotoShop installed), again the installer just froze down my screen after insterion of disk 4. the software did actually get installed, but the little nidbits of files needed to activate my software did not. Online and phone activation failed, so I had to call and have someone read me FTP coordinates to download some cryptic files. This has been way too hard. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by CarbonNYC Just short of a year ago, I blogged about stepping into the great wide open. I quit my job "in these economic times" and planned at least 9 months of rewind, as well as an epic odyssey loop of travel (which came to be) and I came back from that great wide open. I also spent a few weeks sanding and painting my deck. This time with my own choices of what to do was a gift I can never say enough thanks to my late true life fairy godmother (thanks Aunt Martha!). It was hardly sitting around (besides the deck sanding). And with the passing this year of my Mom, my savings again could allow me another year or two of free living. But it did feel time to get back to a place to do some W.O.R.K. A goal of the trip was to figure out that age old question, what do I want to do? I left my job last year, cause I knew that it was not IT. I gave some thought to being a consultant, got advice from people I respect who are making it, but shied away from the idea of selling myself around (that is a gross characteristic what that means). I then thought about the idea of still traveling, but spending longer time at places (months?) doing short term work. My idea that you don't really learn what makes a place work in a few days and it could be interesting to be embedded some place a while, provide some services there, learn about what makes them tick, and take that working info around, sort of a Pied Piper? That too was vague, but I asked a few colleagues about the possibility. A place I dreamed of going was the DTLT team at University of Mary Washington, home of UMW Blogs, ds106, etc. To cut what is already growing into a long story short, when I talked to Jim Groom about it as a possibility, he said they don't have any visiting geek positions, but that they would be opening a full time slot, and suggested I apply and consider moving my base to Fredericksburg, in fact, offering me a place to stay in his house. I had already pledged to coming here to teach (as adjunct) a section of ds106. Why do this? In my previous stints at Maricopa and the NMC, I was working at the organizational level of learning, and they were great perches to get to do a lot fo R&D, understand things from a systems place, etc. But I felt a calling to get to a place of innovation right where the teaching happens, and where I would have the opportunity to teach too. And the other appeal was to work with a great creative team; in my previous positions, I worked with other people, but for the technology side, I was pretty much on my own. Here I sit at a table with the great energy of Jim, Martha Burtis, Tim Owens, and Andy Rush. It's a great seat. And that's not to mention a long list of super creative faculty here I am eager to get to know better. And getting to be here for another Faculty Academy? Cherry on top. In late January, I closed up my little house in Strawberry, and did a 4 1/2 day sprint back across the country (between class ending Wednesday night and arriving in time for class Monday night) And thus vague tweet... In other news to be blogged later, I am no longer unemployed...— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 12, 2012 So yesterday, was my first official day of employment as an Instructional Technology Specialist at UMW. What am I doing? Finding out. I've got my homework to do and meet people, I will be working with faculty in the Humanities, tinkering with wordpress. Other things on my list hopefully to explore are: Update and maybe overhaul of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story Development of Feed2JS as a Wordpress plugin Explore the MediaWiki / Wordpress integration that has been a huge success at UBC Implementation of the PirateBox technology in other spaces. Rich media publishing on the web, sites that don't look like web pages, but more like say Jux. Not apps, the web, that's where its at. Maybe it is HTML 5? Got to learn. Visualizations. I want to learn a tenth of what Tony Hirst does. And that is just a scratch list. I await the ideas I don't know about yet. Got ideas? My ears are open. But it's great to be back in the saddle, and it could not be at a better place. Want to know what UMW and DTLT are really about? Get yer butt here in May for Faculty Academy. I am working there, hoping I can carry my load. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by joeywan Hi, Hello. I was wondering whether you'd be interested in selling advertising space on http://cogdogblog.com? Does the phrase "No, not even after hell freezes over" mean anything to you? The advertisement would be unobtrusive and we can pay you an annual upfront payment for the advertising space. See my rates below. I'm really wondering when you pilfer a list of email marketing schemes if you actually understand the web site you are targeting? Cause if you were a real human being, you might have noticed: Actually what is ore disturbing is that you (or some other lowly paid cretin in your spam shop) read my blog post about another site and sent this spam about my site to an email address that us not even mine. Man you are dumb. Dumb as a post. Dumb as a post in a pile of cow turds. Dumb as a post in a pile of cow turds in the snow. We can also provide content from industry experts in many cases. Thats good! It is exactly what I need on a personal blog that regularly mocks concepts such as 'industry experts". I am from RAM Marketing, a new media agency headquartered in the US. I am so impressed by the design and crafting of your own web site, featuring the latest in 1997 table-based web design, impressive urls that end in 1.html, 2.html, cheesy clip art from the bottom of the barrel of cheap web hosting services. I am completely impressed by your case studies which are so powerful that they do not even name the client. Now that is something I can believe in right after the tooth fairy and Elvis being alive. "RAM Marketing, Inc. is a full service marketing company that takes customer service to heart. We believe every client, no matter what size project, is an important client and should be treated with the respect they deserve. Every project RAM Marketing undertakes is specially customized to meet the specific needs of our client, and no two projects are ever the same." Your email shows that care and attention to customers to the max! We plan out and acquire advertising space on major websites and portals, as well as smaller niche sites. I personally deal with our smaller publishers, increasing brand awareness and share of voice for the major brands that our group works with. Gee there is nothing I want more on my niche site that the voice of your major brands. We'd love to work with you and establish a work relationship through which we could utilize your site for more of our campaigns. My starting price for services like yours is $25,000 per ad per month. Ok? I am checking my mailbox daily for your check. If you have any questions or would like further information, please do not hesitate to email me directly. I am hesitating from now to the day after the sun burns itself out. Kind Regards, Hillary James Campaign Planning Expert RAM Marketing LLC For future reference and to make it more clear to the world of marketing, I shall publish future responses to advertising campaigns with an appropriate tag. Good luck.