Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
I'm still quite on the toe of the learning curve with the DJI Mini 2 drone I got for a gift a few months back (thanks Andy Rush for the recommend). The video quality is stunning, and we are using it to get high and wide views of our acreage. My navigation needs practice though to get the smooth swooping of pros like Andy. And it's quite more fun than I even expected. Even last week's near mis-adventure plus operator error/ignorance. I'll start with the video then backfill the story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn7QJHftihw It was nice and clear last week, no wind, and despite the intense cold (like -29°C) the snowy scenery called for some fly time... after charging up the drone battery. I did not however charge up my iphone (it attaches to the remote control and acts as your flight viewer and controller). Liftoff was smooth, and after a quick snapshot of the house from above.. Home sweet home from drone sweet drone I put it into flight mode hoping to get a nice circuit view, and some practice flying at lower altitudes. Things were fine as I flew west to the road, swung left (south), left again (east) and swooped over the barn. I decided to fly even farther east over the neighbor's field to get a view from father away. That's when it happened. My iphone screen went black, dead. Either it was the cold or low battery, I had no communication with the drone. I tried the RTH (Return to Home) button on the controller but nothing seemed to happen (more likely I did not wait long enough). Thinking that the battery would die and the drone would just drop in the field I walked quickly out in the direction where I thought it was last. As I approached the east edge of the property I could hear it but not see it. So I tried to just flying forward and turning until it got louder, then started dropping the altitude. It got louder but it took a while before I spotted it. Then I pretty much aimed it towards the garage at low altitude until it was over a smooth, shoveled spot, maybe 2 feet off the ground. I could not seem to get it to land or turn off, so in desperation I just grabbed it, somehow not getting my hand in he props, and manually powered it off. That's a long list of mistakes. I think the Return to Home was working (I have it set to go maybe a bit high, like 200 feet). I did read in the manual that when it lost communication with the controlled it should on its own return. But it ended up back in the house rather than out in some field. Then I was curious what it recorded, because the video was still going. When I opened the SD card, it did have an mp4 file, but the file would not open in QuickTime Player, VLC, or any other video app I had. I did some searching for OSX apps that could repair corrupt video. I am not naming the one I used, but it did indicate success, and even launched a .testmovie file in VLC. Joy in video-ville! But when I clicked the "Recover" button I was greeted with a form to register for the software... like $80 for six months? No way. I had a thought. The app was in a folder along with an Uninstaller utility. I opened the apps directory in the Terminal app, and ran a ls-al command. Yup, there has a hidden file was .testmovie! I was able to do a unix copy command and save a copy elsewhere as a regular video file. Victory! I then put that Uninstaller to use. The video seemed fine. Since it had long segments of not movement, I got the idea to edit it down in iMovie, and add subtitles like the drone's thoughts as it lost communication with me. It worked out well, as the file had plenty of glitches in it that just worked perfect for the video. I felt like it needed a retro opening screen, and I had a hunch there would be an old movie with a name like "One of our ____ is missing" - my creative commons search did show a poster as a result that looked perfect... Google image search set for CC licensed returns a result that claims to be licensed, but is it? I was doubtful as the link for the image is from BestBuy.com- hardly a source of open licensed images.. and the BestBuy footer states "© 2022 Best Buy. All rights reserved." Yet results Google provides reads: Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Want to know where this information comes from? Learn More...Small print on google image search The learn more link suggests that Google determines this is a Creative Commons licensed image from the image's metadata, but I inspected the images EXIF data in two different tools and none included a Creative Commons license. Do not blindly trust The Google. So I left the image behind, and instead turned to the fun Pulp-O-Mizer generator I learned about from Paul Bond and made my own poster image. Again to my previous post, Making art is better than just Taking It. And more satisfying. Then for music I turned to the Free Music Archive and found a great track Danger by Steve Combs licensed CC BY. This was all fun (making the video, c.f Cherry on Top) but I obviously need more practice flying! Stay tuned. Featured Image (shown above) my own creative efforts generated by the Pulp-O-Mizer lacks an official license, but states its outputs can be used for non-commercial purposes (violators are subject to the threat of Death Rays from Professor Zappencackler) Last time I checked, the toe was into learning objects, but now it is FB bound? Why not. Flickr is in Facebook. Slideshare just entered Facebook. Twitter has been there a while. My dog is in there. The parade goes on and on. I am nodding in agreement with Stephen with some skepticism as to the impact of so many social network things surrounding us. Tied up in Wires flickr photo by zoethustra But I am in torn. On one hand, I am impressed with this ability of a web social network that allows you to customize it with plug and play widgets that connect with other web content. It does it in a very slick manner. I wasted about an hour one day adding all the places I have been to my travel map. It was addictive. The ease of expanding your social network is honed to a fine art. On the other hand, it is being done so with its own code pieces, not quite the tinkerable approach I grew to love using RSS. On the other hand, the banshee screaming will rise even more since all of these systems bag you with notices by email. I am ignoring abouty 98% of twitter requests, I attend to facebook ones about once a week, LinkedIn maybe every 2 weeks, and I am at the point to tell Ning to talk a flying leap. Maybe it sounds grumpy, and I am still a huge proponent of social networks (the Twitter addiction needs hourly feedings) but there is some limit for all of us out there when we start pulling back from every offer. That's not really a bad thing No, Bleetzork Ziddlebutt, I do not want to be your friend. Now excuse me as I need to go and check the friends updates for my big left toe. Feedback is a mixed bag, and one lessons I may have learned is that you are never going to please an audience as wide as the one on the web. So among the many places we collect feedback, some recent ones have just caught my eye. First, from our Writing HTML tutorial, we have more than 3500 feedback messages assembled over the last 10 years. And we do not just keep the nice ones, added soon will be today's gem: I hate your projects that you let mingus use I think that they are pointless and they really have no reason for being availuable to students who dont know what they are doing????? So if I were you I would take it out. Sorry, you are not me, and your opinion is in a small minority, so as they say, "fuggedaboudit". Next, one of my favorite Maricopa Learning eXchange packages is the Economics webquest based on supply and demand of human kidneys which is about: This webquest is designed to get students to consider the application of economic tools to nontraditional areas. I mean, supply and demand of basketball tickets is one thing, but kidneys... Anyhow, Mary McGlasson writes that she has gotten at least two messages where people have missed the point of the Package and aim to offer some kidneys: "I am a 36 year old healthy female who is interested in selling my kidney. Please contact me at xxx-YYYZZZZ. My name is Zzzz Vxxxxx and I live in Zzzzzzzz. Thank you." No, we are not that kind of exchange! Mary writes me: This is the second person who has tried to post an ad to sell a kidney on this package. I'm not sure if I should be encouraged that people are making their way to the eXchange, or just disturbed . . . anyway, it's a good thing that you've given us the capability to hide/delete comments, since kidney sales are illegal. I wonder if I ought to add a disclaimer somewhere to that package . . . ? It's hard to know what to say, since I've already stated that such sales are illegal in the US in the body text. As odd as these kinds of feedbacks seem, they are a breath of fresh, human air compared to the slugs of spam we sometimes wade through. Gotta love good or bad feedback. Something that always gets my fur up is the blatant use of fishy language dressed up like "fact" or science. Last week when i was so idly bored (by choice) I was watching late night TV, and there were two different ads for things like "Gut Buster" or "Pilates Plus" - those ones where people are so obviously and disgustedly 6-pack abs fit they dont need devices to get in shape- flash by these charts that claim, "227% More Efficiency" or "190% more effective"... and than never say what they are compared to or how. But that's TV, it is aimed at the PT Barnum crowd. Yet, I find the same crud in my inbox. I usually ignore the requests for "LinkedIn" connections or Plaxo requests until I get to a night I am so bored (beyond the boredom of watching network TV, really rock bottom boredom), and I then might go in and clear the decks on those social network effects. I've knocked LinkedIn around a lot in the past and remain mostly un-enamored, but give some credit for a few improvements here and there; nonetheless, the overriding reason to link in linked in is to increase the number of linkedin links one has. I'm non-plussed at social networking sites that exist for nothing more than connecting. So in their notices, someone on the LinkedIn marketing or spam department decided to make the notices more "human" like by added random phrases at the bottom, and here's one that made me cough up a fur ball: More likely than what? Getting hit in the schnoz by a flying carp? Throwing a resume out a window? How does one prove/disprove such a point? My data, with 107 connections, suggest I should be 74 more likely to have received a job offer (so far, not that I am looking, is zero). Am I an abberation? Am I not gaming the game right? My point is not just to blindly read stats and "facts" without questioning them severely. And question why some entity would cloud their message with stat-crud. I wish I could remember that light bulb turning on moment when I realized succeeding in the school game had little to do with studying, knowledge, or intelligence-- but learning how to score on multiple choice exams. My skills carried me through many standardized tests and college exams where I can really say I got better at figuring out the answer than knowing it. But I am not sure I can fully yank off the Emperors Statistical Clothes. Instead I offer a trivial example, which may not extrapolate as far as I believe. In my combing of the corner of my RSS reader where I collect Weird/Funny/Strange stories (the Google Reader tag is "odds-and-ends" sounds like I am playing Jeopardy... "I'll take Neatorama for $200, Alex"), I found tonight a fun thing to try-- the M*A*S*H trivia quiz. While I have not seen an episode of this iconic TV series in at least 20+ years, I did watch it extensively in the 1970s, all the new episodes in prime time and daily re-runs at dinner... maybe even having seen the entire series 7, 8, 10 times? I've watched the movie at least three times. And at the time I could faithfully quote the classic lines, after more than 2 decades, it seems pretty rusty, like at best I might recall the character names. So I took this 10 item "quiz". I got an "A" Yes, I got 9/10 correct, although on review, I can say I knew "for sure" only 3 answers. I got maybe 2 more right on hunches, 1 on totally gaming the "All of the above", and 3 more on outright guesses (author of the original book, for example). Of course, this test construction is utterly simple- 3 or 4 choices make it easy to guess. But I am thinking here I got a 90% rating when I knew 30% of the content. And when I think about how much of education is based on multiple choice exam scores, all carefully charted and graphed, and statistically validated-- I cant help but casually wonder what it all really measures. I don't mean to ridicule the entire franchise and field of examination as there is much more to it than I will ever know, but... well, I will anyhow. I don;t know what to do, but I am heading over to the Swamp to see if they fixed the still and maybe have a good poker game going. flickr foto Poster Presenteravailable on flickr Come meet me on July 12, 2006 to talk about our large format printing project at Hamilton College Like the conference session converged with a Second Life presence we ran at the NMC 2006 Conference in Cleveland, we are again playing with that intersection of real and virtual. We have taken high res photos of the poster presentations that were at the Real Life conference, and brought them into the NMC Campus in Second Life. Attached to each is a notecard with some information on the poster, and a number of them have attached links that will open relevant URLs in a web browser (I really want to build in a feedback mechanism...). You can zoom in really close on these and get a lot of detail, in fact, more than I can usually see by squinting my eyes at the real thing-- see some 2D photos loaded into a flickr photo set. But the cool intersection will happen July 12, when we will have a number of the conference poster presenters be there "live" on NMC campus, to talk about the projects represented there. Anyone with a Second Life avatar can join; see the details at http://www.nmc.org/sl/2006/06/29/posters/. It's just one of the things we are exploring as a way to use this virtual world. In the works are more of the intersection with real life conferences, and in August, we are shaping up a Second Life Art Expo, where we will bring in artists who create works in world, many of them ones who created the scupltures that are all over the NMC Campus. For more on this project, visit the NMC Campus Observer (somehow I have my hands in another blog ;-) It's been a while since I did an edtech cover song. And this one was actually inspired quite some time ago. But recently while reading Audrey Watters notes for her talk Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning my brain was triggered. You see it was her November 2014 Hybrid Pedagogy article on Maggie's Digital Content Farm that had me listening more closely to Dylan's song that was her metaphor, a song of protest, of not giving in. Released in 1964 it was (I think) a knock against the folk movement that turned on him when he went to a more full and electric sound. Well, I try my best to be just like I amBut everybody wants you to be just like themThey say sing while you slave and I just get boredI ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. I love that line, and when I listened to the song, well it was like, I gotta learn to play it. I play it ALOT. For myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKie-cHhqU0 It's not all that complicated musically (at least the way I do it), a capo on the third fret, where most its a E hammering on a lot form the open strings, than the last little chords go Am7 and D (with a little Dsus4). My new thing is trying to learn to play harmonica along side, using my C harmonica (maps to key of G). I decided during lunch today to redo the lyrics to lift from Audrey's article, so here ya go. https://soundcloud.com/cogdogroo/maggies-digital-content-farm I tend to work it a bit as I am writing the lyrics, and then one run through before I record. But pretty much when I click record in Audacity, it's one take. There a re a few flubs in there where I just rammed on through. I added a bit of reverb, because, reverb. So it goes. Here's my re-worked lyrics: I Ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more No, I ain’t gonna work her Digital Content farm no more A freelance writer on the Web I struggle to be heard Can you send me payment For those 1000 published words I need a new tire gotta fix a busted door I ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more I ain’t gonna put my stuff in Maggie’s LMS no more No, I ain’t gonna put stuff in Maggie’s LMS no more Gotta log in to see it Can't share it with everyone And when my class is over Some admin flushed it gone A domain of my own I'm going go for I ain’t gonna put stuff in Maggie’s LMS no more I ain’t gonna signup for Maggie’s social network no more No, I ain’t gonna signup Maggie’s social network no more The web's built for open access Sharing freely I know But ads gotta sell my data I'm stuck in your silo Whatever is what ed tech says its for (Whatever) I ain’t gonna signup for Maggie’s social network no more I ain’t gonna feed Maggie’s data farm no more No, I ain’t gonna feed Maggie’s data farm no more Tech that exploits We send people to such a place Surveillance, control They are profoundly unsafe How do we protest againts this kind of war? I ain’t gonna feed Maggie’s data farm no more Ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more No, I ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more Well you really outta think of what you ask of your students Who's farm are they working? And who benefits from the rents? Are you safe out there? Are you that sure? I ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more This is fun, but it's serious. Dylan’s protest in 1965 was to plug in. Mine, I don’t know… it might be to unplug. But if nothing else, I tell you this: I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm. And I think you need to think about your own work. Where you work. For whom. And then you must consider where you demand your students work. For whom they work. Who profits. Where that content, where that data, where those dimes flow. On whose farm are you working? On whose farm are you demanding your students work? To what end? For whose profits? Are they safe there? Are you safe there? Are you sure? Are you working on/for Maggie's Digital Content Farm? Top / Featured Image Credits: My own remix of the cover for Dylan's Single clearly done without permission of any record company. I claim this in the spirt of parody. Whatever. I'm coming off of a fantastic closing session at the NMC Symposium by the Future by Ruben Puentedura on Of Maps, Systems, and Stories: Visualization for Sustainability (we are still processing the recorded audio but there is a gold mine in his slides). Ruben's examples and ideas on visualization have me inspired to carve up some time and get down to learning to use processing. Until then, I went back to my RSS feeds in visual design/info-stuff-matics and within a post or 10, found a reference to Hipmunk, which provides a fresher, visual way of doing flight planning as opposed to the list views we see elsewhere: We make it faster and easier to find the flight you want. Most flight search sites haven't changed in years. They have an intimidating search page and endless pages of flight results. Finding the right flight often takes all afternoon"”or all week. At Hipmunk, we make your experience a lot better. We're building better interfaces for searching, browsing, and filtering your flight search results. So like any other site, you enter your travel dates and destinations, and choose to maybe see all airlines or just your favorite. As an example, I plugged in some fake details for a trip I might do next month to fly from Phoenix To Baltimore, maybe in a quest for some great seafood. Rather than the Long List I might get elsewhere, I get a visual set of options: Each airline is color coded and labeled, and the flight info is laid out on a timeline, so you can quickly see how much time and when you will be traveling, including layovers. Even more, you can grab the vertical bars on either end, and narrow the time of day you want to travel- and it does this right in the page, for example, if you do not want to see night time or late in the day flights: On the right side there are some little numbers on a menu that when activated says "show worse" which looks like it shows alternate flights on the same airline that may have longer routes (I may really want to make a stopover in Denver rather than a direct flight, or in this case, maybe I need to have a longer layover in Houston so I can fit in a conference call or a stop at the great wine bar there). Clicking on a flight brings up the full details: And at anytime, you can click the BUY buttons on the left to (I am assuming) go to the airline site and make a purchase (hopefully which will go better than my awful experience buying at United)- they also seem to be color coded to show better prices. I only did a quick run through of Hipmunk, but it truly seems to offer a more efficient way to at least identify the flights you want. I often use Kayak (especially on trips with other than round trip stops; though on my last round the world trip through 5 different destinations, no one booking could do it all) -but often on Kayak, you get like 20 pages of results (yes I do filter down by Star Alliance or flight times, but you do get more information than you can process over several screens). Right now, Hipmunk is looking very hip to me. It is only for solemn or silly reasons I will put a cloth chain around my neck. Yesterday was definitely the latter. I made a video as a "trailer" for our upcoming UdG Agora Google Hangout (this Friday) the live sessions we are running each week to support the online phase of the project. Of course, a trailer was not really critical. No one told me to do it. But this feeds into something I have been trying to write think about for a possible Hybrid Pedagogy article. I may come back to that. In our project our participants are working on "implementation plans" for the challenges/activities they are integrating into their courses over the next few weeks. We are encouraging them to share in their ~40 person sized groups in our online community space dilo and/or their smaller triad groups. It has been a little bit of an effort to move them from seeing they were turning it in like a homework assignment to us, their group facilitators, and it's more for each other to share and support. Somewhere in the random neural circuit room, I was reminded of the scene from the movie Office Space, where Peter is harassed by his boss, Lumbergh, about his lack of covers on his reports https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy3rjQGc6lA This could be fun, and Ken Bauer was game to play the part of Peter. I did a quick re-write of the script, and sent it to Ken. As he does,m he shot his video in like 10 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfsheW6RwJE Reminder, Ken is in Guadalajara, I am in Arizona. We are making a movie together. But Ken has the office decor, he works in one. My home is full of wood paneling. I lack a set. What to do? Set up the Green Screen! [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I tack it to a wall that get's the most natural light from doors and windows. I have 2 clamp in utility lights I added to fill the background (these are those cheap lamps from the hardware store, I clamp on some ripped up old sheet fabric as a diffuser). My video camera is my iPad (because it's easy to monitor the angle) and I use my Samson Meteor mic for audio. To play the part of Lumbergh I had to dig out of the back of the closet one of 2 ties I have (the other one has green in it, that won't work) and some prop eye glasses I have used before to create the serious academic look. It took about 45 minutes to set up, test, and shoot video. I then took an hour to edit in iMovie- yeah I should use something more sophisticated, but why? I can pull off must of what I need here. My character sits in the upper video track using the green screen mode, which shines through to some generic office photo I found. I have a few cuts between me and Ken, even a view where my video is over his dialogue. There is this thing in video called the 180 degree rule that you need to pay attention to when doing these 2 camera angle edits, to maintain their spatial relationships. To do this, I had to flip Ken's video horizontally (I chuckled every time I chose this video effect since Ken is an expert on the flipped classroom). Also what I like to do is add a layer of audio environmental sounds, it smoothes the gaps when we are not talking. I used an Office Ambient sound (creative commons, ftw) from freesound. Okay, that was all the background stuff-- unlike a DVD, on CogDogBlog you get the extras FIRST. Here is the episode for "Dilo Space" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp9qqkby7BU It is totally ridiculous, there is a message. And its not too likely our colleagues in Mexico know the original movie. That, is not even critical to get the message (the one mistake we should have done Ken is Spanish subtitles). Even if they do not understand it, they should see that we are having fun. And this is my idea to write about videos- it's when you do them in teaching for Stuff That Is Not Contained in the Syllabus. So much of stuff written about video is Its All About the Content. And so much money, time is spent on making it look like professional video. Why? Are we trying to emulate TV? Why not guerrilla style video, low tech iPad and iMovie editing? Instead of producing video students may never be able to emulate, show them what they can. And damnit, show you are a goofball you can have fun. KEN WHERE IS YOUR IMPLEMENTATION PLAN!!!! DO NOT BLAME THE COPY MACHINE. Top / Featured image credit: Here I go again, attributing myself! Why? Because I can. No because I do -- flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/21068972872 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Allright, one more GIF (this morning) and then off to do something else. Maybe. This one can fit into two of the categories- RIFF a GIF and GIF the #ds106 (this is a test if I can slip one example into two assignments). Muppets + ds106 #4life Today was our presentation on our "Ocotillo" project titled Maricopa's Ocotillo Evolves Again: 18 Years of Faculty Led Instructional Technology Initiatives: Since 1987, Ocotillo has been a faculty led initiative to promote the effective use of instructional technology. Like its desert plant metaphor, Ocotillo has evolved again into four new action groups, leading a range of face to face and online activities in the areas of Learning Objects, ePortfolios, Hybrid Courses, qnd Emerging Technologies. Learn what the groups have done and see how they have used a "small technologies loosely joined" approach of weblog, wiki, discussion board, RSS, and streaming video technology to support their projects We had the coveted slot of 4:15 - 5:15 PM, last of the day, on a day when the temperatures climbed 20 degrees, the sun was glorious, and broadway shows apparently beckoned. Still, we had a good 20-25 person turnout, and in our tiny room, it looked pack. There was a bit of Ocotillo's past, and by sheer good luck, the creator of this organization, our former Vice Chancellor Dr. Alfredo de los Santos was present. He's an amazing leader, and a highlight for me was a mentorship with him a few yards back. The bulk of this was an overview of the activities of our Action Groups, and we had two in the room to do their own spots (Thanks Lisa and Shelley!). And a real quick dash through the "small pieces" technology approach. As a point of note I only got half a hand raise when I asked who in the room had experience with wikis. It was fun, we laughed, we cried, we found learning objects (just kidding about the last one). Nice to have it in the rear view mirror. This was another wiki-fied presentation, a format that works well for the fluid ideas I weave at the last minute. Lacking net access in the presentation room (Grrr), I faked it good enough by running the wiki off of my G4 laptop in local server mode. Dog on a laptop. It's time to warm up the ds106 assignment muscles, given that it is almost 2012, and things are already ramping up as evidenced by actual posts going on over at bavatuesdays. My plan is to comb through the assignments and find some that may have been lightly touched; but we are eager to see which ones might emerge as the Suprise Assignment That People Jump On Early and Go Nuts With. Last year it was the animated gif extravaganza, and in September it seemed to be the Messing with the MacGuffin. Regardless, tonight I almost randomly chose Iconic You- I find the description a bit vague: Create an iconic image/design for your own site that somehow represents you. As "iconic" could be taken as a descriptor of any image, like it is symbolic, or more in icon style. I already have my dog icon I use everywhere. This is actually form a real photo of my old dog Mickey, with the background removed, flipped horizontally, and modified using the Watercolor filter in Photoshop. I could have cheated and used that one, but I thought I'd go in deeper. So this is how I think- obviously I will use a dog photo and since my work/play/life is on the computer, I want an iconic image of a dog and a computer. Ironically, I have a series of them of Mickey's sister, Cadu: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I started with this photo in Photoshop using the Quick Selection Tool to remove the background elements. Since her hind part was cut off in the photo, I used the lasso select tool to add a bit to her rump to round out the shape. To make more iconic style, I used the Palette Knife filer to give it a less photographic look- these were my slide settings: turning Cadu into the final look shown above: I take it iconic in both ways- it represents me but is also a more graphic interpretation of the photo. Hmmm. It's okay, but I could not be satisfied with just that, so I made 2 duplicates of the layer, and made some subtle changes with the brush tools, and selecting parts like the tail and rotating... all in the name of turning it into an Animated Iconic Me: cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Reema This blog's crusty old theme (I still like it, sue me) has a pretty narrow width content column, 500px fixed. I typically size my media to fit. Since I have been syndicating content into here from my other blogs-- my Barking Dog photo site puts images in at 950px wide, and my ds106 tricks site is at least 800 wide, I end up with posts requiring manual editing. Here is an example, the post originally at ds106 tricks has images 71- px wide, so when they are syndicated here, I get cruft like: [caption id="attachment_25162" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image to see it big-ola)[/caption] [caption id="attachment_25163" align="alignnone" width="500"] yeah, click the screen shot to see it larger[/caption] The images blow wide, at the top its not horrible, they are behind the sidebars... but it bothers my design sense. I've noticed on themes like the stock WordPress Twenty-Eleven -Twelve, -Thirteen that it seems to magically size all images wider than the column width to fit. I dug into the CSS and found the classes are setting a max-width for images in the content column to 97.5%. That is easy. So I added this code to me blog's CSS: /* Images that do not blow up in width */ .entry-content img, .comment-content img, .widget img { max-width: 97.5%; /* Fluid images for posts, comments, and widgets */ } img[class*="align"], img[class*="wp-image-"] { height: auto; /* Make sure images with WordPress-added height and width attributes are scaled correctly */ } img.size-full { max-width: 97.5%; width: auto; /* Prevent stretching of full-size images with height and width attributes in IE8 */ } .wp-caption img { display: block; margin: 0 auto; max-width: 98%; } .wp-caption { max-width: 96%; } You have to put a maxsize on the caption class because that is the one that decides the space usage if a caption is added in the Wordpress editor. Now I was lucky because my theme names the div that contains the main column content is same as the Twenty- themes. You might have to root around your single.php template or peek at the source code, because theme designers can name they divs all kinds of goofy names. Anyhow, it seems to be working: But I am sure it will gunk up somewhere else. And I still have challenges where the RSS feeds seem to not include the embedded video, but a thumbnail linked back to the post. It's always something... if it's not one thing it's another. Next week, April 19-21, is the 10th annual Teaching, Colleges, Community (TCC) Worldwide Online Conference, or affectionately known as "the online conference from Hawaii where you do not get to go to Hawaii". I'm ramping up to deliver a live keynote session on April 21 (see below). The theme this 10th anniversary year is "Looking Back Toward the Future": Since the 1970s, the impact of educational technology has been relentless and ever changing. What can we learn from our past? What's hot and what's not? Where are we going? What would we like to see? Through your experiences, we ask that you remind us, guide us, and help us navigate towards the future. Join us on our 10th anniversary of the TCC Worldwide Online Conference to share your expertise, experiences and knowledge relevant to the use of information technology in learning, teaching and academic services. This event will also be useful for novices and those interested in Internet resources for teaching and learning. It will provide a strong foundation about what's currently happening in higher education. This might be my 4th or 5th TCC conference, and it truly is a great experience as you get to interact as much as you can with a wide range of near and distant colleagues-- and since there are people presenting, chatting, posting around the world, there is something going on around the clock. This is the third year our office has sponsored an institutional registration so that all faculty, staff, yes students, and even administrators can participate at no cost to them. We've been able to send more than 100 each year, which is not bad (unless you consider we have nearly 10,000 full-time and part-time eligible employees, not to mention another order of magnitude of students). The individual registration is reasonable (US$77, though it is late registration now so it is US$99), and this gives you access to all presentations and archives for the year. It's not too late to sign up! Last year, I did a live audio session while attending an NMC meeting in San Francisco (via Elluminate), so picture me holding a laptop in a hotel hallway, aiming towards the wireless hub in our meeting room, looking from at a distance like a looney having an intense conversation with his screen... and then some other meeting emptied out in the hallway with lots of chattering noise. So when asked by colleague Bert Kimura to do a keynote session this year, I rummaged around my big pile of remixed presentation ideas and graphics, and came up with this silly title/description: "Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future" Predictions of the future are easily analyzed in hindsight and ought to be skeptically questioned-- you will have to tune into this session to see the connection with an old Star Trek episode. However, author William Gibson's insightful quote, "The future is here. It is just not widely distributed yet" is the framework I use to peek at the future. So for the use of technology in teaching and learning, where is this "not widely distributed future?" I am not sure, but in this session we will take some guesses at places you may find the future. The present use of the web was visible, but not widely distributed in 1992-- is something of that scale already here? Will text messaging displace email as a communication mode? We will look at the drivers of consumer used technologies that become disruptive (digital cameras take the lead of the consumer photo market, MP3 players re-shaping the music industry). How about those multitude of technology gadget web sites? The future is there and it is not. Are small pieces of technology "loosely" joined technologies (often open source) displacing large comprehensive commercial tools? Explore hands on some of the interesting "social" and connection technologies such as "tags", RSS, wikis, podcasts, and perhaps whatever else pops up between now and the conference. With a week to go, that is all there is right now, as I am synthesizing things up to the wire. Since it is a live session presented in the Elluminate virtual classroom, I'll be uploading a series of slides into their whiteboard, and tossing out some audio over showing web sites and such. It is recorded and saved, though made available for registered participants (see, it is worth paying!), but I'll have some fragments of content posted eventually (once the ink dries). More exclamations of "holy flickr" emitting from my room. The flickr montager generates a mosaic image based on tags of a word from flickr. I played a bit with it, tried my own montage on the tag "dog". It randomly chose some image of a pocket puppy type dog (or as my friend Donna refers to 'em, as "barking slippers") and generated a montage image of it base don other flickr photos tagged with "dog". Digging in deeper, I tried to think of a tag that would pull up my own photos, so I used "Mickey" for my former Labrador (and logo for my sites) where I have a bunch tagged. The image chosen to display was of a cake with Mickey Mouse. Sigh. But hovering over the icon images that form the larger one, I found a few of my own photos. Imagine th fun when I realized that clicking a icon will make that image the target! So here is Mickey getting a bath, the image rendered as a collection of several hundred other flickr images tagged with "Mickey": And Mickey saying, "huh": Not bad, especially if you stand back from the screen. Another way cool thing built around the nicely open flickr API, another example of what happens with technology that leverages "collective" works, another huge sink of time, another fine thing. Tip of the blog hat to Tim Lauer A japanese houseplant has its own blog, and updates it on a regular basis: If houseplants could blog, what would they say? To find out, Kamakura-based IT company KAYAC Co., Ltd. has developed a sophisticated botanical interface system that lets plants post their thoughts online. A succulent Sweetheart Hoya (Hoya kerii) named "Midori-san" is now using the system to blog daily from its home at bowls Donburi Cafe in Kamakura. Read about it on the Pink Tentacle blog or go directly to the source (the plant blogs in Japanese). So what does a plant blog about? Usual stuff-- politics, silly Youtube videos, punk music, drinking binges, soil pH levels, phosphates.... So if a houseplant can blog, why can't ____________________ ? (fill in the blank) Follow me through this path of incongruities. We live in this hyper-connected modern age, where larger than every managed before information is retrievable, sharable, around the world. All that Did You Know stuff. Standing at the precipice of the Web of Data possibly soon accessible via one of those hand flying Minority Report interfaces. Perhaps. The fly in the ointment, the kink in the gear shafts, is that, it feels, like almost on a daily basis, I face an increasing amount of inefficiencies in the things we have to deal with in daily life. Perhaps it is just taking longer, but I see so many places that are not taking advantage of all the savings of time, money, and human effort the cool tools can offer. Look at Exhibit "A"... This is a scan of a piece of paper that is a xerox copy of my immunizations as a child, a piece of paper from my pediatrician's file. This was how doctors kept medical records in 1963. On my doctor's visit last week, 46 years later... they use the same technology. Scribbles on paper, analog records, data not connected to anything, not transmitted to relevant places, locked in yellow folders. It is not part of any web of data. It does not even KNOW there is a web of data. Of course there are many technologies for electronic medical records, but how pervasive is it? On my check-in, the receptionist asks me to fill out (by handwriting into blank spaces of a form that is too narrow for the information they request) a yearly update of my records for their files. "But I did that on my visit 3 months ago, are you sure you need this?" I asked. AT first, there was that look in her eye of "You IDIOT, just do the F***ing form) but she flipped 2 pages back and found the same form I did fill out in August, and she mumbled something about them not noting it right on the folder. Their method of notification for her was a hand written scribble on the outside of a manila folder. All of the doctors offices I go to are full of walls of these manila folders, data that is stuck in the analog universe. I've complained before about the continual irony of someone emailing you a form to fill as a PDF file, requesting me to complete them, and FAX them back. This requires me to waste my time, printing a digital document to paper (waste of resources), hand write in my information (most likely marginally legible), return it via the emerging technology of 1981 (Fax machine), where some poor sucker on the other end has to decipher a now badly printed document (analog), and manually retype that information into a computer screen (return to digital). Multiply this waste of time, resources by a million, times it happens a day, and there is a massive amount of efficiency lost in the workplace-- that has realy dollars on it, readers... because COMPANIES/OFFICES ARE TOO FRACKING LAZY TO LEARN THE SIMPLE PROCESS OF CREATING AN EDITABLE PDF. Want more> How about those insidious automated phone menu systems when you call to get service from a company. This is what happens when I call my insurance company. (me calling Human) phone menu: "Welcome to Humana, please let us know if you are a patient, doctor, or something else" me: "Patient" phone menu: I see you are calling from a registered phone number, so we know who you are. For verification purposes, please enter your Humana ID. me; (punching in numbers) phone menu: please enter the last 4 digits of your social security number me; (punching in numbers) phone menu: please enter the zip code of your mailing address me; (punching in numbers) If they know who I am, why do I have to enter all this stuff? After about 4 more rounds of pressing buttons, I actually get to talk to a real human being! Humana Rep: "Hi My name is Janna, can you please confirm for me your Humana ID? me: (getting pissed saying the same numbers out loud I just punched in their stupid system) Humana Rep: "thank, you, can you please tell me the last 4 digits of your social security number." me: (realizing I am in a Twilight Zone episode, saying the same numbers out loud I just punched in their stupid system) Humana Rep: "Thank you, can you please confirm your mailing address?" me: (looking for Rod Serling in the corner, so I can punch that cigarette down his throat), saying the same information out loud I just punched in their stupid system) This is already 14 minutes into my contact with Humana, and feeling like I am close to getting service, I explain the full details of the reason for my call. Their response, "I will transfer you over to XXXXX where someone can handle your request." In my last case, I actually got passed around to 2 more departments, having to repeat the situation 2 more times. I will not even mention the Chinese Water Torture syndrome when you are on hold, where the voice cuts in every 45 seconds to than me for waiting, letting me know how "important" my call is and how they value me as a customer. On my last call to a Walgreens Pharmacy where I got this, I was just about out the door, where I was going to drive 20 miles to Walgreens to yell at them "PLEASE STOP! I GIVE UP, I WILL REVEAL ALL THE STATE SECRETS" Want another? I recently decided to take a 403b retirement account that had accumulated some funds (well a lot of them evaporated last year) from my years at Maricopa. I was not adding to it, my after an appointment with an advisor, we decided to roll that money over into an IRA I could control better. I had not added anything to it in 3 years, since I left Maricopa. Nationawide insisted I send them a "Separation" letter from Maricopa, something on official letter head, stating I no longer worked for them. I'll skip the WTF where I thought they could easily ascertain this from my tax records, but I figured this might be pointless. I thought it seemed, simple, call someone up at the Maricopa Community College HR department, and ask them to email/fax/tie to the leg of a pigeon a simple letter. Even after 3 years being out of the system, I still knew the URL by heart http://www.maricopa.edu/hrweb/. But I will give anyone 50 bucks if they can look at that opening page, and find (a) a phone number one can call to ask an HR question or (b) which one of the 65 links is the department that might provide this service of generating a separation letter. The problem with this web site was the same as it was when I was there, and for that matter, the entire district office- they defined themselves, and their presentation of their organizational structure, as they saw themselves, not as an outside customer. Each one of those separate main links for the HR web site, is a different small island, each has a different web site design and structure (and I know some of those web pages have not been changed in design since 1997). So I took the only logical route. I clicked at random links, trying to find the right person to call. The first two numbers I found (at these sub department levels, they give phone numbers to named individuals, there is no switchboard, or single line to answer questions) I got someone's voice mail. The next strategy got me farther, I saw a name of someone I knew (the task I was asking was not really her domain), someone who had been dragged like me when I worked there to some professional development retreat in Colorado. So I explained to her what I needed, I forwarded a form that Nationwide had sent me (it was a PDF that I would need to print out, complete by hand, lather rinse repeat from above) that seemed to be a possibility in place of a letter. A few hours later, I got an email from someone in another part of the HR web, who sent me ANOTHER PDF that I would need to print, complete, etc, and FAX BOTH forms to a third party company that generated the separation letter. Oh, and that it might take 10 business days to process. At this point, I was numb, and likely writhing in spasms on the ground, with droll running down my chest. I gave in, and played the inefficiency game, and printed/faxed and flipped birds to all of these basttards (actually they did process it in about 2 days). I write this knowing that other people will share their similar experiences. Multiply this gross inefficiency again and again, and you can literally see giant piles of money burning, and the economy engine of this "great country" drifting up in smoke and ash. I dont know what to do beyond continually pointing out the insane idiocy of our society, one that as a larger whole, seems very far far far away from any sort of science fiction utopian future. It is much more Brazil we are headed to than anything I've been self chained inside the Hilton in Orlando for 3 mights now. Tomorrow I make my break for the border, over the fence, and will run for the airport. This is mostly my own doing. I am here for the eLearning Guild 2008 Annual Gathering. I have learned that "eLearning" is an umbrella term for online training, etc in the private sector, things like "corporate virtual universities" etc so it is a different crowd and conference from the typical education ones I have attended. Maybe its different. Folks here are quite nice, met ones from insurance companies, police departments, and others that work for the eCompanies that create eLearning. I'd say it is noteworthy where there are a number of sessions and products claiming to address the problem of eLearning being "boring". I'm here at the invite of Mark Oehlert, whom I have crossed paths online-- he has an interesting presentation format called The Great ILS (That Spells Serious Games) Challenge 2.0 (more on that in later post). When i asked the Guild about helping with travel expenses, they asked if I could do 2 more sessions. Sucker. That is me. I bit that hook.., a bit for the curiosity of attending a different conference, but also the location made it reasonable to schedule a pre-conference visit with my Mom in Ft Myers. But oh did I fall behind on my prep, so I was in the hotel all Monday night, Tuesday afternoon/evening doing my prep. I've not seen anything outside the hotel lawn (sorry Sis, I did not get out to "see the sights"). So I dont have a great deal of conference type blogging to do. There's a lot of technology here, a lot on SCORM, virtual classrooms, XML, screen capture, etc. There's over arching thread though of a lot of focus on "content"- moving it from one system to another, turning "content" into courses. There's mention and even sessions on Web 2.0, X or Y generation learners, and even a few mention of social networking (and met some people doing corporate wikis on a scale educators can only dream of), but over all its learning focused on content- lots of paper handouts too. LOTS of powerpoint. LOTS. So I did attend a session today on "Serious Games for Corporate America" and oh my gosh, I could not take it seriously at all. After talking about using games to appeal to "Gen X", the first example was a game based on... Jeopardy. This and subsequent examples were all multiple choice "games" that delved only as deep as rote memorization (this company, by the way, charges $40k for a game license, am I in the wrong business again?). Another "game" had a "race car" theme, but was more multiple choice where getting the answer right meant your little car would advance one stop on a track. I really struggle to call something a serious game that is based on multiple choice. Did I forget to mention the hangman game? Was I in some sort of time tunnel? Was this 1994? 1987? Where the **** was I? I am astonished to even compare these "games" to the open ended Alternate Reality Games I saw at SXSW, at the concepts Henry Jenkins shares about the richness of fan fiction and convergence culture, of the complexity of modern multifaceted storylines people watch in shows like Lost. I did not see anything serious about trivial games. Wow, that was one.... strange..... session. My creative work only gets fully moving when I have settled on a metaphor, a shtick, if you will. For the DML Workshop I did in October with Kim Jaxon, we were agreed on building on the Western theme the workshop had the previous year with Justin Reich. I had pitched Justin the notion of playing off the title of the movie How the West Was Won by Making it How The Web Was Won. There was a mockedup poster and lots of GIFs He went for it. For the workshop this year with Kim we fixed on the theme of staking a claim on big open of the web. Before updating the web site, I scoured for maybe a different western to use, and landed on one I was unfamiliar with, The Big Country (1958) - loaded with name actors like Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston (not as the hero), Burl Ives (not as the cheery Santa), and Chuck Connors (as a bad guy with no honor). I really chose it because the poster lent itself to remixing: [caption id="attachment_65450" align="aligncenter" width="760"] My remix of the Big Country movie poster[/caption] And I did a bunch of GIFs to use in the workshop content and to tweet out as teasers: All of which I made use of without seeing any of the movie. I scrounged around looking for a full version on YouTube, but all you come across are stub teasers to go to some third party shady site because YouTube has taken down the uploads. I could not find it in Netflix or Amazon Prime, so I resorted to shelling out $7 for a DVD disc. You don't get much in the box besides the disc, no pamphlet, inserts, not real disc extras. In the future I might just rent. Under the spell of my bout of bronchitis I watched all 2:45 of the movie last night. I'm definitely into it for the familiar scenery; IMDb lists a lot of Arizona locations, many in the rough country south of Tucson. WIkipedia lists only Red Rock Canyon State Park as the film location for the movie's Blanco Canyon. Either way, I can say for sure, it's Big Country land. The IMDb reviews are rather glowing "Magnificent", "Easily one of the most underrated movies of all-time" "Big entertainment, bigger music". I love that the New York Times web site has the original review from 1958: WILLIAM WYLER'S "The Big Country," which opened at the Astor last night, is a two-hour-and-forty-six-minute Western designed to demonstrate that men should live in peace. But before this indisputable bit of wisdom is conveyed to most of the parties involved, the screen has been crowded with quarreling and fighting and three of said parties have been killed. and But for all this film's mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude. Peace is a pious precept but fightin' is more excitin'. That's what it proves. I cannot add anything significant in terms of a film review. It's a Western, there are good guys, bad guys, horses, mountains, cattle to chase, gun fights and fist fights. That's all there. I'd say the most interesting part of the movie is Jim McKay, the lead character played by Gregory Peck, who is not someone you think of as a lead in a western. He arrives to the Wild West, wearing the wrong fancy clothes and hat. He reeks of being a city Easterner, and outlander, someone who does not belong. And through the taunting of the rowdy bunch from the Hannassey's, his refusal to ride the wild horse offered by Heston's surly ranch hand character, his refusal to fight when challenged, has everyone there underestimating home, labeling him coward. Even his fiance. We have him pegged to get a dusting. But he's self confident, has survived worse scenarios at sea (the disdain of the man at the party, when he asks McKay if he has seen a place as big, and McKay says, "yes the ocean"). He plays by his own rules, and does not have to demonstrate his manhood in front of others. He rides the wild "Old Thunder" with Ramon, the ranch hand. He goes off on his own, confident in his ability to navigate, while everyone who knows the land so well is sure he has died. But when it comes down to it, he takes on Heston's character in a fist fight with no audience, and earns his respect (not the most theatrical fight scene). Every other character plays according to trope, as to what Western characters do. Well, maybe. The one ranch hand questions the dirty work they are asked to do. As does Heston's character towards the end, at least for a moment, taking a stand against the Major's desire for violence. Maybe it's less a story of peace being better than fighting, as the New York Times suggested, and more of the idea of strength and confidence coming from within, from character, not from what we do as performance in front of others. Anyhow, I finally got around to seeing the full movie. It was on my list to do. It still worked great as the metaphor for the workshop. At least I know so. Featured Image: My own photo of the DVD I purchased, sitting atop my dusty hat, on my dirty floor. Eventually when I upload it to flickr. it will be licensed CC0, public domain. But please, steal this photo and make lots of money from it. No it's not that show. Not available on any TV channel But yes, I am back co-teaching Network Narratives with Mia Zamora for a group of intrepid graduate students at Kean University. For the full (of something) story on this adventure, you could tune into the podcast we did a few weeks ago with Terry Greene and Anne-Marie Scott for Check the O.L.: Liner Notes from Groundbreaking Online Learning Listen to "NetNarr with Mia Zamora and Alan Levine" on Spreaker. As usual this class is both planned in terms of our usual "spine" approach but also has much that evolves along the way. Last year, our theme was speculative fiction via the "Net Mirror", with the idea of the internet being the Black Mirror like device that we should wonder about when the devices are off. In our discussions a few weeks ago, Mia suggested the idea that ties into other work she has been involved with of the Post Pandemic University. I admit my first reaction was a mild "meh" - is this going to be academics defending the sacred institution? Is it too narrow in terms of all that we endured in 2020 and have yet to see in 2021? But then I thought of the experiences our students are going through, as well as my own step-daughter who is in her first year of a Masters program. These are people right now in the Pandemic University. What "normal" can they compare with to possibly see a new one when they have not experienced? I see our students on the front lines of watching the systems do way more than pivot. So they are ideal to be thinking about what the future might be for higher education, more so than me whose experience is rooted in the old. So this year's NetNarr is cast still in the Net Mirror framework, but focusing on PPU- Post Pandemic University. You can take the stylistic entry point (that's all CSS text effect I found in CodePen) via http://arganee.world/nm21 http://arganee.world/nm21 This redirects to the new site that you can also just click your way over. Like last year, I set the course up maybe in a slight step back from the Connected Courses syndicate in via Feed WordPress from separate blogs formula. Our Kean students all have authoring accounts on the course site. https://cogdogblog.com/2014/07/feed-wordpress-101/ As much as I still hold to the value of students writing in their own space, I wonder some if that notion overshadows just the value of students reflective writing. Isn't there something to be said about writing side by side in the same place? But we still have syndication running- I set up a feed to publish our course site posts to the main NetNarr hub which means we can still invite open participants (a.k.a. Sarah, Wendy, and Kevin who always show up) to blog along. That works. We have tweets corralled under the #netnarr hashtag and it's already quite lit up from our students and open participants (just watch the conversation visualized via Martin Hawksey's twitter tags genius). There is also quite a series of guests we plan to have as Studio Visits with our first one last week where Laura Gibbs provided dynamic intro to microfiction. You may bark at me because we are not offering these as wide open, nor are recording them. This is a reaction as well to the times we are in, and wanting to make these experiences focused on our students. If you really want to join a future one, just let us know. What are we doing? The Summary gives a sense of our major themes, each one being a 2 week focus that includes readings and studio visits, but as well, discussions led each week by a different student-- we are calling them "pathfinders" this year. Each week Mia posts in her side of the announcements the details on the class activities and what is being asked for in weekly reflections. My half is aiming to introduce each week some creative activities that we ask the students to to explore our theme and findings, so that their weekly reflection includes ideas expressed in words and ideas expressed in media. My "gimmick" is going to be each week making a bit of a message created in a different media. I already did the easiest, a video (but I tried to suggest subverting the expected video form) and this week, as a companion to the microfiction writing introduced by Laura Gibbs, is doing microstorytelling in five photos, using Five Card Flickr. We plan to have students for some time to do some DS106 Daily Creates as a means to stretch their media skills. We had run our own Daily Digital Alchemies in the past but I felt like being in a larger pool of participants of DS106 would be more valuable. I have another idea I hope to unleash soon as sort of a modern version of Frank Warren's Post Secret project which is still going strong after its birth in 2005. What you can really do to help is (beyond the usual twitter stuff) is to read and comment on our students reflections (we are calling them Field Notes). We have a really strong, expressive, thoughtful and from I can see already talented writers in the mix. How should they project the future higher education experience? I participated in two webinar discussions last week that had the words "post pandemic university" a descriptors. but frankly what I heard is people talking about [important issues] of the current systems, as they try to change. Or maybe the Post Pandemic time frame is months from now. I'd like our students to scan farther. Not into flying car and spaceship future, but a nudge beyond the mess we call now. I'm rather excited to be in the fifth revolution of NetNarr, especially without knowing exactly where it is going. Join us online at http://netmirror21.arganee.world/ or in The Twitters (and even in Annotation Space - I always harbor hopes of fostering a narrative place in annotations, there's more we can do there than just comment on articles). What is the new PPU gonna be? Look into the mirror. Featured Image: Screenshot of the animated NetNarr entry at http://arganee.world/nm21 which with background image based on portion of cracked glass CC0 Pixrepo image (darkened) superimposed on Pixabay image of surveillance camera by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke It's worth seeing the animated effect! An online workshop of interest (tip of the blog hat to my colleague Jim Tipton) "RSS115: The Beginners Guide to Weblogs and RSS" led by Library Stuff guy Steven Cohen: If you have ever thought about creating your own weblog or utilizing an aggregator to read news but have been a bit skeptical then this training session is for you. This hands-on training will explore some of the current software tools that are being used to publish to weblogs as well as read content via RSS. During this online workshop, the attendees will have the opportunity to post/publish to a weblog, explore the features available with the software, as well as examine content via a news aggregator. It is offered via LearningTimes as a 4 week workshop, with live online sessions once a week starting May 11, 2004 and costs $150. Looks like a good hands-on event for RSS newbies or wannbes. Just wait until the graduate courses are available ;-) cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jeremy Brooks There is a imprint from that boot labeled "copyright violation" across my face. I got stomped... and likely deserved it. I had a eight-baked idea to do a video response to Dave Cormier and George Siemens in their call for videos about the future of education for a short course they are teaching. I'm not big on pontifications or hanging predictions out in the air (me of the William F Gibson Model of the Future). Then after seeing that David Wiley took a well delivered prediction of continued same-ness (so clean you might not get the parody tag?), I figured the snark gloves were off-- a wild idea emerged in my feverish undersized canine skull to do a little mashup of a popular movie with some substituted dialogue. And a few fun jabs at my friend and intertubes sparring buddy, Jim Groom. Source clips were easy enough to find, and I spent about 2/5 hours in iMovie assembling it. Now, if you see it, I will eb first to say the production quality is awful, my actors I hired for voices should never work, and likely, it is not even funny. But also... in present terms, its pretty much a copyright faux pas in the eyes of the studio that owns it. I really did not mashup too much, re-arranged just a few scenes, and overlaid my own dialogue in a few places. I knew that. On the other hand, when you get close to it, the grey line between what you can or cant doo gets wide and fuzzy. I became curious what happened when you tried to post it. YouTube cranked on it like 20 minutes after upload, and then I got an email saying it was deleted due to violation of terms of services. GUILTY! I am wondering if they have this automated, as that bit of technology for matching is impressive. Someone on twitter suggested Dailymotion as a place where more gray things float. Again, it was a 35 minute upload, I saw a preview, but the public link always said processing... and when I checked today, it had been deleted due to violation of terms of service. GUILTY! And yeah, I could embed it on my own web page, and eventually I will get one of those threatening take down emails from a Boot Wearing IP Lawyer. I don;t care if anyone sees my crappy movie (30mb); it was more worth it to see what happens when you enter that gray zone, or more likely, cross it. It is damned murky, and you can only find hints of the edge by crossing over. That said, I have even a higher appreciation and respect for people who do really good mashups. You may think it is some greasy haired kid in the basement with a PC clutching a Mountain Dew in Cheetoes covered fingers (actually for me it was Dos Equis and some nacho chips, and yep, need a bath). Doing it well is damned hard. You have to analyze the source in incredible detail. It is not just copy paste, especially if you want to match dialogue. It is super-creative to recast one story line into a new one, or to match different forms into something new. If you think mashups, remixes, re-edits is just some easy copy/paste done by "kids" then go ahead and try it- it is not trivial. Me? I've been caged. cc licensed flickr photo shared by crossfirecw I am taping foil in my windows and bolted bars across the doors, cause the steel-booted enforcers are coming. Looking at the goofy banner on this blog and the reasons behind naming CDB, it is apparent that for 2003, I did lots of bloggin', plenty of doggin' (complaining about everything), but very little coggin' So this month, I am back in the mountain bike saddle, riding 11 miles to work 2-3 times per week. A few years back, when I had more energy (and we had only one family car), I rode every day. Bicycling is some of the best thinking time of the day, a 45 minute slot of time to reflect and enjoy some desert scenery in the middle of Phoenix (see the 1997 vintage virtual bike ride site). So the cog action is back. Today, passing through a section of Papago Park reminded me of a classic story about great designs that fall short. In 1994, Papago park was a prison for German POWs, and a group of them planned a daring escape by tunneling more tan 130 feet underground to a canal, secretly crafting a canoe, in the hopes of floating down the Salt River, to the GIla River, and on into Mexico. Small problem- those nice blue lines for rivers on the Arizona maps represent rivers that, well many times of year on the Salt River, are bone dry. Imagine the surprise at getting to that river bed after a daring tunnel escape, and seeing no water to float the boat. Most of the prisoners were so dejected they could not even run farther, and all were quickly caught. Some say it was the largest POW escape in the US. There is some parallel there for technology design, I am sure. There is nothing really arounf to mark this history- it is now part ball fields and part National Guard base. Anyhow, I digress. Spending some time with your brain and body engaged in physical activity is very liberating. I am recharged! Now I cog, dog, and blog. Woohoo. Mmmmm, another mutated strand of 5 things meme got batted my way from Alisa. I've got a lukewarm thing about such things. Over the years I have never forwarded those email things which warned an anvil would drop from the sky on this coyote if I failed to forward. Well, maybe it did. But I'll play only because Alisa is so cool and knows my favorite cocktail ;-) So her rules are: 1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages). 2. Open the book to page 123. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the next three sentences (sentences 6-9). 5. Tag five people. Okay, so I'll start by saying that I had to change the rules. I just had to blaze a new path. Do things my way or the highway. (Insert your own Cliché here) I'll try it your way, @soul4real! though it will reveal what a literary noob I am as Go Dog Go and CDB barely clock above 20 pages ;-) Since my office is chaos, it was easy to pluck three books from the random stacks. Let's see if I can count sentences.... rummaging and counting sentences.... Ah, I like this one! After a long silence he yawned, then said, "We're using another shadowless thing." "What's that"? "Words." The only clue is the story takes place in the outdoors of Oregon. One not used was O'Henry's Short Stories (hah, I paid 10 cents for it in a thrift store; on Amazon it is 14 cents!) - the sentences landing there almost sounded like a geology book. The other not used was Edward Abbey's Brave Cowboy which I would have easily taken since he is one of my favorite authors (my copy of Desert Solitaire is in shreds), but the first sentence was one of those free flowing like a desert wash in flash flood ones- literally a paragraph. Now the hard part- who do I want to inflict this upon? Should I pass the meme on? Will people just groan and mutter foul words about me when they get tagged? Oh well. I'll pick some from my Google reader with no real logic of choice. Jim Groom cause he is sure to be eclectic and reads big thick (and remembers them) Scott Leslie ditto- I saw all the books in his basement office, so I know he has a stack, And I bet he hates memes more than me. Sue Waters just because I know she reads every trackback ping, likes memes, and is just a fun person who has gobs of people she can spread this to. Rachel Smith cause I know she wants to post something on her new blog site. Chris Lott cause he needs a light hearted break from blogging about PLEs and imagine he has an Alaskan scale sized book collection. I am guessing he will roll his eyes at the meme thing too. I guess there was a theme to my selection, they are all from people who blog from the west coast of their continents. There. I have done the dirty deed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gX5Gxhv5Mk Just so my students who start ds106 starting tomorrow know who they are dealing with! There is still time to drop, ha ha. (more…) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by thebassoonist12 If a classroom can be flipped to make better use of time and group processes, why are we not flipping more things? I've spent three days in Austin attending a conference in the same model going back how Ook ran them in 2500 BC. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by WorldIslandInfo.com Rooms with front lecterns, screens full o' powerpoint, partially full of passive participants mostly reading email or facebooking, badges, Big Name Keynotes, vendor booths, they only critical missing piece was the Dreaded Conference Chicken. A lot of us acknowledge this irony of traveling long and far to ignore someone in the front of the room, that the best interactions happen in the breaks and the evening socials, the stuff that is not part of the agenda-- then (excuse what might be an expletive) WHY THE F*** DO YOU PLAN THE LARGEST PORTION OF PROFESSIONAL GATHERING TIME FOR THE LEAST USEFUL ACTIVITIES? I am not the first one to ponder this, here is the same question from a conference planning blog (published in September 2010)- or a dude offering consulting (buy the book! hire me to flip your conference) -- a compelling critique of the limitations of traditional conferences and a complete road map to creating more effective alternatives. When Karl Fisch was cited for flipping, he told Daniel Pink: "When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong," Fisch told me. "The idea behind the videos was to flip it. The students can watch it outside of class, pause it, replay it, view it several times, even mute me if they want," says Fisch, who emphasises that he didn't come up with the idea, nor is he the only teacher in the country giving it a try. "That allows us to work on what we used to do as homework when I'm they're to help students and they're there to help each other." Why cannot we do this for conferences? All of that content stuff that we fill up the agenda with- presentations, videos, talks, can be done before the event, and we can use the bulk fo the time for the stuff that counts- discussion, debates, conversations-- in fact, I'd like to go to a conference where we get to do something, make something, instead of talking about doing things, or showing pictures of people making something. In the Telegraph article on Flip-Thinking, Pink goes right to the big idea (my edits in bold): When he puts it like that, you want to slap your forehead at the idea's inexorable logic. You wonder why more schools [conferences] aren't doing it this way. That's the power of flipping. It melts calcified thinking and leads to solutions that are simple to envision and to implement. This has certainly been done- it is the structure they run the K-12 Online Conference. Why cant a conference be flipped? cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by kuminiac What do we have to lose, besides the chicken? The Flickr Related Tag Browser is a cool way to surf and cross surf related tags within the vast flickr photo-empire. Flickr Related Tag Browser lets you surf Flickr's 'tag space'. Flickr tags are keywords used to classify images. Each tag has a list of 'related' tags, based on clustered usage analysis. Thanks to the Flickr team for their great API. Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. I could not agree more with that last sentence. Is there a lesson out there as to what can happen when you let folks loose on data via an open API? That more people will enter a site through these more or less freely franchised outlets? It seems like the antithesis to rigid corporate portals. But enough of that let's walk through how it works (Geez, I wish I was set up for screencasting!)... (more…) Andy Rush, I feel your pain! You anguish (not really) Seriously! Stop taking Edupunk so seriously and it sounds like you are feeling meme-deprived: Do you know what Jim posted about right before his seminal Edupunk meme (Jim says it's not a meme, by the way) was born. He blogged about ME. What about me? How do I fit into Edupunk? Why didn't I take off as a meme??? Seriously. And as one who has also worn tin foil in public, I offer your own meme, EDURUSH: I don't believe in technology, I believe in Andy. And that's why I don't think our struggle is over the future of technology, it is over the struggle for the future of our culture that is assailed from all corners by the vultures of bad video codecs. Lossy web video formats are selling us back our ideas, innovations, and media for no price. I want them all back in h.264, and I want them now! EDURUSH is all about divX, mad biking, and WordPress gushing.EDURUSH Manifesto All we need is a theme for Andy's meme... Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/537486104 Andy flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Anyone RSS-ing or surfing the education weblog scenes (e.g. Weblogg-ed) know that educator weblogs are catching on as a quiet revolution. And it is happening here in our system, a quiet revolution thaking place in and under the radar. Out at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, their home-grown eportfolio system features a blog tool, and last we heard, they had over 250 active faculty and student folios and some creative uses of the blogs. Word spread after some demos at our September Online Learning Group meeting. A media staff member at Phoenix College shared her blog used for an outside project that is documenting a digital video production. Another faculty at South Mountain Community College has been using for some time Blogger for her English students to create Web folios. A team of faculty support staff at Phoenix College are using a blog I set up for them to document development of some new training materials. And today I was at a meeting at Phoenix College, where apparently their dean has been reading the e-mails I have been sending about the blog-potential. Their college will be setting up an installation of MovableType to use for various committee projects as well as some instructional support for some classes. I will be visiting in November and running a version of BlogShop likely hosted from their new site. This is just the tip of an iceberg (in Phoenix? Yes!) Bear with me on what my unravel as a long strand here, Im trying to weave into one a stream that's been flowing all day. Never one to write in that organized a fashion, I see a path: celebration of some incredibly original, creative video forms- and I want more; reading something way out my normal scope; which leads me to an incredible video experience about a box, but its more than the video; and speaking of the mystery box; the overarching reach of an education connection. Are you ready? Please place your minds into the upright and locked open position... (more…) flickr foto Cadu On Alertavailable on my flickr What? Did I hear that cats beat us dogs in the FlickrTagFight? I cannot believe it! Something must be done! More dog tags! More dog tags! More DOG tags! "This cat tag thing is out of control! I say upload your dog photos en masse and show these cats who's on top! What are you watching me for? Get out there and tag dog photos!" I'm mulling over what many other quicker, maybe wiser, colleagues have done, and migrate my blog software from MovableType 2.661 to WordPress 1.5. It's not critical, not urgent, but I feel it nagging at me. Last week I dumped a chunk of time trying to get all the perl pieces in place to use the captcha plugin for MT (actually mainly for other blogs on my server). Trying to get the perl pieces in place for this plugin was a headache and a half. Tried to cpan the need GD.pm modules. First I was missing some sort of Test.pm modules.... oops, that was a missing piece of CPAN.pm that needed to be downloaded. GD needs the gdlib 2.0.8 or higher... and that was something I failed at via cpan and manually install. I did manage to install gdlib using fink via FinkCommander on this Xserve, but the hard part with that is that it places it in a directory that perl does not find by default. So than I tried adding the appropriate paths or "use" statements to get at GD.pm. I felt close, but perl thought otherwise as the plug in script kept bombing with detailed errors of "Premature end of Script headers". While chatting/complaining with D'Arcy, he emphasized how easy the move from MT to WP was for him, setting my wheels into motion. The WP features look very robust, so I am going to give it a try sometime soon. It's time for a change. I don't have time for it, but it's time. I did not catch the stream of the ds106 presentation at the CUNY conference by Mikhail Gershovich and Michael Branson-Smith, so I did not hear their response- but Mikhail's tweet bemused me: Amusing because who can really say what a University "feels"? Nah. It really shows how thin the understanding is of an open course, in the assumption that the experience of the open participants is the same as the one that students are paying tuition for -- a "course is a course of course of course" to misquote Mr Ed. Yeah, why should some people get for FREE what others are paying for? Opening your stuff pays back in the long run. That was my lesson first learned in 1994, when I realized a set of tutorials on web page creation I was putting online as a workshop for my local participants, could be useful to other people elsewhere-- at no extra effort on my part. An dover the years, people who came across this stuff would contribute back, via suggestions for improvements, translations into other languages-- all that pay it forward stuff worked its way back. In many of the established MOOCs (is it really so? traditional MOOCs?) they seem to try and create a similar experience for all students, with the exception that registered students go through a process of assessment or credit granting. In ds106, on the other hand, the open part really is not the same, and those who take the open/free route really do not get the full experience of the on the ground students. Outside of a few rabid partcipants (prsent company counted) most of the "free riders" do selective bits of the experience. They dip in and out. They do not absorb anything from the home base beyond a few bits of web page data transmitted. The on the ground registered students get a lot of extra attention, guidance, mentoring from people like Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Michael Branson-Smith, Scott Lockman -- plus a close community of peers doing the same. The additions of the open participants add even more to the experience, and in fact, the question should be turned around to look at the value of getting free tutoring, advice, suggestions from people not even being paid to help with the class. How about that? If the "University" were to look closely, they would find the open course a net gain in a richer experience rather then some penny pinching loss of tuition dollars. It's not the model for every course, but it's time to open minds that the students we are ushering through our institutions ought to be prepared for living, working, co-creating in an openly networked world, not a closed box. We ought to be giving them more of these connective experiences. It is however, difficult point for those who have not had a taste of the experience. But it seems time to be thinking a lot more opening about when we mean by a "course". Of course. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by oddsock I am curious to hear how Mikhail and Michael answered the question.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r990CWYtx_o I'm not to sure the relevance of that Bill guy or the Mark dude, but take some time out next week for the An Hour of Code project: It's a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code" and show that anyone can learn the basics to be a maker, a creator, an innovator. We'll provide a variety of self-guided tutorials that anybody can do, on a browser, tablet, or smartphone. We'll even have unplugged tutorials for classrooms without computers. No experience needed. Watch this "how to" video for more information. Check out the tutorials in beta. I hope ds106 people note the relevant age range: There was a time last year when i was pondering with Jim Groom a possible subsequent class to ds106 that might focus on a code/scripting level, not trying to turn people into C++ programmers or python growers, but just the kind of conceptual understanding you can do with basic conceptualizing how URLs work, how web pages are structured, and how to use things like existing javascript libraries. Well that went into the Big Bin of Ideas That Might Never Get Done. In the meantime, this is the direction being pursued in a big way by Mozilla Webmaker. I came to the Hour of Code project via the WebMaker blog An hour of code to shape the web we want (and there via a tweet that I lost track of). Mozilla is organizing local maker events (make with other people) as well as offering a list of "makes" one can do in support of an Hour of Code... not to be too self serving, but I am proud to see my Thimble make Cory Doctorow's Mood Room listed. That is not why I am suggesting looking here, there are a pile of great projects that get you into code through the guided see/change.try again interface that Thimble provides. I am not quite sure where to plug this into ds106, but anyone who enjoys the creative activities we do there would get into as well the Hour of Code activities. Surely you can put aside some email reading or Facebooking to do some code. Heck, I might even be okay (maybe) if you put aside some ds106 time. How shocking is that? Check out the Hour of Code, and spread the word. But do not just tweet links, Make Something! creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog She was perhaps the dog I've lived with who had the best disposition. My ex got a dog for her kids before I moved in; Fusge came from the pound, a chocolate lab / doberman mix. I think the kids tacked on the "MC" in front of her intended name (for her obvious colors). Thanks to the bits of my Mom's annual calendar that are now my Google calendar, I get a reminder that she passed away this day in 2001. I remember taking Fudge on runs (me on a bicycle) so she would not be so energetic for a kids sleepover. I remember camping in the woods up here not too far from where I live now. I remember her being a good companion to Dominoe when I moved in. I remember her once eating a whole bowl of raw shrimp sitting in the sink, and a few times eating a crater out of a tray of brownies. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I remember a backpack trip in the Superstition Wilderness with my friend Uwe, who brought his dog, Husky. That poor dog ended up with blisters on his pad, and Uwe carried him out the last few miles. Fudge? She walked out solidly. I remember her just always happy to see you. I remember her muzzle growing grey with age. I remember the summer of 2001, when we noticed she stopped eating. I remember the vet describing the advanced cancer that had engulfed her stomach. I remember that dog not showing one indication of what had to be severe pain. I do not feel like I really remember nearly enough. These memories are shreds, fragments, faded photos. Here's a raised paw to you, MC Fudge, a Dog among dogs. Without a doubt in doing talks about the future, my favorite (and many other people's favorite) quote is from William F Gibson cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It is so powerful. I still sit back and marvel at it (see also the attempts to track down the source). These words bashe the simple idea of time being some sort of linear line with neat little dots and notes hanging on it. Or that some person/authority can put a signpost out alerting you that you have arrived. Tt just doesn't work like that. Sorry, but the future swirls around us like bits of ephemeral wisps (as well as the non-future). And we don't know it until it is right Here, and then it is not the future, eh? In some alternate universe, I might be a PhD in Philosophy, and this topic would be my dissertation, just built around this beautiful quote. But today I came across the perfect bookend quote, in, of all things, my reading of Bob Dylan in America, in reading this quote about the past from William Faulkner: The past is never dead. It's not even past. That, to me, is just as heady, and deep, and makes perfect companion to Gibson's line on the future. Yeah, history is alive, right here too, along with the future. Where are we going? Oh my, I am getting dizzy. Right here in the Now, I am surrounded by an unevenly distributed future and a past that is not past. Time is not as simple as we tend to think. [caption id="attachment_6606" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="(image from http://www.wbrschools.net/)"][/caption] Neither are people. While growing up in the 1970s, I was a TV junkie, and this one little bit from maybe the seminal sitcom that had layers deeper than cheap laughs, All in the Family, has always rattled around my head. In this scene, the stubbon, thick headed family autocrat, Archie goes head to head with his intellectual, unemployed son-in-law, Michael (who Archie calls "Meathead"). These people are opposites in every regard, but given their relationship to Archie's daughter, living in the same house, they have to co-exist. Here, in a rare case of trying to do something together (a fishing trip) they have a major discussion about something banal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFuniFSP2fo I love this because both parties are dead set in their way being the "right" or better way to do something. Internally, if you could play a tape in their heads, would be an expletive laden track of how stupid the other was. And they sort of make concessions to the other, but actually never do. While the future and past mill around together in the Now, can we really be as simple as being adamant in our sock and a sock versus sock and a shoe attitudes? Woah, Neo, a bit too much thinking in the morning. Gotta get more coffee.... cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by hermitsmoores This is a last little bit of code I wanted to bang out today (for more on this statement, see my next blog post). We have over 3800 examples that people have shared for the ds106 Assignment Bank. The way these get here are that people set up their accounts on ds106.us, and once we get their blog feed URL, as long as they use the proper assignment tags, we are able to syndicate the examples in automagically. IN a few cases, people may just do a single ds106 assignment as part of a class or a workshop (e.g. as Dean Shareski's students have done), but without getting their work on blogs we can syndicate, these one off pieces of work cannot be part of the collection. Or in some cases they use weird platforms (I am looking at you weebly) that do not support tags. So I had the idea a while back to connect a form where people could submit examples for these edge cases. I just got it working with a bit of hacking around. My first hope was to have the form appear in a lightbox over the assignment page, but getting dynamic data to populate the gravity form tags was not working. I went the lesser route, of setting up some external parameters I could pass to a second form page. If you go to any assignment now, there is an extra link on the left side that gets you to the new form. The form will add info as the same post type of the syndicated examples, apply the tags. The main page script will even use the email address to locate a gravatar. This is still just an experiment; there is always the potential for spam or just stuff that is not relavent. We still prefer people to get on the ds106 bus and do their work by blogging and tagging. It is almost worth it just to see what I can do under the hood with the templates. For those that are curious, I set up a blank wordpress page that uses a custom template, and I have set up the site to be able to pass a query variable in the URL that contains the id of the assignment, so the new page can reconstruct the info. The form is generated by gravity forms, where I pass it through php the values for the tags the item needs. If you give it a try, please do something real! One of the best diversions in Milwaukee from the League for Innovation conference we found was a dinner at the Safe House. Following the address to a door in an alley marked "International Exports", we had to use all of our sites to get ourselves inside. Beyond that, I am sworn to secrecy, but see their web site for more vague details and innuendo (and a fun theme for a web site). If you do get to Milwaukee, it is worth checking out-- but make reservations! We heard on Saturday night there was a 3 hour wait... Tom keeps pumping out his creations of the Illustrating Odd Autocompletes assignment he spun out this gem featuring my pals Gardner Campbell and MC Hammer (!) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward and so… turn about is fair play. I went to The Google to find what Tom Woodward Likes, and found… I actually went firs for a google search on Intelligent design and settled on the comic that was included in a blog post “Intelligent Design” Vs “Darwinism” (okay I am stomping on rights to use this image, it comes from a Ning url, and a reverse image search turns up hundreds of places it appears online; it is a cartoon by Rex Babin, deceased comic artist from the Sacramento Bee. Fight for the RemixRight!) I then searched my own flickr photos for pictures of Tom, maybe I would put his head in the cartoon, but I just loved this one of him and Jim Groom cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I thought about trying to erase the background from the comic to see uf I could put Tom and Jim behind it, but it was impossible to cleanly remove the background white. Then I hit the brilliant idea that I might be able to place it on Jim’s chest like a t-shirt design. With a little bit of rotation, distort, it had the right orientation but still looked like a cheap ;paste job. Playing with the layer modes, the COlor Burn option turned out to be the winner to make the image look more like it is a design Jim is wearing. So Tom likes intelligent design,,, what other possible thing could explain the existence of Jim Groom? Boom! Written up here just to tag another example for the assignment. cc licensed flickr photo by danielgenhart.com There is joy in Mudville this morning (=my inbox and some people claim it is not worth it to check email first thing, phooey), as in response to my battle with Icelandair a trace of humanity has been detected- they are offering to refund my money for unused tickets due to their delays (which they say still do not exist, but I shall no longer quibble..., well not too much). To quote: Dear Mr. Levine. I refer to our previous communication and apolgise for the delay in getting back to you. I am really sorry that you missed your connecting flight from Boston and I reiterate my sincerely apologise for any inconvenience and additional expenses caused. Having checked our records, flight FI631 blocked in at 6:13 on November 29 and we do not have any records of bags being delayed that evening. Please note that when travelling on through tickets the tickets can not be issued unless the connection time is legal. The minimum connection time between flights is decided from the airport authorities and after the delivery of your luggage the connection time you had left still was legal. Mr. Levine I am sure that you are able to appreciate that we would not be in a position to refund your expenses caused as neither our flight nor your luggage was delayed. Since your tickets were issued on Icelandair paperwork we are willing to authorize a refund on unused coupons and ask you to please send the original unused coupons to the address below and for my attention. The amount will be around USD 400- This is done on exgratia basis and without prejudice. Once again, I would like to extend my very sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused and annoyance caused on this occasion. I do very much hope that you will not be deterred from travelling with us again. Yours sincerely, Harpa Johannsdottir So we would not be in a position to refund your expenses means they are not willing to refund the $900 I had pay out of pocket for a USAirways flight to get home, but they are going to give me $400 for the tickets I bought from them that I did not use. They are returning what they had previously pocketed. I am happy with a partial victory... I cannot say if the blog helped or persistent emails, but it is worth it to keep barking at the door until someone pays attention. ... then you just might have to pound them in yourself. And few things in this tech work give me more joy when figuring an end around, even if it's one you end up not using. Rising For a number of months, I've been working away on an [unblogged about] project for JIBC, again like last year's work on a leadership resource site, is something for BC Corrections. Without going into too much (yet) let me just say this is putting online a ton of materials (14 hours of learning to prepare for in follow up in-person training) aimed at all current staff as well as new ones as they come on board. The content is delivered in, yes Blackboard, but my role has been in turning pages of content that come at me in Word files, to something interesting (I hope) that we publish in Articulate Rise 360. I had never used it before, but it's not terribly complex. And the authoring is all done via a web browser. What it produces is clean and works elegantly in different device sizes. It provides variety of content "blocks" - for text (basic, headings, large text statements, lists, a few quotation), media (embeds video, audio, iframe code), images (full screen, centered, left/right aligned, text atop, carousels), interaction (tabbed, accordion, flip cards, sort cards), very simple assessment (multiple choice, fill in blank), even a simple branching scenarios. Yes, it's aimed squarely at corporate type training. The tradeoff, though, are a lot of limits to what you can do and very limited customization. The irony is that it's all published as web content, but you cannot do everything you can possibly do in a web page. A lot of my work here has been apologizing- telling my content writers "nope, we can't do that" or "sorry I can't change the format like that" but also in coming up with ways to pull of their ideas in this limited set of tools. All of those leads me to bring the tale of bullet points. 3 Are the Types of Bullet Points, No More, No Less https://youtu.be/xOrgLj9lOwk?t=88 "Then shalt thou count to three, no more–no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out." As it does, Rise offers three, no-more-no less ways to create lists. Three shall be the number of styles thou shalt count-- oh excuse me, Monty Python moment. First, since we are counting, are your web style ordered lists (ignore the late night typo in bullet 3, sad): 3 items, numbered, in order Yup, a pretty version of what you get in HTML with <ul&/gt; tags. Not making an enumerated, list? Reach for the bulleted list type. Or what in HTML is an un-ordered list. same 3 items, marked with "bullet" points Yeah, bullet points. They seem like very tiny bullets, right? So in the development, I started reaching for the 3rd type, checkbox lists, since the marker was bigger. Those items now with nice big boxes in front It's maybe better visually, but here I made the mistake of reaching for a visual change that introduced a problematic confusion with function. Because in Rise, these kinds of lists the boxes can be "checked" by a learner when clicking them. The check provides no response/feedback; it seems to be more useful when you want to provide a list of things with a prompt and a reason to check the items. I can check the boxes but what's the meaning? So it's not ideal from a functional standpoint, and can lead to some confusion as to why a list of items can be checked off. Can We Change.... No. My content folks asked a few times- "Can we make the bullet points bigger? Can we use a different symbol for lists? Can we use this picture icons for lists?" I feel rather rigid in having to say "no" all the time. But they did provide feedback that the check box style was confusing, so I needed to do something. I did my searching and looking for possible answers in the Rise user forums (which has the fun title of "E-Learning Heroes"). I found discussions of it in a thread that was 3 years old that started with a request (and upvoted pages and pages of times) to allow coloring of text bullets. And actually they were discussing bulleted lists inside the text editor. But it's in the same vein- they things people here are asking for are just CSS changes, ones not afforded access to in a visual editor. The company responses are repeated pastes of: The text editor used in Rise 360 doesn't support formatting the bullet or numbering color. We have requested improvements in that tool so you can have better control over bullets. If we get new information, we'll share it with you here. Sometimes the responses make it sound like its a technically complex request to make, something that takes years to implement (?). Since I can preview the content I am developing in a web browser, I just popped an example into my browser, opened up the inspector, and found it was quite easy to change the bullet size for the tiny unordered list. It's just changing the height and width of the .block-list__bullet class from 0.7rem to something bigger. But because the Rise Content is delivered via Blackboard (exported as a SCORM package and launched in its own window inside the LMS) I have no means to add custom CSS. Well, I do. I had an idea. the SCORM package is just a .zip file, and inside is all kinds of typical web content. And by digging around it's directories, inside scormcontent -> lib I found the content CSS as main.bundle.css. It's like 360k of minimized CSS, but a search for .block-bullet__list got me to the place an edit would be needed. I bumped the value of height and with to 2.5rem, saved, and recompressed the SCORM zip archive. How to test? That's easy, I have had to check a few things in the packaging of SCORM using the free SCORM Cloud test site https://cloud.scorm.com/ And voila, a wee bit of CSS tweaking, and we get what is years in the making-- bigger bullet points. Ginormous bullets! This is a proof of concept. In practice, it means that when changes are made to the Rise content (and in each of the 11 existing Rise modules), before being moved to Blackboard, they would need to be run through this process. It certainly is possible to script a command line process to do this. It's extra tedious steps, but not as impossible as the Heroes make it out to be. It's Really Not About the Bullet Points This is a lot of blather about a trivial design aspect that I bet most would never take much notice to. No, I am taking the time to write this (a) to remember, but more (b) to say this is how I relate to web technology. I like to dig around and poke underneath. All of what is wrapped up in this software is dressing on the wide open protocols of the web. And if you can do it with the latter, there's likely some means to backdoor it into the former. That's my point. Don't stop completely at something they say is not possible until you've poked around a bit. Featured Image: Clay tablets from 1450 BC a Wikipedia Commons image NAMA Linear B tablet of Pylos originally shared under a Creative Commons CC-BY license modified by me by cropping and adding a few bullet points (not well rendered, but hey, it's a metaphor). You get inside your car, turn the ignition switch, hopefully put on the safety belt, maybe turn on the radio or some kind of music player. The engine warms up. When you want to do, which gear to you put it in? A tad obvious, right? Within a few pages of Chapter 3 ("Ideas") We Make the Road By Walking, I am highlighting the sections I bet almost everyone reading now is doing (the person who owned the book before be didit in yellow highlighter), quoting the same passages those who are blogging about it, It seems odd that it comes under the heading "Is it possible to just teach biology?" where Horton and Freire advocate that teaching cannot be about meeting some competencies, outcomes, or minimal viable whatever. MYLES: As soon as a started looking at that word neutral and what it meant, it became very obvious to me that there can ne no such thing as neutrality. It's a code word for the existing system... Neutrality is just being what the system asks us to be. Neutralaity, in other words, was an immoral act. Within a page... PAULO: Neutrality. This is why neutrality is the best way for one to hide his or her choice, you see. If you are not interested in proclaiming your choices, then you have to say you are neutral. But if in being neutral, you are just hiding your choice because it seems to be possible to be neutral in the relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed, it's absolutely. It's the neutrality vis-à-vis this kind of relationship that works in favor of the dominant. MYLES: Always. PAULI: Then instead of saying I am with the dominant, I say I'm neutral. /me looks in the mirror. Gulp If you need a historical context, there was this recent thing called the "2016 US Presidential Elections" or if you live in the UK you have the thing which sounds like a kids cereal but is much worse. And there is also the phenomena by which people are left to feel powerless, when they are neutralized. Numb. I bet that was a common feeling across this country November 9, 2016. I'll leave the discussion of purchased human data deployed in social media to others ("We have three major voter suppression operations under way”). Fake news. Post truth. A so-called "landslide" mandate is really one half of the half of the US Population that felt it was worth voting (the rest must have been neutral). And look at the goliath of neutrality, Google-- long gone is "do no evil" replaced by neutrality--- "we just ignore evil, it's not our place" (let's put aside who's advertising game provides the vast incentive for publishing fake news) (no, let's not put it aside). Actually Google is not neutral when it comes to taking money for ads. Neutrality = "Immoral" = the Social Media Powerhouse Virtuous Stand = smells like poop Machines, circuits, chemical reactions can be neutral. Inert things. It does not work for humans. Raise your hand if you are inert. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by ER24 EMS (Pty) Ltd. under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license[/caption] When driving down the highway, you may approach the scene of bad accident moved to the side of the road. Flashing lights. Twisted vehicle wreckage being pulled into a trailer. Bodies on the ground surrounded by uniformed personnel. Slowing down, inside the comfort of your car, purified cool air blowing in the vents, the conscious thought might be "Oh what a terrible thing" while the subconscious whispers, "I'm glad it's not me." Then you go on down the road. I remember a family road trip for a vacation to Lake Powell, and a collision with a truck had us on the side of the road. There were fortunately no bodies on the ground, but one totaled car. I remember my resentment simmering in the summer heat at all those cars slowing down, pale faces turning slowly, and speeding on to their vacations. How often in out culture are we looking out the safety of our windows at the car wreck of society, cruising in our neutrality, but that subconscious grinding "I'm thankful it's not me"? With the end of year self reflection, I am taking stock of my own large pile of neutrality. It ain't pretty. I am very certain what does not work, but gives us the impression that it does, is social media. It let's us sit at home and think we are influencing people, but it's a ruse. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/804357638808948736 It neutralizes us into a place where we devote much energy to something that has negligible impact. If it is designed this way, it's diabolical genius. You want something better as a guide? Spend some time with Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the T**** Agenda (I adamantly refuse to repeat the man's name). My bit of summary is take action locally, meaning "MoC" (Members of Congress), because when it comes down to it, they are very un-neutral; they operate specifically on doing things that will keep them getting re-elected. Going back to Horton / Freire, a recurring theme is working with people via a lens of something that is insanely important to them. There's a long list of issues I could be worried about, with the cabinet announcements more or less nominating billionaire foxes to be in charge of the henhouses. But the one that matters to me right now is healthcare. This is a looming post in my head, the working title is "Don't F*** with My Unaffordable Healthcare". My "affordable" plan is going up 58% next year, benefits trimmed, and I have no reason to believe I will have access to a plan in 2018. So I am taking notes on Indivisible and how I will get on the radar of my MoC: US Representative Paul Gosar (whose email updates I have read for 2 years as a regular round of Obama kicking). US Senator John McCain (why why did he just not kick back and retire?) US Senator Jeff Flake (for a while he was a T**** critic, but guess he is bending to the wind; I call it the Paul Ryan background of month od celery) I do have a twitter list of them set up to scan but it's pretty much PR and posturing. McCain tweets a lot (or someone in his office does), Gosar is pretty regular, Flake much less. But my aim will be more at letter writing, calling their office, and looking for opportunities when they do town halls. I am going to be researching their positions on healthcare. I will be working my MoCs. Getting out of neutral is also an aim for the Networked Narratives open course I am plotting with Mia Zamora. It's still a somewhat vague concept (feel free to tell us so by hypothes.is-ing it up for us). What I'd like to do is whip a storm of media creativity a la ds106 but lesser so for the sake of "making art" or playful imagination and more so to turn those skills and creations towards imagining a more just and righteous world. Like purposeful storytelling. Meaning civic aimed. Could the world have not provided us a more screwed up scenario to work with in 2016? Can it be an aim to help people (me included) to explore their own and others neutrality? To shift it into a better gear? Frankly it can be overwhelming. This is far out of my territory. Can we draw in enough diversity in participation? How can we take on issues that might be damaging to people? And who the ______ am I to do something like this? I go back to Myles and Paulo. About how Highlander found a launch point of centering where people have knowledge or concern (not where the organizers of the school did). The way Myles talked about thinking in terms of a place: I was trying to find something that would fit, something that would be relevant. I wasn't looking for a technique or a method. I wasn't, and you know I am still not. That's not what I have ever been interested in. I was looking for a process of how to relate to people. Finally lightning struck. Finally, it just became very clear that I was never going to find what I was looking for. I was trying the wrong approach. The thing to do was just find a place, move in and start, and let it grow... I was just a slow learner to find out I didn't need to know; I just needed to have a vision and that I shouldn't know. You should let the situation develop. And of course you've got to use anything that you've learned in the process. Thanks Myles. The place is going to be one we make, maybe in a room maybe in online space, maybe both... a world called Arganee. And I don;t know how to do it. And I shouldn't. (repeat) (repeat) (repeat). We still made the mistake of imposing with the best of intentions because that is all we knew. We came out of this academic background and we were still within this orbit of conventionality in education... But the thing that made Highlander work is that we had a commitment. All of us had a commitment to make it work in terms of the people's interests, not in terms of ours. We didn't have any trouble saying the answers we have are for problems people don't have... ... the idea that really took form there: people learning from each other. You don't need to know the answer. You can help people get the answers. You have to know something; they know something. You have to respect their knowledge, which they don't respect, and help them respect their knowledge. [caption id="attachment_63839" align="aligncenter" width="630"] photo from http://www.projetomemoria.art.br/[/caption] Thanks guys! I don't need to have these answers. Just a vision. And this is something most people can see at the end of 2016. The world is more f***ed up than ever, we have no trust in governments, our economic, health, and environmental futures are dystopian at best. We do not even know what is true or fake. Rampant, meaningless deadly violence. And we are stuck in neutral, meaning we are working in the favor of the dominant. The ones who promise to drain a swamp and then pave it gold plated pillows to pillage from. Do you want to do something? Shift into some action with us.. [caption id="attachment_63840" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Public domain wikimedia commons image by Jacapa090[/caption] Top / Featured Image: I had in mind some kind of mechanical gauge with a needle in the middle. Searches on just "neutral" did not even get close, adding "neutral meter" in Google Image Search (phasers set to "licensed for reuse") got this black and white motorcycle speedometer on pexels by Mike Bird licensed CC0. I modified it to color red the "N" in the bottom and to also color the needle, to emphasize how far you get in neutral. I am pretty sure there must be one of those Words that Have No English Translation for "fatigue of writing family tribute posts." The photo shows flowers I picked from my own garden to visit someone I shall not see again. Nancy is my ex's mother. While those two do not have a relationship, Nancy has been special to me; she lived for a while near me in Strawberry until her health deteriorated and she moved to Payson. After my mother died, I asked to call her "Mom". She's been through a lot in the last few years; strokes, seizures, and a second round of breast cancer. They say the cancer has moved in her brain. She's gave up eating a week ago, and is just waiting to go into the night. Her son, contacted me and said I could come say goodbye. I wanted to do flowers, because she was an avid gardner. When she left the Phoenix area, we had moved one of her glorious rose bushes up here. It thrives, and has just started budding again for this summer's display. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I visited Nancy last August and brought her some of her own roses [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license[/caption] I was not sure how aware she would be today, but her eyes lit up in recognition when I came in the room, and she gripped my hand hard. Her words would not come, so I talked about my travels, my flowers, and how I would think of her when the roses come each year. There were tears. On that last visit I had asked to record some audio (having told her how much it meant to have my Mom's audio recordings), hoping to have her relay her stories of growing up on a farm in Minnesota, her early days as a piano prodigy, her studies at university, and then what he career was like as a woman executive in the 1970s. She was vice president of a medical testing company, and I remembered she had photos of her meeting with President Ford. There is almost an hour of her conversation; that is something I have sent to her grandchildren. But I did pull out the bit when she talked about working as a woman business leader in that era. In that hour, many times she struggled for words (and you can hear her respirator in the background). [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/nancy-executive.mp3"][/audio] I opened up the boxes of old photos, and could only find two photos of Nancy; one doing another thing she excelled at- cooking. She would serve elaborate meals (a family joke was the year she did a 5 course Chinese meal for thanksgiving). The other is her chilling out on one of our summer vacations on Lake Powell. I also remember her choosing adventurous things for her birthday; I think on her 60th she went for a day getting instruction on flying a plane. At the end of our audio session, Nancy said very softly... "Anyhow, it's been a wonderful life." That's the way to go. I have another person now to remember, and it will be easy given the regular reminders that grow in my yard. [caption width="480" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Go in peace, Nancy. UPDATE May 10, 2015 Nancy finally left this life last night. Off she goes into the light, with grand piano music, flowers, her two sisters, and everyone else she loved. I found one more photo with my Mom (deceased August 2011) at family Christmas gathering here in Strawberry. Both moms got along grandly with each other, and after mine passed away, I started calling Nancy "Mom" too. [caption id="attachment_42672" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Me and My Moms[/caption] Now completely motherless on Mother's Day, I am finally getting around to doing some #cookielove Top/featured photo credits: flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/17397529832 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license The dirt goes in the hole by May 30, 2013 (the end date of softlayer's billing cycle)... the Feed2JS server will be cancelled on May 28, and the lights go out. For some time, the domain will be pointed at an information site on wordpress.con, and a small "nag" notice is now appended to all feeds from the current server: If you do not want to see this nag message in your output, just modify your code to include a &nag=n on the end of the string, e.g. I was worried about breaking a bunch of sites, but a url not found means the javascript is just ignored, and left blank. I set up a test page to verify http://lab.cogdogblog.com/hungry.html. The code site is shaping up, and a big thanks to Tim Owens for jumping in an helping prep the front page readme using Markdown Oh tim, I will never forget my first pull request ;-) But Tim has done more, he figured out how to set up an Amazon EC2 AMI so you can also run your own Feed2JS instance up ni the clouds. With a little help from my friends... cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk Round up yer wiki-ing, pardner! I just got early word that wikispaces is expanding their program of ad-free fully featured wikis that was up to now offered only for K-12, and making it available for higher education too. We're taking it to the next level. Our great ad-free, private, Plus-featured wikis are now free to higher education, as well. With this whole new audience for our wikis, we're extending our commitment to give away 2 million total free wikis for education. The features in these free educational wikis normally cost $50 per year, but are completely free when used for K-12 or higher education. That means wikis for teachers, students, professors, researchers, librarians "” anyone and everyone using their wikis in K-12 or higher education. So spread the word and let's achieve something great together. If you're using your wiki exclusively for K-12 education, find out how to upgrade your wiki and get lots of other great information at http://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/teachers. If you're using your wiki exclusively for Higher Education, find out how to upgrade your wiki and get lots of other great information at http://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/highered. I have used Wikispaces a lot over the last 4+ years, the home for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (and its first version at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+ways), the Web 2.0 Storytelling wiki that goes with an article I co-wrote with Bryan Alexander. These are all on the basic free service that works well, even with the ads. But the version wikispaces offers not only takes away the ads, but gets you the full features (page level permission control for one) that I use extensively on our paid hosted versions at NMC for the Horizon Reports and more. Round 'em up, cowboys and cowgirls! It's time to wiki it up cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by alandberning Might be time to take a road trip to Wikieup, AZ, and see what the desert wikis are up to. It's end of the year time to unplug, and transmit one more blog post (at least until Tuesday!). So take this one as a loud CogDogBlog Howling At the Moon wish for everyone to have some peace, reflection, and fun for whatever holidays you celebrate. I'm unplugging here at 6000 feet elevation in central Arizona, at our cabin hideaway in the sleepy town of Strawberry (zero gas stations, no stores, 2 restaurants, 2 bars...) and what a present today brought with fresh snowfall. So in many ways, this year has been one of interesting juxtapositions, like the odd combination of cactus and snow. I'm not feeling as eloquent as my friend and colleague in Victora, Scott, did with his holiday wishes (thanks! and the hot tub gets rather frequent use, so try and find a conference to attend in Phoenix sometime soon, and I'll drag you up here.) It was a ride of unexpected dimensions with my job leap from 14 years of work in the Maricopa Community Colleges, an office that took a huge risk on a green rookie in 1992, saying goodbye to a long list of colleagues. And I cannot believe the great fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to join the NMC, and take on a whole new way and pace of exciting work with the best circle of workmates. The adjustment to working at home continues (actually need to find ways to stop work!). There are way too many people to thanks for crossing paths across the net, in Second Life / throwing me blog comments, etc. Getting to hang with my Canadian amigos Brian, D'Arcy, Scott, Jason for the Northern Voice 2006 conference was yet another opportunity to fall in love with Vancouver. And I got to meet one my long time web heros, Nancy White, and being part of a gem like chain of informal collaborations started by her talk. There are folks I have yet to meet, but connect with frequently across blogosphere, like Tim Lauer who unveils one new cool tool after another (and wow, if only I could re-incarnate myself as an elementary school student in Tim's school), the tireless Will Richardson, who did his own amazing job leap in 2006, the utterly amazing in breath, depth, and ability to dig up the most cool unusual weird stuff, Bryan Alexander (still wanting to find a project we can do!), all the fun folks at the NMC Summer Conference (Tim S doing Folsum Street Prison Blues at the Rock 'n Roll Museum, whew!), all the edgy daring people experimenting in Second Life and coming to NMC Campus -- we are all just werewolves, tall sexy blonds, dogs, flying monkeys... And comment sparring to the contrary, I cannot think of no one whom I respect and learn more from (and skim links from) than Stephen Downes definitely the top, A-list edublogger. And even with rare encounters, I can never get enough time with Gardner Campbell and wish him the best for next year. There are people who I've started to have more connections with like Beth who does an amazing amount and range of work... in areas that really matter. It was just a blast and a half to do a presentation Jam at Northern Arizona University with colleague Brian Lamb, where a bad year is that we only get to do one presentation together. I appreciate the folks like Darren and Sheryl who were willing to let me take an unconventional approach with a keynote for the k12 Online Conference. There are no words of sufficient appreciation to have had several opportunities this year to work with Joe Lambert and colleagues at the Center for Digital Storytelling -what they accomplish is sheer beautiful magic. Ditto for the opportunity this year to work with a bunch of fabulously creative people at 20 some Texas Art Museums who participate in the NMC Marcus Project. I am forgetting more people than I am remembering, like the 346 people who contributed 928 comments to this blog in 2006 (those are legit, non spam comments). For those interested, these are SQL commands I used to pull this info: SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_date` >= '2006-01-01' AND comment_approved != 'spam' SELECT `comment_author`, count(*) as cnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_date` >= '2006-01-01' AND 'comment_approved != 'spam' GROUP by comment_author ORDER by cnt desc Okay, so this is rambling on, and I apologize to people I am neglecting. So peace in the waning days of 2006 and cheers for who knows what the *#^$& will happen in 2007. I just added a new feature to this blog's templates, likely the last tweak I will do as I am rather dead set on moving soon to WordPress (especially after seeing D'Arcy's demo of the flickr gallery plugin). The new feature is a link along the front page and archive pages (and individual entries) where the line has links for comments, trackbacks, etc that says "IM this". Clicking the link will open an iChat/AIM client chat window with the URL in the chat entry area, so all you need to do is pick a buddy to share the URL with. Stealing this from Preshrunk's entry on "Feature Creep" (who stole it from someone else, go stealing!), it is a simple matter of a link that looks like: <a href=aim:goim?message=http://www.blah.com/blog/the/url/for/this/post">IM this</a> where in MovableType templates it looks like: <a href=aim:goim?message=<$MTEntryPermalink$>">IM this</a> Okay, this is pretty low on the potential use scale, but rather simple to do for newbie template twidlers. Like I said, waiting for MovableType to rebuild 800 posts is but one more reason to wake up and join the WP crowd (yes I will James, no need to spur me on, it's a matter of time). MT is like, so.... 2002. Tired. When the switch happens, it will likely be a conversion attempt of the past CDB 800 posts, but sitting at a new to be determined URL, and leave this old blog as an embarrassing artifact. Follow Kokopelli to Starbucks! by cogdogblog posted 27 May '08, 4.58pm MDT PST on flickr Mesmerized by the sounds of his flute, you order a triple latte venti... again. The World's Largest Kokopelli pipes his way in Camp Verde, Arizona www.worldslargestthings.com/arizona/kokopelli.htm This one's for you, my coffee monopoly hating friend. FYI, I marched over to the convenience store and got a juice and water, no venti shmenti for me. I've made some noise here and there about the value of meta-data, not that I do not believe it in it nor do I think it does not exist, but mainly, I have yet to see the applied use beyond searching. Out of last week's NMC Spring 2004 Online Conference, someone asked me, "Well doesn't the Maricopa Learning eXchange have meta-data?" Heck yes, the MLX Packing slip metaphor is meta-data, we just do not make a big deal about it or even identify it as such. For that matter, just about any system that is built on a database has its own unique meta-data in the fields that make up the database. So what? So just for grins and because Monday was quiet, I spent about 45 minutes creating Dublin Core XML.RDF meta data representations of all 800+ items in the MLX. I think. Well, I did not have to do it 800 times, just one new template. Each MLX packing slip has way down on the bottom, a link to its meta-data in Dublinc Core format. Or simply, you can take any MLX URL such as: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=127 and modify the URL to see the lovely DC XML data (differences shown in bold): http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip_dc.php?item=127 I had a nice iChat across the seas to David Davies, and he suggested the notion of embedding the DC descriptors in the MLX RSS feeds. This would be trivial since we already use an RSS 1.0 generator, and I can add dc: tags to the output. Actually a few are in the already, namely: <dc:subject>...</dc:subject> <dc:creator>...</dc:creator> <dc:date>...</dc:date> But I am still wondering, why the #$&* I would do this- as most people using RSS now are engulfed in a world only needing title, link, and description data. I spent the bulk of the morning trying to get an implementation up of an OAI harvester script, which in theory would allows some great huge monolithic learning object entity to include our puny little collection in their federated searches. I am close, although it involved creating a duplicate data table to run the cross-over from the MLX data structure to the fields this OAI implementor requires (without diving in and re-writing their query code). If anyone has a readable copy of Thick Headed Lunkers Guide to Meta Data For Totally Idiotic People (the version that has acronyms spelled out), I will pay a premium price for it. Today the Best Dog Ever* turns eleven or as Lorne Green would calculate "that's 80 for you and me" -- depending on your calculation. I always went with human years * 7 plus 3. I math digress. Felix is older but not old. I adopted him in April 2016 from the Humane Society in Payson, Arizona. He might have gotten renamed "CC" because it was only the landing the month before a long term contract with Creative Commons thanks to Paul Stacey. Before this, being an itinerant edtech quote/un-quote consultant, I was traveling much, one year it was 80%, not home enough to care for pets. The CC gig meant my work was steady for 18 months, giving me enough confidence to feel like I could adopt a dog. The ad on the web site led me to look at another dog, who I might have chosen, Felix was so new he was not yet listed, but he sure was making a ruckus when I went in the back room. They asked me if I wanted to see anbother one, so they brought Felix out to meet me. I was sitting on a low bench, and he leaned next to me hard. I had been chosen. The word on Felix was he was known for continually jumping the fence of his owners, who left him alone outside while they went to work, and was always running away. Neighbors would either take him home or call the Human Society. Apparently this last time, Felix had jumped the fence but got stuck on it with his collar. The owners never came to claim him. So he had abandonment issues, big time separation anxiety. But I had an ideal gig of mostly working from home, so he mostly would be with me. In those fist weeks, I tried a few experiments to leave him alone, which, were... really not good. The howling, crying. I recorded a few as a series of "Felix Home Alone" videos. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDYiiVgwnVx49VOhNKN_pMP8ECDt5o_Oz Thus I pretty much took Felix with me in I needed to go to town for errands, he would stay in the truck. We did long road trips, camping, a lot of time in the Red Dog F-150. He joined me for a drive from Arizona to Saskatchewan in 2017 to visit Cori when we were dating. On a night when Cori and I went out for dinner, Felix pushed the screen out of a second story window, and the neighborhood witnessed an anxious dog on the roof, brining a visit from the fire department. That did not endear him at all to Cori! But she did not give us the boot, as we are all one family now. She loves Felix Dog and he always waits upstairs with her in the morning so they come down together. And oddly enough, since we have a house with 2 cats, Felix has grown to be comfortable here left alone, often for 8, 10 hours with no problem. Okay, I have to backtrack. The first summer with Felix, I took him for a day trip to Flagstaff. We came across an event in a city park, all about rescue dogs. We enjoyed walking around the exhibits, and I spotted a table from the Payson Humane Society, the place I h ad adopted Felix. I expressed my appreciation, and the woman there light up. "I remember Felix!" She was the person who took all the photos for the web site and she said she would send me his puppy photo. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/28006382764 Puppy Felix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license "Did you know that when he was brought in as a puppy, we named him 'Strale'. That's Italian for 'Lightning' for those marks on his nose." I thought about this and was confused because in Google Translate, "strale" did not translate to "lightning" nor the other way. So I reached out to an expert, I emailed Jim Groom's wife Antonella, whoi explained it. Strale in Italian meant not the lightning in the sky, but the kind that came from the finger tips of Zeus! So there is Puppy Felix formerly know as Strale in 2014. And thus this morning, I took a photo attempting for the same pose, as close as he was able to would produce. So tonight, 80 year old in dog years, Felix, gets a toy dinosaur. Play on! Featured Image: Composite of Felix's puppy photo in 2014 and him now in 2025. It is shared under a CogDog Have Fun With It License, 1.0, or in human years, CC-BY.