Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Google's genesis was in well executed back-end server stuff (those precious search algorithms, they KO-d Altravista, Yahoo, Lycos) and at the time of ad-cluttered busy sites, it's stark simplicity design of plain text, one colorful logo, on a white background was the antidote to the web status quo. But hey, its 2008, and there is no reason not to personalize your iGoogle home page experience with a little more color with the user generated iGoogle Artist Themes Now you can put the work of world-class artists and innovators on your personalized Google homepage. Below is what I use on one of my four browsers, 3 of which have a different iGoogle account (dont ask why) and I have a desert theme on my main one in Firefox. As a subtle nicety on these landscapish looking banners, the scenery changes with the time of day (my time of day, not theirs), so my home page now has a sunrise looking style. Your home experience can be landscape photography, Asian comic art, or just LiveStrong w/ Lance. Isn't this just wasteful window dressing? Web frivolity? The skeptic in the back of your education technology presentation leans back full of self servicing hypocrisy and says, "How does this promote student learning? Isn't this more of what in the old days of those mac applications were called "fritterware" - ways to fritter away your time? An excess of capability that serves no productive end. The canonical example is font-diddling software on the Mac (see macdink); the term describes anything that eats huge amounts of time for quite marginal gains in function but seduces people into using it anyway. (Hey, I think I know where they got the idea for the name!) Those swipes are easy to take. But there would not be all of those iGoogle themes (and all of those delectable MySpace web designs) if our personal expression of who we are, or want to be, is not a core value. It's not trivial, and any software, project that ignores the desire to personalize a technology experience is.. well.. maybe a macdink. Of all the people I did not expect to highlight this user experience so eloquently (well maybe that is not the right adjective, how about vividly) came across in when I ran the other day with my old MP3 recorder and found an old ITConversations recording of Ze Frank at a RailsConf session. OMG, that was brilliant. Oops, this blog post has taken a ride on the tangent train. Where was I going? Oh well, I see my stop up ahead and am jumping off... BTW, these iGoogle themes are all part of the Google Gadgets, which if I did not know better than to utter the term, seem to have a lot of the attributes educators once pontificated about as "learning objects" - small bits of easily re-usable code, though of course w/o any "learning" per se embedded, but there was no technology back in the LO hey day that even got close to this simplicity. So go out there and grab a theme, no reason to be plain old white bread iGoogle (and for the Google Conspiracy Theorists, yes, I bit off on the red pill and they now own my soul, so what?). Linktributions Ahoy? by cogdogblog posted 21 Oct '08, 5.27pm MDT PST on flickr Are more people using "my made-up term? Will it some-day make it as a Word of the Year? (hah, down ego, down....) I got a nice little tweet from @eemann who discovered linktribution and Google now finds about 1400 instances-- though I am sure about 800 are from my own blog, and another 580 are from people's blogs where my trackbacks have landed there, but that leaves maybe 20 people who picked it up. Long-tail meme? I still assert the power of the simple mighty tiny link. Likewise, I am franchising out to twitterbution given a twitter shout out and/or a link to a tweet-status when someone gives you something worthy via twitter. Already has 34 of them! Or is it thanking them via twitter? I dunno. Send your link love today. Everyone loves inbound links, so crank out some outbound ones. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Darwin Bell Things are really going super duper with responses to the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge, where last Wednesday I dared y'all (that means you, all 4 billion people in the internet) to do a ds106 Daily Create seven days in row. People are stepping up, some of whom have not done TDCs before, and at least 2 UMW students are in the action. I've been doing daily summaries, found at my blog tag 7daychallengetdc. Originally I had said at the end, I would challenge you to make up a digital story from your own work. And you can certainly do that... you make up your own rules (which still makes me wonder when people tweet apologies about not getting it done by midnight or the same day, phooey). After all, its not like anyone is getting graded here! http://twitter.com/cogdog/status/224504754104049665 But in conversation with Martha this morning about our week 9 of ds106 summer assignments on Remix/Mashup to change up the final challenge, in fact it is now an Official Assignment-- Seven Day Daily Create Challenge (And Mashup Thereof): In the spirit of pumping up activity for the Daily Create I issued a challenge to see who was strong enough to do one every day for a week. That is the first part of the challenge, and to do this assignment, you should do the same. Then, and here is where it gets interesting, my friends, is that you are to make a mashup of content that other people created for each fo the seven days, and to make an interesting story out of it. How you do it is up to you, but you should use the media (and link back, give 'em credit) to 7 different pieces of media submitted for the Daily Create on the days you did yours. So there it is- now I challenge you to weave together a story from the work other people did the same seven days you did your own TDCs. Still. The question remains. Are you tough enough for this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nup1zJeV5Q This semester I am taking a complete respite from the usual big ed tech conferences... well, I am taking a break from all of them. The time spent traveling, the cost of travel, really do not balance for the things gained. That said, online conference have yet to really find a niche yet that provides value as well. The value I speak of is what I am able to gain by surfing RSS feeds and blogs I place my trust in. So last week there were 10s, 20s, maybe much more from our system among the 6 gazllion other ed tech types in Orlando for EDUCAUSE 2005, but really, for all the techies there is hardly made a ripple in the blog-o-sphere. Of course the bulk of blogging activity was taking place in the EDUCAUSE hosted blogs which were nice, lots of podcasts, but mostly lots of "rah-rah". I am basing my "barely rippling" analsyis on the Technorati tags for EDUCAUSE_ANNUAL (the official suggested Tag), a whopping 28 posts a week after. There was a good hunck of session summaries in JoAnn Gonzalez-Major's Rose Colored Glasses, though I may be put back by her favorite movie being listed as National Treasure a disc so bad I was hoping it was camp comedy. But I digress. At one point 2 days ago, the Technorati search actually topped off with 3 links for a spam blog. This site apparently mixed its own mathetic content with that of sites they suspect likely would be searched on, in fact when I checked the link, it no longer had the phrase that technorati had latched onto, and the spam sucker had gone on to include phrases listed for some medical conference site: A day later, it was gone, hopefully spotted and expunged by Technorati. So if anything worthy happened in Orlando, maybe someone can give me a call, the blogs I read and searched for don't yield much. For the last year or more I have been blabbering about the "small pieces of technology loosely joined", so it was extremely overdue that I actually read the book I pilfered the phrase from. So thanks to a holiday gift card from Borders (which is really just a portal to Amazon) just fresh off the Amazon.com truck comes my own personal copy of David Weinberger's Since I barked about needing an Idiot's Guide to Meta-Data, I have had some productive on and off blog posts with some folks that are a step above me in meta-awareness. Thanks to Sarah, who sent a link to the CETIS Draft Guide to Meta Data which shines some light on what some of the acronym soup organizations are up to. I still find documents like these laden with technical jargon- it stars out right away with schema, elements, and standards... all I am looking for is something that would also provide a sidebar with a written scenario of how some of this stuff might be used. Tell me a Metadata story, even if the ending is not happy. But seriously, the CETIS document is a nice read. Also Scott's comments on my Yeti-Data sighting post and a later phone conversation has me understanding the playing field a bit more. Organizations like CETIS and Edu-Source in Canada are way ahead of us in the states because they are going at the learning objects grail as a collaborative (at least it appears so) as opposed to the individual fiefdom efforts of us down here in the lower province of USA. Bottom line seems to be: Adding Dublin Core meta-data to the MLX does not really do much, there needs to be more of a structured interface to allow access by systems that will us other standards, IMS, LOM, etc-- and OAI is pretty specialized into publications and MLX items may be lost in the wash there. I think I will sit on the sidelines a bit longer to see what develops more so on the end of tools and systems that will construct things out of so-called learning objects (is that APOLLO?) and then figure out how to tie MLX "we have metadata we just do not call it metadata" to a format that can be leveraged. Weeks and weeks had passed by, like listless grass blowing down the dirt lane, since she had returned home. Still, no one was going to challenge Dorothy as the saddest person in Seward County, perhaps in all of West Kansas. Not the moping cows, not even the Rogers family who lost their grain silo, two sons, and a new tractor in a freak silo toppling could compete. "Why was I so gung ho to come back to this puke bucket of a town?" she whispered inside her head. "Auntie Em is nice, but as exciting and dumb as a door post. And Uncle Henry? His breath reeks of wet corn and all he was really interested in was prepping for the winter hunt. Guns, cleaning guns, oiling guns, guns. (more…) I've taken a second stab at converting the elegant, Creative Commons licensed static HTML themes from HTML5 UP and baking it into a Wordpress calling card theme. The first one I did was based on the Dimension theme, and got a nice tweet from Dan who just put it to use https://twitter.com/dpzuberbier/status/904370799230021637 The need for that one originally was to have something at the top of Wordpress multisite suite for Mariana Funes, but I've been more interested in offering this for people just starting their Own Domains. The idea is to think of a domain as not just one blog, but a collection of sites. It makes sense to put a landing page or calling card at the top, not just a blog (ignore my own example! Do as I say, not as...). This was what I put into place for the Ontario Extend effort to start people with domains with a simple site that they should outgrow soon. That was the case when @Nursekilliam jumped in with my Wp-Dimension theme (leading to useful updates). Then she DM-ed and said she really liked the Big Picture theme from HTML5 UP. I offered no promise, but was curious what it would take to do a second creation of a theme from the HTML UP template. Voila! See the live demo . The theme may have a bit too much animation and parallax for some, but doing this was my own challenge. Now that it is done (first beta version on GItHUb now) I'm happy as the Wordpress version is to me, more flexible than the original. This is because the HTML5 Up theme is hard coded to a fixed number of sections in the page, and hard coded in the style sheets. The top of the site, the intro, is all designed with the Wordpress Customizer. The default background image of Kamloops is easily changed with the Header Image option in the Customizer; and that means one could upload many images, and use the setting to a random one is displayed on every page load. And rather than having a fixed set of social media icons in the footer, my theme makes use of a plugin for creating social media menu items, where the choice, order, and links are all set in the Customizer. But the real flex is in the sections below the top intro section, they are all simple Wordpress Posts, with the order of appearance a user option. By using large sized image as a a featured image, generates output where content / background slide in as an animation, and have a simple block text of title (post title) and a small bit of content. They are automatically alternated in left/right orientation. And you can create longer content, whatever you can get in a blog post, but creating one that lacks a featured image. This gives room for whatever content, media you can cram in a post. I even added a sneaky way to create a Wordpress gallery, then modify the shortcode name, and BOOM! You get the animation / slideshow version you see in the original html theme. [caption id="attachment_64932" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The HTML5 UP animated gallery can be rendered in Wordpress via a special shortcode[/caption] But see it all in action at http://lab.cogdogblog.com/bigpicture/#content. The second one was easier in some aspects; I already had code I could copy from the first theme for setting up the Customizer, adding the post metaboxes. The structure of the theme is simple: Header template (header.php) Footer template (footer.php) index template (header.php) A functions template (functions.php) This theme took a bit of gymnastics to set up the IDs for each section, building menus out of that, and dynamically writing CSS in the top of the template. There's probably more fancy pants programming ways to this! But it's beta, baby. Give it a spin. Loaded documentation here too. Featured Image: It comes as a default header image for the new theme, it's mine! Where the Rivers Meet flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Yesterday I put up the tombstone for Feed2JS, on its life support after 10 years. But like any good zombie, I just cannot kill it, it rose from the grave, and shall continue to provide free RSS content in your web sites, for FREE! Cartoon Zombie by ~Sabotender Brian Teller, a web developer in Hagerstown Maryland, did not want it to die, and offered me free hosting and TLC for the service. He did not want any big credit or banners on the site. But I flipped the DNS switch to the new server about 2 hours ago. You can tell you are looking at the new site if the Feed2JS home page has the "Good News" header: Let's give Brian a lot of thanks for keeping the zombie feed service alive. This is more of my own niche technical fixes that is more interesting in that I learned a new trick, added a small feature to a WordPress site, all only because I inadvertently capitalized the header column of a CSV import. Or again, my own habit of narrating my work for what I have heard is characterized as a "mythological reader" (aka you). Cori is putting to use this year for her high school students a WordPress site we conjured up in 2019? 2020? for students in a program at multiple schools share and give each other feedback in writing. This makes me wonder how much/little remains of K-12 teachers creating public spaces for student reflecting. Remember when student blogging was more than a "thing"? I pretty much over documented the site customizations in April 2020 so most of the nuts and bolts are there. They key feature explained there is I set up a way to add a profile field to indicate the name of a student's school. This is not displayed anywhere, and is purely present to allow the teachers (who have admin access) the ability to easily sort posts, comments, users by their own school. What? Okay, I made it so the school names of an author are a column in the view of Posts (all student posts when published are set as Pending status for a teacher to review, and make public). A click on a school name filters all posts to ones from students at that school: And I even got fancier, and added a similar column on user profiles, but also, an admin interface feature to filter users by school name: All is working perfectly in a new version of the site for 2022 (thanks to Reclaim Hosting, I was easily able to clone the original site to an archive, and strip out all old student users and posts for a clean start. The other night Cori asked about a student's account at one of the other schools that had no data in this profile field. Here is what it looks like, at the bottom of the basic WordPress profile, I added one more field (they are populated when I use a plugin to create accounts from an uploaded CSV file that includes a column for school name. This is what it looks like from one of my test accounts (Felix makes an appearance!) I then realized this field was editable by the student- what if they changed or wiped it out? I poked around the WordPress Codex for some ideas and then searched wider on how one can make a user profile field only editable by admins. The answer came from a post at WordPress Q&A - how to make custom field in WordPress user profile read only? It seems like something there would be a WordPress hook/action for, but its more of a small bit of Javascript added to the admin pages that is invoked/inserted only for non-admin users, and then renders a specified profile form element to be "disabled" or "read only". Here's the magic juice: // disable non admin editing of school profile field // h/t https://wp-qa.com/how-to-make-custom-field-in-wordpress-user-profile-read-only add_action('admin_init', 'wordplace_user_profile_fields_disable'); function wordplace_user_profile_fields_disable() { global $pagenow; // apply only to user profile or user edit pages if ($pagenow!=='profile.php' && $pagenow!=='user-edit.php') { return; } // do not change anything for the administrator if (current_user_can('administrator')) { return; } add_action( 'admin_footer', 'wordplace_user_profile_fields_disable_js' ); } /** * Disables selected fields in WP Admin user profile (profile.php, user-edit.php) */ function wordplace_user_profile_fields_disable_js() { ?> <script> jQuery(document).ready( function($) { var fields_to_disable = ['school']; for(i=0; i<fields_to_disable.length; i++) { if ( $('#'+ fields_to_disable[i]).length ) { $('#'+ fields_to_disable[i]).attr("disabled", "disabled"); } } }); </script> <?php } And it worked on the first try! As an admin, I can edit Felix's account like shown above, to update their school association. But an author trying to edit their own profile will see that School field is not edible: An author account can see what School they are associated with, but the form field is editable only by site admins. This all worked fine on my development space, so I updated theme. Then the weirdness settled in. I noticed that all student accounts from one school were showing no data for this profile field! And any effort to edit in a new value would return a blank form field. Now I had to go in deep, I peeked in the database via phpMyAdmin, and diving into the user_meta table I spotted the problem. No student had edited their profile field for school. In fact, what I noticed was the meta_key_name for accounts lacking a school name was labeled Student while the working accounts, the meta_key_name value was lowercase. Thus the error was on me- the Excel spreadsheet I used to generate the CSV values needed to import in bulk to WordPress I had wrongly entered capital case 'School" in my header fields.All the data was there, just mislabeled. A quick mySQL update query reset the metakey name to be lower case. This is rather obscure but maybe one day it can hep. As usual, my paths to solutions take a good deal of wandering, but finding a working path (there is never a right one) is insanely valuable to me, even for a feature only a mythological reader will notice. Featured Image: found in an Openverse search on "read only" https://flickr.com/photos/stanjourdan/9105922197 Writing / Editing flickr photo by stanjourdan shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license During my drive into Florida today I caught the last bit of Michael Branson Smith's great Horror Cast for ds106 and I really enjoyed hearing the voices of his students. I get the sense they have bit off fully on the ds06 experience. The theme was horror stories from the classroom, bad things teacher and students have done that may cause a shriek in the night breeze. Jim Groom came on and shared his true life story of (?) grade school, where his teacher Mrs Lizardus apparently show her true form and mass attacked the students as the lizard she is. The body count was high, but Jim said he survived by quick thing and busted out a window. While stopped by the roadside, I noticed the grass in the media was moving more than just from the breeze, and managed to catch the brigade of gators heading north to extract their revenge. Jim, I suggest locking the doors and getting that lady from across the street to guard your house. The lizards are coming, the lizards are coming!!! This must be some form of a spubble, directed at someone else. Fun. Chelsey is making me an incredible offer, I just got her email: Hi, my name is Chelsey and I am a content-manager. If you are interested I would love to write a post for your website that I think your audience would really love. Really, you talked to all three of my readers? Tell me more about your clairvoyant methods! Since you are so interested i my blog, than I am sure you saw the big obvious notice tight there on the front page that makes it blatantly clear to anyone with a say, a 5the grade reading level, that I DONT WANT ANY STINKING GUES POSTS! No? Your beady eyes missed them? Let me help you out, and I will highlight the key passage: I have a list of content titles I can send you and if you like any of them I will write a blog-post of about 500-1000 words including images and video. Oh I love video. Do you have any ideas of boots crunching roaches? Can you write a post about content-managers who annoy web site owners with requests to write blog posts when the web site owner has a rather obvious statement on the front of their blog stating that this is something not done there? The more high quality and relevant links we get the more Google loves us right? Yes, which is why I write my own shit. Why would your cut and paste stuff do better? Do you do special favors for Google? Please let me know if you like this post idea or if you would like me to write about something else and I can get started right away. You can get started right after reading this post, this is what I refer to as The Treatment - look at your fine companions of previously squashed roaches. Best Regards Chelsey | Content Manager No, these are the worst regards. Please get your scummy self off of the internet. Top / Featured Image: Chelsey's photo was found in the Creative Commons licensed YouTube video Gaming Roach is now on TWITCH! Blue Fire. by tesla1000 posted 16 May '06, 12.49pm MDT PST on flickr Miles Waldrons T.C. Clintlightning@aol.com Like the web first did about 12 years ago, Twitter seems to have jumped an inflection point from something weird and for geeks only... to something else. Who would of thought? I did not when I first tweeted in 2007 (thanks once again @colecamplese), but like the web, had this tingling sensation (hindsight 20/20 specs on) that there was something there. On one of my recent drives back and forth across the desert/mountain transition between home and Phoenix, I started thinking of some of the interesting phenomena that happen in the .... (ugh don't use this word,, no, no, resist...) ....the.... "twittosphere". Eavesdropping on Half Conversations. This happens when you are looking at your stream, and you find yourself curious about the halves of conversation you are hearing (half from one party you follow) yet you don;t see the other half, as they person they are conversing with is someone you don't follow. In some aspects, its like listening in to that loud person at the airport or in the bank who is having a loud conversation on their cell phone. Can you piece together a story from half it's lines? I don't know about you, but this is an odd thing to follow if something sparks an interest-- one way I sometimes decide to add to people I follow. The easy way is to follow the other person. But you can sometimes follow the links of "in reply to" and trace the conversation, but that also is not perfect as sometimes twitter seems to not preserve the train. It's sloppy, and I guess there are some people who would prefer more "structure" (ugh, threaded tweets). It is the sloppiness and serendipity I prefer. It adds some element of mystery and intrigue. It is the chaotic nesting of connections that I find interesting, but that's likely not the way everyone likes it. @you Seeing the @someperson appear in other electronic places; using it in blog comment replies or discussion forums, is interesting, as a new shorthand for directing a reply. It starts to feel reflexive. There is also the quasi emergence of your twitter handle as a nickname for yourself. I smile when I go someplace and someone refers to me as "cogdog". I am thinking there is a potential for making some t-shirt $$ on a line of personalized @t-shirts. Direct Message is the New Email I find a fair number of people reaching for twitter to contact me over launching an email. I guess it has to do with convenience as they have twitter tools open, maybe more so than email? It's easy enough to check your "inbox" and keeps people from writing long rambling blabbathons. I am now working with someone on doing a conference session and this person does not do email, so all our contact, negotiation as been through twitter direct messages. I would not suggest it supplants email, but in many cases it can be more effective than email, and in some sense better than IM as there is somewhat of a trail. Worlds Collide As I watch the conversations in my stream swim by, I smile as I notice people twittering to each other who I would have sworn had no communication or connection as I know them from different "networks". I see former Maricopa colleagues twittering with people I met in Australia, I see Second Life contacts tweeting to K-12 teachers I met at workshops, I see NMC colleagues tweeting with some geek programmers I know from developer circles. I love that this happens. I am not taking any credit, because the paths of connections are way to complex to even chart, but it signals a true explosion in the numbers and ranges of what may be ephemeral (or not) connections. Twitter is hyper-connecting us at a scale beyond what we had ever seen in blogs, listservs, etc. Even if you can sort of what is a "group" vs a "network" the looseness of these connections makes them much more of a Heisenberg Uncertainty cloud than anything you can graph. It becomes more about funky probability than lines on a chart. It also resonates with Michael Wesch's concept of YouTube "context collapse" -- to me, this happens in the twitter process, but maybe even it is "network collapse" as models of networks as neat nodes connected by sticks becomes an organic soup where the network connections form, shift, de-connect more quickly than you can see or draw them. How do really even define a "twitter network" as it is not merely the people I follow or follow me, as I can spontaneously create a connection with someone I don't follow or does not follow me (privacy locks notwithstanding). I am not suggesting that twitter will emerge as some sort of essential communications platform, and I shudder to speculate at what technology future generations will shake their heads at in disdain and mutter, "Twitter? that is for old people, like my parents". But I am near absolute sure of my first gut instinct, moving past the sneering of "what do I care what someone had on their pizza last night", there is some there there-- and I plan to be there. What twitter phenomena have you observed? Do the same aesthetics that apply to traditional motion media (fil, tv) apply to web video? Video for New Media: Developing the Aesthetic and Managing the Workflow Pacific Ballroom, Salon G Tools & Techniques Intermediate Video production for the multi-media project is the art of adapting the decades old technology and aesthetic of television to the needs and sensibility of new media. This adaptation involves, among other things, the reassessment of issues of dimensionality, continuity, spatial logic and workflow. Attendees to this session will learn strategies of video production and post-production for the new media environment, including methods for subverting the established limitations of traditional motion media. Issues and solutions of postproduction workflow for multiple, simultaneous editors will be particularly stressed. Derek W. Toten, Tulane University The Continuity System creates narrative continuity relies on editing and mise-en-scene anyone working in narrative filmmaking is expexted to be familiar with Example http://www.405themovie.com/ Obvious elements of continuity... narrative chain of cause effect adherence to 180 degree line (axis of action) consistency of screen direction 30 degree rule use of establishing shots eyeline matches Shot reverse shot patterns match on action cutting rhythm dependent on camera distance of the shot (wide shots held longer then close-ups) "tried and true methods" sometimes violated but held overall. Less evident details of continuity graphic qualities roughly continuous from shot to shot figures are balanced and symmetrically deployed within a frame lighting consistent space of the scene clearly unfolds and does not jar or disorient Video example of montage of students talking about suggestions for packing for international travel (designed for peers speaking to peers) more less evident details of continuity motion flows from central theme nothing distracts from the center of attention Comparison of video clips on their own versus within the context of content in a web site or DVD. Examples aim to avoid having video in its own separate box. Spatial Logic Everything about continuity establishes 3D space within the 2d space of a screen. But spatial logic on the web is not as constrained Dimensionality Until recently all screens, all videos were 4:3 aspect ratio. Even HDTV is fixed (16:9). Film has established sizes as well. Web video is not constrained, can work against it. DVD video examples have video on right side of screen, taller than wide. Workflow For Multiple Editors Using Vegas Video for production. For multiple editors considered using Fiber Channel (server based, expensive...). Next, tried local Gigabit network within a LAN for sharing files (one audience member has a lab with 11 stations linked). Other approach is check in check out of portable hard drives. Requires more coordination but practical. Vegas cannot have multiple timelines drawing from the same media pool. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Evan Leeson: http://flickr.com/photos/ecstaticist/3289337255/ I’m on tap to help lead The Week 4 of Headless ds106, and I can tell you right now I probably wont do much. I have way overestimated the time just to prep the lessons, and probably like many participants, feel awash in all the flow of stuff folks are doing. That’s normal. But that is also to show that this is a headless course. The work for this week is posted which means– you can do whatever you want! Helping out this week are Emily Strong, a veteran of at least two rounds of ds106. She already has her pom-poms on and completed a first assignment. Emily has created and blogged some stunning visual work. And of course, who else do we think if when it comes to visual, but Giulia Forsythe, who like me was in that first freshman open class of Spring 2011. Tentatively we are going to run an open Google Hangout on Wednesday at noon EST to review the week, Emily wants to do some GIMP demos (YAY), and we will review some of the visual assignments we found most interesting. After all there are 145 of them. I tihnk it is interesting to share the strategies for selecting which ones to try. We also have the fun photoblitz this week- it would be cool if some folks to this Tuesday so we have some new ones to show. There are a few things at play this week: I like to see how people start approaching their photography with more thought about composition, as well as noticing things they might not have paid attention to before- quality of light, shadows, spacing, balance, patterns… We start using the assignment bank in earnest, giving you the latitude to choose the work you want to do. This is also a time to remind/suggest that this work in ds106 is more than just making the media, it is writing about the idea, the context, the story element, and also sharing how the heck you made it. Note as well that we do not tell you what software to use nor is this a class in How to Do X in PhotoShop; and in fact, this calls on you to dig in to your self learning mode to figure things out (or learn to ask for help before floundering long). I can say that you will want to be aiming towards using a graphic editor that has layers; you can only do simple visual art in tools like Microsoft Paint and they always look like they were made with Microsoft Paint. Layers are the key. If you do not have access to Photoshop, get a copy of the open source GIMP, or try the web based pixlr. Layers are the bomb. Period. And do not forget the forming and connecting for the radio show groups. Some folks are already coming up with themes (there is still plenty of time). We asked you to try a short team announcement this week, and next week we will ask you to design posters. In weeks 7&8 you will work on the shows in depth. I remain amazed at the output people are doing for a course they will not get a single credit or badge for. This is affirming to the idea of ds106. I cannot believe how lucky I am to get so many valuable offers for everything un-imaginable-- people I do not even know are nice enough to personally email me with great things to improve my life: You've been nominated, Thanks to a private nomination, you are now eligable to obtain an official University Degree. Obtain a prosperous future, increase money-earning power, and the enjoy the prestige that comes with having the career position you've always dreamed of. The degree will be awarded to you based on your present knowledge and life experience, bachelors, masters, phd and more are available. If you are serious about this, please call us back ASAP at 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx Sincerely, Andrew Xxxxxxxx - MBA, PhD - MBA, PhD -Admissions Officer Wow, I can get an official University degree! And just to think of all those years I wasted attending classes, writing papers, doing research, and paying tuition, when all I need to do is call Andrew! I am such a lucky dog... and apparently spelling is not a big deal at Andrew's University Shop: you are now eligable to obtain My kind of Skoool! cc licensed flickr photo shared by Bachir It's time! Let 'em loose! Tomorrow I'm on my way to Vancouver for Northern Voice 2010, which, if I may state subtly, is the best fracking conference in the uni-verse. My first fest was 2006, and I've been there for 2008, 2009, and now, 2010 "the Post Olympiad" version. I'm excited to not only hang out with Bryan Alexander, but the Gothic One is the opening keynote! I urged him to bring is most intense stuff. Yeah, they'v spread the format to 2 full days, but Scott Leslie (you, Scott, there are so many variations of you in Google) protested and there is an Alt.Moose Camp going on ion the spaces between (kudos to the planners for opening that up). I'll be doing a little how to moose camp session in there on creating a web preso in CoolIris. I'll also be up with Brian Lamb and Chris Lott on... hmm... what might be construed as a performance session Saturday on Blogging- Not Dead Yet -- I'm still seeking some participation, give us some exxamples.counter examples if you think Blogs Are Dead or if they are Indeed Alive -- judging from the response from my last post, I smell dead blog people. It will be sad not to have the Bava with us, as we had a swell time in 2008 hanging out and singing the eduglu blues. At least I don't have to worry about him drooling on my iPad. But those are just the pieces of the Mooseperience... it's all about the people that come to Northern Voice, which is why I go- the schedule and sessions are nice cherries on top. The Moose is on the road! Ain't he a beauty? cc licensed flickr photo shared by Travis S. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by TFDuesing I must admit that when I come across other people's flaming #FAIL tweets I experience a wave of "hey- over reaction, eh?"-- until it is I in the fiery rage of being done under by a bad consumer experience. And here is the thing, no matter how it sounds, We are in a unique time where at least for now we can have a place to voice such complaints -- and sometimes there are results (I have my own success story after fighting Canon on shoddy rebate practices). I find it utterly stunning that companies would continue practices that attempt to wear down consumer complaints with the leaden weight of their own bureacracy. So for the sake of others who might hear, or find themselves falling into the same pit, or maybe someone who has a pipeline to pursuing consumer action here in Australia. Before leaving the USA, I found many sites that offered codes to unlock my LG Thrive mobile phone, which in an ideal world, would allow me to purchase a sim card and plan here so I can use my ohone and data services while traveling abroad. I paid $10 for an unlock code from http://sim-unlock.net (who I must say does respond to questions). On arrival at Melbourne airport, I stopped at a Yes Optus store, and purchased a AU$40 sim card with unlimited phone/text/3 Gb data plan. The young lady did all the button punching to set me up, including entering the unlock codes-- the latter seemed to not work at first, but when the phone was able to make text and calls, she assured me it was all set to go. When it failed to access the web, she told me it was because of poor signal inside the terminal. I was a bit tired to think here- but a key missed step here was she never looked up my phone model to see if it would work here. Apparently unlocking a phone means squat if the host network closes its doors to phones it does not sell. So I was sold a product that would nto work with my phone. Later that afternoon at my hotel, I called Optus Pre-paid and got some technical assistance from someone who tried to walk me through the settings. Everything failed to work. I suggested it might be easier for me to take it the next day to a store. I walked a few km to the Optus store in Docklands. The woman there punched up my account and told me my phone was not compatible with their network .I did not get an answer when I asked why this was not told to me when I bought it. I asked about getting a rebate for the data plan since it was of new use to me-- she told me I would have to call Optus; it could not be done a the store. Oh, I was offered the option to buy another phone for AU$140. Scratch that. Later that afternoon, I called Optus Prepaid customer support. When I explained what happened, the first operator tried to say I should get a phone that would work on their network. When I asked to speak to a manager, the first answer was that a manager would call me back in 24-48 hours. Blood pressure rose here. "No that is not acceptable, I need to speak to a manager now". I waited on hold about 10-15 minutes. The manager who came on tried to tell me I would have to go back to the store at the airport to deal with this. He used he word "walk" -- I tried to explain the airport was far away. He then said I should go to the closest store to get a refund. I replied with incredulity that the woman I spoke to at the store told me the exact opposite, that I would have to call Optus. He went away and ostensibly contacted the store, and came back with a litany of that there was nothing that could be done, that I had a full phone plan that was good. I again explained that I was sold something that out of the box would not work here and it was not acceptable practice. The blood pressure boiled higher, and my ending was letting them know I would be calling my credit card company and disputing the purchase. I hung up. Now I come down from the angry exchange disappointed in myself for getting so angry on the phone- that obviously doe snot accomplish something, especially with the worker ants on the end of the phone. But I do feel totally screwed by Optus, and incensed that they would rather spend employee time giving me a run around, rather than doing the right thing- like even offering a $10 refund. So by following all of their internal protocol, they have earned a customer who will hold this grudge a long while, and will now tell others about this --because I can. Is that the best business practice? So my recommendation is to avoid Optus Pre-paid at all costs-- and to really ask the key questions when you try to use your phone on another country's system. And do not leave the store if the thing is not fully functional. As an example to show that this is not always the way a company can go, a few months back I bought use of the privacy service that hides your IP address when online, with the accurattely named Hidemyass.com -- it worked extremely well (and their tech support responded within minutes to an email question about setting it up on my phone), but I really only needed it for a short while. I had remembered that they offered a 30 day trial period, and when I wrote to ask for a refund since I did not need it- they did so without question or hassle. There is a night and day difference in these approaches. Yeah, in one case I got what I want and the other I did not. But also, in once case I feel completely jerked over, and the other I feel respected. Which kind of customer would your company like to ave out there? Whether I sound like an overly outrageous jerk, let it be known, I have a channel to do this on. And my channel is lit. Once more, say No to Optus Yes. Update (Dec 3, 2011) After several rounds of emails that sounded like Optus might be willing to save their reputation, I find nothing but failure. At times though it can be a little tricky, as we're not always going to have settings available for every handset available worldwide, but we will definitely do what we can to try and find them so we can pass them on. Unfortunately the handset you're using isn't one that Optus provides support for on our network so I'm unable to find suitable data settings. They kept asking me to "return my starter kit to the store" and offering to refund if I would not be using the calls function. They seem to toally miss the fact I am using the damned phone. I was asking for some renumeration for being sold a data plan that clearly does not work on the phone I brought into the country, despite that I had done my research that the handset (an LG p506) was quad band and compatible with the network here. Their clerk at the airport did not look up my model at all; if she had done so and told me I could not use the data, I would have skipped the entire purchase. The other clerk at another store said it would not work at all on their network, then their Social Media Response team says it does work but they dont know how the f**** to set it up. It's all a pile of dog crap. Again, if you bring your own phone into this country, go elsewhere then Optus. Say NO. For some reason I've been having Cracker's Teen Angst song in heavy iPod rotation; the lyrics are just ra ra (or is it la la la la). A new version might be: Cause, what the web needs now Is a new kind of resource collection. Cause people just cant do search location. Cause, what the world needs now Is another learning resource repository Like I need a hole in my head. This is triggered by a series of Academic Commons articles, starting with an intro Building a Network, Expanding the Commons, Shaping the Field: Two Perspectives on Developing a SOTL Repository. Gah, the word "repository" just gives me the way back feeling. As old as the web is is the idea we need to take time and effort to build neat organized cubby holes for the flow of information in it. It's petty, but the very first sentence in this intro, a real throw away, just started my hair up: More and more college and university faculty--in community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and large research universities--are working to improve their teaching practice. Really? They were never doing that before? I'm now aware all the great teachers I had 20+ years ago were just punching a clock and focusing their time on parties at the faculty club. And thus the tired old argument... there's "more and more" information out there-- and people dedicated with the business and practice of working in learning environments are really just dolts who cannot learn to be information savvy? "they are often overwhelmed by the mass of information." So the obvious answer is .. "The internet is big and messy! Let's spend time organizing bits of it for other people!" In the first piece, Tom Carey writes about How Do Open Education Resources Acquire Their Value for Teaching and Learning?. Without reading this I might start thinking, is value in the resource or the eye of the beholder? I reading the paper, I do "grok" that Carey pushes attention away from collecting the resources and suggests we should be building networks, not repositories: we have begun to use the term "OER Knowledge Exchange Network" to refer to the emerging technical and social infrastructures which enable communities of higher education teachers to access, share, extend and apply online knowledge representations and resources for enhanced teaching and learning. My understand starts to fade with the description of "Pedagogical Content Knowledge" which seems to be a concepot of harvesting the teaching practices and contexts on how resources are used- suggesting parallels with some of the meta structures that are designed around the MERLOT resources... good old MERLOT is still in the bottle? I recalled the time and effort it took to add reviews, use cases around MERLOT was severely dwarfed by the number of things in there. In 2005, I got notice that something I created had been reviewed in MERLOT ... note that the resource was created in 1997. If I can fathom what the premise here is to more than build collections of Open Education Resources, but also look to somehow catalog? connect? the teaching practices that put them into use. The next article is Can a Repository Make the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Usable? which is more in the line of Field of Dreams- if we build a repository people will come. A lot of the emphasis of the group behind this seems to be focused on establishing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a "thing" or a "field" and this article makes a suggestion that the picture of a SoTL will emerge from collecting things about it. Beyond simply storing or indexing SOTL research, ideally, a repository would act as a touchstone around which an academic community for the scholarship of teaching and learning could form while the repository would be in turn constructed and developed by that community. A spiraling process of development could enable the SOTL community to define the field inductively while, at the same time, the users of the repository would design appropriate ways to search the ideas and objects in the repository--for example, by using keywords--and refine and strengthen those search strategies to fit their community's particular needs. New search mechanisms beyond keywords, which build on the ways that people access the information in a repository according to criteria such as "most searched," "most bookmarked," and "most viewed," show additional promise for developing community-generated knowledge. By incorporating such ways for the repository to adapt to community-generated knowledge, the repository itself would reflect the dynamic nature of the field. Finally, an electronic repository would provide a lasting virtual space for SOTL research, and the persistent URLs assigned to repository resources would keep items from disappearing into the ether. In addition, as the archive grew to include new items, it would provide data for the study of the historical development of the field. Wow, keywords! search terms! And of course, the librarian mindset- we must preserve the tomes as a call. What makes the repository URLs and better than others? Then the process of how "stuff: gets in the repository is described as a process of local groups recommending stuff, other groups reviewing and vetting... by the time this all happens on a large scale, my ashes will be compost. I am not just tossing stone and glass houses. I built a frigging repository for all these reasons that people loved the concept and ignored the repositing. What the world needs now is another repository, like I need a hole in my head. The web is the repository. I can guarantee that efforts to neatly organize the raging river of information shall fail. That does not mean there are not ways around it- why not harvest and use the existing technologies out there? a Digg-like entity for SoTL or whatever cause you have? I will never ever ever build a repository or be involved with said construction. What the world needs now is another repository, like I need a hole in my head. Colen is hard at work on re-coding the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) for the proposed open-source version we hope to make available as an alpha soon. There is a good deal of restructuring of the code libraries, yanking some code logic from individual PHP files and putting them in the libraries, outlining some functionality needed for some basic admin tools. But we have the database and a crude version sort of running on a test box (don't ask for a URL... yet). One of the interesting things to be changed is how we organize the packages in the Maricopa MLX- the main organizing unit is by colleges, so searches and RSS feeds can be filtered within a specific college's contributions. In a sense, every person who creates an account in the MLX has an affiliation with one of our colleges, so that any packages that create are automatically associated with that college too... (more…) Our reviews came in as "icky". "Risky". "Manipulative". Hey, pleasing all the people all the time, not worth trying. Last Friday was my last act in Canada from a 4 month stint as an Open Learning Research Fellow at Thompson Rivers University. As a nice dessert to the experience, Brian Lamb and I were invited by Clint Lalonde and Valerie Irvine to do a live web session from University of Victoria for Open Education Week. Our title "THE OPEN WEB (a) Lost (b) Reclaimed (c) Co-claimed (d) All of the above" was meant to poke both at multiple choice assessment and what seems to be all to often the polarizing of issues in educational technology ("open vs closed", "LMS vs Open Web") whereas (we think) the reality, like the uncertainty fields of electron locations, lies in between. This was the framing to talk about our efforts at TRU during my time there to raise interest and activity in using the open web through our SPLOT tools and the You Show open seminar An outline of our major points was established earlier (working as usual at our office at the Fox and Hound in Kamloops). I finagled a way to deploy the presentation via a Wordpress site. We took the scenic Fraser Canyon Route and had plenty of time to work out the ideas and see some scenic spots along the way. Brian has longings for a new university planned at this locale: cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Sitting on the deck of the BC Ferry crossing from Tsawwassen, enjoying the sunshine, I turned to Brian and asked, "So what is our shtick??" We thought a bit about reprising our You Show video characters. I had wanted to do one more episode where they left Kamloops for a "Big Meeting With High Powered Executives in Victoria"; alas we ran short on time. And sitting there on the ferry, we both agreed, most of the audience would not even connect, since our viewership on the videos peaked at 200 in week 1 and dropped to 14 by the end. Alas, metrics. Thinking about the false positions of "Reclaim" vs (what ever is the opposite), and my idea of "co-claiming" as a middle ground, I asked Brian, "What if we have a public disagreement?" "Like where we disagree on how to approach the open web?" "Yeah". cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I hope to write soon about why I gravitate to wanting these narrative aspects to public work and open courses. After the summer 2011 performance teaching of DS106 by Jim Groom as Dr Oblivion, I questioned whether such a narrative was important. That changed once I tried it the following summer, in teaming up with Martha Burtis for our ds106 as Camp Magic Macguffin. I am still working on that rationale, but I could see in Brian's response this was interesting. I can say, for me as a teacher or a presenter, it gives a whole boost of energy and motivation to the entire activity. Before the ferry landed we decided we would pen our presentation with us walking out on stage as if we were dis-agreeing about stuff in the presentation-- Brian would be defending position of trying to make use of an LMS in a frame of open web, and I would accuse him of selling out. It would be just a short opening to set things up, the idea is that our host Clint would break it up and snap us into shape. The point was to show that extreme positions are not necessary. It need not be "LMS" vs Open Web. It need not be a false dichotomy because it need not be a dichotomy. This in fact was the gist of the "good vs evil unicorns" post Martin Weller made after this incident (not implying we were any influence, Martin blogs just fine on his own material). That night we met up with Clint and a few other friends/colleagues for dinner and beers. We asked them for feedback on the idea; and we definitely wanted Clint (and Valerie) as hosts to be clued into what we were doing. But we felt like it would be good for the audience to be a bit questionable at first; not to play it out too long, and to reveal that ti was a performance to make it clear to all. The conversation was useful- in fact, someone else shared a conference experience where a presenter used a rather generation-dated Saturday Night Live reference to a co-presenter named Jane, and how badly it fell because most of the audience did not even watch SNL in the 1970s. it sounded painful and obviously a bad idea. In hindsight. So yes, the performance thing can be risky. We knew that. We discussed it. But if we avoid all risk in public presentations, does that leave only reading PowerPoint slides (oi, there's a dichotomy right there) (see how easy it is to fall into that?). To us it sounded fun. Anyone who knows Brian and I know were are way too good friends to argue over the content of a presentation. And I loved it when Brian launched the narrative with a tweet later that evening. NOTE: Apparently Maha Bali feels like my summary in the post was a bit "tamer" than the tweets below tell it. That's the point too, people have a spectrum of interpretations. I will say our language in the tweets got a little passive-aggressive, but to me, not really personal attacks. Your interpretation may differ.We met up in the morning for breakfast and to fill out the rest of the presentation site. And we amped up our public disagreement in twitter, with me questioning some of Brian's slides, and him asking me why I was taking them out. It went on, where it sounded like I locked Brian out of the Wordpress site. I would hope there was transparency to the antics. First of all, we are both long time twitter users, and if we had a disagreement, the last thing we would do is play it all out in public, that's what Direct Messages are for. But of course, not everyone knows us, nor might understand. People can take things on twitter at face value (that strikes me as odd). And we escalated it a bit, people jumped in. Clint played it perfectly, telling is to get our act together. We each got private DMs from friends, right up to the time of presentation, asking if this was an act. Ok, it may not have been the most wise choice, but it was an interesting social experiment. We carried it into the opening as planned, but called it out clearly about 3 minutes in. Still, some people felt a bit offset by it. Others totally saw it as acting. I regret if people felt disturbed-- at the same time, it says a lot to me that people care that much to be concerned Brian and I were fighting over, of all silly things, a presentation. I'd be more worried if people did not react like that. cc licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by Clint Lalonde And we even hugged on camera just to be absolutely clear. We may have hammed it up in twitter, but that was in character. Is it manipulative? Perhaps at am emotional level. I doubt I would do it again (never ever say never), but I am not going to apologize. Did it distract from our presentation? Perhaps, I felt like it addressed the entire point. In our actions, we are generally very clear to ourselves on intent, but like all communications, as much depends on the receiver as the communicator. There can be a whole spectrum of possible ways people interpret you, and often far from your intent. That's what makes things interesting (?) Anyhow, I wanted to capture some of this not to thrash it out or argue; I'd rather talk about the presentation itself. Just for some fun, I storified a lot of the theater. Storify is DEAD so I rebuilt this as a WordPress page. https://cogdogblog.com/twitter-performance-act/ Is there a wrong or right here, or somewhere in between? Only you can answer for yourself. Icky it is. Ok. Sometimes it;s okay to be icky. As long as you don't be icky all the time. Top / Featured image: Modified from Public domain Asia Chi Pulling image from Wikimedia Commons Hi, Hello. I was wondering whether you'd be interested in selling advertising space on http://cogdogblog.com? Does the phrase "No, not even after hell freezes over" mean anything to you? The advertisement would be unobtrusive and we can pay you an annual upfront payment for the advertising space. See my rates below. I'm really wondering when you pilfer a list of email marketing schemes if you actually understand the web site you are targeting? Cause if you were a real human being, you might have noticed: Actually what is ore disturbing is that you (or some other lowly paid cretin in your spam shop) read my blog post about another site and sent this spam about my site to an email address that us not even mine. Man you are dumb. Dumb as a post. Dumb as a post in a pile of cow turds. Dumb as a post in a pile of cow turds in the snow. We can also provide content from industry experts in many cases. Thats good! It is exactly what I need on a personal blog that regularly mocks concepts such as 'industry experts". I am from RAM Marketing, a new media agency headquartered in the US. I am so impressed by the design and crafting of your own web site, featuring the latest in 1997 table-based web design, impressive urls that end in 1.html, 2.html, cheesy clip art from the bottom of the barrel of cheap web hosting services. I am completely impressed by your case studies which are so powerful that they do not even name the client. Now that is something I can believe in right after the tooth fairy and Elvis being alive. "RAM Marketing, Inc. is a full service marketing company that takes customer service to heart. We believe every client, no matter what size project, is an important client and should be treated with the respect they deserve. Every project RAM Marketing undertakes is specially customized to meet the specific needs of our client, and no two projects are ever the same." Your email shows that care and attention to customers to the max! We plan out and acquire advertising space on major websites and portals, as well as smaller niche sites. I personally deal with our smaller publishers, increasing brand awareness and share of voice for the major brands that our group works with. Gee there is nothing I want more on my niche site that the voice of your major brands. We'd love to work with you and establish a work relationship through which we could utilize your site for more of our campaigns. My starting price for services like yours is $25,000 per ad per month. Ok? I am checking my mailbox daily for your check. If you have any questions or would like further information, please do not hesitate to email me directly. I am hesitating from now to the day after the sun burns itself out. Kind Regards, Hillary James Campaign Planning Expert RAM Marketing LLC For future reference and to make it more clear to the world of marketing, I shall publish future responses to advertising campaigns with an appropriate tag. Good luck. It is too late for Jim Groom and Tom Woodard who cinematicly presented warnings about zombies for the NMC Rock the Academy Symposium, but I missed a key resource for the zombie intrigued. How remiss to have not shared the Common Craft cult classic- Zombies in Plain English: There was so much there I did not know about zombies! They cannot swim and don't like Costco! I got something in the mail yesterday that moved me so much, it has taken another day to get to blog about it (is that slow enough for the slow blogging crowd). I have to weave a back story before I get to the punch line about getting something back (not tangible, but emotional) for giving to an organization. We should not be giving to get, but there are things we can get than will feed back into the giving cycle. If that is not confusing enough, my seven blog readers, then you must be skimming. Slow down and read. In August I wrote about a different way to make a WordPress plugin (to the four remaining readers, do not gloss over, this is not a post about technology). Joe Solomon had asked 10 educational bloggers to try out the Possibly Related Classroom Projects plugin. The plugin analyzes the text of a post, and appends links to 3 potentially relevant projects listed among the 14,000 plus ones at DonorsChoose. DonorsChoose is a place where teachers from disadvantaged schools can post project ideas that need funding (small scale, classroom projects) for materials, with the idea that people willing to donate money can select a project that they would like to support. I was skeptical, since a lot of what I write here seems to not have much relevance to school projects. But as I wrote in August, a post I wrote about my experience with "moo cards" linked me to three projects, that by title seemed far off, but as I read the project detail, was excited, especially one project for a school in Phoenix (Think Local) was asking for money to stimulate kids interest in reading by buying some classic story books, and one of the books listed was Click, Clack, Moo (and more great books on the project list like Where the Wild Things Are) and that ironically was a book I had just purchased for myself (and enjoyed, even at my supposed advanced age, see my level of literature is about 2nd grade). This was too much serendipity-- my blog post on moo cards to a project in Arizona for kids reading Click, Clack, Moo that I had just bought -- I had to donate to the Literacy Pills project. So back to yesterday. I get a somewhat thick packet in the mail from Donors Choose that is described in the letter as a "thank you package" from the teacher her students. It includes a detailed one page Project Cost Report that shows exactly where the money went (to buy 17 books!), a chronological Fulfillment Report, that also shows the logistical support DonorsChoose provides- they review the proposal, verify material costs, and even orders them for the teacher. But there is more. The teacher who ran the project included an appreciative note: ... Your donation helped me pass on my love of reading to my students, who are at an age where they will learn to either love or hate reading. Thanks to your gift, many of my students love reading and contantly beg to take the books home every night! When my students finish their work early, they often pick out a book to read. It should be noted that the books you donated are usually the first chosen. It's a delight to see them so excited about reading some classic books that I myself read when I was young. Your donation fueled that excitement, and for that, I sincerely thank you. It thrills me to se that my students do not approach reading as a chore but as a delightful activity. Thank you for making this possible! Wow, that is really something. Yet there is more- part of the project funding including giving the teacher a (probably disposable) camera and DonorsChoose processes the photos which I get copies of in my thank-you package: But wait, there is more, much more... The envelope also includes hand written thank you notes from the students, and there, melt goes my heart reading them. I scanned a few into a PDF to share: Student Letters (2.1Mb PDF) Even if these were done as "Now let's sit down and write letters before recess" they are still so precious and full of that honesty kids have when they are still wide-eyed and full of excitement and enthusiasm (before we school it out of them). I am very touched. Wow, do you think I am a bit motivated to give again to DonorsChoose? You bet, I gave, and I got, and am ready to give. Related articles by ZemantaMaurice Sendak and Mommy?'s Little MonsterHow Can We Make Charitable Giving A Year-Round Habit?DonorsChoose update: Ars surges into third place I had fun going overboard on making this promo video for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDYJAZiskRw This was created for today's keynote at the Learning Connections District Champions meeting in Toronto. When Deb invited me to speak she asked me to do a video she could use to summarize the workshop after it ended. I really should have just turned on the web cam and blabbed away, and I might have been done in an hour. But I had this half idea to piece together a message from it using the tools themselves, so I wrote a script, and assigned tools for each line. For the tools that have audio or video capability, I use it directly; otherwise, I made voice-overs in iMovie. To capture the animated/bviudeo segments, I did screen capture with iShowU. The slides for today's session are posted on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/cogdog/50-ways-workshop-for-learning-connections-district-champions This was a highly charged group! They are all leading and techie teachers from the districts across Ontario that work with this project. Part of this new version of my presentation/workshops is a new wiki (discussed below), but I wanted to try a different approach in a hands on workshop. Typically, I do my overview, and have people get a go at making a story of their own choosing with any of the tools. In the vein of doing the same story in multiple tools (like I did originally with my Dominoe story), in the part where I do some audience suggestions for a story prompt, I asked the group (of about 40) to put and organize their ideas on an open google doc where I had set a starting prompt: The Most Amazing Thing Happened Yesterday at the CN Tower The plan, which pretty much fell apart, is that the group would create an outline that would be the basis for them using in the later section. It was fun to see 40 people madly toss ideas into a wiki, but it became a mish mosh, with Steohen harper, a homeless person, Charlie Sheen, hockey, and the Queen making appearances. The doc is still there, but I turned off the public editing -- bit.ly/lc11-story-prompt. In a rare occurrence for this activity, Elvis did NOT make an appearance. For the next part, where I talk about finding media, I wanted a way for them to create a pool of images, maybe video, they could find using the sources provided on the wiki- I asked them to post some information to a google form. This did work, with about 34 people adding something. If I did it again, I'd simplify the form. Some people got tripped up in trying to pick the license- next time, I would just have a checkbox to confirm what they found was licensed for re-use. It did being up questions and a few of them were not familiar with the various creative commons flavors. I was also not quite clear that when they shared the URL for a flickr photo page, that I did not give them enough detail on where they need to go to get the actual file if they opted to use it. But all of this hardly mattered, because once in the game, they were all deeply immersed. I'm waiting to see what kind of things they produce. And as usual, they all had a first good laugh at Blabberize but then as I watched what people were trying, that was one of the most common ones chosen. A highlight for me came later, when one of the participants, a principal told me how she put this funny tool to use right away by doing a quick skype with a teacher at her school who was dealing with a troublesome student. Here she is telling me in a video I recorded on my iPhone: As alluded to earlier, this qworkshop used the newest version of the wiki (I am still working on) at http://50ways.cogdogblog.com/). The first version (http://cogdogroo.wiksipaces.com/50+Ways) is still on the wiki I made for my 2007 visit to Australia, and I've been wanting to redo it in a new structure, and especially, open more doors for ways people can produce it (although the original is in a wiki I locked all the pages because, frankly, some editors kept messing it up!). In the time since, I've learned some good tricks to use in Wikispaces. The big one is that each of the tool pages is locked still, but I have three sections on each that CAN be edited, because the Description, Examples, and Feedback content are stand alone along wiki pages that are open to edits; I can incorporate them into the tool page by using one of the widgets. On the old wiki's tools page, all the tools were described in a long monster scrolling list. In the new one, wiki, the tools are organized in a main page by using page tags to put them into categories (by type of tool), which is nicely updated as I add new tool pages. Each tool, then has its own page, including: link to the category page for the type of tools (this allows me to put something like Slideroll into both the Slideshow category and the Video one).A Screen shot of the editing interfaceDescrption*Link to and embedded version of the Dominoe story created in the tool.List of examples of other content created in the same tool*A list of comments/advice from people who have used the tool before* *All three of these sections are opened to edits. As an example, let's look at this portion of the page for One True Media Again, only I, as lord and master of the wiki, can edit this page directly. But anyone who joins the wiki has access to edit the content that provides the text on the red box; they are actually editing a different wiki page that is unlocked. They can go to the page and click "edit" via the link in the green box, but by checking the "editable" box in the "Include Wiki Page" widget, it enables that small EDIT link which opens up the content to be edited and returns to the enclosing page when done. I ask anywhere people add examples or content, that they "sign" their contributions by appending the 4 tilde (~~~~) string, which when publishes, records a time stamp and link to the author. It's my hope, then I can get some people involved with adding examples, feedback, and even improving my descriptions. As of tonight, I am still 15 tools short of having moved all of the old ones over, plus a batch of brand new ones sitting in the entryway. I want to get these loaded, as I have been procrastinating this a long while. It has also been good to review the ways some of the tools have evolved (and some have gone to the Island of Lost/Dead Tools). It's interesting to note that a good number of these are still around since I first spotted them in 2007, ones that have obscure names like Image Loop, Rock You, Comic Sketch. It's nice to see that my 4 year old, infrequently used logins still work. It's also interesing to see that some, which likely were one person experiments, have become mainstreamed: Kerpoof is now a part of Disney.Tabblo was purchased and supported by HPTikatok is now owned by Barnes and Noble Quite a few of them have gone to a tiered model,. where you get advanced features by paying for membership (Xtranormal is close to falling off the list since you can only do one basic movie with the free account), and others seem to be trying to make money be offering print services. Oh, the other new thing has been using another set of tags to indicate what kinds of media the tools can use (e/g/ can upload audio, can import photos from Picassa and Facebook), so that there is a grid to choose tools by Media Capability. I'll get another chance to try this all out next week, when I get to do another iteration of 50+ Ways at Baruch College in New York City. This is, easily, one of my projects that has grown a lot of legs, and I want to keep them moving along. I'm open to ideas on the site. creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by kennymatic Here it is, what seems like what I have done every other week since March, packing the suitcase and setting an early wakeup so I can drive down to the airport. There are some really good thing I can see way off carrying me into 2015 (below). For the near term, tomorrow marks a 20 day East Coast trip, and what is going to be my last airline travel for a while. Maybe a long while. Tomorrow is a hop from Phoenix to Buffalo, and a skip across the border to visit my favorite doodler. Then Thursday its a train ride down to The Big City, to again be part of the Baruch College Schwartz Communication Symposium. And it will be a gathering of Good Folks- Barbara Ganley, Mikhail Gershovich, Grant Potter, Brian Lamb, not to mention the home crew folk like The Luke Waltzer maybe Boone Gorges, Esq. Rumors are of a possible Saturday Jam Space. Over the weekend I plan to be Brooklyn-iter with Michael Branson-Smith, and maybe get to meet the artist Emilio Vavavarella (and collect on the cup of coffee owed for doing his web site). On June 3 it is another train leg south to Richmond, where it is going to be an intense week of Wordpress slinging with Tom Woodward, basking in the glow of Gardner Campbell, as we unleash something perhaps as unMOOC like an open course as I have been in before-- it's all under Top Secret Wraps (meaning we've not built it yet), but there is a teaser out today and a wee bit of guidance. See http://thoughtvectors.net. Look for the #thoughtvectors stream in twitter. And then the suitcase gets emptied for the last time in a while when I return to Strawberry on June 12. I hope to focus on important things like my garden. And riding a new set of wheels thanks to the super energetic Kevin of Pedals 'n Pistons in Pine, AZ. During my last trip he was able to sell off my fancy shmancy but un-used Road bike, and so I handed him back the cash for a new 29" modern mountain bike, a "bomber" in his parlance. This guy is so excited he emails customers photos of the work he has done: Can't wait to ride-- do ya hear me, Todd? I am contemplating a possible week road trip to Colorado in late June-- coming to Durango, your way Mike Kelly, and on to my friends at Desert Weyr Ranch in Paonia. I'd like to get to see The Tank in Rangley, a project I helped Kick Start. My last commitment is a keynote and workshop for Arizona K12 Camp Plug and Play, July 7 in Tucson. That's just a 3 hour drive (which apparently is halfway across some countries). Ideally I'd like ti visit Karen Fasmipaur and Brad down in Portal. But July is meant to RELAX! My sister and brother-in-law might visit, maybe I can get them to help me redo the kitchen. Well I do have 1 or 2 web site projects to finish up. Okay, but that's just the lead up. The exciting news is for what's coming in the fall. Brian Lamb and I have been talking this up off an on for... well a well. Today, white smoke came out of the chapel in Kamploops https://twitter.com/brlamb/status/470002500364279809 I plan to spend four months on a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University with Brian and colleagues on a suite of projects related to aggregation, wikis, academic open publishing, and more. This will start in mid or late October, and run through the end of February 2015. Among the many cool things are (a) getting to be n Kamloops; (b) getting to hang out with Brian AND Keira AND Harry and especially Dexter; but most importantly (c) it is a good length of time to not worry about stitching together a bunch of little projects as I have been juggling and poorly managing. It's a chance to focus in on new projects and work with faculty, staff, and students. This also means it is time, after taking DS106 to Work... to take a vacation. Or retirement. I am going to dial back the ds106 energy to make space for new interest. It's not a break, there is always DS106 Radio. I hope to find some folks to take over the care and feeding of The Daily Create (and I still hope to revamp the site as another Wordpress customizable theme). DS106 always morphs and moves. Heck, if you want something to do this summer, some folks have broken off from the main site and moved into a trailer somewhere in the West Texas But wait, there is more. It's not i-dotted or t-crossed, but 2 weeks ago I got a swell awesome email from Richard Elliot, the guy who had arranged both by visits to New Zealand (in 2000 and 2004) creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And it looks like I will go again in late September-October to keynote Shar-E-Fest and do a bit of a circuit tour. I am rather stoked to return, for many reasons, the land, the people, but oh yes, just the magic feel of places there creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Also in the mix is my first attendance/presentation at the 2015 MLA conference in Vancouver (conveniently I will be in the province at the time ;-) I was invited to bring some open learning / ds106ness (see I can not get away from it) to a panel session on "Visionary Pedagogies for the 21st Century: Teaching the Humanities with Digital Technology" with Gabriele Dillmann, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Amanda Starling Gould. The invite to propose something came out of the blue, from a comment exchange with Gabriele in the Future of Education MOOC via but I look forward to working with these new colleagues; heck they want to start doing google hangouts this summer so we can get to know each other. This dog has some plans worth packing for! creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by alee_04 Between travel earlier this week for NMC meetings, time off between now and Monday, and squeezing in many late night hours banging our new drupal site (should be able to share it in a few weeks), I'm feeling way behind the blog train. Just sifting through my RSS feeds, I am compelled to send a few shoutout linktributions to colleagues who really deserve a full CDB blog post. Well my first one is to WordPress 2.1, who's autosave feature had snagged this post's opening from certain defeat as I accidently closed the tab containing this draft! First, Bet's screencast Shoulder-to-Shoulder Instructional Media: My Tagging Screencast at NTEN! is to me, the essence, and a must show item that most lucidly explains, and demonstrates, the use of tagging among people with a common interest to develop shared resources. It's well produced, a bit fun, and uses labels and metaphors in a great delivery. And the blog post that contains the screencast includes great supplementary material; all in all a great model of how to deliver and package a screencast. Bonus points to Bet for her use of dog images. Several shouts to Brian, who is blogging now at a pleasing pace, for the sharing of his poster boy status (a photo mis-contextualized by a newspaper who deserves a trip on the cluetrain), the rampup to NorthernVoice 2007, an event I will rue endlessly missing this year. Jim Groom, blogging at bavatuesdays, who I had the pleasure to chat with late one night at EDUCAUSE ELI (as we both tried to find bits of decent wireless connectivity in the conference hotel), is doing some very cool things with WordPress Multiuser at a multiclass level at University of Mary Washington. D'Arcy is busting out the Yahoo Pipes, making me a bit antsy as I've yet had a chance to play with what promises to deliver an uber tool for custom rip-mix-feeding. Scott rightfully sends Blackboard to the corner to wear a blog dunce hat. Gardner's blog frequency is up, and glu-ing me into some new things to check out like Mojiti. Will's son's wiki-ing makes papa proud. Right on. And on it goes, the great river of blog posts, poisng to roll me over like a crashing wave, Reaching now for command-A.... [caption id="attachment_17412" align="aligncenter" width="274"] All dressed up for Alan's Bar Mitzvah, May 1976[/caption] Aren't I cute in my blue tuxedo? That is me and my Aunt "Bebe" at the time of my Bar Mitzvah, in May of 1976. I had no clue, and I wonder if she did, that in 7 months she would be dead from cancer. Attached to the side of her refrigerator was Mom's Big Paper Calendar. Each year she would buy one of those large blank calendars where you write in the month, day year, and she would copy over the events from the previous one. Meticulously penciled in were birthdays, anniversaries, and in later years, many markings of dates of friends and family members who passed away. And in her own Cookielady fashion, were also includes milestones for pets and dates of key family stories, like the date and year my sister's nose got broken when hit by a baseball (a week following this, she had recorded when she had her own hysterectomy - does Hallmark make a card for that?) When we cleaned out Mom's house last year, I transferred it to a Google Calendar, and in a different way, I hope I carry on the spirit of what Mom did. I feel the connection when reminders come up from that calendar. Last week, December 7, marked the day my Aunt "Bebe" technically my great-aunt, passed away. What saddens me is that I know so little about her beyond the presence she represented to me when I was a kid. I know almost nothing. Her real name was Reba. I am not sure why we called here "Bebe" or even if that is spelled right. She lived in Silver Springs, MD with my Uncle Morty. I guess it never dawned on me that it was odd in their modest brick house they had separate bedrooms. Much later that I realized it's because, while I called them "Aunt" and "uncle" they were not married. They were blood relatives, how possible? They were brother and sister, in fact, twins. The family tree limbs are even more crossed, they were the youngest siblings of my fraternal grandfather, but much younger, so they were maybe only a year older than my Dad, who would have been their nephew. Confused? That's why I called them Aunt and Uncle. We would drive a few times a year from Baltimore to visit, very warm memories, mainly because of the attention they gave me. Not the lavish kind of spoiling the kids, but the way they honestly took an interest in me, encouraged my schooling. Well that is what I recall, I cannot remember too many details. But it was that strong sense of genuine interest, and also that thing when adults both treat you like a child but don't treat you childish. We spent time together talking, walking, not in front of screens. I cannot remember what kind of work Bebe did (I am counting on my sisters). I never knew her husband, not even his name. She had a son, Steven, an even more vague memory- a wooly haired man with a bushy beard, likely fully immerse into all of the hippy scenes of the 1960s. I heard he lives in the Portland, Oregon area. No one in our family ever had contact with him after his mom passed away. Do you know how many Steve Goldman's there are out there? Aunt Bebe shared with me with one of her own hobbies, collecting stamps and coins. She gave my my first stamp album, and a number of my first items in the book. I don't remember if she started me with coins first or after stamps, but she also gave me those blue books to hold wheat back pennies and old buffalo nickels. She seeded those collections too. I know she would spend a lot of time talking, teaching me about these things she enjoyed. She was not being super talkative but always provided a warm and nurturing presence. Like my parents, it was that 100% assurance that not only were they they for you. An assurance as solid as the earth. Except, as a kid, you have this sense that it is the permanent kind of permanent.. ... until your parents are explaining cancer to you.. I can see Aunt Bebe smoking a lot of cigarettes, and would not be surprised if that's what did her in. I have a faint memory of visiting her in the hospital in the weeks before she died. Always kind of bony skinny, she was frailer yet, and her head was bandaged. Did I understand chemotherapy? Could I look it up in the internet in 1976? I know I have these strong buried memories of her, but it bothers me so much that I have so much little insight into her life story. This is some of the drive for constructing my grandmother's stories from audio recorded in 1993 and likely my own pursuit of storytelling. I think of the boxes of my own history, old letters, school reports, photos, cards, cassette tapes in the boxes in my closet. What am I doing with all that ephemera? We have so much more available to us for not only collecting and organizing the bits of our stories, but also making it in a form that will last as well as a form that is easily shared. And frankly that is why all of this posting online is way more than navel gazing or resume building or just frivolous frittering checking in statusiing- we have at our disposal the tools, means, skills to keep memory from fading. And that is important. I know fully my Aunt loved me. I have a sense, not in the afterlife BS looking down from clouds etc, but just in the sense that her time and attention spent on me becomes part of me, shapes me, and is with me. And while I struggle to assemble anything other than an out of focus recall of her, I know its there. And you know what, just in the reflecting, typing, I feel more memories kicking in. I feel more of that presence. It's that thing of how some cultures say you die first when your body ceases to function, but your real death is when people stop telling your stories. So Aunt Bebe, you live. And I will stop doing the latter only when the former happens. Wow, have I been delinquent on catching up on the crazy creative riffing going on among the ds106ers in Google+. Besides spinning out Collaborative GIF stories they have mashed up glitch art and animated GIFs, and discovered/invented an entire new kind of photographic device, the GIFaChrome. Check out the new site Rochelle is weaving to document the history, technology, and art of this post modern camera. Who needs Kodachrome (yawn) when we got GIFaChrome? http://gifachrome.com/. But what has really blown the wind up my skirt is the app that john Johnston made to generate glitch images and even save them as animated GIFs. It’s pretty much click and try, but the results are unpredictable (and that is the creative fun) I’m still trying to adjust my exposures and get the right ISO settings, but am eager to try more; so far I have merely glitched my tattoo (it did not hurt as much as it may appear). I want to get my hand on that new Layercake version! Rochelle is weaving/assisting two different end of Headless ds106 activities- her GIFaChome work AND helping corral some “Best of ds106″ work we can highlight Friday Dec 13 as a Headless Party. Stay tuned! And get your GIFaChrome on! Completely irrelevant to technology... but I am in a 3 week physical ramp up in preparation for a Grand Canyon backpack, 3 days, 2 nights down the Hermit Trail. I'm getting my 2-3 day a week bike commute, some good weekend climbs, like Camelback Mountain. The park service issues lots of dire warnings about people who have died on this trail. Sounds enticing ;-) From experience, they tend to err on the side of rabid conservatism in dealing with under prepared hikers. For canyon hiking, the biggest gap is between one's over-estimation of their abilities and under-estimation of the terrain. By the way, here in Arizona we refer to it just as "The Canyon", not to be confused with any of the other hundreds of spectacular canyons I've walked - Aravaipa, West Clear Creek, East Clear Creek, Fossil Creek, Oak Creek, Secret, Walnut, Sycamore (at least 3 of 'em), Paria, Buckskin Gulch, Salt River, Boulder, Roger's, Fish Creek... In fact, on the drive north, you climb up "The Rim" ("Mogollon Rim" is the 1000 foot drop off at the edge of the Colorado Plateau). However, you do not stop for some food in "The Flagstaff", just "Flagstaff"- but you may just in fact get a big juicy hamburger at "Bun Huggers" (and in fact, their burger is called "The Hug"). These tips just may save you from sounding like a tourist if you ever venture out here. One more time.... "I am headin' up The Rim to hike the The Canyon, stoppin' in Flagstaff for food, probably eatin' The Hug ." Anyhow, that is why i am not blogging September 17-19. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It's been almost a month since the Open Education conference wrapped up, this is a bit of summary of the experiment of using a PirateBox as a conference activity. The idea as cooked up with Scott Leslie, was to experiment with an open source sharing technology. As outlined on the conference web site: Between twitter, blogging, flickr there will be plenty of public sharing of the experience of Open Ed 2012. This is good. We are also seeking new ways of documenting the conference experience through the device created by David Darts, the PirateBox. which turns a local space into a communication and sharing network. Using open source technology and under US$30 in parts, the PirateBox creates a local, open wireless network. Upon joining this network, you are not connected to the internet, but a web server running locally on the box, which is set up with simple tools for uploading and downloading files, synchronous chat, and a message board. All communication with the PirateBox is anonymous. This technology has potential and implications for conducting networked projects where the internet is not viable or for a way of sharing content that is localized. For a few days before the conference, during the conference, and following, we provided a few prompts for ideas for content to be shared: Prompt 7: Share a photo, audio, or video that represent the first thing about Open Education conference you will share with your colleagues Prompt 6: Make a photo or drawing that represents the most amazing thing you heard or saw at the conference that is brand new to you Prompt 5: Take a photo of someone intensely engaged in a discussion or listening to a session. Prompt 4: Share a photo, audio, or video that shows you meeting at least 2 people you have not even connected with before. Prompt 3: Promote Open Education 2012! Pretend you control mainstream news and can generate a 30 second message about the conference. Prompt 2: Use your camera or audio recording device to show the experience of travel to Vancouver Prompt 1: Share a photo, ambient audio, or video that captures the essence of the space you do your best work in. The box itself, was fit inside a curious plastic toy box, and was set up in the main lobby area where people gathered, and was accessible during the conference, plus two unconference demo sessions provided people a chance to learn more about how it worked. Tony Hirst wrote up a detailed and illustrated blog post. For a summary of what was collected: 10 Audio Recordings 2 Documents 4 Music Recordings 68 Photos 6 remixes 7 videos cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As our agreement, the TreasureBox has been mailed back to Scott to as part of the conference archives, I am not sure what, if anything will come of it, but the entire web structure that is on the box can be uploaded to a web site and provide access to all the media. Until then, I am providing the archive on my site, for the 0.5 people that might be curious. Now for this build, similar to my original Storybox, I've built a web structure to organize the content- the default is all the media sits in one directory. For my approach, I offload all of the media that gets added, and run it through some scripts to process, and optimize. I found that big files (3000px wide images, full scale video) can be slow to access and view, plus I wanted something that would include icons for previews. My scripts are a combination of php scripts and one shell script that I run on the local web server on my MacBookPro. [caption id="attachment_16303" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size image)[/caption] I have written up some documentation on these steps which looking at it now, appear rather byzantine. As some final reflection... There is a lot of things going on at a conference, much of it during the breaks between sessions. Most attendees are focussed on the sessions, so expectations for them to do these extra bits should be kept realistic, unless it is folded well into the conference planning and announcements. We did get some interesting items, and much of it I have no idea who submitted it. We have among the remixes, two mashups of Gardner Campbell as an album cover, two line tracings of other shared photos, and 2 animated GIFa. If I were to do it again, I might go the simpler route of the single uploads directory, IN a way, the original purpose and design was explicitly simple (and messy). This was a wonderful opportunity to try the PirateBox out in a public space. I am eager and interested in doing it again, so if you run an event or a conference and want to set one of these up, it is a service I can offer or just point you in the right direction. I found it very easy to build with the newest software, and all of the parts can be found on Amazon.com (with the battery and $5 for the toy box, the costs was $84). Do you want a treasureBox, conferenceBox, MakeUpYourNameForABox? Let me kno! I can help. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Some might squint at my ethics, but by an interesting sequence of events, this Friday Brian Lamb is coming to Maricopa for a Dialogue Day on Learning objects, Wikis, and Other Curious Things. Brian and I have done a number of great collaborations since we both started chatting at one of those stale lecture format conferences, and have done some (I think) great work since then. So I was rather agreeable when Lisa Young, co-chair of our Ocotillo Learning Objects Action Group, e-mailed me a few months back and said: I've been reading a lot of great articles and blog posts by this guy at University of British Columbia and I think we would make an excellent speaker. Do you think we can bring him to Maricopa? Sure, no problem! So while Brian writes Far more disjointed than usual. It's yet another cry for help..., we're lining up an audience of faculty, staff, and a few administrators to get his spin on learning objects, and as we hope, to go a bit farther into the new waters of folksonomies, wikis, RSS, etc. Some who read CogDogBlog may have the notion that things I write about are growing like desert wildflowers across our system, but like everywhere else, these things take a while to sprout, A long while. There is likely no one in our system that will register if you ask them about "Rip. Mix. Feed."... a aoncept I have player with more externally than internally. But it will be good- our Dialogue Days are built to be short on long lectures, and long ion discussion, ands on activities, etc. And we are in good hands for something interesting. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by batintherain Do you see more than you don't see? Is there nothing in what you don't see? What if you never see the bird? More metaphorical nonsensical questions? Or shall I for the first time toss at a TL;DR? No, this is not too long, and it matters not to me if you do not read. This is for me to spill out some thoughts. While I was enjoying mostly a "not look at the online stuff" extended visit to Vancouver, some sort of comment party busted out on a post around here. Not that it counts as participation. Jon Becker posed a provocative question and others chimed in before I saw it: I think it’s time for an honest look at participation in cMOOCs. I have a sneaking suspicion that participation wanes in ways that some wouldn’t want to admit, particularly for “courses” where there’s no *real* incentive (e.g. credit, PD points, etc.). Also… how big is the group that carries on with #etmooc? And, honestly, how many people really, truly continue to particpate in #ds106? So how does one actually take an "honest look at participation in cMOOCs"? What constitutes participation? Connected Courses has clocked over 1770 blog posts from 239 blogs. I do not have access to the database to run a query, but my hunch is if one ran a frequency distribution for the authors versus number of posts, we'd see something like a long tail emerge: [caption id="attachment_37044" align="alignnone" width="500"] Public Domain image from Wikimedia Commons[/caption] And probably a similar curve if we looked at the distribution of the twitter activity, a few people tweeting a lot, and a lot of people tweeting little. And maybe a similar curve if one graphed the number of days people participate in cMOOCs. This would be perhaps waning participation. So we look at MOOCs (c or x), see all those signups, and see how few people are present at the end, and call it a loss. Look at all those who did not finish. Dropped out. Or did not post a blog post. Or tweeted twice and vanished. It says participation is gauged by the volume (like loudness). The glass, nearly empty. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Frankly, I think this is the wrong portion of the glass to be looking at. And I think we do not see the secondary, tertiary ripple effects of the participation we do see. Or maybe I am just an optimist. But people who have experiences in Connected Courses, often use them in ways we never see. They may get incorporated into their teaching. Maybe months from now or maybe right away. They share ideas or discuss them with colleagues not in Connected Courses. They have discussions between each other in more direct channels that are never seen elsewhere. Of course this is my own supposition. My own irrational optimism? It almost is belief bordering over into faith. I have no data. But I read things like Laura Ritchie's Blogging it For #Ccourses. Sure Laura has been pretty regularly tweeting. We could count that. But read her post. There's stuff there that would not show up unless she wrote about it. She's teaching a music course right now where she is rolling her experiences into it: MUS654 has been an experiment for me – throwing myself and my students in the deep end and overall they have really taken to it. I am not sure that running a course on creating a curriculum is necessarily the best choice if the course is to be appealing to a wide audience, but it has made the first inroads to reach a wider community and it has certainly encouraged my students to get out there and think wider. She's "connected" in with another music class, a high school one: Last week another class of mine connected with David Preston’s high school class. We all learned ukulele as an initial hello activity so we could play with one of his students and some of my students came in one evening to make the link. We certainly had a few challenges to negotiate with live cross-continental communication, and how it all changes when you try to play music collaboratively. So here her experience is rippling out, diffusing into another teacher (and his students) not even in Connected Courses. This would never register in anyone's course analytics. And also with another class, not even a music class, but photography: Some really neat face to face 3D (as Maha would say) connections have been born over the past week. Some of Jonathan Worth’s #Phonar students are working with a cello piece that I recorded, and one contacted me... and I arranged to take her to meet the maker of my cello, Malcolm Combes. How cool is that!? This guy is a legend to me and I love that part of his story is now going to be connected and told through another medium. I love that connections don’t always have to remain online. Connections that don't have to be online. Jon called for help https://twitter.com/jonbecker/status/534071368141533184 but I do not see any pigeonholing- Jon you asked about numbers of people who are participating, and suggesting (unless I am overstepping) that the relative numbers are low. Numbers, numbers, numbers, no measurement there. Reminder-: And, honestly, how many people really, truly continue to particpate in #ds106? You see, I do not worry about the people who "participate" less (and my point is how do we know what that level is?), and relish the ones that participate more. Because I do not think we need to have massive numbers of people doing this at a high level, that their rippling out effect can be more effective. I see in Laura's blog post, actions that seem to reach at least 40-60 other learners/teachers. Yes, I cherry picked one from someone who might be tossed into the active participating bin of someone's data analysis. I know you are not a measurement guy Jon, neither am I. My point I try to make is the stuff that can even be measured for participation is not the stuff all that interesting. But the real question I think Jon was getting at is if there is meaningful participation (or outcomes, or ??) from open courses, like Connected Courses that do not have a grade/stake/incentive attached. Relax Jon, you are not in the pigeon hole. There is no right or wrong here, as heck, I am only throwing out partly baked hunches. I got no proof. But I think the stuff that you see as "waning" participation has much under the water line we do not see. And the stuff that is in the bottom of the glass is quite powerful. Much more potential than speculating about the empty space above. [caption id="attachment_37045" align="alignnone" width="500"] Free License Wikimedia Commons image[/caption] I've had fun following D'Arcy Norman's tweets as he experiments with an old Pentax film camera he got from his Dad. It got me thinking that I've had a string of cameras, but have never bothered to document my camera history. Not that anyone would care,, this is a blog post for me as an audience. With some fiddling in flickr I was able to find the number of photos I took for cameras that are matched when you upload photos (find the camera, do a search on that model, than change the search results to search your own photos, check the number at the bottom of the search results). I start with the genesis of my interest in photography, when in my last semester at University of Delaware (1986), needing an art elective, i chose a photography (a darkroom course). I cannot even remember why I chose it, but it was almost the best class I had in college, and had I made the accident a few years early, I might have had a different major. One of the earliest images I developed that I like was this one of a run down chicken coop: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I did not have a manual 35mm camera at the time, but a room-mate did, and he said he never used it, so he loaned it to me for the semester. I am fairly sure it was a Pentax K1000- fully manual public domain Wikipedia photo shared by SlugBug Because I had shown this interest in photography, as a graduation present, my parents gave me an Olympus X-700, my own SLR cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was a basic kit with a stock 50mm lens, case, cheap flash. I think when I was working the following year in a Ritz Camera Store (Westview Mall in Baltimore) I bought a used zoom lens, but I cannot remember any details on it. It was at this store that I picked up perhaps my favorite film cameras, a Nikon Nikkormat- I sold someone a new camera to replace this one, and the guy asked if I might know who might be interested in his old camera... I said, "me!" and I think I bought it for $100. It had a Nikkor f/1.4 lens. The reason why was on my last Geology class as an undergrad, actually it was the field camp where we went to Sound Dakota, a guy on the trip told one story about this metal Nikon he carried- he had gone on raft trip, and took a spill, He thought the camera was ruined, but after taking it apart and letting it dry, it worked fine... I kept that in mind as it seemed like the most sturdy piece of equipment for taking photos. I used that camera exclusively for my 6 years in graduate school, taking it all over the west. The original case got worn, cracked, and eventually it was just a case made of duct tape on the outside. Sometime in the late 1980s I picked up a small pocket 35mm camera, an Olympus Stylus, but I was so pleased with how sharp the little camera was for people photos. cc licensed flickr photo shared by the other Martin Taylor Although it was mostly plastic, it was durable and its curvy shape was comfortable in the hand. On a Grand Canyon river trip I took in (?) 1988, I took the Nikkormat for black and white photos and the little Olympus for color. The very first digital camera I got to use was one we got at Maricopa- the very first Apple QuickTake 100. It was huge, and I don't remember being too impressed with the photos. Other people at the time were using that Sony Mavica one that wrote images to a floppy disk inserted into the camera-- those just seemed so clunky looking. My own self purchased digital Camera was an Olympus D-450, with a whopping 1.3 Megapixel resolution (I think the top quality images were 1280x960)-- I got sometime around 1999. I went for this brand because of my experience with my small Olympus film camera Its 32 Mb SmartMedia card could hold 72 images. I used this extensively on my 2000 sabbatical to New Zealand and Australia but all of the photos were uploaded to my own custom hand spun web site. When I got back to my job at Maricopa, I picked up first and Olympus 3030 (3.3 MegaPixel) and then a C4040-Z (4 MegaPixel) for the photos I took on the job. I liked the 4040 so much I bought one for myself and got many years of good use out of it, this was most likely the camera I was using when I started using this little site called "flickr" in March 2004 (the early pictures do not give camera data). Of the flickr data which includes camera data, I had 650 posted photos with this camera. The first photo that flickr gives camera information on is dated August 20 2004, so assuming all older photos in flickr were taken with this camera (63 of them), the total is 713. In July 2005, I took the step up when I got mt first digital SLR, the Canon Digital Rebel XT, or as I later called it, the "Big Gun" cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The photo quality was several steps above what I had been using for sure, and I had thought going back to an SLR might get me back to full manual mode shooting (cause at one time you did not even have a choice), but I usually found the Aperture priority or even full automatic was giving me great photo quality. I did not get any extra lenses, etc for it til later. But I did take 2355 photos on flickr using this camera. After a few years of using the "Big Gun" I had been noticing at conferences the fun my colleagues seemed to be having with the little pocket Canon Digital Elph cameras- and how lovely large that screen on the back was. So I picked up a Canon SD 800 IS: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was able to find I took 4495 photos with this camera. And I loved what this little camera could do, especially for something you can slip into a shirt pocket. It became my main camera for years, and it went so many places, did so many things. One of them was using it to shoot GigaPan scenes, the rig that moves a camera on a robot controlled tripod head to take multiple images that are stitched together to create a hugely detailed image. The goal of getting to a GigaPixel image is helped by several factors, including a longer optical zoom (mine was about 3.5x) and image resolution (mine was 7 MP). So on a September 2008 trip to Japan, I was mesmerized by this new Canon that was not yet available in the states, that had among other nifty features, a 14 MP capacity! I could not resist the fun of buying a Japanese camera in Japan, so I got the little black IXY 3000 IS (eventually released in the US as the SD990 IS) cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I cant get an exact count on flickr photos posted by camera model, since it does not officially track this one, but by searching on the dates I used this camera the most, I come up with 3085 flickr photos posted using this camera. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was still thinking of the poor Digital Rebel which had not been out much since I got wrapped up in the little pocket cameras, so to stir my interest, in 2008, I invested in a fast Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens. I had thought I might find one cheaper in Hong Kong or Japan, but it was cheaper to get it from home ordering on Amazon.... but I ended up still not using the Digital Rebel after all. Next I ought to include the iPhone (which I got in August 2008) as a camera. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog For a count of my iPhone photos, the camera model flickr search on catches just handful of photos- perhaps ones just sent by email; with the use of 3rd party phone apps, the camera must be reported differently, but since I always tag them iPhone, I get a count of 142 photos posted on flickr from the iPhone camera. The camera landscape was reshaped again after a June 2009 workshop at the NMC Summer Conference -- this was a day full of photography at Point Lobos with Bill Frakes (Sports Illustrated) and Don Henderson (Apple) and it totally reinvigorated my interest in going back to the DLSR. It was about 10 minutes before checking out of the hotel, I went online to Amazon to see what Canon had (since I had the one nice Canon Lens) and decided, impulsively, yes to order the EOS Rebel T1i cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I just love this camera! I am definitely experimenting more, and finding what I can do with low light and depth of field; really pushed now by the assignments of The Daily Shoot. To date I have only 1231 photos posted to flickr (since July, 2009) but that increases daily. To add to the outfit, I got the Tamron 18-270 zoom lens and am considering another one soon. The flickr photo counts show which of my cameras I have used the most to post to flickr: Though looking at my photo count, I am missing about 1000 photos credit (hmmm, is there a camera I forgot about?) To be continued... for as long as I breathe! If anything teaches you about being able to do repairs, it's going for long distance bicycle rides or using one for commuting. You end up refining a set of small but flexible tools that you can carry, and sometime, far from anything, you find yourself improvising. Or there was a time I was camping alone and awoke to a flat tire in my (then) new to me old truck. I could not locate a lug wrench anywhere! I had not even done the thing you should do with a vehicle and practice doing a tire change. Luckily I had tossed in the back an almost random set of tools, and there was one multi pronged lug wrench that fit my wheel. You don't want to wish misfortune on anyone but dealing with these situations, on your own, is invaluable. In these cases there is no replace choice. And maybe these examples are not a fit for where I hope to steer this post, but I'm dovetailing to it now from my recent jubilant experience of having repaired an old electric fireplace rather than buying a replacement. This is my reflection from reading The Right to Repair as the latest installment of the Middlebury College DLINQ Digital Detox. where the theme is looking at the impacts of technology on this planet we happen to inhabit. Bob Cole writes in this installment about the choice or even the access to chose to repair broken/obsolete technology devices rather than replace with new. This dilemma of paying someone to repair versus replacing a device is probably familiar to anyone who has reached a potential “end-of-life” crossroads for one of their many electronic devices. There are upsides and costs to each. Yet I wondered, are these my only choices? Are there alternative paths for a self-described tinkerer and occasional fixer? Could I source the parts, tools, and repair knowledge on my own? What might I learn along the way? Heck yes, but I am not too clear on what "end-of-life" crossroads he refers to. Yes, some devices do just break where they just will not function, but: I am writing this on a 2013 MacBookPro that still provides enough power and capability to do everything I want. Long ago, when I worked for a college that paid for my computers, I got new machines on something like a 2 year cycle. This current machine was one I had to pay for myself (as a freelance web geek). It is running a less than current OS (mojave) so I can still use the Aperture software I love for photos (software no longer supported but still functional).And there is an older 2009 MacBookPro sitting in the other room, which is a bit more worn (it had a collision with a sidewalk) but still usable to play music through the stereo. My DSLR, a Canon 7D, I got in 2012.And if anything says keeping and using old stuff it's my vehicle- a 1998 Ford F-150 I bought in 2010 with 88,000 miles on it (now up to 207,000). I do this because I am a bit of a thrifty bugger, but I also feels strongly about using things as long as viable. I cannot say it's a purely environmental mindset, it's just who I am. Yet Bob's article cites a tendency for technology makers to keep you from doing this, whether you believe that devices are designed to go obsolete or if they are made in a way to defy being upgraded. On my older MacBooks, I have done hard drive swaps, replaced batteries and inserted memory upgrades, but these are not really possible anymore. The IEEE Spectrum article Bob referenced, Why We Must Fight For The Right To Repair Our Electronics, suggest my hunches are wrong, that there might be a plot to make us think replace first when something breaks. Unlike the 30-year-old mixer on your kitchen counter that refuses to die, new technology—especially the smart devices with fancy, embedded electronics—breaks more quickly. That trend, confirmed by a recent study by the German government, applies not just to delicate products like smartphones and tablets but also to equipment we would expect to last for a long time—like televisions, washing machines, and even tractors.https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics Speaking of broken technology, I could only read the intro to the article because they request I sign in to read it, and that bugs me. Yes it might be free, but why tease me? Mobile phones are the ones that seem discarded the most and as Bob notes in the article, it takes some special tools and inside scoop to crack one open. I would be hesitant to do this, but I remember my colleague Tim Owens once doing a fix on an iPad. And I remember a time I did some work in Vancouver and rented a room via Air BnB from a guy named Darcy. He had this great niche business- people who broke their mobile phone screen could contact him, he would buzz to their office on his bike, and had the tools and knowledge how to replace screens. And he had this side business, then called "Lumberback" where he would replace the back of your iPhone with a matching one made of real wood. I had to get one just to watch him do his work. "Anything can be opened and fixed" he said. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/7370290346 Lovely Spalts Lumberback flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license And yes extend broken devices to broken technology. Can't play old flash content? Try Ruffle. Mozilla hung up the great Thimble app? They gave a window to migrate it to Glitch. When Storify bit the dust and closed shop? Create an end around. This is the spirit of reclaiming your web experience, and it's as much repair over discard. I've not had much trouble location owners manuals for old devices, usually there are too many results. And you can find most any part on eBay and a whole list of other parts sites. Yes, YouTube is full of explainer videos of a wide range of usefulness, and it takes some patience to find not only the right one, but the one where the video maker is showing you something useful and not promoting their channel. Bob hits a key point too with: repairability provides a more sustainable response to the global challenge of electronic waste, with the added benefits of conserving natural resources, saving money, and building community.https://dlinq.middcreate.net/detox-2022/post.html?id=23948 (emphasis added by me) If you ever want to embrace the near infinite-ness of the internet, it's when you end up diving down into some of school web forum of people fanatical about Ford F-150s (yes, I end up in one of many of these when I am researching an issue with mine). Outside of the glitz and scale of all the mainstream social media places is a generous long tail of small scale, and highly interest focused discussion spaces for almost any device you can name. You find all ranges of helpful, but yet sometimes argumentative (or worse) behavior, but I am rather fascinated by the social dynamics you can find in these fora (and if I was better at remembering and finding I would give you an example). Now as a disclaimer I should slide up about 10 paragraphs, I am not overly skilled at all this fix it stuff. I cannot solder if my life depended on it. No welding, either. Many times, the answers I find are way beyond my skill level. But I enjoy the hunt for answers, and the rewarding feeling when I am able to pull through on a repair (saving the $ of replace). The reward of confidence is incalcuable. My desire to repair over replace is not as firmly places in reducing my environmental impact. It's more of an ethos of an attitude towards "things", and that I am doing maybe a small part by just using stuff as long as possible (and then stashing them in a box or drawer because some day I might need a part). Oh I also cheap ;-) so saving $ is good too. If there is an environmental impact, that's good too. It's not only right to repair, or choice to repair, but also a reward of repair. Thanks Middlebury DLINQ for running this series... And kudos to Tom Woodward for the signature style approach to the web site. I've seen his photos, he knows his way with repair tools too. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15066574576 Bike Repair Shop flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license This is the first in a series of posts meant as a guide for almost anyone to create a Wordpress site that operates as a networked hub for content created elsewhere. This is the engine, the Jim Groom Syndication Bus that drives ds106, the Open Digital Storytelling course/community/space. It is intended primarily for Connected Courses, which is intended to be offered in October-November 2014 as an open course in how to create open courses. Although published in 2014, the author, aka me, regularly updates, adds tips, fixes typoes typos, and sometimes tosses in unnecessary gifs. Lately I have pondered a simpler approach via an OPML subscription file and asking participants to learn to use an RSS reader. I have built several of these sites in the last few years, after learning how it works with ds106, such as ETMOOC (Educational Technology MOOC), Project Community (The Hague University of Applied Science), Harvard Future of Learning Institute, rmooc (Thompson Rivers University), Thought Vectors in Concept Space (UNIV 200 at VCU), The You Show (Thompson Rivers University), Covering the Coverage (VCU Great Bike Race Project), Networked Narratives (Kean University), #ResNetSem Research Networked Seminar (Kean University), Open Learning Hub (AAC&U), Domains of Our Own (OntarioExtend Project), A Hub of Hubs (Open Web DML Workshop). For more examples of syndication hub classes, see the Staking a Claim workshop section on WordPress syndication hubs. All of these sites are different with themes, purpose, kinds of syndicated content, but they are all are powered by Wordpress and the Feed Wordpress plugin. While I have written what I thought were extensive documentation posts, they tend to be full of gory detail for all of the custom coding I have done for each site. For the purposes of sharing the basics, I am writing this series of posts as a guide that will not depend on any custom coding of template hacking; as an example, I will use the Connected Courses site itself as a model. You do not need to be a Wordpress guru, you do not need to know PHP is. To build one of these sites, you will need a self or institution hosted version of Wordpress -- you cannot do this on Wordpress.com because we need to use a plugin (extra functionality) not available there. If you do not have access to a place to do these, there is no finer option that Reclaim Hosting where as an instructor you can register your own domain and get an entire server infrastructure for the crazy price of $50/year. It will help to have some basic Wordpress concepts (difference between posts and pages, tags and categories, how to install plugins). Or you can use the information here to help your local tech support to enable this functionality for your own site. The folks at UC Irvine have already selected a lovely theme; I will walk through the steps I did to set it up for syndication, all steps I did via the Wordpress dashboard. Much of the information I will write in the next few posts comes from a Skype conversation between myself and Howard Rheingold, which he kindly had transcribed. Are you ready to be syndicating? Let's go. Tentatively these are the steps (links will be added as they are written): Basic Concepts of Syndication - and what to think about even before you touch that Wordpress thingInstalling and Setting up Feed Wordpress - Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombinedFeeding the Machine - How to get RSS feeds into the aggregator without losing a fingerSome Feed Magic - Optional ways to improve feeds from sites such as flickr, twitter, etc, creating a twitter archive, RSS Feed TLCA Few More Tricks - leveraging categories, adding attribution, setting featured images Also, another way to experience working with this kind of approach is Building a Course Hub part of a Connected Courses Workshops for the 2016 and 2017 DML Conferences. Here you can create a trial web hosting package, and install/experiment with a fully functioning Feed Wordpress powered hub site. More Stuff... Lots of posts! See ones tagged syndication (listed below), as well as ones tagged FeedWordPress, tagged rss, tagged connectedcourses. [display-posts tag="syndication" include_date="true" date_format="F j, Y" posts_per_page="20"] more... Featured Image: Created with the Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator (because I can) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Scott Maxworthy It's almost ready to share. I've been working on and off since August (a project I thought I could do in a month) on turning the ds106 Assignment Bank into a customizable Wordpress theme that could be used for any kind of collection of "Things to Do". But I've done all I can, and just squashed a few nagging details and formatting. A big one over the last 2 days was updating from using as a parent theme the previous WP-Bootstrap theme (based on Bootstrap 2) to the most current one based on Boostrap 3. If that sounds like gobbledy goop, do not worry. The parent theme provides the base functionality of the site, and I am using one based on Twitter Bootstrap "the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web." The previous WP-Bootstrap had all kinds of crazy option panels, and the new version is much leaner, makes better use of LESS. The downside was having to do a lot of manual changes to my templates, because the many of the spans, divs, etc have changed. Enough blah, let's first look at the exterior and interior, the former you can see as well at http://bank.ds106.us (the content is of course silly filler). (more…) An afternoon of poking around the TRU Collector WordPress Theme has taken away an unnecessary vestige of how they started. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1339725698651414528 This goes back more than six years ago, yes to October 31, 2014 (guess who was not out trick or treating). How can my memory be that good? It's not, but I have a detailed record of all the work I did on my TRU Open Learning Scholar Fellowship because I was foolish enough to blog it all. The very first SPLOT was an experiment in creating one of those image comparison tools (like the more modern JuxtaposeJs or the H5P Juxtapose Image tool) It emerged as a WordPress theme named The Comparator (and is semi-broken as of now). The need here was to be able to upload before and after images. Using the comparison jQuery library required the images be the exact same dimensions. Making this a requirement for a person using what should be a Simple tool seemed much. But it dawned on me that if images were uploaded to the WordPress media library like when one authors, WordPress does the work of creating multiple versions of an image with the same dimensions (cropping a bit as needed). This lead to the SPLOT approach that got spun out into later themes. Each site had an authoring level account. I was able, via code, when someone visited a SPLOT creation form, to seamlessly log them in to WordPress, unbeknownst to them, as this secret user. This provided access to the WordPress media uploader, which was a simple means to put images into the site. I put into play the Remove Dashboard Access plugin, which redirected anyone logged in as an Author role away from the dashboard. And I added some CSS which hides the WordPress authoring menus. Yes, this was one of those Grand Kludges. But it worked well for years, and went into the TRU Writer, TRU Collector, and the SPLOTbox themes. Still, the approach presented some problems for other people trying to use the themes: A tedious task to create a new fake user, check for it, run the login scripts, and passing them back and forth from a Welcome Desk page (to check for an access code) and back to the creation formAnd it's more problematic on WordPress Multisite. I have to add logic to deal with situations where someone is logged in to their own site. And if you are not a system admin, it's not easy or maybe even possible, to add this user who would exist in the overall users table, to a new site. Colin Madland called it out https://twitter.com/colinmadland/status/1189358508203855872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1189358508203855872%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcogdogblog.com%2F2019%2F11%2Fsimpler-splot%2F It added a lot of extra code and templates to the themeIt was the equivalent of cheap duct tape. It was only a year ago that I was able to tackle this first on TRU Writer, the first SPLOT to go authorless. It came from some fiddling with a jQuery dropzone file uploader for another project, powered by some under the hood ajax code I cobbled to take the file saved in a browser session, and insert it into the WordPress Media Library the same way it works when logged in. It meant redoing about 80% of the creation form processing, using some sneaky tuff to generate previews. I was able to make similar changes in a few weeks to the SPLOTbox theme. but alas, it was almost a year until I sat down to re-jig TRU Collector. It's available now to try at http://splot.ca/collector and if you are brave and manage your own domain, you can download an updated version of the theme from Github. A worthy relative new feature in WordPress is that you can update a manually installed theme the same way you first installed it- by uploading the updated version of the theme as a .zip (it's insane to imagine it took this long, but who am I to complain)? See the newest item created author-lessly... I did get the word out in twitter, and clink clink come the likes and retweets. But hey... Jump in please and give the new TRU Collector a go. I'd like to make sure it's working so we can have Reclaim Hosting push out updates to people who used their cpanel installer. I've slipped a few more enhancements in! Because of the way WordPress resizes animated GIFs, if you uploaded one bigger than 500px, it would animated on a single view page, but the front page thumbnail would not (because it downsizes a GIF to a non-animated JPEG). But in this new version, the 600px wide Cartman GIF in the entry post is also moving on the home page. Previously the thumbnail on the front was inserted the standard way, telling WordPress to use a specific size image the_post_thumbnail( 'post-thumb' ); I found a wee bit of code in Stack Exchange that got em clued in on how to get the mime type for an image in the media library. So now I can test the featured image to see if it's a GIF, and if so, we use the full/original size. $thumbnail_image_size = ( get_post(get_post_thumbnail_id()) ->post_mime_type == 'image/gif' ) ? 'full' : 'post-thumb'; It's the little things that animate. But wait... there's more. WordPress gives you a standard setup for comments like this: But I have a idea for a site where I want to have a different title, and maybe even a place to add a custom prompt for the comment form. This is now a feature in this theme (and also TRU Writer and SPLOTbox): I'm pretty excited to get these changes in for TRU Collector, specially on finding in the last few days more ways other people are using the theme. https://twitter.com/tinebeest/status/1339312253984772096 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1339319643098345472 But here I am in six years down the road from the first SPLOT, ripping out the first feature I put in. That's progress! So long secret Author accounts! Featured Image: Pixabay photo by Adam Vega edited by me including cropping, adding text and logos to the books on the desk, and adding some messages on the board. Some recipes claim to be easy. This podcast was in the oven for almost three months, and the fault is all mine. Antonio and I recorded this episode on March 21, way back in the early part of pandemic lockdown. Then I just let it sit. But in a way, it’s interesting to hear us talk while this was a bit of a novelty, not the dread filled mire it has become. Oh, was that pessimistic? No worries, because my colleague and friend Antonio is a primo optimist. Just listen to him! I did learn some Italian, OMS in Italian, is “Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità” or what you might say, as in WHO (World Health Organization). Antonio was understandably concerned about his 90+ year old mother in Italy. Antonio described that in Puerto Rico there were night time curfews. Students at his University. Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, had to leave their dorms and return to home on the island. He says that things at Sagrado were done in orderly manner for lockdown. This was his preparation week for the “online pivoting” (insert ballet puns). He noted that after Hurricane Maria, Sagrado was first in Puerto Rico to reinstate classes as hybrid (under tents), so they were used to dealing with calamity. Because that seems pretty regular there, be it from natural forces or the boot of the US Government. He described the hashtag #EsteVirusLoParamosUnidos or “We Stop this virus united” – Check out the 150,000 photos tagged on instagram. But as “always an optimist” Antonio was ready to do remote teaching. I shared a great retweet form Moia, and 80+ year old high spirited professor from Mexico I got to know form the UDG Agora Project Este es un virusito que anda buscando un descuidadito, pero si te cuidas, no va a encontrar un nidito y se va a morir solito. @ArturoZaldivarL @lopezobrador_ @BeatrizGMuller @nestora_salgado @SusanaHarp @NapoleonGomezUr @galvanochoa @AristeguiOnline @lydiacachosi @cogdog https://t.co/sIceH0ENrv— moiacost (@moiacost) March 21, 2020 Antonio noted the first COVID-19 death in Puerto Rico happened recently, a tourist from a cruise ship. I wondered if there was any singing from balconies in Puerto Rico. Antonio talked about planning for teaching his Italian film class– he was using some sites for co-watching films, and that he had plans to watch soon a Mario Bava movie with Jim Groom (who blogged it thus). Antonio’s strategies including Mixing asynchronous and synchronous. His INF115 New Media students, like always, publish to blog class summaries, with blog syndication to the main site, doing daily photos, and a class podcast project (see the class summary post by Antonio). He urges students to “enjoy” the boredom of these times, but also write about it in their blogs, be creative, do something to capture this time. Antonio relays that it’s important to talk about how we feel about this time. As optimistic as can be, Antonio says this is an ideal time to experiment. I talked a bit about grand plans to make the Daily Blank WordPress theme fully language localized so Una foto cata dia could be completely in Spanish (as it turns out this was way more work than anticipated, but still on the table. I also talked about wanting to tap into the new Creative Commons search API as a means to support a different version of pechaflickr. Postscript- om Three months I got as far as a crude prototype of fetching random images tagged “Landscape” which sometimes takes 3 reloads to cough something up. Antonio reported in Puerto Rico it feels like a sense of denia about the pandemic. At the time, despite any faux Presidential boasting of “the best testing” there were no testing kits in Puerto Rico. Results had to come from labs in Atlanta or elsewhere. So there is really no data on the extent of the virus in Puerto Rico, just knowledge than around March 21 there where ~20 people infected, and 1 death. While feeling that the Western way of life may be crumbling down, one positive of this time might be… less pollution (paging Dr Doom). Antonio’s recommendation for hanging on to optimism is… Cooking. He shared that the most bought item in Italy is wheat flour– people are discovering art of making pasta and bread. He referred me to Mark Bittman’s No-Knead Bread recipe, which thus became the name of this episode. Thanks again, my good friend, Antonio, and many sorries for taking way too long to post. Image Credit: No knead bread flickr photo by Ullisan shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog One of my mom's recently acquired phrases was her being "blown away" by something positive, and I am sure those would be her words at seeing what by internet friends are doing in her honor tomorrow. Thanks to Martha Burtis and Giulia Forsythe (I think those are the idea spawners), and idea is spanning to celebrate Mom's make the world better one bag of cookies at a time philosophy via the Day of CookieLove (see http://bit.ly/cookielove): In tribute to Alan Levine's mom, who passed away unexpectedly last weekend, we'd like to invite you to participate in Cookies for Cogdog. One of the wonderful things that Alan's mom did was bake chocolate chip cookies every Sunday and then give them away to strangers. This Sunday, September 4th, we're hoping to get people to follow in her footsteps. Bake some cookies and then brighten a stranger's day by giving them away. We'd joked in that February ds106 momcast about how to make the world better, and we really had hoped to get Qadaffi's home address so Mom could send him some cookies (I am sure he would have come to his senses after one bite): cookies for Qadaffi I am actually not going to be baking cookies, I am going to be watching for what happens (as an excuse, I am spending the weekend on my sister's sailboat) so please tweet and flickr and comment me your stories about what's happened. I'm watching #cookielove happening. Trend that, baby! Darren is on is way to China, but got his #cookielove doen early, thanks man! And I'd like to share a special thank you to Beth Kanter for her make Alan blush post "On Networks, Love, and Death: Cookie Love" This is all helping me so much through this time, especially facing up to next week when my sister and I head to Mom's house to handle the legal stuff. I was also moved in that ds106 radio session with Mom when she asked why I as archiving our conversation and I said something about someday she would not be there- damn I was not ready for it this soon. mom archived Thanks to everyone making and sharing cookies tomorrow, you are too making the world better, one shared cookie at a time. I am blown away. I’m back again for Intro to Guitar, with not much progress in a year, but I still love strumming around. I pretty much told the story of my Takamine last year (and it sounds similar to Irwin’s story). Those who have guitars they have held a lot know that familiar feeling. Mine has its share of scratches, and there is a camping story of the ding in the bottom right, and that G string peg which has needed replacement screws for decades. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Looking forward to another go around. Ignore this! I am testing Aaron's RSS to Email Aggregator, which should be able to send me RSS via email from selected blogs (in case this one). More details later if the experiment works, but I have to post a new message to see if I get the email update. I am sure that no one ius listening. Hey CogDogBlog, you seem to be devoid of not only a hello world, but not too many posts at all recently. So never going out of style (here) is the genre of Blogging about Not Blogging closely followed up by Blogging about Blogging (2007 version! 2010 version!) (and a cover song "Where Have All the Bloggers gone") No one has complained really except for me. And blogging grows more passe with each passing pass. Yet, as somewhere blogged in this mess, at some level, there are times I cannot not write. Get it? Probably not. I have a heap of open tabs or ones left as shards in my browser history that are whispering to be spun out here. I did spend time the last few months spinning out lonely posts in the OEG Connect space so it's not like no writing happened. I even gave it a metaphor treatment as another quiet space called the Idea Corner. As they say... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqxqwxMf6V4 This blog... not dead yet. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/46083237704 Hi Out There flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Pesky WordPress bugs, this is how we take care of them. It's all about isolating the problem, some keyword searching, and a smattering of luck. This post just for my own reference. I'm helping my friend Mariana Funes with a collection of sites in her WordPress Multisite at http://marianafun.es (note she is using my WP-Dimension theme for a landing domain page). Another site in her fleet uses a premium theme that she is fond of; but one her course sites a few of her protected posts where just ignoring the built in WordPress functionality that provides it. I tried the regular stuff, flicking off plugins, deleting cache and cookies. No change. Then I tried swapping the theme; and boom! It worked. So now I know it's a theme issue. But what in a theme would make it not provide built in WordPress core code for password protected posts? These searches did not get me much closer: wordpress protected post not working wordpress password protected page still visible wordpress password protected page not asking for password In sifting through the results for the third search I hit on something that seemed on track from StackExchange: Ended up discovering that the template needed the content() function in it for the password prompt to appear. For those that are in my situation and need to password protect content or PHP scripts in a whole template, this works http://wordpress.org/support/topic/346373 The link did not work, but in combing through the theme's templates, I saw in content-single.php that the way the posts content was being displayed was a bit different than normal: echo apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content); which I think applies a few more text checks (?). I tested by commenting out this line and replacing with: the_content(); and Boom! Now we were getting the proper display, not seeing the content, but instead: But how to fix? Ideally I would go make a child theme that would have the replacement for this file. That's the clean way. But for a short term and quicker fix, I did What You Should Not Do, edited the theme file, replacing the original line with: if ( post_password_required() ) { the_content(); } else { echo apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content); } It seems to work. I left a comment on the theme author's site in Theme Forest, it seems like something they should fix, with more awareness of any implications of my hack. But who would have known that password protection was tied to the way WordPress content is rendered? Now I do. You too, my odd reader who made it to the bottom of this post. Hi. Featured Image: Pixabay image by TambiraPhotography shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. This Tuesday marks the culmination of our second year of the UDG Agora project, maybe one of the best projects I have been ever part of for professional, collaborative, cultural, and human reasons. It is also one that will likely never make a splash in any academic marquee publishing space. The project is a significant investment by the University of Guadalajara, the large multicampus public university that serves over the state of Jalisco in Mexico. The enrollment there is well over 100,000 students including a large virtual university. I bet most people have never even heard of UdG. Somehow in the mantra of the affordability of higher education "crises" this university charges no tuition for Mexican students (students pay fees and books, about US$70-200). The UDG Agora project's aim is to improve the teaching practices of professors through development of mobile learning technology and student-center learning design. The Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) is managing the project in cooperation with the Coordinación de Innovación Educativa y Pregrado (CIEP) at UdG (see a JIBC news announcement of the project or presentations last year for OpenEd15 and one for Conectactica). Okay that is the long and windy intro. ¡Vamonos! Why is a project for faculty development in Mexico is being managed by an institution from Canada, and led by a group of North American educators who are not fluent in Spanish? Mine is not to ask why. I understand that UdG has a strong interest in a larger profile as an international university, and thus wants more professors able to teach in English (sigh, that is convenient for us, but says something about the world). They wanted this program delivered in English. Among professors UDG selected to participate in the Diploma program, 315 of them in 2015 and 85 in 2016, many were largely bilingual, but not all. On our side, some of our team was somewhat able to make their way in conversational Spanish (Tannis Morgan and Brian Lamb), a fun mix of Portuguese flavored Spanish (Nancy White), and as fluent as a 3 year old (me). For an optimally, ideally designed program, everyone would be fully bilingual. But we had to make do. For the in-person sessions we ran in July 2015 and Jun 2106, we did have on-site translators, equipped with microphones and headsets for participants who needed our English translated into Spanish, and sometimes for Spanish to be translated into English for us. I have to admit, hearing the live translation, I felt like I got about 40% what was being said. We made do. But do not get me wrong, our translators were heroic, and in typical fashion I found among my Mexican colleagues, there was never an attitude of "I only do what's in my job description". My main translator, Jorge, ended up being as much a coach and helper with the participants trying to figure out iPads and apps and twitter and google drive [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] plus he volunteered to do an audio track for my Edupunk Mockumentary. In July 2015, our hosts took Brian Lamb and I one night to a local cultural event in Guadalajara... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The next morning I got a big response when I told my workshop: Anoche fui a la lucha libre y aprendí muchas nuevas palabras en español "What words do you learn?" "Tell us!" We had help in 2016 from UdG staff like our co-facilitator Kike (Enrique) - he wrote and delivered a few of our studio (workshop) sessions in Spanish, helped so much in communicating in person, and online, and in our Google hangouts. The activities we ran during our in-person sessions we called studios, and in each one, participants tried new technologies and posted their work into a DS106 assignment bank themed site we called a Challenge Bank. I added the Google Translator Wordpress Plugin to provide both a Translate button on all pages (bottom right), but it also has a shortcode I use to put a link to translate into Spanish in the top menubar. Of course, it's not perfect, but we make do. The online portion of the program, 8 weeks each year when we ran weekly Google hangouts and invited participants to ask questions, share ideas, and give each other feedback in an online community hosted in discourse that we called dilo. Naming that was another language thing. In July 2015 I asked a few of our hosts what we should call the space-- I did not want to use an English name. And it needed to be short, because it would be in the URL. This again was where Kike helped us out, suggesting the name "dilo" which he said means "say it." The expression is well known as a shout out to musicians by Mambo band leader Pérez Prado. And there is serendipitous irony, as for some reason, my parents or grandparents had a few Pérez Prado albums that I now own. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Like elsewhere in our Agora space, we encouraged out UDG Agora participants to talk in Spanish there. As we did too on our weekly Google Hangouts. In 2015 we had a nice weekly progression (video archive) from mostly us English speaking facilitators to later dominated by our Spanish speaking participants: For the 2016 series, there was a pattern in out format where we might launch the discussion with one or two questions in English, but our guests would go into full discussion mode in Spanish. It is after all, not for us. Another nice addition this year was a number of hangouts where the where in the classroom to hear as well from the students who were trying the new activities their teachers were implementing. Obviously most of the tweets by our participants, and their students as well are and should be in Spanish... There is a phenomena where even professors from 2015 doing activities this year have their students mention some of us, we we often get a burst of student memes, videos, projec links. The Twitter translator helps me understand most of what I read. https://twitter.com/Topete_V/status/805500547587444736 https://twitter.com/memob9/status/804823241348890625 https://twitter.com/karlosrage/status/804125588420075520 https://twitter.com/Marisol_CR97/status/802372219477180416 https://twitter.com/AnaPaulaViZA/status/799475970944049152 https://twitter.com/chepe120396/status/799363778613690368 If I responded, I would do so in some mixture of English and Google Translate flavored Spanish. In twitter, we make do. At the end of the project, participants are asked to share the results of their implementation projects in a public site we called Comparte (this is an instance of the TRU Writer SPLOT, with a few special modifications for the project). Here I spent the most effort to make the site in Spanish, there is no reason their reports should be in English. Again with the help of Kike, I translated as much of the Writer theme interface as possible, and also attempted to get most other elements translated as well (I keep finding a few I missed). The instructions are in both Spanish and English; last year, Brian and I sat down with Kike and did a screencast to help explain the wahy the site works, again in both languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-tdveG775g A feature I added this year was the enabling of the WP Post-Ratings plugin, so anyone reading a report can rate them on a 1 to 5 scale. For fun, I found out how you can add your own ratings scale, so, we have a rating of 1 to 5 tacos: We would love to have more people add some taco ratings, but more importantly add some comments as feedback to the reports in comparte. If you cannot read Spanish, then use the built in option to translate the reports. You can respond in any language you like. Not being fully conversant in a language may be a barrier, but it also became a sign of everyone's efforts, facilitators and participants, to try that much more to understand. There is a universal language of humor we enjoyed... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] ... the language of creativity [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] ... the language of surprise [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] ... the language of collaboration [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] ... the language of open sharing [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] ... the language of succeeding where you thought it not possible [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Without full fluency in languages, we did much more than making do. Top / Featured Image: flickr photo by me https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/27642494901 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license “US Navy 110202-N-9268E-007 Sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) help build a home for a mother currently raisin” by U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Cmdr. Karen E. Eifert Heading into a latter (not last, not ending, not over) phase of the You Show, in unit 5 we offer/ask participants to consider how they move a site that looks pretty bloggy into something that might be outwardly facing more like a portfolio or informational web site. As part of this, I have been offering people individual sessions for a blog “make over” where we talk about what they would like to have the site do, what they have done already, and then work with them on either picking a new theme, tuning up the one they have, and building out structures like pages, categories, menus. To that end I have been fleshing out the two demo sites in our trubox server that one that shows off the features of themes in a normal blog and a copy of that site in one that lets you see it set up with a static front page. The first volunteer was Denise. Her blog is hosted on WordPress.com and it was a chance to look at the themes I reviewed there (see the second fold out breakdown sheet of unit 5). Here is the “before” photo And after, where we applied the Cubic theme found on wordpress.com No she still has some work to do, adding featured images, but it certainly moves away from the sequential text heavy / side bar on the wide look of a typical blog. I recorded our entire session using QuickTime player in screen recording mode. The video ended up being over 3 Gb, so I compressed it a bit to upload to YuTube; the details of the text on the screen might be blurred, but form an audio and what you see you should be able to follow the (haphazard) steps: Watch her blog unfold at https://dkat2015.wordpress.com/. I also did a session with Michelle for her blog, hosted on TRUbox. She has been doing well to explore the Baskerville theme, but she wanted something more in line with the One Pager / Landing Page type design that opens with a big image (she has some incredible photos from her year of international travel). This is what we started with, which to me already looks good: As she described what she wanted, it really reminded me of the Moesia Theme I am using on this blog, so we decided to give that a go, and I showed the stops on how that theme is set up via the Customizer area. Here is how it looks just after the session. It’s just a start: I started a screen cast recording but QuickTime Player crashed after about 10 minutes; this is what I did save Follow Michelle’s progress at http://michelle.trubox.ca/ Now the look of the makeover is just one part. I spend time trying to help them think about the structural set up related to the kind of site they want to make. What I find is that people get really confused about the difference between creating content in WordPress Pages versus Posts. Most seem to think first of Pages, and there is the naming convention since we call most things on the web “pages”. Pages make sense, and then people make a lot of pages, and make incredible nested structures of subpages. This is useful for content where the order of things matters, and where a structure like a table of contents or and index works best. I use it on the you show in the Units and the Guidebook, and I make use of the Page List plugin to generate automatically index lists or entire site maps. Denise had started with Pages for each of things that she wrote. Then she made a page that was a table of contents for 3 short stories. And she create manual links to those stories and manually added them to the menu. Single pages- for an About, a Bio, a list of publications, stand alone content works. But when you start making a structure, Pages get cumbersome, and you have no means of organizing like categories and tags. You cannot put a Page in more than one place in a hierarchy. So I show people how to set up categories to group things, and how if you write things as posts, you can put them in a category (or more than one), and the archive link for that category then serves to generate dynamically everything that has been published in it. For Denise we set up a generate category for Writing, and then subcategories for what she knows of now as the topics of her writing, like “Poems” or “Cats” or “Research”. The thing about subcategories is that anything she publishes in the “Cats” category shows up as well in the more general “Writing” category. Michelle had a different need. She too started writing a bunch of pages, and hanging them off of the menu. She wants to write about different facets of her instructional design work, like “Learning Design” and maybe “Assessment”. Then she wanted to add examples, and things she does in these areas as she goes. My suggestion was to write a general static Page about the topic, like she has done for Learning Design. Then as she has content to add that supports it, do them as posts in a Learning Design Category. We can add to her sidebar a widget (using Flexible Posts Widget plugin) that lists the most recent posts in that category. And with JetPack plugin, we can use its visibility module to make it so that widget only shows up on that one page. There is a lot people can do beyond the Post – Post – Post default set up of blogs. But there’s a lot to grapple with: The differences between posts and pages. Most themes do not show off all their features when you preview them. And finding where to activate or set them up us wading between the Customizer and some gargantuan theme options panel. Or the theme is set up where it requires certain pages set up with special template settings. Bottom line, the theme preview often does not show off all of its features. Menus are confusing at first because by default they just appear. It’s easy to show people how to set them up, but on an intuitive level, its a step and a half. Widgets get baffling and plugins seem like they are from outer space. Sure WordPress.com is drop dead easy to set up, its free, and then you want to do a simple thing like change the color of a font or background, or enter some custom CSS and BAM! It’s upsell time. Upsell here, Upsell there. I’m hoping these bursts of one hour coaching can nudge people up the slope of blog skills. This stuff takes time and practice. But after a makeover, they can feel so good about their own blog self. Creative commons deviant art image by Sauriv One can hope. Just what I needed in the middle of a work day- another interesting web tool. But there is this itch when I find these, and the scratch says, "Hmmm. Must blog this.... must .... blog.... this...." So how do you know if something is "bigger than a breadbox"? You can guess or measure. Sizeasy is billed as atool to help when you are shopping online- like how big is that gizmo when the web catalog has "dimensions: 128x32x87cm"?? This site allows you to enter those exact dimensions, and then either compare it to something else or to an object of known dimensions. it generates it as a 3D view, and you can rotate to compare widths, heights, etc. So, in a quick play, I entered (guesses) for the dimensions of say, a refirgerator, and compared it to a mattress and a plasma screen: But the neat thing is that when people create their comparsions, they are saved on the site, and thus - a user generated collection of size comparisons, like Box Of Matches vs iRiver s10 vs Ipod Shuffle And there's a lot of saved comparisons for devices like: iPhone vs Blackjack vs Treo 750 vs Mogul vs Touch Fujitsu P1610 vs Kohjinsha SH6 vs Asus R2HV vs Samsung Q1 Ultra vs Fujitsu U1010 Pack Of Playing Cards vs HTC S720 vs HTC Titan vs HTC Libra vs KRZR vs Samsung i760 vs Samsung i730 Canon HV20 vs Sony HDR-HC7 vs Panasonic HDC-SD5 I'm not exactly sure why I find this interesting, but its a novel concept. Linktribution to .... well I cannot linktribute. I found this in the September issue of MacWorld, but their web site only has the August issue on line. How Web 1.0 is that? Paper before web? In exploring some new tools for rich media publishing, I took a return visit to http://jux.com a site for publishing magazine style media sites, that fill the screen. In many ways, it could be a blog-ish like thing, or a portfolio, or a tumblr that is not just another tunblr. Maybe I don't know what it is, that's why I play with it. Each time you reload the front page, the items shuffle around a bit. And it also changes the display to fit a mobile browser You have 6 different kinds of content, slideshows, single photos, video, articles (like a blog post), countdown (not sure yet what that is), and blockquote. Images can be uploaded or yanked from photo sharing services; videos can come directly from youtube or video. There are some basic layout editing tools for fonts, size, colors (the fonts seem not all work across browsers)- not super sophisticated, but to me, geared towards doing simpler layouts. So for my experiment, I am creating another site for the StoryBox, and playing with releasing some media that is from inside the box (single photo and a slideshow) and other things like the mashup I blogged about recently. Jux also offers embed tools (though it seems to curiously be available only to the author when logged in, WTF?), like this summary of the PirateBox (which sadly is cutting off the bottom of the text, the font sizing from jux appears to be inconsistent). i'm going to monkey a little more with this as a publishing tool, it has a very "un-web page-ish" feel that appeals to me. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A fitting end to the first week of the tour. Five days, 4 locations, 2 cities, 13 presentations. And now for a break in the action, a chance to catch up (whatever that means) sleep late (sort of) and relax at my friend/host Nigel Robertson's home in Hamilton. The sessions Friday were at his spot, University of Waikato, and we toasted that with some Good George brew at the campus pub. The plans for the trip included both the front end weekend (before the talks) at Nigel's as well as this middle weekend, I imagine chances to tour around, hike, etc. I did not count on getting to New Zealand in the middle range of a marathon running cold, so the first weekend was squelched with me being kind of sick, and the second with me kind of tired. Still, we enjoyed home cooked food, and just relaxing, being kept well anointed with a stream of Nigel's eclectic beer collection. On Saturday morning I had a wonderful breakfast meetup at "Jacks" with Friends Jenny and Terry, who I last saw here in Hamilton when I did a talk at Wintec in 2004 creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog We've still not sorted out when, but think it was 2002 or 2003 that they came and visited me in Strawberry, when Terry had a business trip somewhere out West. Then Nigel and family took me out for a visit to Raglan, starting with a fine Roti lunch at a place called "The Shack". I had learned at my breakfast that Jenny and Terry had taken me to Raglan in 2004 but I had no memory at all. We started hiking from a parking area where we went through some bush and over the ridge to the beach; but at the top of the ridge the rain busted out and we took shelter in a somewhat enclosed metal barn. The rain let up (as it does) and we found that the back of the barn had a huge graffiti message of "Shark Gong", here nicely placed at the end of the rainbow creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog We made it across to the view over the beach, and the rain returned; once again we took shelter (this time in the resttooms). After that, we made our way down to the black sand beach, and the sky then opened up clear. The surf was crazy crazy rough creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Right after the place where Nigel's son played on this big rock... creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog .. he got stranded on a higher pile of a large log; a series of two huge waves crashed in amd almost went over the boy. It was a bit scary for all. Once home, it was again and relaxed night of food, beer, music, and looking up weird facts on the web. Yep. I had given Nigel a special Arizona treat; a lollipop with a scorpion inside, which Gus made a big show of eating. He also got curious about the Storybox, and even tossed in a few pictures before I left Sunday creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Nigel then drove me back to Auckland, where I would be based for the second week of the trip. That was the weekend of recharge, and by the end, pretty much the droop and dreck of the cold had gone away, where0ever is the place they go. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I really appreciated and cherished the conversations and low key time spent with Nigel and his family, adding to the long list of my internet friends whom I've shared spaces and memories with in their homes. That's been a real (like genuine) rich part of my experiences. And I am lining up more. Now... on to week 2. Setting Up Gigapan by cogdogblog posted 22 Jun '08, 8.37pm MDT PST on flickr I set out today to give a test ride to a new camera device, the GigaPan, a computer controlled camera mount designed to make large detailed images of landscapes and such. However, it;s a long story, but I am without my spare battery and charger for my Cabon Powershot (left it in some hotel on the east coast), so I did not have juice for a panorama. This spot is on the edge of the Mogollon Rim looking south over the town of Pine, Arizona. I will return when I have juice! I am fairly sure I would lose my own head were it not attached. Sometime earlier this year, I lost the battery charger that came with my Canon SD800, and had a generic one purchased at Best Buy (I had ordered an original Canon one, but accidentally gave my PO Box instead of my street address, and it got lost on the UPS delivery machine when I was away on travel). Well sometime during my 2 week east coast trip, I left my spare battery and my charger in one of the 4 hotels I was at. So when I went out to test this Gigapan gizmo, I knew the batter was below 20%, and that last bit went fast (burned during the set up portion). So on order for delivery is my 3rd charger and battery ;-) I was really hoping to be able to share my first Gigapan image- I was introduced to this by Keene Haywood from UT Austin who showed me the stunning images and annotation zooms you can do with the online panoramas (check out http://www.gigapan.org/ ) and he made some special arrangements to get me one of the last ones from their beta, and he brought it to New Jersey to get it to me. So although the camera failed, I did enjoy watching how the GigaPan rig did move and snap the shutter, just like a good little robot. With this and the Panoramio site I stumbled across yesterday, I am very interested in this process of photography connected to places. Hopefully, with a new battery (and a fully charged spare, plus i ordered an 8 Gb SDHC card for maximum storage), I'll have images in a few days.