Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
CogDogBlog a la iPhone by cogdogblog posted 16 Mar '09, 8.54pm MDT PST on flickr Thanks to Andy Rush for pointing out the WPtouch plugin which with a few clicks gave me this cool styled iPhone version of my wordpress blog (also Android phones see it as well, I understand). Oh this is so sweet! I am about to set this up on about 5 NMC WordPress blogs. The beauty of this plugin is that you upload it, optionally tweak a few settings in a WordPress settings pane, and your site is revved up for the mobile audience. I messed about 15 minutes with the PhotoShop template and made a custom icon, which not only appears here but also becomes the default icon when I make this a bookmark on the home screen of my iPhone. Harkening back to my rant about I'm a WordPress, You're a Drupal I am shrugging my head because doing this equivalent process on a a drupal 5 site is going to take hours of major coding, theming, CSSing, and likely cussing. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Little Wide World During a presentation last month for the TCC World Online Conference a participant noted in the chat with some irony, that despite the unconventional form and function of ds106 I pointed them to a traditional (long) syllabus for my 2013 class. I said that it was a university course at UMW, so it needed a syllabus. Somewhat later (like yesterday while sitting on a beach) it struck me that it's another case of Korzybski's line of the map not being the territory - the syllabus is not the class, the experience, but some representation of it. In wrapping up a year's experience teaching ds106 I was thinking of how the syllabus was like a mode of bread making, following someone else's recipe, but changing up the ingredients and the process, iteratively, and getting one's hands in the dough. And each time you bake, you tweak. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Ben Ward So down the post I am going to write up some of the things that went into the class map, how it evolved; there is stuff here that is not explicitly in the ds106 assignment bank that may (or not) be of value to someone else. But there is something else. I remain astounded that anyone with a fully functioning neocortex talking seriously about MOOCs being some model of saving educational costs when the word is each course rings up a tab of $250k (edx) or even more. What does an institution get for dropping a quarter of a million per course? I can tell you what you do not get- an ongoing open sharing of the processes, of what worked, what did not work. Not a Udellian narrating of the process. It's more like another loaf of pre-packaged Wonderbread off the racks. And it ties back to what Leslie Madsen-Brooks recently summarized eloquently in using UMW as a case example of innovation on higher education. That's right, look beyond the Ivies and the Silicon Valley darlings, and you land at a tiny, public liberal arts college in Virginia. Jim Groom writes it all in the title- the Innovation isn't Technical, It's Narrative. I spent 6 months working at UMW thinking they had some magic in the water (did not taste any). But it's a culture of open sharing, not the final products, but the makings thereof. It's not a mindset of saying, "Look what we experts hand you like Greek gods", it's an ongoing narrative of trying, asking, failing, reflecting, of process, not just product. And so, for your $250,000 course, do you get the story of how the sausage was made? Or just sausage? When my Fall 2012 ds106 class rolled around, I realized it was ridiculous for me to proffer a definition of what "Digital Storytelling" is- a place where most courses start as their map. My map for it was- I don't know what it is, but we will spend 16 weeks asking the question again and again. Learning should never be an end game of an answer, but the quest, right? So for ds106, you have a history (at least all the bits I could find) of the class back to Spring 2010, it has its own digital story. You get 9 iterations of the class at UMW, both 16 week semester versions, and the summer "performance" types. The syllabus I have been using is part of a lineage that goes back to the beginning, with changes incorporated along the way, and not just mine, but the ones of co-teaching along side Jim and Martha Burtis. I will add that this course asks a lot of the students. We tell them up front, the scare email I learned from Jim. I encourage newly enrolled students to drop the course. We don't want them in there without knowing the demands. And as usual, the end of class feedback is usually of the of "this is way too much work for a 100 level class". It's usually, but not always followed up by a "but I learned so much". I felt less bad about this for Spring 2013- Nearly all of my students were seniors, getting their last credits in. They are experienced students. But there is something else that ought to be its own post-- I firmly believe that learning should be hard. We need to push learners- not make it hurt or hard just for the sake of being hard, but I feel like a lot of education hinges on making it easy, not hard. What accomplishment is truly worth achieving if it is easy? Also, note that my year of ds106 includes teaching it once as face to face, and 3 semesters (one a 10 week summer session) as a fully online class. In all cases, 90% of my students finished and passed (out of 25 students). There was no change in that in an online class. A cornerstone of the students work is a weekly summary of their work as a blog post on their blog. It was Martha's idea that we require them to enter that as a URL in Canvas to document their assignment work for the week. I still am in favor of this approach- I get a snapshot of their blog at the time of submission, I can review and give some grade, and students get a better measure of where they stand. I can comment there on things might not do on their blog, and it makes the final grading really straight forward. The downside is I have a glut of work, since 90% of their blogging happens in the last 2 days of the week. I read easily over 1200 student blog posts this semester. So here's a bit of over the shoulder analysis of my most recent syllabus for Spring 2013. We do not do a tremendous amount of reading chapters or articles in the course. We have no textbook beyond this free one called "The Open Web". There are weeks when their are required viewings of videos or audio content, but the gist of the course is making stuff, and writing in their own digital space about the process of making stuff. The other thing I love about the class is that I am not teaching software. We do not require tools they should use. They can use whatever software they oen for image, audio, video editing; we provide a resource of open source and free web based media tools. They qiuckly learn to first try finding the answers to using tools themselves. There are more how to tutorials out there than I could create in a lifetime. I should also note that my online class has no weekly lectures. All of the class is done by a weekly post of work to do. I offered each week an optional live session on Google Hangout, themed as "The ds106 Show" (students had a participating requirement to join me for at least one episode). I found these incredibly valuable to have conversations with the students and the open participants who joined me. The production of these was nil -- my cost was I decided to do a series of silly promo videos for each week I also set up optional open drop in labs for students, but participation falls off quickly as their schedules get busy. The keys to me are frequent commenting on their blogs, and responding to their questions on twitter- that community space only makes sense if they see a quick value to it. Weeks 1 & 2: Bootcamp This is an idea that came from Martha and I teaching in parallel in Fall 2012. The first two weeks are focused on getting the students up to speed quickly in managing their install of Wordpress, blogging, organizing things in categories, customizing with themes, plugins, widgets. We wanted to get this out of the way, so in week 6 I was not having to remind them about using hyperlinks and embedding media. I start them early with an understanding what I want in their writing up assignments, that its more than just posting a piece of media. They start right away doing Daily Creates. In the first week, I made sure there was a simple video one as we saw it powerful to be able to see each other and the place we did our work. I would link to it, but YouTube gas totally fubared their own tagging system, so finding videos by tag is seriously broken. They are asked to look at advice from pervious students, something they will come full circle to do at the end of the class (another brilliant Martha Burtis idea) Students love the Daily Create.. for weeks. I usually require 3-4 per week. They are not graded on what they do, but I give feedback. Their attitude towards it seems to plateau mid-semester. I can tell when they reach this point when it starts to look more perfunctory. Not all the students get to that point, but I keep tabs on it, and drop it as a required thing usually when we start doing video. I had the most blog ready set of students in my last class, liekly because a good number of them had been writing on UMW Blogs for 4 years. That goes a long way to explain the "water" theory at UMW (it's not in the water, it's in the Wordpress). In the challenge part, their last bootcamp task is that we give them an assignment (make an animated GIF) and do not provide any instructions on how to do it (besides a few reference links). The goal here is not the media they create, but that they learn the "ds106 way" of not expecting the course to provide all the steps, but to find their own way. Week 3: What is Storytelling? We finally get into the topic here. In semesters past, we had them read a selection from Bryan Alexander's excellent book but I got tired of seeing parroting of readings. They get some videos to watch that offer some insight (Kurt Vonnegot's Shape of Stories always a hit). I actually want them to blog their oen ideas on entering the course, of what storytelling conjures up, and what they think adding "digital" means. At the end of the semester I ask them to revisit this and reflect on what has changed, or not. They start ramping up their creating, with some story creating activities. Week 4: Introduction to Audio Martha and I moved audio earlier in the semester-- they get a heavy dose in the middle when they do radio shoes .Nearly every student dreads audio, and we thought by starting them earlier gives them a longer run with it. We introduce the mid term group audio show project so they can start thinking about it and forming teams, so the work is segmented in the next weeks when we move into visual and design activities. So we start like all of our media- an observation/listening activity. I have them listen to selected audio storytelling from This American Life, The Truth, and Radiolab, so they can start paying attention to the nuances they may not normally hear- use of music, cuts, overlaid tracks, sound effects (foley), ambient sounds. I use an edited down version of a Radiolab episode where I have marked these things to listen for as soundcloud comments http://soundcloud.com/cogdog/detective-stories-examples I ask them to listen to a few videos by the makers of these shows. And they get their first audio creation assignment, a five sound story. It's just to get them doing simple audio editing. Alsot every student dreads audio going in. It's the Rodney Dangerfield of media, it just gets no respect. By the time we move past audio, most of them have a new appreciation for it. A few still hate it. But I emphasize that good audio on its own makes other projects (e.g. when they do video). Weeks 5 and 6: Visual and Design These are often the favorite portions of the semester. The assignments here are fun and very doable. They get experience image editing; I really encourage them to use an editor that allows creating in layers (as it becomes obvious that stuff done in Microsoft Paint just looks crappy). They dont need Photoshop, GIMP has all they need, even if the interface can make you cuss, and the online editor pixlr is pretty darn sophisticated. Each week has a "Safari" type challenge, something Jim and I found worked well in our face to face class, was to give them a creative challenge to do in a limited time frame and using what was around them. Both of these fall into a meta layer of ds106 I call "Seeing the World Differently" -- students end up looking at their surroundings and noticing what they did not even see before. I want them to start using their cameras (or mobile phones) for going beyond snapshots, so provide them a collection of techniques to try. And one that I love, and the timing works for it, is the Valentine Day's challenge -- because it was created for us by a former ds106 student. Sarah contacted Jim in Spring 2012, and challenged our classes to modify some cheesy sappy valentine's day card with new captions. It's not a huge technical task, but doe shave them probing a bit more with their visual editing. For week 4, there is a "photo blitz", essentially a scavenger hunt of things to capture photos of in a 20 minute time span (their first and last images need to be a clock). Make an ordinary object look more interesting, almost supernatural. Take a photo that makes use of converging lines. Take a photo dominated by a single color Take a photo of something at an unusual angle Take a photo of two things that do not belong together. Take a photo that represents the idea of "openness" Take a photo that expresses a human emotion Take a photo emphasizes mostly dark tones or mostly light ones. Make a photo that is abstract, that would make someone ask, "Is that a photograph?" Take a photo of an interesting shadow. Take a photo that represents a metaphor for complexity. Take a photo of someone else's hand (or paw) The outcome is predictable, as they write of looking at their rooms, class buildings, campus in a new way. When we move into Week 6 and doing design assignments (the line between visual and design is always fuzzy), they are getting more experienced at picking things from the assignment bank, and writing them up. As a variant on the photo blits, there is a design assignment to review some design concepts outlined in a shared doc, and to find examples of 3 or 4 of them as they go about their week. Again, it's trying to see these design principles not in some book or video, but where they live. They add their example links to the google doc. They also get in here the specifications for the mid term group audio project- and they have to start their process in these weeks of visual and design. Weeks 7 & 8: Group Audio Projects This segment amps up the stakes, because not only do they have to deal with a media they still may dread, there is the expected dysfunction of group projects, and it is a segment where the deadlines are moved from weekly to having 2 weeks span (and this time, it was 3 because spring break was in the middle). The final audio shows are broadcast the week later on ds106 radio, an event I just love. Its fun because their work goes live, we challenge them to grow us an audience (I think we did top 30 listeners), but also because at least one team member has to join me live on the radio to talk about their shows. It is both pain and joy to see the group dynamics pan out. We had some drama this time around, and a lot of ideal group activity too. They have to figure out how to work together. I did not see any groups this time where it all fell on one person. And the production value this time was really high. It would be easier, if all they had to do was individual audio assignments, but the group dynamic is one of those things that are hard for them, yet the challenge is one of those growth ops. They also had their own audio assignments to do. One of the required one was taking a 30 second segment of a Charlie Chaplin sequence, and recoding the foley sounds that might work with the action (this idea came from Scott Lockman in Spring 2012 when my in class students performed their foley live). For this time around, their segment to do was based on a formula of what month was their birthday; I wanted a mix of segments for a later assignment. Week 9: Stories in and of the web This is one of those "only in ds106" ideas- that we have students explore how stories might be told within the construct of the web itself, within neither the comment space of sites, or of creatively re-writing web pages to tell a new story. We've come a long way since the first few times of wrestling with the Firebug tool, Mozilla's Hackasaurus is a gem of a tool, and students have a lot of fun seeing how they can recast a web page. Some of them get a better sense of how web content is assembled. Generally, most of them dont go as far as I would like with changing up a web page. To add some juice to student commenting (I still struggle for a magic postion to have them learn to comment just for the sake of commenting), I came up with a new idea- they were to create a fake persona and have that character leave comments (or engage with other fakers) on each other's blogs. That was a win. Week 10: Reading Movies Again, another level of noticing a media before starting to create it. I had a few required viewings on movie making, and yes, a reading of Ebert's How to Read a MOvie (sadly he passed away the week before!). I have an activity I came up with for Fall 2012 I am really happy with, the three part scene review. I provide a list of YouTube collections of famous movie scenes, and ask the students to view it 3 times and to record their thoughts: Turn down the volume, and notice the camera work- cuts, angles, character placement. Turn down the visual, and pay attention to just the audio- dialogue, foley, sound effects, ambient. Watch it normally, and comment on how the first two work together. Weeks 11 and 12: Movie Making Video editing brings together much of the semester so far, so their only task for these two weeks is doing video assignments from the bank. This time, I required them to do opening titles, closing credits, and I was looking for their writeups to reference sources for all of their video. I seemed to have to do less support for Windows Movie Maker (maybe because Andy Rush was my guest that week on the ds106 show). Weeks 12 & 13: Remix and Mashup The last content sections of the course, involved work that again continues movie editing in terms of putting together bits they have done all semester. I have to say after discussion a few weeks ago (was it Giulia Forythe or Micheal Branson-Smith when we hung out in New York?) who noted that students were doing remix/mashup work all semester long, and it might be artificial to present it as something of its own at the end of the course. Actually Brooke said it best: So, remixing. Like I said before, this week really didn't clear up what remixing really is. As I talked about in my video, is editing a photo I found on the internet remixing? I call it photoshopping. I don't even think there should be a name for either of those, to be honest. I'm taking a course on the Memory of the Civil War, and we've discussed a lot about how memory comes into being. Everything comes from somewhere. There are no original ideas. So why do we have to have a name for something we do naturally? Intrinsically, even? Is it because it has become part of the legal system that we need a name for it? I had them watch videos like Everything is e Remix and Remix Manifesto- I was lucky that Andy Baio's New Prohibition one came out that week, which may be the most insightful piece to see on the topic. Students had already been getting YouTube copyright flags, and of course they got mad. "Don't they know I am a student? I am not trying to make money. I am doing this under Fair use" And thats the crux of Baio's message- Fair Use is not a law. It offers no protection. All it provides is a way to argue a case if you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars defending yourself in court. I have to admit falling down on introducing creative commons and copyright like we typically did in earlier ds106 classes. I always found students did not really "get" creative commons just because I told them it was important. I had hoped to come back to it after they had a few rounds of creating with media, and they might reflect on the idea that they should have access to all media in their culture to create from. I cannot say I got to that message in the end. Most of them just wanted to know how to post their video and not get flagged for copyright- to complete the assignment. We do want them to have this experience of being flagged so they can question the laws, because its going to be on them going out in the world and making these changes our generation has failed to do. Week 15: Final Projects In lieu of a final exam, I have students complete a final project- the specs are shared with them 2 weeks earlier so they can get started. The first time I taught ds106, the projects were wide open as to what students could do, and so ended up their final products. Over the last few rounds, I had honed it. This time I asked them o start with a character to be the focus, the hero, it could ba real or fictional persona. Their story had to be told in multiple media created in response any of the ds106 assignments, but they had to put their character on an arc (Vonnegut's story shape was a useful reminder). They had to assemble it all in a single blog post that combined their embedded media with narrative of their blog post. They first had to write a post about their character choice, and that gave me room to suggest that the consider how to place their character in a different context or challenge than we know them. I asked them to surprise the audience, to play with reality. I was highly impressed with their output this time, I assemble all the stories in a storify. I also ask them to use categories on their blog to organize what they think of their best work, and lastly the "pay it forward" assignment of recording a message or media that represents their advice to future ds106ers. Whew this post was a marathon, and still feels like it is scratching the surface of the experience. I'm super proud of my students, even the one who's reflection considered the class busy work and recommended to future students "drop this course" ;-). It's not only the media they created but the extensive narration most of them did for their work- again, at UMW, that is what is in the water, the idea of narrating ourselves. There are pure chunks of golden bag substance on the way students articulated their experience. Yeah, and if anyone makes it this far, let it be known how crappy my breadmaking analogy is-- look at my bread! You could smell the self-righteous fuming over the intertubez when Evernote announced changes in their free plans. Here is a little lesson in human nature. No one likes having something taken away from them by someone else. It's easy to predict the reactions: Outright anger from people who used a product for years without paying for it. "How dare they take away something I never paid for"? Immediate digital panic to find alternatives, to jump to another product. How many "here are 8 alternatives to Evernote" posts flew out of the coop? Hurry quick, jump, change, right away NOW NOW NOW. I do have to say that their approach to doing this has been rather... douchy. Out of the blue getting an email warning me to upgrade or I won't be able to use the product on more than 2 devices, who the bleep ever thought this would not have pissed off anybody? I hope whatever consultants they hired or internal strategists came up with this are flogged with wet noodles. If you ever are going to change what you gave out for free, you better toss 'em a bone of some sorts. Like I said, when people have gotten comfortable with your free product, pulling the rug out is going to rile them. Has anyone at Evernote given their kid a toy and then yanked it away? How can you not expect tears? You better have more than puff like: Our goal is to continue improving Evernote for the long-term, investing in our core products to make them more powerful and intuitive while also delivering often-requested new features. But that requires a significant investment of energy, time, and money. We’re asking those people who get the most value from Evernote to help us make that investment and, in return, to reap the benefits that result. It's my hunch they knew this, and are willing to take pissing off people who never did nor never would give them money. Who needs leeches? Does anyone enjoy freeloaders? They want to roll with the people willing to pay some for the service. For me it bears more thought than a Brexit level logic stay or go decision. Just saying "swap for One Note or OSX Notes or Jiggly Wiggly Free Note App because it's still free" is not fully logical-- it really depends a lot on how much of Evernotes features you fully use. If its just a place to jot down notes, then heck, go to Google Docs and stop whinging. While I've had Evernote installed on several laptops and mobile devices for years, I have to say my use has been pretty minor. Like almost nil. I have an encrypted note with things like my frequent flier and prescription numbers as a handy place to always have them. I have a few scattered project notes. I've seen people really use it fully. I remember visiting Alec Corous and he showed me how he keeps a bunch of notes on all those YouTube videos he watches, organized in a way he can pull them out easily for his presentations. But I actually started using it in earnest when I started my new project with Creative Commons, both as a place to organize web sites (I clip with the Evernote tool, but also have an IFTTT recipe to cross post stuff with a certain tag from my pinboard account). I have been taking notes from conversations with folks I have been having, notes on meetings, and each week I have been writing up some bullet summaries of things I did. I have been tagging some notes, and I have a master "uber" note to act as an index. What works well is to be able to quickly cross link notes. That I can clip stuff easy from the web and add notes. That I can drag and drop images and media. That I can share notes with colleagues. More or less this is stuff I would trust before to my memory, or if I blogged stuff, or searching email. [caption id="attachment_58912" align="aligncenter" width="630"] sample weekly notes[/caption] It's not really blog stuff, just... well notes. But it's slowly settling into almost a working pattern, one that has helped already to locate references or ideas. Okay, I could likely do this in any of the "alternative" apps. But there's a cost of time spent transferring, time spent figuring out a new platform. But I am not quite feeling the imperative. I also have to say that the 2 device limit is not a crucial blow to me. I only need it on my work laptop and my phone. I don't need it on my old laptop, and certainly can pull it off my iPad. And since most of my stuff is text, I doubt I will bump into the storage limits. And if I do, well then I may just pay for the service if it is working for me. Stuff I pay for now is: Flickr Pro well heck, they only store, make searchable, sharable, like 45,000 of my photos over 12 years. And for all the crap flickr gets, when they last did some changes, free accounts got their limits boosted, not cut. The 1 TB for free is huge- I am maybe at 1.4 TB with my paid account. Pinboard because they brought back the simplicity yet insanely functional features to bookmarking, including importing all my stuff that piled up through the decline of del.ici.ous and the sense I never made of diigo. Totally worth it, and the guy behind it is a genius and a crazy thinker... who is currently playing shuffleboard in Antarctica vimeo -- well I needed a boost from the free account to share a large family video, and just kept the account at that level, because (a) one day I will get booted from YouTube; and (b) vimeo just seems classier and full of film buffs, not lunatics. There's more, but my brain is stalling. If I was organized, I'd have a note for it. Freemium models are a bit fraught-- we all enjoy getting great stuff for free, but somewhere bills need to be paid. And when you take away from something that was free without giving anything in return but words, well... expect a s***storm from the people formerly known as users. Nothing lasts forever, is the appropriate bumper sticker saying. And when the free rug gets tugged, it bears more thought than impulsive indignation and panic jumps. You might not be losing much, or you might adjust, or you might shrug it off. Or maybe you will come to an understanding of paying for a service instead of always expecting free rides. Top / Featured Image: This search took a few rounds of thrashing in the search box. I started with one on "not free", and almost went for the Stallman beer glass image for Libre not Gratis, but that was not the message I think I am aiming at. There were a few mime images that might have worked. Then I looked at few on search on "indignant" - still not feeling it. I got closer with searches on "forever" though a lot were a bit too romantic. Then way down the scroll I got this Creative Commons licensed deviantart image "nothing lasts forever" by purplehaze-gin -- perfect, and ironic in the body art metaphor. I'm getting ready for my February travel adventure, a month working with Antonio Vantaggiato at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in San Juan, Puerto Rico. On thing I will be doing is co-teaching his course Nuevos Medios Digitales y Redes Sociales – INF 115. IN fact, I am doing my "assignment" since he runs a Feed Wordpress aggregator, and I need a tagged post here to add to the mix. This week I got to see and talk to the students via Skype. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/689475123640827904 Antonio asked about setting up a Daily Create for the course. In past iterations of his course, he had his students do some daily photo sharing through flickr, and I offered to set up a Daily Blank site with a focus on daily photography challenge. The idea is for the students to practice their photo skills, observations of the world, but also share and engage with others via social media. I suggested calling it "The New Daily Shoot" in honor of the site that started a lot of this Daily stuff. But I have some qualms about the use of "shoot" as a gun reference. Maybe I overthink that. So I tried playing with some Spanish names with Google Translate and ended up with what might not be grammatically correct as Una Foto Cada día I populated the first week with some ones recycled from the original Daily Create's Photography category -- this worked well because I could pull responses as the example image. The first one is one I will walk the students through Monday, when they are in class. My plan is to have them do the challenge there in the moment. [caption id="attachment_52399" align="aligncenter" width="562"] #fotodia1 Compare Your Shoe With Someone Else[/caption] Yes, some people might say this is too easy. But my philosophy on creating Daily Creates is not to make them challenging, that if someone wants to do it quickly, they can take that route, but make it open ended enough that some people will take it in unexpected directions or intensities. That is, leave the making it challenging up to the person doing the assignment, not baked into the assignment. So in this case, I want one they can do right there in the classroom, but also where they have to do it with someone else. Yes, it's easy to make a photo of two people's feet together; that's a snapshot. But some may think about the positioning, or the background, or doing something wild with light or shadow, or maybe do it differently, like put their shoes on their hands or heads. In setting these up you have to think of the base tag the site will use, nothing too complex or hard to remember. I went with fotodia which will make the hashtags end up being #fotodia1, #fotodia2, #fotodia3. It's not a problem that it is used elsewhere in twitter, because the site does not just look for tweets tagged #fotodia1 they must also be sent to @Avbot2. If you are interested, and it is helpful for the students to get feedback from people outside their course, please responded before Monday to the first Foto Dia -- take a creative photo of your shoe next to someone else's and tweet it including #fotodia1 @Avbot2. And then follow @Avbot2 or the #inf115 tag to see the other ones we will be doing all of February. Please send me sympathy for having to spend the month of February in Puerto Rico! [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image Credit: I looked a while for a photo to represent this new web site, lots of people holding their camera (mostly male, and the ones with women looked more like fashion models) but loved this one for having a male and female figure, but she is more prominent-- flickr photo by ralphbijker http://flickr.com/photos/17258892@N05/2588342742 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license This will likely be a first and last blog entry referencing politics. I might be judged as apathetic, but I do my research quietly, make my decisions, and vote, without foaming at the mouth or making it an obsession. However, after some hasty mulling, I decided to share my summary of the political scene. We are in blandville. It is like going for ice cream and finding the 31 flavors are slight variations of vanilla. it is like a small town bar where they boast, "we have both kinds of music- 'Country' AND 'Western'". I feel like I am Charlie Brown listening to his teacher say, "Wahhh wahh waaaah wahh wahhh wahh wahhhh. Wah wahhh waaaaaaah waaah waaaah wawahhhh." It's hardly limited to the nationals- our local city councils, state elections are operating at the same level, but usually with less class and much less polish. I am not apathetic, I am numb. Anesthetized. I cannot say it bothers me as there are plenty of other things to absorb my energy, but politics is down past the bottom of the list. Yes, I would like some Vanilla number 16--- no make that Vanilla number 9-- in a cup-- no in a .... oh never mind. My oft repeated line this year is something about most enjoying the net based things that happen totally without provocation, plan, just spontaneous connectedness. I am sure that its maybe 3% of the general population that can really experience this with wide eyed excited wonder, and I am fortunate to know some of the best among that percentage. I was setting down to shoot down some emals, perhaps edit those audios I need to publish soon, like yesterday, and as the habit goes, I said, "I'll just check twitter quickly, just a minute to scroll." And there, in the 5 seconds ago, I saw Jen was linking to a ustream.tv channel she was broadcasting on. I'd not done hardly any ustreaming since my trip to Australia, and said, hey, I wonder how it works if you have multiple people broadcasting? So I flipped on my channel and we could pretty much talk back and forth, and she was relaying chats from ?? Alec Couros and/or Rob Wall?? So without knowing what else to do on camera, I reached for my prop, and brought Fresa on screen: (more…) A recent barking about "everything is a learning object", including my left big toe got some interesting responses-- sometimes you can slave over an important blogged item and get nary a trackback, but toss out something silly and it ends up down under somewhere. So part two to this escapade is "Everything is a weblog" including my right little toe (equal rights to all toes). Huh? Stephan Downes pointed his OLDaily today at what Syllabus magazine bills as a "blog"- Casey Green's "Digital Tweed" (same name for his column in the dead tree version of Syllabus). Now just because you call it a blog is it a blog? Does it hold up? It sure as beans looks to be pretty much a web forum very similar to phpBB, vBulletin, and sure enough you need only wade a few lines deep into the source HTML of Casey's alleged blog and there it is: <title>Syllabus Blogs: Digital Tweed (read only)</title><!-- Web Wiz Forums ver. 7.01 is written and produced by Bruce Corkhill ©2001-2003 If you want your own Forum then goto http://www.webwizforums.com --> Okay, let's dig into what we may look for as blog characteristics. Scalpel please. (1) It is chronologically organizaed. Well yes, I guess so. But so is any web board. (2) It represents the views of the writer. Well yes, Casey seems to be able to post, and he writes posts about things he is interested in. But ditto point above. (3) It automatically generates archives organized by time/topic. Hardly unless you would consider an entire blog to be its own archive. (4) It generates RSS feeds. Nope, as Stephan noted today as well as someone on the comments area at the so-called blog. No feed at all. How can you miss that technology trend? (5) It is open to comments. A very weak, meek yes. You have to register to post comments (a major dis-incentive that I would ever return is a required registration, fuggggetaboutit). And comments are not appended to the "posts" but filed in another forum. (6) It has lots of cat pictures and long references to grooving with friends down at the local coffee house. Not at all, not from a guy in tweed. Trackback? Dreamin'. Blogroll. Nada. Syndication? Hah. Well, you do get blinking ads. I could go on, but in my book it hardly fits the bill or captures any spirit of Jill's definition. Now this is not to say there is anything wrong with what Syllabus is doing, and Casey might develop a thriving web community in this space. All the power to him. But for Syllabus magazine, which purports to be near the cutting edge of instructional technology, to slap up a web BBS and call it a blog, well, I think it shoots any thin credibility they had out to the compost heap. With all the various free to low cost blogging systems out there, why? And people are dead on to say, where the *#^$ is the RSS? Somebody please buy them a ticket for the cluetrain. To close with a tune... This ain't no blog, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around No time for dancing, or lovey dovey I ain't got time for that now. So now, since any BBS on the web is a blog, e-Bay is a blog, the planet Mars is a blog, Wallace and Gromit are blogs.... make way for my right little toe, a blog it is. Flatter me and offer to ship a mystery box? At some level I was intrigued, but at the next level down, skeptical. Choose one - curiousity or caution? I went with the latter. In January I got an unsolicited email message from someone at Wix. (I respect their privacy, and changed the name). Hi Alan,My name is Nathan, and I'm a Creative Team Leader at Wix.com. I'm reaching out to you with something a bit different :)In the last few months, my team and I have been working on a new innovative concept. We have packed this concept into a free, no strings attached box that we’d love to share with you as one of our selected influencers from the Tech industry.I know the information I have provided you is basic, but the reason is that I do not want to ruin your experience (and let's be honest, what's more fun than being surprised on the holidays?)Would you be willing to share your address so we can send you the box?Important note: we will use your address for this purpose only.Wishing you the best and Happy New Year,Nathan Referring to me as one of the "selected influencers from the Tech industry" set off the most alarm bells. But so did giving out my address to a company I have never had a connection with. I know what Wix does, and have done what I could to support students who choose to use it, but the lack of good RSS feeds and a means to export content has made it low on my interest level. I ignored it. A second message came, same as the first, I thought I sent a reply saying "no without a clue of what's in the box." As I cannot locate it, that happened solely in my mind. I did want to know about the box, but it was hardly sufficient to bite off on what sounds like some marketing student's mid-term project. Then I forgot about the box that never came. Now I know from WP Tavern that I missed out on a pair of Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones as part of a spoof type video campaign aimed at making WordPress look bad. On one hand, it's maybe the kind of hijinks and weird videos I did as part of DS106, e.g. posing as a Teacher With No Name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHIUSNXl08k So who am I to criticize a company for taking on a non traditional ad campaign? Like others quoted in the follow-up piece as someone who has devoted much of their efforts to developing, creating in WordPress, it seems like an odd strategy. Did anyone else opt for the box? How are you liking the headphones? I'm glad I ignored the box and left it sitting outside perched on a boot.. I can't say I have any warm feelings at all for Wix, not that I did before. Featured Image: Perched flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by me wiping out the Amazon.com text and replacing it with the Wix logo in the email Nathan sent. Look, I'm no chemist. I did standard chemistry classes as an undergraduate students, and delved in through my major in Geology (what do you think rocks are made of?), courses in Geochemistry, did I take PChem? What I do remember is my 10th grade Chemistry teacher, Blooma Friedman, would not put up with any scientific nonsense. Every then and now, some image will be passed around on social media, where someone has taken a collection of related items, abbreviated them, put them in boxes, colored in a few, and called it a Periodic Table. The latest is a Periodic Table of Ed Tech (missing the Audrey-Hyphen) from some outfit called CB Insights: [caption id="attachment_57325" align="aligncenter" width="630"] It looks so scienc-y[/caption] It looks like the Periodic Table of Elements. It has rows of boxes with alphabetic symbols. Groups of them are color coded. To visualize the breadth and depth of the ed tech landscape, we used CB Insights data and analytics to create a periodic table of ed tech startups and investors. The table below covers startups targeting a variety of ed tech categories, as well as top exits and top investors in the space What data is shown here? They put 130 companies in a chart and colored it in. I rather enjoy that the location of Lanthanide series (bottom two rows) are "largest investors" and "top exits" (whatever that means). In the Periodic Table of the Elements, these are the "rare earth" elements, though they are not extremely rare. Rather fitting, if you have the Insights to look crap up on Wikipedia, you find that these "largest investors" and "top exits" are located in a place that: could be interpreted to reflect a sense of elusiveness on the part of these elements, as it comes from the Greek ????????? (lanthanein), "to lie hidden". But let's go to school. Read along with me. The periodic table is a tabular arrangement of the chemical elements, ordered by their atomic number (number of protons), electron configurations, and recurring chemical properties. This ordering shows periodic trends, such as elements with similar behavior in the same column. There is a logic to the structure, not just a bunch of pretty boxes. The order of the elements has meaning-- it is by increasing atomic number, or the number of protons in the nucleus of the element's atomic structure. The reason it is even called a periodic table is because of the repeating periodic patterns that are related to the number of electrons in their outermost "shell" -- the columns or groups have meaning, they all have the same number of electrons on that shell, and these repeat in the same pattern as you go across the rows (or periods). The periodic table can be used to derive relationships between the properties of the elements, and predict the properties of new elements yet to be discovered or synthesized. The periodic table provides a useful framework for analyzing chemical behavior, and is widely used in chemistry and other sciences. Mendeleev did not just put elements where they might look nice, it's a great bit of scientific thinking, he arranged all the known elements by these characteristics, what was genius is he was able to predict the properties of elements that had not yet been discovered. CB Insights has a whole slow of these. But do us a favor, if you are trying to show us groups of companies or technologies that have commonalities, draw a freaking Venn diagram. They are not the only ones out there that try to make stuff look more sciency. It's crept into Wordpress https://twitter.com/mburtis/status/732569274015944704 At least the Periodic Table of Wordpress Plugins has a reason to the order of their elements/plugins, the sequence is by increasing number of downloads. But what is periodic here? That means repeating patterns. You cannot be a Periodic Table without Periodicity, then it's just a table, and then it really is just a list. Periodic tables of meat. Periodic Table of Minecraft. Periodic table of Swearing. Periodic Table of M&Ms. Periodic Table of the Empire Strikes Back. I do like the Periodic Table of Canadian Elements. Lest you think I am serious... I am a big fan of the Dog Table of the EleMUUTS, and while I can find the Australian Shepherd (As) I cannot find Felix's other half, Catahoula Leopard Dog (Cl?), so his mix is AsCl. But if you are going to parade something as like a periodic table, do it in a manner that respects the brilliance of Mendeleev, not just a bunch of letters in boxes. Top / Featured Image : It's not even good at meta, but yeah, toss some pictures of tables into colored boxes, and that makes it a periodic table. Found on a site called "Pleated Jeans" with no attribution of any kind. That must make it copyrighted, eh? Looking at the photo I think of my little grandmother as a remixer. It came in an envelope of memories she share; the photo on the left of her was labeled "New Years Party" and I can only guess by her hair that maybe it was late 1980s or early 1990s. She had indicated on the right, with the pen circles was a photo of her and her husband, my grandfather Abraham, dated 1942. They were styling in dress, probably headed out for some social event. I am not sure if in 1942 they were still living in Newark, NJ. By my calculations, they would have been maybe 37 years old here? Today marks the day 13 years ago my grandmother finally faded out of this world, and I believe almost 98 years old. She had outlived all of her brothers and sisters, outlived her husband by 47 years, and even outlived both of her own children. I have the envelope this photo and a few others she sent to me; the postmark pinpoints it to December 1999. It maybe be the last letter I got from her. I am holding it, and looking at the effort it probably took her to write out. This is one of those things that you want to hug the post office for even being able to decipher it's destination. [caption id="attachment_59225" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Grandma's writing on the last letter she sent me[/caption] I have the letter inside too; she says on page two "I am enclosing some of my treasured memories." She knew how much I enjoyed hearing her stories of growing up in poverty, about her father the chess champion widower, about she and my grandfather's lives in the first half of the 20th century. She knew from 1994 I was interested when I recorded on a micro-cassette her stories, which I now have digitized. This. I can listen to her voice from the past talking to me now. Her sing song lilting voice. [caption id="attachment_59226" align="aligncenter" width="508"] Page 1 of grandma's letter, mostly a telling of what she had been doing.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_59227" align="aligncenter" width="508"] Page 2 of grandma's letter from 1999.[/caption] She mentions a letter to my father from her father- I am pretty sure I have this in my Dad file. I think it was some kind of re-assurance when my Dad dropped out of university. "Also a Valentine I got from My Husband" -- I hope I have that one too. Look how she ends the letter: I'm not sure you knew I graduated from Johns Hopkins class of nurses aides. Actually I forgot this. I vaguely remembering stories that she had volunteered at hospitals in Baltimore. I have this photo of her dated 1946, again dressed up, and out somewhere-- still boggling that she is younger than I am now. How does one imagine one's grandparents as young adults? [caption id="attachment_59228" align="aligncenter" width="311"] Grandma in 1946, that would make her 41, much younger than I am now.[/caption] Or here in 1955, a photo labeled "Ridgewood Avenue", in the Liberty Heights area of Baltimore, the house my parents lived in when I was born, but we moved when I was only 2, so I only have photos for memory. She is still younger than me. She is a widow. [caption id="attachment_59229" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Grandma in 1955[/caption] That looks like my Dad in the background fiddling with the record player. I might have some of the books on the shelf That old TV made it to the house I grew up in. Sitting on top is a photo of my brother David that is now on my wall. That chair she is sitting on? Those made it to our house, eventually I may have had them in the apartment I lived in after graduating college. I go through this to reinforce my only memories which are scattered and really lack most of the narrative resolution (in terms of the amount of information density) to do more than pull out scattered details. But I have this envelope, which she held in her hands, struggled to write my name and address on, and share with me. I found it interesting, that in 1999, she sent me a photo that to her was "then and now" and for me, now, it is then and even a more faded and distant then, a then that was long before before me and keeps receding deeper into then-ness. Again. Her words. "I am enclosing some of my treasured memories." What are the treasured memories we enclose for others? And how? I wonder. But the thing I never ever had to wonder about was the reliable force of love this woman was for me. It was beyond question that she, as well as my parents, my sisters would do anything for my good. All I can do is put my thanks, and love, to you, Grandma, out into the universe. Top / Featured Image: A scan of a collage of photos my grandmother mailed to me in 1999. As if it were ever a possibility, I shall license them with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog No one wanted to acknowledge that the Earbird family might stop running the Rook that had been a fixture on the streets of Fort Perry for three generations. Where would people go to replace their worn bishops or chipped pawns, or get the new copy of Chess Illustrated? Nowhere but the 'Rook. And the weekly challenge matches that still packed the sidewalks on Saturdays-- where could this go? But the Bradford clan that owned half the property in town had plans to install a new shop for pokies, claiming that "chess was for old birds and demented dweebs." (Chester Bradford was feared for his power and influence, not for his literary accumen). Who would stand up for the Earbirds? They lived in one of the most run down houses in town, owned no cars or fancy clothes, all they had they poured nito the rook. Who would help the Earbirds keep their lease? Who? This is another attempt at getting a blog post out, after a lull-- no at doing a cropped sign story- a ds106 assignment I tossed out last May with the first example of Anti Tennis Radicalism. The original sign in this case read: Seabird Rookery Please Keep Out It's not the greatest assignment, but I think of it every now and then. Yesterday was then. Here's the thing, a few people have done some neat examples by re-creating signs with new elements-- I like it, but its not the spirit I wanted in this one- the only editing you should do is cropping the photo, either when taking or in post, but this is creating by the simplest act of deletion or framing. What can you do to a sign to crop it in a photo, suggest a new meaning, and write a story? Emptied Anticipation by cogdogblog posted 27 Mar '09, 8.29pm MDT PST on flickr Most every day I walk the one quarter mile walk to my mailbox. I have two choices of routes, and usually take the other back. I should know every detail of the way, but in search today of my 2009/365 photo, I again face head on that challenge of finding something unique in the ordinary. I passed by a neighbors yard that has a gate but no fence. I think it always would make a great shot, but the light is wrong and its crowded by trees. Another house has a very old rusted, cash register sitting against the base. That's too easy. Also trespassing. But reaching sight of the mailboxes, thoughts of photos evaporate. How can there not be anticipation/excitement to see what the postal service delivers? What surprise awaits? maybe a gift? new issue of Wired? a letter from long lost friend? maybe it is packed so much I can barely open the door! Perhaps there is a unexpected windfall, a Community Chest winning card of much higher value than Monopoly gives? maybe a package? And on opening the box.... nothing. Not even junk mail. Yesterday at least I got an anachronism I could use as fireplace kindling. It's not the first time an anticipatin event has ended up empty. And on the scale of things.... totally minor. I can deal with that. But then. Joy. Excitement. Because, in finding nothing, I had found my photo for today. Aahhhhhhhh. It might seem counter intuitive to remove from the WordPress dashboard the menu items that allow a user to create posts. Or crazy. But follow my weaving here. This all started when Dave Cormier picked up my call to try a SPLOT. Well, I actually whinged https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1177305423650725896 Dave wasted little time! But in no time quick was messaging Bad News. https://twitter.com/davecormier/status/1177320240138588177 That's one I've not seen before. So I went over to one of my WordPress mutisites, made a new blog, set the theme to Baskerville, installed the plugin, and hey it all just worked. Now I know the worst thing you can do when try to help someone with a technical issue is say, "it worked for me." That does nothing (or less) for the recipient. So Dave DM-ed me a login, I checked our his site, made a few settings since I am so familiar with the theme. I made a quick post via the Writer functionality. I still cannot get a white screen of death. He messaged that it was still happening. Argh. Then it became clear. He was not quite familiar with how the SPLOT worked, and he was trying to create something new, the regular way one does in WordPress, by making a new post in the dashboard. That's not how it's done! For the content creation SPLOTs, it's all done from the front end form. Not the back! I actually had never even done that in one of my SPLOTs. But here is the value of having someone unfamiliar with your work take it for a spin (and crash in the corner). But it's a realistic error. So I dug into stack exchange searches and found some three simple code chunks to add to the themes. This first one removes the left side sub menu New Post (or Writing) item from the Posts menu (my code cleverly changes Posts to Writings but they are really just posts under the hood). add_action( 'admin_menu', 'truwriter_remove_admin_submenus', 999 ); function truwriter_remove_admin_submenus() { remove_submenu_page( 'edit.php', 'post-new.php' ); } Next, I want to remove Writing (aka Post) from the dropdown + New in the admin bar. Again, a short chunk of code. add_action( 'admin_bar_menu', 'truwriter_remove_admin_menus', 999 ); function truwriter_remove_admin_menus() { global $wp_admin_bar; $wp_admin_bar->remove_node( 'new-post' ); } Now one more. When you go to the main listing of Posts (aka Writings) there is a big Add Writing button next to the header. I could not find a way to remove it in code, so I reach for the CSS hammer, and find the proper selectors to make it disappear. This goes into a new CSS file admin.css I created inside the theme's include directory. .wp-admin.post-type-post a.page-title-action { display: none; } Now I just need some code that will enqueue the special style sheet when the dashboard is loaded: add_action('admin_enqueue_scripts', 'truwriter_custom_admin_styles'); function truwriter_custom_admin_styles(){ wp_enqueue_style( 'admin_css', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/includes/admin.css'); } And poof! Like that, there is no way to generate the SPLOT content except from the front end, where it gets all the special goodies it needs. I was quickly able to add this as well to TRU Collector and SPLOTbox. And now, NO NEW POST FOR YOU! (blog post title inspired by Seinfeld). Featured Image: Created with imgflip meme generator the rights to which remain rather murky. cc licensed flickr photo by Photography by Chris Rob Wall's excellent post on Unintended Consequences pinged me recently (Rob, you gotta stop selling yourself short on your writing, ok?). In reading it, however, a phrase I have read like a thousand times before, maybe even said myself, jumped out and get stuck in my fur: The google-bot is such an unforgiving beast since it forces us to deal with words that might have been written long ago and in a much different frame of mind than one might have today. Similar statements usually produce head nodding, saying we have to inform young people that their raucous drinking photos and myspace rants of their youthful antics may hurt them in the future when they look for a job. But what does that really say about us? It sounds like the under the bed monster fear of "looking bad" or "looking stupid" to others. Flip it around, and it says we should create online representations of ourselves that aim for some false perfection, a sheen of lack of flaws, like we all should have bodies of Hollywood waifs and minds of Harvard physics majors. We should delete something we wrote in a different time of life, or slop over it with electronic white out? How real is that? It sounds like a desire for a Stepford world, a Pleasantville with no hopes of cracks. Yecchhh. The Fear of a Googled Past says that you may be measured as equally on what your current accomplishments are as that Spring Break trip 15 years ago to New Orleans where someone photographed you kissing a __________ on the ____________ wearing a _________ _____________. Frankly, if some company I am interviewing for wants to judge my merits and capability on what they can Google of a past party incident .... I really have no interest in working for them. Never forget, when you are interviewed, you are also interviewing a potential employer. There's more to it as the bloopers in recorded classroom lectures raise fear of professors being caught being... human. Oh no, we must erase evidence of imperfection. I like the way Stephen Downes aptly swats at the fear monster: You read this sort of story a lot, the one where somebody does something online and lives to regret it. In this case, it's a professor who utters something stupid, where formerly, "in the sanctity of the classroom, when you say something, it stays there," but now, it's online. I have two views. First, openness is good. If the behaviour was inappropriate when seen by everyone, it was inappropriate, period, and should not have been covered up by the so-called "sanctity of the classroom." Second, as more and more practices become more open, the self-appointed guardians of morality in our society - you know who you are - are going have to lighten up and stop pretending people live lives of sanctity. Nobody does, and we should stop pretending. (emphasis added) It's time to put the fear in a more appropriate scale. I don't live a life of sanctity, nor do I even want to pretend I do cc licensed flickr photo by foreversouls What we need is more open-ness of our feared googled past; flood the tubes with it. I suggest a campaign of self sharing our embarrassing past moments; if more do it, and laugh, they may be minimized in the fear department (at least that is my utopian theory). Here is my boastful sense of fashion at an early age: Maybe child-hood silliness is not threat enough. Do you want drunken stupidity stories? Maybe it's time to reblog them. Cars wrapped around poles? Badly acted roles in terrible plays? Papers written the night before that are un-readable? Badly timed investments? I have more stupid s*** than I know what to do with it. And I don't give a cat's ass if you google my past and find something laughable, because those bits are not the entirety of who I am. I will laugh first at them. I stand in the face of my google-able past and laugh. hahahahahhaha. In my ongoing stream of "how can twitter be that awful when this happens daily", I present the case of a geological cross section that yanked me far down the web rabbit hole. My primary view into "bird space" (frankly that masto-term has as much goofiness as "toots") is a Tweetdeck list, old school chronological organized of the main people I am most interested in (avert your eyes from the public stream and the algorithm-itized web side). A few clicks back, an image jumped out from a @Brainpicker tweet: https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1582557649614393344 I clicked not to read about Eisley's cherishing (sorry Maria Popova, I treasure your posts) but to find out where did that old style Geologic diagram come from? That's my academic background clicking into gear. Remember I have zero credentials in my ed ech field, instead a checkered past of Education = 1*B.S. + 1*M.S. + 0.5*PhD. Well the post actually fits the image well as Popova frames Eisley's writing with the metaphor of a slice through rock and time: Descending into an enormous slit in Earth’s crust — “a perfect cross section through perhaps ten million years of time” — in search of fossils, Eiseley describes the skull he discovers entombed in stone several million years down this chute of timehttps://www.themarginalian.org/2022/10/18/loren-eiseley-the-slit/ But that image, where is it from? The caption offers he entrance to the web rabbit hole, another kind of slit-- "Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)" That is what a hyperlink does, it is so simple, it opens a door for the curious. I still have tremors from seeing some of my organization's work published on the web with nary a link. Where does it go? Yikes, is this a dead end? It's an online store from society6 where one guesses Maria Popova sells printed art work, as she says, where proceeds go to a good cause. But who the heck is Levi Walter Yaggy? That name is not one I recall from my studies. The next step is doing a search on the print's title "'Geographical Portfolio' by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887" First link result (who the bleep had a viral tweet about Google search being a dead mall of no results?) takes me to: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/05/yaggy-geographical-portfolio/ Now I have some insight into this Yaggy guy- he was creating educational materials, and doing cutting edge interactive elements in 1887-- and too, sadly, racist language on some maps. In 1887 Levi Walter Yaggy published the Geographical Portfolio – Comprising Physical, Political, Geological, and Astronomical Geography with his publishing company, Western Publishing House of Chicago. The popular set of maps and charts (an expanded second edition was released six years later) was intended for teachers to use in classroom settings. The two by three-foot sheets used clever composite images to convey the range of topography and animals around the world, resulting in dense caves and steep mountain peaks that could be straight out of a fantasy novel.In addition to their imaginative designs and eye-catching color palettes, Yaggy made strides in the teaching aid field by incorporating interactive elements. Each set included a 3-dimensional relief map of the United States and latches revealed hidden diagrams on individual charts. Unfortunately, despite his forward-thinking designs, Yaggy did include the era’s all-too-common racist depictions of non-white populations on some of his cultural maps. But look at those retro looking richly detailed maps, not just the cross section but the Cosmos and landforms! They are rather eye catching. As usual, I am wondering about the use / publishing of the images. Are they likely just old enough to be public domain? Most probable as that would enable Maria Popova to sell the cross section as a framed print. There (again) is no specific attribution statement but the next link in this associative trail takes me to Yaggy's maps in the David Rumsey archive. Now it has been quite a few web years since I visited but I remember Rumsey's maps being on the web for a long time. And thus we get to the Geologic Cross Section in the Rumsey Collection. Yaggy's Geologic Chart available from the David Rumsey Map Collection I cannot find any right's statement, and it does take some digging down at the very bottom of the Rumsey Collection home page: Copyright ©2022 Cartography Associates. All Rights Reserved. Learn more Hmmm. Can this be the usual copyright dead end? No wait, below the text is an old school Creative Commons image. I go one more click deep to learn more as he URL suggests info on copyright and permissions. This is downright refreshing! Images from this web site and database may be reproduced or transmitted and used without charge for personal use or in any publication, either in print or digital media, by any for profit or non profit publisher.https://www.davidrumsey.com/about/copyright-and-permissions It does suggest contacting the copyright holders even for stuff like Yaggy's maps that are older than 1924, but there explicitly is a Creative Commons BY-NC license. Go Yaggy! Go Rumsey! I am still curious as to the person Levi Walter Yaggy and yikes! He does not exist in Wikipedia. Levi Walter Yaggy is a red link. Because I am currently taking the WikiEdu Wikidata Institute, I did find an item there for Mr Yaggy with a few biographical property items. Way down at the bottom I spotted a link labeled COMMONs suggested Yaggy had a category in Wikimedia Commons. Bingo, he does. Here I found the same Geologic Chart as an image in Wikimedia Commons. The licensing info asserts a public domain status since it was published before 1927. However, the image source link looks fishy, it goes to an entry for it from Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Map sales, indicating the copy of the map was sold. Yes, as a public domain image, maybe i does not matter where it was found,but I think the David Rumsey link is more suitable. I left a message on the Talk page, maybe I should just edit it. But back to that cross section image, it's worth some study,especially given it's vintage. It's schematic to show the geological epochs and eras, the layers perhaps not quite proportional, and then in the lower/oldest strata (now referred to as Pre-Cambrian) Huronian is an ancient glacial event. I cannot find a modern use of time for "laurentian". And way in the most recent, Psychozoic is new to me-- defined in Wiktionary as a rare geological term "Pertaining to the period of geological time characterized by the presence of human intelligence, the Psychozoic." The modern term might be Anthropocene. The layers more to the right are a bit more confusing, the seem to be names of geological units from these time periods? And maybe too,i looks like Yaggy tried to toss in some paleontology with Mastodons (no not than one) and typical rock types for the time period (which would depend where you made this cross section). It's more idealized, and despite some odd choices, the attempt to show these relations on a diagram, plus landforms and even erupting volcanoes, just makes me happy to explore. Now I need to go back, and maybe create that Wikipedia article for Levi Walter Yaggy. And all of this, came from curiosity from one image in a tweet among tweets. Follow those curiosities and I will see you maybe down in the rabbit holes of wonder! Featured Image: Geologic Chart by Levi Walter Yaggy found in the David Rumsey Map Collection, most likely public domain but also maybe licensed Creative Commons CC BY-NC. Score another one for having a personal archive. Or having a shred of a memory. I cannot say I follow the European Football Championships but did pick up a sense of the surprise victory by Iceland over England (skip all Brexit puns here). But something triggered when I saw this tweet that Pat Lockley re-tweeted today: https://twitter.com/DagurHjartarson/status/747509035000299520 That shore, those little houses by the water, looked very familiar. And that green boat. It's like I was there. Because... I was. And digging through my photos of my first trip to Iceland in 1999, I found myself looking at my own photo of that exact location: I remembered this place as a museum about the hard life of 19th century Icelandic fisherman located in Bolungarvik. A replica of the real kind of fishing center from the era, it is called the Ósvör Maritime Museum. The featured photo on this post shows me leaning on that boat, here is another shot I took of it: These photos are assembled in a really old thing I built in maybe 2000 as template for a javascript based slideshow, it was called the "jClicker". Since my Maricopa web archives are gone, I hoisted my own at http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/proj/jclicker/. Here is what my Icelandic photos looked like in that interface: [caption id="attachment_58629" align="aligncenter" width="630"] I knew I had that photo![/caption] I'm impressed that the old slide show template still works. I think I had some trick to preload the next image because that was the era of "fast" dialup speeds. Yes, the photos are pretty small -- THIS WAS 1999! I was using an Olympus D-450. Now I am not going to argue with an Icelander, but I doubt that football player Ragnar Sigurðsson grew up in that fishing museum (maybe it was an implication he is from Bolungarvik. Being "right" here does not matter. What does matter is that (a) my brain somehow identified that photo in the tweet and (b) I knew where in my personal archive to look. I consider this another score for the self hosted archive. A goal if you will... UPDATE: June 28, 2016 More proof to my case, thanks to a DM from Pat Lockley https://twitter.com/felixfeatures/status/747539905476182016 And just for clarity, according to Wikipedia, Ragnar Sigurðsson was born in Reykjavik -- that ain't Reykjavik in the photo. #LetsKeepTwitterTruthy Top / Featured Image: A younger version of me in front of one of the boats at the Ósvör Maritime Museum in Bolungarvík, Iceland. This was in 1999 doing some sightseeing after doing some workshops in Reykjavik. This was before Creative Commons, before flickr. But I will put a standard Creative Commons BY license on all my photos. I've been still mentally energy catching up after the sprint marathon that is running our Symposium on Mashups last week and thuse am delinquent on sharing what an over-the-top session Jim Groom and Tom Woodward did on Welcome to the People's Republic of Non-Programistan -- including fake accents for 30 minutes -- catch the Connect recording but more, so catch the zany metaphor they carried out at http://bionicteaching.com/ihatecode. But heck, I dont even need to blog much, check out Tony Hirst's in kind response To Comrades in Non-Programistan - A Message from Feedistan. And oh, I am just crazed rocking to the first video Tony included- DataPortability- Get Your Data Out: Not to mention Fair(y) Use Tale[s] (oh what a mashup!). All Hail Feedistan! For the last 12 years at maricopa, my e-mail signature has been "Was Geologist, Now Technologist" a Readers Digest condensed version of my tale of transforming from a graduate student in Geology to a techie at Maricopa. Last night, I attended an event at Arizona State University, for one night of flashback nostalgia. The event was the Department of Geological Sciences 2005 Robert S. Dietz Lecture, featuring Phil Christensen on "The Evolution of Mars: Changing Views of a Changing World". While I recall playing volleyball and drinking beer at his house, Phil has achieved a long list of amazing planetary science work at ASU, most recently with his team's spectroscopy devices that have gone on both Mars Rovers and the Mars orbiting space craft. Phil's talk covered the range of our ever changing views and knowledge of this neighbor planet, from the "red dot in the sky" to Huygens' first pencil sketches in the 1600s, to Lowell's falsely identified canals, even Marvin the Martian, and the current fantastic imagery from the Mars Rovers. These surface images are such striking, and very familiar to the red rock landscapes of Arizona and Australia, except for the eerie pale orange sky, lacking a single cloud. Very cool stuff, and the full packed lecture hall was very engaged. Face it, humans love Mars. Anyhow it was fun to see some of my teachers from 12-15 years ago when I was a student there. It reminded me a bit of the neat "What If" site created by someone who graphically generate a path their life might have taken with a different set of decisions. In 1989, having finished my Masters in Geology at ASU, I was at one of those Robert Frost-ian forks in the road-- I had an offer to do PhD work with Phil Christenen's Mars Group and one from Sue Kieffer to do research in volcanoes and fluid dynamics. I chose the latter, and a long series of events catapulted me from there to here, and I can wonder where I would be had I stayed on the Mars side.. maybe still wearing tattered jeans, a scruffly beard, and who knows what?? You cannot say, just on rare times, idly speculate what could have, might have been. On the other hand, the road chosen has been extremely blessed and without any second guessing of that choice. There's little end in sight for fixing all the dead links I have to Content Previously Housed on Wikispaces since they went and pooped their own web bed. Another one today when Ken Bauer tweeted an old image: https://twitter.com/ken_bauer/status/1055476373958115328 which he did find himself https://twitter.com/ken_bauer/status/1055476754482151424 But sadly, the original and many links are now dead, thanks to Wikispaces - How many "billions and billions" of web links like http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/TwitterCycle now go to this death zone: [caption id="attachment_66940" align="aligncenter" width="760"] All Wikispaces.com links end up here. F*** you wikispsaces and your future endeavors, may you go bankrupt ASAP.[/caption] I've got my back up of that link, which I will soon add to my growing set of web sites reclaimed, but for now, I am placing it here. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]The Twitter Life Cycle flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Twitter Life Cycle I created this 100% Kathy Sierra knock off in April 2007, after myself climbing the twitter life cycle curve (she knows about it and likes/approves!) and have continued to watch other colleagues go through the same process, though not always plateauing. So I thought it would be cool to open a wiki so others could add their name to the roster below. For an amusing cycle with a low ascension slope see @jpbimmer (thx to @courosa) I Have Climbed The Twitter Curve If you have had a similar experience, add your name below as a comment, your twitter link, when you started, and a related blog post if that counts. Alan Levine http://twitter.com/cogdog started January 2007 with If I Fall Into One More Social Network Tool I’m Going To Scream Like a Banshee and in a few months, er weeks... http://cogdogblog.com/2007/04/18/twitter-cycle/ and became a core part of my Being There presentationHelen Otway http://twitter.com/helenotway started January 2008. I am now at the stage I cannot stop! Been through all the stages of wondering why use Twitter, to feeling like a stranger at a party, to making connections and now feeling a part of the network.Chris Lott http://twitter.com/fncll started November 2006 http://www.chrislott.org/2006/11/30/all-a-twitter/Sue Waters http://twitter.com/dswaters I'm thinking April 2007 but first blog post Giving it a try! is dated June 18. My favourite twitter post I've written Getting More Out of TwitterJohn Larkin http://twitter.com/john_larkin started July 15th 2007D'Arcy Norman http://twitter.com/dnorman started January 2007 http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/01/31/twittering/Barbara Reid http://twitter.com/home/barbs1 started October 2007George Siemens http://twitter.com/gsiemens first twit November 23, 2006 , first blog post: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/archives/002831.htmlMathew Needleman http://twitter.com/mrneedleman started December 8, 2007Leslie Madsen-Brooks http://twitter.com/lesliemb started October 2006 http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/2006/10/twitter.htmlRobin Smail http://twitter.com/robin2go started February 1, 2007Simon Brown my first update is clueless skytrystsjoykickin back, lettin it all flow 02:50 PM March 31, 2007 but I've had a lot of fun since then - blog post at http://cafechat.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/twiddeo-in-vocational-education-and-training/Brent Schlenker http://twitter.com/bschlenker started Jan.2007Martha Thornburgh http://twittter.com/roswellsgirl started March 2007 First tweet "Checking out Twitter because Steve (teach42) told me I should.James Croft http://twitter.com/jamescroft started Feb 2008. I love finding new ways to use twitter; I use (with no particular favourite) the site itself, SMS, GoogleTalk thru gmail, a OS X Dashboard widget called twidget, pockettweets.com from my iPhone and Twitterific. Do I have a problem? Definitely.John Krutsch - http://twitter.com/johnkrutsch started Nov 2007. Created first twitter based app. Feb 2008 http://www.tweetclouds.com"Teddy Diggs started May 1, 2007. One thing that kept me going was a very early tweet from cogdog about this learning curve. I decided to see if he/it was right. Think he/it is."Howard Errey started 12:20 PM March 30, 2007 wondering if there is a downward side to the curve reading "removing followees who tweet excessively"Judy O'Connell - http://twitter.com/heyjudeonline started Oct 2007. Definitely been through the Twitter curve! and currently sitting in information overload. I keep going back for the contact, information, and direct dialogue - oh.. and quick calls for help. Got into the most heated debate and mentally challenging discussion in Jan 08 which I blogged in Google Generation and Virtual Libraries. Is there a problem with tweeting? Definitely because so many people don't have time - even if they know it exists! As I wondered at the end of 2007 what exactly will take prime place amongst our educational collaborative tools and what will just merge into pop culture? For now I rely on the twitterverse to help me track the ebb and flow.'Martin Weller - in Sept 07 I was bemoaning Twitter as being elitist (and not as good as Facebook). By March 08 I was a fully paid up 'hub' user, and my blog is in danger of being retitled 'Re. Twitter'.Lynne Crowe - http://twitter.com/lynnecrowe started August 2007 with this post Twitter RevisitedStarted Sept 2007 but could make no real sense of twitter, until I read the forum on classroom20 started by lizbdavis in Jan 2008. Started in earnest and now, two months later, find it difficult to go a day without it. http://murcha.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/one-little-tweey-bird/Louise Thorpe http://twitter.com/lpt21 - started Aug 07 stopped straight away "don't get it" - started again Jan 08, first blogged about it recently at http://shu-lti-ai.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-twitter-experiment.html suspect it will be the first of manyLisa M Lane - http://twitter.com/LisaMLane - clueless Jan 07 http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/?p=16, voted a best app Feb 08 http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/?p=75Dean Shareski -http://twitter.com/shareski started February 07 Stupid but still effectiveAlisa Cooper - http://twitter.com/soul4real started March 29, 2007. Got Caught in a Twitter Tornado Yesterday.Nathan Lowell - http://twitter.com/nlowell started 09:44 AM April 03, 2007Dean Hall - http://twitter.com/deanpence started March 9, 2007. ( First post. )Sylvia Currie http://twitter.com/Currie created account after hearing Beth Kanter and Nancy White talk about it - not sure where, just remember thinking what the heck? Then was reminded I had the account during a workshop with George Siemens at CADE in May 2007. Started paying attention more around Jan 2008 with a little helpful nudgy-ness from Heather Ross and after discovering different tools for tweeting. Twirl more than I tweet, but feel it becoming more part of my daily routine.Glen Gatin http://twitter.com/ggatinsigned up for Twitter Mar. 9, 2007, not much happening, couldn't figure it out, forgot about it, heard more about it, hmmm, reset password, Jan 2008. Now have it constantly open on second monitor. Getting lots of excellent clues.Cindy Kendall, http://twitter.com/ckendall started October 9, 2007. Didn't think too much of it at first, until the community started to grow, and all of a sudden it was a quick and convenient way to share interesting tidbits with others and receive tidbits in return. Now it definitely is a mix of personal and professional, and I enjoy the informality of the community.Sarah Sutter http://twitter.com/edueyeview Started Twitter October ?, 2007. Twitter ConnectionsPumpkin Yang http://twitter.com/pumpkiny Started April 2007.Doug Symington http://twitter.com/dougsymington Started Twitter April 08, 2007. Popular topic during Jan '08 EdTechBrainstormKerryJ http://twitter.com/kerryank started in December 2007 during Christmas break. Twitter allows for everyday conversations with people you don't have ready access to. I check it 3 or 4 times a day at work and have a window open all night at home. Feel my learning and relationships are benefiting in big ways.Linda George http://twitter.com/georgygrrl started during February 2008 vacay. I was feeling sorry for myself that every one in the world had gone to someplace warm. Then, I stumbled upon a tutorial on how to use Twitter and I have been hooked ever since. What a wealth of information!!Cole Camplese - http://twitter.com/colecamplese Not my first post about it, but the one where it started to click http://camplesegroup.com/blog/?p=605 happened 2/9/07minh mcCloy http://twitter.com/mizminh I was instantly engaged by the concept - my 8th post - "upgrading firefox & becoming just a teensy bit excited about twitter" on my 2nd day. I'd been waiting for Twitter. :)Chris Duke - July 2007 - Gradually "got it" - first here then more and finally.Giannina Rossini http://twitter.com/gianninarossini - Twitter account created some time in Sep07, didn't "get it" till Jan 08. It took a lot of peer pressure, persuading and nagging ... now I've even got it linked to my Facebook status. Where will it end?Loonyhiker (aka Pat) http://twitter.com/loonyhiker started in January 2008. I love it now! At first I wasn't sure what the heck I was doing but as I started to connect with other educators, I thought, "I am not alone!"Pierro Marie http://www.konterfai.com Unfortunately, I have my start release date not in my head but I am here on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/konterfaiBarbara Ganley http://twitter.com/bgblogging started in May 2007 at UMW's Faculty Academy and seeing Cogdog have such fun showing us his tweets.Skip Offenhauser http://twitter.com/soffenhauser- created an account in early 2007but didn't start until late 2007 because I was one of the "I don't get it!" people. Now I do. Recently did a small teacher training on twitter http://rsdtech.wikispaces.com/Twitter.Marlene http://twitter.com/marlened - created the account mid june 2007 but really started in december 2007. I passed all the steps described below, plus the "now my updates are protected" one.Keri Morgret http://twitter.com/morgret started using in September 2007 at the COSL meeting. I created a second account a couple of months later, and removed the protected updates from this account. Love using twhirl, helps manage multiple accounts.Heather Dowd - heza - Started tweeting (twittering?) in February 2008 after reading about Twitter before going to the IL-TCE conference (ICE - Illinois Computing Educators). I was thinking of giving it up, but maybe I will just stay on this curve. I think I am currently in the "who are all these contacts?" phase.Fleep Tuque http://twitter.com/fleep - First Tweet: March 11, 2007 First Epiphany: Crossing paths with Wayne Porter First Evangelizing to Educators: Posting on the SLED list Now closing in on 700 followers, have gotten much more selective about what I tweet. What felt like a conversation among friends or friends of friends now feels like a shouted conversation in a really crowded party where I know some of the people but not sure who all might be able to hear me. Still find it incredibly valuable, but not sure what I should be adding to the network.Antoine http://twitter.com/japonophile - First Tweet: October 16, 2007, I'm only starting to grasp the value of Twitter: Twitter: gazouillements du Web 2.0.Joel Zehring - http://twitter.com/joelz - Started April 27, 2007. With very limited time, should I blog it or to twitter it?Phillip Long - http://twitter.com/RadHertz - First Tweet April 24, 2007. Had to look back to find my first Tweet (424 of them). That's 50,880 characters of Tweeting (if ea were 140 chrs. long). Wow!Colleen Carmean- http://twitter.com/carmean - First Tweet May 15, 007. Stopped in now and then. Got sucked in more and more, especially via distant connection to friends at a conference. Got scared cuz I'm a wimp (see Jim Groom's thread), now sneaking back in slowly to get my dose of tweets. Still murky. Going to use it to connect to my online students next few weeks and see if 'learn by doing' will wipe away fuzzy understanding.Kate Olson - http://twitter.com/kolson29 - started in December 2007 - I'm a full-scale addict, but find more and more uses for it everyday, getting to the point where I'm going to be more selective about who I follow, also trying to use direct messages more rather than replies - first mentioned twitter in my very first blog post on January 8, 2008 (and have many times since)Rob Wall - http://twitter.com/robwall - First tweet on April 26, 2007 ("Starting twitter account. Listening to CBC radio."). Initially skeptical but got it pretty soon afterwards during a spontaneously twitter mediated co-presentation at TLt 2007 conference.Grant Potter - http://twitter.com/grantpotter - Joined Mar. 07 - first Twit much later during May 07. Twitter use picked up considerably when I moved from rural to urban area with dependable cell service and GSM service supporting my smartphone. Now Twitter from phone far more than via browser.Cindy Seibel - http://twitter.com/cgseibel First tweet on January 2, 2008 - "Getting online tools set up for EC&I 831", Dr. Alec Couros' grad class. First blog post Twitted, Tweets and Young Learners. Now 11 tweets away from 1000 - that's an average of just under 12 tweets a day, one every 2 hours - surely that's not spamming?? Just hooked.Nicola Avery, sorry no blog post - tweeted before I blogged - sometime last May/June I think, was only occasionally tweeting until conversation with Karyn Romeis made me decide to use it more meaningfully as a work tool - would like to be able to substitute my profile picture for a live video so that whenever I am using a device with camera on, it can automatically show this on twitter too :-)Biray Alsac - my first tweet was in March 2007 but I didn't really get into it until October 2007. I've written a few blog posts mentioning Twitter, but my favorite is "Mindful Tweets: Using Twitter to teach and learn about Mindfulness"Toni Twiss - http://twitter.com/tonitones - First tweet early 07. Blogged about it - thought it was crazy - until I followed about 20 people then it started making sense as links and ideas started coming in. I spend more time checking twitter than anything else. Best professional learning I have ever done.John Martin - http://twitter.com/edventures - Started almost exactly one year ago. No one believed me that it would take off, so I dabbled a bit and waited. Around the end of summer it started to ramp up and the rest as they say is history. Now I find myself still trying to convince others of the value of developing their own community of practice on Twitter. It is not yet self-evident to many here on my campus.Rubaiyat Shatner - http://twitter.com/rubaiyat - Friends were using it at SxSW, and didn't get it because I don't have SMS on my phone, made my community join once I got home and it continues to make me smile. Will be doing a project with art students in a few weeks.Cherice Montgomery - http://twitter.com/chericem - Considered it early on, but as someone who actively participates in a number of other online communities of professional practice, I found it difficult to imagine the professional utility of messages limited to 140 characters--esp. since at first glance, they appeared to be little more than a neverending stream of status updates. So, I didn't actually sign up for an account until March 8, 2008 after talking with a couple of colleagues about it during the MACUL Conference. Now that I've been tweeting for almost a month, I'm intrigued by the opportunity it offers me to play in a lot of new sandboxes (no pun intended).Karen Kliegman - http://twitter.com/kkliegman First time August 2007. Couldn't see the point at first, but I have picked up some amazing info from the twitter community and have made some 'twitter' friends. Blogged about it - why should I care - http://wlteam.blogspot.com/2007/10/there-is-more-than-one-way-to-hatch.html, but now see Twitter as extremely useful!Allison Miller - http://twitter.com/theother66 - Adelaide, South Australia - @howard61 'invited' me into Twitter, after it was discussed at danah boyd's Melb workshop in the middle of 2007. However, I never really did anymore with Twitter until Alan Levine mentioned it again during his workshops at the South Australian Art Gallery in Oct 07, and since then there's been NO looking back. I'm a 'daily user' and am continuously amazed about how friendly and 'informative' the Twitter network really is. Perhaps we needed to have only been allowed to add to this wiki in 140 characters or less. Happy Tweets.....Steve Dembo - http://teach42.com - Chicago, IL. Eh, I'm not impressed... Still seems like a waste of time. But I'm willing to give it a slightly longer period to test it out and consider it. ;) My most well known post about Twitter is What I Learned From Twitter Today.Laura Blankenship - http://twitter.com/lblanken - I thought I'd only been Twittering for a few months, but it's been a WHOLE YEAR! That's like a century in Internet time. My first tweet from March 13, 2007 is " Listening to Led Zeppelin and thinking about how to skin a Drupal site." I still love it. I was just thinking about a blog post that I haven't written yet called "My Co-Workers live all over the World" because that's what Twitter is for me, a collaborative workspace. Like everyone else, I didn't get it at first, but now I find it indispensable at conferences and great for those quick temperature-taking moments during the day. Also, it feels like poetry sometimes and since I was a poet once upon a time, this appeals to me.Alan Cann - http://twitter.com/AJCann - First Tweet November 05, 2007, nearing the end of the exponential phase, but still obsessed? http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search?q=twitter?238?# ?204?Dave Melone - [[http://www.twitter.com/snaggle/|http://twitter.com/snaggle - 1st up 10/10/2007 after I got to it on my iPhone. I am an addict now, not a lot of followers but I still find great info out from other twitterersJane Lowe - http://twitter.com/janelowe - April 2008 - Lisa Parisi got me started - it's addictive!!Jane Keyes - http://twitter.com/janekeyes Feb 2008 couldn't make sense of it, now can't stay off of it. Having trouble not checking out every link!Clint Lalonde - twitter.com/clintlalonde Feb 2008. Entered 12 step program on April 1. My 3 Months of TwitterLynn Tveskov - http://twitter.com/abalone November 30, 2007. It's the place I'm experimenting with identity by deliberately permitting (some of) my anonymous personal blogging buddies to mix freely with meat world friends and work colleagues. Officially addicted.Martin Pluss- http://twitter.com/plu First post 18 July 2007Jeffrey Keefer - http://twitter.com/JeffreyKeefer First Tweet was on March 6, 2007. My 4th Tweet (on the same day) - "added Twitter to my blog, interesting toy. Must have some practical use." Barbara Dieu - http://twitter.com/bdieu First Tweet on March 24th 2007. Since then following 210 in English, Portuguese and French, 420 updates and 57 direct messages. Very useful for quick updates when travelling or mobile, get a feeling of what's up, quick notes and conversations, backchannel at conferences and events (with twemes - which combines delicious and flickr nicely). Much easier than blogging but much more superficial.Matt Lingard - http://twitter.com/mattlingard First tweet was April 18th 2008 and the associated blog post: Time to Twitter was tagged 'Fun', as in not to be taken seriously. Mid-term report: Twitter: From Cynic to Addict?Therese Weel http://twitter.com/ThereseWeel Signed up Oct 2007. Made a conscious effort to "become a better lifestreamer" spring 2008 ,fiddled with twitter some more, up until then delicious was my twitter.Carol Daunt Skyring http://twitter.com/caroldaunt First Tweet October 2007. Disparaging blog comment Nov 2007 http://tinyurl.com/4hcmja Have since hit the top of Alan's lifecycle - which I suggest be labelled 'Twitter is running my life' (that is running not ruining!!)Vyt Karazija http://twitter.com/borborigmus First tweet 1 May 2008. Less than 2 months from WTF to Sierran/CogDogian plateau. Blog http://thwartwise.wordpress.com - which currently has slow post rate because of inordinate time on Twitter!Moira Sarsfield http://twitter.com/msars After initial dismissal in Oct 2007 - "I don't care what kind of sandwich someone I don't know is eating." - I saw the light in mid-April this year and was hooked almost at once. Blog post at http://msars.edublogs.org/2008/05/25/hello-world/. And I also appear (anonymously) in Vyt's blog post.Vance Stevens 'got it' after hearing Jeff Utecht present asynchronously at K-12 Online 2007 almost a year ago. I was sort of at the can't-stop stage but then the dbase fiasco occurred mercifully short of the fizzle-point. I'm working now on a document where I chart these uncharted waters. Right now it's in working-version state but if I think of it I'll put the link to the final version here later (like yeah sure, in our dreams, if I don't get twitter-scattered meantime). For now you can visit: http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/papers/tesl-ej/08june/twitter.htmGraham Stanley http://twitter.com/grahamstanley I can't remember exactly when I signed up as it was so long ago, but I received my first circular email from Biz Stone in December 2006, so I think it was before then. I remember that I signed up and didn't really understand it until I set up the SMS function and started receiving messages on my mobile. That was sometime before May 2007, when I became a Twitter evangelist, and began to tell other people in my network about it. Since then, I have I've gone from following 30 people to following 485 people and being followed by 555, so the way I use it has changed considerably - I can no longer read everything, but do use Twhirl to keep track of what's going on when I'm online.Bernie Dodge. http://twitter.com/berniedodge . My first thought, maintained for several months, was that Twitter was yet another timesink with no redeeming value. Then, in July 2007, I sat next to David Warlick at a workshop in Vermont we were both keynoting and noticed what he was doing on his laptop. I gave in and started following him, and some of the people he followed, and up the curve I flew. Since then I've inflicted it on students and family, and gotten rediscovered by an old grad school friend. I find myself posting more during vacations when there's time to explore and share links. I've reached the plateau on your graph, though mine is more like a square wave above and below plateau level. Multiple days without tweeting, then multiple tweets per day. I wish I could tweet to subsets of my pals without jumping ship to Plurk.Jo McLeay: I can't remember who got me into it, but I joined about May, 2007 and loved it straight away as I had lots of my PLN on there when I joined. I wrote and blogged about twitter for my Master of Education in ICT here and here.Robin Ashford http://twitter.com/rashford Oct 27, 2007 according to http://www.whendidyoujointwitter.com/ When I first heard of twitter my immediate reaction was...well, the first paragraph here has a little rant I wrote in a blog post. At this stage, I consider twitter to be one of my top three social media tools.Michelle Dyer-Hurdon - http://twitter.com/azmichelle started in Jan. 2009! Yes, I was very late to the party. I really only started using Twitter heavily in the summer, inspired by the tweeters from Iran. I now find myself conserving characters even when typing email!Richard Schwier - http://twitter.com/schwier Born: Sat 12 Jan 2008 20:46 - It was a dark, cold, snowy evening, and I was looking for a distraction and several friends (Couros, Shareski, Wall, Ross) were already into it. Two years + later, and I'm still distracted. My pattern is similar to Bernie's--plateau with gaps and spurts. Now Twitter is one of my key ways to connect quickly and reliably to a group of people I talk with regularly. The wider conversation is good too.Helen Keegan - http://twitter.com/heloukee Born: 17 May 2008. Didn't get into it straight away - sporadic use for a year or so. Struggled with audiences, having my PLN and other online peeps in the same place ;) Ended up going down the PLN route, and don't regret it - fab friends/colleagues/peers/towers of awesomes, and also love being connected with ex-students and helping them to connect with others... prob. buzz off those ongoing connection the most. I still have an on-off thing going on with Twitter, finding that I tweet the most when i'm on 'leave' or at conferences. Sometimes struggle to get my Twitter mojo when drowning in the day-to-day...David Truss - http://twitter.com/datruss Started in November 2007 after reading http://twitter.com/fceblog (Claudia's) 4th or 5th blog post on the topic. Before that, I was completely in the "Dumbest thing" mode of thinking. The light bulb turned on for me pretty quickly as this and the next few slides hinted about (January 2008) http://www.slideshare.net/datruss/brave-new-www/7 -It doesn't say so in the slides, but these amazing connections all came through my twitter network. What's interesting is the role I play as a lurker now... sharing in fits and spurts but often searching and reading with just a retweet when I like what I see. I'm off the cycle now and into a new kind of participation. Cindy Jennings – https://twitter.com/cljennings Joined May 2008. I wrote some about accidental Twitter learning here: https://odnett.wordpress.com/2009/06/ It still happens when I have time to look. And were it not for The Twitters, I would not know the absolutely coolest and most gracious keepers (or givers away…) of sharing and web hospitality like YOU. Don't be like Wikispaces, don't break the web. Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Dead crane flickr photo by kevin dooley shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Almost some fraction of a lifetime later, I am looking at my own house of truth as having been shaped as much as what I was taught by as much as what was never taught. Or Alan gets grapples with what the big academics talk about as positionally. And in so many big things in life, we end up taking sides on issues, maybe without always seeing it, or that we are on the right side. Let's talk about religion, you know the topic you should never talk about. Or specifically those holidays in December. All the Holidays I grew up in a Jewish family in area of Baltimore with many Jews, though not exclusively in my neighborhood. We were on the less rigorous side of the spectrum, aka Reform Judiasm. So indeed we celebrated Hanukkah and just understood that was different than the neighbors who did Christmas. Our house was dark while others had the brigh lights. I remember my Dad and I would always take quite walks just to enjoy and look at the decorations. I can remember our mutual favorite, it had ni lights, but it was a two store square shaped white house, with a rood that sloped gently back. It triuly looked like a big box. And their yearly Christmas decoration was draping a huge red ribbon and bow down the front, like a giant gift box. I never truly found a belief or a faith, I enjoyed the traditions, the stories, the Passover seder. As an adult I pretty much skipped the celebrating part. Then I got married and was introduced more closely to Christmas celebrating. OMG, I loved the tree and putting lights up. As I am now, I really do not see myself as a Jew or a Christian, and I am on the side of celebrating holidays. Each year, Cori and I do the Christmas tree setup, decorating, and we also do the Hanukkah candles each night. I give me partly remembered, maybe a bit made up story I barely remember of the Romans destroying the temple, and the mircal of light lasting 8 days. The best part is we just sit together, lights off, the phones down, and we just watch the candles burn down, in front of the Christmas tree lights. This is rather minor. War Israel's war on Gaza -- really not a "war" since the power of Israel is total, following October 7, 2023-- did not sit right from the start. I don't need to cite the specifics, do I? the 52 tons of rubble. The photos. If a side is to be taken, I'm not on the side who kills on this scale. Not that simple. I looked to read things outside of the news streams, and bookmarked a few (first in November 2023), hardly comprehensive. Like Talking About Gaza in a Jerusalem Hospital (unpaywalled from the Atlantic) of Jewish and Arab medical staff who looked beyond the boundaries. Maybe the most moving was a The Speaking Part, an episode of This American Life, of a woman named Youanna and her 72 day experience of moving her family aorund Gaza City, waiting and trying to get across the border to Egypt. Youanna had to voice the story of a life together, answering questions for her young children. Juju wanted to know, was the cat getting food? Yes, Youmna said. The neighbors were feeding her. There was Mohammed, 11 years old, who, two weeks into the war, had begun pulling at his lips and biting into them until the skin tore. Mohammed wanted to know if his school was still there. Yes, Youmna said. Cerine, 8 years old. Every time the family fled, she always wanted to know where they would sleep, and would they be able to sleep together? Yes, Youmna would reassure her. We will all sleep right next to each other. ... They seemed like the right words to say, even if Youmna had no idea if they were true. With Aline, with all her kids, Youmna's strategy was to sell them on her own certainty, even if there was no reliable information on who was dead or who was alive. She wanted them to believe there was, and she had it. Youmna would summon all the authority she had as a mom who knows things. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/822/the-words-to-say-it/act-one-7 There's much more of course, comics, poems, wills written. The list can go on long. The Wall Between In early 2024 I came across the a story about The Wall Between, a book cowritten by an Arab and Jewish (Canadian) academic, that called out in its brief description like it was written for me. I ordered it right away. The Wall Between, my copy, still with a bookmark halfway through. i'm still slowly working my way through, it's my usual habit of starting books and then adding to a stack of partly reads next to my bed. I have had the book a year, and in taking this photo, I had noticed more closely the top line. Maybe I had not looked and thought it was "What Jews and Palestinians Don't Know About Each Other" (maybe that's what ChatGPT would construct?) But its more poignant in the actual text that reads, "What Jews and Palestinians Don't Want to Know About Each Other" -- that there is an investment in the sides that is almost undoable. The shock for this Jewish kid from Baltimore was in the very start of reading, I came across the reference to Nakba, something that was never covered in a world history class and certainly not mentioned in my religious schooling. You can look it up, of course. Unlearning With What I had Never Learned I had never gotten the fuller story of the British Mandate and establishment of Israel- it was played more about a victorious and righteous act, the land that was promised, the accounting of the Holocaust, there was the glory in books I read (and the movie version) of Leon Uris's Exodus. There was no mention I casn recall of the displacement/cleansing of Palestinian people who were living in the land that was stamped as a country named Israel. Then I rethink something I always felt was a formative experience from my Jewish religious school. I saw it as progressive that maybe in 6th, 7th grade, we had a unit or more on comparative religion. We got to go to a Quaker Meeting and a high mass at a Catholic Cathedral (was it the Baltimore Basilica or Mary our Queen??). We never went to, or maybe even discussed, Islamic religion, we did not go to a Mosque (Masjid Ul Haqq has been around since the 1950s). Was this deliberate? Or is my memory faulty? Where were choices made about what not to teach kids, both in religious school, but I am fuzzy on what public school covered. Regardless, with the heavy emphasis we got on the horrors of the Holocaust, to the witnessing on TV of the Munich massacre of the 1972 Olympics, a not very religious kid from Baltimore ends up with almost an internal subtle wiring of Israel just always gets an automatic justification. You don't dwell on it, but to entertain any thought means you are abandoning your faith. That wiring fell apart for me in October 2023. Not that I did anything except read and internalize. The Obliteration of Education The very first story I bookmarked was Education Is Casualty of Israel-Hamas War, as Bombs Hit Gaza Universities (Al-Fanar Media). I can't look at this photo of a bombed building at the University of Gaza and ask, in what conflict is it justified to destroy universities? (well actually all wars). "The ruins of a building at the Islamic University of Gaza after an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday. (Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education)" from Al-Fanar Media Or see the summary of Universities in Gaza bombed by Israel from The New Arab. The bombs wiped out the universities and all the other schools. What exactly is the military strategy that says, "let's bomb schools"? Where are the Open Educators? I am now thinking of the work we do at Open Education Global. I was fortunate to be part of several support efforts to help educators bring to awareness following the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. We shared and rallied in our community space and I was lucky to record a podcast with a rather heroic open education librarian, Tetiana Kolesnykova. Their struggles continue as the war is on going. Yet I am wondering where are the conversations and where is the action to support the educators and students in Gaza? Have I missed something? I have noted that people do join our OEG Connect Community with affiliations in Gaza and Palestine, that was where I got curious and started learning about Al-Quds Open University. It's not totally silent. With not much search effort (no AI) I found: The Gaza Education Hub (fund raising through the Open Collective) Academics for Palestine (Academia against apartheid, active) Open Education in Palestine: a tool for liberation (open book chapter by Javiera Atenas, 2017) Palestine OER Strategy Forum (2017) Open Educational Resources in Palestine: High Hopes Promising Solutions (by Jamil Itmazi, 2020 in Current State of Open Educational Resources in the “Belt and Road” Countries) Palestinian Journal for Open Learning & e-Learning (journal published by al-Quds Open University, last issue 2021) The resources gets backdated quickly. I am sure there is more. There is no silence on many university campuses though the forces are working fervently to eradicate protest and to leverage institutions with the funding hammer. And Thus? I'm writing for myself here, and working to find out my own unsilencing. I am though whispering about it to my open education colleagues because all of the lofty goals of providing accessible education to all the world ought to be talking about and rallying against the obliteration of education in Gaza. Otherwise, it's just words. There are no sides to stand on. I am with Hanukkah, Christmas, AND chips and guacamole. Featured Image: The new Traditional Hanukkah Chips and Guacamole flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We buy/get music for many reasons, to enjoy it, but for many people (I hope) there is an interest in knowing more about the musicians, the meaning of songs -hence the liner notes that used to be part of the LP or CD package. I am reading now Bob Dylan in America and caught note that the author worked for years as the creator of liner notes for Dylan's music and website, and even was nominated for a Grammy for his work (an award for liner notes? there is recognition for the music meta data?) Likewise, a movie on a DVD is certainly what we buy/rent/borrow it for, but to me, there is a ton more worth learning from the extras-- Modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by One Thousand Words -- where through commentary, "making of" shorts, interviews, out-takes, deleted scenes, we get a whole rich layer of meta about the feature. With the dying out of the packaged form of media- the place for the context around them is going to be the web. And this brings me to a few observations seeing the flow of blogging going in among the students and far flung remote participants of Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course at http://ds106.us -- this is by non means a criticism, and is more of my own take on blogging about our work. A lot of people are proud to show their work- as they should be-- but a lot of times they just plop the media in a post and say, "Here is my _______ for assignment ________ on ____________". It's great to see the video or animation or graphic bit of storytelling, but that is really not the whole story -- there is always more of a story behind the story- how it was made, what the inspiration was, what the person who created had in mind, what their own commentary on it. For example (and again not picking on him) Jacob posted this beautiful graphic he did called "Davinci's Power Outlet" -- it looks for all intent, like one of Leonardo's notebooks, with a mouse on some sort of treadmill generator. Check it out http://blog.laughingllama.info/?p=129. He has since added some more written parts to his post, but when I went there at first, I had no idea if he montaged it in PhotoShop (thats about all I could do) or drew it himself (actually it was the latter, which makes it that more impressive). But without any context, without any story behind the story, we miss out learning about the craft that went into it. But even more so, you as the creator of the story, are missing out on a chance to really show your own thinking out loud, your ideas, etc. So when you post some piece of media for one of these projects (or any one), I certainly hope that you can tell more fo the story behind the story-- to me, provide the context to your work. It's not just for your audience, it is for yourself. Believe me, when you labor hours over getting the perfect sync for your animated GIF or lavish effort to find the font to make the movie poster jump out-- in the moment or near after, you can remember all of the ideas and things that went into creating it. In a few months, the details will get blurry, and in a year or more you might barely remember it. Do yourself a favor, and archive it for your own reference (and us too!) Thanks, from a meta information freak. Featured image: Diamond Dave Whittaker looking at No Direction Home liner notes flickr photo by Steve Rhodes shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license In ramping up for next week's Mural UDG project on open education at the University of Guadalajara, I go back to something that, after so many years should be more enabled by technology, but is as messy as always. Giving attribution for reused photos is an old horse ridden around this blog, and this very simple, human form of appreciation still seems much more exception than anything else. I was reminded of this when my former Maricopa colleague Jim (and also neighbor) sent an email with a subject line of "Look what I found. It does show your copyright in the link" and a URL. It's an MSN story on The Best Brewery in Every State and sure enough I recognize the photo: And they do give credit with a © Alan Levine so they do give credit. What they do not provide are (a) a link/url to the original; (b) the fact that the photo is actually licensed under Creative Commons BY license; (c) The caption is wrong; the photo is at THAT Brewery in Pine; they were from a series of photos I took when brewers from Arizona Wilderness Brewing Company (in Gilbert) visited the brewery near me in Pine. For an attribution grade, I give MSN a D- according to the rubric. But no one enforces attribution nor do they enforce licenses. But let's rely on Google's AI to find the image That is quite useful if you are looking for Russian reviews of American movies (and the image does not even appear). Google yields 11 more web sites that have used this photo: Guess how many provided attribution for the image? I'm waiting. Yup. Zero. Nada. Why? Because 99.2% of the world's web sites (arm chair estimate, sue me) never model giving credit for photos. I know it's my photo and vagule recall the day I took it, but I am fuzzy on exactly where/when. But I can search my flickr stream on beer pour and find it in 5 seconds (that's the benefit of writing titles and captions pn photos, if I just mass uploaded photos named IMG8265642.jpg I'd never find them). [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Hot Scotchy Pour flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] I am so insane about attribution I attribute my own photos (I am not legally required to do so); if you see me not attributing photos because it's not required, then you might generalize that behavior to all photos found on Russian Film review web sites. I learned of this photo re-use not because of Google, AI, blockchain, but because of a human connection, a friend who took 30 seconds to send me an email. That is how a human network works; also like this: https://twitter.com/laura_ritchie/status/969332594994221056 I'm with John Henry, I will keep hammering by hand. Since technology does not really help me find re-use of my own photos, I do it manually. For the last few years, when I come across a reuse, or when people comment/thank me in a comment (which does happen on a regular basis), I've been adding to my own album of reused photos: I have little expectation the practice of simply saying thanks via attribution will happen on the web at any measurable level; but I will aim to do it every time (I am nto 100%, but maybe 99.2%?). How about you? Is your practice like everyone else to just grab images from Google and reuse w/ saying thanks? Mom would not be happy with you. Try some thanktribution. It means a lot. Featured Image: Hot Scotchy Pour flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license flickr foto Strawberry Mountain Reflectedavailable on my flickr Another photoblogged thing while I am tossing up a pile of new photos to flickr. I am continually fascinated by the reflections the bright Arizona light creates off of our 1999 VW Beetle. The car is fun to drive, but crikie! all the parts are plastic and it has been a wallet drain with repairs and busted parts. At least it has this redeeming quality of creting interesting reflections, this showing the reflectedview we see to the southeast of our cabin in Strawberry. Compared to this guy, in twitter-chips, I am a hermit in the woods. Does John Edwards keep up with his small group of friends? Does he have a designated staff twitter-er? More idle banter, while I have little meaningful to blog these days. But the twitter buzz train is rolling. I get a handful of notices of twitter-ness from folks I know (and a bunch I don't know. On a good day I am selective) My twittering is in short bursts, and I keep forgetting to be a frequent tweeter. And I hear more and more about folks who are discovering useful bits of info by checking their friends tweets. I am still warm to the use of this tool, and am not bothered at a lack of a Big Educational Use in Capital Letters. There is something there, there, said the rabbit. Actually, I just like saying, "twitter". Something unusual happened in the NBA this year. The game actually got exciting. There is action, points are being scored. I went to a Phoenix Suns game about 3 years ago (someone felt bad because they forgot to show up for a meeting and offered to share me his ticket, I encouraged him to miss meetings more often) -- and it was a dull, listless affair. I swear fans were reading newspapers, balancing their checkbooks, cleaning their fingernails, during a game that was lucky to hit the high 80s in points. That went out the window this year with the unexpected run by our Phoenix Suns. There is scoring, enthusiasm, passing, youth, and a sense, even if it not true, that they actually enjoy the game. And the selfless and electric play by Steve Nash is just one more reason to love Canada. Yet all year long, the naysayers kept waiting for the bubble to burst and it failed to do so; it was not til the last week of the season that Sports Illustrated found room on the cover for the Suns. The most pathetic case is Charles Barkley, who cannot miss an opportunity to badmouth this year's Suns. He is so transparent is his desire to see this team not achieve what he failed to deliver in his mid 1990s days here-- showboating and hogging the ball with those lame triple pump fakes in the low post while the current team plays as a team without the Grand Canyon sized ego feedings required of "Sir Charles". I cannot wait to watch him eat crow or at least Amare Stoudemire's used shoes. Even if they do not win it all, it's been an exciting year and it is actually refreshing to see a game played rather than a bunch of millionaire prima donnas strolling up and down the court. Eeek, I am a closet sports nut. I CN HZ TWEETS posted 29 Sep '07, 2.06pm MDT PST on flickr Twitter is cheezing my tweets again. Am ready to coin the term "Cheez Tweetos" - sort of eCheese Its lacking the orange crud on your fingers (though blue bird feathers works fine for debris) Copy your tweets to your clipboard before "updating" - you have been warned Some interesting ideas at the IA Think blog on PowerPoint and Idea Development including the often linked (and still a riot) PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address. But this post is not just another lambast at the results sometimes called "no power and no point"-- the author has a valid wonder about the value of thinking only by bullet points: In my experience PowerPoint bullets are often authored in leu of written narrative. That is, rather than writing a report and summarizing key points using PowerPoint, PowerPoint is the report. A question, I think, that is raise by this: Does reliance on bullet points (over written narrative) lead to less idea development? Hence the rise of the weblog, where while the appearance is sometimes the focus, it is usually on the writing, the ideas, the connections between them, and the power of one individual to reach a wider audience (wider than those dozing off in the darkened room of the Powerpoint theater). It is rather refreshing to have an emphasis on the written form. Edward Abbey would have blasted away a river of searing, biting sarcasm at technology and those attached to it (a common fallacy is taking hos words literally), but his ideas on writing, to me, answer partly, "why we blog": But maybe there is something a little better. We write in order to share, for one thing-- to share ideas, discoveries, emotions. Alone, we are close to nothing. In prolonged solitude, as I've discovered, we come very close to nothingness. Too close for comfort. Throught the art of language, most inevitable of thr arts-- for what is more basic to our humanity than language?-- we communicate to others what would be intolerable to bear alone... We write to record the truth... to keep the record straight. Maybe Mr Clippy has a weblog? If you have been on the web more than (fill in the blank with a short amount of time) you know the feeling when you click and find yourself greeted by a 404 Not Found message. It’s a standard response a web server returns when it cannot locate the content for the URL requested; it might mean the link is wrong or it might mean that the content once present there was removed. The “default” Apache server response was at one time the only kind you ever saw; Room 404 is not very friendly, useful, or well decorated: Standard Apache 404 error message I am not sure if the number has a significance; among the whole building of rooms in the server building, the 4th floor is identified as “client errors”. That means YOU are to blame. Fortunately, in modern times (at least a few minutes ago), people have gotten a lot more creative with the decor of their 404 rooms. I really enjoyed this one shared by Michael Berman for the UC Channel Islands Room 404 I haven’t seen any Univ with a better 404 page than mine! http://t.co/W94XjgGn0C – be sure to hit “play” for full cheesy effect — A. Michael Berman (@amichaelberman) January 29, 2015 And in fact, there are sites like Best 404 Pages on the Web with prize ribbons and upvoting and stuff, e.g.: Espinoza Classic 404 page, from http://www.404notfound.fr/page/espnza This little tangent began while looking for a site on the Thompson Rivers University web site, and seeing: Zoing! Much of the TRU site is pretty well behaved and has proper tone and such, but Room 404 makes me chuckle. The funny thing was when I decided to go back to grab a screen shot, I got a differently designed Room 404: Uh oh, they always blame the dog for the mess in a room I kept reloading to see what else I could find. Out on the limb is the wolf sculpture atop the Brown House of Learning Perhaps the NSA is responsible for ruining this room The room has graduated! Love the link to graduation photos I don’t know how many there are, but as usually a feeling of sadness and rejection when I open a web click ane dend up in Room 404, kudos to the web gophers at TRU who made it interesting. See what room you get http://tru.ca/404 Ok, chipping away more at the WP templates. One of my blog software critcisms is the notion that an "archive" listing is just a bunch of the posts in a category or date range all glued together (see "All Your Archives Are Wrong"). To be honest, I should poke more through the WordPress docs and better understand the template system, but I am more prone to hack away at the templates until they do what I like. So I just monkeyed a bit to get WordPress playing my way. First for the Date archives, edit the archive archive.php template, changing the portion that reads: ) ... Posted in | Note that I am using the_excerpt_rss() to get a non HTML shorter version for the text of the post excerpt as a brief summary. I've flattened some of the display, and put it in an unordered list (my own stylesheet addition of a .arch_list li class listing is just something with margin-bottom:1em to space items on the output) This creates to me more of an archive as an index, rather than an archive of glued together posts. For category archives, you can use the same file saved as category.php The summer online version of ds106 that Martha Burtis and I are teaching is off like a rocket- but there is no reason why you cannot jump on board; just head over to Camp Magic Macguffin and follow the right side link to sign up. There is no worry about coming in later, although our bunk house groups are coalescing and currently bonding, kum bah ya-ing. As a point of notice (or to help me sort out my own blog personality disorder), I will be doing any assignment work right from here, the home blog, under the ds106 tag. However, as part of the storytelling of the storytelling course, I decided to play with a video blog, hosted under tumblr, but mounted here under the subdomain, macguffin.cogdogblog.com: I have noticed, and came across a few references to it elsewhere in the google-verse, that tumblr blogs are rather long cached, and feeds may not update for like 12 hours. I cannot locate any official statement on that, but I have noticed a lag between the posts and the feed. I am primarily doing it as a video blog for my reports from camp. If you followed ds106 last year, you know there was a lot of weird shit that went down, with revolutions, kidnappings, banishment, chainsaws.... weird. The whole premise of this year is to bring a sense of calmness and safety to a fun camp experience, all about artistic creativity and self-actualization. Rainbows and unicorns are our mascot, even if there is a counselor running around with a hatchet, and apparently Uncle Hector is loose in the woods. @mikeberta FYI a large crate addressed to you on camp loading dock from Cryogenics Inc. Its busted open, Uncle Hector IS LOOSE IN THE WOODS— Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 1, 2012 SO far, I have had to fly to Canada for my orientation with the camp holding company, CVI, and met our operations manager, Mr E (odd dude). The made me do some sort of survival things in the woods, which I guess I passed, and then I was dropped back in camp last night with some mystery package I am instructed to give to Marco, the facilities guy. My curiosity got the better of me, and I peeked inside the package, and have been suffering intense headaches since then. But our campers are right on target, our UMW students are up and blogging, we have had some great campfire discussions (especially the last one with Bryan Alexander) that have worked out well with the live broadcasting and auto archiving of Google Hangouts. We've handed out some camp badges, yes BADGES, BADGES, we got bad ass badges! See the bottom of the week 2 newsletter for our campers of the week, and Martha has even gone and made a flickr group so anyone can make and give out badges. We know that Counselor Doodlebug has been sending some out as well, like: cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe I think things are going well, there are a few anonymous notes whining "where is Jim Groom?" - and Jim and I have chatted much of the time- he really wants to be a camper and work on hos bead necklaces and sand paintings. It's time for a new change of ds106, don;t you want to be part of the merriness? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xrqm2Q5NtM And remember, ds106 is the place to come this summer as a break from those silly old MOOCs! And remember, NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN THIS SUMMER, NOTHING! Wow, I need some rest, tomorrow is another busy days, chasing campers and keeping tabs on the counselors. We hear there might be some ruckus between bunks four and five. Here, to demonstrate some tricks and insights into making animated GIFs, I shall reveal my cultural antiquity with a reference to the Arnold Horshack enthusiastic hand raise from the TV show Welcome Back Kotter (while cheesy at least for that era, a positive image about school?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cDAqrywsHE I was recently asked by a colleague if I wanted to be part of a great project again this year, and I was looking for a fun way to show my enthusiasm. What could be more enthusiastic than a Arnold Horshack handraise? Surely, there was an animated GIF for that (and I won't stop calling you Shirley). I came up dry. [caption id="attachment_52961" align="aligncenter" width="630"] This is an internet travesty. What's wrong with this net generation?[/caption] So I did something about it. I used the Giphy GIFmaker with the 4 second Youtube video above and was quickly able to fill in this Internet Culture Gap, even adding text overlay to the GIF with my own Ooh Ohh Horshack GIF. That was easy. Well there is this. [caption id="attachment_52962" align="aligncenter" width="630"] It's easy to make a GIF... that weighs in at 3.8MB[/caption] This short GIF comes in at 3.8Mb. Most people do not care about the size of media, spoiled as we are by cable internet and 4G mobile. There is a cost, though. and with some know how, we can not only put this fat GIF on a diet, we can do things not possible with the Easy Bake GIF tools. Whys is the GIF fat? The easy rip and GIF tools merely grab a frame every 0.07 seconds and put it on a timeline. That's all they can do because they are just an algorithm. This is more or less flip card animation, where the entire screen is changed every 0.07 seconds, whether something moves or not. This was the motivation for early animators to develop Cel Animation techniques -- There is no reason to redraw the same background scenery of say, the western landscape of the Roadrunner cartoons-- if it does not change for a segment. Or via Wikipedia Generally, the characters are drawn on cels and laid over a static background drawing. This reduces the number of times an image has to be redrawn and enables studios to split up the production process to different specialised teams. Using this assembly line way to animate has made it possible to produce films much more cost-effectively. The invention of the technique is generally attributed to Earl Hurd, who patented the process in 1914. The outline of the images are drawn on the front of the cel while colors are painted on the back to eliminate brushstrokes. Earl's 1914 idea is something we can use more than 100 years later. Below I detail how I reduced the file size of this GIF animation by a factor of 10 AND added elements that the quick and easy tools do not. Okay, I am using Photoshop, which of course, limits people who do not have this software. It could be done, more tediously, in other software (GIMP? pixlr?) by using GIF Exploder to extract the frames of any GIF to single images, delete unnecessary ones, modify others, and repackaged as a GIF with maybe Giphy's Slideshow tool. But hey, use what you have. If you open an animated GIF in Photoshop, you should see the frames in the Animation window. My Horshack GIF created in Giphy came in ay 47 frames, each in its own Photoshop layer. The first thing I do is thin out the number of frames. You can delete ones that do not change much from the previous frame. In GIF animation, you do not really need fluid motion, it is a GIF, not cinema! I went through from the first segment where we see all the students, and reduced the sequence from 15 frames to 4. Then I start adjusting the timing, which you can do per frame (I know of few tools that let you do it this easily), but also I change the timing from that sequence from 0.07 seconds to 0.1. [caption id="attachment_52964" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Changing the timing of multiple frames, select the frames, and then use the menu for timing from any of the selected frames.[/caption] I think the rest of the sequence, and I have my gif slimmed from 46 frames to 9. [caption id="attachment_52965" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Arnold's GIF lost a lot of weight![/caption] We can also do some more optimizing at the time of saving as a GIF. These are settings I fiddle with: Numbers of colors- the most you get in a GIF is 256, and for photos, the fewer colors you use, the more grainy it can look. I can live with this since it's an old show, so I drop it to 64 colors. If your gif is an illustration with lots of solid color, you can get crazy file settings by dropping colors to 16 or 8. Lossy - I actually do not know what this setting does, but just started using it more. It does make images a bit noisier, but even ay a few percent, can knock some blobs of weight off. Image size If you can live with smaller file dimensions, you can squeeze more weight out of GIFs- but here, since I have saved so much, I am actually going to bump it up a bit from 480 pixels to 500. Whooppie. So here is the GIF, from 46 frames down to 9, from 3.8Mb down to 387k It may not be ultra great with some quality loss (this is different from the goal of doing fancy cinemagraphs), but I can live with it for the purpose I have in mind. I could stop and call it a day. But why, when I can do more? The Easy Bake GIFS can only use what is in the video and maybe a text superimposed on all layers. But this is animation, and we ought to be able to more changes per frame. I want to emphasize the "Oh Oh" letters, so I am going to make them flash. I first use the magic wand, and the shift key to create a multiple selection of the green text fill. I will then create a new layer, and I want it ABOVE all the others, so I move it to the top of my layer stack, and with that selection still active (what we used to call when this was new as "marching ants"), I fill it with my foreground yellow color, with the short cut "option-delete". So now I have filled in those letters, cool! Except it has done it one every frame! That's not what I want. [caption id="attachment_52969" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Yellow filled success, but it is on all frames...[/caption] What I want to do is toggle it off for all frames I do NOT want to see it. There are many ways to do this, I select all the frames in the animation window, and de-select the frame's radio button in the layer's palette. Poof, they are all gone! [caption id="attachment_52970" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Hiding the Yellow Fill layer on all frames[/caption] What I then do is select the frames where I want the yellow to be visible (alternating frames to make it flash), and then turn ON the layer just for those frames. Get it? Show and hide stuff using the layer visibility. More cleanup- the original has a black bar on the left, so I use the crop tool to get rid of that (and reduce the height some, every bit of less pixels is more bytes saved. Cropping one frame affects the entire file. Flashing colors is one thing, but let's add a brand new element. Since Horshack has that strident yell, I pull in one of my favorite images of a donkey, that I place to the side. I turns it's visibility off from the first frames, and move it's position and resize it in the the Arnold frame. But I then find out that the move is only done in the one frame, I want that donkey on the side in all the last frames! So I find the frame that I like it's position (and select it's layer), and from the menu in the animation window, select Match Layer Across Frames.... Now follow the logic, I have the donkey visible in frames I want it, so I deselect (visiblity, if I left it on, the donkey would be visible in all frames), all I want it to match is the position in frames it is visible. Now the donkey's position is fixed... which ends up looking a bit static. So I step trough each frame in the last sequence, with the donkey layer selected, and nudge it a few notches horizontal and vertical so its position bounces around slightly. And thus, with these tricks done, my new and improved Horshack Ooh Ooh GIF is done as much as I want to go, and comes in with more animation at 379k vs the 3.8Mb of the one Giphy popped out of the Easy GIF oven. Now this is a basic example. But what I have found with GIFs is-- if you can create a background layer that does not change (like cel animator Earl Hurd figured out in 1914), and then just add or move the smaller parts that change in overlaying layers, you can do rather complex GIF animations that do not have large file size... only the parts that need to move, are ones that are repeated. I still use Giphy to grab the original sequence for my GIFs (probably w/o the text overlays) and then do my photoshop mods to those files. If you want to poke around with my Photoshop file, you can fetch it from Vinnie Barbarino. I never thought I would spend 90 minutes blogging about Arnold Horshack. Long live enthusiastic hand raises. Top / Featured Image: screen capture of the famous (well long ago) Arnold Horshack hand raise from the show "Welcome Back Kotter", found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cDAqrywsHE. I'll leave it to the lawyers ravens to sort out the legality of re-use. This is supposed to be an introductory blog post for the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class. Hello/Goodbye it is-- while it's a bit early to jump over the fence (I did rad the first chapter of the book), but I am finding it's not the experience I need. I'm on course in my usual Zero for MOOC (and now SMOOC) Completion. I'm bailing, again- it's not fault of the course, it's me. And I do not want to come off as a snob like I know all this stuff, but if you are in a class, you have to take responsibility to get up and change if its not the right fit. I am wagging, see I am friendly? I will come back to the dog above. Wagging. I really wanted to be part of this open course for many reasons, including my respect for Lisa Lane and Todd Conaway as facilitators. I also saw it as an opportunity to evolve my skills at online teaching, given I have done just one class so far. I wanted to stay with an open course. What I missed was that the course is not only aimed at teachers new to online teaching, but relatively new to being online period. I am not comfortable with labels of "experienced MOOC" people and "novice", and some of the assertions that we should be tempering our communications so as not to scare off said novices. We are all educators. A mix is a good thing. It may be me, but I find the very usage of "novice" almost a disabling term. It tends to keep people comfortable at a low level of online ability. I started this class with the idea I was a "novice" at teaching, but I refuse to wear that as a label. In everything I do, even the things I have some skills, I have so more more to learn than I know that the idea of the labels is ridiculous. I am always moving forward on that spectrum of experience. Let me tell you about my "novice" students in ds106, which for some people needs to be explained as jargon, the Digital Storytelling class I teach at the University of Mary Washington. Most of my students have never done blogging, many are new to twitter, and are setting up their first YouTube accounts. In two days of this class, they have taken control of their domain, installed wordpress, created videos, and embedded them into their blog posts. This stuff is not hard, and don't you dare drag out that digital immigrant crap. The students do this because they just go and try; if they do not know what a term is, they look it up. They take action, they do not wait for the course to provide. So, I am feeling harshness coming on, but let me frame this with the approach how we each media in ds106- the first level is always noticing, listening. In photography, they learn to see details through the lens, and notice light. In Design, they learn to identify color, font, use of space. In audio, they listen first to appreciate layers in sound, foley effects, use fo background. Frankly I am not sure people should not be teaching online without some level of basic experience being and doing online. I have no idea if this is off base, but frankly it is a major (to me) difference of doing things ON the web (e.g. putting stuff inside LMSes) and doing things OF the web. I am not saying people have to be experts at web stuff, but the web should be like a place they feel like they inhabit, not just visit or witness through a glass plate window. And you might say, that is the purpose of the course. And I hope it does help those folks. I understand totally what this course is about, it is preparing teachers for the kind of online teaching that is done at Miracosta and many other places. It is stuff that is well designed and structured, as Lisa describes: Unlike these MOOCs, this class is not an open framework for participating in an online community. The syllabus, unlike other MOOCs, is not just an open topic and a synchronous session (we may not even have many of those). It is based on guided exploration particular topics with a particular design of progress, particularly suited for those just beginning to teach online. I can try, but all of this structure is going to make me loopy. It's not my way of being. It's not my style. I am loose stock. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What it took an afternoon literally padding up a creek (Patapsco River in Maryland) was that this is a course that is aimed at people who wi;l teach what is, if there is such a thing, a traditional online class. I am actually not that interested in that sort of online teaching; I want to be in the space of experimentation. I have no research papers or studies to rely on, but I go by my intuition and experience here- What we are doing in ds106 may not be the form many other classes can do, but to me, it is most close to the very structure and dynamic of the internet itself. I am not really seeing how the kind of content in the syllabus is gooing to feed my growth in such an experimental teaching space. In ds106 we purposely challenge our students, we deliberately make them uncomfortable, so they will learn how to move out of that space on their own. So you see that wagging dog above? Do you know what dog it is? It's not Lassie. The kind of media is an animated GIF, maybe one of the oldest forms of web media that has been resurrected in a new form, one that has been at the heart of ds106 a long while. For our assignment this week, we told our students to figure ut how to make an animated GIF. We did not provide them a screencast, a tutorial, a guide. We want them to struggle, to have to figure it out. We want them to be (a little frustrated). By them moving past that level of frustation to success is what gives them confidence to do that again and again. To me this is the kind of modern learning that we need to be doing, because the world is changing too fast for us to be designing well formed structures. Now here is the thing, what I find myself trying to do as a teacher is to de-program the students from they way they have been conditioned to DO school. They get so worried about having to complete the task, to get all 25 points of credit, that they miss the real outcomes. I want my students to be trying things they have not done before, to interpret the assignments in their own way (not just "what do I have to do to get credit"). I want to free them from worrying about the frigging points! I want them to focus on their process of learning, not the products. I want students to find their own voices in their work, and make the assignments work for them, rather than me- here's a twitter exchange where I was trying to work this angle with a student: https://twitter.com/aspangle0629/status/243034650270900224 And you want to know something? Alex is not in my section, he is in Martha Burtis' section. DO you see how we are blurring the boundaries? If one of my students might make it this far down my blog, here is a clue. If you try something and produce something that is kind fo crappy, but you can write a narrative of your process, describe the influences, the intent. you will do better in my class than someone who makes something slick but cannot talk about their process. Well here I am at the end of a post, I keep going back and trying to take out the stuff that makes me sound like a frothing mad dog. But here is this the thing- if a class, course, program, webinar, anything is not working for you, you have to get up and go. Who are you helping by sitting quietly and being "nice"? So Lisa, Todd, thanks for all the fish. I am sorry.,. I am not tagging this post to the course site. This is not a criticism of the work you are doing, but an awareness of the lack of a fit for me. All me. If I can help in some way, let me know. But I won't be in the regular mix, I have some sticks to go chase. cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by TheGiantVermin Today was the rockin' launch of the NMC Campus opened virtually in Second Life. After much morning prep, we ran two different 2 hour sessions, at 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM PST. I am working on a new NMC site that should server as the primary news outlet (read as blog published, podcast enhanced, tagged, and flickr syndication encrustated). The agenda was posted at the main "teleport" entry: (more…) "Who is taking a picture of me?" This during my last presentation at UNITEC. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Workshopping It flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] This 3+ year old photo was recently discovered by Karen (partially in the left side), and was taken in one of the workshops I did during a visit to New Zealand in November 2004. This workshop, or BlogShop, [link is dead, try later version of BloggerShop] was your run of the mill introduction to blogging, and I had the participants run out to Blogger and create their own blogs, on the spot. Some how Karem found the photo and took the time to write a nice comment, where she shared that she has been blogging since and having her students blog as well. She blogs as Karen's Blog on her teaching and travels, did her own version of a blog workshop as Taking control: How can blogs support students in their language learning?, has a shared blog with some colleagues where they share what they are reading, and used the original blog she made in the workshop as a travelogue for trips to Thailand, Australia, and India. This is about as exciting a thing to discover as a workshop presenter, that people take what you throw at them in an hour session, and go much farther than you might even dream about. In fact, looking at the other blogs from these workshops, its nice to see that some played out a bit, some did not, but that's okay. I have to give a big nod to Google for not chopping off the 3 year-old blogs, many of them inactive, but even at a one post blog, they are a small ripple in the blogopshere. Thanks Karen, and keep on blogging! And the power of this single comment has me mulling over an idea of something new to do, blog-wise. Featured image: Screenshot of BloggerShop site: Today marks the 1333th DS106 Daily Create-- it has not missed a beat since TDC1 on January 8, 2012. There will be one tomorrow, and the day after that, and the... ... with subtle switch coming up officially Thursday. We are switching it to a new site that continues the practice but changes, and hopefully simplifies or expands the options for how to works. The (new) Daily Create is actually up and running now at http://daily.ds106.us/ - it's more like a cross-fade, The current site at http://tdc.ds106.us/ will publish it's last one tomorrow, and the same one will appear at the new site. In fact you can submit to both- upload the photo to flickr for the old site, and tweet it out with the right tags for the new. See, today's Daily Create (a writing one) is available at the [soon to be] old site and at the new one. The new site uses a special Wordpress Theme I have been working on this year, the Daily Blank, it allows anyone to create their own daily challenge/assignment/whatever site. It's first run was for the You Show, I have also put it into play for Mariana Funes' Still Web, and currently it is going gangbusters for the UdG Agora project as the Daily Try. Why are we doing this? The current DS106 Daily create is dependent upon and forces users to use specific media services to submit their work. Images go to flickr, video to Youtube, audio to Soundcloud. This brings some technical issues. This week flickr's tags are not aggregating the work of new students. It also depends on the Awesome Flickr Gallery plugin which the last few months has been less than awesome (it needs regular manual cache dumpings). YouTube actually stopped searching on tags more than a year ago. And Soundcloud? Sigh. Every time we add a new Daily Create, we have to create a fake account, because they only let you make one. And all of these limit participating to these platforms. The new site also means the categories need not be limited to media type. There could be a category for Mocking Jim Groom, for example. The new site takes responses via twitter, almost a throwback to how the inspiration for the DS106, The Daily Shoot, worked (point of reference, the Daily Shoot folded after 678 assignments). This means if the Daily Create asks for an image, it can be included in the tweet, or referenced via a link. The image can be anywhere on the net as long as its publicly viewable. Some Daily Creates (short ones) might just be composed in a tweet, others might be referenced by link. The writing ones present new possibilities. On the old site, the Writing responses were actually saved to the site, using some custom code I added in 2012. But on the new one, if what you write is bigger than a tweet, well then you have to put it online via dropbox, Google Drive, or better- your own blog. If I was teaching, then, I might suggest to my students to post their daily create work on their own blog (where they can add context and behind the scenes info), and tweet that link as a response. The main hurdle in this new way is that if you respond you must include two things in the tweet- the @ds106dc account AND the specific hash tag for that day. The tweets than get embedded in the site. For example, see the Daily Try #agoratry94 The responses include images and videos, embedded directly as tweets. And there is another bonus feature, because we can tag responses with the twitter account that sent it, we are able to create a personal link for each person who participated. For example Sara, @saracarolinagm who has done 67 Daily Tries, has a link to show all of her work http://udg.theagoraonline.net/daily/hashtags/saracarolinagm/. This also let's us make a leaderboard -- which indicated 145 different people have done at least one. I'm excited to see this go live on DS106. I suggested to Jim maybe wait until the end of the semester since several classes are in motion, but in typical fashion he said-- "just flip the switch now." A big thanks also goes to Mariana Funes, who has taken over populating the Daily Creates. We have had many conversations where we share the big secret- Cresting Daily Creates is a massively creative act. And also to Tim Owens, who crafted the original Daily Create site in 2011. And to te hundreds of people who have done them over the years. So give the new site a try now, it's functional, because on Thursday... it will be the only option (the current site will of course remain as an archive) (what do you think this is an LMS where we flush stuff?). Create on, Garth. Top / Featured Image Credits: flickr photo by Rusty Russ http://flickr.com/photos/10159247@N04/6991245337 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license This dog has been blogging since April 2003 and requires no goofy theme music, over enthused child actors, or laugh tracks. My people have alerted to me to a Disnatravesty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JhlTa9woM It's gonna be last Dog Blogging Standing, Stan I bet you will not even make it past 100 posts. This one is number 3472, punk. For The Wag! The CogDogBlog has been un-snapped. Back in December I experimented with adding the capability offered by Snap.com that with some additional calls to a remote JavaScript library in your blog templates, it adds a small web site preview when you mouse-over a link external from your site. I found it interesting, sometimes in the way when I was trying to right/control click to copy a URL, but never quite convinced myself why it was important. And since it was yet one more thing loading something else from an external site, I'm opting to take it out for now. Though is this interesting concept, a blog full of poems by [[mez]] (what language??) that uses links to some external preset sites to add some visual oomph to words, as jill noted: As you can see, the code-snippet only shows previews to linked pages on other domains. So Mez created a quick-and-easy blog dis[ap]posable, put up a few technically very simple HTML pages on another server, and linked to them from her poem. Ta-da: instantly a new genre is born. Similar effects have been used, so I suppose it's not exactly a new genre. But there's something about taking disposable, ready-made, super-easy bits and pieces and putting them together as Mez has done that's just really fascinating. It's neat, but still, I am asking myself... why do I need this functionality in my (un-poetic) blog? So, in poising to yank this out of my WordPress header template, using another computer where I do not have the master files for my site (please tell me most WP bloggers keep a full copy of their templates, code, etc, and regularly backup their database.....), I came up with my idea fo a scratch pad inside my template folder. You see, when you edit the template files for your theme via the browser (which does require they are writable on the server), in this case I would typically just delete the Snap code from my header.php template. but what if I change my mind? Do I need to trudge back tot he snap site and regenerate the code? Instead, I made a stub of a new template file,an almost empty template, that is actually not even used in my theme, called something like myscratchpad.php. Actually, to give it a pretty title on the list fo templates, I put at the top: This is uploaded to my theme directory. Now I have a place I can cut the snap... code from my header.php template, and paste here just in case I change my mind... This is a woefully puny tiny idea, but is useful if you have some things you need associated with your blog that you may need when you cannot get to your original files, or maybe do not have access to FTP or .... Well, it works for me. Liar posted 24 Jan '08, 12.49pm MST PST on flickr The web site istwitterdown.com is a big fat liar You cannot trust any web sites. Definitely not mine either. iscogdogdogblogfullofcrap.com? Yes Lola on the beach by ambertq posted 22 Oct '08, 12.48pm MDT PST on flickr I have to leave town tonight. I have a red-eye to Newark and hopefully a connection and some information when I get to the next place. You see, my older sister and her husband have not been home since November. Her house and car are in tact. They had retired, so they are not missing from work. There have been a few sporadic dispatches that would make it seem they are okay, but I have to go find them to be sure. Actually, I know exactly where they are! Cause they invited me out to meet them where they are wintering, in the freakin Bahamas! They have been living the life of carefree pups living on thei5 38 foot sailboat. I will fly out from Ft Lauderdale Tuesday morning, and hang with them, for a week, no laptop, no internet, just sun, beach, and water. At best there will be scattered tweets before I leave the mainland. This dog is gone to the beach! Cya! Bless Joe Clark. Not only does he write a stunningly useful book, but he also provides all of the chapters (for free) to Building Accessible Websites. When you buy the book, you get the entire text (but no graphics) on the included CD-ROM, along with a few extras, like fonts and utilities. Now the whole book is available online, in individual chapters. I was led this way since in the section on accessibility in Zeldman's Web Standards book, the mighty Z referenced Joe's work with supreme praise. I've just dived in a little, but Joe writes extremely clearly with a little bite of humor. And it is practical stuff you can use. I am already reviewing my coding of web forms based on Chapter 12. If you think web accessibility is just tossing in some ALT tags or getting Bobby approval, you better dive in a little deeper. It is not hard at all. Like someone has mixed the metaphors, "It is not rocket surgery." Joe leads the way. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The loop is now closed, having returned home on Friday, November 18-- this is one day past week 22. I have to say that doing these weekly updates were a blast and saved me the trouble of writing actual blog posts. Number of days on the road: 148 Miles Driven: 15,035 -- That is an average of 101 per day, Longest driving Day: the last one 620 miles from Amarillo, TX to Strawberry, AZ. Most Recent 1000 mile marker: 15,000 miles, south of Winslow AZ Number of States/Provinces driven in: 29: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delawre, New Jersey, Washington DC, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of times Red Dog broke down: 0 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 6 Number of minutes spent while customs offices inspect items in my truck crossing into Canada: 24 Worst Drivers in the Universe: South Florida where the rules are go as slow as you want in all lanes. Most scenic foliage drive: Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. Second was highway 58 in southwest Virginia Best alternative to Interstate- US 19, the Georgia-Florida Parkway. Number of ferry rides: 7 Number of minutes spent while customs offices inspect items in my truck crossing into USA: 0 Money spent on gas: $4020.80 Cheapest gas price: $3.05/gallon (Refinery, NM). Highest gas price: $5.64/gallon (CA$1.39/liter) (Wawa, ON). cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Scariest things seen ceramic and stuffed: clowns. Number of iPhones dropped into canyons: 1 Photos posted: 3026 (that is an average of 20.4 per day) Number of 106 photos taken on trip: 40 Number of 106 milepost photos: 7 Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 18 Best B&B: Eagle Eyrie in Camilla Georgia Number of nights spent in sailboats: 3 Number of nights camping: 20 Best Campground and Experience (likely never to be knocked off this list): Canoeing to Wallace Island, BC with Scott Leslie; close second Holly Bay Campground, Daniel Boone National Forest and Hermits Hollow, Colorado Wettest night camping: that big storm in Colorado with @pumpkiny wh thankfully had tequila Coldest camping night: Glacier National Park, Alberta, Canada Most Number of consecutive nights camping: 6 Most Number of consecutive days without a shower: 6 (see previous) Number of Islands Slept On: 3 (Whidbey Island, WA, Wallace Island, BC, and I have to count Vancouver Island, BC) Comfort of the "West Wing": delightful cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Best Town Names: Niceville Florida and Fracking, Pennsylvania Best place to be in that no one believes me: Welland, ON Best Out of the Way Museums: EBR-1 Breeder Reactor Idaho National Laboratory; Old Idaho Penitentiary, Boise ID; Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington AB; Little Congress Bicycle Museum, Cumberland Gap, TN Best Factory Tour: Snyder's Pretzels, Hanover, PA Weirdest Large Roadside Objects: 2 (Dog Bark Park, Cottonwood ID; Pysanka Egg, Vegreville AB) Number of new forms of transportation: 4 (paddleboard, Jet Ski, 4 wheel Quad, tractor) Best Beach Walk: Batchawana Bay Provincial Park Joy of getting to hang out with my sisters: large cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of former PhD advisors met: 1 (hi Sue!) NUmber of hitchhikers picked up and gotten stories recorded for StoryBox: 1 Number of books read: 13 (Most recent: Jack Kerouac On the Road Best Song About Dogs Sung in Loud Bar in Guelph: "Littlest Hobo" by Kyle Mackie Number of boxes of Snyders Pretzels consumed behind the wheel: 7 Best storytelling stranger: That ranger in Mount Rainier National Park. Lost dogs tended to: 2 (thought @injenuity later dod the work to d=find their owners) Number of times spent helping a friend of a friend move: 1 (thats what happens when you drive a truck) Most Gracious Hospitality by someone who is waayyyyyy busy and asked on last minute notice: Vicki Davis Friend/Relatives Homes Visited/Mooched Upon: 33 cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe NUmber of times getting screeched: 1 (thanks Kim!) Thanks to Colin Madland I got to co-present out work on creating a system for WordPress hosted portfolios for over 500 new students at Trinity Western University. I was unable to attend in person, but Colin submitted us a proposal and got me in the room via his Zoom room. https://twitter.com/terribateman/status/1058466811887280128 There was that bit of podium time while Colin and the local AV guy were fiddling with the audio settings, leaving me big on the screen just to make goofy expressions. https://twitter.com/duckdeux/status/1058467986544058368 Just getting ready for this was a win as Colin introduced me to GitPitch a slick way to build web-based presentations (powered by Reveal.js) be editing Markdown content in GitHub. Got our slides right here You will find reference links to relevant content etc right inside the deck. I gotta thank Colin a lit for giving me a nice pitch (and he's right, I need new projects!) https://twitter.com/thatpsychprof/status/1058468445509939200 But really, I must thank him for bringing me onto a great project that, as most do, got me to stretch both familiar and new tech muscles. https://twitter.com/edtechfactotum/status/1058468967533043713 And maybe the best part was after our round, as Colin was carrying his laptop back to his seat, I got to wave to a lot of friends and colleagues at ETUG. I regret I was unable to stay for the table conversations, I guess that makes me some kind of virtual parachute presenter, but I had plans to get to Regina as a my wife student taught last year was playing in a UR basketball game. And imagine the irony getting there to see that UR was playing a team named the Spartans ... from Trinity Western! I know the team name since that was what we came up with for the fourth portfolio theme template I made for TWU. I'm eager too to give GitPitch another play. Featured image: Via a tweet from Brian Lamb. Since twitter has nothing even remotely enabling of licensed media, I'll give credit to Brian and invoke a WTFPL license. https://twitter.com/brlamb/status/1058468852273532929 UPDATE: One day after updating my code, I got some crappo spam email via the contact form for stupid hand bags. I am done with email forms. If you cannot figure out how to reach me, I am not sure I want to hear from you. Don't even bother with what follows! Email contact forms, so 1990s. So prone to spam, but I guess still needed. Maybe. I have on my landing site and was asked about it https://twitter.com/mannaxc/status/477840195803705344 The Treble template I used for this site had a form, but nothing to process it. Using mailto: in the form action is pretty useless (won't work in many client apps, especially mobile) and what you get is even more useless. The template I used for another client project did have a PHP script to handle mailing of the message (using the PHP mail command). When I first set it up, all I got was spam. I did some research (and lost the link) but found some suggestions for tightening up the form to block spam. I modified my form and saw the spam drop to zero. Then tonight while revisiting it to write this up, I noticed that I had left off the critical command to even send mail, so nothing at all has come my way. Sorry if I ignored your message. The main steps I had (thought I) put in place are: Name your php file something obscure Use non standard form field names for "name" and "email" since bots look for those to automatically insert into Create a dummy form field with a name of "email" and use CSS to hide it (it is not used, scripts will think they did their work, but the info put in the field is never used). Trap for missing referrer in the HTTP header (meaning the form content did not come from your original page, some bot/script tried to go directly to the form response) So here is some of the elements in case you want to try, or better yet, tell me my method is crap. This is the base of the form where people first encounter it- fields for "name", "email", "subject", and "message". Send Create your own name for the form tag value of action="" -- this is the name of a php file you will create to process the form. Also, edit the names of the fields for name and email to something non standard, cryptic. Something better than someobscurefieldname. Now, make a new PHP file with the name you made up from above. Copy the header from your main file so it has all the stuff to format your page, and copy as well the form content. You will makes a few changes. At the very top of your php response file, insert this code to manage the response Yo will want to change the names of the variables $_POST['someobscurefieldname]] and $_POST['anotherobscurefieldname'] to match the ones used in your form name= and of course make the feedback strings relevant. Somewhere above the form, find a place to insert the feedback and copy the form, but add the value statements for the name and email fields so it remembers what your intrepid commenter has written One of the most frustrating aspects of Apple iDevices is the complete obscuration of the file system. We Have Been Judged Not Worthy of Having Access, in the name of ease of use. I'm find with this is the primary mode, but I know for a fact that within my decide is a file system. There is no reason to justify locking an advanced user out of access to their own files. This came up the other day when I was listening to Bryan Jackson's regular ds106 broadcast from his 12th grade philosophy class- one group of students was frustrated at not being able to get their recorded memos off a shared device, it being too large to email. And running it through iTune presents its out suite of synch issues. I as driving at this time and could not recall the app I have used to get files from the device. I just ran into a similar situation, for a different reason. I am staying this weekend at my sister's house in Baltim0re- she is away on a sailing adventure, so her high speed internet is turned off. I rely on Verizon MIfi but the cell signal here is awful and my connection speed is 2 notches above dialup. I have some recordings I made today from visiting my aunts using Griffin iTalk on the iPhone- they are 20- 130 Mb in size, and unwieldy to email or send to my dropbox. But yes, I recall, I have a copy of Phone Disk Macroformat' sap for being able to mount your iPhone as a drive (It is discontinued in favor of their new, not free iExplorer app, but you can still get a copy of the free Phone Disk listed under "Discontinued Apps" at the bottom the downloads page. Phonedisk gives you access to the apps on your phone that have files associated with them- each app is considered a different "drive" When you have an iDevice connected to your Mac, Phone Disk mounts by default the media drive, where your pictures and videos reside. Vis the Phone Disk menu you can select a different "Connection Root", one of the other apps, so I am able to select "iTalk" (I am excited to see I can access Cinemgram, so I can get my animated GIFs without emailing them to myself) When I do this, from my drives on the left of my finder, I have full access to all of thre audio stored in iTalk, and I can copy them in seconds to my Mac And WOWZA, there are all my audio files (and a bunch more I thought were deleted). This is way easier than fooling around in iTunes, and the usual way I end up doing with photos- emailing it to myself. As far as I can see, this discontinued free app is a nugget of gold. What I found in poking around: The audio files from the Memo app reside in the default Media mount point, inside a Recordings Folder Not all apps are accessible via this tool .I have no idea what decides this, it must be something in the way the apps are written. The Cinemagram mount point has gobs of video file- the original .mov and the one used for the generation of the final GIF; it also creates a mask as a JPG. but there are no .gif files storied here- the must be generated on the server. Some of these apps have a lot of residual media files in them. Or maybe I am not cleaning them up enough? And Apple, c'mon, give us access to OUR files on OUR devices we paid for. There is no reason to lock us out. None. They are our files. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Do not get me wrong, I am rather proud and excited to have my 10 copies of Educause Review that includes my article. The thing is... I don't know what to do with them. I've read my own piece more than enough before publication, and I have read the other ones already online. And the whole question an entire publishing industry must face every day is- what is the added value of the print version? Yes, I can read it offline, away from electricity, the network. In my reading room. And I can look at the ads. Yeah. I do enjoy reading print books, there is something more intimate and often (but not always) immersive about holding it in my hands, not getting twitter pop-up messages. Just me and someone's imagination or ideas. So I am not implying that print journals are useless. But the entire shift is standing in our faces- the value pre-internet was that this was the only way to get the information contained within. That advantage is now gone. It is time to create a new value. What can be done that is of value with this version in my hands? I now face the prospect of putting them on a shelf, in a box, in a cabinet. In the past I might have mailed a copy to my Mom. I seek an experiment, maybe inspired by I Left This For You To Read. What happens if these get sent out by mail, and people choose to annotate, markup, add questions/ideas, maybe scotch tape in something relevant, and then send it on to someone else with the same invitation? Where would they go? What would they become? Could it become a more personal kind of sharing than on the big wide open internet? Can something more be made of it? Maybe a piece of literature would be better, but I have these 10 copies and think it is worth even a lead balloon idea than just let them sit on a shelf. Thus, the experiment. I will keep a copy for myself and maybe send one to my sister. That leaves 8 copies of this issue of EDUCAUSE Review. If you want a copy, use my contact form and send me a mailing address. I'll mail it to you. You will get some handwritten barely legible message from me. I will include a web form address just so I can know geographically where it went. Thats the only info I will ask. You can just keep it. End of story. Or, you can make something out of it, or an article within. Or turn into art, pr a story, or just commentary. Optional, but it would be cool to see a blog post or a tweet, what it's like to get this. Maybe I'll ask for some cryptic hash tag. And what would be cool is if you send it on to someone else. Maybe this is silly. If I hear nothing, I conclude it's not really an interesting idea, and I shall have to make some room on the bookshelf. But if written material is not unique because it is widely available, it seems to be that some form of social reading, or within smaller networks, might be the way to keep that print thing special. And no, I am not trying to shill my article. There are plenty of others to read. What do you think? What do we do with stuff in print? Eight copies remain, envelopes ready. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Mmmmm, another mutated strand of 5 things meme got batted my way from Alisa. I've got a lukewarm thing about such things. Over the years I have never forwarded those email things which warned an anvil would drop from the sky on this coyote if I failed to forward. Well, maybe it did. But I'll play only because Alisa is so cool and knows my favorite cocktail ;-) So her rules are: 1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages). 2. Open the book to page 123. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the next three sentences (sentences 6-9). 5. Tag five people. Okay, so I'll start by saying that I had to change the rules. I just had to blaze a new path. Do things my way or the highway. (Insert your own Cliché here) I'll try it your way, @soul4real! though it will reveal what a literary noob I am as Go Dog Go and CDB barely clock above 20 pages ;-) Since my office is chaos, it was easy to pluck three books from the random stacks. Let's see if I can count sentences.... rummaging and counting sentences.... Ah, I like this one! After a long silence he yawned, then said, "We're using another shadowless thing." "What's that"? "Words." The only clue is the story takes place in the outdoors of Oregon. One not used was O'Henry's Short Stories (hah, I paid 10 cents for it in a thrift store; on Amazon it is 14 cents!) - the sentences landing there almost sounded like a geology book. The other not used was Edward Abbey's Brave Cowboy which I would have easily taken since he is one of my favorite authors (my copy of Desert Solitaire is in shreds), but the first sentence was one of those free flowing like a desert wash in flash flood ones- literally a paragraph. Now the hard part- who do I want to inflict this upon? Should I pass the meme on? Will people just groan and mutter foul words about me when they get tagged? Oh well. I'll pick some from my Google reader with no real logic of choice. Jim Groom cause he is sure to be eclectic and reads big thick (and remembers them) Scott Leslie ditto- I saw all the books in his basement office, so I know he has a stack, And I bet he hates memes more than me. Sue Waters just because I know she reads every trackback ping, likes memes, and is just a fun person who has gobs of people she can spread this to. Rachel Smith cause I know she wants to post something on her new blog site. Chris Lott cause he needs a light hearted break from blogging about PLEs and imagine he has an Alaskan scale sized book collection. I am guessing he will roll his eyes at the meme thing too. I guess there was a theme to my selection, they are all from people who blog from the west coast of their continents. There. I have done the dirty deed. I can't stop the curiosity impulse and sometimes feel obliged to chase down source-less photos. So it started with a Cory Doctorow tweet (just follow him, you will not be sorry) https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1494697045231165443 Why this image? It's just road side Americana. Was it the tweet saying "circa 1970s" which was my childhood? That guess might be based on the vintage of the photo. The models of cars might push it to late 1960s but not too far. The tweet goes to Wil Wheaton's Tumblr (which might be the source of the 1970s). Tumblr... yes it still exists. It was the platform that really enabled that "reblog" / repost thing. a one click way to just post to your site what someone else did. It leaves a trail of unsourced media. Wil (can I call you by first name) reblogged this from a tumblr called Every Day Life in the Past. End of trail because no one in tumblr attributes photos. That's so not cool there. What do we have there? A cafe named "Magic Chef" offering "Home Style Cooking" or maybe it was the "Eat Shop Cafe"-- that's pretty damned unique. Not. Search results for Magic Chef Cafe land you mostly in appliance land. I did find another image (via Google Lens reverse search) of the same restaurant from a vintage postcard seller ("MAGIC CHEF CAFÉ RESTAURANT PEPSI COLA SIGN OLD CARS ADVERTISING POSTCARD COPY", this image is the same place, but the cars are older: That could push it early 1960s? There seems to be a shop adjacent, some kind of Dance studio? My trail ran cold. Most references to Magic Chef restaurant seemed to be ones that were later taken over and turned into other kinds of restaurants - Chinese, Filipino, one in Qatar, one in Abu Dhabi. I thought maybe I would find a reference with an address and do the Google Street view visit, but alas, I went cold. Maybe someone else can go farther. Not all the rabbit holing lands you some place, it just ends up some digging around. But always worth it. Well, to me. UPDATE: March 1, 2022 See comments below as Eric Likeness has sleuthed this to the nth degree: See Getty image that matches the postcard one above, it's stated as a 1976 photo?Also, same image from Worth Point that included an address- it was in Denver, 2459 South Santa Fe Drive.And finally, located in Google StreetView... not much to see now! Eric wins the rabbit prized and also, for showing how the internet works- ask for help, offer help, it all makes for a nice circle. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/jm999uk/3491575165 Same hole, same rabbit, different day, but same hilarious photo! flickr photo by johnmuk shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license I've been using email, I think since my undergrad days at University of Delaware, maybe 1981 or 1982.. I know for sure I had a BITNET email at Arizona State when I got there in '87. E-mail, spam, the sheer volume of junk is a pain, but ot one I can yet say I am ready to live without, yet one has to wonder, since Ray Tomlinson supposedly emailed "QWERTYUIOP" how long its arc will last. This was really brought to my mind with two incidents- one was a very much email like message that came to me from a colleague via Facebook. For this person, their institutional email system is so bad, so unusable, that FB is a preferred alternative. Does that tell you anything about needs for user experience design? The second is I am now getting regular messages from people via direct messages via Twitter. To reply, I need to go to a URL, and trot back a 140 character response. Then there is this new thing called "Jott" which allows messages to go to/from web to mobile phone, so you can, in theory, get on your phone an audio message sent via the web. Here's the irony. The notification for all of these systems so I know there is a message for me? I get an email! Nope, e-mail is not going anywhere away in my lifetime. "I'm not quite dead yet" to quote a philosopher. Edward Tufte's short course "Presenting Data and Information" is coming to town in late January... can anyone who has attended one of these or knows a friend who has (or a second cousin of their mother-in-law's dentist) let me know if it is worth it? Or should I just buy the t-shirt? I found a new cartoon tag line for this blog, on the front page at Live in the Deliirious Cool (no idea what the site is)... I'll let them bear the brunt of re-use of a published newspaper cartoon. There are two dogs talking, one says, "I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking." Sounds like a plan to me.