Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
There is absolutely nothing novel or prophetic about talking about smartphones (a word I loathe to use, but heck, I can live finally with "Web 2.0") as potentially replacing computers as a primary device. I got to try it out this weekend. This was not a planned exercise. After visiting friends in Phoenix this weekend, I returned home (a 2 hour drive normally, extended to 5 due to highway closure) and was dismayed to realize I had left my backpack at the restaurant where I attended a holiday party. Dismayed is a #&@^* understatement. In that pack was my MacBookPro, my iPad, my DSLR (and extra lens), my portable hard drive with my photo archive (THAT was backed up before I left).... I was able to call the restaurant 10 minutes before they closed, and they assured me the backpack was found and could be picked up. Still. I was without my main camera for doing dailyphotos. The computer was backed up on TimeMachine before I left, and I do have an old one, but I decided to use only my iPhone over the weekend (it would be Sunday until I could fetch the pack, thanks to my frield Coop who fetched it Saturday night). This is not to say this was an eye opening experience, but frankly, for ordinary tasks- email, twitter, web browsing, even doing photography on the phone and uploading, I was able to do it all. I am also not saying that I would ever suggeste I could replace my laptop with a phone, but can see more and more the potential for being laptopless (now there is an awkward word to split at the end of a line). Of course I could not do (serious) video editing, audio editing, or programming on the mobile, but there's a lot of tasks I can do. And its just going to get better and better. I got all my stuff back, a huge relief, and after 2 days of dusting my stupidity for leaving my gear behind, it was a worthwhile experience to be untethered from the laptop and keyboard. I suggest giving it a try sometime, just for the heck of it. cc licensed flickr photo shared by bitzcelt Elwood: It's 106 miles to get this sidebar coded, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses. Jake: Hit it. I have no idea why I opened this way except for Jim Groom Inspiration. But to jive my code chops, there's nothing more energizing than doing a little hack and chop coding in Wordpress. Today I was again doing some sidebar fine tuning on the NMC MIDEA web site (previously covered in my almost done series on doing custom post types in Wordpress 3.0). It was one of those "oh this might take 20 minute" deals that ended up going a bit longer. but like Jake and Elwood, when you gotta go to Chicago, you drop the sunglasses and hit it. And this is pretty simple, and most likely there is a plugin that already does what I needed, but sometimes, it is just worth the effort to roll your own code. It's the same joy of actually doing something in your car engine that actually does not result in flames or calling a tow truck. What we have on this site is a number of accounts, me as admin, some staff as editors, and a few guest bloggers, with roles as authors. The category our gues authors blog under is called "Ideas", and my idea was to add to the template sidebar, above the part where widgetized stuff happens, a blurb and a listing of our guest bloggers. I also liked the feature of not listing authors who have yet to post. At first it seemed like the function wp_list_authors would do, but it has no way to list just authors of a certain role- it is meant for all authors (you can hide the administrator; I thought by making all our staff admins it would work, but that did not). I scoured a few plugins, but most are widget oriented (its a long explanation, but because this only appears on category archives, doing a special set of widgets was overload) or or geared for listing author avatars. Next I googled and found a custom function from WP Engineer that at first looked good, but it was written for previous versions of WordPress- things have really changed from the early days of basing author capabilities on an integer user role number, though the info is still there in the database. I started editing their script to get it to work, going back and forth to phpMyAdmin to run test queries. it ended up sort of working, but still was not what I sought. I wanted it (a) to not only list the authors, but link to their profiles; (b) list the number of posts the author has written like the wp_list_authors() function does; (c) skip authors that have not posted (again like wp_list_authors() function does); and (d) list the authors in alphabetical order of their last name... which I did not find anywhere. With some more elbow grease I more or less got it going, but really though the code was not quite as lean as it should be (this is the place where it may not pay to keep coding, but now Jake and Elwood were only 50 miles from the Windy City, and they could see the glow of light on the horizon). There is actually quite a bit of fine grained tuning you can do for blog user accounts, down to the specific capabilities, and you can add/remove what accounts can do beyond the basic titles of "author" editor (see Roles and Capabilities). Most of this seems put to use for creators of plugins. But with another round of Googling, I found the function I was looking for from Steve Taylor- it would return a list of ids of users that had a given role, and it made my code a lot shorter. Only 25 miles til Chi-Town, boys.... I still ended up rolling some bits to do the parts I wanted... so here are the two functions I added to my functions.php template to generate a list of users with a given role as a >ul<...>/ul< list, in alphabetical order by last name (I made all the accounts, so I know they have these parts completed), skipping users with no posts... It is pretty heavily commented, and ought to be semi-explanatory... function getUsersByRole( $role ) { // find all users with given role // via http://sltaylor.co.uk/blog/get-wordpress-users-by-role/ if ( class_exists( 'WP_User_Search' ) ) { $wp_user_search = new WP_User_Search( '', '', $role ); $userIDs = $wp_user_search->get_results(); } else { global $wpdb; $userIDs = $wpdb->get_col(' SELECT ID FROM '.$wpdb->users.' INNER JOIN '.$wpdb->usermeta.' ON '.$wpdb->users.'.ID = '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.user_id WHERE '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.meta_key = \''.$wpdb->prefix.'capabilities\' AND '.$wpdb->usermeta.'.meta_value LIKE \'%"'.$role.'"%\' '); } return $userIDs; } function midea_list_authors($user_role='author', $show_fullname = true) { // Generate a list of authors for a given role // default is to list authors and show full name global $wpdb; $blog_url = get_bloginfo('url'); // store base URL of blog $holding_pen = array(); // this is cheap, a holder for author data echo ''; // get array of all author ids for a role $authors = getUsersByRole( $user_role ); foreach ( $authors as $item ) { // get number of posts by this author; custom query $post_count = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT COUNT( * ) as cnt FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_author =" . $item . " AND post_type = 'post' AND post_status = 'publish'"); // only output authors with posts; ugly way to get to the result, but it works.... if ($post_count[0]->cnt) { // load info on this user $author = get_userdata( $item); // store output in temp array; we use last names as an index in this array $holding_pen[$author->last_name] = ' ' . $author->display_name . ' (' . $post_count[0]->cnt . ') '; } } // now sort the array on the index to get alpha order ksort($holding_pen); // now we can spit the output out. foreach ($holding_pen as $key=>$value) { echo $value; } echo ''; } And this is simply called in my main sidebar.php template... I use a conditional to insert it where I want, so it only appears on the archives for the "ideas" category (I made the defaults of my function match my use case... sue me!) MIDEA Ideas Our panel of guest bloggers, all of them experts in the museum and technology field, bring you food for thought. And with that, welcome to the big city... see it in action And the boys are now in town! cc licensed flickr photo shared by cszar According to sources, one of these buttons has been on YouTube videos for maybe 18 months, and I never clicked it, can you guess? That one on the right, looks like a menu? Quick quiz, what does it do? I've seen it for a while and shamefully never clicked. Woah Neo, woah. It's "Interactive Transcripts"- for a while YouTube has been automatically adding machine transcription to videos, meaning it is guessing at a transcript. Often, it is horrible, but as we see below, you can correct it. Why do it? For one thing, it allows your videos to be captioned, meaning you improve accessibility for the hearing impaired. But, wait, there is more. It provides navigation within videos! I tried it on a video I had done for ds106: [caption id="attachment_9944" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image for full size version)[/caption] (1) When I click the magic button... (2) The transcript opens. (3) If I click any line in the transcript, the video jumps to that location Maybe it is just me, but that seems pretty damned useful! Yes, look at the line I selected in the screen capture: World vegetable day make a footer that celebrates the holiday so how people do I cannot recall the video exactly, but a lot of the transcription is pretty crappy (or humorous). But you can easily fix the bad transcripts, when you edit your video, click Annotations then Captions. On the right side, you will see a link for "Machine Transcription". Open this, and you have access to edit the wrong words right in place: For example, the very first one should not be: love missus allen conduct and i'll give you a little walk-through on how to use So I can edit it ro be Hello, this is Alan (Cogdog) and i'll give you a little walk-through on how to use Or you can download the entire transcript file (*.sbv), edit it as plain text, and upload it as a new caption. That's what I did to clean up the transcript on this video showing how to use SoundCloud for the ds106 Daily Creates: [caption id="attachment_9947" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image above for full size version)[/caption] So you get the interactive transcript for navigating anywhere in the video AND closed captioning. It's a thing we need to do more often with our videos, and YouTube's editor makes it pretty easy to get both gains. Oh, and I am already brewing a new ds106 assignment that would involving telling a different story via the captioning. I cannot claim as ambitious a summer reading agenda as Jim Groom, but somehow I have managed to finish an unprecedented two novels in the last 3 weeks. Both were titles I picked up at one of the book sales from the Pine Arizona Library; first was David Mitchell's Black Swan Green; I grabbed that only because of how much I enjoyed reading Cloud Atlas (oh wait, I have a report on that one when I read it in 2011). I could not put it down, but that's another post. I did jump a connection in talking about why zombies bore me. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/479667056074166273 I had never read Elmore Leonard before, and likely picked it up out of curiosity/respect when he passed away last summer. And this is by no means a literary review or plot summary... but here goes. The story takes place in new Orleans and has a central ex-con, Jack Delaney as primary character. At first he was just a bit too perfect, former jewel thief, could have been model, a bit wry, obviously a ladies man, and he ends up getting involve with a beautiful ex-nun and a plot to steal money from some bad people. But what I found in reading this book is how Leonard really does not stick to the expected plot lines, there are twists turns, the obvious romance never happens, and it is more dialogue then action. And as described in a New York Times review, it really is more about the characters than the action: But it will do. Mr. Leonard has got his usual diverting cast of grifters and creeps up his sleeve and action as Byzantine as ever Chandler himself thought up. In fact, reading it, I felt like William Faulkner when he was writing the screenplay for the film version of Chandler's novel "The Big Sleep." The story is that he had to call up Chandler to find out what was going on. Chandler wasn't sure.Yes, it will do.Letting the Characters Do It"Most thrillers," says Elmore Leonard, "are based on a situation, or on a plot, which is the most important element in the book. I don't see it that way. I see my characters as being most important, how they bounce off one another, how they talk to each other, and the plot just sort of comes along." In fact, Mr. Leonard is so comfortable allowing his characters to control the pace and action of his stories that he didn't know how "Bandits" would end until three days before he finished it last April. And without giving anything away, the story could have ended in at least 4 or 5 different ways and still be satisfying. And you find out that the key character on which it all turns is not the one you have been following for most of the book. Deft. What I found enjoyable is how deep and genuine (as far as I can tell) Leonard gets to the setting of New Orleans outside of the stereotypes. He paints that tension of locals versus tourists: Out on Bourbon Street bumping into each other, the whole bunch of them aimless, probably thinking, this is it, huh? The street a midway of skin shows and tacky novelty shops. The poor guys at Preservation Hall and other joints playing that canned Dixieland, doing "When the Saints" over and over for the tourists in the doorways. There was some good music around, if Al Hirt was in town or you found a group with Bill Huntington playing his standup bass or Ellis Marsalis somewhere. His boy Wynton had left town with his horn to play for the world. That reference jumped me back to a trip in 2008 for a conference at Tulane, and my local colleague/friend Marie took me to a place called Snug Harbor, and saw not only Ellis Marsalis, but the youngest son, Jason, too. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Well written setting and a swirl of characters, none too sure who is quite the good guys... all for a good read. I wonder what is next? Featured Image: This is definitely my photo! That's my MacBookPro on wood table in Strawberry. But darn! I cant find it anywhere in flickr, taken sometime before June 22, 2014 tweet of book page. Friday, last homestretch of the conference. Collaborative Usability Evaluations with IDEA Online Rachel Smith (Comment- this is a very cool, Carl Berger "cooooool", resource. Sign up, submit designs, and join their evaluation group. The system itself is well designed) Asked for hand raises of faculty, staff, who designs online content or learning objects. Then... asked for who had professional training in interface design (one hand raise). Hence reason for the IDEA Online project - a web site resource for getting feedback on interface design from any submitted site. Currently has 60 members. Started as paper based checklist... ended up being 60 pages! Seemed more efficient to move online. (more…) Yes, here comes yet another family memory story about my grandmother, who shall be referred to usually as "granny". I'm still working through the adaption to TapeWrite of her telling them recorded in 1994. Another long ago memory came to me a few weeks ago, the taste of her thick split pea soup. As a kid (and a kid-like adult) I loved that soup. It was hearty, chunks of ham, and small dumplings she dropped in. In 1987, that first year I had moved to Arizona, I bet I told her in a phone call or letter how much I missed her split pea soup. I imagine her laughing warmly. What I did not imagine at the time would be she would mail a box to me in Arizona. In that box was one of her soup pots, a bag of split peas, and an index card with her hand written recipe. Now here is where my memory gets fuzzy, I must have tried the recipe, but I cannot remember making the soup. At 27 I was not thinking about being as old as I am now nor that she would ever not be around. On one of my grocery expeditions a month ago I tossed a bag of split peas in the basket. With the weather turning much colder this week, the soup desire is on, and so was lit my plan to make some of that green soup. Not only is my memory lost, so is her soup pot and recipe card. So I hope you don;t get mad Granny, is I turned to Betty Crocker's Split Pea Crock Pot soup. At Safeway Sunday, I looked for ham hocks, but could not find them, and since they had a lot ham on sale for Thanksgiving, I just bought a half ham, cooked so I can a number of meals as well as the bone for the soup. I fired it up at 8am, and it was a slow cook all day... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Public Domain Dedication Creative Commons ( CC0 ) license[/caption] But by 7pm it had thickened nicely, and made for a nice soupy meal. It was pretty good (and will be for like 4 more left over servings), and have no means to compare to Granny's but I will give her the nod in the comparison. And then I find my memory is more faulty, searching for a reference in a blog post, my search turned up a PDF of her recipe! grandmas-pea-soup I think my sister had a copy of it after all (and at the bottom a reference to the egg drop / dumplings I remember) It's similar to Betty Crocker, but like all recipes, there are differences. I do remember Granny's having the sliced hotdogs (I tossed in some ham chunks). Who cares if the soup is as good as I remember? The memory is even better. And next time I am trying the egg drops. Do yourself a favor, not only make an effort ASAP to get audio recordings of your family stories, get the recipes! Top / Featured Image: That's my photo of the soup I made tonight, taken after I uploaded today's photos to flickr. This one will be there tomorrow and you can bet a bowl of soup that it will be licensed Creative Commons CC0. With all that IPO pumping, the quaint little twitter blue bird is going to be sporting some new duds cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by green kozi Make no mistake about it, according to a recent Forbes piece Can Twitter Save TV?: Twitter's message to the networks is different, and it comes in well short of 140 characters: We come in peace; let's make money together. Lots of tweeting when a show first airs transforms TV into what it used to be: an event, that others scramble to join live. Live, of course, means you can't skip the commercial (which separately explains the soaring prices of sports programming rights). And when the commercial is followed up by an ad on Twitter, the company says, the viewer proves more likely to buy what's being advertised. "We help marketers win the moment," says Adam Bain, the company's head of revenue. And guess what you, humble lunch tweeter, or hash tag genius, get as "marketers win the moment"? Twitter isn't here for you. The premise is (if I have figured out all the buzz speak) Twitter aggressively encourages shows and actors to tweet crafted messages that drive viewers to watch shows, and advertisers back up the money truck to the networks. Do you remember when the prompt for twitter was "What's on your mind?" now the aim is "What can I tweet that is going to drive eyeballs there?" The same article more or less graces Fast Company's "Converting the Flock". What counts as success here is How actress Kerry Washington (new name to me) star of a sexy Beltway soap (gag) called Scandal (ditto on new to me) is now a Twitter darling of live tweeting from the production stage. She even wrote sample tweets for her reticent costar Tony Goldwyn and put them in his draft folder so all he had to do was click during the broadcast. I am getting a real sense of who this people are from the way they express themselves. The Twitter team coached Vatican cardinals and the Pope Hisself how to tweet. Twitter bought a company named Bluefin Labs for $80 million... we are not talking about guys in a garage here. These are the games played hard and fast by suits. New CEO Dick Costolo "came into his job with a single mission: to make money." One of their other company purchases brought with it a product named Curatorr, which lets brands, media companies, and advertisers create preloaded Twitter streams that can be embedded on websites, tablets, and television. The new money making Twitter is going to be calculated, crafted, and aimed specifically at messages that benefit advertising. Lunch tweets are going to be a quaint thing of the past, it's all about tie ins (my emphasis): These TV partnerships are a small part of their revenues but a huge part of their sales and PR strategy. They're changing Twitter to be this really smart, topical, content-based. strategic place for advertisers to be as opposed to a bunch of noise and blather. That noise and blather? That's you and me. It's a whole new age for Twitter, can't wait. cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by Sharon Terry Frequent readers may know I have been a fan of the iRiver tiny MP3 players for their recording capability. I had purchased two for us in my last job, and just from a meeting last week, saw that another colleague at Maricopa had purchased one for doing some audio recording. See, the folks at iRiver ought to know how vast and powerful an influence I am ;-) I was eager to get one for my new job at the NMC- I very much like doing informal audio interviews. Browsing the iRiver iFP 700 series lines, I was dismayed at how many were no longer available, not at Amazon, nore at the iRiver store itself. I managed to get an order in for an iFP-795 (500 Mb) that was sold only as a bundle with a waterproof kit. But I had some problems with my new credit card (another long story about call-centers around the world that mangle new address changes). By the time I had fixed the issue with my card, the item was gone: Despite the preceding page which indicates it was in stock: It seems very much that the iFP line is being phased out. Worse yet, the new T10 players, with their slick candy colors and maybe even, improved interfaces, are only compatible (for models sold in the US and Europe) with Windows XP. This is not very clear at all from the specs page, where Mac is listed, and the details are hidden in asterisked foot notes. So if you are thinking about an iRiver, and are on a Mac, get one fast or you are left to ebay as the source (well I guess I could have gotten the T10, boot camp booted into Windoze and .... nahhhhhhh, too much trouble). iRiver- great little devices, terrible user interface, inconsistent web site, and poor choice in marketing strategy. I saw Mikhail's effort of telling the story of The Shining in 6 Frames in response to Jim Groom's explanation of this as an activity used in his digital storytelling class. But c'mon, how many other ways do you mix up Jack with an Ax, Jack in the Ice, Jack in the Bar, jack poking his head through the wall, Jack as Woody Allen (oaky, Mikhail, that was clever and rule bending) ? Yawwwwwwwn I was looking for some different angles on the story. Some made up ones. For me, the Shining was a story about a boy, his toys, and his boundless love for a Dad who gave him more and more toys. This morning was a treat and a half. Five times over. Via a Google Hangout with students in The Hague (Netherlands) connecting three of us in the US, one in Canada, one in Mexico, was the premiere of the videos representing the students work as part of Project Community, a design course at the Hague University of Applied Sciences. Not a MOOC, not anything you will read about in any edubuzz site, not totally an open course for others to do along side, but still done in the open, was student collaborative work turned way up past 11. And it's pretty amazing stuff. I use amazing often, so this is the amazing kind of amazing. This is the fourth year of this project that myself and Nancy White have been part of working with this first year course in the Industrial Design Engineering program. The course part is managed by our colleague there Laura Stevens, and sections of students have local tutors (meet the team). The 9 week syllabus is heavy on group work, collaboration, all aimed toward projects that will support the work of a number of small Non Governmental Agencies (NGOs). In previous years, we have had upwards of 80-100 students, all doing reflective blogging that I built syndication into the site, and we ended up with as many as 12 groups each doing projects for 3-5 NGOs. It was a lot of blog reading for the tutors and us, and thus some NGOs ended up communicating with 3 different groups and getting different recommendations from each as an end product. This year we re-did the structure in a way that I think worked really well, gave the students a better team learning experience, and was more productive for the NGOs. The keys here were: Students were put into smaller groups of 5, each taking on a different role (Team Project Leader, Client Services, Documentarian, Technology Steward, and Production Manager). Each team then chose their own name, and set up a team blog on Wordpress.com Two to three teams were associated with one NGO, so there was a larger NGO team. As we moved into the development of a final project, the larger NGO teams had to combine efforts to produce one video So in the end, we ended up with 11 team blogs. Because of the way syndication to the course site was set up, we could split out blog posts per team, per individual author, per NGO 5 Kings 5kingsblog.wordpress.com BATCO batcoiwf.wordpress.com Blue Mood lijinghz2014.wordpress.com IDE Collaborators idecollaborators.wordpress.com IDE RESEARCHERS ideresearchers.wordpress.com InterHague interhague.wordpress.com ROBOBLOG blogwithswag.wordpress.com The Ducks projcomtheducks.wordpress.com Tiny Houses Found In Transition foundintransitionblog.wordpress.com Tiny Innovators tinyinnovators.wordpress.com watotomages watotomages.wordpress.com Today they had to show their final project videos to the rest of the class, and us. We did this in a live Google hangout, so we could not only see the video, but talk about them, and hear from the students how the team experience went. We had 4 representatives from the NGOs join us either in the hangout (one was in the room). If you want to spend an hour reliving it, here is the archive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzoNyhvJVeo It is most worth watching to hear the students talk about their work, and also to hear what their work meant for the NGOs. The Tiny Houses group gave Shorty Robbins ideas that were really new (the ideas for funding and creating a system of "Tiny Offices". Francois Bruley from the International Water Foundation was so impressed he handed out Honorary Founding memberships to all the students who worked on a project for his NGO. Cinthia Reyes of Robotica Educativa had just shared the recommendations of students with her board and she was overwhelmingly excited about putting several of them to work. We had a note of appreciation from Michelle Oliel from Stahli Foundation describing how the students went beyond their project to help her deal with a technical design issue. And the team that worked for Contru Casa came up with an idea that was new and novel to all of us (you just will have to watch the videos). If you just want to check out the student videos, they are in a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K91VhFkuXIk&index=1&list=PLzsSL9O5E1ZgyBVJXIzjKLq1gH39sawOu We had some trickery in the hangout, as it always goes. Laura asked me to schedule and initialize it; she and the class participated with us via her iPad. The class just watched the videos play from a projected computer. This does not work well for us to see and hear in the hangout, so I decided to play the videos through the YouTube tool in Hangouts. It does work well, though every hangout participant needs to install the Youtube thing, and because Laura was on an iPad, I had to mute her every time. I thought that what we played through the YouTube Hangout tool would go out on the stream and in the archive, but it did not. So to make a full video, I ended up downloading the hangout archive, the five student videos, and re-editing all in iMovie (I was able to trim about 20 minutes of non essential stuff, mostly me and Nancy being goofy). The level of blogging this year and quality of the videos produced are orders of magnitude above what we did in previous years. Are we that good or are the students? I really enjoyed seeing the variety of approaches the teams took to their video, some doing RSA Animate style, others with elegantly edit4e video, others with role play, and ones with clever animation approaches. I am, as someone near and dear (and Mom) to me frequently said, "I am blown away". Top / Featured image credit: By Frederic Austin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Principles of Distributed Representation Stephen Downes "Not another metadata talk" he promises.... since Stephen puts his presentations online, and I saw him turn on Audacity to record his own session, I am bowing out of taking copious notes (well no, I changed my mind, see below) While the intros are going, Stephen has a nice slide show of his photos from a visit to Aspen. Before the notes, it's worth saying that Stephen in person is how he is in hos written work - deeply thoughtful, self effacing, sarcastic, humorous, challenging...) also in his presentation, note the use of references and information just published yesterday. And Stephen was on spot- challenging us, saying boldly what is crap and what is not... curious to hear from others how it was heard. Onto a few notes (Cyprien Lomas was taking more detailed notes than I, but trying to do it together in SubEthaEdit, we ended up stomping on each other...) (more…) Three Amigos Kerpoofing It posted 29 Sep '07, 12.51pm MDT PST on flickr Working on our "teaser" for the K12 Online conference... Played a little with this fun tool for creating cartoon graphics, www.kerpoof.com - harder to figure out how to embed or create linked stories. Last Flickr blog post (for now). Must run out to Home Depot to do some Real Work. Big Data. Massive courses. Large scale. Yawn, I'll take the other end of the graph. Like from this post, recounting how a DS106 Daily Create honoring an 1990s woman bronco rider named Bonnie McCarroll. https://cogdogblog.com/2016/04/openness-affords/ Three months after Ron's response to that daily create, sculptor Ann Ayers responded sharing info about her bronze works of Bonnie McCarroll. https://twitter.com/AnnAyres1/status/725357343861555204 Even if she's sifting google for things related to her interests, well that slim a chance of connection is like small pebbles from different continents meeting in a vast sea. But this week, three years later this series of serendipity threadings, Ann commented on the same post: Once again I came across your very interesting post. I am honored. My studio is at 1016 Halsell St Bridgeport, TX I am working on my first life-size of a veteran. He is setting on his trunk reading “Letters from home” it touches those who received mail and those who didn’t. Those who wrote letters and those of you who didn’t write enough. And sadly those who hoped it wouldn’t be the last letter he ever read from home. It will house with the veterans in the museum in Bridgeport. Another tiny one this morning. A trackback notification (does anyone still express trackback love anymore) from the old DS106 Inspire site. -- itself a great story because it was an idea of two DS106 UMW students from their class in ?? 2012? The idea was to share the work of other DS106 participants that inspired you. Instead of hawking your own stuff, retweeting your own mentions, the idea is to honor someone else's work. Who is even looking at these old sites? Bots? It's not been updated or maintained in a time span greater than the rise and fall of like 1000 tech products. The irony was they had found the mention there of one of my old daily create responses, a video made whole walking a neighbors dog I was caring for, nominated to inSPIRE by a Rita Artinian (I had no idea it was there). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwGEsjX523M The trackback was from the post What an Adventure! from the blog of a Mrs Vogel who seems to have a big interest in storytelling. Take a look at that happy puppers, how much enjoyment he gets from going on a simple walk. I loved this video, after combing through a pile of defunk links, because it really tells a story. It starts with excitement of the beginning of the walk, there’s a brief pause for a breath at the stop sign, then we continue on the journey. A warning sign briefly catches our attention, but as a viewer we can see the warning as a weak attempt to see the dog in any other light than happy and good. the video ends as the walk is completed and a happy puppers gets to destroy junk mail, my favorite part. It would be lovely to see more videos like his one but this story is whole on its own. Enjoy! Meanwhile in Big Land, Google is closing down Google+ because they say nobody uses it (while more likely it was the huge security breach). Yet Another Classic xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/1361/ One of the pioneers in blogging, Blogs at Harvard, is flushing the blogs. And big time open advocate Mozilla, after deep sixing Popcorn Movie Maker a few years ago, is tossing Thimble into the grave. A lot of the small stuff seems to stay around. There's a lesson there. Featured image: Those Peaks Are Tiny flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I am trying some live blogging from the NMC Online Conference. Now up is a keynote... Personal Broadcasting, Education, and the Remix Culture Laura Blankenship, Bryn Mawr College (blogs as Geeky Mom) Wired Magazine feature- not new, there is a history that goes back even to Shakespeare. Now- Writer's Duel (harry potter Fanfiction) Sampling, remixing, mashing up- done as a critique of our culture. Playing remix of John Lennon's Imagine and George Bush's speech... http://www.thepartyparty.com/ "Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating" -- William Gibson Remixing Education Microlevel ** (individual students and faculty) ** Class Level Macrolevel ** Lifelong Learning At Micro-level implemented examples of recorded class lectures, student presentations as podcasts/vodcasts, videos of lectures, hybrid courses not there yet = building on others' work- piecing together lecture/class materials from multiple sources, open source and multimedia textbooks, having students build on class materials using other media At macro-level, implemented are creating a major, taking both online and f2f courses at multiple institutions Not there yet- creating your own degree (hybrid degrees), open courseware, outsourcing courses Ways get distributed between official channels and unofficial channels- Official channels include iTunes, Podcast directories, video lectures, webcasts -powerpoints, podcasts by faculty, lectures by series, special guests- mostly digitizing the classroom Unofficial channels - Google Video, YouTube, Broad view of education (look at education category in YouTube) often irreverent, some practical in scope-- how to, pushing the limits Some Examples: * Anthropology Lecture (Official channel) - dry voice, slow paced, reading from overhead. A "recorded lecture" has not changed anything, just recorded it. * Diet Coke and Mentos (YouTube video) (Unofficial channel) - guys in street putting mentos in diet coke that explodes, "if it is on the internet, it must be true". People willing to video themselves doing things and publish/share them. Issues * Access: Does everyone have broadband, a computer? Accessibility issues * Finding: How do you find the material? It is not catalogued-- "there's a lotta junk in YouTube". Institutions not moving quickly * Copyright: If we ask students to remix and broadcast, what are the copyright implications? How do we manage our own IP? Law is not keeping up. DRM is being built into the hardware- likely to be restrictive Potential * Building on and creating new knowledge in multiple media (not just text) * Developing a critical eye toward audio and video * Lifelong learning * Learning beyond the walls -- very important Navin R. CogDog: The new JIME's here! The new JIME's here! Harry Groom: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing. Navin R. CogDog: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 106 - Levine, Alan H.! I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this paper everyday! This is the kind of education publicity - your name in a refereed journal - that makes people. I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now. This is the joy of being published, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU Just in time for putting PDFs in your friend's stockings... A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum Nothing is more sweeter than the serendipity of finding something online that grabs a breath from you, and such that you drop what you are doing to dig deeper. This has only happened to me, oh, estimating (counting on fingers...) maybe 18672 times. One more. A day or so ago, on scanning the flow of tweets, I saw this message from Roland Tanglao Who knows why one tweet grabs your mouse as opposed to another? But with that I was fallen into a fun time of exploring the noticings site which taps into many of my interests- flickrs+daily photos+geolocation+a bit of gaming, with a simple premise "the game of noticing the world around you" The elegant aspect of noticin.gs is that it has cleverly simple rules. Your goal is to notice details, objects, interesting things, lost items in your surroundings. Take a photo, post to flickr, geo-tag the location, and tag the photo "noticings"-- the web site does all the rest. Every 24 hours, the site crawls flickr and awards points based in criteria like: Noticing something near someone else's noticing. Noticing something. Your first noticing in a neighbourhood. Being first player to notice something in a neighbourhood. Noticing something every lunchtime for a working week. Noticing something every day for a week. Noticing something that's been lost by someone. plus the teaser Of course, there may be hidden rules, which can only be discovered by earning them. And it amps up the challenge by making scores public. I just started so only have 50 http://noticin.gs/players/cogdog So for me, I saw a lot of ties of this and the noticing I do when finding my daily 2009/365 photo. I wanted to share this back in twitter, and thanks Roland, and mentioned something about the parallels (me) of doing the daily 2009/365 photos. The joy of this crazy web is that we see things differently, for Roland, he sees one as self induglent and one as with others, in his case Your Mileage May Vary I have to respect that, since Roland has long been one of the prolific flickr photo posters (he must have 9 gazillion pictures on flickr)-- and he's just a nice guy, too. But I find that remark curious, as I see a lot of "indulging with others" happening in our 2009/365 space- people regularly comment (some as soon as I post), there is an active community -I don't fell alone at all. This was the gist of my 2009 Northern Voice preso on Say/Blog it in Pictures - it is one of the most informal, unstructured, yet appropriately bounded in structure groups I've been in. So i don't agree with Roland at all-- for me, MMDV- My Mileage Does Vary. And all of this is besides the point- it is all about playing the noticings game- start noticing today! rack up some points. And its part of the newly arranged area on flickr called the App Garden- a place to find those clever apps people outside of flickr create with the API- where noticin.gs has a nice corner garden spot creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by kennysarmy Batted around last week via email amongst my new TRU colleagues was the idea of perhaps hosting a Kamloops based WordCamp in early 2015. I definitely like the idea, but tossed in that I'd like to see something less conference-y. For a music analogy, most conferences are like concerts. In some big room, the Big Name on the stage performs a feat of slide flipping, and the audience in neatly rowed chairs sit, applaud, take notes, tweet, and read email. Then there are a series of smaller simultaneous mini performances in smaller venues. If you are lucky you may get to talk to the performers in the hallway (if they have not parachuted in) and often you will find other attendees with an interest in the same instrument as you. "Really, you play the E-flat whoozlehorn, too? How do you handle the tremolo on the flotzit?" I'd like to see more do than listen. Something more un-conferency, where at registration, people would include specific things they want to learn or get help with, and as well, offer the areas they have some experience or expertise in. In my first week here, I met colleagues like Colin Madland, who is working with Wordpress and multisiting for Open Learning, and was at a faculty talk last week where the presenter was sharing a wordpress.com site she used for a Criminology Course. I suggested to Colin, maybe we start an informal weekly meetup where people could bring problems and solutions. And we just jam on ideas. The thing is, I think it needs some sort of structure, not overly structured, but when someone comes in to show a site that its less than a demo, or a "How do I make a Wordpress Site more jazzy" but more like "I have this course site, but I'd like to be able to organize content by _______" or "How do a find a less bloggy them for a site that features student posts on _____" (not the best examples). Or "This is the way I used the WP-Groohuober plugin to create a threaded discussion in the ....." Anyhow, this is just the start of outloud thinking. But more like creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog or creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog than creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Duke Yearlook Ideas? Rotten tomatoes/ Hardly Hollywood, but I've been focussed this week in the MCLI movie studio (e.g. my G4 TiBook). We are preparing an online opening for our Ocotillo Action Groups that will include some video welcome messages from our faculty co-chairs... as an introduction of their efforts this year and a teaser to invite people from Maricopa to join in some asynchronous discussion board activity. This meant setting up not only the video sessions with 8 faculty, but we decided to add greetings from our chancellor, 2 vice chancellors, and a dean, so over the last two weeks I was setting up the lights and camera (Canon GL/1) in at settings in our office, the administrative offices on the top floor, at a college site, and one pair that decided it was appropriate to film at the Desert Botanical Garden (mid day it was about 105 degrees). This week it was logging clips in Final Cut Pro, capturing video, doing some basic edits, tossing in some fake Ken Burns-like pans over screen shots.... It's been about a year since I was inside FCP, but it came back quickly. I end up saving in DV stream QuickTime (to burn a DVD), then compressing to QuickTime for streaming, and running through Discreet Cleaner to generate Windows Media PLayer and Real formats. Oh, I also am making a VHS tape of it so our IT folks can digitize it for our internal IP/TV video network. The big unknown is the demand this will create... I've arranged to have the Windows Media and Real content hosted on one of our college sites that has production level Helix servers, and I'll have the QuickTime running from our XServe. I'll share a URL once we're out of the gate (and I am sure it has not completely imploded), as I am interested in having folks external chime in to our efforts... Our hourly comment spam assaults on the Maricopa Learning eXchange ceased around 10:00pm local time yesterday. My best guest is that the spammers mommy finnaly told him/her it was time to shut fof the computer, brush their teeth, and off to bed. Likely, after a bowl or two of Cocoa Puffs this morning, they will be back in action. Or so they think. All of their spams have been intercepted, logged. The IPs recorded include: 210.251.92.104 218.50.2.74 220.93.120.39 61.50.172.143 80.55.203.182 80.58.14.107 and trace to various networks in China and Korea. Taking a different tack, I looked up the various gamvling and pharmacy URLs they were trying to be inserted in our site. Interestingly enough, they were registered to different persons, such as: Alexandro Marie Old Eagle School Rd 63 Swaledale Wisconsin US 76127 Jazmyne Benjamin Wister Rd 40 Rodman Florida US 65255 Isabella Perla Continental Blvd 28 South English Maryland US 69100 but then the pattern emerged- all of their Whois records have emails in the form of: contact28@support-24x7.biz contact6@support-24x7.biz contact18@support-24x7.biz So now I think these are names and addresses plucked from the phonebook... hmm it might be worth a phone call to the number listed? Does anyone know these folks? Can domains really be registered in the names of people without their permissions? So doing a SamSapde trace on the domain in the contact address, we get to some interesting details- the registrant for this "business" has a name of "Phentermine Deals" and an address in the lovely safe harbor of Antigua. Too bad the hurricanes dod not flatten their shanty shack. The billing and contact details point to a ISP hosted in.... France. There we can see, for a piddly 12 Euros a year, Gandi.net is a spammers best friend. Wow, we have French ISPs hosting web sits for Caribbean spammers for domains likely falsely registered to folks in small towns across America, and all their action is masked by routing scripts through Southeast Asian IP addresses!!! I am pretty much a rank amateur in this detective work, anyone want to play? Is anyone out there appalled that questionable pharmaceutical peddlers and online gambling hosts would stoop to shoving their unwanted content into a free, educational resource? Would they do this on a web site for blind orphans? refuge relief groups? IS THERE NO SHAME OUT THERE? Tomorrow at 8pm ET I join my long time colleague and good friend Darren Kuropatwa for an OSSEMOOC webinar session on Storytelling, by request of Donna Fry. There is a story in that sentence, because during my cross Canada leg of my 2011 Odyssey I met Darren for the first time in Winnipeg, and it was a tweet out of the blue that connected me to Donna (and meet her in Thunder Bay). I love the unique way Darren presents ideas, and if you are ever in one of his workshops, you know you just will not sit there. He will make you do something creative. We are trying this tomorrow night, and you can help us beta test a part of it. First all, we are using as a theme, that for teachers looking at the world of amazing things out there, that very often what is obvious for them is amazing to others-- so well encapsulated in a 120 second video by Derek Sivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcmI5SSQLmE The activity is something we want people to respond to reflexively, don't try to over think it. But where ever they (or you) are sitting, looking around for an object, a metaphor that might represent a response to this question: In your practice as an educator, what is one thing important and obvious to you that shapes your approach? Just look quickly and grab the first object you see. It may not be the best metaphor, try to make it. I am looking at my table, and I see books (too easy), a coffee cup (too dirty), a wooden pen (maybe), even a roll of electrical tape (that seems most interesting). We then ask you to record a 15 second video, not showing your face, just the object, and start it with "What is obvious to me is...". Do not explain it, just state it. Leave it to the audience to figure out the connection with the metaphor. Go. We are asking people to send videos to Darren's Dropbox; if you have a QR Code Reader you can add a contact or send via or just email them to darren_1e14@sendtodropbox.com This was one I did when I grabbed an old radio tube that sits in a dish near my work area https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTYZRMFmXTM Thanks for trying this out! And if you want, join us tomorrow for the live session, to see what happens with the videos, take a seat in Darren Hall. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license[/caption] And you may even get us doing a live guitar duet. flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3124023004 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Today I am driving across a rainy country road in southern Ontario, thinking a little of home, and out of the random shuffle of songs on my ipod comes a lovely, haunting, but lovel song by the Pixies that I mist have neve tuned my ears to before... did they sing "Sedona"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=400ZEgJOVp8 Indeed, after the opening melodic guitar riffs are the cryptic lyrics Havalina Walking in the breeze On the plains of old Sedona Arizona Among the trees Havalina First off all, are they talking about the collared peccaries (which are not pigs nor hogs) -- Pecari tajacu. I know them as javelina though the 'pedia lets me know that they are also known as "saÃno or báquiro, although these terms are also used to describe other species in the family. The species is also known as the musk hog, Mexican hog. and a javelina. In Trinidad, it is colloquially known as quenk." cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Quenk. That is not such a pretty name for a song title. "Walking in the breeze On the plains of old Sedona" It does sound picturesque, but there are no plains in Sedona, new or old, its nestled in the bottom of a canyon! cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by btocher "Among The Trees" Sedona is not really the place you think of forests, though there are lovely stretch of trees along Oak Creek Canyon, graceful cottonwoods, stately sycamores, in the side canyons juniper, pinyon pine... cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So this song is full of factual errors- and I love it for that. That is the beauty of music, of art, of what you can conjure up with just words, or just music, or words and music, or an animated GIF... it's about imagination. Facts are for textbooks. Havalina? art. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was a grey, rainy, snowy, wintery day up here in the Arizona mountains. In the afternoon I decided to pull out the little mini turntable and listen to for the first time, some of the old 78s I brought home from my Mom's house. I had ever heard these before, but played them live for ds106 radio (note, a first segment where I was trying my Zoom H2 as a mic produced ugly white noise, thanks @easegill for letting me know). I recall seeing these records on the shelves in the basement of the home I grew up in Baltimore, but am not sure if they were my parents, or more likely my grandparents. Regardless, the 78s are old; they have significant heft. Each disk has one song per side (78 rpms go fast) and they certainly have that old scratchy noise. Here's the archive, with me reading some from the liner notes in between: Playing those old 78s on ds106 radio I kept calling it vinyl, though in twitter, Jason Green suggested they were made of shellac. Anyone know for sure (before I google it)? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The first one I played was Boogie Woogie Piano, a collection from Brunswick Records - It is described as "historic Recordings by Pioneer Piano Men- Montana Taylor, Speckled Red, Romeo Nelson, Cow Cow Davenport". What cool names, "Cow Cow". The music, recorded in the late 1920s, is definitely blues based, but it's upbeat, and piano of course providing the sounds, some of it with vocals and some piano solos. I really enjoyed the feel of this music, which according to the liner notes, has a lot going on. The boogie woogie was probably an outgrowth of the barrelhouse blues which self-taught pianists, all over the South, played chiefly as an accompaniment for blues singing; often it is hard to distinguish one from the other. But the blues ar played or sung most often, in slow or moderate time and in simple rhythms. Boogi woogie applies the same basic form at a fast, sometimes furious tempo; and it is far more complex than any ragtime or jazz piano style. I have about 4 more disks of Boogie Woogie. The other music was a real shift; I am fairly sure it wa smy grandmother, since she was of Hungarian and Romanian descent, hence the Decca "Roumanian Gypsy Music" cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This music was both sad and longing and well as fervent dance music, pretty much what you woudl expect to hear in "Fiddler on the Roof". In Roumanian folk music one of the most characteristic features is the strange little trills and grace notes in which the composition abound, and the oriental feelings. DOINA- is one of the most important and characteristic of the folk songs -- the song of the shepherds, played on the flute, usually. The melody of the Doina is of an extremely melancholy and plaintive quality, highly ornamented with the typical grace notes. The mournful beginning suggests the shepherd's unhappy thoughts on losing a sheep. The music interprets the fruitless search up hill and down dale, becoming more and more agitated. At last the sheep is found and the song ends in the wildest frenzy of delight. Anyhow, this was just a sampling, I have alot more to play eventually. I like it! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It's been a while since I got heated up about catfishing, the bizarre phenomena where apparently groups of poor folks in third world countries find a way to scam, lonely people via fake social media profiles using my photos (when they tire of using Alec) to round out their fake persona. It's not because anything changed. Facebook CatfishBook still freely allows people to create fake profiles with my photos, despite them having such advanced facial recognition technology -- if facebook tags me when I upload a photo of myself, why do they not recognize that some turd named Harry Woodgate Adrain uploads my photo to his profile? [caption id="attachment_52490" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Yet another fake CatfishBook profile using my photo found at https://flic.kr/p/9ZZmy6[/caption] So it has felt rather pointless, and I have let it go for a while. But this says to me that if we wait for systems to change what is wrong with themselves, we remain victims. But we do not have to wait for CatfishBook to change if we act smarter. People are doing this. Since doing all my publishing about this, it means that should someone who is suspicious of a person's social media profile does a revers image search, it's more likely they will come across my stuff about Catfishing. It's as simple (in Google Chrome) as right/control clicking on a suspicious photo, and doing Google Image search for the photo: [caption id="attachment_52491" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Doing a reverse image search on a very suspicious account (my own)[/caption] or just using the Google image search by uploading an image or inserting it's URL. Now a reverse image search only seems to find matches for me like 30% of the time. It's not really searching all the photos on the internet. Sometimes Tineye finds thing google doesn't. Often not. But it's a tool people have available. And they are using it. Most of the email I get from catfished victims found me because they took this step. The one I got yesterday was a real gem, because (a) she was suspicious from the start and (b) she let the line run out before yanking it taut. I am not going to share any info about her, I will call here "SW" for "Smart Woman". She sent me a rather detailed screenshot of her conversations with someone named "Harry" on I believe Tinder. Harry was asking for dinner, SW wisely suggested a more casual meetup first for coffee. She asks about his profile photo. [caption id="attachment_52492" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Catfish Chat 1[/caption] She was already reverse image searched that photo, which is a commonly used one. It's a photo of me from 2008 when I spent a month in Iceland. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] SW probes Harry about his photos... [caption id="attachment_52493" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Catfish Chat 2[/caption] He offers to send it by text. SW is smart, she says "My phone only accepts numbers I can enter" and asks for his number. Smart? Yes. A common pattern here- Harry quickly responds, but with a number that does not work. It looks real, but is not. She asks for an email address. His reply? "Email? Too long". SW presents her caution. [caption id="attachment_52494" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Catfish Chat 3[/caption] Harry is so compassionate, eh? She asks to know more about him, his name (which he provides as "Harry Woodgate Adrain") that he has a 6 year old boy "out of wedlock", Single dads seem to be a good ploy in date scams, they usually have vilely mean ex-spouses. And so SW pulls out her ammo! [caption id="attachment_52495" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Catfish Chat 4[/caption] This is priceless. I wonder what Harry will do? Maybe he will pull out the fake Skype trick using a crappy quality video of me as a course, claim its a bad connection, etc. [caption id="attachment_52496" align="aligncenter" width="486"] Catfish Chat 5[/caption] He has answer... [caption id="attachment_52497" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Catfish Chat 6[/caption] Apparently Harry has fears of his photo being used! Ho ho ho. SW reports she got a few more texts while she was out, and by the time she replied, Harry had already blocked her number. I went into CatfishBook and found two profiles with the name Harry Woodgate (they have already been shut down). Sometimes its a bit tricky for me to find my own photos. This was one: [caption id="attachment_52498" align="aligncenter" width="630"] My that Harry Woodgate is handsome, and a professional baseball player too?[/caption] That was easy to find. That is of course Camden Yards, where I went on a stadium tour with my sister in 2012- she took the photo with my camera. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The second one stumped me, as it was obviously me, but I did not even recognize my own t-shirt, and I was standing in some strange doorway, wearing my camera slingpack. [caption id="attachment_52490" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Yet another fake CatfishBook profile using my photo found at https://flic.kr/p/9ZZmy6[/caption] For fun, I did a reverse image search in Google, and came up with a whole net full of fakes over on LinkedIn CatfishedIn: [caption id="attachment_52499" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Rather interesting how LinkedIn allows multiple accounts to exist all with the same photo[/caption] With some amusement, I noticed the last fake profile was for someone named "Paula" -- she could not have a prettier photo, eh? I let 'em know about this https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/691527353357332481 and filed a report with them. Their responses always make me laugh because they tell me to login to check for a response. I don;t have a CatfishedIn account nor plan to get one. Back to the photo. I was hopeful it was in my flickr stream. The shape of the door clued me in that it was from a visit to an old jail, and searching my own flickr photos for "jail" found the photo: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Note how cropping the photo made it look like Harry was standing in an ordinary doorway. Not a territorial prison in Wyoming, which is where I was standing in my own photo. As part of my petty war with Facebook, I have an album in Facebook with the my photos that have been used in catfishing scams. I am including these screenshots because once the accounts are closed, the evidence is gone. It was time for a break, plus it was after midnight. I went for my nightly relaxing dip in the spa, but a new idea bubbled up. I might have trap for the Harry that SW was chatting to. You see, she gave him a URL for my blogpost when she bombed him with the news she knew he was a fake. My hunch was there would be some details in my web server access logs for requests for that blog URL http://cogdogblog.com/2015/10/11/facebook-as-catfish-paradise-its-community-standards-wears-the-cone-of-shame/. So I logged on to my cpanel and downloaded the log for the last 24 hours. It only has 35,000 entries in it. But I have my ways. There is a cool function in BBEdit that will copy all lines containing a string to a new file, so I ended up with 57 lines, including right after their conversation (there was a time stamp in SW's chats and I know what time zone she is in). Access logs include all requests for images from that URL, so there will be some repeats, but each line looks like this: [caption id="attachment_52500" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Sample Apache log entry[/caption]. I need to just get the list of IP addresses... Hmm... I do a search on that string after the IP - - and in BBedit replace it with a tab character or \t. Why? I can pop openExcel, paste this in, and the first column are just the IP addresses. I can copy this column back to BBedit, which has another handy tool to delete duplicate lines - I end up with 40 unique IP addresses accessing the blog post SW shared with "Harry". These I can put into a Bulk IP Address Location tool, that should return a geolocation for those addresses. I should see some for SW's location, and hopefully some from where a catfisher is looking at my blog post. I am so clever. Not. They are all from San Francisco and one is from Los Angeles. How? Where is my flaw? I was hoping to see some IP address in maybe? It still might not have worked, they are probably smart enough to spoof their IP addresses all the time. This morning it dawns on me- I have CloudFlare set up on cogdogblog.com-- these are all IP addresses of the CLoudFlare serves that redirect requests to my blog. With some research, I find that there is an Apache server mod from CLoudFlare that should make the servers report the actual requestors IP address. I ask Reclaim Hosting to look into it, and they fix it within 4 minutes. But it will only help for future requests. Oh well. My hopes are slim to less than none that CatfishBook or CatfishedIn are going to change their infrastructure to address this issue. Heck, the more accounts they can list in a colorful chart, the better their business looks to investors. But what I have found is counter to what people usually react with. They suggest it's a problem that I have so many photos publicly available. But you see having those publicly available, and all of these blog posts, means that when catfishing victims start searching, they are often going to find my stuff. And they will get more suspicious of possible fake personas. To me the answer is informing people and people getting more informed. And acting on their own behalf rather than expecting some entity to protect them. Webpreserver has a good post on Ways to Protect Yourself Online from “Crooked Sweethearts” I want to share with something relevant Alec Couros shared after sending him the chat transcript. In this TED Thing James Veitch shares the fun he had by doing the unthinkable - responding to an email spammers message, and playing out the spammer to be a victim of their own deceit. https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_when_you_reply_to_spam_email?language=en#t-575790 It maybe accomplishes little, but as James says, if he can waste some scammers time, then it counts as a small strike back. And that's what I liked about what SW did, she let the line tun a bit. She wasted the time of the scammer, maybe letting them think their play was working. And she had fun with it. There's a lotta fish out there. "Who in God's name is alan?>" indeed. I am the bastard who is going to find ways to waste your catfishing time. Top Featured Image Credit: This is what happens when you search for open licensed images with keywords "dog" and "catfish"- the interwebz doth provide bizarrely again, thank you for this flickr photo by editrixie http://flickr.com/photos/editrixie/10511841036 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license I am not sure if what I am going to describe is some kind of condition or diagnosis (or just weird). I have a pretty good recall for landscapes or places I have seen. They seem to register in my brain more efficiently than location of car keys and missing wrenches. A few block clicks back I wrote how I would do that when seeing Landscape paintings or old photos or even movie scenery, I play a little bit of guessing where in the world that is. https://cogdogblog.com/2015/08/where-is-that-photo/ It just happened today in the most weird place. I was looking at some details of Adobe Lightroom software, which I have access to in my subscription I pay to get Photoshop. I spotted an icon link? or?? I am not even sure why I clicked, but I was looking at this tutorial page in Lightroom Classic and paused... Screen capture of Lightroom Classic Tutorial -- public information?? I am feeling this tingling sense that I have seen it before... like a trip in 2008 when I visited a week in Japan with my god friend and colleague Bert Kimura. As often a search of my own photos in flickr for "temple japan" got me there very quickly https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2904947974 Kinkakuji Temple flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) which I know from my caption is Kinkakuji Temple in Kyoto or more properly (thanks Wikipedia) Kinkaku-ji (???, literally "Temple of the Golden Pavilion"). My photos are from a lower vantage point, I cannot see the mountain tops behind it like the image in the tutorial. The tutorial of course does not have my extra, trivial memory.... When Bert and I were standing there som school kids came up and asked me (obviously an American) if they could practice their English. Bert took the photo and let me use it. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2905160264 Kids from Hiroshima flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It went something like… "Excuse me! Excuse me" (little voices rang out). "Hello, My name is Miko" said one reading from his script. "What is your name?" "My name is Alan" I replied. "We are from Hiroshima," said Miko, "where do you live?" "I live in America, in Arizona" "Will you sign our book?" And there I was signing my name in their books as if I was some kind of celebrity, and then they gave me a present. First was a note- and they were far from rude. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2905009782 Presents from Hiroshima School Kids flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And the present... https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2904163089 Presents from Hiroshima School Kids flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Inside was photos from Hiroshima,and some hand made origami. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2905012480 Presents from Hiroshima School Kids flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2904170413 Presents from Hiroshima School Kids flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I lost track of the presents, but the memory stays there, drawn out by a photo of a golden temple. Leading to a beautiful moment. ??????????? Bert for making that happen! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2898139573 Bert flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Featured Image: Amazed at Kinkakuji Temple flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) superimposed atop a screenshot of the public web page for the Adobe Lightroom tutorial. [Media Description] Adobe Lightroom tutorial web page with an image of a Japanese temple by a lake. Superimposed on it in the lower left is a photo of a man in a beard and t-shirt, me! in front of the same temple. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Ross Pollack: http://flickr.com/photos/rossap/3686277203/ Okay folks, we are setting up a live google hangout for Wednesday, September 25 at 9:30am PDT / 12:30pm EDT (check your local time) to talk about photography and the visual storytelling exercises for Week 5 of the Headless ds106. I will kick things off, and we will have Giulia Forsythe there for the first 30 minutes, and then Emily Strong will join in for the next half (conflicting schedules, you are stuck with me for the whole thing). This is open if you want o join or tune in via the YouTube page (links to be tweeted before we go live). Our script writers have come up short again, so we are just improvising, talking about this week’s tasks, the assignments, and maybe some GIMP editing demo (that’s on Emily). It would be fun if you could do your photoblitz today or early tomorrow, so we can have a pool of those to look at. This one should grow.. RSS in Government: In this site, we'll monitor creative uses of RSS to provide information to the public above government information and services.... There seems to be a connection or at least a lot of content from the Utah State Library site that has a great RSS tutorial but they seem to be collecting feeds from several other government agencies. And there are some experiments going on to send content out RSS content by email using "bloglet" (not any relation to Pigle). Lastly, another web site completely running in MovableType. <tiphat>tip of the blog hat to Lockergnome</tiphat> It starts, as often it does, with a tweet... https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/563176357576712192 Audrey's series on The History of the Future of Education is more than book worthy. In her latest, The Automatic Machine, Audrey takes us more into this past future history. I've read previous bits by her about Sidney Presser and claims for inventions of machines that teach (wikipedia quote): "The first.. [teaching machine] was developed by Sidney L. Pressey... While originally developed as a self-scoring machine... [it] demonstrated its ability to actually teach" I was really sucked in by the embedded video where Pressey explains (standing in front of a classroom of passive students) the Teaching Machine in 1964: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7OfEXWuulg Thirty-eight years after the description Audrey quoted, his explanation of how it works and what it does has barely change. The only new feature is the ability to trigger an award, a piece of candy for a correct answer. The woman's expression is priceless when she presses the right key and gets a candy: "We give Tums now. We used to use Lifesavers, but they are too big now to fit this machine." Thirty-eight years to work on technology, and still foiled by bugs and lack of standard sizes assessment rewards. And than that tickling. I had to make a remix with this classic video. My idea was to find a modern talk about MOOCs, and put its audio to Pressey's video. It would be easy since since you talks continuously, and you cannot really see the movement of his mouth, so keying to his motion was not needed. I searched in YouTube for "MOOC" and "assessment" and found very little. Oh well. I was about to use Daphne Koller's 2012 TED Talk on What We're Learning from Online Education -- there would be some humor in her voice coming from Pressey. Her talk is eighteen minutes, so finding two and a half would not be too hard, especially where she talks about what they are doing. But I went back to the YouTube well, and one or two links in a sidebar was EdX's Anant Agarwal TED Talk (we know what TED talks about a lot) on Why Massively Open Online Courses (still) Matter. There was a spot about nine minutes in he is talking about the virtues of learning online, self-paced, and talks about the student's excitement over the "green checkmark". Paydirt. So here is the final. I got lucky because the phrasing and timing worked out really well; as Agarwal talks about videos and interactivity, Pressey is handling the Teaching Machine. It ended up pretty damn good according to my MOOC Mocking standards. I present "The MOOCing Machine": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UG3iYSs5iE And now, for the pay I am continually trying to advocate in everything from ds106 to the You Show -- the making part. I use the extension in Chrome from SaveFrom.net to download both videos as mp4 videos, and import them into iMovie. The key for this stuff is knowing how to separate the audio and video tracks. I put the Pressey sequence in first, and use Modify -> Mute Clip to remove the sound (muting is handy as I can un-mute it if I need to hear the original track to match to something else). I then select the segment of the Agarwal clip that's close to what I need (it need not be precise since I can adjust the in and out points in the timeline) and drop it in after the Pressey one. Select that clip and use Modify -> Detach Audio. This is what separates the audio from the video. I take the audio track and slide it under the Pressey track (do this first!) and then delete the Agarwal video. Then its a matter of finding the start point in the audio (drag the left margin). I removed one small bit by using Split Clip on the audio track twice, and deleting the part I did not want. Sometimes the audio matching takes a lot of work, but my first guesses were really lucky. Right as Pressey is doing his candy reward thing, Agarwal is talking about "instant feedback". He says, as Pressey manipulates the machine "How else to you grade 150,000 students?" Here in the closing sequence, I use a simple "Centered" title from iMovie. I wonder if folks know you can modify the fonts, colors, sizes, even add extra lines? Don't accept defaults! I continued Argawal's voice for his credits, where he talks about "students dreaming of the green check mark" and then when Pressey's credit sequence comes in, I fold his voice in, which we have not heard. He ends with the value of students retrying an answer (one of four choices, sigh) and the amazing feature of flipping a lever to get immediately scored testing. I roll in with a credit screen for Audrey's post.... and fade to black. "an ability to actually teach". Let's hear it for actual teaching by a machine. This may be my finest remix hour... until the next one. Playing more with the #ds106zone for the Twilight Zone episode of the Invaders. All of the screaming, banging, and destruction might is averted if Alien Lady checks her iPhone. Instead of getting zapped by laser guns and whopping spaceships with her axe, instead, Alien Lady and Jim Groom laugh at old stories over the best tacos in Virginia, perhaps the entire east coast. Messing with the Macguffin may be one of my all time favorite ds106 assignments, because technically it is pretty simple (superimpose some text on a screen capture of a movie scene): Wikipedia defines the MacGuffin as "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction." For this assignment forever change the plot of a movie, tv show, etc. by changing a single line of dialogue. Put this new line of dialogue below a screen-cap of the moment in the movie you're changing. Credit to Tom Woodward for posting an example of this idea in the #ds106 Twitter stream. The beauty here is in the thinking and decision of what incident might unravel the plot- the storytelling here is in the thinking not the tool tinkering. In this case, if Alien Lady is not in her house, she never encounters the spaceship (maybe they fly on to Jim's house), and the creatures on the ship get to go home. I knew I wanted one of the earlier clips she she is cooking in the kitchen, and holding objects in her hand. I got the idea to throw in a twist, what might get her out of the house, but tweet from a friend? So while her house is a shack, has no electricity or running water, she does have an iPhone (solar charger). I clone brushed the knife out of ehr hand in PhotoShip, and made room to insert an image of an iPhone (there must be only 10,000,000,000,000 of them out there). I did paste in a screen cap of a twitter screen rather than an iPhone ome screen, it is so small you canot read the tweet. I placed it over her hand, then copied her hand from the screen layer, returned to the oPhone layer, and deleted the selection to make it look like her hand was on top. For the tweet, I used a very key site for doing ds106 fake content- LEMMETWEETTHATFORYOU http://lemmetweetthatforyou.com/ lets you type a username in a box, and the twitter message. In this case there really is an @AlienLady, so I inserted a clip of the TZ character for the icon. And there you go, the power of the MacGuffin is that it can neutralize the Twilight Zone! The link came from an actual comment to a blog entry-- imagine that, a useful link from a comment! BlogSieve ("Advanced Feed Processing for Atom, RDF, and RSS") is a new service that is fresh out and has potential for those wanting to mix RSS feed sources and recombine them in new ways: BlogSieve is a web-based tool that creates new feeds by filtering, merging and sorting existing feeds. The BlogSieve engine accepts virtually every (valid) feed format, processed results are then exported into any feed format you choose You can enter up to 5 feed sources (RSS URLs) as a starting point. The feature that Blogsieve offers that may maje it stand out from others, is that you can create a series of "filters" or search terms, so you are not getting everything from all 5 sources, but ones that match keyword criteria. It also provides output in 4 flavors of RSS. As a quick example, I grabbed the URLs from 4 of my Canadian blog authors I read, mixed it with my own, to create the "Four and a Half Canadians" feed: http://feeds.blogsieve.com/5/RSS2.0. The service is new (I had bad luck with my first test of filters, maybe a bad choice), and what it really lacks is a way to go back and make modifications in the settings (like when my sample feed above I forgot to select a category, so we are labeled as "Art"...). It could also stand to append the feed channels in the item titles so you know where it came from. If you read this full entry, I ran my new BlogSieved feed through Feed2JS to show the output (more…) I love tagging and still persist in vain hopes that I can encourage others to do some shared tagging, but feel lucky if I can get a handful of people to use a single tag. I am regularly tagging web sites in delicious with tags destined to be repurposed on at least 10 different web sites, and am starting to wonder what my cranial capacity is to remember what topics I am tagging for. photo credit: Steve Roe So its with some irony I saw some tagging "instructions" for a flickr group. I'll likely lose my membership for posting this, but small beans. I liked the concept of this Project NetPop group -- to "depict how the internet is changing life around you... Post pictures to show the impact of the Internet and technology on your life and the world around you." In fact I was noodling about a blog post asking folks to share their stories of Good Things that have happened solely through the connected nature of this web thing. I was invited to drop photos in this group but was floored at the tagging instructions: Tagging is important! Here's what we ask: 1. NETPOP: You agree to assign the tag "Netpop" to all the photos you add to this group. 2. LOCATION: You agree to tag all the photos you add to this group with the location where it was taken (if appropriate): a. City b. State c. Country 3. CATEGORIES: You also agree to use any of the other tags, if applicable, listed in the library that is covered in the "USE THESE TAGS..." discussion. 4. SEGMENT: If you take the survey at ProjectNetpop.com and find out which segment you belong to, add the segment name to your tags. Have fun! Moderators agree to review tags and categorize pictures according to the Project Netpop tag rules. Have fun? As if I am free form tagging I am going to remember all of this? Do I have to tag my mood, the room temperature, my cartesian coordinates, what I ate for lunch? Top down tagging seems to me a pipe dream; consider your self lucky if you can get a group to remember to use one tag. But then again, what do I know? I must get a dozen or two emails a week from so-called SEO experts asking if I want guest posts or will insert their clients link in my site. So I almost too quickly read this one from Emma at TasteWP: I have a cool WordPress tip for you!I see that you're linking to plugins in the WP repo, e.g. here you link to https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/. Did you know that by replacing "wordpress" with "tastewp" in the URL it spins up a demo site with that plugin already installed? E.g. please click on https://tastewp.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/ to see what I mean. It allows your visitors to immediately try out the plugins which you recommend. No login is required and of course it's 100% free! And this is tasty. And impressive for what it does. Think about it when you are looking to review or pick a WordPress plugin. All you have is what the authors write about it, maybe if luck a link to a demo. But this "trick" Emma shared lets you actually take out of the Codex for a full test drive. I will choose a different example that what she shared, that migration plugin is one I do not use anymore. But of, the Page-List plugin is in my toolbox for almost any project. Following the directions, I start with the wordpress.org URL of https://wordpress.org/plugins/page-list/ and change it to https://tastewp.org/plugins/page-list/ See what this does, it's amazing (well I think so) https://tastewp.org/plugins/page-list/ Watch as it dynamically spins up a fully functioning WordPress site with the Page-List plugin installed. The little timer indicates you have 2 days to explore with it (if you create a feww account at Tastewp.com you get a 7 day run with it. UPDATE! It also works for themes, so starting with say the Intergalactic theme URL you can set up a tasty demo site via https://wptaste.org/themes/intergalactic/ I immediately had a new thought. Sure I can remember to manually swap the wordpress.org domain to tastewp.org but wondered if I could quickly build a javascript bookmarklet that would do it automatically (not so quickly, like 75 minutes as I dusted off the javascript commands and sorted through my bracket typos). Here is version 0.2, you simply drag the link below to your browser bookmark bar. Then go to any Wordpress.org plugin or themepage, and click the bookmarklet. I include checks to make sure the page in view was actually a plugin or a theme (check for wordpress.org/plugins or wordpress.org/themes in the URL) an also added a confirmation dialog since it can take a bit of time for the TasteWP to spin into action. Taste WP For the curious, a walk through of my off the cuff JavaScript efforts as commented code (a newer version than the original to include functionality for themes) javascript:(function(){ // define the bookmarklet protocol as a function // get the URL of the page in view, convert to string wpURL = window.location.href.toString(); // set up a holder for the theme/plugin name wpName=''; // check if it is a plugin, if so save it's name // it even gets fancy and extras the plugin name from the DOM if (wpURL.includes('wordpress.org/plugins')) { wpName=document.getElementsByClassName('plugin-title')[0].innerText+'" plugin'; } // check if it is a theme, if so save it's name // iagain extra the theme name from the DOM if (wpURL.includes('wordpress.org/themes')) { wpName=document.getElementsByClassName('theme-name')[0].innerText+'" theme'; } // if we have a value for wpName we are in the right place if (wpName !='') { // yes we have a url! // now offer a message of what will happen, with an opt-out if (confirm('This may take a minute or two, but TasteWP.com will spin up a fully functioning demo site using the "' + wpName +'. Enjoy your taste of WordPress!')) { // start the tasting! First split the URL on "/" into an array tasteURL=wpURL.split("/"); // swap the second element from wordpres.org to tastewp.org tasteURL[2]='tastewp.org'; // now do a redirect to the tasteWP link to set things in motion window.location.assign(tasteURL.join("/")); } // end confirm condition } else { // red alert! wpURL is not a WordPress plugin link alert('This is not a WordPress theme or plugin page! Try again?'); } // end url check })() Maybe the bookmarklet tool is not truly needed, but it was fun to build. And doh! I did not even notice, but TasteWP already has a bookmarklet tool, from https://tastewp.com/ under Tips and Tricks then WP Directory tools. I like mine a wee bit better cause I made it. And thanks Emma and TastWP for this nifty tool. Just seeing something that can dynamically generate a test site is something file away. Just to be clear, I am not paid for recommending TasteWP, I only write about stuff I try and like. Other requests for guest posts and links still get The Treatment! I love me doing some bookmarklet tools. You? Featured Image: Felix likes tasting WordPress plugins more than rawhide bones... and he love his bones. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/37047162502 You Have No Idea How Good Rawhide Tastes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Margaret Almon UPDATE: Nov 2, 2013: See the final application and goofy Alan at Stonehenge video I'm scrambling somewhat to prepare by the end of the month a proposal for a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship; below are bits or bypass by waffling and go to the drafty draft. I first heard of the Foundation via Philipp Schmidt who's work there led to P2PU. That's a huge project. And then last year, I read David Wiley's project that was funded. Ginormous. Borrowing terminology and the insight of Jin Udell, I am aiming to extend the work we have done up to now as ds106 to be something that would enable people to build, foster their own distributed network communities. Rather than creating software solutions as an answer, this will rest on the existing (trailing edge?) open source tools of the web, primarily but not exclusively Wordpress. ========- D-R-A-F-T -======== Describe the world as it is. (A description of the status quo and context in which you will be working) At a mature age of 23, the World Wide Web has achieved much of the vision of its creator Tim Berners-Lee: The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. "“ The World Wide Web: A very short personal history by Tim Berners-Lee May 7, 1998 http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html In the world of education, we have bountiful resources and content on the web, but in practice, many educators lean towards a more familiar a print publishing/broadcast mindset-- not taking advantage of the affordances of being of the web. The meteoric rise of interest in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) focuses on achieving its first letter via approaches of replication, e.g. one super professors lecturing to learners, automated assessment, etc. and not using the affordances of it's massive participant group. What scales is the teaching (to many) not necessarily the experience of those aiming to learn. There is a better model out there for scaling open learning, it is right under our browsers... the web itself. What change do you want to make? (A description of what you want to change about the status quo, in the world, your personal vision for this area) I would like to see educators gain a better conceptual understanding and practice of web thinking, using the affordances of a distributed network, and an abilities to create, manage, and operate in a de-centralized space. This can be achieved without the need for corporate investor funding, but within the structures and open source tools of the web. It's what Jon Udell describes as innovation toolkits -- "products or services that, while being used for their intended purposes, enables their users to express unanticipated intents and find ways to realize them." And it is one that does not call for new technologies; in fact will work is re-conceptualization of what we currently have in new ways. I propose to build a suite of tool kits as extensions of the ones I have used or built for the ds106 open digital storytelling class but making them extensible for other subjects and organizations who would like to operate in a more "web-like" manner, using a distributed model where participants may create, publish in many places, ideally some are ones they manage. the full draft... I'm craving feedback so trying to wave my openness flag by posting this draft. What I seek includes but is not limited to: Would it make sense to a general reader? Is it a mistake to hitch it it closely to Wordpress? Can you think of ways you might want to build/use something not as a copy of ds106 but has the attributed of its parts (or something we have not thought of)? Do you have any idea for a project we could collaborate on (I am hoping to list potential ones, it is not a commitment, as I understand it, the fellowship provides needed funds and travel costs. Where are my typos? In my gut this feels like a super long shot, but the foundation really seems to take a unique approach to supporting people first, then projects. I would be super ecstatic to have the support to be able to focus full time energy to this. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Ikhlasul Amal Thanks in advance... I am enjoying the last leg of a nice long vacation at our cabin in the pine forests near Strawberry, Arizona. Not unique in the west or elsewhere in the world, we are in the ninth year of a drought, and the forests are bone dry. Just 10 miles to the south, the Willow Wild Fire is raging, and the skies here daily are filled with thick smoke, it has rained ash, and we have seen some spooky red haze sunsets and moon rises. What is truly amazing to consider is that while I am here worried about our little piece of heaven, there are more than 1000 men and women wearing heavy protective gear, working 12 hours a day, in 90+ degree heat, fighting the fire in roadless desert wilderness area. The folks doing this are true heros (see the photos). Do you want to know how hot and dry it is here? Two days ago, a bull dozer used to clear a defense line scraped a rock, and started another 40 acre fire. And we hear that more than 5 times this has happened, so that the dozers are now only used at 2:00 AM when the air is cooler and there is a fraction more humidity. There are also reports of people target shooting, and the ricochet of bullets on the rocks sparking flames. It is a tinderbox. Now, it is just time to worry about the thousands of folks headed to forest campgrounds for the July 4 weekend-- although fireworks are cancelled and there are bans on camp fires, what are the odds of careless acts of sparks? Think Rain. Update July 4 D'Arcy sent this cool satellite image showing the smoke plume from space-- we are under that north rending smoke plume on the left edge of the fire. However, the last 2 days have been more clear up here, but they are saying the fire could burn for a while, and I am guessing from the maps, may burn the entire ridge of the Mazaztal Mountains, (bonus points for whomever can pronounce that correctly). The word is the mountain is covered with fuel that has not burned for 60 years. On this post, I have almost little to say as Jon Udell's "The Network is the Blog" is so on spot and astute, and, well poetic. He hits some things which sound obvious in reading but easily to forget- the electricity of the blog-o-verse has everything to do with the human network it travels upon. The dictionary definition of “blog” is correct, but it says nothing about the network in which the blog participates. By way of analogy, consider a dictionary definition of a telephone: “an instrument that converts voice and other sound signals into a form that can be transmitted to remote locations and that receives and reconverts waves into sound signals.” That’s fine if you already know what a telephone network is, but the definition doesn’t work on its own. Just as telephones are meaningful only when connected to the telephone network, so blogs are meaningful only when connected to the blog network. Both are carriers of human communication, but where the telephone network is essentially fixed -- at least for now, until VoIP softens its structure -- the blog network is malleable and is shaped by our use of it. It’s more like a nervous system than a computer network, and for good reason. We can’t say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated. The blog network is made of people. We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge. Clearly this architecture can help manage the glut of information. More subtly, it can also help ensure that no vital inputs are suppressed because nobody has to rely on a single source. If one of the feeds I monitor doesn’t react to some event in a given domain, another probably will. When they all react, I know it was an especially important event. The resemblance of this model to the summing of activation potentials in a neural system is more than superficial. Nature knows best. And this network is no under a dominant corporate thumb or government grip (yet? that we know of?). Poetic. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Time keeps on running past me, teasing, "Nyeh nyeh, you are BEHIND on blogging". Dirty scumbag, that Time. Now it is closing in one a month since my 3 week jaunt to parts of Asia, and huge tracts of land remain uncharted. Like anyone is complaining. Anyhow, the second leg of my tour was a week in Singapore, a first time visit. I have to admit some super geography ignorance. When I knew of the trip invitation to go to Japan, I said, "hey I am in the neighborhood, why not go visit Jabiz Raisdana in Singapore". cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Long time blog friend, and having met once in Shanghai, I kind of missed the fact that it was more then 3000 miles, a 7 hour flight from Tokyo to Singapore. But I got there (despite some adventures with a late night arrival and a cab driver who could not seem to find the gate to the school). But next day, I was there in Jabiz's classroom, a vibrant setting I had only seen in his blog words and flickr photos. A huge thanks of appreciation goes to Jeff Plaman and Caroline Meeks, who really were the ones who coordinated, arranged my trip, and lined me up with a full schedule of sessions at UWCSEA. (more…) In my story of Dorothy getting bored in Kansas, I wanted to have a way for her to go back to Oz, and the easiest way would be via the Play It Backward, Jack ds106 assignment: Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don't they? So take a video of something in your life--someone running, the toilet flushing, the sink dripping, someone spitting, whatever--and reverse it! They not only look weird, but they sound weird. I used the "No Place Like Home" clip from YouTube, already saved as mp4 from my previous work. I brought this into iMovie, and edited the Clip to make it go in reverse. I added a bit of fade out on the end, visual effect of "Cartoon" and Audio effect of "Echo", all to give it a freaky kind of satanic feel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2am4_OAh-7M Just keep repeating that, and you might go back to Oz, Dorothy. If you need the reference... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVk1qswggXM Last weekend, I went on a photo walk in Baltimore with friend/colleague Bill Shrewbridge, and we went to check out something of a Baltimore unique thing- the Patterson Bowling Alley on Eastern Avenue, a mighty emporium of 6 lanes. Built in 1927, it is one of the hubs of a variety of bowling (and many say it originated here) popular in baltimore and a few other east coast cities, duckpins. The pins are much smaller than ten pin, and the ball about the size of a grapefruit, so its harder to make a mark (the top scores in the alley were like 212). I remember doing this as a kid, and of course we had to have a go at at (the scores are not presented to preserve our vanity). We had the stylish shoes going... cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I played around with doing some animated GIFs- here is one from a series of photos shot in rapid mode with my 7D and stitched in Photoshop, this is the kind of repetitive, infinite motion variety (there is some annoying flickering from light changes on the far wall): And here is the other one done on the iPhone with Cinemagram, with the reverse motion a bit more unworldly, like the ball bounces back off the pins This of course may not have any storytelling meaning, per se, as just media. But the way I think about these is they could be seeds for story or something to wrap a story around. Even with that, there is still something interesting and relevant about reducing a scene to its very basics of movement. That is the the Zen of Animated GIFs, the fluidity of life reduced to 3, 4, 5 frames of motion. Ultimate, penultimate, ultra-ultimate... we found the holy grail at Blue Water Seafood in San Diego. Brian and I celebrated the fruits of our presentation labor here with fabulously fresh swordfish and mahi-mahi tacos. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/93915698 Blue Water Seafood flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Yes, to all those who asked us during the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, we took this quest very seriously. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/93915194 Two Tacos flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It's all in the sauce! Featured Image: Yes! This is IT! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) AS an FYI, this blog, Feed2JS, and every other thing internet originating at Maricopa will be going offline Saturday July 30, from 7:00 Am to Noon (PST). They are needing to do major electrical upgrades to the main server room, and thus not only are web servers going down, so is email, phone, and internet connectivity for our entire college system. Oh my gosh, what will we do? I feel the shakes coming on already. The main room server has been running with several hundred boxes on a grid originally designed for a few mainframes-- and in the midst of our strong electrical storms where outages are the norm, the need is strong to beef up the wiring and the back up generators. That is phase one- we will have complete outages again Saturday and Sunday August 6-7. There. No blog, no cry. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 126 Miles Driven: 11,476 Most Recent 1000 mile marker: 11,000 miles, east of Nashville, TN on October 21 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 22 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 4 Money spent on gas: $3048 Cheapest gas price: $3.08/gallon (Fountain Inn, SC). Highest gas price: $5.64/gallon (CA$1.39/liter) (Wawa, ON). Photos posted: 2485 (that is an average of 19.7 per day) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Most scenic foliage drive: Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. Second was highway 58 in southwest Virginnia Number of books read: 12 (Most recent: Things the Grandchildren Should Know) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of iPhones dropped into canyons: 1 Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 13 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. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of un,non,anti conference family reunions attended: 1 Bavastock! Most unexpected activities: Riding a tractor on the Durnin Farm, Helping a friend of a friend move in Nashville, and one other I have to keep private I will reveal soon. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Most depressing shell of a city: Danville VA Number of times spent helping a friend of a friend move: 1 (thats what happens when you drive a truck) Number of new forms of transportation: 4 (paddleboard, Jet Ski, 4 wheel Quad, tractor) Best Beach Walk: Batchawana Bay Provincial Park Number of times I was really kidnapped : 0 Number of places I faked being at during the search for Center of the Internet: 3 Number of blog posts written during search for Center of the Internet: 8 Number of videos created for search for Center of the Internet: 7 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Best ds106 radio cast- talking vinyl and fake revolutionaries with Gardner Campbell Friend/Relatives Homes Visited/Mooched Upon: 31 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog 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 Bike Ride: Canmore to Banff and back with D'Arcy Norman. Most Recent Bike Ride: Virginia Beach Best Town Name: Fracking, Pennsylvania Number of friends known online met for first time: 21 (most recently added Pat aka @loonyhiker) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Laundry Stops: 14 Number of Breweries Visited: 7 (Glenwood Canyon Brewery (CO), Revolution Brewing, Paonia CO; Laughing Dog Brewing, Sandpoint ID; Grizzly Paw, Canmore AB; Steamwhistle, Toronto ON; Ottos, State College PA). Number of ds106 radio broadcasts with new people: 10 (most recent with Tom Woodward in Richmond VA) Number of Super Late Night ds106 Broadcasts That Were Totally Worth It: All of them. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of things shared in StoryBox: 941 (where are your contributions?) audio recordings: 124 documents: 15 graphics: 19 music: 37 photos: 615 videos: 126 remixes: 3 animated GIFs: 2 Biggest Dumper of StoryBox content in one dump: Jim Groom Most Consistent Contributor over span of StoryBox: Giulia Forsythe Number of Storybox Public Appearances: 36 Number of StoryBox demos: 5 (September 23 at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; September 28 at University of Mary Washington, October 21 at Brock University), October 26 for Faculty Development Institute, Virginia Tech; October 27 for Honors Residential College, Virginia Tech; cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'm slow to change some things.... I have had the same self modded theme on CogDogBlog since November 2005 (see the last face lift), so 4+ years later, I felt it was time to toy with some new digs. But I am impulsive (I can speed shop with the best of them), so I looked at about 3 themes, and liked the approach of Patrick's hoPE theme as it uses a flickr gadget to display my own photos in the upper right. I'll kick this one around the yard a bit, tweak some sidebars, and give it my usual theme hacking. Look for the next make over in 2014.... creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Jeremy Levine Design Having done more than a handful of Feed Wordpress powered syndication sites, I've had some interesting opportunities to handle difference scenarios when the course/event actually decides to run another year. I posted an extensive write up for The Harvard School of Graduate Education's Future of Learning Institute, a week long summer event. That site had the vent information plus the syndication of blog posts, photos, tweets, bookmarked resources, and a slick way for participants to submit posts by email. In late April I was approached with a request to quickly archive the site and prep the same design for this year. This is a case where the thinking (first) was to make each year's site a different thing. Sadly this was not hosting on Reclaim Hosting where cloning is an Installatron snap, so I did it the old school export database, copy files, make new subdomain, install wordpress, import database -- to make an archive site at http://2013.futureoflearningpz.org/. Then it was a matter of wiping out posts and content specific to 2013 in the main site. I thought I was done. The organizers came back to me in June with a desire to have a more modern theme AND they rethought the organization, and felt like rather than having separate sites for each year (episodic), that they preferred to have a single site, where content could add on year after year, and they could use it all year long. It made sense, but the timeline was crazy short; especially to try and toss in a new theme. Plus they wanted to be able to change styles on all elements, something that was easy to do with the Styles plugin added on top of the old Twenty Eleven Theme. So did some CSS tweaking to make the content fill the page edge to edge, and incorporate a full width graphic header image. This change also meant a reorganization of content, to identify parts that would remain the same year to year, and others that would be different, and thus introducing the idea of a page hierarchy (described a bit in The Te of Pages); so for all program information, it would beed a parent page like FOL2014 and under that pages for keynotes, sessions, etc specific to that year. They also wanted to have more dynamic content on the front page, so I did some redesign, and added code to create new widget areas. This is the new site front, where the purple boxes show the widgeted and dynamic areas The top one is just a place for them to put a welcome message, it's just a widget that spans the page, and I made a simple text widget, so the site managers could modify the content (e.g. of they wanted to change the message daily, which they did not do). The middle area was meant to feature Spotlighted content - as content came into the site, I made it so the site managers could edit any syndicated content, and if they added a Spotlight category, it pushed it to a special archive page, but also the three most recent items moved to the front page in the middle section. If the item was a tweet, it would natively embed there. I did set it up, so if they modified the entry to have a featured image, it would use that instead of text from the post. And I added a footer section, so they could add a caption like "This is relevant to today's workshop"; they did this simply by editing the post excerpt. I don't think they understood the featured image concept, because all the ones added after I set it up were text only. So I went in to modify two of the entries to have a featured image, which changes the front page to: I am not sure why so many people do not use images in their blogging. I have an affliction of not being able to stand seeing stubby posts with no media. Or worse "click here" links. Anyhow. One thing that did not work well. The organizers expressed concern about the performance of the site. I had to explain to them the concept of their rock bottom priced shared server bluehost plan, with an analogy of a staying in a cheap hotel where everyone shares the hot water. So we upgraded their plan. I also tried the W3 Total Cache plugin, which in testing helped performance. Then I found it broke the SimplePress plugin I use for their facilitator discussion forums. Then it was also causing some problems of caching the mobile themed version of the site on some browser views. Maybe I just did not configure it right, but I had to nuke it. The event had 13 learning groups, with an info page for each one (again, needed to be organized for new content in future years), e.g Learning Group 7 as http://futureoflearningpz.org/fol14/groups-2014/group7-2014/ There was also a blog category for each group, and I set up the post by email feature of Jetpack (I called it a "Quick Post") so group participants could submit reports, photos to their group - .e.g the category for group 7 in 2014 is http://futureoflearningpz.org/fol/learning-groups-2014/group7-2014/ This meant that for participants to have their emailed post be associated with that group, they would need to include somewhere in their email message the code: [category group7-2014] This was probably not made clear, as I do not think anyone among the 94 quickposts got the right category code, so I ended up manually categorizing these to make them land in the right groups. I admit this was likely a bit complicated, but there's not much I can do not being at the event site. The site activity was comparable to 2013, a peak of 2700 visits in the middle of the event And a good amount of activity in the various flows; Feed Wordpress just chugged and chugged as it does. The ideas for the organization/participant community is now to promote activity and publish news posts all year long. I've offered to work with them next spring to introduce a new responsive theme, and assist in the setup for next year's institute (also, perhaps to import the 2013 content to have as an ongoing body of knowledge). In this syndication structure, the new idea is to have all of the flow continually build and grow in one place, and structure the yearly event specific content to keep its integrity (rather than archiving to just overwriting it year to year). In maybe another post, I will discuss a setup where it made more sense to create a new site every year. Stay tuned to http://futureoflearningpz.org/ 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 cc licensed flickr photo shared by misterbisson Yep my internet grandchildren, Old CogDog remembers when e-mail was pretty much it for everything on online activity, long before junk mail, phishing, spam, twitter, facebook. blogs, heck before the web. It;s refreshing when something nice just lands in thr box, and makes you pause and smile. Today's gift: Hi Alan, I am a secretary at [Xxxxxx], and a bit of a tech geek, so I have been following your blog since you presented at our [school]. Anyway, I am sure you have already seen this, but on the off chance you haven't... This site will compare bing and google search results side by side. http://www.furia.com/code/bg/bg.cgi I picture the shy secretary secretly tweeting and blogging, and the fact that this person decided to share something forward the old fashioned way, well heck, it's just making me smile. As I wrote in the reply: That is so kind of you to share, and to pull the curtain back, I do NOT see everything out there and rely on other people to share, so thanks ;-) (and my choice of photos above is a bit slanted, I could not find a bing box, so sue me) List crossing. Attending (and presented) yesterday at the Modern Language Association Conference here in Vancouver. I mingled with more rhetoricians then I usually do. I got to meet Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Strommel of Hybrid Pedagogy fame. My session yesterday was part of a panel on Visionary Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century: Teaching the Humanities with Digital Technology, and the story of how that came to be is... well serendipitous. Here I am with co-presenters Gabriele and Petra: cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I glossed over paying attention the full names in our few months of e-mails. Petra 's husband had a little godfather thing going with MOOCs; I remembered reading her post from her 2014 MLA session (you cannot beat a good title). It was last year that I met Gabrielle in a discussion forum in The History of Education MOOC (which as you might see, as an open online course you cannot see content without registering) (open as in not). I am sure I was complaining about the format or talking about DS106. Anyhow for some reason Gabrielle invited me to be part of the panel and talk about DS106. Once I saw it was in Vancouver, I was definitely in (and this was before I know I'd be in British Columbia for the TRU fellowship) (talk about serendipity). My overly pun ridden talk title was "Assignment Riffing: What Happens in DS106 Does Not Stay in DS106". I hope to talk about how the culture of DS106 is described by people modding the creations/ideas of others (remember the Bag of Gold thing?) but also the very nature of now some 20+ iterations of ds106 riffs off of itself as a course that is more than a course (of course). I opened with the meme posters many people generously helped out with for the Daily Create TDC1069: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=interestingness-desc&safe_search=1&text=tdc1069&view_all=1 TDC responses in flickr It turned out, as usual, a lot to cram into 20 minutes. So I talked really fast. Like that helps. I built out shiny web site with everything for the presentation and more at https://cogdogblog.com/stuff/mla15/ This presentation expands our session’s conversation beyond the course, unit, or a particular institution. Unlike MOOCs (of c and x variety), the open digital story course ds106 uniquely stands as more than one course, but as overlapping ones from multiple institutions with a cloud of open participants. Its Internet radio station and Daily Create challenges offer opportunities outside the course. An open assignment bank not only gives flexibility to choose assignments, but also invites participants to add new ones, a living example of the “adjacent possible” in a course. It may appear ludicrous to house assignments for editing images of famous paintings to include fat cats, creating poetry from titles of songs, or putting fast food in the hands of internet pioneers, but the media created are not the end goals in ds106. Participants open their apertures of creative interpretation, incorporate works of others in a constructive fashion, and narrate their creative process. A frequent spirit of spontaneous "riffing" occurs, not unlike that of improvisational jazz musicians, that ripples far beyond the confines of one course. and thus slides... https://speakerdeck.com/cogdog/assignment-riffing-what-happens-in-ds106-does-not-stay-in-ds106 and thus recorded audio... One slide sequence deleted included the montage of "characters" who have been a part of ds106 - Ol Hatchet Jack, Talky Tina, Anna Cow, Gifadog... And another was a montage trying to show the Bag of Gold riffing (I even had I sequenced to the original video). I did have some fun in talking about the DS106 Daily Create; ironically this was the day marking its 3rd anniversary. I put out a special challenge to Petra and her husband to complete "A MOOC and a Duck Walk Into a Bar...". https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/553384812556607489 (Yes I had a follow up tweet fixing the URL). (Because typos). But I think I will earn my beer from Mr Kerohan https://twitter.com/petradt/status/553630075917070337 We did have a rather nicely partly full room, at least 50? And It was great to see John Maxwell from SFU sitting in the front row (thanks for being our photographer). In her talk on "Fostering Global and Digital Learning with Google+ Hangout as a Communication and Knowledge Sharing Tool" Gabrielle shared her experiences teaching German and film studies via Google hangout, using it as a way for students to practice their conversational German, both for her students at Denison and on a collaborative project with students in Bulgaria. She talks fondly of a time in her class where students were re-enacting a romantic scene. One player was a male 19 year old student and the other was a woman taking the class who worked in the registrar's office; she says other students had tears in their eyes when he expressed his love (in German), forgetting their every day roles (I speculated how rare it was for a student to express love for the registrar). In "How to Do Things with Books and Screens: Literature and Digital Pedagogy" Petra presented on her projects running a literary role play in twitter of The Picture of Dorian Gray and just this past year of a twitter role play Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on Halloween. She also shared some of the fascinating projects that came out of a class Literature and Social Online Learning that combined computer science and humanities students. I recognized the REwrite project from coming across my radar somewhere; it was run during NaNoWriMo as a means of retelling Jane Austen as a choose your own adventure game. See more examples about this class in a news feature New Stanford course brings Silicon Valley to the humanities classroom. There really felt like good interest/energy in the room (if you dod not know this, and most teachers should, body posture in the audience is pretty clear). There were questions about (and my memory is fuzzy) questioning about how much "content" was covered ("the approaches are innovative, but..."). Someone asked about how work like this is assessed. And there was a question about the overhead of having to teach both content/ methods, and dealing with shifting technologies. All in all (at least for me). It was a great experience. I also had a chance to catch an always energetic talk by Jon Beasley-Murray as part of the panel on Rhetoric of Crisis and the Politics of Cuts. While he has been known to say: https://twitter.com/jbmurray/status/537096817821757440 I felt not much bewilderment. In From Here: MOOCs and Higher Education Jon pulled zero punches in a brilliant juxtaposition of the University of British Columbia's branding message of "From Here" and how visually, metaphorically, it was disassociated from any place we might construe as where teaching and learning happen. For once I pretty much put away my devices and listened in to the various viewpoints questioning the overplay of "crisis" in education. What I got was- it's not much of a crisis (it's "stress"? "turning points"?) -- unless it's happening to you. According to David Downing, Pennsylvania has much figured out, and funding higher education and keeping it being taught by full time and/or reasonably compensated adjuncts, is quite doable. Heather Steffen made also a clear showing that the situation is hardly new. Some good Q&A (I do like the MLA leaves a more than token amount of presentation time for discussion) about the role of students, making the message clear, how some educators who have parents who think higher education is a crock, and of course, lots of talking about neoliberalism. I've never seen a neoliberal, but they are out there. Not at MLA. And then to top it off, I bumped into Petra again in the hallway, and got to meet Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Strommel and joined them and a group of more folks for dinner. Quite a day. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine During my weeklong visit to Fairbanks Alaska I was fortunate to have met and been asked for a podcast interview with Chris Malmberg, who does this "Digital Beards" series for the University of Alaska Fairbanks eLearning and Distance Education group. Here I am for Digital Beards 10 "“ Alan Levine, DS106, and the Internet We had a nice lunch before this at... oi, I forgot already the name of the locals place we had lunch at, but it was great. We were talking about trying to define the internet, and he had this great rant at how it was like one of those action figure toys you never know exactly what will open up or turn itself into when you press some random button. It sounds silly now, but it totally made sense at the time. I tried to do this for a daily create which was to "draw the internet" (ignore more messup of the hand) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Anyhow we actually talked about beards in the beginning of the podcast, and just when you thought it would be just two guys talking about not shaving, we digressed into the shape of ummms, but then found our way to talking about ds106. While he was recording, I was broadcasting it live to ds106radio, but you get the whole thing in his edit above, down to the last "ds106 radio FOR LIFE" at the end. I really enjoyed meeting Chris and this fun conversation. He is a creative writer and I gotta like a guy who's tagline is "an educator and a clown" Serendipity would have no magic if it did not sneak up on you and lovingly whack you on the side of your normality. On a beautiful Saturday when I ought to be outside playing in the fresh snow, I am instead pounding away at this #%$*@ keyboard working on web sites. Finally, after getting a little bit done, I peek into the twitter screen, and get maybe the best possible message a teacher can get. https://twitter.com/MsHerrick_Math/status/685878964053737473 Watch her video first. Karissa was a student in the last DS106 course I taught at University of Mary Washington - an online section I taught in the Spring of 2013. She was a memorable student; studying to be a math teacher she came in with a lot of talent and energy. Her blog (now retired, but because of Feed Wordpress we have an archive of her work) had a clever title and theme (and URL) Confessions of a Future Disney Princess [caption id="attachment_51808" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Internet Archive Capture of Karissa's DS106 nblog[/caption] She wove her love of math with the unlikely pairing of her love of Disney Princesses, naming herself Princess Karissa. I recall even then her audio and video work showed her talents that have gone even farther as shown in the video she shared today. There was a Calculus song she did for the Audio unit, and like the great students she was, a full writeup on the production. https://soundcloud.com/krisavball08/calculus In someways I've felt the worst time to assess what a student learned is right at the end of the course- what you get is a short term memory / experience dump. To me, the most important assessment is something teachers cannot do; it falls on students. And that is to find out later in life what they are doing with their education. So it's 3 years now since Karissa started as a student in my ds106 class, and she felt motivated to (a) remember by twitter name and (b) share the creative work she is doing now in her role as a teacher herself. There's only a bit I can take as a credit. Karissa was a great student, motivated, creative, and she took what I gave, but that's as much, or more, credit to her than me (as if we can ever figure out that complex function). [caption id="attachment_51809" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Has y=mx+b been so clearly explained?[/caption] Thanks Karissa, for reaching out, and for using your talent and energy for your math students. This is totally +memorable and the best gift I could have gotten. Top / Featured Image Credit : Screen capture of former ds106 student Karissa from her new video Slope "Hello" Parody found on YouTube I am so old I remember both doing this and recommending it in the Ordovician era of the web- putting my email address at the bottom of every web page. Ha ha, fool. But there was no harvesting and selling of emails for purposes of sending unwanted marketing spam. Once the internet altered to become the advernet, this all changed. Email spam is now a FOL. Gmail saves me a lot of even seeing the river of sludge that is down in the foul underbelly of the internet. I almost never look at my spam folder, but sometimes I do just to get a sniff of the sewer (and mine is relatively clean) [caption id="attachment_64536" align="aligncenter" width="630"] SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM [/caption] I also get a regular stream of offers to write guest posts, often for pet web sites, but a lot of ed-tech products; mostly I delete and move on, sometimes I am compelled to fulfill the offer that is right on my home page, to mock them. Largely it's not worth the time. Delete and move on, delete and move on, delete and ... And that's what I did with this one spamvertising HostGator web hosting that came on May 29. That's right, the oldest internet profession is email spam marketing. I have never used HostGator and have no relationship with them. It is clearly unsolicited email, and you can tell that it is a spam effort as the sending address is a Gmail account, and my email is one of 12 in the senders list (software for doing this sends in small batches to not look like spam) (you can't fool me). But when a second exact copy came a day later, my fur hackles went up a bit. [caption id="attachment_64538" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Smells like rotten spam[/caption] Slightly different. This one sent just to me. Same thing, comes from what purports to be a personal Gmail account offering services from Hostgator. What to do? Become irate in twitter. https://twitter.com/HGSupport/status/869607515180453889 Okay I inflated by one. They did respond quickly and from multiple support accounts. Thus I emailed them the the two messages like: This is the second Hostgator spam message I received in reference to https://twitter.com/HGSupport/status/869608053359992832 This is unsolicited email and a clear violation of the CAN-SPAM act. This contains links to your site. The first response clearly shows they did not get my message: I hope this message finds you well. My name is Adrienne, and I am part of the Customer Service Management Team here at HostGator. We work with every department within the company to ensure customer satisfaction. We received your email and wanted to follow up with you. First and foremost, we would like to offer our most sincere apologies for the frustration that this matter has caused you. We will certainly do everything in our power to have you removed from our mailing list. What email address would you like us to have removed? Yes, my fur is really standing up This is bullshit. I was not contacted from a mailing list; the emails were sent from gmail accounts not associated with HostGator, and sent to my email address w/o permission or any relationship with HostGator. Maybe have your lawyers refer to https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business and come back with a better explanation why HostGator is using spam advertising. Ahh, now they get it: Thank you for taking the time to follow up with us. We understand that your time is valuable, and as such, appreciate you taking the time to reach out to us. Please accept my apologies for misunderstanding your request. After a review of the information youâ??ve sent in your previous email, we will continue to investigate the source of this email and why it was sent. Again, I offer my sincerest apologies for the trouble. On twitter, this is the "explanation" https://twitter.com/HGSupport/status/869617861668503552 Who are "affiliates" Are they people at home sending spam email ads vie their personal gmail accounts? Are Maggie Logan and Alex Smith real? Then look what came in this morning... A web hosting ad for a different company, iPage, from a personal gmail account, bearing the same email spam victims as the first message from Hostgator[caption id="attachment_64545" align="aligncenter" width="630"] SPAM is multiplying like sex happy roaches[/caption] I have never been a customer nor have any affiliation with iPage. Now we have a relationship, I call them out as spammers. https://twitter.com/iPage/status/869952893356568578 I won't take this fertilizer at all. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/869959330744815616 Why am I getting unsolicited email spam from multiple web hosting companies? Because they are not independent. The answer is one google search away Who Owns iPage. From Wikipedia: iPage was initially founded in 1998 as a full web service provider, but the company completely re-launched operations as a web hosting provider in 2009. It's currently run by Endurance International Group, which is also the owner of other web hosting companies such as BlueHost and HostGator. Endurance International Group, WTF is that, some kind of ultrasports trainers? Nope. Nice. They offer "Everything small businesses need to fuel their online presence and reach customers everywhere" including spam email advertising campaigns. Let's get them into the fun circle. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/869951059073970176 https://twitter.com/EnduranceIntl/status/869960493724835841 Always blaming "the affiliates". Who the fuck are affiliates? They will try and shift the blame to some third party, but the fact is the affiliates are email spam marketing campaigns with direct links to the companies listed as Endurance International group "brands" (I anticipate the Blue Host offers next). Let me repeat- the same exact type of spam advertising was emailed to the list of victims for two different Endurance "brand" companies- I hold the Endurance International group 100% accountable for this practice. An illegal practice. For the Endurnce group, let's do a review of the FTC CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business: Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law. They violate rule 1: Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message. and rule 5: Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests. and most key, Endurance International Group who is only blaming "affiliates" Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible. Once more in case you did not see that The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. I have three violations sitting in my inbox and ready to file with the FTC. Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $40,654, and more than one person may be held responsible for violations. For example, both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that originated the message may be legally responsible. Email that makes misleading claims about products or services also may be subject to laws outlawing deceptive advertising, like Section 5 of the FTC Act. The CAN-SPAM Act has certain aggravated violations that may give rise to additional fines. And let me be very clear- you picked the wrong person to piss off as you piss all over the internet I once loved https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/869963955686457344 Maybe you should focus more on providing good company service like my friends at Reclaim Hosting / Rockaway Hosting. They have a soul, a conscious and do not have to do spam marketing. They also pick up a lot of your frustrated customers. It's your move, Endurance International Group and do not make it a lame one. UPDATE May 31, 2017 11:30PM PT Despite tweets saying they were investigating, the HostGator spam continues: [caption id="attachment_64550" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The SPAM that keeps SPAMMING[/caption] UPDATE June 2, 2017 1:39AM PT I was told by Endurance Whatever that the problem was taken care of: https://twitter.com/EnduranceIntl/status/870346415578521601 as well as given an explanation from Jonathan at HostGator: First, I feel it would be beneficial to address your concerns on what an "affiliate" means to a hosting company. Here at HostGator, as well as many other non-Endurance owned hosting brands ( https://www.godaddy.com/affiliates/affiliate-program.aspx), we offer an affiliate program where individuals can sign up, then refer customers to HostGator to earn referral payments. More information on this program can be found here : https://www.hostgator.com/affiliates Our affiliate team does take time to evaluate applicants to this program to help ensure that only quality individuals get accepted, but regrettably from time to time we have bad apples that participate in unacceptable behavior such as spamming. It is strictly against our affiliate terms of service (https://www.hostgator.com/tos/affiliate-tos) for any affiliate to spam, as this of course not only violates the CAN-SPAM act, but as you are aware, sullies the reputation of the brand they are attempting to "promote." I use this word in quotes as these individuals are clearly combing the internet for e-mail addresses, and are looking to take advantage of HostGator in the interest of earning a quick buck, which certainly does not promote HostGator's reputation. We take these offenses very seriously and will immediately terminate any affiliate found to be violating the agreement linked above. So far, we have terminated the affiliates you originally reported... In summary, the messages you received were in no way approved by HostGator or it's parent company and are a direct violation of our affiliate/referral program, so we appreciate you sending these examples along. So HostGator and parent company just place blame on rogue affiliates, whom receive some kind of compensation for referrals. I responded with my opinion that the CAN-SPAM act made it clear that HostGator was responsible for spam email advertising their services even if it was sent by these so called "affiliates" -- again quoting from the FTC: Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible. However, Jonathan still tows this line of not being responsible: After review of this message, we have found that this was actually the same affiliate from the original report who has since been terminated from the program. In regards to your concern on oversight, this section of the CAN-SPAM act would not apply as we do not offer the affiliate program in order to handle our e-mail marketing on our behalf. Our e-mail marking is not handled by affiliates, and as outlined in our terms of service, our affiliates are not allowed to send unsolicited e-mail. The affiliates are empowered to use banners or ads for their websites and are never given instruction to send unsolicited messages. While we agree that it would be ideal to have such a high level of oversight, I'm sure you can understand that we cannot realistically review every e-mail an affiliate sends as we cannot prevent an individual from creating an e-mail address with Gmail and sending messages without requesting our approval. What we can do is continue to improve the vetting of our affiliates, and act on any reports of abuse or misrepresentation of our program or brand. Should I feel assured this is over? F**** no. I got another spam email tonight, following Jonathan's email:[caption id="attachment_64553" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Jonathan at HostGator said they took care of this rogue affiliate. Not.[/caption] One more tweet across the bow. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/870547782196617219 At this point, with 4 spam email marketing messages for HostGator, it's time to file my complaint. Don't **** with the dog. Update June 12, 2017 Now thanks to the email marketing spam incentivized by Endurance International, I am blessed to get spam email for BlueHost https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/874334678987272193 Does Endurance have the endurance to keep spamming me? Will they continue to duck their role? to defer blame? Featured Image: I did a google images search (set for openly licensed images) on "world's oldest profession" and got much less racy / relevant images, but as this one shows, it's not what you think (it's used as image on the Wikipedia article on Agriculture which lends itself to fertilizer and the topic of this post). It is a Maler der Grabkammer des Sennudem 001.jpg Wikimedia Commons image placed into the public domain by The Yorck Project. It's the MOOc Mocking Channel! All Cows. All Mocking. All The Time. flickr foto Not So Picturesqueavailable on my flickr It is a hazy day at our cabin Strawberry as the front of the Cave Creek Complex fire, 12 miles to the southwest, is smoking up the skies. Fortunately, the news is saying that there is less to worry about in terms of the fire reaching hear. Despite this haze of smoke in the normally crytal clear blue Arizona Sky, the danger to our cabin Strawberry seems to be of a lesser threat from the Cave Creek Complex fire that what we heard earlier in the week. I am not surprised the Phoenix news media stoked more concern than warranted with their slant on the "news" during the week. Fortunately the strong winds that moved the fire quickly north last week have slowed down. According to the reports on the fire incident web sites, the northern edge has not moved much in the last 48 hours, due to wind change, and some differeent terrain where the amount of dry fuel to burn is lessened. They are setting up control lines just south of the Verde River, and breacing those would be the worst case where they would start a possible evacuation. Then we would have at most 13 hours to get out of here. But due to some incredible efforts by 1300 some firefighters out there in 100+ degree heat, things are looking a bit less grim. But the threat is always there in the extreme dry climate of Arizona, compunded by the multi year drought, compunded by dry lightining storms, compunded by the sometimes boneheaded human behavior in the woods. Anyhow, we can relax slightly, and now consider going ahead with our plan to drive to Colorado for a family wedding July 4. The blog will be quiet from July 2-6.