Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by caddymob It's time to start issuing citations for pooping on the internet. The sheer irony of what came in via a trackback (still value among the flotilla of spam) to my still un-solved pursuit to find the source, the actual credible source, for the oft asserted """fact""" (triple scare quotes) that "visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text". Please keep the internet clean and never NEVER EVER use that assertion in any form. Unless you like poop smell. And here is the poop piled irony- someone actually used my post doubting the existence of this fact as a citation of its existence. In fact, the entire """"article"""" ought to be strip searched for credibility. The odor commences with the title A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words – And About 50 Milliseconds from the revered wisdom of AlignTech Solutions "Positioning you to grow your business" (growth can be achieved with a proper dose of fertilizer). I must quote the opening, where I get first link credit for a bull**** statement: Aside from shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre (illegal and not recommended), visuals trump words when it comes to quick, clear communication. In fact, “visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text, graphics quickly affect our emotions, and our emotions greatly affect our decision-making,” according to Mike Parkinson in The Power of Visual Communication. In addition, the brain deciphers image elements simultaneously, while language is decoded in a linear, sequential manner that takes longer to process. Plus research by Edgar Dale shows the retention rate of visual information is double the retention rate for reading. So why does author Tim Holdsworth cite a link to my blog post as a citation for the (wrongly repeated) assertion in Mike Parkinson's book? When he could have linked to it directly?? I will tell you why. Because the author googled a phrased, and mine was listed higher than Parkinson's (maybe). Because if he read my post, the author night have found a different source. But let's put my vanity aside. Let's follow on to this carefully researched piece of writing. Holdsworth cites (and not to the source but to one of thousands of replications of the faulty diagram) the already well proven WRONG and MIS-APPROPRIATED interpretation of Dale's Cone of Experience - this has been thoroughly roasted and skewered by Will Thalheimer. Edgar Dale never did the research the diagram was based on. And then of course we get: It takes roughly 50 milliseconds for people to form an opinion about a website and determine whether they’ll stay and read the content or leave. How rough is 50 milliseconds? I formed an opinion of AlignTech Solutions site in maybe 72. Follow the link to the source of the assertion. What you get is an abstract: Three studies were conducted to ascertain how quickly people form an opinion about web page visual appeal. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each. The second study replicated the first, but participants also rated each web page on seven specific design dimensions. Visual appeal was found to be closely related to most of these. Study 3 again replicated the 500 ms condition as well as adding a 50 ms condition using the same stimuli to determine whether the first impression may be interpreted as a 'mere exposure effect' (Zajonc 1980). Throughout, visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from one phase to the next as were the correlations between the 50 ms and 500 ms conditions. Thus, visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression. Downloading the article would cost me $41 (and that is another whole smelly pile of dung). Did AlignTech read the study? Did they see if the subject size is relevant or the conditions comparable? "Moral of the story?" Aligntech has zero credibility in my book. Their writing is steeped in poop. And still it goes on. People continually write the unproven assertions and even document it with an official looking citation to a document that does not contain the research the assertion is based on. The CogDog Grand Prize ($60) for locating the research credit for the assertion that "visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text" STILL stands unclaimed. 60 clams could be yours. And do not repeat these clichés please! Take your internet poop home creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Joel Abroad Did you know that airlines can take your money for tickets, and then keep it when their own delays cause you to miss connections? There is a word for that. Did you know they can ignore requests for customer service? Not reply to messages they acknowledge they will? Did you know that the Bush administration has putt handcuffs on the Department of Transportation's ability to respond to consumer complaints? Sure DOT says file a complaint online, but in September 2007 according to New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg this is an empty pursuit: The Secretary of Transportation has the authority to regulate airlines and issue fines up to $2,500 to carriers for violations of federal airline consumer protection rules. But the Bush Administration has chosen to limit the number of passenger complaints DOT can follow up on. Claiming budgetary shortfalls, the DOT only follows up on complaints related to discrimination and handicap accessibility. Most complaints are simply logged and reported monthly. So this is a CogDog effort to smoke some response out of an airline who has taken my money, cost me another $900 to get home, and then, after ignoring most of my contact requests, says it is all my fault. We will see about that. What follows, for documentation, is a letter I am sending by registered mail to Icelandair, who in my mind, has committed theft. I do not expect to see one cent of my money. They have all the lawyers and fine print stacked up against me. But the game has changed and many businesses do not get the fact that they can no longer stomp on consumers and trust that no one hears about it. Companies need to know that they are transparent, and we have collective/connective tools to shine lights on the rats. --------------------------------------------- Monday, December 29, 2008 Icelandair North America 5950 Symphony Woods Rd Ste 410 Columbia, MD 21044 Cc: Better Business Bureau, U.S. Department of Transportation Aviation Consumer Protection Division, GetSatisfaction.com To whom it may concern, I am writing seeking resolution to a series of incidents beyond my control including late arrival and baggage delivery of an Icelandair flight on November 29 that caused me to miss two connections and required me to pay out of pocket $917.50 for a ticket to get home plus losing $158.04 for a prepaid hotel I was unable to use due to these delays. In summary and detail below: Icelandair has pocketed money I paid for two unused tickets for flights missed that were not my fault. We have a word in America for taking money. Icelandair's customer service has been abysmal in (a) lacking a phone number for customers to call for service and (b) a pattern of repeated ignoring requests for customer service submitted via their web form and by e-mail. I am asking in writing for a refund of $1075 as a minimum response to a terrible sequence of poor customer service. My next stop may be small claims court. My roundtrip from Phoenix to Reykjavik was purchased via expedia (ticket 108 7376269300) included legs of US domestic travel on US Airways and American Airlines, and according to these airlines, all fees ($1204.30 total) were paid to Icelandair for these tickets. I departed from Reykjavik on November 29 on flight 631 scheduled to arrive at Logan International airport in Boston at 5:50PM, which as planned should have left me enough time to make my 7:40PM flight from Logan to JFK on American Eagle. The attached message I received from Harpa Johnaasdottir documents the late arrival of flight 631 by 23 minutes. Officials at other airlines I have asked have said that Icelandair being late on arrival by any amount holds responsibility for me missing connections. I did not exit the plane until 6:25PM. Bags did not emerge in baggage claim until 6:35PM, and my own did not come out until 6:45PM. It took at least 10 minutes to exit US customs as there was a single long line at least 45 persons ahead of me. At approximately 6:55PM I took my bag down the hall to the transfer station so it could be sent to American Eagle. Please note that the attendant for Icelandair was absent from their post, and it took some talking to an agent from another airline who agreed to transfer my bag. I was told to wait for bus 11 to take me from Terminal E to B, and exited at 7:00PM to see that bus pull away (I would have been aboard that bus had your employee been at their post). I waited another 14 minutes as many buses came and went. I ran to the ticket counter for American Eagle to find the lights had been turned off and the gate agents were gone. I attempted to board electronically at 7:18PM (see attached receipt) was not allowed to get a boarding pass or get aboard my flight to JFK. Because of the delays I missed my 7:40PM flight to JFK as well as my next day scheduled flight at 6:15am on US Airways (flight 15). The only way I could get home was to purchase a ticket from the US Airways counter in Boston for the next morning that cost me an extra $917.50. Because the US Airways ticket I had was purchased from Icelandair, they could not issue me a ticket change. I returned to the International Terminal at Logan to seek an Icelandair staff person, but the counter was closed. I used my computer to log onto your web site for customer service (http://www.icelandair.us/information/about-icelandair/contact-us/) which lacks a phone number to call for assistance. The only form of contact was a web form there, where I submitted a message Nov 30 (item number 138307) for which I never got a response. On December 10, I called your reservations line (1-800-223-5500) where the operator was most unhelpful, claiming there was no phone number for customer service, and only could provide an email address, to whom I wrote the attached message on December 11. I received one response from Harpa Johnnsdottir (attached, Dec 17) claiming that there was sufficient time for me to make my connection, and implying it was my fault for missing it. I am an experienced international travel, and have never had problems making connections at Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore airports. I replied to this message on December 17 (attached) with a detailed chronology as detailed in this letter, and have not gotten a response. Another message submitted to your web service form, acknowledged on Dec 18 (item number 140011) has also been ignored. I have contacted American Airlines, US Airways, expedia, and Icelandair seeking a response, and everyone points at someone else. Bottom line- I paid my money to Icelandair for tickets I could not use due to delays of Icelandair; I was forced to pay much more for a ticket to get home; Icelandair has kept this money and offered only one token apology; and Icelandair has demonstrated a repeated pattern of ignoring customer requests for service. I regret this experience has tainted a wonderful month I spent in Iceland, and while I do plan to return, I will seek any way other than Icelandair to get there. This entire sad tale has been posted on my website and shared with every consumer agency I can find: http://cogdogblog.com/2008/12/29/icelandair-took-my-money Please do the right thing and provide more than empty apologies. Regards Alan Levine --------------------------------------------- UPDATE Jan 5 2009: (partial) Victory! Victory! Victory! Icelandair is now offering to refund $400 for my unused original tickets, Yay! I am going to write something in this first of two posts that I bet (and hope) a lot of people will disagree with. I want that. I want to hear your dissent. That is what this stuff is about. Here it is, I make my own artificial distinction between publishing a weblog and the broader, social act of blogging. Huh? This came from several instances of following some interesting stories in my RSS reader, finding a blog where the author had written something where I wanted to disagree with, agree with, offer extra information... and in a number of instances I had no voice because there was no comment functionality. I get tired of looking for it, trying to even find email contacts, and failing. I understand fully the bloggers who have dealt a blow by spam. I have too dealt with the scourge of blog spam, but rather than quitting and cutting of others, I researched, experimented, and found solutions to the problem. It is an excuse that does not wash, and it is giving in to spammers. But I see it more problematic- if you publish a weblog without a comment feature, you are using software just for cranking out web pages, and you might was well be using FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or GeoCities for that matter because it is just web content. Blogging is a social process. It is discourse, conversational, a back and forth with your readers. If there is no voice "back" for the readers, to me, while there is a thing at a URL called a "blog" it is not blogging, and not part of any connected fbaric of the web. There is no conversation except for the author. And that becomes a lonely voice. And I become less interested in reading. So to twist an old tired saying, "If a comment-less weblog falls in the woods, it certainly does not make a sound". Or worse, to re-write lyrics to the Talking Heads "Life During Wartime": There ain't no comments, this ain't no blogging, this ain't no fooling around This ain't no OLDaily, or C. D. B., I ain't got time for that now Coming up next... "'Echo Blogging' Ain't Blogging Either" Earlier in the week I thought I might have 6 for this post as part of the Write 6x6 thing I signed up for. I was thinking of experiences I had this week that affirm or support what (I think) I know. These were triggered by interactions this week as the organization I work for, Open Education Global was hosting Open Education Week. Note: as a blogger I hardly ever keep blog posts around as drafts, once started I like to finish. But I do often drafting in my head, letting ideas percolate (or evaporate) until something coalesces or I just decide to start writing and see what happens (this is the latter). First of all, my ideas are far from universally adaptable, nor are they profoundly original, nor worth glossing the title of a published book. I find these ideas more like long term wood sculptures, I just keep chipping away at, wondering if it is done. They are never done. https://flickr.com/photos/wbur/5170202422 Thing 1 & Thing 2 flickr photo by WBUR shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license Thing 1. Asking For Help (in public) One of the activities I created this year (it does not matter much what it was, but you can ask) was a public space to ask questions about a technology. This sometimes is what I think the internet was built for. Many of you know that feeling when you type into a search box a "how to ____" search. Google you complete me? What does google know about my toenails? I was and was not surprised when someone chose not to post a question in public, but sought out my email address to ask a question. I may not have to explain why people do not want to ask questions in public, it has to do with our own "ingrown" fear of not wanting to look ... hey this could almost be wordle? S T _ _ _ D. Everybody else know how to do this but me? A class, be it online or not is always a community, that is not a cliche. But if everything is just between one student and a teacher, maybe I could just be a vending machine. If one student has a question, more likely do. And if you design courses with public spaces, can there be anything better than an environment where other students answer each others questions? Long ago I saw this in media classes I was teaching. Students had a forum to ask, twitter, and they had their own blogs to document their projects. I saw over and over that students would include in their weekly reflection things like "I spent an hour trying to figure out how to manipulate an alpha mask in GIMP." So I invoked what I call the Fifteen Minute Rule- if you are stuck on a task, a concept, trying to find a resource, if you have not found an answer on your own in fifteen minutes, stop, and ask your classmates. Not that this was a rule to enforce, but just a suggestion that it's always better to ask, regardless of what you think it means to not know. I have come to believe that this is a key (I don't think skill is the right word) practices to have especially in networked public spaces. Ask for help. Often. And there is so much to be said for a class environment where other students can offer answers. The best was when it happened before I could even notice the question. I do not need to assert my expertise and Pretend I Know Everything. This seems obvious, and here I am thinking anyone reading his will reach for a Homer Simpson DOH! meme. Here I will save you the trouble https://giphy.com/gifs/thesimpsons-the-simpsons-3x14-xT5LMzIK1AdZJ4cYW4 From giphy Do you feel okay to not be an expert in public? I sure am. I prefer playing the know it none. Thing 2. No Best _______ on the Internet The internet is pretty big, right? Can I insert another Homer Simpson GIF? So I do get questions (see Number 1) where people want to know the Best Tool for ______ or the Best Resources for _______. Anyone who confidently answers those questions like they have seen everything is... suspect. I find the best part of the internet is that there is always more to unturn, dig up, stumble upon. For a number of years I have had an interest in a group of technologies that are able to provide the kinds of activities, experiences we have connected to the internet... when we are not. This has such importance for parts of the world where connectivity is slim. Or none. And there are a host of clever solutions, Internet in a Box style. I'd like to think I have come across a lot of these. But O am always reminder that there is a giant tsk-tsk finger waving from the Orb of the Internet. Just a year ago during Open Education Week, I randomly attended a session where I heard about the use in the Northwest Territories of a platform developed in South Africa called Nimble. And people replied with other examples, like Wikifundi ... then World Possible then Kolibri. Woah. Well, after heating of these I felt rather informed. That's dangerous. I am sure know I know much less about this topic than exists. In another discussion I was introduced to another platform that, as mom used to say, "blew me away" called Kiwix, one open source tool that lets you download vast amounts (or very specific parts) of resources like Wikipedia, to run stand alone from off devices or even on a phone without connectivity. When people offer their informed opinions, keep in mind it's largely centered on things they know about. If you ask me about what to use to make web sites, chances are I am going to recommend WordPress. Need a computer? Well, I am likely to recommend an Apple device. My experience is heavily centered on what I know and work with. If ever you apply Thing 1 to ask a question in public, always keep in mind Thing 2-- understand that there is often more. This again is really my experience, I cannot prescribe them for you. But that's what this blog is for, my outloud, likely to be easily proven wrong, ideas. Okay, that is week 1 for my Write 6x6. Gotta start the brain percolating for something new next week. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/27416615263 Two Paws flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license In prep for Tuesday's You Show workshop session on audio I worked feverishly about 4 hours Monday night and 3 hours Tuesday morning to create the newest SPLOT tool, the Sound Pool. This is a place to share audio clips, tracks, either MP3 audio either found on the web (via a URL) or uploaded to the pool. Last night I decided to add support for SoundCLoud tracks. It's a direct followup from the Image Pool with a few new enhancements. This is done as a Wordpress child theme of the Baskerville theme, another elegant gem by Anders Noren. Beyond clean design, responsive layout, a total lack of Theme Bloat, Baskerville makes full use of Wordpress Post Formats, a feature I've never much paid attention to. But it allows a post layout (or its representation on the front page or archive) to display slightly differently depending on the format (based on media)-- if you use a video format and provide a URL for YouTube or vimeo, the video is embedded on the front page of Baskerville and at the top of the post. If you use audio, then it embeds a sound player. Editing this post by hand, you would choose audio as a format in the bottom right (I actually hid the other 7 formats not used in this site), and then enter the URL for the audio in the top right. This means on the front page, all of the media can be played without even having to click to the post. To enable uploads of media, I am using the same approach as not only the Image Pool but also the TRU Writer. This is topic of a future post, but it means that I have to secretly, invisibly log a visitor into a secret Author account (to make available the media uploader, and for the Writer, the rich text editor). As an example, Jon Fulton uploaded a one called Splotsquelch - it is his example of taking a single recorded sound (the puff of an inhaler) and editing it into a musical composition: On the form used to add content (it currently does not require a pass phrase to access), we collect info (name of person sharing the sound, name of the person/entity to give it credit, and a license under which it was found or will be shared, if original). This provides the basis for a new feature, cut and paste attribution text, one with HTML: I'm trying to simplify the web form for sharing a new sound, the only required items are a title, the sound itself and a license. Clicking the "upload sound" button opens the media uploader; a file can be dragged and dropped to send to the server. When a choice is made, the URL gets inserted into the field below. But sounds can also be added simply by entering a URL for an MP3 file or, as of last night, a soundcloud track. I use a pair of functions; one that does a string match looking for "soundcloud.com" in a variable to detemrine if it is from SoundCloud, and another that can add a check to make sure the URL ends in ".mp3" function url_is_audio ($url) { // tests urls to see if they point to an audio type, either an mp3 URL or Soundcloud page // if we have a SoundCloud URL, activate the green light if ( url_is_soundcloud ( $url ) ) return true; // otherwise let's look at the file extension on the URL $fileExtention = pathinfo ( $url, PATHINFO_EXTENSION ); // get file extension for url $allowables = array( 'mp3'); // allowable file extensions // check the url file extension to ones we will allow return ( in_array( strtolower( $fileExtention) , $allowables ) ); } function url_is_soundcloud ( $url ) { if ( strpos( $url, 'soundcloud.com') === false ) { return (false); } else { return (true); } } Next we allow choices of categories, free form tagging, and a caption -- what becomes the body of the post. I heard you critics, there is no longer a requirement of a caption. This is sad, because you may end up with the contextless flow of stuff that typifies tumblr. Captions are important (to me). Last are the names of the person sharing the audio (take credit or stay Anonymous), and fields to add the name of who to credit for it (optional) and a license choice (not optional, I am holding this line). Once cleared of some basic form content checking, the info is added as a new "post" and adjusted to reflect all the things in the form (adding categories and tags, custom post data, setting the post format to audio). The URL that identifies the sound file is added as post meta data, and my code adds the other bits: The theme has a configuration screen for the site admin, where you can make access require a code word to use the upload form. I don't have email notification built in now, it could be an option to turn on/off in future. One of the first things I added to the theme was options to download the audio (for mp3 uploads or links) inspired by a tweet comment by Ken Bauer -- the native Wordpress audio player never provides a link to download. I put it in thrice, adding a link to the front page (as an icon) and in sinle post, below the content, and in the bottom post data: This is east to do since it is stored as the post meta data value for audio_url. Since I added the ability to embed SoundCloud (see below), my logic has to work only if the post represents an MP3. In the content-audio.php template which formats the content just for the audio post-formats, I use ($audio_url is fetched earlier from the post meta data). if ( $audio_url and !$is_soundcloud ) { echo 'Download'; } Note the use of download inside the link tag! This makes sure the link just downloads, rather than opening in a new tab. I had to create some new icons to present on the front page and the grey background box, just had to do some copying of the styles done use for the rest of the theme. I had not planned to make Soundcloud an options, but I am also helping Bryan Jackson on a new site for his Talons #IntroGuitar class; he took my suggestion to try Baskerville. He asked me last night why no sound played when he put a SoundCloud URL in for the audio field-- that's because the theme is not designed for it! The mods I made on his site, came into play for the Sound Pool. On both the content-audio.php (formats an entry for the front page) and single.php (formats a single post), I do the same thing. At the top, I fetch the value of the audio URL, and then run that against my function so I know if it is SoundCloud or not. And when it comes time to display the audio, if the URL is for SoundCloud, I use the function that embeds the player. If the URL is for an MP3, we use the native audio player. Moose Mugshot posted 30 May '07, 4.18pm MDT PST on flickr We just spent a week camping up at Algonquin. It was wonderful, such a gorgeous wilderness and what wildlife! Woo hoo! I'm already planning to attend Northern Voice 2008 but now I am packing the good moose duds since my session on "50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story" got selected for the Saturday schedule... this will be similar to, but in no way, a clone of the previous versions. Looking forward to representing the Greatly Unknown Canadian Southern Province of Arizona. I was sorely tempted to use another photo but that one might be a bit offensive ;-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wITJM0Xo6g4 If you watched TV in the mid 1980s you should recall the smarmy commercial for some megacorp that apparently owned more food products than you could name (Airstream, Altoids, Avis, Blue Valley, Butterball, Culligan, Ekrich, Good & Plenty, Hunt's, Jolly Rancher, Krispy Kreme, La Choy, Meadow Gold, Orville Redenbacher, Peter Pan, Playtex, Reddi Wip, Samsonite, Swiss Miss, Tropicana, Wesson and World Dryer)-- Beatrice. With all the company buying that Pearson seems to be doing (does anyone wonder where they get all the moolah to go on the shopping spree?), it was time to remix them in (no accounting for quality of the singers). All of the names listed in the video are either acquisitions made by Pearson or investments in other companies (via CrunchBase). Can anything stop them from buying everything else? Lesson from the past, Beatrice was itself eventually bought out and disaggregated elsewhere. That's how the From some banter via twitter this morning with Clint Lalonde and Pat Lockley, it occurred to me a great challenge to Creative Commons is that the license is metadata that is usually separated from the content it refers too-- e.g. it is extra code in a web page, or additional information stored with a photo in flickr. https://twitter.com/clintlalonde/status/540174888170823680 Yet it is possible, at least with images, to insert a rights statement into the media itself. This could be done with mp3 audio files with ID3 tags. But it's mysterious, elusive, and not really used in any way. So I DIM (Do It Myself). The process I still use for managing my photos with Aperture includes metadata I have aperture add to every image. I wrote already how this is done (by making a custom metadata preset), and what it looks like. At the time of import into Aperture, I have Aperture automatically add a Creative Commons BY-SA statement into the image metadata. This means data that is stored into the image file itself. Here it is for a photo recently run through my system: The Aperture Flickr Exporter tool I use sends the photo, and all of the titles, descriptions, tags I write to flickr when it uploads the image: The Creative Commons attribution that flickr adds is external to the image; they store it their database, and thus represent it when it appears on flickr. But my extra metadata (including a creative commons assertion) travels with the image. If you download the original size from flickr the metadata I put in with Aperture is still there (not sure why they strip metadata when they make copies in other sizes, see the problem?). You can see some metadata (but not my cc statement) from the Get Info command in the OSX desktop To see it all, I need another kind of software. In Photoshop you can see all metadata from the File menu -> File Info. Viewed raw, you see its all XML, but there, in some Dublin Core field for rights is my statement: Photoshop gives you a human readable form of this. Again, the metadata rights statement I inserted in Aperture has traveled with this image up to flickr back down and can be seen again. Of course it's not anything "standard" but it could be formalized in software and other tools. If someone gave a rat's whisker about it. In some Alternate Universe Full of Attribution as a Value, this kind of action would be built into all our software. When we used media, it could automatically provide proper attribution, because the information would travel with the media. "could" ... "might" ... "would" .... Until then, it requires some elbow grease and DIM mindsets. Twas just some silly banter in twitter that got me looking for an image I had created for a presentation at an EDUCAUSE ELI conference. And thus I found myself flipping through a set of remix style book covers I had made back in 2006, a full half decade prior to find a course/cult named DS106. "Beyond The Blog: Ready For Prime Time" was co-presented with Brian Lamb January 30, 2006 at the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference held that year in San Diego. I am not remembering the exact genesis, but somewhere in the goofy stage of preparation, we concocted a conference location quasi relevant theme of Fish Tacos (hence the user name on the flickr account). On some previous vacation in San Diego, I had sampled the divine delicacy of my first fish taco, but could not remember the name of place. So Brian and I wrapped a theme of Search for the Perfect Fish taco for our time in San Diego. They were found at a place called "Blue Water" -- and Bryan Alexander was present at a witness. Look at these young Ed-Tech Kids [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Brian had the idea to use a theme of science fiction book covers, but while browsing the ones on a flickr group (still there), remixing seeming questionable because most were copyrighted. So I took it on to create mock covers, using Creative Commons licensed images (found in flickr), and playing with the author names to represent our colleagues. The whole idea to construct the presentation within flickr (coined a "Flickrtation") was borrowed/stolen/inspired by a presentation we spotted by Sean FitzGerald and Leigh Blackall. I think it got accidentally blogged or leaked (this was pre-twitter after all), so the first image is a nod to them: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] The presentation itself was aimed at what might have been called Peak EduBlogging [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] As Weblogging matures, the supporting technology and techniques become more sophisticated, from online diaries to powerful social networking and Web publishing tools. Participants will plunge headlong into the pitfalls, perils, and payoffs associated with supporting social software use in educational settings. Disruptive technologists and skeptical academics are especially welcome. How quaint, we were calling it "Weblogging" ;-) If you go to any of these "slides" you will find more than the gorgeous Photoshoppery (actually my work then was rather primitive), but also full, hyperlinked annotation. We could set of on flickr branches based on tags ("tag branches" to show related content riffing off of the book cover themes. We added auxiliary commentary audio as well (oi, hosted on http://www.ourmedia.org/ which now just responds "no longer in use" I wonder if I have the old files). And people could add comments. Ten years later people are still pumping out Powerpoints. Poo. We had some kind of Hermann Miller "Advanced" designed presentation room set up (I have seen recent home video screens 4 times that size) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] How many people can you recognize in audience? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Fitting in with the sci-fi theme, Brian had cued up some opening creepy alien music, and we both were wearing foil hats. How many presentations have you done wearing foil? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] We started by talking about blogs, which were still dismissed by many as "online diaries", D'Arcy Norman was the first honored author: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] As an alternative, we remixed David Wiley as author of the book that showed the ways blogs were much more. I will not want to run a linkcheck to see how few of our examples are alive. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] We then looked at what were early stone club equivalents of campus blogs, with the author representing James Farmer, who was just getting off the ground with a startup that is now edublogs.org (I wonder what happened to that guy?) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] After this, Phil Long gets remixed with Philip K Dick to provide the entrance to talk about Social Software... in 2006. Look at those names of dead services. Except flickr. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] Our next remixed author is named in honor of Stephen Downes, in talking about networked learning... this was 2006! Two years before he co-spawned the MOOC. We wrote: The internet has shown itself to be a model for growing, interconnected "scal-free" networks... and as new services and tools are added, we face a world where things are not all neatly categorized or stored centrally. Can we deal with it? Ten years later, the same conversation is happening in little silos of Facebook Groups, slack etc. We quote from Jill Walker, one of my first key blog influences (she started jill/txt in 2000 is still blogging) on "Network Literacy" plus ça change... What's more important to teach our students is network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment. Weblogs are the first native web genre. Serial, unstable (ethics: edit? annotate? delete? change your mind? - compare net journalism, post-editing), networked. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] And we could not do sci-fi book mashups without including Bryan Alexander, here in the epic novel RSS 451 where people burned syndication tools in lieu of Facebook... Here we talk about the only partly realized potential of RSS (It Still Works, /me kicks Google in the shins) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] And we come to the evangelist of syndicated thinking and being, Gardner Campbell, her recast as "Dr Glu" for the now dead sites that offered "glue" like aggregation, spinning out the idea of the elusive magic Edu Glu that would knit it all together. I can still call Gardner "Dr Glu" when I see hime and watch him break out the classic smile. Our "key questions"... What are some ways of collecting the small pieces into useful packages? What are the key considerations in aggregation and representation? How do the current available tools stack up? What are advantages/pitfalls of relying on this site versus hosting it in your own web site? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006 under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] Damn, Brian and I were pretty far seeing with our foil hats. Those flickr images each have anywhere from 2000 to 9000+ views each, maybe because they are just old, or maybe they aer that good. It depends how you want to bake the numbers. Without boasting (what the heck have I been doing), this is one of my proudest talks, and that says a lot, because Brian and I have done more than a few over the top ones. I wonder if blogging will ever take off... Top / Featured Image: Screen shot of a flickr set used as a presentation at a conference more than ten years ago. And people always hold up flickr as some kind of dying web albatross. Silly fools. In my workshops and materials on finding images licensed for reuse, I do explain how google image search can be used to filter out results that are licensed for reuse. I use this quite often myself, in fact I recommend making a browser search shortcut to make this easy to do. But be wary of the results. Google provides no information I can find on how they actually determine that an image it presents as licensed for reuse is actually licensed for reuse. This was what I found this morning when I wanted to blog about something (now I am not doing it because I am blogging about Google's faulty search results) and the image I wanted was two robots talking to each other. My image search, set to be filtered for images licensed for reuse was on robots talking to each other worked quite well - in fact the first image was exactly what I wanted. [caption id="attachment_43146" align="aligncenter" width="630"] This image is identified by Google as licensed for reuse. But is it?[/caption] I should be done- I can download it knowing and trusting google... But I like to provide attribution so I go digging to find the source of the image. The link google provides for "View Page" is actually an archive of blog posts in an Innovation category from Enterra Solutions. There looks like a lot of post thumbnails using similar style graphics. It takes' some scrolling, but I find the entry that actually contains the image I found on google, a post titled "Robots Talking to Each Other". The Enterra Solutions blog provides no attribution for the image, no link to the source. There is no indication of a creative commons or any kind of license on the page, nor any meta data in the HTML source. There is no license for reuse of the image. But Google has their butt covered. Way at the bottom of the result screen that shows the image is a small statement in tiny grey text: Images may be subject to copyright Or Even if we say this image is licensed for reuse, heck, we might be wrong, so it's your fault if you get in trouble. Good luck with that. But hey, right next to that is a Send Feedback link. Maybe they listen to problem reports and take corrective action. Maybe the moon is made of cheddar cheese. So I can let them know there is a problem... [caption id="attachment_43148" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Hi Google, just want to let you know of a mistake.[/caption] This is pretty neat, after clicking the highlight button, you can indicate the areas of the page you are reporting on. I like that. [caption id="attachment_43149" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Ok Google you asked where the problems are- it's on "licensed for reuse", the image, and the button (behind the box) that reads "view page"[/caption] I then explain it a bit more clearly in the problem report form: [caption id="attachment_43150" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Just to make it clear, Google, I can explain that the image you said was licensed for reuse is not. Got it?[/caption] Wow, maybe they are really going to deal with this? They might fix this problem (and how about the millions or more of other likely mis-identified licensed images??) [caption id="attachment_43151" align="aligncenter" width="630"] My google experience is strived and improved? Not.[/caption] After all that... Nada. Bubkas. I feel so... so... truly... valued. Maybe it is just a bug, a code mistake. My code frequently does things wrong. Google is big and what they can do to even give me these results is near miraculous. But this is hardly the first time I have had this experience. My suggestion for those using Google to find open licensed results? It still is valuable, especially if you use your keyword ninja search skills. But I will not use any image unless it is from a site that clearly indicates the licensing -- Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Deviantart, or Pixabay. The results from google are usually dominated by these. But if the source image comes from a blog (even mine) or some niche site, I would pass. It's just not worth the hassle. Unless, of course, you are among the 99% of internet uses you just think anything google hands out is fair to grab. But if so, you would not be down here at the bottom of this post. Caveat Google. creative commons licensed deviant art image by Alora-Of-Hearts. This image site clearly states the re-use license directly on the site. I can't help it. I notice something reading online, it triggers a vague connection in my old school neural network device and I cannot get on with quote unquote being productive until I emerge with something from the internet rabbit hole. Notice the underlined, clickable words. Any idea what they do? (tangent). Okay, it starts with the morning scan of Mastodon (the platform currently known as Mastodon, why do we do this?). Derek Moore share something that triggered the click reflex, partly because I've known and followed Anil Dash since the web was a kid (he co-created the first blog platform I used, he currently steers one of the coolest new ones, and he was a major support when I need help keeping Feed2JS alive). Oops,I loinketh too much. This is the post by Derek that caught my eye: https://social.ds106.us/@weblearning/111729974918467187 Yes, part was curiosity to read what one of the pioneers and active users of blogs had to see. But it was also, that image in the post. I recognized it. This I clicked to read The lost infrastructure of social media where Anil compares the valuable features of early blog platforms that have been consumed or possibly described by the 2023 Word of the Year. I will leave out the irony of where the founder of MoveableType current blogs (cough). But that photo of the colorful tiles, repeated throughout the article... it's very recognizable, right? https://medium.com/@anildash/the-lost-infrastructure-of-social-media-d2b95662ccd3 My memory was reading a story how this surface was the outer covering of building somewhere, I think an art studio (?), that had become very popular as a place for people to take Instagram selfies / portraits. That should be easy to find, with search tools? I tried "building with colorful tile exterior popular for instagram selfies" - nope, just got a bunch of various buildings and random instagram profiles. Maybe take out "instagram"? See "building with colorful tile exterior popular for selfies" - even worse, all links to tips and articles about building materials. A different tact, I tried a reverse image search (now known as Google Lens) on the image in Anil's post, I got heaps of sites that had used the image but as usual for well used ones, finding any source of it could mean days of scroll clicking. But wait a minute, partly down the first scroll or two was a link from some one I know, Maren Deepwell had used it in a blog post she wrote in 2021 on Joining Conversations for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging (good choice of image as metaphor!). And being a good use of open licensed images, at the bottom of her post was an attribution to the image on Unsplash. Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash Attribution for image used in https://marendeepwell.com/?p=3087 Surely I can click a link and find the image. Isnt that handy that Unsplash provides cut and paste attribution? Except... The first link takes me to the author's profile and catalog of Unsplash images. The second link takes me to an Unsplash search on a search for the words african colours. Neither link in this so called attribution takes me to the actual photo. In terms of Attribution Best Practices approach of TASL (Title, Author, Source, License), we are 1 for 4 with only an "A" (not in the terms of a grade). The most important part of an attribution for me is the link to find the image. Unsplash makes it seem like they are supporting creators with this attribution practice, but they deliberately make it hard to find the specific image, you can guess what they want to do is draw you in to their site and click around to see more ads and paid content links. I'm still determine, the link to the photographer's profile Andrew Ridley indicates he has 55 photos there (sometimes a creator has hundreds or more). I can scroll through to find it... which I finally do locate -- I would take the time to attribute this photo as: Multicolored Tile Wall With a Pattern of Small Squares Unsplash photo by Andrew Ridley shared under an Unsplash License. (noting that Unsplash does not display a title, you can pluck it from the source title page or the link URL) So I found the source photo, or one of many you can find. But one detail I see that might help is that on the source image page, it includes a location - Stratford, London, United Kingdom. Back to the searches I try using "Stratford" and "art studio" (the latter relying on my memory) art studio building stratford color tiles selfies I got stuff related to Stratford as a brand of building tile. I then tried london with art studio building london color tiles selfies which set of the Ding Ding Ding bells of finding whatr I was looking for. Third item down was what I remembered reading, or actually hearing, as the story of this building was a podcast episode of 99 Percent Invisible on Instant Gramification (highly recommended listen/read). Emerging From the Rabbit Hole Victorious, But... I did find the carrot! And I griped a bit about Unsplash faux-tribution. More than that, this exercise demonstrates the futility of keyword search, maybe, or just shows that it takes more than that to find things. So I wondered to, is this AI stuff the new deal? I went to Bing and entered a prompt: I am looking for a story about a building covered in colorful tiles that has become popular as a background for Instagram photos. Where is this building and the article that described why this happened? Me asking Bing to which I got the wrong answer: Certainly! The building you are referring to is likely the azulejo-covered buildings in Portugal. Azulejos are decorative tiles that can be found covering the facades of both medieval and more modern homes, restaurants, cafes, churches, shops, and train stations 1. The tiles are called azulejos after the Arabic al-zulaich, meaning polished stone 1. The art form was introduced to Portugal by the Moors, who had learned the craft from the Persians 1. The Portuguese fell in love with the art form and used some of their wealth to decorate the walls, floors, ceilings, and facades of both their private and public residences in colorful, intricate azulejos 1. I found an article on The Anthrotorian that describes the history of azulejos and why they are all over the buildings in Portugal 1. The article also includes stunning images of the tiles and their patterns. I hope this helps! Learn More1 theanthrotorian.com 2 britannica.com 3 britannica.com. 4 britannica.com Bing's wrong answer Okay, bing, I'm gonna prompt engineer ya! I reply with: No, this is not what I was looking for. I believe the building was an art studio, and the article I am looking for told the stpry of how it cam to be covered with the tiles and the phenomena of it becoming popular as a place for Instagram photos. Can you find the article and identify what the building is? Me asking Bing Back Bing comes with an apology and assurances of a right answer, but while it finds something interesting, this is still not what I seek I apologize for the confusion earlier. I believe the building you are referring to is the Mosaic House in Chiswick, West London 1. The house is owned by artist Carrie Reichardt and is covered from top to bottom in colorful mosaic tiles 1. The house is a remarkable sight and has become an Instagram sensation 1. The house is now an ‘uncensored’ public mural and is free to visit at any time 1. I found an article on Secret London that describes the history of the Mosaic House and its political messages 1. The article also includes stunning images of the tiles and their patterns. I hope this helps! Learn more1secretldn.com. 2britannica.com. 3britannica.com Bing is still wrong Again, maybe its my poor skills in prompt engineering. And I could go back and prompt, prompt,. prompt and maybe it will get me what I seek. It's an interesting approach, but I find almost no adventure in it, and I am not really active in the search or applying any critical skills beyond rewording search words. I prefer by rabbit holing tools, and I am going back in soon. Have fun at the prompt box. Featured Image: EDUCAUSE Scopes flickr photo by cogdogblog (me) shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified (by me) to include superimposed on the window Multicolored Tile Wall With a Pattern of Small Squares Unsplash photo by Andrew Ridley shared under an Unsplash License. Wow, I thought I had written this up somewhere, but because Ken asked, and he is doing cool stuff with his Connected Course... https://twitter.com/ken_bauer/status/565576149955530756 What is the Magic Box? Not much magic, but it is meant for the Wordpress / Feedwordpress type aggregated sites I have been building the last few years (see my how to series). In the more recent iterations, these sites have a signup form powered by Gravity Forms and custom code that automatically adds people's blog feeds to the site's Feed Wordpress data. The Magic Box was something I added to help people figure out their RSS feeds, using some code that fetches the source of that URL and examines it for tell tale signs of RSS (meta tags). It works best on main blog URLs, getting feeds from category and other assorted partial bits of blogs is problematic (that's a whole other blog post, in the RSS is Great and Messy at the Same Time category). So typically I link to the Magic Box in the place where we ask for a blog's RSS feed [caption id="attachment_40073" align="aligncenter" width="630"] From the Connected Courses blog sign up form[/caption] I first made a magic box for the VCU Thought Vectors course, then Connected Courses, Networked Scholars 2014, and most recently for the You Show gig I am doing here at TRU. They all do the same thing, and you can use them any time. If I knew I was going to keep using it, I might have been smart and hosted it somewhere and just linked as needed, but it's nice to have it within the navigation of the host course site. Enough Intro, Alan, How do I make One? NOTE: Having some issues with the plugin that formats code- get all of the code fragments shown below, you can download as text file. If I was a bit more deft, I might do it as a plugin, but I don't see a sign of that happening. So to make one you have to be able to edit your theme's template files. These first bits need to go in your functions.php file. The first function cdb_parameter_queryvars lets me pass parameters to my templates via the URl string, in our case, the value of the URL field in the form. The second function feedSearch actually requests the HTML source of the web site represented by $url and more or less brute forces looking for the link tags that contain RSS feed addresses. Some sites will have several but in my experience the primary feed is first (wobbly assumption). The funny thing is parts of this came from code by Martin Hawksey that he attributed back to me and Martha Burtis on the ds106 site. Some sort of boomerang attribution. /* ----- add allowable url parameter for urls */ add_filter('query_vars', 'cdb_parameter_queryvars' ); function cdb_parameter_queryvars( $qvars ) // add parameters to be passed in wordpress query strings { $qvars[] = 'blogurl'; // for passing blog url return $qvars; } /* ----- find primary RSS feed for a given blog (all posts only) */ function feedSearch( $url ) { // via Martin Hawksey via from me (@cogdog) if ( $html = @DOMDocument::loadHTML( file_get_contents( $url ) ) ) { $xpath = new DOMXPath($html); $results = array(); // First look for RSS 2.0 feeds $feeds = $xpath->query("//head/link[@href][@type='application/rss+xml']/@href"); foreach($feeds as $feed) { $results[] = $feed->nodeValue; } // Next first for Atom feeds $feeds = $xpath->query("//head/link[@href][@type='application/atom+xml']/@href"); foreach($feeds as $feed) { $results[] = $feed->nodeValue; } // we have somethng if ( count( $results ) ) { // we assume (badly) that the first result is the blog feed return $results[0]; } else { //oops return an error code return -1; } } else { // another error if we are unable to get the source HTML return -1; } } Next you need to create a new Wordpress Page that will host the form, name it whatever you like, but make sure it's slug (the URL field) is exactly magic-box You can put what ever you like in for some introductory content, and add images. The Magic Box functionality is added via the template code below. Save that page. It does nothing, yet. We have not added any magic. Now what you want to do is to look for a file in your Wordpress theme called page.php which is the general template for any Wordpress page. Make a copy of that and save it as page-magic-box.php. This takes advantage of the Wordpress Template Hierarchy for Pages. Our new template will be used only for a page with a slug name of magic-box. This first bit of code gets executed before we do any thing for the page layout, it should appear before your template's code for It does all the logic when someone submits the form- it makes sure there is something entered, and then sends the value to the feedSearch function. if it gets something back, it sets up appropriate feedback response. It was just shy of 16 years ago (Homer's math was wrong) that I dove into WordPress on this here blog. I still make Homer head-slapping type mistakes. Here's today's edition. Maybe you do not know this. but WordPress does it's best to connect the name for a post if there is not an exact match. What? Well I take my `cogdogblog.com` and add on homer. There is no direct page at http://cogdogblog.com/homer but see what happens. Or even good old http://cogdogblog.com/doh. Try it on your site, can WordPress guess something close or are you sent to room 404? Maybe it helps to have a lot of posts to search through? Kind of neat, eh? I'm jumping ahead. But one thing you should know about WordPress is the secret door to log in (if you nuke that WordPress meta widget which usually provides a login link, I always nuke that) is to tack on /wp-admin to your blog URL. Some time ago I thought I discover it was easier to use http://mywordpresscoolsite.com/admin It always worked, and I have been using it as a footer link in the Network Narratives site so students have an easy way to log in to blog there. One of my students messaged today about a problem on the site, where the login link was http://netmirror21.arganee.world/admin Hi Alan, when I click on the link to login to NetNarr, it takes me to a blog post labeled “Admin Oye”. The first thing I do is check if the link works. Oh uh, he is right! http://netmirror21.arganee.world/admin Sure enough, rather than going to the login page, it lands on a blog post that had admin in it's title-- which, the same way WordPress acted with my homer doh links tries it's batch to match based on title. It lands on a post that has "admin" in the title. My little "trick" only works if there are no posts on a site with "admin" in the title, WordPress goes to the closest match... /wp-admin. So my "trick" is actually no good. So here is the thing. I make mistakes and goofs in not only WordPress but almost all of my technical tasks on a several times a day frequency. But what happens is I invariably learn more for finding the reasons why and addressing them, then if I got it "right" in the first place. That's Homer Simpson-c logic. The more you "doh" the more you end up knowing. And were it not for the silly idea for this blog post's image, did I land on a 2004 blog post reminding me that I attended an Honors Forum Lecture featuring a writer from the Simpsons. My blog, my outboard brain. Featured Image: A meme made with ImgFlip Meme Generator (try and unravel the licenses of meme images) https://imgflip.com/i/55poi9 The ds196 GIFfest is going wild! And a bunch are taking on the Muppets challange including @noispreofessor @timmmmyboy and Michael Branson Smith who launched this one. I like the Rodney Dangerfield Muppets, the ones who get no respect, and who gets less respect than Beaker? Bring on the GIFness! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouzuam9MFxc I'm doing a third round of Amazing Stories of Openness, as an invited keynote for the Spring ETUG Workshop (June 2-3 in what is usually described as "lovely Nelson, BC) . An Amazing Story is you sharing an example of something unexpected that happened as a result of you sharing something on the open web- it might be as simple as an invitation to present at a conference, a connection created with a new colleague, an image being used for a museum exhibit on the other side of the world-- see http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/etug11/ for where all the stories will eventually appear. For an idea what I seek, look at the videos from 2009 and 2010. While on the road in May, currently in Vermont, then New York City, and later in Vancouver, I will be bugging people I see to step in front of the camera. So you have been warned. Anyone else can share a video with me via me googly form at http://bit.ly/mb1XAZ. Spread the Amazingness! A credible, textbook design process includes extensive pre-planning, testing, reviewing feedback, and making public once it has been thoroughly scrutinized. That's not happening here. The previous post was syndicated here from a new project being hastily assembled by me and Brian Lamb at TRU as part of my Fellowship. Part of the package was running "some kind of workshop" related to storytelling. That left plenty of room for latitude. What we are planning is in part an iteration of an open DS106 experience -- not as a course, but more like a professional development or seminar series. It's being offered as an 8 week thing starting January 12. It's maybe 8 weeks because that's the rest of my stay here, but it also fits in well with the format I last taught DS106 as an online course for graduate students at George Mason University. There are a few types of target audiences Brian described for me at TRU- staff, faculty, students are invited. Portfolio Builders - like many (or all places) there is an interest in helping people create, manage digital portfolios. As the "managing your own stuff" we hope to give them an experience (not suggesting its best for all) of doing such a thing in an open online space. Knowledge Mobilizers The term knowledge mobilization, new to me, is a way of saying how to disseminate share academic or research work, the impact of research, into a broader audience, or better, into active use beyond specialists. So we hope to introduce this idea through the use of media creation and expression.. in an open online space. Media Makers Whether new to it or not, there is always an interest in learning how to use, create media. Tool lovers are welcome. A more concise description from The You Show "Pitch": How do we communicate outward the work we do as learners, teachers, researchers? Portfolios suggest the final production. But like a film movie, a great deal of process happens that leads up to that, yet gets left on the cutting room floor. We are looking for people interested in (a) creating sharable portfolios of their work; (b) communicating or mobilizing information about their work to a general audience; or (c) improving their digital media skills. If any or all of those outcomes appeal to you, we invite you to be part of an eight week open seminar we call “The You Show”, running from January until March. This will be a hands-on, participatory experience. We will guide you through eight weeks of practical skill-building, mixed with what we hope will be examples of inspirational work and reflections. You will be expected to work, but then again that work will be directed to a product that should address your own objectives. What we want to do is apply some of the fun and and approach of the digital storytelling course DS106 here at Thompson Rivers University (and for anyone else on the open web who wants to play along). The lens for this, or better, the shtick is played out in the low budget production Brian and I (and Harry) made yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxrGeRk85T0 Hence what we came up with as The You Show (the top level domain was a throw away suggestion at a meeting with the Open Learning Instructional Designers; we were planning a "sandbox" site for some projects with them). It's a bit of a play on words, as is all language, right? So what you will work on is a show about you showing you, made by you, but also where you show the work being the showing of you. Clear as... It's again about the long running trope on this blog about "narrating" the work as you do it, ideally in a public blog. People get hung up on sharing their precious stuff (because someone will STEAL it); fine, do not give away the stuff. How about giving away the process of making stuff? Showing your thinking process? Citing your influences? I go back again and again to the metaphor of DVD Extras (aging metaphor) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by One Thousand Words[/caption] Sure, the final movie is the goal, but I love how I can watch again and listen to the director provide insight to all the scenes, the out takes, deleted scenes, background information on the music and the location setting. Thus the You Show plays with the idea of producing what is on the Front Stage (learning how to create/express in media), but also providing insight to what happened Back Stage to make it happen (writing about the making thereof). Thus in the vein of dog food consumption, after producing the video last night (blogged on the site as Front Stage) I also wrote the Back Stage post. Grand Ambitions are in place to do this for the duration. Variable mileage disclaimers apply. As an experiment I wanted to see about Feed Wordpress syndicating (which apparently is archaic) this over to my blog here; I do not want all posts, nor just stuff I produce. Actually what I wanted was just the stuff in the Back Stage category that I had authored (in the hope Brian or someone else may write these too [cough]). I know you can get all kinds of feeds from Wordpress, so it did not surprise me that with about 5 minutes of web searching I figured it out. So this is the standard URL for all things I have posted on the site: http://youshow.trubox.ca/author/cogdog/ What I learned is I can add a URL parameter that just lists the stuff I wrote in the Back Stage category (had to find it's ID, 11, from the Categories dashboard) http://youshow.trubox.ca/author/cogdog/?cat=11 And thus, ergo sum, ipso facto, I can make this an RSS feed capable of consumption by Feed Wordpress http://youshow.trubox.ca/author/cogdog/?cat=11&feed=rss2 Of course, you may be interested in asking "What does this course seminar look like?" "How can I participate?" "Will it be Open?". It's all being added as we go. The skeletal schedule is listed as "Breakdown Sheets" The idea is each unit launches with a video (as in above), and a link to the suggested activities for the week, kind of like the weekly assignments in DS106. There will likely be a version of The Daily Create. For the participants at TRU, we are offering it as a flexible option, but really hope people show up in person for weekly open discussions, drop in lab sessions. Brian is casting out to invite in some folks, like hopefully D'Arcy Norman is on tap to be here for the unit on Visual Communicating, and we will have something like a photo walk. We will likely set up an optional email notification, copying some others in using TinyLetter (opt in, of course). I do not know fully how this plays out for online participants. There will be a blog signup, aggregator on the site. Perhaps we can do some drop in hangouts. This is the unplanned part. It's kind of like a Connected Course without the course part. The You Show is assembling as we go. There should be a tad or two more coherence on the site later in the week. If this intrigues you (if not I doubt you would be reading way down here) stay tuned, but this thing is on... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8J4MTYUYzs As a bit of remaking, the movie making metaphor is a repeat for me. I played with this back at the Maricopa Community Colleges in the mid 1990s of using it as a metaphor for having faculty work with a team of students on a multimedia development project. I created the fictional "Studio 1151" (that was the code for my center's acronym, MCLI, expressed in Roman numerals) (clever eh?) (maybe) [caption id="attachment_39057" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The Studio 1151 project, circa 1996, Maricopa Center for Learning & INstruction[/caption] The featured image (top) used for this post is Public domain Wikimedia Commons image from Charles Darwin's Notebook "his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837)" I was just looking for some kind of sketch notes, but really love that the opening to his note is "I think". Here he is back stage noting his ideas: I think case must be that one generation should have as many living as now. To do this and to have as many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction. Thus between A + B the immense gap of relation. C + B the finest gradation. B+D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. Bearing relation to ancient types with several extinct forms" The travel route for where I live now in Strawberry to Phoenix is a lovely drive down highway 87, the "Beeline Highway", that romps up and down some fabulous jumbled up geology, connecting the Sonoran desert to the forest plateau. Ir cab be idyllic... until something happens to close the highway, as the alternative routes can be 60, 80 miles of detour. Lats summer a fuel truck lost control on a steep downhill, crashed, and the northbound highway lanes "melted" from the heat of the explosion. And just Friday, I heard, that a landslide caused by water running below the surface which loosened rock, buckled the highway, and it is still closed as repairs continue. So with some curiosity I've been Google mapping some bits and pieces, and have been dismayed that none of the news actually provides the map location of this incident. Shouldn't most online news be geocoded to map?? So, in normal conditions, the drive from Strawberry to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix is 107 miles, calculated simply by plugging in these end points into the driving directions tool on GMaps. If I had to drive today, with Highway 87 closed from Bush Highway to State Rt 188, I'd have to take 188 to Globe, and then Highway 60 into Phoenix. I'm not sure how many people know tis, but with one of the Google Maps driving directions displayed, I can click on spot on that path, say where highway 87 meets State Route 188, and I can drag the path onto 188 to change the route. This detour makes a total distance of 176 miles, a 69 mile detour! (more…) I'm a fan of Wired, sifting through the slick ads for the sometimes good writing... and I lifted the Wired. Tired. Expired. theme for a recent presentation. But however "cool" a magazine may pass itself off for, underneath it is a business and there are bean counters and bottom liners working to milk my money. I loathe the "urgent" reminders that start 5 months before my subscription expired and I deliberately ignore them until a month before. What do I get out of giving interest free loans (okay, I provide this service to the US Government). But this latest "personalized" note from "Jeffrey Stone, Office of the Publisher" makes me wonder if they are working under the P.T. Barnum School of Business: (more…) On Tuesday, everything was lined up smooth for my invited talk at Skidmore College, Making/Telling Stories That Matter (ironically I submitted that as a title before I knew that the Skidmore motto was "CTM" aka Creative Thought Matters) (honestly). Except that when the a/v crew went to turn on the livestream broadcast, they found it was already broadcasting... a lacrosse game. With 30 fans watching. A bit of scrambling, huddling in the presentation hall because the stream had been reserved. Someone had to call in to pull the hook. The fans were not happy (a big thanks to Rowan Peter, tuned in from Melbourne Australia who captured the whole scene via screen shots) Jeff: What happened to the lacrosse game? Rob: Some clown put this on Lacrosse fans are a tough crowd. Even worse for them was how badly they gotten beaten by Hamilton. I loved the whole story playing out. Maybe they could have broadcast my talk over the video action of the game. Mashed up. Anyhow, this was a talk in response to one on digital storytelling in light of Skidmore plan to create a cross disciplinary center as a Documentary Studies Collaborative. The talk's description was Maybe it goes back to cave paintings, maybe as humans we are wired for it, and maybe some of the magic of stories is that we cannot quantify them inside a neat definition. Our bodies react to a powerful story, a surprising story, a story that resonates with our own experiences. We can make better use of stories when we also practice listening, observing, retelling, experimenting, and practicing and practicing. Recipes do not work to make good stories, but I can share much of my own experience in creating and teaching what we call web-based storytelling. Through examples, experiences, and activities, I hope you can walk away from this session with new ideas to use in your own narrative and creative acts. Storytelling is about performance; Storymaking is what goes into creating a story to be told. We need both. And did you notice the lack of any mention of technology? It will be there! The slides are shared though it's hardly the talk but all links listed are available at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/Skidmore+Storytelling Making / Telling Stories that Matter from Alan Levine I revamped all my previous material for something new. I tried to open with a bit of acting to demonstrate the idea of storytelling doing the unexpected, and how the character is important- I pretended when my image of a campfire did not show up on slide 3 to call up on the phone and be be irate to a fictional assistant named "Tom" -- e.g. that as a character, I was turning out maybe not to be one to root for. I hears laughter, so the acting was not so convincing. Maybe that was the lacrosse fans. Next I talked about the power of "Once upon a time" as an opening time/place indicator, and the ways that things like the short story Knock (example lifted from Bryan Alexander) accomplished the scene/character setting in the first sentence, and then the unexpected twist, ending in the second sentence. I tried to contrast the element of surprise and story development of stories that we enjoy in books and film, to the "give away everything you will say" approach of bullet point presentations (I believe I referred to the screen shot of one as "an abomination of creativity"). I also put my animated GIF chops to work to poke some fun at the adage from Aristotle "Tell them what you are going to say. Tell them. Tell them what you said." If you have to repeat it that often, is the message memorable? what does it say about "then", which is you, if you need to be banged over the head three times with it? And, as my GIF tried to suggest, what if that was the films style of Hitchcock (The GIF is a bit heavy at 1.5 Mb, but you can watch it yourself) Wanting to break up the expectation of a talk being me talking, I put them trough a short activity, a version of the Keychain stories we've done in ds106 and also that worked well last year in a workshop I did with Barbara Ganley. They certainly go into the activity cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine The hook in this activity is after they swapped stories (they were advised to listen closely), they were asked to combine groups where one person was to tell a story.. then I told them, that the storyteller is not telling their own story, but the one they heard. That's because when we create a lot of stories, we are often telling someone else's story. The idea is not to tell it exactly like the original, but to find our own way into the importance of the story, the "so what?" I did some GIF work again to make a countdown timer Then it was onto the stuff about what works in stories- the character, the hook, the shape, suspension of disbelief (using the Troy Library Book Burning as example), the unexpected, showing over telling (power of the silent dinner scene in Jaws)... I also did less about the "pyramid" as the structure of a story and more on the story spine (thanks Darren Kuropatwa for connecting me to that). I shifted to being talking about documentaries; my hunch was most people think of them as I do, the kids of TV shows we saw as a kid-- as a reference to the form, I used the Mockumentary, the Majestic Plastic Bag and the current poster child of the form, the guy who is so good, his name is part of Apple software http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MogiGvxnHkE The thing that turned most of what I was planning on its head (nicely) was a link I found via a tweet from Barbara Ganley to Inside the Magazine by Adam Westbrook, which was well worth the $20 for its 4 issues, because it was really some of the freshest writing and ideas on storytelling free from the cave painting cliches. It also linked to quite a few amazing pieces of web creative form I have seen in a long time, a genre as I clicked deeper and deeper, is called "interactive documentaries". Instead of making these slides, I ended up putting a lot of time into turning it into a separate web resource: [caption id="attachment_29036" align="alignnone" width="450"] Examples of Web Documentaries[/caption] but also going into examples of what web video can be (e.g. TouchCast). It's really a small sampling of what is out there- mainly for what it is showing that an experience on the web can be something other than "pages" loaded with links and sidebars. And in the last 7 minutes I tried to explain ds106. At least give them a few things to look at. I don;t know about the lacrosse fans, but I had fun. A big shoutout to Ben Harwood and his boss Beth DuPont for brining me yo Skidmore (thia was just day one, left for another blog post is the workshop from the next day). And then, the next day, this thing was hurled at my from an unknown admirer cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I am forgetting who's blog post I read recently asking about doing blog posts by email... ah yes, thank for Inoreader, it was JR Dingwal who mentioned this in a new post about revitalizing blogging. Part of me was tempted to respond to JR and say Try Posterous! (old timer internet joke) Posterous was a nifty early aughts service aimed at making posting east, with the most useful route being posting via email. It was bought by Twitter and shelved. Heck, the domain is there (Twitter is so dumb it does not even redirect the url) waiting for something to be rebuilt. Hello, 2008? https://cogdogblog.com/2008/08/posterous/ Now I found also in my flickr memory drawer that back in 2010 Chris Lott ran something through posterous called Ye Olde Motley Readers (bless you for the millionth time, Wayback Machine) where open participants could post by email in a shared reading of James Joyce's the Dubliners. "Motley Readers Postcards (outbox)" flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4345462650shared into the public domain using (CC0) I digress. But I do remember WordPress having this capability via maybe the Jetpack plugin (which weighs like 90 gazillion internet pounds, but I still use it). I could not find it on any of its plugin pages... but did find a useful trick from Jetpack Central on how to find, turn on and off, all the modules in the Big Ship Jetpack. You just tack on to the end of your WordPress site /wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack_modules and boom! I found the long list and activated post by email. It generates for you a special, secret (as in do not put it on your blog post) email address you can use to write an actual blog post by email. There are a bunch of features you can use to include via shortcodes, like adding categories, etc. I do not see how to add a featured image, but that can be done after post (or I could use the shortcode to post as a draft). Heck, I am doing it right now (maybe, will know after clicking send). This is about as easy as possible to be blogging, or blogging about blogging, oir blogging about not blogging or blogging about JR or.... Featured Image: (added post publication, this could possible be remedied on one of those plugins that makes the first image in a post the featured image) (also for future reference, the post arrives as a Classic Block). https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4345462650 Motley Readers Postcards (outbox) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today's ds106 Daily Create was a drawing one Today is the Eighth of July. Make an artistic drawing using only figure eights I'm to blame for this one- wanted to avoid an American bias for July 4 so why not make the eighth the focus? This was a free form doodle on the iPad with the Paper 53 app one I have enjoyed tinkering with to get over my mantra of I Cannot Draw. There's some mixture of the mild rain and grey clouds that I did as a background with the brush plus it has mixed with the brightness of my flowers represented in the colors of the 8 shapes. I was hoping to play with the idea of the 8 being rotated to become a symbol of infinity. It was fascinating to see that Sandy Brown Jensen used the same app and drew a similar shape cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Sandy Brown Jensen Great minds/artists creating alike! Those two adjectives are about the last ones I would reach for to describe Stephen Downes. But how long and drawn out is the "long tail" may be relative. But these are the words of the June 5, 2006 Time Magazine article on the Long-Tail phenomena- see the very last paragraph in Long Tail's Tribe: Take Stephen Downes, a senior officer of Canada's National Research Council, whose arcane, overlooked blog is a classic long-tail story. "I live in the long tail," Downes said at a blogging event in Vancouver last year. And not necessarily by choice. "[Bloggers] who are in the long tail would probably rather not be part of it," he said. "They simply want to be read." As an earlier catchphrase put it, if the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog [emphasis added]. Arcane? Overlooked? Are you taking this as a badge of of rebel insignia, Stephen, or is it just more fodder for American journalism? And if you are "arcane, and overlooked", then I am nano-scopic and indistinguishable form cosmic dust. Even without the handwritten year, photos along can clearly indicate an era. Today marks the day eight years ago that my grandmother passed away; last year I edited a video made from audio I recorded in 1994 and some scanned photos. She was born in 1905, so in this photo of her lounging in Florida, even more oddly, she is two years younger than I am now. Granny made it to 97, she outlive her husband by more than 50 years, she outlived both of her children (my dad and my aunt), and she outlived all of her brothers and sisters. I cannot imagine what that feels like, but then again, I would think you cling to life no matter what. Thanks for the memories, you live in my mine, and my retelling keeps them alive. Me and my Granny, Baltimore, 1994, the year I recorded her stories on micro-cassette. In preparation for next week's series of demos on podcasts, I've downloaded likely more than I have in the last 10 months. The sheer number of them is turning out to be more staggering than I thought. Content varies, production quality varies, all according to typical distribution curves. I am listening to a bunch flying on the plane from Austin back home to Phoenix, cringing while looking at the pretty clouds. Why cringing? I am listening to one that is supposed to be one in more than 100 of a series of tips in a particular subject (I am not specifying the feed as it really does not matter). I guess this one has some sort of following because there is a whole lot of upfront stuff that is hard to swallow as a first time listener. Out of a podcast that is a shade over 10 minutes, it is nearly 4:47 before we get to the content. That is almost 50% intro fluff. We get cool hip music. We get an announcement from a sponsor. We get a long ramble about the tribulations of the podcaster's job situation and efforts to make a change. We get some stats on how well this podcasts ranks are doing. We get zzzzzz.... Worse. There is almost 1:30 of closing music, more reminders about the URL for the show's web site, etc. We end up with about 37% of the show being actual content. And even more. Out of that sub four minute portion, about one minute are tips that refer to external sites, and the bulk of the rest are details about the value of one of the sites run by the podcaster! Hey, it's all about me! ME! M-E! maybe if I was a frequent listener to this channel, all of this would be as important as getting a raft of clues about Lost, but c'mon- even a one hour TV show is only 30% full of commercials. If you are getting up to 50% of fluff before the content, 15% at the end, and swiss cheese in the middle, I think it is time to stop podcasting in front of a mirror. Again, audio is an art. Maybe I no nothing about radio, the art of recording, etc, but my hunch is 63% of your content not being content is not the greatest design. On the other hand, I am listening now to Willowcast, a podcast from an Omaha elementary school where kids make podcasts for kids- On a 13 minute cast, the content comes at 0:23 into the play. Well done, Willowcasters! Hello, world. No, that's been done before. But hello, empty WordPress editor, screen, even more sparse when the Gutenburger editor opens full screen. More white space. Forgive me blog, for it has been 11 days since my last post, and it's been only 3 this month. Even doing my ALL CAPS tweets of impersonation has lost its luster. President ALL CAPS was last seen April 7. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/1247535933898948609 Lethargy oozes. Yes, as my Cori reminds me, with her lovely wry smile, "there is a pandemic going on." Everything seems to feel, well, sluggish, in energy. That pile of work peeking out in ignored open browser tabs, windows left open. I try to get my daily photos in, but maybe it's once a week to get to posting. Blog drafts rummage around in my head, whispering, swirling like that majestic plastic bag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLgh9h2ePYw Yet the blogging, Just. Does. Not Happen. If anything all these years of blogging has taught-- hold the bus! I completely missed the Blogiversy. April 19 was the start 17 years ago. Yes, that the only way to crack a blogjam is just to crack it open, and there is always the reliable Blogging About Blogging or Blogging About Not Blogging. So here it is. And what do I really have to be dragging about? Here in our quiet little town in one of the quietest provinces of Canada, we are safe, with food, internet, cat and dog playing together. People elsewhere are dealing with much more. Break the jam. Then via Stephen Downes OLdaily I learned of the passing of Keith Lyons, and it will be his final blog post. I can't say I know Keith, but he's commenting, linked, tweeted back and forth for a while. I can find a first comment from Keith on my blog from 2008, during CCK08. And a trackback from Keith's blog as recent a January 27 this year. And a rather complimentary post from Keith, or a "PT" (Post Terrific?), from a 2014 Howard Rheingold did with me . Yet, in reading his obituary blog post, there is much much more to this man that I never knew. So what is known of us, what is not known, seems to always be a wide gap. I'm humbled by Keith's story and legacy, and also awakened to that non-original notion that our time here is pretty much a blink, especially to a planet. Use this time better than well. Squeeze every bit of opportunity out of it. Live it with as many people you can touch, connect with, make a difference for. So this is my busting the blogjam open. Not that anyone is noticing, not that it even matters that blogging is a dwindling act in lieu of the social media quick fix (please react to this with an emoji). It's just that the writing here, in the past, has always been a thing to help punch through challanges and thought jams. The blog gates are open. At least right now. Featured Image: Logtumble.jpg a Wikimedia Commons image placed into the public domain as the work of a US Government agency. I thought I had my own photos of a river full of logs, but this one works well as these are petrified logs from Petrified National Park in Arizona, a rather underrated park worth a visit if you are ever hoofing the I-40 between Flagstaff and Albuquerque. Despite my best intentions, I am now in a state of blogging to about 4 or 5 sites, all my own doing. So why not do some internal promoting? On the personal side, is I Hate Running, a WordPress I put together last year when I completed my first ever half marathon. I ran a second one just 3 months later, so "hate" become "sorta like". This blog was a fun stretch with the template, and taught me some new tricks with using custom fields to trigger different content affects. There's a fair amount of randomness hidden away there too. So in the spirit of efficiency, rather than running 13.1 miles on 2 separate dates, I am combining to run my first full marathon in January 2007. The blog serves as my diary, log, and a way to connect with others-- like Kleph who has been commenting from Peru. Okay, so here is the shameless plug- I am running also to raise money with team Diabetes; I am into my 36th year of living fairly well with diabetes, a disease which is hard not to know anyone affected, and one that continues to grow in numbers each year. So if you feel inclined to sponsor me, well thanks! I have a web form to sign up. Otherwise, at least drop an encouraging comment (spammers need not click, though they do at a rampant pace). Oops, gotta run. Literally. For all their analysis of my e-mail, Google has zeroed in on my interests: For a click of the link, you can find the magic product to stop my annoying bark Here comes the excuse about not blogging... I've not written much here about the Networked Narratives course I am co-teaching with Mia Zamora at Kean University. That might be because each week's announcement is a long post, plus there are weekly event pages to assemble, like for this month's "virtual bus" tours, not to mentione being in a hangout for class on Wednesday's and running another hangout during thw week, and keeping the Daily Digital Alechemies filled... It's been so utterly fantastic to be teaching again. We are pretty much on target for the "spine" we set up for the course, making each month a different mode of activity. January was getting set up, thinking about "digital alchemy", February was a series of 4 weekly Studio visit hangouts with narrative practitioners, and this month... a bus. So yes, we have weekly hangout visits, but the shift is from February ones with experts to the ones in March with peers... around the world. Each one is set up differently, with some different "pre-boarding" activities, or asynchronous media sharing or doing something in a collaborative space, with hangout at the end of the week connecting Kean students with peers elsewhere in the world. We were partly inspired (and we also borrowed from) an online workshop on Inclusive Globally Networked Learning from the 2016 DigPed Workshop with Maha Bali, Kate Bowles, and Paul Prinsloo, who teach respectively in Egypt, Australia, and South Africa. The part we borrowed was where they asked people to add to an open Google Doc a response to "What kinds of images, names, people, issues come quickly to mind about the places we’re from?". We've been trying that with a bit of a second layer for the places we visit. We ask our students in New Jersey, to share what they know of a country from their own experience, news, pop culture. What is the stuff about a far away place they carry around with them. The additional part is to ask them to now use the internet, and find out more specific information what life is like in the city we are virtually visit (and we ask them to do the same for say, New Jersey) (there was a bit of loose driving as our students do not necessarily identify with Newark New jersey being their city, not always New York City which so many in the world know, so we stayed with the locale being "New Jersey"). So it's both to learn about another place, but also, to hear in return what people in the other place know of where you live, and, what the internet says of that place. That said, it has not exactly played out like that, but as I hope to conclude below, it's really the conversation we have that matters, not these activities. Our first stop was Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where I had asked a colleague I got to know from the UDG Agora project, professor of Tourism Laura Aguilar. She had four of her students present, and since the timing worked out that we, we ran the New Jersey side during our class. We had set up the pre-boarding activity to share in an open Google Drive folder some photos related to food habits. https://twitter.com/TurismoUdeG/status/837095884550778882 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/837139567635394561 This was a deliberate choice to talk directly to people from Mexico given the terrible political treatment of that country in American politics. And our students did ask questions to their Mexican counterparts about how it felt to hear what comes from America. As we noted, their response was very respectful given what it must feel like. The standout moment for me was when asked about the border wall, Alondra said a statement that still resonates: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/837141865317068800 But the highlight moment was totally unplanned. Someone in our class noted how bright the light was coming in the window of Laura's office and asked to show us out the window. I think it was Alondra there who picked up Laura's iPad, and walked down the hall with a look of eager determination, and walked out on the veranda to show us the campus at University of Guadalajara in Puerto Vallarta. Then our class was turning the laptop out the window to show the view of Kean (heck, I had not seen that), and I was even taking them out on my deck to show the view from Strawberry, AZ. It was so simple, yet so electric. The second bus tour was a bit different, and almost rather than a physical place, we inhabited the web site of the Young Writers Project, which is based in Vermont, but is a home for creative writing for teens around the world. Our host, Geoffrey Gevalt, set up a special part of the site just for our group -- we had all the Kean students make accounts on the YWP site. Rather than us explaining it, we asked students to explore and figure it out themselves. We did a portion of this in class, and our students did more than click links, they were digging deep, reading poetry, and writing comments. And later in the week (now) they are posting on the YWP site too. This was was not in our expectations for the bus tour, that we would essentially spend time immersed on another web site. For the place sharing, (after Geoff said the questions I listed above sounded "a bit bookish") we decided to share about where we live with audio. We asked each person to share three morning sounds that represent their starting at home (getting ready). the transition to school/work (e.g. transportation), and a third that captures some of the ambient sounds of school/work. The bus ride itself provided again the unexpected and wonderful... because it was not tightly planned. We heard from two YWP writers who took a break from home schooling (or skiing) to share there experience; a third one (Astrobot in YWP) actually was listening in and chatting while she was in school (with her teacher's permission). And one of our students, Laura, is a teacher herself, and she tuned in from rahway with a room full of excited 6th grade writers. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/844177900563652608 https://twitter.com/writeannabella/status/842756540893446144 https://twitter.com/stryii/status/842769773608009728 https://twitter.com/ywpvt/status/842789356616278016 The surprise part came from the discussion about both Isabella and Adelle sharing about meeting other writers at a YWP open mic night. It was interesting to hear about what the process if saying their poetry out loud, in public, meant for their writing. And this lead to a request that they read one of their poems for us-- both agreed, and it was so moving. Even Astrobot, who could not speak because there was a quiz going on in her class, slipped her poem in the chat, and Mia's son Jude (who is an active class participant) read her poem for us. ONE WORLD Is it really bad The color of one's skin? The way they worship Speak Or the place they call their home? There are different cultures Ways to see the world And Although different They are at their roots Much the same From human To human The same species So why kill For these differences? Why discriminate? Why hate? These differences They make us beautiful Make us proud Proud to be ourselves This united human race The bus rides in repeat circles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUjtC6iUJJU And after the bus tour, Geoff has set up Laura and her Rahway students with their own YWP community web site. Fantaassssstic. I was moved by the challenging topics and powerful responses by the YWP writers; I reached back to find some examples of writing my Mom saved from me in 6th grade and 8th grade, and while nostalgic, it seemed so much more naive. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/843695760243806209 And it lead Mia and I to plan a spoken poetry session with our students this week. What we are doing is hardly novel or revolutionary, but is striking me, how effective it can be to get people together who do not know each other, from other parts of the world, for an agenda-less and presentation-less conversation. It's a lesson learned from the Virtually Connecting experience. That maybe just by talking to others, elsewhere, we can do better for understanding than what the buzz of social media or the burn of mainstream media provides. The next two bus tours, to Australia with Kate Bowles this week and to American University Cairo next (with Maha Bali, Hoda Mostafa, and Sherif Osman) have a connected theme (it happened on it's own) of the stories of student experience on campus.... or as Kate eloquently described it I’m thinking: would it be interesting to ask students to photograph an image of a place on campus where something meaningful has happened for them, to them? A place of memory or resonance, for any reason. As an example, I have a friend whose dad came to her graduation, and then after he died she felt she could always remember where she saw him sitting on a wall after her graduation ceremony. So this is still about spaces and places, but it’s about recognising that we all personalise spaces that we frequent because we have personal memories. We are experimenting with before the hangouts, have the students from each place look at the web sites of the others to find out the way the institution describes student life, so again, trying to balance what the web says about a place with what the students there share. The planning for this is rather loose (an understatement) with a few emails or DMs for logistics, and an idea for the activity that unrolls a few days before we publish it. Loose planning is different from under planning; and it takes me back to one of the first lessons I got in this game, as a young instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. I was in charge of planning the large year end faculty development retreat our office ran and was literally sick with nerves about planning the activities (asking some 150 people to spend a day doing stuff). My mentor, then Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Alfredo de los Santos, told me that all I needed to do was get people in a room with something meaningful to do-- that they would take care of the rest. Alfredo was, and is, so right. Loose hands on the wheel is the way to go, then and now. Featured image: "Bus" pixabay photo by MichaelGaida is in the public domain using CC0, edited to add "netnarr" and "Alchemy" to the bus Tony Bates recently posted Who are the founding fathers of distance education? following the release of a Steve Wheeler produced video interview with Tony and other identified "fathers" Michael Moore and Sir John Daniel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEZU89Drkj4 As he is, Tony humbly downplays his role, and lists five other suggestions in his post, inviting others to add comment with their suggestions (As he does, Stephen Downes prolifically responds and counters the idea a bit). I do have to say, this in this age of 2016, that it is shocking that someone would put three white men on screen with a label of "founding fathers." What does it take to consider the impact of language from previously centuries where the norm was suppressing the rights of women and people of color? Yes, it's "just a phrase", but to me it's poor form. I left a comment on Tony's blog, but his blog never seems to take my comments. I will assume it's a technical flaw. So I present as an addition to so called "fathers" Anna Elliot Ticknor. I only know of her through a fabulously written Hybrid Pedagogy article by Keith Brennan titled "The Victorian MOOC". In 1873 Anna Elliot Ticknor created the Society to Encourage Studies at Home -- the first correspondence school in the US-- to offer education to those excluded from the university system- women. Of multiple skin colors. And yet women, in pursuit of education, opportunity and knowledge sit in drawing rooms, kitchens, porches, and schoolhouses across the continent, opening packages from the same organisation: The Society to Encourage Studies at Home. The packages are filled with books and papers; there are letters crowded with answers, questions, feedback, criticism, resources, learning and encouragement posted from over 200 volunteer Society teachers — almost exclusively women. The Society to Encourage Studies at Home is a 19th century network of women who connect across the continent over the postal system. Women may be significantly disbarred from third level education, but they are not disbarred from organising, networking, connecting and educating. And this is what they do. They organise and educate one another. They organise departments, schools, libraries, curriculum, instruction and education. An institution. On a massive scale. They reach out to ten thousand students over twenty-four years. It is a massively open postal university. With 200 volunteers they 'leveraged the postal service — the most advanced, accessible and democratising information technology of their day — to provide support, education, opportunity, and resources to women regardless of race, location, class, or financial disposition. Women who were actively, explicitly, and implicitly excluded from education. It’s the story of an ed-tech revolution that came to be called the “Silent University”' In 24 years they educated over 7000 women and and a claimed MOOC stomping success rate of 65%. Unlike modern approaches, it was never about the technology (the postal internet) or the content: The desperate need was not only for content — books, essays, curriculum. It was for content resourced with access to empathetic expertise. The warmth, support, empathy, and understanding that were at the heart of the project seem key. So were the resources and method. Ticknor’s own ethos was one of warmth, encouragement, support, access to resources, and regular access to expert instruction and feedback. Each learner had an instructor. Each instructor regularly corresponded with their student. Each student stayed with an instructor for a long time and corresponded back and forth. Each relationship was allowed to determine its own course. And each instructor followed their students development closely. Reading their notes, reading their essays, setting their exams, setting their reading in response to their needs. That, of course does not "scale", so we leave personal "warmth, encouragement" to the side for click counts and bot graders. Brennan scolds us for fogetting history in worshiping the "Silicon Valley and elite institution narrative": If History has forgotten the Society, and eduprenuers have usurped innovation, then Thrun’s pivot, and EdX and Coursera have also forgotten the dispossessed. The Society achieved something that modern mooc innovations have so far failed to do: Openness. Access. Egalitarianism. The failures of history are condemned to repetition if we fail to listen. The successes are available if we care to tend to the past. The core lesson of what has been termed the paleo-history of education technology is perhaps this. Edtech is not disruption. It’s iteration. There is very little history on the Society to Encourage Studies at Home; a jstor paper "The Silent University": The Society to Encourage Studies at Home, 1873-1897 published in 2001 by Harriet F. Bergmann in the The New England Quarterly Thin even of the nurturing name for this Silent University -- Society to Encourage Studies at Home -- not about bringing Ivy Leagues to the poor around the world, not about disrupting education, not about promotion for the sake of counting registration numbers, not about getting a certificate. Just the encouragement for studies at home. Go Anna, you are as much a father founder as the others. Founder of the very first correspondence school in the U.S. And nearly completely forgotten. Top / Featured Image: My remix of a frame from the Creative Commons licensed video Learn from three founding fathers of distance education interviewed by Steve Wheeler #EDEN16 with addition of Public Domain image of Anna Ticknor from Wikimedia Commons I'd like to think it's rather clear if anyone glances at this blog that despite it's title, it does not sell dog products, and definitely is not in the genre of home improvement tips. Plus, there is a clear statement on the bottom of every page. The exact statement is: Here I bark and growl about the web, edtech, photography, and other stuff that gets under my fur (more...). Send those e-cards and e-letters to cogdogblog at gmail dot com -- except requests for requests to post links, ads, guest articles, or product reviews. I don't do that stuff. If you bug me you get the treatment. When someone I've never heard of, never communicated with, emails with a gushing statement of how much they love my blog and wanting to know if they can write guests posts or if I will put links to their sites in my posts, well I know that they have actually never even looked at my blog. Like Glen. Last week, Glen cold-emailed me. I came across your site while looking for resources for our next blog and I knew I had to reach out immediately, kudos on a fantastic blog. I can't wait to see what kind of resources my random pile of posts might be of use, but I bet you will tell me in the next sentence, now that you've hit me with the ego boosting first greeting. My name is Glen, and I'm reaching out on behalf of a growing home interiors business who operates in the same marketplace as Houzz and Made. Oh, yeah, Glen. My blog is all about home interiors. Perhaps you can summarize all of my posts you found about this industry? This month, we're looking to secure sponsorship placements with five prominent blogs and your site jumped straight to the top of our list. Your list must be pretty thin if you are reaching down into mine and it surfaces to the top. I cannot imagine the 4 runners up. Would you also be willing to accept link placements on pre-existing content on your site? Perhaps you would like to read that little note at the bottom of every blog page that says I don't do guest posts? Or link placements? Or maybe your deep research can dig up how often that occurs here? Please let me know if this is something you're interested in discussing further. Please accept my non-response as a not interested. That is what most human beings with functioning cerebral cortexes would do. But for Glen's sake, I just decided to trash and ignore his action that clearly violates the FCC CAN-SPAM act. I asked my audience for suggestions. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1049451950222249984 The votes are in. https://twitter.com/ericlikness/status/1049456310364921856 Especially when there is the rancid follow-up: Hi Alan, I reached out last week but haven't heard back. I wanted to see if there was an opportunity to sponsor a post on your site. Please see my initial email below. Best wishes, Glen I think I shall just reply with a link to this post. Activate the sprayer! Featured Image: This image is published under Creative Commons CC BY-SA because of the license in the original image it was based on. It was modified by adding my own logo (CC BY-SA by Bryan Mathers) and some extra label text to FLIT Spray Can 1.jpg a Wikimedia Commons image by Andreas Franzkowiak licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA Like many I was in disbelief that we are in a Steve Job-less world. It's deeply sad to lose anyone of such influence, of course, but I am not quite to the point of religious fervor elsewhere. And I was going to avoid trying to write anything, but... I got an email from someone really really wishing to organize some world wide tribute act- it was a grand idea and might be interesting to see. I do not begrudge people doing this, but its not something I am invested in, because its just a spike of feeling- rather than a plateau. It seems more appropriate to act every day in the spirit Mr Turtleneck espoused in his Stanford commencement speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc as an ongoing thing, without fanfare, then doing a one time act. Live each day like it might be your last? We need more than tributes. But that's just me. On the Road by cogdogblog posted 10 Apr '08, 9.00pm MDT PST on flickr Petal to the metal for today's trip from Phoenix to Ft Myers... Flaps! Flaps! And a major "Whew" that I am not booked on American Airlines. For perhaps uninteresting list of reasons, my blog juice has run low recently- there was about a 10 minute time span of recovery from the NMC Symposium on Mashups before going head first into the bowls of drupal trying to get our registration system read for the NMC Summer Conference, along with nurturing along 2 new MediaWikis for Horizon projects, and a fast track on a new WordPress powered project site. And I am feeling kind of... well bored with twitter as well, oddly enough at a time when scads of people are following my lack of tweeting (like a burst of 100 in a week). Its part of regular cycles I find myself going through, and in the silence was some non blogged non tweeted yawns over diigo, I was off line and missed the flickr video news, geez I may just finally be losing my edge, people will realize it, and move on to D'Arcy's doorstep. There is a mouldering blog idea related around diigo, which was a tool I casually looked at before the big wave, and I am sure it us a tool that will intrigue my interest, but am honestly losing a bit of excitement every over every shiny new marble that comes rolling down the chute. It's something about moving beyond tool lust to a love of the craft. But that is just embers on tge blog dust bin, nothing flaming there. And I have also full knowingly put myself on a traveling treadmill. Today is the start of a cross country zig zag- I went from Phoenix today to Ft Myers and my nice Southwest flight overfilled with grumpy, whiny passengers from American Airlines. Somewhere I was recently reading of the hardships endured turn of the century by workers on these rigged sailing ships working the fishing grounds in Alaska -- and just overhearing these pathetic "oh I am so put out" comments from people whose travel is delayed 4 hours ot who's battery ran out on their Crackberry-- just seems so --- so--- well, lame. Then again, my travel was only budged 25 minutes, so I can afford to be snooty. So here is the current tour... I am in Ft Myers this weekend to vist dear old Mom, and hope to dip my toes in the gulf at Sanibel. Monday, I head to Orlando where I am attending/presenting at the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering -- one session on Second Life, another on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, and the one that got me invited is a panelist on the Great ILS (Immersive Learning Simulations) Challenge- which Mark Oehlert is responsible for letting me in on. On Thursday, I leave Mousetown and hop to LA where I am doing a Second Life discussion at USC on Friday and then part of a Second Life workshop with Susan Metros and Hilly Willis of USC for an accreditation conference in San Diego (go ask me what Second Life and accreditation have in common). Then it is home for a week before another NMC meeting trip/ week in Austin at end of April. On the road agaaaaaaaain... (I am reaching for an all-time obscure title for this entry). Out of curiosity, I followed a link from a TrackBack notification to this entry on Rino's Blog (in dutch): Weblogs voor studenten OK, we zijn het er na de posts van Alan Levine , Scott Leslie, Sybilla, Pierre, en ondergetekende en de bijbehorende kommentaren zo'n beetje over eens dat: weblogs zonder kommentaar optie een belangrijk deel van hun funktionaliteit missen, zeker in. Without any knowledge of Dutch (sadly, as the folks over there are quite able to ready my English blog). I am wondering what was said in the entry on "Weblogs voor studenten" Not much heavy lifting needed to guess this is something related to "Weblogs for Students". Just for grins, i decided to put this through the Dutch to English language translation from WorldLingo, which helpfully produces: Web-unwieldly one for students OKAY, we are there it after mail of Alan Levine , Scott Leslie, Sybilla, Pierre, and undersigned, plus associated bowl driving ear about a beetje concerning once that: Apparently, the word "Weblog" written in dutch translates to "Web-unwieldly"! Hah! Is your weblog really web-unwieldly? The other one I am more or less guessing from other contextual clues is that the references in Dutch to "commenting" (referring to blog comments) comes out of the sausage grinder as "bowl driving ear ". What's the point? Not much really. Just the amazement that people in the Netherlands are reading this blog and filtering it through more networks of Dutch blogs. The other ironic thing bouncing around the blog is that one day after writing about the Digital Storytelling workshop I assisted last week, one of the faculty members mentioned there had already been contacted by an interested teacher in New Zealand who had scooped from across the Pacific what we were doing in Arizona. It's nice to be continually amazed by all of this, which was unthinkable as a way of connecting just a short time ago. Just do not put much faith in machine language translations, but check them out fro time to time. Despite their far from perfection performance, more than several times, I have used language translation sites to get the gist of what someone has written to me in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and even has allowed me to compose some crude responses. Now how about some more bowl driving ears? I am guilty of this as much as the next person-- in working on a web design project, or any project for that matter, you can get so close to the details and the content that you easily miss minor but important details. Huh? (more…) creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by kennymatic Here it is, what seems like what I have done every other week since March, packing the suitcase and setting an early wakeup so I can drive down to the airport. There are some really good thing I can see way off carrying me into 2015 (below). For the near term, tomorrow marks a 20 day East Coast trip, and what is going to be my last airline travel for a while. Maybe a long while. Tomorrow is a hop from Phoenix to Buffalo, and a skip across the border to visit my favorite doodler. Then Thursday its a train ride down to The Big City, to again be part of the Baruch College Schwartz Communication Symposium. And it will be a gathering of Good Folks- Barbara Ganley, Mikhail Gershovich, Grant Potter, Brian Lamb, not to mention the home crew folk like The Luke Waltzer maybe Boone Gorges, Esq. Rumors are of a possible Saturday Jam Space. Over the weekend I plan to be Brooklyn-iter with Michael Branson-Smith, and maybe get to meet the artist Emilio Vavavarella (and collect on the cup of coffee owed for doing his web site). On June 3 it is another train leg south to Richmond, where it is going to be an intense week of Wordpress slinging with Tom Woodward, basking in the glow of Gardner Campbell, as we unleash something perhaps as unMOOC like an open course as I have been in before-- it's all under Top Secret Wraps (meaning we've not built it yet), but there is a teaser out today and a wee bit of guidance. See http://thoughtvectors.net. Look for the #thoughtvectors stream in twitter. And then the suitcase gets emptied for the last time in a while when I return to Strawberry on June 12. I hope to focus on important things like my garden. And riding a new set of wheels thanks to the super energetic Kevin of Pedals 'n Pistons in Pine, AZ. During my last trip he was able to sell off my fancy shmancy but un-used Road bike, and so I handed him back the cash for a new 29" modern mountain bike, a "bomber" in his parlance. This guy is so excited he emails customers photos of the work he has done: Can't wait to ride-- do ya hear me, Todd? I am contemplating a possible week road trip to Colorado in late June-- coming to Durango, your way Mike Kelly, and on to my friends at Desert Weyr Ranch in Paonia. I'd like to get to see The Tank in Rangley, a project I helped Kick Start. My last commitment is a keynote and workshop for Arizona K12 Camp Plug and Play, July 7 in Tucson. That's just a 3 hour drive (which apparently is halfway across some countries). Ideally I'd like ti visit Karen Fasmipaur and Brad down in Portal. But July is meant to RELAX! My sister and brother-in-law might visit, maybe I can get them to help me redo the kitchen. Well I do have 1 or 2 web site projects to finish up. Okay, but that's just the lead up. The exciting news is for what's coming in the fall. Brian Lamb and I have been talking this up off an on for... well a well. Today, white smoke came out of the chapel in Kamploops https://twitter.com/brlamb/status/470002500364279809 I plan to spend four months on a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University with Brian and colleagues on a suite of projects related to aggregation, wikis, academic open publishing, and more. This will start in mid or late October, and run through the end of February 2015. Among the many cool things are (a) getting to be n Kamloops; (b) getting to hang out with Brian AND Keira AND Harry and especially Dexter; but most importantly (c) it is a good length of time to not worry about stitching together a bunch of little projects as I have been juggling and poorly managing. It's a chance to focus in on new projects and work with faculty, staff, and students. This also means it is time, after taking DS106 to Work... to take a vacation. Or retirement. I am going to dial back the ds106 energy to make space for new interest. It's not a break, there is always DS106 Radio. I hope to find some folks to take over the care and feeding of The Daily Create (and I still hope to revamp the site as another Wordpress customizable theme). DS106 always morphs and moves. Heck, if you want something to do this summer, some folks have broken off from the main site and moved into a trailer somewhere in the West Texas But wait, there is more. It's not i-dotted or t-crossed, but 2 weeks ago I got a swell awesome email from Richard Elliot, the guy who had arranged both by visits to New Zealand (in 2000 and 2004) creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And it looks like I will go again in late September-October to keynote Shar-E-Fest and do a bit of a circuit tour. I am rather stoked to return, for many reasons, the land, the people, but oh yes, just the magic feel of places there creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Also in the mix is my first attendance/presentation at the 2015 MLA conference in Vancouver (conveniently I will be in the province at the time ;-) I was invited to bring some open learning / ds106ness (see I can not get away from it) to a panel session on "Visionary Pedagogies for the 21st Century: Teaching the Humanities with Digital Technology" with Gabriele Dillmann, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Amanda Starling Gould. The invite to propose something came out of the blue, from a comment exchange with Gabriele in the Future of Education MOOC via but I look forward to working with these new colleagues; heck they want to start doing google hangouts this summer so we can get to know each other. This dog has some plans worth packing for! creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by alee_04 This is my own riff on the eminent Photoshop RiffMaster, the Noiseprofessor, himself riffing with his own photoshopping of Brian Lamb's super dog Dexter. I upped the Fonzie with Zack's face, and even twiddled his thumb a bit ;-) Can ds106 be any more fun when people just play like that, rapid fire? On the surface it looks silly, but there's something more at play. I'd wax on this, but would rather make more GIFs today. But it did get me thinking about a new assignment to be rolled into what will be (look for details tomorrow) a ds106 GIF Festival, this one known as Riff a GIF: Some of the best parts of ds106 happens when people spontaneously build off of the whacky things others share. Rapid fire style. Your assignment is to riff on someone eles's ds106 work and make it new in a GIF form. It can be revising an existing GIF, or taking a graphic and turning it into a GIF. Riff the GIF, say it three times fast. For which this post shall be properly tagged to get included. The same thing happened already, when Martin Weller tweeted about his plans to do some #ds106 radio: https://twitter.com/mweller/status/281056146540879872 And that got me thinking of maybe putting Martin's face into a disco themed image, a bit of quick photoshoppery got this: Ah a bump in the Mac OS X Tiger upgrade --- my vopy of iPhoto is toally stuck in spinning beachball land. I've tried rebuilding the library, renmaming, extracing photos with iPhoto extractor, etc. It is still hosed. I might have to get a copy of iLife now and start over. I had a huge pile of photos in the old version (still there), but really should have backed them to DVD first. I did not discover the barfing flickr panda just followe dlinks in my gReader from sites like Mashable. The panda provides a different way to Explore flickr, the 500 most "interesting" photos as identified by the magical algorithm. The Panda just seems to be a new way to vew them; just sit and watch as new photos are upchucked: There is a bit more information, but no explanation, in Of Pandas and Rainbows. To some people, Explore is the ultimate beauty contest. It's the pinnacle of Flickr, the achievement of achievements. They fret and conspire and worry, and actually get angry and frustrated, when their perfectly fine photos, never "get into" Explore. Except it's basically random. No matter how artificially "interesting" you try to make your photos (Explore photos are selected via Flickr's "Interestingness Algorithm", affectionately known as the "Magic Donkey"), Explore is still only 500+ images each day. And each day on Flickr, there are more than five thousand photos uploaded each minute. That's each minute. So to help these poor souls, to shed some light on the mysteries and myths of Explore, a Group was formed. "The Secrets of Explore". A clearinghouse of info to clear up the nonsense, to spread some fact jelly over fiction bread. And of course, it has its very own blinky graphic. This artwork might go blinky for the cause as well, but it's also an homage, a bit of a congrats and thank you, to the fine Flickr volunteers who risk their sanity, to tell TruthToExplore(tm). Why pandas, you ask? Why pandas vomiting rainbows? That's a whole other secret. Holy cow, if I thought the internet was big. Swallow this line again: And each day on Flickr, there are more than five thousand photos uploaded each minute. I like the mystery. Take your best guess- what does the barfing panda symbolize? And is he/she really barfing? In recent work on ushering people into a Domain of Their Own I've been looking for ways to have them conceptualize their domain as more than one site or blog, as more like a plot of land. For the eCampus Ontario Extend workshops we emphasized putting some kind of calling card or simple front gate at the top, at the entrance, using the simple cPanel Site Publisher as a starter. I reworked that as well for the DML Staking a Claim workshop with expanded content on Better Calling Cards. These include two Wordpress themes I concocted, duct taped together from the design of two different HTML5 Up Themes (which are CC licensed), WP-Dimension and WP-Big Picture. It's nice to see some other people using them. But there is another kind of "thing" you might want at the top of your domain, especailly if you manage a sprawling set of various sites likeBryan Alexander. He emailed me recently with a subject line of "Wordpress Question": Alan, could you recommend a theme? I'm setting up a kind of hub or portal site. Not much content: just links out to my various projects. Should be around 7 links. Any WP theme leap to mind? My first thought was like... almost any theme these days with some kind of masonry layout (links to content from featured images on the front page). But I had a thought of nice clever way he could do this himself, using a new theme from my favorite designer, Anders Noren, fashionably named Hamilton. I had recently put it to use on a site for Marian Funes; she had chosen one of this multiplex premium themes from Themeforest that looked great in the demo, but weighed in at about 300+ files and 65 Mb (I have a future blog post about BloatPress themes). It's like learning a new operating system. I convinced Mariana to try the much simpler, lightweight, and free Hamilton. In thinking about Bryan's message, I saw a simple approach to his site. He creates a blog post for every one of the sites he wants to link to; all it needs is a title and a feature image. No one will ever see the post... we use the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin. It's rather simple, when you activate the redirect option that are added to every page post, instead of displaying that post when requested, a visitor is sent to the URL specified: So Bryan just needed to activate this plugin, create a series of posts, enter the URL in this plugin's options field, and upload a featured image. But what about the order of the front links? Posts are organized by date created. One could create them in the reverse order they want them to appear, or fiddle with editing the published date. The more elegant and flexible way was telling Bryan to install the Post Types Order plugin. This provides an interface where he can just drag and drop the listed posts to control the order of appearance. [caption id="attachment_65280" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Change the order of appearance on the front of the site by drag and drop interface of Post Types Order plugin[/caption] That's pretty much it. Bryan did some extra work to add the nice background image via the Customizer. I found an icon he could use for the site icon, which generates a cute favicon. The one thing that comes up with people using this theme is asking how to "control" the size of the front images. This is a bit of a trap of designing it to look good on your own screen. This is a responsive them, and it changes the sizes of the images as needed. The rule of CogDog's thumb is- use a large sized image, let Wordpress and the theme create the smaller size it needs. The layout of this theme is more controlled by the aspect ratio, the ratio of width to height, not the absolute size. You can see how Bryan mixed it well using a variety of image shapes, some landscape oriented, some portrait oriented. Check out the final site Bryan created https://futureofeducation.us/ [caption id="attachment_65275" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The Future of Education Observatory, the site for Bryan Alexander's seeing of all far and wide[/caption] [caption id="attachment_65274" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The linked part of the Observatory; each one was created as a post but uses a redirection plugin to send to other sites[/caption] I also recommend setting the Permalinks (in the Dashboard under Settings) to be simply Post Name So you do not get hover URLs with uncategorized in the URL (the default Wordpress permalinks setting is to put the category in the URL. A WP developer's cat cries in anguish every time you publish posts with uncategorized in the URL. FYI use the Customizer -> Background Image to do what he did with the observatory image, Change the Preset menu to Fill Screen (tiled backgrounds went out in the 1990s), and use the grid to experiment where to fix the image edges: [caption id="attachment_65283" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Setting up the background image. This creates a fixed image that everything scrolls over[/caption] Also experiment with the icons at the bottom of the Customizer to gauge how the site will look on other device screens (table and small phone). I liked this approach so much I am using it for a hub of sites for my upcoming Australia workshops. Mine is not a top of domain, but it is the hub for a series of mostly subsites in multisite install, but a few of the front links go to other URLs. [caption id="attachment_65276" align="aligncenter" width="760"] That dude was me, in 2007, this is the site for a similar return trip 10 years later[/caption] [caption id="attachment_65277" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The links on my site, the first two are external sites (one a google doc) the others are other wordpress sites inside this multi-site install[/caption] It's the same approach. I added one more plugin that adds menu icons for social media links (the menus appear from the top right "hamburger" button- I've been surprised how many people are surprised when I name it so). The theme has two menus, one for each side. I like using the right side for social media links: [caption id="attachment_65278" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The overlay menu has links on left, social media on right[/caption] The icons on the right are enabled with the Font Awesome 4 Menus plugin which lets me add them using the class names for Font Awesome icons (you need to activate CSS Classes under Screen Options in top right to make this field visible) [caption id="attachment_65279" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Adding menu icons by using Font-Awesome CSS class names[/caption] There's one more gotchya that comes up, and that I should have known better- many people want to customize the footer to have something different than the copyright and the credit link to the theme author. This happens a lot in themes. In ones I make, I try to add a Customizer option to modify the footer, but in the large majority of themes, the footer is hard wired into the theme. The recommended approach, and what I should almost always do when I start a new site like this, is to create a child theme. This lets me override parts of the main theme, and when the main theme is updated, I do not lose my modifications. I would recommend creating a child theme for a Hamilton Hub, if only to customize the footer. It's pretty simple. You should already have the parent theme installed on your site. Do not fear, I can show you how to birth this theme. All you need is a plain text editor, OSX TextEdit or Windows NotePad. Create a folder for your theme, call it maybe Hamilton Hub (or Hamburger Helper whatever you like). Inside that folder, create a new file named style.css (that file name must be exact), and in that file put: /* Theme Name: Hamilton Hub Theme URI: http://cog.dog Description: Child theme for Hamilton theme used for maybe a hub site Author: Alan Levine Author URI: http://cogdogblog.com Template: hamilton Version: 0.1 */ @import url("../hamilton/style.css"); This indicates the folder is a child theme related to the parent named hamilton. Enter your own name and Author URI, it matters not. Note how it references the directory name of the parent theme (next to Template:) as well as in the path to the relative URL of the parent theme. Now, make a copy from the Hamilton theme directory (you might want to download that so you can do this) of one file footer.php and put that in your hamilton-hub directory. There is bunch of php code in there, but if you even have a small awareness of HTML you should see that the footer content is on two lines, each wrapped in a ... tag: © [caption id="attachment_24724" align="aligncenter" width="461"] Mike the Headless Chicken might be your Teacher[/caption] In about 10 hours the first week of Headless ds106 launches- the first week's assignment will be published at one minute past midnight (PST) and will appear at http://ds106.us/category/the-site/fall-2013-headless/. We already have 38 blogs in the mix- check out all the posts from participants. If you are new to ds106, your task this week is to set up your ds106 blog space, register it with the ds106 site, and once you post something, your blog will appear on the right side list. This week is not taxing- a few videos to respond to about art, doing a few daily creates, and getting into the habit of writing up a weekly reflection. And being part of our online spaces in twitter and/or Google+ If you have been around the ds106 bend before, what you can do to help is welcome people, offer advice, and model good ds106 blog writing behavior. Or document your creative process. Or share your favorite work from the past. Or do Cat Breading. Whatever. Of course, as an open course, everything on the week's list is optional. No grades, no lecture videos, no apologies. And for those who are new to ds106, it is going to look chaotic at first. And later. This is not a course of rigid syllabi details, we are not going to offer explicit instructions on how to do your creative work. The idea is not to learn directly from an instructor, but to learn alongside others figuring it out as well. So you know what is coming (you can get a general idea from the syllabus, yes there is one of those), this week and next are for having people get their blogs un shape, explore how to customize them, do a bit of small media creations, explore the ideas of personal digital space. IN week three, we move into an introduction to digital storytelling, and in week 4 we enter the creative long stretch of the course, starting with appreciating (by listening) to audio storytelling. Although we call it "bootcamp" the first two weeks are pretty light- this gives everyone a chance to learn their way around, to get in the social media mix, and providing some flexibility for those who jump in during this stretch. As far as the chicken? Do you know the story of Mike? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqDjRCHyjTY "Miracle" Mike the Headless Chicken (April 1945 "“ March 1947) was owned by farmer Lloyd Olsen of Fruita, Colorado. On September 10, 1945 Lloyd was sent out to the yard by his wife to get dinner. Lloyd swung the axe down on Mike and chopped the chicken's head off. But much to his surprise, the chicken did not die. Mike was still able to balance on a perch and walk clumsily. He even attempted to preen and crow, though he could do neither. Olsen decided to continue to care permanently for Mike, feeding him a mixture of milk and water with an eyedropper. Once he got used to new and unusual center of mass, Mike could easily get himself to the highest perches without falling. His crowing, though, was less impressive and consisted of a gurgling sound made in his throat, leaving him unable to crow at dawn. Mike also spent his time preening and attempting to peck for food with his neck. If THAT is not a metaphor for open learning, for dealing with your hand, for going against the grain. I don't know what is. The cogdog has been busy, and hopes to be back barking soon. As a reprieve of insane early heat and sun in Phoenix (97 in late March is a bit much, and early), we have enjoyed a rare outbreak of weather with a few days of major, very much needed rain. Up here in my mountain escape, we got more than 2 inches in 3 days, almost more than we have received since January 2004. But enough weather blab. I am in a bind getting three presentations lined up for the April 20-22 Teaching in the Community Colleges 2004 Online Conference. One is on using our simple web slide show template, the jClicker, for student art presentations, another on "photoblogging" (so in learning more I am having to bum colleague's mobile phones that have picture taking capability), and a roundup of some Maricopa faculty to "share stories around the digital campfire". More links coming soon (once I actually create the online presentations next week). Biff Cantrell might sneak back in somewhere too for a guest appearance. Our office has sponsored institutional registration, so that any faculty, staff, or student in our system can register for free to attend the conference. Last year, we sent more than 100 people, so the fur was raised on my back when I got word that only 31 had signed up (and 1/3 were those in my online class where it was required). So I added a new tool to my repertoire of getting people to participate in our activities- "shaming by email". It actually worked. The MLX Great Package Race ended with a flurry, with about 100 new packages flooding in the last 36 hours. On one hand this is good as we now have more than 900 items inside the warehouse, but I am hoping to get out of the incentive program as it really should not be necessary. Fortunately, some of my late, just before midnight posters were watching the scoreboard, as Lori and Laura both pointed to some problems in my database query logic (the perils of date/time comparisons). Woo-hoo! Elise's Learning Movable Type blog has a fantastic set of useful tips, template tweaks, etc, a;; cleanly explained and illustrated for the MovableType blog crowd. I just spent an hour fixing up some CogDogBlog issues that escaped notice or care, thanks to Elise. Problems with Default Style Templates took care of a number of side nav bar issues where contain spilled out and dribbled down to the bottom of the blog. And her code for Recent Comments also cleaned up some side bar issues. I'll be back for more tips. This is part 5 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication - and what to think about even before you touch that Wordpress thing Installing and Setting up Feed Wordpress - Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined Feeding the Machine - How to get RSS feeds into the aggregator without losing a finger Some Feed Magic - Optional ways to improve feeds from sites such as flickr, twitter, etc, creating a twitter archive, RSS Feed TLC »» A Few More Tricks «« - leveraging categories, adding attribution, setting featured images Feed Wordpress is a plugin, but itself has it's own suite of plugins to extend it's functionality- a plugin with plugins? Yes. I will be reviewing a few of the ones I have used, and also discuss the other affordances you can find by using tags and categories after content is syndicated. Wielding Your Tags and Categories Earlier in the series we set up Feed Wordpress to automatically assign categories to all feeds, as a way of creating subsets of the entire syndication flow. Because they are categories, they all have links to their archives, which you can use to add to your Wordpress menus. You can use the built in Categories widget to put a listing in a sidebar/footer widget. If you want to list just the syndicated category structure, you will need to install a plugin that allows you to select a portion of all categories to display, such as AVH Extended Categories Widgets, Sub Categories Widget, or others. If you want to do a tag cloud based upon the ones in the syndication stream, I find the built in Wordpress widget a bit bland and limited. I prefer the Ultimate Tag Cloud Widget, used to generate the footer at the Thought Vectors site. Another way you might consider using categories is to "curate" the flow of content and add categories to specific posts to build collections. On the Future of Learning Institute site, the site admins regular edit posts and add a "Spotlight" category, which are then promoted to the front page: This include a mixture of tweets, photos, and blog posts. Many themes have built in sliders to display content from a specified category or tag, often you add a "Featured" category to a post to push content into the slider. The ability to do organize content like this was a primary reason for choosing the Editor theme (Woo Themes) on Thought Vectors. It has three areas that display posts based on tags: There are many ways we could have used these; the top were posts tagged by facilitators to promote important class links. The slider displayed posts based on a secret tag admins used to create the big banner sliders, but it could just as easily been tags added by admins to promoter student content. And the bottom row of 6 posts were based on participant's use of the "nugget" tag. So you can use tags/categories that are suggested to your participants, or you can add tags/categories to display on your site. The ways and approaches wil vary depending on the features of your theme. Feed Wordpress Add Ons I have used a few extra plugins that can add functionality to the Feed Wordpress plugin itself. Several are listed/described on the developer's web site. If the the links are dead, you can find the current version on his Github site. Adding Attribution to Syndicated Post Items When you syndicate in the posts on your site, you will get a link and a excerpt from the blog (if you choose the option for permalinks to point to the original source), but there is nothing really to indicate that the post came from another site; it will look just look like any locally authored posts on your site. The FWP Add Attribution Plugin takes care of that issue by creating a setting in Feed Wordpress that allows you to define the way attribution strings are added. For examples how this can appear, all participant posts from Project Community (example) bear an attribution to the source (highlighted with red box): or at the Future of Learning site when this plugin is activated, it adds an extra piece of settings to Feed Wordpress, under the Posts and Links Section -- look for Attribution Boilerplate You can choose to have the attribution appear before the post or after it. And you have a number of template variables to build an attribution that can list the source, link to the post, etc. And because it is set as a global setting in Feed Wordpress, you can override it per feed if you have some that you do not want to show the attribution text. Getting Featured Images One of the trickiest parts of this enterprise is taking advantage of visual Wordpress Themes that make use of Featured images to represent posts on the front page of your hub. The thing about this is that this is a feature specific to Wordpress; there is no part of RSS data that identifies such an image. My typical solution is to use a plugin that uses the first image in the body of a syndicated post to designate as a featured image. It typically download a copy of this image to your server. Ideally, the plugin might offer a default plugin you can use if the syndicated post has no images. I've tried several plugins over the years; currently the best one I have found is the one, FWP-Sic-Em by the author of Feed Wordpress. I am using here on my own blog, and used it for recent projects such as Covering the Coverage, Networked Narratives, Ontario Extend Domain of Our Own sites. Theming it Up, Making it Pretty Earlier, when we set up Feed WordPress, we suggested waiting until the house was built before painting the walls (meaning the WordPress theme for a syndication hub). It's time to paint. Now here is the thing- Feed WordPress just brings in content from other blogs, and makes them posts on your hub site. So you can use pretty much any WordPress theme. Because your site potentially will have many posts coming in, you probably do not want a theme that runs a long string of recent posts on the front page. What works better is a theme that is more like a grid or what is called masonry style where the posts are represented by a featured image (hence our discussion above) and maybe a short 1-2 sentence excerpt. While I cannot make a thorough recommendation of all themes, I can provide examples of the syndication sites I have done and the theme they used. All of these themes are free (a few of my projects did use Premium themes) Project Community ran for four years using the Responsive Theme. Networked Narratives and Ontario Extend Domains of Our Own both use the Cover theme. The You Show used the Virtue theme. The Hub of Hubs demo site is built with the GridBox theme. Research Networked Seminar used the Baskerville Theme (other themes by this author that might work well include Rowling, Garfunkel, or Hamilton. Oy Vey, Duplicates! Frustratingly, Feed Wordpress seems sometimes to publish the same post twice, you end up with duplicate posts, e.g. I have seen this in most of the sites I have worked on, and have yet to identify a pattern. Feed Wordpress supposedly has a mechanism to detect if a feed item is new, but I have never found what exactly it is checking (the date? url? the content?). I have tried the FeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter plugin but recall it either (a) did not work or worse (b) messed something else up. It has been a while since I tried. I pretty much shrug and say it's easier to ignore a duplicate post than to risk missing a single one. If anyone has ideas or clues as to maybe what kinds of feeds this happens on, I'd like to know! Who's in the Syndication Hub? On most of my projects I have custom coded widgets for sidebars that can do a list of blogs in each category; as of now I have not found a way to generalize it (sorry!). But you can use the Links Shortcode Plugin to create an index of all syndicated blogs. See it in action on the Future of Learning Institute site on the page of syndicated blogs We can use this since we know (correct) that Feed Wordpress stores all of the sites syndicated in the Wordpress Links structure, by default in the Contributors category. The page above generates this list simply by a Wordpress Shortcode [links category_name='Contributors' exclude='13,17,18'] The excluded ones the ids you can find in the links editor (ones for twitter, flickr, and instagram) since I just want to list the blogs syndicated. This same shortcode would work in a text widget as well. Radiating Randomness When syndication blossoms you gather so many posts... so many posts. When I ask students to comment, they are often overwhelmed, so I like to create some links that will provide a link to a random syndicated post. Random spins... Public Domain Pixabay Image by MirellaST http://pixabay.com/en/roulette-game-gaming-money-colors-252390/ Because we have set things up with an organized category structure (we did do that, right?), there are some ways to create links to a random post from a category (all syndicated blogs, just from one category for a section in a multi-section class, etc). I have that and more in Random Posts with a Time Twist -- it's custom code, and requires you use a child theme. The twist is you can also make links that pick a random syndicated post from a category (you choose) within a number of days (like within the last week). It's All Dessert Now [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]red fruits cupcake 1 flickr photo by chotda shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license[/caption] This is the end of this series of posts. I hope I have given you more than enough to not only get Feed Wordpress set up, but also making it fit your course or project need. I am sure I missed (or messed up) something. Let me know in the comments! One thing to always keep in mind is that syndicated content become just like local blog posts, and anything you can to them, you can do to syndicated content. This includes the way they interact with your theme and all of the 5 gazillion plugins out there. Now it's time for you to feed! This is part 5 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication - and what to think about even before you touch that Wordpress thing Installing and Setting up Feed Wordpress - Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined Feeding the Machine - How to get RSS feeds into the aggregator without losing a finger Some Feed Magic - Optional ways to improve feeds from sites such as flickr, twitter, etc, creating a twitter archive, RSS Feed TLC »» A Few More Tricks «« - leveraging categories, adding attribution, setting featured images Featured Image: Electrical Plug flickr photo by One Tree Hill Studios shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license I have not jumped on the #ungrading hashtag but glance at it often and respect the efforts people share to move away from point system approaches and quiz/testing as measures of proxies of quasi-indicators of learning. The participation in the Ungrading Book Club and now EdCamp is impressive. This post has bounced in my heads as a cranial draft (that word combination just reeks of wrongness) slipping down (if there is a list) as I question if I have really anything to add. Plus my teaching experience, compared to many others, is not quite overflowing on the shelves (that's mine on the left in the image below). https://flickr.com/photos/chriswaits/6987483282 Empty shelves at a grocery store flickr photo by waitscm shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Then I have a running thought that I have nothing to say about Ungrading as I don't think I have done much grading when I teach. Yes I have to issue grades but loathe making them so foregrounded. My meager amount of teaching is been in atypical courses (mostly media making) that lend to grades being based on creative outputs. And all of this has been as adjunct faculty where you do not really get any leverage to buck the tide on what an institution requires- so I always have had to report grades. Mostly I try to create a setup where student work, participation is visible and self documented. Rather than assigning so many points for say comments on blog posts or discussion forum replies, there is a way for students to reflect and articulate their own perspective on how active they have been, I think of my approach more as "De-emphasizing" grading. That gets dangerous, saying "de-grading" but if there is a way to move the experience of being in the class and being part of something as the focus, rather than The Grade. Note: Alfie Kohn was here way earlier. But I hesitate to say for sure like a blanket that All Grading is Good or Bad. I watch the way my wife Cori grades both her high school and university students, and she does in such a beautiful and constructive way that I see never end up being punitive. And so I take the Ungrading movement as less a "Burn the Grades Down" and more of seeing how educators are reframing and redesigning their approaches to move grades themselves from the center. While I boasted of never having taught where course grades were based on formal assessment techniques, assertions may be subject to inquiry: https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/1425283967067074561 when I dug into my early teaching below, I found I did issue a quiz or two. But before tossing out my likely unimportant thoughts on grading, I felt it was better first to start with reflecting on my experiences with grades as a learner then a quick review of the courses I taught. And pretty much from the first classes I taught at community college in the 1990s I asked my students to produce projects that showed their skills/knowledge to create works, but also to write about their methods. And the grading was almost more wholistic than arithmetic tallying. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/568080067315642368 Me and Being Graded My unfounded theory is that our perspectives on grading are somewhere resting on a pile of experiences being graded ourselves. I loved school from my very first day at Bedford Elementary school in Baltimore, Maryland (home of the Bedford Bees, still). Something special happened to me in second grade in Mrs Foreman's class the images and text below from a talk I did on teachers and school being memorable/unmemorable (or hear me tell the same story). I sat in the second row, 3rd seat in, for Mrs Foreman’s 2nd grade class in Baltimore. I thought of myself as just another kid, not very special until the day she returned a math quiz. She said that only one student had earned a distinction- a check plus fantastic. I did not imagine it was me, until that was on my paper she handed back. Now just a simple assessment, but that was the day I felt a magic sensation for wanting to doing well in school. I wanted more. I got hooked on getting the good grades, and found with a almost photographic memory, fondness for writing and doing math, I found the test part of school rather easy. I did most of my high school exams without studying (I remember this group of kids whining about doing all night cramming when I got bby just with what I remembered in class). I even found the standardized tests more of a puzzle to figure out patterns than a stressor. What I found was, by tests or writing paper being something I could do readily, I could focus more on pursuing things that made me curious. I did get a rude awakening my first semester at University, because the assignment and exam stakes were not as easy as primary and secondary school, but I still never found that performance part of doing tests and quizzes really problematic. Grades were just something to take care of so I could do other things. That sounds a bit glib or even egotistical, and I am sure I am forgetting some harder and more challenging graded items (calculus? Physics? GREs?). But I always felt I could learn the school rules which means finding the most direct path to a good grade. Me and Teaching Now to summarize my meagerly stocked teaching shelves. I am leaving out things that I do consider informal teaching (like the story of Writing HTML) for the specific times I was in a position of issuing grades. ART184AA (Scottsdale Community College, Spring & Fall 1987, Spring 1988) In my role as an instructional technologist at Maricopa, I sought opportunities to teach. I was encouraged to do so my Director (who also had me take an instructional design course or two at Arizona State University), but my gut told me the faculty I worked with would respect my ideas more if I had real teaching experience. I forgot to reply to this twitter poll by Maha Bali (blogged too) https://twitter.com/Bali_Maha/status/1443666528940040192 I absolutely agree it is essential/desirable/beneficial for anyone working to support faculty to have course teaching experiences (not just tech workshops). I think that is why even earlier at Maricopa I took the opportunity to adjunct teach a night class at Scottsdale Community College, ART 184AA, a one credit introduction to animate course. This opportunity came from the department chair Bill Martin, who I worked for on some other projects, who knew I had some skills in Macromedia Director, the software the class was taught around. Being in my pre-blog era I cannot find or remember anything how I developed my course. I likely had someone else's syllabus to start with. But I did find on an old hard drive some of my teaching materials. They seem to have the same tone as my much more recent courses. You can see this in my syllabus. ART 184AA course-infoDownload Right there on page 4 is my grading and attendance guidelines- see the side note "Basically, if you show up to class and work on your animations, you can easily earn a good grade. Your instructor is an easy grader!" and right there is the mention of a Mid-Term Exam. I apparently gave this as a take home exam, and it's all stuff they could find easily in the course materials. take-home-testDownload The class was built around a lot of in-class hands on practice learning techniques of animation (I have all of these in my hard drive, each had example files they could access as models). The bulk of the class was a process of working towards a final animated story, and built up over weeks with assignments like a proposal, and developing characters, and showcase sessions where they gave each other feedback. It's an early version of how I built later media classes. Looking back I am impressed with my early teaching self. I even had a CD-ROM showcase reel-- to give a sense of the student work, I actually loaded up my Sheep Shaver Mac Classic OS 9 emulator where I could launch the Director App... here is a bit of a screen recording of some student animation. It's crude for what we can do now, but for that era? I am happy with how it holds up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSsvD0vdVrA What does this have to do with grading? Well I do have points based system. I had to give grades. But beyond that simple exam, it was all based on what students did in the class environment, which even then I had in mind of being more like a studio than a class. I had forgotten so much of this early teaching, but I am certain that the entire practice of being responsible for a credit course (be it a once credit survey course), managing students, doing the admin paperwork taught me so much about being a teacher. Update: Because they are accepting old syllabi, I added my syllabus to the Open Syllabus Project. CIS 236 Web Based Teaching (Phoenix College, Spring 2004) As often it happens here, My Blog, My Outboard Brain recalled more than the one between my ears. I had no easily accessible memory of this 2004 experience co-teaching an online course in a 2004 post titled Confessions of a Lousy Online Teacher. As the dust gets blown off the memories, this as an online professional development course offered at one of the Maricopa Community Colleges, Phoenix College (taught in WebCT of that slaps a timestamp on the vintage of this memory) that one of my colleagues Kurt Chambers invited me to co-teach with him. Here is my "glowing" reflection of the experience: The natives are restless and rumbling among the online web teaching course I am co-teaching this semester. One student’s self-evaluation referred to the “hostile” environment (a week's worth of angry posts to the discussion board).https://cogdogblog.com/2004/03/confessions-of/ Ah I found a few more shreds in my blog by combing through the archives, https://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/2004/04/08/copyright.htmlone post referring to a lesson on copyright, landing me on an Internet Archived copy of a Maricopa Learning eXchange Copyright and Fair Use: Doing the Right Thing. That is about all I can remember. I may have led it more than once or maybe Kurt fired me. There must have been some kind of quiz/assessments given. The DS106 Era (Spring, Summer Fall 2012, Spring, 2013: UMW @ Spring 2014 @ George Mason University) It's going to take some discipline not to blog too much about DS106 (and avoid the droll history), but like it has been for my technical growth, so much of my approach to teaching came from several experiences teaching it. I'm able to parse and link quite a bit from the History of DS106 page. So I have: DS106 Spring 2012 (UMW) in person, teaching in parallel with Jim Groom. Not much to link, except syndicated blog posts ... and via the WayBack Machine the syllabus with grading infoDS106 Summer 2012 (UMW), online, co-teaching with Martha Burtis (the infamous Camp Magic MacGuffin)DS106 Fall 2012 (UMW) online, teaching in parallel with Martha BurtisDS106 Spring 2013 (UMW) online, teaching soloEDIT 572: Digital Audio/Video Design for George Mason University, 2 sections graduate level course, working adults- look GMU still has my syllabus lingering around https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/221638357409742848 First of all, none of these classes had a textbook- the open web was our reference. You will not find any quizzes or final exams. All of the grading, even if there are points are percentages, were based on the work that students showed and reflected on in their blogs, including a mid semester group audio project (the radio show) and a final comprehensive project. The weekly "assignments" were things I blogged, and included things like doing some number of DS106 Daily Creates (small creative activities where responses were tweeted) and student selected responses to a number of medium sized tasks in the DS106 Assignment Bank. Students were also tasked with adding both new Daily Creates and DS106 Assignments to those collections. You can find an example of the work for Week 6 on Design from my Spring 2013 course. I guess I did give a quiz -it was more a gimmick to get feedback from my students, I heard from more than half, plus David Kernohan, that guy will follow any link. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/250975856531472385 A few notes that seem worthy: That first class in Spring 2012 pushed me hard. I remember being in awed of the Jim Groom persona, having scene how he playfully teases fellow faculty in meetings and students in class. It quickly settled in that I was not going to emulate him, and I had to work hard to find my own style. I tried to have as little me in front of the room; I think it was Jim's idea to include in each class a good portion of time doing something creative. There was something magical in the way we (and later with Martha Burtis) taught our own sections in parallel. We would collaborate on the weekly tasks and projects, but we taught them our own way. The interactions online often blurred students between sections (not to mention mixing with the open online participants).Jim had a method I did steal, at the end of the semester we had students book a 10-15 minute individual appointment where we asked them what grade they would give themselves, and then I would ask them to share their own highlights or proud moments. I always remembered Danny, a student who always sat in the back, hoodie up, face behind a laptop. During the semester I wrongly assumed he was not paying attention, but the way he articulated what he got from storytelling in hat interview blew my assumptions apart. Also, during the last 2 weeks he was actually filming me in class- I played the part of a "boring professor in his project. Hah!I also had 2 or 3 students who lingered after class, we walked home across campus, and I so appreciated the way they described in words their interests, their desire to create media, not just check off assignments.The way things were set up, with students blogging, their blog posts syndicated together, having links that they can use to show their responses to assignments, their participating via twitter and the Daily create. I did not have to count and tally their numbers, instead they were asked to use those links to discuss their own level of participation. And I have to credit Martha Burtis with something I used often after for end of semester summary, the request to "Pay it Forward" -- students were asked to create and post in some media form (audio, video, graphics, their choice) a message of advice they would give to future students. By speaking to a future person, they always ended up saying more about themselves. I collected for these a few years in Storify (which went south) but you can find a good chunk of them still sitting there on the DS106 Advice to Students pageFor one semester were there was no DS106, I combined all of the materials many of us did for the 2013 "Headless DS106" indicating that there was a class with no teacher. That too flowed into what still exists as the Open Course "timeless" version and I believe is still used at least in structure by Paul Bond, who has carried the teaching torch longer than anyone, in his DS106 teaching.I spent a significant amount of time reading student blogs and giving constructive feedback, especially in the beginning, when they were new to it, and before they picked up that load. But reading all of their posts is what told me the most about their work. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/225291600912326656 Grades were given along the lines of percentages for the 2 major projects, then for weekly reflective blogging, and some measure of participation (twitter, creating new assignments, blog commenting). Easily all of this ds106 experience was a foundation for much of my later work. Networked Narratives (2017, 2018*, 2019, 2020, 2021: Kean University) #NetNarr was a course I co-taught with Mia Zamora at Kean University, and in many ways was a direct descendent of DS106. Students blogged and we syndicated posts to the main site, we had something like Daily Creates, even a few times a Bank of stuff to do. I put a SPLOT to use as a form of collecting final projects written like they were journal articles. We offered many parts of it to open participants. The set up was unusual in that Mia and the students were in a room in New Jersey, and I would be online during the week and show up in those old days using Google Hangouts on Air. Most years we co-taught the course, the 2018 asterisk is for because that year while Mia was on a Fullbright in Noway, we taught courses more in the parallel style. I actually taught class at Kean and never was in the classroom (that's another story) I'm easy in danger year of over explaining the course... The work that students blogged did was syndicated to a course site, grouped by year, and within categories and tags to see responses to different activities. Something seems to have gone awry from my FeedWordPress site, but I had a listing of all student blogs in my course as well as open participants, with links to their twitter stream, hypothesis annotation activity... for example here is the entry for one of our stellar open participants, Kevin Hodgson (thanks @dogtrax for being there every year): This was what was available as well for all students (as an important note, the class start up process, built as a Choose Your Own Way experience, encouraged/allowed students to use pseudonyms for blog names, twitter names, and even to opt out of using social media), a listing where their activity in the class is visible. Pretend Kevin is a student in my class, I and he has a reference to: His entire blog All of his blog posts syndicated into the class site (indicated by use of tags in his blog)His Twitter accountBut more than that, a means for him to look at his twitter activity within the context of the class and open participants (indicated by use of the #netnarr hashtag) by a link to a Twitter Tags Conversation Explorer (please if you use twitter hashtags make use of Martin Hawksey's amazing tool to archive and make a visualization of activity) -- but even better, a trick I learned actually generates this complex visualization with Kevin's node highlighted. Right there is a count of his contributions, the tally of times he has been replied to or @ mentioned... and if you really want to have your minds blown, click the button for Replay Tweets. A link to Kevin's Hypothes.is activity. This "data" is not just for me to use, it is for the student too, and I would much rather read how they describe their activity and contributions rather than tally up numbers in a spreadsheet. We also made use of grade contracts as a chance for students at the outset to declare their goals for the course. At the end of the course, they had to report back and self assess if they achieved their goal. I developed a system for this using Gravity Forms for the students to submit their initial contract (and they get a copy by email). At the end of the semester, I was able to resend these notifications, and another form used for students to share their response. This worked quite well both as a means to do these, but a way for students to honor their commitments. Learn more how this was done https://cogdogblog.com/2017/05/netnarr-contract-crafting/ Grading the Grading I'm not sure all of this amounts to much. I certainly cannot assert that my approach to grading is anything to be emulated. And it's not to say grades are just evil bad. For myself as a learner, they always worked as an incentive, but the grade itself was not the ultimate goal, it was more like a carrot hanging out there. And until the whole system changes and we are all Freire schools, well, the machine requires grades. I favor approaches where it's not me grading students, like a thing I am doing to them, there is action and responsibility on both parts. Grades ought to be a process of give and take on both learner and teacher side, but anything that can be done, be it ungrading or de-grading, to move them out of the ultimate goals for a learning experience. I am now at the end this long post and maybe giving myself a grade on it of ...... Featured Image: I am fairly sure this photo was a piece of old road equipment spotted at Goldfield Ghost Town in Apache Junction, Arizona, on a visit there with my friends John and Bobbi Ittelson. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6734732227 This is How Your Work is Graded flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I've been daunted by the ds106 Spreadsheet Invasion assignment where you are charged with creating an animation using the software designed for... sales reports, etc. It is, ironically, the first Design Assignment. And one that is least frequently done. But thankfully, it was my student Tiffany who undertook it bravely in her Tale of a Flower version that pushed me over the hump of inertia to try this. So here, I tell in a rather horribly inaccurate fashion, the process of Geology that form sedimentary rock (invasions of inland seas, rivers, and desert environments over time) and uplift/eroison processes that shape canyons. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhen9RSGj0U I did this while idling time yesertday at BWI airport, wine was involved (Malbec, I love relaxing at Vino Vola). A lady at the next time working on NUMBERS in her spreadsheet must have been tsk-tsking me coloring in cells. There is a fair bit of slop, I was not careful to move the selection box (I could not find a way to get it out of the way). But more or less, I just kept adding to it, coloring selections of cells and reverting them to no fill as needed- I ended up with 82 screen shots. When I wanted to elevate the landscape, I just deleted 3 rows from the top, and colored the empty cells at the bottom. I used an old Mac file renaming tool to change the file names to be "geo01.png, geo02.png" etc. This is because in QuickTime PLayer 7 You can do File- > Open Image Sequence..., select the first one, and it grabbs all the rest into a video file. I set the frame rate to be 1 second... Which was pretty horrible, so I brought into iMovie. I broke the main clip into sections by finding the pots I wanted to have different speeds, and splitting the clip (control click for menu, select "Split Clip") Then for each clip, I use the little menu in the top left to do a Clip Adjustment, and change the speed to make it go faster or slower: Beyond that, it was a matter of adding some titles, a few transitions. I grabbed a bit of the opening of John Mayall and the Blues Breakers "The Mist of Time" as a sound track. Another little trick is get some black screen on the end. You cannot use the "Fade to Black" transition without something to fade into. Sometimes I import a black PNG, but what I did here was to add a title sequence with just spaces in it (no text), which creates a video sequence of black. I could then extend the audio sound track to match, so there is some outtro music. This was quick and slightly dirty, I'd like to think about how to do something more elegant. It would be more useful to do some things with different sized columns, maybe make them square so you have pixel shapes to work with. Or perhaps the animation could eb done by creating the action as a long horizontal sequence, and doing a screen recording as you scroll the horizontal. But I love using Excel for something it was not built for, this is so Ed Parkourish. Things come around, as they say. Sometime in 1988, as a Geology graduate student on my way to my field study area near Bishop, California. I drove through Death Valley, with likely the obligatory photo of my car at the Sea Level sign. That was driving my 1973 Ford Maverick and a photo taken on film with my 35mm Nikon Nikkormat. I had no phone with me on that trip. Two days ago, I drove the same route, seeking the place to do the "now" photo: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Recreating a 1988 Photo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] This time it's me still driving a Ford, but now a 1988 Ford F-150 and the photo taken with an iPhone 6. I am not quite sure it's the exact spot, there are a few places the highway passes through sea level. In the 1988 photo you can see the Mesquite sand dunes in the background. The exact location does not matter much, I was there both times. This all triggered an Amazing Story of cover art. When I started working as a green ed-tech for the Maricopa Community Colleges, I digitized this photo with a scanner, and it was sitting on my web directory as a file named sealevel.jpg. A German pop band named The Sea Level, contacted me years later asking permission to use it for the cover of their CD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKYIKUd-res I still have their music floating around my iPod shuffle. I wish I could say their song came on as I was driving across Death Valley. Well I could, but... This is the Internet I still love. Bet yer Bloglines cannot do this! One of the features I treasured in my desktop RSS reader (back when I used NetNewsWire) was that it would periodically download the lastest feeds and store the content on my computer. This meant then if I was offline (e.g. on a plane), I could still browse and read the news. I had pretty much guessed that was not an option with a web-based browser. But on a recent plane trip, I discovered my guess was wrong. While waiting for my departing plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (where the offer free wireless in every terminal, take that you T-Mobile $$$ offered only other airports), I had opened my Google Reader and left the browser window open when I put the laptop to sleep. Later on flight, while using the computer, I looked for some reason at the browser -- and was pleasantly surprised that I could still key through the stories that were sitting in my reader -- which means that in its ajaxy splendor, Reader was dl-ing content locally. I'm just a googly fan-dog. My big/little sister Harriet is quite talented in many creative areas. I have a 26 year old quilt she made, an oil painting of the bicentennial tall ships she did in her teens, and a re-designed kitchen thanks to her help and decor taste. A little over a year ago she took up watercolor painting, and she has shared a number of ones she made from my photos. But this one she texted me is stunning: [caption id="attachment_56483" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Felix in water color, painted by my sister...[/caption] that she made from this photo I took of Felix the first week we was with me: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I was trying to think of a way to show them together, and remembered-- "DUDE YOU MADE A SPLOT FOR THIS!" That's right, that's what The Comparator does. Upload two images of the same size, and it publishes a "thing" where you can drag a slider across then to compare images. Actually, if you go to the site, the demo image is the before / after photos of my kitchen that Harriet helped me redecorate: I just made one with the Felix images-- check out the Watercolored Felix on the SPLOT or... if my code works, I should be able to embed it here: Well that's how bad my code is, looks like some Javascript conflicts in ye old SPLOT. Let's try it with the TwentyTwenty plugin: [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] Wow, I would have never guessed as a bratty little brother that my older sister would be so cool, thanks Sis! [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: Screen shot of the Comparator SPLOT composite of my photo of Felix and the version my sister painted from the photo Opening keynote for the NMC Regional Conference at Tulane is Words and Music, Crafts and Costumes, Ritual and... Radio: The Power of Old Media in New Orleans by Nick Spitzer, of American Routes "the radio program from New Orleans devoted to the sources and symbols of blues and jazz, country and gospel, roots rock and soul, as well as related ethnic, regional, popular and classical styles of the music and musicians that define the landscape of American vernacular culture." Spitzer presenting in image and music- In a conference devoted to the wide and dazzling array of new media in relationship to intimate community life in New Orleans and elsewhere, much of what may be extended in the classroom, broadcast or global networks comes from original human forms of expression. The implications of which are: pre-modern forms of artistic communication still speak to us, old modern forms like radio offer time-tested models of extending oral tradition and traditional aesthetics, and new media at their best often aim to recreate and create anew community experiences that we may feel are lost when the market-drivenrush to new technology values form and efficiency over content. (note- the audio is being recorded for all keynote sessions and will be posted ASAP to NMC web site). Opening music Tipitina by Professor Longhair - mix of Jazz, blues in New Orleans "gumbo" style. Showing photos from flood, maps, with version of music in minor key by Allen Toussaint, sets tone. Then a different version by Now playing Louis Armstrong (1925) photo with overlay of business card of banjo player John A St. Cyr as plasterer. Meaning of word Creole with many meanings, but has to do with creativity, being from other places, but creating something new as a "mix". Expresssed in glasswork, carpentry, trades with original styles reflecting these cultures. Fats Domino house has a "crafty" look in a post flood photo- nothing fancy at all a "double shotgun". "Fats speaks Creole". More upset about loss of 9th Ward than lost of his home. "I want the city rebuilt right" say the Creoles, they want it built like their own style, not from outside. In New Orleans, for every great musician are thousands of kids in the streets who wont make the big time, but are part of the rich culture in New Orleans. "Eddie Bo" interview after flood speaking of being a craftsman - all males learned how to build starting at age 5-- he learned bricklaying and carpentry. Loves this work as much as music, sense of pride in building. Ends with jazz version of "When the Saints go Marching In". Pride in the trades brought home to simple houses adorned with the crafts of these people... "a Cadillac sheen to a shotgun home." Spitzer, as native of Connecticut, found attraction to a sense of "Creole-ness" -- do not need to be born into it-- "to be Creole is to be whole- absorbing all of the mixes of your ancestry- a way to understand to who you are." New Orleans as place of tradition that was also progressive. With a big thud another well used educator web site not only bites the dust but totally poops the web. Just after publishing the newest version of Another Web Bites the Dust, the first tweet in my mention us this: https://twitter.com/ictlogist/status/963661023801741312 No, not Wikispaces! I've used the hosted wiki service since their start in 2005. I think I first dabbled in PBWiki (which was once cutely known as "making a wiki is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich" but now seems to be some corporate collaboration store front). Wikispaces was the backbone for my 2007 trip down under, the first home of 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story and more. There was one hoisted in 2008 as an appendix for the Web-Based Storytelling article I published with Bryan Alexander. I've used it since 2012 to house my various presentations and associated resources and another one to host more wiki-based presentations. 50+ web Ways to Tell a Story got a reboot/refresh as its own wikispace in 2010. I got NMC set up with hosted Wikispaces for the Horizon Project work and more from 2008 on (who knows what will happen to their archive). All of those links will be flushed down the web sewer hole in July. All of the places linking to them from elsewhere on the web will spawn dead link errors. Flushed: Over the last twelve months we have been carrying out a complete technical review of the infrastructure and software we use to serve Wikispaces users. As part of the review, it has become apparent that the required investment to bring the infrastructure and code in line with modern standards is very substantial. We have explored all possible options for keeping Wikispaces running but have had to conclude that it is no longer viable to continue to run the service in the long term. So, it is with no small degree of nostalgia, that we will begin to close down later this year. Notice how they make no effort to contribute the content to the Internet Archive. They do not make at least the effort to preserve existing content as static. Nope, just cut us all off. Oh we get such great options for export. You can export or download your data by following the steps below. Please note that this will download in Wikispaces Format and, if you are planning to upload this onto another site you may find it easier to copy and paste the data from directly your Wiki to your new chosen Wiki site. Please keep this in mind and allow yourself enough time to do this. Let me translate this for you- their exports are useless unless you want to cut and paste and reformat content. The export suggest exports for various wiki platforms (WikiMedia, DocuWiki, etc), but they are not importable data files (XML), they are just individual static wikitext. What's even worse, because of their session authentication, despite seeing traces of them in the Internet Archive, the Wayback machine just tosses you in a cycle of redirects. [caption id="attachment_65889" align="aligncenter" width="760"] No Wayback Machine path for Wikispaces. Bad Wiki.[/caption] I spent a good chunk of time last night seeing what I could do with their export. Here is the view of 50+ Ways as it stands now at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/ (link dies July 31, 2018, RIP) [caption id="attachment_65890" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The dying corpse of a 11 year old Wikispaces project[/caption] The HTML export gives you all of the content as separate pages, but unless you have internal links on the front, you are SOL because the navigation sidebar is gone. This is the export of the same wiki [caption id="attachment_65891" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The HTML export of the 50+ Ways wikispaces site[/caption] It's more or less all the content, sans format. I guess it's not horrible (I still had to do some global search and replaces to convert internal links that were absolute URLs). However I was determined to see if I could do a better archive job, so I turned to my trusty SiteSucker app. The first "suck" got me like 3000 files. But the first problem I noticed was that they were using URLs to Wikispaces for CSS, Javascript, and more. I toggled the setting in SiteSucker to download those apps, but it kept crashing (Wikispaces is blocking requests). So I went back to the other one, and started downloading local versions of all JavaScript and CSS files, plus images used in CSS. I ran about 35 search and replaces cross the entire directory (Thank you BBEdit, you are my lavation again). There were still a lot of un-necessary menu bars, wiki editing tools, and I opted to hide them by adding some CSS display:none for divs that contained the top menu bar, the wiki edit stuff. This was added at the bottom of the embedded CSS to hide the Wikispace chrome: .ws-theme-header .ws-theme-menu-inner, .WikiInternalHeaderNav, .WikiFooterNav.WikiElement, .btn-group.pull-right { display: none!important; } I did global search and replace to clean the footer and toss some shame at Wikispaces. F*** them. [caption id="attachment_65892" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Thanks for nothing, Wikispaces[/caption] More regex search and replace over 1000 files to fix URLs. It's likely still got problems, but I find the CogDog Archived version much more palatable that the export they crapped out: [caption id="attachment_65893" align="aligncenter" width="760"] My site sucked and manually cleaned archive of the 50+ Ways site[/caption] This was heinous stupid, tedious work to do. Yeah, I am guilty of expecting forever hosting of free stuff. But for some reason, maybe because Wikispaces was there so long, that maybe even if they folded, they would do so gracefully, and thinking of preserving the legacy of content created there. And often I justified it by saying that its worth it to use the kinds of tools teachers might do. Hell yes, I can build my own sites and wikis. But I felt like this was some talk walking. Hah. So let's be frank. Any company offering you a free web based service, no matter how smarmy their mission statement about making the world better, does not give a rats turd about your content. They will flush you at the drop of a dime. A penny. There are so many ways Wikispaces could have done this gracefully (and their front page is still offering services like it's same as it every was). They could have done something to maintain legacy content as static HTML. Or turned it over to the experts at the Internet Archive. Did they even communicate this problem to their so-called "community"? This stuff is valuable to many of us, and I would have been willing to pay to keep my wiki's alive. I didn't even get an email notification. Nope, they just flushed the tank. There go your wikis and mine. Swirling down the not found hole This one is a big turd going down the hole. Wikispaces is going front and poop center for the next video update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFjigsXHuyY Featured Image: 60073 Service Truck flickr photo by Brickset shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by slapping a Wikispaces logo on the smelly port-a-potty.