Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
I was happily iPodding my bicycle route home when my Shuffle went south, blinking amber lights. The battery drained, cutting the Clash off in mid song. Wow, after getting used to the audio track while biking, the lack of it was, well deafening. It turns out when I plugged it into my iBook at night, I was not getting any battery recharge since the computer went to sleep. I think that one did not make it into the user manual. So when I am seeking technical answers, do I reach for customer support, a "FAQ", and official help file, or even a "Knowledgebase"? Do I rush out and buy a fancy charger? No way José. (more…) It was just a simple daily create. Well today's could be simple (take a photo of a cloud) but the prompt was to play with the idea of the Judy Collins song Both Sides Now. Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air and feather canyons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way. But now they only block the sun, they rain and snow on everyone. So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow it's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all. Clouds as beauty to gawk at clouds as things which block the light and make you cold. What is the illusion, Judy? I got only a late in the day show of some variable textured clouds on a blue sky, billowing beyond a twin pair of apartments that are near my apartment I am staying in this month in Puerto Rico. My cloud photo felt so ordinary. So I tossed it into Intensify Pro, and added some more vivid settings. By I don't have the both sides. So now my idea is to put the before and after photos in the Knight Lab Juxtapose tool (worthwhile since it is one of the Web Tricks I am demo-ing tomorrow for a faculty workshop. So my both cloud sides are the real and the super real- HDR is really just representing the image data in a different set of intensities and values than the eye might see by itself. To use Juxtapose your images have to be somewhere on the net at a public URL- that could be a static URL from flickr, or tossed on your web server, Google Drive. or as I did mine, in my Public Dropbox folder. They do not host the thing for you, you get cut and paste iframe code that produces what (I hope) you see above. And I had to put it somewhere (here) to embed. But there it is. It's supposed to be responsive and work on mobiles. Both sides. This was the idea of my first SPLOT built last year, the Comparator, the one that is least developed and more wobbly. However, it does host the whole thing via a URL and offer embeds. This is one I did to compare a before after of an Album Cover mashup Both sides of clouds and juxtaposing? Top / Featured Image- partial of screen show my creation with the Juxtapose tool. Feel free to steal this image and MAKE LOTS OF MONEY! #BecauseThatHappensOften Talk About WordPres Fan Boy by cogdogblog posted 16 Aug '08, 1.24am MDT PST on flickr How cool to have dinner with ma.tt Mullenweg and satisfy my WordPress fanboy moment Wish me luck tomorrow, I present first on the schedule (rumor is there is actually a schedule for WordCamp). A fun evening meeting people who work for Automattic-- the people who make WordPress happen live all over the country, world, and manage the whole flat, distributed company quite nicely. Matt also mentioned what should be a wild presentation tomorrow on "Crazy Horse" a radical prototype of a new WP interface. And what a bush with fame- chatted with Ben Huh, the dude behind I Can Has Cheezburger et al and he shared some details on a new wacky site coming on line Monday. Funny, he said to me, "I think I recognize you from your photo on the WordCamp site" "Dude, my icon is a dog!" Oh did we laugh. I Can Has I Can Has Cheezburger Dude. Enough picture posting, I have to slash some slides to stuff my talk into a 20 minute slot. For those not lucky enough to attend the MERLOT 2003 conference (any conf in Vancouver is worthy), I just posted the content from our MLX poster session: Building the Maricopa Learning eXchange (Using a Bit of Competition and Bribery). How do you cultivate the use and contribution to a learning object repository? We will share some strategies we have used at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources that support learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges. We dashed the typical pasting papers on board approach for a metaphor-overload "mini-town" with model buildings (the warehouse), trucks, houses, satellite dishes, etc all with ties to their meaning in the MLX. I am not sure if people were interested in the MLX or just wanted to play with the toys (one of our sports cars is missing ;-), but we met lots of folks. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This audio reflection comes close to the end of my cross country sprint from Arizona to Virginia, as I close in on Fredericksburg Virginia, where I am now, and not planning on driving away from for a while. Maybe it will become Hallowed Ground Slices of Life 009: 90 miles from Fredericksburg I had just listened to Scottlo, who inspired me to try this audio reflection, end his Slices of Life with number 47 "End of this Chapter", his own path. It's been remarkable to follow him from his start, when he was questioning everything about his teaching, to the torrent of excitement he achieved by number 47. Many ways to fill in Scottlo's blank: Always Be _________ing I am looking forward to first face meeting with my ds106 students, and plan to meet individually with students and review their blogs, get to know who is who. Tonight's class plan to be hands on, with a crack "gentle" whip for some who had not yet set up blogs, reminder tneed to embed media rather than linking, and urge the writing in their own voice, not the school voice. I plan also to how to set up categories in blog for organizing as well as setting up permalinks to have different forms of blog urls. The next phase is making the space their own, starting with theming, but going into widgets, plugins, etc. As a great example rossannamarie.me has done an interesting restructure by making a landing page, and building a navigational structures to the blog portion and a separate update summary that journals how the blog grows It is also time to turn up the heat on commenting and need to be linking more in their written posts. The first round of reflection posts on Cyberinfrastucted were mixed, some just "I think this is cool" when really I want them to reflect on what it means to them,a nd to connect to other ideas, not write the general school report summary. I hope to have them circle back later to their initial Cyberinfrastructure post at the end of the term, to see if the class in which they are actually doing this has changed or evolved their first idea. There is a fair amount of student pushback on use of technology, probably from Gardner's quote about "everyone needs a cyberinfrastructure" Just as the real computing revolution didn't happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won't happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment. This vision goes beyond the "personal learning environment"5 in that it asks students to think about the web at the level of the server, with the tools and affordances that such an environment prompts and provides. I rambled a bit on Beth Kanter's post on content curation, citing the prolific Robin Good as an example of someone that does this to the nth degree (and I agree with what he does as being a flashlight into the bag of gold). I agree with the value of the recommended tools, but not as a total toolset (e.g. scoop.it) in that they are all *external* Both Beth and Robin exemplify the balance of managing their own digital space, much as the digital locker in Gardner's talk, and what we are asking students to do in this class. My last bit was an idea for the next This Week in ds106 live vide show with Jim, with me pretending to skype in, and apologizing for not getting there in time. Jim will get angry, and then I will walk on the set. (later) We did pull it off that afternoon: http://vimeo.com/35916371 May 2 is but one the 365 days per year, another block on the calendar, but also it is World Tuna Day. Who knew? Skip on by if you, rare reader, are looking for something difference for me recycling family memories. It's my blog! This day for me is the marking of my Dad's birthday, the last one I celebrated with him was the last he celebrated in 2001. His cake was given in the hospital where his present was the cancer diagnosis that took him from us in less than 4 months. I spotted my usual memory objects, one of which is an ancient long wooden level that once resided in his basement tool corner of the family home in Baltimore. I feel the worn indents where his hands might have held the tool, the nicks, trying for any sense of life presence, which of course is not there. He'd not want me being sad on his behalf, he'd want some "hello Junior" "hello senior" conversation on the phone. I just try to keep the memory of his throaty voice in my head, it seem so far away and faint. As a kid, as a young adult, you do not foresee having to construct the memories, as my parent's presence was as solid as the ground I stood on. Maybe it's not practical, maybe I should have thought more of being without him. I never sat down and recorded his stories. And no one is left to fill them in. All I have is my memory and the sensations. Hello sadness. Hello memories of our regular family summers at the beach in Ocean City, MD. Dad's smiles were the biggest, broadest, most radiant there. He'd emerge from the surf with "that grin." One memorable summer we were there in the tail end of a hurricane, I believe it was Hurricane Agnes in 1972 (?). One day was too dangerous to even be outside, we huddled safely in our small apartment. The surf the next day was too rough for the kids to swim, but the beach was open. Dad went out three times in the surfm each time using his toes to pick up and bring back a conch shell. It was heroic to me. My Mom still had them when we cleaned out her house. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3226791584 The Three Shell Day flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Yesterday, as the bonus part of my birthday the week before (my birthday 5 days before dad). Cori and Jessy Lee took me on a sightseeing adventure to visit, learn about, and take photos at Batoche National Historic Site. The park was not open but we had obtained permission to walk in, we had the whole place to ourselves. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/51153037285 2021/365/121 Batoche Time flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It was time to take in the scenery, but also the impact and resonance of the 1885 battle that squashed the Métis resistance, but also gave light to the ways of life that had been established there before this. I spotted a reminder in the cemetery. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/51151262777 Father flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And we then start talking the ins and outs of taking photos of markers, but agreeing that it's part of memory sustaining. What do we have without our memories and the things that can summon them? Out on the river trail, Cori pointed me to the snowberries (Symphoricarpos what grand Genus naming), and how her own Dad explained to hear that being in one of those patches was the place for us to have conversations with those that have passed. I took some time to just stand here, and summon up the words I might say to Dad. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/51151264552 In The Snowberries with Dad flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) That conversation is just between me and him, but it helped in a way to tune into the time echoes, like rocks skipping across the lack of forever of past conversations. Whether you believe in the power of talking from the snowberries or not, it's more about just stopping and being with the ones you can no longer talk to. They are only gone if they are forgotten. And shortly there after, the stormy clouds and coldness of the wind lifted. And the light emerged. Sure, just a coincidence. Some suspension of belief helps. Happy birthday always, Dad. I shall always mark this day. Featured Image: A photo of dad's level taken today with personal photo of him in maybe 1994 superimposed on top. It's my image, but like all, I release my stuff into the breeze of public domain using Creative Commons CC0. I was pleased to see one of my new, "bestest" colleagues I got to know this year, Sue Waters get a well deserved recognition link from Stephen Downes for her chock full of good advice post on My Advice On Being A More Effective Blogger! (For another gem see her illustrated post on getting more out of Google Reader). As Stephen writes: The advice about reading other blogs and taking part in conversations is spot on. If you think your blog is a 'publication' or a form of 'broadcasting' then it will not be very successful. I cannot echo this enough, and have long done so, to remind people in all the excitement and frenzy of "publishing" in this user-generated, everyone can create, Read/Write web, the act of participating in other people's spaces sometimes gets lost. It's something I mentioned recently as "everyone's favorite subject" - and the point there was not to promote vanity, but to underscore the power of acknowledgement- be it a comment, an attribution link, or just credit made public. I was harping on it back in 2003 with a statement that "Blogging is a Social Act" (note to web selves- the old "Jade" server this BlogShop once resided on was axed after I left Maricopa- please all bless the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for locating lost pages). Stephen also mentioned: I also stress the importance of having a blogging routine - I have been in meetings all day today but the day isn't done until the newsletter goes out. but I add another routine- taking time when cruising Twitter streams or RSS summaries- jump over to someone else's blog and write a comment. Not just "nice post"- but add something, disagree, provide context, references, join the conversation. And this all leads me to the actual long winded end goal of this post- a "blogging" habit I try to do that has nothing to do with blogs but with photos. On some regular basis, I peruse my flickr contact photo stream- the latest photos of all people I have added as contacts (please don't say, "I have no contacts"- this says you have missed the participating part of the social sharing of photos). In a matter of say, 15 minutes, I can send comments or acknowledgments to a lot of people who's pictures I admire, or who have posted something that caught my eye, or reminded me of my own experience to share. So yes, it takes some time from those important other tasks (deleting email, jabbering on twitter, poking Facebook "friends"), but remind yourself of just how damn good it feels when someone else, especially someone you don't know, acknowledges your blog post, your photo, yourself with even a small comment. Believe me, it goes a long way, on both ends of the giver and receiver. So jump out of your own publishing corner and spend some time in in those of others. I guarantee, over time, it pays itself forward. flickr foto 2 p.m. monday commuteavailable on flickr downtown dallas straight ahead, obscured by fog. Ugh. Arrive in Dallas a few hours ago, and its about 106 and 90 percent humidity. I... can..... barely..... breathe..... I.... am..... swimming.... in sweat. And what a nice chatty cab drivery I had. I was almost at the hotel when I noticed he had every a/c vent pointed towards the driver! modified from Wikimedia Commons public domain image I am not blogging about not blogging about not blogging... but dangerously close seeing the last post dated September 30. Last night I closed had my two week round the world loop, and yes, some 140 years later, I have some speed advantages over Mr Fogg, who to rely on steamers and railways to win his 80 day wager. But he got rich on his trip; I came home tired and sick-- having eluded catching a cold the entire time, much of in enclosed space of planes recirculating other people's exhalations. While riding the bus from the Phoenix airport terminal to long term parking, I calculated via my TripIt tracking that between September 22 and October 6 I traveled 29,118 miles by plane. It was (a) a nutty way to see the world because I did not see a whole lot of it; (b) all related to a series of important NMC meetings; (c) something I chose so I cannot blame anyone but the tired dog in the mirror. I'm behind on my 365 photos. On my dailyshoot photos. On about half a dozen blog posts bouncing in my head. On prepping a badly needed update to 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. On all kinds of work projects. I'm no even trying to pretend I can manage the #plenk2010 readings. Har. I missed some hellacious storms in Arizona. My vegetable garden turned a giant bowl of yellow squash and tomatoes while gone, and most of the plants are starting to show their weariness, likely from the cooling evening temps. I am facing the car who's tire blasted on the way out of here and needs to be fixed. There are weeds the size of collies in my yard. My training for the half marathon has a big divit in the weekly miles. Can't even think about it all with the jackhammers pounding the school and the dry hacking coughs I can do in peace in a quiet house. Can I start whinging now? Or stop? So let me turn this cranky cloud inside out for some silvery interiors. This trip included: A big scoop of frequent flyer miles. A brief respite in California with my special someone, and even there, probably the first run I can say I did not hate. Several fine legs of comfortable flight on Air New Zealand, some of the best, friendly service and useful amenities anywhere. They have the best clubs too, with real food, and a self serve bar. But the top thing was their rugby themed safety announcement, which certainly grabs your attention like no other: A chance to see the unique home of Phil Long in Brisbane, Rana Batan Waru, truly a temple under the trees. Too bad he was deathly clobbered with a nasty virus (which I am assuming I did not catch... I said.... I am assuming...) I did a keynote for Kaplan University's online conference, KU Village 2010, at 1:00am the day I arrived... and presented from bed. It's a whole new work world. A great breakfast with Cyprien and family plus a walk down the Brisbane river trail. Here I learned about, and observed about the dive bombing magpies (and a day later got pegged myself, ouch!) Several great dinners and conversations with my boss, Larry. Plus we ran a great meeting related to the ensuing 2010 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand Edition. The idea was to bring together educational leaders and develop a series of Strategic Action steps meant to further the adfances of technology in higher education down under (see draft of Brisbane Communiqué) Was an extra bonus to re-connect with long time Aussie friends Robyn Jay and Michael Coghlan Had a great donner with Steve Wheeler, who ironically was in Brisbane for a different even and also keynoted for the Kaplan University conference. What are the odds... Saw some great exhibits at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, enjoying most of all the photographic portraits of Douglas Kirkland, a long time Look photographer I never heard of. A too brief return visit to Wellington, NZ, where I was there last almost exactly 10 years ago. A city near the sea built on hilly land shaped by earthquakes- a San Francisco recipe for sure. A second version fo the same meeting for the Horizon project with a group of New Zealand Educators, again focused on outlining the critical issues for advancing the use of technology in higher education ((see draft of Wellington Communiqué). Gordon Suddaby from ACODE was an amazing host. Also got to meet the godfather of Wikieducator, Wayne Mackintosh I thank the weather gods who turned the rainy weather into blue sky for my last free afternoon in Wellington, got to walk a bit under sunshine, make a short visit to Te Papa, and had a great visit with Kristina H who invited me to Beer o'clock at her company, Catalyst. Okay, New Zealand is a long freaking way from Barcelona. Like half a world. It was 1 hour to fly from Wellington to Auckland, another 11 hours to Hong Kong, another 13 to Paris, and another hour to Barcelona. While I had a four hour layover in Hong Kong, it was not enough to visit my friend Nick Noakes. That was a bad plan to fly through. Met an interesting young couple on that long flight to Hong Kong, they on their way to London- he worked as a plaster, but was excited to talk about working on the set of a hollywood movie being shot in the Giold Coast- his steps he build would be famous. I was excited to find some Manuka honey in the Auckland duty free shop, one for my friend Cheryl and the other for my Mom when she comes to visit. I was dismayed when the French security took my honey because their machine could not identify it. Yeah, they were on high alert with the latest terror scare (there were 3 different checkpoints on a simple transfer). But now I have to tell Cheryl and Mom I lost the honey. Barcelona is always magical, from the curvy gothic streets to hearing a trumpet being soulfully played in the streets at 6:00am- and the food, the food, the food! It was a pleasre to be part of the Open EdTech 2010 meeting, this year with the avant garde topic of Campus Life- not what you think. It was a look at what makes the online learning experience engaging and attractive, looking at everything BUT the courses and the content, where usually all the focus goes. Eva de Lera is a truly brave and visionary leader at the UOC, and a host among hosts for making the experience memorable, including again, an experience at Cook & Taste... the details from the meeting are still being summarized but a short brief will be out next week, and we at the NMC are due to publish the full report in a month. The rest of the trip home is a blur of weariness, coughing, and dozing on Delta, which feels like the chintziest of airlines after Air New Zealand. I'm still a boat load of photo uploads behind. And all that other stuff. But I did go around the world. I think I just wanted to be able to say that. Not that I would do it again under the same time constraints. Don't quote me on that. I sit down planning to write some straight forward documentation, and somehow a stick shift manual transmission metaphor slides in and I am photoshopping SPLOT logos on old book covers. Welcome to my easily distracted mind. Before I go too far off the blog post map, I am covering here: Some interesting uses of Paul Hibbitt's Docsify This to render/embed/link to markdown source content in other contexts (and invoke the ghost of transclusion) Splitting out my long READMEs into meaningful chunks A set of generalized installation/ update instructions for WordPress SPLOTs Addressing a request from Reclaim Hosting for instructions on updating SPLOTs previously installed with their cpanel custom installers (thanks Lauren Hanks for being so patient) Let's shift this post into gear! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6279378208 Schwinn Stick Shift flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Docsify This [These] SPLOTs I'd have to write a series of posts to credit what Paul Hibbitts has been churning out with Docsify This, a nifty (SPLOT-ish) web tool to on the fly display markdown content in a friendly, document style format, clear of the Github interface (if that is the source). I began a process a few months back to use this to embed the SPLOT documentation within the Theme's options area- previously I was manually converting markdown to HTML (and often lapsed making changes), but this way it would always display the most current documentation via an iframe. https://cogdogblog.com/2022/08/docsifying-splot-docs/ I realized later I could again use this approach on entries in the Mother SPLOT web site. I had previously copied the list of exampe sites created with a splot, but again, I did do much copying. But now, I am separating out from the old long sprawling readme, a separate markdown just for examples. As an example (oi), for, the TRU-Collector, see the Examples In Action as source markdown, but I can also generate a stand alone version with Docsify This, but even better, the entry for TRU Collector on splot.ca displays the same content embedded within it. What this means is, when update a SPLOT's documentation or example list in the Github markdown source, everywhere I display it with Docsify This is immediately current. This to me is a huge efficiency gain and a new flavor of transclusion. So far, I have implemented this on TRU Writer, TRU Collector, and SPLOTbox. Other SPLOTs stand in line... as well as the calling card themes (partly done with WP-Dimension). The WordPress SPLOT Happy Book It is a guidebook, after all... Answers to the Secret Might Be in Your Hands flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified to change “Life” to “SPLOT” and add the logo Actually it is the next issue that led to doing this, but I set out to write some general documentation for all WordPress SPLOTs, to cover how they are manually added and updated as WordPress child themes (and urge consideration of the fab WP-Pusher plugin that can install directly from Github source and automatically update). While I could have just created a post/page somewhere on the splot.ca site, I felt that itch to try the same approach. So, again, the source of all content is a markdown source in a splot repo I use as a "lab". With Docsify, you have a stand alone readable version with navigation managed by section headings, and the same content is iframed inside a post on splot.ca (this enables being able to put other content around it for context). Reclaiming The Updating of App Installed SPLOTs Like the old SNL act of Chico Escuela, "Reclaim Hosting has been berry berry good to SPLOT..." Yes, Reclaim Hosting supported development time for me early on, but they did more when Tim Owens created the first of several Installatron scripts that added to every Reclaim client's cpanel, the set of one click SPLOT (and more) installers. https://cogdogblog.com/2018/11/double-splot/ This saved people the steps of installing the custom themes but also set them up with helpful plugins, initial settings, and even some demo content. It was set also to push out updates when it checked for WordPress version updates. I was quite proud of my stuff in the Featured Apps row (3 calling card themes there too)! I have no idea how it worked, but like once or twice a year I would create a new Github release, send Tim a note, and updates happened. Yet these updates always lagged behind the more frequent changes I made to the source. And that got more critical recently with the PHP 8 changes, which I am still catchup up on fixing (yes, on many sites I am using the MultiPHP cpanel to keep at PHP7.4) I had no idea of the complexity of the Installatron scripts until Lauren Hanks from Reclaim let me know months ago that they were not going to be able to support such updates, but were willing to keep them available if developers (me?) took care of that. In the interest of understanding, asked to have them transfer me a copy of what I thought was a simpler one to learn with, the WP-Dimension calling card theme installer. I made an account at Installatron com and Reclaim transferred me a copy to play with. I did the best I could in guessing what needed updates, but the command line install stuff baffled me, and even with some reclaim tech support I pretty much failed on becoming a viable Installatron-er. In November of this year, the word went out that the offering of these installers was going away. To my mind, I am not losing sleep. And in fact, I believe that people will learn more about managing SPLOT sites if they go through the set-up process themselves, rather than having it just pop fresh out of the oven. This leaves though two issues that lead to the creation of the WordPress SPLOT Guidebook: A general guide for creation of a new SPLOT site How to update existing SPLOTs that would have been installed previously from the Reclaim custom installers One major improvement in a WordPress 5.x update was allowing themes like SPLOTs initially installed as uploaded ones to be updated the same way-- just add a theme and upload the new version. That is quite a leap, as my usual update approach was old school FTP. The one small hitch I had to write up was having to do some extra name changes to the Github downloaded themes . It takes a theme in a directory named coolsplot and downloads it as coolsplot-master.zip. To WordPress, this is a completely separate theme. So for these sites there is a necessary ZIP Dance move: There is a full section for this in the new WordPress SPLOT Guidebook. Does this make it clearer or not? Let's see how smooth my gearshifts operate. Vroooooom! Featured Image: SPLOT stick shift by Alan Levine based on Stick Shift [Transportation] flickr image by trustypics shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license modified by inserting SPLOT logo and replacing gears 4 and 5 for Update and Install, shared here as well CC BY-NC Last week I posted some "interview" questions for educators who have their own self-hosted domain; here are a few first responses. My idea for doing this is to give some wisdom of others who have gone down this road to our participants in the Ontario Extend project supported by eCampus Ontario. These participants working towards their collection of module badges, and more generally looking to network with other Ontario educators, are blogging their work. And we are aggregating posts in our own blog hub. Many are getting their blogging chops going with free, hosted blogs, but we have available for, those ready for it, the chance to have two years of hosting their own domain, all provided by eCampus Ontario. Still the question is, beyond the what, but why? So in the response bin: https://twitter.com/sandramardene/status/1005202062781526016 Sandy Brown Jensen (mindonfire.us) is an artist, storyteller, long time community college teacher in Oregon, and ds106 participant. In her domain interview, Sandy gives a why One thing I have noticed is that a lot of people in the wide circles of my acquaintances and life activities Google me, and when they do, I want them to land on a blog of my latest creative work, which is a different motivation for keeping it up than just garnering comments. It is my online reputation and resume, and it works for me in surprising ways. as well as a poetic rationale Having your own domain needs to spring from your own desires: as a way to talk back to the world; as a way to talk to yourself while allowing others to listen in; as a way to document your passage through this all-too-brief passage of light that is your life. Thanks Sandy! Through connections, Sandy and I have become friends, and we have visited each other's homes. From Scotland, primary school educator John Johnston (johnjohnston.info) titles his response A Kingdom of One's Own. https://twitter.com/johnjohnston/status/1005498332880437248 I got to know John too through DS106, and his clever inventions, experiments, and playfulness with media has been my fortune to know. On a trip a few years ago to Scotland, I got to sit in John's kitchen and geek out in person. Like many, John did start out on free services (blogger) but eventually hot his own domain. His urge to consider domains rings to his nature as a real Experimenter I like the idea of my own space more than a domain. I like futzing. It is important, to me, to have one place. Sites in silos, or aol, or tilde spaces are fine playgrounds.but services go away. The domain is just an address pointing to my messy kingdom where I can do what I want, if I can. I find great value in having my blog go back for years. I search it often. If I’d trusted a silo my content might have vanished by now. Ideally everyone would get a domain automatically. Obviously this would make for a lot of domains. Colin Madland (madland.ca) educator and technologist in British Columbia also answered the call for responses. https://twitter.com/colinmadland/status/1005592470069972992 I guess these are all people I know, as I got to meet and work with Colin in 2014 when I had a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University. Colin has two domains and a collection of sites with in. His reasoning for having a domain includes: I appreciate the freedom and flexibility of having control over my domain. I have learned a tremendous amount from making mistakes and having to troubleshoot through them to come to a resolution. The experience of trying to export my old blog from Blogger was a little ridiculous, and it is nice to know that I could pick up and go with relative ease with my current setup. In order to succeed and persist, new domain owners will need an active community around them that is willing to be open and generous with their experience and their difficulties. Aaron Davis (https://readwriterespond.com), k-12 educator in Melbourne Australia, is someone who I've crossed paths with many places online. I got to meet him in person last November when I visited Melbourne. https://twitter.com/mrkrndvs/status/1006159976430292993 Aaron is very much a technical experimenter and is very interested in affordances of this thing called the IndieWeb. He was very much influenced by a network of educators, and made a leap from Blogger to his own domain: In part, my domain name comes from my interest in the notion of marginalia, the stuff that we write, but never gets written. As J. Hillis Miller explains: "As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading." And also, I added my own response, as I believe in doing the very thing I ask others to do. Pretty much you can see that people who have responded so far are ones from my learning network, and that alone says a lot about cultivating a thing. And there is irony, that every one who responded is someone who these online connections led to in person meeting, and friendship as well. Chris Aldrich (https://boffosocko.com/) has a domain name I love, one with a story involving Muppets, one that makes you curious. And now we get into the category of People I Know Online and Have Yet to Meet. https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1006980443143471106 Thanks for your interview responses, Chris. Chris is an active advocate and practitioner of the Indie Web movement, like just that selecting this chunk of text in his post, offers not only a means to annotate it with Hyothes.is but also a url to deep link to the selection: Generally I do everything others would do on any one of hundreds of other social media websites (and I’ve got all those too, though I use them far less), but I’m doing it in a centralized place that I own and control and don’t have to worry about it or certain pieces of functionality disappearing in the future. I can totally nod in agreement with the metaphor of Commonplace Book: In large part, I use my website like a modern day commonplace book. It’s where I post most of what I’m thinking and writing on a regular basis and it’s easily searchable as an off-board memory. I’m thrilled to have been able to inspire others to do much the same, often to the extent that many have copied my Brief Philosophy word-for-word to their “About” pages. And I must just end up wholesale quoting Chris's post: Collecting, learning, analyzing, and creating have been central to academic purposes since the beginning of time. Every day I’m able to do these things more quickly and easily in conjunction with using my own domain. With new tools and standards I’m also able to much more easily carry on two-way dialogues with a broader community on the internet. I hope that one day we’re able to all self-publish and improve our own content to the point that we won’t need to rely on others as much for many of the moving parts. Until then things continue to gradually improve, so why not join in so that the improvement accelerates? Who knows? Perhaps that thing you would do with your domain becomes the tipping point for millions of others to do so as well? https://boffosocko.com/2018/06/13/the-story-of-my-domain/ That last part is not strictly related to domain, but there is a connection. William Ian O'Byrne (wiobyrne.com) started with a domain required for a doctoral degree program, but also spent time working on a few other platforms before "bringing it all home" to his own domain. As I mentioned earlier, when I first started this journey, I did it because it was a requirement for my doctoral program. But, as time advanced, I wondered why I should not respond or comment on news in my area of inquiry. Why shouldn’t I get involved, make my voice heard, and share out opinions and work online. https://twitter.com/wiobyrne/status/1009522131430989830 As something he teaches it makes sense to be "in the game": Having a domain is important to me as I research, develop, and teach. My main area of focus is the literacy practices of individuals in online and hybrid spaces. As such, it’s important (IMHO) for me to “walk the walk…and talk the talk.” I should build and experiment in online publishing, and explore the impacts on my digital identities. William notes that what he finds important in the careers of academics, to hone and manage their representation online, is not really taught to newly minted professionals: Finally, keep in mind that most of us are not taught to do this in the preparation for our careers. We should be, but we’re not. Most of the people developing and facilitating these educational and career prep programs are trying to figure all of this out for themselves…let alone teach you. We need to develop a domain that we control and put in the same amount of polish that we do our offline identities. Offline, we pick out a certain outfit, shoes, and hairstyle that fits our persona. We have a certain way that we want to be viewed, and select options, or habits that help create that persona. Online, we’re often a mess of half-formed elements and inconsistent information that doesn’t share the “real” version of your digital identity. Think about the version of you that you want to create…and make it happen. Even More Stories Now they are coming in! Here are all responses saved as a Twitter Moment. Interviewing Your Domain Got a domain story to share? If you are participating in Ontario Extend and your blog is connected to our hub just post with a tag of whydomain and the magic of tags will add it to our collection. If you are from elsewhere, please tweet to @ontarioextend with a #whydomain hash tag (see responses). I'd sure love to hear more stories, especially from people I don't know. And for closing, I reference a post Aaron linked to, from API Evangelist Kin Lane (kinlane.com) about Many Perspectives On Internet Domains Many folks have no idea what a domain is. That they type them in regularly in their browsers, click on them, let alone that you can buy and own your own domain. This illiteracy actually plays into the hands of tech entrepreneurs, and each wave of capitalists who are investing in them--they do not want you knowing the details of each domain, who is behind them, and they want to make sure you are always operating on someone else's domain. It is how they will own, aggregate, and monetize your bits, always being the first to extract any value from what you do online, and via your mobile phones. I am captivated by this version of our online world that is unfolding around us. What worries me is the lack of understanding about how it works and some awareness of where they are all operating when online. People don't seem concerned with knowing what is safe, what is not. What worries me the most is that number of people who don't even have the concept of a domain, domain ownership, and any sense of separation between sites online. After that, the misuse, misinformation, and obfuscation of the digital world by people operating in the shadows and benefitting from ad revenue. I know many folks who would argue that we need to create safe spaces (domains) like Facebook where people can operate, but I feel pretty strongly that this is an Internet discussion, and not merely a platform one. Featured image: Many-Perspectives-on-Internet-Domains-Kin-Lane.jpg by Aaron Davis used as his blogged response to the interview questions Yet another exmaple to show that weblogs can be more than just a place for teen diaries and cat fetishes, Steven Cohen has hoisted a presentation into Blogger format- see "Staying Ahead of Your Patrons With Weblogs and RSS". Is it anything different than a garden variety PowerPoint slide show? No, not in terms of content- it is a linear series of bullet point screens, some with hyperlinks. But is that novel? Yes, because instead of pushing out a 3 Mb PowerPoint by email, it is just a few k to send a URL. Plus it can be updated later. Plus it can be made available to those not in the room and will be there for a long time. Plus it can get comments from others. Can your PowerPoint do that? But where is the familiar blue background, the cool screen builds, wipe transitions and woosh sounds? No comment. I just enjoy seeing blogs used for un-intended purposes, and given Steven's content, it is the ideal vehicle to present information about blogs. It's very rare that I go to the twitter web interface to read tweets (in their soon to be quaint 140 character limit form); like many I rely heavily on the multiple stream view of columns in Tweetdeck. Left side is my full stream which I barely look at; next is a column for a list I call "frienz" which are really the ~120 people who's tweets I look at regularly. Then there are a few columns for various hash tags, direct messages. To me, it's almost what the power of creating a collection of blog feeds in a news reader as compared to just visiting a list of blogs. So I have an impending dilemma in the ramp up of #western106 the open version of #ds106 I am prodding. There is going to be tag slop. I almost never want to ask people to use multiple tags. So some people will use just #western106, some will add the #ds106 because that's a more general audience, and some will cover their bases and do both. I have done all 3 this week. The thing I did not want to have to do is to set up a #western106 column to sit next to my #ds106 one. I tried a little experiment with the search box. If I put #western106 #ds106 in, what I see are tweets that used both hash tags. An intersection. It's AND logic. It's not what I want. You can see the same results via the web search interface. Then I wondered what would happen if I used an OR in the search too, #western106 OR #ds106, and now I see tweets that use either tag (or both)! BAM! It's a Union. It's OR logic. It's what I want. You can again see the same results via the web search interface. And this is much more useful. Comparing my #western106 OR #ds106 column with my #ds106 one you can see my second tweet in the left column, with just a #western106 is of course not in the right column. And that you can see a tweet like the one from Paul Bond, with just a #ds106 tag in the right, is in my new column on the left. Some dexterity with logical expression goes a long way in all kinds of search tasks. As an undergraduate student in the late 1980s at the University of Delaware, I took this special self-paced course in Logic (rightfully so from the Philosophy Department) where we had a workbook and a series of assessments. Heck, it was no different from a lot of online courses now. And it worked. I got logic in my head (only some if it, I sure do a lot of illogical things every day). Add a little bit of OR to your searching. I bet you could construct some complex queries, maybe fleshing them out on the twitter advanced search page. Here I set up a search for all tweets containing the words disruption and education exclude ones that include Gates and also ones that mention @audreywatters: And yep, it produces some tweets! including of all things the voice of Don "In a World..." Lafontaine I can copy the search terms in the field in the upper right, and use them in Tweetdeck From here I can make a column out of this because I need to track this stuff. So how can you step up your twitter search mojo? Just doing a column on a hashtag is pretty ordinary. Now you have a trick. Top / Featured Image Credit: "A Confidence Trick - JM Staniforth" by Joseph Morewodd Staniforth - http://papuraunewyddcymru.llgc.org.uk/en/page/view/3281320 Evening Express (Wales). Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. I love photos and I love maps, but I've not been the best at doing both together. I almost never remember to go back to flickr and place my photos on the map, so less than 10% of my photos are geotagged. I really want the process to be automatic, the best I do is on my iPhone photos which can geotag at the time of the camera shot. Back in January, I saw a story on the new GISTEQ Phototrackr, a very small and portable GPS device. The principle simple- the Phototrackr records your locations and time stamped at regular intervals, and software then can "locate" the photos by matching (or interpolating) by the time stamp on the photo. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was stuck for a while... because I could not get my MacBookPro or my PC to even recognize the device. The GISTEQ support was... well non existent (no response to emails, and limited helpful responses in the sites's forums). I sat it aside for almost 3 months! When I returned to the GISTEQ site, now there was helpful information pointing to a new driver and software, and badda boom badda bing, it worked! The downside was I had to import photos into the GISTEQ software to add the geo data to them. And the software they give you with the device will not geotag RAW images (you have to buy the upgraded version) so at first I thought I'd end up using just my old pocket cameras, export the images from the card, drop them into GISTEQ to geocode, then drop into Aperture to edit. Lots of steps. In about the same time frame, I switched to using Aperture 3 which has a new "Places" feature, which can map the photos that have embedded geolocation, or provides a map tool as well where you can drop your photos. But I also noticed there was a feature to import GPX files, so if I could somehow get the tracks exported from the PhotoTrackr, I'd be set. It's not too complicated, after all. The funky thing about the Phototrackr is you have to remember to turn the thing on before popping it in the USB port. In the software, I act as if i have photos to geocode, so I simply ask it to download the data from the PhotoTrackr: which opens the device, so I then just import This brings the data off of the device into the software. Now I click the "GPS Log Manager" button in the bottom left, and find the track in the list that matches the date/time I want to geotag. This brings up a preview of the data, and there is a button on the right to export the data as a GPX file: which I just save on my computer. Over in Aperture, it took some fumbling to find the way to geo tag- if you go directly to "Places" you see only the photos that have already been geotagged. So I go back to my normal gallery/editing view, select the photos I want to geo tag, and then select Places from the View menu. From here I hit the GPS button in the bottom left, and select "Import GPX file" from the menu. This imports my data file and creates a track on my map. The problem I have had so far is that it now shows my map from the world view layout. I did not see an easy way to zero in on my new track besides a series of zoom and pan (I am sure I am missing something). Once I can see my track, if I simply drag all the photos that should be located and drop them on the track, it attaches the appropriate longitude and latitude to each photo: At this time, I'm not all that interested in the Aperture map, but now when I upload to flickr, it adds the latitude/longitude to each photo. It's still not seamless, but its a process that works now in my normal photo review flow; I dont have to geocode in some other software (I only need it to get the data off the device). Maps and Photos- two great tastest that go well together! Yes, I know what SEO is, a term I don't profess any useful knowledge (or interest) in. My simple approach has been- you want a lot of people to see your stuff? Write/publish a lot of it, share it. But don't try to crack some secret sauce success. No, I am writing about something different, something that happens often enough (or at least did before) that I tag things with it. And it's another helpful answer to the Why Blog question-- I pursue Serendipity Energy Opportunities. These are the rather unpredictable amazing true stories that can happen (no guarantee) when you share something online. And it's not on me to suggest to anyone else to be this way, it's my preferred way of being. Enough banter, get to the point already, blog author! Amongst the predominant blog comment volume/mass/density of spam and ridiculous email messages like "Paul" https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1071990906826514433 consider yourself fortunate to get one like I did yesterday. It's in response to this rather minor in the stack of things in the world post I wrote on Secrets Beneath a Chair. It's all because last March, after an embarrassing number of years not doing it, I had the carpets dry claimed at the house in Strawberry. So there is an accident that opens the door. I picked up a special family memory, the rocking chair that once belonged to my brother. In putting it upside down on something else, I saw something I had never noticed- like a little mystery clue to the origin of the chair. There the name of a furniture company and large stencil ? the model? plant? With some digging/guessing I figure out it was the Temple Stuart Furniture Company, this vintage kind of stuff: A bit of company research suggested it was a company started by a family named Stuart located near Templeton, Massachusetts. That's all my little curiosity roaming, and usually as far as it goes. Until yesterday, when "Liana" posted a comment, a genuine human written comment: I currently live in the old Stuart family home! I was looking for furniture of theirs to put in the house and came across your post# thought I would share! How neat is that? The serendipity energy I get is because a connection is made that would not have been possible w/o the internet. Isn't that worth having as much of as possible? That's all there is, but it's what possible when the stuff you share has enough descriptive words for the data sucking search giants to parse, but also largely impossible when you house your words, content, memories on some third party service that can dump your stuff when they get bored/tired/broke. The same thing happened this summer when I wrote about a friend of my grandmother who had given me one of her paintings. I barely remembered Gert Hammer, but through that SEO (the serendipity) kind I got several comment messages from her family. Or another one about my cousin who grew up in a performing family of high divers, the post brought forward memories of people who knew her Dad. Does this just happen with family stories? No, Not really. The time a German band used my photo of my car in Death Valley for the cover of their CD? or more recently a blues band asked for use of a photo for their new record when they did not even need to? Maybe the common thread is music. So this is the real why to the blogging, to create more potential for Serendipity Energy Opportunities. Featured Image: My own remix of one from the classic "not the droids you are looking for" scene from Star Wars itself having been memed many times (including me once or twice). Rights? Pop Culture? Obvious non-copy? Hello legal grey area. But it fits my post so well... As part of the ramp up antics for the ds106 headless double header extravaganza Friday, I managed to get a video that represents a real problem for the GIFaChRome folks The full story and innuendo has been published there by possbile rogue or double agent BB. The silliness does not stop, the shark is not yet jumped. And the remixes mix on. Since the images of the GIFaChrome right there on the home page bear a lot of resemblance to the Hasselblad large format camera, one could see that one of the world’s most renown camera brands would not be very pleased. But to play with it more, I decided to change the name slightly, and who could be a better namesake face that David Hasselhoff? A video was found where he is being interviewed before a conference and its not much more of a step to confuse the two names. And so since the parent company is Sweden I plotted that the speech made should be in Swedish, and there is one voice that comes to mind- the chef from the Muppets show. The video then just took some slipping in some audio of the muppets character to represent Hasselhlof’s voice, and his message is done as subtitles. Added in a little graphic, tossed in as a Picture in Picture in iMovie- if you do a transparent PNG, it can almost act as a second layer. This was a second version with a back black drop I thought I might use (but didn’t) One trick for that in iMovie is to make the graphic 720px x 480px dimensions, so the image has the same aspect ratio as the video… it can be cropped cleanly. That was fun. Of course Rochelle reminded me I may have missed another opportune connection, the Bugs Bunny episode where he is the guest in the kitchen for the main ingredient of “Hasenpfeffer”. Maybe that can be a sister company. Later. It has actually been several months since I read "Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means" (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi) but I keep coming back to it, scribbling in the margins, and finding it so insightful to thinking about links between people, places, and things on the net. It has everything to do with my oft pitched "Small Technologies Loosely Joined" ideas. I learned much about mathematicians I had never heard of mathematicians such as Paul Erdõs and Alfréd Rénya, and how the Kevin Baconized notions of "6 degrees of separation" are not only not so new as Hollywood, but only a piece of the network thinking so elegantly laid out by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked weaves some history of network theory with Barabosi's own research group's efforts at Notre Dame (he is a physicist), and is fascniating (a) because it used the internet itself to study netorks and found concepts that extend to a wide range of fields, and not just science, but social theory, how terrorist operate, economics, Hollywood actors. For more, get the book, or at least visit his web site. The 30+ pages of URL heavy footnotes are a treat in their own. The crux is the discovery of scale free networks, ones who are goverend by power laws rather than normal probability distributions. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, we find that real networks are governed by two laws: growth and preferential attachment. Each network starts from a small nucleus and expands with the addition of new nodes. Then these new nodes, when deciding where to link, prefer the nodes that have more links. These laws represent a significant departure from earlier models, which assumed a fixed number of nodes that are randomly connected to each other. But are they sufficient to explain the hubs and power laws encountered in real networks? It is these power law distributions of web sites and the recognition of the role of highly connected hubs which continue to resonate with me. The power law is seen as the son to be memed "Long Tail" effect (see the December 2004 Wired article) where, say looking a weblogs, a small number of highly popular blogs have a dominant majority of inbound links, these are the technorati, the people who's blogs are most widely read. There is a rapid drop off in terms of more ordinary blogs, and this is where you and me sit way out on the long tail, and new bloggers are way out there with 1 reader (themselves) or maybe 2 (them plus Mom). The point greatly highlighted in the Wired article is that there is a huge wealth of information and value in this long tail (yay!) The examples are pulled from Amazon and the online music industry, where Wired tries to make the case (some are arguing it, but being right is not the point), that there is a profitable and almost significant amount of business and activity out there in the long tail, where the numbers are not dominant of a best selling author or musician, but it offers an outlet to be heard and accessed by a respectable number of people. it means we all have our own niche on the internet, and taken as a sum of many, we count. It also means that the nature of blogging is not solely limited to what you write, or which software you use, or how elegant your sidebar and CSS is, but that you actively participate in other people's blogs, that you become a hub yourself, and that a hub is made in incoming and outgoing flows of information. You'll see more mention of the "long tail" as it becomes recognized in more and more places. In fact, Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail books, is blogging his progress as he expands it into a book. He is thinking much about blogging: If you're like me, virtually all of your time is now spent between two inboxes: your email and your RSS feed (which I read with the excellent web-based Bloglines). Indeed, I've pretty much stopped using bookmarks altogether. If I do visit a site, it's usually via a link in my feed and only then if I feel pretty sure the full text there will be worth the trip. With the exception of specific tasks, such as search and transactions, the Web for me has mostly turned into another text-and-minimal-graphics stream that automatically delivers content of interest, differing from my email only in that it's not personal and doesn't require my response. In other words, the age of curiosity or routine-driven surfing may be ending. The future, once again, looks like Push. That represents two big shifts. First, it's a significant aesthetic retreat, from the pretty to the practical (following the Google model), and from the entire package to the single post. Second, it's a behavioral change on the part of the readers: in a subscription age, where publishers don't have to entice you back each day with a flood of new content, quality trumps quantity. Once they've won you as a RSS subscriber, it requires an active decision on your part to unsubscribe. This puts a premium on the thoughtful post, now matter how infrequent, and discourages floods of random miniposts designed to drive return traffic. Anyhow, if you are curious, passionate, interested, whatever about how the internet functions and behaves as a network (not the geeky protocals, but like an organism), pick up a copy of Linked. The other morning I was out aiming for some photos of the fresh snow on the pines in my back yard- my timing was good as a passing jet was scratching the sky with contrails, and in a flash I aimed to angle a photo with it in the background of a branch. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Boom when I saw that in my stream, I said, this has to be GIFfed, making an animation from a single photo. It looked like something was shooting right out of that pine tree. Woah, see even in Arizona, the pine trees are armed with pistols! I don't know whether to put this GIF in for Gun Crazy GIFs or GIFFing Impossible! so I am tossing it in both. This is where it helps to think in stacked layers. I knew I wanted to make the contrail emerge from behind the pine branch. So I copied the left upper corner (the pine branch) to the top layer. I then lasso selected around the contrail, and cut that from the background layer to its own middle layer. I used the magic wand (reduced tolerance to 4) to select and subtract the blue around it. Back on the bottom layer, I clone brushed the blue background to cover where the contrail existed, so I had a solid blue background. From the top layer, I used a small eraser brush, and just brushed out some of the blue around the leading edge of the branches where I wanted the contrail to emerge. In the animation palette, I used convert Layers to Frames, to get a three framed animation. I turned on all layers in all frames, and slid the contrail layer to the left, so it as tucked in behind the top layer pine branch. I used copy frames, then paste frames (after) to extend the animation to 11 frames. I then went frame by frame, and moved the contrail a bit tot he right in each frame, so it moved along the horizontal, and then passed off the right side of the screen. I set each frame to 0.1 seconds, except the first one I set to a full second. This one came in at only 73 Kb! That's because of using layers with small bits per layer, but also the large areas of solid blue compress well in GIF. So when you are in Arizona, keep in mind that even the trees are packing heat! And not the "dry kind of heat"! As soon as Chris Gilliard shared the flying Ring drone my mind went to free association. https://twitter.com/hypervisible/status/1309837664191942658 It went back to the Twilight Zone episode "The Invaders" just for those scenes of Agnes Moorehead whacking at the flying invaders in her cabin. This episode is brilliant on so many levels, especially for the lack of dialogue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pyMd0jGWwI And that back of my brain went... remix with the advertisement (which is a comedy to watch the inept thief and the expression of the guy watching on his phone). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_cNOQJWO94 Got both clips into iMovie, turned the ad black and white. The Picture in Picture editing mode was sloppy on fitting the Twilight Zone on the guy's phone, but hey, this is quick art. It says less about the device and more about how helpless we are against these devices of convenience that feed on fears that are suggested to us by tech companies. So here you go, the signpost up ahead reads... The Drone Zone This is no out-of-the-way place, not an unvisited place, not bleak, not wasted, maybe dying. This is a suburban house, cookie cutter, plain, a house with high speed internet, a house speaking of IOT progress. This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who's been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror, which is even now coming at her from – the Drone Zone. https://vimeo.com/461640076 It's low art for sure. My favorite kind. Featured Image: One scene from the YouTube clip and a masked part of the flying drone from CNBC article (Google must have extracted it from video). Most likely not legally licensed, but its remix, its parody, it's art, damnit. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Can You Dig It? (the original call sign) January 23 marks the day in 2011 when a blog post from Grant Potter announced ds106 Radio. I hope people who have been part of the community before, or just have been a listener, or just want to be near something cool, spend some time tomorrow celebrating this birthday. I'm not going to be explaining all about our internet based free form wide open manager-less radio station -- see http://ds106.us/ds106-radio I made the image above as one of the pre-cursor bits, today's Daily Create was to make a birthday card.. I will tip the hat that tomorrow's is to post an audio birthday greeting to SoundCloud. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Forgrave There are not choreographed organized plans tomorrow, it's just another day at the station. I did change the programming to be all day, from midnight PST (3 hours form now) to play for 24 hours a random mix of archival ds106 related content... I am way over due on writing up how to do this since we made some changes (another post "coming soon") (I've written that before). But let's not rely on the pre-programmed stuff. If you are equipped to do live broadcasts, please step in sometime tomorrow (the PROTOCOL is to put out a stream request to twitter with the #ds106radio hash tag, or just try and grab the mic). Share your favorite memory, or just do something like Bryan Jackson and Leslie Lindalle have already done this evening, sing some songs. Tell some jokes. Perform a scene from a movie. Or just talk. flickr photo shared by Cris Crissman All of the best stuff of ds106 radio is the live stuff. If you want to try broadcasting, we have all the info and coordinates you need at http://bit.ly/ds106radioinfo. Or just tune in and listen- via http://ds106rad.io/listen. Or tweet a birthday message to #ds106radio and say what you love about it. Or help clean up that open radio document. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by David Kernohan More on the radio station and hopefully some updates (revive the twitterbot??).... soon. But if you have had any experience, encounter, exposure to ds106 radio in the last 3 years, please give it some love back tomorrow. At least tune in -- http://ds106rad.io/listen Oh the wailing and despair that is bleating across the blogscape about MovableType's announcement of the fee$$$$$$$ for MT 3.0. I've not bothered too much as I prefer to wait until the dust settles, but I am reading of mad rushes to rampage, rapid switches to other platforms such as WordPress, Bloxsum, heck, maybe folks are running to Blogger. Yes, the pricing / features at the low end for us little folks looks dismal, contorted, and well, it is does not seem designed for ME. And nothing is chiseled in concrete. But just a minute-- It is not like any of our beautifully running installations of MT 2.6 and earlier will suddenly blink out or self-destruct in 5 minutes, Mr. Phelps. This insane rush to upgrade or jump seems awfully.... hasty. Sure down the road, there are going to perhaps be compelling technical, feature reasons to upgrade or switch blog platforms, but there is nothing wrong with staying where you are at. MT 2.X still works, eh? It's not broken, eh? So my strategy is to wait, perhaps there will be a different strategy handed down, as a reaction to the public tar and feathering that bloggers are applying to SixApart. Maybe it will be time to try something else. Maybe, but I cannot find a compelling reason to do anything different now. Upgrade when there is a reason to, not just because something just came out. I'm a stickin' and publshin' with 2.6, and that is ok. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine To cap off a full weekend, after attending the SCC Tech Talks on Friday I headed north to Flagstaff to catch the show by Ira Glass at Northern Arizona University. The great irony is that I found out about this show via a tweet from my friend Grant Potter in Nova Scotia. I ought to brain dump all I absorbed from the show; it was just that good. I have no photos. There is a possible chance I accidentally clicked a button on my phone and opened a ds106 radio stream. I am just not sure. He entered on a dark stage, all we hear is his voice. He was carrying some sort of tablet device he used to control the audio clips he played, and the light from the screen was all we could see. And he began talking about how intimate the form of audi is, how it might make more sense to just do the entire show in the dark. Which of course was a set up. The lights came up, as did the applause. Glass made some jokes about the sound we all knew comsing from the body we did not know. From my row K vantage point, he carried some resemblance to our new old new old radio friend, Scottlo (where are you brother, where are you?). A fair bit of the show went back to the fantastic Glass Manifesto post I discovered last week, He contrasted the difference between typical news coverage, CNN style of booming music, and authoritative "We know the story" voice, and the different approach done on This American Life. He emphasized that notion of their style having one layer being the plot, the person's story, and at the same time, the importance of it illustrating a message about "the way the world works". Often I talk about how people new to storytelling string things along like a series of events-- and I framed that as a negative, but Glass spoke how that is the narrative flow that pulls you along, if crafted well. He used the example of "Just Keep Breathing" the story of the New Zealand girl who was bit by a shark. And her story, she does tell as a series of events, but as Glass notes, once you are in-- you cannot leave that story. "Did she die?" was a funny line. The thing is, the story, told in the subject's voice, traces to the larger story of a common human experience of parents not believing what their kids say. There was a middle section where he explained all the times he spends on the phone with lawyers-- dealing with smut. The laws on what can and cant be said on the radio are apparently a moving target. The prologue about a traveler's dilemma of using the Knee Defender was a problem because the subject referred to himself several times as "not wanting to be a dick". Apparently one use of this is allowed, but multiple times is considered "dwelling on it". Glass played examples of how his questioning technique always tries different angles to get the interview subjects to say in their own words, the large message of an episode. That focus on getting the key elements from the person, not summarized by a narrator, is important to remember. He gave a lot of insight into the making of the Harper High story. It began with an interest in covering one of the Chicago urban schools, where the death rates of students was outrageous. He playfully described how a TV news would have to do so much to generate the feel, but how the format of audio gets to that closeness and intimacy carried by people's stories, not recorded to see. The crew from This American Life spent 5 months developing the story, and it turns inside out your stereotypes of what gangs are about. Glass did a lot of banter with the audience, a funny riff when he acted surprise to find Jews in the mountains ("Outdoor Jews? That's crazy"). He referenced the journalism students in the audience. While there was an outline, he spoke rather much like you were just sitting around a dinner table. I noted at least 8 or 10 times, he referred to recording as "getting it on tape" or "reviewing the tape"-- although they work digitally, he uses the old media as the reference to anything recorded. There's way more, and I might have to dig through my cobwebs to get to an answer. I did get a chance at the Q&A section to ask a question. The audience was slow to raise their hand, so I got the second one. I was thinking all along about a way to ask him to say something I could record as a bumper for ds106 radio. It just sounded so cheesy, and I really wanted to ask what I ended up asking. I did mention I was a fellow Baltimore born kid, and yelled out the name of Milford Mill High School, where I went, and he did a few years before me. That seemed really lame, as I was never a big cheerleader of high school, and there I am pumping my fist. Anyhow, my question was noting that This American Life gets a lot of submitted story ideas; the stories come to them, and I wanted to know what he woudld advice to students about finding the angles into stories. He talked about getting a sense and try a lot to come about ti with not just the news type questions. He talked about his frame for a story on weather when he moved to Chicago, and found the angle through people's experiences who were struck by lightning. He talked (like the transom piece) about how it took him 8 years to get the right way if doing this-- and even played that early clip of him telling a story trying to "sound like an NPR guy". He reminded us that we tend to forget that others have to work long and hard to get to the well known personas we know. And then we went our separate ways. Ira missed his chance to hang out on the deck in Strawberry. I got a lot out of this, I may have some clips to use for the next ds106 class. I may. And just for more irony, I just saw Ira Glass has a twitter account: He has upwards of 47,000 followers. And he has not made a single tweet nor does he follow anyone. That's how you get to be when you are that good. On the 'net anything can be anything. Or not. You might think http://www.learningobjects.com/ might be something related to learning objects, but in reality what they do is: enhance the overall learning experience by addressing the needs of key stakeholders at each step in the learning lifecycle, from planning through to delivery, assessment and reporting. Huh? Do you need a degree to write phlaff like that? Is that the random word generator gone off kilter? Buzzword bingo with no winner? Actually they create Blackboard add-ons, those lego-like building blocks. Since my big left toe is a learning object why not? "Everything, daaahling is a learning object." Dusting off some ds106 poster riffing. I guess there as some fun banter about remixing james bond posters with some dogs we know, Mariana was off and running with it... But she let me down by not making it an assignment. So I had to step in with The Best Bond Is A Dog: All thanks to a conversation on Twitter. An emergent DS106 assignment "˜Remix (in a dog appropriate manner) a Bond movie title and create a poster'. Hence, Daphne Groom, in the classic "You Only Bark Twice" [caption id="attachment_31878" align="aligncenter" width="346"] (you ought to click to see 00Daphne in full size glory)[/caption] I decided to give Daphne some more dog pride that she gets in this photo of Miles and Tessie with that poor dog in a tutu! creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by snakepliskens I liked the 1960s motif of the poster from You Only Live Twice, appropriate since it features Jim's favorite Bond actor ;-) There is something parallel about Bond surrounded by the ladies in Bikinis and the way Daphne is surrounded on the photo. The PhotoShoppery was the usually amount of clone brush, paste in place. I even managed to tint Tessie's hands a bit to match the skin of the others. I tossed in a pic of Jim in his stunning suit from the TEDx in Puerto Rico just to cover up Sean Connery. That was first time I used the Edit Special-> Past Around to make something come in outside of a selection, that worked well. Gill Sans Ultra Bold, squeezed and stretched a bit, did a good job of faking the poster text. Normally I go to the detail of editing the producer and director credits, but this is enough for one night's poster re-editing. You Only Bark Twice! Yes, we know that Google has become the appliance of the web. If it were to go out, it would be on the scale (well not really) of losing electric or water. And while some may bemoan that students' first thought to research is to Google-it, I find myself curious that often people ask me questions that are painfully easily google-able. Ok, I am in too deep, my natural reflex when I don't know something, cant find something, need to get an example is command-k; type; return which is the sequence to put my cursor on the Google search field in Firefox, enter my keywords, and go. This is nothing new, I can remember dealing with this, actually much more, in the late 1990s. Often, it is a request for technologies for doing X. I found, or at least I thought it was more useful in the fishing versus nugget sense, to not just use Google to find and answer and parrot it back (like I really knew it), but to email back a URL string that had the search embedded. So why do people call or email questions that are so easily found DIY on Google? As an example, and not to pick on the person that asked, I got a comment on the blog from someone who had seen my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story presentation at a conference, and was asking for the URL as it was not listed on this blog. Feeling Lucky? http://www.google.com/search?q=50+web+2.0+ways+tell+story And it's more than knowing how to slap keywords in a search field, that is so Google 1.0. Climb the power curve by using quotes, + to force a match and - to remove and ... well, I may be looking for stuff from the PBS web site in math but not algebra And the next level is setting up a GoogleAlert (not to be confused with Google Alerts) for regular updates of content that might be changing, grabbing that as an RSS feed so you can scan in an RSS reader. So I expect I will continue to get google-able questions and will provide google links as answers. Nine years ago, an almost random brushing of one person's story, even if immortal, so brief as to leave almost no remnant, ripples back again. Just because I left a little shred of information here in the blog pile. That someone far away could find. At once time this would be turned into a video and tossed onto the pile of Amazing Stories of Openness. Were it not for almost a random series of unrelated incidents, I'd never looked into the life of a Tasmanian World War I soldier Kevin Gavan Ray. That story is mostly shreds but at last now, thanks to a needed dose of web serendipity, there's a least a poem to add to it. Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip... no not that tale. In early December 2011 I got an unlikely opportunity to fly to Melbourne Australia to do a digital storytelling workshop. Just saying that makes me feel like I am talking about a science fiction story where people go in planes to travel around the world (For what it's worth, LA to Melbourne was at that time the longest single hop flight). Even that I was going needs to be wound farther back a few months early, on my round the country road trip, I visited Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach in Virginia, who ran (and still does) the PLP Network. The story she told me that her colleague and partner, Will Richardson, quote unquote didn't feel like flying to Australia to do keynote at their conference. So she offered the keynote spot to me. The joke was it was because I had a pony tail like Will. Even more irony- earlier in that trip when I drove through Northern New Jersey, Will was too busy to meet up. So I got a free trip to Australia. I decided to tack on another two weeks; I visited a colleague I knew from Maricopa who moved Down Under (I got to see the 12 Apostles), I got to pal around with my DS106 friend Rowan Peter Peter Rowan in Melbourne, where we visited a giant Theremin and we had a fun tease of MOOCs (MOOCs on Ice) and George Siemens (the "Skate With George" plan never happened). And of all things I got to visit Rowan''s house and carve "cogdog" lawn art in his grass, all while wearing a Canadian hockey jersey. The story has not even gotten weird yet. And I am wandering farther upstream than I needed to. The next part of a trip was a hop to Tasmania where I wanted to see because my first visit there in 2007 I was deadly sick. And then I found out Nancy White would be in Hobart as well at same time, and on top of that the ASCILITE 2011 conference was there on the same dates, so I would get to connect with a batch of my kiwi colleagues. All of this leads to December 8, 2011, when I had a chunk of time to do a favorite thing, wander around a new location with my camera. Just random walks where curiosity leads. As it does, I wandered down Soldiers Memorial Avenue, which honors Tasmanian soldiers who died in World War 1. There's a special tree planted for each soldier, as well as a marker. There are hundreds of them, each numbered sequentially, so I went on the hunt for my #ds106 obsession then of collecting photos of the number 106 (yes there are almost 500). Thus I found this marker for Kenneth Gavan Ray: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6476744591 Tree Number 106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I blogged about this little adventure, even recorded myself reading the story, or what there was of it, of Ken Ray. https://cogdogblog.com/2011/12/tree-106/ There was not much info I could find then, just that he and his three brothers all fought in the same unit in France, and Ken died there wonder in battle, taken to a hospital, and it seems like everything got blown up. There seemed to be some question about where his body was, but the other soldiers unit confirmed Ken had died there. And yes, if you search on this soldier's name, the first few hits are some records in the Australian War Memorial that have almost no information. And maybe 2 links down is my blog post. That was the last I had thought about Kenneth Gavan Ray. Until I got a blog comment this week, nine years later from Ben Wilburs. What incredible serendipity! I’ve been doing research into a poet named Oscar Walters, who was from the same unit as Ken Ray and wrote a eulogy for him, and my search for more information about Ray has led me straight to this post. I am astonished that of all the trees in this walk, Ray’s happened to be #106, and so you happened to take a photo of it.Walters’ poem for Ray can be found on my website, at https://benwilburs.github.io/westraliana/owalters/poems/kenray.html. I have borrowed your photo of Ray’s plaque. Oscar Walters was a soldier in the same unit as Kenneth Ray, and eventually became a newspaper writer and is known for poems he wrote about the war. This is the poem Walters wrote "Ken Ray. Killed in Action." that was published January 2nd 1917 in Hobart's paper, The Mercury. WHERE the trees are torn and dying And the battle-planes are flying, Where the star shells split the darkness; He is sleeping peacefully; And the howitzers’ loud screaming Shall not wake him from his dreaming, Where the hearts of men are tested In the hell of Picardy. Grandly did he stand the testing, But for ever he is resting, Where the shrapnel shall not find him And he cannot see the flares; Deep his sleep but great his glory, Brief is his immortal story: “Only say I fought for freedom In the trenches at Pozieres.” On Ben's web page with this poem, he writes: Kenneth Gavan Ray was a sapper from Hobart who served in the 13th Field Company Engineers alongside Oscar Walters. He was killed in action on the night of August 4th 1916, at the age of 21. He served with his three brothers also in the same company, and though they buried him on the night of his death, in the confusion he was officially declared missing and it was not until mid-1917 that he was confirmed killed in action. His gravesite was lost and has not been identified. That seems to be the most anyone knows about Kenneth Ray. Somewhere in my searches I found what looks like his enlistment papers, which is covered in old fashioned hand written annotations, his unto name crossed out. And I wonder if that D2S758 taped on top is a death record identifier. I like how he listed his age as 20 & 3/12. His next of kin was his father. So Kevin Gavan Ray signed up for war duty on September 6, 1915. And he died less than a year later, August 4, 1916. Oscar Walters's poem nails it: Brief is his immortal story:“Only say I fought for freedomIn the trenches at Pozieres.” And that is said. Again, there is that question. Who will find and tell your story? What traces will you leave? Maybe a pile of twitter thread and instagram likes? As always, I treasure, crave, the web serendipity of this seemingly mathematically improbably connections. And they happen because of the traces I leave in flickr and here. My story may not be immortal, and on the scale of things brief, but I plan to do more than leave my story to others. Featured Image: Animated Gif of my photo In Memory of Kenneth Gavan Ray flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license fading to a cropped version of an image in the ANZACs national archive (but the link never opens for me) It was a pleasure in my first week here to meet UBC History professor Tina Loo, who Brian and tipped me off to as far as doing inventive work by incorporating the Wikipedia Education Program (WEP) into her HIST 396 class on North American Environmental History. Part of my mission here is to learn more about the successes of the UBC Wiki project and what we might be able to leverage form it at University of Mary Washington. But in listening to Tina describe her integration of the WEP program into her class, where students spent a semester developing and working on content written for Wikipedia (see the final work), I am getting also interested in that as a potential for what UMW classes already do well with their students- conducting and publishing research in the open. Tina and I met for conversation over lunch, and I recorded a bit of our talk (sorry for background sounds as we were in the busy student union building). Conversation with Tina Loo A few highlights... The WEP did require a semester long format, and provides a syllabus approach to doing this kind of project-- but it does not become a class about wikis, and the tech part comes much later into the process. Tina reporte that the technology learning curve was not as steep as she expected although some students did have challenges with the editing. Writing for Wikipedia is different from the other articles read in class and essay assignments in that the genre is an encyclopedia and does not conveying an argument, presenting information. It aims to be "Just the facts" and a well rated article should reflect a consensus opinion among scholars. According to Tina, a selling point is about the pedagogy and what it means for students to write in the public: Don't you want them to care about what they do? Don't you want them to take the experience out of classroom and to live beyond the parameters of a class. One of the things that excited the students was that the work they were doing would have a life beyond the 13 weeks... they show their parents, their grandparents what they did. I also asked about the difference between publishing in a local space (especially a nearby vibrant wiki) versus on Wikipedia -- Tina said it was the value added was the students were doing something that matters because it is living on beyond the context of the course and other eyes are seeing it beyond the professor and the teaching assistant it engages the students so they take it much more seriously She did acknowledge the Large potential for this kind of project is combined with responsibility not to put out "shoddy" information- there is more at stake working in a public space, and it can scare students at first. What they gain is a sense of a bigger audience for their writing, plus real world skills-- working in social media, collaboration with people you may not meet with. The last time I checked, there is no one working in an office with a responsibility to write an essay. I'm digging in a boit more to the Wikipedia Education Program and also hope to interview a few of students who did Tina's project. Featured Image: Tina Loo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Sometime after I ejected myself from Facebook I also deleted my LinkedIn account. I checked in to Hotel LinkedIn when they first started, and as it grew, it consumed services like Slideshare. I have heard of people making important connections via the service, so I do not discount its value for some, to me, I never saw much I did in LinkedIn except linking in. And the email notifications were like roaches, they just kept scurrying in my inBox no matter how many times I clicked preferences and stomped. My exit from both services was really part of my own response to the cliché "everyone is on Facebook." It was with about 0.5 seconds of reflection that deleting my LinkedIn account meant I would loose my cherished endorsement for okra folding. And while sometimes some creepo uses my photo on a fake account, I do not exist on LinkedIn. If I try to log in, as expected, it finds no account for my email I thought I had left Hotel LinkedIn. Then I got this in email today: Someone from LinkedIn wants to add me to their "professional network" (I cringe because 98% of these never change or personalize the message). If I have no account in LinkedIn, how can they invite me to be added? How can I confirm I know ******* if I am not in the hotel? Technically, legally, it's probably likely not a violation of some reading of the law. I bet if I clicked the button, I would be offered a chance to create an account. But when I checkout out of Hotel LinkedIn, I did it because I did not want to receive ANY emails from their site anymore. In their privacy policy they can hang on to my information as long as they see fit, I actually have no idea what information they have kept on my account, as spelled out in their privacy policy: 3.2 Data Retention We retain the personal information you provide while your account is in existence or as needed to provide you services. We may retain your personal information even after you have closed your account if retention is reasonably necessary to comply with our legal obligations, meet regulatory requirements, resolve disputes between Members, prevent fraud and abuse, or enforce this Privacy Policy and our User Agreement. We may retain personal information, for a limited period of time, if requested by law enforcement. Our Customer Service may retain information for as long as is necessary to provide support-related reporting and trend analysis only, but we generally delete or de-personalize closed account data consistent with Section 3.1., except in the case of our plugin impression data (i.e., the information that you visited on sites carrying our social plugin, but which you did not click on), which we de-personalize within 7 days (although we do maintain 30 days worth of webserver logs for security, debugging, and site stability purposes only) by creating aggregate data sets that cannot be traced back to individuals. I do not know exactly how someone logged into linked in was able to send my a contact request; if they had my email already, I would expect them to... write me an email. If somehow LinkedIN is providing my email address, and I no longer have an active account, well something is fishy. And if you think ANY company actually deletes your information when you close an account, well standard offer of beach front Arizona ocean property applies. Here is my Privacy Assertion: I do not want to see anything from LinkedIn in my inbox Thankfully, an email filter, will make sure I am fully checked out of LinkedIn email. Of course, there is a larger hotel operator that I may never be able to extract myself from. UPDATE: Minutes Later There us yet a second unwanted email from LinkedIn -- "********'s invitation is awaiting your response." I have a middle finger salute as a response. At the bottom it reads: You received an invitation to connect. LinkedIn will use your email address to make suggestions to our members in features like People You May Know. I never gave permission to LinkedIn to use my email address to make suggestions to its members. It gets more fun. Why not click the unsubscribe link? One click unsubscribe is supposed to be part of the CANSPAM act, right? The link takes me to a page to create an account In order for me to stop getting emails from LinkedIn I never consented to, I have to create an account on their site? Not likely. UPDATE May 14, 2015: A courteous response from Joe at LinkedIn support; as requested they have blocked my email from being used. Thankfully, I don't have to listen to the Eagles muzak anymore. Plenty of Instructions at the Alamo posted 7 Nov '06, 9.40am MST PST on flickr Do quiet non smoking men only have to remove their hats? Why do women get to keep their hats on? Can we take pictures? This sign from the Alamo hopefully is not hung at the ELI conference venue. Tomorrow (or is it later today, I sure blew a bunch of time on twitter) I am bound for San Antonio for the EDUCAUSE ELI Annual Conference. This has become one of my favorite yearly events, much more human scale than the large circus of the EDUCAUSE main conference in October. In many ways it feels like our NMC Summer Conference, and this one is better 'cause I dont have to run anything, I just get to show up. But it's valuable all because of the people who come to this conference, almost all of my favorite edu colleagues will be there. For nostalgia, it was ELI in 2002 (?) that I first heard a session from Brian Lamb who's refreshing view at that time on so called "learning objects" (are they stil around??) became the grounds for many great collaborations. And there's a long list of other folks I hope to connect with.. if those pesky presentation sessions don't get in the way. So what the heck, as online a freak as I am, I am now excited about F2F encounters like ELI. My only responsibility is showing up for the Tuesday 3pm NMC session where we release the 2008 Horizon Report. There are some rumors that Elwood Alexander may be called again into action like in 2007 [flv:http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/movies/elwood.flv 320 240] I'm sure ELI will be all twittered, blogged, flickr-ed, etc. Cannot wait to get there! My search history may indicate otherwise, but I feel like on a daily basis I am poking in Google Images for results licensed Creative Commons. I use one nifty trick to hasten the search, but just made another one that might be of use. The method I have used for quite some time goes back to 2013 a trick I picked up from Chris Lott, written by me as The Gift of Time. It lets me create number of keywords I can use in a browser bar to fire off searches for any keywords in my own flickr photos, in WikiPedia, the WordPress codex, the PHP documentation, and Google Image Search (with results limited to ones licensed Creative Commons). For example, I can do the latter from anywhere by typing gcc then say tiny tool as I did to find a featured image (see my results). Here is how you can set up the same thing(s). Browser Saved Search Engines in Chrome, I create a saved search engine under Preferences -> Search Engine -> Manage Search Engines or directly chrome://settings/searchEngines. I will have already done a search on any site with the settings I want (the keyword does not matter), e.g. for "dog" and Under Tools, "Creative Commons Licenses" or something that looks like https://www.google.ca/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&hl=en&tbs=il:cl&authuser=0&sa=X&ved=0CAAQ1vwEahcKEwjQu_mp_ojwAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg&biw=1233&bih=659 For what it's worth I whittle the parameters down to the ones needed to give the results, not really knowing what ved, biw, bih are. https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=il:cl If the results are ones with the desired settings, just copy it, don't worry about the "dog". In my search engine preferences mentioned above, I add a new one, giving it a title, a short abbreviation I remember, and I enter the search results url, but replace "dog" with "%s":https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch&tbs=il:cl The %s is a placeholder for whatever keyword(s) we send it. Now the fun / useful part. Whereever I am in Chrome, if I type in the browser bar gcc and press TAB it replaces gcc with the title of my search engine, and then I can enter one or more keywords. Just press RETURN, and I get the search for smallest possible tool AND results are set for ones licensed Creative Commons. This has been very valuable to speed up my image searches. And there are equivalent capabilities in Firefox (under Preferences -> Search -> Search Shortcuts) and likely Safari. Ahhh But My cleverness breaks down after getting my first results; if I modify the search times, the license option gets reverted back to All Images (I lose my setting for ones licensed Creative Commons). I had some hope there would be some clever extension or hack that would let me set defaults for Google Image Search. I found bupkis. Almost 10 years ago someone on Stack Exchange as if you could create a default for image size search result. No solution. One can conspirasize that Google wants you exposed to as much stuff as possible, no matter your intents. A Tiny Tool is Born But one suggested response here reminded my of a the little tool I made almost as long ago for making a JavaScript Bookmarklet tool to search any blog from anywhere on the web. I use this all the time on my own blog. I can highlight some text on any web page, and search my blog for the same thing, or if I do not select any text, I can enter it in a prompt box. It was drop dead easy to make one for Google Image Search. Just drag this link to your browser bookmarks bar (sadly bookmarklets are dead in Firefox, not my fault). Once set up, you could highlight a strange or wonderful term like splot, click the bookmarklet, and get results for images matching that text that are licensed creative commons One click to get to CC licensed images for SPLOT! How useful is that? If no text is selected, you just enter it in, the box, and here are your results. Clicking the browser bookmarklet tool opens a Google Images CC Licensed search interface wherever you are on the web. It still flips the Creative Commons setting off if you add any more keywords, so I have not really solved the original problem. But this nifty tool I can see using more than my saved search engine. None of this does anything to assure you of the results, I continue to find results in google image search results that when I visit the site, the license is not clear. And the results are no comprehensive, it often becomes better to run a search at pixabay, Wiikimedia Commons, unsplash, or flickr, if you dont get good results. There's more there than you find in google. Maybe this little tool might be useful? Featured Image: Drill Spade Tiny- a Wikimedia Commons image by Emrys2 licensed Creative Commons CC BY-SA) Attribution-Share Alike and shared here the same. I found it using my own tool. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drill_spade_tiny.jpg Yesterday I had the fun opportunity to talk about attributed and possibly [semi] serious use of the kinds of media people see/share all the time. This session was a free pre-conference teaser for the 24th annual Teaching, Colleges and Community (YCC) conference. That's right, 24... and it's still being organized by the very people who did the first one, Bert Kimura and Curtis Ho from the University of Hawaii. Maybe the best little free online conference you have never heard of. Before I go silly, I have to do my web paleontology act to dial back to a League for Innovation conference in 2003 where this smiling man named Bert asked to talk to me about the conference. At that time, the acronym as aimed at Community Colleges, and as I was doing instructional technology work at the Maricopa Community Colleges, he gently pitched the idea of getting Maricopa to participate at an institutional level. This meant I got my office to pay a single registration fee, and any employee could take part of the online conference at no cost to them. It was a fabulous PD opportunity to offer, and we got to joke about sending so many people to a conference in Hawaii (meaning they did it from their office). Since then... I did a presentation for TCC in 2004 on Photoblogging, I had just discovered flickr, but actually talked more about Buzznet and Fotolog. Hah.In 2005 Bert invited me to give a TCC keynote, in which I invoked a metaphor of Star Trek’s Harry Mudd to talk about Small Pieces Loosely JoinedI was in Hawaii later that year for an NMC conference and visited Bert and his wife at home, enjoyed a local style beach dinner and a mountain hike. In a trip to Asia in 2008, I again got to visit with them for a week in Japan. These things, done well, grow into friendship.I also was asked to keynote in 2013, which ended up using a different metaphor for the DS106 Show (this involved me invoking a scene from Network where I urged others to do through open their browser windows and yell "I'm MOOCed as Hell and I'm Not Taking It Anymore"Maybe the crowning TCC was the 20th, when for the first time there was part of the conference on site in Hawaii. I got to do a keynote where, invoking Brett Victor's talk, I time traveled back to 1996 to talk about the web. This involved me making a Yahoo T-shirt and buying a Walkman for props. I decided in December, when the call for presentations for this year's TCC went out, to submit a presentation- it's actually going to be a revisit of the 2004 one and see where we have gone in 15 years in terms of communicating with shared photos. So... when Bert and Curtis approached me last month asking if I would do the free pre-conference session they offer in March, I of course had to say yes. They said I could do the same talk, and I of course declined that offer, and pitched my silly idea. The interest in "doing more" with media we see as entertainment (or worse) in social media goes back of course to many things DS106, but more to the studio sessions we did for the UDG Agora project- Brian Lamb led one on Meme Media: Attention-Grabbing Images And Animated Gifs and I did one one on Making Short Form Videos. It's been a part of Networked Narratives (2017-2019). And I did a first run of Affordances of Silly Media for a group of mostly community center leaders in Melbourne Australia during my ISS Institute fellowship there in 2017. I had lots to draw on. The platform for TCC was Adobe Connect, a platform I have not seen since leaving NMC (before 2011 then). Honestly, it's not changed much since. I had to provide "slides" for them to upload, which of course meant, none of the GIFs moved, I just had to describe them moving and provide links (and twice during my talk Adobe Connect went down in a beach ball spiral of doom). I thought I had packed way too much in, the Keynote presentation was 25Mb for 65 slides, many meant for fast flipping. I must have talked fast, as I got through on about 40 minutes. We had a great audience, with folks I could see during intros from across the US, Canada, Japan, Greece (where it was 2am apparently), and even a colleague from Canberra who saw me present there in 2007. Anyhow, I have the slides and a whole bunch of links (a lot) over in my Presentation show room https://cog.dog/show/2019/03/20/silly-media/ And a recording of the silliness is available on the conference web site. At least four people took up the challenge during the talk to make meme images about TCC; thanks so much to the always eager and excited Cynthia Cologne for making and sharing them. https://twitter.com/lyrlobo/status/1108532535208759296 And thanks of course to Bert and Curtis and his TCC team plus Rebecca and John Walber from Learning Times for helping run the show. If you are looking for a great online conference experience, check out TCC in April. The theme this year is "Sustainable Learning, Accessible Technologies, & Diverse Contexts." Technology, Colleges and Community (TCC), is a worldwide online conference attended by university and college personnel including faculty, research associates, academic support staff, counselors, student services personnel, students, and administrators.Join our 24th edition of this annual event to share your expertise, experiences, and knowledge relevant to the use of information technology in learning, teaching, innovation, and academic services. This event is very helpful and “friendly” to novices. It provides you with a strong foundation about teaching and learning with modern technologies. Featured Image: TCC2019 Meme made at imgflip using the Distracted Boyfriend pic. My data suggests the world is definitely post-SPLOT, it's fallen to the bowels of the hype curve? I am almost ready to offer bribes to what I thought was a major accomplishment, blogged here a month ago. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1171101041175289863 But the SPLOTs go on in development right here. I have as of this morning a working prototype with all the working parts to remove the need for special hidden logins for media uploads. That's Another Post! This one is about a new feature added to TRU Collector, the SPLOT originally created for quick sharing of image media. I have that history pegged at January 15, 2015. The idea came from TRU Instructional Designers Kelly Warnock and Melissa Melissa Jakubec who will be doing a workshop next Friday on finding openly licensed images (and we will have a version of this Tuesday for the You Show). What they described was wanting an online image gallery where participants could share the images they found.Again, the idea is a way people can build a shared pool of images, organized by maybe categories and tags, with some extra data for license and source info, but that would not require any accounts or selling of one’s data tracks to [fill in the name of your not favorite data overlord]. The use cases have grown as many people have put it to work (see examples). especially colleagues at the Coventry University Disruptive Media Learning Lab. Daniel Villar-Onrubia used it in ways where people were writing longer than image captions, that led me to add a rich text editor- e.g. for students and/or conference participants to do intro bios. For my own uses in #netnarr I bent it into something almost like an assignment bank. This expanding of possibilities is what I called enabling the unexpected which I think is rather exciting, especially compared to LMS lathering and textbook pounding. As I did a bit of contract work for DMLL this summer, one request was to add, like in TRU Writer, the ability for authors to enter an email address so they could be sent a special link. What is special? Why it allows them to edit the thing after publishing. This again is optional, as part of the SPLOT DNA is not requiring personal information. But email was really the most workable means to provide an post publishing edit link. Originally I thought of offering the edit link after publishing, but expect most people would not save it. For this new one, I thought about asking for a passphrase, but it seemed to prone to easy breaking into the site. First of all, this is a feature site owners can turn on and off- the default for TRU collector is OFF since it was never there in previous versions. If left off, then your site users never will see a form field to enter the email, nor the special button on a published item that will send it to the email address entered to the form. You will see another field, and this too was a request from Coventry. They thought it a good idea to nudge students to use their university email, not personal ones, so even as collected data, it will not be personal emails (this feature was added quietly to TRU Writer too). The link is emailed right after publishing, but can also be triggered. If active, when published- a Request Edit Link appears on an item only if the author added an email address. The button will send the email (I guess there is a chance to be annoying and click the button a lot, I may lack enough time for all the jerky things people might do to be annoying). I also tossed in for good measure, the ability in the theme options to select the Pages that have special uses on the site (e.g. so they are not required to be specific ones by URL, e.g. /collect for the form.) The newest version of the theme is now in play at my main Collector demo site (the one that has been running since 2015) http://splot.ca/collector/ and is available for your SPLOT toying from https://github.com/cogdog/tru-collector I hope soon to push some updates to the sites that use the single click installers from Reclaim Hosting... I'd like to make sure these new features work. Which means I really need some people to poke around, and enter an email address, try the post publishing editing. How much do I have to bribe to get someone to try on their own site? SPLOTs are getting to be a lonely outpost. Oh well, no time to mope. I have exciting work to do on this new drag and drop media uploader. Featured Image: I found this nifty public domain picryl image Daily News. ANS to the editor [1851] Mar. 31 and decided to add some script of my own. My paint strokes were horrible so I used the Cursive Letter Generator and added a SPLOT logo of my own making. Lob this all as public domain, if anyone is really counting. flickr foto Searching for the Ideal Streaming Technology posteravailable on flickr Searching for the Ideal Streaming Technology poster as reprised on the NMC Campus in Second Life (July 2006), This was a study done in Spring 2006, and a number of NMC members had participated. Authors Dr. Edgar Huang and Clifford Marsiglio from IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) presented this as a poster session at the 2006 NMC Summer Conference and was even reprised in Second Life when we held the poster sessions there in July. But even better, the authors have published their study, aling with a pile of video resources (tutorials and screencasts about the 5 video technologies studied) as a web site- see Searching for the Ideal Streaming Technology: In August of 2006, we completed a study that examined five video streaming technologies in terms of their image quality, streaming quality, accessibility, encoding and Web-authoring efficiency, and cost. The five technologies were Flash, QuickTime, Real, VX30 and Windows Media. For easy and fast access and interaction, we have decided to publish the study at this permanent Web site.... .... Our study has some interesting findings and conclusions regarding these streaming video technologies. You may find them immediately applicable to your daily work. We have also constructed five tutorials, as byproducts of this study, on how to encode and Web-author with latest approaches a streaming video with each of these five streaming technologies. These tutorials are designed for broadband streaming though targeting dial-up users just involves adding a low bit rate alternative. And the conclusions? Which video horse do you put your money on? Look out for the long shot streaking by on the rail. Of course people will argue for centuries about a "best" solution, but the metholdogy doen in this study, and their sharing their results publicly in this site, are models for what should be done broadly everywhere. Pontification on the meteoric popularity of Flickr is a common past time-- and it makes all the sense in the world of network hubs, preferential attachment, link fitness, etc (see Thinking About Links...). Flickr was hardly the first photoblog site (I danced a bit with fotolog and buzznet before flickr even hit the seen) but flickr's design and myriad of uses have made it the Google of the bunch. Well earned. I was also thinking of some of the blog "memes" that have passed around, those ideas that spread virally across a social network (What's a neme?). Recent examples include: * Your personality in 25 links (A-Z): What web sites pop in your browser for each letter of the alphabet? * 40 questions about 2004 : personal reflections (who has time to answer all of those?) * My Not So Greatest Playlist : create a party shuffle (random mix) from your digital music collection. * Grab Book Page 23 Sentence 5 : greab the nearest book you are reading and share the 5th sentence from page 23. Is there a purpose to this? They are fun and perhaps revealing when put into a larger pool. Why are some bigger and more rampant? It has all to do with the amount of exposure they get on hubs, and perhaps how simple they are to join/add to. I was willing to cut and paste a 10 song list but less eager to write out responses to 40 questions. Which brings me back to flickr. It's free form tagging tied to visual, personal images make it the über center for creating memes that are easy to join. What are flickr memes? Just follow the tags. * Photos of road signs. * Photos of cemetaries. * The 2004 election meme. * Photos of Eclipses. * Storytelling. * Heck, even overweight cats have a meme! The number of memes here is mind boggling (if your mind is boggled by memes)- and it is so easy to pitch into a flickr meme. The immense number of internal flickr links as well as the valuable ways you can tie your web sites in and out of flickr are key at making it grow into one of those network hubs that are so critical to scale free networks. According to Molly's Web Design and Development Personality Indicators: Frustrated with the range of attitudes and opinions I deal with as a standards-oriented educator, I've decided to begin a project (very) loosely based on the Meyers-Briggs personality indicators. So, dear readers, I'm hoping you'll help me add and refine my categories, but I'm off to a start with the following... There are not a 100 questions to respond to, just a self-assessment; so I am somewhere in the land of: TTLM. Trying To Learn More. In this category are the good men and women who might still be serving it up Old Skool but are open to learning, open to growth yet struggling with standards related concepts and the snakepit of browser challenges of contemporary Web design and development. These brave souls are not in the majority, but they are to be lauded and assisted for their willingness to venture forth and expand their horizons. and SAVD. Standards Aware Visual Designer. These people are designing with standards in mind - creating beautiful sites for the screen, working toward achieving accessible sites, examining usability and human factors, and very possibly beginning or already designing for alternative devices and media types. A very rare breed, and if you are reading this post it's very highly likely you're either one your own fine self, know all their names or have Zeldman's personal phone number memorized. Now what? Do I get Zeldman's number? And who's gonna admit to being OFAD? Labels are good for.... well.... soup cans. Maybe some readers are all over RSS and massive amounts of syndication of content, but I am jazzed whenever I discover some small, useful, time saving way to make use of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined. Using free web content services like flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati that can travel the RSS road to dynamically update content elsewhere, moving from static hand spun web pages to live ones, is powerful stuff. So here is a roadmap of a change I set up in about 30 minutes time to rescue some stale links. This approach is something teachers can easily do to populate their own web sites with new web resources for their students, and can be done so efficiently, and without much effort. It fits in to an instructors own discovery process of resources, and boils down to: (1) Find interesting sites (2) Bookmark (using browser tool link) to del.icio.us (3) Tag it with a special identifier (4) Create a cut and paste Feed to Javascript code (5) Past to Web page(s) By repeating 1+2, the pages in (5) are auto updated. It is no great Einsteinian leap, but cannot imagine where there is not a goldrush stampede of faculty using this approach. So back to my situation. Our web site for the Ocotillo Online Learning Group has pretty much a stock template for all of the internally linked pages in that site. When I set it up, I did so in a manner so that a box of content on the left side navigation bar representing a collection of new web resources, was generated from a single external text file. Without getting too techie, the PHP technology we use for all of our web pages allows me to create a place in all documents that says, "Take all the contents of this external file, and stick it right here". The benefit of a PHP include is if I update the little text file, all changes that reference it are updated. So my original plan was every now and then I would manually update this file, and there would be a "see more" link to a larger set of web site links. The pitfall to this approach is I either get lazy, or run out of time to keep doing all this manual editing. Thus, the links that were listed as "new" were pretty much 2 years old. So I had a brief flash of light. Or maybe it was just an extra jolt of coffee. I already do a lot of site bookmarking on my collection of my del.icio.us bookmarks. I could just start tagging stuff I wanted on my OLG site with a tag of... olg in addition to other tags L might add like "teaching", "code", "ajax", "technology", "socialtech", etc... in my normal review of web sites, and extra click using the del.icio.us bookmark tool files sites into a special OLG category. Now a link to this collection is a start, but we can do more. If I copy the RSS feed URL for this tag collection, and then take it over to Feed2JS, I can build a cut an paste JavaScript line of "code" that will generate a simple list of say the ten most recent marked sites. Just by putting this JavaScript code created by Feed2JS: View RSS feed into a text file named new.inc I can have the dynamic feed of new sites inserted into my web pages (the formatting is controlled by some extra CSS styles, but that is not essential. In all the pages I want this on the sidebar, all I need to have in my HTML code is: I also add to my new.inc file an extra link for "more resources" page that goes to another new page that now uses the same construct, but displays the most recent 20 bookmarked sites, and includes the item descriptions. Now if all of this sounds complicated, it's only because I've tried to over explain. but think about this- once set up, you can use the Feed2JS code on any number of web pages, be they PHP, ASP, CFM, HTML, home page, Blogger template, Blackbaord/WebCT site... And if you set up tags for say your different classes you are teaching, as you find new resource sites relevant to these classes, you can tag appropriately, and the most recent items will be automatically published to your different course web pages. It is simple, and elegant, or at least I think so. Being able to update numerous web sites via the basic act of bookmarking and tagging in a collection, and having different subsets of content being "pushed" out as new content to other web sites... well it is just sweet music to me. Worth more than the banner "2 Cents Worth", David Warlick muses on Four Reasons Why the Blogsphere Might Make a Better Professional Collaborative Environment than Discussion Forums: I have been experimenting a good bit lately with integrating some of the emerging web tools (blogs, wikis, rss, podcasting, etc.) into my presentations and workshops, attempting to expand the scope and dimension of these events. For most of my presentations at NECC, I used a wiki page for my online handouts, enabling participants to come in after the presentation (or during if we'd had WiFi in the presentation rooms) and add their own insights on the topics. Some of the wiki pages also aggregated web links from my Del.icio.us account and related external blog articles written by participants after the session (and by colleagues before the session). This was accomplished by tying in with Technorati's ability to generate RSS feeds based on keyword and tag searches. With this experience, I've been wondering about using some of these tools to establish professional collaborative spaces for schools, districts, and school consortia. Our tendency is to look to discussion boards and mailing lists for online collaborations, and all things considered, these may remain the most effective tools for many collaborative efforts. This is but another recognition of what my Canuck friends and I tried to pitch as Small Technologies Loosely Joined. It's about us being in charge of building our own sources of information and ideas, and participating in conversations distributed in many places, rather than neatly organized into one nicely structured cubby. David's reasons I'll buy into, but it's not the entire enchilada: 1. Teacher Blog Articles come from the Person. Or that the blog becomes an expression/extension of the teacher, with a personality, and (should) lend itself to human expression. There is much to be said for ownership of the part of the Read/Write web that we Write. 2. Blogs extend beyond their primary community of interest. For the most part, or in theory. I do not think by themselves blogs do this, it is the social process that happens as blogs are linked, commented upon, discovered, referred, Googled.. IN fact, I think most people focus too much on the noun part of blog, "THE BLOG", the creation-- blogging, in my humble mind, is also a verb, and the act of participating in others' blog spaces... see Blogging is a Social Process. 3. Blogs and other RSS content can be organized uniquely. That is an understatement. Via RSS we are free to ick and choose our own channels, to mix and match, to add and discard. Again, more on ownership, but very much, as opposed to a fixed wall "virtual community" or discussion board, you are responsible for seeking your input, at the core of the process of Active Learning. Maybe this is a process of Active Communicating, as opposed to the old modes of Passive Communicating- stuff thrown at you from a listserv in reliable, but rigid structures. 4. Individual blog articles with their comments and links to related blogs can serve better as a stand-alone document and line to for other interested people. Yes, but a "document" is even the wrong metaphor. I think the point is an idea put out there ends up, for the most part, server crash and non-payed ISP bills aside, a fixed piece of the net. It gives ideas a small peg in the grander space of all ideas. But blogs are but one of the pieces- wikis, as alluded to in his opening, Skype, chat, Google News+Maps+Froogle_...., photoblogs, vlogs, even old IRC are possible pieces. What else? The magic, the sheer utter magic, in all of its simple, item, link, description, is the humble RSS feed-- the ties that loosely bind and connect disparate systems. Rather than all of the various named tools, which will morph, evolve, devolve, the most important understanding that should take place is managing and using RSS-- not at the technical level of XML and the various flavors, but the underlying principle at work. David's piece also resonates with a recent experience trying to fathom the value of that grand 1980s technology, the email listserv it all begain with a mis=palced question of "blogs vs. listservs" on the ITForum discussion list. That "conversation" is limited by David's reason #2, and in hindsight, seems as plausible as going to a bar near Fenway and trying to start a rational comparison of the superiority of the Yankees (note to blog- as an original Orioles fan and life long Yankee hater, I would never do that ;-). Of course people on a listserv will prefer it... they have chosen it as their medium. They want the comfort and structure it provides. And that is fine. But it's not a space I find as valuable for the rapid exchange, discovery of information and ideas in my field... for the very reasons David describes. It's not even an "either/or" type of question, if you buy the small pieces approach. That all said, I think it is going to be an incredible uphill battle for large numbers of people to embrace distributed conversations, and information that is not neatly organized into fixed hierarchies and ping-pong discussion threads. So it will take a while for others to pick up their share of David's 2 Cents, and just wish they would lift the veil a bit more from the known to peek into the unknown... cause that's where the action is at. One of the tweets Nixon did not manage to erase in 1972... Just kidding. I found this great, fun tool Twister from Classtools (twitterbution to @John_larkin, about time I gave you one back). It is a simple web form where you can enter info about a historical figure, and create a fake status message from them, as if they were tweeting back then - like Beethoven complaining about his iPod, Monet pondering painting versus gardening, or Isaac Newton calling for a post apple falling beverage. It's pretty simple, enter a fake twitter handle (be creative), their real name (used to pluck the images from sonewhere), the tweet they might have said (use hashtags! @people! bit.ly links!), and the date to put on the tweet. It's late for the ds106 visual assignments, but this one is easy anyone can do it in about 5 minutes. I made the ones on this post actually from my iPhone. A few more I made... Old Testament tweets... And from a footnote I saw in Sean Wilenz's Bob Dylan in America Right foot red, left arm blue-- let's play Twister http://classtools.net/twister/ Ahhhh, Spring time is almost here in the northern hemisphere (though here in Phoenix we have already experienced 90 degrees F for more than a week). This is a favorite time of year in the Sonoran Desert, as those precious relatively small, but important amounts of December, January rain, cause a burst of color as cacti and desert wild flowers burst into a raging riot of colors, even if for just a few weeks. We have desert landscaping at our home, not a lick of grass nor any time spent pushing a lawnmower, and last weekend, while tending the gardens (pulling weeds) metaphors began wafting through my mind..... (more…) If I was tweeting this, I might make up a silly hash tag like #CoolNewTechnologyIJustFoundThatsBeenOutForEons I use Gmail extensively, got my CogDogness, as well as over the last few weeks, I have ditched the desktop email client and using the Gmail version of our NMC Google Apps email. By finding my oldest Gmail message, I've been using it since July 2005 (and have amassed pile that is 3% of the capacity)-- yet a lesson of the web tech crazy pace is that there is always something new to learn. You never get to the end. Since I've been Gmailing so long I have pretty much ignored the ticker tape of "web clips" or news/ad-like things that sit atop the inbox. Until today. I noticed a link to "edit" the web clips, which is a tab inside the settings, and likely has been there a long time (learn more about Gmail web clips...). Woah, neo, of course- those are all RSS! And... you can remove all the ones you dont want (i zapped them all)... and... drumroll- you can add your own RSS URLs! For a test, I added feeds for comments to my blog and to my flickr account. Essentially, the web clips are turned into a mini feed mixer (although the docs say the clips are displayed randomly, not sequentially). So now, instead of unwanted cruft from cookbooks, forbes, my gmail ticker has my own feed items atop my inbox: I am not 100% sure how useful this is, but now in my email reading, I can get some notifcation using the clips I want, not theirs. And that. my friends, is a good thing. Good web dog. I've been jumping between my Mac web browsers, habitually in Safari, running to FireFox to try the cool new stuff, or to log into a site as a different user. But now I think I will not be going back to Safari. There is just Too Much Cool Firefox Stuff-- greasemonkey, the search plug-ins, RSS reader extensions like Sage, Fox-only things like the mechanism in TiddlyWiki as described by Brian Lamb. The only hang up was the motley crew of bookmark tools I had lingering on the Safari toolbar... no sign of an easy export. A dab of Google gets me to the Safari Bookmark Exporter (wonderful tool) that allowed me to export the Safari bookmarks to a Firefox friendly HTML file. Sweet. I know, I know. Firefox has been cool for a long time. I'm just a creature of browser habits, but have finally picked up and made the move. The Fox is now in my web driver seat. I've never done it formally, but have been in the periphery of some of the best folks who teach digital storytelling. My former colleagues at Maricopa, Linds Hicks, Rachel Woodburn, and Cheryl Colan have been generating magic for years (and right now they are weaving the same magic in New Zealand- Cheryl is even managing to vidblog some of the action). Each summer, they have run a "Digital Storytelling LearnShop" for Maricopa faculty, that produced some of the most moving pieces I have seen anywhere. Okay, I am gushing with bias, but having been there in the past, I can say that it's been the one workshop where everybody produces something of high and meaningful quality. Since I was at NMC this year, I missed being there in mid-May, though I did pop in on the last day to see the final movies. What a show! And as part of some last work I did in my old job, I got the examples posted to the set of Digital Story examples. (Unfortunately, the Streaming Quicktime server there is kaput, so if you want streaming, use the Windows Media versions; the QuickTime links now point to the iPod versions which are on progressive download). I hate to play favorites, but here are mine from the last batch (find all the movies from the list of examples): Homeland Security is seemingly about tomotoes, from Linda's experience growing up on a midwest farm, where they were unfashionable growing "organic" and comparing it now to the experience of picking up tomotoes at Safeway,. But Wham! It goes into a deeper place with her wondering about why in Arizona, we have tomatoes bearing stickers of origin in Mexico, Israel, etc. And ends with a sense of odd wonder about this world where we eat vegetables grown on the other side of the globe. Useless Things are what we all have, right? Clutter? Gettng organized? Dmitri does a fast paced fun frolic through his things. What does he do with them? Hope is what Stephanie seeks. As a college counselor, she is faced with helping a student who's physical and tatoo'ed attributes butt up against her own sense of self. Great use of simple imagery and photos, and what a tough tale to tell. Mrs. LeMon's Orange Tree is the focus of Diane's long history with a piano teacher who was very special to her. The pieces used in the story are all wonderful artifacts of her experience, down to the actually background music of her own child hood piano playing. Here I Go Round in Circles is Margaret's story of family and self, but what sets a lovely shiver of coolness down my spine is her own singing of the opening and closing tune. Whew! Soulful. Well, I really should list all 16, but am getting tired of cutting and pasting image links, they were all special from the May 2006 class. All in all, we have 33 stories there for the sharing... all of which intimidate me even trying this. Get thee to a Digital Storytelling workshop, best if you can track Joe down. Oh if you caught Beautiful Depravity back when they were starting out, you'd know what pure true Metal music is all about. Of course by the time Thou Art Metal came out in 2002, they had already lost a lead guitarist to a bizarre accident with a welding torch, and their original keyboard player found Buddha and left the band. But still, with the big bang opener of Remorseless Promises, to the haunting chorus of Dark Wrath, the hypnotic chords of Decayed Chant of Desolation, and the epic closing arc of Grim Delirium, this album holds up as the inspiration for nearly every metal band that has followed. Are you still with me? Everything above is made up, of course. Starting with a band, album cover, and song list created by the Metallizer Heavy Metal Music - Random Album Generator . But more than a mere generator, the Metallizer provides a useful widget that will shine up your sidebar: For fun and neverending metallic mayhem, you can display random metal albums on your own site or blog with the Metallizer.dk Widget.... No adware, spyware, or any other nefarious scheme is involved. However, this service may cause Armageddon, may damn your eternal soul to Hell, and/or may self-destruct without warning. Found at the home of fun weird stuff at the Generator Blog from where I never fail to find something fun and cheap to blog about. Someone has to do this stuff, cause most of my once favorite blogs are quite dead or at least lifeless, as everyone seems to only focus their attention on bursts of 140 characters at a time. Yesterday, my cousin and I were watching a bit of early silent films on TV, and I mentioned something about it being a very different form of film than modern. David went on to highlight the use of a single camera, not moving. He then mentioned that when he was working on his PhD in Education (1970 from Arizona State University, and yes, he remains a die hard Sun Devils fan) -- that he did some work in educational technology, I think he even said he worked on a "minor". That made me curious about what was "cutting edge" back then. He talked about video, and how he did some early stop motion video with humongous cameras. David also described things people were doing with printed text in making texts or activities that had a non-linear design (if you answer this, go to page X). Yeah, print. And this was the time when the cutting edge of technology, right out of the bowling alley, came on the scene-- overhead projectors! I was compelled to tweet this, along with what David described as "same as it ever was" that researchers were very concerned about the fear teachers had of using something like a 16mm projector: A reply came in from Kim, citing that 16mm projectors were scary! And I had a brain synapse spark or something, because I had the memory surge from back in fifth grade- when the scrawny kid version of Alan did exactly that, operated the 16mm projector. My school did something now that I never would have cited then as being innovative, but thinking about it, the folks at Bedford Elementary were just that. This is maybe 1973, and a few kids, including me, got to me on "A/V" crew. There was a small closet with carts that held things like opaque projectors, film strips, super 8 loops, and the two big guns, 16mm projectors. The A/V crew were charged with knowing how to use the equipment, and bringing it to teachers who requested use of them, as well as operating them for teachers. When I got to 5th grade, I was the lead person for this team, which also meant that it was me who had to set up the projectors when we had a school assembly. It was definitely this machine, a Graflax (though ours did not have the Dharma Initiative logo) The task was threading the film from the front reel through the machine, and onto the take up reel in back, and the key was making sure you got the right sized "loop" right above where it went down in front of the lamp. Doing this for a class was pressure enough, but getting ti right for an assembly when everyone was watching? Well you did not want to screw up. There was time when that know it all math teacher, Mr Fike, tried to adjust something in the middle of a showing, and kept screwing up... he finally let me step in and fix it. When I think about it, maybe it was not huge, but my school, teachers, principals, gave an appropriate amount of responsibility to us kids. When we went into the classroom with a machine, the teachers were looking to us to be the ones who knew what to do with them. This was some profound start on my tech career, and I had completely forgotten about it until now. Also forgotten was in middle school, where I joined Stage Crew, and became the kid who operated the lights for the plays we did, yanking down those big switches, and throwing the spots on. Again, giving kids responsibility is a huge learning boost as well as confidence. I wish I could thank my elementary school! Go Bedford Bees! The editor of EDUCAUSE Review, a good friend and fellow Arizonan, has been nudging me a few years to consider writing an article. Sure I blog a lot, but a publish article requires things like grammar, references, and coherency... so last Spring I suggested co-authoring as a crutch. Over the summer, I was honored to collaborate with Bryan Alexander (that guy can write! We wrote the draft on Google docs and tagged madly our resources) on the article just hitting print/PDF/web in the November/December 2008 issue - Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre: We are hoping to stir up some conversation about this, and are eager to have some push-back on our assertion. Our research googling on the topic mainly brought up... us! But as we've talked about it in our presentations and workshops, we get lots of nods of agreement. Our article describes Web 2.0 Storytelling as "telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies." emphasizing two components- microcontent and social media. We feel the rich media, non-linear capabilities, jumping of media platforms (or even ARG-like going out into the real world) make for a much different kind of expression than producing a personal video of some dog story. So we want to generate some conversation, resource sharing, responses in story form. Our plan is then to have an open wiki-based discussion space for the month of November, after which we will archive the site as a resource for EDUCAUSE. The wiki address was provided in the print and web versions, which went live Friday (I thought we'd have til today), so here is our Web2Storyteling wiki: Please help us out by getting some things into the four main response sections of the wiki (it is open to editing, no log in required). There is nothing more self-reinforced as lonely as an empty/sparse wiki. When people see a blank space, it seems they hesitate to be the first to write. Please please pretty please toss something into http://web2storytelling.wikispaces.com/-- I am hopeful with the light inbox and RSS readers that not all edtech heads are at EDUCAUSE conference in (lovely) Orlando. It's been a while since I shot or even explored Gigapan, the amazing photo exploration tool that lets you see a wide range of zoom detail in a scene. I have not even captured a scene in a while (see my old 'pans). But by sheer accidental link clicking from my RSS Reader (am I the last person on earth reading feeds while everyone else tweets their lunch?) I found on a neat site (see below) that you can now embed a gigagpan image.. So here goes one I took in November at the foot of the volcano Hekla: If you are interested in some applications of the gigapan I can think of few finer that the Geology ones by Ron Schott lots of structures and outcrops to study at many different scales. The thing that got me (linktribution to David Weinberger) here was a blog on Nano Gigapans, where rather than looking at large open scenes, they have gone the opposite way and have set up detailed scenes of very tiny things, like an SEM image of Blood and Hair -- this is brilliant, and has me nostalgic for a part time job I had as an undergrad running an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) at a DuPont lab. Hmmm, I am again inspired to take the rig out... Today's DS106 / Western Daily Create was to do some "research" on spaghetti westerns: https://twitter.com/ds106dc/status/683957433044082688 This is one of those tasks that could be as simple as tweeting a link like Paul Bond's refernece to a Mario Bava western, or the more in depth analysis of Johnny Guitar as a Bavatuesdays blog post by Jim Groom (oh the bava-dipity). That's why we love the Daily Create, you can drive it anyway you like. I worded today's vaguely, somewhat as a change up from the easier to do visual / photography ones. I was watching a documentary last week on The Spaghetti West where towards the end they refer to later work by Sergio Leone -- My Name is Nobody starring Terance Hill and Henry Fonda. [caption id="attachment_51495" align="aligncenter" width="350"] poster from TV Tropes http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/MyNameIsNobody[/caption] I've not yet seen it (but as I am finding there is an almost limitless supply of full length westerns on YouTube, here is the full version, but as I have read, it's almost a bit of Leone spoofing his own genre. Terance Hill, born Mario Giotti (half Italian, half German) had a run of successful westerns as sort of a wise cracking, almost goofball shooter, in contrast to the almost silent brooding Clint Eastwood (man with no name) characters in Leone's earlier work. My Name Is Nobody (1973) is an Affectionate Parody of the Spaghetti Western, originally released in Italy as Il mio nome è Nessuno and starring Henry Fonda as an aging, legendary gunslinger named Jack Beauregard who wants nothing more than to retire in peace, and Terence Hill as "Nobody", a man who idolized Beauregard and wants to see him die in a blaze of glory fighting singlehanded against the infamous Wild Bunch. This Wild Bunch Fonda's character takes on is a gang of 150! The trailer does a nifty job of mixing the minimalist poster style of the era with the scene footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RYq1PLdT0s I have some interest in the films that signal the impeding end of the wild west (the Shootist, John Wayne), Dead Man (Johnny Depp), and... and... well I am learning. Okay, this is gone farther than a Daily Create typically does. NOBODY should watch My Name is Nobody, NOBODY! (I will) Top / Featured Image credit: screen grab at 2:18 in My Name is Nobody trailer found on YouTube The web as whatever we thought we knew it is all going to poop, eh? I don't disagree about the large parts of it most see on an every day basis. I do wonder though how much we can make these grand assumptions when so many un-explored bits and crevices exist out there that are not covered by the same media stories we repost. I have started tagging in my old school one person social bookmarking space the small glints of light as smallweb which I have duct taped flowing into the fediverse. The web is out there. You just need to look in the corners, scrape through the goo. Anyhow, wading into the waters possible labeled NOSTALGIA AHEAD, it is not for the looking back to the web past, but seeing it in the now. This week I dropped in to listen to a futures session from the University of Regina's Open Education Bootcamp, pretty much as this was a gathering organized by folks I have known long, hosted by Alec Couros and featuring Stephen Downes, Valerie Irvine, Brian Lamb, and David Wiley. The gang! In passing, Brian flattered me with his story while teaching in Mexico of learning HTML from a free web tutorial... that I had made, this was long before we knew each other and collaborated so much, we found my work through the web. This was maybe the first public web thing I ever made, the Writing HTML tutorial I created as a young instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges (backstory blogged somewhere). It's long disappeared from the original web server, but when I left my job there I took all my web assets on a hard drive, and so the old thing lives on my own domain at https://mcli.cogdogblog.com/tut/ - while it bears a Creative Commons License now, those did not exist in 1994. The power I saw in HTML was you could pack up any web page and move it somewhere else, or share from an old floppy disk. The web was portable. I made this for a workshop I did at Maricopa, but it made sense to me then to put the entire thing on the web, and in that way, anyone could use it. There was a feel free to make a copy but please attribute statement on it - and that on its own spawned people to make translations into Spanish, Italian, French, and even Icelandic. Enough about that. The thing was Brian just mentioned this, I added to the chat simply "and its still on the web": but did not drop the URL. But Shauna the host went and found one maybe from a university in Minnesota. I thought about piping in with my "official" link, but why? I did not need to. Later out of curiosity, I dumped into the search box (maybe the last waning days of relying on Google search before it all goes to AI goo) "Writing HTML" "maricopa" and its rather startling, humbling to see how many places around the world, left ignored, unvisited on so many web servers, is my little piece of web work. This is not to brag, I do that enough here, well hack, maybe I am. But its more this clanging siren that by the simple act of just giving away this chunk of content for free, it has lodged into so many corners of the web, like wild flowers. Even if my web site crumbles and the internet archive's lights go out, it just will live on. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/48965317751 Smoking Dandelion flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I cannot extrapolate my premise experience to everything, but I have found in so many times, if you make something reusable (ideally useful too), package it so its self contained, and give it away, you do not have to worry about it disappearing from the web. The web is archiving my stuff in an organic way. It's like enabling little seeds of the small web that carried in the wind. Sure you can hoard and protect your stuff. In one fragile place. I'd rather let my stuff go. Featured Image: From a photo I took yesterday for a free local newspaper box and in the background screenshot of the Writing HTML tutorial found all over the dusty web. Ok. I am trying some way out there, It is a Mac OSX app called Kung-Log that allows me (I think) to post and edit my MovableType blog directly from a friendly Mac OSX interface. We will see what happens as I am "Kung-Log" blogging this one right now. Woah. (more…) This is supposed to be an introductory blog post for the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class. Hello/Goodbye it is-- while it's a bit early to jump over the fence (I did rad the first chapter of the book), but I am finding it's not the experience I need. I'm on course in my usual Zero for MOOC (and now SMOOC) Completion. I'm bailing, again- it's not fault of the course, it's me. And I do not want to come off as a snob like I know all this stuff, but if you are in a class, you have to take responsibility to get up and change if its not the right fit. I am wagging, see I am friendly? I will come back to the dog above. Wagging. I really wanted to be part of this open course for many reasons, including my respect for Lisa Lane and Todd Conaway as facilitators. I also saw it as an opportunity to evolve my skills at online teaching, given I have done just one class so far. I wanted to stay with an open course. What I missed was that the course is not only aimed at teachers new to online teaching, but relatively new to being online period. I am not comfortable with labels of "experienced MOOC" people and "novice", and some of the assertions that we should be tempering our communications so as not to scare off said novices. We are all educators. A mix is a good thing. It may be me, but I find the very usage of "novice" almost a disabling term. It tends to keep people comfortable at a low level of online ability. I started this class with the idea I was a "novice" at teaching, but I refuse to wear that as a label. In everything I do, even the things I have some skills, I have so more more to learn than I know that the idea of the labels is ridiculous. I am always moving forward on that spectrum of experience. Let me tell you about my "novice" students in ds106, which for some people needs to be explained as jargon, the Digital Storytelling class I teach at the University of Mary Washington. Most of my students have never done blogging, many are new to twitter, and are setting up their first YouTube accounts. In two days of this class, they have taken control of their domain, installed wordpress, created videos, and embedded them into their blog posts. This stuff is not hard, and don't you dare drag out that digital immigrant crap. The students do this because they just go and try; if they do not know what a term is, they look it up. They take action, they do not wait for the course to provide. So, I am feeling harshness coming on, but let me frame this with the approach how we each media in ds106- the first level is always noticing, listening. In photography, they learn to see details through the lens, and notice light. In Design, they learn to identify color, font, use of space. In audio, they listen first to appreciate layers in sound, foley effects, use fo background. Frankly I am not sure people should not be teaching online without some level of basic experience being and doing online. I have no idea if this is off base, but frankly it is a major (to me) difference of doing things ON the web (e.g. putting stuff inside LMSes) and doing things OF the web. I am not saying people have to be experts at web stuff, but the web should be like a place they feel like they inhabit, not just visit or witness through a glass plate window. And you might say, that is the purpose of the course. And I hope it does help those folks. I understand totally what this course is about, it is preparing teachers for the kind of online teaching that is done at Miracosta and many other places. It is stuff that is well designed and structured, as Lisa describes: Unlike these MOOCs, this class is not an open framework for participating in an online community. The syllabus, unlike other MOOCs, is not just an open topic and a synchronous session (we may not even have many of those). It is based on guided exploration particular topics with a particular design of progress, particularly suited for those just beginning to teach online. I can try, but all of this structure is going to make me loopy. It's not my way of being. It's not my style. I am loose stock. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What it took an afternoon literally padding up a creek (Patapsco River in Maryland) was that this is a course that is aimed at people who wi;l teach what is, if there is such a thing, a traditional online class. I am actually not that interested in that sort of online teaching; I want to be in the space of experimentation. I have no research papers or studies to rely on, but I go by my intuition and experience here- What we are doing in ds106 may not be the form many other classes can do, but to me, it is most close to the very structure and dynamic of the internet itself. I am not really seeing how the kind of content in the syllabus is gooing to feed my growth in such an experimental teaching space. In ds106 we purposely challenge our students, we deliberately make them uncomfortable, so they will learn how to move out of that space on their own. So you see that wagging dog above? Do you know what dog it is? It's not Lassie. The kind of media is an animated GIF, maybe one of the oldest forms of web media that has been resurrected in a new form, one that has been at the heart of ds106 a long while. For our assignment this week, we told our students to figure ut how to make an animated GIF. We did not provide them a screencast, a tutorial, a guide. We want them to struggle, to have to figure it out. We want them to be (a little frustrated). By them moving past that level of frustation to success is what gives them confidence to do that again and again. To me this is the kind of modern learning that we need to be doing, because the world is changing too fast for us to be designing well formed structures. Now here is the thing, what I find myself trying to do as a teacher is to de-program the students from they way they have been conditioned to DO school. They get so worried about having to complete the task, to get all 25 points of credit, that they miss the real outcomes. I want my students to be trying things they have not done before, to interpret the assignments in their own way (not just "what do I have to do to get credit"). I want to free them from worrying about the frigging points! I want them to focus on their process of learning, not the products. I want students to find their own voices in their work, and make the assignments work for them, rather than me- here's a twitter exchange where I was trying to work this angle with a student: https://twitter.com/aspangle0629/status/243034650270900224 And you want to know something? Alex is not in my section, he is in Martha Burtis' section. DO you see how we are blurring the boundaries? If one of my students might make it this far down my blog, here is a clue. If you try something and produce something that is kind fo crappy, but you can write a narrative of your process, describe the influences, the intent. you will do better in my class than someone who makes something slick but cannot talk about their process. Well here I am at the end of a post, I keep going back and trying to take out the stuff that makes me sound like a frothing mad dog. But here is this the thing- if a class, course, program, webinar, anything is not working for you, you have to get up and go. Who are you helping by sitting quietly and being "nice"? So Lisa, Todd, thanks for all the fish. I am sorry.,. I am not tagging this post to the course site. This is not a criticism of the work you are doing, but an awareness of the lack of a fit for me. All me. If I can help in some way, let me know. But I won't be in the regular mix, I have some sticks to go chase. cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by TheGiantVermin