Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
It is definitely NOT Ok, Google. The rationale for shutting down Google Reader smells like my old tennis shoes. You bring in gazillions of bucks on ads and you cannot aford to leave a service running as is? Show us the numbers! Make the Web, don;t breaking it. Bad, dog, Google, you are a very bad dog. With some irony, during one of my longer flights recently, I watched two different old classics about men being the last living things. I'd previously seen the more modern version I am Legend with Will Smith, but had read that it pales next to the original it was based on, Vincent Price's Last Man on Earth. I had downloaded it from the Internet Archive, but it is also available in full length on YouTube (along with the weirdness of pre-movie adds for Scott Walker- "last Republican on Earth"?). A bit from the trailer Okay, being a movie from 1964, the effects are cheesy. The "infected" are lumbering vampires, who seem to be easily fended off with a 2x4. There is the creepiness of the lead character's former best friend moaning "Morgan... Morgan" as the zombie/vampire tries every night to bust in the house. But what is there is the created creepiness of that place of being the last sane person, when all your family, friends, and everything you know has decayed away. There was the smugness of denial that the air-borne virus from Europe would hit America, and even if so, Science would Save the Day. There was being holed up in a basement, safely behind bolted doors strewn with garlic, and painfully watching the old home movies from before the plague. There was the a glimmer of false hope of finding another living being, only to find there was a "catch" for Bob Morgan. Being the last man was not such a great deal. Contrast Morgan's battle to Henry Bemis, the character Burgess Meredith played in maybe the classic-est Twilight Zone Episode, Time Enough at Last In full bore irony, the picked on Bemis, who just craves for time and peace to indulge in his passion, reading. By the act of his disobedience, he survives an atomic bomb because he hid in the bank vault to read during lunch. Like Bob Morgan, Bemis wanders through a landscape of despair and ruin, and finds himself totally alone.. until he wanders into the remains of the public library. He seems to be the last man who gets what he wanted, but alas, cruel fate takes it away. What's the moral? Being last person on earth sucks either way? Ultimate, penultimate, ultra-ultimate... we found the holy grail at Blue Water Seafood in San Diego. Brian and I celebrated the fruits of our presentation labor here with fabulously fresh swordfish and mahi-mahi tacos. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/93915698 Blue Water Seafood flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Yes, to all those who asked us during the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, we took this quest very seriously. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/93915194 Two Tacos flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It's all in the sauce! Featured Image: Yes! This is IT! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It does make a decent news story to announce the offering of a free, as in no cost to taxpayers, database of local photos for a city. https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/800020936380403713 "Freely Available" is... well ok. As told in the story from Albuquerque TV station KOB4: Stunning images of Albuquerque and surrounding areas aren't hard to come by, but finding them online free of charge is. Really? I just found more than 100,000 Creative Commons licensed flickr images of Albuquerque, many stunning. Or I can use Mediachain to locate more than 1000 fantastic open-licensed photos from flickr, 500px, pexels, and dpla. Wow, that was hard to come by. Snicker. The "new internet database" has 400 high quality photos, produced by a local studio, at a cost of $300,000 paid by the city and private investors. That's $750 per image. They do have some interesting videos and timelapse, so my math is unevenly distributed. But of course, there is this possibility "the site has the potential to be a viral marketing tool". Let's go look at some free photos. Oh. Okay, it is "free" to register. No big deal. Is it necessary? Registering allows us to better track metrics on downloads. We believe this is especially important since this project is partially funded with public dollars. We will never sell, give away, or otherwise distribute your information. As far as I can tell there are no open licenses attached to the collection. You can find on the registration page the long set of license agreements, with boilerplate lawyer fee language (for fun if you view source on the license you can see it was written in MS Word) that is much more clear if a Creative Commons license was used instead; it's more or less the same result: Your exercise of the Licensed Rights is expressly made subject to the following conditions. Attribution. If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must: retain the following if it is supplied by the LICENSOR with the Licensed Material: identification of MarbleStreetStudio.com as the creator(s) of the Licensed Material; a copyright notice; a notice that refers to this License by the City of Albuquerque; a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties; a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable; indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this License. You may satisfy the conditions in Section III(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information. If requested by the LICENSOR, You must remove any of the information required by Section III(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable. Share Alike. In addition to the conditions in Section III(a), if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply. You must include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, the Adapter's License You apply. You may satisfy this condition in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share Adapted Material. You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, Adapted Material that restrict exercise of the rights granted under the Adapter's License You apply. As far as I can tell there is no API so the collection can be integrated into other apps or other parts of the information ecosystem. The database is a small, unconnected island. It's a pretty island. It bears no indication (from viewing source) that it is anything but a custom designed database. The photos are really really good, do not get me wrong: But the only metadata visible is an image file name and a list of tags. You get way more data in flickr- this is just a bit of what flickr provides for the image I used at the top of this post: [caption id="attachment_63326" align="aligncenter" width="587"] Got metadata? Flickr does.[/caption] Why would the city of Albuquerque not participate in a commons, say by adding their images to the Flickr Commons? Or working with their libraries, make the collection part of the Digital Public Library of America? I am not critical of the project. I am definitely not critical of the media produced. And if I was able to get a big money grant to produce media, I would love the opportunity. I am critical of harping over this idea of free being virtuous in terms of cost of access. By not participating in a larger ecosystem of media, by not using standard infrastructures for data management, by not deploying open licenses in use by billions of pieces of other media, it's a huge opportunity loss. But hey, potentially it might go viral. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Rox's Pix under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: Found this photo by searching mediachain for Albuquerque (after misspelling it a few times)- the source of the image is in flickr, so I used my own preferred attribution tool to give credit got flickr photo by jghil https://flickr.com/photos/jghil/4239029954 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license. Admittedly, not running my attribution through Mediachain means I am not adding to the chain, so here is their attribution code, just for the blocks. Albuquerque Balloon Festival by Jghil via Attribution Engine. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. It must be bluntly obvious that I am infected with ds106 (for readers lacking exposure to the virus or the ability to reach for The Google, ds106 is the open Digital Storytelling course now in its second year of evolution, spreading out of the University of Mary Washington. With MOOC Hysteria continuing an epic rage through the public consciousness, I waver from mild annoyance to blissful yawning to often... "meh". Today, I could not be more pleased to see that ds106 is not on a list of MOOCs -- assuming that it does not "conform to the original format developed by George Siemens and [Stephen Downes]". The structure and modality of ds106 seems to remain a data point of its own. Besides I've never really wanted to be part of things that are so "conforming". I did have some thoughts about the image Stephen did share with his OLDaily post as a comparison of different network models of scaling, essentially the faceoff of xMOOC versus cMOOC And here I wade into waters I will perhaps drown in since Stephen is way more steeped in network knowledge than I. But to me, actually the diagram on the left actually scales well-- depending on what is the thing at the center and how much it can pump out. That is the model of mass production, right? So it can scale (whatever that means). The question is, what is the quality of the thing it is scaling? Its more about the things on the connection lines than the nodes, right? And is it just the scaling that matters (e.g. WE CAN TEACH 180,000 STUDENTS WITH ONE TEACHER HA HA HA yeah right). And the network model on the right, what is the quintessential cMOOC conformist types, what happens if that scales? To me you get more and more of the same pattern, repeating to the horizon (the dry lake is not the metaphor, I just think in terms of natural patterns). [caption id="attachment_9594" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Broadwell Dry Lake Bed, photo from Wunderground http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/Leia/552?gallery=[/caption] I totally am a fan of the networked approach to online leaning that really Stephen and George broke ground with in 2008 (and they never get credit in Time magazine). I see it as more better, this connectivist model of George and Stephen. But to me- it's not really a purely even distributed network as depicted, with all nodes equal-- there is some hub, some centrality of the course itself, the thing people are networking about. There is dependency on the open course site to be open. What these digrams describe are the relationships of the people involved in said courses. I see another dimension as being important. What I tried once before, in citing the differences of ds106 from their other bovine named courses, is to try and call it "fractal", saying that scales were for lizards. To me, all other MOOCs, be they x or c type, sis to create the same content/curriculum for everyone in the course- they all do the same tasks. And to be honest, the framing points are actually weekly lectures, be they videos spawned out of xMOOCs or webinars. The instruction in these modes are teacher centric (even if people can banter in chat boxes). In ds106, what we provide the open participants is not intended or designed to be the same as for the registereed students. It is not a scaled copy. The structure that happens in ds106 ends up being more like localized cells, revolving around the different courses affiliating with ds106, like now sections 1 and 2 at UMW, the section for York College, previous semesters when we had classes at Temple University in Japan, Kansas State University, etc. Outside of UMW's ds106 courses, these are other classes that have some overlap, but are not the same-- they are part of ds106 but not ds106 as we teach it at UMW. The overlap is in the use of student blogs to publish their works, doing creative challenges from the Daily Create or the Assignment Bank-- all of their work aggregates into the main ds106 site and paths cross on twitter, flickr, etc. I described this as a fractal model, because of what I saw as the quasi replication at different places, but was schooled on this recently: https://twitter.com/Downes/status/248508074581716992 I totally accept that fractal is not really the right metaphor (and I will try to avoid playing wit the phrase of "fancy decorations"). Maybe it is more of a network of networks model (you kind of like the way the Internet itself works). Or rhizomes. Or pickled beets. Whatever. Might ds106 be more of a decentralized network model? [caption id="attachment_9595" align="aligncenter" width="300"] from History of Networks http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3308292/blog2/?tag=networks[/caption] That's the problem with network diagrams. You can get mired in the abstration. Actually it looks something like this: https://twitter.com/mhawksey/status/248773148743450625 I will need Martin Hawksey to appear in the corner to explain for the visualization-impaired, but this as generated from an export of the ds106 wordpress site including almost 20,000 blog posts And there is more visuals courtesy of Mr Hawksey. His mad genius set up for gathering/analysing twitter data in a Google Spreadsheet has been piling up date since August of this year, and we are just starting to play with the visualizations his TAGSExplorer generates - here is one you can play with based on this data shows not only the clusters, but you can drag nodes around to see the relationships and the data: [caption id="attachment_9610" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image for full sized version)[/caption] [caption id="attachment_9609" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image for full sized version)[/caption] And even with this, I am sure if *it* is the underlying model either. I don't care if diagram model is right, what I care about is establishing a different way of thinking about doing open courses. I don;t care about talking about the theory of MOOCs or having MOOCs on MOOCs (kind fo caniblistic). I'd rather be doing / teaching my open course then bantering about it. Yet I do. But we've been doing this stuff at ds106 as an open course now in our fourth full semester, plus having run different iterations in 2 summer sessions. We have no lectures. We run the bulk of our class out of an open assignment repository that users create te work for others to do (and have not even seen anything like it elsewhere). We have a course where people who are done with the class return a year later to do assignments. We have a place where open participants not only give comments to students, but sometimes work with them on group projects. While we do have these local cells, the boundaries between our groups blur and merge. We have a radio station and a community that extends way beyond the class. When the ds106 classes end at UMW-- the community keeps on going. Where the course ends and the community begins is grey. But wait-- there is more. Ben Rimes has started a 106 book club as a way to connect people over readings. We had a summer camp in 2012 that even had a store of swag. There was a telethon to raise funds to support the radio station. In the first year Todd Conaway made the first ds106 radio t-shirts. Where does this occur in those MOOC things? I guess there has been Udacity t-shirts and I guess Coursera does barbecues -- but hey, those guys have gazillions of dollars! Oh yeah, we are not getting any venture funding. Nothing from Bill Gates. Heck, our community kickstarted money to support us (has any other MOOC done THAT?) - over $12,000!. And so in some ways it can rankle when the stuff we are doing is not mentioned, but actually being out of the limelight is better. I kind of like flying below the radar. It keeps you knowing where the ground is. ds106- it ain't a MOOC and nor is there ant MOOC that has got what we got. Is it a better model? I don't know, and the approach is not one we see as stamping out carbon copies of. But for what we are doing, it is as close to magic dust of the cosmos as I have seen in 20 years of education technology. Nuff said. I got teaching to do, and art to make. ... then the server move has been successful. You are viewing the same old dog blog on a new server host, with a shorter and more memorable URL: http://cogdogblog.com/ and its RSS feed: http://cogdogblog.com/feed/ If all goes well, all old links, RSS feeds, etc from the old host at cogdogblog.com/...../ will be automatically routed here. I will leave the redirects up for at least 6 months, if not longer. Speaking of which, one gripe I have always had is when web developers move directories around, create new URLs and do not leave a forwarding note or path, and leave in their wake a long tail of broken links, bad search results, and a funky smell. If you are wise enough to be running an Apache server, it is bone easy to set up re-directs, if your server is set up to pay attention to .htaccess files. This is a simple file placed in the root directory of your server, and I am able to make any URL that starts with the old URL address permanently re-direct to the new one by adding a line on the jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu server: Redirect 301 /cdb http://cogdogblog.com This makes an automatic browser re-direct for any URL under my cdb/ directory to go to the new home. And what a coincidence. I have written about this before. If you go to the old URL: http://cogdogblog.com/2005/02/03/this-old/ as a living example, you will see in action what it does. Web re-direction is something any web site manager should be able to handle without much effort. Another week, another fabulous time spent sitting around the DS106 Radio campfire today for the High Noon Radio show. This is the “Fistful of Design” week for Paul Bond’s UMW Students, so Paul and I had as guests two folks who know how to design their way out of a paper bag (or on them), Amy Burvall, she of the 30 creative projects a week, and Cheryl Colan, teacher and designer I have known since my days riding the western ed tech scene at the Maricopa Community Colleges. We got yer archive right here… http://106tricks.net/wp-content/uploads/audio/high-noon-show-05.mp3 If you are curious as to what the DS106 Radio Radio Booth looks like, it puts out a lot of heat, so put on your safety glasses: flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license My setup is described as Rube Goldberg… but its a beauty. Jason Toal was doing some live sketch noting with this Sketchport thing which could be watched as he drew. Cool. And some tweet-worth stuff from the conversation… My "Standing on the Shoulders" post re: artistic influences https://t.co/03q4rkLk9v @cogdog #western106 pic.twitter.com/RwU5DBqw4P — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 Tune in for our chat about #visuals in media https://t.co/qwjPBHrmnJ @cogdog and moi #western106 pic.twitter.com/mxVEMUlB6Z — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 Where to find (some) of my #visual projects on the web https://t.co/gXe0SMnldQ #creativity #western106 @cogdog pic.twitter.com/3srJvennUv — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 On being a serial creator…https://t.co/LCeT9NByFM (this image by @MrZiebarth ) Join radio #western106 in 30 min pic.twitter.com/SKrUmCudOh — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 Some great musing on design & the West: https://t.co/5BIrd4GbpK #western106 #ds106 — paul bond (@phb256) February 17, 2016 Icon yourself the #ds106 way: https://t.co/qkx6GxbMUK – simple yet meaningful #western106 — paul bond (@phb256) February 17, 2016 Glad the #ds106 gets a lot out of Vignelli's Canon https://t.co/cPmQD3iAts I once worried it might be too insider-y #western106 — paul bond (@phb256) February 17, 2016 “Some people call me the space cowboy, some call me the gangster of love.” https://t.co/1uropz6fK0 #western106 #ds106radio — Hank Soda (@HankSoda) February 17, 2016 "The more I erase, the better it is" @amyburvall #ds106 #design listen live for more design goodness https://t.co/ETEeHEKzJD — Cheryl Colan (@cherylcolan) February 17, 2016 talking Saul Bass on #ds106radio https://t.co/E7immMgUnu — paul bond (@phb256) February 17, 2016 5 traceable listeners tuned into #ds106radio #western106 campfire pic.twitter.com/922RuxiHGm — Hank Soda (@HankSoda) February 17, 2016 Picture This by Molly Bang – fabulous design tutorial https://t.co/lrugsrJi1A #ds106 #design — Cheryl Colan (@cherylcolan) February 17, 2016 Brilliant #GraphicFacilitation resource ‘Picture This’ https://t.co/6FdEj2VT7y (PDF) via: #western106 @cherylcolan — Hank Soda (@HankSoda) February 17, 2016 We came up with an impromptu design challenge…. Your design assignment vi @amyburvall – Something western, whimsical, and the color persimmon tagged #ds106 and #westernwhimsy — Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 17, 2016 #westernwhimsy #ds106 pic.twitter.com/G1t9I7Jzc2 — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 Take the Whimsy Way West with #ds106 #westernwhimsy pic.twitter.com/1l5xmJ6ImT — Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 17, 2016 Try https://t.co/e4tpgK123h for generating a random phrase to draw @serendipidoodle challenge #metaphor #visualthinking #western106 #ds106 — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 Also a fun sketch challenge- the creative constraints of https://t.co/bExoCLdzFG which randomizes your FB statuses #western106 #ds106 — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 How about illustrating a #Beatles lyric and posting to my @tweatles21 account? #western106 #ds106 — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 Thanks for the #western106 #ds106radio campfire @cogdog -folks should check out Unflattening by @Nsousanis :) — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 @cogdog @phb256 @cherylcolan Here is the #minimalist poster series on symptoms of #depression https://t.co/WT40Mc67S0 #western106 #ds106 — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 .@cogdog check out the colours in this 1970s era portraiture https://t.co/IZxL8jBKJ0 #photography #ds106 #seventiesswank — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 For anyone interested in a menagerie of #visualthinking sources: https://t.co/FQ7LMgc6nU my G+ #western106 #ds106 @cogdog — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) February 17, 2016 Amy urged us to watch Brigitte Bardot and Sean Connery in Shalako Thanks all for the great convo! Best I could find from D'Arcy's photos, some thumbnails, he slashed and burned all his flickr It may look like I knew what I was doing with this guitar at the Northern Voice EduGlu Blues JamFest, but rest assured, you most likely dont want to ask for a recording (there was none)- but just holding a guitar, for me, is a sensual experience. And a nostalgic one. So I am thinking of a story. A story of a blonde. A blonde fender Telecaster. I started taking guitar lessons at 15, with the non original day dreams of being a rock star. We did not have the toys that are here now. I started with a red, white, and blue acoustic for my first lessons. The first song my teacher showed me was "Day Tripper". My parents said if I stuck with lessons 6 months, they would let me get a "real" guitar. Incentives worked. I ended up with the Takamine acoustic I still own. But this story is not about her. I got tired of the regimen of lessons (especially as it veered into music theory- i just wanted to play songs from the radio) and quit. My friend Larry had a organ/keyboard synthesizer, and could pluck the notes/chords by listening; another guy Marc played drums. We talked Kevin into singing. Larry's older brother had left a mondo Marshall bass amp in his house. We schemed a band. So with my snow shoveling / gas cutting money saved up, I looked in the newspaper for a used electric guitar. And came across the blonde telecaster from some guy, with a Peavy Backstage small amp. I don't have a digital photo, but it looked pretty much like thids photo... except the pickguard was white and the wood not as grainy, but, well it's a guitar. https://flickr.com/photos/mediawench/4506854196 Fender Telecaster, April, 2010 flickr photo by Maggie Osterberg shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license Mine was maybe a 1973 vintage, not as much grain in the body. It was a heavy sucker, but it felt like a guitar god just to hold. Not that I could make it really sound great. Actually (and this is added later) I scanned a photo from 1980- look at this 17 year old kid: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2543589389 Me and the Telecaster flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) So we did maybe one party in my basement. We trucked Larry's electric organ and his brothers giant Marshall amp, and played loud music for hours. Our tight knit group of friends went off to college. Kevin got an acoustic. I was not playing the Tele all that much, and thought we made an arrangement where he bought it off me for like $25 and I would buy it back some time in the future, and it would pass back and forth. But that was not how it panned out. We drifted apart, lost touch, I moved west, he got married, I got married, he had kids... And he had the Tele! I was pissed off for some time, a lot for the loss of a friendship that I made akin t a brother.. and he had that beautiful guitar (never mind the obvious fact I did sell it). But time wore down that story and I was resigned to that being how it ends. Ironically, Kevin and I ended up taking different paths into careers of education technology, me via Geology, he via engineering. About 3 years ago, I had an opportunity to do a workshop at the university he was at, and took a chance to reconnect. I had dinner at his house and watched my old beer drinking buddy parent teen age kids. And here is the good part of the story. His son, now 15, plays guitar, and is damn good. And he plays that Telecaster in a real band, who plays in front of real audiences (somewhere there is a YouTube clip, looking...) And that is where that Telecaster needs to be. In the hands of someone who can make it make beautiful rock and roll (not the noise I generate). In the hands of a young musician, not some old dreamer. And even better, a few weeks ago Kevin and I met up for beers in Tempe (he was in town for a meeting), and I finally figured out we can have a better friendship now in our 40s than the nostalgia glory I had painted of being 16. But you know what? After holding that Ibanez at Brian's house... I'm ready to consider getting an electric. And maybe, maybe, maybe, it may even be... a lovely blonde Tele. Our local paper carries a Monday morning local column on computers, most of the time covering those critical questions on spyware and video drivers for Vista. But the writer sometimes looks at the Internet (with a Capital I), and today I was curious to read the take on social networks. You had my riding down nostalgia lane with the opening: The Internet, often referred to as the "Information Superhighway." is bulging with information that grows exponentially every day. Really? Maybe me and Gomer should check out this new fangled Information Hghway. When was the last time you heard someone call the net the "Information Superhighway?" I was instantly transported back to the early 1990s when the (before we had enough people on the net to make a meme) phrase was coined by Al Gore (long before his pseudo claim to inventing it). At the time I thought it was silly and even hoisted a sarcastic web page (heck, if I did not know better, I would claim I was blogging and maybe that I invented that concept), still clinging to life at my old Maricopa web site, on the Information SuperHypeWay. That image might have been my invention of the term "mashup", taking a public photo of the then VP, an image of a city a student graphic artists had created for us for another project, and my touch, the Photoshopped empty bubbles. At the time the notion seemed silly to me, as I was using dialup at home waiting for the the long promised cable highway to reach our part of town (I think it took about 5 more years), and the metaphor seemed off kilter, reminding me of overpasses that were built for a nearby freeway about 6 years before the freeway actually connected them. That all seemed so long ago until today's newspaper column. Now of course, it is easy to throw darts at someone charged with writing in a few paragraphs trying to explain what social networking is to a likely audience that does not know that Ajax is something good for your computer. And the effort is not all that bad, though strangely limited to describing social networking as social bookmarking (Digg and del.icio.us), yet again, limiting the main benefit to helping drive traffic to sites you bookmark by tagging them in these sites. But I enjoyed more the memory of driving my Buick Century down the speedy highway... cc licensed flickr photo shared by dchrisoh This year I fell out of NaNoWriMo only 12 days in, and it was a good thing. I could sense form where I was, that my attempt at writing a World According to Dogs novel was maybe at best, a not original idea and not welle executed. But failing writing about dogs, I'm into some good reading some books, here in my Kindle app, in the "dog vein" I want to credit John King for his comment that led me to read the marvelous, yet bittersweet, Timbuktu. In that story, told by the world wise "Mr Bones" we find the dog seeing a parting of the ways with his estranged, yet dog-loved, human companion, the mentally off kilter. homeless, and dying, Willy G Christmas. It was a quick read, yet like a coat of dried mud, I cannot quite shake it. It is, in its unusual way, a love story. Willy is a stream of conscious firehose, at the end overloaded with all of the world he has taken in (here's my kindle saved clipping) Understanding. That's what I'm after, chum. The key to the puzzle, the secret formula after four-plus decades of groping in the dark. And still, all this stuff keeps getting in my way. Even as I breathe my last, I'm choking on it. Useless bits of knowledge, unwanted memories, dandelion fluff. It's all flit and fume. That sense is very familiar for me now! The second dog point of view book I have just started is Beautiful Joe An Autobiography of a Dog (gotta like the $0.00 price). It's the tale of an abused dog, and it was published back in 1873! A quote clipped from the opening, on humans and animals (though make a modern gender switch for that use of "manly" to be "humanly": Kindness to the animal kingdom is the first, or a first principle in the growth of true philanthropy. Young Lincoln once waded across a half-frozen river to rescue a dog, and stopped in a walk with a statesman to put back a bird that had fallen out of its nest. Such a heart was trained to be a leader of men, and to be crucified for a cause. The conscience that runs to the call of an animal in distress is girding itself with power to do manly work in the world. I'm liking the reading now more than the writing.... Got any more recommendations for dog authored books? cc licensed flickr photo shared by betta design I spent too much of today fiddling around with setting up a wiki on our new Jade server. This was at the request of one of our most intrpeid and adventurous faculty members, one I hooked on HTML in 1994, roped into blogs last year, and he's already to push the envelope out past Mars. The obliqure reference in the post title is that I am about 150 miles southeast of the aptly named small Arizona town of "Wikieup" on the wild highway between Phoenix and Las Vegas. There are about 1000 various wiki systems to choose from, and it is hard to know one from another, and today I played with OddMuse, a descendent of UseMod-- it seemed to be one that had some flexibility for features like RSS and rolling as a weblog. Most of it was fiddling with a new style sheet for formatting, and going back and forth on a bunch of settings. The scripts are not that hairy, but there are a pile of settings to twiddle and the whole writing mode is different in wiki-space. I am not quite ready to unveil the wrapper, as there is actually nothing but goofy content. I see that it is very careful to set up a very clear structure and entry to wiki's. More to come. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Still catching up on the slices of life audio reflection, this one almost two weeks old. ALways Be 'Poligizing for being behind? This audio recording is from January 26, the morning I left home in Strawberry Arizona, for the 220 mile express trip to Virginia. Slices of Life 008: Leaving Arizona I am going to miss these Big Blue Skies cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In many ways, this was eerily similar to the day I left on my 5 month odyssey in June 2011, but also very different. At that time was unsure if I could even live the road life; would I hate it? I of course found it I could manage living out of Big Red and being mobile for few months, and that home was always in Strawberry even if I wasn't. I know now too that if I need to I can do 500, 600, 700 miles in a day. I reflected on my section of ds106, a class I will be teaching in person at University of Mary Washington. Last night was third session I did remotely via Skypa (a huge Arizona sky sized thanks to Jim Groom who has been present for my students, and set up the two way video liv stream) This is far from an optimal way to teach this way; It is hard for me to see, hard to hear audio clearly via skype (especially since I had busted m laptop and was using my iPhone- students are tiny!). I cant read body language, and really I am "sort of not there". But it was just a bridge needed to give me time to get across the country. So far, 20 of my 25 students have their domains and wordpress blogs set up, done with minimal direction -- I agree with Jim that it's a lesson in not relying totally on the course or the teacher to provide answers, that they will need to figure out things on their own, with their pal. Half of these have already customized their themes. Last night's session was the discussion of Gardner Campbell's talk on No Digital Facelift and paper on Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Stealing/borriwing/co-opting on of Gardner's own classtoom techniques, I had asked them to think about "nuggets" within reading or video- a key sentence or phrase that grabbed their interest, curiosity as starting points for discussions. I provided Jim a few YouTube links that use the technique to point to a particular timecode to start playing, examples: Bag of gold http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=02m50s Digital facelift http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=10m15s Little big planet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=18m50s Small things can be meaningful http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=33m20s I also had Jim show some examples of how te "bags of gold" became a bit of a viral meme last year. e.g. Tim's Kinetic Typography, Tom Woodward audio remix, Giulia Forsythe's visual notes, Barbara Dieu's video remox -- in all of these, these show visual ways of drawing out different nuggets of the talk. I tried to start with a discussion of "What is bag of gold? what does it mean to you?" ... awkward silence. But the discussion picked up next when we moved to "what is a visual facelift". It was interesting that students felt Gardner was advocating a total technology makeover for teaching, which got into the most active state as they debated what could and could not be taught online. I for one have not come across anyone advocating that surgery could eb taught completely online. Class closed with an attenmt to describe what Personal Cyberinfrastructure means- asked student to read passage out loud (borrowed again technique from from Gardner): Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline. "” American Council of Learned Societies, Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006 We do have an archive of this class http://vimeo.com/35725367 And posts from this assignment are available at http://ds106.us/tag/pci I then speculated what to do next week with Storytelling- introduce examples of web storytelling? The slice closed with a personal memory of my trip return to this road in November, where I crossed the 15,000 mile mark and getting an iPod shuffled memory of my Mom, She's a Rainbow" Driving north from the Ponderosa Forest into the pinyon pine forest and eventual sage brush high desert terrain near Winslow, I marveled at how subtle wast this transition from forest to high plains, not clear where one begins and other ends -- life is gradational http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2810674928/ It's meaningful to me even if "nobody" blogs anymore, these things still work as generators of potential serendipity. Earlier this year, I rummaged through some old photos, online databases, exploring what small shreds I could find about my mother's brother, my Uncle Harvey. I have the barest warm glow shreds of memories his wife, my Aunt Doris, but no photos, and getting AI to generate something was just pitiful cartoon goo. https://cogdogblog.com/2024/01/stories-of-aunt-doris/ But as the internet turns, an interesting thing happened. Another post a few months earlier shared more memories and old photos honoring my Mom's youngest, and now only surviving sibling, my Aunt Dorothy. Quite unexpectedly, that post got a comment (who out there in blog geritol lan remembers blog comments?) from my cousin Susan, who I liekly have not seen in close to 45 or 50 years! Let's navigate the tree- Susan was the oldest daughter of Mom's older sister, Ruth. I remembered her a bit as an artist, drawing and painting, and loving books. That's about it! We began emailing, and as I had just visited my oldest sister in April, where one night we looked through her own box of old photos.I had found one of all my cousins on that side of the family, posing for some event. Look at the kids, with the full range of expression, Cousins from my Mom's side of the family. In the back, left to right is Barry,Linda, Albert, and Susan (Albert was son of Aunt Dinah, the others are children of Aunt Ruth). In the front are my sisters Judy and Harriet, and from my Aunt Dorothy, my cousins Frannie, Hank, and Jane in front) I recognize the abstract painting in the back as one of Aunt Dorothy's I saw when I visited in 2012 so guess this is at her house. Since I am not here, I'd guess the date as 1963 or earlier. But then in an email and photo exchange with cousin Susan, she shared a photo her Mom's photo album had of the adults of these kids posing in the same place, and written on it was the caption that the gathering was for wedding of Harvey and Doris. Susan confirms this took place at our Aunt's home. The adult counterpart to the kids images, my parents on the left, and other of mom;s siblings and parents on either side of Doris and Harvey, bride and groom. I appreciate that my Aunt Ruth added labels for all. So thanks to the re-connection to cousin Susan, who found me via this blog, I now have at least one photo of my Aunt Doris that I sought, very grainy, but a photo nonetheless. I can't say it's how I remember her (which is not at all), but is certainly more desirable in fuzzy grainy old photos than what generative AI goo shat out. Doris Cohen and Harvey Herondorf on their wedding day, likely 1964. The last bit of irony was getting a message from my sister Judy, the same week I re-connected with my cousin, that she ran into her while shopping at Costco. I cannot give credit to my blog, that's just real serendipity. Yes, my little bits of family photo-sleuthing is pretty minor on the scale of say, climate change or AI bromeisters, but to me, it just rings that little bell of reminder that we can take ownership of our small corners of the internet, toss something out there, and let coincidence work some magic. Featured Image: Composite by my of cropped versions of he photo of family members shown in this blathering blog post. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jenny P. If we just lived our lives out by setting, pursuing, and meeting objectives, what a sterile world it would be. Here;s to what you learn when you are not expecting too, and for surfing by serendipity. Serendipity is following the curious post titles in your RSS reader, leading my to Andy Rush sharing his discovery of a utility called Evom (well that was a nice find there-- ). But since Andy played around with the backwards spelling things-- I thought it would be fun to write a bit of my comments in reverse text. Now I thought I did this in BBEdit before, but I think I did something insane like a grep search to put each letter on a separate line, a reverse line sort, and a search and replace on the line return characters. Surel;y someone has created something like that already-- googled a bit on on reverse text generator, and what do you know? The first hit is Lucky- The Reverse Text Generator does not only backward, but also Flipped, and Upside Down: So playing with my opening sentence, I can do things like: .ytipidneres yb gnifrus rof dna ,oot gnitcepxe ton era uoy nehw nrael uoy tahw ot s;ereH .eb dluow ti dlrow elirets a tahw ,sevitcejbo gniteem dna ,gniusrup ,gnittes yb tuo sevil ruo devil tsuj ew fI or Fi ew tsuj devil ruo sevil tuo yb gnittes, gniusrup, dna gniteem sevitcejbo, tahw a elirets dlrow ti dluow eb. Ereh;s ot tahw uoy nrael nehw uoy era ton gnitcepxe oot, dna rof gnifrus yb ytipidneres. and the ever useful ˙ʎʇıdıpuÇɹÇs ÊŽq ƃuıɟɹns ɹoÉŸ puÉ 'ooʇ ƃuıʇɔÇdxÇ Ê‡ou ÇÉ¹É noÊŽ uÇÉ¥Ê uɹÉÇן noÊŽ ʇÉÉ¥Ê oʇ sØ›ÇɹÇÉ¥ Ë™Çq pןnoÊ Ê‡Ä± pןɹoÊ ÇןıɹÇʇs É Ê‡ÉÉ¥Ê 'sÇʌıʇɔÇɾqo ƃuıʇÇÇɯ puÉ 'ƃuınsɹnd 'ƃuıʇʇÇs ÊŽq ʇno sÇʌıן ɹno pÇʌıן ʇsnɾ ÇÊ ÉŸÄ± And this is just one of 20 free tools in the TextMechanic's toolbox- a lot of them extremely useful. So a little bit of goofing off, and I find something like this. As Rick Schwier said... But more so, it always sends a ripple down the spine, when I stare at this screen and knowing I am looking at a doorway to the infinite-- not that the internet is really infinite, but relative to what I can know, see touch of it-- it might as well be. And there is infinitely more to know and find than what I can store in that grey spongy mass upstairs. Goofing off is part of my method. And blecch to all my grade school teachers who scolded me for that. Bleccch. I ride the InfiniVerse. Shopping for Horizon Project Items by cogdogblog posted 25 Sep '08, 7.52pm MDT PST on flickr This is where we get stuff for horizon.nmc.org/ So what do you want this year? Cloud Computing? PLE? Mobile virtual worlds? [caption id="attachment_8164" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="(full size is one click away)"][/caption] Star Yam 13: The Final Leftovers is the next series of adventures for Captain James T. Fork of the Starship Yamterprise, it's 9 year mission, to sek out new plates and new celebrations, to boldly go where no yam has gone before! It's a Yam Jam Theme, starting with Lisa Lane sailing the Yam Boat, Scottlo showing the Yam Who Would Be King, and next, MBS taking my favorite starchy movie, Cool Hand Yam (goes well with eggs). How could I resist? I'm no spud. Now someone needs to make this assignment for ds106, as this is getting out of yam. It could put a whole now flavor on mashed-up assignments. Ingredients for this image: Star Ship enterprise image from Free Desktop Backgrounds The potato is from Culturally Authenitic Pictorial Lexicon which is becoming a source I like more and more for its creative commons images. The font is Star Trek Future from fontspace.com UPDATE for red shirted ensign ds106ers! This is now officially an assignment with the tag VisualAssignments311 Just when we thought the net was full to the brim with social bookmark tools, comes another new kid on the block: RawSugar: RawSugar enables you to save and tag all your favorite web pages and then later find the one need in seconds. Why is this so important? Think of how many times you forgot the name of a restaurant, place or event you're trying to remember and can't locate the right web page with the information you need. Saving pages on the web with RawSugar means you can find them in seconds just by remembering a couple of key words. Perhaps your looking for a cafe in San Francisco. Just search for San Francisco cafes and RawSugar displays all the web pages tagged San Francisco and cafes. Looking through the list you'll find the ones you've saved. With RawSugar you can easily save everything worth saving: travel destinations, hobby sites, kid's birthday places, physicians, architects, piano teachers, favorite recipes, professional and business-related resources... you name it! Actually it looks at quick glance to be as featured as any other one. It has nice way of suggesting tags (some AJAX tag completion is mixed in the sugar?). My mini gripe is the JavaScript bookmarklet tool does not have a way of grabbing the highlighted text in the targeted web page as a default content for its "Notes" field (the site description). This necessitates the window swapping task of cutting and pasting a description from the original site. It takes almost no extra programming weight to provide this feature. I have hacked some other ones by combing through the source page of the add site form, but Raw Sugar had so much JavaScript and other obfuscated code I could not even begin to dabble. I quickly made an account (I only have 14 of these things), and was able to export my del.icio.us bookmarks as XML and import them into the RawSugar jar... well, it got most of them. It's a big pile, and there was some obscure proxy error message. But that does give me good pause to think about what a Good Thing it is that data can be this transportable... I've shlepped stuff from furl to del.icio.us from linked my spurl to del.icio.us... shouldn't more data be as movable? So now I have added RawSugar to my hefty Site Submission Bookmarklet Maker. So a thumbs up on RawSuga, though I doubt I will do much marking in it now. My only complaint is as being a diabetic of having an aversion to the name-- but then again, I doubt one would get far with a site based on "Aspartame" or "Sucralose".. so I guess the closing phrase is... "sweeeeeeeeeeet". Tip of the Blog Hat to "Mr Small Pieces" a.k.a Joho The Blog. This is the start of our online workshop, or "blogshop" for showing faculty at our colleges a little bit about weblogs, and to get them started using MovableType. It should ba a grand adventure! (more…) My twitter curiosity rose to a nice sharp peak and fell off given there's real work to do. Like just about everyone else, my pre-twitter perspective was, "What kind of person with too much time to spend would bother IMing every time they scratched their leg?", and then having tried it, found this strange multi-layered communication patterns that was... well interesting. Uh back a step. Twitter is a web-service where you create buddies/contacts, and you can use several devices (web form, IM buddy, SMS, even messages form Second Life) to send a short (~140 character) message about what you are doing in the moment. Like D'Arcy called it, "nano-blogging". And Cole was really giving it a good go at Penn State as a project group "letting them know what I am doing" tool. There's something there, I am just not sure of it. But I dropped off a bit, the desktop Twitterific seemed to sputter in and out of communication, the twitter IM buddy would disappear for hours, and I thought he was dissing me. And then I just aimed to go to the web site to see "what was happenin'" with my twittery ciircle, and twitter.com was going into some infinite spiral in the web browser where it just had fits down in the status bar. I just find these things curious, so did a quick screen capture: Freaky weirdness. That's what happens when you become the popular kid on the Web 2.0 school yard. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Profound Whatever One of my long time favorite web site references is the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), not only because of its comprehensive depth and breadth of information about movies and TV shows, but also because it is rich in data- you can go from a movie summary to follow the works of its director or lead actors, via hyperlinks. It is the site I reach to for learning about or making links to movies. And IMDb now has a new feature I really like- lists you can make and share. But before that, a little more honor about IMDb- I can recall coming across it from my earliest web days in 1993- it is one of the oldest reference web sites I can think of- way before Wikipedia, way before search engines. In fact, it celebrated its 20th birthday last year, and cites its origin as pre-web (1990): The lists that continue to be the backbone of the Internet Movie Database existed before October 17,1990... They were originally collected and maintained by a hearty group of movie fans who frequented a Usenet group (a text bulletin board) called "rec.arts.movies." The lists included the credits for actors, actresses, and directors, as well as biographical entries for moviemakers who had passed on (known back then as "the 'dead' list"). But we mark the date because on October 17th, our founder, Col Needham, wrote a series of Unix shell scripts which made these lists searchable. The ability to search existing data is one of the key components of the Web experience, and it immediately made the lists more meaningful and useful. Though the new name was still six years off, the Internet Movie Database was, in essence, born. And IMDb has not slowed down since, adding more user generated content (reviews and forums) as well as the handy mobile apps (so you can settle arguments at the theater or coffee shop). What I had forgotten was that in the late 1990s IMDb was bought by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, but they have a relatively low profile there, beyond the links to buy movies. Ok, back to lists. I was tweeting tonight about my possible movie topic for the ds106 video essay assignment -- and people were suggesting movies of a similar genre, so where else would I turn besides IMDb? I started bookmarking movies in my browser (old school), until I noticed that IMDb had a new "Add to Watchlist" button- now that makes total sense. [caption id="attachment_6512" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="New feature at IMDb!"][/caption] And by some luck or action action, I already had an IMBd account, so I was able to login and start adding movies to a watch list. The other piece I noticed here was hovering over the movie box icons, I got summary info, and links to buy, or in this case, watch on Demand from Amazon (something I get with my Amazon Prime account for free, woot, thanks Jeff!) [caption id="attachment_6513" align="alignnone" width="486" caption="Movie on IMDb Watchlist that I can see on Amazon Instant Video"][/caption] I thought I saw a way to share a Watchlist via twitter/facebook, but cannot find a shareable URL, and now it is saying my lis is private. Oh well. But there is more you can do- you can create other lists of movies on IMDb- so people are making lists of their favorites or collections of best comedies or worst horror movies, but I was thinking, there is something people can do related to ds106 -like as we move into the video, the movies they have watched for influence or ones they are using for projects-- so I started my own ds106 one for movies related to projects I have done - this is a list you can make public and share via URL: [caption id="attachment_6514" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="My ds106 IMDb list of movies"][/caption] Or one could make assignments where people have to build lists of movies according to a theme or... well, I'm just starting the idea machine. But the ideas for lists are compelling. Among the many unanticipated outcomes of 2020 is the genericizing of a product brand name into the vernacular (I have been waiting like 20 years to have a reason to use "vernacular" in a sentence). It's like what happened when a translucent, colorless, flavorless food ingredient, commonly derived from collagen derived from the boiled bones, connective tissues of animal parts, becomes cheerfully known as jello. Thus the act of synchronous online video meetings, achieved through many products and services, is now just an ordinary verb (or noun). Be it fatigue caused by the activity, the facial expression the environments engender, the way dreaded office parties still occur. Aragorn Research nailed it back in May and I'd bet it is in the running for word of the year. From this tangential reference to boiled cow and pig skin we go to the year of how many billions of hours we spent staring into grids of other people staring at the same style grids. I had an idea to build some rapid montage of such scenes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfWk95N_0o More than 270 images were sourced (ignoring the rights of use, this was for commentary, parodying, etc) in scavenging Google image search for "zoom gallery" "zoom meeting" "zoom meeting pets" "zoom meeting funny". I ended up with maybe 20 that were duplicates used under different file names in online sites. Quite a few were stills from this GIF (and I forget where it came from, I think it was a Zoom Inc promo). They sure seem happy, and fatigue free. I had a reason for going down this movie making hole... yes. It was in my mind when working on the planning for the OE Global 2020 conference. It's there in conversations (taking place on zoom meetings) for future events/activities. After all the time people are spending in these environments, are there other modalities, what others ways of collaborating we can use besides this one? I find that the first reach colleagues go for is webinar, webinar, webinar. And webinar. And that is my Zoom Fatigue, is that it seems to be the limit of our imagination. It just leads to this... https://www.instagram.com/p/CJFZejcjTF6/ Playing with the holders that came with a family board game, it's sad that just the shapes and black borders lead me to the Z word. I for one will do all I can to make Zoom the software product not become a generic word for the activities it enables. Otherwise, the fatigue will lead to endless spouting "vernacular! vernacular! vernacular!" No one wants that. It just leads to harder stuff. Here is to 2020 just zooming bye. Image Credit: Just a silly go at the Distracted Boyfriend image with the imgflip meme generator. Shared under a Who The F*** Knows/Cares How to Attribute Memes license. cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The cable end with the black tape is what goes into my Alpine stereo deck in my truck. When I got my iPhone5, with the smaller interface "Lightning" port, using it to connect to my deck (There is a standard USB port from the unit- STANDARD) resulted in tons of static over my audio. Having purchased the #$*ing $30 adapter, the music sounds good. The third party Lightening cable I bought for $10? Works about 40% of the time. And you know what? Even with all this I would not trade platforms for anything. As much as it giles me, that's so. Paste a sucker sign on my butt and kick me. Errorbook posted 14 Nov '07, 3.52pm MST PST on flickr Too popular for its own good? Will the groovy ship Facebook sink under its own weight? I dunno, but a raft of these screens are not all that enticing for me to spend time here. Too bad the poke thing always works... 10 days in to one digital story per day in May, 10 stories done. Still going strong. Today was a play with something I wanted to try for a while, an overdub of my own audio over a classic scene, where I change the script to say what I want it to say. My timing to the spoken part is sub par (that is really hard), which I did by doing voiceover in iMovie, reading from my updated script. Here you go, for the next time you are stuck in a boring lecture, dull presentation, deathly webinar. I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as bored as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. Well WTF? Even without audio in it, the YouTube copyright sniffers wont let me embed this clip. Oh well, go there to enjoy my madness cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by RickC Opening scene, a frenetic office space, rows of desks of young ambitious clerks on the phone, typing reports, several smoking cigarettes. Young Billy runs into the office of the office manager, clutching a report. Billy: Mr Ritter! I found a violator of our copyright! This one has a segment of a Charlie Chaplin movie we own. Ritter: Hand me that report kid. (scans). Hmmm, that looks like its a lift of our stuff. This guy has our video and just put his sound on it. DAMNIT When will those scruffy bloggers realize they are STEALING from us? Good work. Call YouTube and start the takedown process. ------------------------------------- I like to imagine what really happens when some entity gets YouTube to slap out a violation notice. I've not had too many, which may be luck, because I do some lifting of movie clips (nearly always stuff I find in YouTube itself) but nearly always remixed into something new. It took them a year to catch up with me. I am hardly the first nor last to get one of these, and like most people who do remix, first thought- WTF? The "violation" is that a year ago, I found (on YouTube) a 2 minute clip from a 1929 Charlie Chaplin movie. I was teaching ds106 at UMW, and it was a great suggestion from Scott Lockman when I was teaching audio to come up with an activity for my class. I put them in groups, and assigned them each a 30 second section of the film. Their task was to improvise foley sounds that could used to create a new sound track in place of the music. In class, I played back the video and recorded the sounds they made. I recorded their audio, later mixing it with the video to show as a result what the effect of this technique could be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOaP2myiWPs And almost 11 months later they have caught up to my criminal acts. Is anyone a bit surprised that a silent films from 1928 is still copyrighted? First of all, the clip I used was about 2 1/2 minutes of a 71 minute film, 3.5% of the original. This was for educational purpose. And it is a *remix* it has a different audio track (me introducing, my students making sounds) that is clearly different from the original. No one would mistake our video for the original movie. I think Billy in the Copyright Investigation room did not do enough homework. What to do? I clicked the dispute button, outlining the points above. ------------------------------------- The scene: a cramped meeting room, men and women in suits rifling through papers, ash trays spilling over. Ritter: Okay we have a dispute filled by this CogDog. I've called in our lawyer Flanders from Bite And Scratch to give us an opinion. Flanders: I'm afraid you are on shaky ground here. it's really not a copy of your film and it ssuch a tiny segment. You know, you really should call us in on these cases. Two hours of deliberation pass Ritter: Damn, we have to let this one go. I hate losing! Johnson, call Billy and have him release this claim. Fortunately, we have 123 new takedowns in progress. Our work will never end as long as this so called artists keep taking what we own. ------------------------------------- And within 11 hours, I claim victory: I cannot help but wonder how it really works and if how this system of automation can be seen as legitimate or even effective. Considering that elsewhere on Youtube is the entire movie But I don't care a whole lot, cause I WON. Google is good. Google is great. I wish I kept better records of this, but I have vague recollections of finding some of my most favorite web discoveries at perhaps 3 links downstream of a search, or just by following a suggested link to one source and happen-stancing (random clicking) elsewhere. So I use search most often while looking for specific things, but for discovery, it is really just the first layer of yielding primary sources. It is those secondary, tertiary, (quadriary?) exploration links that lead to the hidden gems. So this morning, when I stumbled into something completely useful without it popping in a search result (and the fact I was not even looking for it initially), I am just compulsed to write it up at home before going into work, and will likely late for work. So it started with an item that popped up in a few sites in my RSS reader. The April 2005 D-Lib article "Social Bookmarking Tools" by Hammond and others from the Nature Science group is an excellent read and a must bookmark-furl-spurl-delicious URL. Good beacuse it is thorough, intensely linked, illustrated, but also well written, and reads like it is written by someone who really is with it in terms of web technology: Because, to paraphrase a pop music lyric from a certain rock and roll band of yesterday, "the Web is old, the Web is new, the Web is all, the Web is you", it seems like we might have to face up to some of these stark realities [n1]. With the introduction of new social software applications such as blogs, wikis, newsfeeds, social networks, and bookmarking tools (the subject of this paper), the claim that Shelley Powers makes in a Burningbird blog entry [1] seems apposite: "This is the user's web now, which means it's my web and I can make the rules." Reinvention is revolution – it brings us always back to beginnings. We are here going to remind you of hyperlinks in all their glory, sell you on the idea of bookmarking hyperlinks, point you at other folks who are doing the same, and tell you why this is a good thing... This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things going on here: 1) server-side software aimed specifically at managing links with, crucially, a strong, social networking flavour, and 2) an unabashedly open and unstructured approach to tagging, or user classification, of those links. So the article was a find in itself (and has been properly furled, actually before I read the whole thing). It was towards the middle of the article under "Building Communities" where the authors begin to share the different ways tags and links dig into sources they have compiled in Connotea. The very first item in the list (this morning when I found it, this will change, right?) was listed as: where the tag line was enough to hook me: Freetag - an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications Now I had back of my mind (way in the back, dusty seldom visited regions) been thinking that in a second generation version of our Maricopa Learning eXchange I could see a way to add tagging as a part of the MLX system (this is on the back burner until I can wrestle enough time to finish the first generation alpha of an open source MLX). Note to self- it looks like Connotea is evolving nicely, must return for another cup of connotea... But holy XXXXXXX! Freetag looks like it may just be able to plug in! Freetag is an easy tagging and folksonomy-enabled plugin for use with MySQL-PHP applications. It allows you to create tags on existing database schemas, and access and manage your tags through a robust API. This might mean I can incorporate some tagging into the MLX without having to toll code myself. What is exciting to me, besides the value of the find, was the joy of the find. I would have likely gotten to this site from a web search, unless I did something like a specific search (which does work well, by the way). I found it by click luck. This is what I tried to convey as the closing message in my TCC 2005 presentation yesterday... with the overload of information that we all feel, while traveling the confusing road to the future, how will you travel? With a sense of: Despairflickr image from http://flickr.com/photos/sabineschmidt/2507284/ or a wide eyed look of: Wonderflickr image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jon_pawley/8697122/ Finding by serendipity keeps me in the latter category. PS Just the flickr search on "despair" brought a pile of serendipity-found images. See the lonliest hotdog or a dire situation. Follow the "your gone" set of images in order... Is there a mini meme of flickr storytelling? Hmmmm modified from cc licensed flickr image by mag3737 I was pleased to be invited to give a keynote on Friday at Tulane University's Tech Day... they run a great free event open not only to the Tulane community but they offer it to other local institutions: Tech Day is an opportunity for the Tulane community to come together and celebrate the technology that makes life on our campus what it is. It is a day of toys, tech, food and fun. We will have academic and technical presentations as well as games and door prizes. Come show your licks at Guitar Hero or your moves in Dance Dance Revolution. Or come learn about the new trends in technology and education with presentations from our faculty and the vendors that provide us with the technology you use every day. Tech Day is free and open to the public. A few months ago I was asked if I was interested (are you kidding? It's in New Orleans, my bags are packed!) in speaking about social media. I was prepared to dust off and update one of my previous dog and web shows, but a few weeks back I felt like a different urge to focus on, fro among the stuff I track for the NMC Horizon Project, the up and coming buzz word seemed to be the "real time web". Even more vague in meaning than "Web 2.0", I saw some wiggle room to try and make a case for some ways in which the web we know and love (maybe) right now is transforming into the next web that will be. Maybe. So you can catch my newest CoolIris preso at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/tulane09/ -- where you will also find all the links I used and more -- it was not live streamed but it was video recorder, and as soon as the crack Tulane video time puts it through the "Remove the 'Um' Filter and Make Him Sound Knowledgeable plug-in" I will share. I did aim to use some reach to the audience beyond who is present with some twitter shout outs, calls to respond to instant surveys, etc. I do see a lot of power in demonstrating the Audience2.0 effect. The remote audience also missed the point towards the end where I realized I had neglected to plug in my power supply, and has my 16% battery went quickly down (luckily my friends here hustled as I tried to talk my way through the black screen of powerlessness). But here I do a little Post Presentation Recap (where is John Madden when I need him?) I do like to have some media running as the audience enters; this time I set up a playlist in iTunes to run through a few top videos looking at social media, including the fab new Did You Know 4 and Social Media Revolution. Mike Wesch's A Vision of Students Today is a reliable "classic", and I tossed in my own Rock the Academy video (hey, it is my show). As an opening, I used something I heard in a recent presentation by Kevin Kelly, where he remarked on how much has changed in the 6000+ days since Tim Berners Lee announced the WWW (you can find this original newsgroup posting). I used the World Time Clock Date Duration Calculator to come up with 6625 days for the day I gave my presentation. I tried to frame this against things that have radically changed, revolutionized, overturned in this time span by the web - myself (deploying my youthful mullet head from 1992), TV; telephony, publishing, music, etc and leave the hanging question- where is the parallel change in education? I don't carry a pat answer, but does Google know what the Real Time Web is? http://www.google.com/search?q=realtime+web? I felt like this YouTube video explained it rather clearly how it works Not one for focusing on definitions, my aim was to provide examples, but I see some range in what this means, and dont see a lot in having a boxed in specification for it. It does not mean everything in "real time" more more near real time than we typicalyl feel. There is the real-time ness of immediacy, when we back and forth in social media conversation, the real-timeness of dynamically updating data with little or no effort, the real-timeness of the web shifting from notions of "pages" to much smaller bits of data that can be recast, reformed, visualized, passed on.... I wanted to show some things I played with recently, updating web sites with real time updated data or charts generated by Google Spreadsheets (http://cogdogblog.com/2009/08/31/google-spreadsheets/). I had set up a three column sheet, initially with 0 values (and show the chart) and asked an audience volunteer (thanks Simon!) to estimate the percentages of people responding.. I asked how many had twitter accounts, how many had facebook accounts, and how many had web enabled smart phones. I first used some examples of things I'd looked at before as giving a sense of the web being created and expanding all the time, things that allow you to actually see it happen, including BloggerPlay - the current images being used in Blogger posts http://play.blogger.com/ TwitterVision- geomapping recent twitter messages http://beta.twittervision.com/ WikiPediaVision - geomapping the people doing the most recent WikiPedia edits http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/ UStream.tv - being able to see realtime personal web strreaming http://ustream.tv/ (more…) I've been thinking about the pace of MOOCs, and then got bent on a track to make the animated GIF from one of my all time epic movies. The later thought was that this actually applies to any course, and of course a course (Wilbur, where are my oats?) has to have a schedule. But... it is the pace of a MOOC which creates the pressure when one cannot keep up with the rowing. I felt that having really missed the start of moocmooc over the weekend while I was offline at Unplugd12 And if we are not quite the super hero that is Number 41? Of course, nothing stops me from jumping in late to Moocmooc and from tweets I can see people are doing interesting creative work. so I am not bashing the effort at all. I am the fail point here. Once again I SUBDNSU (Signed Up BUt Did Not Show Up). You see, as Stephen Downes had pointed out a few weeks ago, in a course where one is not putting down tuition dollars and the process for getting accepted is clicking the button, one really has not much commitment on the table. I am more wondering about the fixed pace of open courses as being a challenging hurdle for those opting in. It seems almost a set up for the term I think does not truly apply anyhow-- dropout. As the commander increases the pace from battle speed to ramming speed, who else by Charlton Heston in his most buff days could keep up? I'm not even the dude who fell over clutching his heart, I did not even pick up the oars. And that is my fault, not the MOOCs. So I wonder, is the one speed driving the boat the nest way? I am not sure, for how else do you get the communal effect if people are not doing the same work at the same time? Yet this is the base model- one pace for everyone in the boat. The pace for most MOOCs seem like a regular drum beat- every week, every week, every week (though the CodeAcademy ones are set more for self-paced). I would maintain that ds106 is one that can be dipped in and out of or sampled in different order, without that sense of "missing out"-- though one could say the main course has the drum beat of the course at University of Mary Washington. Today I was just brainstorming with Jim Groom how we might take the UMW syllabus and generate a generic one that anyone joining at anytime could pick up their own pace (or someone teaching a course could model theirs around). The "work" always ends up being aggregated into the Assignment bank and that can happen at any time Like I said (or maybe meant to say) -- I am just full of questions, not answers. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by khalid Albaih I will leak that I am toying with a new variant of an open learning experience. This is in the less than half baked category. If I say I am going to teach a course, it means of course (of course), that I know the content or the material or the topic and bring it to you as participanst. Let's say instead, I were to set up a process where I might say, "I do not know how to do ______ (a topic, skill)" who wants to spend ________ (amount of time) learning it with me? So not me as teacher, but a group as learning something in parallel. The process might be: Define the thing to be learned, what I would be able to demonstrate at the end as my "work". Yours might be similar, it need not be the same, but similar. That's up to you Identify people that have skills, experience in the area, or resources to rely on Outline the steps needed to accomplish it, and the needs/materials required Complete the steps Produce a prototype Get feedback and refine Call it done So the outcome would be both a process and my own product. Now my first thoughts are to something technical- I know one thing I have wanted to do is build a web based creative writing tool that would leverage the content form a twitter account, and I would want it so people could tweet content to that account to be included. The thing to learn would be how to use the twitter API to gather the content, and wrap it into my own kind of site. Or another thing I have wanted to take on is leraning how to do one of those data fetch/python magic/gephi generation of data visualizations that Tony Hirst does. Or maybe it is something like learning how to bake a cake. Is this viable? Sensible? Is it any different from the Roman ship? Still the pace of these course IMHO bears some consideration. cc licensed flickr photo shared by theilr It's been a while since I did some WordPress hacking, and today I think it showed. Like a good bone I could not let go of a niggling little problem, and then after going around in circles, I found an obvious way that was much more simpler than where I was headed. But there are things even learned in a few trips around the roundabout. Here's where I drove around in circles today... for a while, I have been publishing web versions of the NMC Horizon Reports in CommentPress format at http://wp.nmc.org -- this is very useful for publications since it allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, so they are tied at a more micro level to the content. (Yeah they are in the old CommentPress mode, I know I should be using the newer digress.it and am ready to publish the new one there this week). Since Mobiles have been part of the Horizon Reports since like 1776, and there is the nifty WPtouch plugin that elegantly makes WordPress sites display cleanly on not just iPhones, but other mobile platforms (my first play was last year and I have rolled into most of my WordPress sites). (more…) Please excuse our regularly scheduled blogging for a sad announcement. Today we had to put down my labrador retriever, Mickey, normally the dog on the banner image for this blog. As warm and affectionate he was with humans, this dog had a strange aggressive streak towards other dogs. Last Spring, he bolted through a tiny hole in the porch of our cabin and attacked a small dog that was passing by. After reinforcing our fences, dropping a wad of money at a doggie therapist, using a bark collar, we were resigned to the fact he could not be around other dogs. Yesterday, a visiting relative stopped by the house with his new Great Dane puppy. I was not there, and missed the incident by 10 minutes, but apparently Mickey managed to squeeze out the door, and again went straight for the puppies neck in a death grip. Fortunately they were able to pull him off, and after a trip to the 24 hour pet hospital, the pup was found to have cuts and abrasions, but no serious damage. I could not put anyone through this again, as Mickey could easily kill another dog, so this morning I sadly took him to the vet to have him put to sleep. This is one of the saddest things a person can do, it is unavoidable with pets, but there is no getting around making these decisions. I do not blame him, he was a dog, and had animal instincts that proved to be unacceptable. The ironic thing is that this was the first dog we did not get from the pound, but from a "breeder" with papers and such. Given the skin diseases of his sister and Mickey's aggressive streak, I am rather doubtful of the quality of the papers or the breeders who sold him to us. His picture will return soon, but for now, in honor of Mickey, he is transaparented out... The New Office Backbone by cogdogblog posted 6 Jan '09, 11.11pm MST PST on flickr Last night I re-wired my home network with a new Apple Airport Extreme -- an 802.11n speed network hub, it is then hard wired to my older Airport (left) which serves the premises 802.11b/g speeds for the iPhone and guests (if you all devices running 802.11b/g to use the new Airport, it slows the speed down, so the new one is for n speed devices only- my laptop). Also new is the LaCie 2 Tb drive next to the Airport Extreme-- it is connected to the Airport via a USB hub (so my printer is on the wireless as well) with a plan I can run Time Machine over the high speed n connection. swith 3 LAN ports on the new Airport and one on the old, I no longer need my NetGear switch (I have ethernet to my PC, a backup hard wire for the laptop, and one for a VOIP phone) My old 400 Gb drive (left) got toasted and I am praying Disk Warrior can pull some magic out of it. The new Airport alone is a lot faster than my previous setup which had my cable modem running through the NetGear switch, which I think means all of the DHCP action was going back to my ISP. With the new Airpoer Extreme being downstream from the cable modem, the DHCP is now being done locally, and everything is being the built in firewall. I got some ideas for the dual airport setup from an article on AppleInsider that gave me the idea of having a "fast lane" network and a slower one for the older devices and iPhone, plus how to configure the new Airport Extreme for making best use of the 5 GHz band. Here is a schematic of the new setup (done in gliffy, click image below for full size or see on gliffy): There was an issue when I first tried to find the new Hard Drive in Time Machine- it did not appear! I found the answer from an post at Morph8 a Terminal command line to make the drive visible (this is all one line) defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 But it took about 12 hours for Time Machine to do its first backup of 102 Gb -- part of this was user error as for the first three hours I was connected to the network on my older airport, and then I was probably making things slower by being online all day. The other unexpected result was that on the wireless connected hard drive, the Time Machine files are stored in a disk image format-- I am hoping that is not a problem as the thing grows. Might have to research this one. But now Time Machine is doing its hourly incremental backups, so I am much better covered then before when I only updated when I remembered to plug in the external drive (which got full anyhow). And printing across wireless is just fantastic. The only downside is that the HP Scanner software cannot locate the HP device via wireless. The new LaCie 2 TB "Big Dog" drive is visible as a shared device, as is, in theory, my PC. And.. now my PC is visible as a shared drive, and as soon as I figure out the bizarre vista file sharing, moving files should be easy. It's a whole new network! UPDATE: (Jan 7, 2008) After all this I have taken the Big Dog drive off of the wireless network. It was worth the experiment. If all I was doing was Time Machine back up, it would work fine-- it is the first write that is time consuming because it is copying everything, but beyond that, the backups are smaller and barely noticeable. However my problem is I am using the same drive as an archive of old project and media files (things taken off my main work machine) and even basic copy time was too slow over the wireless. So I have taken the 2 Gb drive off the Extreme and have it connected, when I am working near it, by Firewire 800, and copying from other drives is lightning fast. With my 400 Gb drive on the fritz, I just purchased a 750Gb LaCie from Amazon; the prices are just amazing if you go back in time at all. This drive is mainly for my personal media, and the long delayed project of putting on disc all the photos that are sitting in a plastic box in my closet on about 200 CDs and DVDs. In some alternate universe, this past Tuesday I was visiting my brother to celebrate his 62nd birthday. I am likely teasing him for being so old. This is just my imagination wandering. David never made it to his 36th circuit around the sun, and mentally, I was told his brain might have made two laps. There is never quite the right store card for this. So I retry once a year, to find one more scanned old photo, or memory shred to revive, if but for a moment. Just in this writing, I jump out of my own center of the me universe flow, one where even with an electronic calendar reminder of David's passing earth entry date... I forgot. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] What does one make of the fragments, the half filled baby book my parents likely did not have the heart to continue filling in (or which lacked the appropriate questions to ask for a mentally retarded child)? His rocking chair, sits as a marker in my home (now far away). A photo of my Dad, being a Dad to his son inside a horrible institution called "Rosewood"? [caption id="attachment_39925" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Dad and David, maybe 1970?[/caption] His name, most likely from our grandmother's father, who passed away before we were both born? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] Yes, that's about what I can do. Invoke his name. My brother, David. Top / featured photo is mine. Self attribution? Why not.. cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by cogdogblog: http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14337657250 I always provide links back to the source as attribution for the flickr creative commons photos I use. Today I ran into the not so surprising case of wondering what to do, and what the ramifications for, if the original is no longer there? Here's the case. A dark night in a web that knows how to keep its secrets, but one dog is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions. Me. Oops, wrong story. I was working on a site which has a banner collage made of 5 or 6 flickr cc licensed images. When I did the original, I downloaded them in 500px size (I keep the original cryptic file names, like "196478990_e68fe3c25a.jpg"). I also, and I wish I could say always, kept a text file with the credits info. In making a credits page on the new site, I reached for my favorite tool, yep, the one I did myself, the Flickr CC Attribution Helper for Greasemonkey - a Firefox script that nicely inserts two kinds of copiable attribution strings right in the flickr page (only if it is cc licensed): Now frankly I think this is best thing since cc licensed flickr photo shared by mattburns.co.uk Look! I just used it! Again. I digress. So I was going to use this as my usual way of attribution for flickr cc content. Except, one photo came up with the message at the top; I guess the owner of the flickr account skipped town and closed down the account. Or make up any other story. Got hit by a meteorite. Killed their account in protest of not getting enough attribution (I was late again!). But I got thinking, what happens then to the right to use it if the original is gone? And what would I link to as attribution? I tweeted before really thinking... Plenty of people reminded me that it was there in the license (doh) the legal-verbiage-I-click-without-reading, section "7b Termination" Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above. So once something is released into Creative Commons, it is there forever under the terms you originally got it, even if the original goes away, or the owner changes their mind. The only "termination" is if the user (me) does something to breach the terms of the license, like using something commercially when it is NC (??) or making jokes about lawyers. Or even more clearly, in the Creative commons FAQ: What if I change my mind? Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation, be they verbatim copies, copies included in collective works and/or adaptations of your work. So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy for people to be using your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work. , And an even bigger "doh" for me because I can still provide attribution by photo credit (in text) without doing a link back. I am so hunk up on links and linktribution that anything else feels weak. So my original record keeping works, in those days, before my cool as bread Greasemonkey script, I would keep text file logs (which was tedious, about a 4 trip copy/paste routine from web page to text file) 2572694217_200b3646af.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/19353461@N04/2572694217/ scimanal Where the first line is the file name I saved it, the second the link, and the third the flickr owner's name. So thanks "scimanal" for the photo, where-ever you are. On a related front, as a number of people are hopping off of Firefox for Chrome, I'll have to bone up on Chrome's extensions. But, a neat discovery I found was a way to enable Greasemonkey Scripts in Safari- an opensource thing called Greasekit. It's pretty easy, you first download a thingie called SIMBL. You gotta love the geek cred behind this description: Problem: Some applications do about 90% of what I want. Solution: Develop my own applications. Better Solution: Patch the application myself... SIMBL (SIMple Bundle Loader) - pronounced like "symbol" or "cymbal" - enables hacks and plugins. For instance, SIMBL enables PithHelmet to enhance Safari. Wow, I am glad to have my PithHelmet! Please ignore the diversion. Install SIMBL, its a small app that goes somewhere deep in the bowls of the computer. The download GreaseKit, more or less a small plug-in file that you bury about 7 folders deep in your home directory. The next time you launch Safari, you have a Greasekit menu, where you can add Greasemonkey Scripts. I;ve not tried too many (well just mine, and it works): Keep those attributions a goin' Link if you can! Not relevant to anything but what's happening around the office... When I started at Maricopa, I found the building had a locker room available, and for about 3 or 4 years, I was an everyday bicycle commuter- you can tell be the later 90s vintage of my "Wacked Out Bike To Work Page". Part was economic driven as my wife and I had one vehicle between us, but I also enjoyed the scenery, found the exercise essential to managing my diabetes, but best of all, it was good thinking time. Fats forward to now, we have 2 cars, more things to do, and I bike maybe 2 days a week, but have had some 2 month stretches of no biking. But a few weeks ago, Todd, who runs our Wellness Program, asked if they could use a photo of me in bike gear to promote a Bike To Work campaign / alternative transportation mode. Little did I know they would plaster posters al over our district... (more…) Stephen had oatmeal for breakfast, so someone stepped up to keep the tweetverse informed: Whew, this is fun! Without much effort, I have added another 5 interviews, each under 5 minutes, for my upcoming article on digital net audio, You can find all 11 and (more as I add 'em) on the mcli Forum Spring 2005 Podcast. Joining the crowd, and rounding out some of the gender gap thanks to this morning's call for help, are: * D'Arcy Norman, University of Calgary * Sherri Vokey, University of Nevada - Las Vegas * Bert Kimura, Osaka Gakuin University (Japan) * Susan Smith Nash, Excelsior College (New York) and Xplanazine writer * Sue Lister, Ontaria Canada (she made it easy by sending my a URL for her own podcast response to my questions) I'll be gathering a few more through the end of next week (I am on break through March 21)-- now looking to widen the geographic reach (although I've chatted to Japan just today). This is so easy to do, especially after a few are done. Call up on Skype / iChat, hit record in WireTapPro, ask the questions, save as MP3, import into Audacity, delete the gaps and umms, and then export again to more compressed MP3 (I am doing a 32 bitrate- I may have been able to go lower, but the files sizes are now a reasonable 600-1100k). Look at me, the iPodless Podcaster... Interesting that all 11 I spoke to have an iPod, and a number of them had 2 or 3. Most are making use of podcast content. We are getting some interesting ideas on how it might be used for learning. I have started also asking more about the possibilities for students being the content creators as a first order thought is in the vein of the faculty as broadcaster. Will Richardson pointed out something I had not thought of-- as you listen there is no way to make notes or even "bookmark" the audio for details worth coming back to. And Susan Smith Nash emphasized the importance of a well written text summary of audio content. Good stuff comin' in via the digital air waves. Let me know if you have 5 minutes to spare the week of March 21 and I'll give you a Skype call. Thanks to everyone for playing. A few clicks back I had played with a test Blogdigger collection - this is a service that allows you to take a pile of web/RSS feeds, and then have that itself be able to collapse into its own feed- an uber feed if you will. My test was to build up a collection of RSS feeds from known Learning Objects sites, and is Blogdiggered at: http://groups.blogdigger.com/learningobjects. A few notes and quibbles: (1) They have redesigned the layout, some improvement. (2) There are 986 items listed as returns from 10 sources. (3) I had listed a feed from EdNA but it does not appear to be learning objects but news about instructional technology. So that would has slid off my list. If someone wants to fix this, see below. (4) There are two search fields- very confusing. The top one searches all of Blogdigger, but there is a second search form in the little blue area in the middle that allows me to search within by collection (this is good) as well as Blogdigger wide. What we have here is a need to stamp out an abolish redundancy! The top search form is un-necessary. (5) The search within a group is neat, because it allows you to save that search as its own URL, such as this one within my LO collection for the word "math" http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?q=math&search=1&id=252 But why cannot the XML link now reflect this as a filter? And worse there is no link that takes me back to the primary collection. This is B-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-d navigation. Still, I like the concept, and am optimistic they can adjust the output templates to address the quibbles above. I very much like what this does to repurpose a collection of feeds into a new purpose. Oh, again, the invitation is open- if someone out there wants to add an RSS feed for a Learning Object collection, there is a link in the lower right. The password is the 4 letter name of the little building block metaphor that some apply to LOs (all lowercase, Jeeves!). I'm already pretty wired into iGoogle as my home, been so for like, well ever since it came out. But now, Gmail is getting the widget business to, as the Google Labs now offers options to add to the Gmail side bar, small iGoogle-like widgets for seeing your calendar, recent docs, etc. As described in the GMail Blog: To get you started, we've worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail. All you need to do is go into your Gmail Settings, click the Labs tab, and enable stuff you want to add to Gmail. On of the most useful ones is the Reply include Selected Text on (I think I got the name wrong), but if you want to reply and just include a portion fo the original message, you just highlight it and use the "r" shortcut! That is a timesaver. Another one is the Forgotten Attachment Detector! Sweet, Go Google Go. Mothers' Day when your mother has passed on... there are no flowers to send, no cards to mail, no phone calls. But that does not mean nothing to do (not like not writing too many double negatives!). The first Mothers Day after mom passed on, in my post I lifted the lyrics from the song Motherless Children, (I knew mostly from the 461 Ocean Boulevard album by Eric Clapton, but he lifted it from Blind Willie Johnson, lift it on...). Now 8 mom-less Mother's Days on, I reflect obviously that having known a mother, you are never motherless. Maybe it's more Not Fade Away (again I knew from the Rolling Stones, but they lifted it from Buddy Holly). So again, I listen to a few bits of audio stories I recorded with her in February 2011, our last time together. I looked through the old photos, never enough of them. The one I used above was the last photo of her. When my sisters and I traveled to Mom's house in September 2011 to "pack it up" we found a film camera partly used. We took a few photos at the Sanibel Island beach Mom loved, where we tossed back into the ocean all the shells she had collected. Then we took the camera to be developed, unsure . On the roll were some photos of Mom and neighbors who had gone to see a minor league baseball game The team then was known as The Fort Myers Miracle, but apparently renamed to be Might Mussels. Little is permanent). https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6343079380 Mom's Last Baseball Game flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6343080058 At the Ballpark. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license There was also this shot of her dining room table as she left it, with some paperwork, the ancient old metal stapler I remember from the old house, a thank you note ready to be written. So Mom. These bits of memories help in wiping that "motherless" phrase from my vocabulary. Mom often wagged a finger at me and my sisters, saying “When I am going you kids better be there for each other... ” You never expect to do be saying those words in past tense when you are hearing them in the present one. And my sisters sure are, there for each other, even spread geographically. My sister Judy is an exceptionally caring, tireless, generous and involved mom of her adult children, and in every way is a "chip off the mom block." She and her daughters carry on the chocolate chip cookie thing well. While my sister Harriet did not have children, but she's been a loving step-mom and is also a "chip off the mom block" with her full life, doing post-retirement work in a clothing store (like Mom) and being a jigsaw puzzle demon, but more importantly, just caring so much for people around her. Last night here at home we had a full day Mother's Day celebration yesterday for Cori. Even in COVID times when it was not possible to buy bouquets of flowers and gifts like usual, Jessy Lee was tireless in doing the errands to set things up and cooking a fabulous meal (my part was making a berry pie), still baking a surprise right at this moment. But oh those moments of story sharing between Cori and her daughter over our dining room table, joyous tears, with flickering candles, and so many Mom stories of adventures and overcome challenges these two did in those many years they were a house of two. And then there are the "kids" of Cori aka "Momma Saas" to so many of her former and current students. They honored her with attention and gifts, like one from Lane, now a rancher sharing 47 pounds of beef, plus others bringing today giant rocks for our crazy gardens, phone calls, texts. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_9Q1ESly7Q/ I know for sure how much Mom would have loved Cori and Jessy Lee, and would want to hear all their stories too. And laugh. In all this, surrounded by so much "Mother-ness" I am so fortunate, and know it, and can never use the phrase again of "Mother-less." Happy Mother's Day, my mom and moms everywhere. Postscript Via an email, Matthias Melcher shared another example that there is a German word for everything that unfolds itself like a story. The German word for "very alone" is "mutterseelenallein" and means literally "alone with nobody but mother's soul". But this also suggests that mother's soul is always with you and hence immortal. Featured Image: a bit of photoshop masking and tweening to make Mom fade out and in, from my own photo At the Ballpark. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. This past week's Daily Creates I seemed to have done more this week with my iPhone camera than my DSLR, and dod a bit more experimenting or playing with 2 apps - PhotoGene for editing and ToonCamera for making cartoon effects. (more…) I should be working on other things, but I get a technology bug under my skin. After publishing my first screencast and getting some quick feedback, some of my own, I wanted to take myself to task and do something beyong screencasting as just tours of software. Creating "How-tos" for using RSS, or a course management system, or some other technology is fine, but it is not all that interesting to me. What is more interesting is using technology to create stories, compelling things. In this entry, I will share a quick digital story I created with simple tools, and in a short time frame (shorter if were not for my own boneheaded blunders). I deliberately created the basic slide show in PowerPoint, not because I love it, but because it is prevalent. (more…) This Friday, the self-proclaimed "Grandmother of Electronic Portfolios", Helen Barrett is coming to town as our guest for our event "ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty", where we are expecting an audience of 90+ faculty and staff. The day's agenda is split-starting with a morning focus on student ePortfolios, with Helen presenting on her recent work connecting digital storytelling and eports, but the highlight (sorry Helen) hopefully will be a student panel we are assembling with 5 Maricopa students who are now or recently have been building ePortfolios. We are planning on capturing the audio of this discussion to be able to post online. Over lunch we are planning on setting up computer stations with a collection of Maricopa ePortfolios available for viewing, as well as having the student panel members and other faculty present be on hand to share their experiences. The afternoon shifts to discussions of faculty portfolios, with another session led by Helen plus some group activity. We are planning a followup event in mid April where those who are eager to get started can have a hands on experience with an ePortfolio system, and hopefully between now and then they will be accumulating or reflecting on what they want to bring as artifacts. Mostly we are eager and pleased that Helen was willing to travel to Arizona in the middle of winter (!), seriously, we are fortunate to have an expert of her caliber coming here, and I know she is a dynamic speaker for faculty and students. flickr foto iAudio and Shuffleavailable on my flickr My new iAudio U3 is so tiny and light you'd think it might float away.. but it can carry 1 Gb of stuff. Here is relaxes next to my Shuffle My iAudio U3 MP3 player/recorder prompty arrived and I am just starting to play with it. I got this model given the phase out of iRiver models that work with Mac OS X (the T10 lines are Windows only). It is tiny, tiny, a tad heaver than my Shuffle and light (no battery, it recharges via USB). Moving files to and from are easy, as it mounts as a desktop drive via USB 2.0 connection, so no funky middle software needed. The audio sounds very good, decent bass, so as a player, it is great. I've only done limited testing with the recording-- the process is easy (buttons and menus a little more clear to use than iRiver). It may have a little more background noise, and you definitely want to not touch or move it whiole recording with the built in microphone. My biggest disappointment is the file format it records audio- it is WMA only, so I am left with using shareware to convert these files to something I can use to edit on the Mac. It's not mentioned at all in the docs-- there is some 'Jet' software that is Windows only for converting copied files to pther formats (I can always do this on the XP side of my MacBookPro, but that is seemingly a risky venture). So I have the nifty little device (1 Gb capacity, and because you can move any file, it can act as a thumb drive) but need to push it through some more paces. I am more than comfortablly qssured that no generative AI can really hallucinate my writing. See those trademarked typos? Me. See a quirky nonsensical title? Me. I digress, as usual. Here is a typical small tale of unexpected adventure of one thing leading to another, like a neural path, but none one that can be predicted even with your vectorizing databases. A morning coffee ritual is a quick attempt at the current DS106 Daily Create and maybe, if an idea pops up, submitting a new one into the queue. I cannot not do ds106. And I have to write this post tonight, because the fruits of this labor gets published as tomorrow's Daily Create, TDC 4334 (look ma, a palindrome number)! For this idea, I needed an image of an every day object. Ahhh, the perfect antithesis to modern technology is the lowly toilet plunger, though it may have use for dealing with problematic CEOs. I reach into my handy dandy tricks for searching google images forcing it to return only Creative Commons licensed results. The result that jumps out looks perfect, but from a source I have never seen before-- CCnull- but here it is in full glory, Ausgussreiniger + Saugglocke + Pümpel (German word creation can be so lyrical). ccnull image display for what I deduce is German for "pluinger" with all info one might expext from a photo catalogue I come across a fair number of shady reference sites in Google Images but this one, with the help of Google translate, covers all the bases, plus some curious bits We see all the info needed for a good TASL of attribution, Title, author, a direct link to source, and clear listing of cc license What's above most other sites, and I've never seen, is Lizenzurkunde anzeigen or View License Certificate). It leads to a rather detailed page outlining the author, license, and more legal looking stuff. Woah. CCnull is advertising supported with those bottom links to stock imagery... though there is something awry in results for "Aktuelle Vorschläge zum Thema Ausgussreiniger von iStock by Getty Images" or "Latest sink cleaner suggestions from iStock by Getty Images". Those images (likely having tags like "plunge") are not like any backed up sink/toilet I have plunged. But what do I know about the stock photo biz? I foolishly give all mine away under CC0. Now one bell that rings is that as good as this site is, and it goes way beyond the usual listing, is for me to assemble a recommended form of attribution, it's at least a four time round trip of copy paste between this source and wherever I might use it. I have inklings of ideas that might come from some kind of bookmarklet tool, and also wondering about the connecting to Nate Angell's Bulk Open Attribution Tool (BOAT). And it nudges me that it's really time for me to redo my own Flickr CC Attribution Helper, which I use almost every day, but is a bit dated and could be done much more flexibly. I digress with ideas. So I got my plunger picture, yay. I make my modifications in Photoshop. I use no generative AI features. And on writing this up as a Daily create, I get the idea to add a historical reference, to which I ask The Google- When was the plunger invented? to which, first answer indicates 1874 but I gotta read the Wikipedia linked result (do others notice this google feature which returns as part of the URL highlighted text?). I could just link to the article as the historical reference, but note in the Wikipedia article, citation 5 is to the patent entry by John Hawley himself (the dude who invented the plunger!). Except I notice that the link for the patent is a bad link, no results https://worldwide.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=USUS158937A Weird because I can find it my poking around at a slightly different URL But I am looking again at the URL Wikipedia is providing, and it looks suspicious. That last part of the parameter string, IDX= is th epatent idea, but it seems to have a duplicate "US" in the string. Ahah! Maybe I can edit and fix the Wikipedia article. I login in to my seldom used account, hit the button, and yeah, the reference list is not exactly editable, its a placeholder I dust off my memory, and recall that this is the layered way Wikipedia creates reference list, this is where the references we see are generated, but the data for a citation references sits inside the source as a content inside <ref>....</ref> tags, where the footnote is added. I'm watching the clock tick by as a slip one notch down the hole. I could just let this go, but isn't this the way Wikipedia should work? If I don't fix this minor error now, who will? Does it matter in the scheme of things. Hell yes. So now I am looking at this patent reference, where the relevant information is highlighted below Now what I find interesting, or what I am guessing, is that Wikipedia has a spoecific data structure for patent references. So rather than rely on a single URL, it provides data to which the proper link is built when the page is published (maybe it can use a different patent site for say a different language version of wikpedia? Or exchange sources if the patent site goes south? I am looking at this citation and have a hunch. It has variables like the country, th epatent number, dates, inventor names {{cite patent|country=US|number=US186206A|status=patent| title=Improvement in vent-clearers for wash-bowls| gdate=1877-01-16|fdate=1876-06-06|inventor=John S. Hawley}} Does the possible error in the patent number leap out? The country code is already entered, but there is an extra US in the value for number=US186206A.... my guess is it should be changed to be number=186206A What can I lose? I make a 2 letter deletion, pass a captcha, and boom, I edit the page. And win! The patent link now works. Everyone can now link to and read the full 1874 patent details for this transformative invention: The figure is a longitudinal section of my improved vent-clearer. My invention has for its object to furnish a simple, convenient, and inexpensive device for clearing the vents or discharge-pipes of washbowls, stationary wash-tabs, &c., should they become accidentally stopped. The invention consists in an improved ventclearer, formed by attaching a rubber cup to a handle, as hereinafter fully described. https://worldwide.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US158937A And my wiki contribution to the world is done. For today. What's th ebig deal? Why a fascination with plungers? It's not the plunger. It's that the real power of Wikipedia are the humans behind the edit screens and inside the Talk discussions. An ecosystem 99% of the world never even sees is there, making Wikipedia better, one edit at a time. I discovered something a few weeks ago, not even worth adding to this blog, where a group of people who use WIkimedia tools to batch add photos to Wikimedia commons, mining ones that are licensed the flavors Wikipedia ingests. What I discovered reading a batch of discussions years old, is that a back and forth discussion over a number of my flickr photos, which honestly, I had no case marking as CC BY. I gaffed. I'll spare the details, but I had made a rookie mistake long ago. And some folks inside te editing space, had sorted it out, in back and forth, but not antagonistic, discussion (I've since adjusted my licenses, but as it goes, I cannot revoked the past ones done wrong). All of this sets te stage that I am finally keen to devote time and effort where I can, be it as small as fixing a link, to stepping in more as a Wikipedian, one who makes it better by editing. Even if it's just fixing a bad link for a toilet plunger patent link. Today in 2023, I cant really tinker or do anything with the innards of the Generative AI obelisks except maybe toss my bone tools at it. But I can create my own web sites and I can make contributions to the public spaces like Wikipedia. Because I can see inside of it, and see the hands and signs of other humans there. One bit at a time. Now... I challenge you to look for that CC BY licensed plunger image in tomorrow's DS106 daily create and maybe just come up with a response of your own. This again is the internet I came for, where an inkling of an idea leads me to editing a Wikipedia page for a toilet plunger, certainly, not listed in my daily objectives. Plunge into the open web, break away from the owned spaces, paywalls, popup ads, and crap infested poopification much of it has become. But not all of it, as long as my hands can click Edit. Featured Image: Ausgussreiniger + Saugglocke + Pümpel ccnull image by Tim Reckmann licensed CC-BY 2.0 modified by placing behind it a screen shot of the edit screen of the Wikipedia article for Plunger flickr foto Found Numbersavailable on my flickr Here in a men's room at the Flagstaff Brewery are those pesky bad luck numbers that someone Lost. Shall we play them in the lottery? So there I was, taking care of... mmmm. "business" in the men's room at the Flagstaff Brewery, when these familiar numbers were there written on a wall plate cover right in front of me, Has someone Lost these numbers? Okay, a good chunk of our holiday time was consumed watching the first season of Lost on DVD. I must shyly admit that I have been addicted to this show from the start, but had missed 2 or 3 crucial episodes. At least my fandom of this show has some good company. The intricate, nested, slowly revealed storylines may get me. The fact that not everything in the plot is as guessable as most other TV. Maybe it was growing up in the era of the orignal Airport disaster movies. Maybe it is the lush Oahu scenery. So we consumed the series like hungry vultures. And oh, the sheer joy of having no commercial interuptions. In watchig again I picked up the pattern that the very first person pictured in the episode opening (I think), often a close up of their eye, is the "subject" of the episode flashbacks. And then there is realizing the plot focuses on perhaps 14 main characters, leaving maybe 32 unknowns who have bit parts, usually as background stand-ins during the funeral scenes. This is even suctly referenced in the episode where Boone wonders aloud to John Jocke about the fated Starv Trek red shirt crew members who typically are killed (and hey, there is even a society for them). And lastly, I am curious how often the "unlucky" numbers ar eplayed in current lotteries. I bet it is high. Talk about product placement. So what is your take on Hurley's numbers? flickr foto A Presentavailable on my flickr My last day this year in the office, and there is a new present I ought to be playing with... replacing a 2.5 year old G4 Powerbook with a shny new... Today is our last official day of work until after New Years. Trying to take care of some year end wrap up, catchup on 1000 other projects, and then this happens! I was not expecting to get a new laptop, but when the boss says, "We have some extra funds-- should we upgrade your llaptop?" what else would be the response? My current workhorse, 1 MhZ G4 laptop is fine, but is also at least 2 years old if not more. Given my track record, getting a new one means that in a month, Apple withh announce a breakthrough in a new technology (G5 laptop??) and I will be owner of a new old computer. Oh well. I dislike upgrading, moving content, re-installing applications, but it looks like my last project of the year... Thanks to the elves that brought me the box! The future of the StoryBox is subject for a new post. Let's say my new approach is to find ways to release the content by making it available for people to create remixed new works out of the pieces. The original media shall remain in the box, in the time capsule, but can be released by remix. Here I wanted to share three things I made out of the StoryBox content, as the first public examples. (more…) I can't stop going back for more GraphJams. I am wearing my GraphJammies eating peanut butter and GraphJam sandwiches. But I am waiting for my own submission to be portrayed, based on a recent blog post of my own. But for now, cue up that CD track that starts with scratchy vinyl sounds and get the funk toes tapping: more graph humor and song chart memes GraphJam even give you the video! GraphJam! (Where It's At!) GraphJam! (Where It's At!) GraphJam! (Where It's At!) cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Since EBCDIC Move along. I thought this course would be The One. The One I Finished. It's not the course's fault at all, it's all PEBKAC. I was eager to dive into the P2PU course Play With Your Music: "Play With Your Music" is a free, 6-week online course where you'll make 3-5 songs of your very own, using the newest tools on the web. You'll learn the in's and out's of audio production, while working with music you already know and love. Anyone with an interest in making music is welcome, and all you need is a computer and a browser. The course is now in week 5. I have not gotten much further than Tuesday of week 2. I'll leave the excuses out. There's a lot to like about the course design, the Mechanical MOOC method (so worth reading the report by P2PU) where participants are grouped into cohorts. The curriculum is reasonably designed with a good balance of short videos to listen to but also directed creative activities. The topic is one I was motivated (or so I thought) to take on as a challenge, occupying what I have learned is the Csikszentmihalyi-an "flow" channel. I was curious to learn how to use Soundation. A first mistake I made was setting up my Gmail to move all messages from the course and my group to a label-- there were a lot of messages coming in from the group and Google+ (BTW the plus stands for "more email notifications") (much more)... and oops, it was week 3 when I realized I had not seen any messages. Because duh, I had moved them out of my mailbox. IN the future I might use the filter for the group communication, but not the course announcements. In week 3, I thought I could rapid catch up, and set out to do the past work... I even set up a tumblr for my stuff. And day after day, I managed to say, I will do it tomorrow. And at this point, well, its just not worth it to rush through the course to try and get the experience. I suck as an open student. Truly. Pogo rules apply. There is a question I have (meaning no real answer) -- what is sacred about the weekly schedule? Is there something to a ... a.... I looked for the name of something that occurs every seven days (septennial for days?) and look what Google gave me? (Google, I do not understand your algorithm at all) But why, in an open course, not tied to an institution, semester schedule, are course planned on the 7 day cycle? There is of course a balance, you stretch things out too long and the pace is slow, or distractible excuse making slobs like me can make excuses on a bi-weekly schedule too. Still-- why is the treadmill of an open course tied to the rhythm of a traditional school schedule? That was one (of many) admirable aspect of the ETMOOC Alec Couros ran last year-- its schedule was a 2 week cycle. That is a question I am thinking too for the now maybe ending Headless ds106 we set up, where we pretty much wore out the active participants from the first half. The pace of it is insane, and there is no reason to tie it to the 7 day cycle, is there? One of the grand successes has been the version of this ds106 experience Rochelle Lockridge has been running inside the 3M corporate firewall (if all goes well a presentation and paper might be coming out of a 2014 open thingie conference). Her plans for the future are to let loose of the rapid pace, and turn it into a monthly cycle of topics. This is another blog post coming soon to a space near here, some reflections on the headless ds106. But I have my questions still about the rapid semesterly pacing of courses being a factor in people lapsing who sign up freely for an open learning experience. Maybe the magic cycle is Biblically inspired. Again, I am my own sole source of ships floundering. What can I do? Maybe I will roll up my sleeves and try again January 15. It's a whole new year. Maybe I will be different. YAOOCS And the ds106 pre-course assignmnet craze moves into 11th gear. Michael Branson-Smith takes the movie poster into a new dimension with his iteration of American Werewolf in London featuring two different elements of movement life sizing the original page. Next, Jim Groom crams about 5 animated GIFs into one with his version of Jason and The Argonauts, turning the whole poster into an action scene. (more…)