Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
More and more I have needed a Mac OSX SFTP client for moving web content to various servers- we have knocked off open FTP on all of our web servers, and I need it now for loading content to SourceForge. Pity that my long friend Fetch, used since the early 1990s, has yet to jump up to SFTP. It has been a road of trying a bunch of different apps, none of which was reliable (many do odd things with file permissions). On the scrap heap is: The Truck: Transmit it worked ok (I recall) but was funly with permissions, and you had to pay for it. The Captain: Captain FTP yes shareware, not much-- my programmer Colen uses it but claims it has quirks. The Dud: MacSFTP- could never use the demo, the download was already expired The Duck: CyberDuck - Free and a cool icon... I had gotten use out of the Duck last few months, but it overwrites file permissions, you cannot upload a multiple selection of files, and it takes a minutes to register the first transsfer. Worse, every transfer seemed to want me to click to allow a transmission. It never would connect to sourceForge's server. And today I think I found the winner-- Fugu from the University of Michigan. It is free, has a clean interface, and works well without mucking up permissions. I am still not crazy about two-paned transfer interfaces (I like dragging and dropping from the desktop to.from Fetch)... but that is just a matter of adjustment. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by The Daring Librarian One of the things the veterans of ds106 radio miss with the new station software is the ability for the @ds106radio twitterbot to recognize when a live braodcast has been started. I have full confidence Grant Potter will sort it out. Tonight, I was fiddling with a live broadcast from my hotel room in Japan, just playing some iTunes music via Nicecast. Rowan Peter called out for a voice over, so I switched over to my preferred Ladiocast mixer sert up. I was curious though, there is a setting in Ladiocast I do not see in Nicecast, to edit the metadata being sent out with the stream. Usually it's the song info from iTunes, but there is a setting under Ladiocast (Streamer 1 -> Metadata) where you can update/override what is being sent out. So I tried making a new setting here: So if I out in a status with LIVE in it, at least I could get the twitter bot to message it: https://twitter.com/ds106radio/status/310364352022708225 and for fun, I changed it one more time https://twitter.com/ds106radio/status/310371900067020800 Of course, this is not a viable solution, as only a few people use Ladiocast and it is manual, but at last it does do an announcement- I am guessing ti changes the feed that the twitter bot is checking (?) This is your regular arcane technical note, more to me than anyone else. I might be a broken record but again and again I return to David Wiley's description of the disposable assignment (and what the potential is to be the opposite): These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. David terms the alternative to be "renewable assessments". Now not to get all nitpicky semantic, and while "renewable" is a desirable attribute, is it necessarily the opposite of disposable? And why do assignments get cross listed as "assessments"? We have collections of activities in places like the DS106 Assignment Bank which are assignments, but not necessarily assessed. It does not change at all the value of the concept, it just makes sense to me to aim for Non-Disposable Assignments. Maybe it was the NDA acronym that is a problem? I've been trying a few of these in my Networked Narratives class. And just to show I might be familiar with my own dog food, in looking back on some previous mumblings on the topic I have to admit two of these are rather "textbooky" in nature. The Referencium [caption id="attachment_65966" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The hallowed halls of the #NetNarr Referencium[/caption] I made up a word and also a concept that confused my students for the first two weeks. But my idea was, that in the course of the class, students (and open participants) are coming across many readings, videos, references on the three main course segments -- Digital Art, Games and Gaming, and Electronic Literature-- as well as the over-arching theme of "This Digital Life". The idea then is I set up an open google doc, and over the month we are working on a topic, ask students each week to contribute to web references (title, url, and a brief description). For each of the three segments, I have two of my graduate students assigned as editors- they encourage contributions, organize and edit the contributions, and at the end of the month, I close the document to editing, and convert it to a web page. I think there would be not much trouble finding items from secondary links/references from assigned readings / course materials, plus things they might come across in their regular information consumption. But I also set up a page to "flow" possible candidates into. This is a feed of anything tagged #netnarrlinks in twitter ( way anyone can nominate something?) as well as the things I am always bookmarking in pinboard. To establish a path, I managed a shorted round for the first three weeks, when we were introducing the idea of thinking about our digital lives (tracking, surveillance, etc). I publish this in an online "journal" (self published using the TRU Writer SPLOT) with the first one at http://journal.arganee.world/2018/87/ (it was an easy publish, just copy/paste from the Google doc). The current one on Digital Art is in progress, and already going better than the first one. Anyone is welcome to add something to the collection, hoping to show my students the "network effect" of contributions from beyond our class. So what are we making that is non-disposable? A published collection of resources on our course topics, co-created by students. It's not huge, but I hope they see that they are building something for people beyond our class. [caption id="attachment_65972" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Referencium on Digital Life published in the Arganee Journal[/caption] (Also, after publication, all of these are set to open with Hypothes.is annotation enabled). Again a small way anyone can help is to tweet any interesting articles, videos, presentations, examples of digital art with the #netnarrlinks tag. The Re-New Media Art Project [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]That New Media Art Book flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] As part of the introduction to Digital Art for Week 3 of NetNarr I aimed to have students appreciate some of the early examples of Net Art from examples in the 2006 book New Media Art by Mark Tribe and Renna Jana. I bought a copy of the book on a whim in 2010 when I visited the MIT bookstore; it had an appeal because that was the part of web history I knew well. In January 2014 I got a bug to start a project to revisit these digital artworks, finding out if they were still even available, what became of the artist, etc. I also decided to make it a project to learn tumblr better, so launched Re New Media Art There's a blog post somewhere in this house about the idea. On thing that helped was that Mark Tribe had set up, at least available in 2014, a wiki version of the book content on a Brown University server. It's no longer publicly available, but again, hail the Internet Archive. In two years I managed to complete reviews of a whopping 6 of the 35 pieces. I was actually pleased to find a number of the old tech sites still there, again supporting my theory that individuals are the best hope for archiving web content; institutions not so much. My idea for the NDA (which I realize might be interpreted as asking students to do my research) was to have them take on the digital archeology investigation of one of the 29 works in New Media Art that I had not reviewed. I also came up with the plan to have each of my undergraduate students work as a team with a grad student. I asked the undergrad student to be the one to write up their results in their blog (this was also my cunning plan to have the grad students help the undergrads write better posts). I put some instructions and the list of all digital art works needing review into an open google doc, so the students could "claim" the one they chose (this was done in about 45 minute block of time). The task was: Pick one of the artist names listed in the open google doc http://bit.ly/re-new-media-art that links to a Wayback Machine search for the original content from the book. Indicate the work as "taken" by adding your twitter names after the title. For each one gather the following info (much is in the Wikibook) See a example of a completed research: Title of Art Work Artist name(s) When it was published on the web Technologies used Current URL (if still available online) Link to Wikibook page (in Wayback Machine) A brief summary of the piece, not just copied from the book (quotes are okay, but write your own analysis of the piece) Screenshots that represent the work Information on where the artist is now Publish as a blog post in one of your blogs and add the link to the google doc. Then you will get credit when it is added to the tumblr site. I was pleased with the effort and results they got for doing this in a short time (I typically spent maybe 90 minutes or more doing each one). Almost all of them were new to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine (which is a key part IMHO of being a Digital Alchemist). Three got done in class by my students, and our heroic open participant, Kevin @dogtrax did one too. I used the information in each of their published blog posts to move the research into he tumblr site, giving each of them credit there, e.g. [caption id="attachment_65969" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Credit for students who researched "Empire 24/7"[/caption] These are the new items added: Empire 24/7 by @nessacastrii and @mrsjayj Electronic Disturbance Theater (FloodNet) by @tiffsanto, @Justinsightfuls, and @Kmarzinsky ToyWar by @dogtrax My Boyfriend Came Back from the War by @BlaqueBeauty_30 and @rissacandiloro While not huge, I'd content this works as adding value to the world. And there are still 25 art pieces left in the hopper for anyone else to take on. The Make Bank Likely my favorite teaching with the web concept of all times is the DS106 Assignment Bank, and it's not even my own creation. I've done the digging into the origin story, and the idea spawned from conversations among Jim Groom, Marth Burtis, Tom Woodward, and myself, but it was totally Martha who brought it to life and built the architecture. After creating a generic version as a Wordpress theme, I've put it to use several times in later projects (Warning,if you invite me onto a project chances are I will suggest a bank, or a daily ______, or a SPLOT. It was a Challenge Bank for the UDG Agora Project, a Box of Magic Tricks for my ISS Institute in Australia. Briefly it was a Quest Bank for the Creative Commons Certification Project. One of the first uses by someone other than me for the theme was the work Karen Fasimpaur and Brad Emerson did to create a Connected Learning Make Bank. I really wanted to do one for NetNarr, and after a lot of tossing bad ideas for what to call the "things" in it, I settled on borrowing the name of a NetNarr Make Bank (after checking with Karen, she said, "yup, do it"). [caption id="attachment_65974" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The Make Bank is organized around the main topics of the course- This Digital Life, Digital Art, Games and Gaming, and Electronic Literature[/caption] What makes this valuable, non-disposable? First all it asks anyone who responds to publish their work online at a public URL (often but not necessarily their own blog). The value added is that each response gets added as an example to the original Make (aka assignment). As more people complete them, it grows examples to inspire others. But also, it opens the door for students to not only complete assigned work (which they have been institutionally trained to do) but also to add new Makes (aka assignments). This changes a lot for them; I'd suggest more is learning in creating an assignment than doing one. Plus, the format requires that you not only develop the assignment, but also complete it yourself as an example. It is dogfooding. Plus, the bank takes the assignments out of the context of my course content, and puts it in a place others can use, or remake. So while we have already the New Media Art research this in class (the Make Bank was not quite ready), it now exists in the Bank as an ongoing, non-disposed, assignment. Through some new categorizing features, I can now build a set of Makes, say this collection from the week we looked at Memes. My students are still getting the hang of how this works, that responding to the Make, means writing a bit about it in the response form. Hopefully more than "here is my response". [caption id="attachment_65970" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Completing the response form for a Make is more than just dropping something in a box[/caption] Through the Make Bank we will do more than writing articles; it opens the door for non-disposable participatory projects like #SelfieUnselfie. No Waste Management I'm not in the teaching business to create boxes to collct assignments. No matter what you call them, making non-disposable assignments / renewable assessments is all about creating meaningful work. And yes, it's a bit more work on your end to build. But it changes everything for you and your students. Once you go NDA, you cannot go back to this. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Disposable flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Featured Image: Spotted this on a neighbor's trash can, it seems high tech considering we have no curb-side recycling where I live (or no one told me). Darkened a bit for contrast from Non-Disposable? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This is where I might start with "I don't know a lot about film" or "I'm not a film critic". I've used before the extras on DVDs and its relation to the film as a metaphor for blogging about our work and the final paper/media production/presentation. And a long time ago, in a career far far away, I used the metaphor of a movie studio for multimedia production with students and faculty working together. So there is something about film-making that intrigues me, that we go to the movies, and never realize how much work and how many people went into making it, and the invisible bits like foley sound or whatever a second assistant grip does. It might have been in one of the Katexic email newsletter that I came across the Cinephilia & Beyond site that goes behind the scenes of movies, with a lot of focus on screenwriting. Who know what it was or why I decided to read today's Cinephilia and Beyond story on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it sent off a wild round of mind ricochets. It's been a while since I've seen the movie, but remember it's mind / time twisting plot, mind erasing, the dark streaks of reality, and like many, marveling that Jim Carrey could actually act. Once. This is not a film review; go to IMDb for the 411 on the movie. This is how creative ideas happen, not by some 10 Tips to Write a Hollywood Movie post on medium... Having heard his friend complain about her boyfriend for what seemed to be a hundredth time, French artist Pierre Bismuth asked her if she would erase him from her memory if such an option was at her disposal. He soon passed this idea to his friend and filmmaker Michel Gondry, who liked the sound of it and discussed it with Charlie Kaufman, with whom he worked on Human Nature. From a simple discussion in a cafe, therefore, sprung out a film that many believe to be one of the very finest produced in this century. I know only some of Charlie Kaufman - that he wrote Being John Malkovich and while I saw Adaption once I really did not understand it. I like how IMDb lists his "trademarks": Scripts usually feature reluctant protagonists who start out in the story as downtrodden or self-doubtful, frustrated with life or love or their professions. Stories with bizarre plots that showcase a sense of fantasy in the real world. His films often deal with themes of reality and identity but maybe the best is his quote "I don't know what the hell a third act is." which says to me he avoids the conventional approach. Every Cinephilia includes an embedded copy of the film's screenplay- I like how they paraphrase it's use, sort of a copyright nod/dance: A monumentally important screenplay. Dear every screenwriter/filmmaker, read Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation. I've looked up screenplays for dialogue segments, but have to admit I have never read one fully-- I did ready about the first 12 pages of the one for Eternal Sunshine, and am thinking it might be worth taking on reading an entire screenplay. It's a rather different kind of writing, where the author has to concisely set the environment of the scene in such a way the director/producer can design it for the camera, but where most of the action is carried in dialogue and short stag direction. It's rather visual and audio media done all in text! Cinephilia & Beyond intersperses the story with large photos many taken from the film set and embedded video, plus excerpts of interviews. I get a lot out of reading the questions to Kaufman and director Michel Gondry which gets at the relationship of writer and director. The interviewer asks Kaufman about dealing with the audience's expectations / ability to deal with sophisticated plots -- this is a powerful statement about a writer who is not doing his work thinking about what people think. From my vantage point in writing a story, I can’t and don’t and have no interest in thinking about the level of sophistication of the audience. I can only think about what interests me, and maybe what I would want to see if I were watching the movie. To me, that’s the key to writing something that’s not pandering. I go about my business and try to do what I’m interested in doing in the best way I know how to do it. That’s my job. What's interesting about the Cinephilia & Beyond articles is that they are long and dense with content, but after the opening discussions, presentation of the screenplay, and some interview, a lot of it is abstracted from other sources. This is often other interviews with the person that did the music, or the editor. There is a great interview with Carrey and Gondry where they talk a lot about the "making of", again, showing us a glimpse of what we never see in a movie because we only see what the camera records and the editor shapes. And then there is this amazing look at how the special effects were done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNihHGBjwvI What I did not expect to find here was a video clip that literally jumped out of the page. Kaufman had given a lecture at a screen writer's gathering in 2011 (the entire talk is available in SoundCloud). But it is this 5 minute segment, where someone put Kaufman's audio over a montage of clips from his movies that exploded my head... https://vimeo.com/45097801 Kaufman launches with an observation of the commonality of the deep human pain we all have, how creative people tap into that. But then he moves on to a commentary about the state of the world of information, entertainment is "produced in the same factories that make Pop-Tarts and iPads", how it is controlled, how we are controlled. How prescient from 2011 for 2016. And then... then... Don't be tricked into thinking that the way things are in the world are they way they must work. What I'd like to express is that the notion of being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings a change can begin to happen in how we begin to think of ourselves and the world. We are not the passive audience for this big messed up power play. We don't have to be. We can say who we are, we can assert our existence, we can say to the bullies and con men, the people who try to shame us, flatter us, to the people that have no compunction in lying to us to get our money and our allegiance, that we are thinking, really thinking about who we are, and we will express ourselves, and with this, other people won't feel so alone. I want to tell you I have a hope there's another way to be in the world, and that I believe that with courage and vulnerability and honesty that the stuff we put into this world can serve a better purpose. What I have to offer is me. What you have to offer is you. This. From 2011. We need now more than ever in 2016. I could make this a creed: "I want to tell you I have a hope there's another way to be in the world, and that I believe that with courage and vulnerability and honesty that the stuff we put into this world can serve a better purpose-- what I have to offer is me" This aside, I find so much in this kind of writing, and showing, and explaining that I wish we had more of in education. This is the stuff that you cannot deduce from analytics or meta-data or metrics. This is the stuff that would be inane to slap a badge on. What if more educators could break down their methods and process into something this rich, share it "with courage and vulnerability and honesty" and make a statement as moving as that video? Oh-- "I don't have time." Yeah. It's not impossible. I would gather The authors of Cinephilia & Beyond do more than blog. They have shown it's possible. They do it consistently. "Don't be tricked into thinking that the way things are in the world are they way they must work." What do you have to offer? Top / Featured image: No searching/metaphorizing here- this is the logo from the Cineophilia and Beyond site In the summer of 1986 as an undergraduate student in Geology, I got an internship at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. At the time I was on track to likely continue the track on to graduate school, but had not really zeroed in on an interest, but on that seemed to have my interest was paleontology. I am fairly sure I had an overly imagined, movie-induced idea (this was post Indiana Jones era, while not a paleontologist was close enough), idea what that would be like. Plus I also was hooked as a teen on the story of Lucy. Ancient human history, older earth history, I liked. Beyond the internship experience of getting to do work with practicing research scientists (and enjoy exploring Manhattan), they also brought in speakers in the field. One was a specialist from the American Museum of Natural History who had done this amazing research in finding dinosaur eggs in Mongolia. Dinosaur eggs in Mongolia? Got me interested. Excitement, and hit it... I arranged with him to get a back stage view of the museum. Behind the (?) 5 floors of brightly light halls of dino skeletons, the halls of dioramas was a different world of the research areas, I think it was seven floors. It was dimly lit, full of boxes and rows of cabinets. I remember watching someone slowly brush soil off a bone with a tiny paint brush. Yeah, I was immature, but that did take care of my visions of the glamorous adventures of paleontology. I had (and still have) an interest in history and what we can reconstruct from scant clues, but my gut said paleontology was not the field for me. My that was way too long a preamble. But I have had some excitement recently with using a keyboard as my tiny brush, tracing fragments of web history. Rather then seeking answers to things millions of years old, just trying to find information about the early web form 20 years ago? It feels similar. Next month (March 15-17) I have the opportunity to keynote at the 20th Technology, Colleges, Community Conference (TCC). Yes it's in Hawaii (ducks). It's also the 20th year for this conference, and the first 19 years were completely online. Started at Kapi'olani Community College, the CC in TCC initially was "Community Colleges". In 2003, I was in Milwaukee for the League For Innovation Conference on Information Technology (their link no longer work, but I have my own shards in my blog), and got to meet Bert Kimura, who was one of the original organizers of TCC. He got me interested to get the Maricopa Community Colleges where I worked active as participating in the annual conference. I did a presentation for TCC in 2004 on Photoblogging, I had just discovered flickr, but actually talked more about Buzznet and Fotolog. In 2005 Bert invited me to give a TCC keynote, in which I invoked a metaphor of Star Trek's Harry Mudd to talk about Small Pieces Loosely Joined (notice again, the conference site is gone, my Maricopa hosted wiki reference is gone, but my blog post remains in tact). Here's the funny memory about that presentation. I was attending an NMC meeting in San Francisco, and had to step out of a hotel meeting room to do my keynote. The platform I think was Elluminate (the parent of Blackboard Collaborate), so I was in a quiet hotel hallway speaking into my laptop (I needed the wifi from the NMC meeting room). Everything went fine until a meeting in the other room ended, and rush of people went right into the bathroom right across the hall from me, so my conference talk included background sounds of jostling conversation and toilets flushing. The show must go on. I also was asked to keynote in 2013, which ended up using a different metaphor for the DS106 Show I have had this great history with TCC and a long time collaboration / friendship with Bert Kimura. We hiked together when I was in Hawaii for a conference in 2005 and he hosted me for a visit when I was in Japan in 2008. It's an honor to be asked to speak at TCC 2015- but also an interesting approach since the conference planners decided to celebrate the 20th year by making it a hybrid conference-- some 100 participants will attend in person at the University of Hawaii and hundreds more will participate online. That was my own web archaeology, assisted by my own web sites and a bit of searching. For my presentation, I am going to do a bit of retro, talking about the state of the web in 1996. While its twenty years later, we still talk about it like the original conception, as a hyperlinked set of documents. We still talk about "pages" as much as we say "dial" someone on the phone. So I want to bridge forward and talk about some edgier web approaches that bust out of those perceptions. I do have a clever shtick in mind, but this time it is not based on any TV or movie references. It is based on history. To ground it I've asked Bert and his colleagues about the form and presentations from the first TCC conference in 1996. I remembered him saying it was text based (?) maybe it was via a BBS? This was just about the time of the inflection point of the web where it became more than one of a handful of ways people used the internet. Two years earlier, the web was sharing the attention space of things like usenet, gopher. But the rise of graphic browsers, the earlier presence building of web sites, definitely took off in 1996. What's impressive about TCC is they do have a rather complete archived history of conference presentations from 1996-2007. That already surpasses many organizations (cough, no names named) who cast off their web history. A few days ago I asked Bert by email for any files he might have had from TCC 1996. I wanted to know if there was any digital bits left online besides the conference papers -- how was it run? who were the keynotes? There was not much in the archive. I found a folder for a web page archive for what looks like a page Bert made as a welcome for conference participants. There was no URL on it, so I could not use the Wayback Machine to find it. To bring it "alive" at least for my presentation use, I put the web pages on my domain at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/tcc96/welcome/ I hope Bert appreciates his youthful photo! It's the web of 1996, not much formatting, but it moved past the grey Mosaic pages of 1993-1994. But it's HTML and images -- it still works (unlike the Macromedia Breeze archive of my 2004 presentation dead due to flash plugins loaded in javascript). The rest of the file in the archive Bert sent were related to the conference evaluation, drafts of the questions, but also a full summary of the results: And in here I found the gold clue. First of all the questions indicate the technologies used for the conference- a listserv, a gopher server, a MOO,... and a conference web site. That old URL http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/tcc_conf/ no longer works.. but I did find it saved in the Internet Archive Wayback machine - the oldest snapshot was from 1996 and is complete. Later versions in the Wayback Machine seem to be missing links. An important lesson in using the Wayback is to try multiple versions snapshotted at different dates, after 2003 all you get are "not found" messages. The conference instructions outline the format, look at how you ran an online conference in 1996! Listed below are the conference presenters. Their presentations will be posted in the TCC-L subdirectory on the Kapiolani CC server for your viewing starting 25 March 1996, Monday, at 08:00 am (GMT Offset -10). Please "attend" the presentations of your choice between March 25 and April 1. The conference will begin on April 2, Tuesday, at 5:00 AM (HST), with a posting of welcome messages (Provost John Morton and Dr. Bert Kimura) and the keynote addresses to all participants via email. These will also be posted on the web page later in the day. From April 2 to 4, please send email to the presenters whose sessions you attended, including greetings, questions, and comments. All presenters will be standing by over the three days to respond to your messages. During the three days, TCCCON-L@hawaii.edu will serve as the general conference for all participants and presenters. Please send email re presentations that you especially enjoyed, the conference as a whole, etc. On one of the three days (Apr 2, 3, or 4), each presenter will be featured in a live-chat MOO session for about an hour. A tentative schedule is included below. Please see the instructions for MOOing, which have been appended to this message. Beginning on the 25th, you can view the presentations in two ways, WWW or Gopher: URL: http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/tcc_conf/ gopher leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu (at the main menu, go to "Kapi'olani Info") At the "TCC-L Online Conference" main menu, you'll find an updated conference schedule, presentations, bios and photos of presenters, etc. We'll be sending you, via email, an updated schedule of events for the April 2-4 conference by the 25th. You get titles, abstracts, and links to papers for all presentations. What was interesting was the effort to provide a synchronous component- not of the presentation- but of a gathering place. Presenters would be present at set times in a MOO. I did not misspell MOOC. MOO stood for "MUD Object Oriented". How geeky is that, the acronym includes another acronym. MUD stood for "Multi-User Dungeon, with later variants Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain)" -- originally text based interactive game environments later used by educators to provide the kind of experiences we call social media now. Not only does the TCC archived site include the instructions for the MOO, you get the logs! This is how we navigated an online conference venue in 1996: *** Connected *** MOOhalo Conference Center Comfy chairs surround a table. Computer terminals are on and you are ready to get some work done. You see chair here. Last connected Mon Apr 1 21:29:20 1996 HST from oahu-242.u.aloha.net There is new news. Type `news' to read all news or `news new' to read just new news. @exits out (#225) leads to 4th floor (#218) via {out}. out 4th floor This space stretches across disciplines. To get to the MOOhalo Conference Room, go through the ATRIUM, or you might want to go DOWN to the third level for a visit. Looking through the glass wall, you see space for building and exploration. You might want to try Nash's gym which is UP above you. Sometimes tutoring takes place in a quiet place near here. If only you could find the TUTOR. And on and on it goes. They also ran in the MOO a "Coconut Cafe" as a post conference party event suggesting an awareness of the need to provide informal conversations, the hallways of face to face conferences. In later years I remember this in TCC online events as the "Luau Lounge" -- I tihnk we lifted that idea when I worked for NMC, later even having post conference dance parties in Second Life. Also in the Conference Logs is the entire archive of the listserv where you can track much of the information and interaction. In there I find the "keynotes" -- which were presented as text! One was from Dr. Bob Holderer, Assistant Professor of Writing, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania on "An Open Invitation to the Banquet". The other keynote was by Eric W. Crump, Coordinator of U of Missouri Learning Center Learning Technologies. Crump's "keynote" was on a web page, linked from the email forum -- INTERVERSITY: CONVERGENCE & TRANSFORMATION, or DISCOVERING THE REVOLUTION THAT ALREADY HAPPENED Thanks to the Internet Archive, I found pretty much the complete history of this 1996 conference -- well the gopher server is no more, the MOO long gone -- But the web, in its basic elements of HTML and media -- can live on a long freaking time. What technology or media that you used in 1996 can you still run on a modern computer? The native web. Do you have any sense how important the Internet Archive is? Without it, we have huge gaping holes in the history of the web, which may not register a huh from the masses who's view of the web is mostly a scrolling series of "now" status messages. History... is more than an academic interest. It is where we came from, what formed the present, what informs the future. And to me, this is way more exciting than fossilized dinosaur eggs! [caption id="attachment_40038" align="aligncenter" width="630"] By Daderot (I took this photograph.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption] Well... Fossilized dinosaur eggs are still cool. Top / Featured Image Credit cc licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by Çatalhöyük: http://flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/3063561209 cc licensed flickr photo shared by gianΩmerz I'm regretting not getting started my series on WordPress 3.0 and custom content types; a big chunk remains to be explained, but that has to wait till after a few days of vacation. But there was something Jim Groom mentioned that I was going to tackle later, but can inset now; it's a powerful piece that's been there quietly, that I used on the MIDEA site-- Child Themes. In all of my WordPress work I find a theme I like, download it, and then start ripping it to shreds. This makes it near impossible to update if the theme later changes. Children take care of that. What happens is that you download the Perfect Uber Theme and install it. But rather than start tinkering, you make another directory in the theme directory, call it something memorably like "Child of Bava" (mine is called "midea"). Inside at a minimum you create a style.css file and put at the top the standard comment block that defines a WP theme. Identify as a theme the directory name of the "parent" theme, in my case it is "modularity". Then we use some CSS to slurp in all the existing styles of the main theme: /* Theme Name: MIDEA Theme URI: http://graphpaperpress.com Description: A child theme, yo! Author: Alan Levine Author URI: http://cogdogblog.com Template: modularity Version: 1.0 Tags: nmc License: GPL */ @import url("../modularity/style.css"); Then in my WordPress dashboard, I select MIDEA as my new theme, and it recognizes it as a "Child of Modularity": So here is what I can do; I can use all the style that the Modularity theme provides, but in my MIDEA style.css, I can add new CSS that maybe I decide I need or... even better, I can over-ride something in Modularity to customize ion my child theme. So the CSS is additive or on top of the Modularity CSS. One of the reasons to do this is to keep my modifications separate from the original theme, so if there is an update to Modularity, I can install that, and my mods are still riding atop. But what is even better; is I want to create a different sidebar.php template, or make the archive.php template work differently, I just create a version of it in my child theme, and it supersedes what is in the original parent theme theme. Again, it is keeping my customizations from mixing with the original theme. And one more key thing, that we will get to in the rest of the WordPress 3.0 Customization code posts I hope I can get posted before too long--, the all important functions.php file, the one that allows me, you to add logic and custom code to your template, is additive like style.css. So as I develop specific functions I need for my variation on Modularity, I code them into a functions.php file that is in my child theme directory. Besides being a more logical way to organize theme customizations, child themes offer some interesting potential. Let's say we have a course where students or groups are set up in their own WordPress space. The "parent" theme might be the one for the class, but then we might have a series of different child themes of each student, with each its own customization (e.g. banner graphic, color themes, anything you can toss into a style), its own sidebar template, etc. Child themes offer a sound structure for creating many variations of a core theme. I'll never dive in and twist apart a theme again; I'll just spawn children and design from there. For more on Child Theming in WordPress see: Theme Shaper's Child Theme Basics and How I used a WordPress Child Theme To Redesign My Blog Lorelle's Parent/Child Themes in WordPress: The Future of WordPress Themes WordPress Codex entry for Child Theme Themelets a gallery of Child Themes Let the kids out! Continuing in this series of WordPress 3.0 Hackery... Overview WordPress 3.0 Content Types- my plans to dive in Creating the content types. The easiest part Leveraging child themes- my newly discovered best practice for chopping apart themes. Adding the meta data field editing boxes (add_post_meta). Hacking the Editing fields. Modifying templates to display the content, Hacking the templates. You can find all the posts in this series at http://cogdogblog.com/2010/07/23/roundup-wp3/ I'm hard on my laptop keyboard. That photo is my 3 year old MacBook Pro. Gone are e-r-t-i-o-a-s-h-n plus the Shift key and space bar are showing fatigue. You will see similar patterns on my older 2009 one, and the one before that I managed to crack the shift key. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]What the SHIFT Happened? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Several people at the Creative Commons summit like Clint Lalonde were horrified fascinated by the specter of my keyboard: https://www.instagram.com/p/BTcGisXjzBr/ A few months back I did some research to find out of such wear as covered on my AppleCare (not clear from search) which I noted expired in May 2017. I contacted Apple Support this week by chat, only to find out my calendar error; it expired beginning of May. Oops. The rep said typed I would have to take it to an Apple Store for an assessment of the repair cost. I asked typed if it could be done in one visit since it's a 2 hour drive to the nearest one. He replied typed that it was likely a 3 day turn round on repair. I sighed typed that my work depends on my laptop and being without it would be challenge (I probably could manage since I have an old spare laptop, but wanted to check the response). He offered typed I could send it in for mail repair that would be 5-7 days. I said WTF typed thanks for the information and are you even listening to me I will think about it. I then went on Amazon and found an $8 solution, the Kuzy Silicone skin, that arrived in my mailbox 2 days later, both days which I had full access to my laptop. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Apple Selfcare flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] It's a bit different feel, but I am getting used to it. And it has a cool color. And my laptop did not leave home. I see no decrease in my frequency of typos. Apple Self Care. Featured image My Worn Keys flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Allright, one more GIF (this morning) and then off to do something else. Maybe. This one can fit into two of the categories- RIFF a GIF and GIF the #ds106 (this is a test if I can slip one example into two assignments). Muppets + ds106 #4life cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk The "syndication bus" is the Groomian term for the use of RSS aggregation technology that allows a class/community to run as both a hub and a decentralized network of blogs- individuals publish in their own space. The class or central site exists to subscribe to RSS feeds from those blogs to republish them in aggregate form. This is carried out at big scales in ds106 using Wordpress and the Feedwordpress plugin. I'm working with Alec Couros to put FeedWordpress into play as both a blog hub and a twitter archiver for his ETMOOC which starts next week. Conceptually, what we have done with Wordpress is the same that is done for many of the Connectivist MOOCs powered by Stephen Downse's gRSSHopper. But it comes into play at smaller scales as well -many classes on UMW Blogs are run via the same model- students blog in their own space, what they blog is pulled to the class site. This was a long-winded way to introduce a writeup for another class sized bus I worked on in September. Nancy White approached us about helping with a class she was co-teaching for a university in the Netherlands -- and they were interested in "a bus". Since I was spinning out on my own, I took it on as a development project (and any chance you get to work with Nancy, do not hesitate to say yes). She recently wrote her massive (in terms of blog post!) reflection on the course and mentioned the technology pieces I worked on-- and this prompted me to write this up just so I can remember. The class is part of the Design Engineering Program at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and was a first effort to run a course outside the walls of an LMS. As Nancy paraphrased the course's purpose: My shorthand is that the course was an exploration about how online communities and networks can be part of a designers practice. When and how can these forms be of strategic use? And of course who could better do that then Nancy? Part of the design they wanted was having students do reflective blogging in their own space, and having a ds106 like place where the students work was brought together. At that time, we were just getting our Fall 2012 students started setting up their ds106 blogs, and it occurred to me for te kind of reflection these students would be doing, it would be a lot of overhead to have them take on a full fledged blogging platform. Maybe I did not want to tutor 60 students in Wordpress ;-) but I pitched the idea of using a platform that was easier to author in and bends itself to media-- tumblr. Since tumblr provides RSS feeds (though their updates can lag like 12 hours) it works as a platform we could syndicate into a hub Wordpress site. We ran the Wordpress site in the shared hosting of Hippie Hosting. After a bit of theme shopping, I settled on the Responsive Theme because it was clean, and I like more and more the approach of responsive themes to adjust themselves to different screen sizes. I set up a brief tumblr guide to cover the basics The ultimate class site (still available at http://projectcommunity.info/) looks like: That leading video worked well as they planned to have an introductory video each week (I believe done in Google Hangouts archived to Youtube). The students were put into 9 groups for working together; and 1 or 2 groups where associated with five different themes of the course. What this meant for Feedwordpress, is that for each student RSS Feed added, I would set Feedwordpress to add a group category to each feed, as well as a theme category. These means on the site, we could generate a tag archive for all the blog posts in one group, e.g.group 7, but also pull all blog posts that were associated with a theme, e.g. Support Raising. So there is a design decision when setting up feedwordpress how to handle incoming tags and categories attached to the external blogs. My current approach is to convert all of these to wordpress tags, so they are descriptive of the original blog posts- that way I can attach categories I need internally to organize content, and not have the site organizing taxonomy intersect with the user supplied ones (we do the apposite on ds106, all incoming categories and tags are made into categories, and we add site tags to organize). To organize the feeds, I fell to setting up a google form for the students to sign up and share their tumblr sites, and I manually matched each student to their pre-assigned group (and hence theme). Not the most automated, but it worked, and I added subscriptions for 60 some tumblr blogs. Another decision point was making the choice to set the comments to be done on the class Site. In ds106 we like it better when comments are distributed, but with tumblr commenting is not even built in; enabling it involves integrating with disqus. Besides, the instructors (and I too) aw it as better to have the comments managed at the class blog. I got the idea to hack the template (actually made a child theme as I do all the time now) with some code to add a line of attribution to the original tumblr blog. As Martha Burtis deftly noticed, there is actually an add-on for Feedwordpress that does this more elegantly - I use this now on all FWP projects I do (it has been added to ds106 as well). The bus ran smoothly from start to finish. It aggregated 576 blogposts from 54 students, and another 90 posts from the 5 faculty. I learned a lot of new useful plugins on this project: Better WordPress Recent Comments to make a comments widget on the front page that could be paged through via ajax. Display widgets is super handy to set a particular widget to appear (or not) on particular pages or category archives. This allows you to have different widgets as needed, and not be so tied to one commons sidebar everywhere. Hierarchical Pages provides shortcodes for automatically creating a tree structure if you set up pages to have a hierarchy (used here for the syllabus) - so as pages were added each week to the syllabus page structure, the shortcodes would generate a list that reflects those new pages Q2W3 Post Order to simulate sticky pages behavior on category archives (sticky only works on the home page)- we wanted a particular blog post to always be at the top of the themes pages as an introduction. Search Everything extends the wordpress search to go beyond pages and posts; i used it to extend to comments and comment authors. Very useful plugin. Top 10 adds a view count to each post. WordPress Backup to Dropbox because everyone knows to backup their site, right? I like the flexibility of doing backups to my drop box. WP Category Post List Widget Not sure why this is not a built in widget, it creates a list of posts in a category. I used it on the front page to show the posts from one group as well as sidebars internally for each group or theme. YouTube Channel makes a widget to put, in our case, a Youtube widget that randomly displays one video from the classes YouTube channel. Probably about 35% of the present site functionality was not there from the start, there was a lot of building the airplane as we flew it and responding to student questions and feedback. I learned a ton in doing this, and am armed now with what is needed to do a custom aggregation site for almost any class, group, or project. The bus is totally the way to combine the best of the distributed network where people own their ideas and content, but you can pull them together and re-cast them needed via something as old (and dead?) as RSS. If you want this kind of setup... well it is a future blog post (once I build my consulting site) but I AM AVAILABLE. If you are not on the syndication bus, you are not riding the waves. UPDATE Jan 10, 2013 The Jetpack plugin collected site stata and generated a prett report on the site activity http://jetpack.me/annual-report/39185870/2012/ It hardly takes much to compel me to blog something about Flickr. Sure, lots of folks are just dumping photos to Google because it applies some data sniffing organizational features, or pouring them into Instagram for the quick like fixes (where they can never be found by search), even jumping now into the novel PixelFed space. But for me, I stay where my heart and maximal photo experience has been since 2004. That soars even more with the news of the creation of the Flickr Foundation aimed at preserving public domain photos for 100(?) years and "stewarding this cultural treasure for future generations, and fostering a visual commons we can all enjoy." It starts with the flickr commons, but goes father with big ideas like digital buoyancy and the data lifeboat (what are the odds Instagram provides anything like that?). Already a Fine Machine https://flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179876970 The water stretching machine of an eastern parachute manufacturer stretches shroud lines so as to make them more adaptable to the finished product, Manchester, Conn. (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) The current flickr commons is to me already a fabulous machine for not just images, but the stories behind them (unlike other places where you look a media it is worth it to read the comments). But as I see so many blog post, slide decks reach for the wealth of photos open to reuse from Unsplash or Pexels to me I find a bit of sameness, I imagine they are all photos done by the same photographer. The Commons has an element of such different style- and while most of course vintage looking, why not mix it up a bit? I find metaphors quite easily... https://flickr.com/photos/mennonitechurchusa-archives/14723596407 1975 St Catherines Ping Pong flickr photo by Mennonite Church USA Archives shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) A Wee Flickr Commons Search Tool Totally, for my own use, but can be anyone else's, I have been making regular use of a browser tool that is almost as old as web dirt, a browser bookmarklet: https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/bookmarklet-to-find-edyth/ I can do that because of the way flickr's searches can be accessed outside of it's site. Come Improv With Flickr The list of things I love about flickr have high among them the availability of it's API but more than that, a long term history of not breaking it, enabling people, even code dabblers like me to create tools like Five Card Flickr Stories, which while maybe a bit creaky still enabled me to create a quick story from random flickr photos dealt to me in sets of 5. Flickr's API allows as well perhaps the web thing I am most proud of, Pechaflickr. A feature I baked in in 2021 allows a set of random images be served pecha kucha style from the tags of flickr commons flickr photos, and using the "Heather" mode creates it as a puzzle to Guess The Tag: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1603252147847569409 Just in case the bird house collapses, just the challenge yourself- In honor of the Flickr Foundation, "What is Going on in these Flickr Commons Photos?" For the peak behind what is happening, yes I have my own blog post that will stay here no matter what the Dark Lord of Twitdor does: https://cogdogblog.com/2021/03/pechaflickrcommons/ The Message Is... https://flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/16468742056 Solar System Montage of Voyager Images flickr photo by NASA on The Commons shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) It's exciting times for the commons and Flickr Foundation is aiming for the big sky future. I am eager to see all that happens, stay tuned to https://flickr.org. Note: All images in this post were found in the Flickr Commons which should be obvious in the captions. This is part of my approach to public domain media- just because a license says you do not have to attribute, I will ABA Always Be Attributing because it makes the Commons that more visible. Oh, and I put to use another of my Flickr tools, the Flickr CC Attribution Helper, something I have used multiple times each day since 2009. It is made possible by the openness of the Flickr platform. Featured Image: Found in the flickr commons by a search on "telescope"- and you cannot go wrong with credit given to Rene? Descartes. An Early Telescope flickr photo by History of Medicine Division - NLM - NIH shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) [media description: archival image of a man is looking through a telescope, the parts of which are lettered for further identification and discussion.] Related to recent wonderings of "Where Have All the Bloggers Gone?", it appears that author William Gibson is blogged out. In "Last Postcard from Costa Del Blog", Gibson pens: Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging. I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off. Of course, the person that really created the notion of cyberspace is entitled to focus on writing rather than blogging. Maybe it's the next great slogan for blogging: "low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial" Previously I have documented the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) diagnosis of SpamNymphomania, the sad, desperate attempt to stick Porn Pill Casino links into any web form that contains a textarea and a submit button. In extremely sad cases, they continue to do so when there is no payoff at all, they submit stuff to web forms that never publish content to any web site, so their URLs never see the light of day, But the Texas Hold-em mania is the most extreme, so they continue to try and stuff things in our web feedback forms and latest today, trying to stuff it into the form on the Feed2JS site that allows normal people to share new CSS designs. The solution is rather simple in my PHP scripts to issue die statements for sites where there are known keywords for valid input; in other cases, I have traps set for excessive numbers of URLs. This is all just to save me from deleting some email notifications, cause that is the only place the content goes, from your spam to my deleted mail box. Spammers, get some help today. Nahhh, just get a freakin' life. Do something meaningful for a change, rather than abusing people who have better things to do. Again, is that the legacy one hopes for as their eulogy? "Oh Absinth542 was a lovely human, who managed to get Phentermine Inc a top Google Rank for 2 months back in 2005." Hmmmm, this blog post title sounds like either a bad idea for a recipe with a food processor or a headline of a New Zealand rural road accident report. But noooo, neither, it is this awesome video done by Clint Lalonde where he mashes up Brian Lamb for an intro to a keynote Brian did for the Distributed Education Conference at Camosun College. Dr Mashup gets mashed up himself! I think Stephen Downes' voice has never sounded more natural ;-) And check the credits, "made with 100% free stuff" See the wiki bits of Brian's presentation Confessions of an unrepentant doomfreak... It's all coming apart, but that may not be a bad thing but I am sure it pales to the in person experience. It's good to have short cuts. I'm a mad spree of code update for my pile of Wordpress themes I plan to use in my workshops down under. One thing I noticed in my own dog-fooding with the SPLOTpoint I built as a presentation platform. The navigation between "slides" is way down at the bottom: [caption id="attachment_65224" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Navigating between slides is always a scroll and click...[/caption] If you wanted mainly to flip between the featured images that fill the top, like "slides", well, awkward. I wondered how simple it would be to add some navigation via arrow keys. My search on wordpress arrow key navigation brought a number of possibilities. Maybe a plugin? But I have my "slides" organized in order based on a custom integer value. There's got to be a code way. The answer was just a few results down the page, How to add Keyboard Navigation to your WordPress powered website. It was even easier because my theme already generates the footer navigation buttons, no need to add them as hidden divs. Mine is done in a function, and the class names are different, but that was no problem: function splotpoint_post_nav() { // Don't print empty markup if there's nowhere to navigate. $previous = ( is_attachment() ) ? get_post( get_post()->post_parent ) : get_adjacent_post( false, '', true ); $next = get_adjacent_post( false, '', false ); if ( ! $next && ! $previous ) { return; } ?> 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? Sometimes I get lucky and two ideas on different paths cross paths right in front of me. It’s a matter of just reaching out and grabbing them. Brian had an idea for our You Show Audio unit to add (or maybe replace?) the instructions for the activities with an audio explanation. This is the kind of approach I like to use a medium or technology to explain the medium or technology. I wondered somewhat about the downside of not making the content accessible, which is not a direct concern, but one of those things that one should keep in mind. At the same time, in an email group, my colleague from Maricopa, Alisa Cooper, shared a link to an interesting tool- a speech recognition add-on for Google Docs. My stream crossing idea was to record the audio at the same time running the add-on to see how well it did with transcription. I’ve had the usual mixed bag experiences of garbled YouTube annotations and yelling corrections at Siri. The tool adds itself to an Add-ons menu in GDocs. I almost gave up, because it never showed me the promised “start” link, but it showed up when I saved the doc, closed, and re-opened it (once again, the Old Reboot Trick works). I set up my Samson Meteor mic, turned on Audacity to record, then activated the Speech Recognition add-on. I put all of this behind the web page for the activity so I could focus on whatever unplanned commentary I would make (hey I am just testing this out). It was interesting to see what it came up with: View of the speech to text right after stopping the recording. There is no response to end a sentence or change paragraphs, so you get the blob of text. It got a good amount and messed up maybe 20%? 25%? Even at that, I sure prefer that than trying to transcribe from the audio (if you have ever seen me type, it may have been an instigating reason for my marriage ending). Here is the blob that came out before editing it: okay I’m going to try explaining the first assignment for the new show the unit for I’m recording this but I am also using a new add on to Google Docs has actually transcribing this to text that is not essential force activity sounds of your work the idea is to capture two different kind of sounds that you can use inside of your project next week so this could be the place you work or could be just special place at home but the idea is to think about the environment of the place so I do a lot of my work here Cincinnati are you in my apartment what kind of empty right now usually I have something on the TV I would it on CNN large can background music it’s pretty empty but listen very closely there’s a small low taking excess old fashioned analog clock on the floor and my fridgerator ambient sound so the suggestion that something MySpace which what I would do for my Simon is just recorded it without me talking it’s just to hear the background sound set environmental sound your sound like a perhaps a more noisy office in my feet in a library might be inside of a laboratory somewhere the idea of the same it is to get something that you can use it later today to perhaps a background as you talk about your work but it sounds pretty sure I’m Beyonce or sense of the environment second summer assignment something completely different phones idea I’ve never done this life it’s interesting the promises to record one sound one single sound get something with an inhaler and we’re just recorded just a little bit sound this week it won’t mean much hope for the child’s health Decatur many times space it out make it go up make it go down make a change pacemaker be like a river runs layered on top of its off to make that one sound beyond most like corpus and it’s just an experiment to see how much you can pimples with a single sound like a single note longest time trying to learn how to play harmonica so I’m just going to play a single product keratin out and see what I can do with that and perhaps edit favorite tracks put it in the sound pull up reps upload it to my blog and just keep it for next week so we’re just grabbing raw material this week that’s all I’m doing and I just want to have this is a record And you can compare it to my post edits in the doc (which I guessed more at than trying to match perfectly to the audio). In Audacity where I recorded it, I trimmed the in and out points. To demonstrate some techniques, I decided to put some music in as a background, using “Perspectives”, a creative commons licensed track from the most useful Incompetch Royalty Free Music Collection — by the way this site does a stellar job of providing attribution text: “Perspectives” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ In Audacity I use one of my favorite bits, the envelope tool to fine tune the audio to duck it under my un-dulcet mumbles. My voice is the top track (I again was too close to that mic), and the music in the lower track. In the You Show page I am able to embed the audio, add a download link, and a link to the transcript I did in Google Docs http://youshow.trubox.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2015/02/unit4-activity1.mp3 Download • Google Docs transcript It’s not perfect, but was worth experimenting with. While looking for more information, I stumbled into Online Dictation, a web based speech to text generator. I was fascinated to watch how the words morphed and change as I spoke. It seemed to do a little better, and I was able to have it end a sentence by trying “dot” (or was it when I said “period”)? Here is a little screen cap of my test. Actually this would be pretty neat for doing some mashup type videos. Stuff just happens all the time, crossing streams and everything. On the net, its more than fine to cross the streams Yesterday I had the fun opportunity to talk about attributed and possibly [semi] serious use of the kinds of media people see/share all the time. This session was a free pre-conference teaser for the 24th annual Teaching, Colleges and Community (YCC) conference. That's right, 24... and it's still being organized by the very people who did the first one, Bert Kimura and Curtis Ho from the University of Hawaii. Maybe the best little free online conference you have never heard of. Before I go silly, I have to do my web paleontology act to dial back to a League for Innovation conference in 2003 where this smiling man named Bert asked to talk to me about the conference. At that time, the acronym as aimed at Community Colleges, and as I was doing instructional technology work at the Maricopa Community Colleges, he gently pitched the idea of getting Maricopa to participate at an institutional level. This meant I got my office to pay a single registration fee, and any employee could take part of the online conference at no cost to them. It was a fabulous PD opportunity to offer, and we got to joke about sending so many people to a conference in Hawaii (meaning they did it from their office). Since then... I did a presentation for TCC in 2004 on Photoblogging, I had just discovered flickr, but actually talked more about Buzznet and Fotolog. Hah.In 2005 Bert invited me to give a TCC keynote, in which I invoked a metaphor of Star Trek’s Harry Mudd to talk about Small Pieces Loosely JoinedI was in Hawaii later that year for an NMC conference and visited Bert and his wife at home, enjoyed a local style beach dinner and a mountain hike. In a trip to Asia in 2008, I again got to visit with them for a week in Japan. These things, done well, grow into friendship.I also was asked to keynote in 2013, which ended up using a different metaphor for the DS106 Show (this involved me invoking a scene from Network where I urged others to do through open their browser windows and yell "I'm MOOCed as Hell and I'm Not Taking It Anymore"Maybe the crowning TCC was the 20th, when for the first time there was part of the conference on site in Hawaii. I got to do a keynote where, invoking Brett Victor's talk, I time traveled back to 1996 to talk about the web. This involved me making a Yahoo T-shirt and buying a Walkman for props. I decided in December, when the call for presentations for this year's TCC went out, to submit a presentation- it's actually going to be a revisit of the 2004 one and see where we have gone in 15 years in terms of communicating with shared photos. So... when Bert and Curtis approached me last month asking if I would do the free pre-conference session they offer in March, I of course had to say yes. They said I could do the same talk, and I of course declined that offer, and pitched my silly idea. The interest in "doing more" with media we see as entertainment (or worse) in social media goes back of course to many things DS106, but more to the studio sessions we did for the UDG Agora project- Brian Lamb led one on Meme Media: Attention-Grabbing Images And Animated Gifs and I did one one on Making Short Form Videos. It's been a part of Networked Narratives (2017-2019). And I did a first run of Affordances of Silly Media for a group of mostly community center leaders in Melbourne Australia during my ISS Institute fellowship there in 2017. I had lots to draw on. The platform for TCC was Adobe Connect, a platform I have not seen since leaving NMC (before 2011 then). Honestly, it's not changed much since. I had to provide "slides" for them to upload, which of course meant, none of the GIFs moved, I just had to describe them moving and provide links (and twice during my talk Adobe Connect went down in a beach ball spiral of doom). I thought I had packed way too much in, the Keynote presentation was 25Mb for 65 slides, many meant for fast flipping. I must have talked fast, as I got through on about 40 minutes. We had a great audience, with folks I could see during intros from across the US, Canada, Japan, Greece (where it was 2am apparently), and even a colleague from Canberra who saw me present there in 2007. Anyhow, I have the slides and a whole bunch of links (a lot) over in my Presentation show room https://cog.dog/show/2019/03/20/silly-media/ And a recording of the silliness is available on the conference web site. At least four people took up the challenge during the talk to make meme images about TCC; thanks so much to the always eager and excited Cynthia Cologne for making and sharing them. https://twitter.com/lyrlobo/status/1108532535208759296 And thanks of course to Bert and Curtis and his TCC team plus Rebecca and John Walber from Learning Times for helping run the show. If you are looking for a great online conference experience, check out TCC in April. The theme this year is "Sustainable Learning, Accessible Technologies, & Diverse Contexts." Technology, Colleges and Community (TCC), is a worldwide online conference attended by university and college personnel including faculty, research associates, academic support staff, counselors, student services personnel, students, and administrators.Join our 24th edition of this annual event to share your expertise, experiences, and knowledge relevant to the use of information technology in learning, teaching, innovation, and academic services. This event is very helpful and “friendly” to novices. It provides you with a strong foundation about teaching and learning with modern technologies. Featured Image: TCC2019 Meme made at imgflip using the Distracted Boyfriend pic. A little over a year ago, someone new entered as an open participant in ds106: I'm working this summer as a grant researcher, and part of the project I'm working with has to do with innovations in education. Partway through my project, I stumbled across a blog called The Tech Savvy Educator, and I continued stumbling onto Jim Groom"˜s Digital Storytelling class (Mr. Groom magically found and responded to my first blog post before I'd even told anyone that I was making a blog, I'm assuming through some kind of back-link-sensor or quite possibly MAGIC). Following the discovery of the Digital Storytelling (ds106) class, I proceeded to basically do the class, reading the essays, watching the videos, figuring out how to register and manufacture the blog-object you're viewing right now. And I started having all of these huge hits for teaching in the fall, like using shared documents to teach research paper writing and format style, and using blogs, wikis and flickr accounts by a fictional character (or characters) to teach creative writing Brian really came on early 2012 with his introduction of his Bagman character, an exemplar of someone carrying a theme or character through multiple assignments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=4xUITZopO5w I was very excited to get an email from Brian this week sharing the news that he would be teaching a digital storytelling course at University of Michigan starting in early 2013, and it would be connected with ds106. He specifically asked for tips for teaching the course. For reference, I have been part of ds106 as an open participant (in 2011), taught it as an in person class (Spring 2012), and an online class (Summer 2012 and currently Fall 2012)... that is me experience, not expertise. My notes are spread across a few places, a category of my teaching related ds106 notes, audio reflections from Spring 2012, the web site for that same course and the summer "camp" version. So what can I tell Prof Bagman? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by andessurvivor I guess this is the part after the preamble where I actually try to answer the question. First, everyone that teaches the class is going to have their own method, syllabus, outcomes etc. That sounds obvious, but is what still makes ds106 radically different from other large, massed, big courses- all others aim to replicate the same experience for all participants. What we do at University of Mary Washington, ends up being the hub of the front of the main site ds106.us, but taught elsewhere, be it York College, Kennesaw State University, Temple University Japan are actually overlapping on the elements of ds106 and their own on the ground courses. And this does not even address the surrounding cloud of open online participants who pick and choose their own levels of participation. What it means is there is no single "ds106 course" but more or less some messy Venn diagram, where the lines between classes participating is porous and blurred. The other aspect I am still formulating is developing my own persona or character as a teacher. I struggled with this my first time around; I knew my presence would not and should not be the way Jim Groom teaches, and even noted the way Scott Lockman describes his class presence as performance, even "vaudeville". It comes with time and experience (I actually had not done classroom teaching in 12 years before last Spring). I am rather confident knowing some of Brian's experience that this is something he has a feel for. It's not that the classroom is a broadway show, but there is some element of show time to doing it, even online. The way we run the class at University of Mary Washington is intense. The usual feedback is how much work the class was (coupled with how much it was worth it), and that it is "way more work than other 100 level courses." But the students stay in it, mostly. And put a lot of time into it. Why? We collected some of this as an end assignment for our summer class where students wrote their last "letter home" with advice for future ds106 students. So we make this clear upfront. Jim was always excellent in his over the top scare email sent to registered students before the class starts. I might be getting better, since I had about 8 students drop (and 6 added). I actually said that I was trying to talk them out of the class. But letting the students know early, even before the class is started, how much work it is helps them set their expectation. It may also be setting them up to try harder? One of the biggest challenges in doing ds106 is getting students set up in their domains, installing wordpress, and then being able to get functional in their ability to use their blog well. There are a lot of mechanics to cover. If you teach a ds106 class, you do not have to have students do the entire "manage a personal cyberinfrastucture"- they can easily do all work on a hosted space like Wordpress.com, Blogspot, tumblr. That is a call on how important it is for your students to learn this bit of managing their digital selves (this is a key outcome for our class). Last Spring, because we were having students register their own domains and arrange their own web hosting, it was really 3 weeks into the semester before all of then were set up, and then they ended up being at different levels of proficiency- even 5 or 6 weeks into the semester, I was commenting and reminding some students about linking and embedding media. I am not sure if there is a better way to streamline this- a simpler tool or having all students use the same? But this semester we have greatly accelerate this process via the support of UMW and its IT department for the Domain of One's Own project. We are set up now to register domains for students and set them up on a web hosting platform that we manage (and students get for free)- and I had 3/4 of my students set up and using their wordpress sites in 2 days. Tis greatly shortened the time spent on mechanics. Martha and I came up with the idea of devoting the first two weeks to what we called ds106 Bootcamp, where we made assignments mostly focussed on things that would get them writing posts, using tags and categories, customizing their sites with themes and plugins, and understanding how to embed media. As we have done it at UMW, there is a balanced sense of both structure and lack of structure and largely we are also inventing and tweaking the course as we go. One of the most pleasing things I found in my first round of teaching was how little I have to do in terms of teaching students how to use software. This is because we actually do not prescribe that students use specific software- for doing their graphics work, they are free to use commercial copies of PhotoShop if they own it, but also refer them to open source tools like GIMP and web-base ones like Aviary (see our ds106 Handbook section on Tools). We have a comprensive archive of past ds106 syllabi now for 6 different semesters (including 2 summer sessions) -- and one of my current projects is to harvest all the material from them (recorded presentations, recommended readings/videos) into a generic syllabus for someone like an open participant o pick and choose the things to do that they prefer. What has been most impressive is in ds206 is how adept our students have been at figuring out the tools. They struggle with it, yes, but they also are able to seek their own answers, or reach out to ask for help. I could very well be wrong, but I think we often underestimate this in our students, or maybe need to provide more places for them to struggle a bit- that notion I ascribe to of UMW History Prof Jeff McClurken about wanting to make his students "uncomfortable but not paralyzed". My hunch is often we over structure things, and waste a lot of time doing cook book recipes. It was this kind of thinking that led my colleague Martha Burtis and I (we each teach our own sections of ds106, but we work together to plan all assignments, so our sections are in parallel) to come up with a challenge assignment in our second week. We actually gave our students the assignment to create an animated GIF but purposefully did not tell them how to do this. We wanted them to take on the challenge of discovery. We each spend a lot of time both preparing and providing feedback. I cannot overstate how important that contact is, even more so in an online class. Here in week 4 I am trying to keep up with the task of reading all and commenting on most of my students blog posts. I know that will tail off as we get into more complex assignments (reviewing video work takes a lot more time than visual assignments), but also that the students and the open participant community pick up on commenting. Google Reader is essential for keeping up to date with the student blogs. Sp students need to know they are not writing into an empty space. Commenting is key glue, eb it acknowledgement of work, suggestions for improvement, critical evaluation, or just providing something fun or relating it. All of our students work is what is done in their blogs- we do not do any quizzes or tests in ds106 at UMW. The same goes for twitter- we made an early assignment to include a twitter message and reply they got. If comments are glue, twitter is the electricity then generates nerve impulses. If you cna get your students bouncing not only to you, but each other in this space, it goes a long way. They learn it is not only a place to get answers, but a space to have conversations, to have some fun, to be more connected. But you as the instructor are the key hub in the network, so I am keeping a steady pulse of calling out students positive efforts, or drawing in my own connections to comment or tweets to students. The last thing I ever want to to is require X number of comments or tweets per week. If you as the instructor are monitoring the blog comments and twitter streams, you will have a good sense of who is present and who is not, just the same as you can gauge their participating in class. Setting up counts makes it seem more like a primary school measure. I expect my students to gauge for themselves how active they are-- giving them hints like that there is a URL for a twitter search to show an individual's activity in a hash tag stream, and setting up RSS feeds for comments on student blogs (well if they are using Wordpress, you can do this). Be a drill sergeant on due dates. I was way too lax my first times through, I bought almost all excuses. No mas. The load of reviewing student work gets crazy when you have to rewind to the expectations of two weeks ago. Tis semester we are trying out using our LMS, Canvas, as only a gradebook, where student have to enter a URL for their required weekly assingment. This has a deadline, plus it gives students s sense of where they stand on the course. Maybe this seems obvious, but the work should be fun. We use a heavy dose of humor in ds106, be it in the play of animated GIFs, wearing goody hats in Google Hangouts, or creating fake summer camps. This is not limited to ds106 as a "creative course"; I see a place for play in everything. Witness Jim Groom Art. And it should be fun for the instructors. (and it is if they do the same work). It was one of the things that impressed me about Jim Groom's first ds106 classes (even before it was an open course) as well as earlier in the game by people like Barbara Ganley -- that teachers are seen doing the same work / assignments the students do. One one hand, it gives them a better understanding of what is being asked of students, but more so, it does something to enhance or even flatten the student/teacher relationship... that it is not an instructor telling the students "You need to do this" but students hearing and seeing-- "We are all going to do this..." Encourage and generate free form riffing. This might not always pan out, but a combination of instigating and inviting others in generates a dynamic and energetic environment. This has happened ins ds106 when somehow one idea gets propagated out, more like a small scale meme. This happens often in ds106, like with Slide Guy or early on with Bags of Gold remixes. How to do this is yet to be quantified, but I bet you do not see it in any Coursera class. What helped in my in-person class was chunking the time into discrete segments especially for doing things like our "rapid prototyping" activities- giving students something to make or produce in 15 or 20 minutes. We did photo challenges and how Michael Branson Smith started his current class with a challenge of shadow pictures. One of the more amazing stories was how in Spring of 2012, a former student gave us a design challenge related to Valentine's Day - something we added on the fly to our class that week. Maybe my highlight in the Spring was the audio activity I did to have my students learn Foley techniques by making them create sounds in real time for a silent movie. The whole dynamic and energy of the room changes when I stop talking and the students start doing. I did this with having them use groups to share project ideas, to teach a technique in class. The worst classes were ones where I stood up in the front of the room and talked. This again is patently obvious (until you find yourself in the front of the room talking). What's hard is breaking students of their assignment focus mentality. They come to you with 12, 13, 15 years of experience of doing what it takes to get the points for the grade. That is what we teach in school. We have criteria for our assignments, and things that get produced for grades. Ot can take time and a lot of repeating to have students do more than post something that says "Here is My Assignment". The get really focused on producing the product, and what we emphasize is that more important is that they share the idea and thinking behind what they created AND that they narrate the process. Some students take along time to stop writing like they are filling a blue book. Again and again, I encourage them to think about doing assignments in a novel way, that they can do things opposite tot he assignment if they make it interesting and can explain it. We try to create a sense in students that their work is not isolated. In most school work, the only audience is a teacher. In ds106 we have a start by being in public publishing space, but we are always triyng to have students be aware of the connections to other works, be it looking at examples in the Assignments Collection or seeing the best of work, the in[SPIRE] site. But its more than that- having students understand how tagging can group media in sites like flickr Youtube, is a key skill, as well as having them understand how to manipulate URLs to generate links to related (or not) content. It takes a while, sometimes forever, for students to find a blog voice. Not only that, with no experience in writing for the web, they typically do not provide the context for what they are doing. If the assignment is to make a photo that illustrates an idea of "tension" often we see a post titles "Tension Photo" and just a picture. Again and again I leave comments asking them if that single post was ll anyone saw from their blog, would they even understand what the picture is meant for? I am constantly reminding to link to the assignment, to restate it, to expand on their choices for they way they responded to the assignment. Just doing the assignment is not enough. We ask them to blog like champs. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by andessurvivor SO does this help? I dont know, I hope Professor Bagman can give a thumbs up. And we are excited to see what he does in ds106 with his new course. This post is meant primarily for participants in the Networked Narratives course I am co-teaching with Mia Zamora, where everyone is publishing in their own blog space. Everything here applies as well for the Open Learning '17 course led by Gardner Campbell; I'm working on both sites at the same time, so things I do on one cross over. In terms of staying tuned into news and current interesting information, many people these days rely on social media. For me, that is part of my information flow input, but not only one. Yes, I find many useful things shared by other, but it depends on when I tune in, who I follow, and how deep-- it's pretty much accidental serendipity. My more primary means is checking regularly maybe 150 different websites, mostly blogs. Do I visit 150 blogs on a regular basis? Heck no. I make use of the same three letter technology that we had you trip over to connect you blogs, RSS. These feeds can pull the stories from hundreds of sites into one interface where I can scan them like subject lines in my email inbox. Just like there, I can skip stuff that is not important or interesting (that's why blog post titles matter!). The Flow of Networked Open Courses (aka a lot of blogs) In an open networked course, I want to be more confident I am scanning the activity, especially for my students. And even more so as a teacher. One thing I can do is go to the course home page, and see the new posts displayed at the bottom. That's the full flow of all blogs. In a busy course, it starts as a trickle, then becomes like a garden hose, and eventually a high pressure firehose. With the way I set up syndicated sites, we can slice the flow; in networked Narratives we have a page for posts just by Open Participants or just ones by the Kean University students. [caption id="attachment_64068" align="aligncenter" width="614"] Screen shot montage of the most recent syndicated posts by Kean students; by now it's already changed[/caption] Hocus Pocus... OPML So I am going to share you some web alchemy, and a magic potion called OPML. You need not know what that stands for (make something up), nor do you even have to look at it (it's cryptic XML, don't look). If you can understand that an RSS feed represents an updated data file that shows the latest content of one blog, and OPML file is a bundle of links to RSS feeds, it's like a mega subscription file. It's like a big folder of --- okay, the metaphors are getting in the way. Let's just do it. First we need to get these magical mysterious files. I am going to do this with the interest of following just our Kean blogs, but this could work for all of them or the open ones as well. You will find the same links on all. From each of these "flow" pages, in the header you will find links to a page that lists all of the blogs that are connected, I call them Notebooks -- here is the one for Ken alchemists (see also the one for all blogs or open ones). Check the four orange buttons Click the buttons for Blogs OPML and the one for Blog Comments OPML (you should do this on a computer, mobile devices probably will cry when you click on these). Both links will save files to your computer. Just download them. Do not open them. To set up yourself to be an OPML Alchemist, you need a tool called an "RSS Reader." There are a number you can use (Google had a great one, and they killed it, sigh. I'm still in mourning). I will recommend Feedly, but you could easily use other ones. Feedly is free, go create an account. It will give you something blank. Like twitter, they want to suggest things for you. Do that later. Or never. But do click (if the right side here is not visible) the Discover and Follow button. Way down at the bottom, is the link you want: So first import the Blogs OPML file you downloaded. Lights may blink and gears are churning. On the left side, you will see a link that represents all of the blogs listed in the file. On the right will be some kind of listing of the posts from these blogs, the newest ones first. [caption id="attachment_64071" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Posts from all the blogs in one OPML file. Cool![/caption] The titles in bold are ones I have not read. So the interface can tell you at a glance what is new. Your first view may be more of a graphic grid layout, different from my screenshot above. That's my preference; you can change the views by opening the small menu to the right of the title: If there is a title that looks interesting, clicking it opens it so I can read the blog post right here: [caption id="attachment_64073" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Reading one post...[/caption] When a post os open, if you click it's title, you can then jump over to the blog itself if you prefer reading it there (or if you want to add comments). You can even use keyboard shortcuts to read through them-- j loads the next one and k the previous. You can read through many blogs this way. As they say on late night TV, "but wait, there is more!" If you click the OPML feed open on the left, you can see the names of all blogs in the subscription. And if you click a blog, you can now scan all the posts from one blog: Okay, let's breathe. With this set up, we can read a whole bunch of blogs in one single interface. When a blog publishes new stuff, it will be updated here (there might be some lag in how often feedly checks for updates). That's why I consider this one of the few technologies I can safely say that it saves you time. Okay, but there is the second OPML file. We use the first to read the posts. The second one contains the activity on the comments to all blog posts (this works for blogs published on Wordpress or Blogger only). That's right, folks-- you can monitor the comment conversations on hundreds (or 10 or 3) blogs in one place. AMAZING! ? Now import the other OPML file, the blog comments one. In this case, I see the title of the post that was commented on, as well as the name of the commenter, all in my scan view: Just flip through them (j and k are your friends), and if you want to respond, click the title and jump out to a blog. And like above, I can quickly see what the activity looks like on a single blog: Yes, Writeannabella is getting good activity on her new blog-- I can see it in a glance, as well as seeing that there are no comments. At once glance, we can get a sense of the participation level on every blog or the community as a whole. I cannot say enough how critical this alchemy is to stay in touch with the activity in an open networked course. Yes, it is good for teachers, but it is just as useful for participants to take in all the activity in one place. Are you ready to do some OPML Alchemy? Fear not the funky acronyms! Top / Featured Image: A screen shot of a real OPML file for Networked Narratives, edited in Photoshop (inverted, rotated, scaled, blurred) by me shared under CC BY Old black and white photos- do they look old just because the lack the colors most of us see day to day? We look back at them from a world full of colors, but so did the original photographer. Can we open that world again? Among many tweets that slip by on a daily basis, sometimes I get a spidey sense of more to explore (although I have X other things I ought to be doing). This happened when I came across a ResearchBuzz tweet (if you don't follow Tara do so now): https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/1104031137222049792 That's neat, yes? The typical thing one might do is exclaim "COOL!" and retweet ASAP then move on. But I like to try things first, so I hopped over to https://colourise.sg/ to see what it did. The backstory and insights into what these data scientists in Singapore did is worth the read. The hook in the opening grabs me: Have you ever looked at an old black and white photo and wondered: what did the person taking this photo actually see? Was there something about the arrangement of colours that compelled the photographer to capture this very moment? And if so, did the photographer see something that we?—?modern day viewers of this black and white photo?—?are not privy to? And also note they had a particular interest in being able to provide colors to historic images from Singapore. Then a whole long raft of tech stuff, but the important note here (and on the tool site) is "The purpose of colourisation is to generate an image with colours that are plausible. It by no means guarantees that the colourised image is an accurate representation of the actual snapshot in time." Okay, I will be honest. I tried it first before reading all that. I went first into my old photos, and on a set of photos my sister had digitized from my Mom's photos, there were two of my grandparents I have used, but forgot the one at the bottom that was of my Dad. The date on the side reads "May 1955". So that was my first try in the Colourizer (I saved the side by sides): Original image of my Dad and the version colourized by https://colourise.sg It definitely has his skin tone and my first thought is that it adds more punch to the photo. I do find myself wondering if he would wear a blue shirt, red was more his color. I'm curious some why it chose blue, but he, AI did not know Dad. And then I have to do the math and realize he is only 29 there. So next I think about doing a historic photo, that would be valuable to see how a 100+ year old photo maybe changes it's impression with added colors. I open my new browser tab, and since I use the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser Extension, I get a random image there. The first few I thumb through are war photos, than the random castles one gets, and old baseball players. But the 5th one I found was rather appropriate, especially that it was International Women's Day. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1104056749294800896 I learn I was responsible for sending Clint Lalonde down a rabbit hole: https://twitter.com/edtechfactotum/status/1104089397954195456 Later my mind gets wondering. The site does claim the photos are only plausible, not necessarily accurate. I wonder about the kind of round trip test one can do with Google Translate (translate something in one language to another than route it back to see how far off it might be). As it happens, I have a recent photo of a rather special person wearing a bright colored shirt sitting in front of a colorful background. 2019/365/61 We Fit flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) So I convert the photo to black and white in photoshop, then run that image through https://colourise.sg From color original (above) to black and white (left) then colorized with https://colourise.sg Obviously the shirt and background colors are not original, but the skin and hair are rather close (the smile of course, is amazing). It is almost a bit sepia toned, one might think it's a different era. And I keep in mind that notes mentioned in the article describing the methodology: Our model performs well on high resolution images that prominently feature human subjects (images where people occupy a large portion of the image) and natural scenery.The following images look believable (at least to us) because they contain objects that exist in sufficient examples of the training image dataset. And so the model is able to identify the correct objects in the image and colour them believably.Bringing black and white photos to life using Colourise.sg?—?a deep learning colouriser trained with old Singaporean photos Also from this article are some other brilliant examples, works great with sports heroes: https://twitter.com/WExline/status/1092829714903752705 This was a lot of fun to play with and think about- and suggests that AI can do some amazing things, even if the color is off. As an ed tech blogger, there seem to be 2 things to blog about recently- Why Google Plus is The Greatest Thing Since _____ or Why Google Plus is Just Another Wave Fantasy. 'Scuse me while I sit on the fence and see. A major problem with this technology is it is missing a funky theme song, I think Billy Preston is appropriate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un63LEAN22E A huge obstacle for Google that twitter and Facebook did not have is that when the latter started, there was not a whole lot really like it. What Google does now has to stand up to comparison, and make, IMHO, a better case for why it is essential to someone already immersed in another social network. Maybe it is Hangouts or Sparks or Kibbles, but it seems Google is more aimed at Google types, not Moms an Uncle Bubbas. Don;t get me wrong, there are some great things they have done in design and interface. And maybe it will really become a necessary tool. I was doubtful of twitter at first, and did as I am now, dabbled quietly until something clicks (I think it was a blog post from Cole Camplese that pushed me up the curve). What Cole did was not what we see now in G+ streams- talk about the tool itself, but he wrote of a meaningful use of the tool. And I agree with things others have mentioned already, ugly URLs, lack of integration with Non-Google Services, lack of RSS feeds, all things that have engineer-able solutions. But it's the big feature itself that is getting under my skin a bit. Maybe someone can scratch it out for me. It's Circles. Now I can see some reasons and places where it is going to be useful to have communication tools that go to a limited circle of people. That is something we've had a billion internet years in email. G+ Circles offer "better" controls for grou communication than Facebook, yes. But take all of this targeted communication to another magnitude of activity, what we end up is a silo-ing of communication into pipes that are not wide open. Open or public is not a default in G+, but a user choice-- for many that is a feature, me, I want as much as possible on the Open Range cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What happens as more communication, sharing goes on in circles and not in the open space? The magic of twitter is that we have these permeable conversations; I may write something intended for a handful of people I may have a circle for, but at the same time, it is wide open, and has potential for adding to my "circles". Yes, I am on some extreme of the curve of human nature in the way I wish to communicate, but I have less desire/need to have private/closed communications than open ones. What happens when our communication patterns go from cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Werner Kunz to cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Ludovico Cera ? Unlike others, I have no answers on Google+ in many ways I'm eager to see some new things emerge. Just keep in mind that circles in 3 dimensions are only open at the ends. Will G+ go 'round in circles or go down in circles? This is the third year I am doing my roughly annual tradition of taking a week with the blog posting on this site put on "mute" (or muzzle) as I will take all my writing to blog via the comment space of other sites. This is the notion of "comment blogging" I found long ago, and something I hope helps to underscore the power and benefit of putting your energy into participating in the blogs of others, of making it an active social process. If all we did was post on our own, we'd just all be the screaming fanatics on the corner. So I first did this in 2006 and it served, among many things, to be a good spring board for going to my first Norther Voice Conference in '06 Last year in February I hoisted my week of blog abstinence and I always feel energized at the end of said week for having more or less visited many other blog homes, put my feet up in their couch, and had some great conversation. It is a way to give back ot other bloggers. A way to spend time seeing what widgets others user. A chance to discover new bloggers, maybe prune a few dead limbs from the RSS feed tree. All kinds of benefits. This week will be the third annual week of no blog posting (nothing is stopping me from tweeting!). The first step is a little database tinkering to see this past year's leader chart, to see who has the most frequent commenter here (part of the week is returning the favor). The mySQL query I used is: SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE comment_date >= '2007-01-01' AND comment_date < '2008-01-01' GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC to get me this year's honor roll: Alan 180 DArcy Norman 44 Beth Kanter 44 Scott Leslie 24 Jim 24 Gardner 22 Cheryl 20 Brian 18 Sue Waters 18 PatrickQG 14 Bryan Alexander 12 Stephen Downes 12 Chris L 11 Claudia Ceraso 11 dawn 10 Update Beth Kanter has moved up to a first place tie (she had 24 as "Beth Kanter" and 20 as "Beth", redoing the query to include email addresses sorted this out. Go Beth! And not surprising, I am the top barker, but also not surprising, taking first place among everyone else, for the third year is D'Arcy Norman which says a lot about the year round active commenting by someone who gives a lot back to the edu web. You go, D'Arcy, even with that crazy SK2 tripping apostrophe first name! I will be hoping that coComment is capable of tracking my stuff at http://www.cocomment.com/comments/cogdog - it was flaky earlier I had turned it off in October 2007. And wow, I have had the hardest time re-installing it on Firefox. I ran it twice and it never showed up. My email request to their tech support disappeared into the lost sock drawer. Finally I dug through my list of "Addons" and saw it was sitting there but had never been enabled, something most extensions seem to manage to do after restarting the browser. So now I am set to go, no more barking here for a week. Let's see if this code will work: I'll see you on the other side of this blog-less week. Now off to comment... where should I dash off to? Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"] There’s much technically about the photo that could be better, especially the focus, and maybe a tad of a bigger number (smaller hole) aperture to the depth of field not quite the shadow. But the joy was capturing this while perched on a chair, holding the camera up over the gutter, and blind aiming down the gutters. The first thing is that rain in a dry climate is always special, the water precious. It says… “there must be something unique going on you can find with a camera”. Walking out on my deck, I noticed the drops of water streaming off the edge of the roof into the gutter. It was the pattern than caught my eye; and with the rain having just topped, some good light was coming through the clouds to the east. When I stood on the chair, I was below eye level of the gutter, and so could not see into it, just slightly above where little rivulets were flowing down. I had a hunch, that maybe, if I aimed the camera looking down the rain gutter, I could get something interesting with converging lines. I wanted to go with a more open aperture as I did not want to see in detail my neighbors house at the end, but also knowing that a shallow depth of feed would work IF I could get the focus on the streams. I took maybe 8 of these, but the frozen motion drops here; one falling and one rising off of a crown of a splash, were magical. I just wish I had gotten a tighter focus. If I was more diligent, I might have gotten out my 6 foot ladder and a better vantage point and I might have gotten a more technically proficient photo. But the magic of a blindly aimed photo, where later I see what I could not see, makes up for that in a big way. For me. It's been many weeks, maybe months, since I updated the CDB sidebar "Google of the Week (GotW), so today was as good a day as any. Also, I added GotW as a category archive with requisite RSS feed. The GotW appears in the CDB sidebar, using MovableType's built in API to Google, in essence, a syndicated form of a Google search result. Since I have quoted Edward Abbey twice recently-- (1) (2), it was fitting, at least to me, to provide some googled results to sites that features Abbey quotes on writing: http://www.google.com/search?q=edward+abbey+quotes+writing Happy Googling During my hike today to see Dark Hollow waterfall (in Shenandoah National Park), I did some more experiments with doing some rapid sequence shot of the water detail. It was cloudy, but ay ISO 200 I set the aperture open enough for fast shutter speeds 1/1250, 1/3200 to freeze the motion, and taking a rapid sequence of 4-6 shots. Here are three more shots for the ds106 Photo It Like Peanut Butter assignment where you are charged with creating an animated GIF from your own photos. I've written up before on the method on how I do these in Photoshop. In 128 colors, I get these GIFs to under 700k each. There is an entire universe of movement in water, here are but a few atoms There is potential for movement in many photos... creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by alee_04 The suitcases are packed with winter clothes and secured. Computer gear? Check. Camera Stuff? Ditto. Guitar? Got it. Medical supplies (well what my lame oh insurance will provide)? Yep. iPod? Loaded. Having been home a whole five days after two weeks in New Zealand, I'm off again. This time? a ROAD TRIP! Tomorrow I start on a 1900 mile journey to Kamloops British Columbia. With assistance from Brian Lamb, I have been granted a four month fellowship as an Open Learning Scholar at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). What am I doing? From the letter of acceptance, the goal of the research award is (1) to bring research expertise to TRU to support the reinvigoration of research and scholarly work into open, distance, and online learning at TRU-OL. (2) to further enhance the vibrancy and diversity of the research community at TRU-OL and TRU generally Got it? Stay tuned. I'll be working with Brian on a bunch of web site projects, probably some wiki ones, doing some PD in storytelling and connected/open courses... and whatever else we cook up. I found Brian sitting on a strong limb of the organizational chart tree: atop a box of innovation. I'm coming show what "BC" stands for https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/522555842663809024 Seriously, I am really honored by this opportunity and eager to work at one place rather than juggling 5 disparate projects, and have funding for 4 solid months. I'll also get some opportunities to visit a few other BC institutions, and to hang out in the Vancouver area over the holidays. I'm also slated to be on a panel presentation at the January 2015 MLA conference in Vancouver. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Vicki & Chuck Rogers Of course, I am following convention by leaving Arizona in the winter to go to Canada. Oh well, there will be beaches after. I'm taking a week to drive up there, it's along trip, but I am hoping to not have too many madcap driving marathon days and to enjoy parts along the way. I've got plans lined up to visit friends / colleagues along the way (a.k.a freeloading) not unlike my previous travels. It's a bit sad to leave my cozy home in Strawberry, AZ, but as Arnold says, I'l be baaaaaaaaaaaaack (in the Spriiiiiiiiiiiiing). Red Dog is ready to roll! Let's go! creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Sue me, I'm an idealist. Okay, I will add one more to that note on the fridge: "Say thanks." I still maintain that way too much emphasis on the realm of advocating openness, open licenses, is based on the creators side. That putting a license on your work "protects" it from uses you prefer not happen. Still, a prevalent public understanding of digital content for the general public seems to be at either end of "If I can see it online, I can grab and use it" or "if you share it online in must be for sale." The former is heavily reinforced by the online blast of content shared in social media; there is no means or no one has bothered to make means, for credit/authorship to travel with content (just keep praying for your blockchain, good luck). It's also exacerbated by popular authors who demonstrate the use of unattributed media affirming the "if it's online I can use it" mentality. I saw this week a tweet where Hugh MacLeod shared his beautiful archive of "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards." I've remembered these from way back when, and am sure I used one of them about human networks before. Curiously, I could not locate any kind of usage statement on his site, nary a © or a CC. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/911271050188484609 Interestingly, and I do appreciate it Hugh, his reply came via direct message Non-commercial social media use is Creative Commons. Commercial use is more of a traditional licensing agreement. Been that way for years. This is, I guess, the "You gotta ask" permissions. I fully support a creator's right to choose how they share it. But what ab0ut that individual user, potential re-user? How will they know? Are they compelled to say thank you (via attribution), or just Grab 'n Go. On another site, last weekend I participated as a volunteer in our local community fund raiser, a mountain bike race (disclaimer of sorts; I got paid a little bit 2 years ago to rebuild their web site, but since then, I maintain / update it for free). As I enjoy doing, from my location on the course I had a great vantage point for taking photos of the racers. [caption id="attachment_65075" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Some 290 bike race photos all shared into the public domain. Hey public, that's you. It's yours! Free! It works![/caption] Like the rest of my flickr photos all are put into the public domain. After someone shared into Facebook, I got a few requests for where people could buy the photos. When told it was free to use for any use, that I do not take / share photos to make money, well, I guess they got what they wanted. For free, working. Another person relayed a message from a bike shop owner that wanted to use some to share in instagram (I guess it's a positive that they inquired). Again I explained the public domain idea, that it would be nice to get a credit. That actually happened. On a platform that lacks any ability to define license options nor a means by which URLs in captions are links (that's another rant). https://www.instagram.com/p/BZTS5sclld_/ Maybe it's one person at a time. After all it's not easy in practice. But go ahead, and try to keep your content locked in the DRM freezer. Or just open the door and grab anything, don't say thanks. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Free as in "It Works" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Featured Image: The Virtuous Properties flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) On my tale of switching media player plugins, D'Arcy's comment about troubles with the Anarchy Media Player preview got my thinking, why be stuck with the lame graphic the plugin provides? Just make your own, and replace the vid-play.gif file inside /wp-content/plugins/anarachy-media/images -- here is a test to see how mone looks- this is the default player if you do not provide a media image: Paddy the Wombat movie Isn't that nice than: Thanks to Jason Toal, direct from Canada via FedEx, I have this classic turntable that originally belonged to Grant Potter. I'll be able to spin the teen vinyl I carted back from Mom's garage cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog but I need to find me an amplifier and some speakers. I talked to the doctor for a consultation and am awaiting his prescription. I have at least confirmed the turnability. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On the platter is one by the king of the Tulsa sound an @draggin favorite. Despite the apparent demise of blogs the flat line of the RSS-ograph blips with a pulse from David Kernohan "on chatbots." FOTA is alive! Unsure if my comment gets through the gate (a first one generated a critical WordPress error, sorry, David), but I have to at least assert my assertion, as if it blips anywhere in the raging discordant discourse, "Intelligence might be based on pattern recognition as Stephen [Downes] asserts, but it should not be mistaken for intelligence." So when David passes a linked reference to the Colossus as the dawn of pattern guessing to decrypt war time messages, my pattern recognition goes to where no GPT can fabricate: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14094365766 2014/365/125 Just Part of Colossus flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license This photo was taken on my own visit to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, that being a memorable day when Dave and his partner Viv drove me all the way from Bristol where I visited them to Milton Keynes where I spent a week at the Open University. Maybe a machine could mine the facts from my blog posts and photos, but it would never make connections, the feelings, to the experience of being there that are not digitized or accessible to wholesale scraping. Never. Or is this my own flailing effort to raise a pitifully tiny flag of I am Human in front of the advancing, inevitable horde of machines? For an image I could have plopped a prompt into a DALL-EMidJourneyStable Diffusion but why, when I can deploy one of my own making? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52726715586 2023/365/63 Infinite Clones flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I could try my best to weave more words around my emerging thought patterns, yes ones that I generate from my own sum of vast experiences. And truly, I could say that I myself, with this nerve network plugged into a 3 pound skull enclosed non-battery powered device, merely have been training 50+ years on written, visual, auditory media,much of which I did not ask explicitly to use, from which I generate through some mystical process, my "own" words? my "own" imagery? Everything is a Remix but AI Does Not Remix Like an Artist Who better to turn to than Kirby Ferguson to wisely delve into Artificial Creativity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA Stop, watch the whole thing. I mean the whole damn series. I can only yank quotes Of all Humanity's technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. it has the potential to create either a Utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get? Just like everybody else I do not know what's coming but it seems likely that in coming decades these visions of our imminent demise will seem campy and naive because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naive. Everything is a Remix Part 4 He takes AI to "court" on three counts, and makes a point that many don't want to accept, that harvesting all of the "stuff" readily available is maybe not the point of ethics to hang the purveyors. If you buy into his theme that everything is a remix, that means everything is available, as he has done in his video. But do not take this as suggesting there is a free ticket to just grab content for the classic "because you can" reason. Follow Kirby Ferguson's statement about all the media he has remixed into his video: On some videos about AI the big reveal is that this video was actually made by AI. But this video and this series is the opposite. Nothing has been AI except where I cited AI art. This is entirely human made, the words are all mine but they're merged from the thoughts of countless people. Everything you've seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists. All these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new and yes I did it all without permission. Everything is a Remix Part 4 The big difference is that this filmmaker provides credits / attribution to he sources. It is very clear what was used. There is no mask of source content or how it was used hidden behind a facade of a commercial purveyor whose very name has washed open with techno-clorox. Also, lost in the court section is a very valid question- Training AIs on individual artists work does seem wrong everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets and maybe AIS should simply not train on images from active art communities. Also some company should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images which would avoid this Hornet's Nest entirely. Somebody please do this. Everything is a Remix Part 4 Why is there no ethical entity out there creating training from public domain or openly licensed materials? Or why does quote/unquote "OPEN" ai DOT com, which already trains its machines on Wikipedia amongst everything else, just create a version limited to truly open content? About the only thing I found was an image generator on hugging face that looks like it does this, but I am not clever enough to make it do anything. There is a free idea for anyone to pick up. Finally, Kirby Ferguson ends with a compelling (to me) assertion of the essence of creativity. AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and inventive by chance. Computers can now create but they are not creative. To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you've done. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate. Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art, living, AIs don't know what it's like to be a child, to grow up, to fall in love, to fall in lust, to be angry, to fight, to forgive, to be a parent, to age, to lose your parents, to get sick, to face death. This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling. Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it's not because of what the AI did it's because of what a person did. Art is by humans for humans. : Everything is a Remix is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular it's a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual it is shared. Everything is a Remix Part 4 (emphasis added by me) Please watch this video! All of them! Back To The Hammer Hand https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4955746757 Another Old Thing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license But it's not as clean as just going John Henry and making an untenable slice of human versus machine. Artificial Intelligence "stuff" is a tool, but it's not "just a tool." I am reaching back to something I often rely on from Gardner Campbell's explanation of Marshall McLuhan “There is no such thing as “just a tool.” McLuhan wisely notes that tools are not inert things to be used by human beings, but extensions of human capabilities that redefine both the tool and the user. A “tooler” results, or perhaps a “tuser” (pronounced “TOO-zer”). I believe those two words are neologisms but I’ll leave the googling as an exercise for the tuser. The way I used to explain this is my new media classes was to ask students to imagine a hammer lying on the ground and a person standing above the hammer. The person picks up the hammer. What results? The usual answers are something like “a person with a hammer in his or her hand.” I don’t hold much with the elicit-a-wrong-answer-then-spring-the-right-one-on-them school of “Socratic” instruction, but in this case it was irresistible and I tried to make a game of it so folks would feel excited, not tricked. “No!” I would cry. “The result is a HammerHand!”.... http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/doug-engelbart-transcontextualist/ So no “just a tool,” since a HammerHand is something quite different from a hammer or a hand, or a hammer in a hand. Gardner has given me more directly, in email: I got to that in part because of McLuhan's famous dictum "the medium is the message." Most folks appear to think he meant that the medium shapes the message. If you read the piece in which the phrase appears, however, you can see that's not what he meant. Instead, McLuhan thought of every medium as a message about what we are and desire as human beings. He said the electric light was a message. Every medium should tell us something meta about itself, and something vital about humanity. A medium is not just a channel for transmitting stuff. A medium is also itself a message, a transmission. Can we understand the medium's message about itself, and thus about us? That's why the book is called Understanding Media. What is the message these media convey about themselves? and about mediated experience generally? So with that, I built on Alan Kay (and I think others as well), who said "we shape our tools, and after that our tools shape us," bringing in the idea of man-computer symbiosis, putting it all within the context of Engelbart's integrated domain, and then re-reading McLuhan to find a way to express what I took to be something essential about his ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience, and I came out with hammerhand. Gardner Campbell, personal communication Much of the educator reaction to ChatGPT (which to me is narrow as there is much more we should be wrapping our heads around), so focused on the fear/worry/change factors rather than " ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience." So This Thing Happened Today Which I Defy Anyone To Experience By Typing Prompts Into a Box Going back to where I started, with David Kernohan's On Chatbots post, he gives just a short bit at the end to maybe the larger idea of his two, under the heading "A Matter of Semantics": I want to close my argument by thinking about the other major strand of artificial intelligence – an associative model that starts (in the modern era) with Vannevar Bush and ends with, well, Google search. The idea of a self-generating set of semantic links – enabling a machine to understand how concepts interrelate – is probably closer to the popular idea of artificial intelligence than toys like ChatGPT. http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/on-chatbots/ meaning (I think) that the interconnected web of ideas imagined by Bush that influenced Engelbart and actually was instantiated by Tim Berners Lee, is the connectivist idea that the web itself, changing with every new bit linked on to it, offers more potential for making something akin to intelligent than chatbots that are merely regurgitation parts of it in a way that just parody intelligence, not embody it. So this happened today. It is of no significant to any discussion threading out in the ghosted public square of twitter or the de-aggregated butvibrantcorners of Mastodon, certainly not dead to ne where I will never vention spew pots of (f*** it I cannot call it "Meta" its always Facebook),or the iteration of the America Online is to the real Internet as Linkedin is to ______________... Oh I might have lost my thought completely, as it humanly happens. Can I get help? This makes this blog sound like some marketing cheese. This is what people have their undergarments wadded about? Seriously? I push back One cannot get more Gurgitating Parroted Trash than this. If you are worried about AI generated text, then maybe look some in the mirror at your own human generated text. Okay, I am left to my own story making. Today I sat down to catch up on a few DS106 Daily Creates, it being the very essence of acts of human creativity assisted by tools (using a "TDC HAND"). This was one challenge from a few days ago which in true TDCness, gives a nudge, and opens a door to respond in almost any way. tdc4081 #ds106 When randomly generated people from different countries meet each other... Lots of ways to run with this, so I just start with the random names generator that suggests possible names from different countries. Cool! I love random stuff and never saw this one. There's 12 countries listed, each with 10 names. I just decide to be quick and use the first names in the middle row: 4 random made up names from Romania, Hungrary, Spain, and Sweden. Before getting to where / how they meet, I decided I need pictures. Before everyone got wrapped up in Generative text posing as intelligence, there was the phase of all the generative adversarial network (GAN) tools making realistic photos of people and thing that do not exist. If you want a real diversion, see This X Does Not Exist. But I went for the one I remember for generating people, thispersondoesnotexist.com but that now seems gone and only goes to some AI outfit. But I did find a similarly-URL-ed version at https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/ that was interesting,as there are a few more options to choose from (gender,age range, a few ethnicity options, so I generated 4 non-existent people for Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor. I imported into Photoshop using one of the Panorama collages which spread them out like photos on a table. Then I tried to think if where to place these non-existent people. I first reached for a new browser window thinking of some sort of technical image, like a computer circuit board. This is when unexpected-ness happened. You see I use the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser extension that puts a random public domain image in my screen each time I open a new browser tab. I was fully intending to open an image search, but there, but random chance here was my answer, a road sign for Hanks Coffee Shop, even better, because it was from Bensen Arizona, a place I have been before. https://flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/36720060613 Hanks Coffee Shop sign, 4th Street, Benson, Arizona (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) So now it all came together, these people who do not exist, met up for coffee at Hanks in Benson. A bit more Photoshop editing to make a cloud background, superimpose the names of the four, and I was done. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1637520673735163906 "So what?" is certainly a reasonable response. Couldn't I save time and just type into an image prompt box, "Photos of 4 people displayed under an old time coffee shop sign"? And maybe iterate a few times until it's "good enough"? Yes, but is making art about the process or the product? Maybe sometimes it is just getting the thing done, turn it in, as they say. But what is the connection to it? Would an AI remember driving through Benson, AZ on a memorable road trip to camp in the Chiricahua mountains? Would it remember a completely un-related connection from these photos in the Flickr Commons and that there was a call a while ago for examples of galleries of themed images from the commons? And would it then decide, for no productive reason, to search for other Arizona road sign images in the flickr commons, create a gallery, and then share it back? I'd say, plausibly, eff no. I want to be doing stuff described as "Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it's not because of what the AI did it's because of what a person did." I'm not saying at all don't do AI. And I absolutely intrigued by what it might offer, we have hardly even scratched the surface. But it does not always mean we have to just line up as robot servants to the AI Industrial Complex. If we lose our ability, interest, to be non stochastically human in our tasks, then we end up being "derivative by design and inventive by chance." Fin Never. But I am hoping maybe to see before not too long, another just thinking blip from FOTA. Featured image: Humanly created and selected, mine https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5263924327 Beware the Machines! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed flickr photo by Edd Dumbill I've done (more than) my share of posting complaints about companies. AT&T. Alltel. Dreamhost. Invariably, someone will chime in that either (a) they have not had an problems with Xxxxxxxx or that (b) Yyyyyyyyy is better. There is a problem of extending one's individual experiences to everyone. My new theory is that even if your mobile/ISP/web host provider is not causing you problems, and you feel compelled to extoll their virtues, eventually, if you are around long enough, they will short you/cut you off/drop service/ break. Then you will be running to twitter or your blog to declare that "Zzzzz Sucks!". That's why I am a bit loathe to just hop from one to the other, and deal with all the transition tasks therein, when I am in the midst of some recurring "suckage". Of course there is a breaking point, but I just expect with all the customers companies deal with, and their own tightening corners (meaning laying off tech and support staff), the suckage will eventually catch up to me. So all we can do, as singular victims, is to publicize suckage so at least there is a trail out there for others to find, and suss out for themselves. This has been the longest pre-amble to declare that my webhost, DreamHost... sucks. Which means that more than a few people will chime in, "Hey, I have no problems with PinkHost!" or "HostoRama is Awesome!" Dreamhost purports to offer status on the services, even with shiny RSS feeds. In the 2 or three years they have been sucking, in the outages and server crashes that have affected my site- not one was reported there. I stopped subscribing to that feed long ago. I monitor my status using ServerMojo, which checks my site several times and hour and sends notifications when it is down, and documents downtime for me. The typical status process is: * Someone emails "hey, dude, your site is down" or I try to post something to my blog and never get there * I verify other services (other hosted domains, ftp, telnet) and confirm, "yep, my sites are down again" * I submit a ticket * I get an automated response thanking me * a day later I get something like "I apologize for the downtime you've experienced. The webserver you are on (sobe) crashed, and was just rebooted. We are currently still investigating the cause of the crash at the moment, but your sites are back up and running." I contacted them as usual after a prolonged series of outages in November 2008. The usual happens: It looks like the server on which your site is hosted (sobe) was experiencing a few issues that required a restart. I checked the sites your referenced and everything seems to be back up and running. I have been experiencing increasingly slower response time in accessing my web site over the last few weeks, and the servermojo tool I use to monitor it messages me almost daily that my site is unreachable. It does look like sobe has undergone quite a bit of troubleshooting due to network filer-related issues. You may want to consider volunteering to upgrade to our newer servers (that won't have the same problems as the server you're currently on as the file servers aren't networked at all). Eventually, all users will be on these servers, but as that is a massive undertaking that could cause a few errors for some users based on how their site is configured, we are starting with volunteers first. You can find out more about this by going to Billing / Manage Account in your panel, or by clicking here: https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=billing.accounts& Then, click the "UPGRADE TO UNLIMITED DISK AND BANDWIDTH FREE" link. I was optimistic about the upgrade. Then I got a response message with this timeline: "it could be done next week or next year". Hmm, does this suck? But moving means taking days to package my stuff, set up new accounts, disrupt domains, emails, and eventually have NewHost eventually suck. In late January, 2009, the cycle repeated, again, this server crash happened yet was never listed in the DreamHost status page. They issues almost the same response to my report: I apologize for the downtime you've experienced. The webserver you are on (sobe) crashed, and was just rebooted. We are currently still investigating the cause of the crash at the moment, but your sites are back up and running. So I fire back, to prod them a bit, since losing a customer should get attention. My sites are down again. Dreamhost's service level has slipped from tolerable to "I am shopping for a new host" your status indicators never provide status but I have data from a service that monitors my site that documents uptime of way under what you advertise. Please fix the server to which they respond, offering me the same unfulfilled promise from 3 months earlier: Hi Alan, I'm very sorry that it's taken this long for anyone to get back to you. We've been working on some issues on your webserver "sobe", however we haven't been able to get them completely tampered down just yet. We are still trying to get this resolved, however it seems this may be a lengthy process. I would like to offer to move you to a new server, however there are some caveats involved as the move would have to be to our new cluster (per our newsletter). If you'd like to volunteer to be moved to this new hardware (which I recommend), you can do so by following this link and then clicking the "Upgrade to Unlimited" link: to which I reminded them, with links to my tickets submitted back in November, that I had done this, and had not gotten my server moved. Now we escalate a little up the chain, now getting a response from a Brandon there, from a different email address: I requested to be moved from Sobe almost two months ago and was told "it could be done next week or next year". I want either my host moved ASAP or an option to exit my contract and get a refund. Hi Alan, things have changed since then, and I'm actually handling expedition for now. If you do find that you aren't moved over as soon as you need please let me know and I'll be happy to see what we can do about canceling and refunding your account. I've forwarded your request to the expeditionary team and you should be moved over within the next few days. You'll receive a confirmation e-mail from the team when they've completed your move so you can check over your sites for any issues. Oh yay, I am now being helped by the expeditionary team. Except. Nothing happened. Nothing expedited. A three year paying customer is still on a server that has crashed numerous times in the last 5 months. Does this suck? The cycle repeated itself February 19. All my domains returned 403s. I had to tell Dreamhost that their server has crashed. Not that they would tell me. So now I am going to remind them as much as possible: It's been more than a month since this message and I have not heard anything from DreamHost, and it has been since November 2008 that I requested, as instructed, for my web site to be moved from sobe. I will do my best to remind you every day by email that you are not following up on this. Now I expect comments questioning my sanity for staying with DreamHost. But here is my deal. I go to all the trouble to pick up and move, and SnazzyAtFirstHost will be great, but eventually will... suck. Why should I go to the trouble to move from one suck to another? My new mode of operating is that I expect all services, companies to suck. That way, if they don't they have met my expectations. If for some reason, they don;t suck, then they will exceed my expectations. Can you believe how many times I used the word "suck"? Oh boy, will the spam start coming in from the p*** sector. Update March 9, 8:30 AM Raised hopes or not? I've heard that line before about that "expeditionary team".... Hi Alan, sorry if we missed you somehow! I've forwarded your request to the expeditionary team and you should be moved over today or tomorrow. You'll receive a confirmation e-mail from the team when they've completed your move so you can check over your sites for any issues. If you haven't been moved by tomorrow please feel free to write me so I can check in with the team and see what's up! update March 11 5:30pm I gave DreamToast an extra day to cone through. Another email today reminding them I have not heard anything from the "expeditionary" team. Was told that the move script was being updated and I was in queue for "maybe" tomorrow or Friday. update March 16 4:30pm So the DreamHost expeditionary team is like what? busy huffing? Brandon, dude, it has been a week since your now empty promise. I am off to the form to pester you again by email. I am setting up a Google Calender item to remind me daily to do this. update March 16 6:30pm Apparently Brandom has jilted me, and Mike is stepping in. Will he break my heart? He says I am his "personal queue" but does he say that to all the customers? Will I be left at the altar, waiting for my server move? Stay tuned to the next scintillating episode of "As the DreamHost Sucks"... It seems that the tech before or whoever was suppose to start the move did not. I went ahead and put in the request to move, so hopefully it will complete by tomorrow morning. In the meantime i will leave your ticket open in my personal queue and get back to your in the morning to give you an update. Thanks! Mike G update March 16 7:06pm Mike is da Man! I am wearing white to the wedding. My domain is on a new server, my web site loads at least 3 times as fast and my email zips in. Now... why the f**** did it take since November 2008 when I originally requested to make this happen? Those are the philosophical questions that remain a mystery. update March 17 5:02pm Oh they are huffing at DreamHost, cause I just got a notice that they moved my site again, to "wonderwoman" (great name for a server, IMHO)> So I wait, pester, whine, and watch my site divebomb for 4 fricking months and no action, and now they movee my twice in 24 hours. Now this was a League conference highlight. Diana Oblinger knows how to deliver a compelling presentation (she speaks, she does not read) on a relevant topic. She researches and presents data, references, processes, and important ideas. And she uses PowerPoint with a bit more power and point than most. Someone give video copies of her keynote this morning to some of the other clowns that they have put on stage here. The title was "The Agile College" and started with a compelling true or false quiz- "The US is still the world leader in higher education", and then presented an impressive string of facts and data that shows the many places we have lost of long held edge. From drops in completion rates, to dramatic differences in success from poorer students, the message as not about doom and gloom, but a wake up call to do something radically different in higher education. She had our attention.. (more…) creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by RobotSkirts Blog comments. Once the only social network, the way we conversed among blogs, wikis in the pre-twitter, pre-facebook era. It was, really, where the interaction happened. Now, thanks to Google providing the link bait incentive, blog comments are the honey pots for bot gibberish; Akismet snags some 10,000 spam comments per week on this site. But they are still rather important in Connected Courses-- nothing, absolutely nothing, motivates someone new to blogging, reflecting in their own space than getting feedback. Especially when it comes from a person they do not know. It cracks open the "why" of what may appear to be pointless blabbering. We seek to be hear, to be acknowledged. Blog comments do that in a simple, but effective way. There is, and has been, for a long time a desire to be able to "track" comment activity. Because they exist elsewhere on the web, and are formatted, stored in variable formats, there is really no simple means to track one's comments elsewhere. Way back in those web olden years, there was an attempt at a few services; I recall trying cocomment which, is DOA, but you can find shreds in the Internet Archive coComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, you can keep track of your comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response. Have you ever posted comments or questions on articles and blogs and then forgotten where you've left them? By tracking your conversation with coComment, you can see all your comments on one page and get notified. You will never miss a response, and will always be part of your online conversations! If you're blogger or site owner, you can integrate coComment to power or track your conversations, while becoming part of the growing coComment community. Great idea, execution? Well, the downfall, was to make it work, everytime time you went to a blog to comment, you had to remember to click a JavaScript bookmark tool to register the comment. People, especially me, are too fallible for that. I was intrigued when I saw Gordon Lockhart's tweet: https://twitter.com/Gordon_L/status/512982643592683520 It was something he had done previously for #rhizo14 What I did not realize that I learned from reading his documentation was that Blogger provided RSS feeds for comments- for some reason I thought that only Wordpress had that feature. He's put it into motion for Connected Courses- see the results at http://iberry.com/cc.htm What it does well is that it allows you to see somewhat the conversations happening on the distributed blogs of Connected Courses, like a high level scan. If I understand his approach, he is taking the feeds from all Wordpress and blogger sites, and checking the posts for having a "ccourses" label/tag and matching the comment feed action to the posts (some python magic). Its definitely useful, but of course, you have to keep in mind it is missing the blogs that do not have comments at all (tumblr) or the platforms that lack comment RSS feeds (everything other than Wordpress/Blogger). Still, compelling. I rigged up something similar for the Thought Vectors site, a Thought Vectors Comment reader: I have some gnarly technical notes on how this was done -- essentially, from the main site's collection of syndicated feeds, I was able to do a database query to identify the blog generator (essentially a way to find which of the feeds were wordpress), then wrote the script to output all of those feeds as an OPML file, with the RSS URLs re-written to reflect the blog comment RSS URL -- essentially for an RSS feed from http://cogdogblog.com/tag/thoughtvectors/feed the comment feed is http://cogdogblog.com/tag/thoughtvectors/comments/feed). I probably could do the same for Connected Courses, but augment the code to check as well for Blogger sites, since I know now how to construct RS feeds for its comments. I always used an RSS reader when I taught ds106 as a way to see and respond to the comment activity on my students sites. It truly is the one valid time saving piece of technology. That all said, I have a pretty laisez faire feeling about comments. A few clicks back I had a back and forth DM conversation with Maha Bali about this. To me, being able to organize and track comments is really not something I crave. I think of comments as conversations, I certainly do not want a database of every conversation I had. I think of conversations as ephemeral, and happy if I can remember having a conversation, not really needing to have total recall. We had a laugh because she tried to recall a comment IO made on her blog expressing that ;-) just google recursion. I know others feel differently and would like better tracking and documenting of comments. It's a feature of known that intrigues me because in that system, comments are stored primarily on your own personal site and pushed out to the site you are commenting on, likely a more logical data flow. There are some low tech approaches one can try. For while I was trying to add a custom string of mishmosh characters as sort of a tracking code to my comments. In theory, I could run a google search on that. But it is my own downfall that I did not remember to do it everytime (the same problem as cocomment), so much I cannot even recall my secret code. I also have gotten in the habit thi last year of always putting in the name field of a comment box: Alan Levine (@cogdog) On my own computer it is usually filled in as autocomplete. If I was smarter I might do something more unique, but I can try a rough Google search on that string (filter out results from my own blog) It does bring up a lot-- but is it everything? So for me, I'm okay if I have an incomplete record of my comment activity-- its really ore important to be contributing conversation than trying to ensnare it like some obsessive accountant. It's messy. But essential. So please, leave me a comment? Or better yet-- find a random syndicated connected courses post http://connectedcourses.net/random and give someone else some comment love. Feel the power of good ole RSS, like shooting lasers from my finger tips. I just used the RSS feed from the OEG Voices Podcast I manage from, yes, a self-managed WordPress site to directly be connected, and updating without me lifting a pinky, to a YouTube hosted podcast. The OEG Voices Podcast now on YouTube and it will update all by itself For every item in the feed (20 of them), it populated a "video" with the art of the episode's image and the audio of the podcast. Via RSS. The next time I publish a new episode on the website, BOOM! It will be added to the YouTube version. I had previously experimented with what YouTube called a podcast, which was really just adding a video to a playlist. It offered no podcast feed, and the creation process was manual. In an email I got this week from Descript (makers of the podcast editing software I am using) I read that YouTube had added a means to populate a podcast there by using an RSS feed from another site. You can read the full details (which is what I did this morning) on YouTube's Help How to Deliver a Podcast with RSS. It was pretty much enter a URL, which it checked (I had to make one small change in my Podcast Press settings in WordPress to add an email address to the RSS feed), which generated an emails message that I had to click a link to verify, and then it was off to the races (well it took a few hours). I guess one could subscribe to it in the YouTube land, but it is not itself a podcast with it's own RSS (who cares, I have my own), but it is syndication in action-- update from source, and then the target gets auto updated. Small Pieces RSS Joined! Now I might be inspired to do this for the Puerto Rico Connection podcast I do/did with Antonio Vantaggiato, we are really on the low low end of our episode frequency, Hola, Antonio! (okay it's in motion, that was easy) Updates The OEG Voices podcast has bee self updating, and the embed for a playlist will show newer episodes then the screenshot above. Yay! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLze0jtuKTgpEIjhKVoRfIBCwUaRfdfcLS Featured Image: Aiming To Listen to The Stars flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by inserted the OEG Voices Podcast logo also shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license and a crude recreation of a YouTune logo. Ignore the Numbers? posted 24 Jan '08, 2.26pm MST PST on flickr If Hasbro is strategic, they might do something smart to acknowledge almost 50,000 game players of Scrabulous. Or if they listen to lawyers and PHBs, they will piss of 50k people. I'm one. Cluetrain, anyone? Crikies, they can likely run the whole company off of selling Star Wars and Pokeman stuff, or will they stick it to word geeks? Don't all those people look so happy using their computers? Smiles, working together, so perfectly diverse. They all seem to own Apple laptops. Shiny. Happy. Well except for one guy in the middle. Last week while trying to deal with a problem in my health insurance, I had to create an account on their site. The profile set up had a 5 screen survey, each displaying a photo of one of these Shiny Happy Computer People. Their poise and clip art stock photo perfection got under my skin"¦ they were just to shiny, too happy"¦ especially given the situation with my insurance company. Okay, my August payment was late (I forgot) (even with my calendar reminder) "” I have been on time with paying for my own insurance for a year, and I slipped up. No excuses there. I got a letter on August 15 informing me I was late, and to make up for it, I had to send a check to not only cover August, but September. I did that right away. Okay. But then when I went to renew my mail order prescription for my insulin, the web site for the company that manages it reported that my account was cancelled! I called my insurance company. They said there might be a problem with the medical suppliers web site, and if I created an account on the Anthem's site and entered the prescription site there, that it should work. Not Okay. It didn't. Called the medical supply company and they confirmed that Anthem had cancelled my account. Called Anthem back. Oh yes, they said"“ it was because I was late on my August payment. So because I was late for a payment, Anthem canceled my ability to get my diabetic supplies. I have to wait for them to process my check, with about 9 days of insulin simply left. Their letter notifying me about my late payment contained no notification that they canceled my prescription service. So I am not a shiny happy computer person. I'm the guy in the middle. Not Shiny. Not Happy. Rising like a bullet up the record charts of Instructional Technology Issues this year is Learning Space Design, with a lot of good stuff coming out of the EDUCAUSE ELI initiative and the July/September 2005 issue of EDUCAUSE Review. It's timely here at Maricopa, having last year passed a very large bond election for major construction at our 10 colleges, which was a factor in our having hosted our own Ocotillo Learning Spaces Day here recently, September 16. It is the challenge of creating physical structures that may last 30 years, when the activities, tools, that are used within have a much shorter frequency of change. Will we build buildings like we did in the 1990s? On September 16, we had about 120 folks from teams sent by our 10 colleges have a full day's worth of focus on the topic. It was very well received, appreciated. Sp part of the "redux" is providing a link to another blog posting of the "post game recap" of the day's events. We managed to capture a lot of the info, linked from the agenda, including: Copies of presenters PowerPoints (though we had to shave the images from Phil Long's 86 Mb Powerpoint to the 3 Mb of word slides). Lesson forgotten- always have a USB thumb drive on hand to grab these before they leave Audio recordings from 3 of the primary sessions, which we have linked as MP3s. We're expanding this to a number of our project sites using MovableType as a simple publisher to create podcast Feeds and a library of summary content files, so there is a collection of Ocotillo Podcasts available Notes from the 4 afternoon breakout sessions recorded directly into a wiki Photos of the day's activities including the classrooms converted to "Learning Studios". I did feel like the morning half was much to heavy on presentation; at least two presenters even noted that the type of future learning spaces needed to provide environments for the collaborative hands on work they saw taking place, yet pinpointing the present irony of their presentation being a lecture mode. Will that ever change? Our time for the hands on exploration of the Learning Space photos got squeezed, which was too bad as the room came much more alive when the door was opened to exploration rather than listening to a presentation. I was pleased/relieved that the quickly constructed system we programmed actually worked, a "mini" flickr, where reps from the colleges could upload, annotate photos of their learning spaces, which could then be viewed within a fixed set of categories and/or filtered by college site. We ended up with 260 photos there, pretty good, although 3 colleges never got around to it so their photos were limited to the meager set we had on hand. And although we set it up for appending comments, there was not a whole lot of commenting happening. The other side of the "redux" is that we stirred up interest in this way back in 2001, when as part of the efforts of ramping up to our bond election was a series of technology visioning forums meant to instigate some creative thinking about the future. One of our best sessions was with architect Phillip Parsons on Designing the Hybrid Campus because he challenged our ideas, even analyzing photos of our own colleges he took during a visit. He wrote a summary paper, where under "Next Steps" he suggested: Any successful development of hybrid learning will require significant development effort at the curricular level, as well as major administrative effort. The first step must be to test in broad terms the hypothesis that hybrid learning will lead to better learning at lower cost. This means looking at how space is currently used, and hypothesizing, in a broad-brush conceptual fashion, how facilities growth in the future might be managed more effectively if a hybrid approach to learning were to evolve. It also means imagining, with the help of faculty at the various colleges, some scenarios in which particular parts of the curriculum might be adapted more completely to the hybrid approach, and thinking through the different building and campus characteristics that such courses would suggest. Ideally, pilot projects will be funded and publicized. While this work must be highly collaborative, and needs inventiveness and flexibility as well as careful attention to data analysis, it also requires shepherding, or leadership, at a system-wide level. A rich and effective approach to furthering the concept of hybrid learning at Maricopa must draw on and encourage the distinct strengths of each of the colleges, while looking for opportunities for interwoven and mutually supportive development. Ideas and experiences, and even resources, must be shared. It seems to me that we really did not follow these suggestions, and pretty much have gone down the well trodden path of "business as usual". At the Sept 16 sessions, I heard a repeated theme I heard as groups came into some of the redisgned learning spaces set up for the event: Participants were intrigued and enjoyed looking at the flexible configuration, but quite honestly and openly wondered how they could propose these setups in rooms for maybe 24 students when the system pressures classrooms to fill perhaps 30, 35 per class. So while we have carefully crafted and hone vision and mission statements, what comes out is the suggestion there is an unsaid mission that actually drives most things here- we aim to serve as many students as possible, because everything here, funding, resources, is driven be enrollment numbers. No one will claim this is our mission, but it is borne out by the actions. Lastly, the frustration with having an event, even one that goes well like this, is that it is a one-shot deal. We are asking up and down the organizational ladder- who will champion this? who will lead? who will participate? We can not address the complexity of Learning Space Design with a single event. Stay tuned. I hope there is something else to say. Through some forgotten path I came across Podzinger, a search tool that claims to search for keywords inside a podcast, and offer audio playback links to the actual segment itself: Podcasts have been subjected to the same primitive search through categorization ... until now. PODZINGER looks inside podcasts, not just the metadata, letting you search podcasts in the same way that you search for anything else on the web. When you type in a word or terms, PODZINGER not only finds the relevant podcasts, but also highlights the segment of the audio in which they occurred. By clicking anywhere on the results, the audio will begin to play just where you clicked. There are also controls that let you back up, pause, or forward through the podcast. Or you can download the entire podcast This touches on a real interest of mine, having URL addressable segments oif Big Fat Media, as beautifully demonstrated (with working code) by Jon Udell a year and a half ago. As is podcasts, and digital video are published as Big Fat clumps of media, to use them you are left with listening/viewing start to finish, and you cannot easily remix them without advanced editing skills. So the premise of podziner sounds good- a search engine that drills into the content, and a mechanism to say, link to an audio segment 10 minutes and 24 seconds into a 85 minute podcast. So there is a keyword search (note that use of full quotes like Google will make it a phrase search). My search was on the phrase online testing I cannot locate a full list, but apparently Podzinger has a fixed list of sites it searches, though sites can add their feeds to the search mix. And it works on a smaller range of browsers (Not Firefox on a Mac). You get a small audio player on the left, an ability to download the source MP3 or add to iTunes. In addition, I had trouble with most of results getting the "zinged" result to play back, many of them posted messages like: I was only able to get this to work after 3 or 4 search attempts, finally just on the word "ajax", landing on something from Adam Curry. Here is what is no impressive- it lists a result at 12:40, but rather than the little link jumping to that segment, you actually have to sit and watch the counter flip by maybe 2x or 3x playing speed until it cues to the location: Also annoying design-wise are the tiny left side audio controls that take some pretty precise clicking, and that the highlighted words in a search result are in orange text, the same color as their hyperlinks, leading one falsely to believe they are links to., So the concept it on point, the execution of it is a bit lacking, but should improve with time. It is in the right direction of audio search. Daniel Villar has been on fire with the SPLOTs. Not only did he invite me for a workshop last month in Coventry University (and that site is a SPLOT), where we got pre-made versions of them available on Conventry.domains, he recently put three different ones into play for his new OWLTEH project. Beyond this, Daniel has provided a bunch of good ideas that have recently made their way into several themes. If you are ready to bail on the first paragraph because I just launched into SPLOTs, I have a SPLOT that explains SPLOTs. I know of these because he tweeted them. But if you are creating sites with these Wordpress themes I have built (as well as the three Calling Card ones, WP-Dimension, WP-Highlights, and WP-Big Picture -- I need a favor. I want you to... SHOW US THE SPLOTS! You see, I try to keep a list of example sites people have made with these; it shows the range of ideas people come up with, plus it helps to show that other people have made them. On each Github repo for these themes I have a section in the ReadMe called something like See It In Action, for example over at the TRU Collector: [caption id="attachment_66255" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Examples of the TRU Collector out in the world[/caption] Once you scrape past the shroud of confusion of Github, the beautiful thing about it is that it's a collaborative editing space as much as Google Docs is. I have a sentence below the list: If you make a TRU Collector site, please please pretty please, fork this repo to edit this Readme with a link to your new site. But I think maybe that Grant Potter is the only person who actually did this. So I aim here to show you how easy it is. You will Fork a Repo and then brag about it. You will need a free GitHub account (I just made one for my dog to make sure I explained this correctly), its also useful for reporting issues, problems, offering feature requests. Or just sating hi. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Apparently the Furniture Rules Have Been Established flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] If Felix can do Github, why not you? Okay, so let's say Felix has made a new site from the Splotbox theme, and he wants to share it as an example. Good Dog. He clicks over to the repo and then on down to the Readme.md file which in the content for the main repo. Hovering over the pencil icon (he knows that means edit, not chew), you see that it is labeled "fork and edit": What forking means is that it takes an entire copy of the theme from my repo and puts a copy into yours. You make changes, and then send them back to me. I then accept them into the official site. Then he finds the place in the Markdown code for the examples. Okay, this may look scary, but all you need to do is copy the other examples. The * in front means its a list item and then the [label](http://somecoolurl.oeg/splot) is how you add a link. This took Felix about 3 minutes: The box at the top helps the repo owner (me) understand what changes are being proposed. If your Markdown looks good, I can add it to the public repo just by accepting the changes. It looks and sounds more complicated than it really is, but it's all about distributed editing and managing versions in a way much more efficient than shoving around email attachments. If this still makes you scream in horror, there's another simple way, and that's just to send me a link by opening an issue, it's more or less like writing a blog comment. Help me. I cant track them all. The only way I find them is random mentions on twitter, sometimes I can google the phrases I put in my theme footers like Another Splot on the Web or "blame cogdog". But forking and proposing changes in Github will get you some code cred, eh? Just like Felix. Eh? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKGhWkZLn_k The day before yesterday, I journeyed with my partner in art crime to a brick wall on a side street of Fort Erie, Ontario, and cemented a USB thumb drive into the wall: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Why? Because, very much like the PirateBox, it is public digital art built around anonymous filesharing (damnit!). From the main site: "˜Dead Drops' is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. "˜Dead Drops' is open to participation. It's a quirky idea, and the usual blog posts about it are filled with comments like "great way to share porn", "perfect for spreading viruses" or "just like a Mac user will inser anything into their computer"-- the lowest common denominator of cynicism rises to the top of blog comments. But think about the concept of having the simplest devices possible, the disposable a most thumb drive, as a vehicle for sharing content. Or the radical image of people with laptops jammed against a wall i a public place. So yeah, it i a curiosity thing, but there is no reason to limit the imagination- imagine a whole network (meaning not a network) of these distributed with clues and challenges to find more. Or a way to share information about local areas, or collect anonymous ideas for improvement of our urban areas. Weird? Flaky? Yeah, call that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, who set up a public installation of dead drops. In August, we sought to locate one in Toronto, only to find it an empty hole cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog so it was fulfilling to create a new one. I lacked the tools or patience to prey the thumb drive out of the case, and who knows how long the drop will last among the winter weather. That is not the issue. What is on the drop now is a bunch of content liberated from my StoryBox, so there is a second place in the world to access this (for now). Just use the dead drop database to find it-- or add your own! Four years ago today, it was just another one on part of my 15,000 mile "Odyssey" Road trip. I was leaving Welland Ontario after a very special one week visit with Giulia Forsythe. I called my Mom (in Florida) in the morning for our usual quick touching base calls, just another call where we teased each other and laughed. I met Kim Gill for lunch in Oshwa, east of Ontario, after doing a little bit of walking around a lake side park that had a view of the Darlington Nuclear Reactor. Before leaving Oshwa, I remembered to get a postcard and mail to Mom- I was doing a project of sending her a post card from every state and province I visited. Sure I had a lot of Ontario left (I was going at least to Montreal, with dreams of getting out to the Maritimes). I actually stopped at The Big Apple in Colborne. How can you do a road trip and not stop to see a giant sized apple statue? I also had a booboo trying to back away from a gas pump, and put a dent in the side of my truck. The dent and blue paint from the cement pole are still there. I arrived in Belleville at the home of ds106 friend and colleague Andy Forgrave. I planned for just another August 28 to be in Montreal, but in the evening we met with his colleague (Doug?) for dinner in town. And that's where this August 27 turned out to be like no other, because during the dinner I got a phone call from my sister, who was frantically screaming "Mom is gone!" I've written the Cookielove story elsewhere, but here, four years later, the memory both feels far and close. So what to do, except write Another Blog Post About a Deceased Relative. It's for me, how I keep their story alive by telling them to myself. And so I reach into the old photos... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] There they are in their 1960s clothes, Dad with his sideburns and bright tie, Mom with her "silver" hair color and heavy eye shadow. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] From a visit to my sisters house in Baltimore, maybe 1994? Then I could count on the hugs being something on the eternal supply line. In the middle of your family times, you do not ponder them ever not being available. They are Just Always There. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Hah! How many people got hot tubbing with their Mom. She was not a fan of the tub here in Strawberry, this was one of a few times she obliged. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Yep a selfie before they had a name, in May of 2005. I had a small 35mm pocket camera this was taken with. I think this was the time my ex and I brought her Mom to visit mine on Sanibel Island, in Florida. Both moms are gone. But I am not done with you, August 27. On this day in 2001, exactly ten years before Mom's heart suddenly gave out on her, my Dad gave in to his dance with cancer. He was diagnosed in March, so invasive in his stomach and nearby organs there was no treatment. For his birthday in May, I visited in the hospital and once more in early August 2001. Dad was himself, but he was also decaying, you could see it in his struggle to pay attention. I cannot even begin to respect what families have to go through day by day in watching a loved one do this long dance to death. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I do not know what I am laughing like a goofball here maybe in 1968, but my memories of Dad are wallpapered with seeing him working with the barbecue grill, or pushing the lawnmower around the yard, or preparing the above the ground pool for winter, or washing his car religiously every Saturday or walking out of the big waves on the beach in Ocean City Maryland. I think about him doing this stuff, alone with his thoughts, intent on the task... and I find myself doing this while working a shovel in my own yard, or focused on my barbecue grill. But I do not wear shorts like that. [caption width="480" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I bet I do not need to tell you this was 1976, the proud Bar Mitvvah parents. The Big Party was a huge deal, likely the largest event they ever planned. I am sure I knew almost nothing about what it took them to organize it. All I knew was that they thought of me unconditionally as maybe The Most Important Person in the World (I am hopeful they did the same for my sisters). You do not get that from everyone, or anyone it feels like. "Unconditional"? That sounds so archaic. But it becomes as assured as the earth you stand on, as much as you know the sun will appear and warm the world every August 27. It's not a day of sadness, it's just another August 27 where I thank them for everything. Just another openly licensed photo I can use... Top / Featured Image Credits: flickr photo by mararie http://flickr.com/photos/mararie/6715436855 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license Disappointed with people I consider online peers who are up in arms about #OpenBadges & #ConnectedLearning. As if ideas are 'owned'. Gah.— Doug Belshaw (@dajbelshaw) March 6, 2012 I am fairly sure I can draw the dots as to what Doug is Gah-ing about. Badge bashing is flashing about, but it was hardly "up in arms" when some people noted that the DML splash with Connected Learning did not seem to mention a great deal of prior work in this area. I thought this was something we learn early, but a little of this goes a long way. (FYI, the graphic is from Soul Kahn's ep- okay, I did not find creative commons, but I did buy the album, if anything for the Alec Baldwin song). It's not that I see people like Siemens, Downes, Courus seeking anything but a reasonable nod to their work. Anyone who has invested, say ahuge about of personal time, commitment, energy into a body of work, say a thesis is going to naturally feel a bit off put if some other organization announces a highly publicized work of highly similat nature w/o even crediting prior work. Maybe they did, I nor others have not seen it. Doing the background research, the environmental scanning is part of any effort like this. It's hard to see how one could miss work like this (look, Doug, you do it yourself). No one is claiming ownership of these ideas, and I agree that ideas are never really the product of just one or a small group of people, they are shaped, reframed, but their influences are as much a network as the ones the DML is talking about. We borrow them all the time. Borrowing and acknowledging go well together. But acknowledgement is so much a key to the idea of connected thinking/being/learning (cough attribution), it is part of the juice that makes the flow go better, and frankly, is such a simple, easy thing to do, that it seems silly for me to be writing about it. I thought I leartned that in kindergarten. It ought to be the natural reflex. I'm not even sure I will press the publish button because this seems just silly and I'd rather be creating stuff then harping about it. NUff said. Except me. As of one minute ago I confirmed what I noticed last Wednesday. According to the all seeing Google, on the entire world wide web there are but three Creative Commons licensed images of a dog. People have worried about enclosure of the commons, these seems to be a whole lot worse. Or maybe I am being overly dramatic How sad that there are only three photos of dogs licensed for Creative Commons Where Have all the Doors Gone? This all began with writing my last post where the title included the words "front door." As my atypical method goes, I look for the featured image before writing anything else. I always seek open licensed images, and while many people have different sources they use, I still lean on Old Do Lots of Data Tracking Evil Google because (a) I can uses its advanced search features; (b) it hits a wide variety of sources than a single source (flickr and Wikimedia commons yeah, but also Pixabay, other public domain sources, etc; and (c) I have a honed set of bookmarklet tools and pre-rigged search engines. For the latest iteration of my whacky methods see the Magic Box of Image Search tricks for the last Open Education Week, the latest is setting my main browser interface to not return anything BUT Creative Commons licensed images. I was shocked a bit last week when I did a CC filtered Google image search for "door" returned a miserable 7 results before the end of internet sign "Looks like you've reached the end" These are not the open licensed door I was looking for (none are creative licensed, despite the setting) In the interest of he post, I went for my fall back, searching my own flickr images for door, which yielded 440 results, and all open licensed. "Hey Google! You suck!" As it ended up, while opening new tabs for links I was seeking, the Free to Use browser extension yielded a perfect public domain photo from the Library of Congress. Who Locked the CC Dogs Out? I felt this evisceration of the commons by Google was strange, so I dug in a bit, hence a search on the word that is part of my name and tends to produce gobs of images- dog. A standard google image search with no restrictions yielded lots of pooches, pages and pages, but flipping open the Tools, selecting Creative Commons from the Usage rights menu, cut it down to 3. I did the usual checks. I deleted my cache and cookies. I tried different browsers (Safari and Firefox). I switched networks from the home wireless to hotspotting from my mobile phone. De nada. Well, 3 dogs still. Even before tweeting, I thought first o report it to folks who ought to know about this, and posted it to the Creative Commons Slack (if you are not in there, that link won't do aTnything). I got a quick reply from Cable Green (thanks) who alerted some of the other CC folks. The first responder Timid Robot could not reproduce it (but later did) and others chimed in. Then I tweeted, and other confirmed the paucity of CC licensed dogs in Google Images (and even worse, cats were affected). https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1572807067827838976 Earl Does URL Dissection Now here is the strange oddity. From all the tools I have made/used I know that a google image search for dog with the Creative Commons license search produces results via a URL like: https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=il:cl I know my parameters: q=dog is the search term, tbm=isch signifies and image search and tbs=il:cl should tell Google o return only results license Creative Commons. Now the strange thing that Timid Robot from CC reported was changing the URL to https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=sur:fmc,il:cl makes it work like we'd expect (see if it works for you?) The big question is what the bleep is sur:fmc?? It's a big question because Google does not seem to document all its parameters. I know though because I have been making these URL search gizmos for a while. This goes back to the usage rights options that were first introduced by Google in 2009 where first aligned (mostly) with Creative Commons Licenses, where the usage rights were The first options for limiting Google Image results for Usage Rights- and it applied to cats The options were written like a weird rephrasing of CC licenses, and you had to venture to an advanced search interface: Not Filtered By License (all the cat photos)Labeled for Reuse with Modification (cats licensed CC BY, CC BY-SA but not ND ?)Labeled for Reuse (cats licensed under any CC license. ?)Labeled for Non Commercial reuse with modification (cats licensed CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA?)Labeled for Non Commercial reuse (cats licensed CC BY-NC-ND, CC BY-NC-ND-SA?) The search queries in this era passed parameters (with actual licenses seen there) with a lot of logic passed for the usage rights, you can see this from what the old CC Search Engine produced: https://www.google.com/search?as_rights=(cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute|cc_sharealike).-(cc_noncommercial|cc_nonderived)&q=dog&hl= (which no longer works). Somewhere Google changed the parameters, as when I started fiddling with browser shortcuts for image searches filtered by CC licenses in 2013, the parameter to return images "free to use and share" was in the results as sur:fmc You can still find this in the antique Google Image advanced search (same results as the old CC Search), you get the CC licensed results. Mostly. But here is the kicker - look at the Usage Rights menu- it does not indicate the licensing. And there is no way to get this sur:fmc parameter or results from any selection/option from the Google Image Search form. What the bleep is tbs=sur:fmc Oh I searched! I found nothing from any Google.com sie, just bits of code for various image search scrapers (here's one example) (and another). And then I should not be surprised to find reference to this search parameter in a blogpost by my friend John Johnston where he showed how it can be used to aid searches on iPads (where the filter options for CC are not there). Google Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Of course google changes itself. Sometime in 2020 Google changed the Usage Rights options to now offer the options under Usage Rights to be either "Creative Commons" or "Commercial and other Licenses" - you can inspect the URLs to find this is indicated in search parameters tbs=il:cl (Creative Commons) or tbs=il:ol (Commercial and other Licenses WTF does that even mean?). Of course, the Commercial license option currently produces lots of dogs but alas, the Creative Commons option gives you 3 bubkahs. Now What? I'm making noise to no avail. I put a question in the Google Help forum. What I got? https://www.google.com/search?q=crickets&tbm=isch&tbs=il%3Acl I think in my small knowledge of How Google Really Works that somewhere they munged up the search tool. I'd think they care, but why would they really care about open licensed images? there's no $$ in that. Google is broke, I spotted it, and no one really seems to care. I'm giving them The Stare. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/25851626173 Try to Ignore My Eyes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) So I am not using Google Image search much, because it has been neutered. And yes, I agree for most folks the best option for CC licensed images is OpenVerse (ignoring the Build Your Own License every search site seems to do now) - look, there are over 10,000 CC licensed dog in OpenVerse, and you even get cut and paste attribution. You will find nearly all my Felix photos there. And again, I will craft a new image search strategy. Updates Lots of action from this post getting tweeted. Do we call twitter "broken" when it works to get notice? Hmmmm. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1574647587759693825 Looks like promise of this being fixable, so keep checking and see if the CC Dogs are let out! https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1574794069699485697 And woah, thanks to a trackback ping (still a thing) to a Russian blog, I see for what its worth, this post got into Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007025 and apparently on September 28, 2022 I hit number 34 on the HN front page. My blog views went from an average of 500 per day to 11,000! There's my big moment. Poof! Followup in a series now tagged googleccimagesdogsmissing https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/google-cc-image-search-better-sad/ https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/google-search-poop-smell/ And for a new way of finding CC licensed images... https://cogdogblog.com/2022/10/open-to-openverse/ Featured Image: Who Broke the Internet? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) easily found in my own flicks stream, modified by me (Alan Levine) to include a screenshot of the only 3 CC license images google can find (more…) No, the title is not a bad TSA joke (are there any good ones?), but a lovingly statement of joy for yet another cool photo tool. Piclens has been around a while but only for Safari on Max OS X, but now it works as an extension for Firefox on Mac or Windows. Piclens turns web pages from many photo services (flickr, Picassa, Facebook, MySpace, and more) into a stunning slide show, like iPhoto in a cool black turtleneck sweater. If you are on a site it supports (Flickr, Picassa, Photobucket, facebook, many more), a small triangle appears on a mouseover of an image. When you click the triangle, the image (and all linked images from the page) appear in a slideshow format: And a grid on the bottom lets you swing in more sets of images if you have a lot. When you click a single image, you can examine it in more detail: or double click to load a slide show, with the desalting present, to launch into a linear slide show. Could turn any flickr set, tag set, into a cool slide show, and one that you could access in either linear or non linear fashion. Might be coming to a presentation screen near you soon. Piclens is sweet, yes even more sweet than Vegemite (oaky that is not a compliment, but Piclens is very cool)! While on the phone today with Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, he suggested I take a look at the latest issue of Syllabus-- it was sitting on my "maybe I will read some dead trees" pile, but lo and behold, on page 36 is a screen shot from the presentation I did with buddies Brian and D'Arcy for the October 2003 NMC Online Conference on Learning Objects. This was our Connecting Learning Objects with RSS, TrackBack, and Weblogs "show", using Macromedia Breeze for an audio narrated presentation (and real images and voices for our pseudo-characters, Boris and Lora). The NMC conference was one of the better and active one of these types of events, and I am not just saying that because we were part of it. It was rather active, and Larry said that people were using the site, posting to the boards, for weeks after the live event. Anyhoo, the Syllabus article for February 2004 is one of the "Case Studies" that describes the NMC conference ("An Experiment in Social Computing") which is to be honest is rather general and could have used some more actual content or comments form the conference (Larry says he got the byline, but it was written by someone else???). In the article is a screen shot from the conference, and shazaaam! it is the 2nd slide from our presentation. (The little JPG on Syllabus' web site is pretty grain, so here is a better grab:) view image Oh, the ego stroking, indeed.... Well not that much of a stroke. CDB readers will know that we think Syllabus does not know a blog from a hole in the ground, and even this article is woefully lacking the relevant web links that would give it depth, breadth, and context. All we get are the same words as are in print, and I find almost no value added in a digitized version of the dead tree article. It is again, a digital representation of paper, or in Negroponitan terms, more atoms than bits. But what the hey, may it will get tossed on the resume ;-) The blog keeps on keeping on, though I see in recent posting, there's a lot of looking back, and one (well this one) can start worrying about being seen as too "back in the day" mindset. Time to flip the scopes (well there is a lingering draft of one more retro post). The old CogDogBlog cycled right past it's 18th birthday. Hey, technically it's old enough to be considered an adult in many jurisdictions. The daily photos happen, but with more sputters. Minor splot tinkering and use happens, but heck they have got some age spots on them. The workload is full, with community engagement projects with OE Global, support for BCcampus simmering in the H5P Kitchen and also at the OpenETC. Some occasional update work via JIBC for the Corrections Leadership site. Less about these seem to get blogged (as most of them in the work end up involving a fair bit of blog publishing elsewhere. The excuse pile can be heaped upon easily. Plus, there's new tasks at home, having moved to a 16 acre rural property. Like operating a tractor. And the ongoing question of what does pandemic emergence look like, is there a clear line of being on the other side, or the slow fade into the something else. All of this is blabber as I am waiting for that spark of an idea that opens a new creative door in the tech work. That thing I have been lucky to latch on to or bump into or just accidentally fall into that generates some new ideas. The thing I know is that I never find it when I am looking for it. The universe just seems to drop it according to some other system's design than my own. One possible glimpse of a spark comes from Paul Hibbitts, whose work in using grav as a content publishing system has been for a long time "something I should find time to explore" but lately in his sharing channel of the OpenETC Mattermost I have been intrigued at his use of docsify as a static web publishing platform that needs no special scripts or geeky server set up to create web content from markdown content. See his docsify starter kits which are all set up to clone, copy, and repurpose, all hosted in Github. My idea comes from a realization that the sprawling documentation I have written for my GitHub hosted WordPress themes and plugins are lost on long ReadMes that NoOneLikelyReads (e.g. SPLOTbox setup). It seems like creating documentation in the more structured format of docsify (e.g. sections with a table of contents) would be better. And then I asked Paul in Mattermost chat if it was conceivable to combine all ym documentation into one docsify. Not only did he answer but he even created an example. https://twitter.com/hibbittsdesign/status/1398364338658766848 I'm getting glimmers because docsify (or perhaps it's also i the GitHub flavor of markdown) has a means to embed media, but even more, a way to include content from external files (and cracking open a dusty doorway labeled "transclusion"). Until I actually do something, I am writing here maybe to tie me to follow through. The other spark of an idea that I have no clue where I might use it came from the great snippets (oh which I might understand 20% of the tech) I find in the RSS Feed of my photo geek friend Roland Tanglao's blog, that led me to a tweet and link reading: https://twitter.com/githubOCTO/status/1394705057803907074 Again, I have no data driven project, but the idea of being able to create a static web site, hosted in GitHub, that could poll for and present visualizations, is something I'd like to keep rumbling around in the gray matter. The "new" tech things do not just pop and an announce themselves, but there are things I try to do to create the potential to even get a whiff of them. What's not new in the tech field is looking for the new. Hello to the next new, whatever it is. How does it work for others? Image Credit: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/45714946862 Everything Can Be New flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Loser Once they were mighty vessels of communication, plowing the Internet waters of the 1980s, 1990s. Yes, the big ships labeled "Listservs" were the place for social networking then, information exchange. I've remarked before about listservs being on the Quagga Trail and I keep my subscriptions to the barest minimum. Today, after posting replying to something on the New Media Consortium members list (which does still provide me good technical and project information, and is not very noisy), I was noticing again the typical pattern on a listserv: Some one from someplace posts a question about a technology or a project or asks for input... And the replies come tumbling in like a cascade: Unsubscribe followed shortly by: Please remove me from the list and then someone contributed Remove which was thus echoed with Take me off this list Oh, excuse me, the captain just called us to come and look at the floating ice. I Am So Un Cuil by cogdogblog posted 31 Jul '08, 3.01pm MDT PST on flickr I did not spend much time poking at www.cuil.com since it was pretty well blasted across the blogosophere. My ego search left me depressed, nothing for cogdogblog but plenty of "cat piss" Oh well, they must have wised up, as the search now finds my buried bones It's still rather lame.