Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine At 3:18 am june 14, 2013, the annoying presence of IamTalkyTina, documented previously in my confessed creation story, has disappeared completely. An intense Rim to Rim Grand Canyon hike, 24 miles hiked in 18 hours, 11000 feet of elevation gain/loss, did the trick. The doll is gone. I am whole. Her sing song yibber yabber voice droned on for the 7 hours of descent via the North Kaibab trail. All that talk of her "True Friends" and "Open Friends" and "People Like Me (or else)" and how offended she was by the "Nasty Mean Word" was a constant nuisance and distraction to the peacefulness of that place. The nocturnal birds, cicadas humming, the thundering sound fo Roaring Springs and rushing waters of Bright Angel Creek tried to drown her out, and yet still she went on and on, yabbering, spinning her head, those window shade blinks of the soulless eyes staring at me. But, perched on my backpack, she was not paying attention to the low hanging wires of the Black Bridge as I walked across that metal structure after 3AM, and FWOOP! She was knocked off by a support wire, last heard screaming as the Colorado River swept here away, downstream. maybe perhaps to wash up waterlogged and creepy in a few years time at Lake Mead or ripped apart by bored river trout. Listen in: imtalkytina disappears into the colorado river After that... sweet silence. She is gone. Now you may have seen tweets and comments from "her" or someone pretending to be her (I am looking at you Ben Rimes and perhaps his doppleganger alt, Brian Bennett, and @dkernohan). But those are the pre-programmed remnants of the AI bot she forced me code for her. This morning I finally found the backdoor password into the codebase (it was "Dollsg3tLuvWithInt1mid@tion") and was able to invoke to self destruct module every good programmer thinks of). The destruction was total and complete. As you can see it was effective- the @iamtalkyyina twitter account is gone: [caption id="attachment_21951" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] as is the web site and domain: [caption id="attachment_21952" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] [caption id="attachment_21953" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click for full size)[/caption] If you believe you are still seeing remnants of her activity, clear your cache. If you think you are still seeing communications, well then, you might have to dig deeper and dig your own psyche as it is likely creating the false signs. Her lasting power if suggestion is THAT stronger. Ask Erich Streator, see how he was "loved" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj2nRvmnoKI I for one, see nothing, and am free of the Creepy Doll Curse. The feeling is tremendous. All it took was a 24 mile hike over 18 hours. I am not sure if you need to go through such Exercism to drive out the Creepy Dolls, but it is possible. See how good this trip was. As for me, I feel great, and the internet is free of that nuisance. 4ever. Darn! I was that close to being able to complete use Safari for my Mac browsing (love the tabs, the rendering, the bookmark menus on the toolbar..) but alas, another hitch appears. This morning trying to post my latest entry, I kept getting timeout errors on MovableType Rebuild. I tried copying/pasting to a new entry. No. Tried rebuilding the archives one section at a time (individual, monthly...) No, it crapped out on the category archives. I checked the MT support forums and read a number of similar problems elsewhere, mostly fixed by de-activating Norton on the server (not something we have here). Tried optimizing the database tables. Tried rebooting the server (true mark of desparation). Finally, in a fit of utter despair, I went back to Internet Explorer-- and it worked fine. Damn! Safari was the culprit (reported a bug to Apple's black sock drawer, who knows where that goes). Within three hours of writing yesterday about Blogdigger (an RSS feed combiner that returns a group of feeds as a single feed), I got a nice comment from Greg at Bloggdigger who let me know that the filtering tools were still being tinkered. It's rewarding to get direct responses like that from the folks directly involved with a trechnology. Okay, I created a quick and dirty Bloggdigger Group on feeds from known Learning Object Repositories in about 2 minutes with maybe 5 feeds. The cool thing about Blogdigger Groups is that others can add feeds to the group. So if you have more RSS feeds from learning object repositories, you can toss 'em in the mix, the password is the name for those little plastic blocks that are bad metaphors for learning objects. I'd like to keep it to general feeds, such as the overall one from MERLOT, rather than specific ones for content in say, nuclear biology. Dig it? I just added 5 more plundered from Stephen Downes' DLORN http://api.edna.edu.au/recent.rss?category=0&items=10 http://www.commoncontent.org/rss/newest.cgi http://www.eevl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/learn-on-eevl.rss http://www.humbul.ac.uk/output/RSS/new.xml http://icarus.med.utoronto.ca/lo/rss.xml though Blogdigger has not yet grabbed the feeds... cc licensed flickr photo by gary foulger. In high school I joined the group of kids who did not want to join groups. Maybe I've not changed much since then. But I try a lot of web services, especially as I see others in my network mentioning them. Tonight is WeFollow.com billed as a "user powered twitter directory". People apparently opt in to add them selves to this site, pick 3 tags to describe themselves, where apparently they can be found. When you do this, it automatically tweets yourself entering the crowd. Of course, you wont ever be listed on the front page of WeFollow, since it is full of "people" like BrittXny S***ears (I will never ever use that full name in public), Barak, CNN Kevin Rose, ev, etc. but hey, maybe someday someone will look up your tag. I see these things sometimes and just want to game them or not always be so serious, so my tags are... stupid, and I really dont understand why people just accept the carbon copy statement the site makes for you when it is fully editable: And hahahaha I made my own typo- that should be #frivolousHashTagCreator oh I love that even more. See, I am still in high school. I cannot cc licensed flickr photo by billaday Calling drupal jedi masters! I need some advice. When planning the structure of the NMC web site I had only a fuzzy idea of how to use taxonomies for organizing content, and ended up creating one taxonomy for staff to organize content that is a bit problematic as it serves multiple purposes, and I want to split off a branch and make it available to logged in users. My sloppy taxonomy includes now: Terms used just to organize special content types. The problem is that some of our staff keep forgetting that and use them as general l content descriptors, when they are more like special tags that trigger content to be part of certain views. Regular terms our staff uses just to categorize any content. Wider terms that I want to make available to all logged in users (the current one is set so only staff roles can access). I had hoped taxonomy bits could be slid around like menu items, but don't see that, so I see a process of re-mapping content: Create two new taxonomies for staff- one for the special content types, and one just for regular content (or maybe one new taxonomy with sub terms -- the whole point is to make it clear that one can be used for any content). Re map content to these new taxonomies (a moderately sized task). Rebuild the views to use the new taxonomies Restructure the existing taxonomy and chaning permissions to all logged in users to access the menu when editing content. Remove the old terms from content (or hoping they will disappear if I just delete the terms??) I am just fishi8ng around to see if this makes sense, or if there is any way to streamline the moves- I am betting there is some gnarly MySQL that could handle the re-mapping of content.... I intend not to discuss the merits/demons of badging systems. My main response on weighing such questions always slide down to "It Depends". But to me badging, nanodegreeing, calculating massive course dropouts remains overweighted on one side of the system. This has been mulling in the cranium for a while (often best where ideas are left to fade away) but came again to mind reading Heather's post How do We Define Success in an Open Course? To me, the definition is always for the provider. Success is the success on the entity that offers the course. And of course (to be alliteratively not so clever, Wilbur) if you run courses, you want to know how well you are doing. No argument. And recognizing that people sign up for free no risk courses for different reasons is a relief. Do we end of metricizinging the collections of Collectors? All these are things that an institution, organization provides you. You are badged. You are degreed. You are acknowledged as a Top All Rounder with a certificate or a chip or a blue ribbon. Maybe a cup of Starbucks coffee. All the things we wish to chart, measure-- completion, success etc seem largely to serve the provider. The language here takes me back to perhaps one of the key lessons I learned from my PhD advisor when I was in Geology (and before I DROPPED OUT hah). Sue Kieffer was an eminent researcher, scientist, educator, she dealt with a lot of shit working in an overly male-dominated field. For me, she really brought home the importance of clear writing. When we co-authored a paper, she really hone on on the differences between passive and active voice in writing. Academics love passive voice. It sound lofty. It was discovered in field relationships that the topographic conditions were primary in the disruption of the flow at the constriction. Lab experiments were developed to replicate similar dynamics. The passive voice is detached, removed, distant. This is a bit of an over simplified rewording, and a rushed example: In Bandelier, we observed a narrow canyon that disrupted the flow. In the lab we built a scale model. The thing is, when you move to active voice, first of all, you enter the scenario. I think the smart people call it "Agency". And it says that you did things. For the learner, the student, all of the things that organizations hope to measure for themselves and you, are done passively (not the whole process, the credentialing). Done to you. Given to you. What is missing, to me, is an emphasis on what learners do to assert their own credentials, achievments. Yes, I can collect my badges in my backpack, and have my nanodegrees populate my LinkedIn Profile, but if that is all I plan to show the world for what I can do.... well seems not really much. And its all what other people say about me. Where is my voice? And this is the reason I've long harped on the notion of blogging as narrating my work, and why those of us involved with or at least big fans of UMWs Domain of Ones Own. It's giving learners an open, portable platform that they can use to actively assert what they can do, how they can think. Badges and degrees say "This is What XXXXXX xxxxx says I can do". Your own digital space says, "And here you can actually see what I can do" (and the way I think) (and what inspires me) (and the way I exist as a human being) (and even if I like cats thats ok). And hold the phone Batman, the tendency is to go all binary- It's Online vs Face to face! It's LMS vs Wordpress! It's Real World vs Virtual World! Truthfully, as humans, we are much more analog, meaning we exist on a spectrum. So their is room for BOTH systems that give credentials, badges, certificates of something that ought to be complementary with platforms we manage ourselves to assert who we are, what we can do. Yet the latter is almost never part of the equation, because it is something that does not fit into easily measurable metrics and charts. It's not easy. Messy. "Oh it's too complicated" "I don't have time". It's more like the letters Jonathan Rees yearns for. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by patries71 To be badged or to badge yourself? It's not a question. It's an answer. Yes. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/pedrovezini/8216472043 To Be Choked Or Not To Be flickr photo by Pedro Vezini shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license If I ever came across this in a workshop or presentation, I'd be headed for the door or flipping the laptop open while praying for wireless. In the September 2004 Training & Development Magazine, under a department of fundamentals is "A Trick For Your Trade" Are you looking for a lively demonstration of a learning tool to kick off your next learning session? Try this simple card guessing trick. In addition to helping trainees focus on how to use learning tools, this flashy card trick, when sued at the beginning of a seminar, also sets the mood for creative teaching and the intentional learning that follows. The article goes on to describe this "powerful" card trick thta involved cutting a hole in the corner of the playing card box, obscuring it with your thunmb, and then sneaking a peak when some schmuck in the audience shuffles the desk, and puts random drawn card inserted back in the box. The amazing super presenter astounds the audience when they produce the card drawn. The author seems to forget to cardinal rule of card tricks of never revealing the secret. Where was he when they taught that in first grade recess? This simple card trick is an effective icebreaker that sets the tone for the learning that follows. It's a unique and easy way to illustrate how the tools that will be discussed during the training session are memorable and easy to master, use, and repeat. I would be horrified and appalled at the use of a cheap trick touted as an icebreaker. I would be lulled to sleep and counting the slow ticks of the clock until the torture of this session would end. It is cheesy, and has no real relevance to any topic presented. There are 31,900 better suggestions on Google for ice breaker activities. Ice breakers are excellent, worthwhile things to employ, but do so thoughtfully with your audience in mind. They are worthless without considering the principles of active learning. It's no surprise to see such fluff in industry "training" magazines, which to this day still regularly interchange the words "training" and "learning" as equal entities. Training people how to use software, how a sales system works, how to assemble widgets, how to operate a Widgomatic is a far far cry from learning critical thinking, ethics, how to write argumentative essay, solving differential equations. I am not saying one is more important than another, but I do look carefully at how the word "learning" with or witthout an "e" in front, is used in industry mags. But you gotta be impressed by an author's web site that consists of one single, lonely web page. Haven;t they had a "training".... er "learning" session on hyperlinks? I feel father comfortable swimming in HTML and writing the stuff by hand (I thought at one time everyone would learn to write HTML). It never tops being refreshing to learn one more trick. This started with a Mastodon post by Bracken Mosbacker: https://ruby.social/@bracken/113834316064337070 It reminded me that I have many times in the last few years I have seen Google search results return links like this, e.g. usually the top (non GenAI) result links to a source with that longer URL and it scrolls to and highlights the text e.g. when I was searching for some information on putting down laminate flooring, Google decided to give me a highlighted sentence. I usually shrugged it off, as usually I wanted the source URL, not this one with all the gobbledy gook on the end. But @bracken's post made me think there was a potential use here. If you are building your own web pages, using the old anchor link provided this, or later I learned any element with an id=XXXXXX CSS declaration could be a hook that you could link directly to. This ability thought suggests you can make a link to goes directly (i.e. what they used to call a "deep link") to specific chunk of text in any web page. I did a quick text a very manual way, I used the parameter Bracken shared, and manually created a scroll-to link in one of my posts. This required copying the text, running it through a tool that URLencodes text and adding the :~:text= on the end of my URL and adding the encoded text part. That's a lot of work. I started to think I would need to build a Javascript booklet to create this for a selected portion of the page, but when I replied with that, Bracken gave me the keys to the shop. https://ruby.social/@bracken/113840432527241378 It's actually in the contextual menu when you select a chunk of text and choose "Select link to highlight" I have seen that before, but it never clicked what it meant. I went down many scrolls to one of my posts, used the contextual menu to create a link relevant to anyone running Feed WordPress on how to general OPML files. This gets very interesting- it's one thing to share a link to a resource, but why not link to maybe a key sentence in it? That surely has potential for educators! I thought maybe you could do something to make a link to perhaps the alternative text for an image, e.g. you could deep link to an image but not give away the location with text. That does not work. It seems the text has to be something on a page. I then thought what about having a hidden message in a page, you know, white text on a white background. You could then make a link to reveals that quite easily. Also I was spinning through some kind of DS106is creative challenge, that is a bit like blackout poetry but you could have a series of these links to different web page that highlights key lines that together make a poem. I decided to now go through and make that example now, so I give someone a free idea to pursue. There is much much more you can do with Text Fragments as spelled out in the MDN docs -- note what I did with my links Linking a whole section of text by indicating the start word and end word Linking to locations of one word where it is preceded or followed by another word Link to separate words in the same document In your own web pages, you can include CSS to control the colors used for highlights This is only a quick play, but this looks like a useful web trick to have in one's pocket. Featured Image: Mine. Again. Linked Across the Shadows flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license With some irony, during one of my longer flights recently, I watched two different old classics about men being the last living things. I'd previously seen the more modern version I am Legend with Will Smith, but had read that it pales next to the original it was based on, Vincent Price's Last Man on Earth. I had downloaded it from the Internet Archive, but it is also available in full length on YouTube (along with the weirdness of pre-movie adds for Scott Walker- "last Republican on Earth"?). A bit from the trailer Okay, being a movie from 1964, the effects are cheesy. The "infected" are lumbering vampires, who seem to be easily fended off with a 2x4. There is the creepiness of the lead character's former best friend moaning "Morgan... Morgan" as the zombie/vampire tries every night to bust in the house. But what is there is the created creepiness of that place of being the last sane person, when all your family, friends, and everything you know has decayed away. There was the smugness of denial that the air-borne virus from Europe would hit America, and even if so, Science would Save the Day. There was being holed up in a basement, safely behind bolted doors strewn with garlic, and painfully watching the old home movies from before the plague. There was the a glimmer of false hope of finding another living being, only to find there was a "catch" for Bob Morgan. Being the last man was not such a great deal. Contrast Morgan's battle to Henry Bemis, the character Burgess Meredith played in maybe the classic-est Twilight Zone Episode, Time Enough at Last In full bore irony, the picked on Bemis, who just craves for time and peace to indulge in his passion, reading. By the act of his disobedience, he survives an atomic bomb because he hid in the bank vault to read during lunch. Like Bob Morgan, Bemis wanders through a landscape of despair and ruin, and finds himself totally alone.. until he wanders into the remains of the public library. He seems to be the last man who gets what he wanted, but alas, cruel fate takes it away. What's the moral? Being last person on earth sucks either way? Even just writing this title I anticipate the automated spam offering links to poker web sites. Oh well. I can't pass up a story of serendipity and ancient web technology. The first card is a tweet from Jon Becker, who for quite some time has had his online students at VCU take a spin at Five Card Flickr https://twitter.com/jonbecker/status/1263129127378391045 Like him, I had not even looked at the site in... months? years? It just keeps going, this thing I cobbled together back in 2008 as an experiment in telling stories with random images. Since then, maybe 24,000 ones have been published and they keep coming in. That's not bad for a site held together by duct tape PHP, hand rolled MySQL database queries, and a web design that is not going to be always very modern responsive with react gatsby grunt stuff under the hood. The database connect stuff is so old I have to run an older version of PHP on that domain (thanks Reclaim Hosting for making that a cpanel option). Anyhow, it seems to be working for Jon, but imagine the surprise when one his student Ed Maynes published a story that included... a random image of Jon! https://twitter.com/jonbecker/status/1266048605921705990 Woah, Neo. Look at that, what are the odds of Jon's photo being drawn randomly for an assignment he gave to students? http://5card.cogdogblog.com//show.php?id=45933 Well there are over 10,000 photos the site draws from for images, so each round that's a 10000:1 chance of drawing a Jon card. That's the kind of internet serendipity weirdness that keeps my pulse going. This did remind me to be a bit more regular about tagging more flickr photos 5cardflickr, if anything, just to reduce Jon's chances of being drawn (just kidding Jon). I have to credit Tom Woodward with being most generous in his tagging for the pool. Thanks Jon for finding a use for this old web site. And for generating a dose of web serendipity. In the spirit of remix, from Ed's original story, you can spin a different tale from the same photos. Can you? Would you? I took that on myself... Five Card Story: The Odds of Jon Beckera Five Card Flickr story created by Alan Levine Pandemic time. There seems to be no end in sight, no clear destination. Still we go on down the road as it must go somewhere different. And Jon Becker teachers on, still using this old Five Card Flickr stories site in his summer class at VCU. Call the statistic cops because what are the odds that one of Jon's students would actually draw a photo of Jon from over 10,000 in the pool. It stands out amongst the daily flood of gloom, doom, and decaying of a country from top. But stories like this, even if weird? Lovin' it, loving web serendipty. Featured Image: A remix of File:5 playing cards.jpg Wikimedia Commons image by Enoch Lau shared under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license with a 5th card inserted featuring a screenshot of Ed Maynes's Five Card Flickr story. That makes this image carry the same license. Better than getting an A on the geometry test, it's more exciting to use a magnet to attach Episode 218 of the Teaching in Higher Education podcast to the front of my fridge. I was excited when Bonni Stachowiak DM'ed me asking to record a session. I've seen a number of folks I know get an interview, and had crossed paths with Bonni (I think) at the last DML conference I went to. Without too much more self horn tooting, here is my 39:43 of podcast fame in the episode she title "Courses as Stories": http://traffic.libsyn.com/innovatelearning/tihe218.mp3 I was even more excited when Bonni mentioned wanting to talk about playfulness in teaching, from her message: Playfulness is one of the things I hope we can talk about. One of the examples I have shared in talks I have given about a gazillion times now is your use of the menu item that says, "Don't click this" - that is practically begging the user to click on it. I want us to be more playful in our course designs and help our students be more emerged in their learning. Your fun side definitely shines through... What she is referring to is a thing I added to the top right corner of the site for the Networked Narratives class I have taught/co-taught the last 2 years. It's because in my lazy Wordpress theme choosing, I used the same theme I use on this blog and also used on a (now aborted) project for Creative Commons. I recall one or more people not really knowing what the hamburger menu icon (?) meant (in the theme it reveals a widget area / menu area that overlays the page in view) so I modified the child theme I use to put "open" next to it, e.g. "click here". I decided to make it more tempting on the #netnarr site, so I made the text something no one would ever click: As we talked about in the podcast, that (and more in the course design) is a direct descendent of things I did in ds106. It's a way of thinking about what drives a course- is it really a syllabus or content, or can it be a narrative itself? I'm so glad Bonni and I got to talk about this notion that has been swirling in my head, going back to things Brian Lamb and I did in the You Show and also the videos Mia and I did in NetNarr. Most uses of video in online learning revolves around either content or professors talking to students. These ones we did were not even essential to the course itself, but was more to weave a narrative arc through the class. In many ways, it was more for us as instructors to work on a tying theme, and to think about what we were doing. A recent tweet from Jon Becker I cannot seem to find now referenced a post he wrote in 2015 on Courses as Narratives, and we are in parallel thinking fields. But at the same time, Jon's examples of course trailers, a course web site, innovative syllabus design do show story approaches and elements, I keep aiming at what it takes to make a narrative the force that drives a course, not adds sprinkles to it. I've been self mumbling for a while about maybe writing this up as an article. But hey, there are blog posts to be written. I found about 29 entries in an Evernote notebook where I have been collecting resources like Jon's post, but hey, at one time I even started writing this out: Plot-Driven Courses: Escaping from Syllabus Island or Why I spend hours creating videos that are not course content Excuse the sin of a bad metaphor, but as much as students we teach are shaped by the popular culture of the internet, my influence was of a different media era. It was regular shows on channel 45, the UHF frequencies in Baltimore. If you are of the same influence, just the mention of the show “Gilligan’s Island” will trigger the theme song in your head, your mouth forming the words “a three hour tour..." Gilligan’s Island had a premise-- a group of unlikely people shipwrecked on a tropical island. And while each week there was some event that gave them some hopes of escape, it never happened, if so, the show have not worked. There was no long term plot to Gilligan’s Island. Every show had a predictable script that ended neatly (and exactly the same) in 30 minutes. Some forty (?) years later, a different TV show mesmerized many with again the story of people who would not have been drawn together having to do so to survive on a desert island. In Lost, it was not a tour, but a plane wreck that put people on the island. As Henry Jenkins and Steven L Johnson talked about at SXSW in 2008, the difference between TV shows like Lost and The Wire, compared to the sitcoms I grew up watching, was a more complex sophistication of the plot, unpredictability, a sense of mystery, that ultimately drew fans in to the narrative (c.f. Lostpedia). While both Lost and Gilligan's Island were delivered via the same medium, and produced with commons approaches of scripts, producers, set designers, it was the storyline of these two shows that could not make them more different. The primary plot device of most courses is the syllabus, the content it aims to cover, and addressing of the outcomes of an official course description. Not to say your class is like Gilligan’s island, but its rhythm of weekly readings, lectures, mid-term essays, and a plot resolution of a final exam are as well known as the old shows and their theme songs. I want to share some examples of a different approach to courses where there is a plot device propelling them. This is not to diminish the use of a syllabus as a program guide, but in developing a way of teaching that is not solely driven by the syllabus. This is not a time-saving trick to balance your schedule, in fact, I spend more time with my plot devices that might be recommended. But there is a larger payoff in what it does for my energy level in going about the course. Thanks Bonni for the time and interest to talk about this conversationally, and get me thinking again about picking up the writing. And as a wee present, there is something for Bonni in the part of the NetNarr site she was drawn to (by all means do not click it): https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1030593884399788032 Featured Image: Combined images using screenshot of Teaching in Higher Education Episode 218 superimposed on Public Domain Pictures image Ruled Note Paper by Karen Arnold shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 placed on cropped portion of refrigerator with closed door flickr photo by peapod labs shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license flickr foto New Jobavailable on my flickr I am now delivering packages at campus here! I am disamyed not to have gotten a chance for the courier position at Wintec... a colleague notified me: I'm afraid we have decided to outsource the courier position to another country. Thanks you for your application, we'll keep it on file in case further positions come up. (Read don't expect to hear from us again.) Don't take anything so literally... I just got a nice email from colleague Stephen Harlow and we traded some sarcasm. This photo was from my 2004 visit to New Zealand. All that wrong side of the road driving was messy;-) Here I talked about loving flickr and a few hour later I cannot log in- all attempts are bounced back to the home, un-logged in screen. Flushed the cache, cookies, been tried another browser. Where is the love back? Unrequited? Is it just me? Does it hate my latest pictures? Sigh.... love is so complex. Later... Doh, never mind. Apparently I was still logged in to flickr. But something was till flooey as normally if I am logged in an go to the main flickr page, it bops me to my personal flickr page. In fact, the only way I got back in was to click the "new member request" link and then click the "Yours" link at the top. I think there is some cooke malfeasance going on! cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog "Open" is the theme as I arrived to a wet soggy grey Vancouver for this week's Open Education Conference. So while I cannot expect stores to be 100% open all the time (and this liquor store does pretty damned good to be open), I have higher hopes for content and media and ideas and people. I never would have guessed I'd be in the internet rabbit hole triggered by an article in my ASU Alumni magazine. But in there I found "ASU releases photos of early Phoenix taken by McCulloch Brothers" describing a collection of 4500 photographs from 1884-1947 by two brothers who emigrated here from Scotland and ran a commercial photo studio in Phoenix. The entire collection is found at https://repository.asu.edu/collections/244: This collection houses commercial photographs showing city scenes, streets, architectural views and building construction, commercial activities, water development projects (including dams and canals), landscapes, and agriculture in and around Phoenix, Arizona. Of particular note are the images showing the construction of Frog Tanks Diversion Dam and Lake Pleasant (A101-A353, A357), Arizona guest ranches and resorts (A754-A803), and Roosevelt Dam and the Apache Trail (A357-A372 A378, A381-A392, A404, A409-A411, A413, A418, A472, A946B). These photo capture Phoenix at its time just before emerging as a major metropolitan area in the 1950s. Kudos to Arizona State University for making the collection available AND for releasing them all under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial license. I poked around and looked at images of Camelback Mountain with nothing but desert around it. Then I spent some time studying a 1946 photo of downtown Phoenix, looking east down Van Buren Avenue at Central Avenue: [caption id="attachment_58602" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Cityscape of Downtown Phoenix (1946) Creative Commons licensed image from ASU's McCulloch Brothers collection[/caption] There's a lot of auto businesses there, and just beyond Ray Busey Parts in the middle, you can spot St. Mary's Basilica, built in 1914. For fun, I tried to get a Google Street View image as close to the view as I could manage: [caption id="attachment_58603" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Google Streetview image looking east on Van Buren Avenue[/caption] You have to peek around the Chase building to spot St Mary's. Then on a whim, I took a chance and put the name of my little town, Strawberry, into the search, and was pleased to find a local photo! This photo identified as Strawberry Hill, was taken May 16, 1926 in Pine, AZ. [caption id="attachment_58604" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Creative Commons licensed image from ASU's McCulloch Brothers collection[/caption] Its definitely the terrain around here, though I am hard pressed to identify the location. On downloading the original image, I was able to get a detailed view of the sign: [caption id="attachment_58605" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Detail of Strawberry Hill image[/caption] My guess is this is somewhere along the route of highway AZ87 leaving the town of Pine, it climbs the hill to Strawberry, and continues on to Long Valley, Winslow, Flagstaff. Again, thanks to ASU for making these collection available, it might be a whole new pile of curiosity holes to explore. Top / Featured Image: After looking at some of the Phoenix photos in ASU's McCulloch Brothers photo collection, for fun, I tried searching for photos taken near where I lived. On trying "Payson" as a search term, I saw a photo of the East Verde River between Payson and Pine. Just for grins, I put in the search box the name for my town "Strawberry", and after a few photos of fields of Strawberries, found this one identified as Strawberry Hill, taken May 16, 1926. "Strawberry Hill," McCulloch Brothers Inc. Photographs, CP MCLMB A696. Arizona State University Libraries: Arizona Collection. Photo is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 With the exception of online events, my conference presenting days are behind, me. So it was rewarding to get an invitation to do a session at the University of Regina for ECS 100 (Education Core Studies- “Knowledge, Schooling and Society”). Part of me being there last night may have been my close relationship with one of the seminar leaders. ECS 100 is a first class students take in the Faculty of Education, a large part of which is a field experience in a local school. I was invited to give a talk on Educational Technology and specifically including Digital Citizenship. This was my take: What are implications of, and what do we mean by, using “digital” as an adjective for learning, creativity, storytelling, citizenship? What do we worry about and hope for with technology in 2019? I aim to provide likely more questions than answers drawing from my own experiences in the field since 1992, and suggest that the way forward hinges on our ability to network, share, and support. I opened with a bit of a "not included in this presentation" that said no PowerPoint (which garnered some enthusiastic applause from the front row). Yes, I exposed them to SPLOTpoint: I also could not resist starting with an activity; I wanted to do show pechaflickr because (a) it's fun and generates energy; but more (b) as I wanted to show how it reflects my take on [what used to be called, but now it's got a bad rep] educational technology, so let's say "web tech". This mainly is that the idea was more of a mashup, as are the pieces it is made of, and that teachers have come up with ideas for using it that I never would have forecast (some of them circling back as features); and also, the idea is one that can be done w/o my tool. Anyhow, I asked the students in the room for suggestions for tags to use to generate the random images from flickr. The one that got the most claps as "aglet" (look it up), but in the moment it did not produce enough images, so we quickly punted and went with "penguin". I also (and had not told them this) asked the four seminar leaders to step up and play the improv game (without realizing what the ask was). Stacie, Corey, Riley, and Cori were great sports. I like to start the improv to set a theme, so on the fly I said we were here to talk about the pedagogy of penguins. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1105649353241190401 The rest of the stuff is at http://show.cogdog.casa/digital/ I did not feel a need to overly explain Digital Citizenship as that was in their reading materials, and the excellent guide that the Education Ministry of Saskatchewan offers was written by local UR profs Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt. No need for me to explain them in the room. I did try something that might have flopped, but seemed to have gone well. I wanted them in groups to just brainstorm ideas, associations with the nine elements of Digital Citizenship that the guide is built around, by first thinking about them in the general idea of citizenship (before talking digital). I did groups by rows (somehow thinking there were nine rows, but only 8, alas) and asked them to work in pairs/trios and brainstorm them in a single shared Google doc. It actually worked well, and the doc filled up nicely (the closing of my talk I asked them to return and put ideas on the digital side, and can see that's happening). I decided instead (well, I had my live in coach suggest this) to try and offer a few insights to just a few of them, that maybe they won't get from the links you get in a search. That these were not simple things to come up with answers, that the more you looked and inquired, the more you found (hence the peeling onion metaphor). For Digital Etiquette I tossed the idea of "managing" devices in class, all rather timely since that morning the Ontario government decided to ban mobile phones in schools. Banning devices does not seem in line with the Saskatchewan Outcomes for Digital Fluency. But I cannot tell them a single answer is right here, it's something that they have to wrestle with, and align with their school, district policies. I forgot a part I wanted to say that it's a bit antiquated to put this under "etiquette" since it's the assumption that taking out devices is rude- norms change and are changing, I also tossed into the mix, some examples of where that for all that’s bad, there are unexpected acts of digital generosity.For Digital Access I introduced them to the concepts I learned from Chris Gilliard about digital redlining, because I bet its something they have not come across before.Under Digital Law I discussed copyright (well briefly), but more so what happens when students get the idea they can use any content for school work because it wont get seen. I think we have to be much better at modeling behavior of using open-licensed "stuff" but also (my hobby horse) we ought to attributing everything, not just stuff we have to because of a license.And in Digital Literacy I gave them a quick overview of The Four Moves and a Habit from the Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers- with the caveat that with ideas, opinions students may be coming to school with, and acting upon, are likely shaped by this new, perilous world of questionable sources of news. My close was an urge to start shaping their Professional Learning Network. They had been told in the start of class to make accounts / use twitter, but it did not seem to have been integrated much. So naturally, when I asked the room a question about twitter... well the potential did not seem there. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1105642156025274370 I did try and make a case showing the Twitter TAGs visualization of their #ecs100 tweets. And later I did fix pechaflickr so that first student chosen tag works- see if you can guess it. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1105649558996971520 All in all, it was a great time for me... for them, that remains to be seen. For my talks, I don't write things out. I really want them to be talks. I do have some note sketches, but it all pretty much lives in my head. Presentation notes page 1 Presentation notes page 2 And they were nice enough to give me a thank you card, signed by students. I've never gotten something like that! ECS100 Thank you note (student names deliberately blurred) Featured Image: Modified by overlaying the text "Modifier" on Wikimedia Commons image Clatronic KHF 461 - sender, JRC 2035D on printed circuit board-2323 © Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons) and as such, this derivative is shared under the same license. = Anybody But Yankees Bottom of the eighth, and things are going well. My bias is rooted in my childhood heros circa 1970 and 1983 Do the same aesthetics that apply to traditional motion media (fil, tv) apply to web video? Video for New Media: Developing the Aesthetic and Managing the Workflow Pacific Ballroom, Salon G Tools & Techniques Intermediate Video production for the multi-media project is the art of adapting the decades old technology and aesthetic of television to the needs and sensibility of new media. This adaptation involves, among other things, the reassessment of issues of dimensionality, continuity, spatial logic and workflow. Attendees to this session will learn strategies of video production and post-production for the new media environment, including methods for subverting the established limitations of traditional motion media. Issues and solutions of postproduction workflow for multiple, simultaneous editors will be particularly stressed. Derek W. Toten, Tulane University The Continuity System creates narrative continuity relies on editing and mise-en-scene anyone working in narrative filmmaking is expexted to be familiar with Example http://www.405themovie.com/ Obvious elements of continuity... narrative chain of cause effect adherence to 180 degree line (axis of action) consistency of screen direction 30 degree rule use of establishing shots eyeline matches Shot reverse shot patterns match on action cutting rhythm dependent on camera distance of the shot (wide shots held longer then close-ups) "tried and true methods" sometimes violated but held overall. Less evident details of continuity graphic qualities roughly continuous from shot to shot figures are balanced and symmetrically deployed within a frame lighting consistent space of the scene clearly unfolds and does not jar or disorient Video example of montage of students talking about suggestions for packing for international travel (designed for peers speaking to peers) more less evident details of continuity motion flows from central theme nothing distracts from the center of attention Comparison of video clips on their own versus within the context of content in a web site or DVD. Examples aim to avoid having video in its own separate box. Spatial Logic Everything about continuity establishes 3D space within the 2d space of a screen. But spatial logic on the web is not as constrained Dimensionality Until recently all screens, all videos were 4:3 aspect ratio. Even HDTV is fixed (16:9). Film has established sizes as well. Web video is not constrained, can work against it. DVD video examples have video on right side of screen, taller than wide. Workflow For Multiple Editors Using Vegas Video for production. For multiple editors considered using Fiber Channel (server based, expensive...). Next, tried local Gigabit network within a LAN for sharing files (one audience member has a lab with 11 stations linked). Other approach is check in check out of portable hard drives. Requires more coordination but practical. Vegas cannot have multiple timelines drawing from the same media pool. It's after 11:00PM, hours after co-leading a 6+ hour pre-conference workshop at the 2016 DML Conference, and my adrenaline is still pumping. And feeling a bit daunted in how to summarize this, an off the cuff tweet sort of says it: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/783863754844884992 Or maybe the GIF that you cannot see in the featured image at the top of the post? Hmm, I made about 8 GIFs for this workshop, and they all weigh in around 3-4 MB. You want that GIF, I got it here. Sometime back in March of this year (?) Justin Reich emailed and asked if I was interested in doing a workshop together at the conference. His idea was to pick up on the ideas that ran through the 2014 DML Open course on Connected Courses with a hands on approach to doing it. Heck yeah! This blog post will ramble on a while, but you can just peel off here and see what we did. It's all there, you can do all the stuff we tried in today's workshop. For no real pedagogical reason, and having come off planning to run a DS106 class with a Western theme that did not register enough students where I thought I was going to teach it, my mind was still on Westerns. And for some reason the title of John Ford's movie How The West Was Won jumped into my brain as "how web is won". And The next thing I was doing was mashing up the original movie poster to this: It's in fun but it's also how I think the ideal kind of connected course should work- just like the way the internet works, a distributed network of connections, a place that no entity owns outright, and where individuals create and own their small nodes within. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] It dawned on my last week when I was madly stitching this together, that we were actually modeling the design of the open courses I have been part of, aka ds106. What most "big MOOCs" try to do is give the same course experience to all participants, all 900,000 of them. The way DS106 works often is that there is a class somewhere of registered, tuition paying students who take the course. We offer as an option for anyone else openly to participate, give access to the syllabus and assignments. Then we see usually some exciting overlap an boundary loosening. But we are not giving open participants the same experience as those who registered and payed. We give the content but the content is not the course. Those students, our our students today not only get Justin and I in the room, but each other. There is interaction, body language, conversations that I suggest have value. And they get the added benefit of the input of those open participants. So in the same way, I offered everyone reading this post, or later seeing a tweet, access to the entire curriculum. You out there on the internet, can try and do everything we tried to do in the room today. It's harder to do alone, right? You should have come to DML and our workshop! But here is everything (including probably typos) -- http://connectedcourses.stateu.org. You might notice I built this site at StateU.org. Yes, this is dog fooding (Tim set it up so this account will not disappear in 30 days) (right Tim?). The main site itself is not even Wordpress, but one of the super useful HTML5up.net themes. Plus about 12 Wordpress installs. Plus maybe 9 GIFs. The key to how we would do this only came in the last few weeks. And it was a post by Tim Owens in the Reclaim Hosting Community about "prefab/template Wordpress installs" that unlocked it. As much as I love love Wordpress, a new blog owners first experience is this blank post screen inside a rather confusing array of the Wordpress Dashboard, and a plain boring site called "My Blog". With some awareness of what I knew Tim had done, there was some way to provide users a starting point, like a prebuilt Wordpress site that they could then jump in and tinker with. When I asked Tim, he said this was definitely doable in their "StateU" site. This is what we used in the workshop. The funny thing is today, people kept asking "Where is State U"? Will StateU keep my work alive? I mean, the site does look like a University: It's an insanely great idea Reclaim Hosting developed. And it's free, open to anyone to use-- they made it for running workshops to introduce people to the possibilities of a domain of their own. When you click that Get Started Button (you can do it right now), after authenticating with Google, Facebook, or a LinkedIn account, you then get to choose a subdomain of StateU (so technically you are getting a Subdomain of Your Own) like loneranger.stateu.org. But what you do get is a digital space you can play arounf with for 30 day. You can install not only a Wordpress site, but like 60 other kinds of things form various wikis to URL shorteners to Bulletin Boards to photo galleries to CMS's like Omeka, or heck even drupal. Or if you are a fan of Brian Lamb, you can slap up your own version Moodle. As it calls itself, it's a sandbox.... for 30 days. It's not a place to build your course site, but maybe to explore web apps you might want to use. But if you do build something amazing, Reclaim Hosting will help you migrate it to a regular account. For our workshop we did only... Wordpress. but with Tim's help, when you click the Wordpress icon to install it, in addition to a plain vanilla boring My Blog default Wordpress, you get these prebuilt versions of the tools I have been working on the last few years: All of these are things I have available as installable Wordpress Themes. If you want to run the SPLOT Writer tool I built at Thompson Rivers University, you can get the theme and a long set of instructions from https://github.com/cogdog/truwriter. You will have to install a Wordpress instance, then add two themes, then install a few plugins, then create a special user account, then configure the options for the tool. With the StateU you get all of that done for you with the Wordpress install. What I had to do on StateU was set up the fully functioning template sites, send the info to Tim Owens at Reclaim Hosting, and usually in a about 10 seconds, he added it to the list of options you see above. What I did for each "seed" site was to create 1-3 bits of sample content, and in one of them would be detailed instructions on what they would need to change on their own site. THEN I would use my own template, and create a demo site, with some amount of customization to show maybe what the first iterative step might be. What we offered was way more than we could cover in a workshop. I always believe in blasting people with possibilities and hope that come back to it. I apologized for that like 99 times today. But I do not see Workshops being limited to what you do in the room (like teaching), but having all of this online, my hope us to plant ideas that the participants, or anyone else, might explore more deeply later. Justin and I sent out a survey to our registered participant to find their interests and an idea what their experiences were with tech and teaching online. This was extremely helpful, because, as I found, most of what we did was really new and foreign to many of them. We had maybe a balance of 20% big ideas, why teach connected, exploring existing connected courses, connecting with twitter that was masterfully led by Justin. And we had a powerful yet diverse audience, not all higher ed folks. The flow for the hands on part was first getting people set up on StateU.org. As part of this, I had everyone put one of those vanilla plain Wordpress sites at the root of their subdomains. We did not do much with this, I wanted them to do a first install, and learn to navigate between State U and their installed sites (and let them know when they have a domain, they can install lots of Wordpresses and Moodles, nut just one). One lesson (of many) learned. I was confusing a lot of people because there is the dashboard of their Wordpress sites (for each site) but also the dashboard of StateU (technically a cpanel). How did we get around that? A lot of hands on repetition, they learned by working through it. Several times. Then we offered five things they could experiment with (we covered about 60%?). Each one includes a small bit if description of what the thing does, links to see where other people have put it to use, a link to a demo that I made using the same installer on StateU, and a bit of lengthly detail on how to use it. These are the prebuilt installs our participants had access to today, and you can as well if you explore StateU.org: Image Pool SPLOT "Build a place for your class to build and organize a shared collection of images, without logins. Y'all also get features to require source and attribution as well as submission via email." SPLOT Writer "Create a site for submission of media enabled writing-- for essays, creative writing, a journal, or other places to toss around written words. It sure looks pretty too." Course Hub "Build a course aggregation hub to corral all of the activity published in a distributed course network." (the Feed Wordpress powered hub) The Daily Blank "Wake up an make something every day! Automatically publish a small challenge every day where responses are submitted via twitter." A DS106 Assignment Bank "Barn raise a pile of assignments or challenges where responses are submitted and attached as examples; users can rate items as well as submit their own." Now it's after midnight, I've been trying to explain today, and it's feeling way short of the experience of the room. But go check out what we did today -- http://connectedcourses.stateu.org/. But maybe my favorite part was creating 8 animated GIFs from one 3 minute trailer from How the West Was Won (I did 5 just last night). Like... It's bad enough I am mass deleting virus generated e-mails (there were 66 this morning, about 8 hours later than the cleansing last night) but I got one on my home e-mail account, all be-decked with formal looking graphics. It made me suspicious.... (more…) That Was Bowling by cogdogblog posted 15 Mar '08, 1.46pm MDT PST on flickr "That's a pretty.... wild style of guitar playing, how'd you learn that?" "That was bowling" "Yeah, bowling.. I could tell" I'm digging the British Invasion exhibit at the Museum of Music, Infotainment Island, in Second Life at slurl.com/secondlife/Infotainment%20Island/65/228/43 Join us 9:00 AM PT Monday March 17, as Bucky Barkley gives us a demo of the museum for the NMC Campus Teachers Buzz session. MMmmmmmmmmy Generation! And if you don't dig The Who, they have the Beatles, Stones, Animals, Dave Clark Five, and more old rockers. Kids from Hiroshima by cogdogblog posted 1 Oct '08, 10.04am MDT PST on flickr This cute group if school kids today asked me to help them practice their English while I was visiting Kinkakuji Temple in Kyoto. It went something like... "Excuse me! Excuse me" (little voices rang out). "Hello, My name is Miko" said one reading from his script. "What is your name?" "My name is Alan" I replied. "We are from Hiroshima," said Miko, "where do you live?" "I live in America, in Arizona" "Will you sign our book?" And there I was signing my name in 4 of their books, and then they gave me a present: flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2904163089/ flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2905009782/ flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2905012480/ It was such a sweet moment. I felt famous for 45 seconds. One of the Mastodon new user bumps is getting your head around the extra layer of your name or handle being doubled with the place you call home, both a positive for appreciating federation but maybe a complexity in unraveling names and links. This also comes into play for those building tools, e.g. it gets tricky to make things work when it's not as simple as seeing @cogdog and inferring that's tied to a easily constructed URL like https://twitter.com/cogdog. Here are a few things I've worked through or are trying to for a focus on fedispaces, over the single letter algebra variable one ;-) Mastodon Link Sharing Let's say you make web sites where you want a button or link to enable sharing of a current page, or maybe a dynamic URL on Mastodon. Easy in the old bird thing, because the sharing capability was appending to a simple url the string you wanted included. This is not possible in Mastodon, because we use different hoss, so we don't know how to construct the URL. This came into play for the Discourse powered OEG Connect community I tend/hustle where I have a add on component to create more options for link sharing than x-mail-facebook that come with Discourse. To add sharing to Mastodon, I need a URL pattern to use, which we do not know in advance. Make your own! type into the web bar, replacing "mymastodoninsnce.social" with your fedihomehttps://mymastoninstance.social/?text=@cogdog sent me here (in practice, the string after text= needs to be "url encoded" but it will manage that in a browser, this is just to play) And Boom! I found MastodonShare. It does this by first offering a window ask for your instance url (saving that to a friendly cookie so it knows next then) and then passing off the link share trigger. Now you can try right now to see how it works. It makes draft of a post which the specified text, which you can edit as desired before posting. That will come in handy when I get around to swapping the spaces for the Daily Create theme (his will happen one day!). If you run discourse, you can see how I integrated mastodon link sharing where you can even use the share button to share that (have we self referenced enough?) or heck, masto share it now (you know you want ti try that link) (I hope). I also note that MastodonShare has a nifty browser bookmarklet for sharing any web page to Mastodon which works better than a previous one I handcoded by inserting my specific instance. If you like MastodonShare, give all the thanks to @barredo@mastodon.social or heck, just MastodonShare it! What's My Name? Our handles are now multilayered, as I cannot simply go by @cogdog and you know where t--hat is- it works in single platform spaces like flickr, facebook, etc because there is a definite pattern that can be constructed for a link. In Mastodon, we need to unravel that seeing @cogdog@social.fossdle.org means going to a link like https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog -- that's a lot to do by hand. Or if you see a url for a user's Mastodon account, you have to do some manual unraveling to use that in a post to reference them. If this gets confusing, I recommend Tara Calishan's Mastodon Username Helper (part of the fabulous MastoGizmos collection, also blogged at ResearchBuzz). Enter your Mastodon username, and it gives you the link address, rss feed, and more. I will note that you can have fun entering something like cogdog@twitter.com which is not, a mastodon instance. If it were me, I could have fun with an error check. But yes, this double @ convention is needed but seems confusing. In our OEG Connect community, I added a profile field for people to include their Mastodon username when they signup or edit their profile. I tried to make it clear, but (shrug) I use a data explorer tool to collect responses so I can add them to a directory we share, and I see maybe 20-25% are not entered as mastodon usernames, I see: Mastodon profile urls (understandable) Twitter or Linktree urls single word user name email addresses random words It's going to take time for a better understanding of what a double @ handle means... @blah@domain Or we can hope, and also demonstrate. Link Kerfluffle Link sharing gets convoluted to. I can get a full link from my timeline to ResearchBuzz post from the web client, using the 3 dot menu in the bottom right and selecting "Copy Link to Post", returning https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@researchbuzz/111341032676214725 but if I use what I did on that older bird named platform, and right/control click on the timeline, I get a URL that might work as a link, but runs it through my own instance https://social.fossdle.org/@researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host/111341034516140148 which is a lot to unravel. That is just a habit to unlearn. Recognizing Mastodon Links in a Blob of Text I went through some gymnastics in working out an approach for identifying a mastodon link so I could generate an autoembed in WordPress. This meant pushing my minimal grep skills to look for a pattern of https (or http) :// (domain name of instance) /@ (string of letters, numbers, -,_ in a username) / (string of digits for post id) Somehow I got it to work... but since WordPress is integrating more Mastodon hooks maybe it will be an internally supported auto Embed in the future? I can think too, it might be possible to autolink a text entered mastodon username in the form @ (string of letters, numbers, -,_ in a username) @ (domain name) to create a link to the profile? It's Evolving It's all new, and the complexities that you get for not being under the control of some maniacal rich egomaniac (fictional reference, of,course) means maybe asking a bit more of us as participants to learn new habits, and accept some of the complexity. Links are what it's all about in this web thing, so use 'em and become understandable of them. Ok? Featured Image: Mine, made by me and a camera, zero AI. Links Across Time flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license A quickly composed entry for the What the Font design assignment... Even as a kid I had a thing for the James Bond movie- I am not quite sure what parental supervision I was receiving. I had this little 007 car with petals I rode up and down the sidewalk- I cant say what connection the car had to the movie, but it had the logo on it. I also at some point got a toy 007 briefcase. Inside were all kind of Q like gadgets (if Q built them all out of plastic), but the best was the outer edge of the case where you could load a rubber ended dart, and use a button on top of the briefcase to fire it. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And oh yeah, I still have my Matchbox sized Aston Martin, even with the button the ejects a little man out of the passenger seat. No, I never got the James Bond Ken and Barbie set- dolls were not my thing. So yeah, I wish we had video games 'cause I was not getting enough violent play as a 9 year old. Just kidding. I loved (and still love) most the early Bond flicks, Dr No, From Russia With Love, Gold Finger.... and somehow all of the sexual innuendos went miles over head. It was the sauve coolness, it was the gadgets, it was the bond snark I liked. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Anyhow, I thought the 007 movie logo - the 007 lettres where the "7" made for the handle of a gun, would be fun. I surfed for Bon quotes to try and bend, fol spindle, warp, into the shapes (I put a layer with the logo in for a base, turned layer transparency up, and tried to twist the words around to fit. It's not very eloquent, would like to get more practice at text shaping. In my best Rod Serling intonation, "Submitted for your approval, two different musicians, never having made contact, both express appreciation and credit for shared public domain photos, and offer thanks despite the general understanding of said licenses are that you do not have to attribute..." A direct message came to me in instagram, and it's dicey I would have even seen it as its buried in the menus under requests. Hi Alan- I'm using one of your public domain photos ("wood eye") for a cover for one of my upcoming singles - just wanted to say thank you. It's funny because of course, there is no public domain declared in Instagram, but I can guess he is referring to my flickr photos. I did find one: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/46480815874 Wood Eye flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I am not even quite sure where this was, somewhere on a board or a palette around the house? Or maybe seen out on a walk. But I followed the account links, and sure enough there it is. https://www.instagram.com/p/CDbpqykAP5W/ That was pretty clever to mirror the image to make the eyes. I responded of course with an appreciate thanks, especially since it's not even required under public domain. Thus Bo replied: Thanks Alan - ya I like to let people know if I use their PD stuff. It's much appreciated from my side. That's the way it should work, right? Anyhow, the song is available from a few services -- share widely. Or directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb0SQorZt0Q In less than a week, a comment came in on this flickr photo, just a shot of two aster flowers I spotted in Arizona in 2010: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4625433285 Shambala Eyes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I guess I thought I was being clever with a Three Dog Night lyric reference to a song I had sort of half learned to play. I had put in the caption: "I can tell my sister, by the flowers in her eyes, on the road to Shambala"A little hippie music from Three Dog Night Forgotten photo, and even more forgotten was my little semi-witty caption. Then, I get a comment from "Gorilla Pirate" So I was actually recording a cover of Three Dog Night's Shambala, and I was looking for some public domain wildflower images for part of the art. Coincidentally finding this image with your description (when I only used "wildflowers" as my search term) totally blew my mind lol. Thanks for the photo!!https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4625433285/#comment72157715856019108 I am hoping they send a link! What are the odds of this? This was the kind of stuff that in the past I would dash off to record as an Amazing/True Story of Open Sharing, but it's now lucky for me to get into a blog post. But here's the thing. Independent musicians are not really flush with time or money. Yet I have had repeated experiences where they take the time to send a thanks when they find an image of mind to use. They not only provide attribution, but they reach out to contact me. This has happened before, a few years ago there was a photo of a road that found its way into a Blues CD (and they mailed me a copy!). And maybe one of my first open stories, how a German band used my Death Valley photo as their cover art (this was before flickr, before creative commons). And again, this is the whole experiment I have been running since I flipped my 60,000+ flick photos from CC-BY to CC0 (flickr borked and could not convert them all). I wanted so see is I shared my photos with the least restrictions, one where it is most understood people can just grab and use and not acknowledge or say thanks, how many people would go beyond the letter of the license. Yes, I prefer attribution, but I don't want ti to happen because of rules or a license, I want it to happen because people feel like saying thanks. Many do. This is the spirit of public domain, not just the way a license reads. Because most typical, the way educators and others describe public domain is, "you can use the image and you do not even have to attribute." But you can. Be less of a stick to the letter of licenses. Be more musician. And buy their music. Check out Bo Green's music here https://ffm.to/y57ayr0 and hopefully I will find out soon where Gorilla Pirate is doing their version of Shambala. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14105972112 2014/365/124 Musician in the Making flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) You've heard the declarations. Blogs are dead. 94% of them have not published in the last 120 days. I did not have time today to visit all 133 million blogs Technorati has been tracking since 2002. cc licensed flickr photo by john_curley But I have often marveled at the gems I find by random link walking from blogs- like a hike without a map -- from one story that catches my eye, I am curious about a link that leads me down a lovely path, and before I know it, I am finding beautiful information like stumbling into a field of shimmering golden poppies or a maroon mountain vista (little "v" damnit!). And for me that is a key- if you are one of the 16 or 17 little people who blog, there's not much originality in following the stories of the Big Boys and Girls, unless you put a different spin on a story. The Good Stuff is finding stuff all those Snooty A-listers are not writing about. There are more trails than you can imagine, and more treasures to find, share, and spend some valuable time wandering among. This morning I had an idea. Or maybe too much coffee. Starting from my RSS reader, I had landed on an interesting story on a blog with a curious name. I got even curiouser about some of the blogroll or linklog names in the sidebar, and wondered, "How far can I wander? What would I find? Is it all tombstones, black rot, and blog tumbleweeds like those big shot writers for Wired try to tell us?' I found not death, but teeming life. I found people posting at an astounding rate, and original (and wonderfully strange and often deeply personal and quite silly too) stuff. And I could find no sign that people were in the vain pursuit of a front page Google Rank. Nor are they lone blogs crying to the moon; they are rich with comments and links. So take a walk with me... The trailhead is my RSS reader. I get some great visualization and fascninating "data as art" stories from Information Aesthetics . it was here I went down the trail just a few short clicks and ended up at.... Strange Maps a collection of... not always strange but interesting maps. Like From Pickin' Cotton to Pickin' Presidents where maps of seeminly un-related content and more than a hundred years of time difference... make sense. I peeked over the edge of the sidebar and headed for.... where the past predictions of the future, often camp or cheesy, are detailed- Paleo-Future. Like back in 1957, Commuting will be a Breeze, the future looked like we'd be commuting to work in highspeed flying buses! From here I found myself on a precipice with no way out; the blog links from here were but feint trails and nowhere I could continue. This happens when wandering, so I backtracked to Strange Maps and found a different path, down the road to... Bldg Blog all about architectural, and lots of great photos, like the collage art highlighted in Resampled Space- striking images of "new, fictional, architectonic structures." Wow the view from here is amazing, but I saw a track leading me to... pruned which is still along this trail of architectural related paths, but diverges more into landscaping- and i saw something very familiar from my home start in the magnificent aerial photo looking down at the Central Arizona Project. Improbably, water is sucked from the Colorado River on the California border, pumped up over a 1000+ foot mountain, and then canals its way hundreds of miles to feed the farms and suburbs of Phoenix and Tucson. Now that is quite a journey, but we are going elsewhere, from this blog I can see a shiny odd structure called.... candyland. I am not even sure what it is, collections of writings, reflections, and art, but liked the iconography of the traffic light in tomorrow land. Let's hope the green light stays on, cause we have been stuck at this damned red light getting nowhere for 8 years! Feeling a bit hungry, I saw just up ahead... the bright colors, lively music, and wonderful food smells of Mexico Cooks. It was quite a bit of everything, and lots of pretty things to look at like La Feria del Hongo (The Mushroom Fair) in Senguio, Michoacán (mmmm, should I eat those mushrooms??). Feeling more adventurous, I caught up with... Musings of a Barefoot Foodie who made me smile, and worry a bit about the meal she was preparing--- Steak with Ice Cream Sauce . Where else on this wild trail would you come across such things? She suggested I head down the road and catch up with.... the warm glow of June Cleaver Nirvana and what a fun, rollicking, place this is! I spent some time taking in the fabulous images of Texas Safari (yes, there are camels in Texas! Why not?). Seeking a quiet spot to reflect under a tree, I found myself immersed in... Quotidian Vicissitudes. And here I found a priceless gem, something really worth sharing (for unlike a nugget of gold, I can make more gems simply by giving them away), The Commenter Meme. Memes are common here in the blog wilderness, but this one is worth thinking about, and maybe adopting as a learning/social networking activity. It asks you to list links to the last 10 commenters on your site, and then asks some questions about each one that requires you spend some time exploring what may be new blogs for you to answer a series of questions such as "1. What is your favorite post from number 3's blog?" or "5. If you could give one piece of advice to number 7 what would it be?". I can see teachers maybe doing this with colleagues, or with their students, or maybe... well, I hope you find this as valuable as I did, but sometimes you rush into town with gold and some damn rock expert tells you it is pyrite (which is still nice and shiny, IMHO). Having tucked the gem into my backpack, I saw up on the hill... Vanity Press a place that looks tranquil and plain at first, but draws you into to local stories like Revenge of the Wild Life where you get to understand the challenges of dealing with a problematic Friendly Neighbor (FN). Over on the same reflective ridge, I walked to.... All My Own where I started a bit into the waters of I Didn't Come With An Owner's Manual, smiled, and wondered what the implication of RTFM in relationships. And then.... I ventured down into a valley of more colors than I could think possible called... Tales of a Tree Hugger and as someone who enjoys looking closely at flowers with my camera, spent some time pleasantly lost in the video Meditation on a flower. And after some time here, I strapped on my pack and... And on and on I could go. But I will pass this to another hiker, another wanderer. I thought I was venturing into the Valley of Blog Death, but could not really map the places I found on that false map. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've been saying that annotating maps is one of the most under-used edtech tools, given the wonderful capabilities one can do (for free) in Google MyMaps-- Gmaps are more than finding driving locations to the nearest sushi bar. The fact that you can mark up anywhere in the world with information you pin on a map, is (to me) astounding, but I'm kind of a map nerd. I've done a number of these maps for various reasons, but don't always go back to them. But woah, my not so serious maps of places where people get Starbucks staff to say the word "large" (rather than foo foo 'venti') has like 18,000 views! That's insane. Open public maps are fine for projects and such, but it means that people have license to remove your description (I saw one conference map where someone placed the content they wanted in the map bubble inside my map description), and heck, look at the Starbucks map again; Jay Cross seems to have spammed it with a self promoting pin. Or he was confused. At least we know where he lives. My new quest for the summer (at least) is reclaiming (some of) my weekend time, which has been lately filling with that gray boundary zone where work fuzzes out to the tech stuff I do on my own. So I am making more time for the offline activities, like today's trip up to a new lake south of Flagstaff where I spent a good 2 hours paddling around in my kayak (well some of that time was sitting under a shade tree enjoying a cold beer). But my tech genes don't shut off completely, so I have my flickr photos posted, and tonight I was interested in starting a map with the lakes I have explored, going even back to my first dip in October 2007 when Westley Field took my paddling in the Sydney Harbour. So it did not take too much time to assemble my kayak map: I used the thumbnail size images of my flickr photos inside each pin. View Alan's Kayak Spots in a larger map I still have some echoes of the excitement when I watched the Google Wave demo video on the brief but when they were co-browsing in real time, from different machines, a Google map. This still is one missing piece of maps, making them a shared social media experience. So whats your take on maps? Where do you see people doing interesting things with them? Pinning static info on a map is obvious, but what about edgier things? I've been trying to suggest doing storytelling in GMap. What about a game? ARG? a treasure hunt? a puzzle? a math problem? What's on your map? It was March 27 ordered and on its way March 30 and due to arrive April 4. From China to Scottsdale in 6 days. I knew the thing was fast, but zowie! Meeting Leigh by cogdogblog posted 9 Jul '08, 1.33pm MDT PST on flickr At the welcome dinner for Horizon.au, I finnaly got to meet in person, Leigh Blackall... now I am more eager to find my way back to New Zealand. Give me a free hour and there goes another new RSS Feed. Since 1996, we have been accumulating some 4000 interesting web sites in our web's eye view bag of urls. Essentially the format for the content is a site title, URL, and description (does that sound like RSS or what?) The site has an entire back end admin system where any visitor can submit a site via our drop it in the bag form. New items go into a temp holding area, until we can review them. The added feature now posts approved sites to the new Bag of URLs RSS feed. (more…) Like Scott, i believe I was tagged too by Sir D'Arcy. (Hah Scott, I'm not letting you kill the game of tag!) Four jobs I've had - Laying the lines for little league baseball (very crooked ones at that) - Soil Compaction Tester - Running a golf driving range (yes, driving the cart that all you yahoos aimed at) - Campus mail delivery Four movies I can (and do) watch over and over - Forrest Gump - The Bridge over the River Kwai ("Madness! Madness!") - Memento (there is something new each time) - Ben Hur Four places I've lived - Baltimore, MD (started) - Newark, DE - Los Alamos, NM (9 of the weirdest months of my life) - Flagstaff, AZ (almost heaven) Four TV shows I('ve) love(d) - Lost (I am hooked, and cannot let go) - Six Feet Under (ditto, thanks to DVDs, no HBO here) - M*A*S*H - Twilight Zone Four places I've vacationed - Vancouver Island - South Island of New Zealand (is heaven) - Grand Gulch (backpack days) - Northern New Mexico (road trip) Four of my favorite dishes - steamed Chesapeake Bay Crabs - Thrashers french fries from Ocean City, MD - my wife's chimichangas (baked not fried) - New York steak on my barbecue Four sites I visit daily - My personalized Google home page - MLX (just in case someone actually submitted something) - flickr - not many, i spend to much time in my RSS Four places I would rather be right now - at my cabin in Strawberry, AZ - Floating down the Colorado River - Any beach on the Coromandel, NZ - Spring time in the Sonoran desert Four books (or series) I love - Desert Solitaire - The Brave Cowboy - The River Why - The Crossing Four video games I can (and do or did) play over and over - Yikes, I have hardly played any video games in my life. I had a mild early 1980s addiction to Ms Pac Man. Four bloggers I am tagging I will tag some Bloggers I crossed paths with at Northern Voice: - Kirsten - Nancy - Jason - Jon The meme lives, you Victoria maniac! There's something to be said for making your own tech tools; you certainly know quickly if something goes awry (though you cannot complain much about the tool provider). Something I made first almost 10 years ago is the flickr cc attribution helper. If you take on the task some think too arduous to give credit for photos you re-use, that inking 10 years ago come from how many round trip copy/paste steps it took from flickr to blog to write a good attribution. Not to say what it took to write them consistently. The first generation tool relied on Greasemonkey to modify a flickr page with a cut and paste attribution. This worked great as one enabled in your browser, the attribution fields would show on any flickr image page that had a CC license. The problem was it relied on knowing the document structure of a flickr display page, so every time they changed their format (it happened maybe 5 times in 5 years) I had to update the script. Thus a major step was moving it to GitHub hosted HTML/JS that was triggered via a web browser bookmarklet tool. The way I set up turned out to be nifty (accidently so) in that other forms of output could be added, so tools were added for WordPress with captions, Markdown, an image stamping tool by John Johnston, even for medium.com. And even with the move in WordPress 5 to the new, oft-hated Gutenberg editor (I've made my peace with it), the HTML generated with it's [caption]....[/caption] codes still worked in the block editor. Until version 5.3. Thud. I saw that a week ago, that the pasted in attribution strings no longer worked, the image was gone. Time to go into the tool shed. I spent more than a few [insert chuks of time] trying out different ways of construction the block code. The old way uses the flickr JavaScript API to sent the id of an image (pulled from the URL) -- e.g. for a photo at https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49254195911 the id was 49254195911. That info gets all you need to find out a static URL link to the image, it's license, the userid for the creator. The previous iterations of the tool made it set to an image size you used most often. I fiddled with that, getting an HTML string that would pass the Block Test and render in the editor without the dreaded "Cannot Render as Block" error. I saw, though, that the forward looks better if we use WordPress ability to render the image via automatic embedding of it via the flickr URL. I could see from testing how it rendered it inside of <figure>...</figure> tags with some special class names. It looks like: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/34754346023 That worked great for the image. When I tested in the editor, I saw I could paste in the attribution to the editor, which ends up wrapped in <figcaption>...</figcaption> tags. It previews nice, but... When I set up the attribution to return this chunk for copy/paste: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/34754346023 Blocky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I lost the embedded image, it just produced a plain text URL. Lot's of various testing got me nowhere. What I could see is that pasting in the first code had WordPress do what it does to convert it to a normal img tag. Adding in the caption just gunked things up. So for now, I have left it as putting the image in one block, and the attribution string in a paragraph block following it. This means on editing, you might have to format the caption, or what I plan to do, once in the post, cut it and past into the image's caption field. The copy/paste code for the featured image on this post ends up: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/34754346023 Blocky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Giving this in my editor... (this is how it comes in as a screenshot) I might leave it like that, good enough for one pasted, but I more likely will cut the attribution block text and put in the "Write caption..." field https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/34754346023 Blocky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) What I like is that the image comes in a more fluid size for my blog column width, and it's still linked to original. I have to say it's pretty neat that the Block Editor can accept pasted in HTML and render it. It also does well with pasted Markdown code too. To give it a try, generate a new bookmarklet tool maker from https://cogdog.github.io/flickr-cc-helper/ and use the option for Wordpress 5+ Block Attributor (aka Gutenberg). Then, navigate to any flickr open licensed image, and give it a rip. Nothing done affects any existing bookmarklet tools- well I made one update across them all that new attributions created will use the more current static URLs for images (http://live.flickrstatic.com...) rather than the old ones that had the mysterious farmXX in the URL (these still all work and should work into the future). This is still in testing states, but I'm using it! I have some dreams of a complete revamp that might include; Complete redesign so all options in the toolmaker (image, attribution type) are options from the tool window so multiple tools would not be neededDeployment as Chrome/Firefox Extensions (because bookmarklet tools are from the 1990s and mostly still work but the clock might be ticking)Add support for other image services, e.g. Pixabay, Unsplash, MediaWiki Commons (any service that provides information about images via a Javascript open web api Experiment with creating a WordPress Block tool that could just take the flickr URL and do it all without leaving the editor. One can dream... if only I could devote more time to tool tinkering but the paying work comes first. Since this is something I use all the time, it will get my attention when it goes south! Image Credits: (already inserted in post as example)... Blocky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl_ZEtH9ReE Today's ds106 Daily Create was another video one, these are the kind that make the weak run for the hills crying "Mommy! Video is so complicated..." Make a stop motion movie that brings something to life in a unique way. I actually may have never done a stop motion video before, so that's why I like the challenge. For today's, I used the subject that has dominate my flickr stream the last few weeks, sunflowers. They are starting to wear out and hang their heads low, so I planned to try and document one losing its petals. I found a shorter one that could get in my camera frame a flower and a rock for the petals to fall onto. I set my Canon 7D on a tripod, and used the remote control to take photos. After each photo I would remove one petal and drop it on the ground, so the sequence would show one flower losing its petals, and eventually the entire flower head. It moves around a lot (from the motion me tearing off petals), and the exposure varied as the sun overhead was going in and out of clouds-- but to me it has that jerky motion of stop motion animation. To make the video, I imported all the images into iMovie. I had to select all, then set the cropping to "Fit" so the full image you show, and reduced the duration of each to 0.2 seconds to make the sequence go fast. It worked, but of course, was short, so I repeated it about 5 times, inserted a black frame between, and made it end on a Ken jones pan from flower to petals on rock. To make it complete, I searched ccMixter on the word "Falling" and ended up on a nice bluesy song with a sultry vocal Listen to "Falling" Falling by unreal_dm is licensed under a Attribution Noncommercial (3.0). One can theorize what this might mean- a life cycle, loss, falling as a verb or as an emotion... It's just a video! Oh my, July is almost over. What should you do? Start doing Daily Creates now. Make your own challenge for a week, for August, for 2013... Sergeant Hulka might call you out to do a long set of pushups.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubHn4xEnRP8 Well shoot, I thought Google Calendar was going to be a killer app. I had set one up for our NMC Second Life blog site, hoping the calendar sharing features might allow others we give access the ability to schedule their events. Well, it does do that. But noted by someone in an email who was asking about sorting, I now see by looking at the raw XML, that the items are dated not by the event date, but when the entry was last updated... and that sort of sorting is pretty useless for using RSS unless you just happen to edit your calendar in reverse chronological order. That is just squirrelly weird... the event dates are lumped into summary and item descriptions, which throws up all kinds of new coding challenges to parse and sort. I cannot find too much use for this kind of calendar feeding. So in experiment mode, I am taking a quick look at: RSS Calendar - is pretty straight forward and does provide feeds in event date order. You can categorize events to create different feeds. Entry is old school web, form based, no slick Ajax editing. Another downside, no import of calendar events by iCal or other forms. it looks like individual events can be iCal exported. 30Boxes was recommended by Todd - it was a slicker editor (one field quick adds), more customization on display, better syndication options and export. It looks like it has the ability to import other content via RSS. The thing lacking from both is they are geared towards individual calendar editor/creators; and the piece I did like about Google Calendar is I could give event addition rights to others. Of course, I could share a generic login to both services above, and I might end up doing so. But bottom line- Google Calendar is neat, but the weirdness in the RSS feed format may rule it out for me, and as of yet, I have found no way I could link a calendar view Oops just found a method in the Calendar Publishing Guide. It looks like to get the sort order correct, one might need to use some PHP and MagpieRSS to do some advanced parsing, which might take away my Ajax approach (which is hardly critical). In the "Crazy Scheduling -- I Thought I was Learning to Say No" department, I am lined up to be a participant on a May 17 webcast of the Ready2Net program on "Web 2.0 Comes to Campus" - the free series of webcast and satellite broadcasts produced by the CSU-Monterey Bay. As billed: Is Web 2.0 yet another wave of IT Industry jargon? Or must campuses pay attention? What will it mean to "harness network efforts" to enhance campus resources and services and to improve student learning opportunities? Corporations are taking a broad look at Web 2.0 as a way to transform IT resources and services. Do the corporate conversations about Web 2.0 apply to higher education? And if so, in what ways? At what costs? And with what benefits for students, faculty, and institutions? This R2N program examines the shift in Internet platform, content and users, and serves to inform CIOs, the IT community, faculty, presidents, provosts, and trustees about the challenges Web 2.0 places on the campus's virtual space. Along with a librarian from Solano Community College, I'll be barking there among some execs from Microsoft, Blackboard. It was billed as being "conversational" and may be good practice should I ever get a chance to be on Oprah. I was just asked about this last week, and it is a silly turnaround trip from Phoenix (leave at 6:00 AM) to get to San Jose in time for prep and filming, and then flying right back out just before 1:00 PM. Had to sandwich this in between a play we are going to here Thursday night, and a very special weekend that has been a year in the making- It's our wedding anniversary coming up, and my wife has been holding onto a secret plan that I have been kept in the dark on. No idea where we are going! So going to San Jose to yack about Web 2.0 for a few hours is just the warm-up.... Now I have to go rummaging in the back of my closet to see if I still actually own a tie (my neck has not been knotted for about 10 years). This has nothing to do with blogs, wikis, podcasts, learning objects, or anything technology related. Evidence to the contrary, much in life is not related to that stuff. Yesterday I took a colleague to one of my favorite out of the way lunch spots, hidden away in a local industrial park area. It is a great place for down to earth good Mexican food (carne asada to die for). I had told Eric I would spring for lunch, but after ordering my food and ferreting through the wallet, I saw I had only $7 half of what we needed. And this is not a place wired for taking debit cards. But here is where it is crazy- the lady behind the counter, who may or may not recognize my semi-frequent visits, just wrote down our names, attached my business card, and served us lunch on our promise to return today to pay up. This level of kindness and service in the face of our embarrassment is astounding, and unfortunately this is the case these days. So if you want to know how to find Salsa Y Sombreros, let me know. I will eating there a lot and only partly because the food is good. It gives me thought to considering what I can to to engender that sort of response in the stuff I serve (which is not nearly as good as the carne asada). Finally- something with a "2.0" on the end that has substance! My first tech task of 2006 has been the upgrade of CDB to WordPress 2.0 the "Duke" release. There should not be any noticable difference from your view, dear reader, as apparently most of the enhancements are under the hood. I avoided the excitement and followed the upgrade instructions to the letter, including making a proper database backup (actually I have scripts that do this nightly, but also did a mySQL dump via PHPmyAdmin as well as made a copy of the database there too); made a backup directory copy of the blog, de-activated all plugins. So far so good, time will tell. Supposedly there may be some performance enhancements as database queries were optimized in the new version, and I am getting used to the new admin interface. The new HTML editor is ok, I usually compose in ecto, but wanted to see how the new inside face worked. They've done a bit of AJAX smelling stuff in the Dashboard, cool. I gotta learn some of that. I've yet to do any of the upload tools in the interface which is rumored to have a not so smooth go. This version will likely have some more impact for our WP published MCLI iForum especially on what is written as much more flexibiltiy in assigning user level options- gone are the arcane numbers and now it will be much more role based, which is what I wanted to provide for remote authors to write new article drafts. Also on the blog change front, there may be some radio silence later this week as I am planning to move the entire enchilada to its own server, with a shorter URL, offered to me by a kind colleague. The move part should not take long; it's more with waiting for DNS changes to go into affect. Have no fear, forwarding links will be provided, and I will set up transparent web server re-directs that will make the experience seamless. I've had a peek inside what Brian is agRSSively leaking... no wonder he's been so darn quiet. This will rock (and maybe bust their server) Nobody is anti-sharing, are they? Everybody is for it. It was maybe the first thing I heard about in 1992 as a newly hired instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. My second week on the job was attending an Ocotillo Retreat where faculty/staff working groups developed ideas to advance to use of technology in learning, and the need for sharing was said again and again. And from then through 2018 (and beyond) it's something I end up talking about a lot. Recently, I got a chance to talk openly about sharing with friend and colleague Ken Bauer, as an episode of a podcast series he publishes for the Flipped Learning Network. Ken has got a load of links there, photos too, so that saves me some blogging. But here's the audio, totally free form conversation we had via a Google Hangout. Ken is one of my go to people for recommending a sensible approach to flipped learning; this photo I set up by flipping a sign for a studio session he lead for the UDG Agora project in Guadalajara [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Señor Flipped flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Ken is one of those network made gems of a friend, I believe it was a chain of Brians - Brian Bennett recommending Brian Lamb that I got to know him through blogs and twitter in 2014-2015 when I had a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University. Ken got very excited participating in the You Show, a morphing of DS106 Brian (lamb) and I did as a faculty development program at TRU. But when we had a chance to go to Mexico to with with the University of Guadalajara on the UDG Agora project, it was natural to fold Ken in as a collaborator, even if he taught for a different university in Guadalajara. It's been pure joy to work with Ken, I've gotten to spend time visiting him and his family (they showed me a genuine Mexican Christmas), eating his home grilled fajitas, working with him through projects like Virtually Connecting, even sharing a funky Airbnb in Richmond VA for an Open Ed conference. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Grill Master Ken flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Ken's request for a podcast came I think in the heels of some things I blogged here about sharing and licenses. The answer is always "yes" when a request comes from someone like Ken. Nothing there was crazy new or novel, it's a lot of the same things I have found all my career in ed-tech. Everybody is behind sharing, yet in practice, it's always an uphill battle. I cannot say I have any super success formulas, except dogfooding it and show it as much as possible in your own practice. And it's nice being a guest on a podcast, rather than being on the producing end I usually am on, all I had to do was talk. This was a nice follow to a podcast I did for the Tech in Higher Ed podcast with Bonni Stachowiak, there was even a bit of sharing in action with Bonni's graphic https://twitter.com/flippedlearning/status/1059100472840200192 https://twitter.com/ken_bauer/status/1059114110217043973 At a minimum, doing the podcast was a good chance to catch up, thanks Ken! This is another of nine posts for the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 challenge. Featured Image: One of my most shared photos in flickr, with 39,000+ views and at least links to reuse in the comments, so it's rather relevant: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Life is Sharing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] makes use of cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by bitchcakesny: http://flickr.com/photos/bitchcakes/5187928447/ Now that the 2012 Summer of ds106, Camp Version is over, I spent some time trying to pull some numbers from the machine, given how crazy folks are about analytics and massive. First of all, I want to thank all 172,000 people who registered for the course (just kidding, we want to make the BIG MOOCS nervous). 454 This is the number of blog posts by the 11 registered UMW students over the 10 week course. I first ran a database query to find the number of posts in ds106, where all the aggregation happens, that were tagged for our summer section (umwsum12) SELECT count(p.ID) FROM wp_posts p INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships tr ON (p.ID = tr.object_id) INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy tt ON (tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id) INNER JOIN wp_terms t ON (tt.term_id = t.term_id) WHERE tt.taxonomy = 'post_tag' AND t.slug ='umwsum12' And I got 435. We have been having some issues with Feedwordpress missing a few blog posts (the developer is working on a fix for us), so in the interest of pure analytics, I went to each students blogs and counted their posts. This os not quite as tedious, if you page through their archives Until you get a not found response and go back one), and find that their last paged url is 5 and there are 3 blog posts on that last page, that means a total of 43 (10 per page plus the last 3). The activity per student ranged from 22 to 55 blog posts for the class with an average of 41.2 (that would be 4 per week). The distribution actually might be closely proportional to the grade distribution: [caption id="attachment_9259" align="aligncenter" width="413"] Distribution of ds106 student total blog posts[/caption] Some consideration should go into that some students did a lot individual posts per daily create where others did weekly summaries, and if I really was going to get into it, I should analyze post lengths and amount fo media embedded. 641 Total number of blog posts from open participants, here by looking at posts aggregated to the ds106 site tagged 'openonline' and after the start date of the class: SELECT count(p.ID) FROM wp_posts p INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships tr ON (p.ID = tr.object_id) INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy tt ON (tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id) INNER JOIN wp_terms t ON (tt.term_id = t.term_id) WHERE tt.taxonomy = 'post_tag' AND t.slug ='openonline' AND p.post_date > '2012-05-14 00:00:00' This again is an approximation given some trouble we have had from some blogs not being picked up by Feedwordpress, although the discrepancy fro the UMW student blogs was only 4%. But this would indicate the activity of the non-registered students exceeded that of the registered ones, but likely spread over more individuals. Combined, we had well over 1000 blog posts come into the site over the 10 week course. 803 Number of unique tags/categories used across all blog posts (we convert all tags on incoming feeds to categories. I have no idea what this means. But among the tags for assignments, we find from random sampling: Under pressure just plain blogging Doctor Who bavahead schizopolis lifelong learning dew player DayDoubler Zack Parsons ray harryhausen the magic of zazzy Draw your own conclusions. 68 Number of blogs/users syndicate and published to the Magicmacguffin site. This is based on the number of users created on the site, which is done by Feedwordpress as new feeds are added. Our signup form and ds106 registations were the source for us assigning 84 users to our groups (or bunkhouses). So this means that 16 people supplied information but never posted. Does this mean our "dropout" rate (a term I think has no meaning in open courses) was 19% (or 81% of the people who signed up participated by blogging at least once). But you know how I feel about the use of the word "dropouts" ("hence" "scarequotes") https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/228168819850493952 326 This is the total number of assignment blog posts aggregated to the site (based on the number of occurrences of the post tags, found by searching for the tags in the admin dashboard). I know this is an under estimate because end of the semester we found one student had mistagged all of her posts (she forgot the comma between the general and specific tag). By looking at the distribution, we might infer that the visual and design assignments are more popular, but it should be noted that the audio and video assignments carry more stars (difficulty rating) so students generally do fewer of the number of assignments because they are more challenging) or by the numbers VisualAssignments 116 DesignAssignments 89 AudioAssignments 52 VideoAssignments 40 RemixAssignments 11 MashupAssignments 18 6:10:34 This is six plus hours of the 18 videos created by Martha and I just for the weekly announcements. Tn the first few weeks, we filmed them in DTLT and used the green screen, editing and uploading to YouTube. Because I was traveling for the rest of the course, we went the easy route and did our videos via Google hangouts live, and using the awesome feature that archives them directly to YouTube... This means they may not be edited cleanly but there was no post processing. And we did all of these without any scripts, after discussing what we would do before hand for maybe 10 minutes, they were totally improvised (the last video had some serious editing, but the audio was done improv). Without a doubt, working with Martha on these was one of the highlights of the summer experience. This of course does not include the individual videos Martha and I each did to frame the "narrative". We each did our own tumblr hosted blog for this Macguffin Summer and Martha's Camp Journal More One of my to do lists is to add some capability of the Daily Create site to track the number of submissions each challenge (since these are drawn from third party sources, we would need to poll via their APIs). Also, not figured out yet is some way to keep track of the comment activity across the blogs (#pipedream) Also what I'd like to get at are some ways to visualize the activity in this busy network on the front of the site, as the chronological view moves so fast and is not very useful. So there you go, the numbers. Coming up sometime soon, my own reflections on teaching. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, English professor at University of Maryland, blogs about comment blogging a different mode of effective participation in the blog world simply by using the comment space of other weblog. Kirschenbaum cites how François Lachance effectively is part of the world of blogging without his having his own blog. Presumably François has in mind something like this. I take his point, and think I can predict the range of theoretical positions such a "blog" (should we call it a comment blog?) might be said to occupy: this is blogging in the margins, distributed blogging at the interstices of the discourse network. François appears on no one's blogroll, his entries are not tracked by blogdex or weblogs.com or similar sites. He is an utter non-entity in the standard ecological renderings of the blogosphere, yet he unquestionably has a presence "here." This is precisely, and even more eloquently stated, the point I tried to make in the BlogActing: (blogging is a social process) section of our BlogShop- that blogging is more than writing and publishing your own- it is reading, reflecting, contradicting in the comment-space of other blogs. tip of the blog hat to jill/txt for a pointer to this one Featured Image (added Jan 6, 2020) Cropped top half to better fit featured image area from: https://flickr.com/photos/medmss/12753717913 Macrobius' Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, Marginal diagram gloss, Walters Manuscript W.22, fol. 8v flickr photo by Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yeah, even in the early days it was all about sex online... No it wasn't, that was the unfortunate "special theme" for this September 1996 issue of "the net" magazine. I found this mint copy, along with the CD-ROM, in my Box of Old Job Stuff. The reason I have kept this is not because of the Special 16 Page Report, but because my first web project at Maricopa Community College that got attention was featured in this issue (No, my first web project was NOT abut sex, get yer minds outta the gutter). cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The magazine had a mention of Writing HTML (still alive at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/), a guide I published on the web back in 1994 and kept piling on for the next 6 years or so. I had an odd thought looking at this magazine that back in this time, the best way to help people understand what was on the web was not done online, but in print magazines (well there was the NCSA Mosaic What's New Page which stopped being updated in 1996)). One more time- the effective way to share resources and interesting web sites was via printed screenshots and URLs. There was likely some online version of this, but the web was just on the cusp of being seen as useful, and still a few years away from being something people knew about widely. So let's go back and see what was relevant in 1996 (besides online sex). A new web search engine was out, "InfoSeek" to try and compete with Lycos, Yahoo, WebCrawler, excite NetNoir has a new interactive storytelling adventure called "African Story Lines"- NetNoir is still around as one of the first African-American web sites. Look at the instructions "You can reach NetNoir via America Online via keyword NetNoir or the World Wide Web at http://www.netnoir.com/) -- AOL was seen as the more familiar gateway, and this new fangled thing we just now call "the web" was the World Wide Web. Listed under "education" is Cells Alive which was done originally to promote the capabilities of a graphic design company, but is s reference that still lives now at http://www.cellsalive.com/ "The world waited with baited breath for the release of the World Wide Web Browser Netscape Navigator 2.0" - the bug new feature was the new plugin architecture that allowed technologies like Acrobat, Quicktime, Java to load in a web page rather than external applications. "Navigator is still a buggy an doften unwieldy creature, though. It hordes memory and it crashes with alarming consistency." Internet Explore did not even exist; the other browsers were NCSA Mosaic, WinWeb, and MacWeb. The Spot was highlighted as a web tv show, what we would call a reality show (it is still up at http://www.thespot.com/) "this site follows the affairs, happenings, and ups and downs pf five hot Los Angelinos. They live in a sprawling, seven bedroom beach house with a 42-year history as a carousing and partying site." There is a feature article on "Web Word Processors: Using the HTMl Extensions of Word and WordPerfeect" The author compared the features of Microsoft Word 7.0 for Windows 95 and Novell's WordPerfect (version 6.1 for Windows and 3.5 for Mac). The first video conferencing tool I recall is described here "A Basic Guide to CU-SeeMe"- software that was invented at Cornell University. "While CU-SeeMe is a cool way to communicate (if nothing else) there are still problems with using video and audio over the net... Even with the high bandwidth of a T1 line, I rarely, if ever, received more than 5 frames oer second of video form other CU-SeeMe users... Modem users will have more problems than those on ISDN or T1 lines. Transmissions can almost be useless at 14.4 modem speeds (and audio won't work at 14.4) with only a bit of improvement at 28.8" What a long way we have come! The music sites reviewed included CDNow! and EMusic- both front ends for ordering audio CDs- digital music online? hah, not in 1996. Microsoft was proposing a standard specification for secure financial transactions, Secure Transaction Technology (STT) - I am not sure if it really exists, as everything now is done under SSL (secure sockets layer) that NetScape developed. There's a lot more, but this bit of back browsing is interesting to see the state of the net in 1996- hey is this what you were looking for in terms of turning the clock back, Martha? I have an extra copy of the magazine I can bring out to F'burg if it might be of use to you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BBZVQ4zBcU Stuff goes wrong, what do you do? Wait for the gong or just keep the patter going? Last Thursday I was slated to do a half hour session for Thom Cochrane (Auckland University of Technology) who is leading a multi-institutional New Zealand project on mobile learning. He asked me to do a 10 minute mini version of the Affordances of Open Learning talk I did last month at AUT. I actually had thought I could do it previously, but my calendar got unraveled with my travel to Canada, and twice I had to cancel. GONG. As much as I love the live show format and that Google Hangouts automatically archives them (and fast), every time I run one, it feels... https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/458790128639418369 About an hour before, I had remembered that there was a hitch with screen sharing presentations; Hangouts can only share a window that is already active, so anything that goes full screen (Keynote, Powerpoint) cannot be shared because that full screen is actually a new window. You can try it yourself- Chrome still blanks on the GIFs. GONG I did a quick test, and exported my presentation to HTML from local files. I opened in Chrome. Blank screen. GONG. But it did play in Safari, in a normal browser window. So that I can share. With more time I would have tried a Google Doc Presentations, but I recall having trouble getting the animated GIFs to export. And I need my GIFs. Thom fired up the hangout, invited 3 or 4 guests, and we were set to go. Escept that the button to go live for him was non functional. GONG. So we had to restart the hangout. I kept getting server errors on joining til about the 4th try. 1/4 GONG. But we eventually were in motion. I went to screen sharing from Safari, and just talked talked away. Since I could not see the hangout screen... well when I returned to it, the screen was blank. And my connection to the wireless network was gone. BIG GONG. I joined a second network and was able to log back in; they said I disappeared about 1/2 way in. So I repeated what I thought I said. Obviously this is not optimal, but I consider it my loving example that technology can let you down, and the only recourse is to keep going. If you want to see the whole Gong Show (and how Thom just keeps rolling too), well, it's your time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he-DYOIY8Co If it's going to be a Gong Show, it might as well be Gene Gene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuJHKVQ2kLA As best I can find from old posts, I started messing around with making a WordPress theme to provide a functionality of the ds106 Assignment Bank in July of 2013. So while lumped in as a SPLOT, it was actually pre-SPLOT. Like anyone cares. But it's really one of my favorites to use in projects with the biggest example being the UDG Agora Challenge Bank. It's a bit more complex to set up, but I have been amazed with for example, the use of it at UBC Open Learning Challenges. One place that has taken a liking to the bank is Middlebury College, so when a DM came from Amy Collier asking a question how to tweak something, I as eager to make changes. I may be spoiling a debut, but see what her team has started with the Teaching & Learning Knowledge Base: A bank of teaching ideas from Middlebury College, built on the ds106 Bank theme. As usual, when others use one of my themes, they help highlight use cases and situations I had not anticipated. Amy's timing was good, as I had a few windows of attention before the OE Global 2020 conference last week consumed me. The first one was a bit easier. Amy asked about the wording below a "Thing". The generic name (internally called a "Thing") for what in the original was an "Assignment" but can be recast in the theme options as a "Challenge" or "Make". For her new site, it does not really work as the "thing" is a "Teaching Idea". It is awkward to say "Complete this Teaching Idea": Since everything submitted is called a "response" it was easy to update the template for this section with a verb of "respond" in place of "complete": Respond to This After you respond to this please share a link to it and a description so it can be added to the ones listed below. Now it reads a little bit better: I was able to send Amy a link to a revised version of a single template in the theme that she could download and replace on her site (the change is around line 167). Ah, but then another request: May I request help with one additional Assignment Bank change? Currently, when someone tries to submit a Teaching Idea, there is a required field for them to add a URL for the idea. While sometimes useful, there may not always be an associated URL for the teaching idea. Is there any way to change that required field to optional within the code? If so, how might I do that? This was the part of the submission form Amy was asking about: You see. this had some of my own bias built in. It happens. I always felt for ds106 or anything where you are putting up something you are asking others to do (be it an assignment, a creative activity), I believe you should do one yourself (or find one) as an example. That's the way to not only provide an example, but really testing out your instructions. But that's my own preference. And maybe that does not need to be required for a teaching idea. This one took a little more than a single template change (it was three). The fix I took was to allow entry of "n/a" in the field where it asked for a web address: This means that error checking on this field tests if the entry is a valid URL or the string "n/a". And when it's time to display an example, it skips this spot of there is no example. It's hardly ground-breaking code work here, but I am happy when I can make some small adjustments to my themes that not only make it better for one site, but in the end, others. There are about 23 examples of this theme in action-- by no means massive, but at least it seem useful for maybe 20 other people. And all it points back to the legacy of the original DS106 Assignment Bank the idea that was launched in a Skype call in December 2010 and put into play shortly after so cleverly by Martha Burtis in the first open DS106 (there's a spiraling post on this tale). This is still running and working now 10 years later. Checking the stats baked into the front page, in this bank "As of Nov 24, 2020 this collection includes 993 ds106 assignments and 17175 examples created from them."http://assignments.ds106.us/ I remain inspired by this basic concept I returned after a long while to add one more assignment. Because I can. Because you can. And this is the reason why I wanted to try back in 2013 to make a generalized version of this site as a theme that others could use. And here in 2020? The concept seems as viable as ever. The Bank is solid. But it can use a few bricks patched up every now and then. Feature Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/10814919444 Bank On It flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today's ds106 Daily Create is a Drawing challenge, for which, as usual I reach for the Paper 53 app on my iPad. Make a detailed drawing of one of your own eyes. My plan was to take a self photo with my iPhone (for some reason, I am unable to look directly into the camera because I look at the screen which is not the lens), and then cropping / zooming it in on the eye: It's not a great photo at this zoom, but propped up was good enough to use to draw from on my iPad. In Paper 53, I brushed in a pink skin tone (thinking like layers, this is the base, in the corners, leaving an eye shaped hole. I traced the shape of the eye, the eye ball, and the crease lines using the pencil tools. Then it was just using the brush to fill in the colors, and the pencil/pen tools to put some details like eye lashes. Those white shapes are supposed to be the reflections of light in the original. What I like about this is the ds106 way of an activity getting you to notice something in much more detail then you normally do. How often do you try and see every detail in your own eye? I remember thinking I always had brown eyes, until I dated someone as a teen ager who said, no, they are hazel. Hazel? What is that beside the maid on that old tv show? But it did help to know they were not just brown. And even today, in looking at that detail, I found myself using tans and a tinge of orange for the core and trying to fade it into a more green/steel grey color for the rest of the eyeball. And noticing even more, maybe just the photo, but there is a very very subtle rim of pale violet around the edge of the white of the eye (which, is not white, but sort of mottled with all kinds of vein texture). So there we go, an worthwhile stretch of drawing and noticing for today's TDC, an investment of maybe 25 minutes. What about your daily create? It's never too late to start-- no pressure. You don't have to draw an exact replica of your eye-- what if it was abstract? metaphorical? a collage? There is no judgment, assessment of daily creates, so anything you try is better than good, it is teh awesome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubHn4xEnRP8 Create something every day, it helps deal with all the other depressing other stuff in the world. I do not need any social media reminder service to tell me who's birthday is today; May 2 is always etched with being my Dad's birthday. Today he would have been 93, but alas his odometer ran out at 72. I do this math, and figure out that when my dad was the age I am now, I would have been 19. How do I measure up? It reminds me of about the same age difference in this old photo, with my Dad as maybe a teen, and his own father. Undated personal photo of my Dad and grandfather. Often when I think of Dad, I think of the way he organized and took care of his tools, there was the corner of our unfinished basement with them nearly organized. He had a giant metal toolbox of shiny sockets and wrenches, remainders from his short stint as an owner of a gas station in the 1950s. I had wished I would have gotten that box, but after his death Mom had given it to the neighborhood handyman, who likely made better use of it than I would have. I remember something calming about sometimes just standing in that space of his in the basement, while he was off at work or napping or put cutting grass. I can almost get the basement dust smell, and the sense of filtered light through the old windows. So I have these cherished tools of Dad in my own (unorganized) toolbox. Finding them, holding the tools he once feels, is my connection today. Holding Dad's tools- this image will be uploaded to flickr tonight, and shared under a CC0 license. I remember that old screwdriver, most of the paint worn, the metal sleeve that never stayed in place- that was the one Dad always used to pop open cans of paint. The old chisel was part of a set I did take from Mom's house, a soft pouch of various sized ones that he used for the years he did work as a brick layer. This was after the time he had struggled in University, the experience his parents tried to force on him, and when he decided to be a craftsman like his father and father's father. I regret I never got to learn the bricklaying craft from him. Dad was a bricklayer The Vice Grips plier was not strictly one of my Dad's tools, but a story. I remember a time when he helped me fix a wheel on my bike. I could not turn the bolt with a wrench. Rather than him doing it for me, I remember him showing me the way a Vice Grip wrench gave extra leverage. Tools were important things to Dad, and they are to me as well. He often stressed about taking good care of one's tools. I do not have to go any farther with this metaphor, do I? Happy birthday Dad, and thanks for all the tools you showed me. Among my favorite memories are seeing him emerge with his big ____ eating grin from braving the big waves at Ocean City. I love you, Dad. Dad coming out of the waves... family photo It could be I am just out of coding shape or there is more to this reshaping of the ds106 Assignment Bank than it seems. I'd hedge money on the former, but not for ling. This afternoon was spent doing more inside shuffling and some important theme adjustments. But now at least we have a front end where the menu of assignment types are generated dyanmically: Nothing is pretty yet, but the boxes each represent a "term" or something like a category within the taxonomy of Assignment Types- this means, you can create your own list of categories for assignments like making categories in wordpress posts, and the front page will automatically update to reflect these. Ultimately you will be able to create / upload icons, and the theme will have options to have it sort by name, order added, and.or maybe the number of items within each one. I am thunking you will be able to define upfront what you want to call these "Things to Do" - "Assignments" or "Challenges" or "Tasks" or "Fish Heads". And I have a start at generating the basics of the views of one of these Once formatted and filled out with the other parts of information, it will do pretty much what you find on this kind of page at ds106. Ok, there is not much there. But its important to work out a framework that will be flexible, trying to envision situations I am not expecting. A few chunks of time was spent undoing what I said last time -- on further thinking it becomes more important for the ds106 Banker Theme to be a full child theme, especially as I am adding overrides for a number of the template files. The way the parent Wp-Bootstrap themes is set up is not quite the same, it loads the style sheets via a function, but after some research on the dev site, I found they had fixed a situation that was making it hard for people to add their custom CSS on top-- the parent theme is set to call the child theme styles after it loads it own, so there is no need in the child for an @import ../wp-bootstrap/style.css For any developers out there, its useful to know the different between a function like: get_stylesheet_directory() which will return the directory path for the active theme or a child theme if it is a child theme. This is different from get_template_directory() which always gets the parent theme directory in a parent-child relationship. The responsive Bootstrap theme will mean the content should flex itself to fill whatever screen size is there. I am planning to put any widgets in the footer and kill the sidebar ones. If this is done correctly, it can still be in a blog that has its own blog posts (can be used for news, etc, commentary). I lost a good chunk of dev time this week with jury duty, but am hoping a few more solid days of code banging next week might have it close to be something ready to let some people try it on. The later phases will be moving the options out of being hard coded and into editable theme options. That is brand new territory, but conceptually it looks straight forward If there are things you are hoping to see in this kind if site, now is a good time to lay down your requests. Keep your eye on the dev site at http://bank.ds106.us and development notes here at http://cogdogblog.com/tag/building106 More Moo Goodness by cogdogblog posted 2 Aug '08, 6.19pm MDT PST on flickr My moo note cards arrived today! I got a set of 16 cards with photos from my journeys to Australia. Yep, got more moo card goodies- my set of 16 notecards came today; I made a set of selected photos from my trips to Australia. Not seen is the text I put on the inside (which also includes photo information, link, etc): Some glimpses of but a few beautiful places within Australia! I want to see more... What can I say but I do believe in the Six Million Dollar Man, but not Bigfoot... Now hold on to your comments, kids. I believe in Serendipity, I live and breathe its fumes for all of my online career.. How else might I have gotten to house sit for a month in Iceland, have a German Rock Band use my photo for cover of a CD, or get invited to do a month of workshops/presentations in Australia crammed into two weeks?? I would think "Serendipity" is my middle name. But Serendipity is not a thing. You do not create it or cause it or make it.. it happens. This has been rolling around in the part of my brain that carefully organizes drafts for blog posts (hah) after Deen Shareski-d Pursuing Intentional Serendipity. Now, as usual, I agreed, grokked, nodded with all Dean wrote: I think the phrase I'm looking for is intentional serendipity. I think it's Peter Skillen's term but there may be others using a similar concept. In a world where play and wonder should really be considered essential dispositions, our education rarely values learning that isn't somehow tied to a chosen standard or outcome. and he goes on to relate the typical, serendipitous type of thing that happens when you participate in open spaces (in this case, a conference thing that was amped up by interactions from the tweet thing). But it is this phrase "intentional serendipity" that has been nagging at me, in the semantic construct (if I knew what that meant I would explain, but it sounds like PhD stuff). Dean links to the blog post with this title by Peter Skillen, where really he describes the same spirit of allowing for serendipity to happen. In Peter's case, the phrase in the name he gives his computer; I guess because it is the starting point for his actions that end up in serendipitous acts. I just do not want to give the impression to anyone that they can go about and do things and expect the serendipity to happen, to make it intentional. @cogdog As chairman of the Cormier award's committee i hereby confirm you as a Doctor of Philosophy in the internets.— dave cormier (@davecormier) January 12, 2012 It cant be serendipity and intentional, because serendipity is accidental (go ahead and take away my honorary Dave Cormier degree for quoting Wikipedia): Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages. Julius H. Comroe once described serendipity as "to look for a needle in a haystack and get out of it with the farmer's daughter". Even if Wikipedia is full of crap, I love tis jumping off point for the word's source (my emphasis added): The first noted use of "serendipity" in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717"“1792). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa or golden island (some trace the etymology to Simhaladvipa which literally translates to "Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island"). And oh where the tangents lead... William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: "making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design". A zemblanity is, effectively, an "unpleasant surprise". It derives from Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla), a cold, barren land with many features opposite to the lush Sri Lanka (Serendip). On this island Willem Barents and his crew were stranded while searching for a new route to the east. I think many of you work in places where zemblanity is a common practice? Why am I carrying on about this when I agree with the sentiments? Because I think the distinction of operating in a mode where your actions are aimed not at gaining the results of serendipity (expecting the happy accidents), but by doing things that in general, create a potential energy for happy accidents to happen. It's a bit I started talking about the last time I did a talk on Amazing Stories of Openness. If you act in the Open mindset, e.g. start sharing your work openly, connecting and commenting on the work of others, contribute ideas to projects elsewhere that interest you -- rhere is absolutely no guarantee that any of these amazing things (invited trips overseas, having your photos appear in published books, getting job offers) will happen to you. I believe it becomes more likely. BUT... if you do not do any sharing or open activities, I can certainly guarantee you that no Amazing Stories will happen to you. It is... as Nancy White said the first time I did these "Openness is not just about open resources, it is about open attitudes". In my mind, serendipity is not intentional, nor is it a thing we can pursue-- it is a force generated as a secondary (or many-ary) results of our actions of sharing, helping, contributing. It is when we create a potential opportunity for the unexpected to happen, when we step out of our status quo or usual circles (one example why twitter matters much more than Facebook/Google+ for the greater opportunity to hear from people I do not know). It comes about again in this short piece on Structured Serendipity by Jason Zweig for the Edge 2011 Question. Zweig, a financial columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writes here about his technique for being creative in his writing- he reads from sources not normally in hos field AND he physically changes the environment where he does his reading (my emphasis added): It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field that is new to me "” and to read it in a different place.New associations often leap out of the air at me this way; more intriguingly, others seem to form covertly and then to lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to force these associations out into the open; they are like shrinking mimosa plants that crumple if you touch them but bloom if you leave them alone.Robert Merton argued that many of the greatest discoveries of science have sprung from serendipity. As a layman and an amateur, all I hope to accomplish by throwing myself in serendipity's path is to pick up new ideas, and combine old ones, in ways that haven't quite occurred to other people yet. So I let my curiosity lead me wherever it seems to want to go, like that heart-shaped piece of wood that floats across a Ouija board.I do this remote-reading exercise on my own time, since it would be hard to justify to newspaper editors during the work day. But my happiest moments this autumn came as I reported an investigative article on how elderly investors are increasingly being scammed by elderly con artists. I later realized, to my secret delight, that the article had been enriched by a series of papers I had been reading on altruistic behavior among fish (Lambroides dimidiatus).If I do my job right, my regular readers will never realize that I spend a fair amount of my leisure time reading Current Biology, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. If that reading helps me find new ways to understand the financial world, as I suspect it does, my readers will indirectly be smarter for it. If not, the only harm done is my own spare time wasted.In my view, we should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces. This kind of structured serendipity just might help us become more creative, and I doubt that it can hurt. I really connect to this idea of reaching outside of our familiar places/sources of information, and for doing so without a direct purpose, and that the things we come across in doing this might never come up again, but just might, as sort of a sub conscious absorption, become something that makes for a model or a metaphor when we are trying to be creative. To me this goes for any field, and seeding ourselves with ideas from different places cannot but help by a fuel for the work we do, down the road. https://flickr.com/photos/jef_safi/505652237 cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by jef safi (writing) If I were of the resolution making type, I might state to try this approach more. Featured Image: Cropped from original... https://flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/4756665496 ... six million dollar man and bigfoot! flickr photo by x-ray delta one shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license A little record spin horn tooting for a US Forest Service document published with two of my photos in it. I do volunteer work with a local organization that raises funds for and then does the manual work of, expanding a system of hiking/biking trails around Pine and Strawberry, Arizona (I am working on a web site for them, still in draft, will be at http://pstrails.org/). But I often take photos during our work session, sometimes for publishing stories for now on another local site. This included a series of stories (1, 2, 3) from March 2016 when we worked to install a bridge on the Bearfoot trail across a Pine Creek. I was contacted more than a year ago from someone in the US Forest Service seeking permission to use two of my photos in the publication National Strategy for a Sustainable Trail System. They did not seem to care about Creative Commons licensing, so I did fill out some kind of release document. It's finally out, and I got my copy in the mail today (the web version PDF does not seem to match the print). [caption id="attachment_65875" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Cover of the US Forest Service National Strategy for a Sustainable Trail System; that's not my photo on the cover, but it is a photo in Tonto National Forest where I live near.[/caption] My photos appear on page 3 on the page for "Shifting to a Model of Shared Stewardship" [caption id="attachment_65876" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Those are my two photos on the bottom of page 3[/caption] [caption id="attachment_65877" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Close up of my two photos[/caption] That top photo is a volunteer named John, who is well known among us for creating the finishing touches on the smoothest trail stretches: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]John The Trail Smoother flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] And the other is a group lead who are assembling the bridge beams [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Bridge Assembly Day on Pine Creek flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] This might be among my proudest reuse of photos. Thanks Forest Service! See more photos of our trail work https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/tags/pstrails Update Mar 3, 2018 Very proud indeed! https://twitter.com/USFSSouthwest/status/969961345155149826 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/969963667134517249