Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Linktributions Ahoy? by cogdogblog posted 21 Oct '08, 5.27pm MDT PST on flickr Are more people using "my made-up term? Will it some-day make it as a Word of the Year? (hah, down ego, down....) I got a nice little tweet from @eemann who discovered linktribution and Google now finds about 1400 instances-- though I am sure about 800 are from my own blog, and another 580 are from people's blogs where my trackbacks have landed there, but that leaves maybe 20 people who picked it up. Long-tail meme? I still assert the power of the simple mighty tiny link. Likewise, I am franchising out to twitterbution given a twitter shout out and/or a link to a tweet-status when someone gives you something worthy via twitter. Already has 34 of them! Or is it thanking them via twitter? I dunno. Send your link love today. Everyone loves inbound links, so crank out some outbound ones. The best thing in my email box today, or maybe this month, was a message from Michael at the University of Cape Town: Hi, Last year your 'Amazing Stories of Openness' provided excellent fuel for our campaign for open scholarship at the University of Cape Town. I now have an amazing story of openness to share with you! It would be great to add it to your collection, if you are still curating it. One of our open educational resources contributors had her shared content picked up by a journal in Spain. As a result, her work has been published in the Journal and translated to Spanish. This is a great case for the open sharing of academic work as openness here led to the publishing of a journal article. See the blog post below for the details. http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct/2010/11/12/from-uct-opencontent-to-a-journal-article And like the other stories (plus the set added in 2010), this was not necessarily huge Change the World Amazing, but just one more bit of goodness wrought by openness, or how Michael frames it: This is a great example of how openness can lead to benefits for people working in academia. It's not all about giving it away for free; it's about operating transparently so that others can see all the great work we are doing. Operating openly allows us to make connections with other people and have opportunities that would not be possible in a closed system. The internet enables this openness; we just need to embrace it! In this case someone found Matumo's teaching materials and considered them so valuable that they wanted to share them more widely though the journal. Matumo still gets all of the credit for the article and can add a publication her list of accolades! With some more details from a news story about this, we learn that Matumo Ramafikeng's story started when as a Masters student she was doing some lectures as a stand in, and at the suggestion of another colleague, expanded her lecture notes into something much more on the UCT's OpenContent Directory (http://opencontent.uct.ac.za/). The material helped her students locally, but because it was shared openly, was discovered by and published in a paper in a Spanish journal. You do not get Amazing with your stuff tied up inside a CMS or a locked down repository. Just look at what can happen at http://opencontent.uct.ac.za/. To Michael's question and anyone else among the tens of thousand Amazing stories out there, you don't need me to collect stories or produce videos. Blog it, but do more- answer the call and record your own story in video format- it is much much more Amazing if you tell your own story, in your own voice and words. I'd love to add more. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Still catching up on the slices of life audio reflection, this one almost two weeks old. ALways Be 'Poligizing for being behind? This audio recording is from January 26, the morning I left home in Strawberry Arizona, for the 220 mile express trip to Virginia. Slices of Life 008: Leaving Arizona I am going to miss these Big Blue Skies cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In many ways, this was eerily similar to the day I left on my 5 month odyssey in June 2011, but also very different. At that time was unsure if I could even live the road life; would I hate it? I of course found it I could manage living out of Big Red and being mobile for few months, and that home was always in Strawberry even if I wasn't. I know now too that if I need to I can do 500, 600, 700 miles in a day. I reflected on my section of ds106, a class I will be teaching in person at University of Mary Washington. Last night was third session I did remotely via Skypa (a huge Arizona sky sized thanks to Jim Groom who has been present for my students, and set up the two way video liv stream) This is far from an optimal way to teach this way; It is hard for me to see, hard to hear audio clearly via skype (especially since I had busted m laptop and was using my iPhone- students are tiny!). I cant read body language, and really I am "sort of not there". But it was just a bridge needed to give me time to get across the country. So far, 20 of my 25 students have their domains and wordpress blogs set up, done with minimal direction -- I agree with Jim that it's a lesson in not relying totally on the course or the teacher to provide answers, that they will need to figure out things on their own, with their pal. Half of these have already customized their themes. Last night's session was the discussion of Gardner Campbell's talk on No Digital Facelift and paper on Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Stealing/borriwing/co-opting on of Gardner's own classtoom techniques, I had asked them to think about "nuggets" within reading or video- a key sentence or phrase that grabbed their interest, curiosity as starting points for discussions. I provided Jim a few YouTube links that use the technique to point to a particular timecode to start playing, examples: Bag of gold http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=02m50s Digital facelift http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=10m15s Little big planet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=18m50s Small things can be meaningful http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=33m20s I also had Jim show some examples of how te "bags of gold" became a bit of a viral meme last year. e.g. Tim's Kinetic Typography, Tom Woodward audio remix, Giulia Forsythe's visual notes, Barbara Dieu's video remox -- in all of these, these show visual ways of drawing out different nuggets of the talk. I tried to start with a discussion of "What is bag of gold? what does it mean to you?" ... awkward silence. But the discussion picked up next when we moved to "what is a visual facelift". It was interesting that students felt Gardner was advocating a total technology makeover for teaching, which got into the most active state as they debated what could and could not be taught online. I for one have not come across anyone advocating that surgery could eb taught completely online. Class closed with an attenmt to describe what Personal Cyberinfrastructure means- asked student to read passage out loud (borrowed again technique from from Gardner): Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline. "” American Council of Learned Societies, Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006 We do have an archive of this class http://vimeo.com/35725367 And posts from this assignment are available at http://ds106.us/tag/pci I then speculated what to do next week with Storytelling- introduce examples of web storytelling? The slice closed with a personal memory of my trip return to this road in November, where I crossed the 15,000 mile mark and getting an iPod shuffled memory of my Mom, She's a Rainbow" Driving north from the Ponderosa Forest into the pinyon pine forest and eventual sage brush high desert terrain near Winslow, I marveled at how subtle wast this transition from forest to high plains, not clear where one begins and other ends -- life is gradational http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2810674928/ cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by sebastien.barre For this week's live broadcast of the ds106 group radio shows I came up with an entirely new contraption for managing different sources, in contrat to my previous methods of using Nicecast. I still prefer using Nicecast, and do so for voice broadcasts or voice mixed with music (DJing)- but in the past I have ran into problems doing it with something like Skype as one of the sources, though I have mixed it in with the application mixer, the missing piece is for someone on Skype to be able to hear back what is on the stream. The new thing in the mix is the free Icecast broadcastng software, Ladiocast. I cobbled together the approach below with a combination of Tim Owen's Ladiocast tutorial (critical for setting up Ladiocast) and Scott Lockman's setup for doing his Second Life to Google Hangout broadcasts. This post is a long scroller! Go long! (more…) This is fun. The huge database of more than 7 million books people have collected in their accounts at LibraryThing (oops, that one is on my list of things yet tried) is mined in a way you might have not thought anyone would want. The "UnSuggestor" takes a book title you enter, and from the accumulated data, picks the book least likely owned in the same collection: Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest. The unsuggestions come from LibraryThing data, not from Amazon. LibraryThing also produces great suggestions. So consider yourself odd if you own both pairs of books? Well-rounded? a Library? I am not sure what one might use this for, but clearly someone looked at the LibraryThing data pile sideways, and said, "what would happen if we did this?" A linktribution goes to Platypus Matt at Kairosnews. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'm in deep infatuated camera love with my nifty fifty f1/4 50mm lens- its what I use on my camera 90% of the time. Why? Why not- I get my sharpest photos and it lets me do amazing things in low light. It just works. And we do well with what works, what is comfortable, like the best pair of worn jeans, cowboy boots, or easy chair. Ye, there is something to be said by forcing yourself out of that zone. I read a photography guide somewhere that said once in a while, pick a lens you do not normally use and see what you can do with that exclusively I had that happen by my sheer clumsiness on a trip this summer when I dropped and broke the 50mm in Flagstaff, so I shot a whole day at the Grand Canyon with the wide angle. Today I decided to do a walk around the heavenly place I am staying in Vermont, using just my Big Gun, the 300mm L series, a rather inflexible lens since that is all it does, no zoom. My usual reach for it is to do distance shots, like wildlife, but I spend about 90 minutes with it today. It really is one I do not feel all that comfortable with- w are cordial, but the relationship is still a bit hands off. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This same lesson is not limited to cameras- it goes for software too. Once investing enough energy into a tool, we can get reluctant to use others, even indignant to their potential. I would rather not use any other thing for my image work than Photoshop, but given most of my students do not have access to it, I feel like I should try and use the ones they might use- even though I find learning and using something like GIMP uphill. It is something I am trying to find a way to formulate to my ds106 students- in their freedom to choose assignments at will from our collection I see a tendency for them to chose the simplest ones, the ones that can just click a few buttons on a web site generator or in a mobile app to achieve the result. It seems to be about just producing the required result. I think this is fine for some of their work, as long as they do a bit more on the behind the scene part, e.g. writing up their thinking behind the work. They do not always do this. There seems to be just a mad rush to Quickly Produce Something To Get the Points. They are mistaking the goal to be the product as opposed to what I want to see more of, the thinking and creative process that gets them there. And so I do not think students are getting much out of this course if they are not struggling and working to figure out how to be creative in tools like GIMP, Audacity, etc. Because if they can get a few basics of understanding, the tool becomes an amplifier for their ability to create, as it can be used for much of their other work. Being able to create a funny picture at Zombify or Meme Generator is creative yes, but not something you can really extend to other areas of their thinking and writing and creating. It is limiting, like a cheap plastic lens. I spent about 2 hours today trying to reproduce something I can do in one menu command in Photoshop, but using GIMP. Yes, it is not as easy, but now I have a better understanding of some of the layer and selection options in this software. And I can explain it to someone else. Thus I think mobile apps and one off web site tools are a poor short cut approach to ds106. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Learning to create with our tools that are not always our first choice, or may be challenging to use is the place where you really start to transcend your perceived capabilities. Yet here it is on a Sunday night when ds106 work is due at midnight, and I fully know I am going to see the usual "wohm back" dump druck approach to assignment work. I am seeing signs in a few of my students of breaking out of that mindset, but not many. Maybe I am too hopeful or have unrealistic expectations, but squandering your chance to really flex and grow your creative muscles when you can take the way way out is... well bot doing much for your own learning experience. So if you are feeling pretty good at something, or think you have the hang of it, take some time to maybe dropping your favorite tool and pick one you might not use that often, or ever. Just for a while. You may fully decide it is not worth doing. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This opportunities to stretch are mainly of our own making, when we decide which of those two paths in the woods to take. It's as a difference of taking some leaps and stretches that can be ones that amplify our potential geometrically, rather than just piling up more chips arithmetically on the predictable path. 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 I've been hibernating but not necessarily in a subconscious state. First it was the Thanksgiving cold that decided to stay at least a week. Then it was the rush at the deadline of our Learning Grants applications, our internal grants program that has a 100% online application and review system (which means about 100% of my time watching over for minor glitches and helping people find the Big Giant Submit button). Then it was/is making the last dash for our Wednesday release of the new MCLI iForum publication. Then it was about 4 simultaneous requests for quick turn round event registration sites, 3 of which required extra custom programming. Then it was chilling up in Strawberry for 4 days (we hit the low 20s F last night). Then it was... well, it is getting tedious. I rather feel like headplanting in the sand until the din and blabber (not the fun kind) of endless takes and broad claims of Twitter demise, Fediversitopia subsides. Oh I have something maybe to say, but I'd rather build stuff and tinker that toss sermons. Out of curiosity and exploration and something of a refreshing DIY SPLJ, I am dabbIing/tinkering in the fedispace. It's been a topic that finally sparked activity in the OEG Connect space. And I believe, as of current count I have one, no two, wait three, maybe four... um five Mastodon accounts I am tending. Then again, as I peek into my Tweetdeck, I have 10 additional accounts I can spew bird noise from. Yet this post is about how pursuit of one publishing solution to the new place led me in a different direction, and a useful methodology now I can flex like I know what I am talking about. I do not. But I have a gizmo I can flex now. I love that word, I will take the Wiktionary definition "Something, generally a device, for which one does not know the proper term." More technically... As it happened before it came from DS106... Featured image for some old blog post Or maybe for DS106. Once Jim Groom took the nudge to figure out how to spin up Mastodon in the Reclaim Hosting cloud gizmo (see, thingamagig!) and launch a place for DS106 I was starting to think how it might be possible to wire up the DS106 Daily Create (well into its 10th year, never missed a day, and zeroing in on the 4000th TDC, one has to hum the song Where Have All the MOOCs Gone) to join Tootland. Enabling Mastodon into the Fray of the Daily Create Having built the Daily Blank WordPress theme that runs it (and several cousins) I know conceptually it should be able to tap into the Mastodon API (note I have never done that) to get replies to a specific account, parse them to find daily hashtags, and add them to the Daily Create site as responses. There's a number of moving parts: Create a DS106 Daily Create Mastodon account Get the Daily Create WordPress site to auto publish new posts to a Mastodon Account Figure out how to get replies to that account via Mastodon API How to parse the replies to find hashtags Add each reply as is done in twitter, to the WordPress content type that houses them Figure out how to embed the Toots from a URL Plus a few more bits about updating the way posts are published, adding a taxonomy to organize the responses sources, adding more options to the theme options.... well a lot more. Now Homed In Mastodon Not going in order, embedding from a URL turns out to be easy: https://cogdogblog.com/2022/11/toot-embed/ For point 1, that was easy -- now if you are somewhere in the fedivserse, because it is federated, no matter where you instance, you can find, follow, and lavish praise to whomever runs @tdc@social.ds106.us Posting/Tooting (whatever) to Mastodon Now to point 2 I thought I had that solved with a WordPress plugin, Autopost to Mastodon. I am using it right here on this blog, pretty easy to set up. Well, except as I toyed with in that post, it leaves behind the alt text for the featured image. But I set it up on the Daily Create site, and it worked. Well it over worked, this morning. It double posted. That might not be such a bad thing, but something is awry. Then... be the time I got back to check the Autopost to Mastodon Plugin there is a note that it's now closed to downloads. Lights out. I mean, it still works on sites where its installed, but no developer is going to respond to my petty issues. Someone suggested Mastodon Autoshare, which looked almost exactly the same. I have it cued up to run tonight. I am thinking its a problem with the schedule post mode of the Daily Create? And before someone chimes in about the ActivityPub plugin i have used it before- the problem is that it becomes its own instance in a way, and does not show up in Mastodon as an account one can reply to or access replies via an API. I think it is time to back away from WordPress plugins. Actually for tweeting Daily Creates, I use the dlvr.it service that polls the site's RSS feeds. Alas, they do not know what the heck Mastodon is. Yes... IFTTT FTW Then I wondered about the versatile IFTTT. This is an undervalued way to do some magical things to connect web sites to do what you want them to do, rather than just taking what they offer. It's the spirit of the old Yahoo Pipes, a bit more simple and clicky click to set up. You create first a "trigger" in one service (if This happens here) and then a response to take some of the info provided and send it to another service (Then That). I did not see Mastodon listed as an IFTTT service, but on a whim, I tried the Google Gizmo and found How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT on a blog called K-Squared Ramblings ("Sci-fi, comics, humor, photos…it's all fair game" -- another example of someone who does not have to go back to blogging because Kelson has not stopped). In this case I can use as a the IFT trigger the RSS feed from the Daily Create site (RSS as the paleo web technology that most everybody gave up on and just keeps working), then the trigger is a new item appears. The trickier part is you have to create a custom "Webhook" aka a "Web Request" for the TT - this is a custom action that a receiving site, like Mastodon, has to be set up to allow that IFTTT can connect with via a request over the web. And it does. The steps described worked perfectly, as usual, it took a few mis and back steps but it's not too hard. Maybe the one I missed fired was ... the first one. Easy enough to create an IFTTT Webhook, follow the link, and click a Create button. The not so easy part was finding where the heck it was! Kelson's article has the link, otherwise, I am not sure from the IFTTT site where I would ever find it. Creating the Application in your Mastodon Instance was also easy to follow Kelson's steps, just find it in your account Preferences. You need that URL from IFTTT that identifies the webhook source, that feeds your newly created Mastodon "application". Then for the TT step, you select the option to use a Webhooks and then Create a Web Request. The key info needed is the Access Token from your Mastodon application used in the Additional Header field. The body is where you define what is used from your source in the post to Mastodon. For the Daily Create it looked like: Webhook options created in IFTTT Once made, I have my handy gizmo ready to go... To trigger it I would need to post something to the Daily Create, but I just decided to wait and see if it would work the next morning (as well the Mastodon Autoshare plugin I had set up). UPDATE Nov 30, 2022 Thanks to Kelson who replied (in that weird Twitter space) to my sharing of his recipe: https://twitter.com/KelsonV/status/1597848688864690177 What this means is that when creating (or you can edit exisiting) the Development application in your Mastodon account, for the URL just use https://maker.ifttt.com/use not the full URL for your webhook, because that is revealed in the footer of your post: The Footer of your auto tooted item is credited to IFTTT as the application but also the link for it as it stands points to your webhook URL and its key, not good! You can just go back to your Mastodon Preferences, look under Development, click the application named IFTTT to edit: Change the application website to be just https://maker.ifttt.com/use Note as well you can name it whatever you want! It does not need to say IFTTT And see the difference it makes Custom name for my Gizmo! The Scoreboard Reads: IFTTT 1 : WP Plugin: 0 The next do there was nothing posted by the WordPress plugin. I'm pretty sure it either is defunct or not capable of being triggered from a scheduled post. But my IFTTT gizmo did it like a champ! This means, if anyone replies to that MastoToot/Post/Whatever We call It with a something that includes the #tdc3970 hashtag, once I do more work to make use if the Mastodon API to pick up replies, they can be displayed interspersed with the bird responses at https://daily.ds106.us/tdc3970/. For now, with IFTTT I have a working flow to publish the newest Daily Creates to Mastodon. Ironically, for some reason, while looking at the twitter posting service I use from dlvr.it - that one seemed to have pooped out. Or maybe it's the beginnings of the musky dissolving. https://twitter.com/ds106dc/status/1596950378792247300 So will I was already cooking with IFTTT, I made a new applet to tweet as well. The gizmo is now operational, in both Twitter and Mastodon. This is going to be a pattern, as I am not quite ready to be panicking about twitter skies falling. Likewise, as fresh and interesting as Mastodon sounds, I am not confident it will be where everyone lands. I'm trying to play both hands now. The two new gizmos set up at IFTTT both triggered by an update in RSS from the Daily Create site, one tweets to that bird place site and the other sends it to the elephant haus. I guess I should title them a little more consistency. but (shrug) This was all worth figuring out (see what happens below) but I still have a heap to figure out on harnessing the responses in Mastodon. While IFTTTing -- Bring my #CoolTech Tagged Bookmarks to Tootville While poking around IFTTT I found one of my previous made ones that, like the they are designed, just quietly does its job. Speaking of trailing edge or maybe even dragging edge technologies that again, many have left behind as they went to relying on twitter or other friable services, I still regularly tag web sites of use/interest in Pinboard, relishing pretty much all the features of the ancient del.icio.us. With their bookmarklet tool, it takes almost no time to do from any browser, I even have to set up on the smart phone. For me, it remains invaluable to bookmark and tag so I can find things later, but also make use of what you can do by tags (RSS for one). So for lack of a better name (and cliché) I have been for a long while tracking more or less "neat web stuff" by tagging in Pinboard as cooltech. Look what I can do! I have my own page that displays the most recent set, by embedding the RSS feed using my really ancient Feed2JS. Talk about small pieces still joined! https://cogdogblog.com/cool-tech/ But I also just maybe a year ago, I set up an IFTTT gizmo to tweet out everything I tag cooltech in Pinboard which I can even harness in twitter via it's own #cogdogcooltech hashtag, e.g. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1594291630944788482 While I had the heat on with IFTTT, I made a new version of my applet that would send the same ones to my Mastodon.social account: Again, I can cover my bases, or better yet, be viable in bird houses and elephant herds. It did take a few tries. My first errors was I forgot the opening status= for the body of the webhook. I had to keep tagging a few new stuff to test. But they were still cooooooool. I've got my IFTTT grooving now with my #cogdogcooltech going both to twitter and Mastodon... how cool is this? And? This is so much like the old school small pieces loosely joined, yet there is a new piece I know now of being able to connect to Mastodon via web hooks. Having this understanding opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities, if you are willing to grok the basics of how information can flow from one place to another. IFTTT really makes it almost plug and play. You can either limit what you can do to what a service provides, or you can dig in and figure out how to wire your own Gizmos. I am firmly in the latter camp. Featured Image: Mine! and I attribute anyhow, weird, eh? I do not have to, but... ask me why! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14114451102 The Box flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license [Media Description:] A very odd looking mechanical instrument perched on a scratched meta base, it has metallic cylinders, levers, and in the back, very frayed old wiring leading to more machinery behind. It's all very mysterious File this in the overly generalized, crass, and no one really gives a flying hoot blog category (everyone has that category, no?). The bulk of anything I would put on a plastic pedestal called "career" boils down to this: Looking **** up. This came to me within my first few years of being a so-called "instructional technologist" at the Maricopa Community Colleges (actually the title was less glorious-- "programmer analyst, instructional systems"), dial the time machine back to the mid 1990s. I was deep into the glory optimised era of the web. Working at a central department in a large distributed education system (10 independent colleges), internally I guess I got to be known as the guy to ask edtech questions. My time interacting with people n this system was largely: Someone calls me on the phone (this was actually qute common) or sends a VAX mail. message asking if I an tell them anything about a tech tool or suggest something for their subject area. Reply "Let me get back to you" Spend time doing my one trick pony act -- I call it-- wait a minute, there is jargon -- "Looking Shit Up on the Internet" Call or VAX Mail back a summary It was just reflexive, and for some reason, people thought I was knowledgable or knew this stuff. That's pretty much been the bulk of not only my career but also my interactions. It makes you look knowledged on your blog, in some bird theme messaging platform, well almost anywhere you communicate or interact with people. And DOH sez Homer, so is everyone else. I have friends and colleagues that seem to have this savvy depth, they can recall exact concepts from literature, the full song lyrics from 20 yeat old songs, quotes from obscure films-- I am always looking shit up. I barely remember pop culture references, and often have to look things up to reply to social media threads. But I don't care that I am not a walking talking Wikipedia. And quite the opposite- I crave looking things up. Obscure things. Or finding things when I have just a vague memory shred. Or all my stuff chasing microfacts from old public domain images. I love the search, the chase, the zig zags. The dead ends that. need refines. But if I do anything, maybe I'd like to think I am okay with explaining it to the person that asked me. It's not enough to click a button to get an answer, but to sort through all the answers and recast it to them in a way I sense is best giving what I know about them. ZOMG I am confessing I do what Generative AI does? Your AI Wise Professor is of Course… A Robot with a Book (One of just a paltry few Sadly Robotic Metaphors for AI) The best part really is that in the search to fid answers for others, I nearly always observe bits myself, not all of them stored in the grey matter, but tucked away as a clue. But what's always the treat is when I discover something else along the way that has nothing to do with my goal. It's like hoovering up bits of extra knowledge as a by product of something else. I blab. This blog post is no personality crisis of identity and worth (well those are every day incidents) but something more mundane- rotating images on. Mac. You see I am well versed in those situations where I have a photo, often from the iPhone, that I end up having on my Mac (also sometimes they come as stuff sent to me), that are images that are turned 90º from the orientation I need them. I know just from frequent repeat the quick and easy approach is dropping the icon into the quietly versatile Preview app, and going to the tools (or when I remember command-L or command-R) to do a quick rotation left of right (in many photo editing apps like Lightroom, it is command-[ ot command-]). This is the stuff I do so often there of course is no lookup. But today I am watching Cori's daughter who is visiting us do her research work. Jessy Lee is a historian, and she has thousands of photos taken of handwritten journal entries, all taken from her visits to archives. The standard tool she uses is an iphone or maybe a compact digital camera. Each photo is like a sentence or two in handwritten documents likely over a hundred years old. And I am watching her occasionally rotate her Macbook 90 degrees, so I asked what she is doing. Jessy Lee explains that many of the photos are rotated, and yes, she know how to open in Preview and manually rotate. But the way she is working is from her desktop director of hundreds of images in the OSX Gallery view, as she just needs to read each nad written note scanning for some key information. This is a crude simulation of what is happening (using my own photo directory). Imagine these files are all hand written documents, each in different orientations. Again, they could be rotated, but she needs to just scan hundreds of them in a session, and opening i Preview, rotating and returning, well I can see why it interrupts her flow, and as well, why maybe in the interest of time, one might turn the machine to read a once sentence document. So me, Mr I Have Used a Mac Since Steve Jobs Had Pimples (I stretch the truth), I do not know if it is possible to do a quick image rotation from the desktop. I reach for my One Trick, and ask The Google "os x rotate image from finder" There's a spray of results which of course is what the damn thing tries to do in the generated summary. I see the Preview trick I know, and other suggestions for creating actions to rotate folders of files (not the task), and apps to download and try/buy. But there is it is amongst the chaff, and amazing and useful Mac Trick that I bet tons of other people will scream OF COURSE EVERYONE KNOWS THAT, was sitting there ll the time and i never know. The say shortcut for the menu items in preview, command-L or command-R works on an image file selected in the Mac finder. Holy cow! It's a game changer for Jessy Lee, and for me it slides quickly into the stuff I did not know to the stuff I will cause I will use it. And I get to flaunt what a non-Expert I really am. Again, I am getting all revved up and spending a good chunk of an blabbing when I could be listening to Classical Music or reciting Chaucer to write about something that is insanely obvious. You will scream that this should be the featured image: Hey this is my blog and I am glad to fill it with flaff that you will eye roll me. Go ahead. But this whole little tiny act today of finding just by poking around the internets, something really simple and obvious and useful, well, its the thing that jas jazzed me about the web since I first popped in my Mac Quadra 900 that floppy disk with the handwritten word Mosaic on it. If you cannot be excited about finding stuff, well, ummm, welll, okay. Featured Image: Screen shot of the search field on this here old blog. Yeah share this as CC-WTF. Screenshot Rainbow over Skinnhufa by cogdogblog posted 3 Nov '08, 2.28pm MST PST on flickr This morning's mixed skies here in Iceland had both sun and rain... and sun and rain and sun and rain. Over the course of regularly complaining here about companies that get under my fur, it is incumbent upon me (wow, I never used that word before) to write when the opposite happens. In a relatively short turn around time (time for mail to reach from Strawberry, Arizona to Reykjavik) I have an email and a confirmed $400 refund to my credit card, that Icelandair has done the right thing (well to me) and refunded my for an unused ticket I was stuck with after delays caused me to miss a flight home November 29 (see the whole tale). I shall now write weekly praise of Icelandair (just kidding), but thank them publicly. Lesson learned- if you are planning international travel through Logan Airport at Boston, and do not want to miss a connection, plan for a double length amount of time, I'd say 4 hours to be safe. Do not expect to quickly get from one terminal to the next on the bus system that lacks any signage, and expect that the friendly staff at the airport will bite your head off with a "yuse idiotz" look when you ask how to get to terminal E. The helpful instructions I got were, "Get on da bus". But yay for small victories! Also, I am looking forward to getting home as my hosts have sent me by parcel post the 3 coats I left in their closet. What to GIF tonight? I was recalling a few photos I took of something in West Texas I spotted on my trip home in December. Then the lightning bolts flew, so thanks to Rowan Peter for the idea on my Who GIFs to include some Pete Townsend Windmill Powered GIFness I had a series of 10 sequential shots of these windmills in motion: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog At the same spot I had done a Cinegram one, playing with freezing the rightmost tower and making the others move in a fun but not so useful for generating electricity fashion From my series of photos, I imported them all into Photoshop as a Stack. In the animation palette, I converted the layers to frames. By examining the rotation, I was able to find 6 frames that did a smooth repetition, and deleted the rest, I used this clips of Pete Townsend's windmill guitar work from Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7LVHiMzyrA I believe this was the footage of the Who's last live concert performance at Shepperton Studios that was used in the film The Kids are Alright, the windmilling happening at the end of Won't Get Fooled Again. (I am hoping a proper Who scholar will set me right). After converted the downloaded video to a.mov file, I imported this into Photoshop via File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers at maybe every 4th frame. In the animation palette I searched for 6 frames that would work well as a cycle (it might be two). I then selected all frames from the Pete file, used the Copy Frames command from the animation palette window. Over in my Texas Windmills, I selected all frames, and used the Paste Frames command from the animation palette window and the option to "Paste Over Frames" which superimposes Pete on the Texas windmills. By linking all of the pete frames, I aligned his chest with the hub of the front most windmills, resized him to fill the frame more, and then dropped the layer opacity to 55%. It was still a bit square and I felt like the background windmills were a bit hidden, so I applied a feather edge layer mask to Pete's action. Shazam! Another Rock 'n Roll GIFtar hero. I'm sure the old white hairs who pull the strings at Big Business sit back in the leather chairs of the country club, and fondly remember the pre-internet days. Back then, customers had no easy access to information about companies their practices, and they sure could not publish their pesky complaints to a place where millions read them. That has changed, as covered in the March 2007 Wired Issue on Companies who embrace (or abhor) "Radical Transparency". But still, and I doubt I am the only one, when trying to address a customer service issue with a company, you can feel like their entire structure is meant to frustrate you into just giving up. Of course, this post is headed down the road of my own petty complaint (hey, that's what blogs are for, right?), a mere molecule dropped into the ocean of customers. I have a mobile phone. In fact, according to the company (which actually is about the third that took over the original provider), I have been with them since 1998, something they read to me from the script on the screen when I call. With a recent month of heavy overage charges for minutes beyond my plan (ouch, take it and smile!), my wide and I are looking at combining to a family plan. So the question is-- am I out of my contract? A simple question. It ought to be available in their ajaxed-out customer portal, I use it to do most of my account duties (paying) or checking statements online. Don't you think in the web site I usually have to not only identify myself with my password, I actually have to give a second password PIN) to even get to me information? It sure seems secure. After looking through every tab of account info, profile, plan details, I could not locate this information. I went to the FAQ. It was not F or A or even Q I guess. Finally did a search on "contract expire" and found the answer buried elsewhere in their docs. To get this information, I had to call them and request it. Huh? WTF? It took 15 minutes to even get this bit, talk about the big drop in Chutes and Ladders. So this morning I called. it is not an option anywhere in their "automated" phone menu (phone menus are evil. phone menus are evil, repeat after me, phone menus are....). In fact, it took several traverses up and down the menu to find the one I could press to speak to a person (actually, hitting "0" about 10 times eventually does it, and it kind of feels good). Now I was getting somewhere. Hold music and cheesy talk ads for more services. I would like to strap their CEO to a chair in a dark, humid room, and force him/her to listen to this phone tree torture for 12 hours. Finally, after 17 minutes on hold, I got my answer. My contract with them is up. Can you imagine the jubilation at getting the answer? So I am free, yet worn out after trying to get at a piece of information about my account that is so brain dead obvious ought to be up on their "customer service" web portal. it almost makes you consider conspiracy theories as to why this information is obscured. I am tired now. And no, I am not getting an iPhone. That is not the reason, But wake up companies- your days of hiding behind the veils of structures that impeded or diminish customers are numbered, and you can bet more and more of us pesky individuals will take the time to shine some light your way. It might have been on c|net's site for 8 years, but I just randomly discovered their "Big Picture" feature -- by attaching associated links form their stories, this flash app can create a visual map, showing connected stories or companies featured on their site: For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links to other News.com stories. In addition, News.com highlights the important companies that appear in a story as well as attach appropriate topics to each story. My stumbling started with their story on Universities register for virtual future, where the sidebar link brought me to the "Big Picture" for this story: Clicking on a node can draw a new map, with that story as the center, and new links, or you can pop and view the full news story. This leads to some ways to explore content other than link hopping form the articles... Now this is hardly revolutionary, as such things have been around for web eons, like the Visual Thesaurus, various 3D search result viewers, and going back to the late 1990s work of Roy Stringer and the Navihedra. I' more curious than certain if these offer people ways to navigate connected content that they would actually use and discover... or is it just neat eye candy? Dem Fancee iPhoners ar Fer Citee Folks? by cogdogblog posted 11 Aug '08, 9.13am MDT PST on flickr I guess usn folkz that lives out here in da sticks cant get no iphones, heck we cant even get close to an Ai-Tee-N-Tee store. How the heckus kan I find dem fancy fones if I izz too far from da city? Gotta love the design of an interface that gives you feedback it does not permit. No, you have to HATE that. See, when the blogging is slow, I just splatter stuff directly from flickr. That's what happens when you are lost in the frontier being the 50 mile radius of the AT&T magic circles. I've had loose shoe laces all my life. For a number of years I never even tied my tennis shoes, wearing them like slippers. I lost count how many friends. stranges would make a point to ask, "Did you know your shoes are untied?" I have a memory as a kid, maybe 4 or 5, and my older sisters were trying to teaching me the "right way" to tie my shoes, but I could not seem to master the wrap a loop around a thumb and pull through. It's along the lines of my elusive effort to learn to fold fitted sheets. Yes, I know there are tutorials and videos, but I've ingrained my ineptitude so deep I am afraid to let it go. My sister did try- she made this practice tool by punching holes in a piece of cardboard and threading a lace through them like it was a show. Maybe my perception problem was not doing it on a real show, it was too abstract.(There was no internet in my childhood, no web site with 18 different shoe knots). So Judy taught me a hack and this is the way I have been tying all my life, what is called the Two Loop or Bunny Ears knot. I am not sure the schematic diagrams help me, it's a 3D visualization required. Videos are better, but I find it interesting they are never filmed from the angle you would see while trying to tie your own shoes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsydRalh0ow But the Bunny Loops worked for me, though it is now I realize all my life... I have been doing it wrong, in essence creating a Granny knot where a proper Bunny Ears has the strength of a square knot. My knots have been weak and pulling off all my life. And I would have gone on had I not decided to read a blog post By Bud Hunt including, of all things, a TED Talk on shoe tying. Yup. https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes But still, the angle I am watching Terry tie his shoes is never the one I see with my own shoes. Isn't that important? He does introduce me though that there are strong and weak forms of shoe knots, but he is demonstrating the loop thumb knot, not the bunny ears. Am I going to have to learn from scratch? Ironically or serendipitously later that day I heard a Science Friday story on the physics of shoe tying that confirmed the TED Talk and eve more about the forces that lead to shoes working themselves loose. I left feeling re-assured that graduate students at Berkeley were on top of this research. What I figured was I was looping my bunny ears in the wrong direction, going over maybe rather than under. I tried to loop oppositely and lost it. The muscle memory is really burned into my brain, like the way I can barely zip one of my coats because the zipper is on the opposite side of all my other coats. Yes I know I could learn, re-wire my brain. I feel old. But then I came up with a much more doable solution- I am doing my first lace crossing the opposite way, so I just start in my regular way, and then cross them opposite. Now I can do the bunny ears the way my memory does almost automatically. Here is a video. Notice the angle! I did it wrong too, I know I filmed it from my view, but I am always about 50/50 for getting the iPhone in the actual orientation. (I can go back and rotate my video, but I will instead wave my I Am Wrong flag) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCpk4OQMNOA For the last 2 days, on 8 walks with the dog my laces have stayed tied all but one time. I will gather more data, but I think I'm onto something. Maybe I'll write a book about this. Nope... But my shoes are on tight. UPDATE: Apr 20, 2017 Thanks Sue for connecting my laces to the backwards bicycle, it's a direct connection. https://twitter.com/suebecks/status/855075385977057280 Featured image: Screenshot from my own YouTube video which is licensed CC BY. Ok, Jim asked me to up the game, so I am going to get more particular about frame selection for my animated GIFs. We are working on the ds106 kickstarter awards for people who requested an animated GIF in their honor. I've got the task to do the one for Boone Gorges, who requested something "bad ass". My first neuron went to maybe something from Mad Max, which I might still do, or maybe Tyler Durden who was the baddest because he wasn't.... never mind. I went to Samuel J as Jules Winfield, those mutton chop sideburns quoting Ezekiel... I'm really happy with this one! Jules just keeps ranting, but the little hand/head motion of the scared kid in the foreground make it complete (IMHO). Plus, by doing these by hand, working with your fingers in the mud and not just using some fricking iPhone app, it comes in at 526k, almost svelte, lean, mean... Jules: [Jules shoots the man on the couch] I'm sorry, did I break your concentration? I didn't mean to do that. Please, continue, you were saying something about best intentions. What's the matter? Oh, you were finished! Well, allow me to retort. What does Marsellus Wallace look like? Brett: What? Jules: What country are you from? Brett: What? What? Wh - ? Jules: "What" ain't no country I've ever heard of. They speak English in What? Brett: What? Jules: English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Brett: Yes! Yes! Jules: Then you know what I'm sayin'! Brett: Yes! Jules: Describe what Marsellus Wallace looks like! Brett: What? Jules: Say 'what' again. Say 'what' again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more Goddamn time! This was the scene I plucked from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czb4jn5y94g And I tried to zero in on a part where the camer had no movement, of which there were a lot fo short cuts, but of course, waving the gun and mouthing off fit. I grabbed the clip as mp4 (I use PwnYouTube learned it from Tim Owens), and opened it in MPEG Streal Clip. I use the selectors for the in and out point of the small scene I want, clip it, and then slowly move the slider to different scenes and saved them as frames. In GIMP I use the Open as Layers option, and under the Filters-Animation menu is Playback so you can see how it flips. This one worked well as I saw nothing I needed to nudge. I did convert the image to Indexed (Image-Mode-Indexed) before the saving as a GIF and enabled the dithering option). The one thing you have to play with as an animation is the time between frames- I first did 190 milliseconds but it was too slow, so I dropped it to 120. This one worked well as full frames; the next one I want to see if I can isolate things like eye movement. I am not sure how this goes down in GIMP- I imagine I will have to make a regular background layer, and then select just the parts I want to move and merge to copies of this layer. Yes, but just making the GIF does that Gaiman "Just Make Art" feeling flow. Now I am hankering for a Royale With Cheese. I've had the personalized Google home page set on all my browsers for a while, but just recently noticed that you can now add tabs to organize and spread out the different tools and feeds you can use. So I gleaned a few off the front view, leaving my flickr wallet,Gmail inbox, delicious tagged sites, a few tools: And moving a set of "tasty" RSS feeds to a second tab, a aggregator in any other sense, plus a third one for a few among thousands of available tool modules (they seem endless): All of them seem to load faster. It really feels like home. Why the heck would I want my web browser open with someone else's content? Yuck. Holy iPhone Screen Shots by cogdogblog posted 25 Aug '08, 11.56pm MDT PST on flickr Enough n00b me trying to capture iPhone screens via a photo from my camera. Via comment by Guy K just press Power and Home button together: blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/08/the-art-of-ipho.html Compare to flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2798321033/ Emailed as if magic from my iPhone One of the nifty things about WordPress, as if they need naming, is the ability to embed media into posts simply by putting a URL on a blank line and pressing return. No futzing with copying and pasting HTML. Just the link to the page that houses a YouTube video, a SoundCloud audio, a flickr photo, even a tweet. What is even slicker is when you see it happen in the WordPress editor. I've been dabbling with some SPLOT things that use a front end editor, and this is one feature I am unable to get working when there is no logged in account (it is an ajax issue, chasing, chasing, it down). But here is an odd thing; more than a year ago I accidentally discovered you can also autoembed a giphy gif just by putting it's URL on a blank line and pressing return. I've used this in several different themes, sites, and it works. The weird thing is that it does not appear on the list of oEmbed services supported in the WordPress docs (I had made an edit to the old wiki-fied version in the codex, but that page is neutralized, and I guess my edit was tossed too.). And I am sure I tested successfully on WordPress.com, but when I went back to confirm this morning... well it half works. The embeds are not automatically done in the editor, but they do happen when published. A giphy.com url on a bank line in the WordPress Editor, no embed. When published, the embed magic works. Maybe it's still in the oven being developed. But that's not why I started writing. I looked at my old post and was reminded that the giphy embeds are always sized exactly to their original size. Some are small, and the uneven, non responsive width bothered me. So with a little bit of digging in the Chrome browser inspector, testing some CSS, I found a nice solution that makes them all fit my column width. This can be added to any site via Customize -> Additional CSS. img[src$=".gif"] { width: 100%; } This means any img HTML tag with a src="" URL that points directly to a .gif file is sized to fit the width of its container. Maybe to be safer, one could put it inside the class name that most themes use for body content: .entry-content img[src$=".gif"] { width: 100%; } WAIT! DON'T USE THAT. I just saw that this was causing havoc on my site where some embeds and other things insert those single pixel gifs, as well as some icons I have used. Here is a better selector- it only selects img tags where the src="" contains giphy.com. Thanks W3Schools for schooling me on the use of ^ $ * in selectors. .entry-content img[src*="giphy.com"] { width: 100%; } Regardless, here is before/after shown in an animated gif (gif the irony?): Hardly world-saving, but it pleases my aesthetic eye. It reminds me of some CSS I used years ago to have small file icons appear adjacent to any HTML link that points to a .pdf URL . a[href$='.pdf'] { padding: 5px 0 5px 20px; background: transparent url(http://somesite.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/pdf-icon.jpg) no-repeat center left; } Anyhow, these kinds of CSS tricks are always fun, and the internets rarely fail with I am seeking a how do I do this in CSS query. Here was another little fun tool I found last night: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1182146416753483777 Being able to easily add GIFs to a post without juggling HTML embed code OR gnarly Gberg blocks is just sweet goodness to me. See how well it fits in here? https://giphy.com/gifs/marissa-mayer-2grHbbaucBsrK Did you see how I got a GIF here? One URL, copy, paste, kaboom. UPDATE Oct 11, 2019 WordPress peeps have added Giphy to list of supported Embed sources, the system worked. Featured Image: After searching in Google Images for embed I kept seeing a lot of NASA images, as they were embedded GIFs used in their site? This has little relevance, but the Mars Rover is a neat machine that just works at a great distance. File:Curiosity at Work on Mars (Artist's Concept).jpg is a Wikimedia Commons Image placed into the public domain as a US Government agency work that is not copyrighted. Submitted for the Colophon of the Week (once I look up a definition of what the heck a colophon is), from the Newsdesigner blog: This site was coded with rudimentary HTML, PHP, CSS and BEER. The 3-column CSS layout was adapted from one found at Position Is Everything. BBEdit helped wrangle the alphabet soup, and Adobe Photoshop rearranged the pixels. Most everything is powered by Movable Type, and Verve Hosting keeps all the ones and zeroes safely on their spinning platters. The typography: David Berlow's Cheltenham FB and Giza, Matthew Carter's Verdana and Georgia, and a touch of Franklin Gothic and Utopia. This site is best viewed with a stiff drink in hand and in any browser that is not Internet Explorer. Whew, that is attitude! Bark bark, woof woof! We like it. Written by Portlan Oregon "News Designer" Mark Friesen, this site is a must read for those who have an eye for news. Heck, I never even knew that news was designed! Check out the left sidebar which pulls up front page screen shots from major news papers, world wide. I'm curious how these are loaded.. Yup, we love a blog with real bite and real personaility. I've just swapped the spam "defense" here from SpamKarma2 to Askimet. The word is that Dr Dave is going to top updating it. Sk2 has sure needed regular attention lately, a lot of moderation, and then I found out that friends of mine were being tossed its captcha, and I hate bad captchas. Bad news. And then I recall at Northern Voice 2008 when keynoter Matt Mullenweg said he created Askiment for his Mom top be able to blog w/o worry of spam... well he had me. So now I am running Askimet. No spam fence is w/o problems, so I am holding off any celebration. All this moaning and groaning of how bad, vile, deceptive, awful, broken the internet has become. Yeah parts are, but not all. Not all. Let me shed some alternative light your way. More than 10 years ago when I was building my collection of 50+ Web Ways to Tell Story (Wikispaces killed the site, but I have reclaimed it, Pfffft, alpaca poop on you, Wikispaces) I came across what I thought was a most ridiculous site, Blabberize. The web site let you upload an image of a person or animal, trace the shape of a mouth, then associate it with an audio file, and it created an animated speaking image, where the mouth moved in sync to the volume of sound. Among the most ridiculous of all was the demo, where an alpaca raved about the tool in an east Indian accent. Guess what, it's still online (you do need Flash, sigh)! But it counted for my 50 ways criteria- a free, web-based tool that allowed you to create something from more than one kind of media, so it's still one of the living tools in my collection -- see http://50ways.cogdogblog.com/Blabberize.html. And just to prove my wrongness, I eventually came across some non silly ways people thought to use it. Well guess what? The alpaca is back, and talked directly to me today on twitter: https://twitter.com/Blabberize/status/1030343036168036352 I'm excited to hear not only have they restored their web site (meaning Dominoe's story is still there), but there is a brand new iOS app out soon https://twitter.com/Blabberize/status/1023737736568758272 And just for your information, Mr Talking Alpaca, I am not solely about dogs! On our daily walks, my wife, Felix, and I regularly talk to out neighboring llamas. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]I Wonder What You Are? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Blabberize is back! Take that internet doom-mongerers. Featured Image: Screenshot from a tweet I got from the Blabberize Alpaca. I am sure he goes for a CC-NO-POOP license. August 30th--It's True. by Jessica DeWinter posted 7 Sep '07, 2.22am MDT PST on flickr Freed from the shackles of corporate America. Hah, not what you think. Not that I *know* what you think. One of the interesting re-threads I heard at Northern Voice this year was the navel gazing equivalency of blogging about blogging, blogging about not blogging, etc. So I am not going to blog about my manufactured excuses for not blogging much at Northern Voice, not really even doing much of my VoiceThread version either. Nope, am I blogging about not blogging? At one time I had a compulsion to provide "Coverage" at conferences- blog sessions, photos, post audio, my my gawd, that gets tiring and I am not a great stenographer. And at the same time I am not blogging, Reverence Jim has amped up his blog machine to crank out 5, 7 posts a day. The Rev is on a tear! He is single handedly keeping the edtech blogger scene with a registered pulse. But I would not blog about him blogging... And of course,, he had time given he did not cram himself into a plane to wing his way to Van Rock City from FredBurgerTown. Shoot, I lost abut 13 hours blog time with just travel there. But seriously, there was a large Rev sized hole in the presence of the conference, (and throngs of bloggers invoking, "Where's Jim? Where's Jim? Where's Jim? Where's Jim? Where's Jim?") so start plotting now, Real Reverend Jim to have your ticket punched for NV10. What I quit is the ***** idea I ought to blog, and hoisting the flag of I blog when I fracking well feel like it. And I certainly won't blog about my blogging. No more blogging about not blogging or blogging about blogging.... this week at least. I have some feverish work to do this week on an upcoming presentation on, of all things, podcasting. (A previous post titled Sick of Podcasting was titled as a joke- I am not "sick" or "tired" of the concept, it was my own inertia of having done the same presentation twice in a week, and actually it was fun- new disclaimer coming on my titles, "not to be read at face value"). My focus on this session is "Podcasting On the Cheap"- the free/low/no coast ways of at least getting your feet wet. I've got my ideas lined up, but could use some help from anyone out there on sharing the sites available for posting the media files one can lump in a podcast feed. This is one of the missing or less clear links- where to hang the media files. I've always had my own servers available for stashing my media, but that is not the common option. The known suspects are OurMedia and perhaps YouTube. Others that pop up form some googling- anyone use these? I am looking for more than file storage places; they must have a publicly addressable URL so pop into an RSS feed. They cannot be ones where the media expires nor ones with low storage caps (like ones that offer 5 Mb) nor ones that offer "3 months free" * Bolt http://www.bolt.com/ * esnips http://www.esnips.com/ So where can you reliably hang some media for free? As a special request, how about using Odeo to tell me your thoughts: Send Me an Odeo Message cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by hey mr glen The worst kind of blog post opens with some sort of apology for not blogging. It's a good thing I am not doing that correctly? Because the only one I should every be sorry to ius myself, my personal audience of me who reads what I write. And if I don;t read, I think I still know what's going on. The passage of time being quick, rapid, dizzying, seems an understatement. If you see my lost time, and those 9000 pair of unmatched socks, and the pile of car/house/gate keys, and that 1971 Hank Aaron baseball card, please let me know. One thing that seem to have fallen off my track are photography. The daily habit is hung out on the line. But really, who am I answering to? I more or less did regular daily photos since 2007. I'm on sabbatical. Actually, i seem to be doing more with the iPhone, which is not to say I am hanging the DSLR up. Not in the least. It is still one of the things I enjoy the most, and had a fun resurge today. I went up for a rainy day rendezvous with my sisters (who are in the Baltimore area) and we had a great day at the National Portrait Gallery / Smithsonian Art Museum, conjoined museums which makes it interesting to pass from one to the next. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I never thought much about a portraits being of interest, but I was rather intrigued by the micro stories of biography you get there, one person per painting/photo/statue, each an invite to go more. Like Bucky Fuller, what is inside the geodesic head? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Anyhow, that thing of photography I enjoy most is finding some interesting frame of detail. Blogging to has gone a bot ragged. But I'll be f****ed if I am going to blog about not blogging. Next. The days go fast at DTLT at University of Mary Washington, and the pace is frenetic. I could not be at a better place. Some of y'all seemed to have missed the memo; I have not been here just teaching ds106, I am on full time at UMW. And yes, teaching ds106 - what a ride that is now into the last week. I've got a backload of reflections. I have a truckload of "things I would like to do better". I am super impressed with the output of many of my students, yet still struggle to feel good about the way I have been structuring the class time. Getting the engagement level on that stage has been frustrating for me, and a number of the students seem in it for just doing the assignments, getting the grade. Where's the "#4life" in that? The exciting thing has been crafting the new ds106 Remix machine, and starting to plan with my summer collaborator, Martha Burtis, on the ds106 online summer course we will co-teach starting in (yikes!) about a month. But let's keep that glass half full. New on the to do list is doing more biking. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The country roads around here have been wonderful diversions of exploring, if a bit wanting on decent shoulders and lanes, once you get away from the traffic, there are tons of quiet back roads. But I am getting in gear here- I signed up to do a 100 mile ride in late August with D'Arcy Norman up in Banff, so I have some serious training to do. I maye even retool the old "I Hate Running" blog - that URL still works for a biking blog. Other things on the horizon will be a 3 week extended visit to Vancouver, to pilfer the minds at UBC on their uses of Mediawiki, plus to hang out with the East Van gang (Will the Soundlab still be around, Jason?) as well as getting to hang with Bryan Jackson and hopefully Scott Leslie. And attend Northern Voice. And then! I've got a green light to work.teach remotely in July, so I am headed back to my home in Strawberry for a repsite, and to clean the weeds. In the yard. I find some pangs of thinking back to a year ago, when I was ramping up my year of freedom, and in Junem when I started the 6 month road odyssey. I've not progressed much, if any, with what to do, if anything, from that experience. Writing a "book" makes me yawn. But I have a ton of media, not to mention the 3 tons of media in the StoryBox. I have been dabbling some with Jux to publish some bits and some (unblogged) (yet) dabbling with a year later's reflection in Cowbird. Time. Where are you? I know you are out there. Sorry? Nah. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6 cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yes, it is so- this LG Thrive is my (temporary) replacement for my iPhone that lept over a cliff this week. It is a Droid. Frankly the fervent fetishing of this phone over that phone tires me (though I really want the one that starts with "i"). Here's the reasoning... The nearest AT&T stores, even the ones within 30 miles, do not have the 4S in stock. I need a phone now. It seemed hardly worth it to contract in with an old model. I am more than 30 days out from being eligible for an upgrade. I could have gone to a Verizon store, but with future plans for international travel, a CDMA phone makes zero sense, even if the US network is better. Shane at the local AT&T outlet store was helpful .I asked about replacement smart phones, and he told me the ones in his store were priced more than the ones available down the street. He rigged me up with an AT&T sim card, and off I went to Best Buy to get a "Go" Phone. I did see that they had the 4S in stock, but with a few calls to AT&T Customer Careless, I would be left paying for an early upgrade fee, and extra $150 (?). And then I realized was told that the unlocked 4S would be out next month, and that makes the most sense for 2012 where I might have several trips out of the US. Thus I found myself buying an Android phone. Yes, it is not the same, I miss the iOS interface, but frankly it does just about everything my iPhone could. Some notes: The Google integration is great for mail, calendar, etc. I even got access to my entire music collection with one click. I've been able to find apps that match what I had on the iPhone and used frequently, including Words with Friends, Facebook, twitter, Skype, photo editors, Evernote. I found a media player that I can use to listen to ds106 radio (of course there is no broadcast one). I'm only using the free apps, but the market place has tons of stuff. The camera is not bad, and I found a really good audio recorder, even if it records in the obscure .pcm format (another addon converts to mp3) The battery life sucks. Quickly. I like being able to add widgets to the main screens; like a small audio player tuned into ds106, or a twitter widget for mentions. I deleted them so it would not suck battery, but nice to know they are there. It mush have a 250 Mb sd card in there, I have already tun out of room- I will have to add a bigger card. It is super good that when I connect by USB to by MacBookPro, I have full access to my content files. I can drag files to and from the phone with ease. I am more bothered by this in iOS. I can understand a rationale to hide the file system from the general average user. But there is a file system in there, cause stuff exists as files. To make it totally unavailable to everyone, is, well, dogmatic. It is akin to OS X-- it is a beautiful and elegant GUI, that sits atop a unix OS, which I can get to if I want to. It pretty much does 90% of what I want it to do, and I can live with it for a few months. In fact, it makes more and more sense for me to live with and use this other OS, as we should not get so singularly locked into bogus places of platform superiority. In other breaking news, I guess my iPhone is still alive- I am getting tweets from @CogDogsiPhone I am so happy that my iPhone is having some fun. I do miss him, but can do oka with my aPhone. Strange as it sounds, today I had to email my Mom a scanned copy of a copy of my own birth certificate to prove her own birth record. And perhaps the most challenging was helping her decode the email attachment so she could print the record. It goes like this. Her Florida drivers license is up for renewal and some new regulation (she says) requires her to bring a copy of her birth certificate. The problem is that back in 1929 Baltimore, records were not so rigorously recorded. The daughter of immigrants, whom-ever took the record information probably could not understand the name her mom reported, so Mom's birth certificate lists her as Baby H********** (Polish sounding name); a later attempt by her parents to update it recorded the wrong name- her name is "Alyce" but the thick accent ended up with her official name being listed as "Ellis". But apparently, there is some way for the Maryland authorities to generate a legal certificate if her name appears on the birth certificate of one of her children. I had one in my safety deposit box, so I drove down to Payson today (after rummaging 20 minutes to locate the darn key), and got a xeroxed copy that I planned to scan at home and email. Interesting information I see in my own Certificate of Live Birth (whew, I was born alive) - coming into this world at 9:22pm in April 1963 at a hospital that no longer exists. Also interesting to note is that it lists my father's occupation, but there is not even a blank for one if my mother had an occupation. Yes, not that long ago... Even more sobering is noticing that my parents were 36 and 34 when I was born, getting to 10 years younger than I am now. That makes for some kind of time distortion field effect. So I got home, scanned the docs and emailed them to Mom, knowing full well she suffered with attachment challenges (the email kind). Sure enough, I get a call, when she tried to print they came out way too small. I was trying to sort out what the problem was, and dreading trying to remotely troubleshoot her NetZero web based email. But we persevered, What worked was I was able to log into her account, see the same screens-- and OMG what an interface travesty that is, I do not blame her confusion. It showed only small previews of the images, and to print them, I had to talk her through the steps to download the image (and ignore some Windows attempt to have her upgrade some crappy photo software package). And then since we had to wait 4 minutes to download the files via her dial-up modem, we had time to chat ;-) Finally, she had the document printed, and she was rather excited (and technically worn out). I tried to soft pedal offering regular tech support, but she is my Mom, I will oblige. After all of this, she should be able to get her license renewed. Now if I wanted to keep her off the roads, I might have.... just kidding. Mom, consider yourself certified. The Abominable Pine Man was spotted in the vicinity on December 15, 2012. Unlike the Lock news Monster, Sasquatch, the photos of this super natural creature ares sharp, clean, and obvious no fabrication or some buffoon in a fur suit. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In time the monster morphed into a floppier version cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But it was not invincible, in fact, it had pretty much transformed into a sad shell of its former glory: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Until today! It's back, reformed, and now something more of a Squirrel Bear Hybrid: Just for the sake of the ds106 GIFfest, I call this a sporting event GIF ... who's gonna stop me? When will the GIFfing stop? NEVER! flickr foto You Have Been Warned!available on my flickr I was too scard to take a photo of this fearsome fish. This hand made sign from a local aquarium (Acuario Cet-Mar) in Puerta Peñasco, Mexico, might be part of a new WordPress theme that may be applied here ;-) My friends told me stories of some tourist fool previously who disregarded the sign and found out how much the dog snapper fish does bite. It really was not easy to get a good picture, but the big fish with the bad reputation has some sad puppy eyes. The weekend in Mexico was just what the doctor ordered, lots of sun, R&R, and no conputers or interent. The beach, ocean kayaking, the cervezas, and jumbo shrimp for every meal were highlights, not to mention the view parasailing. See the rest of the flickr-ed evidence. Here comes the excuse about not blogging... I've not written much here about the Networked Narratives course I am co-teaching with Mia Zamora at Kean University. That might be because each week's announcement is a long post, plus there are weekly event pages to assemble, like for this month's "virtual bus" tours, not to mentione being in a hangout for class on Wednesday's and running another hangout during thw week, and keeping the Daily Digital Alechemies filled... It's been so utterly fantastic to be teaching again. We are pretty much on target for the "spine" we set up for the course, making each month a different mode of activity. January was getting set up, thinking about "digital alchemy", February was a series of 4 weekly Studio visit hangouts with narrative practitioners, and this month... a bus. So yes, we have weekly hangout visits, but the shift is from February ones with experts to the ones in March with peers... around the world. Each one is set up differently, with some different "pre-boarding" activities, or asynchronous media sharing or doing something in a collaborative space, with hangout at the end of the week connecting Kean students with peers elsewhere in the world. We were partly inspired (and we also borrowed from) an online workshop on Inclusive Globally Networked Learning from the 2016 DigPed Workshop with Maha Bali, Kate Bowles, and Paul Prinsloo, who teach respectively in Egypt, Australia, and South Africa. The part we borrowed was where they asked people to add to an open Google Doc a response to "What kinds of images, names, people, issues come quickly to mind about the places we’re from?". We've been trying that with a bit of a second layer for the places we visit. We ask our students in New Jersey, to share what they know of a country from their own experience, news, pop culture. What is the stuff about a far away place they carry around with them. The additional part is to ask them to now use the internet, and find out more specific information what life is like in the city we are virtually visit (and we ask them to do the same for say, New Jersey) (there was a bit of loose driving as our students do not necessarily identify with Newark New jersey being their city, not always New York City which so many in the world know, so we stayed with the locale being "New Jersey"). So it's both to learn about another place, but also, to hear in return what people in the other place know of where you live, and, what the internet says of that place. That said, it has not exactly played out like that, but as I hope to conclude below, it's really the conversation we have that matters, not these activities. Our first stop was Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where I had asked a colleague I got to know from the UDG Agora project, professor of Tourism Laura Aguilar. She had four of her students present, and since the timing worked out that we, we ran the New Jersey side during our class. We had set up the pre-boarding activity to share in an open Google Drive folder some photos related to food habits. https://twitter.com/TurismoUdeG/status/837095884550778882 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/837139567635394561 This was a deliberate choice to talk directly to people from Mexico given the terrible political treatment of that country in American politics. And our students did ask questions to their Mexican counterparts about how it felt to hear what comes from America. As we noted, their response was very respectful given what it must feel like. The standout moment for me was when asked about the border wall, Alondra said a statement that still resonates: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/837141865317068800 But the highlight moment was totally unplanned. Someone in our class noted how bright the light was coming in the window of Laura's office and asked to show us out the window. I think it was Alondra there who picked up Laura's iPad, and walked down the hall with a look of eager determination, and walked out on the veranda to show us the campus at University of Guadalajara in Puerto Vallarta. Then our class was turning the laptop out the window to show the view of Kean (heck, I had not seen that), and I was even taking them out on my deck to show the view from Strawberry, AZ. It was so simple, yet so electric. The second bus tour was a bit different, and almost rather than a physical place, we inhabited the web site of the Young Writers Project, which is based in Vermont, but is a home for creative writing for teens around the world. Our host, Geoffrey Gevalt, set up a special part of the site just for our group -- we had all the Kean students make accounts on the YWP site. Rather than us explaining it, we asked students to explore and figure it out themselves. We did a portion of this in class, and our students did more than click links, they were digging deep, reading poetry, and writing comments. And later in the week (now) they are posting on the YWP site too. This was was not in our expectations for the bus tour, that we would essentially spend time immersed on another web site. For the place sharing, (after Geoff said the questions I listed above sounded "a bit bookish") we decided to share about where we live with audio. We asked each person to share three morning sounds that represent their starting at home (getting ready). the transition to school/work (e.g. transportation), and a third that captures some of the ambient sounds of school/work. The bus ride itself provided again the unexpected and wonderful... because it was not tightly planned. We heard from two YWP writers who took a break from home schooling (or skiing) to share there experience; a third one (Astrobot in YWP) actually was listening in and chatting while she was in school (with her teacher's permission). And one of our students, Laura, is a teacher herself, and she tuned in from rahway with a room full of excited 6th grade writers. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/844177900563652608 https://twitter.com/writeannabella/status/842756540893446144 https://twitter.com/stryii/status/842769773608009728 https://twitter.com/ywpvt/status/842789356616278016 The surprise part came from the discussion about both Isabella and Adelle sharing about meeting other writers at a YWP open mic night. It was interesting to hear about what the process if saying their poetry out loud, in public, meant for their writing. And this lead to a request that they read one of their poems for us-- both agreed, and it was so moving. Even Astrobot, who could not speak because there was a quiz going on in her class, slipped her poem in the chat, and Mia's son Jude (who is an active class participant) read her poem for us. ONE WORLD Is it really bad The color of one's skin? The way they worship Speak Or the place they call their home? There are different cultures Ways to see the world And Although different They are at their roots Much the same From human To human The same species So why kill For these differences? Why discriminate? Why hate? These differences They make us beautiful Make us proud Proud to be ourselves This united human race The bus rides in repeat circles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUjtC6iUJJU And after the bus tour, Geoff has set up Laura and her Rahway students with their own YWP community web site. Fantaassssstic. I was moved by the challenging topics and powerful responses by the YWP writers; I reached back to find some examples of writing my Mom saved from me in 6th grade and 8th grade, and while nostalgic, it seemed so much more naive. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/843695760243806209 And it lead Mia and I to plan a spoken poetry session with our students this week. What we are doing is hardly novel or revolutionary, but is striking me, how effective it can be to get people together who do not know each other, from other parts of the world, for an agenda-less and presentation-less conversation. It's a lesson learned from the Virtually Connecting experience. That maybe just by talking to others, elsewhere, we can do better for understanding than what the buzz of social media or the burn of mainstream media provides. The next two bus tours, to Australia with Kate Bowles this week and to American University Cairo next (with Maha Bali, Hoda Mostafa, and Sherif Osman) have a connected theme (it happened on it's own) of the stories of student experience on campus.... or as Kate eloquently described it I’m thinking: would it be interesting to ask students to photograph an image of a place on campus where something meaningful has happened for them, to them? A place of memory or resonance, for any reason. As an example, I have a friend whose dad came to her graduation, and then after he died she felt she could always remember where she saw him sitting on a wall after her graduation ceremony. So this is still about spaces and places, but it’s about recognising that we all personalise spaces that we frequent because we have personal memories. We are experimenting with before the hangouts, have the students from each place look at the web sites of the others to find out the way the institution describes student life, so again, trying to balance what the web says about a place with what the students there share. The planning for this is rather loose (an understatement) with a few emails or DMs for logistics, and an idea for the activity that unrolls a few days before we publish it. Loose planning is different from under planning; and it takes me back to one of the first lessons I got in this game, as a young instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. I was in charge of planning the large year end faculty development retreat our office ran and was literally sick with nerves about planning the activities (asking some 150 people to spend a day doing stuff). My mentor, then Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Alfredo de los Santos, told me that all I needed to do was get people in a room with something meaningful to do-- that they would take care of the rest. Alfredo was, and is, so right. Loose hands on the wheel is the way to go, then and now. Featured image: "Bus" pixabay photo by MichaelGaida is in the public domain using CC0, edited to add "netnarr" and "Alchemy" to the bus What are the odds? Amy Gaharan has just announced her joining the Professional Bloggers Association (PBA): the practice of being a consulting blogger-for hire, or operating a weblog with a functioning revenue model that goes beyond Google Ads Now it would be easy to take potshots, to throw darts, to provide snickering insinuations about the beginning of the PBA tour and its bowling connotations. But that would not be very professional. No, actually I am announcing the formation of the Amateur Bloggers Association (ABA), for people who blog not for revenue, not for status, or not even as an assigned responsibility, but just because we are personally motivated, passionately imbued, missing our medication, or just plain compulsive about cats or robots or Marvin the Martian or the band FloogerNozzle. This group does not care if others consider a "blog is terrible" as blogging is in the eye (or RSS reader) of the beholder. We do not care if your blog has pinkhighlights, disco balls, or is just green monospaced text. There are no membership dues, requirements, or nor even an application form. We actually already have several million members worldwide. Board Members now include: El Presidenté Biff Cantrell Seargant At Arms The SnakeMan Secretary of Cute Expressions: Meg the Mic Girl Emminence of Sustenance: Two Hot Chefs Guru of The Obvious Leon Lighips well the list goes on. We have room for millions of leaders. Make your own title up. The ABA site should be up in a century or two. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What was I looking for in the drawer in my office? An envelope? For some reason, I lost track of the task at hand, and noticed the black moleskin notebook with the SFMOMA logo. I remember it. And lost myself down a memory hole as this notebook contains shreds of events from perhaps one of the most tumultuous 6 months in my adult life. But first, the book. It was a gift, the best kind, unexpected, and given for no occasion. Peter Samis, a colleague and dear friend from my days at NMC, director of education at SFMOMA, was a voracious notetaker. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In his travels, work, he always jotted sketches in his moleskin notebooks. At an NMC Board meeting, I saw him crack out a new one. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In 2006, that was number 339 in a long series. Peter showed me his notes, and talked about the way he used it to process ideas, how he always had it with him. It is his blog. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There are so many things I like about Peter, his breadth and passion for art, his love of photography, his love of laughter, his classy hat but mostly... he is just a genuine, caring person. Peter called me out of the blue a few months ago, just to catch up. Of all the colleagues I knew and worked with in five years at NMC, he is the only one who has reached out to stay in touch. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was so thoughtful of him when he handed me my own moleskin at an NMC Board meeting in 2007-- notebook #1! On that first page I read: This book a gift of colleague and prolific note taker Peter Samis @ NMC Board mtg, June 9, Indianapolis Apparently I did not take many notes at the meeting, because right below that is a note from the vacation I went on right after the conference; my wife at the time flew out to meet me in Minneapolis, and my notebook has a rather detailed bit of notes of places we went, meals eaten, relatives visited. Right below the note about getting the book, is the incomplete: Alma, Wisc - quote from Emile Zola about artist, gift, work (FIND) I never found that quote, or rather never put it in my notes. It must have been on a statue, or museum-- but Google makes it easy to find "The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work." To be complete, right now, I wrote out the quote on that page. No rules against editing one's notes. I am rather surprised at the level of mundane detail I wrote for the rest of the trip, I must have motivated... for a short while. Subsequent entries, undated, look like some of my technical notes, ones about the flickr API, Second Life, Horizon Report, drupal (WTF?). Then, I was inspired by something D'Arcy Norman had done in his notebook, sketching a "History of Blog", so I DWDD (Did What D'Arcy Did), a few pages of notes, and then a chart attempt creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This is followed by more pages of technical notes related to NMC work; then on a September 3 2007 trip to LA, I had time to work on plans for my upcoming grand tour of Australia, all capital cities in 2 weeks. There are notes on the presentations and workshops I was working on, and percentage estimates of how complete they were creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Notice that 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story was listed as "80%" finished (this was the place I first did it) with a note "Finish the MFer!" Geez, I only had 40. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog These are notes on what dates I was in what cities in Australia, with some efforts (gasp) at running; I was in the middle of training for a first marathon. There are no notes about how sick I was after catching a cold on my first weekend in Tasmania. There are no notes about the amazing flower story event in Hobart. For all the interest in notes I find, I see more gaps. Oh look, more notes of NMC related projects and tech. Then a few from my first SXSW conference in March 2008, a panel session named for a Zeldman quote Don't worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop. My own hand written note: NOTE- more people here doing notes on paper than Yeah, I never completed the sentence. Do I have too? And then a telltale page, what looks like to anyone else just a list of phone numbers, addresses for utility companies and banks creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What is missing in the pages earlier are the darkest times I've had, after leaving my marriage and moving up to Strawberry, some very bad blank spots not worth note writing. Or even reliving. But this page marks the beginning of the official end of my marriage, filing for divorce in March 2008- these notes were for me removing my name from the accounts for utilities at the house we shared in Scottsdale, and switching the ones for Strawberry (and the title) to my name. Breathe. I can barely touch that intense time. Better left as gaps. There is very little after that. A few phone numbers, a note for work, a place I wanted to buy a special bottle of wine. I wrote last week about the life history I have in 10+ years of blogging and flickr photos, but now I also have these fragments in notebooks and journals, and there are more bits of me in there not anywhere else. And to me, it's fine that its a patchwork, that is the beauty of our human minds to weave the connections. It's not about being some kind of monk like detailed narration of everything, just enough to have the pieces to jog the memory to fill in the gaps (or to leave the ones empty worth leaving empty). It's not having some perfect system to capture everything like a record player. So today, I started writing in the notebook again. now some 7 years after Peter game my notebook #1, and I have not even got one finished. He must be above 500 now ;-) creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Just looking at that notebook, and following it back to that special moment and small thoughtful gift from Peter-- in a world seemingly wobbling off its pivot, in the tiniest way, makes things more than just ok. I wonder what will be on the next page. Not that it's that blog worthy that as maybe the most frequent SPLOT user, "I Did It Again", but I thought this concept was nifty. Timely. Perhaps even resonating. And I am also going to violate the rules I set out by blogging it, but I think the site as crested (as in a tiny ripple). For this year's round of Networked Narratives, my colleague Mia Zamora and I cast a theme asking students to focus on imagining what the Post Pandemic University will be like. When we landed on this theme, I was a bit skeptical but it struck me that for first year students or ones just starting a masters program which represents our students, the had no "normal" experience to shape a new normal. They were at the front lines of this experience. Somewhere early in the semester I thought of Frank Warren's Post Secret project launched way back in 2005 where he invited anyone to mail him an anonymous postcard with whatever secret they wanted to share. I think I saw him present this at the 2008 SXSW conference. The concept of the project was that completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they had never previously revealed. No restrictions are made on the content of the secret; only that it must be completely truthful and must never have been spoken before.https://postsecret.com/ I wondered if there might be value in creating for the NetNarr students (or anyone) a place to record private thoughts, observations about This Pandemic Moment. Thus a new SPLOT was born, using the TRU Writer theme, ideal for creating anonymous writing spaces. I called it Pandemic Whispers. http://whisper.arganee.world/ It was while I was introducing it in class that a counter-intuitive thought occured to me. Typically, to get an idea like this used, I would do what I am doing here, blog about it, tweet about it, and wait for them to come. But what if we did not publicly announce this, and spread the old fashion way, from one person telling another through non-public channels. So I sent a lot of emails, sent direct messages to friends, colleagues to give it a try. There was a pretty good response, interest. A few would respond that they just submitted which dispelled the anonymous layer as I would see just one new item. But somewhere down the line, I was less able to figure out who had submitted what. Maybe it was rippling out. As of last week, there were 41 whispers (see them all or try one at random). Not massive, but still an interesting collection. There's short expressions of frustration and secretive pleasing thoughts. Poems. Art. But it seems to have run its course. So I lift my own embargo on sharing and am blogging it. As if my readership counts as significant? But if you are curious, the whisper box is still open. Hold the Phone In a meeting last week, OE Global colleague (well technically, my boss) Paul Stacey shared a project that he said he thought I would appreciate as something similar. Telephone (https://phonebook.gallery/) is "A game of art whispered around the world" (hence Paul suggesting it). TELEPHONE is just like the kids’ game. A message is whispered from one person to another and changes as it is passed.We whisper a message from art form to art form. A message could become a painting, then music, then poetry, then dance. We whisper each finished work of art to multiple artists so the game branches out exponentially.Halfway through the game, we reverse the process. We start assigning multiple artworks to a single artist. We ask each artist to find what the works have in common and to create a translation of that into their own art form.So — TELEPHONE begins with one message, passes that message through more than 900 artists from 72 countries and then concludes with a single artwork. You can explore it via artist name, a geographic map, or the game map that shows the flow. It's quite a luscious interface that draws you into seemingless endless paths. A day later I was ketchupping with my good friend Gardner Campbell and he asked if I had hear about an art site called "telephone." Yup! It's orders of magnitude more interesting and world circling than my little project. But why compare? I am still quite pleased with my tiny little whisper project... because I was able to make it happen. Explore a pandemic whisper or a telephone and enjoy them both (or not at all).. Art is art, who cares about scale and size? Feature Image: Pssssssss flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified by adding an overlay old telephone pixabay image by mistytableau. Dynamic RSS feeds are available now from searches performed at my.OAI, the tool for digging through a series of idatabases available as Open Archives. my.OAI is a full-featured search engine to a selected list of metadata databases from the Open Archives Initiative project. All searches performed at my.OAI, even is guest mode are returned with your favorite orange XML icon (un-MERLOT like! ;-) making them available for syndication and retrieval in your favorite RSS aggregator. <tiphat to a friend in Melbourne!> cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine It's such a burden to remain fashionable, especially in web technologies which rise and fade faster than the latest in sweater swim wear... In assembling future lessons for the Headless ds106 course, I'm on the section for storytelling, and find myself hand editing a list of web resources, the "Bag of Links" approach which has not changed much since 1994. The colors went all faded high chromatic, I heard the crooning of The Mamas and Poppas, and became nostalgic for the dreams of social bookmarking, crowd sourcing dynamic link sharing. I am so retro in that regard that I still use delicious. Go ahead an laugh, even with the Yahoo purchase and discarding, the frequent blinking of lights with the new owners, I still tag and bag my links there, a collection that goes back to 2006. Yes I know I can migrate them to diigo (I may have done do). The modern hip kids are using things like Scoopit, and the really cool nerds go for pinboard. In my ideal world, it should not matter where you tag... so I had this fuzzy idea of building something that would provide a strategy for sharing links that did not depend on who's service you used. But here's the thing, what I want for ds106 is a faceted tag search; tag anything ds106, and include a second tag for a particular topic, so we could have resource subcollections for: storytelling audio visual design video remix animatedgif (just for the heck of it and cause #WeLoveGIFs) That is one of the things I love about delicious, you can construct these just by knowing how their URLs work, e.g. everything I have tagged ds106 and audio (http://delicious.com/cogdog/ds106+audio) or everything everybody has tagged the same (http://delicious.com/tag/ds106+audio) -- the rss feeds are also easily constructed. I've done a little digging, and found so far that pinboard and diigo both can do compound tags: https://www.diigo.com/tag/ds106%20audio http://pinboard.in/t:ds106/t:audio Scoopit does not seem to provide compound tags. See and that is the thing about link sharing in Google+, Facebook, and twitter- you cant get the stuff out (there might be a way with twitter). The links go into the chute and never return. But I am going even more retro: That's right, Yahoo Pipes. Nobody uses that, right? https://twitter.com/fgraver/status/372372761903370240 Go ahead and snicker, but I think Yahoo Pipes is one of the more brilliant web building tools out there, because of its maker-like interface of dropping in modules, the way you can test output, and it does things that you cannot really do easily otherwise. It lends itself to learning logic, string manipulation, even some regex, and more. For years I thought the only reason Yahoo kept it going was because they forgot about it. But I have a hunch that it has some critical internal use. To try it out, I build one this morning to provide a way to mix these tag feeds together into one. You can enter a general topic tag (like ds106) and a subtopic one, plus list a strong to remove items that have something like "ds106.us" in the links... as a resource for ds106, we don't need bookmarks to ds106, right? The first half of the pipe builds the feed for each service, based on the two input tags, using the StrongBuilder to create parts of the URLs, URLBuilder to assemble them, and FetchFeed to... [caption id="attachment_24756" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click the pipes to see bigger pipes)[/caption] It uses Union to put those feeds together, a Filter to block out the items that link to ds106.us, Unique to remove duplicates based on link url or title, then sort what is left by publication date with newest first.. and voila! One feed [caption id="attachment_24757" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click the pipes to see bigger pipes)[/caption] Voila! This is of course dynamic as people tag new stuff we get new stuff. But stuff does roll off the bottom eventually. But here is my idea- build a series of these for topics in ds106, and use the RSS feed to pull into the site via FeedWordpress. I would create a custom post type, so they don't litter the blog flow of ds106 activity. And we could than build a series of category pages that would organize these, and they could be searchable. There is still litter among those. We could add the WP-Ratings and let visitors up vote content, or build something where we could move lesser valuable ones to draft. There are a few ways to do this. I guess the question is, regardless of my gauche use of old tagging tools and rusty pipes, is this approach sensible? It does hinge on people tagging (and remembering the tags). Are there other services with adding? Or just tell me to take my knit poncho and go play volleyball with Ted and Bob. Just found the WordPress plug-in WP-iPodCatter which creates iTunes ready RSS feeds from a WordPress blog. This became necessary as I dabbled with posting my first enhanced podcast file, and noticed that WordPress never put the *.m4a file in as an enclosure. It turns out, WP is pretty limited on what it seeks for enclosures (mp3 only). But iPodCatter does more as it enables all the other iTunes specific fields that make your feeds ready for the Big Store. There was one needed trick, as our webserver was not configured for the proper MIME type. Failing to get the command write via WebMin, I was able just to add it directly to the .htaccess file in my WP directory (some hosted sites will not take new MIME types this way) by adding: AddType audio/x-m4a .m4a This is part of a new piece of NMC where we will be using a blog to publish the latest news from the Second Life project that launched last week-- the NMC Campus Observer. Pieces are still being added, and other 2.0-ish things are pending, but to get my hands dirty, I created an enhanced podcast using the mp3 provided by our guest musician, Johnny99 Gumshoe, whose avatar performed "live" lasy week for us in Second Life, using the audio streaming features built into the sim-- check out Johnny99 Gumshoe Rocks Out NMC Campus Opening. The enhanced podcast was bonehead easy using GarageBand-- just plopped in the mp3 to a music track, and dropped images to the podcast track, and sent it to iTunes, which creates the m4a file. It might have taken 10 minutes total. The direct link is: http://www.nmc.org/sl/audio/johnny99.m4a We were not pleased with the use of TeamSpeak for running the audio for presentation and communication (having to hold a key to talk is awkward) and there was a lot of noise and artifacts (people leaving their mikes open, some dropouts). Since Johnny's music streamed in nicely as a live music stream, we have been looking at some tools that provide MP3 streaming directly from a PC- such as ShoutCast, icecast, and SimpleCast. But I was very excited when I found NiceCast for Mac OSX, where you can stream audio from any application (e.g. iTunes) or audio device (input/output/both). It essentially allows you to be your own internet radio station. It has a lovely interface, some of the best documentation I have seen (as opposed to an unformatted text file as most of the PC apps have), and some interesting capability to create a set of effects and filters via a graphical interface. I was able yesterday to easily stream music from my own iTunes to Phil Long over at MIT. The downside is you cannot have too many streams going since each one takes a chunk of your bandwidth, so we will be researching some of the services that host the streams. NiceCast is slick as you can then use a third party server to do the actually streaming to listeners, and NiceCast provides the stream from a Mac to that server. At least that is how I think it works. I just keep learning it, making it up as I go. The video assignments are a ton of work, we know it. The pace continues this week (and we have some room to relax the deadlines, so stop fretting). While the assignments are intensive, do not forget to do a detailed write up in your blog post with your assignment work: Include the name of the assignment and link back to the original on the assignments site. What is the story behind your work? Why did you chose the subject, topic? What does it mean to you? What is your process? Describe the tools used, steps to create the piece, sources of your media. This is really to me a minimum of what makes a good assignment writeup. A strong post includes your own reflection, not just a narrating of the facts. It has a meaningful title, not just “Design Assignment”. If you are referencing movies, songs, characters, places- a stronger post includes hyperlinks to information web sites- the web is built on links- write for the web not just on it. This Week’s Assignment The 15 star goal is raised again this week – more work in the Video assignments category- (see the full post for weeks 9 and 10 on the ds106 site)- one of them needs to be the Movie Trailer Mashup assignment (note this is listed in the Mashup section but it is done as video). In this one, you should take the trailer of a movie you are familiar with, say the one you did for the essay assignment, and mash it up with content, or audio from something completely different- the goal is to use the trailer to completely change the plot or genre of the original. Keep At the Project Thinking I’ve been hearing and reading your ideas. Be writing on your blog and/or contacting me about the thoughts for your projects- I want to see a well crafted pitch for your concept completed by end of this week. Some things to gel your thoughts: Past ds106 Projects Archive Try and thik of a way to combine / mashup Items in the assignment bank Look at some outside creaive exercises in the ds106 Idea Machine. Talk to me if you would like to build some stories out of the content in my StoryBox, media not seen elsewhere on the web. Other Stuff If your YouTube video is blocked, you might want to try vimeo or this strategy for under fair use law disputing a takedown Free Screencast software (Mac or PC) Jing or screenr Other options for screen capture on Windows used by students in this class – Microsoft Expression Editor or Fraps. Resources and Examples for Video Mashup/Remixes Kind of Screwed – Andy Baio’s tale of trying to do everything right in doing a derivative work and still getting sued. Opens many questions on copyright, fair use, derivative works. Let Us Never Speak Of This Thing Again resources and audio from a ds106 session in 2011 from Brian Lamb Everything is a Remix – Kirby Ferguson’s documentary series A Fair(y) Use Tale recut of Disney films to explain copyright. RIP: a remix manifesto a documentary on mashup culture featuring the work of Girl Talk Just a few samples… Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed – two different sources re-edited to be coherent story Don't Tase Me Bro/MC Hammer – news event mashed up with music Scary Mary (recut movie trailer – family movie reversed to Horror) The Shining Recut (recut movie trailer – horror movie reversed to be love story) Star Trek Meets Monty Python – redubbing Kel McKeown: Instructional Video – creating new sounds from recut instructional videos Hitler Downfall DMCA Takedown – retelling via captioning Literal Video Versions – music videos form literal interpretation of lyrics Odd Kid – lip sync and remix Sweded Films – low/no budget remakes of hollywood films Weird Al Yankovic Bob parody plus a twist, lyrics are palindromes Open Education Week.... It's so hard to be open? Not around this dog house. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine How quickly this time went, this workshop represents the last stop on my ISS Institute circuit. It was also the most distant travel. Sigh, this is back blogging, I loathe loathe loathe back blogging– this is from the workshop done November 22, 2017. I should have known better, back from my 2000 visit to Albury New South Wales, I should have remembered that Wodonga was the city on victoria just south of the Murray River that forms the border between the two states. As it was, this workshop was originally planned for two days before; it was not until talking to Brad Beach on my arrival that I was reminded it was that far away. Moreover, my plans were already that I was going to travel to Albury by train after my last session to meet up with Tim Klapdor ar Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga. Fortunately, the Wodonga TAFE planners and the ISS Institute staff were able to shift the workshop to Wednesday, saving a long round trip. As it was, I was driven to Wodonga by Lisa, enjoying some parallal experience in educational technology while also enjoying how the scenery unfolds leaving the Melbourne metropolitan area. The brief for this session included: TAFE teachers who use technology in their everyday teaching, using Moodle as the LMS to engage, interact and assess current students A hands-on workshop of showing what can be done, what’s current, what’s changing – and how teachers can use technology/websites for teaching. Show some examples of tools and resources and how it can be implement implemented for teaching and learning. Current and Future trends/issues/challenges of technology and teaching/learning. My preparation for this was some collection, re-arranging, and augmenting of some of the materials in my previous sessions (Wodonga benefits from getting the refined versions). This works well in the web site structure I set up, where each “workshop” is organized by sections in a WordPress site using my WP-Big Picture theme, so in this case I used as a base the Show Your Work! one. But in there, I can create a custom page that has a slightly different set of materials, picked just for this workshop: I started with another round of using AnswerGarden to ask their expectations of the workshop; I like to think it provides me some info but also generates to the audience some ideas how they might use this simple too (with me pointing out that AnswerGarden is (a) free; (b) single purpose; (c) requires no login or user data Yes, they wanted some fun, tool ideas, activities, and food (e.g. ice cream and scones). This alone gives me a sense of the personality int he room, though it was obvious when we started it was an energetic group. But if we were all online, I might not get this “read” on the group directly, but perhaps an AnswerGarden can help. Although the topic of future of technologies was in their brief, the room was nearly all practitioning teachers, so I only briefly touched on some of the topics in the On Futuring session The real activity started with pulling out my bag full of odd objects and asking the participants to do the first activity of Identifying Contextless objects. The Contextless Stuff is Out Again at Wodonga TAFE flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This is a two part activity meant to get out the difference between trying to “find the answer” vs sharing your process of finding the answer. They are asked to use anything they have at their disposal to learn about the object, or where it’s from. The electronics/circuit board parts are easy picks, as is the turquoise metal armed thing (a cheap laptop stand). I was pleased a few more people went for the pages ripped out of old cookbooks. Sharing the Process of Contextless Object flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And more people chose the odd CD and vinyl (which are not that hard to research) and we invariably hear some music playing. One person chose the Tijuana Brass album, not the original Herb Albert, but this led to an association I had to share of the article on the Whipped Cream model who is now 76 and living in the Seattle area They all took photos of their object and uploaded them to the Image Collector SPLOT, I tagged all the ones from this workshop to pool them together: Perhaps my favorite example was the person who had a picture card of a boat where you could read the name “Marion” on it: Found the Marion flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Because this person is an outdoor educator and has some prior knowledge, by adding the keywords “steam” “paddle” “boat” he found an identifying site for the boat www.psmarion.com/about-ps-marion/ I talke through the part of this workshop that expanded this activity, the idea of “showing your work”, and how we could have done the second part of the activity, to create an audio narrated video describing the process. I also got to share the work of my Maricopa colleague Sian Proctor on how she has been having her students to web screencasts as a way of explaining and showing their understanding. There was plenty of note scribbling going on here. The rest of the workshop time was the participants exploring my collection of Silly/Useful Web Tricks I began with the group doing an group improv round of pechaflickr – And I am totally blanking on the tag we used! Sigh, that’s why back blogging stinks. This active group was an ideal way to end my series of workshops. Featured Image: Sharing the Process of Contextless Object flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It's a Bag of Coalby: cogdog I cannot say this has a whole lot of meaning-- it more or less came out of just thinking about the rallying call from Gardner Campbell's No Digital Facelift presentation we use to start ds106. So maybe if people do not see the value of the Bag of Gold, perhaps another precious natural resource. I visited Gardner a little over a week ago, and we did some lamenting how much people tend to gravitate, or not want to move away from the status quo. Maybe gold is not enough of an inducement. Maybe it is a bag of? Doritos? a bah of crude oil? a bag of lobbyists? I don't know. All kidding aside, how do we stir up more excitement about the potential of the internet versus the fear and loathing that keeps people from embracing? Like my other colleagues close to this, the answer seems to always end up at... ds106, the answer to everything. It's not just us boasting, it is that sea of creativity that, to me, shows the potential for things we do not expect, the adjacent possibilities. IT"S A BAG OF COAL! WHAT PART OF IT DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND! I did this as a small sample of the web storytelling assignment for ds106 to use one of the 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story tools to say something about web storytelling. I always thought xtranormal was one of the most original tools--- "If you can type into a box you can make a movie". I was disappointed that they made the free options so slim, but I had some credits when I last used it for another video project. It's easy to slip into the silly mode for this tool, but really, it can be used quite easily to block out scenes, or play the part of a film director. It remains one of my favorite tools. This is for my own "to do" list most of all, but I have a wheelbarrow full of stuff I've been immersed in (and 3 more palettes piled high with new things to do), but to be blogged sometime between tomorrow and the end of time.... * A Drupal State of Mind: in line with a previously successful strategy of using the technology that D'Arcy does, I am on the learning cliff to get a new site going that will be a dynamic web community for the 1999 vintage NMC main site. But as powerful as Drupal is, it is hard to find the right toe hold climbing up; the terminology, the billions of modules, the trillion of forum suggestions... well it is daunting. My plan is not to tinker in the lab and produce a nice shiny site, but to actually build it out in public view, sort of like peeking through a construction site fence, and hopefully get some input, building it organically. Actualy, my first step is to do a separate Drupal instance that will be mostly a blog about this work, to document both code and design as we go. * Web Audio Casting: i've set NMC up with a web audio/video content delivery network, for more effective publishing of media content, but we also have it set up to to live audio streams from our events... this is first put to use by streaming live audio into our Second Life Campus, and I've gotten up to speed with Shoutcast technology and found an even slicker Mac OSX client that allows me to stream content from any application or audio source to our streaming service, which then handles the multiple client requests. but there's more-- this Saturday we have an virtual event (an Artists showcase in Second Life) where we will have a live panel session-- our remote presenters will be both calling in to a phone bridge (toll free number in the US), but we have some panelists from the U.K., and we will be using Skype conference calling to connect to them, and then Skypeout that audio to our teleconference bridge... AND then a special hardware bridge that can take the sum audio from the phone conference, push it out through Shoutcast to our media stream. It's crazy! We went through some testing this morning and managed to create some freaky reverb effects, but its all working. * Moving to Flash Video One only has to look at the raging success of the Flash video sites like Blip.tv, YouTube, et al, to realize this is the way to publish video content. I've done a few examples of getting QuickTime or WMV video into FLV and create a web player, but I'm far from an optimal solution. I'd sure like some sort of jukebox player to select different video content. * reBlog I have two prototype sites almost ready for public view that use the reBlog concept, which takes rss aggregation to a new group filtering/publishing level. It's slick, but is taking time to simply the interface for the folks we are askng to do the reblog work. * Screencasting I got my hands on a copy of Captivate and am dabbling with some screencasts that will support some of our workshops. It is an enticing form, but there is a lot more to it than just turnig on the record button and talking as you click around a piece of software. There is an art to doing it right, and I am at the clumsy crayon stage of this art. * RSS in MediaWiki Other folks have pitched in a date display option, and I've updated a few small pieces in this code that allows you to embed RSS feed content into any MediaWiki page... there are still a few feeds that just do bizarre formatting things that require special treatment (that's you, Yahoo-- weird RSS formatting central! line feeds in item titles, why?). * Feed2JS Looks like my old server at Maricopa bit the dust. I have no access to it anymore, and have hoisted the new home at http://feed2js.org/. Sorry for broken sites. I have not had any time to focus on this, but I still intend to get the code on an EduForge site, develop a new approach for mirrors, and the code above has some insight for building key word filters. I'm getting some use of it myself on numerous NMC pages. Well, there is more, but I should be doing the work, not blogging about blogging about it..... cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by noii's Since Michael Branson Smith's ds106 class is moving into the audio portion of the course, I devised a new assignment for the audio section. And this is something I need as well in my own adventure to find the Center of the Internet. So here is the gist of the assignment. Like some people use special whistles to attract birds, your task is to create an 30 second or less audio file that might be used to "call" a particular character from a movie, tv, or real life. It cannot feature voices, but sounds only. Share a description why this sound would be attractive to the character (be inventive, write a story about it). So in my case, I am desperately trying to attract the attention of Dr Oliver, the character who is driving ds106 students on a Journey to the Center of the Internet. Looking at this character in the videos: My sense is he likes the sound of martinis being mixed and people fawning about him ar cocktail parties. Here is my Bird Call for Dr. Oliver: Dr Oliver Bird Call My recipe was to search for "cocktail" at Freesound.org. I downloaded 2 files, one of a martini being mixed and another of ambient sounds at a party. I import both tracks into Audacity- sliding the party audio to the right (using the Time Shift Tool, double arrow icon). I selected the party music out to 30 seconds, then use the trim tool to delete all the other parts of it I don't want. I wanted some overlap with the party sound to fade in and out- in this case I use the "Envelope Tool" (2nd icon top row of the tools) which allows me to adjust sounds levels in the audio by placing hinge marks: So what sounds can you mix/create to make a Bird Call for a character? How would you call Dr Oliver? Can you please try this or any other ds106 assignment to get his attention? Please? CALLING DR. OLIVER!!!!! A few weeks ago twitter and some blogs were all a' gushing about the demo of Google Wave like it was the new Shimmer, maybe even more than a dessert and a floor wax. I tweeted some snark about the hype -- a bit foolishly since I had not seen the demo. I failed to heed my own warnings of judging a technology from the outside (well, I cannot help but be from outside, since all I have to go on is an 80 minute demo). Until today on the flight to Hawaii, when I watched the whole demo on my iPhone. I'm surprised the plane held steady with the number of times my jaw dropped or I yelled, "wow". So I cannot do much except say wow-- but--but--but if the wave does break (in the positive surfer sense), this could be a huge game changer. Not only does it change email and communication as Rasmussen proposes in the beginning ("what if we were to invent email today?") -- it could be the end of the static web as we know it. Now of course, with web 2.0 we think it is really not static, but the web on wave looks a whole lot different than what we have now- this very blog post becomes a conversation that is always being updated, edited. There is also this sense of information, communication becoming free of the technology boxes we have them now- so the same content can be modified, edited, discussed via a browser, phone, blog, wave client, some remote programmed bot.. It could change the sense of what we think of as documents, as they become distributed yet connected-- the piece about people working simultaneously yet in a chained publish model (pieces of one wave are updated causing instant propagate changes where-ever that web is used. The notion of playing back a wave goes way being watching a video of MediaWiki updates-- did you catch the small piece about just playing back a single person's contributions? Doesn't this have some compelling interest for assessment, to be able to track a single student's contributions to a larger group project? Is Google Wave the manifestation of those long ago (for me dead) dreams of reusable learning objects-- but with much more? Another piece that just jazzed me was both presenters manipulating and marking up a Google Map together. This has been one missing piece of Google Maps / Earth- the social layer that we see in virtual worlds. With wave, we can be co-exploring (or heck field trips) in maps, maybe Earth? Things maybe to be added or I missed include: I saw them adding users o a Wave one at a time. I'd like to see an ability to define groups, and groups made o groups, so you could mass add people together. Or perhaps you tag contacts, and assemble them that way. It wasn't clear what kinds of permission layers you can add- it looks like everything is editable. If that is the case (and I am not sure I mind), then-- everything becomes a Wiki (and conversely, as someone else suggested, wikis as we know them go the way of the doodoo bird). What if a wave is "complete" can it be frozen as a final product? What if I want to let Jane and Nancy edit, but only let Harvey view a wave (or maybe harvey can only comment, but not edit). Waving seemed fine for 2, 3, 5 people-- what happens when 100s are in one? 1000s? So I have sipped the wavy cool-aid, and it is now factoring into plans for a major new NMC collaboration site I will be charged with designing this year. While this is all exciting for the technogeek in me, the bigger question is -- is it too much a cognitive leap for people to jump form their inbox? Is it too complex for people to grok? What will be the big feaure, app that will make people drop the fears to try hopping on a surf board and get on a real wave? I am paddling out there to see.... I've already barked about how cheap it is to like stuff on Facebook (my campaign to have everyone like everything failed). If you can just click something in 0.2 seconds does it really carry any value? But now, of the ease of which I can endorse someone's skills in LinkedIn, means alot if one gets a lot of endorsements, which all it really means is that a lot of people are mindlessly clicking because someone else mindlessly endorsed them. What really is banal is when LinkedIn pops up people I know and asks something like "Does Alec Couros know about E-Learning?" Its such a frigging stupid question, I am insulted to be even asked. It is close to this: I would be embarrassed to let it be known I have clicked such obvious questions. And of course, LinkedIn is merrily tracking all that clicking activity, you can even see who is looking at your profile. It's as warm a feeling as peeking in someone's window to see they are peeking at you. You know what is even more ridiculous? I have two endorsements for skills in Moodle. I have maybe used Moodle 5 times, the last in 2008. Tonight, two people have endorsed my skills in Project Management. WTF? I could barely manage myself out of a paper bag. To again lift my leg on the system, I went in one day and posted a series of skills like "chasing cats" "mocking moocs" -- of course, LinkedIn emailed everybody under the sun and told them I added new skills. The funny thing was I went back a few days later... and my silly skills were gone! Who did that? Who is censoring what I put on my silly profile? So I went back and added a few key skills: These seem to be sticking, so please endorse me in my skill of MOOC Mocking. I'd really like to see that one move up the board. It got really fun when Tara Calishaln, who has been running Research Buzz since like the day after Tim Berners-Lee created the web, had a good skill suggestion: https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/360428198770655234 I am all about okra folding, and now I am endorsed. Solid. Now I will be heavily recruited, right? Someone will tell me a story of how useful endorsements have been for their success. I do not preclude that as a possibility. But if you really put stock in the meaning of what people can click on 0.2 seconds, well... I have new skills in Arizona Beachfront Real Estate Sales. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Kevin Dooley I find perverse pleasure in finding a way to force Google to Sit, Stay, Rollover, and do the tricks I want it to do rather than what it decides. The sense of power is of course a fabricated illusion, but still, the effect is robustly divine. After some explanation of my current approach, creating a quick shortcut for google image results that are CC licensed, and steps hpw ypu can do the same, I present my newest hatched karate chop to Google. My Shortcut Gift My almost daily use of Google Images is to locate ones that are open licensed to use. Yes, if you search on this you will find a gazillion results that explain how to do this. Type in your search terms, click the button By default you get results from all over tarnation. Then click Tools. Then look for Usage Rights menu. Then select Creative Commons licenses. So first you have to see the results you likely cannot re use, then it takes 2 more clicks to find the ones you can reuse. And if the results are crappy, try adding a new term to the search. The results send you back to seeing the general image pool. So you have to repeat the pattern to filter again. I find this repetition not only wasteful, but insulting. Remember that Google's primary mission is always to get more stuff in front of you that you might click. The more you click the more data they collect. My approach for a long time, dialing back to gy Gift of Time back in 2013, is using a Custom Browser Search. https://cogdogblog.com/2013/12/gift-of-time/ In Chrome, if you go to Preferences then Search Engines (direct link) you get no surprise, some options for the default search tool to use in your browser (there are similar setting in Firefox, Safari, et al). Scroll down more, and there's a whole long raft of "Other Search Engines"... if I guess right, in Chrome, every time you type a keyword into a web sites search box, it adds an entry here. But what I learned back in 2013 (and that was a nod to Chris Lott who showed me this), is I can add my own patterns. Now Google Search results end up with a mile long set of parameters added to the results URL. I've done some work to whittle them down to the bare minimum. Search all of Google for the best creature https://www.google.com/search?q=dog Search all of Google Images for photos of the same https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch Search all of Google Images for CC licensed photos of the same https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=il%3Acl What I can do now (and outlined below how you can do the same) is in my browser url bar, type gcc press TAB, enter my search words, press Return, and BOOM! I get only images that are licensed creative commons. I bet I have done this 20,000 times since 2013. Here's the skinny. Again in Chrome to Preferences then Search Engines (direct link) Scroll down to Other Search Engines, and click the Add button. The name is what will pop up in the browser bar when you activate it, call it what you like, even "Google I Order You To Be CC". The keyword is a shortcut yo will remember to activate it, so make it memorable. Mine is gcc (I could not enter that again in the screenshot above). The third one is what makes it work, it is the search result that has all the parameters you want to be put in place, and %s replacing the actual search terms from a result. For this example, use: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch&tbs=il%3Acl For those wanting to know, q is the search terms, tbm=isch indicates it is a google images search and tbs=il%3cl make it return ones that are cc licensed. This has worked wonderfully, and I have a few more shortcut searches in my arsenal (f TAB searches my flickr photos, wiki TAB searches wikipedia). But the problem is the same as before- my shortcut works fine for the first search, but if I change any keywords, I get bopped mack to searching images without any filtering for CC. The New Trick What I have long hoped for was some setting in Google Chrome, or maybe even an extension, that would made Creative Commons Licensed my default for any image search. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1354845851848302592 Surely this cannot be that complicated, others have asked too. Why can't Google offer a bunch of preference options (see above for the click reason). So last week I hacked my own answer. I found a browser extension (works on more than Chrome) called Requestly that lets you modify a URL in your browser. Once installed, you can go to a spot to create your own "rules" (account not even needed). Now I experimented with tons of settings, this is for now, Alan Borrowing Occam's Razor of the simplest. I run on URLs that contain somewhere in them tbm=isch this is what identifies a google image search result. I suppose there is a chance so other web site might use these same query parameters, but nothing here will break the web for you. All it does is add to the url the extra query parameters tbs=ol%3ci that force results to be Creative Commons licensed. In Requestly, you can create your own via the Create Rule button. I could not export my rule on a free account, but I was able to create a share link that will let you import the rule. Now here is the fun part. No matter what terms you enter or whatever tool options you change in Google Images, you will only get results that are creative commons licensed. I cracked their code! bahahahahahaha. There is a downside. I cannot ever get all the other stuff as a result. I would have to either disable the rule in my Requestly settings or deactivate the extension if I want to see stuff not licensed CC (or just go to an incognito browser window or another browser). I tried my hardest to get the Regex search going that would get around this, but just came up short. This is just a first cut attempt, but I feel pretty proud of the result. I can make Google sit, lay down, and roll over and only hand me image search results that are open licensed. WTF Commercial and Other Licenses As a sideline, I have never looked at the results listed as options for "Commercial and Other Licenses"- it looks like what it says, try (without my gizmo activated) https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=il:ol Yes, you get results from Shutterstock of course, but many other dog and pet related sites. Over the results of you over over "licensable" and when you click the preview, there is an indication of the photographer's name and referencing Getty images. I downloaded a bunch and could not find this in the photo metadata, so Google must have some other correlation between images on say Petfinder.com or AKC.org heck even edx.org (remember when they were about "open"?) and Getty. Weirdly, I see results that indicate they are from Unsplash.co, that are listed as licensable from istockphoto But when you click the image it's clear. You do not go to an Unsplash photo for this little toy dog, but search results for Unsplash that have the iStockphoto ones at the top you need to scroll past to get the ones you want. This again supports my contention that google will nudge you ever ever more circling towards more commercial content that exposes you to more links to commercial content. Why would they give you an image search result which is not the image shown n the preview, but a page of search results that include it as a thumbnail? Although they pay lip service to Creative Commons with a buried option in search that you cannot even make a default setting, they are by no means a guardian of the commons. Do everything you can to subvert The Google. And find joy when you succeed. It's a likely losing war, but you might come out on top of a few skirmishes. Featured Image: Revox A720 Digital FM Tuner pre-amplifier flickr photo by touhotus shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by Alan Levine to put CC on the display, change the brand name from Revox to Google Images, and modify the knob labels Even without the handwritten year, photos along can clearly indicate an era. Today marks the day eight years ago that my grandmother passed away; last year I edited a video made from audio I recorded in 1994 and some scanned photos. She was born in 1905, so in this photo of her lounging in Florida, even more oddly, she is two years younger than I am now. Granny made it to 97, she outlive her husband by more than 50 years, she outlived both of her children (my dad and my aunt), and she outlived all of her brothers and sisters. I cannot imagine what that feels like, but then again, I would think you cling to life no matter what. Thanks for the memories, you live in my mine, and my retelling keeps them alive. Me and my Granny, Baltimore, 1994, the year I recorded her stories on micro-cassette. What do you do when not sure which ds106 Design Assignment to do? Spin the random chooser. Seems like a good thing to do, hence this little bit of design work. The assignment this is for is Name That Single: Create a design for a favorite song by using just simple designs and NO WORDS...Basically a design assignment with the rules in charades. IE: for No Doubt's "I'm Just a Girl" I would just have a symbol of a girl. Shall I give a clue? The lead singer of this band is female. Some might quibble that I have violated the instructions for no words with my math symbol. So what? Who cares? the point is not to just stay within the lines, but to experiment with the concept. To select my song, I also used the randomness of the shuffle in my iTunes to pick this song. I'm standing in the middle of life with my pains behind me. But, I got a smile For everyone I meet. Long as you don't try dragging my bay, Or dropping a bomb on the street. Got it? Half of the length of the run, puts you.. in the middle? Yes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CYsOGTA0eo Gotta dig Chrissie's shiny telecaster. There's more synchronicity here. I've been taken a few times to taking photographs of curvy roads, and like those quite country roads where you can just lay right down on the stripe and get the photo- the one I used to make the image above was in Newport Virginia and is the road to Gardner Campbell's house where I stayed in August: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog To get the more abstract effect I used the Palette Knife filter in photoshop which can make a photo more like a painting, but not as overdone as the watercolor one. The markings where just some paint brush and text for the arrows and math. But what I thought about was that it was only after doing something similar here in Vermont: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That it would be fun to do a collection of what I tag now as BellyOnTheRoad photos. There is something just real... real about doing that. I only have four, but as a reminder, if your photos are geotagged (usually automatic for mobile phones or can be done manually in flickr via the map tools) you can assemble a map for a tagged set of photos. If you go to the "Your Map" link under the flickr You menu you get to the map tool; mine is http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/map/. You can tell it to search everyone's photos or just your own, and give it a search term, in my case the tag of BellyOnTheRoad. Cool! I get a map for where my four belly on the road photos are from: [caption id="attachment_9725" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click map for flickr version)[/caption] So yet another way flickr can help you organize not only your photos, but any ones you can search on. Kind of funny where you end up when you start out clicking "random" Data. Big. Analytics. I don't dismiss a potential, the efforts to "harness" it. I just don't find it all that interesting. But my data? Different. I've been running my own metrics for maybe two months. I may hate dieting more than I hate running. The only time I lost a good amount of weight was being very sick for a month with the flu. But not liking the shape of my middle body in photos, thinking about long term health, I've been on my own mission of data. Having this guy in my life has changed my methods: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] With Felix, we are walking early morning, mid day, late afternoon, and in the evening. It's quite good on many fronts- like spending time away from this machine, thinking. And then I found out by accident, that without me knowing, my iPhone 6 purchased in November has been counting my walking distances. Data. I saw that my average walking distance went from maybe ~1 mile per day B.F. (Before Felix) to more than 4 miles per day A.F. (After Felix) That was a month ago, my average walking distance is now above 7 miles per day. I decided to experiment and began tracking my weight. This started by pulling out the evil measurement device from the back of the closet. From my data, I can see a bad high of 212 pounds on March 16, 2016. At 7:43am (like the time means anything). I thought about looking for some Internet of Things Scale to send the data to my iPhone, then realized that rather than shelling out a few hundred bucks for a smart scale, I could take the 30 seconds each day to type a number in. Two months later, I am knocking ay my lowest number: Like Ben Werdmüller noted, the 10 things I am trying to lose weight are really two- less food + more exercise. I hate to say, but obviously, the daily racking is somewhat of an incentive. Not for getting any game rewards or badges, but just to see small increments of success. But I play games with it. My morning weigh in is right after waking up, before putting on pants. My doctor's scale, even more evil, runs about 5 pounds heavier than mine, but I can rationalize that. Later in the day, more stuff in my pocket. Wearing pants and shoes. I know my true weight is my lowest number. And I play more games with it. After making coffee, I sometimes return to the bathroom to, ahem, sit and lose a little more weight. And sure enough, the numbers drop a little. Sometimes, I have seen it go up a few decimal points. WTF? Discard that data. But overall, over two months, with jogs up and down, the general trend is a bit toward where I want to go. Of course, if you look closely at the vertical axis, the drama of the fall may not be... dramatic. [caption id="attachment_57698" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Weight changes by week, month, year... which numbers do I like?[/caption] Still, the numbers I like are ones that favor my goals, and thus the most true and accurate. The others I can discard, and explain away. Numbers are so pure. Top / Featured Image: My scale, sometimes my friend, mostly my enemy. You want this image? Why? Well I will share it under a Creative Commons BY Attribution license. Go ahead and make a million dollars from it. Good luck. I just cleaned up a bug in a golden oldie web site, and it is playing music again. The Interactive FlipSite was created so long ago I cannot remember exactly for sure, at least before 1998. The purpose was to create a site to illustrate simple probability for basic mathematics using the most simple of tools- the odds of flipping coins, and the counting of "heads" and "tails" of the coin flips. This was one of our "What if?" type projects... a ways back, I met with Scottsdale Community College Math faculty to flesh out an idea he would dream up that we would produce that would make good use of online technologies. john had been doing quite a bit then with graphing calculators, and initially we were thinking of doing some sort of tie in with real world data. But just in conversation, sitting in his math lab one summer, he just blurted out, "What if we could simulate me flipping coins every 5 seconds for an entire year?" And the idea nicely mushroomed from there. So while the web site is a bit dated and the graphics of John flipping are rather cheesy, it still works nicely all these years later (well after I fixed a JavaScript related problem John had alerted me too). It works like this- the site makes it looks like John is flipping a coin in real time, but in reality what we do is to pre-create a giant text file with all 6 million plus coin flips for an entire year ( a bunch of "1"s and "0"s) . The programming feat (perl) was to have the web application (Shockwave) be able to determine the current time (well it is local Arizona time) and then to determine where in that giant array of data we should be. So if I hit the site, on say July 12 at 9:07:50 AM, it finds the location in the array where that data starts, and grabs enough future coin flips for say, another 10 minutes of flips. Shockwave is able to call a perl script to fetch appropriate data as needed. We have another perl script that can regenerate the year of flip data. It is also able to hit the summary data, e.g. the total of heads and tails up to that point, and generate a running total, so it can let me know that there have been 3,341,614 total flips, where 1,669,175 have been heads and 1,672,439 have been tails. But watching coin flips does not teach much, that is just the teaser. What John dreamed up and we built were other tools, including: Flip Parade: allows you to see a graphic display of series of flip results for any point in time between January 1 and the current date and time..Flip Streaks: allows you to query how many times, say a streak of 12 heads has occurred in the history of the year. From the results, students can repeat this streak on the Flip Parade, and then they can visually test their assumptions about what follows (some assume there might be a long set of tails, but probability states.... well, you should fill it in).Experiments: using the flip data, you can set up tests to find frequency distributions of coin flips for X number of people each flipping a coin Y times (you enter the X and Y for your own experiments). The site generates a frequency distribution and then students are encouraged to compare the results to the mathematical prediction. John has used this site regularly since we created it. I set it up and forgot about it ;-) But it is cool to see that old technology and good ideas can still cook together. Go play: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mobius/flip/