Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
I'm a big proponent of using images with my online writing, all of my blog posts start with an image before I even write. But sometimes you do not have access to upload images, but with a little bit of know how you can sometimes insert them. This happened just today to Danny, a participant in Ontario Extend who had posted his response to the Collaborative Dining Activity. The editor does have an insert image button but it does not allow uploads directly to the site: [caption id="attachment_66488" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Insert image button for editor to the Ontario Extend Activity Bank response to an activity[/caption] What this button asks for is a "source" ... [caption id="attachment_66489" align="aligncenter" width="760"] What is the source?[/caption] ... where the source it wants is a URL to an image that exists elsewhere in the internet. That's maybe not well understood. This sometimes means image hotlinking, not always the best approach it you are using a link to some other web site. This is not always kosher, because the image may someday be removed, but also, it might mean you are putting a demand on someone else's web server. You can find a raft of free services to upload images and then get pubic URLs for them. But this still makes you reliant on a third party. But it's legit to do if it's your image and you put into a place you manage. Here are a few options. You may know more. I upload all my photos to flickr, let's use as an example this resilient dog I know. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Tug of Toy flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] I will download the large sized one to use as an example. Since I have my own domain, I have the ability to just upload it to my site using file transfer tools. I keep a directory on my cogdogblog.com domain for such "stuff", so I can put Felix's photo there and use this URL anywhere a site expects an image http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/felix-tug.jpg Copy that url to a new browser window, and load it. Hello Felix! Not everyone has their own domain, but if you do have a blog, even a free/hosted one, you have a place to store media. Since I have a blog, well several, (and hopefully you do) I can upload my photos upload it to my blog. In a Wordpress dashboard (the black menu interface), I can go to Media -- Add New Once it's been uploaded, way over on the right is an "Edit" button [caption id="attachment_66493" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Once an image is uploaded to your Wordpress site, look for the Edit link[/caption] And from here we can find the image's File URL [caption id="attachment_66494" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Getting the URL for an image uploaded to your wordpress site[/caption] And after all that, my next example. I can use this anywhere on the web, like the Extend Bank's Image Source. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/felix-tug.jpg Sometimes in a pinch I might just be editing a post, like this one, or just start a new one that I later discard, but still use Add Media button, all just to add an image to my library. I actually just skip inserting the image, but once uploaded, again, on the right side, I can get another image URL So any place I have a blog, I have a place I can generate a URL for an image, here from my self-hosted Wordpress blog. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/felix-tug-1.jpg I cold also use a Wordpress.com blog, and just upload an image to my library, so I casn return later to grab an image I might want to use later by it's URL And look! Another place I have my own managed, own place for the same image's URL I can use https://cogdogblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/felix-tug.jpg Goggle blogs provides this, maybe a tad uglier, but still.. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MwHKBDgXyiI/WzEjz_WXx0I/AAAAAAAADLU/0tuFgFM-GgkGfI2rWZrZYifcpK0M5mpjgCLcBGAs/felix-tug.jpg Same photo, I might put in my Dropbox, I can create a public link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yv29kjiwrgz2mrt/felix-tug.jpg?dl=0 Hey, same dog, same photo, but a different URL. But one I own. Maybe I am polluting the web with Felix's photos, but this is now a permalink "a permanent static hyperlink to a particular web page or entry in a blog". One I control, not someone else. I can decide to make it permanent forever, or remove it. It's mine. All of this is maybe way too long an explanation for Danny's response, which initially had no image. But Danny did have a picture. And there is another way, which is asking me for help, so I added his image. Either way, using images us important in communicating online, and getting a bit more savvy about how to use image URLs might come in hand. Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Raspberry Pi Camera Module - Inserting Cable flickr photo by ghalfacree shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license[/caption] We are rolling out today the You Show’s The Daily – a site that will generate a small creative challenge every day at 8:00am PT. A new one will be tweeted out by @youshow15 and appear on the front of The Daily site as well. This is based on the success we’ve had with the DS106 Daily Create, now entering it’s fourth year. This version for The You Show will be aimed at tasks that can help you practice media creation and idea development. Enough explanation. This is the one for today: The Daily #youshow15 Share a photo of the most rewarding thing you do on a daily basis http://t.co/fynVGsayP7 #tweko pic.twitter.com/8Hllbhx7nC — The You Show (@YouShow15) January 15, 2015 Did you notice how neat I get my tweets embedded in my post? It has links that work. This is another bit of WordPress magic of automatic embedding. Every tweet has its own URL (usually linked where it has a time/date stamp), so if you paste that URL on a blank like: Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. https://twitter.com/YouShow15/status/555605327412862976 Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. I get the embedded tweet between the “blah blahs”. This one is pretty easy for me- the most rewarding thing I do every day is to take photographs. I have done this almost every day since 2008, and I pick one to post to my flickr account to represent my most meaningful photo of the day. I blogged in my regular place a summary for 2014. I enjoy the post-dinner ritual of reviewing my photos, discarding about 2/3, post-editing the others, often finding things in the images I might have missed when I took the photo. Sometimes the selected photo is the “best” to me, but other times it is one that may have more meaning, or a connection to what I did that day. I have a pretty extensive record to look back on and track my growth in the art of photography. The daily ritual forces me to focus every day, and often to stretch and try something I have not done before. The way I try to use the challenges like we are pubslishing for The Daily is to review it first thing in the morning. Sometimes I know right away how I want to respond, and I try to get it done in less than 20 minutes. Other times I let it simmer in the back of mind all day, so that I can have my radar up for ideas or subjects I can use. For today’s I decided to try taking a photo of my camera with a second camera, and got a pretty neat image looking into the front of the lens of my camera where I could actually see, looking backwards through the viewfinder, some of the campus lights outside the window. To respond, I sent a tweet to @YouShow15 and included the hashtag #ysdaily1 and a link to my photo. Whatever you share must exist at a web site somewhere, and you can certainly use your own blog as a place to put today’s photo. Or it can be on flickr or Picassa or a public dropbox. @YouShow15 #ysdaily1 Doing something every day (testing You Show Daily) https://t.co/avLKtEwfD1 — Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 15, 2015 And you can see mine and any others people tweeted on the entry for The Daily for January 14, 2016. Sometimes the response might be a thing you write on your blog, other times perhaps a link to a YouTube video. There is no requirement to do all of these, but we generally suggest trying to complete 3 a week. Look for ones that seem easy to do, but also try some that may have you wondering if you can do it. There is only try. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Here we are in 1987, me a 24 year old mullet head know-not-much and my side kick, Dominoe. In May of that year we did a practice camping trip in western Maryland' it might very well have been the Catoctin Mountain area where the previous October I lost/found her. That story... has just about fueled a career, it seems. I look at this photo of me looking out, I am seeing a future? Looking for it? Hoping for it? Who knows. I was there, and I can only guess what I was thinking. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What I knew of camping, yeah. I had been maybe 5 times in my life before, and I bet I was eating beans from a can. There is the green Eureka tent bought from LL Bean, oh the stories that tent heard. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today marks the day in 1993 my first dog companion left this world. At that time, looking back to 1987, I would think how far I have come. More looking back now dwarfs that gap in units I cannot even measure. It's all a trajectory. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Oh how simple it was then. I have no longing to go back to that, but I see myself looking like a kid. Heck I was. But I had the best companion I could ever hope for. That dog, Dominoe, it feels like she gave, without expectance of a return, much more than I gave back. I am still learning from her. Twenty one years and counting. The summer storms we call "monsoons" arise from mixing wet air from the Gulf of Mexico with heat rising from the desert have finally started getting into gear, bringing rain and cooler temperatures to Arizona. I spotted the bright white vertical column of the thunderhead as I was driving east on AZ highway 260 from Camp Verde to the top of the rim. I was looking for an angle to get the photo, and remembered this bumpy side road off the highway. But there was still a hill in the way, so the dog and I started stomping up the rise, trying not to think about the likelihood of rattlesnakes. I did not top the rise, but the view opened up to give this shot. Photo Metadata When: Jul 23, 2016 06:17:18 pm Camera: iPhone 6s Focal Length: 4.15mm ISO: 25 Aperture: f/2.2 Shutter Speed: 1/2262sec Rights : This photo by Alan Levine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Inside the Photo This photo got picked today for Flickr explore rather mind boggling for an iPhone pic sitting among so many stunning photos. The magic of explore is you cannot expect it, I thought maybe something was up when it showed 20 favorites this morning from people I do not know. And then shortly after I got a notification it was added to the In Explore flickr group, as confirmation: The photo sitting shortly atop the flickr In Explore group, screenshot on the same device that took the picture. The photo is now at 2000 views, and climbing. Yes, I am kind of bragging. Guilty. It’s fun. As mentioned in the photo info below, on a late afternoon drive home from Flagstaff via Camp Verde, I was taking in the dramatic sky as the summer thunderstorms were moving across the top of the Mogollon Rim. I thought I might get a sky shot before I started up the hill, like at the turn for the road to Fossil Creek Canyon, but the sweeping view was not at that point. So I headed up the hill, listening to music but eyeballing the sky ahead (and of course watching the road). As it wound through a narrower stretch of rock, I spotted the bright white column of a thunderhead climbing, and so I made the choice to pull off and try to find a vantage point. I had some fun with a deer skull I found on the ground, balancing it on the branch of a small juniper: flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license By the time I got to the vantage point, I doubted the photo was as good as I had hoped, but took two shots just the same. The original had quite a bit more sky, and cropping it wide (turning off the proportions of the original) at least enhanced the width of the clouds. I cut some of the ground out too, to emphasize the sky. I thought it was a pretty good photo, enough to choose it as my photo of the day, but not super good. You never know. I had been mulling a post about photography with the iPhone. I am so dedicated to most of my work with the Canon 7D and my nifty fifty f/1.4 lens. The iPhone cannot match it for sharpness nor what I can do by managing aperture / depth of field. It’s not even close. I’ve taken some photos with both devices, and the colors from the iPhone are usually not as crisp and vibrant. And with my previous iPhones (4,5, and now a 6) I felt the camera was quite inferior. The 6, though has come a long way, and now I am enjoying using it as my camera while dog walking. It’s a different kind of challenge, knowing what it can or cannot do, but a good one. By getting super close to a foreground subject, locking the focus/exposure, you can force somewhat of a shallow depth of field. It excels too at being able to place it at low, high angles that would be tough to do with the big gun. But mostly, its the same exercise of looking at subtle details of small objects, or special light, that makes photography my favorite thing to do. flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license This photo was also selected for In Explore about 2 months ago, and it too was taken with the iPhone. I spotted the colors a small plant I still do not know, but the way it was lit by the morning sun almost called to me. I noticed it, and almost passed it by, but getting down closer to the ground showed me that the light was stunning. I admit I moved the burned pine cone behind it, partly to prop it up a bit, but it also added an interesting textual contrast. I will still reach first for the DSLR, but since getting the iPhone 6 in December, I am finding it is enabling me to do more photos I would have previously discounted as possible. It’s not about one camera being superior, it’s about figuring out what you can do creatively with the one you have. I like them both. If you really want to appreciate what an iPhone photographer can do, follow Dave Caleb on Instagram. Dave, a photographer teacher at a school in Singapore I got to meet when I was there in 2013, does stunning stuff with an iPhone 5, macro lens, and assorted editing apps. He’s got a fantastic eye for detail and light. #Silhouettes of #SUP #surfers in #Tofino #BC. #iphone5s & #snapseed A photo posted by Dave Caleb (@davecaleb) on Jul 1, 2016 at 7:34am PDT #LookingUp at burning #incense. A sweet smoky smell fills the air. Golden circles with prayers hanging in a black room. #SlowBurn. #iphone5s & #snapseed A photo posted by Dave Caleb (@davecaleb) on Apr 26, 2016 at 3:15pm PDT Ready for #takeoff. Eye to eye with this little guy. #CloseUp #macro image captured on an #iphone5s and #21x #olloclip A photo posted by Dave Caleb (@davecaleb) on Jul 11, 2016 at 7:30am PDT cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dinstereo With returning from Nelson for what my California speaking friends would call "beautifully trippy" time, I am coming to grips soon with next steps in my journey, leading to a departure June 23 for my Road Trip Odyssey. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of trips, presentations, conferences, all packaged up neatly now in the box labeled done. Among the things I won't be doing in the foreseeable future, I have for now done, at least for the next few months: my last plane flight trip my last conference attendence (and last presentation) my last road trip to/from Phoenix my last firmly scheduled obligation. That last one (get it?) is key, as my modus operandi for the road trip is to avoid being pinned to being in a certain place at a certain time. To make this happen, a lot has to happen in the next few weeks. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog At least my wheels, Red Dog, is ready (well she does need to go to the mechanic for a pedicure and checkup), now that I have the sexy cap on the back (a smoking deal I found in CA). There is a two pronged effort looming in my 17 days here-- both organizing the stuff I need to take with me, and organizing the stuff I am leaving behind, and prepping the CogDogHouse in Strawberry to sit, stay, and behave. I also have some things to prepare on my StoryBox concept-- which is growing more interesting as I mull it over. I will be making a dedicated page here on the blog, as soon as I can toy around with a web interace that will work via the PirateBox to provide some guided prompts for what I hope to collect. Because I am aiming to go the next 4,5, 6? months with no income coming in, I;ve been offering my place here in Strawberry AZ, 6000 feet elevation in the cool pine forest as vacation rental... if you are interested in an Arizona vacation, within 90 miles of Sedona and 3 hours to the Grand Canyon, contact me- I am only offering it to people I know (which I guess includes all the non-spammers in my social network) at CHEAP rates ;-) Seriously, it will help me to know that people would be here every now and then... then again, while my neighborhood is quiet, my neighbors have already shown they will call me whenever they see un-familiar car or black motorcycle in the driveway. The whole part of living out of the truck for this time is not a huge deal-- I did this extensively in the late 80s doing my Geology field work, but there's a bit more of managing to sort out these technology things I lacked then. I've been ordering power supplies, and tomorrow will start piling all the camping gear out to see what I got. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I also have plans to be doing some road biking with the super light Trek I picked up in February, but have done almost no riding on it (between travel and the excuse of lack of decent roads here to ride). So part of the routine in the next days is getting out a bit, especially before I meet up with friends on the road expecting I am more Cog than Blog. But also, I look forward the next 17 days to waking without an alarm clock, and doing some slow time as well, maybe just sitting in the hammock reading (or napping)-- once I have done the rest of the clearing and cutting-- landscaping projects around the estate. And on the last list, I am wanting to do a camping/kayaking trip next week (Maybe Knoll Lake?) and hoping my buddy Mike comes through with a promise to do a hike to the Verde ruins he knows well. The sadder lasts will be coming up to the last Tuesday night Yoga followed by Beer at Sidewinders and Saturday breakfast at the Randall House with my circle of local friends here. Yeah, there's a list of lasts, but nothing really lasts... cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Tammy Green (aka Zesmerelda) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by JLM Photography. Disclaimer: Yet another blog post without a destination in mind; this is in the vein of open ended wondering, probably ripe for shooting arrows at. Batteries not included, void where prohibited. I've been dabbling, writing, teaching about digital storytelling for years, I still cannot tell you what it is, as a definition. For sometime, I';ve had this niggling question that has been knocking to be written out. It is a question. Is there a difference (or anything meaningful) in making a distinction between when storytelling is used as a strategy for some other goal as opposed to a goal in itself (just to tell a story)? A few months ago I was at a conference, and sitting in a session on SEO. OI think it was because I did not move quick enough out of the previous session, and got trapped in the middle of a row. A woman got up in front of the room; she was a good speaker, enthusiastic, and introduced her SEO company and explained what they do. "We are just storytellers. Period." I got little queasy. I mean c'mon, you get paid money to improve some company's placement in search results. Yes, you tell a "story" of that company, but its for the express purpose of a business advantage. Ugh, am I some kind of holier than thou storytelling snob? It's the core of consulting firms who help clients define and give voice to what's best and most distinctive about them--and use the power of who they really are to create compelling brands, develop inspired leaders and deeply engage their workforces. I mean that actually sound compelling and something I'd want if I was some CEO. And then it becomes a thing we do to tell stories with data (and people I really respect do a lot of powerful work here)-- when I look at sites like this, they are dominated by the tools and the techniques, and I am not rarely seeing the story. Yes, it is finding ways to elicit meaning, direction, maybe interpretation out of data, but are these really stories? With a jpurney of a hero, an arc, the overcoming of obstacles? I have seem amazing ways to represent complex data, amazing ways to elicit trends, patterns, but is there really a story that data tells, or is it we tell stories with data? Or ??? I am not criticizing, I am just asking, fumbling with the question. I do this myself in my workshops, where I urge people to use storytelling techniques to create a message that is more approachable, interesting etc. So dont get me wrong, I am fully in support of using storytelling as a means to an end, but for some reason it bristles me when it comes off as being something more spiritual or ethereal (scracth that,s top using fancy words you neoliberal so and so...) What is the difference, if any, when the end goal is just to craft a story, when Story (capital) ia the goal? I honestly was tipped here a while ago from a conversation with Barbara Ganley, when she told me why she loved the community of Cowbird, because it was to her, a place of people outside the mainstream, who were solely aiming for creating stories for the sake of stories. Maybe it is a meaningless question. Likely. Let me move on to another one. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by estelle f I've been thinking to a lot about the word "storytelling" and how I bring it to workshops and presentations I have done (and are doing like next week). The word itself to me suggests the performance part, the idea that someone really good at it (like Barbara) are really powerful at the telling part. And while I believe that everyone does and can tell stories, the connotation that comes up is that really passionate, engaging person in the spotlight with a microphone. If the word really mattered, I'd rather be talking about Storymaking than storytelling, because that is the stuff I like do- creating, manipulating, I feel more comfortable saying I am a Maker of stories than a Teller of stories. Like I said, this is just one those free form posts of little purpose than to try and capture some thoughts. To be honest the name, and even the intent dont really matter as much as the making. Stop spending so much time retweeting links and gushing over TED Talks, get your butt over to ds106 for the next 5 weeks of the Twilight Zone flavored class Jim Groom is leading, and make some story art. But if you got some insight or more likely, some criticism, bring 'em While it is possible to mash potatoes with my 1998 Ford F-150, I really would not compare it as a utensil to my plastic kitchen masher. It's quite capable of mashing potatoes but is really meant for more. Obviously. I read Ryan Cordell's Profhacker column yesterday, Build a Speedy, Dynamic Class Website Using Markdown, RStudio, and GitHub Pages. He shares his approach on creating course web sites based on Aleszu Bajak's approach. Ryan contends this approach is better than his previous use of Wordpress for a "dynamic, menu-driven, flat HTML course website". I am a bit of a Wordpress zealot, having being using it for (yikes) 12 years for most of my own work and for my projects. But I'm hardly a Wordpress hammer seeing everything as a WP labeled nail. I've been doing a lot of web projects the last few years sans Wordpress, using HTML5up themes (my calling card https://cog.dog/), presentation sites like for MLA15, Skidmore College Storytelling, Domains 2017. I set up a bunch of interactive tool sites as static HTML running in GitHub Pages like CC IP-SUM, We Make The Road By Annotating, Words With No English Translation, and Flickr CC Attribution Helper. None of those sites used Wordpress. I spent a lot of time last year developing a publishing flow rooted in GitHUb Markdown, that would seamlessly work there, in Wordpress, and the Hugo Learn Static site generator (sort of Jekyll-like). I certainly think Ryan's approach for making a set of web pages for a course, syllabus, course information, works well as static HTML. I have some questions about his claims on comparison to wordpress (addressed below) but more so, I don't think his use case makes for a strong extrapolation to the use of Wordpress. A menu driven set of HTML pages is hardly the limits of Wordpress can do. Let's take on the issues Ryan outlines as problems for Wordpress. Bloat. As WordPress has become more and more prominent—by many accounts, 25% of the web runs on WordPress today—the number of plugins required to keep it safe and functional have ballooned. I increasingly felt I was wasting too much time just keeping the application and all of its plugins up-to-date. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a claim that Wordpress is bloated, but that's not even how Ryan framed it; his claim suggests the overhead of maintaining Wordpress and plugins updates. As of version 3.7, Wordpress and plugins can be enabled to automatically update with no intervention. If anybody remembers what it took like 8 years ago to manually install Wordpress, edit config files, create databases, you have no idea how streamlined it is in 2017. I'm not sure how many content management systems have a facility close to this, or to the breadth of community development. Now he can make a case that because of the high use of Wordpress (it is actually now 29%) it's more of a target by hackers. This does call for consideration of plugins and other measures to keep your site secure. But this is hardly "bloat". Next argument of Ryan's was a suggestion that Wordpress was slower than static. Speed. While the phrase flat HTML might recall the early days of the World Wide Web, such sites, generated by methods such as the one I’m discussing today or through systems like Jekyll, which I will discuss more in the near future, are simply much speedier than WordPress-driven sites. They load almost instantly and respond nimbly. By contrast my WordPress pages feel sluggish. A platform that does a lot of tasks, an admin interface, a database connection may make one thing that of course a bunch of static files would be naturally faster. But do more than a gut feeling if you are making a claim. And there are more issues to consider for speed than the platform; there is the host, it's backbone connection to the internet, and all the squirrels sitting on the wires between your browser and the server. I decided to do some testing with a recently Wordpress blog post that was originally published on a Wordpress.com blog then automatically republished on my own blog via Feed Wordpress Syndication (which, FWIW, is something Wordpress can do that a static site cannot do). I saved that blog post from my blog as stand alone web page so it would all be self contained static HTML (using Save As... in Chrome). This post has embedded images, a YouTube video, even a Github GIST file. I should add it took me a bit of fiddling because I had to also include the CSS for the parent Wordpress theme, but it's all available at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/on-transformations/-- although on the sam domain, that is all separate from Wordpress- here is a screenshot of the directory files, which weigh in at 5.1 Mb I think it's important if you are going to compare a Wordpress site to a static HTML one, you ought to compare them on the same web host. Again these are the three sites tested: Wordpress.com https://cogdogroo.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/on-transformations/ Self hosted Wordpress on CogDogBlog.com http://cogdogblog.com/2017/11/on-transformations/ Static HTML on CogDogBlog.com http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/on-transformations/ I ran a simultaneous load test of three sites on WebPageTest, where the results are available in a number of formats, here is a comparison video: Wordpress.com is kind of a slow nag, eh? Or you can see the charts and graphs. [caption id="attachment_65423" align="aligncenter" width="760"] For the visual progress, self hosted Wordpress is fastest[/caption] And also the timings for various elements, for the most part, self-hosted Wordpress is a winner How can this be? Well, I run a caching plugin on my Wordpress site. But also, Wordpress is really damned optimized. This test is hardly conclusive, but I like to do more than go by a feel in my browser. Ryan's third point is whether Wordpress is appropriate for his need: Need. Frankly, I realized that few of my sites required the infrastructure of WordPress. Only a handful took real advantage of WordPress’ advanced user roles, and few of them included enough resources to make a full database architecture really necessary. This I totally agree. His need is an outline series of web pages, something with a table of contents structure, a menu to navigate. I'd hardly reach for Wordpress to do this task. The "interactivity" and "dynamic" features he cites is really just generating menus from a .yaml file. Heck, I was doing that with PHP or Javascript in the 1990s. It's just a bunch of static pages. But it's not argument that Wordpress is not a good platform. Ryan's points 4 and 5 are the same, Simplicity, and again I mostly agree. Simplicity. I am increasingly convinced by arguments for minimal computing in the digital humanities, at least when such choices are possible. If I can make my course and project sites more amenable to access from less resourced computing environments, that seems like something I should do. This too is valid. With static HTML you can actually develop completely on your desktop (though I do as well with Wordpress and Varying Vagrant Vagrants), but moving static files is simple file transfer. Simplicity. One reason I liked WordPress Multisite was the ease with which I could create a new version of an old class site, so it just needed to be updated rather than recreated. But doing this is perhaps even simpler in the flat site formats I will discuss in the next few posts. Whenever I next teach Reading and Writing in the Digital Age, all I will need to do is create a new branch of its GitHub repository or, were I using a different host, duplicate the folder containing all the site’s files. Either way the duplication will take seconds, and all that will be left is to update the new files to reflect any changes made to the course between semesters. I am not sure how this is valid. If you are using Multisite, you can simply install a plugin like NSCloner to internally clone sites in seconds. I just did this for a multisite I used for a speaking/presentation tour. I made template sites for wordpress and my "SPLOTpoint" presentations, and made about 12 clones as needed. There's a lot to be said for simple static sites. I'm doing more and more of them, and there are some really slick things one can do. I will do that as a first approach. Going without the overhead of database and server setup is key. But it hardly makes for a valid comparison for a static site of fixed pages to compare it to Wordpress and all the things it can do and manage. If you are going to mash potatoes, go for the masher, not the pickup truck. Featured Image: That's my own photo of my Ford F-150: Big Red flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. Ironically I found it search Google Images (results for open licensed results) for f-150 tire with results found in Wikimedia Commons. The potatoes edited in are from a pixabay image by Capri23auto shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by dvanzuijlekom As a kid my Mom would ask me what present I wanted for the holidays or a birthday. "Present" being so singular, I thought I gamed the system by asking for a "big box full of a whole lot of little toys". She always delivered. Over in another room of the Campbell household, Gardner is merrily making some of his first animated GIFs. I got thinking about a few that were sitting in my undone pile, or the half baked ideas pile. Here is the unboxing. First of all, my good friends and happy couple, Michael Gershovich and Jennie Morris, the night we sat out on the new roof tap bar of the Park South Hotel. As it happens, often I get multipl photos, which plays out as a 1-2 Photograph GIF This is done in a way described elsewhere, using Photoshop to Load Files into Stack, letting it align obects, cropping, and setting some inter-frame timing. Cute, aren't they? Next, on the day I left the UK last month, pulling into Heathrow on the express train, I noted a retro style animated video poster that looked as if it was itself a GIF- what were the Seven Minutes That Changed the World? I dont know (it looks football relevant), but the style is dead on 1960s movie horror poster I had recorded the sign as a video on my iPhone, and used the 5SecondsAPP (a favorite of John Johnston) to make into a GIF. The nifty thing with this app is I could crop the image, and I could discard non-relevant frames. Next are prototype Muppets. There was a discussion while I was visiting Giulia's colleagues at Brock University about the very first appearances of Jim Henson's works- they were 8 second commercials created in the late 1950s for Wilkins Coffee, with a close bit not really froggy Kermit named "Wilkins" and a grumpier triangle shaped dude named Wontkins. Perhaps as shorts these were the inspiration for Vine? There is a collection on YouTube, and surprising how violent the plots tend to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxLyuw5bdyk The clip I chose was at 3:16 when Wilkins calls his store for some instant coffee Hello Grocery Store? Send me some Wilkins Instant coffee! (coffee squirts out of the phone) Maaaaaan! How instant can you get! That's it. And then finally, in thinking about thoughtvectors and the first week being on As We May Think I poked the YouTube machine seeing if there was any footage of Vannevar Bush. I found the same clip repeated, where a rather enthusiastic, hand gesturing Bush describes his fascination for the brain and a computer operating in a similar way. His hands looked like he was a keyboard player (the musical kind), so I slid in a synthesizer below, and his words animated in. For this one, I downloaded an mp4 clip with SaveFromNet, imported into PhotoShop 6 as Layers (one every 10 seconds). I changed the size to leave from to slide in the keyboard image, and placed the text on the screen to appear sequentially (turning layers on and off). No major connection here, no gif associative trail, just a pile of GIF detritus. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by epSos .de I've been sleeping on my development work to finish out a Wordpress theme that gives someone the functionality of the ds106 Assignment Bank but for any kind of content. But I'm back in the game (track the prototype at http://bank.ds106.us/ the content is meaningless). I'm building out a back end theme options page where site creators should be able to configure their own site. I wanted to have an ability for each kind of "Thing" (assignment in ds106 language) to upload an image to use as an icon. I'd done it as entering a URL in a field (clumsy) and via a button to spawn a file upload box (old school). What I want is the ability to use the native Wordpress media uploader. I finally found the right how to in a post by Mile Jolly though he did leave off how to code the form part-- I leveraged some from the tutorial he cited and looking under the hood at other wordpress themes that have this capability. There's a lot Wordpress gives you built in now the missing link is writing your own custom jQuery to communucate the modal boxes choice back to your form. So now it is working; here it is doing it in a place where you can designate a default icon for a "thing" if none is provided. So you start with the Assignment Bank Theme Options panel: I have made a few changes to the thumbnail, media sizing (see below), but to select a new default thumbnail, there's a big button, which opens the Wordpress Media uploader; like any other media in the system, you can select one that is already in the library, or drag and drop a new file (any size) Notice the customized title and button label, I did that! Just plop a new image in there, and let it upload And if selected, the preview is changed when the modal box goes away: Snazzy. Now I found a few examples of doing this, but usually it was for one uploader per page; when I get around to the editing part that allows you to add new "things" or edit them, they will each need a media uploader. I'm using code for the theme options based on the excellent tutorial by Aliso the Geek. It has a nice framework for the options screen, that is generated, so I can set up a media uploader anywhere by a block that looks like: $this->settings['def_thumb'] = array( 'title' => __( 'Set default ' . lcfirst(THINGNAME) . ' thumbnail image' ), 'desc' => __( 'This image will be used if none is defined.' ), 'std' => 'Default ' . lcfirst(THINGNAME) . ' Thumbnail', 'type' => 'medialoader', 'section' => 'general' ); These are all placeholders added to the options page ('section') defines the tab of the screen. The generalized code for mediauploader (I type I wrote myself, it was not in the original) This will look like mumbo jumbo but its her for my own record keeping. case 'medialoader': echo ''; if ( strpos ( $options[$id], 'http') !==false ) { echo ''; } else { echo ''; } echo ' '; if ( $desc != '' ) echo '' . $desc . ''; break; THUMBW and THUMBH is a defined value for the theme's media setting for thumbnail size. The value of this option is a URL for the uploaded image's thumbnail isze is stored in $options[$id]. If there is no URL there, I use the nifty placehold.it to generate an image in the right size, e.g. The actual value we are saving is stored in a hidden form field; and the button launches the wordpress media uploaded, and passes it some values via the data-____________ options -- one one is the key for this option $id so I know when form element to modify later. To make the media uploader work we need a few more things; for the options class I wrote, we need to ask wordpress to load our custom javascript library as well as the ones Wordpress needs: // enqueue scripts for media uploader add_action( 'admin_enqueue_scripts', 'ds106bank_enqueue_options_scripts' ); This calls a function in my functions.php, which loads the javascript Wordpress needs, along with my own custom js library just for the theme options: /************* OPTIONS STUFF *****************/ function ds106bank_enqueue_options_scripts() { // wordpress js needed wp_enqueue_media(); // custom jquery for the options admin screen wp_register_script( 'bank106_options_js' , get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/jquery.options.js', array( 'jquery' ), '1.0', TRUE ); wp_enqueue_script( 'bank106_options_js' ); } The library I used is based on Mike Jolly's with a few additions to work here. It is pretty well commented (I hope) /* ds106 Bank: Javascript code for theme options editing code by Alan Levine @cogdog http://cogdog.info media uploader scripts somewhat lifted some from http://mikejolley.com/2012/12/using-the-new-wordpress-3-5-media-uploader-in-plugins/ */ // holder for media uploader var file_frame; // called for via click of upload button in theme options jQuery(document).on('click', '.upload_image_button', function(){ // not sure what this does! event.preventDefault(); // If the media frame already exists, reopen it. if ( file_frame ) { file_frame.open(); return; } // Create the media frame // use title and label passed from data-items in form button file_frame = wp.media.frames.file_frame = wp.media({ title: jQuery( this ).data( 'uploader_title' ), button: { text: jQuery( this ).data( 'uploader_button_text' ), }, multiple: false // Set to true to allow multiple files to be selected }); // fetch the id for this option so we can use it, comes from data-options_id value // in form button options_id = jQuery( this ).data( 'options_id' ); // set up call back from image selection from media uploader file_frame.on( 'select', function() { // attachment object from upload attachment = file_frame.state().get('selection').first().toJSON(); // insert the thumbnail url into the hidden field for the option value jQuery("#"+options_id).val(attachment.sizes.thumbnail.url); // update the src of the preview image so you can see it jQuery('img#previewimage_'+options_id).attr( 'src', attachment.sizes.thumbnail.url ); }); // Finally, open the modal file_frame.open(); }); If an upload s selected, the javascript gets the attachment, parses it to JSON, which then lets me access its properties to return to my form. It does two things- it changes the hidden form value that has the URL for the thumbnail, and also changes the src value of the img tag that displays it, so the new thumbnail appears when the modal box is closed. I'm having to rethink some of the things I had planned for options, originally there was going to be a custom media size for the thumbnail as it appears n the main indexes and archives, and another for the size it uses in the page. But I found the media uploader does not return the URLs for these custom sizes, and the media was getting messy with the multiple sizes. So I am switching tot to use the build in thumbnail sized image when it appears on the front index and archives, and the built in medium size when it appears on a single page-- these are changed in the options box I set, so you are not limited to 150x150 thumbnails, and 300px wide default medium sized. There is some trickery with the media; if an image for a "thing" is uploaded to the site, we can control the size of the thumbnail, but others are created by the auto embed of flickr and YouTube. The auto embed of flickr is a PITa because you only get 320x240 images. I did a bunch of CSS flopping this morning, to get something that makes them a bit more uniform. I got a big post by the Smashing Magazine code for vertical and horizontal centering. I'm still playing with this, but am pretty close to abetter layout, here on a view of all the things in the test site I have a minimum height for each, using the Smashing Magazine centering the media, and some border tricks (curved border same color as background). Right now this is all done by editing the theme's custom CSS... I may see if I can turn the theme options on to manage some of these changes. There are more things to do: Set up Feed Wordpress integration - I have an idea that could use a aggregator right in the site or use an external site aggregator-- this si what fills in the responses to a "thing" Set up TGM Plugin Activator This is very slick, it can define required or suggested plugins, and make it easier to have them installed Add the form for manually adding an example Add the options co configure, create the types of things Possibly add embed code to be able to embed an assignment A few more things I am forgetting (there is a list) I'm not even going to promise a date, but I am in the zone right now! Last week was long, I am sure there were 16 days crammed into it. This included flying to Atlanta for the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference, presenting twice on Monday, exiting early Tuesday to hop a flight to Dallas, and being part of a trio running a 3 day workshop. After a late Friday night arrival at home, I am fairly sure my wife stacked me in the back of the pickup truck with the rest of our gear for a weekend escape to our cabin. The computer was not touched until late Sunday. That's a roundabout way of saying I was not blogging. Well, I had something itching to blog, then I deleted, then I itched, then I shut the lid on the computer. Sometimes it benefits to let an idea sit and ferment, or die of neglect. We'll see which is the advisable course. This has to do with some reaction to the release last week of the 2007 NMC Horizon Report, that was blogged after our presentation at the ELI conference where 175 crammed a room we were told to expect 60. By the time I got to Dallas, I got a report from our office that more than 1300 copies had been downloaded from our site. But numbers don't mean much. There were the 20+ colleagues I rant into at ELI who gushed about how they cannot keep copies of the past reports on their shelves. But anecdotes don't mean much. A few of the folks involved with the project were taken aback some by some backlash on a few ed tech blogs (check Technorati for the most current) -- for some people, they felt like there was nothing really revolutionary about the 6 Horizon technologies, that they were not really all that exciting or even were passé. For those individuals. This is not all that surprising, as some similar things echoed during the work of the advisory board that generated 200+ items we put on the table, and helped vote them down the funnel to a set of 6-- people felt like the horizons were not near enough, but they made the same mistake (in my mind) that others were doing... they were confusing their own horizons as educational technology innovators for those of the audience the report is intended for - mainstream technology users and decision makers at educational institutions. That is a different horizon. If one is looking for futuristic cutting edge technology predictions, take a ski trip down the end of a Gartner Group curve, or any of a number of other future peering technical crystal balls (and really far ones by 2150, "Remaining fideisms have diluted into agnostic mysticism; true fideists dwindle"). The Horizon Report is not trying to predict the wild wooly future, it is trying to outline what is going to be viable on a broader use scale (meaning not just the innovators and early adopters) in the near future. And the process is not meant to be "right". Heck, in 2004 the near term horizon included SVG graphics, which was left in the dust by the spread of Flash. But it really was grounded in the information available at the time (hint- this is a place where the web audience can participate, but filling in the wiki for the "Where are they now" pages) So yes, for those in the middle of the technology game, who are immersed this stuff daily, there might not be anything revolutionary about the list. Time to Adoption 4-5 Years: The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming Time to Adoption 2-3 Years: Mobile Phones Virtual Worlds Time to Adoption One Year or Less: User-Generated Content Social Networking So the Horizon Report is not an attempt of declaring which technologies are technically viable today, but when these ones might be used broadly at educational organizations. Let's be real- technologies of wide adoption and use at our organization now include email, web browsers and web search, classroom projection systems, desktop office software, course management systems-- hardly anything sexy at all. We're in the process of analyzing data from a December 2006 survey of NMC member organizations, but I can share now that less than a third report they are hosting blog software or wiki software, and across their population, the estimate the usage of such tools is about the 10% level. And for anyone who has gotten some idea that their is some dark hand pulling puppet strings on this effort, they have missed the point that NMC provides the process and the summary writing for the report- the ideas, the voting, the decisions are made by the 30 or so members of our advisory board which this year had a more international representation then ever before. And the entire process, the ideas generated, the 12 finalists, are all documented openly in our wiki. In fact, our board never met in a meeting or a teleconference call- all communication and work was done by email and the wiki. What did not work this year was some experimentation with the reblog concept -- the idea of using a system of a web-based aggregator and having people on the project occasionally jump in and mark sites to post to a new blog site... I got the Horizon reblog set up, but never cajoled someone into helping the reblogging. I accept that it really takes a bit of effort to spend time doing that, and after a while, i admit, I dropped the ball myself. We had some more luck with using a special del.icio.us tag to mark sites relevant to this year's work, racking up some 230 sites at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07 ... though I might have tagged about 80% of them. But using this along with derivative tags when we narrowed down the list like for user generated content or educational gaming saved a lot of time in tracking resources, more so than cutting and pasting to a document or even a wiki page. I cannot think of a bigger information management saver at a minimal time cost than using a browser bookmark to mark and tag a web resource. Yet, I am convinced, even among people in the educational technology field, that the number of active taggers is rather low. I'd be curious if there is some research on this. I'm pleased that we got these URLs in the final report-- and there is no reason to stop or why more of y'all cannot jump in the tagging. Operators are standing by! Like now. Use hz07 plus/minus socialnetworking, user_generated, mobile, virtual_worlds, educational_games, scholarship. And this can continue to grow, which is something we are working with our advisory board on-- the report comes out once a year, and is well received, but what can be done to sustain more discussion, research, etc to review how these play out-- e.g. make it a year round activity, not a snapshot in January. So I don't care of people do not agree with the report, and actually I look forward to dissent because that means discussion and thrashing of ideas. This is where the ideas grow. You don't like the 6- put your ideas on the table. Disagree with the timelines? Show us why. Show us the examples that show the timeline is much closer. Your own individual techno horizons are likely to be here but not evenly distributed. Someone should be worried. With just a few sniffs, I might be getting hooked on Google Reader for my RSS habits. I've not really like using web-based RSS readers for scanning, as checking each site's news required a wait for a web transcation, whereas a desktop reader grabs allt he stuff quickly, or in the background, allowing me t paw through it quickly. But Google Reader's ajax scented interface is fast. And the keyboard shortcuts make going through items even quicker than my desktop reader. First off all, there is easy in and easy out via an OPML input/export of your feeds. So I was able to grab my list from either my Bloglines collection or my desktop reader's export functions, toss them into Google Reader, and was off to the races. And it kept my folder structure for organizing my feeds. And you can select an entire folder to see all the news from that folder's feed contents, or an individual feed. You can get the full contents view, or if you are a headline scanner, you can toggle to a list view: And a simple press of the "k" and "j" keys lets you pop open the next or previous story: And other key presses all you to mark them as read/unread, mark as special with "stars" or "shared" (more below). You can add tags of your own choice, allowing creation of cross feed collections. You can mark all as read or unread/ The left pane allows you to see all your feeds, or just the ones with new stuff. But what os really cool, is Google Reader offers tools to share your feeds, categories, starred or shared items. So I started keeping a collection of my "shared" items, for which you get a direct URL to share as well as an RSS feed. So in a very easy manner, you have all the functionality of a reblog site. But wait, there is more. For the shared sites collection, there is also an option to "add a clip" to your blog or web site; Google Reader creates a cut and paste Javascript so you can embed the latest stuff right into your site-- I have added it to the front page sidebar of my blog here, using the 5 most recent shared items. Heck, this could put my own project out of business. Oh yes, there is more. The public and clip features are also available for each "folder" of feeds you have (or tags you have created), just by changing their status to "public": I came across this most recently on the New World Notes site, where Wagner James Au reports from Second Life- he has 9 of these separate instances on the sidebar, w/o much page load delay. This is just things I have sniffed in my first 45 minutes of play with Google Reader, but wow, I am in looooooooooove. I've been using Wordpress since 2005, hacking themes since 2008, and doing a whole lot more since then.. yet I have never written a plugin. All of my custom code has been done in theme templates and functions.php files Well, now I have done so, without spilling much blood. This is also the first time I have written something with a proper PHP class. As usual I came across a wide swath of how to posts, many of them as helpful as echoing Hello World level complexity. I found Francis Yaconiello's How to write a WordPress plugin good for giving a solid foundation for elements to include, I plucked bits from the Wordpress Plugin Developer Guidelines. And because my plugin needed to create and respond to a form, jaskokyn's How to Create a Wordpress Admin Form was of assistance too. I do find it worth noting that I rarely get my answer in a single tutorial, I have to mix and match (and discard often). Do not get to excited, this is not very exciting. And I bet Martin Hawksey has already done something way more elaborate. The folks I am working with on DML Commons are doing some research on the interactions and were looking for some data from the blog syndication. I've looked at a smattering of Wordpress stats tools, and they all are like log data, and are presented only to the admin side. I was thinking there might be something that does slick charts and graphs and stuff for the public side (I bet there is, one cannot find everything out there). But there was nothing even I could find that would give them some basic data by category for the syndicated posts (things brought into the blog hub via Feed Wordpress). My first effort was to do a one off custom script that generated the following in CSV format: post ID source indicated (either 'local' or 'syndicated') post title publication date and time author name (first and last name from profile, this is added to user profiles via the gravity form signup thing I built) author username on site blog name (host blog or remote blog if syndicated post) post character count (string character count after HTML stripped out) post word count (after HTML stripped out) number of links in post (count of '' tags) list of hyperlink urls (from all href= tags, hoping my regex is on target) I set up a duplicate of the site on a dev server, and sent them a few links to export the data for the two different strands, Professional PathWays and Design Research (because of the syndication design, these posts get put into categories). This was supposed to be just a test of the functionality. They said, "thanks this is perfect!" Hmmm. I really need to start rolling some of my things into plugins so they can be use elsewhere w/o needing the theme hacking. So in a few hours this morning I got a working plugin, now a very alpha version on github as Export Post Data to CSV. When activated, it adds a Post CSV Export item to the Wordpress Tools menu. Nothing sophisticated: [caption id="attachment_43528" align="aligncenter" width="630"] My big fat plugin[/caption] You can choose to export data on all posts, or from within a category. The wp_dropdown_categories() function is handy as it can generate the menu, including an item for All Categories, keeping the category hierarchy, and even including a post count. I have it running here on my blog: [caption id="attachment_43533" align="aligncenter" width="474"] CogDogBlog Sloppy Category menu selector[/caption] Then you click the Blue Button. The script generates the CSV data which you then choose where to download. I did an export on my category for Syndicated posts from my Barking Dog Studios site (I bring in posts there from a category on that site I go "inside the photo"). Boom! Barking Dog Category CSV Data [caption id="attachment_43531" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Screen shot of CSV data[/caption] I do not know how helpful this kind of data per post is. Ideally we'd like to cross it by time maybe with twitter data. What else might there be worth extracting from posts? I can already see that I could get tags and categories. This on its own is not big, but now I have the method started. For the upcoming #vcubrb projects, I am hoping to roll into a plugin a lot of the functionality I have been hand coding into the Feed Wordpress sites I have been building. This way we could potentially make it easier for people to create a Connected Course. I can see having: A Shortcode for adding a user sign up form, without needing gravity forms (including the logic to add the data to Feed Wordpress directly The Shortcodes I use for generating the blog lists A script to generate OPML feeds for categories of blogs But at least now I have grown up, written a plugin, and can shave like a big boy. Wikis are one of the most powerful, and low barrier entry of Web2.0 technologies, and ironically, ancient, almost as old as HTML itself. Thanks to a twitter links from Vicki Davis (twitterbution), I came across one today that is certainly proving itself as a wiki way to do things. This post is not strictly about the wiki itself, but a snippet I saw there, but it is the TwitterPack wiki, that asks the question: If someone were joining Twitter today, who might they follow? Twitter Packs is a place to get a starting idea of who on Twitter posts about what. Come in, look around, add your name where it makes sense, and help out. And it has a lits of categories, Topical, Geographical, and the tell all note, "Add new categories as needed.". And the piece I smiled at as the opening pages wiki guidelines, my highlights added: It's the second bullet that jumped out of the page and made my smile- it is the Wiki Way, 'No one has "forgotten" or "left out" anything. You just haven't added it yet.' and goes very much to the notion of fishing over fish nuggets. The nugget way is someone builds a "complete" directory for you; fishing means you help build it. Sure its messy, its not perfect alpha order, it does not contain "everything" (like there is a central authority who knows everything about every twitter user), but it has/will have a lot of value because its "collective" input. This is pretty much my new bumper sticker expression of web 2.0: 'No one has "forgotten" or "left out" anything. You just haven't added it yet.' The blog may be blinking in and out for a week. I'm currently visiting family in San Diego through Monday (look for some pix soon of Sani, my step-son's cute 'little' Great Dane puppy) and a hope flight back to Phoenix to catch a Tuesday morning flight to Hawaii for the 2005 NMC Summer Conference. Looking forward to visiting there with the great bunch of people who go to NMC events, as well as colleague Bert Kimura, who I've worked with on the TCC Online Conferences the past few years (via iChat, Bert's been teaching me the key Hawaiian language expressions, mahalo, Bert). Yes, someone has to go to Hawaii, so I raised my paw. Blogging on the beach? I doubt it. Hope to be a bloggin at the conference, until then I have to cram in some, ahem, last minute work on my presentations. I', lagging a bit in writing up today's MooseCamp experience, the day session before the Northern Voice 2006 Conference. All in all, it was a full and tiring day. On one hand, it was a bit like a standard conference format; the sessions seemed to fly on by and lack significant time to reflect and absorb. It started with the EduBlogger Hootenany, with fellow blogmiesters Brian, D'Arcy, and Scott. This was in some sense a secondary follow-up of the Social Software Salon we did yesterday at UBC. Instead of carefully planning out a scripted presentation, we set up in the middle of the room, joked around and almost spontaneously, a conversation started from the audience. I am thinking more about this as conference sessions as conversations rather than transmissions. It was extremely rich, and ended all too abruptly. D'Arcy has already posted a nice comprehensive summary. There is more too here I watn to let distill, what I find as a disconnect of what we call blogging, a false monoliithic vision whne people talk about blogging, and an artificial separation of blogging inside and outside of education. Next up was AJaX for Geeks by Dave Johnson of E-Business Apps, a company that actually is in the AJAX business. The presentation is available. My big colusions: My current knowledge of JavaScript is decrepitly ancient. I hope to do something about number 1. Structured Blogging and Microformats by Bryan Rieger who is part of the creative force beyond the nifty nifty Yiibu. He used those nice lego graphics to contrast the monolithy of blog content once pulbished versus what might be possible with microformats. There was a lots of interesting discussion about merits versus the overheads of having people fill out motre forms, and whether there should be mroe in the tools hands to facilitate. There was a momemtn when I was partly distracted when he referred to D'Arcy, Brian, and myself to speak about the folly that was meta data for (ugh) learning objects in that the form filling that was asked was overbearing. Alas, it moved on, but it was even more mindblowing that he knew of our work. Turns our Bryan was among my pre-blogging online communities around Macromedia Director, and had nice things to say about the old Director Web. After lunch I was present in the room for Blogging and the Future of (the) Media by Kurt Cagle. I have no recollections of this presentation and its reverences to Marshall McLuhan. Next was Nancy White's Community Building with Blogs session. This was the day's highlight so far, because it was all conversation, it was people talking about what they considered online community and what sort of stories they had from their blog community. And there was chocolate shared. There were two excellent PhotoCamp sessions led by Kris Krug, full if tips and massive in the room expertise on digital photography. And a room full og high end digital SLRs and big monstrous lenses. I picked up a few tips myself, and am going to aim for a better Canon 50mm lens, start trying some ND filters, and amining to do more experimentation in manual exposures. but frankly, bottom line, I just like taking photos, not the frittering over techniques or post production-- I just like the capturing an idea, and seeing if it worked or not. Another gem was the last session on Great Podcast Sound for Cheap with Bruce Sharpe, who is a volunteer sound editor for ITConversations. This was very practical stuff, and I learned I was doing almost everything wrong in my use of Audacity. He has some free tools and Audacity plug-ins at Singularproductions.com. The major tips for cleaning up audio include: bandpass filter noise reduction snap, crackle, pop removale (Click removal) EQ (maybe) over-rated? Also suggested was Mp3 Gain - an open source tool that normalizes the sound levels for a group of files. Rest of day: End of Camp. Walk to Stanley Park. Eat a Sausage. Be very Cold. Go Back to brians home. More beer. And Fish Tacos. Sleep. Today was an epic road trip with Jim Groom- we hit Flagstaff, the tacky Flintstone Village at Valle, and then many of the viewpoints of the Grand Canyon out to the east exit, ending with an epic pile of Navajo tacos at Cameron Trading Post. This day was great, so f***ing great (f-word warning for the music in this video). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj1H0l54ZuY My wife and I have been taking a class together... nothing formal, but our city of Scottsdale offers a City Government 101 class, which meets every other week where you get to learn about a different department. It's been everything from finance to water resources to trash to libraries to police/fire... one of the highlights was a visit to the traffic control center where a huge screen allows staff to monitor and adjust the traffic lights across the entire city... and live demos from the police K9 unit... and also, our library which offers a lot of services, many of them now online such as their databases, including something soon that will allow e-check out of audio and video files for use on portable devices. A city can be a much more complex entity that one gives it credit for, taking a lot of what is offered for granted... Scottsdale puts a lot of money and effort into their Community Services, which is second only in employee size to the police department. Now I am sounding like a commercial, but I can say I've learned much more and can appreciate things better in a city just by knowing more about it. The name of the band is subject to argument, but like those Brits in 1970 rocking atop a roof, at the Domains 2017 Conference something happened atop a rooftop in Oklahoma City. And then after the conference, weirder stuff happened -- people went home and fired up good old fashioned blog posts. Just like it was 2007. Thus, the another wretched ed-tech cover song was hatched. https://soundcloud.com/felixadog/get-back-to-where-you-once-blogged Lyrics Brian's an edtech who used to be a blogger Thought it made a real difference Brian left home in Kamloops British Columbia Went to the Domains conference. Get Back! Get Back Get Back to where you once did blog Get Back! Ab-ject! Get Back to where you once did blog Martha at Mary Wash is the only one left Who knew where the idea came from. In her keynote it was abundantly clear She's the ethos of domain of one's own. Get Back! Get Back Get Back to where you once did blog Get Back! Get Back Get Back to where you once did blog Blowing the dust from their blog writing screen Feeding posts tagged domains seventeen. Will they resume tweeting and facebooking Leaving months til something new is seen Get Back! Get Back Get Back to where you once did blog Get Back! Get Back Get Back to where you once did blog Featured Image- styled after Gig In Japan's image Beatles / Get Back Up On The Roof / 1CD Digipak with all elements replaced. Photo from tweet by the Great Luke Waltzer https://twitter.com/lwaltzer/status/872225489838100481 This month marks the 49th year since I was diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic. Back in 1970 they actually hospitalized me 10 days to stabilize my sugar levels and to educate me and my parents about this new routine of daily injections. I do not remember my parents worrying about the cost of medication. I have no idea what insulin cost then, but I would guess it was covered under the health care plan my father earned as a US government employee. Those three vials in the photo above are a one months supply for me now, and the range of prices one might pay for that depending on where in the world you live, and if in the USA, which flavor of health insurance you might have varies over orders of magnitude. For some people it might be $50, for others over $1000. How is that even possible? What kind of system produces this disparity? If I am looking at my old checkbook entries correctly, in 2005 with employer health coverage this supply might have cost me $25. Later, under the ACA healthcare plans I paid for, accounting for deductibles, in 2013 those three bottles would have been $120. Read these numbers and explain to me how this is possible: In recent years, insulin prices have skyrocketed, according to figures compiled by the Senate Finance Committee, which is investigating possible price gouging in the industry.Between 2001 and 2005, Eli Lilly’s Humalog increased from $35 to $234, a 585 percent increase, the Senate panel found.Novo Nordisk’s Novolog rose from $289 in 2013 to to $540 in 2019, an 87 percent increase. Sanofi’s Lantus, meanwhile, increased in price from $244 to $431 between 2013 and 2019, an approximately 77 percent increase.Americans are dying because they can’t afford their insulin. That’s now a 2020 campaign issue. (Think Progress) The 2016 T1International Insulin & Diabetes Supply Survey clearly showed that the costs of insulin in the US was double, quadruple, even more the price for the same medication in other countries. Meanwhile, people are dying because they cannot afford these unevenly distributed high costs of life critical medications. Is the price based on cost to produce? The article on Beyond Type 1 How Much Does it Cost to Produce Insulin caught my attention. Summarizing a research study by Imperial College London, the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and Liverpool University, it suggests a year's supply sound be something under US$75. Note that the full research paper, published under Creative Commons is amazingly available for free to view. Then there is this visual: https://twitter.com/kidfears99/status/1093166693415821312 Almost a year ago, I decided to send an email message to my quote/unquote Representative, Paul Gosar, asking him, as a medical practitioner and self appointed advocate of health issues, what he could do about breaking the insulin monopoly. I included the reports above as references. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1062836896441819137 In January 2018, response arrived from a staff member in Gosars office that hardly answered the question. Thank you for contacting the Office of Congressman Paul Gosar on the issue of Insulin and the rapid price increase. It’s true, drugs like Insulin have risen at a meteoric pace that is troubling to say the least. You referred to the monopoly in the insulin industry being a cause and of course, 3 companies is by no means a comparatively competitive marketplace but this is not the main source of the rise in prices. Like many bad things in healthcare, excessive government intervention is the culprit. Innovation is the key to refining and improving any industry but like government often times does, it stifles innovation. Drug prices are no different. Any drug that goes from an idea to a reality needs to go through a long, arduous process. This is done mainly because of the stringent FDA regulations to get a drug approved and produced for the market. Since Insulin is a biologic drug, the process is even longer than other types of drugs. During the Trump Administration, the FDA approved a record number of generic drugs in order to foster competition in various health industries. In order to lower all drug prices, this activity needs to continue and be ramped up if at all possible. There are so many steps to get a drug approved that monopolies often times form and it’s because the lobbyists of big drug companies can create these barriers that their company can easily jump but smaller companies cannot.Response from Representative Paul Gosar, emphasis added by me So the culprit here is "government intervention"? What even does that vague reference mean? It's more or less the "bogeyman". Actually there is a better explanation on how insulin pricing works in the US (again from Beyond Type 1) where one learns of the entities known as PBMs or Pharmacy Benefits Managers. Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, are the player that is hidden in plain sight. The three largest PBMs are Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and OptumRX. PBMs are third-party intermediaries who negotiate prices between pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. However, the lines between insurance companies and PBMs are becoming increasingly blurred — OptumRx is owned by United Healthcare, Cigna recently merged with Express Scripts, and CVS Health acquired Aetna.PBMs’ stated goal is to reduce costs from pharmaceuticals for the insurance companies while improving health outcomes for the members of the insurance plans. They participate in the rebate system and take a share of the profits from prescriptions that are sold to members of the insurance plans. This group is often invisible to consumers and can drive up the costs of prescriptions without consumer awareness.How Insulin Pricing Works in the US From How Insulin Pricing Works in the US (Beyond Type 1) There are 6 blue circle entities in this diagram; all of them except the consumer have a slice of the profit pie. Rebates between manufacturers and PBMs are hardly the end of the story. Let’s explore this web a bit further. Insulin arrives at the pharmacy either directly from the pharmaceutical company or through a prescription drug wholesaler. There are negotiated payments from the wholesaler to the drug company, from the pharmacy to the wholesaler or drug company, from the insurance company to the pharmacy, from the insurance company to the PBM, and between the pharmacy and the PBM. Then there are the rebates the drug companies give to the PBM and the PBM gives a portion of that rebate to the insurance company. This all changes the cost from the time the insulin leaves the manufacturer until it reaches the customer at a retail pharmacy.Customers pay at the pharmacy when they receive their medications, and if they have health insurance, they are responsible for the co-payment and premiums. Depending on the insurance plan, prescription drug costs may or may not contribute toward the deductible, but they do count toward the out-of-pocket limit. These plans and rates are not standardized, so people who need insulin end up paying a wide range of prices when they pick up their medication at the pharmacy.The consumer cost is affected by all of these behind-the-scenes negotiations and rebates because there are five parties making money from a single transaction.How Insulin Pricing Works in the US No, Representative Gosar, it is definitely not government invention causing the cost of insulin to increase at rates beyond almost anything else. The proof is across the border. I moved to Canada in May 2018. They do not just toss free healthcare your way (it took until March 2019 when I got my permanent resident status). I arrived with a 3 month supply (at the $120 per month cost), and as I relied on my ACA coverage, I was able to order my supplies sent to my Arizona address, where a friend was able to mail to me here (the costs now had a shipping topped on top). I was under the impression I could only do this once, but my friend located a regulation that said for personal use, I could get another 3 month supply sent (checked with calls to Canada Customs). It was cumbersome, but at least I could get my insulin. Then, almost on a whim, I called a local pharmacy to ask if insulin could be bought over the counter, without a health card. The answer was yes! "Do I need a prescription?" (thinking I would need to see a doctor). "No, pharmacists can write these). The cost per bottle of insulin here was CA$35 (US$27). Way to Go Canada flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) The very same bottle, same stuff inside, same packaging outside, without insurance, that cost 10 times as much in the US can be purchased over the counter in Canada! How can the same same item, the same costs to produce, vary so much? (see the five hands in the profit pie above). At least there is finally some pressure from the Congressional Diabetes Caucus on the big three companies that form the insulin cartel, who are making some feigned moves towards price changes. The Senate is applying pressure and Colorado is too. There is no way that anyone anywhere should not be able to obtain life necessary medication like insulin because of a cost machine. 2014/365/307 Eight Bottles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license The act of "evergreening" by the insulin cartel allows them to infinitely prolong patents and completely squash the development of generic brands of insulin that would be competitively priced. So a positive ray of light here, working from the other end, is an effort towards open sourcing insulin production: https://twitter.com/judell/status/1185007377281507329 This is more in the spirit of the (Canadian) medical team that first isolated insulin. They put their patent into the public domain, never intending it to be a billion dollar profit industry. Stuff I Remembered Later... See Affordable Insulin Now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIpAxkAE8kY Featured Image: A Month of Life Juice flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) An aspect if blogging I find essential is shying away from a "please the world" view, meaning stepping out on limbs, and thus sometimes, being outright foolish, wrong, even "stupid". And I welcome being called on my shit. So sometimes, or often, I spout something before thinking it through. So here is my public service for showing there is no harm in doing something stupid. And this is much more likely to happen in the fire-aim-ready world of twitter. So today, I caught wind of a few folks, like Cole, suggesting people take another look at the "other" twitter, Pownce, where I barked back I was just being a smart-ass. And not really thinking of aiming it Cole's way, it was more on a string of comments I usually get when I post some gripe when twitter is down. They usually go like, "Twitter stinks! Lets have everyone go over to X!" Yes, twitter does blink out a lot, I've had my share of eaten tweets, and aberrant behavior. But its not about an alternative that is "better" because it is only "better" because of the people there, not because it has 3 more features, cooler buttons, a cuter cat, fewer crashes or some other attribute. Social software is not about the software, folks. But as Cole responds rightfully so, I was awfully knee jerk and yeah, harsh. And darn, he is right. After all my blabbing on "Being There", I was not even eating my own dog food. So thanks Cole, for calling me on that. This was especially paw in mouth when I realize that it was Cole's early blogging more than a year ago, that got me taking a loser look at the potential of twitter. So I am now offering my dog-plogies for barking off the deep end. It happens. It will happen again. As someone dear to us has yelled before, "I WANT TO KNOW! I WANT TO KNOW!!!!!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM2ZV5KyogY The mystery is un-shrouded, whether it is Peter Rowan or Rowan Peter. Or is it that simple? I hear crickets from down under. With all that IPO pumping, the quaint little twitter blue bird is going to be sporting some new duds cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by green kozi Make no mistake about it, according to a recent Forbes piece Can Twitter Save TV?: Twitter's message to the networks is different, and it comes in well short of 140 characters: We come in peace; let's make money together. Lots of tweeting when a show first airs transforms TV into what it used to be: an event, that others scramble to join live. Live, of course, means you can't skip the commercial (which separately explains the soaring prices of sports programming rights). And when the commercial is followed up by an ad on Twitter, the company says, the viewer proves more likely to buy what's being advertised. "We help marketers win the moment," says Adam Bain, the company's head of revenue. And guess what you, humble lunch tweeter, or hash tag genius, get as "marketers win the moment"? Twitter isn't here for you. The premise is (if I have figured out all the buzz speak) Twitter aggressively encourages shows and actors to tweet crafted messages that drive viewers to watch shows, and advertisers back up the money truck to the networks. Do you remember when the prompt for twitter was "What's on your mind?" now the aim is "What can I tweet that is going to drive eyeballs there?" The same article more or less graces Fast Company's "Converting the Flock". What counts as success here is How actress Kerry Washington (new name to me) star of a sexy Beltway soap (gag) called Scandal (ditto on new to me) is now a Twitter darling of live tweeting from the production stage. She even wrote sample tweets for her reticent costar Tony Goldwyn and put them in his draft folder so all he had to do was click during the broadcast. I am getting a real sense of who this people are from the way they express themselves. The Twitter team coached Vatican cardinals and the Pope Hisself how to tweet. Twitter bought a company named Bluefin Labs for $80 million... we are not talking about guys in a garage here. These are the games played hard and fast by suits. New CEO Dick Costolo "came into his job with a single mission: to make money." One of their other company purchases brought with it a product named Curatorr, which lets brands, media companies, and advertisers create preloaded Twitter streams that can be embedded on websites, tablets, and television. The new money making Twitter is going to be calculated, crafted, and aimed specifically at messages that benefit advertising. Lunch tweets are going to be a quaint thing of the past, it's all about tie ins (my emphasis): These TV partnerships are a small part of their revenues but a huge part of their sales and PR strategy. They're changing Twitter to be this really smart, topical, content-based. strategic place for advertisers to be as opposed to a bunch of noise and blather. That noise and blather? That's you and me. It's a whole new age for Twitter, can't wait. cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by Sharon Terry Sometime after I ejected myself from Facebook I also deleted my LinkedIn account. I checked in to Hotel LinkedIn when they first started, and as it grew, it consumed services like Slideshare. I have heard of people making important connections via the service, so I do not discount its value for some, to me, I never saw much I did in LinkedIn except linking in. And the email notifications were like roaches, they just kept scurrying in my inBox no matter how many times I clicked preferences and stomped. My exit from both services was really part of my own response to the cliché "everyone is on Facebook." It was with about 0.5 seconds of reflection that deleting my LinkedIn account meant I would loose my cherished endorsement for okra folding. And while sometimes some creepo uses my photo on a fake account, I do not exist on LinkedIn. If I try to log in, as expected, it finds no account for my email I thought I had left Hotel LinkedIn. Then I got this in email today: Someone from LinkedIn wants to add me to their "professional network" (I cringe because 98% of these never change or personalize the message). If I have no account in LinkedIn, how can they invite me to be added? How can I confirm I know ******* if I am not in the hotel? Technically, legally, it's probably likely not a violation of some reading of the law. I bet if I clicked the button, I would be offered a chance to create an account. But when I checkout out of Hotel LinkedIn, I did it because I did not want to receive ANY emails from their site anymore. In their privacy policy they can hang on to my information as long as they see fit, I actually have no idea what information they have kept on my account, as spelled out in their privacy policy: 3.2 Data Retention We retain the personal information you provide while your account is in existence or as needed to provide you services. We may retain your personal information even after you have closed your account if retention is reasonably necessary to comply with our legal obligations, meet regulatory requirements, resolve disputes between Members, prevent fraud and abuse, or enforce this Privacy Policy and our User Agreement. We may retain personal information, for a limited period of time, if requested by law enforcement. Our Customer Service may retain information for as long as is necessary to provide support-related reporting and trend analysis only, but we generally delete or de-personalize closed account data consistent with Section 3.1., except in the case of our plugin impression data (i.e., the information that you visited on sites carrying our social plugin, but which you did not click on), which we de-personalize within 7 days (although we do maintain 30 days worth of webserver logs for security, debugging, and site stability purposes only) by creating aggregate data sets that cannot be traced back to individuals. I do not know exactly how someone logged into linked in was able to send my a contact request; if they had my email already, I would expect them to... write me an email. If somehow LinkedIN is providing my email address, and I no longer have an active account, well something is fishy. And if you think ANY company actually deletes your information when you close an account, well standard offer of beach front Arizona ocean property applies. Here is my Privacy Assertion: I do not want to see anything from LinkedIn in my inbox Thankfully, an email filter, will make sure I am fully checked out of LinkedIn email. Of course, there is a larger hotel operator that I may never be able to extract myself from. UPDATE: Minutes Later There us yet a second unwanted email from LinkedIn -- "********'s invitation is awaiting your response." I have a middle finger salute as a response. At the bottom it reads: You received an invitation to connect. LinkedIn will use your email address to make suggestions to our members in features like People You May Know. I never gave permission to LinkedIn to use my email address to make suggestions to its members. It gets more fun. Why not click the unsubscribe link? One click unsubscribe is supposed to be part of the CANSPAM act, right? The link takes me to a page to create an account In order for me to stop getting emails from LinkedIn I never consented to, I have to create an account on their site? Not likely. UPDATE May 14, 2015: A courteous response from Joe at LinkedIn support; as requested they have blocked my email from being used. Thankfully, I don't have to listen to the Eagles muzak anymore. While many people are slamming WordPress because of its baby in charge, I'm focussed still on the open source software I run on my own sites that are not impacted by the tantrums. Lately I have been putting to work on several sites, the WordPress ActivityPub plugin that makes your site publish to and suck in responses from Ye Not So Olde Fediverse. Just to stake my paw in the space, I started making this work all the way back in 2022 making use of IFTTT and a nifty recipe for posting from RSS to Mastodon (which still works) https://cogdogblog.com/2022/11/gizmo-to-mastodon/ I did have a run with the very first release of the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin (before it was automattic-ed), first on a WordPress.com test blog and here on the home front. While it did work, I found it awkard to be represented in the 'verse as the "so good they named it twice" handle like @cogdogblog.com@cogdogblog.com. But more, I felt like my blog should push stuff to my own mastodon stream, after all, it's my stuff. That's why I took the other path of rigging up gizmos to post from not only WordPress, but also flickr (I have a tag for my dog Felix in flickr that triggers a post to his own mastodon account) plus I have ones that post things I tag in PInboard as cooltech as stuff in my Mastodon stream tagged #cogdogcooltech. Oh and I have a tag in Pinboard to send stuff through Zapier to our OEG Connect Community Space. I'm not sure if I am losing my 3 readers in detail, but this is a very efficient small pieces taped together system for link sharing. I use the Pinboard bookmarklet to tag a site I am viewing (along with a description), I can give it tags that organize it for me. At the same time, some of those tags trigger sharing to other channels. If ChatGPT can do that for you, well go right ahead. I had put this in play too for the DS106 Daily Create once Twitter put the death knell on the API which made it work beautiful for maybe 10 years. In the meantime, I had noticed that the WordPress ActivityPub plugin had been adding features that made it / makes it more viable now, thanks to much effort by its original developer Matthias Pfefferle and I returned to it first for the podcast site I do for OEGlobal, OEG Voices which you can tune into on the Fediverse by searching profiles for @oegvoices@podcast.oeglobal.org and also putting it back to use here in the Dog Blog home as @barking@cogdogblog.com. But of course the real gain is that if for some crazy reason someone on Mastodon replies to your federated post, it comes to your blog as a comment. And you can even reply back as if your blog was talking (which it is, right?) A key feature is setting up how the blog publishes. The default is by author, meaning your presence on the 'verse is by federating only thr posts you author under a handle defined by your wordpress user name. Almost all my sites, I am the only author, or the only one who actually posts, so I now go with the blog profile only option meaning the blog has one voice. Setting the profile to blog as just one fediverse entity Now this gets interesting, as when you go back to the welcome tab, for Blog profile, you can make the first part of the fediverse handle by any name I want. So I have gone on most my sites with some kind of verb like @sharing@.... or here it is appropriately @barking@..... That may be of no significance to you, but to me, it's a small human touch. It shows up on the welcome tab of the Activity Pub plugin like Seeing your blog's own fediverse handle (the first part of your profile) As the link says, the real fun comes in the Customize the blog profile tab. Here you can do everything, choose the custom handle, create a background image, write the bio, and add the links that appear on your fediverse profile. This really makes the profile stand out. Making your blog's fediverse profile very personalize. Only if you are into that. So far my fleet of sites I am federating now via the ActivityPub plugin includes: The home based dog house mother ship, this blog CogDogBlog federating as @barking@cogdogblog.com The SPLOT that no one wants to contribute to, but heck I will keep at it, Sadly Robotic AI Metaphors, federating as @splotted@sadlyrobotic.cogdogblog.com OE Global Voices, the podcast I do for OE Global federating as @oegvoices@podcast.oeglobal.org/ Open Education Week, the global major important significant world-wide event for OE Global I organize and shamelessly promote, federating as sharing@oeweek.oeglobal.org. This a brand new experiment, and actually because of some tech issues I keep asking to get fixed, is not quite fully federating. But I am excited to not only be federating posts (my cheesy news items) but the calendar of events themselves as submitted, using a new WordPress Event Bridge plugin ("federate your events") that extends the ActivityPub plugin to work with the Events Calendar plugin we use to run the event sharing. The DS106 Daily Create the non-stoppable daily creative challenge that has published one every day since January 8, 2012, federating now as @creating@daily.ds106.us - note that about two years ago, I yanked the guts that tried to work through Twitter, to push to Mastodon using an IFTTT gizmo sending out as @tdc@social.ds106.us but I have been putting it back to federating out with the ActivityPub plugin so any direct replies are now appended to a post as a comment (see a most "brazy" example, thank you Paul Bond for being a fine model). Much still has to be done on the site to make it work to track actual responses to the challenge from the chit chat. The only way to find these I know of now, is searching in Mastodon for the blog's username, and selecting "Profiles Matching" - I wish there was a direct link to open in Mastodon the profile. Finding a WordPress federating blog in Mastodon by search The one thing I am having a challenge with (okay one of many) is-- how can I have a hyperlink from a WordPress site that is federating via ActivityPub that opens it's post in Mastodon? In Mastodon, all of the share links are back to the WordPress URL, I need to have a link that opens in the Mastodon interface. If someone can answer that, I will mail you a jar of home made jelly. The other problem that comes up for many is-- in the world of federation we end up with so many different handles. In the excitement of people jumping from Instagram to Pixelfed, I heard this complaint about why their username could not be the same as their Mastodon one. Heck, I had that oen too early, which is why for this purpose the Gizmo-ing to Mastodon with IFTTT, Zapier, and a personal favorite, Make.com can make sense to publish things to your timeline. My strategy now though, is to accept the Many Accounts I will have, and its on me to boost them from my main account. Guess what? I have a blog post for this: https://cogdogblog.com/2024/11/federated-fragmentated/ But going forward, I am all on with using the ActivityPub plugin in WordPress, and its features keep growing. Why are you not Getting More Federated? It's easy in WordPress. And while answering the question, get yourself the un-official shirt. Featured Image: Pexels Photo by Felipe Liberal free to use under the Pexels "Why-Can't-They-Just-Use=CC" License modified by Alan Levine. I used Photoshop Generative fill to add street content to left and right, it does a decent job, plus I brushed out the Ha'Penny Bridge text and added my own "W'ORDPRESS ACTIVITY" to the name of the Pub, and slipped in a Wikimedia Commons WordPress logo licensed GNU General Public... what is the result? I toss my derivative into the grand commons via CC0. Building an RSS feed made simple came the link in my blog. Hmmm, we can alway use more simplicity... (more…) We are doing some tinkering soon on our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) "packing slips" to increase the visibility and usage of the commenting tools, which are relatively unused situated near the very bottom of each packing slip. Ideally, this is the place MLX users would describe their potential, or real, re-use of MLX content. As it works now, comments are linked to each packing slip, and a copy is sent to the MLX package author. The comments can be anonymous, but if an email address is provided, the author can answer a question directly via the email copy they receive (the comment-er's addresses is inserted in the FROM e-mail header). Currently, the comments are tacked into simple text files, but we are going to be rolling them into the MLX database, so they can be managed, sorted, and likely deleted by the author or an admin. But getting back, how can we get better information to package authors from the comment feature? There are several unheeded reminders on each packing slip, first under the detailed description Note! As a professional courtesy to the owner of this package, if you use some aspect of this package or have some thoughts about it, please share your feedback via the Comments Tool. and following any uploaded "supplements": Note! As an aid to the person who shared these items, if you adopt any of these materials or have some ideas about them, please share your feedback via the Comments Tool. Perhaps open ended comments are not direct enough in terms of soliciting useful feedback? Just today, I got an e-mail comments from a colleague: This afternoon I was helping a faculty member with Blackboard, and I was explaining how easy it would be to include a predefined Google link so students could research outside web resources. I went to the mcli site (because I remember seeing that you had done it for some topic in the past), and what do you know if the second most recent MLX package listed in the feed was your Google Linking! How unexpected! We printed the package details and the supplemental webpage, and off the faculty member went with something new to learn. This is wonderful stuff, but as a personal email message, I and the sender are the only ones who know of this experience. Finally, there is the even more un-used "TrackBack" feature- we try to explain it in non technical terms, provide a linked web form interface for submitting trackback-like information. I am thinking of re-writing that section of the packing slip as well, and labeling it something more like "ShareBack- a place to share back how you have reused this item." Isn't that the gist of the theoretical "Reusable" aspect of learning objects? How come this is not a primary effort to track re-use at other learning object collection sites? Technically the TrackBack is working fine (see MLX TrackBack Summary), a few of them being auto generated by appropriate blog tools and a pile of them I have added manually. I see problems with the arcane binary data format the MovableType StandAlone TrackBack CGI scripts create- again, I am going to try and modify them to record directly to our database. Update (a few minutes later).... TrackBack definitely works! In referencing / linking to an MLX package in this blog post, the ping was automatically registered in the MLX Trackback- see it for yourself! I had to do nothing but link to a MLX URL! I think that is freakin' amazing. What is the authoring software we used for content creation could send such "pings" back to learning object repositories when content from the collections are "re-used". "Twitter is a waste of time" -- yeah, time I could better spend reading dull emails, clipping my toenails, filing my taxes. Pfooooey. Yesterday, I got caught up in a mini burst of twitter spontaneity that was pure fun... and is still gurgling along today. IOt was the opposite end of the tail from trending, but it sure was fun for 30 minutes. This all started when Michael Berman sent me a chat via Skype because he saw my satus line "Strawberry Fields Forever" (a play on my location in Strawberry, AZ), and he said, it would be funny to have a list of Less Than Enthusiastic Rock Songs like "Strawberry Fields for a Little While" or "You Shook Me for 15 Minutes". Well heck, why just play back and forth on chat. I said, let's bounce this to twitter - with the hash tag #lessThanEnthusiasticSongs It was just pure silly fun because a handful of other people joined in, some I do not even know. Favorites: @cherylcolan: Fly Like a Pigeon #LessThanEnthusiasticSongs @rushaw: "Jiggle the Casbah" #lessThanEnthusiasticSongs @schwier:To dream the annoyingly difficult dream #lessThanEnthusiasticSongs @mckennaEDU: "Tangled Up In Periwinkle" #lessThanEnthusiasticSongs @noiseprofessor: When the Levee Shows Signs of Wear #lessThanEnthusiasticSongs @pumpkiny: Meander This Way #lessThanEnthusiasticSongs @aforgrave: Dull, Sad People #lessThanEnthusiasticSongss @amichaelberman: "Sort of Nice Looking Woman" #lessThanEnthusiasticSongs What does this mean? Nothing. Kibbles. Bits. But when you are in this mix live space, you almost feel like your hand is on the rail of the internet, you can feel the heat, the hum of the packets moving. That's where it's at. Do the assignments you assign? I blabbed about this recently for the Ontario Extend mOOC I was facilitating, so it's also appropriate for the Networked Narratives course I co-teach with Mia Zamora. At some point I would have used what was seemingly fit word for this about eating one's own canine food, but I have learned that it's not really meaningful or even respectful outside of North America. The focus of our class has been opening students to the dark aspects of the current internet, data tracking, privacy, the surveillance economy, living in a post truth world, etc. All along we have asked students each week to find and review a reading relevant to the topics, tagging their posts so we can aggregate them in one nice pile (50+ at last check). This was the idea we had for a final project; to identify one slice of the darkness, one topic, to do some research, and develop a guide to understanding and addressing/living with this topic at an individual level. Students are being tasked to write this not as your typical essay assignment, but in a narrative fashion, where they write as some form of communication between themselves (an unknowing person of the topic) with someone that has more experience and wisdom, a digital alchemist guide that the students are bringing to life (that character being themselves at the end of the project, we hope). Part of the work will be both characters using and leaving helpful notes and markers in the web via hypothes.is annotations. This last week we asked them to start by identifying two possible topics, suggesting ones that they new the least about, thay surprised/scared them the most, and write them up this week. With feedback from their teachers and other students, we will want them next week to narrow it to The One, and start the research work. One student in class asked for an example of a final project of this type, which we do not have, as each year these projects are different. We did show how they will be published in our Arganee Journal (!SPLOT) essentially a well formatted, referenced, media and link encrusted blog post. The closest we had to the writing of it as narrative were the "letters home from arganee" in our first course. Without too much thinking of what it would take, I piped in, "ok, I will do the task along side you." That's all the prelude. I am considering two topic areas below. For me (and our students) the aim is (a) to keep it narrowly focused, specific; (b) something for which we can suggest steps one can do to be informed or take action. Data Obfuscation: Give The Trackers Worthless Noise You Are Being Tracked. Erasing these footprints - or not leaving them in the first place - is becoming more difficult, and less effective. Hiding from data collection isn't working. Instead, we can make our collected data less actionable by leaving misleading tracks, camouflaging our true behavior.https://noiszy.com/ This idea was spun from a remark by Anne-Marie Scott during our studio visit when she mentioned AdNauseum. I had bookmarked this long ago, but never tried it. AdNauseam is a free browser extension designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from tracking by advertising networks. At the same time, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas. Obfuscation, a word I stumble over in saying, is an interesting approach, "the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language." It's deliberate in an attempt create noise and confusion around meaning. Much has been driven by the current US administrations decisions to allow internet service providers to provide differentials services based on our activity. There is somewhat of af analog to this approach in software related to data masking, but that's not quite relevant here. Noiszy is another user tool that has a similar aim as Adnasuem- send meaningless information to data trackers. A more experimental tool, aimed more at signalling protest is Make Noise. Some writers suggest that making noise will not really hide your browsing habits. The field guide would research this and more data noise generating tools, experiment with them, and try to gain some understanding about their impact. It would explore possible negative outcomes of generating random activity- would web services like search become any less useful? What changes in the ads delivered have when using noise generators? And what would it take for them to be effective? My curiosity is less about "will this protect me" somehow as an effective way to navigate the modern web and thwart tracking, but more as an interest in a counter typical approach of expecting systems to act as shields. And also, as note in most of the tools listed above, it's almost more to make a statement. My alchemist pal, Vulpes Internetus has already started leaving me some hypothesis notes to wonder about and respond to - he is wisely tagging them fieldguide to there is a way to see them all at once https://hypothes.is/users/rebeg?q=tag%3Afieldguide Just as I was writing my alchemist tweeted another tool https://twitter.com/rebegmaestro/status/1114652919519956992 Facial Recognition Faceoff I've got less on this topic as I am pretty sure I will do the topic above. But with the rising interest, awareness into how much of our faces are photographed in public, I'm curious about approaches that one might to to avoid; are there ways (that to not involve hiding or living in a box) to be in public and thwart the cameras? My info so far is one main article in Wired: How to hack your face to dodge the rise of facial recognition tech - Techniques for fooling FR can be roughly divided into two categories: occlusion or confusion.Occlusion techniques work by physically hiding facial features so the camera simply can’t see them. How successful these methods are will depend on which bits of your face are hidden and how well hidden they are.:So if occlusion is uncertain at best and liable to get you locked up at worst, that leaves confusion. One of the most straightforward techniques is to stop the FR system working is to make it think it isn't looking at a face.https://www.wired.co.uk/article/avoid-facial-recognition-software The question really is, can we still go about our daily business without weird things on our face? (this topic needs help!) Featured Image: Image by Free Creative Stuff from Pixabay We may regret the visuals, but the dog is out of the bag... [caption id="attachment_23864" align="alignnone" width="500"] modified from cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by Lip Jin Lee: http://flickr.com/photos/levoodoo/3204026062/[/caption] I'v just written up a bit of information about the Fall 2013 Headless ds106 -- essentially, we will be publishing a regular scheduled series of tasks based on the syllabi on the past 7 ds106 courses taught at UMW. Anyone interested follows along for portions they care to. No apologies for "dropping out". That is decapitated. But I am not teaching it. Jim Groom is not teaching it. No one is charge, though I have a call out for volunteers to assist. You are not signing up to teach but to assist, help, cajole, stir the pot, in whatever way you see fit. This way, Jim and I get to do ds106, not teach it. It is really in response to challenges we know for open participants, three is not structure or map through ds106. So if you seek that, you can do it along side others. The Syllabus has the time schedule for topics, starting August 26. If you want an idea what each week entails, see the Spring 2013 Weekly Announcements. What I am really hoping happens is that people bring along new people, a friend, colleague, students, colleagues, a group of teachers seeking PD, that is your real task now- find a way to bring new folks in. I suggest reading Jim Groom's post with his perspective on this idea (although I cannot even say "Acephalous"). Let's face it, ds106 has never been massive in terms of participants, and there is a reason for that. You can't have a sense of community within a massive, automated machine. You need to have a sense of affection for those you are creating alongside, and that's a fact that is overlooked (or suppressed) when we jump from the idea of massive participants to massive data collection to number-drive generalizations about experience. Along those lines learning is processed and denatured into an abstraction that can be more readily salable. It's all bullshit, the important thing is the learning within a community of people that provide you with a series of contexts for the experience (no matter how disparate), nothing else matters one lick to those who are not trying to commodify the whole enterprise. But remember- no one is in charge, not NOBODY... NO ONE. or EVERYONE. This is an exciting experiment in what the ds106 community can do. But do not take me wrong- I am not in any way saying that this kind of course can happen automated, cranked out of a Silicon Valley Sausage Grinder, without teachers. That is cow poop. This is the result and product of the blood, sweat, and GIFs of those who have led classes and those who have participated in ds106. Let's roll this one big time. Go headless in ds106. Which is not to be confused with losing your head... cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Janine With all the talk about the Net generation being so vastly, genetically different from... well everyone else, I try to avoid falling too much into the quick generalities. It's too easy to apply labels when, as people, we are all on some sort of continuum. Like others, I have a live in subject to study. I enjoy exceptions to rules. Yesterday, I walked past 22 year old step-son's room, where, in contrast to the usual... um.. harsh metal, I was surprised to hear the sounds of something in my iTunes rack, Highway 61 Revisited. I asked Travis, "Are you listening to Dylan?" He smiled and said, "Everyone ought to listen to Dylan." This generation is not always as foreign as some might think. You can now tag me #AlmostCanadian. About 10 months since crossing the fenceless, welcoming border into Canada to live with, love, and marry Cori, the government has said I can stay. Yesterday, a typical Big Blue Saskatchewan Open Sky Day, we drove to Saskatoon for the final interview to get my permanent resident card. We took the word "interview" as a possible quiz on each other; as it turns out, it was more of an approval of the paper work our lawyer had submitted for us in September. This means I can stay here. The word joyous is an understatement, can you tell? This Woman I Love flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) The other cards are lining up- I got a Health Card 3 weeks ago (still sorting out details on what it covers for my diabetes) and a Saskatchewan driver's license today. The only thing I cannot do now is vote. This opens the door for a possible summer road trip for us across the southern border. Most importantly, it means a big step in the process of a forever stay here with Cori, under these open skies. Featured Image: 2019/365/97 Earth Meets Sky flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) All the news that is fit to make up... Today's Daily Create Challenge was writing something by remixing content from different sources: Find 3 news stories. Use words from second paragraph of each, make 3 stanzas of 3 lines, In the last 2 hours I experienced a computer religious experience. I opened the box for my new G4 laptop, connected a firewire cable from it to my old laptop, and then watched in awe as the entire content, applications, and set up were transferred over. It was 100% smooth (so far). Details on how to do this I found at Mac OS X 10.3: Transferring data with Setup Assistant frequently asked questions (FAQ). I have never had an upgrade experience like that. I am a bit shaky, disoriented, hearing music, and seeing bright light... swimming towards it... cannot ... type... any .. m............. Where in the World is Google Reader? by cogdogblog posted 28 Feb '08, 9.24am MST PST on flickr Why has Google Reader been banished from my navigation? Its not even listed on the More Google Products - it seems to not exist. Though it is alive and well at www.google.com/reader Maybe it is a game. The diagnosis is likely on the spectrum of an obsession. In the buildup to the first open version of the open digital storytelling course, the one, the only, DS106, I first saw a sign with a 106 on it. I noticed it. It was so long ago that what I was doing at the time was... running, training for a half marathon (I did and I still do hate running). I saw a 106 marker on the canal trail in Mesa, Arizona and took a picture December 18, 2010, adding in some color saturation effect. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2010/365/349 Psychic 106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] This was 11 days after Jim Groom had openly blogged the idea of running ds106 as an open and online experiment, so 106 was on my mind. That's where it started. I've seen (and stayed in a few) hotel room 106's [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Behind the #ds106 Door flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] I've stopped at lot of highway mile markers [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Though I walk through the #ds106 of the valley of death... flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] I note them when I test my blood sugar [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Bleeding ds106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Sometimes I just make them out of objects (or act like some mysterious entity does it) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]106 Juniper Berries flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] They appear on license plates [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]License to do DS106 in British Columbia flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] You start looking at street addresses, and when you starting seeing 100, 104... you start preparing to find a 106 [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]The Door to 106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] You find them on dials [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]The Zenith At La Posada is Fixed on #DS106 Radio flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] I also made this into a DS106 assignment. So it's been 7 and a half years since that first 106 photo and I find, when I'm out, my secondary senses are usually noticing signs and addresses and license plates, as my brain seems tuned into looking for that pattern. I think there is something to that noticing. It was one of the things I heard often after our DS106 photo activities (e.g. the "Photo Safari") and daily creates is that participants just started paying more attention to the every day world around them. They started looking for converging lines and patterns in carpet and fonts on signs and creative window reflections. Maybe there are some research studies out there about such benefits. There was one I came across recently-- The daily digital practice as a form of self-care: Using photography for everyday well-being, but I think more about what it means for the brain, the thinking to be paying more attention to the world around us. More like Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking: A Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation who became more aware of things she missed walking around New York City by spending time walking with various specialists. Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer. Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see—if only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. That's a bit closer to what I think my habit does, but I am wondering too about activities where you ask people to be attuned to one pattern, be it a course number or a word, and just spend time setting the brain to always be looking for that in the world. This came to mind again listening to Bonni Stachowiak in her own episode of the Teaching in Higher Education podcast talk about her fascination with the number 208... in episode 208 (as it happens I am getting interviewed by Bonni this week). so I am not the only one who gets obsessed with a number. I bet there's 106 different ideas for this kind of noticing activity... or is it just a weird obsession? Featured Image: screen shot of my flickr photos tagged 106 all photos by me in my flick account and I happily toss into the public domain under Creative Commons CC0 photo credit: pcesarperez People are so hung up with being labeled n00bs- it's time for the bulk of us in that category to let our n00bility to bask in the sunshine, not hide in a closet of shame. Here are some suggestions for pumping up your n00b factor: Keep those generic icons that come with every account, grey generic silhouettes are unique, almost no one uses that brown twitter icon. Send thousands of invitations via linkedin to people in your address book(s) and be sure to use the custom text, "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." Everyone will thik you sent them a personal email. Tag everything in delicious "cool", but don't waste time adding more descriptive tags because that just messes up the database. The perfect text to describe your WordPress blog is creating an About page that says "This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress." Also, it's easier for people using your RSS feed to know what your blog is about if its tagline is "Just another WordPress blog." One of the most effective ways of participation in web forums or listserves are to add a lot of "me too" posts or "I agree". Also, be sure to send everyone several UNSUBSCRIBE ME messages when you are ready to go, so everyone knows you are leaving. That is just plain courtesy. By no means create a unique flickr url for your photo collection; why give up a cool urls like http://flickr.com/photos/52354243@N06/2784393798/ Also, people can find your images better if they have titles like IMG4637.JPG or DSC_2381.JPG. Captions don't add any meaning either. The best blog themes come by default, because they have the best designs! And they are blue! Blue is very cool. Use Rounders 3 for Blogger, Bluebreeze for drupal, Kubrick for WordPress. In Second Life there is no reason to spend good Lindens or time fussing with your avatar; what's wrong with blue jeans and a t-shirt and helmet hair? Strut your n00b (well in that herky jerky avatar walk) in 3D glory. When creating wiki pages and blog posts, use really long titles as it makes the URLs stand out more. Long URLs are gooooooood. Avoid adding hyperlinks in your blog posts; they take to long to add, who wants to fuss with tags, and they just send people elsewhere. And why write stuff when you can copy it from someone else's site? Heck, that's what sharing is all about, eh? Also, load your sidebar with bright flashy widgets, people love flashy widgets, especially ones that move and grab your attention. And make a good long blogroll off blogs everyone else lists; that's the "connectivty" that fuels the blogosphere. What else am I missiing? This Friday, the self-proclaimed "Grandmother of Electronic Portfolios", Helen Barrett is coming to town as our guest for our event "ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty", where we are expecting an audience of 90+ faculty and staff. The day's agenda is split-starting with a morning focus on student ePortfolios, with Helen presenting on her recent work connecting digital storytelling and eports, but the highlight (sorry Helen) hopefully will be a student panel we are assembling with 5 Maricopa students who are now or recently have been building ePortfolios. We are planning on capturing the audio of this discussion to be able to post online. Over lunch we are planning on setting up computer stations with a collection of Maricopa ePortfolios available for viewing, as well as having the student panel members and other faculty present be on hand to share their experiences. The afternoon shifts to discussions of faculty portfolios, with another session led by Helen plus some group activity. We are planning a followup event in mid April where those who are eager to get started can have a hands on experience with an ePortfolio system, and hopefully between now and then they will be accumulating or reflecting on what they want to bring as artifacts. Mostly we are eager and pleased that Helen was willing to travel to Arizona in the middle of winter (!), seriously, we are fortunate to have an expert of her caliber coming here, and I know she is a dynamic speaker for faculty and students. Our NMC 2004 Small Pieces session intended to make a case for creating effective net-based collaboration using a discrete set of free tools, not so tightly controlled. This was fine, fun, and (frilly), but I wanted to describe here how we are trying to implement this for some real work. We are headed into the 18th year of a faculty-led initiative for instructional technology at Maricopa called "Ocotillo" (see some history and the details on the metaphor). Dealing with technology, this almost organic organization evolves and re-invents itself, and just this past year, we "flipped" over a structure from representing college interests to topical ones (more details than anyone wants). Anyhow, bottom line, this coming academic year, we will have four "action groups" each led by a pair of faculty, who will research, promote, prod, disseminate, dissect, and hopefully engage people in the areas of: Learning ObjectsHybrid CoursesePortfoliosEmerging Learning Technologies Being a large, decentralized college system in an ever sprawling metropolis, I am vigorously promoting using more technology to share, communicate, and conduct this work, and get us out of the "F2F meeting/workshop" mode. So while ramping up for our Small Pieces presentation, I was also cobbling together a system of weblogs, wikis, and discussion boards, tied together with RSS, tape, and bailing wire, and hoping we can spring this effectively on our system this year. In what will become a long rambling post, I will describe how this all works together. Brian has already pointed out that this is actually not loosely joined but rather "tight" (a compliment, I hope). And as an off kilter kind of success, before even sharing the URL, this morning already got a drug product spam (MTBlacklist now engaged)... (more…) Do you have your own internet domain? Good! We'd like it if you can share with participants in the Ontario Extend project some wisdom from your experience. Having a domain is not part of the program, but we do have some pre-paid accounts for ones from Reclaim Hosting for participants who work through their modules. I've written a bit of a What and Why Domains in our guide developed for the North Cohort institute we did a year ago. But it would help to have people who have taken on the responsibly and challenge of managing a Domain of Their Own to perhaps explain their own what and why. Are you game? I thought it might help if I provided a few interview-like questions, but freely free to respond any way you wish, in a blog post from your own domain. If your blog is syndicated to the project please include a tag of whydomain in your post. These will show up on the site via https://extend-domains.ecampusontario.ca/tag/whydomain If you are not part of the project, please tweet a link to @ontarioextend with a #whydomain hashtag. And now, the questions... Domain Interview What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name? What was your understanding, experience with domains before you got one? Where were you publishing online before having one of your own? What was a compelling feature, reason, motivation for you to get and use a domain? When you started what did you think you would put there? What kinds of sites have you set up one your domain since then? How are you using them? Please share URLs! What helped you or would have helped you more when you started using your domain? What do you still struggle with? What kind of future plans to you have for your domain? What would you say to other educators about the value, reason why to have a domain of your own? What will it take them to get going with their own domain? Blog away! [caption id="attachment_66394" align="aligncenter" width="500"] via giphy[/caption] Featured Image: First Lady Michelle Obama does an interview with radio show host Eddie 'Piolin' Sotelo public domain photo from the Obama Library. Countless are the posts of people showing off the "coolest" AI thing, using Google's NotebookLLM to generate a chatty podcast of your uploaded book, blog post, paper, shopping list. Woah. Wow. You click and listen hearing a male and female voice banter back and forth in conversational tone. Neato, you are so onto this AI train! When I spotted the always wise worded Kate Bowles post her assertion "I just need to bookmark this as my full-hearted nope to AI podcasting. For so many reasons. Just nope. In every language, from my heart to yours. Stop." https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/113224924415029550 Do not get me wrong, the technical accomplishment is impressive. But riddle me this-- how many of these have you fully listened to start to finish? Or for more than 10 seconds? I felt like I needed to, as the two voices say so often, a "deep dive". I made it a goal to download a bunch of these, assemble them into a single track, and listen to them all. I used a few I'd seen my edtech colleagues share, but just searched the Google for things like "I made a podcast with NotebookLLM" - and ended up with 11 audio files (two were youtube videos I had to extract audio from. Since the pair never introduce themselves, I have been calling them "Biff" and "Buffy" I re-named all the files "biff-and-buffy-1.mp3", "biff-and-buffy-2.mp3" ... "biff-and-buffy-11.mp3" and have emerged from being so well informed by this every chipper and knowledgable pair of botcasters. Here it is for you, an hour and 49 minutes of audio ________ My soul hurts from this stuff. But a few notes: The banter is remarkable, well at first. But listen closely and you can hear as one voice talking the other chipping in with "Totally", "100%", "that's amazing" The have inflection and intonation that is really not what we are used to for synthetic voices I even heard a few "ums" in there. Weird. The clichés are strong. I heard Buffy say at least 3 times "Work smarter, not harder" The always refer to their "show" as a "Deep Dive" Biff and Buffy carry the same exuberance for every damn topic. I wondered about uploading something really banal and seeing how the hep it up. In one sample listen, you might be wowed. But over a series, Biff and Buffy sound like a bunch of gushing sycophants, those office but kissers you want to kick in the pants. Judging a bit, but to me the voices sound very middle class white. I know the response will be, "they will add more voices" or "it will be improve". And they come across as hip experts on everything. After about 45 minutes, I am ready to throw them out the window of my truck (I listened while driving) But beyond the point of showing that this can be done (reference the old saying about why a dog does something) - what is the use? Will people really use this as a mode to consume content? I'd reference a telling article I spent my one month's free read on the New Yorker, Jill Leplore's Is a Chat with a Bot a Conversation? (paywall, readable in browser incognito window) (please tell me you know how to do that) (or just try, eh?) I am sure someone, likely based in eastern Canada, will have a different say. But I think we need to go beyond the "This is neat, look what I did" level. So many of these articles I scanned are full of outlining all of the steps needed to do this NotebookLLM parlor trick. A favorite commment on one I saw was: "How I Turned My Resume Into a Podcast with Google’s NotebookLM AI"Summary: I uploaded documents and pressed a button... Is this the grand future of human creativity the prophe--profits are yodelling from the mountain tops? See if you can listen to one hour and 49 minutes of this stuff, then come back with your comment. I am open to having my mind changed, but to me this is still a trick from the parlor room. For reference, the sources of my Biff and Buffy show are the following, I leave it for you to figure out which one is what. https://sheknowsseo.co/how-to-use-notebooklm-to-make-a-podcast-from-your-blog-post/ https://darcynorman.net/2024/09/23/notebooklm-summarizes-my-dissertation/ https://www.buzzsprout.com/1102442/episodes/15812241 https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/29/notebooklm-audio-overview/ https://talkingwithmachines.com/does-anyone-actually-want-ai-generated-podcasts/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/couros_playing-around-with-googles-notebooklm-activity-7241870968258752512-SzFF https://open.spotify.com/episode/16VFabNCxxtlrXUqtuGo7V?si=omji0uBdR8GQUBQ1_QBM5Q https://ideasandthoughts.org/2024/09/18/googles-lm-notebook-made-this-podcast/ https://dev.to/jamesbright/how-i-turned-my-resume-into-a-podcast-with-googles-notebooklm-ai-4nji https://medium.com/@artificialintelligencenews/how-we-created-an-ai-podcast-with-google-notebooklm-the-results-are-mindblowing-e24c8e7bfd13 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ai-generated-podcasts-the-future-of-audio-storytelling/id1768892778?i=1000670948117 I had some thoughts to mimic the audio podcast summary of my almost nil LinkedIn profile, but than I am playing into the parlor game. Nah. See below! Postscript In assembling 11 audio files into one, I went back to use the ffmpeg command I have used to assemble things from my old voice mixer toy, but ran into some hangups as it required all kinds of command line updates, that then wanted a new version of xcode... I found this little trick which looked neat, just using the command line cat command, and yes, I quickly got one file. And on my first listen I was treated to several of the tracks being chipmunked, reflecting the source's note "Simple, right? As long as all the MP3 files are recorded at the same bitrate, it should just work." Just for fun, this bit of Biff and Buffy are not much different from their "regular" voice: Post Post Script Gulp, I went and did it. Bridging off the dude who did a LLMcast based on his LinkedIn profile, I tried mine but there was not enough info there for Biff and Buffy (by design) so I added my calling card site. Here is the bit to round up the listen to a fill 2 hours, as the butt kissing pair lather it up about me (love how they pronounce SPLOT). Featured Image: As per my routine, the only times I use Generated AI images is to mock generative AI. I used Adobe Firefly to generate the image above, but sadly I forgot to save/publish the link. I asked for an image in 16:9 aspect ratio for the prompt "A cheerful and excited man and woman sit at desk of recording studio speaking into a microphone". I regenerated the image to something similar. How does one license such things? Shrug. I just try to be as clear as I can. There's a lot of twitter talk (don't ask me to define "a lot") of #Ungrading or as the Inside Higher Education article being batted around today calls it When Grading Less is More. I'm not sure where the locus is here- there's seems a bandwagon jumping on teaching gradeless, which is, as most will say, a big leap from how we have taught/learned before. Jesse Strommel has been ahead of the curve on this in championing but also in his practice. And people I respect like Maha Bali and Ken Bauer have been working it through too on their blogs. It's a bit easy to shrug off a change in approach to grading because the system requires one to be given; there is a lot of room to change how that process is done. Someone I respect well who I don't see quoted on this issue is Lisa Lane, who wrote eloquently on a somewhat contrarian view this past January on Doing Grades Well. Among many things I respect about Lisa are is her devotion to teaching and also how she is not just spouting theory; in pedagogy and technology she thoroughly tries out everything she talks about. The point that Lisa brings (among many) is that she sees what we are grading is the work, not the student. This is where the idea of grading students is the problem. I’ve seen it technologically embedded into systems: “student grade”, “assign the student a grade”, etc. We don’t grade students; we grade work. Judging other people, particularly people whom you know only through one small life window, is wrong. I have had students say to me, “I hope you don’t think less of me because I did a bad job on this paper.” Of course I don’t — what on earth gave them that idea? Well, years of school where the grade was used to represent them, when someone punished them for poor grades, when they were called a “D student”.There are no D students. But there is D work. And there is a D that goes with compassion, that says, I’m sorry but this work wasn’t up to the standard, and here’s why. Please let me help you as we go through the course. Let me find you the services you need. I’ll sit in my office and listen to you cry even when I’m supposed to be at a meeting. What I don’t want to do is change your C to an A because you need it to make your family proud or because you really need it to get into another class. If I do this, I am not doing my job well. I’m doing it poorly. I know it and so do you. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about you.http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/musings/doing-grades-well/ As a student I did not really mind grades at all. That's because I learned early how the grade game is played, and because I remembered stuff and got good at taking tests, good grades were easy. It was the thing I did to move along in programs so I could focus more on what made me curious. It certainly was not exam cramming that made me hungry to learn. It was not some treadmill of direct instruction. In teaching I have done little in traditional grading (yes my teaching has been predominantly in media and creativity, and a lot online, so maybe just dismiss me as teaching something not content driven, shrug). So I don't have much ungrading to do. I don't use textbooks, open or not. I don't give quizzes or exams or assign traditional essays. The approach I have taken (yes grumpy man it's a constructivist zombie one) is that I grade students on the way they document, reflect, explain, narrate on the web sites they own. It's a "Show The Work!" approach. For media creation assignments, I am not grading the quality or aesthetic of the media, but how students are able to explain, in their own words (a) their thinking and approach to coming up with an idea for the assignment (b) their own documentation of how they made it, and attributing of resources; and (c) how they relate what they produces to the specifications of the assignment and/or what it means to them. My students are free to do an assignment differently than what I wrote if they can write a rationale for it. And show it. So they grade is not what I do to them, it is a reflection on how they provide a body of work of this evidence of their own work, growth, including other links that support the documentation of their work. In NetNarr, I have them use the link that shows where they are and their activity in the Twitter space, a link to their Hypothes.is annotation tracks (see how the syndication setup makes these evident). They can also use a link from the Daily Digital Alchemies which clearly shows their work (e.g. found on the leaderboard). But I don't use this as a data-driven approach; these are all the materials students can use on their last reflection to demonstrate and narrate their work. We do Grade Contracts as well; I have them submit their choices in a form on the site powered by Gravity Forms. They get an email confirmation of their choice. At the mid semester point, I trigger a resending of that, and ask them to email us back with a statement of how they think they are doing. And we ask them at the end of the class to self-evaluate according to the contract. This kind of holistic approach was something we did in teaching DS106 back in 2012 at University of Mary Washington. I borrowed the approach of Jim Groom in having brief (5-10 minute) end of semester conversations with the students, where they were asked to describe their arc of progress in the class and assign themselves a grade. The memory I also lean on from this experience was a kid named Danny, who always sat in the back of the room with a hoodie on and face half hidden by a laptop. I might have assumed he was tuned out. But when he explained in that interview, his coming to understanding of remix culture and weaving an arc into a story, I realized he was more tuned in to me than I was to him. In fact, in the last 2 weeks of class he filmed a bit of me to use in his final project (I think I played the role of the boring professor). The thing I do acknowledge is that students look for some gauge of their progress in the course, typically gauged on that letter grade scale. But students also know if they are doing the work, if they are present or daydreaming, do we need points and letters to confirm? I am all for having means of showing, and if need be, grading the work. They get continual feedback via email, blog comments, private messages. Now There is a Machine that Grades flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) So yeah, I enter letter grades into some administrative database. But I am not always the driver of a grading machine, we drive together. I don't want to sound like I am critical of the grade system, there ought to be some level of indication of how well the work is done. Like Lisa Lane wrote, I want to be doing it well, and doing it well. I am not saying there is one single approach for all learning, and would hardly think anyone apply my approaches to all teaching. Featured Image: Want Better Grades? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I might be a broken record but again and again I return to David Wiley's description of the disposable assignment (and what the potential is to be the opposite): These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. David terms the alternative to be "renewable assessments". Now not to get all nitpicky semantic, and while "renewable" is a desirable attribute, is it necessarily the opposite of disposable? And why do assignments get cross listed as "assessments"? We have collections of activities in places like the DS106 Assignment Bank which are assignments, but not necessarily assessed. It does not change at all the value of the concept, it just makes sense to me to aim for Non-Disposable Assignments. Maybe it was the NDA acronym that is a problem? I've been trying a few of these in my Networked Narratives class. And just to show I might be familiar with my own dog food, in looking back on some previous mumblings on the topic I have to admit two of these are rather "textbooky" in nature. The Referencium [caption id="attachment_65966" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The hallowed halls of the #NetNarr Referencium[/caption] I made up a word and also a concept that confused my students for the first two weeks. But my idea was, that in the course of the class, students (and open participants) are coming across many readings, videos, references on the three main course segments -- Digital Art, Games and Gaming, and Electronic Literature-- as well as the over-arching theme of "This Digital Life". The idea then is I set up an open google doc, and over the month we are working on a topic, ask students each week to contribute to web references (title, url, and a brief description). For each of the three segments, I have two of my graduate students assigned as editors- they encourage contributions, organize and edit the contributions, and at the end of the month, I close the document to editing, and convert it to a web page. I think there would be not much trouble finding items from secondary links/references from assigned readings / course materials, plus things they might come across in their regular information consumption. But I also set up a page to "flow" possible candidates into. This is a feed of anything tagged #netnarrlinks in twitter ( way anyone can nominate something?) as well as the things I am always bookmarking in pinboard. To establish a path, I managed a shorted round for the first three weeks, when we were introducing the idea of thinking about our digital lives (tracking, surveillance, etc). I publish this in an online "journal" (self published using the TRU Writer SPLOT) with the first one at http://journal.arganee.world/2018/87/ (it was an easy publish, just copy/paste from the Google doc). The current one on Digital Art is in progress, and already going better than the first one. Anyone is welcome to add something to the collection, hoping to show my students the "network effect" of contributions from beyond our class. So what are we making that is non-disposable? A published collection of resources on our course topics, co-created by students. It's not huge, but I hope they see that they are building something for people beyond our class. [caption id="attachment_65972" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Referencium on Digital Life published in the Arganee Journal[/caption] (Also, after publication, all of these are set to open with Hypothes.is annotation enabled). Again a small way anyone can help is to tweet any interesting articles, videos, presentations, examples of digital art with the #netnarrlinks tag. The Re-New Media Art Project [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]That New Media Art Book flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] As part of the introduction to Digital Art for Week 3 of NetNarr I aimed to have students appreciate some of the early examples of Net Art from examples in the 2006 book New Media Art by Mark Tribe and Renna Jana. I bought a copy of the book on a whim in 2010 when I visited the MIT bookstore; it had an appeal because that was the part of web history I knew well. In January 2014 I got a bug to start a project to revisit these digital artworks, finding out if they were still even available, what became of the artist, etc. I also decided to make it a project to learn tumblr better, so launched Re New Media Art There's a blog post somewhere in this house about the idea. On thing that helped was that Mark Tribe had set up, at least available in 2014, a wiki version of the book content on a Brown University server. It's no longer publicly available, but again, hail the Internet Archive. In two years I managed to complete reviews of a whopping 6 of the 35 pieces. I was actually pleased to find a number of the old tech sites still there, again supporting my theory that individuals are the best hope for archiving web content; institutions not so much. My idea for the NDA (which I realize might be interpreted as asking students to do my research) was to have them take on the digital archeology investigation of one of the 29 works in New Media Art that I had not reviewed. I also came up with the plan to have each of my undergraduate students work as a team with a grad student. I asked the undergrad student to be the one to write up their results in their blog (this was also my cunning plan to have the grad students help the undergrads write better posts). I put some instructions and the list of all digital art works needing review into an open google doc, so the students could "claim" the one they chose (this was done in about 45 minute block of time). The task was: Pick one of the artist names listed in the open google doc http://bit.ly/re-new-media-art that links to a Wayback Machine search for the original content from the book. Indicate the work as "taken" by adding your twitter names after the title. For each one gather the following info (much is in the Wikibook) See a example of a completed research: Title of Art Work Artist name(s) When it was published on the web Technologies used Current URL (if still available online) Link to Wikibook page (in Wayback Machine) A brief summary of the piece, not just copied from the book (quotes are okay, but write your own analysis of the piece) Screenshots that represent the work Information on where the artist is now Publish as a blog post in one of your blogs and add the link to the google doc. Then you will get credit when it is added to the tumblr site. I was pleased with the effort and results they got for doing this in a short time (I typically spent maybe 90 minutes or more doing each one). Almost all of them were new to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine (which is a key part IMHO of being a Digital Alchemist). Three got done in class by my students, and our heroic open participant, Kevin @dogtrax did one too. I used the information in each of their published blog posts to move the research into he tumblr site, giving each of them credit there, e.g. [caption id="attachment_65969" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Credit for students who researched "Empire 24/7"[/caption] These are the new items added: Empire 24/7 by @nessacastrii and @mrsjayj Electronic Disturbance Theater (FloodNet) by @tiffsanto, @Justinsightfuls, and @Kmarzinsky ToyWar by @dogtrax My Boyfriend Came Back from the War by @BlaqueBeauty_30 and @rissacandiloro While not huge, I'd content this works as adding value to the world. And there are still 25 art pieces left in the hopper for anyone else to take on. The Make Bank Likely my favorite teaching with the web concept of all times is the DS106 Assignment Bank, and it's not even my own creation. I've done the digging into the origin story, and the idea spawned from conversations among Jim Groom, Marth Burtis, Tom Woodward, and myself, but it was totally Martha who brought it to life and built the architecture. After creating a generic version as a Wordpress theme, I've put it to use several times in later projects (Warning,if you invite me onto a project chances are I will suggest a bank, or a daily ______, or a SPLOT. It was a Challenge Bank for the UDG Agora Project, a Box of Magic Tricks for my ISS Institute in Australia. Briefly it was a Quest Bank for the Creative Commons Certification Project. One of the first uses by someone other than me for the theme was the work Karen Fasimpaur and Brad Emerson did to create a Connected Learning Make Bank. I really wanted to do one for NetNarr, and after a lot of tossing bad ideas for what to call the "things" in it, I settled on borrowing the name of a NetNarr Make Bank (after checking with Karen, she said, "yup, do it"). [caption id="attachment_65974" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The Make Bank is organized around the main topics of the course- This Digital Life, Digital Art, Games and Gaming, and Electronic Literature[/caption] What makes this valuable, non-disposable? First all it asks anyone who responds to publish their work online at a public URL (often but not necessarily their own blog). The value added is that each response gets added as an example to the original Make (aka assignment). As more people complete them, it grows examples to inspire others. But also, it opens the door for students to not only complete assigned work (which they have been institutionally trained to do) but also to add new Makes (aka assignments). This changes a lot for them; I'd suggest more is learning in creating an assignment than doing one. Plus, the format requires that you not only develop the assignment, but also complete it yourself as an example. It is dogfooding. Plus, the bank takes the assignments out of the context of my course content, and puts it in a place others can use, or remake. So while we have already the New Media Art research this in class (the Make Bank was not quite ready), it now exists in the Bank as an ongoing, non-disposed, assignment. Through some new categorizing features, I can now build a set of Makes, say this collection from the week we looked at Memes. My students are still getting the hang of how this works, that responding to the Make, means writing a bit about it in the response form. Hopefully more than "here is my response". [caption id="attachment_65970" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Completing the response form for a Make is more than just dropping something in a box[/caption] Through the Make Bank we will do more than writing articles; it opens the door for non-disposable participatory projects like #SelfieUnselfie. No Waste Management I'm not in the teaching business to create boxes to collct assignments. No matter what you call them, making non-disposable assignments / renewable assessments is all about creating meaningful work. And yes, it's a bit more work on your end to build. But it changes everything for you and your students. Once you go NDA, you cannot go back to this. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Disposable flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Featured Image: Spotted this on a neighbor's trash can, it seems high tech considering we have no curb-side recycling where I live (or no one told me). Darkened a bit for contrast from Non-Disposable? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Let's say someone sends you some info related to a project, maybe some links, etc... is it bloggable? One could say, if it is on the web, discoverable, Gooogle-able, then it is open to be blogged about? I faced this recently with something I sent out that some info linked to a project site that is not quite ready for public exposure... and one person took that as a prompt to blog about it. Now, I take the responsibility, since there were never any parameters set out by me, I did not prepend a message or the project with a request to keep it out of public sites until it was prime time. My bad. But does that make it fair game? Likely so. A link is wide open to anyone who can find it, guess it, etc, right? It's really not even a problem, and the impact is not even important, so I am hoping the person who reads this knows what I am talking about, need not make a fuss. It is not an issue or problem at all. I think it is more of an interesting questions bloggers may consider themselves-- what is fair game to write about? What is off limits? What do you follow up and say, "Is it okay if I post something about this?" And the beauty i of the blog--verses, we each get to make that choice. There is no need to appeal to gurus on a mountaintop who write Rules About Blogging That Begin With Big Roman Numerals like they were commandments or something... we can do our own rules, follow them, break them, etc. So there is no answer to "Is X Bloggable" except-- "It's up to the Blogger". So is anything not bloggable? Hmmmmmmm. Like many folks, I was interested in comic guru Nick Sousanis's call for participation in a week of Grids and Gestures Quickly, have a look at your ceiling tiles or other grid-ish things around you. If you then imagine putting these features to music, you might have regular long notes on the tiles, some shorter notes, and maybe rapid staccato beats on a ventilation grill. Ok, now come back to a comics page – and think about the idea that in comics, time is written in space. Comics are static – and it’s in the way we organize the space that we can convey movement and the passage of time. Unlike storyboards, to which comics are frequently compared, in comics we care not only about what goes on in the frame, but we care about the size of the panel, its shape, orientation, what it’s next to, what it’s not, and its overall location within the page composition. The way you orchestrate these elements on the page is significant to the meaning conveyed – there are some strong correspondences between comics and architecture in terms of thinking about the way the entire space operates together. Having briefly thought about this, I want you to take a single sheet of paper (any size, shape will do) and drawing with a pencil or pen, carve it up in some grid-esque fashion that represents the shape of your day. It can be this day, a recent day, a memorable day, or a typical/amalgamation day. And then inhabit these spaces you’ve drawn on the page with lines, marks, or gestures that represent your activity or emotional state during those times represented. The emphasis here is to do your best to not draw things. (You can always do that later!) And also, you can leave space blank on your page – but that has to mean something. This isn’t writing where you can finish a final sentence mid-page. Every inch of the composition is important in comics – so be aware of that as well. Finally, when I do this in class or with groups, I give people about 5-10 minutes to do it, so they have to make decisions quickly. Try to give yourself a similar limit. I've had it on my table a while, but it was on a plane flight last month that I finally read through a pre-print of Nick's work (now his Unflattening book) - this section has a great representation of the grimness of school having learners in boxes: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] That happened out of the sheer weird serendipity of the web. I think it was in 2014 that Nick put out a call for people to send him (by twitter or was it email) just a tracing of our foot on a piece of paper. I got drawn from that for a prize! https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/486734988918800384 I think it was maybe Mariana Funes who suggested making Grids and Gestures a part of the DS106 Daily Create which makes lovely sense. We could have filled the weeks with prompts, but it also seemed like one is a good way to go, so people can try it, and if it resonated, they would do more on their own. Twas an easy one to set up... https://twitter.com/ds106dc/status/719451817688457216 I aimed to try for the full week plan. What I like about Nick's prompt, and what makes it "ds106ish" is that its not over prescriptive-- there are many ways people could (and did take it on). Some (like me) drew on paper, others like Kevin did it on a device. Amy Burvall defied convention: https://twitter.com/amyburvall/status/720838671755182080 https://twitter.com/amyburvall/status/721040810364407809 Mariana sketched beautifully https://twitter.com/mdvfunes/status/720997379915325440 Yin Wah did frame ready art too https://twitter.com/yinbk/status/721004086108139520 All this says that people were free to make this assignment their own, not abide to some rules of servitude to the assignor. For me, I wanted to experiment with reflecting on Nick's idea of the shape of the grids, what it meant to represent time. I'm also influenced by long ago reading of Scott McCloud with some sense that the spaces between frames meant something too. I also wanted to avoid, as much as possible (though I find its impossible) trying to represent things with what's in the grids, not try to draw them, but still I did. Oh well. I also deliberately am NOT trying to draw a comic. And lastly I did these quickly-- this is what I could do in the time I could drink my first morning cup of coffee and before it was time to walk the dog. So maybe 10-15 minutes. Also, after doing the first one, In my photos I ended up including a bit of the world outside my sheet of paper. [caption id="attachment_55957" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Sunday Grid[/caption] My first grids were all rectangular boxes. And I struggle to even rememner what I was representing. There was a grey heavy morning weather. I meandering dog walk. A drive somewhere. Planting stuff. Probably time spent on the computer. [caption id="attachment_55958" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Monday Grid[/caption] The boxes broke on Monday. Most every one of these starts with a coffee symbol. The log dog walk is the first broken box. There are stretches of repetitive computer work, one open break for a video chat, more walks. Breaking into symbolism, there is a dog walk that includes a stop at my mailbox where I got a check ($). The last 2 rows go more into the shape of time- it represents while waiting to upload by photos to flickr, I zonked out on the couch around 10pm... and woke disoriented at 1:30am. [caption id="attachment_55959" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Tuesday Grid[/caption] Again, the day starts with coffee and dog walk. The big half block represents the time spent at the Ford dealer getting my truck serviced (not sure if there is relief in the bill being only $550). There is getting Felix's dog tag, a happy dog tail (for meeting people), a piece of pie at lunch, and a nice drive home where I got to talk to my friend Kevin on the phone (I did not symbolize the dropped connections between Payson and Pine). I also did nto symbolize at the gas station when Felix (the dog) jumped out of the door as I was getting out. There should be bolts of panic in a time span of 20 seconds. The bottom left is pretty much a map of our long walk up a steep hill street (Ralls Drive). And the rest is the miscellaneous stuff that seems to fill evenings on the computer. [caption id="attachment_55960" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Wednesday Grid[/caption] Again, start with coffee and dog walk. There is a lot of repetitive copy/paste work on a prototype (which is pretty cool, but there is a bit of manual grunt work under the hood). Some good video calls and more coding. Then the big topographic looking blob is an approximation of the drive Felix and I did from Strawberry to Cottonwood to visit with my friend Todd before he left for a new job in Washington State. I returned home, did a bit more repetitive work... and... I was laying down on the floor in front of the heater, and felt something like a small bit, and was freaked out to find a black spider inside my t-shirt. This is followed by a bit of disorder as I look up and tweet about black spiders, figure out it was NOT a black widow... [caption id="attachment_55961" align="aligncenter" width="630"] (Felix's) Thursday Grid[/caption] Just to mix it up and experiment again, I did Thursday's grid as a representation of my dog's day (as I saw it). Apparently, dogs have no bounding grids! We wakes up from a slumber, has a big bowl of dry crunchy food, and goes on a long walk full of loud smells and wonders. Then he lounges most of the day, either out on the deck in the sun, or on the couch. There is play time with a ball, a tiny neighbor dog named "Bella" bones, Kongs, and more walks and more giant bowls of food. And of course, Nick had a drawn reference... https://twitter.com/Nsousanis/status/720988845513125888 I probably should have done one more, but... choose my own assignment? Nothing here was done as a means of trying to draw something. I found the daily practice of thinking through the day before to be valuable, as the challenge of trying to represent the shape of time and activities without depicting them (I failed often). Thanks for triggering a great activity Nick. For anyone out there, it's worth noting how active Nick was in acknowledging and giving feedback to people who participated in Grids and Gestures. And because this is not locked up inside some xMOOC, you can still do it at any time - there's a lot of examples to draw from. Top / Featured Image: An image from the post would have done fine, but I wanted something less literal. I was nicely surprised by how many flickr photos I had with the word "grid" in them, many would have done. The one I chose a flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/8121357840 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license worked on may layers (get it?), the grids are superimposed, but askance, the indiscriminate other objects, including a leaf. This was taken at the Oil Museum of Canada (in southwest Ontario) looking into a shaft of some form filled with water. Here is Proof! I Created YouTube by cogdogblog posted 14 Nov '08, 8.13am MST PST on flickr The heck with the flimsy claim of Herbert Elwood Gilliland III who says he was the fourth You Tube inventor -- I have videotape proof of me sketching out the concept in 1979 (it is the second part of the tape where I outlined the core functionality of the web). Someone has to pay. I will accept my due share of $1 million paid in small biscuits. Created with Videotape Generator- make your own! says-it.com/videotape/ I baked banana bread tonight; I am eating warm slice of it right now. Big deal, eh? A year ago I could not say this. One day I saw again the pile of brown bananas I had let linger on the counter too long. In a surprise move, I googled "banana bread recipe". There's only 3,000,000 results. My rough rule for trying new recipes is choosing one with the smallest list of ingredients and the fewest steps. Joy's Easy Banana Bread recipe fit the bill, and it worked. The question with recipes, and quick solutions in general, to me is, "Is this a bounding box or a starting point?" As I iterate with recipes, I end up annotating them: [caption id="attachment_64469" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Marked up recipe[/caption] First of all, being diabetic, I replace the 1 cup of sugar with Stevia; but the ratio is 3:1, so it's marked as 1/3 cup Stevia. Joy put 1 egg on the ingredients, but I like mine moist, so I tried 2, and that's my regular approach now. Maybe I'll bump to 3 soon. Joy called for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, but the first time I made it the only baking soda was a box of unknown vintage in the fridge. But several reviewers of Joy's Easy Banana Bread suggest using baking powder over soad, and that I had. Boom, augment that recipe. Finally, all on my own I started adding crushed walnuts to the mix. That recipe is pretty marked up. I prefer to use the same approach in all my work. Don't take recipes for rigid rules. If you want to discuss this more, come on over. I have a few slices of banana bread left over. And it's goooooood. Featured image: The banana bread I made tonight from my annotated recipe- From Three Mushy Bananas.. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Published tonight on medium.com - am still finding my way around the writing space. I find it makes me actually go over my words like 4 or 5 times rather than my typo-ridden blurt here. But anyhow, the real truth behind the origin of the Internet I am a Smart-Ass (the Internet was built for me) I could have just as well written it here. And I just was about to publish and was looking at what I had blogged here-- I kind of grumble at some people who write in one place with just a link elsewhere. This was a post idea that literally came to me in the shower, though I am pretty sure I've written parts of this in some aspect here. But it is one of those cases where most of the blogging takes place away from the blog-- in my head. There is always more than works itself as I write, and things are moved, chopped, added. But the thought out ones are fun to work with. The addition tonight was thinking about all of those writing projects I did in Middle and High School, and how my teachers really ate up the ones where I took an existing story and mockified it. I actually still have many of my school reports and papers. Again, my Mom's presence because she had them all in a box in her garage. So I knew I still had a copy of my rip on the King Arthur story as The Legend of King Archive and the Drivers of the Round Lot That was a dangerous potential rat hole as I opened the box in my closet with these memory papers. Not for ant sadness, just that I knew I could lose myself in poking through the old stuff. But yeah, take a smart-ass kid raised on network TV and MAD magazine, toss him into the internet, and he finds his place in the universe mocking up old movie posters and radio shows in ds106. Trippy. As best I can find from old posts, I started messing around with making a WordPress theme to provide a functionality of the ds106 Assignment Bank in July of 2013. So while lumped in as a SPLOT, it was actually pre-SPLOT. Like anyone cares. But it's really one of my favorites to use in projects with the biggest example being the UDG Agora Challenge Bank. It's a bit more complex to set up, but I have been amazed with for example, the use of it at UBC Open Learning Challenges. One place that has taken a liking to the bank is Middlebury College, so when a DM came from Amy Collier asking a question how to tweak something, I as eager to make changes. I may be spoiling a debut, but see what her team has started with the Teaching & Learning Knowledge Base: A bank of teaching ideas from Middlebury College, built on the ds106 Bank theme. As usual, when others use one of my themes, they help highlight use cases and situations I had not anticipated. Amy's timing was good, as I had a few windows of attention before the OE Global 2020 conference last week consumed me. The first one was a bit easier. Amy asked about the wording below a "Thing". The generic name (internally called a "Thing") for what in the original was an "Assignment" but can be recast in the theme options as a "Challenge" or "Make". For her new site, it does not really work as the "thing" is a "Teaching Idea". It is awkward to say "Complete this Teaching Idea": Since everything submitted is called a "response" it was easy to update the template for this section with a verb of "respond" in place of "complete": Respond to This After you respond to this please share a link to it and a description so it can be added to the ones listed below. Now it reads a little bit better: I was able to send Amy a link to a revised version of a single template in the theme that she could download and replace on her site (the change is around line 167). Ah, but then another request: May I request help with one additional Assignment Bank change? Currently, when someone tries to submit a Teaching Idea, there is a required field for them to add a URL for the idea. While sometimes useful, there may not always be an associated URL for the teaching idea. Is there any way to change that required field to optional within the code? If so, how might I do that? This was the part of the submission form Amy was asking about: You see. this had some of my own bias built in. It happens. I always felt for ds106 or anything where you are putting up something you are asking others to do (be it an assignment, a creative activity), I believe you should do one yourself (or find one) as an example. That's the way to not only provide an example, but really testing out your instructions. But that's my own preference. And maybe that does not need to be required for a teaching idea. This one took a little more than a single template change (it was three). The fix I took was to allow entry of "n/a" in the field where it asked for a web address: This means that error checking on this field tests if the entry is a valid URL or the string "n/a". And when it's time to display an example, it skips this spot of there is no example. It's hardly ground-breaking code work here, but I am happy when I can make some small adjustments to my themes that not only make it better for one site, but in the end, others. There are about 23 examples of this theme in action-- by no means massive, but at least it seem useful for maybe 20 other people. And all it points back to the legacy of the original DS106 Assignment Bank the idea that was launched in a Skype call in December 2010 and put into play shortly after so cleverly by Martha Burtis in the first open DS106 (there's a spiraling post on this tale). This is still running and working now 10 years later. Checking the stats baked into the front page, in this bank "As of Nov 24, 2020 this collection includes 993 ds106 assignments and 17175 examples created from them."http://assignments.ds106.us/ I remain inspired by this basic concept I returned after a long while to add one more assignment. Because I can. Because you can. And this is the reason why I wanted to try back in 2013 to make a generalized version of this site as a theme that others could use. And here in 2020? The concept seems as viable as ever. The Bank is solid. But it can use a few bricks patched up every now and then. Feature Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/10814919444 Bank On It flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Harvard Law prof Jonathan Zittrain deals with big scary issues, like encroachment of first amendment rights online and the invasions of privacy from bad software. His recent book paints a possible dark future for the internet. So it was a wonderful surprise when on last week's plane travel I watched his TED Talk on The Web as random acts of kindness Zittrain here gives a brilliant, upbeat talk, and actually explains how the internet works (no tubes) - as he does so by comparing the movement of packets to how a beer gets passed down the row to someone at the ball game. More than that, the picture he paints that the mechanisms and bits that make the whole machine hum along, the vehicle that propels Wikipedia, has to do with a small number of people volunteering to do collective acts of good deeds, kind of Amazing Story like things The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust. I see them all the time, and often barely take notice (maybe because I am used to them). Just today, I got an email from Doug Gilford, letting me know that he changed the URLs of a blog post I had written... back in 2005. Oh yes, some of it is in his own interest, as the links lead to his on site, but he sat down and wrote a personal email. SO as a thanks, I will give a shout out here for Doug's AMAZING site- the complete archive of MAD magazine covers http://www.madcoversite.com/. To me, it is these single person niche web sites-- brimming with passion for a specific topic -- that are the positive outcomes of what the "millions of disinterested acts of kindness" enables. Long live the odd, strange, dedicated, amazing web sites that are out there, more than anyone can count or know. Gawd, no I am getting teary eyed. Podcasting has been an interesting phenomena to observe. It really did not exist a year ago, and has been riding like a bullet up the technology charts, most recently fueled by inclusion of its features in Apple's iTunes. It's all good. I've been trying to sample more from a variety of sources, mostly on my idle time of bicycle commuting or running. I'm hard pressed to say if I would really devote the time to them other wise. The best for my interests has been far the offerings of ITConversations, mainly due to the quality of the productions, but more so, the quality of the personalities I can choose to listen to. What I do not buy is the "subscription" model because I cannot say I have found a source I would want to listen to most of the content most of the time. I do not do that with radio I listen to, web sites I visit, the few TV shows I watch-- I am not a fan of any one channel. I The problem with the podcast "model" is that the content provider is claiming they know what I want to listen to (or assuming I am a rabid fan). Fortunately, there is some interesting tinkering going on that gets around this publisher chooses mentality, where individuals are able to select file sources and rip-mix-cast their own audiocasts. For the howtos, see "Use Del.icio.us to create customised podcas"t. The approach involves first setting up your own unique del.icio.us tag. As you come across MP3 URLs, either favorites found elsewhere or your own casts, you bookmark them with this delicious tag. Then, you can take that RSS feed provided by del.ico.us for your tagset, and run it through Feedburner which will then feed it with proper RSS enclosures as a genuine podcast. And at a minimum, the URL for your delicious tagset becomes a menu selection for those that just want to pick and choose MP3s rather than subscribe. If you do start tagging the feed URLs this way, do the world a favor and write a brief description in the "extended" field so someone can have an idea what the cast is all about. As an examnple, see how Jon Udell delicious-izes his podcasts and his shorter sound bite segments. Each of these has its own RSS which could be Feedburned to be a podcast. So that is about dis-aggregating podcast feeds into new feeds. The other side of the coin is that one is stuck with the whole MP3 feed, start to finish, cheesy intro music to the one little 45 second bit you need 35 minutes and 20 seconds into a show. You cannot search, or easily scan. And you cannot easily link to that particular segment. Again, guru Jon Udell has shown that technically there is a method for linking to specific segments within an MP3, but this has yet to be exploited developed into a less geek friendly approach. But its more than just being able to link to specific audio targets. The aspect of a podcast (or really a web hosted mp3) is that it is a one way media transmission, which is like... so 2003, sooooooo Web 1.0. What would be interesting is if I could not only reference say specific sound targets in a stream, but I could use that to create something new with my own audio inserted annotations. So I could link to segments of say some podcast about Web 2.0 technologies, and rather than being limited to listening start to finish and perhaps remembering things I want to comment on and write up as a blog post-- I could pause the playback, bring up my own podcast recorder software that-does-not-exist, press "reference" segment so it includes a bookmark reference to the specific source, and then I can record my own remarks. This would be Web 2.0, this would be a way to build layers of content. This would be interesting. So be wary of content that comes in a one size for all approach. The mantra for digital content should be tools for disaggregation, mixing, adding, and republishing as something new. It's not even the Net Generation any more, it is the Tivo generation. Ask for it. Expect it. C'mon, podcasting is already 11 months old.... ancient.... Update: Thanks to a tip from Tim Lauer, it appears that del.icio.us can do RSS enclosure feeds (and a whole lot more) without needing to run it through Feedburner -- see http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/06/casting_the_net.html.