Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
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) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by agiledogs I'm really getting the hang of setting up these FeedWordPress powered syndication sites- I wrote a few days ago about using this approach to create a twitter archive site for the ETMOOC site. At the same time, and more over the last few days, I have been tweaking the edges and putting into motion what should be a core of the site, the aggregation site for participants in the MOOC which starts next week. Alec Couros has that draw power! I heard well over 1000 people signed up; the ETMOOC Google+ Community is brimming with intros of educators from all levels and corners of the world. As a little bit of architecture, the main ETMOOC site (http://etmooc.org/) is running Wordpress multisite, using URLs for subsites, and I have rolled out the two extra sites, the Twitter Archive (http://etmooc.org/tweets/) and the Blog Hub (http://etmooc.org/hub). As of tonight, we are syndicating in 65 blogs and everything is humming nicely with 165 posts brought in: Check it out now at http://etmooc.org/hub. This post is more a run down of the Wordpress mods to organize the site; in a next post I will go over the process for getting blogs into the mix. (more…) I present a wee test for you, kind, gentle savvy reader. Have a run through these 10 random images, and see if you can guess the topic of this post (no scrolling, eh?) https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1090968062436753410 How did you do? When I tested it out myself, I was not sure I could pass my own guess test. Yes, this is a variant of maybe one of the favorite things I have built on the web, pechaflickr in a mode that was inspired by some feedback I got from a teacher named Heather (hence she gets credit in the tool). That alone might merit an Amazing Story. The site just runs on its own steam (it's hand rolled PHP + some duct taped jQuery libraries), I actually have not even peeked at it in a while. But every then and then, I get a notification that someone responded to the form where I ask people how the use pechaflickr (even that form was so old I had to update the intro and add a prettier background image). It makes my heart warm reading the responses. One example from an EdTech session leader I have used it at a variety of EdTechTeam Google for Education Summits around Alberta to wrap up and get the audience involved in the lunch and learn session I do with a variety of Ignite Talks.I use the different Ignite presenters to show how it can be used in school for topics/discussions and then wrap up with PechaFlickr to show how it can be used for ice breaker/improv/or just practicing thinking on your feet. @mrmacteach And from a 9th grade teacher I'm sharing this with my colleagues because some do full pecha kucha assignments and it's a great 'quick fire' kind of speaking activity. Some suggestions for improvement: for some reason it gets stopped by my building's filter, which I can open, but it makes it hard for students to use independently; maybe it's something in the site description or optimization? The only other thing would be to change the DIY look of the loading page into something cleaner or more professional but that's a salt-to-taste kind of thing. I'm not sure I can do much about filters. I expect some schools may block anything that mentions flickr (?). I think this person has a point about the first screens that loads as a bit of a taunt. They are randomly picked from a set of five (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), all images drawn from flickr cc licensed pool. I'll look at them again. Another commenter saw it at "Conference in Guam" and simply said, "I want to use it." A language teacher at a high school said: Hi, Thank you for creating this useful tool. I have used it in a few different ways. I teach Spanish and I am also the advisor for our Model UN club. In our MUN meetings, we use Pechaflckr to get kids comfortable speaking in front of a group. When they attend MUN conferences, kids need to be able to think on their feet, Pechaflickr is a fun way to get everyone talking. Today I used Pechaflickr in my AP Spanish classes. On the AP test, students have two speaking tasks, one is a simulated conversation where students need to participate in a conversation. They have 20 seconds to respond to each prompt. Pechaflickr helps them to learn to keep talking for the full 20 seconds. The other speaking task is a 2 minute cultural presentation. If we set Pechaflickr to 6 pictures, that gives each student 2 minutes. They had great fun choosing topics for each other in class today and trying to connect all of the random images that appear all while speaking Spanish! ¡¡Muchísimas gracias!! Another high school teacher shared Partners talked about each photo they saw for 6 minutes I never tire of reading the way language teachers develop ideas for using the pecha flickr improv in language activities, it has to be better then the scenario I remember of French highschool were we had to recite the conversation of ordering soup (Hey Monsieur Rivken, for some reason I still remember, "Quelle est la soupe du jour?"). And just as warming to hear from someone at an Elementary school you guys are perfect! Maybe not? And among the tweets mentioning pechaflickr, look at a nice plug from New Jersey (love the GIF). https://twitter.com/NJCTENews/status/1072495722422038528 And Brad Dale liked it as well. https://twitter.com/bradjdale/status/1069958282452840450 And of course, as previously mentioned, on her own, Nele Hirsch put on the web a German version. https://twitter.com/eBildungslabor/status/1069484380907810816 This is why, despite all kinds of wailing about the demise of the internet, the foulness of social media and what is or is not openness, I still love this place. Featured Image: Screenshot from my closing round of the topic of this post as a pechaflickr tag with the actual tag blurred out (have you figured it out yet?) Just because Gardner asked for it (and in fact it was recorded), here is a low quality, 80 minute MP3 from the session Brian Lamb and I did in Flagstaff on Social Software (or as we called it, Tag Cloud frenzy): http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/audio/nau06-keynote.mp3 [1:20:00 36.6 Mb MP3] So the sun is shining a bit brighter on my technical woes. Last weekend, my satellite internet connection at my cabin was back where it should be (800-1000 kbs download and 150-200 kbs upload), not exactly the DSL speed at home, but that's as good as Hughes gets. However, that's not to say their support phone line solved my problem. I keep nagging them about my terrible experience (almost 2 hours on hold waiting for escalated customer support), and their response by email (which again is a donotreply@hughes.com address, thanks a bunch) still contends that "my problem was solved with the steps provided by customer support" which is total bull turds since their "steps" where that I should call customer support! What kind of Orwellian logic is that? But my desire to pester them is dwindling... until the next time Fred in the Switch Department decides to Flick Off the Amplifier Beam for Arizona. Now there is the mystery of my dim screened MacBookPro. I had done everything Apple suggests to remedy, restarting, zapping PRAM, Resetting PMU. So did the dude in the store. So I get a call Thursday from "Brian the Tech" who reports the screen lights up after doing a PMU reset. WTF? I do have a rather strong feeling the fault lies in my hasty action while using Windows XP in the Bootcamp mode (actually I was in the middle of my Hughes satellite trouble making, when they insisted I go through this monkeying around with MSIE proxy settings (ignoring the fact that 24 hours earlier everything was honky dory with my connection with a good speed test in Firefox in OS X.... so it is their fault I was using XP!). I had to leave quickly, and without thinking that I was in that operating system, I simply closed the lid like I do in OS X to put it to sleep, but somehow in XP, I triggered a meltdown. My small clue is in a MacBook PMU manager utility for Windows under Bootcamp made by the lovely named Quacks Like a Duck Software: Since Apple has provided wonderful hardware to run Windows on, but provided less than wonderful drivers for said hardware, I've coded up this app that makes running Windows on your MacBookPro a bit more pleasant... * Resets the backlight to full on before the system enters suspend. * Restores the previous backlight value upon resume from suspend. * Requeries the backlight control device after resume from suspend. I a majorly guessing, but this utility suggests there are some issues of suspending Windows and the hardware of the backlight control. But that is beside the point, perhaps.... So now I have the other end of an experience I have had before when helping colleagues and office mates with their computer. I get a frantic call, like, "Alan, my computer won't do ______", I saunter up, and say, "Just click Open" or something benign like restarting, and the problem disappears, some sort of proximity effect of computer karma transference. And I have heard among the computer support, there is a special identification code to report for these scenarios of a customer code of 10T. Yup, that is a case ID number of 10T. One more time... ID10T That's me. So I'm back in business, after updating all the working files I had created on my older laptop. Well almost. I had a task to try on Windows, and I goot up, the dithery Windows flag passes by and I get... lsass.exe: Unable to Locate Component The application has failed to start because DNSAPI.dll was not found. Please re-install the software. Now that is terribly diagnostic! Clicking the OK box, leaves Windows on a blank screen. The only exit is pulling it from life support (yanking the power supply and battery). This lets me get back to my sane OS X system where I can do some googling. Some of the results insinuate it is a variant of some SASSER virus, hard to imagine since my Norton is up to date. But one obscure reference suggests I can copy the said missing DNSAPI.dll for somewhere else (not specific) to where it should be( /WINDOWS/system32/). So in OS X, I search my XP drive for this file, and find a few of them scattered about in arcane named Windows directories. The most likely candidate is sitting in WINDOWS/system32/dllcache, so I copy it to the higher level directory, cross my fingers, and boot into Windows. Ohmygosh, it actually worked! Time for a victory dance! Take that Windows! I feel a streak of good luck. And I have a post it note that says, "When finishing windows, Pray, Cross Fingers, and only Exit via the Start Menu" cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Ben Brown I've railed for many a year about the fetid scourge of blogs, rampant bombardment of irrelevant, unwanted garbage comments laden with nefarious links, all seeking to increase google rank. Can this be turning? Should I believe in the tooth fairy who says Google wants to only reward "sites with high quality content"? A recent article at The Awl suggests that The Golden Era Of Spam Comments Has Ended: The search engine optimization community has spent the last two years in a panic. SEO people flood our Internet with spam links and fake Twitter bots and paid traffic, to help bad websites look more popular than they are, to deliver fake viewers to web ads. They now spend their lives on the run, Google nipping at their heels. Their biggest project? Removing all the spam links on websites like this one"”the spam links that they put there. In early 2011, Google issued an update to its search algorithm"”they called it "Panda""”that elevated social media and news sites. Sites both big and small, usually spammy and sometimes not, saw major decline in their Google traffic. Companies like About and Mahalo and eHow cratered. Google said they wanted for "the 'good guys' making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded." In spring of 2012, Google moved on from Panda to Penguin, which further refined that goal, though still the updates sometimes had a negative effect on non-spam sites, cutting traffic to older and larger sites. But it was the Penguin 2.1, released in October, that sent spammers to the bitter edge; now they can't repent fast enough for their spammy sins. Panda? Penguin? (more info) Perhaps I have been wrong in suggesting Google is not going after the roaches that litter my blog with cruft like: [caption id="attachment_28624" align="alignnone" width="500"] 4 of 1800 spam comments caught by Akisment[/caption] Two weeks ago Akismet flipped of on this blog, and in less than 2 hours I had abut 300 comments that were no longer getting netted. The roaches keep pounding on the shores of long tail bloggers like me. And you. There is an entire industry of Search Engine Optimization consultants who proffer expertise in getting Your Company to be Top of the Search Results listing. Call me simple, but if your Daisy Sprocket Widget Company wants to be the best, maybe they should provide good merchandise, customer support, and present their wares in a way that attracts customers. Satisfied customers link back, word gets out, and your brand name gets more recognized in online space. But no, they hire Sammy SEO Sleaze to play games with keywords, and hire underpaid workers in third word countries to spend time lobbing your URL into the comment blogs of knitters, musicians, students, non-profit organizations. So what Google for years did was award sites with search results based on just the quantity of inbound links. That;s what gives us the present situation. But newer search algorithm between rolled out inside the secret Google Garden might actually be punishing sites that have low quality meaningless inbound link, causing panic because SEO expertise is now worth as much as used toilet paper when their clients drop far off the front page of results. And so this is a phenomena with said SEO experts are now writing sites like the Awl asking them to actually remove the comment spam their practices (or someone in their quote unquote industry) generated: So the black hat spam folks who spread these links across the Internet have reversed course. The Awl, and other websites like it, receive email after email each day from companies requesting that we help them clean up their presence in the comments, deleting links posted by fake accounts, the log-in information for which has long been lost or never recorded. This isn't only happening in The Awl's inboxes, either. "The funny thing is, we don't actually want that spam lurking around in old comments," Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza wrote to me in an email. "But we obviously like seeing the spammers suffering as a result of their own misbehavior." "So we just leave it up," he wrote, "even though we don't want it, in the hope that Google may penalize them further." It makes me wonder if I should turn of Akismet and let the crap spam stick. Nah. It clogs up the database. I flush Akismet maybe once a among of anywhere from 2000-5000 spam comments it caught. In the old days it was obvious links for porn, pills, and casinos. But now you get stuff like: I like the helpful information you provide on your articles. I will bookmark your weblog and test again right here frequently. I'm slightly sure I will be told many new stuff proper right here! Best of luck for the next! I do not know if it's just me or if everybody else encountering problems with your blog. It appears as though some of the written text in your content are running off the screen. Can someone else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them too? This could be a issue with my web browser because I've had this happen before. Many thanks It is so general, but it sounds like a person wrote it. I can smell these a mile away. The ones I don't see, that land in Akismet, are stunning in their verbosity, and represent many languages. For fun, I lift the whacky out of context lines and tweet them out via @spamstories https://twitter.com/spamstories/status/415900485002854400 https://twitter.com/spamstories/status/405595955497402368 https://twitter.com/spamstories/status/374976195546595329 One day I hope to create a site that uses these somehow for doing random storytelling. Do not expect blog spam to go away anytime soon. It's going to take years for people to realize that they might not only be ineffective, but also harmful to the supposed gains in search results. But there is some sweet irony in even the idea that the very act that spammers used for gain might now be biting them in the roach butt. At least I like to imagine that is happening. Frankly the whole idea of crafting your online communications and playing tweaking games to get a better search result are just... repulsive. But I was curious about the many tools of the trade, so I dropped my blog domain into ahrefs, a backlinks reference tool. According to their results, they found 96,000 links to this site from over 2000 domains, and my URL rank of 51 and Domain rank of 63 are "average"-- Not bad for a site that has not employed one single SEO strategy, game, or gimmick. Take your SEO and shove it. It's just poopy. [caption id="attachment_28626" align="alignnone" width="500"] Image from homecreationseveryday.wordpress.com[/caption] Perhaps it will never be used and / or no one really needs to know this technical minutiae, but I’m documenting as much as possible the work that will lead up to this Creative Commons Certificate. Yesterday I wrote up a bit of this duct taped system to collect via a Google Form resources as suggestions for the materials we will develop / provide, to organize in a Google spreadsheet, and then use some web code to create a browse / search / filter interface. Elsewhere I was trying out one of Martin Hawksey’s new tricks for his Twitter TAGS system that uses some tools to geolocate data in a spreadsheet and render it via a map using the Awesome Table Geocode add-on. In an email exchange where I had asked Martin a question, he suggested in response to my post on flipping tables that I look at the general Awesome Table tools as an alternative approach. It did not take too long to make a new sheet with the data I was using into the form Awesome Table needs (it needs on more row below the column titles to indicate the kind of filters and parameters to use. This is now in place on my test page for viewing the resources in the spreadsheet, and it’s already more awesome than what I had before. One plus is that the layout is more responsive than what I had before. But more importantly, the tools are more sophisticated to focus in on data by different filters and search. I can put copyright into the Resource field to show only items with “copyright” in the title: Now with only 10 rows of data, this may not be that impressive, but it would work the same if where there are hundreds of rows. But wait, there’s more. I can narrow in further with the drop down menu filters- these are from the form items that came from radio buttons and check boxes, so they can be used as limiters too- So if I narrow it in addition by items marked as specific to the Library Certification, I get one match. Again, this may not be the most exciting table for you since there are not many pieces of data, but when there is more, this should be useful when we are assigning them to different modules. Now if I could only get you excited enough to add some more resources to the data. Will you? Awesome. Oh one more “awesome” thing about Awesome Tables – it gives you some stats on the usage of the table Awesome data on Awesome Table data. Too much Awesome? Featured image: flickr photo by Didriks https://flickr.com/photos/dinnerseries/7894656450 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license This is for @pumpkiny, trapped in an edupreneur conference full of MOOC hustlers... I could go for that, so who is going to be the 2000-teens version of Anita Bryant? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ld8DQkC6po "He's not a talking bird, he's a thinking bird. He thinks MOOC" Sorry, MOOC mocking helps me stay sane. While I revel in the joy of life changed with the introduction of my newish dog Felix, my calendar bittersweetly reminds me today is the day 23 years ago I put down my first dog, Dominoe. She too was adopted, though not via a shelter, but via co-workers of my friend and them apartment-mate, Kevin, who found a run away dalmatian. Last October was 30 years to the day on a mountain where I lost her and she found me, and taught me a lesson. Her story is my most viewed YouTube video, the basis for maybe my most popular storytelling thing, and also the namesake of my first internet domain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMp-Fl-sXrU During my round North America trip in 2011, I return to the scene of the story, than on it's 25th anniversary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVO98HWGLB0 And it was 30 years ago this summer Dominoe was my travel partner for my first long road trip adventure, driving from Baltimore to Arizona to start in August 1986 my Masters in Geology at Arizona State University. Technically, I did not start the trip until July 28, 1986, but close enough. I do have a hand written journal of the trip, down the east coast to visit family in Florida across Texas, a stop in Denton for a friend's wedding, and a monumental drop into the real Southwest west of Amarillo, Texas. It was she and I and all my possessions that would fit into a 1973 Ford Maverick. I can see in that photo things I still have and cherish, the guitar I took lessons on at age 15 and my Dad's old drafting table. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I'm cringing a bit reading my old hand written journal notes. I complain a lot about people camping in giant RVs (that's not changed). My selective memory erased this part, but it's there in the notes- Dominoe cried and whined a lot. Why don't I remember that? The car apparently stalled a lot and was hard to start, and thus made me worry. It was someone at a New Mexico campground who showed me how to flip the choke in the carburetor. I was of course nervous at age 23 of what all this life change meant. From August 5, 1986 in a Baton Rouge KOA campground (I have in my notes the odometer reading, 98699.0): Electrifying beyond adjectives. It is raining. Big deal you say? Maybe you are inside by the fireplace. Or in a recreational vehicle watching TV while you are "camping." Oh yeah, I'm a real camper, that is with a "c" not a "k." I'm inside my Timberline Eureka green tent with water flowing underneath and thunder in my ears. Oh this is survival, although safety in the car is less than 5 feet away. Oh yea, I am worried / frightened. I'd tell Dominoe "it's all right... I think" with the wind whipping and lightning flashing it is almost like the time in the Badlands when the old blue tent got demolished. My main concern is the water under the tent, it is starting to soak the floor down at one end. The other end where we are sitting is in the lee of a tree, so water is not running under our end. Dominoe is shaking, we had one really strong thunder clap when we both jumped. I cringe a little because my trip of camping was staying at highway side KOA campgrounds, my equipment was cheap and primitive, and my experience was pretty nil. We survived the rainy night in Baton Rouge fine, and made it to Phoenix safely. And had many more trips after that, California, Utah, Nevada, all the way to Mount St Helens. So long ago. I am writing now to the sounds of a dog happily focused on the chewing of a bone, oblivious of my warbling memories of a dog I had in my life 30 years ago. Thirty. The photo at the top was where Doninoe and I camped in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above Santa Fe. Yet again, another calendar reminder has be digging through old photos and journals. Looking for... who knows? Maybe just to try and imagine the space I was in so long ago, so not even remotely aware (thankfully) of everything to come. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I do know I cannot imagine not having that Dominoe in my life. This now would not be now at all. Top / Featured Image: my flickr photo of Dominoe https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/9354174619 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license With Brian's announcement that Gardner Campbell is visiting Vancouver this week (shucks, wish I could have extended the stay another week... or forever), I remain tickled at the shelf life of my silly graphic there-- and more so that Gardner even sometimes refers to himself as "Dr Glu". These were from a series of images I created for the so called "Fish Tacos" Beyond the Blog session Brian and did at EDUCAUSE ELI in 2006. Somehow we got on this train of doing a Science Fiction flavor (yes, we did wear foil hats for this presentation) and is really among the most favorite collaborations I have done-- we did the whole presentation via flickr along with some creepy sci fi music Brian fished out of the mysterious place he finds weird sounds (we had people coming in asking us to turn it off, so it was effective). I got on this idea of doing knock off of cheap paperback book covers, and mixing up the names of them or the authors to honor (we hoped) our colleagues, so see who you can identify in the set-- last year I had used VoiceThread to pull that flickr set into a show-- so drop by and leave some comments for the Good Dr. Glu. Travel safe, Dr Glu.... (Hey EduGlu Band-- he needs a theme song...) cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk We are big on hubs here at the hub of CogDogBlog. In fact, well, let's say I am writing something profound about networks and syndication, mainly because I am setting up and testing some blog syndication for Alec Couros's ETMOOC due to blast off in mid January. Like the work ds106, I am implementing FeedWordPress on the ETMOOC site. This will be running as its own blog on the multisite install, along with another separate one intended solely to archive tweets. Howdy, ETMOOC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isPr8O4g4Ls It was time to make the run to upping this WordPress site to the current version, 2.1, nicknamed "Ella". Hey, it is jazzy! There are promises of better code under the hood and some new features I've yet to really look much into. I'm pretty religious about following the upgrade instructions, backing up the static files, making a database dump, shutting off the plugins, downloading newer versions of the plugins, etc. But I also took the opportunity to do what I should have done when I move my site to Dreamhost, which is to use their "one-click" installs as it makes future updates, also one-click. But I was able to jump my previous install on board without too much sweat or cussing. First, I moved the entire directory, which includes not only wordpress but a few other piles of content, to a temp directory on my server-- this gets pretty easy using Fetch (perhaps the piece of Mac software I have used the longest, it is the champ) for my ftp -- I open a second connection to my server, so I can drag content form one directory to another pretty easily. Once my main directory was empty, I just cranked up the Dreamhost Control panel, and ran the one click install, telling it to use the MySQL database table that already existed (crossing my fingers it would not wipe it out). And it worked like a champ, just did the one click wordpress database upgrade, and my site was there... uh oh, it is old skool default template! How romantic! I thought about leaving it like that. But all I had to do next was to drag my theme directory from the holding pad to where it belongs. Woah, Neo! Dreamhost socked about 25 templates in the directory. Handy if you dont have one yet, but I slogged them to a different place, as I did not want them all loading up whent I go to edit my theme. Next, I uploaded newer versions of my plugins, and started re-activating them. Rather than one by one, I try 'em all and hope for good fortune. And it seemed to be all kosher! Only test now is that Twitter plugin I spoke of earlier today, since that's not on the list. I've activated it, and this is a test of the CogDogBlog WordPress Twittering Operating System.... Beep! Nice features seen so far: Autosave as you draft. I've lost more than a few either due to human or wordpress error A Files manager not sure what it does, but seems to allow you better access to your files that are edited form within WP. Better Upload Form for composing in WP, having to always tell it not to use thumbnails everytime was a pain, now it remembers my choice (I think) Sing, Ella! After a few years of little use, in the last few months I've been semi-casually posting photos to Instagram. My primary destination remains flickr (despite repeated rumors every year of its imminent death). At night I pick one or two from my iPhone flickr app, and use its sharing option to put into Instagram. I have also been adding the location I take the photo. Hopefully you do know that photos taken with your mobile phone embed the location you took it directly into the image. That information travels with the photo. Most of my photos, especially while home, are done with my DSLR. Therefore, I merely manually enter a general location (Instagram suggests place in my proximity), my little town of Strawberry, Arizona. But maybe 10% this year are ones taken with my iPhone, so Instagram suggests place names near that location. That's pretty handy. It's nice to have a little place name under your photo. I like to see where other people's photos are taken. Yesterday, out of mild boredom / curiosity, I was clicking all around the Instagram app; and was curious about the little icon with the geographic pin: [caption id="attachment_61476" align="aligncenter" width="354"] I wonder what this button does?[/caption] It opened a world map, with maybe 3 clusters representing my photos, and indicating that some 300 of my photos were geotagged. Kind of neat. I zoomed in on the southwest USA part of the map, into Arizona, into north central Arizona where there was a cluster of photos... until I zoomed in directly over the location of my home. Gulp. As a card carrying White American Male, I have few problems with creepy stalkers. If they are stalking me, well, they are really really bored. Still, for the last 12 years of sharing some 40,000+ photos in flickr, many of them around my home, I have made a diligent effort to not broadcast my exact location. Not because I am fearful, it just seems like a Good Practice to Do. So if I take a photo in my driveway, I blur/crop out any part of the photo with my physical address or license plate (well since I put COGDOG on my plate, that is kind of obvious, another story). And I remain totally happy that ever since Google Maps has been around, that even if you find my address, they wrongly locate the physical address 1/2 mile down the street. I do not plan on telling them this. Ha Ha Google, you so wrong. Finding out that Instagram was publishing a detailed location map of my house, got me looking for info, finding confirmation https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/779680337546711040 From The Daily Dot's How to delete Instagram's secret map of where you live: On Instagram, I'd kept my profile public, but I did use the location toggle to tag photos I snapped periodically. Little did I realize that enabling any geotagging features made my IRL hangouts totally public. From my home to my laundromat to the restaurants where I take lunch, you could pretty much figure out where I'd be on a given day by zooming into my photo map and looking for patterns. Pinpointing the exact location of my home was a piece of cake: It was the cluster with the most photos. Again unlike the author, I am not facing a dangerous situation, but this is that ounce of prevention stuff few people do not want to bother with. And on the iPhone, delving into the Location settings is like wandering through some byzantine attic full of piles of mystery boxes. Following the Daily Dot' advice, I turned off iOS Location Services for Instagram. [caption id="attachment_61477" align="aligncenter" width="354"] No location for YOU, Instagram.[/caption] and went through the steps to remove all of my geolocation data for photos posted in Instagram (which ranks near the bottom of intuitive interface design, there is no way I would have figured without the Daily Dot: The first time I tried to do this, I thought the tool was broken. It was that confusing. First, head into the tab with the map of your photos. Next, you'll want to select "Edit" in the upper right corner, and you'll see your photo counts change from blue to green on the map. Zoom out to select a cluster of photos if you need to, and click on the photo icon. Here's the confusing part: You'll be met with a grid of your photos from that location and only two buttons, "Select All" and "Deselect All." There's no wording about removing geotags or deleting location data at all. It's not obvious, but if you choose Deselect All > Done, you'll be met with a pop-up message confirming that you want to remove X number of geotags. Click confirm and your historical whereabouts will be wiped from the map. Phew. If I was into conspiracy theories, I would call this obfuscation by design. I am and I do. Now, my map is clean, and with Location Services turned off, it should remain that way. [caption id="attachment_61478" align="aligncenter" width="354"] Mapless on Instagram[/caption] Well, until I upload an Instagram image, and go to tell the world that this photo was not taken at my house by generically Strawberry, Arizona. They work every way possible to turn the Snoop on My Location button to Yes. I like having a map show where my photos were taken-- anywhere in the world but showing where my house is located. I could accomplish this by remembering to remove the geotagged info from every photo I upload that shows my home location. But that's asking a lot of my memory. And it's tricky. Even if I tell Instagram that my photo was taken in a general area of my town, if the image contains geolocation data, it will still accurately pinpoint my home although I feel like I am not doing so. This is Sneaky By Design. There are better ways. Do you remember me mentioning flickr, the social media site doomed to die almost every year since 2004? They have a "geo-fencing" feature where you can define an area on the map that flickr will not publicly show photos you have take from that area. It is not ironclad since the locations are still buried in your original photo's EXIF data, but that's a better approach than Instagram, IMHO. If you wanted ironclad, you can change your flickr settings to now show EXIF data (I am not sure if that blocks requests via the flickr API). When I go to a browser where I am not logged in, and look at my flickr account's map, There are no pink dots within the boundaries of the metropolis of Strawberry, that is where I drew my boundaries: [caption id="attachment_61480" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Public view of my flickr photo map; when I am logged in I see many more pink dots in town, many right on my house[/caption] It is far from easy to find in the flickr settings, which, you will recognize, still have the web design of flickr in 2008. But you can create your own flickr geofences via https://www.flickr.com/account/geo/privacy/. And when you define a fence, you can back fence your existing photos. When the feature was announced by flickr, it was done so in a way that (at least to me) showed how they were thinking about their service. The title was In the Privacy of our Homes: You probably know what geotagging is. It’s nerd-speak for putting your photos on a map. Flickr pioneered geotagging about five years ago, and our members have geotagged around 300 million photos and videos. We’ve always offered the same privacy settings for location data that we offer for commenting, tagging, and who can see your photos. You have default settings for your account, which are applied to all new uploads, and which you can override on a photo-by-photo basis. This works well for most metadata. I have a few photos that I don’t want people to comment on or add notes to, but for the most part, one setting fits all my needs. But geo is special. I often override my default geo privacy. Every time I upload a photo taken at my house, I mark it “Contacts only”. Same for my grandma’s house. And that dark place with the goats and candles? Sorry, it’s private. Managing geo privacy by hand is tedious and error prone. Geofences make it easier. While you are poking around your settings in Instagram, do yourself another favor. Remove your phone number. Why does Instagram need your phone number? Remember that they are owned by Facebook. You know about Facebook? If you ever want a chill down your spine, read how Facebook recommended that this psychiatrist’s patients friend each other. Facebook dearly wants your phone number. Dearly. Heed The Guardian's advice about the way Facebook Owned Whatsapp only gave users a month to prevent the app from squealing your phone number to Facebook Never let any app owned by Facebook have your phone number. And think about what it means if Instagram knows exactly where you go and when on a regular basis. And shares it with not just creepy guys in hooded coats. Top / Featured Images: I made this image from several elements. The base image found easily by searching on "stalker" is a flickr photo by @lattefarsan https://flickr.com/photos/lattefarsan/13062114715 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license. I found a lovely CC0 licensed photo in pexels of the profile of a woman taking a selfie, which I converted to black and white, masked out the background, resized, blurred, and superimposed on the image in the original (yes the legs are at a 90° angle, but you have to stop somewhere). I then superimposed some pngs of the Instagram logo and a wireless symbol (rotated and blurred). For a bonus prize, how the heck is this thing licensed? CC-BY-SA + CC0 = ? The CogDog will be doing a lot more running around for the time being. It is not just the zaniness of semester start up, but I am feeling the loss of a valuable part-time student programmer who has been with MCLI for 5 years. This reduces my technology staff from 1.5 to 1.0, and that 1.0 is... ahem, moi. Colen was the third student we have taken on here, and it was a given that he would move on at anytime. He has been the principle programming and database support behind the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), the online application and review system for our Learning Grants program, and some new online apps for our Faculty Professional Growth applications. Plus he handled the processing of our digital photos, the maintenance of a number of web sites, and he did the admin on a bunch of Linux test servers. And a lot of troubleshooting for the staff in our office. Colen was the third of student programming successes I have been lucky to find-- each time I have found a young students in our system who has strong, self-motivated interest in computers, not necessarily out of the box skills. Colen was here a few years to get to his level of expertise. The first student went out on his own and has a successful web business, surviving the dot-com blowout. The second student finished his ASU undergraduate degree and now is a full time web developer for a resort in California. I am proud that Colen has gotten a full time staff position (benefits!) at our neighbor, Arizona State University. this has been one of the expected outcomes when you develop young programmers, that they will move on to success, but oy! The pain of starting over. My director recognizes the need for a full staff position to do this work, and while we can make the budget for it, there is apparently a "freeze" on creating new positions within our District Office. So until then, I am scrambling to maintain web order, hoping to send a hook into the ocean and attract a part time programmer with strong web design (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) and desirably stronger PHP/mySQL, Linux/unix awareness... and who can develop in a MacOSX environment (the PCs here are for testing). Drop the emails, you have to physically work in our office. It means development of our openMLX is slowed, but not stopped (I am supposed to have a version ready for some projects by October). Via open artifact cam this link to MovableBlog's Integrating del.icio.us with PHP and Magpie describing a way to embed the output of your del.icio.us links in a web page. As always, there are many paths to the same destination. As frequent readers know, this can be achieved via the JavaScript approach using our Feed2JS service or standalone code. Of course there is a round trip delay for this as a PHP script must be called which then fetches a fresh feed from the source (or loads a cached one). Or maybe JavaScript is just too clumsy for your tastes, If you are on a PHP capable server, you can install Magie (which you need to do with the approach described via MovableBlog), but if you also use our PHP version of Feed2JS you can achieve the same effect. The advantage of our approach over the one described above is that it can be repeated quite easily just by creating new shorter series of include statements. For example, below I will use it with my del.ici.ous RSS feed, but 3 weeks ago I used a different set of parameters to the same code. Feed, Rinse, Repeat. (more…) Like a fragile flower, continually littered by link rot, the web is not helped at all when outfits like Storify just rip their content out of the web's fabric. Three years ago, for no real reason beyond the imagination in my head, I published a video featuring 35 web site skeletons dancing to the beat of that toe-tapping Queen song (a midi version). Storify, and maybe more need to get in the act. I tweeted a call out asking for suggestions as comments to the video https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/940623838810746880 So far, I got... Zero. I'm not impressed by Impression Data [caption id="attachment_65526" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The massive activity, all the data on my tweet, all of which produced no responses to me request. **** I forgot to say "please"[/caption] I gotta say, if I were designing a BloomDog's taxonomy for social media activity, the value of a "like" or a "retweet" would be some crumb way off to one corner of the pyramid. The Like/Retweet mentality produces a nano shot of endorphin with the illusion we have done something. The actual impact of this activity, especially if it is the limit of your online contributions, can be easily rounded down to Nada. Can I shame anyone into helping me? All I am looking for are once free web services that have been shuttered, mothballed, trashed. Just URLs. Is that too much to ask for? Here was the 2015 list, that even than, was paltry. Some of these came from the Island of Dead Toys in 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story, some came from some Wikipedia searching. Help me, Obi Web Kenobe, tell me more. Use the comment form below. Or tweet me. But for ****'s sake do something beyond liking or retweeting this post (which means I will end up now with zero likes/retweets). Some links still work, but usually not to the original content, often a redirect to the web axe that chopped it down. Anyhub anyhub.com AskJeeves ask.com Aviary aviary.com blo.gs blo.gs Clipmarks clipmarks.com Connotea connotea.org Fotopedia fotopedia.com Friendster friendster.com furl furl.com Geocities geocities.com Google Answers answers.google.com Google Buzz buzz.google.com Google Helpouts helpouts.google.com Google Lively Google Notebook notebook.google.com Google Reader reader.google.com Google Wave wave.google.com iGoogle Jaiku jaiku.com Jaycut jaycut.com Jumpcut jumpcut.com ma.gnolia ma.gnolia.com Orkut orkut.google.com Posterous posterous.com pownce pownce.com Qik qik.com simpy simpy.com SixDegrees sixdegrees.com Tabblo tablo.com Technorati (blog search) technorati.com Trovebox trovebox.com Twitpic twitpic.com Xtranormal xtranormal.com Yahoo Auctions auctions.yahoo.com Bring Out Your Dead Webs! Featured Image: Bring out your dead..... flickr photo by pmarkham shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license There shure is plenty of whooping it up out there in the riding pen, with all these folks coming in with all shiny intentions of doing Western106 with this outfit. Lots of that action is with the Daily Creates, where these riders are doing all kinds of tricks. Like that wild Groom Kid (“Jimmy The Groom”?) he takes a simple challenge and turns it into a full on rodeo horse show. That is a darn good thing. But here I am in the ranch office looking at what is built up and mebbe ready for this here course to start moving Monday, and it looks not much more than what was left after the fire in Tombstone Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Image But don’t be thinking I’m in here worried with my knees a knocking. I’ve run this route plenty of times, in different terrains. Lots of the folk coming in have done some or a lot of DS10 before. I’m a counting on them to help me with some ideas. You see I could go back to the map of the Open DS106 and put some Western flair on it. And I will leverage that as a general structure (much of what you see in the Syllabust is from that). And we are sticking to a schedule that parallels the one for the gang of students Paul The Bond is running from the UMW Ranch way out East. That makes for good timing. Paul’s got some other kind of self-building approach I’m not too sure I can figure out. And am not sure how that will play differently in an open course where not everyone is on the grade chuck wagon. Much of the structure, assignments, etc comes form the more usual ways of doin’ DS106 – two weeks of learnin’ stuff in camp, then riding out with visual (the photo safari), listenin’ to audio, some looking for design in the world, radio shows, etc. What will be new, ‘specially for yours truly, is interjecting exploration of the genre of Westerns. To me, I’d like to start pretty traditional, the cowboy US Westerns, John Ford, John Wayne, Lone Ranger, Bonanza, etc, and then move out to Spaghetti Westerns, outlaws, and ultintely probing issues of women and peoples of color in the westerns, and even to modern stories that are westerns. SO there will be some readings and maybe some videos to be a’ watching. I can handle some ideas (hint). Another ideer that has been swimming in my noggin, is maybe we do some collaboration to build out our own reference guide to the genre. I started out with posting to the sheriff’s office wall a document with categories and things under it. Heck it is open so any fool can scribble on it (I am Fool #1). But that document is already unwieldy. I had some wild thoughts to gettin; folks to work together with that github gizmo, but I could just as well set up a series of documents in a Google Drive box anyone can edit. Paul has done this thing asking his students to do blog posts where they cite “Best of DS106” work from others in their class. It’s a way to shine some light on what your pardners are doing out on the trail. In the first years we used the DS106 inspire for this, but I like how Paul has done it by having students do it as posts in their own blgos, with a tag. I also like the things Paul has done over the waves of air on DS106Radio with “tweet alongs” of radio shows. Maybe we could do some scheduled “watch alongs” with a movie each week. Ask everybody to start watching a movie at say Tuesday after dinner (and after them beans have died down). Or Maybe we can run a regular live radio show too to summarize what we are all doing. It would be fun to rustle up some guests. I dunno. That’s a lot of ideas. It ought to be not too much for open participants to do, cause they might just ride off into the sunset never to be seen blogging again. But mebbe you got some ideas? What would you like to see happen for a structure and level of activities for Western 106? Because, this ain’t no real job for the Man With No Course… Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons I’m as much a volunteer as any of y’all who signup, ‘cept I as fool enough to take on the lead task here. Ideas? Are there cowpersons named “Bueller”? Wow, another great WordPress characteristic-- publishing entries from ecto to WordPress seems almost instantaneous! Previously, clicking "Publish" to MovableType was a minute or more of grinding as MT had to not only put content in the database, but crank through and republish indexes, entry pages, category pages, etc. With WordPress is just goes into the database and you are done. I am loving it. Roll back your time clock to the mid 1990s and consider your reaction to this statement (lifted out of context from a comment about BitTorrent): Yesterday, it took me 2.5 hours to download a measly 39 megs. I remember being hesitant to download something as large as 5 Mb (even on the LAN at work), that used to be outrageously large. "Measly" 39 Mb indeed. What might be measly in 2010? flickr foto Office With a Viewavailable on my flickr This is where a spent most of the time during the holiday break in Strawberry Arizona. The cubicle next door has a hot tub. The odometer has rolled over 2006 and tomorrow marks the first day back at the office. Since I'm coming off a splendid restful time on break, and I've been getting to do more photo action than normal, the first blog sets will be via my flickr pile. So D'Arcy, at your request, this first one is for you, a shot of the hammock view at our place in Strawberry. The little mound in the distance is Strawberry Mountain. I wish I could say I made some reading progress on a pile of novels sitting on my nightstand, but most of my hammock activity involved noises like "zzzzzzzz". If I could get a job with this office view, I'd jump in a nano second. One day after arriving in Puerto Rico, they had me planning a workshop / talk for today. That Antonio Vantaggiato, he is one boss hombre, especially now I have deputized him as a Tombstone Marshall ;-) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Actually he is one of the kindest and most thoughtful people in our edtech field. It was he who brought me here in October to do the "Unspeakable" TEDx thing. As we discussed that visit, he offered me return visit for a longer working visit with the STEMmED project at the Universidad Sagrado del Corazón in San Juan, PR. That started Monday, after a red-eye flight from Phoenix. I'm here to help share ideas with his colleagues, co-teach his INF115 course (we got them started with a new Daily photo site last week, Una Foto Cada Dîa, help with Wordpress stuff, maybe spin off a SPLOT, and whatever else we dream up. Yesterday he asked if I could do a general open session for students, and two of them (Shayla and ??? yikes I forget names easily) sat with me yesterday to brainstorm some topics. Somehow we landed on "cool stuff" after I talked about the idea of using popular web media like memes and GIFs in an educational context. Around 2pm the brilliant Bernabe Beltran asked for a title as he was designing a flyer for the talk, and the title fell out "GIF, Memes, and Cool Web Stuff". In like an hour, he made the talk look rather elegant (well below my photo): The only thing left was to develop something to say. Last night I put together some ideas into one of my Wordpress as Presentation sites (HEY INTERNET, POWERPOINT IS FROM THE PREVIOUS CENTURY, when talking about the open web, do it on the open web -- http://show.cogdog.casa/cool/. Thinking about Cool, I started with how not cool I was in school. Yep, that is my 5th grade class photo, circa 1973, and you can easily see how uncool I was: [caption id="attachment_52871" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Can you find me in this class photo?[/caption] I gotta say front row, second kid from left was cool... yep, that's Daryl Sirota slipping a middle finger salute into the permanence of class photo. However what is cool is seeing the photo I posted on flickr from the town sign in Cool, California [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] ...get more views than the town population and that one of those decided to add the photo to Wikimedia Commons... someone I do not even know (thanks PDTillman!). Next, because I like to start a talk with the audience doing something (and it has a later tie-in), I had the group (maybe 15 students, Antonio, and fellow faculty and cool person, Doribel) do a round of pechaflickr. The tag chosen by one of the studens was "clown" - here is Javier himself talking about clown fear [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] You can try the same pechaflickr settings as we did, though your clown photos will be different (there are lots of bizarre clown photos out there, who would have guessed?). This group was very participatory. I had not done a complete count in the room (usually I choose enough for everyone to have a turn, so the last 5 I left it open for anyone to jump in-- no slide was left unspoken for. I like to talk afterwards about who was nervous, how the usual mode is to literally describe the pictures, but people like John go beyond and add something to the story not shown in the photos (for some reason he got a photo of a lake, and he talked about drowning clowns in the lake, okay morbid, but....). Next we went on to discuss meme images, which is nice, because I do not have to explain them, just show. Of course there are memes about memes: Interestingly while all of the students have seen them, only one or two admitted having made one. So I had them help me do one with imgflip: We talked about the "why" they are populat, of course funny, but one of them said what I hope they would-- that it evokes/expresses a vivid emotion. I postulated about possible uses of the basic capabilities of combining images and texts into messages for education that maybe were not "teaching" but could generate curiosity. The "funny" is the aim most people aim for, but what about just representing an important person in your field, with a message? Or using the same image to represent opposing or different perspectives n an issue? Or.... Next was on to The Mighty Animated GIF. I used as some possible use cases from the collection of Short Form Videos I assembled for the UDG Agora project -- to observe natural or man made processes, to show a path through a complex system in a shortened amount of time, to identify a passion of ours-- I love this Vine of Jabiz Raizdana showing his love of books in a 6 second loop https://vine.co/v/e5ll2VAlMEV I introduced the easy GIF maker tools like Giphy and imgur, but pointed out some of the shortfalls of quick and easy (large files with un-necessary repeated frames, limits on complex animation...) Very quickly following this was a promotion for the value of blogging... Several people have shared these stories about what Facebook is (here comes the scare quotes) "doing" about fake accounts.-- Facebook is testing a feature that alerts you if someone is impersonating your account (from mashaable.com) and Facebook is reportedly testing a tool for detecting profile imposters (The Verge)... and everyone else is re-reporting it-- Facebook’s testing a feature that alerts you if someone’s impersonating you (Naked Security). Facebook is working on a new tool to help stem one source of harassment on its platform. The social network is testing a new feature that will automatically alert you if it detects another user is impersonating your account by using your name and profile photo. When Facebook detects that another user may be impersonating you, it will send an alert notifying you about the profile. You'll then be prompted to identify if the profile in question is impersonating you by using your personal information, or if it belongs to someone else who is not impersonating you. Note that Facebook does not explain how "it detects that another user may be impersonating you". Though the notification process is automated, profiles that are flagged as impersonations are manually reviewed by Facebook's team. The feature, which the company began testing in November, is now live in about 75% of the world and Facebook plans to expand its availability in the near future, says Facebook's Head of Global Safety Antigone Davis. If the process is automated, that leads one to guess they are using their own facial recognition software. Gee if only I thought of that and like blogged it 9 times. But wait a minute. Antigone Davis. This is the first mention I have seen of a person inside of Facebook working on this. She seems to be on Facebook. Or is she?. She is on LinkedIn. This is interesting too, because the frame it more in the lens of harassment or "reputation smearing" -- the article suggests Facebook is aiming at women who are victimized by perpetrators making fake accounts of women... Note that "Facebook" never mentions catfishing scams, the ones I am roped into, where people create fake accounts using my photos to lure women into false romances, leading to asks for money. To them it's as if it does not exist. While impersonation isn't necessarily a widespread problem on Facebook, it is a source of harassment on the platform, despite the company's longstanding policy against it. (Impersonation also falls under the social network's names policy, which requires people to use an authentic name.) Hmm, "impersonation isn't necessarily a widespread problem on Facebook"? How does one quantify "not widespread" like in relation to likes of cat photos? It's not like I have documented thoroughly in ridiculous detail numerous impersonations over the last 6 months. But I am a small catfish bait compared to Alec Couros, who has not only blogged about it, but been on TV. Not widespread? Would you believe the FBI? from a 2014 FBI Internet Crime Report: That pie chart adds up to $86 million lost by victims of these scams and these are just the ones where they were impersonating military personnel. How the bleep is this not a widespread problem? It's impossible to quantify the extent because of the shroud of shame over victims, most of whom likely never report their victimization. Criminals search dating websites, chat rooms, and social media websites for personally identifiable information, and use well-rehearsed scripts to attract potential victims. The criminals present convincing scenarios involving family tragedies, severe life circumstances, and other hardships in an attempt to solicit money. Yes, one might say it's not just Facebook involved, but Alec and I have made 2x4 over the head clear how prevalent this is. Why am I not optimistic? Because if I get one of these magic notifications, and indicate an impersonation, what happens? Profiles that are flagged as impersonations are manually reviewed by Facebook's team Oh yes, the same teams / process that ignored reports for over two weeks of a fake account using my photos all the time claiming that it was in line with their community guidelines? The same team that never uses a name? The same process that is shrouded in mystery? How excited am I? Not even a good running dream... Top / Featured Image: Reused from a previous post, this is modified from flickr photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com https://flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/2403514661 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Today is Blogday, celebrating an effort to push some folks in the long tail of the blog a little bit up the curve. BlogDay was initiated with the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to know other bloggers, from other countries or areas of interests. In that day Bloggers will recommend about them to their Blog visitors. Okay, but since we are celebrating, let's sing! Happy Blog Day to You! Happy Blog Day to You! Happy Blog Day dear blogosphere! Happy Blog Day to You! Do I now owe any royalties to the copyright holder? Apparently not!. For my puny piece, I combed through my recently comments/trackbacks (yes, ones that have sifted through the spam protection) for these 5, before they posted comments, unknown blogs to me: Sum Musing Orla from Toronto is doing "Sum politics. Sum fun. Sum research. Sum more fun. Sum rants. Sum silliness. Sum seriousness. Sum statistics. Sum 'aha's. Sum thoughts."Help Us Get To BETT"Just a bunch of teachers trying to change the world"-- some Moodlers are aiming high to get to the British Educational Training and Technology (BETT) Show which apparently is one of the biggest educational technology conventions in the universe. Like good Moodlers, they are collaborative, open, and like knocking at the doors of the establishment.Rejon: The Jon Phillips Portal. Jon is "an open source developer, programmer, artist, designer, writer, educator, lecturer, and curator with 12+ years of experience creating communities and working in and around computing culture. He currently is working on teaching, freelance programming, consulting, and writing jobs to pay the bills prior to entering a PhD program in the near future." Check out his stuff as the utilities bill is pending ;-)Speechi Story a blog in both French and English "everything you wanted to know- and more- about Speechi"-- Speechi apparently is a software that does the Powerpoint to Flash dance.Cognitive Dissonance has a clever title referring to an academic term I need to look up. I'm having trouble trying to locate the links that has the two line "about statement", but looks people writing who are members of or interested in AECT (Association for Educational Communications and Technology) That's my five, how about yours? PS- Irony, for what its worth. The Blogday site is a wiki ;-) Some interesting and funny too comments came in to my mini exploration of twitter friends to followers ratio. And vavoom, todays inbox has about 6 more friends notifications; of them maybe one I know and added. But get this, for those want to push the ratio even higher, is TwitterAdder with a new record of 15.44! That is 1853 friends with a scant 120 followers. And what is the tweet action? Well, it is self promotion (no crime, but virtue?) for TwitterAdder.com: Have you ever wanted more friends on your Twitter account? Now you can. Just enter your Twitter login details below and we'll add 20 random friends to your account. which may explain recent rashes of friend requests from unknown origins. Call it TwitterFriendSpam? What is the desire to build up a huge list of "friends" (who are not really your friends)? C'mon, I bet some out there are pushing the volume past 20.0 friends to followers. Since August I've been working on an up to now unblogged WordPress as portfolio project with Colin Madland at Trinity Western University. Let's dash the "un". I remember hearing of electronic portfolios from my very get go in instructional technology in the 1990s. I remember getting to know Dr Helen Barrett who even then billed herself as the "grandmother of electronic portfolios" and she was early to the web with that electronicportfolios.org domain-- I think we met at a NECC conference (ISTE precursor in 1996). It's rather telling that we are still after ideal solutions; I admit my bias that the flexibility of a self curated blog site (better yet a self-owned domain) rather than an institution templated system, is the better way to go. So I was interested when Colin approached me in mid July with an ambitious project-- his university had committed to a stand alone server (Reclaim Hosting hosted, natch) for a multi-user WordPress site that in September, aka now, would be giving sites to 500+ incoming students, all to be used in a process of foundations classes to start building a TWU portfolio. After seeing it done on the OpenETC site, I suggested getting the NSCloner Pro plugin that provides a hook into the user/site registration process to offer a series of templated sites for new users to choose from. This way, rather than getting a vanilla Hello World site dressed in Twenty Seventeen theme, we could give students a start with a theme designed for portfolio artifacts, and also with some structure/starter content. My initial suggestion, which went awry was to suggest some of the WordPress portfolio themes (like Argent, Illustrator, Blask) that had built in features and used the JetPack plugin. That would save some work creating custom post types and archives, The problem I quickly stumbled into was that on a multisite WordPress, the TWU students would have to each activate the plugin, meaning the upsell laden path to WordPress.com, and in hindsight, a lot of extra cruft code for un-needed stuff. Oh, and for the portfolio custom content types JetPack provided, all items within a Portfolio are called "Projects" which does not match the TWU language of calling them what makes more sense-- artifacts. I did find a way to rename them, but I was already recognizing I needed to re-architect my approach. So the sleeves rolled up, and I began crafting a custom TWU Portfolio Helper plugin that creates a twu-portfolio content type, with items called Artifacts, and it's own category/tag taxonomy. [caption id="attachment_66731" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Custom post types for TWU Portfolio artifacts[/caption] I even got fancy and simplified the top "New" menu on the WordPress adminbar to have just relevant items, and also, putting Artifact first. The other thing we can do to help out Portfolio makers is a pre-made taxonomy, e.g. populate the artifact content types with categories that match the universities Student Learning Outcomes, and other relevant ways of categorizing portfolio content. The plugin also gives three shortcodes that can be used internally to display a count of artifacts, an index view of the portfolio, and one for display of portfolio items. The nice thing about the plugin approach is that a student can start with one of the 3 pre-made template sites, but are not restricted after that from choosing another theme. All of the plugin support, menus, taxonomies, and content go with the site. So quickly, here are the sample sites that are used as ones that are cloned: TWU Inspire Portfolio (theme source https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Inspire-Portfolio) TWU Hearts Portfolio (theme source https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Hearts-Portfolio) TWU Minds Portfolio (theme source https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Minds-Portfolio) The names came from the school's motto of "Inspiring Hearts and Minds"... The starter portfolios are set up with prompts that are aimed at getting the students to edit them. The front page of each using a static Page as the landing, which can be edited to provide a welcome, and a template that displays the most recent artifacts, for example, the TWU Inspire Theme. Each comes with the same starter menu, the first page is one meant for editing, an "About Page", e.g. from TWU Hearts https://create.twu.ca/portfolio-hearts/about/. Next on the menu, is a top link to the entire set of artifacts (e.g. from TWU Minds). Under this menu is a set of sub menus for all of the taxonomy items, for example, all artifacts one might associate with the first Foundations course. I used the portfolio shortcode I made to list out the entire taxonomy for artifacts as an index, and even got it to display the number artifacts within each, see the Portfolio Contents from TWU Hearts. And there is a place for a blog to exist within a portfolio (rather than the front page) if students are encouraged to reflect on their process. Because each of the parent themes offer some slightly different features for customizing, each of these themes has a support area to explain how to change the menus or use the customizer or add/change widgets. And we added a special admin menu to these three themes that provide helpful links to portfolio owners: If someone just activates one of these themes on a new or existing site, they will not get the full set up because the site is designed to work with a specific page on the front end; so there is some theme logic to test if the site is set up this way, if not, it prompts with instructions on how to do this: [caption id="attachment_66734" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Activating this theme on a new site without starting from a cloned version provides help on setting up.[/caption] And I also have some code in the mix that offers a warning to install/activate the TWU Portfolio Helper plugin if it is not present: For Colin as manager of the site, I looked for some tools to help him get some stats on the portfolio sites. I like the extra information provided by the Multisite Enhancements plugin, especially that it tells in the themes listing how many sites are using a theme. A little light bulb went off wondering if I could create a Network Admin widget; and to make it faster to develop, I was able to use the built in functions of Multisite Enhancements to give a listing that showed on the Network Admin Dashboard how many sites are using the three Portfolio Themes: [caption id="attachment_66736" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Some stats on the three portfolio themes[/caption] I am aiming to have a way to download the data as CSV, but am stuck in a code hole, so for now I have it set uo for Colin that it provides all the data in tab delimited format in a text area that he can copy/paste to a spreadsheet. I can see maybe an OPML export if he wanted to run a Feed WordPress syndication of all portfolio sites. But at 338 portfolio created, we are looking great! That's close to 60% of what we expect (I believe students are required to make sites by next week) And the server is still standing up. There's more to do here; I am suggesting maybe a fourth theme that I am in the middle of making. With the artifact display shortcode, the same structure could easily be built in any WordPress theme. It's been a fast development track, and I appreciate Colin and TWU giving me the opportunity to roll this out. If you're looking for this kind of approach, I'm looking for new projects. You know where to find me! Featured Image: Pixabay image by MikesPhotos shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 Here is an interesting use of RSS-- Pheed.com or Syndicated Photography Feeds aims to promote the use of RSS to describe collections of photos. Pheed.com is a database of information about photographs available on the web. We present the work of photographers who have made information about their images available as an RSS feed. RSS is a simple document format based on XML that is used to syndicate web-based content. A pheed is simply an rss feed that has been extended to include information about photographs; a photo feed. The Pheed RSs extension adds to the RSS 2.0 spec two custom elements: photo:thumbnail and photo:imgsrc for the URLs of a thumnail image (max dimension 120 pixels) and the image itself. Along with it are Dublin Core extensions for attributes of creator, rights, photo location, format, and subject keywords. The Pheed.com site aims to provide a search interface to "Pheed" Feeds, for now it looks like a manual process to create as no tools can automatically generate these feeds. This would be a very cool feature for FotoLog to implement. flickr foto Pass the Suflur, Pleaseavailable on my flickr Most folks who have been to the Vancouver waterfront have likely marveled at this yellow mound- a ferry ride, a lot of pixels, and some cropping got me a nice closeup. I have dinkered away a bit more time than I would have preferred to set up this "blog from flickr to MT", but that is what happens why you start pawing around with new toys. It is a matter of clicking the "Blog This" icon from flickr: Anyhow, I had to do a bit of munging to the style flickr uses to create a post, and especially take out the CSS it inserts into the entry (instead putting it in my style sheet), modifying the styles to my liking. That gets really messy when you have MT's default to convert everything to HTML! Then I had to do some subsituting in the template on the flickr site, using their own template tags to insert my flickr-composed caption on the right of this image, and then put this text (which I am writing on the flickr site- screen shot pleeeze!). full size Composing an MT entry within flickr! The only thing I cannot seem to do is to assign MT categories or keywords (the latter I use to generate the full entry URL). Oh well, there is post-production in lots of things. There was no reason for this besides an opportunity to go over the top Watch live video from ds106tv on Justin.tv (Consider yourself fortunate if you do NOT get the mustard ad.....) Some Jim had to annihilate his network, I could not help but obey the force of mockery and go out and TNT some ds106 blogs. Of course, not one bit is meant to be taken seriously. Except for the honest praise about CogDogBlog. I realized I missed by oen blogBirthday- April 19 marked the 8th year of barking and playing. So be warned, ignore your blog, and it might go kaboom. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8rYotiiFP8 I can count on one paw the number of articles I've read on Slate. I am definitely thinking this rag is worth it best virtual fish wrapping, and mostly is a waste of web code and server electricity. They are not alone, but lobbing the criticisms at Twitter like in What Are You Doing? The allure of Twitter, the latest Web sensation are as simplistic and thoughtful as catching fish in a barrel with a shotgun. Of course you can dismiss its potential by culling off the easy to find fluff tweets like "listening to Curious George in the background while drinking terroir coffee whose headquarters happen to be 5 minutes away" and "Just recovered from a night of playing WoW." Yep, that is enough dedicated journalism and thoughtful research. Yep. You could just as easily condemn all journalism but reviewing the best articles from The National Enquirer. You could prove all of Hollywood has no value by a careful review of Happy Gilmore films. You could dismiss all of television by snipping lines from "Entertainment Tonight". That Slate is paper thin in its transparency: Twitter is also a Web 2.0 sensation that's hyped on all the blogs, which means it's a motley free-for-all environment Oh, boldly stated! So many people would not be devoting time here if there were not value for a good chunk of them. How can that be dismissed in such uber cool hip, look down my Slatey nose at you Twitter losers? What about libraries syndicating RSS updates (which via Twitter can reach mobile phones...) or how people can connect and be in touch in a natural disaster or ways twitter is used for productivity or how student teams from 5 schools around the world use it to update each other on their project or the way someone is using twitter to monitor a server or Andy Carvin's ideas on how twitter might save lives??????? I find it disturbing and worrisome that people, educated ones at that, would so quickly jump to dismiss the potential of a technology based on the easily targeted shallow uses of the content one most easily finds there. Do I kiss off the potential of the transistors and microchips in my TV because of the sap of The Donald and wannabes on the Apprentice? And the mag rag hardly earned any more favor with their wafer thin "analysis" of the NBA playoffs, dissing my home town Suns: Historical context: In 39 years of existence, the Suns have never won a title, but the people of Phoenix did throw them a 300,000-person strong "good effort" parade after they lost to the Bulls in the 1993 Finals. Aww, Phoenix, the Special Olympics of cities. Slate, Shmate. Oh, and I can easily dismiss their entire web presence based on the experience of following a discuss link: I've seen better writing inside the stalls of public restrooms. Plaffffff. Nevahhh to return. You gotta tweet what you ask for. I believe I am mixing my metaphors, or just babbling at the end of a full weekend, in denial of the looming Monday ahead. That's what makes it nice to have something novel to play with. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've known Jared Bendis since the 2003 NMC Summer Conference, when I was just an attendee, and he's a super creative guy who just does not fit in any box (like his side line of Silly Services). He's presented at just about every NMC Five Minutes of Fame and always does something extraordinary presenting at our online conferences, one of the few people I know who can pull off doing a one (or zero) slide presentation. I keep digressing. I've been seeing Jared's tweet's over last few weeks about his first iPhone/iPad apps going through the AppleStore review. I chirped in tonight asking what his app was, and knowing it was by Jared, I would have bought it anyhow (I made a reference to helping him get rich), but he quickly offered a comped version of his iPad app, "in exchange for blogging about it." Cool. About 30 minutes later he asked if I tried it. So I better get to it, eh? So I got an app that I did not know what it did, I did not get any instructions, but found myself a few minutes ago launching the Five Minute Masterpiece app. I'd call it a paint on a canvas app- you get a choice of colors from a palette, and you touch to paint on the screen, and it gives a paint-like texture to each touch, not always the same exact color, like dabbling with a blob of paint on your finger. With some experimentation, you can fill areas solid, swipe and smooth others. Just out of the blur I tried to see in my mind a bridge I photographed today: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog and in about 4 minutes had dabbled this version: Okay, it is an interpretation. What we are working with is trying to create in the scope of a limited range of tools. It kind of reminded me of one of my early Shockwave apps in the 1990s, Ruby's Art Pad (it still works! umm in a browser other than Chrome..). Jared has a random mode, which splotches out dots on the screen. I stopped it, and used it as a background, painting a flower type thing over the background. You can set the current drawing to play back, a full instant replay of how the thing was created. That would be interesting to see how someone who really knew how to paint did their work. And just because I had a few more minutes, I did one in honor of tonight's last eposiode of Lost (I don't have TV so am waiting 2 days so I can get it on iTunes. Do not spoil it!), seing if I could write any text (barely). Having no idea what it takes to even build an iApp, I still have to give Jared a huge pile of credit for making one, something I doubt I ever will. Since he is still working on it, if I were to be able to request features. give feedback: Make an option to mute the sounds. They are fun at first, but the SPLORTCH sound every time you pick a colot gets old. Maybe make an option to vary the size of the paint blobs? The "?" button dod not work to shuffle the colors. Maybe offer a feature to select from a list of frame types for the saved picture. Maybe offer a feature to add a caption of explanation to a saved picture. Give it a try- look for the Five Minute Masterpiece in the AppleStore or look for it on the Lemming Labs web site (if you know Jared, you might have guessed that is one of his URLs! Thanks for sliding me a copy to play with, Jared. Hmmm, Five minutes... might this be your Five Minutes of Fame preso at the NMC conference in June? The sound calendar flipping comes with it the rounds of The People That Still Blog writing their summaries of the flipped year and/or the hopes/promises of the year being flipped to. Without resorting to anyone but myself for analytics, I can link to 170 blog posts for 2018 (14.2 per month, and that 0.2 of a post is a beauty). There it is, my review. Stuff I did, made, complained about, projects, blah blah blah. I mock myself. My blog is my humble safe home amongst a web of increasing pollution and abandoned storefronts. I regularly lean on my own writing to connect new ideas, to grab old ones. I now have 16 years worth of stuff. But the way I prefer to see my year is in my annual review/cleanup of the daily photos I have posted to flickr, aiming for one a day since D'Arcy Norman inspired me in 2008. It's rare I get a perfect 365, that is not the goal at all. Towards the end of December I look at my album, and this year I saw I was about 30 images short of 365. So then I have a process of going back through, and finding ones I forgot to put in the album, or days I just was sloppy with organizing. In about 3 hours of sorting, I got it filled out to 355, meaning 10 days I just did not take any, so my 2018/365 flickr album is as full as it will get. What I did not realize, or likely just forgot, is that this process itself triggers a fantastic window into the year at a more human pace and scale than blog posts. Because it's through the camera I see the world, and in turn, I see what/where/who was in it. Enough of that, here is the 2018 in 355 photos in one video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u8m5RoUQyo So it has been a rather big year of life changes- and everything in it pales to getting married June 1 to Cori (a flickr album for that) and moving from Arizona to Saskatchewan, settling into a new home, and working through the thousands of steps to get me status here sorted out. I'll let the photos talk, it has everything in it. Among the many things Cori and I share it's our mutual love of photos, invariably the paired ones we take of each other looking through our cameras. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/226 I Love This Woman! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] I could go on about work and projects and SPLOTs (yes, you do want more blog posts about SPLOTs, right?). Actually a post is due on work stuff for 2018 because I sure need more work for 2019. But that's another post, this one is about what was in the camera view. This daily photo thing is something I just have to do. Discarding ideas of 10,000 hours magically meaning anything, a regular practice of creativity, not just photos, but crafts, music, writing, heck even meditation, really has hit the magic spot when it bothers you to not be doing it. This photo habit works at different levels; I remind myself several times a day to stop what I'm doing and look around for posible photos. It means walks to the post office or with the dog are not just tasks, but opportunities to seek light, shadow, funny signs, and also just let the mind wander. And there are layers of reflection I find useful. Then there is the evening round of pruning photos, editing, writing titles and captions, and settling on a reason to pick One as the Photo of the Day. Maybe it's the most visually eye catching one, or maybe it's one for meaning of what happened. And then end of the year, another time to see them all at a different scale. And while the blog provides a copious amount of filling in where my memory fails, it's often my photos I count on, the captions, locations, etc, to pinpoint moments in my life. And with 11 years of daily coverage, it's a rather detailed, comprehensive credit. It's my outsourced memory. This is why it's not much a decision of me to pony up again for my flickr pro membership, because the platform is not just an archive, it's my lived memory. There are so many ways it serves my needs, that no other option can match it. There is no barrier of entry into this process, you get to pick how you go about it. We have a flickr group for 2019/365 Photos (I change the name each year, it's the same group) now in it's 12th year, with over 1700 members, who have shared over 266,000 photos over the year. No one makes rules, policies, and for the most part, not many people even say much in the group discussion area. I love this so loose an idea of community you can question if it is one (don't question, it is). Lastly, some nuts and bolts on that video. I owe much to some clever command line scripting from John Johnston (summarized in last year's blog post) that I have modified slightly. It is magic- it will download all photos from a specified flickr album, then resize them to proper video dimensions, then string them together as an mp4 video. I thought last year I figured out how to reverse the sequence, but my blog post and memory failed, so I pulled it into iMovie where it's easy to reverse, I added some titles, and CC licensed electronic background music from the Free Music Archive. Lots of people are pretty grim about 2018, but mine was brimming with light and love. From January 1, 2018, an image of one home [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/1 Home is Where The Key Fits flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] to a new home in 2019. There was but 365 days /355 photos between them... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2019/365/1 Effervescence Now flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] And more photos to come in 2019. Featured Image features my favorite photographer: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/154 We Love Photos flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Following up from last month (nobody is tracking me) for this 13th year of daily photos I am trying to do my cleanup and review each month, thus saving me hours of labor in December. Yeah right. Hello tracker? January was perfect, February, even with it's extra day had a 2 day gap. I chalk that up to the long travel Cori and did in the middle of the month to get from Regina to Strawberry, where we spent a quiet time just enjoying the house, the trees, and a wee trip to this place with a stream in the bottom of some ditch. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564358697 2020/366/50 Grasping the Inner Gorge flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Heck there's a decent little canyon just following the road west out of town. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564144986 Last Light in Fossil Creek Canyon flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) But there's as much joy in the small details too; this vehicle track in the field across from out house, at a low angle looks like Alpine peaks https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49563446478 2020/366/43 Faux Alpine flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This rock from our yard went on a little international travel for a class activity on the Networked Narratives course I co-teach. It was a half brained idea but it worked a bit. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49563951831 2020/366/44 A Rock to Share flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And also right in the middle was a delightful Valentine's date night https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564173822 2020/366/45 Valentines Date Night flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) There were not as many cooking / food photos in this month, but there was a celebration of break making. I remain so tickled I can conjure delicious egg bread (Challah) from flour, egg, yeast, and a dab of sugar. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49509116852 2020/366/39 Not Bad For Six Cups of Flour, Egg, Yeast, and Sugar flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And finally, a bit of optimism emerging from the retreating snow in the front yard. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49606017392 2020/366/58 Winter Survivor flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) So February brings the daily count to 60 days done in 2020; I've got 58 dailies, the perfect year of 366/366 won't happen, but it will still be a great run of photos. How's your daily habit? Featured Image: screenshot of part of the February batch of photos in my flickr 2020/366 photos album. My diabolical plan to pump up the activity of the Daily Create seems to be working; The first day of the Daily Create Challenge is not even over, and I see already 21 tornados submitted (the challenge was to draw a tornado). I've been growling and calling people out, daring them to do 7 Daily Creates in a row, and then weave together in a blog post, make something out of it, and leave a comment on my original post. THERE IS NO SLACKING OFF! I decided to enlist the help of five tough guys, and at the same time complete a ds106 video assignment, One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds. Created by Michael Branson Smith, this is one of the more popular assignments, with over 50 examples listed: Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: Prisoners, Thieves, Beauty Queens, Kings, Robin Hoods, James Bonds, Bank Robbers, Assassins, Bad Boys, Kung Fu Masters, Femme Fatales, Sports Heroes, High School Bullies, Rogue Police Officers, Brainiacs, Pregnancies, Principals, Mean Teachers, InspirationalTeachers, Gunslingers, Gangsters, Monsters, Bartenders, Warrior Princesses, Swordsman, Knights, Mad Scientists, Nerd Girls, Obstructive Bureaucrats, Sidekicks, Wise Old Men, Hardboiled Detectives, Tough Coaches, Swooning Ladies. Check out an example here: I got lax on the five seconds, but these guys are tough and they will be in your face if you get soft about this challenge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nup1zJeV5Q Pay close attention to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: "You will not laugh, you will not cry. You will learn by the numbers, I will teach you [to be creative]" -- just by doing 7 days in a row of The Daily Create The Five movies are: Kids in the Hall Brain Candy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVPn14A1msc An Officer and a Gentleman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuuTS_WNw5w Stripes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj6Dfat92u4 A Few Good Men http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2F4VcBmeo Full Metal jacket http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUc62jD-G0o Thanks to a tweet from GNA, I realized I missed a golden clip: http://twitter.com/DrGarcia/status/223226655013998592 I also used the Warfare drums freesound music by jobro http://www.freesound.org/people/jobro/sounds/87136/ And you should know (thanks to a 6th bad ass Major), for some of you I am two seconds from being on you like white on rice in a glass of milk on a paper plate in a snowstorm... Now I wil try and get a little (a tiny bit) serious. I see a lot in our students and open participants, sometimes to take the assignments and Daily Creates way to literal. Like today, draw a tornado. Sure you could take 115 seconds, and make a swirl on a piece of paper, and be done. Fine. But where is the challenge to yourself in doing that? How is just doing the minimum going to make you more creative? It won't. It is a jelly doughnut in the foot locker. It is less then #4life. Here is what I wrote some of my Arizona colleagues when I nagged them on the CyberSalonAZ google group list: Here's the scoop -open your minds and do not be trapped in being so literal. Is it really a challenge to yourself to quickly make a swirl on a piece of paper? Ok, that is the basic requirement. But it shows no imagination. No extending of the creative muscles. It is all too often what we see in students- set the bar for expectations, and they aim right for that. The whole point of the Daily Create is to extend yourself, not just to do what it says. Frankly, I will yawn if I see a bunch of swirls. The magic here is how you *interpret* the assignment. It does not have to look like a tornado, but represent it, or what it calls to mind. Maybe it's the witches legs underneath a house. Maybe its a lonely view out a windshield of a storm chaser. Maybe its a drawing of a shower drain (think how the water goes down). Look up the etymology of the word and go from there. Draw something that represents the places(s) where tornados happen. A few years ago when the Daily Shoot was active, I spent a week doing the *opposite* of every challenge. THERE ARE NO RULES, why are we so bound by rules? Make something up, and explain it or tease it out in a caption. See what Michael Branson Smith did in his by making a cat tornado in a baseball stadium. That is taking the assignment to a new (and weird) place. Or there was someone who said yesterday's assignment (a photo of a cloud that looks like an object) she could not do because it was overcast and rainy. LAME. Make your own clouds in the shower! Draw them on paper! Make shapes out of cotton balls. No excuses are valid in my book, none. You do not get to be better at stuff by doing the minimum. That keeps you at the same level. The world needs more bending of the rules, more making end arounds, more creativity. If you really want to see someone who gets this, listen to this talk by Helen Keegan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qESNQMDupfY You will not laugh, you will not cry. You will learn by the numbers, I will teach you. Tomorrow is Day 2. Bring your top game. One of the best aspects about my current project working on a Creative Commons Certification is that the timeline for the project extends to September 2017... in other places, I'd be in some fats track to build something or pick a technology, and I'd be in some frantic grasping at PersonalizedAPIBlockchainBedgeBots. Soon, very soon, I hope to have the platform to begin the open sharing of the project's development; we have a commitment to do this in a Crazy open method, so much that it inspired a deliberately ironic 4 letter acronym for the Open Education 2016 Conference in November. Meanwhile, by blog will, and always will, be the fertilized garden raw open sewage of ideas. A certification carries some (or ought to) weight of assuredness, validity. A lot of the technical infrastructures in play seem to focus on the validity of the thing being issued, that one can count on that badge/thing being definitely issued by an authority and not just ad hominenly chained together. But that is verifying a transaction. I am more interested in the thing having some value. Why would something from Creative Commons have a value? Is it because of some cryptic encoded 9000 bit hash string that cannot be cracked? No, it's because we have trust in Creative Commons as an organization, one built layer by layer over time by experiences. That there are people we trust that trust them. That they, as an organization, have a long and visible track record of doing good work in the world. Saying it is "just reputation" is true, but it is also looking at a beautiful stone monolith in the Canyonlands country, and saying "it is just a bunch of sand grains". So if Creative Commons (the organization) (as if I can really speak for them) is going to put their name on certifying people have a reasonable knowledge/application understanding/practice of Creative Commons, then they want to be just as sure that a system granting these is not to cranking out certificates willy nilly. At the same time, doing something that that has this kind of validation, in the certification processes we have been looking at, can be labor intense, that there is a review layer that is hard to automate. And people would like (I think) to go through some kind of process that is perhaps part or all online, that can be done relatively quickly, AND has meaning. That's a lot. A lot of certification is done by examination. A lot. Let's take a diversion. This morning I am reading some web sites about dog training, and one of them, at the end of the "content" offered a link to "take a quiz and earn a Certification of Attendance!" (the exclamation mark is critical). I land on this site ProProfs that offers quiz/training tools-- "1,214,000+ businesses, educators and students trust our tools for building & testing knowledge!". There are smiling, happy clip art perfect people taking quizzes! [caption id="attachment_57735" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Getting quizzed and tested could not look more fun![/caption] One of their types of "solutions" was labeled "Certifications" and there is even a bit of a sampler you can take (I give them credit for the demos). I took a Horticulture Certification Quiz, and no surprise, having missed all the classes, that in my 5 item quiz, I got only 20% correct. But there is a certificate: Would this certification mean a whole lot more if the number was 100%? Would it mean a whole lot more if it had the name and seal of Creative Commons on it? (that's rhetorical). But let's say it does mean something- what is this approach showing I can do? Here are my results: [caption id="attachment_57737" align="aligncenter" width="238"] Details of my IHA certification quiz (click to see the challenges I faced)[/caption] Okay, this is just a demo. But I have waded through some online certifications that have quizzes at this level. Asking some recall type questions might be able to show that I have waded through some body of content, but what we truly are certifying here is my ability to recall information on a quiz. Yet. There is a body of work (out there somewhere, I am not going looking for it) on how to design multiple choice exams that are above the level if fact recall, that do demonstrate some reasoning skills. Why are so few quizzes done this way? (that is rhetorical too). But... This is not going where you think it is. I can see a certain bit of foundational knowledge of Creative Commons- the history, the rationale, the variety of licenses, that might be provided by some series of readings, videos, small activities, and yes, tested somehow with a multiple choice type exam. Maybe it it augmented by some individual provided links to demonstrations of their work in the world, showing their application of Creative Commons ethos and practice. What if rather than saying Creative Commons is certifying me in these areas, what if the system allowed me some ways to assert it myself, to say, "I understand and apply Creative Commons"? This is something that could be done in a self-paced mode, that people could earn some kind of validation of their assertion. A-Cert oneself? For many people this would serve their purpose to have some kind of credit thing earned. It does not guarantee any review from Creative Commons, except sanctioning the process. They are not assuring the world that everyone who passes is some kind of expert, but that if they did all the stuff that are in its requirements, then the person out to be proficient. Then what would be a Creative Commons certification would build on this, a series of perhaps face to face, or hybrid, or facilitated online sessions of higher level practice, that would have a layer of review (and/or peer review). This might be something that carries a small fee for review, or some pay as you see fit model, because the review part takes time of people. Or there is another level of certification for trainers, that requires a performance review. I see a multi-tiered approach to this certification-- but to have value, real value, it has to be done on something that is a meaningful and performance-based activities. That is worth certifying. Top / Featured Image: I began by searching Google Images (with the settings for licensed for re-use, of course, of course) on the word "assert" just curious to see what showed up. It was one of the more inexplicable collections I have seen, and for some reason, a lot of photos of what looks like castle turrets. I clicked on the page option for this image I used, and landed on the Wikpedia page for San Andrés, an Olmec archaeological site on the Mexican gulf coast, right in the "crook" of the arm. This image is a drawing made by user "Madman2001" of a print on a cylinder seal, and the bird figure is "speaking" something that includes the glyph of "3 Ajaw" (this is the thing with 3 beaks, rings, above what looks like the letter C and a backwards E). I don;t know why i am digging this deep into the background of an image, but that's happens when you have curiosity. The entire image source is a Creative Commons licensed Wikimedia Commons image Woah, Neo, I am back home. Yesterday started on a sailboat at Sampson Cay in the Bahamas, and 19 hours later I was home where it was 30 degrees. Ahh, back in action, but now I will reminisce on the last 10 days What did I miss? The British flavor of English provides the ideal descriptive term for what this and most of my blogging covers (and expect it to show up as a category or tag). And it fits for writing here about my Annotation Blues. Without Grandpa Internet pulling out a memory of annotating web pages in the Mosaic browser (oops too late), let me just say that a public space for adding comments, resources, discussions to any public internet space just completes me for the idea of what the web should be. My previous efforts to use annotation when teaching were middling. Often it ended up being One Tool Too Many after blogging, tweeting, and... well I forget the rest now. Beyond the expected types of annotation you might ask students to as part of academic reading, I always dreamed of efforts where one might use that layer (and with hyperlinks) as a narrative space jumping across the web. Well we did get a bit of this in the first iteration of Networked Narratives where over in the "mirror world" we asked students to weigh in with Hypothesis (yes the web site is weird, it is encoded in rot13 and a mouseover is required to read) (Alan's weird idea #6756) on a whimsical McSweeny's parody where we acted as if a corporation's social media mishap was actually a clever feint. Okay, the notes are still there and it was actually quite lively. But the thing is, setting up annotation in a course is a matter of integrating into activities, talking through the mechanics, etc. The buy in is mostly there-- it's an assignment after all. The hill is steeper when the participation needs to be self-motivated. Thus concludes the prelude, onto the show? The Approach to the Hill The annotation effort I describe was my idea as part of my community engagement efforts for Open Education Global. Last Spring and into summer was the planning for their annual conference, which was covid-ed online, with the idea all along to connect it to a follow-up in person congress (now May 2022 in Nantes, France). Both events were framed, aligned to the UNESCO OER Recommendation, a most significant document and development in the world of open education. The conference plans called for some kind of "bridging" activities between the two conferences. There was significant effort to invite presentations in any of the six official UNESCO languages. While the majority were in English, the online conference convened several multi presentation webinar sessions conducted completely in Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese. Conference presentations were asked to associate their sessions with one of the five Action Areas listed in the Recommendation: Building CapacityDeveloping Supportive PolicyInclusive and Equitable OERSustainable OERFacilitating international cooperation The official UNESCO Recommendation on OER At least as early as August 2021, I noticed the links in the top right point to the language versions at certain page numbers of a single PDF. Note that the links for Chinese and Arabic versions are interchanged. We could find no contact, no "webmaster" to communicate this problem to, maybe someone has better contacts than me. When I looked more closely at the Recommendation, it's high level and broad verbiage, and seeing the six language versions in the source (it is one large PDF with links to portions within) the light bulb went off in my head that it would seem worthy during the conference, and after, if participants (or anyone) were invited to add notes, comments, resources, links to presentations as web annotations using Hypothes.is. I envisioned the document lit up in overlapping yellow highlights, and rich exchanged happening over in the Hypthes.is sidebar. Planning the Ascent I did not forsee a steep hill to get this going. I reached out for advice to my gurus like Remi Kalir who immediately responded with ideas and examples from his experience getting "crowds" at conferences doing annotation (no longer calling them "Annotation Flash Mobs"). I also contacted Natre Angell from Hypothes.is who offered help, promotion, interest. Yes, annotation could have been done directly on the UNESCO PDF, though that would call for asking participants to install a browser add-on. The via proxy that generates links to documents and opens the annotation tools would not work on the UNESCO document URL. I did create a demo for my colleagues and our conference committee to see at least functionally how it worked. I suggested we look at doing the whole effort in Pressbooks, where we could wrap the annotation target documents in some context, enable the annotation tools to always be available, provide instructions, list the conference presentations that were related. The different language versions would be their own chapter. Our license experts we spoke to said this would be permissible under the UNESCO open access policy and would align with our use of a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. We did get support from Pressbooks to host this (thanks, PB!) but we did not get access until maybe 2 weeks before the conference. I did a bit of small testing with copying sentence by sentence the Spanish language version over to Pressbooks. The outline indexing of the document looked possible with some hand spun HTML ordered lists. Luckily we got support in the name of a brilliant designer and Pressbooks expert, Kate McDonnell who was able rather quickly to move the French, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian content to Pressbooks. We ran in to major challenges with the Arabic version though, it was not possible to cleanly select sentences from the PDF. I was able to see from header data on the original PDFs that this language versions originated from a Word file, but we could not get any one from UNESCO who could locate the original. The Arabic language version remains on a To Do list of mine. Okay, enough blather, the Pressbooks version was made available at https://oer.pressbooks.pub/oeg2021/ Annotating the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, the Pressbooks published, annotation ready version of the UNESCO document (cover art by our OEGlobal talented artist, Mario Badilla) After an introduction, it goes right to the language versions, where all chapters are set to open with the Hypothes.is tools enabled. I moved the background on annotation and the how to annotate stuff afterward, including setting the "about annotation" one enabled with Hypothes.is for those new to using the tool a place to practice. Ideally this would have been ready well before the conference, and something we could have encouraged as note taking activities during the sessions, but I was just about only able to have it ready for debut in a closing session where we shared the ideas of followup activities to "bridge" the two conferences. Still, I was not seeing much of a hill. Introducing Rosa the Annotator It certainly was not necessary, but my remix bones kept twitching for some graphic elements for promoting this. My mind went to those war time propaganda posters, you know the We Can Do It! ones. I decided to recast Rosie the Riveter as maybe her great- granddaughter as Rosa the Annotator: Remix of Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Image by me https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:We_Can_Do_It!_NARA_535413_-_Restoration_2.jpg I'm not sure it did anything, but I always enjoy remixing. The Three Days of Focus Frame Things got busy after the conference with other OEGlobal activity, but I came up with an idea of using a mostly asynchronous event structure in our OEG Connect community space (the same platform where our conference was hosted). I made up previously a format called Three Days of Focus, just a set up of having over a preset 3 days (middle of the week, so it did not land on some timezone's weekend) a series of mostly asynchronous discussion. Given the pandemic, the holiday season, I knew December was not the best, but I want to create about an interval of doing these once a month, where each one would focus on one of the OER Recommendation Action Areas. I shoulder tapped a number of people to get the ball rolling with the December 2021 Three Days of Focus Annotating the Building Capacity Action Area. The information main post had background information, readings and videos for background, suggestions for annotations. For example, we had links to all the conference session related to the action area (thank you, tags). In an ideal world, all presenters would have tied their sessions to a specific portion of the recommendation is addressed. So there was a call for online discussion about the action area. Thinking that it might be hard to know where in the document to go, I created a series of posts under Getting Granular with Building Capacity where I took the sub items of the Action Area, and prepared questions and potential words they would be attached to. I then created a pre-made annotation for each, so there was a URL that could go from the Getting Granular post to the part of the recommendation it referenced, directly to an annotation with a prompt to reply (see an example). Lastly I set up a day in the middle where I was sitting several hours in the "open annotation lab" where I hoped for people to drop in. I like the studio idea of where people could annotate together, alone, but in the same place and time (yes, I had to do another remix image, sorry). And that opens the possibility to talk about how we choose what to annotate, where to put it. How did it go? Not bad, not really a land rush either. We made use of the Crowd Layers tool (thanks Remi and Francisco!) to generate a visual summary of annotation activity across all versions. The live sessions were fantastic, and I recorded bits (with permission) to make a highlight reel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SZ12gcIETI Still, I don't feel we broke far or wide in the broader open education community. I did another live annotation session the following week at OERcamp.global, though it was a crowd on the order of number of fingers (one UNESCO chair was there for a few minutes). Facing the Hill Everyone is assuring me this takes more time to catch on. I did not think that selling the concept of open annotation would be a leap for academics, who annotate all the time. Things I have heard, and accept, are of course the overload of the pandemic. I was suggested to provide more clear outcomes of what could come from annotation. I don't know if I can really prescribe that. I hoped that people would want to attach their projects, research, blog post, papers directly to the Recommendation on OER. I come across things in my feeds and readings all the time that speak to me as annotation potential, and I add them, so I am the peak on the histogram. I've also heard that the broad language of the Recommendation is not things people dwell in, they might cite it as asserting the importance of OER or maybe when they need to reference it for a proposal or a grant. To me the high level language is what calls for diving it word by word, or breaking down. Or asking questions. On the Hill This Week Tomorrow would be the start of the next Three Days of focus, where the hope is to generate annotation on the Developing Supportive Policy Action Area. Yep, I have all the materials set up, scheduled tweets loaded, and again, an open annotation lab scheduled Wednesday (6 hours in zoom, yay). My optimism is a bit low right now, I just do not feel like this is getting traction. The whole idea of bridging the two conferences is, well, slipping. I'm going to align future rounds with existing events, e.g. run a series during Open Education Week and maybe another as a part of OER22 I always have hopes for conferences to be more than presentations, hallway conversations, and receptions with hor devours, that there could be activity outside of the venue, and ongoing ones afterward. Web annotation seemed like an obvious, low barrier, constructive activity that is 10000% open. It can be done at any time, you do not have to face a Wall of Zoom. But maybe I have missed an obvious marker along the path. If anyone has a clue, send me a note. You can find me pushing that rock up the hill. Featured Image: Pixabay graphic by Schäferle modified me to include screenshot of page from the OER Annotation Pressbook and the Hypothes.is logo, let's call this licensed CC BY. As always, getting notice of a photo added to Flickr Explore is best served as a total wonderful surprise, unanticipated. For me, it’s been a while (well not that long, since early August) that it happened. I forget about it. But I never expect a photo to land there, unlike many in the group discussions which sound like “Wahhhh Why Are My Photos Not There Regularly?” People complain about "substandard" photos being selected, but if everything was the same, it would look like all the HDR soaked images you find in Unsplash. 49215941982 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) My photo here somehow got 32,000 views? Do you believe in data or just data that makes you look good? The behind the photo story is just feeling the good late afternoon light when taking the dog out for a romp in the open field across from our home. I mean, we just open the door, cross the unpaved road and BOOM! We are generally looking right into some glorious sunsets. This was a bit before sun down, but the light had that crisp, warm, feel to it. As we wandered towards the small furrow line (maybe that’s what it’s called), a ridge maybe 24 inches high along the power lines, I noticed the beautiful wind sculpted forms in the snow, they looked just like sand dunes. The shadow of the grass on the bottom made for nice contrast. So I bent down and got a low angle perspective, enough to capture the sky too. Oh, the camera “gear”? Yup, just my iPhone 8. And it was not even the pick for my favorite daily photo, that one was after crossing looking back over that line into the sun. 2019/365/347 Remember to Remember flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) But hey, there you go, the magic of flickr explore is in the surprise factor! I’m in explore! Featured Image: 49215941982 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I have increasing respect for historians who try to decipher events from hundreds of years ago. They have shreds to work with. What I am writing about is from only five years ago. I was part of it. I have my story of what happened. But still, it's not always so clear. Nor might it really matter. I have a lot of interest in how ideas happen, where they come from, how the evolve. I find that insanely interesting. But in ed-tech, or tech, or maybe other things, there can be a tendency to bleed from this curiosity over into "I did X first"... which is pointless. I do not see the latter happening. This all started with a blog post by Mike Caulfield on a keynote he gave in Denver on New Directions in Open Education. It's quote good, no really good. About half way down Mike talks/writes about on what he describes as "loosely-coupled courses": For example, what we called “loosely-coupled courses” — courses that were connected not in this lockstep we-read-everything-on-the-same-day way, but through mutual meaningful activities – these loosely-coupled courses did a lot better at engaging connected classes. And boom! the next header I perk up at is "The Assignment Bank as a Loosely-Coupled Connection" -- because he is talking not only about ds106 but the open assignment bank something I was present near its birth, had a hand in evolving, and have been working with as a concept as recently as two hours ago. Mike has modified it slightly, but he described how it came about how I remembered, out of the first open ds106 work of Jim Groom and Martha Burtis at UMW and me. But he also wove the inspiration of the kitting community Ravelry with the creation of the assignment bank. This is such a minor point that hardly matters to Mike's point, and I should have just let go. What Mike write was close enough to what I recall, but to me left off he contributions of Tom Woodward who was present with us on a December 2010 Skype brainstorming call about DS106. And I have heard Jim describe Ravelry as an inspiration for the community aspects of DS106, but my brain had no memory connection with the start of the Assignment Bank. So I commented, and Mike quickly responded, and modified, because he cares too about the details of history. And in a good way, he asked the others involved in twitter https://twitter.com/holden/status/785910110182748161 which led down a bit of a spiral itself, ending with Jim ranting about no one respecting Dr. Oblivion (a tangent I will let go here) and something about weird pants https://twitter.com/noiseprofessor/status/785994525483282432 Tom did pull out the Connected Learning article on DS106 that spun a version pretty close to the one I had told https://twitter.com/twoodwar/status/785917321093140480 but that's likely because that is the story I told them! And I did not do much on the initial syndication build of DS106; that was something Jim and Martha had been working on for years at UMW. But this is the web, we have a lot of shreds to work with. Because we blog. This will be case number 4667 that I make for narrating our work, because our human memory is quite malleable/faulty (especially mine). So on Dec 12, Jim blogged on this brainstorming skype call -- there are even notes in of all places a wiki from that call. Tom had talked in that call of some game mechanics -- in fact it was his idea of Assignment Wild Cards that inspired me to build the Assignment Remix site in 2012. We had dissed the idea of running synchronous webinar style things, and talked about how we use twitter as a place to create the live, real time action of DS106 (and it still does that). Twitter was still fresh and new and mostly free of bots and scumbags in 2010. I had my own post about the call (mixed in with some GIFs, the early DS106 was fueled by an excitement over artistic GIFs. The one I made of Frankenstein may be the first one I did by hand. At that time we were excited, and used for another year in DS106, an important site called The Daily Shoot, which provided each day a small challenge for people to do to practice their photo skills. People responded by tweeting an image to @Dailyshoot with a specific tag. Does this sound familiar at all? I wrote then: My own idea, also influenced my dailyshoot (which you know I love) is that there could be small daily creative assignments available each day. One does not need to do them all, maybe for a class, it would be 2 or three per week. But they would all be small things one could do each do to create something new, maybe a graphic, a fake movie poster, a story played out in Amazon reviews. The thing about Dailyshoot is that it drives you to try new, and challenging, things. And we used the photography Daily shoot for the first year of Open DS106 in 2011; the site stopped running in October 2011, leading us to build the first DS106 Daily Create, pulled together by Tim Owens in January 2012, and later I modified to the current form of the Daily Create. But what about the assignment bank? I always had this story in mind that during that December 2010 Skype brainstorming call that Tom went on a rant about Jim's 10 holy assignments, that he speculated the idea of a bank of assignments people could choose from and contribute to. But my history is not correct either. Because in Jim's post he writes: Also, Martha’s submit your assignment via Google Spreadsheets, which republishes as a post with a unique category through FeedWordpress is awesome—as is her “repository” of digital storytelling examples gathered by the class over time (repository probably not the best word—we are working on alternatives). I had in my mind that Martha built the assignment bank after the call, but she had already been doing it before. So what can we dig up for history? Enter the Internet Archive- the first entry for ds106.us is Dec 13, 2010 (the day after our call): [caption id="attachment_62218" align="aligncenter" width="630"] DS106.us on Dec 13, 2010 via the Internet Archive[/caption] It has the sign up form to add a blog, but the link for assignments are just a category view of a few posts Jim wrote with assignment ideas, carry forwards from the version he had taught the year before at http://ds106.umwblogs.org/. The first site is rocking that Twenty-Ten Wordpress theme Jim loves so much ;-) But I do remember that the first system for allowing people to submit assignments that Martha built was done with a Google Form. This shows up in the Internet Archive on January 21, 2011, about the first week of the UMW class, as well as what Martha created to show the assignments: [caption id="attachment_62219" align="aligncenter" width="630"] DS106 Visual Assignments from January 22, 2011[/caption] And all the basics of the Assignment Bank are here- not only the submission form, but the grouping by media type, the star ratings, the tags someone had to use to get their response attached. The site was using some kind of third party service that generated thumbnail images of outside web sites (which eventually broke more often than not). This was not yet a separate subdomain- for 2011, it was within the main DS106 site. I can see by peaking at the source code that Martha had created a custom post type for assignments, and was likely using the Views plugin to display. Martha found the spreadsheet for the form responses, and I can see all the early assignments that are still in the bank are there: https://twitter.com/mburtis/status/785936835864367105 I have to say that I am most confident that the Assignment bank is totally the idea and prowess of Martha Burtis, all hail Martha, as she is awesome. There is a pretty big gap in the Internet Archive for the ds106 site from late 2011 til almost mid 2013. Nothing for 2012 -- which is too bad because that was when Tim Owens came on board and totally revamped the main site into its current design as well as rolling out the Daily Create. But I can pinpoint when the Assignment Bank became it's own site; it was November 2011. I can tell because that is when the current site's submission form was created: [caption id="attachment_62220" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The assignment bank's submission form was created in 2011[/caption] And the very first assignment Spreadsheet Invasion (that's Tom's assignment, he blogged it too) [caption id="attachment_62221" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The very first DS106 assignment, I know because the tags to identify it is DesignAssignments1[/caption] This was published Dec 15, 2011-- This too was Martha's work. She figured out a way to extract the data from that Google form and convert it to the custom post types in the new Assignment bank as its own site. I actually cannot figure out how this works, it's some kind of field markings in the post. It Still Works. I did not get my hands on the insides of the site until I was working at UMW in Spring 2012. The heart of the site has not changed, and still what almost no one will ever see as the brilliance of what Martha did in setting up the assignment bank as using Feed Wordpress to resyndicate from the main ds106 Feed Wordpress site- Syndication of Syndication. My additions were some optimizing of the single assignment displays, generalizing some code as function, changing the front to use the Wordpress assignment taxonomy to produce the menu instead of fixed images. Starting in August 2012, I began work on what has evolved into a number of projects- I took the system that was built specifically done for the DS106 Assignment bank to a more generalized theme that could be used for other kinds of collections, the DS106 Assignment Bank theme and later doing a version of the Daily Create as a replicable theme, the Daily Blank. I've put these into use in many projects since then... the UDG Agora Challenge Bank is the ds106 Assignment Bank (with better features added for writing responses on site) and I am doing more modifications to put it to use for a project with creative commons. The ds106 Daily Create now uses my newer version, but has also been used in other sites (not all mine). So, to cut a long post long, credit for the DS106 Assignment Bank is truly on Martha Burtis, I have just been running with it since then. It remains to me a powerful concept, of not just the part of users creating assignments, but of thinking less of teaching as a fixed path, as mix described in his post of "loosely-coupled". Does all this digging for when things happened matter? You have to say-- in comparison to what? Even with a fair bit of written "evidence" I still had to dig to find missing parts (which is more fun that I can describe). There is a lot to be said for being able to find old blog posts. I used a Wordpress trick of knowing how archives work. That I can go to Jim's blog and see all his posts for December 2010 via http://bavatuesdays.com/2010/12 or Martha's http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2010/12/ or mine http://cogdogblog.com/2010/12 or Tom's http://bionicteaching.com/2010/12 And truth? Well, it hinges on who is talking and who is listening. It is so relative. But this Bank thing has been a great ride that keeps on going. I'm done, Mike! Top / Featured Image Details: I started looking Google Images (filtered for licensed to reuse) on "Historian", scrolling and scrolling past images of books, and men with books, and statues, and almost gave up until I see this Escher-like image looking down a stairwell. It just felt right. The image is a CC0 Public Domain pixabay image It seemed a little odd for week 3's ds106 assignment to be about 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to tell a story, but there is no way I would just do just another Dominoe story. I was flailing around for an idea, and the story just happened while wandering about. Here is a Vuvox Collage story about a boomerang at DFW airport (link to view directly). Vuvox can be quirky, but the media on a scroll line and its editing features are a nice change from the usual stuff. As usual I got the unusual music from ccMixter-- "PEACE" by rocavaco (feat. the world) http://ccmixter.org/files/rocavaco/26369 A few posts back I asked for some help to Convince Curmudgeons with Comments -- this is in reference to a few vocal critics of our online report tool for a faculty summer project professional growth program who did not want copies of their projects to be cross listed in our Maricopa Learning eXchange. As is the reports themselves are about 4 clicks in from the main professional growth site to the Examples of Summer projects where likely few web explorers might venture; also the value that the MLX adds over just a response to a handful of questions is the ability to attach relevant web sites and upload supplementary media files which can be attached. For example, Donna Gaudet's project on Online Community and Retention Research has a static report on the FPG web site (response to the report form questions) while her MLX package has the same responses plus her three word files that have all the resources she compiled. Or compare Geoff Eroe's report on his project Complex Modeling and Animation Techniques for Character Studio and 3D Studio Max to the MLX package that includes an AVI file of one of his animation sequences. And Niccole Cerveny's Rock Art Research in the Field and Laboratory has a basic report but the MLX package includes web links to related web sites such as the local Deer Valley Rock Art Center. Isn't that worth something? So the deadline for filing the online project reports passed on September 30... so we had lots of calls the afternoon of September 30th when the bulk of the reports came in to our database. And we did rather well, out of 110 projects funded, we have 90 reports submitted and electronically approved by our college reps. Now here another great part- we automatically associate these MLX entries with a common identifier, a system tag if you will, so they can be grouped as a hole into what we call an MLX special collection for Faculty Professional Growth Summer Projects which lists 98 total projects (8 from last year when the online tools were still in beta). This one URL can be used to dynamically link to the most recent sum of all MLX items in this collection plus there is an RSS feed for the newest ones in the collection or a feed for a random selection that could potentially be used on a web page that could highlight random packages within this group. That seems pretty valuable to have as a collection? Well today I went into the dusty vault of the MLX code and added a new feature that allows a keyword search within a special collection, e.g. all MLX packages in the Summer Projects collection that contain the word "assessment". That should be useful to someone. So again, if any is interested in helping convince the stubborn ones who think this is not valuable, pick one of these packages, and send a comment. A copy is emailed to the package owner. There is nothing like a little pat on the back, a massaging of an ego, to help people see the value of putting their work in public. And I am jazzed to get back to some MLX coding. The big project is to streamline the original version from its year vintage 2000 design to the new look of what will be the open source version. Inside the Photo What a way to close out 2017! My very last photo uploaded to flickr made it into flickr explore. Like usual, the notification of being added to the group to tracks photos In Explore came in after midnight. I grabbed a screen shot on my phone while it was still visible above the fold: Another friend recently shared that her photo was picked and was curious how it’s done, like only “serious” photographers get in. Sorry but it’s automated. You can find many explanations, which at some point get vague and arm waving. Flickr’s explanation is: “There are lots of elements that make something ‘interesting’ (or not) on Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic content and stories are added to Flickr.” Thomas Hawk, a name that’s been around a long time (I know for sure I have reused his photos before) offers top 10 ways to get more attention on flickr. A previous version contained the helpful “Take interesting photos”. But a key thing to keep in mind is that flickr will only look for photos to include that are in the last 5 of a batch upload. My photo, in fact, was the last for that day (actually for 2017). As it was my photo of the day, I tweeted it, and it picked up a few quick favorites and comments. That’s what counts. It was not a huge amount, but somehow enough to make the cut. I’d say the best approach is not to try hard to get in explore; it’s always better as a surprise. Talk about surprise as this photo was taking with my iPhone 6s. Actually, out of the 18 photos I have the In Explore group, seven were taken with this camera. The photo was taken on my late afternoon dog walk in the neighborhood opposite from mine. Felix and I had done a little loop into the forest, and walking back on Filler Road, which has one of the higher vantage points in town, I spotted the moon just sitting over the Mogollon Rim. I did not have great hopes of a good moon photo, because the exposure is trucky and not well done via automatic exposure. But I put the camera app into HDR mode, and locked focus on the moon, and framing it to get a low horizon of the top of the Mogollon Rom (the highest points around here). On looking at the photo that night, I liked the composition. The moon itself was overexposed, and I tried boosting the highlights and trying a little burn brush in Aperture. But I was not quite happy with the framing, this was the original shape: I most typically crop photos in the same aspect ratio as the original, but as an experiment, I tried a no constraint crop that was a very wide image, and cutting off the land to a sliver. The trees became almost like silhouetted figures watching the moon; I upped the contrast and the black levels to make the foreground go very dark. 2017/365/365 Rising 2018 / Setting on 2017 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I had little trouble picking this photo as the pick of my day. I was not sure if the moon was rising or setting, so i played in the title “Rising 2018 / Setting on 2017” with the idea that as the last photo of the year, 2017 was setting and 2018 was rising. My title might have confused Art Oglesby who first tweeted a spectacular super moon shot Super Moon Rising 6:30 am Jan 1 2018 pic.twitter.com/O9bJCgDqJ2 — Art Oglesby (@ARTiFactor) January 1, 2018 Apparently I messed up his title I meant Super Moon Setting – your post title mixed me up — Art Oglesby (@ARTiFactor) January 1, 2018 Again, a last photo of the year Explore was the perfect way to call 2017 a wrap. We got some really sad news today, a death in the ds106 family. https://twitter.com/fairuzmaggio/status/303687617747243008 Yes, a computer has died. While Fairuz is in mourning (or shopping), let's deal with it in the ds106 way -- and make some art! Hence a new design assignment, A Memorial For Fairuz's PC: Fairuz is a UMW student for the Spring 2013 ds106 class, and suffered a catastrophic loss of her PC. We should honor its memory by designing something as a memorial- a funeral announcement, an animated GIF headstone, a floral wreath of RAM chips. REMEMBER THE PC! I made up a bit of graveyard commentary: cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It must have been ds106's fault! It is the Raven! The weight of all that media, the taxing of the CPU by the strain of animated GIFs, what kind of machine can take this kind of stress and live! Let's bow our heads for a moment of silence... and go make some art now! I've had a number of months of quiet resignation of the ever constant flow of email spam (now unreadable PDFs of stock offers, still sweet deals to enlarge body parts I am not equipped with, great sounding mortgage offers for homes I don't own in Florida), not to mention the torrent of blog spam that I watch over the 10 or so blogs and wikis I touch. But a trackback I got today to a link farm, a place designed to only generate internal links to itself (via spam insertion to innocent blogs) is just the kind of smelly roach that fired me up. Al pages on the infernal site are self linking, each one laced with Google AdSense links, in the marginal hopes some fool might click and generate some nano revenue for the roach-a-teers. So a blog post I posted today contained a NMC presentation that had a medical term in the title, and right as rain (not in the desert) a spam trackback came into the WordPress Spam Karma 2 containment zone linking tyo a subpage at this site purporting to be giving "university updates". That's curious though, the domain looks somewhat legit, it is "universityupdate dot com" (I am not adding any more linkages to their pile. It ain't there , brothers and sisters. The site is right away an obvious link farm. It's just full of category link pages, mostly void of content. Most of the hyperlinks that have real sounding titles are not linked to legit URLs. And it sure as *#&#^ has nothing to do with universities. It's hundreds of pages of google AdSense pages. And if I can find info on these roaches, they are not all that hidden. Using domaintools for some research on the roaches, the fetid site has 355 internal links and zero external. What kind fo web site has nary a link anywhere else? A link farm does. And they are hosted by in Saskatchewan, Regina -by roach providers, Loose Foot Computing Limited. Again, for all of their bright colored banners of Doing No Evil- Google, who's tools, services I love, adore, and give sloppvery kisses to -- provides financial reward, incentive to link farms and blog comment spammers, and with all that immense Googly Brainpower -- why are they not actively stomping out the roaches? If I believed in conspiracy and evil profiteers I might have a theory, but I'm just not that sharp. I just hate spammers. I hate evil, greedy, farts who waste my time. And I hate them even more for giving Canada a bad name. Grrrrrrr. Two years, a year ago, it was noteworthy when feedless-sites were worth announcing they had added an RSS feed. Is it really newsworthy anymore? There is some sort of tipping point at work here, just curious if the threshold has been lost. It takes me back 10, 11, 12 years ago when the first web sites were popping up. Every (almost) new site was nesworthy in its presence, announced in the NCSA Mosaic What's New Page. I recall combing through my multimedia magazines, noting the first companies that had a URL in their ads. I was collecting them like mad in manually edited collections. There was no Google, no Internet Explorer, not even a Yahoo (well maybe a baby Yahoo). It was a trickle, then a steady rain, than a constant flow, then it is just part of the scenery. Will the same happen to RSS? Will its absence be more noteworthy for an organization than its presence? Is it still mildly geeky to use? Has it arrived? is arriving? will not arrive? Meanwhile, according to my aggregator, Dr. Green today is performing a root canal, 2 crowns, 6 checkups, plus a golf match at 4:30 pm ;-) Like a flying cannonball, like a balloon full of bricks, my goal to do a digital story a day for May has flopped mercifully: I'm not going to apologize, that is for weenies. It was a tough pace I was holding, but last week's travel did me in... and frankly, well nobody cares if I keep these silly challenges. So I wave my FAIL flag proudly. I went down blogging. Or not blogging. At least I got my cheese. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by j.gurian Small, insignificant observational note of no consequence: In my two podcasting demos this week for faculty and staff at our colleges, I showed as a video example an episode from the TV show Lost that I had bought on the Apple Store for $1.99. Before I showed a small bit of it, I asked how many in the room watched the show... Any guesses on the response? I had my hand way up in the air, admitting, yes I was hooked on the show. On one day of my demos, I was joined by maybe 2 others in the room, and at another session, no one else in the room indicated a Lost addiction or interest. No conclusions are drawn, no inferences about Digital Natives and Immigrants, no suppositions are made about un-awareness of pop culture. Nope. But the folks at the Dharma Initiative has been informed. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've milked this story plenty of times before- during a 2007 workshop in Tasmania, I used as an example of the power of unexpected connections, someone the year before had commented on a flickr photo I had tagged as "unknown" and told me the kind of flower it was-- what was amazing was the woman who did this was in the workshop (here I am telling it again in video, where you will here about 20 times the word "amazing".) This just happened again today- out of the blue, un-asked for (and not even tagged or captioned with a request to help learn about the subject), flickr user "Sculpture Kris" added a comment to this photo of a sculpture I saw in Rochester, Minnesota. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog telling me a lot more about "Boy on a Dolphin" then I knew before: And ironically, there was a previous work by the artist, Girl with a Dolphin in London, that I bet I walked right past when I visited the London Tower Bridge in August. Now this is really tiny, this is not open education or anything that will Reform Education as We Know It, but I am (flipping through thesaurus for some other word than "amazing")... astounded that people may seek out photos in flickr of things they have information on, and share them like this. Sculpture Kris did more than just comment, he/she researched the other photos on flickr, and added the Youtube video of another version of the Boy/Dolphin sculpture elsewhere in London (tactfully in front of a Mercedes Benz dealership?) which then leads via related videos to a clip of a movie with Sophia Loren (and if you go further you are deep down a line of tangents that I am not taking responsibility for). But back to this example- perhaps this could be an interesting exercise for classes learning about Web 2.0 tech / social media? Seek a shared piece of media posted in a site like flickr in a topic area that you know or are interested in, do some research to share some information, and post it as a comment. Comment some learning forward? I have someone who regularly mines my flickr stream for photos that he posts to WikiPedia articles he helps author, and always lets me know when it is used; I end up reading the article, and damn if I end up learning something new. Again. So I will use the "A" word again. Among the river of social media and the crap that comes across our TV news-- we can use a whole lot more Amazing Stories (my self plugs for 2009 and 2010 versions of Amazing Stories of Sharing). They are small things to do, yet powerful... and contagious. Thanks Sculpture Kris, for the spark of my day. No, it is not Potted Meat Food Product, just down the shelf... Wikis: The Next Frontier for Spammers? Wiki maintainers can expect an increase in spam after a webmaster newsletter highlighted the effectiveness of Wiki spam in raising a site's Google ranking. WebProNews described how a webmaster improved his rank in a search engine optimization (SEO) contest using links in Wiki "sandboxes" - pages where users are urged to test drive the format and learn how to use it. All kinds of body enhancement products, hormones, elongation devices, chemicals, mortgage deals, ebay tips-- all now veering for your wikis! Head for the hills! Inspired by tonight's #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It's a break in the action from grading. No, it's just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop til you frame it out. I present, what happens when Educational Technology meets a MOOC in a field, you get E.T. The MOOC(ie). This was done in Photnshop CS5 with a bunch of layer hi-jinks, starting with basic images of cow in field, and a PNG file of ET (useful for its transparent background). I separated the cow from the background, and backfilled it with some clone brush of the grass. I used two shades of blue and the Render Clouds to fill in the sky. I had a GIF of a flying saucer from a preious project; I opened that in PhotoShop, copied all of the frames from the animation palette. In my cow file, I made copies of the frames, enough to have twice as many as the animation. I pasted in the spaceship frames (paste into frames option), and nudged it around in layers below the cow to make it land. I brought ET in at several sizes, and made hime waddle up from the ship (flipping it horizontal was cheat enough). I duplicated the bigger versions of the cow and ET, so I had two layers, and in one used the puppet warp to bend their eyes toward each other. Then it was a matter of droppng in some text, turning layers on and off as needed, and chaning the frame timing to give it pause in places. Super goofy. It's a scarcy combination, but it really is friendly. Yes, here comes yet another family memory story about my grandmother, who shall be referred to usually as "granny". I'm still working through the adaption to TapeWrite of her telling them recorded in 1994. Another long ago memory came to me a few weeks ago, the taste of her thick split pea soup. As a kid (and a kid-like adult) I loved that soup. It was hearty, chunks of ham, and small dumplings she dropped in. In 1987, that first year I had moved to Arizona, I bet I told her in a phone call or letter how much I missed her split pea soup. I imagine her laughing warmly. What I did not imagine at the time would be she would mail a box to me in Arizona. In that box was one of her soup pots, a bag of split peas, and an index card with her hand written recipe. Now here is where my memory gets fuzzy, I must have tried the recipe, but I cannot remember making the soup. At 27 I was not thinking about being as old as I am now nor that she would ever not be around. On one of my grocery expeditions a month ago I tossed a bag of split peas in the basket. With the weather turning much colder this week, the soup desire is on, and so was lit my plan to make some of that green soup. Not only is my memory lost, so is her soup pot and recipe card. So I hope you don;t get mad Granny, is I turned to Betty Crocker's Split Pea Crock Pot soup. At Safeway Sunday, I looked for ham hocks, but could not find them, and since they had a lot ham on sale for Thanksgiving, I just bought a half ham, cooked so I can a number of meals as well as the bone for the soup. I fired it up at 8am, and it was a slow cook all day... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Public Domain Dedication Creative Commons ( CC0 ) license[/caption] But by 7pm it had thickened nicely, and made for a nice soupy meal. It was pretty good (and will be for like 4 more left over servings), and have no means to compare to Granny's but I will give her the nod in the comparison. And then I find my memory is more faulty, searching for a reference in a blog post, my search turned up a PDF of her recipe! grandmas-pea-soup I think my sister had a copy of it after all (and at the bottom a reference to the egg drop / dumplings I remember) It's similar to Betty Crocker, but like all recipes, there are differences. I do remember Granny's having the sliced hotdogs (I tossed in some ham chunks). Who cares if the soup is as good as I remember? The memory is even better. And next time I am trying the egg drops. Do yourself a favor, not only make an effort ASAP to get audio recordings of your family stories, get the recipes! Top / Featured Image: That's my photo of the soup I made tonight, taken after I uploaded today's photos to flickr. This one will be there tomorrow and you can bet a bowl of soup that it will be licensed Creative Commons CC0.