Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Because of a favorite rabble rousing desert rat author, a while ago I paraphrased his quote as a sidebar thing on my previous blog theme: [The Blogosphere] is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top. I just hand coded it into a text widget, and maybe added two more quotes I found about writing that I [reworded] to make it about blogging. Ha ha. One of my web design projects called for a widget with a testimonial quote; the idea of asking them to hand change it from time to time seemed silly, and those I found the Quotes Collection Plugin. It's pretty slick, you just add quotes to the back end: [caption id="attachment_45877" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Adding a quote to the collection.[/caption] I am not using the source field, that would let you link. If you used tags you can group quotes. When I think of it every other leap year, I just do some searching on quotes about writing, then just mod them to my own twisted ways. You get a widget you can put on your sidebar, change settings to load a random quote. On the front page, I have it so you can page to the next quote, on my page sidebars, it is set to auto-refersh via jQuery. [caption id="attachment_45878" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Sample sidebar quote[/caption] And you get a shortcode as well, so I am able to have a page that shows all my quotes, even to make it do random sort each time via putting in my "On Blogging" page: [quotcoll orderby="random"] Nothing earth tremoring here or that technically complex, but I really respect a plugin that does exactly what I was looking for (and then a tad more), with a reasonable interface. Top / Featured Image Credits: That's a screenshot of my own blog! Get over it, legal hippies. Nothing new here, is there ever? But I am a bit tired of every post to Mastodon WordPress plugin (and ActivityPub too) sends there a featured image without the alt text entered here in WordPress. I end up getting (correctly) slapped by the Please Caption bot! I know! It's not my fault! I featured images have alt text, but Autopost to Mastodon and Share to Mastodon plugins ignore them So I am switching the posting there to use the IFTTT gizmo approach I set up earlier. And thus, I must try a post with a featured image fully decked out with alt text, and see what happens. It has in the WordPress media Library the alt text that should travel with the image: Looking upward at a 1970s style building, plain walls, just two windows with birds in front. Words at the top of the building trim read Question - Experiment - Connect Stay tuned (or not) For those outside of the Fediverse... you can easily see in to https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog UPDATE: Aack, my IFTTTing really borked, back to using a darn plugin, now trying Share to Mastodon which ironically posted the alt text of the building below but skipped the alt text for the first image in my post. Featured Image: I forgot where in the UK I saw this building with the great verbs on it! Question, Experiment, Connect flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) [Media Description: Looking upward at a 1970s style building, plain walls, just two windows with birds in front. Words at the top of the building trim read Question - Experiment - Connect] I got a nice memory pingback when reading a the recent update from Evernote -- later below I'll go back to my experience trying this, but they were describing their approach about designing a new version of their app for the iPad (THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT iPADS. THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT iPADS. THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT iPADS.) Designing the new interface was a daunting task. First, we made an advanced prototype by cutting out a roughly-tablet-sized piece of cardboard, writing "iPad" on it, and carrying it around for a few days. We would bring it to meetings, hold it in different ways, and try to imagine what Evernote would feel like on this form factor. We looked pretty stupid and people made fun of us mercilessly. We printed out Photoshopped UI screens and taped them to the "iPad" to get an idea of font sizes and finger placement. We learned a lot. We tried taking our existing iPhone UI and making it bigger. That failed the cardboard-poke test. We tried taking our existing Mac UI and making it smaller. That failed the cardboard-poke test. We locked ourselves into a conference room for three days and threw away all of our previous designs. After some trial and error, we got something that we fell in love with. One major design principle of our iPad interface is to get you to your notes quickly. The new layout and interactions dramatically reduce the amount of navigating and searching you have to do. The idea is that it should be easy and pleasant to just get to any note you want in a very tactile way. We want you to have the feeling of running your fingers directly through your memories. It's hard to describe but easy to experience. Of course, you can still search. (my emphasis added -- CDB) While it is funny, and they nicely make humor of it, is the carrying around, and pretending to us, a life sized cardboard model of a device-- but it clearly led their team to rethink the assumptions that had in their heads. It's a valuable lesson for design, especially for something we will interact with in the real world. This touches back to a brilliant webinar Ruben Puentedura did for our Connect@NMC series thids week on what he calls a "Lively Sketchbook" meaning a suite of mobile apps that give, in a device, the aspects of creativity he outlined for Da Vinci and Hemingway. Ruben cited three critical aspects for why something like an iPhone/Android could be this, and not, say a netbook: Ubiquity Initmacy Embeddedness I really recommend listening to the archive- it was a brilliant discussion of this (and not just about apps) This kind of design with paper prototypes likely is common of course of the design of objects and devices, and I'd be surprised to hear of any product being successfully built without doing this. But it also has bearing on design of web interfaces. It took me back to the pre-web days when I was working at Maricopa, then on multimedia projects, which meant things like HyperCard and Director and CD ROMs. Early on I attended a corporate learning conference in Anaheim, and had a stunning revelation from a session on design where the two presenters shared their approach of paper prototypes. The would create sketches, not overly detailed, of the screens they were designing, and buttons wer labeled with keys that would indicate another screen that would appear when clicked. They put these series of screens in an old fashioned looseleaf notebook, where you could re-arrange the order of screens rather easily. Then they would do usability testing by flipping the notebooks open to a test user, have them follow the instructions, and flip to the right page when they finger clicked a button (or link I guess). This could easily be done for web design- I tried it in the late 1990s when I worked with a faculty member on The Hero's Journey web tool (the site is there but I am doubtful it works) -- but I remember it was useful to sort out not just the layout of screens but how people interpret them. And the cost of doing it is a stack of paper, a notebook, and some pencils. Heck, if you did it in pencil, you could redesign things on the fly. Oh, better, what if you had a set of those peel and stick stickers, each with things like dialog boxes and buttons! I may have forgotten this lesson, but some new web design projects that are baffling me now, I may pull out the paper prototype tools. Now where the heck is my pencil? Niiiiiiiice. I have been mildly using Furl because I tend to bookmark things on my home computer I end up needing at work, and on my work computer I end up needing at home. Call it Murphy's law of bookmarks. Furl does this with little fuss, just a bookmarklet link. I thought I had noticed that Brian had added a Furl section to his navbar, and sure enough, Furl offers RSS feeds. Very cool. I could not be out done, so plunked a Furl-ed Bar to the mess on the right of this blog front door. Yes, Brian, some house cleaning is in order. Some other day. It's rare I feel like passing on something forwarded via e-mail, but this message form my colleague Jan in Melbourne is too good to pass up. Look carefully at the double meanings in these URLs (all real and well meaning): Make sure you don't make the same mistake when setting up your web page. It's not always easy choosing the right domain name... but you can't do much worse than these people. First there is "Who Represents?" - a database for agencies to the rich and famous: http://www.whorepresents.com Second is the Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views: http://www.expertsexchange.com Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island: http://www.penisland.net Need a therapist? Try: http://www.therapistfinder.com Finally we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales: http://www.molestationnursery.com And my own story... my personal domain dommy.com is named for my first canine friend, a dalmation named Dominoe that a former room-mate nicknamed "Dommy". One day I got an email from a self-proclaimed "dominatrix" who informed me that in her world, "dommy" means "Dominant Mommy". But I guess that world is pretty small, as in 7 years, no one else has made that mistake in seeking services ;-) So look closely at your domain choices! Have someone else look at it sideways. Another gem of a resource that has a hook or two into the RSS game, is the free Google Alert service. Google Alert runs daily Google searches for you and emails you whenever new results appear. Many people use Google Alert to keep track of what the web is saying about them, their interests or any projects they are involved in. Even if you have no clue or interest in RSS, Google Alert is an extremely useful tool to keep you in tune into web resources that cover areas that interest you. <tiphat>Found a link to this via some long last path to an entry at IDBlog.</tiphat> (more…) There's a heated web browser debate going on over at "Redemption in a Blog" as techies try to sort our what web browser Homer Simpson uses, see "Homer Simpson Uses Tabbed Browsing". Top theories bounce between FireFox and Safari, with no clear winner. I would bet Homer wants his pop-up ads not to be blocked ("mmmmm... pretty pictures") Mo has no comment. And they say the Internet is a waste of time? Hah! Among the many unanticipated outcomes of 2020 is the genericizing of a product brand name into the vernacular (I have been waiting like 20 years to have a reason to use "vernacular" in a sentence). It's like what happened when a translucent, colorless, flavorless food ingredient, commonly derived from collagen derived from the boiled bones, connective tissues of animal parts, becomes cheerfully known as jello. Thus the act of synchronous online video meetings, achieved through many products and services, is now just an ordinary verb (or noun). Be it fatigue caused by the activity, the facial expression the environments engender, the way dreaded office parties still occur. Aragorn Research nailed it back in May and I'd bet it is in the running for word of the year. From this tangential reference to boiled cow and pig skin we go to the year of how many billions of hours we spent staring into grids of other people staring at the same style grids. I had an idea to build some rapid montage of such scenes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfWk95N_0o More than 270 images were sourced (ignoring the rights of use, this was for commentary, parodying, etc) in scavenging Google image search for "zoom gallery" "zoom meeting" "zoom meeting pets" "zoom meeting funny". I ended up with maybe 20 that were duplicates used under different file names in online sites. Quite a few were stills from this GIF (and I forget where it came from, I think it was a Zoom Inc promo). They sure seem happy, and fatigue free. I had a reason for going down this movie making hole... yes. It was in my mind when working on the planning for the OE Global 2020 conference. It's there in conversations (taking place on zoom meetings) for future events/activities. After all the time people are spending in these environments, are there other modalities, what others ways of collaborating we can use besides this one? I find that the first reach colleagues go for is webinar, webinar, webinar. And webinar. And that is my Zoom Fatigue, is that it seems to be the limit of our imagination. It just leads to this... https://www.instagram.com/p/CJFZejcjTF6/ Playing with the holders that came with a family board game, it's sad that just the shapes and black borders lead me to the Z word. I for one will do all I can to make Zoom the software product not become a generic word for the activities it enables. Otherwise, the fatigue will lead to endless spouting "vernacular! vernacular! vernacular!" No one wants that. It just leads to harder stuff. Here is to 2020 just zooming bye. Image Credit: Just a silly go at the Distracted Boyfriend image with the imgflip meme generator. Shared under a Who The F*** Knows/Cares How to Attribute Memes license. Do you know one of the oldest professions on the web? Not that one -- heads out of gutters-- please! But then again, revel in the curioustity holes that Wikipedia can open when I looked for that link... No, it is making web pages that are list of other web sites. Educators love this dearly, and yes of course call it "curation." It's what I did much in my early web years. Making resource collections (example, example) was my own focus in my early 1990s web years, heck I ran a "Bag of URLs" site at Maricopa for like 10 years. I spotted a 2022 version from Stephen Downes -- Some of The Best Free Digital Storytelling Tools for Teachers and agree with the always opinionated summary of an OLDaily post "As before, I won't attest that these are the 'best', merely that they exist." As web-based storytelling was in my "bag of interests" back to the Devonion era of the internet, my curiosity was tickled. This Bes Free Digital Storytelling list was published in the Educational Technology and Mobile Learning (ETML) blog published by Med Kharbach since like 2012. The article lists six of these "Best" tools (what makes 'em best? shrug)-- StoryboardThat, Canva, Adobe Spark, Animoto, Make Belief Comix, and Pixton each with a two paragraph description. I could not resist double checking a storytelling thing I did long ago... https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1580343254796894208 David Porter had a good idea (Hi David)-- that was exactly my plan! https://twitter.com/dendroglyph/status/1580571018804236289 What was once 55+, then 29, now like maybe 10 I'm dialing the web time machine back almost exactly 15 years to 2007 when planning a series of workshops for a grand Australian tour organized by what was then the Flexible Learning Framework (a presentation/workshop archive exists). What emerged was maybe one of my favorite web-based projects, 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story where you can find the full backstory on the idea and the Paul Simon influence. The crux was I had seen a handful, well maybe rwo different web based tools (Slideshare and Voicethread) that provided a free place online to assemble a multimedia "story" from two or more types of media (1 could be text) and then published openly. My loose criteria for building this list... um collection of tools was: The tool allows you to mix 2 or more media types to create something you can publish to the webThe tool is free to useThe tool exists on a web site (e.g. not a download or a mobile app)The tool is not specific to any operating system or browser It hit me early in planning that a good workshop could not be, "here's a list of 50 tools!" so the idea blossomed: But since I was doing this as a workshop, I realized that if I found 50 tools, I'd have to know how to use them. I could not just give them a list of tools if I did not know them inside and out. So I got this really silly idea- what if I used the same media and story in every tool and told the same story in each different tool! https://50ways.cogdogblog.com/History.html My means to understand and compare the tool was to tell the same story (about me and my lost dog / found, Dominoe). I could demonstrate then using a storyboard and a common set of media (loaded into flickr as a number of tools could directly tap into that as a media source). I was fortunate to be able to run, grow, prune the 50+ Ways as a workshop/presentation game many times from 2007 to 2014. Sometime in maybe 2013? 2014? I started a "fork" with Darren Kuropatwa for a version that made use of mobile apps. And oh my gosh, speaking of time, I just noted the very first version of the 50 Ways workshop was done 15 years ago this week, October 15, 2007 in Hobart, Tasmania. I am now in danger of too many tangents, but that same visit in Hobart generated perhaps the most amazing of my amazing web stories. But yes, the tools, the tools, the tools. Apparently the first version of 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story hit 55 tools. Over the years I collected a long list of ones to add (many left on the table) and as tools disappeared or no longer were free to use, I sent them to The Island of Lost or Dead Tools where 36 markers are laid to rest (oh memories of Jaycut! Xtranormal! VUVOX Collage). Speaking of Dead Tools (cough Wikispaces) With much irony for dead web sites, the site I built this out on (and many other web resources) Wikispaces, bit the web dust in February 2018. I could have easily built my web materials in any numbers of ways (well in 2007 likely it would have been raw HTML or maybe PHP) but I specifically wanted to use a free web tool that wa available for educators themselves. Wikipsaces had so much to offer. And then it went belly up. I made exports of all my Wikispaces sites, but have not restored them all yet. But the 50Ways site was the first Wikispaces reclaimed site I moved to my own domain as 50ways.cogdogblog.com. Broken links remain in many places. C'est la web. I Give to You these 50.... 29.... 10 Storytelling Web Tools My associative trail went for no valid reason to the Moses segment of Mel Brooks's History of the World Part I https://youtu.be/w556vrpsy4w?t=47 And left behind, as I no longer updated the site. were 29 tools left standing. After seeing the 2022 blog post of Best Storytelling tools I wandered how many of my last standing list remained, especially since two on that list, Animoto and Pixton were among my 50. Left Standing: 2022 Recap of 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story Here I am 15 years after making the first list of 55 tools, ready to review the remaining 29. How many remain? Care to wager a bet without scrolling? Quite a few passed on as they were originally based on Flash, whose demise left a lot of dead web in its wake. Bring out the dead or alive story tools! Amongst the Living Animoto - (on ETML "best" list) [50+ ways link] is now a template driven suite of video tools, perhaps like Canva? Still Free. The version I remember in 2007 did something unique, after uploading a set of photos, it would turn them into a video and add its own effects and music based on some analysis (or randomness). My old links are all dead (probably those were flash based) but my account was still there and it says my videos may be restored in 48 hours. We put it to use in 2015 for the UDG Agora project, which had over 150 responses (links are likewise MIA). But it looks like a viable and working video platform.Blabberize - [50+ ways link] might be a most memorable one and is more than alive. When I first saw the talking alpaca in maybe late August 2007 my first reaction was almost how ridiculous it was, it allowed one to record an audio, and have a photo of someone's face animate the mouth opening and closing in sync. After laughing at how silly fun it was, to me it met my criteria, especially after finding a few educators who had put it to use. The fun part was over the years, I interacted on twitter with @Blabberize leading to maybe one of my favorite blog post titles of all time, Zooming With A Talking Alpaca (and we just reconnected again after this week's mention, so there, twitter is not 100% bad) Four From Flickr - I might have had my thumb on the scale here as these 4 different items all represent storytelling done within flickr groups, tags, or features that enabled telling of a story combining images and text. They were all different ways to use a single tool/site, but at the time, to me merited listing separate. Because flickr still works after all these years, all the examples are alive and wellFlickr Five Frame Stories - was a group and an early favorite, inspiration of mine, that encouraged the sharing of stories in photo photos, no captions. [See Flickr Five Frame Dominoe Story]Flickr Linking Notes - was one I fabricated, but made use of the pioneering Flickr feature to annotate photos with text notes, and a note could hyperlink to any URL, or in my case, the next photo in the story [See Flickr Linked Notes Dominoe Story]Flickr Six Word Stories - a flickr group around since 2005 where people share one photo with a title that follows the Hemingway story rule. It's still rather active [See Flickr 6 Word Dominoe Story]Flicktion - just a flickr tag of images with a full story in the caption. Yes, maybe an edge case, but it fit. Sue me. [See Dominoe's flicktion story]Google My Maps - [50+ ways link] Look at this, a Google tool from long ago that has not been neutered! The ability to add points to a map with text, links, and images make it means to tell a story through location [See Google My Maps Dominoe Story]. Mixbook - [50+ ways link] is aimed more at designing scrapbooks for printing ($) purposes, but did and still works as a web-based service to put together picture books with text [See Dominoes story in Mixbook]Slideshare - [50+ways link] I'm on the fence to include this service for displaying a Powerpoint deck in a web browser. In 2007, that was novel, but even better there was an ability to upload audio that could be synced to a slideshow for a narrated story format. This tool was one of the first two that inspired the whole 50+ ways concept. The audio feature is gone, and technically, if this stays on the list, I ought to add Google Slides. But I make and break the rules! [See Dominoe's Story in Slideshare]Tar Heel Reader - [50+ ways link] I have a soft spot for this tool, what you see published is not super fancy, but developed from someone at University of North Carolina, published via WordPress it's still running! A key innovative feature when it was created in 2009 is support for accessibility and its ties to use images from flickr. Still alive! [See Dominoe's Story in Tar Heel Reader] and [see also how it automatically creates a credit page for flickr images].VoiceThread - [50+ ways link] is better than jus alive, VoiceThread is an established service and educational platform I still see being used. Along with Slideshare's old audio feature, the capability of Voicethread to use audio to narrate images was a co-inspirator for the whole 50+ ways site. I would have put VoiceThread above many of the tools on the ETML list (see Dominoe's Story in VoiceThread). Depending if you buy my lumping of the 4 flickr-based tools into one or not, this means 8-11 of the last checked 29 tools are alive and usable in 2022. Our Respects to the Dead/Lost Tools That was a lot of work to review all the 29 tools left on my last updated list. The rest are either completely dead URLs, or have a sign announcing closure, redirects to a general site that no longer provides the service, and a few sit there as they were 10+ years ago displaying a bunch of broken Flash greu boxes. Let's just send condolences to the ghosts of bubblr (very clever but sadly killed by flash), Empressr (domain available for 25k!), Glogster (memorable as a multimedia poster "temporarily disabled for operational reasons"), Kerpoof (gone redirects to Disney.com), MapSkip (died in 2016 "several recent attempts to deface and hack the site have made it impossible for us to give MapSkip the love and care it deserves"), Mapwing (error message), OneTrueMedia (nothing at link, read an obit), PhotoPeach (site is there, so is the smell of dead Flash, most links do nothing), Picassa (sort of a pulse as it became Google Photos), Pixton (one of my favorite comic builders, it's around but no free service), SlideFlickr (most recent 1200 days ago, all links generate errors), Slideroll (all links show blank pages), Storify (bit the dust big time as covered on this blog), ToonDoo (shut down, 2019 security breach too), Wayfaring (dead, domain for sale), Yodio (site appears with just login screen, no content), Zentation (looks like it might work, my old links are gone, and much of the current examples are sketchy content). So What? Shrug. My curiosity got the better of me, chasing down these old sites. I have to say I am pleased that the two tools that started me on this path are more than just alive. The fact that Blabberize is around, and that I have message exchanges with the talking alpaca, cheers my small web heart and soul. Seeing also Tar Heel Reader alive as what looks like the effort of one dedicated person also makes me positive that the web is not 100% consumed by corporate entities. I go so much out of what began as a workshop idea, that grew into the sprawl of (now) a lot of dead links. 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story never was about the list of tools though that is what most folks remember. To me, the light bulb idea of creating the simple demo story and trying to recast it in so many ways was a big spark. One of my favorite assemblages was a video for a 2010 workshop that I assembled from using 34 available tools at the time, many of them now laying on the beach of that dead tool island. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDYJAZiskRw Note to self that I was nudged to revisit the 50 ways site almost exactly 15 years from the first workshop in Tasmania whispers to me that the magic of web serendipity is out there. Even if the Island of Dead Tools is overflowing, at least there was nothing quite like Xtranormal. I was there. And also, reminder- it never was about the tools... what got lost when most people saw the site was the process- develop the story idea (outline, storyboard), locate the media, then look for a tool. A good story does not begin with a tool or a list of them. Featured Image: the same Flickr image added in 2010 to the Island of Lost or Dead Tools page of 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story. https://flickr.com/photos/jesusbelzunce/4941089798 242/365 flickr photo by Jesus Belzunce shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh8mNjeuyV4 GOOGLE: Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! [clang] Get out your dead feeds! CUSTOMER: Here's one -- not even valid. DEAD RSS: I'm not dead! GOOGLE: What? CUSTOMER: Nothing -- I'll just use AOL. DEAD RSS: I'm not dead! GOOGLE: Here -- the link says RSS is not dead! It should be, y'all should sign up for Google Plus. CUSTOMER: Yes, it is. DEAD RSS: I'm not! GOOGLE: It should be. Go get Feedly, will ya? CUSTOMER: Well, it will be soon, no one reads feeds. DEAD RSS: I'm getting more items! CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment. GOOGLE: Oh, I can't take it like that -- it's against regulations of doing no evil. DEAD RSS: I don't want to go in the cart of dead apps! Wave and Buzz smell rotten... CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby. GOOGLE: I can't take it, I've got ballons to launch... DEAD RSS: I feel fine! New content coming in. CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor... GOOGLE: I can't. CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? It won't be long. GOOGLE: Naaah, I am busy coding a google glass service for visualizing personal Google circle activity CUSTOMER: Well, when is your next round? GOOGLE: Thursday. DEAD RSS: I think I'll go for and get a few new items... CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do? DEAD RSS: I feel happy... I feel happy. [Google pulls plug on servers] CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much. GOOGLE: Not at all. See you on Plus this Thursday. CUSTOMER: Right. Let's Hangout. [clop clop] FEEDLY USER: Who's that then? DIGG USER: I don't know. FEEDLY USER: Must be an internet king. DIGG USER:: Why? FEEDLY USER: He hasn't got shit all over him. 9:14 Monday July 1, 2013. I'm not Dead (yet) [caption id="attachment_22827" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image see the full size corpse)[/caption] Today I pulled put the trowel and mortar mix for some work on the DS106 Assignment Bank Wordpress theme, my pile of code and stuff so you can make a bank of anything (not just assignments) that works like the original DS106 Assignment Bank. I've got some reason as it looks like we might use it for the Creative Commons Certification project as a place for the things people will do in the process of earning a certificate. I'm a bit stuck on what these things might be, they are not assignments, and likely not challenges as I did for the UDG Agora project. The nice thing is it doe snot matter because I am just tinkering on a local version of Wordpress running on my laptop (I'm loving more and more Varying Vagrant Vagrants). I added today a new option from an email request by Jim Luke (more below), but the thing I spent the most time on is something you never likely will notice, as mundane as the mortar between the bricks of your bank building. Good old mortar... "Mortar should never be stronger than the bricks" is a well-known maxim in the bricklaying world. In this context, "stronger" does not mean its load-bearing capacity, but the mortar's hardness and permeability. This is a shaky metaphor, because while I am the son of a bricklayer, my experience is limited to a few brick garden containers. Those Pesky UI Tabs Warning, some Wordpress code and handwaving technical stuff are coming up. You have been warned, please put on your safety glasses. Much of my Wordpressing the last 2 years have been building tools that are entire custom themes, from this Assignment Bank one to the one that lets you make your own site like the Daily Create, and farther back to the SPLOT tools done while at TRU. My goal was to make them so you could install a theme, and enter, change a bunch of stuff via a Dashboard options page (rather then making edits to some theme PHP file). No programming for you. Setting up an options page lands you into an arcane corner of the Wordpress Empire known as the Settings API, one of the more mystical parts of the codex. I'm not even sure of why it's called an API, it has nothing to do with shuttling data via json. Oh well. But it is complex. This was one of the cases where I bounced from one tutorial to the next, confused, until I found one that was less confusing, and I have gotten a huge amount of mileage from the 2011 posts/code by Aliso the Greek on The Extended Wordpress API Tutorial. To try and not make this post as long and drawn out as a Bill Clinton speech, the Settings API is a handful of functions you can use to let Wordpress do the grunt work of generating the forms and data storing to create a thing like this (and this is about 1/4 of the current options) A whack sock of options can be organized into "sections", though in the simplest use of the Settings API, they are all generated in one view, but are grouped together. Aliso The Greek's code made doing the options pretty much a task of creating an array for all the form elements you needed, for the screenshot above, I defined them via (duck, here comes some PHP): $this->settings['thingname'] = array( 'title' => __( 'Name for Things in the Bank' ), 'desc' => __( 'What is the name for the kind of thing banked here? Assignment? Challenge? Task? Must be singular and should not contain numbers (0-9).' ), 'std' => 'Assignment', 'type' => 'text', 'section' => 'general' ); $this->settings['new_thing_status'] = array( 'section' => 'general', 'title' => __( 'Status For New Things' ), 'desc' => __( 'Set to draft to moderate submissions via web form' ), 'type' => 'radio', 'std' => 'publish', 'choices' => array( 'publish' => 'Publish immediately', 'draft' => 'Set to draft', ) ); $this->settings['thing_order'] = array( 'section' => 'general', 'title' => __( 'Display Order' ), 'desc' => __( 'On the main index, the order in which ' . lcfirst(THINGNAME) . 's are listed' ), 'type' => 'radio', 'std' => 'name', 'choices' => array( 'name' => 'Title', 'id' => 'Date Created', 'count' => 'Count', ) ); $this->settings['thing_orderby'] = array( 'section' => 'general', 'title' => __( 'Display Order Sorting' ), 'desc' => __( 'Which to list first?' ), 'type' => 'radio', 'std' => 'ASC', 'choices' => array( 'ASC' => 'Ascending', 'DESC' => 'Descending', ) ); $this->settings['exlen'] = array( 'title' => __( 'Excerpt Length' ), 'desc' => __( 'Number of words to show for content when displayed on an index or archive page' ), 'std' => '55', 'type' => 'text', 'section' => 'general' ); The nice thing about Aliso's code (parts which still elude my understanding) was that it did some jQuery magic to group my long scrolling set of options into a tabbed interface, like this: [caption id="attachment_59763" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The old tabbed interface from Aliso The Greek's tutorial[/caption] which worked great until about a hear ago, when I noticed that rather than being tabbed, everything was spit out onto one screen. Everything worked, but the documentation is even longer than the form... and it bothered me. Cutting to some chase, what I found in digging was that an update to jQuery rendered the jQuery Tabs UI code that did the tabs... DOA. Using the last compatible version of jQuery might have worked, but that's a cheap mortar job. I let it go for more than a year, until today. I won't bore the 0.5 readers left here, but it was about a 30% rewrite of the code for the options interface, some yanking out of old dried mortar. The result is not super optimal, it has all the settings in one tab, and the documentation in another, but is good enough brickwork for now, I updated the Daily Blank theme too, to the new tabbed settings/ documentation tab style: Pretty exciting, eh? Like watching mortar dry. And Now a New Feature / Option My thinking of the Assignment Bank theme is rooted pretty deeply in the way the original one worked, and what I have done with it since, that an "assignment" displayed would have information, a link to submit examples, a link to submit a tutorial, and under those headings, all of the responses / tutorials. Here is one from the UDG Agora project created by Nancy White- Visual Metaphors. Or Not?. The top is all the descriptive stuff: In this site we call the Examples from the original assignment bank "Responses" and rather than tutorials, we have a place for "Resources" to help you do the challenge. But when other people use your code, they often come up with use cases I never thought about. This happened today with an email from Jim Luke at Lansing Community College, he was using the Bank theme to build a resource collection, but as he described, there was no need to display those bottom two sections. The quick and easy way would be to hide them with CSS, but there's be a bit if un-needed database pounding going on. And besides, I thought of a different way. So there is a new option, in the mix, where you can control what is shown on the bottom of a single "thing". The default is to show both Examples and Tutorials (any time I add a new feature, the default is to do what it did before, so it does not change anyone's existing site) [caption id="attachment_59767" align="aligncenter" width="630"] A new option added to the mix[/caption] Maybe there is a case where you do not want to list the tutorials column, only the examples, changing the option to 'Examples Only' yields this on the bottom: Or maybe you want just the Tutorials/ Resources column, just flip the option again to 'Tutorials Only' (or Resources in this example, other options let us change the label) And finally, for the case Jim described, we want nothing on the bottom, that's an option! Jim, if you are watching, this update is now available from GitHUb, just replace the ds106banker theme. Ipso Brickum I have a few more bricks to add, more mortar work. It's really really super duper helpful if you have feedback, feature requests, shoddy brick work reports, to use the Issues ares of the theme's repo. It's great to come across a few more sites using the theme, from the repo Readme: Foodworks Assignment Bank Middlebury College UBC Open For Learning Challenges University of British Columbia UDG Agora Challenge Bank University of Guadalajara Agora Project Mobile Social Media Learning Technologies Project Bank Aukland University of Technology The Connected Learning Make Bank The Still Web Contemplative Practices Bank All The Toys HumanMOOC Activity Bank Instructional Technology Assignments INDT501 at University of Mary Washington If you make use of the theme, one of the best things you can do is fork the GitHub Repo, add your site to the ReadMe, and submit a pull request so I can yank it back to the original site. Now, where is my trowel, I have some bricks to handle... Top / Featured Image: Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY) image from Torange.biz. Lots of good stuff for the bricklaying metaphor. [caption id="attachment_29048" align="alignnone" width="500"] Before yesterday, I could give proper creative commons attribution to the image I used here in one copy/paste action. Today it take 6.. 7.. 8 clicks and still I cannot copy the owner's name's name to attribute! Here gies cc licensed (take a wold guess at the license) flickr photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/60835699@N00/2077066872/ by some guy named Steve[/caption] Since 2009 I have maintained what was once just a greasemonkey script, but later a chrome extension that was designed primarily to help me blog with flickr creative commons attribution photos (it provided a string of text with proper attribution, license, and the img tag to embed the image). As of yesterday, when apparently yahoo flicked the switch, my cc attribution helper is in the trash; inert, dead, and with no hopes of coming back. In the trash. I spent about 3 hours today trying to parse the new code underneath the new Yahoo look, and felt I could parse most of the info like before with Xpath, but something in the new architecture renders the script dead, even for simple alert debugging checks. Yahoo is serving up some complex Javascripted dynamic content. Besides the ASCII bicycle in the HTML source (candy), you find fun trickery like: Yahoo's class is a facade of protection... neue! Charming. The helper may not be totally impossible to fix, but I trotted out beyond the limits of my browser scripting, the XPATH code I had used was already on those fringes. I doubt I have the chops to raise it from the dead. I think only Yahoo can enable this, so if this was useful, you can toss in a few votes for my suggestion as a feature. The creative commons licensing in the new groovy flickr is down below one of the three "charm" tabs; on your own images you actually see the license, but on anyone else's page you see either All Rights Reserved or Some Rights Reserved -- to know the license you have to hover or click. More clicks to attribute correlates with what is already a low level of attribution going down the tubes. [caption id="attachment_29049" align="alignnone" width="500"] Some Rights Hidden.. what is the license on a flickr image??[/caption] To give attribution to the owner of this image... I cannot even copy/paste Steve's name. Sorry Steve. The funny thing about the flickr interface is where its veneer thins, and the old flickr look pokes through. If you go to your own photo stream, and click "Edit" (I've never even done this before)- look, beneath! It's old flickr! [caption id="attachment_29051" align="alignnone" width="500"] Old flickr lurks beneath the new[/caption] And even more ironically, the flickr collection for creative commons? It's the same old page it was in 2011. It's old flickr with a new headband! The de-valuation of creative commons shows too- nowhere in the source code of a flickr creative commons image can you find any meta data or rdf triples or any shred of machine code ti indicate creative commons content. It's undiscoverable. Now I now many of you will tell me how bad flickr is, and how you have moved on to 500px or self hosted or ... I am going to go out on a wobbly limb; I kind of like the new design, It's modern. I just want to be able to more cleanly and efficiently do attribution. I believe in attribution. I still love flickr, this being my 10th year hoisting my photos there. Stupid romantic am I. Strongly. So back to the drawing board. The rights info and everything else is in there via the flickr API, so probably a better approach is some sort of bookmarklet tool that can provide the cut and past code in a pop up window. Rewriting the content into the flickr page was nice while it worked, but was always dependent on the structure of their pages having certain divs and ids and classes. That was always dicey. UPDATE Mar 27, 2014 No, I did not get a personal call of apology from Marissa Meyer. I have been seeking some images, and found a bit of a shorter step process to find attribution. I do my searches with the creative commons options at compfight. They actually have a decent attribution string you can copy, and then download the size you need. But I follow the link to the flickr image, this case one of the great collection of numbers by LEOL30. Under the 3 Dot menu, then to Download/All Sizes. From here is a decent attribution license string and the name of the photo owner you can actually copy with a mouse. One more click to copy the page URL. [caption id="attachment_29067" align="alignnone" width="500"] Getting to the new and less improved flickr attribution text[/caption] so at least I have "15" by LEOL30 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License http://www.flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/176206535/ I can get some HTML in my 500px size via the arrow coming out of the box icon so I can get [caption id="attachment_29069" align="aligncenter" width="433"] some cut and paste image code for a blog post[/caption] "15" by LEOL30 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License http://www.flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/176206535/ It's interesting that flickr puts an attribution to the photo owner in its own generated HTML tag, for the title attribute: [caption id="attachment_29070" align="aligncenter" width="258"] Hyperlink code generated from flickr share button[/caption] e.g. title="15 by LEOL30, on Flickr" How much extra effort would it take for them to modify that to read: title="15 by LEOL30, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License photo on Flickr" They can do this, if they wanted to. I feel your fatigue. I feel mine. But I keep finding them interesting! Call me a fanboy (it's a legit word in the dictionary). Tossing a linktribution to HeyJude (HeyJude! Hi) who has clued me into many new tools, I gave a go at Posterous: Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email. We launched in July 2008 and we've been steadily growing and adding features. We love sharing thoughts, photos, audio, and files with our friends and family, but we didn't like how hard it was... so we made a better way. That's posterous. We're super excited to see what happens when blogging becomes as easy as email, and we hope you enjoy posterous as much as we do. How wild- you can set up an account without... setting up an account! So more or less, any way you can email something- text, words, pictures, movies? to post@posterous.com or SMS to their number (in the US only for now, sorry), you can blog. (more…) So you can't get enough twitter action of the smackdowns of Reverend Jim "Bavaman" and his sidekicked D'Arcy Bike Wonder Norman? The Cabed Blogsader abhors anyone who dares to change out their blog theme, especially Norman! Stay tuned as the story unfolds! Make your own addition to this talke at http://www.batmancomic.info/ My wife and I have been taking a class together... nothing formal, but our city of Scottsdale offers a City Government 101 class, which meets every other week where you get to learn about a different department. It's been everything from finance to water resources to trash to libraries to police/fire... one of the highlights was a visit to the traffic control center where a huge screen allows staff to monitor and adjust the traffic lights across the entire city... and live demos from the police K9 unit... and also, our library which offers a lot of services, many of them now online such as their databases, including something soon that will allow e-check out of audio and video files for use on portable devices. A city can be a much more complex entity that one gives it credit for, taking a lot of what is offered for granted... Scottsdale puts a lot of money and effort into their Community Services, which is second only in employee size to the police department. Now I am sounding like a commercial, but I can say I've learned much more and can appreciate things better in a city just by knowing more about it. [caption id="attachment_8466" align="aligncenter" width="284" caption="BAGMAN NOW!"][/caption] It is about time we had a Bag in Charge we can trust, which is why I am on board to elect BAGMAN for President! My contibution is this campaign poster for the ds106 assignment BAGMAN Campaign Poster. Although not of the same political ilk, I was compulsed to reach back for another unlikely candidate, Richard Nixon in 1960: I found this at the Learn California site which has info on the Nixon Campaign: As radio and television gained popularity with the voting public in the 1940s and 1950s, image and media exposure became increasingly important to waging successful campaigns. Companies subsequently sprang up across the nation offering campaign management services. Richard Nixon hired two of the most preeminent and innovative of these companies to run his California campaigns for his 1960 presidential bid. I did this one in Photoshop CS5- some of this might not have been easily done in GIMP, but some of the principles should. Here's how... (more…) I'm allowed to brag a bit, right? Word came via email that a WordPress site I built last year for BC Corrections (hosted by and working with folks the Justice Institute of British Columbia) won a bronze prize from the Horizon Interactive Awards. I wrote several posts about the making of the BC Corrections Leadership site: https://corrleader.jibc.ca/ Sometime in early 2019 I heard from the project manager, Al, that he submitted the for an award. "Oh, that's nice, I thought." Then, Al emailed last week with the bronze news, this site did win an award in the Training/E-Learning category. That's very nice. It's at listed there under the "C" winners: So there were some 800 entries for Horizon Interactive Awards in 2018. And it looks like a lot of awards are given out across like 30 categories. But it still means something, right? I am proud of the way my colleague Peter and I could build upon a metaphor of maps and terrains and what functionality I could wrangle of the WordPress Total theme, some plugins for creating reusable blocks of content as well as Advanced Custom Fields, and a free contact form plugin that I could pass some parameters to prefill fields. I got a lot of JIBC CTLI support from Dennis Yip, especially for dealing with plugin requests and uploading of static content to a hosted web directory. Still, the best part of this project was designing the CorrLeader Navigator -- something that was barely a wish from the project spec for a means to make easily available what was new on the site: The idea is that the WordPress API is used to populate this mini HTML site with JSON driven data snapshot for all the content (it's about 1Mb of data but it's cached on the static site), and a means for any visitor to filter the content by categories and resource type. The secret sauce is that it can save these preferences on your device without leaving a single, trackable cookie; it's all local storage, which never leaves the device. I kind of thought this would be of a lot of interest, but maybe I never really explained it well enough. I tried. But even without it being noticed, for me it was a valuable exercise to build (and I owe Tom a thanks again for help with the ajax requests). While the project wrapped up in late November and likely much leadership development put on the racks for this ________ pandemic, there has been interest, and for the last two months I have gotten some work adding a set of new resources and self-paced training modules on the site. It's all bronzy! Featured Image: Most definitely not the most kosher re-use, but I fall on the knees of parody and obvious non-commercial use of a Monopoly game card, remixed to change the message of the "You Won 2nd Prize in a Beauty Contest: Collect $10" found in some forgotten corner of pinterist. cc licensed flickr photo shared by TakenByTina My previous post just outlined the kinds of things I put into a new site created with a beta version of WordPress 3 (I started with the first beta and honestly, it had more polish than most finished products) - I actually did not tell you much. Now it's time to get out and start hacking. In this post, I'll detail what I did to create three content types on the MIDEA site. You will see code, raw PHP out in the open. While there is an excellent plugin for creating custom content types (I did try it out and also parsed through the code to see what it did), it only did about 15% of what I wanted. Creating the content types are easy. But the plugin does nothing to help you add the form elements to create, edit the extra meta data I needed to add to the content. Please put your safety goggles on now. It's All About the functions.php, Baby This was a huge, and seemingly "doh"-like realization of the power of a single file inside most "beyond the basic" WordPress templates. The purpose of functions,php is to have a place to put functions you can call from anywhere in your templates. I'd seen it in there and noted that it typically did a bunch of formatting tasks for a template, or some custom things to handle the way a template needed to fish through Pages. But I'd done a of of template hacking and left a lot of code in the templates that would have been cleaner and more re-useable in this file. But we can do it for much more, and this is where we will put the code to create my three content types. I will admit that what I am spelling out here is a mashup of some code I found elsewhere and mostly what I kept banging on til it works. I know nothing about the WordPress process flow, and something I did may not be fullykosher or optimal. Thats my disclaimer. We start simple- to create our content types we need to add a few "hooks" or places in the WordPress normal flow opf whatever it does, that it does a few extra things for us. All we are saying is that when WordPress gets going (init) we want to add a "hook" to run the code we will out in a function named midea_custom_init. Its good practice to prefix your functions in this file with something unique that may collide with other WordPress code. I've gone the route of naming all my code functiions (well, most of them) with a "midea" prefix. It's in this new function that we launch our new content types. We need to do a few things for each custom content type: register it with wordpress (turn it on) set up any taxonomy (tagging capability) we may want. I set this up, but have yet to implement it. activate rewrite rules so WordPress hands off URLs correctly for the new content type. set up the template redirects so our content types have their own templates. To our code above, we will add our midea_custom_init function, first to set up the content type for organizations cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by NoiseProfessor This still cracks me up, and I had rustling around my iMovie a certain comercial that I wanted to mashup, so here it is, featuring the lonliest edtech repairman (note one f-bomb in the audio). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L83ccqViexA So first Lora, searches our MLX and then uses her MT Bookmarklet to ping a Correlation Meter that she can use in teaching about the correlation coefficient. She writes a blog entry... cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Florin Draghici That title may mislead you that I know something. It just sounds good. But as much as we seem to be in a world of digital information abundance, there is plenty of strategies in publishing of creating scarcity that does not truly exist. I know a number of colleagues do thing like pledge support for open access (I thought Martin weller had a post with his stand on this, and he did stick to an open access route to publishing of his book). This is a long end around to talk about how I feel getting, in the postal mail, notification of an agreement for a paper of mine that was published recently in a museum education journal. Now my rate of publishing is maybe one paper every 2 to 12 years, so its not much of a big deal .but going forward, I wont be part of any publishing that restricts access to the content. There has to eb a better way. This paper was done as a favor to a friend doing the editorship for a small journal. The letter today states: In compensation for the right to publish and license your article, we shall send you two complimentary copies of the Journal issue in which the article appears. In the event that there are two or more authors of an article, each co-author shall receive at least one complimentary issue. Authors of book reviews, research notes, and other ephemera shall each receive one (1) complimentary copy of the Journal issue in which their contribution appears. The Xxxxx xxxx shall provide no offprints but shall allow you to photocopy up to fifty (50) copies of your article, or provide fifty (50) electronic copies "“ with further reproduction by the recipients forbidden - without fee for non- commercial professional distribution. No electronic posting of your article is allowed without our written permission. I wonder what is scared or magical about the allowed number of reproductions, 50. Maybe I ought to hum a song. And they pretty much have full copyright of the work. This in no way means I am upset or irate, and frankly, the restrictions mean little to me. I share more directly on a daily basis bere on this blog, which is where my ideas roma free. It just seems a bit outlandish, like some vestige of an earlier mechanical age. As such, I can offer no link to the article. And as such, I wont mention its title, topic, or where it was published. And no, I have not come up with a better model for academic publishing, but then again, neither has the publishing business, and they have more to bring to the table than the same olf models of restriction to create value. It just does not work. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by roujo Again, academic publishing is not really all that important to me, but should it happen, it will be in a place where there is no restrictions to access the content. A few months back I started having some problems with my SamrtDisk Firelite portable FireWire drive... I keep all of my working documents on here, a mirror of my web site, as I shuttle it between home and work computers. After two failures, where Disk Warrior managed to save the day, I ordered a new one, as it had served me well for at least 2 years. The new shiny drive came, I copied my data to it, and thought I was back in business. Over the last few days, I noted the drive would not mount reliably on attaching the firewire cable. In fact, to even get it to light up, I had to severely bend the connection in the back of the drive hard to the side, just enough to get it to mount. Fearing a mechanical issue with the drive's ports, I started copying files back to safe location. Twice during the process, the drive disconnected/lost connection itself (I tried not even to touch the table). Is this more Calgarian hardware Voodoo? I knew for sure this brand new drive was hosed. I had tried several different FireWire cables, to no avail. I looked up the SmartDisk customer service number, called them. 8 minutes of smarmy music later (there should be laws against this), I was talking to a technician. She asked for computer informartion. Okay. I described the problem. She insisted I try another computer. It failed again on my spare G4 laptop. She asked me to do a different cable-- Is not 3 different cables, tried at both ends, enough? Finally, she agreed to send me an RMA, the package they send you so you can mail them the device, so they can look at it and confirm the hardware is bad. I gave all the information and was told an email would confirm the information. Twelve hours later, there was no email, nor was it mired in my spam filters. I created an account via their online support site, explained the situation again, asked for confirmation that the RMA was actually processed. At 30 hours, there was no response on their online customer service message board, so I called again. This time, it was 11 minutes of smarmy hold music, then the "We value your business blather, but I had the option to leave a phone message. Explaining it for a third time, aiming to maintain composure, I pleaded to receive a confirmation that they are sending the RMA, that it had been processed. Please, oh, please, please, can I just have a wee bit of customer service? Now this time frame is not all that long, and I have had far worse customer service. And the internet, instant, or semi-instant gratification, has spoiled my sense of patience. But if you post on a web site an electronic customer service system, I am going to get my fur up really bad if it does not respond in even a 28.8 kbs speed of Internet time. Don't set up a half-arsed service system that does not give service or respond as it says it will. Or provide a realistic statement of response time so my expectations are not revved up. But heck, their response is not anywhere as non existent as my requests recently to Apple SmartDisk can still win the race ;-) Following remotely from a train as our friends Brian, Keira, Grant bring us from Quebec via ds106 radio not only the sounds of the student protests but the wise words of Harry: https://twitter.com/DrGarcia/status/216245077989789696 The scene there shared by Grant: We managed to be on the wrong street every night while in Montreal to witness the student protests, in fact, we just saw photos from Sherbrooke and University today's activity where we walked this morning to the train station. There was a woman last night in the convenience store on Duluth who relayed a conversation of some people lamenting the repetition of it all, while the store owner's only lament was losing a pan. There seems to be a veiled discomfort, even a tinge of embarrassment, or worse, apathy like "What the F**** are they complaining about?" Just like the occupy movement last year, I feel on the curious periphery, and have this river of joy that where-ever you sit on an issue, you should sit somewhere. The mere fact that people are exercising a democratic right to voice disagreement is something to celebrate, not get our shorts in an uproar. Has society gotten so far from our roots of disagreement that is it all discomfortable? Anyhow, what rung with me is that simple statement, "Freedom is Fun" - should we not have joy in this freedom? I'm sitting on a train trying to figure what to do with this message. Brian asked me to plug it into Google Translate, which on first pass came out with the horrible "la liberté est un plaisir" which thankfully Bryan Jackson jumped in with the more audiophonic: https://twitter.com/bryanjack/status/216249862914707456 (I am playing with the new Wordpress auto embed o twitter statuses...) I took this version into Google and had it speak it aloud, which I was able to record in WireTapPro tp have as an audio file I began mixing it with some audio I had collected in the StoryBox, one track of some kids in Hobart Tasmania chanting in a park, and anther of some kids and a plane overhead that i recorded... somewhere. I don;t know what this means with the mechanical french voice floating by. This is not even a ds106 assignment, but something about working with the media and thinking about this situation resonates, and at least keeps me from just rushing past this event like the passerby I am. Liberté est Amusant If anything working on this may have me pronouncing one French expression this week that I did not butcher horribly. I thought this was going to be a small digital cleanup project I could cross off my list over the holiday break. But like many tasks, when you pop open the hood (bonnet for those elsewhere), there ends up being more than you expected. There is a publication I wrote in (gasp) 1989 that I want get online. It is digital, yes, but the challenge may be hinted at this photo that shows the media it was stored on. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/7566347376 These Old Discs flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Yes that top floppy disk was the one where the files were stored to write this: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50789445501 Yawn Worthy Title flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I imagine scores and scores of readers here are eager to have online access to "Ash Flow Zones of the Bishop Tuff: Detailed Mapping with Landsat Thematic Mapper", my 1989 MS Thesis in Geology from Arizona State University. The abstract should get you craving more, more, more: Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data is used to map in detail the distribution of ash-flow zones of the Bishop Tuff exposed in the Volcanic Tableland, near Long Valley, California. Laboratory data demonstrate systematic changes in the reflectance of the Bishop Tuff associated with degree of welding and vapor-phase crystallization. Reflectance spectra of vitric, non-welded tuff have absorption features indicative of ferric iron and water, the latter in pore spaces and as well as in hydrated glass. With greater degrees of welding, reflectance drops with the change from ferric to ferrous iron in increasing amounts of opaque, low reflectance magnetite. The water absorptions disappear with the loss in porosity and decreasing proportion of glass. Vapor-phase crystallization of silica and alkali feldspar, minerals lacking absorption features in the visible and near infrared wavelengths, produce flat reflectance spectra.Reflectance derived from the TM data are semi-quantitatively compared to the laboratory reflectance measurements and show consistent trends between the mapped geologic units. These units identified from the TM data and verified in the field include non-welded tuff, two types of partly welded tuff (vitric and crystalline matrix), and three types of vapor-phase crystallized tuff (moderately crystalline, strongly crystalline, and oxidized). Individual fumarolic mounds were recognized and mapped from the TM images. Three alluvial units dominated by rhyolite, granite, and granodiorite were differentiated in both laboratory reflectance and TM data.Strongly crystalline vapor-phase units and the fumarolic mounds overlie the thickest zones of dense welding. This indicates that thickest accumulations of the Chidago lobe are along the east side of its present outcrop area, and reflect an east dipping pre-existing surface covered by the pyroclastic flows. The distribution of the Tableland lobe is mapped from the TM data and includes several thin flow units further north than previously reported. A previously unrecognized alluvial sheet of rhyolitic gravel deposited on top of the Bishop Tuff is also mapped. This sheet correlates with the resurgent doming of Long Valley caldera that initiated overflow of a Pleistocene lake occupying the caldera. This correlation assigns an approximate age of 0.6 Ma for the deposition of the alluvial sheet. Chidago Canyon must have been incised prior to 0.5 Ma, when the lake had dropped to a level at which most drainage was through the Owens River. Relative age relationships observed in the TM data bracket the age of faulting east of Casa Diablo Mountain between deposition of the alluvial sheet and carving of Chidago Canyon, or between 0.5 and 0.6 Ma. Technically it is in digital format, I have the original files I put into MS Word 3 for Mac, composed on a Mac Plus. Over the years I tried to open them in a modern version. Maybe 10 years ago I read somewhere that I needed to get them first into Word 4 which then could export to a modern format. I even bought a copy of Word 4 on eBay but I could not get it to install on even my old Mac. I forgot about it until a few weeks ago. I took a dip into the search realms again, and came across a link to a Word Legacy File Filter sitting inside, yes folks, a tilde space for someone at Columbia University. With a little bit of poking around I find that "~em36" is Edward Mendelson. And just for curiosity click sake, going to the main entry to Edward's tilde space opens all kinds of curious rabbit holes to click open. To me, these kinds of web corners are infinitely more interesting than seeing who is reacting with an emoji to a tweet someone linked that I was mentioned in (can you tell how effing bored I am with twitter?) Back to the topic. The Word Legacy File filter looked promising, but I would need a Windows machine to try it out. Despite my rants, twitter can be useful when deployed with an ask: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1333529316693475328 I probably did not have to mention Ken Bauer, but in typical fashion he responded with an affirmative https://twitter.com/ken_bauer/status/1333530239155232772 And in a few hours, my five Word Files, some 31 years old, were there for me to open in the copy of Word on my computer in 2020. Before I get to share what I found, a special hat tip to Frederick Graver for connecting me to the Macintosh Garden, as I found some gems of old game software there I used for projects in the mid 1990s (that's another post) https://twitter.com/fgraver/status/1333668229277999108 On a quick check, I could see in the files Ken sent back that the majority of the formatting was there. My plan was first to get a clean and pretty version in Word so I could generate a PDF, and then look at making a web friendly version. While everyone's impulse these days screams PRESSBOOKS! PRESSBOOKS! PRESSBOOKS! I wanted to try something different and something I could host on my own domain. Sure, I could get it inside a WordPress site easy enough, but at this point I would also like to stretch the platform skills a bit. This seems a job for a static HTML site generator. People say that Jekyll is old, but it is widely used and there are tons of themes. Maybe Just the Docs (?) I also thought of Hugo (I had a run with it 4 years ago for a project) and know that D'Arcy has been putting it to use as his main site. Maybe the Docsy theme? Yes I could go on and on here. Maybe Grav. Ghost. Docsify. Or do it as a wiki? One could tool on forever. My hope is once I have it in Word, to run a Markdown conversion. Then I spent like an hour trying to futz around getting the damned tabs formatted right on the table of contents. It looks like the style sheets survived (and oh did I have an array of styles used in 1989, but glad I used them). And then I realized how many literally pasted in photos were in my thesis! I have like 80 figures, a majority are one or more photographs. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50788691288 Old School Pasted Images flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I was working on a the 9 inch and black and white screen of a Mac Plus. There was no Photoshop or inserting digital images. I had to make the layouts for figures, captions, even sometimes scale bars like above. The photos are printed 35mm photos that I put into the thesis by cutting (with scissors) and pasting with spray adhesive. There are vague memories of doing this in the wee hours of the Mac Lab in Physical Sciences F-Wing. So these will all need to be scanned. And I have a number of diagrams that were likely created in MacPaint and saved as PICT files. I have the files, and am poking around trying to find something that can open these relicts (downloading a trial version of Graphic Converter). The satellite image itself I do have in a photo format. The original data was on a large VAX tape reel (which I have somewhere) that I recall my advisor sent to a NASA center where a negative was generated, and photographic prints made. Sometime in the 1990s I got this version assembled, adding some text overlays Also in the back was the map I created meant as an overlay for the satellite image. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50789450621 Maps Too! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I am very fuzzy on how I made this map. I imagine the legend and labels were done on the Mac and printed out. The map itself was likely done by tracing on onion skin overlay. There was a nice surprise in the Appendix... code! I had a small program I had written in maybe FORTRAN. What I can deduce is that it took the data from a scene (7 different values corresponding to wavelength bands) and used a matrix math to determine the best 3 bands to optimizing the display. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50788692468 There's Code in My Thesis! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) But wait there's more! Tucked into the back was one more figure, that was not part of the official thesis. It was a copy of a Mary Worth comic strip from what I can see has a copyright date of 1990, so it was after my thesis. The plot line seems clearly taken from my MS thesis! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50788690003 That Time My MS Thesis Showed in Mary Worth flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) "What are you trying to say, Essex?""The boy included satellite images in his thesis, Kelly!""From up there a camera sees evidence of faults in the earth's surface.""Earthquakes?""These look like bad examples of abstract art, Essex!""They're computerized images of 'TM data' from Landsat satellites!" If Essex had access to my thesis, he could have explained to Kelly how the reflectance data of field samples provided ground truthing to conform the ability of a satellite to discern differences on welded tuff not visible to the human eye. Anyhow, since this project is going to take some time, look for an ongoing series of posts about its progress. It's a tuff project ;-) Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50789554277 2021/365/1 Red Book Project flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Hardly Hollywood, but I've been focussed this week in the MCLI movie studio (e.g. my G4 TiBook). We are preparing an online opening for our Ocotillo Action Groups that will include some video welcome messages from our faculty co-chairs... as an introduction of their efforts this year and a teaser to invite people from Maricopa to join in some asynchronous discussion board activity. This meant setting up not only the video sessions with 8 faculty, but we decided to add greetings from our chancellor, 2 vice chancellors, and a dean, so over the last two weeks I was setting up the lights and camera (Canon GL/1) in at settings in our office, the administrative offices on the top floor, at a college site, and one pair that decided it was appropriate to film at the Desert Botanical Garden (mid day it was about 105 degrees). This week it was logging clips in Final Cut Pro, capturing video, doing some basic edits, tossing in some fake Ken Burns-like pans over screen shots.... It's been about a year since I was inside FCP, but it came back quickly. I end up saving in DV stream QuickTime (to burn a DVD), then compressing to QuickTime for streaming, and running through Discreet Cleaner to generate Windows Media PLayer and Real formats. Oh, I also am making a VHS tape of it so our IT folks can digitize it for our internal IP/TV video network. The big unknown is the demand this will create... I've arranged to have the Windows Media and Real content hosted on one of our college sites that has production level Helix servers, and I'll have the QuickTime running from our XServe. I'll share a URL once we're out of the gate (and I am sure it has not completely imploded), as I am interested in having folks external chime in to our efforts... D'Arcy recently exalted MT Spamkiller with proofs from his blog how the spam cockroaches were being blocked. I had not peeked at my MovableType activity log in a while, and was overwhelmed at the number of comment spams that were stopped by Jay Allen's MTBlacklist plug-in. I shudder at the thought of doing the manual deletion I did just a few weeks ago. I can hear an entire army of soliders smashing their heels down on the comment spam cockroaches. (more…) Scott Leslie was feeling his ds106 radio love at the ETUG meeting... I'm thinking of trying some more multiple camera shots to animGIF-ize. We all had quite a bit of fun with http://bigassmessage.com... for example, Try this one on. In checking out some of the student visual design work for ds106 (which the CUNY students are really going far and powerful with), I could not resist one more Macguffin. A better real estate decision could have avoided dealing with that whole building full of freaks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogfqfnt2Aaw Thinking again on the idea of a regular challenge of a "Daily Creative", this one took me all of 15 minutes from idea to screen capture to plastering text on in photoshop. Writing the blog post may have been the most time consuming (and most important). These Macguffins are addictive indeed. Double the buzzword fun! I've only glazingly-eyed scanned some things people are writing about "Personal Learning Environments", but I just wonder if you create a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) on something, does that mean it really exists? But I understand, embrace, and cheer the notion that the tapestry of free, loosely connected, highly personal technologies (and so many of them are like, "Web 2.0") that have the nice viral growth of use tat is running smack up and against the philosophy, structure, rigidness, lethargym fees, of our "established" educational technologies. I like the tension. Bring it on. Like Leigh and to an extent James, I feel like, "so what? the whole dang 'net is my PLE". What is it if you give it a name? I am more than open to being wrong, and guess I should read a bit more on the work being done, but at this point, it seems a bit, well, vapor-ous. By the time I figure it out, it will be up to the 2.0 version. And I still may not get it. Are tag clouds, as Read/Write Web suggests, entombed? dead? On my fleet of NMC WordPress site I am shifting to using tags more on posts as an organizer, and tossing some clouds on the pages (see lower right sidebar of Pachyderm Services). Its a bit easier on these sites that have a relatively low number of posts to go and "back tag" content. But here at the old Yeller CogDogBlog, there are a lot of old bones- this, when published will be number 2100. And my tagging in the past, has been, well spotty. On the other hand, I was never too rigorous with the categorizing, so I am thinking as far as being effective, the approaches may be tied for last place over here. Never the less, I am more of a loose ranging tagger than a cubby-hole categorizer, so I have started tagging posts, and swapped out the old Category listing on the side bar to a tag cloud (I use the option to randomize the order, mmm love randomness), my template code is: And I tweaked the Archives template in a few places to do a proper header and title. I have my templates tuned to display the links to the tag archives when used, as well as the WP Tags to Technorati plugin which links the same tags to who knows what at Technorati (see the bottom of this post, if I remember to tag it!) To enable the switch, I used the built -n WordPress tools to convert my old categories to tags (under Manage -> Import), so for now, the cloud is likely heavily weighted my the old categories. How do they stack up? Putting them side by side, we have, weighing in at about 140 different ones, are my sloppy pile of "Dog Tags" versus the neatly stacked 32 different CatDog-egories: There is no real answer as to which is "best" (although my headers show my bias) - it's like asking for a definitive answer to the world's favorite vegetable (though, I am sure it is not beets. Nope. Nasty. Yeccch). I like tags, but pretty much, in WordPress you can make categories work like tags (multiple associations), so it more boils down to your preferences. I'm a tagger, what are you? Read/Write Web: "Bring out your dead!" Tag Clouds: "I'm not quite dead yet...." One year ago I drove to the local Humane Society animal shelter in Payson, carrying the cocktail of excitement and nervousness. After almost 8 years of being without a canine companion it was time, enabled by my starting of an 18 month contract project that assured me work from home. I'd been the Dog-less CogDog. No more. I had looked at the dogs available for adoption on their web site and saw some prospects. It dawned on my during the drive that I had never even been to a shelter before! They offered me to look around when I go there. The first dog I saw in the corner cage was barking loudly, but had interesting colors. He was not one that was on the web site. There were two cute black labs, named Batman and Robin. I was very tempted by labs. The first dog I got a chance to meet I think was "Buster" some kind of Australia cattle dog mix. He was friendly, playful, and I felt comfortable walking with him. I almost said "yes" but then thought, "this is how you always buy a vehicle, one test drive and buy." I asked to look at that first dog I had seen, the loud one with the mottled colors. His name was Felix. I remember going in the yard first with him, and one of the aides telling me what they knew of him. This is what I knew. I sat on a low curb, and Felix walked over and leaned in to me hard with his body. He chose me. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Meeting Felix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] I knew the dog I wanted. But I wanted to give any room for second thoughts, so I told them I needed to prep my house (true) and I would return in two days. So technically Felix's "Gotchya Day" (thanks Pat Lockley) is April 6. But Felix had his veterinarian appointment today, so afterward, I took him over to the Humane Society so visit the friendly folks there. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]We're Just Visiting, Pal flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] They of course remember Felix, and he put on a show of excitement and yowling out loud, what he does more and more when he is excited. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/849334258262876160 I cannot say enough about the Humane Society Shelter in Payson and all they did to process the adoption (and process me). I must have gushed something today like, "You have no idea what this dog means to me." You want data? How about 717 photos of Felix posted to flickr in that year? According to today's visit, Felix weighed in at 73 pounds; he has grown since he was only 54 pounds a year ago! ironically, from all the walking we have done, I have almost shed the same amount of weight he gained. This photo, taken, April 7, the second day Felix was home with me, may be my all time favorite [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2016/366/98 "Did Someone Say Go for a Ride?" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] It's become (cropped) my avatar in most places. Bryan Mathers made it into a graphic for me: It's likely to be etched into an arm soon ;-) A month later my sister sent me a water color painting she made of that photo! It's now framed in my bedroom. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Art in the Mail flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Most people, with help, get his name right: I could write another 10,000 words about all the things we have done this year. I will spare you (it's in the captions of the photos!) But every day, he puts things into perspective: 700 photos and a gushy blog post do not even come close to the spirit of this humble dog. Thank you, buddy. Featured image: combo of my own photos from April 4 2016 Meeting Felix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license and today, April 4, 2017 Waiting for the Doc flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) For our new CDB readers, we have been experimenting a few months with adding Trackback records to all items in our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). This allows a way for each item to potentially record an entry everyitm someone describes an MLX item in a weblog. And we also have included a TrackBack summary tool for our entire collection. But still we new, and were reminded by David Carter-Tod (and also noted by Randy at CarvingCode) that there is still not much of a pool of people who can easily send those TrackBack messages or pings (Limited now to MovableType users although Dave says it is coming soon to Manila and Radio) . So, as one first crude cut, we have a new feature of every MLX item that provides a web form for registering a new ping. It is still not nearly as elegant as a tool that can autodetect the Trackback record and automatically send a ping. In fact since SiT's Manila site lacks a TrackBack function, I used a new feature in the MLX to post a TrackBack ping to the item he blogged about as if David had done it himself. But here it goes, along with a recap of the TrackBack features we have added to the MLX. (more…) Digital in the Wild: Community Using Technology in Post-Katrina New Orleans NOLA Blogger panel session at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. A panel of five community activists (Ted Cash, Bart Everson, Alan Gutierrez, Sandy Rosenthal) will present their perspectives on how the levee catastrophe in New Orleans catapulted the need for digital information and communication in the community. In various ways, the panelists have each been involved in using technology since the storm to assist in the transformation of the city. They will share their perspectives on why technology has been critical to the lives of New Orleanians since Katrina, and how. Moderated by Chris Reade - never expected to be involved in rebuilding or recovery. "Digital in the Wild" coined by Alan Gutierrez not about "cool new tech"- technology was not even the pivotal role. After the storm, you would ave thought a Treo would be useful, but it was a brick. Every switching station was under water, but the key tool was text messaging. Before the storm few people here text messaged, but now it is common. Broadband cards have revolutionized social services in the area. Sandy Rosenthal intro. Began as education mission that the effects of Katrina was not a natural disaster but a man made one. Investigative assessment about what happened here, outside of Corps of Engineers. Needed citizen support. Created a one minute PSA to Youtube. Got 24,00 views in 24 hours- not accident, they reached out and alerted membership and contacts. (see YouTube channel) Alan Gutierrez intro. Was in Ann Arbor during Katrina, following CNN. When levees broke was looking for more in depth and detailed info than news was providing. Started looking in web forums at local news sites, which became inundated with posts- the BBS was really old (1998 vintage tech) and clunky. But participants stepped in with tremendous user support for themselves. Having interest in social media, as software developer, understood that there was need to get more info out there. When people got to NOLA, they dropped the social tech and went back to old methods- coffee shops, human networks etc. Got interested in tools to help capture those conversations. Bart Everson intro. multimedia artist, teacher at Xavier. Lives in mid city New Orleans, got 6 feet of water in house, but had raised basement, not much roof damage. Able to move back in quickly, but were only people in blocks nearby, no electric. Around Christmas 2005 finally got electric. Took internet a year to return. No newspaper, no mail. Text messaging was key for communication. Hooked up with neighborhood organization previously saw how it operated as opaque, but after Katrina became ideal vehicle to support recovery. Not like a homeowners organization, more like an interface to government. Helped them set up blog for them. Started working with other local agency groups involved in recovery efforts. Ted Cash intro. Tech support for neighborhood organization, Common Ground Relief. Open source work, computer recycling. Helped people get access to tech. Set up system of repeater from cruise ship to relay network access to neighborhoods, satellite based city labs. People involved learned how to do this as they went. Chris Reade intro. Was based in Baton Rouge- became in sense "New Orleans West". Had work to coordinate and connect displaced businesses. Asked to help develop centralized org to coordinate relief agency activities. Need for information, to connect people. Developed "Yahoo for Recovery"- LouisianaRebuilds.info - calls it low tech-- "yahoo about 6 years ago" = not fancy web 2.0 tech, basic, but filling need to share information. Question. How did your tech needs change from before flood to today? Ted: A lot of people still lack conventional internet access (no cable, DSL). Have no money for this. Uses open source, labs run on Ubuntu (Linux OS). Set up 300 PCs from recycled computer (Green Project). Bart: Mobile tech became much more important. Before, did not see need to use since was on computer all day. After, it became critical. Still uses same Blackberry first bought after flood. Neighborhood has needs to compile data, wikis have become useful. Most technologies are solutions looking for a problem, here there were problems in need of technologies, deployed common tech in unexpected ways. Collected common information for per square foot costs of roofing, etc. Alan: Still huge need for new tech to be developed here. Her there was a community but needed to find tech to bring them together. Like opening scene of Lost, looking at destroyed plane to say, how can we use this? Uses wikis, wordpress- using it less than traditional daily journaling, used it more as a database tool (see homes posted at Squandered Heritage). Site owner looks at site stats, to see for example, when contractors are looking at information. Turned into community activism vehicle. Sandy: Wikipedia was important- as an organization had license to add external links to Levees.org to Wikipedia articles related to their work. Became number one referrer to their site. She monitor 10 articles a day. Question: What didn't exist pre-Katrina that exists now that makes people more vital? Sandy: Many more activist groups, actually so many she gets confused. Who would have thought there would be so many? Alan: Much greater savvyness, people became "Knowledge workers" looking at so many sources how to 'triage information', what was important, what could be ignored-- towards an end. Bart: Much more cohesion among blogger here, reading and commenting to each other. Not enough news if I just read newspaper or listen to radio. Has become a real community unto itself. Started local dinners among bloggers. Has put together local conferences, not just virtual community. Ted: Company has developed repeater devices that are much easier to use Meraki Repeaters. Question. What ahs failed to live up to hype for what to should do? Ted: Earthlink free wifi was major failure. Alan: Offers from high tech firms to do social networking not recognizing the dynamics of the local communities, who are not interested to quick hopping to new networked spaces (a digital divide?). Block Captain concept of local people who went house to house to share information, who was there, contatc info, made basic Excel database. "Not necessarily tech savvy, but are now information savvy". Chris: Broadmoor was not a well known neighborhood, but became significant after for its level of activism. Power of internet to mobilize local people. Sandy: Skyrocketing cost of advocacy. To use company to help generate one click letters to congress went from $1200 to $20,000 per year. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by andyp uk While I am intrigued by the technology and promise of open badges, and respect people who are part of the movement, it's one of those things that Might Be Important But I Don't Get All That Excited About. Or it's like forms of art I know I should appreciate but just do not get. And it's just too easy to take a cheap shot and invoke Gold Hat. Before you think I am going to bark and growl about badges, I am not. I am intrigued to see how they develop. What's been swirling around in the back corners of my cortex is the idea of relying on external entities validation of who we are, what we can do, etc. And this goes further back than the digital era. That's the story below. As Ira Glass says, "Stay with us..." So as key as earning credit. recognition for skills achieved, demonstrated in or outside of formal education might be, to be it is of equal or even more importance that we continually maintain our own digital space that demonstrates who we are, what we do, rather then relying on Google or other entities to define out reputation. That is a prime reason I keep at this blog space, rounding up to its tenth anniversary next year, as part of the Jon Udellian concept I value of narrating the work I do. It's why the efforts of UMWDomains is so vital to some of us. You can have third parties and analytics assign you a number (or worse), and you can narrate yourself. I am committed that the latter is crucial, though of course it does not alone act as a certified "thing". But it provides a lot of key context. Frankly I see open badges and managing your own digital self as complementary, yet I worry people might opt for a more automated approach, because it might be less effort. And in life, there are always shades of complexity with being certified (reaching for but leaving behind the scare quotes). While driving back to my Arizona home last week, I opted to take the more scenic, less Interstate-y, route across New Mexico by detouring through Socorro to US 60. It was a chance to get some authentic local food. I actually broadcast this story out loud on ds106 radio, so maybe 3 people heard it. I will try and re-tell from memory. My higher education experience started in 1981 at the University of Delaware, supported by my parents financial backing. I began as a Computer Science major, and hated it, after a year grew to dislike the abstract programming exercises. In my sophomore year, I convinced my folks that I would be happier switching from a field of certain employment to one that interested me more, Geology, one of much lower job prospects. And that's what kind of people my parents were, they questioned me, but supported my wishes. I like to think they saw this experience as more than a track into a job. Maybe they would have paid for me to go to thimble making school. I did well academically in those two years, in some measure because I had learned how to succeed in school, how to take tests, how to write papers, etc. I had a good record on paper. My analytics would be bright green lights. Looking back, however, I was so immature, with not a great deal of world awareness, and a boat load of insecurity hidden below a veneer of youthful bravado. I was rather unformed. I felt like my life needed an adventure boost. I had not even traveled farther west than the Appalachian Mountains, certainly not out of the country; heck I had not even been to New York City. And it was not the first time that I got the idea that a geographic move would put a spark into life. Since I was not very interested in my new academic field, I got the idea to transfer to a school out west. When you study geology in the East Coast (this is a great exaggeration), but you have to drive somewhere to maybe scrape a bush away to see a rock. Out west, as I imagined, and later found to be true, all that textbook stuff is laid out naked to see. I did some research (pre-internet, I could not google anything) and found a school with one of the best repuations in the field, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology located in Socorro, New Mexico. I applied, and with my solid certifications, was accepted, and flew out there in September 1983. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Again, my parents were there, I assume they paid for the flight. In fact I have no memory of this part, I knew I would have flow from Baltimore to Albuquerque, yet I have no idea how I got 70 miles south. I did not ride a bus, take a cab- I am guessing there might have been a van from the university. It was exactly what I had asked for, a climate, scenery, and environment completely and radically different from where I had spent my life. And I panicked. The differences overwhelmed me. I was so not ready for this. I was so unformed as a young adult, though I did not do it at the time. it makes me wonder now, even as I look back 30 years with a much more experienced eye, even how my future self will look back at me now. But that's a tangent. The entire 2 or 3 days there is a blur I cannot remember. If I had stuck it out, I am sure I would have acclimated, befriended, and gone in a life direction that I can only make up where it would have gone. Maybe I own a mine now. But I felt like I needed to escape, and before classes started so my parents did not accrue tuition bills (I actually never even talked about this period with them later in life, missed opportunity). I probably told them and NMT officials that I was off kilter with my diabetes. Again, its all blurred, except I know that I was flying home (again on ticket probably bought at new cheap cost to my parents). Life played itself out, a semester off, then one at the University of Maryland, a transfer back to Delaware, and a wonderful series of steps that included a trip west to Wyoming for summer field camp, going to grad school in Arizona, falling into a tech job at the Maricopa Community Colleges.. to here. Like everyone's life paths, there are many branches we can only speculate about. We can wonder at the "what ifs" but its only useful if we extract something learned from them. But last week I felt the need to just stand there and wonder, and reflect. And I have almost nothing to document that experience, no photos, no journals. no ideas written down. But more than that, I had all the paper certification to show I was ready for that educational experience, and I was so un-ready on a personal, developmental level. It actually shudders me to think how unformed I was. A work in progress, as is now. These things are important, the things that aim to ascertain what we as individuals can do. It's just not the whole picture, not that there is really anything that can capture that. Our digital selves ought to be as nuanced and complex as a real selves. There is no grand conclusion here, just that take badges and certifications for what they are. They have value, but to me, its only in the context of quite a bit more do they make sense. Do I get my Long Boring Blog Post Badge now? Doh! I wrote this two days ago and forgot to click publish! n00b! It's the first week of classes for the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course and I am already lapsing behind. As a Massively Open Online Course, maybe I cna get lost in the crowd of 2000 gazillion students. Would you believe a dog ate my homework? Despite my success at gaming the school system on high school and college (meant- learning how to take standardized tests well), I've become a sloppy lazy learner in my adult years. I have a lot of trouble with structured courses because... everything I have learned in my last 16 years on the ed tech field has been through what my teachers are going to call Connectivism- I learned what I needed, when I needed, from networked sources. I did miss the first emails, overlooking I had to sign up to get them. I do like the version of resources Stephen has created with his tools, The Daily. There's probably going to be too many ways to connect in the connectivism course. I see the giant list of discussion sin Moodle and think... do I hear water running outside? Is it dinner? So I am not going to try and draw some diagrams of key points, and to be honest, I am skimming the readings. To be honest, the whole "is it a theory or not?" discussion is a bit of a yawner. Does it matter if we define it? Why are people so doggedly tied to a theory? Is one theory fit all? I kind of see useful bits across the spectrum. But the bickering back and forth, the battle to quote the most obscure academic reference, is, well for me... uninteresting. I care more about what we do with all this. At the same time, I have lived, worked, breathed in this connected space for as long as I have been in the field, and even a bit before that. I fully grok that the ways I learned, a lot of rote memorization of facts, is quite Victorian indeed. It was so important to know the capitals of 50 states (quick! What is the capital of North Dakota?), yet we are questioning whether it is more important to "know" that (which to me is imprinted in te recall area of my mind... Pierre, yes I remembered that I did not google it) or to "know how to get" that. It's a trivial example. And yet, I am more interested in knowing or thinking about... how may times were captial cities placed somewhere unlikely between two rivals? I "know" (or think I do) this was the case in Arizona (Phoenix did not exist, but both Prescott and Tucson vied to be capitals) and Australia (Canberra was plunked down halway from Melbourne to Sydney). And there is the interesting part to chew on. I have to acknowledge i work on a base of many things I have stuffed into my memory; ity does not always come from the cloud. So it cannot be all connectivism all the time. There is some foundation the ability to connect rides on. So I don;t know where this all goes. I am doubtful of my own resilience to stay with a fixed pace course when there are so many networked things I have to dabble in. I'm already time challenged with leaving Wednesday night to stay on Phoenix, fly to San Francisco Thursday for meetings Friday, and then jump to China on Sunday. Yes, the dog ate my homework this week and next. Good dog. Given a recent spate of web nostalgia for my TCC keynote, it was a natch to play with something for the tilde club site Jim Groom (more likely Tim Owens) set up https://twitter.com/jimgroom/status/578748877970370560 I was inspired by ~dkernohan's classy act of frames. I did a heap of frame-based web sites in the 1990s, it was then a sensible way to create a layout with common header and sidebar links. These sites included (none of these work anymore, they were perl script searches of an indexed text data file) an index of Community College Web sites, examples of Teaching and Learning on the Web (notice the syndication XML link), the Multimedia Authoring Web. But for my tilde web thing, I wanted to do something with a LOT of frames in it. Somewhere on a beach or a plane I envisioned something like the Simon game, with each frame being a button that would generate a sound. My frame monster includes 16 different HTMl files that are pulled together in the layout in the index.html file, it uses 9 nested framesets. These are doing by chopping the page into either rows or columns, and putting in them either the HTML link for a static content, or a nested frameset to fill in the row/column with another level of frames. I am not going to explain much about frames, since I have a tutorial I wrote in the mid 1990s; still it's a nested monster. The Weblodium NOTE: This site uses old school HTML frames, but apparently your browser does not support this 1990s feature. Try the sad dull alternative. Each frame source page I made so the entire frame is clickable, and when activated it changes it's background color and text color of an H1 title, plus it starts (or stops) a looping sound file. Stop reading and try it out now-- http://ds106.club/~cogdog/weblodium/. The structure of each frame source is about the same- it uses an external stylesheet and some jQuery to make the action work. Let's breakdown the one second in form the right: An external stylesheet style.css has commonly used CSS; the style tag below is to override the main stylesheet for the headings- they need different amounts of top padding depending on which frame it is. Not also a style sheet link to the Font Awesome CSS - this is a slick way yo have icons in your site that are actually a font and not a graphic (hence are smaller and has a few other tricks) This is really the entire content. The container div wraps everything; it's CSS is sized to fill the frame and have a hand cursor when mouseovered. The stuff inside the H1 tag is how you put in this case, an image of some cubes from the Font Awesome library (see the examples for ideas what is possible with this code). The last thing is the audio tag with it's src attribute linking to the sound file which will be played. By not including controls in the tag, we had the audio player start/stop buttons (we will do this via JavaScript), plus we do add the loop parameter so it plays continuously until the frame is clicked again to stop. All of the work is done with jQuery. We have an array of background colors ($bcolors) and text colors ($tcolors), and a variable $bstate, which is either 0 (the audio is not active) or 1 (the audio is active). A click function is set for the entire #container div. The first thing we do is flip the $bstate value (if it is 0, we are turning on the item, so set it to 1). We change the background colors and the foreground h1 text according to the value of $bstate. Lastly we either play the sound (#instrument is the audio tag ID) if it is not playing, or if it is playing, we might be shutting the lights off. I could probably code this more cleanly, e.g. the best might be a single configuration file that would be used to swap our entirely different different sounds and button characteristics for the entire instrument. Its a tad hard coded now. Sue me. The sounds were grabbed really quickly from mostly Freesound and are quite ready to be retired for a better set. For my main ds106 tilde club site http://ds106.club/~cogdog/, I have some bits from real pages I made in the mid 1990s: The top GIF is something I made for ds106 as a play on the early kinds of GIFs. The background texture I used on web sites in the stone age. And the stuff at the bottom is all dynamic generated JavaScript. today = new Date(); document.write(''); document.write(''); document.write(''); document.write('Finally, according to my IndiGloWebWatch®, it is now '); document.write(today.toLocaleString() ); document.write(' (Did you really need a web browser to tell you that?) '); document.write(' Furthermore, you are visitor number:'); document.write(''); document.write( Math.floor( today.getSeconds() * today.getTime() * Math.sqrt(today.getMinutes() ) )); document.write(' since April 1963. Do you believe that? Why not? '); document.write('because of my own hokey javascript'); document.write(''); And that's what we do in ds106.club, we enjoy the sounds of the musical Weblodium. Next slide. I'll refrain from writing about the old days when I'd blog a presentation, and all the other ones I attended, the same day. Next slide. To cut the glowing short, the OER18 conference was amazing on all levels for the location, the venue, the conference organizers, the co-chairs, the weather... and above all, the people who come to this conference. I last attended this conference in 2014; it was the "vibe" of that conference that compelled me to want to come back for 2018. For what it's worth, both times I did the travel etc on my own dime. I do want to thank the organizers for providing a dispensation that covered the registration fees. That is but one example of some remarks I made at the end acknowledging the "human" way the conference is run. AT every step, communication, it feels like you are communicating with a genuine person, not some faceless organizational acronym. Next slide. Okay, anyhow, my colleague Mia Zamora and I decided to submit a presentation on our Research Networked Seminar, which I ran at Kean University connecting with the seminar Mia taught in the fall 2017 at the University of Bergen. With already too much ado, our session was long titled Networking the Seed Plot: #ResNetSem as an Experimental Transformation of the Research Seminar https://twitter.com/MiaZamoraPhD/status/986462948423020544 Embracing a networked learning context for academic study that thins the walls (Couros, 2009), we propose a new form of research networked seminar. Keeping a traditional small number of direct participants engaged in dialogue driven by individual research interest, our design incorporates networked forms of inquiry and reflection. In this presentation we consider impacts of introducing networks and tools for Masters level scholars, and how a practice of open networked inquiry might lead to a revision of academic research. We present as a case study of #ResNetSem, a co-located research seminar that bridged a Writing Studies research seminar directed by Alan Levine at Kean University, USA (http://resnetsem.arganee.world/) and a Digital Aesthetics research seminar directed by Mia Zamora at the University of Bergen-Norway (http://networks.miazamoraphd.com/). While very different seminars, a common ground is research and writing about digital culture. Our #ResNetSem design encouraged students to expand their reach of resources and expertise to develop a learning network for their individual inquiry. https://twitter.com/JRDingwall/status/986600653509267456 We have some slides... next slides: And there is a video archive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V5OD3rQmGM The fifteen minute slot goes fast, but one of the things we wanted to get in the session was perspectives from our students. I originally had some idea about doing a Laura Ritchie type idea to have my students raise money to attend the conference; we talked about it in November, and they submitted abstracts, but the time frame ended up looming very short. Two of my students provided a bit of video testimony that I edited together into a 3 minute blurb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2sRqIAzYlA We also had one of Mia's students Nicholas who was able to solicit funding from Bergen to attend the conference and be the closing statement of our session. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Mia Listens to Nicholas flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] The wonderful part of Nicholas story is that his idea for his Masters Thesis changed as a result of the seminar. His original research idea was about the role of anonymity in online spaces, but as a by product of the seminar experience, he changed his focus to be researching networked learning. That's about as good a result as one can ask for. Next slide. Without much grand summarizing of the conference experience, it, combined with a pre-conference set of sessions for the Disruptive Media Learning Lab at Coventry University, has me thinking how much more effective we are at connecting and understanding each other at the human, individual level. Like these two folks: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]BFF flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] or with a fun shoe [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]The Requisite Keynote Shoetweet photo flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] How about launching with a VHS tape? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Launch OER18! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] or maybe it helps to have more sessions with ukuleles [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2018/365/109 Collaborating at #OER18 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Things seem to get bogged down in openness at the institutional or movement level. I'm more interested in the human level. Next slide.., Featured Image: Old School Presentation Clicker flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by thebassoonist12 If a classroom can be flipped to make better use of time and group processes, why are we not flipping more things? I've spent three days in Austin attending a conference in the same model going back how Ook ran them in 2500 BC. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by WorldIslandInfo.com Rooms with front lecterns, screens full o' powerpoint, partially full of passive participants mostly reading email or facebooking, badges, Big Name Keynotes, vendor booths, they only critical missing piece was the Dreaded Conference Chicken. A lot of us acknowledge this irony of traveling long and far to ignore someone in the front of the room, that the best interactions happen in the breaks and the evening socials, the stuff that is not part of the agenda-- then (excuse what might be an expletive) WHY THE F*** DO YOU PLAN THE LARGEST PORTION OF PROFESSIONAL GATHERING TIME FOR THE LEAST USEFUL ACTIVITIES? I am not the first one to ponder this, here is the same question from a conference planning blog (published in September 2010)- or a dude offering consulting (buy the book! hire me to flip your conference) -- a compelling critique of the limitations of traditional conferences and a complete road map to creating more effective alternatives. When Karl Fisch was cited for flipping, he told Daniel Pink: "When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong," Fisch told me. "The idea behind the videos was to flip it. The students can watch it outside of class, pause it, replay it, view it several times, even mute me if they want," says Fisch, who emphasises that he didn't come up with the idea, nor is he the only teacher in the country giving it a try. "That allows us to work on what we used to do as homework when I'm they're to help students and they're there to help each other." Why cannot we do this for conferences? All of that content stuff that we fill up the agenda with- presentations, videos, talks, can be done before the event, and we can use the bulk fo the time for the stuff that counts- discussion, debates, conversations-- in fact, I'd like to go to a conference where we get to do something, make something, instead of talking about doing things, or showing pictures of people making something. In the Telegraph article on Flip-Thinking, Pink goes right to the big idea (my edits in bold): When he puts it like that, you want to slap your forehead at the idea's inexorable logic. You wonder why more schools [conferences] aren't doing it this way. That's the power of flipping. It melts calcified thinking and leads to solutions that are simple to envision and to implement. This has certainly been done- it is the structure they run the K-12 Online Conference. Why cant a conference be flipped? cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by kuminiac What do we have to lose, besides the chicken? For as vast and fast expanding as it is, the web ends up being rather friable (that's my geology vocabulary surfacing). All set off by a seemingly simple tweet by Rob Reynolds https://twitter.com/xplanarob/status/720697804969111553 It reminded me of a paper from a colleague I met way back in my own way back machine, back to my Australia contacts from the early 00's. This one paper always stood out for it's title, which I recalled being about "Why Teacher's Don't Share". A google search would get me all kinds of stuff, but I did not have specifics enough in my head. But I do have a blog. With it's own search. I knew I had blogged about it, and like that, found. Sort of. I have a post from May 2003 with the title, and it mentions that the paper is from Greg Webb, whom I am pretty sire I met in Sydney in 2000. The paper's title was "Why teachers don’t share resources, and what we can do about it" and my hunch was what Greg wrote then still first in 2016. With irony, I see that his paper was published in some kind of early web annotation tool: What is even more interested about this paper is a little known technology from WebOrganic known as Pageseeder— it allows readers of this paper to embed threaded discussion comments directly into the part of the paper they are commenting on- very different from reading a paper and going to a discussion board; this places the discussion right in the context of the paper. Sadly, so sadly, so typically, the link in my blog post led to Room 404: Sounds like a job for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Nope. This means the Pageseeder site does not allow its content to be indexed by the Wayback machine. But the NVER site has a way to request the paper it has metadata for: Ok. Reach for Google. I find a record for it in some site called VOCEDplus, "the international tertiary education and research database". Well it's not the paper but some kind of library like record. I get an abstract: This paper discusses in an informal and non-rigorous way some of the reasons why tertiary teachers may not share their resources. It starts with a provocative statement and it offers some suggestions as to how this non-sharing may be overcome but does so knowing that it requires changes in working conditions. Flexible delivery has been with us a good six years and there has been no significant change to cater to the new working conditions it requires. But discussing it and bringing the issues out in the open will help. There's a link to it http://nw2000.flexiblelearning.net.au/talkback/p41.htm which I vaguely recall was maybe a Flexible Learning online conference I probably participated in during 2000 when I was in Australia for a sabbatical. But alas I am 404ed again And this URL too is locked out of the Wayback machine. What happened to the root site? http://nw2000.flexiblelearning.net.au/? It's been archived, and I'm sent to it's current organization site... which is devoid of all its history. Why is it so freaking hard to locate a 7 page paper from 2003? It's not like I am asking for 2003 B.C. Oh but look how "easy" it is to request the paper: For one thing it was "published" into some non-standard format on a third party server that changed it's infrastructure. Meanwhile, I can share a paper I published online in 1994, because (a) it's published in [crude] standard HTML AND it's sitting on a server I manage. Okay, so I failed to find some obscure paper from 14 years ago. The web was so primitive then, eh? But think about all the stuff you might be spraying about in other silos, your Instagram photos, your google docs, your pinterest boards, and tell me how viable they will be in 2030. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by NRCS Soil Health under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Or make that "friable:, not viable. For all it's strength of connection, the present web is quite fragile and far from future proof. Top / Featured Image: Screenshot from today's failed effort to find a link to a paper from 2003. [caption id="attachment_28442" align="alignnone" width="490"] The GIFaChrome Party House Band, the music genius of David Kernohan and Vivien & Rolfe[/caption] I have no idea how to even blog what culminated today for headless ds106. Maybe it was because what was in the boxes. Trying to write this up sells it short. But one ought to try. This is in lieu of a more comprehensive it-might-be-blogged-one-day-before-the-sun-burns-out post for what has happened the last 15 weeks since we launched this half baked experience. Today, we ran a live performance of what has emerged over just a few weeks, and completely supplanted the idea of having a final project in the course. The entire GIFaChrome idea (see a narrative of the unfolding) emerged from Rochelle Lockridge's effort at a remix assignment... and it just mushroomed from there to glitch art in Google plus, John Johnston's app, an amazon product page, layercake technplogy, dogs giffing, commercials, music, and then it jumped over the shark into a narrative of its own and its own web site, twitter account, sock puppet characters... This was totally emergent, the things that happen in a community of motivated, mildly to severely obsessive people, and just a spirit of invention and riffing ideas. In ds106 we;ve have had the experiments with the class as a narrative -- the Summer of Oblivion and Camp Magic MacGuffin. These were ones crafted by the instructors; a key thing is that the GiFaChrome story was completely the idea and driven by its participants. So today we ran a live ds106 radio show where there was planned product announcements; we had a house band, the Inkspots (music lovingly produced and performed by David Kernohan and Vivien Rolfe, they are simply amazing), commercials and testimonials produced by the group, interviews with characters, and the grand unveiling of the new products, and something awry at the end. A big thanks to today's cohosts on the stream-- Christina Hendricks, David Kernohan, and Mariana Funes, plus the contributions of John Johnston, Amber Lockridge, Christina's son, Vivien Rolfe for the audio content. To say this was a group effort is not even giving enough indication what kind of crazy production went into this, and in something like 2 weeks total (the show was maybe done in the last 5 days). Here is the archive of the entire show: ds106 Radio Archive for GIFaChrome Launch And some of the separate segments if you wish to sample Inkspots Intro Music (David Kernohan and Vivien Wolfe) I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire (The Inkspots) (David Kernohan and Vivien Wolfe) Alan Interviews Engineer John Johnston GIFaChrome Endorsements Christina Hendricks, Jonathan Worth, Alan Levine, Amber Lockridge, Colin The Dog GIFaChrome Commercials Roxy Louridge Audio Notes (Archival Audio) Rita Skeeter Report (Mariana Funes and John Johnston) Inkspots Closing Music (David Kernohan and Vivien Wolfe) Transmission Ended I volunteered to man the audio and run the stream; this was with my usual setup of funneling system audio through soundflower into LadioCast (which acts like a mixer), and sending the output form Ladiocast into niceCast to do the broadcast and archive. Skype has its audio routed in and out with soundflower so participants can hear the stream without having to tune into the stream (which is 15 seconds behind anyhow). Here is how crowded it was on my desktop [caption id="attachment_28443" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click to see the full size mess)[/caption] A few different things here. I wanted a background crowd sound of people at a party; I found a few clips from Freesounds, and made a single file in Audacity. I played this through QuickTime PLayer 7 so I could manage its own volume, plus I can set it to loop in there and just let it run. I had iTunes there just for the hour before the broadcast to play music from a shuffled playlist. All of the audio segments that were pre-recorded, I had in a desktop window, named in the order they would be needed: When I needed them to play, I just did the click on file name and spacebar to do the OX S quick preview, meaning I could play the audio without putting opening them in an application (when I do this in iTunes, I have to watch the overlapping it does at the ends of songs). It worked well 9but ti does mean you cannot be fishing around looking for files while the segments are playing. For the last segment when people pretended to open their boxes (ripping cardboard for foley!), I activated the fun effects box Grant Potter sent last year (it makes electronic squeals, static, etc) just playing out of portable speakers cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine And then I played the last "End Transmission" audio and killed the stream. It was a wild ride. And the funny thing, as we were still in Skype after the stream was off- my clock said it was 1:06pm: [caption id="attachment_28445" align="alignnone" width="500"] The broadcast ended at 1:06pm! Click image to see the clock[/caption] But that was just the first half of the show. We took about a 10 minute breather, and then convened around a virtual campfire (this time the looping background sound was campfire with some owls and coyote yelps) to doa bit of ds106 debrief. ds106 Radio Archive Campfire Discussion (featuring Alan Levine, Christina Hendricks, Talk Tina, Todd Conaway, Mariana Funes) It was great to have Todd Conaway call in, and there was some ideas brewing via Twitter from Seth Goodman and Tom Woodward https://twitter.com/GoodmanSeth/status/411596192544325632 something with creating spontaneous cohorts, and 12 side die. Check the archive, my brain was fried by this time We did get to play a reprise of one of the mid term audio show projects, Rhonda Jessen and Karen Young created another Cooking with the 3T's show and the highlights of Rochelle's ds106 inside of 3M experience. And I plum forgot to play an excellent discussion that Mariana Funes and John Johnston made as a "european" reflection on headless ds106. The 3Ts Dreamcake Show (Rhonda Jessen and Karen Young) ds106 Reflections from Europe (Mariana Funes and John Johnston) 3M DS106 Highlights (compiled by Rochelle Lockridge) Like I alluded to, I hope to unpack a bit more of the headless ds106 experience. As usual, it snuck up and became all consuming (in a good way) (I think). The idea of a courseless course makes me smile. And it worked, maybe not to plan, but hey, plans are made to be broken. Until then, for some other reflections see: DS106 in 106 posts and 106 bullets published at 1:06 and Those I Miss (Mariana Funes) G+: "˜The Forge and Working-house of Thought' (Jan Web) That one Christina said she was publishing tonight ;-) Here's to the crazy ones. And as usually, it might be easy to mistake the goofiness and the play for what really happens in the vortex of ds106. Ask any of the participants about the skills they ratcheted up in this production. Ask about the new alliances forged. Ask about the impact of creating a living and evolving narrative, of building a digital presence for a story. Dig here for a sto https://twitter.com/twoodwar/status/411593348026499072 Yes, kind of like that. No Loopy Loopy I'm slow to change some things.... I have had the same self modded theme on CogDogBlog since November 2005 (see the last face lift), so 4+ years later, I felt it was time to toy with some new digs. But I am impulsive (I can speed shop with the best of them), so I looked at about 3 themes, and liked the approach of Patrick's hoPE theme as it uses a flickr gadget to display my own photos in the upper right. I'll kick this one around the yard a bit, tweak some sidebars, and give it my usual theme hacking. Look for the next make over in 2014.... I double dare ya. With a cherry on top. Whipped cream too. It's just around the corner, the flip of the monthly calendar, but so soon, The University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy will be happening- May 16 & 17 here in Fredericksburg. Let's see- you will get a keynote by David Darts, an NYU Art professor who will bring forth issues on digital media, copyright, and cultural complexities. The guy behind the PirateBox, I am eager to have him autograph the one I have. But wait, there's more- featured presentations by the Canadians! Giulia Forsythe will be Drawing Conclusions in her talk on visual literacy and Grant Potter wil be sharing ideas on tinkering -it's connection to learnin, and the possibilities created via the "adjacent possible". But wait, there's more- an opening "Carnival" of hands on sessions on web radio stations (Grant Potter showing ds106 radio), live video streaming (Andy Rushaw and Jim Groom showing the DTLT "kit"), Visual Notaking (practice your own skills led by Giulia Forsythe), and 3D Printing (Tim Owens and the MakerBot). But wait, there's a lot more - 2 days of panels and sessions by faculty at UMW, sharing a wide range of innovations in teaching, learning, and technology. This ain't no buzzword flipping, this is the real deal. You are not left bludgeoned by powerpoint nor will will you be inclined to be heads down in email. But wait, there's more- you get fed! And not conference chicken! But wait, there's more- a lively party at Casa Bava. What's it like? Not exactly disco lights, but the energy and fever will be high http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt12SiN_4Ks So how much would you pay to attend an awesome conference? $800? Seriously? What kind of excuse will you make? You live in Europe? Pshaw, its a short hop. You are busy saving baby seals? Do it next week. What could possibly be a justification to miss out on FA12? Get this- Faculty Academy's registration fees are..... $0.00 for not only UMW faculty and staff, but anyone from the educational community. So what are you waiting for? go now and register. Are you still here? Are you INSANE? Go register, willya? Okay, for me this is exciting, because I am attending Faculty Academy for the first time as an insider, having joined DTLT and UMW in March of this year. My last Faculty Academy experience was 5 years ago, when I was an invited speaker - Wow, that post was a stream of conscious, the event being meeting for the first tome Barbara Ganley as well as getting to see the UMW crew of Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Steve Greenlaw, Jeff McClurken, Patrick Murray-John, Chip German, and of course Gardner Campbell who reached out and gave me the Caravan welcome, the start of a friendship I cannot put enough value on. This was a pivotal presentation for me, maybe one of the first times as a featured presenter, but also in assembling material for a talk on "Being There" that I find I still draw upon many years later. But it was not about my stuff that I recall Faculty Academy, it was the buzz and camaraderie of the people here, many of whom I am getting to know anew as colleagues. It was a conference that stands out from the other conferences. So for me, its sort fo coming home in a way. but for you-- I do not buy any excuses. Get to thee Faculty Academy! I expect you. No excuses accepted. None. It's wonderful when real people can utter statements that go beyond what someone's imagination can conjure up. I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, a city known for its luxury resorts, endless seas of golf courses, ritzy art galleries, giant mansions (who truly requires 15,000 square feet of living space), monster SUVs, etc. The money increases as one heads north through the city; our home (1200 square feet) in a south working class neighborhood helps keep the median income from going to far into the stratosphere. In today's paper was a story on a rash of break-ins of luxury SUVs, how thieves are cleverly disabling car alarms by cutting battery cables, and drilling into panels to sever door releases. A police spokesperson described one woman whose vehicle was broken into twice in two weeks since it was not parked in the garage (I would guess this is a place with a 4 car garage that could swallow our house whole). The woman parked her SUV out in front of her home, even after police suggested it would be safer parked in the garage. Her response to the suggestion was... But my neighbors won't be able to see my Hummer. Utterly amazing. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by Tinker*Tailor loves Lalka When I open my web browser, I sometimes imagine myself perched on the precipice of the edge of the infinity. It was how James Hutton, cracked open what was the 18th century conventional understanding of natural history (my emphasis added) In a paper presented in 1788 before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a newly-founded scientific organization, Hutton described a universe very different from the Biblical cosmos: one formed by a continuous cycle in which rocks and soil are washed into the sea, compacted into bedrock, forced up to the surface by volcanic processes, and eventually worn away into sediment once again. "The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry," Hutton concluded, "is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." The surprises of what I find, of the vastness of what I don't know, actually makes me giddy. Like dried paint. You know the expression about something being as dull as "watching paint dry"? I used it as a joke in a reference to today's live Google Hangout with Martin Hawksey https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/477470197901561857 Just trying to be funny. And just for fun, I wondered if there was maybe someone's goofball site where they had a live web cam set up to allow you to experience this. Could there be much more silly, useless? Hence I looked [caption id="attachment_31072" align="alignnone" width="500"] Searching for paint drying web cams[/caption] Heck, there are several, with their own domains http://www.watching-paint-dry.com/ -- that "Mr Paint" set up in 2006-2007. In May/2007, the inside of my house was painted, so I had a webcam provide live coverage to the Internet ... and again two months later when the outside of the house was painted. Lots of commentary and pictures on the Paint Blog. In 2006, Internet surfers could Watch Paint Dry in my basement crawl space via a D-Link DCS-6620G wireless webcam. X10 Powerline technology is used to control the various "zones" and allow you to turn them on and off in real-time. And it's still there. Why? Why not? Because Mr Paint predicts it might be a few years before the job needs redoing, you can instead watch grass grow. Hold on, Mr Paint, Patti Ann has you topped as "the official Watching Paint Dry Web Cam" This page his literally been here since early 1998, when it was set up while we were painting our dining room. It's been here ever since, and truly is the first, and the only Official Watching Paint Dry Webcam. And a variation, at SUDftw you can watch paint peel on a web cam. And it goes on and on. I cannot think of too many times, maybe any times, when I wondered "is there a web site for X" that I did not only find X, but Y * X. Multiple sites for watching paint dry was likely not the goal when the web was first proposed and made real by Tim Berners-Lee, but they absolutely represent the outcome of the original vision for the web (my emphasis again) The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. The internet (and web) that a corporate entity would have developed would not be like this. I opt for the one where people keep web sites up for 7 years after the paint has dried. Because that not only means there is room for everything, it means there is room for anything. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by photophilde PS- Speaking of mystery, I am wondering why the majority of images I found searching flickr images with compfight for "inventory" produced cameras and Barbie dolls. The answer is out there... [caption id="attachment_9754" align="aligncenter" width="360"] modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by Katie Tegtmeyer: http://flickr.com/photos/katietegtmeyer/471513151/[/caption] Muzzled. Self. http://twitter.com/dkernohan/status/255302652299210752 Why? There's plenty of other things to blog about. Plenty. Meet Halle Gottried (pronounced MA-lee GAHT-fryd) on Facebook Fakebook WTFbook. Chief Engineer on an MSC (Mediterranean Shipping Company) container ship, he studied Engineering Science and Mechanics at Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences. When not on the high seas, he lives in New York City. According to someone he communicates with-- I will call her "M"-- Malle was born in San Salvador. Sadly, his father died when he was two and his mother a few years later. An uncle in New Jersey raised Malle. Life has been full of loss; Malle's wife died in a car crash five years ago, leaving him to raise his 10 year old son, Harrison. Oh, she has a photo of Malle and Harrison that he sent her. [caption id="attachment_53842" align="aligncenter" width="630"] A man named Malle and his son.[/caption] The had a few video chats but Malle seemed to always have trouble getting his microphone to work. I think you have caught on here. This is another fake facebook profile sporting several of my photos. His profile is one of my most popular photos used to create fake profiles-- posted to flickr in 2008 [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] His photo of him hanging out at the Deer Park tavern (which FYI, is in Newark Delaware, where I attended undergraduate studies) has a perfect match in my photo at the Deer Park Tavern taken and posted in 2011. Malle is a rather religious dude. He posts his feelings with biblical passages which show people on facebook what kind of man he is "Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Malle is that kind of truth. And what are the odds- there is someone else with the exact same name on Facebook- just Malle 1 is missing a t in his URL -- and Malle #2 is also in the shipping business. He of course is a different person, you can tell by the photos I am not sure who's photos these are, but I will bet all $1.5 billion that Facebook pocket in profit in the last 3 months of 2015 that it is someone not named Malle Gottfried. This all starts with fragment of a comment on my blog: Please tell me who Alan Levine is or please have him contact at at my email My gut knew knew right away that this was a victim of a catfishing scheme. I respond saying, "yes, what can I do for you?" M responds: Are you the guy in the pictures? I feel like a real fool that has been scammed. You are probably thinking I am an idiot and right now I fell worse than an idiot. So here is the thing lost in people worry about my losses- this is a real victim who is gushing with shame right now. I share the new page I just set up, it is info I have had to repeat at least 10 times in the last few months. Thank you for responding to my email. Yes I was scammed but thanks to doing an image search I came upon your blog. It has been a rough two weeks. I had received email from the fake person with of you and your son. I have to admit your son stole my heart. I think there should be something you could do since pictures of a minor child have been used. If there is something I can do to help you stop this I will do what it takes to put a stop to it. I kept my receipts when I sent money. If that is your son he is adorable but please do protect him from this. If going to FBI helps, please do. A friend from Texas who I protecting from this scam has reported this to the police and gave your picture to the law enforcement. All your pictures were sent to me through messenger and video conference on messenger worked. Being educated with a Xxxxxx xxxxxxx degree and the job I held I should never been fooled into a scam of this magnitude. Sorry you and your son were used. It might seem baffling, but she has not fully grasped the completenss of the scam-- she thinks the photos are of my son (I do not have children of my own, the photo she was sent is a friend's son I visited in 2011). And she has in her mind that something was taken from me, when she includes information that she has sent real money to this person. V-I-C-T-I-M. She expresses worry for the personal information that has been taken from me -- I have to credit the scammers on the name choice. My grandmother's maiden name was "Gottfried". Personal information? Hardly. I wrote about my great grandfather on my blog and have a few photos of his chess medal and old chess set in my flickr photos: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] You cannot really count information I have published publicly-- and that anyone over the age of 4 with a web browser and search box can find-- as "stolen". The amount of shame M is carrying is tremendous. I did suggest that while it might not be worthwhile that she file a police report, especially since she apparently lost money. I also said the best thing she can do is to share her story so others cam be more aware. Her response was that the embarrassment from people in the town she lives in finding out, is too great. Scammed and shamed silent. Are you catching on to the cycle of victimization here? The shroud of shame on victims does a few things- it under-reports the scale of the activity, it allows the scammers to continue thier theft, and it let's facebook continue to pile up profits while never even acknowledging this problem, much less doing anything about it. Oh yeah. Do you remember Timothy Boostrom? https://twitter.com/LouiseShark/status/701940743842230273 These accounts are definitely zombies, the Facebooking Dead. A few months after finally getting the fake account taken down, look at that-- he's back as Timothy Lynn Boostrom. Facebook has some super fancy AI facial recognition software, but it cannot figure out that Halle Gottfried made an account with my photos (one used several times in accounts Facebook deleted- don't they keep track of their own trash?) nor that Timothy Lynn Boostrom is using a fake photo? I don't have AI, but I found out in 30 seconds doing a reverse google image search that this image shows up several times in reports at RomanceScam. Look the same photo is named Johnson Kelly in Google+. And when you report a profile on Facebook, they provide highly relevant options to explain why you are reporting. "Other" A checkbox labeled "Other" F***ing Other. So I am going to risk something and toss out a gender question. By far, the victims of catfishing scams are female. I have yet to hear of one scam like this, for the purpose of scamming money, played out on a man. Yes, in the documentary that spawned the name, it was a male, Nev Schulman, who fell in love with a fake facebook profile. But he was not scammed out of money. Largely then this is a scam played out by nearly totally men on women; not just to play or prank with them, but to steal money-- the number I came across from AARP that in one year the losses were $80 million plus in one year. So we have plenty of horror stories of misogyny in the work place, in social media, but here we have large scale scamming and theft of women's money -- where are all the women getting mad at what is happening to their sisters? If I had to guess, there is a bit of snickering (by both men and women) at the foolish mistakes of the victims, that they had this coming? This sounds like a bit of a stretch. So victims of romance scams have their trust broke, a love they thought was possible smashed, they have money stolen, they are full of shame, and no one gives a shit about their situation? Let me repeat what I keep repeating- in the last 3 months of 2015, Facebook made $1.5 billion in profit (not revenue, pure gravy profit). Both myself and Alec Couros have made a lot of effort to publicize catfishing and try to get someone from Facebook to just respond and talk about this situation. So far, what has been heard from Facebook? Zilch. Facebook makes billions in profit and takes no responsibility for women being scammed out of money and victimized on Facebook. Way to go. Keep in liking. I sure as f*** won't. The only thing I use Facebook for is hurling shit at Facebook. And tracking down scammers. Because Facebook sure is not doing that job. #HEYFACEBOOK! Anyone out there? Bueller? Bueller? UPDATE: Feb 22, 2016 (about 10 minutes later) My sister for there first, but we both reported Halle Gottfried as a fake profile. As usual, their response is that creating an account using my photos is not a violating their "community standards" Do I have to again read you your own fucking community standards? Look at "Halle"'s photos, including the profile photo and compare them to the photos in my Facebook Album of Fake Profiles. How is this not as plain as day? WHO THE F*** ARE YOU FACEBOOK? WHO? Talk about rabbit holes (the kind the dogs go running down). Twas just a tweet flying by https://twitter.com/dendari/status/598160274475098113 This, published on imgur, is way more than image sharing. BePawsitive, self proclaimed dog lover writes: This post showed up on the front page a few days ago. It shows Cesar Millan being bitten by a yellow lab on his show. This lab, Holly, had an issue with guarding food, and Cesar was brought in to fix it. By and large, Cesar is not well respected among dog trainers and behaviorists. His methods and theory are extremely outdated and can be dangerous for dog and human alike. He has no legitimate training or certification. My biggest problem with him is that for a supposed professional he can't read dogs at all. When commenters on this post pointed out Cesar's poor methods and how avoidable this bite was they were mostly downvoted. It's too much to explain in 140 characters so I created this post to analyze what went wrong. View the whole clip on youtube, if you like, but I'll be breaking it down in gifs. What unrolls is essentially a well written and illustrated blog post. It has over 140,000 views and over 2400 comments. Jim Groom has already salted my interest with a review of the imgur GIF making tool -- it simplifies the approach we have taught in ds106 by bypassing the download clip from youtube and trim in MPEGStream clip. That's for a future post. But I really like what BePawsitive has done to show the usefulness of GIFs to show a process, to focus on a key element of a video-- we can see more clearly the dog's reactions to this human mishandler. There are many great GIFsplanations here. I slowed this one down a bit and labeled a couple signals so they'd be easier to spot. Cesar is explaining something about her relaxation to the owner, gesturing close to her face. She's still giving signals that he's ignoring. She's averting her eyes from him, and even gives a "whale eye" before the bite. For some reason, Millan reaches out and places his hand on her nose. As he's reaching her ears move back, but I'll admit that it's quick and less noticeable. She snaps at him, and he backs away. Then, defying all logic, he immediately moves back toward her, and THAT is when she bites. She stated "Leave me alone!" as clearly as she knows how, but he didn't listen so she reacted. I am not quite advocating imgur as a blog platform. It's just interesting to see what it is doing. The story is impressive: Imgur is the Internet's visual storytelling community. Millions of people visit Imgur every day to explore, share and discuss the best visual stories the Internet has to offer. More than 60 billion images are viewed on Imgur each month, and Comscore ranks Imgur among the top 100 sites in the US. From 2009 "Founder Alan Schaaf launches Imgur in his Ohio University dorm room as a simple, no-limits platform to shares images online." to 2014 "Imgur raises $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz and reddit, its first external investment." And they say higher education is broken ;-) cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Derek K. Miller I had way, way too much fun (as if there is really such a measurement) with my presentation yesterday for the ITC 2011 conference here in Florida. On the beach. Under the sun. Maybe it was because this was all brand new material- or just it was because I got to talk about my favorite subject, photography. I called this "Through The Lens" and you can find the various bits and links and slides and audio at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/itc11. http://www.slideshare.net/cogdog/thru-the-lens The things I tried to aim for were some really weak metaphor comparisons between both mechanics of cameras (aperture as being breadth of attention, shutter speed as time spent, iso as sensitivity) and the artistic ends (snapshots versus good photos, cropping, composition) etc and learning. I tossed in the notion of context via reference to the brilliant column by Errol Morris Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire -- which sadly, is now tucked safely inide the paywall of the New York Times (may their plan go down in flames, please). The other side of this was my piece on how on gets better at doing things-- you do them. You get to be better at photography by doing the 10,000 hours at at (and no, Gladwell is not the source, only a referrer). And really, at the end, the slides that only emerged at midnight the night before, is the piece we do not spend a whole of of ed tech attention to- the most powerful force in the learningsphere- motivation. Not posters or incentives- that deep seated drive that makes one want to go beyond average, to become better at X, to figure out what they want to/should learn that they are not aware of now. I only resorted to one dog photo too, as duly noted by the eloquent EDUHULK cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by -=RoBeE=- and this really was merely to present the concept of aperture priority. Thanks ITC for letting me take the stage to show and talk about the power of photography. Can you believe it? This is another SPLOT blog post. Why? I'm trying to keep up with myself. The SPLOTbox has turned into a WordPress theme that can be used for sites where uses contribute items framed around video, audio, and now, image content. The Built In Variety Pack Foster Farms Turkey Variety Pack flickr photo by Pest15 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license Not turkey, but media... The media in SPLOTbox appears prominently as the featured content of items, on both the index/archive page and single views. Examples (available too as a tagged set): Giphy gifs http://splot.ca/box/2019/157/YouTube Video http://splot.ca/box/2019/174/TED Talk Video http://splot.ca/box/2019/170/SoundCloud Audio http://splot.ca/box/2018/82/Flickr photo http://splot.ca/box/2019/176/SpeakerDeck presentation http://splot.ca/box/2019/130/Vimeo Video http://splot.ca/box/2019/166/SlideShare Presentation http://splot.ca/box/2019/164/MixCloud Audio http://splot.ca/box/2019/136/ SPLOTbox items tagged "varietypack" show what's possible These are all made possible by the built in feature of WordPress to embed media simply from the URL of the page that contains them. This is the magic of writing a post, and putting a URL on a blank line, pressing return, and watching it appear in the editor (with the rich text editor) or when previewed/published. SPLOTbox includes support for the ones listed above, a subset of all the services it supports (ones most likely to be used by educators was picked for the theme). By request, a few others have been added to behave the same way, by means of some code that can convert URLs to embeds. Internet Archive Video http://splot.ca/box/2019/91/Internet Archive Audio http://splot.ca/box/2018/68/Adobe Spark Page http://splot.ca/box/2018/80/Adobe Spark Video http://splot.ca/box/2018/79/ In addition images and audio can be added by a direct URL to files of types jpg, png, gif, mp3, ogg, m4a. Direct link to audio http://splot.ca/box/2019/122/Direct link to image http://splot.ca/box/2019/133/Direct link to gif http://splot.ca/box/2019/128/ That's quite a bit. But there is a way, for the intrepid, now to extend this even farther. This came about from discussions of SPLOTbox with Daniel Villar-Onrubio about a possible need to support a rather lesser known video site for a special ise case for a class. Yes, I could keep adding extra code to support, but then the tool possibly gets cluttered with every possible site under the sun (hence I have not included every possible one WordPress supports. So I came up with the idea of a SPLOT Extender Plugin. In fact, a first version of this is running on Chad Flinn's Open Pedagogy Playlist site, to support Transistor.fm the podcast service Chad uses. See this example http://openpedagogyplaylist.com/aintbroke/ Now the plugin is available https://github.com/cogdog/splotbox-extender -- but note, out of the box it does nothing. In fact, it might be rather useless as a plugin, as the only way it works is with editing it with some things to add more services. So it's more template than plugin (maybe one day, it might be possible to create a visual interface). So this gets arcane, and code heavy. It's more about opening the of SPLOTs (or other things WordPress) that can be designed to be extendible. Below, some insights into what it does. Hey, I'm a Plugin, I'm Available Public Domain image from https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Available-now-vector-sticker/1660.html The tiny first bit of the plugin does one thing- it lets the main SPLOTbox theme knows it's there. // just a function we can check to see if this plugin is loaded function splotboxplus_exists() { return TRUE; } The main theme, in any place where it might check for things added by the plugin, can execute this by testing the condition: // check for extras from the helper plugin if ( function_exists('splotboxplus_exists') ) { // do something special by calling functions in the extender plugin } What Sites Supported? In a few places, notably the share form, the SPLOTbox theme needs to indicate which sites are available to add by URL. While currently the theme supports 13 different ones (via the methods described above), the theme options allow a site owner to offer only the ones they want to make available: The basic part of the splotbox_supports() function returns a comma separated list of the sites the theme supports. function splotbox_supports() { /* return a comma separated text list of all support media sites that are supported by URL entry */ $supported_sites = array(); // all possible supported sites that are built into the theme $all_sites = array( 'm_spark' => 'Adobe Spark Pages/Videos', 'm_flickr' => 'Flickr', 'm_giphy' => 'Giphy', 'm_archive' => 'Internet Archive', 'm_mixcloud' => 'Mixcloud', 'm_slideshare' => 'Slideshare', 'm_soundcloud' => 'Soundcloud', 'm_speakerdeck' => 'Speaker Deck', 'm_ted' => 'TED Talks', 'm_vimeo' => 'Vimeo', 'm_youtube' => 'YouTube', ); // pull names of ones activated in theme options foreach ($all_sites as $key => $value ) { if ( splotbox_option( $key ) ) $supported_sites[] = $value; } // alphabetize it sort($supported_sites); // return text string, separated by commas return implode( ', ', $supported_sites); } The array keys set up in $all_sites match the name of the checkbox values in the theme options so we reduce the list to ones enabled, sort the list, and return as a comma separated string. The Splot Extender plugin has its own function splotboxplus_supports() that can return the names of the services that are being added by the plugin. These would be edited in your own plugin. function splotboxplus_supports() { /* array of names of all sites added via this plugin, used for display on share form called by SPLOTbox includes/media.php --> splotbox_supports() $supports = array(); for none */ $supports = array('Animoto', 'Metacafe', 'Transistor', 'Imgur', 'Daily Motion'); return $supports; } Here we are adding actually five media sites beyond the ones the SPLOTbox supports (someone is ambitious). The theme's splotbox_supports() function has extra lines to check existence of the plugin, and if so, merge all the names returned by splotboxplus_supports(): function splotbox_supports() { /* return a comma separated text list of all support media sites that are supported by URL entry, either built in WordPress embeds our others added to this theme */ $supported_sites = array(); // all possible supported sites that are built into the theme $all_sites = array( 'm_spark' => 'Adobe Spark Pages/Videos', 'm_flickr' => 'Flickr', 'm_giphy' => 'Giphy', 'm_archive' => 'Internet Archive', 'm_mixcloud' => 'Mixcloud', 'm_slideshare' => 'Slideshare', 'm_soundcloud' => 'Soundcloud', 'm_speakerdeck' => 'Speaker Deck', 'm_ted' => 'TED Talks', 'm_vimeo' => 'Vimeo', 'm_youtube' => 'YouTube', ); // pull names of ones activated in theme options foreach ($all_sites as $key => $value ) { if ( splotbox_option( $key ) ) $supported_sites[] = $value; } // check for extras from the helper plugin if ( function_exists('splotboxplus_exists') ) { $supported_sites = array_merge( $supported_sites, splotboxplus_supports() ); } // alphabetize it sort($supported_sites); // return text string, separated by commas return implode( ', ', $supported_sites); } And this is now reflected in the forms that call the main theme's splotbox_supports() function - it's a combination of sites the theme supports plus ones added by the plugin. Media Types Extended Without overly explaining everything (hey is anyone even reading this?) the Extender plugin has 3 functions that help the main theme know whether supported sites are for audio, video, or image content (some for organizing, some for display, the parent theme uses post-format types). These need to be edited to include the URLs that identify sites being added. function splotboxplus_video_allowables() { /* add the domain fragments to identify supported video type URLs called by SPLOTbox includes/media.php --> url_is_video ( $url ) $allowables = array(); for none */ $allowables = array('animoto.com', 'dailymotion.com', 'metacaafe.com'); return $allowables; } function splotboxplus_audio_allowables() { /* add domain fragments to identify supported audio type URLs called by SPLOTbox includes/media.php --> url_is_audio ( $url ) $allowables = array(); for none */ $allowables = array('share.transistor.fm'); return $allowables; } function splotboxplus_image_allowables() { /* add domain fragments to identify supported image type URLs called by SPLOTbox includes/media.php --> url_is_image ( $url ) $allowables = array(); for none */ $allowables = array('imgur.com') return $allowables; } All of these functions are accounted for in the main SPLOTbox theme to augment the functions that help identify types of media. Supporting More Embeddable Content Another function -- splotboxplus_embed_allowables() -- tells the SPLOTbox the URL fragments that identify sites that can be embedded bby native WordPress support. function splotboxplus_embed_allowables() { /* add domain fragments to identify string match supported embeddable media beyond ones supported by SPLOTbox e.g. from https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/#okay-so-what-sites-can-i-embed-from called by SPLOTbox includes/media.php --> is_url_embeddable( $url ) $allowables = array(); for none */ $allowables = array('dailymotion.com', 'animoto.com', 'imgur.com'); return $allowables; } The order these are entered does not matter. In the SPLOTbox theme any URL entered is tested against the list, and if it's among all the types allowed, it uses the WordPress function to generate embed code. Extending Support Beyond What WordPress Offers If you thought this was fun up til now... SPLOTbox can also provide similar embed support for media sites that are not in the official list. This is possible, if: The service provides an embed code (doh)The service has a URL that can be easily string matched to identify it as the source (this is the challenge of adding H5P as has been requested)The public URL for the page that contains the media has some kind of id number that can parsed and then applied to the embed code to make it work. (There is some reason I am not using the filters recommended by WordPress...) By example, the way this is done built in to SPLOTbox for audio/video from the Internet Archive, a link for a Tom and Jerry video https://archive.org/details/Jolly_Fish_1932 uses the following embed code: <iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/Jolly_Fish_1932" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe> So we can see the pattern for creating the embed code is to use the URL for src="" but replace details with embed. In SPLOTbox, this is managed by checking all URLs first if they are in the list WordPress supports, than the splotbox_get_videoplayer( $url ) function (it has "video" in it as legacy since when this was added it was only for video embeds, c'est la code) looks for URL matches to ones with this kind of custom code manager. For the Internet Archive example above, this part of the code: function splotbox_get_videoplayer( $url ) { // convert the video URL to a site specific iframe / player code $videoplayer = ''; if ( is_in_url( 'archive.org', $url ) ) { // Internet Archive $archiveorg_url = str_replace ( 'details' , 'embed' , $url ); $videoplayer = ''; elseif ( is_in_url( '*****", $url ) ) { // a few more blocks for handling Adobe Spark } elseif ( function_exists('splotboxplus_exists') ) { // check for any plugin provided embeds $videoplayer = splotboxplus_get_videoplayer( $url ); } return ( $videoplayer ); } This cascades down to the part where we check if the Extender Plugin is around and what it can do- this version is set up to look for Transistor.fm content or metacafe.com content function splotboxplus_get_videoplayer( $url ) { /* Custom functions for creating embed codes from URLs, e.g. for ones not supported directly by WordPress. Generally this is parsing the media URL for codes used to return an iframe HTML to embed content. Somewhat modeled after https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_embed_register_handler w/o using filters. Mote: the function has "video" in it but can be any media site that provides embed code */ // transistor convert url to embed if ( is_in_url( 'share.transistor.fm', $url ) ) { // substition to get embed URL $embed_url = str_replace ( '.fm/s/' , '.fm/e/' , $url ); return (''); } // metacafe convert url to embed if ( is_in_url( 'metacafe.com/watch', $url ) ) { // substition to get embed URL $metacafe_url = str_replace ( 'watch' , 'embed' , $url ); return (''); } // none used return ''; } You Call That a Plugin? Sure, why not? Yes, to use it you would need to code some things. And when you forget a semicolon, the site may go poof. It's more to provide the functional concept of being able to add support to SPLOTbox without necessarily forking the theme. I've tried to explain all of this in the Plugin ReadMe (does anyone read ReadMes?). I made a gist with a copy of the entire plugin with the described examples here that is also currently running at http://splot.ca/box. You can see the support in action in this set of examples. Animoto Video http://splot.ca/box/2019/168/Transitor.FM Audio http://splot.ca/box/2019/146/Metacafe Video http://splot.ca/box/2019/110/ (note I gave been unable to get this service to not autoplay, very annoying)Imgur http://splot.ca/box/2019/179/ (not the best, the embed includes header/footer, and does not size well, it's just a demo, damnit!)Daily Motion Video http://splot.ca/box/2019/184/ What else can one put in the box? A whole lot more now, with some help from the SPLOTbox Extender plugin. Featured Image: Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay modified with SPLOT logos.