Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You can tweet but you cannot hide. If you mention "Clippy" in a tweet, that *#&$ing paper clip will hear you and reply, in that "I'm trying to be helpful but am annoying as biting ants in your shorts" way. Try it. Tweet something snarky about Clippy. Insult his bulging eyeball. Vow to Kill Clippy. And for the sake of humanity, do not follow http://twitter.com/">MSClippy Next thing you know, Bob will be tweeting too. I see your pie charts and lists of almost 100 books read this year, Martin Weller. And it is impressive. My summary will not take a spreadsheet, as I just today finished one book for 2019, this one bought maybe a year ago (big review below). The list is one book long (well there is another partly read one maybe that might fill the 2020 year end post). Cori is quick to remind me how much I read online that certainly counts as reading. So there is that. I've watched my step-daughter visiting home from university devouring a book in 48 hours. Maybe it's a goal setting thing for next year, to do more off-screen reading. It was certainly a thing I enjoyed as a kid and young adult. And when I slid into finishing the last 50 pages of The One Book Not Yet Named, I pleasantly lost myself in it. The List follows. (1) The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell My photo of a book a bought sitting on the couch. If/when uploaded to flickr, it will be licensed CC0 I chose this book months or more ago solely on my experience reading two earlier ones by David Mitchell- Cloud Atlas (blogged) and Black Swan Green (also blogged). The sweep and narrative bending structure of Cloud Atlas was mesmerizing while the character and voices of Black Swan Green grabbed my soul. Maybe it was my uneven pace of reading (when the book sat un-opened for months), but I never quite felt the same draw in the Bone Clocks. The young Holly Sykes story in the first section seemed right out of Black Swan Green (same era), and the complete shift in narration when it jumped to the next section felt like it would be Cloud Atlas like weaving that ties together in the end. Bit to me the voices in the 6 narratives, seemed more like the same one in different bodies, and the unfolded, beyond human awareness tale of the mystical battles of the Horologists and Anchorites, just felt a bit contrived. The evil side seemed just more like shrouded creeps, and the good side just seemed like we knew that was the team to root for. It became more of a battle to keep reading, and when I did, it always required a lot of re-reading to find out where I was in the story. So the book sat a lot. I was compelled enough to see where it would go, and maybe the best part was the reality of a grim 2043 future where all the things we take for granted now are gone, and those who are left glance back in almost disregard for the technology and convenience infused present reality. If anything, I'd guess the time span of the book was a way for the author to speculate on a dark future. The book was, even with this, worth getting to the end. They can't all be epic cheering ones (especially when there is only a list of one). Maybe I can double my list and generate a chart in 2020. Image Credit: Pixabay image by by Sanya2017 Sigh. It is no wonder no work is going on this morning. Our Asian wikis spammers returned, this time not only spamming our pages, but creating their own... and this time leaving a veiled threat of a message: Please do not delete. I send this message only one time, in order to introduce some China website. IF you delete, I will publish every day. There is only one problem, my Chinese spamming guest... your web sites have zero or even negative relevance to our educational oriented wikis. What do links to suppliers of electronics, fireworks. linens, camping equipment, fishing gear.... have any freaking connection with Learning Objects? Well, now you have another problem China spammer. Try and figure it out. This word has been rumbling around in my head for a while. I used it recently when a colleague (I'll leave the name out but it's too not hard to find, and I don't think they will mind) asked for feedback on an assignment for students to do something in social media. The assignment was well-constructed, clear, and... just so... "Assignmenty". It's what students are used to being given, it's what faculty are used to giving. It probably has a title in larger font, a due date, a list of things to do and one of my favorites, the bulleted list of objectives. I do not object to objectives. They make a lot of sense in the design of a lesson or activity, from what I recall they are supposed to be a means for the designer to keep everything aligned. But why are they always overt and usually the first thing a student sees? I do not think I have every fully read a Bulleted List of Objectives-- As a student, I look for the List of Stuff I Need to Do. We do them Because We Are Supposed To. It signified that This is An Assignment, There Will Be Tasks, There Will be Grades. It likely will be a Disposable Assignment. It's the Game of Education. Please deposit another quarter (well more, tuition has gone up since Ms Pacman left us). Now I am not saying that all assignments need to be some kind of wild crazy DS106 show (well, maybe that's not a bad idea). But when the thing in its opening and first glance so clearly signals what it is, have we missed the opportunity to hook a learner's interest, motivation? Is the purpose of an assignment to complete the assignment? When we are Assignmenty, we ask learners to do the minimum to achieve some level of reward. Assignmenty things have fixed fences around their yard. Do we leave holes, gates, doors for learners to go farther? is that crazy (or stupid?) So all of this was rumbling around the back corners of my head until I read Dave Cormier's post The Marc Rubio Disaster, rote learning and getting the answer right says about the repetitive process: Our entire school system is a training ground for this. The teacher is correct. They have prepared what you ‘need to know’. You are going to be tested on whether you have ‘remembered’ what you ‘need to know’. The question of whether you need to know it (How am I ever going to use this in real life?) and whether it’s actually true are not part of the system – though certainly there are some teachers that include it on their own. I'm not an Instructional Designer nor do I play one on TV. I'd like to think some rubbed off from the IDs I worked with in my first hitch at the Maricopa Community Colleges (Naomi who hired me as an ID, Maria who is now interim chancellor there is an ID). I took a class in it at ASU ;-) One of the first web things I did that went beyond my work there was a tutorial on HTML (mid 1990s). An ID intern named Tom gave me a lot of good advice on design (he gets credit, I wonder where he is now), although looking back, I have a lot of explicit objectives in the lessons, which have a pretty regular structure. Maybe they are not bad... So I just wonder if there are other ways to create assignments that do not feel so... Assignmenty. Maybe I am off my rocker. Maybe there is no rocker. And I wonder why it feels like my blog has been taken over by Simon Ensor (all I need is a monospace font) ;-) who I bet is rather far from creating Assignmenty things Top / Featured Image: Screen capture from a Youtube video about submitting assignments in Blackboard. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy3T5eZsk-0 How are mere mortals going to motivate themselves to produce videos given the epic quality of the ones by Michael Branson Smith? Must we shave heads and show dark ominous videos in the dark? The Horror! If you have no idea, check out his latest masterpiece, the ds106 Confessional http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpORNQaEVu4 I for one plan to flush all my videos down the crapper. MBS rocks the video space! The extent of flickr-ness keeps receding like the edge of the universe. Today, I stumbled upon flickr Scout which allows you to find which of your photos have made it to the spotlight of the flickr Explore! page-- on a daily basis, flickr pops here the 500 photos uploaded in one day with the highest level of "interestingness". The Scout not only finds your photos in this pig pile, but tracks their current level. So of course, it's all about feeding the ego! I did not think my scouting results would come up with 5, and of these 4 are not ones myself would say are all that interesting (and the one I do like is not the conference bag ;-) 1. Bug On The Road XP 2. Obligatory WIki Photo 3. The Home for the Conference Bag 4. Woohoo! A Ribbon! 5. Daisies And even cooler! The flickr scout creates a graphic of your results, and uploads it directly to flickr for you: Amazing. And there are a lot more toys from where this one came from. Linktribution: Found via curious exploration of the photos link on Andy Piper's blog after he posted a comment on a story on the NMC Campus Observer blog. Oh what a crazy web we weave! cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog An actual lifetime ago, April 1987, I was perhaps likely forward to an upcoming 24th birthday but also the trip that summer that would pack up my east coast life for transplanting in Arizona. But on this day, I got word my brother passed away. The fragments of the story slip through the fingers, as yellow as the old tape that holds photos in the books. [caption id="attachment_29134" align="alignnone" width="500"] A happy six month old baby[/caption] In his baby book, now in my care since my Mom passed away, at 14 months, the book has a blank page for "Anecdotes: amusing incidents may be recorded below". Incidents of amusement, I wonder how my parents dealt with the mixed bag of joy, appreciation, but overwhelming concern to be parenting a mentally retarded child. I can only wonder. [caption id="attachment_29135" align="aligncenter" width="394"] March 20, 1953 - "First piece of cake. Grabbed a handful of cake and pushed in his mouth. Loved the chocolate, Barry [cousin] helped him"[/caption] A piece of cake, huge incident. Finding the joy in every little crumb of chocolate. The pages for age 10 are blank; 1963 was the year I was born, and my parents made the wrenching decision to put David in an institution, Rosewood State Hospital, a place I will never go back to. There was no birthday party. I am fairly sure my parents paid him a visit, they were good about that. But nothing noted in the book, not guests, no gifts, the book painfully put away on a bookshelf, a book meant to mark the progress and development of child. David would never develop much farther than the amused by cake mental age. I can only wonder and speculate of a different universe where David lives a full life. For now, I only have this one. I do this yearly so I keep my memories as fresh as the old yellow tape and fading photos allow. cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That is all we can do. Today I had the opportunity to open the Arizona K12 Center's Ninth Camp Plug and Play in Tucson. About I year ago, I sort of "crashed" their mobile learning conference here-- I came down to visit colleagues Dean Shareski and Wes Fryer. Shortly after I got a super nice email from Tony Vincent, leading to this year's invitation. This talk was more or less a breeze through five "things" I've done around using/creating with images: It's easy to take and share digital snapshots (witness Facebook). But we can do much more than capturing moments by creating and expressing ourselves using photographs as part of our visual language. While I was educated as a scientist and self taught myself web-development, telling stories with and through photos is what I am most passionate about. In this session, I share with you five things I've done fueled by this interest. These include practicing communication through improvisation, creating stories in pictures only, amazing stories that may happen when you share photos, giving credit for photos you can use, and a strategy for expressing complex ideas or concepts in photos. Maybe one will be interesting to you? Picture that. Listen to audio recording of presentation The five things include: improv with pechaflickrkudos to participants Nick and Adria ("like Adrian form Rocky without the 'n'") for doing a great improv talk on nachos Visual Storytelling with Five Card Flickr Storiesmaybe the fastest demo I've ever tried, pretty much just ran one quick round True Stories of Sharing PhotographsTold the usual favorite, the Amazing Flower Story but did a quick recap of the others in the set; this eas also a chance to talk about how giving credit for use of a photo as a set up for the next item Giving Attribution with flickr cc attribution helperI tried to make a case that being asked to give attribution has all the appeal of writing citations and bibliographies in a paper, plus that the way we mostly talk about creative commons is wrapped in language of not giving attribution is "lying" "stealing", and "plagiarizing" -- as in Whereas to me, giving attribution is an act of appreciation, acknowledgment, of paying it forward.I showed how writing a model attribution for a flickr photo was about a seven step process, hence the reason for the flickr attribution tool was... selfish. Image Seeking for Fantastic Visual Metaphors This was a teaser for my evening workshop, the new teaching kit on an image searching strategy I created for Mozilla's Teach the Web program. This was a really energetic group, and i had a lot of fun playing with them. Thanks Tony. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog In the evening I was asked to run an optional workshop-- this was ImageSeeking Photos and images are the building blocks of most digital expression. We are well past the place of cheap clip art, and have easily accessible more images than we can imagine. Learning how to find images is trivial when you are looking for a specific thing. But when you are trying to find images to represent something metaphorically or more complex (e.g. how do you look for an image to represent "honesty" or "unfairness"?) keywords often fail because these are not literal concepts. In this workshop you will use ImageSeek, built in the free Mozilla Thimble Tool, for not only helping you and your students deploy a more oblique strategy for finding images, but also a way to save and share the process. http://go.cogdog.it/azk12-imageseek Since my Mozilla Teaching kit is remixable, I remixed my own stuff. The workshop materials were a remix of the original teaching kit. Within it, the first activity was a remix of the Image Finding Discussion Activity, etc. It was quite illustrative to remix my own materials, it made it quite easy to customize them for the workshop. It ended up more discussion, we had a chance to hear how people search (not everyone reaches for google first); one participant shared the roflbot site which she uses to add attribution to the image she finds. This was the first chance I asked a group to use the ImageSeek tool and manipulate it in Thimble. I have to admit, as noted in a comment from Robin Good, that it's a bit complicated to use. Folks had trouble navigating to the right areas to edit, in my demo the scrolling links in the tutorial pane made the code vanish, one participant followed me instructions and all of the line number links were different... Everyone appreciated the approach, the use of the framing questions, and the idea of keeping a record of your effort, but it seems like its too much overhead to do it all in the Thimble app. I am not surprised, it did seem a tad complicated, but hey, it was an experiment. The idea of searching for metaphors still holds up. I hope. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by quinn.anya Just got word via the tweetvine from Dave Lester that the first ever WordCamp Ed (WordCamp Education) is happening in Washington, DC, on November 22 at George Mason University. WordCamp Ed is a WordCamp focused entirely on educational uses WordPress "” in schools and universities. The inaugural WordCamp Ed will be held at George Mason University on Saturday, November 22nd featuring a morning of pre-planned speakers, and a barcamp-style afternoon breaking into smaller discussions and sessions. Oh I am envious of those in the area that can show up. I will be a bit too far away, even farther than Arizona. But I really like that Dave is doing this- I got to meet him only briefly at WordCamp in August in San Francisco -- but he is doing some very cool stuff with ScholarPress- plugins for WordPress that are of use to educators. I had a great time at WordCamp but felt it was really dominated by all the people trying to make a living selling WordPress development services (like 400 of them)- a WordCamp for Educators is an awesome idea. They are doing more unconference stuff than WordCamp main, and even better, registration fee is by donation: There's no mandatory registration fee for WordCamp Ed, but we'll pass around a hat at the conference to help defray the cost of shirts and food. I already see Cole Camplese and Patrick Murray-John are signed up, but where is the Reverend EduPunk? Anyhow, I hope the WordCamp Ed concept takes off with more of them (look how many WordCamps there are, and all but San Francisco are locally organized). I wonder how many I could get to my cabin for WordCampEd Strawberry? Back in November 2003, when I was wasting a lot of time dealing with blog spam, I wrote blogged the approach I took to close comments for this site after an entry had been up for 30 days. In a nutshell, I have a timed job calling a PHP script that rummages through the MT database and closes comments for entries that are more than 30 days old. It worked great. Except yesterday that it was doing this not just for this blog, but all the other blogs hosted on the server. Not quite what everybody may want, though we heard nary a complaint. But I found out when Bob Stepno wrote asking, Is that real or phony blog spam in demo blog? While following links about the NMC conference, I found my way to your previous Breeze thing about RSS... not a bad tool, it seems, and a nice presentation that I'll point some friends to. However, if you're going to link to fictitious blogs (e.g., http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/), please put a note to that effect on the blogs themselves so that real humans don't waste their time posting comments trying to interact with the "authors." (All readers might not get to the disclaimer/credits at the end of the presentation. They might even google themselves into the blog itself.) Meanwhile, I don't know if this blog-comment-spam is authentic or also a "demo"... but it's amusing either way. Yikes, "phony spam" -- what a concept! http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/archives/000010.html And sure enough, Boris' old entry was littered with porn comments and nude people links, likely sneaking in under the radar before we put up the blacklist and closed the comments. Strangely enough, the blog spam cockroaches descended on the post titled "Cool Gizmo". Then I started looking around the database and noticed that every entry had its comments value set for closed. The fix was easy, modify the PHP script so it acted only on one blog. Since I was rzor sharp on my mySQL queries from banging out the last bits of the online dance registration site, this was cake. (more…) Note: This is mostly meant in jest to point out how religious we tend to get with our tools and even more so to play with the image below. Several people will react viscerally to my assertions. Please take this with a giant grain of NaCl. A does of Snark. All of this is based on my own experience. No web sites were injured in production of this blog post. I know and respect drupal enthusiasts. I know and respect WordPress enthusiasts. I myself associate with the latter, but I do use drupal for the bulk of the web presence of my day job. Have I set this one up with too many disclaimers? So take with some gross judgment that there are drupal people and WordPress people (and we love the extremists). And largely, those that are really successful in bending drupal to their whim are programmers, developers, people who can get deep down into the modules and hooks and can breath the "drupal way". On the other hand, people who use WordPress can go a long ways without having to get down into the soul of the code. They use a WYSIWIG interface, and mostly, It Just Works. This is so totally like the Mac / PC fanatics game. I lost track of the source, but remember one writer who claimed that ultimately, the reason why PC's rose to dominate the market in personal computers in the 1990s was because diving into DOS and BAT files poking in the BIOS was more "masculine" than using a graphical interface. I cannot really say I believe that, but there is something in that that makes me nod, "maybe". Does that fly as well in these two modern web publishing systems? I dunno. I had a recent frustrating experience in trying to get drupal to do what I needed for the NMC web site. A problem had vexed me for a while. We were getting messages from some users that certain web pages viewed in Internet Explorer would just bomb with an un-useful "an error occurred page". I managed to narrow it down to ones that were using some embed code to insert Flash video content from our media server into the pages. I got around it temporarily by putting some of the video on blip.tv, and using its embed code, but it told me that the method used on our site was bad. Our developers had written me 2 drupal functions to look for a custom tag in our content like: [flv:http://media.nmc.org/somelink/to/video.flv] and I could see in the code it was using some variant of the swfobject method; yet noted we were using an older version of that code library (1.5); the newest version was more than just a replacement with the newer version. I did find a reference on an MS site about certain issues with the way javascript code was used to re-write content; and surprise! hacks were necessary to wrap things in divs a certain way for IE not to go off and cry... http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/927917. But no matter how many different ways I matched by code to theirs, it refused to play nicely. So I thought maybe what I need is a newer drupal tool to embed FLVs. I went shopping in the drupal module place. I scanned a long list and many of the module were overkill; things designed to enable uploading of video and conversion to FLV formats; FLV Mediaplayer looked promising. I downloaded the 5.x version, where the entire documentation page reads: Fixes flashvars merge issue On activating this module, it indicated I needed to download, and activate another module. I did that. The new embed method did not render anything except PHP errors. I traced through the code and it was littered with debugging dump statements. Back to the drupal forums, where I found someone asking a similar question, where the developer response is: Fix is in CVS, bad validation due to regression. Thanks for the catch. Now this is where I break and jump to how you install plugins for wordpress. You download the code, upload it to your own server, go to the plugins page, and click a link to activate it. You dont have to go elsewhere to scrim other pieces or comb through CVS repositories to find fixes. I bailed on the FLV Media Player and started wondering if I;d be putting all of our video in the cloud. I really preferred to have our videos on our media server; that is what it is there for, and we get very detailed data on usage. But this is where the community saves me- some tweets of frustration got some direct messages, even and email with a phone number from Bill Fitzgerald. I met Bill last year at Northern Voice, and really respect him for his work, drupal expertise, and ability to take our WordPress ribbing and sling it right back without getting nasty. Bill got me pointed in the winning direction with a recommendation for SWFTools (which for some reason is a "project" not listed on the modules page for media) that in the end solved my problems. And now I had found the definitive signal for good drupal code- it had multipage documentation, written in something close to English. I've scanned quite a few modules in the last 2 years, and often you feel lucky to get a read me. Yes, drupal peeps will quickly hop in and tell me errors of my ways. But I am an experience developer, and have installed many kinds of PHP/MySQL systems, and I still fail to fully grasp the way drupal works. I find the details to be usually be deep down in the code, and to go beyond just the basics calls for someone at the developer level to fix their PC drupal. Whereas with a Mac WordPress, though not perfect, lends itself to people who want to be able to customize their web sites without peering into the code. Now let me re-iterate; I very much love what drupal does for our NMC site; and there are somethings that would have taken a lot of code and duct tape to do in WordPress. I love views, and make heavy use of them. I like creating my own CCK content types-- but I am again and again facing a wall in drupal because it seems to defy my way of thinking. My angst comes down more to my own short comings in learning this system... but I really do not want to have to ramp up to the level of being a drupal developer to be a drupal user. I'm a WordPress.... Featured Image: The classic I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ad (source unknown, most likely copyrighted, sue me( with drupal and WordPress logos swapped for famous heads. Background is my image! Across the Crest flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license A totally inconsequential blog post. Because I can. A total key to learning how to work with / deal with the discourse discussion software we are using for the Udg Agora project (hey there was a BLOG POST on this) ... has been the discourse meta site. This is where the developers hang out, and people trade ideas and complaints and how the heck do I do X discussions. There is something worth noting in the dog food eating department that they are using their own software in support of it. Meta, get it? Geek humor. I must say the response to my questions, especially n00bie ones, was incredible quick, and helpful. Most of the time I got a response in 30 minutes. When was the last time some commercial software company gave you a response that quickly? Anyhow, last week, while trying to work out the kinks of the bulk account creation, I posted there asking if there was some way of seeing a count of the number of pending invitations and the ones that had been redeemed by users. The only way I had done it was by scrolling the whole list and counting the number of finds in the name of a button that is in every line. Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood gave it a thumbs up within a few hours, an in less than a week, the code changes were pushed to github. And the latest update to discourse (for which Tim helped out with) rolled in my suggestion- now when I look at my invitation displayed, I can see the counts right there in the column heading. It's hardly a world changing feature. And this is pretty much old hat for open source software. But it feels pretty damn good to ask an idea, have it discussed, and see it appear as a feature in a system I am using. Within a week. When I make a suggestion in an Apple forum, all you hear are the plinks of small stones falling down a bottom less well. What if school worked like that? What if? Top / Featured Image credits- emailed to me my Tim Owens, ask him where the heck it came from. Or just read the freaking graphic. That thing on the bottom? It's called an Earl. There is a badge generator site, you don't need Mozilla I've not been able to directly say Happy Father's Day since 2001; that year I think I was on the road in Australia and he was home in Florida hanging out with cancer, before passing away in August. I had brought him  an Aussie belt cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My mom ended up sending it back to me in a box of other special items, and I've worm that belt almost out in the last 9 years. So given a lack of direct communication, I spent an hour riffling through old photos and memories... Our lawn was a source of pride for Dad, and after years of various push mowers (and I did my own fair share of pushing), one of his dreams came true when he bought himself this little riding mower. IN fact, his email address included "lawnman" in it. Dad did sure enjoy eating steamed crabs (and I am living proof of genetics), and many a summer night, as this one from our annual August trip to Ocean City, was a marathon of crab picking and claw hammering. I recognize this smile from the older photos of me as a child- here it is again in a photo with his first grandson. That smile says a lot to me. I can feel it. Even with a much smaller lawn in Florida, Dad still got his work fix in tending the gardens. He did pretty well planting the tops of pineapples and later harvesting new ones that grew out of the plants. In fact, a few times, his pineapples were stolen! My Dad was not extremely verbal, but his actions said a lot, but more than that, it was always a known that he was there for me, no matter what. So while Dad's not here, he is here. This was just another one of those stories where someone made use of one of my public domain flickr photos shared under CC0. If you follow the typical convention as taught in those woekshops, this means you can use an image, and not even need to give credit. Just grab and go. But that's what a man named Thierry in Belgium did. https://cogdogblog.com/2021/11/open-as-in-dog-treats-with-insects-and-spent-barley-grain/ He not only took the photo from flickr, he took the time to contact me and offer thanks, letting me know he was using Felix's photo on the web site for his product-- dog treats made from insects and spent barely grain. Yum. Four years later, aka yesterday, Thierry contacted me again letting me know that after much effort and sweat, his business did not succeed, and he had left it in the hands of someone else. Why did he bother to do this? Why does one even have to ask, it's a human thing to do. And like originally when he contacted me, he offered to show me around "if I was ever in Belgium." This little story bounces in my mind after tuning in last week to the Creative Commons announcement od their new CC Signals framework/project as some means for content owners to "signal" their preference on how material is used by GenAI-- a "new social contract." It sounds virtuous and has nice icons. I can't say I see by any means what possibility there is for such reciprocity to happen, given the Big Guns have pretty much ridden the train of "we will hoover everything". Doug Belshaw said pretty much more succinctly than what I might conjure. To me, CC licenses were pretty much a preference signal though mostly the way I heard people talk about them was the idea that a license offered some kind of "protection" of their stuff. Slap on a CC BY-NC to stop commercial use. So I still hear language of the idea that when people share, they have some expectation of such reciprocity. I have naively for my entire edtech career taken the other route- when I share, I expect nothing in return. No money. No credit. Hence most of my 70k flickr photos are CC0. That way, when I receive a thanks, or someone letting me know where/how the use my photos, it's a bonus (and it happens a lot). I don't take photos to be compensated, so I do not even care if someone takes my photos and makes money. Heck, I have seen a few of 'em with a price sticker on Alamy. If some sucker pays for a photo they can get for free from my flickr account, well that's nothing to me. I have gotten more professionally and in just the kinds of connections from the Thierry's on the internet that exceed anything I might have gotten by trying to project my stuff. Yeah, I believe in the fairy tale kind of commons, laugh away at me. I'm not here to take a side on CC Signals, I am not even sure enough what it is, and I will follow it with interest but am still not clear what can come from it. Me, I will just keep foolishly giving away every single thing I have made and shared online. I don't need to put out requests or have expectations for reciprocity, I prefer it when real people just do it because its the right thing to do. And I make all the efforts to extend reciprocity when I benefit from someone else's work. I'd rather be naive then greedy. Featured Image: I'm Alone With My Big Thoughts flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Go ahead, take my photo! Use it w/o attribution! Sell ***** with it. Train your LLM with it. Have fun. Waiting now for the start of Garry Putland's talk on the Australian LO portal- I had a chance to chat with him early, and heard about what sounds like an incredible integration of information connected with RSS- he mentioned availablity of more than 2000 feeds, not only for objects, but information piped to different web portals. Well, maybe I am getting ahead of the presentation... It is ready to roll. In a snippet, the Ozzies are way ahead of the pack in terms of "getting it" with open source, standards, syndicated content, and communities of practice. Makes us look like roadside wombats.. MERLOT and EdNA now have a relationship to be revealed here. (EdNA= Education Network Australia) Rightfully so, Garry is based in Adelaide, home of many great vinyards. He mentioned (and others have alluded to) published RSS feeds from MERLOT, but have yet to see anything for real. Is it to be revealed at Thursday's 4:00 PM session on "MERLOT Federated Searches"?? The abstract mentions implementations of "web services". (more…) Upgrading to Flash Player 8 for Mac OSX-- follow these instructions: Among the billions of reasons I primarily use a Mac is that I do not need to go ask some IT department to give me permission to do something to my computer. In fact it is usually the reverse- when something wants to run on my Mac, it usually asks me for permission. To me it looks like some web proofreader at Macrodobe was sleeping at the keys. A cowboy made of snow showed up on my deck on January 6. He was not much of a smiler. Over the next 11 days, Ole Grumpy (as I called ) him, lost his clothes, then blew up in weight (from a later snow), but then started wasting away. By yesterday morning, he was gone. Here's a scrapbook video of his short life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVt0uAhZDrA These were from photos taken January 6-17, 2016. [caption id="attachment_52235" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The slide show editing interface in Aperture[/caption] I used the slideshow features in Aperture (software that still works great for my, I'd say something about prying from stone cold hands, but that metaphor is all wrong), added captions and music, and then exported as an MP4 video. I did this in the 30 minutes it took me to reheat and eat my leftover lasgagna. Miss ya, Grumpy. Top / featured image credit: flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/23597646873 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Just try to say that any number of times fast. I have coined what Jon Udell described as a single grain of sand on the internet beach. Yes, anyone can invent make up a word. But the idea (I think) Jon was trying to illustrate in that 2012 class visit to Virginia Tech, is the notion of a URL being a living thing. The web is not a stack of index cards or dots on a graph; the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=futzopublicus at the time of the screenshot above was a google lost black sock. But, by the sheer act of stating its existence on the web (mine via a tweet), it is changed . And in my act of blogging, it should change again. I should note that that first appearance in google is not the best search result, it links to my twitter timeline http://twitter.com/cogdog a URL which of course changes at a ridiculous place. It makes one wonder why/how google and twitter get along in the web crawl cycle, why did the single tweet not show up? https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/611624343659896834 Isn't that a more accurate search result? Is google's crawler at fault? Is twitter putting some obstacles at crawling? It's a silly exercise at first, but the brilliance is the questions it spawns. This as one of the UDG Agora Daily Try activities, fleshing out some stuff for an upcoming workshop series in Guadalajara Mexico- I am using my Daily Blank Wordpress theme to create a site that works like the DS106 Daily Create but submissions are done via twitter. But wait! I have not explained what Futzopublicus means. I was inspired by experiencing my computer hanging in a spinning beach ball cycle of doom during my keynote at the CALI conference. This was in fact a fabulous part of my presentation, and opportunity to show the time honored DS106 tradition of messing up (aka "futzing") in public- Futzopublicus. So do be a favor, see how we can change the distribution of sand grains, use "Futzopublicus" online now. Top / featured image credit flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/17259819956 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Note: It's rare around this blog that something lingers in draft as long as this post. There is a reason for everything, right? But this one needs to get squeezed out of the Easy Blog Oven for another one to follow. The very same desire I heard in my first week (1992) as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges, one I came to describe as "the database of dreams" is still sought Grail-like in 2021. I saw the same questions and challenges maybe I've been asking myself all career. This was in the session at OERxDomains21 Melissa Jakubec presented-- "If You Build It, Will They Come?”: The Challenges Of Building A Communal OER". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phjqCGc3zsM Her question refers to a project site she created to collect learning activities. It's quite well designed! This session will introduce and reflect on a project that led to the creation of an open repository of successful learning activities, including sample stem language and examples to be remixed, reused and reshared. Learning activities are categorized by type (online discussion, group project, blog post, etc.), learning outcome level (according to Bloom’s taxonomy) and discipline to facilitate reuse by faculty, instructional designers and educational technologists. This results in a resource that can be searched according to widely known fields. For example, the resource can be searched for discussion activities appropriate for comprehension, analysis or synthesis.Despite the attention paid to the design of the platform and the ease with which resources can be searched or shared, engaging the wider community in building the resource has been a challenge. This raises the question of whether or not it is worthwhile to develop these types of open resources when they are not well adopted. Other wider factors, such as lack of recognition or reward for working with OER, may also affect the use of the repository. The learning activity site is quite SPLOT like in that visitors can contribute to the WordPress published site without needing an account. This is quite fitting as it was Melissa and colleague Kelly Warnock whose request during my TRU fellowship in 2014 spawned the creation of the first TRU Collector SPLOT. The SPLOT making was maybe just the latest in a long marching ant strand. I've created so many of these web-based open collection sites that I can't even count them all. Back to that session's question: "If You Build It, Will They Come?” I have to say the answer is, not matter how brilliant the design, the metadata fields, the visual metaphor--if that is all you do, then-- No. Sorry. I laid it out in 2003! There is almost nothing more cliche than a Field of Dreams metaphor “If you build it, they will come”, but it is all so fitting for those that get glaze-eyed at the potential of building a Learning Object Repository (ugh, I despise the connotations of the “R-word”).But I can guarantee you, that if you build it, they likely will not come, and if they do the pace will be one that gives you heartburn into the night."Repository of (Learning Object) Dreams" Yet. That is no reason to not stop trying. And I do keep trying. I likely won't stop. In Which the Blog Promise to Look Forward is Broken I again go back to my past experience, to look forward. I have built so many fields of database dreams I cannot remember them all. Since my first bits of extending mid 1990s HTML web sites to be things that could dynamically build content collections from forms filled out by site visitors, I have been playing this game. Much of my early web efforts has collecting links, first in manually maintained hand edited lists, than moving to ones that were searchable and could be set up with crude perl scripts to contribute new ones (the "database" was a tab delimited text file) A directory of Community College web sites I maintained early on- and the archive still works had in the original version (wayback machine thanks) had a submission formI spent years building up examples of Teaching and Learning on the Web, organized into categories by discipline.Various collections of "interesting links" like Hot Links that got boosted to 451f and then into a giant Bag of URLs (4700+ collected from 1996 to 2005). All of these sites jad submission forms, but I cannot say for sure how many actually came in, or whether it was 99% me. The Database of Dreams predated my web era at Maricopa. This was (and is) a huge system of 10 independent community colleges with many many pockets and of innovation in both educational technology and pedagogical innovation. And this was in 1992 when I landed there. My first week on the job was an "Ocotillo Retreat" at Mormon Lake, Arizona. This was the first of many times I heard of a desire to have some means of creating a comprehensive collection of "Who's Doing What" with technology. Heck I wrote about this (pre blog) in our center's newsletter. That was how we did this for years, collecting snippets likely form email and publishing them in print (and web). Hey there was a web submission form! I worked with one committee to design a HyperCard stack as the database! Here was the database of dreams in 1992. Library of Technology vintage 1992 Again, I only have my memory, but the most successful collections were the ones we published in our newsletter as we worked our connections and contacts to flesh them out, likely done through email. The MLX I will claim the one and only thing I created I will sort of call a "repository" as maybe the most successful of these database of dreams was the Maricopa Learning eXchange or the MLX. I am still proud of it from both the richness of the metaphor but also the things we were able to build into it, including some of the most innovative stuff I did with some technology called RSS I learned about from some Canadian named Downes. And it's one I regret the most not doing enough to archive it. When I left Maricopa in 2006, I took all my web files, and exported many of my project databases, but the MLX database was one I forgot to grab. But to get to this, I have to peel back a few more layers of context. This goes back to work Maricopa leaders started n maybe 1994 as the Maricopa Learning Paradigm, leading to a paper published in 1997 aimed at what seems like a basic question- how is learning defined (and embodied) in the large system of Maricopa? This became the learning@maricopa.edu project our center facilitated, but it was led by Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, Alfredo de los Santos. But here is what Maricopa was focused in the late 1990s, led from the top (this from my brilliant Director at MCLI, Naomi Story in our newsletter published in 1997 Discourse about Learning at Maricopa appears to have taken hold across the district. One of the compelling questions that some have asked is why is Learning such a hot topic. As Maricopa continuously updates, enhances, reforms, and transforms itself to meet not only the demands of a global and local economy, but most importantly, of our students who will frame our future, we must clearly stand for something. What we can stand for is quite simple...Learning. That all students can learn, be independently and individually motivated, and be life long learners can be our daily mental mantra. Do our current educational environments, processes, and systems encourage student investment in Learning as a lifelong enterprise? How do we build the capacity and encourage a self-renewing context that perpetuates Learning as a value? The Maricopa Learning Paradigm attempts to move us to a discourse that coalesces Maricopans around a higher level of commitment of Learning as our core value and raision d'etre for leadership and institutional transformation.Maricopa Learning Project: What's it all about? (The MCLI Forum, Spring 1997) The Maricopa Learning project had many facets, including a series of Open Space Forums to develop this idea of what Learning@Maricopa meant. One concrete recommendation that came out was to build something that would show the range of programs, teaching ideas, materials that showed by example what Maricopa learning looked like. And this is where the MLX and brown shipping boxes came in. In my work I was rather fatigued by the heaviness of Learning Object Repositories and had seen how sleepy most people get when you try to excite them about metadata. So my idea was something that represent learning at Maricopa could be as small as a single class exercise to an entire large fellowship program. I got the spark of the idea when some boxes of supplies got delivered to the office. That's it, like examples of learning, shipping boxes could be small ones that fit in your hands to large ones that needed a forklift to move. And all shipping boxes had a label that described them (aka metadata). And the collection of them all would live in a giant warehouse. That was how the Maricopa Learning eXchange got started... Front of the MLX (explore in the Internet Archive) Anyone could submit a "package" at the loading dock, aka a web form, and what was created to represent a sample of learning was the Packing Slip: Top portion of the Packing Slip for Bernie Combs's "Research Methods in Social and Natural Sciences" Everything on the slip was a database field (mySQL), so we could create search filters on the colleges who were represented, the disciplines, and more. And yes, you will notice that these bear some very early Creative Commons licenses. But wait, there was more. Contributors could include aby number of web links as well as uploaded documents (or supplements). What is shareback? As this was in the early 2000s and blogging was being birthed, I implemented my own version of Trackback links, so if this packing slip was mentioned in a blog, it could automatically get added here as a "shareback". There was view counts, and even I added a means to represent all of the Packing Slip info into Dublin Core Metadata Format. How well did the MLX do? Amongst the later snapshots in the Internet Archive, it looks like there were 1825 packages in 2013. Maybe not massive, but that's pretty good. The ways this was done is detailed in maybe the most fun I had in a conference poster at the 2003 Merlot Conference titled "Building the Maricopa Learning eXchange (Using a Bit of Competition and Bribery)". The "building part" included: Part of the task in building this sort of collection is getting its contents to a level where the content is seen as valuable. It takes time and much effort to convince people in the organization to submit their materials. And they need to be able to find content of interest to see the collection as a destination worth returning to.The first requirement to create this buy-in is that the submission process must be as simple as possible, which we achieved with a friendly metaphor of entering them at the loading dock of the warehouse. We added a comment feature for all items that are tracked and sent to the package owner, as well as integration of TrackBack technology for connections to weblogs and other sites. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/117805081 MLX VIllage flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I went way overboard on this "poster" - I had a model warehouse with shipping trucks and loading machines, this again was my metaphor overload approach. I don't have my own archive (yet) of this web site, but it's available in the WayBack machine and the PDF version is pretty lush! merlot_poster (August 2003, PDF)Download But the real secret sauce of the MLX was that, because our center ran a number of other programs and projects, we were able to make the reporting back on Learning Grants we gave out or the faculty professional growth projects. We managed to tied in so that when someone entered their report for these programs, an entry was made into the MLX. The competition and bribery came from the idea of offering prizes to the colleges that registered the most new packages submitted in what we called "The Great MLX Package Race": Next, we appealed to the notions of "competition" and "bribery" by offering prizes of software to the college that contributed the most items between November 2002 and March 2003. This was rather successful, adding more than 350 new items (with one third arriving 48 hours short of the deadline), and we have made the "Great MLX Package race" an ongoing event, with new prizes awarded every six months. For the race that ends August 31, 2003, we have added software prizes (donated, thanks!) for individual contributions. Yup, I offered prizes, software. I had no shame. And the other approach was making the content from the MLX available to by syndicated out to the different college web sites. I was inspired by the 2003 paper by Stephen Downes's RSS for Educators to build that into the MLX, every nook and cranny. This was maybe my first experience of getting positively Downesed in Feb 2003 Maricopa Learning Exchange Maricopa has long been a leader in online learning (an early winner of NAWeb Awards, for example) and so it is not surprising to see it right at the cutting edge of what may be an important trend sweeping through online learning: the syndication of learning objects using technologies like RSS (I will have a lot more to say about this over the next few weeks, so stay tuned). Maricopa's Learning Exchange is starting small (333 objects as of this writing) but this should be considered a proof-of-concept at this time. It is worth having a look at their syndication page to get a deeper idea of what they're up to. By Various Authors, Maricopa College, February, 2003OLDDaily Feb 26, 2003 Because we tracked the colleges represented in a package, I was able to generate an RSS feed so say, Estrella Mountain Community College had a data stream representing their contributions. This was where my tinkering to create what eventually came to be known as Feed2JS came in as they could use a cut and paste bit of HTML, along with their own CSS, to match their own web sites (I cannot remember, maybe 2 or 3 of the colleges used this?). As I look back on this, I had more in the MLX mix than I remembered. Yes, A lot of this is still the "building" aspects, but the features I aimed for was to make it of use outside of the project. And tying the input stream to other reporting systems was maybe the most significant means of input. Yet I think the competition and bribery made for the most fun means to pull things in. I was glad I could find the PDF of that 2003 Merlot Conference poster- it describes the MLX better than I have done here. Building the Maricopa Learning eXchange (Merlot 2003 poster)Download Sadly, the MLX was decommissioned a few years after I left. Amazing Stories of Openness The original 2009 covers for Amazing Stories of Openness Another collection effort of great interest to me that had open submissions started as an Open Ed conference presentation in 2009. The whole idea was to collect short videos of colleagues sharing examples of what I had experienced myself- the unexpected outcomes of sharing openly: While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “True Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and you can share your own.Amazing Stories of Openness, 2009 These are still out there as is a lonely web submission form at http://stories.cogdogblog.com/ I am pretty sure the bulk of these came as I would bug colleagues to record them on Skype or maybe they responded with interest to my blog post begging. I did a number of rounds of these over the years, and if I had a presentation coming up, I would mount a campaign to bug people. I did create \ a Google form to collect, no longer active, but the spreadsheet shows I got 17 responses. A few were from people I did not know directly, but colleagues were the bulk. In true form, Scott Leslie was the first responder. I found that when presenting I could even put willing audience members on the spot and record them live on my mobile phone. But the "collection" only grew around the times I solicited them for an upcoming presentation via blog posts, twitter, direct asks of colleagues. The built site alone did not draw many/any stories in. Even as I have had the collection sitting there for years as a first a static HTML site then one in WordPress, I struggle to think of more than maybe 3 that came in, unsolicited just from what was built. Most came from my direct interventions. The SPLOT Dreamy Stuff of Collections The SPLOT themes I started on at TRU are ones I have put to use numerous times to solicit collections. In fact, the very concept of creating sites for people to contribute written content, visual, or mixed-media all seem poised to do the same kind of collection building I have been after. I end up using SPLOTS often myself for projects. I keep seeing potential! Very few of them generated more than a handful of responses unless maybe it was part of a project or even class where they can be assigned (I am leaving those ones off the list below). Let's see how many I can rummage up: 30,000,000 ACA Stories (TRU Writer)- Maybe my one political venture, when the Affordable Health Care was under attack, I got an idea to collect stories of people who it had helped (like me). I collected... 13Pandemic Whispers (TRU Writer)- created this year as a way for people to write Post Secret like admissions of their pandemic experience. I got 42.Extraordinary Stories of Open and Online in the Covid-19 Era (TRU collector)- I was hopeful for a community building effort for Open Education Global that all of the pivoting educators did would blossom with stories. Well, 63 is not bad (I may have entered a third of them myself), and I even figured out a way to connect a second submission site that fed the main one so we could have a Spanish language entry point.OpenETC Inspire (TRU Collector) This has just recently been launched for the Open ETC (educational technology co-op for B.C.) as a way for community members to "give back" by sharing another member's site that they find inspiring. A total of 16 collected so farStories of OpenETC in Action (SPLOTbox) Another one for the Open ETC aimed at collecting the stories behind someone's site created at the OpenETC (12 stories collected) Once Built, What Will Make Them Come? I am still trying to figure this out. And many things, it depends on the context, the intended audience, what you have available to reach people who might contribute. The site itself, where we spend a lot of effort, seems alpst secondary to the efforts you will take on to make it (hopefully) come alive. The things that seem to be needed are: Direct asks to contribute seem to do better than broadcasting wide in blog posts and social media. Sure, people will like your tweet and repost, but I've not found it works well. More effective is direct messaging, emailing, extending a person invite to someone you think has something to contribute. It honors them. My wife Cori reminded me of this several times in one of my "why is no one adding to my collection!"Tying the submission into some other process helps. That was the leverage I had with the Maricopa Learning eXchange- because I ran other sites that required reports of some sort, I was able to tie them together so submitting a final report on a professional growth sabbatical or for an internal grant our office ran, could be set up to also add to the MLX. But often you do not have this luxuryOrganizing it around a presentation, workshop. Mke it part of the sharing activity to report back to the larger group (this also works if you are teaching as you have the carrot of making it part of an assignment.Submit stuff in other people's name. Heck, if they have done something worthy, why not add it in their name? Maybe not quite kosher, but you can also put a note in a description.Be patient. More than you think is reasonable. Just about when you are ready to throw in the towel, a spark fo activity often appears. Stay with it. Be almost annoying with your enthusiasm for it. After all these years, I do accept that building the thing is actually the smaller part of filling it. Thoughts? Maybe others have better ideas. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4458478083 Dreaming of Angles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed flickr photo shared by hangdog Ah, there is nothing like the smell of serendipity in the morning... One of my favorite things in looking at web sites is finding some secret or some method entangled in the HTML of the source code of the page. I love view source. I love the tags. Color me geek. I was looking at this story on Wired Gadget Lab about a new Samsung ebook being shown at CES that offers potential for not only reading content, but also writing/annotating on it. In doing my delicious tagging, I noticed the key descriptive sections are in two different parts of the page; so my method is to copy the second section to my clipboard (select, command C), then hilite the first section, hit the TAG button (I used the firefox extension). The tool inserts the hilited text i the description field, and then I paste in the second part. But I noticed for the pasted section (trying it twice) that it keep appending at the bottom a link back to the story; e.g. text that was not copied from the page. Hmmm, is it picking it up from some hidden color text on the page? No. So I just start copying different paragraphs from the body text of the wired page, paste it into my text edito, and no matter what section I copy, it appends: Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/samsung-e-books-let-you-read-and-write/#ixzz0c2IdLJHs Ahhh, the brain (and coffee) kicks in-- they have some widget in the web page that detects when something is copied, and somehow adds to it. Sneaky! Time for Underdog, Command U (view source in Firefox). I start scanning the source (ugh, it is 2010, do you think Firefox might actually make the view source window wrap the code?). The first surprising things is... woah, the site is run in WordPress! All the tell tale signs are there, plus the generator tag: Woah, Wired, you better update your WordPress- current version is 2.9.1, do you need help with that? Wow, they have a lot of javascript thingies in their <HEAD> but it does not take too long to find this: And thus I am now looking at the Tynt Tracer web site. It seems more geared to people who want to know how much their lofty words are lifted from the web page: Insight into the "copy and paste" phenomenon. Your content is likely copied far more than you realize. Depending on the site, up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content. While this may not sound like much, think of it this way: on a site that has 20 million page views per month, content is copied over one million times during any given month. That's a lot. How do we know this? Tynt's patent pending Insight technology is currently running on hundreds of thousands of web sites and monitors billions of page loads per month. Since the average content copied is between 200 and 300 words, even a site with only 100,000 page views would have up to 3 million words leave the site via copy each month (not to mention all the images!). That's also a lot. So what they offer is some javascript code you can add to the header of your blog or web site (you need a self-hosted site where you can edit the templates). It adds the capability to append to copied body text the link back to your original source, and also does some tracking of the copy activity. What I also liked is there is an option to also append a creative commons license of your choice to the copied text. I'm trying it out now on CogDogBlog, so if you copy any text from my pages, it will be appended on pasting with: Read more at CogDogBlog: http://cogdogblog.com/2010/01/08/peeking-at-code/#ixzz0c2XApVTH Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Maybe it is annoying for the copier to get something they did not copy? Maybe it helps spread the linktribution meme? Cool or not? I've been reading Syllabus magazine for quite some time, not always agreeing with everything in print, but I found good stories on instructional technology, case studies, review of technology that faculty use. But all that has been flushed. Syllabus has morphed to "Campus Technology" ...the complete resource for leaders in higher education. Campus Technology offers an expanded coverage of academic and administrative computing as well as articles from strategic planning to practical tips. Let's see the first issue articles... IT Spending: Where's the Value? Enterprise Technology: Selling the Vision Telecommunications: Can Cisco Answer the Call? Faculty & Technology: Rewarding TET IT Directions: What's Next for Windows? Smart Campus: MPEG-4 and the New, 'Flat' World The Web: Reading Between the Lines Not to mention the centerfold, a 18 page HP "Higher Education Contracts Guide", a read less thrilling then the phone book. The closest article related to teaching, Faculty & Technology: Rewarding TET offers a strange theory that faculty can lose their chances of tenure by spending too much time using technology: The time he spent on the use of TET—an as yet unvalidated tool—simply took away from his more serious teaching endeavors. The time involvement also detracted from his scholarly research; he made fewer scientific discoveries and received no grant money because of it. Syllabus was aimed at faculty, tech support, and administrators (tens of tens of thousands or more of potential audience readers) to something aimed at the top tier of administration, Presidents and CIOs (thousands of potential audience readers??)-- so I am left to guess it is not about creating a publication for a larger audience of readers, it is about creating a publication for an audience that spends large amounts of money. So speaking of not wasting time, I can go through this new magazine in less than 4 minutes. They did one thing, at least the old URLs to Syllabus articles were maintained. Before there was a dwarf from Middle Earth (or least before he was penned to Lord of the Rings), Gimli, or "New Iceland" has been there by Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Thanks to some colleagues, I had a chance to spend some time there as an invited speaker for the Riding the Waves of Change conference. There is probably some metaphor of those waves being frozen; I was constantly taken aback when looking out the windows and seeing a lake that never moved. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog With a lucky set of travel twists I managed to get there as planned late Tuesday night, meeting Andy McKiel at the airport, and setting off right away for Gimli. They worked me hard those three days... On Wednesday, I was asked to talk to the Manitoba Association of Education Technology Leaders, my first does of acronyms. It was completely conversational, free form, and at this point... I cannot recall the flow, some of it touching on old web history, the ideas of narrating one's work. Thursday I had the opening keynote slot for another Storytelling talk, Storythinking > Storymaking > Storytelling. In contrast to previous talks, I skipped through the "why storytelling matters" (not because it does not matter), with some nods to my little video card dealing of the storytelling metaphors. What I wanted to get to was a sense (hidden in the title) that "Storytelling" suggests performance, where I find the making of stories and the thinking in a story mindset, more interesting. So I wanted to show through the four major things I have made/been involved with - 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story, Five Card Flickr Stories, pechaflickr, and ds106. With the suggestion of Darren Kuropatwa, each was aimed to start with its own story as an introduction. https://www.slideshare.net/cogdog/storythinking-storymaking-storytelling I did record some audio Among the many people met that was a highlight, a special shoutout to a most creative grade 12 teacher, Tara MacLauchlan, who does some amazing collaboration with her colleague to the north, Zoe Bettess, who teaches grade 3. Tara even produced a nifty sketch note of the talk https://twitter.com/msmclauchlan/statuses/466966648574857216 For Five Card Flickr Stories, I invited participants to tag photos in flickr with the conference tag (rtwgimli) so we could have a special round of Five Card Riding the Wave Stories. For this I rigged by second flickr account so participants could post by email (that night I noted I had not changed this post by email address in a while, and found a few hundred spam photos; I may have inadvertently lost someone's Gimli photos in the cleanup). For pechaflickr I did a quick demo round with volunteers Sophia and Darren (yeah, that guy) with random images based on the tag "viking". They did more than an incredible job! As usual I had not nearly enough time the end to give ds106 justice. I had slides lined up with examples from the past as well as from my recent George Mason University "DS106 Goes to Work" class. Apparently I was energetic, or more likely, over caffeinated. But I had fun. All the presentation resources, including links mentioned, are at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/Storytelling+Riding+The+Wave Wikispaces is dead, I archived this talk myself. On Thursday afternoon (and repeated Friday morning) I led a 75 minute workshop on 50 Ways to Tell A Story-- I let the direction be nudged by the interests of the people present. Since I had provided an overview on my Thursday keynote, I aimed to take them through a story brainstorming process using, like I did at Skidmore College in March, pechaflickr. The idea was to generate 5 images, and ask people to develop individually a story that would weave them together. After my kidding of the thursday group's "niceness as Canadians". I told them what I learned in the UK that you can identify a Canadian because most of their sentences start with "I am Sorry"... so someone suggested "apology" as a word. I'm game (and surprise, one photo was of a dude in a Mountie uniform). The Friday group chose "jungle" - this presented more unified images, but still made the task not that much more easy. You can find the workshop materials at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/Riding+The+Wave. I ended up giving the Friday folks a bit more play time over "me explaining" time. Also on Thursday afternoon was another group conversation, this the Manitoba Association for Computing Educators (ManACE) for their AGM meeting. Someone in the audience gave me a good start when he asked how we identify the best work in DS106, leading me right to talk about inSPIRE And then I got the closing keynote, and this topic was Andy Mckiel's to talk about the idea and model of the ds106 Daily Create. I started a bit early, at two of my aborted efforts as a kid to be musical. In hindsight, I was not self-motivated nearly enough to practice. I took took this one through my experiences as a daily photographer, discovery of the Daily Shoot, and how we built our own version in January 2012 after the Daily Shoot folded up in October 2011. https://www.slideshare.net/cogdog/doing-the-daily-create creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A big thanks again to the conference planners Collette, Diane, Craig, Cheryl, Ron, and Mark for the invitation; Andy for suggesting me (and for giving me yet another hand made pen). And double thanks for Ron who did all the AV setup, plus the music for the open mic night. And even more thanks for Darren Kuroptawa and Chris Harbeck for spending some time and sharing their homes/family/meals with me over the weekend. Manitoba, if you enjoyed those two days of blue sky sunshine.... you are very welcome. Featured Image: Hark! a Viking! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license flickr foto It's Back!available on flickr There's joy in Sun-ville! My MacBookPro has returned, outfitted with a new fan, logic board, and something else I am forgetting. And for speed, I added another 1 Gb of RAM. Let's Rock! With all new guts... it was almost 2 weeks since I took in the MBP because of the extra-ordinary loud fan noises (much more than the rumor-ed "mooing" sounds). Yep, it's fan was bad, along with some wiring doo-dad, and while it was in the Apple repair, it got a new logic board as well. I am eager to transfer back all the working files, and retire my 4 year old iBook which served admirably well as a backup. cc licensed flickr photo shared by michael.heiss Given the rising tide/trend of electronic books, for a number of months I've been pondering how to make our NMC publications available in an ebook format. With the push of an iThing it looked like ePub was the format to aim for. It is after all, a standard (or is it a guideline). My experience suggests it is a muddy place, much depends on the devices that access the content (oi the browser wars of the 1990s), but this is a stream of what I've figured out so far. I will pre-amble that I have almost no expertise in this- its just what I figured out by head-banging attempts to produce an ePub. I'll foreshadow the hint that I am excited about the just released Anthologize tool for generating electronic texts but it's too early to tell on that one. First, I tried a number of the various tools that offered to convert a PDF to an ePub -e.g. ePubBud. I can say that you get "something" you can view at the end, but its really not optimal on format, layout- you don't get much in the options to customize, so its a crapshot whether it does a decent job. That is because under the hood- what an ePub file really is is not a file at all, but a container of files, many of them XML, and all the "content" portions of your ePub are structured HTML, or XHTML. So anything that attempts to "convert" your PDF must make guesses as to what are headers, where are breaks, etc, and who knows what it does with things like lists and links. I learned the most from the excellent tutorial "How to Create an ePub By Hand" which clearly illustrates many of the moving parts in an ePub, and provides a template to start with. Harrison Ainsworth's Epub Format Guide is another great reference (and is also available as an ePub). So what you end up doing is a lot of hand coding of XML and XHTML files, package it up with a few other key files in a zip, and than just change the file extension from ".zip" to ".epub" If you are leaping ahead like I did and think you can take that DRM sprinkled ePub, swap its file extension to .zip, and pry open to peek at the structure-- good luck. You get a *.cpgz file which when you uncompress-- gives you another version of the original zip, endless circle (well not exactly true, I just found the unix command line "ditto -xk source.zip " which seemed to pop it open, but thats just a detail- have not tried it yet with a dl-ed epub). While embarking down this manual path, I also asked our publication designer, who does use inDesign to generate our documents, to experiment with its ability to export ePub. I've not hear much, but he was unable to even get a simple test file going, and as is, this would require recasting of his templates and styles to get something ePub-able. I also got connected (thanks Phil Long) with someone who does this as a business - and found out on that end, they doe a ton of work doing it the manual way to get a template that works, and then get to the point of more automation in generating the content. I thought this would be pretty easy to do for our NMC Horizon Reports since I already re-publish them in WordPress format (see http://wp.nmc.org/) so I already have the content in HTML. It took a little bit of tidying to get clean XHTML- changing extensions to .xhtml, closing some tags properly, adjusting local links, changing the HTML headers to: The tricky part was packaging the files up. The instructions indicate that the special mimetype file should not be compressed, and must be the "first added to the zip". I had no luck getting this to work on a Mac, and even on a PC using WinZip, with everything as stated, I could not get the file to validate using the ThreePress validator-- it kept saying the first file in the zip was not 8 characters long (meaning it was not finding "mimetype" first. Crap. I was in a corner. I looked at other apps- Calibre is very handt for converting between eBook formats, and allows some modifications of the various settings (setting a cover image, editing the metadata) but what I really sought was something that was more of a full fledged ePub editor. And than I found maybe not the Holy Grail, but for me, what turned out to be pretty Grail-ish - eCub by Julian Smart. It is cross platform and free! eCub is a cross-platform tool for creating EPUB and MobiPocket books. EPUB is become a popular e-book standard and is open and free for all to implement. EPUB files can be read by MobiPocket, Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Stanza, the Sony Reader, and many other readers and applications. MobiPocket books can be read on desktop platforms, mobile platforms and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. eCub offers a convenient way to import text and XHTML files and create all the necessary components of an EPUB file. It makes it easy to view and edit files, and check the generated EPUB, using external tools. It can also generate audio files from your book content using eSpeak and other text-to-speech software. A wizard allows you to create a new project in seconds, with options for generating a table of contents, a cover page, and a title page. You can create a simple cover design image using templates and a simple design tool. Then you can compile, check and try out the EPUB at the click of a button. With eCub, I simply made a new project, and was able to import my directory of xhtml files. The file tool allows me to change the order, and even to edit them if needed: There are a number of settings panels that pretty much take care of the grunt work of generating the content.opf and other XML files the ePub needs, plus it adds the meta data. It has templates you can use to generate a cover, but I just went for the simple of the same cover image from our publications. I went a few rounds of edits (mostly tweaking the XHTML for some formatting errors) with the ThreePress ePub validator to get all but one error cleared there (it seems to be saying the format for my publication date is invalid, but I cannot see any issue there). So here is 2010-Horizon-Report.epub (236k) a test version of an ePub equivalent of the 2010 NMC Horizon Report (web version) This is a draft version, yadda yadda, small type legal mumbo jumbo, batteries not included, your mileage will vary... But the test was in seeing how it worked. The desktop version of Stanza was sad, as it seemed to ignore all formatting, and produced a river of text. I have to say the iBooks app in the iPad looks and acts the best so far. I like how my own publication sits in the shelf The downside is of course, the jump rope of having to get stuff there via iTunes sync. Also, mysteriosuly enough, with ePub files sent my mail or even when accessed in DropBox, iBooks is never offered as a helper app for opening ePub files. But in iBooks, this version works in a lovely manner- it displays using the simple styles I made for headers, the hyperlinks to internal and external URLs all work, the table of contents and other bits work great. Stanza too displayed the content reasonably (though it ignored my own style sheet), but did all of the lists, bold, italics as it should: However, the hyperlinks in the generated Table of Contents as well as internal ones went nowhere. In some searching (I cannot locate the exact location now, but thought it was here)... I found out to get Stanza hyperlinks to work, you actually have to press and hold the link at least 2 seconds. I think that is "the fix is in progress" statement here. So I have an ePub proof done, and tested it small scale. I don't have access to other readers, and assume I might have to run it through Calibre to generate versions that will work with other eReaders (which has my scratching my head over the concept of "standard"). With eCub and my content already in formatted HTML I should eb able to convert a number of our other documents more easily. In the end, creating an ePub is far from easy. I would think there is a ton of room for someone to create a better kind of application to generate ePub files and more than the quick and slap conversions, but a full fledged editor. And most ideally, I am hopeful the just off the code press Anthologize will be a viable option, which might be the best since our content already exists in WordPress. It does require a little bit of server sized tweaking (re-compiling PHP to include the ZIP extension). This is really an early stage for ePub-- there are some interesting possibilities of JavaScript ePub readers perhaps making it possible to embed/integrate ePub with other web content. Then there is the headier stuff, since ePub can allow for scripts and object tags, for Interactivity in ePub. Definitely the folks at ThreePress are doing a lot with this leading edge -- see http://blog.threepress.org/. And that's all I know for now! It was a windy day at the Grand Canyon, but it's clear the vistas and grandeur brought some clarity to Jim Groom's perspectives on who has the greatest blog. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R3HnPaYfso Yeah, 4Life! flickr foto Not So Picturesqueavailable on my flickr It is a hazy day at our cabin Strawberry as the front of the Cave Creek Complex fire, 12 miles to the southwest, is smoking up the skies. Fortunately, the news is saying that there is less to worry about in terms of the fire reaching hear. Despite this haze of smoke in the normally crytal clear blue Arizona Sky, the danger to our cabin Strawberry seems to be of a lesser threat from the Cave Creek Complex fire that what we heard earlier in the week. I am not surprised the Phoenix news media stoked more concern than warranted with their slant on the "news" during the week. Fortunately the strong winds that moved the fire quickly north last week have slowed down. According to the reports on the fire incident web sites, the northern edge has not moved much in the last 48 hours, due to wind change, and some differeent terrain where the amount of dry fuel to burn is lessened. They are setting up control lines just south of the Verde River, and breacing those would be the worst case where they would start a possible evacuation. Then we would have at most 13 hours to get out of here. But due to some incredible efforts by 1300 some firefighters out there in 100+ degree heat, things are looking a bit less grim. But the threat is always there in the extreme dry climate of Arizona, compunded by the multi year drought, compunded by dry lightining storms, compunded by the sometimes boneheaded human behavior in the woods. Anyhow, we can relax slightly, and now consider going ahead with our plan to drive to Colorado for a family wedding July 4. The blog will be quiet from July 2-6. It's been one of my long term dream plans to make a generalizable Wordpress theme approach to the ds106 Daily Create so people (me included) could create news site to run daily challenges. One of the things I wanted to do differently was to make the way people contribute is via twitter, going back to the way the old Daily Shoot used to work. My plan was to work in the twitter API, so that it would look into the mentions timeline of the account you wanted to us (so you only get replies or tweets to a specific account). I also wanted it to use a specific hashtag, so the site would know which Daily _____ it responded too. And last, I wanted an item to have a link to the response in the tweet. Well... I actually got it all working in the demo site and set it up for a version to run for the You Show. And I got most of the technical shenanigans into a long winded technology teeming post. One thing I was worried about (maybe not likely a problem) was a way to progressively load new responses-- it would be too much overhead to list them all since I am using an embed function on each tweet. I thus experimented with the Ajax Load More plugin, and got that sort of working, where it could append the next 10 set of responses (its tricky since these are stored as custom post types) (but I got it) [caption id="attachment_39890" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The grey button loads more data (it can also be set to load by scrolling)[/caption] I think I got the event timer to work, but also added an admin feature to force an update. But... The Problems I think its a lot to ask people to get the three needed items in a tweet (@trushow15, #YSdailyXX tag, and a URL). And worse, I keep coming across ones I see in twitter that look like they have all three and are not showing up. While I could dig and pick at the latter problem, the first problem is more of a problem. And thus I realized I think I am doing it wrong. A Reset So I went back to the way I set up the Writing responses to the DS106 Daily Create (example). I think it will be easier if people respond just by filling out a form on each entry. Like: What a minute- that submission form looks familiar. It's just like a comment form. So if I use the comment form (which I can do some tweaking to change the labels), it takes care of the displaying of the responses. I might be able to ad some code to auto embed any IMG URLs. Now the site gets easy. I will still have the back end magic that creates unique tags, and schedules the post from the admin interface (I'm pretty proud of this): [caption id="attachment_39892" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Custom Meta Box[/caption] This panel appears in the post editor, and when the entry is saved as draft, it does a bunch of things to each post (1) adds the next available tag (which might not be necessary, but is useful for naming the post urls); (2) Sets the post to be scheduled 24 hours after the last one in the queue; (3) adds some meta data to each most Plus now I can use maybe a more elegant looking theme. I think I can re-rig this in a few days, ultimately it should be a lot simpler for other sites to use. Heck it might be now something that can work as a child for any theme? I will leave the original code on github because knowing how to get stuff from the twitter API as a useful thing to figure out. [caption id="attachment_39893" align="alignnone" width="630"] Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Wikimedia Commons image by Victorgrigas[/caption] I'm doing it wrong more often than not. It just helps to know. UPDATE Jan 25, 2015 Change that channel, I think I figured it out. Top / Featured Image cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by Scot Rumery: http://flickr.com/photos/srumery/4243905723 Free content for community colleges (well and everybody else)! Free! Developing content based on model of MIT Open CourseWare success, but for community college level courses. Foothill-De Anza approached by Hewlett Foundation to lead effort for more general education level courses, community college level curriculum. Based on success with FHDA success in ETUDES (Easy To Use Distance Education Software), home grown course management system, Project name: Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets (SOFIA) open content initiative http://sofia.fhda.edu/ Sofia - the wisdom and intellectual virtue achieved when striving after the best ends and using the best means" - Aristotle Alan's cheap, half-baked summary: The goals of the project are lofty, admirable, well planned, et . Everything looks like it should. What is not clear is how the content will be shared, is it the course as a bundle, is it unbundled, can one use pieces?? It also begs the questions others have asked about MIT's Open CourseWare project- isn't there more to the course than then content? Regardless, I'll be curious to see how these free courses are rolled out and received. (more…) An artlcle and links from University of British Columbia's e-Strategy newsletter (no RSS!) features some interesating tools developed at the UBC Arts ISIT. <tiphat>Tip of the blg hat to my colleague Michelle, who has one of the funkier blog names for an educator ;-) </tiphat> You gotta like the fun photos of the tool creators on the news story. (more…) This morning's RSS buzz, or rippling murmur, is the web video from upstart LMS Instructure announcing the open-sourceness of their Canvas platform, and with it, a literal parody of Apple's then ground breaking 1984 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCIP3x5mFmw As a frequently off target metaphor users, I step blindly into pot calling kettle black, but is the 1984 really the parallel? Sure Blackboard has a large corner, but they are hardly that dominant, and frankly, seem to be teetering unaware of the sign taped on their back "Kick Me, I am Obsolete". I did like the use of flame throwers in the Instructure video, even the fun out takes at the end, looking like they had some fun there. But if you want a real message, listen to this clip from perhaps the most memorable NMC presentation we hosted when doing our conferences in Second Life. This was Jim Groom and Tom Woodward titled The Revolution will be Syndicated: The coming revolution will be syndicated through a web of feeds making ideas ever easier to find. Sharing will no longer be the exception, but the rule. Enduring these hard, transitional times takes not only a revolutionary mindset, but the resourcefulness of a survivalist, therefore the methods we will examine are not only mind altering, but they are also very cheap, flexible, and open. This presentation will involve some performance art in an effort to "revolutionize" how we imagine web-based publishing in higher education. Come to this session ready to doff the chains of LMS slavery and join the brave new world of web-publishing in the Age of Syndication. Check out the opening-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nZxxksVqpQ Jim and Tom had cast the vision of LMS zombies on the train, LMS zombies eating at McDonalds (maybe LMS zombies suing each other in court)-- in Tom Woodward's epic line describing LMS's "like artery clogging document warehouses where engagement goes to die." Their theatric pyrotechnics suggested that LMS zombies sit among us, at meetings, in the hallways, in the classrooms-- now that was some flamethrowing (even if was cheap tricks in Second Life). You can get the whole video and more at http://www.nmc.org/preso/6438 This was back in November 2008, and honestly, it is sure looking like burned zombie flesh when I look at what is bubbling over at ds106, Jim's open digital storytelling course- which, among other such open courses- is the least "course-ish" thing out there. It is barely 2 weeks in and there have already been about 700 blog contributions. To those who doubt the ability for ordinary learners to become "system administrators", look at how many of them are adorning their digital lockers. We think usually of revolutionaries as the building burning, flag stomping radicals with the bull horns, but often the real revolution happens within, and not with the fanfare of flamethrowers. And that is no secret. Ultimate, penultimate, ultra-ultimate... we found the holy grail at Blue Water Seafood in San Diego. Brian and I celebrated the fruits of our presentation labor here with fabulously fresh swordfish and mahi-mahi tacos. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/93915698 Blue Water Seafood flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Yes, to all those who asked us during the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, we took this quest very seriously. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/93915194 Two Tacos flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It's all in the sauce! Featured Image: Yes! This is IT! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I've dialed back the level energy I spent in January and February writing about catfishing. It consumes me with negativeness, and frankly-- nothing is really going to ever change at a systemic scale. Do you really think Facebook is unaware of this problem? Given the number of reports that happen, the presence of catfishing support groups un Facebook- how can they possibly not know? And given that they know, what does it mean that they avoid responsibility? They are thus complicit. Check out this telling video where Alec Couros demonstrates a face matching tool available on a Russian dating site that is surely within the realm of Facebook's technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnu1IhbtRwc And ask yourself- why is Facebook not providing its users a tools to face match potential "friends"? If Facebook eats the web, I sure hope the choke on some fish bones. So do not expect Facebook to do anything except pile up advertising profit. One catfishing victim I've heard from off and on for a few months, an artist, emailed recently and said that after moving trough her stages of WTF/shame/rage, she decided to work on a piece of art related to her feelings. That may be the most sound course of action I have heard from a victim. Another victim contacted me today, and sent some photos of some Euro-dude's dating profile site with all my photos, 4 out of six in the flickr set I keep stocked with photos known to be used by catfishers. She asked for resources. I was about to send her my Catfishing Info page, but thought about one of her comments. Once she found out she was considering just letting the scammer keep going at it: I'm gonna play on for a little while until I figure out a way how to nail the bastard (or the group) Just for grins, I pointed out some problems with one of the photos of supposedly this oil drill operator at work: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Just a little zooming in on the "oil drill platform" one sees the equipment is made by "Mauer Manufacturing" - an Iowa company that makes agricultural equipment, not oil drilling machinery. You can see reflected in the front window of the supposed oil rig, not ocean or rock, but a field of grain. And that big tub shooting in the back? I am not sure what it's called, but the machine is actually a combine owned by a farmer friend I visited in Ontario. That's where the grain gets shot into the big bin in back. It takes very little to find problems in the photos, even before victims do a reverse image search and find that the face they knew as "James" or "Malle" belongs to some guy named Alan. This whole thing reminded me of the TED Talk James Vietch did when he decided to do the atypical reaction to spam email- he replied to see how far the scammer would go: And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? And that’s what I’ve been doing for three years on your behalf. Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. It’s really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. I don’t think what I’m doing is mean. There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. All I’m doing is wasting their time. And I think any time they’re spending with me is time they’re not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right? It's well worth a watch: https://youtu.be/_QdPW8JrYzQ But his message again got me thinking-- "All I’m doing is wasting their time. And I think any time they’re spending with me is time they’re not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right?" Catfishing victims have almost no recourse. Facebook does absolutely nothing; and I've shown more than once how flawed their so-called reporting system really is. There is almost no legal recourse because the scammers are overseas, virtually untraceable, and I've been told because victims willingly give up money, the burden of proof of a crime is proving psychological damage. And frankly, I think I lot of people in general look down on victims as almost being responsible for being fooled. But here is something victim can do. I am not sure how many would really want to do this, but imagine if A LOT of them did? Victims can waste the scammers time. They can continue acting like the romance is alive. Like a catfosh on a line, rather than cutting the line, let that fish swim and swim and swim and tire itself out. "the more time [a scammer] is spending with me is time they're spending scamming [others]" And there would be, I expect, a bit of satisfaction in flipping the con, because now a victim is armed with the truth of the scammers deceit, but the scammer would not know it. Their con is a long game, they spend weeks or more courting victims. If you can make them spend more wasted time chasing an knowledgeable victim who won't ever send them money- it's that much time they are not entangling women who are not in the know. So thus I added this bit to by Catfishing Info Page: If You Really Want Revenge– Waste Their Time! Let Them Think They are Still Fooling You… While I doubt many victims would want to do this, if you really want to get back at them– you might consider how you can waste their time and effort. What I mean is continue to, like the fish, play them out, continue to act like you are in love, and do whatever you can to make them expend effort to fool you. That's right, take action, and scam the scammers. Imagine if this happened on a massive scale. Imagine an organized effort, as organized as the scammer's operation. Imagine all those catfish just swimming around, going nowhere, and becoming worn out, starved from exhaustion. [caption id="attachment_56162" align="aligncenter" width="630"] From chathamdailynews.ca[/caption] It seems beautiful. Update: See also Scambaiting https://www.419eater.com/ Top / Featured Image: I had hard time with the search engines. I was not even sure of the fishing term when you avoid reeling in a fish and let it swim and tire out. I finally figured it was "palying out the line" but when you combine "play" and "fish" you get a lot of cute graphics of video games or drawings representing the game "Go Fish". The image I found is from a Dutch fishing blog post-- it carries no license or credit (as it seems 98% of the web), so while it's not strictly re-usable, I am giving more credit than they are. flickr foto Cleveland Rocksavailable on flickr Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Next week, June 7-10, is the NMC Summer Conference, this year we are in Cleveland, hosted by a Fab Four of Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cleveland Museum of of Art, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is my first time being at the conference as part of the organzing team, rather than past years as a partiicipant, so maybe when I say the program is tremendous, my bias is showing. But since I first attended my first NMC (Ohio State in 2002), it became my "must-attend" conference. One of my interjected ideas is to put in the printed program a call for an official conference tag: Use web 2.0 tools to link conference content online! When you post photos, movies, blog posts, and relevant web sites using a web tool that supports tagging, be sure to add the official conference tag: nmc2006 tag. That will make it easy share and find content using Flickr Technorati, del.icio.us, and similar sites. To see what has been tagged so far, visit these links: http://www.technorati.com/tag/nmc2006/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/nmc2006/ http://del.icio.us/tag/nmc2006 So for anyone attending the conference this year, be sure to upload lots of photos, bookmark sites, and post blog entries tagged with nmc2006. I am working today on an aggregator / display page for the conference site, and cooking up a podcast page as well. And what could be cooler! For the Thursday night reception at the Rock and Roll Museum, they are opening up the 4th floor studio for us to jam. What a week it will be in Cleveland, see you, tag you there! cc licensed flickr photo shared by [phil h] I'm a huge fan of CoolIris, the browser plugin that turns media content into an amazing flowing virtual wall. It is hands down one of the best ways to explore flickr or YouTube searches, since results are not limited to one page, it becomes endless flow. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Since February, I have been crafting a lot of my presentations in the CoolIris format, using the form of RSS to drive the content I pick- see my documentation on Tricking Out CoolIris as a Presentation Tool as well as the step by step instructions posted by Doug Belshaw. The reason it works for me is the way I can associate "slides" with a URL so I can jump out to a web page and easily return to the presentation- or it is seamless to jump around. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I pretty much modeled my work using the example CoolIris has for Enabling Your Site with RSS which again I have used for a strings presentations since February 2009, and in most of them I had embedded FLV video which worked flawlessly... until sometime in late May. It was about the time I upgraded to Flash 10 that I noticed (and was told by Dean Shareski) that the embedded videos no longer worked. They status icon just pun endlessly and the video never played. Video for YouTube played fine. Dean had sent a link acknowledging this on the CoolIris Bug page which has since been removed. The CoolIris discussion forums had a number of people asking about this with a whole range of suggested work arounds that never worked. In testing I I have confirmed that it fails on: Mac OSX with Flash 10 in Safari (3 and 4) Firefox (3 and 3,5) Windows Vista with Flash 10 in Internet Explorer 7 However, it does work in Windows Vista with Flash 9 in Firefox 3.0 For my most recent presentation, I did an end around by linking out to a web page to play flash video, which works, but is not optimum. Tonight, I nailed and squashed the bug to the wall. I outlined this in fill detail to bugs@cooliris.com. Let's see if they acknowledge it. I found the bug when using their test feed linked under "self help". I nabbed the RSS feed their example used, since the embedded FLV worked perfectly there. I had modeled my MediaRSS for embedding FLV content after their example listed under step 1: As their example suggests and their documentation states Note: The URLS can be relative (i.e. images/photo.jpg) or absolute (i.e. http://anysite/images/photo.jpg). So I started looking at their sample RSS test feed where the FLV video did work, and first was baffled since the format they used was nowhere near the example; the XML structure was different and text was encoded in CDATA format. So I first copied this into my own MediaRSS and replicated the format. Nope video still worked. In a whim, I wrote the URL path for the FLV content as a full URL. Bingo it worked. Bug found- relative path URLs do not work in the MediaRSS file. My original MediaRSS was the same as the basic Their Generation stick around for the smashing end.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY which is the format that fails to load. However, if I recoded it: Their Generation stick around for the smashing end.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY Up here at my cabin, we have no TV reception, so we have a system of a DVD player, TV, and some Altec-Lansing computer speakers for audio. I've noticed when the TV and DVD are off, if I raise the audio cable, I can hear some low, static filled radio sound from the speakers. With some investigation, I found by extending the speaker's audio input cable up and away, I get a medium strength radio signal, and matching it to a radio, my speakers are picking up FM 101.1: actual annotated photo on flickr I snagged a bit of the audio, switching between the speakers acting as a radio and the radio acting as a radio: http://cogdogblog.coom/wp-content/audio/speakers-radio.mp3 Too bad the music sucks. On other unworldy communication fronts, my refrigerator has been pinging Technorati with requests for refills, the coffee maker is publishing RSS feeds updated with each brew cycle, and the toaster is posting really bizarre YouTube videos. Hello, world. No, that's been done before. But hello, empty WordPress editor, screen, even more sparse when the Gutenburger editor opens full screen. More white space. Forgive me blog, for it has been 11 days since my last post, and it's been only 3 this month. Even doing my ALL CAPS tweets of impersonation has lost its luster. President ALL CAPS was last seen April 7. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/1247535933898948609 Lethargy oozes. Yes, as my Cori reminds me, with her lovely wry smile, "there is a pandemic going on." Everything seems to feel, well, sluggish, in energy. That pile of work peeking out in ignored open browser tabs, windows left open. I try to get my daily photos in, but maybe it's once a week to get to posting. Blog drafts rummage around in my head, whispering, swirling like that majestic plastic bag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLgh9h2ePYw Yet the blogging, Just. Does. Not Happen. If anything all these years of blogging has taught-- hold the bus! I completely missed the Blogiversy. April 19 was the start 17 years ago. Yes, that the only way to crack a blogjam is just to crack it open, and there is always the reliable Blogging About Blogging or Blogging About Not Blogging. So here it is. And what do I really have to be dragging about? Here in our quiet little town in one of the quietest provinces of Canada, we are safe, with food, internet, cat and dog playing together. People elsewhere are dealing with much more. Break the jam. Then via Stephen Downes OLdaily I learned of the passing of Keith Lyons, and it will be his final blog post. I can't say I know Keith, but he's commenting, linked, tweeted back and forth for a while. I can find a first comment from Keith on my blog from 2008, during CCK08. And a trackback from Keith's blog as recent a January 27 this year. And a rather complimentary post from Keith, or a "PT" (Post Terrific?), from a 2014 Howard Rheingold did with me . Yet, in reading his obituary blog post, there is much much more to this man that I never knew. So what is known of us, what is not known, seems to always be a wide gap. I'm humbled by Keith's story and legacy, and also awakened to that non-original notion that our time here is pretty much a blink, especially to a planet. Use this time better than well. Squeeze every bit of opportunity out of it. Live it with as many people you can touch, connect with, make a difference for. So this is my busting the blogjam open. Not that anyone is noticing, not that it even matters that blogging is a dwindling act in lieu of the social media quick fix (please react to this with an emoji). It's just that the writing here, in the past, has always been a thing to help punch through challanges and thought jams. The blog gates are open. At least right now. Featured Image: Logtumble.jpg a Wikimedia Commons image placed into the public domain as the work of a US Government agency. I thought I had my own photos of a river full of logs, but this one works well as these are petrified logs from Petrified National Park in Arizona, a rather underrated park worth a visit if you are ever hoofing the I-40 between Flagstaff and Albuquerque. 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. I rarely listen to the radio anymore, about as much as I can endure is some public radio during the morning commute, and I have not listened to a music station in eons. So since I have been enjoying my iPod Shuffle, I've been curious about options to use it as a player in my vehicle. The Shuffle did work well in the VW Beetle with one of those cassette tape player attachments, but the only problem is that a few months ago, my wife and swapped vehicles, just for some variety sake, so now I have the mid 1990s Nissan Pickup (so unattractive with its hood of primer color I will not post flickr photos) which has a CD player but no cassette deck. Having heard mixed reviews of the FM transmitter devices (audio output plugged into them is sent to an unused station on your car radio), I was excited to read glowing reviews of the DLO TransPod which provides a dock for the shuffle and pops into a cigarette lighter for power. It is supposed to have excellent sound. I'll likely give it a try... hmm, with this purchase, the cost of Shuffle accessories of the sports case, SOny earbuds, and the TransPod exceed the cost of the iPod! This could be the last time I ever listen to anyone's commercial radio broadcast. With some regular motion in the learning space, maybe every other lunar conjunction there is a sharp increase in attempts to define learning objects. David Davies has been at it with echos here and there. Personally, my attention span goes into day dream mode as the level of definition attempts grows, but I accept that it is the inevitable step one takes on a journey from exposure to this term. Some stay on this narrow road a long time while others get around to saying, it is not the specifications of the road that matter, but the destination (or just a good trip). Me, I am heading for the mountains. Among the clatter in my RSS I came across "Moving from theory to practice in the design of web-based learning using a learning object approach" from the E-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology: This paper describes the design of a web-based learning module. The aim in the design was to operationalize the concepts of granularity, reusability, scalability, and interoperability as they relate to learning objects. The prototypical module was designed for contexts where identifying and solving ill-structured problems is relevant. The module consists of an aggregation of learning objects including video segments, a bibliography and discussion forum activities. The module specifies an instructional sequence through reliance on a problem-solving model. Two rounds of module testing using WebCTTM were conducted. The module represents one perspective on operationalizing concepts related to learning objects. Not to be overly critical (right, eh?) but I find reading this paper a reminder why academic research journals are so, well, "academic"-- the writing is just plain laden with the correct academic words in lieu of plain english. As much as I could distill this project: * created web content using a variety of media * put it in WebCT * had some students try it (they had trouble getting RealPLayer to work, who doesn't) * gathered some student opinions * speculated that the module developed from French course "could" be re-purposed I am a bit overly sarcastic here, but what really got me is that when you peer closely the "learning objects" are JPEG images, HTML, video clips: The module represents an aggregation of seven objects in HTML format, one object in JPG format that can be embedded in one of the HTML pages and a set of thirty video segments. The description of the problem itself constitutes an object in HTML format. The problem-solving model constitutes another object and prescribes the instructional sequence through a series of phases. The model consists of three phases of Consult, Gather and Act. Each of these phases is represented by one object in HTML format. In between each of these phases is a Reflection. The latter phase is represented in an HTML page that links to an online asynchronous discussion forum. (my emphasis added) And there are no linked examples or even screen shots to share what this "module" does. If this is what an example of something made from learning objects is, then I have been doing this for 10 years. In 1994, I created this mini lesson example on Mineral Hardness for a paper at the Association of Applied Interactive Multimedia (AAIM) conference, July 1994. Mine includes 5 HTML objects, 9 GIF objects, and one JPEG object. Sure, you could easily re-use the Moh's Hardness scale with a little creative effort, into an activity for a French Class or a Sociology class?? And since this has been online for 10 years, surely it has scaled? Well, shoooooooot. I've been "operationlizing" learning objects all along! I knew it! The web sites I have created for the last 10 years, include likely more than 30,000 learning objects, and just imagine how many more of them are out there elsewhere on the web. Good gracious, they are everywhere! What shall we do? My point is not to belittle someone's research from my reading of an article, but it just seems to me that you can paint almost anything as made of learning objects, and at that point, they have no meaning at all. After all, my previous research shown that my left big toe is a learning object. But hey, let the definitions start rolling again. I am ready for a siesta. A faculty member I am nudging into blogging shared this beautiful essay about blogging, Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs by Kate Baggott. I would try to summarize, but this award winning essay says it all: Show me your context, baby. I already know the world you live in; tell me only how you see it. I am among the most demanding readers of blogs, or web logs, or on-line journals, or whatever you choose to call the daily missives individuals post on the web. I want the whole story: the profane, the sacred and the essential facts. These are the demands we make of great literature too, but that comparison is too limiting. To call blogs literature would be to turn them into an elitist, edited, and vetted art, one which is contrary to their very nature. The complexity of what blogs and their reactionary, perfectly contemporary, accessible prose could mean to the future of sustainable storytelling, to truth in journalism and to the survival of democracy, is too great to call literature. And about the authors... Bloggers are like the smart and difficult students who interrupted every lesson with sarcastic commentary and passed their exams with audacity and contempt for their schools, their subjects, their teachers and the exams themselves. They do not write for audiences or according to deadline. They comment because they have something to say. This is at the heart of my interest in blogs- the platform for people to have their own voice, their own say. It is environments constructed by people, not constructed for them (a.k.a vapid presentations, page turners of learning objects....). I believe in the wisdom and might of blogs and bloggers, but I believe it with the same fear and hope that lovers do when they cling to each other in any fresh spring romance. Like the lovers, I do not know if my belief is ultimately sustainable or just naive, but like the lovers I will let it bloom in all its good feeling. Amen, Kate. (and thanks Shelley!) Three Amigos Kerpoofing It posted 29 Sep '07, 12.51pm MDT PST on flickr Working on our "teaser" for the K12 Online conference... Played a little with this fun tool for creating cartoon graphics, www.kerpoof.com - harder to figure out how to embed or create linked stories. Last Flickr blog post (for now). Must run out to Home Depot to do some Real Work. Wow, once you start tinkering with code, the worm can opens up. I made a few more adjustments to the RSS to JS demo due to the worminess of RSS 2.0 versus 1.0. After comments in yesterday's announced fix, I became aware that the code would not deal successfully with RSS 2.0 feeds that use <guid> for the item's url and where <pubDate> is used to give the date the item was posted. A few more logic checks and i think we have these bases covered, noting that the date/time format for <pubDate> (RSS 2.0) is different from <dc:date> (RSS 1.0). Also I added something that makes inserts a "no title" string if there is no <title> listed for an item (seems like this happens with Radio feeds often??) Hopefully that will tide this script over for a while... "The worms crawl in thw worms crawl out, they turn your blood into saurkraut..." (old kids song) cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That keynote speaker, is he talking to me? Yep. In his ED-MEDIA presentation on Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment, slide 14, Stephen describes the process that is at the core of his activity (16,000+ posts since 2001!), which he named in honor of little ole me as ARRFF: or Aggregate, Remix, Repurpose, Feed Forward. Stephen was firing on all pistons, and had some great lines on the difference between complicated things and complex things, mesh networks versus star networks, the mystery of the hidden flash animation, the myth of solitary autonomy, some things about butterflies and more. You can catch the audio on his site at http://www.downes.ca/presentation/225 ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! Taking some blindfolded tosses into the wiki pond, I am going to see if this stuff really works. It comes up in many circles, discussions of online course development, learning objects, and just today in the digital storytelling workshop: Where can I find sources of free media (images, audio, video)? This is usually in the context of having to provide vague answers to questions about "what I can or cannot do" in terms of copyright. Our usual advice is where-ever possible, go for original acquired assets or use the free stuff that is "out there". The rise of Creative Commons is starting to open some great doors (i have made good use of OpSound for multimedia soundtracks) as well as the things housed at the Internet Archive. Anyhow, to address these repeated requests, I am setting up a wiki page as a reference for free MediaSources:. http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/objects/wiki?MediaSources Since this sort of falls inside the realm of learning objects, it is floating inside the new Ocotillo Learning Objects wiki. I have a few upcoming workshops that I tend to build as pages around this as a resource. Now here is the plea- jump in and help shape, grow, round out this collection. Use it for your own purposes, but let's stir up some active participation in this wiki. Please? If you play in our wiki, I'd be glad to wander over to yours! Strap your self in for another wild old crazy link tour, real audio echoes from the web past, and an anomaly of a free web storytelling tool that not only is around after a start 8 years ago, but quite useful. This web rabbit hole goes deep, deep, deep, including some browser source inspection of now dead flash embeds on a site preserved in the Internet Archive and some url decoding to find lost audio. Okay you grey hair web readers, how many of you remember VoiceThread? I had forgotten about it, one of the keys, and actually the instigator for 50 Web Ways to Tell a Story. It's still on the web some 18 years after it was planted there. Twas forgotten by me until I opened an email I could have easily just let slide down the unread bin. Hi Alan Levine, We’ve noticed that you haven’t used your VoiceThread account associated with [EMAIL READACTED] in over a year. If you do not sign in to VoiceThread again your account will be archived and all the data in your account will be permanently deleted. If you would like to continue to use VoiceThread, please sign in here.[link deleted] email from Voicethread.com April 12, 2025 Permanently deleted? Nooooo. All I had to do was sign in. And thus I found Stuff I Created and Largely Forgot About. My collection of audio narrated sets of images saved again in Voicethread, going back to July 2007. What's the Big Deal? Maybe not much. But for the time, and still now, VoiceThread holds up well. Really well. "What does it do?" It allows me to upload a series of photos as a web-based slideshow. "Big deal!" Well wait, I can also record audio (and now video) that I add to each, along with text, like a comment. So now I have voice narration or comments. And I can listen to what I said 18 years ago. "Hmmm, but not so novel." Wait, I can also set it up so anyone visiting can add a comment as text or audio, so it becomes a conversation. "Maybe interesting, but I have to go now to Like some Instagram photos." Well, hang on. I will be getting to some examples. But first. A 2007 Discovery Tale I am able to unravel what happened 18 years ago by, some miracle of AI mattering and spacing? No, it's based in my blog timeline. I "discovered" it on July 5, 2007 (sharp eyes will notice this is the same date I created by first VoiceThreads). Also note in links to come I have already been in more recently to fix broken links, edit others to point to the Internet Archive. https://cogdogblog.com/2007/07/voicethreads/ "There’s no shortage at all of cool new tools to create and express yourself on the web. I came across Voicethread via a link from Tim Lauer (linktribution!)" Note I practiced the long lost art I coined for giving credit to the person who shared a link. Tim was a principal at an elementary school in Portland, Oregon, who shared so much valuable for me working in higher education. I seemed to remember he had described this find as a blog post, yet I failed trying the original link to Tim's blog (when I tried last week it redirected to some crypto casino site, now it's just a domain reseller). Oh Tim, I'm sad to see this. Damn. Again, the Internet Archive saves the day, or maybe the minute. Not much to see as pretty much this was the blog post of what is more or less a socail media share today, at 117 characters it fits in the little container of an original tweet. Joyce Valenza points to VoiceThread, a tool for adding sound recordings, and text messages to slide shows and images. https://web.archive.org/web/20071016184524/http://timlauer.org/2007/06/26/voicethread/ Yet as you might see, what is there is the trackback ping from my blog post to Tim. Can't do that in a social or even a static site generator. Moving on. Tim shared a link, I clicked, explored, and it set me off on a journey of web based storytelling that sends associative trails in too many directions to even count. The Awkward Family Photograph That Started All of This From the very first example I found then, was something called "What is a VoiceThread Anyohow" where you saw this: The original VoiceThread, hang on I will send a link down the page. Be patient! There is of course the classic 1960s posed family portrait, the kind where the kids are forced to wear their "good" clothes and stand and smile unnaturally in a photographers studio. You can see the goofy smiles, the "I hate being here" smiles, the fiendish smiles. I have one of those of my own family. Just an old photo? No- see those icons on the sides? Each is an audio recording of the people in this photo, much later (like 2007) each telling you their version of what was happening here. The guy who created VoiceThread? His name is Steve, and in this photo he shares the story too. I do have in my blog notes the Mom's message, surrounded by her 6 offspring, she trying to keep things in sufficient order to get a happy snap shot. “I’m the happy mother here in this picture of these children, some of whom… appear to have anxiety disorders… I don’t know why the look unhappy, because I’m their mother- and they should be happy.” For me, this was a pivotal find. Why? In July 2007 I was preparing for a huge honor and commitment. I had gotten this amazing invitation from the Flexible Learning Network to visit Australia, travel to every major city, and do presentations and workshops about this exciting Web 2.0 stuff for education. In my zeal, I aimed to use the same tools I would be talking about. I set up a free parallel blog on WordPress.com https://cogdogroo.wordpress.com (get the roo?) and most of my materials were on the free now gone but archived by me, Wikispaces. I tentatively offered to do something on digital storytelling which my blog can show what I was doing in 2005, 2006 and 2007 (study those URLs, this is WordPress affords me). I had noted at the time that Slideshare (still around), the service you could upload a big fat Powerpoint and get it in a sharable view on the web format, had added a feature where you could add to your slides a recording of your audio. And in the web tool, you could synchronize the sound to the slides. Thus, without any special coding, anyone could synchronize slides or photos to sound. One could tell a multimedia story. I knew of maybe five other web based tools I could do this on. Could there me more, like maybe 15? 20? When then I saw what could be done with VoiceThread, it was literally the "perfect storm" of ideas. The crescendo cymbal crash came when Paul Simon was performing as part of his being recognized with the Library of Congress Gershwin Award for Popular Song. When he sang the classic "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" that's when it hit to me- I am going to dare myself to find 50 Web Ways to tell a Digital Story (archived by me). Even with the catchy name, I realized that for a workshop I would need to bring more than a list of tools-- I'd have to know what they could do, how to use them. So my next big idea was for each tool, I would provide a version of the same story in all 50. Of course my 50 versions of this story involved a dog, one named Dominoe who I had taken in as a rescue, then almost lost, and found her again. Yup, I blogged about this August 2, 2007. Time-lined myself, again. https://cogdogblog.com/2007/08/50-ways-2/ Here, finally is a sample of VoiceThread, playing back over the web from the version I created in July, 2007. I had completely forgotten that I've had the bits installed on this blog to capture data in Google Analytics, which for the paranoid means your browsing habits are feeding the big G machine (not the purpose of today's meanderings). In fact, I doubt I had looked at the reports at all, but they do contain an incredible amount of data, if that is your quantitative type of fun (I'd rather roll in the mud, myself). Fortunately, they have a lot of visuals ;-) So for the past month, my readership seems to be going out of phase with the stock market: So from June 21 to July 21, 2007, some 2790 people actually ventured here, or as my use of division suggests, about 104 per day. Wow, who are you? Analytics provides all kinds of breakdowns, by country (my readers are from 85 countries, mostly US, Canada, U.K. Australia, Germany, Ireland, Hong Kong hi Nick! and elsewhere), connection type, browser, etc. And looking at the data from the sources of traffic So most come from referring sources (linktribution rules, thanks), followed by search engine results, and direct links (mostly from RSS??). And you can see what these sources are: Now this is interesting- more than 300 visits came from referrals from twitter! And in the "Thanks for All The Links" department, I nod to Stephen Downes who, consistently since I started blogging in 2002, a mere mention in OLDaily generates many visits. Stephen, in the sea of edubloggers, you are an A Lister ;-) In fact, not to shower too much praise on Stephen, when I look at the blog posts that generated the most visits: Easy Peasy Rich Media - VoiceThreads 453 visits Expertise, Idiocy, Monkeys: Write Blog Postings and Articles 159 visits A Powerful Set of Images, Ideas 152 visits Worlds Shortest Articulated Blog Post (Relative to Length of Title) on the Absurd Opinions on Teaching With Technology, Courtesy of the Old Skool Luddite Club at the Chroncile 140 visits I am fairly sure these were all ones mentioned in OLDaily. And just by looking at these sites, I found something really cool- if you are logged in to Google Analytics, it provides a graphics overly showing data for every link on that page of your site: so the little bars show a measure of many links were followed, and data appears when you roll over the link. Data overload! I actually looked here for a rather simple task related to my last post about a friend who reads my blog. Google analytics told me that in the last 30 days, I had 2790 people visit this blog. I was curious about the comment rate. For this, I had to dive into mySQL, and write a query: SELECT count(*) FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = '1' and `comment_date` > '2007-06-20' which gave me 104. So the percentage of people who comment of those who vist here is a whopping 3.7%. Commenting is still the most under-rated activity done in the blogosphere. Tom keeps pumping out his creations of the Illustrating Odd Autocompletes assignment he spun out this gem featuring my pals Gardner Campbell and MC Hammer (!) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward and so… turn about is fair play. I went to The Google to find what Tom Woodward Likes, and found… I actually went firs for a google search on Intelligent design and settled on the comic that was included in a blog post “Intelligent Design” Vs “Darwinism” (okay I am stomping on rights to use this image, it comes from a Ning url, and a reverse image search turns up hundreds of places it appears online; it is a cartoon by Rex Babin, deceased comic artist from the Sacramento Bee. Fight for the RemixRight!) I then searched my own flickr photos for pictures of Tom, maybe I would put his head in the cartoon, but I just loved this one of him and Jim Groom cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I thought about trying to erase the background from the comic to see uf I could put Tom and Jim behind it, but it was impossible to cleanly remove the background white. Then I hit the brilliant idea that I might be able to place it on Jim’s chest like a t-shirt design. With a little bit of rotation, distort, it had the right orientation but still looked like a cheap ;paste job. Playing with the layer modes, the COlor Burn option turned out to be the winner to make the image look more like it is a design Jim is wearing. So Tom likes intelligent design,,, what other possible thing could explain the existence of Jim Groom? Boom! Written up here just to tag another example for the assignment. I will toss in a few more bits at lunch time, heading out tonight from Phoenix for the direct hop to London. There's a few days adjustment, Still Web planning, and I expect tangential conversations with Mariana Funes. But I am really going to visit Colin. I hear we are traveling in fine mode to reach Newcastle for OER14, where we meet up with our third leg of the 3M-DS106 stool, Rochelle Lockridge who apparently is already on royal ground at another conference in London. We have something secret cooked up for our OER session. It will be over the top (or falling down) when we show how worlds collide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxZHfTSby6A Much goodness expected in Newcastle, rumors of several ds106 agents might be present. There will be a bit of respite, a port of call in Bristol with some of the finest people in the land creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Time to return the favor creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Then, thanks to Martin Weller, I get to spend a week visiting the Open University, and hopefully doing some quick work to support the OER Research Hub project likely spent just fawning over the masterwork of Martin Hawksey's OER Impact Map. I'm looking forward to seeing Martin again, maybe he will take me for a ride creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Seriously, I have a big thank you for him and his terrific team at the OU for making this visit possible, And after everyone has said so many flattering things about Milton Keynes... well, the photos will speak for themselves. Okay, back to packing. Where is my sun screen? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Do not get me wrong, I am rather proud and excited to have my 10 copies of Educause Review that includes my article. The thing is... I don't know what to do with them. I've read my own piece more than enough before publication, and I have read the other ones already online. And the whole question an entire publishing industry must face every day is- what is the added value of the print version? Yes, I can read it offline, away from electricity, the network. In my reading room. And I can look at the ads. Yeah. I do enjoy reading print books, there is something more intimate and often (but not always) immersive about holding it in my hands, not getting twitter pop-up messages. Just me and someone's imagination or ideas. So I am not implying that print journals are useless. But the entire shift is standing in our faces- the value pre-internet was that this was the only way to get the information contained within. That advantage is now gone. It is time to create a new value. What can be done that is of value with this version in my hands? I now face the prospect of putting them on a shelf, in a box, in a cabinet. In the past I might have mailed a copy to my Mom. I seek an experiment, maybe inspired by I Left This For You To Read. What happens if these get sent out by mail, and people choose to annotate, markup, add questions/ideas, maybe scotch tape in something relevant, and then send it on to someone else with the same invitation? Where would they go? What would they become? Could it become a more personal kind of sharing than on the big wide open internet? Can something more be made of it? Maybe a piece of literature would be better, but I have these 10 copies and think it is worth even a lead balloon idea than just let them sit on a shelf. Thus, the experiment. I will keep a copy for myself and maybe send one to my sister. That leaves 8 copies of this issue of EDUCAUSE Review. If you want a copy, use my contact form and send me a mailing address. I'll mail it to you. You will get some handwritten barely legible message from me. I will include a web form address just so I can know geographically where it went. Thats the only info I will ask. You can just keep it. End of story. Or, you can make something out of it, or an article within. Or turn into art, pr a story, or just commentary. Optional, but it would be cool to see a blog post or a tweet, what it's like to get this. Maybe I'll ask for some cryptic hash tag. And what would be cool is if you send it on to someone else. Maybe this is silly. If I hear nothing, I conclude it's not really an interesting idea, and I shall have to make some room on the bookshelf. But if written material is not unique because it is widely available, it seems to be that some form of social reading, or within smaller networks, might be the way to keep that print thing special. And no, I am not trying to shill my article. There are plenty of others to read. What do you think? What do we do with stuff in print? Eight copies remain, envelopes ready. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My how I have fallen down on my presentation archiving. I joined Tom Woodward and Amy Rector Verrelli on the last day of Open Education 2015 to present The Great VCU Bike Race Book: Connected Learning meets the UCI Road World Championships. Imagine your university was going to close for a week in the 1st month of the semester because the UCI Road World Championships was overtaking your city. Residential students could stay in their residence halls, but classrooms were to be closed and traveling to campus would be extremely difficult for non-residential students. Next, imagine you are charged with considering how you might turn that situation into one or more learning experience. The open Web to the rescue, #amiright? The Great VCU Bike Race Book (#vcubrb) was borne of this opportunity. The Great #vcubrb is a unique Connected Learning experience at Virginia Commonwealth University that will take place during the Fall 2015 semester. There are three purposes for the #vcubrb. 1) To provide a purposeful, enjoyable learning experience during the Bike Race week, especially for residential students who would otherwise not have any academic work to occupy them. 2) To give students an opportunity to participate in an innovative online course that aligns with the VCU Quality Enhancement Plan's goals of integrative learning by means of digital fluency. 3) To provide a unique faculty development experience that will advance VCU faculty's involvement in distinctive online learning. My hunch is the "#amiright" in the abstract meant Jon Becker wrote the proposal, and we missed Jon and of course Gardner Campbell who were unable to attend the conference- leaving Tom to represent the ALTLab, Amy as one of the faculty who taught a course, and me who remotely worked on the web site. After two days of sessions and some conference grumbling about "too much open textbook" stuff, Amy and Tom were keen to go with something different... and literally we came up with the idea on Thursday over some street tacos from a truck behind the Vancouver Art Gallery. We each had our different roles in the project, but felt a 3 way slide deck walk through was not tasty. How could we do it more conversational? If you overly generalize presentations, the person in front comes in with a pre-planned stack of stuff; the audience listens or tweets, and maybe there are some questions at the end, or just polite clapping. With us being three Americans recently crossing the border for the conference, the customs desk experience made think of a different modality. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by Arturo de Albornoz under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license[/caption] So there is this set of official paperwork, the conference session presentation, maybe itself a paradox of content? (leave that for another day) What if we said to the audience, rather than us coming in with our set of presentation content, what if we asked for a volunteer to come u0 and ask us a series of questions as if they were the customs/presentation agent? Just to make sure this did not flopped, I pre-enlisted a willing (Canadian) volunteer... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Grant Potter will always play along. I sent some suggested questions. Who are you people? What is this Bike race thing? What is "UCI"? (Tom can answer) How did you get involved? Why is a university even doing this? What kinds of courses were created? What was it like for faculty (Amy's response key) What do you have to show for this? What was the experience like? What happened for the students? What is this book thing? Why are we talking about books? We might have done 2, but it was enough to set the discussion in motion. No slides. No script. Just Tom, Amy, and I conversing about this project we were part of, as we had the day before outside eating tacos. Just for reference, as I have really said nothing about the project... UCI Road World Championships - official race site. If you get near the screen you can smell bike oil. The Great VCU Bike Race Book - this is a holder now for a few bits of project parts, but ultimately will be "the book" (open, but not a textbook!) UNIV 291 Courses - a piece I worked on as gateway for information about the courses. Great graphic art work on the jerseys by VCU's Emma Gauthier (blogged here) Anthropology of the Crowd -- this is Amy's course site, a tremendous body of work by her students. Her summary there on the front is the kind of project recap we dream off- it's reflective, full of examples of student work, and lots of media. FAQ this is Tom's work, and much of his sarcastic wit got toned down, but still left with great lines like: Bike Fortunes another Woodward gem, take a spin. Creative Commons and Copyright- a reference for student bloggers. Interviewing Tips - a great video with Scholar-in-Residence (and peer of Jonathan Worth) Brian Palmer-- Brian's photography and blogging for the project were total highlights. Covering the Coverage the site I worked on. It was a daily "newspaper" that curated and published content syndicated in from student blogs (~1500 posts in a week) via Feed Wordpress. (previously blogged... the making of this site) There you go; a pile of web links- no slides, no audio recording, not even a photo of us yacking on stage. It was as great as the tacos. Stay tuned, as we move early next year into producing the "book" (again, not a textbook ;-) Top / Featured Image Credit: You should envy those street truck tacos! flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/22863843910 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license