Last 100 All Text

Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….

flickr foto This Old Phoneavailable on my flickr This may shatter my reputation as a techie, but I have hung on to this Nokia phone since 2001-- I really am not a huge mobile phone user, and I come it at max maybe 150 minutes a month. All this phone does is enable me to make phone calls (shocking), though in fits of boredom, I have played "Snake" on it. As you may notice, it has been sporting a lovely bit of duct tape to keep the battery connected. But Old Nokie is now retired, and I am sending this phone via my new Motoroloa V10, a camera phone that I used to take this picture. Actually, I first got a Nokia 6225i but never got it to send pictures nor could anyone at the store or the tech support line. Hint- never buy a new phone at the store where it is so new, the employee do not know how to use it. I am now using phone technology that ahs been around for 2-3 years. I guess I am a phone Luddite or Lagger. I bare my soul in being not much of a techie in terms of cell phones. That said, having snapped a few camera phone photos and emailing to friends and directly to flickr via their easy access, I am rather startled that I cannot easily find many or any examples of this simple and readily available technology in a context of learning. Oh sure, plenty of us (self included) write about its potential, but where are the examples? People are writing about citizen journalism but where are the citizen Photojournalists? The cases where students are using phone technology as reporting devices? We have in wide distribution a simple technology tool that would allow students to be roving reporters, or to gather field data (observations of natural or man made phenmomena) or documentation or projects or ... I am thinking of things like coverage of the 2004 wildfires in Southern California or the BBC's News program of Your Pictures, Your News. But it need not be news that is the sort of data collected / reported by phone. Maybe I have missed it, but isn't this a ripe and rich area for teachers to tap into as a learning tool? I am sure they are out there, hidden beyond the reach of Google way out there on the Long Tail... I totally forgot I even had this blog. What is it here for? Someone tell me. I always provide links back to the source as attribution for the flickr creative commons photos I use. Today I ran into the not so surprising case of wondering what to do, and what the ramifications for, if the original is no longer there? Here's the case. A dark night in a web that knows how to keep its secrets, but one dog is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions. Me. Oops, wrong story. I was working on a site which has a banner collage made of 5 or 6 flickr cc licensed images. When I did the original, I downloaded them in 500px size (I keep the original cryptic file names, like "196478990_e68fe3c25a.jpg"). I also, and I wish I could say always, kept a text file with the credits info. In making a credits page on the new site, I reached for my favorite tool, yep, the one I did myself, the Flickr CC Attribution Helper for Greasemonkey - a Firefox script that nicely inserts two kinds of copiable attribution strings right in the flickr page (only if it is cc licensed): Now frankly I think this is best thing since cc licensed flickr photo shared by mattburns.co.uk Look! I just used it! Again. I digress. So I was going to use this as my usual way of attribution for flickr cc content. Except, one photo came up with the message at the top; I guess the owner of the flickr account skipped town and closed down the account. Or make up any other story. Got hit by a meteorite. Killed their account in protest of not getting enough attribution (I was late again!). But I got thinking, what happens then to the right to use it if the original is gone? And what would I link to as attribution? I tweeted before really thinking... Plenty of people reminded me that it was there in the license (doh) the legal-verbiage-I-click-without-reading, section "7b Termination" Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above. So once something is released into Creative Commons, it is there forever under the terms you originally got it, even if the original goes away, or the owner changes their mind. The only "termination" is if the user (me) does something to breach the terms of the license, like using something commercially when it is NC (??) or making jokes about lawyers. Or even more clearly, in the Creative commons FAQ: What if I change my mind? Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation, be they verbatim copies, copies included in collective works and/or adaptations of your work. So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy for people to be using your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work. , And an even bigger "doh" for me because I can still provide attribution by photo credit (in text) without doing a link back. I am so hunk up on links and linktribution that anything else feels weak. So my original record keeping works, in those days, before my cool as bread Greasemonkey script, I would keep text file logs (which was tedious, about a 4 trip copy/paste routine from web page to text file) 2572694217_200b3646af.jpg http://www.flickr.com/photos/19353461@N04/2572694217/ scimanal Where the first line is the file name I saved it, the second the link, and the third the flickr owner's name. So thanks "scimanal" for the photo, where-ever you are. On a related front, as a number of people are hopping off of Firefox for Chrome, I'll have to bone up on Chrome's extensions. But, a neat discovery I found was a way to enable Greasemonkey Scripts in Safari- an opensource thing called Greasekit. It's pretty easy, you first download a thingie called SIMBL. You gotta love the geek cred behind this description: Problem: Some applications do about 90% of what I want. Solution: Develop my own applications. Better Solution: Patch the application myself... SIMBL (SIMple Bundle Loader) - pronounced like "symbol" or "cymbal" - enables hacks and plugins. For instance, SIMBL enables PithHelmet to enhance Safari. Wow, I am glad to have my PithHelmet! Please ignore the diversion. Install SIMBL, its a small app that goes somewhere deep in the bowls of the computer. The download GreaseKit, more or less a small plug-in file that you bury about 7 folders deep in your home directory. The next time you launch Safari, you have a Greasekit menu, where you can add Greasemonkey Scripts. I;ve not tried too many (well just mine, and it works): Keep those attributions a goin' Link if you can! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by woodleywonderworks Hypertext the Lingua Franca of the Internet The Web wouldn't be there if Tim Berners-Lee did not design webbrowser and webserver software, invented HTTP and defined URL. Also not less important if his bosses of CERN wouldn't have had the insight of allowing to have the world this for free it would have gone the same way many other fine projects went: "the big void." -- from Hypertext and the Web by Lamont Wood (1991) From several places lately (student blog posts, some course web sites), I see a repeating pattern of people writing words and putting them ON the web, not writing words FOR the web. It's not like we lack examples of web-based content that makes use (well designed and not so well designed) of the building blocks that make the web the most important innovation of the last XX years. And the most humble, fundamental piece is the hyperlink. Have you ever seen one of those? In the context of what you are reading, you might are free to explore relevant (or related? or just curious?) rabbit holes. Put aside Nicholas Carr's logic, the web is not web if you end up at dead ends. I remain appalled at content on the web that begs for links. I see my students doing video assignments based on re-interpretation of film- how can they not consider linking to the source material they found on you tube, to the movie reference on sites like IMDb, to location names, to director names... Maybe it's just my own way, but I cannot write too much without wanting to link it. It just seems the natural order. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Noah Sussman Links not only make the web what it is, they make it better. We need more links, Carr, not less. If you think otherwise, find some other place online to hang your writing. Seriously. There's more to it than links. What about MEDIA? I would not say that every piece of content on we web needs images, videos, but certainly in blog form, how can you avoid using the language of media to augment words? Not as add ons without meaning, or candy, but to communicate what can be done well by the brain- seeing patterns, metaphors. I am not an expert, but I am pretty sure the brain does not store information as words. begin Parenthetical Insert: March 26, 2012 Reminded by @dkernohan's comment below, this is less of a universal need than links; it very well depends on the purpose, place of the writing. Dave asserts that media should be used only where it advances the point and does not present accessibility challenges, say in the online writing where one si trying to propose an idea, make an argument (dare I say "formal") (nahh). I am a bit stuck where to line myself up here, as even in my post here, I use media that are not critical to what I am trying to say; what I am writing could stand without the pictures. But (for me and how I write) media adds some sort of visual punctuation, some breaks in the content. Whether it distracts, depends on the individual. The again, Carr argues that hyperlinks also distract. Sigh, I cam finding more unstable footing here. Yet- we have these affordances to employ said media in am abundance that print did not allow, and there is room, IMHO, to push what we can do in communication through visuals. end Parenthetical Insert What about VOICE? This web space is a place to speak in a voice we own, not that abstracted removed, dehumanized stuff best served up in exam blue books. This is my mild rant phase on this, my next step is to organize some ideas to go about remedying the situation. It seems almost silly to have to do this when we are immersed (many of us) in a rich flow of media rich hyperlinked content- what is the brain logic that says, "I think I will just dump 1000 words on my web page". I want to send all of you linkless text lobbers to read Jon Udell's Seven Ways to Think Like the Web Given the web's hybrid nature, how to can we teach people to make best use of this distributed hypermedia system? That's what I've been trying to do, in one way or another, for many years. It's been a challenge to label and describe the principles I want people to learn and apply. I've used the terms computational thinking, Fourth R principles, and most recently Mark Surman's evocative thinking like the web. This is going to be basis of hopefully some future work for me-- Be the authoritative source for your own data Pass by reference not by value Know the difference between structured and unstructured data Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions Push your data to the widest appropriate scope Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber Reuse components and services cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Jason A. Samfield This is the web I believe in. These are core values I would like to see enacted much more widely. The web is what we make of it. What we assert of it. Please, write FOR the web; think in a webbed way. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by only alice Creative commons usage can be vague and tricky on its own, but it gets even more fishy. I was searching compfight for an image to use with a puff rant on predictions. This flickr image, licensed CC BY, that came up on a creative commons search result was the kind I would like to use, until I read the caption: This is the picture by Mark Weaver, I copy it here to only use for my blog posting; the the original here: www.flickr.com/photos/markweaver/5300867059/ That link is to the original image which is a New York Times image All Rights Reserved. Now to me, copying a copyrighted image and then setting the copy to be creative commons licensed does not really make it so, Maybe this is an attempt to do a flickr version of No Copyright Intended. As much as I am an advocate of open licensing/sharing, I can't really condone the wholesale copying and slapping a CC license on it. That seems toi be breaking the meaning of creative commons, in that the creator gets to assign the rights. Is it me or does it smell fishy? It just muddies the water IMHO. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by contemplative imaging My ResNetSem students are now published... well, it is our own journal, but hey, we can do that. The new Arganee Journal is here! The new Arganee Journal is here! Are you kidding? I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this journal every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity - your name in print - that makes people. I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU For their final requirement of the first semester seminar, students were asked to submit their working draft of their introduction, a preliminary outline, and their annotated bibliography to the Arganee Journal, a web site published using the TRU Writer wordpress theme (I know this one well). [caption id="attachment_676" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Arganee Journal, Issue 1[/caption] Or for those that like direct links... Conversations With My Father Breaking the Manacles: Finding, Claiming, and Shaping Self On Making a Poet: Exploring Writerly Identity by Reimagining Ginsberg’s Prophetic Experience The (Trans)humanism of Young Adult Literature: Exploring the Shortsighted Nature of Transhumanism Through the Scope of Youth Keep in mind these are early, early drafts. But they all give a clear description, rationale, and framing of each student's project. Each includes at the bottom, a link to the student's "behind the scenes" thesis blog-- that's the place to learn more and to give them feedback. An April 2018 issue of this journal will include the final short paper versions of the theses. It is going to be a fantastic journey to see how these drafts evolve into full, creative thesis works. I'm kind of proud. Cropped version of The Chepstow gleaner (Welsh Journal) public domain image from Wikimedia Commons Got Snark by cogdogblog posted 6 Jan '09, 11.10pm MST PST on flickr Today Amazon delivered my copy of Snark -- "It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation" Oh dear. I thought this book would be celebrating my beloved state of mind, but nooo.... In this sharp and witty polemic, New Yorker critic and bestselling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming the nine principles of snark -- the standard techniques its practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter.... Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel, but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs. I might have to pull out my snark about Snark. Tenth FitIn which the reader sharply disagrees with the direction of the book and decides snark is still a fun word and way to be. I come away at the end of this small back rather disappointed. The message is confusing, and feels more like being condescending from another direction, like being at the kids table of some Woody Allen movie where all these self-loving intellectual urbanites banter over obscure issues for 9 hours over coffee. The bits on history were worthy in terms of learning some bits, especially on the original story by Lewis Carroll called The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits -- that warns of the most dangerous form of snark, the mysterious Boojum. There is speculation on the origin of the word being a simple crossing of "snail" and "shark", but it has such a nice ring to it. Since hearing it from some source I don;t recall, I've taken it to be a spunk sarcastic attitude, ultra cynical with edge, extra Tabasco in the Bloody Mary or more fire for the hot salsa, an attitude I've been honing since childhood and that found home in this blog. I relished examples of snark found in web pages, catalogs, etc, of standing out from the drab dullness of every day life. Denby's take is it is much more mean spirited and serves no other end but to hurt, or to use group talk to single out individuals from a crowd of know-alls. He aims to distinguish it from satire, yet hios book lays it on pretty strongly to the ones he identifies as snarkers, including a whole chapter on New York Times writer Maureen Dowd. A movie reviewer charged by Denby as a "snarkist" is described (objectively?) as: There's tons of junk around at any point, and Queenan has spent his years banging around in the sub-basement of movie culture, kicking empty beer cans against the wall, emerging to ridicule hapless pictures that no one took seriously in the first place." That reads like snark shooting at snark. The author seems intent on looking down his nose at something... is that me? He sums up the "Conscious of a Snarker": Snark is like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard. It wants to get in your face without presenting a face of it's own. and i do agree that the form practiced under anonymity of comments to news stories, blogs, and the worst pit, YouTube comments, are a level to which I don't aspire. You pick up early a scent of disdain the writer (I smell newsprint on his tweed jacket) has for the internet. But it's not a total loss. I have found myself questioning some things I write digging more at to the message; am I trying to lash out vindictively or is there a point? Denby does somewhere state that the antidote to snark is not :"gentleness" citing his examples of finer forms practices as artful insult or satire. However, I found his line of difference so vague as to not be even discernable. Despite the literary put downs, I am proud to wear my snark badge. "For the snark is a Boojum, you see" - and Boojum it stays, book notwithstanding. In the ongoing commitment to keep use of my trusty old 2012 Macbook Pro, after a battery replacement last May, the latest challenge was the loss of my spacebar. I did my diligence in watching YouTube videos of various people demonstrating how to pop of the spacebar and clean\inspect. As pried open in the toot above it was pretty grungy with dirt and hair and who knows what. After cleaning and checking the parts, I popped it back on... not space action. Intermittent, then nada. I did call the shop that redid my battery, but that's a drive and maybe leaving it there. I tried again last night, finding I could get a space character tapping on the base with a screwdriver tip. I checked all the plastic lifter bits, verified the placement of the little plastic bobber, pressed it back. Well... i got a few spaces and a few non stop ones, and then-- none. Back to the thinking board, maybe there is some way to map another key trigger space characters. A web search led me to a StackExchange discussion which led me to Karabiner-Elements, a public domain app that is designed to do all kinds of modifications to the Mac keyboard, many I do not know about, but key is that I can map any other key to send a space character. And from their downloads link I could find the old version that works on my OS 10.14 ancient OS. That's all I need, I was able to make use of the command key on the right side of the spacebar (which I never have used) to be mapped to be a spacebar. Okay, this is not an ideal solution as it is taking extra effort to use a different key to be my spacebar, but at least I can use the old machine where all my source code lives and my photos. So for now the right command key is my new spacebar, thanks to some searching, sifting, and finding some great public domain software. Featured Image: My own photo of this computer's well worn keyboard. Why any one would every need such a photo is beyond me, but I release it into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. [Media Description] A finger points to a computer keyboard at the space between a very worn spacebar and the command key to the right, Like a small stubborn, unique, old fashioned house surrounded by modern monolithic mega modern glass and steel structures, the Domain of Ones Own project started at the University of Mary Washington stands out as one hope amongst Educational Technology's adoration of mega scale, management, analytics, automation, and tall tall towers of data, data, data. Much like Edith Macefield's home. And much like (will all my first sentences here include "like"?) someone claiming they were at Woodstock, I will love telling people I was there when Domain of One's Own happened. I worked 8 months DTLT starting in January 2012. While not in any way an architect like Jim Groom and Tim Owens of a vision that goes back to Gardner Campbell's A Personal Cyberinfrastructure, I had a front row seat (and flew some of the pilot flights) for the launch of Domain of One's Own. [caption id="attachment_60029" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Jim Groom and Tim Owens, #4life[/caption] Domain of One's Own, just about un-acronym-able (just try "DoOO"), is not my story to tell. But the sections of DS106 the open Digital Storytelling class I taught in 2012-2013 were among the first ones to pilot DoOO. A characteristic of DS106 from the start was that students did all of their work in a their own online space, not the University's LMS, not even UMW's own Wordpress Multisite, but each student publishing to a domain of their choosing. The first section I taught was in-person for the Spring 2012 semester; at that time we had students register their own domains AND set up a low cost hosting account with set up for us by Jim's colleague, Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding. It was almost 2 weeks to get all the students through those hoops before they even got to using their Wordpress sites. In that time, all of the student's Wordpress blogs got hacked with a taunting black screen boasting the mark of Emre5807. For many, this is a total disaster. For DS106, it was a chance for students to see a bit of the underbelly of the internet, to learn to re-install their software, and we made Emre5807 a character for them to build stories about (@Emre5807 is still on twitter, I know nothing about that). The wheels were in motion for Domain of One's Own- before it was even created, it was a repeated expression in Jim's repertoire. Tim had learned the ins and outs of web hosting in a side experiment called Hippie Hosting, a sort of ed-tech hosting co-op for a few of us who were tired of getting run arounds with commercial web hosts. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] It's too bad the UMW Faculty Academy web site seems off the air (Tim Owens fixed this) At the 2012 Faculty Academy I recall Domain of One's Own was already established as a pilot project and presented there to UMW faculty (it was a lunch session "Domain of One’s Own Discussion for Interested Parties in 211" - 211 is a room number!). The summer 2012 section of DS106 I taught with Martha Burtis, our Camp Magic McGuffin theme, might have been among the first ones using DoOO (and probably one of Zach Walen's classes). I know for sure I used it for my Fall 2012 online section of DS106 and the Spring 2013 section I taught for UMW. The set up absolutely worked; what previously took two weeks for an entire section to get their domains registered and web sites set up and Wordpress installed, now took two days. But to me it's not the Domains part that is important. And while the Own is powerful... it's the Our that matters. Because when it's ours, we care about it, like Edith felt about her house. Another session I remember from the 2012 Faculty Academy was on student portfolios, and because that's the way they roll, the main speakers were students. The idea of blog portfolios had traction before DoOO in the longer established UMW platform of UMW Blogs-- a university hosted Wordpress site where registered students could create any number of sites. The two students in the Faculty Academy ePortfolio session emphasized that just getting handed a site or a domain as new students probably would not mean much; that the power, benefit, and value after having experiences a series of uses of public web sites for their work in multiple courses. That's what UWM Blog established; doing a blog for a class was not a one teacher experiment, it happened repeatedly. The experience built on itself. These students said that having meaningful assignments in course blogs is what opened their minds to ideas how they could use blogs for interests outside of specific courses. I remember Shannon Hauser, then a student, showing us her UMWBlogs "dashboard" where she had a set of maybe 10, 15, or more different Wordpress sites she had made for classes and clubs in her years at UMW (Shannon has her domain going http://caravanista.net/). UMW Blogs was a foundation that helped make DoOO such a success at UMW. But, as Davidson College student Andrew Rikard pointed out last year, just handing students domains is not going to accomplish much. In his EdSurge article Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It?, he zeroes on it a key question: I agree that owning data has the potential to give students agency and control. But it is not a guarantee. I want to shift the emphasis from data possession to knowledge production. Gaining ownership over the data is vital—but until students see this domain as a space that rewards rigor and experimentation, it will not promote student agency. Traditional assignments don’t necessarily empower students when they have to post them in a public space. Andrew saw some courses use DoOO as a vehicle of taking "audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency." But he saw others that used it more like an LMS-ish assignment drop box. My experience with DoOO at UMW was really in the pilot phase, and before it was offered to all students. For many of my students, their experience was for that one DS106 course. And while we focus much on getting a course's evaluation at its end, my belief has always been that its more important to find out what the course experience meant to students years afterward. In August 2013, a few months after the last DS106 course I taught at UMW, I wondered what happened to my previous students' web sites. I always kept a spreadsheet for each class, so I ran a link check tool on the 81 students domains-- summing the results up as Withering Domains On a quick glance, 27 or 33% have kept their ds106 blogs, and 7 or 9% have used them for other purposes... But the thing is, most students see their domains again as a place to do assignment work for one class. None of my students my first 2 sections had kept their domains, and in fact I found that four of the expired student domains had been bought by those weird entities that reuse domains as "splogs" or spam blogs set up to build google search rank for businesses often shady. I saw that as a small statement of value for those domains. That's a partly full glass. One of the small rewards of using DoOO was seeing the creative ways students chose their domain names-- when I look these over, I see it as a personal choice as identities not necessarily their names (I did encourage them to pick something to reflect their interests or personalities, suggesting that AlanLevineDS106.com is pretty dull). Enjoy this random list of all 81 Domains I Once Knew: laceface18.com, slowlykillintime.com, ultim8bimmr.net, missrunnerbug.me, ahomelyhomeless.com, larahampson.com, savethepandas.net, bonzosbruha.com, ciararnorquist.me, tha-goodz.org, sscanvasgraphics.com, danielzimmerman.net, totipotentplasm.com, coffeedogsandactivism.me, katherinekame.com, kag0715.com, flavorblast.me, marcey109.com, turkoenisa.com, grotogrotto.com, effiejones.com, sarahpark.org, paristokyo.me, kanonnie24.com, Kiersten-Pyrtle.com, ashstegemiller.com, mycosmicmind.me, confessionsofafuturedisneyprincess.com, above-the-clouds.net, rossannamarie.me, owlbereading.com, joltfree.org, brittanydray.com, confusedeasily.com, kevin4518.com, missambermay.com, any-ideas.me, themanthemyththepaul.us, mindofamasri.com, the-weekly-update.com, happiprocity.us, omaraminzay.com, livegraced.com, chachachelsea.com, alittleallovertheplace.com, umwdarlingchaos.com, colinjschulz.me, fandomprincess.com, corgisandcupsofcoffee.com, cwyrough.me, tipet.us, tm-hobbs.me, suitablechain5.com, aetherbunny.com, ritho.me, heymsparker.org, ohmygott.com, analyticd.org, ampersanddragon.net, hairbrushsinger112.com, capnmarkish.com, acarlson.us, aspiring2b.me, jersey-strong.com, j-rabbit.info, rescuesgtsocks.com, cryptovalence.com, lovelylashe.us, bparsons.org, melindakumi.com, amelialord.com, boaduwa.com, Shenikarich.com, kncrotty.com, bellekid.com, guacamoleh.com, keelin.me, livingwithouta.net, chanda0703.com, hockey-in-heels.com, dontstrayaway.com Now some three years later I was curious to see what as changed. I got smart today and set up a Google Spreadsheet equipped with a custom formula that can test if a link is still valid (the function I found is from Check On Page for Broken Links in Google Docs; I changed it slightly to return ALIVE for a 200 HTTP status response, and DEAD otherwise). Out of 81 domains my former DS106 students at one time owned, 19 of them reported ALIVE. On manually checking those links (because you can't just run with data), many of them were either parked (abandoned) domains, others set up as spam blogs, or in a few cases, owned by people different from the original student. I got yer data summary! Out of those 81 sites created by my DS106 students, only 6 of them (7.4%) were still owned by those students (it might be 7, one of them is now a cooking site and I cannot tell if it is the same person that I taught at UMW). Some might say that's not great, but I still maintain that this was a factor of most of them being done in time when DoOO was a pilot. But don't look at them as data or cells in spreadsheet, these six living domains are people: Haley (Fall 2012 http://aetherbunny.com/) was an exceptional writer, she did a senior project of analyzing DS106, which she summarized in a post describing it as "an ethos of teaching". I see her now and then in twitter, and I believe she is working in the field of publishing. And writing poetry. Eric (Fall 2012 http://omaraminzay.com/) used his domain for later classes. I heard from him after his DS106 section with me, he sent me this link about a YouTube video he made for his final project-- "112000 views in 3 months, someone try to top that with their final project". That's more views than I have ever gotten (maybe combining all my YouTube videos). I've heard he's about to start an internship with the National Park Service. Enisa (Fall 2012, http://turkoenisa.com/) used her domain for a Marketing class after DS106; I would guess she has graduated. Maybe she is in her one year of hosting that UMW provides after students graduate? Jennifer's (Spring 2013 http://livingwithouta.net/) primary domain does not have much in it, but all of her ds106 work is still in her subdomain. She had a memorable post No Rules for Good Photographs featuring a fantastic photo of her husband holding a lens in which his face is inverted. I've used it a few times in presentations (with credit, naturally); in September of this year I tried to contact her through her flickr account to seek permission to use for a talk where I had to use media only openly licensed. I did not hear back, but I saw through her flickr photos that she was doing wonder work in Art Therapy. Alice (Spring 2013 http://ampersanddragon.net/) still has her domain up with all of her DS106 student. She was in a creative plane of all her own; I recall she had one some contest that funded her getting a 3D printer she had set up in her dorm room. I would guess by now she has graduated. Amber (Spring 2013 http://missambermay.com) came in to ds106 as a very talented voiceover artist already; she already had a collection of YouTube cartoons that she had done the voices for. In class, she taught me how she used her closet as a recording booth, where the hanging clothes provide the baffling of studio. Her site is a current portfolio of the creative work she is doing now (this whole post was somewhat inspired by a tweet she shared in the last few weeks). And do you know who else the domain data leaves out? I got a tweet in January from Karissa, a Spring 2013 student who let her domain go, but she shared how she was using the video skills she learned in DS106 as an elementary school math teacher. This is An Unexpected Affirmation of Why I Teach: https://twitter.com/MsHerrick_Math/status/685878964053737473 A domain on its own is temporary, it's something we rent, and can choose to not pay for anymore. The same for web hosting. I'd love to see more people see their work as valuable and worth preserving. But I've maintain that it's our relationship to this space that matters. The only artifact I have from high school is a yearbook and maybe some typewritten papers my Mom saved; from my undergraduate experience I have only two textbooks; from my graduate school experience a box of slides, field notebooks, and a few papers. These are really but fragments of the lived experience. In some past presentations I have shown this image and asked the audience if they can identify what kind of room it is. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Of course it is recognizable as a hotel room (I think this was a room I had in Canberra, Australia in 2006). You can see the questionable decor of the bed spread, a complete lack of anything personal on the walls, and affordances like one outlet on the opposite side of the room of the desk. We do not have much of a relationship with this space, it's a brief one. It of course does not say much about me as someone in the space. It's not mine, my presence will be wiped when I leave. This is an LMS. Now compare that image to another bedroom: [caption id="attachment_60030" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Sorry I cannot remember where I got this photo from. I sure hope it was openly licensed[/caption] This may not be your style of decor either, but this room asserts its inhabitant. This person owns this space AND they care about the stuff on the walls, on the bed. It oozes "them-ness". And I maintain that how we feel in these two spaces, both of which serve the same purpose as a room to sleep in, but our energy level in those rooms is dramatically different because of our relationship to the space. We feel and act differently in our own spaces. The room metaphor is no accident. Domains will be important to students in the longer run, beyond their time at an institution, but not because they own it. It will be important to them if they find it has a value to them beyond a few courses. And it will be valuable to them if they care about their domain, maybe even love it? if it reflects who they are, what they feel is important in a way no other hotel chain can. To repeat what Andrew wrote, owning domains is not enough. Owning data has the potential to give students agency and control. But it is not a guarantee. Not every student will come to love their domain. Many will let it go when they are out there in their first jobs, when the finances are thin. I would choose food over a domain. But their decision will also hinge on what their relationship is to that domain, and if that provides something useful to them not just in the present, but the future. I know that value, when I can look back and see how far I have come, or just to know what was important to me on say any day in my past I've mostly forgotten, perhaps April 21, 2013 or maybe October 29, 2008. It's a domain. And it's a room. And what happens to it matters more over time. Just look at Edith's house in Seattle --well maybe not, the internet says it's abandoned-- but her story, her spirit is there, her Edith-ness is imbued in its walls. I'd rather be in a house like Edith's, brimming with stories, than in a mall. Top / Featured Image: Thinking of an image of one of those old houses surrounded by crummy houses or big buildings, I searched for Google Images (licensed for reuse) for nice house surrounded by slum but all I got were slum photos. There are a lot of slum photos. I went back and tried house surrounded by buildings, and bingo, found the image above in Wikimedia Commons, but the source is a flickr photo by magnetbox https://flickr.com/photos/magnetbox/2687393593 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. This old farmhouse house, owned by a feisty lady in Seattle named Edith Macefield, is a whole fascinating story in itself, as she refused to sell it to developers who built a giant mall surrounding, engulfing it on three sides. The "Holdout" episode on 99% Invisible is a touching story where the construction superintendent ended up becoming her friend; when she died she left the house to him. A group of locals are fans-- the Army of Edith Mayfield wear tattoos of her old house. Learn more of Edith and her house on Wikipedia. To totally mangle McLuhan is medium.com the message? Does it control the message? What is the message? I will unfairly pick on one story in my assertion that for a lot of what people publish on medium- the entire arc of the story is contained within a click bait title. And this has a lot of tie-ins for the way people are writing about twitter's new plans. A tweet is still a tweet is still 140 characters short (about the length of something like "Twenty Ways to Lifehack Yourself And Love What You Do While Traveling in Tibet") and what ever it links to or opens 10,000 more characters elsewhere on twitter, pretty much ends up at the same place as a title. Coming up very soon in my Western 106 Not a Course is a part of DS106 and elsewhere I always enjoy-- asking people to think about the shape of a story as demonstrated by Kurt Vonnegut (deftly using the technology of... a chalkboard) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ This movement from good to bad to good, and all kinds of variations is what pulls us into the story. And very important, as he is describing Cinderella's post midnight fall, is that the character in a story usually ends up not as low on the curve as where they started -- and most often, way off the G scale ("infinite joy"). This cycle also can be wrapped into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (recently well re-framed at brainpickings). A key element of the journey, or the ups and down of Vonnegut's curve is the journey from the normal world into an extra-ordinary one, and the return back-- and that even if we return to the same world we started in, we are ever changed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhk4N9A0oCA Now I emphasis a lot when I teach storytelling, and just blogging in general, that you should never publish something with a dull title. I comment quickly on students who post something like "Assignment Five" or "My Audio Story". A good title is everything. It's the headline, the teaser, the way your work is represented elsewhere in a flood of other stories, often the title is your only little bob above the waters. I cannot even start writing until I have a good title. But that's just me. And that's what goes on on medium, in a stream of social media, and how stories come in the inbox, people do that microsecond scan at a title, make a click / no click decision. So a good title is a good idea. Anywhere. But when I read a lot of stories (not just on medium, but it seems that way) what I find is ... there's not much more revealed that was not in the title. I found one this morning, and I use this again, as an example of a phenomena, not as a literary criticism of the work. Who the ***** am I to call a kettle black? This story has over 1000 shares, more than anything I have done (as if shares are that important??) It's got a lot going in the title. Two things you do not expect together. A cat. Everyone on the internet loves cats. If I get the shape of it, its pinned to: Parents get kid a cat. Cat disappears in house. Meows are heard. Various repeated steps to locate cat in hidden spaces under floor. Sledge Hammer used to open spaces, selfie stick kind of used to look in holes. An external force is brought in (fire captian, at least a "she") but hardly provides any Obi Wan Kenobe influence. In fact, this character does little for the story. Cat walks out of hole in its own Is it a story? To me, it's pretty much a Facebook status message. "This happened, then this happened, then that." To me the story goes no farther than the title. The Vonnegut shape is kind of flat and low amplitude; Kurt's head sort of sags at the flatline. What extra-ordinary world was entered and then returned from? What was the lesson learned (do what the animal adoption agency suggests)? What about the cat's perspective? To me there was a clever title... and not much more revealed. The extra 10,000 characters worth in the new twitter are really not even essential, because everything is in the title. The title is meant to be easily shared in social media. The title is not only a draw to the story; it is in fact the entire story. This seems commons in medium. Does the environment itself encourage this, forge this? Is it what is seen as the norm? There are exceptions, like stuff Paul Ford writes (I gave up trying to find an example, because the stream of medium intermixes and considers equivalent, long thoughtful pieces and short comments and cool web links. Sigh. The frigging stream. Good writing rises above the medium (and medium.com). It can exist anywhere. Take some time to read Dan Cohen's For What It’s Worth: A Review of the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin”. The title draws you in, but does not give away the story. A good story, IMHO should take a reader through a journey, and often to a place not give away in the title. What ever happened to surprise? In the microstory world of medium.com and Facebook Instant Whatever-- everything starts and ends in the title? The kind of writing Dan showed, and many others do... takes some work. Much more than putting some click bait words into a title. What's in your title? Is it everything? I'd rather hear from the cat. Top / Featured Image Credit: based on screen capture from Kurt Vonnegut's The Shape of Stories found on YouTube The other day a colleague asked my thoughts on a system (yes open source) that makes it "easy" for faculty to create profile pages. Scanning the examples, I found relatively clean pages driven by web forms, standard portrait photos. But it felt as lively as a rental neighborhood that looks like creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Carnotzet And I cannot help but wonder what is the incentive for an individual to represent their own hard academic accomplishments in a institutionally owned site the individual must must revisit on a regular basis to tidy up the ornaments in the yard? How do you really stack that up to something people maintain as their own spaces? And here comes the Greek Chorus... That's too hard. Faculty can't/won't... Really? People who have devoted large chunks of their lives and energy and hair in the pursuit of deep academic inquiry? It has to be "easy". Let Todd Conaway explain the pitfalls of the "easy" button: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJjg99Wvq8 My question would be to anyone who prefers to underestimate the abilities of their colleagues (cause that is what you are doing) to think about the key findings in their academic discipline, the discoveries, the exploration of a new way of thinking... did any one do this by taking the easy button? I've looked recently at an LMS based open course, its lists of modules and documents, all designed with the elegance and curiosity of a shopping list, all to be easy. I clicked away feeling... it has all the excitement and motivation of reading the back of a package of alkaline batteries. Easy. A learning experience should never be designed to be easy. When we learn we should stretch, we should go beyond our bounds... One of my all time favorite quotes is from UMW History Prof Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation Jeff McClurken in his philosophy: I want my students to be uncomfortable, but not paralyzed Not "I want my student's learning in my class to be easy. I'd really prefer they do not try very hard." The opposite of easy is not impossible. Set the dial as high as easy... creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by John's Brain ...and enjoy your easy meal. My use of experiment is more the try "to learn something" in the definition than a well-designed test "done in order to learn something or to discover if something works or is true." This is also framed in my ongoing wrestling with the conference experience that is (to quote myself) overly "presentationally oriented." Compound this by a tendency to organize online conferences as replicating in-person ones without consideration of what Dominik Lukes described as the "affordances" of spaces. This is not simply fixed by online platforms where you move an avatar around a graphic of a conference hall. And usually overlooked is our focus and time- when participating in an online conference we do not devote 3 days to be fully locked in. We. Do. Other. Stuff. I have no solutions to offer. Anne Gagné asks directly who is complicit in the conference game, and I here to write "not me." While her focus is on exclusion of participation, my primary goal has been to explore ways to break down the dichotomy of in-person versus online conferencing. In the end, I might only have a clever name. Here we go, where I try to explain the "AND Conference" format I welded into the OE Global 2022 Conference. The 2020 and 2021 OE Global Conferences I may not have been writing a ton here about my work with OE Global, but I began some part time consulting in March 2020 invited by Executive Director Paul Stacey to bring in some community building new ideas. Other "things" in the world happened that month, so I was also asked to help plan their November 2020 Conference that originally was going to be hosted in Taipei but had to move online. Well golly gee, I do have a blog post about that effort. https://cogdogblog.com/2021/01/in-the-rear-view-mirror-oe-global-conference-2020/ A part of this thinking I hold on to still is Conferences as Conversations. One key influence was noting the registration for the 2020 conference was something like 4 times the count as an in person conference, and a significant response in the follow-up survey was many people noting that outside of a world-wide pandemic, they still would not have the capability to fund and travel for an in person conference. Flip the calendar ahead a year to 2021, and the conference that was planned to be in Nantes, France was not viable for pandemical reasons. We at OEGlobal (and me now working full time as of June 2021) organized an online conference at the end of September 2021 that made use of the same discourse platform as the year before. For a while in the 5 months earlier planning, there was some hope they could have the in-person conference piggy back right after the online, but again, ****ing pandemic. So the in-person conference was bumped out to May 35-25 this year, but it would continue the theme of the online conference around the UNESCO OER Recommendation. There was a desire for some kind of "bridging events" in the time between, but that did not materialize fully outside of efforts to engage the community in an annotation effort of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, ideally to attach examples, discussions, findings from he conferences directly to the wording it was related to. I thought this would have a lot of resonance, and it's not an onerous task to add a Hypothes.is note to a web page, but I did not really see a good amount of traction. At least I made a nifty remix, meet Rosa the Annotator. My remix of Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Image used in a call to annotation action. By maybe February of 2022, the green light was flashed in the sky for a GO for the in person conference in Nantes. So free trip to France, right? Who would not grab that? Me. Go or Not? As a credit to Paul Stacey's leadership style of operating as a "culture of care" he offered to his staff the option to not travel if any of us felt it was unsafe. While I was vaccinated and witnessing precautions fraying like a mask left by the roadside, as a Type 1 diabetic looking at varying variants, I questioned the need to go. Especially as at the time I had not had COVID (I got bit in April and it was a doozy). But it was more than pandemic worry. I had/have misgivings that the way forward out of this unevenly distributed now being a return to doing what we did before. I was thinking too of all the people who had participated in the online conferences (like over 800 in 2020 and more than 600 in 2021) who again would have no shred of participation in a conference. In my years at working at Maricopa and at NMC, I was fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to go to a (as a colleague nearby says) "wacksack" of conferences, around the globe. This shifted much starting in 2012 as being self employed meaning that outside of a few invites, going to a conference was not only a "pay for everything yourself" ordeal, but also compounded by being salaryless "you earn no money while not working"--see Conferences by the Numbers. And Chickens. And I recall hearing of colleagues working at institutions having the opportunity to go to Bali, Cape Town, Milan for OE Global conferences. That was way out of my self funded ability. Oh well... By opting out I was missing the chance to meet colleagues I have known for two years only through screens. At the same time, I did not feel like the chance to go on a plane to a neat place was enough to justify a risk to my health. And it put me in the same place as others who could go to this in person conference, for all kinds of reasons. It seems like the person supporting a part of the conference open to participants not there in person should be operating the same way. Presentation Mindsets After proposals for the Nantes event were accepted in March, presenters were asked to confirm their plans to be there (and also they need to register). We started seeing messages from a number of presenters who had planned to travel for the conference, but for an array of reasons- health, family, financial, etc could not. When told we were planning some online components, the first question was, "Can I do my presentation online?" The idea that I was hatching was that the online components would be everything but presentations, it was not to be an online conference at all e.g. the OER22 Conference did a stellar job at being a "hybrid" conference of both in-person and online. But this is the modality for either state. I've seen examples of pre-recorded presentations that just do not get much traction. I don't watch to many myself. I aimed to design something counter-presentational. How would that fly? The AND Conference Idea I had leanings more towards an un-conference mode where those who wanted to share their work could do so, but not in the scheduled presentation mode, but more of discussions/activities that were asynchronous, again using out Discourse powered OEG Connect platform. The emerging idea was not to try and have this "in-person" vs "online" dichotomy, but more aim for ways of interacting that would bridge both, and offer something for both. I started with some playful naming of things do for hose "In Nantes" and those "Not in Nantes". Thus I started framing my concept to my colleagues not as an "Un-Conference" but and "AND conference": After two years as an online format the OE Global conference returns May 23-25, 2022 as an in-person event with the Congress in Nantes. This event continues the 2021 online conference theme of furthering the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER.Recognizing that many educators who participated previously in the online mode are not able to travel to Nantes, we are aiming to organize modes of participation for those “Not in Nantes.” This is not a presentation-based online conference or even a hybrid conference format; we seek a variety of connective channels of participation from wherever you are during the conference. Not an opposite to in-person, we suggest a mode of Unconference design as something added to the Nantes Program for all. The OEGlobal 2022 “And Conference” is a variation inspired by the Yes, and concept, hence our naming of this as an “AND” conference.All of this will be based in the OEG Connect community space, and requires no fee to participate. Learn how to be part of the “AND” Conference at https://connect.oeglobal.org/c/oeg-2022 We hope to see you there.Alan's concept pitch A bonus attraction for this was the conference hosts Nantes Université offered to produce live video streams for the two larger conference halls, meaning three keynotes, and 50 some sessions would be made available. Also, we were not soliciting fees or registration for participating online. Free as in $0. Having supported the previous two OEGlobal conferences as fully online in OEG Connect meant familiarity with setting up this iteration. Since this part was open, no access restrictions needed to be put into play. The structure was 4 fold- an area for the daily schedule, then all the in-person conference sessions ("In Nantes Conference Sessions", plus the "Not in Nantes Unconference Sessions" (really just topic threads). Then between them was the Interaction Zone, aimed at being the activities that were available to those In Nantes and those Not in Nantes (see, the "and"?). The OEGlobal22 Conference in OEG Connect The In Person Conference Parts The Schedule and the In Nantes Conference Sessions were no different than what we did for the online conference. Each presentation is its own topic, we added a link to a live stream if it as available, and we ask presenters to share resources (perhaps more than slides) and pose questions. We ask participants to engage with the presenters. In keeping with my old idea, each presentation could/ought to be a conversation. Out of 101 sessions, 30 have at least one reply "here's my slides", some have 2, 3 4 replies, one has 11. So this did not generate much activity, but then again, this all came together maybe a month before the conference. The information about what we were doing gere went out bby social media and emails to participants. The Online Unconference Parts In the Looking at the Glass Partly Full Department, I was happy to see a few topics started in the Unconference area, three of them from presenters who had planned to be in Nantes but fate intervened. There were bursts of the kinds of exchanges I hoped for. The description for this area included: We are asking that you try to think around the usual idea of this as an online conference built around presenting online. We are urging you to think beyond the idea of a “presentation” as for this Unconference there is no fixed nor guaranteed audience, so yes, you can certainly present your work, research, project, but it can be more effective if you offer something for a viewer to do, respond, or contribute in this asynchronous environment.https://connect.oeglobal.org/t/create-participate-in-unconference-sessions/3673 I had tried to be clever in my Magritte Remix on the concept, that what we were doing was online but it was not making it an online conference. Remix in the the style of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images 1 made by Alan Levine using Pixabay image by 200 Degrees I am not sure anyone noticed. But Werner Westermann's topic on Artificial Intelligence and Open Education: indifference or unable to connect was exactly what I thought we could generate. To be this is more interesting, valuable than watching someone flip slides. Others of note include: Social Media Choices for Open Educators came from a question posted on CCCOER email list, by Amy Hofer I thought it was good fodder for conversation, though I was never successful in arm twisting Amy to join in. There was a good thread on the federated alternatives to twitter, and it is nudging me to look at setting up an OEGlobal Mastodon instance.Contributing to Our Roadmap was good call for response posted by Alex Enkerli to questions on a national OER planSurvey on where institutional policies interact with open educational practices a call again for responses by Leo Havemann who had presented in Nantes (a good example of doing the AND from the in person side)And a few more (see them all) As a proof of concept, I feel like these were successful. Again, the late notifying of this (because it was assembled a few weeks before the conference) was a factor. But at least we generated discussion type activities outside the usual online conference presenting mode. Interacting Together Stuff Again, I see a very good sign that the topics created in the Interaction Zone had the most activity. The idea here was to offer things to do, discuss, share that would be a bridge between the audiences, that could be done whether one was In Nantes or Not in Nantes, may have overplayed that bit of wording, but at least did not slide into making it a pair of acronyms. A few examples include: The View We Never See in Zoom was completely organic, as it came out of a different discussion where Judith Sebesta shared a photo of her desk where she would be participating from online. I struck me as interesting, because in zoom I always see the room behind participants, but never what they see. Remix and Share an OEGlobal 2022 Postcard again getting some fun mileage out of the Visual Thinkery remixable digital card that Bryan Mathers made for us for the first online conference.Shameless plug - please respond to my international OE Policy Survey was shared by in Nantes participant Leo Havemann who was active in asking for response to his survey, but here it generated quite a good thread of discussion on how individuals see institutional policy.How Far To/From Nantes? was a different approach to putting our locations on a map. We asked people to use a distance calculation tool to share either how far they were traveling to get to Nantes or how far away they were participating from. It's small, but to me it is showing how you can make something viable for all participants to do.Attach Conference Sessions, Notes as Annotations to the OER Recommendation is at the bottom of the list by replies, with a resounding zero. After 7 months of trying everything to garner interest in the UNESCO OER Recommendation theme of both is conference and the September 2021 online conference something people would see value in annotating the source document, without me even noticing, thanks to the fantastic CROWDLAAERS dashboard I saw more than 60 new annotations added during the week of the conference in Nantes.And a few more (see all the interaction zone topics) Oh wait, maybe the most interesting/successful were the Hallway Conversations we held twice during the conference afternoon coffee breaks. I suggested having some sense of "live" action outside of the streamed presentations, and much inspired by the years of participating in Virtually Connecting experiences I suggested we try to arrange a way of allowing participants Not in Nantes to hear and talk to people on site. Long ago and not so long ago people active with DS106 radio did things like this, but it requires someone with experience broadcasting on site, and then there is no remote participation without a lot of fancy audio rigging. And we could have done an audio only zoom, but haven't we had enough zooming? I cannot recall who suggested it, but we ended up experimenting (successfully) with Twitter Spaces. Yes, it meant participants had to use twitter, and it only provides speaking capability on a mobile device, but it did mean people could listen from anywhere, and potentially speak too. My sum experience was being a listener to one during Open Education Week and an impromptu demo with my OEG colleagues. And because you can only pre-schedule one Space per account, I set up one via our OEGlobal account and one in my own twitter account. And thankfully Lori-Beth Larsen volunteered to be a roaming "mic" in Nantes, plus a few others joined in, and actually it did end up working fairly well. I set them up to be recorded, so at least the archive lives in the tweets: https://twitter.com/OpenEdGlobal/status/1526324225103085573 and https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1526342972530466816 Getting an audio file of the recording is however is anything but simple. You actually have to request a download of your entire Twitter archive (mine is well over 1.5 Gb). Then rummage around to locate a .ts file, a format I never heard of, but is some MPEG-2 relict from DVD days. It was stored inside a spaces_media directory. I recommend as well saving a copy of the spaces_metadata.js file which can help you locate the proper archive if you have more than one (it also provides a count of participants). This part of Twitter Spaces makes it feel like the software was some high school kid's special project. It is rather arcane to get your archives. Each time you want an archive, you have to download the whole boat, would it really be that hard to provide access to the one file you need? Anyhow, then you are left with some mystery format file -- I used an online converter to make into an mp3 and I was then able to have something I could share and also edit into a new podcast episode of OEG Voices: https://podcast.oeglobal.org/2022/06/16/voices-36/ I had a much longer list of ideas of interaction ideas, but just was not able to organize them all. Still, the response was very positive for the ones we did try (the cup is partly full, the cup is partly full, the cup is partly full...) Timing as Challenge I am pleased we were able to pull of these bits and put out there as a slightly different way to think about conferences, maybe to be less a dichotomy approach of online vs in person, and also to break down the idea of conferences as presentation-centric. The idea was developed late in the planning process, so it became more of an emergent experiment, but now is on the table for the 2023 OEGlobal conference that will take place in Edmonton. As that is a few hours driving distance for me, I will definitely be In Edmonton, but also dedicated to creating opportunities for those who will be Not in Edmonton (I am starting this now!). And beyond these efforts, we at OEGlobal were successful in person continuing the effort to create sessions where presenters could speak in their own language (see sessions offered in Spanish, French , and Arabic). On site was a first use of a different approach to multilingual sharing than attempts at live translation, see the Multilingual Interactive Display an AI application created by students of our conference chair, Colin de La Higuera. I captured a few bits of the Word Cloud view generated during the opening keynote: Expect this to be a design of future OEGlobal conference and events. Much on this AND Conference "thing" hinged on the support and interest of the on-site staff, participants. Thankfully, my colleagues had faith on my whacky ideas. I admit greatly over-estimating my own energy! I had grand plans of operating on Nantes Time, and after the first day being up from midnight until 9am, I collapsed. On day 2 I was not present live, even with some weird chills, and the original second Twitter spaces was rescheduled or day 3. Note to self, Alan: You are not 22 years old ;-)me All in all, though, I am appreciative of having this opportunity to change up the usual conference game. And will continue doing so as long as I am breathing. Can conferences be as much places for open conversations as much as for presentations? You can guess my answer... Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/32059230981 2017/365/7 Joined Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This thing is still on, even if it has not sprouted much in a while. Just posting to make sure it works. And to add one more shredded post to the pile of likely the oldest blog topic. That's all. For now. Hi. Featured Image: Plug Time flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I'm not sure what to call the breed of web tools that enable you to draw in content from other web X.0 sites automatically-- some call them lifestream (maybe not, wikipedia lands you somewhere else) more like http://lifestreamblog.com/. Swurl is a new one and I am liking its elegance. I get my requisite custom URL and give it my username at a few web services, then I can toss in some customization like colors, banners... I just plopped the image I use from this blog: What is less subtle is that there are no links to see more pages.... as you scroll down content keeps coming in, the river of stuff, like it has no end. Also, what I really liked, is that snce I gave it my accounts, some which have been used for a long time like flickr and del.icio.us, it goes way back in my internet life. I am looking at my tabs, and wondering what the heck it might have grabbed from 2001 especially since flickr was around only since 2004. (more…) This is a tale of how my curiosity gets fed and pulled into unexpected places on the internet (yes the one that apparently died again in 2015). This is a tale of how my plans for a "productive" morning get nudged later as I cannot stop seeking connections. This is a tale of why my toast sits cold in the toaster because I forgot about it. This is my daily tale. It's Amy Burvall's fault. Thank you Amy. https://twitter.com/amyburvall/status/663706355874725889 The story in Open Culture (one my my favorite haunts for interesting stuff you can openly use) describes a new web site from UCSB with audio archives of some of the oldest audio recordings-- Edison's cylinders. Okay, so this might have some future use in my next ds106 class. Bookmarked in pinboard. But my curiosity is kindled because I have one of the cylinder containers (not the cylinder) I purchased at friend Loran's antique store in Pine, Arizona. I start searching my own flickr photos to find a photo of it. Instead, I found a photo of the same containers I took at the Laramie Plains Museum on a trip there in 2007 [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I know I have a photo somewhere of mine sitting on the media player shelf next to my DVD player, but I do find I used the old media container to prop up another old media device: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I pull my container off the shelf, and look for any kind of identification on it, there on the top is some information about what might be inside. I cannot read the handwriting, it might be related to the original content, or just applied later by someone else who used the container. The best guess I can make is: In ???? public, by Bryan but below I can make out a stamp that looks like an identification number- I can read 892x but the last digit is unclear. I go to the UCSB Audio Cylinder Archive and notice that under the Cylinder of the Day, the link for the item “Russian kamarinskaja” is http://www.library.ucsb.edu/OBJID/Cylinder4929. Now this is another reason I like the site, because the URLs look like they mean something (rather than many URLs like most Google products which are long strings of gibberish hashes), and that means I can make the URLs work for me. This is one of many lessons I got from Jon Udell; he was talking about this in 2001! My hunch is that Cylinder4929 is the ID number printed on top. This means I can maybe find some info by exploring http://www.library.ucsb.edu/OBJID/Cylinder8920 http://www.library.ucsb.edu/OBJID/Cylinder8921 http://www.library.ucsb.edu/OBJID/Cylinder8922 etc. Maybe one of the listed artists will be Bryan? Here are all of my URL explorings, for Cylinder8920 through Cylinder8929 Nothing definitive here, my hopeful guess is 8292, which turns out to be Jolly Coppersmith [Kreuzfidele Kupferschmied] by Sousa's Grand Concert Band, released somewhere between 1896 and 1900. My reason for choosing this one? My Dad like Sousa marches. So get this, through this open archive on the open internet, I can listen to music recorded to wax more than 115 years ago. Because they provide the material free and without obfuscating media players, I can download it and share it with you: [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/cusb-cyl8929d.mp3"][/audio] And even better, because the file has good meta data, it travels with the media [caption id="attachment_49780" align="aligncenter" width="455"] Audio meta date that is kept on upload to my Wordpress Media library[/caption] And look what the entry at the UCSB Archive provides, this is normal stuff for libraries, but its cleanly done and presented- I could see all other recordings by the Sousa Band [caption id="attachment_49781" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Info on "Jolly Coppersmith" from UCSB Audio Archive[/caption] And I love that it has a "Durable URL", one that redirects to a database search. We need more durable URLs. We need more interesting archives and collections done so well. So thanks Amy, for sending me down the best kind of rabbit hole, maybe not what you expected on sending the link. But the part I like is being curious and finding information and ideas I did not expect while standing at the front of the rabbit hole. Which is where it seems a lot people spend their time, just starring favoriting hearting stuff. You gotta dive in. And dig. And you will find that the blather about the internet being dead is just the fog outside the rabbit hole. See you later, I am going back in. Top / Featured Image credit: my own photo taken this morning, not yet uploaded to flickr where eventually it will have the same creative commons license as my other 43,000+ photos cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Vijay.. I took a spin on the random button for the ds106 audio asignments and ha ha ha, I got one I had submitted, Character Bird Calls: Like some people use special whistles to attract birds, your task is to create an 30 second or less audio file that might be used to "call" a particular character from a movie, tv, or real life. It cannot feature voices, but sounds only (try http://freesounds.org). Write a description why this sound would be attractive to the character, why it would be effective (be inventive, write a story about it). (Stranglely the example I did, Calling Dr Oliver never got added, hmmmm). So began to consider maybe a pair of characters calling each other, who might that be? My brain mulled back to the childhood TV shows I watched, so here is my bird call (details below the fold) (don't peek)? (more…) Sure a new year means all kinds of things (sans resolutions) for me it's time to mark another year done at the Daily (but never everyday) Photo effort. Thus 2023 makes it the 16th year for this habit I do no want to shake. To recast the story again, it goes back to the solo effort D'Arcy Norman did in 2007, nudging me to try in 2008, inviting others to do so via a flickr group. I've kept going at it since 2008, as has D'Arcy (tho in his own photo place) (and he is doing so again, maybe in 2023) (can I apply blog pressure through endless parentheticals?). https://cogdogblog.com/2009/11/x-a-day/ The 2022 Wrap I took lots of photos in 2022, most every day a few, but somewhere in mid September I bogged down on the process of editing captioning posting to flickr. Why? Insert any theory ... or as it is the thing to do, ask the Wisdom of Oracle-like ChatCPT: Q: Why would someone who had completed a daily creative activity for 15 years have stopped doing so recently? What are theories for why people lapse in positive habits? ChatGPT sez: There could be many reasons why someone who had completed a daily creative activity for 15 years might have stopped recently. Some possible reasons could include changes in personal circumstances, loss of motivation or inspiration, increased workload or responsibilities, or simply losing the habit of doing the activity. There are also a number of theories that attempt to explain why people might lapse in positive habits. One theory is that habits are formed through the process of classical conditioning, in which an automatic response is learned through repeated pairing with a stimulus. According to this theory, if the stimulus is no longer present or if the response is not reinforced, the habit may be broken. Another theory is that habits are formed through the process of operant conditioning, in which an action is reinforced through the consequence that follows it. According to this theory, if the consequence is no longer reinforcing or if the action is not performed consistently, the habit may be broken. It is also possible that lapses in positive habits may be due to a lack of motivation or a lack of self-control. In these cases, individuals may need to find ways to increase their motivation or build up their self-control in order to maintain their positive habits. ChatGPT gibberish What insight... as usual it starts with some relevance into the question but quickly steers into generalized pablum. Regardless, it became a holiday task to catch up on this backlog. I am my own task maker here because I insist on writing titles, adding captions, tagging all photos. I have noticed a few colleagues which have been doing this a while doing the dump and upload method. ChatGPT can guess but it is a trivial chore. But having info that I can use later to search photos is what makes this act of value to me. It is metadata as much as ISO and shutter speed and geolocation. Plus I believe in the potential of providing context for photos not just using it as a storage facility. This is my way, I cannot criticize others. After catching up on the backlog of my 2022/365 flickr album I usually go through to fill gaps, days I forgot to add to the album, or ones I named wrong in sequence. This year I spent less time doing this, which matters little as I am the only auditor. As is for 2022 I scored 343 out of 365 days, no perfect, but a better batting average than 2021 (329 out of 365). Out of 15 years, only twice did I truly achieve a 100% score. Again I assembled a year end review, making use of my friend and colleague John Johnston's command line script to download photos, resize, and assemble them into a video (and yes I remember when John shared the now dead pummelvision site that previously did this). My version is slightly different to find photos from my album rather than tags, but it saves a lot of work in putting them all in a single video. It's my own obsessive habits that has me editing in iMovie to reverse the sequence, add titles, music, credits. Finally, enough blog blabbering... the video! https://youtu.be/bl_bokGp2Tk Teeing Up for 2023 A good start is resetting the habit (pfffft to ChatGPT's lame fallback to operant conditioning, I ain't no lab mouse). Meaning Just Doing It. January 1 photos taken? Check. Edited? Check. Uploaded to Flickr? Check, into a brand new album and tag stream. Check. Today? My slow blogging habit warms up, still lovely light for Cori and I to get out and snap some photos. I also make a quick edit to the Flickr Group originally set up in 2008- change the name to 2023/365 Photos, pick new cover image and icons from members of the group (well over 1800), posting a short announcement. It's funny as these 1800 some people, vastly I have no idea who they are, occupy this space and have no real interaction beyond doing their photo thing in whatever way makes sense to them. It's hardly a community, it's more like strangers engaging in similar pursuit and never talking about it, just doing it. I kind of think this is fascinating. Want to jump in? The water is warm and safe, see https://www.flickr.com/groups/366photos/ Onward with One Step into 2023 Insert the disclaimer about hating / not making resolutions. Those sound like traps. I do this because the act of noticing interesting patterns/light and rendering them as photos always has worked for me as a creative act. Were it different I might make drawings, or music, or folded paper sculptures. But I am noting the dispensing of my time/energy-- I have slid some this year to the ease and nano-click rewards of posting to instagram , twitter, and now some to mastodon. I want to find again the priority first of getting my photos to the archive, place that matters and I control... no, it's not flickr, but my own database in Aperture and hard-drives. Everything online is exhaust from that, but it should be flickr first, then others. Daily photo habit for 2023 now reset, but it's on me to follow through. And whether I do 1 or 365 matters not. Featured Image: Composite of my first and last daily photos of 2022: 2022/365/1 The Sun Star flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2022/365/365 Caf-Magic flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) [media description: Photo of a bright sun over snow cover landscape superimposed on a photo of the bubbles atop a cup of coffee] Another element I am using in my story is that Dorothy figure ut that to return to Oz, she would need to go shopping and find a new pair of ruby slippers, since you cannot expect to just fall out of the sky again and land on another witch. So she has to go shopping somewhere upscale. For this piece of the story, I used the Wait, Where'd That Guy Come From? assignment (fun because I never dis that one before): Photoshop someone(s) (or something(s)) into a picture that isn't supposed to be there. I did some searching on photos of high end shoe stores, but somehow the thought of Dorothy shopping for shoes in the Villaggio (located in Doha, Qatar) worked for me- using this Travelblog photo. Here is Dorothy (and Toto too) slyly shopping for magic shoes in Doha: To mix her in the crowd, I would need an image of Dorothy standing or walking, and isolated (no arms around Scarecrow, sorry). The one that worked was for an ad for a life size cardboard cutout. In Photoshop, I deleted the bit of ground around her feet, and dropped in the main photo. Her layer is on top of the others, but to make it look more real, I position her to overlap with someone standing closer to the camera, and use that person's shape as a selection to delete a bit from the Dorothy layer, so it looks like she is behind (it is likely better to extract his shape later first and they drop it in. Dorothon was very tiny. I went to make a blowup of the area after putting a circle around it- I zoomed in the circle to about 400%, and did a screen shot. I then can paste that back to the normal size, so it looks pixelly like it is a real blow up. Digital stories grow in odd places, not quite limited to 8 minute personal videos. I am very drawn to ones that you find in unexpected places- such as Olivia Judson's recent New York Times piece. In The Last Calendar, she relates the story that emerges from a shared Google Calendar she and her brother made to track contact with their ailing father who lived far from them both: To try to cope better with this situation, my brother and I created a shared Google calendar "” an online calendar in which we could both make entries from wherever we happened to be. Each time either of us spoke to our father, we marked it in the calendar "” what time of day it was, how he sounded, what we spoke about ... But the calendar had other, more subtle effects, too. It was, in essence, a journal kept by two people who read each other's entries, and so it gradually became a conversation between the two of us as well as a straight-up record of events. One day, he's infuriating my brother with speculations about two friends' having an inappropriate affair: "I said I thought he was being outrageous and that it was none of his business, even if his wild speculations were true. I hope he has the sense not to say anything to anyone else about his unfounded, wild, no evidence claims." Another day, I'm remarking, "I'm worried by the extent to which he does not seem to cook for himself anymore." ... At the time, I was glad we kept the calendar because it helped us to cope with a difficult situation. Now I'm glad for a different reason: it helps me remember small details about him, the little things that slip out of memory, that fade with time. Laughs, tears, worries, frustrations, joy and love "” it's all in the calendar. This exemplifies what I have learned from my experiences teaching ds106 and just practicing stories. There seems an assumption that the media created is the story, that its all neatly self-contained in a video, animation, written piece, photo essay. People struggle with can something like an animated GIF be a story? a mashed up movie poster? This is a limited view of story. The stories exist in our relationship to these media, the context, the stuff that swirls amongst the fragments that are just media. Frankly, to see story as being solely contained within one collection of bits and bytes is... sadly limited. So look up from the digital media and consider what stories they can perhaps stimulate, or remind, or just retell in us. I write this because... I have my own calendar story. For years when she lived in Florida, 10 years, 20? my Mom bought each year one of those blank wall calendars where you write in the dates and months in blank boxes. She would then faithfully hand write entries from the previous year. Over the last few years more and more entries marked Yahrtzeit - the dates when people she new had passed away and she would light a candle to mark it (she had a cupboard that had dozens of the little candles) By the time I last saw here with it in February 2011, there were entries in almost every box, many of them the passing of friends in her neighborhood, names I did not know, but also birth dates, anniversaries of just about every cousin and cousin's nephew, and cousin's nephew's spouse in the family tree. She even had a code system, a (b) for a birthday (a) for anniversary, (y) for yahrtzeit and the number of years since She marked dates that marked the births and deaths of dogs my sisters and I had. In fact, we had a laugh and a play disagreement because she called once to let me know she was thinking of Dominoe on the date in July my first dog passed away. She had in her (paper) calendar as July 24, and when I checked my own (digital) one I said, "Mom, thanks but it is actually July 26." She was insistent on the accuracy of her calendar because of her meticulous bookkeeper method. I was insistent because... it was my dog! We laughed like always. Guess how it appears in my Google calendar now? When my sisters and cleaned her house last year, we had many warm memories. I am not sure if we kept that last calendar, which was, as always, attached to the side of her refrigerator. I, for one, could not see doing it "mom's way", so I went through the calendar, and created a new Family calendar on Google that I share with my sisters. I changed the date method, since Mom would have to update the number every time she copied over; I record the year it represented. The method does not matter. But the stories and memories come most from the odd events she chose to track. January 10: Mom Face Fall (2003). Mom was delivering some homeowners paperwork to a lawyer, and she accidentally tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, and hot it hard with her face. It was not pretty! She even sent me a photo (not in my email, she had to developed and sent in a letter), and it was horrible! Her face was black and blue, like she had been beat up in a bad bar fight. January 16: Honey Y (2004) My sister's first sheltie. Awwww April 7: Harriet's Nose (1967). A nose? Yes, this happened when I was only 4, but my ssister had been sitting on a fences at the school across the street, watching the pony league baseball players practice. An uncaught ball caught her square on the nose! There were ambulances and all. I get a reminder every year. April 23: Mom Hysterectomy (1968) Does Hallmark have a brand for this? Why is this on the calendar? I can only imagine it was memorable. My memory was playing outside, slippped, and hit my head on the bench. I ran in the house crying to look for Mom and she was gone. I think maybe my grandmother was there, as Mom had been rushed to the hospital (in an ambulance?) I missed it completely. But that thought of Mom being gone? It resides in me every day now. At age 5? July 18: Gert Hammer B (1916). I barely remember Mrs Hammer, she was a friend of my grandmother, and she was an Artist with a capital "A" a Painter. She lived in a small apartment with a living room full of easels and paint and watercolors. Mom said she was loathe to part with her paintings, so it was memorable when she gave me a small pen and ink drawing of some abstract shipyard. I still have that in my bedroom, along with a few more watercolors. September 3: Cousing Bobby Y (1984). Mom's eccentric cousin. The story I know is he worked at the Post Office in New Jersey, and saved his money for his international trips to other countries. We would get this postcards from Austria, Bolivia, India and it just read "Hi From Austria! Bobby". Maybe in some way he inspired some interest in me in travel, but more, it was a thing I emulated in 2011 when I wrote Mom a similar style postcard from every state and province I visited. Sadly, the day I bought her one in Ontario was the day later I got the call she had died. I hand delivered that last postcard. October 15: Grandma Janet Levine B (1907). My grandmother, born into a poor couple in Newark New Jersey, lost her own mother at a young age, but also never got an official birth certificate. It was much later in life she was able to get one because a census taker had noted the number and ages of children in the home, and Granny was finally able to get that piece of paper. She ended up having to pick a date in October, so she chose the 15. I always teased her that I wanted her to live to 100; she made it to 98, and that was just fine. November 6: Mollie Y (2002). "Aunt Mollie" was not my aunt, but Mom's best friend from high school. They were life long friends, and for all intensive purposes, she was my aunt. She was always fashion conscious, I can recall them sitting together (in the 1970s) yacking and smoking cigarettes. They were life long friends, and I know Mom missed her much when Mollie passed away. There is much more there, many family names for cousins and relatives I barely remember and rarely or never see. The calendar itself is not a story. It is an enabler of the ones. I am flowing with re-energized memories just having gone through it to write this post. Stories aren't wrapped neatly inside videos, photos, scrapbooks, those are just the memory sparks. The stories are in us, between us. it takes no special skill to know them, it's in the heart. They reach up from unexpected places, a flower underfoot in the sidewalk. Stop once in a while from the business of the day, and pay attention to those flowers. Lewis Hine [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Coming into my last week here at TRU I am hoping to get my portfolio site into shape to represent the four months here of my fellowship. I am very pleased with the capabilities of this Moesia Lite theme (a free one in WordPress), and it was one I recommended for Michelle and it looks like Christina Hendricks is checking it out too: @cogdog I like Moesia theme, but the scrolling is too fast (I keep going past what I want). Possible to change that easily? — Christina Hendricks (@clhendricksbc) March 7, 2015 I like the ability to have the top welcome screen, and I have it set to appear only on the front (not sure I want my face looming over the site that much). The images can be set to be randomized (I think I have 6 or 7). Moesia has pretty good documentation and a better demo than you can see on WordPress.com. I did not enable all of the vertical one page stackable things it can do on the front (adding a slot for “Services” “Clients”, “Team”, “Testimonials” that is the norm it seems for business sites)- this involved creating a raft of custom post types. But I did find buried in the documentation a few extra extensions I added, mainly widgets. I don’t like having all these iddy biddy plugins and am curious why they are not baked in the theme, but oh well. So I have an extra extra widget with a bit of context below the big image header (where it says “Portfolio for a TRU Open Learning Fellowship”) and another widget area at the bottom where I put the Moesia Social widget as well as another one that allows me to put 3 recent posts from my “Favorites” category My ultimate plan is to shift the front to use a static page that will have some callouts for the key areas, maybe using the Moesia Masonry Extension. But the real thing I am coming to realize is an ongoing grand challenge is how to categorize content. We urged You Show participants in the very first unit to try and brainstorm possible categories, but this is hard to do if you have no experience creating a site like this. Thus categorizing ends up being something that evolves as you add more to the site (unless everything remains “Uncategorized”), which I know from my main blog, ends up being a bit chaotic and uneven. And having to back categorize gets tedious. I do think there is a middle ground, to be a little adhoc until maybe you have 50, 6o (?) posts, and then seeing if there is a more meaning full bins to organize posts into. My suggestion is fewer top level categories are better, make them comparable in scope but somewhat broad. I sat down last week with a blank paper and a pen to rethink my own on this site: cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And came up with four top categories, with a “stuff-y” flavor: Stuff I Can Do — skills in technology, media development, writing, and also one I like “Explaining”. Stuff I Have Done — tangibles that would show those skills; e.g. projects, web sites, publications, presentations Stuff Reflected — the meta writing and narrating, plus other activities that have happened while here not strictly related to work. Favorite Stuff – my own picks for favorite posts or the items I want to foreshadow. Under each are more sub categories, and most posts end up in more than one place. On interior parts of the site, this appears in a sidebar There is another category Syndicate This for posts I republish on my main blog via RSS Feeds. This indicates something else too, the posts I felt worth sharing more widely. Like this one! I have the top level ones on the menu, and am considering whether to add all the sub categories to it. Right now, I am leaning away. This seems to be ab ongoing process of refining, so it’s never quite “done.” I keep changing, so thus my portfolio should. And you probably cannot do that much changing in a centralized portfolio tool. Plus each iteration of considering the categorization is a self-reflective exercise. To Brian Lamb, Yacht Rock borders on religion. Part mockumentary, it was a web video series that Brian has raved about for almost as I have known him. I won't even try to explain it, leave that to Wikipedia. And to me shame, I've not watched it. That's on my homework list; Brian has done enough work in our previous time to school me on all kinds of YouTube regions I never knew existed. Last Sunday I was at my local record shop, actually an antique store in Pine Arizona called "Moose Mountain". The new owners have added a corner of vinyl, and its my go to place now for album browsing. So it was there I spotted what must be... https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/663046052757397506 Wikipedia has a little bit of opinion in its description of this 1973 album: Full Sail is the third album by singer/songwriter duo Loggins and Messina, released in 1973. It showed the versatility of the duo, with everything from 1950's retro to island-style to sappy ballads. The single "My Music" charted at #16, and the follow-up, "Watching the River Run", made it to #71. The album as a whole did better, reaching #10 on the Pop Charts. And I was compelled to buy it for sheer novelty. While playing the album last night over #ds106radio (I likely just admitted some copyright violation, come and get me), I opened the album to see this touching photograph of Loggins and Messina https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/663919147764461568 And it was crying for a remix- hence in some PhotoShoppery, using these photos of Grant Potter and Brian Lamb -- ones I sought for having soemthing appropriate to the right angle... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license Eventually producing this remix... Not quite the smoothest edges and color tinting, but goofy enough to make me giggle. Smooth sailing, indeed. It's been bad enough delting the email crud generated by the latest virus, but today I got my first porn content inserted into a comment on this weblog, with links to just about everything possible you could imagine being enlarged, shrunk, photographed, made money on, etc. So if you exercise IP banning on your blogs (this is my first one listed, and I suspect it is not much protection), make sure you ban this piece of dog poop: IP Address: 61.181.5.80 Name: vig-rx Email Address: bushlee@yahoo.com Judging from the tracerout below (I removed the starting path from maricopa out to our Phoenix path), it wades through the usual suspects (Hong Kong, China, and likely into some anonymized zone: 5 phx-edge-05.inet.qwest.net (206.80.195.185) 4.23 ms 6.335 ms 4.893 ms 6 phx-core-01.tamerica.net (206.80.192.246) 4.308 ms 7.518 ms 4.589 ms 7 den-core-01.tamerica.net (205.171.8.77) 25.961 ms 32.907 ms 23.603 ms 8 den-core-02.tamerica.net (205.171.16.90) 25.454 ms 26.682 ms 24.207 ms 9 500.pos2-0.gw2.den4.alter.net (157.130.172.41) 32.802 ms 25.334 ms 28.771 ms 10 153.at-5-0-0.cl1.den4.alter.net (152.63.92.150) 26.564 ms 29.352 ms 24.435 ms 11 0.so-0-0-0.tl1.slt4.alter.net (152.63.9.70) 53.337 ms 34.09 ms 35.05 ms 12 0.so-4-1-0.tl1.scl2.alter.net (152.63.1.25) 69.921 ms 64.003 ms 63.831 ms 13 0.so-1-0-0.xl1.scl2.alter.net (152.63.1.10) 63.751 ms 64.279 ms 62.602 ms 14 0.so-5-0-0.br1.scl2.alter.net (152.63.57.45) 62.598 ms 66.622 ms 62.14 ms 15 sl-bb20-sj-6-1-1620xt1.sprintlink.net (144.232.9.1) 129.007 ms 196.098 ms 183.324 ms 16 sl-bb21-sj-15-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.3.158) 69.304 ms 65.816 ms 64.868 ms 17 sl-bb24-sj-12-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.3.202) 65.742 ms 63.491 ms 65.603 ms 18 sl-bb21-hk-14-1.sprintlink.net (144.232.9.38) 241.133 ms 242.436 ms 242.911 ms 19 sl-gw10-hk-14-0.sprintlink.net (203.222.38.38) 283.809 ms 241.48 ms 241.848 ms 20 sla-chinet-1-0.sprintlink.net (203.222.39.58) 409.713 ms 418.788 ms 407.358 ms 21 219.158.3.29 (219.158.3.29) 413.733 ms 413.654 ms * 22 * 219.158.6.10 (219.158.6.10) 410.615 ms 418.538 ms 23 202.99.66.142 (202.99.66.142) 415.673 ms 410.778 ms 413.926 ms 24 * * * 25 * * * 26 * * * 27 * * * If people responsible for this put their energy into doing something actually productive for society, the world would be vastly a different place... called Utopia. I am worried this is just the beginning and it will become a regular chore to not only clean my inbox of this crap but now my weblog. Grrrrrrrrowl. This dog wants a bite out of spammers. Come out from hiding, you stinky weasels. I dread those meetings with my editor. She is rather harsh. Just the way she looks down on me. I have a new manuscript for her to review. I just cannot predict how she will react. This was our last meeting. https://soundcloud.com/cogdog/my-editor-is-a-b This is my go at a new ds106 Sound Effects Story: Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds. As a change up, I opted to use sounds from a few Twilight Zone episodes I had downloaded for some other assignment work: Time Enough at Last I recall a conversation with Bryan Alexander who relayed his travel experience in the form of an inverse law- the higher the cost and luxury status of a hotel, the worse your internet connectivity will be-- the best free wireless is found in an obscure Motel 8 in rural Pennsylvania. This has certainly proven true this week with the NMC Conference in Cleveland- the Intercontinental Suites is a swank place, but the in room internet paid connectivity has been shot to hell all week (was it a hotel full of techies?); there is zero wireless available in a place that you think would cater to businesses, and the rates they charge for our conference connections border on grand larceny (they not per line, but per connected Mac address- so each computer hooked in is another kaching). To some minimal amount defense, the hotel is bound by their contract to a provider with a name I will choose not to slander, because it would be really easy to pile on some nasty adjectives. It just took 25 minutes for their "service" to process a connection request, at a speed bordering on tin cans and clothesline before the lights came on. It makes little sense, since once that ordeal is over, the connection is fairly decent, like cable in a crowded neighborhood. All their "supprt" line can do is blame the issue on too many connections or (and I swear this is what their rep said, "too many people engaged in illegal peer to peer file sharing." What a load of dog doo-doo. So if you want a plush robe in your closet and soap carved into flower shapes, shell out the big bucks; if you need to get some work done on a free and reliable wireless, check into the local No Tell Motel. I'm wrapping up my work with Colin Madland at Trinity Western University creating a collection of clonable WordPress sites with custom child themes intended for the electronic portfolios TWU is proving for 500+ new students. As an extra piece of this work, I created for their WordPress Multisite a Network Admin dashboard widget that counts how many sites there are using the three different templates. Wait a minute, there are four themes listed. What's with the "Spartans?" Yes, because I aim to over deliver for my clients, I gave them one more template than they asked for. Colin had mentioned strong interest from some Art professors, and we both agreed we might need one that is more visual heavy on the front and archive screens. I offered to try making a new child themed template, and we both agreed that the Blask theme looked pretty good as a starter. It was one like two others I used that were wired to use the JetPack portfolio post type options, so I knew how to convert them to the custom post type we are using via a TWU Portfolio Helper plugin I wrote. But after 3.5 hours of working on a version of this, I ran into many problems and was not getting much of anything like the demo. And the single item layout was a bit awkward to my eye. So I suggested using another theme I was rather familiar with from my SPLOT work, Anders Noren's Fukasawa theme. Colin suggested for a name the TWU mascot, hence the new TWU Spartans Theme. Here it is! In doing this theme, I added a feature that is now available on the other three portfolio templates. Each of them uses a WordPress page as the front entrance to the portfolio, with introductory that a student can change by editing the page itself. The part below, though, was hard-coded with a title "Recent Artifacts", a sub-title "Please explore and provide feedback on my artifacts!", and a fixed number of recent artifacts displayed (depending on the theme, some looked better with 3, others with 6). But now, on all the TWU Portfolio templates, all of this lower section can be edited via the WordPress Customizer: Furthermore, I was able to add to all themes for the artifact custom post type category and tag archives, a count of the number items in the header (even with correct grammar if there is just 1). Each theme also has a guide in our support site that describes the features special to each theme. Also there was one class where they wanted to use WordPress but not the taxonomy and guides created for the incoming students portfolios, and decided to use normal blog posts and category. So I wrote a guide page for taking a new site that came with all the extras and "unplugging" it. For this site, I also re-structured it's series of content authored by multiple authors as a mixture of pages and posts, to be all pages, and using my favorite Page-List plugin to create indexes of subpages or sibling pages as needed for navigation (see the new structure for the Foundations and the Resources section). And... wait... there is more! I re-wrote some things I have written before and before as blog guides for students (not about the buttons and parts of the WordPress interface, but a bit broader), How To Publish Artifacts Like A Portfolio Champ: [caption id="attachment_66810" align="aligncenter" width="760"] modified from creative commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by Lotus Carroll[/caption] WordPress portfolios are blossoming in BC, also at the OpenETC Coop I hear that some 90+ students have spawned new WP published portfolios (it was their use of the NS Cloner Plugin for users to create copies of sites on signup that I took to the TWU project). For those interested, the child themes and plugins create are all available openly: TWU Inspire Portfolio theme https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Inspire-Portfolio TWU Hearts Portfolio Theme https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Hearts-Portfolio TWU Minds Portfolio Theme https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Minds-Portfolio TWU Spartans Portfolio Theme https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Spartans-Portfolio TWU Portfolio Helper Plugin https://github.com/TWUOnline/TWU-Portfolio-Helper Thanks again, Colin and TWU for bringing me on for this work. As always, I think I learn the most in terms of new site building tricks and tools. Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]One flickr photo by Beaukiss Steve shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license[/caption] Aw shucks, it's like Navin R. Johnson discovering he is listed in the phone book, I find I am small icon listed on TwitterPoster: Can you find me? I am three rows below Justine, who with 5226 followers, is supersized. I swear she is looking at me. I think she likes me.... Ego-googling is expired- subscribing to technorati feeds of your own stuff is tired.... and twitter poster is wired! WTF? Why do I have 440 followers? Who are you? Why are you following me? Creepy! Some of you have bad breath! I'm sorry, but I rarely even look at all the twitter bacn that comes to my inbox, and I usually dont follow back. I'm not being snobby, and its not that I am disinterested in your own twittering, its just... well, if I did follow 500 people I would end up reading them all. Okay that is a weak excuse, so all of you are likely now to stop following, and demote me to the bottom of the big list. Weird. A few weeks ago, as a favor for a friend buying a computer, I did something unusual. I went inside a mall. My formative late teen age years were spent at Security Square Mall in Baltimore (named for its proximity to the headquarters of the Social Security Administration). My last job before leaving Arizona was selling cameras at Ritz in Westview Mall. Both these malls are settings for the story being told in Serial Podcast. As a kid I remember going to maybe among the oldest mall Mondawmin Mall, built in 1956 by a group led by James Rouse, who went on to build Baltimore's Inner Harbor and Columbia, the planned city between Baltimore and Washington DC. Since then, I go very rarely. But they are not bad places. On this recent visit, an empty store in Sahali Mall was the location for a used book sale organized by the Kamloops Symphony. There I picked up two slim novels by Don Delillo. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] A few years ago I read Libra and perhaps White Noise, and really relished his writing style. At 126 pages The Body Artist and at 116 Point Omega ought to be quick reads. The generally were, but that does not mean easy reads. I am not about to give a literary analysis; there is thus place called "The Internet" where you can find a lot of these. But some interesting similarities: Both stories play around with our concept of time. The opening chapter of the Body Artist is almost an excruciatingly detailed act by act of the ordinary morning routine of Lauren and Rey. In Point Omega, Richard Elster goes to the desert (some reviewers call it Arizona, but by description and narrative this is definitely in California, near Anza-Borrego) to experience slow desert time, and talks much about geological time. The opening and closing chapters take place in the art exhibit where the Man With No Name absorbs an art exhibit that slows down the movie Psycho to play over a 24 hour period. Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it. But not for him. He is in another structure, another culture, where time is something like itself, sheer and bare, empty of shelter. -- The Body Artist p94 He'd exchanged all that for space and time. These were things he seemed to absorb through his pores. There were the distances that enfolded every feature of the landscape and there was the force of geologic time, out there somewhere, the string grids of excavators searching for weathered bone. -- Point Omega p 19 I have to admit the setting in Point Omega speaks to me because of my long stint living in Arizona. Both stories involve people dealing with incredible personal loss. Both stories have characters that seem rather under developed, or semi transparent. Lauren narrates in a sparse manner that jumps around, but also repeats motifs like always touching the newel (the stairway post). I wonder too about the repeated description of birds, they have a meaning too (life fleeting??) In Point Omega, narrator Jim Finley spills out his own story more in small doses. Both stories have almost ghostly or mystery ones- Mr Tuttle may not be real in The Body Artist, and Jessica is an enigma mostly described by other people. Both stories weave narratives that bob and weave a plot line, and are only somewhat wrapped together in the last chapter. And its never a neat package. Both stories involve people invested in older media forms- the tape recorder of The Body Artist and film in Point Omega There's probably more I could pick out; these are stories that do not end neatly. They leave you trying to weave through it and find the layers of meaning. I am sure people may hate them because it's not the neat Freytag pyramid of story shape. ICanHasAirlineTickets posted 29 Sep '07, 2.38pm MDT PST on flickr If you have not caught the I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER craze, you are about 1 meme behind. It is a subset of the broader genre of LOL CATS. I created my oen with the ICanHazCheezBurger Factory, a site where you can browse a vast set of uploaded cat images, and then annotate them, to create your own. Mine has its own URL. It helped me since I have a severe deficit of cat photos. Yes, like many things on the net it is surficially, well silly. Maybe stupid. And easy for people to snub noses at. But dig past the content, and what yuo have is (a) a user generated collection of media about a topic; (b) a web 2.0 tool for remixing the images with text to create new content; (c) a network of tools for voting, sharing, etc. So swap out cat content with something, say, more academic. This is the way I am suggesting we need to be in terms of "being there" with technology, looking past the way web tools are used for silly things, and looking at the affordances they offer. This is Blog By Flickr Day! What I am getting at, this is a vehicle to do versions perhaps of the kind of Interesting Snippets blogged before at http://cogdogblog.com/2007/07/02/a-cheap-lynnetter-knockoff/ and in fact, the new version of Picnick makes this a snap (must reblog what I sent elsewhere) Now That is Technical Detail! by cogdogblog posted 16 Dec '08, 7.08pm MST PST on flickr There was a slight leak in the computing cloud when I was just checking my email. I figured it would close quickly (and it did), but I was curious at the link provided offering technical details. Ah- that makes so much sense- "Numeric Code 5" - thanks for all the detail! Overwhelming! I love goofy screens. Almost as much as weird user interfaces in hotel showers. Or maybe I should find another book to read. You just cannot sit back too long in confidence with blog comment spam roaches. They multiply, mutate, miniaturize, and just keep pecking at the castle door. If you have a WordPress blog that has hummed along nicely using Dr. Dave's Spam Karma 2, you may have noticed a spate of roaches has been lining up your door and getting in. For more, see the details in The State of Spam [Karma]. It seems like the roaches have gotten smarter. They have an unfair advantage (besides being repulsive and crunchy) in that the code that SK2 protects us from is right out there in plan view. So now, they have evolved from script kiddies throwing piles of links with forged addresses, to single link incursion attempts that mangle some text from a blog post title to confuse you. And it is confusing. Side note- did anyone notice the rise in acne prevention spam? Does that tell you anything about the involved audience? Anyhow, Dr. Dave is hard at work, and he is, after all, an "Evil Genius" (but a good kind of evil), and is down in the lab cooking up a new scheme. And yes, he does have his PayPal tip jar open. It's rare that I dip in, but I will for things I get a lot of value of, so my contribution has already gone in the coffers. And this is my own moolah, not my employers. Since a fair amount of spam I see come from old posts with higher google points (duh, can anyone recognize the Giant Colossal Being That is Doing Nothing But Offering Spammers Incentive? "nofollow"? what a joke), I've taken the steps to close comments from posts more than 30 days old. Remember, spammers never sleep. They are below those that would steal candy from a baby or steal the change from a blind mans' tin cup. They have no redeeming value, humanity, or reason to live. They are a waste of human flesh. Let's call to arms a vigilante strike force! I'm just getting my feet wet with customizing MediaWiki for several NMC projects- sure it is easy to set up and install out of the box, dump the flower logo for your own, but there is sure a lot of stuff under the hood. There are a lot of flexible editing codes if you can dive into them. While Tim notes some new WikiPedia RSS feeds, and there are RSS out form Mediawiki powered sites to update on changes, I found nothing to render RSS content inside Mediawiki, which I have seen on some other wiki sites. So it was off to scrounge, and I found an extension hot off the press called GISWiki/RSS-- te nice thing for me is that it is based on the good old MagpieRSS parser, something I have played with quite a bit. So I dropped the script into my Mediawiki extensions folder, created a test page. Ugh- it renders all the content as standard HTML, using tags Media wiki ignore. I assume the example site perhaps has some HTML extensions that allows <a href...> tags, but I did not want to go down that route. So I rolled up my sleeves, and just edited the output to use Mediawiki type codes. It was only about 6 changes, but I have now incorporated it as a side bar on our NMC Campus Guide wiki, using feed content from the NMC Campus Observer. There are some good options in the code- I want to explore further the ones that provide a keyword filter (assume it could filter the output to include items matching the keywords), and the option to highlight specific keywords in the output. Another example test page, using the New York Times technology News feed, this an output with item descriptions, and entering my own string for the feed title: But so far, I like what it does, and is going to be a key loose joining in some new small piece action. Oh, I posted a copy of my version of this at http://cogdogblog.com/code/rss.php.txt - just remove the ".txt", and modify the one path variable for your location of magpie (I will later post my change to the Mediawiki site where I found it). Feed on, inside yer wiki! Browsing sites registering as users of Feed2JS I discovered this morning that there is now a feed to provide updates on the Cocktail of the Week. Who would know there was such a thing? Apparently David Berghouse has been publishing this site from Australia since 1995, quite a nice stretch! Good on ya! FYI, the recipe this week is for... a "4th of July" 20 ml Bourbon, 20 ml Galliano, 20 ml Kahlua.... well go see the rest. One day, future educational technologist yearlings will gaze up in earnest to their parental units, and say, "Mommy, Daddy, will you tell me the origin of SPLOT story again?" Imagination at work. It's been beyond rewarding to see the results of an idea I likely initially laughed at over a beer in Kamloops spread and be used by a slowly growing number of people, notably recently put into use at Coventry University, a wikipedia orientation activity, and new to Domain of One's Own people at Colgate University. Yup, it's dem SPLOTs [caption id="attachment_53701" align="aligncenter" width="900"] Modified from flickr photo by Tom Simpson https://flickr.com/photos/randar/18499512788 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license[/caption] All of the SPLOTs are available at my GitHub corral; in my ReadMe's I encourage people to fork and edit to add their examples... and it has happened maybe once in 3 years. So I add them when I see them, sometimes I will search for my taglines that are in the template footers https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/915229204559536128 It's been picking up a bit. Mostly, it's my own use. I dogfood my splots and ds106 stuff on just about every project I do. But SPLOTs for libraries? Yup, Scott Leslie is blogging, and not only that, blogging about brainstorming library-oriented SPLOTs. (That works with the "L" as he first communicated in a DM). I draw much pleasure that people take an interest in SPLOTs while they still have no firm definition. I hope they can resist one. All SPLOT-like things are good. I really dig the Knight Lab Tools for what they provide as a single purpose tool, though I think what it takes to put into your own work, short of Wordpress plugins, present a barrier. I also love the platform independent approach of H5P and plan to explore them more after doing some intro workshops last month. They are definitely small tools, to be they are more widgets, but at least they extend what you can do in a platform. I would say that SPLOTS need not be the Wordpress based approach I did for the first batch, though I've not done any new ones any other way. I'd say what makes the ones I worked on a little different from any small tool is that (a) no technical skill is required to set up beyond Wordpress installation, theme set up (which can easily done for others in a multisite environment or the cloning approach being done at Coventry). But more so, they also are multi-person tools, they potentially create sites where all content created is public and shared (SPLOTpoint might be an exception). But Scott wrote of a hole in the SPLOT-iverse: How that idea/approach came to be is surely a long story. I can’t find the single origin story from any of these folks, if indeed there is a single one, but my own take would be that it’s a combination and culmination of open web/small-pieces-loosely-joined/”learning as creating” thinking they’ve been doing for years, combined with long-time frustrations with the monolith that is the enterprise LMS (and its overly complex integration approach), the privacy nightmare that is the web and finally with some inspiration from other sectors who are also promoting simple to use web-based content creation tools. Scott's take is accurate in terms of the cast involved, and yes the story is out there in fragments. I posted most of this as a reply to his post (because good bloggers deserve comments), but want to post here as my own record. This of course is my origin story; Brian Lamb was there for it all, and may have details to fill in, or total objections to my version. Here is my take on the SPLOT origin story. They were hatched during and Open learning Fellowship at Thompson Rivers University from mid October 2014 to mid March 2015, all work done there has been portfolio-ized at http://cogdog.trubox.ca SPLOTs are mentioned first October 28, 2014 in What The SPLOT? Because of challenges with FIPPA legislation (dealing with Canada institutions and their limitations of using web services based in the US that might transmit student information), the goal was to create simple learning applications that do not require any creation of accounts. As a place to develop these, we registered the splot.ca domain and set up a WordPress multisite as a development and testing environment. The conversation definitely was over beers at the Fox'n Hounds in Kamloops. My flickr photos indicate that I arrived in Kamloops the afternoon of Friday October 23, that weekend was sad in retrospect my last visit to Brian's house on the lake. It's likely the SPLOT conversation happened the night before that blog post, October 27 when Brian and I started talking about the work I might do for the fellowship at TRU. Or maybe it was the 28th- here is Brian's Tweet from 3:18pm in the afternoon. Maybe I wrote my blog post at the Fox and Hound, we really did work there. https://twitter.com/brlamb/status/527223001482133504 One part of the fellowship was running with Brian a "ds106 for faculty PD" which became The You Show, another part was setting up a domain and a Wordpress Multisite to host blogs for first staff at Open Learning, and later for faculty projects, what is now the powerhouse known as trubox.ca. And the other part of the fellowship, over in the Department of Vague Ideas was the concept and Brian definitely spoke the name SPLOT that night, prefaced by "I know you will hate this but..." We've told the story before, such as the our Open Web presentation (an ill-fated one in which my idea to playout us staging disagreements in twitter before hand had everyone taking them literally). I will add that the image of the beer glass as actually taken two nights after the SPLOT discussion (I know this Because I Chronicle Stuff in Photo Captions) [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Behold The Imperialist Pig flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] That photo was at the Noble Pig in Kamloops, but is close enoug for horse shoes and metaphors. Early on we identified two core challenges in getting people to get onto the open web. The perceived difficulty (and lack of support) of open web environments, and privacy concerns. The premise than was ease of entry/simplicity of tool (which I like saying now as small single purpose tools). There was also the common issue of putting a great tool like Wordpress in front of people, and watch their eyes glaze over trying to explain the dashboard and differences between posts and pages. This factored in later on the development of the TRU Writer from Brian's experience supporting English faculty Ken Simpson who had several assignments a semester for students to submit essays, and it was always a drain to create accounts and explain the Wordpress innards, when all the students needed to do is to compose and submit an essay. The other desire behind SPLOTs was tools that did not explicitly require supplying user information, a response largely to the limits of strict adherence to FIPPA regulations (variable interpreted in Canada as the limits to which educators can ask students to create accounts on web services based in the USA, yeah our so called "Patriot Act"). It may not have been explicit at the time, but considering how much our price for using free web services is the wholesale back of the network exchange of our information, it became an ongoing question when looking at these sites, how necessary it really was to have to create accounts to do something simple. We spoke that night of Tom Woodward's brilliant projects using Gravity forms as a front end for people to create/contribute content to Wordpress sites w/o needing to go through the dashboard. [caption id="attachment_65434" align="aligncenter" width="760"] One of about half a billion of Tom Woodward's useful projects[/caption] That might have been as far as the conversation went, besides deciding to register the splot.ca domain (run then under Brian's Reclaim Hosting account). Brian was soon on his way to Australia for a conference, leaving me time to tinker. That was the beauty of the TRU fellowship, it was more like a sabbatical as I had full time just to experiment, not to do other people's projects or web sites. I was given a TRU office I almost never used, I did most of the development in the student center coffee shop, Common Grounds, looking out across the mountains on the other side of town. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Common Grounds Dark Roast flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] The first SPLOT was inspired again some by Tom, as well as one of the Knight Lab Tools, the image comparison tool- I first built it in HTML jQuery just to figure it out. My prototype is still hanging in my domain http://lab.cogdogblog.com/comparator/ [caption id="attachment_65435" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The prototype for the Comparator[/caption] Of course, just mention HTML or jQuery and most humans will run away. That's not the end solution. I had in mind that Wordpress had everything needed to make this easier, as it manages image uploads- all you need are two images of the same dimensions, saing different sets. The stumbling block was that unless you did simple form upload, there was no way for a non-logged in user to access the Wordpress media uploader, which provides the auto image resizing needed to make it work well And this was the breakthrough, figuring out how to secretly log in a visitor as a generic author, hiding the admin bar and the dashboard, just to provide front end access to the media uploader, blogged on November 18, 2014. This was the basic feature of several future SPLOTs. The Comparator is still out there, and mostly works, but it has been the least attended to. I made use of a simple Wordpress Bootstrap theme as the parent one for this project (as I first did for the DS106 Assignment Bank) The next one could arguably be questioned as a SPLOT but since I had the keys to the web site and I built it, the Daily Blank went up December 1, 2014 as a new SPLOT. I had long wanted to convert the original DS106 Daily Create to a format that could be used by others, but also, could use twitter as the submission channel, rather than specific media servers for the original. I also knew I wanted to use it for the You Show (which we did for the You Show Daily). I must have been in a great development groove, because this one involved doing a Wordpress theme with a built in twitter authentication, timed scripts to query the Twitter API for tweeted replies to a certain account, and a lot of other tricks. The TRU version was the trail one, it was not until September 2015 I rolled it over into ds106, and have put it into play for many of my projects since then. By December 5, 2014, I had a bloggable version of maybe the most versatile SPLOT, the TRU Writer: So far on my fellowship here at TRU I have partially developed three Smallest Possible Learning Online Tools (again give all credit/blame for the acronym to Señor Borregoruido). I am not quite convinced they will evolve into anything usable, but hey, that’s what experimentation is about. A main principle we are trying to is give faculty, students ways of publishing content online that is not dependent on creating accounts or releasing your info to anyone. ... The TRU Writer is a new partly finished one, this is about off and on 4 days effort. The idea is to create a tool where people can quickly compose (or paste in) content for an article, essay, poem, and have it published in an elegant format. I was really excited to discover the free, beautiful Radcliffe Theme in the WordPress collection, giving us a media rich front page We had existing needs for this right away at TRU, for a few english classes, and one our favorite examples, Katie Sykes's Lawyering in the 21st Century course which Brian brought on after I had left. What is cool about this the way Katie built course materials and an archive around the writing tool. I did a prototype for the TRU Writer as an alternative to a cumbersome journal publishing platform (but sadly not picked up on) and as a means to publish an undergraduate student research journal (used some). I made use of it myself for the UDG Agora Project - more than 200 SPanish speaking faculty published their project reports in Comparte. Perhaps the second most useful SPLOT is the TRU Collector; as blogged January 15, 2015 this came from a specific need and request from TRU Open Learning Staff: The idea came from TRU Instructional Designers Kelly Warnock and Melissa Melissa Jakubec who will be doing a workshop next Friday on finding openly licensed images (and we will have a version of this Tuesday for the You Show). What they described was wanting an online image gallery where participants could share the images they found. Sounds like a SPLOT. Their idea. Again, the idea is a way people can build a shared pool of images, organized by maybe categories and tags, with some extra data for license and source info, but that would not require any accounts or selling of one’s data tracks to [fill in the name of your not favorite data overlord]. The last SPLOT built at TRU, blogged on February 4, 2015 was the Sound Pool, which was like the Image Collector, except for Audio. " In prep for Tuesday’s You Show workshop session on audio I worked feverishly about 4 hours Monday night and 3 hours Tuesday morning to create the newest SPLOT tool, the Sound Pool. This is a place to share audio clips, tracks, either MP3 audio either found on the web (via a URL) or uploaded to the pool. Last night I decided to add support for SoundCLoud tracks. It’s a direct followup from the Image Pool with a few new enhancements. There's been a few more splot added since, and all of the ones listed have been fairly regularly updated (except the first one, the Comparator) as I end up using them for my own projects, or sometimes someone requests a feature. SPLOTpoint is the newest, and I have been making heavy use of a theme hack Brian and I used for a few presentations. That was not even a full year of the SPLOT, it was like one third. I'd certainly like to do more SPLOTs. It seemed easier to do in that environment at TRU where I both could pour a lot of time into R&D and also pick up ideas by being proximate to others with ideas. So there's the SPLOT Origin Story, or at least Alan's Take. What is a SPLOT? Let's make no fixed definitions. But lesson learned. If Brian Lamb brings you an idea over beers with a silly acronym, laugh off the acronym and latch on to the idea. Featured Image: Original SPLOT logo deigned by me superimosed on Pixabay image by geralt shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 My day job is in the world of Open Education and in those circles there is talk of "all the opens" - open source software, open data, open science, open access publishing, etc etc etc. All good stuff. But in the first one on the list, and where much of this started, the usual frame of open source are the tech geeks working together on software. In one of those series of unlikely events, I was digging into the world of open source by ordinary folks, people who put it to use for their work, learn largely on their own how to build technologies that do real world stuff for them, and free them of the binds of commercial or pre-packaged systems. And it all started with goats. Note: This was pretty much drafted as a discussion post in the OEG Connect community space I run for OEGlobal. While its Yet Another Blog Post To Be Done about "building online communities" it feel like I am 90% of the noise there, it almost becomes another blog-like space. Shrug. At OEGlobal have been working with Andrés Segura-Castillo on an effort of Systemic Inquiry for our organization. Since 2009 Andrés has accomplished an impressive array of research in education and computational fields at UNED, the state distance university in Costa Rica. For me, a good environment of meetings is one where there is at least, after the work part, a bit of fun or discussion of things outside the agendas. I am fuzzy on how this came up, I think I might have talked about the metaphor of gardening we put to use for this year's Open Education Awards for Excellence and mentioning the home Cori and I live on a rural acreage. Andrés then shared that he and his wife live on a rural property in Costa Rica, where they are deploying sustainable land practices... and also his joy of tending his herd of goats. Goats! Thus in later meetings, there was always time to ask about the latest goat story, we make use of the GOAT acronym, and I even tossed in a version of those British Virgin Media O2 ads with a call to "Be More Goat." Ha ha. As Andrés described yesterday another funny story of his goats escaping an enclosure to eat plantains or coming to their front door to announce they were "out", it reminded me of a message earlier this year from longtime, tech oriented friends in Colorado (USA) who run a ranch that specializes in the breeding and care of a breed of rare black Welsh sheep. Ken and Oogie are folks I met online in the 1990s, ironically via a common interest in multimedia with the use of (drum roll for old technology platforms) Macromedia Director. They did contract work for the military when they lived near San Diego, but sometime later they picked up and found a ranch in Paonia Colorado, what they call Desert Weyr. I've driven up and stayed with them several times and got to see first hand the work it takes to run an sustainable operation like that. They put their analytical minds and Figure Stuff Out approach to their ranch work. Breeding a rare sheep breed involved collecting and analyzing data, and I forget most of the details they shared, but the lambing period was intense. Monitoring their flock's vital signs was instrumental to success. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5873267468 The Scoreboard flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license Plus, there was always farm equipment to fix. Ken, ever the hacker, shared his home designed weather systems and how he stored data published to a web site. In 2014 he even did some mods for my Storybox. Thus I thought of them with that OEG Connect post with a title "Open as in Farmiing". And like my blog style here, I often reach for photos in my posts. Shrug, As usual I reached into my own flickr photo collection, which is so much more fulfilling that getting some cartoonish gack from GenAI. Isn't the world a better metaphor than cartoon slop that looks like all the other slop? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/48740965553 Farming Framed flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) My friends had developed themselves a technology using RFID chips attached to the sheep’s collars that they had made an Android app for reading data and recording vital health data for each sheep, all very important in their breeding program. They showed me a prototype when I visited in 2014, then it was called LambTrakker. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15116722016 Entering Data into LambTracker flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license The idea was out in the pasture with the sheep, Oogie and Ken could record physical data about each sheep (vital signs, other observations) by scanning the ID with an Android device, an enter that data. Later they wouldtransfer it to their home built database system It's funny as a core of those old Macromedia Director nerds still stay in touch via an email list. It was there Oogie recently shared that their original LambTrakker software was now a more generalized and one that is completely open source. The project is called AnimalTrakker The purpose of AnimalTrakker® is to provide software and data analysis tools that aid in the management of livestock. Our mission is to bring animal management solutions to all who work with animals, whether veterinarian, small farmer, or commercial rancher. Our goal is to make it easier for you to provide your animals with a healthy and comfortable life, all while they provide food, fiber, and other products for human use. Currently, AnimalTrakker® can track sheep, goats, cattle, horses, donkeys, and pigs. AnimalTrakker® is free and built from open-source, transparent, easily audited software. We feel that every user should be able to edit and modify the software to suit their specific needs. We believe in a future free from control, overreach, and excessive monetization, and AnimalTrakker® is our commitment to that future. This is very much the spirit of openness, right? Developed by specialists, using existing open source components and then shared back? The software is available on GitLab plus a very comprehensive set of support materials (that leads me to see this is put on the web using the Obsidian notes platform and published with its built in Obsidian Publish, neat discovery on the side). I have to say the opportunity to see the sheep operation was amazing (and Paonia is a beautiful corner of northwest Colorado, a fun town too). Okay I can brag that one of my CC licensed sheep photos appears on the front page of the AnimalTrakker site. And look, it's attributed. How about that? While exploring the AnimalTrakker site I found or just got curious about more examples, and landed on FarmOS: FarmOS is a web-based application for farm management, planning, and record keeping. It is developed by a community of farmers, developers, researchers, and organizations with the aim of providing a standard platform for agricultural data collection and management. The farmOS server is built on top of Drupal, which makes it modular, extensible, and secure. The farmOS Field Kit app provides offline data entry via a progressive web app (PWA) at farmOS.app. Both are licensed under the GNU General Public License, which means they are free and open source. All code is available in the farmOS GitHub organization. There is a I bet a whole raft of open source tools developed by people who work the land. So I am curious to hear of more examples of open source or just open practices in other corners outside our usual aim towards education, beyond the open source developer specialists. I know there are many in the health sector. And this was the question I posted in OEG Connect. I am eagerly waiting for someone to chime in with a contribution. Well, I waited about 3 hours, and added one myself. See, alot of my community activity is me talking to me, sometimes through different accounts. It was while writing about the farming/rancher use of open source, I remembered an example more close to home. Diabetes. I have been living with Type 1 diabetes since I was 7, and I remember some 10 years ago reading about a diabetic who had hacked together their own technology as an “artificial pancreas” combining an insulin pump connected to devices the measure blood sugar levels. With some digging I found that this was a diabetic named Dana Lewis, who shared a photo of her system on some platform that rhymes with "bitter" (screen shot only). I recognize the Medtronic Mini Med insulin pump (first one I had) with a Raspberry Pi being at the heart. Screenshot Dana published this as an open book (using gitbooks) Automated Insulin Delivery -- How artificial pancreas “closed loop” systems can aid you in living with diabetes, which is available at https://www.artificialpancreasbook.com/ Automated insulin delivery is a technology for managing type 1 diabetes that goes by many names: hybrid or full closed loop, artificial pancreas system (APS), “looping”, and more. But whatever you call them, automated insulin delivery systems are not all the same. You have choices, ranging from the type of insulin pump body and CGM you want to use, to the algorithm and controller, to the interoperability and remote monitoring options, and more. Like switching from multiple daily injections to an insulin pump, switching from manual diabetes to automated insulin delivery has a learning curve. It’s certainly one you can tackle. After all, you’re already tackling type 1 diabetes! You already have the base knowledge and experience you need to succeed with a closed loop system, if it’s right for you. But you might be wondering how to get ahead of your learning curve before you start or even choose an APS. Or maybe you’ve started and want to dig even deeper into optimizing how an automated insulin delivery system fits into your lifestyle. This book was written for you! It leverages the collective knowledge of the early adopters of do-it-yourself and commercial systems from the past five years and packages it into easy, understandable guides and lessons learned. https://www.artificialpancreasbook.com/ The book is available on Amazon -- "a physical, printed book that’s available through self-publishing. It’s priced so that every 2 copies purchased will fund an author-priced copy that I will donate to hospitals." Woah. But it is also available freely as a downloadable PDF or just the GitBook version as a web site-- so you can review portions of the content anytime, and see any changes over time. There will also be additional links and videos with more content. The website and its content are open source, so if you see any typos or have suggestions, you can make those suggestions or edits directly! Now who has a real sense of "open"? The story was that major companies that profit from the money made in diabetes care systems kept pressure on not to allow more devices to come on the market or want to control the prices (that’s just my memory" but organize under the hashtag #WeAreNotWaiting as in “We are not waiting for government or commercial entities to create the health care we need.” See for example (there are many) #Wearenotwaiting - the parents who hacked diabetes https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/wearenotwaiting-the-parents-who-hacked There is the Nightscout Foundation that supports and organizes efforts by people building their a suite of open source medical devices for diabetes care. NightScout is just one: Nightscout (also known as CGM in the Cloud) is an open-source cloud application used by people with diabetes and parents of kids with diabetes to visualize, store and share the data from their Continuous Glucose Monitoring sensors in real-time. Once setup, Nightscout acts as a central repository of blood glucose and insulin dosing/treatment data for a single person, allowing you to view the CGM graph and treatment data anywhere using just a web browser connected to the internet. There are several parts to this system. You need somewhere online to store, process and visualize this data (a Nightscout Site), something to upload CGM data to your Nightscout (an Uploader), and then optionally you can use other devices to access or view this data (one - or more - Follower). Also related is The Open Artificial Pancreas System project (#OpenAPS) which was founded The Open Artificial Pancreas System project (#OpenAPS) is an open and transparent effort to make safe and effective basic Artificial Pancreas System (APS) technology widely available to more quickly improve and save as many lives as possible and reduce the burden of Type 1 diabetes. OpenAPS means basic overnight closed loop APS technology is more widely available to anyone with compatible medical devices who is willing to build their own system. We believe that we can make safe and effective APS technology available more quickly, to more people, rather than just waiting for current APS efforts to complete clinical trials and be FDA-approved and commercialized through traditional processes. And in the process, we believe we can engage the untapped potential of dozens or possibly hundreds of patient innovators and independent researchers and also make APS technology available to hundreds or thousands of people willing to participate as subjects in clinical trials. These are all efforts using the ideas of open source / open access / open data but also are able to organize and coordinate efforts via the open internet. So from goats to sheep to insulin pumps, a thread of open source that is done by people, born of interest, ideation, and the drive to make the world better. Just standing in a field of grass, saying, "Hey!" Featured Image: Hey! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license - one of the black welsh sheep bred at Desert Weyr, Colorado. [caption id="attachment_19022" align="aligncenter" width="474"] in which I animate my high brow formative cultural influences...[/caption] My class of ds106 UMW students are off and running. If anyone sees them, tell them to keep going. The semester start pulls at both ends for me. It's exciting to bring a new group of (now 26) into the fold; at the same time it is daunting to realize that they are starting from scratch, that its going to take a range of time for them to get to the part of really writing and creating they ways we hope they do. This week, that time span was for some... one day. To say this is an amazing group is an understatement. It's not all of them, a few are still grappling with setting up domains, social media accounts, and probably wondering what they have gotten themselves into. I can say a year ago, when I introduced class to my students, there was some awareness of twitter, but for nearly all, it was braind new. I see my new group with profiles of hundred, thousands of tweets (not all but I see more experience represented across the board). Many know blogging because they are experience with great UMW teachers like Zach Walen and Mara Scanlon. Some have told me of having 10 years of internet experience. Let me share what is keeping me happy on the ds106 treadmill this week... In the first episode of the new ds106 weekly show, which students are not required to attend, four new students showed up already. Just to see what was going on. New student Nancy (http://bellekid.com/ she has already figured out creating a landing blog for her domain and making subdomains for her other pieces) asked why we were not doing anything in reddit. She is leading the way, and we have resurrected a ds106 subreddit that has created 2 years ago by a redditor named fracking-awesome. Former student Daniel Zimmerman is helping trick out that space. Let me repeat that. A student from a previous semester is, on his own, as a volunteer, contributing to ds106. Does your Coursera MOOC do that? I'm a reddit n00b. I don;t know what we will do there. Nancy sees it as a place to have richer conversations around content then twitter, maybe to have students share works in progress and get feedback. I don't see reddit as a place where you go in with a strategic plan, you let it evolve. Stay tuned to http://www.reddit.com/r/ds106 or help us figure out what to do there. Amber enrolled via an override (usually add 2 students during the first week because I know at least 4 or 5 will drop). I peek at her twitter profile where it says "Im pretty good at voice acting.....yuup..." and a link to her YouYube channel . She has hundreds of thousands of views there (I swore the first time I went there it said over a million), but she has some serious YouTube / video talent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDJsVtUuxXg She is already off an rocking with setting up her landing page domain http://missambermay.com/, her ds106 blog, and also, on her own, connecting a blog her UMW English 202 class. Woah. She already is writing in her ds106 class blog about things that are not ds106 assignments- check out You Might Want to Keep Your Receipt: Discovering Personal Information Online. I have helping out too in class, again on her own interest, Haley, an exceptional student from last semester, who is doing her own project on ds106 Independent Study Proposal: Edtech Boogaloo: So if you're interested in what the Big Scary Research Project is (more or less) going to be about, read on! The short version is that I'm going to be picking apart what makes ds106 such a unique educational experience, connect and juxtapose it to larger trends within edtech and online education, and from there wax poetic (or wax critical, I guess?) on where I see edtech/online ed heading as the field continues to evolve. I'll be framing my critique and discussion from the perspective of a student participant, and using the University of Mary Washington's edtech initiatives as a starting point. Stay tuned to Haley- she is going to be a future edtech heroine. Actually she is already, she just does not know it. There's more. Jennifer already comes with a craft a day filled lovely blog. Last night she tweets about "her first video"? I was not sure if she meant first video ever or her first stop animation video: https://twitter.com/Dayeseye/status/292051682270003200 My jaw is still n the floor at the beauty of her video. Let me remind you- this student is creating stuff that is not even assigned. Then there is Leah, who I met last year when she was a student in Martha's Identoty class. She has been exploring about creating a new blog space / portfolio separate from her 10+ years of stuff she has been doing in YouTube and other places. She is cognizant and thinking about shaping her online digital space. Brooke is doing Daily Creates that are not even assigned, trying new tools https://twitter.com/bparker5/status/292145190574120960 Then I saw this student's first reshaping the basic out of the box wordpress blog. Her unique interpretation of the Daily Create to fabricate a story about an ordinary object? She takes it to a new place via a time-lapse drawing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=NycQ9ntE-Og She writes: It has been an overwhelming week for a social media neophyte booting up. Never before have I had such an internet presence, learning about so many new tools and their use so quickly. As a consequence, I turned to my strengths in making my first Daily Create. I used Quicktime to record my screen activity whilst drawing a cherished, ordinary, functional object; then used iMovie to accelerate the recording. And then it dawned on me that I knew her, she has some amazing 3D printing chops. More woah, Neo, more Woah. Watch Kristen really take up that challenge of making up a story, with the tale of a sacred, treasured laundry detergent bottle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2BYFXpxsDs And this just the beginning. Meet the new students (and some others from the great beyond) via the Daily Create video from this week This is going to be a wild ride, and I am locking in on it. You can too. Get involved with ds10t as an open participant. Do Daily Creates. Give feedback to my new students on their blogs. Do you have a ds106-ish class that you want to become part of our community? We have two on board already, and I am about to link in the York College ones via Michael Branson Smith. It's crazy, but if Jane stops this crazy thing, I'm, gonna bite someone. Oi, somehow I never published this post, my own answer to my own challenge. I just found it in my unpublished drafts drawer. Bad Dog. The first rule of issuing challenges is be prepared to remix your own dog food. Thus I find myself tonight working at doing my own creation for the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge. You can see the whole series of related posts at http://cogdogblog.com/tag/7daychallengetdc Okay, this is not easy. I scanned the 174 entries that came in (actually there are more now than when I summarized), and downloaded enough media I could use (I had to skip a few flickr photos that were not creative common licensed and some audio that were not set in SoundCloud to be downloaded). A theme somewhat emerged, like something bad that might happen if a flame was turned on somewhere in the world, that triggered a few catastrophic events... Here ya go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahYheTP-0z4 This was assembled in about an hour's worth of iMovie fiddling. I do a lot of splitting of clips, separating the audio tracks, and using multiple audio layers. I found there are audio effects you can apply to a video clip (that was new to me) I ended up using three things by our long time ds106 Australia comrade, Rowan Peter- his two audio files and one flickr photo just jelled for me. Dr Coop's blue flame was the trigger, Melanie's video for best technology with the flushing toilet got me started thinking about the world swirling down the drain, which leads to tornado swirls. Mayln's boiling water was a nice build up to the triggering event (whatever that flame hit). Rowan's recording of a Japanse telemarketing call seemed to be good backdrop for the mechanical parts of the world that might go into an infinite loop. Norm's static video of for ds106 (along with his audio "just found a TV") sounded like a post apocalyptic effort to communicate. Rowan's sounds of breathing made for the closing gasp[s over his own eerie desolate photo (natural scene lacking human artifacts) Here are the media pieces I used: (more…) This same thing happened a year ago. In some fluke of nature because, as a state with leading indicators of worse budget deficit, lowest numbers of high school graduation rates, Arizona is somehow ahead of the curve in terms of not following the confusion of shifting clocks for daylight savings. Yes, all of the wheat farmers here have to deal with the vagaries of the natural changes of sunrise/sunset. Our clocks stay the same year round. For electronic devices, the code logic necessary to deal with setting the time must be simple. function ArizonaDSTTimeAdjust() { # code for adjusting daylight savings time zones in Arizona. #ummm. we don't need any code. bye } My computers use network timeserver to set the correct time; both my Mac and PC are correct. My atomic wall clock is correct. My wrist watch is correct. Yet, my iPhone is not. With settings in Automatic mode, my iPhone reports the time here an hour later than what it is. I can't really explain. Last year, it eventually caught up, a few days? weeks? later. I cannot remember. Does anyone know what time it is? Because the movie about dentists was such a gag fest, I am tweaking my post title to lob some rocks at Apple. But before that, my long disclaimer. I love Apple products. I am one who's "stone cold death grip" would be clamped on a PowerBook. I've done programming, multimedia, CD-ROMs, internet-ing all in the Mac OS for almost 20 years. I run all of my web server apps on a humble Powerbook. Back in 1987, I was hooked as a Geology grad student put in charge of a lab of new Mac Plus-es. I loved those little guys, even swapping floppies in and out, System 6, Word 3.0, a blazing fast 300 baud modem. Later, for some visualization research, I had primary access to the two color Mac IIs in the open lab- I could boot anyone off if I had some research to do. Then I moved up with some more research projects using a Mac IIci, with that fast 68030 chip. Dropping the grad school game and coming to work for Maricopa in 1992, my lineage included a high end Quadra, then an PowerMac 8500, then a G3 Pismo laptop, and two more later G4 TiBooks. The first web server in Maricopa was a Mac SE/30 I plugged in the net in 1993 running MacHTTP. My home machines have been a Mac Classic, a Performa, an early G3 tower, and an iBook. And now, for my new gig at NMC, I am blessed with a MacBookPro (blessed so far, though it has not been stressed). When my hand slips and slices across a keyboard, the blood is rainbow colored. I bleed those colors. But as much as I love the Mac environment, I've never been all that enamored with the Apple 'mystique'. No pilgrimages to MacWorld, no immersion in MacRumor forums, no turning old macs into gumball machines or aqauriums, no secret posters of "Steve" on the back of my door nor are there black turtlenecks in the closet. I have to say, though, after getting a bit of a whiff of the hype over Apple's iTunes U, trying almost in vain to summon collaboration and interest at Maricopa, and barking about it in this blog, I am completely lost on how their strategy of keeping the product a secret has a snowball's chance on a Spring day on Phoenix asphalt. Our local iTunesU rep is out of contact with the software engineers and as much in waiting to hear what iTunes will do as we are. We never got a response to the invited "application" submitted more than 4 weeks ago. All we heard is, "all will be revealed May 15". And the only information left to share is the PR plaff that has not changed since it was hoisted in January. What can I tell our faculty? "Education beyond the classroom"? How about our technical folks? "Easy as pi"? This might be a successful strategy for unveiling a new iPod or some sexy hardware, but in terms of a service to education, I cannot say enough wretched things about "The Secret Lives of Apple Products" approach of keeping educators in the dark. If that is the plan, then they should not have stirred up the hype machine with a veil of cliche phrases. And to be honest, at this point, I don't even care. Maybe iTunesU will be an uber cool technology, and will revolutionize education, and be a floor wax too. Frankly I feel like we are made to be fools stuck beyond the velvet ropes. So the flick "The Secret Lives of Apple Products" may never leave the shelves at Blockbuster. I'd almost rather be forced to watch an endless loop of "Broken Flowers". [caption id="attachment_17312" align="alignnone" width="500"] Animated GIF of Stave Hargadon during podcast recording with Audrey Watters[/caption] Last week Todd Conaway tweeted me (I enjoy how that has become my grammar) that he was going to attend a session in Phoenix that Steve Hargadon was running on his Hack Your Education tour. It was well worth going for both the chance to meet Steve in person, and have some great conversation time with Todd. We met up in Camp Verde, somewhat midway between my place in Strawberry and where Todd lives in Cornville (our towns alone are part of the oofy place names in this odd state Carefree! Why? Nothing. ). The drive time talking to Todd on the road there and back was worth it. It was a small but interesting group of people who showed up at a rather shining gleaming building, part of the University if Phoenix empire in Tempe a mmix of Phoenix K-12 educators and consultants, notably the bubbly Peggy George (first time meeting in person). cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog The first hour was listening in as Steve recorded his weekly podcast with Audrey Watters (whom I got to meet twice in 2013). They have an interersting format, a conversation review of Audrey's ever more valuable Hack Education stories of the week -- as a side note, I can't recommend more supporting the work Audrey does https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/277515664506372096 It was not exactly clear for the audience there if we were invited to pipe in. In later conversation, I answered Steve's question that they ought to consider doing their "show" live on ds106 radio The real "meat" of the evening was Steve's Conversations on Learning We start by having you identify the most significant learning experiences from your own life, then use those build a set of lessons for learning: those elements and conditions that are really needed for learning to occur. We then discuss the skills you believe will make a difference for students to succeed in the 21st Century, and we brainstorm a framework of strategies for developing those skills and achieving long term educational goals for you and/or your children. And this was valuable; I will not forget sharing stories with Len, and hos own "learning about pyrotechnics" as a kid that is one I will hang on to. The evening reinforced a conversation Todd and I had about the value of these small face to face gatherings, like the CyberSalon group that started in Phoenix and Todd has been replicating in the Verde Valley. It was also so worth it to meet and talk with Steve (and yeah, that organization we talked about?a fork as has been stuck in them). Much to be said again, for the power of conversations about online stuff that we sit down and do person to person. Not everything needs to be tweety. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Functional Simple Web Design by cogdogblog posted 27 Nov '08, 11.00pm MST PST on flickr No frills, but in zero clicks, goingtorain.com/ gives you your local weather forecast (detects location via IP address). Maybe it is the start of some new minimalistic zen of web design... Linktribution to Mashable.com It won't put much of a dent in the problematic aspects of the internet, but at least a reminder that it can still be that Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. Often without much thinking, in our web doings, we click the + button or more likely, command-T to open a new tab to do something. You are greeted then with this bit of zen or nihilism, depending on the mood of the day: This really makes you pause and think? reflect? Are any neurons clicking here? I don't see this anymore since installing the Library of Congress Free to Use Extension (looks like Chrome only, someone should make a Firefox version, eh?) Every new browser window loads a random image from the Library of Congress's Free to Use collection. Rolling over the the bottom "i" button explains it better than I can: The Library of Congress Free to Use extension provides a way to explore historic images from digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The images displayed are either in the public domain, have no known copyright, or have been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. This is just a small sample of the Library of Congress digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The digital collections comprise millions of items including books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more. Explore away! First reaction, way to show women at work! Then the caption makes me wince a bit- "With careful Douglas training, women do accurate electrical assembly and installation work, Douglas Aircraft Company, Long Beach, Calif" like women needed extra special training to do this work. Oh well. It's a great image. You can click the caption to get more info from the LOC https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsac.1a35332 Do this first of you want to learn more - if you use the download button, you lose the screen! And you can use the arrow buttons for more exploring. Now some may see this as a bit of a distraction, that the real task at hand is to do something else. But having a constant reminder of public, open licensed historical images, even if I pay them little attention, just feels good. And it seems more useful than a blank white screen. Even to write this post, I opened a new tab, and got this image of the mysterious Petrova... who ever thought that opening a new browser window could turn into a writing prompt? I love opening browser tabs because they are no longer blank. Featured Image: Screenshot of LOC Free to Use Browser extension displaying image of Petrova (1915) "Photograph shows British American actress Olga Petrova (1884-1977), who was also a screenwriter and playwright. She was born Muriel Harding." no known copyright restrictions image from the Library of Congress. That thing about eating your own dogfood? It's really quite good stuff. Last week I posted some questions for people to answer about the story of their own domains. This was aimed at helping our Ontario Extend project participants answer that Why Should I Bother With My Own Domain question (they may not even have that question). It's fitting that I do what I ask students to do a assignment, a teaching lesson I learned long ago from my mentor and friend, Barbara Ganley. What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name? I honestly have a fleer of them, but the main one cogdogblog.com where this blog sits I registered in 2005. The reason for naming it was spelled out in the first blog post, April 19, 2003. After tossing and turning names related to technology, getting frustrated because They All Sucked, the idea came to me while bicycle commuting. The things I enjoyed were Bicycling (the cog), dogs (the dog), and this new blog, so it just popped into me head. Since then the name got shortened to be my online handle @cogdog. What is left out of the why behind the name, is the impetus. I had a "home page" of raw, now ugly 1990s HTML but was inspired by colleagues like Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman, to hoist a blog platform. I ran it on a server in my office at the Maricopa Community Colleges (in the days where I could plug a computer into the ethernet port, and run it as a server. Hah). My URL from 2003-2006 was a long one http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/. A colleague named Steve Dembo (who has and still is at http://www.teach42.com wrote me an email with a message about the unwieldy length of that URL, and that he was willing to buy me the codogblog.com one and make it redirect to mine. I thanked him and declined, but went and got it myself. A colleague named Audrey Thurman hosted it for me a few years. The timing was fortunate, as a year later that Steve wrote me, I left my position at the Maricopa Community Colleges, and was appreciative I had "claimed" my domain. I did what I urge others not do, I put my blog at the top of my domain. But since then I have picked up a wack sock of others, all with some justification. dommy.com was my first domain purchased when I started doing some consulting outside of my job. It's been pretty dormant since. I kept it for nostalgia sakes. cogdog.info bought to be a portfolio kind of site. cog.dog for total vanity sake, it's my "calling card" site, and thanks to Tim Owens ar Reclaim Hosting for alerting and setting things up for me to get the dream domain when *.dog became availble secretrevolution.us bought for use in two presentations. It was really to make a separate identity for something I though might be bigger (alas) barkingdog.me a photography portfolio site, yes it could have easily been a subdomain, but I like the name feed2js.org a web service for rendering RSS as Javascript, my first big kind of open web thing from maybe 2002-- and the thing still works today. Hmmm. pechaflickr.net my mashup for improv with random photos from flickr done pecha kucha style. cogdog.casa I may forget the real reason for getting this, mainly to have another site for doing some experiments. Got some presentations and splots hanging there, and a new podcast project arganee.world for hosting the Networked Narratives course co taught the last two years with Mia Zamora. I might have a problem of domain hoarding. I also had for a while 30millionlike.me for some political awareness about US Healthcare issues, later archived it to http://bones.cogdogblog.com/30million/. What was your understanding, experience with domains before you got one? Where were you publishing online before having one of your own? I was well aware of domains, having been doing internet and web building since 1992. I had been managing a number of web servers in my work at the Maricopa Community Colleges, and did a heap of HTML building by hand and trying to teach others how to do it since 1993 (see http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/tut). And I started doing some early work on my first domain, dommy.com and some outside consulting. But I had really limited knowledge of managing domains, the early web hosting I had offered nothing like cpanel. Things like DNS set up and configuration still are close to black magic. What was a compelling feature, reason, motivation for you to get and use a domain? When you started what did you think you would put there? The story above tells that, how Steve told me my URL was too long to remember. I was already blogging in MovableType then Wordpress, so really what I did for the first 10 years was just hosting my blog at cogdogblog.com -- I used almost none of the affordances of a domain of my own. What kinds of sites have you set up one your domain since then? How are you using them? Please share URLs! Cogdogblog.com has become a bit of a sprawling dog house with a lot of odd hallways, secret chambers. As much as possible: Blog http://cogdogblog.com blog since 2003, about 2 years as MoveableType, and Wordpress ever since (details at http://cogdogblog.com/bits/) True Stories of Open Sharing http://stories.cogdogblog.com/ Wordpress site for collecting sharing stories of amazing things that happen because of being open, goes back to a 2009 Open Education Conference presentation. Twitter Archive http://tweets.cogdogblog.com redirects to a github site where I use a genius script by Martin Hawksey for generating a dynamic twitter archive of my own tweets. I use it sometimes to search my tweets (see blog post) Resume http://resume.cogdogblog.com at one time I had a Wordpress powered resume theme, now I just redirect this URL to my portfolio site at http://cogdog.info/ Make a MOOC http://mooc.cogdogblog.com a silly fun site created with some PHP/HTML to randomly generate names for made of MOOCs. MCLI Archive http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/ an archive of many sites I built 1993-2006 at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, all of which were later decommissioned, many for good reason, in the old days I had perl scripts writing to openly editable web server text files, a terrible security problem now! Laboratory http://lab.cogdogblog.com There is just a place holder splash screen at this subdomain (it uses jQuery Backstretch to resize the background picture to any screen size). >I use this domain to put a lot of other sites, a mixture of Wordpress and standalone web sites including: Wordpress demo sites: WP Big Picture http://lab.cogdogblog.com/bigpicture/ and WP Highlights http://lab.cogdogblog.com/highlights/. Soundslots http://lab.cogdogblog.com/soundslots/ - HTML and jquery experiment with picking random free sounds from Freesound.org Random Experiments for Mozilla projects- flickr search via JSON http://lab.cogdogblog.com/moz/fjson.html RSS Magic Box - http://lab.cogdogblog.com/magicbox/ tool to find RSS feeds for blogs Interactive Documentaries: Making Stories That Matter http://lab.cogdogblog.com/i-docs/ standa long web site as resource for an invited presentation at Skidmore College Parody Web Site CVI http://lab.cogdogblog.com/cvi/ - used as a fake business site for a DS106 class taught in 2012 (at one time it had its own domain, some are not worth hanging onto DS106 GIF TV http://lab.cogdogblog.com/106giftv/ an experiment in a small HTML site to make it look like GIFs are playing on an old TV set (click the GIF to change the channel) Known http://klown.cogdogblog.com I tried a bit of using the known platform for a different approach (POSSE) to social media. Not used much anymore. Web Bones http://bones.cogdogblog.com/ the start of some examples of web sites I am archiving, ones no longer living elsewhere that I have been responsible for. Five Card Flickr Stories http://5card.cogdogblog.com Almost 10 years old? A web tool I built from scratch using PHP, MySQL, and the flickr API as a visual storytelling tool based on creating a story from 5 random photos pulled from flickr. Over 20,000 have been made there! 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story http://50ways.cogdogblog.com/ Back to 2007 my project in web-based storytelling tools, archived here when the Wikispaces platform folded tent in 2018. There's a lot more there, I found these from looking at my subdomains and some directory scouring on my server. There are many more things lurking in the corners, stuff I have forgotten myself. What helped you or would have helped you more when you started using your domain? What do you still struggle with? It seems silly to just credit the internet for help, but everything I have learned about tech I have learned from the stuff that other people shared. But I had no concept at the start of running multiple sites via subdomains, everything when I began was moving files to a server via ftp- blogging and wiki platforms were the first ones I dabbled with the presented interfaces for creating web-based content systems. If anything I struggle to remember where everything is! What kind of future plans to you have for your domain? I'm trying to refrain from buying any more domains, I have plenty! I do have long running plans to update my own portfolio site, it's way out of date http://cogdog.info as well as creating some kind of collection site for my presentations. I used a Wikispaces site as a catalog, and need to reclaim that for my own. What would you say to other educators about the value, reason why to have a domain of your own? What will it take them to get going with their own domain? I can't think of much more important than having control over where your stuff is published. I see a lot of tendencies for people to go with what is more convenient, in terms of time and ease. We only realize how that falls short when a company like Storify or Wikispaces (or these others) pull the free rug from under our feet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPt9uX9Gf2A Of anything, be ready to know that it takes time and effort to run our own domain, as much as it takes to be responsible for your own home, food preparation, or automobile care. But the satisfaction, knowledge of being in charge? Priceless. Featured Image: File:Whistleblower Interview.jpg Wikimedia Commons image by Wildbill007 shared under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license Just to be clear... My title is misleading- there are elements of the ds106 site we are going to be making available soon in a format for you to open, paint, fill, decorate, install on your own site. I worry more about the "in a box mindset" cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Travis Nep Smith I understand why people are expressing an interest for something like "ds106 in a box" https://twitter.com/rusapt/status/362814405156679680 After all it is definitely the best thing since ___________. Cult status notwithstanding. But for reasons which hopefully gush out below, I'd really like to eradicate that "in a box" expression- it's the kind of mindset in the early web years that got us AOL instead of the open internet, that has educators locked in LMSes rather than open systems, that has "everyone" posting statuses and liking in Facebook rather than their own space, that has higlhy educated people lathering over mass produced machine graded learning video lecture as a learning experience. First of all, we are excited that people are growing interested in using what ds106 has evolved for other subjects. Mike Caulfield framework of a multi-class experience around issues of water ... water106, and Jason Green is trying to get something going for a music class, based on the ds106 approach https://twitter.com/jasongreen/status/362788411700035586 But to be clear the site is not the course. The basic ingredients is a platform where there is some coordinating information, and the use of an RSS feed aggregator to collect, and maybe tag, re-organize content that people publish in their own spaces. : : : The ds106 site itself is a bit of a monster of accretion, and we've pretty much built it in the air as we flew the plane, using our open source Wordpress platform, plugins, but a lot of custom code that is a hard wired jumble. We definitely want to make it available in a form that others can use, and its my goal to have a workable version of the ds106 Assignment Bank as something like a Wordpress theme (with maybe 3 required plugins) that could be readily customized for other kinds of collections. I am working on this August 2013 (a.k.a. now) and it should be unrolling in a viewable version at http://bank.ds106.us (bank does not refer to recent money raising efforts). I will be tagging the progress here as http://cogdgoblog.com/tag/building106 (and have include past related posts on building syndication hub sites) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Chris Mear A key pillar of ds106 is its core aggregation of content from participant's own sites using Feed Wordpress as the engine of the syndication bus. Doing this is something I have been extending out to other uses, an engineering design class in the Netherlands, ETMOOC, last week's Harvard Graduate School of Education Future of Learning Institute, and the currently ongoing Art+Reconciliation MOOC. Others have figured out this architecture, see Martin Hawksey's brilliant work on the octel course site. And Martin Weller's open H817 course. And what From the folks at the University of Denver Portfolio Community: The University of Denver Portfolio Community is a comprehensive electronic portfolio system that supports individual, course, and community portfolios and curriculum assessment. This session will discuss the DUPC's development and lessons learned during its implementation and compare it to other electronic portfolio systems.. Began work in mid 1990s in school of communication. No commercial products then, so they did a home grown system. Note to presenters- Nearly all presentations wade through word slides of background info, etc before getting to a rushed and hurried demo. Always start with the demo, give us a visual. grab our attention.... then wade through the bullet points. (more…) cc licensed flickr photo Day 200/365 "Yawn" by Wellstone This may be in the "pot calling kettle black" category> tag, but I have this long standing growl in my belly about Screencasts. The technology is great, lots of tools, free ones, but when we talk about them it seems to be always about the tools. We rarely talk about the production quality, and I find nearly all of them to be yawn inducing. I can count on one paw (maybe) the number of screencasts I have been able to watch from start to end. Maybe one tail. Maybe. Why are they all delivered in monotonic voice? Why is there little human conversational voice? Where is the inflection? I think what happens a lot is we turn on the camera and just start recording, perhaps with an outline list. Or it is too organized, and we get someone reading (monotonic) us in what ends up to me being the informational equivalent of Mrs. Donovan's voice. And these movies take so damn loooooooong to get to the plot. Way too much set-up, and zero character development Am I too picky? And who am I to criticize? I've not done a Sundance/Cannes level screencast myself. Heck, mine have not even approached public access channel quality. Of course, I am basing this in a rather poor sampling (well just everyone I have bothered to tray and watch). So while we hone the craft in digital story telling, why do we not use some of the same approaches in teaching how to do screencasts? Why do we focus only on the tools and not the craft? And like most movie reviews, this is 10000% subjective and your mileage may vary. But for me... most screencasts are useful when I cannot sleep and need a nap. I ought to be the last person to get wade into the waters of arguing over definitions. By definition I loathe quibbling over definitions. But c'mon, Chronicle of Writing Poorly But Great at Oversensationalizing Headlines About Higher Education, I cannot event tell what topic el Chrono is writing about. [caption width="620" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by f2point8[/caption] Blame it on the weak wifi at the conference hotel? Bad appetizer at the opening reception? After the opening of Open Education 2014 of which I am safely in British Columbia attending virtually via tweets, the Chron declares via headline that Open Education has a Publicity Problem. Before I even get below the digital fold, I frankly do not know what they are writing about. That's a writing problem. From the headline Open Education has a publicity problem. Do they mean "a collective term to describe institutional practices and programmatic initiatives that broaden access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems" (wikipedia)? Maybe not. Try this one on again. Open educational resources, or OER, are public-domain learning materials that instructors and students can use free instead of shelling out for textbooks. Does The Chronicle mean "freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes" (wikipedia)? OERs are not public-domain, works "whose intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable" (wikipedia). And at the end of that slippery sentence, the writer compares OERs to textbooks. Just what the bleep are they writing about? That's a writing problem. They are hanging out with David Wiley, he has some clear ideas on the subject. The blaring problem is the Babson survey report that 66% of faculty (who were part of the survey) are unaware of OERs. I dunno. I think a 33% awareness of a term that has only been in use within the last decade is pretty damned good. Especially since even professional writers on the subject cannot even figure out what they are. Do you want to know who has a publicity problem? Commercial textbook publishers. Show me how many students rave about the value of spending hundreds of dollars for a single textbook. Of course it's not a huge problem for the bookosaurouses; they do have all those funds for PR departments. But the Chronicle? They have a writing problem. And this is not just a quibble; they influence the field, just witness the confusion in the comments open that article. People go from their awareness of OERs to talking about textbooks. OERS are not Open Textbooks are not Open Education. There is a relationship, not an equivalence. Let's help out the Chronicle. Let them know there is a nifty online encyclopedia they can use as a starting point. There are OERs for composition as well as Open Textbooks for teaching composition. Heck there are even MOOCs. This internet can be so recursive on itself. Nada Dabbagh, Professor & Director Division of Learning Technologies at George Mason University (she is the person who invited me to teach a DS106 class for GMU starting now) emailed about an ironic event in one of her classes. She has an assignment where her students are asked to compare a constructivist learning environment and compare it to an objectivist learning environment. Without her prompting, one of the student groups had found and selected on their own, DS106 as the former. I asked if they would share their project and was curious how they discovered DS106; she got this response: I'm fine with sharing it with anyone who is interested. I came across it largely by dumb luck. I had been trying to research MOOC's as a possible option and came across the idea of a Connectivist MOOC. Then I came across a reference to ds106 as a constructivist MOOC on pinterest of all things (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/444026844482264651/), which led me right to their site. Apparently Brenda Boyd, Director of Professional Development & Consulting for Quality Matters Program maintains a pinterest MOOC. And look where DS106 sits, right next to our pal, St Sebastian of the Thruns (not a suggestion that DS106 emerged from his head) You can listen to the student's project as a screencast at http://www.screencast.com/t/u4IzpiWe. I was impressed with how well they were able to encapsulate the characteristics of DS106 just from what they found on the web site. And now form the irony department. Apparently the objectivist course the students looked at, something called Skillport, would not allow the students to use screen captures of their site in the screencast. There's open and then there's _________________________ cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by YlvaS I thought I had come up with a compelling piece in writing Steve Jobs & Neil Young Jam Across Time on Internet as Radio, and i fell rather silently in the blog pile. There you go. But what makes a live radio station, like ds106 radio, different from podcasting? It's just audio on the web right? This was somewhat of a conversation I had today with my every so gracious host here in Vermont, Barbara Ganley. Pen and paper in hand, she came walking into her library a place I was comfortably sitting in doing some work on the laptop, wanting to ask some questions about ds106 radio. She did not flinch (too much) when I asked if we could have the conversation on the radio. It's just the way I have always thought-- to explain a media or technical environment, do what you can to actually use that media. When I wanted to help people understand HTML in 1992 the best way was to create materials and workshops that were ON the web. Tangent. The questions she framed and I wandered off the path on answering were trying to get out the potential for learning, understanding, community-ness in a live audio space versus just uploading recorded audio (which is not a bad thing, just a different thing). Anyhow, without much more ado, here is the recording of our banter. Conversation with Barbara Ganley on/about Live Radio Later she was talking about an upcoming workshop that she was going to be doing on this topic, and was talking about how doing audio interviews was possible, but maybe it would be better to bring some people in live in Skype or Google Hangout. "That would be good, " I started and as the reflex goes, "but why not also broadcast it live on ds106radio!" I can't help it. Ahhh, radio, it is a relationship that sometimes is hard to explain when you have been bitten by the bug. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Evans Archive Show me the exact line between habit and obsession. I might take a photo of it. Since 2008 I have attempted, though not 100% succeeded, at taking photographs every day, posting my favorite to flickr, as one of more than 1700 others in the Daily Photos group there https://www.flickr.com/groups/366photos/. The calendar change means setting up a new flickr album, and reviewing the past year to find ones that fell through the cracks (forgot to add to album, forgot to upload, and definitely some days of no photos). Still, I was 19 short of 365... but that's the mostly empty part of the glass. Here they are, a year in almost daily photos, all assembled into a less than 4 minute video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8COFMOziFk Like I did for 2018 and 2017 this was easily done with a clever command line script by John Johnston that downloads all photos from the album, resizes/crops, and assembles them into a video (ironically the music I chose from the Free Music Archive is by a guy named "Robert John"-- all the Johns helped me). Why do I still do daily photos? Aren't I supposed to move on to new challenges? Get out of some "box"? I can only guess at it, but at the base level, photography -- not the photos-- continues brings me joy to find light, detail, oddities, in the process of cropping out out a tiny portion of the world (I argue that photography in a way is creation by deletion, removing everything except what is in the frame) in a way that makes it interesting (to me), or just to find something that makes the spidey sense tingle. It's one common (among many) that drew Cori and I together. Just today on a walk I noticed that look on her face that I know well, a sense that "there is a photo here worth finding". There were no smartphone cameras for me as a kid or young adult (uh oh, semi-nostalogic old man reflecting warning, phones were bulky plastic objects hung on a wall). I did have some kind of pocket/automatic film camera, but it was far from a regular thing I did. I have maybe 2 photo albums of prints from my analog years (like 14-27). In fact, my love of photography started with a semi-random choice for my last art elective as an undergraduate student. I took a photography class where we learned to do our own darkroom development (in some place in my brain I store the smell of fixer). I borrowed a Pentax from a room-mate (thanks Glenn, wherever you are). One of the first outings I drove back home to Baltimore, went downtown, and looked at the city in a different way than one does in just going about doing other things. This image was from where I pulled off to the side of the highway that runs through the city. The image is not fantastic (my teacher was "meh") but it was meaningful for some reason, maybe one of the first few I worked on in the darkroom. As of 2020, this photo of downtown Baltimore I created, printed from a University of Delaware photography class in 1986 is framed on a wall in our home in Canada. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4216431936 Streets of Bawlamer, Hon flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) One of a few digitized versions of my early film photo stuff stored as a flickr album. If I had taken this elective class earlier in my college education, I might have changed majors. Don't discount the outcomes of taking classes that seem outside your interest zone! As as, my parents performed a wonderful act of love by giving me my own SLR camera as a graduation gift. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4168526206 Pre Digital SLR (~1986) flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) More cameras were to come -- a history up til 2009 is blogged as https://cogdogblog.com/2009/12/i-cameras/. The current ones in play include my Canon 7D and an iPhone 8. But this is the thing. My joy and motivation here are not the cameras or the editing software, not the technology, but the creative process of photography (cue this thought for another blog post). I have no expectation taking on a daily photo challenge can do for you what it does for me. I know from experience teaching media classes, that just having students do these for a short while in a class leads them to see the world around themselves differently. Instead of focusing on tasks or phone swiping, the act of noticing lines, patterns, juxtapositions, color, shadow has them appreciate more their every day surroundings. I know that from 12 years of daily photos; I bet more than 80% are taken in and around my home. There is always something new to see when you look closely. So if its a resolution thing, a desire to take on a creative challenge, join the 13th round of the Daily Photo group in flickr https://www.flickr.com/groups/366photos/ This group was started for in 2008 and will likely be running for years to come. A photo per day project for each year - 366 by the end of the leap year. No rules, no requirements, no apologizing, just shoot a lot and share ONE photo per day. Doesn't matter of what, or with what device.Upload photos to your own flickr account, then add your daily photo to this group *after* you join. If motivated, please spread some comment love and join the discussions. Or just take and share photos. I count now 1794 members, some of them have been here 10+ years. There is almost no interaction, usually I post a message when the year changes over, I change the banner image and icon (choosing from photos by members). It can almost beg the question, is this a community? Regardless, this little bit of space has collected over 274,000 photos in its span, without fanfare, people just doing this same thing that has mattered so much to me over the years. Just knowing that others feel the same drive, desire to see the world through a camera and share... well that makes me feel much better about the world. Featured image: Almost blind luck, I searched this photo from almost exactly a year ago just by searching my flickr images on "photo". It was actually a "No Hunting" I edited with PhotoShop. I did not even realize until I looked at it for writing this post, that the image had been added to Flickr explore. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/45856108644 Landowners and their Silly Rules! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) My experiences with the bottom feeding world of catfishing has wiggled and slithered from weird to worse. Last week a message came to my flickr mail from someone claiming to be a producer of a national TV talk show (I'm leaving the name out, but it's one of the big ones) saying that they were working on a story about someone scammed by a persona using my photos. I say here "claiming" because in this alternative world you have to almost question the reality of everything and everyone. But they provided an email address with a TV network in it. I found the person in LinkedIn. Maybe legit. Sometimes I expect a reverse scam by a fake victim. That's what this stuff does. As in every message like this I responded with an offer to prove the source of any photos and a link to my page of resources. They sent a photo that was obviously me, but I could not place it. In the photo I was in a classroom (whiteboard visible) next to someone, but it was cropped vertically like a mobile phone photo. And kind of blurry. I was not sure the photo was mine. Reverse image searches did nothing, but with some awareness of my own clothes, and when my beard was shaggier I was able to find it from a series of conferences/workshops I did on an overseas trip a few years ago. The scammer had cropped out the colleague I was standing next to. But that was me and my colleague at that conference. Years ago. Now this TV rep is asking me to come on the show, for some kind of big reveal, claiming that the victim needs proof that I am not the person they have been taken in by. Apparently (I am told) the victim has sent a large sum of money to the person using my photo. I have negative desire to be on a TV talk show. I have a line with catfishing victims. I am sorry they got scammed and their trust toyed with. I am willing to provide the source of any photos victims might share. I do not get involved with their stories. I've had some who still confuse me with the fake persona they were taken in by. I've been threatened with harm from ones who think I am the scammer. My wife has been targeted. I do not get involved with their stories. I explained this to the TV show person. I am not interested in being involved. I do not want my name involved. Next I got a longer message filled with guilt and shame; they said that I am the only one who can clarify the truth for this victim. Now every other victim who has contacted me has already crashed through to a realization when they see my photos as the originals. The victims are confused, embarrassed but they have become aware on their own. It's not my responsibility to prove who I am not. And this TV show person is now trying to portray me as culpable. And it pisses me off. Face it- TV people care about one thing- sensationalizing any story to get ratings. Who knows what happens if I were to go on camera? Do they make me out to me the scammer? What if the victim does not believe I am who I am? What happens to my family? What happens to me ethical standing? What if the show makes me out to be "that guy" who... I don't even have an answer for that. All I know they show has used tactics of manipulation, shame and guilt for their own ends. They don't get me. I do not get involved with their stories. So I am not going on this show. I shared photos of myself on flickr. Someone else lifted my photos to create fake accounts. No TV for me. PS. I owe so much to my wife Cori for helping me think this through as well as putting up with the weird characters who show up online bearing my photo as their own. Featured Image: A slight manipulation of a vintage TV pixabay image by Alexander Antropov. The cord was edited in PhotoShop to not be plugged in, but laying on the floor, the wall paper copied to cover it, and the original plug in the image was covered by the electric outlet pixabay image by Open ClipArt Vectors.

Last 100 All Text

My Profile

Your Profile