Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
I've tried for months to get the WordPress PodPress plugin to behave- on multiple sites it just plum refuses to embed the player in the page. Every option is set to display the player, I can see it in the source, and it fails. And it seems like it gets upgraded once a week, each a complete download and replace of a gizillion files. The only advantage it appeared to offer was ability to generate iTunes formatted feeds, something we've not really desperately needed. On a new podcast focused site I am working on, I am switching to the Anarchy Media Player- and it Just Works. As an experiment, the last 4 ds106 Daily Creates have been designed hatched to be ones where each builds off of the last. I did this partly to see if such a thing would work, but maybe also as a repeatable activity in doing remixes where the participants build off of each other’s work. The whole thing again is to set up something where people are encouraged to riff off of each other. To recap: TDC 697 (Dec 5, 2013: 18 responses, so far) was a visual challenge to create an image to go with one of the headlines tweeted by the @twoheadlines account. Those themselves are mashups published each hour from real news headlines. TDC 698 (Dec 6, 2013: 14 responses, so far) was a writing challenge to write a news story that might go with one of the images from the day before– the idea was to write a story for someone else’s image. TDC 699 (Dec 7, 2013: 6 responses, so far) was an audio challenge to create a dialogue, music, sound that could support one of the previous stories. TDC 700/a> (Dec 8, 2013: 3 responses, so far) was a video challenge to pick from any of the preceeding content and assemble into a video I did a lot of annoying calling people out on twitter along the way to goad people into participating @clintlalonde Get out of the snow and see what you can do for today's #ds106 daily create http://t.co/PP8D44u6pD — Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 5, 2013 @Todd_Conaway Enough pimping for @techsavvyed Where is your #ds106 Daily create for today? http://t.co/PP8D44u6pD — Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 5, 2013 @shareski Maybe you could wake up from a nap and do a #ds106 Daily Create http://t.co/PP8D44u6pD Heck even @courosa might too. — Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 5, 2013 It is rather effective. But all that smack talking takes a lot of time and energy. My hat is off to the king of smack. I deliberately set up this order. Doing images is very approachable, so that is first. Writing is also not too challenging. But look at the fall off in participating once the Big Bad Audio comes along… and then doing video (which honestly falls beyond the “you can do a daily create in 20 minutes” line) really sends them running scared. This is not too hard to set up. And there is no reason why anyone coming along later cannot add theirs right into the mix. The video remix really needs a good pool of media. This troally makes for a decent workshop activity as you were asking for Amy Burvall, right? @jimgroom @cogdog What, iyho, are the best #remix projects a group can experiment with in the course of 3 hours? Doing wkshp in July — Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) December 4, 2013 I remain curious- a lot of people know about and refer the Daily Create to others. The tweet about it. But the participation rate is usually single digit (or less). But who am I to explain? I got remixes to do. For mine, I followed the story about the Oakland Raiders giving birth to a baby girl, it is their “Miracle Play” My story started with the headline Oakland Raiders welcomes baby girl — Two Headlines (@TwoHeadlines) November 28, 2013 I used the awesome image Dean Shareski made cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Dean Shareski And I used the story Ben Rimes wrote thought I could have used Dean’s or the one by Astrocomfy (who are you? you rocked this series!). I sort of cheated and used my own audio. I also tossed in the Peyton Manning in Orchid Pink (Is that Karen?) for that last line where the player says “I gotta pee”. The play action does not quite match, but there are some happy synchronous places where the action kind of matches the soundtrack. I also got the to add some of the Don “Ina World” LaFointaine movie trailer voiceovers from a mashup of his best ones along with a video of Raider Highlights. No one seemed to find use for my Wonder Woman on tour in Japan image cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine And I had fun writing While Inspectors Calm Fears of Radioactive Contamination at Yankee Stadium League Reviews Ruling on Cesium on Mariana's Bat where we find characters like Nuclear Security and Incident Response spokesperson Rime Bens, Toronto Blue Jays manager Kerno Davidhan, Yankee slugger Funes Mariana, Blue Jays pitcher Lock Patley, Major League baseball official spokesperson For Giulasythe, and Yankees coach Kim Droom. Well, I had fun working this idea. And heck, one day I might get a workshop where I will put this in motion (I am available, not sure how this would go at weddings or bar mitzvahs). Doing a Daily Create on the day it is published has no nearing or construction to block you from doing it any time. Like I am sure Dean Shareski is going to finish his audio and video– my guest appearance in his class in February is riding on this. And keep your eyes tuned for Wednesday, when you get to mashup Stephen Downes, a steer, and a song. There is always a new daily create, every day. Try one tomorrow, or yesterday, or a week from next Thanksgivukkah. [caption id="attachment_28642" align="alignnone" width="500"] Of Course We're Open, from a shop in Toronto[/caption] The Headless ds106 experiment we set up August-December 2013 had many successful points. Most was in the new influx of active participants, but the ending group project (not planned) was in terms of rich collaboration one of my peak ds106 experiences. But it was an experience that was still bound by time. It started and ended. And in discussion with Rochelle Lockridge about her wildly successful efforts in running a parallel ds106 experience inside the 3M corporate world, I felt more that the weekly pace was un-ncessary for a truly wide open ds106. Of Course We're Open. It's not completely filled out yet, but in a week, the Open ds106 Course ought to be fully built out. The idea is to take the posts (time based) that made up the headless ds106 course, and put them in a Wordpress Page structure (actually page and child pages). This way they can be ordered, and also nicely displayed as an index: Rather than "weeks" they are units- the idea is that in re-use, they could be done in a time scale a user or group chooses (in the syllabus, I am adding suggested time spans based on the ds106 course at UMW). We are associating it any blog we had previously tagged as openonline -- if your blog was part of Headless ds106, I might not have remembered to add both tags, so if yours is not listed on the Open ds106 Participant blogs, let me know so I can re-tag it. This probably will end up more of a reference for anyone that would like to repurpose ds106. I still think there is more power in people doing the same work in parallel, the network reinforcement effect. But there is no reason why a group could not decide to run their own timed series of ds106 for another class, professional development, or crazy people who just want to create together. All you would need to do is maybe set up a Google+ community, decide on a schedule, and go to it. It's that open. Or people maybe will choose to move through the Open ds106 in their own pace. Now it's true there is much more in each until than most people might choose to do. It's more of a buffet than a prix fixe dinner. ds106 in the Crystal Ball For Spring 2014 there is no UMW class to follow along with. I understand from Jim Groom that he will teach a summer 2014 version. And I have offered to teach on in Fall 2014 (unless that MacArthur check shows up) (heck if it did I would still teach) (but something could happen employment wise). I am teaching a different flavor of ds106 for an online 10 week graduate certificate course at George Mason University, this will start in mid March. As I am designing it now, it will be in the full open vein. As usual, we offer to set up a course aggregation for any teacher running a "ds106-ish" class- it need not be digital storytelling, but something that overlaps some with ds106. This could be anything from a Cyberspace History course (as previously taught by Scott Lockman), to a new one coming this spring-- English Studies in the Digital Age, being taught by Jennifer Travis at St Johns University. These would be courses where students will be individually blogging, and making use of the ds106 assignment bank and/or Daily Create, ds106 radio... What we do is add an option in the ds106 blog signup form so students can add their blog to the giant ds106 flow, but we can tag them internally to create a course flow. If this is of interest, see Are You Teaching a ds106ish Class? The Making Thereof (for the Wordpress Junkies) I use the Page List plugin because it has great options for how to dynamically output this index based on the parent-child relationship, so all I need in the main index page to generate that list above is a shortcode [subpages] On each unit page, I am also making use of the nifty features built into the Salutation theme we use. One is static blocks, which are chunk of content you can sue elsewhere. Like the obscure concept of Wiki Transclusion, I can include this as a reference in my pages, and if the static block changes, those changes are propagated to all pages that use them. So each page will open with a common note, that yellow block is actually a static block content (and it uses another Salutation short code to put the content in a message box style), so in each page, I can reference that note via: [static_content id="open-ds106-intro"] This has already paid off a few times as I had to tweak the text in the block. But here is where it gets super trippy. The bottom part of the unit pages is another static block, in my page, I just put: [static_content id="open-ds106-index"] In that static block, I can use the pagelist short code, so it puts the unit index in the bottom of every page (along withsome more bits of common text: The ds106 Open Course It's always on and never ends (learn more...) [siblings] If you have questions, corrections, suggestions, lavish praise, etc for this unit, please let us know via the comments form below. And lastly, to alleviate the fact that the unit pages are long, I am using the Salutation shortcode to make content blocks that toggle open and closed, e.g. breaking up the sections of Unit 3: What Mean Ye Storytelling This is simply done via [toggle title="The title of this cool section"] cool content here [/toggle] The editing is going much more quickly than assembling the Headless 13 lessons. I have a few links to update, and I remove all references to "week" and change them to unit. I am striving for a structure with an opening intro, some sort of "inspiration" media, and all the content. If you have comments, suggestions for topics or media, even corrections for typos, please add to the comments of each unit page. I am hopeful this can be a useful reference or jump off point, but mainly, shows that ds106 is of course open, but not quite a course, because a course of course always ends. Does anyone still look up number, business names in a big thick yellow pages phone book? Is that still the first reflex when a net connected computer is in reach? Two recent observations indicate that for many folks, not just techies, but Jane and Joe Citizen, the web is becoming the reflex. We have a new site up for a regional theatre festival our colleges are hosting -- it is a hugely complex multi-day event, with maybe 1000 attendees. I got 3 concerne email messages lasy night (rightfully so) as the address I had for the main conference hotel site was listed as 523 West Peoria Ave when it is actually 2523 (I hacked off the leading "2"!). Note what these emailers said a similar statement to this one (my emphasis added): On the hotel information page for the program, the hotel's address is incorrectly listed as 532 W. Peoria Ave. The correct address is 2532 W. Peoria Ave. For those of us visiting Pheonix (and using Mapquest to navigate) this can be a quite problematic! ;-) This is not a unix convention or a perl users group, but actors, directors, makeup artists, etc. It is by no means a scientifically researched result, but it appears that finding locations on Mapquest for many is a standard reflex. The other was a few weeks ago when I was trapped for 8 hours in a driving class to pay my dues for a photo radar ticket. At least 4 times during the instructor's monologue, he referred to issues, laws, statistics, information and said, "You can just go to Google to find more", or "that is on the National Safety Council's web site". There wa snot one instance where any of the 49 other people stuck in those uncomfortable chairs flinched, reacted, asked "What is Google", looked left out when he suggested they "find it on the web". They all knew. The web was nothing special, no more than their TV, phone, or electric light bulbs. Maybe I am over extending, and I am not suggesting this is everywhere, but the web is way past critical mass. We are not having to say "I mean World Wide Web", explain how to use a mouse or multiple windows, or help people find a search engine. It is in a reflex. The closing sessions of the EDUCAUSE ELI conference was the New Media Consortium's release of the 2006 Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies. This was the second year I was on the advisory board, and this year we notched it up quite a bit by doing all of our collaboration on a wiki at MIT. This site will continue to be open so more resources can be added and more conversations can take place on issues about these horizon items. The format for sharing these is the NMC's famous "Five Minutes of Fame" format, where, no surprise, you get 5 minutes to present, and if you get over, you get "gonged" and must exit the stage. It's quite a feat to condense a presentation into 5 minutes. Each of us who was asked to present one of the Horizon items had free reign to present it as we wished. I was asked this year to do the segment on mobile technology "The Phones In Their Pockets." Rather than dolling up a PowerPoint, I decided instead to just run a background slide show of images, about 250 I culled from flickr and elsewhere. Quite a few were from a user who takes hundreds of photos of people in public places using cell phones. I loaded these into iPhoto, and ran a full screen slide show with a 1 second transition. I was rushed and ended up grabbing alot that are not re-publishable, but you can get a good sense of ones I used from a flickr slide show of "interesting" images tagged with cellphone. But I rigged up a gimmick, to be interrupted about a minute in by a phone call. This was my script: [Run iPhoto slide show in background] It was kind of embaraassing that Larry Johnson asked me to do this segment, since I am a cell phone "immigrant". Until last June, I was using of those grey screen Nokia bricks-- all it could was make phone calls. Does anyone remember how futuristic the Star Trek communicators were? Kirk would just flip open the metal cover (wow... a flip phone) and have instant communication with the Enterprise. All it did was voice! How lame. He needed Spock to lug around that bulky Tricorder. Today's phones go far beyond both in functionality and power. =============== interruption ============= [Phone rings loudly] Oh, I am sorry. This is emabarrassing. [looks at number] I'm afraid I have to take this call. it's me? Yes, but I'm kind of busy right now... I have less 5 minutes! What? it Failed? The whole interactive portion is down? Oh crap. Are you in the server room? Okay, here's what to do. Find the router box. They all have names and Pooh stickers. No, not Piglet. No.... Eyeore is that Windows box HR uses for some ancient Access database. Yeah, Tigger, that's the box. Pull up the activity monitor. Grab a Bluetooth screen cast with your phone and zap it over to me. While you're doing that, I'm SSH-ing by SMS to see if I can free some cycles without bringing down the whole system. I'm looking at the video. Yeah, we've got 5 database processes is in the red. My over-ride will only hold for maybe 20 minutes. Here's what to do. Send the status video to Ronit. Yeah, she's our new wizard, a genius. Just in case she has to come down tonight, phone her the server room map and geotag the location of the server. Text me back with a status. Ok? Yeah, I'm phone recording the speech. It's an okay audience, kind of quiet. Polite. Thanks again.... Mom. And phone me some more video of your ballroom dancing class. I think you're leading too much with your left foot. ============================ There is no need to prove anything about the ubiquity of mobile phones, just look around, anywhere you go in public. Importance shown in these photos. People love their phones, they not only take pcitures with them, they take pictures of them. And look at the importance of personalization- not just ring tones, but wall paper screens, decoaration and plastic skins. Phones can be extension of personality. This is the true always on technology, soon to be always connected, and beyond that, maybe? maybe? always broadband Modern phones have multifunction capability, computation, storage that 10 years ago was your desktop PC Geolocation -- it not only tells me map-related information, but my location tailors services for me For education -- not the richest set of examples we could put in report, but interesting things have already happened, so please help us and add some new thins (but hey, it is a wiki!) I bet this year someone will hack a clicker service using phones. But do not think of these as just a computer in your hand. It's not just for putting learning content on a phone- more than Blackboard on a phone. What do phones not do well? -- accept a lot of text input (fast thumbs aside). What can they do well? messaging, photos, media playback (ROCKR notwithstanding). Audio/video capture? Could it be podcast recorde/publisher? Data gathering. Field recorders. Checklists, PDA. Possible roles? registration? class clickers? Lab data? Audio enabled response systems. Translation. [GONG] Thanks to me helper for the call on cue. This was a ton of fun, yet I still am a fumbler on the phone. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/zub/72900156 flickr photo by seizethedave shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license By sheer acts of curious link following, I ended up today learning about Warnock's Dilemma via Classy's Kitchen: Warnock's Dilemma is the situation you face when people don't comment on your postings: The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations: 1. The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said." 2. The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out. 3. No one read the post, for whatever reason. 4. No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason. 5. No one cares about the post, for whatever reason. The origin of the dilemma is this post to a perl developers list, and Bryan Warnock provides further historical commentary in this later post to another perl list. I am sure I mostly write in the regions of 2,4, and 5. The variant is the irony when you labor over a post that you feel strongly ought to elicit a response and gets little (that is Wanock's) and you write something totally silly without any forethought, and the responses come tumbling in. Don't get me wrong, I will drink up feedback like a thirsty dog no matter how/where/why it comes. And I am more than ever confirmed that there is little more re-inforcing on writing than getting an unexpected contact, a pat on the back, even a challenge from "out there", from someone you've not met before. Do not ever undervalue the power of public comments (except from spammers). Hello and greetings as far as one could be from the hub of Being Relevant. It is blissfully calm here, away from the bright lights of LinkedIn and its burdens of reposting liked comments. I am so out of the latest news on Blue Sky, how can I breathe? I also am free of having 10s of thousands of followers on my Nonstack and having to feed them regularly with news of my speaking engagements and book tours. There is ample time to pen my long typo ridden posts of nattering mutters that nobody will read. I can almost nuke Akismet on the blog, as the comments come in at a rate of once every third lunar eclipse. Even better I do not have to groom my Generative AI expertise to waft at conferences, and there is no need for me to be flogging Claude to vibe code something new to demonstrate my prowess. There's no pressure to be up to speed on the latest LLM model. If all this stuff is as great as they proclaim, I would think I can jump in anytime as it is so advanced I do not need to bring any experience to the table. But you know, Irrelevance is not for everyone, it can be daunting to be that unimportant. But for me, it's quiet, and there is so much room to roam, away from the hubub. Just wanted to send a postcard from the quiet center of Irrelevance, it keeps moving farther away from the noise. Adios! Featured Image: A remix of the photo of my 1973 Ford Maverick parked next to a sign in Death Valley that actually reads "Sea Level". Some German band found that photo and used it for cover art of their CD. This happened in a time where I was relevant ;-) No one really reads this blog, I hope. I am testing this. Let’s say we need to add some documentation here for doing email… Registering Your Domain and Signing Up for Webhosting This tutorial will take you through signing-up for both a domain and web hosting as part of the UMW Domains pilot project. If you haven't selected a domain name yet please see the Selecting Your Domain Name article for some guidelines and recommendations. Submitting Domain Name Once you've decided what your domain name will be, go here. You'll see the following screen: Confirm Your Choice Enter your chosen domain name in the provided field and click submit. After that you will be taken to a screen that will ask you to confirm your selection and click checkout. Note: You can disregard all the "check out" and commercial language of transactions here, there will be no money changing hands---work your way through the process with that in mind. Check Out Once you click "Check Out" you will be directed to a page that will ask you to fill out your personal information. Please fill this out as completely as possible. Error creating thumbnail: File seems to be missing: /home/dtlt/subdomains/wiki/images/b/b6/Setting_up_umwdomains_4.jpg Enter Contact Information When you have finished this click next and review your information and be sure to check the radio button indicating you have read and agree to the terms and conditions. Confirmation Emails After this you need to check the email address you signed-up with. There you should find two emails from support@umwdomains.com: one with your contact information and the other with your account details and login links. Note: make sure you check your junk mail folder. Also, if the emails don't come immediately it could be a server issue, so have a bit of patience. Contact Info Email Error creating thumbnail: File seems to be missing: /home/dtlt/subdomains/wiki/images/5/54/Setting_up_umwdomains_6.jpg Account details and login links email Error creating thumbnail: File seems to be missing: /home/dtlt/subdomains/wiki/images/0/00/Setting_up_umwdomains_7.jpg Logging In to UMW Domains If you click on the login link in the email with account details you will be taken to the UMW Domains login area, enter the username and password you specified in the sign-up process Error creating thumbnail: File seems to be missing: /home/dtlt/subdomains/wiki/images/e/ed/Setting_up_umwdomains_8.jpg Plesk Dashboard Once you logged in successfuly you will see the dashboard for Plesk, your web hosting space that officially makes you the sysadmin of your own education. BOOYA! Error creating thumbnail: File seems to be missing: /home/dtlt/subdomains/wiki/images/8/8a/Setting_up_umwdomains_9.jpg If there was a Most Valuable Player award for advancing open content, I would certainly give it to Creative Commons. Remove CC from history, say it never happened, and I wonder if we'd have the awareness of enabling sharing content. I dont want to argue that point, it is a long winded way of saying it is a Good Thing. A damned Good Thing. This relates to an experience I had today the leads maybe to more questions. For quite some time, I have posted my photos to flickr with the simplest CC license, By-Attribution. That's all I want; I don't care what you do with my photos, commercial not, how you further license them, whatever. I don't post them to gain anything, i post them because I like them. If you do, great. So today, as has happened a few times in the past, someone emails me via flickr asking permission to use one of my photos, actually for an exhibit at one of the San Francisco science museums. My usual thought is something like- Don't they get Creative Commons? They can use it w/o asking permission, that's the beauty. photo credit: Phillip And that's where the little light bulb (really little, about 0.0005 watt) went off-- if they did not ask, then I would never know my photo was being used. And that tells me a lot. First the left side of the brain starts firing, thinking about ways re-use of photos my trigger trackbacks, or maybe there are ways of generating CC attribution text (RDF?) that would contain sometihng to track its placement, or maybe some centralized directory... And then a voice (am I hearing voices?) goes, "That is too complicated! Add any more steps to the process for the user of CC content, and the re-use goes way down". It must be simple, time to shave the Occam style. While it would be nice to know that my picture was used in some art installation or commercial for meat food products, any expectation to automate notification is doomed, and really I will find out by accident, or not at all. And then another click. My CC license of attribution is a basic minimum. That's all you really have to do to re-use my photos. But how much do you aspire to do the just minimum? Is that it? photo credit: minimum So rather then knee-jerking a "don't they understand CC" when someone asks permission, I am now appreciative because I have an old fashioned trackback. And this changes things when I use someone else's CC imagery-- sure, I can slap my attribution in and be done, but maybe I ought to do more than minimum and sometimes contact the image creator and let them know where their photo, song, etc has been put to re-use. As I write this, it seems like Blogging the Obvious, but it was just a subtle shift in my attitude today. Attribution is great, notification is better, an honorary level of respect and appreciation above the minimum (and that you may enjoy someday receiving). Yesterday was a eventful day at the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting. My travel arrangements for this conference were pretty tricky -- I got in my truck and drove 20 miles downtown to Phoenix. No lost luggage. This was my first ever attendance at a CNI conference; a different flavor of colleagues, so I got to meet a lot of new folks in the library and information architecture fields. My hats off to Clifford Lynch and colleagues who arrange a program that is interesting, not dense with too many sessions, and leaves room for the critical hallway meetings. And there is the touch of Cliff's Roadmap, which provides a wonderful context for the 2 day meeting. A highlight was getting to co-present with co-conspirators Bryan Alexander and Cyprien Lomas. We did a session on the NMC's Horizon Report, of which they were both involved as advisory board members, What's in Your Horizon? Process, Technologies, and Impact of the 2007 Horizon Report. The presentation itself was something I might call a PowerPoint mashup -- I used as a basis the slides created by my NMC colleague Rachel Smith for the EDUCAUSE ELi conference in January (designer extraordinaire), but as her slides were custom designed, I had to toss in my own simple templated, but flickr-image loaded slides. And before the tomatoes get tossed for using PowerPoint- the only reason is to have something to load in slideshare: We aimed to get the audience into participation mode and get them contributing ideas, questions for our Horizon Research Agenda effort (ahem, wiki operators are standing by), but we had a challenging time getting some audience participation! (Bryan is suggesting bringing a taser next time). Anyhow, thanks to the 40 or so who showed up, even the woman who was being critical (that was good, dialogue-good, need more dissention!), but left early (ouch!). And also to the colleague wishing not to be named who suggested this year's report was "not sexy enough". My response is the slide that mentions that "time-to adoption != time to technically viable". Beyond that, at the conference I had the shortest range IM ever. During the closing plenary, when I flicked open my laptop to Google a project the speaker mentioned, I got an IM from Cyprien... who was seated right next to me. Also for a highlight was spending time with Bryan for a scenic drive to the top of South Mountain (he claimed he could see Vermont from there) and a decent Mexican dinner (sadly the wait was too long at Los Dos Molinos!). And he would have certainly enjoyed the Mystery Castle if it were open. Inside the Photo Photos taken on January 1 are important to me as they are the start of a new daily photo set/album on flickr, a practice I have done every year back TO 2008. For this first day of the new year I traveled from Vancouver to Victoria via BC Ferries. It was the fourth in a row, maybe five, of clear blue sky days here. The color of the red container ship contrasting with the deep blue water yelled to me PHOTO! PHOTO! This was the best of maybe 7 or 8 I took of the ship, which I ultimately (here) framed to make the ship seem separate from everything, just showing the edge of the pier. One might say the ship is the subject (the red color is what stands out) but it could also be the expanse of open water filling the foreground, right? The editing included a bit of cropping to move the horizon higher than the original and also to trim a bit of the extra pier showing on the right. I did a bit it of adding saturation to the reds to make the ship stand out (using the color editor in Aperture). I experimented with some HDR filters, but I did not like the grainy effect that put in the sky, so instead I bumped the orange colors, increased the overall saturation. So there’s not a whole lot of complexity here- instinct suggested the ship would make a good shot, and some waiting to catch the best late afternoon light angle on it. The post edits are mild, it pretty much was how I thought I saw it… but more intense by isolating the ship from the rest of the world around it (cranes on the pier, other ships). Photography is as much in what you remove from photos as what you include. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Horia Varlan Not the first, not the last, but I humbly claim being dead wrong about ds106 not getting the MOOC respect. We get tons of it. Check it out, after 7 hours, the DS106: The Open Online Community of Digital Storytellers Kickstarter campaign, launched around 5pm today, is closing in on half its goal: What the bleep is going on? Read the site, watch the video. Pretty simple- ds106 has been chugging along on a self hosted web server, and with all the burst of activity this year- 7 universities participating in DS106, more than 1200 open online participants that have generated over 18,000 posts- the server had to be moved from a shared host to a big rack in the clouds. While ds106 was born here at the University of Mary Washington, we are asking for support, because it belongs to more than us. And its a fascinating experiment in whether an open community will support its own infrastructure. Hats off in a big way to Tim Owens for not only developing the idea to use Kickstarter, but running with it the full way from conceptualizing, designing, and even directing Jim Groom on camera ("how ya doing" he says to the server ;-) I've been around the crew at DTLT a few weeks now, and the pace of things happening here is just under light speed. Tim, Jim, Martha, Andy are a real powerhouse- and this new kid is hoping to catch up. I've been very flip to MOOCs but seriously, stepping back, all of them are bringing value to the DIY education space- no matter the structure, they are presenting opportunities that were not there before. Even if no one yells "4Life" in the AI course, it is still an open space to learn. In fact, in all of this, it is not what the MOOCs do or provide, but what people bring to the MOOC. So bring on more MOOCs of all flavors, and stand them up against the rising tide of opportunists who want to cash in on the interest in openness. Openness is as openness does. Say what you want about ds106, the lines in Giulia's epic art (which is the design of the kickstarter t-shirt, and this, the only way to get one is to pledge) gets to the heart of ds106, this is a call not of branding ds106, but of claiming what is free, and open from the washers. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe We need to think differently about our culture. This is not simply augmenting our experience with technology. Claim your space. Review. Remix. Make Meaning. Make Art, Damnit! MOOCs 4Life! I almost missed this tweet. https://twitter.com/Every_User_/status/569573438022656002 With apologies to John Entwistle My name is 740343, And I've just become alive I'm the newest populator Of the planet we call Twitter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZcarsKBTv8 Following the curiosity link for @Every_user I find the details of this bot art of Matthew Plummer-Fernandez: An autonomous twitter account that, one by one, lists and follows every single twitter user in order of their twitter ID number. An archive of the archive. A reminder that you are a number in a vast database. A sorting of social media that is not based on real relationships but arguably a more honest listing of our relationship to the banality of computational infrastructure. Keep on tweeting, feeding that banal computational infrastructure. I sure will, just call me 740343. I have a feeling deep inside That somethin' is missing It's a feeling in my soul And I can't help wishing That one day I'll discover That we're living a lie And I'll tell the whole world The reason why Well, until then, everything I know is what I need to know And everything I do's been done before Every sentence in my head Someone else has said At each end of my life is an open door the Lyrics to The Who's 905 written by The Ox, John Entwistle Animated GIF constructed from icon for @Every_user overlain with animated Matrix GIF from giphy (opacity dropped 44%) It's been a while, WordPress blog. Been busy! That's all to say now, more later. Just circling back to the first, long ago deleted, post- some make it harder than it should be. Hello. Featured image: 2018/365/178 Hello World flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) flickr foto Welcome Reception - Flickr Demoavailable on flickr NMC Regional Conference, San Antonio Texas At the Wednesday opening reception for the NMC 2006 regional conference, we not only had great food and drink, but 8 different demos related to "What the 2.0 Are We Talking About? New Web Demos", where colleagues I arm twisted gave informal hands on demos to anyone who wandered by. It was rather energetic the whole time, and thanks go to: 2.0 of Flickr by Tom Hapgood, University of Arkansas) 2.0 of Geotagging by Cyprien Lomas, University of British Columbia 2.0 of del.icio.us by Brian Lamb, University of British Columbia 2.0 of Web Video by Shelley Rodrigo, Mesa Community College 2.0 of Google Docs by Michael Roy, Wesleyan University / Academic Commons 2.0 of Odeo by Gardner Campbell, University of Richmond 2.0 of Gliffy by Bryan Alexander, NITLE 2.0 of Vyew - by Alan Levine, NMC In addition we had a great warm up activity, thanks to NMC colleague Rachel Smith, in which participants did "people tagging"-- they had to pick 3 "tags" to describe themselves, and then find at least 5 people who could sign their slip of paper who had the same tag, all tossed into the bin for some Adobe provided prizes. The room went crazy, and forgot mostly about the web demos. Bryan Alexander and others are "people tagging" Set your sanctimonious crap shields to 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvhAsJPXj1M Put it on the shelf of classics like shallowness of people who take an Amish Technology break bravely going cold turkey FOR 25 WHOLE DAYS. I think the dude should go out with Sherry Turkle for a long walk on the beach to debate the finer points of Middle Age French poetry. These perspectives are laden with a huge amount of judgmental assumptions of what is going on in when you observe people absorbed in their devices. I experienced this myself a few days ago, out in a restaurant. At an adjacent table, 3 teen girls and their dad were absorbed in their phones. I noticed Mom glancing out with what seemed like a vacant gaze of helplessness-- that I very well be imagining. It's pretty easy to write a narrative, but we do not know the whole dynamic of their experience. Maybe Mom is feeling at ease with the enjoyment of an earlier moment I did not glance at and judge. Be careful how you frame other people from a 30 second observation. The guy on the corner could just have easily missed the connection with the girl without his phone. That is how serendipity works. Or maybe while he is out trying to engage strangers in conversations, the phone he left on the table has a surprise message from Steve Spielberg who was forwarded his script but only has the morning to chat before he goes to Sydney. If Look Up Dude wants to frolic in the leafy park of Pleasantville world, go away already, Hey You Get Off of My Net. I prefer the version where where amazing stories happen facilitated by the dreaded evil life sucking devices. Vacant numbing interactions can take place with or without technology. And so can the opposite. It is never as simple as these pap videos make it out to be. The thing is, there are evolving social norms developing in which the conventions of interactions should incorporate, in a way that calls on us to find balance, of the technology and communication in our lives. Shutting lids and turning off laptops does not alone make us better attentive and caring people. I wonder if the Look Up Dude has every ridden a New York Subway or ridden in an elevator. But let's stop these preachy views that doing without (or with) technology in our lives is better. Unless you are ready to go live in a shack in the forest, this is the world we are in. Look Up Dude's binary fog filtered view of the world does not reflect the complexity or potential of humans, the attitude reduces us to simple states of being that I find not only dumb, judgmental but also insulting. And sappy. This pushback on an overly simplistic unrealistic binary view of human / info tech behavior is at the core of a project that has been slowly distilling over months and conversation with Mariana Funes, one about finding the balanced place in the middle. Stay tuned. It may even appear on your phone. Despite the shift to this ornery block editor (I have made my peace with it but still regularly cuss at it) and avoiding full site editing, I still love ya WordPress. Always. Mostly. I have noticed something for a while. WordPress does not like hanging out waiting for you in open tabs. Many times over the last? two, three years, I notice that leaving a unfinished post in an open tab, ends up in a cycle where when I return to update, it just spins and spins on my attempts to save. It just never gets there. I end up leaving that window open (just in case), going back to my posts, opening the same one again in a new window. After making sure my last changes are there (and they always seem to be), I then click update, and all is kosher fine. There's maybe a lesson in just finishing what one starts. Or not keeping so many damn tabs open. But here is another variant. I had a tab open a day? 2 days? in my dashboard for the comments. I went back to write a response, click the blue Reply buton, and I get this helpful error message: This is helpful feedback, did I ask what 19 minus 20 equals? No. I clicked a Reply button. I copy the text of my comment which never posted, reload the page, and now I can reply. My hunch is that the Modern WordPress admin interface, aka The Dashboard, is dependent on some cookies to ensure that maybe what is being submitted is current, or not malicious If I Left My Laptop Open in a Coffee Shop. But clearly, leaving unfinished work in an open tab, or just the open tab itself can be problematic. These are just inconveniences yes, and having experience, some intuition, and even the gumption for examine my browser console, I am able to work my way around them. Still, the user interface is not providing me any indication to the problem. Does this change my love for WordPress? C'mon true love is lost because of small quirks. Lesson learned. Finish what you start WordPressing and close the damn tab. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/30478819@N08/46937745005 Waiting for you like ... flickr photo by wuestenigel shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I am more than comfortablly qssured that no generative AI can really hallucinate my writing. See those trademarked typos? Me. See a quirky nonsensical title? Me. I digress, as usual. Here is a typical small tale of unexpected adventure of one thing leading to another, like a neural path, but none one that can be predicted even with your vectorizing databases. A morning coffee ritual is a quick attempt at the current DS106 Daily Create and maybe, if an idea pops up, submitting a new one into the queue. I cannot not do ds106. And I have to write this post tonight, because the fruits of this labor gets published as tomorrow's Daily Create, TDC 4334 (look ma, a palindrome number)! For this idea, I needed an image of an every day object. Ahhh, the perfect antithesis to modern technology is the lowly toilet plunger, though it may have use for dealing with problematic CEOs. I reach into my handy dandy tricks for searching google images forcing it to return only Creative Commons licensed results. The result that jumps out looks perfect, but from a source I have never seen before-- CCnull- but here it is in full glory, Ausgussreiniger + Saugglocke + Pümpel (German word creation can be so lyrical). ccnull image display for what I deduce is German for "pluinger" with all info one might expext from a photo catalogue I come across a fair number of shady reference sites in Google Images but this one, with the help of Google translate, covers all the bases, plus some curious bits We see all the info needed for a good TASL of attribution, Title, author, a direct link to source, and clear listing of cc license What's above most other sites, and I've never seen, is Lizenzurkunde anzeigen or View License Certificate). It leads to a rather detailed page outlining the author, license, and more legal looking stuff. Woah. CCnull is advertising supported with those bottom links to stock imagery... though there is something awry in results for "Aktuelle Vorschläge zum Thema Ausgussreiniger von iStock by Getty Images" or "Latest sink cleaner suggestions from iStock by Getty Images". Those images (likely having tags like "plunge") are not like any backed up sink/toilet I have plunged. But what do I know about the stock photo biz? I foolishly give all mine away under CC0. Now one bell that rings is that as good as this site is, and it goes way beyond the usual listing, is for me to assemble a recommended form of attribution, it's at least a four time round trip of copy paste between this source and wherever I might use it. I have inklings of ideas that might come from some kind of bookmarklet tool, and also wondering about the connecting to Nate Angell's Bulk Open Attribution Tool (BOAT). And it nudges me that it's really time for me to redo my own Flickr CC Attribution Helper, which I use almost every day, but is a bit dated and could be done much more flexibly. I digress with ideas. So I got my plunger picture, yay. I make my modifications in Photoshop. I use no generative AI features. And on writing this up as a Daily create, I get the idea to add a historical reference, to which I ask The Google- When was the plunger invented? to which, first answer indicates 1874 but I gotta read the Wikipedia linked result (do others notice this google feature which returns as part of the URL highlighted text?). I could just link to the article as the historical reference, but note in the Wikipedia article, citation 5 is to the patent entry by John Hawley himself (the dude who invented the plunger!). Except I notice that the link for the patent is a bad link, no results https://worldwide.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=USUS158937A Weird because I can find it my poking around at a slightly different URL But I am looking again at the URL Wikipedia is providing, and it looks suspicious. That last part of the parameter string, IDX= is th epatent idea, but it seems to have a duplicate "US" in the string. Ahah! Maybe I can edit and fix the Wikipedia article. I login in to my seldom used account, hit the button, and yeah, the reference list is not exactly editable, its a placeholder I dust off my memory, and recall that this is the layered way Wikipedia creates reference list, this is where the references we see are generated, but the data for a citation references sits inside the source as a content inside <ref>....</ref> tags, where the footnote is added. I'm watching the clock tick by as a slip one notch down the hole. I could just let this go, but isn't this the way Wikipedia should work? If I don't fix this minor error now, who will? Does it matter in the scheme of things. Hell yes. So now I am looking at this patent reference, where the relevant information is highlighted below Now what I find interesting, or what I am guessing, is that Wikipedia has a spoecific data structure for patent references. So rather than rely on a single URL, it provides data to which the proper link is built when the page is published (maybe it can use a different patent site for say a different language version of wikpedia? Or exchange sources if the patent site goes south? I am looking at this citation and have a hunch. It has variables like the country, th epatent number, dates, inventor names {{cite patent|country=US|number=US186206A|status=patent| title=Improvement in vent-clearers for wash-bowls| gdate=1877-01-16|fdate=1876-06-06|inventor=John S. Hawley}} Does the possible error in the patent number leap out? The country code is already entered, but there is an extra US in the value for number=US186206A.... my guess is it should be changed to be number=186206A What can I lose? I make a 2 letter deletion, pass a captcha, and boom, I edit the page. And win! The patent link now works. Everyone can now link to and read the full 1874 patent details for this transformative invention: The figure is a longitudinal section of my improved vent-clearer. My invention has for its object to furnish a simple, convenient, and inexpensive device for clearing the vents or discharge-pipes of washbowls, stationary wash-tabs, &c., should they become accidentally stopped. The invention consists in an improved ventclearer, formed by attaching a rubber cup to a handle, as hereinafter fully described. https://worldwide.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US158937A And my wiki contribution to the world is done. For today. What's th ebig deal? Why a fascination with plungers? It's not the plunger. It's that the real power of Wikipedia are the humans behind the edit screens and inside the Talk discussions. An ecosystem 99% of the world never even sees is there, making Wikipedia better, one edit at a time. I discovered something a few weeks ago, not even worth adding to this blog, where a group of people who use WIkimedia tools to batch add photos to Wikimedia commons, mining ones that are licensed the flavors Wikipedia ingests. What I discovered reading a batch of discussions years old, is that a back and forth discussion over a number of my flickr photos, which honestly, I had no case marking as CC BY. I gaffed. I'll spare the details, but I had made a rookie mistake long ago. And some folks inside te editing space, had sorted it out, in back and forth, but not antagonistic, discussion (I've since adjusted my licenses, but as it goes, I cannot revoked the past ones done wrong). All of this sets te stage that I am finally keen to devote time and effort where I can, be it as small as fixing a link, to stepping in more as a Wikipedian, one who makes it better by editing. Even if it's just fixing a bad link for a toilet plunger patent link. Today in 2023, I cant really tinker or do anything with the innards of the Generative AI obelisks except maybe toss my bone tools at it. But I can create my own web sites and I can make contributions to the public spaces like Wikipedia. Because I can see inside of it, and see the hands and signs of other humans there. One bit at a time. Now... I challenge you to look for that CC BY licensed plunger image in tomorrow's DS106 daily create and maybe just come up with a response of your own. This again is the internet I came for, where an inkling of an idea leads me to editing a Wikipedia page for a toilet plunger, certainly, not listed in my daily objectives. Plunge into the open web, break away from the owned spaces, paywalls, popup ads, and crap infested poopification much of it has become. But not all of it, as long as my hands can click Edit. Featured Image: Ausgussreiniger + Saugglocke + Pümpel ccnull image by Tim Reckmann licensed CC-BY 2.0 modified by placing behind it a screen shot of the edit screen of the Wikipedia article for Plunger cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Bert Werk Cut to the chase- unless something drops from the sky, the lights on my RSS feed service Feed2JS will turn off by June 1, 2013. Between now and then I will get the word out, attach a small alert on feeds fed, offering alternatives, suggesting self-hosting (including investigating what it would take to make an EC2 AMI, thanks Scott for the suggestion). I do cringe at the thought, but any site that does not change anything will likely spin in a spiral of non connection. Call me a rat. It's not the money. Well partly it is. In September 2011, when my free hosting for the service disappeared, I put a call for donations and got way more than I expected, enough to get me through June 2013. But then the $184/month for the dedicated server hits my pocket, which currently has not a steady inflow. The site gets banged really hard, and it would not be here were it not for expert tech admin done for free by Aaron Axelsen. He added a Cloud Fare setup to help distribute the load, and it is still getting banged hard. Some people were telling me it went out for them. And as I started looking at the stats, the big users were some link bait farm sites that had something like 20 calls to the site to bring people in and maybe click ads on the sidebar. Or whatever. I'm not sure why I am trying to give them a free ride. My real audience are the personal sites and the educators just trying to add a dynamic source of content to their sites. I don;t know how to provide it both ways. It's not about the money. I could ask again. I could get money for text ads on the front site. I could convert it to a fee-based service. Frankly, my heart is not in running a service. It's not my bag. I start things. If I took one of those aptitude tests for management or implementation, I would register in negative numbers. That said, this puppy has been running as a free service for over 10 years now- I think I was tinkering with it in early 2003 as I first stumbled into the RSS hole via Stephen Downe's seminal An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers. I was already tinkering with the first RSS2JS when this blog started in April of that year (kind of sobering to see how stark and not very interesting my early blog writing was). The code is old. The MagpieRSS parser is old (an experiment to switch to SimplePIE killed the server a few clicks back). I'm way past the limits of my tech skills to carry this out, I was done a while ago. I feel a bit of a sellout, closing up an open resource, leaving a lot of sites and people hanging cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Scott Beale and maybe as suspect as Google for giving up on an RSS service. I'm the pot, I'm the kettle, and blackened. So barring any miracles of angles or rainbow toting unicorns, the next steps will involve me: Putting a link to a notice at the bottom of feeds, like I did back in 2011 (I will offer the CSS to hide it once you have gotten the news). I dread doing it this way, but its what gets attention. recommending other services that are viable (might need a refresh) posting details on how to run this on your own domain, including the settings so you can restrict the use of it Get with the current age and move the code to GutHub where all the cool code lives. investigating what it would take to run in the Amazon cloud with similar features for personal/single organization parameters When it closes on June 1, 2011, traffic will likely bounce to my domain registrar. I'm hanging on to the domain for a while! I'm open to other ideas and suggestions, but 10 years has been a good long run, and I'm ready to let this puppy go. Launch the rotten tomatoes my way. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by [nicolu] Sorry. Today I cleared 28,000 photos posted on flickr, since I joined there in March 2004. I don't fawn much on my stats, but I have noticed that my generla photos average about 0-20 views, but when I tweet them, it jumps to 110-120. I often tweet from within flickr and usually the one I share is my 2012/366 photo of the day (I am way off track, about 75% done to date). Today, as an experiment, I tweeted 5 pictures in a row, yes, that is more spammy. And If I was watching my stream I'd say "SHOWBOAT" but I actually really did like them. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/263398205289558017 And sure enough, all five cleared the 100 view count: That one with 54 views is odd, it is from 2008, but somehow spiked today with 42 views over its normal baseline of 0-4. It's not hard to guess, people don't really go to flickr to look for photos, they get nudged there from social media. Or is that so? My overal stats should 1/3 the traffic to my photos comes from within flickr. Yet I see this same pattern on a daily basis. Maybe I should not have dropped out of that Cousera course on social network analysis... If I wanted to be a real Social Media Dust Bunny, I'd tweet 'em all. Do you remember the kerfuffle when Georgia Tech canceled a Coursera MOOC on "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application" because the ill-advised use of a Google spreadsheet for 40,000 participants, crashed it? Can you imagine what would happen to Georgia Tech courses if a Category 4 hurricane slammed the state, leaving its inhabitants flooded, lacking access to basic necessities, with no electricity for weeks, (also if the US Government decided they had already "wasted" too much money helping Georgia)? Then take some time to watch this video all the way through, even if you do not understand Spanish (I don't). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq5ITNMFWjA This was produced by students of Antonio Vantaggiato's INF115 course (Digital New Media and Social Networks) at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico. With class meetings under tents, dealing with intermittent electricity, tropical heat, and limited network access, Antonio's students planned, researched, produced, and edited this video under conditions that other Universities might have given up on. "Más allá de la Burbuja" translates as "Beyond the Bubble". From our most recent Puerto Rico Connection podcast the people in San Juan, the biggest city on the island, consider it a "bubble" where things are not nearly as bad as out in the smaller towns, the mountains. If you can think of the bubble condition as ones where people have no electricity for months after a disaster, pay quintuple amounts for things like water and ice, can you imagine outside the bubble? That's what I think the students were trying to show in their video, where you can see the extent of conditions there, but also hear it in voices and stories of the students themselves and the citizens they interviewed. Antonio published in his blog some more back story about his students work including photos of the production in action. [caption id="attachment_65627" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Interview scene, on the set of the video production, photo from Antonio's blog[/caption] Despite all that Maria brought onto Puerto Rico, despite that all our President has provided is a bad photo op tossing paper towels, keep in mind that the teachers, staff, and students Universidad del Sagrado Corazón managed to complete their Fall semester on time despite all the challenges. In an American, much better funded University, they throw in their own towel in when a spreadsheet crashes. Imagine. Please do not forget what US citizens are dealing with in Puerto Rico. Please do not forget that as an act of "tax reform" Republican Congress decided to not help out hurricane victims and instead lined even better the pockets of the wealthiest class. Mostly do not forget what Antonio and his students accomplished, inside a bubble that would crush most of us. Do not forget to send messages of care via postcards and #care4sagrado. Send anything you can that might help these students to: Universidad del Sagrado Corazon Attn A. Vantaggiato Computer Science PO BOX 12383 San Juan PR 00914-8505 Let them know we respect their courage. Featured Image: Photoshop modification with Sphere effect of my photo of Old San Juan -- San Juan Profile flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Punful titles for $200, Alec. What is the word to describe when something tastes really, really good? Savor the question. And get ready for more dusty old web era meandering. I'm writing about maybe one of the oldest web 2.0 (can I even use that phrase without sounding out of fashion) concepts- bookmarking web sites in shared environment. Indeed I was there early (insert old man web badge here) with the original del.icio.us in maybe 2004, and maybe even earlier with something called furl (it got rolled up into diigo). It was wild. What ever happned to spurl? Mr Wong? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3159516557 Do We Need More Social Bookmarking Services? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Heck for some time I was a "hot" thing in del.icio.us. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2246510239 I Was Hot flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) The adjective of "social" here is what I always resonated with was the act of doing something for yourself (keeping track of web sites by bookmarking) gained value in a platform where others were doing it too, so that tagging my sites, tied it into the efforts of others. It all worked so well for me, I rolled it into project work like in the old days of the NMC Horizon report process. I kept piling on bookmarks, then delicious went under. But because bookmark data was as simple as a structure HTML format, I could pick up my bag of URLs, move to maybe diigo for a stretch (yikes its still there), and since then pinboard. I dig the latter because ot its retro style-less style, but its functionality- rss of everything, tagging, etc. My use is still primarily my own data hoarding, but I have a few tags I use tied to trigger action elsewhere- stuff I tag as "cooltech" uses an IFTTT thingie to post to mastodon, another tag I have a zapier thing to post to the OEG Connect discourse community. I can even embed a page of current stuff here with RSS. I was merrily doing this and got reminded that my tagged links in pinboard like https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:cooltech/, which were once public, are not. This worked for a while https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/?query=cooltech but alas is also clamped down. Heck, now that O am checking, even my public links https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog are not public. It took a bunch of messaging to find out that the owner of the service had to make this a logged in feature (something about hackers pounding the service). How would I ever know? Alas, pinboards end of life for me is looking iminent. Luckily, via a mastodon post by Stephen Harlow, I found a new possibility -- raindrop.io. I was able to export all ~8MB of bookmarks accumulated since 2004 (it's just old HTML) and plop it in raindrop. I am able to now have a public view of all things tagged "cooltech" https://raindrop.io/cogdog/cooltech-49901180 and I can go ahead and use its rss feed to change my triggers. Now, when I write/post this, along comes along "what about this open source tool" "just install it yourself" Get Readeck. Or Linkace. Or this federated thing. Or that one. What's wrong with you, Levine? Here's what I want: Yes, I should be able to host my own. But I'm tired of tending web sites. I likely have more broken ones than working ones. I'm lazy. I really am not too bothered nor am enough of a purist. Yeah, lazy. But really, with feed readers and bookmarking, I am never "locked" in because I can always export/import easily. I want descriptions, notes, with my links. A lot of the tools are just the links, but I take care/effort to include info about a bookmark. I make use of (old web dust warning) bookmarklet tools to add this when I save. I want my bookmarks to be public. And then I want them to have feeds or triggers that can spawn other acts. It's feeling like time to fold the pinboard tent. Sad. And again looking at the road. Could I be foolish to rely once more on an outside service that most likely will pull the rug one day? It's not too problematic to me IF i can pack of my stuff and take it home or to the next one. I have to say I am not sure if I have the energy left to keep patching my duct taped web pile. Should I stay or go? Does it matter anymore? Tap. Tap into the blog mic. hello? Featured Image: One of my mine. Yeah, old old photo of a bookmark. I feel this web old. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/26659207979 A New Favorite Bookmark flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It's been a few weeks since the Blog Brothers were yakking but they did let participants (well anyone) know that their garage would be open for those angling to create a Connected Course. Open is as open does. [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Phil's 1stPix[/caption] Cars are pretty easy, right? Blogs and RSS are way more finicky pieces of engineering? Maybe, maybe not. Look at these guys, who do they think they are? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnNVxGvXjTg Unit 6 of Connected Courses is idling around the corner, the one where we you should aim to take the topics and issues discussed previously, and use them as a guide to planning your own Connected Course. The folks in the front office and headquarters are lining up some hangouts and resources, which should be good stuff. I'd guess a lot of folks want the bolts and rivets, thats what us guys in the garage are here for. So bring your blog, site, or just questions to the shop. The shop of course is an area of the Connected Courses forums to ask questions about syndication engines and all the boxes plugins. You can tweet questions, but I almost bet the answers are way too much metal to fit into 140 characters. A few things. We will try to answer everything, but there's a lot of ground to cover, and there is going to be a wide range of experience coming in here. Our goal is to get you at least started, and confident on the road, and knowing you have a place to come back to or peers you can count on down the road. This is not something you will easily build in just two weeks. My hunch is that the DML folks are interested in a way to support a community of people building and teaching connected courses. Yep, this is just the start. And there are plenty of others out there that can also pitch in and help out others. I'd also like to be clear that the Wordpress platform, and Feed Wordpress syndication methods we use in Connected Courses (and ds106, and other sites I have done engine work on) are but one way to do this. Laura Gibbs is doing amazing stuff with Blogger and inoreader. Not every course calls for students getting their own domains. The Feed Wordpress guide I wrote up will provide a base to build your site, but it does assume you will have gotten as far as installing Wordpress, that you know how to add plugins, and can install themes. So be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get your elbows greasy. Are you ready to teach connected? Drop by the garage, and chew some fat with me and my brothers and sisters. Click, Embed, and I want to thank our staff: Director of Accounts Payable: Bill Shredder Database Programmer: Maya Esqueuel Assistant Customer Care Representative: Kurt Reply Bob Dylan Interpreter: I. Shelby Released Chairman, Restaurant Career Study Group: Art Majors Javascript Expert: Ahb Jack Notation Commencement Speaker: Gladys Overwith Photoshop Image Doctoring: Indy Layers Head of Bldgs. & Grounds: Moe D'Lawn PHP Code Supervision: Jaurez de Semicolon Director of Deep Sea Research: Marianna Trench I had first stumbled into the J-Walk Blog a while ago, and remember it as a place that is oozing with sarcasm, right there from the byline: Stuff That May or May Not Interest You Wow, a real mission statement! I had first done the J-Walk with the first of three wickedly funny fake sites below. If you have a tough time dealing with sarcasm, don't go here. The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference "Write better emails. Make more moneys." Spam University "Welcome to Spam University, the world's top-rated educational institution for the growing spam industry." Google Content Blocker "Google's mission is to organize the world's advertising for maximum exposure to Web users. Unfortunately, annoying Web content often overwhelms the page, causing many users to become distracted and overlook the ads. That's where Google Content Blocker comes in. It effectively blocks all Web site content, leaving only the advertisements." The blog posts are a mixture of odd or funny photos like the Taxidermist who does Jackalopes and other odd-ball/ weird news like Ashes to Ashes. And lastly, in the FAQ is the "fine print" Any rebroadcast, reproduction, or other use of the pictures and accounts of this blog without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited. Sanitized for your protection. Do not read while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. One size fits all. No user-serviceable parts inside. Blogger does not carry cash. No wagering. Void where prohibited by law. And how cool! Mr J-Walk is from Tucson, a fellow Zonie. cc licensed flickr photo by Marcus Ramberg I've been seeing a number of my search results this year landing on sites like WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers -- these are useful setups using a wiki based model where anyone can post a question, and then any site visitor can answer. It's a great approach. I mean, how man time have you been to s site, and looked for a help in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) only to find the Q you have is obviously not FA-ed? The problem in FAQs is that people who know the answers get to write all the questions, so they write only the ones they can think of. But in poking around these sites, I was finding a whole bunch of bizarro questions and oddball answers. There is a whole layer of microcultures in these spaces that just make be sit back in internet curiosity. This is also the lesson in that "open is as open does"... This is a legit questions, but is this the best place to ask when a rock climbing gym in Grand Rapids is open? (un-answered). My grandma had this thing called the "Yellow Pages", not sure what they did except make piles in the closet. Or there is the wide open question of How much do things cost? which of course draws the appropriate response of "well it depends on wat the thing is." (and the subtext of, "you bonehead..."). There are important queries that need to be answered, such as, "Does John Cena have a stardoll?" I have no clue who John Cena is nor what a stardoll is but it does merit its own category (and the question is answered succintly). Was it idle curiosity or term paper writing that leads one to ask, "Why did Johann Sebastian Bach write music?" though the answer is not one I'd put in a paper, well at least without not using some captial letters. There are timely questions like "Did Bernard Madoff ever act in a movie or TV show or does he just look like someone I've seen on TV before?" And there are deeply needed questions like, "What grade is junior prom in?" I'd had to be the prom date of that questioner. People seeking answers to help them get employed, like "What in your job do you feel you have done well over the past year?" -- like how is an internet audience of potential answer sources have this info?? And we are seeking answers to things like, "Where is Kent Goodman?" which comes witha a bit of Zen-like smackdown for an answer. More philosophy is put out for questions, like, "How many reruns can be reran before having to be rewound to be reran as a rerun?" Wiki answers has obviously been dealing with this as they have an extensive category of Harmless Nonsense . Now beyond all of this silliness I have culled from there can be quite a bit of useful responses, yet even less wiki-fied than Wikipedia out to be taken with a grain of web salt. But the interchange, the topics, here so much reflect the quirks we bear as humans, so its nice to see it out in public. Lastly, http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_anyone_here_a_sensible_person? What mean ye storytelling- the #etmooc version from Alan Levine Thar be slides, slides, slides, way too many slides, from a presentation I did online yesterday as part of the ETMOOC Section on Digital Storytelling. You can find resources mentioned at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/What+Mean+Ye+Storytelling and an archive is available. It was a lot crammed in. I wanted to play out the idea that as a concept, digital storytelling is something I don't focus on defining, as most definitions fail to capture the range of things we see--- in fact, they way I frame ds106 for my students is that I can't tell them what storytelling is. The whole class experience is making that a question we pursue. And more and more and more and more, I find that shifting teaching from a "I know this and will transmit it to you" is way less interesting that taking a topic or concept and pursuing it together. Gee I feel so rhizomy. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by romainguy This is the image to represent my other liekly not so novel thought- we tend to get focused on the thing as something that contains a story- the video, the web page, the sound, the GIF, the book, the movie-- I do not see the media form as the story. The story is our relation to it, what we impart to that media, the way we share an experience with others. It is between us. Media are not stories to me. A picture does not tell a story. It might launch one, or instigate one, or represent a story. But the story is between that picture of the rock and you. It might by the story of how those sailing rocks move across Death Valley (explanatory story). It might be the story of that travel from the rock's perspective or a tweet the rock might say (imagined personified story). It might be how kids play pranks and move the rocks or how they are moved by aliens from the Thorgazian Nebula (wildly fictional narrative). it might be a poem about exquisite or grand travels (metaphorical story). It might be an animated GIF of the rock sliding across the desert floor (a story of motion). I have no idea if that really makes sense or matters to people. It does to me. If you are looking for the story, or creating one, don't just feel like the media created is or even needs to be the whole story. In a fully developed complex story, e.g. a produced film, you find as many untold stories (behind the scenes making of, alternative endings, the wide open range of fan fiction), and a universe of remixes. Anyhow, I tried to spit out a variety of examples that indicate the range of story possibilities of what web based stories could be. Samplers, not fenceposts. One key method IMHO is not constraining your ideas to just the explicit features a tool might offer. I've been thumoing the drum for 5+ years, yet one of the most underutilized features of flickr every teacher can find a use for is the ability to annotate an image with hyperlinked popup notes. You can go even farther by putting hypertext links on the notes. This opens up a world of multi-pathed stories or choose your own adventure ones - I used my 50 Ways example from Dominoe's story. Another variation, and again, it happens to be flickr cause If I was Stranded on a Desert Island With Only One Web 2.0 Tool It Would be Flickr. In 2011 I tried an experiment with taking 10 Dailyshoot (predecessor to the Daily Create) prompts and each day writing a section of a story in reverse. Huh? Have you seen Memento? On January 31, 2011, my first photo was the prompt for the end of the story and each day, the photo I took and the narrative I wrote were done in reverse, until February 19, 2011 I wrote what would be the opening of the story. Right now you should be terribly confused. Just shrug it off. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe My lesson is meant to be that you can do a lot to re-interpret these digital tools and platforms in ways their designers never imagined. You are not limited to what the tool can do. You are only limited by what you imagine is possible. I did a speed run through of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I skipped through Five Card FLickr Stories since we had people in etmooc do that last week on their own. And woah did they- I see 34 created stories out of a pool of 130 photos they went out and tagged. Next, I tried something I've not done before in Collaborate, I did a screen share and we did a live run through of pechaflickr, my improv mashup of pecha kucha + PowerPoint Karaoke * random(flickr). We had volunteers from the audience take turns saying lines over the slides (Alan's not to self, a 30 second interval would have been better with slide lag). I've done this successfully in Google Hangouts and recently presented on pechaflickr using pechaflickr. I then tried to give an overview of ds106 in about 10 minutes, probably generating information whiplash and a few speed of presentation infractions. This session was a bit of an experiment for some future sessions, and I plan to parcel this back out to be separate topics. Thanks to everyone who stepped in front of the firehose, and apologize for those whom spilled Java all over their computers and got locked out. You can catch the show via free on-demand. I was pretty jazzed and fired up for having gotten 1 hour of sleep the night before, that itself a story ;-) UPDATE: Feb 14, 2013 Just came across this film short that proposes the brain science behind storytelling, and the power of a story's dual punch of distress and empathy, the latest work by the brilliant Kirby Ferguson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHeqQAKHh3M It presents a whole new way to think about the arc of a story. I've already waxed on the demise of the television I grew up with. So long. I just finished watching a funny episode of the Simpsons, but my TV is still off (actually it gets no reception); I watched Mypods and Boomsticks on Hulu which in true form, poked some fun at "Mapple", it's "MyPods" and CEO (using an underwater Jeff Han-like interface) Steve Mobs: This is hardly new, as hulu has been around a while, and there are plenty of sites to watch full shows, etc. But can you imagine the inner panic at the network television empires? Their era is gone. Over. Kaput. Adios. Yes, I know hulu cannot be seen out of the USA (I experienced that black screen in Iceland). And the AT&T ads are super cheesy annoying, but they are only 15 seconds. Maybe there is a Greasemonkey Tivo. But as far as I am concerned, the control of television networks is gone. I do not even need their devices. This is not to say I will start watching a lot of content, but I am intrigued as the disruptive nature of the net ripples seismically through the establishment. This is just the beginning. If you want to watch, below the fold is the embed (you cannot do that with your television set, eh?) (more…) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by TFDuesing I must admit that when I come across other people's flaming #FAIL tweets I experience a wave of "hey- over reaction, eh?"-- until it is I in the fiery rage of being done under by a bad consumer experience. And here is the thing, no matter how it sounds, We are in a unique time where at least for now we can have a place to voice such complaints -- and sometimes there are results (I have my own success story after fighting Canon on shoddy rebate practices). I find it utterly stunning that companies would continue practices that attempt to wear down consumer complaints with the leaden weight of their own bureacracy. So for the sake of others who might hear, or find themselves falling into the same pit, or maybe someone who has a pipeline to pursuing consumer action here in Australia. Before leaving the USA, I found many sites that offered codes to unlock my LG Thrive mobile phone, which in an ideal world, would allow me to purchase a sim card and plan here so I can use my ohone and data services while traveling abroad. I paid $10 for an unlock code from http://sim-unlock.net (who I must say does respond to questions). On arrival at Melbourne airport, I stopped at a Yes Optus store, and purchased a AU$40 sim card with unlimited phone/text/3 Gb data plan. The young lady did all the button punching to set me up, including entering the unlock codes-- the latter seemed to not work at first, but when the phone was able to make text and calls, she assured me it was all set to go. When it failed to access the web, she told me it was because of poor signal inside the terminal. I was a bit tired to think here- but a key missed step here was she never looked up my phone model to see if it would work here. Apparently unlocking a phone means squat if the host network closes its doors to phones it does not sell. So I was sold a product that would nto work with my phone. Later that afternoon at my hotel, I called Optus Pre-paid and got some technical assistance from someone who tried to walk me through the settings. Everything failed to work. I suggested it might be easier for me to take it the next day to a store. I walked a few km to the Optus store in Docklands. The woman there punched up my account and told me my phone was not compatible with their network .I did not get an answer when I asked why this was not told to me when I bought it. I asked about getting a rebate for the data plan since it was of new use to me-- she told me I would have to call Optus; it could not be done a the store. Oh, I was offered the option to buy another phone for AU$140. Scratch that. Later that afternoon, I called Optus Prepaid customer support. When I explained what happened, the first operator tried to say I should get a phone that would work on their network. When I asked to speak to a manager, the first answer was that a manager would call me back in 24-48 hours. Blood pressure rose here. "No that is not acceptable, I need to speak to a manager now". I waited on hold about 10-15 minutes. The manager who came on tried to tell me I would have to go back to the store at the airport to deal with this. He used he word "walk" -- I tried to explain the airport was far away. He then said I should go to the closest store to get a refund. I replied with incredulity that the woman I spoke to at the store told me the exact opposite, that I would have to call Optus. He went away and ostensibly contacted the store, and came back with a litany of that there was nothing that could be done, that I had a full phone plan that was good. I again explained that I was sold something that out of the box would not work here and it was not acceptable practice. The blood pressure boiled higher, and my ending was letting them know I would be calling my credit card company and disputing the purchase. I hung up. Now I come down from the angry exchange disappointed in myself for getting so angry on the phone- that obviously doe snot accomplish something, especially with the worker ants on the end of the phone. But I do feel totally screwed by Optus, and incensed that they would rather spend employee time giving me a run around, rather than doing the right thing- like even offering a $10 refund. So by following all of their internal protocol, they have earned a customer who will hold this grudge a long while, and will now tell others about this --because I can. Is that the best business practice? So my recommendation is to avoid Optus Pre-paid at all costs-- and to really ask the key questions when you try to use your phone on another country's system. And do not leave the store if the thing is not fully functional. As an example to show that this is not always the way a company can go, a few months back I bought use of the privacy service that hides your IP address when online, with the accurattely named Hidemyass.com -- it worked extremely well (and their tech support responded within minutes to an email question about setting it up on my phone), but I really only needed it for a short while. I had remembered that they offered a 30 day trial period, and when I wrote to ask for a refund since I did not need it- they did so without question or hassle. There is a night and day difference in these approaches. Yeah, in one case I got what I want and the other I did not. But also, in once case I feel completely jerked over, and the other I feel respected. Which kind of customer would your company like to ave out there? Whether I sound like an overly outrageous jerk, let it be known, I have a channel to do this on. And my channel is lit. Once more, say No to Optus Yes. Update (Dec 3, 2011) After several rounds of emails that sounded like Optus might be willing to save their reputation, I find nothing but failure. At times though it can be a little tricky, as we're not always going to have settings available for every handset available worldwide, but we will definitely do what we can to try and find them so we can pass them on. Unfortunately the handset you're using isn't one that Optus provides support for on our network so I'm unable to find suitable data settings. They kept asking me to "return my starter kit to the store" and offering to refund if I would not be using the calls function. They seem to toally miss the fact I am using the damned phone. I was asking for some renumeration for being sold a data plan that clearly does not work on the phone I brought into the country, despite that I had done my research that the handset (an LG p506) was quad band and compatible with the network here. Their clerk at the airport did not look up my model at all; if she had done so and told me I could not use the data, I would have skipped the entire purchase. The other clerk at another store said it would not work at all on their network, then their Social Media Response team says it does work but they dont know how the f**** to set it up. It's all a pile of dog crap. Again, if you bring your own phone into this country, go elsewhere then Optus. Say NO. Both Stephen and George recently pointed to this bit from Wired News: Educators Turn to Games for Help. What an idea! ... wait a minute, we took a look at Shall We Teach with a Game? back in 1994 at that time, with having our faculty review a selection of CD-ROM games for potential in new learning environments. It is good to see that MIT has caught up with our work ;-) But no, we are not crowing for "we did it first credit", but more to look at the power of small innovations that use existing content rather than big ticket projects that create glitzy, commercial game level apps. We have had some internal discussions in our our organization about a (real? perceived?) notion that our system's reputation for innovation has lost its luster. So a question is, when people think of innovation, it it only the big money projects from MIT, Microsoft, etc? Blarney. (more…) That's not only a confusing title it's seemingly something unlikely had you asked me a year ago -- "Will you in the future play guitar with a cello teacher you meet for the first time at a 200 year old mission in Tucson?" And today's meeting with Laura Ritchie ought to have been an entry in the True Stories collection. I first crossed paths online with Laura maybe in ds106 or phonar, but definitely in Connected Courses. in a short span she jumped in with blogging in her own domain and sharing some fabulous teaching and connecting as a music teacher at the University of Chichester. Her own tale of connecting with Jonathan Worth and eventually becoming part of his phonar class is its own amazing story that led to her showing up at Coventry with a truck load of cellos. But even bigger is her #Musiquality project that brings not only her, but five of her students (who raised the funds for the travel) to the US where the join students of David Preston for a performance in Yosemite (and I am likely missing a big chunk of the story). As it turns out, Laura's Mom lives in southern Arizona, so she had a short stay here in my state and asked if I was able to meet up. It's a 4 hour trip to Tucson from home, but timing worked well since I was in Phoenix Tuesday for a conference at Maricopa Community Colleges. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I'm glad she nixed my idea for a place to meet; Laura's mom suggested meeting at Mission San Xavier del bac south of Tucson. The mission was founded in 1562 by Father Kino, and the structure of "White Dove of the Desert" was started in the late 1700s (it's described as the oldest in tact European structure in America (?)). Regardless of the facts, it was a great place to meet for a few hours. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] As part of her own project, she asked to record her asking me a few questions on how I learned music. If I recall right, she's building a collection for her students to appreciate the different goals and approaches to music learning that might be different from those working towards a performance career. But she also wanted to play music together, so I had brought my guitar, she had her cello (what it takes to travel with that kind of instrument is impressive; her case does have skateboard wheels on it) [caption width="480" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] And we found a nice little courtyard on the east side of the building. Not knowing quite what t play, I suggested a simple chord progression. I honestly have little understanding of how cello playing works, and she described this free form "jamming" as something she does not frequently do, so we were both stretching. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Here's a bit of a recording, after the chords, there's fragments of BB King, Peter Paul & Mary, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and more (or less). But the best part was when she played through one of the original pieces written for her that works with a computer visualization program. [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/guitar-cello-tucson.mp3"][/audio] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Can I keep using the "amazing" word for this experience? Thanks so much Laura (and your Mom) for the hours at the Mission (and a pretty yummy taco too). Follow what she does on this trip and beyond at http://www.lauraritchie.com/. Hey! Have you heard about this new cool thing called "blogging"? Well, shucks, it looks like the folks down at Blackboard central have stumbled on to it! Innovation! Yup, with all the expertise and license bucks piled up down there, they have set up "The Blackboard Weblog" at ... Blogger.com? http://www.blackboardblog.blogspot.com/ And all those Bbig Bbad Bbroad misspellings down in Bbaltimore are intentional. Bbbbbbbbbloggin' Have fun with this one, James! So Dean Share(ski) is tired of tired phrases and acronyms Dude! I submitted the perfect zen like comment for him, twice, and his blog ate it twice (the second time wising up and composing it in a text editor), so here it is sent directly from The 'Berry LOL, peeps, that's a great blog you wrote today. That being said, I was enjoying some coff and cold za when I caught this in my PLN. At this point in time, I am working it into my Web2.0 slideshow for my preso on 21st Century Learning/Skills cya l8r down in The Jaw And for Jen in the comments, I shall never relinquish 'Amazing' "Library" and "Gaming" were words that you likely saw rarely paired years ago. I was a library junkie as a kid, loved wandering stacks, walking out with piles of books, but it's hard to shake the imprint that it was a place were the main noises you heard were were "Shhhhh" not "boing!" It's hardly news to hear of a public library experimenting game setups to attract people to come, stay, be part of a library. A google on "public Library" and "wii" brings in.. oh... 383,000 results (no I have not looked at them all!). Is that astounding or ordinary? Is that yet another one of those fun measures I like to use to suggest the scale of the size of the net? I had a fabulous time in at the "Gaming in Libraries'" session of the Midwest Library Technology Conference, where they not only talked about games, they let us play. It's more than a Field of Dreams approach, just tossing games into a room; I have worked with, read about, and heard from those clever librarians who design activities, resources that do what librarians do so well, put information in context for us. This is not even meant as a post to ponder the implications, more of an observation I had a few weeks ago when I stopped by the Isabelle Hunt Memorial Public Library in Pine, Arizona -- the closest town (3 miles) with a gas station (actually 2) and a market (1) to where I live. The population of Pine is likely a bit over 2000, and the library is a real gem. Housed in this tiny building is a diversity of books, magazines, videos, audio books, community resources, computers connected to the internet, and a gung ho team of librarians that politely fall over themselves to help you. And darned if on my last visit there, they had re-arranged the checkout racks of DVDs to make room for a single Wii station! Yep, this little library has got Wii. Cue the folk music, Pete... Where have all the bloggers gone? Long time passing. Where have all the bloggers gone? Long time ago. Where have all the bloggers gone? Spammers have picked them ev'ry one. Oh, when will you ever learn? Oh, when will you ever learn? My RSS reader stays pretty grey these days. Many of the past everyday reads of edubloggers seems to have sputtered out. The Davids's, Carter-Tod, Davies, and Wiley are rather infrequent, maybe off chasing Goliaths. James is on "hiatus." Even my buddies D'Arcy and Brian seem to be busy off doing non-blogging. Maybe they have moved on to Wiki-ville. To be honest, it takes a major sort of OCD behavior to keep at this (unless one wins on blogging for dollars blogging activity. Unless you have the energy and reach of Stephan, the sheer volume of links as Bruce, the internal drive of Will, or the meglomania of Dave the Magnificent, how long can you keep the pace of blogging before imploding? It appears, with some rough guestimation, that it takes about a year before a regular eduBlogger reaches the burn-out point.... which means I have about 3 months left in the gas gauge before I start to f-a-d-e away. Seriously, it calls into question how the practice of blogging will sustain, or is the norm that there will be waves of new passionate bloggers on the speed curve, and the waning decline of the seasoned writers? What will become of this litter of un-maintained blogs, proliferating Google-dom? Does it mean we get more echo blogging (direct regurgitation of news from elsewhere) and less original writing? What can it mean for educators who have high hopes of students keeping up a regular blog pace? What does it mean the blogging is now a staple of schlock marketing outfits??? I have no idea except my blog clock is ticking. Now for the refrain.. Where have all the bloggers gone? Long time writing. Where have all the bloggers gone? Long time Pyra. Where have all the bloggers gone? They've gone and got a real life. Oh, when will I ever learn? Oh, when will I ever learn? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Like this tulip, lingering languidly long after its prime, I am giving up the 473 day photo string of participating in the Daily Shoot. After 15 months of being faithful, I am giving it a rest. Part of it is just not feeling the drive or stretch to complete the assignments, which, frankly is making me feel hypocritical considering I have been using it as an example of successful informal learning. But like others, I am feeling a bit of weariness with the repetition of recent assignments: April 24, 2011, #524" "Make a photograph that features the horizon" March 27, 2011, #497: "The horizon can be a strong composition element. Make a photograph that emphasizes the horizon today." and at least twice more in the older history Or: April 21, 2011, #522: "Make a photograph that features water today." March 9, 2011, #497: Make a photograph that features water in one way or another today. Also used for number 9, number 51, and number 293.... And I am contradicting my own post from last month, where I suggested the repeats were really best seen as a reason to ratchet up the creativity, even take it in an opposite direction: Keep in mind that just because YOU did the assignment once, does not mean some new person has. Keep in mind that you can interpret the assignment in a radically different way. It is a challenge, right? I urged people to take action, if they don't like the assignments, to submit some new ones. In one day, I submitted 10, and noticed the id number of the returned URL was above 400. That says to me that a lot of people have submitted ideas. But I can barely remember the last time I say a user submitted assignment come through the queue. Now, the folks running the site are busy, professional photographers, and perhaps, running this little sideline has become a chore. Yet, I feel they are making a social media mistake of not even responding to comments, tweets, more or less ignoring the participants. The last blog post was January 12, 2011. If they need help keeping the energy going, I think they ought to reach out to their activists. While one hand it feels a bit childish to expect communication and feedback, there cannot help but be a sense of loss when a network you participate in ignores you. And at some point, people ignore shrug their shoulders and focus elsewhere. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Jillian Corinne I am quitting the dailyshoot, though it has been a powerful experience and example I fall back on as a key approach to motivation and learning- that we learn by doing, redoing, again and again. And I am going to still do photography on a daily basis, but will rely on my own inventiveness for the subjects. Daily photography still is the creative obsession I hook into. Just going my own way with it. I prefer not knowing exactly how flickr picks photos to be in it's explore featured area. It just sort of happens. I know when either there is a weird spike in activity or you get the norice that your photo has been added to the In Explore group. I've had a few get in there, and it's never quite the ones I would pick. It's a mystery machine. A weird thing happened the other night. Two of my photos were picked from my most recent batch, how does that happen? See if you can figure which are mine (when I get a notification of the In Explore group I try to grab a screen shot right away because they move off the top fast). [caption id="attachment_65092" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Two screens worth of the In Explore Group, two are mine![/caption] The stuff I read suggests that you only get one per day. Besides the bee in the image above, is there a bug in explore? So these are the two: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2017/365/265 Spell My Name! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Mmm Good flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Now it does fit the Explore description in that these are the last two photos I posted that day. But they really were more snapshots, taken with my iPhone. The top one I did give more attention to framing, trying to get the spelling of the dog cookies in adjacent to Felix's gaze in the corner. But the bottom one? just snapped. If I was more attentive I would have moved the chair leg you see in the bottom right. But here is a more curious thing, look at the stats on the photos: [caption id="attachment_65093" align="aligncenter" width="760"] flickr stats on first explored picture[/caption] [caption id="attachment_65094" align="aligncenter" width="760"] flickr stats on the second explored photo[/caption] The views and faves numbers are almost identical. Why? I think the first photo is much better. My wild guess is that the most of activity among flickr explore is people go through fast and view/favorite everyone, like it's part of playing the game of garnering attention. Does that make the numbers less meaningful? Is that plausible? I'm more curious that anything. Getting explore is a treat. No, the real treat was the whole story behind the photo. Those lovely dog treats came as a surprise package from a colleague I collaborated on a workshop in August. Look at those custom treats she sent, home made! Happy Felix. No mystery there, that was a wonderful gift. Featured Image: "Why is the Suitcase Out?" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I did not know my wails of despair were heard by by co-habitant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh7YcR_U-2Y I started my campaign a month ago asking for stories of connection, and a few did come in. I saw more tweets and retweets than stories, and even enlisted Bugs Bunny to the cause. Well I do have 13, peeking way down to the bottom of the optimism in the partly full cup. And to those folks -- Aaron, Greg, Mariana, Laura Ritchie, David, Heather, Kevin, Claudia, Kathy, Andy, Cathy, Teresa, Dean, and Alyson -- Mazel Tov. I have heard from a bunch of people and I guess it's still not clear what I want. Or maybe there are no more stories left. But to me people are making it much more complex than it need be. Turn on the mobile video camera and talk to it like you are in conversation with a buddy, just a natural voice, and telling them about something unexpected via a connection on the internet. I'm not gonna go around begging and nagging. I put out an ask, I get a response, and then I reflect on what comes and as well as speculate why it's so hard for people to do this. Hopefully Feldspar's explanation is better than mine. Around the 3rd or 4th week in September I will be compiling what I have into a video keynote for the K12 Online Conference in mid October. But even then, I will always add them to the site at any time. Listen to Feldspar, ok (his real first name is "Plagioclase") Top /featured image credit: a frame from a video I made myself, in my own house, with my own stuffed animal. That's attribution, eh? Northern Voice Emergency Warning by cogdogblog posted 26 Feb '08, 12.26pm MST PST on flickr The signs at UBC needed some updates One more NV thing- I loved the explicit warnings in the UBC auditorium for Fire and Earthquake, but felt there were not enough warnings for Northern Voice. (edited in flickr with picnik) cc licensed flickr photo shared by michael.heiss Given the rising tide/trend of electronic books, for a number of months I've been pondering how to make our NMC publications available in an ebook format. With the push of an iThing it looked like ePub was the format to aim for. It is after all, a standard (or is it a guideline). My experience suggests it is a muddy place, much depends on the devices that access the content (oi the browser wars of the 1990s), but this is a stream of what I've figured out so far. I will pre-amble that I have almost no expertise in this- its just what I figured out by head-banging attempts to produce an ePub. I'll foreshadow the hint that I am excited about the just released Anthologize tool for generating electronic texts but it's too early to tell on that one. First, I tried a number of the various tools that offered to convert a PDF to an ePub -e.g. ePubBud. I can say that you get "something" you can view at the end, but its really not optimal on format, layout- you don't get much in the options to customize, so its a crapshot whether it does a decent job. That is because under the hood- what an ePub file really is is not a file at all, but a container of files, many of them XML, and all the "content" portions of your ePub are structured HTML, or XHTML. So anything that attempts to "convert" your PDF must make guesses as to what are headers, where are breaks, etc, and who knows what it does with things like lists and links. I learned the most from the excellent tutorial "How to Create an ePub By Hand" which clearly illustrates many of the moving parts in an ePub, and provides a template to start with. Harrison Ainsworth's Epub Format Guide is another great reference (and is also available as an ePub). So what you end up doing is a lot of hand coding of XML and XHTML files, package it up with a few other key files in a zip, and than just change the file extension from ".zip" to ".epub" If you are leaping ahead like I did and think you can take that DRM sprinkled ePub, swap its file extension to .zip, and pry open to peek at the structure-- good luck. You get a *.cpgz file which when you uncompress-- gives you another version of the original zip, endless circle (well not exactly true, I just found the unix command line "ditto -xk source.zip " which seemed to pop it open, but thats just a detail- have not tried it yet with a dl-ed epub). While embarking down this manual path, I also asked our publication designer, who does use inDesign to generate our documents, to experiment with its ability to export ePub. I've not hear much, but he was unable to even get a simple test file going, and as is, this would require recasting of his templates and styles to get something ePub-able. I also got connected (thanks Phil Long) with someone who does this as a business - and found out on that end, they doe a ton of work doing it the manual way to get a template that works, and then get to the point of more automation in generating the content. I thought this would be pretty easy to do for our NMC Horizon Reports since I already re-publish them in WordPress format (see http://wp.nmc.org/) so I already have the content in HTML. It took a little bit of tidying to get clean XHTML- changing extensions to .xhtml, closing some tags properly, adjusting local links, changing the HTML headers to: The tricky part was packaging the files up. The instructions indicate that the special mimetype file should not be compressed, and must be the "first added to the zip". I had no luck getting this to work on a Mac, and even on a PC using WinZip, with everything as stated, I could not get the file to validate using the ThreePress validator-- it kept saying the first file in the zip was not 8 characters long (meaning it was not finding "mimetype" first. Crap. I was in a corner. I looked at other apps- Calibre is very handt for converting between eBook formats, and allows some modifications of the various settings (setting a cover image, editing the metadata) but what I really sought was something that was more of a full fledged ePub editor. And than I found maybe not the Holy Grail, but for me, what turned out to be pretty Grail-ish - eCub by Julian Smart. It is cross platform and free! eCub is a cross-platform tool for creating EPUB and MobiPocket books. EPUB is become a popular e-book standard and is open and free for all to implement. EPUB files can be read by MobiPocket, Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Stanza, the Sony Reader, and many other readers and applications. MobiPocket books can be read on desktop platforms, mobile platforms and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. eCub offers a convenient way to import text and XHTML files and create all the necessary components of an EPUB file. It makes it easy to view and edit files, and check the generated EPUB, using external tools. It can also generate audio files from your book content using eSpeak and other text-to-speech software. A wizard allows you to create a new project in seconds, with options for generating a table of contents, a cover page, and a title page. You can create a simple cover design image using templates and a simple design tool. Then you can compile, check and try out the EPUB at the click of a button. With eCub, I simply made a new project, and was able to import my directory of xhtml files. The file tool allows me to change the order, and even to edit them if needed: There are a number of settings panels that pretty much take care of the grunt work of generating the content.opf and other XML files the ePub needs, plus it adds the meta data. It has templates you can use to generate a cover, but I just went for the simple of the same cover image from our publications. I went a few rounds of edits (mostly tweaking the XHTML for some formatting errors) with the ThreePress ePub validator to get all but one error cleared there (it seems to be saying the format for my publication date is invalid, but I cannot see any issue there). So here is 2010-Horizon-Report.epub (236k) a test version of an ePub equivalent of the 2010 NMC Horizon Report (web version) This is a draft version, yadda yadda, small type legal mumbo jumbo, batteries not included, your mileage will vary... But the test was in seeing how it worked. The desktop version of Stanza was sad, as it seemed to ignore all formatting, and produced a river of text. I have to say the iBooks app in the iPad looks and acts the best so far. I like how my own publication sits in the shelf The downside is of course, the jump rope of having to get stuff there via iTunes sync. Also, mysteriosuly enough, with ePub files sent my mail or even when accessed in DropBox, iBooks is never offered as a helper app for opening ePub files. But in iBooks, this version works in a lovely manner- it displays using the simple styles I made for headers, the hyperlinks to internal and external URLs all work, the table of contents and other bits work great. Stanza too displayed the content reasonably (though it ignored my own style sheet), but did all of the lists, bold, italics as it should: However, the hyperlinks in the generated Table of Contents as well as internal ones went nowhere. In some searching (I cannot locate the exact location now, but thought it was here)... I found out to get Stanza hyperlinks to work, you actually have to press and hold the link at least 2 seconds. I think that is "the fix is in progress" statement here. So I have an ePub proof done, and tested it small scale. I don't have access to other readers, and assume I might have to run it through Calibre to generate versions that will work with other eReaders (which has my scratching my head over the concept of "standard"). With eCub and my content already in formatted HTML I should eb able to convert a number of our other documents more easily. In the end, creating an ePub is far from easy. I would think there is a ton of room for someone to create a better kind of application to generate ePub files and more than the quick and slap conversions, but a full fledged editor. And most ideally, I am hopeful the just off the code press Anthologize will be a viable option, which might be the best since our content already exists in WordPress. It does require a little bit of server sized tweaking (re-compiling PHP to include the ZIP extension). This is really an early stage for ePub-- there are some interesting possibilities of JavaScript ePub readers perhaps making it possible to embed/integrate ePub with other web content. Then there is the headier stuff, since ePub can allow for scripts and object tags, for Interactivity in ePub. Definitely the folks at ThreePress are doing a lot with this leading edge -- see http://blog.threepress.org/. And that's all I know for now! Talk About WordPres Fan Boy by cogdogblog posted 16 Aug '08, 1.24am MDT PST on flickr How cool to have dinner with ma.tt Mullenweg and satisfy my WordPress fanboy moment Wish me luck tomorrow, I present first on the schedule (rumor is there is actually a schedule for WordCamp). A fun evening meeting people who work for Automattic-- the people who make WordPress happen live all over the country, world, and manage the whole flat, distributed company quite nicely. Matt also mentioned what should be a wild presentation tomorrow on "Crazy Horse" a radical prototype of a new WP interface. And what a bush with fame- chatted with Ben Huh, the dude behind I Can Has Cheezburger et al and he shared some details on a new wacky site coming on line Monday. Funny, he said to me, "I think I recognize you from your photo on the WordCamp site" "Dude, my icon is a dog!" Oh did we laugh. I Can Has I Can Has Cheezburger Dude. Enough picture posting, I have to slash some slides to stuff my talk into a 20 minute slot. I have a pent for photography. It was the last elective I took as an undergrad, and if it were earlier, I would have taken a different career path. Blogging is great, but there are some neat niches for other flavors. Take "photo blog". I recently stumbled along via legendary web designer Jeffrey Veen this nifty new site, Buzznet, a free site where you can create your own photoblog (here's mine). At Brian's suggestion, I had been playing with Fotolog where you can upload one image per day, build a collectiion, collect comments, and create dynamic links to other fotologs (mine). It was a wonderful international flavor with photos being posted from all over Europe, South America, etc. But Buzznet has a bunch of other features I am liking a bit more. First, you can upload 10 images per day. It can automatically create a slide show. You can post new items via email and via photo capable cell phones. But here is the best... Buzznet provides an RSS feed that you can use in another with thumbnails of your latest photos-- see the newly added feature to this blog's side bar. Now this is fine for creating collections of the photos, and I may toss some more up now and then... but I am thinking of what would it take to get some of our art teachers interested in this? Students can create online portfolios of art work (not just photo students), other students can comment online, and best yet, an instructor could create a page that includes the RSS feeds so they can "monitor" what their students are doing from one screen. For that matter, science students might be able to publish photos of say an experiment, or service learning students could document their community work, or..... [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 I flipped to Academia.edu after reading one blogger referring to it as "Facebook for Academia" and while it has a few FB-like features (updates) I could not think of a more opposite description for a social network. My analysis here is admittedly first impressions and shallow ;-) What it seems to provide is a social networking for faculty, to find academics with common research interests, to browse by departments and roles. The structure is a rigid tree. There is "universities" at the top that you scroll or navigate horizontally by name, departments underneath, followed by and orderly listing of people by roles, faculty in top, then post-docs, then... I have a gut level negative response to an org chart structure which feels as 18th century as can be, and some of this in the midst of thinking about the discussions of networks and chaos theory in the ongoing Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. Is a fixed tree really the forward looking network shape of academia? Is this the future looking way of thinking about academia? And then beyond that, look at what "academia" is defined at the top search box... Academia = universities only There are no colleges in academic.edu; no community colleges, not art institutes, no research centers... Certainly no space for Stephen Downes or any other independent, un-affiliated educational researches who lacks the proper insignia and elbow patches to get in the tree.. So none of my former colleagues at the Maricopa Community Colleges who were actively engaged with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning are allowed inside. This was a program directly affiliated with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching -- which I would consider as rather "academic". Oh yes, because the Carnegie Foundation is not a University, does that mean its members cannot be part of the forest? I guess one could simply add an organization as there is a link there. And there are some 6000+ academics sitting in their perches of tree branches. And maybe I am just taking cheap pot shots as someone obviously has put a lot of work into this site and concept. But, to me, and who am I but a lowly Non-Academic. Academia = universities only is a walled garden. No, not much a garden, it is a walled forest of sterile trees. I like it better out here in the jungle. Where the wild things are. Here's another episode where Alan Discovers Something That Has Been Out A While and Maybe Everyone Else Calls it Old News but..... This morning I was doing a Google Image search (more often these days I am using the advanced options to filter out images licensed for re-use) and was surprised/curious about what I saw at the bottom of the results: Google Social Search was rolled out in October but I missed that one. From what I saw, it's not only pulling media from your "social circle" but also from things and people they create or link to. A lot of people write about New York, so if I do a search for [new york] on Google, my best friend's New York blog probably isn't going to show up on the first page of my results. Probably what I'll find are some well-known and official sites. We've taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today's launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend's blog on the results page under the heading "Results from people in your social circle for New York." I can also filter my results to see only content from my social circle by clicking "Show options" on the results page and clicking "Social." Yes, Uncle Google, your favorite Borg, is now mining your contacts and links in your Google profile. More info here.... Check it out, every Google user has a social circle at http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcircle where mine revealed: This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results. It is based on a combination of the following: * Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (32) * Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile (259) such as Twitter and FriendFeed * Secondary connections (3899) that are publicly associated with your direct connections This and a whole bunch of more ways to filter your search results are there under the "options" link that I've been ignoring for months. So if I do a search on Arizona Place Names, I can drill into my social search using the options link: And from those results, I can filter down to the social connections of one person listed in my "circle". I'm not sure how I might use this, but its one of those little cards to file away in your deck of web tricks. Okay, none of y'all are dog enough to step up to the digital a story a day in may task, but this dog is going for the full ride. There is so much to choose from in the ds106 assignments submitted by participants, and if that is not enough, there is some place with like 30 or 40 tools you can use. For today, while sitting on a train from Vermont to the Largish Apple, I sat admiring the wet landscape, and decided to return to one of the most creative assignments (and made by a UMW student)- making a story from the titles of songs in an audio playlist. I had done this before, so I upped it a bit by pulling small bits from each song to go along with the flow. Being here on the road, and thinking about the longer trip ahead this summer, here is Stay/Go/Road Stay/Go/Road Playlist Story powered by Fotopedia Our romance started in March, 2004, although I had been seeing someone else- it was this activity we had in common, then I called it Photoblogging. But then I met... flickr. It was, and in many ways still does, to me reppresent the first and foremost social medua experience, even if everyone else wants to hang out at the mall. And we survived the stormy year where she went off and moved from Vancouver chasing fame and perhaps mis fortune in California . But you know love has a cost (no it is not that kind of relationship), but flickr does have her annual needs. Today I renewed my annual Flickr Pro account. Since then I have had 9 years invested in this relationship (summoning Lorne Green "That's about 65 for you and me"): Since we started dating, this relationship with flickr has cost me $191.47 or $21.27 per year or 6 cents per day. She is holding for me 28,350 photos, meaning it costs me $00.0068 per photo. Or in other currencies, I could buy a Tall cup of starbucks in lieu of uploading 272 photos. But this is not a relationship based on money or coffee even. My stats have shown spikes of daily views over 2000 in the last year. Thats small compared to big flickr stars but to me it is pretty Amazing Cool. But its not about numbers even. It's the crazy serendipity when you meet someone who commented on your photo at a workshop in Tasmania. Or how a photo of a pile of logs leads you to meeting a valuable colleague who happens to make hand made pens. I could go on and on. But flickr to me has been one of the most important in the way, to me, the internet operates as serendipity catalyst. It does not cause serendipity (because it is not really a thing) but creates the conditions in which it can occur. It creates the potential for serendipity. And if you do not want any serendipity in your life, then by all means DO NOT OPENLY SHARE ANYTHING! KEEP YOUR IDEAS AND CREATIONS OFF OF THE INTERNET. Make it hard to find, lock it behind password and paywalls, and then you will be safe from having anything amazing wonderful happen to you. Flickr, we still got a thing going. I hope you are in it for the long haul cause I am. PS: With some irony the creative commons flickr photo used above "Love Like a Card Game", is no longer even on flickr- but it resides on fotopedia. Love lost. Love found. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by psd It's sweetly ironic that despite the almost consistent reprisal of "RSS being dead" maybe that's in terms of outward perception. Down at the bowels of the systems of internet flow, and I see plenty of it in highly functional action via my own small corner of it. Since really far back in ? 2002 ? when I first came across this notion of Really Simple Syndication (which to me says much more than "RDF Site Summary", it remains to me, that most magical glue of the web after the hyperlink. And as Martin Hawksey eloquently summarizes it one can say the aggregation/syndication layer is what may, at not only a technical, but a design/philosophical level, distinguish the (ahem here come scare quotes) "tsunami" of interest (I called it hysteria) of the Ginormously Massive 100K Online (and we can punch the Open part soon) Courses (edUCKA = edX + Udacity + Coursera + Khan + eventually Perason) as coined with great glee by Cathy Finn-Derecki with the ones being forgotten largely in the Atlantic, the New York Times- the cMOOCs of yore (c being for Connectivism, and more irony and chagrin for the orignators, that the first one where the name was applied CCK08 is offline), EC&I831, CCK08, PLENK,ds106. And while I plan to talk about the syndication architecture of mainly ds106, where I have had the most experience, I am seeing now a more clearer distinction (besides the fact the funding for xMOOCs exceed cMOOCs by about.. $100 million) between these in first what is a technical distinction but also as mention above a design one. x and c At a grossly simplified level, it's about where the locus of learner activity happens. In the xMOOCiverse, learners have to go to a central place, several of them behind what they see as an open door (free registration) but really is not open going back out. Learners go TO Coursera, Code Academy, etc, login, get their content, lectures, practice activity, engage in discussion forums, but its all inside the Big House. None of the content, activities is syndicated back outward, there are no live feeds of activities, no APIs to tap into a data flow. I'm not even sure if you get a sense as to what your learning peers are doing in there. This is what scales- mass production from a central distributer. Now in a cMOOC space, it is "˜distributed, chaotic, emergent' because learners produce their work, publish their own thoughts or projects in their own space- be it self hosted blogs, free hosted blogs, social media sites- it is distributed through the network. And it is the magic, power, and (to me elegant) simplicity of syndication technology that the cMOOCc subscribes to, aggregates, re-organizes, and re-publishes. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Orin Zebest This can scale, though I think we have shown that ds106 does so in a fractal sense, but maybe not quite insanely to the 100k level. But you want to know what kind of model this system is? It's the soul of the internet. As Martin summarizes-- The "˜distributed, chaotic, emergent' comes from a recent presentation by George Siemens for EDUCAUSE talking about cMOOCs. It's apparent from the survey of MOOC technology that course teams are taking a loosely joined set of tools that they are comfortable with to facilitate a shared experience with the learner. As commented by Downes when writing about gRSShopper "the users are assumed to be outside the system for the most part, inhabiting their own spaces, and not mine". It's also apparent that people are taking discipline based approaches using tools aligned to study areas as previously described with PHONAR/PICBOD Even with the bespoke nature of MOOCs there are still opportunities to start collectively raiding the parts bin. Given the widespread use of Twitter in MOOCs are there tools/techniques required to aggregate and disseminate the course discussions? Given the wide use of WordPress within education are there opportunities for MOOC specific themes or plugins? With the ability to freely record and stream video from a Google Hangout do we need a wrapper to allow comment collection and annotation? Now I could (and might) toss in some sketched diagrams with circles and lines, but to try and go simply- As learners produce their ownmaterial in their own chosen spaces, the updates to what they do can be transmitted automatically (ahem, bow to whatever direction Dave Winer is at and praise RSS). The aggregation of this content is achieved in the tools we have used (Wordpress platforms and Feedwordpress plugin) or the gRSShopper system designed by Stephen Downes. What these do is more than just bring it all in, but through inspection of tags, media types, and likely a lot of intriguing database gymnastics, can more or less republish, reproduce it in many forms. I suspect gRSShopper does this as well, but what I have respected for a while is that the ds106 tool of aggregation also gives us a local (e.g archived) copy of the original content- in publishing it back out, we reference te original, but having an archive says we have the stuff if the blog author removes their site (ahem, that is a Bad Thing, every time you break an URL, Tim Berners-Lee cries out in pain) (I wince as well). One difference in the ds106 approach, and I am waffle on if there ever will be a definitive reasons to go either way, is that comments on content from original sites are made inside a gRSShopper powered site, while at ds106, the comments live at the original sites and we do whatever is possible to syndicate those in as well (the hitch being not all sites provide that functionality). On one hand it brings what might be a fragmented conversation together (gRSShopper sites), but as an individual publisher, I totally prefer comments being at the level of my posts. But at the end of the day, be it gRSShopper, the Wordpress/Feedwordpress set up use for ds106- it is this aggregation/syndication of externally hosted content that makes for the networked effect. It is not quite of the realm of possibility of xMOOCs to develop something similar (heck with $60,000,00o, one can do a lot of things). Will they? I don't know. Resyndicating Syndication in ds106 But that's just the beginning for us at ds106, because we actually resyndicate that archived content out to our other sites to do some Really Cool Stuff. And it has to do with another pet favorite technology, tags. When we add a new feed to ds106, we bring in all the tags that come with the original content (internally in FeedWordpress we assign them all to Wordpress Categories), but we are able to add our own system tags. This provides us some ways to slice and dice stuff. So if we know that a group or class is doing ds106 together, we can add a tag for that group, and be able to create subviews of activity by say, Jim's Spring 2012 section of ds106, my Spring 2012 section of ds106, Michael Branson Smith's class at York College, Scott Lockman's Cyberspace and Society class at Temple University in Japan etc. We also started tagging the contributions all the open online participants as well, as oft requested my Lisa M Lane. And you know what? That alone gives a basic re-syndication link that anyone can use (through the beauty of Wordpress, just add /feed to the end of any of the URLs above, e.g. http://ds106.us/tag/yorksp12/feed/) That's just the beginning, and here is the brilliance of Martha Burtis for the way she crafted the ds106 Assignments Collection. On its own, this resource where people can add new assignments is fantastic. But what Martha added is a clever idea that builds a new layer on the syndication structure by a means to where we can attach the actual examples that people have done. FWIW as of this moment, the collection includes 397 assignments and links to 3804 examples created for them. It took me a few weeks of tinkering in the code to really see what was magic. Each assignment has two tags to identify it, let's say the Say it Like Peanut Butter Visual assignment one of our more popular ones and one of the first, where people are tasked with creating an animated GIF from a movie sequence. If ds106 subscribes to your blog, all you have to do is add two tags to your post for us to connect to it. There is a general tag of VisualAssignments for the general category of kind of assignment, and a unique one that links it to this particular one say VisualAssignments2 (Yes wordpress fans, those integers at the end of the tags are post IDs, technically custom post-type ids, and you can see how old an ID this assignment was). When began looking at easy to optimize the code, I first wondered, why two tags? One could easily parse the category from the specific one without too much PHP sweat. But that is not the real purpose of the general tag. You see, the Assignments site gets its content by subscribing itself to the main ds106 site for each of the assignment types (Visual, Design, Audio, Video, etc), and looking specifically for feeds like http://ds106.us/category/VisualAssignments/feed/ - so what we are doing is re-syndicating via Feedwordpress what we are syndicating via ds106. This means that ds106 is the primary entry for the syndication input, but we are able to add other site capabilities by being able to parse the syndicated content on its inbound tags. We even went farther on this track with the 2012 Summer class for ds106, with our Camp theme, we saw it as interesting to run ds106 from its pwn web site, Camp Magic Macguffin. Participants still regustered their profiles and blogs at the main ds106 site, the hub, but with even more tagging we were able to do things like: Re-syndcate all posts for anyone participating in camp to the new site (feeds we tagged magicmacguffin) Create views for just UMW students (feeds we tagged umwsum12), and also have their own RSS feed Create views for just our open online participants (feeds we tagged openonline) Create views for just our volunteer group leaders, our camp counselors (feeds we tagged counselor) Create views, RSS, OPML links for our groups which are mixes of UMW and open participants, Bunkhouses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and X (feeds we tagged bunk1, bunk2, etc) I wrote a custom script to generate a dynamic OPML file based on the current subscriptions for the bunkhouse group, as well as an up to the minute listing of all the blogs we had coming into Camp Magic Macguffin site (79 blogs total). Martha created the templates so we could have the custom pages for each group, each with their own widget sidebar. So if you follow the path pf one participant say it is UMW student Chanda, but she produces all her work at http://chanda0703.org/ That feed is syndicated into the main ds106 site, but with the tags applied, her content goes to the front page of the Magic Macguffin site (via the tag umwsep12), the subset of views for UMW students (via the tag umwsep12), and her bunk group (tag bunk2). And anything she tags for assignments goes into the examples listed just for the assignments she did (I want to work on a way to list all assignments doen by an individual, add that to my list). Do you see the beauty here? Through one main syndication hub, ds106, we can re-syndicate, slide, dicem filter and even syndicate out again. What this is again is very 'distributed, chaotic, emergent' (again think of the underlying structure of internet packet switching) versus the one size fits all massive design of the xMOOCs. Okay. This is the nuts and bolts, let's step back. Syndicating UMW Blogs / UMW.edu This is all part of the arc of activity at UMW (of which I am a late grabber on-er) which goes from the Bluehost Experiment to UMW Blogs (and to the UMW web site) and what is going to blow your socks right off your feet, the new A Domain of Ones Own project. UMW Blogs is a rich petri dish of aggregation as it is a single, but large instance of a Wordpress multi site. Anyone with an umw.edu address can login via their campus credentials and create any number of blog sites. Feedwordpress is in the mix, so internally, there are a number of classes where students blog individually, but like ds106, their work is also aggregated to a class blog. But they also do it in multi-layers as we do in ds106. So for example, I helped Andi Smith set up a Feedwordpress powered sites for her July 2012 course HISP 470 Preservation Abroad- Paris where her students are blogging their experiences studying art. culturem and architecture in Paris. The students had their choice to use UMWblogs or any other service (a number used tumblr, do we get the idea of open or what?), and are doing simple post aggregation at the main site. What is clever is that since these travel abroad programs are common at uMW and often involve students blogging their experience, is there is "mother blog" of all tis activity, UMW Study Abroad. This site aggregates posts from various blogs UMW students are using to chronicle their study abroad experience. The posts in this blog link back to the original post on the students' blogs, and we encourage you to click on the title of a blog post here to visit the students' blog and comment on their adventures. Alternatively, below there's a list of contributors to this blog, click on one of the several links to visit a student's blog. One more time, resyndicating syndicated content- students blog their experiences in their own spaces, they are aggregated to a class blog, and then aggregated again to a larger group. This is now poised to syndicate even farther on the UMW.edu site.... Now here is a case of largely un-heralded brilliance in an institutional use of open source software. Cathy Finn-Derecki and her colleague Curtiss Grymala have built the most amazing wordpress site no one knows about. The entire UMW.edu university web site is run in Wordpress. Is that done anywhere else? (I found University of Arkansas Little Rock, probably a few more out there) Institutions usually shell out big bucks for content management system driven institutional sites; Cathy and Curtis have done deftly and beautifully this with open source tools, coding and sharing their own back to the community. Run an enterprise site with "just a blogging" tool (isn't that just for diaries?). Different organizational offices, departments, each run their own site within the UMW multi-site. (yes, indeed 'distributed, chaotic, emergent'). I was musing a few weeks back to Jim that what seemed to be missing from the department pages was a sense of aggregating the blogging being done (or that should be done) by not only students, but faculty and staff. ALl the syndicating power we've played with in ds106 could make these sites hubs of their own. I should have known, Cathy and Curtiss are working on it ;-) And not only that, they are designing structures for individuals to have their own aggregation hubs for blogs, social media. etc. Now I sit back and wonder what could be done with some tagging of the inbound feeds and doing some more aggregation and internal re-syndicating... Jim is already there! 400+ Domains Will Flower The next evolution is going to be grounded in even more invidualized publication via the revolutionary A Domain of One's Own project (it defies acronyms). This is an extension based on experience in ds106, Zack Whalen's past classes, etc at UMW where students went out and purchased their own domains and web hosting accounts to house their work. With the support of CIO Justin Webb (coolest name ever for a CIO) and the Division of Information Technolgoy Services, this is going to provided free, and managed, to 400 students in a pilot that has already started, based on the awesome experimentation, organization, planning by our one Tim Owens. A Domain of One's Own is a new pilot project from the University of Mary Washington and a collaborative effort between the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and the office of Information Technology Services. This pilot will give 400 students and faculty their own domain name and web space to install a portfolio of work or map to existing systems. Content from coursework in the pilot will be aggregated here, as well as an exploration of aggregating the work students are creating directly to umw.edu. We believe this pilot project will give students the flexibility to build out their "e-portfolio" using a variety of software and approaches in a space that gives them the power to easily migrate and transport that data when they graduate. We're excited about the possibilities and will continue to update everyone on the project right here at umwdomains.com as the pilot unfolds. In all ways, this is the evolution of the ideas that Jon Udell was talking about in 2006 or so and recently he wrote up in Wired Cloudline, where he links back to an EDUCAUSE session in 2007... as nudged by Jim, I recently traveled back in time to sit in that room. Why We Love Jon Udell cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Among more unsung technical heroes of our age is Jon Udell. Early pioneer in computer and network infrastructure and what came to be what we call social media, he is really one of the most advanced thinkers of the broad picture of especially syndication technologies. He's had a strong connection to our circles back to 2006, and brought his visions to UMW at the 2006 Faculty Academy. In internet time, that was the early Ordovician era ;-) (geologist joke...) There is much to summarize, but relevant to this long winded post I am struck by his vision of what he described as the "Awareness Network" [This is] what happens when your involved with a group of people who are both publishing their own work and subscribing to one another's. The flow that happens in that kind of environment is remarkable. This is bit of Jon I have always subscribed to, his notion of "narrating the work we do." In 2007, Jon was advocating the uber accumulating of everything a person does as "hosted life bites"- but more importantly his vision of this being not only in the cloud, but a permeable, open cloud: This digital archive of myself is not attached to a computer or on storage only I can access, but rather is a repository of my life work that exists in a place where it can participate in relationships with other people's repositories and with other people. I think that this turns things inside out in an interesting and useful way.... It always struck me ever since I started blogging how it was such a natural fit it was for what actually goes on in the academic world. Yet it seemed that few academics were really embracing this mode of communication... but I have heard the following comments a number of times from different people and the comment was in response to 'Do you narrate the work that you do on a blog and is that an interactive process?.. up to the point where you say, publish to a peer reviewed publication' ... A lot of people said 'no'-- and this phrase came up a number of times, 'I don't want to put half baked ideas out there... I want to know that I am right.' I had a hard time wrapping my head around that because in my world, wearing different professional hats, I've used my blog in the same way, as this sort of exploratory probe to put ideas out-- that are half baked. Precisely because of inviting the kind of interaction which I have had received in spades has helped me immeasurably to refine my thinking. An argument I am trying to make with little success right now is that this notion of narrating one's life work, or another way I like to say it is "narrating your public agenda" is really quite broad. And while most people think it would not apply to them, I actually think it applies to almost everybody in some way. The notion of narrating one's own story online-- cause we are doing it anyway, or if we are not, it is being done to us is the thing. This is the world to us now. You are what the search engines find when someone puts your name in. Do you want to or not want to participate in that narrative? I argue that everyone should want to. This notion was also propelled by gardner Campbell's notion of a personal cyber infrastructure http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc This narration of the work we do as students and educators has been going on for several years at UMW, and the syndication technologies above really embody Jon's ideas back in 2007-- with the foundation of the UMW Domains platform and the syndication machines we have in place (and only are just starting with), it's really going to push new boundaries in the coming year. I am hopeful it will mean in increase in the open sharing of Jon's "narrating our public agenda" and a whole lot of half baked ideas. This is a rich space UMW can go far with, being THE institution of wide open idea sharing, rather than wringing over massive open online courses. Turn those syndication machines on. Was there a request for more web nostalgia? Bueller? Bueller? Oh, I mean... Weller! Martin Weller has his own cottage industry of 25 years of _______ going strong... heck he has books, swag, and now a podcast. All I got are some blog posts getting tagged thewebandme but I'm going for a 27 here. Because 1993 was the year I discovered the web and launched my first web server, running on a Mac SE/30 on a table outside my office's lunchroom at the Maricopa Community Colleges. This is the follow-up to the story of me naming the machines in the office, technically sub-sub domains after minerals and geological formations. Going back to early 1993 I'd been trying to find ways to provide digital distribution of the Labyrinth-Forum, a print newsletter our office did for the entire system, lots of paper going out in yellow intercampus mail envelopes. Having set up an AppleShare server all Apple users in the district could connect to and augmenting it with a Gopher Server to provide similar resources for PC users. I had designed a HyperCard version of the news letter for the former, and in maybe September 1993 I was tediously working through a process of software that converted those stacks to Toolbook, for the latter. It was way too much work, and I was doubtful people wanted to read articles this way. Then came serendipity. At an October 1993 educational technology event at Phoenix College, a colleague named Jim Walters handed me a floppy disk with a word written on it. Jim, in his humble way, just said, "You like exploring the Internet, Alan. Try this." Stop and think about all the ways we try to convince, sell, arm twist, persuade people to use some platform we adore. Jim just slipped me a diskette, and left the discovery to me. Oh, on that disk, the word? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/1805322592 Slide15 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Mosaic. I shudder that I might have to explain it for folks who missed this era. The first graphical web browser. I returned to my office, slipped the disk into my Mac Quadra, decompressed it with StuffIt Expander, and clicked the icon. Everything I have done in this field seems to have sprung from that moment. Where there trumpets heralding? Angels harmonizing? Nahhh. But what I saw was clear. An application that could display text and images on either platform. But more-- it was those blue underlined words you clicked on... hypertext. I saw right there that I could drop this HyperCard/Toolbook/AppleShare/Gopher thing and just create content in HTML. I gobbled up the NCSA HTML Tutorial. And what's more, maybe in 2 weeks, I found a free Mac app, MacHTTP, that could run a web server. Yes, this is real photo of the version I printed out to learn from. And the handwriting in the upper right corner? That is what comes next. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/117804915 What is this HTML Stuff flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I plugged a spare Mac SE/30 into the network, requested a machine name for it, and launched my first web server in December 1993. The name I chose was Hakatai, named for a geological formation in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I rafted past it in like 1989 as a Geology grad student at ASU. I made a web page to explain all of this. Because I could write HTML. The thing is, I have a web page I kept going from 1993-2001, where I had some means of adding up the "hits" from the web server log, but more than that, a complete history of stuff I did in those years. That web page still works... because I reclaimed it in my own archive at http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/server/ The MCLI web server history, 1993-2001 I kept so much. There is a log file from the very start, the first month of this little Hakatai server, with the first "hit" on December 6, 1993 at 12:42:56pm. That was me, I am sure, it's from a mac in the office. The first access outside the office was two days later, I can tell from the address it was from GateWay Community College: 12/08/93 08:56:25 OK mac29.instru1-#1.gwc.maricopa.edu. I am guessing this was my colleague Jose Candeno. I can read where it was read in the next weeks, mostly me in the MCLI office, an access from Estrella Mountain Community College. But then, th big one, January 17, 1994: 01/17/94 13:21:20 OK nermal.ncsa.uiuc.edu. :HOMEPAGE.HTML That's right, NCSA. Home of Mosaic. I had submitted that Hakatai server to the NCSA What's new site, that was THE place to go to find out new web servers. I announced the MCLI server that day; you can still find it in an archive. The Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction, or MCLI, is a central source of resources and innovations for the ten colleges in the Maricopa County Community College District, Arizona. Our server offers information about the District, links to our Gopher servers, on-line versions of MCLI's publications, and will soon have demos of instructional courseware developed at MCLI.NCSA What's New, January 17, 1994 Then the server log explodes. Hits from the UK, MIT, Italy, the Netherlands, some .com domains. I can read stories in server logs. And check out the look of that arhaic first site! I remember rendering that pyramid thing in Strata3D The MCLI web site, January 1994 And yes, I got that MCLI newsletter done up in HTML, with all issues from 1993-2001 published in web versions (goodbye HyperCard/Toolbook). In June 1994, the first release of the Writing HTML tutorial (that is another blog post), which I had a snapshot version saved. In December 1994, I moved the web site to run on a PC, an Intel 486 speed machine sitting in our office, running NCSA HTTPd server software. I have no memory of doing this, but I must have figured out some basic unix. The server grew and grew, and a year later, September 1995 moved out of our office up to the ITS Big Machine Room to sit on a DEC Alpha server running Apache. It moved again in 1998 to something bigger, the IT folks told me not to publish the hardware or software, so we were a long way from the days of me just plugging Mac SE/30s in as servers. By then I had this server page being automatically updated, some con script that every month counted the lines in the log file and updated a count file somewhere. It stopped for some reason in 2001, maybe it was no longer feasible to do- but there I have the number, by July 2001 we had been hit 76 million times for web requests. That server page I was proud to discover a few weeks ago, and clean up some of it's links. There is my Maricopa Web History, at least the first 8 years -- http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/server/ Ah, but if you really want to be impressed, see the collection of web badges we accumulated. And hah, I forgot that I had also collected a long list of places our web site got mentioned, the MCLI Sightings. Note the graphic at the top? Oddly familiar? Weller? Weller? Yes, those X-Ray glasses was imagery around from the 1990s. It was from a CD of Visual Symbols designed by Clement Mok. Our center owned a copy of that CD. Long before Creative Commons, these were media that could be re-used for free. I used a few of the images from that CD for menu icons on the Learning English Electronically project I worked on I loved those glasses, I painted the yellow WWW on them used for a presentation I first did with my Maricopa colleague Donna Rebadow called "What A Site! Finding, Evaluating, and Integrating Web Sites" first done in May 1998 at Douglas College in Vancouver. Just to be clear. I am not saying the X-ray glasses were something I created nor that Martin or the illustrator Bryan Mathers copied it from me. The original image was one I got from elsewhere, and I'd not be surprised if Bryan maybe saw a version of it elsewhere, I just did an image search on x-ray glasses spiral and there are many similar versions. Yup, lots of them. It's more like great imagers imagining alike. Or maybe Clement Mok borrowed the idea? What goes around... goes around. That's a long way, and not even close to the whole web trip, from that floppy disk Jim Walters handed me. Featured Image: An old photo I took of the first web server I ever set up, the one for the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, plugged into the network December 6, 1993. From the Forgotten to Blog Department. And also filed in Last Site That Gets Updated is My Own division. About a year ago, Keira connected me with the folks at the Edible Garden Project (EGP) in Vancouver, who were looking to redo their web site. Check out the site at http://ediblegardenproject.com In calendar time it took about a year to get from old to new, some of it my schedule getting in the and sometimes the EGP folks were busy, but the thing was, this bothered neither of us. It was great working with Emily and her team, they brought a lot to the table in terms of what they said they wanted in a new site. There were some logistical steps to jump through before we even got to the pretty stuff. This is the original site, which is now residing at http://archive.ediblegardenproject.com/ (my web fetish, keep a history alive); (more…) Hah! Just plain geeky fun crazy. What would happen if I tagged this in del.icio.us? asked Kotke in del.icio.us will eat itself. I won't give it away, but you have to have some sense of del.geek.i.ness to appreciate it. And it smells like a case of an attempt at recursion without the terminal condition to make it work. Come to think of, in a chat today with Brian, we were both marveling at how often we reach to Wikipedia for a quick reference check. Look at how rich the info is on the entry for recursion! It is explained via Sponge Bob, a Serpinski triangle, some funkier math logic, and the sublime dictionary definition of recursion. It is a rich entry, indeed. Would Sponge Bob ever make it in a printed tome? Even perhaps more noteworthy, is a relative lack of public crying about the "validity" of Wikipedia. is it me? Has it become passé as we now foam over MySpace and YouTube? Was it quietly become valid? Or are more people finding tidbits useful? Is there a bend to the idea of Complete Authoritative Sources to I'll Comb It and And Questions (okay, that was very highly idealized, pie in the sky, and likely wrong). But back to del.icio.us will eat itself --- this post is one of those gems for those looking at blog styles-- clever, understated, under-explained, inquiry driven. There is no user's guide or list of objectives. It is a blog post of quirky beauty.