Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
On today's drive across a large swath of Virginia, I was listening to some episode of a new radio show The Truth. With production quality along the lines of This American Life I am thinking it has good examples for ds106 students to learn the qualities of good audio storytelling (use of music, sound effects, tight editing, good writing). The shows really draw you in to the story; I heard today Eat Cake where a couple meets in the most unlikely way (a cold phone call to a stranger on Valentines day), and the transference and augmentation of interaction passed bu the participants in Interruptible. These radio shows are dramatic fiction- the site bills itself as "Movies for Your Ears". But the episode I heard today on Movie Mashups was a bit different and the host described it as not their typical show: but on listening, I had that reflex of "This would be a great ds106 assignment" so now it is: As demonstrated by the Movies Mashup episode of the radio show The Truth, take two different movies and extract the dialogues scenes of actors form each, then re-edit them to create a story as if the characters from different movies were in the same conversation. Listen to examples from the show including The Terminator and Legally Blonde ("Terminally Blonde") and from the TV shows that become "The Sopranos in the West Wing." If I really was pulling ym weight, I would actually do this assignment as an example, but I shrug and say, their examples are better. No I will do this one eventually. Doing ti well would mean getting enough lines from two different movies to edit them into sub clips, and doing the recombine. The first example where The Terminator brushes off Reese Witherspoon's character form Legally blonde is so tightly edited, you believe it is a real conversation. This is a hard assignment! Are you up to it? What two different unlikely movies would you use, ones that have enough dialogue to make a back and forth audio show of a say 5 minutes. I'm thinking in terms of the Kirby Ferguson scheme of Copy, Transform, Combine in this process- the transform might be less here (does that make this more of a mashup then, I still trip over the difference). Anyhow, with the launch of the fall classes of ds106 starting next week, get ready to amp up your game. It's time to start making a lot of art! Last weekend I built a fence around a vegetable garden in our yard. I am not really much of a craftsman, but this project came out pretty nice. Working with the hands got me thinking about (reaching for the metaphor) building things out of learning objects. I have harped before that there has been way too much emphasis on the creation of the "repositories" and the piles of meta-data, and the search tools- and almost nothing on the craft, the art, the magic, of building something out of the things inside the collections. Last week at one of our faculty instructional technology meetings, we were trying to get some commitment to taking on the learning object issue. There was the usual tired, over-trodden attempts at definitions, a lot of shrugging, and then the often worded desire for some sort of magic, point and click tools that would assemble LOs into meaningful learning activities. As the line goes in the hilarious Australian comedy The Castle: "Dreamin'!" But as I worked on that fence I thought about what an un-realistic, un-attainable, expectation this dream places on technology... (more…) Since not long after the day in October 1993 when a colleague handed my a floppy disk (remember those?) labeled "Mosaic", our office has had a continuously running web server. We have gone through several iterations of trying to build collections of web resources for educators, and in going through some old files, I got a bit nostalgic. Just a bit. Our latest iteration might be construed as "Web 2.0", but let's roll back the decimals... Web 0.9: Old School Hand Spun HTML (1994-1995): World Wide Web News was a the old simple HTML with a few graphics that we published on our site and then advertised by email. The issue above dated September 14, 1994 covers web browsers, our web server running on a Mac SE/30, and some web links to Frog dissection, AskEric Virtual Librarian, The Pompeii Forum Project, etc (links are most likely long gone). In later 1995, we went wild and crazy and used those background tile images, the cutting edge NetScape table tags (look at June 1, 1995 for "New: Jazzed Look for NetScape 1.1". And we picked a few "Top of the Web" picks. The web seemed pretty tiny then, looking back. In late 1995, we began trying to cull these into a subject organized structure of "Hot Links to the World Wide Web", where we tried like the first Yahoos, to put links into a navigation tree. Again it was all hand coded HTML. We also had a set of suggested web starting points for general information. Web 1.0: Indexed Search And The Second Crudest Database (1996-1997): Recognizing some of the folly of trying to manually get links into categories, we moved to different system- using a web server indexing code (GLIMPSE?) and some perl code, to have all the data stored in a text file database that could be searched, and make the information displayed dynamic. With the help of my first part-time student programmer (thanks Kurt) we created the 451F collection (with ap0logies to Ray Bradbury): What design! Using those new fangled frame displays, we could keep a search/navigation area on top. All entries were more or less "tagged" with the categories in a drop down menu, and key words could be searched against the whole collection, or a category. At this point, though, I was the only one that could add links to the collection. We started to see some early issues of links going bad. Web 1.1: Bag of URLs with Submission and Content "Management" (1997-2005): We began to expand our methods of creating web resource sites, to include web forms for people to add new sites to our collection. In the beginning, we naively had an open submission, but quickly learned we needed our own admin tools to preview the submissions, edit the old ones, etc. The "Bag of URLs" was set up so we could collect 20-40 new sites, descriptions in a holding bin, then when ready, we had a web interface for publishing them as a new web page, re-creating the main page with the current content, and generating an email message that could go out announcing the new issue (we used a listserv so interested persons could self subscribe). Here is an example from May 2000: This ran for quite some time, though in the last few years, I got less frequent with compiling new issues. Between 1996 and 2005, we added 4721 sites, and all of the sites added could be keyword searched. Somewhere in the early 2000 years, I created a bookmarklet tool to make added them pretty simple from my web browser. We continued to have troubles with links going bad, and on perhaps a yearly basis, took the time to run all the links through a checker and tried to remove the dead ones. On more than one occasion, we were notified that links that once were valid content had been purchased by porn outfits. We were still basically running this from a large tab-delimited text file that was indexed by a unix search tool. About a year ago, the volume of legitimate sites coming in to spammers trying to dump links in our form got to be about 80:1, so I cut off the open form submission, adding a required password. It also became clear that even the manual effort of dumping links into a form, was taking too much time. Web 2.0: Bag of URLs Fueled By Del.icio.us (2006-): Like a thunderclap, it struck me that it was much more reasonable to maintain this site simply by tagging sites I was already tagging for my own collection with a special tag for items I wanted to display on this site. So the current version merely uses the JavaScript dynamic display code from del.icio.us to show everything I have tagged with "urlbag": At this time, it is only picking up my own tags; I've yet to sort out the benefit of public tagging for what is a rather specialized collection. There are issues of tag pollution... It might be nice if there was some way to say aggregate the del.icio.us tags of say, a group of users I trust, rather than all the crowd on the site. And at this point, I never have to edit the main site again. I like that. What a long, link loaded road it has been. Multitool Evolved posted 30 Jun '07, 9.33pm MDT PST on flickr I'm commencing looking in a few minutes, but am casting out the Lazyweb request (no echoes via twitter) for a web tool-- I need a web-based discussion board/ forum tool (gazillions exist) that would allow me to have my own custom scripts (from outside the tool) that would generate new threads-- the web forum would simply be a place to go for people to reply. The need is for an app I am building in Second Life that will generate content that gets posted; what we need is a web interface for people to register replies. On thought is simply setting up a WordPress blog; I could script form SL a way to register a new blog post, and thus the replies could come through comments, but I think the client is expecting more of a threaded discussion board format. But I'd like to avoid Rolling my Own (Sloppy) Code. Ideas? Oh, it it ought to me PHP/MySQL flavors. Doth I Asketh too Much? Wordle Does Feeds by cogdogblog posted 28 Jul '08, 10.57am MDT PST on flickr The uber nifty Wordle tag cloud generator now can take any URL that has an RSS feed and generate one of those lovely word maps of content. Here is what the latest blabber from CogDogBlog has in it- heavily weighted by my serious examination of the Pooh- Eeyore Debate. What would be cool is to grab a time series of these to see how word use changes over time. And now if I ran a new Wordle, my Wordle would contain "Wordle" since I am blogging about it. Oi, the recusrion! I have a problem. Last week, instead of investigating an issue with one of my project platforms, I was exploring via Google Streetview a town in British Columbia verifying that photos of certain mysterious creatures inexplicably had their faces blurred by Uncle Google's algorithms. In an upcoming "thing" in a few weeks I hope to be making a case for the power of maybe misusing my "productivity time" for the exercise of following a curiosity signal. There's something important to me, at least, about exercising that tingling when there is a promise of a trip down the rabbit hole-- and it's never about catching the rabbit, but just the chase. Twitter of course excels in providing these jump off points... and I can hardly spend all my days chasing rabbits, but a good run, say 45 minutes, is something I can make room for. It feels like good brain exercise. This one started from a great source I have followed so long I cannot remember, ResearchBuzz: https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/1509159135463546891 I cannot fully identify why this tweet, among so many, was one that called to click. I am not one of the devoted trackers of these hypothetical creatures. Sasquatch is hardly a center of interest though as I unpack below, it/he/they (what are the pronouns?) is a metaphor I have exploited before. And the lore seems to be that all photos of Sasquatch et al are blurry but I am like others and ask why (I like the suggested answer because they are actually blurry!) And in Tweetdeck I did not even have the links preview like above which means the entrance to the hole was merely the text of the tweet "Everyone deserves #privacy . Even sasquatches. (Sasquatchii?) #GoogleMaps" and previously built in experience that @ResearchBuzz tweets good stuff. The Rabbit Hole Entrance The story Sasquatch censored? Harrison’s landmark carving is camera shy in Google StreetView’s eyes is from the Vernon (B.C.) Morning Star, noting a quirk identified by others about its town's welcome sign statue gets the personal privacy treatment in Google Streetview. Local Facebook groups were amused by a quirk of the interactive map-making technology that normally blurs the faces of people pictured in StreetView pictures. According to an observation originally posted on Twitter from CBC Vancouver municipal affairs reporter Justin McElroy, it seems the face-hiding feature also works on large wooden statues; the grinning face of the iconic Sasquatch statue that sits outside the welcome sign at the entrance of Harrison Hot Springs has also been blurred.https://www.vernonmorningstar.com/trending-now/sasquatch-censored-harrisons-landmark-carving-is-camera-shy-in-google-streetviews-eyes/ My curiosity could have ended there. The typical response might be to retweet, send a link to a friend, and move on to the more important work of the day. But something kicked off the switch here. And this goes back to the information literacy stuff I followed long ago from Mike Caulfield when he was calling it the Four Moves strategy and now is SIFT- the act of following sources upstream. I often do this as much of what is reported on web sites is a reframing of something published elsewhere, often itself a recasting of... It's the act of reading of a summary of a research study, and going to the bother of finding the source. But still, this blurring of Sasquatch statues hardly beckons for further research. I do not doubt the story in the Vernon Morning Star. And it's questionably of importance. It's something else... Maybe it is an associative trail? There was some trigger of connection- I have never been to Harrison Springs but saw the signs for it many times in 2014-2015 when I was in Kamloops for a few months of a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University. And I actually recognized the statue! Earlier that year I did a talk playfully comparing the myth of OER reuse being as challenging to track as finding clear photos of Bigfoot, Nessie, et al. I collected examples shared by colleagues as a collection of Amazing Stories of Openness -- Tannis Morgan took on the full spirit in her sharing and even tweeted about it-- posed with the said Sasquatch blurred by Google! https://twitter.com/tanbob/status/496711801103347713 But the real call is that this is eminently repeatable. Google Streetview is wide open for you to go anywhere in the world their car mounted cameras have gone, and explore yourself. It's got so many, close to infinitely interesting elements for creative or explorative learning activities. Heck one time on a highway I spotted the Streetview car coming at me, and I waved-- it took a year but I did find myself there. Into the Hole It's easy enough to find Harrison Hot Springs in Google Maps and then drop the streetview icon, I am able to "drive" up the road into town. Heading north on Hot Springs Road https://goo.gl/maps/Mz6eF29eWUwtHRow9 This probably is not the efficient way to search for blurry Sasquatch... but I did get luck, I spotted a statue outside the the RV resort, a different statue than what was in the news story. But OMG, yes, the statue's face is blurred: Who is that blurred face creature outside the Springs RV resort? Just wandering around the streets was interesting if not efficient. So if I use a search on "Sasquatch Statue" while in this area, it gets much easier: Searching for Sasquatch Statues near Harrison Hot Springs, BC Very quickly I found one (face blurred) near the waterfront: Looks like Sasquatch. Maybe. As usually, the figure is blurry, and even more so in the face. And then the main one featured in the news story, identified in Google Maps as Sasquatch Statue 3 Confirmed the news story! Now here is a fun thing you may not know, Google Streetview keeps a timeline of photos from different time periods, so if you click the date in the top left, you can see the same location taken on different dates. So I am able to document that Sasquatch, blurry or not, was there greeting visitors in September 2015, but not in August 2011! While poking around, I noticed some interesting things with Streetview. It does blur the face of humans walking around, but not dogs. The privacy of humans is protected by a blur, but not for pooches. And the blurring on statues is not even consistent- I found this one at a housing development, and the woord statue seems to have blurred the figure with an eagle head, but not the bears. Which statues get the blur treatment? Only Google's algorithm knows So there is some kind of hierarchy for facial shapes that get the blur treatment? Again, the relative importance of this is highly questionable (especially if anyone is left reading this). But that is maybe not my point Do I have one?. What's the Point Alan? There's something to be said for just reading and interpreting information versus interacting with the sources behind it. There's not enough time in any day to do this (or perhaps not enough justification), but these small acts can plant seeds for other ideas that may emerge later. Knowing/reinforcing a few things here: Google Streetview is a fully navigable immersive worldEvery single view can be referenced, shared with a URL.You can search for things within the geographical context of a map locationAnd the Streetview has a timeline, to see the same view across different yearsThe application of the face blurring, to protect privacy, has some interesting loopholes in it. I would never have gotten this by reading a story and retweeting it. This also reminds me of some interesting digital art I came when I learned of the work of visual artist Emilio Vavarella... in his Google Trilogy, he exploited Google's Streetview to examine unintended effects such as glitches, or the accidental appearance of the camera's operator, as part of questioning of the people, technology, and errors in the large data sets we use regularly. So maps are useful for finding locations, getting from one place to another, but there is so much more potential when you look with a curious eye. That's what I find, emerging from the rabbit hole. PS This is an installment of my participating in the 2022 Write 6x6 Challenge, they may never anticipate what the heck gets syndicated into their site! Featured Image: Not in the original, but I added my own blur to a statue of Bigfoot I saw in a small California town in 2014. I leave it to someone else to find in Google Streetview. Based on Bigfoot Wants Beer flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Among a list of topics in our field that I am least interested in is the seemingly endless bickering about one Creative Commons license versus another. It's more that the details of licenses always seems to cast the largest area of attention in talking about open education sharing. After the array of licenses are tossed out in some pretty infographic, the train moves on. The statement that "grinds my gears" is nearly always how public domain / CC0 is described: You do not have to provide attribution. Yes, that is technically true if you literally follow the license. But is that all it means? I prefer the spirit of it explained as dedication, of being offered to be shared in the most widely way possible: Copyright and other laws throughout the world automatically extend copyright protection to works of authorship and databases, whether the author or creator wants those rights or not. CC0 gives those who want to give up those rights a way to do so, to the fullest extent allowed by law. Once the creator or a subsequent owner of a work applies CC0 to a work, the work is no longer his or hers in any meaningful sense under copyright law. Anyone can then use the work in any way and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, subject to other laws and the rights others may have in the work or how the work is used. Think of CC0 as the "no rights reserved" option.CC0 Frequently Asked Questions (Creative Commons) or better yet, this phrasing: CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.Creative Commons CC0 Again, it's technically true that the flickr photos I license under CC0 can be used for any purpose, commercial or not, and people do not have do anything, they need not attribute, they need not share the same way, the can make derivations, they can even make money. So while many people see licenses as some way to "protect" their works, my switching from CC-BY to CC0 was my own test to see what would happen, just because people do not have to attribute and because they can do what ever they want, how badly would it hurt me? As far as I know no one has made a ton of money from my photos, nor have I lost any. In fact, in that time: A blues band is using a CC0 photo on an EP cover, they attributed me anyhow, and they are sending me a copy.Someone used two photos taken on the day her great nephew was born in a self published book of "on this day"A filmmaker asked for use of an image in a documentary, and asked how I'd like to be credited.A professional photographer asked to use one of my photos in the banner image for her contact form "I realize I could totally go and take a photo myself, but if you don't mind me using it, I'll use it with that text overlay so you have photo credit. Thank you and let me know either way."An author of a Polish travel site used a photo in their travel guide -- "Your pictures on Flickr are very good. Beautiful compositions and interesting places. I used one of them with attribution and link to your Flickr account on my site which promotes the U.S. overseas"An author of a book about dog statues asked for one to use in their self-published book, "I am very interested in your lovely picture of Toto and would love to use it in my book. The book will initially have a small print run of 200 and then be print on demand and I am self financing a large part of it. I would of course fully credit you and link to your flickr account. " That's just about 2 pages worth of more than 24 pages of flickr mail. Each one a story. "That's the good stories, where is the slime?" Good question. There's an increasing raft of web sites out there offering collections of open licensed photos. Previously they used CC0, but now each seems to offer their "own" flavor. I am not quite sure why the world needs to sort through what makes a Pixabay license, and Unsplash license, or a Pexels license different from CC0 (there are subtle differences, and the license mavens can help you fine tooth comb why they are no pure open licenses, but I could not give a hoot). So usually it's described as... "you can use it for free and not provide attribution." Sigh. I like Pixabay a lot- it's my go to often for metaphors. And in a yet to be written posted, they are pretty darn picky on what they pick ( have had lots rejected). I know lots of people like Unsplash.com and they do have stunning photos- sometimes to me a bit too stunning. But there's worse. There are some shadier outfits out there that rather than be places where photographers share photos, they go around and scrape images from other sites to put into their collections- and those scraped ones are often CC0 licensed ones, because technically, the license allows a scraper slimeball to do so. Recently my dog pal Martin Weller spotted one of my photos out there https://twitter.com/mweller/status/1093259093085749251 Of course that's my dog! And my photo. The site it is on just gives credit to Pixabay (no link)- and the only contact the site has is a Facebook page. Dead-endville for me to send them a message. With some reverse image searching, I did find my photo of Felix on Pixabay... uploaded there by someone else. And used on a whole raft of other sites (if you see the link, you will also see my comment, informing "skeeze" that he got the breed of the dog wrong). So by the letter of the license, that's ok. But is it the right thing to do? I did find on Pixabay a place in the forums where someone else had this issue, and there is a way to report the account who did this (UPDATE April 17, 2019- Hans from Pixabay moved the image into my account, thanks!) Ahhhhh but there is worse, the scourge of a site called "Maxpixel"- the URLs change every now and then, for a while it was maxpixel.greatfreepicture.com now maybe it is maxpixel.net. Their results come of very often in Google Image search results with filters set to license for free use. And you find there some beautiful pictures, like https://www.maxpixel.net/Scenic-Lake-Landscape-Sky-Sunset-Water-Reflection-1802337 There it is a CC0 license Public Domain image. But here is a trick- take any maxpixel URL like https://www.maxpixel.net/Scenic-Lake-Landscape-Sky-Sunset-Water-Reflection-1802337 and just change out the www.maxpixel.net for pixabay.com -- and wow, oddly familiar https://pixabay.com/photos/landscape-lake-sunset-reflection-1802337/ Now if that does not feel slimy, well try the mackerel ice cream. The entire MaxPixel site is a wholesale theft copy of Pixabay. Again, because of public domain licenses, it's not quite anything that breaks the letter of the license... but it sure seems smelly (Pixabay knows of this, I have seen it discussed, it's hard for them to fight). I am rather disgusted that Do Not Evil Google just let's this stuff slide in their search results. For more, read Just Say No to Maxpixel. Here's another fish smelling site. Tonight, while adding a regional travel link to one of my Arizona web clients, I noticed on the Discover Gila County site a photo that I recognized. Yep, that's my photo! Even before seeing my name on the credit, I saw my red truck from a series of photos I did a few years for the Fire on the Rim Mountain Bike race. It is odd that this site identifies it as "All Rights Reserved" because my photo has a CC0 license: Rider 80 Fire On The Rim 2016 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And if I was dithering to the letter of the license I could complain, because you cannot add an All Rights Reserved to a CC0 license image. But I don't really care. But without a link to my original I first tried a Reverse Google Image search, and landed to a swath of my CC0 flickr photos on pxhere.com (it's not the exact photo but is one and the ones running down the page are all mine from the same event) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/194074 While I see in some places pxhere does provide attribution, here they don't... because by the letter of the license they don't have to, right? But they scavenged my photos, even lifted my entire caption, and stuck it on their site. What happens is other people land here bby search, and they just follow along the crowd that says, "I'll take this, and I do not have to attribute." Okay, so if you have not said it already; the obvious question is, "Alan if you care that much about attribution why do you not license them CC-BY?" It's because I do not see the license as protection or enforcing, and again, this is my experiment. I am more interested in the people that do attribute and say thanks when they do not have to, than the people who just care about the minimum, letter to the license interpretation. As rule, I do not use photos from sites like pxhere.com and others that do not give credit to the photographers who share photos. I have a search shortcut set up in Chrome where I can type gcc search-terms - it not only does an image search filtered to ones licensed for use, but I also remove maxpixel and pxhere from the results (example) For a lesson in doing this, see The Gift of Time. Please, please, for the sake of all open licensed cute puppies do not explain public domain / CC0 only as "use freely and you do not have to attribute." That may be legally and technically valid but from a human, sharing, what would your mom say perspective, a bit morally stinkyfish. My suggestion is always, always attribute, even if you do not have to. It's more about gratitude than license nibbling. The flipside of not attributing, also is it sends a signal to every person who looks at your stuff, to do the same, because "that's what everyone else does." Don't be that person. Featured Image: Hah, sometimes you search for slimy and you find it! I modified the Geograph UK image Slimy purple ice-cream by https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3368229 by Peter Barr and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons CC BY-SA Licence. I changed the top text to read "PUBLIC DOMAIN" and sprinkled some CC0s around. So I share as Peter did under CC BY-SA. Yum, slimy ice cream and CC0 served here... My next talk for the TCC 2015 conference (the 20th one) has me digging in the catacombs of web history; I was looking trough my files for what I had from my talks in 1996. I have a fairly complete archive of stuff I did from my stints at the Maricopa Community Colleges (1992-2006) and the NMC Years (2006-2011). All my Maricopa web stuff has been dismantled and I have no idea what's left on NMC's sites. But I always kept copies of all my stuff. The oldest is from the July 21-23, 1994 Association for Applied Interactive Multimedia Conference called Providing Structured Multimedia Learning Environments- Mosaic for the Internet, perhaps the Ordovician Era of the web. Current metaphors of the Internet include a futuristic highway of data, an interconnected labyrinth of rodent holes, or a globe encircling web. New computer tools have greatly simplified the navigation of this vast landscape of world-wide information. Exploring the Internet is one thing, but how does one use it in a meaningful fashion? At the Maricopa Community Colleges, we have found that after the initial excitement of "going out there," many instructors are left with a feeling of being lost, of not knowing where or how to look for items of interest, much less of how to bring it to their students. This paper will present a rapid way to design an interactive, multimedia learning environment. These "media" available may incorporate almost any text, picture, sound, or digital movie stored on the thousands of computers on the Internet. Mosaic is a free computer program offering "point and click" access to Internet-based information. We have expanded Mosaic's use beyond a tool of navigation. When used in conjunction with any text editor program, Mosaic may provide customized learning environments, easily created by instructors or their students. In the popular analogy, Mosaic is not only a vehicle to cruise the Information Superhighway, but also a utility to construct some on-ramps. There's a trajectory of different technologies I tried through the next 10 years -- and no longer are accessible because of tools such as old Flash, WWWBoard (an old web discussion board), UseMod Wiki, MovableType, Shockwave, Macromedia Breeze. I am surprised the stuff I did using CoolIris still works. But all the stuff I did starting with that 1994 paper in HTML-- it Still Just Works 21 years later. Below are some of the moldy oldies I have re-instated on my own archive. Highways, Webs, and Rodent Holes (September 1994) When I was talking about this new fangled stuff around the Maricopa system. The "rodent" holes represent that I was still talking up gopher. Thinking and Talking IT* (February 1996) This was my first external invited "gig"; my colleague Donna Rebadow, a wildly outrageous faculty member at Paradise Valley Community College and I were invited to Vancouver, BC for a series of talks and workshops a Douglas College. That petroglyph image on the splash screen was one I took at Painted Desert National Park with a pre-digital camera. Going Beyond Home Pages (March 1996) was a talk given at the Arizona State University 1996 Microcomputers in Education Conference. I was pitching Macromedia Shockwave and CGI scripts as the avenue for bring interactivity to the web. Instructional Technology: All the Answers* (June 1996) This was an invited presentation at a retreat for the Oklahoma Association of Community Colleges, Instructional Administrators. I'm recycling material, sue me. Technology & Learning: Magic, Mirage, or Reality? (May 1997) I teamed up with Donna again for an invited gig at Miami-Dade Community Colleges. They were rather vague with what the wanted, the asked from something that would get people excited about web technology. Afterwards, when we asked our host if it met their expectations, Roberta said a memorable line... "That was entertaining". Donna and I were never sure if this was good. I'll stop there as this is the era I hope to cover in my TCC presentation. Plus, I only have like 35 more to add. Top / featured image credit: cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by yilmaz ovunc: http://flickr.com/photos/visitturkey/3389957559 Oh chastise me for a sleazy blog post title, and worse, for probably some bad taste in Photoshoppery. But I see these things, my little teenage brain starts whirring, and then I have to drop what I am doing for a half hour of mashing up. A few days ago the OLDaily in my inbox featured a typically Dowsian summary of something going on elsewhere in the intertubes. That's what he does so well, and has been doing so well for like 15 years or more. But his bit Hachette Wants to Turn Twitter Into a Bookstore got me click curious: I'm not sure I get the appeal of Amanda Palmer and I'm not sure of the relevance of showing a topless photo of her on this story about Twitter becoming a marketplace for books, especially since I don't see books per se as having much of a future themselves, but I guess there's no limit to how far we'll turn back the wheel of time in an effort to monetize our conversations with each other. And going topless seems to be what Amanda Palmer does, mostly. Social media as we know it is not long overdue for a disruption. And magazines like this retro article from Bloomberg even more so. I guess Stephen is behind the book curve. Or ahead. And I must admit I barely know much about Amanda Palmer. She's done something meme like right? And now she is topless on a book cover? Somehow I inferred Stephen writing like that he would never go topless (which actually he never said). Oh well, I clicked the link. And saw the book cover. And then it happened. I gotta make over that bookcover. It's a tad scary. I imagined Stephen authoring and modeling for the cover of The Art of MOOCs or How I Stopped Worrying and Let Connectivism Help It's a tad disturbing. I am counting on Stephen's sense of humour (note Canadian spelling). I could not help myself. I include this in my gallery of MOOC Mocking And now, I am late for my 7th grade Social Studies class. Bye. Wow, these TypePad blogs just continue to pop up, all nicely organized. Here is Ratchet Up "is John Schott & friends, featuring links, often daily, to something of interest in digital culture and the arts." These are not just your typical blog echoes from elsewhere, each story is originally written and tastefully illustrated. The Ratchet Up brief is to be "popular." It's not a high-level, jargon-giddy discussion amongst the digirati, although a few hang out here. We speak mostly in everyday language, but after a couple of drinks in the lounge we like a big word or two just like the next guy. The goal is to have fun and as best we can flash smart, and we welcome equally the wise and the wiseacres. If you send a post the Ratchet will credit your effort. Toss one more RSS log on the aggregator. I spent maybe another hour last night adding a few more minutes of audio recorded with my grandmother in 1994 to TapeWrite. I added a bit of introduction to the recording. This follows my description of the series My Grandmother's Stories, from Audio Tape to TapeWrite and Episode 1: Growing Up in Newark. In Episode 2, my sister and I ask her for details of how she met her husband, Abraham... TW He died before I was born, and I am named after him, so everything I know about him is from old papers, stuff I might remember my parents saying, and this recording. The photos I have of them are more from their later years. I am enjoying the process of adding the "cards" to TapeWrite. It's different from doing video, where you are trying to illustrate the story, here I look for references that are related (like an old image of Atlantic City when she mentions going there for a honeymoon), the few pictures I have. I also mix in a few quotes too. The idea of the cards are partly to illustrate, but also to put key markers in the timeline, it lets people jump from segment to segment, so might be considered some kind of annotation. I'm trying to find a method as I experiment. I have not found a way to group these stories, maybe it;s a feature I am missing. I added a tag grannystories to them all but did not find a public URL. The public profile for my "tapes" does not display tags, and there is some feature to make playlists, but my hunch is those are for viewers, not publishers. I might have to ask Borja what I am missing. I did forget an image, she said in her last letter to me that she included a valentine card from Abraham: : If I had to do it over again, I would have married you sooner, Dad Okay, I think it's weird that her husband signed a card "Dad" but past that, it's a lovely sentiment. Then again, in this audio, I took note that she got married when she was only 17, and met him when he was 14. That seems pretty early as is, Abraham! My favorite thing is that last letter she sent me, where the only thing she had to write on was a page ripped out of an address book, at age 94: [caption id="attachment_60192" align="aligncenter" width="540"] My grandmother's last hand written note to me, ~1999[/caption] Dear Alan, I have no stationary so I am improvale [improvising?] with what I have. Am ok, healthful, for an old lady age 94. Thought you would like the pics. Copy them and return. Love, Granny. I so much love that she signed this "granny" because it was my teasing nickname I would call her. I would tell her how "spunky" she was. But the fact that at 94, she wanted her pictures returned, says she had plans to live a lot longer. She did another 4 years. That's my spunky granny. Top / Featured Image: Collage of photos of my grandfather, Abraham, and grandmother, Jeannette, at their Baltimore home in 1955. Personal photos, but hey, because it's how I roll, they are licensed Creative Commons BY. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine It’s been a while since I have seen Marvin. He was excited to travel with me on my big trip in 2011, it was his idea to jump out at every stop to get a photo. He was reliable for a few photos, but somewhere north of Kingman AZ, he disappeared. I was pretty sure he just jumped into some convertible since he got googly eyed every time he saw a pretty woman in a ‘vette, and there was a blonde in a red shiny one at that last stop south of the Hoover Dam crossing. But I guess he was stuck in my truck this whole time. I never hear him, or he never called for help, or he was stuck in a coma. But today he woke up and made his way home. Hmmm, I’m not sure I am ready for sharing the house with a Martian. I was kind of stumped on what to do for my daily photos today, and came up with the idea of Marvin making his way out of the truck, trying to do some low camera angles, or up angled ones to emphasize the scale. It was 99% improvised, just moving him form different spots out of the trick, up the steps, and into the house. I was going to end with marvin safe and sound on the pillow, but got the idea of the last twist being ho the little bugger just martian-handled the remote. Uploaded photos to flickr and plopped them into a set so I could make an embeddable slide show. This is a bit of a jump ahead to things in ds106 we will try in telling stories just in photos. I try for that daily with the camera, that’s my own personal course. There's something I love about web generators. Not the ones that make power, but ones that power the creation of stuff. The stuff of the useless web. Everything from the tombstones to metal band names to church signs to luchador names. Maybe it's because people make them for no other reason than because they can. Then there is Lorem Ipsum the sites that generate random chunks of text you can use as placeholders for designing content or web sites: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum." There is a whole universe of different variations; I love the collection at Meet the Ipsums. My go to has been Bacon Ipsum which is hosted in Wordpress and even has an API. As much as I love bacon, it does present problems for vegans and those that keep kosher. Last week I was working on some templates for content that is part of the Creative Commons Certification project. My working template had Bacon Ipsum in it. So I said to myself, "Self..." No seriously, I wondered what it would take to build my own Lorem ipsum generator based on something from Creative Commons. To jump ahead to the demo, meet CC IP-SUM: It generates a specified number of paragraphs (1-10) with (1-10) random sentences, all of which are taken from the Creative Commons FAQ. Like: Modifying licenses creates friction that confuses users and undermines the key benefits of public, standardized licenses. What if I have received CC-licensed material with additional restrictions? CC does not recommend use of its NonCommercial (NC) or NoDerivatives (ND) licenses on databases intended for scholarly or scientific use. Version 4.0 of CC's Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). How should I decide which license to choose? You may license your copyright or distribute your work under more than one set of terms. Applying a Creative Commons license to your material is a serious decision. The answer will depend on the law in the relevant jurisdiction. For more details about adaptations in the database context, see the Data FAQ. I did some looking first- I found Lorem Ipsum generator code that was in PHP, used databases. A lot of them are running with Wordpress front ends, like Hipster Ipsum that is fed by a HipsterJesus API. Woah. I was looking for something way simpler, something that would run from static HTML (e.g. could run from GitHub Pages). So I took my dog for a walk and thought it out in my head. All mine needs is a JavaScript external file with a single array in it- each item a sentence that ends in a "." and a space. The logic is a front form with fields for the number of paragraphs and second one for the number of sentences per paragraph to use. Then it's just some jQuery to react to changes in the fields and/or a button click. function get_sum( lines, paragraphs ) { // a place to put the generated stuff var stuff = ''; // loop over the number of desired paragraphs for (i = 0; i < paragraphs; i++) { // open that paragraph stuff += ''; // now loop for the number of desired sentences for (j = 0; j < lines; j++) { // append a random line from the source array stuff += all_lines[Math.floor(Math.random()*all_lines.length)]; } // close that paragraph stuff += ''; } // update the div in our page $("#lorem").html(stuff); } The construction logic is simple; do one loop for each of the desired numbers of paragraphs. In each, start with a tag, then run an inner loop for the number of sentences per paragraph. In that loop we pull a random element from the array and append it to our output string. Then end it with a closing tag. When all that is done, we use jQuery to update the html content of a specified div. I first do this up as completely unstyled HTML, so I can get the function first. In fact, I have posted this as it's own GitHub repo, so someone else can fork and make their own. For my test/demo purpose, I exported all the titles of my blog posts, in my case using a bit of MySQL wrangling SELECT `post_title` FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_status` = 'publish' AND `post_type` = 'post' LIMIT 0,18446744073709551615 And saved the results as a CSV file. That part is totally not necessary in general (I'm just showing off), for the CC one I just copied the text from the web page and did some text editing to get it in the right format (replaced all '. ' end of sentence markers with '", /n"' to wrap in quotes and separated by commas. This is the tedious part, you have to make sure there are no quotes in the real content, and sometimes you get headings or sentence fragments. If the site does not work, it almost means a problematic character. The inspector is your friend. And voila: What it needs is: index.html - the main page assets/js/jquery.min.js - a local copy of jQuery assets/js/ipso.js - the code that interacts with the form and generates the stuff. It need not even be touched as long as you use the same form fields as in the demo. assets/js/cogdogblog.js - the content source, in this case it's just my stuff as an array. You can make your own data files, or have several. You just need to make sure you reference the right script in the bottom of index.html Once running, I made it pretty... using the CC Licensed HTML5up TXT theme. I loooooove these thems. In my first effort I used the text from a few of the Creative Commons license deeds, so you get things like: For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information. Use of the licensed material may still be restricted for other reasons, including because others have copyright or other rights in the material. Share means to provide material to the public by any means or process that requires permission under the Licensed Rights, such as reproduction, public display, public performance, distribution, dissemination, communication, or importation, and to make material available to the public including in ways that members of the public may access the material from a place and at a time individually chosen by them. Every recipient of the Licensed Material automatically receives an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights under the terms and conditions of this Public License. A notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties. Where disclaimers of warranties are not allowed in full or in part, this disclaimer may not apply to You. It's a bit of a legal language mouth full of marbles; I left a copy of this version running for purposes of making this link. Then I switched it to the current version that uses the text from the Creative Commons FAQ. Once I started, I could not stop generating. It's ultimate use? Meh. I did it because I can. Featured Image: Public Domain image from Wikimedia Commons cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Since EBCDIC Move along. I thought this course would be The One. The One I Finished. It's not the course's fault at all, it's all PEBKAC. I was eager to dive into the P2PU course Play With Your Music: "Play With Your Music" is a free, 6-week online course where you'll make 3-5 songs of your very own, using the newest tools on the web. You'll learn the in's and out's of audio production, while working with music you already know and love. Anyone with an interest in making music is welcome, and all you need is a computer and a browser. The course is now in week 5. I have not gotten much further than Tuesday of week 2. I'll leave the excuses out. There's a lot to like about the course design, the Mechanical MOOC method (so worth reading the report by P2PU) where participants are grouped into cohorts. The curriculum is reasonably designed with a good balance of short videos to listen to but also directed creative activities. The topic is one I was motivated (or so I thought) to take on as a challenge, occupying what I have learned is the Csikszentmihalyi-an "flow" channel. I was curious to learn how to use Soundation. A first mistake I made was setting up my Gmail to move all messages from the course and my group to a label-- there were a lot of messages coming in from the group and Google+ (BTW the plus stands for "more email notifications") (much more)... and oops, it was week 3 when I realized I had not seen any messages. Because duh, I had moved them out of my mailbox. IN the future I might use the filter for the group communication, but not the course announcements. In week 3, I thought I could rapid catch up, and set out to do the past work... I even set up a tumblr for my stuff. And day after day, I managed to say, I will do it tomorrow. And at this point, well, its just not worth it to rush through the course to try and get the experience. I suck as an open student. Truly. Pogo rules apply. There is a question I have (meaning no real answer) -- what is sacred about the weekly schedule? Is there something to a ... a.... I looked for the name of something that occurs every seven days (septennial for days?) and look what Google gave me? (Google, I do not understand your algorithm at all) But why, in an open course, not tied to an institution, semester schedule, are course planned on the 7 day cycle? There is of course a balance, you stretch things out too long and the pace is slow, or distractible excuse making slobs like me can make excuses on a bi-weekly schedule too. Still-- why is the treadmill of an open course tied to the rhythm of a traditional school schedule? That was one (of many) admirable aspect of the ETMOOC Alec Couros ran last year-- its schedule was a 2 week cycle. That is a question I am thinking too for the now maybe ending Headless ds106 we set up, where we pretty much wore out the active participants from the first half. The pace of it is insane, and there is no reason to tie it to the 7 day cycle, is there? One of the grand successes has been the version of this ds106 experience Rochelle Lockridge has been running inside the 3M corporate firewall (if all goes well a presentation and paper might be coming out of a 2014 open thingie conference). Her plans for the future are to let loose of the rapid pace, and turn it into a monthly cycle of topics. This is another blog post coming soon to a space near here, some reflections on the headless ds106. But I have my questions still about the rapid semesterly pacing of courses being a factor in people lapsing who sign up freely for an open learning experience. Maybe the magic cycle is Biblically inspired. Again, I am my own sole source of ships floundering. What can I do? Maybe I will roll up my sleeves and try again January 15. It's a whole new year. Maybe I will be different. YAOOCS What a sad day it is when us old skool flickrites now have to wear the official uniform -- just got my note from the principal: What this is referring to is those with flickr accounts had previously, on signing in to flickr, had to follow the extra "Psssss..." link to get to the 5% club's entrance. I felt so special, so unique, wearing my tattered old skool jeans: I am making a bit light of this, as I had a yahoo account used for almost nothing, not even mail, with the same name as my gmail account. So the transfer was easy. And if there are improvements on the way... okay. But in a way, it really feels sad, to loose that special, old skool feeling. I set up my flickr account in March 2004 (that is about 3 internet centuries ago), when I was looking at photosharing sites-- featured in a presentation I did for the TCC 2004 Conference called Publish and Build Communities Around Digital Images. Ironically, at this time I was playing a bit more with Buzznet, a site I've not been back to in maybe 2 years. But I had peeked at flickr, and it did have a palpable different web feel, at that time via a Flash interface, that just seemed different- a snapshot from the presentation above (hey, it is a canned Breeze show, and it still works!): Ahhhh, nostalgia.. the wine of old fogies. Old skool ones, that is. [caption id="attachment_24648" align="alignnone" width="500"] rmooc.ca site [/caption] Brace yourself for another 10 mile long blog post; much like the recent one on the Harvard Future of Learning site, this one focusses on another syndication driven wordpress site. Brian Lamb approached me in mid June about working on this project, and coming on the heels of the Harvard one, I was able to leverage bits of that site's framework-- but it is still nowhere near a copy/paste/go operation. These sites are hand crafted. Art+Reconciliation addresses current issues in Canada dealing with the history of residential schools and the ongoing work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The idea is (I might be wrongly paraphrasing) to examine how art and artists can both create awareness of the issues and help generate communication around the issue. As conceived by Ashok Mathur, this would be an open experience where online participants could be part of the August activities at TRU, where artists were invited for a residential experience in Kamloops, and leading up to a national TRC gathering in Vancouver. A driving part of the design was an effort to forefront the media that would be part of the activities, as well as infuse the syndication of content from twitter, flickr, blogs, etc. The "MOOC" part of rmooc is open to question- it was not a course per se, but a series of events and performances. It's not massive, bit was open and parts were online. Who cares, the media shows some amazing gatherings and art making. For some numbers on what happened (and keep in mind, this is the midway point), the site accumulated: 72 News Items content written or categorized by Ashok. 47 resources written or categorized by Ashok. 49 items spotlighted as categorized by Ashok. 486 syndicated content or media items: 233 Tweets 176 Photos 42 Dispatches (posts submitted via email) 18 Blog Posts (not many, this part was not used during the first phase of the rmooc) 23 Videos (as categorized by Ashok, in fact, he figured out how to add this without me, nice work!) So if you just look at numbers, you would say "obviously not massive" but numbers are not the whole story, and the goal of the first phase of rmooc was in the events that took place in Kamloops. Lost in the numbers are thing like a message from Leslie Lindballe, who was following RMOOC from Saskatchewan https://twitter.com/onepercentyello/statuses/361548557775409157 And again, rmooc is only halfway through its course. As before, I will attempt to review the design elements, the Wordpress customizations, and the setup and implementation of the syndication parts. An additional (and new for me) element was using Mailchimp for managing email communications. Much of what follows paralleled the work I did previously on Harvard's Future of Learning Institute site. Here we go... (more…) Compared to this guy, in twitter-chips, I am a hermit in the woods. Does John Edwards keep up with his small group of friends? Does he have a designated staff twitter-er? More idle banter, while I have little meaningful to blog these days. But the twitter buzz train is rolling. I get a handful of notices of twitter-ness from folks I know (and a bunch I don't know. On a good day I am selective) My twittering is in short bursts, and I keep forgetting to be a frequent tweeter. And I hear more and more about folks who are discovering useful bits of info by checking their friends tweets. I am still warm to the use of this tool, and am not bothered at a lack of a Big Educational Use in Capital Letters. There is something there, there, said the rabbit. Actually, I just like saying, "twitter". Since I know not which will be last, I am doing my own archival work here. This was my first day twittering on January 31, 2007: 11 twitter post by Alan Levine on January 31, 2007, available for now via advanced twitter search, but preserved here as an image because.... well you know what might happen. The contents are available below. This first day's glorious messaging says so little about the future. Here is that fateful day, with tweets in chronological order: Looking at a long list of Cole's twitterstwittering while on a teleconference call- can they hear me typing?setting up a google doc for a project, for once someone suggested it before meduh, i verified my account twicegetting a bit addicted and not doing any worktwittered my backgroundGetting ready to blog about twitterNetNewsWire? That is so old skoolgetting ready to publish my blog post about twttterAll blogged! See http://cogdogblog.com/2007/01/31/networking/ I blame Cole for my new habit Alan Levine tweets on January 31, 2007 It's all a bit... like drivel. Brief (those precious 140 characters), no images, no hashtags, URLs are just plan text. Alan's normal typos. I do blame/credit Cole Camplese, then at Penn State University, for making me aware enough (likely through his blog) to give it a try (his blog post is gone, closest I could find was via the Wayback Machine). I do recall he talked a bit about the potential of it for his PSU team to quickly, update each other on project, being more efficient than email. Hey! Cole invented Slack! I even managed to blog about it: https://cogdogblog.com/2007/01/networking/ And D'Arcy Norman must have been tapped by Cole too as he has a blog post the same day, the post is intact, and also quite a bite more informational than mine: Until last week, I hadn't heard of Twitter. Then Cole blogged about it, and the ETSTalk Podcast folks talked about it. They're looking at Twitter as a tool to facilitate shared awareness of organizational activities. Twitter is essentially nanoblogging (I just made that word up) - stuff that is more of a quick "I'm doing this right now" kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of "friends" and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they're up to. Right now. Cole's investigating this from the perspective of "how would a tool like this affect teaching and learning, and running an organization" I'm not doing anything quite so lofty, I'm just playing. What's kind of cool is that it makes it easy for me to track what I'm doing, so when it's time to do the Dreaded Procrastinated Timesheet Entry mere hours before the payroll cutoff, I could just spider the list of archived updates. https://darcynorman.net/2007/01/31/twittering/ I like how D'Arcy and I call the activity "twittering". Maybe that will come back in vogue. Or die on the vine. How can you find your first day? There's more than enough posts that tell you how to find the first tweet via Twitter's advanced search (while it lasts). Use your profile to find out what Twitter reports as your "since date" and then construct a search that wraps around it with "since" and "until" dates for search parameters. So for my bird born date of January 31, 2007, I found it worked best to use the day before as since (January 30, 2007) and two days after (February 2, 2007) as ai noticed some did not come through with more bookended dates. Oh also key os to switch the default tab at the top from "Top" (useless) to "Latest" What was your first twittering day look like? What will your last one look like? Looking at your own tweets is of course navel gazing, for more perspective, I made a little tool (using a great tip from Anil Dash) that lets you dial in any date in history, and see what all the people you follow now were twittering that day. Give the Twitter Time Tunnel a spin. Here I am diving back to my first twittering day: The Twitter Time Tunnel set for January 31, 2007 Actually I can see I am actually getting up to the day before, I might have to adjust the code! But anyhow, this was the discourse then among people I follow now The fascinating tweets of the day before I joined twitter. Short. "bank run" "sleepy" "doing music with mike" "updating all my profiles to say NYC for location" This is starkly different from 2022. I am not saying better or worst. Time travel is trippy. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/51017986300 Our New Old Phone flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I baked banana bread tonight; I am eating warm slice of it right now. Big deal, eh? A year ago I could not say this. One day I saw again the pile of brown bananas I had let linger on the counter too long. In a surprise move, I googled "banana bread recipe". There's only 3,000,000 results. My rough rule for trying new recipes is choosing one with the smallest list of ingredients and the fewest steps. Joy's Easy Banana Bread recipe fit the bill, and it worked. The question with recipes, and quick solutions in general, to me is, "Is this a bounding box or a starting point?" As I iterate with recipes, I end up annotating them: [caption id="attachment_64469" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Marked up recipe[/caption] First of all, being diabetic, I replace the 1 cup of sugar with Stevia; but the ratio is 3:1, so it's marked as 1/3 cup Stevia. Joy put 1 egg on the ingredients, but I like mine moist, so I tried 2, and that's my regular approach now. Maybe I'll bump to 3 soon. Joy called for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, but the first time I made it the only baking soda was a box of unknown vintage in the fridge. But several reviewers of Joy's Easy Banana Bread suggest using baking powder over soad, and that I had. Boom, augment that recipe. Finally, all on my own I started adding crushed walnuts to the mix. That recipe is pretty marked up. I prefer to use the same approach in all my work. Don't take recipes for rigid rules. If you want to discuss this more, come on over. I have a few slices of banana bread left over. And it's goooooood. Featured image: The banana bread I made tonight from my annotated recipe- From Three Mushy Bananas.. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) If I was tweeting this, I might make up a silly hash tag like #CoolNewTechnologyIJustFoundThatsBeenOutForEons I use Gmail extensively, got my CogDogness, as well as over the last few weeks, I have ditched the desktop email client and using the Gmail version of our NMC Google Apps email. By finding my oldest Gmail message, I've been using it since July 2005 (and have amassed pile that is 3% of the capacity)-- yet a lesson of the web tech crazy pace is that there is always something new to learn. You never get to the end. Since I've been Gmailing so long I have pretty much ignored the ticker tape of "web clips" or news/ad-like things that sit atop the inbox. Until today. I noticed a link to "edit" the web clips, which is a tab inside the settings, and likely has been there a long time (learn more about Gmail web clips...). Woah, neo, of course- those are all RSS! And... you can remove all the ones you dont want (i zapped them all)... and... drumroll- you can add your own RSS URLs! For a test, I added feeds for comments to my blog and to my flickr account. Essentially, the web clips are turned into a mini feed mixer (although the docs say the clips are displayed randomly, not sequentially). So now, instead of unwanted cruft from cookbooks, forbes, my gmail ticker has my own feed items atop my inbox: I am not 100% sure how useful this is, but now in my email reading, I can get some notifcation using the clips I want, not theirs. And that. my friends, is a good thing. Good web dog. Things are shaping up nicely for the summer course of ds106 I am co-teaching with Martha Burtis, we have been super busy supervising and doing a lot of the work at Camp Magic Mcguffin. If you have every mused about trying to take ds106 as an open participant, this is perhaps the best time, during the summer, to come to camp, and let your creativity go wild. Go check out our welcome video and see the special info we provide for online open participants (yes Lisa Lane, we have a tag for you;-). We were excited to hear that canmpers are already getting into the spirit, Lee has already done and created a first camper submitted assignment. So I wandered down to the shored of Lake Macguffin to see how the cleanup was going. It is still off limits while the crews finish the work, after emptying the lake, and removing all fo the debris with backhoes. Yes, there is a bit of reality distortion that happens in some spots, as you can see, but the water looks great, eh? Martha has been busy working on the new docks (she is handy with those power tools), and today, I took one of the new kayaks out for a spin: As you can see, there are a lot of interesting nooks and crannies to explore, and the Fish and Wildlife Service has confirmed we are adjacent to the location of some nesting bald eagles. We hope we get a chance to spot some of them soon. Just make sure you stay clear of that fenced off cove at the south end of the lake. Well, that's about all the news fro Camp, remember we start on May 21, but if you are an open online participant, heck, just drop in when you can, Just catch the creative fever. Can't wait to see you in camp- I'm working on setting up a side blog to post some video updates. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog She was perhaps the dog I've lived with who had the best disposition. My ex got a dog for her kids before I moved in; Fusge came from the pound, a chocolate lab / doberman mix. I think the kids tacked on the "MC" in front of her intended name (for her obvious colors). Thanks to the bits of my Mom's annual calendar that are now my Google calendar, I get a reminder that she passed away this day in 2001. I remember taking Fudge on runs (me on a bicycle) so she would not be so energetic for a kids sleepover. I remember camping in the woods up here not too far from where I live now. I remember her being a good companion to Dominoe when I moved in. I remember her once eating a whole bowl of raw shrimp sitting in the sink, and a few times eating a crater out of a tray of brownies. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I remember a backpack trip in the Superstition Wilderness with my friend Uwe, who brought his dog, Husky. That poor dog ended up with blisters on his pad, and Uwe carried him out the last few miles. Fudge? She walked out solidly. I remember her just always happy to see you. I remember her muzzle growing grey with age. I remember the summer of 2001, when we noticed she stopped eating. I remember the vet describing the advanced cancer that had engulfed her stomach. I remember that dog not showing one indication of what had to be severe pain. I do not feel like I really remember nearly enough. These memories are shreds, fragments, faded photos. Here's a raised paw to you, MC Fudge, a Dog among dogs. Sit, Avatar! posted 11 Jul '07, 6.54pm MDT PST on flickr I was experimenting today with doing some live video streaming from my laptop into Second Life. That darned dog just refused to listen to my commands. Some virtual dogs are just like their real life versions. There's alway room for another Three Letter Acronym. So did I un-intentionally build an LXP? Tannis Morgan first suggested so in twitter https://twitter.com/tanbob/status/1216547869114556428 and even more in a recent blog post. But wait a minute- whatsa LXP? As a TLA it sounds buzzword-ish. But because I know and respect Tannis, when she first blogged why these things could be of interest, that raises the bar a bit on consideration. Her blog leads outside the edu realm to the corporate learning one of Josh Bersin both big time consultant and a company, and heck, an academy too. Apparently Bersin coined the LXP term in 2018 and is a "booming" market in 2019. Here's his definition: As I describe in some of the original articles, the LXP market exists because the paradigm of the Learning Management System is out of date. People no longer search course catalogs for “courses” the way the used to, and we need a way to train and learn “in the flow of work.” So while the category is a product category, it’s also a category of systems designed with a new philosophy: learning in the flow of work. What this means is that LXP systems have a set of key capabilities:1. They present content in a “Netflix-like” interface, with recommendations, panels, mobile interfaces, and AI-driven recommendations, 2. They accommodate any form of content, including articles, podcasts, blogs, micro-learning, videos, and courses, 3. They are social, and include social profiles which connect content to people to create authority, 4. They have paths or learning track or trails so you can follow content to a logical learning outcome, 5. They have some form of assessment and often badging or certification, 6. They make it easy to publish your own content as an individual, 7. They are mobile, fun to use, fast and easy to traverse and have great search and embedded learning features.https://joshbersin.com/2018/09/the-learning-experience-platform-lxp-market-expands/ That helps some but it's still not 100% clear to me what they do or what one looks like. He cites examples of EdCast (an "AI-powered Knowledge Cloud for personalized learning"), Degreed ("a lifelong learning platform that individuals and organizations use to discover learning content, build skills, and certify their expertise.") , and Pathgather ("the learning experience platform for forward-thinking enterprises seeking to reshape their workforce and stay competitive in the digital world"). Those descriptions are from the google summary on search results, e.g. what's in their web site description SEO tags. From my brief foray into the space (mainly reading what a few others are writing about LXPs), content and experiences in an LMS are ones an organization/institution organizes, designs and packages for learners. An LXP aims to be one where learners get to pick and choose their own paths, possibly even contribute to the collections, and have available a wider range of potentially useful resources, from places like YouTube, wikiHow, the rest of the public internet. Why Do We Have Learning Experience Platforms?The original problem these products solved was what I would call discovery.I want to learn something or take a course and I simply cannot find it in the course catalog (LMS).LMS systems were never designed to be employee-centric. They were developed as “Management” systems for learning, focused on business rules, compliance, and catalog management for courses.The LXP, which looks more like YouTube or Netflix, is a true content delivery system, which makes modern content easy to find and and consume.https://joshbersin.com/2019/03/learning-experience-platform-lxp-market-grows-up-now-too-big-to-ignore/ The likely shift Bersin cites is LMS's aiming to strap on capabilities to be more LXP- look more corporate goop names! If you have Bridge (Instructure), CornerstoneOnDemand, CrossKnowledge, D2L, Docebo, Saba, SuccessFactors, SumTotal, or another LMS, most of these vendors now have add-ons that perform LXP-like features.https://joshbersin.com/2018/09/the-learning-experience-platform-lxp-market-expands/ Will education get prodded too to look at LXPs? I dunno. CorrLeader as LXP "Lite"? I probably would have never even read this much were it not for Tannis's tweet calling the Corrections Leadership project ("CorrLeader") I did last year with JIBC. I wrote a detailed series of posts covering the project from a first metaphor based on maps through prototyping and implementation as a WordPress site. The project really was about making a WordPress site. Which I did. But there is always more I get into a project if I can (and they want). And while the project does not have all seven characteristics of an LXP (hence "light") in looking back I see some resemblance. Plus this was not some megabucks corporate development project, it was me and WordPress, and a lot of googling on how to do some tricky parts. The project was meant to be a resource hub for leadership development for middle managers in BC Corrections, working with an established process. It included a mix of what we called Recommended Courses - workshops and classes or, in person offerings that the department was arranging plus independent learning options, some purchased online mini course content and other ones previously developed (many of this were previously tucked away in the bowels of a Sharepoint site). In the map metaphor for the project these were provided as established trails on a map. These were to be mixed in with a wide variety of Additional Resources including books, TED Talks, articles, podcasts. For the map metaphor these were more like points on a map that participants would seek themselves. All of this would be used with the program's professional growth model so a mentor might suggest specific workshops/courses to pursue components or areas for a manager to explore. The site/project itself did not call for any kind of tracking or reporting. I a few places we built forms to submit feedback or reviews or materials, and in somewhat an LXP vein, at least a form to suggest new resources. Going Being the Project Specs: The Navigator If you get me on a project, the specifications are always a minimum, but not necessarily the end. In the early conversations with my client, there was a desire for a means to keep the potential audience for the site informed of new, interesting additions/offerings to the site. The base level is as old as anything on the internet - email. I had some ideas sketched about some easy ways to provide the content so a person sending out emails could easily cut and paste, or maybe generate, summaries of the content. But I also remembered being told that the reason to offer resources such as videos and podcasts is that the type of people this is aimed at are very much on the go, that things that could be easily accessed on a mobile device would be even better. This eventually came to be developed as the CorrLeader Navigator This is a separate lightweight HTML (Bootstrap theme) site designed for mobile screens. It is not a version of the full site crafted for the small screen. Rather, it accesses quickly a summary of all content on the site via the WordPress API, presenting it in either a text summary listing or a richer media version (where videos are embedded, links work, etc). But more than that, on your device you can store preferences for the mode of presentation types of resources, and filter by the 27 content topics or any of the three broad leadership areas. While building it out, this was what I called my Crazy Checkbox interface, as I weaved different ways to have all of them be coordinated (selecting all or none, or all in a leadership area, or turning off the All selections if a subsection was chosen). Now the thing here that I was so sure would catch interest (well I thought this alone was pretty damn amazing) was that these options were saved on you device, but never by cookies which could be sent out. All of this is done with browser storage, it's preferences (tracking maybe) that never leaves your device. Now surely someone would think this was amazing. Useful! Worth asking me about it. Well... I have not heard any peeps of interest. Curiosity. Well Tannis just spoke up. So I cannot say "no" interest. Maybe I did not explain it well. What a Lite LXP Might Do This can put into action the idea of "headless" WordPress Content Management Systems (CMS). It means you could use all the affordances of WordPress to let your content designers build content, but not use it (or just very lightly) as the presentation means. So stop fussing with the templates and themes and plugins. Turn WordPress into a content management system. But let the client side not be hitting your WordPress database, but just grabbing it's data as JSON API data (basically text). The CorrLeader site's 88 full media content entries comes over in totality in about 1Mb of text data. And we have it cached, so you are not hitting the WordPress server hard. I should add that after the CorrLeader Navigator loads, any change in view, filters, is just done locally., there are no further HTTP requests except for maybe media. And this is where I can think an LXP approach could go. You could have a client platform that maybe draws from multiple sources, not just one, and perhaps one the users choose themselves. Yu provide the browsing, searching, finding to be done on a site with a much smaller footprint. But let's go farther. One of the nifty prototypes I did build for Tannis was her idea of a Constellation metaphor to represent groups of resources that are related. This whole prototype was done by a pile of WordPress custom development using D3js (yep, a long blog post exists for that too). But having done the CorrLeader Navigator, I can see it would make maybe more sense to dynamically generate the constellations on the client side; let it draw from maybe multiple WordPress content sources? I am just conjecturing here. But having done a few WordPress (and other source) projects/demos with API calls, it's got a lot of potential for getting back to a web of pieces being loosely joined. What's Not There I have built a decent working prototype. It lacks use of what seems to be needed by the Big Programmers- a layer of some kind code buzzword named frameworks. And my stuff does not have reporting, tracking (if it were left to me I would build systems where the learner decides when, where to submit their data, not have it harvested), AI, recommender systems, badging, social media integration. But it sure could. Or not. Hey! Anyone Out There? I'd be excited if anyone sees enough potential in all of this to want to build something like this for your project or program. And to be honest, sitting here between projects I have time and need for new ones. This may not be Big Enterprise Level Stuff but I think there's quite a bit here even conceptually that feels, excitingly... new. Throw CogDog a project bone? Featured Image: A complete fabrication by me and Photoshop of a mock Jeopardy game board. I started with a screenshot of a real one, but completely traced it over, faked fonts and effects (well I did find a source suggesting the font for the cards is ITC Korinna and it worked great). Is this a copy? No. It is parody I claim, so I choose Sue Me for 100 cents, Alec. cc licensed flickr photo shared by red5standingby A recent interest timesuck addiction um,, interest has been playing Words With Friends... with friends. I've been on a lucky streak, and have beaten a few people who are smarter and more educated (people who actually use words like "epistemology" in regular conversation. But its really not about winning, it's the joy of playing, challenging your brain. Who am I kidding? It's better to win! Give me the X on a TL box sliding down to the TW score. And maybe I will start using "words" like "QI" "XI", "NEF", "AE" in everyday language. But that's not the point either. Here is the word I have been thinking about. cc licensed flickr photo "M" and cc licensed flickr photo "O" shared by Leo Reynolds I can't remember if I was 7,8,9 when my Mom showed me this word game with the wooden tiles. I just remember the warm times together playing games on the kitchen table. It was in a few years that something happened, I eventually won a game from her (she was not one to give a game away), and then I was winning them regularly. But it was less about being the winner, then the joint winners, as we played along the guidelines that a combined score of above 500 meant it was a good game on both sides. Another thing I am finding is that, like photography, most people can sit down and play (click a shutter), but the more you play (take pictures) the better you get just be the act of reflection on what you are doing, experience. Learning by doing. And you don;t have to have the sharpest and most in depth vocabulary, you just need to know how to make the best of compound words, of knowing something of the letter frequency counts, and most of all, a lot of luck in the draws. A game of Words with Friends can play out quickly but is asynchronous, when you and your friend bat it back and forth like a tennis ball, but it can also dribble out for weeks. I like both ways of play. I've had only 2 people I played for months, but after tweeting something about it, i have a rack of 3 or 4 games going. One player I had no idea who it was, until I connected it with someone who has been responding to some of my tweets this year (with a flair for humor), yet ti was not even until I looked closer at their twitter name, than I realized it was someone I've known online for like 10 years. So thanks M3 O1 M3 for getting me started with this love for word games- in which I am just learning by doing again and again. Qi ya later, XI! Yesterday I had the fun opportunity to talk about attributed and possibly [semi] serious use of the kinds of media people see/share all the time. This session was a free pre-conference teaser for the 24th annual Teaching, Colleges and Community (YCC) conference. That's right, 24... and it's still being organized by the very people who did the first one, Bert Kimura and Curtis Ho from the University of Hawaii. Maybe the best little free online conference you have never heard of. Before I go silly, I have to do my web paleontology act to dial back to a League for Innovation conference in 2003 where this smiling man named Bert asked to talk to me about the conference. At that time, the acronym as aimed at Community Colleges, and as I was doing instructional technology work at the Maricopa Community Colleges, he gently pitched the idea of getting Maricopa to participate at an institutional level. This meant I got my office to pay a single registration fee, and any employee could take part of the online conference at no cost to them. It was a fabulous PD opportunity to offer, and we got to joke about sending so many people to a conference in Hawaii (meaning they did it from their office). Since then... I did a presentation for TCC in 2004 on Photoblogging, I had just discovered flickr, but actually talked more about Buzznet and Fotolog. Hah.In 2005 Bert invited me to give a TCC keynote, in which I invoked a metaphor of Star Trek’s Harry Mudd to talk about Small Pieces Loosely JoinedI was in Hawaii later that year for an NMC conference and visited Bert and his wife at home, enjoyed a local style beach dinner and a mountain hike. In a trip to Asia in 2008, I again got to visit with them for a week in Japan. These things, done well, grow into friendship.I also was asked to keynote in 2013, which ended up using a different metaphor for the DS106 Show (this involved me invoking a scene from Network where I urged others to do through open their browser windows and yell "I'm MOOCed as Hell and I'm Not Taking It Anymore"Maybe the crowning TCC was the 20th, when for the first time there was part of the conference on site in Hawaii. I got to do a keynote where, invoking Brett Victor's talk, I time traveled back to 1996 to talk about the web. This involved me making a Yahoo T-shirt and buying a Walkman for props. I decided in December, when the call for presentations for this year's TCC went out, to submit a presentation- it's actually going to be a revisit of the 2004 one and see where we have gone in 15 years in terms of communicating with shared photos. So... when Bert and Curtis approached me last month asking if I would do the free pre-conference session they offer in March, I of course had to say yes. They said I could do the same talk, and I of course declined that offer, and pitched my silly idea. The interest in "doing more" with media we see as entertainment (or worse) in social media goes back of course to many things DS106, but more to the studio sessions we did for the UDG Agora project- Brian Lamb led one on Meme Media: Attention-Grabbing Images And Animated Gifs and I did one one on Making Short Form Videos. It's been a part of Networked Narratives (2017-2019). And I did a first run of Affordances of Silly Media for a group of mostly community center leaders in Melbourne Australia during my ISS Institute fellowship there in 2017. I had lots to draw on. The platform for TCC was Adobe Connect, a platform I have not seen since leaving NMC (before 2011 then). Honestly, it's not changed much since. I had to provide "slides" for them to upload, which of course meant, none of the GIFs moved, I just had to describe them moving and provide links (and twice during my talk Adobe Connect went down in a beach ball spiral of doom). I thought I had packed way too much in, the Keynote presentation was 25Mb for 65 slides, many meant for fast flipping. I must have talked fast, as I got through on about 40 minutes. We had a great audience, with folks I could see during intros from across the US, Canada, Japan, Greece (where it was 2am apparently), and even a colleague from Canberra who saw me present there in 2007. Anyhow, I have the slides and a whole bunch of links (a lot) over in my Presentation show room https://cog.dog/show/2019/03/20/silly-media/ And a recording of the silliness is available on the conference web site. At least four people took up the challenge during the talk to make meme images about TCC; thanks so much to the always eager and excited Cynthia Cologne for making and sharing them. https://twitter.com/lyrlobo/status/1108532535208759296 And thanks of course to Bert and Curtis and his TCC team plus Rebecca and John Walber from Learning Times for helping run the show. If you are looking for a great online conference experience, check out TCC in April. The theme this year is "Sustainable Learning, Accessible Technologies, & Diverse Contexts." Technology, Colleges and Community (TCC), is a worldwide online conference attended by university and college personnel including faculty, research associates, academic support staff, counselors, student services personnel, students, and administrators.Join our 24th edition of this annual event to share your expertise, experiences, and knowledge relevant to the use of information technology in learning, teaching, innovation, and academic services. This event is very helpful and “friendly” to novices. It provides you with a strong foundation about teaching and learning with modern technologies. Featured Image: TCC2019 Meme made at imgflip using the Distracted Boyfriend pic. Okay, so you are either hepped on twitter or think it is the dumbest thing since the Clapper. I'd use it more if it wasn't so popular and bogged down lately. But twittervision makes for an interesting way to "watch" the tweets world wide. rather than seeing the flow of your local circle, you are watching disjointed pieces of conversation world wide... with each tweet geolocated on a Google Map. I made a short screen capture of a few tweets bouncing in from across the map [QuickTime clip 3.4 Mb] From what I understand, to geo-located a tweet, all you need do is to include in your message a code like "L:Phoenix, AZ" - I tried 2 tweets and watched the map, but never made it to the screen. It's a little mesmerizing to sit back and watch, in the same way at LiveMarks you can watch in real-time what people are tagging with del.icio.us Tweets on a Map! Sometimes in the RSS grazing you zoom quickly past something that just has a tiny spark, and it registers- this might be big. I had that sensation upong finding this O'Reilly article from uber uber geek John Udell, Prime-Time Hypermedia: In the course of trying to transform my blog from a hypertext publication into a hypermedia publication, I've run into a bunch of obstacles. In the world of tech blogging they are -- ironically -- almost purely technical. Presentations, demos, and interviews are often freely available for viewing or listening, yet infuriatingly hard to link to. Almost anyone can create and post a snippet of audio or video, but almost no one can do so easily, spontaneously, or routinely. In a series of columns beginning with this one, I'll review and elaborate on a variety of hypermedia techniques I've been experimenting with. I don't know beans about high-end AV technologies, so don't look for expert guidance or Hollywood production values. I come at this from the bottom up, as a web-savvy blogger frustrated by the opaqueness and intractability of existing hypermedia content. I want to be able to repurpose that stuff on my blog. I want you to be able to do the same on your blog. And I'd like to see all of our blogs enriched with original audio and video content, where appropriate. It's time to take the Web to that next level, and the means to do so are at hand. (emphasis added) He starts with references to issues of searching video content by indexing the content into text and searching that, something that technically works but really would not easily pan out. He then suggests another approaching, allowing weblogs to be able to link directly to specified segments within a vide/audio stream, and the blog posts would thus provide the text "annotations" that could then be searched (there are some parallels here to my own half baked ideas that weblogs could provide the contextual wrappers to learning objects, connected by trackbacks) It goes like this (I think). There are available somewhere, many places, on the net, video chunks of longer length, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, etc, more than you would want to link to. Simply by using a link to a script on a web site again elsewhere, you can specify in the URL string the start and stop times of the A/V video segments you want to "chunk" out and reference in your weblog. Hand it an MP3 URL plus start/stop times, and it hands you back the corresponding slice of the file. It's a whole different way of using audio/video, and taking the burden off the blogger of having to sort out how to stream the content- they can access and stream just small parts of a larger stream. It's not exactly clear what he is getting at until you look at some of the examples, see the elaboration in Udell's blog He provides an example linking to a short segment of a 14 minute interview with Dave Winer: http://udell.infoworld.com:8002/?site=cyber.law.harvard.edu&url=/blogs/gems/dave/sandquistCoffeeNotes.mp3&dur=00:14:11&beg=00:03:40&end=00:04:23 Simply by fiddling and changing the beg= and end= parts of this URL, you can access different parts of the segment, eg. a later segment http://udell.infoworld.com:8002/?site=cyber.law.harvard.edu&url=/blogs/gems/dave/sandquistCoffeeNotes.mp3&dur=00:14:11&beg=00:06:15&end=00:07:50 or an earlier one. http://udell.infoworld.com:8002/?site=cyber.law.harvard.edu&url=/blogs/gems/dave/sandquistCoffeeNotes.mp3&dur=00:14:11&beg=00:01:10&end=00:03:10 It's not clear yet how one could use this on a wide scale and it brings up the inevitable crying of who is going to host the media files and/or put up with remote linking-- but it is the concept that is interesting, though experimental. It just smells like potential. Tip of the blog hat to Roland Tanglao and Tom Hoffman (who even points out how it supports digital portfolios) From some previous visits with excellent learning leaders in Australia and continued contacts with colleagues there, I was asked to be audio interviewed online June 2 (here) via the LearningTimes site "Live Session: RSS, Blogging and What it Means for Teaching and Learning" (It is free, but you need to join LearningTimes): Participate in this international live interview on "RSS, Blogging and What it Means for Teaching and Learning" with Alan Levine of Maricopa Community College and Garry Putland of EdNA Online (Australia). Michael Chalk (Australia) will conduct the interview, supported by LearningTimes member Michael Coghlan. This event coincides with the launch of Edition 5 (June 2004) of the Knowledge Tree e-Journal of Flexible Learning in Vocational Education and Training where Michael Coghlan's eagerly awaited article 'Finding Your Voice Online' is available for download. I am quite humbled to be billed as such (just to show that the reality distortion field is not just for Steve Jobs, but almost anything on the web), especially in the company of Garry Putland whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2003 MERLOT conference. There seems to be down under, like elsewhere, a bubbling rise of interest in blogs for education, as well as tossing of of the litany of acronym soup RSS-XML-CSS-ePortfolio.... I am hoping over the holiday weekend for a flash of brilliance. It should be fun, and I was impressed with the quality of the audio chat from my first use of LearningTimes a month ago. Blogs, RSS, all the technology are no magic bullets for learning, and I think we tend to look at each technology innovation as such, rather than just enablers, or just another tool among a collection to reach for when appropriate. This is in conjunction with the electronic publication the Flexible Learning Leaders produce as the Knowledge Tree-- which has some great publications and sharing of excellent work, but.... I always have the impression that the publishing notion is one of "paper". A tremendous amount of work goes into a published paper (in a previous life I spent a year writing a 4 page published scientific paper), but these blog days I really value the quick and rapid exchange of "publsihing" in blog space. Perhaps they go hand in hand- blogs can be used to flesh out preliminary ideas, get feedback, launch trial balloons, that could ultimately feed into (or not) a polished paper. But I leave that for the academics to sort out-- I have zero interest in journal or academic publishing, nitpicking over word counts, reference formats, etc. I got a chance to spread the ds106 mojo at Wordcamp Vancouver today, with my session on Building an Open Course/Community with WordPress, Syndication, and Duct Tape: ds106 is an open course in Digital Storytelling that leverages platforms of open source tools, syndication, and social media in a way that makes it more community than course. At ds106.us is a wordpress powered hub that aggregates and recombines input from 500+ external blogs plus a user contributed assignment bank, daily creative challenges, even a radio station. Built by a team of educator tinkerers, not coders, ds106 is as a model of a community network that is not limited to just courses. This was on the heels of a cross-Canada flight with a 1:30am arrival to our quarters in Vancouver, a little bit more late night slide fiddling of slides, a trailing cold, and lot of coffee. Hence, GNA's description feels apt: https://twitter.com/DrGarcia/status/257191082033573889 First up the slides, exported from Keynote as a pDF and upped to slideshare Building an Open Course/Community with WordPress, Syndication, and Duct Tape from Alan Levine I also broadcast the talk to #ds106 radio, and had planned to record the audio on my ipad... but forgot to click the Big Red Button. Oh well. I also had my keynote presentation doing some auto tweeting (curious? here's how) (yes, I have to update those instructions a bit). Ah, but who needs an audio recording when Giulia is doing her amazing visual notes? cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe I really meant to do a nice web site for the presentation with links and stuff, but alas, this is a Wordpress conference and why not just blog it? eh? A few thoughts- as I guessed most people do not know nor really care about massive open courses. But they do all have the common experience of school, sitting in rows, listening to lectures, whule at the same time being part of the creative aspects of the open web. People do not really even get or understand syndication. It feels like magic. Maybe it is. RSS is sure lively and useful for something that is dead. People were really interested in the Daily Create and the concept of the Assignment Bank. I spoke to people in areas outside of education who quickly saw the application potential. Maybe I did convince them how much fun this is and I do it for reasons that ahve nithing to do with being a business success or maximizing my SEO. Now, the links: (more…) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ihave3kids GNA had a good idea for the ds106 Daily Create scheduling... https://twitter.com/DrGarcia/status/432031072931426304 I had been thinking about the timing of when they are published; it has been 10:00 AM EST from the beginning, aiming likely at our students in Fredericksburg, and/or first thing in the morning for the west coast, and something totally inconvenient for people in other time zones. Here is the thing about time zones-- no matter what time you schedule something, it will be a crappy time for people elsewhere on the globe. That is a problem I cannot fix. But is a good thing to have the TDC planted in your head early, so I have just modified the site, so new ones are released earlier, 5:00 AM EST. We do this in Wordpress as scheduled posts, so it was easy to tweak in my script that creates new ones; the ones already in the queue were edited in the dashboard. This means for North American, your TDC will be waiting for you when you wake up. Most of you. For friends in the Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Zanzibar... well maybe still not optimal. But as GNA suggested, it would help to have the @ds106dc tweets repeated at reasonable intervals. I set up dlvr.it to send the tweets based upon the RSS feed from the site, so as soon as new ones are published, the tweet will go out (within an hour, the is the frequency it checks the feed). I could not find an option in dlvr.it to repeat a tweet, so with some poking around, I came across http://tweko.com/. With this service, any tweet that goes out from this account with a #tweko hash tag will be repeated 2 more times at 8 hour intervals. I will know in a day if it works. But now, you have fewer excuses for not doing your daily exercise! cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Giulia Forsythe Especially the artist of that image ;-) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by JoelMontes under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license[/caption] I repeat myself, but wow, do I love Writely, the shared web word processor. A few nights ago, I go an email invite to edit a Writely document-- this came from Phil Long at MIT, and I followed the link in to edit a document we has creating to use as a demo presentation. How mind blowing it was to see his words appearing at the bottom of the page as I was adding this picture and some text to the top. Can your grandfather's wiki have live editing by more than one person? I've been using Writely to draft some new project ideas for next year, and inviting sopme colleagues to help edit. One small, tiny shortcoming I see is that some of the people I invited to edit, merely typed in some comments rather than actually editing my copy. It would be swell, Beaver, if there was a way in Writely to attach a comment to text that was not really part of the document itself. Most others seem to want a full, one screen display of all changes like Word's Track Changes. You get them in essence by tracking Writely's revision history. but it's not exactly the same. For all that Writely does right, I can live without the detailed Track Changes. I'd really like to see what some creative writing teachers can do with this, or anyone else working on a document written by more than one person. Writely Wrocks! We have some fun in Networked Narratives with coded messages using rot13. Just look at the Daily Digital Alchemy 243: An encoded challenge today, what the ***** is "Pna lbh pbairefr va EBG13? Ner lbh pyhrq va?" That's much more than an Alan typo... It's just a simple cipher that works by changing each letter in a word to the one that is 13 letters after (wrapping around after Z). It's nifty, because being half of the number of letters in the English alphabet, decoding can use the same formula (just add another 13 to get back to where you started). This was an early thing that happened when Mia Zamora and started planning NetNarr in 2016. We were excited that as a twitter hashtag, no one was using #netnarr. But then I shared rot13 where we found that #netnarr became #arganee... that sounded like a mystery world (hence the domain arganee.world (I wonder if anyone ever ventures there, it's weird). I always did the encoding/decoding with a lot of roundtrip copy paste at the rot13.com site. As I saw two of our students going back and forth, I wondered if there was a Simpler Way. And boom- I found a seven year old bit of Javascript usable in a browser bookmarklet. I then tried it out. It worked great it tweetdeck- I could select any text, clicked the bookmarklet, and it would apply the rot13 transformation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA2_-8j11NQ Because of that magic of the same function coding text that decodes it, you can use it to convert any "normal" text to rot13 or any converted text back to "normal". And if you use it without any selection, you get a dialog box to encode any message: Use the bookmarklet to encode any phrase Now I am encoded! How can you do this? Well browser bookmarklet tools no longer work in Firefox, so do this in Chrome or Safari. Just click and hold this link, then draaaaaag it to your bookmarks bar in your browser. Or copy the script text: javascript:function%20convert(inText){var%20outText='',t;for(i=0;i<inText.length;i++){t=inText.charCodeAt(i);if((t>64&&t<78)||(t>96&&t<110))t%20+=%2013;else%20if((t>77&&t<91)||(t>109&&t<123))t%20-=%2013;outText%20+=%20String.fromCharCode(t);}return%20outText;}if(window.getSelection){var%20sel=window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0);}else{var%20sel=''}if(sel==''){var%20act=document.activeElement;if(act.type=="textarea"){var%20start=act.selectionStart,end=act.selectionEnd;if(start!=end){var%20prefix=act.value.substring(0,start);var%20middle=convert(act.value.substring(start,end));var%20suffix=act.value.substring(end);act.value=prefix;act.value%20+=%20middle;void(act.value%20+=%20suffix);}}else{void(inText=prompt('Phrase...',''));if(inText)alert(convert(inText));}}else{out=convert(sel.toString());sel.deleteContents();var%20span=document.createElement("span");span.innerHTML=out;sel.insertNode(span);} Go to your browser's Bookmarks Manager, create a new bookmark in the place that puts them on your bookmarks bar, add a new bookmark, and past that chunk in for a URL (you might have to poke around for instructions, here is one set that might help). It sort of works on a mobile device, I used this set of instructions to add it to my iPhone Safari app. I can take a web view, select the first paragraph: This is the before screenshot of a web page. I selected the text of the first paragraph, opened and clicked the Safari bookmark tool... And look! I rot13-d it. It was not good at tweets, since in the twitter app, you cannot select partial text in a tweet. Nalubj, V whfg jnagrq gb funer fbzr qvtvgny nypurzvpny gevpxf gung zvtug vzcerff lbhe sevraqf naq jbeel lbhe sbrf. Got it? Featured Image: Magic Spell combined with Eight Trigram - Section 6.1 Round shape - John Ferguson 01.jpg Wikimedia Commons image by John Ferguson shared under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license (which means I do too). Inverted colors of image and bumped contrast for better design with blog header. New in Google Labs is an add-on for having embedded web search in your email space- this means while composing a message, there is right in the mail interface a search form. The results appear in a GChat pop-up/overlay, and the results can be directly inserted into your message. In this case, I am emailing my friend Cole a message, and need a URL for a site to share-- I can search+find+insert all in the email composing window. So this saves having to tab over to another window, run a search, copy/paste the URL (especially since the one in Google Search results does not point to the actual URL, but a Google ByPassSnagSomeINfo URL). It's Gggggggggreat! cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Joe Lencioni The energy of ds106 radio continue to shine, with the almost impromptu music themes this week, from work songs to a fun day (was it Wednesday? just yesterday?) of "Songs to Grow By" -- meaning songs you heard as a kid, or songs your parents/grandparents played or, as the Dr Garcia's bumper went, "ones your aunt played as she drove you across the country not even stopping to get McDonald fries" (I am guessing that is not just a generic example, Dr G?). The thoughts that came to me were the eras of music that played out of the basement family room of our house in Suburban Baltimore, with the old tube powered record player in a wooden box. I assembled a mix of music and a few intros. Alan's Songs to Grow By The song lists include: Parents and Kids sounds Mom's music for house work- Neil Diamond "Sweet Carolina" Dad's marching music - John Philip Sousa My listens to Winnie The Pooh on LP, everyone likes te Tigger song, but I had a fondness and desire for Eeyore to be happy First Rock Album My sisters bring in The Beatles Abbey Road- played Octopus Garden as it was a bit of a story and at least Ringo got some spotlight Box of 45s courtesy of our neighbor The Jackson Five "ABC" Mark Lindsay "Arizona" (ironic that I would now live there) Alan Buys His Own Albums (Yes He Knows He Needs to Get Them Out of His Mom's Garage!) Bachman Turner Overdrive "Taking Care of Business" Paul McCartney and Wings "Helen Wheels" I later realized that is was really fitting to have some Schoolhouse Rock, so I tossed some of them into the bin including "Conjunction Junction", "Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here", "Zero My Hero", "Three is a Magic Number", "I Got Six" and "Figure 8" -- you can find them all on the Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H9WN1DGm9o What a fun day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KDPUTyDyQ It's your birthday today Mom, and all I got you was a blog post. Again. I bet you are making cookies, as you do on Sundays. I would call... but I cannot. And no one can enjoy those chocolate chip cookies and what was more valuable, the gift of a bag of your cookies. Mom would have been 86 today. I must have done the subtraction 3 times, 2015-1929, thinking the number was not right. It must be more. It was right. Four years since the last time I could call Mom for a birthday greeting. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] She loved Herb Alpert's music. In that photo is one of the 1960s vintage tables I remember from the living room of our house in Baltimore. The tables were there when we cleaned out her house in 2011. Back at home in Strawberry, I have maybe six of the Herb Alpert LPs that she still had in her house, the ones that were on the shelves in our wood paneled basement family room, the one with the Zenith tube record player. Maybe I need to sit down and listen to them all. In one of our recorded conversations, she told me, in sequence, about her enjoyment of the Herb Alpert music's beat and her reason for baking and sharing cookies. [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/cookies-herb-alpert.mp3"][/audio] I'd like to picture her dancing on that beach with Herb and the band. Happy 86th, Mom. I'm into some crazy stuff. If you told me even last year I'd be having a 1 hour, clear, voice conversation over the net to a colleague in Finland, I would check to see what medications you were missing. But today, I was interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina from Finland, where he was the mix master and actually recording the session for a future SkypeCast. I almost forgot the novelty of the technology, as it did not drop out once. Of course, then he had to tell me I was a second interview after he had a session with Stephen Downes, so barring some editing magic that can assemble my words more coherently, by comparison, I am going to be the one sounding like an Arizona dirt farmer. Skype works, works well, is free, and that is enough of a cool factor for me. But tomorrow morning is something even wackier, suffice it to say I am attempting to do a remote video chat/presentation as part of the New Media Consortium's EDUCAUSE/NLII session on their Horizon Report (published today). So if you are in New Orleans for the conference, nor hung over in the Quarter or lost in the hotel, you can go to the session and see a grainy video of me, breaking up, as I babble through a bunch of "umms" and "I think" LIVE, over the net, and maybe even recorded! I do have a backup - this is me during the practice session using "old" cell phone technology to walk through the set up. If this fails, I might be doing that sad imitation of the Verizon Guy. Hey if you are at EDUCAUSE, go easy on the network during my stint! For that matter, if I can ask the entire Internet to pause for 5 minutes so I can have the whole bandwidth, I will be nice for the rest of the year. Well, maybe the rest of the month. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Christian O. Harris On May 15th I am bringing a new round of Amazing True Stories of Openness to the Yavapai College Summer Institute and guess what? I WANT MOTE STORIES! A few people said they would do these last time, and fell short. Shall I name names? Again the call-- Have you ever had an amazing unexpected outcome from something that you shared online? or just made a connection through open networks with someone that you would have not otherwise been able to do? I am looking for more examples to add to my collection but not for me, it's so I can share with others. See http://stories.cogdogblog.com for stories gatherered so far and the call for stories Keep the open web alive, full of magic and wonder http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB7eAGS5_0U If you are a teacher using the internet in any way, connecting with other teachers through blogs and social media, all you energized ETMOOCers, students who are connecting with world experts, talking to astronauts (ahem Donna Fry) -- tell me a story! It's crazy simple, Sit down in fromt of a web cam and tell me a story, post it to youtube/vimeo, shazam, done. The point is to use your own experience to provide a spark of inspiration to others, like the ones attending my session at Yavapai. Nothing says more of the value fo open sharing than another educators positive experience. As the second part of a series of posts about a leadership model web site created for project managed at JIBC, this one is about some of the early interface explorations I dabbled with. In the first post, I laid ground for the map metaphor for leadership, there would be three "regions" corresponding to the model's areas of Personal, Relational, and Organizational Leadership. Within these regions, the site's resources could be accessed via a map of recommended trails and off trail destinations to explore. I looked first at d3.js which I used previously for the dynamic plotted representations for the Constellection prototype, which too was based on mapping resources from a WordPress site. But while I found in the project gallery many examples of putting data into basemaps (e.g. a bubble map) I did not see anything like a trail map or something with destinations and routes plotted dynamically. I forget how I landed on looking at Leaflet.js, a powerful library for generating dynamic maps: Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 38 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.Leaflet is designed with simplicity, performance and usability in mind. It works efficiently across all major desktop and mobile platforms, can be extended with lots of plugins, has a beautiful, easy to use and well-documented API and a simple, readable source code that is a joy to contribute to. This is a relief to find an open source platform, especially considering how many projects I've had using Google Maps getting torqued by their putting a price on using their API. The lights clicked on when I read the "Not of this Earth" Leaflet tutorial. Sometimes, maps do not represent things on the surface of the earth and, as such, do not have a concept of geographical latitude and geographical longitude. Most times this refers to big scanned images, such as game maps. While I was not doing things off earth, this demo showed me how map elements of locations and routes could be plotted on to any base map, like the fictitious land maps I had already been dabbling with. I spent 2-3 weeks working on some prototype maps where I would add pins for the recommended resources as well as some dots and lines for the others. The content was mostly place holder, but I got it working with different colored pins for the 3 areas, pop up descriptors with links, and even getting into creating map layers that could be toggled on and off. This was all meant to show conceptually what an interface could look with, and thinking the rather than the hard coded locations and data I put in manually, they could be dynamically generated from a Wordpress site. To make the code work more available, I put the three prototypes in a GitHub repo, and published them as things to explore via GitHub pages. So here is the site where all are available: The public demo site where the map prototypes can be explore. These are far from what I envisioned, but enough to show the potential functionality. First Demo: Stuff On the Map This first demo was really to get the hang of putting a few pins on the map. Here's a bit of GIF action to amaze you. All the Leaflet stuff happens inside the <script>...</script> tags at the bottom (see full source code for demo 1), but to outline it we first declare the map, set some boundaries to define the coordinate system, the image for the basemal, and a bit that adds the bottom left legend. var map = L.map('map', { crs: L.CRS.Simple, minZoom: -1 }); var bounds = [[0,0], [1000,1000]]; var image = L.imageOverlay('images/land.png', bounds).addTo(map); map.fitBounds(bounds); L.tileLayer('', { attribution: '© CorrLeader Program | Map via MapGen4 ' }).addTo(map); Something that is useful (at the bottom) is some code that for development gives a way to get the local coordinates for a clicked location. // popup to give coordinates var popup = L.popup(); function onMapClick(e) { popup .setLatLng(e.latlng) .setContent("You clicked the map at " + e.latlng.toString()) .openOn(map); } map.on('click', onMapClick); Back to the top, after setting up the map, I add this bit to define the red dot destination icons used for the "off trail" locations; the others I just use the built in pins. var destIcon = L.icon({ iconUrl: 'images/dest-icon.png', iconSize: [18,18], iconAnchor: [9, 9], popupAnchor: [-3, -7], shadowUrl: 'images/dest-shadow.png', shadowSize: [18, 18], shadowAnchor: [9, 9] }); Then I define variables to represent my four map pin locations I will put into this demo (the coordinates come from the pop up code above). var teamwork = [182.1, 207.0]; var honesty = [171.0, 426.0]; var collaboration = [ 249.0, 625.1]; var communication = [127.2, 809.0]; Each one of these is defined by a chunk of code like below. I define a marker using the coordinates above, then add bits to create the popup message contents and a tooltip. Here are two of them. marker = L.marker(teamwork).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('Teamwork Duo Reges: constructio interrete. Quod cum dixissent, ille contra. Quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliqua historia vestigium ponimus.'); marker.bindTooltip("Teamwork"); marker = L.marker(honesty).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('Honesty Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Compensabatur, inquit, cum summis doloribus laetitia. Mihi, inquam, qui te id ipsum rogavi? Que Manilium, ab iisque M. A mene tu? '); marker.bindTooltip("Honesty"); These are just brute force added to the map, later I can see turning this process into a more elegant function. Maybe. For the off trail locations, I define their coordinates, add the popups, then use the polyline function to connect them (if needed). var teamwork1 = [234.0, 232.5]; var teamwork2 = [195.0, 280.5]; marker = L.marker(teamwork1, {icon: destIcon}).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('How to turn a group of strangers into a team TEDtalk by Amy Edmonson, Oct 2017 Watch Now'); marker.bindTooltip("Amy Edmonson TEDTalk"); marker = L.marker(teamwork2, {icon: destIcon}).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('ENAV 2450 - Leadership and Teamwork BCIT School of Transportation Course More info'); marker.bindTooltip("Leadership and Teamwork course"); Second Demo: A New Map Base The second demo is not any different for the map code, it has a few more pins added, but mainly this was to make use of what I felt was a more map-like base map. The source code of this map too is available for forking and peeking pleasure. The second demo puts pins on a new base mal. Third Demo: Pins in Every Region, Toggled Layers The third demo added some more functionality. There are different colored pins added to each region, but the bigger deal was adding the legend (top right) with the regions defined as layers, as well as the "off trail" locations, that can be toggled on and off. Again a Leaflet.js tutorial on layers and groups got me moving in the right direction. Each region has its own colored pins, so pretty! Like before, each pin has a tooltip and a popup info bubble, and a ink that could go to the full WordPress page/ The top tight icon has the layers which can be toggled on and off. The off trail resources (Discovery Trails_ are not shown on initial load, but can be toggled on here. A few red and blue trails are available in the Discovery Trails layer. I've tossed almost enough code here, but this one too is fully available to look at. The set up is the same as the first demo, this time we define a few more location images. But given the number of items here, I got them set up to be populated in a loop. For the Relational markers (red) , I first define the layer group and set up an object/array for all the data: /* Relational Pins */ let relationalg = L.layerGroup(); let rnodes = [ {"label":"Teamwork", "loc":[295.0, 232.2], "pop": 'Teamwork is the ability to work cooperatively with others to achieve group objectives. This competency is fundamental because leadership is not an individual sport. The essence of leadership is accomplishing worthy goals through the combined efforts of others, and teamwork capabilities are crucial. In this section you\'ll learn teamwork strategies, such as the four phases of team development: forming, storming, and performing.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Honesty", "loc":[327.0, 305.2], "pop": 'Honesty is a leader\'s most valuable and most valued leadership quality; it serves as the gateway for trust and inspiration.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Collaboration", "loc":[326.0, 388.2], "pop": 'Collaboration A collaborative leader invests time to build relationships, handles conflicts in a constructive manner, and shares control.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Communication", "loc":[308.0, 458.2], "pop": 'Leadership communication consists of those messages from a leader that are rooted in the values and culture of an organization and are of significant importance to key stakeholders, e.g., employees, customers, strategic partners, shareholders, and the media.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Coaching Skills", "loc":[380.4, 414.4], "pop": 'Coaching Skills includes the dialogue in which the coach facilitates the coachee, to learn, clarify values, release potential and increase performance by focusing on goals to achieve success.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Influential Leadership", "loc":[386.0, 355.0], "pop": 'Influential leaders are defined as leaders that rely on influence as opposed to coercion. These leaders create followers who want to follow as opposed to followers who believe they have to follow.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Delegating", "loc":[242.5, 250.5], "pop": 'The delegating leadership style is a style of leadership where a group leader assigns projects or assignments to their employees and gives them free reign to work. The employee(s) get to make all decisions and choices, which they are then responsible for.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Investing in People", "loc":[214.3, 304.8], "pop": 'Successful leaders understand the difference between things and people in an organization. They know that it\'s important to manage things, but that it\'s even more important to invest in people. Leaders don\'t just mouth empty phrases like “people are our greatest resource;” they demonstrate by their actions that people – not strategy, products, plans, processes, or systems – are the most critical factor in an organization\'s performance.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Effective Communication at Work", "loc":[236.4, 369.2], "pop": 'According to many researchers, a leader is one who has an ability to take charge, direct, encourage, or stimulate others... Good communication skills help to develop better understanding and beliefs among people inspire them to follow the principles and values which their leader wants to inculcate in them.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Leading Through Collaborative Communication", "loc":[276.9, 455.7], "pop": 'Leaders demonstrate their trust in employees by the open, candid, and ongoing communication that is the foundation of informed collaboration.', "link": "#" } ]; This means I can add them to my map like: for (let i = 0; i < rnodes.length; i++) { marker = L.marker( rnodes[i].loc, {icon: redMarker}).addTo(relationalg); marker.bindPopup( rnodes[i].pop + '(more...)' ); marker.bindTooltip( rnodes[i].label ); } It's nobody's compact code, but it's a little less brute force. The other two regions are defined this way. The map set up for this one is done at the end, along with the new code to set up the layers/groups. var mbAttr = '© CorrLeader Program | Basemap Fantasy Map Generator'; var landmap = L.tileLayer('', {id: 'mapbox.land', attribution: mbAttr}); var map = L.map('map', { crs: L.CRS.Simple, minZoom: -1, layers: [landmap, personalg, relationalg, organizationalg] }); var bounds = [[0,0], [400,800]]; var image = L.imageOverlay('images/land2.jpg', bounds).addTo(map); map.fitBounds(bounds); var baseLayers = { "CorrLead": landmap }; var overlays = { "Personal Leadership Destinations" : personalg, "Relational Leadership Destinations" : relationalg, "Organizational Leadership Destinations" : organizationalg, "Discovery Trails": trailg, }; L.control.layers(baseLayers, overlays,{collapsed:true}).addTo(map); So What Next? This was really to give my clients an idea about what was possible in a dynamic map interface. This was not even tied into a WordPress site, as that was a process that needed to go through some hoops wit the Technical Services team that manages their servers. This, in fact, changed everything, but that's the next post. Still. if this never got into the site, I learned a ton about using Leaflet.js and you never know when that might come in handy on some other project. There's rarely anything lost in prototyping, if you are learning as you go. See all the posts in this series... Featured Image: Screenshot from the third demo prototype. Dog on a laptop. It's time to warm up the ds106 assignment muscles, given that it is almost 2012, and things are already ramping up as evidenced by actual posts going on over at bavatuesdays. My plan is to comb through the assignments and find some that may have been lightly touched; but we are eager to see which ones might emerge as the Suprise Assignment That People Jump On Early and Go Nuts With. Last year it was the animated gif extravaganza, and in September it seemed to be the Messing with the MacGuffin. Regardless, tonight I almost randomly chose Iconic You- I find the description a bit vague: Create an iconic image/design for your own site that somehow represents you. As "iconic" could be taken as a descriptor of any image, like it is symbolic, or more in icon style. I already have my dog icon I use everywhere. This is actually form a real photo of my old dog Mickey, with the background removed, flipped horizontally, and modified using the Watercolor filter in Photoshop. I could have cheated and used that one, but I thought I'd go in deeper. So this is how I think- obviously I will use a dog photo and since my work/play/life is on the computer, I want an iconic image of a dog and a computer. Ironically, I have a series of them of Mickey's sister, Cadu: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I started with this photo in Photoshop using the Quick Selection Tool to remove the background elements. Since her hind part was cut off in the photo, I used the lasso select tool to add a bit to her rump to round out the shape. To make more iconic style, I used the Palette Knife filer to give it a less photographic look- these were my slide settings: turning Cadu into the final look shown above: I take it iconic in both ways- it represents me but is also a more graphic interpretation of the photo. Hmmm. It's okay, but I could not be satisfied with just that, so I made 2 duplicates of the layer, and made some subtle changes with the brush tools, and selecting parts like the tail and rotating... all in the name of turning it into an Animated Iconic Me: Note- I wrote a bit of this while I was waiting for a highway to re-open... It looks like I have offline time for some slow blogging. I am writing this from the front seat of my car, stuck in a highway closure on Arizona Highway 87, whose nickname is the "Beeline Highway". The bees are not moving fast today, there is an accident up ahead, and the highway is a parking lot of strangers thrown together. There is the usual flitting around, craning necks, and people who don't know each other talking like they don't. There is no spot to do a turn around on this mountain highway, and what else can one do? As much as I might complain, I am guessing someone up ahead is having a much much worse day, likely the worse of their life. While here I have time to reflect on the experience a few days ago of attending the Program for the Future event in San Jose, designed to honor the 40th anniversary of a computer historic event known as the "Mother of all Demos" (I prefer to to acronymize it like someone else did in a presentation as "MOAD"). If you have never seen the video of what Doug Engelbart and his SRI team did in San Francisco, stop now and go watch the video. Watch it twice, or more... As I said in our presentation, back in 1968 I missed the Mother Demo; I was only 5 and was likely watching the Flintstones instead. But I wonder (and have been asking others) what is happening today in our tech world that might have such an impact. Or what someone who is 5 now might be seeing 40 years from now. What this live demo did was demonstrate almost countless features of the modern computer interface in a time when computing meant mainframes, punch cards, and teletypes. Engelbart's peers saw no reason for a computer screen-- but I think he showed them wrong. Engelbart seems most credited for invention of the mouse (which was actually co-created with Bill English), but when you look at the demo, that is not even a significant aspect of the NLS system. He had two way video conferencing (al a Skype). Live co-editing of documents (Google Docs), cut and paste of text, a flexible menu structure, and more. I am always curious about the meaning of the chalkboard in this photo of what is written "5->3" The Program for the Future was meant however to convene people around Engelbarts concepts of collective intelligence, which again he outlined long before it reached buzzword status about a year or two ago. The hopes for the event were to stimulate research, development, advancement of these ideas, and there were certainly plenty of heavy hitters in the crowd. (more…) I'm awed by the generous response to my putting out a kibble bowl for patreon-ing here. All the email they send you is advice for more barrages of self promotion. I loathe that, but I sense I need to keep a drum beat going. To that end, I've added some bottom of the site buttons and some end of post begging. And in that vain train, a late round of GitHub commits looks like: [caption id="attachment_66074" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The begging commit, dude.[/caption] as I added some buttons at the top of all Read Mes on my GutHub repo pile. Ok, that's enough slime for now. I'll make some short updates on patreon as to things I am doing with the kibble support. I had hoped there might be an RSS Feed I could syndicate here, but alas, they have that door shut. https://giphy.com/gifs/internet-avatar-the-last-airbender-22YRFp0UNzGIU Okay, enough self promo. Back to making stuff. Featured Image: Pixabay image by Lydia89 shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 Our hourly comment spam assaults on the Maricopa Learning eXchange ceased around 10:00pm local time yesterday. My best guest is that the spammers mommy finnaly told him/her it was time to shut fof the computer, brush their teeth, and off to bed. Likely, after a bowl or two of Cocoa Puffs this morning, they will be back in action. Or so they think. All of their spams have been intercepted, logged. The IPs recorded include: 210.251.92.104 218.50.2.74 220.93.120.39 61.50.172.143 80.55.203.182 80.58.14.107 and trace to various networks in China and Korea. Taking a different tack, I looked up the various gamvling and pharmacy URLs they were trying to be inserted in our site. Interestingly enough, they were registered to different persons, such as: Alexandro Marie Old Eagle School Rd 63 Swaledale Wisconsin US 76127 Jazmyne Benjamin Wister Rd 40 Rodman Florida US 65255 Isabella Perla Continental Blvd 28 South English Maryland US 69100 but then the pattern emerged- all of their Whois records have emails in the form of: contact28@support-24x7.biz contact6@support-24x7.biz contact18@support-24x7.biz So now I think these are names and addresses plucked from the phonebook... hmm it might be worth a phone call to the number listed? Does anyone know these folks? Can domains really be registered in the names of people without their permissions? So doing a SamSapde trace on the domain in the contact address, we get to some interesting details- the registrant for this "business" has a name of "Phentermine Deals" and an address in the lovely safe harbor of Antigua. Too bad the hurricanes dod not flatten their shanty shack. The billing and contact details point to a ISP hosted in.... France. There we can see, for a piddly 12 Euros a year, Gandi.net is a spammers best friend. Wow, we have French ISPs hosting web sits for Caribbean spammers for domains likely falsely registered to folks in small towns across America, and all their action is masked by routing scripts through Southeast Asian IP addresses!!! I am pretty much a rank amateur in this detective work, anyone want to play? Is anyone out there appalled that questionable pharmaceutical peddlers and online gambling hosts would stoop to shoving their unwanted content into a free, educational resource? Would they do this on a web site for blind orphans? refuge relief groups? IS THERE NO SHAME OUT THERE? Useful Highway Tweets by cogdogblog posted 14 Dec '08, 5.53pm MST PST on flickr Thanks to @sorden I know am following ArizonaDOT - Department of Transportation which is now tweeting accidents and highway closures. I am trying getting these tweets via SMS - the message above would have helped a few days ago when I got stuck in a highway closure on the Beeline Highway near the Slate Creek pass-- I would have known the road was closed twitter.com/ArizonaDOT/status/1052129515 There's only a few spots on Highway 87 where I get signal nothing past the exit for Four Peaks until just past Sunflower, then over the pass, nothing until the AZ 188 junction, and then nothing until Payson. What would close the loop would also be a way to let people tweet the same account to report problems-- it's not clear where they are getting their data, but the messages are posted via txt so it must be from ADOT workers in the field. No... what would close the loop is better mobile signal along the highway routes; beyond the cities, Arizona's rugged topography is pretty much blank spots on cell coverage. I do take requests for SPLOT features; the whole evolution of them has been propelled by ideas people have sent me. Readers should ask, "What The Hell is a SPLOT?" Good question, I have a SPLOT that answers that question (google recursion). Before plopping the details, I should acknowledge Reclaim Hosting for starting in April, a year long mini fellowship to support SPLOT development and integration into their hosted solutions. We are working on c-panel installers for pre-build SPLOTs. It's mini, and I still am thankful for any support people can send via the cheesy donate buttons below (I hate groveling for this). The more support I get, the more time I can put into developing and sharing stuff that is free in both price and liberty to use. Okay, on to the SPLOT features. Links to Media By Selected Licenses For both the TRU Collector (for images) and the SPLOTbox (for audio and video), sire owners have options to either request or require (or not ask at all) for a re-use license for media added to one of these spots (this was, in history, the reason for the very first version of TRU Collector). Daniel Villar from Coventry University asked a while ago if there was a way to have links that would should all items with a particular license. In theory yes, since the licenses are stored as custom fields for each post. Before jumping into the code, I looked for plugins that might do the job, and got the WP Custom Fields Search one working. It created a sidebar widget, where I could create a drop down menu with the names and values for each custom post litem for the custom field "license" (If you run one of these site, use Screen Options in the tp right of your dashboard to enable the view of custom fields, its handy to know what is stored under the hood). While it worked, I prefer to find approaches that don't rely on plugins. And it was not that complex. It first means adding to the themes functions.php something that allows ms to send a variable for the license required to the post query request. // ----- add allowable url parameters add_filter('query_vars', 'trucollector_queryvars' ); function trucollector_queryvars( $qvars ) { $qvars[] = 'flavor'; // flag for type of license return $qvars; } So now on any url I can append a ?flavor=cc-by... which does nothing until I set up a page to deal with it. My approach was to create a new template page-licensed.php (source code) that is called for any page with a url name of /licensed My themes automatically create these Pages when the themes are activated; if you update an existing TRU Collector site, you can either activate another theme and then reactivate TRU Collector, or create a new Page with a slug/url name licensed. The way it works is, when you just go to the page, like http://splot.ca/collector/licensed/, it generates a list of all possible URLs to provide the desired view: [caption id="attachment_66200" align="aligncenter" width="760"] A sample page that displays all license links[/caption] You can edit the page to put whatever content you like at the top (and change the title). I'm not sure I would use this directly on the site. But you can use the URLs to add to menus or widgets. For example, see all images on this site licensed Public Domain or ones licensed CC-BY, or ones where the rights status is unknown. Now the actual URLs look like http://splot.ca/collector/licensed?flavor=pd or http://splot.ca/collector/licensed?flavor=cc-by. But I figured out some extra hijinks to make these pretty links: // ----- rewrite rules for licensed pretty urls add_action('init', 'trucollector_rewrite_rules', 10, 0); function trucollector_rewrite_rules() { $license_page = get_page_by_path('licensed'); if ( $license_page ) { add_rewrite_rule( '^licensed/([^/]*)/?', 'index.php?page_id=' . $license_page->ID . '&flavor=$matches[1]','top'); } } so they work as http://splot.ca/collector/licensed/pd and http://splot.ca/collector/licensed/cc-by. There is one small hitch... for these links to work, you need to go to the Settings -> Permalinks and just click the save button to regenerate the rewrite rules (if you do not the links will generate 404 errors). This is also at play on SPLOTbox- see the demo site http://splot.ca/box/licensed/. I think this is rather useful, so thanks Daniel for the idea. SPLOT Box Support for Internet Archive Content This is another request from Daniel (he keeps sending good ones), to provide a way for SPLOTbox to use media from the Internet Archive video collection (bonus it seems to work for audio). The current use of vimeo and YouTube is that Wordpress supports auto embed for these sources, meaning embeds can be generated by simply sending the URL of the page source. There are ways to add support for other sources using wp_embed_register_handler. This means being able to write a regex pattern to pull info from the source URL for the media and generate the embed code. I'd never done this before, all the more reason to try. So I have a video on the Lone Ranger at https://archive.org/details/enter_the_lone_ranger and I can see the embed code is So it seems all easy, I just need to take the source URL and substitute embed for details in the embed code. it took some head banging with the demo from the Wordpress Codex and stackoverflow scouting to find the right way to do this. My approach is try try, fiddle, try, fiddle until I get rid of the error messages and maybe the thing works. My stumbling point was really my regex expression. But this will work for any site you want to make Internet Archive videos automatically embed in Wordpress: // Set up oembed for Archive.org videos add_action( 'init', function() { wp_embed_register_handler( 'archiveorg', '#https?://archive\.org/details/(.*)#i', 'wp_embed_handler_archiveorg' ); } ); function wp_embed_handler_archiveorg( $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ) { $embed = sprintf( '', esc_attr( $matches[1] ) ); return apply_filters( 'embed_archiveorg', $embed, $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ); } I even got regex fancy using https? meaning it will work with a URL that is https or just http. It's working now on the SPLOTbox demo site http://splot.ca/box/ so you can try it out: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/992404442291957762 Get Your New SPLOT Themes These updates are now available: TRU Collector https://github.com/cogdog/tru-collector SPLOTbox https://github.com/cogdog/splotbox I do all my updates so they won't mess with previous versions, you should be able to upload to your site's wp-content/themes directory to update. If you don't enjoy ftp-ing ... what's wrong with you? ;-) I suggest using the Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades plugin which allows you to upload the theme from a downloaded ZIP file in the Wordpress interface (like when you first added it)... Wordpress does not allow you to upload a ZIP version of theme to update it, but this plugin does the end around you need. When we get things working with Reclaim Hosting's plans to off these as cpanel installs, the normal Wordpress automatic update will also update the themes. Now that is a great thing, and why I am excited to be collaborating with them (besides being the coolest company on earth, they own a freaking video store!) If you are not on the SPLOT train yet, play around with the ones at http://splot.ca. and my ears are open for good ideas that will improve them for others. SPLOT on. Featured Image: Pixabay image by 3dman_eu shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 Yes, it's was always and is still the double dipping of February family events- February 5 would have been my parents' 64th Anniversary... and today would have been my Mom's 85th Birthday. I am pretty sure she would be baking cookies this weekend, as she did here in 2010 during our regular Thanksgiving time here in Arizona It's hard not too remember the tremendous outpouring of Cookielove when she passed away unexpectedly in 2011, her last batch of cookies on the table at her house, hidden under a puzzle box. Her system was simple, so simple, and made such a difference to people she interacted with Mom's Cookie Method My nieces and my sister do a great job of carrying on Mom's tradition; her a photo my sister just texted me I miss the fun we had, such as when she did this shut of Thumbs Down for the Wired Boob issue cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine (more…) Here is an example of how we are tying events, projects into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), and using syndication technology to provide a service. Today is yet another of our Dialogue Days, one day topical faculty development activities-- Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment: (more…) It's energizing to have an eager workshop audience.... today I demo-ed our Maricopa ePortfolio system for the new interns in our Faculty In Progress Program (FIPP). After a presentation on portfolio-ing by one of our experts from Mesa Community College. I showed them a mocked up fake ePort, and then we just created new content on the fly. They were ecstatic at how easy the system was to use, yet flexible to be a container for a wide variety of content types. Every time they asked, "How would you do ______?", there was a feature to answer them. Yup, it can be archived to a ZIP and put on CD. Yup, you can restrict portfolio pages by password. Yup, you can change the page colors at any time. And they really liked not needing to know any HTML to create this content. Sweet. As an experiment, I had asked my colleague, Eric, not a technologist, to add to the "fake" eport-- the only instructions I gave was to log in, yet he was very comfortable in creating new content, editing what I had written, adding new linked documents... This group was excited, so I am hoping to see some nice portfolios fill out over they year-long internship. It’s time to swan dive back into ds106, I seem to have lost by absence note for the last six weeks. But here, at the tail end of video week comes something more massive than a MOOC, a ship that sails like no other, and for which no iceberg will generate a plot: This is for the Mash a Movie for ds106 assignment: Download different scene clips from one movie to create a short commercial for DS106. Clip, trim and remix them to let people know what DS106 is all about and how they can find us at ds106.us. Challenge yourself to overdub the audio to have the characters saying DS106 where it would be appropriate. Also try and add the DS106 logo onto an object in a scene. Now that I read it again, I did not exactly do the assignment. So what? It’s not following rules or stapling yourself to some rubric that counts. I saw this assignment from Rochelle a few clicks back, and was motivated after seeing the masterpiece John did for BrigaDS106. So what could be a more bloated big movie about a bog thing than to parody Titanic? (“Collide with Destiny” was one of the taglines, others were just as juicy). My starting point was latching on to the “King of the World” yell with the ship proudly setting out, not the mushy scene with jack and Rose, but when he and Fabrizio first skip out to the bow: What nailed it was when they were excitedly pointing to the dolphins, and I had the idea they would be pointing to Headless ds106 blogs. I did feel like it needed a graphic poster for an opening, which sent me down another design/photoshop/fun rabbit hole: based on the original poster that I liked for the simple image, words As usual, in Photoshop, I start with a duplicate of the image so I can use the original as a reference. I clone brushed out the title with the texture of the ship’s hull. The closest font I had in my pile was “Haettenschweiler” with a bit of tracking extended to 75 so make the letters a bit more spread out. I command click the layer to make a selection of the text, create a new layer, and use Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste Into to paste in a texture file I found of steel with rivets. Boom. Good enough. But I did not want Jack and Rose in my poster, so I removed them out (a bit of magic wand selection to remove behind the ship rails. For the space behind the image I would use, I created a new layer below this one. I made a foreground color selection of the blue in the original and a background color of the lighter white there. I then used Filter -> Render -> Clouds to make a background fill layer in case the new image did not completely cover. Yes, you can see a seam, but I can smudge out that boundary later if needed And who to put in the sky? I immediately thought of the bizarre multiple mashup image of Nana-Tine-Little-Alan cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Rochelle Lockridge I added a Underpainting filter and some gaussian blur to make the couple more dreamy. With a bit of brush erasure, I made the image blend in the background. And all of that work was just for the intro part of the video. The video work is all iMovie, the clip downloaded from Youtube as an MP4 and put into the project (trimming out the ends of the original). Here is a glance at the final workspace (click for full size) I keep the option (small blue button bottom right) to show the audio waveform- this makes it easy to “see” the audio, and quickly adjust levels if needed. To do the cuts to the screens, I use the advanced tools, so when I drag and drop an image from the Finder into a clip segment I can use the Cutaway option so the video cuts to m image but the audio remains in tact. For the bit of ds106 text that overlays the video, I use a transparent background PNG and use the Picture in Picture tool. For each cutaway, I resized the ends of it to match the cut points (essentially when the shot was not of the two characters). In each clip, I edited the cropping to remove the Ken Burns effect for most clips). While iMovie lacks all the features of a full editor, with use of these tools I can get away with most effects I want in ds106 movies. The voice over recording tool is insanely useful for redubbing the dialog- I can just talk over as it records, and the automatic ducking knocks down most, but not all of the original so I can talk over So the captain’s assistant says “680 blogs sir” instead of “21 knots” and when Fabrizio says “I can see the Statue of Liberty, already” in my movie he says “I can animate a GIF, already”…. and then the boom line “I AM KING OF THE WEBBBBBBBBBBBBBB” The intro and outro are additions with the poster. To add audio my technique is to select small clip of the original with the music I want. I then select the clip and use “Detach Audio” to separate the video and audio tracks. I insert my image, slide the audio under my image, and delete the original clip. This allows me to extend the music. And there you go. The biggest ship in the ocean. It looks like the icebergs hit the lesser ships. The ds106ic: It may Collide with Destiny bit it ain’t going down. Jack and Rose can GIF it on. It's been a while since I did an edtech cover song. And this one was actually inspired quite some time ago. But recently while reading Audrey Watters notes for her talk Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning my brain was triggered. You see it was her November 2014 Hybrid Pedagogy article on Maggie's Digital Content Farm that had me listening more closely to Dylan's song that was her metaphor, a song of protest, of not giving in. Released in 1964 it was (I think) a knock against the folk movement that turned on him when he went to a more full and electric sound. Well, I try my best to be just like I amBut everybody wants you to be just like themThey say sing while you slave and I just get boredI ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. I love that line, and when I listened to the song, well it was like, I gotta learn to play it. I play it ALOT. For myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKie-cHhqU0 It's not all that complicated musically (at least the way I do it), a capo on the third fret, where most its a E hammering on a lot form the open strings, than the last little chords go Am7 and D (with a little Dsus4). My new thing is trying to learn to play harmonica along side, using my C harmonica (maps to key of G). I decided during lunch today to redo the lyrics to lift from Audrey's article, so here ya go. https://soundcloud.com/cogdogroo/maggies-digital-content-farm I tend to work it a bit as I am writing the lyrics, and then one run through before I record. But pretty much when I click record in Audacity, it's one take. There a re a few flubs in there where I just rammed on through. I added a bit of reverb, because, reverb. So it goes. Here's my re-worked lyrics: I Ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more No, I ain’t gonna work her Digital Content farm no more A freelance writer on the Web I struggle to be heard Can you send me payment For those 1000 published words I need a new tire gotta fix a busted door I ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more I ain’t gonna put my stuff in Maggie’s LMS no more No, I ain’t gonna put stuff in Maggie’s LMS no more Gotta log in to see it Can't share it with everyone And when my class is over Some admin flushed it gone A domain of my own I'm going go for I ain’t gonna put stuff in Maggie’s LMS no more I ain’t gonna signup for Maggie’s social network no more No, I ain’t gonna signup Maggie’s social network no more The web's built for open access Sharing freely I know But ads gotta sell my data I'm stuck in your silo Whatever is what ed tech says its for (Whatever) I ain’t gonna signup for Maggie’s social network no more I ain’t gonna feed Maggie’s data farm no more No, I ain’t gonna feed Maggie’s data farm no more Tech that exploits We send people to such a place Surveillance, control They are profoundly unsafe How do we protest againts this kind of war? I ain’t gonna feed Maggie’s data farm no more Ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more No, I ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more Well you really outta think of what you ask of your students Who's farm are they working? And who benefits from the rents? Are you safe out there? Are you that sure? I ain’t gonna work Maggie’s Content farm no more This is fun, but it's serious. Dylan’s protest in 1965 was to plug in. Mine, I don’t know… it might be to unplug. But if nothing else, I tell you this: I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm. And I think you need to think about your own work. Where you work. For whom. And then you must consider where you demand your students work. For whom they work. Who profits. Where that content, where that data, where those dimes flow. On whose farm are you working? On whose farm are you demanding your students work? To what end? For whose profits? Are they safe there? Are you safe there? Are you sure? Are you working on/for Maggie's Digital Content Farm? Top / Featured Image Credits: My own remix of the cover for Dylan's Single clearly done without permission of any record company. I claim this in the spirt of parody. Whatever.