Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
Frequent readers may know I have been a fan of the iRiver tiny MP3 players for their recording capability. I had purchased two for us in my last job, and just from a meeting last week, saw that another colleague at Maricopa had purchased one for doing some audio recording. See, the folks at iRiver ought to know how vast and powerful an influence I am ;-) I was eager to get one for my new job at the NMC- I very much like doing informal audio interviews. Browsing the iRiver iFP 700 series lines, I was dismayed at how many were no longer available, not at Amazon, nore at the iRiver store itself. I managed to get an order in for an iFP-795 (500 Mb) that was sold only as a bundle with a waterproof kit. But I had some problems with my new credit card (another long story about call-centers around the world that mangle new address changes). By the time I had fixed the issue with my card, the item was gone: Despite the preceding page which indicates it was in stock: It seems very much that the iFP line is being phased out. Worse yet, the new T10 players, with their slick candy colors and maybe even, improved interfaces, are only compatible (for models sold in the US and Europe) with Windows XP. This is not very clear at all from the specs page, where Mac is listed, and the details are hidden in asterisked foot notes. So if you are thinking about an iRiver, and are on a Mac, get one fast or you are left to ebay as the source (well I guess I could have gotten the T10, boot camp booted into Windoze and .... nahhhhhhh, too much trouble). iRiver- great little devices, terrible user interface, inconsistent web site, and poor choice in marketing strategy. We have compiled more of the products / ideas from the 61 faculty and staff who participated in the January 30 Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day . This was hands-down one of the most high energy and active ones of the sessions we have run in a long time. Unlike many other workshops and sessions, we managed to limit the "lecture" part (Peter Samis' presentation) to 1 hour, and the bulk of the time was in group activities. So what we have posted this week includes.... (more…) Who is better? Yahoo or Google? How do they compare for specific searches? YaGoohoo!gle, which apparently started out as an April Fool's joke. is now more than a joke. Via a simple, familiar search form, this site will produce a side by side search result from the big two engines. The author's blog offers some code to embed a search form in your own sites. Here's a comparison search for something I am familiar with.... Just got a headset for doing audio chatting... too much feedback from the laptop speakers and crappy built in micorphone. C'mon Skype me! "How about a super kids meal? C'mom, trans-fats are fun"I never worked fast food ;-) Wow are my PHP coding pencils dull, but I've had some fun last 2 nights getting them back (we'll see how sharp they really). I have a really crude, ugly, unformatted demo of a tool I want to use later this month for a session at the Learning 2.008 conference. So I am asking (a) for feedback on the idea I think is brilliant may not be; (b) contribution of some content by simple tagging. This blog post will wander a bit on concept and sometimes take a nose dive into code but may surface again. I've been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora's workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative work, from all things, of old Nancy cartoons. Using the Five-Card Nancy web version of Scott's original card game, Ruben conducts an exercise in visual story weaving. Basically, you get a shuffled deck of five panels from different Nancy cartoons, and you have to pick one at a time to, in five steps, produce a coherent story, or at least die laughing trying. The point is to make connections and discuss the reasons for the choice. The idea that has been brewing is to create a web tool that works the same, but rather than drawing from a pool of Nancy cartoons (no offense to the Nancy-holics), draw from a pool of images, say in flickr-- this is different slightly from the Flickr Tell a Story in 5 Frames, but presents another way of facing the challenge of telling a story in images only. (more…) July was a bit tenuous for this year's Daily Photo Habit, and things were looking dicy, but a big upload push last week filled in the first 3 weeks of the month. Now it looks easy, but the seventh month is in the bag, and I'm batting 1.000. Getting to July 31 aka 212 is achieved. Click. Check. Hello August! Seven months into the 2025 Daily Photos, not a beat, flower, tractor, smiling dog, sunset missed. Five of the July Dailies A Bonanza of Color for Saskatchewan Cactus Flowers https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54673317868 2025/365/184 Enter the Cactus World flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Sigh, How Many Times Do I Have to Pose? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54673099956 2025/365/192 I Got This Whole World Situation Covered flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Tweet This https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54673332153 2025/365/196 Solid Advice flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It's All in the Network https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54688535523 2025/365/207 Network Complexity flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) A Dance With Flames https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54687500927 2025/365/209 Dance with the Flame flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I can see the eiight month and this is now looking easy, aiming for the first perfect daily photo year since 2016. featured Image: 2011/365/204 Seven Flower Gloves flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license I clicked in the wrong place on an image in tweetdeck, and saw surprise golden light. Well, that might be overly dramatic. But check this out, it's not in Twitter web. Look in the upper right corner of an image in a tweet seen in Tweetdeck. [caption id="attachment_65323" align="aligncenter" width="728"] What's that icon do? Hover! Click![/caption] Viewed on the web, no shine: https://twitter.com/JTransportHist/status/928677830808014848 But that icon leads to a reverse image search on it Witness the brilliance of artifical intelligence! Best guess for this image: person I would have never guessed that without Google. Okay, not the greatest example, but to me, having a link for reverse image search built into Tweetdeck becomes rather useful for checking sources, for lateral searching. I found not much on the feature, a mention in Tweetdeck's docs for advanced features, and this post from DGVOST. Apparently it went live in June 2017. Who knew? But that latter post led me to this Chrome Plugin, RevEye Reverse Image Search that adds the functionality to extend a reverse image search to different tools- Google, Bing, Yandex, TinEye and Baidu. It opens results in separate tabs, so it's handing off results to other tools. Still, I can see lots of use for this extension. Getting a surprise feature is one thing. Shiny. But then doing some digging into it, and finding another treasure egg? You can't automate that stuff. Featured Image: Gospel of Matthew Chapter 13-18 (Bible Illustrations by Sweet Media) Wikimedia Commons image by Jim Padgett shared under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. I get tired of those emails form people asking to blog about their product, or to include their infographic, or to buy ad space (for the latter I sometimes reply that my starting price is $10,000 per url per month, they usually do not reply). The best are people who gush on how they love this blog, but they somehow miss this front page key warning: Lately though, it's not even worth my time bothering with a reply. That is my time. I would like to assume that a non reply is a message, "I am not interested." Apparently not. Some days ago I sent you my proposal for blog post deal but may be due to busy in other works or some other reason you did not replied me on blog post deal at $30. So i am offer you again if you want then we can continue our negotiation. And this time i am sure we will done deal successfully. You can view our article sample at here: http://www.simplybudgeted.com/2012/09/all-about-cisco-ccie-rs-certification/ Let me about your reply This one I don't even need to mock. It comes self-mocked. Now I know my spelling is bad, but this message is almost un-intelliglble, and if this is your best foot forward, you've got a long way to go in this blogging business. Of course, what do I know. I'm not getting $30 per post. Who's next? Who wants to step past the sign? cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by obscene_pickle I flipped to Academia.edu after reading one blogger referring to it as "Facebook for Academia" and while it has a few FB-like features (updates) I could not think of a more opposite description for a social network. My analysis here is admittedly first impressions and shallow ;-) What it seems to provide is a social networking for faculty, to find academics with common research interests, to browse by departments and roles. The structure is a rigid tree. There is "universities" at the top that you scroll or navigate horizontally by name, departments underneath, followed by and orderly listing of people by roles, faculty in top, then post-docs, then... I have a gut level negative response to an org chart structure which feels as 18th century as can be, and some of this in the midst of thinking about the discussions of networks and chaos theory in the ongoing Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. Is a fixed tree really the forward looking network shape of academia? Is this the future looking way of thinking about academia? And then beyond that, look at what "academia" is defined at the top search box... Academia = universities only There are no colleges in academic.edu; no community colleges, not art institutes, no research centers... Certainly no space for Stephen Downes or any other independent, un-affiliated educational researches who lacks the proper insignia and elbow patches to get in the tree.. So none of my former colleagues at the Maricopa Community Colleges who were actively engaged with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning are allowed inside. This was a program directly affiliated with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching -- which I would consider as rather "academic". Oh yes, because the Carnegie Foundation is not a University, does that mean its members cannot be part of the forest? I guess one could simply add an organization as there is a link there. And there are some 6000+ academics sitting in their perches of tree branches. And maybe I am just taking cheap pot shots as someone obviously has put a lot of work into this site and concept. But, to me, and who am I but a lowly Non-Academic. Academia = universities only is a walled garden. No, not much a garden, it is a walled forest of sterile trees. I like it better out here in the jungle. Where the wild things are. Check out this flickr spawned creation, the Squared Circle Poster. It is a mosaic of 2600 photos from the flickr Sqaured Circle Group (photos of circular objects inside a square image): This image was made by compositing 2600 photographs and arranging them in a fibonacci spiral, a form commonly seen in plants, such as sunflowers and pinecones. The image was produced by Jim Bumgardner using images from the Squared Circle photo pool at Flickr, the photo-blogging website. Jim is aiming to turn this into an actual poster, and to do so, he is seeking to get permission from the people who shared the 2600 photos on flickr-- and he is appealing to them to make sure they have applied a Creative Commons license (tools built into the flickr site) that alloes derivative works. He even created a second graphic that shows in color the images that need permission changes (it looks like 25%- but check out the image): Legally, we can only use your photos with your permission. This means you must license them. Fortunately, Flickr makes this easy. The red band indicates unlicensed photos. The purple band indicates photos which are licensed, but have a "No Derivatives" clause. The photos in the center are useable. Remember: We can not, and will not use your photos if you don't license them! This reminded me of an ichat yesterday with Gerry Paille, and he was asking why places like flickr and del.icio.us are exploding with activity, but educators cannot seem to get anywhere above the no pulse line with learning objects. Imagine a chink of learning material seamlessly created from 2600 other pieces, each licensed. Flickr is proving huge amounts of reusablity of their "objects". Of course photos are much similar than learning objects (after all, we all know what a photo is :-). Right now the server running Feed2JS is down and out. I have only the most limited, around the corner and snake up a pole access, but the server is toasted until someone on their IT staff can go in the server room and hard start the server. It's just a humble XServe getting yanked and pulled form around the globe, and I can only imagine the anguish as folks who have the code on their site see their pages getting hung in the air. I am long gone from Maricopa, looking ahead, yet I have many regrets about not getting that software out onto an open source site before I jumped ship. It grew in scope and use at a crazy pace (something like 15,000 unique feeds cached per day), yet most of the external mirror sites have blinked out, and the way it is organized now puts too much weight on the one main server. Lots of folks have offered their servers, and that is much appreciated, but right now, more boxes is not the answer. My hope has been to put the main information and source code on an open source site (I have one set up at eduForge)-- this would not be a site to tun your feeds through, but would be the place to reliably provide information, status, etc about the project. What is needed is a way for those sites who wish to be hosts, can download the code, set it up, and then do a simple process to "register" their site as a new one open for use. Mirror sites would ping once a day for updates and to get the latest list of other mirrors. What it needs is a re-shifting of the main web site content, with the ability on the form to select the host site from a drop down menu, and something of a system to support the self-registry of new host sites. I should have a free day next week to put some sweat into this-- my real goal is to hang the code out there so others can also contribute and improve it. It's crazy that like 97,000 sites have embedded that code, crazy. And I a sorry if your site is twisting in the wind... hopefully Chuck can raise the server from the dead tomorrow morning, and buy a little time. I'm scurrying madly trying to ramp up a promise to have a Word Press publishing platform ready to release an online version of our mcli Forum. We have been doing a print and web version of this since 2001, and a previous ancestor since 1993. The print version twice a year costs more than a few $k, and takes up a huge amount of staff time in the editing and layout process. Then the web version is another conversion on top of that. And we have no good data on what people do with them after they go out through our campus mail system and land in peoples old fashioned in boxes (the wooden cubby ones in department offices). What we are proposing as gains for a completely online version are: * save money and time * shorten the editing process time and allow remote online editing * have no limit to the amount of content * add content we cannot put in print- more photos, full color images, audio interviews (ahem.. "podcasts"), videos * add interactivity via comments and linked online surveys, etc * full text search * issue and category RSS feeds I idled a away some time in October, so now I am in full crunch mode. I pretty much have the WordPress template done, and have hacked a bit with wrenching functionality from link categories, Pages, and topic categories, using a plugin to make a Word Press page (semi-static content) as the version of the cover/table of contents, and assign the current issue page as the home page; using about 4-5 custom fields tags per post (essentially what the old timers call "meta-data") to make the content move around as needed with fewer manual edits. As of now, I have a WordPress version of our last Spring 2005 issue (old version)... oops, there a re a few more items to tidy up, so I cannot yet provide a sneak peak. The last thing is working out the right user levels needed to give remote authors access (they will be able to compose drafts only), editors (who will be able to do a few more things) WordPress is q powerful platform on its own, but once you get deep into the template structure, money around with the functions and database access tools, well, you can almost do anything. I am hoping to use some of the include functions to have our project web site automatically tap into the WordPress content to pull project specific article references into the web sites.. this is more or less a form of syndication, but may offer more than we see right now. One of the key insights came from our managers meeting, where my colleague Eric noted that in our print versions, a number of the project articles were really recaps of content already on our web site-- background of faculty fellows or summaries of upcoming Honors events. This is fine for the print version and might be seen as a way to get people from print to the web site, But in a web only publication, there is no reason to have the same content in a different place-- so it is nicely challenging us to ask for all articles and content -what makes this different then what we already put on web sites? what can we add in terms of interactivity to make it more engaging? What can we do online that we could not do in print? And my favorite feature? We can correct a typo at anytime! Not writing much this week. Looking for nouns. Must find noun.... Just kidding (not that the world would wobble off its axis if I focused on work rather than badly typing about it). January is ramping up with project intensity, still working with our drupal developers on getting the NMC Web site's 2.0 version ready for a beta release, rolling out a completely brand new WordPress powered web site (not a "blog") but a whole site for a Big Huge Secret Project, working with a large group of artists for a big Second Life event next month, moving the entire NMC web site to a new web host, prepping for upcoming EDUCAUSE ELi conference followed right after by another 3 day pachyderm workshop, and... and.... In a few days I hope to be able to talk about both some neat new WordPress tricks learned as well dome digging into Media Wiki. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk Jim, Zack, Tim, and I have had some loose brainstorms on the idea of free form rapid creation we have seen happen in ds106 that is akin to jamming between musicians. This is the kind of thing the Noiseprofessor in particular excels, to pick up something like fat cats and cat breading in the ds106 stream of tweets/blog posts and making new things, FAST, be building on the same kind of work as others, going crazy dances by Giulia and beyond. Like meme-ish things, from afar, and from outside, this looks silly. But like the tradeoff off improv ideas between musicians, there is something electric in this rapid creativity ("and it seems mostly to happen late at night" observes Zack). It reminds me of Stefon Harris' TEDTalk video on no mistakes in music performance. So follow with me as I try to carry this idea over to coding or scripting or programming and what happens in a networked space where we jam / riff off of each other. This began in one of Jim's ds106 classes live streamed, on audio. His students were working with freesound to create a sound story, and one created on the spot by Michael Branson Smith did something different, he had made a mix of sounds all from the same search on the freesound site. He thought that might make for a different kind of assignment if something could be done to generate a search on a random set of words. This was happening in the chat of the live stream, a seed of an idea was passed, like someone playing a new note. Noting that the freesound search results were easy to construct (based on the URLs that contain the search term). I picked up that note, and said, I think I can whip up a prototype in Javascript, making the simple sound slots site which ran a random search on freesound based on a pre-built list of words. I blogged that experience, and in the comments, Scott Leslie tossed in a suggested beat with a link to a code library that allowed embedding of the freesound player. Right after, John Johnston grabbed the lead guitar and whipped up a demo of a proof in concept that searched the same terms opn flickr and freesound. I yelled into the mic This is brilliant, John! I like how you mashup my ideas to a new level. So the assignment might be to do this five times and make a combo story of the images and sounds served? Whereby he built out the full app, which now makes it so you can run these searches in strings, and put together some embed code to put the results in your own site: As John noted: This kind of proves your point about the monkey see, monkey do stuff. I've been a lot happier riffing off your idea than working through example code. Really enjoying this ds106 marginal activity. Some of us perhaps find it easier to work from an example than think up stuff ourselves. To me this kind of riffing on ideas and quick scripting/coding has a huge amount of potential- I am conjuring up loose ideas haw to meld this idea with something like the structures we have built for ds106 (an open course, aggregated activity, a daily challenge, and banks of assignments) with ways we can learn to build, script, code the web, not in the mechanical step by step way of Music School, but more like jamming in the basement. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by eyeliam I am not interesting in something like teaching how to code; I'd think with some basics, there is more of an opportunity space with learning how to leverage/build off if existing bits, like what you find in github ("social coding") or getting versatile with using jquery (I have been doing more dabbling there lately). This is just a bubbling idea. The first part of the trip to Australia was a three day drive from Arizona to outside Chico California, mostly for my dog Felix to have a place to stay with friends, rather than a month in the kennel. This trip included a crossing of Death Valley, scooting along the most majestic mountains of the Sierra Nevada in eastern California (including the highest peak in the lower 48 states, Mt Whitney looming over Lone Pine, CA, I’ve been to the top). We zipped through Bishop, where I spent much time in my Geology field work for my MS thesis, then up past Mono Lake, around Lake Tahoe, over the Sierra Nevada in I-80 and on to Chico CA. We dealt (well I did) with a blown tire outside of Tecopa Hot Springs, with a detour for a fix in Pahrump, Nevada: Uh Oh flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We crossed Death Valley under perfect weather 2017/365/303 Convergence Over Death Valley flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) stopping at a sea level sign to repeat a photo from 29 years ago and then took in the grand peaks. The Big Ones flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) After a stay over in Bridgeport, CA (where it went down to freezing, luckily I decided not to camp on this trip, we went around Lake Tahoe, taking a break at Sand Harbor state park. Relaxing on the Beach flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And finally got to our friends Kim and Jeff outside of Chico, CA. A day and a half to get Felix settled (it took about a minute) and the flying leg of the trip commenced.. including a long jaunt from Los Angeles to Melbourne, 15 walloping hours in the air. Next Stop… Melbourne flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Sleeping about 6-7 hours worked well for the adjustment in Melbourne, as did the first of many Flat White coffees.. Behold the Flat White flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Featured Image: Red Dog in His Element flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog pre-post script: On re-reading this is chaotic and not even close to a full wrap experience of an intense event, and I feel like I left more out than I described. Sigh, blogging about blogging or blogging about not blogging well... It's hard to blog the experience of last week's Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington because there is so much to try and encapsulate, and I'm left with "it was teh awesome". Some here is the random brain dump. Or maybe it will be all photos. My first experience at faculty Academy was as a speaker in 2007 and 5 years later I find myself on the other side as one of the team at UMW putting on the conference. Then, like now, it is a conference that does not overwhelm you as a conference, there is a lot of space to talk, and there is this kind of family gathering vibe to it. (more…) Today was our presentation on our "Ocotillo" project titled Maricopa's Ocotillo Evolves Again: 18 Years of Faculty Led Instructional Technology Initiatives: Since 1987, Ocotillo has been a faculty led initiative to promote the effective use of instructional technology. Like its desert plant metaphor, Ocotillo has evolved again into four new action groups, leading a range of face to face and online activities in the areas of Learning Objects, ePortfolios, Hybrid Courses, qnd Emerging Technologies. Learn what the groups have done and see how they have used a "small technologies loosely joined" approach of weblog, wiki, discussion board, RSS, and streaming video technology to support their projects We had the coveted slot of 4:15 - 5:15 PM, last of the day, on a day when the temperatures climbed 20 degrees, the sun was glorious, and broadway shows apparently beckoned. Still, we had a good 20-25 person turnout, and in our tiny room, it looked pack. There was a bit of Ocotillo's past, and by sheer good luck, the creator of this organization, our former Vice Chancellor Dr. Alfredo de los Santos was present. He's an amazing leader, and a highlight for me was a mentorship with him a few yards back. The bulk of this was an overview of the activities of our Action Groups, and we had two in the room to do their own spots (Thanks Lisa and Shelley!). And a real quick dash through the "small pieces" technology approach. As a point of note I only got half a hand raise when I asked who in the room had experience with wikis. It was fun, we laughed, we cried, we found learning objects (just kidding about the last one). Nice to have it in the rear view mirror. This was another wiki-fied presentation, a format that works well for the fluid ideas I weave at the last minute. Lacking net access in the presentation room (Grrr), I faked it good enough by running the wiki off of my G4 laptop in local server mode. You just cannot sit back too long in confidence with blog comment spam roaches. They multiply, mutate, miniaturize, and just keep pecking at the castle door. If you have a WordPress blog that has hummed along nicely using Dr. Dave's Spam Karma 2, you may have noticed a spate of roaches has been lining up your door and getting in. For more, see the details in The State of Spam [Karma]. It seems like the roaches have gotten smarter. They have an unfair advantage (besides being repulsive and crunchy) in that the code that SK2 protects us from is right out there in plan view. So now, they have evolved from script kiddies throwing piles of links with forged addresses, to single link incursion attempts that mangle some text from a blog post title to confuse you. And it is confusing. Side note- did anyone notice the rise in acne prevention spam? Does that tell you anything about the involved audience? Anyhow, Dr. Dave is hard at work, and he is, after all, an "Evil Genius" (but a good kind of evil), and is down in the lab cooking up a new scheme. And yes, he does have his PayPal tip jar open. It's rare that I dip in, but I will for things I get a lot of value of, so my contribution has already gone in the coffers. And this is my own moolah, not my employers. Since a fair amount of spam I see come from old posts with higher google points (duh, can anyone recognize the Giant Colossal Being That is Doing Nothing But Offering Spammers Incentive? "nofollow"? what a joke), I've taken the steps to close comments from posts more than 30 days old. Remember, spammers never sleep. They are below those that would steal candy from a baby or steal the change from a blind mans' tin cup. They have no redeeming value, humanity, or reason to live. They are a waste of human flesh. Let's call to arms a vigilante strike force! Today I picked up a copy of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. I found it in a thrift store in the small town of Pine, Arizona. It set me back 10 cents. For another dime I got a book from the mid 1970s full of funny predictions for the 21st century... according to a Rand prediction listed on the cover page, by 2004 we should have already Genetic Manipuation (maybe), Large-Scale ocean framing and mining (is that commercial fishing?), household robots for routine chores (where is mine?), automated highways (is that photo radar?)... But back to McLuhan... It is the book that's making history-- and hysteria-- with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and the twentieth century. Now I am not much of an academic or follower of literature, and you will find me tossing references here to Shlabucky's Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1967) or Melankovf's Model of Internal Magnified Intelligence (1982), but I think it was time to dive a little into this classic. Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed. Obsession with the older patterns of mechanical, one-way expansion from centers to margins is no longer relevant to our electric world. Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. It is like the difference between a railway system and an electric grid; the one requires railheads and big urban centers. Electric power, equally available in the farmhouse and the Executive Suite, permits any place to be a center, and does not require large aggregations. I am not convinced that "departmental sovereignties" have really melted away, perhaps melted some in the corners.. but substitute networks, the internet, for "electricity" and you have the true meltdown of power, control, and access to information that is unfolding us in real-time. Yes, life gets curse-like interesting when after mocking something you end up using it. But here we go, the edX hosted mOOC (medium sized Open Online Course) I've been working on is getting its first visits. The making of this remains to be blogged (can everything ever be all blogged?), but I assembled a short promo video mixing together an animation by the talented artists at eCampus Ontario, with voices and videos from past participants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lIDBqiAFdI Again, we are taking the structure/module/activities of the Ontario Extend project and creating a more cohesive space to have people work through the program. This has been done to address the evaluation of the first iteration, to scale the experience to more participants, and try to keep more of them engaged in the program. We (meaning mainly Terry Greene) has been working to build interest in the new Extend since October 2018, as we were designing it behind the scenes. What he did was create a simple form for people to express interest, and until we were ready invite them to join a Slack site, which is not an integral part of the mOOC, but what we call several "doorways" for out of the mOOC experiences. The official part of the "course" starts January 28, 2019, with two weeks per module covering : January 28, 2019: Module 1: Teacher as LearningFebruary 11, 2019: Module 2: TechnologistFebruary 25, 2019: Module 3: CuratorMarch 11, 2019: Module 4: CollaboratorMarch 25, 2019: Module 5: ExperimenterApril 15, 2019: Module 6: Scholar The real opening is Monday, January 21, for what we call "Module 0", more or less a week to get oriented in the course site, understand the project, look at examples of what people did previously, and start some small activity/engagement. Our "soft opening" has been to send the invite yesterday to people who joined the Slack, a wee bit of bonus for them to get in early, and for us to start to see how the interaction goes. Because eCampusOntario wants to do further research and evaluation, the way inside the mOOC site is a link shared after completing a short online survey (for those who loathe surveys, we have an option to submit nothing and still get the link). The current module structure is all of the content/activities written out for hat was a self-paced route before. What is different is that we will move through them sequentially (new ones released every 2 weeks). But also we want to add some more things for people to feel like they are not alone doing this. This means quite a lot of activities we are setting up in the discussion forums, for the orientation, a few things we call "Small Stretches" (which is a code name for the what we did before as Daily Extends). Later, the responses to module activities will be submitted via forum responses as well (which could also include links to blog posts, of course). We don't know how well this will all work out given we have over 300 people expressing interest, if the forums will be lively, engaging, or overload. I saw some slides recently from a pedagogy talk that more or less derived discussion forums as stale. Or deadly. I don't think that's necessarily a characteristic of the platform, as much as how most times that are experienced. It's the same way you can blame PowerPoint for bad presentations, when there are more than enough examples of fabulous ones. Or to ridicule the chalk and blackboard, until you see what an engaging person can do with the old technology. So rather than us trying to tell people how to be effective in online discussion, one of our early online discussions ask people to share their own experiences and ideas: One thing I like in edX is embedding a single discussion within the content. We are also putting a few polls and other ungraded activities. Which leads to, the idea of "grading" having a different meaning here. Another thing in the mix is suggesting (but not requiring) that participants find/form small "informal support groups" that can share/discuss their work in smaller settings. This could be people at the same institution who meet for coffee, or others who find an affinity via discipline, interests, and connect via email, messaging, or even a private channel in the Slack (or anything else they can decide on as a way of meeting). This is a spin off of the "Triad" concept of the the UDG Agora project. Sidenote: We offered private Slack channels to the early birds as a place for their small team communication; I can see ten already exist. It does not matter if people "pass" this course, it's all meant for them to get out what they want to put into it. Some will really want to do the full program, earn badges, etc. Others may just want to build out their professional network. Some may just want to expand their practice in one area. And a few may just want to see what the heck we are doing. The setup has been to create a checklist and the end of the modules, matching all the ones in the original ones, as well as acknowledging they have submitted for their badge. The "grading" is more self affirmation they have completed the activities, plus at the end doing a final reflection, and a few small participating activities along the way.Mixed in there as well are twice a week optional drop in lunch sessions via Zoom (like we did this past summer). And a radio show! Terry is hosting a once a module show we will record in the middle of a module, and we plan to invite participants to be guests as we go. It will be broadcast on voiced.ca and archived in SoundCloud. Check out the first episode! https://soundcloud.com/voiced-radio/ep-00-alan-levine-and-terry-green To share outward, we will eventually have tweets from @ontarioextend and good old fashioned blog posts (like this one) that Terry and I (and others may do too) syndicate into the hub. It's all in motion, and yes, of course, it's wide open to people anywhere to join us. Enter this way http://bit.ly/ExtendMOOC. This is the "I'm interested form" which will get you to that survey, an optional Slack invite, and the edX entrance link. It's open anytime. The mOOOOOOOOOOOOOOC is in moooooooooooootion! Featured Image: Pixabay image by Devanth shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. I was on the beach recently and found a cute kid to take a photo of: I got the push to make it seeing Before and After Pictures with a Twist on Buzzfeed where some dude inserted modern photos of himself into photos of him as a kid- but its more than cut and paste, he carefully considered the pose and details like shadow. My first reflex- "This would be a cool ds106 assignment" I am thinking of creating a twitter auto responder then when anyone tweets a message like that it responds with something like: So this is now an assignment Then-Now-Together: Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo! Based an example of Before and After Pictures with a Twist spotted in Buzzfeed And now my example- the source image is of me at a beach in Ocean City maryland, digging one of my improbable and unsafe holes: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Combined with a photo taken of me last week by @windsordi on your trip to Point Pelee, Ontario: cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by windsordi It was a matter of cropping out the background. To make it match the color tone, I mucked with the levels and come color correct, and added a Fim Grain Effect to try and match the original. The trickier part was creating a shadow - I found some clues in a tutorial from PhotoShop Essentials. MOre or less you make a selection of the original figure, create new layer below the original, fill with black, use distorts and rotates to move the shadow, add some Gaussian blur, and lighten the opacity. And there it is- me on a beach taking a photo of me on a beach, then, now, together. How about you? Following up from last month (nobody is tracking me) for this 13th year of daily photos I am trying to do my cleanup and review each month, thus saving me hours of labor in December. Yeah right. Hello tracker? January was perfect, February, even with it's extra day had a 2 day gap. I chalk that up to the long travel Cori and did in the middle of the month to get from Regina to Strawberry, where we spent a quiet time just enjoying the house, the trees, and a wee trip to this place with a stream in the bottom of some ditch. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564358697 2020/366/50 Grasping the Inner Gorge flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Heck there's a decent little canyon just following the road west out of town. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564144986 Last Light in Fossil Creek Canyon flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) But there's as much joy in the small details too; this vehicle track in the field across from out house, at a low angle looks like Alpine peaks https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49563446478 2020/366/43 Faux Alpine flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This rock from our yard went on a little international travel for a class activity on the Networked Narratives course I co-teach. It was a half brained idea but it worked a bit. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49563951831 2020/366/44 A Rock to Share flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And also right in the middle was a delightful Valentine's date night https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564173822 2020/366/45 Valentines Date Night flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) There were not as many cooking / food photos in this month, but there was a celebration of break making. I remain so tickled I can conjure delicious egg bread (Challah) from flour, egg, yeast, and a dab of sugar. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49509116852 2020/366/39 Not Bad For Six Cups of Flour, Egg, Yeast, and Sugar flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And finally, a bit of optimism emerging from the retreating snow in the front yard. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49606017392 2020/366/58 Winter Survivor flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) So February brings the daily count to 60 days done in 2020; I've got 58 dailies, the perfect year of 366/366 won't happen, but it will still be a great run of photos. How's your daily habit? Featured Image: screenshot of part of the February batch of photos in my flickr 2020/366 photos album. and covering up our questionable practices... It's been a few days since I fanned the flames of how a big time edu consultant was republishing from other bloggers as their own. Its so easy to sweep your shit crap poop Numero 2 under the rug. It just smells a bit, but most people just walk around and pretend it is not there. Thats old news already. They dismantled their industry news where this occurred and in the best of slick covers, have completely skipped being open about this. I am betting they canned their wordpress developers (?)/ The word I got in a comment was: "We have asked the company that manages our website to remove the (Feed WordPress) syndication technology that was updating the news channel. The feed has been turned off as it pertains to several blog sites due to technological errors in attribution when the plugin was recently updated. and more techno blame: Its trying to be informative to the education community. The organization just began using Feedwordpress to assemble industry news and is still working the bugs out on correct configuration. I hope to have them up and running effectively over the next few days working the bugs out of proper attribution to the authors. Well I don't consult for all those big named badge companies, but I figured out an attribution solution in about 35 minutes. I am working on a new Feed Wordpress powered site where we are pulling all of the source content into the site (like Gilfus did), but I wanted to provide attribution back to the original source (which Gilfus did not do). And to demonstrate what a lousy businessperson I am, I am going to give them the solution for free! Am I crazy or what? You see Feedwordpress provides the source name, link, and permalink as post meta data. It takes but a whiff of PHP to put that on any template. Here you go, here comes the money code: Tada! If Steve really wants to show his appreciation, that six pack of cool Dogfishhead 120 Minute IPA would do it. Somehow I managed to do my homework ahead of time, since my intro video included the story of main main guitar, an acoustic I’ve had since age 15. I thought I would turn this inside out and talk about 2 guitars I do not have, since they have stories too. Once in a year or two the natural progression on my new road to fame as the next Jimmy-Pete-Eric-Keith guitar star was to get an electric. Through an ad in the classifieds of the Baltimore Sun, I called the dude on a landline (just double aged myself), and bought this beauty, a blonde Telecaster: cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I just liked to hold her, she was beautiful (and heavy). The amp that came with it was a Peavy Backstge. My career with it pretty much was limited to solos in my basement, save one party when some friends brought a keyboard and drumkit (parents were on vacation ha ha ha). When I moved west to Arizona in 1987 for grad school, it was one thing I decided I did not need. Arethe might spell it R-E-S-P-E-C-T, but my song is R-E-G-R-E-T. As sort of a way of keeping it in the “family” I sold it to my friend Kevin for a ridiculuous price, $25, with the quasi undestanding we would buy it back off of each other on a regular basis. Except I did not stay in contact with him. Fast forwrd to more recently, and Kevin and I met up when he was in town for a conference in Phoenix, and we’ve been well connected since; I’ve visted his home in Pennsylvania a few times. The good thing is the guitar is in his family, and being put to use by his son, Cal, who can really really play it well. When I visited in September of 2011, we went to Cal’s house, and I got to hold her again: Cal, then a student at Penn State, played in a trio called Think Twice, Dublin, who play some rather avant garde complex music, beyond my 3-chord repertoire for sure. Cal has a deep music love, appreciation, and facility (as he shared some unique vinyl). Their web site then http://thinktwicedublin.bandcamp.com/ featured a photo of Kevin with the Telecaster back in the 1980s when we shared an apartment in Baltimore. Cal even has the original hard case, which was falling apart when I got the guitar in 1980. Long live duct tape. A video of them, playing in the outdoors (I never got out my back door) It is fascinating to watch a love of connection of music between my friend and his son- you expect music tastes to divide parents and children, but here it bonds, genuinely. I could not be prouder to be a small part of this chain, and as Kevin said last night to me and Cal (and agreed by us three), "The Tele is here, but it really belongs to all of us." When I wrote about this encounter in 2011, I mashed up my own then and now photos, 31 one years in the making. Like the Dude, the Tele abides. I could not be happier not to have it anymore. You might “keep” guitars, but the music is not ours to hold. The other story, not so dramatic. I might have the timing off when I traded the guitar to Kevin, because it was earlier then I moved to Arizona when I picked up a cheap Fender Mustang as a less than decent replacement. It was okay to play since it was light, but it was no Telecaster, and it actually broke beyong repair. Since I always had dreams of being Pete Townshend, on a party before a time I moved away (maybe that was when I went to New Mexico– for 2 days– another story, they wont stop connecting). So for this party, I actually did get the guitar out of the basement– to smash it Pete style on a big rock in the yard. It’s actually harder to really bust it than it looks! Fender Electric guitars are solid! I carted around for a while a piece of it long gone. A very grainy scanned photo of the smashing event: cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I am now, at 49, thinking again of getting an electric guitar, maybe I will keep it. And play it. My experiences with the bottom feeding world of catfishing has wiggled and slithered from weird to worse. Last week a message came to my flickr mail from someone claiming to be a producer of a national TV talk show (I'm leaving the name out, but it's one of the big ones) saying that they were working on a story about someone scammed by a persona using my photos. I say here "claiming" because in this alternative world you have to almost question the reality of everything and everyone. But they provided an email address with a TV network in it. I found the person in LinkedIn. Maybe legit. Sometimes I expect a reverse scam by a fake victim. That's what this stuff does. As in every message like this I responded with an offer to prove the source of any photos and a link to my page of resources. They sent a photo that was obviously me, but I could not place it. In the photo I was in a classroom (whiteboard visible) next to someone, but it was cropped vertically like a mobile phone photo. And kind of blurry. I was not sure the photo was mine. Reverse image searches did nothing, but with some awareness of my own clothes, and when my beard was shaggier I was able to find it from a series of conferences/workshops I did on an overseas trip a few years ago. The scammer had cropped out the colleague I was standing next to. But that was me and my colleague at that conference. Years ago. Now this TV rep is asking me to come on the show, for some kind of big reveal, claiming that the victim needs proof that I am not the person they have been taken in by. Apparently (I am told) the victim has sent a large sum of money to the person using my photo. I have negative desire to be on a TV talk show. I have a line with catfishing victims. I am sorry they got scammed and their trust toyed with. I am willing to provide the source of any photos victims might share. I do not get involved with their stories. I've had some who still confuse me with the fake persona they were taken in by. I've been threatened with harm from ones who think I am the scammer. My wife has been targeted. I do not get involved with their stories. I explained this to the TV show person. I am not interested in being involved. I do not want my name involved. Next I got a longer message filled with guilt and shame; they said that I am the only one who can clarify the truth for this victim. Now every other victim who has contacted me has already crashed through to a realization when they see my photos as the originals. The victims are confused, embarrassed but they have become aware on their own. It's not my responsibility to prove who I am not. And this TV show person is now trying to portray me as culpable. And it pisses me off. Face it- TV people care about one thing- sensationalizing any story to get ratings. Who knows what happens if I were to go on camera? Do they make me out to me the scammer? What if the victim does not believe I am who I am? What happens to my family? What happens to me ethical standing? What if the show makes me out to be "that guy" who... I don't even have an answer for that. All I know they show has used tactics of manipulation, shame and guilt for their own ends. They don't get me. I do not get involved with their stories. So I am not going on this show. I shared photos of myself on flickr. Someone else lifted my photos to create fake accounts. No TV for me. PS. I owe so much to my wife Cori for helping me think this through as well as putting up with the weird characters who show up online bearing my photo as their own. Featured Image: A slight manipulation of a vintage TV pixabay image by Alexander Antropov. The cord was edited in PhotoShop to not be plugged in, but laying on the floor, the wall paper copied to cover it, and the original plug in the image was covered by the electric outlet pixabay image by Open ClipArt Vectors. I really do not mind Starbucks as an establishment. They are comfy places and serve my favorite drinks, yes at inflated prices, but I succumb. My own, silly pet peeve is that stupid language thing when you order a drink. I want a "big" drink, so I describe it as "large", and they say, "Venti". That is just plain stupid. WTF is "venti"? "Tall" is "small"? C'mon, speak English will ya? So my new silly travel game is to try and make Starbucks Speak English. It goes like this. Order your drink, using real descriptive terms, "Small", "medium", "Large". When they respond, "Venti?", respond with, "no 'Large'. If you can get them to say the real size, then you win! And we subvert StarbuckSpeak one franchise at a time. So if you are successful, or heck, just of you try, then add a coffee cup pin to this Google Map at http://tinyurl.com/49z88p (if it is set up right, it is open for others to edit) View Larger Map Let's light up the map at establishments where proper human language terms are used. Go out there and use your charms to make 'em speak in words people understand, not snobspeak. cc licensed flickr photo shared by mrphancy I've been a few weeks into using Google Chrome, and sorry Old Fox, the shiny metal is looking and feeling good. With Firefox, it was a long running period of spending time I'd rather be browsing waiting for Mac Beachballs to stop spinning, or that pause when a cursor goes into a form field and the fox must be tapping its feet or scratching itself before allowing me to enter anything. The tipping point for me was the direct availability in Google Chrome of most of some 40,000 Greasemonkey scripts. I'm not going hog wild with scripts and extensions, my lean set now includes: Flick CC Attribution Helper my own humble script that adds to any Flickr photo page that is cc licensed, two different cut and past attribution html codes- one for embedding in blog posts (used above) and another just for text (say in a document or presentation). I use this daily, or if I blog daily, I use it. A lot. Obviously Scrub Google Redirect Links Another key helper- I use Google search every 10 minutes to locate URLs, but their search results do not provide links you can copy easily (hmmm, it seems to change every few months, sometimes you get the links sometimes they are redirected cruft crap). This script adds a link that is the actual search result. GPE provides previews of full web pages from RSS view in Google Reader- rather than opening in another tab or blowing out your reader, it opens it right in Reader. Well, it used too, in Chrome it seems to want to open in a tab. Delicious Tools Extension cause I love to tag stuff. Hmm, it looks like 2 of my 4 might not even be needed. Not sure what else I really need, maybe one of those scripts that provides MP4 download links from YouTube. But the speed and responsiveness, the lack of beachballs in Chrome has been wonderful. It feels like a new springy web (that said, some of the back end pages of our NMC drupal site seem to be loading more in a staggered fashion. Not sure if it is me or the browser). But wait there is more... A few weeks ago I started experimenting with adding Google Translation to our NMC web sites. This was really for one of our new Horizon Projects that is doing a new report for Spanish speaking countries, so all of the content is in Spanish. We had our wiki content translated, and Wikispaces nicely provides localization of the interface, so we have a nice Spanish wiki The challenge that arose was that as part of the process, we wanted the advisory board for this project to review content on our main horizon wiki, which is all in English. Just on a whim, in the mniddle of a meeting on this project, I surfed to the Google Translation site which was typical of all the other translation sites back to Babelfish (hey look what Yahoo picked up)-- you enter either a phrase or a URL in a box and it redirects you to either the translated phrase or to a reload of the web page in the other language. I did notice a few weeks back, that on the Google Translate site, it was actually starting to translate as you were typing in the box. Woah. Try it yourself, that is the best demo. They offer under Translation tools, a quick and easy way to create an HTML widget you can add to your site, so if you are running any template driven site (blog, wiki, etc), it is likely one chunk of code to add. This does the translation right in place, offering something like 50 languages! And it is pretty fast-- not 100% accurate, but enough to get the gist of a page in another language. In a few minutes, I made 8 wikis have this translation feature, as well as the main NMC web site So what is even better, is say, when I have the NMC web site appear in Arabic, As I hover over a translated section, it puts the original language in a hover box, and from the menus at the top, you can quickly rever to the original language So.... that was a long tangent of something that is a quick and easy add on to any web site to internationalize its contents, but... I remember thinking to myself, why aren't they rolling this directly into a browser? I mean already, GMail is already detecting when an email is in another language, and offers in place translation... Well, it is in the newest version of Chrome, the dev version 5 Google Chrome 5's dev build has a feature that detects the language of a web page and lets you translate it without opening a new page. The feature is borrowed from Google Toolbar, but Google Chrome is the first browser that translates web pages without requiring an add-on. When you visit a page written in another language, Chrome shows an infobar that asks if you want to translate the web page. You can ignore the message, change the language that was automatically detected or translate the web page. If you click on "Translate", Google Chrome will translate the page and will no longer prompt you when you click on a link from the page. Here it is at work on the Spanish wiki- when the page loads, the browser can detect it is another language and offers translation. Slick I may have crammed two blog posts into one as I started out talking about my being Chromed and ended up on language translation. Just call me a króm hundur (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify the language) Even with a slew of slaughtered email spam and just about every message I have gotten for several years, my use of GMail's space hovers around 0%: Some of this is likely because they quietly just upped everyone's quote to 6 Megabytes, a whole lotta space indeed. The again Google is out there harvesting all of my precious email for their own profit. Heck, if they can make a profit off of my Nigeria inheritance spam and my facebook-twitter-every-other-social-web site bacn, go fer it. Speaking of spammers, thankfully they continue to send messages in all caps, subject line too. Makes it dead easy to zap 'em, if if there was any question whether some unknown person gave me $6 million or if I won the Dutch Lottery. Again. cc licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Mike_tn This is most likely the last feature I add to the Wordpress DS106 Assignment Bank Theme. If you have been crawled under someone else's blog, this is something I have been working on forever to generate a site like the ds106 Assignment Bank. In a demo for some folks from the National Writing Project, Karen Fasimpaur threw out a wish for options to enable people who add "things" to the bank to be able to attach a Creative Commons license (or none). "That's a great idea, and should be easy" were words I believe came out of my mouth. I have it working in the demo site at http://bank.ds106.us/. On the admin side, there is a new set of options: You can have none of this by selection the "none" option. The second one allows the site owner to have a single license applied to any thing created on the site, and the licensed used is the one chosen from the menu below it. This creates a license statement like: And when you go to add a "thing" to the site, you will see that this license will apply: But the use case Karen was interested in was where the person who uploads gets to choose, that is the third option. In this case the form for adding a thing has a drop down menu to choose (and yes, one of them is All Rights Reserved, Karen said that is a desire on their site) Now thats a long list. I hoped I could set up an options screen to allow you to select which ones appear, but in the interest of time, I am leaving this for later. One could always restrict the licenses that appear on the menu by editing the function that generates it // to restrict the list of options, comment out lines you do not want // to make available (HACK HACK HACK) $licenses = array ( 'by' => 'Creative Commons Attribution', 'by-sa' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike', 'by-nd' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs', 'by-nc' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial', 'by-nc-sa' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike', 'by-nc-nd' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs', 'copyright' => 'Copyrighted All Rights Reserved', ); commenting out the unwanted ones to make it, say // to restrict the list of options, comment out lines you do not want // to make available (HACK HACK HACK) $licenses = array ( 'by' => 'Creative Commons Attribution', 'by-sa' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike', // 'by-nd' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs', 'by-nc' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial', // 'by-nc-sa' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike', // 'by-nc-nd' => 'Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs', 'copyright' => 'Copyrighted All Rights Reserved', ); If copyighted is allowed, the display goes something like: It was not too terrible complicated to add this... but its time to wrap it up and let some others give it a spin. The last remaining task is to write up the documentation. There are some CDD nibbles and quirks to smooth out. I wonder if anyone will ever use it... but that does not matter because I have learned a ton in developing this site. I recently managed to fix an issue with a water pump I use for our irrigation projects that someone else had put together for me. The fix was round about. I did some web searching, found the culprit was likely a pressure switch, ended up swapping the whole pump out, rewiring it the same, and finding no flow happening. As it turns out, I found the issue was completely elsewhere, a faulty in line water flow switch. For me, it's hard to beat the satisfaction of fixing a machine or tool all with my own tools and methods. The same for finding my own end arounds with web stuff. That DIY joy is the best stuff. So here is the issue. I use Discourse for running the OEG Connect community site. Back when I started it in 2020, I used a little feature that allows you to publish what is typically a discussion topic as a stand alone page- a series of them I made as a users guide. It removes all of the Discourse interface, and looks like a regular web page- rather than the '/t' in the url for topic it has 'pub' -- see https://connect.oeglobal.org/pub/connect-guide. A weird issue I found was when I go to edit, it takes a ton of searching/scrolling to find the original published content as a topic, which I can edit was the content owner. My reflex came to view HTML source (like maybe 0.0001% of web users likely do), expecting the real URL was in there. Sure enough it is as a `<link>` tag in the header, a canonical link. And sure enough that URL gets me directly to the source. So I can when needed, view source, find the link, click or copy/paste and be on my merry editing way. But tick tick tick, my head goes, this is also a simple job for a browser bookmarklet-- these are still some of the most useful things I use on a daily basis. And they are all just simple Javascript code, stuff I make by hand. So I give you a magic link you can drag to your bookmark bar. For any web page, when activated, if there is no canonical link, you see an alert. If it does find one, it displays and asks you if you want to take a trip, with OK and cancel options. If you prefer the very simple, Alan's Brute Force Javascript, voila javascript:c=document.querySelector("link[rel='canonical']");if(!c) { alert('No canonical link found.') } else { if (confirm("Visit canonical link " + c.href +" ?")) window.location=c.href}; This is really trivial on the scale of programming feats. And its likely not even elegant. But it works. For me. And I hashed it out myself. I am sure I could have gone the route most people go now to ask ChatGPT et al to spit out the code. I likely would have had to go back and forth several times, likely not saving any time over what it did to do it myself, trip through my own syntax goofs, and finally get it working. But I get more satisfaction doing this myself. Even for this drably simple task, I'd rather DIY it. Make your own tools. See what it does for you. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4928594646 Multitool flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license It's way late in the day before a long weekend, but just to jog some notes down to pick up next week. Besides spawning an Ontario Extend Daily Extend challenge for July I have more plans for the month. Participants in the first cohort training were set up with web domains with Reclaim Hosting sponsored by the project. It was a lot of things covered in the face to face sessions, and we just barely got into the essentials of domain management, written up as a guide. As anyone who has first glanced at the cpanel dashboard, the array of icons is overwhelming. I'm planning on a four week series of activities, exercises to provide a group of people an experience together, and a place to gather around. Reclaim Hosting supports a large number of educators with their domains, and while they have a community area, with great responses in questions asked, and a lot of documentation, my hunch is most people miss the space. I had suggested, and they put in place a "Newbies Corner" where I have been putting out a first few queries of interest in participating in "domain camp". Here we can "extend" Ontario extend to reach a larger community. So a bit of camp activity, discussion, announcement will take place here. It's also in my thinking to create a series of activities for campers within the Activity Bank used so far for exercises in response to the Ontario Extend modules. This works well for sharing, as people will be publishing new sites and content pn their own domain. But it was also reading Tim Clarke's great ideas shared as a response in the Reclaim Hosting Community that got me thinking a big part of this could be people like Tim, who have expertise, to add activity ideas to the bank. That's how the bank was designed. So I am outlining a basic set of topics I will introduce each week, starting July 9: Week of July 9 Meeting cpanel, creating a simple landing page with Site Builder (which most people will want to change), using the Reclaim Community, and introduction to the File Manager. Week of July 16 Creating subdomains, installing apps/sites into subdomains vs directories, setting up a Camp blog with Wordpress, using web redirects. Week of July 23 Installing a better landing page with a wordpress theme (or something else), setting up domain email and email forwarders. Week of July 30 Exploring other cpanel apps A week in camp might include: A weekly intro to the topics, likely a silly video involving green screening ;-). An outline of 2-3 activities, linked to the Activity Bank, published on the Ontario Extend Domains of Our Own site, announced too in the Reclaim Hosting Community area A Monday or Tuesday live video demo session, demonstrating the techniques, tools used that week. It will be archived, and posted in the same places as above. A call for more experienced Domains people to add more activities to the bank. Drop in live office hours maybe on Thursday. These are just some notes transferred from my sketch pad to the blog. I'm thinking that the camp experience would definitely be aimed at people doing their first experience with a domain, but also designed for people who have had their domain for a while but would like to dive in a bit deeper. And this will be a wide open experience for anyone with a new or existing domain to join, definitely anyone who has gotten a domain through Ontario Extend. We do have some more accounts available we can share with participants who have progressed through or are making steady progress though the Ontario Extend Modules. So if you have been using hosted blogs for your Ontario Extend work and wish to explore what more you can do when you reclaim that to a plot of internet land of your own, please let me know. For now, Domain Camp is a graphic and these ideas, I'd certainly like to hear your ideas on how to help people learn their domain landscape. Please comment here or in the Reclaim Hosting Community thread where I started the idea rolling. Who's ready for camp? A credible, textbook design process includes extensive pre-planning, testing, reviewing feedback, and making public once it has been thoroughly scrutinized. That's not happening here. The previous post was syndicated here from a new project being hastily assembled by me and Brian Lamb at TRU as part of my Fellowship. Part of the package was running "some kind of workshop" related to storytelling. That left plenty of room for latitude. What we are planning is in part an iteration of an open DS106 experience -- not as a course, but more like a professional development or seminar series. It's being offered as an 8 week thing starting January 12. It's maybe 8 weeks because that's the rest of my stay here, but it also fits in well with the format I last taught DS106 as an online course for graduate students at George Mason University. There are a few types of target audiences Brian described for me at TRU- staff, faculty, students are invited. Portfolio Builders - like many (or all places) there is an interest in helping people create, manage digital portfolios. As the "managing your own stuff" we hope to give them an experience (not suggesting its best for all) of doing such a thing in an open online space. Knowledge Mobilizers The term knowledge mobilization, new to me, is a way of saying how to disseminate share academic or research work, the impact of research, into a broader audience, or better, into active use beyond specialists. So we hope to introduce this idea through the use of media creation and expression.. in an open online space. Media Makers Whether new to it or not, there is always an interest in learning how to use, create media. Tool lovers are welcome. A more concise description from The You Show "Pitch": How do we communicate outward the work we do as learners, teachers, researchers? Portfolios suggest the final production. But like a film movie, a great deal of process happens that leads up to that, yet gets left on the cutting room floor. We are looking for people interested in (a) creating sharable portfolios of their work; (b) communicating or mobilizing information about their work to a general audience; or (c) improving their digital media skills. If any or all of those outcomes appeal to you, we invite you to be part of an eight week open seminar we call “The You Show”, running from January until March. This will be a hands-on, participatory experience. We will guide you through eight weeks of practical skill-building, mixed with what we hope will be examples of inspirational work and reflections. You will be expected to work, but then again that work will be directed to a product that should address your own objectives. What we want to do is apply some of the fun and and approach of the digital storytelling course DS106 here at Thompson Rivers University (and for anyone else on the open web who wants to play along). The lens for this, or better, the shtick is played out in the low budget production Brian and I (and Harry) made yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxrGeRk85T0 Hence what we came up with as The You Show (the top level domain was a throw away suggestion at a meeting with the Open Learning Instructional Designers; we were planning a "sandbox" site for some projects with them). It's a bit of a play on words, as is all language, right? So what you will work on is a show about you showing you, made by you, but also where you show the work being the showing of you. Clear as... It's again about the long running trope on this blog about "narrating" the work as you do it, ideally in a public blog. People get hung up on sharing their precious stuff (because someone will STEAL it); fine, do not give away the stuff. How about giving away the process of making stuff? Showing your thinking process? Citing your influences? I go back again and again to the metaphor of DVD Extras (aging metaphor) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by One Thousand Words[/caption] Sure, the final movie is the goal, but I love how I can watch again and listen to the director provide insight to all the scenes, the out takes, deleted scenes, background information on the music and the location setting. Thus the You Show plays with the idea of producing what is on the Front Stage (learning how to create/express in media), but also providing insight to what happened Back Stage to make it happen (writing about the making thereof). Thus in the vein of dog food consumption, after producing the video last night (blogged on the site as Front Stage) I also wrote the Back Stage post. Grand Ambitions are in place to do this for the duration. Variable mileage disclaimers apply. As an experiment I wanted to see about Feed Wordpress syndicating (which apparently is archaic) this over to my blog here; I do not want all posts, nor just stuff I produce. Actually what I wanted was just the stuff in the Back Stage category that I had authored (in the hope Brian or someone else may write these too [cough]). I know you can get all kinds of feeds from Wordpress, so it did not surprise me that with about 5 minutes of web searching I figured it out. So this is the standard URL for all things I have posted on the site: http://youshow.trubox.ca/author/cogdog/ What I learned is I can add a URL parameter that just lists the stuff I wrote in the Back Stage category (had to find it's ID, 11, from the Categories dashboard) http://youshow.trubox.ca/author/cogdog/?cat=11 And thus, ergo sum, ipso facto, I can make this an RSS feed capable of consumption by Feed Wordpress http://youshow.trubox.ca/author/cogdog/?cat=11&feed=rss2 Of course, you may be interested in asking "What does this course seminar look like?" "How can I participate?" "Will it be Open?". It's all being added as we go. The skeletal schedule is listed as "Breakdown Sheets" The idea is each unit launches with a video (as in above), and a link to the suggested activities for the week, kind of like the weekly assignments in DS106. There will likely be a version of The Daily Create. For the participants at TRU, we are offering it as a flexible option, but really hope people show up in person for weekly open discussions, drop in lab sessions. Brian is casting out to invite in some folks, like hopefully D'Arcy Norman is on tap to be here for the unit on Visual Communicating, and we will have something like a photo walk. We will likely set up an optional email notification, copying some others in using TinyLetter (opt in, of course). I do not know fully how this plays out for online participants. There will be a blog signup, aggregator on the site. Perhaps we can do some drop in hangouts. This is the unplanned part. It's kind of like a Connected Course without the course part. The You Show is assembling as we go. There should be a tad or two more coherence on the site later in the week. If this intrigues you (if not I doubt you would be reading way down here) stay tuned, but this thing is on... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8J4MTYUYzs As a bit of remaking, the movie making metaphor is a repeat for me. I played with this back at the Maricopa Community Colleges in the mid 1990s of using it as a metaphor for having faculty work with a team of students on a multimedia development project. I created the fictional "Studio 1151" (that was the code for my center's acronym, MCLI, expressed in Roman numerals) (clever eh?) (maybe) [caption id="attachment_39057" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The Studio 1151 project, circa 1996, Maricopa Center for Learning & INstruction[/caption] The featured image (top) used for this post is Public domain Wikimedia Commons image from Charles Darwin's Notebook "his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837)" I was just looking for some kind of sketch notes, but really love that the opening to his note is "I think". Here he is back stage noting his ideas: I think case must be that one generation should have as many living as now. To do this and to have as many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction. Thus between A + B the immense gap of relation. C + B the finest gradation. B+D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. Bearing relation to ancient types with several extinct forms" cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I feel like this just listening to the live audio stream; I can only imagine the full force gale of being in the ds106 class with The Bavanator. This is somewhat for Alex, who asked for an example on how to do the 3 sound remix assignment for Networked Narratives. He's spinning his audio wheels, which I said would likely happen. DONT PANIC! We asked students to record and share three sounds of their morning routine, representing their preparation, transportation, and arrival at school or work- a transition from home to where they spend their days... These were to be shared as a response in the Sounds Tab at https://youngwritersproject.org/netnarr... calling on them to figure out how to record audio, get it on their computer, convert to mp3, and upload. Since I work from home, more or less my transition happens during the morning dog walk (my 3 sounds). The audio editing assignment was to download someone else's sounds, and edit them together, adding a narration for a story you imagined taking place. I took a listen to all the sounds our students shared, and Rissa's Morning Sounds stood out if only for the little bird sound I heard at the end of the first audio file. A little "cheep cheep" maybe a parakeet. So my story is about the bird... https://soundcloud.com/cogdogroo/break-away To make this, I downloaded all three of Rissa's sounds from the YWP site, and imported them into Audacity (File -> Import Audio). The end up stacked in separate tracks, so I use the time shift tool () to slide them to the right so they go in order. I trim a few and apply fade-in / fade-out effects at the start and end, and also overlap them a bit. Then I go to Freesound my favorite place for audio effects, because (a) there are so many and (b) they are licensed Creative Commons meaning the person who shared them is okay with me re-using them. I searched on "bird flying" and decided to use a bit of Damn Crazy Bird by vflefevre because it sounded like a little bird zinging around. The next sound searching on "bird attack" and downloaded SoundMap of Lazio, Italy » Starlings loudspeaker - Ciampino by parcodeisuoni because the sharp sqwaking at the end. And lastly, the short ATTACK ZOUNDZ 1 » Attack Zound-67.wav by Jovica worked for a bit of bird cries. These too I imported into Audacity, and shifted down the timeline, trimming a lot off of the first 2 because they are long. I wanted a sequence of the bird flying, then being attacked. I also left a silent gap deliberately after the last of Rissa's sounds-- a sudden drop of background sounds can be useful to shift, or emphasize a change in action. I recorded my audio in the bathroom of a hotel I am staying at (because the heat was loudly humming in the main room, plus bathrooms provide some echo). I put in my headphones so as I record, I can hear my edited sounds and time my lines to where I think they match the audio. I got the recording you hear on the second try, it was good enough. I just made up the part in my head about my leg getting stuck, that might be my favorite part. On playing back I ended up lowering the levels of some of the background sounds, using the "envelope" tool, especially to make Marissa's sounds seem to retreat as the bird is left alone. This was about 45 minutes from idea to publishing, but I have a good amount of experience in editing. But I had the arc of the story in my head all along, even without writing a thing. Here are some screenshots from my Audacity editing: [caption id="attachment_64302" align="aligncenter" width="630"] (click for full size image)[/caption] Thanks Rissa for giving my a "sound" idea. Featured image: "Abstract" pixabat photo by Extrabrandt is shared into the Public Domain using CC0. flickr foto Spam!available on flickr The photographer of this Creative Commons licensed image "found this Spam can in a 7 Eleven in Santa MarÃa." Yesterday, I was upstairs checking an issue on one of our web servers. I ran into Yosef, who is in charge of our email system. He was sharing the success of some newly installed spam interception software that truly had cut down a significant amount of inbound email spam. He said, "And it is interesting, we get all kinds of interesting statistics... like we know who at Maricopa gets the most spam." So I as curious. Is it one of our executives? One of our vocal faculty? A student? And so I could not help but ask, "And who is number one?" He let out a hearty laugh, put his arm on my shoulder, and said, "Congratulations! it's you!" I know I get a lot, but that much? I know it is largely because in the first 7, 8 years of our web server, I thought it was useful to put my email address as a contact in the footer of every MCLI web page. There was no thought in those days of harvesters, bots, and things that would use email addresses for shameful things. It might have been in 10,000 different web pages, and although all fo our sites since about 2000 have been changed to use a web-based form feedback, there are still a lot of old pages with my email address hanging out. Once an email address is harvested by one spam agent, it is pretty much toast. At least my status will change when they de-activate my account after April 7. What an honor! I cannot think of a prouder moment in my professional career. (Taking a break from my current Kiwi blogging action, cannot stay away). In Learning Objects: A Practical Definition Rory McGreal takes a somewhat noble effort to wrestle the learning object monster. I was looking for that grail like singular uber definition. Is it there? I love reading things like: LOs are sometimes defined as being educational resources that can be employed in technology-supported learning. With appropriate metadata descriptions, they can be modular units that can be assembled together to form lessons and courses. I sure wish someone out there could point me to some real examples of such lessons that have been snapped together lego like fashion. I see these things in the same vein as Sasquatch, Nessie, and the Yeti-- all you get are big headlines and fuzzy photos. And we must hail the mighty meta-data: In order to search for and find LOs, which might be ideal for a particular course, descriptions of their many characteristics are needed. This is what metadata does...Metadata includes a listing of commonly defined fields for each LO. These fields conform to an accepted set of rules. These rules provide a means of creating, handling and storing data and electronically transferring information using common standards that enable international interoperability. I love meta data, even mildly believe in its value, but severely doubt the piles of structured, rigid meta data armories constructed by the acronym soup organizations will go very far. Kind of like driving a Hummer crossing a rope bridge... "Who will do all this tagging?" It has all the appeal of doing the long tax form in quadruplicate. It won't be me, and it sure will not be your average technology user. Rory then goes on to in great detail outline a variety of schema and dimensions to look at learning objects. This is some valid, thought out work... this statement seems left out there hanging: Whether something counts as a LO, depends on whether it can be used to teach or learn, and this can only be determined by its use, not by its nature. So where in the pile of meta data, repositories, SCORMIEEERADRIADNEIMS doe we ever look at tracking use/reuse? Nada. So drum roll please..... LOs can be defined as any reusable digital resource that is encapsulated in a lesson or assemblage of lessons grouped in units, modules, courses, and even programmes. A lesson can be defined as a piece of instruction, normally including a learning purpose or purposes. Like the hundreds of "you've reached the end of the Internet" pages, maybe here one can say "You have reached the end of the learning object definitions. Turn off your computer and go home." Still, it is no clearer than the day before I ever heard the words "learning object". Me, I take a twist on Justice Potter Stewart's definition for pornography, "I cannot define it, but I know a learning object when I see it" Lora's geology objects was the first psuedo blog I created in MT to demonstrate a site in which w person is harnessing the LO/RSS notion in one field. Lora is a Geology insutrctor, and here she has set up MovableType to accept RSS Feeds form our Maricopa Learning eXchange. Later she adds additional feeds from CAREO, Humbul, ITPapers. And then she learns how to have a Google search on "geology learning objects" inserted to her blog Yes, fighting blog spam has been a huge distraction. I would rather be creating things than roach stomping. But I refuse to close off comments completely; it runs dead against what blogs should do to foster community building. About 36 hours ago, I took the approach of renaming my mt-comments.cgi script. The new name was discovered by spam bots in less than 24 hours, so I doubt they are scarfing it from Google (regardless, for now, I am excluding all robots in the server robots.txt file, though I doubt the majority of bots even pay attention to that anymore). The problem in my previous approach of funneling all comments to the individual entry form is that the HTML source clearly reveals the URL for the script to generate spam. I had done it completely backwards by removing links to the pop up comment form. So the goal is to remove the full URL from all pages for http://........./cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=X which is the direct addresses the spammers need as well as removing the comment form from the bottom of the individual entry. I've altered the links that generate the comment window and the JavaScript function that handles it to munge things so the full URL for the comment script call is broken up into hopefully unrecognizable chunks. I'd be more detailed, but I'll make the spammers work for their crumbs. Also, long overdue, I updated the MT software to version 2.661, which introduces some code that prevents multiple script calls in short spans of time, or what is known as "throttling". And Yes, D'Arcy, I have my MT-Blacklist up to like 1100 entries (likely slowing the comment posting way down), but I find it only catches a handful of regular attempts- the 3 waves I got this week were all not on the blacklist (but they are now). The War goes On. How says there's nothing worthy on blogrolls.... Found on a sidebar-- is this a long lost blog cousin to CDB? http://sitcogblog.blogspot.com/ Strike out on Jakob's Weblog Usability Law #1... Shouldn't the idea of publishing on the web mean generating something that can "echo all around the world"? Once again, my experience shows that if you publish something on an employer's web site, or a company's web site, or even in something that just takes away the work of managing web sites, the chances of it having a life to keep echoing is low. And if you are going to go to the trouble to craft something in writing, why put it in a place where the shelf life is short? As named a Linklover by Jim Groom (can i get that on a badge, Jim) I can't agree more with the movie metaphor suggestion that it's all about people, if you go to the effort to publish on your own domain, than you are going to care for it's health more than any other entity. My quick reflex to toss a lost of links into a post was less about being overly prepared for a conversation about Domains for the Home on the Web workshop at Grinnell College, it was more to shake my own memory try to be ready for the open ended conversations about teaching with domains. Added later... because this is my blog and I can edit! The recording of this session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DazqR__Y10 It was not meant to be Yet Another Web Nostalgia tour, but in thinking about writing of the influences of doing what I am doing now, writing about my thinking openly, I reached back for the bloggers whose shoulders I stepped onto. There is a pattern, watch the difference: My Blog My Outboard Brain by Cory Doctorow from maybe 2002 is always a concept I feel comfortable with. It was published on the O'Reilley.com web site, you know the company started by the guy who drummed up the Web 2.0 thing, but if you try the link now http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html (kind of interesting to read it's somehow organized under "javascript" but I digress) it just flops you by redirects you to O'Reilly.com. It's actually more worthless than a 404 page. It helps not in one bit. But experiencing this on a daily basis, I know to reach for the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine where I can link you directly to read Cory's words, rather than O'Reilly's company brochure.As opposed to Jon Udell's writing in a post about the idea of "narrating one's work" it is still linkable, readable in Jon's domain (I provided my own link to a workshop page that put it in context). I had the fortune recently to talk with Jon (where I nearly walk away with more to think about than I gave, still simmering on his notion of understanding and designing for other people's "workflows"). And as Jon mentioned (and my feed reader shows) his own narration at his domain has picked up recently. But here again is that Institution vs the Individual in terms of web preservation- stuff stays around much longer, and is more findable when published in your own domain. There's other early influences I thought of later, maybe the earliest academic blogger was Jill Walker/Rettberg, and jill/txt was one of the first I read, including her post on defining a weblog (when we had to put the 'web in front). Rebecca Blood wrote a history on weblogs in 2000 long before most people even know what they were. Liz Lawley was highly influential too, in her mamamusings site. All of those links live as they are on domains managed, cared for, fed, by their authors. Most of the links you find from there that lead to institutional sites, university/company the same, are most likely linkrotted. Now this is just a small bit of what the Grinnell folks were seeking. They and I obviously do more in a domain than jst self blathering, otherwise ther domain use would be limited to one blog. But it's that idea of having a property or a Jim Groom House of Richard Scarry Rooms that provides numerous places/spaces for reflecting, making resources, course materials, portfolios, and just exploration spaces. As always, it remains to me, as... I would be it was Martha Burtis who framed a domain as a Possibility Space. Maybe that's just some wordplay. But what I heard the Grinnell folks talk about was spaces for students to contribute to, to get to that still useful idea of a lightweight collection space, or a means to publish your own pseudo book, journal. I can only spin out the small bits I have or stumbled across. It's far from the entire scope of of potential. And yes, a shed for your Ferrari takes effort to keep up, but at least it won't be ripped to shreds by some otehr entity and redirected to some Used Car LOT by someone else. A Domain of one's own means you get to say what stays or go, and not to be left a the whom of some technocrat at Gizmo.com or YouNoLngerWorkHere.edu. And to some degree, while not fully pf ones's own, I was able to find my own olde links from a Blogger hosted Blog Workshop site that still lives (at Google's Whim, I better do something soon). It's yikes, 17 years old! I think I exported a copy from a MovableType (cough old man reference) version I had at Maricopa (long ago sent to the web dumping grounds) Bloghsip site circa 2004 https://blogshop.blogspot.com/ And then I keep remembering stuff I gotta archive in my house. For a 2005 presentation, I managed with some Javascript trickery to make Blogger go non-blog format for More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs an NMC presentation. That hyphen in the URL happened because someone got there first (and is still there). This gives me good vibes that it even works, but I think it holds up. It was a play on the casting off that many academics at the time derided blogs as "just online diaries" https://cat-diaries.blogspot.com/ The Javascript menu and button navigation from 2005 still works! As does the pop up extra notes from each "slide" in this non-Powerpoint web-based presentation. I think I better get the Sitesucker app going on this before Google flushes it. Still while these links are not domained (yet) it still asserts my point that sites created for and maintained by the individual will have much web durability than university or company ones. Feature Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/420030308 Older than Vinyl.. Wax! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We've just put online our Fall 2004 issue of our office's publication, the mcli Forum, and am finally glad I can share with you the featured technology interview I did with Brian Lamb, perhaps not so cleverly titled as "Where the Wiki Things Are". How do you help people make the "Aha" step from that first look of puzzlement when you describe a web site that anyone can edit or destroy? I think when they begin to understand that the users are in control; that though they may sacrifice some functions such as security and organization, they gain a great deal of speed and autonomy. It really requires doing to become a believer. I do have one gimmick, where I invite people in the audience to erase or deface all of my materials. Then I restore my stuff with a few clicks of the mouse. That really is the key to the notion of "Soft Security" (which underlies this approach). It needs to be easier to fix damage than it is to inflict it. The fun thing about this interview was we conducted it all via iChat, as alluded to a few months back. A bonus for the web version that the print one lacks are a few more wiki sidebar resources (such as Brian's rockin' NMC show, Wired for WikiPhonics). We also have in the online article a full transcript of the iChat session [56k PDF]. The transcript was rather easy to accomplish- the session was saved from iChat as a iChat file, and simply by printing to PDF, it comes out nicely formatted (though it lacks the iChat icons.... I am the Dog and Brian is the Skeleton ;-) Again, the format of doing an interview by chat was easy to pull off an effective, especially if interviewer and interviewee have the questions arranged a head of time. There of course is some lag as both are trying to be more clear (while typing) then just sloppy chit chat. I would definitely use the approach again.... anyone want to be interviewed for my Spring 2005 article?? cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by fs999 There is a tad bit of smugness of people dissing the cloud after last week's Amazon EC2 #fail. I respect you a lot Doug, but on reading this: Having recently considered moving this blog to Amazon EC2 because it's "˜never down' I breathed a sigh of relief. Bluehost may be slower at serving up content than it used to be but at least it's never completely failed me. Outsourcing via set-it-and-forget-it only works if you've got a backup plan. I cannot say that Amazon EC2's selling point is "it's never down"- and I bet sooner or later, whether you Bluehost, Dreamhost, Toasthost, or live off of that old PC server running in the basement, sooner or later (it could be years or seconds), you will be let down. Count on it. Amazon's problem is that it ran so smoothly, that people started to think of it as Always On. There is No Such Thing, except maybe the sun burns out (and you have 5 or so billion years to prep) or the next geologic era when the magnetic poles flip. Everything will fail, eventually; what you need to do is know it, and be pro-active, and save yourself from becoming a mad screaming tweeting "where the &@%^@-is-my-site" monkey (which I have done when DreamHost has gone flop). Be a Boy Scout. Be prepared. Have your backups done ahead of time. Brush your teeth. Floss too. All good advice, all obvious advice, until the day the sky falls, and you remember saying, "I think I'll do my backups... next week". If you are in the digital spaces and do not have multiple backups of your important stuff, you are riding the risky edge (which Doug does allude to in his last sentence). So it's easy to now smirk and be dismissive of the Cloud. But the same rules apply there as elsewhere, single point of failure is a single point... of failure. It's worth noting the approaches of those on EC2 that did not get hit by the falling sky-- Lessons From a Cloud Failure: It's Not Amazon, It's You. Of course, I will deny all of this calm advice next time Dreamhost tanks on me. Why are you reading this and not checking your redundant backups? Despite the apparent demise of blogs the flat line of the RSS-ograph blips with a pulse from David Kernohan "on chatbots." FOTA is alive! Unsure if my comment gets through the gate (a first one generated a critical WordPress error, sorry, David), but I have to at least assert my assertion, as if it blips anywhere in the raging discordant discourse, "Intelligence might be based on pattern recognition as Stephen [Downes] asserts, but it should not be mistaken for intelligence." So when David passes a linked reference to the Colossus as the dawn of pattern guessing to decrypt war time messages, my pattern recognition goes to where no GPT can fabricate: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14094365766 2014/365/125 Just Part of Colossus flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license This photo was taken on my own visit to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, that being a memorable day when Dave and his partner Viv drove me all the way from Bristol where I visited them to Milton Keynes where I spent a week at the Open University. Maybe a machine could mine the facts from my blog posts and photos, but it would never make connections, the feelings, to the experience of being there that are not digitized or accessible to wholesale scraping. Never. Or is this my own flailing effort to raise a pitifully tiny flag of I am Human in front of the advancing, inevitable horde of machines? For an image I could have plopped a prompt into a DALL-EMidJourneyStable Diffusion but why, when I can deploy one of my own making? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52726715586 2023/365/63 Infinite Clones flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I could try my best to weave more words around my emerging thought patterns, yes ones that I generate from my own sum of vast experiences. And truly, I could say that I myself, with this nerve network plugged into a 3 pound skull enclosed non-battery powered device, merely have been training 50+ years on written, visual, auditory media,much of which I did not ask explicitly to use, from which I generate through some mystical process, my "own" words? my "own" imagery? Everything is a Remix but AI Does Not Remix Like an Artist Who better to turn to than Kirby Ferguson to wisely delve into Artificial Creativity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA Stop, watch the whole thing. I mean the whole damn series. I can only yank quotes Of all Humanity's technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. it has the potential to create either a Utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get? Just like everybody else I do not know what's coming but it seems likely that in coming decades these visions of our imminent demise will seem campy and naive because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naive. Everything is a Remix Part 4 He takes AI to "court" on three counts, and makes a point that many don't want to accept, that harvesting all of the "stuff" readily available is maybe not the point of ethics to hang the purveyors. If you buy into his theme that everything is a remix, that means everything is available, as he has done in his video. But do not take this as suggesting there is a free ticket to just grab content for the classic "because you can" reason. Follow Kirby Ferguson's statement about all the media he has remixed into his video: On some videos about AI the big reveal is that this video was actually made by AI. But this video and this series is the opposite. Nothing has been AI except where I cited AI art. This is entirely human made, the words are all mine but they're merged from the thoughts of countless people. Everything you've seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists. All these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new and yes I did it all without permission. Everything is a Remix Part 4 The big difference is that this filmmaker provides credits / attribution to he sources. It is very clear what was used. There is no mask of source content or how it was used hidden behind a facade of a commercial purveyor whose very name has washed open with techno-clorox. Also, lost in the court section is a very valid question- Training AIs on individual artists work does seem wrong everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets and maybe AIS should simply not train on images from active art communities. Also some company should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images which would avoid this Hornet's Nest entirely. Somebody please do this. Everything is a Remix Part 4 Why is there no ethical entity out there creating training from public domain or openly licensed materials? Or why does quote/unquote "OPEN" ai DOT com, which already trains its machines on Wikipedia amongst everything else, just create a version limited to truly open content? About the only thing I found was an image generator on hugging face that looks like it does this, but I am not clever enough to make it do anything. There is a free idea for anyone to pick up. Finally, Kirby Ferguson ends with a compelling (to me) assertion of the essence of creativity. AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and inventive by chance. Computers can now create but they are not creative. To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you've done. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate. Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art, living, AIs don't know what it's like to be a child, to grow up, to fall in love, to fall in lust, to be angry, to fight, to forgive, to be a parent, to age, to lose your parents, to get sick, to face death. This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling. Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it's not because of what the AI did it's because of what a person did. Art is by humans for humans. : Everything is a Remix is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular it's a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual it is shared. Everything is a Remix Part 4 (emphasis added by me) Please watch this video! All of them! Back To The Hammer Hand https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4955746757 Another Old Thing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license But it's not as clean as just going John Henry and making an untenable slice of human versus machine. Artificial Intelligence "stuff" is a tool, but it's not "just a tool." I am reaching back to something I often rely on from Gardner Campbell's explanation of Marshall McLuhan “There is no such thing as “just a tool.” McLuhan wisely notes that tools are not inert things to be used by human beings, but extensions of human capabilities that redefine both the tool and the user. A “tooler” results, or perhaps a “tuser” (pronounced “TOO-zer”). I believe those two words are neologisms but I’ll leave the googling as an exercise for the tuser. The way I used to explain this is my new media classes was to ask students to imagine a hammer lying on the ground and a person standing above the hammer. The person picks up the hammer. What results? The usual answers are something like “a person with a hammer in his or her hand.” I don’t hold much with the elicit-a-wrong-answer-then-spring-the-right-one-on-them school of “Socratic” instruction, but in this case it was irresistible and I tried to make a game of it so folks would feel excited, not tricked. “No!” I would cry. “The result is a HammerHand!”.... http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/doug-engelbart-transcontextualist/ So no “just a tool,” since a HammerHand is something quite different from a hammer or a hand, or a hammer in a hand. Gardner has given me more directly, in email: I got to that in part because of McLuhan's famous dictum "the medium is the message." Most folks appear to think he meant that the medium shapes the message. If you read the piece in which the phrase appears, however, you can see that's not what he meant. Instead, McLuhan thought of every medium as a message about what we are and desire as human beings. He said the electric light was a message. Every medium should tell us something meta about itself, and something vital about humanity. A medium is not just a channel for transmitting stuff. A medium is also itself a message, a transmission. Can we understand the medium's message about itself, and thus about us? That's why the book is called Understanding Media. What is the message these media convey about themselves? and about mediated experience generally? So with that, I built on Alan Kay (and I think others as well), who said "we shape our tools, and after that our tools shape us," bringing in the idea of man-computer symbiosis, putting it all within the context of Engelbart's integrated domain, and then re-reading McLuhan to find a way to express what I took to be something essential about his ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience, and I came out with hammerhand. Gardner Campbell, personal communication Much of the educator reaction to ChatGPT (which to me is narrow as there is much more we should be wrapping our heads around), so focused on the fear/worry/change factors rather than " ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience." So This Thing Happened Today Which I Defy Anyone To Experience By Typing Prompts Into a Box Going back to where I started, with David Kernohan's On Chatbots post, he gives just a short bit at the end to maybe the larger idea of his two, under the heading "A Matter of Semantics": I want to close my argument by thinking about the other major strand of artificial intelligence – an associative model that starts (in the modern era) with Vannevar Bush and ends with, well, Google search. The idea of a self-generating set of semantic links – enabling a machine to understand how concepts interrelate – is probably closer to the popular idea of artificial intelligence than toys like ChatGPT. http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/on-chatbots/ meaning (I think) that the interconnected web of ideas imagined by Bush that influenced Engelbart and actually was instantiated by Tim Berners Lee, is the connectivist idea that the web itself, changing with every new bit linked on to it, offers more potential for making something akin to intelligent than chatbots that are merely regurgitation parts of it in a way that just parody intelligence, not embody it. So this happened today. It is of no significant to any discussion threading out in the ghosted public square of twitter or the de-aggregated butvibrantcorners of Mastodon, certainly not dead to ne where I will never vention spew pots of (f*** it I cannot call it "Meta" its always Facebook),or the iteration of the America Online is to the real Internet as Linkedin is to ______________... Oh I might have lost my thought completely, as it humanly happens. Can I get help? This makes this blog sound like some marketing cheese. This is what people have their undergarments wadded about? Seriously? I push back One cannot get more Gurgitating Parroted Trash than this. If you are worried about AI generated text, then maybe look some in the mirror at your own human generated text. Okay, I am left to my own story making. Today I sat down to catch up on a few DS106 Daily Creates, it being the very essence of acts of human creativity assisted by tools (using a "TDC HAND"). This was one challenge from a few days ago which in true TDCness, gives a nudge, and opens a door to respond in almost any way. tdc4081 #ds106 When randomly generated people from different countries meet each other... Lots of ways to run with this, so I just start with the random names generator that suggests possible names from different countries. Cool! I love random stuff and never saw this one. There's 12 countries listed, each with 10 names. I just decide to be quick and use the first names in the middle row: 4 random made up names from Romania, Hungrary, Spain, and Sweden. Before getting to where / how they meet, I decided I need pictures. Before everyone got wrapped up in Generative text posing as intelligence, there was the phase of all the generative adversarial network (GAN) tools making realistic photos of people and thing that do not exist. If you want a real diversion, see This X Does Not Exist. But I went for the one I remember for generating people, thispersondoesnotexist.com but that now seems gone and only goes to some AI outfit. But I did find a similarly-URL-ed version at https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/ that was interesting,as there are a few more options to choose from (gender,age range, a few ethnicity options, so I generated 4 non-existent people for Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor. I imported into Photoshop using one of the Panorama collages which spread them out like photos on a table. Then I tried to think if where to place these non-existent people. I first reached for a new browser window thinking of some sort of technical image, like a computer circuit board. This is when unexpected-ness happened. You see I use the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser extension that puts a random public domain image in my screen each time I open a new browser tab. I was fully intending to open an image search, but there, but random chance here was my answer, a road sign for Hanks Coffee Shop, even better, because it was from Bensen Arizona, a place I have been before. https://flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/36720060613 Hanks Coffee Shop sign, 4th Street, Benson, Arizona (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) So now it all came together, these people who do not exist, met up for coffee at Hanks in Benson. A bit more Photoshop editing to make a cloud background, superimpose the names of the four, and I was done. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1637520673735163906 "So what?" is certainly a reasonable response. Couldn't I save time and just type into an image prompt box, "Photos of 4 people displayed under an old time coffee shop sign"? And maybe iterate a few times until it's "good enough"? Yes, but is making art about the process or the product? Maybe sometimes it is just getting the thing done, turn it in, as they say. But what is the connection to it? Would an AI remember driving through Benson, AZ on a memorable road trip to camp in the Chiricahua mountains? Would it remember a completely un-related connection from these photos in the Flickr Commons and that there was a call a while ago for examples of galleries of themed images from the commons? And would it then decide, for no productive reason, to search for other Arizona road sign images in the flickr commons, create a gallery, and then share it back? I'd say, plausibly, eff no. I want to be doing stuff described as "Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it's not because of what the AI did it's because of what a person did." I'm not saying at all don't do AI. And I absolutely intrigued by what it might offer, we have hardly even scratched the surface. But it does not always mean we have to just line up as robot servants to the AI Industrial Complex. If we lose our ability, interest, to be non stochastically human in our tasks, then we end up being "derivative by design and inventive by chance." Fin Never. But I am hoping maybe to see before not too long, another just thinking blip from FOTA. Featured image: Humanly created and selected, mine https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5263924327 Beware the Machines! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Oh the wailing and despair that is bleating across the blogscape about MovableType's announcement of the fee$$$$$$$ for MT 3.0. I've not bothered too much as I prefer to wait until the dust settles, but I am reading of mad rushes to rampage, rapid switches to other platforms such as WordPress, Bloxsum, heck, maybe folks are running to Blogger. Yes, the pricing / features at the low end for us little folks looks dismal, contorted, and well, it is does not seem designed for ME. And nothing is chiseled in concrete. But just a minute-- It is not like any of our beautifully running installations of MT 2.6 and earlier will suddenly blink out or self-destruct in 5 minutes, Mr. Phelps. This insane rush to upgrade or jump seems awfully.... hasty. Sure down the road, there are going to perhaps be compelling technical, feature reasons to upgrade or switch blog platforms, but there is nothing wrong with staying where you are at. MT 2.X still works, eh? It's not broken, eh? So my strategy is to wait, perhaps there will be a different strategy handed down, as a reaction to the public tar and feathering that bloggers are applying to SixApart. Maybe it will be time to try something else. Maybe, but I cannot find a compelling reason to do anything different now. Upgrade when there is a reason to, not just because something just came out. I'm a stickin' and publshin' with 2.6, and that is ok. It's not quite the ds106 Speed Up Your Work Day assignment since I only grabbed 1 minute of video, but it was fun to play with speed up effects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Ohlkj8U74 I grabbed this from the Dedon Road overpass of I-95 during yesterday's bike ride. It would have been better if I had propped the camera on the edge, but I'm no a bit wary of dropping my iphone over edges. I had hoped for a shot that could seemlessly loop, but my positioning was not quite steady. In iMovie, after detaching the audio, I sped the clip up 2000%, from 57 seconds down to 1, then simply copied the clip in the timeline and pasted it about 25 more times. It has the "dream" effect on the clip which gives it that burred edge look. Following Lisa M Lane's groovy movie idea, I went to the Internet Archive and found the funk in Ernie & The Top Notes Inc - Dap Walk. I have no idea why I did this, but standing on that bridge, 25 miles down a country road, the rat race looked a lot more fun than the view in the car. Pity the 96% of the computing world stuck in virus infected, human interface rejected, bug detected operating systems. They act like they like it, but often the Freudian slips are visible. But you don;t have to wait for an Intel powered Mac to get the Aqua groove-- there is FlyakiteOSX: The web site for this OSX emulator is also an OSX emulator, all done with CSS, JavaScript, and groovy graphics. Once you "log in", you get a desktop: which you can see has its own animated dock. You can open up the apps, skim the finder, leave stickies, move things around, (the iTunes emulator never connected to a playlist): Yes, I know Stephen will comment back in seconds with some derogatory remark about Macs, but beyond that, if you look just at the web site and how it is rendered, its a great kick in the sites to your Web x.0 sites. Look again at the images above, they are all rendered in a browser (and the screenshots were taken on my Dell laptop). [caption id="attachment_32539" align="alignnone" width="500"] Wikipedia has all the answers (edited with of Mozilla Googles, see the full authoritative article)[/caption] OERs. People build them. People house them in repositories. People do journal articles, conference presentations, research on them. I doubt never their existence. But the ultimate thing they are supposed to support, maybe their raison d'être-- the re use by other educators, what do we have to show for that except whispered stories, innuendo, and blurry photos in the forest? I am on the case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb7QUqBUoyI Yes, I am looking for True Stories of OER Reuse. Big data, metrics, meta data, those are only like those casts of big feet. The only way to know of reuse is to tell it. So I am adding to my True Stories of Open Sharing a special wing to house True Stories of OER Reuse. I see two varieties of possible stories: You have created, shared an OER, and you have a story of how someone else has used it? YES, I would love to hear your story. You have found, reused someone else's OER? DITTO. I would love to hear your story. I am not looking for links to blog posts, articles, web sites (well only as supporting information). What makes a story your story is YOU telling it. Make a video and claim your story. I have set up a new web form to collect the information. I have a tad bit of urgency as I am scheduled to do an online presentation on this in the first week of August. Are you a believer? Then help me find the True Stories of OER Sharing. Otherwise, people will think of it as creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by naturemandala I started my habit in 2005. Yes, I have accumulated more than a few domains (details in my domain interview). I can stop at anytime. Im fact, I am shucking one this month. I credit a colleague I've not crossed paths with in a long time, Steve Dembo (he still has his own http://www.teach42.com/ sadly last blog post was 2018, they old blogs just keep falling). It was rather funny, and foretelling that Steve emailed me in 2005. At the time, I had a blog on a server I ran for my work at the Maricopa Community Colleges, so the blog lived (dead link warning) at the looooooong URL http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb As a frequent visitor, Steve felt this was a lot of things to enter in the URL bar, so he kindly offered to buy my a custom domain, like cogdogblog.com just to save himself from typing, if only a redirect. That was quite generous, but I declined, and bought the domain myself, and set it up to be Steve's Shortcut. Months later, January 2006, I accepted the offer of a colleague, Audree Thurman (savvy technologist then at Chandler-Gilbert Community College) who offered transfer and hosting of my WordPress (1.5) blog. Like I said, the timing of all this was impeccable as in February I took an unexpected job offer and leapt from Maricopa to NMC in March 2006. So it was a good thing I had claimed both a domain and a web hosting. But back to the domain. In 2005 there was not a bevy of places to register a domain. I knew about Network Solutions (NSI) who actually were the first authority granted to manage domain names in the early 1990s. By 2005, the commercial market for Domains was a small number. I think I mad the choice then to go with aun upstart that was also cheaper, named GoDaddy.com. I can't say I ever felt overly positive about that goofy name for a company, but I signed up in July 2005 for cogdogblog.com and a year later registered feed2js.org. Maybe over next few years, I registered 3 more. Then there was the Italian domain. Looking to build out my new effort as a quote/unquote [spit] consultant, in January 2011 I came up with the idea of a company name "CogDog It!" along with the domain cogdog.it. Something like: The company logo, the name was the web address GoDaddy was set up with the extra steps needed for a non-Italian to register one of it's domains, it incurred an extra $20 "trustee" agreement making it a bit more costly than my others. But hey, vanity. I admit in the 2000s I did not give too much thought to the people that ran tech companies I bought services from. But sometime around 2011 I caught wind of the less than respectful elephant hunting lifestyle of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons not to mention becoming aware of their sleazy super bowl commercials. From looking at my account records, I can see I started migrating my domain registrations from GoDaddy to Hover in January 2012. All of them except cogdog.it - because of those regulations of .it domains I have left it hanging at GoDaddy (for like $40/year). I ended up spending 2012 in a full time job, so never did much with building out a wordpress site or anything on cogdog.it. In fact, I ended up just using it as a redirect (as it exists now) to my portfolio site. The only thing I had an actual use was a few shortened domains from go.cogdog.it (using YOURLS running from my reclaim hosting account), and maybe that was the only reason I hung on to it. All of this is a long way to say I am letting the domain go. It's silly to worry about leaving dead links considering the depth of the worldwide pile of linkrot. Like who's going to notice of the Secret Revolution vanishes, a domain I got for maybe 2 presentations in 2011? Or am I ever going to need a Western DS106 site again? The usefulness is maybe not the point. I can manage fifteen clams a year to keep a domain hoisted, even if maybe only 12 bots and a bunch of web crawlers notice. The point is, this is my work, my craft, and even if it is old, it's my wafer thin slide of history. And I get to decide. But I can let go of the GoDaddy one, I can live with those few broken links and not support them any more. That's one domain, kicked to the curb. Featured Image: My own photo 2012/366/1 Christmas Trash, Oh Christmas Trash… shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license with a GoDaddy logo found on CleanPNG draped over one box. Because I can. I fund this post lingering in the drafts. Next week's will be hard to document! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 112 Miles Driven: 10,859 Most Recent 1000 mile marker: 10,000 miles, just west of Richmond, VA Number of States/Provinces driven in: 21 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 2 Money spent on gas: $2934 Cheapest gas price: $3.08/gallon (FOuntain Inn, SC). Highest gas price: $5.64/gallon (1.39/liter) (Wawa, ON). Photos posted: 3241 (that is an average of 20.9 per day) Most scenic foliage drive: Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of books read: 12 (Most recent: Things the Grandchildren Should Know) Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 12 Number of nights camping: 18 Number of un,non,anti conference family reunions attended: 1 Bavastock! Most unexpected activities: Riding a tractor on the Durnin Farm, Helping a friend of a friend move in Nashville, and one other I have to keep private. Most depressing shell of a city: Danville VA cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of new forms of transportation: 4 (paddleboard, Jet Ski, 4 wheel Quad, tractor) Best Beach Walk: Batchawana Bay Provincial Park Friend/Relatives Homes Visited/Mooched Upon: 30 Best Bike Ride: Canmore to Banff and back with D'Arcy Norman. Most Recent Bike Ride: Virginia Beach Best Town Name: Fracking, Pennsylvania Number of friends known online met for first time: 21 (most recently added Pat aka @loonyhiker) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Laundry Stops: 13 Number of Times Timmmmy Boy made me laugh with "Tell mw about my eyes": 30? 40? Number of Breweries Visited: 7 (Glenwood Canyon Brewery (CO), Revolution Brewing, Paonia CO; Laughing Dog Brewing, Sandpoint ID; Grizzly Paw, Canmore AB; Steamwhistle, Toronto ON; Ottos, State College PA). Best Campground and Experience (likely never to be knocked off this list): Canoeing to Wallace Island, BC with Scott Leslie; Least Impressive: Haag Cove, Washington Best Campground on a Week Night: First Landing State Park on the beach in Virginia Beach Worst Campground on a Weekend Night: First Landing State Park on the beach in Virginia Beach (when the Loud family sets up next to me) Number of dogs met: 32 (Most recent: Fido in Nashville TN) Number of ds106 radio broadcasts with new people: 10 (most recent with Tom Woodward in Richmond VA) Number of Super Late Night ds106 Broadcasts That Were Totally Worth It: All of them. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of things shared in StoryBox: 891 (where are your contributions?) Biggest Dumper of StoryBox content in one dump: Jim Groom Most Consistent Contributor over span of StoryBox: Giulia Forsythe Number of remixes created with StoryBox content: 2 Number of Storybox Public Appearances: 33 Number of StoryBox demos: 2 (September 23 at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; September 28 at University of Mary Washington) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A faculty member I work with has decided to use our experimental Maricopa ePortfolio to create an online portfolio for his Faculty Evaluation Plan review (acronymically known here as "FEP")- something never done before in what is a byzantine paper bound process. John Arle teaches online and hybrid biology courses at Phoenix College, and has used his eP to provide the examples documenting his efforts in 2 Anatomy and Physiology courses including examples and desciptions of his syllabus, course schedule, lesson design, use of CDs (ADAM Virtual Dissections, yum!), Self Tests, Vocabulary Lists and INteractive Puzzles, Take Home Tests & Proctored Exams, Gradebook, Communication Examples, Student / Course Evaluation results, and data reports on student retention. His committee review takes place today, and he informed me that his college President is on the committee and she has easily accessed and reviewed his ePortfolio content. Also new on the eP front, we are testing the use of the new RSS / Syndication from the server that can push the latest changes in hosted ePs to the front entrance of the site. Not yet attached are tools that allow anyone, even people without accounts, to subscribe to email notifcations of ePortfolio updates.