Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by YlvaS I thought I had come up with a compelling piece in writing Steve Jobs & Neil Young Jam Across Time on Internet as Radio, and i fell rather silently in the blog pile. There you go. But what makes a live radio station, like ds106 radio, different from podcasting? It's just audio on the web right? This was somewhat of a conversation I had today with my every so gracious host here in Vermont, Barbara Ganley. Pen and paper in hand, she came walking into her library a place I was comfortably sitting in doing some work on the laptop, wanting to ask some questions about ds106 radio. She did not flinch (too much) when I asked if we could have the conversation on the radio. It's just the way I have always thought-- to explain a media or technical environment, do what you can to actually use that media. When I wanted to help people understand HTML in 1992 the best way was to create materials and workshops that were ON the web. Tangent. The questions she framed and I wandered off the path on answering were trying to get out the potential for learning, understanding, community-ness in a live audio space versus just uploading recorded audio (which is not a bad thing, just a different thing). Anyhow, without much more ado, here is the recording of our banter. Conversation with Barbara Ganley on/about Live Radio Later she was talking about an upcoming workshop that she was going to be doing on this topic, and was talking about how doing audio interviews was possible, but maybe it would be better to bring some people in live in Skype or Google Hangout. "That would be good, " I started and as the reflex goes, "but why not also broadcast it live on ds106radio!" I can't help it. Ahhh, radio, it is a relationship that sometimes is hard to explain when you have been bitten by the bug. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Evans Archive The psychic should know... by designwallah posted 14 Apr '08, 10.41pm MDT PST on flickr Let's see if we are on the same page with this fun image.... cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Hambo The travel is wearing on me. I am not complaining (much). This whole experience is wrapped up in the gift of my god mother's memory for making it posible, and the stream of memories of connections made, re-made, made new by people I have visited. Yet, my energy is slipping, and I find myself focused on the finish line. I am again, like ost of this trip, driven by the schedule. If I can do one more long push (620) miles, I can get home tomorrow night from tonight's stop in Amarillo. The last 3 days have been 500+ miles days on average. There is a reason, as a week from tomorrow, I am off for Australia for a 2 week trip, and I'd like as much refresh time at home as possible. i am stopping less for photos, for wandering, and not doing much on the StoryBox end. I skipped a few opportunities to meet people. It's a good thing I am not doing regrets anymore (inside joke). On the contrary, even moving through large swaths of land, trying to take it in ay 70 mph -- is being there. I am trying to soak it in like a long movie reel. I'm going to delay the last road stat post to be after tomorrow- I should pass the 15,000 mile mark not far from my home, and just short of 5 months of travel. This is just the beginning of trying to think how to wrap up this whole experience into one media soaked archive. I am not even sure what I want to do or how. Yeah, I am mentally fried but soulfully refreshed, is that possible? I know I want to play more, but am so tired... cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Pepe Ortuño cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A few years ago I started some conference presentations with a sloppy attempt of a disclaimer, leaning on my own familiar TV metaphor of Sargent Schultz from Hogan's Heroes and his classic yodel of "I Know Nothing!". I was trying to deploy it in the sense of "I am not an expert" (Yes, I am a card carrying member of the Imposter Syndrome Club). But Schultz's method was one of being deliberately ignorant of what he observed, as some means of staying out of trouble. I tried to use Schultz though, taking it down the path of what I learned when researching my facts on Hogan's Heroes, weighing what I read about the character backgrounds on Wikipedia- I asked library experts among NMC members about what "trusted references" they would use to research the background of TV actors - these include reference books such as "Encyclopedia of Television" ($675) and "Television Characters" ($75) or subscription databases services such as the Gale Group (and I wandered down thr tangential lane of noting actor Robert Crane's mysterious death in an apartment complex less than half a mile from where I lived then). I was trying to ask about what the new notions of "expertise" were and if maybe "expertiness" in the Colbertian sense was sometimes enough. Or maybe it was a problem. Yet I continue to see places where people continually market their expert skills, they spend each day showing the world what they know. I've alluded before (and will again, and will never reveal) that I subscribe to one particular blog, one which has 100 times as many readers and 1000 times as many twitter followers than me (therefore I am jealous), that almost regularly contains some of the most noxious self inflating writings I have ever come across. Obviously, all those followers know something I don't. But reading that keeps me grounded. Or today, someone twitter me a link to 33 Signals Of An Alpha Social Media Evangelist. Some of them are things that many people do who maybe are not alpha leaders / A-Listers per se: 1. They are informers, usually using tools such as Twitter to spread links that point to information-rich articles. 2. They are giving away valuable things for free, such as how-to articles, video tutorials, etc. 3. They are usually early adopters, with things such as new tech gadgets or trendy social network sites. But then I wonder at: 5. They usually have a lot of fans for their own Facebook pages. 18. Their profiles usually can be found on Wikipedia or their own Google Profiles. 19. On Twitter, they tend to have a huge amount of followers (i.e. 100,000+) and get listed 1,000+ times. 24. They usually have a "verified account" stamp for their Twitter profiles. I was unsure if the author was 100% serious or tongue in cheek. In particular, having a huge number of twitter followers is a serious false positive IMHO, and in this month's Wired magazine, Clive Thompson nailed it with "in Praise of Online Obscurity": I've heard this story again and again from those who've risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they're having fun "” but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It's no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting. The lesson? There's value in obscurity. After all, the world's bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight "” in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. They're willing to experiment with risky or dumb concepts because they're among intimates. (It was, after all, small groups of marginal weirdos that brought us the computer, democracy, and the novel.) And that is where I want to be, so here I wave my own flag of ignorance-- cc licensed flickr photo shared by futureatlas.com Rather than boasting what I know, or all the 1-2-3 steps You Should Do To Be As Successful as Me (plus the Link to My Book You Should Tell Your Friends About, I am going to tell you how little I really know. I am a lousy, sloppy programmer. I know enough PHP to make web sites, tinker with systems like WordPress or drupal, but my approach is more sledge hammer- keep piling on code til it works. I don;t do structured programming, my code is not optimal. And most of it is marginally tested beyond my own uses. Almost any technical question someone asks me, I cant recall on the spot. I've built up a lot of expert reputation because I google something and send the results back. That is not what I know at all. The same goes for questions on "best technologies for X" or "Is there a software tool that will do Y"-- if you think I am pulling from my brain, you are sadly mistaken I am not all that well read. Or maybe I just don't remember it much. I can't quote the ideas of famous philosophers or education theorists, I''ve not read many of the great works. My 12th grade English teacher was so dull, I experienced her classes playing LP records of a reading of Julius Ceaser by placing my head like I was reading the book in my lap, and snoozing. I can't sit at social gatherings and effectively banter whether Blah Blahs sense of pacing was reserved due to her Puritan upbringing or if So and so's use of symbolism was immature. It has nothing to do with not enjoying reading, it's more not being that engaged in the talking or posturing about reading. So while I feel like one of the Clampets in a literary circle, I am trying to hang with the loose group of Motley Readers doing some shared reading of Joyce's The Dubliners this month. But I am not trying to share what I think I am supposed to say about it (be googling around)-- I am just going about it on my own. I'm lucky if I can remember the title of a movie I saw, much less memorize the pilot or peel back the meaning. I've hung around with some of my other colleagues that can back and forth with vivid details from movies they saw 10 years ago, or be able to compare on Director's lighting choices with another. Thank you for my offline writing and references when I can reach into IMDb to fill in the neural gaps. And I find it fun to maybe try and latch on better to pop culture references that are not always readily at my recall. So I can banter with Jim Groom and joke that the "CogDog Abides" to a reference that runs through his DNA. I can do it asynchronously! It's not about faking your knowledge, but it is about trying to figure out how to tap in deeply to something you don't have instant recall on. The same goes for song lyrics- you can find online the text version of the words from almost any song, copy it, paste it, re-write a few words into the theme of something you are blogging about-- and you've tapped into a pop culture bit. There's a lot more that I Don't Know, but I am getting tired of writing -- it would take me the rest of my life. So there. I don't "know" a lot of things-- to me this is an opportunity, cause how dull would it be to be Such A Great Expert That Knows it All (and Charges You $25,000 to Bring it as a Workshop)? I'd hate such a burden. But that's me down here happy in ignorant obscurity-ville. That just means I am jealous of the shiny people. And I think the continued propping up of Pompous Self-Inflated Windbags as "experts to follow" is crappo deluxe. The point of ds106 Daily Creates is something that should not take much work, so really it is more than enough to just do them and get them posted somewhere. It is helpful, and suggested for people in Headless ds106 who have some experience, to try sharing some of the behind the scenes notes of their work. Some people make new blog posts per each; I tend to aim for a weekly recap, for which I have created a new blog category. This is usully what I require of my registered students when I have a class. Once again, how you do it is up to you. Here are mine for this past week. It’s been good to see a burst of Daily Creates from people new to the game. TDC 596: Make an impression: take a picture of an indentation (Aug 26, 2013) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo by Alan Levine: http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/9602907093/ This is one of those assignments where you can think of different ways to interpret what it means. An indentation can be something made, found, or metaphorical. If a TDC is a photographic one, I try to get outside with my camera in the morning and try to capture something that could work if I do not find it later. In this case, the dents and nibbles in this fallen apple seemed like it would do. My photo title “Apple + Gravity < Rock" is just attesting to perhaps the fragility of something soft landing on something hard? I admit setting the shot up, the apple I found a bit to the right on the ground beneath the tree, but putting it on a rock gives it a more interesting and simple background, and maybe a suggestion of an event. I have no problems staging an object for a photo. TDC 597: Edit an existing video clip to include an unexpected object in the story (Aug 27, 2013) I am pleased to see ten submissions for this Daily Create- video tends to scare people away. And this one potentially could call for complex video editing, which is what we don’t necessarily want to be asking people to do. For this kind challenge, to me, it calls for juxtaposition of things, characters you would not expect to be placed together. I was not even planning to do this one, but a tweet from David Kernohan nudged me to try: Dear #ds106 – video editing is HARD. Anyone about to chip in with a TDC tip? #headlessds106 — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) August 27, 2013 Because I wanted to see what I could do with the YouTube video editor, a web based video editor that allows you to mix and edit your uploaded videos. I did not have a plan, but the firs video in my list was an early Daily Create (TDC590), the tour of a refrigerator. It seemed like a cut to another clip and back makes for the same thing as making an object appear within a video (which is much harder to do in basic video editing software). What would be unexpected in my fridge? Well what about Jules Winnfield, from Pulp Fiction? I had a clip of his “All me to retort” line from my older MOOC Mocking clip – MOOC Fiction. It worked good timing wise, right when I mentioned “tub of spread” he slides out. I also tried adding some of the YouTube supplied audio beneath the clips. This was worth the effort to better understand how the YouTube editor works, a bit tricky to figure out where to do the cuts, but once you do a few, pretty easy. TDC 600: Celebrate the 600th Daily Create! Express 600 in a drawing without using numbers. (Aug 30, 2013) Hey, who put all the drawing ones on this week? Oh yeah, I know. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine My inspiration here was thinking of a classic edifice like Roman architecture. and the big thick letters you sow inscribed on the plinths (is that the right term) above the columns. I googled a bit to find some diagrams of roman architecture, and decided to draw just a section between two columns. it was not til I looked up my Roman numerals to find that 600 was DC, and it clicked that it was perfect for TDC! What luck. I tried in this one to mix in the pen lines as away of drawing detail or shape over the paintbrush texture. As far as the lightning bolt, I have no idea why I put it there, I started doodling with yellow thinking a bright accent color would help. TDC 601: This is TDC 601! That is 106 backwards! Draw something 106ish backwards (Aug 31, 2013) What? Another drawing? Based in Numbers? WHat is going on at the Daily Create? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I was not going to do this one, but when I was walking around my house, I spotted a space above my bookshelf that I thought would work if I could get a series of photos of my hands spelling out 6-0-1. Actually I tried first to see if a reflection shot in my bathroom mirror would work, but a test shot did not give an effect I liked. So I cleared off my shelf, set the camera on a tripod, and noticed the light on the wall was not the greatest. So I shifted over towards my back door, where I have a neutral background of my carpet. Pointing the camera downward from the tripod worked, and the natural light in the open door works well. I thought the rectangular pattern in the carpet would help if I stitched photos together. I figured I would need to mark the area that the frame covered, so I placed pens just outside the boundary, here in a photo I took to show the setup: cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I did two series of shots, one spacing the hand numbers from left to right — it is actually four shots since I had to put my finger in a “1? to add to the “5? to make “6? — and I did another set where the hands where in the middle. I did have to stitch them together on Photoshop for the image above, and it ended up wider than the original spacing. It was only after posting when I realized I had done a photo rather than a drawing, but it is good to demonstrate for the Daily Create that you can do them anyway you like. Just for fun, I used the other sequence to make an animated GIF in photoshop, importing the four images (merging the first two to make a 6), and then using the option in the animation window to convert layers to frames. I also tried for the first time using the Tween options, between the first and second photos, and the second and third. It makes a sort of cross dissolved, but does add some heft to the final GIF, this one coming in at 1.3 MB Woah, that is five daily creates this week. But then again, I was in training all July. Cue up the music, because Google again does another round of creating dust of your web services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFjigsXHuyY&t=16s I got an email from Google letting me know that Feedburner is getting dusty. Well, maybe they are not deleting the service, but taking away from it. Sure grandpa, who cares? What the heck is Feedburner? It stems from the days when RSS was a thing, not just something old web fogies lament about. For some, it was a service to make RSS feeds more human readable. I found it also was a good cleanser for feeds that just could not get their way through the Feed WordPress ingestion engine. But I used it most for creating a simple way for people to sign up for email notifications when I posted new things... here on CogDogBlog! FeedBurner has been a part of Google for almost 14 years, and we're making several upcoming changes to support the product's next chapter. Here’s what you can expect to change and what you can do now to ensure you’re prepared.Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time. Their non-core feature is most core to me. But what do I matter? It was simple to find the CSV export of subscribers. The front of the site said it was 63 but I saw 88 emails. That is MASSIVE! I then installed the Subscribe2 WordPress plugin which manages the same task (I first used this on the H5P Kitchen site, it lets visitors subscribe and unsubscribe to getting email notifications of new posts). So... if you are one of these subscribers, you should see this post arriving in your inbox (though maybe it might end up flagged as spam as it seems much of the email from my site seems to do). If any of you 88 get this as email, please let me know! And if you are wanting to join the in-crowd of subscribers, look under that hamburger menu for a brand new sign-up form. I am not all that upset, this is not much of a deal breaker, and I guess I should congratulate Google for keeping Feedburner going for 14 years (that's long for Google life). And yes, this is a typical thing you do when you run your own site and do not depend on some corporate overlord to do the work. Email! It's still a thing! Tell your pals. UPDATE 5 MINUTES LATER Well it works! Sort of. I see from this bounce Terry was subscribed under an old email... Don't worry Terry, I signed you up! Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50742567096 Subscribe to Our Thought Leaders Podcast flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Under the powerful Google umbrella, Blogger.com is a huge player in the blog-verse offering totally free, hosted blogs, and they are now even looking less cheesy than a few years back. But for being the heavy weight, they are keeping RSS Feeds a hidden gem only known to those that care to put on their geek headlamps and peer inside the cave. What do I mean? By default, all Blogger blogs automatically generate RSS. You do not even know it is happening. But here is the kicker... the default publishing templates all lack the tiny bit of HTML that would make them visible. The templates lack a link to the RSS Feeds that are published anyhow. Thousands of Feeds lie there totally alone, shivering in the cold. For example, Stephen Downes recently noted today Scot Aldred's new e-learning blog. Dude, where's my feed? It is not to be linked anywhere because of this ommission in their template. But here is the secret trick-- just tack on atom.xml to any Blogger hosted site, and you get the feed. So while Scot's blog sits visibly at http://e-learning-engagement.blogspot.com/, you can get the feed at http://e-learning-engagement.blogspot.com/atom.xml! They even render the XML so it is screen readable, rather than the typical stream of ugly XML code. Why is this happening? Is RSS that scary? Is it being kept only for the chosen few who know where to look? Why is Blogger hiding the Feeds? Perspiring minds want to know! Blogger, let the Feeds out! I recently got an email notification that a peer review has been done of a former project that is available in MERLOT. While it is listed as being loaded there in 2002, actually Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was developed as a CD-ROM in 1996 and converted to the web in 1997. Although I've not even thought about NRU in a long time, I think the old Shockwave version might actually still run (Yup it does! and I even remembered some of the hidden cheats in the game- but wow, is it crude and pixelly). It's approach was an unabashed rip-off of Myst. Actually, it was one of my favorite projects- the outgrowth of an idea to have teams of students and a faculty member work as a team to create some educational content using a movie-making metaphor (see the Studio 1151 Press Release). This is not meant to poke fun at MERLOT for reviewing 8 year-old software (especially since they gave it some high marks). I am rather stoked they looked at it and did not laugh. It does make me wonder about the scalability of the oft-desired structured review process of learning content. cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On my 2013 visit to Hong Kong, my friend Nick and his wife Kelly took me on a trip to this place called Stanley. When we were going through the market, Kelly picked out a shirt for me; she said it had a Bhuddist charm written on it. I likely forgot what else she told me about it, but its among my favorite ones in my rotation: After a meeting today at the Open Learning building here at TRU, in the hallway I bumped into Loretta, and we talked a bit about blogs, portfolios, word documents, travel… and she asked me about my shirt. She’s from Taiwan and started to explain the meaning of the Chinese message on it (the big symbol represents Bhudda). I knew I would forget, so I asked her if I could record her explanation: http://cogdog.trubox.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2015/02/heart-sutra.mp3 DOWNLOAD AUDIO I’m thinking it is what’s described in Wikipedia as the Heart Sutra or ?? (Loretta called it the “Heart Bible”). I like the shirt even more, it is an expression of what we attach value to, of the powerfulness of emptiness, and the longevity of ideas, of the heart. Now I just have to practice that mantra. Back in December I was in Vancouver, and on day was on the bus headed downtown, doing my normal routine of looking detached on a bus full of strangers (but not fac eplanted in a phone). And elderly Chinese man sat across for me, staring intently at my shirt– then I realized I was wearing this shirt. I watched his lips move slowly, and then a sweep of calmness across his face, ending with a broad smile and a head bow. Not a word was passed. All of these random moments in our lives, are they just scattered atomic bits? I think not. I seek the threads. Gerry Hanely, head MERLOT "wine steward"- said a theme was "connecting learning repositories". Interesting, eh? Can you think of an acronym that fits there? It begins with an R.... Keynote: "Leading from Both Ends"- Doug MacLeod from Netcetera to talk about eduSourceCanada. Introduced "Donut Object Repositories" Tim Horton's- a chain of thousands of franchises across Canada. (more…) Even with spam fighting plugins, on a daily basis, I am spending time I'd rather be doing sometime constructive, and deleting, moderating, click through the relentless barrage of blog comment spam. I am feeling like the dutch boy and I am getting weary of trying to hold back the dam. The killer was one that came in on an NMC site purporting to be from a "blog" with a url like education DOT blogslog DOT info that the only "education" seemed to be strange studies of less than main line video clips: I really dont think blacklists do much, but if you bother to hope otherise, ban this IP, source of this crap spewing site 74.86.186.66 Over the last three weeks, all of my blogs have been getting spam, from random or at least non repeating (spoofed?) IPs that all look like: <strong>How to Choose the Right Home Builder...</strong> How to Choose the Right Home Builder Building your own home is one of life's turning points. Who would pass up the excitement of putting up their very own abode? Everyone wants to build a home according to his or her taste and style.... I can guarantee none of my blogs are about building houses, but whomever the SpamMaster is, all of the content looks like this- an opening title in <strong>...</strong> tags, then a few lines of crap. Repeatedly, and apparently in total vain, I have blogged openly that the Great God Google has some responsibility here. Why? It is the pursuit of Google Page Rank and the methodology that gets sites to appear on Google tat is the 10000% motivation for comment spammers- they will do everything possible to force a URL into any open orifice of a web site, meaning any form that will manage to post a link to a web site. The more links into a Evil Crap Ass Site a spammer can generate, the more page rank the links form there get. Google creates ALL of the incentive for blog spam, and from what I can see, has done absolutely zero to do something about it. With all their gazillions of dollars, skyrocketing stock prices, legions of brilliant technical staff... the sit on their collective hands (or whatever happens at the GooglePlex) while tens? more of thousands of individual bloggers are over run with what is basically a frontal assault attack on their personal publishing space. If I were a new blogger, and got the crap I mention above in my blog on my passionate topic, be it education or knitting or fishing or exotic race cars... I would be quick to give up. It's time someone holds Google's feet to some fire. I dont have that kind of power, but what the bleepity bleep bleep bleep BLEEP is it going to take? Google, I love your search and tools, but your monetary incentive providing to blog spammers is killing the love. It's rather simple to me- remove the incentive / reward for spammers, and their activity goes away (or elsewhere). Google has enough intellectual prowess to create some amazing pieces of technology, but I've not seen one bit of that go into stomping out this menace. Oh, well I should give credit for the impressive "nofollow" tag (yeah, like that did anything). Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Damn you, Google do something now about comment spam. Am I the only one incensed? I feel I am alone, howling at the moon. In vain. Grrrrrrr. Was hoping for a happy blog post day, but the rain of spam has killed that. Two years ago. One tweet. https://twitter.com/jimgroom/status/26752815552528384 One blog post. http://networkeffects.ca/?p=655 One free-form web radio station born. designed by ds106 student Andrew Wallingham When ds106 started as an open class, conventional wisdom said we needed a synchronous environment, like the the Java bloated presenter dominated Collaborate. ds106 kind of blew that idea up It was a heady time, two years ago... How many courses do you know that have their own radio station?! Screw elluminate, we want the airwaves, baby!!! Let's say "We Can Dig It!" for two years of ds106 radio, like GNA has done so elegantly in her video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJbdBQUmo3g There is no time like today to listen and pick up the mic and broadcast... I'm putting my stake in the ground to be part of the Write 6x6 extravaganza, but starting here a number 0 (also doing so to establish my tag). Writing 6 blog posts in 6 weeks should not be a challenge, it's more about joining a group of colleagues doing the writing challenge together. As many times it happens, it's the result of me tweeting some blarney about blogging (that might be the first official post). A long time colleague from Maricopa Community Colleges dared me in to join this 2022 challenge from the Glendale Community College Center for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement. https://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/1499220658105905152 I've known of this for a long time as I observed my friend and colleague Todd Conaway ran these efforts at Yavapai College as the original 9x9x25 Challenge (Oh look I did it in 2018). And my whole career was made possible by my start and 14 years in the Maricopa system. So there might be some nostalgia in my 6 pack of posts. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/9080952233 Arizona Six Pack flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license But let's not get ahead of myself with the posts. There are 6 six more to come. And there is the nerdy computer science idea that in programming with arrays, you start the count from 0. This is c=0 where c represents my count. Next week is c++. And there will not be too much more techny nerd outs. Join in the route 6x6 activity... and if you need a boost, try their writing ideas. I'm starting at 0 to set up the blog tag, well and also, to loosen up the blogging muscles. Featured Image: My array of 6 is being counted by juniper berries sitting in between cracks of sandstone... https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15281909986 Six in the Notch flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) The self-proclaimed "grandmother" of electronic portfolios, Helen Barrett has likely the most comprehensive set of resources on her main web site plus her E-Portfolios for Learning blog. Not so evident on the front page of site is a fantastic resource where she has taken the same portfolio content and used it in 22 different eportfolio systems-- this is detailed specifically at Versions of my Online Portfolios. I am exploring different online portfolio systems, free web server space or other strategies for developing online electronic portfolios. My purpose is to find options that are most appropriate for high schools and average individuals who are not associated with a higher education institution. Below are the versions that I have developed so far. Each one includes a reflection on how I developed the original portfolio content using an Excel Spreadsheet, using comments to record my reflections on why I selected each of the 21 artifacts. I assigned them to categories, and created collections or pages for each category. Most of my online portfolio is in a text format right now, partly because of the online publishing medium and partly because I did not want to put a lot of new large graphic files online.As I try other tools, the capability to add images will be explored. Three of my artifacts are digital video clips that I have already posted online. She not only provides the sample portfolios as links and PDFs, but also reflections, pros cons, and a feature chart. This is a must look site for anyone involved with eportfolios, You have to respect her approach to doing this process, by first outlining the structure and artifacts for her portfolio via an Excel Spreadsheet so that the portfolio is designed first by content and purpose, not led by the technology or a particular system. Helen truly is a gem of a resource on approaching eportfolios from an educational perspective, where the tools and technology are subsidiary to the purpose. She has some new material making a connection and overlay between eportfolios and digital storytelling. I first met Helen at some NECC conference when I was a techie baby on the block in the 1990s, and we have crossed paths at conferences and online since then. We are very excited to be bringing her to Maricopa in February for a Dialogue Day on Electronic Portfolios. Borrowing from a movie's taglines the opening here might be "The time is just right for an out and out podcast like this" or "There are no rules and no holds barred when Antonio's accent cuts loose!" Here is the first episode of a new podcast that Antonio Vantaggiato and I produced asynchronously collaboratively. TW Because Antonio's internet connectivity has been spotty, we produced this by uploading separate recorded segments to a shared Google drive, listening then responding to each other's previous message. It was Antonio's idea to name the show after (though not really based on in any way) the movie The French Connection (Ironically ) got to watch the movie on my recent long plane flight to Australia). He suggested we borrow a few seconds of the music track from the Don Ellis clip on YouTube (hey lawyers, this is for a worthy cause, ok?). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhWuqhhNHOI The podcast is published at TapeWrite a nifty podcast platform that allows us to annotate a show with embedded images, text at selected points in our audio conversation. If you have not read the previous post about Antonio and his Puerto Rico students at Universidad Sagrado del Corazon... well you are missing out. Okay, I will recap. Antonio is a good friend, colleague, big-hearted generous teacher of computer science and media. Somewhere between the cruel double hurricane punch of Irma and Maria, we had been in an email conversation about producing an Ed-Tech podcast. Maria changed that plan. My post was a call for a show of support to Antonio and his students, first by responding to a DS106 Daily Create. https://twitter.com/KateMfD/status/920972639597760512 https://twitter.com/grammasheri/status/920796295622680576 https://twitter.com/hasslethishoff/status/920794345808150528 https://twitter.com/ammienoot/status/920760276806447104 https://twitter.com/brlamb/status/920723404419842049 https://twitter.com/erica_diane_k/status/920693798044286982 https://twitter.com/mdvfunes/status/920641049554509825 The second show of support was a #care4sagrado call to send postcards of support. The response has been tremendous! See Antonio's blog posts More Mail from el Puente de #PuertoRico and just today Oh so many postcards for #care4sagrado!! https://twitter.com/avunque/status/929539828072550400 We are both overjoyed at the response, but most specially, the letter from Parisa Mehan https://twitter.com/avunque/status/923571109383102464 that offers a sense of hope and humanity. We are hoping to arrange a future podcast where hopefully Parisa can join us. Some people get to jet around the world, tweeting and playing golf. Others? They get a little bit of electricity after 51 days. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/929207350304657408 Show more support with some #care4sagrado tweets or comments on Antonio's blog or for his students in INF103 and INF115. Featured Image: Photo by #INF115 Student Eri from Twitter https://twitter.com/ericjavieer/status/925760933720444929 At some point as a kid expressing to my Mom some concern about not fitting in at school, she offered often repeated Mom wisdom. "You don't need to be popular or have a long list of friends... what you need is just one good one who you can count on." I'm fortunate Mom, as I have a few of them, and two of them just left after spending a few days visiting here in Strawberry. https://twitter.com/realdlnorman/status/976620765268402176 As "three amigos" we coined our [youthful] selves on a Vancouver beach in 2003, Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman and I got a few days to just hang out, crowned with a road trip yesterday to see the Grand Canyon. I could say much about our time together, but it stays in Strawberry. Just let the photos just stand in for that. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]"I CANT BLOG LIKE THIS!" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] https://twitter.com/realdlnorman/status/975904793368649728 [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]My Friend D'Arcy flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]You Call That Grand? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] There's been a lot of life experiences we've done together, some loss, seeing their sons turn into good young men, and the least important... educational technology gone by (but D'Arcy has gone to The Cloud! OMG). These both were the bloggers in the early 2000s that got me in the game. Most of our times together have been driven by work, conferences, projects together. What grew obvious is that we ought to just make these things happen ourselves. If anyone ever scoffs at the possibility for online connections to be "real" or significant, I don't even have to respond. I know the difference. In thinking of what to write here my associative trail mind went back to Lou Gehrig's above heroic luckiest man alive speech. We so lack public figures of this stature. "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." "Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky." Definitely I am lucky. Featured Image: My own photo of Brian and D'Arcy saying bye to Felix an hour ago. Sometime tonight this will be posted to flickr and shared into the public domain. But who cares about licenses when I have friends like this? Pffttttt on licenses. I keep suggesting to Felix that he should become the family breadwinner and pick up some modeling work. "Hey, someone should pay for all those Milkbones!" He just gives me that dismissive silent stare. 2018 sure seems the year that a lot of people are focused on how broken the internet is, as we wake up and realize whether you wanted to or not the Zuckerburger mother-f****ing ship is piling up your data if if you don't even have an account there (yet still rationalize why its right to stay there), and... and... and... I have no denial there are big piles of poop all over the place those Wizards Stayed Up late to design, but is everything covered with it? Worthy of a True Story of Openness I share my oen data point that gives me some hope, via an art student named Rebecca who I believe is from Australia. Amongst the notifications from services I never asked for, the blog writing request spam from so-called Social Media Experts, comes a kind message from an individual: Hi Alan, I wanted to say thank you for making your work available under a CC Licence. I'm an art student with a plan to create affordable digital pet paintings for Etsy customers. I’ve used Felix as a muse for a before and after sample. I hope this is OK - I've left your website and CC Licence information in the metadata - I hope this is OK to. Please let me know if you would like a digital painting of Felix and at what size. I’m setting up my pipeline and am keen for practice images. Thanks again for your artistic generosity. Along with this example: [caption id="attachment_66119" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Digital painting by Rebecca Franklin using "Still Life Number 243" flickr photo by cogdogblog https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/31884581973 shared into the public domain using (CC0)[/caption] This follows up nicely with the watercolors my sister has made of Felix [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Art in the Mail flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] based on a photo I took of him only 2 days after adopting Felix: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2016/366/98 "Did Someone Say Go for a Ride?" flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] But mean while, Rebecca has been sending me images of other Felix Art she is producing: Based on my original photo: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Are YOU Talking to Me? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] This of course does not put a dent into the mess of the internet. But each time this happens, I feel a dab of positive hope. And what Rebecca did, without asking first for permission, unsolicited. and the way she framed her interet, sure shows me there's plenty of the internet not covered in poop. That we do more connecting from individual to individual rather then from corporation --> individual is the best way forward. I smell no poop here. At least take a few minutes of checking out Rebecca's Printable Paintings site. It's been a while since I devoted what is most likely wasted energy into debunking the oft repeated assertion that "people process images 60,000 times faster than text". If this sounds like something you have heard, seen in a presentation, or book, and it sounds "truthy", please stop and read my background work. I forgot what triggered my memory on this earlier this week. In my last round of whacking away at the dragon of BS, I was able to document the assertion to some 18 years before it appeared in the revered 3M Reference (please actually read this before using it as a citation, it NEVER CITES THE SOURCE beyond "internal research". How many teachers would let their students get away with such a shoddy citation?). A blog commenter named "Buster" pointed me to a 1982 Business Week advertising insert which featured an executive named Philip Cooper making this assertion. Here is the smoking gun: I found that Cooper is currently a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Business Management. I contacted him twice by email seeking information on where his statement came from. I got no replies. I called twice but got recordings that his voicemail box was full. On ">revisiting Cooper's profile this week, I see they updated the web site a bit, I noticed a contact for an admin assistant, whom I emailed a few days ago asking for help in contacting Cooper. I do not know what else I can do except make a trip to Cambridge and knock on his door. I DM'ed Justin Reich on twitter because (a) he is a nice guy; and (b) he lives in/near Cambridge and works at MIT. All I want to know from Cooper is what he based his 60000 times faster statement on back in 1982. And I have a cash reward on the table for an answer. Up to now, I have, in the spirit of the number, offered a $60 cash prize for the person that finds a definite source of this myth. That's right, this cash has been on the table now for 2 years, unclaimed. So I am taking the bold leap, and personal investment to DOUBLE the prize. That's right- Philip, Justin, heck Buster, I have $120 to offer to the person that can show me the definitive source of the claim. Meanwhile it keeps getting repeated in and repeated as if it were fact. A blog from Hubspot lists it first in 19 Reasons You Should Include Visual Content in Your Marketing [Data]. But surely it is a fact, because it is on a Big Company blog AND it cites its source... Okay, it's one thing to link to a source, it's another one to check it. The link to "3M" as a source does not go to 3M but to Mike Parkinson's Billion Dollar Graphics -- and that link is dead. But you can find it in the Wayback Machine (I guess Mike wised up and removed his site?). Okay Hubspot here is the citation you are basing a baseless assertion on: I have not idea HubSpot, who "Zabisco" is, your link as a CITATION leads to the Web Marketing Group's Why Every SEO Strategy Need Infographics which I guess is supposed to be the "source" for the "90% of information sent to the brain is visual" (I'll leave that debunking for another decade). Here is the CITATION- a picture of text from an infographic from a source that no longer exists -- listed as http://www.idonut.co.uk/ Here is CITATION WORTHY PICTURES, eh? And that's just one of 59,000 Google results (if this goes on we will hit the magic number soon). Third on the list is from Janaury 2016, from Business2Community Visual Marketing: A Picture’s Worth 60,000 Words The claim is the title to the post, and look how it is backed up -- it is so surely the truth, that Business 2 Community need not bother with a citation: The Boston Globe is not free from guilt either -- The Power of Visual Storytelling makes the 60,000 claim linking.... back to Mike Parkinson's now dead Billion Dollar Graphics. The author has it in their book: The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand... and there it is again - as factually obvious as the sky's blue color: Note from July, 2021, way in the future... I tried to inform the Amazon via a review of this book that they were publicizing fantasy fiction. My review was denied: Look! "Attention is the new commodity. Visual Storytelling is the new currency." And repeating baseless facts without any backing evidence is the new truth. It's a zombie that will die. But wait, there's more. Stay with me. I was curious of George Station tweeted this as a "here's a great resource" or "WTF?" https://twitter.com/harmonygritz/status/726831479003566080 I am pretty sure it is the latter. The tweet links to something from Allen Communication, maybe one of the mega outfits of corporate instructional design-- 10 Mobile Learning Terms that Every Instructional Designer Should Know. Okay, if your corporate instructional designer needs a reference for terms such as "smartphone" "HTML5" "Mobile Application" "Geolocation" and the ever critical "Digital Native" than you have some bigger problems than mobile technology. But this triggered a memory to this gem from Allen Communication, viewed 20,000 times (skip to slide 5): https://www.slideshare.net/AllenComm/rich-media-increases-engagement There it is. Again. It comes from an Allen Communication March 2015 blog post Why Rich Media Matters. Methinks the media matters more than the truth. There it is again, the 60,000 times faster zombie factoid: But this is Allen Communication, we can trust them, and they have a footnote... I should add that sometime last year, with some folks at the Debunker call, we had some tweets with an Allen Communication account about this, and there was some promise to verify. Yeah, well, 2016. What is in that 1 reference? It says "Study Mode" What is that? Try this link. Study Mode is "a research database". Could this be it? Could this be THE ONE? I can't tell because I hit a login. Study Mode tells me to "sign up for a free acount". They have the funniest kind of free at Study Mode! Forget beer! Free as in $19.95 per month. But I can see it there in the preview-- labeled as FACT Look at all the FACTS! It looks like there is a 1. footnote, and I will bet a pile of bacon it links back to Mike Parkinson's dead link. Just calling something a fact does not make it a fact. Citing a source that does not exist is not a citation. Citing a picture of a statement in a graphic is not a citation. Citing a citation that does not do anything but repeat the assertion without evidence is not evidence. Why do I care? Someone has to care about doing more than asserting repeated baseless assertions lifted from pictures of text in infographics-- might as well be me. Because I refuse to let go. Because we ought to stop providing such bad examples of information literacy in the name of haste and follower counts. from OHMAGIF Anyone else? Anyone in Cambridge willing to see our Philip Cooper? I have $120 on the table for ya flickr photo shared by AMagill under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license I am going to blow it up. Madness! Madness! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpl4wkWMJtE Featured Image: "Madness" was the metaphor that popped into my head when sitting down to blog. I had in mind the ending scene to one of my favorite movies as a kid, The Bridge Over the River Kwai. I searched Google Images (licensed for reuse filter on) for the word "madness" leading me to this party image on stage at a Madness (the band) concert in Glastonbury. https://flickr.com/photos/wonker/3674093321 Madness flickr photo by wonker shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license It is a creative commons licensed image from WikiMedia Commons but the source is a flickr photo by wonker https://flickr.com/photos/wonker/3674093321 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. This leads me to wonder how/if/why Google favors Wikimedia Commons over flickr in its search results. And to wonder too what obligation a person like me has to go back as far as possible to the source? Does anyone even ready my attribution commentary? Bueller? Bueller? cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe If you dig ds106 radio, then join us tomorrow, October 2, a group of us are running a telethon to support the effort. While it is free form radio, truth be known that Grant Potter has been paying for the technical infrastructure since it launched in January 2011. Tomorrow's event will ask people to either donate whatever they can, be it money or just some things like doing a special show or making some art (damnnit). The point is just to show our appreciation for the community ds106 has become. The point is to show how much you dig it. Hands down, being part of this group of friends who talk, play, and meet up on the internet radio waves has been the most exciting technology and social thing I have seen in my career. It's real, folks. It's been a big part of my personal graph, and visiting people on this trip and turning them on the radio has been a highlight of the journey-- as blogged around here at http://cogdogblog.com/tag/ds106radio/ If you can dig it, here's what you should do tomorrow: Tune into ds106radio starting at 10:00am EST tomorrow. We have many things planned, but the best appreciation is being a listener (and tweeting back via the #ds106radio hash tag). You just need to tune into the stream at http://208.82.115.69:8010/live.m3u or see http://bit.ly/radio4life for other ways to tune in- and learn more about ds106radio. Let us know how much you dig it. See our telethon contribution form at http://bit.ly/ds106radio-telethon ds106 radio is more than just talking into the air... cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog it is a real community cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog be there tomorrow and show us that you dig it at ds106radio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-OYKd8SVrI The euphoria of stomping out blog spam cockroaches may be short-lived. Mark Pilgrim lays out the depressing, sobering truth on weblog spam [dive into mark]. Mark sez the good times will last last than a month... And then the spammers will strike back. They'll complain to your ISP that you're spamming, and your ISP will kick you off without so much as a by-your-leave. They'll hire lawyers and bring you down with bogus DMCA injunctions. They'll own a million Windows boxes and direct them all at your server. They'll find your social security number and steal your identify and ruin you personally. It's all been done. It's all been done before, and it was completely all-consuming, and it still didn't work. Spammers register dozens of new domains each day; you can't possibly keep up with them. They're bigger and smarter and faster than you. It's an arms race, and you'll lose, and along the way there will be casualties, massive casualties as innocent bystanders start getting blacklisted. (You do have a process for people to object to their inclusion, right? Yeah, except the spammers will abuse that too.) Sigh. Damn. Sigh. Last year in ds106 I built a few of my assignments out of the movie Dirty Harry -- and having seen this movie just last night, I am just shifting to another classic San Francisco cop, Bullitt. I did this for the Bad Guy Business Cards design assignment -- and completely missing that it said "bad" guy, cause Bulitt is anything but bad. Oh well, there needs to be a good guys card in the mix: Apparently, street gangs in Chicago, like the Hell's Devils, used to have calling cards (see the gallery: http://bit.ly/pyuOEl). This makes me think that poor marketing gives evil-doers a bad image. Help some of them out by creating business cards for them. But not the Joker - that's too obvious. He is the ultimate of no nonsense cool. He sees the in effectiveness and the preening of the superiors, but doe snot sneer as much as Harry Callahan. Bullitt is his own dude, with his own rules. And he uses his own bad ass car, the 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback. I was not sure where to start so I began with a base car from PoliceBusiness Cards (actually it said Houston). I found a copy of the San Francisco Badge in Google, and use its colors to change up the theme of the card. I played with fonts to get match using Copperplate Gothic, not exact, but close enough. I added the car image, moving it slightly off screen to make it seem like it was entering the card. Since he was so effective at it (and not really Bullitt's fault, the whole deal of the witness he was assigned was rigged), I assigned him to the Witness Protection unit. The address is actually from the SF Police site for the Mission District, I decide to use the old style phone exchange of a Name in front to indicate the first two numbers of a rotary Phone (the 55 real number did not work, that as "KK" so I made up "Belmont" as a holder). Of course Bullitt did not have email (heck the cops in the movie did not even have a radio, they had to keep asking to use phones) I'm going to use this dude again in another assignment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPd8Qco2iMI The blog was still the last week as this was some vacation time- first a few days to check on our cabin in Strawberry. The threat from the Cave Creek Complex fire, which burned more than 240,000 acres of wilderness area, decreased for the small communities up here. This time. So with that, my wife and I piled into the VW Bug and headed to a family wedding just outside Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado. There and back, we managed to cover 1700 miles in 4 days, and much of that time was just saying "Wow" at the beauty of the mountains in southwestern Colorado. Pictures may be coming (but not while on the slow dial-up here), but some highlights included: * Eating breakfast out of the cooler at a truck stop near Joseph City, Arizona. Busy place for 6:00 AM. * Heading north on US 191 across the Navajo Reservation, we came across a Native American couple looking at a pick up truck hanging at a precarious angle off the roadway. When we asked if we could help, they asked if we had a tow chain, and then all four of us laughed at the thought of a Volkswagen having any pulling capacity. * North of Many Farms, we encountered a bad head on collision on the highway... very familiar to one we were involved with in 2000 on the way to Lake Powell. The smell of oil, the look of crunched cars, flashing lights of ambulances, the gawking of witnesses, all mixed up in those thoughts of "I hope no one is seriously hurt" along with the honest "I am glad it was not us". * Approaching the Utah state line, we passed a Denver-Phoenix delivery truck-- we saw the same truck 4 hours later in I-70 AND in the return trip 4 days later. We made it to Utah in just under 5 hours, good timing-- except for losing an hour to the time zone change. * Finding an old style gas station in Bluff Utah, marveling at the old metal pumps, before realizing the place had been closed for quite some time. * Not so great was the fan blower for our A/C dying about an hour south of Moab. The dash would start smoking if we tried the fan again, so it would be no air conditioning for the rest of the trip, not a problem in Colorado but... * The slowest fast food franchise in the universe must be the Wendy's in Moab-- all we wanted were some drinks and fries, and bored looking guys behind the counter moved in ultra slow motion. * The scenic highway 128 that took just north of Moab was cause of much mouth gaping as it followed the course of the Colorado River through your typical classic southern Utah canyonland landscapes. * Watching the rain fall elsewhere as we moved east in I-70 across Colorado. Seeing rain fall someplace far off while you are in the sun is not something one gets to do on the East coast. * We must have gotten the last tent spot at a campground in Glenwood Springs. We were traveling without RSVPs and it was July 4 weekend after all. It was a classy gravelly spot overlooking the freeway from "Ami's Acres" but it did well. We met some of the most fun-loving folks across the way who were Oklahomies who had come to Colorado to go 4 wheeling. Thanks "Harley" for showing all the photos on your laptop! That was about 600 miles in day 1. * With an early start, we decided we had time for the scenic loop on highway 48 through Winter Park (bad cell phone connections made it impossible for us to get in touch with friends there). We got through Granby in time to miss the July 4 parade down main street. * What more could be said about the drive through the high peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park!. Incredible vistas, and we hiked to a lunch spot on the Colorado River, here not more than a creek close to its source, and hard to reconcile with the blasting river that rushes through the Grand Canyon. * Driving above treeline and crossing passes at 12,000 feet. We were dawdling at the little climb adjacent to the Alpine visitor center when we realized we had little time to make it to our Inn where we needed to clean up and get to the 4:00 Pm wedding. * Getting to the Baldpate Inn south of Estes Park with about 45 minutes time left before the wedding. We'd have to look around at this early 1900s creaky log structure inn later, but it has a majestic view of its own outside the crass commercial district of Estes Park. * We got to the wedding near Allenspark with only 5 minutes to spare. It was a lovely setting outside, overlooking a creek. We spent a wonderful couple of fun hours with some of the most fun loving relatives on the family tree. It was worth all the travel to get here. Congrats to Zach and Lisa! * Watching fireworks from our window back at the Baldpate Inn. Okay, there is nothing novel about fireworks, but a few "oooohhs" and "ahhhhs" are reflexive. * Yum, the maple chedder waffles served in the morning at the Baldpate Inn. Apparently it is named after a 1913 murder mystery,"The Seven Keys to Baldpate" which was set in a place similar to this Inn. The story is an eBook, a play, and a movie! Off the lobby is a "Key Room" where they have collected thousands of keys of all shapes and sizes sent from places around the world. This is a place to stay if you like ones with character (and do not mind shared bats, creaky floors, and dirt road entrances). * On the way back, heading west again on I-70, we diverted to highway 65 which took us in a spectacular drive over Grand Mesa National Forest. The road starts in a sandstone canyon, and climbs high into this tall mesa in the fir and spruce tree zone. At the top are hundreds of lakes, and the woods were full of snowbank remnants of the 40 feet of snow they had over the winter. But also with the full lakes were lots of hungry mosquitos. * A night in Ouray, an old mining town in the edges of the San Juan Mountains. We loved Ouray, great food at Bulow's Bsitro, and a nice stay at the Silver Nugget Inn (since the forest campground was closed, we were tired). We skipped the swimming pool crowds at the hot springs, and with the advice of our waitress, went a few miles south to Orvis Hot Springs, a more natural setting of springs, and ahem, clothing optional, the only way to go. * We hit the road early (nothing is open in Ouray at 6:00 AM), and took the twisty climbing road to Silverton, along the ways seeing some immense views of snow capped alpine peaks, remains of the mining boom times of the 1880s. We saw two car wrecks and two dead elk on the roadway. Not a good combination at all. * Breakfast at the Brown Bear Cafe in Silverton, and walking around the streets of another town with roots in the 1800s and mining times. * Nothing special in Durango, a big sprawling place. Tied up with road construction and slow moving over side haulers on the road to Cortez. * Entering the vast emptiness of Arizona after crossing the 4 corners. At first there seems like a whole lot of noting, miles of yellow and red sandstone bluffs, but looking closely there is more signs of life than at first glance. It was a hot drive across the Novajo landscape without our air conditioning, so we rewarded ourselves with big heaping Navajo Tacos in Kayenta. * Taking a brake at Cameron Trading Post. The tourist bus loads come in like clockwork. * Finally getting some cooler air climbing to 7500 feet for the entrance into Flagstaff. Knowing how slow and bust US 89a is through town, we know to jump in 1-40 ASAP. We missed the right turnoff to get to the Lake Mary road we hope to take as a scenic route, and end up gambling on a line on the map at the Munds Park exit of I-17. It turns out to be a 12 mile dirt forest road, not ideal travel for the VW, but actually pretty smooth. We finally exit to pavement near Mormon Lake. * Finally, 1700 miles and 4 days later, returning to our cabin in Strawberry. We were eager to get back here to enjoy a few more days of not driving. You know how maps have larger type for larger cities? My observations form this trip are that you can apply another scale of town/city size. Bigger towns have at least a Walmart. If there is a Home Depot too, then it is bordering on a small city. The biggest metro areas have at least a few of these plus a Costco. Well that's the quick blog-less travelogue. It was better to be there in person! I enjoyed not having a computer at all. Today was the deadline for the first week's assignments in the online "Web-Based Teaching and Learning" course I am co-teaching. Just like students, the assignments are coming in with deadline skidmarks, but they are coming in, We had nearly 100 messages in the welcome/ intros and some good discussion about principles of online learning. (more…) photo credit: jespis (a.k.a. Friends Friends Friend) Like Leigh and many others (apparently "a hundred thousand" people), I got a Dear John letter from Eyespot announcing their departure from the video editing/publishing service. It's not all that surprising; what is surprising that there are not more Web 2.0 dead sites, at least ones that will let you know they are tanking. It's a useful reminder for anyone who puts all their assets into one bin (if there are such people) as well as the transient nature of the fun web cloud; like the economy it may just collapse on you leaving you to cry, WHY WHY WHY? (or WTF? WTF WTF?). I am thinking it is the beginning of some Darwinian evolution of only the ______-iest will survive (help me out with what the blank means... Bankrollediest? Funniest? Bought by Googliest?). The honesty of the first bits of the letter are bottomed out by the plaff in the reason why section We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company. After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we're now moving on. That is more likely written by Cupid's Dear John Letter Generator or some other buzzword spewing bot. "We have to stop" Is your mother calling? Did you get called in to the principal's office? After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we're now moving on. Sounds pretty impotent to me. Moving on to where? Beverly Hills? Public assistance? I don't really care all that much about this, but am surprised that people have the gall to spray transparent no-speak words out like that and think the public will just nod and say, yup, you, yup.. Even give us a bit of truthiness. Well actually I do care. Now My 50+ Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story is gonna be knocked back down to 62 (once I can edit my wikispaces site; editing seems to be on the fritz tonight). Or I have to go and poke around http://www.fliqz.com/. Yep, Eyespot shall soon be making an appearance on Ghost Sites of the Web. So long and thanks for all the fish videos. Regarding the recently blogged More Frivolous Fun: Spelling with Flickr, there is a new feature that you can use a small chunk of cut and paste JavaScript to put in the source of your web page, and have it dynamically create a different set of flickr-ed letters on every page reload... think of it as a dynamic logo. As noted in the comment from Eric the site creator, you can now use his script to generate a logo dynamically in a page via JavaScript: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://metaatem.net/spell.php?picsize=s&string=CogDogBlog"> </script> I like it! I like randomness, mixing up content, etc. Thanks Eric! creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog When I visited New Zealand in 2004, I was excited to find the source of wikis. This being of course, a time when wikis were a platform I was excited about sharing. In going through my flickr photos of that visit, besides guffawing at my own photos (that never changes), I ended up down the Internet Archive hole again. I saw the reference links to all my materials for that visit, but it pointed to a web server and a wiki back at Maricopa that was long ago deep sixed -- http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/wiki (again, all my subdomains were minerals) (look it up willya?). As usual, I reached for the WayBack Machine and found my lost wiki past, the KiwiWiki (my I thought that was a clever WikiName) The topics? As WikiWords: WebTool, HybridCourses, LearningObjects, ElectronicPortfolios, IntroRSS, BlogShop, DigitalStories, DigitalPhotos, PhotoBlogging, OcotilloMaricopa, FindFreeStuff, RipMixLearn, EduWikis creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That's November 2004's topic. Ten years later, it's a different wiki http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/Sharefest+2014. The Topics? As NonWikiWords: Being on/of the web, Beyond The MOOC Hype Connected Courses, Mythical OER Reuse (now including Moas), Storythinking Storymaking Storytelling, The ds106 Files, True Stories Open Sharing, The Storybox creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Still talking how groovy the web is; rather than Learning Objects, I am talking about OERs, Storytelling and blogging still figure prominently. No MOOCs in 2004. Whew. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog https://twitter.com/easegill/status/516331870158458880/photo/1 We could talk about the physical similarities/differences, nah. What I will say has remained the same is what a treat it is to visit this magical place, to again stay in the homes of friends, and to connect with a bunch of really passionate and inventive educators whom you do not see in TEDTalks or the Chronicle of Higher Obfuscation. When one talks of the cloud here it is not just virtual servers. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Now where is that Wikimart? I think I have a new mode of developing my workshops and presentations, which of course, does not involve crafting it way ahead of time-- but rather than doing my planning, and taking my best shot at it, I am now just tossing out some half baked ideas, picking up feedback/suggestions, and asking people to look at half done wiki pages. Call me lazy (I do), but I think in this realm, that there is a severe contradiction and pitfall of one person being "experted" in such a fluid, moving, organic, ever expanding at a rate exceeding the speed of light (last one was hyperbole), thing such as web 2.0 (whatever that is). No one can, no one. If they say they are an expert, put on the liar detection goggles. For my upcoming October trip down under, of course folks are asking me to be such an expert. From an american galaxy far, far away... What I see when I scan for resources are hitting poor audiences over the heads with a giant, logo colored stick -- the usual mega laundry list of "Arent These Cool Things to Do On The Web: http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/sets/72057594060779001/ Don't get me wrong- Big Lists are great resources, references... but let's say, I want you to help me write a poem. Do you just toss me a dictionary and say, "Look at all these great words! Just use them!". If I want to visit an exotic part of the world, do you bing me with a map and say, "Just pick a country!". My hunch is for someone new to web tools, leery of using web sites, mildly skeptical, just hitting them over head with a pile of web sites is not very effective. My approach is going to be perhaps two pronged -one is to demonstrate some perhaps subtle lesser known things one can do with well known web tools (e.g. annotating images with notes in flickr, building a podcast set in del.icio.us, using the for: tag in del.icio.us, tracking your name or web site in Google Alert or technorati...) and second, to highlight a few web 2.0 tools that may not be so tech-crunched or well known, but ought to be of interest to educators. And n be able to say why... So I appeal to you, blog readers, to give me an idea of some web tools (who gives a hoot if they are"2.0" or not, I am not mired in definitions), that you find very useful but perhaps are not so widely known. I've asked via twitter, but here, I can really go beyond my 140 character speech. What might I mean? Well let's say: I love the ease of adding books to LibrayThing - which I am guessing is well known, but is it used a lot by educators? Hard to tell- they have an incredible range of features that happene when you tag your books, the Suggester and the UnSuggester are great. Need an inspiring or reference quote? Thinkexist as is WikiQuote (the latter along with WikiTravel are great to highlight that there is more to wikis than WikiPedia. last.fm - incredible levels of social networking based on music tastes- fine for m usic fans but a great illiusttration of web 2-ness I always characterize 43Things as well known, but it seems like a blip on the education scope. Its use of tags, networking, connecting to other web services exemplify a lot of web 2 goodness. What are your own secret gems? Let me know, I'll share, I'll give you credit, I'll bring you opals (just kidding). It's hard to resist a good ds106 assignment submitted by a student- such as the ds106 Propaganda Posters by Daniel Zimmerman (who is taking zero prisoners in this class) Time to let out your inner Big Brother! Create a propaganda poster for ds106. Use your photo editing software of choice and write a message to inspire your fellow ds106ers. For example, I took a WW2 poster about increasing ammunition production, and turned it into a poster promoting tweeting. I found a bunch by searching Google Images on "vintage posters" and was drawn in by the superhero look of a set of Kick Ass Posters from Affein Heim Theaters This was some quick Photoshopping; it will take me longer to describe then to do it. I used Popular Std font to put the "1 0 6" on the head- each a separate layer so I could rotate. For the 6, I converted to bitmap, and did a selection on the background of the poster layer to get a selection I could subtract from the 6. To change the face, I made a new layer, did a multiple polygon selection of the face opening, and did Edit -> Special -> Paste Into to insert a Face of Groom. I fiddle a bunch with transform, rotate, distort- it is stil not optimal, but at some point you move on... For the bottom text, I just filled the space of the words with clones of the paper background (moving the text wider apart to slip in the "ds106". For the MAKE ART text, I used the Popular Std font again, and applied the Craquelure Texture filter to give the letters some gritty. I converted it to bitmap, and then selected all (command A) and nudged it up and down with the arrow to select everything, and used a Stroke at outline the letters. This assignment can be easy or simple, but the appeal is trying to design something in the motif of these old posters. What do you do when not sure which ds106 Design Assignment to do? Spin the random chooser. Seems like a good thing to do, hence this little bit of design work. The assignment this is for is Name That Single: Create a design for a favorite song by using just simple designs and NO WORDS...Basically a design assignment with the rules in charades. IE: for No Doubt's "I'm Just a Girl" I would just have a symbol of a girl. Shall I give a clue? The lead singer of this band is female. Some might quibble that I have violated the instructions for no words with my math symbol. So what? Who cares? the point is not to just stay within the lines, but to experiment with the concept. To select my song, I also used the randomness of the shuffle in my iTunes to pick this song. I'm standing in the middle of life with my pains behind me. But, I got a smile For everyone I meet. Long as you don't try dragging my bay, Or dropping a bomb on the street. Got it? Half of the length of the run, puts you.. in the middle? Yes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CYsOGTA0eo Gotta dig Chrissie's shiny telecaster. There's more synchronicity here. I've been taken a few times to taking photographs of curvy roads, and like those quite country roads where you can just lay right down on the stripe and get the photo- the one I used to make the image above was in Newport Virginia and is the road to Gardner Campbell's house where I stayed in August: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog To get the more abstract effect I used the Palette Knife filter in photoshop which can make a photo more like a painting, but not as overdone as the watercolor one. The markings where just some paint brush and text for the arrows and math. But what I thought about was that it was only after doing something similar here in Vermont: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That it would be fun to do a collection of what I tag now as BellyOnTheRoad photos. There is something just real... real about doing that. I only have four, but as a reminder, if your photos are geotagged (usually automatic for mobile phones or can be done manually in flickr via the map tools) you can assemble a map for a tagged set of photos. If you go to the "Your Map" link under the flickr You menu you get to the map tool; mine is http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/map/. You can tell it to search everyone's photos or just your own, and give it a search term, in my case the tag of BellyOnTheRoad. Cool! I get a map for where my four belly on the road photos are from: [caption id="attachment_9725" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click map for flickr version)[/caption] So yet another way flickr can help you organize not only your photos, but any ones you can search on. Kind of funny where you end up when you start out clicking "random" I think this came via TechCrunch- PicLens is a web browser plugin that allows you to view photos form several services ( Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket) and image search results from Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com in a full screen mode, that keeps a record of images viewed (an icon strip below). Right now it is available only for Mac OSX and Safari, but it says a Windows version is coming soon. So on any of these sites, PicLens availability is indicated by a special icon superimposed on an image: which can be a single image as shown, or an entire set on flickr. Clicking it pulls up the full screen viewer, previous images are stored at the bottom, and a slide show mode is available: Okay, I am not sure what I might use it for, but it has some potential... I have done some presentations where rather than stifling the audience with bullet points, I just use a rotating slide show; usually in iPhoto. I can see doing this even easier with PicLens. Sit, Avatar! posted 11 Jul '07, 6.54pm MDT PST on flickr I was experimenting today with doing some live video streaming from my laptop into Second Life. That darned dog just refused to listen to my commands. Some virtual dogs are just like their real life versions. Good News: Google News and custom searches are available as RSS/Atom Feeds. Bad News: Has anyone at Google actually googled the RSS 2.0 formats? They have taken a weird approach to the format, double listing the title and publication date items inside the description! Okay, technically it meets RSS 2.0 rules, but functionally, it is doing things differently from feeds than we expect. Let's say I am keep tabs on news about squirrels, I get these results. Good enough. But if you look at the actual RSS 2.0 feed content, you see: Greedy squirrel trapped by nuts - CBBC newsround (audio) http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4140000/ newsid_4146200/4146228.stm Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:08:00 GMT Greedy squirrel trapped by nutsCBBC newsround (audio), UK - 10 hours agoA squirrel Just arrived in the big city for the League for Innovation conference that starts tomorrow. Perched on the 40 something floor of the Marriot with my own commanding view of Manhattan. About 1/3 the plane from Phoenix was loaded with folks from Maricopa, almost like a chartered jet. Sometimes you have to travel to a different city to interact with your own colleagues. One of them, Rich, is a New York native, and led us on his preferred transport mode from JFK via the AirTrain and the E train subway. There is nothing quite like the human spectacle of the subway... until you emerge to the human spectacle of the street. From a very suburban city like Phoenix, the crush and density of New York is like being transported to some entirely new dimension. Its exciting and strange all at once. Woo-hoo, well, later time for bloggin', it's time to hit the town. I'm not all that hepped on blogging this conference, so it may just be snippets of observations or a flickr-fest if the weather cooperates. In yet another feat of "faux syndication", we now have our events database updating our Ocotillo Central and Action Group blog sites automatically. This provides a dynamic link from the info on the main Ocotillo Events calendar which has unique URLs for the following views: All Action Group Events General Ocotillo Events Learning Objects Action Group Events Hybrid Courses Action Group Events ePortfolio Action Group Events Emerging Learning Technology Action Group Events This information is now pushed to Ocotillo Central with the three next Ocotillo events appearing in the top right box where John posts his updates, and in an appropriate section in the listings for each Action Group. In addition, each group's events are now dynamically inserted to the left side bar of each group's blog. Once we can modify our calendar database authoring scripts, the co-chairs will be able to directly add/edit events to the database. I call it "faux" since what I am doing is running a script every 15 minutes which hits our database, and builds a file with the data for each information area. Since the blog pages are *.php, I can simply fill the content to the blog pages using php include statements. It makes more sense (to moi) than dynamically hitting a database every time a page is requested. This is more or less how the updates from the wikis (taking the RSS URL and running it through Magpie RSS parser) and the discussion boards (using a phpBB mod Fetch_ALl) are fed to the sites. I guess like the other faux feeds, I can make our calendar update scripts write the events as an RSS format as well. Tiny task. Yesterday, a phone call cam and was like one of those cans of compressed air designed to blow the cobwebs off my neurons. Someone teaching psychology at a school located in the middle of the US was interested in a multimedia project dating back to 1997 (and that was when it was completed). Negative Reinforcement University (NRU) was a multimedia CD-ROM that was actually content designed by a team of students and a faculty member. NRU was sketched out to be a game-like exploration and experience of negative-reinforcement, with the navigation metaphors lifted directly out of Myst. It was one of my favorite of all time projects. Back in 1997, the web was not very viable for creating this, so it was done as a CD-ROM built in Macromedia Director. We did manage to convert it to a version that does play back via the web using the Shockwave plug-in. It looks horribly cheesy now, but I always loved the non linear flow and the small things embedded into it that made navigation not a fixed path of choices, but a subtly guided nudging one. Anyhow, the person who called me noted it was hard to use in a browser because of the funkiness of the Shockwave plug-in and asked if there was a downloadable version, even if it was a big file (the total content size is about 50 Mb, which was huge then but not such a big deal now). I checked my archived CDs, which were pressed to boot for both Mac OS and Windows. The Mac version actually played back okay in OS X (running in Classic), not bad almost 8 years later. On the PC, though, I found that the old code meant to detect the version of QuickTime present was faulty, and the program would exit saying there was no QuickTime, although I knew there was. I thought it would be a quick fix if I could find the source code for the launcher, delete a few lines, and re-publish the executable. First it took a while to locate my original development files- they had been archived off of my mina drives to some still unclear destination. But I did find a CD with copies of the old files. Next was trying to get Director 7 re-installed on my Dell laptop. I found my install disks, but this version was an upgrade, and it kept promoting for a valid Director 5 or 6 serial number... and I could not find them anywhere in our software cabinet. We did some major summer cleaning, yikes. No worries, we have a FileMaker database with all of our software.... except the number someone entered was clearly NOT a valid Macromedia serial number, short by about 10 characters. All I needed was an old Director 5 serial number... so I admit I surfed one of the software crack sites that list serial numbers. I had a valid copy of the software I needed, just needed to convince the installer of that. Go ahead and arrest me, but Macromedia's software reliance on old numbers is rather crippling. Once I could open my launcher file, I commented out 3 lines of code, published a new executable, and we were back in business. It actually worked as it should have on Windows XP. The download files are still hefty (30 Mb compressed) and I am thinking about learning (by doing) about publishing them as torrent files, though the number of people interested in this antiquated software must by very small. So NRU is back in business! Our football team this year is not expected to do well, but the archery team is top ranked. Here comes my epic multi GIF bonanza as part of the ds106 GIFfest, it might fall into a Multi-GIF story. It's BROUGHT TO EXCITING LIFE! What follows are 16 GIFfable scenes from the 1948 John Ford Western, Fort Apache. Rented from the nifty little library in Pine, AZ, the movie appeals on several levels, first because of the iconic scenery of Monument Valley it might be 100 miles from the real Fort Apache). Yes, the mittens are familiar, but it's that vast space the Ford used so well to back narrate the story. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d3a_gKeeZk You also have some name stars, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, even a adult-ish) Shirley Temple. It's a slice a bit different from the typical cowboys versus Indians, though both are present, but really dives into the tension of the white settles who had lived long enough in the southwest to appreciate and understand the land and te people versus the Eastern presence represented by Henry Fonda's Colonel Thursday, who blindly put his stature, class, and textbok ideas above the common sense of those like John Wayne's Sergeant York. Among all of this is also a bit of slapstick humor, especially the local Irish Cavalry men, who had little interest or respect for Thursday's formality. What follows is not a recap of the story, but some key moments that, to me, are drawn out by the GIF process if isolating scenes and ten narrowing them down even more to 3-14 frames. (more…) Some interesting attempts at clustering or building maps of web search results (tip of the blog hat to EduResources). I cannot say I have found either of these more intuitive, but they are interesting. Mooter is beta, but not bad. It sports a Google-like search engine (though there is no information or explanation what "mooter" is or does). A search result displays your query in the center of a map, with clusters of related terms around it, and clicking on the cluster essentially yields a Google-like list of results, though now a cluster is more refined than your original search. For example I ran a query on "learning object" (It looks like you can copy/paste the URLs of search results, but this seems to fail due to a session variable) and you get this "map" (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. Did Mrs. Tharpe know what she was unleashing when she gave me permission to do a music video for an 11th grade English project? Or even more when she watched me play it back in class, a music video with no sound track. Did she have a clue about the odd song with lyrics we might call remix? Bits of James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, childhood poetry, likely swirled with acid trips? Yep, it was in 1980 that I made my first film. I don't remember the genesis of the idea, but I got in my head to produce a literal version of the Beatles I am The Walrus. Lacking a Wikipedia or even an internet, I remember being stumped on figuring out what Semolina Pilchard meant (so it was ignored). I filmed it using my parent's 8mm home movie camera mostly in the back yard of our suburban Baltimore home. Technically this was a group project with two other classmates- Kevin, whom I am still friends with today, who likely saw my madness and went along with it, and Scott, who played the "lead" and likely had no clue what I was doing (he laughed through the entire filming). I can see in it that two more friends, Larry and Marc, played parts, as well as my older sister Judy and even our neurotic dog, Sunny. I have a cameo, helping kick Edgar Allen Poe. Yep, I remember that UMBC t-shirt. [caption id="attachment_66173" align="aligncenter" width="760"] "I am the Walrus: leaps and claims Scott (center) as Kevin (left) and Marc (right) take notice.[/caption] There's also some Monty Python-ish paper stop motion animation. If I remember correctly, the camera had a single frame shooting mode. I still have the paper storyboards I made meticulously (aka neurotically), hand drawn boxes, broken down to every line in the song: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Always Storyboarding flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] The film was edited on one of those double reeled machines you would through by hand, a strange machine I had found exploring the wonderland of my family basement. Editing then was not command C / command V but done using a razor on the machine to cut and the using real tape to secure the pieces together. That tape was still holding it together 38 years later. The reel has been sitting in a box of film stuff of mine for likely all 38 years since. I took it out a few months ago and found inside the box a surprise, my first notes on making notes on the lyrics and time lengths. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Movie Rights... flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Now, in 2018, I finally sent the precious out to ScanCafe for digitizing. I strongly recommend them for digitizing old media. Since the original is silent I put in a sound track that using a cover that Andyboy 63 created on YouTube. That's enough ado, here you can see my high school movie chops: https://vimeo.com/267074538 Actually I am rather impressed with myself, at least one person can be. I have no idea what my friends thought as I just told them what to do. They obliged, no idea why. I had the whole vision in my head. I claim to be the walrus, myself. Goo goo g'joob. Featured Image: High School Video flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Picnik Let's Us Really Play With Photos posted 25 Sep '07, 9.18pm MDT PST on flickr Fresa and Kasha are rather excited about the new features in picnik, the free online photo editor that lets you modify images from flickr, facebook, photobucket, your desktop, and then save back to these sites. The new tools allow text and shape overlays, new color effects, and more. Some of these are tools that are going to be part of their premium package (US$24.95 per year), but this week, for the launch, they are all free. So if it were me, I'd play a lot this week with picnik, more fun and creative than chasing cats, One of the Small Precious Web Gems I plan to tout for my workshops is picnik, a web app for editing and adding effects to photos. I had a small chance to participate in the beta that led to this week's public release of the full version. It's not exactly Photoshop in a browser (though photoflexer comes close), but picnik has a very clean and easy to use interface. I use it directly linked to my flickr account, so I can pull pictures from there, add effects, frames, text, and then save back to flickr as a new photo. I also use it to clean up the often poorly exposed photos from my lame Motorolo camera phone (about 2 years old) - the picnik "one click fix" tool often boost the color end exposure to a much richer tone. It has a rotate and straighten tool that works exactly as the ones i use often in iPhoto. But to me, the real gain, and why this might be useful for educators, is the ability to add text, or even annotate photos. Actually I had hope to run a workshop on how to create the stunning kind of image / word /caption sets that LynnetteR posts in her Interesting Snippets collection. This are powerful one screen messages composed of a compelling or metaphorical photo, which she overlays with text, and than rounds it out as a solid piece of media with a caption contains a few paragraphs of written text, much of it citing resources that support the message. Until now, the web tools for adding text to images were less than simple to use, but picnik has changed all of that. I'm a fan of this tool, but am eager to hear what others think. How might you use a web based photo editor? What can you do by annotating existing images? Zamzar is a very powerful striped cone-headed frog.... Actually Zamzar is a very handy, web-base, free tool for converting files - different types of graphics, audio or document files (dealing with those infernal Microsoft Office *.docx or *.pptx file types). You upload a file, and Zamzar the Wonder Converter emails you later with a link for the download. But there is a new exciting feature. Ribbit. That's right, you can upload a document file (.doc[x] or .pdf), and it does text to speech to turn it into an audio file. I tried it today with a one page PDF, this handout I use for my 50 Ways workshop. Zamar the Wonderfrog reads my document The voice of course is a little robotic, but not horrible, The mistake I see here is sending it something with a pull out box, as reading goes left to right, across the lines, so you get a weird kind of mashup. But free text to voice from just uploading a document? Amazing. Even for a frog. Try it yourself http://www.zamzar.com. Tell the Frog that the Dog says :Wog. Oi, I have many a blog draft bouncing in the brain to recap last week's outstanding Reclaim Open Conference- if you missed out pretty much of the activity and sessions is sitting there openly for you to rewild your ideas. Ideally I would have had this post done prior to my Small Piecers Still Loosely Joined session (itself one of saif draft blog posts), but really, who cares about chronologic oder anyhow. I thought of this while listening to the Thursday session on Replacing a live site with a high-fidelity web archive mirror-- I was listening while driving so missed the screen postions, but am keen to look at the web archiving capabilities of Archive Webpage using webrecorder. I've had some runs at archiving my own sites in my Web Bones space of this domain. Some of the buried bones are domains I owned but let go, others are from external web services that have gone belly up where I have beem able to grab copies of exports. I was thinking that this approach is pretty much post mortem, saving the web bits before they vanish wholesale. But another approach that I have found useful are practices that are doing some of the work while you are still using them. A key example has long before He Who Shall Remain Not Named vanquished the platform I will only call Twitter, I was luck to put into play an archive of my tweets that was updated while the platform was one Iw as actively using. All the credit for this goes to the genius of Martin Hawksey who in 2013 conjured a means to start with an export of all twitter activity to date, and some clever scripting that added to it continuously as I went. https://cogdogblog.com/2013/01/martin-hawksey-genius/ And so I have my own archive built as time went by at https://tweets.cogdogblog.com. The yearly histograms on the right from 2007 - 2023 tell their own story, and all my own tweets are there, reachable by a keyword search. And the death date of twitter being June 13, 2023 being the last time Martins scripts could talk to the big bird by its API, until it was severed by the Evil Overlord. My Twiiter archive available when I need it at https://tweets.cogdogblog.com None of the View on twitter links work, alas, as I flushed the whole shebang in January of this year. But this idea of archiving as I went stayed with me. A slightly different variant is my relationship with flickr, where I have 74000+ photos, with titles, captions, tags posted since 2004. Technnically I know there are ways of archving this, but I am frankly less interested in having an archive of flickr as a copy to hoist somewhere. What I have done is actually for the bulk of this time, used a strategy of writing all of my titles, captions, tags in my home photo managing software (originally Aperture, now Lightroom). This strategy means I am not trusting my "archive" to flickr, but maintaining my own. Sure you can say this is realy archiving, but I feel confident that since I have all the photo data locally managed, I wont lose it should flickr ever bite the dust. But back to what I hoped I had slid into my Small Piecers Still Loosely Joined session - that with an understanding of data flows from RSS feeds, slipping them into integrator services like IFTTT and more new favorite, Make.com that I have a number of archiving as I got machinery in place. I quickly overview one of these in the presentation, but wanted to outline them in more detail in Ye Olde Blog Post Methode. Archiving My Mastodon Activity As I Go I found I have gotten these mixed up a few times, but the first one I set into motion was via IFTTT from an existing applet Save Mastodon Posts to GoogleSheet by darkillumine - it pretty much gives the steps for how to get your Mastodon RSS feed, and its a matter of connecting it to a Google Sheet that it will append all new activity in the format of date, url, post text. To skip my mumbo jumbo, here is a peek at my ongoing Mastodon archive, it just runs by itself. With IFTTT adding to Google Sheets, you can make columns of any fields the RSS feed returns, it's as simple as it could be. IFTTT action for adding new RSS feed data to a Google Sheet, just decided on the columns you want. IFTTT shows I started archiving January 19, 2024 and it is matched in my spreadsheet archive, from that date until posts I made today at the bottom (I have some extra functions in place to remove HTML from the post to make it more readable). The archive even spans January 23 when I migrated my Mastodon account from social.fossdle.org to cosocial.ca (I just needed to update my RSS feed in IFTTT) All fine if I am just archving to keep as a box in my archives. The real reason I do this is I find it more efficient to search here than to try and find in the mastodon search- plus I can search my archive across my activity in different instances. It both archives as I go but also provides me a search tool. The task to do now is maybe find a way to backfill my archives. Up it a Notch: Archving All my DS106 Daily Create Responses Once you have that basic RSS trigger and integrator action, the world is your archiving peach. And just to show it is not just one tool, this next leap uses Make.com instead. Let's start the demo with the archive first, go check it out. So knowing I can get a URL that references all my Mastodon Posts tagged with a #dailycreate in them (cough must remember to include the tag) https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/tagged/dailycreate the RSS feed is available just by tacking on a .rss to that URL One thing I prefer about Make.com is it offers broader access to content in the RSS feed and provides the means that I can apply various functions to the result to have them saved in a better format. The columns I am archiving include: Date Post URL Post Content Media URL Media Description (alt text) Tags The functions built into Make take care of the extra steps in my other sheet to strip out HTML, plus I am able to do some things like take a data array of categories (hashtags from Mastodon) and display them as a strong of hash tags. Customizing content from RSS Feed into desired formats for Google Sheet Columns In writing this up I notice my tag sloppiness in that I forgot to add a #dailycreate hashtag to many replies. Oh well, I can at least in Mastodon edit my own posts! What a feature. I might have to experiment on how to pull in the items from the past. A Self Updating DS106 Daily Create Archive I got this idea as well to create a full archive back to January 8, 2012 for the DS106 Daily Create, in support of another Reclaim Open session I was part of, the Blogathan lunch break on day 1 Remix is #4Life: Why we All Love the Daily Create and You Should Too - hey that's another post to write! This idea came to me that it would be worth doing, especially since the original Daily Create Site is offline; the current site started in September 2015. I saw it as very simple, a 3 column spreadsheet with date, title, and URL to see the full Daily Create (the titles on the newer site all include the Daily Create number as a hashtag). As we do, here is the final archive, which has been self updating for the last 8 days. This archive building was a 3 step process: Get an export from the database of the original Daily Create Site Export all posts from the current site Create a gizmo to update the spreadsheet automatically For the original site, fortunately I know the Man with the keys to the server and Jim Groom was kind in sending my a login to the phpMyAdmin interface that holds all the databases for the ds106.us fleet of sites. While tdc.ds106.us is offline, the database is sitting there. In dusting oiff my MySQWL chops I knew the info is in the posts table, and was able to get the info needed in this query: SELECT post_date, post_title, post_name FROM `wp_5_posts` WHERE `post_status` LIKE 'publish' AND `post_type` LIKE 'post' ORDER BY post_date This got a maximum of 500 rows which I could export as .csv and I brute forced ran the query in two more segments to get the data files for all 1335 posts. It still took some spreadsheet gymnastics as the post_name was just the URL slug like tdc32 which I ended up doing some formula work to generate a full URL that is called from the wayback machine. There was some funky named posts, so a bit of cleanup work was needed, as rendered in a google sheet for the original Daily Create Site. Getting a data export for the current site was easy with a WordPress plugin I have used elsewhere, WP All Export – Simple & Powerful XML / CSV Export Plugin where you can export just the data you need from any WordPress post type. All possible field items are on the right, I only needed for posts Data, Title, and Permalink. WP All Export setup to export the Date, Title, and URL for all Daily Creates from https://daily.ds106.us/ And the ongoing archiving is done with one of those Make.com gizmos using as a trigger, the Daily Create RSS feed. The one trick here was parsing out the publication date as the format in the RSS feed is not how I was listing in the sheet, and was also not a format I could parse as a date format. The easiest way I could do this was by getting a substring of the pubDate e.g. "Sat, 01 Nov 2025 05:00:00 +0000" using substr({pubDate" 5, 11) to get in this case 01 Nov 2025". When added to the sheet as a date, the format of the column displays as YYYY-MM-DD matching previous entries. Make.com integrator for getting Daily Create data from its RSS feed, and the formula work to get a date format - available from pixelfed The final spreadsheet collects the newest Daily Create at the bottom of the archive data, I added a second sheet which reverse sorts it to show the newest ones first. Not Sure This is Everyone's Cup of Joe That's a lot of detail there and I am unsure if I can explain how interesting I find this tinkering. Thinking it through has been a helpful exercises as I had not considered before this practice of Archiving as you go, which in the end, may save you the trouble if having to archive when a service shuts down. But more than that, I do it when it also serves my own purposes/needs, e.g. for a better means to find my own past Mastodon posts. I am also for sure to scratching the surface of what Make.com can do, to me it is an order of magnitude more useful and powerful than IFTTT (and I can see I need to migrate more of my gizmos from there so I can nuke that account). Archive as you go, weeeeeeeeee. Featured Image: Public domain image from pxhere CC0 Confused? Don't know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various "sections" of ds106- these are classes we know of who's student blogs we are syndicating into ds106; all of these posts that come in carry an extra tag we can use to slice, dice, and make fries out of. After a few variations of setting up a random picker in the Assignments Collection, I saw it would be easy to do something for the posts we bring in. The exception here is that we want recent stuff, so these scripts only look for posts published to ds106 n the last 3 weeks. Without further ado, give thse a spin: Random post for UMW Section 1 (Martha's class)Random post for UMW Section 2 (My class)Random post for UMW Section 1 (Martha's class)Random post for York College (Michael Branson Smith's class)Random post for Kennesaw State University (Ryan Rish's class)Random post for all Open Online participants And the links are available on the specific section pages on the main ds106 site. This is achieved with a little php magic. The first thing I had to do is to add a few bits to by functions.php template to add some key functionality. First we have to set up our code so we can pass an extra parameter in our URLs, the one that identifies that "tag" we use internally to identify each section. // add allowable url parameters to be passed add_filter('query_vars', 'ds106_parameter_queryvars' ); function ds106_parameter_queryvars( $qvars ) // allow parameter 'tag' to be passed in query string { $qvars[] = 'tag'; return $qvars; } Next, and this took a little digging on the codex , when we do the work of finding our random posts, to keep it to ones in the last 21 days, we have to add another block of code to functions.php. This essentially adds a bit of mySQL logic needed to do a date offset (note he example in the codex is 30 days, I shrunk it a week) // Create filtering function that will add our where clause to a wp_query function filter_where( $where = '' ) { // posts in the last 21 days $where .= " AND post_date > '" . date('Y-m-d', strtotime('-21 days')) . "'"; return $where; } Now what we have to do is to create a dummy wordpress page. The content it has can be BLAH BOOOGER BOP since it will not be used, the page is a holder we will populate dynamically via its template Heck it can have typos.. But what I want its to make sure it's 'slug" is named 'random'; Now we create a new template named page-random.php - it is invoked only if a wordpress page n my site has a slug named... random! // check for the passed parameter value, set to blank if not fo $tag = (isset($wp_query->query_vars['tag'])) ? $wp_query->query_vars['tag'] : ''; // 21 day filter function (in functions.php) add_filter( 'posts_where', 'filter_where' ); // set arguments for WP_Query() $args = array( 'post_type' => 'post', 'post_status' => 'publish', 'posts_per_page' => 1, 'orderby' => 'rand' ); if ($tag != '') { // add parameter to search for tag $args['tag'] = $tag; } // get a random post from the database $my_random_post = new WP_Query ( $args ); // clean up after ourselves remove_filter( 'posts_where', 'filter_where' ); // process the database request through WP_Query while ( $my_random_post->have_posts () ) { $my_random_post->the_post (); // redirect the user to the random post wp_redirect ( get_permalink () ); exit; } What we are doing is first finding out if the URL has a parameter like "tag=purpledinosaur". We set up our new function so we can filter the query results we will do by the date function set up (published in the last 21 days). Following this, we make an array for some parameters to pass to a wordpress function that looks stuff up in the database. We want it to looks for things that are published posts (no pages, no drafts); we only want one, and the 'orderby" is the magic paramater, it says to brings us a random result. If we did get a parameter passed to us, we will add one more thing to look for, published posts tagged "purpledinosaur" We runt he query, do some cleanup, and that grab the one result- from that post data we can get its URL (get_permalink()) and just send the viewer there via the wp_redirect() function. It all works pretty damned smoothly. The one thing I am stuck on is I thought I could make a case for when no parameters are passed, that I could just pick a random one from all syndicated posts. I tried some extra query parameters based on the post meta data, but all I ever get is the most recent post. I love going random! And thus, you have no excuse not to have fun giving a blog comment to our students. C'mom. click (and comment). How fun is THAT? UPDATE For a simple random post from a blog in general, it's much easier- just append ?random to the main blog URL, like try http://cogdogblog.com/?random Featured Image: Lager flickr photo by t3hWIT shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license CogDog says I can. But WTF does he know? Okay, let’s try. I find a GIF on giphy. I put it’s web address as plain text on a blank like https://giphy.com/gifs/divorceonhbo-weird-hbo-3o7WIpvPm4G2ykbOxi Woah. The visual editor does not show me a preview like other embedded media, but the Preview buttons shows me the GIF. Oh wait, it does when I press RETURN after the URL. This could be TROUBLE The other way to put GIFs into my blog is to upload it as an image, but as some guy explains below, be sure to use the Full Size option in the media box. Here is one I am uploading. I like catz. Does anyone talk about Wordpress Trackbacks anymore? They were the glue of blogging in the day. If I wrote a blog post with a link to something on your Wordpress blog, you would get a notification and a link on the post that went back to mine. Maybe as close as we got to two way hyperlinks. I see them come in to my comments now and then. If I do not know the blog, I might check it out to see who is writing about me. Many times it is just a link farm. But many times not. This one came in via email, not for this blog, but for a 2013 project that is hosted on Wordpress.com For The Remix! was a project initiated by Jonathan Worth. He arranged with author Cory Doctorow to provide a collection of hi resolution photos Jonathan took of Doctorow, and made them available for anyone to create remixes. I had all my UMW ds106 students at the time do it as a ds106 assignment. Jonathan had his phonar students then at Coventry University also make remixes. All of the submissions are available in one giant gallery. Back to the trackback - it goes to a collection of fascinating Pixel Sorted Cory Doctorow GIFs made by Joseph Kesisoglou, who was one of Jonathan's students at the time. They are described as: I downloaded cory001.jpg / cory005.jpg film strips, cropped them to individual frames, colour graded using lookup tables, messed up the channels, exported the frames as animated gifs and pass them through Processing, using Kim Asendorf’s ASDF Pixel Sort code, modified for gif file input version from Sam Walker Now I can see in the dashboard for the site, that these GIFs were added back in 2014. Why is Joseph's site issuing new trackbacks? Why does anyone care? Just me. Curious. Peek at the source code... Joseph published this post in 2014, but he modified it just last week. And I can see from the hover preview in the Wordpress dashboard that he must have modified his theme, and not only that, by digging in more, knowing something about Wordpress URLs, that he moved the content originally in a blog post to a portfolio page. It looks like he added more GIFs that were not in the original post, so I updated the gallery. The why is not important, it was actually a nice change to revisit the site. I'm thinking of building a remix activity with it for the Creative Commons Certification project. Then there is just the pride of working on a project with an author I respect (fan-boy alert). And to circle it back, I got to meet Joseph when I attended the Mozilla conference in 2013. How do I know? My flickr memory clicks in: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Oh Trackback. Remember when we were young? People like Scott Leslie even wrote a poem about ya! [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Public Domain Dedication Creative Commons ( CC0 ) license[/caption] One of Joseph Kesisoglou's Pixel Sorted Cory Doctorow images. It weighed in at 2.5 Mb so I dropped every other frame, made it a tad smaller, and saved with a higher than usual lossy setting, got it down to about 1.1 Mb. The GIFs are licensed under CC BY 3.0. If you thought Mike Caulfield was excited for months about Smallest Federated Wiki, you should read what he thinks after bring a great group of folks to his FedWikiHappening... over the Christmas holiday. And while my Kool-Aid consumption is at a positively high level, I am not quite there to Mike's. But as they overly say, there is something there there about the Smallest Federated Wiki. A lot of folks rightfully are trying to figure out what to do with the thing. Is it a tool for courses? How do we collaborate there? What about attribution? Is it better to have it or not? It's hard to know who did what when? How will it scale? How do we onboard new people better? Jon Udell has (as usual) been burrowing into a level of insight I appreciate, like wondering about Individual voices in the Federated Wiki chorus. Maha Bali makes a historical and compelling case for the voices for information and who gets heard. It gets to a whole different philosophical plane of what really is truth. Most of our intuition for wiki-style collaboration, or for that matter, even Google-Doc style, is one or more or many contributors working toward a single consensus document. For a metaphor, it's like the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California, two river systems, and all their tributaries converge into one that ultimately reaches the sea. [caption id="attachment_39781" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Wikimedia Commons cc licensed image[/caption] The Smallest Federated Wiki ends up being more like other delta systems that are divergent [caption width="640" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by EVS-Islands[/caption] though in its non-hydraulic behavior, the smallest federated wiki branches loop back on itself, at all levels, and many of its arms never come close to reaching the sea. And now my metaphor makes a mess allover the flow. But I see the familiar wiki mode as encourages convergence, where Smallest Federated wiki seems to encourage some sort of divergent semi-convergence. It will confound most people. The FedWikiHappening gathered some really smart and web experienced people who mostly (I guess) have gone through some sort of mind-altering experience trying to find their way through it. My paddling about has been some of the note card keeping of stuff I came across, and drew upon things from online articles/blog posts, to podcasts, to print magazines, even to a conversation with my cousin while we were walking. I then diverged and started some note keeping on ideas generated by a novel I am reading. A central character in the book is a 104 year old feminist radical Buddhist nun, but nearly all of her wisdom is dispensed with a lot of dualism. Things are not this or that, they are this and that, sort of stuff. I'm considering SFW in that vein, that it might be convergent and divergent, attribution oriented and author-less. So it's likely not for everyone, those who look for scale and growth. It's no magic pill, red or blue. (Both pill sare purple!). And to me that matters little to none. I do not always seek the application of tools from the outside. Often it emerges down the line, or not at all. Maybe a year for now, I will have that need, and I can draw back (or more likely search my own blog) for my thoughts on Smallest Federated Wiki. What it did do was right in Mike's concept of a "happening". Long ago, when I was just a pup of an educational technologist, I was given the responsibility of organizing a large event. I was literally a wreck, with a stomach turning worry about what 200 people would think of me if the event was a dud o dull or if the projectors did not work. A wise mentor at the time told me that all I needed to worry about was creating a good enough reason for bringing together the right group of people, and once they were in the room, things would happen. He was right. And that's what Mike did deftly in shepherding these two weeks together, and now letting loose a convergent/divergent plan for what's next. A good example is in the flow of what happened (right most pane) to create a collection of SFW related blog posts - the entire history is in a long URL. The URL becomes more of just a unique address like a set of numbers on the house, but actually a visible history of every family that ever lived at that location. It started from an 8 word post by Maha with a link to her own SFW related blog posts, and morphed into a broader collection of other blog post links, plus an interesting suggestion in the commentary on how to deal with keeping the content "authoritative" (or converged). The possibilities is that some wiki keeper manages that, or non one does, or... dualistically, both, and see what emerges: Don't nominate an authoritative copy, but follow one that emerges Are you walking upside down on the ceiling yet, blindfolded, and dizzy? Jon Udell comes in again with a provocative idea on how to use all of the forking and splitting and twirling; showing how the various versions can be converged or diverged or spread out like a messy river system on a browser map. I would love to help build tools that mine FedWiki’s latent ability to support the teaching and learning of prose composition. And I would equally love using those tools to facilitate that teaching and learning. The idea I've had bubbling but never sat down (yet) to start thinking, because I'm usually thinking about storymaking, is a system to build out frameworks for assembling stories from parts. A typical activity (and it was started in FedWikiHappening) is the thing where someone starts a story, and others keep adding on to it. These usually peter out, its kind of fun, but it usually (IMHO) falls flat because there's no destination or structure to shape the story. It just flops around from paragraph to paragraph unless someone gives it a good kick. I'm thinking a FedWiki where there is a set of guidelines/suggestions for building a collection of character profiles, maybe responses to questions we used on an old Hero's Journey site. People could create one card per character, fork as needed. Then there would one cards to create places where a story would take place. Include images, etc. And then more sets of cards to fill out the steps of a Story Spine. So there could be this whole ecosystem of story elements, and then you drag and drop them to a Fed Wiki page to put them in some kind of outline, then the details could be written in as new text. Or people could fork each other's outlines. This is all hypothetical. I'm just talking out of the side of my wiki. [caption id="attachment_39782" align="aligncenter" width="630"] "The Church of Facebook blog" which google thinks is a cc licensed image but that blog author has not indicated any source. Who knows? [/caption] While walking upside down. Om the ceiling, Blindfolded. [caption id="attachment_29236" align="aligncenter" width="396"] image supposedly licensed for non-commercial use from SA Ballroom & Latin will[/caption] In writing up the current ds106 lesson on telling stories, I provided some updates tips in how to download video form YouTube (and other services). In the past I have recommended KeepVid (requires Java, so its no go in Chrome). Since learning about it from Tim Owes, I switched to pwnyoutube, specifically the cc licensed flickr photo shared by ElDave The main navigation of most WordPress sites is driven by cycling through all of the content that are WordPress pages-- which is nice, but sometimes you have content that you don;t want cluttering the navbar. Or maybe you want to insert something that is not a Page into the navbar. I've been amazed that so few people seem to know how to subvert it, and below is a little trick I use when I want to wedge some other kind of WordPress content into the navbar by Pages process. Mostly this is in your HEAD... I mean the header.php file of your templates that generates it as an Unordered List: This turned out to be a love/hate/love assignment for ds106- Telling Stories in/on the web. It was a brilliant, creative, and challenging assignment cooked up by Martha. The task is to re-write a public web page to have it tell a new story, using only code (especially the Firebug plugin for Firefox). I'll b&m about Firebug later, but first, it is story time! I went for an IMDb profile page for a movie to have it portrary a well known movie radically different. I chose Dirty Harry, partly because I love the series, but also saw the Harry Callahan character as one to be turned inside out. I present the full version of Soiled Harry online at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/soiled/ - the screen below is just what is above the fold you can enjoy a full screen version. Basically, I transformed Harry the tough "do you fell lucky, punk" bad-ass into a pathetic loser with B.O, who undergoes a emotion jerking process of self-discovery: In the year 1971, San Francisco faces the embarrassment of an inept and hygiene challenged cop- Inspector Harry Callahan (known as Soiled Harry by his peers who knows he has not showered since 1967). He is only kept on the force because of the power and influence of his billionaire father and former populist mayor, Pinky Callahan. It is his newest partner, Inspector Frida Lopez (who benefits from a genetic lack of olfactory sensors) who is able to convince Harry to seek help from an unconventional shrink, Dr. Connor. Using humiliation and cat and mouse type of games against Callahan, Connor is able to crack the fears and veener of the smelly cop and bring him to a full state of self actualization Do not miss the touching shower scene where Dr Connor, played by Phyllis Diller, coaxes Soiled Harry into the world of cleanliness. Also, there is the unforgettable rendering of "Feelings" sung by Dennis Hopper. I started off great in Firebug, and got used to grabbing items and editing them. I did a big chunk last night, mostly on the part above, and creating the graphics I would swap in. Luckily there are tons of Clint Eastwood images out there, so I was able to sap the movie cover photo with one of him holding his nose (and posterizing it to match). I found a bunch of other ones to crop to the square row of other images. I wanted to make as many of the links work as possible, so all of the actors, links to others movies, work as they should. My approach first was to use Firefox to save the web page as "complete" meaning I got a folder full of assets, and then used Firebug to find the names of the image files. My first idea was to just replace the files in this directory, but then my page lost all of the functionality of the local referenced urls. Plus when I copied HTML from Firebug, the local directory links were lost in the code. So I instead used the same source, and in my local file, added to the <head>...</head>... section: meaning that all local links like Dom DeLuise would work. What I did for the images I replaced was to load them on my own web server, and replaced in the source code the IMG links to point to these new URLs. I was humming along this morning, having fun, adding tons of content in Firebug... and not saving! And I paid dearly. I ment to use the element selector tool on a link, but forgot to click it, and ended up following a link and blowing away all my work. I was ready to cry. But alas, I had my local HTML file with all the work I had done up to 1:00am last night, so I just sat down with BBEdit and manually edited all of the HTML the old fashioned way, by hand. Because I had already done the work once, and Firebug gave me a good sense of the structure, it was just a tedious re-write... and actually a few sections turned out better. For grins, the last thing was creating a fake ad banner for the top. In the end it was a fun and creative assignment; I tried to change as much detail as possible, including the recommended movies (for these I just searched on IMDb, and viewed the source code, and just grabbed the code for each DIV. [caption id="attachment_6498" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Go ahead punk, make me clean behind my ears!"][/caption] So go out today and find the DVD for Soiled Harry One of the social software sites I wish I had more time to delve into is 43Things. It is insanely social (in a good way), with all the pieces running. You have a personalized space, tags, rss, post to blogs, subscribing to flickr feeds, some sort of social FOAFing. If you have not been there before, it is a place you can list 43 goals, click and see others with the same goals. You can mark off ones achieved, and all of these can be posted to with blog like entries. Once a goal is completed, your entry goes in with the others who have done the same goal. The goals are listed on a tag cloud map. For example, last yuear I had posted I wanted to run a half marathon. So as of Sunday, I was able to mark this one done, and the individual entry I wrote is now one among 292 others who have this as a goal. And there is more, the concept is now expanded and interconnected with 43Places where you list 43 world spots you'd like to see, and then you can mark them off once you have bee there; again, it is tagged, syndicated, connected with others, ties back to your 43Things. And now the trifecta-- 43People, where you list 43 people you'd like to meet, and then mark them off once met, etc. This one is a bit suspect, as a large clump of the tag cloud lists people wanting to meet "celebreties", but hey, whatever floats your boat. Maybe next is 43Pizzas- I can list all the kinds of pizza I'd like to achieve, and once eaten, I can post and link to others who cherish mushroom-swiss-pineapple-shrimp-pesto?? The amount of interconnectedness and layers of this networking makes one dizzy. On one hand, I feel like I could spend so much time write goals, places, and people I want to meet, that I might not have time left to do any of them! I am excited to follow Jeremy's work on 43 Things Masters Thesis in Educational Technology: I pitched three topics to my thesis supervisor, and the winning one is certainly related to this goal: "Using social software as a method of identifying and collaborating on learning goals. 43Things is the most obvious application of this idea, letting users define goals, many of which are goals requiring learning ("˜I want to learn PHP and CSS', "˜learn to cook great vegetarian meals', "˜learn to record music on my laptop', etc) and then connecting individuals to others who share that goal so they can collaborate on achieving the goal together"”sharing resources, expert recommendations, online tutorials, links and comments to support each other. I think it's a powerful model of self-directed, self-organizing collaborative learning." And there are others who want to explore how 43 Things can promote online learning. And it gets so recursive, as he is using 43Things to document his research about 43Things... Oi, the levels of connection almost make my head hurt. But that is good. So is this structure, this networking useful? Or is it cool for the sake of Web 2.0-ness? What does it achieve? I am not criticizing, just curious where others think the 43______ approach runs up against things like the battleship BlackWeb.