Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
It's a bit of a mind bend to calculate that it has been more than 9 years since I left my first "real" job -- 14 years as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The real bend back to reality was the warm greetings I got today returning there for the 2015 Teaching with Technology Conference. I cannot even give a number of how many hugs, and greetings I got from folks I used to work with, I made it a thing to grab some selfies though I am lost for a reason why they are all bros; I got probably more hellos from former female colleagues. If someone wants to visit a place where there is a lot of equity in educational technology leadership, look at Maricopa (not in my 6 photos) I'm most proud of Colen, bottom right, who was a student I hired at MCLI in 1999 and has grown into a technical wizard on his own, and has worked in the center since I left. The timing worked well for me to spend time in Phoenix for this and visiting with the Cyber Salon folks at a pub called Ground Zero. Jeannette Shaffer, the event organizer, was kind enough to invite me to do a session. I decided to bring the idea of the DS106 Daily Create for a session I called (for reasons of making it vague) "Doing It Daily" People who run races, musicians, and yes, even dentists know the benefit of practice and improvement via a regular daily routine. This same concept is used in The Daily Create (http://tdc.ds106.us), part of the open digital storytelling course DS106 (http://ds106.us), as a means to help people improve their creative skills with media. Each day since January 2011, the Daily Create publishes a challenge meant to be done in about 15 minutes, in the media of photography, drawing, audio, video, and writing. Try out the Daily Create for today, learn how the past challenges can be reused, and how you can create a Daily Challenge site for any topic via an open source Wordpress Theme. presentation and resources also available at https://cog.dog/show/2015/05/19/doing-it-daily/ I deliberately decided to start without any explanation, and invited the group in the room to take on a challenge I set up on a site that uses the newer Wordpress theme template I built based on the Daily Create. Their challenge was to tweet a photo to @youshow15 in response to Show opposites working together- make a yin yang image Then of course, I lost the room for a good ten minutes: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I did not show them until near the end how their tweeted photos showed up on the site. And I could not have gotten a much better set of examples showing that the results are seeing how many different ways people can create to respond to the challenge. I also teased them a bit about "why they even did it?" -- there were not prizes, points, badges given, I am not grading them, but everybody in the room took on the assignment. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] It was also great to listen to the work James Abraham has carried on valiantly in teaching Spanish in 3D Virtual Worlds; he gave me some overly generous credit for turning him on to Second Life when I was at NMC. I tried to impress him with my recently acquired Pigeon Spanish. Yes, it was warmly overwhelming to be remembered by colleagues I have not worked with more more than 9 years. There are a lot of great educators in that system, and they almost seem to not know it. But mostly, they are good, warm people. I so lucked out in starting my career here. Featured Image: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]This is How to Tweet! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] I may have to put on my code dog cone of shame for finding out I was missing a feature in the SPLOT themes that should have been there a long time ago. But shame is for silly humans, so I just shook it off, and went about fixing it. This came about in conversation with Clint Lalonde as he was prepping to use the SPLOTbox theme for part of the BCcampus Studio20 event this week. It's worth seeing for all the submissions so far, but you might not return. That's okay. Clint messaged last week with a question that came from Arley Cruthers who is part of the Studio 20 facilitating team. Hey new SPLOT question. If someone shares an image, can they add alt text? And as of that time... the answer was "no." I thought some about the way such images are used- they are displayed as featured images in SPLOTbox, TRU Collector, and TRU Writer. So in the flow of a screen reader, they come before the title and text. I could have suggested it was not needed since those elements should explain it. But on a little more thinking, thought, why not see what it takes to add this? I started first with TRU Collector to see what it took. I just had to add an extra field below the image uploader: Since the images uploaded are made into featured images, I don't even need to add extra custom fields to the post. WordPress images have their own meta data field ready for using. When images are uploaded, we get an ID number for it $wFeatureImageID when added to the media library, so adding the alt description is a matter of adding or updating another post meta value // update featured image alt update_post_meta($wFeatureImageID, '_wp_attachment_image_alt', $wAlt); And nothing needs to be done differently on the template that displays the image since the theme uses the_post_thumbnail() which just uses the text we saved in the alt tag. You can try this out now at http://splot.ca/collector -- or see my test example https://splot.ca/collector/743/. To see it, you may have to... view source. "Roll For Fun" https://splot.ca/collector/743/ That's one SPLOT down. Next up was TRU Writer, and pretty much the same process. There's a new field on the writing form: Available now for you to try at http://splot.ca/writer/write I will leave the inspection up to you on this example at https://splot.ca/writer/2020/790 And last to get the overhaul was the one where it all started- SPLOTbox. This one was more complex because: It uses a variety of media. Images can be uploaded like the other two, but media is also entered by entering URLs like for flickr or YouTube ot Giphy, et al. And it also accepts images from direct URLs like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Dog_for_Senior_Dog_Food_Diet_Wikipedia_Page.jpg/1024px-Dog_for_Senior_Dog_Food_Diet_Wikipedia_Page.jpgThe media are not displayed as featured images, they are displayed like them if they are uploaded. I started out creating some picky logic to determine if the uploaded media was an image (as audio files can be uploaded) or if the URL entered represented an image. It worked but maybe not elegantly. Then I thought about other media types like audio or video. What can the site do to help visitors who cannot hear or see? I'm not about to do transcripts. But rather than trying to make special cases for different media types, I ended up making the field always visible. If the media is an image, then you would want to enter a text string suitable for an image alt field, a description that can be a substitute for the image. But if it is a video or audio or something else, then it's still useful to provide some kind of summary of what the media includes if say, one cannot hear and audio file or see a video. To make it more useful, any URL can be included that can link to a transcript or something else with more information that can help someone who is unable to see or hear the item. I considered the accessibility approach where you place this alternative description in a div shoved way off screen as invisible content. But why hide it? And finally for this site, I decided to display this information with the other metadata at the bottom. In this theme, the alternative text is always visible. So for an image, whether it is uploaded, or loaded from a direct URL, or an embeddable site like flickr- the media description is added to the img tag as standard alt text. Here's an image example: https://splot.ca/box/2020/262/ If you peek at the source you should find the alt text. But it's also now at the bottom of the page (I also styled this post meta a bit): The alt text is shown too as "Media Description" But let's try a different kind of media. I created another example using a URL to an mp3 file, a podcast recording from my work with OE Global. In this one, I have a one sentence summary, and I entered a URL for a link to the transcript (I coded this so all URLs entered become links) Example media description for an audio file Like all alternative text, the value happens in the way people use it. The site here is a container. I am not sure if this is the best way to go. One could say the entire entry ought to include enough information to serve as an alternative. But I am also eager to see how this approach differs as the media description is always visible. All three themes are available now in github with the new features. They are extremely lightly tested. I could use feedback on how it works! Try them out now: TRU Collector with Alt Text Support http://splot.ca/collector (or get the theme)TRU Writer with Alt Text Support http://splot.ca/writer (or get the theme)SPLOTbox with Media Description / Alt Text support http://splot.ca/box (or get the theme) Testing this will help as I'd like to have the auto-updated versions available on Reclaim Hosting brought up to speed too. Thanks again for Arley Cruthers who brought this up and Clint Lalonde for sharing. And while I am thanking Clint, check out the How to SPLOT in 60 Seconds video he made for the workshop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSdxPuXEGJU Can you make me more of these for the other SPLOTs? Alt we go now. And this has also spawned a new SPLOT-based activity that might unfold soon. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/19772421098 The Alternative Route need a Alternative Route flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Northern Voice Emergency Warning by cogdogblog posted 26 Feb '08, 12.26pm MST PST on flickr The signs at UBC needed some updates One more NV thing- I loved the explicit warnings in the UBC auditorium for Fire and Earthquake, but felt there were not enough warnings for Northern Voice. (edited in flickr with picnik) With all the talk about the Net generation being so vastly, genetically different from... well everyone else, I try to avoid falling too much into the quick generalities. It's too easy to apply labels when, as people, we are all on some sort of continuum. Like others, I have a live in subject to study. I enjoy exceptions to rules. Yesterday, I walked past 22 year old step-son's room, where, in contrast to the usual... um.. harsh metal, I was surprised to hear the sounds of something in my iTunes rack, Highway 61 Revisited. I asked Travis, "Are you listening to Dylan?" He smiled and said, "Everyone ought to listen to Dylan." This generation is not always as foreign as some might think. People doing Bryan Alexander's Blog Along Book Club reading of We Make the Road by Walking are already done chapter 3! I just made it to the end of the second one, but there was soemthing that jumped out at me towards the end, and that's always something to pay attention to. (note: I am tagging my posts hortonfreire) Freire was talking about Horton's work on the first Citizenship Schools, noting how the first teacher Bernice made use of the Declaration of Human Rights in her teaching of adult literacy to blacks in the plan to help them become eligible to vote. I must admit I gleaned over the Declaration, as it seems obvious what it was. But stop. That was a monumental work by the UN published in 1948: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages. Makes one wonder reading the news how those righrs are tattered to bits. But that's a tangent. But Freire said: On the last analysis, in my terminology, Bernice used the Declaration of Human Rights as a codification. It was yes, a codification, and when she showed the declaration to them, the debating started. He uses that word like 5 more times in the next few pages, and its wrapped in this idea that while the program's "outcomes" might have been to increase literacy, it was more. Freire points out that the teaching was more than explaining what the words meant, and that most of the people they were teaching understood the concept but were also expanding it: that by discussing with Bernice some points of the declaration, they were reading the world and not the word of the declaration. They were starting a different reading of the world mediated by the Declaration of Human Rights... they were confirming some already known knowledge and knowing through something different. In other words, through the experience with Bernice they were going beyond Compare this to what some are suggesting for higher educatuon to become some Silcon Vallery infused "minimal viable product" https://twitter.com/RMoeJo/status/804717092981248000 But "codification"? What mean ye, Paulo? I have an understanding of the word, but the concept? Let him answer: I was convinced that we would have to start from some very, very concrete piece of people's reality. Inside of the representation of some aspect of this reality, I would put the first word or the word I call the generative word... The codification has a task, a role, in the process of learning and knowing... In my case, the codification works as a challenge, a challenge to the students and the educator. Then the codification gives itself or exposes itself to the cognitive subjects, to those who are open to know, in order for them to read the codification without any kind of word, just a representation of the reality... Reading the codification leads peoplemto have a perception of the former perception of reality. Freire uses the metaphor of a photograph for explaining this, and even uses that as an exercise for his students, to not only take photographs of their world, but to think and discuss their reasons for taking the photograph. From the Freire Instutite description: This is a way of gathering information in order to build up a picture (codify) around real situations and real people. Decodification is a process whereby the people in a group begin to identify with aspects of the situation until they feel themselves to be in the situation and so able to reflect critically upon its various aspects, thus gathering understanding. It is like a photographer bringing a picture into focus. Most definitions of codify seem to focus more on the organizing, arranging, of making things orderly -- to "arrange according to a plan or system" What Freire is saying is a but more than arranging, it's the process of getting that clear picture. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Among the bits I searched on, this explanation from a paper Reflection on Paulo Freire and Classroom Relevance (2013) by Emmy J. Rugut and Ahmed A. Osman (Moi University, Kenya) helped codify for me this idea of codification Participants explore generative themes which are of interest to them. A generative theme is a cultural or political topic of great concern or importance to participants, from which discussion can be generated. These generative themes are then represented in the form of 'codifications' (either represented by a word or short phrase or a visual representation - a picture or photograph). Participants are able to step back from these visual representations of their ideas or history and decode or explore them critically by regarding them objectively rather than simply experiencing them. This makes it possible for the participants to intervene and initiate change in society (Freire, 1978). Freire initially concerned himself with literacy learning. The codifications (visuals) prompted discussion, phrases and words which learners would use to develop their skills. Although this system of codifications has been very successful in promoting print literacy among adult students, Freire always emphasized that it should not be approached mechanically, but rather as a process of creation and awakening of consciousness (Freire, 1988). For Freire, it is a mistake to speak of reading as solely the decoding of text. Rather, reading is a process of apprehending power and causality in society and one's location in it. For Freire, authentic education is always a "practice of freedom" rather than an alienating inculcation of skills. Codification is a way of gathering information in order to build up a picture (codify) around real situations and real people. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The metaphor of clarity in a photograph is part of it, but I also see what I think is the beauty of photography, how we chose to frame, to emphasis a relatively small subset of the world. It's a artful decision to find, to enhance what is important... both focus and framing are critical for making photographs. At the very end of the chapter, these two experience men, reflecting on the work they did in a different era, almost speak pessimistically about the differences in the culture that existed at the time of this conversation. That the motivations which worked for Horton in the civil rights era and Freire in Brazil's economic development are gone. Horton says: I don't see in this country national campaign of significance. The government is trying to launch a literacy campaign without having a ny reason for it except that it would be a good thing if people could become literate... I think the poor and the people who can't read and write have a sense that without structural changes nothing is worth really getting excited about. They know much more clearly than intellectuals do that reforms don't reform. They don't change anything. They've been the guinea pigs for too many programs. So to embolden people to act, the challenge has got to be a radical challenge. Does that have a feeling of familiarity in this post 2016 election? Look who got out the message of a radical challenge (one might see that this concept is not limited to literacy campaigns or social justice, it works for social injustice). But where is our codification? It's almost like we are an era of not making clear or unclear, but just ot even building those pictures. Again, the understanding that works for me is "Codification is a way of gathering information in order to build up a picture (codify) around real situations and real people." It reminds me of a statement I heard (forget where) from Martha Burtis where she described the open digital storytelling community ds106 differently that I ever heard it (that is Martha's genius) -- and I might get the words wrong because it's from memory -- that ds106 was helping students try to make sense of the world through media they create. And that's what worked for many ds106 students, to use subjects they cared about (not ones I cared about) in making of things like posters, gifs, radio shows, remixed videos. More codification, please, more. Top / Featured image: A photo made standing on my tiptoes atop chair, aiming the camera almost guessing down the rain gutter as water dripped in from the roof. This flickr photo is mine! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/14998967189 shared under a Creative Commons (CC0) license My first presentation today at the eLearning Guild conference was "I'm Busy Enough.. What do I Need a Second Life For?" a tact I took as I expected SL was rather outside the realm of focus for this conference. Well, that was not fully correct, as there was a fair amount of awareness here of virtual worlds and Second Life, but when I asked the audience of 50 or so how many had Sl accounts, there were maybe 5, 7 hands raised. A number of others let me know they were there because "it sounded nothing like the other sessions my employer told me to attend" or "we'll never use it at work but I want to know what I am missing". (more…) This blog will go into a period of non-activity the next few days as I work on a project requiring me to pretend to be a tourist in the Rocky Mountains. There will not be anything else posted on "project mini vacation" I am not trying to start a boycott, but am making my own pointless statement about my fatigue with the format and limited outcomes of attending the large educational technology conferences. I've barked and moaned previously (see "I'm Bored As Hell And I'm Not Gonna... zzzzz") about the staleness and sad irony of the 50 minute lecture to a passive audience being the primary mode of information sharing at professional gatherings and the minimal information density of conference presentations. This past year I attended both the mammoth EDUCAUSE 2004 conference (Denver, 6000? attendees) and the League for Innovation in the Community College's Innovations 2005 conference (New York City, 3000+ attendees). Beyond meeting up between sessions with colleagues and doing fun stuff away from the site, I am hard pressed to list much as a take away. I get little out of listening to people read me their powerpoints, or spending 75% of their time giving background rather than starting with the demo. The agendas are so jam packed at the mega-cans that there is no room or time to breathe or decompress (the League conference lacked any seating in the hallways, now that is great design), just shuffle off numbly to the next lecture. And isn't there irony that we travel thousands of miles, dumping travel dollars in hotels, and the conference centers are jammed full of folks reading email??? I watch folks in sessions, oblivious to the blabbering presenter, checking their email, fixing their websites, blogging about their boredom (oh wait a minute, that was me). Is this really sensible? Rational? or am I just suffering from a lack of oxygen? Not being in a purchasing capacity, I have zero interest in the silly hawking of the vendor halls (I will enter long enough to pilfer the free drinks and food), where I can get more info about a product by Googling and reading message boards from actual users as opposed to the smiling booth people. So for 2005-2006, I am passing on the big mega conferences. I'll be at home, reading blogs, maybe listening to podcasts, but if I participate this year anything, I am search of the smaller sized meetings where there appears to be genuine exchange. Or an interesting format. I'm already committed to the August 7-10 SAC conference (~300 attendees) and a must-go for me every year is the New Media Consortium Summer Conference (300-400 attendees). I'll keep my eyeballs out for other interesting regional events-- I'd really like to go to the Open Education Conference at Utah State University, but the timing is not looking good with other events at home in Maricopa (and a planned get-away to Rocky Point in Mexico). I'll be doing the April TCC Online conference and hope to coordinate timing with my colleagues in Australia for their online conferences. This happened to me before almost 10 years ago, pretty much pre-web, when I decided to forgo my conference travel money and used the funds to visit a number of colleges in the Pacific Northwest. I got much more in terms of ideas, contacts, from pretty much informal meetups set up with the technology du jour then (email listservs). So is it just me that thinks the big conference formats are as stale as that forgotten, unidentifiable vegetable rotting in the back of my fridge? Some fool has to call the conference king naked. For 2005-2006, I am not attending the big cons and looking for the medium to little cons, the online cons... And before any comments come raining in, I must admit that beyond my complaining, I do not have better ideas how to run a mega conference. The largest events I have been responsible for are in the 200-250 range, and I know it is a challenge to cook up an agenda that works for a good chunk of them. But I do know there is something better we can do with our time together than plenary + 20 simultaneous 50 minute lectures + plenary + .... I would use the collaborative tools of communication before, during, and after. I would follow the idea of hybrid/blended learning, and use the face to face time for what is best achieved in that format (dialogue, debate, exchange, social action) and use the technology to offline to movement of static content (papers and presentations). And people have to go with something of personal/professional value, not just t-shirts, goofy pens, and ugly conference tote bags. Is there any gathering out there that really pushes the conference format beyond a compressed series of lectures? cc licensed flickr photo shared by lynchseattle I've read and pondered some of my colleagues concerns when they find some creepy account or nefarious avatar follows them on twitter. They have to deal with blocking or reporting or just feeling slimy. My own approach is quite simple, but I'd never presume to suggest it is the best strategy for others. I have no idea who follows me. None. cc licensed flickr photo shared by abbey*christine You see, I turn off email notification of new followers, so there is no time wasted looking at their profile, trying to figure out who the person is or whether they are creepy or wonderful. It does me no harm if some spammer, scam artist, weirdo, or just stalker is listening to me tweets. I don;t see 'em or hear 'em. And I don't choose in turn whom I follow based on some expected reciprocity (e.g. if I monitor my follows, then I may feel some obligation to turn the favor around). I base my decision on what I see people producing in twitter, when they tweet me a message, I might look at their profile then, maybe. To all of you followers, I now wave a hello, and send thanks for the interest, and express my sorrow if you did so in expectation of a follow-back. That's not my routine. cc licensed flickr photo shared by striatic So is there a hole in my strategy? It cuts down on email and time spent click checking. And I don't even get the creeps. But that's me. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Swiss Bones Arizona is a state bombarded by a free source of untapped energy. Our electric companies have been offering incentives in the forms of rebates and tax credits. it's not out of the goodness of their heart or their long term vision on the future of energy- it was mandated by law, and funded by extra fees everyone has been paying each month. For more than a year I have been putting money away towards getting a solar electric system for my house in Strawberry. I have an ideal spot, a south facing roof with no trees obstructing it. Last month, I spec-ed out a system with a firm from Flagstaff, and started the paperwork. I knew the timing was important as the news was that the programs were running out of money, they had already dropped the rebate rate in March. I was dismayed when I got home from my trip to get this letter from APS: On April 13, 2010, the Arizona Corporate Commission approved a change in APS's residential Renewable Energy incentive levels. The Commission approved a reduction for grid-tied solar electric (PV) from $3.00 per watt to $2.15 per watt, and a further reduction to $1.95 once APS had received reservations for an additional 3 megawatts of installed capacity.... The Commission has further required APS to divide the remaining $11.1 million in incentive funding into two funding cycles. The first funding cycle is from March 31 to July 1, 2010, and has an available budget of $5.9 million. The second funding cycle runs from July 2 to October 1, 2010 with an available budget of $5.2 million. Your APS Residential Application was received on 4/27/201. This letter is to serve as notification that at the time of your submission, the first funding cycle's available funds have been exhausted and your application has not been reserved. In an Arizona Republic story, "officials" conjure up a fairy tale that with less rebates avaiable to residents, that the suppliers will somehow magically cut their costs. The changes, if approved by regulators, will add to the out-of-pocket expenses for customers installing solar panels. But officials said that demand is soaring and that reducing the subsidies will put pressure on solar companies to cut expenses and drive down the cost of solar installations. "This is a great problem to have because it means a strong solar industry has emerged in this state and that Arizonans are showing their demand for solar," said Kris Mayes, chairwoman of the Arizona Corporation Commission, the state utility regulator that requires utilities to supply increasing amounts of energy from renewable sources. That logic may have worked before the economy nose-dived, but hardly seems a natural assumption now. If anything, in these times, Arizona needs to do things to encourage more spending and hiring of local companies to do work; instead, they make a move that is bound to generate less jobs for the solar industry, less expansion of alternative energy. I had little luck finding anything like a record of this vote, nes of this vote on the archaic Arizona Corporate Commission web site (vinatge 1996 web design). In a fit of despair, I sent an email to the five corporate commissioners: To: newman-web@azcc.gov, pierce-web@azcc.gov, mayes-web@azcc.gov, kennedy-web@azcc.gov, stump-web@azcc.gov From: me Subject: Reduction of APS Solar Rebate Program To Arizona Corporate Commissioners, I saved for more than a year to have enough money to invest in a solar electric system for my home in Strawberry. I am greatly disappointed that you voted to allow APS to cut back their rebate program, first cutting the amounts offered, and now limiting the program. I just got a letter saying my April 27 application was rejected. As a state we are wasting the huge natural resource that shines on us 300 days a year. It is short sighted to discontinue the incentives for solar energy.If the demand is high for solar energy, then it should be encouraged. I attended a solar energy seminar last month in Payson that was attended by at least 40 other local citizens. At this session we learned that solar panels are more effective in the Rim country because they do not lose as much energy to heat dissipation compared to Phoenix. I would like to know if the distribution of rebates has been equitable to the rural towns. I do not follow Commissioner Mayes assertion that the solar suppliers will drop their material costs; in this economic down turn, the State ought to do everything possible to generate more business transactions, not less. As a result of losing the rebate, I likely will not be able to hire a local Flagstaff company to do the work That hurts the economy. Please do not cut back this program- expand it. Maybe Arizona can do something truly progressive with energy? How much more Arizona stupid decision making can I take? Indeed the golden dreamy soft gel focused ideal of the leisurely retirement lifestyle, you know, out there shopping for vinyl or sitting at cafes writing novels (hee hee, that pingback is for you, Martin). Sound Effect by Matias Massa from Pixabay Nope not me, I am still at full time work at Open Education Global and the real work of blogging here ;-) But I did get this interesting email from BCPensions: We've received notice from your former employer that your employment ended on December 17, 2021. As a vested College Pension Plan member, whose age at termination of employment was over the earliest retirement age, you're entitled to a monthly pension benefit and are eligible to apply for your pension immediately. This letter outlines your options and explains how to apply for your pension. Indeed, in 2020 and 2021 I had contracts to do web development for a few projects with the Justice Institute of British Columbia (mostly likely I have Tannis Morgan to thank for the referral. And the JIBC system had my hired as a Sessional Employee (working remotely from 2 provinces to the east), but it also meant for that time period I was paying into the BCPension fund. And now just being around for a bit longer means that even though I am still working, I can start tapping into that fortune starting next month. Look at me on the retirement gravy train (after taxes, the monthly amount might be enough to buy 3/4 of a tank of gas, but its something). But it was a fun reminder of the work I got to do then, back in my gravy days of WordPress development (have I used that expression twice in a post? obvious I ain't writing with Claude), and it was good stuff. The funny thing is that this 6 year old project web site is still online fully functional. BC Corrections Leadership The first project was a resource for leadership in the BC Corrections system (good proof I can work in content I know nothing about). As we called it in oiur team "CorrLeader" was a mix of accumulated resources and also a guide to programs and offerings from the organization and JIBC. BC Corrections Leadership site https://corrleader.jibc.ca/ Peter, the project leader had much of the concepty organized but what I liked working with him was his interest in the metaphors and the visuals. So we developed this idea of leadership being a complex terrain, and sometimes we traveled it as specified by a map and other times exploring by a compass. There were a few prototypes with generated maps and toying with Leaflet.Js but in ended up being rolled into WordPress with an elegant theme. One of my proudest parts was, after hearing how busy these leaders are, they don't have time to look at a computer all day, that often they were on mobile. I dug into the WordPress API and did a lot of monkeying with JQuery and local storage to create a mobile side site that could display the latest resource, and allow the person using it to use and save filters for content they were interested in. https://cogdogblog.com/2019/10/corrleader-navigator/ It's even more remarkable that the Navigator site ( just HTML/CSS/JS) is also still online and working https://host.jibc.ca/ccjd/corrleadernav/ Towards the end, we even added a podcast called CorrTalk that was done all by the project leads, Sarah and Peter (who was a natural at being a host). I'm still not sure of how/why ther web site is still there and functioning. Do they still use it? (nobody updates). Is it one of those projects that organizations forget about and thus it lives longer? Segregation Reform Program The second project is one I am a bit rusty on, it was again a whole series of standalone course-like materials about models of Corrections that move away and beyond punishment. The specifications were that it would be built in Articulate Rise (A tool I never used before but learned as I went) that was in some ways a bit interesting to use as it was in someways very flexible but also very limited, no hacking on functionality like WordPress. The course content was embedded into a Blackboard course, and I believe then the module end quizzes were scored there. There were modules in Introduction to Segregation Reform, Administrative Fairness, Indigenous Cultural Awareness, Trauma-Informed Practice, Mental Health Needs in Custody Settings (I know these from a hardrive folder of content folders). JIBC provided me access to a vast collection of photos from Corrections facilities I could use, I just had to blur any faces of inmates. The one post about the project I could fine was all about playing with custom CSS to do better bullet points (?) https://cogdogblog.com/2020/12/when-asking-a-long-time-for-larger-bullet-points/ Again i was surprised/shocked to find in my notes that the login I used at the time still works! I was able last night to peek at the old content I built. And So? I got this far without a real destination for this post. It still strikes me odd that much of this web/digital content still lives. I wonder if there is a term for bits of the web that still live because most people who would normally nuke a web site just forgot about them. Like survival by neglect? But mostly I remember these projects as part of the long arc I had in working with colleagues who loved teasing out ideas, not afraid to try new things, and also gave me a lot of leeway in choosing visual and functional design. Yeah, I think that is what I retired from... the fun/exciting work all in a time of optimism or belief in the potential of digital tools interwoven with human creativity. Now it's just Ask Claude blah blah blah blah borg. Not me, as I am not retired from work or creativity. Featured Image: Retired flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I love the idea of dotsub.com user generated video captioning -- In the spirit of blog efficiency/laziness, I am copy/pasting what I've just posted at the NMC Campus Observer: A few weeks ago we shared about a nifty new web video concept where uploaded video is set up so speakers of other languages can add localized captions. We are still impressed with the very 2.0ish idea that dotsub offers -- user generated video captions. In our example, the folks at dotsub seeded our NMC Campus Seriously Engaging video with English captions from the original video (they did this in a very quick time frame, FYI). Just checking in today, I am seeing that someone has done 36% of the video in Italian: We are hoping with a bit of encouragement (nod nod, wink wink) that we can inspire speakers of the numerous other languages to jump in and try some captioning. It's just a matter of creating a free account at dotsub, and going to our movie page, and select from the Translate This Film to say a language you know, perhaps.... Abkhazian, Acholi, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Avestan, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bambara, Bashkir, Basque, Bengali, Bhutani, Bihari, Bikol, Bislama, Bokmal Norwegian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Byelorussian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Cape Verdean Creole, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Chuokese, Chuvash, Cornish, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari (Afghan Persian), Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Fante, Faroese, Farsi, Fiji, Finnish, Flemish, French, Frisian, Fruilian, Fula, Ga, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Greenlandic, Guaran, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Herero, Hiligaynon, Hindi, Hiri Motu, Hmong, Hungarian, Iban, Icelandic, Ilocano, Indonesian, Interlingua, Inuktitut, Inupiak, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Iteso, Japadwohla, Japanese, Javanese, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kannada, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kikuyu, Kinyaruanda, Kirghiz, Kirundi, Komi, Korean, Kpelle, Kumam, Kurdish, Lango, Laothian, Latin, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luganda, Lugisu, Lugwere, Lululi, Lunyankole, Lunyoro, Luo, Lusamya, Lusoga, Luxemburgish, Maasai, Macedonian, Madi, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Malinke, Maltese, Mandarin, Manx Gaelic, Maori, Marathi, Marshall, Mirpuri, Moldavian, Mongolian, Nauru, Navajo, Ndebele, Ndonga, Nepali, Nigerian, North, Norwegian, Nuer, Nyanja, Nynorsk Norwegian, Occitan, Oriya, Oromo, Ossetian, Pali, Pananyano, Papiamiento, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Pushto, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Sami, Samoan, Sangho, Sanskrit, Sardinian, Scots Gaelic, Serbian, Serbo-Croat, Sesotho, Setswana, Shona, Sindhi, Singhalese, Siswati, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, South Ndebele, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tajik, Tamazight, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Tonga, Tsonga, Turkish, Turkmen, Twi, Uigur, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Volapuk, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zhuang, or Zulu! This would of course (ahem, nudge nudge, wink, nod, prod) be a fabulous activity for any language teacher, and there are many other videos on the site that could be used for a similar activity. Blush. My flickr photo of the two headed shower at the Horton Plaza Westin (San Diego) is now the banner image at Starwoodlobby.com as part of their review of this hotel: Here is yet another new ds106 assignment. There are not quite as many for the writing type, so I wanted to add to the bucket. This builds off of the Photo Translation one (I am stoked to see folks playing with it right off the bat) and uses the Words with No Translation tool. I call this one "My Dinner with Toska" - given that Scottlo was the first off the bat to try my last assignment, where he created a personality named Toska, and playing with my utter non understanding of the movie My Dinner with Andre Write the script for a conversation with your long lost friend Toska, who deals with 'a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning.'. Generate five random words from the Words with No Translation tool and make sure Toska uses one word in each of his lines, making sure his words give some shade to their meaning. The tag for this assignment is WritingAssignments310 and you can find it at http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/my-dinner-with-toska/ My random words to use were: Kummerspeck: "Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon." Zhaghzhagh: "The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage" Luftmensch: "The Yiddish have scores of words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person." Gumusservi: "Meteorologists can be poets in Turkey with words like this at their disposal. It means moonlight shining on water." Dépaysement: "The sensation of being in another country." Here is the conversation from My Dinner with Toska: Alan: Toska, Toska, it has been so long since we saw each other. Thank you for inviting me to dinner. How do you feel, comrade? Toska: Oi oi, with all of this moving around the world I am in permanent state of dépaysement- are we really in America? Alan: Indeed we are, I hope you drove on the right side of the road getting here. Toska: I did, although after a week on the beach in Tahiti, I cannot tell if the zhaghzhagh is from the cold here or dealing with the incompetent drivers in this town. Alan: What can you do? They practically give away drivers licenses in Walmart. Toska: Absolutely, although they turn the favor by electing all of these luftmensches to political office who can do nothing but dream useless ideas. Alan: I might go ahead an order you a salad. I would guess you are not eating well. Toska: What can I say? After the traic death of my chinchilla, I am bereft with kummerspeck from all of the junk food I eat. All I want to eat are are pork rinds and cheetoes. I cannot stop myself. Alan: Toska, you are a spirit the world needs, you should take care of yourself better. Toska: It is time indeed that I took a trip to the mountains, go out onto that edge of the lake, and soak in the tranquilty of the gumusservi; I think I shall make that my dessert after our fine meal. I am calling my travel agent now. There you go! What will be the flow of your dinner chat with Toska? PS- I realize for my cheesy graphic I should have pasted Toska over Andre, but his suit seemed to fit well over that image of Wallace Shawn. Sue me. 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…) Saying I am excited is an understatement for the tinkering that has produced the previously described TRU Writer site. I spent time on a Friday night just fiddling with functionality no one will ever notice. In summary, the notion of the SPLOTs I am working on here at TRU with Brian Lamb is... well here is a draft of a session we will do in February for a local event: All too often, educators wanting to use online environments are given two stark choices. They might stay within the well constructed but limited capabilities of a learning management system. Or they might try to utilize the power and freedom of the open web. To the newcomer, open web tools can seem frightening in their multi-faceted approaches and in the perceived risks to user privacy. Enter SPLOT: Simplest Possible Learning Online Tools. SPLOTs are developed with two key principles in mind: 1) to make sharing content creation on the web as simple as possible, and 2) to let users do so without having to create accounts or divulge any personal data whatsoever. Brian and Alan will share prototype SPLOTs, let you try them out, and engage a discussion with participants on how these tools might support engaging and relatively painless online and blended learning. The idea of the TRU Writer is a simple way for faculty, researchers, students to publish web content in a rich, media form without having them create accounts. Rather than try and explain, take a ride on the random example spinner (Randomness is something I nearly always try to toss into the mix). One thing that came up when discussing the idea--before coding the site-- with Will Garrett-Petts (Associate Vice-President Research & Graduate Studies) was he did not see people interesting in composing in a Wordpress interface. Most academics, and what he was used to, was writing in MS Word. At the time, I was sure that paste contrent into MS Word was an HTML disaster... until I did some research and found that the TinyMCE editor in Wordpress 3.9 was capabable of stripping out 95% of the cruft Word puts into HTML. [caption id="attachment_38951" align="aligncenter" width="566"] The Word cut/paste test created this...[/caption] Brian gave it his test last weekend and cut/pasted in from a Word document the full formatted content from the Reclaim Innovation EDUCAUSE article he and Jim Groom published this year. See how it renders in TRU Writer. There is some white space cleanup, and maybe some header conversion that can be done, but most of the effort is done. And, in TRU Writer, you can add extra images, and embed media (this is by no means as rich as the version created by EDUCAUSE, but was done in less than 5 minutes). The funny, unintentional thing is, that because this is Wordpress, it sent an old fashioned trackback ping to Bryan Alexander's blog, and Bryan tweeted it right away: https://twitter.com/BryanAlexander/status/541416831081529344 Internet, you so ironic. Now is the time where I can ask people to try the site out at http://splot.ca/writer. There are design gaps in the interface, and the help screens are a joke. [caption id="attachment_38948" align="aligncenter" width="630"] One day all the help tips will be yours...[/caption] That little bit was fun- figuring out how to create a lightbox screen rather than sending a user elsewhere, a h/t to tutsplus. Now that I have done it once, I can use this again. I'll relay below some of the new things I've done in a week; the theme is hanging on github but still needs some wax and polish and torque screwdrivers. The TRU Writer theme is developed as a child theme of a beautiful, free Radcliffe theme I found in the Wordpress collection. It's definitely medium-like. Did I say "free"? The magic sauce here is to give access to some features you only get by logging in to Wordpress as an Author role, like the Comparator tool, I invisibly, secretly... log you in to Wordpress as an author role. This is done by an invisible login script to an account, removing the admin toolbar and access to the dashboard, and adding (new here) an automatic logout after 2 hours. I've made this even more elegant (I think). The page template that generates the writing tool, first checks for an active login (meaning are you logged in either as a secret author or as an editor/admin)? // already not logged in? go to desk. if ( !is_user_logged_in() ) { wp_redirect ( site_url() . '/desk' ); exit; } If not, you get sent to the "desk" page- it actually takes care of the other case, if you are already logged in and for some reason go to this page, you get redirected to the writer tool // already logged in? go directly to the tool if ( is_user_logged_in() ) { wp_redirect ( site_url() . '/write' ); exit; } Otherwise, you have to enter an access code, a really low security fence as a means to grant access on a per site basis There is even a hint that pops up if you get it wrong (BTW, the super secret access code for this demo site is tru writer). and that gets you back to the writing form previously described. On the form you enter a title, however you wish to be attributed as author, an option to upload a header image, categories, tags, and then the Wordpress visual editor. What I added recently is a chance to add a note that only the editor will see As a TRU Writer, you edit, save, preview... edit, save, preview... and when you "submit" you are done. But the writing gets saved only as a draft (actually it is saved as a draft from he first save, submitting it switches on another category for the editors to use to fund submitted work. So everything is moderated. For my test, I used a Word document of the final formatted version for the Web 2.0 Storytelling EDUCAUSE Review article I wrote way back when with Bryan Alexander. There was something I wanted to test- while the Wordpress editor does a great cleaning job with content from MS Word, you lose the embedding images. They can be added to the TRU Writer using the same media uploader you use in Wordpress But getting images out of Word can be a butt pain. Well, until I googled and found an awesome tip from Clement Nedelcu's Development Journal. If you make a copy of a *.docx file, and change the file extension to *.zip you can then open the compressed file and find all the embedded images. Bingo! They end up inside the word -> media folder! This took but a few minutes to load into the TRU Writer, where I removed extra white space, added some images, and boom! It's online http://splot.ca/writer/2014/101 An extra bonus you get from doing this (secretly) in Wordpress, is you can embed media with a single URL. See the example of Lincoln's speech to the People of Sangamon County. The bits I have been working on including making the editing form wider so you have more space to work in the educator (that is removing the class name from a single div), but mostly setting it up so the sitre can be configured for other deployments. This meant creating an admin options screen: [caption id="attachment_38956" align="aligncenter" width="630"] TRU Writer admin options Screen part 1[/caption] For any site you can customize the access code and a hint given to failed attempts (like "the course name" or "school mascot"). And you define the default header image used if the writer does not provide one. [caption id="attachment_38958" align="aligncenter" width="630"] TRU Writer admin options Screen part 2[/caption] The next section allows you to enter email address for editors; these are people you would set up to proof and publish submitted works (email notification not quite working, need to deal with getting it by phish detectors). There are also a few status messages that check for the activation of the plugin that provides the estimated reading time, and also that the secret author account has been set up. We see this a publishing platform, so I removed the comments part, though now that I think about it, I can just make that another admin option (This is a prime example of how I never anticipate all the design elements ahead of time, its an iterative process for me as I work on projects). But before I did , there was a comment from the ever reading Sandy Brown Jensen Brown Jensen Br... I'm not sure either. I can see setting up sites for just a course, or maybe as a single online journal. The front index page could be recast as a formal intro by making the front of the site a static page. I am counting on other people to figure out some more use cases (as I google "cibra from ashes") -- was that supposed to be cobra? You tell me. Try some quick publishing at http://splot.ca/writer/. cc licensed (BY) flickr photo by mezone: http://flickr.com/photos/mezone/21970578 Just rolled a new feature into the Daily Blank Wordpress theme that's been on my whiteboard list for a few months (speaking of that, where is my whiteboard?). Note: I just found this post sitting in my drafts, written like 5 months ago. Oops. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] My Own Lame Whiteboard Joke flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] This is the theme built for sites like the DS106 Daily Create for regularly published challenges that people respond to via twitter. I've used it for several projects like the UDG Agora Daily Try, the UDG Mural Project Daily Opener, the Ontario Extend project Daily Extend, and for my last class of Networked Narratives, a Daily Digital Alchemy. Also, Mariana Funes runs a Daily Stillness site using the theme. Having managed all these I know two ongoing issues I could code some fixes for. One is a bit practical in that for short term project sites like the UDG Agora Daily Try, the UDG Mural Project Daily Opener, and my class ones, they are not active after a time period. There's no reason to have these sites be knocking at twitter's API every hour. So there is now a "Standby Mode" in the admin options: [caption id="attachment_66313" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Standby mode activated[/caption] I have a status indicator now added as well as a date/time stamp for the last time it sent an update requests for tweets. In standby mode, you can manually push a request by the button there. Someone has to be nice to the APIs. The other issue is keeping track when the queue of daily activities runs dry. In these sites, each daily is a new Wordpress Post, and is set to be scheduled 24 days in the future after the last one in the queue. How do you know when the supply is low? I do have a dashboard admin widget; here is what admins of the DS106 Daily Create see when logged in: They have 42 in the queue, so it's no problem - we have Sarah, Niall, and Bill G in there tending to the daily creates, they must have that new site manager eagerness thing going. I usually tried to stay a week ahead of hitting Empty. I lapsed a few times in the Daily Digital Alchemy where I was lucky to have a feature named @dogtrax (thanks Kevin!) https://twitter.com/dogtrax/status/967514317506711553 https://twitter.com/dogtrax/status/849364197544783874 https://twitter.com/dogtrax/status/840302867386945538 Always helpful to have a watchdog. I've had this idea for a while, coded it a few days ago, and have been testing. It's a theme option where you can designate how low a supply of dailies will trigger a warning, and when it hits that level, that it should email accounts listed in the options too. The site already uses wp_schedule_event to trigger it once an hour to check twitter's API for new tweets. It's a Wordpress hook into the servers's cron tool. I modified by call to the action so it will not trigger if standby mode is on: if ( ! wp_next_scheduled( 'dailyblank_hello_twitter' ) AND dailyblank_option('standby') == 'off' ) { wp_schedule_event( time(), 'hourly', 'dailyblank_hello_twitter'); } This sets up the scheduler to go, and once the hour mark has passed, it hits an action which then calls a function to look for replies to the site's twitter account: // custom action triggered by event for checking for new tweets add_action( 'dailyblank_hello_twitter', 'dailyblank_get_tweets', 10, 0); function dailyblank_get_tweets( $show_fb = false, $manual_mode = false ) { // fetch the twitter account timeline for replies, grab 100 at a time (200 is max), we want replies and user deets // exit stage left if we are in standby mode and not called by admin request if ( dailyblank_option('standby') == 'on' AND !$manual_mode ) return; $tweets = getTweets( dailyblank_option('twitteraccount'), 150, array('exclude_replies'=>false, 'trim_user' => false ) ); : : I was able to also use wp_schedule_event to set up a once a day event, this time, I am telling Wordpress to run it two hours after the time each day it publishes a new daily: // add a schedule to check for low supply of dailies, set the time to be 2 hours // after the scheduled time if ( ! wp_next_scheduled( 'dailyblank_low_supply' ) AND dailyblank_option('standby') == 'off' ) { wp_schedule_event( strtotime( 'today+' . dailyblank_option('dailytime') ) + 3600*2, 'daily', 'dailyblank_low_supply'); } The action triggered for this, should, each day, send an email to specified people if the supply of scheduled posts (dailies) is below the threshold specified in the options (I have a range of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 days as options) add_action( 'dailyblank_low_supply', 'dailyblank_check_supply', 10, 0); function dailyblank_check_supply() { if ( dailyblank_option('supply') == 0 ) return; $scheduled_dailies = getScheduledCount(); // if we are at critical level if ( $scheduled_dailies <= dailyblank_option('supply') ) dailyblank_notify_low_supply( $scheduled_dailies ); } The function dailyblank_notify_low_supply($scheduled_dailies) function dailyblank_notify_low_supply( $current ) { // Let's do some EMAIL! // who gets mail? They do. $to_recipients = explode( "," , dailyblank_option( 'notify' ) ); // what's it say? $subject = get_bloginfo('name') . ' is getting low on scheduled dailies'; $message = 'The number of scheduled dailies on your site ' . get_bloginfo('name') . ' is currently at ' . $current . ' and the settings are to warn you when the supply level is at ' . dailyblank_option('supply') . '. Surely you do not want to let it lapse! (And yes, I will keep calling you Shirley). Check the queue of scheduled dailies: ' . admin_url( 'edit.php?post_status=future&post_type=post') . ' You may want to create a few new ones ASAP! ' . admin_url( 'post-new.php'); if ( getDraftCount() > 0 ) $message.= ' Also there are currently ' . getDraftCount() . ' ones to possibly deploy in the submitted dailies: ' . admin_url( 'edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=post'); // mail it! wp_mail( $to_recipients, $subject, $message ); } So far, on about 5 sites testing, it seems to be working well. Of course those folks piling up 42 in the queue may never need the low supply warning. I'm happy to cross this one off my whiteboard (when I find it)-- it's heading to the Github repo soon. This is one of my favorite duct taped themes- it has some nifty tricks for dealing with scheduling, hitting and parsing the twitter API. I don't see much uptake beyond a few others on making a Daily ____ site (most are mine), yet I think, beyond the techness (which is enough to drive most people away), it's one of my favorite teaching/PD tools, having people do low stake challenges on a regular basis. Featured Image: Pixabay fuel gauge image by PublicDomainPictures shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 combined with Noun Project icon daily calendar by Linseed Studio licensed under Creative Commons CC BY. Inspired by tonight's #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It's a break in the action from grading. No, it's just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop til you frame it out. I present, what happens when Educational Technology meets a MOOC in a field, you get E.T. The MOOC(ie). This was done in Photnshop CS5 with a bunch of layer hi-jinks, starting with basic images of cow in field, and a PNG file of ET (useful for its transparent background). I separated the cow from the background, and backfilled it with some clone brush of the grass. I used two shades of blue and the Render Clouds to fill in the sky. I had a GIF of a flying saucer from a preious project; I opened that in PhotoShop, copied all of the frames from the animation palette. In my cow file, I made copies of the frames, enough to have twice as many as the animation. I pasted in the spaceship frames (paste into frames option), and nudged it around in layers below the cow to make it land. I brought ET in at several sizes, and made hime waddle up from the ship (flipping it horizontal was cheat enough). I duplicated the bigger versions of the cow and ET, so I had two layers, and in one used the puppet warp to bend their eyes toward each other. Then it was a matter of droppng in some text, turning layers on and off as needed, and chaning the frame timing to give it pause in places. Super goofy. It's a scarcy combination, but it really is friendly. Following a link in an email notification from Jay Allen's Comment Spam web site, I came across the best "404 Document Not Found" page I've seen in a while: For more fun things like this, or if you have some large amounts of time to idle away, check out the 404 Research Lab, which beyond featuring some of the better 404 Server Messages, has an explanation of 404, tips for web site visitors for getting around 404s, and suggestions for webmasters to do something more elegant than the out of the box server error message. It was a while ago I blogged something about Doing Something Solar... I've not done a *whole* lot since then, but am planning on some research over the (sunny) summer on what it might take to rig some solar panels into my home grid. The folks at Connect2Earth were nice enough for doing something nice for me- for mentioning of their project, they sent me this cool gift. It is a Solio Hybrid Charger which has panels that can use the sun to fill its battery and in turn, re-charge any device powered by USB type connectors, including the iPhone. I've charged the battery up since I got home and will be testing the power of the phone charge (I don't know if it is me, but my phone seems to charge more fully off of the A/C than my laptop). I can see some future use as a backpack tool just so I can fully geek out (or call for help) out in the woods. But even at home, if I keep this charged by the sun, and use it to power the phone and my mp3 player, well, it might just be a tiny tiny less amount of electric sucked from the coal burning on the grid. At least it seems to work better than my little hand crank/solar charger I keep in the car. So it's a small solar start. I am super impressed with the personal treatment from the Connect2Earth folks- along with the nice gift was a personal letter, even if it was a mail merge, it sure felt genuine (thanks Vicky). Amazing what a bit of personal attention can get you these days. Should not be a surprise, but it sure feels rare. I am charged up! Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3583355309 2009/365/151 Powered by the iSun flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by psychemedia A few days ago the Great and Magical Visualization Wizard, Sir (I shall knight him) Tony Hirst posted to flickr this "Quick sketch - @cogdog follower ESP"- an analysis of my own twitter followers, who they follow, or how he described it: This sketch was generated using a technique I'm starting to call (for my own convenience as much as anything) Emergent Social Positioning (ESP). The idea is basically this: grab a sample of followers of an individual (197 in the above case), then generate a graph with links from those followers to either all, or a sample of, the people they follow. ... The result is a filtered graph, such as the sketch above, that shows how the original target account (the one from which we sampled the original follower list) is positioned in social space by their followers. That is, we see who else the followers of the target account follow in significant numbers. Tony wrote more detail in the caption for his original image. In visualizations, the question seems to be, is there meaning in the patterns or do we try to make meaning out of the patterns? I have been trying to qualitatively determine if the distributions make sense to me. In the following images, I merely bought the base graph into Photoshop, and did some lasso areas around groups that seemed to make sense to me. This first group jumped out first as being mostly, or all, people/organizations in K-12 education. It is also the largest area among the groupings I made; so I wonder Tony if the spread has meaning too. There also seems to be a variation moving east to west in this grouping, from more classroom/teaching educators to ones who support/admin/consult in the field. Continuing this breakdown within the field, to the west I find many of my colleagues from higher education. I am not sure if there is a similar axial relationship, although I see more organizations (NMC, EDUCAUSE) to the west edge of this region. This region is closer to my location makes sense sincde more of my work as been in higher ed. Lying south of the higher ed region are the people who do more work in learning outside of education, e.g. corporate e-learning. It is a smaller group, and the node sizes are much smaller, and farthest form my location, so they are related to my followers yes, but perhaps in a less strong way. I also noticed a grouping of colleagues from the UK, but they were also in proximity to ones from Canada and Australia (I missed a number of outliers), this is the only attempt I made to isolate a geographic group, but it seems to be there. The other really obvious grouping I call my "Core" since these are people I identify with the most, or were colleagues in my previous work, and also likely communicate the most with in twitter, but I also reached out to lasso in people I have also met in person. They are proximally located to my node, and also are among the larger of the node sizes (the size of the text). The area that makes the least sense, (with the exception of @bgblogging, but Barbara is in my mind, a locus of uniqueness) are right around the location my own spot. I;'ve not come up with any grouping of these beyond "etc" (@TechCrunch to @BarackObama to @dailyShoot to @cshirky?) It's sort of a technical other group, but I decided to leave it unclassified. Now getting back to meaning- Tony performs some magic eigenvector-mumbo-jumbo math on a large pile of data and generates this set of patterns. I can look at it and find some meaning or logic to it all. It is interesting, for sure, and makes me wonder what other ways there are to slice, dice, Julienne fry the data. This all leads back to a fascinating set of writing shared by @rubenrp today on twitter- the World Question Center Edge question for 2011 includes the ideas of many science, technology, culture leaders to the question, "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?" On our drive today from Montreal back to the Toronto region, I read a few of these out loud to a friend as she drove. One we both enjoyed was Everyday Apophenia by David Pizarro, a Psychologist at Cornell University with the fab title of "Researcher in Moral Judgment". Since it is short, I will include the full three paragraph essay-- I find it a bit sad that the original articles lack any hypertext, maybe it is because Nicholas Carr is on board and he hates the distractions -- but this is my blog not his, so I am adding some back in. The human brain is an amazing pattern-detecting machine. We possess a variety of mechanisms that allow us to uncover hidden relationships between objects, events, and people. Without these, the sea of data hitting our senses would surely appear random and chaotic. But when our pattern-detection systems misfire they tend to err in the direction of perceiving patterns where none actually exist. The German neurologist Klaus Conrad coined the term "Apophenia" to describe this tendency in patients suffering from certain forms of mental illness. But it is increasingly clear from a variety of findings in the behavioral sciences that this tendency is not limited to ill or uneducated minds; healthy, intelligent people make similar errors on a regular basis: a superstitious athlete sees a connection between victory and a pair of socks, a parent refuses to vaccinate her child because of a perceived causal connection between inoculation and disease, a scientist sees hypothesis-confirming results in random noise, and thousands of people believe the random "shuffle" function on their music software is broken because they mistake spurious coincidence for meaningful connection. In short, the pattern-detection that is responsible for so much of our species' success can just as easily betray us. This tendency to oversee patterns is likely an inevitable by-product of our adaptive pattern-detecting mechanisms. But the ability to acknowledge, track, and guard against this potentially dangerous tendency would be aided if the simple concept of "everyday Apophenia" were an easily accessible concept. This is a helpful reminder; this powerful skill our human brains have to see patterns, quickly, in a lot of information, is extremely useful, but it opens the question to the idea that we may see patterns that maybe do not have any real meaning. I wonder that in the flood of infographics that come our way, or the chart junk that we get on evening news. It's not an easy thing to sort out. For a more detailed look at this phenomena, Michael Shermer's paper in Scientifica American looks useful- Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise: Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it "patternicity," or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. The wikipedia article on Apophenia lists examples including the notion that apophenia is believed to be a common rationale for gambling, in that people believe they see patterns in the distribution of numbers in lotteries and roulette wheels. Another helpful example is Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds in random stimuli, for example, hearing a ringing phone while taking a shower. The noise produced by the running water gives a random background from which the patterned sound of a ringing phone might be "produced". Related examples from pop culture that I have read/seen include William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, and the movies A Beuatiful Mind and Pi. And to come full circle, I know that the word "apophenia" was familiar, since that is the blog name of someone in my Core region above, @zephoria (dana boyd) - where her tag line is "making connections where none previously existed". A final thanks to Tony for giving me a lot of ideas to ponder. This morning's "do the math and taste your antiquity moment" was before a workshop here at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. In the euphoria of my first year on the web (which is honestly still euphoric) my first presentation about the web (and also on the web) was Providing Structured Multimedia Learning Environments- Mosaic for the Internet for the Association for Applied Interactive Multimedia Conference, July 21-23, 1994 in Charleston, South Carolina. More than twenty two years ago. The web page still works http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/aaim/. Tell me what other technology you used in 1994 can make that claim. Limited numbers of copies on floppy disk (both Macintosh and Windows formats) will be available to attendees of the 1994 AAIM conference. Well, anyhow, what I did then, and pretty, much what I did today was to show examples of interesting web sites. Lists of links. I made lists of Community College web sites. Lists of teaching and learning sites on the web. Eventually I built a Bag of URLs collection. List o' mania. Still doing it today- my workshop was called Silly / Useful Web Tricks (made use again of my Morphy the Orangutang and Chicken on a Skateboard image) Old dog, old tricks. We did have an opening run through pechaflickr - the chosen tag was "vacation" and you know what, the photos were not so great. They did it in English, and I liked Doribel's suggestion for them to try it in Spanish. It was about the same. Sometimes you just don't get the whack pictures in the mix. Pretty much what I offered was a set of categories of "tricks" sites I organized as cards in my deck Text Web Tricks Visual Web Tricks Audio Web Tricks Media Mixing Web Tricks Real Time Web Tricks Reference Web Tricks It was not meant by any means to be über comprehensive, just a variety pack of single purpose web-based tools, some that might be useful as is, and some that are just interesting for what they show is possible on the web (like the web version of Spirograph). I demo-ed through the first three categories before our coffee and snack break. After break, i gave them the option to demo the rest, but they took the option I hoped for, where they explored on their own. Quite a few of them spent time searching through animated GIFs at giphy.com -- I spotted you, Doribel, making one. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I saw Antonio building a page with Odyssey. With mostly science teachers in the room, I saw at least three of them exploring the real time earthquake map and noted that they went off from there to some of the other incident maps. And many liked seeing geolocated tweets happen in real time at Tweetping. Carmen, who teaches Biology, had an even stronger interest in the visual tools (I ended up showing her Big Huge Labs which was not even in my list). My idea as to ask them to share what they found, or tools they knew of via the comments box at the bottom of each section. (Comments, are of maybe, a theoretical construct when Points Are Not Attached?) Maybe the most interest and fascination came when I played Listen to Wikipedia, the site that associates musical tones with the real time edit activity of Wikipedia. As it turns, out it made for nice background music for the rest of the workshop. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] After tweeting that, the internet does what it does-- I got a response from someone I did not know, who shared a site that did something like that with bitcoin activity, check out BitListen https://twitter.com/eMJBe/status/700732500222414848 I had plans to transition to talk about and demo SPLOTs, but they were so engrossed in exploring, I could not find an important reason to pull them away. Too bad, as I had designed that special SPLOT card. At least I restrained from putting Brian's face on the card... Now did I get to use the slight remix I made for SPLOT... who now has an official comic character. [caption id="attachment_53701" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Modified from flickr photo by Tom Simpson https://flickr.com/photos/randar/18499512788 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license[/caption] It's not for a loss, I am going to likely use this for a larger presentation next Friday, my last gig here. And a nice touch, along with the coffee, fresh bread, brazos gitano, Myra's fresjh fruit with coconut, is how they seem to like gathering at the end of a workshop for a group photo [caption id="attachment_53698" align="aligncenter" width="630"] photo shared by Bernabé Soto[/caption] And how darn fast Bernabé is with doing the photos and a nice blog post (as well as designing a poster for ever talk I have done here). I of course do not find any problem in setting up a collection of links to explore. One might flog me for doing no more than parading a listicle as a workshop. Yet, I have not claims of the Top X sites for Y, and in fact, my hope is to show how incomplete my list is. Because the web is that big, much bigger than 1994 for sure. But I noticed something else. Sending out links via email, web sites, social media is common, but we explore than on our own. There was a nice energy in the room as people gasped and called out, and shared with each other what they were exploring. There is something to the co-exploring in the same space and time? Am I going all old school smarmy turkle? Pffffft. Links are one thing, but exploring them together is another. That's my stand... and I stand like a Chicken on a Skateboard. Top / Featured Image: My mind waffled over metaphors for this post, as did my searches. I ended up sticking with a search on "lists" in Google Images (Search Option Licensed for Reuse, the one that is hidden away in a submenu). Somehow I ended up in a Wikipedia article on the Abydos Kings List chasing another image, but I liked this strip one better. Creative Commons licensed image "Drawing of Abydos King List" from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AbydosKinglistDrawing.png So I am listening to Dave Winer talk about WordPress and The fediverse, and just had to try Wordland and I am now using it to write a post— it’s gonna happen! What happens next? Is it perfectly imperfect? I've finally caught up with my other colleagues in getting into relaxed, holiday, not-at-the-office for a while mode. One of the nice side perks of working in education is getting their holiday schedule, so I am away from the building until January 3, hibernating up in our comfy cabin in Strawberry, in frequently sipping the internet through a 28 kbs dial-up straw. We're wondering where winter is, as high pressure over the southwest has our temps in the mid 60s in the day, and barely below 50 at night, maybe 20 degrees warmer than it ought to be. And there has not been significant precipitation here in Arizona since October. We want snow, but there nearest moisture must be 1000 miles away. Even the last week at Maricopa, the internal email dropped off to almost nil as most made an early exit, and my major accomplishment on my last day (Thursday) was cleaning my office (meaning trashing piles of papers in my desk or shoving important things into an unorganized drawer). With a notice that our carpets were to be cleaned over break, I even got rid of a bunch of crap under the desk, and tried to detangle the mess of cords and cables from an assortment of laptops, hard drives, speakers, extra monitors, audio speakers, video camera, periphials, that I rustle around. It was cable hell under there, and I got them pretty well tidied and bound up more neatly. I know entropy works in my office clutter. But while most people are slowing their life down and spending time with family, the spammers are still running their race pace. 36 hours away from email, and the ratio of real mail to total was about 3 / 127. Boy do I appreciated Thunderbird's spam filters. And here on the blog, the in vain efforts of spammers has been on the rise lately, and the pile of dead spam roaches is growing higher outside the protective wall of the Word Press Spam Karma 2 plugin. Ah, the smell of dead spam frying in napalm. But enough of that... I'm expecting to be engaged next week in mostly non-bog worthy activity (picture a hammock), so I am mulling over blog year 2005 for some highlights and favorite posts. (Ok, D'Arcy inspired me to comb through my archives): Build Your Own DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker (Jan 13, 2005). The first appearance of the MultiPost Bookmarket Maker, now up to maybe 17 different social bookmark sites in the current tool. Skypecasted Today, Some Other Cast Tomorrow (Jan 24, 2005) Skype is for real- an hour plus flawless audio chat with Teemu in Finland. Foibles of my First Pod... er, iRiverCast (Jan 25, 2005). The technology actually owrked doing a video iChat presentation from my office in Arizona to the EDUCAUSE meeting in New Orleans, for a session on the NMC Horizon Project. Helen is Coming To Town! (Feb 23, 2005). Helen Barrett, the "Grandmother" of ePortfolios comes to Maricopa for a successful ePort Dialogue Day. Ocotillo Presentation Under The Belt (Mar 7, 2005). At the Innovations 2005 Conference, our presentation on Ocotillo went great; the conference environment itself was dull, dreadful and saved only by being in Times Sqaure. Out and About At MIT (Mar 12, 2005). A visit to MIT is magical and eye-opening-- doing an invited presentation was another story, but ti went well. A Lamb Comes to Phoenix (Mar 29, 2005) Friend and colleague Brian Lamb comes to Phoenix for a dialogue day on learning objects and wikis Xxxxxxx Xx or Xxx! Copyright Slap from the Ripley's Folks (Apr 6, 2005). Don't use that phrase online, ever. New Feed2JS Mirror and Some India Students Feed Aggregating (Apr 7, 2005) Our code gets some good use by students on the other side of the globe. Harry Mudd and the TCC 2005 Keynote (Apr 21, 2005). A one hour keynote presentation for the TCC 2005 Worldwide Online Conference: "Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future". That was a little too easy (Apr 26, 2005) Migrating this blog from MovableType to Wordpress took about 5 minutes, and loving it ever since. Podless No More (thanks Mom!) (Apr 28, 2005) After months of complaining, I finally get an iPod. WordPress Search Bookmarklet (May 4, 2005). Well I thought it wa suseful, never heard if anyone else did. In Print/Web: "Internet Audio: Can You Hear/Talk to Me Now? Good." (May 9, 2005) The Spring 2005 issue of the mcli Forum hits the web streets, with an article on podcasting and a feed with my audio interviews with 20 some colleagues. My First (sloppy) ScreenCast (May 12, 2005) I am waiting on the Oscar nomination. What a Day! (May 17, 2005) Our biggest and most successful Ocotillo retreat ever; nearly 200 gather at South Mountain Community College for a day full of technology and guests Richard Baranuik and Larry Johnson. Learning Objects R.I.P. (May 24, 2005) Maybe it was not exactly this date, but Learning Objects sure have waned this year. ("I'm not quite dead yet"!). Technology Firehose at San Diego State (May 24, 2005) An invited visit to SDSU, getting to hang out with the legendary Bernie Dodge. When Was Your Blog-Ha Moment? (May 27, 2005). My most 'successful' meme, maybe went as far as 5 people. I Rode the Wiki! (Jun 15, 2005). I have the photo of the most famous bus in Hawaii. Five Minutes of Fame (NMC Conference) (Jun 17, 2005) My gig on Feed2JS, done with S5, got a gong in Hawaii. It felt good. Cat Diaries (NMC Presentation) (Jun 18, 2005) - a packed small room audience, way too much content, and the most ever I twisited Blogger into creating- More Than Cat Diaries. Four Full Days at PSU (Jul 14, 2005) I'm at Littany Lion country for the EDUCAUSE Instructional Technology Leadership Program 2005. My presentation on Living at the Crossroads of IT&ID was fun to create, fun to present, and slightly missed the mark. Live and learn, eh? Conference Bagged (Aug 7, 2005). I'm not crazy about conference bags... To date, on flickr, my flickr meme tag of conferencebag has a total of 3 photos, and 2 of them mine. SAC 2005 Session on Collaboration Tools (Aug 10, 2005) Sharing the presentation stage at the Snowmass conference is Stephen Downes, Phil Long, and little ole me. Conversations: Tree People and Cave Dwellers (Aug 24, 2005) and Distributed Conversations: More Than Four Reasons (Aug 16, 2005), and A Tale of Technology & Two Organizations: CNN vs Education (sep 5, 2005). These barkings got some of the most comments ever (a whopping 10+ each). More Platefulls: The Ocotillo Sandwich Split (Sep 13, 2005) We manage to pull off two large events on the same day. Dusting Off Crusty Old Software (Oct 11, 2005) How fun! A 10 year old project still has interest and users. RSS Mixers (Oct 12, 2005) Lots of feedback on this tool summary. Me 2.0 (Oct 18, 2005) One of the silliest things I have ever written gets some of the most comments ever. Running / Blogging / Running (Oct 18, 2005) Start of my blog to document my efforts of training for a 1/2 Marathon. Podcast Publishing With MovableType (Oct 21, 2005) How we are using an old version of MT to create a system for publishing audio content to multiple sites. Can I Have That in Small, Unmarked Bills Please? (Oct 23, 2005) My blog is worth 72 million clams. Cover Art (Oct 28, 2005). My photo from Death Valley gets used on a CD for a German rock band and the CD arrives in my mailbox in November. Where else but the net can this happen? cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I did this previously (see www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/831736263/ and www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/831736873/in/photostream/) by setting up my little Canon IXY and this new Canon EOS T1i face to face and in timer shutter mode. Cameras at 10 micropaces! So if you feel like you know something pretty well, what is there in restarting? I've been happy for 2 years doing most of my flickr photography with my little pocket Canon cameras: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'd not touched my digital SLR (a first generation Digital Rebel) in a long time, although a few months ago I did spring for a f1.4 50mm lens. But it was a pre-conference photography workshop at last week's NMC Conference that hinted it was time to go back, relearn, We spent about 7 hours with Bill Frakes and Don Henderson making photos at Point Lobos. It was not really a "class" with lots of "lessons". We walked, talked, asked questions, watched, mimic-ed, traded lenses. It was about as informal as one could get. It was the clarity of the people shots with the DSLR that got my attention, and then seeing the magic that others had done pushing depth of field and manual exposures that sparked my interest again. I decide it was one of those points to shuck what I knew how to do and reset. So in about 15 minutes of decision, before leaving the conference hotel, I ordered this new Canon T1i from Amazon (I rely on the user feedback a lot). If it were not for that new lens I got a few months back, I might have gone Nikon (D90 likely), but in the end, the technical differences matter little to me, but this new one is a whole new camera of function, way beyond the old Rebel. Besides the range of exposures, speed, sensor size, a giant screen, pushing ISO, the HD video mode-- wow, I have a lot to learn and relearn. And not only that, the second day of the workshop, Don led us on a quick run through Aperture. I had the software from last year, but never got over that first barrier of overwhelm at a new interface (I was pretty versatile and comfortable editing in iPhoto/PhotoShop). But those 3 hours of hands on got me over the bump, and here I am tossing off my known and familiar knowledge, and going back to 1st grade. Learning is unlearning and relearning. Its not comfortable to go back to a novice state, but with experience, one does not linger there long. I'm tickled, not ecstatic rolling on the floor, about the response among the ds106 participants in creating examples of mini stories using the tools from 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I've always wanted to have more examples to include, and ds106 provides, abides, subsidizes...What is really cool is that they seem to be covering every tool, even the obscure ones. I'll be combing through them all soon, and will be rolling into the new version of the site I need to round out over the next months. Part of the new model is making it easier for people to add directly to the site. In tribute, I whipped together a comic with gnomz, which has been around a long, long time (gnmoz can be wonky, the embed is not working so I did a full page screen grab with Aviary) Full comic is at http://en.gnomz.com/227499-50-nuggets.html flickr cc licensed photo by Kevin Steele I grew up immersed in, surrounded by, bombarded by television. As much as I complain about the generalizations of the "digital natives" I accept that somehow the absorption I had in television as the primary source of media must have shaped me. Somehow. I saw a lot of TV. Somehow blatantly obvious, television as I knew it is long dead. And that's okay. Growing up in Baltimore, my mom told me I learned my numbers from the TV Guide; fortunately, in Baltimore, the major network channels were 2, 11, and 13, so I guess I learned addition from there as well. I watched a lot of cartoons, a lot of Bugs Bunny, and perhaps I was seeded for a future in Arizona based on the landscapes the Roadrunner ran through. When I was diagnosed diabetic at age 7, my grandmother offered a reward- if I learned how to do my own insulin injections myself for 2 weeks, she would buy me my own TV. Sure, I would stick myself with needles for a TV! I loved that little black and white set. I may have thought it was a magical window into another world, but all of the movement through the window came out of it, not into it. flickr cc licensed photo by dog.breath I can recall sitting in our living room in 1969 watching Neil Armstrong step down and bounce gleefully across the surface of the moon. There were the class assemblies when we'd gather to watch the Apollo crew return to earth... we watched on TVs mounted on carts in the auditorium. There was not understanding why the games at the Olympics stopped in 1972, it started not to make sense. There was the time a kid who was the first I knew to have color television invited me over to watch it. I was not all that impressed with Richard Silverman as the movie was "The Wizard of Oz" (which starts off in Black and White) until Dorothy's house landed in a new kind of land. Heck, I thought the Brady Bunch really was this cool happy, perfect family, completely oblivious to the odd stories we heard later about the actors. I think I had a thing for Mary Tyler Moore. The Six Million Dollar Man was believable. Then there was the early teen years with a major, major Charlies Angles crush in Farah Fawcett; yes I had that poster (no more details available) There were sit-coms, we watched them as a family, at dinner. All in the Family may look quaint in its 1970s sets, but it busted out tough topics not broached on TV like racism (remember Archie Bunker and George Jefferson arguing over whether God was black or white), homosexuality, women's rights, etc. Strangely, Archive Bunker was in the end, not a hated character, more pitiable. It broke conventions, and I think I saw every episode of that, as well as M*A*S*H (the latter likely 3 times over). There was the anticipation for September when new shows would all premiere the same week, and the stacking of TV shows in those months when Nielsen was doing their ratings (using technology of pencil and paper logs). When I was in middle school, I heard people talking about this new show that was live on NBC on Saturday nights, late. It was not even on the local NBC station in Baltimore, I could get reception from channel 4 in Washington DC with foil on the antenna and still it was snowy, but this radical show where they made fun of commercials (Akryod's Bass-o-matic), news, and had some bizarre music acts like Leon Redbone and his tuba or the wild imitation of Joe Cocker by John Belushi. Cable TV came when I was in high school, and oh, was that different. Well it was from broadcast TV. HBO actually played movies all the time. Then there was MTV- I saw it from the start, maybe not from the first Video Killed the Television Star, but remember thinking WTF is "Flock of Seagulls?", but getting addicted to the new form, new sounds like the Go-Gos, the Eurthymics, the Stray Cats, Split Enz, Billy Idol, Duran Duran, Adam Ant, Bow Wow Wow, stuff not on the radio where I lived. And what was it about those Vee-jays that made them so calculatedly likable? Last time I checked (and ti was a while ago) I did not see any music playing on MTV. That was the TV I grew up on, and it is dead. flickr cc licensed photo by Kevin Steele The TV that I absorbed was controlled by networks, the content, the time it was shown, was in someone else's hands. I could not interact with it (besides changing channels); I could not comment on it, I was in fact, a pure consumer of content. But we did not of anything else, and TV shows became a center point of conversation ("Did you see the show....") or the family dinner focus. Was I adversely affected by constant exposure to the repeated violence of poor Coyote and Elmer Fudd? Was I stunted by the writing of sit coms? Maybe. Fast forward to now, 2008. I live in a small town in Arizona 100+ miles away from Phoenix, and receive no television signals. There is cable television available, but I have chosen not to subscribe. It does not offer me anything. Yet I have watched all five seasons of Six Feet Under... on DVD. Last year, I watched the entire season of Lost... on iTunes downloads, viewing on my iPod as I traveled. I've recently been browsing and watching content on Hulu; I was able to see the clips from last night's Saturday Night Live just this morning on Hulu. ("Not Quite from Live From Saturday Night...). We have all the independent production of any Joe with a video camera and net connection to YouTube. And I don't find much conversation around a show on TV, it's about some video on the internet. Watching shows, movies, when I want them, over the internet... that is not the TV I remember. I am marveling at the speed at which the Internet has changed the game for television, and am eager to see if the industry can really find a modern way, or fade off to the distance. It has not only been flattened, TV has been put to rest. I don't know what to call this new stuff, but it's not TV as I knew it. And that is more than fine with me. Is it even TV- "Tele-Vision" -televised vision, anymore? But did that long exposure to TV affect me? I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque... I believe in wikis.... but they are very strange internet things to wrap your head around. I met today with David, one of the co-chairs of our ePortfolio Ocotillo Action Group and we had an interesting discussion on how to make wikis approachable and appreciated (and used) by people who have never ventured into them. "Blogs are the rage, in a lot of media, and there is now some 'shame' pressure for people to get into blogs.. but wikis??? it's not even on the radar" And even when you explain the Hawaiian source of the word, it does not seem to register or connote a web-based collaborative, hyperlinked space when you say the word. It just sounds goofy. David is a bleeding edge technology faculty (having jumped into HTML in 1994) and he struggles with how wikis might be best used (we planned for collaborative building of resource collections, brainstorming answers to ideal eportfolio features, etc). He definitely gets the purpose and uniqueness of the environment, but recognizes the wiki conundrum: the way to understand how wikis work is to have a successful wiki experience. And at first visit to a wiki, there is little that guides you. So if you send a wiki URL by email to a colleague who has never used a wiki before, how will you set them up for success? Beyond that there is a question that has nagged me. As a technology, wikis have been around since the 1990s, old, simple (not bad characteristics) technology. But when someone writes about what wikis are, why does it seem like there are no great wiki successes to share beyond the WikiPedia (which is excellent but on a scale, breadth, and level far beyond what mere mortals can create)? Where are all the great wikis to stand up as the shining examples? Where have the wikis gone? Why are the so few that leap to mind? They are out there- I am sure, but if you got a lead, let me know. I'm looking for ones that are meaningful to educators. Offhand, there is the WikiBook project, open source wiki text books. I have found some useful leads via Teaching Wiki, for example the Green Museum wiki. I like how Brian uses wikis at UBC for workshops, reference materials etc. The Blogs and Wikis stuff from Bemidji State University is excellent, but at a first glance, like all wikis, it does not really explicitly exclaim, "this is what makes being a wiki great". It just looks like a busy web page with lots of links. I am optimistic about eventually finding the sweet spot with wikis. I have had a good wiki experiences, so I am a believer. But there may be a reason why wikis have been around so long but have not hit the hyoe curve like weblogs- in current form, they appeal the most to geeks, which is not good enough. So if you've got the lead on some stellar wikis, let me know. Otherwise, I am just have to wiki up to Wikiup (an actual town in Arizona) Oh WordPress, how I love the, let me count the ways... well one of the ways is the ease of embedding all kinds of media sources just with a simple URL. I am surprised seeing so often authors on Wordpress sites adding a link to a YouTube video, when it is even simpler to embed the thing right in the page (it's not just WordPress, I am forever editing posts in the OEG Connect discourse powered site as people do not know how easy it is). It's built into WordPress through some magic called oEmbed that handles it via some mumbo jumbo API passing when a service provides the functionality. All WordPress sites come preset to easy embed all kinds of source content, just stuff from that little tube video site. You know what is even more amazing? or curious? WordPress supports embedding from Giphy but does not list it, in fact it lists it as removed. Still Giphs for me... (ah now I am really distracted) https://giphy.com/gifs/shocked-jurassic-park-amazed-zz00w5nNFMnPq More amazing than living dinosaurs! https://giphy.com/gifs/shocked-jurassic-park-amazed-zz00w5nNFMnPq With some elbow grease, you can enable support for other services not available in WordPress. I've done a lot of similar stuff to make the SPLOTbox theme work to embed featured media from a URL, but it's a little different to enable autoembeds from any editing block or ye olde classic editor. Enabling Some Audio Auto Embeds I wanted to add some very simple ways on a WordPress site Cori uses with her high school students to post audio reflections. When you think about trying to provide upload support for all the kinds of weird audio formats you get from different devices, it gets messy. My thought was to have students record on either Vocaroo or Sodaphonic Boombox - where you can record audio via a web interface (mobile too) that is saved as a link. The best part no accounts are needed nor is any personal identification collected. Okay, easy to record and save as a link (that also provides an embed code, but I am not wanting to ask people to deal with raw HTML). How to get in a WordPress post? Yes a shortcode is easy to do, but people have to remember their syntax. I briefly wondered about making a custom embed block, but I just could not get very far in building that. Then it struck me the easiest way is to add support for these services via an auto embed. Then, they just need to copy and paste that link into a post. Conceptually it is easy as the conversion from a link like https://sodaphonic.com/audio/344uhz2j8NUJjyUkckQq to it's embed code is really a matter of parsing that string of numbers and letters at the end of the URL to embed as: <iframe width="100%" height="156" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://sodaphonic.com/embed/344uhz2j8NUJjyUkckQq"></iframe> Into the wp_embed_register_handler We Go If you are able to deduce from a URL the info needed to generate am embed code, the way in is via the WordPress function wp_register_embed_handler. It calls for setting up a regex (regular expression) to identify a source from a URL. I have maybe a 0.10 level of expertise in regex, it is akin to conversing in Sanskrit or base 13, but I have faked my way through with sifting through Stack Exchange posts and experimenting with tools like Regex101. The Wordpress docs offers a convoluted example based on a weird Forbes video link and I found a rather almost nil set of examples elsewhere. I started by figuring out a regex that could match a Sodaphonic audio URL and return a match for that id part of the URL at the end. You can see, play with it, and make fun of my regex at https://regex101.com/r/v2JCWJ/1 ^https?:\/\/sodaphonic.com\/audio\/([a-zAA-Z0-9]+)(.*)$ I was stumped for a while with my embeds failing, not because of my cheesy regex skiils, but that the method I saw used in the examples of the sprintf structure apparently fails when I have a "%" in my return string (I use it in the iframe to use a width of 100%). With a bit of wriggling, I swapped in my own method. Here is working code I got going to embed both Sodaphonic and Vocaroo audio in a WordPress editor, placed in the functions.php file of the theme I was working for. It really is just a functional called in init to set up the gizmos that catch these URLs in a content area, and a handler for each to turn each URL into its embed code. add_action( 'init', 'cdb_register_embeds' ); function dcb_register_embeds() { // handler for vocaroo audio wp_embed_register_handler( 'vocaroo', '#^https?:\/\/(vocaroo\.com|voca\.ro)\/([a-zAA-Z0-9]+)$#i', 'cdb_handler_vocaroo' ); // handler for sodaphonic boombox audio wp_embed_register_handler( 'sodaphonic', '#^https?:\/\/sodaphonic.com\/audio\/([a-zAA-Z0-9]+)(.*)$#i', 'cdb_handler_sodaphonic' ); } function cdb_handler_vocaroo( $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ) { $embed = '<iframe width="100%" height="60" src="https://vocaroo.com/embed/' . esc_attr($matches[2]) .' ?autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay"></iframe>'; return $embed; } function cdb_handler_sodaphonic( $matches, $attr, $url, $rawattr ) { $embed = '<iframe width="100%" height="156" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://sodaphonic.com/embed/' . esc_attr($matches[1]) .'"></iframe>'; return $embed; } Make it a Plugin? That's a working example. I felt the logical step is to write it into a plugin to maybe of use to others. On creating a new Github repo I found the name I chose was already taken... by me. I had previously done one at https://github.com/cogdog/wp-embed-extras That was one I did a few years ago as a test case, where I had taken the code I made for SPLOTbox to a more generalizable one that enabled embeds of Padlet, Internet Archive, and some experiments with H5P sources, all doable from a single pasted URL. I updated the plugin to include now Vocaroo and Sodaphonic (I pulled the H5P, it was rife with errors from CORS, security stuff I was not invested in sorting out). So if you want some extra media embed-ability, toss the Cogdog Auto Embed Extras WordPress Plugin into your pile. It's a crude plugin, but you could also mine it to pull some custom auto embeds into another custom theme. I do Have a Master Plan (yeah right) https://open.spotify.com/track/5qHlThMlXHyGXb9ky0NFo6?si=1095b543ebcd4602 Yet another WordPress built in autoembed- for a link to a Spotify track I am fiddling with something else on the plate ripe to be easily embedded in WordPress, but it's still in the lab. Stay tuned. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/51764518@N02/51384144205 Vintage Panasonic Radar Matic Transistor Radio With Touch-N-Tune Automatic Tuning, Model R-1010, AM Band, 10 Transistors, Made In Japan, Circa 1966 flickr photo by France1978 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license [Media Description: A vintage transistor radio, a Panasonic Radar Matic, with a front facing speaker and an analog dial to change stations] For more of a lead up to a western flavored version of DS106 starting January 2016, I aimed for another video to solicit interest from KSU students, where I will be teaching it. Bill Genereux suggested doing a video that might be able to go on their local access TV. I had this idea to have us do a Skype call for audio recording, with the idea of overlaying our conversation on clips of western movies where the characters are conversing. Like we had just ridden our horses up on a wide open frontier of storytelling and starting talking about the vastness of the space. Not quite a dub, but... well it is like this https://vimeo.com/143561990 So we are hoping to kick up some dust so that KSU students register for the online course that runs Jan 16 to May 6... CMST 299 Topics in Computer Systems Technology : Digital Storytelling, anyone in the KSU system can get credit for it. If understood Bill correctly, people elsewhere can of course register of they want some official KSU credit. But of course, the ds106 thing is that you can take it for your own interests, as a DS106 open participant. You will need a blog and a twitter account; it is generally easier to hitch a blog solely devoted to this course, but not required. So far, the folks riding with us are going to be the KSU students who sign up for my class and Paul Bond and his ds106 class at University of Mary Washington. In February, 2016, I will be down in the Puerto Rican reaches of the West with Antonio Vantaggiato and we have plans for his media students to ride some with us. Bill has another class at KSU that might be hitched. There is room here for more, of course. I did send up an open google doc where we are rustlingly up as many examples of movies, tv shows, books, novels, music that might be called "Western". I was pleased as sarsaparilla tea to see some nice feller named "Stephen" (heck I bet he might be Canadian) add a batch of links to radio shows to the doc. This totally fits in with our use of DS106 Radio. I'm pretty excited to be teaching again, especially for ds106. If you've been reading or hearing about it, or if you just are just plum tired of those XMOOC stampedes, this could be your golden chance to get a real open web creative jamboree experience. Just jump. In January. There will be stuff set in place before the course, so keep your eyes peeled to http://106tricks.net (where the screen images come from, its a dern pretty lil web site if I say so myself). There is a much longer version of the video too, some 18 minutes, where I have included a few more clips related to ds106. If you are just tired of sitting around the campfire and have heard all the tunes Ole Lucky has blown on his harmonica, check this one out https://vimeo.com/143407387. But I still think my Big106ie is my favorite western flick so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gewrFgO8vk4 Get yer creative boots on for #Western106 Top / Featured Image credit: A screen shot of a web site I made (http://106tricks.net). No argument that I can use a screenshot of my own site, so why is it a problem to make a screenshot of someone else's site? Ot is it? My shot shows a still image of a frame from the movie City Slickers, for which I have no permission. Am I really copying? See how messy this gets? cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Johan Rd When will that MOOC[cow] finally hump over the Gartner peak and slide down to its valley of disillusionment? Is it after the last article published the cites the birth of MOOCism to the Stanford AI class? Might there actually be something out there beyond the EdXCourseraUdacity complex? Continuing the MOOC Mythology is a media created idea that it represents some sort of single entity answer, a fix for something allegedly broken. What is missing is the realization that open courses are experiments, and as Steven Johnson points out in Where Good Ideas Come From, that said ideas come from making mistakes: ... error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path thatr leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. [Lee] de Forest was wrong about the utility of a gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hot upon something that was genuinely useful Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore. And there might be a bit much too glee and cluck-cluck I told you so over Coursera's wobbles with a course that an instructor quit over frustrations with lack of student engagement or the Georgia Tech Fundamentals of Online Education (FOE) that failed to deal with a fundamental of online education (which became a foe). These are no more marks of failure for online education than over countless courses that fail and fumble that we never hear about because they fizzle inside walls we do not see. This is a failure to see MOOCs as a space to experiment and as some sort of cheap answer to how education works (or doesn't depending on your press card). At the same time, just folding up the FOE course and not rolling with it, using it as an opportunity to learn from a mistake, that is a fatal choice. What better a way to show that technology is not infallible, that as teachers, creators we can rise above a bad experience? What is the lesson taught in giving up? (that is an optional essay left for the reader) Last year when Jim and I were teaching ds106, in te first week, nearly all of our student's blogs were hacked. Did we fold? Did we sweep it under the carpet? No, we made it part of the course. Somewhere out here, the Coursera Film class I enrolled in is maybe into week 3. I've not checked in since the first week, and am well on my way to be among the 98% who Sign Up But Don't Last a Week. And yes, I am responsible for my own not learning. But for a course design not to be doing much deal with this effect, is a serious flaw. In any "real" course, the instructor, the institution has a stake in students succeeding, and are proactive in reaching out to students who stop coming to class. Right? For all of their humping of Big Data and touting Just The Enrollment Numbers, the Big Three are missing out seriously on using their own data to be smarter about supporting learners, even if it is an automated email bot. But right now, the model is totally a Field of Dreams approach. And the ending here has no Hollywood Magic. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Stuck in Customs Beyond the reach of the Times, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, beyond the bright lights of the TED stage, out where venture capital funders and Friedman do not dirty their oxford shoes, are places where the real experimentation and groundbreaking is happening. This is being done by people motivated by making learning happen better, not more cheaply or more massively, or more trendily. These are just few I know of. I am sure there are more out there. Pedagogy First http://pedagogyfirst.org/wppf12/ Lisa Lane is a tireless leader for this effort to help teachers become versatile in online teaching. The platform is not funded by gobs of Gates Money or some custom software, Lisa and her crew keep a wordpress site running with her own roll of scotch tape, and use a variety of web based tools to facilitate the class (It is one thing I do glance at in Facebook). The Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class, an open online class, will begin again in September 2013.. The class is free, offered by the Program for Online Teaching (not an accredited institution), run by volunteer faculty and participants, and open to everyone. We offer a certificate for those who fulfill the syllabus requirements, and open participation for anyone not interested in the certificate... Our in-house program differs considerably from other certification programs in that it emphasizes pedagogy over tool use. Our philosophy is that technology tools should always be at the command of the instructor's pedagogy, and not the other way around. It is similar to other programs in that it requires significant time spent working in the online environment itself. PHUBU: Phonar For Us By Us https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102809428854478622002 I wrote last summer about Jonathan Worth's open photography course efforts at Coventry University, both phonar and picbod being examples closes to ds106 in being rooted with a class but extending their reach far via the invitation for people around he world to participate in the classes projects, and partaking of the impressive list of professional photographers Jonathan taps into. An amazing and perhaps in hindsight, not unsurprising thing happened, the Coventry students who had experienced this form of class demanded a similar format for their final program requirement: Phonar ended 2012 like a supertanker trying to stop at traffic lights. Messily and with significant momentum. So much momentum in fact that the same students who you've seen submit to the will-of-open in both phonar2012 and picbod have demanded that their next class be open too. But better; designed by them, for them and supported by those people formally referred to as "˜teachers'. So what does this mean? It means that most of the projects you've seen grow in #phonar2012 will evolve (in some cases mutate) into Final Major Projects in 2013... Phonar for Us By Us (#Phubu) will run in Google communities and has been designed by the students. The program is structured to be a live and open workshop which everyone can take part in. They've ditched one onsite member of staff in favour of re-allocating those resources to hire three off-site mentors and a series of guest speakers (which you can book one-on-one time with). The Google community/website is to act as a pinboard and support network for us all "“ which means we'd love for you to come along with us on this next leg of the journey. Is this not astounding? In your garden variety MegaBuck MOOC, 98% of the people are never heard from again; here the students not only finished, they said, we want more. They demanded an open course. If I was in some sort of media business, I'd be all over this story. But can anything exemplify more the experimental spirit than the crew at Coventry has done here? Did they say, "Sorry that is not in our business plan?" No they picked up and said, "Yeah man, let's do it." ETMOOC http://etmooc.org/ The Educational Technology and Media MOOC being steered by Alec Couros is way on the edge of the spectrum of being a "course" it is way more community. Forging the usual "This is the Way Courses Have Been Done Since The Plow Was Invented" pace of a new topic a week, the structure is topics being spread over a 2 week period. Participants tap in to different parts of it, via twitter, a Google Community, and their own blogs that are syndicated into the main site. The course is developed with a weak "˜centre'. While etmooc.org will provide a level of aggregation, detail, and direction, the majority of interactions are likely to occur within groups & networks, facilitated through various online spaces & services. Participants are strongly encouraged to develop their own reflective, learning spaces. We're hoping that every learner in #etmooc creates and maintains their own blog for continuous reflection, creativity, and resource sharing. Sharing and network participation are essential for the success of all learners in #etmooc. Thus, we'll be needing you to share your knowledge, to support and encourage others, and to participate in meaningful conversations. Together, we"ll make #etmooc a valuable learning experience for all participants. The reach of the class has been impressive, both in numbers and geography, but mostly in that a good number, maybe even the majority, are people who are not the usual bunch of ed tech heat seekers; there a many practicing teachers taking their first steps into being part of an online networked experience. Oh, and pretty much all of the teaching is done by volunteers for each section, not some single YaleHarvardMITStanford prof with a video camera. Nor did this cost 50 thousand clams to create. And you cannot feel like you dropped out of ETMOOC since you can drop in anywhere. The spirit of welcome, inclusiveness here is infectious. Introduction to Guitar http://talonsrockband.wordpress.com/ Bryan Jackson has already run an open high school class in philosophy, and now he is opening up his guitar class at Gleneagle Secondary school in Vancouver. In a basic hosted Wordpress web site, he has a place for his high school students and anyone else interested to post their recordings, videos, and writings about elearning to play guitar. There is a loose curriculum, but open participants can jump in and out easily. And a semantic distinction, it is not a class that teaches guitar but one where you can learn guitar. If you're a guitar player who's just starting out, or a seasoned six string slinger who is looking to document and share what they've come to know about their instrument and making music, we'd love to have just a bit of information to start out. Interested non-credit online participants are welcome to register as authors on the blog by filling out the form below; from there you can comment on existing posts, or submit an artifact of your own learning (or instruction) as your own assignment. There are no minimums, and no apologies for open-online learners in Introduction to Guitar: do as much or as little as you like. Already people are sharing stories of their guitars, taking tracks recorded by one participant and layering their accompaniment on top. How much easier could it be to open up a course? A free hosted platform, invite people in? Who needs $6,000,000? Leuphana Digital School http://digital.leuphana.de/ I know of almsot nothing about this except having stumbled on it via a mention in twitter. Just look at the tagline "global learning in teams". This new program introduces a fresh, unique approach to collaborative learning "“ a university project open to participants from all over the world, regardless of where they live and what they do. Participants are working in multi-disciplinary teams. Leading scholars and experts guide and support teams in creating their own vision of an "˜Ideal City of the 21st Century'. Our first online course has started. More participants than ever expected are working on their concepts for an Ideal City. You still have the chance to register as a Supporter for our first open online course. Supporters have access to the content in our Library and can participate in all forum discussions, but are not part of the assignment cycles. Join peers from more than 100 countries and support them in their project to plan and conceive their own Ideal City. Again, I have no idea what is happening in this class, but the idea that they are not just in an open class, but working on real projects, says to me this is of interest. Anyone got some inside info on this class? ds106 http://ds106.us/ Did you think I would really forget to mention maybe the most important example (to me)? I tried to write about in EDUCUASE the key feature of ds106, unlike every other MOOC on the block, is that there is no single ds106 experience. It is not a single course. There is the class taught at UMW (mine), but others at University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and York College/CUNY plus the open participants who pick and choose what they want to do within ds106. In my mind, this is a networked structure that is of the same stuff the web is made of, and more web like way of growing than duplication/replication. I've not really heard anyone else that seems to think that is important, ds106 is barely mentioned by our colleagues writing the Big Book o' MOOC. I guess ds106 just some sort of corner freak show. It is certainly not fodder for Serious Thought. And I like that. Because I know my students this semester and others in ds106 are kicking some creative butt. They are making the web, not just slurping it. All of the examples I pulled above seem to be more questions of the form of online learning, not magic bullet answers, that is the place of experiments. And that's where the big ideas will come from. With grand intentions to stick to a schedule of daily challenges, by skin of my calendar teeth I am 31 for 31 days in both daily flickr photos and ds106 Daily Creates. I've held this pace before maybe 2 months? Does it really matter to get a perfect score (no)? But parsing some time to try something new even if not to the daily metronome I will always maintain is valuable. More so than scrolling through ___________ (fill in any social media stream). Daily Flickr Photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/albums/72177720304937239 Sometimes there is a 2-3 day catchup, but the photos have been taken every day. Lots of snow, sunsets, dog, the occasional taco, this is maybe the most compulsive habit I have aimed for now for the 16th frigging year. For fun I made a spreadsheet to make some stats and chart gunk. Since I started there have been 5510 days and of those I posted a daily photo 5205 times for a 94% percentage. For years, I have batted as low as 62% in 2012 and hit the 100% buzzer in 2009, 2015, 2016, 2017, and so far, 2023. Charts! I feel like I am nothing but [frozen] net https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52638874407 2023/365/17 Winter Ball? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) But the fans are dubious. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52660068344 2023/365/29 Charlie and Felix 2/3: Skeptical flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) They are saying... "Show us your charts in February!" Game on. Daily DS106 Create I've spouted and presented and yowled about how great the DS106 Daily Create and while I have done (and created) many of them since 2012, I've never sustained a run at the top of the leaderboard. Well for 2023, I am running 31/31! I just love this bit of data tracking (the good kind) that runs in the now rather old, but despite the Musky One's Meddling, still works via the Daily Blank WordPress Theme. Even more, everyone who ever participates has their own archive built in-- mine is at https://daily.ds106.us/hashtags/cogdog/ Woah, that's 581 TDCs under my belr! That makes my batting percentage 581 / 2710 days or a .214 hitter. Maybe not so impressive after all. But it's still fun to see what I can conjure in about 20 minutes-- https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1618721354441793565 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1618120303267168256 It's been a good mix of challenges in 2023. For more stats and people to be in awe of, see the all time leaderboard. Heck,even Todd Conaway is ahead of me! This year the pool of players is only 14. Without a current or recent ds106 class, theparticipation has fallen. But also the sagging spirit of twitter may be at play. I do have the site posting to Mastodon at https://social.ds106.us/@tdc but admit I am sluggish at getting my head into some code to pull mastodon responses into the site (and the board). The main task is finding or thrashing some PHP code to fetch replies to that account. If you want that, keep bugging me. That's One! (month) I may not keep this pace, but I am going to be at it as much as possible, as this is more valuable use f time than venting about ChatGPT. What are you doing for a daily constructive habit? I'm doubling down on the dailies! Bring it on, February. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/32881499591 Double Prints flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It was time to make the run to upping this WordPress site to the current version, 2.1, nicknamed "Ella". Hey, it is jazzy! There are promises of better code under the hood and some new features I've yet to really look much into. I'm pretty religious about following the upgrade instructions, backing up the static files, making a database dump, shutting off the plugins, downloading newer versions of the plugins, etc. But I also took the opportunity to do what I should have done when I move my site to Dreamhost, which is to use their "one-click" installs as it makes future updates, also one-click. But I was able to jump my previous install on board without too much sweat or cussing. First, I moved the entire directory, which includes not only wordpress but a few other piles of content, to a temp directory on my server-- this gets pretty easy using Fetch (perhaps the piece of Mac software I have used the longest, it is the champ) for my ftp -- I open a second connection to my server, so I can drag content form one directory to another pretty easily. Once my main directory was empty, I just cranked up the Dreamhost Control panel, and ran the one click install, telling it to use the MySQL database table that already existed (crossing my fingers it would not wipe it out). And it worked like a champ, just did the one click wordpress database upgrade, and my site was there... uh oh, it is old skool default template! How romantic! I thought about leaving it like that. But all I had to do next was to drag my theme directory from the holding pad to where it belongs. Woah, Neo! Dreamhost socked about 25 templates in the directory. Handy if you dont have one yet, but I slogged them to a different place, as I did not want them all loading up whent I go to edit my theme. Next, I uploaded newer versions of my plugins, and started re-activating them. Rather than one by one, I try 'em all and hope for good fortune. And it seemed to be all kosher! Only test now is that Twitter plugin I spoke of earlier today, since that's not on the list. I've activated it, and this is a test of the CogDogBlog WordPress Twittering Operating System.... Beep! Nice features seen so far: Autosave as you draft. I've lost more than a few either due to human or wordpress error A Files manager not sure what it does, but seems to allow you better access to your files that are edited form within WP. Better Upload Form for composing in WP, having to always tell it not to use thumbnails everytime was a pain, now it remembers my choice (I think) Sing, Ella! The CD is here! As the tale told previously goes, a rock band in Germany named The Sealevel somehow found my photo of my 1972 Ford Maverick parked next to a "Sea Level" sign in Death Valley and asked if it could be used on the cover of their CD. I just popped by my PO Box and sure enough, Berni sent a copy of the CD, Beach from Last Summer: My Photo on German Music CD flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and as promised, I got a photo credit in the liner notes: And the music is pretty good too! Peppy, modern beach rock music. I've already got it iTuned over to my iPod. Check out the band and their music at http://www.thesealevel.de/ Did you know that airlines can take your money for tickets, and then keep it when their own delays cause you to miss connections? There is a word for that. Did you know they can ignore requests for customer service? Not reply to messages they acknowledge they will? Did you know that the Bush administration has putt handcuffs on the Department of Transportation's ability to respond to consumer complaints? Sure DOT says file a complaint online, but in September 2007 according to New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg this is an empty pursuit: The Secretary of Transportation has the authority to regulate airlines and issue fines up to $2,500 to carriers for violations of federal airline consumer protection rules. But the Bush Administration has chosen to limit the number of passenger complaints DOT can follow up on. Claiming budgetary shortfalls, the DOT only follows up on complaints related to discrimination and handicap accessibility. Most complaints are simply logged and reported monthly. So this is a CogDog effort to smoke some response out of an airline who has taken my money, cost me another $900 to get home, and then, after ignoring most of my contact requests, says it is all my fault. We will see about that. What follows, for documentation, is a letter I am sending by registered mail to Icelandair, who in my mind, has committed theft. I do not expect to see one cent of my money. They have all the lawyers and fine print stacked up against me. But the game has changed and many businesses do not get the fact that they can no longer stomp on consumers and trust that no one hears about it. Companies need to know that they are transparent, and we have collective/connective tools to shine lights on the rats. --------------------------------------------- Monday, December 29, 2008 Icelandair North America 5950 Symphony Woods Rd Ste 410 Columbia, MD 21044 Cc: Better Business Bureau, U.S. Department of Transportation Aviation Consumer Protection Division, GetSatisfaction.com To whom it may concern, I am writing seeking resolution to a series of incidents beyond my control including late arrival and baggage delivery of an Icelandair flight on November 29 that caused me to miss two connections and required me to pay out of pocket $917.50 for a ticket to get home plus losing $158.04 for a prepaid hotel I was unable to use due to these delays. In summary and detail below: Icelandair has pocketed money I paid for two unused tickets for flights missed that were not my fault. We have a word in America for taking money. Icelandair's customer service has been abysmal in (a) lacking a phone number for customers to call for service and (b) a pattern of repeated ignoring requests for customer service submitted via their web form and by e-mail. I am asking in writing for a refund of $1075 as a minimum response to a terrible sequence of poor customer service. My next stop may be small claims court. My roundtrip from Phoenix to Reykjavik was purchased via expedia (ticket 108 7376269300) included legs of US domestic travel on US Airways and American Airlines, and according to these airlines, all fees ($1204.30 total) were paid to Icelandair for these tickets. I departed from Reykjavik on November 29 on flight 631 scheduled to arrive at Logan International airport in Boston at 5:50PM, which as planned should have left me enough time to make my 7:40PM flight from Logan to JFK on American Eagle. The attached message I received from Harpa Johnaasdottir documents the late arrival of flight 631 by 23 minutes. Officials at other airlines I have asked have said that Icelandair being late on arrival by any amount holds responsibility for me missing connections. I did not exit the plane until 6:25PM. Bags did not emerge in baggage claim until 6:35PM, and my own did not come out until 6:45PM. It took at least 10 minutes to exit US customs as there was a single long line at least 45 persons ahead of me. At approximately 6:55PM I took my bag down the hall to the transfer station so it could be sent to American Eagle. Please note that the attendant for Icelandair was absent from their post, and it took some talking to an agent from another airline who agreed to transfer my bag. I was told to wait for bus 11 to take me from Terminal E to B, and exited at 7:00PM to see that bus pull away (I would have been aboard that bus had your employee been at their post). I waited another 14 minutes as many buses came and went. I ran to the ticket counter for American Eagle to find the lights had been turned off and the gate agents were gone. I attempted to board electronically at 7:18PM (see attached receipt) was not allowed to get a boarding pass or get aboard my flight to JFK. Because of the delays I missed my 7:40PM flight to JFK as well as my next day scheduled flight at 6:15am on US Airways (flight 15). The only way I could get home was to purchase a ticket from the US Airways counter in Boston for the next morning that cost me an extra $917.50. Because the US Airways ticket I had was purchased from Icelandair, they could not issue me a ticket change. I returned to the International Terminal at Logan to seek an Icelandair staff person, but the counter was closed. I used my computer to log onto your web site for customer service (http://www.icelandair.us/information/about-icelandair/contact-us/) which lacks a phone number to call for assistance. The only form of contact was a web form there, where I submitted a message Nov 30 (item number 138307) for which I never got a response. On December 10, I called your reservations line (1-800-223-5500) where the operator was most unhelpful, claiming there was no phone number for customer service, and only could provide an email address, to whom I wrote the attached message on December 11. I received one response from Harpa Johnnsdottir (attached, Dec 17) claiming that there was sufficient time for me to make my connection, and implying it was my fault for missing it. I am an experienced international travel, and have never had problems making connections at Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore airports. I replied to this message on December 17 (attached) with a detailed chronology as detailed in this letter, and have not gotten a response. Another message submitted to your web service form, acknowledged on Dec 18 (item number 140011) has also been ignored. I have contacted American Airlines, US Airways, expedia, and Icelandair seeking a response, and everyone points at someone else. Bottom line- I paid my money to Icelandair for tickets I could not use due to delays of Icelandair; I was forced to pay much more for a ticket to get home; Icelandair has kept this money and offered only one token apology; and Icelandair has demonstrated a repeated pattern of ignoring customer requests for service. I regret this experience has tainted a wonderful month I spent in Iceland, and while I do plan to return, I will seek any way other than Icelandair to get there. This entire sad tale has been posted on my website and shared with every consumer agency I can find: http://cogdogblog.com/2008/12/29/icelandair-took-my-money Please do the right thing and provide more than empty apologies. Regards Alan Levine --------------------------------------------- UPDATE Jan 5 2009: (partial) Victory! Victory! Victory! Icelandair is now offering to refund $400 for my unused original tickets, Yay! A wavering of the flux capacitor of pandemic time left this post lingering a long time, not even as a draft in WordPress (I almost never leave drafts), but in my mind. In November of Covid-19 Year Zero (aka 2020) I sold the little house in Strawberry Arizona that was my home from 2008 to 2018. This was both easy and not easy as I had much attachment to the place that in the beginning healed me and I poured my energy into literally remaking the landscape with rocks and plants found within. But in a summer camping trip with Cori, the question bubbled up as to how we would use the place. We had in mind making it our eventual winter retirement spot, and in between, using it once or twice a year for a vacation. In fact we made a vacation trip there for a 10 day trip in mid-February 2020, aware of the rising concern worldwide of the virus that pivoted everything. We enjoyed the quiet, the walks, a trip to the Grand Canyon, visiting local friends. The plan was for maybe a summer trip but more likely a Christmas holiday one. How naive as to what March would bring. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/49564325762 Out on the Neighborhood Trails flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) On that summer camping trip, sitting around the campfire, I suggested the possibility of selling Strawberry. We were paying for a place we could not go visit (I had rented it the year before, and that was not viable at all economically plus we spent that February week doing a lot of cleanup). But even moreso, as we talked about what a retirement might look like, it occurred to us that we would be mostly tied to going there. And what was more appealing, was the idea of retirement being nomads in a small camper, going many places. Cori tried to talk em out of it. We let it go, came back to it, several times, but the feeling stayed with me that It Was Time to Let It Go. Last fall was an opportune time. Properties on the Mogollon Rim were usually popular as summer escapes for people in Phoenix, but the word I got from friends in Arizona was that demand was insanely higher under the pandemic. Many people from Phoenix wanted to escape the dense populations, I heard the forest campgrounds that usually emptied out in late August when school returned were still full into late September. It sold, as is needing paint and cleanup, on the first day it was listed to the first viewers. Yes you can sell real estate remotely. We did a video call with a very good friend who walked through the house so I could list the items I wanted shipped. A lot of books, my vinyl collection, old school stereo, a lot of framed art, a cow skull named Herman, a giant gourd, a metal sculpture of a guitar, windchimes, tools, my Dad's hand made metal dustpan, my slides and papers from my MS thesis, blankets and two key pieces of furniture were packed and loaded into a U-Haul Ubox. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50987679212 2021/365/47 They Arrived! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This place was important to me. I nurtured the trees, grew and spread some award worthy irises, got transplanted cactus to thrive, planted lilac and shrubs and plum trees. Oh the rocks I moved. I went a little crazy with my rock art. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/34900709372 Today's Wall Work flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I left some beautiful slate tile my friend Jack laid in the kitchen back in 2008, and the blue cabinets my sister and brother-in-law helped paint a while back. There was the "vintage" wall texture for a place built in 1977. I recall a video call in maybe 2015 with colleagues in the Netherlands and how Maarten could not get over the wood paneling. He busted out "Alan, you are living in the 70s!" https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/7689257418 So Long Strawberry Cabin flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license There was learning from my former and late neighbor Jack, who built his house from a kit, that my house was from the same kit- O'Malley's Easy Do. As it turns out, Jack's son-in-law Jim was a colleague I knew from Glendale Community College. And my neighbor Leo who took me out in the forest and taught me how to cut and salvage firewood. None of those memories or connections requiring holding on to a house. A house itself is just an inert physical object. I do get some odd looks here in Saskatchewan when I tell people I moved here from Arizona. "Why?" That answer is easy and swift "I fell in love". It's because She Said Yes. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/41157488012 2018/365/92 She Said Yes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Yes, I had a neat little solitary life in that wood paneled house in Strawberry, but that just fades in comparison to my life with Cori. We will return to Strawberry next time as visitors, visit friends, hike the trails I worked on, explore the Mogollon Rim, have brunch at the Randall House, pizza at Old County Inn, lunch on the patio at THAT Brewery, shop for fun things at Moose Mountain antiques. It will all be there. But home and heart are here, fuller, wider, more spectacular than the colorful, wide prairie skies I have grown to love So the editor puts a long cross fade transition on that 10 year scene in Strawberry but you will have to wait to see where it goes from here. Featured Image: A bit of a fade effect applied to: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/21047940590 2015/365/250 Strawberry Skies flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Aw shucks, it's like Navin R. Johnson discovering he is listed in the phone book, I find I am small icon listed on TwitterPoster: Can you find me? I am three rows below Justine, who with 5226 followers, is supersized. I swear she is looking at me. I think she likes me.... Ego-googling is expired- subscribing to technorati feeds of your own stuff is tired.... and twitter poster is wired! WTF? Why do I have 440 followers? Who are you? Why are you following me? Creepy! Some of you have bad breath! I'm sorry, but I rarely even look at all the twitter bacn that comes to my inbox, and I usually dont follow back. I'm not being snobby, and its not that I am disinterested in your own twittering, its just... well, if I did follow 500 people I would end up reading them all. Okay that is a weak excuse, so all of you are likely now to stop following, and demote me to the bottom of the big list. Weird. Swallowed whole. The Company Formerly Known As Macromedia. No funny joined names. 7 years ago, I might have cared. Today? A collective yawwwwwwn. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Little Wide World During a presentation last month for the TCC World Online Conference a participant noted in the chat with some irony, that despite the unconventional form and function of ds106 I pointed them to a traditional (long) syllabus for my 2013 class. I said that it was a university course at UMW, so it needed a syllabus. Somewhat later (like yesterday while sitting on a beach) it struck me that it's another case of Korzybski's line of the map not being the territory - the syllabus is not the class, the experience, but some representation of it. In wrapping up a year's experience teaching ds106 I was thinking of how the syllabus was like a mode of bread making, following someone else's recipe, but changing up the ingredients and the process, iteratively, and getting one's hands in the dough. And each time you bake, you tweak. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Ben Ward So down the post I am going to write up some of the things that went into the class map, how it evolved; there is stuff here that is not explicitly in the ds106 assignment bank that may (or not) be of value to someone else. But there is something else. I remain astounded that anyone with a fully functioning neocortex talking seriously about MOOCs being some model of saving educational costs when the word is each course rings up a tab of $250k (edx) or even more. What does an institution get for dropping a quarter of a million per course? I can tell you what you do not get- an ongoing open sharing of the processes, of what worked, what did not work. Not a Udellian narrating of the process. It's more like another loaf of pre-packaged Wonderbread off the racks. And it ties back to what Leslie Madsen-Brooks recently summarized eloquently in using UMW as a case example of innovation on higher education. That's right, look beyond the Ivies and the Silicon Valley darlings, and you land at a tiny, public liberal arts college in Virginia. Jim Groom writes it all in the title- the Innovation isn't Technical, It's Narrative. I spent 6 months working at UMW thinking they had some magic in the water (did not taste any). But it's a culture of open sharing, not the final products, but the makings thereof. It's not a mindset of saying, "Look what we experts hand you like Greek gods", it's an ongoing narrative of trying, asking, failing, reflecting, of process, not just product. And so, for your $250,000 course, do you get the story of how the sausage was made? Or just sausage? When my Fall 2012 ds106 class rolled around, I realized it was ridiculous for me to proffer a definition of what "Digital Storytelling" is- a place where most courses start as their map. My map for it was- I don't know what it is, but we will spend 16 weeks asking the question again and again. Learning should never be an end game of an answer, but the quest, right? So for ds106, you have a history (at least all the bits I could find) of the class back to Spring 2010, it has its own digital story. You get 9 iterations of the class at UMW, both 16 week semester versions, and the summer "performance" types. The syllabus I have been using is part of a lineage that goes back to the beginning, with changes incorporated along the way, and not just mine, but the ones of co-teaching along side Jim and Martha Burtis. I will add that this course asks a lot of the students. We tell them up front, the scare email I learned from Jim. I encourage newly enrolled students to drop the course. We don't want them in there without knowing the demands. And as usual, the end of class feedback is usually of the of "this is way too much work for a 100 level class". It's usually, but not always followed up by a "but I learned so much". I felt less bad about this for Spring 2013- Nearly all of my students were seniors, getting their last credits in. They are experienced students. But there is something else that ought to be its own post-- I firmly believe that learning should be hard. We need to push learners- not make it hurt or hard just for the sake of being hard, but I feel like a lot of education hinges on making it easy, not hard. What accomplishment is truly worth achieving if it is easy? Also, note that my year of ds106 includes teaching it once as face to face, and 3 semesters (one a 10 week summer session) as a fully online class. In all cases, 90% of my students finished and passed (out of 25 students). There was no change in that in an online class. A cornerstone of the students work is a weekly summary of their work as a blog post on their blog. It was Martha's idea that we require them to enter that as a URL in Canvas to document their assignment work for the week. I still am in favor of this approach- I get a snapshot of their blog at the time of submission, I can review and give some grade, and students get a better measure of where they stand. I can comment there on things might not do on their blog, and it makes the final grading really straight forward. The downside is I have a glut of work, since 90% of their blogging happens in the last 2 days of the week. I read easily over 1200 student blog posts this semester. So here's a bit of over the shoulder analysis of my most recent syllabus for Spring 2013. We do not do a tremendous amount of reading chapters or articles in the course. We have no textbook beyond this free one called "The Open Web". There are weeks when their are required viewings of videos or audio content, but the gist of the course is making stuff, and writing in their own digital space about the process of making stuff. The other thing I love about the class is that I am not teaching software. We do not require tools they should use. They can use whatever software they oen for image, audio, video editing; we provide a resource of open source and free web based media tools. They qiuckly learn to first try finding the answers to using tools themselves. There are more how to tutorials out there than I could create in a lifetime. I should also note that my online class has no weekly lectures. All of the class is done by a weekly post of work to do. I offered each week an optional live session on Google Hangout, themed as "The ds106 Show" (students had a participating requirement to join me for at least one episode). I found these incredibly valuable to have conversations with the students and the open participants who joined me. The production of these was nil -- my cost was I decided to do a series of silly promo videos for each week I also set up optional open drop in labs for students, but participation falls off quickly as their schedules get busy. The keys to me are frequent commenting on their blogs, and responding to their questions on twitter- that community space only makes sense if they see a quick value to it. Weeks 1 & 2: Bootcamp This is an idea that came from Martha and I teaching in parallel in Fall 2012. The first two weeks are focused on getting the students up to speed quickly in managing their install of Wordpress, blogging, organizing things in categories, customizing with themes, plugins, widgets. We wanted to get this out of the way, so in week 6 I was not having to remind them about using hyperlinks and embedding media. I start them early with an understanding what I want in their writing up assignments, that its more than just posting a piece of media. They start right away doing Daily Creates. In the first week, I made sure there was a simple video one as we saw it powerful to be able to see each other and the place we did our work. I would link to it, but YouTube gas totally fubared their own tagging system, so finding videos by tag is seriously broken. They are asked to look at advice from pervious students, something they will come full circle to do at the end of the class (another brilliant Martha Burtis idea) Students love the Daily Create.. for weeks. I usually require 3-4 per week. They are not graded on what they do, but I give feedback. Their attitude towards it seems to plateau mid-semester. I can tell when they reach this point when it starts to look more perfunctory. Not all the students get to that point, but I keep tabs on it, and drop it as a required thing usually when we start doing video. I had the most blog ready set of students in my last class, liekly because a good number of them had been writing on UMW Blogs for 4 years. That goes a long way to explain the "water" theory at UMW (it's not in the water, it's in the Wordpress). In the challenge part, their last bootcamp task is that we give them an assignment (make an animated GIF) and do not provide any instructions on how to do it (besides a few reference links). The goal here is not the media they create, but that they learn the "ds106 way" of not expecting the course to provide all the steps, but to find their own way. Week 3: What is Storytelling? We finally get into the topic here. In semesters past, we had them read a selection from Bryan Alexander's excellent book but I got tired of seeing parroting of readings. They get some videos to watch that offer some insight (Kurt Vonnegot's Shape of Stories always a hit). I actually want them to blog their oen ideas on entering the course, of what storytelling conjures up, and what they think adding "digital" means. At the end of the semester I ask them to revisit this and reflect on what has changed, or not. They start ramping up their creating, with some story creating activities. Week 4: Introduction to Audio Martha and I moved audio earlier in the semester-- they get a heavy dose in the middle when they do radio shoes .Nearly every student dreads audio, and we thought by starting them earlier gives them a longer run with it. We introduce the mid term group audio show project so they can start thinking about it and forming teams, so the work is segmented in the next weeks when we move into visual and design activities. So we start like all of our media- an observation/listening activity. I have them listen to selected audio storytelling from This American Life, The Truth, and Radiolab, so they can start paying attention to the nuances they may not normally hear- use of music, cuts, overlaid tracks, sound effects (foley), ambient sounds. I use an edited down version of a Radiolab episode where I have marked these things to listen for as soundcloud comments http://soundcloud.com/cogdog/detective-stories-examples I ask them to listen to a few videos by the makers of these shows. And they get their first audio creation assignment, a five sound story. It's just to get them doing simple audio editing. Alsot every student dreads audio going in. It's the Rodney Dangerfield of media, it just gets no respect. By the time we move past audio, most of them have a new appreciation for it. A few still hate it. But I emphasize that good audio on its own makes other projects (e.g. when they do video). Weeks 5 and 6: Visual and Design These are often the favorite portions of the semester. The assignments here are fun and very doable. They get experience image editing; I really encourage them to use an editor that allows creating in layers (as it becomes obvious that stuff done in Microsoft Paint just looks crappy). They dont need Photoshop, GIMP has all they need, even if the interface can make you cuss, and the online editor pixlr is pretty darn sophisticated. Each week has a "Safari" type challenge, something Jim and I found worked well in our face to face class, was to give them a creative challenge to do in a limited time frame and using what was around them. Both of these fall into a meta layer of ds106 I call "Seeing the World Differently" -- students end up looking at their surroundings and noticing what they did not even see before. I want them to start using their cameras (or mobile phones) for going beyond snapshots, so provide them a collection of techniques to try. And one that I love, and the timing works for it, is the Valentine Day's challenge -- because it was created for us by a former ds106 student. Sarah contacted Jim in Spring 2012, and challenged our classes to modify some cheesy sappy valentine's day card with new captions. It's not a huge technical task, but doe shave them probing a bit more with their visual editing. For week 4, there is a "photo blitz", essentially a scavenger hunt of things to capture photos of in a 20 minute time span (their first and last images need to be a clock). Make an ordinary object look more interesting, almost supernatural. Take a photo that makes use of converging lines. Take a photo dominated by a single color Take a photo of something at an unusual angle Take a photo of two things that do not belong together. Take a photo that represents the idea of "openness" Take a photo that expresses a human emotion Take a photo emphasizes mostly dark tones or mostly light ones. Make a photo that is abstract, that would make someone ask, "Is that a photograph?" Take a photo of an interesting shadow. Take a photo that represents a metaphor for complexity. Take a photo of someone else's hand (or paw) The outcome is predictable, as they write of looking at their rooms, class buildings, campus in a new way. When we move into Week 6 and doing design assignments (the line between visual and design is always fuzzy), they are getting more experienced at picking things from the assignment bank, and writing them up. As a variant on the photo blits, there is a design assignment to review some design concepts outlined in a shared doc, and to find examples of 3 or 4 of them as they go about their week. Again, it's trying to see these design principles not in some book or video, but where they live. They add their example links to the google doc. They also get in here the specifications for the mid term group audio project- and they have to start their process in these weeks of visual and design. Weeks 7 & 8: Group Audio Projects This segment amps up the stakes, because not only do they have to deal with a media they still may dread, there is the expected dysfunction of group projects, and it is a segment where the deadlines are moved from weekly to having 2 weeks span (and this time, it was 3 because spring break was in the middle). The final audio shows are broadcast the week later on ds106 radio, an event I just love. Its fun because their work goes live, we challenge them to grow us an audience (I think we did top 30 listeners), but also because at least one team member has to join me live on the radio to talk about their shows. It is both pain and joy to see the group dynamics pan out. We had some drama this time around, and a lot of ideal group activity too. They have to figure out how to work together. I did not see any groups this time where it all fell on one person. And the production value this time was really high. It would be easier, if all they had to do was individual audio assignments, but the group dynamic is one of those things that are hard for them, yet the challenge is one of those growth ops. They also had their own audio assignments to do. One of the required one was taking a 30 second segment of a Charlie Chaplin sequence, and recoding the foley sounds that might work with the action (this idea came from Scott Lockman in Spring 2012 when my in class students performed their foley live). For this time around, their segment to do was based on a formula of what month was their birthday; I wanted a mix of segments for a later assignment. Week 9: Stories in and of the web This is one of those "only in ds106" ideas- that we have students explore how stories might be told within the construct of the web itself, within neither the comment space of sites, or of creatively re-writing web pages to tell a new story. We've come a long way since the first few times of wrestling with the Firebug tool, Mozilla's Hackasaurus is a gem of a tool, and students have a lot of fun seeing how they can recast a web page. Some of them get a better sense of how web content is assembled. Generally, most of them dont go as far as I would like with changing up a web page. To add some juice to student commenting (I still struggle for a magic postion to have them learn to comment just for the sake of commenting), I came up with a new idea- they were to create a fake persona and have that character leave comments (or engage with other fakers) on each other's blogs. That was a win. Week 10: Reading Movies Again, another level of noticing a media before starting to create it. I had a few required viewings on movie making, and yes, a reading of Ebert's How to Read a MOvie (sadly he passed away the week before!). I have an activity I came up with for Fall 2012 I am really happy with, the three part scene review. I provide a list of YouTube collections of famous movie scenes, and ask the students to view it 3 times and to record their thoughts: Turn down the volume, and notice the camera work- cuts, angles, character placement. Turn down the visual, and pay attention to just the audio- dialogue, foley, sound effects, ambient. Watch it normally, and comment on how the first two work together. Weeks 11 and 12: Movie Making Video editing brings together much of the semester so far, so their only task for these two weeks is doing video assignments from the bank. This time, I required them to do opening titles, closing credits, and I was looking for their writeups to reference sources for all of their video. I seemed to have to do less support for Windows Movie Maker (maybe because Andy Rush was my guest that week on the ds106 show). Weeks 12 & 13: Remix and Mashup The last content sections of the course, involved work that again continues movie editing in terms of putting together bits they have done all semester. I have to say after discussion a few weeks ago (was it Giulia Forythe or Micheal Branson-Smith when we hung out in New York?) who noted that students were doing remix/mashup work all semester long, and it might be artificial to present it as something of its own at the end of the course. Actually Brooke said it best: So, remixing. Like I said before, this week really didn't clear up what remixing really is. As I talked about in my video, is editing a photo I found on the internet remixing? I call it photoshopping. I don't even think there should be a name for either of those, to be honest. I'm taking a course on the Memory of the Civil War, and we've discussed a lot about how memory comes into being. Everything comes from somewhere. There are no original ideas. So why do we have to have a name for something we do naturally? Intrinsically, even? Is it because it has become part of the legal system that we need a name for it? I had them watch videos like Everything is e Remix and Remix Manifesto- I was lucky that Andy Baio's New Prohibition one came out that week, which may be the most insightful piece to see on the topic. Students had already been getting YouTube copyright flags, and of course they got mad. "Don't they know I am a student? I am not trying to make money. I am doing this under Fair use" And thats the crux of Baio's message- Fair Use is not a law. It offers no protection. All it provides is a way to argue a case if you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars defending yourself in court. I have to admit falling down on introducing creative commons and copyright like we typically did in earlier ds106 classes. I always found students did not really "get" creative commons just because I told them it was important. I had hoped to come back to it after they had a few rounds of creating with media, and they might reflect on the idea that they should have access to all media in their culture to create from. I cannot say I got to that message in the end. Most of them just wanted to know how to post their video and not get flagged for copyright- to complete the assignment. We do want them to have this experience of being flagged so they can question the laws, because its going to be on them going out in the world and making these changes our generation has failed to do. Week 15: Final Projects In lieu of a final exam, I have students complete a final project- the specs are shared with them 2 weeks earlier so they can get started. The first time I taught ds106, the projects were wide open as to what students could do, and so ended up their final products. Over the last few rounds, I had honed it. This time I asked them o start with a character to be the focus, the hero, it could ba real or fictional persona. Their story had to be told in multiple media created in response any of the ds106 assignments, but they had to put their character on an arc (Vonnegut's story shape was a useful reminder). They had to assemble it all in a single blog post that combined their embedded media with narrative of their blog post. They first had to write a post about their character choice, and that gave me room to suggest that the consider how to place their character in a different context or challenge than we know them. I asked them to surprise the audience, to play with reality. I was highly impressed with their output this time, I assemble all the stories in a storify. I also ask them to use categories on their blog to organize what they think of their best work, and lastly the "pay it forward" assignment of recording a message or media that represents their advice to future ds106ers. Whew this post was a marathon, and still feels like it is scratching the surface of the experience. I'm super proud of my students, even the one who's reflection considered the class busy work and recommended to future students "drop this course" ;-). It's not only the media they created but the extensive narration most of them did for their work- again, at UMW, that is what is in the water, the idea of narrating ourselves. There are pure chunks of golden bag substance on the way students articulated their experience. Yeah, and if anyone makes it this far, let it be known how crappy my breadmaking analogy is-- look at my bread! This slow time has allowed a rare luxury: finishing a good book. On one forgotten trip a few months back, thumbing through the schlock selections at some airport bookstore, one caught my attention because of a geology cross-section on the cover. Simon Winchester's "The Map that Changed the World" is the riveting story of William Smith, truly the "father of modern geology." (Michelle hopefully has a copy ;-) (more…) When this blog was young and it's author attended a conference, it hardly took any time to write a post about the experience. Heck, there were usually several done while on site. insert pithy image representing that was then this is now Rambling Pile of Blogcuses But still a month... er two months later, a draft post about the OE Global 2020 Conference has rattled around my head. Gotta shake it loose. I have come close to deleting this draft thrice. I always wanted to use the word "thrice" so check that one off. And as is, my rear view looking memory is always suspect. But I find myself unsettled as I am thrust again into planning cycles for conferences and conference-like events (I volunteered to be part of OER21xDomains). Unsettled as I wonder when/if we might break out of the standard thinking of what a conference is. Unsettled on if/how gatherings can work if not in time and place. Unsettled on how events can work when participants are not captively immersed in being there. Unsettled. Looking Back to OE Global 2020 Conference I had no idea what to expect for the week of the conference in November (itself following the previous weeks of Creative Commons, Open Ed, and a slew of others), and my family planned for me to be a useless zombie after 20+ hour days... but actually the schedule was not nearly that intense and we had the support load well covered. The real unknowns too were how well the live sessions would go, whether we would deal with bad connectivity or bombers. The platform part, the zooming, performed beyond my positive hopes. And also unknown was how much engagement we might sustain for asynchronous sessions and the non-standard environment we crafted to host the conference. All of this comes back into play as we are looking at our future events- last week was the first meeting for the October 2021 OE Global conference, and as most have said-- all of the planning for what we do going forward is, and should be, forever changed. Yet, I feel this wave of uncertainty, this pullibg between what we know of conferences before and what they might be ahead. Heck, I am not even sure of "conference" is the right word. Idealized Hopes From my perspective the bulk of conferences spun online where still very much "presentationally focused". A few days before OE Global 2020 I described the thinking behind our approach to try and make the focus on conversation, and having it within our community site OEG Connect. https://cogdogblog.com/2020/11/conferences-as-conversations/ This was a snapshot before the launch of the conference and covered how my colleagues and I made the open source community platform discourse the conference venue with live sessions hosted in this platform you may have heard of called "Zoom." There are quite a few more parts to the system already described by the architect, my colleague Jure Culachev (conference proposal review, registration, payment, and a slew of magical scripts shuttling information from various Google spreadsheets). We had a crew of volunteer session facilitators and tech support spread over the three regional host locations (Taiwan, Central Europe, and North America). Yet we had a lot of sessions, like over 150 of them. Yes, they were spread around a distributed time schedule. And the formats were the familiar- keynotes, panel sessions, one hour talks, 20 minute talks, lightning talks (10 minute), workshops, posters. I think there were too many, and too many synchronous presentation style sessions. OEG Connect Earlier in the planning we had the idea that the conference venue in OEG Connect would be open only to registered participants, managed by inviting them to create accounts with a link that adds them to the conference group. Jure's scripts made it so the links for joining the sessions would be visible only for registered conference members. This meant that we did not have to "hide" the conference areas, so all discussions, activities, and the posted archives were out in the open. "Groups" in discourse are used to set permissions, but a useful side effect was having a link registered participants could use as a conference directory, e.g. to find other participants. Clicking on a user reveals their "card" with information provided from account setup, but more useful, a means to send private messages. The conference group works as a directory, "dogbot" is my test account! We did set up a help area in the conference area, and the notifications settings in discourse made it handy for support staff to respond quickly: Conference help desk Everywhere we had contact information, we linked to the help desk, but we also provided an email address to contact us with questions. There has been some discussion on our team that a ticket system would be more "efficient" for managing help requests. But I deal with these things all the times when trying yo get answers from company, and they mostly leave me cold. So while our system of having a generic email address that went to a group of our time might be messy, I think there is a lot of value in getting a human response. it creates small moments of human connection, and after so much correspondence coming from automated algorithms, I can tell from the responses to our responses that our participants appreciate knowing they are talking to a person, The help desk was also a place we posted resources, like the presenters guide. Again, as this is in a community space, every place there is information, people can ask questions. And it was my hope that this idea of every part of the conference was a topic in a community space, that everything-- the welcome message from the host, an entry for a keynote, an announcement to a special area for a sponsor-- would carry this sensibility that the thread of our space was conversations. While I wish there was a lot more conversation, I have to say it did quite better again than I might have hoped. Now comes the interlude of stats and charts and graphs... Consolidated Page Views for the week of the OE Global 2020 conference The dark blue represents mostly of our logged in conference attendees, light below would be peekers from outside (it was open after all), and of course you get red bots and crawlers. Of course much of this activity was people going to sessions, as each conference session was a discourse topic, with its description, and a zoom link available for logged in registration conference attendees. Activity definitely peaked on the first day. Is 20,000 page views significant? Well with 600+ registered attendees maybe going to a few different sessions and clicking around, that is reasonable. Here are the numbers for logged in (conference attendees) And one more, here is a look from external referrers, so a sense of what sessions caught the eyes from outside the conference My hope was also that with each session's entry being a conversation, that there would be follow up and discussion after, as well as a place for presenters to post any materials from their presentation. There were a few good exchanges, and I saw connections made, but it was not... well in great volume. Perhaps that as an expectation was a bit much. The Collab and Convo What we called Collaboration and Conversation was meant to be all of the stuff outside of sessions, hallway conversations, chance meetups, impromptu activities. The grand idea was that we would seed a few of them, but then offer conference attendees to create any kind of area or activity they might want to do between the sessions. As usual I had brainstorm list that went on for pages. And it was interesting that a few here were the ones that had the most activity for asynchronous action. Some hits and misses. Open Recipes (500+ views, 49 replies). Hey I have a cooking metaphor happening elsewhere, but I felt this would get traction in asking people to share pictures and recipes, especially ones that represent regions of the world. There was the hope was well that others might see a recipe and try it out (it did happen). Pets of OE Global (495 views, 65+ replies). Credit to my OEG colleague Liz Yata for starting this one, maybe the most active of all. You cannot go wrong asking people to share pet photos, it's a global phenomena.OEG Postcard Remixer: Share a Local Streetview (656 views, 58 replies) Thanks to Bryan Mathers who we engaged to create one of his amazing Visual Thinkery Fabulous Remixing Machines for us - it was a postcard that we planned to roll out a few times during the week for people to easily create a piece of media by uploading a photo, editing a bit of text, and quick publishing to the web. All of them begin from the base version, and I tried publishing a new one a few times in separate Collab and Convo topic areas. The first one went the most active, where we asked participants to show us a favorite local scene through a photo. The second one was less active- I loved the idea of asking people to show where they went locally for a break from the screen. It had maybe 5 takers. The post conference one that I hoped would be a way to curate favorite sessions... well it got one spin off if the launch. Maybe the novelty wore off, but the first one had a nice spin out into twitter. There's more I could pull here, but now that I look back here, there;s more activity than I first assumed, and quite a few of these were instigated by conference participants, for example, OER Metadata - what are you using? how is it working? can we work together?, I am the Wikipedian - do you want to know how to deal with such hobby? , Opportunities for collaboration among OE professional development initiatives, One that I had fun with was setting up an open Zencastr recording booth, and hosting some drop in audio chat. I found it, and hope others would too, a refreshing change from the many hours of staring at the grid view of zoom. Isn't this more or less hallway chat? I published these as an episode of our OEG Voices podcast https://podcast.oeglobal.org/2020/11/17/oe-global-2020/ What also worked well was the open meet and greet area, what one might be tempted to equate as the conference lobby. It was included as a primary destination when participants created their accounts, so the introduction thread was very active (949 views, 97 replies). But also encouraging was the action in the First Time Attendees topic created by my colleague Susan Huggins (826 views, 78 replies). Not Quite Netflix: The Video Archive We recorded all of the sessions where presenters okayed recording, even adding a few workshops that requested them as well. Our tag team of Jure and Mario were uploading archives to our YouTube channel in a manner of hours. There are actually 122 archived views (a few added after this tweet) offering more than 2 days of binge watching https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1329428114372321281 This sounds great, though peeking at the YouTube stats it peaked right around conference time, with a few blips of a heartbeat the weeks after, and then, well flatlined. I will be honest in that its rare to never that I go back at watch recorded presentations. But there they are, open resources sitting out there. Don;t get me wrong, this is totally worth doing, and I would gladly have an archive with little views than no archive. Some Tech Experiments A positive thing about being behind the scenes for me is getting a chance to figure our new tools, tricks, and sleight of hands. Whether it was smart to wait until the night before a conference to finally try The Tool Everyone Else Has Done, but my little experiment with running a countdown clock script in OBS was quite successful https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1328181781267288064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1328181781267288064%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcogdogblog.com%2F2020%2F11%2Fobs-timer-zoom-trick%2F In sessions I was host, it meant the timer clock was always in view of presenters and audience. This is the craptastic part of a product like zoom- it's not like there's an ecosystem of plugins that can extend its functionality. There are only hacks. Look for more details: https://cogdogblog.com/2020/11/obs-timer-zoom-trick/ Another thing I figured out was a way to generate title slides for all sessions generated dynamically from our session planning Google Sheet, and published as a set of Google Slides. I thought it would be useful for our session facilitators to have up between sessions, but for most, it was really too much screen share swapping. Even my approach to push it out through OBS was not great as the slide text was tiny. But it was worthy to figure out the method for this: https://cogdogblog.com/2020/11/mass-producing-slides-from-sheets/ There was a side benefit as Jure was able to deploy this to generate the certificates of attendance that participants requested. The last bit, and did not quite fully pan out, was an attempt to create a dynamic table of all sessions, to make it easier to find them (by keyword/category filter) along with links to their session in OEG Connect and YouTube archive (if there). This all again comes from a set of our Google Sheets used to plan the schedule. I went from trying this in Awesome Table (which has limits on free versions) then as a suggestion tried to do this in Google Data Studio (but failed after even getting some twitter help from gurus), so I went back to Awesome Table. I like having a single interface to access 194 conference sessions. Going Forward Conferences are happening and are being somewhat reinvented. The experiences for OE Global at doing it's first fully online conference are shaping the thinking for the 2021 conference scheduled for first week in October. It may or may not take place in Nantes, France. But even in person conferences are getting a rethink. I hope. I cannot put aside some of the advantages in our online conference format. We have easily 4 times the number of participants who could attend because travel expense was not a limiting factor. And from our follow-up surveys, more than 70% were first time OE Global conference attendees (that includes me!). The comments praise the access and the flexibility, but also carry for many, the conviction that the kind of connections and networking that happen at an in person conference are impossible online. I see it as a challenge, but far from impossible. Hey, I might actually publish this post! It's almost done. I will close with a nod to what was such a pivotal and key part of my thinking back in April, this series from Dominick Lukes: Moving events online: Platforms, strategies and challenges especially his framing of the affordances of on site events, things we barely even take notice of anymore. I'd also like to share an outstanding resource that is likely not on the radar. Creating Copresence in Academic Online Conferences was created by Antonia Sladek as part of her Masters research at Humbolt University Berlin. Published as an elegant presentation format, with Antonia's original graphics, in StoryMapJS (I did not know this was possible!), it provide as a summary a Checklist for Conference Organizers: In this presentation the author outlines what she considers key aspects for creating copresence despite physical distance: The visibility of audiences and individuals, the temporal coordination regarding time difference and everyday duties, and the navigation through multiple media infrastructures. Grab the PDF version as well... if you want to dive deeper into conference rethinking. What's on your mind for conferencing- rearview mirror or forward? Feature Image: Pixabay image by Vijayanarasimha modified with overlay of the OE Global 2020 artwork created by Mario Badillo most likely licensed CC BY) Note: It's rare around this blog that something lingers in draft as long as this post. There is a reason for everything, right? But this one needs to get squeezed out of the Easy Blog Oven for another one to follow. The very same desire I heard in my first week (1992) as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges, one I came to describe as "the database of dreams" is still sought Grail-like in 2021. I saw the same questions and challenges maybe I've been asking myself all career. This was in the session at OERxDomains21 Melissa Jakubec presented-- "If You Build It, Will They Come?”: The Challenges Of Building A Communal OER". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phjqCGc3zsM Her question refers to a project site she created to collect learning activities. It's quite well designed! This session will introduce and reflect on a project that led to the creation of an open repository of successful learning activities, including sample stem language and examples to be remixed, reused and reshared. Learning activities are categorized by type (online discussion, group project, blog post, etc.), learning outcome level (according to Bloom’s taxonomy) and discipline to facilitate reuse by faculty, instructional designers and educational technologists. This results in a resource that can be searched according to widely known fields. For example, the resource can be searched for discussion activities appropriate for comprehension, analysis or synthesis.Despite the attention paid to the design of the platform and the ease with which resources can be searched or shared, engaging the wider community in building the resource has been a challenge. This raises the question of whether or not it is worthwhile to develop these types of open resources when they are not well adopted. Other wider factors, such as lack of recognition or reward for working with OER, may also affect the use of the repository. The learning activity site is quite SPLOT like in that visitors can contribute to the WordPress published site without needing an account. This is quite fitting as it was Melissa and colleague Kelly Warnock whose request during my TRU fellowship in 2014 spawned the creation of the first TRU Collector SPLOT. The SPLOT making was maybe just the latest in a long marching ant strand. I've created so many of these web-based open collection sites that I can't even count them all. Back to that session's question: "If You Build It, Will They Come?” I have to say the answer is, not matter how brilliant the design, the metadata fields, the visual metaphor--if that is all you do, then-- No. Sorry. I laid it out in 2003! There is almost nothing more cliche than a Field of Dreams metaphor “If you build it, they will come”, but it is all so fitting for those that get glaze-eyed at the potential of building a Learning Object Repository (ugh, I despise the connotations of the “R-word”).But I can guarantee you, that if you build it, they likely will not come, and if they do the pace will be one that gives you heartburn into the night."Repository of (Learning Object) Dreams" Yet. That is no reason to not stop trying. And I do keep trying. I likely won't stop. In Which the Blog Promise to Look Forward is Broken I again go back to my past experience, to look forward. I have built so many fields of database dreams I cannot remember them all. Since my first bits of extending mid 1990s HTML web sites to be things that could dynamically build content collections from forms filled out by site visitors, I have been playing this game. Much of my early web efforts has collecting links, first in manually maintained hand edited lists, than moving to ones that were searchable and could be set up with crude perl scripts to contribute new ones (the "database" was a tab delimited text file) A directory of Community College web sites I maintained early on- and the archive still works had in the original version (wayback machine thanks) had a submission formI spent years building up examples of Teaching and Learning on the Web, organized into categories by discipline.Various collections of "interesting links" like Hot Links that got boosted to 451f and then into a giant Bag of URLs (4700+ collected from 1996 to 2005). All of these sites jad submission forms, but I cannot say for sure how many actually came in, or whether it was 99% me. The Database of Dreams predated my web era at Maricopa. This was (and is) a huge system of 10 independent community colleges with many many pockets and of innovation in both educational technology and pedagogical innovation. And this was in 1992 when I landed there. My first week on the job was an "Ocotillo Retreat" at Mormon Lake, Arizona. This was the first of many times I heard of a desire to have some means of creating a comprehensive collection of "Who's Doing What" with technology. Heck I wrote about this (pre blog) in our center's newsletter. That was how we did this for years, collecting snippets likely form email and publishing them in print (and web). Hey there was a web submission form! I worked with one committee to design a HyperCard stack as the database! Here was the database of dreams in 1992. Library of Technology vintage 1992 Again, I only have my memory, but the most successful collections were the ones we published in our newsletter as we worked our connections and contacts to flesh them out, likely done through email. The MLX I will claim the one and only thing I created I will sort of call a "repository" as maybe the most successful of these database of dreams was the Maricopa Learning eXchange or the MLX. I am still proud of it from both the richness of the metaphor but also the things we were able to build into it, including some of the most innovative stuff I did with some technology called RSS I learned about from some Canadian named Downes. And it's one I regret the most not doing enough to archive it. When I left Maricopa in 2006, I took all my web files, and exported many of my project databases, but the MLX database was one I forgot to grab. But to get to this, I have to peel back a few more layers of context. This goes back to work Maricopa leaders started n maybe 1994 as the Maricopa Learning Paradigm, leading to a paper published in 1997 aimed at what seems like a basic question- how is learning defined (and embodied) in the large system of Maricopa? This became the learning@maricopa.edu project our center facilitated, but it was led by Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, Alfredo de los Santos. But here is what Maricopa was focused in the late 1990s, led from the top (this from my brilliant Director at MCLI, Naomi Story in our newsletter published in 1997 Discourse about Learning at Maricopa appears to have taken hold across the district. One of the compelling questions that some have asked is why is Learning such a hot topic. As Maricopa continuously updates, enhances, reforms, and transforms itself to meet not only the demands of a global and local economy, but most importantly, of our students who will frame our future, we must clearly stand for something. What we can stand for is quite simple...Learning. That all students can learn, be independently and individually motivated, and be life long learners can be our daily mental mantra. Do our current educational environments, processes, and systems encourage student investment in Learning as a lifelong enterprise? How do we build the capacity and encourage a self-renewing context that perpetuates Learning as a value? The Maricopa Learning Paradigm attempts to move us to a discourse that coalesces Maricopans around a higher level of commitment of Learning as our core value and raision d'etre for leadership and institutional transformation.Maricopa Learning Project: What's it all about? (The MCLI Forum, Spring 1997) The Maricopa Learning project had many facets, including a series of Open Space Forums to develop this idea of what Learning@Maricopa meant. One concrete recommendation that came out was to build something that would show the range of programs, teaching ideas, materials that showed by example what Maricopa learning looked like. And this is where the MLX and brown shipping boxes came in. In my work I was rather fatigued by the heaviness of Learning Object Repositories and had seen how sleepy most people get when you try to excite them about metadata. So my idea was something that represent learning at Maricopa could be as small as a single class exercise to an entire large fellowship program. I got the spark of the idea when some boxes of supplies got delivered to the office. That's it, like examples of learning, shipping boxes could be small ones that fit in your hands to large ones that needed a forklift to move. And all shipping boxes had a label that described them (aka metadata). And the collection of them all would live in a giant warehouse. That was how the Maricopa Learning eXchange got started... Front of the MLX (explore in the Internet Archive) Anyone could submit a "package" at the loading dock, aka a web form, and what was created to represent a sample of learning was the Packing Slip: Top portion of the Packing Slip for Bernie Combs's "Research Methods in Social and Natural Sciences" Everything on the slip was a database field (mySQL), so we could create search filters on the colleges who were represented, the disciplines, and more. And yes, you will notice that these bear some very early Creative Commons licenses. But wait, there was more. Contributors could include aby number of web links as well as uploaded documents (or supplements). What is shareback? As this was in the early 2000s and blogging was being birthed, I implemented my own version of Trackback links, so if this packing slip was mentioned in a blog, it could automatically get added here as a "shareback". There was view counts, and even I added a means to represent all of the Packing Slip info into Dublin Core Metadata Format. How well did the MLX do? Amongst the later snapshots in the Internet Archive, it looks like there were 1825 packages in 2013. Maybe not massive, but that's pretty good. The ways this was done is detailed in maybe the most fun I had in a conference poster at the 2003 Merlot Conference titled "Building the Maricopa Learning eXchange (Using a Bit of Competition and Bribery)". The "building part" included: Part of the task in building this sort of collection is getting its contents to a level where the content is seen as valuable. It takes time and much effort to convince people in the organization to submit their materials. And they need to be able to find content of interest to see the collection as a destination worth returning to.The first requirement to create this buy-in is that the submission process must be as simple as possible, which we achieved with a friendly metaphor of entering them at the loading dock of the warehouse. We added a comment feature for all items that are tracked and sent to the package owner, as well as integration of TrackBack technology for connections to weblogs and other sites. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/117805081 MLX VIllage flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I went way overboard on this "poster" - I had a model warehouse with shipping trucks and loading machines, this again was my metaphor overload approach. I don't have my own archive (yet) of this web site, but it's available in the WayBack machine and the PDF version is pretty lush! merlot_poster (August 2003, PDF)Download But the real secret sauce of the MLX was that, because our center ran a number of other programs and projects, we were able to make the reporting back on Learning Grants we gave out or the faculty professional growth projects. We managed to tied in so that when someone entered their report for these programs, an entry was made into the MLX. The competition and bribery came from the idea of offering prizes to the colleges that registered the most new packages submitted in what we called "The Great MLX Package Race": Next, we appealed to the notions of "competition" and "bribery" by offering prizes of software to the college that contributed the most items between November 2002 and March 2003. This was rather successful, adding more than 350 new items (with one third arriving 48 hours short of the deadline), and we have made the "Great MLX Package race" an ongoing event, with new prizes awarded every six months. For the race that ends August 31, 2003, we have added software prizes (donated, thanks!) for individual contributions. Yup, I offered prizes, software. I had no shame. And the other approach was making the content from the MLX available to by syndicated out to the different college web sites. I was inspired by the 2003 paper by Stephen Downes's RSS for Educators to build that into the MLX, every nook and cranny. This was maybe my first experience of getting positively Downesed in Feb 2003 Maricopa Learning Exchange Maricopa has long been a leader in online learning (an early winner of NAWeb Awards, for example) and so it is not surprising to see it right at the cutting edge of what may be an important trend sweeping through online learning: the syndication of learning objects using technologies like RSS (I will have a lot more to say about this over the next few weeks, so stay tuned). Maricopa's Learning Exchange is starting small (333 objects as of this writing) but this should be considered a proof-of-concept at this time. It is worth having a look at their syndication page to get a deeper idea of what they're up to. By Various Authors, Maricopa College, February, 2003OLDDaily Feb 26, 2003 Because we tracked the colleges represented in a package, I was able to generate an RSS feed so say, Estrella Mountain Community College had a data stream representing their contributions. This was where my tinkering to create what eventually came to be known as Feed2JS came in as they could use a cut and paste bit of HTML, along with their own CSS, to match their own web sites (I cannot remember, maybe 2 or 3 of the colleges used this?). As I look back on this, I had more in the MLX mix than I remembered. Yes, A lot of this is still the "building" aspects, but the features I aimed for was to make it of use outside of the project. And tying the input stream to other reporting systems was maybe the most significant means of input. Yet I think the competition and bribery made for the most fun means to pull things in. I was glad I could find the PDF of that 2003 Merlot Conference poster- it describes the MLX better than I have done here. Building the Maricopa Learning eXchange (Merlot 2003 poster)Download Sadly, the MLX was decommissioned a few years after I left. Amazing Stories of Openness The original 2009 covers for Amazing Stories of Openness Another collection effort of great interest to me that had open submissions started as an Open Ed conference presentation in 2009. The whole idea was to collect short videos of colleagues sharing examples of what I had experienced myself- the unexpected outcomes of sharing openly: While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues, a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments simply from tapping into content that is open for sharing and re-use. As colorful as old covers of “True Stories” magazine, this presentation shares moving, personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks. Beyond my own tales, others have been culled from the net, and you can share your own.Amazing Stories of Openness, 2009 These are still out there as is a lonely web submission form at http://stories.cogdogblog.com/ I am pretty sure the bulk of these came as I would bug colleagues to record them on Skype or maybe they responded with interest to my blog post begging. I did a number of rounds of these over the years, and if I had a presentation coming up, I would mount a campaign to bug people. I did create \ a Google form to collect, no longer active, but the spreadsheet shows I got 17 responses. A few were from people I did not know directly, but colleagues were the bulk. In true form, Scott Leslie was the first responder. I found that when presenting I could even put willing audience members on the spot and record them live on my mobile phone. But the "collection" only grew around the times I solicited them for an upcoming presentation via blog posts, twitter, direct asks of colleagues. The built site alone did not draw many/any stories in. Even as I have had the collection sitting there for years as a first a static HTML site then one in WordPress, I struggle to think of more than maybe 3 that came in, unsolicited just from what was built. Most came from my direct interventions. The SPLOT Dreamy Stuff of Collections The SPLOT themes I started on at TRU are ones I have put to use numerous times to solicit collections. In fact, the very concept of creating sites for people to contribute written content, visual, or mixed-media all seem poised to do the same kind of collection building I have been after. I end up using SPLOTS often myself for projects. I keep seeing potential! Very few of them generated more than a handful of responses unless maybe it was part of a project or even class where they can be assigned (I am leaving those ones off the list below). Let's see how many I can rummage up: 30,000,000 ACA Stories (TRU Writer)- Maybe my one political venture, when the Affordable Health Care was under attack, I got an idea to collect stories of people who it had helped (like me). I collected... 13Pandemic Whispers (TRU Writer)- created this year as a way for people to write Post Secret like admissions of their pandemic experience. I got 42.Extraordinary Stories of Open and Online in the Covid-19 Era (TRU collector)- I was hopeful for a community building effort for Open Education Global that all of the pivoting educators did would blossom with stories. Well, 63 is not bad (I may have entered a third of them myself), and I even figured out a way to connect a second submission site that fed the main one so we could have a Spanish language entry point.OpenETC Inspire (TRU Collector) This has just recently been launched for the Open ETC (educational technology co-op for B.C.) as a way for community members to "give back" by sharing another member's site that they find inspiring. A total of 16 collected so farStories of OpenETC in Action (SPLOTbox) Another one for the Open ETC aimed at collecting the stories behind someone's site created at the OpenETC (12 stories collected) Once Built, What Will Make Them Come? I am still trying to figure this out. And many things, it depends on the context, the intended audience, what you have available to reach people who might contribute. The site itself, where we spend a lot of effort, seems alpst secondary to the efforts you will take on to make it (hopefully) come alive. The things that seem to be needed are: Direct asks to contribute seem to do better than broadcasting wide in blog posts and social media. Sure, people will like your tweet and repost, but I've not found it works well. More effective is direct messaging, emailing, extending a person invite to someone you think has something to contribute. It honors them. My wife Cori reminded me of this several times in one of my "why is no one adding to my collection!"Tying the submission into some other process helps. That was the leverage I had with the Maricopa Learning eXchange- because I ran other sites that required reports of some sort, I was able to tie them together so submitting a final report on a professional growth sabbatical or for an internal grant our office ran, could be set up to also add to the MLX. But often you do not have this luxuryOrganizing it around a presentation, workshop. Mke it part of the sharing activity to report back to the larger group (this also works if you are teaching as you have the carrot of making it part of an assignment.Submit stuff in other people's name. Heck, if they have done something worthy, why not add it in their name? Maybe not quite kosher, but you can also put a note in a description.Be patient. More than you think is reasonable. Just about when you are ready to throw in the towel, a spark fo activity often appears. Stay with it. Be almost annoying with your enthusiasm for it. After all these years, I do accept that building the thing is actually the smaller part of filling it. Thoughts? Maybe others have better ideas. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4458478083 Dreaming of Angles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) In preparation for next week's series of demos on podcasts, I've downloaded likely more than I have in the last 10 months. The sheer number of them is turning out to be more staggering than I thought. Content varies, production quality varies, all according to typical distribution curves. I am listening to a bunch flying on the plane from Austin back home to Phoenix, cringing while looking at the pretty clouds. Why cringing? I am listening to one that is supposed to be one in more than 100 of a series of tips in a particular subject (I am not specifying the feed as it really does not matter). I guess this one has some sort of following because there is a whole lot of upfront stuff that is hard to swallow as a first time listener. Out of a podcast that is a shade over 10 minutes, it is nearly 4:47 before we get to the content. That is almost 50% intro fluff. We get cool hip music. We get an announcement from a sponsor. We get a long ramble about the tribulations of the podcaster's job situation and efforts to make a change. We get some stats on how well this podcasts ranks are doing. We get zzzzzz.... Worse. There is almost 1:30 of closing music, more reminders about the URL for the show's web site, etc. We end up with about 37% of the show being actual content. And even more. Out of that sub four minute portion, about one minute are tips that refer to external sites, and the bulk of the rest are details about the value of one of the sites run by the podcaster! Hey, it's all about me! ME! M-E! maybe if I was a frequent listener to this channel, all of this would be as important as getting a raft of clues about Lost, but c'mon- even a one hour TV show is only 30% full of commercials. If you are getting up to 50% of fluff before the content, 15% at the end, and swiss cheese in the middle, I think it is time to stop podcasting in front of a mirror. Again, audio is an art. Maybe I no nothing about radio, the art of recording, etc, but my hunch is 63% of your content not being content is not the greatest design. On the other hand, I am listening now to Willowcast, a podcast from an Omaha elementary school where kids make podcasts for kids- On a 13 minute cast, the content comes at 0:23 into the play. Well done, Willowcasters! On July 5, while most of America is recovering form whatever it is they do to themselves the day before, I'll be strapped into a plane 15 hours to fly to Australia. Yes, despite whatever happened, whomever I coughed on, on my visit there last October they are letting me come back. modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin This trip is with my NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith as we go first to Melbourne to launch a new flavor of the NMC's Horizon Project, working with a new advisory board of Australian and New Zealand educators on Horizon.au,. Out of this effort, we are producing later this year a Horizon Report specifically focused on emerging technology relevant to education in this region. We are also going to Brisbane and Sydney, visiting in all, the 5 NMC member organizations in Australia: RMIT, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, University of Woolongong, and University of New South Wales. There might be an intermission in all this to check out the big reef. And I'm looking forward to a beach walk and dinner meet up with a group of colleagues in Sydney, thanks to the choreographing of Angela Thomas for dinner and Sean Fitzgerald for the walk (i understand he has a blog ;-) They keep saying how "freezing cold" it is there, yet the temps don't look that scary. Heck, I had almost snow in Arizona in summer yesterday. So expect the 366 photo stream to shift from Arizona flowers and dogs to assorted who knows what I will see in Australia. And so far, I am avoiding trying to toss out any cute Australian phrases. I've been told my attempts are lame ;-) I am certainly going to link to this video as an example of learning, instead relying on more trusted sources. Okay, I am really excited about this trip! It took some restraint not to pack a month ago. We'll be there July 5-20, and the blog and flickr light shall be lit. And hopefully no one there will call me a drongo. If I knew better, I would take last week's Ocotillo Virtual Kickoff as a resounding failure. We had set up a series of 1-4 minute streaming video welcomes from not only our top executive levels, but more important;y, the faculty co-chairs leading our new initiatives on learning objects, eportfolios, hybrid courses, and emerging technologies. We invited people in our system (and beyond) to join some online discussion boards. We put the word out with system wide email announcements, plus individualized messages to specific target groups. The goal was to meet the ongoing mantra that people do not have time to go to face to face events/meetings, so we set up what was thought to be a flexible format, hybrid if you will. At week's end, the video viewership was low, there were only 20 new accounts added to the discussion board, and the only conversations there were among our co-chairs. Time for hari-kari? No. This is exactly what I expected. over the last 8 years I know I have set up about 50 or more online discussion boards for projects and groups, and can remember on one hand the number that have had more than say 10 messages posted. We first posted the Maricopa Learning eXchange in 2000 and four years later, with lots of demos, bribes, competitions, physical threats (just kidding), I know we have likely less than 4% of our employees contributing content. Just building an online community, and announcing it will not make it happen. Sure, in a class, you make it required for students, but that carrot is not present. It takes time, whole lot more than you would ever think is reasonable. Same for patience, and perseverance. Our faculty co-chairs however are mystified, and wondering why their own colleagues could not spend say 5 minutes to read and post a comment to a discussion board. This underscored my belief that even in this electronic age, we need to go out there and talk to people face to face, or sit down with them at their computers, and spend a lot more time in real conversations to get them "in". Our initiatives are all brand new, still forming, and people do not yet have a clear picture or set of expectations. It fits very well with our Ocotillo metaphor, since what we are doing is very organic, not completely pre-planned, and will grow (or die) over time. It takes much more than technology to build online communities. I so so much dig blog posts from Clay Burrell like his weaving a less than glowing Blackboard experience into a story The Tailor - A Parable. He pulls zero punches but also brings his point home in oblique creative ways. While I was pretty sure what a parable was, a check in was worth it- do people still whinge about Wikipedia because these feels pretty damn good for an explanation? The word "parable" comes from the Greek "παÏαβολή" (parabolÄ“), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed. A parable is a short tale that illustrates universal truth, one of the simplest of narratives. It sketches a setting, describes an action, and shows the results. It often involves a character facing a moral dilemma, or making a questionable decision and then suffering the consequences. As with a fable, a parable generally relates a single, simple, consistent action, without extraneous detail or distracting circumstances. Examples of parables are Ignacy Krasicki's "Son and Father", "The Farmer", "Litigants" and "The Drunkard". Clay's story of the the man who learned to love his suit fits to a t (not t-shirt). The same day I had read his post, I had my own experience which, while more a metaphor than a parable, was, I am hoping in the same vein. It's what I discovered about my dentist. cc licensed flickr photo shared by illuminaut I had been a patient of Dr F for a long time, actually longer than I could even pin a date on. It was mainly because he was fast, efficient, and got the job done-- I was often in and out in 35 minutes (you don't spend much time chit chatting while there are instruments poking about your mouth). He won me over on a first visit when I needed a filling- I experienced zero pain. I must have made poor choices before, because every other dental experience I had prior involved pain. And usually I came out being told everything was okay, the status quo was good. Pretty much I got to know what to expect, it was as comfortable as one could get. When I moved away from Phoenix almost 3 years ago, I started shifting my medical care providers tot he nearest town, as driving 100 miles for appointments was really not optimal. But I hung on to Dr F as I was usually able to schedule a visit around a trip to the airport. On my last visit, Dr F spotted something that he said would warrant a crown. This would require two visits within two weeks, and that was looking hard to schedule. Plus their office is only open 3 days a week. It was at one of my Saturday breakfasts with friends (the real kind, not the Facebook kind) and one of them was raving about her dentist in our nearby town. I decided it was time to go local. Wow, I almost felt guilty, I was betraying, I was going to see another dentist ;-) I called them on Monday and got an appointment that same Thursday. Their office music played country music while Dr F played easy listening. It was just different. A dentist office is full of technology, so I'm always taking it in. The office furniture here was a bit more worn, but once they started, they were using equipment and methods Dr F never did. They were extremely more thorough, showed me more data (they had this camera that took pictures showing the problem tooth in 3 different angles), and Dr H frankly warned me of things I never heard from Dr F (gums, gums gums). They confirmed the same problem tooth, but also identified another one that would need help soon (one might suggest they were drumming up business, but it was all left on me to decide to take action or not). What I realized was that Dr F was a good dentist, but I had gotten comfortable; I knew what to expect, and could guess how an appointment would go. I had really not even thought there might be better ways to deal with my teeth, or that I might in fact be missing an issue. And that gets me thinking too how often we get comfortable with some of our technologies that seem to do what we need, sometimes too comfortable, and so much so that we close our eyes and let the drill go without considering there are other options. That it would be to hard to change (or we'd betray our investment of skills in it). I'm about to toss a coin and maybe delete this post. I thought it started with a grain of an idea, but does not seem to get anywhere near it. I think you'd be better off reading Clay's story. It is poetic. Meanwhile, I am leaving now to go floss. cc licensed flickr photo shared by wishymom (Stephanie Wallace Photography) Sometimes, or maybe frequently, a post here is done rather rashly, impulsively, and often stupidly wrong. I step in my own dog poop. There's nice places on the net where nice people say only nice things. Not here. Hopefully reader glean my "style" as my way of trying to provoke discussion, controversy, and get a reaction. Hence. my new quip on the sidebar by my favorite philosopher: [The Blogosphere] is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top. -- mangled quote from Edward Abbey And doing so, I do manage to get things wrong, or to mis-represent things or just flame off like some overreactive barbecue grill. It's my blog, my space, and my soapbox, but I also want to be quick to point out my own mistakes. This did happen in my tirade The Secret Lives of Apple Products. So this is my lame mea culpa. I tossed out some remarks that suggested our local Apple rep, who has been tireless and supportive to our work for years, had not been responsive, as was the contact from Apple on iTunesU. That was not very accurate. It seems they, just like us, are not in the direct loop on what is going on with iTunes U. I do love Apple. I am writing this with 3 Apple laptops open on my desk. I do, however, stand by my criticism of the way this "product" has been managed. It flew up huge balloons of expectations without any tethers to us on the ground. My venting is only the fermenting of what started out with lots of optimism and enthusiasm and really not much of anything we can do but wait for the product to descend from the engineering labs. So for all those who sent this link around privately by email, saying, "Can you believe what this idiot says?", make sure you follow up with and email and this post's link so others know the idiot is coming clean with. Apparentyl, while some participate in the "distributed conversation" of blog / comment/ trackback / ping space, it is but the tiny tip of the communication iceberg where the bulk of conversation is by email-- nothing bad about that, but it helps to keep that in mind. Nuff said. Gotta work. Rainbow over Skinnhufa by cogdogblog posted 3 Nov '08, 2.28pm MST PST on flickr This morning's mixed skies here in Iceland had both sun and rain... and sun and rain and sun and rain. Over the course of regularly complaining here about companies that get under my fur, it is incumbent upon me (wow, I never used that word before) to write when the opposite happens. In a relatively short turn around time (time for mail to reach from Strawberry, Arizona to Reykjavik) I have an email and a confirmed $400 refund to my credit card, that Icelandair has done the right thing (well to me) and refunded my for an unused ticket I was stuck with after delays caused me to miss a flight home November 29 (see the whole tale). I shall now write weekly praise of Icelandair (just kidding), but thank them publicly. Lesson learned- if you are planning international travel through Logan Airport at Boston, and do not want to miss a connection, plan for a double length amount of time, I'd say 4 hours to be safe. Do not expect to quickly get from one terminal to the next on the bus system that lacks any signage, and expect that the friendly staff at the airport will bite your head off with a "yuse idiotz" look when you ask how to get to terminal E. The helpful instructions I got were, "Get on da bus". But yay for small victories! Also, I am looking forward to getting home as my hosts have sent me by parcel post the 3 coats I left in their closet. I scan a lot of stuff via my networks, news readers, twitters, email... mostly it is just a humongous pile of disconnected bits, and sometimes, sometimes, strands come together to make sense. Huh? In the way back, the way way back of human memory storage I recall Ewan McIntosh writing about some new tool he was excited about called dopplr... I did not even recall what it did, but I get so much useful info out of his blog, that his mentioning of it registered something in my brain. About a week or so ago, another colleague I respect very much, Scott Leslie wrote some tweets and a blog post wondering if there was some web.0 tool that would make it easy to see what conferences colleagues in his net work were attending in the future. He took a stab at upcoming.org but was unsure if that did what he was aiming for. That got me thinking about a way I had mapped my travels since 2003-- IndyJunior was an early Flash application that could read data from an XML file and dynamically map it. My implementation was to create a new XML file for each year, and my custom PHP script uses a menu to pass the XML to IndyJunior. This is pretty much Web 3.14159265 as it is tedious to look up coordinates of places and manually edit XML. But Scott prompted me at least to get my 2008 travels posted. And then today, a small event clicked it all. I was actually searching / reading/ wandering elsewhere, and I saw someone's blog who had a little dopplr badge that pretty much said where that blogger was today. And wham! It all clicked! It seemed like dopplr was the tool Scott might be looking for and one that would be much better for me to do what I had done with IndyJunior. So I hopped over to dopplr.com, created an account, and found it quite easy to add my trips. It did an ok map, but it is strange that the pins don't provide any info when clicked: I like the sidebar widget it provides the only missing thing is that dopplr is seemingly intent to really shine when you establish contacts, and I'm still sorting out how to do that (you cannot see someone else's dopplr unless they let you...." I'm still toying with it, but the best part is how this disjointed events came together. If anyone wants to trade dopplr's let me know - mine is at http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/cogdog I cannot say I have the itch to glitch, but have always dug the kinds of things my colleague John Johnston does with adding glitch effects to digital stuff. But one link leads to another, and an idea sparks, and then next thing you have been dabbling a bit long, it's been an unknown amount of time since you've eaten, the dog has given up on the walk... So I keep getting notifications of content from medium.com in the inbox. I sift a lot, and sometimes follow links, more and more of them ending up like this. A Readwall. I like to check the wall. Often these are articles that are easily found on the original place by Googling the title. Other times, I just pop the link into a new incognito window (one where browser cookies are not checked), and I get my full view over the readwall. So I was a little curious, not fully sure why, to look over the wall at Add an awesome glitch effect to your webpage elements. To be honest, the article was definitely not worth five clams a month; all the code examples provided where screenshots of code. Useless. But there was a useful link to a GitHub library for mgGlitch "a little jquery helper to glitch everything." And my light bulb went off as I had recently played with some simple jQuery to fetch via the WordPress API a random image from a TRU Collector SPLOT. I thought the same code structure could likely work with the glitch library. Hence Glitch-A-SPLOT (warning, a big twitching image appears here) http://lab.cogdogblog.com/glitchsplot/ You can't see the glitch here, but trust me, it does! http://lab.cogdogblog.com/glitchsplot/ The HTML is simple; everything is mostly placeholder for stuff populated by jQuery. <div class="container"> <!-- this element will be glitch --> <div class="glitch-img"></div> </div> <div id="stuff" class="trans_box1"> <h1>Glitching the SPLOT: <span id="title"></span></h1> <p class="small">An experiment in adding <a href="https://github.com/hmongouachon/mgGlitch">glitch effect</a> to a random image drawn from the SPLOT at <span id="splot"></span> <span id="license"></span> <span id="sharedby"></span> <span id="furl"></p> </div> We then add scripts for jQuery and a local version of mgGlitch.js:<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js"></script><script src="mgGlitch.min.js"></script> All the action happens next in a script tag inside (document).ready(function(){...}); which starts when the page loads. We define the source URL for a TRU Collector SPLOT where the images will come from, and then a general function, assuming it is giving a chunk of json with splot image data, to set the glitch effect in motion and populate the other page content (an improvement would be to generate some kind of message of the content was not delivered, hey this is a prototype!) // this sets the image source, in the future it could be // a front page entry var splot_source = 'https://splot.ca/collector'; function update_backdrop ( fromsplot ) { // populates the page with stuff from the remotely fetched json data randyimage = fromsplot[0]; // glitch the background image $('.glitch-img').css('background-image', 'url(' + randyimage.images.large + ')' ); $( function() { $( ".glitch-img" ).mgGlitch({ // set 'true' to stop the plugin destroy : false, // set 'false' to stop glitching glitch: true, // set 'false' to stop scaling scale: true, // set 'false' to stop glitch blending blend : true, // select blend mode type blendModeType : 'hue', // set min time for glitch 1 elem glitch1TimeMin : 200, // set max time for glitch 1 elem glitch1TimeMax : 400, // set min time for glitch 2 elem glitch2TimeMin : 10, // set max time for glitch 2 elem glitch2TimeMax : 100, }); }); // set the title and source of the SPLOT site $('#title').text(randyimage.title); $('#splot').text(splot_source); // load license data if (randyimage.license === null) randyimage.license = "Rights Status Unknown"; $('#license').html('The original image being glitched is licensed <strong>' + randyimage.license + '</strong> '); // load the credit data if (randyimage.sharedby != '') $('#sharedby').html( 'and was shared by <strong>' + randyimage.sharedby + '</strong> '); // add link to the source splot item page $('#furl').html('-- see the original image at <a href="' + randyimage.link + '" target="_blank">' + randyimage.link + '</a>'); } The call to the API is where it gets the data: // Let's get some images! $.ajax({ url: splot_source + '/wp-json/splotcollector/v1/randy/1', jsonp:"cb", dataType:'json', success: function(data) { // save the results in array we can use later splotstuff = data; // use function to update display update_backdrop(splotstuff); } //success }); //ajax If you are curious to see what this looks like, the data the page receives, just pop http://splot.ca/collector/wp-json/splotcollector/v1/randy/1 into a browser. Whether glitch is your thing or not, I'm pretty excited about what we can do with an image if we can get a random (or heck newest? oldest?) from a SPLOT or any site, through the API. This was a fun play. Onward soon to seeing how to make the splot power something like pechaflickr. Featured Image: I took my same code, but skipped the random image fetch, and forced the glitch on my own image of the SPLOT Duck. I screen captured the glitch as a video file, imported into PhotoShop, and made it into a GIF.