Last 100 All Text

Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….

In addition to interesting initiatives such as WikiBooks to publish free content, comes this interesting announcement from the giant Internet Archive: International Libraries and the Internet Archive collaborate to build Open-Access Text Archives Today, a number of International libraries have committed to putting their digitized books in open-access archives, starting with one at the Internet Archive. This approach will ensure permanent and public access to our published heritage. Anyone with an Internet connection will have access to these collections and the growing set of tools to make use of them. In this way we are getting closer to the goal of Universal Access to All Knowledge. By working with libraries from 5 countries, and working to expand this number, we are bringing a broad range of materials to every interested individual. This growing commitment to open access through public archives marks a significant commitment to broad, public, and free access. While still early in its evolution, works in dozens of languages are already stored in the Internet Archive's Open-Access Text Archive offering a breadth of materials to everyone. :: Technology allows us to provide more enhanced access to these materials. First would be to offer similar access to Amazon.com's trademark Search Inside the Book system for public domain books. Therefore library users would be able to find books that mention relevant words and phrases without having to have the catalog reflect each topic. Beyond those uses, however, we see a new type of library user-- one that uses computers to analyze and compare materials. Imagine being able to analyze the changes to the English language over time. Imagine being able to use the hand translated versions of past books as a way to train automatic translation technologies so we can more effectively translate any book into any language. Imagine being able to analyze the interrelation of papers through their footnotes and links to find new patterns of thought. Each of these projects is already proceeding using the digital holdings of the Internet Archive by researchers. As the Text Archive grows, these researchers will be able to do this over a much broader range of texts as the public domain is added to the Text Archive. Re-read that last paragraph- an exciting vision indeed- the unbundling of content, enabling the ripping and mixing of content into new forms... See the Internet Archive Text Archives for a taste so far The thing about remembering my parent's anniversary on February 5 is knowing 3 days later is the date of Mom's birthday. The calendar reminder popped up yesterday. Lest you think this is a sad thing, the photo above makes me smile at the fun we would have on her annual Thanksgiving visits to Arizona. From the flickr photo caption on a photo titled "Mom is Wired" My visiting Mom snatched my new issue of Wired before I could read it; she seemed intrigued by the cover article. I am not sure if she is planning anything ;-) No, she just seemed intrigued by the concept of people trying to disappear- the recap of writer Evan Ratliff's attempt to "disappear" www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/ That was typical for her to show an interest in things (Wired?) I might never have guessed. I started this post playing with a collage of photos of her: On the left is 2009 when I visited her in Florida; on the right is a photo of her labeled as "1949 Atlantic City" -- and in between is 60 years of living. That's what I celebrate tonight. To life. Happy birthday, Cookie Lady. Top / Featured Image: Mom and I enjoying a laugh during her visit with me in November 2009-- my flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4139016457 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license ... then the server move has been successful. You are viewing the same old dog blog on a new server host, with a shorter and more memorable URL: http://cogdogblog.com/ and its RSS feed: http://cogdogblog.com/feed/ If all goes well, all old links, RSS feeds, etc from the old host at cogdogblog.com/...../ will be automatically routed here. I will leave the redirects up for at least 6 months, if not longer. Speaking of which, one gripe I have always had is when web developers move directories around, create new URLs and do not leave a forwarding note or path, and leave in their wake a long tail of broken links, bad search results, and a funky smell. If you are wise enough to be running an Apache server, it is bone easy to set up re-directs, if your server is set up to pay attention to .htaccess files. This is a simple file placed in the root directory of your server, and I am able to make any URL that starts with the old URL address permanently re-direct to the new one by adding a line on the jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu server: Redirect 301 /cdb http://cogdogblog.com This makes an automatic browser re-direct for any URL under my cdb/ directory to go to the new home. And what a coincidence. I have written about this before. If you go to the old URL: http://cogdogblog.com/2005/02/03/this-old/ as a living example, you will see in action what it does. Web re-direction is something any web site manager should be able to handle without much effort. Of course you can pick up a $20 bag at OfficeMax for your laptop, and end up with the same one as every other cheapskate on the plane playing solitaire on with their ThinkPad, with zippers that bust, too many stupid pockets, and just no protection for your investment of several hundred/thousand bucks. On the flip side, I have just purchased my second beautiful RacerX from Waterfield Designs, the first was for my personal iBook and the new one for my G4 laptop at work. These bags are elegantly and smartly designed, as they have been crafted for use by San Francisco bike messengers (the RacerX has a grip that feels like a rugged Mountain Bike grip). The computer compartment is way padded to keep your laptop secure from major bumps and bangs. Yeah a WaterField bag will set you back more, but why lug around a $1500 machine in a bag with the durability of a trash bag? And they look so cool. But more than that, when you order from Waterfield, you get a personal email thanks from "Gary" the owner, and it is not a form e-mail, because he has replied directly to my replies twice. Even the invoice arrives signed with a thanks. With a solid product first, and personal attention to boot, they have me easily hooked as a returning customer. I would think they teach that kind of stuff in business school, but since Waterfield's attention and service seem to be the minority, I would say most businesses skipped that day of class. (more…) Once they were mighty vessels of communication, plowing the Internet waters of the 1980s, 1990s. Yes, the big ships labeled "Listservs" were the place for social networking then, information exchange. I've remarked before about listservs being on the Quagga Trail and I keep my subscriptions to the barest minimum. Today, after posting replying to something on the New Media Consortium members list (which does still provide me good technical and project information, and is not very noisy), I was noticing again the typical pattern on a listserv: Some one from someplace posts a question about a technology or a project or asks for input... And the replies come tumbling in like a cascade: Unsubscribe followed shortly by: Please remove me from the list and then someone contributed Remove which was thus echoed with Take me off this list Oh, excuse me, the captain just called us to come and look at the floating ice. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cobalt123 The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, "” and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! For someone who spent their first 27 years where the sky was the roof of the world, Willa Cather's words are ones that truly paint the immensity of the western sky (from the New Mexico landscape she describes in Death Comes for the Archbishop). I sit here now on my floor for the night sky that shows more lights than I had ever imagined growing up in Maryland, a place where I really can see the Milky Way. It's one thing to talk about it, another to feel the immense blue arc of a sky in the western places where the land feels flattened beneath it- my first taste was the open-ness under the South Dakota sky in 1987, and almost anytime I drive north to the high desert of Arizona: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That Cather sky roof is raised even higher by one of the summer thunderstorm clouds cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So what's with all this waxing about clouds and skies? It's that space it creates, its that smallness you feel as one person, yet it reeks of possibility and opportunity-- it is the essence, for me, of everything when we talk of Openness. In education, this feels like its being talked about more. It hit the mid-range timeline of this year's Horizon Report, it was the theme of the EDUCAUSE Review summer edition, people are running and talking more of open courses-- and all of this is good, but to me, openness, or rather Openness- goes way beyond the sky roof of courses, open resources, licenses, etc. It is the Sky! The Sky! what I thought I aimed for at the 2009 Open Education Conference with the first Amazing Stories show-- actually it was Nancy White's words that still ring for me, her very last words in a video recorded for her story: Openness. is not really about the resources, its an attitude. Even more than an attitude, it's a mindset, it's a way fo being without having to think about it- the colleagues I know who live and work this way do it just as natural as breathing. They live under the Big Sky. The Sky! The sky! Enter today when George Siemens shared this sad tale on Openness- but only it is closed. The Chronicle of Higher Education, that bastion of... well whatever, but they had interviewed George and Stephen Downes and others for their article on open courses-- Online, Bigger Classes May Be Better Classes. An article published on the open web about open courses... is closed behind a pay wall. Subscribers only. Those of us who live under the Big Sky of Openness get 90 words- and then the article is truncated in mid-sentence. The absurdity is stunning, and even if they wake up Monday and read the memo and change this-- it still painfully shows that a lot of people don't "get" Nancy White's attitude. They don't live under the Big Sky. They don't even know it is there. But rather than ridiculing them (well I guess it's too late), I want to bundle them up out of their cloistered East Coast Roof Sky, drive them out beyond the plains, and have them breathe that Big Sky. You don't even know a thing about it, till you found your neck craning back, lost in it's reach and height, from the floor of Willa Cather's earth. cc licensed flickr photo shared by HeatherKaiser The sky-ness of it all was brought out by a recent re-re-re-re-reading of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire , his May chapter ("Cliffrose and Bayonets") when he surveys his "garden". That is a euphemism for the entire stretch of land out the front of his trailer. It probably means nothing if you've never stood under the Big Sky in the open desert, but if you have, you'll know exactly what this feels like. The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna; life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom. Not only love, much more flowers best in openness and freedom. It's not that complex. You just need to look at the sky. The sky! The sky! Understanding openness and its opposite, is as simple as "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky." You are free to live in your world under the roof of a sky, but I prefer and have chosen to live on the floor under the Big Sky. Bear with me on what my unravel as a long strand here, Im trying to weave into one a stream that's been flowing all day. Never one to write in that organized a fashion, I see a path: celebration of some incredibly original, creative video forms- and I want more; reading something way out my normal scope; which leads me to an incredible video experience about a box, but its more than the video; and speaking of the mystery box; the overarching reach of an education connection. Are you ready? Please place your minds into the upright and locked open position... (more…) cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Lady Pain (Marta Manso) After putting out the idea for the plan three months ago, tomorrow is the day my odyssey starts. After all this talk, and planning, and buying shit, and putting shit into boxes (some are boxes that stay others are ones that go), it is time to hit the road. I have to admit I have a rollercoaster of emotions zooming around the gut area. I know this will be a grand adventure. I know I am lucky to have this opportunity. Yet, not knowing how living out of the truck for the next 4 months will go, not being around the comfort of my haven in Strawberry, not knowing what will happen, is all part of it. But I am ready as I will ever be. Tomorrow is last bits of clean up, packup, and hopefully be on the road by 9 or 9:30, angling my way towards the bottom left corner of Colorado for a first night out camping. I will try and do some truck casts along the way, but it will likely be dodgy regions for good signal. I want to thank the anonymous folks who already share some media for my StoryBox project-- of course there is plenty of time, and for many of you, I am bringing the box to you. I've yet to sort out how to customize the front page the python web server generates for the PirateBox, but as a simple way to add my bit to it, I revised the opening graphic: so at least to direct first viewers to look inside the directory. The top file is a local version of the project page, and a link to a local copy of the YouTube video. So yes, as it grows the directory view will grow long, it will be chaotic, but thats the idea- it is open and a big box. And yes, @cherylcolan, the prompts are wide open, I want 'em that way. We'll see how it goes. It's going to be weird missing a lot of the "stuff" going on in my networks, the inside jokes, the ds106radio antics, but I'll not be crawling into a hole, just likely a lower online profile. Daily photos shall be taken, (and uploaded, network willing). But enough of this blather, time to go! Here's a game I play on the web. There are metric tonnes of sights that gather curious / interesting / weird stories be it mentalfloss, neatorama, Random Good Stuff, Holy Kaw... It must be a business, track eyeballs for advertisers, make stuff spreadable, hoping it hits the viral google juiced jackpot. Pretty much they sift it from elsewhere, but at least for the most part they are good about putting at the bottom a link to the source. The game I like playing (because of my low level of amusement or lack of literacy pursuits) is to walk back and see how many sites I can click through until it hits a source of someone who actually posted it themselves. Maybe I need a hobby. I had an example saved in a folder that I accidentally tracked, and have been hoping another chain would reveal itself today. It's funny how the tracks go. First, Alec Couros tweeted out a link to a blog post from one of the #tiegrad students who was present for a web storytelling session I did for them last week. https://twitter.com/courosa/status/565961478792957954 Heidi's Story Time post had some reflections I appreciate, and as well a shared creative activity she has done in teaching her students spelling. It's really a super idea. But the image she included as a link for that activity was worth following, and sent me on a journey down the web hole, a link for abandoned cars in Belgium, leading to a post on Boredpanda (one I had not heard of, it is a big internet) The story has 95,000 facebook likes. These spooky apocalyptic images are not a scene from “Walking Dead”, they were actually taken at one of the biggest car cemeteries in the world – the Chatillion Car Graveyard, Belgium. According to an urban legend these cars were left behind by US soldiers from World War II, who could not ship them back to the US so they decided to hide them in a forest until they could come back and retrieve them. The locals disagree and say that it’s simply an old car dump of vehicles made after the WWII. At one point there were four car graveyards in Chatillon with as many as 500 retro vehicles. Unfortunately, most of the cars were stolen or removed by the locals and due to environmental issues the whole graveyards was cleared in 2010. The photos are stunning, and while Bored, that Panda does provide clear attribution for the photos (although I did not seem to find the photo below in the site it was attributed to and they also seem to have cropped out her watermark, compare) But the Bored Panda post does give a "h/t amusing planet" (a site with a tag line "Amazing Places. Wonderful People. Weird Stuff") for this post on Chatillon Car Graveyard in Belgium (December 19, 2012) This post asserts the story that the cars were abandoned by US soldiers in World War II. The layout is different different photo selection. it was shared 91 times on flickr, 126 +1s on Google Plus, and 2500 shares in facebook. Because data matters. Again photo credit is provided by link. All of the photos I saw from flickr were marked "All Rights Reserved" so I must guess / hope that Amusing Planet and Bored Panda and 9whatever site comes next) either got permission for use of the photo or paid for use?? The Amusing Planet site gives credit to a Behance gallery The Car Graveyard by Stefan Beernaert, who I might gather took the photos (and added the "bonus" feature of bikini topped models). it has 1871 views and 21 appreciations. This site links to some other photographer's site called foantje, an exhibit there (with ominous background music( called "Vroem Vroem". The photos are all ©2015 and visitors to the site are welcomed: This site is not responsible for any accidents or problems caused by the information and pictures on this site. Exploring is dangerous and I would never advise anyone to do this hobby. And here I am out of trail. I am not even sure this was a trail. It's not at all like the sites are the same, some are collections of photos of these cars by multiple persons, some just one photographer's collection. Each has slightly different (or none) background story, none again exactly a like. I do find it interesting to trace sources back from the link honey pot sites. Often you find interesting sidelights. I try to avoid giving reference to the kinds of sites at the top of the chain (and if they have any tracking cruft in their URLs I remove them). This is what I do. I walk the web. top / featured image credit cc licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by James C. O'Sullivan: http://flickr.com/photos/jameschristopherosullivan/5877854211 More detective work with analysis of web server logs with AWstats shows that poor spammers are unable to find their links on my web site. Alas! What is a roach to do! Does that mean that they will target me next? No luck, as they are blocked at the door by the MTBlacklist army boot. Does this mean that they are looking for the fruits of their spam roach labor? Too bad, no signs here... (more…) I hardly have to ask the internet (hey you!) to ignore me, but I am trying one more post as an ActivityPub enabled blog check the formatting when it goes out- this time I have changed the format of the posting to include a title intro, am added excerpt, and a stuffed in hashtag. Already some success as my last post did get Fedi-posted, I can'r embed it as the link for it, as it should be, is the original post. But, when I replied in Mastodon, the comment came into the blog. And my reply from the blog also went back out. So i am a federation of one person, 2 accounts, talking to myself. Hence the "silly polo" (I have been waiting to use that public domain image). Featured Image: Wild West Polo, Coney Isl. (LOC) flickr photo by The Library of Congress shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) modified me to have a top text of "@Topdog@CoGDogBlog.com Fediverse Posting Polo, Mastodon". Kind of weird how I do not need to use GenAI to make pictures, eh? Given most have left the technopastoral garden for the stream (Look our Mike Caulfield, incoming trackback pings from here), I'm given to wonder of how we swim there. Its a side venture to the old trope quote of giving fish vs teaching how to fish (I once spun in the fish nuggets effect, but that's tangential to what's already a tangent). Much online interaction in the increasing sprawl of social media ponds is the tireless act of clicking like buttons or the reshare (I want say "re-X") indeed "I want to inform my network" is noble-ish, in does, in many ways work. My main goal in scrolling is sifting the stream for things of interest, yes I do the re-thing, but also do old school social bookmarking. I've been noticing though that often the links peddled around often are from sites that likely at one time we might ave referred to as "news" sources, but pretty much, the most common pellets are more or less content stuffed and adorned with an increasing array of visual ad cruft. Really, much of the internet is this cat and ad game to solicit me to look at more ads and enter my email address so I can get more things I have to unsubscribe from. It means more and more of my attempts to read and learn are first a scraping of the screen of multiple popup boxes, solicits to sig up for newsletters, and averting my eyes from the blinking pile of ads ever encroaching more on what I want to read. Here's a little gif example showing how much scraping i takes to read something from the MIT Technology Review (before my one free read this month is gone). Percentage of information real estate on MIT Technology Review, unless I pay to clear the cruft. And also, I end playing games like opening things in incognito windows or other devices to avoid the paywalls (I have a little gizmo o build for endwalling the NYT). It takes more work, but its just become par of the flow. Yet also what I am noticing is that the oft shared links are web pages that are more or less some low paid worker recasting a story from elsewhere, with maybe an AI generated feature image. Ask, is this writer operating from a pure interest of sharing information, or sucking me to the ad blinking festerhole? And I get that all of this is in some ways required to make even the publishing of online sites possible. Someone has to pay for electricity, web servers, creators time. Information may want to be free but web servers do not run for free. But is this the best way? I shrug and offer no alternatives. Even the Quote Investigator site, one I have relied on long for great references, is almost so encrufted with ads and popups, I am more hesitant to link chase. And worse, many of these articles "on the web" lack the fundamental feature that makes the web a web... how can you write online articles and no include hyperlinks? Reading an online article that does not include any hyperlinks is a sign of rotting web fish. In Which I Have Strayed from My Topic Old interne main raging at the cloud computing aside, what I wanted to get through is the always practical practices shared my my old pal Mike Caulfield (it's been a while, pal) that has evolved from the Four Moves to the SIFT method of information / web literacy-- if you have not seen it yet, put my dribble writing aside and spend some time and share the new incarnation of the Check, Please Starter Course (which somehow manages to exist without Shopify or VRBO ads). Not just for fact checking, the whole idea of swimming agains the internet current of "easy sharing" is to always try swimming upstream to the sources. If an article is extolling the summary (these days likely AI generated) of a research article, see if you can actually find it. Or the other work of an author. Or the other related work of the institution where it happens. It's not only fact checking, but also, I find, along the way, I always learn more than some blurb news site's click bait quote summary. And most of that learning happens by links (or searching for at least the side tide pools where more links swim). Huh? It Started With Lava Lamps It began with a Mastodon shared story that nibbled my interest. There is some process that kicks in during my scroll throughs of social media that trigger the spidey sense feeling whether the link is worth pursuing or not. Sometimes I will spend time swimming, other times I will just keep it floating in my tub of open tabs until Icome back or just close later when I cannot remember why I kept it open, and others I may social bookmark. I do enjoy the upstream swimming, so maybe things should not change. Most recently, the spark came for this shared story referencing lava lamps (the word alone triggers neurons of 1960s 1970s retro nostalgia and an old story I will not burden those post with). In The Language of Lava Lamps (URL purged of tracking code) published in the Paris Review (only 2 ads), writer Nora Claire Miller leads with her own (non AI generated) photo and a compelling lead: In an office-building lobby in San Francisco, there is a wall where about one hundred lava lamps simultaneously flow. They are not just decorating the wall; they are helping to encrypt the internet. The lava wall is owned by a software company called Cloudflare. A camera photographs the lava lamps, whose patterns are constantly shifting. Each image is then digitized and stored as a series of numbers. This analog process produces sequences that, in their organic variance, are more unpredictable than anything a computer could generate on its own. With the help of its lava lamps, Cloudflare encrypts at least 10 percent of global web traffic. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/09/29/the-language-of-lava-lamps/ Now I am hooked, and the author works in a weaving tale of personal interest, history of lava lamps, I like the writing a lot. Except. There is nary a hyperlink. Maybe it's a publication choice to not let readers click away, or maybe it's just too much effort to write with hyperlinks. But I can feel myself saying as I read "I would have linked to Wikipedia" or "Why not link to the source?" And I can't really use the excellent photo, but a short swim over to Wikimedia Commons helps: File:Lava Lamps at Cloudflare 1 2022-12-04.jpeg Wikimedia Commons image by FASTILY shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. On its own, I cannot swim any further from the Paris Review, but of course, Google Fish is standing by. I am curious more about what Cloudflare is doing, so I am searching for https://www.google.com/search?q=Cloudflare+lava+lamp+encrypt I always enjoy stories from Atlas Oscura, and a top search result is a page with a video, And while the video i quiet an excellent explainer, I get annoyed as I want to read/scan information, not wait to pluck it from a video. One more link to the "story" Encryption Lava Lamps "The randomness of this wall of lava lamps helps encrypt up to 10 percent of the internet." Again, it's a decent enticement. And Atlas Obscura's offer is the ability for readers to click to say they've been to a place (260) or to indicate they want to visit (2089)-- this harkens me back to the original 43 Things social media site. It's interesting, and easily shared, but I still am not far upstream. The source really is CloudFlare itself, which does have a most informative article on How do lava lamps help with Internet encryption? To collect this data, Cloudflare has arranged about 100 lava lamps on one of the walls in the lobby of the Cloudflare headquarters and mounted a camera pointing at the lamps. The camera takes photos of the lamps at regular intervals and sends the images to Cloudflare servers. All digital images are really stored by computers as a series of numbers, with each pixel having its own numerical value, and so each image becomes a string of totally random numbers that the Cloudflare servers can then use as a starting point for creating secure encryption keys. Thus, with the help of lava lamps, Cloudflare is able to offer extremely strong (and sufficiently random) SSL/TLS encryption to its customers. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/ It is full on explanation, even with Learning Objectives (maybe with not enough cool photos of lava lamps). As part of CloudFlare's Learning,Center, a decent, if somewhat company promoting, source of information for a wide range of networking topics. CloudFlare's article has links but all are internal, so when I see the statement at the bottom: Was Cloudflare the first company to use lava lamps for encryption?Surprisingly, no – a company called Silicon Graphics designed a similar system called "Lavarand" in 1996, although the patent has since expired. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/ Cloudflare provides their own artlucle link if, say I am curious about the original Lavarand. For that, I jump pools over to Wikipedia's article on Lavarand to see even more places to swim. Who's All Wet? Maybe it's just me, but I get so much curiosity enabled neurons in my un-artifically intelligence banks in this process. My memory connections are likely something like vectors being adjusting in direction and amplitude as I read and click, but a least my associations, if no vast and precise, are not driven solely by word proximity.distance in large bodies of unseen text. I am continually refining my own embeddings. In my internet swimming, I am always looking upstream and sideways. Sites that are not encrusted with ads and also imbued with outward going hyperlinks are always a positive sign to dig more. Maybe this is why I am not spending my time honing my AI Prompt game, I'd rather be swimming. Just this week, Terry Elliot shared a beautiful gem... https://mastodon.social/@tellio/111545395534734399 How Did I Get Here is not only a fabulous experience to interactively see how data paths in the interne flow, the explanation that its crestor Lexi offers is an exemplary bit of explanation power chock full of outward links. Had I not swam here, I would have never learned of a key bit of internet infrastructure called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). A side swim to Wikipedia adds even more to my knapsack. The Border Gateway Protocol was sketched out in 1989 by engineers on the back of "three ketchup-stained napkins", and is still known as the three-napkin protocol.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol But the swim paths go all braided wide when I visit Lexi's web site and find a whole raft of fascinating web projects, fun things like an upside down Tetris and Wondermap, a JSON powered cared based note taking tool built by 2 people in 48 hours... but a huge gem/find was Putting the “You” in CPU a most useful, well designed, and worthy of being an educational resource for. Curious exactly what happens when you run a program on your computer? Read this article to learn how multiprocessing works, what system calls really are, how computers manage memory with hardware interrupts, and how Linux loads executables. https://cpu.land/ The more I swim, the more I find places to go. And there are ons of obscure, non-trending, fascinating projects, art pieces, writing out there, so why just peddle share the same stuff everyone else is? There is much to experience that is not AI Hype or Get On the AI Train or Get Off the Tracks or Pitiful Tales of Billionaire CEOs. Plus, the more you swim, the more you find that is not percolating through as quick shares of hyperlink-less ad-click bait on social media. Are there other upstream web fish out there? I hope so. Oh, and if you check trackbacks, hi Mike. Now I need to jump back in.... Featured Image: My photo, no crap chat generators needed. Swimming in the Cold Waters flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/46945210151 Swimming in the Cold Waters flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Errorbook posted 14 Nov '07, 3.52pm MST PST on flickr Too popular for its own good? Will the groovy ship Facebook sink under its own weight? I dunno, but a raft of these screens are not all that enticing for me to spend time here. Too bad the poke thing always works... I've already barked about how cheap it is to like stuff on Facebook (my campaign to have everyone like everything failed). If you can just click something in 0.2 seconds does it really carry any value? But now, of the ease of which I can endorse someone's skills in LinkedIn, means alot if one gets a lot of endorsements, which all it really means is that a lot of people are mindlessly clicking because someone else mindlessly endorsed them. What really is banal is when LinkedIn pops up people I know and asks something like "Does Alec Couros know about E-Learning?" Its such a frigging stupid question, I am insulted to be even asked. It is close to this: I would be embarrassed to let it be known I have clicked such obvious questions. And of course, LinkedIn is merrily tracking all that clicking activity, you can even see who is looking at your profile. It's as warm a feeling as peeking in someone's window to see they are peeking at you. You know what is even more ridiculous? I have two endorsements for skills in Moodle. I have maybe used Moodle 5 times, the last in 2008. Tonight, two people have endorsed my skills in Project Management. WTF? I could barely manage myself out of a paper bag. To again lift my leg on the system, I went in one day and posted a series of skills like "chasing cats" "mocking moocs" -- of course, LinkedIn emailed everybody under the sun and told them I added new skills. The funny thing was I went back a few days later... and my silly skills were gone! Who did that? Who is censoring what I put on my silly profile? So I went back and added a few key skills: These seem to be sticking, so please endorse me in my skill of MOOC Mocking. I'd really like to see that one move up the board. It got really fun when Tara Calishaln, who has been running Research Buzz since like the day after Tim Berners-Lee created the web, had a good skill suggestion: https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/360428198770655234 I am all about okra folding, and now I am endorsed. Solid. Now I will be heavily recruited, right? Someone will tell me a story of how useful endorsements have been for their success. I do not preclude that as a possibility. But if you really put stock in the meaning of what people can click on 0.2 seconds, well... I have new skills in Arizona Beachfront Real Estate Sales. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Kevin Dooley I ought to be the last person to get wade into the waters of arguing over definitions. By definition I loathe quibbling over definitions. But c'mon, Chronicle of Writing Poorly But Great at Oversensationalizing Headlines About Higher Education, I cannot event tell what topic el Chrono is writing about. [caption width="620" align="alignnone"]cc licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by f2point8[/caption] Blame it on the weak wifi at the conference hotel? Bad appetizer at the opening reception? After the opening of Open Education 2014 of which I am safely in British Columbia attending virtually via tweets, the Chron declares via headline that Open Education has a Publicity Problem. Before I even get below the digital fold, I frankly do not know what they are writing about. That's a writing problem. From the headline Open Education has a publicity problem. Do they mean "a collective term to describe institutional practices and programmatic initiatives that broaden access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems" (wikipedia)? Maybe not. Try this one on again. Open educational resources, or OER, are public-domain learning materials that instructors and students can use free instead of shelling out for textbooks. Does The Chronicle mean "freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes" (wikipedia)? OERs are not public-domain, works "whose intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable" (wikipedia). And at the end of that slippery sentence, the writer compares OERs to textbooks. Just what the bleep are they writing about? That's a writing problem. They are hanging out with David Wiley, he has some clear ideas on the subject. The blaring problem is the Babson survey report that 66% of faculty (who were part of the survey) are unaware of OERs. I dunno. I think a 33% awareness of a term that has only been in use within the last decade is pretty damned good. Especially since even professional writers on the subject cannot even figure out what they are. Do you want to know who has a publicity problem? Commercial textbook publishers. Show me how many students rave about the value of spending hundreds of dollars for a single textbook. Of course it's not a huge problem for the bookosaurouses; they do have all those funds for PR departments. But the Chronicle? They have a writing problem. And this is not just a quibble; they influence the field, just witness the confusion in the comments open that article. People go from their awareness of OERs to talking about textbooks. OERS are not Open Textbooks are not Open Education. There is a relationship, not an equivalence. Let's help out the Chronicle. Let them know there is a nifty online encyclopedia they can use as a starting point. There are OERs for composition as well as Open Textbooks for teaching composition. Heck there are even MOOCs. Twenty days ago I heard that the elegant story site cowbird was closing up the front door. So I vowed to add one a day until the very end. And I did twenty of them, right up until today (well one day missed because the site was "out of helium" for maybe 2 full days) [caption id="attachment_64228" align="aligncenter" width="630"] My last 20 cowbird stories[/caption] I'd hesitate to call any of them the kind of stories that have a plot. It was more a chance to play with some formats, toss in some shreds of things that happened in a day, or just crap I made up. It was never about anything serious, mostly not, and more just to see what I could come up with every day. This was not for the massive audience (I got about 20 views a day, woah, Neo). I knew for the last one I wanted to do a pure photo story, and pairing my own flickr photos of cows and birds, as a thank you.. I found five of each, and in pairs, they did have connections- both staring, both walking way, both silly signs... Here are the same photos used as a flickr slide show... Featured GIF: Animated GIF by moi made from the first two screens of my last, and forever last, cowbird post. Imagine this- a full immersive 3D world where people from remote locations can share and collaborate ideas... and they can blow each other up. I am not a vidoe gamer but can very much appreciate the novelty, originality, and sheer sarcastic fun of This Spartan Life, or how it is billed, "A Talk Show in Game Space". Your host, Damian Lacedaemion, sporting a camouflage full body armor and range of high powered weapons, is using a commercial multiplayer game to invite special guests in for discussions of life, music, art, society as the characters leap about the typical post apacolyptic environment of machinery and blown up buildings, and of course, shooting. The guests thus appear in this environment, walk, fly, jump, shoot around, and have conversations, which are all recorded and made available in a series of episodes in QuickTime and Windows Media formats. Now before you go and dismiss this as fluff, listed to module 3, an interview with Bob Stein, the visionary behind Voyager Multimedia, as Bob and "Damian" talk about the future of the book (see module 3). Bob is wearing the magenta shiny metal armor. One subtle note is in the comments early on: One difficulty with trying to transfer these places into communal space is just the number of weapons around... they're hard to avoid! So the question is, can people follow along and pay attention to the interesting dialogue here and not be distracted because all of the things going on in this world are not directly related to the main topic? Later Bob talks about the future of books: I've been thinking about how books will evolve over time-- and when I use the word book, I am using iot metaphorically, not the objects, but the vehicle humans use to move heavy ideas around. And that vehicle is shifting from page to screen... The book of the future will be networked and it will not be frozen. They'll change over time rather rapdily... The problem becomes how does an editor make navigating among such a large data space useful?... But I'm sitting here watching this and seeing there is a third component= one is rich media, another is that it is networked and not frozen, and the third is... how to navigate in 3 dimensional data space... To be able to walk around inside a "book" this way will be brilliant. Even if you do not like games, cannot see their appeal, you cannot help but be taken back by the originality of using a networked 3D game space for "community activity" (sans the shooting). What other ways other than talk shows can this format be exploited? Play this, open your mind, and think. A tip of the blog hat to hip cool faculty Shelley Rodrigo at Mesa Community College for sending me the link (Shelley, you need a blog!) Just plain fun, and original by Alan Becker, posted on DeviantArt- Animator vs Animation: An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find - the brush tool, the eraser tool - to get back at his tormentor. It's resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself. -- This took three long months.. i think it's worth it. Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART By way of a del.icio.us for:cogdog tag from nessman (thanks nessman!) The whole notion of learning from failure is a motivational speaker industry. And it's been part of my messaging, just recently for a talk to education students at the University of Regina. I often start technology talks with a promise that the technology will likely fail: If it does fail, then I met my expectations. If it doesn't then I have exceeded them. Still sounds cliché, yes. But I firmly believe in the value of messing up in front, be it a presentation or teaching. It shows you are human. The problem is not in failing in public, it's not recovering. A favorite example was in the early MOOC days, when a Coursera massive course in online learning made a major fail, and they just folded up and went home. At the same time, I was parallel teaching with Jim Groom a DS106 class in person at University of Mary Washington. This was pre Domains Of Ones Own; at that time we had students set up hosting on a service a colleague had enabled for us. The first week, after we got them to set up their first WordPress blogs, most of them ended up being hacked by some scoundrel named EMRE5807 Okay, so we had maybe 50 students, not 40 gazillion, but you know what we did? First was emailing students instructions on how to re-install WordPress (after the server admins plugged the hole, it was an old non-updated WordPress site on the shared server). Then... well we made EMRE a character, a subject of our course. Someone (cough) made a twitter account that mocked us teachers. Memes were made. Emre5807 became part of the experience. Letting go of your own expectation to always be poised, near perfect, in control, not failing is a great relief. I got the full taste today for the Network Narratives course I co-teach with Mia Zamora. This morning, I got a text message from Mia letting me know she was at the doctors office, very ill, unable to teach tonight. What do we do? Teach on. We already had a plan set up and posted, plus a studio visit. The remote teaching was what I did all of 2018, via Google Hangout. We emailed one of our grad students, and Kelli was willing to try and get her computer connected to the class projector system. But at 20 minutes before class, she DM-ed a photo of the kind of cable she lacked on her laptop. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1110636890666004480 The English department office was tied up in a meeting. The option to borrow a VGA enabled laptop meant it had to be returned by 6pm (class goes til 7:15pm). So the plan hatched 5 minutes before class- I made a short url for the hangout join link (it was for the hangout set up in advance for our guest visit), sent to Kelli, and we had students get in pairs, in the classroom, and be in the hangout. This mostly worked (well some students on OS X laptops were forced to download a plugin) except for the audio feedback issue, so we had students mute their mic unless they wanted to speak. It was enough to do the opening announcements, let them know we would be trying to run class like this. Then we invited in Brian Lamb, my friend, and guest for the Studio Visit. And we just rolled with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CAX2d_DJnY This was the unexpected bonus, having the students individually or in pairs, be inside the hangout. Usually we have the one laptop in class, and they are sitting away from it, harder to see and hear. Having them all in the hangout made it feel a bit more conversational (I thought) and while they maybe did not speak much (I asked for audio hellos) they took to being active in the chat. It was a great free form conversation about the state of the internet and also the possible use of animated GIFs, maybe the best part was an impromptu question to all students at the end to say how they think GIF is pronounced. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1110661392431042561 That was only half the class. The rest was supposed to be mostly hands-on activity time; I found from my teaching remotely last year the thing that worked least was me talking a lot. So I like to make the time mostly activity. The first was an ask for them to tweet a GIF they saw most recently, or shared themselves. https://twitter.com/_teachreadwrite/status/1110664893232005120 https://twitter.com/masoochwrites/status/1110665502542782464 https://twitter.com/masoochwrites/status/1110665851928231946 https://twitter.com/MalteseTigerr/status/1110667726928916481 This was well played as it riffs off a comment Brian made in the earlier conversation. https://twitter.com/jlove93253426/status/1110666219022139393 The next activity was meant to have them look at some collections of less typical GIFs we had assembled, to find something interesting to share. This, well, slid by, they were still wildly sharing the first kind. But hey, they can do this latter activity later. Then I tried an overview of the first activity, one designed to have them learn how to use Giphy to make GIFs from some YouTube videos we asked as the source material. But by demo failed, as loading the giphy create tool just came in as a black screen on my overheated laptop, so I talked through the screen shots I had made for the assignment. I decided then to just overview the second assignment and then leave the remaining 45 minutes for them either to choose to go and do the work at home, or stay and work through it or ask questions. Nearly all just stayed. I think I had to tell them to stop at the end of class. They reported that giphy was stalling for them too. So we quickly tried shifting to using a similar video to gif tool at gifs.com (which I found to be more flexible!). We ended up making gifs about giphy fail. https://twitter.com/masoochwrites/status/1110681451463356416 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1110678715330109440 It was both chaotic and exhausting, but we all went through this together. Technology will always let you down, the sooner you are okay with that, and can keep juggling, the better. It took me a while to get to this place, I lived in fear of the FAIL. Letting the FAIL get you is worse than the FAIL itself. Image credit: Meme image found at Saying Images, created on memegenerator.net author unknown. I Can Has iPhone! by cogdogblog posted 19 Aug '08, 6.43pm MDT PST on flickr I've been wrong in my assumptions of AT&T service here in Strawberry. You cannot know w/o a phone to be sure. Maybe AT&T has been busy at woprk since I began barking about them. There is no 3G (network is EDGE) but for phone I am getting 4-5 bars. I dont care about network; I have wireless at home, and I want this baby for the road. So although I've been nasty PO-ed about the path to getting one, it's all rear view window now. And it says something about the slick thing that I love it despite the hassles. I love the iPhone. I love my iPhone. Go ahead, tell me I am trapped in some operating system I cannot hack. I dont want to hack my iPhone, I want to use it. Dean is talking again about sharing. Heck it's in his name so its perfect, and worth listening when he says/tweets "I have something to share(ski)". Take 25 minutes and watch his video Sharing: The Moral Imperative created pre-conference keynote for the 2010 K-12 Online Conference: The kinds of stories Dean shares ought to be moving more and more from exception to norm. But another thread stuck out for me. Dean share(ski)-ed Dan Meyer's path from experimenting with blogs as a form of mental outboarding (thinking out loud) to the explosion that happened around Dan's sharing of his math graphing videos -- Graphing Stories. George Couros, an elementary school principle, wrote an entry in his own blog about an activity his school put on, one that he in fact borrowed from elsewhere, but others were moved by the outcomes George shared about Identity Day so that schools from far away took it one themselves and connected over the shared power of the idea. Jabiz Raisdana who blogs in many spaces, e.g. Intrepid Teacher, decided when his daughter was born to create a blog to document her life from the start. Noting her interest in photography, he began posting Kaia's photos and then they posted a video on her blog of a story they created as a video-- on sending it out on twitter, her post was flooded with comments and colleagues elsewhere had their kids create video stories in response (argh, help me Jabiz, I cannot locate that first story to add a link! Thanks, added it above!). Do you see the thread? These three stories all shared different things, but they were all shared in a blog. When you blog, you leave a mark, a permanent link (if you keep up those hosting fees), but it can last forever (or as long as the internet does). Yes twitter and facebook enable connections, but they are ephemeral. Twitter and facebook can amplify and spread a message, but without a blog reference to hang onto, they will fade into the scroll pile. Just try and find a twitter message you said a few months ago. I've seen tweets fade from twitter search in a matter of weeks. It's not one versus the other, but these stories that Dean share(ski)s still pounds the message to me, that despite the claims of blogging being dead, that it is as vital and important as ever as making your mark, as your own personal think monitor. From Dean's videos were Dan Meyer's words that the gaps in his blogging correlated to the same periods where he felt his teaching was perhaps more flatlined. You cannot build and maintain a history in twitter. Yes I know there are tools to do this, but its not the same as having something more meatier and built out as a blog post, where you work out the ideas like kneading bread. And own them. Forever (or as long as....). Call me old skool, but I will say til my last death grip post, the blog is where its at. I also have to commend Dean on the multi-camera style he did for his video, very pro. I was curious where the clips where going showing him set up equipment, and that sly Shareski was share(ski)-ing subtly how he did his video, down to the iPad as teleprompter. But do yourself a favor and watch the video and of course, share(ski) it and more... I'm at day two for an invited participation in an "Emerging Trends Workshop" for some 50 plus educators at San Diego State University. I was invited by the "father" of WebQuests Bernie Dodge, who emailed a few weeks ago, "Can CogDogBlog Come and Play in San Diego"? Bernie is one of the pioneers in Educational technology and the fact that he thinks I am any sort of expert generated a few night sweats. But hey, winging it is fun. Actually we collaborated, along with another SDSU colleague Bob Hoffman, on Skype conference calls, a wiki, and built the content inside a Moodle. How's that for a smorgasboard? The format is a mixture of mini presentations by us where we fly by complex topics at light speed and then spend more time in breakout sessions in the computer lab where participants get to try stuff hands on. Yesterday for example, I covered flickr and RSS in 25 minutes. Well, not exactly covered, but sprinted through it. We had each participant in the morning create a blogger site, so 50 new bloggers happened very quickly. For each topic/session, Bernie had created an editable form for us to create "Tool Sheets", more or less one pager "how-tos" that allowed me to create content the night before, and actually in between breaks. I like technology that supports my last minute creation process. We keep letting them know we are hitting them with a ton of stuff and whiplash is likely. My stay here is two days, but the faculty participants will work all week on developing a summer technology project. The group is very enthusiastic and were very taken by the features and functions of flickr. In fact, one particpant, James Garza, shared what he posted in his new blog May I have Your Attention, Please his new love for flickr. He said he was so excited yesterday he went home and started uploading pictures til 2:00 AM and decided to buy a pro account. That is good energy! Gotta go, lunch session coming up. With the exception of online events, my conference presenting days are behind, me. So it was rewarding to get an invitation to do a session at the University of Regina for ECS 100 (Education Core Studies- “Knowledge, Schooling and Society”). Part of me being there last night may have been my close relationship with one of the seminar leaders. ECS 100 is a first class students take in the Faculty of Education, a large part of which is a field experience in a local school. I was invited to give a talk on Educational Technology and specifically including Digital Citizenship. This was my take: What are implications of, and what do we mean by, using “digital” as an adjective for learning, creativity, storytelling, citizenship? What do we worry about and hope for with technology in 2019? I aim to provide likely more questions than answers drawing from my own experiences in the field since 1992, and suggest that the way forward hinges on our ability to network, share, and support. I opened with a bit of a "not included in this presentation" that said no PowerPoint (which garnered some enthusiastic applause from the front row). Yes, I exposed them to SPLOTpoint: I also could not resist starting with an activity; I wanted to do show pechaflickr because (a) it's fun and generates energy; but more (b) as I wanted to show how it reflects my take on [what used to be called, but now it's got a bad rep] educational technology, so let's say "web tech". This mainly is that the idea was more of a mashup, as are the pieces it is made of, and that teachers have come up with ideas for using it that I never would have forecast (some of them circling back as features); and also, the idea is one that can be done w/o my tool. Anyhow, I asked the students in the room for suggestions for tags to use to generate the random images from flickr. The one that got the most claps as "aglet" (look it up), but in the moment it did not produce enough images, so we quickly punted and went with "penguin". I also (and had not told them this) asked the four seminar leaders to step up and play the improv game (without realizing what the ask was). Stacie, Corey, Riley, and Cori were great sports. I like to start the improv to set a theme, so on the fly I said we were here to talk about the pedagogy of penguins. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1105649353241190401 The rest of the stuff is at http://show.cogdog.casa/digital/ I did not feel a need to overly explain Digital Citizenship as that was in their reading materials, and the excellent guide that the Education Ministry of Saskatchewan offers was written by local UR profs Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt. No need for me to explain them in the room. I did try something that might have flopped, but seemed to have gone well. I wanted them in groups to just brainstorm ideas, associations with the nine elements of Digital Citizenship that the guide is built around, by first thinking about them in the general idea of citizenship (before talking digital). I did groups by rows (somehow thinking there were nine rows, but only 8, alas) and asked them to work in pairs/trios and brainstorm them in a single shared Google doc. It actually worked well, and the doc filled up nicely (the closing of my talk I asked them to return and put ideas on the digital side, and can see that's happening). I decided instead (well, I had my live in coach suggest this) to try and offer a few insights to just a few of them, that maybe they won't get from the links you get in a search. That these were not simple things to come up with answers, that the more you looked and inquired, the more you found (hence the peeling onion metaphor). For Digital Etiquette I tossed the idea of "managing" devices in class, all rather timely since that morning the Ontario government decided to ban mobile phones in schools. Banning devices does not seem in line with the Saskatchewan Outcomes for Digital Fluency. But I cannot tell them a single answer is right here, it's something that they have to wrestle with, and align with their school, district policies. I forgot a part I wanted to say that it's a bit antiquated to put this under "etiquette" since it's the assumption that taking out devices is rude- norms change and are changing, I also tossed into the mix, some examples of where that for all that’s bad, there are unexpected acts of digital generosity.For Digital Access I introduced them to the concepts I learned from Chris Gilliard about digital redlining, because I bet its something they have not come across before.Under Digital Law I discussed copyright (well briefly), but more so what happens when students get the idea they can use any content for school work because it wont get seen. I think we have to be much better at modeling behavior of using open-licensed "stuff" but also (my hobby horse) we ought to attributing everything, not just stuff we have to because of a license.And in Digital Literacy I gave them a quick overview of The Four Moves and a Habit from the Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers- with the caveat that with ideas, opinions students may be coming to school with, and acting upon, are likely shaped by this new, perilous world of questionable sources of news. My close was an urge to start shaping their Professional Learning Network. They had been told in the start of class to make accounts / use twitter, but it did not seem to have been integrated much. So naturally, when I asked the room a question about twitter... well the potential did not seem there. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1105642156025274370 I did try and make a case showing the Twitter TAGs visualization of their #ecs100 tweets. And later I did fix pechaflickr so that first student chosen tag works- see if you can guess it. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1105649558996971520 All in all, it was a great time for me... for them, that remains to be seen. For my talks, I don't write things out. I really want them to be talks. I do have some note sketches, but it all pretty much lives in my head. Presentation notes page 1 Presentation notes page 2 And they were nice enough to give me a thank you card, signed by students. I've never gotten something like that! ECS100 Thank you note (student names deliberately blurred) Featured Image: Modified by overlaying the text "Modifier" on Wikimedia Commons image Clatronic KHF 461 - sender, JRC 2035D on printed circuit board-2323 © Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons) and as such, this derivative is shared under the same license. A little experiment- not looking to see who can name the pattern (that is easy). It must say something without saying that getting to the end of one book a year is blog worthy. Let it be said unsaid, but there is my bookmark in the index pages at the end of Errol Morris's Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography). The path here was one of those winding rabbit hole paths that could never have been forecasted. Earlier in the year I came to this book simply from a curiosity about randomly presented public domain images. https://cogdogblog.com/2021/01/opener-of-rabbit-holes/ Just a random wander into the Public Domain Review site led me to Of Chickens, Eggs, and Cannonballs: Roger Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) that draws its material from the series by Errol Morris which led me to ordering a copy of the book. The six chapters are framed around each something as simple as a single photograph yet what it means when we ask about what should be simple yet complex question of asking the photo itself represents truth. Or is that all of the context that exists outside the frame (and time) of the photo? What I find most interesting is where the investigations lead Morris and how often, the most unexpected serendipity opens and amazing path, that in the end, perhaps leaves us with more questions than we expected. The initial story, the one that lead me here, centers on two photos of a desolate Crimean Valley in 1855, and whether the cannonballs were moved off the road or on to the road in the two photos taken the same day. Historians have used it to suggest photographer Fenton moved them onto the road to make for a more dramatic image of war. Faking photos in 2021 is something we do on the comfort of our devices, but in 1855 there was some physical labor involved. That is, if you follow that the photos were faked. It all depends which photo you surmise was taken first. We have no evidence that can concretely pinpoint the time and date, no photo metadata. I took the two public domain images in one of those image comparison thingies, still, just looking at the 2 photos, even at the pixel level, does not yield anything close to absolute truth. And do not believe the "before/after" labels. That's just what the software assumes! [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] The unraveling seemed to happen from of all things, a specialist tracking the movement of rocks between the two images. The rocks got to be nicknamed Fred, George, Oswald, Marmaduke, and Lionel, the shasing of light and shadow. As with each chapter, all this sleuthing gets father to a sense of understanding, but never really the concrete answer. But for me, it is Morris's pursuit of the answer that is compelling. And this grappling with what truth we can say is purely in a photograph: It is an error engendered by photography and perpetrated by us. And it comes from a desire for the "ocular truth," a proof that turns out to be no proof at all. What we see is not independent of our beliefs. Photographs provide evidence, but no shortcut to reality. Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing, p93. Hence the puntastic play on Seeing vs Believing as the title of the book... Morris turns the cliché inside out. And along the way the rabbit holes Morris tracks end up showing us that there is a whole scientific field of the science of smiles, that there are observable differences in muscles above the eye that can differentiate a genuine smile of pleasure over the faked "social smile". It's all in the zygomaticus major. Yet even with this, and the other details Morris writes of, do we know the intent truly of Sabrina Harmon, the smiling (or fake smiling) army staff photographed with the dead tortured victims of Abu Ghraib. Do we get the true truth from the photos? By the way, if you are seeking a more critical review of the book, see Sarah M. Miller's one in Études Photographiques. I had not caught her observations that all the chapters in the book surrounded events in war settings. She also suggests he sometime let the interview subjects lead much of the analysis rather than advancing the author's own argument. Shrug. I found all of the chapters compelling to read, as you never knew at all where they would lead to from the opening photo. Maybe most compelling after the cannonballs one was the last chapter, Whose Father Was He (a bit of a red herring as it never has to do with a mistake of kin). Perhaps it was compelling because I just read it! But the story of an unidentified soldier found at the Civil War battle in Gettysburg clutching the photo (an "ambrotype") of his 3 children was less about the truth of the photo, and more how it played out to understand the truth and story of one man among thousands who died there. It was a story left in family tales, a box of letters left in a box almost forever, and almost chance encounters/connections that seem almost improbable at times. Even with being able to map his last months tied to messages in letters, Morris asks what we really know of the experience of the person? And even if we could chart it completely, does it bring us closer to Amos Humiston? Does it capture the essence of the man? Even if we knew where he was every minute of his waking life, would that tell us who he is?:There is an endless fascination with last words, but what about last images? There is the legend of a last image being permanently imprinted on the retina of those about to die. Here, the ambrotype reveals that image. By looking at the faces of the Humiston children, we can see what Humiston was seeing as he died.And what about us? Does linking his experiences with ours allow us to better know him and imagine ourselves as him? Is he important as an individual or an unknown everyman?"Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing, p238. And the original image itself found in the hands of Amos Humiston, the ambrotype, has vanished. That it exists out there, and the use/misuses of copies of the image led to many other stories, grows in fascination. But hey, I got to the end of a book I started in January. Maybe I will get two in this year. Image Credit: My purchased copy of Believing is Seeing sitting on a wood deck in Maple Creek, SK, the bookmark is as deep int the book as you can leave it. Once this is uploaded to flickr it shall bear the Creative Commons CC0 license most of my photos travel with. I got MacGuffin fever- it might be this ds106 semester's animated gif? We all know that collaboration is the way to go, right? We all hold hands, go off to northern canada, and sing tra-la-la-la? ;-) It's 2011, a ds106 Odyssey! BA..... DA..... DA DA [caption id="attachment_28642" align="alignnone" width="500"] Of Course We're Open, from a shop in Toronto[/caption] The Headless ds106 experiment we set up August-December 2013 had many successful points. Most was in the new influx of active participants, but the ending group project (not planned) was in terms of rich collaboration one of my peak ds106 experiences. But it was an experience that was still bound by time. It started and ended. And in discussion with Rochelle Lockridge about her wildly successful efforts in running a parallel ds106 experience inside the 3M corporate world, I felt more that the weekly pace was un-ncessary for a truly wide open ds106. Of Course We're Open. It's not completely filled out yet, but in a week, the Open ds106 Course ought to be fully built out. The idea is to take the posts (time based) that made up the headless ds106 course, and put them in a Wordpress Page structure (actually page and child pages). This way they can be ordered, and also nicely displayed as an index: Rather than "weeks" they are units- the idea is that in re-use, they could be done in a time scale a user or group chooses (in the syllabus, I am adding suggested time spans based on the ds106 course at UMW). We are associating it any blog we had previously tagged as openonline -- if your blog was part of Headless ds106, I might not have remembered to add both tags, so if yours is not listed on the Open ds106 Participant blogs, let me know so I can re-tag it. This probably will end up more of a reference for anyone that would like to repurpose ds106. I still think there is more power in people doing the same work in parallel, the network reinforcement effect. But there is no reason why a group could not decide to run their own timed series of ds106 for another class, professional development, or crazy people who just want to create together. All you would need to do is maybe set up a Google+ community, decide on a schedule, and go to it. It's that open. Or people maybe will choose to move through the Open ds106 in their own pace. Now it's true there is much more in each until than most people might choose to do. It's more of a buffet than a prix fixe dinner. ds106 in the Crystal Ball For Spring 2014 there is no UMW class to follow along with. I understand from Jim Groom that he will teach a summer 2014 version. And I have offered to teach on in Fall 2014 (unless that MacArthur check shows up) (heck if it did I would still teach) (but something could happen employment wise). I am teaching a different flavor of ds106 for an online 10 week graduate certificate course at George Mason University, this will start in mid March. As I am designing it now, it will be in the full open vein. As usual, we offer to set up a course aggregation for any teacher running a "ds106-ish" class- it need not be digital storytelling, but something that overlaps some with ds106. This could be anything from a Cyberspace History course (as previously taught by Scott Lockman), to a new one coming this spring-- English Studies in the Digital Age, being taught by Jennifer Travis at St Johns University. These would be courses where students will be individually blogging, and making use of the ds106 assignment bank and/or Daily Create, ds106 radio... What we do is add an option in the ds106 blog signup form so students can add their blog to the giant ds106 flow, but we can tag them internally to create a course flow. If this is of interest, see Are You Teaching a ds106ish Class? The Making Thereof (for the Wordpress Junkies) I use the Page List plugin because it has great options for how to dynamically output this index based on the parent-child relationship, so all I need in the main index page to generate that list above is a shortcode [subpages] On each unit page, I am also making use of the nifty features built into the Salutation theme we use. One is static blocks, which are chunk of content you can sue elsewhere. Like the obscure concept of Wiki Transclusion, I can include this as a reference in my pages, and if the static block changes, those changes are propagated to all pages that use them. So each page will open with a common note, that yellow block is actually a static block content (and it uses another Salutation short code to put the content in a message box style), so in each page, I can reference that note via: [static_content id="open-ds106-intro"] This has already paid off a few times as I had to tweak the text in the block. But here is where it gets super trippy. The bottom part of the unit pages is another static block, in my page, I just put: [static_content id="open-ds106-index"] In that static block, I can use the pagelist short code, so it puts the unit index in the bottom of every page (along withsome more bits of common text: The ds106 Open Course It's always on and never ends (learn more...) [siblings] If you have questions, corrections, suggestions, lavish praise, etc for this unit, please let us know via the comments form below. And lastly, to alleviate the fact that the unit pages are long, I am using the Salutation shortcode to make content blocks that toggle open and closed, e.g. breaking up the sections of Unit 3: What Mean Ye Storytelling This is simply done via [toggle title="The title of this cool section"] cool content here [/toggle] The editing is going much more quickly than assembling the Headless 13 lessons. I have a few links to update, and I remove all references to "week" and change them to unit. I am striving for a structure with an opening intro, some sort of "inspiration" media, and all the content. If you have comments, suggestions for topics or media, even corrections for typos, please add to the comments of each unit page. I am hopeful this can be a useful reference or jump off point, but mainly, shows that ds106 is of course open, but not quite a course, because a course of course always ends. It is no secret for us in instructional technology that podcasting is becoming the raging meme of excitement, a good thing. Maybe it is because of media attention, or just the whole iPod thing is just too cool. I've heard it uttered much more recently in emails and conversation with faculty in our system, and it is seemingly leaping over blogs and RSS and wikis (who's strange-ness is a large hurdle to overcome). Some preliminary observations: * Publishing audio has always been there. Some think that providing audio content online is equivalent to podcasting. For years, we have been able to record audio, save as MP3, and provide it as a link from a web server. Technically this is not podcasting but people refer to it as such, and it is technically trivial to do once you figure out how to record/digitize audio. May the gods bless Audacity for providing a free threshold into recording/digitizing to MP3. * Missing Tools: Creating the Feeds. If you are using weblog software to publish podcasts, there are readily available plugins to the popular blogware that provide the encoding of enclosures into the RSS feeds. But let's say that Joe/Jane faculty wants to create podcasts, he/she manages to record a few sessions and post them on a server. If they are not hosting them via a blog, but a normal web site or a big old Course Management System, how th heck will they create the RSS Feed? I would like to see an easy to use tool that would allow someone to upload MP3 files from their desktop to a server (or access a directory if the files are already there), and allow them to compose the feed content via a simple interface, and then publish the RSS. Maybe its already out there (I've not looked far). * Thinking Out of the Recorded Lecture Box. A number of the faculty I have communicated with are thinking of only half of the equation- how they can record content to publish for students. This is fine, and can provide a nice supplement, but I hope we start extending this to consider how to get the tools in the students hands, turn them into the publishers. Like Will Richardson has been talking about the "Read/Write Web", how about the "Listen/Record" web? This could be students doing audi interviews, audio portfolio reflections, audio storytelling, speech/communciation/language assignments, publishing project reports, international connections (audio pen pals?). My limited experience with conducting quick interviews via audio chat and MP3 recorders tell me the content creation is not the difficult. It is certainly a do-able activity for students. Creating a podcast feed, however, outside a blog, is not so easy. It's still just a baby technology meme, but its rising madly up the charts. The more we can see and share interesting examples of using it for teaching and learning, the more clear it will be for newbies. A new meta-resource educational technology site has appeared on the scenes-- The Academic Commons: offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons publishes essays, reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources. It may even make coffee, be a desert, and a floor-wax (sarcasm aimed to cheer up a sad Canadian). You can suggest I have a stake in this as I am hovering on the list of Board Members, at the gracious invitation of Michael Roy from Wesleyan College. What does a Board member do? I am still waiting to find out, but it is an impressive group listed. I'll see if my lack of Ivy or grace or proper spelling or extensive literature references keeps me on board. I've had bad conference luck trying to meet up with Michael, though he is slated to visit Phoenix in December, and given our off and on email exchanges on learning objects and such, I think he deserves a trip to Los Dos Molinos. I have a ton of respect for his work at the Wesleyan Learning Objects Program, a gorgeous site with high end objects. Okay, enough babbling, what is at the Commons? There are many pieces, and it has a blog-like feel to content, meaning there is a database and time stamped content arranged in multiple categories. It is well stocked with dynamic sidebar contents and good amounts of RSS feeds top level and down through the sections. And Creative Commons is everywhere. The main part of the COmmons is a quarterly e-publication of the major sections of the site: Essays, INterviews, Hardware/Software Reviews, Project Showcases, and Vignettes... The August 2004 edition features Technology & the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom: an interview with University of Illinois-Chicago's Jerry Graff, Copyright 101 by Richard Lanham, The Dangers of Just-In-Time Education by Michelle Glaros, to name a few. The Center for teaching and Learning tab leads to a pointers to relevant topical areas external to the commons, while the Developer's Tool Kit has a number of places to exchange project ideas, code, technology reviews, etc. The Library offers search and browse access to a range of resources, and has places for people to toss new ones into the mix. And the LoLa Exchange (go ahead and try and read that without hearing the Kinds singing ion your head) is a place to find and share learning objects. A few things there, but hey, we need more repositories. All in all at quick glance, it is a well designed and integrated site. The key for all of these is getting flow of people to and from the COmmons, so we'll keep an eye (easy to do with RSS) on the action. Following remotely from a train as our friends Brian, Keira, Grant bring us from Quebec via ds106 radio not only the sounds of the student protests but the wise words of Harry: https://twitter.com/DrGarcia/status/216245077989789696 The scene there shared by Grant: We managed to be on the wrong street every night while in Montreal to witness the student protests, in fact, we just saw photos from Sherbrooke and University today's activity where we walked this morning to the train station. There was a woman last night in the convenience store on Duluth who relayed a conversation of some people lamenting the repetition of it all, while the store owner's only lament was losing a pan. There seems to be a veiled discomfort, even a tinge of embarrassment, or worse, apathy like "What the F**** are they complaining about?" Just like the occupy movement last year, I feel on the curious periphery, and have this river of joy that where-ever you sit on an issue, you should sit somewhere. The mere fact that people are exercising a democratic right to voice disagreement is something to celebrate, not get our shorts in an uproar. Has society gotten so far from our roots of disagreement that is it all discomfortable? Anyhow, what rung with me is that simple statement, "Freedom is Fun" - should we not have joy in this freedom? I'm sitting on a train trying to figure what to do with this message. Brian asked me to plug it into Google Translate, which on first pass came out with the horrible "la libertÃ© est un plaisir" which thankfully Bryan Jackson jumped in with the more audiophonic: https://twitter.com/bryanjack/status/216249862914707456 (I am playing with the new Wordpress auto embed o twitter statuses...) I took this version into Google and had it speak it aloud, which I was able to record in WireTapPro tp have as an audio file I began mixing it with some audio I had collected in the StoryBox, one track of some kids in Hobart Tasmania chanting in a park, and anther of some kids and a plane overhead that i recorded... somewhere. I don;t know what this means with the mechanical french voice floating by. This is not even a ds106 assignment, but something about working with the media and thinking about this situation resonates, and at least keeps me from just rushing past this event like the passerby I am. LibertÃ© est Amusant If anything working on this may have me pronouncing one French expression this week that I did not butcher horribly. I have been testing an alpha version of the next update to Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin. The changes coming are impressive and make it easier to filter and easily de-spam weblog crud. You can check and protect both comments and/or trackbacks, and it makes it a one clikc operation. Lots of new options coming in v1.5. It might be interesting to see what happens with publicly available blacklist files, maybe some sort of P2P sharing of spammers (the blacklist is a list of nearly 400 filters to trap spam) that can be done behind the scenes. I got two this morning that had 12 new URLs, and snapped it off 2 comments in my blog in one click. There are two main bugs in MT-Blacklist affecting about 25 people of the 750 who have installed the plugin. One causes slow rebuilds, timeouts or a 500 server error. The other is a problem with the de-spam link in the email. Again, Jay is a hero to the blog world. Somebody rich should shower him with money or fame. Do you hate registering to read online news from the New York Times, Washington Post, etc? I do think this service may last long, but it is interesting to monitor what BugMeNot causes in terms of disruptive patterns in the technology landscape. Will the lawyers swoop in? Will the Times start trying to block the accounts? Will it ruin paid services? Will it not make much of any difference? I am more interested to see the social patterns that ripple out that anything else... bugmenot.com Common sense isn't. Bypass Compulsory Web Registration Basically, it is a database of usernames and password you can use to access these login required web sites without submitting your own (fake?) information. There is even a bookmarklet to make it a once click operation. Is it ethically justifiable to do this? You'll have to find your own way there my friend. However, there is an interesting discussion happening over here. This dog has been blogging since April 2003 and requires no goofy theme music, over enthused child actors, or laugh tracks. My people have alerted to me to a Disnatravesty http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JhlTa9woM It's gonna be last Dog Blogging Standing, Stan I bet you will not even make it past 100 posts. This one is number 3472, punk. For The Wag! cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A day late for yesterday's #ds106 Daily Create "Upload a drawing of a place you've been, but NEVER want to go back to." tdc.ds106.us/tdc401/ Rosewood State Hospital was the institution my brother David was sent to after I was born (the story on cowbird). The last time I visited I could not have been more than 10, and all I can remember is the smell and the fences outside. I always imagined it as a red brick facility, but it was actually an old mansion like structure according to photos I found in The Google. Apparently the facility was named for the street it was on in Owings Mills, Maryland, opened in 1888 as the "Asylum and Training School for the Feeble Minded." (via Wikipedia0 Now that is a not so proud name! Check out the history, this was mental healt care in the 1960s and 1970s, sounding not so far a step from an "Asylum for the Feeble Minded" Between the 1950s and 1970s, as in many similar state-run institutions in the United States, there were numerous reports of malpractice, neglect and abuse. In 1981, the U.S. Justice Department declared that residents at Rosewood "failed to receive minimally adequate care". Further investigations proved positive leading to the older buildings' being condemned in 1989 I found a photo of the main building in facebook and used the brush tools in photoshop to paint over my own version of it (I added the fence). I had never used the various brushes much so it was fun to experiment. There is some great video photos of the fire that burnt the building on 2008 apparently the work of arsonists. Kind of fitting. [caption id="attachment_29048" align="alignnone" width="500"] Before yesterday, I could give proper creative commons attribution to the image I used here in one copy/paste action. Today it take 6.. 7.. 8 clicks and still I cannot copy the owner's name's name to attribute! Here gies cc licensed (take a wold guess at the license) flickr photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/60835699@N00/2077066872/ by some guy named Steve[/caption] Since 2009 I have maintained what was once just a greasemonkey script, but later a chrome extension that was designed primarily to help me blog with flickr creative commons attribution photos (it provided a string of text with proper attribution, license, and the img tag to embed the image). As of yesterday, when apparently yahoo flicked the switch, my cc attribution helper is in the trash; inert, dead, and with no hopes of coming back. In the trash. I spent about 3 hours today trying to parse the new code underneath the new Yahoo look, and felt I could parse most of the info like before with Xpath, but something in the new architecture renders the script dead, even for simple alert debugging checks. Yahoo is serving up some complex Javascripted dynamic content. Besides the ASCII bicycle in the HTML source (candy), you find fun trickery like:   Yahoo's class is a facade of protection... neue! Charming. The helper may not be totally impossible to fix, but I trotted out beyond the limits of my browser scripting, the XPATH code I had used was already on those fringes. I doubt I have the chops to raise it from the dead. I think only Yahoo can enable this, so if this was useful, you can toss in a few votes for my suggestion as a feature. The creative commons licensing in the new groovy flickr is down below one of the three "charm" tabs; on your own images you actually see the license, but on anyone else's page you see either All Rights Reserved or Some Rights Reserved -- to know the license you have to hover or click. More clicks to attribute correlates with what is already a low level of attribution going down the tubes. [caption id="attachment_29049" align="alignnone" width="500"] Some Rights Hidden.. what is the license on a flickr image??[/caption] To give attribution to the owner of this image... I cannot even copy/paste Steve's name. Sorry Steve. The funny thing about the flickr interface is where its veneer thins, and the old flickr look pokes through. If you go to your own photo stream, and click "Edit" (I've never even done this before)- look, beneath! It's old flickr! [caption id="attachment_29051" align="alignnone" width="500"] Old flickr lurks beneath the new[/caption] And even more ironically, the flickr collection for creative commons? It's the same old page it was in 2011. It's old flickr with a new headband! The de-valuation of creative commons shows too- nowhere in the source code of a flickr creative commons image can you find any meta data or rdf triples or any shred of machine code ti indicate creative commons content. It's undiscoverable. Now I now many of you will tell me how bad flickr is, and how you have moved on to 500px or self hosted or ... I am going to go out on a wobbly limb; I kind of like the new design, It's modern. I just want to be able to more cleanly and efficiently do attribution. I believe in attribution. I still love flickr, this being my 10th year hoisting my photos there. Stupid romantic am I. Strongly. So back to the drawing board. The rights info and everything else is in there via the flickr API, so probably a better approach is some sort of bookmarklet tool that can provide the cut and past code in a pop up window. Rewriting the content into the flickr page was nice while it worked, but was always dependent on the structure of their pages having certain divs and ids and classes. That was always dicey. UPDATE Mar 27, 2014 No, I did not get a personal call of apology from Marissa Meyer. I have been seeking some images, and found a bit of a shorter step process to find attribution. I do my searches with the creative commons options at compfight. They actually have a decent attribution string you can copy, and then download the size you need. But I follow the link to the flickr image, this case one of the great collection of numbers by LEOL30. Under the 3 Dot menu, then to Download/All Sizes. From here is a decent attribution license string and the name of the photo owner you can actually copy with a mouse. One more click to copy the page URL. [caption id="attachment_29067" align="alignnone" width="500"] Getting to the new and less improved flickr attribution text[/caption] so at least I have "15" by LEOL30 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License http://www.flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/176206535/ I can get some HTML in my 500px size via the arrow coming out of the box icon so I can get [caption id="attachment_29069" align="aligncenter" width="433"] some cut and paste image code for a blog post[/caption] "15" by LEOL30 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License http://www.flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/176206535/ It's interesting that flickr puts an attribution to the photo owner in its own generated HTML tag, for the title attribute: [caption id="attachment_29070" align="aligncenter" width="258"] Hyperlink code generated from flickr share button[/caption] e.g. title="15 by LEOL30, on Flickr" How much extra effort would it take for them to modify that to read: title="15 by LEOL30, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License photo on Flickr" They can do this, if they wanted to. I'm still quite on the toe of the learning curve with the DJI Mini 2 drone I got for a gift a few months back (thanks Andy Rush for the recommend). The video quality is stunning, and we are using it to get high and wide views of our acreage. My navigation needs practice though to get the smooth swooping of pros like Andy. And it's quite more fun than I even expected. Even last week's near mis-adventure plus operator error/ignorance. I'll start with the video then backfill the story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn7QJHftihw It was nice and clear last week, no wind, and despite the intense cold (like -29°C) the snowy scenery called for some fly time... after charging up the drone battery. I did not however charge up my iphone (it attaches to the remote control and acts as your flight viewer and controller). Liftoff was smooth, and after a quick snapshot of the house from above.. Home sweet home from drone sweet drone I put it into flight mode hoping to get a nice circuit view, and some practice flying at lower altitudes. Things were fine as I flew west to the road, swung left (south), left again (east) and swooped over the barn. I decided to fly even farther east over the neighbor's field to get a view from father away. That's when it happened. My iphone screen went black, dead. Either it was the cold or low battery, I had no communication with the drone. I tried the RTH (Return to Home) button on the controller but nothing seemed to happen (more likely I did not wait long enough). Thinking that the battery would die and the drone would just drop in the field I walked quickly out in the direction where I thought it was last. As I approached the east edge of the property I could hear it but not see it. So I tried to just flying forward and turning until it got louder, then started dropping the altitude. It got louder but it took a while before I spotted it. Then I pretty much aimed it towards the garage at low altitude until it was over a smooth, shoveled spot, maybe 2 feet off the ground. I could not seem to get it to land or turn off, so in desperation I just grabbed it, somehow not getting my hand in he props, and manually powered it off. That's a long list of mistakes. I think the Return to Home was working (I have it set to go maybe a bit high, like 200 feet). I did read in the manual that when it lost communication with the controlled it should on its own return. But it ended up back in the house rather than out in some field. Then I was curious what it recorded, because the video was still going. When I opened the SD card, it did have an mp4 file, but the file would not open in QuickTime Player, VLC, or any other video app I had. I did some searching for OSX apps that could repair corrupt video. I am not naming the one I used, but it did indicate success, and even launched a .testmovie file in VLC. Joy in video-ville! But when I clicked the "Recover" button I was greeted with a form to register for the software... like $80 for six months? No way. I had a thought. The app was in a folder along with an Uninstaller utility. I opened the apps directory in the Terminal app, and ran a ls-al command. Yup, there has a hidden file was .testmovie! I was able to do a unix copy command and save a copy elsewhere as a regular video file. Victory! I then put that Uninstaller to use. The video seemed fine. Since it had long segments of not movement, I got the idea to edit it down in iMovie, and add subtitles like the drone's thoughts as it lost communication with me. It worked out well, as the file had plenty of glitches in it that just worked perfect for the video. I felt like it needed a retro opening screen, and I had a hunch there would be an old movie with a name like "One of our ____ is missing" - my creative commons search did show a poster as a result that looked perfect... Google image search set for CC licensed returns a result that claims to be licensed, but is it? I was doubtful as the link for the image is from BestBuy.com- hardly a source of open licensed images.. and the BestBuy footer states "© 2022 Best Buy. All rights reserved." Yet results Google provides reads: Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Want to know where this information comes from? Learn More...Small print on google image search The learn more link suggests that Google determines this is a Creative Commons licensed image from the image's metadata, but I inspected the images EXIF data in two different tools and none included a Creative Commons license. Do not blindly trust The Google. So I left the image behind, and instead turned to the fun Pulp-O-Mizer generator I learned about from Paul Bond and made my own poster image. Again to my previous post, Making art is better than just Taking It. And more satisfying. Then for music I turned to the Free Music Archive and found a great track Danger by Steve Combs licensed CC BY. This was all fun (making the video, c.f Cherry on Top) but I obviously need more practice flying! Stay tuned. Featured Image (shown above) my own creative efforts generated by the Pulp-O-Mizer lacks an official license, but states its outputs can be used for non-commercial purposes (violators are subject to the threat of Death Rays from Professor Zappencackler) That Was Bowling by cogdogblog posted 15 Mar '08, 1.46pm MDT PST on flickr "That's a pretty.... wild style of guitar playing, how'd you learn that?" "That was bowling" "Yeah, bowling.. I could tell" I'm digging the British Invasion exhibit at the Museum of Music, Infotainment Island, in Second Life at slurl.com/secondlife/Infotainment%20Island/65/228/43 Join us 9:00 AM PT Monday March 17, as Bucky Barkley gives us a demo of the museum for the NMC Campus Teachers Buzz session. MMmmmmmmmmy Generation! And if you don't dig The Who, they have the Beatles, Stones, Animals, Dave Clark Five, and more old rockers. Oh if you caught Beautiful Depravity back when they were starting out, you'd know what pure true Metal music is all about. Of course by the time Thou Art Metal came out in 2002, they had already lost a lead guitarist to a bizarre accident with a welding torch, and their original keyboard player found Buddha and left the band. But still, with the big bang opener of Remorseless Promises, to the haunting chorus of Dark Wrath, the hypnotic chords of Decayed Chant of Desolation, and the epic closing arc of Grim Delirium, this album holds up as the inspiration for nearly every metal band that has followed. Are you still with me? Everything above is made up, of course. Starting with a band, album cover, and song list created by the Metallizer Heavy Metal Music - Random Album Generator . But more than a mere generator, the Metallizer provides a useful widget that will shine up your sidebar: For fun and neverending metallic mayhem, you can display random metal albums on your own site or blog with the Metallizer.dk Widget.... No adware, spyware, or any other nefarious scheme is involved. However, this service may cause Armageddon, may damn your eternal soul to Hell, and/or may self-destruct without warning. Found at the home of fun weird stuff at the Generator Blog from where I never fail to find something fun and cheap to blog about. Someone has to do this stuff, cause most of my once favorite blogs are quite dead or at least lifeless, as everyone seems to only focus their attention on bursts of 140 characters at a time. I am going to write something in this first of two posts that I bet (and hope) a lot of people will disagree with. I want that. I want to hear your dissent. That is what this stuff is about. Here it is, I make my own artificial distinction between publishing a weblog and the broader, social act of blogging. Huh? This came from several instances of following some interesting stories in my RSS reader, finding a blog where the author had written something where I wanted to disagree with, agree with, offer extra information... and in a number of instances I had no voice because there was no comment functionality. I get tired of looking for it, trying to even find email contacts, and failing. I understand fully the bloggers who have dealt a blow by spam. I have too dealt with the scourge of blog spam, but rather than quitting and cutting of others, I researched, experimented, and found solutions to the problem. It is an excuse that does not wash, and it is giving in to spammers. But I see it more problematic- if you publish a weblog without a comment feature, you are using software just for cranking out web pages, and you might was well be using FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or GeoCities for that matter because it is just web content. Blogging is a social process. It is discourse, conversational, a back and forth with your readers. If there is no voice "back" for the readers, to me, while there is a thing at a URL called a "blog" it is not blogging, and not part of any connected fbaric of the web. There is no conversation except for the author. And that becomes a lonely voice. And I become less interested in reading. So to twist an old tired saying, "If a comment-less weblog falls in the woods, it certainly does not make a sound". Or worse, to re-write lyrics to the Talking Heads "Life During Wartime": There ain't no comments, this ain't no blogging, this ain't no fooling around This ain't no OLDaily, or C. D. B., I ain't got time for that now Coming up next... "'Echo Blogging' Ain't Blogging Either" I am in pain. This hurts. There is a telephone conference blabbing on my desk, and I am ignoring it. This is a technology project coming out of a large organization we are members of, and I have been tapped to be our system's rep. It is aiming to create yet another searchable archive of educational resources, but the development is fixated in a 1980-1990s model of information architecture. It flies with the grace of an iron pigeon. They are pounding away at creating fixed hierarchies, long flowing submission forms, limp content evaluations, but the prototype interface is making my lunch hard to keep down. It is a clunky wobbly wheeled portal approach straight out of Internet 0.5. No RSS. No comments. No tags. I am having trouble resolving this with what I see externally in terms of folksonomy, social networks, ontologies being over-rated. I am keeping a low profile. Make that invisible. I am not here. I am on a beach in Maui. I wish. I am at the same time honored and deeply scared that a lot of people use my Feed2JS tool created like in 2003 or 2004 for helping people embed RSS feeds in their site using cut and paste JavaScript. If my stats are right, in the 6 hours since the cache was cleaned out (daily), 45,000 some unique feeds have been run through here, which is about 60 feeds per minute. I hardly do anything to the code and I hope it does not blow up on anyone. There may have been some issues since the time I was trying to implement a new parser (which killed the server which for years has been kindly donated for free by the kind folks at Modevia Web Services).... in restoring it I may have put a deprecated version of MagpieRSS; I just re-adjusted and the old FeedMachine seems to be working. For the last few years I had the source code hosted at EduForge but as there were some rumblings of changes there, and that despite my immense depression over being Wave Rejected, I am a Google Fan Person--- so I have moved the Feed2JS code to Google code at http://code.google.com/p/feed2js/. I am still learning how to set things up there, and I don't have source code established as check in / check out basis (like it matters, no one ever jumped at the chance to tinker in the code when offered). But since my contact info is not exactly front and center on Feed2JS site, I prefer if people use the Issues submission tool at the new site to let me know of any problems (no guarantee I can do much, but I will try) I spent 3 weeks in June 2012 in Vancouver (never a bad destination) in large part to learn from the great tech gurus at UBC. I was reminded of something I did during that experience that somehow never got blogged. It started with a fantastic, impromptu twitter exchange started today by Mike Caulfield TWEET DELETED! (Too bad Mike is a tweet-deleter. He said something really interesting here.) In that time I was very interested in the publishing model combination of MediaWiki and Wordpress, and more about the success of UBC Wiki as well, and had interviewed several key players there. But the secret weapon, and maybe something I had not seen many other places, was something Brian Lamb had been talking about for years (I have a blog post from 2004 referencing it) -- Will Engel -- a.k.a. The Wiki Gardener. Will has an information organizational mindset and tends, prunes, transplants the UBC wiki. he shared much about his role, perspective, and the workings of the UBC Wiki in a 38 minute audio interview I had recorded... but sadly never posted. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Here is is, better late than never blogged... I might have done some work with MediaWiki when I was at Maricopa, and then cut my teeth on it more in 2007 and 2008 when I set one up for the NMC Horizon Project work (they database seems disconnected; again the Internet Archive saves the day). Before I showed up at NMC, in 2006, they had used a hosted one at MIT, still there. MediaWiki is powerful, but such large beast to take on, and most installations use about 20% of its capability. I probably did not go much farther, but dug into extensions and even wrote my own for embedding RSS feeds (there are lots of options, the typical MediaWiki issue, lots of options). The biggest revelation was getting a grasp on transclusion, the ability to include one wiki page content in another (and another). This provides a means of a modular construction, because when the source is updated, all changes are propagated to other pages that include them. Some simple things I recall doing are navigation, footers, (getting fuzzy). I am now employing that same concept on my Wikispaces sites (that's another post). In 2012, I was working on projects at UMW, where we were using the Wiki Embed Plugin that allowed content from a mediawiki to be dynamically published to a wordpress site; same concept-- if the wiki changes, the wordpress content changes. We used it moderately in ds106; the wiki is actually more of a document source area where we would compose our syllabi and many of the tips that are part of the ds106 handbook. This was written up in The Little Wiki Engine That Could. The larger idea for documentation is that the same content could be put on multiple wordpress sites, so common tasks, like maybe creating Wordpress menus, could be written up in the wiki, but included in any course page that needed it. They use it on a larger scale on UMW Blogs. Anyhow, I learned much about the UBC strategy and architecture from this conversation with Will. Sorry it took so long to post! I might have a few more interviews lingering in the archives. Featured Image: Wiki Gardener flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Chris Lott It's gotta be monkeys (no offense to the primates) (but I love it when my creative common search turns up an image from a friend, hi Chris). Seriously-- who is Yahoo using as a test group for the "new" flickr? The latest WTF is the insertion of a Yahoo navigation bar that looks like it was hand coded in the mid 1990s. On looking at the page source I truly accepted to see a bunch of .... tags. At least it was not that bad. Maybe there is some humor at Monkey Web Design Shops, since the main div id is named "eyebrow" and the interior divs are all called "yucs" Yeah. YUCK- they cannot even spell that correctly. I was curious to see what the infestation of ads was like, so I hopped over to Safari to explore Flickr when I was logged out or using an old free account I use very rarely. The most odd thing was in Safari there is no Ugly Butt Yahoo Navigation Bar. (more…) CogDogBlog Wordle by cogdogblog posted 1 Jul '08, 6.26pm MDT PST on flickr Wordle is a way cool visualization tool for making gorgeous tag clouds form text. Like many people, I did the easy thing first- a wordle made from my del.icio.us tags and then played with a not so easy to use tool to generate your flickr tags into text so you could "wordle" it. But I want to think more creatively what to wordle. Hmmmm. So I decide to run a MySQL query to generate all of the titles of my blog posts (going back to 2002): SELECT `post_title` FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_status` = 'publish' and `post_type` = 'post' and exported that list (2050 lines) as a text and plopped it into Wordle. So now I see the things I blog about... RSS, Blog, Spam, Learning, Web, New> Flickr, NMC... Hmmm what would you wordle? Today I am wearing my Get Federated t-shirt as my attire as a guest on an Open Education Week panel on "Where are OER conversations happening anymore?" I sing of a Bridge over some kind of waters: Oh, social media gets brokenAnd followers just can't be foundLike a bridgy over federated networksI will connect me overLike a bridgy over federated networksI will connect me over Alan's rewording of for satirical purposes only, ain't it obvious of lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Waters I take on my role as an outlier as I maintain there is no "place" we should need to be settled in, that the internet has always been from is, by design, a decentralized space. Connected, federated. So I know I am "missing out" on all the action in Bluesky, the "great party in a sealed building with no fire exits". I am not here to criticize or barb the people who choose that path, I choose my own paths. Technically I do have a Bluesky account, it just says nothing. Weirdly it gets mentions and a few followers. Sorry, nothing here to see. Rather than relying on the Great Benevolent Providers To Hand Us The Town Hall (winking at you, Martin Weller), my route is to build my own (with help) bridge --- err bridgy between. It's as much the different of rather then saying "being connected by a community" to "connecting to a community." Thats the voice of my once PhD advisor Sue to always write and act in the active voice. What I share here is my thin knowledge and guessing of a nifty tool that Jon Udell (the master tool builder) shared, the use of Bridgy a free and open source building with all the fire escapes used long for doing the IndieWeb POSSE approach of publishing stuff from home (like a "blog") sprating outward to social spaces. Actually it is a related but different bridge, Bridgy Fed Bridgy Fed connects web sites, the fediverse, and Bluesky. You can use it to make your profile on one visible in another, follow people, see their posts, and reply and like and repost them. Interactions work in both directions as much as possible. See the docs for more info. https://fed.brid.gy/ What I take this as meaning is I can make noise at that loud party without having to put myself in the sealed building with no fire escapes. And people at the party can yell back at me. Bridgy Fed provides a service to connect say your posts made in Mastodon so someone in Bluesky can choose to follow, and if they do, replies are relayed back to Masodon. And it works the other way too. The subtle difference, it is you, the individual who creates this bridge (active voice) it is not done for you by the owner of the sealed building. Wha Jon built (working off of the approach of others) is his Fediverse-Bluesky Interactive Cheat Sheet. It is freaking brilliant. So for me, bridging from Mastodon to Bluesky, I am on the left side. To get going, in step 1 I start by following @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. Right away I get a private reply aka DM confirming, with a link to where in Bluesky my stuff will go. https://jonudell.info/fedi-bsky-interactive-cheatsheet/ In step 2 I can follow people in BlueSky I want bring in to my fediverse flow. I miss hearing from Maha Bali, so I add her bluesky handle. the sheet provides a one click copy of the bridge of Maha's Bluesky... but I cannot find her! Why? I can only bridge if she has done the first step on the right (I think). This means she makes choices of how her Bluesky is federated, the choices are not made for her. In the end my Masodon is not spraying everything I write to Bluesky and its profile clearly indicates what it is (which anyone can see, you do not need to slip a 20 to the musky smelled door dude) https://bsky.app/profile/cogdog.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy This is mostly what I have inferred from trying. Indeed, it is a few steps you have to take, yourself, it is no done for you by your landlord. But you can make noise at the party yet not be trapped in its sealed building. This is the internet worth dreaming of. Built by people using bridges and hammers and sweat. Featured Image: A real foot bridge I worked with others to build over a creek near Pine Arizona. It Looks Like a Bridge! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB7eAGS5_0U Have you ever had a pleasant, unexpected surprise happen as a result of having shared something online? I'm building out a new collection of these stories, having done it in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Previously I called these kinds of stories "Amazing", but I got in a little trouble so now I am re-casting them as True Stories of Open Sharing. What is it I am looking for? Did you play the video? ;-) I drew the idea from my own experiences- ever since I started in edtech in the 1990s I've shared openly on the internet just about everything I have created. Why? because that is where I learned everything I know about edtech- from the stuff others have shared before me. Is that crazy? I can't tell you how many times people have stolen my ideas and gotten rich of of them. That's right, I cannot tell you. Because it has not happened. But I can tell you of making connections of colleagues now I count among my closest friends, of getting invitations to visit Iceland, Australia, new Zealand, of having a photo I took of my car in Death Valley used on the cover of a German band's CD, of a panoramic photo being put in the world's largest picture atlas... How can such a basic principle we formulate as kids be drummed out of us? And I am not alone with these stories, those are the ones I have collected over the years. I know there's more. I know many people have. I do it because I want people to know this is possible, that there is more to be gained by paying it forward, sharing it forward than not. How to share? I want to collect these as YouTube videos, so you can either video reply to my video above or slip the info though the slot at http://bit.ly/truestories13 (YouTube makes it easier for me to assemble as a playlist and rig as a CoolIris show like years past). I want a video because it is powerful to see people and listen to their stories. Don't be shy and judge your story unworthy. For those who are getting that jittery connected feeling fmor being a part of the ETMOOC Coursmunnity it could be the connections are are just making now. For every scary fear story of some identity theft or abuse, there are 1,000 of these little positive stories that hardly get a ripple. Lets make a bigger wave. I cannot guarantee you that if you share your stuff online that good things will come your way. The reason for sharing should not be the expectation of a reward, its the unexpected, the serendipitous that make it magic. But I can guarantee you this-- if you never share anything online openly, I can promise you 100000% you will NEVER experience one of these stories. Sharing just creates the potential energy for powerful connections. I'm in it for the chance. What's your story? Tell me, ok? I'll share it forward. Google Docs will have it, Microsoft is brewing it, PhotoShop is doing it, so is zoom...it's high time that the advanced technology of CogDogBlog hop on the artificial intelligence inevitable train. As demonstrated this week at the Reclaim Open 2023 conference, behold the new generation of blogging powered by AI Levine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSHvArVPU5M This is all the mad creativity of Michael Branson Smith, who along with Jim Groom (he has a blog, right?) contacted me a few months ago with a request for a short video he could us to train some AI that would generate some manifestation of me as a speaker at the conference. How could I refuse? Michael is one of he most creative and gracious people I have gotten to know in this ed tech game, initially through DS106, but hey we have spent time together hanging out at his home in Brooklyn. Michael shared a few prototypes, all of them definitely weird with artifacts, but still sounding like me. Each time he asked if I was okay with it, I said I trust you completely, MBS, do as you see interesting. I did not travel to Reclaim, but enjoyed the online perch for the conference (I have to say that the Reclaim Hosting set up for live streams is one of the best I have seen. Live streams are viewed adjacent to a Discord chat, with its TV Guide like directory guide at the top. Michael shared some details of his intent to learn something about AI by doing it himself (DS106 spirit showing). I am forgetting the tools used (it's in the video and hopefully a future MBS blog post). The original video I sent did not perform well, so MIchael relied on one from the YouTube I recorded in 2019 as an intro to students at a Coventry University class I was doing something with. Meet AI Levine's puppet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YroEkJWQ0c Michael did say generating the AI audio was the bigger challenge- i believe he used ElevenLabs for text to speech. AI Levine's blabbering was based on a ChaGPT query to talk about SPLOTs derived from 4 blog URLs MIchael gave it to chew on. The "hallucinating" is readily apparent in the history portion but the gist of it is maybe palpable. As was obvious to most in the room, the video generated was weirdest with the mouth, and Michael ended up blurring AI Levine a bit in post editing. In emails the day or two before, Jim Groom suggested some kind of irate outburst from me in chat where they could then bring me in to the room (via a whereby.com link). That would be fun, and of course, anyone ought to get bent out of shape by being deep faked. That's too easy. My play was then to act dismissive, to assert that I am actually a supreme AI construct: For a long time I have been "training" myself by reading the entire internet. Everything I have made, written, created was generated from a complex process applied to this data. SPLOTs could only have been generated this way. (no idea if this is what I actually said) All in all it was quite enjoyable, as was seeing on the live stream and the whereby video much different views. All surreal. Thanks Michael for creating this fallible facsimile in every AI sense of hallucinatory mockery and thanks Reclaim Hosting for putting this on the program. For me, this again, puts on the table some impressive technical feats to produce, well the equivalent of flavorless mind porridge. Generative content stays within the guardrails of statistic probability yielding an appearance of pseudo meaning. Downtown Dullsville. What I've not seen AI do is to make meaning and connections between the unlikely related. For example, in my regular training on internet content (aka reading blogs), my own neural pathways ran off in different directions in Martin Weller's fab post Yankee Shed Foxtrot where he weaves also different, seemingly unrelated topics- a book on "shedworking" and a song by Wilco. Reading this as a human means I do not regurgitate sentences based on some vectors of word probability. For me and my [Un]Artificial [questionable] Intelligence, a series of other un stochastic connections. My comment on Martin's blog was one of those that really should have been a post here.... so I will steal my ow words: What you demonstrate in action here, oh ye faithful blogger, is something AI can’t- make connections between ideas and things that are statistically out of range. Yes, we have neural networks in our grey matter, but the computerized ones that borrow the name cannot (well Stephen will assert its eventually possible) to connect this way. What foir me your post does is trigger other connections. The idea of “shedworking” (the name new but the idea resonates) for some reason reminds me of a book Scott Leslie recommended (see how connections, work, I can remember it was on a camping trip where we canoed to an island in BC) a book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft” http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2 that honors the value of work we do with our hands, it need not be mechanical, or done in a shed, but is a testimonial to the ideal of craftspersonship and what it does for us (I can extend it to creating web pages by hand). As far as an academic metaphor (you are cornering the market!) I love the idea of conceptually makeing space and time for crafting. And yes, institutions are not providing this per se, but there is a two way play here- us as individuals have some responsibility for also not making the time and place ourselves for doing this. People who design their shedworking places are not just given them by an organizational entity, they take it on themselves. We as individuals have a stake in this. And then for the music metaphor, I dont know if you are into the Song Exploder podcast https://songexploder.net/ It’s a brilliant concept where musicians break down a finished song into its origin story, how the tracks came together, layer by layer. It’s a fabulous metaphor (to me) of what we do little of in our work (outside thr last ferw bloggers standing) of not just pumping their finished work, but the craft of how it was made, how it emerged, if you will from their audio workshed. I wanted to launch an idea like “Course Exploder” where educators could break down a lesson or a OER or course design in the same way. What I enjoy about Sound Exploder is that I get these stories for songs and genres I never listen to (sort of like how university requirements had me take courses I would have never chosen on my own interests). I was just listening to the episode where Seal talked about the evolution of the mega pop hit “Kissed by the Wind” (heard the song plenty but cant say its in my listening queue). It’s rivetting to hear him talk about its origin, but there is a bit in the opening where he talks bout his start before being a mega star: “I was living in a squat. I didn’t have any money and I was just basically getting my act together, trying to figure out who I was musically. And “Kiss From A Rose” came out of that period, when you sort of do things not for any other purpose than because that’s what’s coming out of you. I had no experience in the studio, in a proper recording studio, at that point.” It’s that line– “when you sort of do things not for any other purpose than because that’s what’s coming out of you” that connects in my head back to Shopcraft and sheds and why we even bother trying to do stuff. My comment on Martin Weller's Yankee Shed Foxtrot blog post I may be on the far end of the bell curve of what people want from the world these days, but I crave more the intelligence that makes meaning from dissimilar ideas, not just spitting back the statistically relevant blandchastic stuff. You heard it all from me, the always A.I. Levine. Featured Image: Combination of one frame from the Reclaim Open 2023 presentation The SPLOT Revolution will be Artificial with a conference logo and a SPLOT logo, call the whole thing CC BY. Here are some web site gripes I've been storing up. These are not meant as criticisms of the work and content people are posting, but things that may affect the usefulness, usability, or even return visits to your sites. First up, you as the person who created a web site for yourself, for your organization, are the best at knowing what your site is about, its purpose. Everybody else is going to be guessing at first glance. I have seen more than a few web sites, where my Blink level experience does not give me a clue as to what a site is. But even worse, when I am sharing a web site with others, and especially when I am tagging and adding sites to my del.icio.us collection, if I cannot locate a 1-2 sentence explanation of the site, it makes it pain down in the nether regions to do my social bookmarking. I am looking for chunk of mouse selectable text I can highlight (since del.icio.us can use that for a description) or can copy paste-- I should not have to find it on another page, or be forced to type it since it is trapped in flash or an image. And if I have to dig several layers deep to find out what a site is, my interest level drops even farther. Take a Blink second look at the Open Source Media site -- I found it in my feeds this morning. The descriptive title tag is "OSM". That tells me a lot. It looks kind of blog like, and there are bright red ads up the stripe. I am already 30 seconds in and I lack a clue. So I follow the About OSM link. Do I get the information.. no, it is another menu. I have to dig even deeper: So what's your guess? Which one of the coconut shell links reveals something that tells me what the site is about? Taking the first link plunge, From the Founders, I have to wade through more text just to find what this site is about. It's not until the 6th paragraph down do I even get close: OSM's mission is to expand the influence of weblogs by finding and promoting the best of them, providing bloggers with a forum to meet and share resources, and the chance to join a for-profit network that will give them additional leverage to pursue knowledge wherever they may find it. From academics, professionals and decorated experts, to ordinary citizens sitting around the house opining in their pajamas, our community of bloggers are among the most widely read and influential citizen journalists out there, and our roster will be expanding daily. We also plan to provide a bridge between old media and new, bringing bloggers and mainstream journalists"”more and more of whom have started to blog"”together in a debate-friendly forum. And even reading that, I have little sense what is here, this being something that could have been spawned from a Buzzword Statement Generator That is way too much digging to give me a human readable statement of what a site is about. If I have to work that hard to find something that simple, how willing am I to wade through for something less defined? Gripe number 2 is also related to my bookmarking habits- sites that do not put unique text descriptions for different web pages in the <title>...</title> parts of their pages. Maybe some web site consultant told them to brand every page with their organization name, or maybe they have not figured out how to set up the correct strings in their blog templates, but if I bookmark 8 different pages from the Wooly Mammoth Society, Inc site in my browser or in my social bookmark tool -- which automatically extracts a page title as an identifier-- how will I tell them apart if they are all labeled as "Wooly Mammoth Society, Inc"? How can I use my History or Back button on my browser to jump back from a set of viewed web pages on my site if they all show up with the same name? Just as a few examples I have been collecting, all of these sites, some of them I visit regularly, are sadly set up to have the same eaxct string of text on every web page of their site. This makes me manually have to type in a title every time I bookmark, and those seismic tremors are me cussing at the manual effort required: Bloggsavvy http://blogsavvy.net/are-global-communities-more-local-than-we-might-expect e-Literate http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/im_giving_a_webinar_on_e_learning_usability/ Poynter Online http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=92267 Xplanazine http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2005/11/its_the_legs_th.php Walter Mossberg http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050505.html Now this may seem like petty griping to you, but for any blog generated site, it is bone simple to set templates up so every individual page posting has its blog entry title as the web page title. If you need branding, stick it in some parenthesis. So here are Alan's ways to make the web a tinier bit better: (1) Make sure your home page has a selectable text, human language sentence that says what the site is about. This is a very Jakobian wise tactic. It can then link to a more detailed explanation. But for your visitors sake, finding this information should not be a treasure hunt through arcane menus. It's bad enough when we have to deal with menu trees on the telephone, do not do that on your web site. (2) Make sure every web page has a distinct title in its <title>...</title> tags (unless your is a one page web site with no other internal links). It is an identifier for each page, maybe even metadata if you will. There are better ways to brand your content that mis-identifying content. There, I feel better. Got it out of my system. Like some shiny dress shoes, my SPLOT themes just got a wee bit of polish based on some needs others had. I also made an effort to make sure the three main ones TRU Writer, TRU Collector, and SPLOTbox all got the same shine. This also reinforces what has been true since the first SPLOTs rolled out- that many of the best features come when people have uses I never imagined. Let's crack open that can of polish and see where it was used. More Sort Options By default in WordPress, with its roots as blogging platform, all the views of posts (or items submitted to a SPLOT) are always listed in reverse chronological order, newest stuff first. A few years ago I added to TRU Collector a theme option to that items could be sorted also alphabetically and by allowing a both ascending and descending order, this means all content could be sorted: By Date, descending (default, reverse chronological, new stuff first)By Date, ascending (oldests tuff first, not sure how this would be ever used)Alphabetical by title, ascending (A-Z)Alphabetical by title, descending (Z-A) This came by request from Daniel Villar-Onrubia who had started the clever idea to use TRU-Collector as a site for students in a class (or later, people attending an event) could share bios. That was the only SPLOT I provided this option. But then came the capes. Just this semester, Jessica Motherwell MacFarlane has been doing some amazing work where students create a series of 8 hand drawn comics to demonstrate steps in a personal development process (see Get Cape. Wear, Fly -- the psychology of making one change). She had devised a setup where students, in SPLOT like fashion, did not use their names, but instead would use a unique tag she assigned so that each student's work was available at a tag url. The reverse chronological order is fine for the home page, so you can see newest work first. But when viewed as a tag, a student's work would be in the order of 8,7,6,5,4,2,1 when as comics, that is reversed. A change I have rolled into all three splots, allowed her to to set the order for tag archives only to be normal chronological (sorted by date, ascending). Look at an example to see this in play -the layout can vary depending on the amount of text in the title affecting how the boxes are laid out, so it's not a perfect comic strip, but this is closer to the order of the comic panels tis student submitted. This is the new theme feature, on all three SPLOTs, that the sorting can be chosen as outlined above, but you can also define where this alternate sorting is used: Everywhere on the siteOnly on the home pageOnly on category archivesOnly on tag archivesOnly on tag and category archives In this example, sorting is only applied to the home page, so that items are listed in alphabetical order. In category and tag archives, the display will be normal reverse chronological. For those that like code, this is done with a hook in the theme for pre_get_posts as we need to interact with the query early in the flow of things. The function that manages the different cases has a bit of repetition to it, so sue me. This is the code from TRU Writer: add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'truwriter_order_items' ); function truwriter_order_items( $query ) { // check for not being an admin screem and a main query if ( !is_admin() && $query->is_main_query() ) { // test on the settings switch (truwriter_option('sort_applies')) { case 'all': // use sorting on home, all archives, and search results if ( $query->is_home() OR $query->is_archive() OR $query->is_search() ) { splotbox_query_set($query); } break; case 'front': if ( $query->is_home() ) { // use sorting on home only splotbox_query_set($query); } break; case 'tag': if ( $query->is_tag() ) { // tag archive splotbox_query_set($query); } break; case 'cat': if ( $query->is_category() ) { // category archive splotbox_query_set($query); } break; case 'tagcat': if ( $query->is_tag() OR $query->is_category() ) { // any archive that made it this far splotbox_query_set($query); } break; } // switch } // if main query } function splotbox_query_set ($the_query) { //utility to set the query as per the theme settings $the_query->set( 'orderby', truwriter_option('sort_by') ); $the_query->set( 'order', truwriter_option('sort_direction') ); } A Shortcode to Display All Tags Jessica's sites also introduced a problem I never knew about- because of the number of students in her class, the WordPress tag cloud widget was not showing them all. As it turns it, the widget is hard wired to list only 40 tags, and she had upwards of 60? 70? I thought about adding an option to increase the number the widget could show, but this might have made the TRU Collector sidebar blow up to take up a ton of space. I came up with an alternative approach, I created a [[taglist]] shortcode that could be used on a page to have a full listing of all tags. The default is to list all tags, in alphabetical order-- see how the Cape site uses it to list the full collection. A good shortcode though can offer options to fine tune what it does. These are all the options that can be passed. number=10 limit to ten tags (default=0 or all tags)show_count=false hides the display of the number of times tag used (default=true)mincount=2 will only show tags used 2 or more times (default=1)orderby="count" to order results by the number of times tag used (default="name")order="DESC" to list in descending order (default="ASC")hide_empty=0 to list tags not used (default=1) Examples might include: [[taglist mincount="5"]] List in alphabetical order, but only show tags used 5 or more times[[taglist orderby="count" number="10"]] Show the top 10 tags used, listed in order of most first This might not be of wide use, but it was fun to make it flexible. I guess I should make a similar one for categories (?). For the code minded, here it is: add_shortcode("taglist", "splotbox_taglist"); function splotbox_taglist( $atts ) { extract(shortcode_atts( array( "number" => '0', "show_count" => true, "orderby" => 'name', "order" => "ASC", "hide_empty" => 1, "mincount" => '1' ), $atts )); // set args $tags = get_tags(array( 'number' => $number, 'count' => $show_count, 'orderby' => $orderby, 'order' => $order, 'hide_empty' => $hide_empty, )); if ($tags) { $output .= ''; foreach ($tags as $tag) { // show if the count is more than the minimum set in options if ($tag->count >= $mincount) { $output .= ''. $tag->name .''; if ($show_count) $output .= ' (' . $tag->count . ')'; $output .= ''; } } $output .= ''; } else { $output = 'No tags found!'; } return $output; } A Shortcode to Display Total Count of All Items This one is pretty simple, but can be used in widgets or About pages where you would like to say "This collection includes XX published things". It's already included in the TRU Collector theme beneath the title, but I made it available should it be wanted anywhere else. The usage is most basic, just enter [[splotcount]] where you want the number to appear (you can wrap that in a bold tag in the editor). Really simple code here... no options included. add_shortcode('splotcount', 'splot_count_splots'); function splot_count_splots() { return wp_count_posts()->publish; } I find it useful to dynamically display how many items there are. Categories and/or Tags for Admin Use Option These next few bits of SPLOT and Polish came from questions from Suzanne at Lansing Community College who uses a SPLOTbox as a means for students to share their Starscapes projects. She was interested in using categories to organize the responses by year, but did not want that to be an option on the sharing form that the students see. I already had an admin option in all SPLOT themes to not use (hide) or use categories and tags on the form and the display of published items-- it was pretty simple to add a new option to cover the way Suzanne was seeking to use them. New theme option on tags and category settings shown for TRU Writer, the third one uses them to organize and display on items, but they are only editable from the admin side (e.g. for internal organization purposes) This would mean assigning to categories and/or tags is only done by a admin after something is submitted. Yes, a rather specialized thing to have, but easy to include without changing any previous functionality. Customize SPLOT Metadata Labels For quite some time all SPLOTs have made use of the WordPress Customizer so site owners could change the labels and prompts for the forms where their visitors add content. This too was an idea that came from a user, I believe it was Lauren Heywood at Coventry University who asked because the hard coded ones I had in the first generation were not always understandable to a particular course. Making them editable allows a SPLOT owner to be very site specific as to what kinds of things were asked of on a form. This is all find on the place where a form asks for a person to credit or how a license is described, but I had overlooked that on the templates where an item is output, that the labels were still hard coded. Suzanne's questions made me make this much flexible, as she was repurposing the attribution credit fields for the SPLOTbox for students to enter the name of the faculty member they worked with. So all three SPLOTs now offers customizer options so an owner can change the labels for where content collected from the form is displayed- en example here for SPLOTbox: This is pretty easy since it uses the same functions the Customizer uses to output the options (or default) on the form page. Suzanne also expressed interest in a way to manage the order in which the form items are displayed and the way the information is published on an item. This one is a bit more complex, and might need a bigger can of polish. But it's on my mind. Shining Up Non-SPLOT Authored Posts One example I looked at used the basic WordPress post (usually renamed as "Item" in a SPLOT, but still a humble post) to create ana bout page or maybe a sticky item as instructions for users. This is all fine, but the output template for a single items ends up posting extra information that comes from content created in a SPLOT form. This just took a few extra checks to only output these elements if present as custom fields, and for the place where it enters the "name" entered on a form, if not present, uses the post author. Little bits of code do this like: $wAuthor = ( get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'wAuthor', 1 )) ? get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'wAuthor', 1 ) : get_the_author() ; These are thing maybe only the person with the shoe shine box might notice, but I do enjoy these small bits of spiffing up. And my obsession with these SPLOT things continues, largely fueled when I hear from someone else putting them to use. Cue the music... The SPLOT Goes On... A heavily re-edited parody of an ATCO 45rpm record, the featured image on a YouTube video of Sonny and Cher’s “And The Beat Goes On.” Likely not 100% open license kosher. Shrug. Featured Image: I remixed my own photo of a very special box in real life, a shoe shine box my Dad made as a kid in Newark, New Jersey. I still have it, along with the tins of old polish. It fit the metaphor! Classic Shoe Polish flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

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