Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
For another hurry up and post story, this is an example of the flickr group Tell a Story in Five Frames, where you have to submit to the group discussion a single post with a title and 5 photos that... tell a story. It is in the vein of my Five Card Flickr stories, but of course here, you get to choose the images. This is a great exercise in being creative within constraints and making a message with mainly photos, and honestly, tough to pull off well (I cannot claim to ever have done a great one). The group moderator is pretty critical! Today, I posted what was a series of images I took form some folks doing some sort of team building activity on the Cambie bridge in Vancouver. Technically, the first shot was actually a different group of people than I observed later on the bridge. Posted to the group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157626707827458/. We Can Out Charade Those Redshirts Hmm, the last slew of things written here have been rather snippy. It might be time to see the doctor and get some more blue pills. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Do not take this boyish innocent smile lightly- Tom Woodward is a force of creative and sarcastic genius. It was yet another highlight to have spent tim with Tom in person a few clicks back, and to get to visit with him and his family in Richmond. Until then, I had skyped with Tom when he provided his Amazing Story of Openness for my 2009 Open Ed presentation and probably the most over the top presentation done in Second Life, when he and Jim Groom did The Revolution will Be Syndicated, with extra zombies. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog While at Tom's house, we broke out the StoryBox and did a 20 minute bit of live broadcasting on ds106 radio. ds106 radio with Tom Woodward Don;t take this all literally- Tom has a great wry sense of humor. I hope he does not regret recording this. We talked first about animated GIFs, and he was working on one right there, the very first one shared in Storybox. Tom specualted why they are special They almost like a still picture, but it's not the weight and drama of doing a full on video. Animated GIFs are a nice in-between place, I like the element of motion, it's just enough. Tom speculated on the potential of setting up a Storybox in high school - "It would totally disrupt every degree of control we have on the network. My real question, is can it go in a waterproof container?" We then went even more wild- thinking what would happen if you put the storybox on a bus? bicycles? remote control plane? And his closing thought (after some probing if a StoryBox could broadcast under water): We need more animated GIFs.. and anything under water. Anyhow, I wanted to be sure to share a bit of what was a special Sunday at Tom's house. One more memorable stop on the road. January Crop of 366 photos posted 1 Feb '08, 10.20pm MST PST on flickr One month down for the year's pledge of 366 daily photos posted to flickr (plus one into February), 8.1% done! This has been so much fun to do; making time and effort each day to think visually, and look for novel things to snap pictures of. And I'm glad to say it truly ash been one a day, no backfilling (okay a few were at 2am the next day). D'Arcy started something incredible as there are 35 others in the pool! I know I am repeating thoughts written elsewhere recently, but another great ah ha from the week here in Vancouver has been participating in conference sessions that were conducted primarily in conversational mode, in engagement with an audience, as opposed to the traditional mode of presentation as lecture, inflicted onto an audience. This is just just trying to pat the backs of myself and colleagues Brian, Scott, D'Arcy, Jason for the sessions we did at UBC and at NorthernVoice-- there was a great round of discussion in Nancy White's session on Community Building, and the approach Kris Krug did at Moosecamp for the sessions on Digital Photography. These were all ones where the audience played as much as part as the conveners. Where we were invited to be part of the show, not dulled with ti being hit over our heads. Don't take me as saying all presentations need to be done Kum Ba Ya style, but we certainly do better in this social-software everyone-participates citizen-journalism environment than letting one person dictate on and on and on. And if you must take the lectern, and if you must drill us with powerpoint, please, please, please heed Levine's Law: START WITH THE DEMO! (D'Arcy Norman has referenced this so much I am updating this post 20 years later) -- do not use 90% of the time for background, rationale, theory, reference, pictures of your kids, yadda yadda, get to the stinkin' demo! Show us the demo! https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2694267505 PowerPoint Does Not Kill flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Excite us, entice us, but please do not be playing Killing Me Softly With Bullet Points. There has been sufficient carnage already. Featured Image: Breakin' The Law flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license cc licensed flickr photo shared by michael.heiss Given the rising tide/trend of electronic books, for a number of months I've been pondering how to make our NMC publications available in an ebook format. With the push of an iThing it looked like ePub was the format to aim for. It is after all, a standard (or is it a guideline). My experience suggests it is a muddy place, much depends on the devices that access the content (oi the browser wars of the 1990s), but this is a stream of what I've figured out so far. I will pre-amble that I have almost no expertise in this- its just what I figured out by head-banging attempts to produce an ePub. I'll foreshadow the hint that I am excited about the just released Anthologize tool for generating electronic texts but it's too early to tell on that one. First, I tried a number of the various tools that offered to convert a PDF to an ePub -e.g. ePubBud. I can say that you get "something" you can view at the end, but its really not optimal on format, layout- you don't get much in the options to customize, so its a crapshot whether it does a decent job. That is because under the hood- what an ePub file really is is not a file at all, but a container of files, many of them XML, and all the "content" portions of your ePub are structured HTML, or XHTML. So anything that attempts to "convert" your PDF must make guesses as to what are headers, where are breaks, etc, and who knows what it does with things like lists and links. I learned the most from the excellent tutorial "How to Create an ePub By Hand" which clearly illustrates many of the moving parts in an ePub, and provides a template to start with. Harrison Ainsworth's Epub Format Guide is another great reference (and is also available as an ePub). So what you end up doing is a lot of hand coding of XML and XHTML files, package it up with a few other key files in a zip, and than just change the file extension from ".zip" to ".epub" If you are leaping ahead like I did and think you can take that DRM sprinkled ePub, swap its file extension to .zip, and pry open to peek at the structure-- good luck. You get a *.cpgz file which when you uncompress-- gives you another version of the original zip, endless circle (well not exactly true, I just found the unix command line "ditto -xk source.zip " which seemed to pop it open, but thats just a detail- have not tried it yet with a dl-ed epub). While embarking down this manual path, I also asked our publication designer, who does use inDesign to generate our documents, to experiment with its ability to export ePub. I've not hear much, but he was unable to even get a simple test file going, and as is, this would require recasting of his templates and styles to get something ePub-able. I also got connected (thanks Phil Long) with someone who does this as a business - and found out on that end, they doe a ton of work doing it the manual way to get a template that works, and then get to the point of more automation in generating the content. I thought this would be pretty easy to do for our NMC Horizon Reports since I already re-publish them in WordPress format (see http://wp.nmc.org/) so I already have the content in HTML. It took a little bit of tidying to get clean XHTML- changing extensions to .xhtml, closing some tags properly, adjusting local links, changing the HTML headers to: The tricky part was packaging the files up. The instructions indicate that the special mimetype file should not be compressed, and must be the "first added to the zip". I had no luck getting this to work on a Mac, and even on a PC using WinZip, with everything as stated, I could not get the file to validate using the ThreePress validator-- it kept saying the first file in the zip was not 8 characters long (meaning it was not finding "mimetype" first. Crap. I was in a corner. I looked at other apps- Calibre is very handt for converting between eBook formats, and allows some modifications of the various settings (setting a cover image, editing the metadata) but what I really sought was something that was more of a full fledged ePub editor. And than I found maybe not the Holy Grail, but for me, what turned out to be pretty Grail-ish - eCub by Julian Smart. It is cross platform and free! eCub is a cross-platform tool for creating EPUB and MobiPocket books. EPUB is become a popular e-book standard and is open and free for all to implement. EPUB files can be read by MobiPocket, Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Stanza, the Sony Reader, and many other readers and applications. MobiPocket books can be read on desktop platforms, mobile platforms and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. eCub offers a convenient way to import text and XHTML files and create all the necessary components of an EPUB file. It makes it easy to view and edit files, and check the generated EPUB, using external tools. It can also generate audio files from your book content using eSpeak and other text-to-speech software. A wizard allows you to create a new project in seconds, with options for generating a table of contents, a cover page, and a title page. You can create a simple cover design image using templates and a simple design tool. Then you can compile, check and try out the EPUB at the click of a button. With eCub, I simply made a new project, and was able to import my directory of xhtml files. The file tool allows me to change the order, and even to edit them if needed: There are a number of settings panels that pretty much take care of the grunt work of generating the content.opf and other XML files the ePub needs, plus it adds the meta data. It has templates you can use to generate a cover, but I just went for the simple of the same cover image from our publications. I went a few rounds of edits (mostly tweaking the XHTML for some formatting errors) with the ThreePress ePub validator to get all but one error cleared there (it seems to be saying the format for my publication date is invalid, but I cannot see any issue there). So here is 2010-Horizon-Report.epub (236k) a test version of an ePub equivalent of the 2010 NMC Horizon Report (web version) This is a draft version, yadda yadda, small type legal mumbo jumbo, batteries not included, your mileage will vary... But the test was in seeing how it worked. The desktop version of Stanza was sad, as it seemed to ignore all formatting, and produced a river of text. I have to say the iBooks app in the iPad looks and acts the best so far. I like how my own publication sits in the shelf The downside is of course, the jump rope of having to get stuff there via iTunes sync. Also, mysteriosuly enough, with ePub files sent my mail or even when accessed in DropBox, iBooks is never offered as a helper app for opening ePub files. But in iBooks, this version works in a lovely manner- it displays using the simple styles I made for headers, the hyperlinks to internal and external URLs all work, the table of contents and other bits work great. Stanza too displayed the content reasonably (though it ignored my own style sheet), but did all of the lists, bold, italics as it should: However, the hyperlinks in the generated Table of Contents as well as internal ones went nowhere. In some searching (I cannot locate the exact location now, but thought it was here)... I found out to get Stanza hyperlinks to work, you actually have to press and hold the link at least 2 seconds. I think that is "the fix is in progress" statement here. So I have an ePub proof done, and tested it small scale. I don't have access to other readers, and assume I might have to run it through Calibre to generate versions that will work with other eReaders (which has my scratching my head over the concept of "standard"). With eCub and my content already in formatted HTML I should eb able to convert a number of our other documents more easily. In the end, creating an ePub is far from easy. I would think there is a ton of room for someone to create a better kind of application to generate ePub files and more than the quick and slap conversions, but a full fledged editor. And most ideally, I am hopeful the just off the code press Anthologize will be a viable option, which might be the best since our content already exists in WordPress. It does require a little bit of server sized tweaking (re-compiling PHP to include the ZIP extension). This is really an early stage for ePub-- there are some interesting possibilities of JavaScript ePub readers perhaps making it possible to embed/integrate ePub with other web content. Then there is the headier stuff, since ePub can allow for scripts and object tags, for Interactivity in ePub. Definitely the folks at ThreePress are doing a lot with this leading edge -- see http://blog.threepress.org/. And that's all I know for now! Free tricks. If you have ever downloaded a flickr photo or come across in blogs a link to the image URL, it will be something cryptic like: 19172144641_71660f5fdb_z.jpg You have no idea who it belongs to, or where it lives in flickr. But there is a trick you can do to back out this info. If you look at the filename, it has 2 "_" characters, these actually separate what are more or less data fields. 19172144641 is a unique id for the photo in flickr, it is the key identifier. This is actually the one you want. I read it is actually the sequential number for all flickr photos, so this one is the 19,172,144,641th on in flickr. Woah, 71660f5fdb is a "hash" some sort of munbo jumbo code used if you make your photos private, z is a code for the file size (z=640px wide) But again, the key one is 19172144641. And here is where the magic comes in - I learned this from a 2008 blog post by Bram Van Damme. Of course we all know blogs are pretty useless, right? Take that number, and slap it on the enf of this URL http://flickr.com/photo.gne?id= or for this photo, http://flickr.com/photo.gne?id=19172144641. Pretty crazy, eh? If I really wanted to be helpful, I guess I could take a web tool that does it. But it's kind of fun to drive the web with a clutch and a stick shift. I used to rename all the flickr photos I downloaded for projects to be more descriptive, but now that I know thus secret judo move, I always keep the original file name, since I know I can back out of it the full information from its flickr page. If I do want to be organized, I might just prepend the file name when I save it like yellow_sign_19172144641_71660f5fdb_z.jpg. I use this too often on blog posts that do not provide image attribution. If they uploaded the file to their wordpress site, but left the original flickr name... well you can get to the source. So for my closing I leave you: 3162856342_b1845549bd_z.jpg 7969016534_dd7f852274_b_d.jpg 3283119818_8a549d0f50_b_d.jpg Now you to can amaze your teachers and co-workers with some flickr kung fu. Top / Featured Image credits: Creative Commons Licensed image from tOrange http://www.torange.us/animals/dogs/Dalmatian-15766.html I am about 99999.9% sure (always leave room for doubt) I will never be among the digerati sitting in the plush red seats for a TED conference. No dogs allowed, eh? However, I did, a few months ago, happen to be at a home of someone who has, and got to see watch on DVD examples of some of the sessions, and wow, there are some great presentations done in those brief formats. And now, the velvet ropes are parted slightly to let those not in, near, or even heard of Monterey, savor some of the TED sessions on TEDTalks, where you can get them in audio, flash, quicktime, google video, itunes, podcast, vodcast, itunescast... heck, maybe even in morse code. And its free... well a wee bit of ads.... it is free thanks to some BMW sponsorship which whizzes by in the video openings. But you get the sessions in some of the best web video quality out there. And what's really cool for sharing, they give you the cut an paste code to embed a video in your own blog, so here goes: In this stunning presentation, Hans Rosling pokes holes in your preconceptions of data, statistics, and society with a fabulous visualization tool that allows him to show us insight into trends in world health, animated slices and groupings by time and geography. I was, and still am blown away, by the power of this visualized way to look at data. If you like this video, be sure to tag over to his Gapminder project for more. Do TED from home, for free... could be some could 'casts to catch. (the movie, not the country!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xNnRBksvOU I had promised myself to avoid blogging or tweeting all the injustices inflicted upon my by heartless and stupid companies, no #FAIL proclamations. Oh well, time to bust my own promise. But really, the communcination systems I find myself dealing with seem right out of the Ministry of Information. Yesterday, I got a call from the Ministry of My Health Insurance, aka Humana: "Hello", says an automated woman's voice, "This is RightSourceRX Prescription Services Department with important information for Alan Levine, Is this Alan?" (This seems like a semi intelligent system, it uses voice recognition rather then button prompts) "Yes" I say, slowly and clearly, directly into the iphone mic (previous experience shows she does not always hear. "We have important information for you. Please call 866-xxx-xxxx and enter this message priority code 8492006" Stop. You call me, ask it is me, tell me I have an important message, but I have to call another number to get it? Why dont you give me the message, Ms RightSourceRX? But I continue on down the assembly line, and call the number. Rather than play out the hilarity that ensued, I recoded it (this was the second attempt since the first one ended with me yelling and screaming back at the drone--hmm just as this one ends). Ms Humana asks me several time to confirm the code I entered, and no matter how many yes, yes YES YES I say, she is stumped (in a last ditch effort, I press the number 1, and that works.) (warning, loud f-bombs coming) (sorry mom for f-bombing,, don't listen) Me Yelling at Computer Phone Lady In the end, after this whole double phone call charade, the important information was a reminder to refill a prescription. A freaking reminder. Something that could have been done in an email message. And don't get me started with so called "emails" from insurance companies and banks. Their idea of email is far from what we use on a regular basis. Another insurance company sends me information this way- I get a normal email letting me know I have a message .I then log into their site, find theier web-based messaging interface, click a link to read a message, and it downloads a PDF.... and the message is basically, "We got your request, and will notify you when it is ready." Such things as this have actually come out of some twisted design process, supposedly field tested for usability- say it ain't so. Yes, in a few ways, we live in Brazil. SAy, does anyone have a 27B-6?"¬" cc licensed flickr photo shared by Andreas Kristensson I am stepping inside the CogDog Laboratory today to conduct some experiments in... oh who am I kidding? I am just idly watching snow fall out the window, and thinking of things to try out online. Okay, for you loyal reader of this blog (not the use of singular noun), and the odd non-spammer who actually sites down and writes a comment, I am speaking to you. I am running this completely unscientific experiment to explore what the differences in response or to things I put out there: As a blog post (this here thing) in twitter on facebook To make it fair, I am turning off the automatic sending of this blog post out on twitter. And I am doing this also to test out my up to now un-liking of Facebook. Of course in a blog, I can expound on and on ad infinitum... whereas the other two are the short and shorter forms. My test is to ask for recommendations for three things. This is safe, as ideally, there is a core of people out there with knowledge or experience with these things. So here we go, as I pipette in some volatile fluids and warm the beaker over a bunsen burner.... I am Looking for a Quality Photo Tripod Up until now, for my long exposure photos, night shots, etc, I have used a really cheap, old video tripod. I am seeking something lower than the pro level but higher than basic consumer level. The needs are to be able to do steady photos using my Canon T1i (or whatever camera I might buy next) and using my current big lens, the 300m L IS. It's not super heavy, and the most I would add now is maybe an extender. This is the lens cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'd like a tripod that is not super monstrous to lug around. So what model/brand of camera tripod would you recommend for me? Adios iPhone / AT&T Hello Android / Verizon? (maybe) I really love my iPhone 4, and it is with heavy heart (and a boat load of apps) that I consider a big change. It's really about the network-- today I sit at home with my cable internet down (at best I get a little over 1 Mbps download speed), and I am using my Verizon MiFi card, and am seeing speeds of 1.3 - 1.8 Mbps! I then checked the coverage maps, and it shows Verizon has my little town blanketed in 3G data/voice, and more importantly, on the drive down AZ 87 that I use to go to Phoenix, there are just a few small dead spots. With AT&T on the other hand, they do not even own a tower near where I live- I am on a nebulous "partner" tower, and at best get Edge connectivity for data, and a lot of dropped calls. When I drive to Phoenix, there are actually only 2 short stretches (2-3 miles) along AZ 87 between Payson and Phoenix that I can even get a data or phone signal. "More bars in more places"? What a load of horse dung. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog And I have been thinking that for my tech work at NMC, where everyone else has an iPhone, someone ought to be exploring the other platforms. I can still use most of my apps on the iPad. Putting aside the regular monthly rumor, I am mildly considering after the first of the year, jumping ship. So my question is, were I to go to Android/Verizon, what phone should an iPhone lover get? Beach Reading On Sunday, I am off for an extra week of vacation, an idyllic week on Kauai (yes, you should feel extremely sorry for me, someone has to go there, ok?). So what novel should I pack for the time away? I want something to take my mind away from the normal routine. I like some action, suspense, mild sci-fi, irony, satire... well that is not very specific, eh? cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So in a more open category, send me some paperback beach reading novel suggestions! Thanks. The lab is open. Robin Good asks, "RSS Ads: Should We Push Unrequested Advertisements Into RSS Pull?" No commentary needed here. Nope. Nada. Go away. My twitter addiction is right on course. I can (ahem) quit at anytime, just not today. Or tomorrow. Or... For sheer failure of seeing my calculated negative allotment of free time grow even more negative, I have greatly resisted digging into the worlds of MySpace and Facebook -- but decided for some curiosity and just because I cannot advocate commenting from the outside- I signed up at Facebook. This was really prompted by some stats shared by D'Arcy and Cole about the amazingly high percentage use of FB at their institutions (like in the 80% range). That is rather scary in some sense, considering data Ive seen and collected suggested blog activity at edu being more like in the 15-20% range. But I am not spending much time in facebook, not looking for friends or parties or photos of XXXXX. The bits I have seen indicate they have the social networking and the finding of related interests running at a level our educational tools can only dream of. Put it besides Blackboard and WebCT, and those look like wobbly oxcarts next to a thumpin' Ferrari. I poked around the networks in Facebook trying to get some numbers for a variety of colleges/universities, in not the most scientific sampling, and then to compare it to what I could find for enrollment numbers at the institution web sites -where the first number is what facebook reports as the number of people in the network, the second is the best number I could find on total student enrollment (this was literally 20 minutes of lazy research) Arizona State University 44613 / 58782 75.90% Lewis-Clark College 908 / 3500 25.94% University of South Florida 30763 / 44038 69.86% Harvard 35160 / 20042 175.43% University of Mary Washington 5656 / 4750 119.07% Of course, there are some bull dozer sized curious holes in there- why are there so many Harvard people in Facebook? Is it because of Alumni? I don't know how to get a number that means currently enrolled students. But go Harvard- either the students there value their profile or the alumni are really pounding the social connections. Even if you chopped the Facebook reported numbers in half, those are freakin large numbers! And things get even more bizarre as you look into the user created groups. Dont look if your stomach is weak. Still probing the allure of Harvard, I found the group "Any other crazy ******** out there wanna go to Harvard??" advertised as: This is for ppl who want to go to harvard. the title was pretty self explanatory-- u gotta b ***ing crazy and there are 56 members in this society. I don't want to do more digging. But if you are discounting this kind of activity, you are really going to be walloped by the sheer volume of this kind of activity. And thrusting your head in the sand will not work for long. But I may just try. This month in digital cleanup is taking a broom to a pile of domains that have accumulated a not so tidy pile. I can't full explain why i needed a cogdog.casa domain some ____ years ago? I had some rationale. In today’s fast-paced world, it is important to note that I will delve into showcasing and unprecedented landscape of domain cleanup (I am tossing in all the LLM buzzphrases just to play with you), ignore this sentence, please). But seeing the notice of upcoming automated domain renewals coming in, I started thinking, why do I need these? I see the very first one I bought back in 1997 dommy.com coming up on 29 years old was up for renewal, plus 3 more this month. Much as I loathe breaking links, let's not kid myself, when was the last time anyone was linking to my web clients form the late 1990s? I decided I'd rather maintain my own archive, make sure my own links are alive, leave the rest to be combed through in the Internet Archive. So I am letting four of them lapse this month, and can see letting more go this year. The main ones I will keep of course is the cogdogblog.com fleet (a bunch of subdomains) and another pile of them will be clustered to my personal vanity domain cog.dog I do have a few old project sites I have kept going but I have turned off the domain auto renew so I can move the old barges. https://cogdogblog.com/2026/03/digital-cleanup-domain-barges/ The array of steps I have been doing this week include: A few WordPress sites (subdomains too) clones to live in one of my main keeper domains. Easy to do with the Reclaim Hosting Installatron manager. Some WordPress sites not ever needing updates I am archving as static HTML sites using my venerable Mac OSX Tool Site Sucker (see Archiving Old WordPress Sites as Static HTML) There is a bit of directory play, since the file structure includes meta media like CSS, remote javascript, Google fonts, so all the site files sit one directory in. I have been setting up an htaccess rule to redirect requests into the sub directory. Self-contained sites (HTML, PHP, CSS, etc) just moved of set to be pointed to within one of my subdomains. Before the domains expire, I am setting up HTTP redirects to new locations, just in the long shot they get crawled by web search. I have been happy with the Wayback Link Fixer plugin that is doing a great job of replacing broken links in my posts to point to copies in the Internet Archive. I found useful the extra links you get for looking at a domain's snapshots in the internet archive, the usual result is the timeline view say for cogdogblog.com the other links across the top I have never looked at, and you can see the URL is easy to construct or set up in a spreadsheet. The summary view indicates how many snapshots by mime type, the summary for cogdogblog.com https://web.archive.org/details/https://cogdogblog.com/ indicates it has snagged some 48000 URLs in my blog and over 51000 images. Yikes. And you can dice and slice specifically what URLs on my domain have been archived via https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://cogdogblog.com/* And to keep my own links used updated on this blog, making use of the Better Find and Replace WordPress plugin to edit links in the database to point to new locations. As I work through this, there are snags and things will be broken, still I am convinced no one will know. I am doing this for me. Here comes The Broom. dommy.com (1997) dommy.com now lives at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/dommy/ What/Why: I was in my early years of web development at the Maricopa Community Colleges. One faculty member I worked with on a project recommended me to her husband who needed a web site for his organization. I used it as a place to refer anyone who asked for help with a web site, nearly all the clients I barely remember. I also wanted to have it for an email address I could use, The Name: Indeed the dog theme was there early- "Dommy" was the nickname of my Dalmatian Dominoe. Years later someone emailed to let me know that that "dommy: in her realm of "dominatrix" meant "dominant mommy" Shrug The Site: A hodgepodge of 1990s web layout (yes tables!) some crude PHP and Javascript. But it meant mostly moving the site was just moving files. Buried Down Deep: There is a ton of stuff tucked away, the only means to discover os poking around the directory structure. alan's wacky weird web: This was my "home page" on the web servers I ran 1993-2006 at the Maricopa Community Colleges, just moved to me own domain when I left the system, knowing it would not be maintained. Alan's bike to Work Page: Notes and details of the years I was a bicycle commuter. A History of Dad: Tribute to my father created after he passed away in 2001 I Hate Running: Web site made for a few years of running half and sort of full marathons; originally run in WordPress, later archived to static HTML We pee on spammers: Oh how naively just annoying email spam was back then Alan's NoJava Shop: Back in my glory days of web development with Macromedia Director, this was my stand against all the hype of Java Internet Archive: By date: Saved 366 times between December 5, 1998 and March 27, 2026. URLs: 3,842 URLs have been captured Summary: 14,932 web page captures; 5,765 image captures cogdog.casa (2015) Main Landing page leaves you at the front door, now at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/casa/ What/Why: I am fuzzy why I set up this domain, mainly in the fun times of all the top new TLD and a place just to hang some various small use and experimental sites. No reason why they can hang elsewhere in my other domains The Name: Coming off of my UDG Agora project time I was feeling the Spanish spirit. The Site: The top of the domain was meant just to stand there, not to be a site in itself. Made of just simple HTML, CSS, and the nifty jQuery Backstretch for filling the background with an image. Buried Down Deep: Not much. I had a demo site of suggestions I used when starting my work with OEGlobal in 2020, let that one drift away. The main ones I migrated were Puerto Rico Connection podcast, a WordPress site formerly at prconnection.cogdog.casa moved to prconnection.cog.dog. If I can ever convince Antonio Vantaggiato to join me in the studio, I am game to top the last episode published by robots CogDog Showtime a WordPress multisite formerly at show.cogdog.casa exported with Site Sucker to HTML at https://showtime.cog.dog/. This was a fleet of 12 web presentations for stuff done 2015-2022, many of them done with my SPLOTpoint theme but. few others with my WordPress Calling Card themes. This was an interesting experiment to do an entire multisite with Site Sucker; it only got 5 because not all of them were linked from the main starting site. Lesson learned for doing this is to get links to all subsites on the main entry one. Internet Archive: - note not relevant for main domain since it had no external links. The Puerto Rico Connection By date: Saved 40 times between January 25, 2019 and April 9, 2025. URLs: 308 URLs have been captured Summary: 143 web page captures; 247 image captures CogDog Showtime By date: Saved 58 times between March 21, 2017 and February 19, 2026. URLs: 1612 URLs have been captured Summaryhttps://web.archive.org/details/https://show.cogdog.casa: 701 web page captures; 763 image captures barkingdog.me (2010) barkingdog.me now lives at https://barking.cog.dog/ What/Why: In some fit of Wordpress development and an idea that I should have a site just for my favorite photographs, I coined the name Barking Dog Studios as if it was some entity. Really it was an accidental discovery I found that when uploading photos to the WordPress media library, if it was full of EXIF photo metadata, all of that was preserved. So I hacked a theme where to make a post I just had to upload the image to the post- my custom code would pull its title, description, all the camera meta data to "write" the full post. See New WP Theme / Under the Hood Features for Barking Dog Studios - I thought it was very damn clever. The Name: Well just continuing the dog theme, why not a photo studio with a dog that barks? The Site: Original Wordpress (see post on the first version) site, but I saw no major need for adding new content, so I used Site Sucker to make it all static HTML Buried Down Deep: Lots of ways to organize photo by tags, like all my favorite ones of cacti, ones with bokeh. But there was all the camera metadata, so you can find all photos taken with my Digital Rebel T1i, ones taken at focal length f/2.8, ones taken at ISO 1000. Internet Archive: By date: Saved 354 times between November 14, 2010 and March 11, 2026. URLs: 5,723 URLs have been captured Summary: 11,598 web page captures; 3,861 image captures pechaflicker.net (2014) pechaflickr.net now back where it started at https://pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/ What/Why: Maybe the best thing I cobbled together using the Flickr API (which works in 2026 as it did when I built this) as a fun way to let people practice improv with random photos from flickr or "a mashup of pechakucha and powerpoint karaoke" This was often a hit in audience participation when I did invited talks or workshops, and I still think its fun. I can trace it from a series of tagged blog posts of its development that first appeared way back in 2011. I started on my own subdomain, but later felt like it deserved its own domain in 2014 and had been redirecting it to the new domain. As its a collection of PHP files and media, I simply turned off the old redirection and flipped it back. Come home to where you started pechaflickr. The Name: My own portmantuing of pechakucha + flickr The Site: It's PHP, and makes use of Dan Coulter's phpflickr library for talking to the API and the nifty Vegas javascript by Jay Salvat to make the full screen slideshow. Buried Down Deep: A teacher who emailed me named Heather got a mode of pechaflickr named for her idea A feature to create improv by tag for photos from the flickr commons. The most hidden and fun part is the result of a bet I made with Roland Tanglao in 2018, he bet the flickr API would die and he is still wrong 8+ years later. Internet Archive: By date: 234 times between April 27, 2014 and March 5, 2026. URLs: 139 URLs have been captured Summary: 333 web page captures; 51 image captures (no surpise this is low, all the media comes from flickr) To Be Swept Soon I've got a few more domains that expire later in the year that I will likely let go - cogdog.info was mostly a portfolio for me and my web work (and also used for email, but that service is gone from Reclaim Hosting). I am thinking of redoing that site as WordPress. And I can also zap a really old one I made specifically for a 2010 presentation The Secret Revolution https://secretrevolution.us/ I have turned off auto renew for arganee.world and a huge WordPress multisite there from Networked Narratives days. I am still pondering how to make it all static HTML, I see no compelling reason for it to be WordPress as its mostly my own nostalgia for some major work I did. Likewise I am ready to bring under the existing domains The UDG Agora project and Mural UDG again these are WordPress Multisites for projects that once were supported by the Justice Institute for British Columbia who did not want to keep old project sites alive. Luckily they were willing to transfer to me, so I have been shouldering domain renewals and separate web hosting for quite stretch, just to keep the URLs alive. If all cleanup goes as I see, I might down from like 11 to 2 domains by end of the year. Sweeeeeeeep! Featured Image: 2014/365/42 Dust My Broom flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license One dog tired blog trend here is kicking the cat about whether "blogging is dead". After last week's 2009 NMC Summer Conference, I have a resurgent optimism for the old long form (that is greater than 140 characters). cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog After our 2008 conference at Princeton, I was interested in finding a more coherent way of archiving or capturing the synopsis of the conference sessions- my dream would haveing at least one blogger doing it per session, but as a trial run this time, I decided to opt for inviting three "dedicated" bloggers to cover the plenary sessions (keynotes and the NMC Five Minutes of Fame). The draw would be a front row seat with electricity and a hard wire ethernet- if you are experiencing most conferences these days, you know that the norm (especially in hotel venues) is crappy wireless and about 3 public outlets per auditorium. It seemed like an okay carrot. I also tossed in a TweetUp Badge (woohoo, big spender). We developed a rigorous, peer reviewed process for selecting our Conference Bloggers-- I looked at the registration list and picked three people I liked and respected-- Chris Lott (http://chrislott.org/) Leslie-Madsen Brooks (http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/) Gardner Campbell (http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1) I did not give them much guidance or rules- I was not asking for rah rah and I chose them because they are critical people who are not afraid to write against the flow. I emailed them: If you are interested, just let me know. It's not an expectation that you blog lavish praise for the sessions (we expect them to be great enough to speak for themselves); we just want to increase the amount of social media sharing of the event activities, and having some regular blogging is a piece of that strategy. I did not expect them to be scribes, but they all managed to provide an amazing amount of recording of the speakers, and much more with prolific linking and embedded photos. And they were tweeting. I would guess they were all worn out at the end of the sessions. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But my oh my, I am still completely bowled over at hoe much they added to the experience by doing more than just summarizing. I expected both praise and criticism on the writeups for Kathy Sierra's opening keynote on Creating Passionate Learners: http://chrislott.org/story/nmc-2009-creating-passionate-learners-kathy-s... http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/2009/06/live-blogging-kathy-sierra-cre... http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=785 http://chrislott.org/story/more-on-creating-passionate-learners-with-kat... http://chrislott.org/story/the-value-of-the-stump-speech/ There is an amazing comment thread, a little heated at points, following Chris's post on More on Creating Passionate Users... with Kathy herself chiming in: Really, Chris and Jim, if you're going to insist on being all *thoughtful* in your criticism, the internet might implode. Feels like I've slipped into a parallel universe where people make honest critiques, and actually care that the person they're criticizing understands their perspective (and that it's not personal). Weird. So"¦ thank-you for giving me new things to consider, and helping me strengthen the things I care about. My gosh it feels like the good old blog days of 2005! Long rambling posts, back and forth darting comments, and look! Actual compound sentences not bounded by tweet-length mindsets. This continued in the posts about Friday;s keynote by Marco Torres: http://chrislott.org/story/marco-torres-keynote-nmc-2009/ http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=791 http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/2009/06/liveblog-marco-torres-at-new-m... http://chrislott.org/story/more-on-marco-torres-nmc-2009-keynote/ What I really liked is that our bloggers played off of each other's, interconnecting the posts even more. But wait, there's more. I did not ask them to be scribes, but look at the incredible detail tracked on the Five Minutes of Fame sessioon (10 mini presentations in an hour) and the Centers of Excellence Awards: http://chrislott.org/story/five-minutes-of-fame-nmc-2009/ http://cluttermuseum.blogspot.com/2009/06/liveblogging-another-new-media... http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=799 http://chrislott.org/story/nmc-2009-center-of-excellence-award/ http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=803 But the real gem was the coverage by Chris and Gardner (Leslie had to leave early for another commitment) for the closing tribute session to Doug Engelbart, where he was presented the NMC Fellows award. http://chrislott.org/story/nmc-2009-a-tribute-to-doug-engelbart/ http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=803 cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I knew how much this moment meant to Gardner- to call Engelbart a "hero" for him is a massive understatement. I glanced over a few times at Dr Glu during the session - instead of scrambling to type at the keyboard, he was taking it all in with what I guess was a tsunami of emotion. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I cannot tell you my likly three blog readers (including Mom, hi!) what an epic post Gardner created in NMC 2009 Closing Plenary: Dreams About How The World Could Be-- seriously, this is easily one of the best blog posts I have ever read. Several times Doug covers his face in genuine humility. Can he be the person they're describing? Certainly he did not do his work alone. But of all the great seers and doers of the nascent information age, Doug's achievement is the most singular, the most to be driven by a single imagination. And yet his imagination was never the point. Always, the goal was to enable us to identify, harness, and raise our collective IQ. The idea was to augment human intellects one by one, but by means of a fine tracing of mental and spiritual connections from which would emerge a true "capability infrastructure" to prepare us for the dangers, questions, and opportunities we would encounter as civilization continues to develop. Doug thought at scale. He understood that a car is not simply a faster tricycle. He had faith that an augmented intellect, joined to millions of other augmented intellects, could clarify individual thought even as it empowered vast new modes of thinking, new modes of complex understanding that could grasp intricately meaningful symbols as quickly and comprehensively as we can recognize a loved one's face. For Doug, computers are the tools we have invented in our quest for a new language, even a meta-language. A manner of speaking that can move us through the enmiring complexities of our shared lives and dreams, and thus help us to use those complex lives and dreams wisely instead of being their puppets or victims. My oh my- I would describe this is poetry. And a big thanks goes to my three colleagues for demonstrating to me, at least for this moment, that the power of the long blog post still stands up. And they did all this for a good seat and an orange twitter tag? I don't think so. Flip down the tweetdeck and blog something today- posts like these stand tests of time. I said it many times Monday and Tuesday of this week that the Domains 2017 in Oklahoma City was not a conference but a gathering. Does that matter? You had to be there. This is a vain attempt to blog summarize and will fail miserably in capturing the experience. But I am, at this moment, sitting at University of Oklahoma sitting next to Keegan Long-Wheeler who commanded us all to blog. As he is doing right now... [caption id="attachment_64562" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Keegan is blogging faster than me! This photo will eventually (tonight) go onto flickr shared under CC0[/caption] You could just start by the venue itself, the Hotel 21c is both a museum of interesting / weird art and a hotel. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/872199802372620288 There are talking holograms in the bathroom, intense portraits, weird dollhouses, and purple plastic penguins guests are invited to move around with. If you go to a conference in some city like "Orlandaheim" expect this kind of hotel (quasi OKC joke) where Brian and Tim are glad they did not stay [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Nice Conference Hotel flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Yes, it was more like a gathering of friends, good friends. Good smart friends. Doing cool stuff in domains of their own (or providing them to others). One walk away is that clearly Domain of Ones Own is a long way from "just that thing that UMW does." Tim Owens mentioned that Reclaim Hosting us supporting 50 institutions doing this, from big state universities to small liberal arts colleges to community colleges. The LMS-ification of edu is not complete. A tone was set on the morning of the first day hearing the booming voice of the only Jim groom broadcasting to nobody on DS106 radio [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Live in DS106 Radio flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] One of the many brilliant touches was opening the conference not with a keynote, but the "record fair" two hours of open demos, and such a great way to meet people in smaller, informal settings, other than being sat in rigid rows of auditorium seats: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]IMG_8542.jpg flickr photo by bionicteaching shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license[/caption] Among the Virtually Connecting sessions at Domains 2107 we tried a "roaming" session during the record fair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-pPpKRubk Adam Croom and colleagues from University of Oklahoma really set it up for us, the friendly Oklahoma welcoming, encouraging / challenging us to meet people we did not know and attend sessions we likely might not choose. And NOBODY introduces sessions with more smack and love at the same time as Jim Groom [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]A Man and His Big Fans flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] There was a keynote, one, by Martha Burtis... and it was amazzzzzing, and as she does in her insightful Martha way, got us thinking about doing more with domains than the pragmatic. Thanks to Grant Potter and #ds106radio, there is an archive! http://ds106rad.io/livearchive/05.06.2017-11.30.mp3 The Web seemed well. . .just there. Interesting, visually pleasing at times, weird, always expanding beyond measure, inscrutable, and a bit of an opiate of the masses. I mean, how could we take something seriously that had birthed lolcats? Can any of us say that anymore? This powerful, relentless presence has been growing and changing for 20+ years — and it is changing us and our perceptions and our access to truth and our ability to make our world a better place to live in. And all along, we’re actually the ones who have been growing it and changing it, bit by bit, domain by domain, site by site, service by service. With what we build and what we share and what we sign up for and what we search. The time came long ago for us to have a conversation in our schools and with our students about what this all means. If anything, I worry that it may be too late for this conversation. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]IMG_8628.jpg flickr photo by bionicteaching shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license[/caption] And also poetic... At my heart I guess I’m an eternal optimist. Because, honestly, these days I feel like if I don’t hold onto that optimism with a steel grip, my own spirit would begin to feel unreclaimable. In her ever clever ways, Martha had announced up front that her full screen images had no literal connection to "slides" but maybe there was a connection. Images of labyrinths and fences and ruins and strange architecture. It was towards the end when she shared a video with clips extracted from one produced by UMW student Meredith about Domains, where UMW faculty, staff, students (and Audrey Watters) answered the maybe odd by insightful question, if the web was a concrete place, what might it me? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D377WcqrtDg I highly encourage you to read her presentation notes / post on Neither Locked Out Nor Locked In Oh, and Martha attracted all the penguins. All the Penguins, all the Domains flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And she also joined us after for a Virtually Connecting recap... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku8ngoNNe1A Okay, this post is monstrously long and I've not even gotten to the sessions. I CANT SUMMARIZE THIS EXPERIENCE IN ONE POST... and yet plunge on. It was fantastic to have several sessions that featured the voices and works of students, from Lora Taub's projects at Muhlenburg College to Mary Kaylor's game building students at UMW. I could go on gushing too about the amazing Tom Woodward, who despite his protestations, must be a non-sleeping coding vampire. Tom shared brilliantly formally and informally with doing things that you would not think Wordpress can do, on how he single handedly supports over 20,000 VCU blog, creating community sites at Georgetown. So that light in the top photo is that after knowing it for a long time, I really have to knuckle myself down to do more experimenting and development with the Wordpress API, with the idea of using Wordpress as a data engine but not necessarily a display engine, with diving more deeply into the wild world of fast crazy javascript stuff. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Behind the Lens flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] If Tom is not super human enough, he also takes and shares amazing portrait photos. No he sleeps not. Vampire. Another fortunate turn at the conference was getting to meet for the first time both Rob Reynolds and Stacy Zemke https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/872129002739204096 I have known Rob going back to the 2000 and early single digit years via blogs first. I guess I will get around to listing my sessions because... this is my blog. I did a record demo fair session with Brian Lamb on that old but harmonious group, the SPLOTs "A Shotgun Marriage Smallest? Possible? Learning? Online? Tools?" SPLOTS are the demented spawn of a shotgun marriage, between the drive to simplify open web expression and the refusal to require participant data [caption id="attachment_64563" align="aligncenter" width="630"] "A shotgun marriage" [/caption] I ad fun assembling his in the Wordpress theme I made from an HTML5up template. Oh and yes, this is how SPLOTs are made: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]This is How I make Splots flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] I also had a session on the stuff I have been living off of since the original DS106- RSS Syndication (Tom Woodward is telling me to kill it), The Daily _____, and the DS106 Assignment Bank. I had a bit too much fun remxing album covers. And people even got my late 1970s SNL reference: I very much enjoyed co-presenting (or more listening) with Tanya Dorey-Elias on "Small Design Steps Can Go A Long Way For Open Community Tools" (stuff is in an etherpad, I failed to make it editable). I truly enjoy presenting someone who can bring to the room a useful metaphor, in this case.. snow boots, or Kamiks [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Tanya and Kamiks flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption]. Among many things, the Domains 2017 gathering had what is missing from "conferences" a size where you can really meet and talk to people, good food, a non hotel non fluorescent lit venue, and really, a whole artistic and friendly aesthetic (the graphic mastery of Bryan Mathers, naturally) [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]The Art of a Great Conference flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] You should be crying if you were not there. But wipe your tears, and get yerself ready for Domains 2018. It's #notaconference. Featured Image: Domains 2017 header image by Reclaim Hosting superimposed on Sunrise over Earth (12/61) photo by Qimono from Good Free Photos shared into the public domain using ????. Just to show you how messy licenses get, the link from Good Free Photos points to a license Creative Commons dis-recommends. But I cannot change the license to CC0. Look I see dead licenses! The source site credits a pixabay user but I got bored trying to find this image. A few weeks ago I was audio interviewed via Skype by Teemu Arina, a 1 hour plus session between me in Arizona and Teemu in Finland that was remarkably clear, had no dropouts. In an almost heroic effort, Teemu edited this to a pod/webcast, painstakingly removing my frequent "umms" as well as abstracting my free form meanders to a coherent set of possible ed tech futures. Thjis is now posted on a new site FLOSSE (Free/Libre and Open Source SoftwarE) which is a "posse" FLOSSE Posse is a group blog consisting of members of Free and Open Source Software Association (VOPE) from Finland. We will carry out reportage of FLOSS and Open Content in Education. The interview is now available at: http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=future-of-floss-in-education-interview-with-alan-levine or the direct audio: http://flosse.dicole.org/media/podcasts/Flosse_posse-Alan_Levine_20050124.mp3 Considered the list of heavy hitters to come in the next interviews, I am humbled and honored to be the first one posted. Go ahead, Leon, take your best potshots. The open source / free tools themselves used, Skype, Blogs, et al, are themselves a testament to the topics discussed, another cheering round of Small Technologies Nicely Joined. I'm ready to... well think about doing some SKyperviews in the near future. Note to readers- mostly tedious details on WordPress nuts and bolts to follow- click next for the usual shallow barking and whining) WordPress Plugins are awefully powerful to let you easily add/subtract functionality form your own hosted WP site. But sometimes, they become a marriage that may be difficult to extricate yourself. For the NMC Campus Observer, our WP powered site for our Second Life antics, since its inception on March 2006, I had used PodPress, a rather full featured plugin to handle the embedding of audio, sometimes video. It has a huge list of features, and if you have ever looked, adds a lot os "stuff" to your pages. It has a lot of updates, and each replacement is a not so moderate upload of scads of files. Adding the audio/video content is not done via editing your content, but via a separate editing pane. But more problematic, I've had numerous incidences where the site's display was mangled on certain browsers-- sometimes Safari lost a sidebar, more recently the site was totally wrecked in Internet Explorer, the sidebar pushed down to the bottom, bottom of the post/comments field cut off. If I disabled PodPress, the display issues went away. But then also, did all of my links to the media. And one of the recent WordPress updates seemed to have a conflict with PP as well. So its been on my list for a while to get myself out of this relationship. I have been using Anarchy Media Plugin on other sites which is one with less overhead, no mucking of display (well I did discover the Gregarious plugin has a conflict that disables Anarchy), but better it works simply by replacing a simple hypertext link to your mp3, .mov, etc with a player icon. This way, should you ever move to another plugin, your content is in tact. If you are looking for a simple plugin to just convert mp3 links to a nice small player, I like Taragana's Del.icio.us mp3 Player WordPress Plugin. So the task was I'd have to find every post that had a PodPress managed media, and rewrite the post to have a normal href link that Anarchy could pick up. (more…) The Lamest Unsubscribe Method Evuh by cogdogblog posted 28 Oct '08, 10.18pm MDT PST on flickr TeacherTube, blecccch. Never used, and surely never will. I'm trying to winnow down the crap emails form my inbox. Along comes a "newsletter", unsolicited, unrequested, from TeacherTube. I zipped to the bottom and clicked the "unsubscribe" link. Wouldn't you think that does what it says? About 99% of these inbox clutterng newsletters actually do what their links says, it confirms that I have been unsubscribed from Uncle Bubbah's Fish Fry Recipe list, and we part ways. Adios. But not at TeacherTube. First it makes me log in. And plain as day is the unchecked box where I never did check to read newsletters. I always opt out or dont opt in for bacn. So down at the bottom is a link to "delete account". Wouldn't you expect if clicked a "delete account" link it would ... delete the account? Is that ass-umiing too much? Yep. This is the automation built into this Web 0.0002 site: Please email info@teachertube.com to delete account or change username with the following in message: 1.) Account Username 2.) Account Password 3.) Reason Thank you for your cooperation. (*Please allow 24-48 Hours for Completion of Account Close.) Thank you for my cooperation? WTFFFFFFF? Removing my accounts is a simple row deletion of a freakin database table? Or is this a Fred Flintstone web site with a little bird inside that must peck away at some stone wheel for 24-48 hours to remove my name from it? Believe me, I provided a terse reason to get my account (which has never been used beyond logging in a few times to check out the site). I feel like I am in the web of 1994. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. This is near criminally negligent interface design. License to abuse. Grrrrrrrrr. My menorah is put away, but it seems such a nice symbol to GIF, maybe have to slip it in under Ben Rimes' GIFmas Card assignment (the first rule of ds106 I tell my students is to change up and break the rules of an assignment, if it makes for good art). Do you need the whole story? I would think the Macabees would dig some GIF miracles. This started with mp photo from night 7 (I forgot to get one on the last night) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But that's no problem, I was able to magic brush in a copy of one of the middle candles to fill the gap. i also managed to lose two flames by... well I think I forgot to paste. So I copied an isolated flame, and flipped it horizontal to make it looks little different This baby weighs in at only 48k! That's because I have isolated single flames to a layer, rather than replicating the entire scene. I copied each flame to its own layer, and then painted in black the space behind for the background. I use the animation palette window menu to convert the Layers to Frames. [caption id="attachment_17907" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click to see full size)[/caption] Then it was a matter of turning on layers sequentially for the sequence, and adding some longer time for the first and last frame. Doing the GUFs in layers, and using it to only place things that change is the MAGIC to making GIFs you can really generate a lot of movement and not make it bloat up to me a 2 Mb file. If I was going to notch it up a level. I might make duplicates of the flames and flip them, so I could make them flicker across frames. GIFfing it up for Channukah! or is it Hannukah? or is it ?? I had fun going overboard on making this promo video for 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDYJAZiskRw This was created for today's keynote at the Learning Connections District Champions meeting in Toronto. When Deb invited me to speak she asked me to do a video she could use to summarize the workshop after it ended. I really should have just turned on the web cam and blabbed away, and I might have been done in an hour. But I had this half idea to piece together a message from it using the tools themselves, so I wrote a script, and assigned tools for each line. For the tools that have audio or video capability, I use it directly; otherwise, I made voice-overs in iMovie. To capture the animated/bviudeo segments, I did screen capture with iShowU. The slides for today's session are posted on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/cogdog/50-ways-workshop-for-learning-connections-district-champions This was a highly charged group! They are all leading and techie teachers from the districts across Ontario that work with this project. Part of this new version of my presentation/workshops is a new wiki (discussed below), but I wanted to try a different approach in a hands on workshop. Typically, I do my overview, and have people get a go at making a story of their own choosing with any of the tools. In the vein of doing the same story in multiple tools (like I did originally with my Dominoe story), in the part where I do some audience suggestions for a story prompt, I asked the group (of about 40) to put and organize their ideas on an open google doc where I had set a starting prompt: The Most Amazing Thing Happened Yesterday at the CN Tower The plan, which pretty much fell apart, is that the group would create an outline that would be the basis for them using in the later section. It was fun to see 40 people madly toss ideas into a wiki, but it became a mish mosh, with Steohen harper, a homeless person, Charlie Sheen, hockey, and the Queen making appearances. The doc is still there, but I turned off the public editing -- bit.ly/lc11-story-prompt. In a rare occurrence for this activity, Elvis did NOT make an appearance. For the next part, where I talk about finding media, I wanted a way for them to create a pool of images, maybe video, they could find using the sources provided on the wiki- I asked them to post some information to a google form. This did work, with about 34 people adding something. If I did it again, I'd simplify the form. Some people got tripped up in trying to pick the license- next time, I would just have a checkbox to confirm what they found was licensed for re-use. It did being up questions and a few of them were not familiar with the various creative commons flavors. I was also not quite clear that when they shared the URL for a flickr photo page, that I did not give them enough detail on where they need to go to get the actual file if they opted to use it. But all of this hardly mattered, because once in the game, they were all deeply immersed. I'm waiting to see what kind of things they produce. And as usual, they all had a first good laugh at Blabberize but then as I watched what people were trying, that was one of the most common ones chosen. A highlight for me came later, when one of the participants, a principal told me how she put this funny tool to use right away by doing a quick skype with a teacher at her school who was dealing with a troublesome student. Here she is telling me in a video I recorded on my iPhone: As alluded to earlier, this qworkshop used the newest version of the wiki (I am still working on) at http://50ways.cogdogblog.com/). The first version (http://cogdogroo.wiksipaces.com/50+Ways) is still on the wiki I made for my 2007 visit to Australia, and I've been wanting to redo it in a new structure, and especially, open more doors for ways people can produce it (although the original is in a wiki I locked all the pages because, frankly, some editors kept messing it up!). In the time since, I've learned some good tricks to use in Wikispaces. The big one is that each of the tool pages is locked still, but I have three sections on each that CAN be edited, because the Description, Examples, and Feedback content are stand alone along wiki pages that are open to edits; I can incorporate them into the tool page by using one of the widgets. On the old wiki's tools page, all the tools were described in a long monster scrolling list. In the new one, wiki, the tools are organized in a main page by using page tags to put them into categories (by type of tool), which is nicely updated as I add new tool pages. Each tool, then has its own page, including: link to the category page for the type of tools (this allows me to put something like Slideroll into both the Slideshow category and the Video one).A Screen shot of the editing interfaceDescrption*Link to and embedded version of the Dominoe story created in the tool.List of examples of other content created in the same tool*A list of comments/advice from people who have used the tool before* *All three of these sections are opened to edits. As an example, let's look at this portion of the page for One True Media Again, only I, as lord and master of the wiki, can edit this page directly. But anyone who joins the wiki has access to edit the content that provides the text on the red box; they are actually editing a different wiki page that is unlocked. They can go to the page and click "edit" via the link in the green box, but by checking the "editable" box in the "Include Wiki Page" widget, it enables that small EDIT link which opens up the content to be edited and returns to the enclosing page when done. I ask anywhere people add examples or content, that they "sign" their contributions by appending the 4 tilde (~~~~) string, which when publishes, records a time stamp and link to the author. It's my hope, then I can get some people involved with adding examples, feedback, and even improving my descriptions. As of tonight, I am still 15 tools short of having moved all of the old ones over, plus a batch of brand new ones sitting in the entryway. I want to get these loaded, as I have been procrastinating this a long while. It has also been good to review the ways some of the tools have evolved (and some have gone to the Island of Lost/Dead Tools). It's interesting to note that a good number of these are still around since I first spotted them in 2007, ones that have obscure names like Image Loop, Rock You, Comic Sketch. It's nice to see that my 4 year old, infrequently used logins still work. It's also interesing to see that some, which likely were one person experiments, have become mainstreamed: Kerpoof is now a part of Disney.Tabblo was purchased and supported by HPTikatok is now owned by Barnes and Noble Quite a few of them have gone to a tiered model,. where you get advanced features by paying for membership (Xtranormal is close to falling off the list since you can only do one basic movie with the free account), and others seem to be trying to make money be offering print services. Oh, the other new thing has been using another set of tags to indicate what kinds of media the tools can use (e/g/ can upload audio, can import photos from Picassa and Facebook), so that there is a grid to choose tools by Media Capability. I'll get another chance to try this all out next week, when I get to do another iteration of 50+ Ways at Baruch College in New York City. This is, easily, one of my projects that has grown a lot of legs, and I want to keep them moving along. I'm open to ideas on the site. This is my own riff on the eminent Photoshop RiffMaster, the Noiseprofessor, himself riffing with his own photoshopping of Brian Lamb's super dog Dexter. I upped the Fonzie with Zack's face, and even twiddled his thumb a bit ;-) Can ds106 be any more fun when people just play like that, rapid fire? On the surface it looks silly, but there's something more at play. I'd wax on this, but would rather make more GIFs today. But it did get me thinking about a new assignment to be rolled into what will be (look for details tomorrow) a ds106 GIF Festival, this one known as Riff a GIF: Some of the best parts of ds106 happens when people spontaneously build off of the whacky things others share. Rapid fire style. Your assignment is to riff on someone eles's ds106 work and make it new in a GIF form. It can be revising an existing GIF, or taking a graphic and turning it into a GIF. Riff the GIF, say it three times fast. For which this post shall be properly tagged to get included. The same thing happened already, when Martin Weller tweeted about his plans to do some #ds106 radio: https://twitter.com/mweller/status/281056146540879872 And that got me thinking of maybe putting Martin's face into a disco themed image, a bit of quick photoshoppery got this: Todd has done something cool. He published a search plugin for Mozilla/Firefox web browsers that provides a direct keyword search into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). I don't do a lot of browser hopping beyond testing on the major brands. I've taken the cues from the Zeldmans out there to develop and test for on the more compliant web browsers (Safari), then test, hack, and fix for the oddities of Internet Explorer, etc. Netscape 4? Fuggedaboudit. Anyhow I keep a copy of Mozilla or Firefox around since sometimes there are web sites (like a lot of our Maricopa system apps) that are finicky on browsers. The long amble is that I have not spent much time in looking into this search engine add on, but it is pretty slick, and opens the mind to creating more browser tools. Likie Safari, Firefox comes out of the box with a built in Google Search field in the top right of the browser. However, the piece of code Todd cooked up inserts an new search option that is selectable, instead of keywords going to google, they go to our own MLX search: select other search sites so entering our desired search words: keywords entered goes zing! to the MLX and produces the same results as if you were at our site. It's pretty cool, though sadly, it helps a pithy minor percent of of web site traffic. Oh, and Todd, love the plugin, but the acronym is MLX, not MLE ;-) In consulting You Show participants on their site organization, I am trying to help them see there are more opportunities for the front page than the long river of reverse chronological ordered posts. Many themes (like the Virtue Theme on the You Show) give you an option to display posts from a category, rather than just the newest. I helped Franzi today flip hers using the stick Twenty Fourteen Theme; there is an option in the Customizer to put posts tagged "featured" in the front magazine style layout. For themes that do not provide this, I have gone the route of customizing the Wordpress Loop query used on the front page. A non hacking route is the Category Excluder from Theme Customizer plugin which lets you choose which categories not to display on the front page. This capability becomes very useful on Feed Wordpress type aggregation hubs because the inflow of posts is so high (hopefully) that a river of new posts is not useful. My strategy is to recommend that people who are admins on the site do some curating-by editing aggregated posts to add a category (or tag), they can create a set of "featured" posts (viewable via the Category Archive view). I was never able to get the Connected Courses folks to grasp this idea; maybe no one wanted that responsibility. I did try using a rating plugin on the ETMOOC hub that enabled a "highest rated" view but not too many people voted. As a site admin, it helps to do this via a category process because it forces you to regularly review incoming stuff. I set it up on the You Show site, we have a category called "Highlight Reel" we can add to posts: But the process for getting to the posts to add the category was.. tedious. In an archive view, there is no way to edit that post, and because the links in the syndication hub go out to the site, it is not an option to view the post, and then click the "Edit" button in the admin bar. Some themes add an "edit" link in the templates so you can do this, but Virtue does not. It's a pretty easy thing to add, if you can find the write template file (this varies from theme to theme, in Virtue, it was in /templates/content). The thing you want to add is the wordpress function edit_post_link. There are options you can use on that function to add spans and or css classes, but at it's simplest, somewhere in the loop where it is spitting out content for each post, add something like: What this does is add an "edit" link next to each post that can only be seen by users that are logged in with post editing privileges (Editor, Admin, etc). Visitors to the site will not see them. These helps some, because if I see a post on the flow I'd like to feature, I just: Click the Edit Post link In the editor, click the category to add Update the post It's not bad, but still seems 3 steps when all we need to do is to add a category. So I hacked something in. I will need a way to send from the clicked link a variable that identifies the post ID number I am updating. In my (child) theme functions.php, I do need a function that allows Wordpress to understand extra URL parameters. For my site, I am using ones already created for the signup form: /* ----- add allowable url parameter for urls */ add_filter('query_vars', 'youshow_parameter_queryvars' ); function youshow_parameter_queryvars( $qvars ) // allow parameters to be passed in wordpress query strings { $qvars[] = 'pid'; // when we need to pass a post id return $qvars; } This means I can send to a Wordpress URL something like: http://www.mysite.org/feature-this/?pid=23 And my custom template for this page named Feature This has some logic it can act on. Next, I made a function that can put the link to mark a post as featured, and make it so only people logged in with editing privileges can see (and click) on it. function get_highlight_post_link ( $post_id, $toolslug = 'feature-this' ) { // only for editors and above if ( current_user_can('publish_pages') ) { return (' [Feature This]'); } } I send the function get_highlight_post_link() a value for the post I want to affect. By default, the link will be to a page on my site with a url / slug name of feature-this. And it opens in a new window so I don't lose my place This is solely so I can add this to my templates. By making it a function, I can use it more than one template. In my theme, I find the part of the code that echoes the meta data below a post, and add in: ... (meta data theme stuff like date, comments, categories) Now... (if anyone is still with me). I create a page that has the slug name (url) of feature-this which means if I create and upload a new theme template named page-feature-this I can put in stuff that only is used on the one page. The way to do this is to copy the basic page.php template for your theme, and rename it page-feature-this. Put this code at the top: It's really not that difficult. If you can rationalize being part of an enterprise that profits from the sale of hate ads... provides a space for external entities to promulgate recruitment programs aimed at undermining our culture... can take millions of dollars aimed at influencing a political election... can compel media producers to create click bait hidden headlines... encourages the petri dish of spreadable hoaxes because it adds to the bottom line of data gorging... has an insanely profitable bottom line as a surveillance business based on what you give it for free... If you can rationalize all of that, and more, and still console yourself that somehow your own actions, data are not part of the above... well insert cliché of availability of cheap Arizona ocean front property. I live in Arizona, and I know where the ocean is. If you rationalize being part of supporting and supplying a surveillance business because "it's the only way to stay in touch with people" and resort to poor grandma or Aunt Bertha who would be cut off, well you are part of tossing their identity and data under the bus as well. You are discounting their intellect to possible communicate any other way and you are slacking off on assisting them. Just because it's "easy". Or "convenient". Humans communicated long before this company existed and they will after it crumbles. The numbers are big, but not immune; from John Lancester's You Are The Product (my emphasis added): Perhaps the biggest potential threat to Facebook is that its users might go off it. Two billion monthly active users is a lot of people, and the ‘network effects’ – the scale of the connectivity – are, obviously, extraordinary. But there are other internet companies which connect people on the same scale – Snapchat has 166 million daily users, Twitter 328 million monthly users – and as we’ve seen in the disappearance of Myspace, the onetime leader in social media, when people change their minds about a service, they can go off it hard and fast. For that reason, were it to be generally understood that Facebook’s business model is based on surveillance, the company would be in danger. How can you ignore the obvious extend of its business model? That there is a space for alternatives? Be part of that threat. Leave. Now. On the back of this card: Download your data. Delete (do not deactivate) permanently Do not wait for some benevolent entity do this for you; make it happen directly https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/908488158215413761 Or just keep believing your rationalizations. Featured Image: Color modified and evil logo superimposed on Wikimedia Commons photo Exit Sign Above Australian Door released into the public domain. It was close to a year ago I moved this blog, it's predecessor, and some of my old vintage 1990s home page from servers I maintained when I was at Maricopa. Before I left, the old "Jade" server was running, and I set up some htaccess redirects to send requests to their proper new places. nice and clean. Well, the problem is that the IT folkd back at Maricopa, apparently yanked the machine (no one was there to likely even bug them), and my own blog here had lots of links and image references that pointed to a 404 server. Fixing this was not all that complex, but took a few steps. The first was covering my _____ by going into phpMyAdmin, in my WordPress database, and making a backup copy of the wp_posts table as wp_posts_backup (via the operations tab). I still downloaded a SQL version of the contents, but this is an easy way to revert if I mess up; I'd just have to rename the copy table. So next, I get the SQL contents- via the Export tab, using the options for Save As File, and in addition, checking the Drop Table option, which means when re-imported, it will wipe out the old table, and create a brand new copy. This file is just a long, long series of MySQL statements, that can recreate the database table, and sequentially, re-insert each row of data.. So after this is done, I have a 4.2 Mb text file on my computer. I use the best searchg and replace text editor around, for me, it is BBEdit, and I run a few replacements on the whole file... replace http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb/ with http://cogblog.com/ (this blog); http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/ with http://cogblog.com/alan/ (I had a bunch of image references in that old subdirectory); and lastly all http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/ with http://feed2js.org/ (the newer home of Feed2JS). Also, on a Mac, it is important to make sure the text files have unix line return characters, not Mac, so on a re-upload, it is interpreted right by the server... a job for the indispensable LineBreak, an OS X freeware that can batch convert text files between Mac, Unix, and DOS line return formats. So now I had an updated SQL file, but faced this situation-- at 4.2 Mb, it exceeded the 2 Mb limit in phpMyAdmin (actually the PHP settings on the server). So I had to chop the file into 3 pieces, and run each one sequentially through the SQL tab where you c an select a text file to run a series of commands-- essentially uploading the files that contained instructions to first drop the old database, create a new one, and then reinsert all the data. So with that, I cleaned up about 1000 bad URLs. Not bad. Button for Jim Groom by cogdogblog posted 15 Jun '08, 7.54pm MDT PST on flickr Her ya go, Reverend Jim, fresh off the Photoshop machine, courtesy of a "punk rock saved my life" pin found at Wooden Shoes Books and Records on 4th Street in Philly. As if we needed more blog fluff for edupunk, but I could not resist doing some Photoshoppery. FWIW, the CogDogBlog machine is in sputtering mode following the full tilt experience of the 2008 NMC Summer Conference at Princeton. There's a lot of back blogging to do from that event, and we have some great media to share soon on the NMC web site -- but it was a fantasmic experience, and at the same time, I lacked the will, drive, energy to be blogging, and even the photos are a few days lagging. I'm doing some R&R a few days in Philadelphia and visiting family in Baltimore, and then am back on the prowl by Thursday night in Arizona. [caption width="500" align="alignnone"] creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by jonmartin ()[/caption] Right there is a test of new flavor of my flickr cc attribution helper where it generates copy/paste code to put the image in a wordpress post, but place the attribution text in a Wordpress image caption structure. This is the default output using the regular version of the helper, but in making a new version of the helper tool (see below) I'm intrigued by the potential for a system I am running hosted on github and flexing the flickr API via JavaScript. Somewhere there is a wad of duct tap stuck on a desk edge. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by jonmartin () Whats the deal? The differences are minor or not even obvious above-- actually it looks no different because my current theme does nothing much with formatting captions beyond centering them. You can see a more distinct difference on another blog where the caption formatting is different In a way this is better as its letting the Wordpress theme handle the formatting of the attribution as a caption rather then the default which just uses a <small> tag This started (and ended up delaying my breakfast because I got caught up in code) because someone emailed with a question wondering how the CC Attribution Tool could work to set up some sort of Wordpress slider/gallery to put the attribution in the captions. I tried to explain that that is a rather specialized case, apples vs bananas. Each slider/gallery plugin has different means of building its content; about the best would be one that used images directly from flickr (e.g. Awesome Flickr Gallery was coded to pull in the license info. Any plugin that is using the flickr API theoretically could access the license info; I am not sure if there are ones out there that do this. And I don't feel like writing Yet Another Slider Plugin. I did wonder though if you used the Wordpress Add media to add an image via URL and manually copy/paste the attribution if there was a way to build a Wordpress Gallery out of that. Nope, because images added via URL are not physically added to the media library. But I thought at a minimum, it was worth it to see if the attribution helper could write a version of the output that wrapped the HTML in a wordpress [caption]...[/caption] structure for at least a better formatted single picture insert. And again I am trying to grope my way to some better github understanding. So the core code of my tool is at https://github.com/cogdog/flickr-cc-helper I create a branch of my project called gh-pages and this allows me to host a project page, this is the public facing form for making a bookmarklet So here is how the attributor works (sketched out below). When called from a flickr photo page, the bookmarklet extracts the image ID (in a photo at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/882126043/ this is "882126043") and then sends it as a URL parameter to my HTML script hosted on github. This uses the flickr API to request info for the photo, and then generates the info that pops up in the window. And this is where I find I accidentally created something interesting. All of the "grunt" work is done via a script at http://cogdog.github.io/flickr-cc-helper/cc-attributor.html -- the bookmarklet passes it something like http://cogdog.github.io/flickr-cc-helper/cc-attributor.html?flickd=882126043 and it goes to work. To create a different form of the attribution, I made a copy of the script as http://cogdog.github.io/flickr-cc-helper/wp-attributor.html and changed a few things in the output to make the HTML in the form Wordpress likes for an image (wrapped inside [caption]...[/caption] shortcode): [caption width="500" align="alignnone"] creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] By making the helper URL an editable field, my thought was it would give others the ability to maybe create their own version of for example, they wanted to format the output in a different way than mine. The Helper URL can exist anywhere, it need not be in github. So I was able to make a Wordpresser CC Attribution Helper merely by changing the URL of the second element to be http://cogdog.github.io/flickr-cc-helper/wp-attributor.html This was really just an experiment to try a different kind of output, but it has me wondering about this as a potentially useful tool approach to have plug and play pieces one can use. Anad again, I am doing stuff that a few clicks back would have needed all custom code hosted on a server, what I am doing now is mostly browser based, and passing info via a github hosted page that look stuff up in flickr. I could always change the primary flickr cc attribution helper to add a third copy/paste field for the WP version. Just trying stuff out. And just because I can do this from one click in a browser.... [caption width="500" align="alignnone"] creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] UPDATE Nov 3 8:45PM I heard back from JR, who was very appreciative: You are a real mensch! When I saw that sketch on your blog, I had an even deeper appreciation for the tool you created- just amazing. I'm glad you received at least a small "good thing" out of this whole exercise re: your intrigue over the "potentially useful tool approach to have plug and play pieces one can use." JR provided a solid example of what he was seeking- an attribution with a very specific format; not the IMG tags to include the image. He/she wants to download the flickr image and add to the Wordpress media or slideshow media and add a specific formatted caption with attribution with creative commons namespace parameters and such. Because the image string had HTML but would be included in a double quoted string, I had to escape all of the quotes as single quotes. I was able to code and test a new helper tool in about 30 minutes, there is a new URL that can be used on the bookmarklet creation tool http://cogdog.github.io/flickr-cc-helper/slide-attributor.html I added to the output a link to download the source image, so all the steps can be done from the one page. I learned a new technique-- by writing the href tag with a download parameter, the link forces a download in an HTML5 capable browser, e.g. http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1114/882126043_d95a0245e0.jpg So this is how the same flickr CC helper tool can provide custom attribution code I tinker with my code again... because I can. I still have questions -- https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/529442714962509825 The newest mind-blowing add on for del.icio.us users must be Revealacious billed as "revealing the way you use del.icio.us": Revealicious is a set of graphic visualisations for your del.icio.us account that allow you to browse, search and select tags, as well as viewing posts matching them. * SpaceNav (demo), which allows you to explore the structure of your tags in a rather recreative manner. * TagsCloud (demo), which is an interactive and enhanced version of the tagscloud available in del.icio.us * Grouper (demo), which is an experimental interface for grouping and working with tags. More or less, you plug in your del.icio.us account details, and this site provides some interesting graphic tools to "reveal" relationships in your tagging methodology (or lack thereof?). On a quick toor, SpaceNav, provides an interactive view of how your tags are inter-related, so starting with my tag for "blogging" Rollovers on the small dots in the circle dynamically change to visually reflect the relationships with other tags that I have used-- I am guessing the goal is to develop some patterns that emerge from one's own tagging habits. The TagCloud tool is not the same one you might be familiar with that just shows larger text in proportion to frequency of tags Each click on a tag changes the other tags to give a sense of their connection (or not)-- but the unique things are clicking multiple tags to see the relationships that emerges, for example above, my tag clouds for "podcast" and "rss". Then if you click the search button, you see all the sites tagged as indicated above. Lastly, the Grouper tool does a few things in one interface. At a high level view, it provides a snapshot of highly common, common, and lesser used tags by placing them into 3 groups. This might help you clean up less frequently used tags. But it gets more interesting as you mouse over tags, and color bars are superimposed on the 3 groups to show how many other tags in that group are related to the one under the mouse. This is another thing that is cool and beckons for more than this cursory look. Visualizing the data this way potentially can reveal things not apparent in a large pile of data, but better yet, this is all made do-able because del.icio.us exposes the data to external applications and developers who cook up groovy things like Revealicious. A tip of the blog hat to Robin Good for his Sharewood Picnic Number 18, a weekly feast of provocative sites. Yum. Don't all those people look so happy using their computers? Smiles, working together, so perfectly diverse. They all seem to own Apple laptops. Shiny. Happy. Well except for one guy in the middle. Last week while trying to deal with a problem in my health insurance, I had to create an account on their site. The profile set up had a 5 screen survey, each displaying a photo of one of these Shiny Happy Computer People. Their poise and clip art stock photo perfection got under my skin"¦ they were just to shiny, too happy"¦ especially given the situation with my insurance company. Okay, my August payment was late (I forgot) (even with my calendar reminder) "” I have been on time with paying for my own insurance for a year, and I slipped up. No excuses there. I got a letter on August 15 informing me I was late, and to make up for it, I had to send a check to not only cover August, but September. I did that right away. Okay. But then when I went to renew my mail order prescription for my insulin, the web site for the company that manages it reported that my account was cancelled! I called my insurance company. They said there might be a problem with the medical suppliers web site, and if I created an account on the Anthem's site and entered the prescription site there, that it should work. Not Okay. It didn't. Called the medical supply company and they confirmed that Anthem had cancelled my account. Called Anthem back. Oh yes, they said"“ it was because I was late on my August payment. So because I was late for a payment, Anthem canceled my ability to get my diabetic supplies. I have to wait for them to process my check, with about 9 days of insulin simply left. Their letter notifying me about my late payment contained no notification that they canceled my prescription service. So I am not a shiny happy computer person. I'm the guy in the middle. Not Shiny. Not Happy. Faux Ocotillo Resurrectedavailable on flickr When I left Maricopa last April, my colleague David Weaver gave me this plant as a stand in for an Ocotillo (a project I supported for like 10 years). I am not a good plant caretaker, and with a little bit of in-attention, this plant lost most its leaves a few months back .but some time spent outside, sun, and more regualr watering has brought it back to life. Hopefully the clutter of wires and electronic debris will not be abad influence. Working with David at maricopa was a true honor- he was one of the first faculty I met as a green rookie in 1992 (my first week was an Ocotillo retreat at Mormon Lake), and I can think of not too many others I worked with who put such an amount of energy into both teaching physics, but also embracing (and questioning) technology. Cheers, David, the Faux Ocotillo Lives on! Iit is actually a Jade plant, not even close to a real Ocotillo. It's been while since I did a keynote talk... and even longer since I got my gimmick working to automatically tweet from my Apple Keynote slide deck (first done in 2011). I'd pretty much shied away from slide decks, instead doing more talks lately direct from the web using my own SPLOTpoint or doing things like this with Reveal.js. I got a ping last week from The Place That People Say is Crap and It Probably Is Yet Still Good Because Things Happen Like This: https://twitter.com/amywebb/status/919962105750618114 Amy was asking about getting the Keynote autotweet to work in a modern MacOS. My last working instructions are quite out of date, as apparently, in Apple Infinite Wisdom changed some of the capabiity on what AppleScript could do. Some of the comments indicated it was working in Yosemite, I did not have luck, and gave up (or forgot about it). Counter to the idea that I am on the cutting edge, I am still using a rather old MacOS (Mavericks, OS X 10.9.5) on my primary machine. I heard of problems in newer systems, and I still like using Aperture for photo management (despite people implying the sky was falling when Apple announced end up updating, It Still Works). Since 2013 when I got this MacBookPro have not found a mission critical reason I need to upgrade my OS. I do run a newer OS on my older laptop (if that makes sense) just for testing stuff. But I was able to confirm that my old setup, using Keynote Tweet 2.5 and Keynote '09 still works on my machine. The command line tweeting tool twurl still works https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/919982078778736640 And a test Keynote deck I rigged up successfully tweeted: https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/919982477971558400 which came from Keyote [caption id="attachment_65251" align="aligncenter" width="760"] From inside my ancient copy of Keynote '09[/caption] Wow https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/919982493335396353 While it works for me, I am an edge case. But I likely have a need to use this for upcoming workshops (like coming up so fast I should be working them and not blogging this). I told Amy sometime in November I'd (maybe) dig back into the scripts and/or research if others have cracked this open. So if anyone has had any success getting this (or another) script to automatically tweet from Keynote, please chime in. Yes, I know it might be possible soon with Google Slides. Yes, I know some people schedule tweets in tweetdeck. It's still not quite this effect. On another brain plane I am also thinking about adding it as a SPLOTpoint feature. Later. Yes, later. Featured Image: A derivative of a derivative remixed. The background image of album covers is cropped from a pixabay photo by flo222 that is in the public domain via Creative Commons CC0. I did some Photoshop replacement of the AC/DC Highway to Hell cover (sorry guys, still a favorite on my turntable) with the featured image created for a 2013 blog post that was itself modified from Tweet and Toot Cover flickr photo by Jacob Whittaker shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license I've already written this blog post! Shall I cite myself, ibid infinitum? https://cogdogblog.com/2016/04/digital-durability/ But just to show as an example, in my previous post I was able to reference the 2018 Mural UDG Project I was part of. A few days ago that was not possible, and also on the digital chopping block was years of work on the UDG Agora project. They were on the fast boat to Link Rot. Both of these projects were beautifully organized and managed by the Justice Institute of British Columbia and led by Tannis Morgan -- and these were easily the best projects in all senses I was ever part of. Fortunately they allowed us to build all of our web sites (both were WordPress multisite and made use again of those S things) on a Reclaim Hosting account. This means no doing dance circles around IT departments, we could build fast and furiously, that's what these nimble, organic projects needed. But the projects ended. Tannis has moved on to a new role at Vancouver Community College. The dean who oversaw the project is retired. And someone at JIBC got a renewal notice for the web hosting and 2 domains, shrugged, and did not renew them. Why would they? The project was done. It's good to have friends running your web hosting. If I was still with CrapHost or BlueNose, they don't know me, but Jim Groom does. He let Tannis, myself, and Brian Lamb know via DM that the sites were not being renewed. I think theagoraonline domain and hosting at Reclaim is expiring, it automatically renewed by some snafu, so we are reimbursing the JIBC folks after getting a ticket letting us know. But, in the event there's anything you need from there I can grab a full cPanel backup for posterity and send it along, let me know. A backup is but those are for archivists. This is a chunk of my professional portfolio. Why should we just shrug it off and let all those links go dead? But again, Jim is a friend, and was able to transfer these two sites and domains to my web hosting account. The financial impact for 2 domains and web hosting might be $60 clams a year. This is severe? We should just let our work go for this trivial amount? Both Tannis and Brian offered to chip in. Nope. Not on my watch. Tannis asked in the DMs this whole thing has me thinking a bit more about the ephemerality of OER and whether we should care or not But the OERs themselves are not ephemeral, it's the people who maintain them. And with projects coming and going, staff the same, who would really think an Institution really cares about it's projects legacy? Just snip the budget and call it done. But we all have a stake in these "old" projects and I will do everything I can to preserve my digital cruft. I for one care. Or as Jim said much more eloquently: You are talking to the wrong crowd about not caring about sites, that ephemerality shit is for [NAME REDACTED] I am here to save the web and all the jackasses on it :) That's our Jim, no sublety. My ethos is if I create something, I should do everything I can to preserve it. Individuals care; but institutions do not -- yes there are exceptions to this rule, but it's because of individuals at those institutions. This point was also made in a recent and alarming Atlantic article by Jonathan Zittrain, "The Internet Is Rotting" (tip of the blog hat to Clint Lalonde) in citing the efforts of Internet Archive / Wayback Machine founder Brewster Kahle: It is no coincidence that a single civic-minded citizen like Brewster was the one to step up, instead of our existing institutions. In part that’s due to potential legal risks that tend to slow down or deter well-established organizations. ...Brewster is superficially in that category, too, but—in the spirit of the internet and web’s inventors—is doing what he’s doing because he believes in his work’s virtue, not its financial potential. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/ These URLs are now preserved in my house, no WayBack machine needed (yet) http://udg.theagoraonline.nethttp://muraludg.org/ And I might even go in from time to time and tend to them, like I had to update an image directory for Acumulador so the taco ratings work. Because tacos. What are you taking care of? Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15089231572 Someone Has to Clean the Ruins flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I have an obsession with a 3 digital number. Of course it's 106 for the greatest ed-tech thing that's ever happened. But I'm just talking here about the 3 digit number. Since January 2011, I have collected 367 photos of finding 106's in the world. Milepost markers. Scale measurements. Fuel prices (Canadian liters). Addresses. Time. Blood glucose measurements. Hotel room numbers. Bus routes. Highway numbers. License plates. You get the idea. Here's my first, taken on December 18, 2010. It was so long ago I was running, and while visiting friends in Phoenix, AX, thinking about this weird class Jim Groom was starting, I noticed a 106 marker on a pole along one of the canal paths in Mesa. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] I did apply some wild effects to it. But it clicked that it might be fun to celebrate this DS106 thing by finding photos of the number. It's also the "Illustrate 106" assignment, which now is on the order of difficulty of an easy Daily Create. But that's not the point. But when I am out and about, especially in a new location (this is my last day of a week's visit to Washington D.C.), my eyes are tuned to glance at signs, and license plates seeking 106's. I'm not always looking for them, but it's something that seems to float somewhere between subconscious and higher. Yup, I saw a bus with a 1106 on it, so crop the image, and kaching [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Why am I even blogging about this beside showing you how dull my life is that I look for a 3 digit number? I think there is value into having what I found among naturalists is called a "Search image". I rad about it first in Alexandra Horowitz's book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes which is the author's learnings while walking familiar areas of New York City with different experts, so she begins to see things she never noticed before. The idea is that birds find a food that really appeals to them, and they pretty much scan their surroundings looking for that very thing: Tinbergen noticed that songbirds did not prey on just any insect that had recently hatched in the vicinity; instead, they tended to prefer one kind of bug — say, a particular species of beetle — at a time. As the numbers of young beetles rose through a season, the birds gorged on these beetlettes, ignoring any other available young insects nearby. Tinbergen suggested that, once the birds found a food they liked, they began to look just for that food, ignoring all others. He called this a search image: a mental image of a beetle—with its characteristic beetly shape, size, and colors—with which the bird scans her environment. The naturalist that Horowitz walks with describes this as: Once you have an eye for these things, even when you’re not looking for them, they just jump out at you. Everything is a sign of something. I think of it as more like tuning your observation to one signal, one frequency, so that it becomes less overt, and more of something that pretty much picks it up almost like a radio signal. But what it also does, I think, is it heightens your overall observation intensity. I find that's what photography does in conjunction. I'm always tuned into noting things like vivid light, contrast, juxtaposition, and of course, 106s. I've thought if I taught any other media class that was not ds106, that I might the course number as such a talisman. I could ask students, to pick their own favorite number to look for. Three digital seem ideal- 2 is too easy, and 4 too hard. Numbers seem better, as it affords them in signs, phone numbers, street signs. But by having every person doing the same number, then you are able to compare and appreciate what others are doing. And you celebrate the course number. And jealous people call you a cult. And you get an idea to offer your students socks with the number on it, you fail yo deliver, and they still love you. Hypothetical story. Or maybe I just have a useless obsession with a three digit number. Top / Featured Image: For anyone who watched the Lost series, just me saying "the Numbers" triggers an association. 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 While there are attributed images I really wanted to use from the Lostopedia, the rights are thin there for fairuse, and thinner for me to download. So the image I am using is a public domain one from pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/pay-numbers-infinity-digits-fill-937884/ This one ought to be added to the Amazing Stories of Sharing, all enabled via flickr photosharing. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by windsordi Back in December, I posted a photo of some really solid oak that had been split for me (it was like iron) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Di, who is among the most prolific of kind commenting in flickr, was a bit horrified at the thought of my burning the wood- as she does creative things with wood, turning them (literally) into pens: I'm crying right now... as I look at some of the spalting in that gnarly wood, I'm seeing GREAT pen turning opportunities... I've added some notes to a couple of the logs... here's what I'd be doing with them... www.flickr.com/photos/windsordi/5230785038/ Feel like cleaning up a block or two of the wood? (no bark across the border) and I'll send you back a pen? ;-) How could I resist that? I don't want to see a grown creative woman cry! So I picked a log with interesting internal texture, packaged it up, and had it sent o Canada (not, it is not really cheap, but as you see above worth it!) It's really worth looking at her set to see how an ordinary log gets made into a beautiful pen. I am at the Houston airpot now, eager to get back to Strawberry, and hopefully being able to post a photo soon of my new pen. Thanks, Di! And I still have a lot of that wood saved in the shed. Amazing! Looks like I can be a Silicon Indian-- from my inbox: Next stop.. CogDogBangalore? SNF is increasing daily When Tom Woodward tweets something “might be a good #ds106 assignment”, he usually does not stop there http://t.co/oXnzUDewTQ #ds106 illustrating strange google autocompletes — Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 30, 2013 He goes ahead and tries it cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward and makes it into a ds106 Assignment (and blogs it, natch) Illustrating Odd Autocompletes: Google Autocomplete is an oracle with strange powers to bring oddities into your life. This assignment asks you to seek out that randomness. Start with a strong phrase (things like "I hate . . ." or "I love . . . " seem to work well.) and run through the alphabet looking for really odd autocompletes. When you find a good one, screen capture it and create an illustration that represents the search string. I tried a number o false starts, and got what I wanted by starting with “why do they” and got to starting “pi”, when I spotted “Why do they pierce cows”– my MOOCmocking radar went on. So I found a creative commons licensed image of a cow (now too hard, used google image search with advanced image for “free to use share modify”), but I wanted a closeup of the nose, Cow 0945 was perfect. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Lars Pistasj A similar search for “nose piercing” got me one from Wikipedia licensed the same This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, photo by User:Nicor I decided to update the cow’s tag to a relevant “106″. Meaning? MOOCs are all pivoted and beleaguered these days, so we can expect UdaXsarians to try anything to bling up the “lousy products” Kudos to Tom for following through, and keep in mind the many ideas like the ds106 Assignment Bank, the Remix Machine, and many of the classic assignments came from his cranium. According to my Kindle Reader I am only 18% into Alex Wright's Cataloging The World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. But I am all in. As a precedent to Vannevar Bush, Belgian information organizer Otlet is credited with envisioning many of the technologies and ideas behind this internet thing I am pushing stuff into. The Mondedeum lives... on the web. I'm quite mesmerized by the placing Wright does in a time right before 1900 when technology offered promise to change the world, to break down international barriers, to equalize what was not equal, to envision a "postivist" view of the world. All of these came to bear on the world, apparently, at the 1900 Exposition Universelle (Worlds Fair) in Paris. Now, a new internationalist movement, coupled with-- and enabled by-- new communications technologies and a spirit of cultural progress, imbued many learned Europeans with a new way of thinking about world affairs, one less rooted in traditional national concerns and more concerned with building a futuristic, postnationalist global society. Which century was this? What communication technologies? There is even media puffery like the French Minister of Commerce who remarked "Machinery has become the queen of the world." Wright does point out the shortcomings of the idealistic visions, rooted in a European society looking down their positions wrestling with "the Africa problem". But again, 1900 was an era of optimism for what technology could do for society, education, culture, academia. Most of which eventually dissolved by nationalism and two World Wars. I wonder, are we in a flavor now of a 2015 "Exposition Universelle" of the internet? Let's leave that for another gloomy day. Otlet's ideas were informed by efforts to categorize the world of information, to create classification systems. He was among others trying to build a solution to an explosion of information, starting with tearing up books and organizing them on cards with an indexing system. Otlet embraced the index card as the superior vehicle of information technology. That triggers for me my own metaphor for some experience within the last year being part of the Federated Wiki "Happenings" organized by Mike Caulfield and Ward Cunningham. I felt like what we were doing was Federated Index Cards. And this leads me to what Mike hinted at in a recent post which is mostly about the (nifty) new feature of "rosters" in Federated Wikis. But at the close he adds: I want to start the next happening as soon as possible. Here’s what it is going to be about. We’re going to test this roster functionality by setting up “pods”. Pods will form around a task or research question — for instance, you could structure a pod around the task of improving the Wikipedia coverage of Mario Bava, or increasing the quality of articles on the world’s oceans, or something non-wikipedia like compiling every piece of information about where the “Images are processed 60,000 times as fast as text” myth comes from. You put together your set of people you want working on this, and build a roster you share out to the others. And then you start to build out your knowledge in that weird federated wiki way, where things start to link together in ways you had not imagined. When the time is up, you consolidate your work — moving things into wikipedia, sharing as a more “normal” looking wiki, publishing your results or whatever. Is Mike baiting the hook with the 60,000 times after claim I have been barking about? I bit. I DM-ed him to see what I was thinking and within 30 minutes were talking in appear.in. So tentatively I will try and lead a short foray with the Federated Wiki to flesh out not only the "is there a real source" to the claim, but also to dig more into this idea of such things that sound true but are somewhere in the shy side of truthiness. This might take place in August (depending on the pile of other things I have committed to despite by real wish to have a month off). If you are interested in being part of a small group that will dig into some research and use the FedWiki, let me know, whether you have experience with it or not. I am just putting this out early as an idea, not even sure if it will play out. It sounds like a fun way to dig more into the claim and the claimers. Hopefully by then I will finish this book on Paul Otlet (plus the other 19 unfinished ones in my Kindle app). Top / Featured Image Credit: Created with Blyberg Card Catalog Generator http://www.blyberg.net/card-generator [caption id="attachment_31852" align="alignnone" width="500"] Public Domain image "Space-Tech Lab. QA-118-REG balanced vacuum tube pre-amplifier with tube rectifier and tube regulator" from Wikimedia Commons[/caption] In scanning the Thoughtvectors blogs and twitter stream, a lot of students/participants are well on their way starting their Inquiry Projects. But should anyone be in search of one, I have one I started a while ago, that is free for anyone to run with. It is almost a year since last reporting on the 60,000 Times Question Remains Unanswered: Back in May I wrote about trying to locate the source of a statement that is repeated so much, I had heard it, and accepted it as something that somewhere had a research basis- it is some variation of: Research at 3M Corporation concluded that we process visuals 60000 times faster than text. This is a statement that has been repeated so often on web sites, presentations, the web sites of exerpts on visual communciations, published books and articles -- go ahead and google it -- 42,000 hits on that exact phrase -- that it takes on the allure of truth. Or truthiness. Except one problem. One small problem. There is (as far as I can tell form a lot of looking) no reliable source of that research. Here is the problem with citations. They look concrete. A typical citation for this assertion is: 3M Corporation research cited in "Polishing Your Presentation." 3M Meeting Network Articles & Advice (2001) [Online Article]. Available:http://www.3m.com/meetingnetwork/readingroom/meetingguide_pres.html Except there is one problem. If you actually read that document, it is really a brochure, and the research cited is mentioned in that document as Did you know that visual aids have been found to improve learning by up to 400 percent? Did you realize that we can process visuals 60,000 times faster than text? Would you guess that the average person only remembers about a fifth of what they hear? These findings from behavioral research confirm our daily experience: we rely on all our senses to bring ideas and concepts to life. Effective presenters today realize that preparing to take the podium means more than having your index cards in order. As photos, illustrations, graphs and text make their way into presenters' toolboxes, audiences are coming to expect impressive visual aids. However, high-quality images aren't the whole story. Visuals should support you, not replace you. Use them instead to shed light on your key messages and capture the audience's interest. So the research is never cited, it is only vague inferred. So if you provide a citation to a source that does not provide the reference, how valid is that? After all this time, I do not believe it exists. I have even put money on the table as a bet creative commons licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by Its.MJ Yes, I offered a cash prize of $60 to anyone that can produce the research behind the claim. That money remains un-earned. But the inquiry is not as much the pursuit of the answer, but more into a question of how does one counter a claim that is repeated so much that people accept it as truth? cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Kalexanderson For a parallel example of faulty / wrong information repeated so much that it's accepted as truth, see the debunking of Dale's Cone of Experience. This is a fascinating challenge in an ecosystem of abundant, unchecked information. Any takers? My research trails to date: If It's Repeated Enough... (May 6, 2012) Tweet it, Blog It, Repeat It, 60,000 Times: Truthiness Achieved ... (Apr 6, 2014) The 60,000 Times Question Remains Unanswered (Jul 6, 2012) $60 could be yours! flickr foto Shuffle Come Homeavailable on my flickr For weeks I was sure I had lost my iPod Shuffle... and today I found it stuck in the pocket of a pair of pants I had not worn in weeks. Charge up, little iPod, we got some running to do! Lost, now found. I was conviinced I had lost my iPod Shuffle, and was just ready this week to give up and order a replacement (especially since the bottom line one dropped to below $70). But hold the lines, Apple Store, I am back in business. It turned up in pair of slacks I had not worn in a few weeks (and now I give away that I try to get 2 wears out of my dry cleaning bills). Time to touch base, charge up, and hit the road! We carried the box out of the car and set it gently on those straps, suspended over the hole. I shall never ever forget that lonely creaky sounds those straps make when released, when Mom went into the ground. I spoke about how I was worried when I told mom in March that I had quit a well paying job to spend 5 months touring the country, without a plan to get a job or line up health insurance. I imagined she would let me know what a foolish choice this was, yet that was far from what she said. Mom was so excited for my plan. I told them about the "Cousin Bobby" postcards I sent from every state and province; that Sunday afternoon I was almost out of Ontario when I remembered to get her a Toronto card (this one in my hand). Now Mom I am going to send you with my last postcard to you (big tears). I talked about how as a teen and a young adult how uncool it was to be around my Mom, how her "squareness" annoyed me, her over protective actions that bridled my identity as a "man". I then shared, with a verbal smiley, how much she changed in the next 20 years (ahem) especially after Dad passed; how I looked forward to our weekly calls, our laughs, the fun we had on her visits to Strawberry. And I talked about how much I learned from her selfless sacrifice, how she lived to make connections with strangers, how she was really interested in making people, strangers feel important. I talked about how she participated in My online stuff, letting me blog about her, share her cookie stories and butterfly philosophy live over Internet radio-- that she had a huge following if thousands of people out there who were touched by her, even that they were right now playing "Sweet Caroline" on the ds106radio. I mentioned how mom's stories made an impact in Claudia, a teacher in Argentina I never met but was among those dream friends that are real on the Internet. I told her how much light she made in the world and how lost I am without her (bigger tears). My sister and nephew spoke their own powerful messages (Josh you truly communicated Mom's gifts to us all, thanks). A few prayers, the ropes creak, down it goes, we toss dirt (and one postcard), and it's over. But it's not over. Now my friends, my loving dear internet friends that are more real world than anything, ate spreading Alyce's #cookielove- you are asked on Sunday to bake a batch of cookies, share them with a stranger, and share your story. See http://bit.ly/cookielove This life without Mom in it is not the same, but I want to try even harder to live up to her ways. Bye Mom, from Baltimore, Love Alan This afternoon I am doing an hand-on workshop on our Maricopa ePortfolio tool for the participants in our Maricopa Faculty Internship program. We have had some program like this for a few years where a year's full of experiences, projects, mentoring is supposedly captured in a one page Word document report. I've been applying pressure for some time, that we ought to have intern / fellowship programs either blog, eport, or journal somehow along the way, as the old saw goes-- the journey being more important and interesting that just the final destination. It's like a vacation road trip across Australia, and the only memorabilia you save is the brochure from the tour bus. Anyhow, we have created eport accounts for all the interns and are asking them to use it to post their resume, their materials developed as they move through the program, but most importantly, use the blog to journal their experience. For this workshop, I've not overly prepared ;-) We have an excellent illustrated 26 page guide created and shared by Jennifer Strickland at Paradise Valley Community College that covers the basics nicely. One of my rules of thumbs for technology related demos is to use the topic as the medium, so since our eportfolio as a feature to create a wiki inside an eport, I spent a whopping 25 minutes creating an outline as a wiki page inside my own shabby eportfolio. Its mostly outline, with some links I will show. It allows an audience member who is bored of my talking to explore on their own. Or it can be a reference to come back to. I'm curious to see what things people can concoct for using an unlikely tools inside an eportfolio. At a simple level it is a quick and easy way to create web content (this one is set so only I can edit it). But one could set up a wiki where they let registered users, specific users, or the world, contribute. Maybe people can contribute ideas on how to develop my skills in a certain area (someone can write, "Learn to spell!"). Or Perhaps I could post a draft of a paper, and use it to solicit resources I ought to include. Sigh. It is no wonder no work is going on this morning. Our Asian wikis spammers returned, this time not only spamming our pages, but creating their own... and this time leaving a veiled threat of a message: Please do not delete. I send this message only one time, in order to introduce some China website. IF you delete, I will publish every day. There is only one problem, my Chinese spamming guest... your web sites have zero or even negative relevance to our educational oriented wikis. What do links to suppliers of electronics, fireworks. linens, camping equipment, fishing gear.... have any freaking connection with Learning Objects? Well, now you have another problem China spammer. Try and figure it out. The travel route for where I live now in Strawberry to Phoenix is a lovely drive down highway 87, the "Beeline Highway", that romps up and down some fabulous jumbled up geology, connecting the Sonoran desert to the forest plateau. Ir cab be idyllic... until something happens to close the highway, as the alternative routes can be 60, 80 miles of detour. Lats summer a fuel truck lost control on a steep downhill, crashed, and the northbound highway lanes "melted" from the heat of the explosion. And just Friday, I heard, that a landslide caused by water running below the surface which loosened rock, buckled the highway, and it is still closed as repairs continue. So with some curiosity I've been Google mapping some bits and pieces, and have been dismayed that none of the news actually provides the map location of this incident. Shouldn't most online news be geocoded to map?? So, in normal conditions, the drive from Strawberry to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix is 107 miles, calculated simply by plugging in these end points into the driving directions tool on GMaps. If I had to drive today, with Highway 87 closed from Bush Highway to State Rt 188, I'd have to take 188 to Globe, and then Highway 60 into Phoenix. I'm not sure how many people know tis, but with one of the Google Maps driving directions displayed, I can click on spot on that path, say where highway 87 meets State Route 188, and I can drag the path onto 188 to change the route. This detour makes a total distance of 176 miles, a 69 mile detour! (more…) Are there really neat lines of cause/effect action in the possibility place the internet, 2021 warts and all, still provides? My best experiences there are ones that could never be anticipated. The antidote to artificial intelligence and algorithmic forces are the human especially the quirky ones, that cannot be GANned or blockchained or predicted. An evening tweet leads me to a blog post that flicks on that idea light, and an hour of late night coding yields: It starts with the tweet: https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/1376376572215693314 that leads to reading the post https://blog.flickr.net/en/2021/03/23/george-oates-returns-to-revitalize-the-flickr-commons/ Which leads me to be trying out an idea... https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1376421248335441921 As it turns out, because of the beauty of the flickr api method to search for photos, one has many ways to modify what is returned, including a parameter in_commons to return only photos from the Flickr Commons. Getting this to work meant adding one more advanced checkbox option to limit results: The results are wonderfully unpredictable. Give it a try! And it also works in "Heather" mode (named for the teacher who suggested the idea) where you can create a pechaflickr run where you see the images, but must guess the tag. Are you up to that challenge? This was the first update to pechaflickr I've made since 2017, yet, it still works. This is the best of the web that a provider of a web service gives enough hand holds that I can make it do something it was not built for. And this is a mashup of a mashup- the whole idea of pechaflickr matches pechakucha with powerpoint karaoke mixed in with flickr and now mashed up with the flickr commons. The code itself is a duct tape special mashup using the phpFlickr library to get stuff from flickr and the Vegas Javascript code to run the slideshow. Pechaflickr works well too in any video conference environment where you can share a screen. I have done it for years in Google Hangouts (RIP) and it does fine in Zoom too. I do ask folks to share via a friendly form any way they use pechaflickr, got a nice set of messages today via twitter. https://twitter.com/ProfTucker/status/1376571911560331267 https://twitter.com/ProfTucker/status/1376572438205501440 Just a bit of experience. If you share something openly on the web, it's likely more folks will benefit than you might ever know. To me, that is a positive result. It means your stuff is more useful than you might guess/know. I just am excited that pechaflickr still can do it's stuff some ten years after I hatched the idea. Featured Image: A mashup of my own logo (just helvetica font colored text) with Watermelon eating contest - Leesburg" flickr photo by State Library and Archives of Florida https://flickr.com/photos/floridamemory/19481804090 shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons). How can you resist a clown photo? Ugh, will this one ever end? I decided to create an audio narrated slidecast of my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, using the audio I recorded when I did the presentation at the 2007 NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. It took a bit more time, as I had to grab screenshots, stuff them into a PowerPoint, add the links, upload to slideshare, and THEN do the synchronization. There are a few places I missed the screens so I am talking about some things you cannot see, but worse! What a major "umm" fest this was! Ca I plead fatigue? I think it might be "49,000 Ummm Web 2.o Ways..." But here it is for your viewing torture. Man, do I like Slideshare! 50-web-20-ways-to-tell-a-storyfrom Alan Levine Okay, if you use my materials (and I hope you do)- please go to https://50ways.cogdogblog.com/ but please, please, do not request to join this wiki! It is mine! See the reason why on the wiki entrance. Not all wikis are shared space. And if you do any work with this stuff, please use the discussion tabs to leave URLs for the stories produced so I can add to the examples list. There must be 50 ways..... In a presentation last Friday at the 2016 Open Education Conference Paul Stacey and I described the Certification project as “Massive Open OER Development.” MOOD? People who know me know how much I think of acronyms that start with M-O-O… (that was meant to be wry humor) Hearing about @creativecommons 'certificate' prog – awesomeness with @cogdog and Paul Stacey. –>@NKorn — Viv Rolfe (@VivienRolfe) November 4, 2016 Thus the presentation was proposed as: Deeply woven into successful open education and pedagogy is an understanding and practice of what Lumen Learning defines as the 5R Permissions – Retaining, Reusing, Revising, Remixing and Redistributing content and ideas. As one of the most visible ways to communicate these permissions, Creative Commons makes the 5Rs clear in the licensing of over a billion pieces of content. But understanding Creative Commons– as a content producer, as a content user, or as organizations supporting open practices– is more than reciting a list of licenses. Therefore a new project has been underway to develop a Creative Commons Certification to provide organizations and individuals with a range of ways to demonstrate their knowledge and use of Creative Commons to place even more information into public spaces. It’s value is in the focus on a certification of performed skills and principles, not just an examination of factual knowledge. Openly sharing materials is a common value for the the Open Education community, and in this project we are pushing openness farther by sharing the process of design and develop of the Certification. We absolutely implore that this not become a repeated acronym, but we share in this presentation how the project is an experiment in Massive Open OER Development. Would you be interested in a Creative Commons certification? What might that look like? Let @pgstacey and @cogdog know! #OpenEd16 pic.twitter.com/wighKFmHc6 — Travis Pynenburg (@travenburg) November 4, 2016 Before a few comments about the presentation, here are some details on how to explore it. All of the presentation is available on a site hosted via GitHub Pages (they nuked it!, try http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened16/ — the presentation itself is not a slide deck in proprietary [tired] software, but published openly as native web content: The format allows for moving through the presentation via left/right arrows (or buttons in the bottom right), or to explore more detail via the down arrow (or button): Lastly, the ESCAPE key provides an overview of the presentation, and lets you jump to any portion directly: Everyone's getting a little brain-full as we get to the end of the day. @pgstacey & @cogdog presenting w/coffee in hand. #OpenEd16 — Anali Perry (@grumpator) November 4, 2016 Yes, our mode was to be conversational, as if we were having a conversation over coffee. Also, because of the 30 minute time for the session, we built the presentation materials with a load of links for deeper dives. @pgstacey @cogdog talking #creativecommons certification program #opened16 https://t.co/gSdzauhRuf — Grant Potter (@grantpotter) November 4, 2016 The “structure” of the certifications will be a series of modules and in those, learning units. Each unit will include a “Big Question” to put the unit in context, learning outcomes/objectives, a framing set of opening questions to situate the learner and her prior knowledge, a selection of OERs to learn about the subject (and links to many more), a selection of activities to do that will result in a published public demonstration of a person’s work, and a summary response that answers the question. Using github to create OER has long been talked about at this conference. @pgstacey and @cogdog are doing it #OpenEd16 — David Kernoh?n (@dkernohan) November 4, 2016 Because my role in the project is framing the way it will work, I want to expand a bit on how we are trying to build the system. It’s definitely influence on the model of “forking” in GitHub – a common “CORE” of things one should know in general about Creative Commons, and then forked (meaning copied and modified) for contexts in the specialty areas of Education, Government, and Libraries. And from there, anyone can fork a variant to customize for local delivery. Conceptually, that’s the idea. It needs not only to have three variants, but people have desires for delivery on multiple time scales (a course, to a multi day workshop, to a few hour briefing) and modality (self-paced online, in person, or a mix). So rather than doing a full design and offering via a selected platform, we are striving to build (openly) all of the raw materials one might need to deliver in different platforms. And we will create several iterations in different platforms which could then be shared/customized. The source content thus will be produced by our team (and others who want to participate) in GitHub using Markdown – a text based simple markup language that can be converted to HTML in a growing number of web publishing platforms. Markdown content is structural — not presentational — headings, links, images, lists, emphasis, etc. It was developed in 2004 by John Gruber along with (an honor to his legacy) Aaron Swartz (Aaron’s post about the project is still available). The module on “The Commons” introduces the concept with a unit on “The Significance of the Commons.” The Markdown format looks like: Markdown format for a unit Viewed on GitHub, it looks like a simple, maybe bland web page: This is not a place people would access the unit. Instead, with the assist of the Jetpack Plugin, the exact same markdown content is rendered in this WordPress site: For the technically curious, I wrote some code to re-write the image links, to remove the heading from the first line (because WordPress puts the heading in the title), and to add the inter-unit navigation links. Once in WordPress, I add platform specific things like a featured image. I am using the WordPress parent-child structure of pages to mirror the structure of directories on the GitHub site, and the Page-List WordPress plugin to dynamically build the navigation. This means, any install could remove, add pages, change the order, and the navigation would work. What I have built is not limited to a theme; with a small plugin, this implementation could work on any WordPress theme. The idea would be to offer a starting set of each certification’s content to anyone who wants to customize. Rather than populating from GitHub, I can see offering an XML export from our demonstration site that anyone can use to install their own starter certification site– and then customize from there. But it need not be produced in WordPress. I have now only a crude local prototype, but the same Markdown content can be published using a static web site generator like Hugo: A demo of the same markdown content published in Hugo Most people would not want to fiddle with this- but once we publish the certifications, then we can offer the same content via GitHub, and anyone can spawn a copy, then modify. @creativecommons is gonna meet #ds106. Oh. That will be awesome then. @cogdog and Paul Stacey. #OpenEd16 — Viv Rolfe (@VivienRolfe) November 4, 2016 But this is just the content of the certifications. The things people will be doing to “get” (or we prefer, “claim”) a certification, is by completing tasks or as we are calling them, “Quests.” I am building a “bank” of activities using the same model of the DS106 Assignment Bank using the template version openly shared as a WordPress Theme into a Quest Bank. These are things people will need to do, publish their work at a public URL, and submit to the bank with a bit of written reflection, as evidence of their work on a unit. For a sample of what this might look like, see the example Quest for the unit under The Commons on Compare / Contrast Physical vs Digital Commons. In this quest, you would explore the differences between sharing a physical and digital item you own. When completed, a response to this quest is added to the bank site. We will be able to track all responses you submit, and eventually have it sent to a credential site we are developing in credly. Graphic by Bryan Mathers licensed CC-BY-NC I may be conflating our “Quest” activities with the #CCQuest social media effort our team has been running, but to me it fits together. We published this one before the presentation to put it out there as a request. Paul recently wrote about his electrical blackout inspired idea to frame this project — A Community Sourced Credential – Is It Even Possible?. Paul envisioned the design of the units as a six sided cube: So many people, organizations have expertise and materials related to the units of the certification: And we ask in our #CCQuest if you, your organization, or some other one you know of might have an interest in “Adopting” one of the units. We are not asking you to build it, but to help develop the Big Questions, organize OERs, and provide ideas for quest activities. #CCQuest06 – Which Creative Commons CORE certification would you adopt? https://t.co/kQPKU0ljl3 pic.twitter.com/sb4hqDD6Id — Alan Levine (@cogdog) November 4, 2016 We want this to be community sourced. So this #CCQuest is still running this week. We have a few responses already: @mollyali @pgstacey @cogdog I'd also love to help as a member of CC Japan and an ex-instructional designer of OER #OpenEd16 — Tomo Nagashima (@tomonagashima) November 4, 2016 @cogdog What interests me regards @creativecommons is the question of why 'the commons' and the socio-cultural implementation #ccquest — Aaron Davis (@mrkrndvs) November 4, 2016 And we are asking again this week– are you in the MOOD with us? Audience Questions Thanks to Olga, we have some notes on the discussion from the audience, some technical, some operational. How do people contribute back to the CC cert after they’ve forked it? (Like we do in open source software) Split it granularly so we have fewer merge conflicts How do we identify all the forked versions of the certificate? What does this look like as a professional development? How official is it? How can I relate it back to my professional profile? This is needed now! When will it be available? Should we advertise the slow release of content so that people can use it as its available? Featured Image: Duke Ellington Orchestra – Mood Indigo Wikimedia commons photo by Freimut Bahlo licensed Public Domain It's not the blinking blue border that makes me chuckle, it's the double take of "this is not a joke" combined with a smiley face. I would guess the click also gets you to the place to be the prime ocean front real estate in Mohave County, Arizona. Beyond movies and perhaps MAD magazine references I have no direct experience with being forced castor oil as a cold remedy. But there is an old advertisement in an image that is in the public domain. Wikimedia Commons public domain image Every indication is that the stuff does not taste well. Bring it on. I've been conducting a long running experiment with my 66,000+ photos uploaded to flickr since 2004, I've made an effort to make them all available under Creative Commons CC0. Why would I do this? In way too many instances I see public domain described to educators as "you can use it for free and you do not even have to provide attribution." While technically correct from a licensed fine print term, this is a bare minimum. If someone has provided you their work for under the public domain, a basic act of human appreciation would be to acknowledge the source of an image. Didn't your mom teach you to say thank you? But moreso, when you, as an educator publish works where media is not attributed (because you do not have to), what are you communicating as a practice to others? So my experiment is seeing how often people go beyond the minimum and attribute my public domain photos, or more often than you might think, leave comments to offer thanks or let me know. And these are usually not publishers of products, more often it is an individual blogger, filmmaker, or most often, independent musicians who bother to say thanks. About a year ago, I wrote up more or less this same argument in a post where I shared how I was using a service called pixsy, a service that finds copies of your images used in other web sites (sort of an automated reverse image search service). Most would use this to pursue uses of images that violate a person's copyright. My approach is different, I just am curious to see where my images are used-- I like to update a flickr set that includes how many I have tracked, and I just hit the 200 mark. Here's a little flavor of what pixsy provides, a scroll through GIF of the most recent 100 matches. It's a little bit astounding how many reuses pixsy finds. Since I am using the tiny free slice I get as a flickr pro user, it only tracks 1000 of my photos or 1.5%. Look at their numbers: So if pixsy found 3146 reuses of 1000 of my flickr photos, some math and dimensional analysis suggests ... my 66,000 flickr photos might be used over 200,000 times. Okay, I pat myself on the back. Now, for the castor oil. Among the results I saw a photo I took once while driving in Vermont, with someone's stamp on top of it: I've seen alamy stock photos come up in my google image searches (when I forget to look for open licensed ones). The images in google always have a watermark... because, you actually have to pay to use said photos. So you can go to alamy and buy this photo for persol use for CA$20. Alamy gets CA$50 for use on a web site. A magazine or book use will set up back CA$60. The note at the bottom reads: This image is a public domain image, which means either that copyright has expired in the image or the copyright holder has waived their copyright. Alamy charges you a fee for access to the high resolution copy of the image. And the contributor meta data? It reads "NMUIM / Alamy Stock Photo I should be irate! How dare they make money from my photo? Take a deep swig of oil. Ah but they can. I chose to put this into the public domain. That means anyone can do anything with it. But consider this-- how much am I losing? I would not be out there selling my photos. I cannot say I am losing money I would never pursue. If I wanted to be doing this, I'd be like other photographers that release their photos only to stock firm. Am I really losing out on the 20 bucks that might be coming in from a photo? Not if I never made this my goal. Take another swig of the castor oil. I do not take or share photos to make money from them. And if alamy does this, well that's on them to tell their kids that they built a business out of taking images freely available online and selling them to other people. It's more a problem that people would shell out money for an image from here that they can get easily and for free from here: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/13333788573 2014/365/81 Vermont Roads flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This same "contributor" to alamy has uploaded at least 19 of my photos (ones I can quickly recognize). Everyone take another swig of castor oil. And my legal line of reasoning they have done nothing wrong. There is no license problem. And licenses do not really protect your digital assets. This is more of a human way of being problem. If all this effort boils down to license quibbling and making a few bucks from a photo, what is the value here? Is that a legacy worth leaving? So yes, maybe I could be making mint off of maybe 200,000 reuses of my photos. But that's not what I want to be doing. Instead, I find more valuable, the chance encounters with people who bother to say thank you when they find my photos in flickr. Like this photo: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6842874893 2012/366/39 Happy Butterflyday flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license This was a memory from 2012 when I was at UMW and Tim Owens made a 3D printed butterfly in honor of my Mom. A comment from "Tiffany" came in a few months ago: I hope this ‘comment’ finds you well!I just happened upon your recording of your mother describing butterflies. I’m not even sure how I got here, but I think I know why. Last Saturday, I was taking a walk with my 3yo niece, smelling and looking at all of the flowers along our path. Three separate time, a butterfly flew close to her ear, and she giggled. I asked her why she laughed, and she said, “That’s how Grandma tells me funny secrets. She loves me.” Her grandmother died four months before she was born and I believe your Mom. Butterflies are loved ones from our past, checking in and reminding us that we are loved. Which is more valuable? Some dividend fraction of a $20 sale on Alamy or a comment like this one? Who wants to put a dollar value on knowing what this image meant to Tiffany and her daughter? I don't need castor oil anymore. I leave it for license quibblers and digital asset profiteers. Featured image: A composite of a Needpix public domain image (author not specified) and It looks so harmless flickr photo by pmarkham shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license (see what I did here?) These days you cannot spit without hitting a new MOOC or someone talking about how MOOCs will revolutionize education, etc. If you've been following this for anytime, you will know the story of the first ones, the "connectivist" kind in some parlancesactually naming them c-MOOC (David Wiley's Intro to Open Ed, Alec Couros's EC&I 831. Siemens & Downes CCK08 (which seems to have been vaporized from University of Manitoba and blocked at the internet archive, so much for open), If you check the names, you can sense that the "c" stands for Canada, home of MOOCs on Ice But with the commoditization of courses, the MOOC locus has shifted south of the border, we see the rise of EdUCKA, the big money Blue Suede MOOCs While all the attention has been on North America, in the UK at Coventry University are two open online photography classes that have a lot of mass. Led by professional photographer Jonathan Worth, the two open classes #phonar (photography + narrative) and #picbod (picturing the body) have a close affinity to ds106 -- they are centered on a smaller group of enrolled students how get direct instructor led experiences plus an overlap with a larger group of open participants who choose to do some of the work or engage with the students in a supportive fashion. Theses two courses also run as an aggregation Wordpress hub, pulling in content from individual student maintained blogs. What is extra special about these classes is that because of Jonathan's professional connections, he is able to bring in and connect his students out to practitioners (who come into class too), and students have ended up interning or doing projects with this pros. Also interesting is that these are not just "online learning" for the students at Coventry- they are doing printing and hands on assembly, creating exhibits, going out into the community. The online portion is an augmentation, not a replacement, of teaching. I encourage you to read about the ideas behind the courses in the JISC article Jonathan authored Coventry University - opening up the BA Hons Photography course. In describing phonar: The theme of the phonar (photography and narrative) class is to address some of the big concerns of the 21st-century photographer, some of which I described above. Therefore it was most appropriate to make the class itself a model of what it investigates. As the syllabus directs the students to use other people's work and allow other people to use theirs, the class itself is licensed CC BY-SA (the Creative Commons licence that enables attributed sharing) and draws on the input of both collaborators and attendees. The tasks within the classes encourage photographers to investigate the communities behind a particular subject area and then to draw on their expert knowledge "“ rather than taking a picture of a homeless person students will investigate the underlying causes and integrate people embodying those causes in their work. The same is true for the class itself. In practical terms, this means we begin by asking: What is the role of the 21st-century photographer? Trying to take in the whole course reminds me how hard can be to see all of the moving parts in our ds106, or for that matter any course. It reminds me too about trying to not avoid judging the EdUCKA without having really been through on its in entirety. I'm just as guilty as others of extending a small slice of an experience to the entire enchilada. It's so damned easy to do. This is a third year degree course so the students are gearing up to be ready for a career; their work involved planning a printed book and designing a real art exhibit of their work. The schedule outlines the course, weekly class lectures (saved as video), in class assignments, and the out of class "Directed tasks" (seems to be a lot of link rot, my guess is they are prepping for the next iteration). The left sidebar lists the students own maintained blogs, which are rich in reflection, summary of experience, demonstration of work, etc. This is very much the heart of ds106, students building their own space of learning, showing, being, and aggregating that back to the class blog. On top of this (right side) are the connections to the professional mentors, the people who engage with the students through class participation, video presentation, social media. The outside participants (I think) submit their stuff via tags, etc, and you can sense the international reach by the inclusion of audio translations of parts of the site. Again, this is unlike the mass scaling of the Big Time Money MOOCs, where it is the same experience for all-- the Coventry students get the closely attended and in person experience they pay for; the outside participants pick and choose their participation, but it is not a carbon copy. It is the mixing of the participants where magic happens An essential part of this will be non-paying attendees (you) joining in with us, submitting your work, asking questions and contributing answers. The heart of this is that phonar is not a course about the nuts and bolts of doing photography nor the high level art analyses (thought these happen), it is asking the students to become engaged and part of the projects they examine through the lens (e.g. dyslexia, personal relations, self-image social justice), but that the also explore the process of being a photography, and weaving it together in audio, visual, video format, published to the open web- what they describe as transmedia storytelling. Picbod has pretty much the same structure, but it is a second year course, the title is "Pictures of the Body", and students are exploring the fundamentals of creating visual expressions along a theme of the human body This class sits midway through the second year of the course and in a practical sense it is the first time our students experience the broader photographic community being invited into their classroom. The ten weeks are structured so as to address complex aesthetic, creative and technical issues along with the visual messages, associated with the photographic encounter with the body. We do this through simple practical and thematic tasks, the cumulative resolution of which, become their final lens based submissions. The course covers a lot of ground in ten weeks, starting the very first week with the challenge of photographing strangers, and onto issues of intimacy, lighting, large format cameras, nudes, wordpress, bookmaking-- well you can see it goes far and wide. What is special about these courses are the resources Jonathan and colleagues are tapping into (working professional photographers), and the idea that while parts of the course are online, the activities are done away form the computer, out in the city and communities. Jim Groom and I were introduced to Jonathan last spring (maybe it was via @dkernohan?) and we've been doing some mutually tracking as phonar/picbod are pretty much akin to the structure and ethos of ds106. The great question is why do you never hear about these open photography courses, especially on this side of the pond? About the only coverage was an article in Wired a year ago, long before the current MOOC craze even got started? They've tracked world wide participation in the courses: So getting a chance to hear Jonathan was a reason I woke up at 4Am to catch him, as wells as martin Weller, Dave White, and Lou McGill on the JISC Webinar on MOOCs It was clear that these courses were pursuing a unique connection of learners with practitioners in the networked fashion of the internet, e.g as shown in his sketches (he was not a "slide" guy): I'm looking forward to meeting up at OpenEd 2012 in Vancouver, but we are also talking about some ways to connect ds106 and the fall 2012 phonar course. We need more of these style open courses that are all about the O. . Twitter Works! by cogdogblog posted 22 Feb '08, 3.38pm MST PST on flickr Bill Fitzgerald exclaimed this after asking attendees at nrothern voice who had aspirin and Chris Lott tweete back, "me" People keep asking for how to use flickr or what its practical applications are. Bill Fitzgerald can now vouch that he was able to use twitter to take care of his headache (of course, not drinking at the tiki bar might have worked as well, but not nearly as web 2.0 neat)