Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
And readers think I may go on and on about my old technologies. This guy did a big demo 50 years ago that makes all other demos, including mine, look tiny. If you do not know about the Mother of All Demos, put down the computing device you use every day without much thinking of what it evolved from, and watch how Engelbart did a live demo in 1968 demonstrating nearly every modern computer interface and functionality that you take for granted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLCGFadV4FqU3flMPLg36d8RFQW65bWsnP&v=M5PgQS3ZBWA I was fortunate through my NMC work to be part of the 40th celebration of this event in 2018, when Doug was alive. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] I was more than happy when Christina Engelbart contacted me about helping get an event site up quickly (like in 2 days). She felt it most expedient to do it via WordPress.com and I have helped her with a few other sites there, so we know the limitations. Behold, thedemoat50.org: I had suggested a few themes I scouted in WordPress.com that felt like it would provide the structure needed, less of a bloggy siter and more a page driven one. We settled on Lodestar-- I like the big front images, and it's use of front page "panels" (page content). At least with the upsell on WordPress.com they do to allow custom CSS, I can usually handle most of the modifications Christina needed. The big one was figuring out how to reduce the vertical space the featured image occupied on desktop screens. After the first look, she had messaged: One caveat in showcasing anything from or about Doug Engelbart trying to honor his push for efficient navigation - so try to balance the visuals with offering the key information in the first screenful of a page — this limits the height of a heading/banner to no more than 25% of screen and a skinny menu that placed below the header so when you start to scroll down the info you lose first is the header rather than the menu. That said, if there is a way to shrink the wonderful image you chose for the header onto a modest-height grey banner and shrink the height of the Header to match? After a bit of tinkering in the browser inspector, I found it was actually the padding for the featured image that needed an adjustment: @media screen and (min-width: 30em) { .custom-header-image { padding: 10%; } } The new site has a placeholder for the information on the December 12 2018 Symposium at the Computer History Museum. In making that page, I thought it would be neat to re-cast the original image of what was on the poster for The Demo: [caption id="attachment_66896" align="aligncenter" width="566"] Screenshot of the original announcement for the demo, image from the Doug Engelbart Institute.[/caption] and have it reference the 50th anniversary this year: There is a page too for interactive activities and things to do related to The Demo -- much more will be added as around the world are planned events that are celebrating this 50th year celebration. Not listed is a page to be added that will reflect the looking forward aspect of the symposium... celebrating the past is just part of what is happening; the spirit of Engelbart's work is how his ideas of augmenting human intellect are being put into action now. I also got it in my mind for the intro page for The Demo to assemble a GIF to honor it. I used the historic image of the empty San Francisco Civic Auditorium, fade in and out some titles in a font that was my best guess to mimic the one on screen. I managed to find a cover image for the 1968 Joint Computer Conference at a site from the Centre for Computer History. It's interesting to see the topics discussed at a 1968 conference on computers! And note that Engelbart's session is not called "Amazing Tech Tools" but "A Research Centre for Augmenting Human Intellect" which shows where his focus was aimed. Pitt Time Sharing - IBM 360 - TSS/360 MISS Value Analysis The Computer Field : What was promised, what we have, what we need (Software Session) MIS Design Terminal Languages Computer Models of Vision & Speech New Horizons for Magnetic Bulk Storage Devices Digital Simulation of Continous Dynamic Systems Hand Printed Character Recognition - OCR Medical Information Systems Janus : A flexible approach to real-time sharing A Research Centre for Augmenting Human Intellect [ Read In Full ] MOS GP Computer Plain Talk - Machines that Speak Your Language The Rand Video Based Graphic Communications System Pricing Computer Services - What? Why? How? The Mini Computer Data Structures for Computer Graphics And I also put in a few frames of animation of the Demo itself by nabbing them from the part 2 of 10 in the video archive of the demo on YouTube. It tooks some Photoshop craft to mask the demo, and color cast it to match the background image. So here it is a GIF of a 50 year old demo: There will be more things to add as the event gets closer, but it's totally an honor to do this small bit to support such a key moment in history. More to augment here... Featured Image: Photo of Doug Engelbart delivering the Mother of All Demos from DARPA web site timeline; no rights are specified but will guess it falls under public domain works of a US Government Agency (?). While the dog theme is deeply engraved here at CogDogBlog we are inclusive to... cats. This is a story of Crookshanks the Cat, who showed up on our acreage and crawled into our hearts. And... survived a year outside in the -30ºC Saskatchewan winter. But First, The Oscar Story and His Condo First of all, we live on a 16 acre rural property 20 km outside of Moose Jaw. It was maybe 3 years ago, or more, we started spotting a grey and white cat wandering around. As it is we do, we decided he needed a handle, my father-in-law chose "Oscar" as a name. Oscar spent much time around our open barn, we figured he had a hiding spot underneath the barn to sleep and shelter, but it had to be damned cold. For an outside cat, he sure seemed rather tidy clean. We keep a motion triggered trail camera outside (Campark model H80) to monitor wildlife, especially our resident foxes, and Oscar became a regular feature. Oscar out on patrol, Oct 3, 2023 Into December. Cori and I were concerned about how Oscar would survive in the coming cold. I took on a project over the holiday break, to build an insulated wood "condo" that would sit inside our large storage shed (opposite the barn), where we could also have a heater inside to keep it less warm. The "design" we cam up with was "something 5 feet by 4 feet wide and 5 feet tall". I got some lumber supplies and spent 2 days in the garage more or less making it up as I went. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53437005674 Framing it Up flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I had an old piece of glass I thought would be good to see inside, and would figure out wxactly how to build the interior door for us to access from the inside. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53436685426 Second wall flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We thought Oscar (and maybe any other future cats) would enjoy some perches. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53439332999 With Perches flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It all went together, including a roof, and so it was ready to move over to the storage shed... except I had mis-calculated how damn heavy it was! I thought I'd be able to tip it onto my truck, but the thing was too damn heavy. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53441442288 Transport? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Fortunately I have Cori, who has good ideas, as well as Matilda, our farm tractor. We got it in the bucket, and managed to get it inside and settle on a raised floor on.a block platform. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53441442458 2024/366/3 Cat Shelter in Motion flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) There was more to do, adding insulation and plastic on the exterior, building and hanging the access door, and making a tunnel to connect the cat entrance and a hole cut in the exterior of the shed. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53447853719 Building the Tunnel flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Then it was almost ready, with some extension cords and a light and heat lamp hung from the ceiling. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53447667958 The Cat Shelter flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) And the front entrance was just a wood flap. A new trail camera mounted so we could check on the activity, and sprinkle some food to draw Oscar in. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/53447670858 Smile, Oscar, You Are on Camera flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) We moved the camera inside so we could check on Oscar's winter comfort. He did very well! This photo is already into April, so he had gotten through the worst weather. I did realize a design problem, that front facing door to the outside with just a wood flap on a hinge was a direct shot for icy cold air to blow right in. Oscar saying, I need more food please. That's Not a Cat in the House Sometime around September, maybe, our trail cameras picked up another cat who had landed here, a scrawny black one we named Poppy. Now Poppy roamed widely, we saw here in trees and all over the property. There were very few photos of her inside Oscar's house, once where it looked like there was a scuffle. But then, a less desirable character showed up! This is Not a Cat Yikes! A coyote in the Condo! This is not good. As a remedy to the cold wind from last winter, we decided to move an old doghouse left on the property against the exterior, and then opened a side entrance for the cat. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54001621790 Door Test flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) With some help of YouTube videos we learned a method to keep the coyotes out- build inside that entrance way a series of 90 degree turns that a cat could navigate but a coyote not. It took several iterations but it worked! Our photos showed Oscar in the house but not the coyotes. But... Something happened, because we stopped seeing Oscar completely, and we sadly concluded that the coyotes had tracked him down outside. These were sad times for us. Enter Crookshanks While we wondered about Oscar, we saw on the outdoor camera near the barn regular sitings of the black cat Poppy, but in October last year, a new one who showed up bright white on the night camera. Who is this, a ghost cat? Ah, but in daylight it turned out to be a beautiful orange tabby that got the name "Crookshanks" (from the Harry Potter fans in the house) but ended up getting called all kinds of variations "Crookers" "Caption Crookster" "The Crooklemiester" etc. Crookers is orange in daylight! Crookshanks took well to the condo life. Lounging around at -16ºC (14 degrees colder outside) All the comforts of home We took to regular feeding of Crookshanks, it was a daily routine to go out to the shed, open the door, and place a can of wet food inside (Felix the dog became enamored with licking the can). At first Crookshanks retreated to the tunnel when we entered her place. But over time, she got more used to us, one time going nose to nose with the dog, and eventually allowing us to scratch and hold her. She never seemed to wander too far, we never saw her roaming the property like Poppy cat. This was a fine arrangement for all of us- she was comfortable out there, had gotten through the deep cold. We were not planning on any kind of move in the house. Until. The Coyote Return We came back in September or October from a weekend away, and Cori noticed Crookshanks standing on the roof of the doghouse entrance to her condo and yowling. And then right after, we saw a young coyote pacing not too far away. We could not stand losing another cat to the coyote! We quickly scrambled to set up a spot in the basement. We went out to her condo with food like usual, Cori scooped her up and was able to bring her over to the house. Our plan was to slowly get her, and the two indoor cats accustomed to each other. Plus, to make Crookers a house cat, we had to first get her checked out by our vet, who was kind to get us in quickly. It was funny when we came to pick up Crookshanks at the vet. The receptionist greeted us with a smile and said, "Congratulations! It's a Boy!" An thus we have gender confused the cat, but the heck with pronouns. The good news was "he" was fixed, and was in good health, a guess of maybe five years old. Crookers in The House Cori assured me cats instinctively knew about the litterbox, which I might have doubted given Crookers had gone whereever he/she needed out there. But it was true! We set Crookers up in the basement with food, water, toys, all the good stuff. Maybe inside is the good life. Buffet time! Preparing dishes for Crookshanks who has to have a few days stay in the basement while we go camping. Oh was that cat every hungry for attention! It wanted to be in your lap always and made all kinds of happy yowls for joy. This cat who lived a year (winter) outside on our storage shed just craves human touch. It was then a matter of periodically opening the basement door for the two inside cats, Maggie and Ollie to get to know Crookers. We wanted to do this slowly, under supervision, until we knew that all the cats (as well as Felix) were getting along, and no one would be sprating. The door to our basement originally had a cat door, but I had closed it before as we so no need for the house cats to go down there. I built a rack for the door where we could slide in a solid board to keep closed, a screen mesh door so critters on each side could each see, or just open for free passage. The Adjustment Crookers was curious but cautious coming up and was very cozy with the humans, would just crave sitting with us on the couch. Alas, but not so well with Maggie and Ollie, both females. With confirmation of Crookers being technically a male cat, and much bigger, we started seeing worrisome behavior. He would chase the 2 female cars and trap them in corners. He did not attack but he seemed to be aggressively dominating them, maybe to monopolize human attention (?guessing at Cat Psychology). Ollie got scared a few times and peed. Alas, we were realizing that maybe the inside the house stability was in danger. We started pondering if we should find Crookers a home where he could be the boss or sole cat. We put the word out to people we thought might want to take Crookers in/ A New Home Cori's daughter in Saskatoon located friends, a young couple who just moved into a new home, and were keen to have a cat. With heavy hearts we drove north, with all the favorite things he had in the basement, to have Crookers and them meet. It was instant happiness for all, Crookers had an entire house to roam, and full attention. The young couple instantly bonded. It felt right. And it was, since then we have gotten a regular streams of a very happy cat and just as happy humans around him. Videos of him yowling in joy, sitting in a chair at the table, just being loved. It's November and ... We are both happy that Crookers has a beautiful home, not in a box in the cold, not with coyotes at the door. And we can wonder if we should have given it more time or tried something different. There are no answers. We have the entire story and memory of Crookers the Cat in the Box. Yet. Our hearts remain heavy. For all this cat and we went through. Every winter day, we would trudge out to feed Crookers, but also to give and get a little affection. Damn if a cat does not end up being so much more. And the cat is sure loved. That is the best thing, right? Right? Just on Friday, Cori messaged me after driving into school with a message about it being November-- "I saw a grey cat sitting on the dumpster bin." And sure enough, mid morning I saw a gray and white cat, almost the colors of Oscar, saunter by the French door windows, and walking down the deck stairs before I could grab the phone. Is it time for another outdoor cat? Just in case, we prep the cat door we had rigged in the garage for Poppy the black cat (who just vanished in September and is a story of her own) to get shelter. We put a little bit of food out, plugged in the electric warming pad in the shelter I build below the deck where Poppy wintered. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/54274604464 Front Porch of Poppy's Place flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Yeah, there is more to us around here than dogs, you see? Featured Image: Crookers the cat relaxing in the outside "condo" December 15, 2024. The inside temperature was quite nice 15ºC because of maybe less cold outside temps our how effective the condo was at staying warm! RD1009WF Rummaging quickly through my filtered email (some legit things keep falling through), I came across one of those ones with 2 cryptic links and then a whole raft of random words. I think the intent is to try and flood or fool email filters (but this is my un-educated guess, but see The War On Spam for more). Just for fun, I decided to take the words, add a few RETURNS and indents, and present it as "Word Salad Spam Poetry" (word salad being the jumbled of un-related words by those suffering from schizophrenia).... yeah, like it says, "Cherry nebulae dogleg stealthy slump" Who's the new player in the pherma biz! Cream kelp honeybee katie inquisitive, lamplight functor darken. Maxima concert grocer lapidary marque. Take corrupt decay casteth bellwether angential gettysburg? Christ hexameter aldrich james kirkpatrick chromatograph sleepy door. Kidde rena reticent dacca belt miasma newfound brush assault influential paginate. Mud retaliate weatherstrip apothegm channel point explicate adjourn oceanographer broaden exclude. Marlboro innate bullish sapient djakarta doggone flint referral coattail. Danny perforate enrico material hurtle autumnal boxwood condescend declaratory duly plod. Automat tel not warrior menzies. Counterargument catherwood firsthand bilayer gland hecatomb crepe cityscape. Aroma retina sienna combustion tory courteous! Rag auxiliary divorce syndicate tone coarsen administratrix abe inarticulate collusion define tenement borderland. Dextrose apocalypse dynast abnormal holocaust tedious darken feign. Portent shagging beside bicycle thaw din rectitude skid despot dope weinstein suspicious commissary. Adenine shock plucky posterity maynard intrepid drawl urania crossbill. Amino downstate mount union compendium chow conjugacy chemic micrography burgeon bundle olden. Chloroplatinate cyst combinator lindberg serbia freshen clarke. Cherry nebulae dogleg stealthy slump. Mendacity felix non it'll shasta warren cain assurance carve dapple circumcircle debugging. Catfish ax beckon fitzroy ghoulish salesperson perfecter herdsman coattail taverna ectoderm. Monsieur clothesmen circulate eureka bach. Unexpectedly (which is nearly always the best way) the forward of a science fiction anthology jumped out at me as almost the underlying theme of the Networked Narratives course I am co-teaching with Mia Zamora. A friend Sarah gave me a copy of Loosed Upon The World when I was visiting last August (she has a story in the book too). This was because we were discussing Paolo Bacigalupi who's work I got hooked into because of Bryan Alexander's "near future" science fiction virtual book reading club of The Water Knife (my two posts). And this led me to reading Bacigalupi's breakout first book, The Windup Girl. "Loosed" is described as Climate Fiction (?Cli-Fi?) or "exploring the world we live in now—and in the very near future—as the effects of global warming become more evident." I found myself madly underlining a majority of Bacigalupi's 5 page forward to the collection. He opens with the dilemma of trying to get people to care about large complex issues. He uses the water shortage in Las Vegas and dropping of Lake Mead, noting how people get much more engaged if they had bought a fancy new Vegas house that suddenly becomes worthless without a reliable water supply: Theories and ideas and infrastructure versus visceral experience. Human beings are wired to react quickly and exquisitely when it comes to the visceral, but we remain primitive as apes when it comes to the abstract, the complex, and the long term. Can that be any more relevant to the decay of interest in the abstract, complex, and long term in the 2016-2017 political buffoonery? Sometimes, I've discovered it's possible for a fiction writer to perform a kind of hack on a reader's mind, making them feel things that do not yet exist... ... It's interesting that by creating a made-up world, you can show the real world more sharply and clearly, and in that process, you have the chance of making people engage not with the future, but with the intense realities of our present-- the realities that were previously passing them by. This was exactly the space Mia and I wanted out course to go when we brainstormed it at the DML conference in October. That hack of the reader's (or viewer's) mind with story is for a purpose, not just to "be creative" or to "have fun" but through imagination, to draw attention to the world at hand. It matches with that description I love that Martha Burtis made of teaching DS106 -- it's through media and creative acts we hope to have students try to make sense of the world. Bacigalupi observes out tendency to seek technological solutions, that we can ignore rapid increasing carbon in the atmosphere because one day "we'll fix that problem somehow". I love how he lances this thinking as fiction. He gets to what the approach ought to be: it's a social fix, and social fixed are hard, and complicated, and require human cooperation and restraint, whereas fantasy techno-fixes are easy.. I am not seeing much possibility for social fixes in this new regime. Immigration issues are social, but "building a wall" will fix them? He takes to task the kind of thought to that we can look to the stars and planets for a new world, while ignoring that most of those rocky, cold, gaseous worlds are not nearly as suitable or viable for life as the one we are on. The important thing to understand is that imaginative literature is mythic. The kinds of stories we build, the way we encourage people to live into those myths and dream the future-- those stories have power. And that is exactly where we hope this course to take us in April, when we unfold our own world imagining expedition. Stay tuned to #netnarr! Figure out how many knots to loosen... Top / Featured Image: I'm working this post from the title of a book "Loosed Upon the World" -- sometimes I can just toss a word I might not expect to generate interesting results into the magic image search machine. I am using Google Images with results filtered for licensed to reuse. This woodcut type image from around the year 1600 spoke to me -- Olaus Magnus - On Wizards and Magicians among the Finns a Wikimedia Commons work in the public domain. The description has the keywords, but the context is even better: The picture shows a scene from Finland where many of the inhabitants had magic forces. A speciality was to sell suitable winds to merchant sailors. The man to the right sells a rope with three knots to the captain of the ship. If you loose one knot, you get mild winds. Two knots gives stronger winds and three hard storms. The crew of the sinking ship in the background have not believed in this magic and loosed the third knot. With or without magic, how would you prefer sailing? cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Claus Wolf Today's ds106 Daily Create challenge is a writing one based on the brevity of twitter: Write a story dialogue in 5 half-twits (lines that are 70 characters each) The Urban Dictionary defines a Half-Twit as "A 70-character message, which is half of Twitter's 140 character maximum." Compose your story below, optional to actually tweet them (if you do, include the links to the tweets!) You can blame me for this one. I came across the definition while looking for something else. It kind of takes the challeng of writing short, and making it twice as hard? Or not. My story is called Overheard in the Food Court of the Moscow Airport: EJosephSnowden: Man, I would give my passport up just for a decent hamburger! Putin: You don't want the bowl of shchi? Yesterday you liked the Shashlyk EJosephSnowden: How about a foot long hotdog? A slice of bad pizza would be refreshing Chavezcandanga: Maybe next week my friend you will join me for some Hervido de gallina EJosephSnowden: I wish that vending machine had Cheetoes. Last time I got Pirozhki Yes, I was thinking about how bored and trapped Edward Snowden feels being stuck in an airport. While looking for the photo, I ended up on a blog post which suggested he has nothing to complain about -- an Iranian man apparently waited 18 years in a Charles de Gaulle airport to get asylum. But I imagine him wandering the hallways of Sheremtyevo airport, aching for some good junk food. So I did my careful internet research. On the Wikipedia page for Russian Cuisine I learned about shchi a cabbage soup which has been around Russia for like 1000 years. That is some old cabbage! And Shaslyk is good old meat on a steak, a kebob dish. Then looking to see what kind of vittles he might get if he can ever hop to Venezuela, the 'pedia says for that cuisine is Hervido de gallina or Hen soup. Yum. And for some Russian snacks that might not be so great from a vending machine are Pirozhki or small potato cakes that are stuffed with stuff. Playing themselves for reals on twitter (maybe) are: https://twitter.com/EJosephSnowden/status/357256958824304640 https://twitter.com/Putin/status/1249383612 https://twitter.com/chavezcandanga/status/261654536324804610 I will never complain again about one measly night spent in an airport 5 lines of 70 character dialogue? So you are like so busy tweeting the singers at the All Star Game that you cannot make up a story of 35o total characters max? Sigh, Hulka is gonna chew you up and down. You better eat that peanut butter sandwich you hid in the footlocker. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubHn4xEnRP8 I know 105 of you just looked at that video. That means like 90 of you decided to ignore the challenge. Well done. Over on the Learning Circuits Blog, David Lee just posted Blogging by The Numbers about attempts to draw some meaningful data out of this Blogger hosted blog (since Blogger provides no data, he is using the add-ons from SiteMeter and Bravenet. He then asks: * Are there metrics you see as key when looking at a blog? * Do you know of any benchmarking sources for blog metrics? * Do you track metrics for your blog? If so, care to swap info with LCB? To be honest, "metrics" mean nothing to me when looking at a blog... I have my own, instinctual metrics of looking at the value of the content, the tone of the writer, the frequency and usefulness of what is written, a sense of whether other people read this blogger. When technorati works, one could say it provides some sort of metric culled from the linking patterns elsewhere. I'm not convinced that distilling numbers, no matter how prettily graphed, really gets too much. The most interesting thing about this kind of space (which David and I talked about earlier today on a Skype session), is that unlike the old models of Instructional Design, where you start with figuring our Who Your Audience Is-- on the web, the audience is for the most part, completely invisible. They do not let you know they have entered, exited, or what they did there. They do not come in through the front door. This is the challenge, and some of the fun, at least to me, of creating web content, is that you rake a lot of guesses at hitting the sweet spot. Even the more visceral measure of looking at what posts generated heated comments, might be misleading, as you do not really get feedback except from the most motivated (lots of lurkers), and since many systems do not support Track/pingback, you do not know if someone else has written about your blog entries elsewhere. I've spent hours (well maybe that is an exaggeration, 10s of minutes) laboring over some posts that I think will strike a chord, and bring in a gizllion comments/back links... and it hits dead silence. Other times, you can dash of something weakly thought out, full of typos, and about something silly or irrelevant, and you get all kinds of response. You just do not know for sure what happens when you toss a post out into blogspace. As far as this blog, I have in place the WordPress ShortStat plugin (actually it was modified and shared by D'Arcy Norman to give some stats on RSS feed accesses alone). To be sure, I am not even sure of the exact meaning of all the numbers, and maybe look at it once a month: Since setting it up in the beginning of September 2005, the blog has been "hit" by over 5000 unique people? machines? and almost 700 today. Ewww, that is creepy. Don't y'all have some real work to do? And in the month, the RSS feeds have ben requested by almost 1700 uniques, or about 300 some perday. Most people are hitting the feeds, but a few individual posts get a good chunk, like the CNN vs education one or the question of asking when your "Blog Ha!" moment was (no surprise, these are frequent spam targets). Those two have a good number of inbound links. The search strings are always curious, with people looking for "delicious tagging", "feeddigest", but also more curiously, "bored as hell", "old phone", and "hard wire ipod to car stereo". These can also be seen as my own weak organizational scheme as they are things written about months ago, so folks are trying to find them by search. Another barely looked at metric are the results of the WordPress Popularity Contest plugin, which creates a numerical ranking based on weighted totals from permalink views, category views, home views, feed views, comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks: Overall the most "popular" here is the Distributed Conversations post and the Tree people followup, again the Education/CNN post, and really curious, Signpost of the Impeding Demise of Civilization, Culture, Society As We Think We Know It, less than 40 words written in about 90 seconds. Again, I think it is a god number of external links in from other blogs that are more highly read then my own. In fact, I think the bulk of my traffic is directly related to getting a mention from Stephen Downes. WordPress packs a lot of data in its database, and these and more nifty plug-ins let you get at it in interesting ways. In the end, I am very skeptical of numbers really telling me absolute truths about blog activity and do not really focus on that at all. It would be different if my livlihood were directly related to getting people to see my blog, but that is rather far from my reasons for spending all this time at it (Come to think of it, what are my reasons??) creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog (From almost a week ago, hoping to catch up on the blog back log blogging) After the end of the Tuesday sessions of the Shar-E-Fest conference in Hamilton, Richard (my host, driver, and handler) drove us to the lovely small airport where we boarded a plane to Wellington, about an hour by the beats of the propellers. It was a cloudless day and dramatic to be over the rugged hills and mountains, not to mention flying into a city that is sprinkled like sugar crystals on the craggy hills overlooking the sea. We stayed over in a quaint Motel in Petone, just across the street from the beach, and near where the Hutt River empties into the Harbor. There were plenty of good choices to eat on Jackson Street, we found a great Vietnamese place. I swam laps in a bowl of noodle soup. I spotted the country of Brew Zealand, a fine sounding place to live. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog (more…) Just randomly clicking the new feature links at the bottom of my flickr collection brought me to something I should get around top doing- getting a backup. Hey, what if Yahoo falls into the ocean? Englaze Archive will create a data DVD backup of your original flickr photos, the original uploaded sizes, and preserve titles and captions (not comments). It costs US$29.95 for the first 1000 photos and then $4 for each next set of 1000 (I am now at only 954). I will likely order one pretty soon. Just in case. Ever since I launched this weblog April 2003, I have been talking up blogs quite a bit in my system. The usual heat seekers grab on to the potential and some of the more technology skeptical folks at least do not wrinkle their brows in confusion when I mention "blog". I've run a few "BlogShops" , set up some blogs for folks to experiment with, etc. Most seemed to lack the almost OCD tendencies needed to keep at the practice. The uptake has not quite taken off yet, even after some nibbles that seemed like 2 colleges saw blogs as a possible KM (Knowledge Management) tool but went not much further than thinking about it. Some days it feels like the technology universe here is hemmed in at WebCT, Blackboard, Word, and PowerPoint, while I keep seeing much more interesting things way over the fence. I was starting to think this might take another decade to see blogs rise in use, but out of the blue, I found out one of our more innovative faculty members is setting up individual blogs for some 200 Anthropology students, for them to practice the reflective writing exercises he has provided in different media for years, and, linking cohort groups of students using RSS to link their posts to each other. Again, Neo says' a big, "woah"! I'd also heard that the tech staff at his college had identified a new blog software, maybe it was one I had not heard of-- upon seeing the first link, of all things, it was MovableType (same "Rusty" template we hijacked for the BlogShop). It just goes to show that the brand name of the underlying technology matters little to the people that use it. I will share a URL down the road as right now the students have not even gone to their first class, so it is a bunch of blank blogs. What is interesting is their college's tech staff did figure a way (through some custom Java programming) to have an admin tool generate new blogs via manipulating the mySQL database, avoiding the chore of manual MT blog creation, and something about authenticating against their LDAP. However, the real cool stuff will be when the students actually start their writing. From a project long ago (1996) when we hand rolled perl base discussion forums for these kinds of courses, the students are very conversant and thoughtful writers. Stay tuned, the blog winds are a blowin' again. For more than a year I have turned repeatedly to flickr's creative commons search to locate images for presentations and projects. It never has failed to provide a large number of choices of powerful images to use. The problem is the search tools on flickr are one of their less elegant designed interfaces. You first have to browser/pick via a type of license, and then search. It's hardly efficient. For a long while, I used FlickrLilli, which provided a single search interface with some buttons/menus to narrow to the appropriate CC license types. But ohhhhhh, that Lilli just got slower and slower to load/respond. Darn popularity! Well, here is a new kid that offers even more! flickrCC This is from the "about" portion.. OK, so I should put more time into documentation, right? I wrote flickrCC so I could easily find photos on flickr that were released under the creative commons license. Stuff that I could use for my experiments with the GIMP or include in my blog. The panel on the left displays the first 36 matching photos. Click on any of these thumbnails to get a slightly larger image and the attribution details displayed in the right hand section. Right click the image and 'save image as' if you want to use this size, or click on the link in the attribution text to go to flickr and chose a different sized image. Don't forget to include the attribution text in any work you produce using the picture. To use the web app. just enter a word (or words) into the textbox. Click on 'find' and you'll get all photos with a CC license that match *all* the search word(s) in the picture's title, tags or description (sorted in order of 'interestingness', the photo voted most interesting first). The CC licences for a default search are: "Attribution License", "Attribution-NoDerivs License", "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License", "Attribution-NonCommercial License", "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License" and "Attribution-ShareAlike License" If you want to edit a photo, you'll need to restrict the search to just those licenses that allow derivatives. Checking the 'for editing' box ensures that just those photos licensed: "Attribution License", "Attribution-NonCommercial License", "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License" and "Attribution-ShareAlike License" are returned So let's walk through it... Let's say for example, I was going to bring more diversity to this weblog, I might so a search for images like... Hey, that is really cute! Not bad for a feline. So flickrcc is a great way to just find images appropriate to your license needs, and it returns them in order of "interestingness" usually meaning better pictures first. You can tell this interface is done by someone who built it for their own use, and it makes sense, as this is the approach that takes about 5 clicks to get to in flickr. But wait, there is more. Click the "edit this image" link, and you get thrown into a web image editor that allows you to crop, add text, put a solid color frame, draw lines, and what I think is a huge bonus-- it adds the Creative Commons attribution to the image (see a larger screenshot of the entire web form). Woah, Neo! So without launching PhotoShop or other software, I can quickly generate: This is just insanely great. A linktribution to Stephen Downes Time to be honest. For being immersed in instructional technology for 12 years, I have yet to teach online. I've taught classroom computer courses (Director / Animation), created and delivered lots of workshops, developed a batch of online self-paced tutorials... but never a for-real online course. So I grabbed the opportunity when colleagues from one of our colleges asked me to team teach CIS 236, "Web Based Teaching and Learning"- an online course designed mostly for faculty to learn more about online teaching. The course was pretty much created, and I am leaning a great deal on Kurt as the experienced teacher. Our students are full time and part-time faculty from several of our colleges, some I know, many I do not, some have quite a bit of online / hybrid course teaching experience. Therefore, I am the sheep posing in a fur costume ;-) The course is delivered in WebCT, a rather new space for me. Actually I spend very little time inside CMS-es, about every 3 months I may answer a Blackboard question or admin a setting, but I've not done much "inside the box." As a web designer accustomed to an open slate, I would likely find them awfully stifling. On the other hand, I accept and support the appeal for mainstream faculty to focus on the craft of teaching and not the tools, and also to provide a fairly consistent environment for students. In fact, the last time I worked in WebCT, it was still being coded at University of British Columbia, and user support was direct email with Murray Goldberg. Anyhow, the course starts this week, we are doing good traffic of discussion board intros, Kurt and I are rapidly responding and inviting comments back. The book in use is Susan Ko and Steve Rossen "Teaching Online: A Practical Guide" , and having just found it Amazone.com-ed on my doorstep, it feels and looks practical. I am trying to introduce a worthy amount of external resources, hopefully we will get to discussing blogs and finding relevant content (maybe RSS, no promises). In April, the class wtll have some assignments as participants in the Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, the annual conference that originates fomr Hawaii, but has participants from around the world. Bahhhh I am a Wolf! I've not read much on Skype until I noticed via Joi Ito that a Mac version was out. Heck, I did not even know what it did! It appears to be a simple way to have audio conversations via the net, and even 3,4 way conversations. The trouble is I don't have anyone to Skype with! If you have Skyped, let me know your handle, or Skype me at cogdogblog. Aren't new verbs fun? I sit brain dead in a plane heading west, home, after a New England road tour with stops at Baruch College in Manhattan, Penn State University, Middlebury Vermont, and wrapping yesterday in Salem, Massachusetts. The stop at Salem was an invited session for their sixth Future is Now conference a semester end gathering for faculty to look at technology and learning, very similar to the Ocotillo gigs I previously ran at Maricopa. Actually that had me on a double-header, first as the "post lunch wake 'em up" plenary and right after I did a rapid fire version (45 minutes) of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. So round one was The More Things Change... the more things change, a remix/reprise of a version of this I did at Scottsdale Community College in January 2009. I have some audio I recorded with my LiveScribe pen, and hesitate to post it after hearing the frequency of my "ums". Gotta work on that. The More Things Change... (48.9 Mb, 53:27). As usual, people loved and asked most about the CoolIris format. Learn more on how it is done not for the feint of hand editing RSS...). My premise is to outline how in 15+ years, so many things around us have radically been changed; my own self (showing my mullet haired youth in 1992 first year on the job at Maricopa), television, music industry, telephones, newspapers... but how little school has changed in the same span. cc licensed flickr photo by dcJohn It's a set up, but to me, it really sticks out as an obvious tension point as society and culture and business are radically changed, and the process of school remains... stuck.... in an 1892 mode. I poke some fun at Digital Native Nonsense (c'mon did we really buy that Prensky made up stuff about brains being "wired differently"? what pseudo neuroscience is that?), but tap into some generational observations about gaming, video culture (leveraging Mike Wesch videos), the rapid increases in online activity for those over 70 (and the fun of playing the Zimmers video). my own flickr photo, do I need to attribute myself?? This time I added some more commentary on the profound Alan Kay quote on Technology being something invented after you were born-- first with using the quote from Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (thanks to some Kindle searching from Gardner Campbell-- we had chatted about this while walking in NYC): Here's a tech history question: which went mainstream first, the fax or the Web? People over thirty-five had a hard time understanding why you'd even ask--the fax machine obviously predates the Web for general adoption. Here's another: which went mainstream first, the radio or the telephone? The same people often have to think about this question, even though the practical demonstration of radio came almost two decades after that of the telephone, a larger gap than separated the fax and the Web. We have to think about radio and television [I think this is a misprint--should be "the telephone"] because for everyone alive today, those two technologies have always existed. And for college students today, that is true of the fax and the Web. Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. And on top of that, I added with this bit about Douglas Adams' version found of the same sentiment in Kevin Kelly's post on Everything That Does Not Work yet The satirist and novelist Douglas Adams further evolved Hillis and Kay's definitions by suggesting a natural lifecycle for technologies. In a short essay in 1999 he proposed the world works like this: everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal; anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. Then with a very Doug Adams flourish, he adds: Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are. We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. I added more this time as well on the Shirky's observation of people under a certain age ( the number does not matter) not having reservations on putting themselves online- but my slant on getting over our fear of Googled Past Also new was more on Collective Intelligence including two I snagged from a recent ITConversations podcast that featured my colleague Hilary Mason (oh jealousy getting interviewed by Jon Udell). One was a site mentioned by Jon Patients Like Me where people share their medical issues, treatments, results so collectively one can find patterns for what works for a large number of people. I speculated what a site like Students Like Me might be able to do. Hilary is working on a neat start up called Path101 that crawls the web for resumes and parses them into data that can be used to show patterns in people's careers and also has an intensive personality quiz so users can connect themselves with experts and data about their career paths. The other new "collective" thing I quickly mentioned was the YouTube Symphony. For the second part of the double header, it was a 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story drive by (again, only 45 minutes) I ran it the easiest way- by preloading web pages in Firefox tabs. I trimmed a bit of the up front intro: PowerPoint Does Not Kill Presentations 50+ Ways web site Audience Story Prompt VoiceThread and Slideshare Paul Simon Dominoe 60 second story Dominoe Storyboard Dominoe flickr set 50+ Dominoe Stories Developing a Story Idea Salem Story Building Find Salem Pictures in Flickr Finding Media (Using images.google.com = bad) The 50+ Tools The story prompt was fun, as always, a bit slow to get started. I always find some place or custom that locals know about-- with some help from my host Marc, I decided to use a local bar (I had actually photographed it the day before)- "In a Pig's Eye" so the prompt was: You Wouldn't Believe What Happened at Open Mic Night at In a Pig's Eye From what I recall the story goes-- A Yankee fan steps into the In a Pig's Eye bar The locals start chanting "Yankees Suck, Yankees Suck" The Yankee surprises everyone by stepping up to the open mic He starts to sing.... The homework was to write an ending. I thought the Yankee fan might belt out an amazing operatic aria that melts the heart of all the Sox fans present and totally defuses the tense situation. I changed up the tool discussion, with the suggestion I had gotten at Penn State from Cole Camplese- rather than showing the same Dominoe Story in all 50 tools, I used examples from the Tools page they show how these are used by some educators. I did not get to all of them, but my list included ones listed at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/salem.html My new emphasis is chanting, "It's not about the tools, it's not about the tools..." but people really like the tools (and most people were downloading and installing CoolIris by the time the show was done). I appreciate the folks at Salem State inviting me out for the double header! I find myself people missing maybe the easiest and most sensible way to curate, publish sets of curated tweets. When storify announced it was biting the dust/pooping the web, amongst the rush to jump to some other hosted platform or use my arcane tool, what I noticed was about 90% of the ways people talked about storify was solely archiving tweets. I always saw Storify as more than a bag of tweets (it was among the 50+ Ways to Tell a Story examples)... but if that is all you are doing, why not just use Twitter Moments? If twitter ever poops the web too or gets bought by a bigger fish who trashes the whole thing (if you doubt that look what Twitter did to Posterous), your embedded tweets are toast anyhow. I've been using Moments to embed tweets from the Twitter chats we are doing in Networked Narratives and it goes rather fast, especially for twitter chats where you usually want chronological order. The most recent one I did took less than 30 minutes; here it is, embedded #NetNarr Twitter Chat on Selfies You just look under the menu under your icon on the twitter site for Moments And click the button that cleverly reads Create new Moment. Give it a title, and a description. You can add the images later. Once created, all you need to do is comb through twitter, and use the menu on each tweet in the top tight for Add to Moment (it looks like it lists your two most recent ones in the menu). [caption id="attachment_65902" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Adding a beautiful tweet to a Moment[/caption] You might think you need to do this right away, before they all scroll away. That is one approach. But I just used the Advanced Twitter Search, enter the hashtag (or whatever other criteria I am using), and at the bottom set a date range for the tweets in the day the chat occurred (February 13). [caption id="attachment_65903" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Finding tweets with #netnarr that occurred on Feb 13-14[/caption] When the results appear, be sure to click the top tab for latest, you get all tweets in reverse chronological order, not the stupid algorithm. Then I just go through (yes from more recent to older) and use the little menu to add the tweets I want to the moment. I am selective; I aim to get everyone who participated represented, I skill just "me too" and "LOL" tweets, and make sure not to many are my own. This is what I believe they call "curating" ;-) Now they are lopped into the Twitter Moment. I return to editing it (the same way I created it above). I can select an image from any of the tweets to represent the session or upload a different image. Then in the top left, I use the sort option to be oldest first, which makes sense for a twitter chat. Just publish. Boom. The embed option is hidden under the 3 dot menu: [caption id="attachment_65904" align="aligncenter" width="760"] The embed code is buried under 3 dots. You cannot hide from me.[/caption] This really is rather simple to do, especially once you work through the first time. I will see if you want to use an arbitrary order of tweets, that is awkward (you move it up or down one slot at a time). But for twitter chats, chronological works rather well (yeah twitter, most of us want time order, not your algorithmic order, pftttttt). Moments make the most sense to me for twitter archiving. And woot, you get analytics! Because data! [caption id="attachment_65906" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Rather impressive analytics eh? I cannot even spell moneytize.[/caption] Featured Image: A collage remix based on pixabay image by qimono shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CCO plus the Twitter icon placed over imege, copied, reversed, resized in PhotoShop using Overlay mode. Is the background music "Let's get metaphysical" ? Nah, Just playing my own name game. I had to refrain from writing what is in the vein of declaration of blue as the sky color, but indeed "I like podcasts". And I mean listening to them. My time for doing this in while driving, often on once or twice a week errand trips to towns, maybe 25 or 30 minutes of time to soak up some audio casts. I've noticed lately my own fascination in listening to a podcast and being tuned in for some small kernel statement, not really even related to the show's content, that lodges a mental note of, "I gotta look that up later." And when that happens, Ye Olde Rabbit Hole of Internet Curiosity pops open. For example, I was listening two weeks ago to into a Dot Social podcast episode (a podcast mostly about the the "new social web"?) where host Mike McCue recorded a conversation with dynamic and energetic web advocate and BS critic Molly White at the recent SXSW conference. But the small thing that jumped out was her response to a question of how she got to be a good writer- to wish she credited 20 years of being qn active Wikipedian. That was like a fleck of gold right out of Gardner Campbell's old bag. Hey I already wrote this up in the OEG Connect Space, my blog train went sideways. I am veering back to share a fantastic episode I heard today from the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast, a long time listen for me into the world of sound. This was an episode where host Dallas Taylor interviewed like six other people named... Dallas Taylor. It's just so good on so many levels, and I will not ruin it with trying to summarize. But woah, how many of his namesakes had a sibling named "Austin"! And when he asked another Dallas Taylor for the origin story of his name, and they ended up calling his Mom to have her explain out loud. It's just brilliant audio storytelling, top to bottom, and to me. good case that there's more to podcasting then recording some yammering conversation. All the Alan Levines But on the name thing, back in the day I did my own "ego-surfing" and found I was a lawyer, mathematician, art trader, even a knife retailer, and things got even more funky when I tracked the Google Ad words. A recheck finds me as CEO of a Healthcare system (actually more than one of me). a professor of political theory and another me is a professor of Pathology, a film production manager (I worked on Escape from New York), and finally a painter (that one I will link). I doubt I have the motivation of Dallas Taylor to go out and interview the others that bear my name. My name. Which was not supposed to be by name. When I was born, in Jewish tradition, I was named after a relative who was no longer living, in this case my paternal grandfather, Abraham Herman Levine, who was a big deal in the construction business in Baltimore. A few clicks back I learned he earned his credentials through distance learning (in the 1920s). My grandfather Abraham, in 1955 As my mom told me, she felt that "Abraham" was a bit old fashioned for a name for a kid born in the 1960s, so she modernized it to Alan. Thanks Mom. Say it Like Levine And for my last name, I never am consistent on its pronumciation, Le-veen or La-vine and when asked I shrug and say, "Just call me Alan." One time in 2010 while hanging out with Gardner Campbell in New York City, likely those Baruch Symposiums, we were in line to get some true Brooklyn pizza. Gardner was needling about my lack of consistency, so I said, "let's settle this." So I called Mom in Florida, so Gardner could ask The Source about the correct Levine pronunciation. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4570209156 Is That True, Alan's Mom? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) You could not script it, but Mom gave the same reply. Case close, Gardo! [Don't] Call Me Adam More recently, say over the last five or so years, this weird thing happens. I make a reservation in my name, or order a package sent to me under my name, make an aoopintment under my name, the person behind the desk or on the phone addresses me as "Adam", Not just there, often I will send emails to people with my name on the sender field and also in the footer, and people reply with, "Hi Adam". It's a Big Maroon 5 mystery (and by the way I have never heard one song by the man). I'm no longer bothered, and tend to make a joke about it. I imagine the band preparing for the start of a concert or showing up fior a signing and the people in the front shouting "CogDog! CogDog!" Poor Adam I bet is besieged in people whio repond to him as "Alan". Dude, I know how it feels. Well, I've strung my name along as far as I could. This all goes to all the Dallas Taylors who warmed my heart listening to that episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz. If you are not subscribed to that podcast, Adam suggests you should. Featured Image: My own remix of my own remix of Wikimedia Commons image Hello my name is sticker thats in the public domain. So it is. Prompted by Will's post "Digg For Edubloggers/ Do We Need to Get Our Act Together", I added EdBloggerNews as a new option to my Multi-Post Bookmarklet tool at http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php-- mainly because I was going to try and toss EduBloggerNews a few of the links I am sending to del.icio.us. While in the code, I tried a few approaches to make all of the pop-ups jump to the head of the pack, but failed to get something to work reliably. This means if you have a few tools in the mix, the windows may pop up behind the main window. I am open to any suggestions as to end around this; adding code to name each window and then issue it a xxx.focus() did not work as expected. In my own interest of sanity and focus, I'm letting loose for now my recent rage spate on Catfishing and fake accounts in FaceFakebook. I hit a similar spike a few months ago with the Timothy Boostrom phase. It's not a giving up or giving in, but more just putting it in pause until the next time I hear from a victim. Maybe I pushed out some more awareness. But I have not done anything to the invincible blue shield of non responsiveness from Facebook. I do get this ideas they might actually contact me. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/702113920719446016 It took more than took weeks for Facebook to remove the fake account of "Malle Gottfried" (I prefer calling him "Mealy Gotfake"). But you can search in Facebook, and see where he has moved on to another fake account with someone else's photos. Not my problem? No, it's Facebook's. For the record, the method of reporting that seemed to work was when someone reports the fake account as impersonating someone, and is even better if we are friends on Facebook. That alone suggests some of their motivation, they want me to spend time liking and friending. You can find four more fake accounts there, with nothing in them, waiting in the wings. That's part of the madness. Why would Facebook allow multiple empty accounts with the same name to sit there in the back of the pond? How hard would it be to craft an algorithm to snag them? My intent was just to flip my own bird at FaceFakebook and delete my account. Again. I really do not want to be any part of their system. They were worse than beets. But you know what? That did nothing either. I cannot even look at Fake Facebook accounts without one myself. I cannot have a reservoir of my own images, that Facebook's algorithms really should recognize when Mealy GotFake decides to pawn himself off again with my photos. Or Roddick. or Timothy? Or Gary. Without an account I cannot leave their hanging all the evidence of the fakery and source of my images. I did a little test a few days ago; I uploaded an old photo my sister shared of us with our cousins taken way back when (like 1968). That photo got about 5 times the interaction any of my rants did. That's what Facebook wants- piles and piles of tiny little interactions so they can graph they hell out of us and sell data. So instead, I will leave my little account as is, without much profile info, with little reactions or likes from me, and try to make it as useless as possible to FaceFakebook. Frankly, whether I have a Facebook account or not, whether I rant at them or not, will not likely make any difference in this situation. They are the House, and they make the House Rules, and they are raking in that House profit. And when the cycle revs up again, I will pounce. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by MartinaYach under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license[/caption] And "Malle"? You might just want to watch your back. Top / Featured Image: I'm going back more to compfight for my photos; I tried Google Images (filtered for licensed for re-use) on "dog roll over" and got about one screen of dogs on their backs, and then it was just random dog photos and flipped cars. Over on compfight I got a lot more, I did change the search to "dog roll". This image grabbed my eye, being a symbolic dog, and also being more in the play bow / or ready to spring mode. It is a flickr photo by @optikalblitz https://flickr.com/photos/optikalblitz/6027695477 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wITJM0Xo6g4 If you watched TV in the mid 1980s you should recall the smarmy commercial for some megacorp that apparently owned more food products than you could name (Airstream, Altoids, Avis, Blue Valley, Butterball, Culligan, Ekrich, Good & Plenty, Hunt's, Jolly Rancher, Krispy Kreme, La Choy, Meadow Gold, Orville Redenbacher, Peter Pan, Playtex, Reddi Wip, Samsonite, Swiss Miss, Tropicana, Wesson and World Dryer)-- Beatrice. With all the company buying that Pearson seems to be doing (does anyone wonder where they get all the moolah to go on the shopping spree?), it was time to remix them in (no accounting for quality of the singers). All of the names listed in the video are either acquisitions made by Pearson or investments in other companies (via CrunchBase). Can anything stop them from buying everything else? Lesson from the past, Beatrice was itself eventually bought out and disaggregated elsewhere. That's how the creative commons licensed ( BY-ND ) flickr photo shared by Tupfenmonster Absolutely worth it, despite crashing asleep in my chair at 2pm. Today was showtime for final project presentations by students at a course at the Hague University of Applied Sciences... the third year I have had the opportunity to be part of Project Community. With the indefatigable 'I will comment on every student's post' Nancy White, and the NGO partners the students worked with, we got to join the faculty and students premiere of their projects. It's super impressive to hear the student intros, they are from all corners of the world, and learn to work together and with project clients, whoa re located in different parts of the world too. http://youtu.be/5NgO_Mg6DTE?list=PLwoVCMRHPC3nGKJSZWDAnZyNVERP8fMmn Learn more about the course... Project Community is both a project, a community and a set of tools for using online communities and networks for enhancing the design process in any context. Nancy and I were invited to create an online community space for this course in 2012; the course leaders wanted the students to write reflectively in their own web sites, so I was asked to bring in the Feed Wordpress juice to create the course hub. They went with my suggestion that rather than asking students to learn all about a blog platform, to have them create tumblr sites for their course work so they just focus on writing (makes the Feed Wrangler's job a bit easier with feeds from the same platform). We had 80+ students in 2014, and using the categorizing feature of Feed Wordpress we can create sub views of the twelve student groups. The faculty/tutors also blog in their own spaces and we even add feeds for the NGO partners the students work with. The first year was definitely welding the airplane rivets as we flew, but they asked for a repeat in 2013 and again this year. The course design has improved incredibly this year; in years past we struggled with organizing large hangouts with all the students; this year the hangouts were all at the group level as they consulted with Nancy and the NGO partners. Since 2013 we have had student groups partner with real NGOs where their task is to consult and advise them in strategies for improving their processes through online tools and community building (see this year's project partners). We enjoyed the creativity in the design and variety of their final five minute videos, the production quality has absolutely notched up noticeably this year. But this year, the blog writing has gotten more in depth, thoughtful, and using more media (see the last series of student posts). Also new this year, although it meant that the hangout session ended up going 3 1/2 hours (as much as Google Hangouts can make me twitch, the fact we can have a free video conference this long is golden), was Nancy and I got to participate in the presentation assessment discussion with Laura, Gabriela, Janneke, and Meggie. This is no massive course. It's not actually even open in the sense of being a course where open participants join. It's not something that cost $200,000 to produce - we are using the usual suspects of Wordpress blogs, Feed Wordpress, tumblr, Youtube, (students use Facebook), a site housed on Reclaim Hosting. We actually were pleasantly surprised when they wanted to re-run the project in 2013, then this year, so you can certainly expect another one starting August 2015. I've nto yet full organized the site as it ought to be. They are all now separate Wordpress installs (which actually are not a problem to manage with Reclaim Hosting's Installatron). Previously, i would manually create an archive site at the end of the course, but this time I structured it to be "pre-archived" so we have: General Info and menu at http://projectcommunity.info Project Community 2014 http://2014.projectcommunity.info Project Community 2013 http://2013.projectcommunity.info Project Community 2012 http://2012.projectcommunity.info I have a "template" I made before this year's course, and can use the Installatron clone capability to make a fresh copy for 2015. It might be more logical as a multi-site install, which is how I would do it if I was starting a new. Staying awake for 2015! It's a joy to be part of this. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by carterse cc licensed flickr photo shared by boskizzi Disclaimer. I have nothing but utmost respect and admiration for the people who are stretching (literally) the concepts of what is a "course" by experimenting with the form of an "open course", one with a set of students taking it for traditional credit,. but potentially more, maybe thousands (?) who can participate by the generosity (or interests) of people running the course. It is so much Dave-like to read Dave Cormier saying why he does it: I freely contribute my time to some courses, and am paid to teach others. I "˜believe' that working in the open makes my own work better, gives me broader access to other people's idea and, well, i find it fun. It tears at the silo-ed nature of courses, it aims to melt the walls enough to leverage the power of networked learning. The latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review has a fantastic buffet of articles on the Open theme (I am still bellying up to the table to read these). So it's all good stuff. I have some quibbles (hence the barking) in some ways people are looking at open courses that seem to fall back on traditionalist views of courses. It's mainly when people talk about "drop-outs" or "why people don't stay in open courses" (recently well summarized among other points by Dave Cormier). I'm one of those people. I've signed up for every Connectivism course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes and a few more... and I am also one who falls off the edge of participation. The notion of "drop out" seems to assume that the measure of success is people doing all the assignments/activities from start to finish, filling the forums and blog space with their activity. But that negates the possibility that people pick and choose what they want to participate in. The openness door ought to swing both ways, right? cc licensed flickr photo shared by yewenyi I already wrote my thoughts in a comment to Dave's post: What is wrong with choosing some minimal or micro level to be in an open course? Is the only way to get something out of such a course is to be an active over-achiever in the forums? Why am I a no good drop out if I choose to pick the parts that interest me and leave the rest? Is it open or not, cause I smell a wee bit of hypocrisy if the assumption is I have to have a high attendance rate in an open course. Or maybe I really am a loser drop out, someone who does not stick to the pace of the course, a lazy dog if you will. As previously blogged, the motivation to do what it takes to be a DIY type student is, to me, a place where there is a wide open gap of understanding. And I am a bit saddened if really the best motivator is the pursuit of credit as Lisa Lane suggests -- there is nothing wrong with credit for open courses, in fact, there ought to be more of it to legitimize the concept. Yes, wouldn't it be sad if that was the only successful motivator? But I really want to know more about people who end being highly motivated or active in open courses who are not doing it for the carrot of credit. I want to know more of what makes those people tick. The other thing is that the majority of open courses I have come across (and I do not claim to know them all) are about open education or education technology. I'm not really ready to put the victory dance out on open courses, until we see some examples in say, poetry, history, math. And frankly, the open courses, marched to the beat of a fixed time length syllabus, might be seen as an incremental step from (I guess they would be called) closed courses? Non open courses? Are there other models than attaching the open network to a fixed course? Believe me, I'm all over the joy of openness- but it really ought to swing wide open Go ahead, take me down! Our professional team of qualified experts know how to get your stolen content taken down fast. No matter what country the thieving website is hosted in. On average we will have your stolen or copyrighted material take down within a few hours. Them's strong words. But again, since I am a thieving scoundrel who steals content, I ought to be on the run. And technically, I guess I am guilty-- for using a metaphor that is copyrighted. I ought to know better, but I cannot resist. For quite a few years I have been hoisting "stolen content" on my web site under the banner of "Amazing Stories of Openness". it has taken them 3 years to track me down. Okay, so it was not quote the hunt. I got an email from the person that owns the rights to the trademark name of the magazine. Your use of "Amazing Stories" infringes the Trademark of the same (serial #77422636) for print and electronic publications and must cease.Opportunities to license the brand exist. If you wish to pursue such opportunities, please contact me at this email address.Failure to comply will result in the issuance of a DMCA notice to your service providers. Actually the person was not viscous at all, not a blood seeking vulture. I tried asking nicely: My use of Amazing Stories is in no way meant to steal or profit from the name, it was a fitting metaphor for purely educational use to promote the free and open sharing by educators.I have no means to pay for licensing, so if permission cannot be granted, I will change my materials but need time to do so.If I can ask, in what capacity are you informing me this as I do not see any identification in your message as to whom you represent. Also, is this in regards to the imagery or just the use if the words "Amazing Stories"?I am cooperative but my own curiosity wants to know how my use to promote openness and connectivity in education is a threat or damage to this brand- it was chosen to be the metaphor of wonder and excitement the old publications represent; if that is not the spirit if the brand I will find something else. But the bottom line is: I appreciate your intent when using the name, but one aspect of trademark rights rests on the maintenance of the brand it represents, both in quality and in scope, and without a licensing arrangement, I can not demonstrate that level of control necessary to maintain the brand. Now while I can maybe argue a stand of fair use, as has been noted, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives copyight owners the ability to shut down an entire internet provider (ask edublogs about how this feels), so even if I wanted to take a stand, do I risk losing all my sites and killing every other person's at hippiehosting? Really? Who was smoking crack the day that got voted in? And actually the person that owns the copyright for the magazine says the infringement is my use of the trademarked phrase "Amazing Stories" it has nothing to do with the remixes I did of the magazine covers, who may have a whole raft of copyright holders. That's right, I cannot use the words "Amazing Stories" in a published web site because it takes value away from .... WTF??? This is insane. And I guess I do not learn my lesson; about 9 years ago I got laywer slapped for making a site that was a spoof of Ripley's Believe it or Not. I know people will tell me know I might have a leg to stand on in fair-use, but there looms again the teeth of DMCA. And in some way I knew I was on sqiishy ground with the graphics. I might have assumed they were old enough to be public domain, but thats sloppy. I found the covers on http://www.philsp.com/mags/amazing_stories.html a site I can only guess either licensed within the owner or are in line to get slapped. And look, DMCA Takedown is a business! Is that the kind of work you brag to your MOm about? Do your kids tell the other ones at school how awesome a take down artist their old man is? Look, its just a comical business Heck it looks FUN. I don't really want to make a pissing match, and frankly it is not that important to me. So I am going to be changing the wording on the site. I am going to use art from the public domain art The Digital Comic Museum in particular WOW Comics- There is a ton of art here I can work with. And frankly, my new phrase is going to be "Wow Stories of Openness". So does that make me just a dog who will rollover? I guess so butaccording to the laws in place BY A 100% MAJORITY OF THE US SENATE SEE WHO THEY REPRESENT???, they have the rights to yank my web presence. And that is something I am not going to let roll. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by H.Marine Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/parrhesiastes/815901203 Half guard flickr photo by parhessiastes shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license Limited editions of this holistic and cleanly book are available! This is for a brand new ds106 Design Assignment: Weird Book Room: The Abebooks Weird Book Room lists a collection of titles so farcical you would think they are made up, but they are not. "Grandma's Dead: Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals", "Beyond Leaf Raking ", and "Goats: Homeopathic Remedies" are all actual book titles -- "finest source of everything that's bizarre, odd and downright weird in books." Your assignment is to design the cover of a book title so weird that it will look like it will fit right in to the Weird Book Room. Be sure to include a little bit of jacket blurb for your blog post where you include your designed book cover. Go weird! This all started with the tweet: https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/222938332945063936 And I could not help my curiosity to scan the titles at the Abebooks Weird Book Room Each of them might be a story unto itself, but I could not help but be happy, Neil. So happy to make this into a ds106 assignment and develop my own book title. So the premise of Zen and Toilet Cleaning is that the rhythmic and circulations of every day bathroom cleaning are ones the resonate with the holy cycle of spiritual zonoids, as depicted in the A'Alahyak Temple. You can achieve a higher state of wah with a brush in your hand and your minds eye open. Learn these techniques in a simple but aproachable style as writtemn by the author, a leading Flush Master What book will you put on the shelf? SocialMeter looked interesting- enter a URL and it pulls some stats from major services like del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Yahoo, technorati for how many times the URL has been bookmarked. It returns a total hit count, and you can click each service to yank up its results. Of course, just like one's first foray when GoogleMaps added the imagery (wow, I can see my house from space!), the first thing one does is a bit of ego surfing. So a SocialMeter for this CDB blog got a 1467 1517 score (what does that mean? who knows) nearly all from Google and Technorati. And I took another swipe by socialmetering the original Feed2JS site (interesting as the site no longer is even there.... hey someone at Maricopa, check the darn server!), where it pegged a 4200+ 6213 score with almost all from Technorati (it gets zero from Google since the site no longer can be reached, so who has the more sophisticated robot??): Now this might be in the realm of lies, damn lies, and weather forecasters... I was unable to get any URL to register a non-zero del.icio.us score, using sites I know are bookmarked there. Update: this has been fixed, and rather quickly. Nice going! That said, it's an interesting tool/idea, and would like to see it pan out-- I also think a weighting system should be in there (not sure how) as the services are not all equivalent in scope, usage, and purpose. So who can get a high score (pills, porn, and casino, and other cockroach infested sites do not count)? My tirade of being an iPodless podcaster are no more! That's correct, pod fans, I have a new iPod Shuffle, courtesy of my Mom in Florida as a birthday gift-- I had put it on my list of "wishes", so in her words: I don't know what it is or what it does, but the nice young lady in Best Buy helped me pick it out. So I put it to use today on my bike commute in to work; no podcasts loaded yet, but I enjoyed my mix of crusty old 60s and 70s rock n' roll. It's so light, and simple to operate, especially in comparison to the iRiver I was borrowing from work. I like the iRiver for its recording functionality, so it reminds me of the last podcast I listed to on that device, the ETch session by Donald Norman on "Emotional Design". It was hard to tell from the audio if the geek audience was really going along with it, but I find his ideas on design always refreshing. He reviewed the three levels of emotional appeal: "Visceral" - the gut level, I Love It or I Hate It "Behavorial" - it provides a useful function and does it well "Reflective" - it says something about me or reflects who I am Norman's point was to try and hit all 3 levels if possible to be effective. And also he had a segment where he highlighted that good designs typically have Visceral reactions of both I Love It and I Hate It, so that attempts to produce something that everybody will like rarely achieve that. He also shared an example of an exotic watch that has not intuitive at first to read, but once explained, he found that it was then easily understood. His point was (I think) its okay to have a bold radical design that may require an explanation, or a manual, but it should be so that a one time review is all that is needed. Anyhow, the iRiver is a great product (for me) on the Behavioral level- it is a tiny workhorse as a digital audio recorder, and at a functional level, it does play back (well you cannot listen to a mix of music and recorded audio). But the interface is really criminal! The little joystick for volume vs track skips is no match for the clikc wheel- the movement is so slight, that attempts to change the volume in variable skip a track and vice versa. It is less of a problem if you are sitting down focusing on the device, but manipulating the joystick while bike riding or running is another matter. Then there is the bizarre menu interface, where the options move around the screen in a clockwise/counter clockwise pattern. One would think the navigation is joystick right twice to move over, then down, then left twice to navigate a clock wise circle, but no! All clock wise motions are right pushes, so when you get to the 6 o'clock position, you are clicking right to move left. Lastly there is the odd labeling of the "hold button" (I don't have the unit here to snap a photo), but it looks something like: ---------- | ||||| <---- Hold ---------- So if you follow the arrow icon, you need to slide the switch to the left to hold (meaning you can run without your motions pressing buttons). Or does it mean moving the button to the right is the Hold position? It's trivial, but it is not clear function labeling, in that I get confused as to which position is the correct function. A simpler icon of a closed and open lock at the appropriate end might achieve it better. Anyhow, the design, function of the iPod Shuffle, is a whole different story. Having the USB plug a piece of the device is simple cleverness, and avoiding the need for a cable. The selector switch in the back )Off- Playlist- Shuffle) was a bit less clear, but once operated, it is understood. So iPodding we go! Thanks Mom! I recently got set up with a wireless broadband card for access to the net via my mobile provider (it is Alltel, but the network is Sprint). While up in the mountains of Strawberry, Arizona, it was time for an old fashioned western shootout between my satellite internet connection (Hughes) and the new mobile card. Despite a lot of connectivity issues the first year with Hughes, I must admit that in the last 12 or 18 months, it was worked very reliably. The satellite modem is connected to an Apple Airport wireless running 802.11(b) speeds, so capable of sending up to 2 MB/s, much more than the theoretical maximum of the dish (1 MB/s). So as the arbitrator, I turned to Speakeasy Speed Test... I love the little speedometer graphics. The Dish was first, and pulled in an impressive 998 kbps download and surprisingly, the upload speed was 568 kbps- surprisingly because I thought the limit of my plan was 256 up (shhhhh, dont tell them!) Next up was the little guy, the Franklin CDU-550 USB network doo-hickey. Now, this is not much of a contest, since we are out of range of the digital network, so the maximum it ought to do is about 128 kbps, if it gets a signal at all. We plug it in, give a few moments to find a network... 1 bar, woah, it got 3 bars! And the results showed 128 kbps download and 81 kbps up: So yes, the Dish wins the big medal, but I am pleased that in a pinch up here, I can still get connected. I have a backup! And for a bit of perspective, the speed of the mobile network is 5 times what we had pre-Dish (dialup). And, for some looking forward, some suggest the internet may in a few years get so clogged, we will all be back to pokey speeds in the net. So winners all the way around. Update (like 11 years later) The Dish is long gone, cable internet came to town, phones went to 4G and beyond. You might like the SpeedCheck tool and info on connectivity. Apparently they think people are reading this old post. Speeeeeeeed. Thanks to Scott Leslie, I got inspired to remix a movie scene... http://twitter.com/sleslie/status/250053837816205312 With a little iMovie audio overdub, here is a more relevant statement for what happens when you come into the ds106 bar with swaggering talK 'bout MOOCs. Fists are gonna fly. Cause ds106 ain't no MOOC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1fWvtDma1M With a little digging, the movie is Mean Streets (1973) and that scene includes very young Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel. If that really is your rallying cry... "We Don't Pay For MOOCs" or "It's Gonna Revolutionize Education" or "We Gotta Sign Up for Coursera" then take it down the block. Get outta here. You heard me. Outta here. Jon Breitenbucher invited me back again to do a remote (via Skype) presentation on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the week-long Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program he and his crew run at the College of Wooster (by the way, they are rocking with wordpress multiuser there). When I did this last year, it was one of the best sessions I've had; a lot because Jon's team had prepped the faculty, so they already had done some pre-work to pick their story idea. The way we run it is I do the presentation first thing in the morning (wich was really early here on the west coast time!), the faculty spend about 3 hours working with the tools. We then convene after they are done, and they get to talk about what they were able to create (or the problems they had). This time around, I used Google Presenter for the slides, and we did me on video over Skype to the group in Wooster. I had a slide deck I'd used before for other sessions, and made all the links for URLs as hyperlinks. What did not work well, and I;ve had mixed luck before, was using it in presentation mode, where me clicking the slides advances it for Jon's computer at the other end. I've had it work before, but this time, no matter how many times I would "take control", when I advanced, the only way to update for them was for me to "take control" again. So we went old school.. me saying "Next slide" You can see the slides over at http://bit.ly/50ways-wooster and I also have audio recorded in my Ediro. I felt bad a few people really struggled with some of the tools- Quite a few of them tried Joggle, one of the tools I rarely look at, someone had issues where Tikatok failed to save their work. It's hard to tell if it is an isolated experience or if the tool is flaky, and I struggle with how to list that on my tools site (I started addind user reports as Devon has told me of problems with xtimeline). But you can see the great stuff they did on their twitter-like wordpress site http://faculty-fellows-2010.voices.wooster.edu/ -- I am mining their as new examples to add to my 50 Ways site. And one person had a suggestion which may appear as "Larry's List"- he asked for which were the 10 top tools; i've hesitated to do this because it is a bit subjective, but I think its worthy to share which have the combination of best features and likely reliability. I have some plans to roll out a new 50Ways wiki (already nabbed the wikispaces spot) to make it open for more people to contribute. The current 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story wiki is set for me only to edit, since I used it a lot for presentations; I had it open to members for a bit, but someone indvertantly wiped out some chunks. But I have these ideas for a new more open wiki, and am widely open to suggestions: All of the existing materials will be moved over there Put each tool on its own page, have a screen shot, a more detailed description, a list of pros and cons, tags to identify both the type of tools (Slideshow, Map) as well as the types of media supported) The tags could be used to list all associated tools, so you can more easily get to the ones that allow you to import audio, or ones that use video, or ones that are presentation tools When people contribute, I will have them use the wikispaces code to add their "signature" to the page as a contributor Tool pages would be open to edit, so people can add more examples, or modify the description. I really want to have more, and better relevant educational examples. I'll keep the main list under lock, so as people create new tool pages, I will add them once they have all the "parts"; I'll provide a template for the tool page I had dreamed of having this ready for this week's preso, but stuff just keeps getting in the way! In some reference of software design, there's a process where you figure out all the features you might need, plant it all out neatly, build it, and then go into some cycle of testing and debugging. Then you roll it out, tweet it, and ... well I don't really know how it works. In my little messy world, I get some fuzzy idea, a scurry around to see what bits others have already built, then I start taping ti together and holding things with wire. Most of the time, the final features only come into my mind as I am making it, not before. Often it ends up as lovely as some of my bread experiments: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog[/caption] I'm still rather excited with the results of an open tool for simple web publishing that requires no logins, most of it came together in about a week of Wordpress hacking, and a few folks have tried it out. See the TRU Writer at http://splot.ca/writer. The nifty thing is you are secretly logged in as a generic Wordpress user (to enable the media and writing tool) but you never see the Wordpress interface. I'm stoked to see some more than "play with it and toss up some fun stuff" (I've been doing that for weeks) in two that recently went live: Open all Hours by Keith Lyons and I'm a Teaching Huckster by Terry Elliot. While I am thinking of it, I wonder about adding a feature that tracks how long/short it takes someone to go from first draft to published. Some friends have sent some great questions, and then all kinds of feature requests. What is it? Is it like medium? Is it a community? It of course lifts a lot of design elements from medium.com, big page wide header, generous white space margins and line spacing. It has estimated reading time. That's what came with (and why I chose) the free Radcliffe theme as a starting point. Right now, it's not a community. As a wordpress theme, one could create a separate site for many kinds of uses; one for just a class to share written essays, one just to be an issue or a series of issues of an online journal. But a community? Who knows? Why does it not do private posts? I never thought about it. Not sure why its needed; trying to steer clear of D'Arcy Norman's laws of things tending to approach LMSes. Why cannot I edit it after it's submitted? To give re-editing access seems to require some means of logging in; how does the site know who authored it? I did consider a way around this, when its published, it could generate a specific URL with a random access code; if the writer was able to save it (cough- copy/paste), I could code a way to put the content back into the editing form for revision. This is possible, but I'm holding off. This is not meant as a blogging tool. The real intent is to use to perhaps copy/paste something written elsewhere (even the dreaded MS Word; the new Wordpress Rich Text editor strips 90% of the HTMl cruft out). Something you do in one sitting. Draft, preview, revise, preview, revise, preview, publish. The copy/paste from Word is rather exciting, since I find out that is how 98% of academics compose things (a totally made up stat, but my hunch is close). I did a test with the Word version of a 2008 EDUCAUSE Review paper I co-authored with Bryan Alexander and Brian Lamb Anonymous tried out a version of a more recent EDUCAUSE Review piece, using a copy/paste from Word: It also works well with formatting copied directly from a web page. What this means is, from Word, or a web page copy, you keep all Headings, lists, blockquotes, bold, italic that are in the page as semantic items (for BLEEPS sake, why do people not use the headings styles in Word?). As a test, I did a web age copy from a version of a 2000 online article from years gone by, put in TRU Writer, added some images, and a YouTube clip, and voila: If I did nothing beyond copy pasting, filling out the form, it might have been a 7 minute effort. By looking for an image and a video clip, I might have piled on 6 more minutes to the process. Even today, while testing this out, I got a new idea for a feature. I noted in the one shared by Keith Lyons, he started with a bit of explanation of what he was writing about, and it occurred to me to add a field for some end notes, some extra details to say about the piece. Here is what the form looks like now, with several additions since the last write up: For the author field (the default is "Anonymous") I added a note to say if you include a twitter handle, it goes with the tweet generated by the button at the bottom of a form. Just in case you want some mention-ness. Thanks to a great suggestion by John Johnston, I moved the article writing area much higher (doh, in the first version it was below categories and tags). This is a rich text editor, the same one you use inside of Wordpress. I was able to use some code mojo to remove buttons not needed (like the "more text" one). I love me some Wordpress hooks. I also tried to fill in more info for the help tips, a link that opens up info in a lightbox overlay. I really do not see a need to explain every single button, so I linked to the Wordpress info. The main things there are some guides for inserting media uploaded, and info on embeds. This is a real advantage of this tool, the idea would be to take a plain text article, and add in the affordances you have on the web, links, images, and embedded media. Finally, there is the new form item to add end notes; these get appended to the content when viewed, e.g. I could tweak this for weeks. The preview/publish process might be clunky, or people might forget to click the final button (no work is lost, it just never gets pushed into the pending post area). I do have an thing rigged to generate notification emails to people the site owner designates as editors. And my clever cookie logout thing is not working. The idea is that if you want some other features, well heck git it done. It's a theme. Hack away. Or publish something. Break the sucker http://splot.ca/writer. That's what I will keep doing, though I ought to be pointing efforts elsewhere (more on that soon). Still from The Artist's Dream (1913) by John Randolph Bray, wikimedia commons public domain image I find perverse pleasure in finding a way to force Google to Sit, Stay, Rollover, and do the tricks I want it to do rather than what it decides. The sense of power is of course a fabricated illusion, but still, the effect is robustly divine. After some explanation of my current approach, creating a quick shortcut for google image results that are CC licensed, and steps hpw ypu can do the same, I present my newest hatched karate chop to Google. My Shortcut Gift My almost daily use of Google Images is to locate ones that are open licensed to use. Yes, if you search on this you will find a gazillion results that explain how to do this. Type in your search terms, click the button By default you get results from all over tarnation. Then click Tools. Then look for Usage Rights menu. Then select Creative Commons licenses. So first you have to see the results you likely cannot re use, then it takes 2 more clicks to find the ones you can reuse. And if the results are crappy, try adding a new term to the search. The results send you back to seeing the general image pool. So you have to repeat the pattern to filter again. I find this repetition not only wasteful, but insulting. Remember that Google's primary mission is always to get more stuff in front of you that you might click. The more you click the more data they collect. My approach for a long time, dialing back to gy Gift of Time back in 2013, is using a Custom Browser Search. https://cogdogblog.com/2013/12/gift-of-time/ In Chrome, if you go to Preferences then Search Engines (direct link) you get no surprise, some options for the default search tool to use in your browser (there are similar setting in Firefox, Safari, et al). Scroll down more, and there's a whole long raft of "Other Search Engines"... if I guess right, in Chrome, every time you type a keyword into a web sites search box, it adds an entry here. But what I learned back in 2013 (and that was a nod to Chris Lott who showed me this), is I can add my own patterns. Now Google Search results end up with a mile long set of parameters added to the results URL. I've done some work to whittle them down to the bare minimum. Search all of Google for the best creature https://www.google.com/search?q=dog Search all of Google Images for photos of the same https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch Search all of Google Images for CC licensed photos of the same https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=il%3Acl What I can do now (and outlined below how you can do the same) is in my browser url bar, type gcc press TAB, enter my search words, press Return, and BOOM! I get only images that are licensed creative commons. I bet I have done this 20,000 times since 2013. Here's the skinny. Again in Chrome to Preferences then Search Engines (direct link) Scroll down to Other Search Engines, and click the Add button. The name is what will pop up in the browser bar when you activate it, call it what you like, even "Google I Order You To Be CC". The keyword is a shortcut yo will remember to activate it, so make it memorable. Mine is gcc (I could not enter that again in the screenshot above). The third one is what makes it work, it is the search result that has all the parameters you want to be put in place, and %s replacing the actual search terms from a result. For this example, use: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch&tbs=il%3Acl For those wanting to know, q is the search terms, tbm=isch indicates it is a google images search and tbs=il%3cl make it return ones that are cc licensed. This has worked wonderfully, and I have a few more shortcut searches in my arsenal (f TAB searches my flickr photos, wiki TAB searches wikipedia). But the problem is the same as before- my shortcut works fine for the first search, but if I change any keywords, I get bopped mack to searching images without any filtering for CC. The New Trick What I have long hoped for was some setting in Google Chrome, or maybe even an extension, that would made Creative Commons Licensed my default for any image search. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1354845851848302592 Surely this cannot be that complicated, others have asked too. Why can't Google offer a bunch of preference options (see above for the click reason). So last week I hacked my own answer. I found a browser extension (works on more than Chrome) called Requestly that lets you modify a URL in your browser. Once installed, you can go to a spot to create your own "rules" (account not even needed). Now I experimented with tons of settings, this is for now, Alan Borrowing Occam's Razor of the simplest. I run on URLs that contain somewhere in them tbm=isch this is what identifies a google image search result. I suppose there is a chance so other web site might use these same query parameters, but nothing here will break the web for you. All it does is add to the url the extra query parameters tbs=ol%3ci that force results to be Creative Commons licensed. In Requestly, you can create your own via the Create Rule button. I could not export my rule on a free account, but I was able to create a share link that will let you import the rule. Now here is the fun part. No matter what terms you enter or whatever tool options you change in Google Images, you will only get results that are creative commons licensed. I cracked their code! bahahahahahaha. There is a downside. I cannot ever get all the other stuff as a result. I would have to either disable the rule in my Requestly settings or deactivate the extension if I want to see stuff not licensed CC (or just go to an incognito browser window or another browser). I tried my hardest to get the Regex search going that would get around this, but just came up short. This is just a first cut attempt, but I feel pretty proud of the result. I can make Google sit, lay down, and roll over and only hand me image search results that are open licensed. WTF Commercial and Other Licenses As a sideline, I have never looked at the results listed as options for "Commercial and Other Licenses"- it looks like what it says, try (without my gizmo activated) https://www.google.com/search?q=dog&tbm=isch&tbs=il:ol Yes, you get results from Shutterstock of course, but many other dog and pet related sites. Over the results of you over over "licensable" and when you click the preview, there is an indication of the photographer's name and referencing Getty images. I downloaded a bunch and could not find this in the photo metadata, so Google must have some other correlation between images on say Petfinder.com or AKC.org heck even edx.org (remember when they were about "open"?) and Getty. Weirdly, I see results that indicate they are from Unsplash.co, that are listed as licensable from istockphoto But when you click the image it's clear. You do not go to an Unsplash photo for this little toy dog, but search results for Unsplash that have the iStockphoto ones at the top you need to scroll past to get the ones you want. This again supports my contention that google will nudge you ever ever more circling towards more commercial content that exposes you to more links to commercial content. Why would they give you an image search result which is not the image shown n the preview, but a page of search results that include it as a thumbnail? Although they pay lip service to Creative Commons with a buried option in search that you cannot even make a default setting, they are by no means a guardian of the commons. Do everything you can to subvert The Google. And find joy when you succeed. It's a likely losing war, but you might come out on top of a few skirmishes. Featured Image: Revox A720 Digital FM Tuner pre-amplifier flickr photo by touhotus shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified by Alan Levine to put CC on the display, change the brand name from Revox to Google Images, and modify the knob labels In anticipation for Saturday’s presentation of the Certificates project at the Creative Commons Global Summit this is yet another round at explaining the architecture (still developing), as likely a lot of details will not be covered. My idea/goal/dream has been not to pick or designate a single platform for the certificate (at least for the content part) but design it in a way that could flow into many platforms. This means a source content constructed in Markdown the lightweight plaintext markup language. Here are the presentation slides... It Starts in GitHub The ultimate source for the Certificates content will be GitHub repositories, one for the “core” content that is part of all certifications (Copyright, the Commons, Licenses, Sociocultural issues, Legal issues, and Using CC tools) plus specialty repos for the Librarian Certificate, Educator Certificate, and Government Certificate. Everybody but programmers will likely shirk when the see those places. They are not the expected point of entry expected for people who wish to make their own versions of the content. And when you see the way it looks, you might say “Hmmm that is pretty plain.” Github view of Commons Module Unit “Digital vs Physical Commons” As it is, because Markdown includes only content and structure, not presentation. And now I take a break for a metaphorical intermission… knowing full well the risk of metaphors. A Construction Metaphor I share with you a photo of a humble 900 square foot home mine. My House flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I know it was built in 1977, because my former neighbor, Jack, who owned the brown house you can see just to the right, built his house in 1975 and knew the people that build mine. This is what Jack’s house looks like: From the Same Kit flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) His house is a different color, he added a back solarium and a garage, the room layouts inside are different– but they are at their core, the same house. He told me how he got his house as a “kit” called “O’Malley’s Easy Do” which came as a delivery of pre-coconstructed trusses, load bearing walls, support beams, that he and his family assembled into their home. My house was built from the same kit but looks quite different. It’s not uncommon for new home developments to offer buyers a range of customization options from a common set, but back in the 1970s people not only got the options, they put it together themselves. My case for the metaphor is that the Markdown content, it’s outline structure, are like the major support features of a home- beams, trusses, wall units, but as people who might want to assemble ones, you can put on top of that many other options to change the appearance, to re-arrange the interior walls, and to build it in a variety of locations. Building a Certificate House in WordPress The Markdown content of the certificates can certainly be accessed, used, even copied easily in the GitHub format, but that is not where we are suggesting people work. The work I have been doing is to make that Markdown flow into a few other platforms to show a variety of ways the content could be published/customized. Our primary (ont not only) effort has been WordPress for many reasons, not only the fact that it is the platform that W3Tech suggests run almost 27% of all web sites. Via the Jetpack plugin (or a few other plugins), Markdown content can be directly entered into the editor, and publishes as standard HTML, so it can flow directly into WordPress. The same unit above, publishes on our primary site: [note: link no longer available] but is not tied to a specific theme or template; here is the same content in a different theme: [note: link no longer available] The presentation part is one thing, but WordPress offers some other special features I am taking advantage of. The content is all based on a common outline structure for all representations of the certificate: [note: links no longer available] Top Level Page (overview, delivery format, contents outline) Module introduction (example, The Commons) Unit (example, the Digital vs Physical Commons) Use the Page Attributes to define the Parent page (in this case a module) and the order of display within other unts This means we can use the WordPress Pages content type to create this outline, the parent/child relationships, and the menu order feature for each to control the order of display of modules and units. We then make use of the Page-List plugin to dynamically create the top navigation for all top level pages, as well as the right side index of modules and units. The nice thing about this is that the Pagelist plugin generates these dynamically, allowing a copy of the Certificate to have it’s contents re-ordered or even to remove a non-relevant section, and potentially to add a new one if desired. On the GitHub Markdown site, we have no internal navigation means, and any change in the order of a module or unit requires manual editing of the main table of contents and the module introduction page — in WordPress this is all dynamic based on the author decided ordering of Pages. If that is too much technobabble, the outline format is more flexible in WordPress. We can do other things as well, like automatically embedding media URLs (e.g. YouTube and vimeo videos). As they used to say on late night TV, but wait… there’s more. All the above is done with some codes in a small plugin that will be needed to run a copy of the certificate (along with the Page-List one that is all that will be required). But I have added some more editing options that will be part of any certificate content page. Certification editing options The top two radio buttons define which certification this is a part of and the type of page level in our outlne (this is needed to display the appropriate navigation links). The third field provides a place to enter attribution info for the footer; for example, the WordPress Featured image a site owner may use is outside of the certification content. Dynamically generated footer information; top box is optional attribution credit, bottom includes content versioning info The next field contains the URL for the source content on GitHub; if the box is checked, when saved, the content will be completely updated by the content at that URL, and thus notified in saving the page: Confirmation of update from GitHub (or an error message of something went wrong) The bottom data is fetched at the same time the plugin gets info from GitHub, we can read the current release version and date. What this means is that for the public versions we are doing no content editing in WordPress… all edits are done in GitHub and then pulled into WordPress. As a note, in a final plugin, these fields will not be editable except for an admin, the only one authors can modify will be the attribution (the plugin will also have options to authenticate to Github, for development this is hardwired to a single key). While technically GitHub is a point at which “forks” or copies of the certification could be made, it will be more useful if done at the WordPress level for those that want a WordPress version, where they would be editing more familiar WordPress content, not Markdown. One way this is done by creating an XML export of the WordPress content (whicy at that point is standard HTML), which could be installed in any other WordPress install. We have set up the public versions of the certificates in a WordPress Multisite, so the software, the themes and plugins are shared. While each of the ones we have set up so far look similar Core, Librarian, Educator, and Government — they are all separate sites. Also can instantly make more copies using the NS Cloner plugin so there re possible use cases we might host copies for other groups. The content is not limited to the theme we are using, it ought to work in many other themes (with possible need for custom CSS), see a demo version made by cloning A copy of the Core certification displayed in the Twenty Sixteen theme Building a Certificate House as Static HTML As a first proof of concept, we have made a demo version of the core certificate in a different platform, but using the same Markdown content from the source. This was created with Hugo a static web site generator using the Hugo Learn documentation theme. Hugo processes the Markdown content, with extra header information that, like WordPress, indicates if it is an index page and a parameter to indicate the page order, and generates a stand alone HTML web site with all internal navigation built in. The entire system needed to make a copy and publish in Hugo can be forked from the GitHub repository for this demo site — this is a better point to be making copies of the Certificates content then the Markdown Source. A Yet to Be Built Third House As another proof of concept we are planning to move a copy of the Markdown content into the Gitbook publishing platform — this too will provide a clean web friendly version of the content, plus PDF and ePub versions that could potentially be used in places of poor or no internet connectivity. Does the Kit Home Metaphor Fit? That’s what we hope to see in the presentation… Featured Image: “Construction update: four walls, a roof” by Staff Sgt. Sarah Hanson US Government Public Domain photo. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Pink Sherbet Photography Yesterday Martin Weller, in the midst of writing his book on Digital Scholarship, wrote up a narrative of his day to track his working day and uses of technology. In the summary, he notes the mix of personal and work lives intertwingling while he does this from home, and how much of the technology is not strictly sexy, and in some ways, so mundane they start to merge into his real desktop (my metaphor): What does this digital scholarship snapshot tell us? Firstly, it's quite traditional. This is partly because I am writing a book, but it is also representative. I didn't spend the day overlaying different data formats or creating a musical mashup, or anything exciting like that, I spent it writing. Related to this the technology used is fairly simple - there are no specialist tools in use here. There is a mixture between the professional and personal in their use. Even on a relatively unconnected day when I am engaged in the solo pursuit of writing I still maintain social connections with a global network of peers. A significant point is that there is a vast amount of high quality information available to me without leaving my house. I like the way that different elements of work fit in the elements of my day and that there is a wide range of granularity of outputs, from writing a book to individual tweets. Lastly, these are small, subtle changes and yet the way they intermesh to create the fabric of a working day is, I feel, quite remarkable. We've just become so habituated to them that we fail to appreciate this. I cannot his challenge to do the same; but here in hindsight, I am reconstructing November 23 from mostly memory, but also some digital footprints. As a preface, my job working for the NMC means my office is my home, and my patterns fall short of a 9-5, especially this week while my Mom is visiting from Florida, but here goes. -------------------------------------------- The day starts by alarm clock on my iPhone. I was ambitious to get a lot done today, so it started at 6:15AM, but lately I have been going a few multiple trips to the Snooze Bar. Once a bit more awake, I admit taking some time there to scan the email inboxes (seeing no urgent THE WEB SERVER IS ON FIRE messages, I do a quick clean up/delete of stuff I know I can prune from the subject line. I also read a few stories, blog posts in Google Reader. I have mine organized into a few folders- ed tech (mostly blogs), techie (mashable, engadget, etc), "big ideas", photography, etc. I have been marking more stories to track using the Share feature- I think yesterday I shared one form MediaShift IdeaLab on How To Capture High Quality Video on Your Mobile Phone. I am not using it much yet, but I did toy around with some web site code that tracks the things I share/favorite/Instapaper into one interface (http://cogdogblog.com/reading), but am using the Google Reader Share more now to track things to look at later (whenever that is). I have another private folder of feeds from my sites (it's called "dogs only") that has among others, an RSS feed on issues from my Feed2JS Gogle code site so I can track reports, and one has been hanging there unread for a week or so. I also track daily a feed from comments on my flickr stream, and always enjoy seeing that one lit up. Sometimes days go by without any action, but today there were 6, 3 comments, 2 favorites, and one note added to a photo. Also I do a quick check on the iPhone for Twitter (the new notifications is great, but I only have it set to light up a badge, I dont need to get pop up notes of replies or noises ringing). I also see it is my turn in Words With Friends, I have a few games going, and have been going on a terror streak of great hands that is bound to end soon. Arghhh it does, in one game I have a hand of AAAAIRO. Enough dawdling around, time for the key ask- making coffee. It's gotten pretty chilly, and I check the wood stove, which still has good red coals from last night, so I stoke it up and toss on a few small logs to increase the heat. I have breakfast with Mom. By 8:30am, its time to flip the laptop open- there is a smattering of email, nothing to great when this week is the Thanksgiving Holiday. I take care of personal email (Gmail). I see that my flickr Pro account is up for renewal, and do not want to let that lapse, so pay via paypal- my record there goes back to 2004- interesting that when Pro first came out it was $7, but they must have seen that as too high and dropped it to $24.95, which I have paid every year since. There was a nice note from Micheal P at University of Cape Town who thanked me for a blog post about an Amazing Story he shared (based on his previous email), and he offered to try and get the woman who's story it was to record a video for it. Cool! There is quite a burst of comments to my post on Are You Liking the Like Web (a burst is 14, a huge spike), and I respond to a few as well as the other ones that came in via twitter. I do keep Tweetdeck open all day, I dont open it every time a note comes up, but the pulse makes me feel like I am close to the machine. I toss in a few snarky fun comments, one in response to a D'Arcy Norman tweet of a horrendous Blackboard alert message, and another toying with Chris Lott's mention of me, which as often is the case, comes wrapped in his humor. I could note that it is easy to dismiss this bantering as a waste of time being silly in public, but I see it no different than the banter that might go on during a break at work, or while waiting in line somewhere; just in this case I am able to do it with people I mostly know (and many I don't). It's an important social glue (at least for me) among the other mundane or regular things we do, and I tend to bta back and forth with people I know like doing the same. I then switch to the work email (we have Google Education Edition apps for NMC). There's some spam on a few Horizon Report blogs, and one old oen I can see I forgot to check the box to force a commenter to have one previously approved comment to post w/o moderation. There are a few more tech issues to go back and forth with our web server admin and some developers working a project for us (apparently we need to set up an SSL certificate, which means setting up an account, some more back and forth with the office on which one we should use). More email on organizing a webinar I am doing next week with my colleague Ruben Puentedura. On searching for his previous message, I note I missed a reply he sent earlier to my request to set up a Skype call so we can coordinate. He says he is in Sweden this week, but he can call me at 11pm his time (3pm local, but I do a double check with the World Time Clock) and add it to my Google calendar. There are some listserv moderations for NMC, some requests for information via the web site form, a few web site content tweaks. My ichat pops up, and its my CEO Larry asking for time to today to catch up- we use IM a ton between the NMC staff, and in many ways it is an indicator or both our presence and availability. I check the schedule, and see wide openness, respond, "Any time." He replies with "how about in 10 minutes". I then turn my attention to checking what I ought to be doing- I've managed to clean up the scattered list of hand scribbled things, and have been trying to get better at using an online tsk tool (Nozbe, http://www.nozbe.com/). I go through spurts of being regular at Nozbe to ignoring it for a few weeks, but it never yells at me. I get to check off a few tasks that were done, make some calendar adjustments to other. With email, I try to keep the inbox, if not zero, to one fold of messages (50 in google) so I archive a lot or toss others in the hand "Actionable" drawer. I note I have to process the recording for a podcast I recorded last night with Gardner Campbell. I use the eCamm Call recorder because it is easy and more importantly, puts our voices into separate audio tracks, which makes it easier to edit. It is saved as a QuickTime movie, so I have to drop it on a script that splits the tracks into two quicktimes, and a second one that converts it to AIFF. I then am checking a Google Web form I need to modify as a signup form for an upcoming event, and notice that the "10 minutes" I said to larry as slipped to about 25. I send a message and say something like "Lost track of time AGAIN" and he responds "LOL me too". I call on the Plain Old Telephone, a technology we use a lot at NMC (my big technology feat a few months ago was finally getting around to setting up the one button calls for numbers I use often, for some reason telephone technology defies me). There's a lot of things to review as we discuss a problem with the geolocation data on our new (still under wraps) Horizon Navigator project. We are both testing the map editing fields on test records, and sort our what works and what doesn't, and determine there are a few questions we need to take back tot he developers. We shift to talk about some changes in next year's horizon projects, Larry shares updates on two new related projects that may happen, we review some details for other events, etc. We do a lot of these free form sharing, brainstorming calls, often as not un scheduled. As it happens, the developers email a CSV file of some 300 projects that are lacking the geo data we need to map them on our interface. These are a list of drupal node ids and titles, which they let us know can eb edited via http://......../node/{node id}/edit (which I know). I think, "we need an easier way for staff to run through these), so I import this CSV file into a new Google spreadsheet, set up a new column with a formula to concatenate the urls string and the id into a clickable link, add a column so we can initial when the data is updated, and share it with my colleagues who are going to go through and update the data. Basically we have some information about projects and we have to figure out at least a city/state/country, if not street address, to enter into the drupal site (it auto geocodes based on that data). I start from the bottom of the list, and suggest to Larry to start at the top. its always interesting to see the same spreadsheet being modified in near real time. Some of the data is easy to find (for web sites that lost their physical street address somewhere), others take some researching; a few of the data need better URLs for their primary link. While checking one site that uses semantic web technology, I find a link to DBpedia, an open source project aiming to assist in turning Wikipedia (and other web page content) into structured data. I get a little distracted as it is interesting, and make sure I bookmark it in delicious. In between, my colleague Rachel IMs and lets me know a few of the layouts for another section of this new site are not working, and I go in and notice a tedious series of set ups I did the day before (I counted 62 clicks for each of 37 sections) are gone, or just as possibly, I missed them. It only takes a few minutes to repeat the brainless click task. It's getting close to noon, and I really want to grab lunch quick so I can get in a training run for the half marathon I am doing in January, but there is also in the inbox a semi -urgent notice to get a "hold the dates" email to a list of people who are supposed to be at the webinar I am doing next week with Ruben. We are lacking some key info from the event sponsor (like exactly WHAT technology they are setting up for us), and I have not had enough details to set up the event web page. But since we want to have people sign up for this one (then we send login details a few days before), I copy an existing Google sign up form, make the modifications, test it, create a short URL to point to it, and generate the email, including the signup for so at least they can have that info, Within 12 minutes of sending the email, I can see the spreadsheet filling in (if you have never done this, it is a real thrill, at least for a geek). Yikes, it has gotten to be about 12:45, so I shut the lid, and go have a quick lunch with Mom (reheated soup and pizza). By the time I return to "glance" at the computer (was planning to get out for a run at 1:30pm), email shows a few more technical issues that need responses, a question from an NMC member needs one, a quick glance at twitter shows nothing I am compelled to jump into. Doing some calculations, it is looking tight to get in both a run and a shower before the Skype call with Ruben, and I decided I will push it til after the call. I return to the geolocation data and process another 10 or 20, and have a quick IM with Larry about some of the things we have listed being in the wrong area. By about 2:30, I've been head deep in this a while, and need a breather. I flip back to pesonal Gmail, respond to a question from the new google group I joined for TEDxPHX -someone was interested in the concept of "unschooling" looking for links. I chimed in with the work I dod, a reference, with my own caveats, on DIY U, mention that it owes more than it gave to godfather of EDUPUNK and tell them to read the glass bees blog post that started it all, and a few more links I quickly scavenge from my delicious bookmarks. Ruben promptly ring on Skype at 3:01pm and we chat a bit about travel, the work he is doing in Sweden, Thanksgiving plans, and then go over some logistics for the webinar we are doing together. We wrap, I squash a few more emails. Rachel has found someone who can do this geolocation updates for us, so I create an editing account, share the spreadsheet, and set up a few instructions. Time is ticking. I close the laptop, get on my running gear, and head out at 4:10pm. It's a chilly 42°F and I get in 2.7 miles, but there's no time to relax, a quick shower, and at 5:30 Mom leaves with me for my regular Tuesday night yoga class in Pine. It is not hard core yoga (not that I know what it is), we joke a lot and have fun. What I have gotten to like, besides seeing friends who are not edtechies, is that I start with all this work stuff swirling in my mind, and after a few minutes of breathing and stretching, it fades to the background, for at least an hour. Then, after the healthy exercise, we go down to Sidewinders bar for beer and fried food! We got home at 8:30pm, the day is not quite done for this dog. The nightly chore is cleaning yesterdays ash from the woodstove, and restocking the indoor supply of firewood and kindling twigs, and starting a fire. I then go about my "other" tech activities, outside work (some). I realize I have not looked at all at today's @dailyshoot photo assignment -- I usually try to do it first thing so I can either be thinking about it, or at least try to get photos early I may be able to use if I dont take any later. I scramble around the house for subjects (today is a white object on a white background, ugh), find a few that might work, do some others I can use for my other daily photo (2010/365 photos). I decide a fun thing, and something I have been meaning to do, is to install on my PC the Myst III software I found for $2 at a thrift store. It actually works, and I spend about 10 minutes poking around, trying to get back in a Myst mindset. I attended to the error reported in the Feed2JS google code side, and darned if I did not uncover an error in my code ways, so I tweaked and tested it, updated the source code, checked the issue as "fixed" (I hope)/ My next idea is to get my Mom to be a prop for a blog post idea I've had for a while (she's a good sport, eh)- so we got this one for "Mom Gives Thumbs Down on Wired's Editorial Decision Making" cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Among my favorite daily tasks, usually this time of night, are processing, editing, and captioning my photos- I posted 8 photos out of maybe 23 I took today. (flickr does an elegant job of archiving by date, not always easy to get to... http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/archives/). I did a blog post taking my own swipe at Wired Magazine's being a boob about their covers, composing and posting directly to my blog from the flickr photo I used. Seeing the clock ticking towards 11;30pm, I perhaps unwisely decided to get the podcast I recorded the night before- this is for the Networked Faculty Development Seminar Gardner Campbell is running at Baylor University and beyond. Through NMC, I've been trying to support the participation of people beyond the Baylor group; what Gardner and I aim to do (but schedules get in the way) is to do a weekly podcast summarizing the reading and discussion of the current week,a nd look ahead to the next -- posted on the NMC site at http://www.nmc.org/nmfs. Actually it is my ploy to get a weekly conversation in with gardner; last night we just talked and joked for about 50 minutes before we recorded. I was already a day or 2 late, and wanted to get it off my list, so I did my quick editing in Audacity (removing breathing sounds, tightening up dead space, deleting a few extraneous remarks), posted it to our media site, and wrote up the summary to http://www.nmc.org/podcast/nmfs/8142. I'm not remembering or stating exactly, but it was after midnight before this was done. -------------------------------------------- And that was my work/life day, not all are like that, but it is somewhat representative. There is a lot I forgot or am missing details on. And my gosh, it took maybe an hour to write it up! But I have to credit Martin for spurring this. I am not sure I have a grand revelation; obviously technology is woven in, and today my tech tasks were mundane, nothing really creative. And it is likely blatantly obvious my work/life boundaries are smudged across the time frame. Give this a try! I would not recommend trying to write it up as you go, that would change the flow IMHO- there is something lost in reflection backwards, but maybe something gained. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog "Open" is the theme as I arrived to a wet soggy grey Vancouver for this week's Open Education Conference. So while I cannot expect stores to be 100% open all the time (and this liquor store does pretty damned good to be open), I have higher hopes for content and media and ideas and people. I should be working but... I cannot remember the last time I wore a tie. Somebody died or got married maybe 10 years ago. Another I used as a rag to clean a bike chain. But today for work, I was decked out in this spiffy, CDB official ware, courtesy of Mom. I doubt she gets around to reading the blog but hey Mom, here it is. it's is more than a shirt, yes, just like a floor wax/desert topping combo, my shirt is also a recipe book. I might be cooking up some dog bones this weekend. Since I know not which will be last, I am doing my own archival work here. This was my first day twittering on January 31, 2007: 11 twitter post by Alan Levine on January 31, 2007, available for now via advanced twitter search, but preserved here as an image because.... well you know what might happen. The contents are available below. This first day's glorious messaging says so little about the future. Here is that fateful day, with tweets in chronological order: Looking at a long list of Cole's twitterstwittering while on a teleconference call- can they hear me typing?setting up a google doc for a project, for once someone suggested it before meduh, i verified my account twicegetting a bit addicted and not doing any worktwittered my backgroundGetting ready to blog about twitterNetNewsWire? That is so old skoolgetting ready to publish my blog post about twttterAll blogged! See http://cogdogblog.com/2007/01/31/networking/ I blame Cole for my new habit Alan Levine tweets on January 31, 2007 It's all a bit... like drivel. Brief (those precious 140 characters), no images, no hashtags, URLs are just plan text. Alan's normal typos. I do blame/credit Cole Camplese, then at Penn State University, for making me aware enough (likely through his blog) to give it a try (his blog post is gone, closest I could find was via the Wayback Machine). I do recall he talked a bit about the potential of it for his PSU team to quickly, update each other on project, being more efficient than email. Hey! Cole invented Slack! I even managed to blog about it: https://cogdogblog.com/2007/01/networking/ And D'Arcy Norman must have been tapped by Cole too as he has a blog post the same day, the post is intact, and also quite a bite more informational than mine: Until last week, I hadn't heard of Twitter. Then Cole blogged about it, and the ETSTalk Podcast folks talked about it. They're looking at Twitter as a tool to facilitate shared awareness of organizational activities. Twitter is essentially nanoblogging (I just made that word up) - stuff that is more of a quick "I'm doing this right now" kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of "friends" and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they're up to. Right now. Cole's investigating this from the perspective of "how would a tool like this affect teaching and learning, and running an organization" I'm not doing anything quite so lofty, I'm just playing. What's kind of cool is that it makes it easy for me to track what I'm doing, so when it's time to do the Dreaded Procrastinated Timesheet Entry mere hours before the payroll cutoff, I could just spider the list of archived updates. https://darcynorman.net/2007/01/31/twittering/ I like how D'Arcy and I call the activity "twittering". Maybe that will come back in vogue. Or die on the vine. How can you find your first day? There's more than enough posts that tell you how to find the first tweet via Twitter's advanced search (while it lasts). Use your profile to find out what Twitter reports as your "since date" and then construct a search that wraps around it with "since" and "until" dates for search parameters. So for my bird born date of January 31, 2007, I found it worked best to use the day before as since (January 30, 2007) and two days after (February 2, 2007) as ai noticed some did not come through with more bookended dates. Oh also key os to switch the default tab at the top from "Top" (useless) to "Latest" What was your first twittering day look like? What will your last one look like? Looking at your own tweets is of course navel gazing, for more perspective, I made a little tool (using a great tip from Anil Dash) that lets you dial in any date in history, and see what all the people you follow now were twittering that day. Give the Twitter Time Tunnel a spin. Here I am diving back to my first twittering day: The Twitter Time Tunnel set for January 31, 2007 Actually I can see I am actually getting up to the day before, I might have to adjust the code! But anyhow, this was the discourse then among people I follow now The fascinating tweets of the day before I joined twitter. Short. "bank run" "sleepy" "doing music with mike" "updating all my profiles to say NYC for location" This is starkly different from 2022. I am not saying better or worst. Time travel is trippy. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/51017986300 Our New Old Phone flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) It's time to do away with the silly conference bags and the wasted trees contained within. The whole concept is so, 1980-ish. I may get some organizational dings for this, but I am compelled to complain once more about the staleness of the educational conference format. Somebody please stick a fork in it. This League For Innovation "Innovations 2005" conference drew 2400+ folks to New York City. The "League" (it always feels like there should be automatic trumpet calls when i say "The League", like it is the "League of Extraordinary Colleges") seems not to have changed its conference format since their first one I attended in the mid 1990s. To me the feeling of innovation is still lingering back a decade or more, like a high school jock at the 30th reunion still re-enacting the winning tocuhdown. The conference program (only available on the web as a large PDF download) even has the same exact layout as every previous conference I've attended. Now the format of that is not a big deal, but the format of the conference is the same too. There are about 30 sessios per hour, so folks are spread thin, lofty keynotes, the obligatory exhibit hall , and lines of people queing up to read email. The cheesy conference bag stuffed full of glossy brochures? Mine is on its way to the dump. Wasteful. The 3 pound conferenc program? Hopefully recycled into material to create park benches. But mostly, the staleness is that still the lecture is the primary paradigmMark Millison who actually speaks like a person, not a teleprompter reader, and tells stories, reaches the audience. But Mark cannot be the whole show. I attended a session yesterday where the presenters actually read the PowerPoint slides, not just the bullets, but even 2-3 paragraph quotes that were on the screen. I am sorry, but it seems less than optimum to travel 2000 miles to have someone read to you something you could absorb by reading offline in 1/4 the time. Edward Tufte points out the information density of PowerPoint content is already rather low. To me, it drops off the table when someone reads it to me. The 50 minute session slots (the school bell rings?) rarely leaves any time for sufficient dialogue, conversation, the meatier stuff. It gets shoved in the breaks and the hallway talk. And still, too many presenters (IMHO) put way too much background and blah blah before the demo. Start with the demo.. Grab our attention. Engage us. And the session evaulations, still done on paper, requiring some poor underpaid drones to type it in, and return months later to the presenter. We're nearly all carrying wireless devices and there are rows of PCs lined up with people who travel across country to read their email.... why not use 'em to collect data? But maybe the web, where I get to choose, skim, skip, dig deeper on my own terms, has ruined my attention span. And do not even get me going about the issue of the presentation rooms lacking Internet access for presentations (unless you desire to pay $700). I cannot believe it is not available considering broadband is in every guest room. I'm ready to take a pass on future conferences that are built on the successful formulas of the 1970s. After all, we are not still wearing leisure suits and big bouffant hair-dos. Yes, I am ..... well, you read the title. Update: It gets worse- there is a vendor sponsored e-mail wire labeled as "as 24-hour email and wireless access". I asked if the wireless was open or if I needed a network access name.... Neither, I cannot use my wireless equipped laptop with their set up, it is only for the set of laptops they provide. So there are people lined up to use a wireless laptop. I am more perplexed and amused than... sleepy. Featured Image: Mine, Bagged, trashed. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6054905 The Home for the Conference Bag flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) cc licensed flickr photo shared by ouyea... "That's for kids." "It's just a game." "Cute. Now let me know when you do something academically valuable." "Grow up." "(I can't do that, people will laugh)." With senseless violence becoming a sad norm, with the weight of a world dying of overheating or exterminating its own biosphere, with a future dimmed of optimism, can there be a more timely place than now to truly embrace the power of play? Sure, we can recall the warm memory of a time without the boundaries of possible, when we did not electronic toys but something as simple as a box cc licensed flickr photo shared by Speedboat Professionally we can give nodding ascent to the notion that a sense of play is good, but then we wrap it in scarequotes, and make sure no one is looking, before we revert to our adult responsibilities. I am not advocating we all regress to single digit age behaviors, but find the spaces where we can reach out and fly to the moon on a broomstick. See the great ideas Maria Anderson outlines: Playing to Learn? on Prezi Play is a lot of what weaves its way through ds106 -- Jim Groom is a master at making his classes a playground atmosphere, in the sense of encouraging his students to create, and let the self monitoring behavior meters slide off, yet at the same time, learning the power of expression and creativity. That's the parts to hold on to via the wild rollercoaster that is just ow ratcheting up the first hill. It's a time to stretch past the familiar. And do it with a bunch of other freaks. I was inspired to frame this after my drive home last night from the Phoenix airport. A great pleasure of the 2 hour drive is getting time to catch up wth podcasts of This American Life which, to me, is some of the most inventive, form breaking places for storytelling-- and they are doing it with only one media! Just audio. But what makes TAL work is not the sounds, but the brilliant writing. I continually find myself laughing out loud hysterically or pounding the steering wheel. Last night, it was the former, with episode 422 on Comedians of Christmas Comedy Special. The premise was that Christmas is a time of well worn songs, movies, stories, but who really knows or tells jokes about the holiday? In the opening, Ira Glass played some excerpts recorded by producer Jonathan Menjivar, who talked to third graders at a school playground. As Ira notes wryly, the kids do not seem to know any jokes from memory, but do not hesitate to make them up on the spot. "Why did the reindeer cross the road?" starts one kid, "Tell me," says Jonathan. "To.. get to the antler station!" and the kid goes on to improv a whole hilarious logic for reindeer behavior when they lose their rack. The beauty here, that there is no hesitation for kids to create stories, for many to know instinctively the arc of a joke, and to just stand there and make it up on the spot (see the blog post with a run down of the kids jokes). Just for the sheer fun of it. Just to see if they can spontaneously weave a path to a smile or laughter. cc licensed flickr photo shared by Yelnoc The striking thing is just reflect on all of your internal reactions that would just stop you for doing what kids do naturally. It is that adult self-awareness that stifles us into mature silence. I'd rather be laughing with the kids. I have been thinking for a while that what we ought to be doing to become better presenter is to get better at doing improv- get away from the slides and notes and well rehearsed talking points, and tell a story to an audience. Yes, I can feel the fear puckering. I would too. I do. But think about a safe place to try improv and get better at it? So here is an idea I might toss into the ds106 Assignment machine. It's actually similar in some ways to the Random Assignment Generator. Turn on your web camera. Press record. Start a timer. You then go to a URL that say generates a random one line set up for a story, like: Tell a tragedy about a chicken and a bowling ball. or Make up a story about the love between a flower and a chihuahua- these would be silly but require you to just improv on camera. Just you, your voice, your brain, maybe a few hand gestures. You have to tell a complete the story in 3 minutes. Upload to YouTube, blog, share. The first one is likely going to be fear filled stammering terror. Well, mine would be that plus about 30% "um". So maybe you trash your first one, but then save the second. What might you get from this? Freedom from the confining reflex of self restraint. Play as much as possible in ds106. Don't just do what you know how to do, go far into the unknown. It's just a gesture to nod in approval of the power of play- it is a whole magnitude of order difference to do it. And another to share it. Play, #%@^ it! cc licensed flickr photo shared by shashchatter Here in Phoenix, we don't have that old saying about "raining and pouring", especially since it is now 143 days since any water fell from the sky. But the podcasting flow is pretty good, with my quick and dirty recording with an iRiver, simple Audacity editing (fade in, fade out, bump levels, and take out a few "umms"), and publishing via a scotch tape and rubber band MovableType system. It seems to make sense for many of our projects and events, since not everyone in our geographically far flung system can be there for synchronous events. Just toss the iRiver on a table and record. So recently added to our podcast mix: (1) We have a group trying to look creatively at Learning Space Design. On Wednesday of this week, we visited an Interior Design class at Mesa Community College. The students had completed projects doing a "Post Occupancy Evaluation" of the college's Jazzland CyberCafe, a coffee shop and student gathering area (plus wireless and technology available) built during a remodel of the old library. Previous design students had worked on the plans for this facility. This group did photographic ethnography, surveys, and detailed observations to gather data and analyze just how the facility was used. The students gave our committee presentations and discussed their findings. We will eventually have the PowerPoints posted to our meeting notes wiki, but the 63 minute audio is posted: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/audio/mcc_design_students_mar06.mp3 (2) At the same meeting, we also had a cool demo of what Mesa Community College is doing with Voice/Video Over IP. All of their phones are/will be VOIP, essentially enabling them to do video conferencing with cheap web cams over the network. But the reason for this demo was to show us their surveillance cameras and software-- for their security office, cameras are set up in open and public places around campus, and are connected and controlled via IP. The software they have is pretty amazing; cameras can be scripted to do pans and zooms, and the video stored is all digital. Beyond the concerns of privacy, we were told that numerous crimes had been solved (including a mugging that had happened that day). But our group was interested in the possibility of this kind of technology to possibly gather data over time that would help assess how informal learning space was being used. Their ought to be some tools to script image captures on a timed basis, and some method of estimating perhaps number of people in or moving through a space. Anyhow, the audio is a bit over 30 minutes: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/audio/mcc_voip_mar06.mp3 (3) I've been posting 8-12 minute clips recorded from our Honors Forum Lecture Series, where 6 public lectures are given to a student and community office during the year, all within the theme of the national honor society. (This year it is "Popular Culture: Shaping and Reflecting Who We Are"). The audio is sent to our colleges in CD format, so we just wanted to provide a sampler (plus I am not excited about digitizing hours and hours of audio). This set of podcasts are listed at: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/podcast.php (4) And woot! We just got our first Apple iTunes podcast in their system. Our Digital Story examples mentioned earlier are now directly linkable to the A-iT store via: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=130033155&s=143441 Can't wait to add this as a subscribe link to the storytelling site. That's enough. Clouds are building out my window. cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog An actual lifetime ago, April 1987, I was perhaps likely forward to an upcoming 24th birthday but also the trip that summer that would pack up my east coast life for transplanting in Arizona. But on this day, I got word my brother passed away. The fragments of the story slip through the fingers, as yellow as the old tape that holds photos in the books. [caption id="attachment_29134" align="alignnone" width="500"] A happy six month old baby[/caption] In his baby book, now in my care since my Mom passed away, at 14 months, the book has a blank page for "Anecdotes: amusing incidents may be recorded below". Incidents of amusement, I wonder how my parents dealt with the mixed bag of joy, appreciation, but overwhelming concern to be parenting a mentally retarded child. I can only wonder. [caption id="attachment_29135" align="aligncenter" width="394"] March 20, 1953 - "First piece of cake. Grabbed a handful of cake and pushed in his mouth. Loved the chocolate, Barry [cousin] helped him"[/caption] A piece of cake, huge incident. Finding the joy in every little crumb of chocolate. The pages for age 10 are blank; 1963 was the year I was born, and my parents made the wrenching decision to put David in an institution, Rosewood State Hospital, a place I will never go back to. There was no birthday party. I am fairly sure my parents paid him a visit, they were good about that. But nothing noted in the book, not guests, no gifts, the book painfully put away on a bookshelf, a book meant to mark the progress and development of child. David would never develop much farther than the amused by cake mental age. I can only wonder and speculate of a different universe where David lives a full life. For now, I only have this one. I do this yearly so I keep my memories as fresh as the old yellow tape and fading photos allow. cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That is all we can do. I have to admire and respect the radical gusto with which Stephen Downes postulates What Not To Build -- it matters not even if I agree or disagree (which I do), is that he puts out there no holds barred, as he has done for longer than some of you kids have known what a browser is. And I always learn things-- My sort of environmental scan is a bit different from what you'll get from consultants and venture capitalists. Don't ask me what companies are developing what products, how industry stocks are performing, or where all the 'smart money' is going. I don't know and I don't care. What I can tell you, though, is what technologies are working, what technologies are flopping, and what technologies are fads. It's practical, down-to-earth advice. For example, if you are a technology developer, you already know that you should not try to build a new operating system, a new word processor, an online store or an auction site, for example. These have been built and have established a mainstream presence. You would need thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to compete with them. But when it comes down to it, it is an opinion, based on a lot of things Stephen looks at, but we all carry the perspective of our own goggles. So of course there is going to be a lot of vehement agreeing/disagreeing with his convention that "the iPhone is a fad". And... mostly it is "people who have/want versus iPhones" versus "people who don't/hate Apple". Even if it is a "fad"-- and in technology, for that matter, what is not a fad? What really lasts? What is the staying power required to be "not fad?"... Videodiscs? fad. Floppy disks? fad. 256 color web safe color palettes? fad. Stephen's position seems to be it is a fad if all you think of it as a phone. That's just part of the name, dude. So if the iPhone is a fad, it is without doubt, IMHO, a game changer. If it were not, why are all the competitors rushing to make clones? Without the iPhone, would we see other phones with multi-touch screens or would it be a proliferation of more years of button machines, sliding keyboards, and horrific interfaces? I've been tracking the stats on the NMC web sites this past year with the nifty Clicky service (click image for larger view). Without wavering, for as many months as I cannot remember, the top search terms coming inbound to the main NMC web site have been combinations of "iphone" "iPod Touch". And consistently over a stretch of 6 months, one of the top 3 or 5 pages accessed has been a May 12 blog post by Keene Haywood Keene Haywood on iPhone vs iTouch and why I would always choose an iPhone. The blog part of the NMC site is hardly used, Keene and maybe 5 others out of 3000 accounts actually publish on this site, but this relatively obscure post (no offense keene) has been a top accessed page for 6 plus months. That seems interesting. But this is even weirder. (click image for larger view) Another site, NMC Virtual Worlds, has nothing to do with iPhones- it is about our projects in the virtual worlds space -- and here too, we get a steady stream of search terms leading here on "Second Life iPhone" mainly from one post from August 6 Second Life Communication via iPhone-- which again has consistently been in the top 5 or so accessed URLs. But in some interpretations, this is the sign that this is a fad... or really? In the end, or not the end, I am not standing on either sign of the "fad" sense as I don;t even fully understand what makes or breaks a fad. If it is a fad, it will fade? Or it means other phone makers should not copy it? or they will? Informally, and when I travel, I watch the people using iPhones. They don't look like all geeks, or Apple heads, just ordinary folks. And I find my access to information is changing with the iPhone. You do get accustomed to being able to have access to email, the web, RSS feeds, twitter where-ever you are (that gets a signal). This, yes, is not unique to the iPhone, but BI (before iPhone) I don't recall so many people getting the web in a web browser on a phone; it was always a stripped down WAPpy web. Looking at the innovative developments with the accelerometer, the camera/microphone as an input device, the integration of portable apps with web content... seems more ripe for expansion than fade to fad-dom. I await the response ;-) Related articles by ZemantaGoogle iPhone app is the gift that keeps on givingMove Over Kindle - E-Books Hit Cell Phones I can't stop the curiosity impulse and sometimes feel obliged to chase down source-less photos. So it started with a Cory Doctorow tweet (just follow him, you will not be sorry) https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1494697045231165443 Why this image? It's just road side Americana. Was it the tweet saying "circa 1970s" which was my childhood? That guess might be based on the vintage of the photo. The models of cars might push it to late 1960s but not too far. The tweet goes to Wil Wheaton's Tumblr (which might be the source of the 1970s). Tumblr... yes it still exists. It was the platform that really enabled that "reblog" / repost thing. a one click way to just post to your site what someone else did. It leaves a trail of unsourced media. Wil (can I call you by first name) reblogged this from a tumblr called Every Day Life in the Past. End of trail because no one in tumblr attributes photos. That's so not cool there. What do we have there? A cafe named "Magic Chef" offering "Home Style Cooking" or maybe it was the "Eat Shop Cafe"-- that's pretty damned unique. Not. Search results for Magic Chef Cafe land you mostly in appliance land. I did find another image (via Google Lens reverse search) of the same restaurant from a vintage postcard seller ("MAGIC CHEF CAFÉ RESTAURANT PEPSI COLA SIGN OLD CARS ADVERTISING POSTCARD COPY", this image is the same place, but the cars are older: That could push it early 1960s? There seems to be a shop adjacent, some kind of Dance studio? My trail ran cold. Most references to Magic Chef restaurant seemed to be ones that were later taken over and turned into other kinds of restaurants - Chinese, Filipino, one in Qatar, one in Abu Dhabi. I thought maybe I would find a reference with an address and do the Google Street view visit, but alas, I went cold. Maybe someone else can go farther. Not all the rabbit holing lands you some place, it just ends up some digging around. But always worth it. Well, to me. UPDATE: March 1, 2022 See comments below as Eric Likeness has sleuthed this to the nth degree: See Getty image that matches the postcard one above, it's stated as a 1976 photo?Also, same image from Worth Point that included an address- it was in Denver, 2459 South Santa Fe Drive.And finally, located in Google StreetView... not much to see now! Eric wins the rabbit prized and also, for showing how the internet works- ask for help, offer help, it all makes for a nice circle. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/jm999uk/3491575165 Same hole, same rabbit, different day, but same hilarious photo! flickr photo by johnmuk shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license This cartoon is on a card my sister sent me a few years ago; I have kept it on my refrigerator along with the gallery of dogs past. But I'm not that dog, I'm still at the blogging, April of this year is rolling up to the 10 year mark for CogDogBlog. I'm still figuring it out. And that is what I was musing about today for the people in the open #etmooc course/community (were I in the business of making acronyms would I be aiming for "COURSMUNITY"? No) that launched this month. My part so far has been setting up the blog hub, and in verifying the feeds for that site, I have glanced at over 450 blogs. I've not seen any alike. Quite a few are new blogs, maybe new for the course but also it seems some educators first efforts. That's awesome. I tuned in for the Intro to blogging session last week with Sue Waters just cause I like Sue. I cannot tell you how to blog (well, the key skill is typing in a box and clicking a "publish" button, no more complex or time consuming that doing email). I won't tell you how to blog, and if you come across a web site telling you how to blog, here is my advice. Close the window. But I will talk about what I find is important about the act. For me. Your mileage/kilometerage will vary. It should vary greatly. I am selfish, I blog for me. Not in the shameful self-promotion sense, but because I have found it a way to process my ideas. Perhaps the most relevant description of what blogging means to me goes back to the Stone Age of blogging, in 2002. Writer Cory Doctorow wrote then on My Blog My Outboard Brain: Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers. : : Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVo frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form. It gives me context, connections, and meaning to the things I am focusing on, wondering about, pissed off at, or just triyng my best Steven Johnson hunch chasing. That's all obvious in the moment. Try this exercise. What were you thinking about on February 14, 2006 (besides Valentines Day)? What do you remember? I don;t remember myself, but my outboard brain does! Yes I was writing about a Dissonance of Blogs iN Education (and linked to the same Doctorow post I did above). This is why I blog: It's not just a reference thing, of looking up factoids, this is my history of ideas, almost 10 years worth. Here is what I think is important in blogging, for me, in no real order. Leading with an interesting title. I don't write until I have a title. It is maybe the most important piece! It's what shows up in search results, RSS feeds, tweets. You want to grab interest with the title. Do you remember those things called "newspapers" - they had headlines. Okay, it's obviously not the most important. But don;t blog with dull titles. "Introduction to etmooc"? yawn. Play with your titles, tease us, leverage references, puns, metaphors, Even just doing something like "Hello etmooc! It's Me, Alan". Do us all a favor and write interesting titles. Find your writing style. This evolves over time. BUt you need to figure out what is the comfortable way for you to write. It's like finding that favorite pair of broken in jeans. You know you would rather where them than the polyester dress pants! And how do you find that style? You just start, You try different things. You read other blogs. You lift from writing you like. You work at it like exercise, like making bread. It happens over time. It never stops evolving. Don't try to sound like someone or something you are not. Be human. Make typos. Be real. Or find a character. I've had students who emulated pirates, princesses, animals in their "voice". A blog ought to belong to you, and be you. Use and Embed Media. I always lead with an image or a video. That's how I do it. Once I have nailed the title, I am off to Compfight to find a creative commons image that is a symbol, metaphor, of what I plan to write about. The web is a visual and textual medium. Use those affordances. Link Like Crazy I remain puzzled by my students who start blogging; they are experienced at the surfing part of the web, they must click hyperlinks all the time, but most do not intuitively use hyperlinks (until they get a string of comments from me). The web is not a web without hyperlinks they are the building block of the web. Theya re what adds context and connection to your writing. Participate in Other People's Blogs. I have not met one blogger who did not feel good about getting comments (except for spam comments). Yet many blogs are full of apologies for not commenting (or not blogging- the main blogging topic sometimes is blogging about not blogging). Comments are a catalyst that generates more commenting. And I am not talking about "Nice Post" Use a comment to add meaning, connection, or to disagree. Make it meaningful. To me commenting is just another place to blog. It's like being a guest at someone else's house. Respect them and don't crap on the carpet. I go back to a 2003 post by Matthew Kirschenbaum where he describes how a dude named François Lachance blogged solely in the space of other people's blogs: I take his point, and think I can predict the range of theoretical positions such a "blog" (should we call it a comment blog?) might be said to occupy: this is blogging in the margins, distributed blogging at the interstices of the discourse network. François appears on no one's blogroll, his entries are not tracked by blogdex or weblogs.com or similar sites. He is an utter non-entity in the standard ecological renderings of the blogosphere, yet he unquestionably has a presence "here." Do you know how I found that reference? I searched my outboard brain. During Sue's blogging session quite a few people asked "What should I blog about?" That's part of finding your own style and voice, but I hope that educators blog from their viewpoint, connecting their perspective and experiences. We have more than enough people writing about the top 50,000,000 ipad apps or the best tools for content curation. Puleeze. This is how I feel about that kind of blogging: https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/270605824446038016 If you are going to write about a technology, a web site, a tool- then use it. Make something. Write about your experience with it. We have more than enough echoing what all the popular blogs say. What is interesting to me is YOUR experience, not Wired or Mashable or TechMeme or ISTE or The Chronicle of Higher Education... Below is a likely incomplete outline of how / what I blog about. Suitable for wrapping fish or lining bord cages. Stuff I am doing / trying. This is my R&D. Trying a new technology. Working on a new web development project. Experimentation. Or its things I am trying in ym teaching, my thinking as I develop lessons or look back and reflect on them. I spend a large part of my day doing stuff. There's a lot of material there, for you too. Stuff I am thinking about. Quite often I formulate an idea for a blog when I am doing something else. Driving. Hiking. Pulling weeds in the backyard. Shopping. Often I work this through in my head, it's almost like blogging without a computer. It's not like I have paragraphs done, but I can almost feel it forming in my head. Then there is the stuff I cannot let go. Times where I cannot rest until i get the idea blogged out. It's like it will cause me more pain to not write then to stay up til 3am writing it. It reminds me of The Who's song Guitar and Pen, where Pete Townsend writes about the buring need to write (in his case songs): When you take up a pencil and sharpen it up When you're kicking the fence and still nothing will budge When the words are immobile until you sit down Never feel they're worth keeping, they're not easily found Then you know in some strange, unexplainable way You must really have something Jumping, thumping, fighting, hiding away Important to say That happens to ne. It's like I cannot NOT blog. I have no idea if other people have this issue. And it was not always there for me. I don't do drafts. I know colleagues who have drafts they slowly work on, sometimes taking years to write. I sit down and don't stop until I press publish. I write full of typos and bad grammar. I am sorry but that "jumping, thumping, fighting, hiding away important to say" thing has to be let out. Stuff that Makes Me Mad No one says your blog has to be kum=ba-yah all the time. What makes you angry? Those are fine fodder to get passionate, or to be making an argument. My approach is to satirize. Like MOOCs. They are funny to me, funny as cows. My blogging tone? Imagine some blog snob swirling a red pen, like a wine connoisseur, "Juvenile, sarcastic, with overtones of grandeur and petty peccadilloes. Ridden with typos." Stuff That Comes From (or Near) My Heart I would never tell someone to reach for the personal. That's your decision. But for me, opening up in writing, about things I might have trouble telling someone-- is super magically cathartic. It takes me places I do not expect to go. There are things I don't blog about. Politics. And umm.. well there are probably a few other categories. Life Stuff That Happens in My Day I have these experiences during the day that have nothing to do with my work but I find a connection, or it reminds me of something. I cannot walk without tripping on a metaphor. Find meaning and connection with your life and your work. Here's two things that happened today that might have been made into blog posts. (1) I was at a store and pulled out my iPhone to look something up, but I did that thing where in pulling it out of my pockets I was actually pressing buttons. In fact, I got an alert message asking me if I really wanted to delete an app: And I have no idea, I was distracted, or thinking of something else and I clicked ok! I did not want to delete an app and lose my settings? How many times to I get those nag reminder screens and make fun of them? This experience could take several directions, on thinking about what we do, or how no system is perfect given out human faults, or ... It was an experience with technology yes, but it was really that whole experience of doing something dumb that has me thinking about extending that into a topic. Sometimes I start these with a story like that and only in the writing do I find the direction I want to go. Sometimes I just delete them and say, Meh. (2) I am trying my hand more at cooking (I traveled for 2 years and hardly cooked, and was pretty basic before that). I really enjoy making soups. I started noticing as I looked at multiple recipes for the same soup, that the variation in recipe is pretty wide. It's almost that the recipe writer uses what they have in the kitchen. So I tried that today. I bought a Butternut squash- I have a basic recipe I use for that - its pretty much brown some onions and garlic (A lot of garlic, I have not found a recipe that recommends enough garlic), add water and soup stock (be it vegetable, chicken broth, bouillon). cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I then slice the squash, pop it in, let ir cook soft at least an hour, then move the lumpy stuff to a blender and smooth it. Add spices. What spices? I am not consistent. salt, pepper, a dash of cayenne. Dried sage. Parsley if I have (I didn't). But I am leaving town end of te week, and I figure I would use up my other vegetables. So I tossed in about 5 potatoes and the rest of the carrots. The soup is good. Maybe unique. It could be better. Cooking. It has metaphors. Experimentation. Trying. Or failing- look at my bad bread experiment: cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I could take this into many directions too in a blog post. I find I have more non-education non-work related activities in a day that I could use as connections or metaphors for my thinking. And here I am almost 2200 hundred words into a post. Some expert out there will tell you not to write long blog posts. Fooey on them. I don't need any stinking rules. I write my own. I don't write for them. They can get their own blog. So thats what I say to those starting out blogging. Don't worry about the form and and function. That will come in the process of blogging. You know how you get better at blogging? You blog. Then you blog again. And again. It's pretty simple if you ask me. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Photosightfaces Yes, it is pointless, incessant, barking. But it is my pointless, incessant, barking. Now out to improve your MovableType blog sanity, is Jay Allen's miraculous MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin version 1.5. This is a large update and offers one click, de-spammiing of both comments and trackbacks, adding to blacklist file, and rebuilding of offended files. It is like magic. I had one arrive today with 4 links not even on tyhe blacklist, and killed it cold, dead in seconds. I love the satisfaction, even if it is still reactionary (they spam, I spray). It is more fun that squashing cockroaches, and very parallel, except cockroaches have more more nobility and integrity than spammers. Please, somebody with some deep pockets of extra cash, reward Jay Allen for heroic coding. Bless Joe Clark. Not only does he write a stunningly useful book, but he also provides all of the chapters (for free) to Building Accessible Websites. When you buy the book, you get the entire text (but no graphics) on the included CD-ROM, along with a few extras, like fonts and utilities. Now the whole book is available online, in individual chapters. I was led this way since in the section on accessibility in Zeldman's Web Standards book, the mighty Z referenced Joe's work with supreme praise. I've just dived in a little, but Joe writes extremely clearly with a little bite of humor. And it is practical stuff you can use. I am already reviewing my coding of web forms based on Chapter 12. If you think web accessibility is just tossing in some ALT tags or getting Bobby approval, you better dive in a little deeper. It is not hard at all. Like someone has mixed the metaphors, "It is not rocket surgery." Joe leads the way. creative commons licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by roberthuffstutter With travel and moving to my new perch for a few months, in the last few weeks, my awareness of what's going on in Connected Courses has been mainly the vibe I get from scans of the #ccourses twitter stream and reading a few posts. Beyond counting tweets (~6000) and syndicated posts (~1700) it's mostly hunch to get a sense of what's going on. I prefer what I sense over what data tells me. What you don't see easily are inter blog commenting, the direct messaging/emails between people, the conversations they have elsewhere. You cannot even come close to getting your arms around it all. My hunch is that a good number folks are having that heady rush of a first connective experience, the kind that people who had their "first" in places like ETMOOC, EDCMOOC, CLMOOC, [fill in name of your favorite MOOC], e.g. what I remember from my first round of ds106 in 2011. I believe that after that, your experience is different the next round, not lesser, but that first OMG I AM CONNECTING WITH SO MANY COOL COLLEAGUES AROUND THE WORLD is, IMHO, un-repeatable. It's a made adrenaline rush. This is a good thing. And is also a goal of Connected Courses. But it's also the topic of Connected Courses. And it's worth some consideration of how you create that connective rush experience when it's not the topic of the course. I cannot in any way judge the experience of others, though I do think it's time to start weaving the thread of what people came here for- how to I integrate all the topics covered in a connected course I might create? And so I offer my own opinion which sounds a bit critical, but from where I site the "DO" part of Connected Courses has not been fronted as much as I might have designed. The original plans built in the idea of "makes" (perhaps influenced by CLMOOC). But when I look at the details for sections of Connected Courses, the Makes are buried way down at the end, past the hangouts, past lists of readings, past lists of videos. If I was just scanning, I would see them as an afterthought. I do not see blog posts or comments as "makes", to me they are part of the regular things to do. While quite a few people have been blogging voraciously I am curious about maybe running some database queries to generate some frequency distribution of blog activity. I do not have a sense of how pervasive the blogging is across the large numbers of people who signed up. I bet we still have a lot of reluctant bloggers, of people who see it as really just as something to do if there is spare time. To me, blogging is essential as a reflective practice in a connected course. I cannot see doing one where it was not only encouraged, but expected. But that's me. Connected Courses has offered great discussions, and shared resources, but in my eyes, not nearly enough Doing. As a small example (and here again it sound critical) but it really jumped out at me. In Unit 4 on Gender, Equity Access, there was a great presentation of the FemTechNet's Wikistorming activities- there was a "framing video" talking about Wikistorming -- but why were we not DOING Wikistorming? Or some of the other fantastic activities that go on in FemTechNet? To me, we missed a lot of opportunities to share an understanding of gender, equity, and access through experiencing them, from doing things, going beyond talking about things. More Do, please. I cannot help it. I was ruined by ds106. I sense people look at it and see the craziness in twitter, giffing, running a radio station making propaganda posters that get under Stephen Downes's skim -- and just chalk it up as "that's the fun course". Well it is fun, but the other thing is its more do, than talking about doing. And it calls on people to reflect on their work. And share it voraciously. This bubbled up to me after watching the replay of the session Alec Corous ran for Unit 5 Colearning on The Case of #ETMOOC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj94fbr79dg First of all, I love that Alec called on #ETMOOC and #ccourses participants to be in the hangout. Too many of the ones before were more like panels of experts. Here's a tip- have your participants co-lead the live sessions. But what came out early in the discussion from people who were part of Alec's MOOC in 2013 (http://etmooc.org/) was the importance of the very first shared activity. A Do. The lip-dub project was crowdsourced among participants for the idea, production and creation. Read Alec's follow-up on the making of the lip-dub project. And next, read Rhonda Jessen's reflection on this a year later. Let me repeat, the experience was that strong, it is having people thinking on it way after the course. Most people cease thinking about their course after the curtains are drawn. For many people, like ones in ETMOOC, it has not ended. It's what has become what looks like a silly rally cry in ds106 - "it's #4life" - is more than a slogan. The people in the hangout did highlight what it meant to set the climate for ETMOOC by starting with this activity, and how a sense of "play" made the course more inviting. The course started with a DO. One where many people participated. I think that is even more important- this was a shared experience. The connective experience of blogging, tweeting, annotating diigo is mostly at the individual level. But when people work together to DO and create something, they bond in an important way. A memorable way. Co-Learning is the current Connected Courses topic, but how about getting there through Co-Making? Co-Doing? And another thing that is clear in listening to #ETMOOCers is that they are still engaged with it. People blog posts still show up there -- this was maybe the second blog hub I built after ds106 and it is still going. Does your Coursera course carry on after they turn the lights out? And I expect that the folks running Connected Courses are eager to keep the community going after the scheduled sessions play out- this is my suggestion. Do not use the phrase "when the course is over" or "after the course ends". Because when the organizers of the course signal its end, the people in it see it so. Do not suggest you are turning the lights out. There have been a long list of positives in Connected Courses; my favorites are the ones the planners did not intend. Like the Daily Connector, the diigo annotators, a Research Working Group. I have enjoyed making closer connections via blogs with Terry Elliot, Maha Bali, the regular creative explosion of Kevin Hodgson and the guy who is in a creative dimension of his own, Simon Ensor. I see a lot of "doing" in these spaces. And you can never have too much "DO"... creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by psyberartist If you can wax on about stuff from 25 years ago.... (the blank is left for you to fill in). Feel free to make your own modem sound noises as you scroll on by. No secret here, that I can go on and on about the early web days. It's no desire to wind clicks or time travel, but is, to be honest, rewarding to have been there for this whole internet arc. Even if it is aiming for a burning trash fire. This one springs from Martin Weller, who has being mining his memories into several 25 years of _____ collection, most recently, his book on 25 Years of Ed Tech (available in all of the good open variety versions). It's good stuff Martin shares, because his vision is looking forward from that past. I have to like a book dedicated to one's pals: To my two canine writing buddies, Teilo and Bruno, on whose walks most of the ideas in this book were developed, and who listened patiently to my musings on MOOC and metadata. I knew through my other project work with Clint Lalonde that he was working on the serialized audio book version of Martin's book (nice theme there on a site running on the Open ETC). One of the best parts of weekly meetings with Clint is that after dealing with project issues, we just get a chance to share about other projects. When I heard that Clint had invited a bunch of folks to record reading chapters, released serialy as a podcast (I may have heard of about it first in conversation with Ken Bauer), I thought, "hmmmm, I did not make the cut" but that's okay. But then I got a nice invite from Clint's colleague Laura Pasquini to join a segment of an ancillary “Between the Chapters” podcast. And that struck as being more fun, because it would not be reading but just talking about a chapter of the books. And oh was it. I'll blab on about it, but here it is for you to listen to along with show notes. Yes there was some goofiness as we tried to recreate modem sounds. It was a lot fun to ramble on. I almost hesitated when Laura suggested talking about the first chapter on 1994: Bulletin Board Systems. In 1994 I was 2 years into my edtech career as a mullet haired instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges, dabbling with early HTML and Macromedia Director Multimedia. I was aware of BBSes, and perhaps had tried using a few, it was not a strong memory or experience for me. The reason I saw was Martin had referenced a comment I made on his blog post when he was working out these ideas. I felt it was less about BBSes as a platform or a thing and more about what people were able to do, connect, in this systems where it was all text conversation. I went back to an innovation that was in place and high use when I got to Maricopa (1992)... a home grown system created at Glendale Community College called the Electronic Forum. When I got to Maricopa the Electronic Forum was pretty much a brand name in use at several of the Maricopa Colleges, often referred to as "EF." But maybe the most telling factor was that this edtech was not spawned by a programmer or a technologist, but from the mind of Glendale Community College English teacher Karen Schwalm. I knew Karen later as the faculty director of Glendale's Innovation Center. She was a very strong voice for faculty leadership in the use of technology and student-centeredness (before it became a buzzword). I cannot really tell the Electronic Forum origin story well enough, but with some searching I found a brilliant summary of it in the ERIC archives in a publication called Vision '90. The Maricopa Community Colleges Journal of Teaching and Learning. Volume 2. It looks like it was produced from the part of the organization that later became the office I was employed with. The relevant article is on page 54 "The Electronic Forum: Linking Students to their Future" by Cyndi Greening (I remember Cyndi as a super talented media faculty at Mesa Community College). Like hundreds of other English instructors across the nation, Schwalm waged an ongoing battle with declining skill levels in verbal and written communication. Like other instructors, she wanted to offer students a means for improving those skills as a component of their course work. Facing a week that was already consumed with preparing and presenting course lectures, correcting assignments, fulfilling departmental responsibilities, and serving on committees, she knew that the project would have to be easy to implement and simple to maintain. Then, she struck upon an innovative idea -- the union of an old concept with a new technology.She contacted Christopher Zagar, then the director of GCC's High Tech Center, and proposed her plan. She wanted students to keep a community "learning journal" on the computer. She reasoned that students, using pen names to ensure anonymity, could make candid entries on virtually any topic of concern in this "electronic journal." Entries could then be read and commented on by members of the class. This would improve their writing skills along with their reading, reasoning, and computer skills. Since the purpose of the journal was to encourage students to write, she needed to document only how many words each student had written and how often he or she wrote in the class journal.Zagar assured her that it could be done. He created the programming to integrate the student records with the electronic journal, thereby limiting participation to a specific class. He set up reporting capabilities to document such items as the number of words per entry, journal subject areas, and writing activity by student identification number. At Schwalm's request, he also set up the journal to use the language of writing, not computing. Finally, he established the means for students to change their pen names at will. This all sounds like run of the mill features -- but remember this was in the late 1980s. There were no mobile devices and not many faculty or students had home computers. A lot of the activity took place in the Glendale High Tech Center "pits" large open computing labs. And this environment was all text based. By the flip of the 1990s, it was possible for students to connect via dial up modem. But there's more, and as you read the next quote, keep reminding yourself that this was 30 years ago. The benefits for the students, from the simple improvement of computer and communication skills to the difficult-to-assess effects on networking and social transformation ---are surprising nearly everyone involved."The original purpose of the journal was to improve writing skills. It was to be writing for learning rather than writing for evaluation," said Schwalm. "What we discovered was that the journal gave a voice to silenced or marginalized students. For instance, a student who never spoke in class was very active on the journal, contributing over twenty thousand words in one semester." Citing recent research on classroom dynamics. Schwalm says findings indicate that minority, handicapped, and female students are most likely to remain unvoiced in the classroom. Because of social, cultural, physical, or instructor bias, these students often do not communicate, or communicate in a very limited way in the classroom. The electronic journal, she discovered, put everyone on equal footing.(emphasis added by me) Okay, for those now calling out for giving voice to marginalized voices-- this was the practice of faculty at Maricopa in 1990. Greenings article goes on to describe how the use of the Electronic Forum broadened across disciplines, Math, Science, Criminal Justice, and more. As the use grew in course focused use, Karen and Chris also saw a place for open community discussions: In addition to the classroom journals, Chris Zagar and Karen Schwalm estab- lished two open electronic forums at GCC. The "Public Forum," which is administered by Schwalm, is open to everyone on campus and in the community for the discussion of anything. "The Dialogue Forum - The Forum or the Thoughtful Discussion of Anything at All," is also open to everyone but is limited to the discussion of serious subjects. Kirkpatrick administers the dialogue forum. She reveals that religion, ethics, morality, domestic violence. family abuse, the Smitty's situation (involving the death of a black men at the hands of employees at a local grocery store), and the conflict in the Middle East have all been discussed on the dialogue forum. I extracted Cyndi's article as a PDF since it has so much quotable bits in it: "The Electronic Forum: Linking Students to their Future" (1990)Download I could find a number of bits about the Electronic Forum from the publications our center did, but here is another snippet from a 1994 issue of Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine: Karen Schwalm of the Department of English at Glendale Community College in Arizona developed a tool called the Electronic Forum to extend her class activities beyond the walls of the classroom. The Forum gives students ways to connect to the Internet through electronic mail, mailing lists, and gopher. Using the Electronic Forum, students react to the content of the course and share "exploratory, ungraded, risk-taking" responses with other students online. The Forum also gives students ways to assume anonymous or different identities and take part in discussions on a local or global scale.Schwalm relates how this conferencing gives students a chance to take part in the global conversation on the Internet and thus opens up new possibilities for essay material. Karen Schwalm relates her excitement when the students discover the power of language and the diverse viewpoints expressed on the Internet. Students find new meaning in their writing. This process can sometimes change the relationship between student and teacher. As Schwalm reports that "we are finding that computer conferencing, especially when it involves access to the Internet, muddies the distinctions between teacher and student." Electronic communication challenges the knowledge of the instructors in the face of students who can often quickly gain network expertise. Karen Schwalm points out, "we all become learners and teachers simultaneously.”" This was approach to using technology that was not just about technology was embedded in the Maricopa system in 1994. And yes, the web happened then on Martin's timeline, but the Electronic Forum continued to 1999. The Wayback machine even has Karen's announcement published as an email announcement to the Maricopa system wide Network Services Meeting Minutes: The Electronic Forum, which just celebrated its 10th birthday last Saturday, will close at Glendale this Friday. During the past decade, EF has provided students at all 10 colleges (and at Pima CC, ASU Main and ASU West) with opportunities for electronic mail and group communication in support of both formal and informal learning. Over 275,000 Maricopa students have had accounts, and at GCC alone, students have sent 4.4 million email messages. That's a lot of writing!Many, many faculty throughout the district and across disciplines have used EF discussion groups in their classes, but I want to thank those first brave souls -- Eileen Shiff in Child and Family Studies, Jack Rose in Administration of Justice, and Lynn Ann Wojciechowicz in English -- who started early and helped us find new ways of fostering student interaction electronically. What they learned helped us all and will continue to help us as we move to new systems for supporting student communication. : :Finally, of course, thanks go to Chris Zagar, who took the skeleton of an idea and programmed it into reality. He has always asked me hard questions about teaching and learning that resulted in a far broader vision for EF than I had ever dreamed. As a side note, I recognize the format of that message, why it is an "A1"! When I got to Maricopa, and into the early 2000s, our system-wide email was the VAX based DEC "All-in-One" email system. People did not say "email" the verb or noun was an "A1." But I digress here. There was a rich culture of text based technology, not just for communication, but for teaching and learning at Maricopa. The way the Electronic Forum evolved, from the vision of a teacher like Karen and brought to life with the support of a technologist like Chris, was the norm at Maricopa. I need a whole other series of posts to talk about the faculty lead system wide initiative for innovation called "Ocotillo". Hardly anyone even seems to know this history. This is an ongoing thread I hope to have time to spin out more. I more or less stumbled into the Maricopa system that was well into a deep history of planning and focus on technology integration that was rooted, centered, and strongly driven by faculty interests and student needs. This system was thoughtfully thinking about the future of technology at least back to the mid 1980s. Again, I was not much involved with this but definitely aware of it. And as usual, most of "the field" knows nothing of Maricopa. As usual, community colleges are overlooked. This even struck a chord in something unrelated, but again a reminder of the typical overlooking. https://twitter.com/natematias/status/1326535310268899328 In my years at Maricopa (1992-2006) this was the norm, and BIPOC people where decision makers and leaders from the Chancellor level down to college presidents, academic deans, and faculty. It called for a response, not a "like" or a GIF, but some history: https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1326537788687151104 I don't know if I have a book in me, but there is quite a bit of the Maricopa history I'd like to pry open. I have a lot from my experience (1992-2006) but there's a whole lot that precedes it. And it's forgotten. Featured Image: Smartmodem flickr photo by Beige Alert shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license modified by superimposing the x-ray glasses dude from the cover of 25 Years of Ed Tech (actually the purple version from 25 Years of Ed Tech: The Serialized Audio Version. Actually we don't. We need more fake reality shows. San Francisco: Flip This Mayor There must be something in the water at Oakland's City Hall which makes people stupid. San Francisco's unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom. ------------------------------------------------------- Tune in for the drama in city hall, as city officials labor hard to prove their are "creating jobs". Mayor Stan Usual was elected on a split opposition vote, and has no mandate. He is dealing with a water issue, but it is not stupidity, but lead. As the tech industry dries up, before the tumbleweeds are spotted blowing through SoMa, city council people have developed a new job sceme involving portable structures made from aluminum cans. Who will win this epic community battle for the hearts and minds of the city? Stay tuned.... ------------------------------------------------------- photo credits cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by echoman: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80154053@N00/151680058/ cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by slworking2: http://flickr.com/photos/slworking/3875709508/ cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by Thomas Hawk: http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2934728223/ Hence a new ds106 assignment, partly inspired by the formula of the Album cover assignment, Really Reality TV The tags for this assignment are DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments342 Use the Reality TV Show name generator to get a title for the show. Do a Google search on the show title name. Use the first paragraph found on the 5th result of the search as the first part of the show description. Use the last paragraph found on the 10th result of the search as the second part of the show description. Find three creative commons licensed images to represent a protagonist on the show, the setting, and one example of action. Combine them into a three panel show banner. Be sure to credit the sources in your blog post On your blogpost, write in the elevator pitch for the show, and a tag line for it appearing on ds106 TV. Sit back and wait for Spielberg to contact you. He is into TV these days. So for my show, I generated this name, "San Francisco: Flip This Mayor": My google search results (which who knows if ever are unique?) Result five was a link to 1st sentence from 5th result "the tattler: Occupy Oakland...Mayor Quan flip-flops! Cops cry foul!" where the first paragraph was There must be something in the water at Oakland's City Hall which makes people stupid. (that is definitely show material). The 10th search result was Tech company move boosts SF mayor's branding push, where the last paragraph was: San Francisco's unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom. That leads me to search terms in compfight for "Oakland City Hall", "Mayor", and "Tech jobs", giving me these three photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80154053@N00/151680058/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/2934728223/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/18548283@N00/3875709508/ I set up a blank photoshop document with a black background, and dragged and dropped the downloaded photos (500px size) right in there- you can move and resize them as smart objects, then added some text, and boom! Done. The last bit was to write the pitch for the show. Shiznit! Reality TV is done. TentCam Originally uploaded by cogdogblog Back in the day when I was a free wheeling no responsibility grad student herein Arizona, I spent a lot of time doing solo backpack trips, especially out in the Superstition Wilderness Area and up on the Mogollon Rim. It sure seemed time to get back to nature, and my equipment needed an upgrade, so I made got some new gear last week from REI (well actually it came Friday, the day before my planned trip). I had picked a spot I had seen a few years ago- its quite a ways back on the Rim Road, Forest Road 300 which follows closely the General Cook Trail ruote east/west along the edge of the Mogollon Rim, a 1000 foot escarpment that marks the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. So it was a 25 mile forest road drive, maybe pushing the limits of my little MItsibushi Lancer Iwhich performed like a champ). The hike was not long, about 3 miles, to get me to Dane Spring, a spot I had seen on a backpack maybe 5 years ago. Its on a higher altitude section of the Rim, pushing 7000 feet, so there are plenty of aspen and fir trees, but most important, Dane Spring is a running spring, so water was available. So everything on this trip went to ;plan, almost to exact time and locations I had scouted, I always remark how the magazine articles about camping.hiking are nearly always about people struggling or having near death experiences-- and that it is totally uninteresting to publishing when everything on an outdoor venture goes without adventure. But wow, its been maybe 4 years since I wore a pack, and my feet needed to re-learn how to walk. Yet nothing extraordinary happened. I packed in, set up the new tent, rook a walk and some photos, read, made dinner, lit a fire. and climbed in bed for a long night sleep. Well, I was not totally unplugged- I brought along the iPod Touch and watched some videos. What a nerd. Almost a highlight walking out when I passed a man with about 7 kinds all less than 8. The one in the back was this blond haired type, wearing PJs and cowboy boots, and lugging one of those big plastic bugle horns. So I said, "Good Morning". And he replies right away, "Good morning! My name is Bo!" I don't know why this struck me except for the sheer energy of youth. before we grow up and practically kill that spirit. On the drive home I dawdled more along the Rim Road, stopping to take in the views. It is nearly impossible to describe or catch even in photos the breadth and depth of the view. And being in sight of Payson, there's good cell phone signal, so I was able to make a mountain top phone call to my Mom. She told me she finally figured out how to access my blog (meaning she found the bookmark I set in her browser), but as she said, "I looked at everything and have no idea what you are writing about,": Oh well, here's one for you mom... HI MOM! So here is my first flickr post of a video, all looks good and flickry. The point of this whole ramble is to also see how it posts to the blog. And now to plot the next trip. ds106 Propaganda posters-- they seem to be calling from many places; I came across a great collection at Shorpy (another mint archive for visuals from the past). Hence a warning poster about ds106: This one was rather easy to work with- the original poster was a warning against the dangers of syphilis: The backgrounds of the text were pretty much solid, so it was a matter of picking some fonts from what I had installed in Photoshop. Bauhuas worked ok for the top headline. I did not find exact copies for the script font, so I used Savoye LET and the bottom text was using Marker Felt. Heck I was tempted to leave the white cursive text as it was ;-) Once infected, #4life. No, I did not have writers block or a novel to compose. Actually the email question was not even mine, but written to be sent under someone else's name. Could this be Alan's Secret Neutron Bomb that would eviscerate spammers? Nahhhh, ya must be dreamin'. Now, these are some messages that get generated from our 100% online Learning Grants applications system. This is an internal grants program that faculty and staff from our college apply for on a yearly basis, and we are in our 5th year of having this online. The entire application, review, and notification is done on our web site, another brilliant system developed by Colen, my former student programmer who also did most of the back end work on the Maricopa Learning eXchange. The Learning Grant application period closed at 6:00 PM last Friday, meaning many of the grants came in... a bit before 6:00 PM last Friday- actually we had 67 proposals, asking for $420,000 out of a budget we have of $185,000. The next phase is where our project manager uses a web-based admin tool to assign readers from a pool to each grant, and notifcations are sent to readers. They then log in to the system, and complete their grant reviews online. The troublesome email was one we send to each colleges' Dean of Instruction as a summary of the proposals from their particular college, as well as cc:ed to a list of faculty developers at each site. Scripting an e-mail to send out via PHP is easy, but this one needs to chug through the database, select out the grant details from this year, create an HTML message with a pretty chart, and then make sure it goes to the correct people. Then there are custom isntructions for these people to know how to log in tot he site. These are the sorts of things one does not want to have OOPs messages and messy follow-ups, so there were several rounds of tests to he screen, then test emails to ourselves, one gack mistake that fortunately ended up in the dead mail bin, and finally, by 5:00 PM they went out okay. Wow, scripted emails can be complex, do spammers work this hard? ;-) Are you stressed, tired in the middle of your semester? Imagine your classrooms, campus, students not even sure if they have water, electricity, food, much less internet, just because the place they live was twice in the path of hurricanes. Imagine you are a citizen of the United States of America and hear its leader blame you for this problem, and not delivering a fraction of the aid seen in Texas and Florida. Imagine your syllabus when, as university professor teacher, your are hoping just to contact students, and figure out how to continue classes. Imagine. Like several of my colleagues, I have been very worried about our friend, colleague Antonio Vantaggiato (@avunque), and relieved when he was finally able to message us that he was okay. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918874554826665984 Antonio has been a generous soul in our field, arranging for me a slot at the TEDx event he organized plus a month long fellowship he arranged for me at Universidad del Sagrado Corazon. I don't think he bumped into Zuck's avatar. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918197863057907714 A few people have been asking how we can help, and Antonio is working to come up with some needs and suggestions. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918884158503604225 https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918884158503604225 As a very small thing I thought we could do now, I suggested we start a campaign of mailing postcards to he and his students just to say, that unlike our President.... we care. [caption id="attachment_65218" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Send a postcard to Antonio and hist students at Universidad de Sagrado Corazon[/caption] It's really simple. Do you know what the postage is to mail to Puerto Rico? Easy, the same as mailing something to me in Arizona or some clown in Washington DC. You seek, Puerto Rico is in the United States of America (someone mail that to the clown). That is 34 cents to mail from the USA to the USA. https://twitter.com/avunque/status/918173234197159936 So I am asking as many people as possible to send a We Care About Puerto Rico postcard message to: Universidad del Sagrado Corazon Attn A. Vantaggiato Computer Science PO BOX 12383 San Juan PR 00914-8505 Also, some things Antonio and I have talked about: We will plan a DS106 Daily Create on Wednesday October 18 as another way to send a message of care. Ask people to tweet messages of support with #care4sagrado and/or any of his course tags: #inf103 or #inf115 or #inf1034 or #inf1037 As Antonio teaches his courses via blog syndication http://inf103.com/ and http://inf115.com/ (where you can already see some posts like Rebuilding after Maria), he's thinking about setting a way people could blog messages to his students via RSS feeds We are thinking about doing a podcast / storytelling project about teaching and learning under these conditions These are small, but as Antonio and his university develop their continuation plans, we will wait until he can share some more specific needs of his students. In my month in Puerto Rico, I experienced an overwhelming amount of friendliness, generosity, and spirit despite what were challenging conditions before the Hurricane. And I am horrified by the tone and lack of empathy our President is sending out; he does not speak for me. I'd like to think a pile of postcards might let our friends and fellow US citizens in Puerto Rico know that others feel like me. As I was scrambling to find a first card to send, I ony had a few left from some old movie postcards I bought last year. But the one I did pull was for the movie El Puente de Waterloo (The Waterloo Bridge) -- so with some editing via Sharpee pen, I want to declare it as part of a Bridge of Care to Puerto Rico. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/918938723273736192