Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
This is part 4 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication - and what to think about even before you touch that Wordpress thing Installing and Setting up Feed Wordpress - Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined Feeding the Machine - How to get RSS feeds into the aggregator without losing a finger »» Some Feed Magic «« Optional ways to improve feeds from sites such as flickr, twitter, etc, creating a twitter archive, RSS Feed TLC A Few More Tricks - leveraging categories, adding attribution, setting featured images The previous posts in this series covered setting up Feed Wordpress and getting mostly blog feeds into a syndication site. But you are certainly not limited to blogs, you can add anything to Feed Wordpress for which you can find an RSS feed. From a lot of social media sites, you can find RSS feeds for individual users, less and less it seems you can feeds for across different user accounts. YouTube has squashed most RSS beyond a feed for an individual's uploaded videos. In this installment I will pull some rabbits out of the feed bag to show some tricks I use for RSS feeds that need a little boost. And as well, I show you how to provide some care to errant feeds in your site. Flickr RSS Feeds: Hard To Find and Full of Tiny Images There are a few ways to get feeds of photos from flickr. For your own photos, you can customize what gets included into an "activity" feed-- at the bottom of that page is a link for an RSS feed to provide that information. What is more useful is getting an RSS image on a search, like if your course has a common flickr tag. If you run a search on flickr, if that feed link is at the bottom of the page you might never know, since it is designed as in infinite scrolling page. I tried a search and never got to the bottom. But with some know how and info on what you can get from flickr feeds, we find the format of a flickr RSS feed for a tag looks like: https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=magic Great. You can put that into your Feed Wordpress and go. That is for all flickr photo tagged magic Ahhhh, but one hitch. This is the size of the images flickr provides us via RSS PUNY! That may work for you, or maybe you can wave some CSS magic, but that's a tiny little image, only 320 pixels wide. Here is an extra tool I use to alter the flickr RSS feed to trick it into displaying larger sized images. It does rely on Yahoo pipes a service many of us wonder how it can still be alive, but I have used this pipe for a few years. Thanks Yahoo for killing the Pipes. I'm out of tricks here. Instagram Photo Feeds: Simple and Plain The format of Feeds from tags on Instagram is easy to assemble: http://instagram.com/tags/magic/feed/recent.rss And works directly in Feed Wordpress. What you will get is really simple- a post with the photo title as the title and just an image. But that's all you need, right? UPDATE November 30, 2014: Sadly, sometime back in September, Instagram just turned off publishing of RSS Feeds. They still offer a developer API, why did they do this? Do you think this is fair? Feeds are Pinteresting I've actually not done any syndication from pinterest, but you can get an RSS feed from anyone's account like mine which I may have used 3 times (username=cogdog) http://www.pinterest.com/cogdog/feed.rss You can also generate a feed from a single pinterest board - for my single measly board at http://www.pinterest.com/cogdog/oh-emre5807/ the feed URL is http://www.pinterest.com/cogdog/oh-emre5807.rss There does not seem to be a way to get a feed of tags across pinterest users. Social Bookmark Feeds from diigo Many projects use diigo for organizing and sharing web links. delicious.com had/has perhaps the most robust and flexible feed structure but sure seems unreliable in the last few years. Feeds from diigo will bring along the description and other tags used as well. You can get a diigo feed for a single person's bookmarking- the link is in the bottom right of your "My Library" page. Mine looks like https://www.diigo.com/rss/user/cogdog And likewise you can get an RSS feed for a ingle user's tagged sites, like my diigo bookmarks tagged photography, the feed is https://www.diigo.com/rss/user/cogdog/photography But the rub is you cannot get an RSS feed for the photography tag across other users. The only way to get this effect is to create a diigo group, which provides an RSS feed for its activity. You Can Tweet if You Want To, Getting a Feed Takes Some Effort Until early 2014 you could get RSS feeds directly from twitter; then for whatever reasons they removed this capability (all interaction you can do is through it's API which most mortals cannot do). That does not mean it cannot be done. The same information is published in a different format (JSON for you curious nerds). I have done this for all of my syndication sites using the approach spelled out at Digital Inspiration that uses a Google Script to convert the data to RSS. So you can syndicate in individual tweets. The problem is they look kind of... silly. The text of the tweet comes in as the title of a post, and the same text is in the body. So it looks redundant. For example a tweet I made for thoughtvectors would look like on the site In my work on these sites, I end up doing custom coding, where I can use the URL for the tweet and Wordpress capability to automatically embed so we can make more native like views like: But this goes beyond the bounds of this series of posts. If you really crave it, read my technical writeups on sites for thoughtvectors, for rmooc, and for the Future of Learning sites. It is a question to you then- why would you syndicate in tweets? It is certainly easy enough to generate a twitter widget for your site. Is it to collect an archive? What I do recommend for any project where tweets are happening, especially with a hash tag, is to always set up a Twitter Tags Archive in Google Docs as created my Martin Hawksey. His post provides instructions and a video to guide you. What you end up with is a Google Spreadsheet that checks twitter once and hour and archives tweets to that spreadsheet. So for the Future of Learning Institute, we have all of the tweets as data: But Martin has woven more magic into this tool. There is a worksheet with a summary, and I use the Google Docs Publish as HTML to Embed to create a page on the site for the Twitter Summary I can embed other worksheets and embed to make an Activity Dashboard, a searchable archive for the tag, and probably the most exciting, an interactive tweet explorer -- the FOL worksheet has just started, for a more developed one, see what 10 weeks of twitter activity for thoughtvectors looks like Dealing With Feeds Gone Bad Syndicating feeds never goes perfectly like clockwork. Feed Wordpress will indicate "problem" feeds in the list of syndicated sites by coloring a row yellow: In this case from ds106, the error message on the right suggests the site is no longer online: WP HTTP Error: Couldn't resolve host 'dontgetittwisted.org' but you may see other cryptic messages like: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 14, column 70 Fixing these requires a bit of detective work. You can check out the site by hovering on it's name- and following the "View" link In this case, we get an error from your internet provider saying the domain does not exist. It's gone. You can use the same hover technique and now click "Unsubscribe". Our options are: Turn off the subscription for this syndicated link Choose this if there is a temporary reason to turn the feed off. You can revert it later by later viewing the "inactive" feeds, and reactivate it later. Delete this syndicated link and all the posts that were syndicated from it This is the nuclear option, nuke it all. Delete this syndicated link, but keep posts that were syndicated from it (as if they were authored locally). This is a better option. The original web site is gone, but because we have a copy of all the posts from this blog, we can make it so links point to a local copy, and not the dead site. In other cases, we may realize that the address for the feed is wrong. Let's say we entered the feed as http://tirpate.wordpress.com/feed/ and are seeing an error because the actual feed is http://xtirpate.wordpress.com/feed/ We can hover on the feed and see a nice option for "Switch Feed". That seems like what we want. We get a new screen where we can enter a new feed, and be done, right? This did work at one time, but you more likely get the enigmatic zen like question for which there is no way to respond: I can only guess but there is either a bug in Feed Wordpress or a conflict with another plugin. But we are not done yet. If you recall from the second post in this series, Feed Wordpress stores all of the data about Feeds in the Wordpress Links area. We can go there, look for the site we wish to change by searching the links. When you find the link name, click the edit, and scroll down to Advanced Settings. You can change the Feed URL by entering the value of RSS Address: Once you save, this new RSS feed address will be used the next time Feed Wordpress checks the site. With luck, you have fixed the feed. You can also completely delete a feed by deleting it's link. I said that with caution. There is no undo. Sometimes a feed just keeps generating those yellow box errors, even if it does successfully validate, with cryptic reasons like: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: SYSTEM or PUBLIC, the URI is missing at line 1, column 48 What works often in these cases is to "clean" the feed using Feedburner a Google service. You can provide it an RSS Feed, and it generates a new "feedburned" one. You can use the hover option Change Feed to swap in a new feed URL. I have found this fixes about 99% of the yellow box errors. And That's Some Feed Magic [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Jardin Flambeau flickr photo by -RobW- shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license[/caption] This section does not cover every and any possible feed type to deal with, just the commons ones I have worked with on the sites I have done since 2012. What Feed Wordpress does is almost magical, it is complex, and you should know that there can be a lot of differences in what one RSS feed provides compared to the next. This is part 4 of 5 in a series of posts for Building Connected Courses: Feed WordPress 101 Basic Concepts of Syndication - and what to think about even before you touch that Wordpress thing Installing and Setting up Feed Wordpress - Minimal settings, and planning the way content is sliced, diced, and recombined Feeding the Machine - How to get RSS feeds into the aggregator without losing a finger »» Some Feed Magic «« Optional ways to improve feeds from sites such as flickr, twitter, etc, creating a twitter archive, RSS Feed TLC A Few More Tricks - leveraging categories, adding attribution, setting featured images In the last segment, I will review some more Wordpress mojo you can conjure up for your own syndication site. Featured Image: [317/365] Popular Trick flickr photo by pasukaru76 shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gykuG37Ww6k I will let the video do the talking here- meet my Strawberry Arizona friend and neighbor Jim, a man full of stories from his years in aviation industry. He recently decided to pass on his pride, a bright blue 1973 Volkswagen Beetle named "Bob". Today I visited to take some photos and record hom telling me the story of Bob. This was assembled quickly in iMovie, and yes, I went lazy and took the Ken Burms fever pill. The older photos were ones Jim shared from his computer taken when he was first working on Bob. The audio is truly Bob's purr, recorded, along with the interview, on my iPhone. Go, Bob, Go! Blog Danger Code Level Yellow posted 6 Jan '08, 10.31am MST PST on flickr Word choice on CogDogBlog has earned me a code yellow, Elevated: Tom Cruise might ask me for spare change. The Airbag Blog Advisory System was just quirky enough I had to take time and try. In these dark times you can never be too careful that's why we at the Airbag Department of Security created a Blog Advisory System so that Website Masters can alert their users to the threat condition of words being used. Do you use words like crap, damn, hell, poop, kakka in your blog posts and/or comments? Then consider adding the an Airbag Department of Security Blog Advisory System badge to your site to prevent people from becoming victims of your freedom hating content. Sticks and stones sure, but believe me pal, the power of the blog comment is mightier than a dirty bomb. Developed in our secret Australian labs by |337 h3x0r Cub1cle, the Blog Advisory System is easy to add to any website on the Internets that are compatible with modern technology called Javascript. Basically, I stuck I bit of Javascript into the HTML of my vlog's sidebar, and it does some dynamic analysis (or just picks from random levels, but I want to believe..) so if I ramp up my language, I might hit High (orange) :You're probably going to get fork stabbed. Learn how to walk it off. I was just curious to see what would show, so I'm not leaving it up on the template clutter sidebar. Fun. Linktribution to Tim Lauer via twitter What's your level? Like a flying cannonball, like a balloon full of bricks, my goal to do a digital story a day for May has flopped mercifully: I'm not going to apologize, that is for weenies. It was a tough pace I was holding, but last week's travel did me in... and frankly, well nobody cares if I keep these silly challenges. So I wave my FAIL flag proudly. I went down blogging. Or not blogging. At least I got my cheese. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by j.gurian PT Barnum's rule lives alive and well that the buggiest, most inexplicable, frustrating (tabless) Web browser in terns of its refusal to follow Web Standards has the most users. Again, I have found that my time in web design is spent: * 30% developing a solid design in a web-standard browser such as FireFox * 70% testing and coding in hacks and fixes for things Internet Explorer does for no sane reason The latest is that applying a solid 20px border on the left side of a blockquote class causes all content following to be shifted left, out of view, by 20px, as if I applied a negative margin. Removing the border clears the problem. Putting the border on the top, right, or bottom, clears the problem. A browser with voodoo. By sheer accident I stumbled across the google search results display that matches results to a timeline, here is a technology timeline This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search on technology. From the results, on the left side bar, click the link for timeline. Now you can adjust the time range, or change the search terms, this time, say I wanted to create a search history timeline for China It could be an interesting activity/exercise to create other timelines. Google embeds surprising functional bits i search results. Looking to calculate a currency exchange? Just google "currency exchange" and you get a widget calculator right there. Have you found other embedded tools in search results? Thanks for the surprise serendipity (as if there were any other kind!) Not yet available in any stores! iPod Flea commercial I'm working now in a FleaCast. (Another fine Kotke remaidered link) I'm releasing a day early the collection of Amazing Stories of Openness I will show tomorrow at the opening of the ETUG Spring Workshop in Nelson, BC. These are just the videos, for the session, I have a few surprises up my sleeve, and may even gamble on doing a chunk of this w/o any visuals. So, yeah, bryan Alexander, go ahead and tweet it- your video with the axe was the first one I recorded and is a gem. The stories are up now at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/etug11/ -- the FLVs are bigger than I usually do, as I am running the site locally tomorrow, and want crisp videos. This is doing the CoolIris shtick for the wall of media. The bulks of these I recorded on my iPhone hitting up people on my travels over the last few weeks. I do want to give a nod to Scott Leslie and Karen Fasimpaur for being the only folks that actually sent one on their own. I gotta take some lessons from Alec Courosa and Dean Shareski on doing better at getting other people to do my presentations. Anyhow, I'm winging my way to Castlegar, BC and from there onto a merry trip. I likve a conference that opens with a beer party and hockey. Well, I admire the hockey, I dig the beer. Decades from now what kind of legacy stories will the "founders" of WebinarTV tell their grandchildren? "This was my contribution to the world, remember me for it." I had read about this sleazy outfit from 404 Media in This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts (it's listed as for paying subscribers only but I am a freebie account and I read the full story in my email, there are ways to jump the wall but I leave that to the reader.) WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services. WebinarTV claims to host more than 200,000 webinars. It’s not clear how it’s recording so many Zoom calls without permission, but in some cases the stolen videos posted to WebinarTV can put call participants at risk. As part of the frog in the warm bath, yet one more slathering of enshittification is just another log on the poop pile, right. I smirked and thought, "wow that is crappy." But then again, it does not really meet the definition because WebinarTV just skipped the first step of as a platform "they are good to their users" they just started with step 3 "they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves." But I heard from my work colleagues at Open Education Global that they had gotten one of those notifications about recordings of CCCOER webinars taken and put up on WebinarTV. So of course, they did the natural step to follow the link the notification email provides to remove their webinar. That's rationale, but it's also just wiping one corner of the poop pile with a kleenex. The pile remains, 200,000+ stolen zoom recordings high. Ah, but I had my own taste Tuesday. I hosted a zoom webinar at noon my time, and the first time in a while I set it up with a registration link to attend and also recorded the session to the cloud. Technically, this is a "public" webinar because the link to register is on our event page. Copyright laws and various flavor licenses aside, the present of a public link implies that they can just take a recording of this webinar for their own use. The webinar ended around 1:10 my time, and a scant 20 minutes letter I get this email from one Sarah Blair, VP of Communications at WebinarTV. It arrived before I even got my notification from zoom that my cloud recording was ready. Hi, I've reviewed OER Under the Hood with LibreTexts and set up your On Demand page, along with a new feature called Chapters. Chapters are designed to entice more people to watch your webinar by highlighting interesting topics covered during the session. Note: WebinarTV is designed to promote and market public webinars. If you don't want to participate, go here and click the Remove link in the lower left corner. Your webinar will be automatically removed, and future webinars avoided. Sarah BlairVP of Communications, WebinarTV.us To help spread the word, here’s a ready-to-use message you can copy and paste to your attendees:___________________________________________Missed the live session? You can now watch the full webinar OnDemand, complete with chapters that make it easy to jump right to the parts that matter most: Here___________________________________________Reminder: WebinarTV is for public webinars. If you’re the host and don’t wish to appear, click this link and hit Remove. The webinar will be removed, and upcoming ones avoided. email from Webinar TV, 20 minutes after the end of my webinar. Links like this are dead because I killed them. My first reaction was, "Wow, Sarah, you have uncanny skills- you 'reviewed' this 70 minute webinar in less than 20 minutes." Note that the email was not sent to me, it was sent to the email address our organization uses to log on to zoom. I do not recall us ever being told by Zoom that this is how they protect their customer's accounts. This is what I saw (the link is gone, I made the screenshot for my records) In 20 minutes, without notifying in advance, WebinarTV converted the recording of our webinare into some kind of offering from their site. You will notice that they are displaying the names/images of participants. Just for fun, I did download the AI generated "preview", this is most exciting, eh? Hell yes, I did follow that link and clicked Remove. Who the bleep would not (hmm, I guess 200000 other people). Since Sarah was so nice to watch my webinar, and do all this work to slop some AI on it, I decided to write her back. Sarah, I am confused how you "reviewed" this webinar considering your email arrived before I got my own cloud recording. We are a not for profit educational organization, and this event was open only to registered participants. I do not see your name on the registration record. Therefore this recording is illegal and I am asking for information to be shared with our investigation team exactly how WebinarTV is recording our webinars without permission. And ****** yes I am clicking to remove, but we expect a full explanation reply on how exactly you are taking our content. My email reply to Sarah Blair. Hang on, this will be fun. Sarah must have been busy reviewing other stolen webinars, but she did find time to write me back the next day. Gee. Hi Alan, Thank you for your email. I see you have removed your webinar. Please allow up to 24 hours for this to fully take effect.If you ever decide to expand your webinar audience and take advantage of valuable automated features—such as translation into eleven languages, chapter creation, preview clips, and searchable content within your webinar—we’d be happy to support you. These services are available at no cost, so feel free to reach out anytime.NOTE: WebinarTV is dedicated to promoting and marketing public webinars. If you're hosting a private webinar or meeting, approve registrants or send direct invites, issue unique join links, use a passcode, and admit only verified attendees. Kind regards,Sarah BlairVP Communications, WebinarTV - The Best Webinars Look, Sarah replied, it's like we are real people in conversation Sarah's email reply actually included her "photo" which looks directly out of https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ I gave it the Google Images search for a match, but came up with not much. Reverse image search for Sarah Blair from (left) image in her email reply. Is it wrong for me to user her image? Ask the maybe 500000 people whose images are displayed without their permisson on WebinarTV's web site she does not seem to exist in LinkedIn she has a LinkedIn profile almost as sparse as mine -- or other social media. Her LinkedIn has no image, but an indication "she" lives in San Diego. Oh, she graduated from the University of Vermont in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts in Media and Communication Studies. She has zero LinkedIn Posts and zero followers, so she's doing as well as I am in the LinkedIn rankings. Next I am digging into web searches for graduates from University of Vermont in 2013, not finding a list of graduates, but do note that the father on one graduate named Simeon gave the graduation speech that did inlcude music (that was Wynton Marsalis). How deep can I dig? Hmmm, I find a searchable directory of graduation photos for the University of Vermont and enter last name Blair and the year 2013. There it is! Proof photos of UV graduate Sara Blair. Do you see anything unusual? Is that you, Sarah Blair? Your photo has changed a little in 13 years! So putting aside my growing question that Sarah Blair is an AI construct, "her" reply to me is strange- they actually describe what they do as some kind of "service" like they are some kind Great Benefactors akin to Ghandi. But pay attention to this "tip" from Sarah: If you're hosting a private webinar or meeting, approve registrants or send direct invites, issue unique join links, use a passcode, and admit only verified attendees. Just because you set up registration, it does not protect your webinar. You actually have to do extra workl of approving registrations or verifying attendees, adding special links/passcodes to "protect" your events from being taken by WebinarTV., You have to create barriers of access for event participation. This is not enshittification it is total shit. I am not done with you, Sarah. I am the dog who does not drop the bone. I replied back. Hello Sarah, We did not ask for nor desire such services. What you are saying is that all Zoom users for meetings must put more restrictions on access to events to prevent unwanted harvesting of our content? Your “service” should be opt-in while you force busy organizers like us to opt out of unwanted taking of our content. I might suggest you consider a more honorable business model- this is exploitive and inappropriate. Kind regards Alan Hmmm, want to take any bets that "Sarah" will reply? Maybe apologize? Hah (now I am more sure that "she" is some agentic AI blob) The bigger question is- how the bleep are they doing this? From my own look at patterns, they are able to do this for zoom sessions that are recorded to the "cloud". Most people will assume that they are somehow registering bots to attend events and record, like notetaking ones. This is not what's happening, IMHO. What does Zoom have to say> The 404 Media article includes a reply they got as email" “We are aware of reports involving independent third-party services such as WebinarTV.us / MeetingTV.us that appear to capture and redistribute content from online meetings,” a Zoom spokesperson told me in an email. “These services are not affiliated with Zoom, and the activity described is not the result of a vulnerability or security issue within Zoom’s platform.” Zoom said that based on its review WebinarTV accesses meetings using links that have been shared publicly, then records the sessions using browser extension or “other tools.” “Because these recordings occur on the participant’s device and outside of Zoom’s environment, no platform—including Zoom—has the technical ability to fully prevent third-party screen recording,” the spokesperson said. https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/ This does not shine well on Zoom. It's their platform, and their response is a Family Circus shrug of "Not Me". A detailed report "Zooming Out: WebinarTV’s Rampant Scraping of Online Meetings" linked from the 404 Media article is by CyberAlberta guesses that browser addons for calendars or events is the likely source that is being exploited by WebinarTV. It still baffles me how getting the webinar link enables the hole for a recording to be made without permission. The suggested recommendations for manual pre-approving registrants, locking the meeting once it started again are an onerous burden to put on people who use zoom to run meetings. On review of the 30 registrants for the meeting, I can asses that 28 are legitimate based on educational email affiliations and responses to a registrations question. I identified two names that are suspicious, one gmail one from a weird bluestar.ink domain email with listed affiliations of "Company" and "ngo". I guess one of these was a rogue bot recorder. They were not even clever enough to enter something rel;evant. It seems to me it helps for an event where you ask for registration, to ask for 1 or more items that would help indicate whether it was truly someone with interest in your event. Even if what WebinarTV is not technically illegal, it is on a human level, slimy. What they do is "Create" this podcast called The Phil And Amy Show. Look! It's Phil! and Amy! They look so perfectly synthetic. One example of hundreds of thousands of "podcasts" WebinarTV churns out from stealing your meetings. Just listen to these hip and smooth podcasters, just a sample: Hmmm Phil and Amy sound... so familiar! I'd bet a box of milkbones that these are the NotebookLLM dynamic duo synthetic podcasters- compare them to the ones I assembled in this post https://cogdogblog.com/2024/10/wow-ai-generated-podcast/ Hi Phil! Hi Amy! It's a "deep dive!" “Totally”, “100%”, “that’s amazing” So you will find tons of social posts complaining "my webinar was stolen" but the total poopification is no one will take responsibility or build some ethical stand out of dog poop that says this is a Good thing to do. And "Sarah" if you even are human, my message to you: The service of my angry blog posts are available at no cost, so feel free to reach out anytime. NOTE: CogDogBlog is dedicated to playful posts about dogs and remix media but also for calling out crappy web practices. If you're a company spawning some bullshit about a service based on takijng content from innocent people without asklng permission, either put up with our anger and vile disgust with you or just get the ***** off the web. You are crapping on it majorly. With love, CogDogBlog All I can do is rant and make noise. If you get an email from Sarah Blair, fire more back at "her." And make more noise about this barge of web poop called WebinarTV. [Non] Update Apr 17 2026 https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/116420998803659649 Featured Image: A composite image MADE by me in Photoshop, not spar out of some GenAI vending machine. Based on pexels image Retro TV set in dried grass by Anete Lusina used under pexels Free to use. On the screen is Class Reunions Zoom Meeting flickr photo by Joe Shlabotnik shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license along with the WebinarTV logo lifted from their web site (if they are going to copy my webinar withut asking I am taking their wretched logo), and the crowning touch is Wikimedia Commons image Dog excrement on the street in detail.jpg by Rkoblizek shared CC BY-SA. If I read the license leaves correctly, my image is CC BY-NC-SA. But please steal it. Cause that's what passes for a "service" these days. I'm late with my ds106 design stuff, but you will not catch me saying I am sorry. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I did assemble this for the Postcards from Magical Places assignment, which we had our UMW students with a requirement that the image come from Minecraft. Design the front and back of a postcard that might be sent from the location of a movie or a work of fiction. Both sides of the cards must be created as graphics. The fornt should use graphic design elements that provide a sense of place or use the classic motifs of old postcards ("Greetings from ______")_, both pictures and text. The back of the post card should contain a stamp and postmark that fits with the theme of the movie, as well as an addressee and a message that fits the plot as well. The inspiration was a fanfiaction assignment created by a UMW student in Spring Semester 2011- see the excellent set of LOTR cards at http://cupofchai.umwblogs.org/2010/11/22/fanfiction/ During our first camp fire hangout in Minecraft, I played with putting my new dog skin in the fire, and this seemed to work well as a camp prank of hot dogs. I started out in GIMP but got frustrated with the inability to do some effects on text, and with a loaned copy of PhotoShop, I did this image with rather simple edits, some text warp for the post mark. I sure were excited 'bout leadin' a new herd of ds106 calves from the Kansas State University ranch. Me 'n Bill even planned stuff over beans and a fire and even ole Hatchet Jack was ready to become unfrozen to be doing a new round of DS106. And when I got word from the KSU asking for my official papers, I was thinking this was a done deal. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/677553716162134016 But a messenger rode up late last night with the dispatch I was without a crew. 'Parrently there werent 'nuff young KSU students signin' up to be part of this posse. I guess none of our clever movees stirred an interest, and not enuff saw our handsome posters hung all o'er town. So I rode up to this here perch to take a view. [caption id="attachment_51113" align="aligncenter" width="480"] The Lookout- by Frederic Remington, public domain image from Wikimedia Commons[/caption] So I am still got a dedication to do a #western106. Others have been murmuring of hitching up. Maybe some possibilities are: Some other university ranch might be willin' to pitch me an offer to lead an online ds106 class. Not seeming likely this time of the season. But hey, gotta hang out that sign. I might just want, for fun, to pitch it out as we did in 2013 for the Headless DS106- those who want to ride, will do so, others may just watch the dust of fun leave 'em. Maybee I'll just hang out a tip jar. The gold is not the reason us storytelling cowboys ride, but we do like some vittles, and a ride is a long journey. No hard feelings on ya, KSU. We thoughts you had in ya, but meybe it's just not the time. Any other vaquero's out there got ideas? I'm gonna be hammering out a plan to be ready for ya by January 2016. That there email signup form is now working at http://106tricks.net if you want to be in the dispatch loop. No matter what happens, you cannot beat the wide open views up here. Top / featured Image Credit: Arizona Cowboy by Frederick Remington, public domain image from Wikimedia Commons Here I thought I caught up on my back blogging from the trip to New Zealand, but I have yet to talk about the digital time capsule that appeared at every stop. In this post, I'll give a bit of review about what happened, what was collected, in a subsequent long scrolling gibberish one I will go over the modifications I made to the interface. The new web site for the Storybox has this new interface; the only things you cannot do there are (a) upload media (b) See the media that was collected on this trip (a much smaller set I assembled prior to the trip is online) (c) Access the services like the image board and the wiki. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog That's the idea, to create an internet that is ephemeral, the PirateBox technology creates a local wireless network, where all efforts to connect to the web are redirected to the web server on the box. To me, it plays a bit with the problem of information on the web that is everywhere, in this case it is hyperlocal. Among my workshops and presentations on the Shar-E-Fest tour (September 29-Oct 10, 2014), I asked to do a Storybox session at every stop. So there were seven of these. For the most part, I had an hour or less (maybe 30 minutes), so most of what I could do was to present the idea, and send people on a little "hunt" to acquire media, and add back to the box. As was pointed out by WG in the session at Waikato, just having these prompts pretty much made a limited frame on the media collected, so it's not truly representative as I suggested that the idea is to capture a sense of "now" in this place. Because all the places where institutions of higher education. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But the purpose really was to try and get a pool of media and then ponder what might be done with it. I did let people know that because there is no information stored in the image besides its file name (usually cryptic if it came off of a mobile device) (and thus some metadata might be in the images if the mobile device adds it)-- that they were more or less granting me permission to use their image w/o any kind of attribution. When you look at the media, they are pretty much quick throwaways- like snapshots. I'd estimate upwards of 90% were acquired at the sessions. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog For some summary, the Box now includes 390 pieces of media - this was the breakdown per session: Sept 30, 2014 at Shar-e-fest (84) 6 audio/video files 78 photos Oct 1, 2014 at Open Polytechnic (38) 3 audio files 32 photos Oct 2, University of Victoria Wellington (101) 97 photos 2 videos 2 sounds files Oct 3 University of Waikato (32) 25 photos 4 audio files 3 videos Oct 6 The University of Auckland (26) 22 photos 4 videos Oct 7 Northtec (59) 51 photos 7 videos 1 audio Oct 8 AUT (44) 41 photos 2 videos 1 audio Or by types of media: Images (316) Audio (30) Video (28) Documents (12) Remixes (4) I was responsible for most of the audio (you can only upload photos and videos with an iOS device) and a baseline of what's listed was what I seeded the directories with. The thing I was most pleased with was the infinite wall media browser I was able to build as a StoryBox Explorer - this is running in just Javascript. I created a series of scripts that generated the thumbnails and created the HTML to supply the media viewer (more on this in the techie post). To show how it works, I created a screen cast of the way the Explorer works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2JoZdzffI There was never time to do the next level activities I hope for, to create new content from the Storybox media. I had just started getting a wiki running on it that is a viable platform for creating new content from the media; it needs a bit more work on the content side. More on that sometime in the future. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog People was naturally taken by the Brownie Box camera enclosure, and learning about the parts that are inside. Like me, I sense many see some sort of potential here, but just are not quite sure what to do with it (?) creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog We have just finished the 8 week online phase of the UDG Agora project, this the second year I have been part of this project run by the Justice Institute of British Columbia for faculty at the University of Guadalajara. This is where we tell them about Comparte (Spanish for "Share"), a site I made last year as a place for participants to publish the results of their course redesign projects. Yep, this is Alan again using his SPLOT code, this is the TRU Writer SPLOT, with a few enhancements. Building it last year got me to think about and implement a means for contributors to get a special link to use to re-edit their work (it does require them entering their email address, but there is a way for admins to get the special link too). The site is nearly all in Spanish, including the interface, and instructions on how to use to (thanks to "Kike" Jorge Enrique from UDG, including a screencast video). We wanted to have many ways to find reports, because the collection we have will help the current cohort get ideas how to share their results. I modified the "tags" input field on the writing form to ask for two sets of tags- one for the academic discipline of the project, and another for technologies used: [caption id="attachment_62304" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Two separate tag fields[/caption] The first one are normal Wordpress tags, I created a second taxonomy for the tech tags. This provides us in the footer different ways to find reports of interest (there are 127 reports from last year): We also have reports grouped into categories: Proyectos de Apertura (Openness) Proyectos de Aprendizaje Activo (Active Learning) Proyectos de Creación con Medios (Creation of Media) Proyectos mezclados (Remix) Otro tipo de proyectos (Other types of project) And one always has good old search: During our last live hangout where we provided an overview of Comparte, an idea wormed in my head. I had started to add a category for "Featured" reports as good examples (or "Distinguido"). But how do we find which ones to feature? Why not let the project participants tell us? I already use the WP-Post-Ratings plugin on the Challenge Bank. Because I am running a multi-site, I just needed to turn the plugin on. I had a whacky idea, to not just do 1-5 stars as a rating. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/788087361028501504 Of course, tacos! The WP Post Ratings plugin page had the answer for how to create my own graphics, just make a new folder inside the plugin's images folders, and make sure it had graphics with the same names as the ones on the stars folder, just made of tacos: And they just show up as an option in the plugin (the one thing to watch for is a plugin update, I will have to re-upload the images) Getting them on the site means modifying my template to include: A bit of CSS was needed to make them look good, but they ow show up on the from listing of reports: "Sin evaluar" means that I have not rated it yet (ratings are tracked by cookies), so I can choose my number of tacos to award, and just click the appropriate taco. The ratings also show up on the individual report, under the name of the writer: Here it is showing that 1 vote has been cast, and the average is 4 out of 5 tacos, and that I have already voted (so i cannot stuff the taco box). The plugin provides a widget, so I have in the bottom right, the 5 most highlight taco-rated reports ("most voted") The plugin also provides a link I can use on the menu, to show all of the reports, sorted by the highest average rated first. Maybe tacos are not the most academically rigid form of assessment. But most people enjoy tacos. Well, I took a poll in my house... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] These guys like them too... [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] So I invite you to seriously spend some time in Comparte and really find us the best 5 taco reports. If you help, I will buy you all a taco. Top / Featured Image: This is the design of a t-shirt sold online by Headline shirts. It's not openly licensed and the designs are apparently ©. So I bought a t-shirt as a gesture of appreciation. And I am blogging it, in the hopes the 100s of thousands of my readers buy shirts from them. Would you rather have iron clad control of media or more sales? This will prove I am not a statistician.. but I was mildly wondering today about patterns among people who twitter, as I glanced at my friends, as well as random people on the public timeline and the number of friends and followers on their pages. It seems there might be some behavior patterns there. Some generalizations: A lot of people in my circle have similar ratios of friends to followers, people perhaps shy? more selective, with ratios about 0.4-0.6. There are some more or less companies, entities using this solely to push content out; they have maybe one friend (so they are not really following others) and a few hundred followers, ratios < 0.2 Others have rather high ratios of friends to followers, > 1.0, even as high as 2.0 -- these might be the uber socialites, the ones who seek to have as much as possible from other. Social Seekers? This was hardly a scientific process or sample, just an experiment in curiosity -- what would be cool is to have someone who knows how to dabble in the API to go in and pull out piles of data like this and plot it. Or maybe it means nothing. Anyhow, my data looked like: and for reference, the data points are from: http://twitter.com/GardnerCampbell http://twitter.com/cogdog http://twitter.com/brlamb http://twitter.com/fceblog http://twitter.com/rushaw http://twitter.com/colecamplese http://twitter.com/dnorman http://twitter.com/jimgroom http://twitter.com/markwallace http://twitter.com/intellagirl http://twitter.com/hrheingold http://twitter.com/twitterlit http://twitter.com/RadHetrtz http://twitter.com/notstevenwright http://twitter.com/ApolloApps http://twitter.com/DellOutlet http://twitter.com/FoxyTunesDJ And not knowing much, toying around in Excel, I made a graph.... Does it mean anything? I dunno, but what's in your ratio? creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by martinjetpack A few weeks (or more) ago Karen Fasimpaur asked me if the new DS106 Assignment Bank as a Wordpress theme was reliable enough to be used for the 2014 Making Learning Connected MOOC. I forget her exact words, but something like, "Can you re-assure us that it will not blow up?" I do question guarantees, even more so when it comes to Other People Using My Code, but offered to assist in anyway. No smoke or flames are in sight, but they turned on the lights this week for the CLCMOOC Make Bank where the items are "makes" For those new to the idea of "makes," they are a big part of #clmooc. Over the course of the MOOC, there will be multiple Make Cycles during which time we'll all be prompted to create and build, digitally as well as materially, individually as well as in community. A "make," as we use the term, is any project or work where you are creating something. In this MOOC, we draw heavily from ideas from Connected Learning, which emphasizes creation and empowerment. In this MOOC, possible "makes" could include something you write (a story, poem, play, etc.) or draw (painting, comic, etc.), a web page or app you create, something you bake, or a social network or connection you form. We'll be connecting "makes" to the Connected Learning principles, and while we'll suggest some "makes" you might do, we really hope that participants will come up with their own ideas for makes that are meaningful to them. Our suggestions for "makes" are merely that "“ suggestions. In many ways, a CLMOOC "make" is like a DS106 assignment, but with a categorizations around the types of activities rather than media types. A random example, Make Log In 2013, Karen and colleagues had built out a Make Bank on their Wordpress site using gravity forms but she seemed keen on moving that into the form it is now-- I think she migrated all of the content from the 2013 site. creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by martinjetpack I cannot say enough how much the code and concept has improved from the back and forth working with Karen and Brad, much of it for me to think more broadly beyond the way we frames things for ds106. The layouts are cleaned up, we've added tagging, simplified the way they are organized, better presented examples, and knocked down quite a few bugs (e.g. not being tied to permalink choice, using the theming of the PostRatings plugin, making the search field actually work right, just to name a few). I have a batch of documentation to update on the repo site, but it's there if you are brave to try https://github.com/cogdog/ds106bank and at least now we have one built out example of it in action. A big High Five, it flies! Check it out, add, make, link and get yourself involved with the Making Learning Connected MOOC. creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by martinjetpack I hope more like an eagle than a zeppelin. I feel like I have almost nothing of an immune system, some of this I acknowledge to being diabetic, and maybe the rest to some strong voodoo. I think someone could sneeze in New Jersey and I would end up with a cold in Arizona. Anyhow, the viruses got shared at our home over Thanksgiving, everyone else gets better in 2 days, and I end up laid up for about 5 hacking and sniffling. It ain't pretty. But wokr still gets done, getting our online registration ready for our biggest Maricopa event coming up in January, getting our online newsletter ready for a first rollout next week, rallying some participation on next week's NMC Online Conference in Educational Gaming. Speaking of the NMC conference, check out the animated Larry Johnson, an eerie kind of Max Headroom experience. Our office will be sponsoring registration in the NMC Conference for some folks at Maricopa. Over the years, we've tried some different ways to encourage people to "shareback" their conference experience with the rest of the system. As one example, on his own initiative, David Weaver, Physics faculty at Chandler-Gilbert, wrote up his experience of the 2003 International Conference on Thinking, as an MLX Package. Last year, when we signed up some folks for the NMC Online Conference on Visual Literacy, we asked our Maricopa participants to post their session notes in a Wiki site. There was some success in this, but on the other hand, we heard a lot of struggling with the Wiki way (I belive there is a wiki-phobia out there), and some people we just never heard from. For the upcoming conference on Educational gaming (Dec7-8), we are taking a different approach-- we are asking each participant to create/use an account in our Maricopa ePortfolio tool, and set up an NMC Conference Blog page type, where they will record their own reflections on sessions they choose to "cover". I am using a Wiki as a front end to this, but not asking others to do wiki editing. Because the eport blogs have RSS, I will also whip up an aggregated view. Wow, that was easy. Since the maricopa ePort allows you to embed RSS content, I have just started adding the feeds to my sidebar for the eport Blogs being posted by my colleagues. Well, I'd write more but must leave for a coughing fit. I flipped to Academia.edu after reading one blogger referring to it as "Facebook for Academia" and while it has a few FB-like features (updates) I could not think of a more opposite description for a social network. My analysis here is admittedly first impressions and shallow ;-) What it seems to provide is a social networking for faculty, to find academics with common research interests, to browse by departments and roles. The structure is a rigid tree. There is "universities" at the top that you scroll or navigate horizontally by name, departments underneath, followed by and orderly listing of people by roles, faculty in top, then post-docs, then... I have a gut level negative response to an org chart structure which feels as 18th century as can be, and some of this in the midst of thinking about the discussions of networks and chaos theory in the ongoing Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. Is a fixed tree really the forward looking network shape of academia? Is this the future looking way of thinking about academia? And then beyond that, look at what "academia" is defined at the top search box... Academia = universities only There are no colleges in academic.edu; no community colleges, not art institutes, no research centers... Certainly no space for Stephen Downes or any other independent, un-affiliated educational researches who lacks the proper insignia and elbow patches to get in the tree.. So none of my former colleagues at the Maricopa Community Colleges who were actively engaged with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning are allowed inside. This was a program directly affiliated with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching -- which I would consider as rather "academic". Oh yes, because the Carnegie Foundation is not a University, does that mean its members cannot be part of the forest? I guess one could simply add an organization as there is a link there. And there are some 6000+ academics sitting in their perches of tree branches. And maybe I am just taking cheap pot shots as someone obviously has put a lot of work into this site and concept. But, to me, and who am I but a lowly Non-Academic. Academia = universities only is a walled garden. No, not much a garden, it is a walled forest of sterile trees. I like it better out here in the jungle. Where the wild things are. A very well written introduction to RSS: RSS - A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers (I cannot locate quickly what the "EEVL" acronym stands for but it is a UK resource for engineers). I like the plain language yet the forways into some of the details of producing RSS. <tiphat>Tip of the blog hat to ResourceShelf</tiphat> This document is aimed at publishers and content providers with the intention of introducing & explaining the concepts behind RSS and addressing some commonly expressed concerns. It is primarily intended for a non-technical audience who require an overview of RSS in order to allow them to make decisions regarding the possible use of the technology. However, the guidelines do provide recommendations for good practice, case studies on RSS production and links to tools and specifications which will provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually producing RSS feeds. creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by RiverRatt3 Given a smooth rollout (as far as I can tell) for the Connected Learning MOOC Make Bank, I'm wrapping for now the work on the ds106 Assignment Bank Wordpress Theme, having just updated the internal options documentation and the github Readme. The project that at one time I thought might take one or two months, starting back in August 2012, took almost 10 (a lot of off and on, mostly off). I've tagged all the related posts on this blog as 106bank. You can find everything to make your own bank at https://github.com/cogdog/ds106bank, as unwieldily as it looks, I know of at least 3 or 4 running instances. So far, I am the lone githubber, so it has not been much of a fork and play game there. That hardly means the code is too elegant more likely the opposite, too incoherent. This doesn't mean its quite done. Mostly when people get an idea for it, they are thinking of it in a way I never did. Working with Karen and Brad on this for the CLMOOC has been an enlightening experience. And confirms among things I don't want to be is a software developer. Some things that I thought about adding and might or might not add: A way to add a header image using the Wordpress theme editor, it sure likes nice on the CLMOOC Bank. Refine the icon CSS- getting that CSS and responsive thang to work was a lot of sweat lost. Recode the custom post types to circle our of using "assignments"; it's probably trivial. I thought there were some places that would cause an issue, but now I cannot.... Create a way to generate an embed code so people could make an Assignment/Thing appear in another site Create a way for people to create collections or playlists of Assignments/Things that could then be shared. Speaking of that, I am not sure why I have not added a "tweet/facebook/G+1" this functionality. I better stop that's enough. Fork please... I just want to cross this one off of the big list. Of course I did have grandiose plans of generalizing the ds106 Daily Create too. As you may know, after seeing her speak in 2008 at SXSW and WordCamp, I was rather determined to invite Kathy Sierra to keynote the 2009 NMC Summer Conference. I was a fan long before this as a follower of her blog Creating Passionate Users. I had done a parady of her graphic style in my Twitter Life Cycle which she did kindly acknowledge by comment or twitter. When I was at WordCamp, I had a chance to ask Matt Mullenweg how he managed to get her as a speaker, he told me all their communication was done via twitter direct message. So I thought it was worth a try and did manage to get her agreement (via twitter, it was about 5 DMs to send me her abstract) to come to NMC 2009 in Monterey.. I knew she was a different kind of speaker then we have had before, but my gut told me she would bring us a strong message. It paid off in many ways, mainly as she electrified the audience with her messages on the user experience and the ways we ought to help people be better at the things they want to do. I lost track of how many people expressed thanks (one of our corporate partners said "f******ing fantastic choice!") I am utterly thankful for Kathy for stepping out to a new audience and making a huge impact on our conference. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3621694038 2009/365/162 Kathy Sierra Rocks the NMC House flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Errorbook posted 14 Nov '07, 3.52pm MST PST on flickr Too popular for its own good? Will the groovy ship Facebook sink under its own weight? I dunno, but a raft of these screens are not all that enticing for me to spend time here. Too bad the poke thing always works... February 13, 2014 is World Radio Day a UNESCO Project aimed at making the world aware of the power of radio as a platform for change. Via our friends at SourceFabric (makers of the open source Airtime software), ds106 radio is going to be part of the SourceFabric Radio day long program. What is special about radio? According to the event site: The World Radio Day seeks raise awareness about the importance of radio, facilitate access to information through radio and enhance networking among broadcasters. Radio has to be recognized as a low cost medium, specifically suited to reach remote communities and vulnerable people: the illiterate, the disabled, women, youth and the poor, while offering a platform to intervene in the public debate, irrespective of people's educational level. Furthermore, radio has a strong and specific role in emergency communication and disaster relief. There is also a changing face to radio services which, in the present times of media convergence, are taking up new technological forms, such as broadband, mobiles and tablets. However, it is said that up to a billion people still do not have access to radio today. On that day, SourceFabric is running 2 hour blocks of streams from an invited set of internet-based radio stations that run Airtime, and you can tune in to their broadcast via the schedule page. They are giving ds106 radio a 2 hour block of time at 21:00-23:00 CET (12:00pm PST / 3:00pm EST / 8:00pm GMT check your local time) when they will play whatever is on ds106 radio through their channel. Let's plan something! We had a great response to our 3rd Birthday, come back again for more. I'm willing to run the stream, and handle call ins from people who want to be part of it, call in via Skype. Let's line up some examples of your favorite ds106 moments? I can think of from my collection... Scary Stories from Strawberry (with Bryan Alexander) Scottlo's broadcast from Tokyo after the 2011 Earthquake ds106radio Rockumentary with Dr Gracia, Giulia Forsythe, Bryan Jackson, Zack Dowell, and Grant Potter ds106 Radio Parodies from our own telethon in 2011 cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Want to catch the action? Tune in to us at http://ds106rad.io/listen. Tweet along with is via #ds106radio Want to contribute something to the playlist? Add some info to the google doc. Bumpers are awesome. If it is a long clip, edit it down to a shorter segment, and send it to the ds106 radio dropbox (pass="wejamecono"). Want to be on the call-in show? Awesome! Live conversation is the best stuff. Make sure I have your Skype handle (leave it in the doc). We hope you can be part of our slice of World Radio Day. Twis (present tense of "twas"?) not a real big demand on the internet for the kind of silly randomness I spat out to make a web toy that generates random utterances about AI using the quotes of Agent 007's gadget master, Q. And there's still place and value to do these things without just reachhig for ChatGPT method of Prompt, Copy, and Paste. This was one of a fleet of obscure random generating amusements done for my audience of 1 (me). They had all been first set up to have a button proving a means to blip a generated nugget to Twitter (the platform I only will refer to as Twitter), (shown here as screencap because nobody can really be sure if a tweet can be viewed). A tweet created from one of my generator's with the three part structure, stating what generator it was, what was generated, and a credit and link to the generator. It's not terribly complex to create a hypertext link to share on Twitter (not saying it again), of course , there's no being sure when its supreme commander will arbitrarily take it away. Just make a link that looks like: https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=LINKTOBESHARD&text=DEFAULTMESSAGE This opens a window where the person who clicks can just tweet out as is, or modify it. The thing is... I barely use Twitter, under under extreme circumstances -- I did login to test it for the new generator, here is a link that only works for the those who are Twitter Not Impaired. I've already written too much but basically the old way had After publishing my post, my back brain kept whispering.... why not change the button to share to Mastodon? I had after all, discovered recently MastodonShare that does the same thing via the same URL structure https://mastodonshare.com/?text=text&url=yourURL.com What is slick is he first time a visitor uses this link, it asks for their instance name, from whence the share screen is generated. From then on, the instance is saved as a cookie so te next share will go directly. I could just change it out, but heck, some people actually use the Platform Formerly Known as a Better Platform, so my first approach was to add a second button. I was going to detail the code changes, but I doubt anyone reall cares that much- I do have comments, with occasional sarcasm. And function names like share_it_like_a_bluebird. One could compare the first commit with the new Q generator, where the share button was a single link and the current version where what is changed is: Link changed from an ugly button image reading "tweet" to a bootstrap class rendering a button with svg icons Options from calling function to send twitter and mastodon username to credit, by sending a blank string for parameters, it hides the button A more generalized function to build the button that is less brute forced concatenated Also added opengraph tags to template for spiffer social sharing Who really cares? Well, these little generators are just toys, but now having some chops building the Mastodon share capability can come into use. More than that, there's pride in going through the iterative process of trying a new function, modifying and improving, as opposed to asking ChatGPT to spit out code you try, and then nag, the prompt continuously until maybe you are lucky it works. Both are iterative, yet I wonder which approach teaches you more. I do not doubt one could learn from analyzing and studying the code generated for you, but I'd bet most people will just keep banging until it works and not caring too much about understanding. Look! Proof is in the tooting: https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog/111514643451546447 Fin. Featured Image: My own, but yes, for some reason, although I do not have to, I attribute myself. It's not vanity (well maybe) but being consistent in demonstrating attribution. If anyone actually reads this commntary, and comments, I will mail you a Canadian Toonie. Yes! The attribution, this is One of Today's Projects flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified by superimposing a screenshot of bit of the javascript code I am arm waving about in this post. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine February 13 is World Radio Day and ds106 is on it! Check it out! Tweet it Out! Broadcast it out! It's your internet! Keep it Free! cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine When ever a discussion turns to "defining learing objects" my attention span goes out the door. With more than 500,000 Google-hits (link above), it is not any more clear what a LO is. The "Learning Object Virtual Community Of Practice" bears the cheery acronym LOVCOP, but it has been a ghost town since summer 2003. The virtual tumbleweds are blowing down main street and the saloon is slient. But I have read some things recently where it seems that almost any multimedia lesson created, any web page, every single flash goober, seems to bear the hot label of a"learning object." Therefore, I proclaim that everything that exists is a learning object, including my left big toe, so we can drop the silly jargon and move on to what counts... (more…) As we exited from a fabulous seafood dinner at the Oceanaire in downtown Indianapolis, our tourist eyes were caught by the flashing light animation up the street- looked like a electronic dancer, an avatar maybe. When we asked the valet what that was, he quickly explained it: Waste of Taxpayers Money Gotta like the honesty here. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Capture Queen â„¢ I find myself surprised to see people expecting rules and structure when not explicitly there- are we that "trained" to act by rules and expect rule makers? Huh? I am talking about the Daily Shoot, man. Frequent CDB readers will know I am an addict to the daily camer assignments- I've done 432 of 'em (hey, did you know you get your own gallery on THEIR site? cool!) I love the challenge, and have ventured that is a supreme model of informal learning, of learning by doing, of working the 10,000 hour gig. But I hear whinging (maybe I have muttered it myself) when assignments are repeated, even people saying it has caused them to quit. For example water- it was featured in number 9, number 51, number 293, number 479. Keep in mind that just because YOU did the assignment once, does not mean some new person has. Keep in mind that you can interpret the assignment in a radically different way. It is a challenge, right? And instead of complaining, why not contribute new ideas to the suggestion box? But look at the premise of the site: The Daily Shoot is a simple daily routine to motivate and inspire you to practice your photography, and share your results! It's not a contest and there are no prizes. It's simply about encouraging you to pick up your camera and make photographs. ... That's it. There aren't any other rules. You aren't going to get demerits if you miss a few days, nor will you get gold stars for doing every assignment. We're just here to help you with a little nudge every day. The rest is up to you! So when I hear people complaining about the assignments, it comes off as fomenting the traditional student-teacher role, the expectation that they leaders are responsible for your learning. BS. Look at the FAQ: What are the rules? This is your creative work - there are no rules. And so I see too many people taking the whole thing too literally. Like they HAVE to do exactly what the assignment said. I have a new idea. cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by squacco I am playing the anti Daily Shoot game- not anti like against it, just going opposite to the assignment. So for yesterday's assignment about water, I shot the water defying cactus, "We Don't Need No Stinking Water"- cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today's challenge was to go opposite to "Make a photograph of a beautiful simple shape, such as an egg, today. Utilize lighting and focus to make it sing." - so I went for chaos and mess: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Does this mean I failed? Does it mean I am not working on my craft? No. I am still practicing my photography.... every day. I don't know how long I will roll opposite, but its a new twist on the challenge- want to play? Add antidailyshoot to your tags -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/antidailyshoot/ The DailyShooters addressed this issue of repeated assignments in a December 2010 blog post Now, I know from my inbox that there a few folks that are unhappy about this. Somehow, the Daily Shoot has let them down by not meeting their expectations of what it was. To this, all I can offer is to repeat our mantra: we're about getting you to pick up your camera and practice. Nothing more. Practice involves repetition. We're going to have that from time to time. I do not begrudge someone stopping or not shooting a while. It's not about being obsessive about it (maybe, not... am I obsessive? no I cannot be obsessive.... I just think about it all the time... that is not obsessive, eh?) . It's not about the assignments, its about the creativity. You dont like the assignments, interpret it originally. Or make up your own. Just make art, damnit! In my story of Dorothy getting bored in Kansas, I wanted to have a way for her to go back to Oz, and the easiest way would be via the Play It Backward, Jack ds106 assignment: Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don't they? So take a video of something in your life--someone running, the toilet flushing, the sink dripping, someone spitting, whatever--and reverse it! They not only look weird, but they sound weird. I used the "No Place Like Home" clip from YouTube, already saved as mp4 from my previous work. I brought this into iMovie, and edited the Clip to make it go in reverse. I added a bit of fade out on the end, visual effect of "Cartoon" and Audio effect of "Echo", all to give it a freaky kind of satanic feel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2am4_OAh-7M Just keep repeating that, and you might go back to Oz, Dorothy. The cryptic math is meant to communicate that over the last 2 days (48 hours), I have presented 3 times online 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (if you do the math you get a bad pi). Last night was a presentation for Dean Shareski's ECMP 355 Course (no web site?), which I believe is a University of Regina course for pre-service teachers, "Computers in the Classroom". And I did two more ones today for the Powerful Learning Practice group from El Paso that Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach and Will Richardson leave. I gotta give Sheryl and hear team a to of credit in providing tech support to these teachers; they had them ALL verify and test their voice connection before I started, and rally provided a lot of energy to the back channel. All the participants were highly active, and took on my game of story prompts, this time using an open white board in Elluminate (I squint and ignore the corporate name on the login screen). A lot of thees teachers are already making use of ones like Voicethread, Glogster and Animoto, but also a number them like Blabberize and today there was strong interest in Tikatok and Zooburst. I did not have time to add it today, but my long time Apple buddy Paul Valach shared this example, which is a 2-fer-- a teacher has set of a Clogster site for linking to student projects that explain math principles, each one of those links is an Animoto video. Check it out http://clsatb123.edu.glogster.com/math-animoto/. I've found that with variable network connections, its not worth doing live demos of the tools, so I talk through examples I have screenshots for. I do upload a quicktime version of the Dominoe story which does play well in the space (it is disturbing to hear how many teachers have to work in environments of blocked sites, it suggests that school systems teach their most valued employees as children), I don't have links for Elluminate archives yet, but I recorded my own audio from the session for Dean's class, and loaded it in Slideshare with my slides (I like doing this since this method is one of the 50) 50+ Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story (May 2011) View more webinars from Alan Levine I still enjoy doing this presentation, though I prefer not at this frequency. I dont want to become one of Those Guys Who Do the Same Shtick For Everyone. I still have a chunk of updates to do for the new wiki, and still have about 15-20 tools waiting in the wings to write up. The new wiki format is designed for other people to edit the descriptions of the tools, add their own examples, and share some feedback on the usefulness of the tool (see how to add to the wiki). I have also created a new wiki page that lists the tools that have special features for teachers. This page, and the Tools by Type and Tools by Media Capability are generated automatically based on a structure of tags I set up. After all this, I sure feel like Curly does in this photo cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by mfhiatt Hi. There has not been too much nostalgia posting here lately (well actually not much at all, so there). Maybe last June? But who cares if I feel like dipping into my tech past, it's there. It's part of my journey. And it's my blog, my domain. Farther back, maybe a year ago, I recanted my web start experience, plugging a Mac SE/30 into the network jack at my office at the Maricopa Community Colleges, giving it a sub-sub-sub domain name of hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu, lighting up MacHTTP, and called it my first web server. That was December, 1993. It was a Jay Hoffman post today that started my associative trail back to 1993, summarizing some links, thoughts on the web turning 30. That's on that broad plateau of adulthood. Does the web seem like an adult or is it living an extended teen aged angst? Back to Jay's post... This month the web turns thirty. Of course, the web has already turned thirty a few times before (thirty years since the web’s initial proposal, since the first browser, since the first webpage, etc.). But this month marks thirty years from when the web was first announced to the public; in a Usenet group by the web’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee.https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/the-great-reckoning-comes-around-august-2021/ I can't help but explore hyperlinks, so I ended up at the NPR story on the web at 30 where this nugget caught my eye: And so, with the creation of a single web page, the World Wide Web was born. And it's grown quite a bit since then. There were 10 websites by 1992, 3,000 websites by 1994 (after the W3 became public domain), and 2 million by the time the search engine Google made its debut in 1996.https://www.npr.org/2021/08/06/1025554426/a-look-back-at-the-very-first-website-ever-launched-30-years-later Hold the train, Fran. There were only 3,000 websites by 1994. I planted my web stake in 1993! That was a pretty small web. The author did not cite the sources, but a quick google for number of web sites in 1993 got me right away to see a sign of the 623 club. I have my proof that I was in there! See the self-archived web stats from my web server's first month -- the first serving was before lunch ended on December 6, 1993. From the machine name, I was likely testing from a mac in our office test area, maybe showing my Director (my office machine was topaz.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu) (why do I remember that arcane stuff?). Woah, Neo. My little experiment put the MCLI web server as one of only 623 web serving machines in 1993. But back to that source, MIT Researcher Matthew Gray. The source still lives as a humble web page Measuring the Growth of the Web June 1993 to June 1995. Results table from Mathew Gray's report on Measuring the Growth of the Web That was a different web in December 1996, when 95.4% of web sites were not .com (that included me!) Gray's research made use of something called "ZONE" a "DNS Walker" and other old stat stats collected by the Merit Computer Network Backbone Statistics. Merit was a university coordinated network set up for mainframes in the 1960s originally connecting public university researchers at Michigan State University (MSU), the University of Michigan (U-M), and Wayne State University (WSU) (thanks Wikipedia). There's some real humanity in Gray's reports, from the later version explanation of terminology an explanation of hostnames include: When you use a hostname, it gets looked up on a machine called a name server. Bascially, you give it a hostname and it tells you an IP address. Usually, a given hostname will always give you the same IP address back. This process of getting an IP address for a hostname is called name resolution. Often, however, multiple hostnames will end up giving back the same IP address. For example, the hostnames 'www.mit.edu' and 'anxiety-closet.mit.edu' will resolve to the same IP address, and hence, the same machine.https://stuff.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/terminology.html Wait a minute, what kind of rigorous example is anxiety-closet.mit.edu? It's not a working domain, but once it was (thanks Wayback Machine, AGAIN?) a student organization's web server. Be careful, I started slipping down a huge hole of Personal Home Pages (hundreds), things like black text, blue links on plain white pages with stuff like "For DCDS people, this page may be of interest. It includes the Unofficial Homepage of the DCDS Quiz Bowl Team, a flow chart of organic isomers, and my World Literature Project on Dante's Inferno." I have completely digressed. So I can't help but have my own bit of pride and having been fortunate to have a job then where I could experiment and be one of the first 623 web sites. Again, for context, I was most interested in both creating and helping educators navigate a connected, distributed system of resources... via Gopher. Ooops. And this was driven by a desire in a large, multi-college system that was split in terms of computer systems (Apple and Microsoft) that the internet seemed to be a means to bridge. And not to be all glory, rah rah about the web. But there is a people story here. I did not get to that place of putting up a web server on December 6, 1993 just on my own. I'm still not quite sure what my Director at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, Naomi Story, saw in the relatively green Geology graduate student who applied for a job there in 1992. That kind of supportive, involved, but hands off leadership seems almost quaint. The real key was a gentle, quiet mentor named Jim Walters, who previously had worked in the predecessor of my office, and actually it was a job description of Instructional Technologist originally crafted for Jim that became a role I got elevated into. Jim was then working at Phoenix College, where I attended a faculty showcase event in October 1993. In his way, not being preachy or fawning over a technology, but literally handing me a floppy disk with word "Mosaic" hand written on the label, and just saying, "Try this Alan, you might find it interesting." Not quite the actual disk Jim gave me, just a mockup. That. Changed. Everything. Because, while I had seen a text based interface of the web earlier in the year, navigating the connected set of documents from a physics lab in Switzerland, had not really lit the fires. It was seeing the web in a visual interface, with media, that was hyperlinked that made all the difference. I could go on. But putting that 1/623 stake into the young web was by no means just me. So thanks to all those colleagues I worked with 14 years at Maricopa, those extended educators and technical geeks I connected with via the internet/web, and maybe just the general drift of positive serendipity that leads to this time, place. Thanks, universe. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/16446317149 Land Staked flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Dear Blog, I've been gone so long you are not familiar with who I am? Who, but myself, can I hold up for blame? Have you forsaken me for another, given my inattention? Stephen has already dropped the Wiley E Coyote anvil sized hint. Yet, as we have talked before, fewer things are lamer than blogging about not blogging, yet I shall do so anyhow. That's the thing, my sweet blog software, you waiting patiently with an empty "Add New Post" form-- is that unlike any other places we put our name on in the web, this is the one where we establish all the rules and therefore break them. And that, on this day of USA celebration of our quasi independence (freedom to fill up shopping carts at Walmart, freedom to clog up the cmapgrounds with atvs and generators, freedom to shoot incendiary devices over bone dry forests...), here is to our Blogindependence- freedom to change our themes, freedom to shut of comments, heck even freedom to just go dark. I just did a tally on the June calendar- I was home for almost 9 days. For July, I am here for 31. And so my excuses for neglecting you, dear blog, are nil. There goes that calendar reminder. Today is the day in 1956 that my grandfather, Abraham passed away, seven years before I was even born. I know he died young; his wife lived until 2003; outliving her husband by 47 years is staggering. I am not sure when he was born, somewhere I have in a memory that he was 51 when he passed away. My grandmother, born in 1905, told me that they met at a school dance, so I could guess they were close or the same in age (maybe that's where I got the 51). Last year I dug more into his past, and found out that like my father, my grandfather earned his college degree by distance learning, doing so without any kind of internet or MOOC thing. In thinking today that I'm likely older than he even lived to be, I put together a Photoshop overlay of my photo on his. Here it is in a little comparison widget: [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] Similar but different; if anything, our hairlines match exactly. Me with a beard, and I don't wear a tie. All I can do is wonder about a man who definitely controlled my destiny and whom I know so little about, especially not even knowing what his voice sounded like. I was named after him, he was Abraham Herman Levine; I am Alan Herman Levine... my Mom, bless her foresight, thought that "Abraham" was a bit of an old fashioned name for the early 1960s, so she modernized the first name of her fourth child. These days, with all the retro biblical names that parent's choose, she might have stayed with tradition. But I am of him, though without him by a long shot. UPDATE (later the same day): Thanks Bill Smith for GIFfing me and my grandfather together [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by byzantiumbooks under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: Composite photo of my grandfather, left, and myself, right. That was his company photo as a Vice President of Baltimore Contractors, and was a framed photo that was in the basement of our family home (I used a copy that is my flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6313569378 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license). My photo has a portrait taken in 2014 by Jonathan Worth that he gave to me, so I would consider it also licensed the same. I keep a copy in my dropbox when someone demands a photo of me that is not a dog icon. Woah, this ice is slippery! I don't know how to skate! Can I use an exclamation mark in every sentence, even a question?!cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by cogdogblog: http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/8308186687This, alas, is a second weakly veiled attempt to post to both my known site and maybe twitter too but specifically to the Dog Blog. Tim has tweaked some server things (the last time it posted to everywhere but known, which is kind of the point).Wheeeee! Walking home from my friend's Christmas dinner I was thinking, of all things, about how tired people seem to be of social media and the web, and a lot of resignation to how eff-ed up it can feel. Many of the blogs I relished reading have just gone dark, un-updated in my RSS Reader. And also remembered Jim Groom's announcement of a record-fair inspired Domains conference this June in Oklahoma. That's going to be great, but I think we should all band together, turn on our domains, our blog, bring others along into the fray-- this ought to be the year to rise up and Reclaim the Web. A 1960s sugar covered song popped into my head. And I am humming out loud, "I'm a Reclaimer". It was time to pull out the pen and paper, re-write the lyrics, grab some guitar tabs, and do an edtechcover. This rough crowing was about 30 minutes of trying it out, and recorded in one take. There are goofs and off-key yelling. https://soundcloud.com/cogdogroo/im-a-reclaimer And my lyrics: G D G I thought the web was only for status updates G D G Built by someone else but not by me. C G Trackers are out to sell me C G That's the way it seems. C G D (stop) Surveillance transmitting all of my feeds. G C G G C G Then I got a domain, now I'm a reclaimer G C G C Not a shred of me stored in their cloud C G (1) C (1) G (1) I'm in charge, oh I'm a reclaimer! F (1) (riff) Couldn't login there if I tried G D G I thought likes were more or less a shared thing, G D G Seems the more I gave the less I got. C G What's the use in tweetin'? C G All you get is spam. C G D (stop) When I needed insight I got ads. G C G G C G Then I got a domain, now I'm a reclaimer G C G C Not a shred of me stored in their cloud C G (1) C (1) G (1) I'm in charge, oh I'm a reclaimer! F (1) (riff) Couldn't login there if I tried C G Trackers are out to sell me C G That's the way it seemed. C G D (stop) Surveillance transmitting all of my feeds. G C G G C G Then I got a domain, now I'm a reclaimer G C G C Not a shred of me stored in their cloud C G (1) C (1) G (1) I'm in charge, oh I'm a reclaimer! F (1) (riff) Couldn't login there if I tried I'm a reclaimer, I'm a reclaimer yeah yeah Skip the resolutions about weight loss and running marathons, commit yourself to pry away (not completely, but reclaim your time, your data) from the shallow muck hole of social media, and get back to your blog, Jojo, get back to where you once belong (another cover to do). "It's too hard" does not wash at all. Look how lousy a musician I am, but I can do what I did in 2 hours, with the help of lyrics and chords shared on the internet, open source Audacity software, and a free account on SoundCloud. Or start a new one. Or give a friend the gift of a domain from Reclaim Hosting (friends don;t let friends host with GoDaddy). Or move your site off of the upsell / lock down of Wordpress.com -- Reclaim will do the leg work for you. Stop complaining about social media in social media. Get back to writing and sharing ideas, rather than link shoving. Reclaim it All in 2017. Start now. Top / Featured Image: A mashup, a remix of the Monkees single. It's totally a copyright if you believe in the limited scope of what that means. This use is not to sell (listen to how bad the music I made is), and is parody. Twitter Works! by cogdogblog posted 22 Feb '08, 3.38pm MST PST on flickr Bill Fitzgerald exclaimed this after asking attendees at nrothern voice who had aspirin and Chris Lott tweete back, "me" People keep asking for how to use flickr or what its practical applications are. Bill Fitzgerald can now vouch that he was able to use twitter to take care of his headache (of course, not drinking at the tiki bar might have worked as well, but not nearly as web 2.0 neat) Perhaps a philosophical question? Nah. Just testing default featured image option for the Quick Featured Images plugin. This post has no featured image, nor any images at all in it (a rare thing). Ignore the laboratory spills. I have an old JavaScript bookmark tool I made five years ago-- it allows me, from no matter where I am on the web, to either select some text in a page (or enter in a box) and run a search for it in my own blog. This came from realizing that the basic wordpress search URL was always something like: http://www.myfreakyblog.org/index.php?s=cheddar+cheese And with my mediocre JavaScript tools, I made a site that allows anyone yo make one for their own blog-- the Make A WordPress Search Bookmarklet tool -- which to my utter surprise, still works. It's prety easy- you enter the name of the blog, its base URL, and click "Build The Bookmark"- drag the generated JavaScript link to your toolbar, and you are done. So for example, let's say I have some B movie blog I want to make the tool for, I enter its name, the URL (http://bavatuesdays.com/), and shazam, I can search the Bava no matter where I am browsing: And from there it runs the search for me- oh, what a surprising result! Seriously, Jim, just wanted to share that this is a tool I use all the time as I try to find the old references in my blog. The Future is Here? by cogdogblog posted 24 Sep '08, 7.11pm MDT PST on flickr Spotted on the streets of Hong Kong, I am pretty sure in peeking in the window I saw lots of "Connectivism in a Box" ;-) Go George Go! Mothers' Day when your mother has passed on... there are no flowers to send, no cards to mail, no phone calls. But that does not mean nothing to do (not like not writing too many double negatives!). The first Mothers Day after mom passed on, in my post I lifted the lyrics from the song Motherless Children, (I knew mostly from the 461 Ocean Boulevard album by Eric Clapton, but he lifted it from Blind Willie Johnson, lift it on...). Now 8 mom-less Mother's Days on, I reflect obviously that having known a mother, you are never motherless. Maybe it's more Not Fade Away (again I knew from the Rolling Stones, but they lifted it from Buddy Holly). So again, I listen to a few bits of audio stories I recorded with her in February 2011, our last time together. I looked through the old photos, never enough of them. The one I used above was the last photo of her. When my sisters and I traveled to Mom's house in September 2011 to "pack it up" we found a film camera partly used. We took a few photos at the Sanibel Island beach Mom loved, where we tossed back into the ocean all the shells she had collected. Then we took the camera to be developed, unsure . On the roll were some photos of Mom and neighbors who had gone to see a minor league baseball game The team then was known as The Fort Myers Miracle, but apparently renamed to be Might Mussels. Little is permanent). https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6343079380 Mom's Last Baseball Game flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6343080058 At the Ballpark. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license There was also this shot of her dining room table as she left it, with some paperwork, the ancient old metal stapler I remember from the old house, a thank you note ready to be written. So Mom. These bits of memories help in wiping that "motherless" phrase from my vocabulary. Mom often wagged a finger at me and my sisters, saying “When I am going you kids better be there for each other... ” You never expect to do be saying those words in past tense when you are hearing them in the present one. And my sisters sure are, there for each other, even spread geographically. My sister Judy is an exceptionally caring, tireless, generous and involved mom of her adult children, and in every way is a "chip off the mom block." She and her daughters carry on the chocolate chip cookie thing well. While my sister Harriet did not have children, but she's been a loving step-mom and is also a "chip off the mom block" with her full life, doing post-retirement work in a clothing store (like Mom) and being a jigsaw puzzle demon, but more importantly, just caring so much for people around her. Last night here at home we had a full day Mother's Day celebration yesterday for Cori. Even in COVID times when it was not possible to buy bouquets of flowers and gifts like usual, Jessy Lee was tireless in doing the errands to set things up and cooking a fabulous meal (my part was making a berry pie), still baking a surprise right at this moment. But oh those moments of story sharing between Cori and her daughter over our dining room table, joyous tears, with flickering candles, and so many Mom stories of adventures and overcome challenges these two did in those many years they were a house of two. And then there are the "kids" of Cori aka "Momma Saas" to so many of her former and current students. They honored her with attention and gifts, like one from Lane, now a rancher sharing 47 pounds of beef, plus others bringing today giant rocks for our crazy gardens, phone calls, texts. https://www.instagram.com/p/B_9Q1ESly7Q/ I know for sure how much Mom would have loved Cori and Jessy Lee, and would want to hear all their stories too. And laugh. In all this, surrounded by so much "Mother-ness" I am so fortunate, and know it, and can never use the phrase again of "Mother-less." Happy Mother's Day, my mom and moms everywhere. Postscript Via an email, Matthias Melcher shared another example that there is a German word for everything that unfolds itself like a story. The German word for "very alone" is "mutterseelenallein" and means literally "alone with nobody but mother's soul". But this also suggests that mother's soul is always with you and hence immortal. Featured Image: a bit of photoshop masking and tweening to make Mom fade out and in, from my own photo At the Ballpark. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license. No, it is not Potted Meat Food Product, just down the shelf... Wikis: The Next Frontier for Spammers? Wiki maintainers can expect an increase in spam after a webmaster newsletter highlighted the effectiveness of Wiki spam in raising a site's Google ranking. WebProNews described how a webmaster improved his rank in a search engine optimization (SEO) contest using links in Wiki "sandboxes" - pages where users are urged to test drive the format and learn how to use it. All kinds of body enhancement products, hormones, elongation devices, chemicals, mortgage deals, ebay tips-- all now veering for your wikis! Head for the hills! It was like a brand new day. Officially, the first day of work on my new project with Creative Commons, which is to help them design a curriculum (of sorts) and a system to provide certifications in the understanding and application of CC. It will be openly licensed (of course), and have an ability to be tailored for needs in different sectors (e.g. for higher education, library, government orgs) as well as localized for international usage. More on the details soon. Because the project leader, Paul Stacey, happens to be in Africa my first two weeks, we Skyoed last week about some starting stuff. To try something different for organizing my work, I am trying (at least for now) to organize my project stuff in Evernote. I've had an account for years and a loose collection of un-organized notes. I use an iOS app (Piikki) to scan receipts that are stored in Evernote. I have a random set of notes like Frequent Flyer numbers and prescription codes. I have been clipping (with the Chrome Extension) some relevant readings, and also fiddled today with a way to IFTTT stuff I bookmark in Pinboard into Evernote. Keeping organized notes is a whole new realm for me. But I can try. I made one with the notes from the call with Paul (he gave me 4 things to start looking into, so each becomes a note). I also started a weekly summary just to remember key things, conversations (like I chatted on Skype today with David Kernohan, and I have much more clarity from him on the fuzz of blockchains). One of the things on my list is to think about the "public facing" part of the project- Paul is committed to doing this in the great wide open-- so of course eventually there will be some kind of project blog-- but until then I am doing my own tracking here. Parts of the project will be on github, and we had some discussion about using that as a a workspace too for the team he is assembling. I also have some thinking to do how we can grow a community (eventually) around the project. The part I spent most of today was looking into collaborative workspaces. Basecamp seems a bit yesterday, and of course I thought of Slack, which is Hot Now (and I have used for about 6 projects this year). But that's not a given- some of the issues one might face there is the 10,000 message limit but more that it's a proprietary platform. There's a whole corner of Google for Alternatives to Slack, I spent some time poking through the ones described at http://beebom.com/2015/04/slack-alternatives-for-team-communication. Most seem corporate based, and thus they are stacked (get it) to nudge you into paying for the service. Glip seemed to have the best free offering-- but your stuff is still sitting in someone else's house. I then looked at some of the Open Source Options, one list from Opensource.com and another list from Venturebeat. The two that stood out (and this was a quick scan) were Rocket.Chat (they have a demo version you can explore) and Mattermost billed as "Slack Compatible" meaning an existing Slack could be migrated, and it offers the integrations available on Slack. A number of the open source ones have installations via docker-- but when it mentioned that some could be installed via Sandstorm I remembered that Grant Potter gave me an account to the Sandstorm environment he is running with Brian Lamb and other BC folks. It took like one minute to install Rocket.Chat in Sandstorm, and it sure feels like it has most of what I have been using in Slack: What I want to do more with is explore the integration options. Then I got a bit sidetracked in Sandstorm, and installed Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, and imported my subscriptions from Digg Reader (via an OPML export). And this has me thinking/wondering if the project might make use of the Sandstorm environment. Because I am tagging and also made a blog category here, I was thinking what to call this project for short (and that's something for others to have a say in), but I could not help but free associate with CC Certification as CCC which led to the Civil Conservation Corps which led me to remixing the poster from 1935 (which is in public domain, and funny that I found it also on some other site that had slapped a copyright in the corner, sigh). It's totally not the right metaphor, but playing around with metaphors is what gets the other gears in my head moving... [caption id="attachment_54737" align="aligncenter" width="393"] remixed from public domain Wikimedia Commons image[/caption] It's just the first day, and this project is a year and half. And I have yet to mention the B-word. Top / Featured Image: My own staged photo. At 9:00am today, I busted out a blank sheet of paper, write a title, and laid the pen down (most of my note writing today was in Evernote). The photo is my flickr https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/25199223203 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license By day he's an ordinary computer science professor at Universidad Sagrado del Corazon, but once he puts that hat on, it's adventure time for... Puerto Rico Jones? Indiana Vantaggiato? I've been thinking it's time to record a new podcast with Antonio Vantaggiato, and in a few DMs he asked what about the last one we recorded? My brain was fuzzy; I know we did the one from Australia with Parisa in Japan. Then he types back that he has a Skype call from January 1. And sure enough, I dug into my recorded Skype calls, and there it was, like an old wooden treasure box, inside was a shiny, un-edited set of audio files. I split them out, combined and cleaned up in Audacity, and sent it to our shared Google Drive folder. Then Antonio dug in for his first experience editing it in TapeWrite, and despite one cry of ****** laden anguish in a DM (when one errant click lost it all), like a true Raider of Lost Tapes, Antonio re-traced his edits and published our newest podcast. So here it is, long overdue, especially if it were left to me, Episode 3 of the Puerto Rico Connection podcast with Antonio... TW Okay, okay, it's almost an hour, way too long. We like to talk! And ramble. But it's full of stories of his Christmas trip to visit his daughter in San Francisco, talk of classes, and how things were in Puerto Rico (Antonio leans on the positive side). Our vow is to be more organized, and thus produce a shorter one next time. I don't know, frankly, I'd rather talk longer with "Puerto Rico Jones". And just to top off the experience, Antonio also shared via twitter the fantastic surprises he got from someone who truly does #caree4sagrado https://twitter.com/avunque/status/961330215153754112 https://twitter.com/avunque/status/961330549796286465 https://twitter.com/ParisaMehran/status/961481894717042688 Yes, peace and love from many places in this world (except the White House). Will Raiders of the Lost Tapes have a sequel? We plan more podcasts, but hopefully no more lost tapes. Stay tuned. Featured Image: A hasty mashup of a screen of Raiders of the Lost Ar, a weak effort to replicate the title text, my own photo of Antonio and a different one of my Meteor Mic microphone. OMG, the working conditions I have this month (/me ducks)... no that is my afternoon on Sunday at the beach I can walk to from the Sagrado campus (Sunday morning was spent working on web sites, ok?) Seriously, it is full on weekdays and evening prep in the first 1 days here. So far I have done two workshops for students, planned two assignments of the INF115 class, tended the daily photo challenge site, met with faculty, did an interview. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] The participation so far for the daily photo challenge has been about 9 per day, 182 total responses to 19 dailies. And the most enthusiastic participant is not even in our class. The two workshops have been blogged Bringing the Cool Web Stuff to Puerto Rico and Inside the World of Catfishing. The session last week for the class, GIF It Up, introduced animated GIFs among a more general group of what I have been calling Short Form video. I can skip having to explain animated GIFs, but it is a fun exercise to ask students why they think they are effective, why people share them. I rely again on a collection of examples assembled originally for the UDG Agora Short Form Video Studio. I could not have gotten a better set up response when (?was it Juan?) said that they can express a key moment in a movie. Literally. He was reading my mind. My idea was to have the students practice making GIFs the easy way, with the giphy GIFmaker tool. Rather then just say "go out and GIF" I tried something we did in Western106 where I asked everyone to work with one movie scene as a source- this way we can see how different people choose the part to animate. And Because I Could, I gave them a western scene to work with, the opening to Once Upon a Time in the West- in those eight minutes are tons of GIFable facial expressions and movement (the train, Bronson's harmonica, etc) https://youtu.be/8XkHsinz7oU The "twist" I added was asking them to add caption that has a modern context, my hasty example focuses on the lack of good mobile connectivity in the west. And we have already a few coming in from https://disponibilidad.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/one-gif/ The activity I set up for Monday was designed to have the students do something out of class-- no not flipping, to have them spend part of the class time doing something active out of the classroom. Originally we talked of something like the DS106 Photo Safari, but Antonio and I hatched an idea to get the students started with understanding Audio. The materials for The world of Sound: Recording Audio again have a lift from the UDG Agora Studio, including the listening activity to have them observe with their ears the soundscape of the room (a lot of A/C noise). The activity is similar to the Vox Populi/ One Question challenge - they are asked to use their mobile phone as an audio recorder. The question we asked is a followup to a previous discussion on Wikipedia; the students are charged with collecting at least 3 different people who respond to a question about the value of Wikipedia as a reference or academic tool. To get them started, they were asked to interview each other, then to go out as pairs and find other students, maybe faculty to ask the question. I suggested they find a librarian and also consider asking a family member at home. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] They are asked before next Wednesday to upload their audio to Soundcloud, and embed them in their blog (the students use Wordpress.com blogs which need an upsell before they let you upload audio). The plan is next week to introduce them to editing in Audacity. I am suggesting we have them use clips from other students when they build their own Voice of The People segment. In the rest of the month here, I have 2 faculty workshops to do (already fishing for ideas, Chicken on s Skateboard and all!), devise more class assignments, generate some ideas for the STEMmED web site, get Antonio set up with a multisite of SPLOT tools (all of which need some work on the theme options page)... and get to the beach again soon. It's a great environment to work with enthusiastic faculty and students, plus get some R&D work... and get to the beach! Top / Featured Photos: Dogs on the beach in San Juan, that's me last Sunday-- my flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/24859688016 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Florin Draghici That title may mislead you that I know something. It just sounds good. But as much as we seem to be in a world of digital information abundance, there is plenty of strategies in publishing of creating scarcity that does not truly exist. I know a number of colleagues do thing like pledge support for open access (I thought Martin weller had a post with his stand on this, and he did stick to an open access route to publishing of his book). This is a long end around to talk about how I feel getting, in the postal mail, notification of an agreement for a paper of mine that was published recently in a museum education journal. Now my rate of publishing is maybe one paper every 2 to 12 years, so its not much of a big deal .but going forward, I wont be part of any publishing that restricts access to the content. There has to eb a better way. This paper was done as a favor to a friend doing the editorship for a small journal. The letter today states: In compensation for the right to publish and license your article, we shall send you two complimentary copies of the Journal issue in which the article appears. In the event that there are two or more authors of an article, each co-author shall receive at least one complimentary issue. Authors of book reviews, research notes, and other ephemera shall each receive one (1) complimentary copy of the Journal issue in which their contribution appears. The Xxxxx xxxx shall provide no offprints but shall allow you to photocopy up to fifty (50) copies of your article, or provide fifty (50) electronic copies "“ with further reproduction by the recipients forbidden - without fee for non- commercial professional distribution. No electronic posting of your article is allowed without our written permission. I wonder what is scared or magical about the allowed number of reproductions, 50. Maybe I ought to hum a song. And they pretty much have full copyright of the work. This in no way means I am upset or irate, and frankly, the restrictions mean little to me. I share more directly on a daily basis bere on this blog, which is where my ideas roma free. It just seems a bit outlandish, like some vestige of an earlier mechanical age. As such, I can offer no link to the article. And as such, I wont mention its title, topic, or where it was published. And no, I have not come up with a better model for academic publishing, but then again, neither has the publishing business, and they have more to bring to the table than the same olf models of restriction to create value. It just does not work. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by roujo Again, academic publishing is not really all that important to me, but should it happen, it will be in a place where there is no restrictions to access the content. I whimsically, and falsely, wrote My Dentist Has an RSS Feed (there was a point, but that post has scrolled away...). However, he is rather wired for his work. Today, at his new office, they used a digital xray machine that takes the photos of your teeth, but they insert a mini sensor card in your mouth, that is read almost instantly into a computer and projected on a flat screen in the office for him to examine and show me (no plasma screen yet). Apparently the cost savings (on supplies, film, chemicals) are significant, the images sharper and saved to an electronic record, and also since the coverage is larger, I am exposed to less x-rays. It's one of those subtle things I like to notice where technology slips into ordinary activities, and is useful. At other doctor's offices, I see reams of paper, paper notes, large bukly files, doctors flipping through pages to find things... well it is something they hopefully are in transition. I ordered an 11x14 glossy of my molars ;-) And better yet, no cavities. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by wsilver Last June, before the Northern Voice conference, I spent some extra time in Vancouver at UBC to get insight into their success with UBC Wiki as a community platform as well as a publishing engine (w.g. wiki content being pushed to Wordpress). Part of it was talking to the tech wizards behind it, (including Will, The Wiki Gardener™), librarians, and some faculty. I was curious what I could bring back to University of Mary Washington, whether there was an opportunity for the wiki as a similar place in a school where blogging was pretty well established as a publishing platform. The uptake at UBC might be in part due to the science, math, and engineering fields that use it more extensively than other disciplines, or the timing of its start being in place near or before the rise of blog platforms. I have my doubts about MediaWiki, not about its ability, but it is not really an approachable creating environment. Coders and geeks are fine manually editing raw wiki text, but I would never expect run of the mill folks to take it on, and yes, I know it is not really all that complicated- but it requires you to keep those codes in your memory space. Sure ==== is an <h3> tag and '''blah blah''' is bold text? A graphical editor is really not the full answer. MediaWiki is powerful and super extensible, but finding those bits and tracking down documentation is a trip down Alice's Rabbit hole with a dying flashlight. It pales in comparison to the Wordpress Codex (which ironically is a wiki). I don't doubt its potential, but I was struggling to see how to make a use case for a mainstream faculty. Maybe I gave up too early. What we did, at the brilliant suggestion of Brian Lamb one day sitting at the famous Table in east Van, was to start sketching out an outline for issues for this platform, and we did it IN the UBC Wiki. It's still a brain storm list, but the OLT folks and myself added at least the meat for the technical specs-- see http://wiki.ubc.ca/Sandbox:Wiki_Plots. What I did see as potential was in the wiki as a collaborative space to write documentation and tutorials, and use the embed technology to have that appear in web sites, especially Wordpress using the Wiki Embed plugin. Now the UBC runs an enterprise level set up, but I bet we could do something big with a small system. It was already somewhat in place in UMW Blogs for their documentation (using sn older version of the plugin), and we had a mEdiawiki running on ds106. My idea was to set up two smaller wikis that would help for documentation writing. The power of the wiki embed plugin is that it would allow for instructors to embed the help docs or tutorials they wanted in their own web pages. The aim is to not make the wiki itself a destination; it would be a bit chaotic and not cleanly organized, and really meant as a place for authors to go to. Using standard wiki markup, and extensions to embed video, audio, the content would be what is syndicated, letting the blogs format it locally. So right now the two wiki sites I made are a bit scattered on the fornt page. I suggested using Categories to organize the content for authors to find. I could not get the DPL extension (Dynamic Page List) UBC Wiki uses (The current version was not available, an older one borked). The one part I failed to get working is the pDF generator; the third part site that supposedly supports this function failed on my every time, and Scott McMillian at UBC had said the set up of their stand along server was "not trivial: (if HE says that, look out). So in place now are two small wikis: ds106 documentation wiki http://ds106.us/docs feeding the ds106 Handbook and the UMW ds106 Syllabus Documentation for the DOmains of Ones Own project http://wiki.umwdomains.com feeding most of the support documentation for the Domain of One's Own project Setting up MediaWiki (for UMW Domains) and updating (for ds106) was not too much trouble. For internal / reference I have docs for the codes needed to embed media (quick, do you know the codes for videoflash? case proven). http://wiki.umwdomains.com/index.php/Creating_UMW_Wiki_Docs http://ds106.us/docs/Creating_ds106_Wiki_Docs Each of these have suggestions for using Categories for internal organization (can anything be more arcane than having to recall Category names or fishing through the all Category lists). And there is a separate guide for embedding in Wordpress http://ds106.us/docs/Embedding_in_Wordpress http://wiki.umwdomains.com/index.php/Embedding_in_Wordpress One of the key settings in Wiki Embed plugin is that you can make it so of there any links other wiki pages, rather than jumping to the wiki, Wordpress dynamically renders a page with that wiki page's content; that is groovy, eh? Two wiki extensions developed at UBC are essential- Embed Page provides a Cut and Paste bit of JavaScript so you could embed the wiki page's content in any web page, not just wordpress. This means you can go to any mediawiki page, click the Embed Page on the left nav pane, and you get cut and paste embed code. We've not used it, but I have tested it. This static HTML page embeds from this media wiki page. This is the beauty peoples. If we edit the MediaWiki content, all pages that embed it thus change. Edit once, change everywhere. The Embed Tracker plugin gives us dome data on where the mediawiki pages are used, it shows not only where it is used by how many times it has been grabbed from the wiki- see the stats for the wik page above: So the process again is author in MediaWiki, embed elsewhere as needed. How are we using it? Well Every page sitting on the new ds106 Handbook, a growing set of docs and tutorials, is embedded from our MediaWiki: These are just Wordpress pages with wonderfully little content; like the tutorial for Trimming Videos With MPGE Stream Clip has this for content: [wiki-embed url='http://ds106.us/docs/Trimming_Videos_with_MPEG_Streamclip' undefined no-contents ] Because all of the content comes from the wiki page -- and that short code ius generated by the edit icon, all you really need is the URl for the MediaWiki page... and keep in mind that this plugin works with ANY MediWiki site, including the motherlode Wikipedia. For what it is worth, for the ds106 handbook I am setting parents as children and grandchildren to make a hierarchy (and using the pagelist plugin to insert an index as a shortcode in a page or sidebar). Some extras we get with the Wiki Embed plugin are at the bottom of every embed, some tools to force a refresh: Since our wiki is not a huge active one, I have wordpress to check for new content once a day, but with this tool, you can force a refresh of you just edited the wiki page. The other thing you get in Wordpress is an overview of all the embedded wiki pages: (I am not 100% sure what adding a target URL means...) This is just the first baby steps. The next thing I want to do is going to take advantage of Media Wiki transclusion a fancy name foe MediaWiki pages that use codes to include content from other Media Wiki pages. My grand plan os to assemble a syllabus for people who sign up for ds106 on their own, it could be a self paced guide. We have several years of different readings, videos, activities, assignments. What I envision is making a wiki page for just a syllabus section, one for Audi, one for Design, one for What is Storytelling. With this broken down into chunks, we can create a variety of syllabi just by deciding which of these separate pages to include in a master page, and what order to present them. And at that point we cna use the Wiki Embed plugin to pull in the aggregate wiki page into wordpress-- it is not a hit on the wiki since the plugin embeds content for the time set (in our case a day). There is still a lot of tinkering to do, but I am liking these steps made so far- I really did most of the MediaWiki set up in my last 2 days at UMW... its not a huge undertaking. These little engines are in the "Can" mode - it is as always the DIY seat of our pants build it witjh duct tape approach, but it is going. I will keep working at it. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Leonard John Matthews I pretty much gave up on writing about and hoping that writing about catfishing might have some impact (yup just checked, more than 2 years since last post on it). Of course that hardly means that anything has changed; the scamming of people luring into false romance contact using my photos on fake profiles and eventually tossing the hook for money goes on pretty much unabated. And it's not just Facebook; once recent email provided insight into a rather unexpected spawning grounds. https://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/1047844638525214720 Emails come every few weeks or more frequent, when a person who has been in contact with some friendly person (nearly always a petroleum engineer overseas) gets suspicious and does a reverse image search to find that "David's" photos really belong to some guy named Alan. Not that it's anything different from any other, but one came today: We don't know each other, but someone is using your photos on Facebook. When I get an odd friend request that I don't know, I search the image and let the person know that their image is being hi-jacked. The user is from Africa and accidentally posted photos of his real self, yes, not so bright! This person has some good habits. So check out David Mebradu on Facebook. "David Mebradu is on Facebook" using a bunch of my photos as representing "him". You can find most of these photos in a flickr album I one time kept updated with photos used in fake profiles There's hardly anything here I have not seen before. He's a "drilling supervisor" and studied Petroleum Engineering in Idaho. And he is rather literate, "Im Engr David,i love my Job." Not having a Facebook account I cannot look at the 350 photos supposedly of him. It's not even worth reporting folks. That's spitting in the ocean, and even if Facebook decides to remove it, the scammers have automated tools for creating new fake profiles by the barrel. Except for the fact that some of these photos have other people in them (my family members and kids of my friends), it really does not bother me much. Nothing has been stolen from me, as it's easy for me to assert my identity and show provenance of the photos. And besides, most of my photos are published under a Creative Commons By Attribution and more commonly Public Domain license. One could say it's my own fault for making the photos available. But seriously, do you think if I put a CC BY-NC (No Catfishing) license on an image, it's going to stop anyone? If you think licenses provide you some protection for your media, you are mistaken. And it is why I ended up going the public domain route- I wanted to test myself a different way of thinking about sharing, to do so in the way of providing the least friction. I want people to attribute and give credit not because of some rule or license, but because they get that it's the right thing to do. Yeah know the odds are low on that. Most will shake their heads at me, and cling to the idea that a license will change people's behavior. I doubt it would slow down David Mebradus one bit. What does not work is expecting systems either, like Facebook, to protect. I'm betting more on the individual, and that people will get aware of the strategies they can do to check out the David Mebradus who come creeping with fish costumes. Cap'n Ds Fish flickr photo by Dave Center shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Featured Image: Pixabay image by GregReese published into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Stéfan I've been doing some tinkering over at the ds106 Daily Create site, whose very presence and essence still shines from the approach Tim Owens did when he assembled it in early 2012. The first major new thing is the addition, under a new "Explore" menu at the top, of archives of past daily creates, organized by type - all past Photography, Drawing, Audio, and Video TDCs. This normally would be trivial, since they are merely Wordpress categories, but took some poking around with a flashlight and probe because of the construct of the Parallelus Salutation theme we use (maily because we had to alter it to display only 1 post at a time). I was able to make a new template-category.php to control the new layout, and there are some things in there to make it not act like a normal category loop. It's not even worth explaining since it was rather arcane. The idea here is to make it easier to browse for past assignments, especially as I consider (see below) some new ways to use the TDC archives. I added this a few clicks back, but if you just want to get a random challenge, we have that built in for you too. There is nothing wrong about doing a previous TDC, it lives on. Appearance settings have been tweaked to make the text a little bigger and also (something that always bugged me) was that it was impossible to use a mouse to copy the text of a daily create (this has to do with the custom fonts we previously used, I switched it to a built in Trebuchet MS font). And yes, Ben Rimes, I hear you about the "darkness" of the theme; I may try the lighter skin. There are some updates to instructions on the front page, the FAQ, and the suggestion form as well. And a few photos to spice up the text. Okay, these are kind of cosmetic (though figuring at the PHP jujitsu for the category pages was a fun challenge). The bigger ideas I hope to take on next are: Adding a Writing Category. We see value in written daily challenges and I am keen to have this in the mix. The stop was that the site is built around using third party hosting sites (flickr, YoutTube, and SoundCloud) that provide a way for people to post media, and tag them, and also provide widgets we can use to display it on our site. WHat is the equivalent of that for text? Well there is none. Or we have not found it. The three ideas to make this happen I am juggling are: Have people provide their responses as post comments. This is the easiest, as it would take no work, the functionality is built in. But it does kind of get in the way of commenting if that should ever happen. This is my fail safe. Create an editable Google Doc for each challenge (Karen Fasinpour's idea). This is doable, and allows for a variety of formatted responses. It would require the manual set up of docs, and offers maybe potential issue of work being overwritten. Develop a custom post type and web form to submit. This is my preference now as we have the pieces in place, Gravity forms for submissions. It would make all of the content sit inside wordpress in one organized place Another idea (and actually part of the impetus for setting up category views) is related to a discussion I've had with colleagues about whether we should build a "Kids" version of the Daily Create. At this time I am no inclined to make a copy site, that the site has everything we need; the use of the TDC ought to happen with the way we can enable people to build things off of it. This also is parallel to some ideas I am fermenting (that is how my brain works) on a tool so people can build their own syllabus out of all fo the ds106 artifacts and assignment we have created ove the last few years. I envision a "ds106 builder" site that would be more or less a buffet of this material that could be collated into a savable resource. So I am thinking in the same way of a "builder" tool for the Daily Create. Let's say you could get some giant menu, and pick the TDCs you want to use, maybe have an option to customize or paraphrase the instructions, add an intro, and have that published. This way, you could build your own activities around the TDCs. That one needs to bubble a while. If you have any yeast for my brain, well, you know how to funnel it to me. And I have more cleanup to do elsewhere (like around this dog house) ... cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Ro / wererabbit My wife and I have been taking a class together... nothing formal, but our city of Scottsdale offers a City Government 101 class, which meets every other week where you get to learn about a different department. It's been everything from finance to water resources to trash to libraries to police/fire... one of the highlights was a visit to the traffic control center where a huge screen allows staff to monitor and adjust the traffic lights across the entire city... and live demos from the police K9 unit... and also, our library which offers a lot of services, many of them now online such as their databases, including something soon that will allow e-check out of audio and video files for use on portable devices. A city can be a much more complex entity that one gives it credit for, taking a lot of what is offered for granted... Scottsdale puts a lot of money and effort into their Community Services, which is second only in employee size to the police department. Now I am sounding like a commercial, but I can say I've learned much more and can appreciate things better in a city just by knowing more about it. How cool it is to see that the 365 Flickr Photo group that went from a group size of 1 (D'Arcy in 2007) to about 50 (me and 49 others in 2008) to 212! There are over 8900 photos in the pool, and we have a good flow of photo shooting tips and friendly conversation in the discussions. I'll be speaking a bit on this at Northern Voice, the conference that makes February worth living for. But the real beauty is that this has been all organic; it grew by itself. No one is in charge, no one makes the rules (when asked, sigh, I say the only rule is "try and post one image to flickr every day"). Here is my crop from January, using the CoolIris wall embed: The daily challenge and regular practice still engages my interest and pushes me to learn more every day. Heck, imagine if I felt that way about writing English papers or solving differential equations, not drawing a direct parallel, but thinking more about what engages and what doesn't.