Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
When I embed a tweet in my post, that's all I want. But Wordpress, and the Twitter API, wants to give me more. I don't have to accept that. What am I blabbering about now? Well in a recent post where I am talking about using Wordpress to publish your own versions of the soon to be deep-sixed storify content, even the examples I used in my post exhibit a problem. The tweets I am embedding by the Wordpress oEmbed Magic are the ones in white. But what I get, and occasionally does not bother me, but what clutters the crap out of what I am trying to achieve, are prepended by an older tweet in the chain (background color a bit darker). After a few rounds of swinging the code axe, I am cautiously optimistic I have an answer. Be warned. What follows involves code modifications to your theme's functions.php and for older posts, some clearing of stuff in your database. Now that there are maybe three readers left (Hi Tom!), here we go. As usual doing some Wordpress Code Axing leads into a variety of answers but also often futile swings into StackExchange. But this suggestion offered for a different desire (removing media from embedded tweets) looked on target. Way down in the Twitter API docs for oEmbed where the hide_media in the exmaple is listed, just below is the one that sounds like I need hide_thread When set to true , t, or 1 a collapsed version of the previous Tweet in a conversation thread will not be displayed when the requested Tweet is in reply to another Tweet Bingo! I add this bit of code to functions.php /** * Hide threads for all twitter oEmbeds, using the hide_thread=1 query argument * ----- h/t https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/225081/14945 */ add_filter( 'oembed_fetch_url', function( $provider, $url, $args ) { // Target publish.twitter.com provider if( 'publish.twitter.com' === parse_url( $provider, PHP_URL_HOST ) ) $provider = add_query_arg( 'hide_thread', 1, $provider ); return $provider; }, 99, 3 ); And nothing happens. I make sure my caching plugin is off. No dice. I step back, try a different swing. I poke around the content in the Chrome Inspector, and find a class for the divs that contain the tweet I want to hide, it is .EmbeddedTweet-ancestor. I experiment with adding a display:none; and it seems to work on one tweet. So I update my CSS, reload, and... nada. I do more digging, poking, experimenting in CSS. After way too much time, I learn that the way the content is structured inside this mysterious entity known as the #shadow-root my CSS cannot override it. Put the axe down now. I've reached my limit, so I shrug and cast off a question myself to the Wordpress StackExchange. I usually have good luck and get nearly instant and multiple replies. This time, I got one, but it seemed vague. I think your code is good, but the oembed is actually in transient so your code isn't in use until the transients disappears, you may have to clear them. I sort of know of Wordpress Transients, they flood the post_meta table in the database. They are basically options that expire. Whatever. I installed a plugin that lets me see storied transients but I could not find any. Another missed axe swing. It's back to the Google Flail with a search on wordpress clear transients oembed cache and it's a good one. I found a post that explains how to delete some database post_meta data that the oEmbed plugin caches. Now I am in deep, inside phpMyAdmin the cpanel access to my wordpress database. I'm in the wp_postmeta table. As a test I am going to look for the cache files for one post with embedded tweets (one of the ones I populated with stuff from storify), a post ID of 65496. The embedded tweets all gave an earlier ancestor: This is the query to find all postmeta that have _oembed in the name SELECT * FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `post_id` = 65496 AND `meta_key` LIKE '%_oembed%' Lots of them: I select all of these (breathing deeply in case I am about to cause major damage) and delete them. When I reload the page... BOOM! I killed those ancestor tweets. If I was going to really start whomping with the axe I could nuke them across my site with a mySQL query DELETE * FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `meta_key` LIKE '%_oembed%' But I might just wait a bit before going wild. Most of these should disappear, right? There is an expiry value for a timestamp. At this point I may just lean on the axe in pride. I guess I could wrap my function in a small plugin for someone who does not want to muck with their theme files (and when I say muck with I mean doing this via a child theme, you should never ever ever edit a theme that can be automatically updated. You will lose all your stuff) There is nothing as satisfying as a good axe chop [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2013/365/85 Axe Therapy flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Featured Image: 2010/365/83 Axe Marks The Spot flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) While traveling, I am missing out on most of the wild antics going on in ds106 where there appears to be hostile class takeovers, student revolts, and a lot of name tossing going on. It's no wonder what the MOOC people hardly mention this class, as it fits no mold any online open course has used before, or any course for that matter. But it bears saying that the rallying cry, "ds106 4LIFE" is not a throw away phrase. It does mean, that if things get rocky, you just don't bail, and increment an integer-- you stay in the game. "For Life" is not "For Life until the wind blows the other way" - it is FOR LIFE. And it works both ways- I have little actual understanding about what is going on between the various permutations of Dr O'Blivion and family nor what actually Jim Groom is up to. But I do know, that if you are in ds106, than it is "4LIFE" - you cannot be banished by any entity. Nobody has that authority, NOBODY. "For Life" is not "For Life until someone gets pissed off" - it is FOR LIFE. I will point out an observation that merits attention- note that lack of a single animated GIF being published at bavatuesdays since June 26, 2011 -- if that is not a cause for concern, I don't know what is. Something is amiss. There is no banishing and there should be no running away, ds106 is #4Life and you just don't put asterisks on things like that. It is, however, a curious scenario playing out. It is not clear who is who, and people are trying on personas and playing them out. This is making art damnit, but art that leaps out of the page, out of te screen, and into our own confused reality. I am drowning in things to do, things I would like to do, and things I have to do. My workload is more or less double what it was 6 months ago since losing the expertise of Colen, who worked 5 years for us doing part-time programming support and developing much of the MLX and our two other major online application/review systems. Thus the development of the openMLX drags to a slow grind, well, actually, it has not budged since December. Right now, I am administering and programming new pieces of both our online Learning Grants system and an online faculty professional growth application/review system. New things drop in like 12 event and online registration sites in Spring semester alone or a request to shoot and edit videos for faculty nominated for the NISOD awards. There is a presenter proposal system running now for our Ocotillo Retreat. And hanging out there this week are two presentations to be done for conference travel next week. I am trying to figure out why my Jade server craps out every Saturday. On every front I am repelling spam. I am told for 'political reasons', our district office is unable to add new full time positions, so although we have the funds for it, and have written a proposal, it was rejected last summer when our office requested a full time programming support position be added. While I have great expertise available from Cheryl, again in a part-time position, the road for training in our labyrinth of web systems is a long steep climb. Just venting off some steam. A leap month would be nice. I just added a small feature to our RSS to JS demo, the site that demonstrates a bone-simple (even humans can do this with their bare hands) way to take a known RSS feed and have it displayed inside any web page. This new feature is a simple web form that allows you to enter the URL for any RSS feed, select the various options our demo script provides, and voila! magic- it can do a preview version of the output and... (but wait, if you order before midnight tonight, you get a bonus feature!) it will spit out the snippet of JavaScript you need to paste into your web page. (more…) Mastercards with flickr uses the gazillion images found in flickr to create the familiar game of image matching. The site creator gives the nod to the version from Games For the Brain (a nice collection of stuff), but isn't this really the old game of "Concentration"? Here is the game I played using a flickr tag of "newzealand" ("G'day to you, Richard E and friends in the Pumphouse!") Alas, no secret messages were revealed below. In fact, there were no trumpet fan fares, bells, or prizes awarded. But it is more neat stuff with flickr. Peeking at the flickr tags, it took the most recent images from the tag set. More flickr fun. I've raved before about Kung-Log, Adriaan Tijsseling's amazingly sleek Mac OXS application for doing just about all the MovableType composing and editing. Change is on the way and it is good- Adriaan is at work on a new version, re-named "ecto". In fact, I am "ecto"-ing this entry now in beta version 0.1.5, and it is packed with even more features, interface refinements, and options to ease the process of MT blogging. This is a closed beta now (I loved Kung-Blog so much I made the requested donation for it, and that was a nice key to get early beta access to ecto), and a public beta version is supposed to be out very soon. And get this, it should spread wide-- there will be a future version for Windows. Adriaan seems to release a new beta version every other day, so it is on the fast track. I'll miss the fun of the old name but the new app is getting sweeter and sweeter. When I first saw (or correctly, when Ninmah sent me the link) Google's home page today, first reaction, was "nice graphic"- a guitar version of the logo. Then I moved my mouse. The graphic made a noise. OISOME! The logo makes sounds. But wait, there's more. You can record your sounds at a URL you can share! Woah neo. Like most of you, I then made noise and tweeted it - here is my first song, recorded below as a video: But then I figured out you dont have to strum with your mouse, the keyboard plays things, so I got a little bit farther from Pure Noise -- http://goo.gl/doodle/Ocja, though far from Les Paul, for whom today's logo is made in honor of. And there is more- see from PC Magazine How to Play The Beatles on the Les Paul Google Doodle -- there is a strc ture to all of this, the four rows on your keyboard all control the same string, (so 1, Q, A, Z all play the same string), and moving to the left goes up an octave... and thus, the clever folks at PCMag rendered a version of Here Comes the Sun And this, is the obviou,s why Google is cool. Maybe I don't have to sell my computer-- cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Beyond a few postcards, I was prepared to leave the quirky little Area 51 themed cafe in Nevada without any UFO or alien shlock. Then I glanced on the shelf and spotted a CD - Kenny Texeira's "Groom Lake" labeled as "The official Rock 'n Roll song about Area 51". I am quite sure the secret government agencies that house all the captured aliens do provide official sanctions on music. But I could not resist picking up a copy in honor of a blogging dude named Groom, though paying $7 for a CD with a single track on it is as much a monetary abduction as any. The musician is apparently a session dude from LA and not heavily invested in the paranormal. Let's hope he is not invested in legal takedowns of his music. [audio mp3="http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/groom-lake.mp3"][/audio] Sing along with Kenny: Motion sensors buried in the sand Invisible lasers bordering the land A sonic boom from above Mushroom clouds forming from the dust. There's no excuses, but it's no surprise How the government can issue all those lies 45 years ago, the desert of New Mexico How long will the truth take, oh, in Groom Lake. ET highway is route 375 Paranormal visits lighting up the sky The Cammo dudes are out in force The Janet Jets will never change it's course. Emigrant Valley, had no idea A Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel would appear Aviation frequencies, Classified, you cannot see How long will the truth take. Groom Lake, They hold the keys to the future Why don't they understand Groom Lake, We must explore into the future It's time we had a say. Solid gold. Groom Lake is actually a dried lake, a salt flat in south central Nevada located south of US Highway 375- it is used as a runway for bombers at the Nellis Bombing Range Test Site. It is near the Groom Range Mountains, where gold and silver was discovered in the 1860s, named after the Groome Lead Mines Limited company that financed some of the mining operations. It's also the name of a movie starring William Shatner, among his "finest" work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTXPmSkyZ5Y This precious CD is soon to be mailed to a Groom in Fredericksburg, Virginia. How long will the truth take, the truth at Groom Lake? Top/Featured Image Credit: cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by cogdogblog: http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/16809783940 It's back. It's dark, reflective, you are looking into it. It looks "off". CCO image from Pikrepo But it's not. It's looking at you. Is it? This is the 2020 iteration of a recast Network Narratives, the course I've co-taught (completely remotely) at Kean University with Mia Zamora. Things are different this time around, start with the intro that leads you to the new site. Here's what it's about. Through my own fascination with the dystopian future as now series Black Mirror, I convinced Mia to borrow it as a metaphor (I used the Nosedive episode as a class project when I taught solo in 2018). The metaphor really jumped when I caught this video of series genius creator Charlie Brooker describing where the name cam from. It's brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2YPxSDIoPE I also very much wanted to weave in the Black Mirror Writers Room activity that was done at Mozfest last year- I only knew of this via Anne-Marie Scott's post from her experience in the workshop. It also wove in well as Mia and I wanted as well to have students appreciate the brilliance of the Screening Surveillance short films (very much part of the same genre) and hopefully tie in a remote class visit with sava saheli singh. What we are aiming for is an examination of issues of digital citizenship, participatory culture, networked learning, and identity, leading to the creation of networked narrative type stories that can look into them along maybe the same kind of approach as the ones listed above. We noticed last year when we attempted to engage students in looking at issues of privacy, tracking, surveillance, that often the result (even sometimes for ourselves) is a kind of melancholy sense of helplessness "what can we really do?" (we did ask them to creatively imagine in their final projects possible ways of light through the dark). And if you've watched a few Black Mirror episodes, some are so dark they leave you rather... as they say over yonder... "gutted". But in an excellent essay about the series at the Verge, I like how they suggest that the narrative is changing, and maybe, not as utterly dystopian. That's why I suggested one possible sub title of "Not Necessarily Dystopia". It leaves room for participants to go darker, but it need not be that way. We've changed up some things this time around, first by launching a new course site at http://netmirror.arganee.world Twitter will be a part but not as central, we'll engage in some activities around understanding network and participatory culture again using the #netnarr hashtag. As an interest crossover, Mia is asking students in her other course on Ethnic American Literature to use the same tag (their theme is "What does it Mean to be American") https://twitter.com/MiaZamoraPhD/status/1222313688541147136 And as much as I love the syndicated course approach, I was eager to try the more in house approach of having the students write as authors on the course blog. This takes a chunk of setup away from setting up and fiddling with a blog, and just focus on writing. I'm also eager to push more use of Hypothes.is - we have had the periodic use as most academics do to have participants do shared annotation of readings. I really want to have them as well to think about how it's different as a public, but less visible, conversation space than social media. And I really keep holding hopes of getting some students to consider what a network narrative could be like that maybe hopped across the web in the annotation layer. It strikes me as a way of participating, but less visibly, in networked publics. As before, the class meets in a regular (well it is in a new building) classroom at Kean University, with Mia in the room. As me on a screen with them for 3 hours was not always effective, we have a new format. The first half I will be out of the room as the class discusses weekly readings (students will each sign up to lead a session, suggest more readings, and organize a presentation/discussion activity). I suggested rather than just have me trying to listen remotely, that it could be more interesting for the students to collaboratively recap the highlights, with tweets and or some group note taking on the whiteboard. It may not have a name, but maybe it's "Recap for Alan". I will come in to help lead the "do" part of class where we engage with activities, maybe make some media, explore some network tools, etc. There's more on the table, we have a working overview of what will be happening by topic (kind of like our previous "spines"). This time around will be less trying to get all the activity in gory detail on the site, we have a new flavor to the weekly posts with them happening the day after class- Mia will post on the class discussion and what we are asking the students to do that week. Mine will be an overview and resources for the hands on activities. I anticipate our long standing friends (Hi Kevin! Hi Wendy) who followed before as open participants might say, "what about us?" We will still have lots of places for you to jump in and mingle, but it's less about trying to design a full parallel experience. Like this week, we invite folks to join in our first Annotation as Discussion activity, a page on our site rigged to open up with Hypothes.is enabled. I had some fun on the little splash site with a CSS animation technique I found in CodePen that replicates the opening title sequence of Black Mirror (I tossed in a background image with Backstretch and a second bit of text, and an old fashioned HTTP-Refresh for redirection). Also on the Do Something New front, for the new site, maybe the first time ever, I am using the default WordPress theme, the new Twenty Twenty. I was intrigued as it's development involved my favorite theme designer, Anders Norén, and it was built atop his Chaplin theme which I used last year on a few sites. I know plenty of my colleagues whinge about the WordPress block editor, but I'm all in. The most recent version of WordPress has a lot of blocks that make it compelling, groups, and flexible columns, full width bleed blocks, better control over colors and backgrounds... I'm having fun pushing to around. To me it does a lot of things people end up wielding in those visual builders that end up turning your site into a tower of shortcodes. Anyhow, that's about a week in to this course. #NetNarr is a bit new, a bit dark, but not necessarily dystopian. And fun to be a part of. Featured Image: Image used for NetMirror course page based on portion of cracked glass CC0 Pixrepo image (darkened) superimposed on Pixabay image of surveillance camera by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke plus distorted previous Netnarr logo. Only rhizomes can explain why this idea popped into my head. Maybe it was seeing the #rhizo15 tweets. But there it was, a song going in my head. In the middle of the day I was looking up the tabs. I waited at least until after dinner to write some lyrics. And then practice a few times. And maybe 3 takes. For what it's worth, an honest (warbly on the vocals) tribute to the real Rhizome Cowboy https://soundcloud.com/cogdogroo/rhizome-cowboy The words/chords ( a few of the extras, like the walking bass line are in the tabs) C I've been talking about it so long Connectin' it all along G (Gsus4 G) I know every node in these rootlike links on the web F But metric's the name of the game Dm F C Complex theories ignored because of their length G There's been a load of compromisin' F c And not much synthesizing F Dm G (Dm G) But I'm gonna be where the roots are linking' with me F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Rooting out like a tuber spreading under the ground F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Getting tweets and emails from people out of my network G F (walk) And offers comin' to write a book C Well, I really don't mind your course Rigid as bones of my horse G (GSus4 G) But so much of learning today is takin' the wrong way F And I dream that it's not too late Dm F C With a hashtag, open doc, syllabus we all create G Why don't you read Deleuze and Guattari F c You cant teach the same I'm sorry F Dm G (Dm G) I'm walking around with them atop the high plateau F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Rooting out like a tuber spreading under the ground F G C (F C) Like a rhizome cowboy C Cmaj7 G C G Getting tweets and emails from people out of my network And since Soundcloud truncates the graphic a bit... the album cover: [caption id="attachment_41800" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Not available in stores![/caption] Top / Featured image credit Creative Commons licensed (BY-ND) flickr photo by Forest Farming: http://flickr.com/photos/forestfarming/10855036253 flickr cc licensed photo by billy v Ahem. Is this thing on? Yes, it is me. I am back from my 18 day Around Australia Tour, all of which has been blogged over at http://cogdogroo.wordpress.com and as such, is not reblogged here. But in some numbers, the trip included: Visits/presentations to 8 cities in 2 weeks - all content stored at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/: Being There in that Unevenly Distributed Future What's On Your Horizon? What's On Your Horizon? 50 Web2.0 Ways To Tell a Story Precious Web Gems Powerful Personal Portals 587 photos 236 web sites tagged 37 blog posts during the trip 1 wombat held in Tasmania 1 trip rowing underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge 1 fantastic hike in the blue mountains with 7 friends from Sydney 1 pilgrimage to visit the grave of Bon Scott Countless number of new friends, colleagues, twitteraitis linked up during this journet I managed to catch a cold my first day in Tasmania, which I dragged around the country, likely spreading it everywhere, giving most of my presentations in a raspy voice (which is still rasping). Whew, still cannot believe the whirlwind, but now to get back to CogDogBlogging right here. My web site submission multi-tool, which rolls a selected set of JavaScript submission tools into one, has hit its tenth tool. Thanks to those who have made recent suggestions. This means, you can build your own browser bookmark submission tool that includes all or any from: Furl del.icio.us Frassle Connotea Bag of URLs CiteULike Simpy Linkroll Blogmarks OpenBM How more can there be? I will add them only if the site includes a JavaScript browser bookmark tool. Finally, for those interested in the PHP code that makes the tool work (it is not very complex), it is now available for free, under a GPL license. I've done a handful of web projects this year where it made sense to store data in Google Spreadsheets, and then use a bit of PHP code to make them be dynamically displayed on a web site. In many cases, these are tables of data that are parsed and presented nicely in the web site, but for a few NMC projects, it made sense as a way for a staff person to update data on our web pages w/o having to touch the pages. As a first example, I am cleaning up an older WordPress site I use for logging my running/training; in the past, I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop for keeping a run log and then manually transferred the totals/averages/graphs to my web site by pasting into some text files (they are embedded with a PHP include). It worked, but it did have that tedious manual smell for something that should be more automated. It seemed to make sense to transfer the spreadsheet to a Google Doc. I'm not going to detail all the bits in there, but essentially, for every run, I enter a distance and time on the appropriate date line, and the sheet calculates total/averages per week and on a final summary page. This is just the data; I have another sheet that is just the table for the weekly totals of miles and time spent running; from here I can simply use Google's built-in Publish Chart which provides a URL to embed this graphic: This is subtle but powerful-- this is an image, but not an image- as the data changes, so will the graphic. So I know longer have to manually make a graphic and upload it to my web site; I can simply use the HTML The other piece uses Google's ability to publish a worksheet as CSV- this is data you can then parse on your web site. So I have a sheet that simply does averages/totals for my running log: To access this data, I click the Share button and select Publish As Web Page The options in the top make it so the published data is made current whenever I request it; in the bottom I select the option to have it published as CSV (comma separated value), and I select just the spreadsheet I need. Thus, this URL always gives me the data on the spreadsheet in a form I can use in my code.... this bit takes some PHP savvy to manage, but I use the same logic almost everywhere. I use this on the sidebar of my blog to display an up to date listing of my totals. In my WordPress sidebar, I use a statement to bring in the code from an external file named totals.php that sits inside my theme directory: I could have simply inserted the code into my sidebar template, but going modular like this makes it easier to separate code from format... The basic logic is using the php file command to read int a remote file, which puts the contents into an array; where each array item is one line of data. // get the CSV data as an array from the remote URL $lines = file('http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tMIPDwydKpay-5Oq0_G769w&single=true&gid=0&output=csv'); // get rid of header row $headers = array_shift($lines); // Loop through data- therer is only one line hear foreach ($lines as $line) { $ldata = explode(',', trim($line)); // split row to its own array of elements if ($ldata[0] == '') break; // an empty line means we are done, so exit the foreach loop // now we can just output the information as an HTML list, referencing the appropriate array items echo 'Total Miles Biking ' . $ldata[0] . 'Total Miles Running ' . $ldata[1] . 'Total Hours Running ' . $ldata[2] . 'Ave Pace Running ' . $ldata[3] . ''; } And what is cool is there does not seem to be much of an impact of hitting Google each time. It must be 'a caching. Good stuff. This is pretty simple example. I am running some more complex examples on the NMC Virtual Worlds site where the reason to do this was to have a larger amount of tabular data be displayed in a more readable fashion on our web site-- and to make it so someone other than me can be in charge of keeping the data up to date bu simply editing a Google doc (note that a spreadsheet used for this purpose must be public viewable, so don't mix in any company secrets in there). So for example, our Clients listing is coming from a google spreadsheet, and the parsing tests the existence of certain items to format the output-- e.g. if the organization URL column has a value, we echo the name as a hyperlink; if we have the coordinates of their land in Second Life, we add a teleport link. The code that generates this page also sorts it on output. This one technically is not hitting the spreadsheet every time.... I set this up so a unix cron (a timed script) calls every hour a PHP script which generates the formatted content as a text file on the web server, so the web page actually just reads it in via an include statement... this is a simple form of caching. Another page has actually two chunks of data that are generated from different spreadsheets. Out current land availability page lists plots of Second Life land available from NMC for rental. The main body content is a list of land with the output formatted around data in a spreadsheet. And the current land prices on the right side come form another sheet- this way we can make adjustments to the web page at any time simply by editing a spreadsheet, and never touch the web page- again it works like this: Every hour a cron script on the server calls a PHP script. The PHP script reads in CSV data, sucks it into an array (one line as an item), marches through items, and parses each item as an array representing the cells, and outputs the formatted as HTML to a small text file. The WordPress page simply uses an include statement to display the content (I use the Exec-PHP plugin to be able to run statements in a page). I am thinking more and more how I can use this process.... Of course, this is all baby stuff compared to the masterful data wrangling by the Jedi Master Tony Hirst.... I enjoy accidental discoveries (the title for this entry, Scott, is no metaphor reference to fences). The search form on a weblog is very handy service for site visitors to find content you may have written. But it has an extra hidden value for MovableType (MT) authors. Once you have more than a handful of blog entries, going back to add/correct to a previously written post may involve a hunt and seek scroll through the listings of previous blog entries. However, if you are already logged in to your MT account, the results of the plain old search tool on your blog provides an extra treat- the "edit" link. (more…) Yet again a random click leads down an internet rabbit tunnel. Or a dead end. I meant to do another blog post, and was rummaging through the public domain images the Library of Congress Free to Use Extension puts in my new Chrome tabs. The expression on her face, plus the title of Belle North, female pitcher (baseball) (1919) made me curious. Who is this woman pitching baseballs in 1919 (nice follow through she has)? She could not even vote in 1919! So, Belle North, who were you? Where were you? Public domain image from Library of Congress Bain Collection. As often, in the record for the image, the Library of Congress has all kinds of metadata about the original image and where it is in the collection. "About this item: tells us nothing, but none of them about Belle North. Wikipedia came up blank. The only things the Great Google comes up with are places selling/auctioning prints of the same photo (one just fetched a whopping 7.45 Euros). Maybe the closest a possible answer is the note, "Corrected title and date based on research by the Pictorial History Committee, Society for American Baseball Research, 2006." I tried some searches there but came up with none. So I struck out big time finding anything about Belle North. The internet does that some time. Next batter? That's right. "They" will be here, keeping you up late at night in front of the blinking screen -- rattling their animated chains, broadcasting ghostly noises, spooking you to do things daily, remixing your senses... August 27 marks the start of the two online sections of ds106 at University of Mary Washington. Will "you" be among the "they" that are "here"? If you have been thinking, "this is the time I might do ds106", then step right up now, and find out what you need to do to participate as an open participant. And if you are thinking of teaching a class that you'd like to be part of the community, we have a new form set up to collect some information we will need. They're [almost] here... I have an interesting/weird presentation opportunity tomorrow, traveling all the way to Mesa, Arizona to do two sessions at the Maricopa Community Colleges Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference. It's "weird" because I worked 14 years at Maricopa, nine of those years running the conference that was the predecessor, though I must say I never got more than 250 people registered for this one. Nope, this one is all different from that oid tired cactus thingie. And I am looking forward to seeing former colleagues, many of whom are sure I moved to Austin, or some who did not know I was gone ;-) Anyhow, I am doing an early warning here because I am going to see if I can stretch the audience to do live broadcasts of my presentations via ustream.tv- of course, this is all hinging on the local network (I requested wired connection but am not counting). To solve the issue of the poor viewing angle from a laptop camera- who needs to see my talking head anyhow-- I intend to start the stream with the camera as people enter the room, and then switch the video source to my desktop, using CamTwist. There will be the usual shout outs to twitter as well. As a backup, I intend to record audio on my Edirol R-09, if I can remember to click the Big Dumb Red Blinking Button. Hopefully, the streams will start 10 minutes before the scheduled times from http://ustream.tv/cogdog; with all the things to attend to, I most likely will not see much of the chat and am relying on my connected colleagues in the audience to keep me posted. So the showlist for Tuesday, lucky May 13, 2008, includes: 10:30am PDT (check local time) Being There.. in that Unevenly Distributed Future - yes it is a reprise of the first one last May at Faculty Academy and then a few times in Australia, but I've pruned some less essential pieces, added many new examples, and tossed a few new surprises in the mix.. including a mullet. Go figure. And in the most unlikely occurrence ever, I've posted the presentation early, so there will not be late night tinkering. What the heck, the presentation file is not the presentation, I've heard. If I get good audio, I may turn that into a SlideCasr. 2:00pm PDT (check local time) 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I love doing this presentation, of which there is no presentation being me having about 50 Firefox tabs lined up based on the workshop/presentation first done in Hobart Australia, October 2007. I am sure I will be still trying to ride this horse long after its time, so someone please tell me when to Stick a Fork in It. I've recently added a few more to the mix, including Jaycut (a multi track web-based video editor) and Vuvox Collage (a stunning rich media presenter, unlike any other tool, still in private beta)... so if anyone is counting, I have pegged it at 57, the magic Heinz number, and a few more in the wings that may top it at 60 soon. I'll be presenitng humbly in the shadows of keynoter Michael Wesch. And what is fun to watch is the official conference site, and even I see a few of the registration tools I built there, and the unofficial 2.0ish one full of blgggy taggy utterzy twittery bling. Wow, what a cool template on the blog, where did they get it? So I am curious to see what happens when the 2 cross paths tomorrow. I am quite excited about all of this, and to add to the craziness, the weather forecast I just heard is predicting an "outbreak of weather" for Phoenix- rain? and I might miss snow down to 6000 feet? Amazing. 20/20 by cogdogblog posted 23 Dec '08, 9.07am MST PST on flickr Make your own Custom Eye Chart www.eyechartmaker.com No cheating, cover the left eye and read the smallest line you can see clearly. Some interesting and funny too comments came in to my mini exploration of twitter friends to followers ratio. And vavoom, todays inbox has about 6 more friends notifications; of them maybe one I know and added. But get this, for those want to push the ratio even higher, is TwitterAdder with a new record of 15.44! That is 1853 friends with a scant 120 followers. And what is the tweet action? Well, it is self promotion (no crime, but virtue?) for TwitterAdder.com: Have you ever wanted more friends on your Twitter account? Now you can. Just enter your Twitter login details below and we'll add 20 random friends to your account. which may explain recent rashes of friend requests from unknown origins. Call it TwitterFriendSpam? What is the desire to build up a huge list of "friends" (who are not really your friends)? C'mon, I bet some out there are pushing the volume past 20.0 friends to followers. Now a few clicks over a year old, the ds106 Daily Create is a core part of our digital storytelling class at UMW. Almost a year ago, we discovered an accidental attribute; on January 25, 2012, TDC 17 was one shared by @noiseprofessor was to do a video: Show us your keychain and tell us about the keys and things you have on it. It was just one that was in the rotation. Notice how simple a task it was- ask people to share something that they always carry with them. This was also in the first week or 2 of the ds106 classes Jim and I were teaching at UMW. And we had an accidental discovery. This assignment, doing a 1-2 minute video, was rather effective in having us get to see each other, where we sat down in our homes, dorm rooms, offices to talk about keys. It was a tiny but person window into all of us. You get a sense of it just looking at the previews of the videos, rows of faces. Just by asking people to doa video talking about their keys. That has long been one of my favorite examples of the Daily Create. I liked it so much, that I had it repeated in Fall 2012 as a required first week activity for ds106. For this week, I wanted a similar video, but tried to do a different prompt for TDC 373: https://twitter.com/ds106dc/status/291193781032718337 Okay, maybe not the greatest prompt. And I can see that a number of my students glossed over the word "fabricate". I try to tell them this is maybe the one class where they are encouraged to make stuff up. I will nudge them later to continually change reality, to be fictional, to play with the idea of truth. Bur frankly, I don;t care what story they tell for this Daily Create. We do not grade it on some goofy rubric, there is no "right" way to do these. It's up to each person to interpret the assignment. So if they tell a true story, fine. If they don't explicitly follow the prompt, fine. The whole point is to try and do something new, different, stretch. And actually the point of this one is to get a lot of people doing videos. It helps me as a geographically distant teacher to know students better. And there are also the open participants, and a few individuals I am not even sure who they are, who are in the mix. Just because this assignment as passed by does not prevent you from doing it (or give you an excuse not to) http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc373. If at a minimum all you do is watch a few, and leave some comments, you are helping out my students a lot. Do not underestimate the impact, especially for people new to blogging and social media, to find out that someone is listening, and maybe can step up and more than click a dumbass "like: button. Write a comment or two, eh? Or just check out the videos. I was definitely ROTFL last night watching the ones coming in. These are open windows into individuals, by engaging with them, you can make those two way windows out to the world. When someone loves you fully they often read you better than you think you know yourself. I'm blessed to have that in my life now. In a recent dinner conversation where I was sharing with Cori some of the latest US news I had been following, she looked deeply into my eyes and said, "I remember you were agitated about the last Presidential election, but now you seem distraught about what's going on. Why is that?" Am I distraught? Here I am almost 6 months into my move to Canada. Working from home, I like to keep a radio (well streaming on the old laptop) on just to have some human voices in the background. I sometimes listen to CBC, but usually have the station I listened to for years, the Arizona public radio station KJZZ. During the election of the current president I shall not bother to name by his name, I responded much online with silly ALL CAPS tweets and making a bunch of mocking GIFs and memes. I did a one-time simmary in a collection under the banner of El Orange Chupacabra. It felt like it provided a bit of a relief from the unbelievable reality, but I acknowledged it's insignificance. I tailed off, partly from sensing it had no effect, but more because I was sure America would come to its senses. Then they elected him. And let him install puppets to Cabinet posts, and begin dismantling the systems built to protect the environment, provide healthcare, etc. And with each week since, it seems like most people would be appalled, angry, disgusted by what is, to me, a plundering of values, ethics in the worst way. Enough lies have been said that we no longer flinch, and they seem to have, like the warming frog pot, turned up gently from warped truths to just outright falsehoods. How can this be acceptable? Ignored? In answering Cori I reflected back to the world I grew up in during the 1970s. I cannot say what I thought about government and elected officials then, but I'm sure my assumption was that they took such roles dedicated to public service. To serve all. There was this idea of "the public good" (doesn't that sound quaint?). That they were mostly trusted to run the operation in the interests of all. [Naively?] I felt no worries about the government being corrupt (well, there was Nixon waving from the helicopter leaving the White House because the system operated as it should have towards evil). I did not seem to have to worry about the environment collapsing. War even seem mostly a thing of history. It was a reliable bubble of optimism I remember. I symbolize this as the memory of elementary school-- when they'd gather all the kids in the auditorium to watch the Apollo astronauts splash into the ocean. We'd be watching on TVs (probably tiny compared to today's wide screens) mounted on metal carts. It was all a feeling of having unlimited hopes, dreams, for the future. And so if I have a distraught feeling now it's the realization of how lost that feeling is. We now expect the least of our government, our officials. We do not rely on them. We doubt them regularly. The environment is teetering on the kind of collapse that used to be just in made for TV disaster movies. Every day's news is an indicator of kids not having "unlimited hopes, dreams, for the future" but mostly a sense of "all is crap." What / where do we even have trust now? We've traded HOPE for FEAR. [caption id="attachment_66964" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Screenshot of a google image search for "Obama Hope Fear" Look what pops up.[/caption] Bad deal all around. I see us going on a lot about our regular business (me too) working, making stuff, tweeting, sharing, teaching, presenting, writing, doing errands, waving to neighbors, as if everything is normal. But are things not "normal." I start to think of the elections of November 2018 maybe not being so different from the ones of March 1933. I asked my parents once what they knew when they were growing up and as young adults, what they thought of what happened in Europe leading to World War II; I was told they just did not get much news, they did not know. They had no info. Am I paranoid? We have more than enough information, and then some. This has been bouncing in my head and seemed to be background level worry, until this week bringing 3 days in a row of violent, murderous acts by Americans against Americans. Our elected President, a role that 44 ones prior took to lead an entire country, not a 27% base, is vitriolically casting blame on the media who are, for now while it exists, exercising first amendment rights of expression. He, as some kind of divine arbitrator or what is truth and what is not, and can deem that media who criticize him as "an enemy of the people"? This feels like living in some alt-future novel. But it's non-fiction. And it's it ending in happily ever after. I even start thinking, given the synagogue bombing in Pittsburgh, is it wise to be tweeting smart ass comments? There are people out there targeting, listing, hating, conspiring, to hurt Jewish people (they would not care that I barely practice faith, like that matters). I even briefly went to twitter and changed my display name. That felt extreme. And if I live in fear, they win. I changed back. It's more than feeling distraught-- I mulled over the meaning of the dis-prefix. Resorting to a definition: dis- a Latin prefix meaning “apart,” “asunder,” “away,” “utterly,” or having a privative, negative, or reversing force (see de-, un-2); used freely, especially with these latter senses, as an English formative:disability; disaffirm; disbar; disbelief; discontent; dishearten; dislike; disown. that got me thinking of this thing we call "now" bearing a dis- prefix. "Now" is “apart,” “asunder,” “away,” “utterly,” or has a privative, negative, or reversing force? It feels that way. I'm holding on to hope for a strong counter message happening with the mid-term elections. It did seem to materialize with so many events up to now, where in a zone of reality and normal forces of physics and reason, should have toppled the mad man egging on the rallies. FFS get out and vote. I got mine in. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1057354774297960448 Welcome to disnow. What could possibly be next? I think it's time to go take a walk. Featured Image: Pixabay image by 4240513 shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. I do believe in the Six Million Dollar Man, but not Bigfoot... Now hold on to your comments, kids. I believe in Serendipity, I live and breathe its fumes for all of my online career.. How else might I have gotten to house sit for a month in Iceland, have a German Rock Band use my photo for cover of a CD, or get invited to do a month of workshops/presentations in Australia crammed into two weeks?? I would think "Serendipity" is my middle name. But Serendipity is not a thing. You do not create it or cause it or make it.. it happens. This has been rolling around in the part of my brain that carefully organizes drafts for blog posts (hah) after Deen Shareski-d Pursuing Intentional Serendipity. Now, as usual, I agreed, grokked, nodded with all Dean wrote: I think the phrase I'm looking for is intentional serendipity. I think it's Peter Skillen's term but there may be others using a similar concept. In a world where play and wonder should really be considered essential dispositions, our education rarely values learning that isn't somehow tied to a chosen standard or outcome. and he goes on to relate the typical, serendipitous type of thing that happens when you participate in open spaces (in this case, a conference thing that was amped up by interactions from the tweet thing). But it is this phrase "intentional serendipity" that has been nagging at me, in the semantic construct (if I knew what that meant I would explain, but it sounds like PhD stuff). Dean links to the blog post with this title by Peter Skillen, where really he describes the same spirit of allowing for serendipity to happen. In Peter's case, the phrase in the name he gives his computer; I guess because it is the starting point for his actions that end up in serendipitous acts. I just do not want to give the impression to anyone that they can go about and do things and expect the serendipity to happen, to make it intentional. @cogdog As chairman of the Cormier award's committee i hereby confirm you as a Doctor of Philosophy in the internets.— dave cormier (@davecormier) January 12, 2012 It cant be serendipity and intentional, because serendipity is accidental (go ahead and take away my honorary Dave Cormier degree for quoting Wikipedia): Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages. Julius H. Comroe once described serendipity as "to look for a needle in a haystack and get out of it with the farmer's daughter". Even if Wikipedia is full of crap, I love tis jumping off point for the word's source (my emphasis added): The first noted use of "serendipity" in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717"“1792). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa or golden island (some trace the etymology to Simhaladvipa which literally translates to "Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island"). And oh where the tangents lead... William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: "making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design". A zemblanity is, effectively, an "unpleasant surprise". It derives from Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla), a cold, barren land with many features opposite to the lush Sri Lanka (Serendip). On this island Willem Barents and his crew were stranded while searching for a new route to the east. I think many of you work in places where zemblanity is a common practice? Why am I carrying on about this when I agree with the sentiments? Because I think the distinction of operating in a mode where your actions are aimed not at gaining the results of serendipity (expecting the happy accidents), but by doing things that in general, create a potential energy for happy accidents to happen. It's a bit I started talking about the last time I did a talk on Amazing Stories of Openness. If you act in the Open mindset, e.g. start sharing your work openly, connecting and commenting on the work of others, contribute ideas to projects elsewhere that interest you -- rhere is absolutely no guarantee that any of these amazing things (invited trips overseas, having your photos appear in published books, getting job offers) will happen to you. I believe it becomes more likely. BUT... if you do not do any sharing or open activities, I can certainly guarantee you that no Amazing Stories will happen to you. It is... as Nancy White said the first time I did these "Openness is not just about open resources, it is about open attitudes". In my mind, serendipity is not intentional, nor is it a thing we can pursue-- it is a force generated as a secondary (or many-ary) results of our actions of sharing, helping, contributing. It is when we create a potential opportunity for the unexpected to happen, when we step out of our status quo or usual circles (one example why twitter matters much more than Facebook/Google+ for the greater opportunity to hear from people I do not know). It comes about again in this short piece on Structured Serendipity by Jason Zweig for the Edge 2011 Question. Zweig, a financial columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writes here about his technique for being creative in his writing- he reads from sources not normally in hos field AND he physically changes the environment where he does his reading (my emphasis added): It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field that is new to me "” and to read it in a different place.New associations often leap out of the air at me this way; more intriguingly, others seem to form covertly and then to lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to force these associations out into the open; they are like shrinking mimosa plants that crumple if you touch them but bloom if you leave them alone.Robert Merton argued that many of the greatest discoveries of science have sprung from serendipity. As a layman and an amateur, all I hope to accomplish by throwing myself in serendipity's path is to pick up new ideas, and combine old ones, in ways that haven't quite occurred to other people yet. So I let my curiosity lead me wherever it seems to want to go, like that heart-shaped piece of wood that floats across a Ouija board.I do this remote-reading exercise on my own time, since it would be hard to justify to newspaper editors during the work day. But my happiest moments this autumn came as I reported an investigative article on how elderly investors are increasingly being scammed by elderly con artists. I later realized, to my secret delight, that the article had been enriched by a series of papers I had been reading on altruistic behavior among fish (Lambroides dimidiatus).If I do my job right, my regular readers will never realize that I spend a fair amount of my leisure time reading Current Biology, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. If that reading helps me find new ways to understand the financial world, as I suspect it does, my readers will indirectly be smarter for it. If not, the only harm done is my own spare time wasted.In my view, we should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces. This kind of structured serendipity just might help us become more creative, and I doubt that it can hurt. I really connect to this idea of reaching outside of our familiar places/sources of information, and for doing so without a direct purpose, and that the things we come across in doing this might never come up again, but just might, as sort of a sub conscious absorption, become something that makes for a model or a metaphor when we are trying to be creative. To me this goes for any field, and seeding ourselves with ideas from different places cannot but help by a fuel for the work we do, down the road. https://flickr.com/photos/jef_safi/505652237 cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by jef safi (writing) If I were of the resolution making type, I might state to try this approach more. Featured Image: Cropped from original... https://flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/4756665496 ... six million dollar man and bigfoot! flickr photo by x-ray delta one shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license Much puzzlement happens in setting up syndicated hub web sites with Feed Wordpress, and one of the main tripping points is dealing with featured images. In many modern Wordpress themes, these are what are used to generate those nice pretty front pages of sites, where each post is represented by a photo/image, or used to put posts into a slider, or to represent the posts in an archive listing. How they work varies form theme to theme. In some themes, the featured image is also inserted into the body of post itself when published, in others it is shoved atop the post, in others you never see it except where used as an indicator outside the post. The the average author, it is part of a post. They added it while editing. However, featured image is a Wordpress specific feature and not part of an RSS Feed- the things that go into the feed are title, link, author, date, and the post content. On the current theme of my blog, featured images are used on the front page, and appear atop my posts, but they are technically not included in the post content. [caption id="attachment_53468" align="aligncenter" width="630"] The Featured image looks like its part of my post, but its not part of the RSS feed[/caption] Browsers do make it harder to even see your RSS feed- Safari just coughs and ways WTF? and Chrome shows you a blitz of code. But to see a human view, this is how my post looks as rendered by Feedburner (used for show only) [caption id="attachment_53469" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Content of my RSS feed[/caption] That featured image of Ike and Tina are not part of the mix. "So what?" someone like Sandy might ask. And it's a good question. When we build a connected course (see Feed Wordpress 101 for more nuts and plenty of bolts), we often too want to make use of themes that display syndicated posts with featured images. Except, none exist for these posts. So we use an end around. You can use a plugin that looks for the first image found in a post, and makes it a featured image. It might not be perfect, but better than nothing. In the past I used Feed Wordpress Advanced Filters to do this, but lately I have been using the FWP SIC' EM one created by the author of Feed Wordpress. I put this into play recently for the New Media course I am helping with this month in Puerto Rico at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. It's always a few steps from perfect. Mainly because students author their posts, add a featured image, and none comes with their syndicated post (because of the issue above, featured images are not part of RSS feeds). We've tried telling students to include at least one more image in their post. Sometimes you end up with some other image that is in there. But we are getting most of them. John Johnston just blogged this morning (well I read it in the morning, likely it was his wee hours as he says with the Scottish brogue) about some things he experimented with to add featured images into the RSS feed. I had been pondering that for a while, but he got around to it first. However, I doubt few people are going to figure out how to add code to functions.php in their theme. It would be easier to do via a plugin... and as usual in Wordpress WCIWSAD (Why Code It When Someone Already Did)... I found two plugins that take care of this issue. I opted for the latter one (it had more uses listed, and it mentioned working well on multisites), enabling it on this here blog, and using the settings to embed the medium sized image (in my theme that's 620 pixels wide). So now that same feed has inserted at the top of it, my featured image, because the plugin modifies the RSS feed to shove it in at the to of the feed. [caption id="attachment_53471" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Now my feed has featured images inside of it![/caption] To recap, this is a two sided approach: Plugin on source Wordpress blogs use plugin to add featured image to RSS Feed. Syndicating hub site uses plugin to convert first found image to be featured image, Of course, this plugin has little use for people using Wordpress.com (easy and free means you cannot add plugins) nor for people using other platforms (75% of the web?). Still, if I was running a multisite and hosting blogs for others, I would network enable Featured Images in RSS w/ Size and Position* I bet many are still puzzled.... * If multisite is set up to create blogs by domain name and using directory structures, the images are already local on the server, and you can use an Auto Featured Image plugin that makes a featured image out of the first local image it finds.** ** Look at me, Tom, doing footnotes! Top / Featured Image: Started with a CC0 image of puzzle pieces found on Pixabay. I use the majic wand in photoshop to select the interiors, and then Edit -> Special -> Paste into to insert various pictures in the pieces. Top left is my own CC licensed photo of a cactus , top right and bottom left ore CC licensed logos for Wordpress and RSS, bottom right is a screen shot of the Wordpress editing interface. I then selected the space around the pieces, and deleted the white. In the bottom layer I use the Photoshop Filter -> Render -> Clouds to make clouds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24nUf5-BEe8 I can trace a path from what we are trying to generate via Connected Courses back to my work creating syndicated courses to ds106 to early work at UMW Blogs all the way back to one dedicated writing teacher at Middlebury College who devised what may have been the first syndicated course. Barbara Ganley has been a long time inspiration and a dear friend. We semi-regularly skype and I asked last time if I could record a short conversation about the idea behind the first "Motherblog" (as she called it). As a writing teacher, she saw the potential for her students of writing (and reflecting) in a public space, with peers, so had planned to do a course in Fall of 2001 for a first year seminar course about Ireland and its history as portrayed in fiction and film. She describes what she could not have planned, that the first meeting of her class was September 11, 2001-- a day when everything planned went awry. "What if a class were a conversation?" She had this idea of a federated syndicated class, and it was with some local tech expertise that this class was able to syndicate in student blogs (via RSS. cough. ahem. it. still. works.) to the course, or Motherblog. All of this took place before there was social media. Before the LMSes were entrenched. We talked about the outcomes writing in public, the challenges of assessment (she had her students build their own rubric), the amazing things her students did (and are still doing) how students were using media early, of the impact of the authors and people students were studying entering and being part of the course. One notable attribute that I respected in Barbara's teaching, and also the ay Jim Groom taught/teaches-- is that as a teacher she did the same assignments she asked of her students. She becomes part of the community, not some sort of policewoman/grade cop (my words, not hers). There's a lot to her ideas still key to what is happening in Connected Courses. Thanks Barbara for many things, sharing this time (and seeing your bobcat photos, get those on flickr!) You've heard the declarations. Blogs are dead. 94% of them have not published in the last 120 days. I did not have time today to visit all 133 million blogs Technorati has been tracking since 2002. cc licensed flickr photo by john_curley But I have often marveled at the gems I find by random link walking from blogs- like a hike without a map -- from one story that catches my eye, I am curious about a link that leads me down a lovely path, and before I know it, I am finding beautiful information like stumbling into a field of shimmering golden poppies or a maroon mountain vista (little "v" damnit!). And for me that is a key- if you are one of the 16 or 17 little people who blog, there's not much originality in following the stories of the Big Boys and Girls, unless you put a different spin on a story. The Good Stuff is finding stuff all those Snooty A-listers are not writing about. There are more trails than you can imagine, and more treasures to find, share, and spend some valuable time wandering among. This morning I had an idea. Or maybe too much coffee. Starting from my RSS reader, I had landed on an interesting story on a blog with a curious name. I got even curiouser about some of the blogroll or linklog names in the sidebar, and wondered, "How far can I wander? What would I find? Is it all tombstones, black rot, and blog tumbleweeds like those big shot writers for Wired try to tell us?' I found not death, but teeming life. I found people posting at an astounding rate, and original (and wonderfully strange and often deeply personal and quite silly too) stuff. And I could find no sign that people were in the vain pursuit of a front page Google Rank. Nor are they lone blogs crying to the moon; they are rich with comments and links. So take a walk with me... The trailhead is my RSS reader. I get some great visualization and fascninating "data as art" stories from Information Aesthetics . it was here I went down the trail just a few short clicks and ended up at.... Strange Maps a collection of... not always strange but interesting maps. Like From Pickin' Cotton to Pickin' Presidents where maps of seeminly un-related content and more than a hundred years of time difference... make sense. I peeked over the edge of the sidebar and headed for.... where the past predictions of the future, often camp or cheesy, are detailed- Paleo-Future. Like back in 1957, Commuting will be a Breeze, the future looked like we'd be commuting to work in highspeed flying buses! From here I found myself on a precipice with no way out; the blog links from here were but feint trails and nowhere I could continue. This happens when wandering, so I backtracked to Strange Maps and found a different path, down the road to... Bldg Blog all about architectural, and lots of great photos, like the collage art highlighted in Resampled Space- striking images of "new, fictional, architectonic structures." Wow the view from here is amazing, but I saw a track leading me to... pruned which is still along this trail of architectural related paths, but diverges more into landscaping- and i saw something very familiar from my home start in the magnificent aerial photo looking down at the Central Arizona Project. Improbably, water is sucked from the Colorado River on the California border, pumped up over a 1000+ foot mountain, and then canals its way hundreds of miles to feed the farms and suburbs of Phoenix and Tucson. Now that is quite a journey, but we are going elsewhere, from this blog I can see a shiny odd structure called.... candyland. I am not even sure what it is, collections of writings, reflections, and art, but liked the iconography of the traffic light in tomorrow land. Let's hope the green light stays on, cause we have been stuck at this damned red light getting nowhere for 8 years! Feeling a bit hungry, I saw just up ahead... the bright colors, lively music, and wonderful food smells of Mexico Cooks. It was quite a bit of everything, and lots of pretty things to look at like La Feria del Hongo (The Mushroom Fair) in Senguio, Michoacán (mmmm, should I eat those mushrooms??). Feeling more adventurous, I caught up with... Musings of a Barefoot Foodie who made me smile, and worry a bit about the meal she was preparing--- Steak with Ice Cream Sauce . Where else on this wild trail would you come across such things? She suggested I head down the road and catch up with.... the warm glow of June Cleaver Nirvana and what a fun, rollicking, place this is! I spent some time taking in the fabulous images of Texas Safari (yes, there are camels in Texas! Why not?). Seeking a quiet spot to reflect under a tree, I found myself immersed in... Quotidian Vicissitudes. And here I found a priceless gem, something really worth sharing (for unlike a nugget of gold, I can make more gems simply by giving them away), The Commenter Meme. Memes are common here in the blog wilderness, but this one is worth thinking about, and maybe adopting as a learning/social networking activity. It asks you to list links to the last 10 commenters on your site, and then asks some questions about each one that requires you spend some time exploring what may be new blogs for you to answer a series of questions such as "1. What is your favorite post from number 3's blog?" or "5. If you could give one piece of advice to number 7 what would it be?". I can see teachers maybe doing this with colleagues, or with their students, or maybe... well, I hope you find this as valuable as I did, but sometimes you rush into town with gold and some damn rock expert tells you it is pyrite (which is still nice and shiny, IMHO). Having tucked the gem into my backpack, I saw up on the hill... Vanity Press a place that looks tranquil and plain at first, but draws you into to local stories like Revenge of the Wild Life where you get to understand the challenges of dealing with a problematic Friendly Neighbor (FN). Over on the same reflective ridge, I walked to.... All My Own where I started a bit into the waters of I Didn't Come With An Owner's Manual, smiled, and wondered what the implication of RTFM in relationships. And then.... I ventured down into a valley of more colors than I could think possible called... Tales of a Tree Hugger and as someone who enjoys looking closely at flowers with my camera, spent some time pleasantly lost in the video Meditation on a flower. And after some time here, I strapped on my pack and... And on and on I could go. But I will pass this to another hiker, another wanderer. I thought I was venturing into the Valley of Blog Death, but could not really map the places I found on that false map. Looking at the old drafting table got me thinking of my Dad again. I found this table among the piles of stuff in our family home basement in Baltimore. Since leaving for college, I had asked Dad for it, and have taken it everywhere I have gone. I drove it across the US in my 1973 Ford Maverick- you can actually see it poking out of the back seat of the car in this photo along with my dog Dominoe: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A few years ago, I refinished the drafting table (ironically, or amazingly, this photo was used as part of a photoshop tutorial) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog What I knew of this table was that my Dad used it when he took a correspondence course to get a certification in construction cost analysis, a job he did many years for a private contractor in Baltimore and then for a long time with the US Government- Housing and Urban Development. I recall that he had attended University of Maryland for 3 years, but struggled in college (with sufficient pressure from his parents), and ended up leaving college to work a Dad laying brick for patio at our old house, ~1960? while as a brick layer, and then a short stint trying to run a gas station. I was wondering about this period in his life, and realizing that he had actually done distance learning in the 1950s. So I decided to call my Mom to ask her for some details. I recorded our conversation (not the best quality, I had my iPhone on speaker). Dad shows me how to barbecue She was fuzzy on the details too, when it happened, but she promises to check through her file of 50 years of tax returns to sort out what kind of work he was doing at the time. But the bottom line is that my Dad was working a full time job, supporting a wife and 3 kids, and decided at the same time to take on going to school, and did so in his night hours. So here's to you Dad, doing distance learning in the 1950s! UPDATE: Mom just called after researching her tax records. Dad was working as a bricklayer from 1950 (when they were married) to 1953 (FWIW, in 1951, his annual salary was $4000!), and then operated a gas station from 1953-1956. She thinks he did his correspondence coursework in this window, likely 1950-1953. By 1956, he was working for Baltimore Contractors as a cost analyst, so he would have gotten his certificate prior. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5757449096 Dad's Table flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license The ds106 classes at University of Mary Washington are underway this week- I had my first class last night (with assistance from the Reverend), and I have set up a new blog for ds106 teaching posts (and just to go through same steps I am asking students to do) see http://106tricks.net/. I will next start pulling in those posts using FeedWordPress. Maybe. But I will continue to do my assignments here. My students are charged with doing 3 Daily Create assignments a week, and given this first week's timing, I am having them do only one before Monday. What is this about? Why do this? Doesn't this speak for itself: 1 Take Tongue Twister: Below is the tongue twister you will recite. Record a video of you reciting it in one take (honor system of course) and upload it to YouTube with the tag tdc011. Remember: BE CREATIVE! Thanks to Noiseprofessor for this assignment. Luke Luck likes lakes. Luke's duck likes lakes. Luke Luck licks lakes. Luck's duck licks lakes. Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes. Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes. Of course, I rushed out and did mine, using the record from the web cam option in YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0NtihOGhYY Are we serious? Hell yes. As a low minimum, this activity, which should be done in 15 minutes or left, from record to publish, gets you some proactive in basic video recording/uploading (as well as adding description info and tags). But there is more. In doing this, you are going to be performing. You are going to want to find some original way to represent yourself. It has those elements of improv I think are important, learning how to be a personality in front of an audience (in this case, the internet is your audience). Yet there is more- this is your community already rising to A-Game status: We are seeing people in their spaces- with pets or kids. We hear the ambient sounds of where you are (laughter in the background). People are already augmenting the format- doing it graphically, or introducing Mt Bag Man as a speaker. This is the infectious nature of ds106. I would suggest checking out the assignment when tweeted at 10am EST. You might want to rush out and do it, be first. Get it done. If you have that vision. Sometimes it is better to let it percolate, and be in the background as you go about your day. Or you may want to see what others have done as inspiration. Copying, riffing, remixing- those are all game in the Daily Create- heck you can even do it as an interpretive dance. And look, those people in my class that recorded a 20 second video and shared it? Consider your Daily Creatr work done for the week (but nothing stops you from doing it daily- I am at it 7 days a week). cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine These notecards came with a resort stay in Hawaii a few years ago. Don't ask me why I hold on to these ones; I have no use for them. On this day in 2011, I was setting out from southern Ontario on the road for another leg of my travel odyssey, with the plan to complete a transcanada crossing. In the morning, I called my Mom in Florida, to let her know I was thinking of her on that day, because it was 10 years earlier that my Dad passed away after a 5 month losing bout with cancer. After thanking me, she reminded me (as she did) how proud Dad was of me. We made a few jokes like we always do, and I looked forward to more calls before visiting her in November. I never even made it to Montreal. While at dinner that evening in Belleville, Ontario, I got a frantic call from my sister. "Mom's gone!" Maybe that shock has not yet finished echoing. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Look at those newlywed kids, in 1950... that means Dad was 24 and Mom just 21. She's looking serious there, but I always see a twinkle in Dad's eye, he in his Ricky Ricardo hairdo. I look at that photo a lot, and while I know bits of their story, it really is just about impossible to imagine your parents as young adults, or to even appreciate all you lack in the the fidelity and nuance of how they lived. I do have a recording made when I visited Mom for her 80th birthday in 2009, here she is telling the story how she and he met, how "Blackie" pushed her into Carlins Pool at Park Circle in Baltimore, not knowing she did not know how to swim... How Mom and Dad Met (1949) "He was all smiles" ... "He went home and told his mom, 'I met the woman I am going to marry'"... "He was so persistent!" They lived together, raised a family together, retired to Florida together, and managed to die on the same calendar date. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine It feels like so much more time since Dad passed away, now 12 years. I was talking to one of my best friends from the "way back in Baltimore years", telling Kevin how much I was enjoying just working around in my yard, moving rocks and trimming trees. He remarked how that was just like my Dad puttering around in our yard cutting grass and trimming the forsythia bushes... it seems so obvious but I had not made that leap. I often think of the conversations we never had-- Dad was not much of a talker, more of a letter writer... hmmm, another similarity as I seem to spend a lot of time expressing in words. It's not much for me to realize part of that enjoyment of being outside is being in some way with my Dad. Not that we are conversing... just being there. I'm hanging on to those cards, and I may just sit down and write Mom and Dad a letter. It certainly could not hurt. I do not have a proper yahrzeit candle, so I lit the closest thing I could find (it might just be a Hannukah one). cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine They are together forever. And I miss them so. The ds196 GIFfest is going wild! And a bunch are taking on the Muppets challange including @noispreofessor @timmmmyboy and Michael Branson Smith who launched this one. I like the Rodney Dangerfield Muppets, the ones who get no respect, and who gets less respect than Beaker? Bring on the GIFness! As the second part of a series of posts about a leadership model web site created for project managed at JIBC, this one is about some of the early interface explorations I dabbled with. In the first post, I laid ground for the map metaphor for leadership, there would be three "regions" corresponding to the model's areas of Personal, Relational, and Organizational Leadership. Within these regions, the site's resources could be accessed via a map of recommended trails and off trail destinations to explore. I looked first at d3.js which I used previously for the dynamic plotted representations for the Constellection prototype, which too was based on mapping resources from a WordPress site. But while I found in the project gallery many examples of putting data into basemaps (e.g. a bubble map) I did not see anything like a trail map or something with destinations and routes plotted dynamically. I forget how I landed on looking at Leaflet.js, a powerful library for generating dynamic maps: Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 38 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.Leaflet is designed with simplicity, performance and usability in mind. It works efficiently across all major desktop and mobile platforms, can be extended with lots of plugins, has a beautiful, easy to use and well-documented API and a simple, readable source code that is a joy to contribute to. This is a relief to find an open source platform, especially considering how many projects I've had using Google Maps getting torqued by their putting a price on using their API. The lights clicked on when I read the "Not of this Earth" Leaflet tutorial. Sometimes, maps do not represent things on the surface of the earth and, as such, do not have a concept of geographical latitude and geographical longitude. Most times this refers to big scanned images, such as game maps. While I was not doing things off earth, this demo showed me how map elements of locations and routes could be plotted on to any base map, like the fictitious land maps I had already been dabbling with. I spent 2-3 weeks working on some prototype maps where I would add pins for the recommended resources as well as some dots and lines for the others. The content was mostly place holder, but I got it working with different colored pins for the 3 areas, pop up descriptors with links, and even getting into creating map layers that could be toggled on and off. This was all meant to show conceptually what an interface could look with, and thinking the rather than the hard coded locations and data I put in manually, they could be dynamically generated from a Wordpress site. To make the code work more available, I put the three prototypes in a GitHub repo, and published them as things to explore via GitHub pages. So here is the site where all are available: The public demo site where the map prototypes can be explore. These are far from what I envisioned, but enough to show the potential functionality. First Demo: Stuff On the Map This first demo was really to get the hang of putting a few pins on the map. Here's a bit of GIF action to amaze you. All the Leaflet stuff happens inside the <script>...</script> tags at the bottom (see full source code for demo 1), but to outline it we first declare the map, set some boundaries to define the coordinate system, the image for the basemal, and a bit that adds the bottom left legend. var map = L.map('map', { crs: L.CRS.Simple, minZoom: -1 }); var bounds = [[0,0], [1000,1000]]; var image = L.imageOverlay('images/land.png', bounds).addTo(map); map.fitBounds(bounds); L.tileLayer('', { attribution: '© CorrLeader Program | Map via MapGen4 ' }).addTo(map); Something that is useful (at the bottom) is some code that for development gives a way to get the local coordinates for a clicked location. // popup to give coordinates var popup = L.popup(); function onMapClick(e) { popup .setLatLng(e.latlng) .setContent("You clicked the map at " + e.latlng.toString()) .openOn(map); } map.on('click', onMapClick); Back to the top, after setting up the map, I add this bit to define the red dot destination icons used for the "off trail" locations; the others I just use the built in pins. var destIcon = L.icon({ iconUrl: 'images/dest-icon.png', iconSize: [18,18], iconAnchor: [9, 9], popupAnchor: [-3, -7], shadowUrl: 'images/dest-shadow.png', shadowSize: [18, 18], shadowAnchor: [9, 9] }); Then I define variables to represent my four map pin locations I will put into this demo (the coordinates come from the pop up code above). var teamwork = [182.1, 207.0]; var honesty = [171.0, 426.0]; var collaboration = [ 249.0, 625.1]; var communication = [127.2, 809.0]; Each one of these is defined by a chunk of code like below. I define a marker using the coordinates above, then add bits to create the popup message contents and a tooltip. Here are two of them. marker = L.marker(teamwork).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('Teamwork Duo Reges: constructio interrete. Quod cum dixissent, ille contra. Quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliqua historia vestigium ponimus.'); marker.bindTooltip("Teamwork"); marker = L.marker(honesty).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('Honesty Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Compensabatur, inquit, cum summis doloribus laetitia. Mihi, inquam, qui te id ipsum rogavi? Que Manilium, ab iisque M. A mene tu? '); marker.bindTooltip("Honesty"); These are just brute force added to the map, later I can see turning this process into a more elegant function. Maybe. For the off trail locations, I define their coordinates, add the popups, then use the polyline function to connect them (if needed). var teamwork1 = [234.0, 232.5]; var teamwork2 = [195.0, 280.5]; marker = L.marker(teamwork1, {icon: destIcon}).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('How to turn a group of strangers into a team TEDtalk by Amy Edmonson, Oct 2017 Watch Now'); marker.bindTooltip("Amy Edmonson TEDTalk"); marker = L.marker(teamwork2, {icon: destIcon}).addTo(map); marker.bindPopup('ENAV 2450 - Leadership and Teamwork BCIT School of Transportation Course More info'); marker.bindTooltip("Leadership and Teamwork course"); Second Demo: A New Map Base The second demo is not any different for the map code, it has a few more pins added, but mainly this was to make use of what I felt was a more map-like base map. The source code of this map too is available for forking and peeking pleasure. The second demo puts pins on a new base mal. Third Demo: Pins in Every Region, Toggled Layers The third demo added some more functionality. There are different colored pins added to each region, but the bigger deal was adding the legend (top right) with the regions defined as layers, as well as the "off trail" locations, that can be toggled on and off. Again a Leaflet.js tutorial on layers and groups got me moving in the right direction. Each region has its own colored pins, so pretty! Like before, each pin has a tooltip and a popup info bubble, and a ink that could go to the full WordPress page/ The top tight icon has the layers which can be toggled on and off. The off trail resources (Discovery Trails_ are not shown on initial load, but can be toggled on here. A few red and blue trails are available in the Discovery Trails layer. I've tossed almost enough code here, but this one too is fully available to look at. The set up is the same as the first demo, this time we define a few more location images. But given the number of items here, I got them set up to be populated in a loop. For the Relational markers (red) , I first define the layer group and set up an object/array for all the data: /* Relational Pins */ let relationalg = L.layerGroup(); let rnodes = [ {"label":"Teamwork", "loc":[295.0, 232.2], "pop": 'Teamwork is the ability to work cooperatively with others to achieve group objectives. This competency is fundamental because leadership is not an individual sport. The essence of leadership is accomplishing worthy goals through the combined efforts of others, and teamwork capabilities are crucial. In this section you\'ll learn teamwork strategies, such as the four phases of team development: forming, storming, and performing.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Honesty", "loc":[327.0, 305.2], "pop": 'Honesty is a leader\'s most valuable and most valued leadership quality; it serves as the gateway for trust and inspiration.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Collaboration", "loc":[326.0, 388.2], "pop": 'Collaboration A collaborative leader invests time to build relationships, handles conflicts in a constructive manner, and shares control.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Communication", "loc":[308.0, 458.2], "pop": 'Leadership communication consists of those messages from a leader that are rooted in the values and culture of an organization and are of significant importance to key stakeholders, e.g., employees, customers, strategic partners, shareholders, and the media.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Coaching Skills", "loc":[380.4, 414.4], "pop": 'Coaching Skills includes the dialogue in which the coach facilitates the coachee, to learn, clarify values, release potential and increase performance by focusing on goals to achieve success.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Influential Leadership", "loc":[386.0, 355.0], "pop": 'Influential leaders are defined as leaders that rely on influence as opposed to coercion. These leaders create followers who want to follow as opposed to followers who believe they have to follow.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Delegating", "loc":[242.5, 250.5], "pop": 'The delegating leadership style is a style of leadership where a group leader assigns projects or assignments to their employees and gives them free reign to work. The employee(s) get to make all decisions and choices, which they are then responsible for.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Investing in People", "loc":[214.3, 304.8], "pop": 'Successful leaders understand the difference between things and people in an organization. They know that it\'s important to manage things, but that it\'s even more important to invest in people. Leaders don\'t just mouth empty phrases like “people are our greatest resource;” they demonstrate by their actions that people – not strategy, products, plans, processes, or systems – are the most critical factor in an organization\'s performance.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Effective Communication at Work", "loc":[236.4, 369.2], "pop": 'According to many researchers, a leader is one who has an ability to take charge, direct, encourage, or stimulate others... Good communication skills help to develop better understanding and beliefs among people inspire them to follow the principles and values which their leader wants to inculcate in them.', "link": "#" }, {"label":"Leading Through Collaborative Communication", "loc":[276.9, 455.7], "pop": 'Leaders demonstrate their trust in employees by the open, candid, and ongoing communication that is the foundation of informed collaboration.', "link": "#" } ]; This means I can add them to my map like: for (let i = 0; i < rnodes.length; i++) { marker = L.marker( rnodes[i].loc, {icon: redMarker}).addTo(relationalg); marker.bindPopup( rnodes[i].pop + '(more...)' ); marker.bindTooltip( rnodes[i].label ); } It's nobody's compact code, but it's a little less brute force. The other two regions are defined this way. The map set up for this one is done at the end, along with the new code to set up the layers/groups. var mbAttr = '© CorrLeader Program | Basemap Fantasy Map Generator'; var landmap = L.tileLayer('', {id: 'mapbox.land', attribution: mbAttr}); var map = L.map('map', { crs: L.CRS.Simple, minZoom: -1, layers: [landmap, personalg, relationalg, organizationalg] }); var bounds = [[0,0], [400,800]]; var image = L.imageOverlay('images/land2.jpg', bounds).addTo(map); map.fitBounds(bounds); var baseLayers = { "CorrLead": landmap }; var overlays = { "Personal Leadership Destinations" : personalg, "Relational Leadership Destinations" : relationalg, "Organizational Leadership Destinations" : organizationalg, "Discovery Trails": trailg, }; L.control.layers(baseLayers, overlays,{collapsed:true}).addTo(map); So What Next? This was really to give my clients an idea about what was possible in a dynamic map interface. This was not even tied into a WordPress site, as that was a process that needed to go through some hoops wit the Technical Services team that manages their servers. This, in fact, changed everything, but that's the next post. Still. if this never got into the site, I learned a ton about using Leaflet.js and you never know when that might come in handy on some other project. There's rarely anything lost in prototyping, if you are learning as you go. See all the posts in this series... Featured Image: Screenshot from the third demo prototype. Pretend you don't know me. To save you some manual effort you surely won't mind giving me permission to not only add things to your calendar, but also, you are okay with me sharing your calendar or even deleting it. I will stop calling you Shirley if you agree that this is crazy. But apparently some tens or hundreds of thousands of people are okay with this. They click right by this screen. [caption id="attachment_67023" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Do you really want to grant these permissions to give addevent.com to delete all my calendars? I stopped and said no.[/caption] From years of running events that have potentially / ideally would have participants from all over the world, one of the biggest challenges is time. If I just plan something that starts at 11:00am Friday, and state that, it does not help you much if you are somewhere outside of my time. I've used a variety of world time clocks and tools that convert to local time, and they help a lot. I currently favor the World Time Buddy event widget that I learned about via running the Virtually Connecting web site. An idea struck me a few weeks ago I shared with others in the VC Slack who share technical stuff that what would help folks a lot is one of those buttons that make it one click thing to add an event to whatever calendar you used. Maybe the last time I did this for a site was maybe 8-10 years ago, and recall using some JavaScript library. When I dug into the various solutions people used, nearly all of them went down to using the "free" service from Addevent.com. I decided to test it out, which means creating an account, and a little test event. That was easy. But it sure made my worry spot itch a bit about running this through a third party service. The way these add to calendar links work, from my recollecting, is forming a specific URL that has as parameters the event date, time, and something to help the calendar figure the time differences. And then I started getting all kinds of getting email notifications from Addevent about my "event". Someone favorited it. Then all kinds of other reminders. I decided to refocus on a solution (still not done) not requiring a third party service. I found it interesting that there is no way I could delete my account on AddEvent. I had to email and ask for that. Anyhow, the long winded, ranting intro gets to today. I wanted to tune into the live #el30 conversation between host Stephen Downes and Maha Bali. And look! An Add to Calendar button, that's helpful! And I almost added it to my Google calendar, because that would be easy, quick, and... HOLD THE EFFING BUS! Why would I grant such broad permissions to Addevent.com?? https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1062732784261828608 I mean the service is called ADDEVENT.com not DELETEMYCALENDARS.com No ***ing way. I just looked at the east coast time of the event, adjusted to my local, and added it myself. I would have tweeted to Addevent.com but ... they lack twitter. So I did go their site. I first looked around for any kind of terms of use or technical specs that would say why they need access to delete all calendars I have access to. You do find statements in their privacy notice that seem re-assuring: We are not in the business of selling your Personal Data. We consider this vital information to be a part of our relationship with you. Therefore, we will not sell your Personal Data to third parties, including third party advertisers. The very next sentence is vague and chilling, eh? There are, however, certain circumstances in which we may disclose, transfer or share your Personal Data with certain third parties without further notice to you. So, it's "We are nice we won't sell your data" but "we have hidden secret reasons that we will just give your data to and never tell you." I'm a bit new to reading terms carefully, it's rather enlightening. I was however, unable to find anything there that explains why they need permission to delete my calendars. So I decided to ask them. I will keep you posted. I will also be vigilant and asking you, as well, to give some thought about the permissions you just give. It's not that I think they are doing anything evil; I want transparency about their needs for these permissions. You can say "no". Update: November 15, 2018 "Good news"- a response from Addvent.com: Holy banana, thank you so much for letting me know about that issue Alan. Looks like Google just now changed their permission scopes. It has been changed in our code and will be updated tomorrow - now it will require a lot fewer permissions. We basically only need permission to insert events. Meanwhile, you can read more here what the permissions are used for and how we use it: https://www.addevent.com/privacy/google-calendar Thanks again for letting me know, much appreciated! Let me know if you have any questions. Hope you'll have a great day! I don't remember seeing this link yesterday, but happy to see it today. But I am skeptical of this statement, "Looks like Google just now changed their permission scopes." I find it hard to imagine the API changing to broaden access that much. But what do I know? I found a reference to a change on Oct 31, 2018 that added more fine grained permissions, but really that would change default permissions to be broader? Here are the current permission scopes in the Calendar API v3 [caption id="attachment_67029" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Google Calendar API authorization scopes- if the basic authorization is used, than it gives an app the rights "See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar"[/caption] I'm glad AddEvent fixed this, and it's a good reminder to always think before you grant permission. Featured image: Pixabay image by Catkin shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by andyp uk While I am intrigued by the technology and promise of open badges, and respect people who are part of the movement, it's one of those things that Might Be Important But I Don't Get All That Excited About. Or it's like forms of art I know I should appreciate but just do not get. And it's just too easy to take a cheap shot and invoke Gold Hat. Before you think I am going to bark and growl about badges, I am not. I am intrigued to see how they develop. What's been swirling around in the back corners of my cortex is the idea of relying on external entities validation of who we are, what we can do, etc. And this goes further back than the digital era. That's the story below. As Ira Glass says, "Stay with us..." So as key as earning credit. recognition for skills achieved, demonstrated in or outside of formal education might be, to be it is of equal or even more importance that we continually maintain our own digital space that demonstrates who we are, what we do, rather then relying on Google or other entities to define out reputation. That is a prime reason I keep at this blog space, rounding up to its tenth anniversary next year, as part of the Jon Udellian concept I value of narrating the work I do. It's why the efforts of UMWDomains is so vital to some of us. You can have third parties and analytics assign you a number (or worse), and you can narrate yourself. I am committed that the latter is crucial, though of course it does not alone act as a certified "thing". But it provides a lot of key context. Frankly I see open badges and managing your own digital self as complementary, yet I worry people might opt for a more automated approach, because it might be less effort. And in life, there are always shades of complexity with being certified (reaching for but leaving behind the scare quotes). While driving back to my Arizona home last week, I opted to take the more scenic, less Interstate-y, route across New Mexico by detouring through Socorro to US 60. It was a chance to get some authentic local food. I actually broadcast this story out loud on ds106 radio, so maybe 3 people heard it. I will try and re-tell from memory. My higher education experience started in 1981 at the University of Delaware, supported by my parents financial backing. I began as a Computer Science major, and hated it, after a year grew to dislike the abstract programming exercises. In my sophomore year, I convinced my folks that I would be happier switching from a field of certain employment to one that interested me more, Geology, one of much lower job prospects. And that's what kind of people my parents were, they questioned me, but supported my wishes. I like to think they saw this experience as more than a track into a job. Maybe they would have paid for me to go to thimble making school. I did well academically in those two years, in some measure because I had learned how to succeed in school, how to take tests, how to write papers, etc. I had a good record on paper. My analytics would be bright green lights. Looking back, however, I was so immature, with not a great deal of world awareness, and a boat load of insecurity hidden below a veneer of youthful bravado. I was rather unformed. I felt like my life needed an adventure boost. I had not even traveled farther west than the Appalachian Mountains, certainly not out of the country; heck I had not even been to New York City. And it was not the first time that I got the idea that a geographic move would put a spark into life. Since I was not very interested in my new academic field, I got the idea to transfer to a school out west. When you study geology in the East Coast (this is a great exaggeration), but you have to drive somewhere to maybe scrape a bush away to see a rock. Out west, as I imagined, and later found to be true, all that textbook stuff is laid out naked to see. I did some research (pre-internet, I could not google anything) and found a school with one of the best repuations in the field, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology located in Socorro, New Mexico. I applied, and with my solid certifications, was accepted, and flew out there in September 1983. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Again, my parents were there, I assume they paid for the flight. In fact I have no memory of this part, I knew I would have flow from Baltimore to Albuquerque, yet I have no idea how I got 70 miles south. I did not ride a bus, take a cab- I am guessing there might have been a van from the university. It was exactly what I had asked for, a climate, scenery, and environment completely and radically different from where I had spent my life. And I panicked. The differences overwhelmed me. I was so not ready for this. I was so unformed as a young adult, though I did not do it at the time. it makes me wonder now, even as I look back 30 years with a much more experienced eye, even how my future self will look back at me now. But that's a tangent. The entire 2 or 3 days there is a blur I cannot remember. If I had stuck it out, I am sure I would have acclimated, befriended, and gone in a life direction that I can only make up where it would have gone. Maybe I own a mine now. But I felt like I needed to escape, and before classes started so my parents did not accrue tuition bills (I actually never even talked about this period with them later in life, missed opportunity). I probably told them and NMT officials that I was off kilter with my diabetes. Again, its all blurred, except I know that I was flying home (again on ticket probably bought at new cheap cost to my parents). Life played itself out, a semester off, then one at the University of Maryland, a transfer back to Delaware, and a wonderful series of steps that included a trip west to Wyoming for summer field camp, going to grad school in Arizona, falling into a tech job at the Maricopa Community Colleges.. to here. Like everyone's life paths, there are many branches we can only speculate about. We can wonder at the "what ifs" but its only useful if we extract something learned from them. But last week I felt the need to just stand there and wonder, and reflect. And I have almost nothing to document that experience, no photos, no journals. no ideas written down. But more than that, I had all the paper certification to show I was ready for that educational experience, and I was so un-ready on a personal, developmental level. It actually shudders me to think how unformed I was. A work in progress, as is now. These things are important, the things that aim to ascertain what we as individuals can do. It's just not the whole picture, not that there is really anything that can capture that. Our digital selves ought to be as nuanced and complex as a real selves. There is no grand conclusion here, just that take badges and certifications for what they are. They have value, but to me, its only in the context of quite a bit more do they make sense. Do I get my Long Boring Blog Post Badge now? The excuses for not playing this week are worn thin. While lighting my wood stove, it did not take much of a leap to hear “Light My Fire” in my head, but maybe a more bluesy acoustic version. None of the tabs I found felt right, so I startet varying some of the chords. I really like just running rhythm so I left a wide open patch for someone to riff in some solo or maybe a harmonica (or a tuba?). Or do something about my vocals, please. The tabs I found had the chorus as Am / F#m plus a few capo options, but I was not liking them, so I just started switching it up- I really like the ringing sound of an Am7 – I tried doing the bar on three strings for the F#m, but found I liked what I think is a D5 – and normal 3 finger triangle D, nut leave the top (E) string open. I was playing with also trilling the 6th string G back on top of it. So that’s the verse, and what I think is behind the long organ and guitar solos (maybe, I lost track while strumming to the Doors version). The chorus was fine in the tab I used. G – A – D “Come on Baby Light My Fire” twice. I did a variation on the open G of moving my finger from the 1st string 3rd fret (the high G) to the second string 3rd fret (adding a “D”). I also tossed in the Dsus4 back to D cause it was like the first variation I learned (I think it was Boston “More Than a Feeling”) and it sounds good. The last line switches to G – D- E – E7 (“Try to set the night on FIRE”). I doodled up a sketch of my own chords used here: My goals again are to try and find my own variations on songs I like, not just mimic them. Maybe its because I am bad at mimic-ing them! But I like that 2 chord Am7 – D5 riff, it has a maybe Santana-ish feel to it. And that is my fire in the soundcloud widget ;-) It’s lit. Earlier this month I had some fun satirizing Wired magazine for what I thought was a real non-story as a cover item (like they care what I think?). What I neglected to add later was as I read the issue, they had a real cover worthy story in Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear? where they profiled people like Mathew Sheppard who tried to make his life troubles go away by faking his own death and attempting to vanish. The point being, superficially, that it is harder these days to pull it off given our digital footprints. That is a surface summary- in the article, the failure of the vanishing act is nearly always not the superiority of the tracking, but how tracking makes it easy to find the human failures of the vanishees- when they contact someone, when they use something under their old name, etc-- it is the human failings that crash the vanishing act. What was mildly clever is that Wired added on a bonus to the story- they dared the audience to engage in a sleuth game as author Evan Ratliff went "in the lam" and readers were offered $5000 if they could nail him in public. This came back to me today, in reading the Sunday paper in New Orleans before I return home, the Times-Picayune had a story on this as No place to hide? An online manhunt ends when food, of course, gives man away in New Orleans (since it seems the paper does not archive stories beyond 14 days, I have attached a PDF version I screen-printed; more on this later) -- they had a story here as Ratliff was indeed found in New Orleans, a place where, as the article suggests, people have historically been able to hide. To me, the woefully untrained journalistic critic, the author totally missed the local-ness of the story, and instead largely inflated the fear layer of how we are all unable to escape the giant digital eye. Witness these flowery paraggraphs: The question is: At the dawn of the 21st century -- this era of finely calibrated artificial intelligence, highly attuned and interconnecting technological systems, omniscient cross-linked databases and software tracking devices that pinpoint a freckle on the nose of a child from two galaxies away -- can a law-abiding citizen still go incognito anywhere on the planet, even in New Orleans? Okay, that's not horrible, I use sarcasm myself at times. Try this one on: As the "virtual" world expands with astonishing velocity, obliterating all boundaries that once offered individuals a modicum of privacy, the "real" world -- this physical space we so tenuously occupy -- gets smaller every day.... Our every financial transaction, meal, car trip, text message or e-mail is monitored and electronically collated by gargantuan information systems, which makes it tougher -- and considerably less romantic -- to go on the lam these days than it was back in the days of Bonnie and Clyde. Or take this, Clyde-o and Bonster: Geek squads logged phone calls and text messages, monitored Ratliff's Twitter and Facebook accounts, intercepted ATM and credit card receipts as fast as he made the transactions. The widespread but anonymous acts of domestic espionage pretty much serve to confirm the growing sense that personal privacy is a quaint relic of the 20th century, kind of like black-and-white TV and rotary-dial phones. Damn, I was really pining for my rotary phone. The point here is not that it is hard to vanish in modern society- it is hard to vanish if you are author of a story in a highly publicized magazine who offers money to find you as you remain elusive by using your own credit cards, phone numbers, twitter, and facebook accounts. I fail to see how you can extend this to some scary ominous conclusion that our privacy is gone. Privacy certainly diminishes when one deliberately and daringly puts it in the spotlight. If I was going to try and vanish, I might use some different strategies, like actually hiding my trail. Duh. What Wired ran was a fun gimmick a game, but can hardly be extrapolated to living in a surveillance state (yes I know that my face is capture when I buy coffee at 7-11, yep, that keeps me awake at night). If privacy were so gone as the author dooms, wouldn't we have no missing children? Wouldn't Bin Laden be stuck in Leavenworth? I cannot draw the same dotted lines. The author of the story might have played up instead, perhaps more the story of the person who found Ratliff, or say, parallel stories of real disappearances that happen here in New Orleans, or back parallels in history. Or another missing story idea is how bands of people crowdsourced together online, used modern tools to collaborate and share as people go engaged in the "hunt". I guess there's no ad-selling space in papers for stories of people working together. No, instead, it is better (?) to wave the fear card. YOUR PRIVACY IS GONE! YOU CAN FACEBOOK BUT YOU CANNOT HIDE. GOOGLE IS STEALING YOUR DATA! My limited experience of journalism comes from watching TV and movies ;-) but I thought, end even got what a thought was the post-The Wire perspective of season 5 that newpapers have editors that filter out fluff like this. Oh well, newspapers are perhaps "a quaint relic of the 20th century" or maybe, the 19th. Speaking of which, I refer readers to http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ and suggest little sadness in the demise of newspapers as for the most part, they totally have resisted the changes in culture and technology. In evolution, you deserve to have your species terminate if you don't start adapting and mutating. Look at that online version of the Times-Picayune; first I have to pick and page my way in the store stepping over ads I dont look at. The ad supported model of print papers (classifieds) as fallen aside, yet the best way to save this is to wall paper the content online with glaring ads I am not actively ignoring? And look at the online version of the story- there is not one single contextual hyperlink; they fail to make use of the basic fundamental affordance of the web that makes it a web- links; even links to their own content: And ditto for what Is saw on their main web site-- they offer a 14 day news archive! Amazing! Your content disappears from the public space? What strategy is that? Storage costs are so low, yet it is the strategy to take away the content that might draw future visitors to your newer content? I for one, am not mourning the loss of newspapers... I mourn the loss of jobs and the possible loss of quality writing, but newspapers as in industry? Y'all been sitting like proud Brontosaur-es at twenty minutes til the end of the Jurassic period, ignoring that flash in the sky. Boom. Composed while offline 14 hours on a trans pacific flight... While I playfully gasta-cated at OER24 for folks to put on the Get Federated t-shirt, I knew then and more now that it’s not going to be for everyone. Get Federated T-shirt by me, CC BY– Text in Georgia Font Fediverse logo proposal by Eukombos (CC0) "It's too complicated reigns". Where to Go? Hence the ongoing gnashing of “where to be”? The “professional” pulse of LinkedIn (I’m a bit gutted to see folks who have left their own blogs to home there). The great sea of email newsletter? The light up your Starter Pack of bluesky? It's become a mad rush to go Sky. Buying into the meta trio of InstaThreadBook? https://flickr.com/photos/dclmeyer/38454409930 DIRECTION flickr photo by akahawkeyefan shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license I fault no one for making their choices, or taking the post and spray the same stuff everywhere idea. I get the sensibility, especially if your source is your own microspace. Frankly (why am I using that expression so much? It sounds like an old man tweed dusted phrase), I desire to not have that many scroll spaces. The blog, this here one, had to be central and first for me. I consider most other as exhaust. I'm making a turn to put my energies back to work here rather than falling again for Cousin Elon's Farm. And like the Great Cory D citing the Ulysess Pact after so many iterations of enshittified web dust biting rounds, I am not going to pony up to another masters house. Sure the skies look happy blue.Tell me- how are y'all gonna pay when they want something more than users? I am quite liking the smallness of the fediverse which, as many spaces potentially offer, that original sixth sense proprioception of accidentally bumping into (in the good way) people you don’t know. If you seek push button simpleness and algorithmic drip feeds, there are plenty of options. Actually what I relish about the fediverse is the non simplicity— that gets internet fled with confusion but if you discount the possibility to learn nuance, non obvious paths, than you are discounting your own human ability to learn, adapt. I have plenty of minor gripes in Mastodon. I am never more that 40% confident that a private message is just that (why does the button say “Publish”. And for all the increased proportion of Mastodonners posting images with alt text, why is it so hard to access it in a copiable form (in the web client). Being Fragmented One of the oddest wraps is that as you take on more fediverse tools, you actually end up fragmenting your identity. It’s all connected and interminable, but on every service/instance, you are a new identity. Bug or Feature? Huh? Okay, my main and longest lived identity is here where I started, in Mastodon, as @cogdog@cosocial.ca And note again the power of fedispace. I started on mastodon.social then jumped to social.fossdle.org and finally where I am now. The jumps were pretty easy to do (plus one for Mastodon). Yet my ActivityPub enabled WordPress blog posts as @topdog@cogdogblog.com Anything I post there goes to a different and smaller number of followers (not that I look or count much) (okay I looked, 12). I am fragmented. Really the only sensible approach I have found is to repost stuff from my WordPress identity under my main. It probably looks like vanity self tooting. Shrug Note that I still have running an IFTTT thing that listens to my RSS feed and posts to my main Mastodon account. I’ve not figure out which I prefer so they are both in play. But wait, here are more fragments. I’ve been doing some photo posting to pixelfed as @cogdog@pixelfed.social -- that’s Another me! I am looking at putting more of my photo energy here and leaving the IG behind. And confusion happens here. I can follow a mastodon account in Pixelfed, like Darcy Norman @dnorman@social.ds106.us and where I see only his posts that include images. Then flip to Mastodon where I can follow any pixelfed accounts to see the newest photos. Indeed it all interworks fluidly. As ActivityPub should and does. But to connect mine or at least coordinate, in mastodon I follow my pixelfed feed and the boost new photos. It can be confusing. https://mastodon.ie/@mtechman/113471741547817296 This will happen if I decide to toss my @cogdog self into any other federated service. I will have yet another account somewhere. Don’t think I am pining for some kind of fediverse account ID system, it might be technically feasible, but just noting that being federated means fragmenting of ourselves (solvable) but also being not in one giant vat of other users — what the sky people seem to crave, but swirling from and to smaller ponds. It might look too complex, but again, isn’t find your way through complexity the leveling up of learning we want you to see others do? I’m all for federation, and can call up the poem (maybe) (likely not) if requested (hardly likely), and accept the fragmentation as more feature than bug. Embrace the non simplicity. Stay Federated. Don't fall for the Shtick. Featured Image: My own photo. No need for extruded generated images. The world is full of metaphors, why just give in to the chat box? https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/28006378394 Distributed Grids flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Actually not, but bear with some metaphor swinging from the opposite end of the globe. I'm halfway through a round the world trip for a series of NMC meetings. In the past week, we have run two meetings related to the work of the Horizon Project's Australia-New Zealand Editions. The 2010 version is moving into the writing phase and is due out in late October 2010. We have come here (here being both Brisbane Australia and Wellington, New Zealand) for a different aspect of this project; not to work with the production of the report, but working with key people who we are working with to develop action plans / recommendations to put its ideas more into policy and a wider scope of implementation here. We've run day long meetings that result in the end of a "communique" (Australia one is in draft mode but will be public in a week). That's all context so what I thought was an awareness. Here in Wellington, we held the meeting at an Executive Seminar center at Massey University. Right in the lobby were the objects pictured above- they are the products of 3D printing, specifically the RepRap 3D printer. The items represented in this display are a work entitled Ghosts in the Form of Gifts-- these are replicas of artifacts once held in the Museum of New Zealand, no longer here, at a place currently part of Massey University's College of Creative Arts. Here is the thing. n 2004, when I was still working at the Maricopa Community Colleges, I was part of the advisroy board for the first Horizon Report, which placed 3D printing in the far (four to five year) Horizon. At the time I was really skeptical of this one. It sounded fanciful, and also, something that seemed like it might not be used by many people. But, as the process goes for the Horizon Reports, the over all consensus rules, So here I sit, rather wrong. Not because I have seen 3d printing here, but have also seen, in person, great uses of this technology at for studying morphology of fossils and ancient books University of Texas at Austin Digimorph lab, as a tool for 3D animation at Full Sail University, and on display last month at the Science Museum in London. The thing is, this is a technology that has seen use in a number of fields, from rapid prototyping, to art, to animation, to science... but not a technology that is widely used across the board in education. But it is established enough to have made the mark as outlined in 2004. And pretty much on time. So what about Virtual Worlds? They were of bursting interest all over back in 2006, and our research at NMC got us into the middle of it before it peaked in popularity. At our own peak, we were working with over 200 educational projects that had a presence in Second Life. We have run all of our Virtual Symposia since 2006, including one later this month, in our virtual conference center. We see much more involvement, more interactivity, more "staying" in the place of this virtual venue than any of our web-based conferences. But in many ways, Virtual Worlds have entered a "post-hype" stage. They are "not dead" (see our Spring 2010 survey), but also not are as ubiquitous as people were calling the "3D web" a few years ago (I never bought into that, but now that sounds like pious hindsight). So I see, Virtual Worlds just like 3D Printing- they are not something used by disciplines across the board, but there are many compelling, valid, innovative uses of it still happening. It's just not a Pangea-like technology. But it is also something not even close to "dead" (apply the Monty Python Holy Grail test). And maybe in terms of the way we look at the time dimensions in our work on the Horizon Reports, there is another dimension of spread of a technology across fields in the land of education- just like rivers, there are narrow streams, meandering flooding rivers, and large outflows across wide deltas for how a technology moves over land. It just seemed to ironic? synchronous? to have our Horizon Project meeting in a place today that featured a display of technologies forecasted in the 2004 report. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Holy crap! I just remembered I have not updated this since last month… You would not believe I spend all my time in front of a computer. Apologies to my regular readers! Even the little blue ones!. I am so busy with only your readership as life preserver, being distracted by the shiny, just generally being a nuisance to society in general, my day is full to overflowing from sun-up to sun down and beyond. I am so exhausted. can't they see I am blogging. I swear on the bones of my ancestors I will blog about it when I find my way home. Honestly! I really, truly promise!. Stop I did not write that but neither did some earth guzzling LLM. It's all funny how that happened. I was looking for an image to use.... And the LAST thing I do is reach for a GenAI tool. I needing something to go with "Testing 1-2-3" so I searched my own flickr images (All CC) for "Testing". Since my blogging has been a bet plugged here I thought it would be fun to see what the heck I had posted in 2008: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/2832673925 No Excuse Not To Blog flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Obviously it was a web site, and as typical, the URL it is listed at-- http://www.aussiebloggers.com.au/blogpost.html -- leads to the Dreaded Room 404. Do I stop there? Nah, it is a short trip to find the old site still preserved in the Internet Archive. I figured I would flip through the menus, and be happy with a screen shot. The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator as archived in the Wayback Machine. I figured the button would be a dead link to a dead script, but woah, it's all Javascript, so the old sucker still works! I got my text. Holy crap! I just remembered I have not updated this since last month… You would not believe I spend all my time in front of a computer. Apologies to my regular readers! Even the little blue ones!. I am so busy with only your readership as life preserver, being distracted by the shiny, just generally being a nuisance to society in general, my day is full to overflowing from sun-up to sun down and beyond. I am so exhausted. can't they see I am blogging. I swear on the bones of my ancestors I will blog about it when I find my way home. Honestly! I really, truly promise!. So easy to generate gibberish without the overhead of earth munching LLMs. And look, I got a blog post! And this it was worthy to use the Bing Image Generator to make something of that text as my general rule us using GenAI mostly to make fun of GenAI. Oh is it every beautiful in its horrendousness. Blogging / Not dying Featured Image: Bing Imager Generator produced crap based on prompt I plopped in a box "Holy crap! I just remembered I have not updated this since last month… You would not believe I spend all my time in front of a computer. Apologies to my regular readers! Even the little blue ones! I am so busy with only your readership as life preserver, being distracted by the shiny, just generally being a nuisance to society in general, my day is full to overflowing from sun-up to sun down and beyond. I am so exhausted. can't they see I am blogging I swear on the bones of my ancestors I will blog about it when I find my way home. Honestly! I really, truly promise!' If I was able to ethically license it I would just say "take this poop for whatever you want to do with it? Still working on the new server (see X Marks the (Jade) Spot). I am stumped why a new Apple XServer delivered in November came with OSX Server 10.2.8 pre-intalled though the current 10.3 disks were there. I had trouble getting the 10.3 CDs recognized so blew ahead with the older OS. That was silly. (more…) Like Duvall's Kilgore, who said "there's nothing like napalm in the morning", for a web geek, there's nothing like a bit of curious fiddling with code to make something work. Today's feat was finagling a MediaWiki extension to display a Google Calendar in our sites. I've been using GCal for a year to manage our Second Life events, and Google provides the cut and past code to put in other sides, like our WordPress blog - but MediaWiki is not going to be happy with some <iframe> code, so on some searching I found reference to one on the CouchSurfing Wiki - yet was discouraged that their demo was busted: Going back to the Google search well, I came on the listing of same code in the MediaWiki collection and it suggested that the calendar ID entered in the tags had changed. So there was hope. Setting up MediaWiki extensions is not nuclear physics, but it is a far cry from "plug-in" or "widgets". You have to copy some PHP code, upload it to the server, hand edit the MW settings file (and hope you did not chop a semi colon- a blank page is a sure sign of a typo in an extension). The next tricky part was getting the right ID for our calendar. It looks like an email address, but at first it seemed like it had to be the primary calendar on an account, and the one I set up was actually a secondary calendar. It is there in the Calendar settings, under details- the text where it declares the calender ID: Ahhh, but there is more subtlety- in the tags you (hand code) in MediaWii, you have to swap the "@" for its url encoded entity, "%40", so adding it to my mediawiki page is as intuitive as: um25dbsm7uuis774tb5ualldmk%40group.calendar.google.com But wait there is more-- the default layout was rather.. pinched, so to make it wider, I had to go into the extension source code, and bump up the height and width for the iframe tags. But in the end, and now that I know, it is easy... well, sort of. I have an embedded calendar now for two different SL events, one is ours from NMC, and the other is one maintained by Bruce Summerville in Sydney, who hand adds them to a public calendar when people advertise them on the SL Educators listserv. http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/NMC_Campus_Calender http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/SLED_Calender Smell the napalm! I vaguely remember the way we were taught in high school to research and write a paper. After formulating the topic/hypothesis, we constructed outlines. Then off we would trudge to the library, and use things like the antique card catalog, Citations index to find our sources. As we read books, rolled microfilm, we would use 3x5 index cards as the means to record information we found in the library. In one corner would be the Roman numeral key to our outline, in another corner perhaps a number or code that represented another card where we would store the citation in formation. Eventually you would have a stack of cards of nuggets and facts, that you would then sort. Gaps would be obvious. Then the writing was supposed to happen, by recasting in our own words what meaning we could read from the cards. Of course in reality... well the memories are dusty and tinged like yellowing Scotch Tape. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by koalazymonkey[/caption] But that idea of a chunk of information small enough to fit on a card seems to me the way to think about using Smallest Federated Wiki. In high school, I could only use my cards, what SFW offers is a chance to see, borrow, even augment someone else's cards. I'm aiming to go with Mike's idea of Idea Mining, to use SFW as a self journal of summaries, notes on ideas from elsewhere (papers, links seen in twitter or feed readers, URLs dropped from the sky). I see colleagues who are trying to use SFW (beyond the strangeness and quirks of the interface) trying to use it to collaboratively write together. This is hard, between knowing whose changes are more recent, the lack of a notification or separate comment/review system. The thing is we have plenty of solid collaborative writing tools (Google Docs, EtherPad) that do this pretty well. I am doubtful this can be done in SFW w/o losing hair and sanity. This is because when we normally co-edit, we are working from/towards a single unified version of the document. The document itself is the center and ultimate referenced item. There is one paper, be it a draft, or version 24 or the final edited, polished on. In SFW, everything is fragmented to atomic pieces, not joined, and you get into a whole new level of versioning hell beyond the problem of shoving documents back and forth as email attachments. It starts messy and then gets even messier, and people are left wondering who forked what when and why the edits are all scattered. I'm not saying its impossible, and I am first in line to stand up and say I am Wrong when some folks pull it off, but in my measly SWF experience- this just does seem to be the optimal use of a federated Wiki. It's like McLuhan noting how the first efforts in a new media first replicates the form of the media it replaced (early TV emulating radio shows, early web emulating printed pages). Again, I am only saying this as a gut hunch; I do hope people experiment and perhaps come up with a protocol/process for group writing in SFW. I do think SFW would work as a place to do background research, identify relationships, connect resources from different domains. This is the approach I am taking, my Journal entries are pretty much the Gardner Campbell-like "nuggets" I get when reading stuff in my feed reader, following links in twitter, but also things I come across in papers (well if I read more), but also from sources like podcasts. This quote on nuggets is from the syllabus for the Thought Vectors In Concept Space course Gardner co-led this year: For each reading, we’ll ask you to take a passage from the reading that grabs you in some way and make that passage as meaningful as possible. It could be a passage that puzzles you, or intrigues you, or resonates strongly with you. It could be a passage you agree with, or one you disagree with. The idea here is that the passage evokes some kind of response in you, one that makes you want to work with the passage to make it just as meaningful as possible. A good length for your nugget is about a paragraph or so. Too much, and it becomes unwieldy. Too little, and you don’t have enough to work with. How do you make something as meaningful as possible? Well, use your imagination. You’ll probably start by copying the nugget into your post. From there, consider hyperlinks, illustrations, video clips, animated gifs, screenshots, whatever. Make the experience as rich and interesting as you can. And as we go along, you’ll have more and more of your classmates’ work to link to as well. In fact, linking and commenting are such vital and necessary parts of this course that they have their own definitions page. Obviously, one of the main goals of this assignment is to get you to read these essays carefully and respond to them imaginatively. Your work with “nuggets” should be both fun and in earnest. It should demonstrate your own deep engagement and stimulate deep engagement for your reader as well. Substitute in SFW "page" or "card" or "journal entry" for "nugget" -- "A good length for your nugget is about a paragraph or so. Too much, and it becomes unwieldy. Too little, and you don’t have enough to work with." Rather tan trying to have a topic for a paper pre-determined, I am just using my SFW Journal to capture the things I come across that makes me say "hmmm". I am not trying to find stuff to fit a topic I want to pursue, I am looking for stuff that will suggest what topics I might pursue. These are what I might bookmark in diigo or email to myself, but in this case, the SFW process has me reframe the idea in my own words (for the first paragraph) and then I might add the nugget in quotes, with some links. So I have this pile of "cards" not to fit some outline, but just as a pile. As I go, I am looking to what other people are writing to look for overlapping themes. I have something bubbling as a connection in 3 notes - the idea of our inner voice / critic affecting our creative expression (Shut Up Your Inner Critic), the availability of the digitized books that were in Darwin's library where half contain his hand written annotations (Darwin's Annotations), and hearing Sarah Koenig describe her continued lack of unconfirmed absolute knowing in her year of publishing the Serial podcast (Learning New Info All the Time). I am not sure what this connection is yet, but I see some cross over. And thus, I now may use this as a quasi new lens as I scan my SFW neighborhood (and beyond). My add to the process is creating a new Wiki Section "Connecting Bits to Bobs" where I hope to do this pulling together. It's still not anything tangible, I am just working more cards beyond mine into the mix and seeing if there is a something there there. I'm not saying my way "is right" or that what other people are trying is "wrong", we are all trying to find the meaningful things we can do in the SFW space, and try to find some of Mike's Koolaid for ourselves. There is something else about this FedWikiHappening, we touched on this in an informal Hangout with Mike, Ward Cunningham, Alex North, myself, and Kate Bowles (the first time I think we have heard or seen each other, brilliant experience). In atmosphere there is something between the immediacy of twitter and the more thought out framing we can do in blogs. There is a pleasant/conducive proximity of working along side others, not in a completely synchronous space. This is the effect of twitter when it was less of a Buzz building data sucking machine, before it became Twitter, Inc. But it is less stand along and removed as a blog. SFW is in some weird, interesting dimension in between. And thus I find myself during the day and when online thinking, how will I put this in SFW? [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by sashafatcat[/caption] It's why I am pecking away on a blog post at 12:30am. It's got me thinking. I cannot say I am inside the cult lines yet, Mike, but I can smell the ditto ink. I'll meet you at the card catalog after shop class. It registers a Spock-like eyebrow raise when the folks at Mashable.com are wowed by a new tool, so check out Tag Galaxy. This is a visually engaging tool to explore flickr photos by tags. That alone does not say much, but what this site does is create a planetary like display for showing how tags are related, and the interface invites you to fly in deeper and deeper. So in a Tag Galaxy not very long ago (yesterday) and not far away... You start by entering a tag as the beginning of your journey, and immediately you feel some sort of Force: In the center of my planetary flickr system is Arizona, with circling planetoids (size proportional to number of photos in flickr) are ones to explore -Grand Canyon, Tucson, Saguaro, Desert, Sunset, each revolving around the start point (I am not sure of the distance from the center has meaning). So I decided to explore the rocky planet named Saguaro, (roll your "g" softly sah-WAR-ro) Now my system is defined by the photos that have both the tags of "Arizona" and "Saguaro", and I could continue to refine by picking other "planets", but now I choose to explore, and click the center of the solar system. This was cool to watch unfold, and I missed the screen shot that captured it, but the photos of saguaro cacti start flying in and covering the surface of the center body: And more- you can click and drag the orb to rotate in any direction, and then click to see the individual photo. I had a great time exploring the planetary flickr-system. Yes there are a gazillion visual flickr explorers, and this again is another subtle attribute to what happens when a service like flickr opens their data for people to do interesting things with the data. Open, baby, is it. Ever think you could explore your Bb classes this way? That is a galaxy long long long long long long long long long... As part of a ds106 final project story I am doing based on the Wizard of Oz, I have a part where Dorothy decides to go back to Oz. Not knowing how to find another tornado to whip her house (no one in Liberal, Kansas could explain how the house that was whipped to Oz was back in Kansas in tact. Continuity issues at the tourist trap). I decided to to the Storytelling Within the Web assignment hoping to find a travel agency with a hippy theme: From the Spring 2011 ds106 class came the idea of changing up an existing web page to tell a new story " you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site, but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site"”though you can photoshop particular images on the site. Essentially you alter the content of a web page (content, images) to make it tell a new story. But I failed it surface anything useful. I did find that the authoritative hippy.com site is sporting HTML vintage 1997 (tables, baby, it's all tables and no CSS), The Tecnomadics site seemed to come close enough to give me something to play with - the "hippies on http? banner drew me in. I set about in Hackasaurus to bend the text and media to my story. The one place I could not edit was the slider widget the have below the main header. Once I had saved the HTML from Hackasaurus, I opened it in a text editor, and deleted the DIV that contained they slider widget (as well as the fraebook iframe). I also got rid of a few lower blocks of content; the page was already long and I have enough for my purpose. You (and Dorothy) can find my web edited version of this site at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/gotooz/ozmomatics.html- its pretty heavily edited, all text and menus. The idea is that it appears as this cool kind of travel site for hippies, but when Dorothy reads it, the content shifts to match her own personality and desires. In fact, if you go under the "Take a trip" menu there is a link to "oz", a page that uses the earlier animated gif I made of the ruby slippers, and I set up that page when clicked to go to an embedded version of my backwards video. The story pieces are getting more connected! Inside the Photo This bot of metal sculpture sits atop a bicycle shelter on the campus of Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops, British Columbia. I’ve noticed in numerous times since I arrived here three months ago. It has a stylish shape. On this clear day, in mid afternoon, the light was super contrasty strong. I thought that it would look good against the solid blue sky, but was not sure I could get an angle that had the sky filled with buildings and trees near by. I might have done to brush out the two small white blemishes in the metal. There actually was a little bit of tree detail in the upper left that I clone brushed out in Aperture, and I cropped it a tad to center it up. It was not until I was editing that I saw the reflection of the bicycle shape on the roof of the building. While fully centered, it works (to me) as a composition. I knew I liked it a lot as soon as I saw it in my editor, and was easily my pick for my daily photo. It was a really nice bonus that the photo on flickr was selected to be In Explored: in explore! This makes the fifteenth photo I’ve had picked; and tonight I found the Scout Tool from BugHugLabs (it works through the flickr API) that not only lets you see which photos have been picked for Explored, but also lets you generate a poster: I don’t play the games that people do to get explored, it’s not a goal… but it does feel pretty good considering the quality of photos in there. If you ever need some inspiration, just take a few scrolls through the pool. The best reward is taking photos that you feel proud of and enjoy yourself. Everything else is teriary. I am not trying to start a boycott, but am making my own pointless statement about my fatigue with the format and limited outcomes of attending the large educational technology conferences. I've barked and moaned previously (see "I'm Bored As Hell And I'm Not Gonna... zzzzz") about the staleness and sad irony of the 50 minute lecture to a passive audience being the primary mode of information sharing at professional gatherings and the minimal information density of conference presentations. This past year I attended both the mammoth EDUCAUSE 2004 conference (Denver, 6000? attendees) and the League for Innovation in the Community College's Innovations 2005 conference (New York City, 3000+ attendees). Beyond meeting up between sessions with colleagues and doing fun stuff away from the site, I am hard pressed to list much as a take away. I get little out of listening to people read me their powerpoints, or spending 75% of their time giving background rather than starting with the demo. The agendas are so jam packed at the mega-cans that there is no room or time to breathe or decompress (the League conference lacked any seating in the hallways, now that is great design), just shuffle off numbly to the next lecture. And isn't there irony that we travel thousands of miles, dumping travel dollars in hotels, and the conference centers are jammed full of folks reading email??? I watch folks in sessions, oblivious to the blabbering presenter, checking their email, fixing their websites, blogging about their boredom (oh wait a minute, that was me). Is this really sensible? Rational? or am I just suffering from a lack of oxygen? Not being in a purchasing capacity, I have zero interest in the silly hawking of the vendor halls (I will enter long enough to pilfer the free drinks and food), where I can get more info about a product by Googling and reading message boards from actual users as opposed to the smiling booth people. So for 2005-2006, I am passing on the big mega conferences. I'll be at home, reading blogs, maybe listening to podcasts, but if I participate this year anything, I am search of the smaller sized meetings where there appears to be genuine exchange. Or an interesting format. I'm already committed to the August 7-10 SAC conference (~300 attendees) and a must-go for me every year is the New Media Consortium Summer Conference (300-400 attendees). I'll keep my eyeballs out for other interesting regional events-- I'd really like to go to the Open Education Conference at Utah State University, but the timing is not looking good with other events at home in Maricopa (and a planned get-away to Rocky Point in Mexico). I'll be doing the April TCC Online conference and hope to coordinate timing with my colleagues in Australia for their online conferences. This happened to me before almost 10 years ago, pretty much pre-web, when I decided to forgo my conference travel money and used the funds to visit a number of colleges in the Pacific Northwest. I got much more in terms of ideas, contacts, from pretty much informal meetups set up with the technology du jour then (email listservs). So is it just me that thinks the big conference formats are as stale as that forgotten, unidentifiable vegetable rotting in the back of my fridge? Some fool has to call the conference king naked. For 2005-2006, I am not attending the big cons and looking for the medium to little cons, the online cons... And before any comments come raining in, I must admit that beyond my complaining, I do not have better ideas how to run a mega conference. The largest events I have been responsible for are in the 200-250 range, and I know it is a challenge to cook up an agenda that works for a good chunk of them. But I do know there is something better we can do with our time together than plenary + 20 simultaneous 50 minute lectures + plenary + .... I would use the collaborative tools of communication before, during, and after. I would follow the idea of hybrid/blended learning, and use the face to face time for what is best achieved in that format (dialogue, debate, exchange, social action) and use the technology to offline to movement of static content (papers and presentations). And people have to go with something of personal/professional value, not just t-shirts, goofy pens, and ugly conference tote bags. Is there any gathering out there that really pushes the conference format beyond a compressed series of lectures? Here I talked about loving flickr and a few hour later I cannot log in- all attempts are bounced back to the home, un-logged in screen. Flushed the cache, cookies, been tried another browser. Where is the love back? Unrequited? Is it just me? Does it hate my latest pictures? Sigh.... love is so complex. Later... Doh, never mind. Apparently I was still logged in to flickr. But something was till flooey as normally if I am logged in an go to the main flickr page, it bops me to my personal flickr page. In fact, the only way I got back in was to click the "new member request" link and then click the "Yours" link at the top. I think there is some cooke malfeasance going on! Stephen Downes outlines How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer, essentially a 9 step process for (ugh) writing RSS Feeds by hand. An RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed is an XML file used to describe the contents of your website. As your website content changes, your RSS feed changes. Other computer systems, known as 'aggregators' or 'harvesters', read your RSS feed every once in a while. If you have provided new information, the aggregator takes that information and sends it to readers around the world. Thus information about your site's contents is 'syndicated', that is, rebroadcast to a much larger audience. An excellent one paragraph summary of what RSS is, indeed, but I would hardly recommend wiriting XML in a text editor unless it is for the command line groupie club. XML code is really best for machines to digest, not humans (or canines). Stephen's point might be that RSS is simple enough, and maybe one beer's worth of effort is not much to ask for. (more…) Best days are when the Internet is not full of poop but provides a funny little surprise. I live for them. I'll drop the spoiler first. This happened. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1074709804868878336 I've had several times of searching widely for open licensed photos and landing on one by my Aussie friend Michael Coghlan (scroll past the post about a spammer to the image credit). So the other day, I'm writing a section for a project with a title like "Peeking Behind the Curtain", hoping for a cute animal picture of a Toto-like dog pulling the curtain on the Wizard. My first round of search for open-licensed images in Google was on "peeking behind curtain" and fell a bit short. Changing it to just "behind curtain" was mixed bag too. But the one of some people inside what looked like an Asian storefront kind of felt right, although it looked like all men. It's from Wikimedia Commons, a place I end up getting a lot of my images from. It looks good on the image page and as I scroll down notice something interesting in the photo credits. Hey! That's me! And I don't remember the photo. But the flickr link does: [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]What is Going on Behind the Curtain? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)[/caption] Okay, but I'm fuzzy. This was on a trip where I went to after Japan to visit my friend Bert Kimura, which I only know by scanning the adjacent images in the flickr timeline. I don't want to be bragging about this, just noting the oddity of doing an image search and finding a photo I forgot about. Hey Internet! Keep it full of serendipity Featured Image: Dog With Glasses PublicDomainPictures.net photo by George Hodan put into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0. Here is another story demo for ds106, using my Five Card Flickr Stories site to generate a story from 5 random photos drawn from the Daily Create pool. I still find these a lot of fun. Five Card Story: Oh Brothera The Daily Create story created by CogDog flickr photo by Michael Branson Smith flickr photo by JanusAjax flickr photo by Bookhenge flickr photo by b__parsons flickr photo by cogdogblog Mt brother, the big time write. He has one novel published, and his life now consists of running from podunk town book store to another to sign it for 12 frumpy housewives. He is always telling me that writing is the only form of art. He hates my drawings. He refused to even use my sketch for his book cover. Last night when he dropped in for dinner (after visiting OUR podunk town bookstore, hah hah) (and me the starving grad student paying for his pizza), he left yet another copy on my shelf. I guess I am sort of proud of him, but I just want to sit at the starbucks counter sipping my lattes, and dreaming in technicolor. I imagine strange new worlds of pictures, dairy gods. I see a cartoon world where I whip his butt in miniature golf. And he is silent. I'm kind of glad to drop his author butt at the airport, on his way to Boise or Tuscaloosa or Bridgeport. Damn, he left another copy of that book in my glove compartment. Maybe I'll read it. Or doodle all over the pages. For a while I was saving screen shots of some of the convoluted license statements I come across in Wikimedia Commons. There were ones where images were public domain in one country, but of course here in the US Congress every few years extends copyright like another 50 years. One of the most "crappy" set of terms I found was actually on a photo of dog crap. You just cannot make this stuff up, and in fact you do not need to. The world provides these curious odd wonders on a regular basis (US Elections aside, sigh). But then you find the opposite- the simplest, most understandable kinds of terms out there. I was writing a few more DS106 Daily Creates, and without giving away what the challenge is for June 3, 2016, I landed on the perfect image, of someone who happens to be a personal hero. [caption id="attachment_57575" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KeithR2.JPG[/caption] The photo was uploaded/shared to Wikimedia Commons by the person who took the photo, a user know as Machocarioca, and it's source listed as "Own Work". Yes, cross out the copyright: [caption id="attachment_57576" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Public domain license for photo of Keith Richards on Wikimedia Commons[/caption] Once more: I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law. This of course is both wonderful and understandable. But what seems to me to be lost is that for the most part, the way people interpret a public domain license is, "Oh goody I can use this image and I do not have to bother giving attribution." Yes, legally, that is true. That is the minimum condition to satisfy the terms of the license. That's like getting a "C" in class. That's doing the minimum. The problem I see with this approach, is that when I put my work out in the world, using all public domain licensed content, when people see it... to them it just reinforces the idea that its okay to use any image found on the web without considering licenses or giving credit. And what if I am so taken by the style of that photo, what if I want to see more by the same artist? Maybe they have a classic one of Charlie Watts. But in creating with unattributed, unsourced (legally licensed public domain) media, I am publishing informational dead ends. See my Dog and Cat example. So my mode is Attribute Everything Possible. Even if I do not have to. Is it really that arduous to do? Why? I am modeling behavior of reuse integrity. If I do not have to attribute and I don't, who knows if I am being good reuse citizen? What kind of example am I setting for others, especially students. I can help people find related media, either form the same creator or from the same collection. And, most importantly, I am expressing gratitude, appreciation to the person who shared it. So please, do not take a public domain license as a freedom to skip giving credit. It might take you another 90 seconds to copy a URL or photographer's/collections name. One of the nifty things about the Wikimedia Commons system is that it also tracks where the media is used on other Wikimedia sites. I counted 54 re-uses of that Keith Richards photo. Maybe it's because it is a great photograph. Maybe it's because it is a great photograph of a pop culture hero. Maybe it's because it is a great photograph of a pop culture hero shared under the most easy to understand and free (as in freedom) licenses. Both Wikimedia Commons photos used in this blog post were uploaded, and openly shared by individuals. I am making my only plan to do som regular uploading of more of my own images, and to make them available under what I will call the Keith Richards mode, public domain. It's good of you to practice and share the idea of reuse of open licensed images. But don't just go on the way of "if I don't have to give credit I won't". Make the extra effort. And if you have stuff, don't share photos of dog crap with such ridiculous terms. It's just dog crap. Top / Featured Image: Thinking of the idea of Occam's Razor, my first search was on "razor" in Google Images with filter on for licensed for reuse (are there other usable options?), but most where modern shaving devices. So I added "antique" to the search box and got many usable images. The one I used was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by someone named "CoffeeAddict", labeled as "own work", and shared under a Creative Commons BY-SA (Attribution / Share Alike) license. from the vapid self horn tooting department... (cause thats what blogs are for) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiEMkUE0sHY I just got wind of the edited videos from last month's Scottsdale Community College's TechTalks '13. I love the format they came up with, an idea from Charles Pflanz, brilliantly organized and emceed by Lisa Young. Kudos to the SCC Film department that does professional production and everyone else that was there as volunteers to support the event. It could not have been any more smooth. It would have been enough just to wear one of those cool mic headsets. That was one of the most fun things I've gotten to do in front of a captive audience ;-) The lights were insanely bright, I could not see anyone in the seats, only hearing them. I used my pechaflickr tool to run my presentation, so in a way, it was an improv talk about improv. I have a new idea, that would turn it into a sort of mad libs on the front end. Scheming... The format of 18 minute talks was energetic, and I liked how they led and ended with ones by SCC Students. The format was described as: SCC Tech Talks 2013 is an event where Maricopa faculty, staff, and students gather on Scottsdale Community College campus to enjoy be a series of live, 18-minute presentations about technology and the learning/teaching process with the end result being a morning of inspiring, entertaining, and touching stories with the power to change student success outcomes. The format will be like the highly acclaimed TED talks. The idea is simple: We want to gather Maricopa's leading innovators, its risk takers, its most interesting idea makers and offer them an opportunity to share their stories, ideas, and insights about technology and the teaching/learning process. I can recommend checking out Donna Gaudet on Don't Know Mooch about MOOCs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeYdNrtVZBo Donna took the cow metaphors where they have not been before, but also framed what MOOCs are better than most newspaper web sites seem to be able to do. Plus she shares fascinating details/data about her own MOOC on Basic Arithmetic My good friend "Coop" Alisa Cooper shares her lessons learned from being an online teacher since 1998 - "What I Wish I Knew Before I Started Teaching Online: How to be an Effective Online Teacher" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhzblE49JqU with some fun references to what was state of the world 15 years ago. I need to go back and watch Dave Zemora's talk on 3D printing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_9e6oOugI I was back stage then getting revved up for my own session, but he had the table full of cool 3D printed stuff. I'm excited to see this happening at Maricopa. And do not miss the closing talk by student Pete Mello on Amalgamated Audio technologies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_cEqyARP60 where he talked about guitar synthesizers and digital music capabilities at SCC. I only wish he had done some live demos! Where else would a community college have a professional musician as a student? He has a professional studio in his house!