Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
If I ever came across this in a workshop or presentation, I'd be headed for the door or flipping the laptop open while praying for wireless. In the September 2004 Training & Development Magazine, under a department of fundamentals is "A Trick For Your Trade" Are you looking for a lively demonstration of a learning tool to kick off your next learning session? Try this simple card guessing trick. In addition to helping trainees focus on how to use learning tools, this flashy card trick, when sued at the beginning of a seminar, also sets the mood for creative teaching and the intentional learning that follows. The article goes on to describe this "powerful" card trick thta involved cutting a hole in the corner of the playing card box, obscuring it with your thunmb, and then sneaking a peak when some schmuck in the audience shuffles the desk, and puts random drawn card inserted back in the box. The amazing super presenter astounds the audience when they produce the card drawn. The author seems to forget to cardinal rule of card tricks of never revealing the secret. Where was he when they taught that in first grade recess? This simple card trick is an effective icebreaker that sets the tone for the learning that follows. It's a unique and easy way to illustrate how the tools that will be discussed during the training session are memorable and easy to master, use, and repeat. I would be horrified and appalled at the use of a cheap trick touted as an icebreaker. I would be lulled to sleep and counting the slow ticks of the clock until the torture of this session would end. It is cheesy, and has no real relevance to any topic presented. There are 31,900 better suggestions on Google for ice breaker activities. Ice breakers are excellent, worthwhile things to employ, but do so thoughtfully with your audience in mind. They are worthless without considering the principles of active learning. It's no surprise to see such fluff in industry "training" magazines, which to this day still regularly interchange the words "training" and "learning" as equal entities. Training people how to use software, how a sales system works, how to assemble widgets, how to operate a Widgomatic is a far far cry from learning critical thinking, ethics, how to write argumentative essay, solving differential equations. I am not saying one is more important than another, but I do look carefully at how the word "learning" with or witthout an "e" in front, is used in industry mags. But you gotta be impressed by an author's web site that consists of one single, lonely web page. Haven;t they had a "training".... er "learning" session on hyperlinks? I actually am not ready to blab about the Twitterpocalypse- instead I am experimenting with a "toot" from Brian Bennett, who I have been path crossing (pre-Twitter)? via ds106. I remembered there was once a JavaScript bookmarklet for quick posting built into WordPress... it's not in core anymore, but available as a WordPress Plugin Once installed, it shows up under Tools in your Dashboard, where you can drag a doohickey to your Bookmarks bar. Then, while wandering around on the web, you might come to something you want to blog about, say some guy's blogpost, about, of all things, Twitter and Mastodon and blah blah blah. I can select a chunk of text, click Press This! and now I am blogging in a simple interface. It's a bit like a reduced classic editor. I can even choose to add in Brian's feature image: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="512"] Image by Brian Bennett, credited there as "generated by the Stable Diffusion image-generation AI with the prompt, 'a person running away from a giant blue bird in an impressionist style.'”[/caption] The great Twitter Migration is causing all sorts of hype around Mastodon, but, in my opinion, for the wrong reasons.People disillusioned with Twitter since Musk took over are flocking to Mastodon to the tune of hundreds of thousands of registrations per day. That is astronomical growth for what has been, for the last several years, niche communities of people around shared interests. Source: Mastodon is Not a Twitter Replacement – ohhey[blog] Quick and easy? Not much else I can do, but a way to do quick posts. Oh, Hey, Brian, Hi. Featured Image: [caption id="attachment_72352" align="aligncenter" width="760"] A double ended hex bike tool and a well worn bike multitool sit on a wooden surface. They are metaphors for small useful tools[/caption] flickr foto Hybrid Courses Matrixavailable on my flickr Our Ocotillo Hybrid Courses Action Group chair Shelly Rodrigo went wildly over the top with a "Matrix" theme for her demo on the group's efforts this year... with red pills and blue pills for those faculty considering the plunge into hybrid courses. But I cannot help but mention the fantasic effort Shelly did with sharing! She went for a total Matrix theme here: Take the RED Pill You stay in wonderland and we show you how deep the hybrid learning goes. Take the BLUE Pill The learning ends. You wake up in your office and believe whatever you want. I love it! Maybe for our evaluation purposes we will chart the number of blue pills and th enumber of read pills versus.... We are coming into Week 7 of our 12 week faculty course, Web Based Teaching, and thanks to the return of my co-teacher, we are mostly caught up on back grading of assignments. We had to provide some mea-culpas as our stated turn around on grading had lapsed-- a good part as I had to learn how to fumble my way through the WebCT grading. This seems to me a whole lot of clicking. Click Manage Course. Click View Some Students. Click Deselect All Students. Click the 3 students I need to enter grades on. Scroll 3-4 screen widths to the right to find the item. Click Edit. Enter scores. Click Update. Now I am stuck seeing just these three students. Now have to select :View All Students form the top menu to get the full class view. I can do this, but each "click" is another CGI script processed. It adds up. But that was not my intent of this post. Based on one of our previous Attendance Quizzes (short quizzes we use to get feedback and quick checks on previous week's work), it seemed the class wanted more detailed instructions. So last week;'s activities on finding Web Resources, I did that. Now I can tell at the end of the week by the questions coming in from 2 students.... THEY ARE NOT READING THE INSTRUCTIONS AT ALL... so it does not matter how much detail I write??? If I do not clarify, or link them back to the instructions they did not read, am I not doing my job (could you follow the quadruple negatives). Writing instructions seems to be like and endless task of whittling a stick. You keep cutting, turning, cutting, turning, and it just never seems quite as sharp as you think it can be. But at some point, you just stick a hotdog on the stick, and hang it over the fire., It is done. I will try and share the simple assignments later as MLX packages. They are not that complex. It is simple search and scouting of relevant resources. One is creating and sharing a MERLOT personal collection (so they not only have to poke around the vineyard, they need to create an account, add some resources and write annotations). The second is search and discussion board posting of 3 MLX resources they could potentially use/adapt. The last was saving the results of a relavant Google Search as a web link. I am shocked people do not do this more often, likely the simplest way to exploit Google (in a good way). If you paid very close, detailed (ahem) attention to the Triple Dog Dare -- this is RULE 2 for the current ds106 Headless open course activity of remix-- it's time to break out for creativity in a big way, and remix some photos of author Cory Doctorow. He's given us his blessing (e.g. boing boing permission). All of the information, details, photos to remix, exmaples, instructions are on the site I cobbled together from Jonathan Worth's idea. Here, let him say it. https://vimeo.com/64019665 Jonathan's phonar students are on to it now. Hey are we going to let those phonar kids out remix the mighty ds106? (cheap shot appeal to competition) (I'll resort to any tactic to draw you out of what else you spend time on beside ds106). A few words about the site-- when Jonathan and I planned this last Spring, we wondered about thousands of Cory fans, Boing Boing readers descending on a site, so I suggested we hang it on a Wordpress.com site and let them handle the bandwidth. It was a decent challenge working with the limits there, and that was not much of an issue-- I am using Modularity Lite, one of the Graphpaper Press themes (I love them). The galleries you get for displaying images are nicely done, they can be randomized (seen on the remix gallery and the page that shows Cory's book covers). The front page is a bit of a trick- I am using the theme feature to have a front teaser, and to make space to show the background image, I have snuck in a transparent PNG image (it's like the old invisible GIF trick!) When I ran this for my class before, i had them submit remixes via a Google form; when we went public, I was leery of managing the form submissions, and suggested having all submissions be done via a subreddit. When I met with Jonathan 2 weeks ago, we decided to go back to a form, as we wanted to capture a remix trail (when people remixed a remix) and to ask for a statement about how they define their work as a remix. To be honest, the response has not been that overwhelming (ahem), so we are good for now with form input. I did throw in a second sheet to the google form response sheet, to do some tricks to compose the right HTNL so adding to the gallery and the text list of all submissions a cut and paste step. We left the subreddit up as a place where people could optionally add their remixes and we can run a popular vote - hey that means you, go to the subreddit and upvote some remixes! I had my UMW students do this last Spring as a remix assignment for ds106 and you can find their work as well as some of the open participants sprinkled in the FTR (For the Remix) (Get it?) Gallery: Need to see what was remixed already? (more…) flickr foto Capitol Gated 2available on my flickr I am here for a first time visit, to Austin, Texas, for the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting a one day plus dinner gathering of a number of brilliant and creative reps from various new media centers across the US. I just love so much hanging out with fellow people who do similar (but interestingly different) kinds of work in education. The Arizonan is in town, so any rain has scattered to the netherlands, and it was a gloriously bright day, and I took advantage of an hour to walk around and snap a few photos. There are some exciting new projects brewing at NMC and we will hear more about it tomorrow at the full day discussions. Darn, that music from 6th street is sounding great even up here on the 17th floor of the hotel. I should be out there, but that will wait til... I'll leave the academic wrestling over Google Scholar to the academics-- I was more humanly curious what I could find there... so did a self Google to see if I could find a reference to my previous life. Before materializing as an instructional technologist at Maricopa, I was a graduate student in, of all things Geology (hence my e-mail signature "was geologist now technologist" (see more semi-sordid history). Before I got burned out on a narrow field of research, I did manage to publish a paper in the Geological Society of America's Geology, then the top journal in the field. Their rigorous guidelines limited authors to 4 printed pages, and as their tagline then said, "I would have written a shorter article if I had more time." It was accurate, as it took my advisor and myself a full year not only to summarize the research, but to write, create graphics, edit, write, edit, write, edit... an unforgettable learning experience. Anyhow, via Google Scholar I did find at least some citation references to my November 1991 published article, "Hydraulics of the August 7, 1980, pyroclastic flow at Mount St. Helens, Washington" not bad for something that old and obscure. Just for fun, something I had not done for lack of better reason, I used our new sheet fed scanner to digitize one of my reprints and crunched it down to a 1.1 Mb PDF there for your pyroclastic flow curious pleasure. I find my life is full of metaphors, some fit well, others may be a stretch. Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, I celebrated by doing yard work. Actually, after days of sitting at a computer, there is something very rewarding about doing sweaty, manual labor, doing something with your hands. On Sunday, we took down a 30 foot tree in our yard that was messy and blocking the vegetable garden, and on Monday, we took down a dead mesquite tree at my mother in law's house. There is nothing like the power of a chainsaw in your hands... well it is better when the saw works well. I bought one a year or two ago when we needed to do some clearing up at our cabin, and the last few times using the saw, it has been a real test of patience. The chain gets dull, falls off, jams, the unit leaks oil all inside its case. On Sunday, I had to put the chain back on at least 6 times, a process that is a balancing act needing about 3 hands and some dexterity to avoid the hot engine from searing your skin. We got most of it cut, but at 100+ degrees, we left the main trunk for another day. At my mother-in-laws, the saw was even more misbehaving, and eventually jammed completely as the internal metal spring that wraps around the drive wheel got bent out of shape and could not be re-engaged. I was being rather stubborn, thinking I could bend and tweak this tool to get it working, but wisely listened to my better half. We dashed off to Home Depot, compared models, and got a new one that was a bit better (and $50 more). The new saw was like a dream. It cut the old dead tree like butter, never jammed, and did not shake the skin off my arm. It was fun, and I ran out of things to cut ;-) Sometimes you just need to drop the old tool that you've been nursing along and get something new. Forget about the pride in keeping something old or not really working well patched together. I think there is some sort of metaphor there related to software, but that might be presumptuous. A week from tomorrow is my last day at Maricopa. I'll turn in my badge and key and leave the building. Today, I cleaned out another place I've occupied for a long while -- my cubby in the downstairs locker room. For the last 10? 11? years, I have occupied locker #1 here (top right in the photo), used for my bicycle commutes to work. In the early days, it was an economical and fitness thing; as my wife and I lived in a small townhouse and shared a vehicle as finances were tight. I rode every day for three plus years, cold mornings in december, furnace blasts in the summer, wind storms, glorious spring flower days. That might be some 800 showers gone by, but who is counting? With time, salary advances, a house, two cars... the bike rides waxed and waned to none to a few times per week. Still, it was always a great way to spend time thinking, generating ideas, rather than gripping the steering wheel in a death grip, cursing traffic, etc. But starting April 10, my daily commute while working for the NMC is going to be about 18 feet down the hall (okay make it 35 to the kitchen to make coffee). And for another story... the other day, as I came in the front lobby and headed up the stairs, I heard the sweet southern twang voice of Cindy, the receptionist, who answers the main number for the Maricopa system. "... yes, he is leaving the distict." I paused on the stairs, casually wondering if she was speaking about litt ole me. "Yes, he's going to work for the ... New Media, Constor, um... Conservi, um.. Contorio.." I yelled down from the top of the stairs "CON-SORT-I-UM" "Consortium!" she says. Now who was not calling me to ask? Oh well, cya later. Web-based timeline tools have come a long way... since last year. I have a bunch (among like 30 tools) to update into 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (not to mention a plan to yet redo the site a new way) (how do you like the run on parentheticals) (?). I am keen to try out the Verite Timeline tool, which seems to offer a json type interface for creating media rich timelines right in your web page, or to generate the source data in Google Spreadsheet. That is a post for another day. This morning I came across Jill Walker's blog post mentioning memolane as a new "scrapbook" type tool (jill/txt is one of the earliest blogs I recall coming across when I started in ed tech, she has had some long running blog power). So memolane creates "memory"? lanes? from your tracks in social media spaces. You get to add your accounts, not by entering username/passwords- that is so 2008 -- but by authenticating into those systems. I added twitter, flickr, youtube, soundcloud, instagram (OH NO IT IS NO LONGER HIP?), and my own blog's RSS feed. It's a good set of services, and I would not be surprised to see more added. What memolane does elegantly is to create a timeline from the content from these sources: Where the info is put into those little boxes, each of which loads when clicked so you can wiatch a video, see a photo, listen to an audio, etc: (more…) RSS was the cutting bleeding edge in 2002, or at least it seemed to me. Few people knew what it was if you muttered it (well that has not changed), but very little of the things we are excited about now would have have their oomph without the underlying, humble glue, of RSS, ugly to the non techie eyes XML. Today I did a brief, light speed, un-rehearsed overview of RSS for a small group- done via online service iVolcalize-- this was at the request of Steve Gilbert, from the TLTGroup, and I have dodged Steve for almost 8 months. But he's persistent, and in that time, he has managed to get himself into podcasting, a bit of RSS thinking, etc. So today's session was one of their "iVocalize Synchronous Sessions" on Feeds [RSS, et al.] & Aggregators Samples, Info, Tools, & Uses. I've not been i one of these, but they are pitched as more conversational online events, with smaller groups. I have not used iVocalize before, but it is very similar to Elluminate, in that it runs form a Java client. You have the push to talk audio exchange, a chat area, a white board, the whole 4 yards. In a test, it seemed to work okay on my Mac OS X / Firefox, but launching into the session, the shared browsing is "not supported for your platform". Gulp. So while Steve did intros, I restarted my MacBookPro into Windows XP. Oi, on the first attempt with the applet, it had to download something, a plugin, and it needed a reboot. More wait. Eventually (about 9 minutes into the session) I got there. And started blabbing. I pretty much just blabbed too quickly about RSS-- none of the participants had microphones, so it was hard to gauge the audience, though we got some questions via chat. It was, again, the firehose set loose. As I said, little prep time, and spontaneous talking is my kind of presentation. I have no idea if it was fun for others ;-) For anyone who cares, and this is really nothing new under the RSS sun, I had cobbled some image only slides in (yes, the first time in years)... PowerPoint, since it imports into iVocalize available as a 2.9 Mb download. It's not even worth it, especially since I used a fancy Font Very Few Others ikely Have (though it was a freebie), so I exported the slides as plain images, and quickly posted a list of a few links in a wikispace. the coolest thing was playing around last night with Comic Life, the fun app that allows you to easily pluck images form iPhoto (or elsewhere) and create your own comics like I did above! It's been out for web-eons, but this was the first time I launched it. It was a freebie with the new MacBookPro, and I spent about 4 minutes creating a silly graphic. By sheer web search accident, I stumbled on to Andy M's Yahoo Pipe for putting your twitter followers locations on a map: The numbers ar enot a count per country, but a number on the list of 100, and you can pop from one pin to the next in a cheap world tour. Note that it maps 100 of your followers, so no hopes Scoble et al for popping 25000 pins on a map. And I am not sure if these are the 100 most recent or just the random way twitter lists your followers. And although it says you can embed this in your blog, doing so with JavaScript requires plain text insertion of your username and password, a definite no no unless you like eating phish. You can make it a iGoogle widget. This is less of an interest in using this Pipe and more of a reminder (note to self, not a freaking resolution) to learn more about Yahoo Pipes (so I can more partly understand what the hell Tony Hirst cooks up in his kitchen), Although the project is six years old, I still get regular wikispace member requests for the original 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story Wiki -- out of curiousity I sorted the members role to see the earliest subscribers [caption id="attachment_28390" align="alignnone" width="500"] (Click image if you want to inspect)[/caption] Look at that, no surprise, Nancy White was the first. I am still quite not sure why people sign up to be members- the original wikispaces site is not even a wiki-- its not editable, I just used it as a publishing platform. But over 500 have requested to be members. I think a real reason is that it then becomes available as a link in your navigation menu. I am not complaining, it gives me a nudge that people are interested. There are almost as many subscribed to the newer version as well. When I set up the new version, I built it in a clever way (I thought) using the wikispaces equivalent of transclusion (A fancy way of saying one wiki page including another's content) so that people who became members could help edit the site. Not much of that happens. I suggest it is a design flaw on my part. Yes, a 6 year old site still getting activity. A six year old site that has not seem much updates by its author (me) in at least 2 years. The original iteration was for a workshop done as part of a mad 2 week tour of every capital city in Australia. In fact, the very first instance of 50 Ways as a workshop was for 60 some teachers and staff in Hobart, Tasmania on October 15, 2007. This was the same workshop where the Amazing Unkown Flower Story happened http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHDu9piGHaE And I've had the fortune to do the 50Ways presentation/workshop any times since. A few things to note: I am using a free, hosted web service that has not been yanked out on me in six years. Not everything goes down the Google Reader/Wave suckhole (though the tools come and go). Thank you deeply, Wikispaces. There is still a focus on the list of tools, witness the nearly limitless number of web articls I could limk offering the "top 25 tools for storytelling". I'm not sure why people follow the older wiki, I thought I made it clear the newer one is where I supposedly maintain it (well that is a lie) (but hey, I will take any bit of fandom, go ahead and like this on Facebook, please) I thought I had more profound notes, but oh well. I just felt like tooting the horn. Actually, what I want/need to do is to light my own fire to get back to updating the site, and as loosely planned with Darren Kuropatwa in August, to think about adding some mobile apps as tools (if they work on multiple platforms and are free). This blog is my way of trying to make myself accountable. But please, do not call this a resolution. I might be most proud of the promo video I made in 2011 for an online presentation for the Ontaria (Canada) Learning Connections District Champions-- in which I used 34 of the 50 tools to produce segments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDYJAZiskRw Yeah, the web is so ephemeral. People only look at stuff created 6 minutes ago or if they can spend less than 2 minutes on it. Phooey. But really, I would have never gotten anywhere with this without a good story to tell. Thank you, Dominoe. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMp-Fl-sXrU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVO98HWGLB0 You cannot go wrong with a good story, especially if it includes a dog. A very well written introduction to RSS: RSS - A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers (I cannot locate quickly what the "EEVL" acronym stands for but it is a UK resource for engineers). I like the plain language yet the forways into some of the details of producing RSS. <tiphat>Tip of the blog hat to ResourceShelf</tiphat> This document is aimed at publishers and content providers with the intention of introducing & explaining the concepts behind RSS and addressing some commonly expressed concerns. It is primarily intended for a non-technical audience who require an overview of RSS in order to allow them to make decisions regarding the possible use of the technology. However, the guidelines do provide recommendations for good practice, case studies on RSS production and links to tools and specifications which will provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually producing RSS feeds. I was recently looking for a package to implement a discussion board for a group project, and luckily came across phpBB :: Creating Communities. phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customisable open-source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites. It indeed is powerful, slick, fast, and a snap to set up. You need a server that supports PHP (although you do not need any PHP knowledge to run this) and one of the databases listed above (just about any web host offering PHP liekly offers mySQL). The one bit I stumbled on was it seemed a named database needed to be created first for the configuration script to run. It is rather flexible and provides a nifty editing interface (with more HTML editing controls than MovableType, which is barebones to naked there). I have set this board up for a project where last month I established a group weblog-- thinking that was the ideal tool, but only 2 out of 6 participants used it, so they asked for "a simpler tool" (???), so this is another try. To be honest, it has nothing to do with the technology or the tools- it is human willingness to take the time to participate in a communti activity. Anyhow, I was glad to have discovered phpBB... thought you know it would be nice if it generated RSS... Update (about 30 minutes later) There is a huge community of phpBB codes who share "mods" (modifications) to this system, and in searching the MODS forums, I found a simple add-on that generates RSS feeds from a phpBB site. It was a matter up downloading the code, and uploading one new PHP script and one template file to the site. Wah-hoo!! Badge of Honor posted 17 May '07, 9.45pm MDT PST on flickr You have no idea how much honor there was in being a part of Faculty Academy Sitting in the Richmond airport, sipping the free wifi on my way home to Phoenix, I am still swimming in the euphoric high of having the honor to have been a part of the University of Mary Washington's Faculty Academy- 2 days of tech-teach-learn-love fest. On the ride to the airport, I joked with Jim Groom that it was almost a religious experience (keep in mind I hang out at a UU congregation). This is even twice as funny as people refer to him her as "Reverend Jim" for his passionate "preaching" of the power of WordPress (T-shirts are available). So mentally, in my tired brain is a long list of things worth blogging about, like the crafted "slow blogging" approach I learned here from Barbara Ganley. I really ought to do that, but... Maybe I will as I try to blog offline, just typing out my thoughts in thw plane, hoping I remember a few URLs, the names of people I met, the richness of the 2 days, and perhaps even where I left my house key. And I was serious when I told the UMW folks last night that I might be incessantly blogging the next few days about Mary Washington as much as the recent twitter blogging binge I have been on. They have an incredible-- no that is an understatement - an unbelievable-- no, because I believe in it -- how about just plain amazing thing here, an electric buzz vibe of creative, postively edgy, energy that is doing far and away a range of some of the best uses of web 2.0 technology for teaching and learning. Like I mentioned repeatedly, I'd watched remotely from across the distance, sipping the RSS and grabbing the podcasts in previous years as colleagues I like and respected were invited to Faculty Academy-- in 2005, it was the Two Bri/yans, Brian Lamb and Bryan Alexander. What a tag team! And last year, it was NMC colleague Rachel Smith and long time colleague Cyprien Lomas on the program-- but wait, there's more-- with freaking Jon Udell! Is it that deep impressive oratory voice of Gardner that entices people like Udell to make a trip to Fredericksburg? So it was a dream come try when the Voice invited me this year. Truly, truly, truly, an honor. So here it is, a start at the 10000 Great Things About My Two Days at Faculty Academy. I think there are at least that many, if only I can remember them. In no particular order, except as I think of them: It starts, ends, and could be just about the people here. I've been elsewhere and encountered nice people, and they are nice here, but these are fabulously talented people in all cuts, from passionate teachers to creative technical folks to driven leaders to amazing support folks. Well, it could be several points on people here. After 2 days of great sessions and activity, rather than dispersing as we typically did at Maricopa when I coordinated our somewhat similar Ocotillo Retreats-- they close with a wine & cheese party and a dinner. But nore than that- it was the seemingly spontaneous moment when there was the first "last words" when person after person stood up to share their reflections of Faculty Academy. Oh my gosh, these are people that not only work well together, they talk, act, and are in fact-- family. The cooperate, tease, and support each other like a family. How often does that happen in the artificial social bodies we join called "organizations"? Whatever they have in the water supply here, it is some kind of magic elixer. Fredericksburg- thought I had been here before, but may have gotten it mixed up with Harrisonburg (I think every town in Virginia is a "burg" just left Richmondburg). I hardly got a sense of the place with the schedule, and lodgiing in a nice, but pretty much Anytown Hilton. The events were held in new buildings of a new campus away from the primary one, but Jim did give me a quick drive through of the main UMW campus on my arrival, which is the classic east coast college bucolic versions I remember - lush green grass, towering trees, and a swarm of red brick, high ceilinged, white pillared classic buildings. It felt like a lush, idyllic park.. of learning. Great surprise to run into Rick Reo form George Mason here, thanks for driving down. Faculty Academy puts on this great event-- and they share it for free with other educators from neighboring colleges, universties. This is but one small way they carry out and live to open spirit of sharing what they do. I heard countless mention in the 2 days here of "small pieces loosely joined" -- in the program, in the sessions, in the converastions. And this was not the techies spouting off, I heard it from faculty putting this approach to use. It was a dream, a clever title, a pie in the sky hope back in 2004-- but it is happening for real here. In Chip German, they not only have a CIO that "gets it" in terms of technology and learning, but someone who genuinely feels the "it" and creates an environment that sustains innovation. And I've yet to meet a CIO who spends the full 2 days at this type of event -- not tuned into his Blackberry or other pressing business, but listening intently to the speakers, and more often than not, doing his own photography. Oh my gosh, they set up a twittercamp on a plasma screen Even customized it. And double oh my gosh, I was on the bill with Barbara Ganley, a true heroine of blogging, teaching with blogging, and someone passionate about its still perhaps untapped potential. Someone who writes long, crafted blog posts woven together with beautful photos. I'm taking to heart her worries about people "waning" or being "tired" of blogging, and the notion in her keynote of "slow blogging" of composing those moving, long posts that have an arc of a story. And even more humbling, she spoke like it was a big deal to be here with me-- as I said last night, I just play with technologies, talk about them, toy with them-- while she is actually doing something meaningful and purposeful with them for her students. If I had a wish to be instantly reincarnated, it would be as a writing student at Middlebury College. Close me eyes and click my heels... It was funny that as I met faculty here, not knowing I was an outsider, their first question was "what department are you in?" They do not seem like they are extremely insular and silo-ed, and I saw plenty of examples of cross-cutting department activity, but it tied in with some of the notions in Karen Stephenson's keynote on visualizing networks of communication and trust in organzations. I'm thinking more about what are the implications of maintaining institutional silos. I'm not advocating burning the silos, as there are positives in huddled groupings by the subjects people are passionaate about, but we need perhaps many more windows, doors, chutes and ladders between the silos. The support team of the DTLT group here is one of talent, coordination, camaraderie at a level I've seen very few places, where usually instructional technologists toil in more isolation. Its a Fab Five here with Andy, Jerry, Patrick, Jim, and Martha. How can 5 people have such complementary skills and abilities? In basketball, they would be a UCLA like dynasty, in rock and roll, they would be the uber mega band. In Instructional Techniology, they are the dream team. The folks here are blogging. A lot. Not just the techies or the bleeding edge faculty. And its not just people expounding on their own stuff- its the use of blogs, wikis, drupal in courses that seemed to be oozing out of the buildings and classrooms. It's what many of us hoped for when blogs first came out, that faculty would approach them as a vehicle for engagement, expression, and bringing learning and topics to a whole new level. I lost count of how many blog-powered course projects were going on, and being done but faculty who generaly started with a disclaimer of "I was not much of a techie but with the help of..." I think one faculty who was new to using the new tools did three presentations, of which she was referred to as "coming out" (of the technofearing closet). Jim Groom is just a nice quiet quy who loves drupal. Not. Jim Groom is an amazing, lovable, fireball of creative energy. I lost track again of how many faculty talked about how Jim magically matched some ideas they had to a deployment of it in WordPress (yes, for Jim, everything is seen through WordPress colored glasses, and he has no need to apologize). And he is rarely just in the zone or mindset f technology- he speaks from his trove of experience in literature, history, film, music... They fully deployed the small pieces approach in the materials and web site for the program- The Faculty Academy site is a blog, wiki, aggregating, flickr showing, tagged to the hilt, mash-it-up web of information that expands the reach and connections of the event. They seem to use it as an experimental ground too for new ideas, like the Fishtank and the string of tools that pulls in posts from external blogs that identify posts with a special tag or category. And certainly in the proof that this list is not in order, there is a powerful, magical, a come and jump on the Magic bus presence here know as Gardner Campbell. It was in jest when Brian Lamb and dubbed him "Dr Glu" but his vision and energy here are in fact a glue, not the kind that keeps you stuck, but th fun gooey stuff that helps you keep it all together. Okay, that metaphor missed the mark. Gardner's words, ideas, and vision here are a driving force. And as a long time fan of his blog, Gardner Writes, I am much much more excited to get a chance to listen when Gardner Speaks. What he has to say lifts you off your seat. I may spend a year saying, "Thank you, Gardner". Thank you Gardner. There is a concept here called (well it might not be the official name) the Sandbox. It is the approach they use for experimenting, trying new uses of technology by setting up blogs, wikis, drupals, on an externally hosted location, with the ISP Bluehost. They just refer to their work "being bluehosted". I've seen more, many more, cases where faculty have no option to use new technologies on their internal system due to fear of security, hacking, or just lack of interest in setting these web sites up. I have seen more often than not, the answer is just a flat "No, we cannot install a wiki. End of discussion." By externally hosting them here, they can ypass the infrastructure support issues, and quickly deploy, try new technologies. Yes, I know it is not feasible when there are needs to transmit student information-- but we are in a huge heap of trouble in higher education when we do not provide a place, a space, and the tools for doing R&D. Every industry invests in this to some to a large degree, and education, for the most part, thinks that innovation cna happen purely from the purity of academic pursuit. IN technology, there needs to be places to try and fail, try and succeed. And this is place that took thatr leap, and is now seeing the payoff, the so called ROI. One more time- thank you, Gardner. And another oft to be repeated thank you is to Martha, who tirelessly made everything work as the conference organizer, program designer, and agenda master/mistress (wow, that non sounds wrong). She was key in making this a raging success. I know it is a good sign when people take time to craft clever titles like "M*A*S*H*U*P*S". Jim- again, thanks for being my "Groome" transportation service, driving all the way to Richmond, and at an ungodly hour today. And thanks even more for inviting me home to have dinner with your family. It's all about connections, eh? Did I mention enough times how cool Barbara Ganley is? I need to plot a way to work on a project with her. The group here seemed interested, accepted, got something out of my "Being There..." presentation, which to me, seemed to be mostly a stack of fun pictures, goofy video, and me just saying this is how I look at technology as a pie eyed optimist. And how can I not appreciate the infections energy of faculty like Steve Greenlaw? He not only "groks" it- he gets other faculty "grokking" it, be example and the fire in his eyes. I expect to see him flying around Second Life now, causing postive havoc. And I heard that people took to my notion that you cannot dismiss or evaluate a technology based on quick impressions, inane content (why did I use as an example of twittering of "I just washed my cat"?)-- I scopped up a pile of new flickr contacts like Shannon, Joe, etc. Oh, did I remember to thank Gardner? And add to the dream team, the DTLT's student aid Joe, who gleefully sported a "Geek" t-shirt and came forth with his probing questions on Second Life. If your IT support area is not tapping into the potential of students as staff, you are missing out. The greatest untapped technical and creative expertise on college campuses are the students who ironically pay for the privilige of being there. Fold their talent in, reap the benefits. This was like the second time meeting Andy Rush, and yet for all the technical tips we've swapped, I feel like we go way back. He teaches me, I teach him, yet we've spoken face to face but once before this week. Does faculty blogging spurt to life with tenure? We had joking suggestions that hinted there might be something behind the joke. What might it mean if it is only "safe" to openly express ideas when a job is not jeopardized? They are WordPress and Mediawiki addicts here, but its not a complete monopoly approach-- there are compelling projects going on in drupal and other web-based apps, but wow, do they push out some elegantly designed and constructed WP sites. "Code is pretty" appeared among the other quotes on one of the poetry course sites, and it is the spirit here, along side "templates are pretty". They have an interesting challenge here with a new campus, separate in location, structure, and academic focus than the main. I have little doubt they will figure it out, but it will be interesting to see it unfold. And what a cool surprise it was to meet Laura Blankenship, legendary Geeky Mom! Wow, we gotta find a way to bring Bryna Mawr into NMC. Let's plot. Radical Librarians! In the closing session on folksonomy, Charlotte makes a bold challenge to now run away from the tag clouds and roots for the taggers! At the same time, it is not always techno-utopia. Faculty struggle at times with getting students to post, comment, some places the wiki thrives and in others it whithers-- but they are not relying here on any formal recipe. I feel reborn zest for blogging. Despite tagging, twittering, Second Lifing-- my blog has always been my anchor, my hub, my home. It is my tracks in the sand, my echo chamber. In earlier years, I recall numerous times where what I was doing or thinking seemed on its own to compel me to blog- like an idea was rattling around in my head that would not settle until it was written. With some people talking of blog fatigue or a preference to microblog in twitspace, I'm hoping a corp of rebels will stay true to the power of the blog. Jerry Slezak just so quietly and effectively helps pull many pieces magic together making it look easy. I have to like someone who uses a photo of Camden Yards as the background of his twitter page. Amazing support on on sound and video form David- the big screen, speakers, streaming media were just flawless. And this is his side responsibilites as a server administrator. Does talent here grow like the flowers? Twitter or jaiku? A riddle, a quandry? I'm sitting on the fence. More Social Network Fatigue, but I cannot say what I did in the presentation yesterday and not try being there. Gotta like the program material and graphic theme be "UMQ Groks". Patrick- another renaissance ITSer here, ranging from Anglosaxon literature to RDF, a drupal-torian in a den of WordPress bear cave. And you had to just be there to appreciate his use of the audience singing the Oscar Meyer song to demonstrate the semantic web. Richmond airport is rather cool- small without the 60 gate runs through Dallas or the bus and train travel between terminals of say Atlanta, and even better, they have free wireless! It's time to bash the airports who give only the option of Terrible T-Mobile. But wait, there's more! In the seating area, they have ample electrical outlets, multiple 4 port ones but a few feet apart. Sorry Jim, that Barbara and I could not support for your daily doughnut habit. And in my presentation, I missed a great opportunity when I showed my McDonalds "billions" served image to mention that Barbara Ganley may have the unique distinction of being a holdout of never having eaten a McAnything. I just love radical stands. I am about out of steam, and still just scraping the surface of my impressions from the time here. This experience will resonate wiht me for a long long time, and as I hoped slashe expected, I am taking home much more in learning than I may have left here. So run, click, tune into the Faculty Academy site. Find an excuse to be in the Fredericksburg area next May. Check out the web/podcasts. Pick up the flickr stream, the delicious marks, the tweets. Oh, I almost forgot. Thanks Gardner! "Every day I get in queue... (Too Much UMW bus!)" The Magic Bus is a caravan indeed. I awoke today wondering, that if in today’s mankind digital age, a stellar website is needed for all kinds of businesses? Is there a place I can post my own information on the internet? How can I get a stunning design but also a great under-the-hood engineering that leads to reliable seamless functionality all the time? Is there such a thing? And then, like karma, the key to enlightenment arrives in my inbox: Oh Nitin you are my savior. You, the emissary of the cockroach world that poops all over the internet, what a noble profession you must have, sitting down each day to make these grandiose offers to complete strangers? Thanks for also including your selfie pic https://twitter.com/MCorbettWilson/status/954129616125374464 I'm saving my quarters so I can make that long distance call. Enjoy the treatment. Featured Image: Roach - 02 flickr photo by siamesepuppy shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I like how the caption informs me "Despite popular opinion, roaches are very clean." Okay Scottlo, I am on track to follow your lead of Always Be Reflecting. Scottlo, aka Scott Lockman, is one of my friends i have never met, an educator in Japan who connected via the narrowest of chances to ds106radio. For the past few weeks, he has been engaging in a practice of audio reflections (see Slices of Life 01 "“ Introducing the Project). As described, it came out of his interesting in Action Research, and in his audio discourses- with himself on the streets of Tokyo-- he uses it as a platform to sort out his challenges in teaching and more-- But in thinking this through, a bigger question has emerged. And it is a question I've not given enough time to thinking about. I'm not very clear on how to word the question yet. It goes something like: what does it mean to be a teacher? or what am I trying to accomplish in the classroom? There are a number of things I find fascinating about what he is doing, and be prepared as he self-deprecatingly pushes my praise aside-- There is some power in talking to yourself out loud (hint, use a mobile phone and act like you are on a call). It occurs on a different plane of thinking than writing; I have long held the belief in the power of refelcting while blogging, but in writing, much gets filtered, or edited, or synthesized from thought to typing. Talking is more free flow, like a conduit from the brain. Putting it in public makes you accountable (to yourself) but opens up the channel for connection, feedback, criticism, etc that would not be possible in a closed journal exercise. Scottlo says he is creating an archive of his thinking of teaching over a 4 month period, and sees it as a rich source of data. And though it may jusy be a matter of setting, one of the things I like best is that he takes his recording out into the spaces he is living in- walking to the train, sitting in a park (with birds, kids, dogs barking), at the hotel he takes naps in, walking to his classroom, our in traffic (among the vans full of generals)... this whole biut of ambiance gives a true sense of his setting, and I feel more connected then if he recorded in a clean, sterile studio. This process which I am trying here- takes time ;-) I sat and listened again to my own recording, and that playback feels important, and took notes to include here on the post. I am not in a place to go completely regular, but am interested in trying. These posts should be aggregated here via http://cogdogblog.com/slices and the audio should be RSS-ified via http://cogdogblog.com/slices/feed. Here we go (with trepidation...) Slice 001: Under the Big Sky Friday November 18: Driving west of Albuquerque, last day of my 5 month Odyssey, about halfway through long 620 mile drive from Amarillo, Texas, to home in Strawberry, Arizona. It was here, 24 years ago driving out to Arizona for my start as a graduate student, driving my 1973 ford Maverick (with Dominoe by my side). I stopped here because my odometer had flipped, and even then, I had this thing about documenting in photos (film camera then: I cannot find the photo now) Albuquerque is nicknamed "Duke City" I could not remember at the time, but The Google has answers In the early 1700s, King Philip of Spain granted a group of Spanish colonists permission to to start a new city along the banks of the Rio Grande. The colony's governor, Francisco Cuervo y Valdez wrote a letter to the Duke of Albuerquerque in Spain, reporting the new settlement and its name: the Villa de Alburquerque. They had named their new city after the Duke. I thought of that while driving down the steep grade of I-40 from the east, and the key part that hill played in the movie Lonely Are the Brave, based on the Edward Abbey novel The Brave Cowboy (I used this early in the year for the ds2106 movie assignment). It was Carroll O'Connor playing the truck driver, a load of toilets, of all symbolic things, that led him down the hill toward Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) in a big way. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Leaving Amarillo I had stopped to see the Cadillac Ranch, the modern art piece consisting of 10 Cadillacs planted in the ground, where which you are welcome to create your own messages in spray paint-- which I did: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I had meant to stop here in my first trip out in 1987, and completely missed it, I think because I had turned off I-40 prior to get to Palo Duro Canyon. So I was closing an old loop. It was welcoming to be returning to the familiar high desert landscape- feels like home to me, especially the sky. This always leads me to the prophetic writing of Willa Cather: The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, "” and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! That statement, Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. so makes a difference to me of the East versus the West. I had listened to a whole swath of Scottlo's Slices of Life - I think it was episode I had just heard Slice 029 "“ This'll even juice up your libido. Scottlo shared the story of how he found ds106, via a chance browsing of his feed reader, and one blog in particular he had listed but never read (my blog!), and just happened to peak at an early post about ds106 radio (I am fuzzy, was it the one about being sucked into the radio??) If not for what is really a chance action, all of who cherish Scottlo would be at a loss, we would miss his personality, his music, his ideas, his sharing of those challenging days after the Tokyo earthquake- broadcasting his first skype call to his Mom-- those broadcasts were to me what took ds106radio from a curiosity into something new, powerful, life changing. While I marvel and cherish how such slim a circumstance that we make the connections- how many more don't happen? How many more potential people out there have I not found yet? I feel infinity nearby. And it reminded me of the poem Claudia Ceraso had shared -- about dreams being places of friends you have not met-- as she wrote to me A Spanish poet, explaining what dreams were to him, said: "I only know I know a lot of people I have never met". The Internet is like a dream. A real one. Scottlo is a person I know whom I have never met. And it almost does not matter. So I would like to write a song that begins with Scottlo's expressions like== "Taking the train to Chiba..." On this recording on, I amusing my iPad with Griffin iTalk - it has a easy to use big red button, and the wireless transfer option for paid version ($1.99 woot), as well as the big clock for recording time. So here we are- ABR-- Always Be Reflecting Shpader! So that is my first slice. Technically, I had a bit more at the end of the day when I walked into my house for the first time in 5 months. Here, I am, with all of you, friends among the dream of the internet, friends like Scottlo, under the sky, the sky, the sky! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Twice this week I've gotten requests to use some of my flickr photos (and ironically both photos were taken in San Diego, but on different trips) for use on other web sites. The first was asking to use my Gaslamp photos (1 and 2) for a San Diego tourist guide site (sorry, I lost track of the site). But weirder was a request from Starwood Lobby, a site that publishes "unbiased" reviews and photos of hotels, to use a photo they said I had taken at the Westin in San Diego, where I stayed this past January for the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference. I was a bit stumped trying to remember what I took of in terms of a photo of the hotel until I looked at the link-- it was the impulsive photo I had taken of the Two Headed Shower in my room: It is a small step closer to one of my 43Things. It's flattering to get the requests, and yet totally unnecessary since all of images are all licensed under Creative Commons. But flattery works. I cannot breathe! The feeds are swirling! Snatding on the shoulders of giants, Brian Lamb and David Wiley (imitation and flattery apply here) I mixed up my furl bookmarks and flickr photos with the cogdog feeds and voila! the uber feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogblog This just rocks! I have just skimmed the surface of feed burner, but they are doing this rip-mix-blend stuff up right. Just provide them the URLs for your blog RSS, other bookmark services, and flickr info, and you get a feed where stuiff from all 3 is combined. And that looks like the tip of the rss-berg. You get stats. You can tweak the feeds. It attempts to make a HTML viewable version of the feed (mine is plunk full of HTML... hmm). But this is it, this is another excellent example of small pieces, nicely joined! PS you have to like a cool site with an attitude ;-) From the FAQ: I'm new to RSS and feeds in general. Maybe I want to publish a feed as part of my blog or website offering, or maybe I just want to learn more. Where do I start? We've got our own tidy little introduction to the topic. Start here: About Syndication, RSS, and Other Web-Altering Chemicals. PPS- the HTML in the FeedBurned feed is apparently an issue of bad handling of XSLT in Safari and Mozilla browsers. Bummer. cc licensed flickr photo shared by sailn1 Bailey studies up on his RADAR skills My sister's sheltie, Bailey, is a rather experienced sailor-- he and his "parents" have just left their summer land berth near Annapolis for another venture down the Atlantic coast and a winter in the Bahamas. Not to shabby a life. I am hoping to catch up with them again in the Spring like I did last year -- if Bailey will let me on board. I'm rather proud of my "little/big" sister (little cause she is smaller, big cause she is older) who has seriously taken up blogging/flickr posting/google mapping to record their travel and stay in touch with friends... wow, sailors are really a connected network on many levels- she gets more regular comments than I do! Like a good blogger, Harriet is compulsive to post, not always easy when the internet is spotting. Follow sailing Bailey at http://moondance38.wordpress.com/. I am hoping when I see him in the Spring, that Bailey can explain radar to me.... cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by misterbisson "Curating" web content has been a medium flying buzzword over the last year. I'm not going to wade into the definitions or the tension from the museum quarter. For irony, on searching flickr cc images for "curator", the image above is of a curator at the Shovel Museum (did you know there was such a thing?). There is something about shovels.... What is this "web curating"? There is curated.by, Qrait-- described as: A realtime curation platform designed to fulfill the needs of content curators and reduce information overload for the rest of us.... Real-time filtering isn't curation, it's filtering. Qrait lets you combine real-time filtering and your own personal touch to create something of value that people trust. If I understand correctly, it is filtering plus picking. Again I reserve no judgement about whether this is or not curation, but it is an interesting new twist on mashing up social media content, or glueing them together. This morning I took a play with another one, Storify. Like a modern tool, you create accounts through an exiting account (authenticating in twitter). You get to pick and chose content from your twitter stream, twitter searches, facebook, flickr, YouTube, RSS, slideshare, and even embedding content ordinary URL. I found the search tools a bit under developed- there where tweets I found by scrolling back in time that did not come up on search. In flickr, I'd like to reach into sets, or search within a particular user's stream (e.g. my own). But that's an aside. I found it easy to assemble strings of things, and I can augment them with text box descriptions. And you can re-order them. I am thinking I can use this as an example within 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. On using the tool, it lends itself more to current or in near time action, so you can pluck things off of a stream. It would be ideal as a tool to build an archive of the best bits out of a conference or event. You can also invite co-authors to help do the work. The other neat thing is when you publish, it offers the option to send a link to twitter, and even notify the people mentioned in the tweets you pulled. I could only give this a whirl by creating something. I spun my wheels for a while, but thought with a few recent live audio streams on ds106 radio, I decided to find content I could do related to people (me, @Scottlo, @mikhailg) who had recently brought their Mom's into the live stream. It took maybe 15 minutes to assemble-- and here it goes, as you can also embed it (see below- note, it would maybe be more useful in an iframe, as it is long) I'm going to give it a closer look, but would like to hear what people think of this. It's quasi evolutionary step from the process of creating/sharing in a personal space (blog) to doing blog-like things in multiple places, but being able to assemble some of it together (not a total mix). cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Minneapolis Institute of Arts There is something there there. Talking To Myself From an iPod to an Avatar in a Virtual World by cogdogblog posted 6 Aug '08, 2.49pm MDT PST on flickr What does it mean if I am sending text messages from my iPhone to my second avatar in Second Life? It could mean some sort of techno-psychotic meltdown as my world coalesces to a virtual set of barbershop mirrors. Nope, I was testing AjaxLife, a web based client for communicating to other avatars in Second Life-- which you can now do via an iPhone/iPod Touch. blog.ajaxlife.net/2008/08/iphones/ CDB and Zoraster had a grand time of utter babble as I was trying to get the photos to post a story n NMC Virtual Worlds: virtualworlds.nmc.org/2008/08/06/second-life-iphone/ I am taking a break soon from all this insanity! Lora's geology objects was the first psuedo blog I created in MT to demonstrate a site in which w person is harnessing the LO/RSS notion in one field. Lora is a Geology insutrctor, and here she has set up MovableType to accept RSS Feeds form our Maricopa Learning eXchange. Later she adds additional feeds from CAREO, Humbul, ITPapers. And then she learns how to have a Google search on "geology learning objects" inserted to her blog The more you click around the web, the more you see information rich sites that could do a little bit more good by adding RSS feeds to their content. It's even worse when you scan the URLs and sense that the content is idling away in a database. Like Clara Peller's inquiry for beef, we are wondering, "Where's the Feed?" Both myself and D'Arcy Norman implemented it into our learning object collection sites in a matter of a few hours. Here is just a scoop of sites that should be adding the little orange link box.. I Think I Remember These by cogdogblog posted 21 Apr '08, 8.12pm MDT PST on flickr My running shoes have not seen the light outside the closet since the PF Chang's marathon in January. Today was the first run in like 3 months. Not very far (less than 2 miles), not fast at all, just moving... one step at a time. It's been almost a month since I blogged about the Chronicle of Higher Education, the "flagship" of the ivory tower had published on their web site misinformation that it had scooped from some other blog sites on a story about the 2007 NMC Horizon Report. The Chronicle wrote on December 17 that the 2007 report was "released last week" when it was published on January 21, 2007 at the annual EDUCAUSE/ELI Conference, where I am fairly sure I recall there were Chronicle reporters in attendance. I duly noted this in a comment. Apparently, the Chronicle website, labeled at the top as "The Wired Campus" does not get or pay attention to comments on its site, does not monitor blog trackback, does not use web 2.0 tools to monitor references to their stories from elsewhere on the internet. Man, are those ivory walls thick! I bet wireless signals cannot penetrate. My colleagues at EDUCAUSE, who are are partners on the Horizon Report, are doing the New Scholarship thang as they keep forwarding me more and more blogs, from academics, who keep parrot meming the same wrong information- the latest one. So is checking facts something that falls out of the wash on New Scholarship? What about correcting incorrect information? Do we need a flame thrower to get the attention of the Chronicle? (doubtful that will work, there are those thick walls). Actually I know I could call someone, but the point, to me, is not to just fix the misinformation, but to point out the perils of acting like Web 2.0 rather than acting in a Web 2.0 mindset. I am not saying we have to be perfect in publishing, and I am first to admit I have gotten things wrong before, But darn it, if you get something wrong, and people bring it to your attention, why would you not correct it? Why would you let wrong information hang out in the breeze? Yes, this is minor (and IMHO disturbing), but someone has to stir up the pot... So for the 2008 Horizon Report, I am suggestion we put in giant 80 point text, HEY CHRONICLE! THIS REPORT WAS PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 28, 2008! Flamethrower.... ignite! Today, Michigan was good for my 106 photographing, I got a store in Ann Arbor, a state highway into Jackson, and a milepost on I-94. It was the latter, while I as broadcasting live to ds106 radio, that I got the idea to take a series of photos as the heavy traffic rolled by. Voila, Life on the Highway with ds106: It just keeps going and going. (more…) Between travel earlier this week for NMC meetings, time off between now and Monday, and squeezing in many late night hours banging our new drupal site (should be able to share it in a few weeks), I'm feeling way behind the blog train. Just sifting through my RSS feeds, I am compelled to send a few shoutout linktributions to colleagues who really deserve a full CDB blog post. Well my first one is to WordPress 2.1, who's autosave feature had snagged this post's opening from certain defeat as I accidently closed the tab containing this draft! First, Bet's screencast Shoulder-to-Shoulder Instructional Media: My Tagging Screencast at NTEN! is to me, the essence, and a must show item that most lucidly explains, and demonstrates, the use of tagging among people with a common interest to develop shared resources. It's well produced, a bit fun, and uses labels and metaphors in a great delivery. And the blog post that contains the screencast includes great supplementary material; all in all a great model of how to deliver and package a screencast. Bonus points to Bet for her use of dog images. Several shouts to Brian, who is blogging now at a pleasing pace, for the sharing of his poster boy status (a photo mis-contextualized by a newspaper who deserves a trip on the cluetrain), the rampup to NorthernVoice 2007, an event I will rue endlessly missing this year. Jim Groom, blogging at bavatuesdays, who I had the pleasure to chat with late one night at EDUCAUSE ELI (as we both tried to find bits of decent wireless connectivity in the conference hotel), is doing some very cool things with WordPress Multiuser at a multiclass level at University of Mary Washington. D'Arcy is busting out the Yahoo Pipes, making me a bit antsy as I've yet had a chance to play with what promises to deliver an uber tool for custom rip-mix-feeding. Scott rightfully sends Blackboard to the corner to wear a blog dunce hat. Gardner's blog frequency is up, and glu-ing me into some new things to check out like Mojiti. Will's son's wiki-ing makes papa proud. Right on. And on it goes, the great river of blog posts, poisng to roll me over like a crashing wave, Reaching now for command-A.... (more…) In my development work on the template for a ds106 assignment bank site I've been learning a bit more how through code I can add menus and submenu items to the wordpress dashboard. I was thinking about that while editing some of the items set in the queue for the Daily Create. On this site, each published post is a single daily create, the ones that people submit via our form end up as draft posts, and the ones lined up ready to go are scheduled posts (published but set to a future date). The thing is when working with these, I end up having to first go to the posts menu, then clicking the menu link for "Scheduled" or "Drafts" to edit: And I was wondering if it would be possible to add some submenu items to the Posts menu on the left side to reduce the clicks by 50% There are built in wordpress functions to do this, like add_posts_page, but it seemed to require a function to build a custom page, not just redirect to another existing one - the link to the drafts editing page is http://xxxx.xxxx.xxx/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=post This seemed doable, but for grins I looked for a plugin and found something way better- the Admin Menu Editor, which not allows you to add menus, but to re-arrange or edit the names of existing ones. So I was not only able to add these two frequently used menu shortcuts, I could name it from a "Posts" menu to a "TDC" menu This is not hugely significant, but as part of the spreading the duties, I am hoping to train some of out headless ds106 volunteers how to manage this site- the menu names and new ones will help. I hope. This is the editing screen you get- you can change any existing menu items on the dashboard; and I was able to add my two new items: [caption id="attachment_24774" align="alignnone" width="500"] (click image to see full size)[/caption] In theory you could hide menu items (though it does not take their function away, better to manage this with roles and capabilities), but it could simplify the menus for people who are not WP junkies. There are a lot more you can di to customize the dashboard, but this is simple, and useful. What to Do When You Can't Get Your Twitter Fix by cogdogblog posted 7 Jun '08, 6.07am MDT PST on flickr Newest thing to do whentwitterisdown.com Each click gives you a new idea... Like "Read a MF-ing book" Might be more fun that whentwitterisup.com thanks @mathplourde It's almost like it's 2004. There's an exciting new thing someone portmanteau-ed as "podcasting". Not so new, of course. I've been part of one with Antonio Vantaggiato that defies the meaning of frequency (it's more or less a reason to talk to mi amigo). I've also started a series for my work this year as part of Open Education Global- OEG Voices aims to just that, to share the voices of open educators. And it's been fun too to sit on the other side of the process, as a guest (especially as all you do is show up, that's on someone else to edit and publish). Last week I got to join my NetNarr colleague Mia Zamora to talk about our work on the Terry Greene and Anne-Marie Scott Check the O.L. show. I've only been once on Terry's Gettin' Air show, and I gather from recent episodes that getting to two appearance is like the Frequent Podcast Gold Plated Platinum World level of clubs. A really nice surprise was last month getting asked by Tim Carson to be the on his Praxis Pedagogy show for what he never called the "Last Episode Before Christmas but Not the Die Hard Christmas Special" (inside not joke). I so enjoyed Tim's relaxed, unstructured, conversational approach. And this being that "praxis" and "pedagogy" are words I know of, but almost never use in conversation. Plus it was the first time we ever had a conversation (though we did establish that had met before during a Virtually Connecting session). But a bigger bonus, and something that I value even more than someone being nice enough to let me talk about everyone's favorite topic is learning something in the process. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/50430280406 Podcasting Tools flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) The audio recording and editing is old hat. For doing this in what under pandemic is the only way (e.g. doing online), a key factor for a long time has been recording in a means that my audio and my guests audio are in separate audio tracks. This makes it so much easier to edit, especially when audio recording levels are uneven, and also to remove background noise, and this blips when we step over each other talking at the same time. For a long time, my go to method has been recording in Skype using Ecamm Call Recorder, a Skype add-on that does exactly this. I can then import both tracks into Audacity for editing, mixing with music, and final saving to mp3. But I got a new tool in the box when I did work with Terry Greene and got introduced to Zencastr. This tool offers more or less a web based recording studio, where all guests can be invited with a link (no login required). And when the session is done, I get separate audio files for each. At least for now, due to pandemic, the free version of Zencastr provides this feature for multiple guests (before that was a pay featured). Note: I recently came across Cleanfeed, which offers this and even more. It might be something to try soon. All this comes back to the way I set things up for the first few OE Global Voices podcasts. Taking the suggestion of my colleague Kristina Ishmael who had done this in her podcasting, we set up our sessions first to meet in zoom, just to establish a bit of togetherness, like if we had done a podcast at a conference by sitting around a table at a cafe. The idea was to just do this to meet and establish a sense of how the podcast would flow. We then asked everyone to mute mics in Zoon, sent them a link to a Zencastr session, and established audio in there. At this point, they could keep the visual in Zoom, so it felt more like they were talking in a small group of people, but recording in Zencastr. This goes back to the radio lessons I learned a long time ago from Scott Lockman, then when recording, put a photo of a loved one behind the microphone, so you speak as if you were talking to someone you know closely. It should get you out of monotonic flat or academic pomposity speaking mode. The other thing is that it allows me to take from group photos to use for the published podcast (after of course asking everyone before if they agree to doing photos). I find that, to get optimum photos, you need like 5 time as many people are in the room, as in most shots, you get maybe 1/3 of the people in good poses. I end up doing a bit of PhotoShop mix and matching to get the best group photos. Given how much jumping around this made things, it worked for our first 5 sessions. Only once did we have a guest forget to mute the zoom mic, and I spent most of the session hoping the echo I was hearing was not being recorded (it was not). All of this comes around to my recording session with Tim Carson last month, we met in zoom. So before we started I asked, one podcaster to another, how he did his audio recording. And this I found out I was doing this wrong, or maybe, unnecessarily complicated. Tim let me know that Zoom was set up so you could record a session and get all audio of participants as separate files. Thus later I was googling "Podcasting in Zoom" and landed on several articles, such as one from Pop Up Podcasting. The big tricks are: Record, but not to the cloud. Recording locally lets you get higher quality sound.Set recording options (these are the ones in your settings, when logged in)Record a separate audio file for each participant (so yes, you get a separate audio)Optimize for 3rd party video editor (I believe this gets best quality) This absolutely worked, I did this for the most recent podcast recording, where we had 3 guests. In my recordings (in OS X, it's inside ~/Documents/Zoom and then one folder per session, this is where your chat logs land too) The files you get from a zoom recording with separate audio So I get a full video (don't need), a mixed audio (ditto), but in the Audio Record directory are all the separate audio tracks I need (yeah). This is much simpler for participants to not have to jump from Zoom to some strange audio platform. Was I doing this wrong before? No, as I ended up with the same result, an edited podcast. Is this the best way to do podcasts? Maybe, but not necessarily. The thing of importance to me is getting those audio tracks as separate files for each person. Doing quality editing from a mixed tracks is close to impossible. Ah, but I realized another problem with either/or approaches to doing this. Being able to see each other in conversation adds much to the dynamic, especially to see the people we are talking to, and, where, if they are okay to share, their immediate surroundings. And they can easily choose to participate without the camera, that is always an option for me. But is that the "right" way? The "best" way? I tried an experiment during the November OE Global 2020 conference, which of course (c.f. 2020), was online. I came up with the idea of having open "drop in" audio sessions scheduled 4 times during the conference, at different days/times to be timezone friendly. These were set up as Zencastr links that were thus open to anyone (could there be Zencastr bombers? sure. Were there? no), and there were 12 participants (if you count Terry Greene twice) across 3 sessions. I put all three episodes into one podcast post. The thing is, we had rich conversations/ without the visual. Audio alone can be quite good at this, you do not need to see other people to have great conversations. And it will be better for people with limited network connectivity. Mostly, I felt it was a good break from the predominance of Zoom stare modes we all spend a large part of our days doing. You now, the endless stream of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfWk95N_0o Plus, in editing, I made use of open licensed music other attendees shared in a different conference thread. Again, I am wondering, is it "better" to do recorded conversations with remote participants with the video so we can see or without so we can be present just in our voice? This is always a thing I find in educational technology and education, or each alone-- some kind of expectation that there are right and wrong ways, or one "best" way to do something. This gets you chasing solutinistic approaches or buying into vendor sales poop. The answer is always in the middle And that's where the most creativity, and living imagination occurs too. I will always opt for the grey middle. But hey, feel free to tell me I am wrong. I am wrong (and thus human) on a frequent basis. Updated Musings We've done two of our OEG Voices podcast recordings in Zoom, Episode 6 has been published. One advantage is that it is easier for our staff to run the sessions as simple meetings, not requiring me there as technical support. I noticed one or two small segments where audio was garbled due to network hiccups. And that led me back to thinking why Zencastr is more effective for audio quality- in that platform, audio is recorded locally on a participants device as a temp file, and uploaded at the end of the session. My hunch is the quality of audio recording will be higher. As usual with technology you are at mercy of competing demands of convenience/simplicity on one end (Zoom recording) and quality/complexity on the other (zoom initializing / switch to Zencastr for recording). We are always pitted in the middle, pulled from the ends. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/27130726119 The Twittermatrix Choice... flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Thanks to a tip from Alex I tuned into the now released version of 43 Things, which is addictive, intensive connected, and tagged inside out. I had peeked at the beta a few weeks back, but the released version is wild, social, and amazing. It is tags, tags, and tags on speed. The premise is that you build goals for yourself, 43 Things to do in your life, and it connects you to people who have the same goal, or who have accomplished it (these are things done, that the accomplished can rate as well as write a blog like entry to describe). You can add them as free form entry, by browsing other people's goals by category and saying, "this is my goal too", and by keyword searching. You can invite people to do the goal with you. Okay, mine are not earth shattering and was more or less just playing and I may be the only one for a while with this goal. They have certainly done their homework, taking cues from flickr and del.icio.us, and doing things like building in a function to publish to carious blog tools via their APIs, and providing RSS feeds. So yes, it might be a personal development tools, it might be a unique way to study social behavior, it might be a place to create a persona, well, time will tell what it will be. And wow, I have 32 more things to drum up..... Moose Mugshot posted 30 May '07, 4.18pm MDT PST on flickr We just spent a week camping up at Algonquin. It was wonderful, such a gorgeous wilderness and what wildlife! Woo hoo! I'm already planning to attend Northern Voice 2008 but now I am packing the good moose duds since my session on "50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story" got selected for the Saturday schedule... this will be similar to, but in no way, a clone of the previous versions. Looking forward to representing the Greatly Unknown Canadian Southern Province of Arizona. I was sorely tempted to use another photo but that one might be a bit offensive ;-) Found at and hereby atriibuted to elearnspace comes this beautful grpahics and post from Stephen VanDyke on How News Travels on the Internet: I read the Wired article Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious, and thought it was informative. But it seemed to be lacking the big picture view of how the news travels. The Blog Epidemic Analyzer was also amusing and showed how attribution is underrated, but it too seemed sorely lacking cohesion, nor was it a very new topic. So I thought to myself: “Hey this isn’t all that complicated, I should make a visual diagram to illustrate this”. And this infographic was born.Here’s how I see news travel, I think it’s a pretty self-explanatory graphic, plus I’m too lazy to do a proper write up. Infer as you wish, maybe I will become the “source” one of these days. Like the driving directions you get sometimes from online maps, it may or may not get you to the destination or in the best amount of time. But more so, Stephen not subtly knocks on a prevalent problem in blog-space- the sloppy and rarely done practice of giving credit and attribution to sources. How many times do you find blog entries that are merely copies of stuff elsewhere? How often is it merely a repeat? How often as a blogger do you obsessively scrape details from your server referral log or technorati and find others are blogging about your entries and never saying so, never commetning, never TrackBacking? What I also like about Stephen's map is his categorizing and links provided for examples of the different nodes in this space. And then being a sarcastic humorist, Stephen lampoons himself with a follow-up map on How Drugs Travel in the Hood! And who is that Elmo in a suit? We at CDB support the advancement of other dog blogs, esepcially as the number of Google-able cat blogs (6,040,000) appear to be ahead of the dog blogs (5,710,000). Therefore we share with your "Dog News: weird, inspiring dog tales". The Dog New folks have gone ahead and applied Creative Commons licensing to their content, so they are some savvy pooches. I like the disclaimer: Dogs don't lie: Reliance on the information this site contains is at your own risk. COPYRIGHTS ©2004 Dog News - Other contributors retain their own copyright. Material on this Dog News site may not be published or broadcast without express permission, except as authorized by the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike License: in a nutshell, For Profit companies or websites do NOT have any authorization or permission to republish any of this site or its newsfeed. All rights reserved. Dog News is not affiliated with linked stories on other websites and is not responsible for their content. All links for news stories expire eventually... and we're too busy picking up dog poop to bother fixing them... C'mon dog bloggers, arise, we cannot let the cats rule! No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster Update: WTF with Feedster? I've had an account there since they've been out but their "MyFeedster" interface is acting like bad alpha software- the change password form uses Text input fields rather than password types, it does not process the change request, it does not remember that I have already logged in, and it refuses to accept a 75px square JPEG image file as an icon. I expected better... cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Universities better get on the MOOC bus, because it is leaving the station... https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/355031898264846336 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/355032159670640640 cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine You don't have to ride the bus off the cliff. There is a safe haven of reprieve from the madness called.. you know it... ds106 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eayDFs98ToY&list=PLDYiiVgwnVx4zkXpwskaPIalWC0Zo_T-B The most recent class, a 5 week summer class at UMW, doing ds106 finished a month ago. Yet you can still find: People still doing Daily Creates, we are running a July Summer Challenge Ben Rimes is running a book reading group, the 106 Book club. Open Online Participants continue to go about ds106 at their own pace -- see what Sydney based instructional designer Tanya Lau has done on her own, Tech Teacher Bill Smith has jumped in as well, and is even building a piratebox, Stefanie J (from Germany) continues to produce ds106 art... Mariana Funes, a student in Martin Weller's H817 Open University course in Open Education, has written a sweeping summary of her look at ds106, Can digital storytelling provide an effective educational tool? ds106 Radio runs 24/7 and with many people doing live broadcasts, newly starting live broadcasts as Fall 2012 UMW student Daniel Zimmerman What do you call a course that has this much activity when there is not even a course running? Try... ds106 But here is the thing-- there is no course at UMW scheduled for Fall 2013 that will be ds106. This happened before, in Fall 2011, and Michael Branson Smith ran a York College CUNY course that kept the pace going. And if you want to run a "ds106-ish" course and use the site to aggregate yours and your students blogs, then you can still put a request in. IN the last few years, classes from York College, Kansas State University, Kennesaw State University. University of Michigan, Temple University Japan, SUNY Cortland, and Jacksonville State University have done so-- see the links from the ds106 History. And this underlies one of the strengths and mysteries of ds106- there is actually no single ds106 course, it is many, and none, in the same overlapping space. Does your MOOC do that? Even with $43 million of new chump change? But here is the thing I have kept spinning in the back of the dog brain-- for someone who comes across ds106, it is a bit, if not a lot, bewildering. Where do they start? Where is the syllabus? Where is the teacher? What the heck is going on here? I tried to create some starting points in the ds106 Quick Start Guide. So here is my dog haired idea for Fall 2013- run a leaderless open section of ds106 for anyone that wants to join along. I don't have time (nor am getting paid once cent to work on ds106) to be a teacher, what if we crowd sourced that, kind of the way Alec Couros did for ETMOOC? Here's what I am thinking we could do to create a ds106 course without a teacher... We set up weekly assignments based on the last full semester class taught at UMW, these can be set to be published as schedule posts for late August through December 2013. There is a proven and time tested schedule. Interested people can do as much or little as they want, they network via twitter, syndicate their ds106 blogs into the ds106 site. We set up a signup sheet for people who have done ds106 before to be "guides" for a week, which means just announcing the stuff, doing the work that week, helping people with questions, or adding new things to the mix which might help. All you commit for is to help guide a week for a topic you are interested in or have experience to offer. I might suggest that people who have done ds106 before bring along a colleague as a mentee, or maybe a group, and coordinate your own communciations/feedback/discussion/feed support. But mainly, do your part to bring at least one new person into the ds106 fold. This can be done with little overhead- the syllabus is there, the content, the course structure. All we need is you. I am NOT going to run this, just offering to ask you to help us push this bus into motion. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Bruce McAdam What a grand experiment, to see if we can have an online course run without a teacher, Harvard super prof or not. Isnt this a refreshing change from the smell of MOOC poop? Who wants to play? cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dean Shareski has been running a wonderful example of learning by doing/sharing/reflecting in his personal learning project to learn how to play a guitar. There's a lot of things I like about what he is doing: As a teacher, he is doing the same project he is asking his students to do. I cannot say how powerful this is, it is the thing Jim Groom has done all along in his digital storytelling courses (even before ds106) and was something I always respected Barbara Ganley for doing when she was teaching writing at Middlebury College. This changes the entire student/teacher dynamic. Learning is happening in public. Dean is showing the example of examining what he is doing by putting it out in public. Not the final project, but the process. This ought to happen all the time. The network is providing People are responding to his posts with suggestions, resources. etc. Narrate the process doing this in video makes you reflect to an audience, but more importantly yourself. As you progress, the videos should chart your progress (can someone say "assessment"?) So I cannot just let him pass what eh put out as a challenge without picking one up myself. I've thought about it a while, and came up with wanting to learn how to play the harmonica I bought for my trip. I imagined having the time to sit around campfire and learn how to play, but the thing has hardly been out. I am sitting in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina and said, damnit Dean I gotta catch up. This is my first baseline, or Dean's step 4 "Take a early baseline snapshot of your understand at the beginning and another one at the end. Compare and analyze." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_dPsT31gdQ So help me out with some resources, videos for me to get started. I've seen a few, and they all involve someone who makes it look so easy a 2 year old should be able to be wailing the blues in 10 minutes. I'm ready to learn. Just like wildflowers or weeds, springing up across the net are more services to help you use RSS in your web sites. FeedSweep just came on the scene, in time to help Amy sweep her "webfeeds": Anyone that wants to syndicate RSS and Atom feeds on their web sites would be well-served to take a look at FeedSweep, a new free service provided by Howell Developments. The only JavaScript-based system I’m aware of that provides support for parsing Atom Feeds, and in addition, the only one I know of that will let you fully customize CSS style. Also comes with an easy configuration for novice web masters. Aggregates multiple feeds, actually caches (most of the JavaScript-based services don’t, to my knowledge) and comes with a bunch of pre-made styles! Oh, and I wrote it, but I don’t feel shameless for mentioning it because it is IN FACT, free. As someone who has provided a similar service for well over a year, I say "welcome" we need more of this. Spread the feed spreaders. Granted, Howell D may be correct that not many of the services, myself included, syndicate Atom feeds, though I am hard pressed to see what Atom offers in syndication basic headlines (title, link article) all that you get in old fashioned RSS 0.91, but yes, I guess one might need this down the road. But c'mon, dude, I doubt your research: "the only one I know of that will let you fully customize CSS style"- your feed code is a pile of HTML tables and embedded CSS from the params sent to your server (colors, etc) and then spit back. Our implemetation does it the sensible way- the feed just returns the information in standard HTML with CSS classes, and all the customization is provided on your own CSS styles. More "actually caches (most of the JavaScript-based services don’t, to my knowledge)". Wrong again. The old OnyxRSS library we use caches feeds; the setting on our server is a 3 hour refresh, but if download our scripts, you can make it as long or short as you like. Maybe I am being picky, but as others have been at this longer then me, I would hesitate making claims of being "first", "only" and just sell your service, which works fine. based on what it does. Leave the loud claims for the plan jackets down at the used car dealers. Just a handful of others at this for more than a while: Adam Curry's JavaScript RSS-Box Viewerhttp://publish.curry.com/rss/David Carter-Tod's Wytheville Community College News Servicehttp://www.wc.cc.va.us/services/news/CaRP: Caching RSS Parser http://www.mouken.com/rss/Infinite Penguins RSS Viewerhttp://www.infinitepenguins.net/rss/index.phpRSS-xpress Lite from UKOLN at the University of Bathhttp://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/include/ Actually, we have some ventures going on Electronic Portfolios at Maricopa. A new mcli site (for now) chronicles three project/efforts. (more…) In checking out some of the student visual design work for ds106 (which the CUNY students are really going far and powerful with), I could not resist one more Macguffin. A better real estate decision could have avoided dealing with that whole building full of freaks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogfqfnt2Aaw Thinking again on the idea of a regular challenge of a "Daily Creative", this one took me all of 15 minutes from idea to screen capture to plastering text on in photoshop. Writing the blog post may have been the most time consuming (and most important). These Macguffins are addictive indeed. A tin full of stuff. Scout knife. Cuff links. Engraved bracelet. Puzzle game. A tin full of my Dad's stuff. It's just stuff. But it was my Dad's stuff. Friday marked the day nine years ago Morris Levine left this earth. You don't forget your loved ones, but their presence ebbs and flows without much regular pattern, except twice a year. First is May, for his birthday, a day I wish I could have back again to celebrate, and late August (2 days ago), the day I wish I could give back again. Can it be nine years? I try cycling back to where I was, who I was, what mattered in August 2001. There was no user's guide (and if there was I would not have read it anyhow) for dealing with your parent's death, especially when it was the cancerous impending one that just unravels in front of you. My way to deal with this time was to tell his story, in a web site, started before he passed away, and finished afterward. My way is to do write something, photograph something on these two days a year. Nine years? I play with math. I am now the age my Dad was in 1974. He still had another 15 or 18 years of work before retiring. He was in his rhythm of cutting the grass and washing the car. It was maybe a year after the oil embargos; I remember him waiting in line to buy gas that was suddenly much more expensive that before (but insanely cheap compared to now). But those are just the snapshot bits I have as watching him as an 11 year old kid. What did I know of his thoughts? Dreams? Hopes? Worries? I have the hardest time trying to imagine my father as a man the same age I am now. I cannot warp time like that. So the stuff in the can came from my Mom after Dad died. I don;t know why, but it helps just to open that box every now and then and look at it. There was something else in there- his last wallet. Hah, what can define a man more than his wallet? It is something that sits close to him every day ;-). I don't think I had looked at it before; it looked empty. But flipping it open, I found some artifacts in the back pocket He has my business card from the job at I held at the time (at Maricopa Community Colleges) with his familiar, careful block letter writing (something I did not inherit) with my cell phone number at the time. There his his Lee County Library card- he got a lot of joy in retirement volunteering at the library. That's what I knew of that time, but did I know what that joy was about? Did we ever talk about it? And then the hand written piece of paper with my coordinates from the year before, in 2000 when I had my sabbatical visit toi New Zealand and Australia, and more or less blogged it (before there was blog software, this was hand writing HTML posts and uploading photos every day) on my own web site https://bones.cogdogblog.com/dommy/az2nzau. He followed my web site continuously from his home in Florida, even printing it off into a thick folder, a paper archive of a web version of a trip. It's one of those things he did that silently spoke in volumes. There again, that hand writing, so... Dad-like. Most of his communications to me were in hand written letters, pages and pages where he expressed himself more comfortably than talkin--- wait a minute, now I know something perhaps I did get from him. We did talk though on the phone, and in the Arizona portion of my life (after 1987) we had this tradition of me calling him (in jest) "Old Man" and him calling me "Junior". That I can feel, in my ears, in my heart, So now I sit here trying to unravel that time for him has stopped, frozen in memories, photos, words, a tin full of stuff, yet for me it flows on, to some place I cannot yet see. I will, in time, like he did. Who would not answer "yes" when asked if they would like a dose of serendipity. A word that conjures a bit of magic. A rather well worn tag around here. So I am coming back again to relish in my own weird obsession, not saving vats of time asking LLMs to do my tasks but worse, spraying that time with my web flashlight down public domain rabbit holes. Flynn's Free to Use Browser Extension (keeping it propped up) Since some time in maybe 2018, my web browsing experience has enabled bits of that magic through a browser gizmo created by a student intern name Flynn Shannon at the Library of Congress, called the Free to Use Browser Inspection. Indeed I have been a tad enthusiastic about it, and have made a few small technical guess fixes to keep it running for me. Why? https://cogdogblog.com/2018/09/instead-of-nothingness/ Each time I open a new tab, rather than blank space or some Google junk, I get a random public domain photo from the Library of Congress. Often I just go on to my tasks, but many other times, my curiosity is drawn in to strange old machines, historic street scenes, oddly dressed people, mimetic architecture, places I have been to, it's hard to pin down the why. Many times it is the expression on the face of a person, I cannot help but wonder who they are and what they are doing. Like: Free to Use Browser Extension yields a face of a 1914 baseball player. When the curiosity clicks, I click the name in the bottom left to see the entry for this image in the Library of Congress. I generally use this as the jump point, I have my own browser bookmarklet tool that lets me in one click run a search on Jack Coombs in the flickr commons. From there I can get to the same photo in flickr. Why flickr? While I do adore flickr on its own, from here I can do things like use my own Flickr CC Attribution Helper to get the code to insert the image in one copy/paste to my WordPress site along with a fully formed TASL-y attribution. But more importantly, in many cases, the comments in flickr, some 17+ years old, share much more information about what's in the photo. I rare cases, like this one of Jack Coombs, the only comment links to some of his other photos, like this one of him on the field. From there I can find links to his Wikipedia article to learn his nickname was COlby Jack and even another comment that identifies the stadium: The building in the background shows that this was taken at Hilltop Park in New York.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilltop_ParkHome of the Yankees, and briefly the Giants, it was demolished in 1914. Sure I could just ask GenAI "Who is Jack Coombs?" and it would spit out a recasting of Wikipedia. But in my efforts of rabbit holing, I am not looking for facts and answers, I am looking for serebdipty and stuff I am into expecting. This is how I end up losing time in Public Domain Rabbit Holes. I seek not any treatment. That time is not lost, its full of magic. I leave with an aura of appreciation and hope for the fragile web. Lance Vibes His Own Serendipity Machine My other atypical obsession is I still read a lot of blogs... via their RSS feeds. How web old am I? In the miix I caught a post by Lance Eaton (his blog, not his stacksub thing) that grabbed my attention because he described his hunger for some kind of machine to send serendipity from the far reaches of the Internet Archive. Another thing that inspired this new series is that I like the Internet Archive but exploring it can be a challenge. There's a lot of content, and it's not easy to find thing or rather find things at random. I feel like I have to dig in and that feels a little less serendipitous for how I might like to engage with it. With the help of AI, I built a small web program that would send me to a random detail page on the Internet Archive. https://www.byanyothernerd.com/2026/01/internet-archive-artifact-000.html So indeed he vibe Claude coded an archive roulette which is... set up as a browser extension that appears in a new tab. Eerily familiar? Was he reading my blog? Nope, he was just thinking in parallel spaces. You can download Archive Roulette from his github repo, and just like the Free to Use Browser extension, it is loaded in Chrome as an unpacked extension (do not sweat that techie vocabulary likely hoping I will impress you with my fading prowess it is super easy to set up). Browser extension for exploratory discovery of Internet Archive materials with quality filteringA Chrome extension that transforms your new tab page into a serendipity engine for digital history. Discover random photographs, audio recordings, videos, books, vintage magazines, historical newspapers, and software from the Internet Archive's vast collections. https://github.com/leaton79/archive-roulette And it works rather slickly. Each new tab gets the roulette interface. You can create filters for type of media (like I tested with a date range of 1800-1920 for images withe keyword Manhattan) as well as specific collections. A spin of Lance's roulette wheel lands a preview of a painting from the Brooklyn Museum, A Rough Surf by William Trost Richards This tool is admittedly impressive, it keeps a running log of recent finds, and you can use a heart button to favorite them. The variety, when you do not use any filters, is quite.. variable! Because of how vast the Internet Archive works. And I am even more impressed with Lance's efforts to use the tool once a week as a series to publish not just an image of what he found, but his thoughts and rabbit holing like querying into the item. I mean look how deep Lance goes in writing about an 1899 book by a gynecologist who wrote about the health benefits of bicycling. That's about as obscure as you can get, right? In exploring this text, my mind goes in two directions. The first is seeing this text as a prime example of how social norms and conventions were woven into the medicalization of bodies that were taking place in the 1800s. Neesen is tying together ailments, morality, and expertise, and through that, casting more control of women, even when he endorses the idea that women should ride bicycles https://www.byanyothernerd.com/2026/01/internet-archive-artifact-0002.html I look forward to the rest of the series. And given my own interest in Daily Things for a Year I am in awe of Lance's 365 efforts - poems, short stories, photographs, books, articles, even stickmen. Multiple Machines Loaded I'm going to keep my trusty old extension active now, but because I can flick extensions on an off, I cam keeping Lance's Archive Roulette in my box of Extensions. I feel fairly sure there is a future time I will find a use for it. Both Extensions are within reach! Despite my own lack of interest in making things the vibe way I have no problem using stuff other folks make. The Serendipity of Finding an Image to Represent Serendipity Machines As a further example of my time inefficient ways, I started looking for an image to use from my own flickr collection, the usual starting route. A search in Google Images with options on for CC licensed really was sparse (I am finding it less and less useful), so I did end up trying Openverse with a search on serendipity machine that brought a series of ones in that I liked, such as these kind of steampunkish type images https://flickr.com/photos/dumbledad/6430497785 Aleks Arcadia seminar on the Serendipity Machine flickr photo by dumbledad shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license There's no info, and these are from a guy named Tim. But I was curious if I could rabbit hole some more with a web search on Aleks Arcadia Serendipity Machine that had a lot of misses, but even with Google being "so terrible" the first result got my going to a summary of a University of Canbridge talk in 2011 on The Serendipity Engine by Dr Aleks Krotoski (good timing as the web banner says the site disappears on July 1): The Serendipity Engine is a physical manifestation of theoretical and technological interventions that can be used to enhance serendipity on the World Wide Web. It is a working machine that uses bike parts, flower pots, cake, pulleys, lightbulbs and other concrete objects to articulate the processes that could be translated into digital “solutions” that will re-engineer the potential dystopian social trajectories of current (social) software trends. It has been theorised, devised, designed, developed and welded together by Dr Aleks Krotoski and Dr Katrina Jungnickel. Each of the components of The Serendipity Engine highlights problems observed by digital theorists, designers and technologists with the way the Web currently works – linguistic barriers, echo chambers – by proposing one vision of how the technology can be re-tooled to increase serendipitous encounters. The aim of the machine is to inspire insight into the social and cultural effects of the decisions that developers make – often for commercial reasons and at the (explicit or implicit) requests of consumers – through simple, lateral demonstration. https://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/34581 Wow, that is exactly what I hoped to fine, a real machine that creates web serendipity. That talk site had a link to the web site for Aleks Krotoski (double thumbs up the 2011 link is still valid) with a lot of interesting stuff, but I did not quickly find the "engine". Thus it was another search on better words Aleks Krotoski Serendipity Engine with much better results, articles, videos, but what looked promising was a tumblr site about the project overflowing with many interesting links about serendipity many getting my pinboard treatment. Somewhere in there I spotted a link to what would be the website about the project http://theserendipityengine.com/ alas which is no more, but I found remnants in the wayback machine. Hmm, I was way off track. Rabbit holing means sometimes doubling back so I returned to the Aleks Krotoski site and spotted a social link to her flickr account. The last photo posted was 2013. But if anyone has photos of the machine, I'd think it would be the co-inventor. Hmm I spotted her road trip in 2013 to the Grand Canyon, she was just a few hours from where I was living then. Better than that, I could use flickr to search her photos for serendipity and BINGO, that first image was the one I wanted for my feature image for this overly long and maybe tedious post. And it is CC licensed. And it has bike parts. Again, again, and again. Lots of folks want magic machines to hand them answers and stuff. Many times I get much more out of my time inefficient way of search, wonder, sidetrack, distract and ... wandering in downtown Serendipity-ville. Feature Image: the serendipity engine (title suitcase) flickr photo by Aleks Krotoski shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license Wow, a side benefit to the iPhoto to flickr plugin is that it grabs the metadata iPhoto stores for the images, as I noticed images such as the giant Fred Flinstone I had uploaded this was had been (correctly) identifies as having been taken with an Olympus 4040 digital camera. This is good meta data- it is automatically created (no tag typing, or 2 page form completions) and it is transparently and appropriately used when the "object" (my image) moves from one environment (my computer) to another (to flickr). And then you click the link for the camera name, and you get all the freakin meta data! This is provided as part of EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data file format that is nicely handled by iPhoto. Does that make sense? Metadata ought to be completely in the background. Transparent to the user. Is that the tack taken by "learning objects"? Nooooooo - the metadata is out in front, like a big ugly boulder dropped in your front yard. Even more flickr eye openings- you cannot right-click save images; they are presented as Flash objects (yes i know screen shots are possible), butt that is n-e-a-t. And what about that link that says "Flag this photo as 'may offend'"?? What happens when you click it? Do the police come to your door? ;-) I looooooovvvvvve flickr. I am in love, deep in love. Go Flickr Go (Cue the E.R. Music) Previously... on CogDogBlog: PowerPoint is 2.0-fied with SlideShare It has been a few weeks since I looked at slideshare, and today uncovered some things that likely were always there. I am swiping the notion from Bryan Alexander's vocabulary in terms of talking about "microcontent" -- each slide in an uploaded PowerPoint, that gets convetreted to Flash, is addressable as a URL. This is big, but means you can direct link to a specified slide in any show: http://slideshare.net/sam_the_mc/pokemon/4 http://slideshare.net/pedronr3/premios-de-fotojornalismo-2005/8 http://slideshare.net/pedrobeltrao/modularity-and-evolvability/18 http://slideshare.net/cjin/061203futurewebappstempo/43 it is a matter of taking the URl for any slideshow presentation... say, http://slideshare.net/cogdog/talking-about-rss/ and just appending the number of the slide you want to link to say, slide 7. If those shideshare folks are listening, what might be cool is a way to bookmark or favorite a specific screen, and then have a tool to create mashup from different shows! I learned that by looking at the show I posted from our NMC Regional Conference -- it says there are 3 comments, but on the first screen, I only saw one... then I saw the little commented slide links below which show that in slideshare, you attach comments to specific screens (example)! Microcontent feedback, woooooo! And their developers are on top of feedback! as noted in my slide 10. And it appears they have added (or I just plain missed) that if you create a hypertext link in PowerPoint, these are preseved in the slideshare version; it just can get obscured by their overlay for next/previous slide navigation (I say take thhose off the content area and leave for buttons and keyboard navigation). A big tail wag for slideshare! I'm piling in on the remixing from Open Education 2012 started by Tom Woodward. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIel89KqD6k Tom, like he has done so well before, launches first Seeking a Blessing with this equation http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=kIzA4ItynYw + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpaPBCBjSVc to get this audio remix GC Remix I could not resist piling on top of that, so taking on Tom's theme of perhaps the words of a Preacher Man, I added to his audio some video of Gardner during the Boat Cruise Jam Session but considering the Preacher Man idea, tossing in another other dude with a guitar http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCMadNbQU0 + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r47q3pE7s8g + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ILq4s5DiE cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It was my honor and sheer fun joy to be invited by Mike Caulfield to KKeene State College today to bring a new interation of the Secret Revolution. In fact, Mike and his crew at the CELT had made it the theme of their Faculty Technology Showcase. I pulled out the stops in this session, adding all new content to the version I had done last summer in Edmonton, and included the "gimmicks" of the computer voice, my "inner techno soul" who talked back to me using the command line generation tool. I added this time the "hacking" of my presentation also including some entity sending tweets out of my account, using the Keynote Tweet app/modification I wrote up that again makes this a viable option for Keynote and twitter. Slides are posted The Secret Revolution (Keene State College)View more presentations from Alan Levine. And I have an audio recording available as well: Secret Revolution at Keene State College I'd write something more prophetic but I am zonked. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Just tonight on The ds106 radio, Scottlo was scoffing at the idea that the ds106 Kickstarter could fund a bus "What kind of bus can you get for under 2 grand?" Why a groovy Mystery Machine, of course! May the hippie force roll into your town (and CogDog too!)