There’s just somethings you don’t think of going together, but the web never fails to unveil, almost on a daily basis, an example of some use you would not have imagined the day before. So when Coop was visiting this weekend, she told me about a local group of Arizona folks participating in the 100 […]
As noted with much excitement last week, I am going to WordCamp August 16. It all got notched up a bit now when I got an email from Matt (yes that ma.tt – what a URL! I looked into getting al.an but the Dutch refused to go for such a short domain). Anyhow (with a […]
Lots of new iPhone/iPod apps for accessing Flickr. Using now Exposure from connected flow (same folks that make iPhoto/aperature export plugin). Blogging from iPod for the fun of it!
More Moo Goodness by cogdogblog posted 2 Aug ’08, 6.19pm MDT PST on flickr My moo note cards arrived today! I got a set of 16 cards with photos from my journeys to Australia. Yep, got more moo card goodies– my set of 16 notecards came today; I made a set of selected photos from […]
While I tinker with them, I’ve yet to code my own WordPress plugin. There are so many to choose from!
A few weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Joe who I had met at Northern Voice. He was developing a plugin that would connect blog posts automatically to related content in a site called DonorsChoose.org— I had never heard of it, but what a great concept. Teachers (and/or students) submit ideas for learning materials or activities they don’t have, and the site connects them with people willing to help them get what they need. Donors can choose which project to contribute directly to.
DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning materials and experiences in our public schools. We believe this inequity is rooted in the following factors:
1. Shortages of learning materials prevent thorough, engaging instruction;
2. Top-down distribution of materials stifles our best teachers and discourages them from developing targeted solutions for their students; and
3. Small, directed contributions have gone un-tapped as a source of funding.DonorsChoose.org will improve public education by engaging citizens in an online marketplace where teachers describe and individuals can fund specific student projects. We envision a nation where students in every community have the resources they need to learn.
According to Joe, the site has over 14,000 developed lesson ideas, and his concept was to create a system where blog posts would automatically by linked to relevant content at DonrsChoose.
I was a little curious since I really doubted the rants and whinges I post would have some correlation in a school project database, like when I use words like “cat piss”, but he said apost I made about the Learning 2.008 conference had a great amount of correlation.
Besides manually updating six separate instances WordPress (to version 2.6) in the NMC fleet of sites, I also finally paid some over due attention to the version of WordPressMultiUser I have had up since November 2007. This tool some rustling to get it to the right version and also what had not been done in a while- making the front door.
I am hardly a WPmu guru, certainly no bavatuesday… maybe a bavalatethursdaymorning. Most places running WPmu are doing it to provide a blog hosting service, like edublogs or the crazy stuff the Rev does at Mary Washington.
My need was to have a series of separate sites hosted in WordPress w/o having to have an even bigger fleet of separate installs (Heck, maybe one day I can rope them all in under the WPmu hood). No these are all a series of online publications we have done at NMC in the lasy 8 months, all using the slick CommentPress template. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, CommentPress provides a way to post a series of publication chapters as “blog” posts, but the special feature is that comments can be attached to individual chapters.
So we have things like the 2008 Horizon Report in this format as well as the text of a keynote given by Howard Rheingold on Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action.
Until just a few minutes ago, these were separate little sites, but now I have at least a crude launch page for the entire WPmu site at http://wp.nmc.org.
I Am So Un Cuil by cogdogblog posted 31 Jul ’08, 3.01pm MDT PST on flickr I did not spend much time poking at www.cuil.com since it was pretty well blasted across the blogosophere. My ego search left me depressed, nothing for cogdogblog but plenty of "cat piss" Oh well, they must have wised up, […]
Perhaps your head is exploding with all the new stuff coming out of every electronic orifice. It might be useful to consider how you go about getting your dose? Maybe it’s RSS, it might be clicking every link shared by a Jedi master, or slogging through the plaff of twitter, heck it might even be from a magazine.
I have a technique that never fails to give me a lift (when it works), yet I can hardly claim it is reproducible. It’s equivalent to kicking over a rock when hiking just to see what might be hiding underneath, when you find something cool (or just as not, squishy) in an expected place.
For a while I have been saying I should keep track of all the useful or interesting things I have found online by sheer serendipity. The best part is the surprise factor, and that it is very likely something that is not in everyone else’s news feed.
One source that works occasionally is scanning the links people put in their e-mail footers. Sure mostly it is their blog, or their company, or their math department.. but quite often people put links in their footer to something they are truly passionate about. When the listservs I read are dull, I scan the footers.
The one I can remember is someone on the Second Life Educators List had a link to Free Rice, a fun site that offers a multiple choice quiz to identify the meaning of a word:
For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.
Okay, 20 grains is pretty small, but spell a lot of words right and…. But its a great concept that ties together two unrelated goals (getting “smarter” and feeding the world) in a clever way.
Again I am embarrassingly late to embrace a trend. Moo cards have been around like since Web 1.6 – those slick half sized business cards that feature a different image on each card, and quite often images personally picked from flickr.
Thanks to a friend who slipped me a promo code to get a discount on my first order, I tipped the cow… er scale, and ordered my first set of cards:
The Moo tools are as easy as dipping Oreos- you give your flick credentials and you can then start selecting images from your photos, from your tags, sets, or just poking around. I rummaged around my hundreds of my photos flowers and dogs. You don’t have to select 100 pictures to make 100 cards (if you use less you get repeats). You can customize the info that appears on the back, including your flickr icon (yay) and either free text on the six lines of print, but can also have information auto inserted based on the image used (mine has a URL to the photo).
I can’t stop going back for more GraphJams. I am wearing my GraphJammies eating peanut butter and GraphJam sandwiches. But I am waiting for my own submission to be portrayed, based on a recent blog post of my own. But for now, cue up that CD track that starts with scratchy vinyl sounds and get […]
