“You’ve got two empty halves of coconut and you’re bangin’ ’em together.” Since I began banging coconuts in instructional technology in 1992, I’ve heard of this quest for the holy grail, the mythical database of who’s doing what with technology. I held back writing this for maybe a day, but could not let it go– […]
flickr photo Autoretrato com Colorado by Paulo Brabo
Maybe two months from now will mark the 15th year I have been on the web. This will be October 29, exactly at 10:30am, 15 years to the minute when I inserted a floppy disk labeled “Mosaic” (in perhaps a Mac Quadra 900) that my Maricopa colleague Jim Walters had handed me, and had said, just with a smile, “Try this”.
Profound moment indeed.
In all this time, I have never lost a shred of excitement over those crazy serendipity happenings, connections, opportunities, that present themselves only because the web was there. Things that would not have happened otherwise, in that creepy parallel universe where there is no internet, no world wide web.
So I am going to toss out a few and see if others pick up and share there own. My stipulation is that each story much have a link to an artifact of the story. Cause if there ain’t a link, its not a web.
I have tons of stories, but will keep it to three.
Woah! I found out today my old Shockwave projects can breathe again!
I cut my multimedia teeth in the 1990s on Macromedia Director. I was happy in the early part of that decade pounding around HyperCard and then came along a project (something to do with Study Skills) that required a lot of animation and there was this software box on the shelf that sounded promising.
I never produced or created as much in those Director days. It was the first time I fell into a full blown online social space, the Direct-L listserv (hey it still exists!). I still have some scarred flesh somewhere from some guy named G Gordon III at Virginia Tech who flamed my seriously. It took 3 months from that scorching before I felt okay to post.
But around that same time, 1994, I was excited at the hypertext potential of the early early barebones web. So after seeing my buddy Marvyn H create a public Director FTP site (the “shared cast” at Houston Community Colleges), I decided to open a public web site, the Director Web at Maricopa. (actually, when it started it was the Director Page).
At the time, Macromedia did not even have a corporate web site.
Riffing from D’Arcy’s idea and cleaner sketch, I tried mapping out the blog history of cogdogblog.com April 19, 2003: CogDogBlog 1.0 launched on maricopa server jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan using MovableType April 26, 2005 Migrated blog to WordPress (1.5) leaving old one as archive and moving new one to jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb – Content was exported from MovableType (comments were […]
I saw today that RSS might be starting to meme its way across our system. It takes time. This morning I got a call from a faculty member asking where she can get software to see RSS. I sent her googling in “Desktop RSS Aggregator” not recalling which of the 90 or so ones is […]
