ICanHazAirlineTickets

ICanHasAirlineTickets — originally uploaded to flickr by cogdogblog…

If you have not caught the I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER craze, you are about 1 meme behind. It is a subset of the broader genre of LOL CATS.

I created my oen with the ICanHazCheezBurger Factory, a site where you can browse a vast set of uploaded cat images, and then annotate them, to create your own. Mine has its own URL.

It helped me since I have a severe deficit of cat photos.

Yes, like many things on the net it is surficially, well silly. Maybe stupid. And easy for people to snub noses at.

But dig past the content, and what yuo have is (a) a user generated collection of media about a topic; (b) a web 2.0 tool for remixing the images with text to create new content; (c) a network of tools for voting, sharing, etc.

So swap out cat content with something, say, more academic. This is the way I am suggesting we need to be in terms of "being there" with technology, looking past the way web tools are used for silly things, and looking at the affordances they offer.

My tickets have been booked.

How Not to Tell A Story

It seems obvious that bullet-pointing a story is wrong, deadly, yet it happens again, and again. And again.

Break the trend. Tell your story in spoken word, in images, as an audience wants a performance, wants a bit of mystery, humor, not to read a screen while a marionette parrots.

Too Much Social Networking? Try NOSO

Too many “friends” (who are not really friends)? Can’t make toast w/o posting that as a twitter update? yourInbox full of bacn? Perhaps you are coming down with Social Network Fatigue… I lost track of some links form some recent edu bloggers mentioning the dread of “too much stuff”.

I’m writing to tell you… I really do not have an answer or a cure. And even worse, the torrent of new “stuff” is going to continue to flow at faster rates. This topic is right at the heart of my “Being There” presentations coming to several of my stops (have no fears, if you miss it, I will have slides and audio posted).

I face the situation daily myself- bottom line, you do not have to “keep up”- what you ought to do is “keep up” on a segment, a topic, a technology that matters to you now, and “keep up” your network of other people looking elsewhere. And find that balance in your lives. Go offline. Go outside.

With that, I had a smile coming across the “NOSO” project

NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.

These “NO” events, called NOSOs, take place in designated cafe’s, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants –whose identities remain unknown to one another — agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another “Friend” is present in the space.

NOSOs are scheduled by users through the NOSO website. They last for a duration of 1 – 30 minutes, after which participants disperse and return to their regular activities.

So it is a social network about not social networking!

A tip of the blog hat to Beth Kanter for this link -Beth is a tireless web 2.0 user, presenter, and evangleist in the realm of using technology to support the efforts of non-profit organizations. Beth’s Blog is well worth tossing in the aggregator. Uh oh, something else online to take up your time!

I may mention this somewhere in the stream of presentations- when you see some of us glitzy technology champion presentations, and if we talk about “technology saving you time”, it is a lie.

Picnik! Play with Photos

Picnik Let’s Us Really PLay With Photos — originally uploaded to flickr by cogdogblog…

Fresa and Kasha are rather excited about the new features in picnik, the free online photo editor that lets you modify images from flickr, facebook, photobucket, your desktop, and then save back to these sites.

The new tools allow text and shape overlays, new color effects, and more. Some of these are tools that are going to be part of their premium package (US$24.95 per year), but this week, for the launch, they are all free.

So if it were me, I’d play a lot this week with picnik, more fun and creative than chasing cats,

One of the Small Precious Web Gems I plan to tout for my workshops is picnik, a web app for editing and adding effects to photos. I had a small chance to participate in the beta that led to this week’s public release of the full version.

It’s not exactly Photoshop in a browser (though photoflexer comes close), but picnik has a very clean and easy to use interface. I use it directly linked to my flickr account, so I can pull pictures from there, add effects, frames, text, and then save back to flickr as a new photo.

I also use it to clean up the often poorly exposed photos from my lame Motorolo camera phone (about 2 years old) – the picnik “one click fix” tool often boost the color end exposure to a much richer tone.

It has a rotate and straighten tool that works exactly as the ones i use often in iPhoto.

But to me, the real gain, and why this might be useful for educators, is the ability to add text, or even annotate photos.

Actually I had hope to run a workshop on how to create the stunning kind of image / word /caption sets that LynnetteR posts in her Interesting Snippets collection. This are powerful one screen messages composed of a compelling or metaphorical photo, which she overlays with text, and than rounds it out as a solid piece of media with a caption contains a few paragraphs of written text, much of it citing resources that support the message.

Until now, the web tools for adding text to images were less than simple to use, but picnik has changed all of that.

I’m a fan of this tool, but am eager to hear what others think. How might you use a web based photo editor? What can you do by annotating existing images?

BYT

I am sure people range quite widely over their feelings on the “value” or “dangers” of YouTube, probably as polarizing as the take on WikiPedia. But let’s cast aside the value judgment, and recognize in terms of technology and a social phenomena how it changes our concept and expectations of video.

Tonight I am in a hotel room in Dallas, Texas (I am here for the Pachyderm Conference the NMC is running this week); my normal television viewing habits are rather minimal, but while on the road alone, it just makes for nice background noise. For some reason, I was distracted by one of the new, quirky commercials for Geico (auto insurance company, known for its off-beat ads) – where it mocks a news documentary pointing at one of my formative cultural influences, The Flinstones (as a kid, my TV habits were a bit more “on”).

In the era I am now defining as BYT (Before Youtube), there was no easy way for me to share, re-publish television content- but now, in the flash of a Google Search I have something I can now re-watch (again and again), and share with you:

I have this strange flashback to my very first experiences with digital video, in fact, it was the first weeks of my employment in 1992 at the Maricopa Community Colleges, that I found myself at the QuickTime 1.0 conference in San Francisco, being mesmerized by those herky jerky tiny video clips that look just horrible by today’s standards. In fact, I still have the CD full of those first clips (they still work 15 years later, a testament to file formats)- I forget the name of the guy who did the comedy clips like Mac Aerobics:

 

 

And wouldn’t you know it- this video too is on YouTube.

But back to that Geico commercial. AsI re-watch I am struck by how the commercial form itself has evolved into something more complex than a product pitch – it is tapping into pop cultural references, and playing off in a form that might give question to, “is this a commercial”? Sometimes I am wondering the strategy of the Geico commercials as they really tell you nothing of the product (yes, I know its all abouts stamping by brain with a brand) — but these 30 second spots are very well produced, demonstrated modeern editing techniques (all of which are available in desktop/webtop software) effective as “short stories”. What else can we learn from them?

And for those still tsk-tsking the use of YouTube- take a look at Learning From You Tube- a college course in media studies that is using YouTube itself as a platform for the course content. For more, see Andy Carvin’s post on this project, YouTube 101, Yes It’s a Real Class. No, this may not convince the YT Skeptics, but to me, demonstrates the philosophy I aim to bring in my Being There presentations – that we can really only fully probe the potential of new technologies by R&D, experimentation, taking some risks.

Actually, as often the case, I started this blog post inspired by something else, and actually more trivial. When I was sitting here wondering, “is that commercial in YouTube”, my natural reflex was, like many others, to Google It — http://www.google.com/search?q=geico+flintstones+commercial The first two results are YT videos, and what I did not notice before was that Google search results allow you to watch this video right in the pages of the search results “click the “Watch Video” link and it unfolds in Ajaxy glory right there in the Google search results page:

And this is the hallmark of the YT era- the ability to easily embed rich media in the context of content we create, not forcing us to go to the “home” site, not shoving ads in our face (yet).

What did we do for our short form video fix BYT?

Going Virtual at Go Virtual

Panel Session at Go Virtual — originally uploaded to flickr by cogdogblog…

Anya Ixchel (aka Angela Thomas). me as CDB Barkley, Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes), JoKay Wollongong (aka Jo Kay), and Sean McDonnugh (aka Sean FitzGerald) as panelists for Go Virtual 07 NSW Learnscope Regional Event

We had some great exchange among us and with the audience, and amazingly enough, the audio really worked out very well. It was exciting to hear the excitement from some of the audience who were new to Second Life.

Thanks Jo Kay and Sean for inviting me to be, virtually, part of the NSW Go Virtual Event. It’s not easy at all running these hybrid events where some of the participants are in the same place (their audience in Wollongong) and others dangling at a distance in Second Life. When it works out well, it’s magic. When it doesn’t…. well that’s another blog post.

And its an honor to join my virtual colleagues, some of whom I have met in RL and some I hope to cross of the list when I come to Australia next month. For me, the greatest tangible benefit of my time and experience in Second Life has been the expansion of my professional network, as it has affording new collaborations that likely would not have happened, even on the web.

What sometimes I struggle to keep in mind, and like to remind people, that we are standing on the very beginning thresholds of virtual worlds technologies. The very first baby steps. A few years from now, all of this activity may seem quaint, and we may be in worlds far beyond Second Life, or SL may have morphed into something else. The platform is irrelevant.

But folks out there are already being asked to justify this activity, as if there are measurables yet, or concepts of “ROI”– and will their organizations refuse to even allow some exploration if this is still lacking? Would we have only gone to the moon if someone had been there before? It’s a tough area to address and asks for some leeway based on some educated hunches.

We all had some good words to say about the value of “creativity” in this space– yet I wonder what are the best ways to communicate this, as it seems to be understood best by those who have had a creative experience. And it struck me, as I was reaching for words, that there are many niches of creative potential here that are not just the 3D modeling and making pf impressive builds in Second Life.

There is creativity in how we represent ourselves. How we communicate. How we interact. I cannot build anything except plywood cubes, yet I find creativity in just organizing events and bringing people together.

My favorite creative activity in SL is taking photos. For some, taking snapshots is enough, but I am looking for different angles, lighting, composition, cropping, macro shots, etc, all things that I do with my RL camera.

What I’d like to say is you don’t have to build a thing in SL to be creative. Creativity for teachers, is in the ideas they conjure on how to leverage what is there for something that can help engage learners.

I might be babbling because it is late, and I have 10 minutes left in the day to call this my Sunday blog post.

Thanks again Sean and Jo for inviting me in.

Blog A Day

With my trip about three weeks from lifting off (ignoring the panic of being “ready”), I’m aiming to start posting at least something here daily, be it ever so trite as a twitter snip. It’s another blog log on the fire, given my primary outlet, several running at NMC (here, there, and way over there).

I do plan to use this blog as the main daily summary of all the amazing events I will see next month, the stunning beautiful and articulate people I will meet, and the electric vibe of being in each of Australia’s capital cities inside a 2 week span.

And just to add a little bit more on top of my schedule (just posted a copy on this blog, I will share that I have yet another blog, a personal one, that I use to chart my training to run a first marathon in January. So I am also needing to get my training runs in while jetting around Australia. I am slow as an ancient wombat, but I just want to finish one of these feats, and cross it off my list.

So this blog post has no epiphanies, no whooping over cool tools (that might be tomorrow), no witty puns, and surprisingly no dog photos.

Oh well, I will break that last one- here are my pups, 6 year old Black Lab Cadu (left) and frisky new Beagle pup Fresa (right), relaxing at home among the dog clutter (toys, chewed up sticks):

Stay tuned tomorrow for… well something else.

Mobile Tagging Your World with Semapedia

Please excuse the reposting of what I just published at the main dog house- blog once, publish thrice?- but this was a neat find I found from Marg’s blog… is there potential given the strong interest and capability of mobile tech in Australia?

I’m still scratching my head to find out exactly why I think this is interesting… I just have that tingly feeling. But as we see ever increasing of interest in virtual worlds, continued explosion of web things, mashups, and mobile technologies, its the connections of them that seem to intrigue me the most.

Although I lack a phone even capable of tis stuff, the things that allow people to connect by mobile devices, share, acquire thing in our every day meanders, or via coordinated efforts seem to be underplayed in education (with notable efforts), especially considering the proliferation of mobile phones in many pockets.

There are many examples of the kind of creative group activities facilitated by phones +/- web +/- geo-location data like you see at the Come Out & Play Festivals. They are simple and elegant in design, and do not call for massive amounts of technology. And they intersect the technical and real world environments.

So it was again that beautiful sense of web serendipity of space baring my way through Google Reader (I don’t care it is cumbersome for D’Arcy, it works for me), I came across Semapedia:

Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

To accomplish this, we invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into the form above. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. You just hyperlinked your world! Others can now use their cellphone to ‘click’ your Tag and access the information you provided them.

So you take a Wikipedia URL that exists, it generates a PDF document with a graphic like code that represents this URL that a mobile phone (equipped with free reader software) and read–

QR Codes’ and are basically cellphone-readable URLs. Basically they are 2D codes when they are standard-compliant with ISO/IEC18004.

So if you re out and about, and you come across a Semapedia code tacked to a wall, a park bench, etc, you can read it with your phone and get the relevant info from Wikipedia.

So it is using mobile technology to link places with content – does that ever happen in a learning environment?

Just for fun, I created one for where I am today, Strawberry Arizona, which is pretty much demographic data in WikiPedia

The Semapedia site then generates a PDF with a bunch of tags I can use to put “out” in the real world (okay, I will bypass the litter concerns)- which if I actually had a decent phone, would render something like http://semapedia.org/w/15236.

And here is proof! My tag was added to recent tags listing:

Now putting aside people’s hangups on wikipedia, what might one do with the ability to locate locations, things with information? There is obviously things like reference material, history, but also mapping, perhaps data collecting and analysis.. and then there is the whole other side. If yo had some sort of outdoor, real world activity where you might set up such tags, you would then have a vested interested in perhaps authoring, researching some of the Wikipedia pages you might link to.

And one has some of the nice connections from Semapedia- a mashup with the Semapedia locations and Google Map, a pile of flickr photos showing placement of the “semapedic tags”, a time machine showing the creation of the tags on a timeline (using the very cool MIT SIMILE timeline), and KML data for Google Earth.

And This is one of those ideas that started off as a “what if” exchange by two people via email that really took off- leveraged by the connectivity of the net- read the backstory.

So I saw some shiny tech and conjecture it might have some education usage- but I always need a reality check. The real creativity, I have seen over and over again, is when instructors are able to see a potential and develop an application for their own needs/context. Does this have a “real” use or is it just “something cool” (or not even that)? I dont know and there never is a single answer… but I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Linktribution to ed(ge)ucation design :: by Marg

The Schedule Emerges

Am I allowed yet to legitimately yell, “Crikies!”"? I am looking now at a month and a day until I get in the long leg flight (well short hope from Phoenix to LA, but then the leg from LA to Melbourne is a doozy) that will get me Down Under.

I’d been toying with some calendar tools, but I fell back onto my Google mania, and assembled a calendar of my visits, flights, etc. Unfortunately (rattles fist of fury at WordPress.com) I cannot embed a Google calendar here, but it a no brainer over on Wikispaces. I am entering the times in reference to AEST time zone, and if I got the math correctly, the local times should be correct if you are in other zones. So click and fly to Google to check the calendar.

But the better set of details is over on my wiki site at http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/Schedule where a nifty Poodwaddle embed shows local time on all Australia time zones, and I have listed out more details of the presentations/workshops at each stop, and yes, embedded the Google Calendar.

There’s lots of planning and pawing around behind the scene over the next 30 days.

But one more time on the beating on a dead horse department- with the plethora of web tools that offer cut and paste code to embed content in other sites, I feel totally handcuffed here at WordPress.com, knowing full well I can use whatever code I like in my own hosted WP blogs, and that WikiSpaces offers the ability to insert just about any kind of web code in their pages as well.

Tech Then and Now

With that one month til departure clock ticking, I am thinking about the gear I will (and won’t) pack for my trip. And it got me thinking to what has changed since my trip to Australia in 2000 – so some flashbacks. I am also looking for some info about public internet access and mobile phone rentals, so if you are in the know, drop me a comment.

Computer Then:  366 MHz iBook SE, with 320 MB RAM, 6GB HD
Computer Now: 2 GHz MacBookPro with 2GB RAM, 160 GB HD

Camera Then: Olympus DL450, 2MP 1280×960 images, 32 MB Smartmedia card could hold 72 pictures
Camera Now: Canon Powershot SD800 IS, 7.1 MP 3072×2304 images, 2 Gb SD card holds about 800 pictures

Mobile Phones Then: I was able to rent for 2 months a basic phone that was capable of… making phone calls. People I visited were regularly doing SMS with family traveling in Europe, elsewhere. Text messaging was unheard of at home
Mobile Phones Now: Looking for recommendations for a short term rental so I can be reached while on the zig zag road around Australia.  Pretty much need phone only, and no, I do not have an iPhone to bring.
Networking Then: Hard to impossible to connect to campus networks, arranged a 2 month contract with BigPond for 56 kbps dialup that was more likely 28 kbps speed.
Networking Now: Not yet sure. I have heard that internet in hotels is outrageously priced and poor service. How are my options for finding public or low fee net connections? Are there rental services I can get got a high speed access via cell phone networks?