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Sometimes your plans work even better then your wildest dreams.

Related posts:

1. Watch Out for those Sneaky Cats

I’ve started doing some Skype video interviews to collect the material for an upcoming Open Education conference presentation on Amazing Stories of Openness. In an email exchange with Leigh Blackall, I thought it could be fun to post a call for stories on YouTube and ask people to respond in video.

it seems so web 2.0ish.

I’m having problems with what looks like fine MPEG 4 video on my computer upload to YouTube and end up with the voice and video way out of sync, like the badly dubbed Godzilla movies, so here it is hoisted on my own server.

It’s still a call for responses, so please reply to the bad synced version on YouTube or post a comment here with a link to your video response. And I have to admit, I need some diversity- so far (self included) my cast mostly all white guys. C’mon ladies and folks from outside the US? But I am not picky, white guys are still welcome.

call for amazing stories (quicktime)

In my first cut of shotting the video, I used the laptop camera on my MacBookPro and spoke audio into my headset mike. The audio was pretty shabby, and started out out of sync.

So I redid my monologue, using my Flip Mino sitting on a GorillaPod. With no one at home, it was a bit of trial and error (out-takes not) to get the shot aimed right. I edited it quickly in iMovie (I am still using the 2 versions back one). I add titles, and I like to separate the audio track to I can cut and drop in some still images. I also went to ccMIxter for some background music- Happyhappyrainbows by colab.

I save mine as broadband high quality MPEG-4, which comes in at 640×480. I uploaded to YouTube, and the web version was way out of sync. I redid it at medium quality and same result. I don’t understand what YouTube is doing in the processing, but it is borked. I give up.

Sometimes, you just have to say, it ain;t gonna work, and move on.

You can also send me some details on your story via the Google Form at the bottom of http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories. I am really excited about the bits I got so far, and I have a fun reto idea for the presentation in Vancouver.

Related posts:

1. Seeking Your Amazing Stories of Openness
2. Tell John about Do Not Call
3. Podcasting Demo Call For Help (The Lamb Approach)

cogdogblog posted a photo:

Another wildflower, some sort of wild lilly?

cogdogblog posted a photo:

Cause that's where the rays are...

cogdogblog posted a photo:

Some backlighting on these yellow flower made for some interesting shadow effects, this is a re-crop to make it a bit more interesting

cogdogblog posted a photo:

cogdogblog posted a photo:

My new Lowepro Fastpack 200 a backpack for the new camera gear. The side pouch bottom drawer opens for easy access to me Canon T1i with the 18-80 zoom and lens hood attached, plus lots of room for other gear. A padded pocket in the back can hold my 15" MacBookPro. I am thinking this can replace the long used Timbucktu messenger bag I've had for years.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

A bunch of Stellar Jays have been hanging around my yard, yellowing from the branches of the pine and juniper trees, or congregating beneath my deck. I'm not sure what they are screaming about.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

This seems to be a cursed planting area in my yard. A tree from the nursery dies after 2 years of trying. Last summer I tried transplanting a juniper-- fail. Another tree sprout I moved seemed to be doing okay, showed some new leaves in the Spring, and just went crispy dead the last few weeks.

So failing everything else, I moved some cactus in; just plunking the prickly pear and beaver tail pads in the ground usually work out.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

I've got two small plants planted beneath my apple and peach tree. Hoping for fresh berries later in the summer.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

cogdogblog posted a photo:

cogdogblog posted a photo:

Side view of some wildly spawned black eyed susan (?? correct- and who was Susan and why does she sport a shiner?) that are growing in a patch where I let almost anything grow (sorry bgblogging, NO to dandelions, they are big, thorny and ugly in Arizona). It's also where I have bird feeders so I'm getting lots of spillover sunflowers from the dropped seeds.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

A tired sticker on our outdoor mailboxes.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

First drops spotted! There was more to come as we got a standard summer "monsoon" thunderstorm.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

Rain water hanging on some webs.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by misterbisson

Yep my internet grandchildren, Old CogDog remembers when e-mail was pretty much it for everything on online activity, long before junk mail, phishing, spam, twitter, facebook. blogs, heck before the web.

It;s refreshing when something nice just lands in thr box, and makes you pause and smile. Today’s gift:

Hi Alan,

I am a secretary at [Xxxxxx], and a bit of a tech geek, so I have been following your blog since you presented at our [school]. Anyway, I am sure you have already seen this, but on the off chance you haven’t…

This site will compare bing and google search results side by side.

http://www.furia.com/code/bg/bg.cgi

I picture the shy secretary secretly tweeting and blogging, and the fact that this person decided to share something forward the old fashioned way, well heck, it’s just making me smile.

As I wrote in the reply:

That is so kind of you to share, and to pull the curtain back, I do NOT see everything out there and rely on other people to share, so thanks

(and my choice of photos above is a bit slanted, I could not find a bing box, so sue me)

Related posts:

1. More Stupid, Absurd Email Spam
2. Jolly Well! Britain Gets in On Email Bank Spam Scam
3. If You Are Going to Spam Me By Email, At Least Make Me Laugh

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

That keynote speaker, is he talking to me?

Yep.

In his ED-MEDIA presentation on Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment, slide 14, Stephen describes the process that is at the core of his activity (16,000+ posts since 2001!), which he named in honor of little ole me as ARRFF:

or Aggregate, Remix, Repurpose, Feed Forward.

Stephen was firing on all pistons, and had some great lines on the difference between complicated things and complex things, mesh networks versus star networks, the mystery of the hidden flash animation, the myth of solitary autonomy, some things about butterflies and more. You can catch the audio on his site at http://www.downes.ca/presentation/225

ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF! ARRFF!

Related posts:

1. Free Places To Hang Your Media?
2. Shining Up CoolIris For ED-MEDIA
3. Power of Old Media in New Orleans

I pulled out all the Hawaii in yer eye themes for the latest incarnation of my dog and dog show, presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the EDMEDIA 2009 conference (all links mentioned in the show are just a scroll away from that link)

It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference:

Hawaii 50+ Ways the trailer

Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic?

I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to take a tack of emphasizing some things I suggested were more important than the tools, some things I called “the craft” and aimed to hang them on some of the examples.

• A story must clearly arc to an end, to a “punchline.”
• Distill a story down to only its most necessary elements.
• If you cannot create media, modify or re-purpose.
• Think and tell in metaphors and symbols.
• Be creative within a limited tool set.
• The act of locating media is a key craft

I did get the audience to join in the group story game where they had to contribute to the prompt:

Under a Full Moon, Last Night I Saw The Strangest Thing Happen On Waikiki Beach

(as usual) it involved Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” and then he was dancing with a shark… someone has to wrap that one up.

And also as usualy lots of people want t know what software the presentation was done in.

“That’s the web”

and it is! It’s just images, some RSS, and the CoolIris plugin– all building on what I outlined in CoolIris as a Presentation tool. It’s a bit easier now to run your own image slide shows, even from your desktop, and Scott Leslie keeps pounding at other ways to create shows– but to me, the most powerful method is rolling your own RSS feeds since you can then define the web link for each slide. That is the reason I use CoolIris as it is nearly ideal for doing presentations about web sites because of the way it moves back and forth from presentation to web and back.

A few new wrinkles I tossed in this time:

• For candy on the eye candy, I added my own logo to the CoolIiris menu bar. Easy stuff.
• Ever since May, something changed in either CoolIris or Flash (and no one is owning up) so that my previously working FLV videos that played inside the CoolIris wall now refused to play. They just spin and spin and spin, and CoolIris is not even acknowledging this as a bug. I ran an end around by doing anormal image and link to a web page– a page I created that autoplayed my flash video in a web player- e,g, http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/hawaii-50-ways.html
• Almost by accident– yes it was an accident or a typo– I found a new CoolIris trick. The normal thing is to make a thumbnail image by making copy of the full size image but smaller dimensions II do mine as 240 pixel wide JPEGs). While testing, I had noticed that I had a thumbnail of a different image than the full size- and when played in CoolIris, you get some neat transition effects. I used it on a few slides- as shown in the video below, not sure if it comes through as an effect (or a gimmick):
  cool iris trick

A few other notes on my mad methods- I do everything to avoid the inevitable Sucky Hotel Internet. So I run my presentation in a web browser, but running locally from Apache running on my MacBookPro. That makes it run a little faster. IN addition, because of the awkward pauses while waiting for web sites to load– all of the external sites I planned to use I had pre-loaded as tabs in my browser, so all I needed to do was to minimize the CoolIris interface, and flip to the right tab.

So that was 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Hawaiian Style (pineapple and Canadian bacon??).

Book ‘em, Dominoe.

Related posts:

1. 50(+) Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (or 50 ways to drive myself nuts)
2. Lend a Hand to 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story
3. 50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I’ve been saying that annotating maps is one of the most under-used edtech tools, given the wonderful capabilities one can do (for free) in Google MyMaps– Gmaps are more than finding driving locations to the nearest sushi bar. The fact that you can mark up anywhere in the world with information you pin on a map, is (to me) astounding, but I’m kind of a map nerd.

I’ve done a number of these maps for various reasons, but don’t always go back to them. But woah, my not so serious maps of places where people get Starbucks staff to say the word “large” (rather than foo foo ‘venti’) has like 18,000 views! That’s insane.

Open public maps are fine for projects and such, but it means that people have license to remove your description (I saw one conference map where someone placed the content they wanted in the map bubble inside my map description), and heck, look at the Starbucks map again; Jay Cross seems to have spammed it with a self promoting pin. Or he was confused. At least we know where he lives.

My new quest for the summer (at least) is reclaiming (some of) my weekend time, which has been lately filling with that gray boundary zone where work fuzzes out to the tech stuff I do on my own. So I am making more time for the offline activities, like today’s trip up to a new lake south of Flagstaff where I spent a good 2 hours paddling around in my kayak (well some of that time was sitting under a shade tree enjoying a cold beer).

But my tech genes don’t shut off completely, so I have my flickr photos posted, and tonight I was interested in starting a map with the lakes I have explored, going even back to my first dip in October 2007 when Westley Field took my paddling in the Sydney Harbour. So it did not take too much time to assemble my kayak map: I used the thumbnail size images of my flickr photos inside each pin.

View Alan’s Kayak Spots in a larger map

I still have some echoes of the excitement when I watched the Google Wave demo video on the brief but when they were co-browsing in real time, from different machines, a Google map. This still is one missing piece of maps, making them a shared social media experience.

So whats your take on maps? Where do you see people doing interesting things with them? Pinning static info on a map is obvious, but what about edgier things? I’ve been trying to suggest doing storytelling in GMap. What about a game? ARG? a treasure hunt? a puzzle? a math problem?

What’s on your map?

Related posts:

1. Liveplasma Pop Culture Mapping
2. 5th Year, Still Flash Mapping With IndyJunior
3. Silly Map / 13000 Views