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Thanks to Pat Lockley from who I learned the phrase Gotchya Day, this week I knew to mark April 6 as the day in 2016 that I adopted Felix from the Payson, Arizona Humane Society.
@felixadog celebrates our 2 year “gotchya” day with a visit and donation to Human Society of Central AZ. They all remember “Fix It Felix” nods to @patlockley pic.twitter.com/s1BL9XWLOH
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) April 12, 2018
I had the original photo taken for me by a staff member as I left the facility my “new” dog. I also happen to have the same t-shirt I wore that day (from a trip to Tasmania in 2011). Cori helped with an attempt to redo the photo in 2023.
Until April 2016 as much as I wanted to have a dog, the extensive travel I was doing for work then (a lot of variable length freelance stuff) made it not feasible. Everything changed when I signed on to an 18 month project with Creative Commons (helping craft the design of what has become the Creative Commons Certification).Having solid work mostly from home for that length of time opened the doggy door, as one might say.
Here’s the thing about memory. My internal story was that the week I signed my contract I went down to the Human Society to look for a dog, but since I have contract files (and more reliable, a blog post), I actually started Creative Commons work March 16, 2016. My flickr photos I went to North Carolina 2 days later for an Indie Ed-Tech meetup at Davidson College.
So maybe I pondered the dog idea for a month. I started looking at the Payson Humane Society web page, taking note of what kinds of dogs were available.
I did make my visit to the Humane Society on April 4, 2016. I had met another dog first, some kind of Australian Shepard, named maybe? Jasper. I almost went with him, but thought it wise to just take another for a test drive.
Felix was one in a cage in the front corner, so newly arrived he was not on the site. He was making quite a noisy excited fuss which almost made my ask about the black labs further down, but I asked to see Felix out of the cage.
They let you set outside in a medium sized enclosure to wait to meet a dog. I was sitting on a low curb when they brought Felix out. He sat right next to me and leaned in to my side. That was it, I was chosen.
First pic:
I put down a deposit, as I knew I wanted him, but they encouraged new adopters to go home, check out their home, and come back to claim a dog.
I was back on April 6, no hesitation. After signing and paying the $75 fee, they brought him out to me. Here he came with now what I know as his typical excitement:
And then they offered to take the photo of us together used above.
I remember walking out to the truck and the thought came flying in my head- I have no idea if he;s going to want to jump in a strange vehicle. What do I do if he recoils in fear?
It was no issue. I opened the door, he jumped in faithfully (like he has done 4000 times since), and we drove home. He loves rides. Still.
The next day, April 7, was our first one together. He stuck his head out the rails of the front porch and gave me the iconic look that I have even out to use as my social media icon.
It’s been lots of adventures since, tracked in his own photos (2146 of them!) and tweets. And here we are together 7 years later, living on a rural acreage in Saskatchewan with a Cori in his life plus 2 cats and a world of snow to roll in and rabbits to chase.
April 6, happy Gotchya Day, Felix.
Featured Image: Composite of my own photo from April 6, 2016– Dog Smiles flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license and a redo photo today taken by Cori Saas to be posted later to flickr under a CC0 license.
Strap in (or hit eject) for a long blog ride. This has been one of those percolating drafts, meaning it has not progressed far from my head. But time is essencing.
As there are a wave of steps to weave together, I am borrowing in all sense of honoring, not stealing, a section convention from Kate Bowles’ blog.
Once again because almost no one cares for making the case of the power of RSS reading, I keep finding more reasons not to buy into the “twitter does it better” theory. I have a set of photography feeds I sometimes skim through at the title level. I cannot even deduce the reason why I got a nibble of curiosity for “The $10 Camera Photographers Are Snapping Up” (Fstoppers).
Curious clicking that was the opener to this whole run.
The author makes a case for the versatility of the old mid 2000s style pocket digital camera, but in this style I loathe in at least a lot of photography sites, asking me to not read, but watch a video of two photographers doing an outing with their $10 cameras. Loathing is because there’s not much skimming one does from content in a video.
The video is well produced, and obviously the two had fun, but I find it all a but more style over substance.
That’s me.
The thing is the video opened a memory stream, as I do not need to find one of these cameras used on eBay, I just need to rummage through my box of camera STUFF.
Memories flood in.
My cameras are a thing I keep track of– by photos. Though it has been 14 years since I wrote of my lineage of film and digital cameras there is only one more not on that list, my current DSLR Canon 7D…assorted iPhones, a few forays trying some vintage cam— I got off track already.
The thing is in 2005 when I plunged into the first DSLR, the Canon Digital Rebel, I saw no direction going back to small pocket cameras.
Shift to 2007 while I was working for the New Media Consortium. Quite a few in that crowd were avid digital photographers. Two colleagues and fellow camera geeks I respect much kept going on and on to me about their little Canon digital cameras. I will call them Phil and Carl for now… well those are their names. These two made a case for what was then rather high image quality from the little cameras (7 MP), but more the affordances of a pocket camera for street photography, and unobtrusive photographer, in lieu of putting a Big Camera in front of your subject.
I took the plunge and bought that PowerShot 800 SD IS. And that was pretty much my main camera for a few years. On a 2008 trip to Japan I could not resist picking up an updated model (IXY 3000IS) that offered maybe twice the resolution and was not even available in the US.
I knew Carl would smile at those specs.
Back in 2002 I was organizing district-wide technology initiatives at the Maricopa Community Colleges. In collaboration with then IT Vice Chancellor Ron Bleed, we organized a series of collaborative events/workshops called the Ocotillo Technology Visioning Forums.
This has much to say about the heady times I was lucky enough to be part of at Maricopa. The rationale of these activities was preparing for a bond election to fund the system, including instructional technology, which as noted there, from the previous planning in 1994 had not included the impact of the world wide web (as the web then was called).
Under the umbrella of bond planning, Ocotillo and Information Technologies Services (ITS) are sponsoring a series of Technology Visioning Forums that will bring to Maricopa a series of distinguished professionals, who will inspire and challenge our thinking about instructional technology and facilities for learning.
For the next X (3? 5?) years, what is the next “web” we might need to address for the future? What is the learning environment of the future look like? What do models of “hybrid” courses mean for planning? What sorts of technologies are we planning for? What do Learning Objects mean for course developers? How do we provide better physical (and virtual) learning environments?
Each Maricopa college will form a team to participate in the process, leading to a collection of outcomes to be further developed at the year-end Ocotillo Retreat.
Ocotillo Technology Visioning, 2002-2003
One of those “distinguished professionals” was a colleague (and friend) of Ron’s from the University of Michigan named Carl Berger, who spent two days in December leading us through discussions guided in his theme of “Back to the Future: After WYSIWYG, What is the Next Killer App?”
The excitement Carl spoke with was infectious, while at the same time backing his ideas with examples, experience, research, and a focus on pedagogy. Amongst the media I found from my old Maricopa MCLI web server archive (all was wiped out after I left in 2006) I found two 320x240px video excerpts from his talk- I patched together to share:
I also found a copy of Carl’s presentation slides!
Here in 2002 he pointed out emerging technologies (just respect this from looking back 21 years) were wireless networking, these brand new tablet devices, learning objects, integrated administrative systems, open learning platforms, research tools, and a vision of a learning platform he called “the Real Processor” explained through a narrative Maria, a professor using a platform that looked LMS-ish but was richer in complexity.
But these forums were not just slidedecks and cheese sandwiches, there was a whole lot of group discussion, brainstorming, and collaboration between faculty, technology staff, and administrators. And, can see it because I found an archive of photos from these events, assembled in a funky Javascript slideshow thing I built in maybe 2000 called the jClicker (I am shocked it even works!):
When I took a leap from Maricopa in 2006 to work with the New Media Consortium, it was a more than pleasant surprise to be at the conferences and connect again with Carl. Here he is gleefully uploading photos he is taking with one of those small cameras at the 2006 NMC Conference in Cleveland.
As I learned Carl was right there from the birth of NMC and was at it’s first conference in 1995. Later, on a visit to his home, he pulled out and gave me a mint condition T-shirt from tha conference (I still have it).
And always Carl was beaming with his excitement about new Apple technology, the latest photo editing software, and always with some new kind of camera. He was active always in the era of NMC’s Second Life period (look! I even found him in the directory as an avatar named Carl Oxberger).
In more image rummaging, I am so happy to find Carl in a photo listening intently to another fantastic friend colleague, Bryan Alexander, here at a 2009 EDUCAUSE ELI Conference.
The photo becomes even more special to me because of the gracious comment of another influential colleagues/mentor, George Brett, who passed away in 2015.
For no one keeping track of the camera stories here, at this time I was using much that small Canon as well as my first iPhone. But the small camera came back in a big way through an unusual device.
Once again,toward my latter years at NMC, I was the beneficiary of a lucky connection. A new colleague named Keene Haywood knew of my interest in camera, and told me about his Austin friends at an outfit called Charmed Labs were developing beta versions of a thing called a “Gigapan“. I was a robot controlled mount that would move a camera methodically through a grid pattern and worked with a stitching type of software to create potentially a GigaPixel panorama image.
I was curious, and Keene hooked me up, and I bought I believe one of the few beta versions of the metallic box rig.
At the time, it could use only the small cameras, and I did a bunch with that first Canon Elph, seen above. It became an object of curiosity in public spaces when people would watch it go through its robot maneuvers, moving a bit, the robot rm clicking the shutter, tilting a bit, and repeating. See it in action:
I recently came across the box where I had stored the rig; it’s been 10 years maybe since I even used it. I assumed that the software that made the images was long gone and after showing it to Cori I said I did not see a need to keep it. “No way!” she said. “That’s part of your photography history, put it on the shelf with your camera collection.”
Out of curiosity I did the Google thing and found out how wrong I was- the software is still out there and the Gigapan site is alive. I even found my own collection of panorama images, all there. I give em a CogDogBlog howl of praise for keeping a web site going 15 years later.
One scene popped out, a panorama image I made on my last day of my 2008 Month in Iceland adventure, when I drove out to see Þingvellir (that place where they were doing democratic forms of government in 930AD).
Typical of most off the highway places I explored while living in Iceland, I saw no people when I got there. So I set up my Gigapan rig to capture a scene.
Then car pulled up! Three American college age students came out. I was shocked when one guy looked at my rig and asked “Is that a GigaPan?”. As it turns out, he had worked at the Carnegie Mellon University where it was first developed.
Now calculate me the odds of that.
Speaking of long odds, I got an email request in 2011 to use the scene I had made that day for use in a book. They wanted the biggest highest resolution possible, I remember doing some hijinks in PhotoShop to generate the format of a TIFF file.
And here is something I know would make Carl smile, a photo stitched together from that little Canon camera was printed in the largest picture atlas ever, a book that is six feet high! That has to be my biggest (literally) credit ever.
I kept in touch with Carl, and it was rewarding to see he had retired and settled in St George, Utah. The last NMC Conference I was part of was the 2010 one at Disneyland, never a place that was on my list of destinations, but conference location picking was not my department. Since I was living then in Northern Arizona I made a decision to skip the air travel and drive to LA, the way out taking the dull Interstate 40 route.
But this made for a scenic backroad return trip, which I had arranged to pass through St. George, at an invitation to stay with Carl. He was eager to show me his latest Lumix camera, but the big part was an outing he set up for us to do some photography together in Zion National Park, one of his favorite places.
What a glorious and ideal a day! Carl was as usual so xcited to share with me his experimentations with HDR photography, later resulting in my buying at Carl’s suggestion a copy of Photomatix Pro software.
Here is an HDR image I later made using that from a photo, which if you read the flickr comments, credits Carl and the software from rendering a fantastic image from originals that were not so great.
I also steered a trip through St George in 2015, on the end of the longway back from a 5 month stint at Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops BC. I took an even more back way across Nevada (The Extraterrestrial Highway) before pulling up to Carl’s home in St George.
Again, I got a huge warm welcome from him and Shari, we chatted, he showed me his latest geeky toy, a Cardboard VR Camera. If you look at the table, he has more toys out!
Like previous visits together Carl urged me try another photography software, Intensify. So again, I bought software Carl said I should use– and to this day this is maybe the main photo editing tool I turn to whenI cannot tune the image the way I like with my normal controls. I use Intensify usually on 1 or 2 images of my daily photos.
Thanks, again, Carl!
And again, Carl has no limit on his energy and enthusiasm. He suggested a photo outing to the luscious sandstone scenery of Snow Canyon State Park, where we spent hours poking around, climbing sandstone bluffs, taking photos.
Look at this scene– forget Waldo, can you find Carl?
That was eight years ago I visited Carl. Over time, I’d still “see” him active in his flickr stream and we’d “talk” occasionally in comments. I slacked a bit in emailing after I moved to Canada in 2018, but saw some new flickr photos in December. I commented once or twice, asked if he still used his same mac.com email.
Now if you think all of this is written in eulogy like fashion, you are wrong. Well… I got an Instagram message from a mutual colleague who shared that Carl posted in Facebook that he was in hospice with maybe 3 months left to live. But they said he was posting photos a few have come in flickr usual scenery stuff and his little dog, Thor. As my colleague knew I was not on Facebook, they relayed this message from me to Carl.
Hi Carl, I don’t use Facebook but was excited to see a new Flickr photo today of Thor. There’s nothing like the companionship of a dog! I’d give anything to be now walking with you in a Zion canyon, geeking out on cameras, HDR, and hearing your joyful laughter. I regularly use the Intensify CK software you recommended! No need to respond just keep taking photos. With you in spirit, friendship always, Alan
I cannot say enough (well I tried) about the 21 years I have been lucky enough to know and be friends with Carl. They do not even make these kinds of leaders and visionaries any more; ones like Carl who are not in it for ego or spotlight, but because he cares about and loves his work. Carl has been huge influence on me as a mentor, and moreso as a friend.
From little cameras to big panoramas, I am fortunate to have known to the genuine laugh, love of life’ love of teaching, and the big heart of Carl Berger. Keep on clicking the shutter, Carl!
Featured Image: A collage image made from a photo of my old Canon Digital Elph (that Carl inspired me to buy in 2007) That Little Camera flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0), with on the screen a photo of Carl from our 2015 outing — The Eye of Carl Berger flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license plus a screenshot of the Gigapan.com web site.
Babies who are 6 to 9 months can form memories of masked faces and recognize those faces when they’re unmasked.
The new study should allay concerns of many parents and childhood experts who worry about possible developmental harm from widespread face-masking during the pandemic.
For the study Michaela DeBolt, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology, and Lisa Oakes, a professor in the psychology department and at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, used eye tracking to study how masks influence infants’ facial recognition.
They showed 58 babies, each seated on a parent’s lap or in a highchair, pairs of masked and unmasked women’s faces on a computer screen, while cameras recorded where they looked. Because babies linger longer over unfamiliar images, the researchers could derive which faces they recognized, DeBolt says.
The testing took place at the Infant Cognition Lab at the Center for Mind and Brain in Davis, California, from late December 2021 to late March 2022, during a statewide mask mandate and the arrival of the coronavirus Omicron variant.
“When babies learned a masked face, and then they saw that face again unmasked, they recognized it,” DeBolt says.
However, when the order was reversed, babies did not show strong recognition of masked faces that they first saw unmasked. DeBolt says that was similar to her own experience of not instantly recognizing a friend who was wearing a face mask.
Learning faces is central to how babies learn to talk, perceive emotions, develop relationships with their caregivers, and explore their environment, Oakes says. “So people were very worried about face masks and the effect they would have on how infants are learning about human faces.”
Oakes, an expert on cognitive development in infancy, says the study highlights a remarkable ability of babies to adapt. “I think that it should be very reassuring to parents in general,” she says. “Babies all over the world develop and thrive.
“There are so many variations in babies’ everyday lived experience,” she adds. “As long as they are well cared for and fed and they get love and attention, they thrive. We can get into a mode where we think the way we do things is the best way to do things and that anything different is going to be a problem. And that’s clearly not the case.”
The study appears in a special issue of the journal Infancy, which focused on the impact of COVID-19 on infant development.
Source: UC Davis
The post Mask or no mask, babies remember a face appeared first on Futurity.
It seems like many worlds ago, when “MOOC” was not a term I mocked, but as it happens, this month marks the 10th year since Alec Couros launched ETMOOC, the Education Technology MOOOOOOC.
Susan Spellman Cann has been heroic each year in organizing a tweeted reunion
ETMOOC 10 Years TOP 10 https://t.co/B0ln6mDK1b
— Susan Spellman Cann (@SSpellmanCann) February 7, 2023
The linked “smore” site suggest ways to participate
https://www.smore.com/n6y9c-etmooc-10-years-top-10
- Write a blog or vlog of 10 ways #ETMOOC made a difference to you and post to the hashtag #etmooc
- Join us for an online gathering on Friday , Feb. 10th 7 p.m. MT
- Donate to the Mario Couros bursary that ETMOOC created for educators. Ask @courosa how you can contribute.
- Come up with your own way to celebrate and share to the hashtag #etmooc
I’m not sure I will make the list of ten, but, hey I got a blog post started.
This came from the heady days of cMOOCs, following the inaugural MOOC 0 the Connectivism jam of Siemens, Downes, and cormier of 2008 (for which no site remains). I was more vested in the digital storytelling community of DS106, which not only still is online, but the web sites still work, and I still do the DS106 Daily Create.
Still, for the most part, academics and scholars and such hardly gave any respect to DS106.
But the heart that still pulses and beats there is the magic of the Feed WordPress plugin (still works) to run what came to be known as a “Connected Course” where participants did their work, reflections on a blog/web site they controlled/managed, but their posts could be syndicated to the main site using Feed WordPress.
Can I say again that this old technology still works? I know Ken Bauer might still be using it and Maha Bali as well, and of course the mother ship DS106 still syndicates as “the flow” where it has collected some 92,000 syndicated posts (some intrepid scholar might consider that as a research topic, but no one likely will).
Anyhow,,this significance for ETMOOC to me was it being the first site I created a FeedWordPress syndication hub after learning how to do it for DS106. I cannot recall how it happened, but I guess Alec asked me.
I built for ETMOOC a 3 part site via WordPress multisite including:
. I noticed a while ago, it was pretty broken! I’d helped Alec a few times with his WordPress sites as it seemed like his htaccess file kept getting deleted. Tonight, I went in to fix, and it took a while to locate the proper one to fix it, and I added an SSL plugin to make sure all links went to https. Something was still funky on the two subsites, no images appeared in the media library… it ended up taking a custom pair of rewrite rules to resolve the old way WordPress created URLs to images.
Anyhow, the ETMOOC site is back for the party and some historical purposes (it likely is broken elsewhere).
Getting this working made a path for me to refine the syndicated blog approach for a few other sites, and organizing my approach as a guide:
A lot of this was a result for applying the DS106 system to ETMOOC.
But there was more to it than just web sites… it was in the days when educators were openly sharing and building those network connections, many of which are alive for me today, 10 years later, when Twitter is a simmering pile of poop, and most folks have given up on their blogs.
The thing I did not have for ETMOOC was the gravity forms($) plugin that enabled the automatic adding of a new feed to the syndication hub. I did ETMOOCs old school manual thing with a Google Form, and I ended up first checking the feeds for 500+blogs and adding them directly to Feed WordPress (it seemed 30%+ got things not quite right finding the RSS feed for a tag/category). But the upside was — I got a glance at every participants blog!
I have a few lingering posts tagged ETMOOC a few of them the nerdy WordPress details of building the site, but it was fun to discover the 2013 version of a Mastodon #introduction as a video
It was such a rich time for networked learning and oh oh oh so innocent. I think if you described the net culture of 2023 to us 10 years ago we’d be shocked (or disbelieving).
So thanks ETMOOC for what it was, and Susan for keeping the spirit alive.
I’ll see your 10 and raise you another 10. See you in 2033.
Featured Image:
It’s that time of year, with a calendar reminder or not, to think of the span between these three days of February. Three days and many years now.
February 5, 1950–now 73 years ago–marks the date Alyce Herondorf married Morris Levine and set out on that life together that gave me, my sisters, my brothers, and everything I know to be. Because of them. The wed in an even numbered year that makes the mathematics of the passing time easy to calculate and hard to accept.
Three days from now will have mark the date of would be Mom’s 94th birthday. She would explode in laughter were a phone to work — we’d joke about time, and cookies, and memories of times together in Ocean City.
Today, Cori and I got to spend time together snowshoeing around our property, laughing, joking, and her enjoying my silly goofiness.
Mom and Dad would have so loved knowing Cori as a daughter. I can imagine those weekly phone calls where they would want to hear about all we are up to, them full of questions of our lives and always, lots of laughs and joy.
I can feel their togetherness in thinking about them and can feel them with us.
On these three days, and beyond. Forever.
Featured Image: Unpublished photo I took of my parents on their Florida porch, licensed CC BY (bye)
As it happens while looking for one thing (now forgotten) in my piles of web stuff, I stumbled across a directory of audio conversations I recorded in 2007. Just sitting there in a web directory.
It reminded me of one of the classic early Web2.0 Storytelling stuff I used to trade with Bryan Alexander— I Found A Digital Camera in the Woods (original forum post is gone, a copy is available).
I found a reference to this in a blog post written before a 2007 circum-Australia tour– I think it was material I hoped to use in presentations, but I am actually not too sure what I asked folks.
Here they are as a playlist:
Great to find these voices of colleagues from the past– now what the heck was I using it for?
Oh well, found audio is fun.
Featured Image:
FreshRSS 