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hmm. Seem's everyone is in to virtual worlds these days. Not only am I having some fun beta testing metaplace and have long wandered through Second Life, but now Lively (by Google) seems to really be taking off with its simple web-based interface. Pop into the Google Room or create and share other spaces and let your animated avatar start chatting.

Rashmi’s Vote Did Not Help by cogdogblog
posted 6 Sep ‘08, 10.58am MDT PST on flickr

Sigh.

I did not win the MacBook Air in the Slideshare Best Presentation Contest, and did not even get close with what only I thought was clever as The Last PowerPoint.

And how sad for Guy Kawasaki, I don’t think he ever received the important subliminal messages I left for him.

Even rashmi’s vote was not big enough to get me on the marquee.

Oh well, it was fun trying.

I blame my misfortune squarely on the bad mojo in PowerPoint. It might be the last time I use it myself..

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Custom Bb Mug by cogdogblog
posted 6 Sep ‘08, 10.58am MDT PST on flickr

Don’t settle for the swag they choose for you; make your own with the Mug Generator:
www.metasolutions.us/mug/

More generator fun. Must stop. Someone pull my plug.

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Are You Talking To Me? by cogdogblog
posted 6 Sep ‘08, 9.49am MDT PST on flickr

Next time you need a good nom de plume, try the Mob Name Generator. Tell them Shakes Pretiili sent you.

Yes, I am all over the Generator Blog a nearly infinite list of fun little things to do on the web that create things dynamically.

Next up… maybe.. the Chinese movie generator, the Swedish Furniture Name, or next time some asks you for a reference, spit out something with the Endorsement Generator.

Besides the silly stuff, which of course is very important here at CogDogBlog, I found a link to PhotoSoup which creates a word finder puzzle generated by pairs of tags in flickr… very cool indeed:

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.

I just made one based on my flickr account- it creates a word puzzle based on my own tags with images from other flickr users who deploy the same tags:

But wait! There is more! You can generate embed code to put a PhotoSoup puzzle in any web page. The size is pretty large, so I put in on a wikispaces site as a demo:

http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/PhotoSoup

and even cooler is that every time it loads (I think) you get a different puzzle.

Its a good day when you start having fun looking at silly things and then fall into sweet serendipity land of finding neat sites like PhotoSoup.

Just don’t mess around with Mr Petrilli. I warned ya.

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No Excuse Not To Blog by cogdogblog
posted 6 Sep ‘08, 9.49am MDT PST on flickr

Holy Snapping Duck Do! I just noticed I have not updated this since the long board was invented… You would not believe how terribly tardy the Victorian internet can be. Apologies to my regular readers! Even the little blue ones!.

I am lost in a sea of pseudo-olde-english with responding to fanmail, hoping you haven’t found other blogs, just generally being asleep, dreaming and chancing to various lawyers I met recently, and my day is passing in a blur from the first cockadoodledoo from the rooster to I run out of alcohol. I am not being a whinging Pom or anything. but who cares.

I declare solemnly I will make more of an effort to blog more often until the nice men in the white coats come back. You wanna test me? Cats if you don’t…

Created with the fun “Lazy Bloggers Post Generator”
http://www.aussiebloggers.com.au/blogpost.html

Wow, it would be easy to do a blog post a day…

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Explore the National archives in a very interactive way of exploring images- the site then pulls an array o related content, and individuals can create their own collections and pathways through the vast materials.

Nabil Fahmy, Ambassador of the Arab Republic of Egypt to the United States

A short week here at Penn State with the Labor Day holiday, but of course quite busy. The beginning of the semester crunch stops for no end-of-summer holiday.

Cole Camplese, ETS director, lives on a cloud - that is, cloud computing. Google’s Chrome open source browser project has Cole interested due to the potential is holds for cloud computing in education.

Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, has two interesting posts in the Educational Gaming Commons. The first is on browser-based gaming, which is exactly what it sounds - games played off an Internet browser. He weighs the pedagogical possibilities and links to a great article about browser games.

Brett also talks about a new wiki on Virtual Worlds that is a treasure trove of information on these worlds.

Jeff Swain, ETS instructional designer, posted the latest ANGELshorts to the ANGEL Community Hub. This one is titled Five Things Instructors Should Know about Downloading All Drop Box Submissions. If you are not familiar with ANGELshorts, they are very handy brief guides to doing specific actions on ANGEL, and are produced by Jeff and Mary Janzen, ETS writer/editor.

Allan Gyorke, ETS education technology manager, goes Zen on us this week. More specifically, he talks about when things and people take on roles other than what they are “supposed” to do.

Looking for training? ITS Training Services just issued the following announcement:

Technology workshops and overviews now open for registration

Registration is open for the technology workshops and overviews offered by Information Technology Services this fall.

Registration is open for the technology workshops and overviews offered by Information Technology Services this fall. This semester, students, faculty, and staff at all Penn State campuses can take advantage of live or recorded sessions that are being offered online through Adobe Connect meeting software. Popular overview and hands-on topics include Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Data Warehouse, ANGEL, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, podcasting, cascading style sheets, and many more. Visit the Web site for details on all available training options or to register for training at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

That’s it for this week’s BuzzLion.

Makes it easy to do an OLE cut-and-paste Flickr photos to your blog (ie: WordPress using TinyMCE, Blogger) and give the proper attribution

A network of concurring genes and proteins extends through the scientific literature touching on phenotypes, pathologies and gene function. iHOP provides this network as a natural way of accessing millions of PubMed abstracts. By using genes and proteins as hyperlinks between sentences and abstracts, the information in PubMed can be converted into one navigable resource, bringing all advantages of the internet to scientific literature research. Terms of Use iHOP was developed and created by Robert Hoffmann and is a free service from the academic domain, licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Hopefully you will find that iHOP makes things possible which would not be without it. iHOP is free of charge, thus its continuity will depend on the community it was created for.

In WikiGenes (http://www.wikigenes.org/), authorship tracking technology enables users to directly identify the source of every word. This was not possible in first generation wikis, although authorship is essential to acknowledge contributors and to appraise the reliability of information. On the basis of clear authorship attribution, users can rate each other, and a self-regulating reputation system can be implemented. This is useful to address quality maintenance and the problem of editing conflicts, which used to depend on slow and theoretically refutable top-down decisions. To facilitate contribution and unambiguous use of scientific language, WikiGenes enables editing of articles in their final layout and citation of scientific terminology and references through integrated database and ontology lookups. All contributions to WikiGenes will be open access.

WikiGenes is the first wiki system to combine the collaborative and largely altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship. In view of the extraordinary success of Wikipedia there remains no doubt about the potential of collaborative publishing, yet its adoption in science has been limited. Here I discuss a dynamic collaborative knowledge base for the life sciences that provides authors with due credit and that can evolve via continual revision and traditional peer review into a rigorous scientific tool.

WikiGenes is the first wiki system to combine the collaborative and largely altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship. In view of the extraordinary success of Wikipedia there remains no doubt about the potential of collaborative publishing, yet its adoption in science has been limited. Here I discuss a dynamic collaborative knowledge base for the life sciences that provides authors with due credit and that can evolve via continual revision and traditional peer review into a rigorous scientific tool.

In this resource kit, community organisations can find helpful online guidance, ideas and tools for developing and facilitating e-learning in communities and regions. The kit includes suggestions and options on the why and how of e-learning. You'll find guidance on low cost tools and technologies, as well as ideas and stories to help you get started.

One of our NMC Virtual Worlds projects this year was construction of the virtual campus for the University of the Pacific which included a mixture of replication of campus structures, such as Burns Tower, and creation of new spaces which only exist on the virtual campus.

Since the ribbons were cut May 7, 2008, faculty and staff at the University have been busy using the space and developing new applications for therr virtual learning space.

They are inviting you to learn more about their Second Life campus and how it has already been put to use in this new machinima video:

Some things of interest include their learning spaces high above Burns Tower, the “Sky Labs” where faculty and classes meet in flexible designed spaces, a space for sharing “freebies” a gallery of student created content, and a lab where faculty are developing custom learning applications.

In the video, we learn from Volleychick Boa about how Second Life is being used for Speech Critique where students stream their webcam into Second Life for review by their faculty, how the debate teams are conducting activities in world, a nifty survival experience (a crashed plane! snow!) for a management class, and the development of a student club area, just to name a few examples.

To visit this exemplary campus in Second Life, check out the University of the Pacific at http://slurl.com/secondlife/U%20Pacific/166/141/22

During the summer of 2008, NMC Campus was pleased to have hosted the twice weekly performance of CARP’s (Cybernetic Art Research Project) Second Life interpretation of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. As a follow up to the “final brick” show in late August, Second Life video virtuoso Gary Hazlitt has been hard at work creating a full 43 minute video of the performance.

As a sneak preview, Gary has published his own video interpretation of The Wall V-2, and ironically, has placed it to a soundtrack of a live Pink Floyd performance of Comfortable Numb, a song not used in the show!

Read more about Gary’s work on this and enjoy this sampler:

Look here soon for the release of the final video.

During the summer of 2008, NMC Campus was pleased to have hosted the twice weekly performance of CARP’s (Cybernetic Art Research Project) Second Life interpretation of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. As a follow up to the “final brick” show in late August, Second Life video virtuoso Gary Hazlitt has been hard at work creating a full 43 minute video of the performance.

As a sneak preview, Gary has published his own video interpretation of The Wall V-2, and ironically, has placed it to a soundtrack of a live Pink Floyd performance of Comfortable Numb, a song not used in the show!

Read more about Gary’s work on this and enjoy this sampler:

Look here soon for the release of the final video.

Cat and Mouse Tale of Textbook Piracy Continues

Has anyone heard of textbook piracy here at Penn State?