Writer SPLOT: Escape from the WordPress Theme

It’s a work in progress, but check out this version of the TRU Writer SPLOT that is no longer tied to the original’s Radcliffe theme (hit the write menu item to try it). All SPLOTs are … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

SPLOTbox With More Configurable Media Variety

As alluded to last week, some expansions have come to the SPLOTbox media collector theme for WordPress. It made sense to add support for image-type media, making the SPLOTbox perhaps a bit broader … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Never Dad-less

There’s no preparation I had as a kid for thinking of a Father’s Day without Dad around, prepping his barbecue for grilled steak even on his own day. I had no world without thinking of … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Chasing the Course Arc: Storied Workshop for Kenyon College

After engaging with a group of high energy faculty/staff at Kenyon College last week, the answer for the Campbell Consortium may just be… “maybe”. The question was set up as Seeki… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

More Ways to Plug Into SPLOTbox

In a media making workshop I ran last week (overdue for the blog queue), I found it both reassuring to see how participants took to sharing media created in a TRU Collector SPLOT powered site and a… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

@ontarioextend Domain Camp Preview

Even while preparation falls into place, it was due to to put out a promo video for another round of Ontario Extend Domain Camp. In the first year of the project, Domain of One’s Own was a co… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Two Great WordPress Taxonomies That Link Great Together

Leave it to diabetic to use a sugary metaphor to a candy slogan. Okay, WordPress, you have these two ways to organize posts, Tags and Categories (yes, there are more than “uncategorized”… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Space for More Spaces

It’s rather telling that my search for “information abundance” is dominated by results with “Information Overload” in the title. This was my effort to find an opening … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

At the Arts Gala: Making Stories with Sound

(Wow, is there ever a backlog of overdue blog posts. I’m giving myself demerits for tardiness). Maybe my favorite media thing to teach is audio editing, because it’s typically fat from … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Hello, World

It’s been a while, WordPress blog. Been busy! That’s all to say now, more later. Just circling back to the first, long ago deleted, post- some make it harder than it should be. Hello. F… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Every Open Tab a Curiosity Beckons

I’ve mentioned it more than once here, but maybe the best thing I have done to put some serendipity wonder into the daily web browsing experience is installing the Library of Congress Free to… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Tools of Dad

I do not need any social media reminder service to tell me who’s birthday is today; May 2 is always etched with being my Dad’s birthday. Today he would have been 93, but alas his odomet… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Vestigial Features: On Splotology and Phylogeny

(with some apologies to Stephen Jay Gould) SPLOTs evolve? Well yes. I’m starting some new work with Daniel Villar-Onrubia at Coventry, where they seem to have taken a shine to SPLOTs. It was … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Seeking Answers: Can a Narrative Tie a Course Together?

This idea has been bouncing in my head for way too long, it’s time to get some help chasing down an answer. And I would be fine if it’s not the one I seek. I have been contacted by a qu… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

In the SPLOT Footnotes it says 1. you can add your own features

I’d say a good tool is one you do not have to wait for MasterCraftCompanyInc to make a feature for you, when there are pathways to hone it yourself. This follows up somewhat to my ode to Word… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Zoom! Extending The SPLOTbox Media Capability

Sometimes a SPLOT just needs a little more kick. Well maybe, but I do have a working project with an interest in using the SPLOTbox in a case where the media is from much lesser known site on the o… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Glitch-a-SPLOT

I cannot say I have the itch to glitch, but have always dug the kinds of things my colleague John Johnston does with adding glitch effects to digital stuff. But one link leads to another, and an id… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Big Fish / Small Search Pond

Oh stats. I don’t typically look at the WordPress admin dashboard site stats, but it’s there. Sometimes a funny item pops out of the “top searches” display. What the heck wa… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

One Day / Two Online Presentations

Of all days, yesterday, happened as a convergence of doing presentations at two different conferences. Fortunately, I was able to do all from the comfort of home as they were online ones. In my lat… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

As in Enabling the Unanticipated

Like what the world needs is Yet Another Blog Post Defining Openness… (ir in my case, another post about SPLOTs masquerading as another topic?). But the wisps of this have been flitting aroun… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Permanent Stay

You can now tag me #AlmostCanadian. About 10 months since crossing the fenceless, welcoming border into Canada to live with, love, and marry Cori, the government has said I can stay. Yesterday, a t… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Data Obfuscation and Facial Recognition Faceoff: Possible #Netnarr Field Guide Topics

Do the assignments you assign? I blabbed about this recently for the Ontario Extend mOOC I was facilitating, so it’s also appropriate for the Networked Narratives course I co-teach with Mia Z… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Who Ya Calling a Grader?

There’s a lot of twitter talk (don’t ask me to define “a lot”) of #Ungrading or as the Inside Higher Education article being batted around today calls it When Grading Less i… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Springtime Answers!

A question or even several of them, surreptitiously, slyly sent my way via a blog post. Even cleverly using my own photo as a featured image. “Well played, my friend.” was my comment in… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Silly Media Offered at 24th TCC Conference Teaser Session

Yesterday I had the fun opportunity to talk about attributed and possibly [semi] serious use of the kinds of media people see/share all the time. This session was a free pre-conference teaser for t… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Openness, Not Just Licenses, Can Take You There

I just popped a CD of blues music into the player. How it got here is a story with being in the mix of other True Stories of Sharing. Why? Well, that’s my own photo printed on the back cover.… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Digital + _______ Talk at University of Regina

With the exception of online events, my conference presenting days are behind, me. So it was rewarding to get an invitation to do a session at the University of Regina for ECS 100 (Education Core S… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

I’m Did the Extend mOOC Work We Ask of Participants

Among the great lessons I got from my mentor Barbara Ganley was the idea of doing the same assignments assigned to, and along side, your students. In teaching writing at Middlebury College, she com… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Coloring Black & White Photos with AI– Bringing to Life, or?

Old black and white photos- do they look old just because the lack the colors most of us see day to day? We look back at them from a world full of colors, but so did the original photographer. Can … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

WordPress Multisite – fixing an error I bet I am the only one to have baked

I am going to say I have to just fixed maybe one of the most obscure problems on a WordPress site, I can almost guarantee you will never have yo do this. I write here only for my own record (okay a… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Blogging on a Gutenburger Diet

There’s not much middle ground on people feel about the changes wrought to WordPress 5 with the Gutenberg Editor. It’s endless rabbit/duck season arguments. My own modification of the R… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

The Daily Blank Theme can be… less than Daily

Not everyone is up to running a daily _________ kind of site (like the original DS106 Daily Create). It’s a tough pace! So now you can make it Every Other Day or heck, even Weekly. This was o… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

The Slimy Sideshow of Public Domain

Among a list of topics in our field that I am least interested in is the seemingly endless bickering about one Creative Commons license versus another. It’s more that the details of licenses … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Metronome of Diabetic Life

The period, in terms of the reciprocal of frequency, is 3 days. Every 3 days comes a beep from the box hanging on my belt. It actually looks like one of those antique pager devices. That’s th… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

The Handy Person’s Guide to Manual SPLOT Updating

You’re tooling along in your Model T SPLOT on the Internet Superhighway, and the tire goes flat, needing an update. Are you gonna wait for a tow truck, a helpful stranger to stop and help, or… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Easy IndieWeb Login with WP-Dimension Theme

Those big time motivational speakers who talk about starting to learn with a problem you want to solve have never really accounted for serendipitous learning. Is everything as simple as problem -&g… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

The Little Things

Big Data. Massive courses. Large scale. Yawn, I’ll take the other end of the graph. Like from this post, recounting how a DS106 Daily Create honoring an 1990s woman bronco rider named Bonnie … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

1-2-3 Annotating the Intent

This seems by my time to working on projects using web annotating. As noted early, we are planning more extensive use of hypothes.is in netnarr but the really Big Show is taking off this week, the … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Who is Belle North?

Yet again a random click leads down an internet rabbit tunnel. Or a dead end. I meant to do another blog post, and was rummaging through the public domain images the Library of Congress Free to Use… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Between the 5th and the 8th (and beyond)

This week of February was always handy for remembering to send cards or do phone calls to my parents. I knew the 5th and the 8th marked their anniversary and Mom’s birthday (often I’d g… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

We’re in the Store!

This was way overdue for our millions of fans, but this podcast is finally available in the iTunes Podcast Store…. | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Slowing Down a Daily _____ Site

It can take a lot of [insane?] effort to publish something like the DS106 Daily Create every day, but there seems to be enough hands on the wheel to do it daily. I’m not sure where or who did… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Got Room For Story in that Metadata Schema?

I don’t dislike metadata at all. It does wonderful things to organize heaps of media, content. But it sometimes leaving me… cold. A tweet from Bryan Alexander got this mind clicking. It… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Duct Taping A Hypothes.is RSS Feed Widget

Do you remember the scene of Web Apocalypse Not Now where Lieutenant Colonel Bill Feedmore boasts, “I love the smell of an RSS feed in the morning!” I hope not. But tinkering with RSS n… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Can You PechaImprov the Topic of this post?

I present a wee test for you, kind, gentle savvy reader. Have a run through these 10 random images, and see if you can guess the topic of this post (no scrolling, eh?) How did you do? When I tested… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

#netnarr Select, Click, ROT Magic

We have some fun in Networked Narratives with coded messages using rot13. Just look at the Daily Digital Alchemy 243: An encoded challenge today, what the ***** is “Pna lbh pbairefr va EBG13?… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Dogfooding My Own WordPress Theme

The first HTML5Up template I turned into a WordPress Theme was WP-Dimension. The great irony was that I made use of the original static HTML theme on my own domain at cog.dog, but never went back t… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

65 Years Later: No Cake, David

In its impeccable reminding, my calendar does not have to worry end up being the butt of You Had One Job. Yesterday, was the reminder that it would have been my brother David’s 67th birthday.… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago