October was Connected Educator’s Month. (Soapbox moment: I can’t wait until we can get rid of these silly “awareness months.” Okay, I’m done). I’ve been on Twitter for almost three years and I was curious about what engagement actually looked like for a given period of time. So, I decided to do a little experiment.

The Data

I went through all of the interactions and put them into a Google spreadsheet to visualize the data a little bit.

For the mentions, I decided to subtract my reported (via email) RT’s from my mentions count in order to get a more accurate number. I used two different means to get these numbers, so they’re probably double counted.

I went into this expecting that articles and blog posts would draw the highest level of engagement on Twitter. I was really surprised to see that my offhand comments were the most interacted-with.

And I think part of my surprise in the results is because I didn’t set up an easy way (at the beginning) to track the interactions (specifically, Mentions) for each individual tweet. All I measured was the number of times a particular tweet was RT’d or favorited, which isn’t really interacting at all…at least not in the traditional sense.

The Deep Stuff

Twitter is a funny machine…it allows people from across the world to interact with one another, but not under the obligation of actually interacting with them. I had no idea how many times particular tweets were retweeted by followers. So, while they were resonating with something I had said or shared, I wasn’t aware of that interaction. So, the question going through my mind right now is:

“Is it my fault for not interacting and engaging a follower, or their fault for not reaching out and engaging with me?”

I decided to create a really official sounding, yet totally made up, metric for my engagement in October. I’m calling it the Engagement Quotient. (Sounds good, right?) I got this by dividing the number of Mentions by my total Tweets for the time period.

To get this, I wanted to know what percentage of my Tweets encouraged some kind of direct response from someone as a Mention.

Out of 689 tweets in October, I received 542 mentions, giving me an EQ score of 79%.

In reality, this means absolutely nothing. But, to me, it means that something I’m doing is engaging my PLN. And that means I’m contributing to the discussion in some way, which makes me feel good about being a connected person/educator/male/whatever.

In the future, I want to have some better goals set up from day one. A lot of this came toward the end of the month as I thought about what it means to be engaged. So, while it is mildly scientific in nature (I had tables and charts), it could have been more so. Maybe I’ll do it again in a few months and see if it changes based on season. I’m not sure.

If you want to see my data, you can check out the spreadsheet here.

Wired business had an article come out earlier this month about a small school in Mexico that saw huge gains in learning because of some computers put in the classroom. If you haven’t seen it, you can read it here.

Because Wired is wildly popular and because education is kind of a hot topic right now, this article has been making some waves. Even in the office, it made its rounds as a fantastic idea that schools are behind on. The teacher in me welled up and wrote a [STRIKEOUT:preachy] soapboxy email to the group passing it, and I figured I would post it here as well.

I’d read this article earlier this week. It’s a fantastic, heartwarming story, but I do want to make one comment (this is the teacher in me talking now)…

Gupta downplays the role of the teacher. While on the surface, this looks appealing for a lot of reasons. Students can explore on their own without the dictator at the front of the room. They can work collaboratively, problem solving and self-democratizing. This is all great, but having a teacher is still important (and that’s not because I’m a teacher at heart). All of this can be done, but the role of the teacher is to provide context for the content. Anyone can get online and look up facts about the moon, DNA, or the French Revolution. What is missing is a facilitator providing context to the flow of information we get from the Internet. There have been plenty of times students are learning the content, but then fall flat on their face when they try to explain it because there is no good way to put information into a box, nice and neat.

I saw my job in the classroom as being a content resource, yes. More importantly, I could ask the probing questions and listen critically to what students were saying back to me. I’m sure Correa was doing that in his classroom, but not brought out in the article. Consider the number of times you get up and talk to someone here who knows more than you do about a task you’re trying to accomplish. You can read StackOverflow and forums all day and still not be able to accomplish the task. It’s the same thing internships are set up to do. We don’t call each other teachers, but we all teach a little bit each day.

I’m not trying to rant against the article…it’s a fantastic story of success against really stacked odds. I’m glad to see stories like this getting press and some time in front of people who might never hear them, but I’m worried that the trend of downplaying the role of educators is going to continue.

Ok, I’m done soapboxing. Thanks for indulging me.

Yes, computers are great at finding information. But, it still takes the wisdom and experience of teachers to put that content into context, and that’s the valuable lesson here.

The eight weeks of remixing have kicked off for CEP811 at MSU. Right off the bat, our first task was to pick an edtech buzzword and use Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker (I think they should have called it “remixerator,” but that’s just me) to make a one-minute video explaining our buzzword.

How could I resist the opportunity to describe a MOOC? (I really just like saying the word “MOOC.” Admit it. You do too.)

Here’s my final remix:

I’d never used Popcorn before and it actually took me a good while to get used to it. I’ve done a lot of video editing, so it was hard for me to not treat it like a full-blown video editor. I actually started this on Tuesday and then had to walk away for a little while to try and clear my head before I finished.

I think what I like the most is being able to search for content as well as link to content right in the media bin. It’s helpful to be able to paste a link and have the photo or GIF pop right in. I also like that links are included in the live project for attribution. It makes the whole curation process much simpler because I don’t have to try and keep track of every source in a separate space. I really tried to come up with metaphors for some of these ideas, but being limited to Creative Commons materials (and I’m not complaining) makes it hard to do sometimes.

I couldn’t help but editorialize a little bit at the end. MOOCs aren’t that hard to understand: they’re super-massive classes taught by a professor (usually using traditional means) to students in an LMS. There is little creativity and little freedom to really use the web. Essentially, they’re not doing a whole lot of innovative work, and now, some are making a ton of money off of their platforms.

Of course, the big conflict is that universities also want to make money off of these online courses. So, already, we have a conflict of interests that doesn’t really do anything to help students have a better online learning experience.

It may be summed up best by Larry Cuban in a recent Washington Post article:

Given the history of universities and colleges in the United States, chances are that many higher education institutions (non-elite and community colleges) will continue to retrofit and transform MOOCs into credit-bearing courses that will yield revenue. MOOCs will not revolutionize higher education.

Are MOOCs here to stay? I’m not putting my money on it.

I drive a really long way to work twice week.

I love what I do every day, which is why I choose to drive. To entertain myself I listen to a lot of podcasts. Radiolab, WireTap, and This American Life are favorites on the drive.

When I plugged the iPod into the stereo yesterday morning, it jumped to my entire song list at “A,” and just started playing songs in order. Rather than stopping and going right to a podcast, I decided to let it play for a while. I listened to songs Friday morning that I didn’t even realize were in my library (digital music overload, anyone?). It was pretty enjoyable and I heard some great music that I hadn’t listened to since at least high school.

That being said, I switched away after a while because of how disjoined everything felt. Have you ever listened to an album from start to finish without interruption? If you haven’t you really should. If a band is really thinking about their music, an album has a flow and a continuity that adds to the overall experience of their music. I found myself anticipating the next song on the album only to be disappointed (and sometimes even surprised) by the change of track.

It got me thinking about learning. Your class has a flow…a continuity that helps students travel through the content. Far too often as a teacher I heard, “Why is this important?” or, “When will this even matter?” In other words, I wasn’t doing a great job at helping to mold the entire experience of science around the individual parts. I didn’t have good segues or transitions at times. Other times, I jumped from one topic to another without any prelude, much like playing through your library alphabetically.

Think about how you’re interacting with your students. How do you transition? How are you painting the story of your content? Why should they anticipate the next step or reflect on where they just came from? Think about teaching as a story.

If you’re looking for a fantastic album to listen to start to finish, consider Bon Iver as a place to start.

I made some quick additions this afternoon to my GitHub repo for this project, which I’ve renamed to PySky. I had to do some research on the Pyephem license before I packaged it with my code. It turns out it’s available to distribute freely with other software as long as I provide my source, so now, it’s packaged with my simple python script.

Update 9:08 PM 10/16/13

Looks like I wrote the post too soon. I was able to spend some time tonight working on the script after my wife went to bed and I was able to get both of my original problems solved. The updated script is posted on GitHub.

I was able to find a nifty little piece of code to help me manage responses to prompts so my code is a little cleaner. I don’t have to have as many conditionals (if, elif, else) in my functions anymore, which makes everything look a little bit nicer.

As far as my coding, I’m working on a couple things:

1. [STRIKEOUT:Users will be able to set their location, rather than having it hardcoded to South Bend (which isn’t useful at all).]
2. [STRIKEOUT:The program needs to be able to save the location data for all lookups. I think a global variable is a good way to do this, but I need to learn more.]

Things have been crazy lately, so I haven’t touched this in a while. I’m still also working on getting the hardware I need to get my Raspberry Pi up and running. The only video-out it has is an HDMI port. I don’t have a monitor that can take HDMI, and I’m having a hard time tracking an HDMI-to-VGA adapter down. I might need to turn to Amazon for this one.

BUT, I did get another crucial piece of hardware for this little jaunt that I’m very excited about.

Of course, it happened to come on the cloudiest day of the month so far. I’ll post more pictures of the scope in a later post.

I worked a little bit tonight on my code while Lindsey got to bed early while the baby napped. I added a menu at the beginning of the program which prompts the user to select either Stars or Planets. Then, they can put their choice in.

This is a short-term implementation for a few of reasons:

1. For users without the PyEphem library, I need to see if I can push a download or package the data somehow.
2. I don’t want to have a ton of menus to go through
3. The star library is pretty small. It’s good enough now, but I need to find another one to tap into.
4. The code is “chunky.” I want to go through and streamline when I’m more awake.

I keep thinking about how much more I’m learning working on this project as opposed to when I tried to learn Python using arbitrary lessons. It’s really driving home the idea of interest-based learning and it’s not something I’m going to forget any time soon.

If you want to see and try the new code, you can fork it on GitHub.

I’ve been dabbling a little bit every day with this project and I’ve made some big changes since day 1.

First, with some help from Brandon Rhodes on StackOverflow, I got the function to print the altitude/azmiuth data for a planet when you run the script. This is still hardcoded for South Bend, but that’s where I live, so it makes sense. Down the line, I’ll make this a variable a user can use to set their locality.

Next, I found a python module to pull the current date and time when requesting the planet’s location. Since the Earth moved, it didn’t make sense to display the position based on date alone. Now, it will read that information from the computer and give more accurate results. Because I did this during the day, I used the sun as my object so I could check it’s position in my program vs other databases and calculators online. And this is where my brain started to hurt.

If you’re not familiar with astronomy (and I’m still learning) you can display position in a few different ways. The easiest (most popular?) way to describe position is using altitude and azimuth coordinates. The altitude is the angle of the object above the horizon and the azimuth is it’s angular distance around the horizon. So, if it’s position is 30^o, 270^o, it would be 30 degrees above the horizon looking due west.

You can also use celestial coordinates, right ascension and declination. RA is the angular distance from the celestial equator. In other words, if you stand on the equator and look up, you’re looking at RA = 0. The declination, on the other hand, is the direction north or south of the celestial plane. To me, this is much harder to conceptualize in my brain, which is why I prefer alt/az descriptors.

So, back to the code. I got it to print alt/az data, which was awesome. So, to make sure it was working correctly, I checked it against some other tools, and that’s when I ran into problems.

So, I went back to the code and changed it to print out the RA/Dec instead of alt/az to see what would happen.

Which was better.

I need to find some way to improve my alt/az calculations. I don’t know if it’s my location data or if there need to be adjustments to conversions, but I’m getting funny answers. For now, I’ll keep it in RA/Dec because the entire point of this program down the line is to pass this data to a telescope, so it doesn’t matter which one is easier for the user to look at. We’ll see.

If you want to see the current code, here’s the current dev code base. If you’re a python coder, feel free to fork and contribute.

This is kind of a long story, but stick with me, because I’m excited about it.

Rising Action

I’ve always enjoyed astronomy, looking at the stars and planets, and more recently, trying to take pictures of them in my back yard.

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I’m planning on buying a telescope in the near future, and part of that is going to include a simple motor to make sure I can aim it accurately and efficiently.

I’m also starting a master’s class in a couple weeks at MSU which is focusing on the maker culture idea and its implications in the classroom. Rather than purchasing a textbook for the course, we’ve been asked to buy a Raspberry Pi, Makey Makey, Squishy Circuits Kit, or a LittleBits kit.

And that’s when I had my stroke of insight. (I won’t be presumptuous and say genius. Yet.)

My project this fall is going to be going back and actually learning Python to create a program on the Raspberry Pi which can be used to control my telescope.

After doing some searching, I even found a Python library, PyEphem, which is a database of astronomical data put together (in part) by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Those are the guys that landed Curiosity on Mars. They know what they’re doing.

I know this is going to be a crazy six weeks of learning, working, and applying that to the classroom. While working full time. And raising my daughter.

Bring it on.

It was one of those days, and I couldn’t pass this one up.

The Headless ds106 is in full swing, and this week is Design Week. I love design work because it makes me think hard about how to communicate ideas both subtly and artfully. You can see some of my design work from the Twilight Zone theme this past summer.

Earlier today, Rochelle Lockridge posted an article in which someone (a colleague?) created an animated GIF for a presentation they were doing for work. This animation is great (and probably beyond my own GIMP chops) and it was a cool story to see them work through the struggle to learn GIMP to produce the image.

Later, Alan posted this tweet:

This is where the shark jumps #ds106 00 Participant in @Rockylou22 3M Salon applying GIFs to science animation http://t.co/Z5DO2N5k3W

—Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 2, 2013

And BOOM. Sharks? Complicated animated GIFs of technical thingywhosits? I got to work.

I give you: “Make the shark jump you.”

In ds106, we don’t jump the shark. That bad boy jumps us.

Go make art.

Since 2011, the online resource of thousands of educational videos has been heralded as the “savior of education” and a model for flipped classrooms (I’m going to bite my tongue on this one), and now, the go-to place for “personalized learning.” There’s a whole lot of bad in here for a lot of different reasons. But, the newest piece, the idea of personalized learning delivered by Khan Academy, is dangerous.

How do you recognize an LMS? This is what I came up with:

• An LMS reports data, people reflect.
• An LMS flags poor performance, people grow through engaging members of the community
• An LMS hosts and organizes learning content, people build their content as they learn
• An LMS keeps track of grades, people couldn’t care less about grades when they’re engaged.

Remember, an LMS is a machine, nothing more, nothing less. It will only give what you put into it.

Now, back to my question. Khan Academy.

“Personalized learning” has popped up in KA promotional materials lately. (It is the phrase you use in a conference proposal to make sure it’s picked up.) The problem is that the personalized learning offered by most third party groups isn’t personalized at all. It’s actually randomized degree of difficulty. In other words, it’s a giant, adaptive test bank that feigns its way into schools under the guise of personalization. Students are still stuck in the system. They are still forced through the steps and procedures. They have no choice in how to demonstrate their learning other than the built in, old fashioned assessments. Personalization is being eroded because either companies are really good at sales and marketing, or we’re all looking for the wrong things.

And this is why Khan Academy is nothing more than a big, fancy LMS. While powerful and extremely helpful, every LMS out there locks you into their system. If you have students, assignments, announcements, documents, and assessments poured into one place, it becomes very difficult to see any reason to step away from that construct. Sure, they make the teachers life easier, but once you’re in, it’s hard to get out (mostly because of time constraints, not necessarily procedures to switch platforms).

The big difference between “traditional” systems is that the teacher was in control of the content. Not so with Khan Academy, and this is why it’s more dangerous than the others. Teachers and schools are diving into the system because of the helpful data and videos, but at the same time, they’re unwittingly sacrificing any option for a student to choose to do something different.

We’re asking the wrong questions when it comes to evaluating learning tools for our students.

While enticing, we should not be jumping toward anything that has content baked into the system. It becomes too easy to begin relying on that content as the backbone of your course, whether you “mean” to or not. Good intentions don’t count when students’ interests are sacrificed for the sake of simplicity.

What are you really using the LMS for? Too often, a LMS is a one-way communication tool with students simply uploading materials to turn in for grades. What limitations are place on them when it comes to choosing their learning opportunities? What options do students have to ask insightful questions and then find resources to report those out? What kind of content can be brought into the system to be used as a resource by anyone else in that system?

Ask yourself when you plan on allowing students to truly direct their own learning. If you can’t come up with a reasonable answer, ask yourself “why not?”

This summer, I survived the ds106zone. There was a creative blitz that I’ve been wanting to carry through the fall. But life (literally) has come into my life, and I haven’t been able to carry the momentum.

Right now, the ds106 community is tracking through a self-inflicted “headless” course. No professor, no grades, no expectations. It’s pretty fun to watch the flow coming through Twitter, and I wanted to take a few minutes today to participate in the visual work they’re doing.

The assignment was a photoblitz: 15 minutes of photography around certain themes. I was able to do about 10 minutes here at my desk during lunch (not counting the writeup). In fact, I didn’t even stand up. It was all done from my chair on my phone, because that’s all I had with me. My five photos are below.

You can see other photoblitz submissions on Flickr.

This post has been on the back burner for a long time, but I finally have a little time to sit down and finish it.

I use Chrome exclusively. There are a few little hiccups (like Java plugins not running, but really, in the age of HTML5, who uses Java plugins? Get with it, people.) but for the most part, Chrome is the most reliable and most customizable browser available.

One thing I really struggled with was having multiple Google accounts. I have my personal account, but I also had one for work. If you’re in a GAFE school, you know what I’m talking about. It really drove me nuts when I would click on a document link only to have it open in the wrong account.

I’ve discovered a really interesting little tidbit about Chrome that has changed my life forever. Chrome does this neat thing called “sandboxing.” Essentially, what happens in one tab doesn’t affect what happens in another. The same is true for one Chrome window in relation to another. This is the key.

So, to manage your Google life like a boss, you need to do a couple things. First, go into your Chrome settings.

Now, find the part on the page that says Users.

Then, click on Add new user. Once you name the user (and choose a sweet avatar) you’ll get a sign in page.

This sign in page is where you choose which account you want to use for this particular user. So, I have a personal user as well as a work user. Each user is linked to that specific Google account. So, I don’t have to deal with the annoying “multiple sign in” option any more.

The other awesome thing about this method is that all of your apps and extensions are kept separate (which makes sense, because they’re linked to accounts). I can have extensions associated with my personal Google account (RSS reader, calendar, etc) as well as extensions for my work account. The same is true for passwords, forms…you name it.

If you’re a Chrome user, this is definitely the most efficient I’ve ever been with the web. I do have to keep two windows open at times, but the amount of time that is saved from not having to sign in and out of accounts has been well worth a slightly more cluttered desktop.

Do you have any other Chrome power user tips? Leave them in the comments.

Today is the last day of our family of two. This weekend, my daughter will be born.

My wife is 39 weeks pregnant today. We’ve been busily preparing our home for the arrival of our daughter, who happens to be the first girl born in either family since Lindsey. We’ve been blessed with support from our families and we wouldn’t have been able to do nearly as much as we have in the time we were given.

How do I know my daughter will be born today? Because if Lindsey doesn’t go into labor by tonight, we will go to the hospital and be induced.

I’m in a weird place right now. This was not the plan. Everything has gone so well over the last 39 weeks, it feels almost like we’re dropping the ball at the goal line.

There are mental positives and negatives to this whole arrangement. Pro: I don’t have to anticipate waking up in the middle of the night to my wife’s contractions. Con: I have to think about the induction and possible cascading effects all day. It’s hard not to think about the negative impacts of medically inducing labor when you’re staring it in the face.

I trust our doctor. I trust his judgement and wisdom. I trust his staff, who alerted us to the fact that Lindsey’s amniotic fluid is lower than it should be. But I also trust that God has arranged all of our meetings, relationships, and circumstances with our best interests in mind. While this isn’t the path we were hoping to take, it doesn’t matter what we had in mind. All that matters is the fact that Lindsey delivers the baby safely, and that we can all come home together.

We’ve been prepared and we’ll continue to be equipped. We’re ready for two to become three.

I used to write a lot. It wrote about day-to-day. I wrote about wins and losses, living, learning, and people. I haven’t written that way in a long time. I want to change that.

I wrote, what seems like ages ago, about a shift in my career. I left the classroom. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, and now, six months later, I’m still glad I took the risk. Honestly, until last March, I hadn’t ever considered what it would be like to not be a teacher. I went into college having my major declared. I stuck with the program, even though I wanted to quit in my third year. And I can’t even begin to explain how glad I am to have stayed with it for (nearly) four years after graduating.

I do have to admit that I’m still struggling with being part of the 50%. I had my reasons, as I’m sure everyone else does. But, it’s still hard to answer the question, or respond to the looks when I tell people I left teaching. Interesting side note: this fall was the first time in 25 years or so (including my own schooling) in which I didn’t experience a first day of school. It is definitely strange.

But, even in absentia, I can still experience students.

I bought a house nearly a year ago. We had overlooked it mainly because it looked pretty ugly on the inside. Not gonna lie. The yard is awesome though. We’ve got a full acre of land, with half of it fenced in the back. (I feel completely comfortable saying that a dog is in our future sometime.)

We moved in planning on doing some remodeling at some point. Mostly, because of the kitchen.

And then, we got another incredible piece of news.

My life had been inexplicably changed with the sound of my daughter’s heart beating strong and resolute. We had some serious work to do. What ensued was a display of love, support, and encouragement from family and friends as my wife and I worked hard to make sure our home would be ready for little _____ (sorry!) when she arrives any time now. It started with the kitchen and quickly spilled out into our dining room. (There are far too many pictures to post here, so feel free to browse through the project on Flickr.)

I haven’t been around for a while. I’m not writing in an effort to explain my absence or even to get more likes, props, kudos, or back-slaps for the blessings I’ve been given this year. I’m writing because of the support I’ve felt, along with friends and family physically here, from you. The notes on Twitter, the blog comments, and the emails…they did not fall on deaf ears.

The year has been wonderful, and I’m excited about the new things on my horizon, even though they’re not in a physical classroom any more. I’m reminded every day that learning can, and should, happen without walls, and I’m thankful for the friends surrounding me, helping me continue to learn.

When the Camtasia Mac update came out a few years ago, I was intrigued by the new sketch motion callouts included in the media. Essentially, they’re little animations of circles, squares, squiggles, and arrows to spruce up my videos. They were cool, but I quickly wanted the ability to create my own custom callout for my videos.

Using some Camtasia trickery, you can create custom animations. I tried it and made a short proof of concept video to make sure it worked. Rather than typing the whole thing out, I made a short video (4:30) on the process I used. You can see it below or watch it on YouTube. After the video, I’ve got some other tips on how to manage the custom callouts you make.

If I were going to do this frequently, I would make a little library of callouts to import. You can’t add media to the library in Camtasia Mac (but you can in Camtasia Studio on Windows), but you can make your own library of callouts. Go through the process I outlined above and then export your callout as an mp4. Save it in a folder on your computer and then import the callouts when you need them in later projects. They’re so small, your videos won’t have a noticeable difference in file size.

It is a little convoluted, and will take some time, but after you get the process down, you should be on your way to making your own custom callouts. If you have one you want to share, put a link in the comments below.

A year ago, I discovered If This Then That (IFTTT), which might be one of the most innovated web services I’ve ever come across. Ever.

In short, it allows you to create simple programs that help manage things you do on the web. If you use the Internet a lot, you should use IFTTT. Like, today.

I started with some simple scripts to do things like auto-tweet new blog posts and tweet new YouTube uploads (a lot of stuff to do with tweeting, actually…).

As I played with it more, I got crazier ideas. For instance, I travel for work. If I drive my car, I can deduct the mileage from my taxes each spring. But, the IRS wants me to have proof of that mileage. Now, I could keep track of receipts, but that’s a little insane. I do have invoices, but I wanted one more level of tracking. Well, I created an IFTT recipe that will add my location (through Foursquare) to my Google Calendar when I use a certain tag with my check-in. You can grab it here.

Now, I’m trying to think of ways I can use it to share out what teachers and students are doing. For instance, I had an idea yesterday on ways to crowdsource photos from a conference. It takes some creative thinking around Gmail and a Flickr or Instagram account, but it can be done.

If you’re interested in using this recipe, you can grab it here, but there are instructions below.

1. Set up a Gmail filter – There’s a good tutorial with a video here if you don’t know how to do this. The important thing is to make sure the filter is easy to manage in whatever account you’re using. A good way to manage it is to make the filter the name of the conference (or the Twitter hashtag you’re using).
2. Make sure your attendees use that filter – IFTTT looks for that Gmail filter, so if the email isn’t grabbed by Gmail, their photo won’t make it to Flickr. I make sure they do this by making the subject line of the email the conference hashtag.
3. Tagging on Flickr – The script is set to tag the photos with the name of the conference. This will help you manage those photos later if you want to add them to a set or group. I would keep that, but you can add more if you want to.
4. Make sure people know about it! – Be sure to tell your attendees that all they have to do is email you a photo, and it will get posted automatically.

I’m looking for a way to get Twitter photo uploads to go to Flickr, but because you can’t use Twitter as an input anymore, that’s becoming a little more complicated. If you want people to use Instagram, you can create a similar recipe that looks for an Instagram tag and it will send those to Flickr for management later. I chose email because there are still a lot of people that aren’t on Twitter or Instagram, but use email. Seemed like a low barrier for entry.

Do you use IFTTT? What’s your favorite or most creative recipe? Share links in the comments!

My computer is getting pretty full of photos. I’ve been taking more, but it is also housing nearly every photo taken since my wedding in 2009. I know that is chump change to a lot of people, but it’s been bugging me.

I was going back through some of my kitchen remodel photos from earlier this spring and…well…I don’t know how I missed it, but some random guy is dancing in my back yard in one of them. I have no idea who it is. I also don’t know how the hell I missed it the first time through these photos.

I haven’t finished going through my pictures, and I haven’t seen him since the tear out day back in May. But since seeing…whatever it is…I’m worried about walking past that window alone at night.

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This assignment was tough because I needed to find a way to keep my image small (original is over 2400 x 3200, and over 2MB) and make sure Jim stayed outside. So, I converted my image to 64 bit and resized it to 650px tall (173KB final size, with all the layers). That dramatically changed the file size, which was awesome. To get Jim outside, I imported the modified GIF as frames (thanks Talky Tina) and then cropped, scaled, and positioned. I merged Jim with the background image.

To get the window frame, I used the lasso select to pull the glass part, being careful to cut around objects on the window sill to keep some depth perspective. Then, it was a matter of duplicating this cut window frame and merging it into each later of the project to sit on top of Jim.

I had tried to do this back during the summer #ds106zone sequence, but couldn’t figure it out or something. I don’t remember.

Leading up to the headless ds106 planned for this fall, it’s an August GIF-a-thon. I managed to find some time tonight to get one finished and uploaded.

What you see below is a reconstruction of what really happened. We were able to get to the doctor in time to reduce the chance of major scarring. Today, you can barely even tell this occurred.

The GIF is 11 frames long, which keeps its size pretty low. I also varied the length of each frame to give the illusion of the ball flying back at my face much faster than I threw it to Peter, because that’s what happened IRL. What a punk.

Two or three weeks ago, I was home alone, tasked with priming the new drywall in my kitchen. I decided to geek it up a little bit and film the entire process so I could come back and time lapse the work.

I tried using a couple different time lapse apps, but I didn’t really like the quality of the tests I did. So, I ended up filming on my iPad and then pulling the huge files into Camtasia to speed the clips up. Next time, I’ll probably spend more time researching time lapse apps so my files aren’t as big.

Here’s the video:

I was at EdCampBLC this morning in a session talking about “transformative change,” whatever that means. A lot of the discussion focused on how we can use technology to bring change into classrooms, and my mind kept sitting on the fact that there are mental barriers to change that we overlook, and in turn lose people, because of the high-level goals of the changes.