Ok, so it is not what I usually blog about, but I had an interesting adventure this last weekend, and I want to share it.

My wife, my 80 year old Mother, and myself, all decided on the spur of the moment to head for the Texas hill country for a couple of spring days of wildflower viewing. We had been in this area before, on about the same time of year, and found beautiful diplays of our native State Flower, the Bluebonnet.

Our plan was to stay out at Joan Myers PhoenixNest Cabin (http://www.phoenixnest.com/interior.htm ) about half-way between Llano and Mason and just north of Castell, and tour the area for wildflower views. I love the area around Bend, Pontotoc, Cherokee and also Mason, especially south on the back roads along the Eckert James River.

My wife and I, left the D/FW metroplex around three on Friday afternoon (04/06/07), and were able to see a nice display of bluebonnets and other assorted wildflowers from the Dam at Lake Whitney all the way into Clifton, just before sunset.

Then upon leaving Clifton on Saturday morning, just as we turned off the main highway toward Turnersville we ran into heavy snow. This was a real surprise. We often have an Easter “cold snap” but we were looking at big flakes of the white soft stuff….SNOW. Eventually the snow became a mixture of snow, sleet and rain. Any views of wildflowers were pretty well wiped out for the day by the mix. The precipitation continued most of the day, and got somewhat heavier after lunch around Llano and Mason. Just before Noon, we lunched at Cooper’s B-b-que in Llano, and it was very cold and rainy, but there was a lull in the precip, and we were hopeful, that it might go ahead and dry out.

After the wonderful lunch, we drove on out to Joan’s Phoenixnest Cabin

 and checked in, and got a short breifing from Joan about the ranch we were on (continously in operation by her family for over 100 years) and her views on wildflowers and weather.

We then drove on to Mason. By now, it was already snowing steadily and was beginning to mix with sleet. By 4:00 PM, the road surfaces had a pretty good slurry of sleet and snow on them. Some of the sidewalks in Mason had ice. We made a couple of stops on the square, in particular, Hinckley’s Country Store (It’s an old time five and dime type store with a great collection of toys – I’m always on the lookout for a great toy for my Grandson – and it’s run by the mayor, Ray Hinckley, who also runs The Red Door Bed and Breakfast, a bed and breakfast up over the store), and Willow Creek Cafe, for an early lite supper.

The weather had continued to deteriorate as we ate, so after the meal, we headed back to Phoenixnest and got into a fairly driving and blinding sleet storm which was already accumulating pretty heavily on bridges. The hunter’s type cabin was roomy and warm on this cold, cold night, and the addition of satelite TV connected us with the rest of the world, while we bunked down for our rest. As far as I know, most of the sleet and snow ended around 9:00 PM that night. I don’t know the official night time temp for the area, but I suspect that the overcast sky and the coating of sleet, kept most ground temps above freezing. The plants above the ground were probably not so lucky.

On Sunday morning, Easter Sunday, we took the old road back to Llano via Castel. There was still a pretty good covering of white on the ground, but already the bluebonnets were poking their heads up above that. By 8:30 the ice was mostly gone from bridges in Llano and it was already warming up..

We then travelled back out toward Mason via Hwy 71 and encountered icy sludge on several bridges. We turned north at Pontotoc and headed for Bend. The coverage appeared heavier here, and the bluebonnets had not raised their heads yet. At Bend, it was still pretty white.

Snow in Trees at Bend

More Snow in Trees at Bend

 I took a number of photos here and at the Colorado Bend State Park. Things appear to have survived the storm and will continue to bloom. I am not sure what effect the cold weather will have on other plants and trees in the area (I hope they didnt lose their peaches).

Snow in the State Park (Above and Below)

Claret Cup Cactus bloomin in the snow.

Close-up of Claret Cup Cactus

Bluebonnets poking their heads above the snow!

More defiant Bluebonnets

Texas Verbenna in the snow.

From Bend back to Clifton, the bluebonnet coverage was slight but none-the-less for wear. I left out of Clifton going North to Iredale where I turned and went to Walnut Hill. This drive was very nice with big fields of bluebonnets around Iredale. Finally, at Glen Rose, we hit the Easter Traffic and the bluebonnets faded into the background scenery of the whizzing autos that were beginning to clog the artieries of the metromess.

It was a very interesting weekend. I really missed the enjoyment of the bluebonnet bloom, but I figure a chance to see it white in the Hill Country was a pretty good trade, ans as you can see from my photos, I still got to see some interesting displays of mother nature. Good luck to those of you who come after me.

elderbob

I suppose that more than anything, I am interested in life-long learning, with the emphasis on “life-long”. I am convinced that the internet has learning potential at every stage of life. This nice little “you-tube” foray proves my point. Age may have only a small part to play in whether or not a user is a native or a digital immigrant. I have met many folks over 80 who are fairly computer savvy. It may be that someone of a different age has introduced them to the “wonders of the net”, but in the end it is up to the individual to fine tune their own learning capabilities….and age probably has little to do with this. I think the trend will be toward more formalized offerings toward the baby boomer generation, but there are already a lot of early adopter explorers out there, like this Florence….

The Web 2.0 is driven by sparks that fly when certain convergent elements collide and interact. For me, such an interaction occurred last week, when I had occasion to help connect a group of kids and their instructor in Nevada with another group of kids and their instructor in Virginia. But let me back up and give the full story first, and then tell why there was a spark in Web 2.0.

This is how Brian’s class shares lessons over Skype. Note the web cam and laptop pointed at the ActivBoard.

A few weeks ago, I saw a blog post about a class of 4^th graders in Sparks, Nevada, just out of Reno, who had created a Skype connection in order to include an at home student who was unable to attend regular class because of health issues. There was local news story that told about the instructor and a counselor seeking assistance from the larger community to insure that in this case there would be “no child left behind”.

Brian Crosby, 4^th grade instructor at Agnes Risley Elementary School, had been given the task of educating a student who, he “might never see.” A bit of Web 2.0 magic and support of a caring school counselor and a school system that seemed to care, resulted in obtaining a MAC, a high speed connection and a Skype audio and video link to Mr. Crosby’s 4^th grade class. Celeste, the recipient, can be seen in the news film with her head displayed on one of the classroom laptops, just like she would look if she was actually occupying that seat in the classroom. The smile on her face seems to extend from one ear to the other.

Brian’s class of 4^th graders were so desiring of inclusion, that they created a short video to describe their desire to reach out to a fellow classmate who was in need. Their filmed efforts are nothing short of delightful.

On the opposite side of the country, I had befriended Lee Baber some time ago, and found that we both had an interest in raising the technology bar in American classrooms. Mrs. Baber’s eighth graders had already been experimenting with video, audio and web-casting via something they had created called “YouthBridges”. So it seemed a natural progression to me, to see if I could hook these two tech-savvy classes together.

So last Thursday, Brian Crosby, Lee Baber, a 4^th grade class at A.Risley Elementary in Sparks, Nevada (including home bound student, Celeste), an 8^th grade class at Hilyard Middle School in Virginia, and myself, all met online via Skype for a discussion of the technology and feeling involved in bringing the remote student into the classroom.

It was such an absolute treat to hear these young professionals question and answer each other. Oh, there were numerous glitches as should be expected, but in the end, a very nice, informative conversation took place among all the parties.

I recorded the conversation, and took a couple of days to use Audacity to edit and even out the various sound levels. The result, a near 30 minute discussion among digital natives about the technology they were studying.

Now, up to this point, I suspect my comments have appeared rather dry, but as you listen to the attached MP3, listen for the tiny sparks that are being generated among those present. Not just the students, but the adults as well. It was as if our paths all converged in Web 2.0 and from that convergence of elements little sparks of creativity, caring, knowledge and pride took on a role of their own as the energy that helps to drive Web 2.0.

Across three time zones, two classes use technology to find out more about how to help others and what inclusion means.

Last Saturday was my Grandson’s first birthday. He seems to have a budding interest in superheros who can fly through the air, so we hosted a Superm** party for him and 7 of his young friends. In order to make this a memorable event (Ok, memories in the parents, probably not the kids), we created from the whole red cloth, 8 tiny red capes emblazoned with the letter “S” and all the copyrighted Superman paraphernalia that we thought one year olds could handle….ie, Balloons, plates, napkins, a poster, and a table cloth with pictures of Superman. Then I ventured down to Walmart (our version of a superstore) to purchase a decorated cake. Lo and behold, they were not only capable but willing to duplicate a cute photo of our grandson onto the cake. But as a last instruction from the baker, “we can’t do any copyrighted material”.

So this is what the silliness has come to. Superman (not even a real character) cannot be duplicated on a cake without paying a royalty for “cake kit” (basically a small superman figurine and some candles) for under $4.00 USD.  And then, I can’t put a photo copy or hand drawn image of the same hero without paying a royalty for the 8 one year olds who will scarcely enjoy the patterning of the sucrose decorations on the cake.

So, faster than a speeding bullet, I headed home to do a Google Image search for Superman. There were dozens of images to choose from, but to be on the safe side, I waited until the middle of the night, when no one was watching, and then I selected one in which the “S” insignia on the front of the chest was scarcely visible on the flying character. Then in Photoshop, I cropped an earlier photo of my Grandson’s smilin’ face and pasted it on superman’s body. All this was delivered to the bakery, where I told them that this was actually just his wresting uniform.  Here is the illegal photo:

SuperJosh

Now, I am not sure that the FBI will pursue the 8 one year olds or even me, for violating what could be a violation….I think they are going to have a hard time finding the evidence…we ate it!

…and the diapers have already been disposed.

The Ecstasy of Influence (Harpers.org)

The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play background music in their stores; students and scholars are shamed from placing texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely fragile practices in a rapacious world. Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.

We have discussed the niggely-piggely gritty of content rights in terms of copyrights and copyleft, and probably most of us have come away confused and fearful of even quoting someone elses work. Jonathan Lethem proposes a different view of “plaigiarism’ and in that vein, “copyright”. Take a few moments to read the thing all the way through, then file it away in your mind for a few days. Apply it to instances of “intellectual content” that constantly swirl about us, and see if your views change.

Just to make sure that you saw this, I got a comment on the last post about the “Slide Show Tool” from the folks at Zoho who make the tool available. It’s interesting in that it was posted as a comment to let me know why the tool wasnt working. Apparently I tried to post the wrong link and none of you will be able to see the slide show. In addition, I can only see it if I log into Zoho but then wouldn’t be able to share it.

So in order to correct this matter, I am going to post it again, but this time with the appropriate link. You should be able to see the Slide Show here. Let me know if you have any trouble seeing it.

And just to make sure you understand what happened, I have included a copy of the comment below:

New comment on your post #10 “Slide show tool”

Comment:

Thanks for trying out Zoho Show!

A small tip on how to link to your public presentations in Zoho Show. The link you have used will open only for you and that too when you are logged in. To make it accessible for everyone, please login to your Zoho Show account, click on the ‘Actions’ link at the top, choose ‘Make Public’. You will get a URL in the pop-up there and this is the one you should be using here.

Check out http://zoho.com for more useful tools from Zoho.

Spent a bit of time tonight playing with Zoho Slideshow. I thought I could embed it here and have it show on the front page, but when all was said and done, I think I prefer the way the slideshow looks as a link instead. I like the way it opens into a full screen with the movement tools underneath. I am still playing with it, but maybe someone else would like to get in the sandbox with me.

There have been several post on video on WordPress, so I though I would play with a bit of it.
I think there are several ways to put video on WordPress (I need to keep in mind my arbitrary size limits on a free account so I can only show so many videos here). I am going to try to show several methods to do it.

First, is to simply save your video to YouTube or Google Video and then get the necessary code and post it here. You post it by using the actual URL location of the video at YouTube or Google and putting in brackets in the

Listen here.

So I stumbed across this funky service from Swedish Radio, that lets you post a few words in a small Java window, and in a few minutes, they take each word, run it through their musical database and spit it back to you in bits of music. The quality stinks and it would never get around to passing as real music, but there is something interesting here.

My first thought was, how does the web-site get around the copyright laws. Second, who has time to search all the songs and find just those precise words. I contemplated these complex questions over a bowl of cherry cobbler, and soon the answers were pretty crystal clear. The copyright issue is moot, because the radio station has probably already paid the necessary copyright royalties to the appropriate “money grubbing” authorities. The second issue is a bit more complex but one that I think will eventually apply to some of what is going on in openwebpublishing. Apparently their entire collection (or at least a fairly large chunk of it) has been put in a database, and they have engaged some sort of search mechanism to prowl through the database to look for specific words that are parts of the lyrics of songs.

Which finally brings me to the third point. Does each separate word have a copyright? “Samplers“, those folks that take bits of published music and put it in other peices of music often called mashups, are often in the hot-seat for “borrowing” copyrighted music. So again, how small is the smallest snippet that must be considered as copyrighted. (A good read about these copyright issues and how they impact Web 2.0 is Simon Moore’s “March of the Spiders: Policy Challenges for Copyright in the Digital Publishing Environment” – Sorry but the PDF version no longer works)

Which in turn, leads me to my final point….people who are engaged in copyright law are making far more money than the original artists that produced the content that was copyrighted.

And we are just talking music so far. We still haven’t discussed text, or photos, or design….and the list may go on and on forever. I suggest that it is this over-application of copyright intent that will eventually cause Google to lose money on their purchase of You-Tube. There was a day when You-Tube just didn’t seem to care that the content authors, borrowed a bit here and there from originally copyrighted material. Now that Google is in charge, they are paying much closer attention to where the material comes from. Already, some vloggers are looking at other web-space to display their craft. What if someone copyrighted colors in a photo? Do think this is far-fetched? I am an amateur glass-blower and I know for a fact that there are many glass blowers out there that have their own secret formulas for developing some of the brilliant colors that go into their works. Some have even gone so far as to copyright those formulas….not the colors but the formulas. There is no reason to believe that photo artists may seek the same creative protections…or at least those that pretend to protect the artists for a fee. So who owns the copyright for the Blue in sky or the Periwinkle in some flowers? Or the letter “A” (Big Bird and Elmo shudder in disbelief). It seems to me, that the net is already causing a lot of us to re-think protection of materials. Copyright rules are way behind the times, and need a lot of adjustment before folks are going to adhere to them.

But I like to think that there is a new and better approach out on the horizon. There are literally thousands of netizens who are working hard to put content under Copyleft protection. They are seeking ways to put music in Creative Commons where anyone can use it. Music 2.0 will eventually compete with copyrightable Music 1.o….and there is a good chance Music 2.0 will win.

In the meantime, I am on the watch for ways that people who are more interested in the music than the money, that are willing to step over the copy right boundaries. People who love music and creativity so much that they are willing to donate the music to worthy causes….independent musical content creators. I have created several videos that used commercially copyrighted music. In those cases, I tracked down the original artists and asked permission to use their works in educational videos. In every case, I was granted permission by the owner of the copyright. So who do the copyright funds really go to…..well, that’s another issue for another day.

Finally, with the tedium of current copyright law, it is becoming increasingly necessary to find databases of content, to check against to make sure that we are using a word or term, or a color, or a tone that has not been previously copyrighted or has be copyleft-ed or if need be, to whom I need to pay the royalty fee. Consider for a moment, the size of a database that would include all the tones possible for all the instruments performed by all the performers in all the possible ways of all times. That’s some whopper of a database. Who is going to put it together….Google, perhaps…with it’s football fields of server constantly prowling the net for the new and the old, maybe they have the collective computing and storage power to do such a thing. Already, they want to put every word in every book ever written into a database…..it is but one step away from questioning whether or not they are constitutionally violating copyright amendments by doing so.

(Listen here for the final comment. )

So twenty years from now, lets meet here again to see if I was right or wrong. And in the mean time, light in up. They can’t lock us all up.

Leave it to me to do things in a slightly different manner. I know the task here was to set up a “WordPress” blog, and I have done this. But I already have a half dozen blogs that I periodically comment in. I guess it is one of my complaints about using blogs in education. Without intent, blogs eventually get neglected and become the flotsam and jetsam of internet space. I have blogs that I meant to comment more on, but I forgot to upgrade them, or maybe something else came up, or maybe I forgot which blog I meant to write what subject in. Either way, I have blogs that have not been well maintained.

Because it have many multiple interest, it makes sense (to me, at least) to have several blogs. So, in terms of “openwebpublishing”, I decided to put all those blogs in a highly accessible place so I would be continously reminded of them, and hopefully stimulated to use them more often. A year ago, at the Webhead Convergence, I hosted a week long session on using Portals to Maintain Web Presence. I still like the idea, and over the last year have spent a significant amount of time working on my Joomla web portal. Today, I added a category to my portal called Elderbob’s Blogs, and listed all of my blogs in that box (you can see it half way down the left column). Now, for the duration of this class, I plan to focus in on ways that I can use the portal to maintain (perhaps juggle is a better word) all the various classes and activities that I am enrolled in. If you watch closely (and I think I have the RSS set up correctly for the Portal and/or the blogs), then you will see the changes as they take place.

So with that in mind, I need to get back to my blogging in the other blogs. I will be blogging about the openwebpublishing class here, so perhaps this is a great place for many of you to watch. See ya’ later.