Hey Vermont was stealing all the Weird Media attention with The Great Prison Escape, so Arizona has to up the ante with the Freaky Decapitator. It's the heat, it's a Dry Hades Heat.

Alongside the ghostly indoor malls are the abandoned strip malls; I did some photos of ones just east of Mesa Community College, in AZ. These are not even very old structures and a waste they sit empty.

Perhaps worth considering is what mean ye by "completion"? Showing up? Passing an exam? These are completions as decided by the course provider. Where is the part of what a student determines they got out of a course? I could not agree more (well maybe I can) about the blind allegiance we have to the weekly schedule, one that beats out like the rowers on the Roman slave ship where Ben Hur was pulling oars http://cogdogblog.com/2012/08/15/mooc-ramming-speed/ The weekly pace structure serves the course provider as much as the assembly line served Ford. Ok maybe extreme. But few question it- why must open course proceed at such a fixed pace? A nice exception was the ETMOOC one run by Alec Couros in 2013- a two week pace gave more reasonable time to reflect and think about the concepts. It feels like a factory floor.

Small and US-centric example. Employers have to verify that I am a legal citizen via an I-9 status form. As a part time online teacher, each place I go I must complete separate paper work which must be notarized. I have a packet for 15 pages to process today for a new one. When I took a job at UMW, they required that I present my documentation in person, requiring a visit to Virginia just to show them my passport. It's an insane amount of paperwork, that ought to be managed centrally- why do I have to prove my national citizenship over and over again?, but now, each institution has to have admin staff manage a whole process for this.

Someone will have to be within 30 feet to send the Bluetooth signal...

That was superb suspense and production! I'm leaving the lights on tonight

Martin, I'd be glad to help with the set up. I've been nose deep this, having processed over 370 submitted URLs for the ETMOOC hub, and I can tell you the concept sounds reasonable at a conceptual level. In practice, with the variations in how different platforms publish feeds and combine with the human factor - I have seen URLs submitted as http// http//: http://// URLs that pint to single posts, URLs that point to pages, URLs that say "none"... I'm ready to outline about maybe 30 different things you might have to test for. Auto discovery sounds automatic, until you realize a few things. A Wordpress URL can have 3 or 4 possible feeds (blog rss, blog ATOM, comments, category). Its one thing to run auto discovery on one URL and pick a feed (FWP has autodiscovery built into it). But its trickier to figure out in an automated script which one you use. Blogger URLs for "labels" (what it calls tags") lack anything to autodiscover, the only you feed you get is for the whole blog, not what you want. I am nto sure why you are fiddling with the OPML. You should should copy the URLs and paste them into FWP. What I am doing for ETMOOC is adjusting URLs to be actually Feeds or ones I know can autodiscover the right feed as the first one. If I get a URL like http://bigtoenail.wordpress.com/category/beer if I leave it up to autodiscovery, the first URL is the root RSS feed not the category, but if I add/feed on the end, that is the one it picks. So I cam cleaning my list of web sites to URLs I know FWP can manage. I then copy a list of these URLs, and let FWP multiple process them. I have let it rip on 50 URLs with no problem. We are up to over 350 feeds it is running now. I've not tried the tag matchin approach, the way I have gone about it is to assume we want to syndicate everything coming in; all from a simple blog or a category/tag feed from someone who has marked their own content. I'm sorry but its not quite "just a plugin" solution.

if I read between the lines, you seek a system that would include a way to have Feedwordpress and the signup form integrated? Having been mothering this for a year, and currently with the ETMOOC site, some is easy, and some is black art. Mechanically it is not a challenge, expect that FWP stores all of the information in the wordpress Link structure, which is no longer being automatically present in WP 3.5 (i can be done via a plugin). It's an arcane way to store the data; we asked the developer about doing mods, but enver heard back. The device we use at ds106 requires the use of a paid WP plugin, Gravity Forms, to handle te data. Its likely possible to code this w/o that plugin, it just makes things really easy (and does email confirmation). That said, getting the feeds is easy if people are submitting blogs solely devoted to your class, that was the reason for the class I set this up for with Nancy White, that we asked students make new tumblt blogs- an entire blog is easy to autodiscover the feeds. It gets more convoluted when you let people use a more general blog, but use a tag or feed. Oh my it gets messy. Wordpress category/tag feeds are easy to ID, but they are not the first ne auto discovered. Blogger labels (equivalent of tags/categories) are not autodiscoverable. They have to enter it manually. For ETMOOC I tried to make this explicitly clear, a long doc which very people seem to read http://etmooc.org/hub/connect I have evidence that 15% of educators do not read ;-) For class, it is feasible to verify the feeds, but you have to know something about the various ways they work. So in the end, setting up a ds106 signup form is not the hard part, its dealing with the vagaries in the data. I'm willing to take a look once I can get past the startup of two open classes, and we can see about that Weller test.

One lovely poster-- as are many in that blogs best of series. It's comforting to see such good poster art happening-- have you seen the animated GIF series of Hitchcock posters by Michael Branson Smith? He's not done psycho yet.... http://www.michaelbransonsmith.net/blog/tag/alfred-hitchcock/

That is impressive, Martin. I mean it, no sarcasm. If someone in my house (and its only me and a stuffed animal) ever said "only 20 miles" I'd surely think the cheerios were laced with acid. Those photos, however (guessing form the file names they are Gower?) are stunning! Scenery always helped me stay interested, hence my allergy to treadmills, My 2012 summary: Miles run: 0.0 Best to feeling better and being a groovy disco history student in 2013.

Hey Disco Queen... you did far better than many (present company included) on your first broadcast. But you cannot show up in your sparkly dress and dance just one time. When is the next show? And it's time to notch it up a level and figure out the app mixer effect so you can DJ over and under the tunes. So when is the next show? So when is the next show? So when is the next show?

"This is what all education is like" silly hats for the ladies? The thing is, as you point out your own experience, when education works, it is not newsworthy, not even noticed. I firmly believe, on a regular basis, hundreds of millions, maybe more (lack of analytics) people are learning something effectively. The adjective does not even belong applied to a system. Your kitchen plumbing, your car, your shoe laces are things clearly identified as being broken, they do not work as intended. But a system? It's like claiming the ocean is broken, or the universe is broken. It does not even make sense. That said, what your experience describes as working .e.g. not broken, and for you) is the process of education in action. There *are* problems with the system, access to education, cost of education, slow rates of change, inequities... I could nto agree more (I think this is what you are saying) that if the description "broken" is broken (oh the recursion!) then the idea of "fixing" a system is also... broken. What we are doing, I hope, is the iterative process of trying to make it better. Now get back to your homework!

The only thing that is every truly dead is saying that something is dead (and Dave Cormier's snark is dead too). I am glad @Dougclaw mentioned Kevin Kelly's quest to locate items from a random page in an 1989 Montgomery Ward catalog - the entire page of some pretty obscure items were still available somewhere in the world http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/immortal_techno.php Down with slogans! Down with slogans! (repeat after me...)

A really good read in response to Turklism is "The IRL Fetish" and the notion of digital dualism, all too often we do in education (and elsewhere) to boil complex spaces to binary choices on the extremes http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/ I will say it is obvious to everyone that you are an awesome blogger ;-)

"We'll be looking for the entire victim" -- now THAT ia dedication!

Not too much thought at all; I would have gone for this if all it had was an extended version of The Magnificent Seven, the song that brought me back in the fold after hearing a lot of London Calling when it was all over the place. I take it you find "Ivan meets Gi Joe" as rubbishy, for some reason I loved its silliness. If anything, on this album, you have to admire the broad brush of genres they took a swipe at. I appreciate the effort to get back to album thinking, do more of this!

There is more we can go than say it is "interesting", we can consider it as a form of potential energy, what are they ways we can create learning environments that increases the potential for rhizomatic goodness?

I did consider that as an idea, Martin- and curious if anyone could estimate what the impact would be or what sort of numbers it would take to generate some disturbance ripples. But I imagine it is more than just recording a string of bad likes; the traffic Facebook exchanges is all about our habits or our profiles (do we even know what data they ship to companies). Yes, your plan takes the deviousness to a delightful higher level.

The translate widget is not working for this tweet! Can you close caption it for the infocult impaired?

What about "shroomed"? Caught up in a hazy false euphoria of bliss. Or "harpooned"? hunted and tormented for just being a blubber filled denizen of the sea. Or "groomed"? lumberinging around zombie like until we listen to the ways of Jim? This is just my roundabout way of saying congrats on the launch.

She is Super Creepy, Super Creep! Si what did her wax cylinder voice say?

(1) How do you know you are not a good photographer? Where did that assessment occur? You choose and frame your subjects well, and that to be says "Good photographer" (2) That is the true outcome- its not about improving technically, but seeing your world differently, looking at things you might not see before. And I bet despite your assertion, that you start doing things automatically with the camera that before required conscious choice (cropping, angles, aimign for good light, avoiding badly lit subjects) (3) You do not get to decide what is boring, it is in the eyes of the beholder. The milk picture evokes some mystery- why is it out? who's bottle is it? is the milk bad? I've being doing the bulk of 4 years of daily photo on my 1/3 acre property and small home, and I am amazed I can still find new things. And when I am stumped for a subject, I try to fill it in my a creative title or caption. ... (10) This is key for me. The task you took on was under your own direction, it was not for a certificate or a mark, but because you set a goal. The thing you left out which was indicated in the other points, is the influence of others on your process- the social acts of commenting and being in a shared space is important in learning too. Why not daily challenges for math, history, science? And putting in my own... (11) Why stop now?

To quote the name of one of my favorite blogs. "No Good Reason". They are waiting for exemplars to follow the lead from. Let's set up a faux web site to look like a prestige publisher, like Elbow Patches Ltd or PlasticTowers so self publishers can grab a veneer link. How does that yachting cap fit?

Or turned on its head, the purpose of space is education. Sadly this space is sounding like a romantic tradition, but one that I cherish. When I was an undergraduate, even mostly as a graduate student, I had little focus on "I have to do X or take Y to get a job" -- the space are those long running discussions about a poem, the all night effort to build a project-- really when all the focus was on being in a place/time of just thinking, trying, learning. Ah, the good old days.

Please place your ideas in the upright and locked position. The static reference list is certainly a vestigial organ. The other value would be in that of citation referencing, to know what other papers/books reference yours, but this is hardly enabled via the static snapshot of sanctioned formatted bibliographies (OMG he did not put the period after the title!) References are structured information, yet are done typically in this unstructured format. I'd like to see, besides JFGI, maybe being able to link to a living reference source online.