There are lots of pictures this week. I’ve been walking in an entirely new area and that’s been interesting. I’m also playing around a bit with adding more commentary about what I liked about the pictures. Race cars on the streets of Richmond are fun and this one had an interesting background that echoed the lines of the grill. Dazed and slightly confused. This guy shouted to me to take a picture of the damaged sidewalk as he passed. The light caught his face just right as he turned the corner. You can’t see it all that well in the preview version but it looks better full size. The tattered grip tape and the echo of the yellow in the window appealed to me. I love the guy’s clothes and his expression. That mixed nicely with the hand drawn sign and strong primary color blocks on the store behind him. I like the way the power lines come down and meet the rivets of the semi trailer. The semi-pro feel of the eagle is also fun. I liked the mix of nature and litter in a way that juxtaposes the title of the beer- so natural it grows on bushes. There is a certain kind of decay that feels almost intentional. While this doorway smelled of urine, it had that […]

I spent the first two days at the VSTE conference so I’ll throw a few of those in here as well. My summary of the conference ranges from a conversation with Andrew Carle about all sorts of things from Markov and Beautiful Soup to the other end where I watched 50 or so people sit in a room to watch a woman Google Hang Out in (this needs a better verb) to show them how to click around a website. People came. Lots of people. No one walked out. I really don’t understand. VSTE conference attendance is about $350. I also did a few presentations at VSTE. One on OER stuff where I continue to try to convince people that content is the lowest bar and that the open tools, people, and communities are the things that make that content valuable. I’ve talked about that enough here before not to launch into it again. I did another presentation called something odd like “Rethinking Professional Development.”Interestingly, I didn’t submit any sessions but someone must have put my name down. As they didn’t have any description, I did most odd things I felt like. In this case I attempted to really provoke some conversation from the crowd by putting up some hyperbolic slides and then provoking additional chaos. My initial plan was […]