If it seems like I’m playing lately it is because I am. The last week or so has been an exploration of all sorts of fairly odd things. Markov chains, Twitterbots, McRibs1, photo walks to name a few items. These are easy things to dismiss as trivial. It’s not necessarily obvious how these strange wanderings […]
I’ve established here enough times I’m not a programmer so I have to find ways to get things done until I learn more. I found this gigantic list of edtech related conferences compiled by Dr. Wright thanks to Stephen Downes’ feed. It’s in Word1 for a variety of reasonable reasons and I can’t fault anyone […]
The Rise of Twitter Bots : The New Yorker “What drives affection for Tofu is less narcissism than reliable ersatz companionship in Twitter’s crowded, cliquey lunchroom; Tofu Product is everyone’s imaginary friend.” “One of my first bots was Exosaurs, which combined Wikipedia’s list of dinosaur species and the Kepler telescope’s list of confirmed exoplanets—both freely […]
I’m walking a good bit more than I have in a while and it’s all in downtown Richmond. I walk a few blocks coming in from where I park and have the chance to walk around the campus some as well. I find myself parking farther away and taking some slightly roundabout paths coming to […]
I have a beautiful new laptop but I have yet to transfer over my actual drawing programs (Omnigraffle, Photoshop, Illustrator). I had the need for a few icons for a website I’m working on and Keynote 6 is on this machine so I gave it a shot. I was very pleasantly surprised by the vector […]
[snap url=”http://bionicteaching.com/trials/markov/” alt=”DS106 Markov Tweet Generator” w=”400″ h=”300″ link=”on”] The following is how I adapted the Markov chain generator from Hay Kranen. Thanks to the comments1 I found below Hay’s post2 this Markov + Shakespeare version inspired me to figure out the “post-to-Twitter” option.3 Anyway, the much cleaner version is up and running. It now […]
Read More… from Markov Tweet Generator Code, Path, & Potential
In discussing trajectories, elements of engineered serendipity, “thought vectors in concept space” with Gardner and Jon yesterday the following occurred. Gardner shared this video (which is well worth watching and I rarely have the patience for videos). That led to a discussion about creating and using a MOOC/hashtag specific Twitterbot (like horse e-books but real1) […]
The link bait title should have been something like “5 Must See Themes for WordPress Multisite” but in any case, I’m wandering around the Internet looking for interesting/useful looking examples1 (educational and otherwise). I started by browsing this old Google spreadsheet of WordPress in education examples2 and then moved on to the WordPress showcase but […]
I touched on this with a previous zombie pictures post. Essentially, metadata is awesome because it lets people find your stuff and it helps your stuff find its audience. Metadata is also absent more often than not because people don’t like to type in lots of tags and they especially don’t like to do it […]
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A Prayer for Lost Phones. ” Let us pray for those who lose their phones and therefore cannot follow character-restricted utterances regarding occurrences on far-flung fields of play. Let us pray, dear Lord, for those whose phones are not with them today, and yet they suffer phantom rings upon their thighs and […]