As thus it was following the adventures of Stephen Downes as he bicycles around Iceland that got me thinking of places I saw there for my month of house sitting in 2008 including a Gigapan panorama image I made on my last day seeing Thingvellir somehow becoming used in print form in a 6 foot printed high atlas.

Find the thread there!

And thus I am spending more time in 2026 re-writing a blog post from 2010 fixing links, adding images, and filling in what was a skimpy post. Why? Shrug. Because it’s my blog and I care about what’s left there hanging in the dusty corners of not too many people’s interest.

Zzzzzzzzzip rewind, let’s dial this back a few clicks.

Following Stephen Downes Iceland Bicycle Trek

I gotta admire how Stephen retires, far from puttering around on a golf course and sleeping in, he flies to Iceland with his bicycle and camping gear to explore. Not only that, somehow he is still reading papers and web sites to post to OLDaily- you can follow his bike adventure in Mastodon via #SDdaily.

It’s also a bit nostalgic for that month in 2008 when I live in Iceland to house sit for a family on vacation with my main responsibility of counting their 17 Icelandic horses in a pasture and tending a sweet Icelandic sheepdog named Skinna.

When I saw Stephen was camping near Geysir, I commented from my own memories of seeing natural landmarks there that anywhere else would be a park with fees and crowds.

Downes ?

Downes@mastodon.social

July 6, 2026. To Geysir. Iceland, Day 12. A bit longer a ride today (I didn't feel like staying in Laugarvatn) and fewer hills, but cooler and again against the wind. I made it feeling better than the previous day – still not strong but I made good time. I didn't actually go look at the geysers – time for that tomorrow. It's a major tourist draw and – disappointingly – you can't buy food here, only order from the restaurant. #SDDaily

July 6, 2026, 9:09 pm 2 boosts 1 favorites

Though yes, Geysir is a tourist draw for the Golden Circle, so not as quiet as some other places I remember like the majestic waterfall Seljalandfoss that I had to myself for hours. But in his reply Stephen mentioned that he had hoped to ride to Thingvellir, but was challenged by the grade (it looks like he did get there).

And thus the cascade of memories.

From that one place name.

Thingvellir 2008

I only got to Thingvellir or more appropriately Þingvellir on my very last day from my month living in Iceland, as it was a place if interest not only for its history as where Iceland formed a parliament in oh the year 980! but also from my university years studying Geology it is a spot to see as a place to see on land the manifestation of sea floor spreading and extensional plate tectonics.

And indeed like most of the places in southern Iceland I explored (by car) in November 2008, there was no one there at this national park. I stood in the rift zone!

And as I was doing regularly in my travels then, I was not only taking digital photos, I was making high resolution panoramic images with an interesting rig called a “Gigapan,” So in the quiet I set the device up on my tripod and set it in motion to collect images.

This device held a consumer grade pocket digital camera, then I was using for much of my travel photos a Canon IXY Digital 3000 IS I had bought in Japan as it was a model not even available yet in the US (it is in the Powershot SD990). The camera was attached to the rack of the Gigapan, and to create an image I used the controls to identify the top left of a large scene and the bottom right. Then you set it in motion, and the robot control moved the camera and pressed the shutter to take maybe 50? 80? separate images in a grid pattern, each image at maybe less than 4 Megapixels each). Later, its software would stitch them together into a single high resolution image by combining all those images into one. And when published on the GigaPan site, viewers could navigate it by zooming and panning, as well as creating “snapshots” of details in the big image.

Here is a video of the rig in action for another Gigapan image captured at Point Lobos, California.

Now here is the funny thing, as I was letting the Gigapan do its thing at Thingvellir, my quiet alone time there ended.

One car drove in, with 3 young men who got out, walked up and said hello (I was at one of the main viewpoint areas). I was shocked when one of them said, “Hey, that’s a GigaPan!” as I had set this up in several locations over a few years, a few in Arizona where I lived, in Melbourne Australia, in Beijing, Hong Kong, Golden Colorado, the Great Sand Dunes south of there- and never had one person recognized what I was using -it did draw a crowd, like a curious pan handler in Beijing (that’s Brian Crosby in the background)

But here, in late November, alone at Thingvellir, some Americans popped out of their car and knew this device, I recall one mentioned being a student at Carnegie Mellon University where it was part of a project, I think he mentioned working on the software.

Thank kind of serendipity often warranted the Amazing Story treatment, but I guess I never added this one.

But wait there is more, and it’s BIG.

My Thingvellir Photo in a Giant Printed Atlas

The image I created there with Thingvellir was not really one of my better ones, I had forgotten to set the camera to lock it’s exposure, so it adjusted as it traversed into more light portions lit by the sun. So the end image has a number of vertical bands. This is a screenshot if the image that was published on the GigaPan site:

The wild thing is that in 2026 the GigaPan site is still online, that seems amazingly unlikely the way web sites are abandoned across the board. The link for my Thingvellir image does not work (originally the viewer relied on Flash), but it does show up if you search for Thingvellir.

Sometime in early 2011 I got an email from a staff person at an Australian publisher named Millennium House seeking permission to use the image in a book, referencing it’s link in the GigaPan site. There was no Creative Commons license options on my image at GigaPan.com but in my reply I stated I share everything elsewhere under a CC BY license, just seeking attribution. As often it was, this was new information to a commercial publisher:

Thank you so much for getting back to me – appreciate the prompt response. Thank you so much for agreeing to allow us to use your image in our atlas.

As I’m not really familiar with the workings of creative commons, I’ve been and had a look online– and I believe that we are allowed to use the image with your permission, provided credit is given for the image? Is this how it works? Please advise if there are any fees involved. I’d just like to be sure of the terms and conditions before I arrange for an agreement document to be drawn up (I’ll need a postal address for the document too).

As you will have seen at our website, Earth Platinum will be the world’s largest atlas (at a whopping 1.8m x 2.8m when open!). It’s a limited edition and we will only print 31 copies. I am not yet sure whether all copies of proofs will be needed by the printer, or whether there will be proofs to spare. If there are spare proofs, then we would be happy to send you a copy of the page/s that feature your image (although it may be a little large to fit in a portfolio!).

Feb 28, 2011 email from Janet Parker at Millennium House Publishers

So I just had to sign a non-exclusive license agreement where all I got was credit in the published book (which is all I ever want, but wait for more). They did require a high resolution image for the scale of the book — if you are not used to meters, the print size of an opened page is 6 feet by 9 feet! The Gigapan software just sent it to the web site in some format that it allowed viewing via a Flash player, so to get them an image I had to run it through Photoshop I think to create a 500MB TIFF that I sent them via ftp.

I got a few updates from Managing Director Gordon Cheers documenting the publication of the Earth Platinum Atlas (as I write this the Millennium House Publishers web site is not reachable), including June 2012 when one of the 31 printed copies was set up in the British Library. Gordon cordially invited me to be there, not really knowing I was then self employed and not likely jetting to London for the soiree.

He did send a photo of where my Thingvellir Gigapan image appeared across the bottom of pages 24-25 of Earth Platinum in the section on Plate Tectonics.

That has to be one of the biggest reuses of my photo! Earth Platinum is still a record holder in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest atlas. It was only later that I learned that each copy came at a $100k price so look at how “smart” I was to give it away for free. Call me a fool for not asking for a fee.

Because that is how I work. I seek not to make money from what I create

Along with the British Library, I can trace that the National Library of New Zealand and the State Library of New South Wales bought copies, as well as the National Centre of Documentation & Research (United Arab Emirates) and “private collectors” in Saudi Arabia and Australia. That’s a hell of a coffee table book! According to a press release from the State Library of New South Wales, the Earth Platinum Atlas was printed in Italy and bound in Hong Kong.

Gordon cheers had emailed a picture of the Altas at the Hong Kong Bindery

He must have thought I was a high flyer (who was dumb enough not to ask for a photo fee) as he invited be to the launch at the National Centre of Documentation & Research in Abu Dhabi.

Alas I was busy June 12, 2012 as apparently I was hanging out with Scott Leslie in Vancouver and also sitting in Brian Lamb’s then office at UBC booting up the old CAREO server.

Didn’t I Blog This?

Heck yeah, in August 2012, I posted this tale of the Big Atlas

But when i visited the post this week, it was full of dead links, and missing a lot of details I found in old emails from Millennium House. So instead of blogging something new, I was rewriting old posts, which I do enjoy. There’s so much more to the story, and it swings full force to 2026 and then back to 2008– through connections and paths that no LLM could ever model, and even if it did, it would never have the experience of being alone making images at Thingvellir and getting weird requests from Australian publishers.

More on the GigaPan

And then there is that weird device I had in my possession. I came across it via my colleague Keene Haywood when we worked together briefly at the New Media Consortium. Keene was keenly savvy with both tech and connections, and it was his Austin connections to an outfit called Charmed Labs that was working on the prototype. Keene set it up so I could get one of the GigaPan prototypes before they went into production.

And it is only in 2026 that I came across the place this device had in science and technology back in an era where people did this crazy wild efforts- the GigaPan was a NASA Mars Research funded project in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University (remember the guy who showed up at Thingvellir and recognized my GigaPan?) – this was one of several CMU efforts under the Global Connection Project.

The technology behind the Mars rover PMAs inspired Randy Sargent at Ames Research Center and Illah Nourbakhsh at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to look at ways consumers might be able to use similar technology for more “down-to-Earth” photography and virtual exploration.

In 2005, Sargent and Nourbakhsh created the Global Connection Project, a collaboration of scientists from CMU, Google Inc., and the National Geographic Society, whose vision is to encourage better understanding of the Earth’s cultures through images. This vision inspired the development of their Gigapan products.

After seeing what the Pancams and PMAs could do, Sargent created a prototype for a consumer-version of a robotic camera platform. He worked with Rich LeGrand of Charmed Labs LLC, in Austin, Texas, to design and manufacture the Gigapan robotic platform for standard digital cameras.

https://marsdaily.com/nasa-derived-technology-captures-unique-inaugural-image-999/

The GigaPan goes big — At President Obama’s 2009 inauguration., photographer David Bergman used the device to create a 1.6 GigaPixel immersive scene of this event as reported in Wired as 1.4 Gigapixel Image of the Inauguration Shows the Day in Amazing Detail this using the same rig I used at Thingvellir.

For some reason I kept my GigaPan device, even though the software it once used does no longer work. It sits on my camera museum shelf with a Zoom Master, an old Olympus DSLR, a Kodak Pony camera, and my grandmother’s old Polaroid. Again, these are objects but each is a story, a strand of memories, that flow through me.

Just a mention of Thingviller from Stephen Downes sent me down a trail of discovery and rediscovery, it took sifting through captions in old photos, finding emails, and some good old fashioned web search.

This web thing, it still works. Big.

Featured Image: Thingvellir flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Ahhh, 2026. That’s another grumbly post.

But here it is, I was rather taken by this fantastic web site created at Thompsons Rivers University called Indigenous Peoples in Education: A Stock Photo Collection really worth leaving here and going to appreciate what and why this site was created. Someone may have been inspired to nominate it for an Open Education Award for Excellence. Maybe.

At first I was warmed that this might have been built with the TRU Collector SPLOT, but is not. It makes good use of the same parent theme that I love, Fukasawa by Anders Noren. No big deal.

I was curious to know how many photos were in this collection (not to brag, but its built into the sidebar of TRU Collector, see example.)

Thus the wonder, Surely (and yes I am calling you Shirley) there is a simple web tool or method to get the total number of blog posts on any given WordPress site. I would think this is quite done with the WordPress Rest API.

In fact this was bubbling around my mind when I wrote about the BC Corrections Leadership site I built more than a few years ago for JIBC that was still running. Maybe at my near peak level of custom code work with the WordPress API I made a mobile version of the course content called the CorrLeader Navigator (blogged to ridiculous detail).

The problem with my first web searches is that no matter how much I jiggled by search terms, the bulk of the replies were efforts to get all the posts via the API, I just wanted to count them.

What I did get that every request to the API returned in the response header a total number count for posts. Google’s AI review eagerly offered code that does not work:

fetch('https://your-site.com')
  .then(response => {
    // Retrieve the custom WordPress header
    const totalPosts = response.headers.get('X-WP-Total');
    console.log('Total Published Posts:', totalPosts);
  });

I can tell without even trying because the URL you need to pass to fetch is not the web address but an API call.

Stupid Gemeni.

But the leading clue I found in StackOverflow is you can just use a WordPress API url that just fetches a data on a single post (the latest, FWIW) which for this humble blog would be http://cogdogblog.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=1

Snd indeed, in any browser, that returns a wad of JSON content about a single post. But you do not see the response headers. I found via the W3 reference on HTTP Response Headers a link to Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer (See exactly what an HTTP request returns to your browser). This is the kind of little web tool I can see if one person’s effort to make something others can use, thank you Rex.

I fill out the form with the REST Api Url above

And boom I get results (and smiling at the URL of results noting its a perl script), in there noting X-Wp-Total: 5919 which is indeed my post count.

Now of course, this is a rather convoluted way to get this number, but in doing so, I have more of an understanding how the data is found and returned.

I thought about dusting off my HTML/Javascript chops and building a little tool anyone else could use, wouldn’t it make sense to have that kind of tool out there? it’s pretty simple, it could just take an input of the web URL, the API request easily assembled. If a fetch request returned an error, most likely it’s not a WordPress url. I bet Tom Woodward could build this in the time it takes me to make a sandwhich.

Or I could do what Everybody Else is Doing These Days and just ask Claude or one of his pals to build it for me. That’s not my jam, sorry.

For now, I cobbled some Javascript I can cut and paste into a browser console:

async function getTotalPostCount(siteUrl) {
    try {
        // Appending per_page=1 minimizes data transfer
        const response = await fetch(`${siteUrl}/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=1`);
        
        if (!response.ok) {
            throw new Error(`Probably not a WordPress site! status: ${response.status}`);
        }

        // Extract the special WordPress header
        const totalPosts = response.headers.get('X-WP-Total');
        
        console.log(`This WordPress site has, wow,  ${totalPosts} posts`);
        return parseInt(totalPosts, 10);
    } catch (error) {
        console.error('Error, likekly not a WordPress site?: ', error);
    }
}

// Example usage (Replace with your actual WordPress site URL)
getTotalPostCount('https://cogdogblog.com');

Boom, I get the 5919 blog post odometer at CogDogBlog.

I can try some other random b-blog

But getting back to the original quest, via this (sort of) simple method I can find that the Indigenous Peoples in Education Stock Photo Collection has just under 200 images.

That’s a long way (and actually about 3 weeks later) to getting an answer. If we think of the web, and its various tools, machines as something to dispense an answer, well there, it maybe could be spat out of a vibe coded site in less time then it took me to remix my featured image (but that is fun, and I do not want machines doing that for me).

But what would I have learned about the underlying mechanisms? What could I extend to a different situation? Are we just seeking answers any more or are we after understanding?

I’ll take that over speed and efficiency any day of the week.

Featured Image: Before Computers, Adding Machines flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This was a machine spotted in the Willowbunch (SK) museum. My own photo edited where I plunked in a WordPress logo and redid the Burroughs logo in similar type and effect. Nobody generates images around here except me by hand.

It started with a Mastodon post by Bonni Stachowiak referencing her own post on the metaphor of hammers and the hammering question of AI as “tool”

Bonni Stachowiak

bonni208@mastodon.social

I reflect on a recent post by @mahabali and really dig deep into the hammer metaphor. Plus a song about hammers and the flowers Dave and I planted in the front yard, recently.

Hammering My Way into AI-Related Metaphors and a Familiar Song: https://teachinginhighered.com/2026/06/07/hammering-my-way-into-ai-related-metaphors/

#criticalAI
#highered

June 7, 2026, 7:59 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

And to trace the tunnel back, Bonni references the post by Maha Bali on Must-Read: AI is Not a Tool, It’s a Medium-Institution (Discover Abi Awomosu) itself referencing yet one link back another post critically going after the “AI is just a Tool” spiel. Maha digs into the relationship with a tool when we use it, not just admire it on a shelf, quoteing from Abu Awomosu’s article:

That framing [of AI as a tool] is not just dismissive — it is the ceiling of what tool literacy can imagine. A tool is discrete. You pick it up, put it down, its function is fixed. A hammer drives nails. You are the agent. The institution that holds you both remains unchanged.
….

You don’t pick it up and put it down. You inhabit it, or it inhabits you.

https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-say-ai-is-the-next-industrial

It all resonates for sure, but what tripped me off was the hammer metaphor.

Immediately I went to an association with what I remember being described by or attributed to Marshal McLuhan’s ideas of tools as extensions of humans, about when we hold a hammer in our hand, it is a new tool, not just a hammer, not just a hand, but a “hammerhand.”

That’s one of those associations that aew buried deeply, like it just takes a reference to “hammer as a tool” and it rises up like a shark eager for a …. well not that metaphor.

So I hit the web search, which again I find weird for how broken and useless it gets pitched, and yet somehow it works for me, (with Google in My Hand it is a powerful GoogleHand?) I looked for mcluhan hammer hand. The link I dug down to was below the top layer whioch indeed is mostly not what I want to see but what the Pusher pushes.

There I came to a 2011 blog post (remember blogs? and people keeping their knowledge online) Painfully Coming to Grips with ‘The Medium is the Message’. I admit I skimmed down past the title of the post and even the author nickname because I was digging down into something that felt right. It’s another post, but I cannot quantify fully that sensation on a search that I have found the golden thread to pull out of the web sweater.

I hit exactly what I sought, and even more, an important relevant message from 2011, forgotten in the glittery rush of AI in a bottle

One of the ways McLuhan tries to make this clear is through the concept of “extension”. He explains that media is not just a tool, it becomes a part of us – an extension of what we can do.  I had a breakthrough on this when I listened to the podcast conversation between Gardner Campbell and Alan Levine for the McLuhan session of a past NMFS series, on the heels of our Wednesday session (I wish I’d listened to it before!).  Gardner used this perfectly simple and powerful example to explain what McLuhan means by “tools as extensions of ourselves”.  Here goes…

“If you pick up a hammer, and hold it in your hand, what do you have?” Gardner asks. Our answers immediately jump to capabilities (“you can build a house” or “now you need a nail”).  But Gardner urges us to, instead, think in terms of the most basic, the most obvious thing.  You have a hammer in your hand.  Simple.  And the, he says, McLuhan goes further. What McLuhan would say  is that you don’t have a hammer in your hand, what you now have is a “hammerhand”.  You’ve changed the hammer.  And you’ve changed your hand.  A new union, that neither one was before you picked up the hammer.

Aha. The penny dropped for me. And my next immediate thought was how very wrong I’ve been in a key element of my thinking about new media technology (this is the painful, blowhard part). In my work, I spend a lot of time with teachers and students, talking with them (coaching them) about the use of new media as it’s applied to teaching and learning.  What I regularly say, in an attempt to soothe and reassure them, is that all of these wonderful web tools are just that – they are tools.  Not unlike a pencil or a chalkboard or a microscope.  What you do with the tool is what makes it worthwhile.  What you plan, create, devise is what has meaning.  Gawp.  Exactly the opposite of what McLuhan is saying.

emphasis added by me from http://Painfully Coming to Grips with ‘The Medium is the Message’

And boom! The tunnel went full circler- of course this was the wisdom of Gardner Campbell in the years of his New Media Faculty Seminars– or his title “Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Development Seminar”. He lead a series of conversations with his faculty (then at Baylor University) on readings from The New Media Reader (it’s still online, how can you say the web is dead?).

But what Gardner had done is to run and share his seminar structure (you can find it in the wayback machine, well I did)- but it was a distributed seminar, he had other university groups sign up to run their own local versions, and then there was network sharing via RSS, forums, all that old connectivist stuff folks just shrug off in LinkedIn puff posts as “web nostalgia.”

It was real. I actually visited Gardner in 2010 and sat in one of his Baylor seminars. It was real. It reas real good.

But the post also mentions a podcast- yes, because I was then doing stuff with what was once the New Media Consortium, we collaborated on two years of doing a podcast (yeah, podcasts in 2010) where we would discuss the weekly topics, he would share what happened in his Baylor discussions and what we saw more widely in the network.

I found the posts for most of the podcasts yes again in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, including indeed New Media Faculty Seminar: Fall 2010 Week 8 the episode on 2 McLuhan essays in the New Media Reader in which Gardner spells out the Hammer Hand.

The love of the Internet Archive goes deep, as I was able to download from this, and all other episodes the audio for these episodes. When the NMC went out of operation, all of its assets where bought by EDUCAUSE like it was an estate sale, only because they wanted the gold plated Horizon Reports. They chucked or left in a back warehouse a huge web legacy of content, resources, media that I worked on whiole there 2006-2011. I shake a fist at EDUCAUSE for being a lousy caretaker of web history.

So I am doing it myself, I have all the audio I could snag, here is the Week 8 episode with the HammerHand conversation in the eloquent voice of Gardner himself (how quaint a podcast, no intro music, no show promotion and no effing ads, just audio).

And because I just ran a program to create a transcript, here is the segment starting at 12:09

Again, we were thinking more about I think The Medium Is The Message, but the extension idea, we had one fellow in there who’s a film and digital media scholar who had read McLuhan at the beginning of his graduate training and had understood that McLuhan was trying to get to a fuller sense of a kind of theory of media than anybody had, and so it was obviously groping around in lots of ways, but the illustration I brought up was that of the hammer in the hand.

And that’s the one that I tried with my students a few weeks back, and it seems to have stuck. It seems to have been just crazy enough, but just useful enough to keep McLuhan’s thoughts alive as we’ve moved along.

So what I said was, and we were in second life when this was happening, so it was a very interesting context, and I said, “So if you pick up a hammer, what do you have?”

I said, “Give me the absolute bare bones most obvious answer,” and they couldn’t do it at first. They said, “Well, you have a tool, or now you’re going to look for a nail, or you can build a house, or you have the capability to blah, blah, blah,” and I said, “Those are all right answers, but they’re not getting at the most basic reality that McLuhan wants us to start with.”

And after a while, one person just was bold to be as basic as possible, which is very hard to do. It’s very, very difficult to get to the absolute basic most obvious thing and start there.
And I think it was a “she,” she said, “Well, you have a hammer in your hand.”

I said, “Right. You pick up a hammer, you have a hammer in your hand.”

Right. That’s the basic level we need to start at, because what McLuhan would say is, “Well, looked at one way, you have a hammer in your hand.”

Looked at through the light of his media philosophy, if you’re truly understanding media, you don’t have a hammer in your hand, you have a hammer hand.

Gardner Campbell explaining the Hammer Hand

When I shared with Gardner, he reminded me of the earlier episode we recorded for week 5- we were actually in Barcelona for some NMC conflab with the UOC (University of Catalonia Online) imagining the future of the “Campus” in a digital era (Hah the horizons were pretty short of what 2026 has). But we did record our podcast literally form the roodtop of the place we were staying, we had all kinds of Abbey Road vibes going. I am surprised that amongst the many photos I took of the trip I have none from the rooftop studio, but I do have the audio.

Well I have dig up from the tunnel for air, and just appreciate all of this being triggered by a mention of hammer as a metaphor.

I still think of it as not just a tool, whether in my hand or not. It’s a tool with my mind.

Featured Image: My “new” hammer, a fun pen I bought on a whim, in my hand. It’s not just a hammer, it’s not just a pen, is it a HammerPenHand? Oh the metaphor os now kicked to the curb. Image soon to be uploaded to flickr where it will be shared of course into the public domain using CC0.

Aince I end up doing what one might call blogging over at OEGlobal, I wanted to just mention a post I spit out last week that has some overlap, a summary of the responses nominators made in 2025 when I added a field for declaring their use of GenAI in compiling a nomination. Read the whole shebang, it’s pretty much a blog post hanging as “news” (I have no luck convincing my colleagues to write posts that are not just ANNOUNCEMENTS).

First of all, I read / scan all nominations as the come in over a span of weeks. One part is that I have to add a few tags/classifiers on the back end, but also it gets me a good sense of the pool this year. So I already had a sense last year that much use of GenAI was for people whose first language is not English (the G in our organization’s name!) as well as fitting to the form field character limit, but also to help draft/frame replies to match the criteria.

It was in the mindset of experimenting that I decided to swallow my LLM loathing (actually I use them often for organizing unstructured data) and load the responses into NotebookLLM. I did not add an identifying information, I only used as data the response to the open ended question on GenAI transparency and also included a column for the country of the nominator.

I will not repeat the outcomes (read the post), but it did a fairly good categorization that was along the lines to my own, and also did a decent job to pull some relevant quotes. Also, because the question was just one question “Describe your use if any of GenAI in writing your nomination” I aimed to have to pull from responses some sense of what LLMs were used.

The assistance for non-English speakers is pretty obviously important and something I would never want to limit– although we encourage nominators to write in any language (we get a few in Spanish and French) as we can translate and send to multi-lingual reviewers, it is pretty clear that most feel like they should write in English.

On Groundtruthing

There is an aspect of the whole GenAI game I do not see discussed (though I hardly see all most discussion) but that is having a familiarity with the data one is analyzing. Without being close to understanding what’s being dumped from the truck into the magic machine, the only way you can judge the outputs is how readable or pretty they are.

This leads me back to my formative academic years studying the subject that has nothing to do with my current work- Geology. So much of the education and process was “experience in the field”- you can understand all the concepts and block diagrams and mineral thin sections, but without what was always called “ground truthing” you are getting into something close tio statistical or speculative conclusions.

For decades before I started and into my study years, for mapping and field work, we relied much on areal photography of landforms their relationships. When we trudged out to a real place on the earth, along with the maps and compasses and rockhammers and notebooks and granola bars in our backpacks, we’d take those photos out in the field tio see if what we saw from the air matched what was really there.

In my Masters research it went to another level in that I was using data from Landsat satellites to see what its data (some outside the human visible range) could tells us about large areas of volcanic landforms.

The satellites merely collecting the energy radiated back to their sensors from light bouncing off the ground. The work included analyzing and experimenting with representations the data recorded then on magnetic tapes, with then the field work or ground truthing to see what was revealed “out there” taking samples back for inspecting under microscopes and labs to measure their spectral reflectivity.

Old School Pasted Images flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

I see what we are rushing to do with LLMs and GenAI is to do a lot of fancy summarization, generation of stuff measured way way up in space. But if you have never walked up and down the hills, canyons, cracked open rocks to examine in details, took samples back to the lab, measured sections and mapped with notes, how to you know what to make of the pretty pictures the data could show.

I diverge a bit too much with my Geology field work nostalgia days (actually they could be extremely frustrating, another story).

If I am plopping something into an LLM to analyze, summarize, something-ize I will always have done some sort of first cut myself or at least have an understanding what data went on.

GenAI for the 2026 OEAwards

Again, I wrote more details already, but I did make some refinements in the questions for the 2026 Open Education Awards (open for another 26 hours!). The first was making the first question be a simple yes/no, did you use GenAI at all for writing your nomination (making this a clear data point not inferring form responses).

At this moment the “yes” rate is a notch above 60%. If this was the response, then the next question asks the nominator to explicitly share what tools they used and for what purpose.

From reading this year’s responses, the use cases/reasons are fairly similar, but what comes through more is how usual this seems (my inferring) for people who use GenAI, that it reads like part of their normal workflow. Also the tech last year was mostly ChatGPT, this year I am seeing more Claude and Copilot mentioned.

There will be a followup analysis.

Humans will Be Humans

With a bit of sad irony I spotted this pattern once in 2025 and twice so far in 2026. A nominator indicates that they did not use GenAI, but the at the top of the description or rationale entries is a bit of the reframing response from the machines, like “I have condensed the description for you to copy to the nomination form” or “Here is the text you can copy to the reasons for nominating response, reduced to match the word limit.”

I almost do not know what to do with someone who states a negative as on a question of transparency but leaves the tell-tale dirty fingerprints of LLM responses in what they copy paste.

It is most human of them.

Featured Image: I adamantly refuse to have any image for my writing to be spawned by GenAI., For the love of humanity, make use of the oodles of open licensed images to which you can credit real breathing people as well as go first to Better Images of AI if you need an image to represent GenAI that is not another Robot or blue glowing brain. For this post Better Images of AI graphic Distant Writing by Fabrizio Matarese Licenced CC-BY 4.0

Nope not me, I am still at full time work at Open Education Global and the real work of blogging here But I did get this interesting email from BCPensions:

We’ve received notice from your former employer that your employment ended on December 17, 2021.

As a vested College Pension Plan member, whose age at termination of employment was over the earliest retirement age, you’re entitled to a monthly pension benefit and are eligible to apply for your pension immediately. This letter outlines your options and explains how to apply for your pension.

Indeed, in 2020 and 2021 I had contracts to do web development for a few projects with the Justice Institute of British Columbia (mostly likely I have Tannis Morgan to thank for the referral. And the JIBC system had my hired as a Sessional Employee (working remotely from 2 provinces to the east), but it also meant for that time period I was paying into the BCPension fund.

And now just being around for a bit longer means that even though I am still working, I can start tapping into that fortune starting next month. Look at me on the retirement gravy train (after taxes, the monthly amount might be enough to buy 3/4 of a tank of gas, but its something).

But it was a fun reminder of the work I got to do then, back in my gravy days of WordPress development (have I used that expression twice in a post? obvious I ain’t writing with Claude), and it was good stuff. The funny thing is that this 6 year old project web site is still online fully functional.

BC Corrections Leadership

The first project was a resource for leadership in the BC Corrections system (good proof I can work in content I know nothing about). As we called it in oiur team “CorrLeader” was a mix of accumulated resources and also a guide to programs and offerings from the organization and JIBC.

Peter, the project leader had much of the concepty organized but what I liked working with him was his interest in the metaphors and the visuals. So we developed this idea of leadership being a complex terrain, and sometimes we traveled it as specified by a map and other times exploring by a compass.

There were a few prototypes with generated maps and toying with Leaflet.Js but in ended up being rolled into WordPress with an elegant theme. One of my proudest parts was, after hearing how busy these leaders are, they don’t have time to look at a computer all day, that often they were on mobile. I dug into the WordPress API and did a lot of monkeying with JQuery and local storage to create a mobile side site that could display the latest resource, and allow the person using it to use and save filters for content they were interested in.

It’s even more remarkable that the Navigator site ( just HTML/CSS/JS) is also still online and working https://host.jibc.ca/ccjd/corrleadernav/

Towards the end, we even added a podcast called CorrTalk that was done all by the project leads, Sarah and Peter (who was a natural at being a host).

I’m still not sure of how/why ther web site is still there and functioning. Do they still use it? (nobody updates). Is it one of those projects that organizations forget about and thus it lives longer?

Segregation Reform Program

The second project is one I am a bit rusty on, it was again a whole series of standalone course-like materials about models of Corrections that move away and beyond punishment. The specifications were that it would be built in Articulate Rise (A tool I never used before but learned as I went) that was in some ways a bit interesting to use as it was in someways very flexible but also very limited, no hacking on functionality like WordPress.

The course content was embedded into a Blackboard course, and I believe then the module end quizzes were scored there. There were modules in Introduction to Segregation Reform, Administrative Fairness, Indigenous Cultural Awareness, Trauma-Informed Practice, Mental Health Needs in Custody Settings (I know these from a hardrive folder of content folders). JIBC provided me access to a vast collection of photos from Corrections facilities I could use, I just had to blur any faces of inmates.

The one post about the project I could fine was all about playing with custom CSS to do better bullet points (?)

Again i was surprised/shocked to find in my notes that the login I used at the time still works! I was able last night to peek at the old content I built.

And So?

I got this far without a real destination for this post. It still strikes me odd that much of this web/digital content still lives. I wonder if there is a term for bits of the web that still live because most people who would normally nuke a web site just forgot about them. Like survival by neglect?

But mostly I remember these projects as part of the long arc I had in working with colleagues who loved teasing out ideas, not afraid to try new things, and also gave me a lot of leeway in choosing visual and functional design.

Yeah, I think that is what I retired from… the fun/exciting work all in a time of optimism or belief in the potential of digital tools interwoven with human creativity.

Now it’s just Ask Claude blah blah blah blah borg. Not me, as I am not retired from work or creativity.

Featured Image: Retired flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

(now I am curious how the AgenticAI blog spammers will author comments all about the virtue of sand castles, but that’s another story).

Along with my recent efforts of sweeping a fleet of 12+ domains and web sites, archiving to my bone pile, and letting the registrations go, two larger ones loomed… util this month, when registrations and hosting for https://muraludg.org and https://theagoraonline.net come up for renewal.

I’m ready to let the waves of time reclaim them.

These were both significant projects I was part of 2015-2018, where I was not only building sites but also planning and implementing these projects. They were both things I am immensely grateful an almost accidental series of events –being on my fellowship at TRU, doing the wacky YouShow with Brian Lamb when we had a guest Tannis Morgan visiting, and she willing to play the part of “the consultant from Vancouver”.

Stop all the back narration! Through this, I got to be part of the UDG Agora project (archive link now) that Tannis managed with the Justice Institute of BC in collaboration with University of Guadalajara. Easily, this was THE Best project, team, participants, experience of my career. Okay, read the whole post for more

After two years of that project, the band was called together to organize a special institute on openness for UDG faculty, what we pulled off in 2018 as the UDG Moral of Open. It was a few years later, in 2021 Tannis contacted me to say that the domains and web sites that JIBC had registered and hosted were going to be let go. I asked or she offered, and I had it all transferred to me, and I have been keeping this going for the last 6+ years on my own time.

Why?

These were such key works and I also despise the clear cutting of web sites that companies and organizations do, it goes to my assertion that digital durability rides more on the individual than the institution.

But as I get older and cranky (just kidding), I start to wonder if anyone but me really cares about these sites. I can’t say one person has contacted me about them in 5+ years. All the links to the project from JIBC are gone. The web forgets only when people do.

So on June 1, when the renewal notice came in, I decided it was time to pack them up as an archive, and move my own domain.

Both of these are WordPress multisites, so archiving had a few bits to sort out. But my usual route of reaching for the OSX Site Sucker app (a $7 app made by a guy named Tick) paid off. It makes a static HTML version of sites, so I am not longer having to run, update, manage WordPress. I just let it loose to travel every link from the top, and for the most part, it “sucked up” into a directory on my Macbookpro.

That works for things linked from the main site, but as I often do, I sometimes toss other sites into the heap. So running through the other sites in the multisite admin helped find a few more from theagoraonline site and for muraludge I had to nab a tack on site I had did as an experiment. To note:

• theagoraonline.net All of the UDG agora actuall sat in a subdomain, there might have been the idea we might replicate the project in the future.
  • Landing Page: Set up to be a holder at the top of the domain, archived at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/holder/
  • New landing page: Just made this quickly with an HTML5up template to guide the agora stuff https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/
  • All of UDG Agora: https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ includes a fleet
    • The Challenge Bank (SPLOT version of DS106 assignment bank) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/bank/
    • The Daily Try (SPLOT version of DS106 Daily Create) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/daily/
    • Dilo – this was a problem, it was a discourse community at https://dilo.theagoraonline.net that was never archived nor is ther much in the internet archive. I ended up making an archive page https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/dilo/ but need to fix a bunch of internal links. One day
    • Comparte – Rather proud of this version of the TRU Writer SPLOT I managed to manually translate into Spanish. All participants used it to write final reports as short papers https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/comparte/
      
      Lesser used but still preserved:
      
    • Ask us Anything – I had found a WordPress theme to set up a site that kind of worked like a mini Twitter for participants to ask questions https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ask/
    • Welcome to the Agora – presentation made with the SPLOTpoint theme for the Open Education 2015 conference in Vancouver https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/opened15/
    • ImagePool – a TRU Collector SPLOT we made… I think to have a place for workshop participants share and embed images from they needed to enter for the Challenge Banl responses. https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/imagepool/
    • Edupunk, EduBauhaus, D.I.O? – Hah, a presentation (SPLOTpoint again) I copresented with Brian and Tannis for a conference in Guadalojara– they actually requested us to talk about EDUPUNK. This was crowned by maybe my favorite edited video ever, the Edupunk Mockumentary Enjoy it all https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ciinovapp
    • Constellations Work Training Services – I forgot totally about this, a visualization experiment Tannis contracted me to do for this idea of displaying sets of work skills as constellations that could be navigated 3D wise using I think DJ3s. Actually this was hung on the muraludg site, but for some reason I slid it over to https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/constellation/
    • muraludg.org – SiteSucker got everything, this site was maybe a little less sprawling? Lots of things copied form the agoraonline, SPLOTs and all
      • Contestar – a version of the “Ask Me Anything” enjoy the archived error messages https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/contestar/
      • Acumulador – Maybe the top use I have been part of for TRU Collector. We had working sessions in groups, and they all had generate a report by uploading an image of their sketch notes and provide information. https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/acumulador/
      • Daily Opener – another iteration of the Daily Create. Rather impressive how much participation was in both of these by our colleagues in Mexico, many of whom seem to have never wiped out their accounts (judging by embeds that still work) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/daily/

I thought I set up web redirects on the original domains, but looks like my chops are dusty. Regardless, they all go into the big web surf end of June and likely some cryptopokermassage scam site will grab the domain.

No regrets here and it was fun to do a little late night archiving. Sitesucker is THE Bomb, it does such a brilliant job of doing the WordPress to static HTML work, no need for me to be entangled with Claude.

I do remember a sandcastle thing I did, maybe the last time I did Ocean City with my folks before I went off to college. Rather than our usual August family vacation, we did a weekend in September when everything in that tourist town is dead quiet, the beaches with a handful of people. We stayed at the Stowaway Motel on 21st Street. (Why do I remember that?) I made then rather giant cone of sand, maybe 4 feet high, which I crowned with a crab exoskeleton I found. I remember some folks who came up the next day saying how they enjoyed spending all of the late day light watching my sand mountain take the hits (it was just a hump of sand in the morning).

So yeah, I love keeping my old sites up and going or at least archived, but who am I kidding? It’s all just sand piled up and the big waves will come one day. But its fun to build the walls oin defiance.

Featured Image: My own photo of one of several sand castles 2016/365/65 Built to Withstand the Sea flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license modified to slap my retired domains.

In that flu fog many key dates were missed – the date when I took a plane flight to Regina to meet Cori for our first “date” and also last weekend, the lap around the sun for old Felix (“hey, who is calling me old?”) who crossed his 12th solar orbit path last weekend. I patched together that 1, 2 = 12 collage on my phone from his puppy photo when maybe he was 5 months old at the Humane Society (they gave me a copy when I adopted him 2 years later) with a more recent photo.

That’s what you get for being 12 a list of photos. Here are ones I nabbed from eacy year he has been in my life on or close to his birthday.

Send cards and bones to Felix on Mastodon (all the cool dogs are federated!) @felixadog

Before Alan (2014)

That first summer I had Felix (2016), we went to a dog event in Flagstaff, and a rep from the Payson Humane Society recognized Felix. She emailed me his puppy day photo from his first adoption round there. She shared the story of his first name being “Strale” as an Italian word for lightning bolts like the marks he had on his puppy pose.

2016 (2 years old) First Birthday Together (Strawberry, AZ)

This was less than 2 months after his “Gotchya Day”, but he was settled into this cabin as his home.

2017 (3 years old) A Hike on the Mogollon Rim

After a year plus together, we had our routines down! Lots of walks. Getting a dog and doing many more walks (and a few other habit changes) yielded a blog worthy weight loss.

2018 (4 years old) At Home in Saskatchewan

All kinds of changes, same old peaceful sleeper. Cori and I were married, so dog and I packed up the truck and moved to a new home in Saskatchewan, both happier dogs for the change.

2019 (5 years old) Mortlach, SK

Indeed, a mighty fine present is a new rawhide.

2020 (6 years old) Saskatchewan, Pandemic Times

All that sleep and rest makes for time to ponder the world, the meaning of life, whether we would see our llamas on the next walk….

2021 (7 years old) At Ursa Acres

DON’T TEASE ME WITH CHEESE! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

We had moved to our 16 acre rural homestead, and cheese is the upgraded gift from rawhide, maybe. Look at those eyes! Also this year, in one of those web serendipity things, an older Felix photo was requested for use to sell an interesting kind of Belgian dog food. Those stories only happen on the open web.

2022 (8 years old) At Ursa Acres

Indeed, another photo, you are 8 years old now, still looking good.

2023 (9 years old) At Ursa Acres

Still philosophizing from the floor position. At ease and calm, storing energy for our next walk. Or are we going camping soon? We did blog celebrate this year;s Gotchya Day

2024 (10 years old) At Ursa Acres

Looking good at double digits. This was a year the photos fell way behind schedule, closest I had to the May birthday date. But handsome! Adorable! Worthy of being a viral dog on Instagram!

2025 (11 years old) At Ursa Acres

For the 11th, and attempt to remake the puppy pose in the grass. The Strale marks are there, more faint. Same cute dog. Got a blog post out of the deal.

2026 (12 years old) At Ursa Acres

Here in year 12, Felix takes on the job of mentoring our new energetic puppy, Pimm. He does his best to stay up with her play moves, and we have seen evidence Felix has taught her to snow roll.

2027 (13 years old)

Stay tuned, the story and the photos go on! What more can I blog about these days than dogs?

Featured Image: Collage of my own CC0 images of Felix with a screenshot of just a few of the ones tagged Felix in Flickr (guess how many?) – since 2024 those get posted to Felix’s Mastodon @felixadog , he’s a tech savvy ActivityPub enabled dog.

(locals may notice that at about 21 minutes into the show when a stream of people walk in the background by as part of the Tunnels of Moose Jaw tour)

This was actually a re-do as one we had recorded earlier online something glitched with the audio, just as well because I think this conversation was better. Besides, it was an excuse to meet up in town.

We got to talking about my work at Open Education Global, banter about of course GenAI, the state as it were of social media, that there’s still goodness on the ‘net, how I got to Moose Jaw from Arizona, and a good chunk of how we really first connected, on digital (and non) storytelling. If you make it to the last question you will find I’ve been a a place in Saskatchewan that Dean (a native) has not been.

I’ve known Dean online through first the edtech bloggers to sometime in the mid or early 2000s, there really was a gold era then of Canadian ed tech folks I was fortunate to connect with through really just blogs, like for instance Dean, Rob Wall, and Alec Couros, way ahead of the curve on podcasting, had a long run of the EdTech Posse podcast “talking about education, especially from a Saskatchewan point of view.”

Sometime in 2006? 2007, definitely in 2008, Dean would email me with a requests be be a guest in his course at University of Regina to do talks on digital storytelling. The routine was an email would arrive from Dean with a subject line of “Me Again with a Favour?” Would that have been in the days of Elluminate? nope I think it was Skype and ustream.tv. I know I did one in 2008 while I was working remotely (for NMC) while house sitting in Iceland. It might have been this one or earlier that one of his students was Cori Saas, now my wife, she too then an active teacher blogger I connected with in the era.

Actually on the transCanada segment of my 2011 CogDogOdyssey road trip, on crossing Saskatchewan, I got to visit and stay wth all three of the original EdTech Posse folks. Here I had Dean do a Young Me/Now Me photo thing (was that a Ze Frank routine?) on that visit.

Dean was Canadian nice and gracious in talking about my various storytelling projects over the years. When he asked one that was a stand out for me, I was pleased to hear in response that he still makes use of Pechaflickr, heck it’s been too long since I tried it (yup, it still works).

I’m not sure I had too much profound to say on Dean’s show, but at least it was not all just the old web geezers show. Conversations, especially at coffee shops or as we also have done here on walks, are really the best kinds of connections one can have. The stuff we did than still matters now, just in a different, a more evolved, and often unanticipated context. We both agree on the value of storying.

Let’s coffee meet again, Dean, ok? The best thing is knowing I cracked the code

Featured Image: Unlocked flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license with irony a photo taken when I lived in Arizona and knew not the code.

Cough cough cough cough cough:

• Cough cough cough cough cough
• Cough cough cough, cough cough cough cough
• Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.

Cough, cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.

Cough cough.

Cough.

Cough cough: Cough Cough Cough cough cough cough cogdogblog cough cough cough cough cough cough Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

It’s called “Virtual Painter” and is in a folder with a few other iOS apps that were more commonly used a decade ago to do creative fun with images- you upload a photo, and chose from a set of maybe five styles, and it turns a photo into an image that looks like it was painted say watercolor style or oil paint style.

Just for the heck of it, I loaded up a photo I took of our old yellow tractor (her name is Matilda, does anyone else also name all their vehicles?) rendering it with the style “Purts”. It’s rather nifty to my untrained art eye.

It’s described in the app as “Oil Painting: This is a conventional oil painting with a glaze finish. Broad strokes are used for the background while the detail is added with a finer brush.” If my phone were in a Flintstones episode, we’d peek inside to find some harried little bird painting with a brush.

I knew there was an extra story of the app, but the brain is fuzzy, right? Of course there’s a blog post, and darned if it’s just another rabbit holing story like part 2 of yesterday’s The Best Holes of Curiosity

This was classic. I noticed in flickr that a user name Taka Umemura had favorited a photo of mine and followed me. I maintain my still high level of disdain of the “like” button but for some reason (though I know when Bryan Alexander favorites a flickr photo he will reuse and attribute it in his blog), I was curious. I found that he had made a version of my photo of the dome of a building in Mexico that looked like it had a rough painted texture you could almost feel.

I commented on his photo my thanks for liking the photo and making an artistic version of it, asking how it was done. He replied:

Thank you very much. I’m glad to see your comment. I am providing some app on my web site. Please visit once.
www.livecraft.co.jp/EN/index.html

That was in 2015 that I was able to download from Taka’s site my copy of Virtual Painter.

I was thrilled to click 11 years later and see that his Livecraft site is not only still there, but he has continued to explore painting and storytelling even now with of course a bit of AI. The real joy is here is the effort of one single person expressed on their own web site.

But it also gets me wondering about the blurry lines between photo filter/alteration effects, which have been around a long time, and the current ranging crop of GenAI image tools. One could argue with me (and likely win) that there is no difference. Somewhere in Virtual Painter is an algorithm for altering the pixels of a photography to resemble the style of paintings.

To some degree I might not even care how I made an image, but more, does it please me? Does it communicate something I want to hang under me name? I have no real hand in what Virtual Painter does (well there is a slider for the effects intensity). Can I really claim I created that oil painting of a tractor?

Just for fun, I uploaded the same photo to ChatCPT, and asked it to create an oil panting style version of my tractor.

Personally I like the Virtual Painter one, but I guess I could re-prompt ChatGPT for more texture in the sky. I am not sure that is the point.

Which image to I feel more like it was me who created it? I can’t say. But the difference I can say is that the image pn the rate was the product of one digital artist, craftsperson in Japan, for whom I have had a small personal connection. As far as on the left? me and Sam are not in the same circle.

Is any of this meaningful? Maybe not (remember my brain is fuzzy today).

And all of this pales to the nearly accidental path I took years ago to find this app and make a broef connection with a Japanese digital artists.

So if there are two paths on the digital woods, that is to road I prefer taking.

Featured Image: Rendering in Virtual Painter app with purts style of my ohoto of a farm tractor. Do with it as you like!