I voted for @lessig today
I voted for @lessig today, at least with a donation.
2009 conversation between @ethang and @lessig on twitter
I always thought he was a pretty swell guy.
#Fiesta4dejulioUSA #2015 #madrid
The US Embassy in Madrid hosted (apparently) the largest party in US embassy history. There were 3000 attendees, including myself, and some very talented musicians. Here’s the pics & vids:Â https://goo.gl/photos/qBQnyuMay1XKo4oH9.
Also, Ambassador Costos likes my tweets:
@DJ_LesCarbonell kickin set last night thanks! #Fiesta4dejulioUSA  #madrid  pic.twitter.com/7XLqpuM021
— Ethan Crawford (@ethang) June 28, 2015
Ambassador Costas Favorite Tweet
Frank Biasi: GIS in the Rockies 2013 Keynote
Frank Biasi presents “Extending our Reach through Maps and Multimedia Integration,” the second keynote for the 2013 GIS in the Rockies Conference, held in Denver, Colorado on October 10, 2013.
Recorded and broadcast live by Ethan Crawford, RockyMedia
Mapmaking
I’m making maps to add to a report we’re developing for the University of Denver Sustainability Council. The report recommends several transit improvements for the University of Denver campus, such as a new cycle track, bike/pedestrian signage, painted bike boxes, bike fixtations, curb cuts, green sharrow lanes, and new red crosswalks. You can read the report here: DU Land Use Transit Recommendation.
View full map: http://geocommons.com/maps/219532
DS106 Hello World!
photo by Stefanie Doll
This is the first of several posts related to the DS106 course I’m taking as an open-internet participant.
Here is a short description of DS106, taken as excerpts from the about DS106Â page:
Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course …  you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer (none of those wimpy ass iPads), a hardy internet connection, a domain of your own, some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster (and we’ll spend time helping you get up and running with at least two of the last three requirements).
As an emerging area of creative work, the definition of digital storytelling is still the subject of much debate.
In many ways this course will be part storytelling workshop, part technology training, and, most importantly, part critical interrogation of the digital landscape that is ever increasingly mediating how we communicate with one another.
The course objectives are rather straightforward:
- Develop skills in using technology as a tool for networking, sharing, narrating, and creative self-expression
- Frame a digital identity wherein you become both a practitioner in and interrogator of various new modes of networking
- Critically examine the digital landscape of communication technologies as emergent narrative forms and genres
I look forward to engaging in this interesting and important field of study.  I hope to take the lessons learned and share them with my learning communities, here in Colorado and around the world.  Feel free to join me in this critical discussion, you can register yourself at http://ds106.us/register/ and contribute to the discussion on your own blog, and stay in touch via the ds106 twitter feed.
HAPPY World Car-Free Day
It’s September 22, 2011 – the last day of Summer this year.
I can’t help but reflect on all those summery things that we leave behind: bright mornings, sweet iced coffees, balmy bike rides, popsicles, raging outdoor chicken parties, beer-in-hand kickball, zip-lining into mountain lakes, warm nights of cricket & locust chorus, and other stuff. Sayonara, summer – we will miss you.
Still, Fall is a beautiful time of year. Â The colors, the smells, the birthdays (ahem). Â Last week I bought a case of wine and churned about 20 homegrown tomatoes into a fresh, hot, steamy pot of tomato soup. Â Soup season is upon us! Â You may be lucky enough to have a taste. Â It’s a delicious time of year.
There is another reason to celebrate September 22nd. Â Today is World Car-Free Day. This is when we come together by bike, by foot, by hovercraft, to celebrate the potential of a car-free world. Whattaya say?
Here’s are some of my favorite bicycle videos to get us celebrating a car-free world:
Thumbs up for Rock and Roll!
Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania Fights Illegally Parked Cars with Tank
Bike Lane Activism in NYC
I Am Not a P#$$Y
Case Study of a 3-way Street in NYC
Women’s Liberation and the Bicyle
Early Bicycle History in Denver
Ooh, La La! Horse Joins Tour de France
Careful what you wish for
For the past several years I’ve been wishing for the return of old-school colorado summers, when the monsoons would sweep through each afternoon, cooling & cleansing the city and offering a sweet drink for my gardens. Â Yet Each year Denver seems to get more and more dry, with less snow in the winters and less rain in the summers.
But this July has been different, bringing epic rains and breaking a few records. Â Thus it appears that my longtime wish was granted, at least temporarily. Â Our dry state is currently getting pounded with daily thunderstorms, bringing rain in amounts up to 3.5 inches of rain in as little as 90 minutes.
And two days ago, as I was celebrating my kickball team’s season finale with a sangria, I became stranded at Pasquini’s Uptown as a rainstorm brought walls of water into the area.  Unfortunately I drove that night (I never drive, my bike is my transport here).  But this time my car was parked directly out front, and as you’ll see from the video below, 17th Avenue was no place for a little car that night (even one with a big attitude).  The video hardly shows the reality – as it’s too dark, and too early in the storm to show exactly how high waters rose on July 12th.  There were trucks driving down the street, creating wakes like I’ve seen coming from double 200HP outboard boat engines.  My poor little subaru was flooded inside and out, and my insurance company tells me it’s probably beyond repair.
So, moral of the story: be careful what you wish for. Â Epic rainstorms bring flooded engines and glove compartments.
Still, I say “bring it!” Colorado, I’m not backing down from this fight. Â I will take any rainstorm you can deliver.
GIS Revelations
The following excerpt came from the final comments I offered in a discussion board for an online course I took in Fall 2010, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems. (It was an entirely online course, which was an good experience that I’ll discuss in another post someday. For now, I’ll just mention that I was pleased with online education and I plan to do more of it. I also posted links to our textbooks.)
ArcGIS Desktop (2010)
Getting Started with Geographic Information Systems (2010)
This course has been a great introduction to the vast universe of GIS. I say ‘universe’ because there’s a lot of space to map out there, and even here on my city block there are countless attributes that could be collected and imported to a GIS for further study, or for mass consumption. For me, playing with GIS is like having a second brain, and one that is far more mathematically inclined than my first brain. So GIS has been an extension of my skill set that I never knew was accessible.
I learned that ArcGIS is an incredibly feature-rich environment. It amazed me to witness how much this software is capable of, and I know that we’ve barely scratched the surface! Yet I also found the software to be very clunky and somewhat old fashioned, if that makes any sense. I also experienced a very tedious and painful process just getting the software installed and licensed properly (using the 180-day trial that accompanies our textbook). And using this software, I was regularly reminded about how restrictive software licensing can be, and how inaccessible this amazing resource is – unless you fork over large sums of money. For that and other reasons, I look forward to using other GIS software tools in the future. I hope to learn more about mapping with Google Earth, and also exploring the open source alternatives to ArcGIS, such as PostGIS, GRASS GIS, Quantum GIS, and uDig. Yet as I understand it, ArcGIS is the industry standard, and any alternatives have a ways to go to match the functionality (am I wrong?).
Finally, the more I learn about GIS, the more questions I have. But this course has certainly affirmed to me that I’m capable of understanding the basic concepts of geography and cartography, and of navigating the GIS environment. I eagerly look forward to learning more about this universal field.
PS: It was great studying with you all!
Live Video Test
Tomorrow is Ignite Denver 6! Are you going? You can be there in person at the Rackhouse Pub, or you can just wear your jammy pants and watch it from home. Because I’ve gone to the effort to send it right to you, wherever you may be.
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Why & How I Built an Auto Retweet
Last month I setup an auto retweet, so that every tweet from @ignitedenver would be immediately reposted by @ethang (my personal twitter account). If that doesn’t make sense to you, you should start with a twitter primer, or learn about 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter first.
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2010 and other great things
Greetings to you all. I’m Ethan Crawford, a khaki-wearing, half-introverted hominid by weekday, and a simple (albeit curious and social) gentleman by evening/weekend. I have a variety of documentarian persuasions, ranging from playful experiments in the the arts (such as photography, videography, sketching, and singing), to more formal attempts at research and truth-seeking (mostly focused on global informational cultures). I figure it’s better in the long run if all of my ramblings and results live freely out there in the information-ether, rather than staying stacked up and locked away in piles of paper, hard drives, and neurons within the boundaries of my little city plot. This website is an attempt to put all my stuff out into the open web. I hope that you can find something useful here, because frankly most of it is somewhat foreign and peculiar to me. Enjoy!
Sincerely,
Ethan Crawford
Welcome
Welcome to ethancrawford.com, we are hard at work building this space. Please stay tuned for further information.
-the management
UNESCO Forum on Open Education Resources
The UNESCO Virtual University has generated a lot of activity with their Forum on Open Course Content. The online discussion was held from October 24 to December 2, 2005, and brought together a diverse group of individuals from 90 countries. In February 2006, the event’s final report was released (attached). An email list was recently established in hopes of producing a collaborative research project on OER. Today the organization released a research agenda (attached) to further explore the topic. They are ecouraging wide participation in the effort to define and expand the structure of Open Educational Resources. (more…)
Live ePresence webcast demonstration
The ePresence community will be hosting a live webcast demonstration of their latest release ( ePresence 3.1) tomorrow. This is an open source system for content capturing, archiving, and webcasting, developed by the University of Toronto Knowledge Media Design Institute. The latest release incorporates live webcasting, VOIP, podcasting, screen capture and powerpoint support. Has anybody used ePresence in classroom or distance learning environments?
New Directions in Multimedia
Any frequenter of the EDUCAUSE blogs has likely experienced the potential of emerging technologies in media consumption. Cell phones, PDAs, and iPods are changing the way most of us (on one side of the digital divide) think, store information, and entertain ourselves. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that over 10% of American adults own iPods or mp3 players. EDUCAUSE’s Steve Worona points out that iPod technology is creating more unexpected ideas than you can count. And what’s more, notes Worona, iPods are only the beginning of this multimedia adventure. (more…)
