cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by woodleywonderworks

All the work your groups have done the last two weeks pays off as your shows will be broadcast on ds106 radio Monday and Tuesday of this week. As the last part of our audio segment, your task this weel will be to evaluate the show from another team and also self evaluate your own team’s show. In addition, we move to a different kind of storytelling, one that uses the space of existing web sites as a place for you to assert your own stories into them.

Radio Shows Go Live

The recorded radio shows wil be broadcast live this week on ds106 radio which you all have had experience listening to back in week four. At least one person from your time must be present in Skype to introduce and talk about your show before and after we play it on the radio. All of the posters, bumpers, commercials and the schedule are available at:

http://ds106.us/2012/10/22/radio-shows-live-on-the-air/

Links to the full shows are available at http://ds106.us/2012/10/22/radio-shows-live-on-the-air/

We are offering a listening incentive -that is extra credit will be given to the team that can demonstrate they got the most listeners at one time for their section. How you get listeners is your challenge- use your communication tools, friends, family, and help them figure out how to tune in at the right time to hear your show. To get the credit, at least one member of your team must prove their maximum audience size with a screen shot of the ds106 radio status page that shows the count (other team members can use the same image or a link to the pot that shows this count).

Your final task will be to listen to the show from another group (either live or from the posted archives). You will then write a blog post in which you evaluate the show, offer advice, suggestions, or compliments (be sure to link to the show!). In addition, you will provide the same evaluation for your own show, after having completed the work and listened to other ones.

You can find the show each person on your team needs to review at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RqCd-H0zVvPhiq9AjEE6HufEc_hwurUg9QjRjc6WEt8/edit

Each time will be assigned a show from the other section to review, and you will have a chance to modify the criteria by which you will review the shows. The final criteria for this will be locked in as of Wednesday night at midnight. You can find which show you will need to listen to and the draft of the review criteria at

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13Vvl2jF7rPkOKW06HW4nLfN8bS3naMUXMZj_fiZVUSA/edit

Telling Stories Within The Web

This might be a subtle distinction, but so far you have been using media (so far images, design, and audio) to create stories in the web spaces you publish to- this is writing stories ON the web. In this week, we play with this idea in a way, in that you will be asked to use the affordances of other web sites to change their intent, meaning, or purpose to tell a story in those spaces.

This Web Storytelling idea was first done in ds106 in the Spring of 2011 where the description for what we are asking you to do is

Over the next week we’ll be playing with storytelling within the web. What does this mean? Well, Martha Burtis lays out the idea nicely in this post here about the idea behind this assignment (read it!), but to briefly summarize: you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site (if you can), but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though you can photoshop particular images on the site.

You are not being asked to code web pages; but we have tools that you can use in a web browser that allow you to modify the content of an existing web page, change the text, images, and links, so that it has different content and meaning. Some examples include:

• Serena Epstein re-wrote an MSNBC news page to make it look like it was talking about the fences on the UMW campus
• Martha Burtis made an Amazon product page look like some contraption that automated ds106 work.
• Alan Levine re-crafted an IMDB summary of a Clint Eastwood movie to change the movie plot.
• Andrew Wallingham turned a google search result into something… well maybe creepy.

The story creation part means finding an existing web page to work with as raw material -good candidates are newspaper stories, product entries in sites like Amazon or eBay, movie/book reviews — in fact, simpler pages like a search result or Craigslist are easier to work with.

The tools you can use allow you to, in a web browser, actually modify the content. The trick is then to save it as a raw HTML web page, and upload it to your own web directory (this means returning to your UMW Domains control panel to upload files to your site). The end goal is to have both a screen shot image and an real working web page that is the new one you created– on your own site. Here are a few approaches you can take for this project:

Firefox + Firebug Add-on

When we first added this assignment to ds106 in spring of 2011, we recommended a add-on tool for the Firefox web browser called Firebug. This tool provides an editing interface where you can manipulate the content and web code, and see the results on screen. The challenge of this tool is that it is very easy to make a mistake and lose your work (by doing something as simple as refreshing the browser page). However, this is still one possible way to complete this assignment, and you can find a tutorial about how to use Firefox/Firebug to edit an existing Web page here.

Hackasaurus

Another, newer approach that we currently recommend is the Mozilla Hackasaurus tool:

Hackasaurus makes it easy to mash up and change any web page like magic. You can also create your own webpages to share with your friends, all within your browser.

What you should do is install the X-Ray Googles tool in your browser (this should work in any web browser). This can be invoked directly on the web page you want to change — and it provides an overlay interface to change text, formatting, even images — essentially to rewrite any web page.

When you are done, you’ll need to copy your changed code (click “P” when the X-Ray Googles are activated to see the changed code), and upload it to your own server space (instructional video on this is forthcoming).

If you choose this technique, we highly recommend that you spend some time browsing the Hackasaurus site — there are useful instructions and pointers!

The good thing about Hackasaurus is it creates everything as a single file that you can upload directly to your wordpress site.

1. When you hit Publish in Hackasuarus, the only option is “download” this gives a display of HTML code. Copy that in its entirety.
2. On your computer, open up the app that is a plain text editor- in Windows this is NotePad, on the Mac is it Text Edit. DO NOT USE MS WORD. DO NOT USE MS WORD. IT WILL RUIN YOUR PROJECT!
3. Paste all the stuff you copied.
4. If you are using TextEdit on the Mac, Select “Make Plain Text” from the Format menu.
5. Save it as a file that ends in .txt
6. From your desktop, change the file name so its extension is “.html”
7. Open this file (it should appear in your web browser) and make sure it looks like the page you redesigned. You may get weird warnings for things like flash, etc. Ignore them
8. Start editing your blog post. Click thew “add media” button (it is one of the icons just above the editing tools, towards the left side.
9. Upload the html file
10. Edit the “title” field to be the text you want to make hyperlinked
11. Make sure you use the option nest to Link URL for “File URL” This is the web address of your new page.
12. Click insert

And now you have a link o a standalone web page.

Raw Code

Or if you are down and dirty with web code, you can save the raw source of a web page and reconstruct the content in HTML. This approach is not for the faint of hear! We recommend taking it ONLY if you have some experience with writing/editing HTML.

Your work then is to do the Storytelling Within the Web assignment – write a blog post with the usual writeup components, and include both a screen shot of your reworked page and a link to a live web version of your retold web story page. This is a five star assignment.

More Web Storytelling

We have a few more of these kinds of activities in the ds106 Web Assignments section – your task is to do another 5 stars worth of these assignments.

Daily Creates

You should be very deft now at doing the Daily Create assignments, so we are going to ask that you add a new component this week. You are to do at least three Daily Creates this week. When you have completed your three, look at them and find a way to connect them in a story. Re-edit your captions of your flickr photos, you tube videos, and soundcloud recordings so that there is a narrative that uses the media AND links them (via a hyperlink) to your other media.

So your story might start with a flickr image, then link to a YouTube video, and then link back to another flickr image. The idea here is to construct a story that jumps across these media sites in a way that works as a single story.

Weekly Summary

Your weekly summary and personal reflection post is due by midnight on Sunday, October 28. Your post should include the following:

• Evaluation of the other radio show you are assigned to review, as well as one for your own group (if you wish to try for the extra credit, include image or link to place to demonstrate your show’s audience size).
• Complete the Storytelling within the Web assignment
• Complete another 5 stars worth of Web Assignments (if you do not like this, this could be a good time to create your own assignment or write a tutorial).
• Continue to comment on other student’s blogs and participate in ds106 via twitter.
• Complete 3 daily creates and connect them as one web based story.