cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by indieink Beyond the unpredictable outages from high usage of the ds106 web site (well not so unpredictable, Sunday evenings are common) students are not allowed “the web site is down” as an excuse. Martha has already covered this from the last time we had bouts of this and for those concerned with #ds106 site outages, review this: wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2012/09/24/oh-… — Martha (@mburtis) October 28, 2012 and I followed up with some suggestions of how Google Reader can keep tabs of key class pages for you. I thought of one other key way to get to ds106 web pages when the site is down. It begins with “G” and ends with “oogle” — google search saves cached copies of web pages, and all you need is some deftness at search terms, and access to the Secret Button. So this is week ...

I was on the beach recently and found a cute kid to take a photo of: I got the push to make it seeing Before and After Pictures with a Twist on Buzzfeed where some dude inserted modern photos of himself into photos of him as a kid- but its more than cut and paste, he carefully considered the pose and details like shadow. My first reflex- “This would be a cool ds106 assignment” I am thinking of creating a twitter auto responder then when anyone tweets a message like that it responds with something like: So this is now an assignment Then-Now-Together: Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to ...

I’ve excited that we brought back the within the web storytelling assignment to ds106- the one where we ask students to use a browser tool to “re-edit” the content of an existing web site to give it a whole new meaning. IN many ways this subverts the web in a playful way that says, I can make this web page tell any story I want: From the Spring 2011 ds106 class came the idea of changing up an existing web page to tell a new story ” 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, but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though you can photoshop particular images on the site. Essentially you alter the content of a web page (content, images) to make it ...

Gotta feed the animated GIF bacteria that lives in my gut. I had a few sets of photos I have taken over the travel span that I took series of things in motion for the express purpose of making them animated. I did these in PhotoShop via the method blogged earlier – essentially importing files as a stack, setting frame sequences in he animation palette, and sometimes masking out to reduce the elements being animated. These will be tagged to end up in the Photo it Like Peanut Butter ds106 assignment. First up, from the great state of New York, at the small town where I crossed the Hudspn River, I had just hopped out of the truck to take a photo of the bridge when the sound of a train grabbed my attention (I literally ran across the tracks to get the angle) – this one is 549k. Next ...

This was week marks one of the highlights (for me at least as a teacher) of ds106 where we do a live radio broadcast of the student audio projects. This is where they work in groups to produce a 30 minute radio show, and is likely one of the most challenging projects. The challenge is not only the dynamics of working in groups, which is compounded by these students being online, but also because doing a good radio show is a lot of work- much more than the audio assignments we have given them for warm-up. On Monday I managed a 3.5 hour marathon to broadcast 5 groups from my section, and Martha just completed her run tonight. I’ve just finished organizing the archives. These include the posters for each group, plus 3 audio segments- the before show conversation with the group rep, the show itself, and the post show ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe DISCLAIMER: This is mostly a brain dump. Little coherent ideas emerge. Typos will occur. You have been warned. This session I participated in at Open Education 2012 was proposed by Julià Minguillón titled “Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of DS106″ – the idea as Julià outlined it was to try and find useful patterns and meaning in the large amount of networked activity that happens in this universe. I’ve been interested in this for a while but ow sure how to wrap my arms around it. Because of the syndication model set up in our site, we have essentially a copy of every blog post that the site has subscribed to since before January 2011 – over 20,000 posts (unlike those other high priced enterprise systems, our open source fueled site actually keeps all ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe It’s been a jam full week of conference and post conference fun at Open Education 2012 – how much cooler could a conference be that has not only a night boat cruise but has a rocking jam session from participants? cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by mnlamberson On the first day I had my 22.5 minutes to talk about the ds106 Assignment Bank and the Remix Machine we built for it earlier this year – the idea hopefully to share that its more than just using resources strung together but thinking of everything as something we can bend, spindle, fold, and mutilate creatively- that we actually remix our ideas. The session was The Open Assignment Bank of ds106 and Remixing Thereof where you will find requisite slides and resource links. ds106 is an ...

I got a chance to spread the ds106 mojo at Wordcamp Vancouver today, with my session on Building an Open Course/Community with WordPress, Syndication, and Duct Tape: ds106 is an open course in Digital Storytelling that leverages platforms of open source tools, syndication, and social media in a way that makes it more community than course. At ds106.us is a wordpress powered hub that aggregates and recombines input from 500+ external blogs plus a user contributed assignment bank, daily creative challenges, even a radio station. Built by a team of educator tinkerers, not coders, ds106 is as a model of a community network that is not limited to just courses. This was on the heels of a cross-Canada flight with a 1:30am arrival to our quarters in Vancouver, a little bit more late bight slide fiddling of slides, a trailing cold, and lot of coffee. Hence, GNA’s description feels apt: ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by wilmesmom People (like me) can get upset when the ds106 server goes down, and here is another tip to help you to keep tabs on the Daily Create, so you can know the assignment even if the server is belly up and gagging. At first i was thinking of building a new site on ym own server, and use something FeedWordPress to susbscribe to the Daily Create, but there is an easier solution, something we suggested people use already to keep tabs on the blog sin their class section. Google Reader. And yes, RSS, that technology that supposedly dies every 8 months. All you have to do is to subscribe to the Daily Create Feed (http://tdc.ds106.us/feed) in Google Reader. This works because it continually polls the server, and the feed content is stored in your account, so it will be ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve stilled not gotten very far in learning how to play my harmonica. Maybe, it is like learning… you don’t get far without putting any effort into it. But I can still have fun making noise. Tonight I have about 5 gazillion things to do, what am I doing making a ds106 assignment? I can’ t help it. This one is Make Music DAMNIT: Play the first song you have ever learned through any type of musical medium. Do it in a way that conjures up your memory of learning that song, or somehow fold the song into a larger story. Like almost no other person in the world, at 15 I decided I wanted to be a rock and roll guitar player. It was going to eb tought. Not only did I lack a guitar, I would not know ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by t3hWIT Confused? Don’t know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various “sections” of ds106- these are classes we know of who’s student blogs we are syndicating into ds106; all of these posts that come in carry an extra tag we can use to slice, dice, and make fries out of. After a few variatoions of setting up a random picker in the Assignments Collection, I saw it would be easy to do something for the posts we bring in. The exception here is that we want recent stuff, so these scripts only look for posts published to ds106 n the last ...

I’ve been urging my students to give each other more constructive feedback via blog comments; but this idea if challenge, coming form a student, not me, is soemthing I have to get behind: @cogdog I am issuing a challenge to all my fellow #ds106-ers: 7 comments on 7 different blogs this week! LET’S MAKE THIS HAPPEN. <3 — Haley (@doodle_muse) October 10, 2012 Ok, Haley, let’s ee if this works. The challenge is to make 7 constructive comments on 7 different blogs in a week, anyone in the ds106 mixes blog, but ideally, our lovely section. What is constructive? Well, hmm, what is NOT constructive is “cool” “Awesome audio mix” “this is great”. Constructive is what you’d like to see in terms of feedback yourself, right?- stylistic suggestions, ideas for how it could have been done differently, links to relevant sources elsewhere, tutorial tips, something like you have seen elsewhere. ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As we move into audio week, I wanted to whip together a quick example of a ds106 assignment just in case students are having trouble in Audacity. I hit the random button a few times in the audio assignments and ended up on Theme Verse: Create your own verse from a song! Pick a few lines from a few of your favorite songs that have the same focus. Then, combine them together to make a new verse in a song. Make sure it makes sense and it goes together! So the idea is to put together a verse of a song with selections take from multiple songs, but that are tied together by theme or to make sense, like they are the verse of one song. Here’s my thought process. I opened iTunes and tried to remember the verses of ...

There are the paths of links that maketh up the web and then the paths of experience that make up another web. Sometimes it just gets tangled up in a ball of serendipity that really is not all that important in the long run, yet still tickles me. Today’s ds106 Daily Create was contributed by one of my #ds106 students: #ds106 #dailycreate by @lyndseylu112 eXtreme edit. Take a photo, then edit that photo to the eXtremetdc.ds106.us/tdc274/ — Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 8, 2012 so I was compelled (self compelled) to make an effort. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I had combed through recent photos trying to find one that was not already full of color, hard to do when you get to witness the glory that is Autumn in Vermont. The original photo was one I took on the way here, in north central New ...

I like how my students are learning how to create their ds106 design graphics in GIMP by no means the easist software to use. Sometimes they get frustrated and revert to ones they know or just drawing things on paper and taking a photo. The point of this class is for students to become creators, and sometimes this means making a choice between trying some quick and easy web generator graphic tool or doing it the hard(er) way in software. To become a more versatile person with media, in the long run you will be better off knowing how to make your own graphics, because they will do much much more than the one off easy apps. I saw this morning my student was up agains the GIMP wall @cogdog i’m trying to use GIMP to put text on an image for a design assignment but I can’t figure it ...

What do you do when not sure which ds106 Design Assignment to do? Spin the random chooser. Seems like a good thing to do, hence this little bit of design work. The assignment this is for is Name That Single: Create a design for a favorite song by using just simple designs and NO WORDS…Basically a design assignment with the rules in charades. IE: for No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl” I would just have a symbol of a girl. Shall I give a clue? The lead singer of this band is female. Some might quibble that I have violated the instructions for no words with my math symbol. So what? Who cares? the point is not to just stay within the lines, but to experiment with the concept. To select my song, I also used the randomness of the shuffle in my iTunes to pick this song. I’m standing ...

Hey kids, do you know what tomorrow is (well it already is in New Zealand, those futurists). Yes, it is October 6. What’s special about that? October 6… is 10/6 meaning a day to celebrate ds106 So tomorrow, your make a photo showing your 1...

Submitted for no one’s approaval, another design example for the ds106 Minimalize Your Philosophy assignment: Pick your favorite quote OR make up your own phrase which describes a philosophy that you try to live by. It can be about love, friendship, family, education, culture, health, charity, etc. Design a minimalist poster depicting the concept. Extra challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don’t forget to explain your thought process. :) Okay, I am not going to claim this one as MY philosophy, but I had this idea, and needed to make a poster, and this was the closest assignment I could find (yeah, I could create a new one, but we have plenty). Today on our walk around the country roads near their home, friends Barbara and Bill pointed out some innocuous nondescript green plants on the roadside. They had been mowed down, but there were ...

It was time tonight to do some ds106 design assignment, this time a Triple Troll Quote. the classic ds106 assignment game of mixup and mis-attribution: Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure. From the official site: How It Works 1) Get a picture of someone people idolize. Obi Wan Kenobi, Barack Obama, Captain Kirk — any beloved public figure will do. 2) Slap on a famous quotation from a similar character from a different book or movie. Pick something close enough that a non-fan might legitimately confuse them. If you’re using Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, you’ll probably want to grab a quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. 3) Attribute ...

Another problem with taking the quick short cut route of doing ds106 assignments is generally the text tools are limited to slapping text on top of photos. I am seeing a number of the early work my students are doing is that are not really looking at how the text interacts with their design. If the text is just typed over the picture, it will look flat, often it is not as readable due to conflict with the background, and frankly, it ends up looking not designed. I’m beginning to wonder if when asked to designa poster, if students are really thinking about say, how movie posters look? Let’s say i am working on some assignment, maybe it is designing a book or album cover, and I use a photo of my friend Bryan Alexander. I can use many tools, but I choose pixlr a free web based editor I ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Pete Prodoehl I truly love the evolution and use of the ds106 assignment collection – we have almost 100 assignments to choose from each in the Visual and Design sections, all of them created by ds106 participants, and even rated by them for difficulty. A downside is, well, some of them lend themselves to be done rather easily. Some of them, like What People Think I Do or Zombify Yourself are done simply by going to a web site and clicking a few buttons. You can satisfy the minimum of the requirements in an expedient fashion. Or we have seen many ways people have used a wide range of graphic editing tools to complete the Color Splash Assignment versus other students who complete the assignment using an iPhone app. Martha and I wonder how to deal with this not ...

I was curious last week to see how many of my ds106 students were doing their part to stay tuned to the class hash tag (or me) in twitter. What better way than a POP QUIZ? Testing if my UMW #ds106 students are listening in twitter. Particpation Quiz can get you EXTRA CREDIT POINTS docs.google.com/spreadsheet/vi… — Alan Levine (@cogdog) September 26, 2012 I got 15 responses, 12 of whom where in my class, which is just a shade over half. That’s pretty good, or is it? They got a whole 5 points of freaking EXTRA CREDIT. The quiz was really silly and the equivalent of a hand raise in class: I asked their twitter handle (so I could match them to my students). I did ask a data chartable multiple choice item: What ways have you used twitter since class started? And probably has no significance at all, beyond the ...