Well, you might only be able to go back to 2007. And Google Streetview often does not provide too many exit doors. But this seemed like a cool discovery, simply at random. Last weekend I was driving north from home on highway 87, and coming down the hi...

File this one in the Unexpected Wonderful Internet Things That Started With an Almost Random Click department. I do like to know when someone comments on my flickr photos. In a previous version of the mobile app, what it showed for notifications matche...

Whilst passing through various discussions, tweet streams, blog posts about education, I end up feeling like Michelle Flaherty because I am always reaching for my experience and examples from ds106 (I won’t embed the video ;-) While not much acti...

My “involvement” in #rhizo15 is pretty much listening to the tea leaves in twitter, today’s bits had a fair bit of rumbling about “Content is People!” When I read Simon’s post I really had expectations of a DEVO song...

List crossing. Attending (and presented) yesterday at the Modern Language Association Conference here in Vancouver. I mingled with more rhetoricians then I usually do. I got to meet Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Strommel of Hybrid Pedagogy fame. My se...

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Johnson Cameraface What happens when ds106 takes on a theme and subject of the TV series The Wire? That unfolds next week when the class starts at UMW. Do you feel me? (that’s a line from the show, ok?) Jim and Paul have been ripping through reviews of the first six episodes. I’m expect to float in and out, as one does as an open participant, and have watched the first two again. There’s a bit of affinity since I am from Baltimore, though not the areas where the show takes place. My first interest in the show was piqued at the 2008 South by Southwest conference in a keynote session where Henry Jenkins and Steven L Johnson discussed the increasing complexity of TV narratives, comparing old school simple sitcoms that I grew up on with newer (then) shows such […]

As usual in my house yesterday I had NPR Radio on in the background. The show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me had a segment with Baltimore filmmaker John Waters as guest. PETER SAGAL: In April 2011, we talked to a man who’s made some of our favorite movies – John Waters, who went to the city he made famous, Baltimore, Maryland, and we’re surprised to discover he didn’t actually grow up in Baltimore, Maryland. JOHN WATERS: No, I grew up in suburbia, which I ran from as quickly as I could. (SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE) SAGAL: Yeah. WATERS: I wanted to come downtown and be a beatnik. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) SAGAL: What drew you to downtown Baltimore, to the city? WATERS: Well, I first came downtown, and I saw beatniks, and I saw people that didn’t fit in. I saw outsiders that didn’t even fit in with their own minority. And […]

creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by stevendepolo You do know the irony of #ds106 #4life? Right? With a four month fellowship at TRU starting in late October through March and no plans to teach ds106 for a while, I shall be dialing back my role in keeping the lights on inside the web site. The other thing about ds206 is that it rests on not one person. As previously aired on this blog, Mariana Funes and Giulia Forsythe have agreed to keep the Daily Create fresh. That one is really hard for me to stop doing, and I probably will not stop. As for everything else, I had a video chat with Jim Groom Friday, and he has all the info to take over the keys to the main site and it’s ancillary parts. But more than that, he’s returning to teach a regular semester version […]

Trippy. The frames of this gif (image data) were edited in audio editing software. It’s in the realm of glitch art as the effects created are largely unpredictable. It’s a matter of saving an image in an uncompressed format, importing into Audacity, applying an effect or two, and exporting back again. I saw a link to it via a retweet by Hilary Mason What happens when you use audio effects on images? http://t.co/LcxCGPrW14 — Brett Camper (@professorlemeza) July 13, 2014 Brett Camper’s post on Data Bending With Audacity has a long list of examples. I was able to do it with both this post and a prior one by Antonio Roberts. I started with a JPG of a photo rummaging around my desktop pictures, a photo of a cholla cactus I took maybe 10 years ago: In Photoshop, I resized it to 800x600px and then exported it as a TIF […]

Dusting off some ds106 poster riffing. I guess there as some fun banter about remixing james bond posters with some dogs we know, Mariana was off and running with it… But she let me down by not making it an assignment. So I had to step in with The Best Bond Is A Dog: All thanks to a conversation on Twitter. An emergent DS106 assignment ‘Remix (in a dog appropriate manner) a Bond movie title and create a poster’. Hence, Daphne Groom, in the classic “You Only Bark Twice” I decided to give Daphne some more dog pride that she gets in this photo of Miles and Tessie with that poor dog in a tutu! creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by snakepliskens I liked the 1960s motif of the poster from You Only Live Twice, appropriate since it features Jim’s favorite Bond actor ;-) There is […]

creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by dvanzuijlekom As a kid my Mom would ask me what present I wanted for the holidays or a birthday. “Present” being so singular, I thought I gamed the system by asking for a “big box full of a whole lot of little toys”. She always delivered. Over in another room of the Campbell household, Gardner is merrily making some of his first animated GIFs. I got thinking about a few that were sitting in my undone pile, or the half baked ideas pile. Here is the unboxing. First of all, my good friends and happy couple, Michael Gershovich and Jennie Morris, the night we sat out on the new roof tap bar of the Park South Hotel. As it happens, often I get multipl photos, which plays out as a 1-2 Photograph GIF This is done in a way described […]

creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by – Slavin More tinkering goes on with the ds106 Assignment Bank as a wordpress theme (watch it change as often as flickr at http://bank.ds106.us), thanks to the work being done by Karen and Brad on a new version for the Making Connected Learning MOOC. Again fresh eyes and ideas are helping me see (sometimes) past the way we built it for ds106. One area we have danced around is the use of the WP-PostRatings Plugin. Typically this is used to allow people to register votes for blog posts, and has flexibility to have simple up/down voting, or 5 star and many more. The way we have used it for DS106 has been a crowd sourced difficulty vote (1 star is easy, 5 is hard), so anyone visiting an assignment can click on a star value to register a vote. What […]

creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Before reading this, I suggest reviewing Mariana’s newly shared “The psychology of open: On wrestling your inner MOOC”. It was written for a presentation she is doing June 3 at one of the more interestingly titled and themed conferences — The Higher Education Academy is running a conference called Heroes and monsters: extraordinary tales of learning and teaching in the arts and humanities. Her summary: I have been invited to run a workshop on the psychology of open education ‘You cannot be half-open: On wrestling your inner MOOC’. I want to focus on the inner barriers academics wanting to operate in the open web encounter and how they can overcome them. This is what I am defining as the psychology of open education and I have decided that my next book will be about this. What follows are my […]

Yeah, c’mon When the course is over When the course is over, yeah When the course is over Keep on the blogs Keep on the blogs Keep on the blogs, yeah For the blog is your special friend Keep on feeding as it intends Blog is your only friend Until the end Until the end Until the end About the time last week I was in the UK, my most recent DS106 course ended. Thus DS Goes to Work, went to work, and overall I was very pleased with what the students were able to do. And more for the way they were able to write about their story ideas and process then the media products. Again, this was an online course for George Mason University’s Instructional Design and Technology program. Students are all full time employees of a major consulting firm; many of them where taking one other courses. […]

I typically tell people the ds106 Daily Create is something that should take less than 20 minutes per day, hence today I spent maybe 2.5 hours on mine. It’s not a rule, it’s a choice. Today’s one was special though. I am visiting David Kernohan and Vivien Rolfe in Bristol, and David’s son Ben is a fan of the daily create. He is also 6. I offered to publish one Ben made up; his idea was to ask people to create a board game (as usually, the editor takes some liberty, so it became “Design and draw your own board game about ds106″). It’s best often to go with your first association, and mine went to Monopoly; and therfeore I present the Gartner Hyped Game of MOOCopoly creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My original idea was to mock up an image, but as I […]

This was the academic theme for today’s presentation at OER14 in Newcastle, UK by Rochelle Lockridge, Mariana Funes, and moi, “A DS106 thing happened on the way to the 3M Tech Forum“: DS106 (http://ds106.us/) is a computer science course in Digital Storytelling at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), framed on principles of the web as a platform for storytelling. Students learn to manage their own digital domain in the process of understanding storytelling and creating media. In 2011, DS106 opened up to a global community of online participants. This case study explores how DS106 tools, methodology and philosophy were adapted into the corporate world at 3M to build community, collaboration, and effective global communication skills. Our hypothesis was the pedagogy and assignments of the DS106 open course could be modified for delivery on a corporate intranet, using internal creation and communication tools standard for 3M employees. We hoped to […]

In writing up the current ds106 lesson on telling stories, I provided some updates tips in how to download video form YouTube (and other services). In the past I have recommended KeepVid (requires Java, so its no go in Chrome). Since learning about it from Tim Owes, I switched to pwnyoutube, specifically the bookmarklet tool. I’ve seen it not work for periods, and lately Chrome has been tossing up a click through unsecure script warning. But last time I passed by pwnyoutube I noticed a new service– and it has smoother dance moves than the others. SaveFrom.net not only can download video from YouTube URLs, but also another 40+ different audio/video sites. But the cool moves begin when you install the helper extension.add-on — it looks like it works for IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and more. And this is what makes it best- in YouTube, vimeo, and more, it adds […]

Given a photo from @drgarcia of Jim Groom and his new sidekick, Daphne, I was struck by how similar their intent was on the computer screen. As a fitting parallel for one of my older efforts at the ds106 assignment, the parent child head swap, we have now a dog who, if she tries hard, may be up to Dog Blog Standards. Keep on blogging, Daphne!