To those who are considering registering for ds106: This class is definitely worth taking, provided you have enough time to dedicate to it. The hands-on, intensive format will challenge and stretch those who put in enough to get something valuable back out. You can expect two primary benefits: First, you will learn a variety of ...

I am pleased to present the culmination of my efforts at making a game for the ds106 final project: Beneath. Go ahead and try it out. I hope that you enjoyed playing it as much as I did making it! It definitely ended up being much more work than I had anticipated, but it was ...

Perhaps the most noticeable change in this update to Beneath is the incorporation of sounds effects. Doors now creak when opened, bang when shut, and rattle if they are locked. Furniture makes a sliding sound when it is moved. And picking up items make two different “pickup” sounds, depending on whether the item is normal ...

Here is the latest update to Beneath, the game that I have been working on for my final project in ds106. There have been a number of changes from my last update: First, you’ll notice that there is now a title screen introducing the game and providing instructions for playing. One nice side effect of ...

For this update of the game, I moved away from general “make a game engine” type activities, and started focusing on creating the story that I want to tell. So gone are the two test areas you’ve been seeing for a while; they’ve been replaced with the first two screens of the actual game. There ...

What is interesting about McBride’s essay is how I can see echos of it in ds106. As she states, the essay isn’t specifically about the remix, but rather formal versus informal learning discussed within the context of remixing. Even so, she raises important issues about remixing such as copyright and content. This is the first ...

For the Video Essay Assignment, I chose to create a commentary on the John Hughe’s classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The premise is that his sidekick Cameron undeservedly gets a bit lost under Bueller’s very long shadow, yet his narrative is interesting and deserves a bit of the spotlight. The video is full of spoilers, ...

I started on the ds106 video assignment today and ran into an issue right away. After ripping a DVD to my hard drive, I wanted to create a few short clips using MPEG Streamclip to test out Windows Movie Maker. Unfortunately, I was getting no picture or sound when trying to play back the VOB ...

Here is another update to Beneath. My focus since last time has been figuring out how to allow the player to interact with their environment in ways beyond merely walking about. Here are a few changes you may notice… Most obvious is that there now a new starting area – a mysterious forest. Within it ...

Here is my contribution to the web storytelling segment of ds106. The assignment was to modify a real, recognizable web page to tell a story; for mine I modified a special report the BBC did on the history of Mars exploration. In this re-imagined reality, however, advanced life was discovered. Here is the HTML version ...

For the Web Storytelling portion of DS106, we are tasked with taking a page on a well-known website of our choice, and modifying the content in it to tell a story. After all the fun with had in class on our trip to the moon, I thought it would be fun to create something with ...

Greetings! Here is another update to my final project, Beneath. First, check it out. Just click on the window and move around with the arrow keys. Also, turn up your speakers or put on some headphones. There were three majors changes in this version: music, lighting, and triggers. Music This is courtesy of Kevin MacLeod. ...

Today is the big day for the ds106 audio projects: everyone will be unveiling their 30 minute radio shows starting at 2pm! In the meantime, here is a small sample from the show Patrick and I created, Tales of the Town. This segment is a sound effects story, exploring an unnamed individual’s unusual evening on ...

There have been a number of changes to the game since my last update. Perhaps the most immediately useful is that it now has a working name – “Beneath.” So now you can call it that instead of “Galagonwagon’s game project thing.” Check out a demonstration of the new stuff (click below, and use the ...

After much deliberation, I decided last week that I would make a game for the final project. Initially I had wanted to do something with photography, perhaps continuing the daily shoot or experimenting with taking portraits of strangers as noise professor has been doing. But I settled on a game for two reasons: first, creating ...

In celebration of the completion of my last midterm ever, and the onset of spring break, I present to you some new toys from the DS106 Radio Twitterbot… …Statistics! Ever curious who the most prolific live broadcasters are? Here are the top ten: Broadcast Title Occurences James Groom’s Broadcast 155 DJ Downes is in da ...

Yesterday I highlighted some great work by others in the class; today I’ll share work of mine that I’m particularly happy with. While I don’t consider myself to have particularly developed artistic skills, something I’ve enjoyed about this course is not only seeing some of my work turn out better than expected, but finding that ...

There has been a lot of great work coming out of DS106. From visual assignments like the minimalist movie poster, animated GIF, and playlist poetry to the Daily Shoot to the insanity that is ds106radio, it’s been a wild ride so far. Let me take this opportunity to highlight some of the work I particularly ...

So for the Audio & Sound portion of ds106, we will be using Audacity as our audio tool. After all of the installation blah blah who cares stuff, I thought it might be interesting to create a recording to see how Audacity works. But not just any recording, like a “testing 1 2 3 test ...

Design Assignment:. Create a tv/movie poster that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography. Speed may not be the pinnacle of film, but the theme of the movie lends itself to a design aesthetic like this. Abstract concepts can be hard to distill, but the idea of a bus moving ...

This is my contribution to the ds106 Visual Assignment “Four Icon Challenge”: Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons. As you might guess, it was hand-draw...

CogDog asked a thought-provoking question on his blog recently: has the daily shoot improved my photography? This is a great question. I’m not sure if there is a simple yes or no answer for me. I’ve played with photography off and on over the years, enough to develop some basic skills and head knowledge. But ...

a ds106 story created by Galagonwagon flickr photo by ravnclaw89 flickr photo by ismart29 flickr photo by cogdogblog flickr photo by cogdogblog flickr photo by b4ssm4st3r Another lazy summer afternoon. Sunlight filtering through the leaves, dancing amongst columns that had always been there. Another lazy summer afternoon. A girl floated across worn stones, weaving amongst ...

Visual Assignment: Find appropriately licensed pixel art tiles. Assemble your finds into images, creating a sequence of five, to tell a story without words. Credit: Reiner’s Tilesets

Alan Levine suggested an improvement to the @ds106radio twitterbot: as long as I was collecting all of this data, why not make it available via a searchable interface? Ask and you shall receive… If you visit http://ds106radio.galagonwagon.com/song/ in your browser, it will display the currently playing song. If you’re curious (or need to know), the ...

Earlier this week, as the the ds106radio-mania was in full frenzy, I tweeted the following idea to #ds106 (which Jim promptly retweeted to the masses): Who can program it? Well actually Jim, now that you ask, I can program it. It seemed like a fun little project, so I decided to see how far I ...

Tim O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0?” is a well-known articulation of the ways in which the internet experienced a paradigm shift in the early 2000′s. For this assignment, I wanted to take two of the changes he identified, and express them in a different way: Web 2.0, in part. on Prezi (For best results, view ...

What does digital storytelling have to do with web 2.0? The curmudgeon in me thinks of that as an unholy confluence of buzzwords that ought not be mixed. For that matter, digital storytelling?  Really?  Charles Dickens and the rest of the brit lit crowd is real storytelling. It’s good enough for me; it ought to ...

One of the questions I’ve been pondering from time to time over the past couple of weeks is why personal cyberinfrastructure matters. Hearing Campbell’s own vision for this was helpful, in the sense of providing some well-considered points on the matter. Part of what bothers me is my belief in the value of specialization: shouldn’t ...