Wagner College Workshop: Dive into ds106

Alan Levine • April 26, 2013


cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by freshwater2006

Helpful Links for ds106

Our Digital Footprints

digital_footprint_blog

What does the web know about us? Working in pairs, see what traces you can find of your colleague (Note, if someone prefers not to be searched, use the name of your workshop leaders). Resources:

Organize your information in a grid like Clarence Fisher does with his middle school students (Professional, Biographical, Personal, Other).

will richardson info

Running Your Digital Space


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by romsrini

For this workshop you will be using your Wagner College Faculty Site, which will have been set up for you. We will not have time to review all of the features of WordPress, but enough to get you started publishing to your own site. As a start we will review:

Join the ds106 Community

You are on your way to becoming a “ds106er”- we have set up a special grouping for all participants in this workshop, so you can understand how the community works as a group within ds106.

Register your blog at http://ds106.us/signup boting the following:

  • Your blog address will look something like http://faculty.wagner.edu/alan-levine
  • We will ask for a twitter account name. We use twitter as our main communtiy tool; if you do not have an account, you can set one up easily. If you prefer not to, just put a fake username in the form. I won’t report you.Be sure to choose Wagner College Workshop as your affiliation.
  • There are two steps to the form, the first colletys your information. The second one confirms the source of your blog’s content that ds106 will look for. Since your blog will have more information that just ds106, enter for the blog feed a special URl that will only look for posts tagged “ds106”.

    If my blog is http://faculty.wagner.edu/alan-levine/http://faculty.wagner.edu/alan-levine/tag/ds106/feed.

feed2

First Assignment

Now let’s start some publishing. Before we put pen to paper fingers to keyboard, keep in mind:

Here is your first blogging assignment – What does [Digital] Storytelling mean to you?

Use this as an opportunity to put down in words what your current concept is of storytelling. There is no right or wrong answer here- this is to set up your current idea of what story means. Do not go look anything up online — I am looking for your ideas. Just write a blog post to represent a starting point what storytelling means to you.

What comes to mind visually when you think of the word? Think about what the word brings to mind: images, places, people, sounds. How would you describe it to someone else? What examples can you think of that strongly represent stories in terms of books, films, songs?

Then, expand on what it might mean to introduce the word “digital”? What changes, is different, or is the same? What do you see or think of when we say “digital storytelling”?

Write your first blog post. We will try to start organizing out blogs from the beginning- create a category called “Experiments” or “Exploring” or whatever category you would like to use to organize the things on your blog taht you are researching.

Also add “ds106” as a tag.

Publish!

You are on Roll! Post Again!

Now, create a new blog post and write a reflection on the Digital Footprints activity we did earlier. What did you find? What did people find about you? What was the experience like? Write at least a paragraph or two. Again, use the same category and tag to organize your posts.

Add Some Media!

WordPress makes it very easy to embed media in your site, for the most part, you need only the web address where the media is found on the web (see how to embed media in your blog in the ds106 handbook or more information from WordPress). Try to find images, videos, or audio that are related to either or both of your two posts. The sites you can use this way include the following (use the search tools on each site- you do not need accounts to do this):

Or, if you have your own media (and we know that you are only using creative commons licensed media, correct?), you can upload it directly to your blog via the Add Media button

Check Our Network

Now that we’ve all done some blog posts, let’s see how they are aggregated at ds106- visit http://ds106.us/tag/wagner. Read at least 2 other blog posts and add some comments.

Today’s Daily Create!

The Daily Create for today is in written form, so you can enter your response directly on the site – see http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc474/.

tdc 4-26-13

Note that your contribution will have it’s own web link on the ds106 site. Write a blog post that provides some more context or background on your Daily Create, and make sure you provide a hyperlink to it.

Consider adding a new Daily Create challenges to the site.

Dive into the Assignment Bank

The ds106 Assignment Bank includes over 500 creative activities contributed by students and open participants.

ds106 assignment bank

For a first effort, we will complete a visual assignment, the Triple Troll Quote:

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 Know Your Meme: here is 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) Add to the graphic 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 the quotation to a third character, from yet a third universe. This way, nothing about your image is correct, and you’re trolling fans of all three characters at once.

The key here is identifying the subject- it could easily by a figure in your field. It can be one from fiction or pop culture. Maybe it is someone recently in the news, or perahps start with one of the portraits of more than 100 iconic people.

If you need some ideas, look at the bottom left of the assignment page where you will find examples done by other ds106 participants.

Try to find an image of someone the subject might be confused with, you might try The Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Us Government photos, World Images, etc.

You will next need to edit the photo to add the troll quote and the mis-identified source. For simple editing, we recommend the following web-based photo editing tools:

Once you have completed your editing, save the final image file to your computer.

Now you write a new ds106 assignment blogpost- refer to our guide How to Write Up ds106 Assignments like a Blogging Champ.

We look for these elements in a Champion Blog Post-

  • It has an interesting title. “Triple Troll Quote Assignment” is not interesting.
  • Provide a name, link, and preferably a description of the original assignment — this lets a reader know the context of the challenge you are responding to.
  • Include as tags the following
    • ds106 (so it gets sent to the ds106 site)
    • VisualAssignments (so the site knows what kind of assignment it is)
    • VisualAssignments24 (so the site knows what specific assignment this is, and thus your blog post gets added as an exxample)
  • Write a paragraph or two describing the idea behind it. Why did you choose the primary character? How did you relate the other two characters mis-represented? How does this relate to you? What is the story behind the story?
  • Embed the media directly into the web page. You do not want to send your readers elsewhere to see what you made.
  • Write up a description of how you made the media. What software did you use? Give credit by name and a hyperlink to the source of any media you used. Did you discover and new techniques? Why did you make decisions on font, color, etc? What would help someone else do the assignment.
  • What is the story in this assignment?

Exploring More Assignments

If we have time, explore the ds106 Assignment Bank. Perhaps try one randomly selected or one from the collection of featured assignments.

Are there assignments that you might be able to adapt to your own teaching? Are there ones that would make you try something you have never done before? Are there ones that are just too weird? Do you have an idea for a new assignment? You can add one easily.

As you read the assignments, you can change the difficulty rating by entering your vote (click on the star value you think the assignment deserves).

Write more blog posts about what you discover in the Assignment Bank.

And if you want to see how this resource is changed up to a different level, explore the Assignment Remixer!

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