We had an unprecedented incident of weather in Atlanta recently, affectionately dubbed “Snowmaggedon,” “Snowpocalypse,” etc… which essentially means we had a few inches of snow-then-ice that completely shut down the city, school included, for an entire week. On my 4th day of “Snowcation,” I happened upon Dean Shareski’s blog post sharing his first assignment for DS106.

Woah. An open course on Digital Storytelling and online identity development? I checked out the DS106 site, and immediately decide to join the fun. It was a great motivator to learn more about MOOC’s, digital storytelling (pressing, since I have promised to teach an introductory workshop on DS this summer), and most importantly, it gave me a push to follow through on committing to an online space/presence/blog beyond my online course — something with an evolving voice.  Something a little scary, actually, as I stand on the shoulders of giants, smart folks and risk-takers and wonder what I might have to offer…

The serendipity was just so joyously loud in the dead quiet of the snow-covered city — I had to try.

I had an easy time thinking of an introductory story concept (see below). I had great fun creating it, too. (I tried to make it 30 seconds but 45 was the best I could do. To echo Blaise Pascal, if I had had more time, I would have created a shorter video)! Note the snow!

What set me stumbling was setting up my hosting — specifically, the domain transfer. I gave some money to Bluehost. Easy. Installed WordPress from the cPanel. Easy. Wrangled a few help tickets and obscure keys and codes with eNom (Google’s registrar). Not so easy. And then had only to wait a week for the transfer to happen. Then there was Jury Duty and Educon. Ta-da!

Here’s my first assignment. More to follow.