cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Richy Schley: http://flickr.com/photos/wanderlinse/5397674268/

Checking all of the meters, spinning a few dials… ah there we are, signal.

It has been a week since we launched the Headless ds106 course and on seeing the posts that have come in, the burst in twitter activity, I am pretty happy about the level of activity. More than that, it is very exciting to see a new crop of open participants who have all the signs of being bitten by the #4life virus.

I was just thinking that it would be useful to track some weekly stats, because there is nothing I enjoy better than the smell of analytics in the morning. No it does seem useful to chart some data, so I hope to update a spreadsheet to show by week the number of blogs listed, the total number of posts, and a weekly summary of twitter activity (the latter coming from our use of Martin Hawksey’s tracking spreadsheets).

In about 30 minutes, the work for week 2 will be published. This is still in many ways a startup phase. For people new to ds106, we suggest digging into the features of your blog platform, and trying some things to customize it, exploring themes, plugins,. widgets, menus, categories. We cannot give much direct instruction here, because how you do this hinges on your choice of platform.

We also go to explore some of the framework and idea for this course, the importance of the concept of a personal cyber infrastructure, and ask you to consider the ideas for this laid out in talks and papers by Gardner Campbell. And maybe try to answer the age old question about “Bags of Gold”.

But thats the summary of the class stuff.

My own work is a bit wrapped up in making sure those parts of the machine are working, but I also dod my own stuff this week to change up the look and function of this blog – covered in Tweaking the Theme, originally set up for course materials the first time I taught ds106.

I also completed five daily creates this week, and wrote up some background info on each of them.

I am not going to respond much to the videos we put up for this week… I’ve done this already in times past. There are certainly others we could have put there; but the idea is to have you do some reflection, and sharing on what art (or ART) means to you. This course is about making art, and in a few weeks we will tap into a powerful message Tim Owens shared the first year of open ds106– We Are All Artists.

Many people have trouble with this assertion. I did for a while. No not me, I am not an artist. I cant create. I’m not good at ______.

We are all good at that negative self talk, sometimes rationalized as keeping oneself humble. If anything, I hope you find ds106 a place to comfortable play out against those assertions.

I will say that if you are looking for more resources and inspiration, a few places I rely on include:

• Swiss Miss http://www.swiss-miss.com/
• Open Culture http://www.openculture.com/
• Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/

Hardly a complete list… bust stay tuned for some ideas I have about list of links.

Okay, it’s almost ready to flip the Headless Assignment to week 2. There shall be more Daily Creates to do! In fact, there is one we hope everybody does.