Wow, what a week.  It’s been a rollercoaster for sure, and I’m starting to find I’m grateful to have had my blog along for the ride to help me document, evaluate, and share the ups and downs.

I got to talk about stories, put a shape to an old favorite I’ve begun to be able to share with my kids recently, and even tell one of my own favorite stories through pictures – a task I honestly didn’t think I could do at the outset.  I still don’t feel that I got everything out of it that I wanted, but I do feel like I got a story of sorts out of my pictures, and I guess that’s a good start. I also got another excuse to go and browse through the ds106 Inspire page, and review the work of past students a bit more, which is always a welcome task. It was fun to play with the idea of story shapes, and I still feel that storytelling is a way to share and preserve joy among humanity, maybe even moreso now than when I started.  I’m still open to having someone try to prove me otherwise! *hint hint*

I also got to know my fellow ds106ers a little better as we all started to get used to providing feedback to each other through twitter, GoogleReader, the comments section on the ds106 Assignment page, our own blogs, and even on some source sites like Flickr and YouTube. I really don’t know how many times I commented – I’m pretty sure I started to get on peoples’ nerves after a while.   Pretty much, if I saw someone’s work, I did my best to leave a thoughtful comment – if not always constructive, at least a little bit snarky and fun.  I have to admit, though, I didn’t work too hard to get comments on my own things.  Thankfully, there are some thoughtful students out there who left me some unsolicited love.  Also, I found out that providing something people need (like, say, a tutorial on how to do a *really* difficult task we’ve been assigned to do this week) is a *sure* way to get a few comments or 20. 

For fun, it’s worth mentioning that I learned how to crash a Google Hangout old-school style, how to redirect to my subdomain, how to move my entire blog up a level (though I have yet to get up the guts or time to actually try this one just yet), added a Creative Commons license, got a Paint document into a WordPress Media Library and hence onto an actual page, submitted my very first assignment idea to the repository, along with my own work to that effect, and in general got a lot more comfortable playing around on my WordPress dashboard – with the Widgets, Plugins, and the Themes.  I do apologize if my blog is unrecognizable as my own for a while – I can’t seem to find and settle on a Theme that I really love just yet.  Maybe I never will, and mine will become known as the Chameleon.  I don’t know.  I can’t figure out how to make embedded YouTube videos fit in the space alotted for entries on a two-sidebar theme design, I can’t find a theme that my Tag Cloud fits in, I can’t make my blog title show up or edit pictures like some of the themes promise to allow me to do (but then have no option for), among other issues of this kind.  Mostly, in other words, I got really picky with my blog’s appearance this week, though I don’t know why.  I may just have to crash another GoogleHangout this week to figure it out. Professors be warned. (Argh!)

On my to-do list now, then, aside from figuring out my theme situation, is to start submitting classmates’ work to the INspire archive, moving my blog up a level to get rid of that ugly /wordpress tag, figuring out why in the world my blog *still* won’t automatically tweet when I post a blog, and finding a way to make this darn weekly summary more interesting.  I feel like no matter how hard I try or how creative I try to be, it still comes out like a laundry list.  Which is boring, and not the spirit of ds106, and not the spirit of my blog.  So, ideas to that effect would be most helpful.

I guess I’ll go ahead and publish this now, before my story becomes the one that goes ‘Once upon a time, there was a girl who worked on her stuff for ds106 ALL week long, but fell asleep before she submitted her assignment to Canvas and woke up 5 minutes after midnight to discover she was too late…’