It’s not the blinking blue border that makes me chuckle, it’s the double take of “this is not a joke” combined with a smiley face. I would guess the click also gets you to the place to be the prime ocean front real estate in Mohave County, Arizona.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by World Bank Photo Collection The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. – The World Wide Web: A very short personal history ...

In August I noted the oddity that you could upload animated GIFs to Google Drive but you could not insert them in any documents. A comment on that post had me re-checking, and woah, you can directly upload an animated GIF anyplace you can upload an image, here is a gDoc with two GIFs I just slipped inside. It’s even easier in a GDoc presentation, you can just drag and drop one in from your desktop, check out this quickie. You can have more than one per slide. I can see a way of using this to assemble a series as maybe a movie of GIFs? I wonder if the auto advance features will work on this embed? (YES IT DOES! I could now assemble a series of animated GIFs…) Hmm.) Yup, this is getting cool- here is the series of GIFs I made from the classic movie Fort Apache, ...

We got some really sad news today, a death in the ds106 family. Motherboard is dead. What am I supposed to do for #ds106 this week!? — Fairuz Maggio(@fairuzmaggio) February 19, 2013 Yes, a computer has died. While Fairuz is in mourning (or shopping), let’s deal with it in the ds106 way — and make some art! Hence a new design assignment, A Memorial For Fairuz’s PC: Fairuz is a UMW student for the Spring 2013 ds106 class, and suffered a catastrophic loss of her PC. We should honor its memory by designing something as a memorial- a funeral announcement, an animated GIF headstone, a floral wreath of RAM chips. REMEMBER THE PC! I made up a bit of graveyard commentary: cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It must have been ds106′s fault! It is the Raven! The weight of all that media, the taxing ...

Each go around of ds106, one assignment seems to take off in popularity, with no real explanation why. Previously we have seen bursts around Say It Like Peanut Butter, One Story / Four Icons, Splash the Color, and Messing with the MacGuffin. I’m guessing, maybe wrongly, we will see a burst around the Six Word Memoir assignment, hot off the press. It mixes the challenge of a SAix Word Story with designing a graphic poster of it, as recently shared in Brainpickings. Our assignment is: How would you tell your life’s story if you could only use six words? Come up with a six word autobiographical story and then design/illustrate it (more than just a photo). See examples from Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students from Grade School to Grad School. The idea for the six word memoir is credited to Larry Smith’s Smith Magazine back in 2006, and plays on ...

Two more for the GIF pile of ones made not by downloading video clips, but using my own photos– the ds106 assignment is Photo it Like Peanut Butter: Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minmal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff. See a bunch of examples at http://cogdogblog.com/2012/02/10/photo-gif-peanut-butter/ I found these in my own backyard, a place I have photographed 1000s of things, yet I find two new ones today. The first was noticing the patterns in water dripping out of one of my conduits that transfers runoff from my roof gutters out to my apple tree. I thought it would make a nice photo, but once I got my belly on the ground, I fired off 5 shots in rapid fire mode in my ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by MyDigitalSLR In what I’d call the semi-porous community (because we have people outside the class who can and do provide feedback to students) of my ds106 class at University of Mary Washington, nurturing a healthy amount of commenting has typically been a struggle against inertia. One might have to make a case that the act of commenting has value; frankly, I start with that as a given. If that is a question for someone, I would guess they’ve not been participating in these spaces. We would lump commenting on others blogs as part of a participating credit. As a teacher, I am pretty much at least scanning all the blogs and have a gut sense of who is being active in commenting. But the last thing I want to be doing, and asking my students to do, is something ...

Part of this this week’s ds106 work on Visual Storytelling is the “photoblitz”. We ran this in the in person sections last year as one way of making the class sessions active; we would give students 4 photo assignments to find examples of within the building our class was in. The idea was just to practice looking at details in the places around us, and in bending our creativity in interpretation of the task. In moving to an online activity, we came up with the idea of making this aself directed activity, and taking pictures of a time piece to document your start and stop times. So one part of this is thinking about using a place that has enough variety, though I have read many students who manage to do this in their dorm room. I did mine today, mostly around the outside of my house, and clocked in ...

Just put the phone away, will ya? cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This one is for the Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge a rather special one since it was former ds106 student Sara K who sent this out as a challenge last year. It’s only fitting with Valentines Day tomorrow t put it through the ds106 treatment, this assignment is required of all my students for this week in visual storytelling. The task? I was in Urban Outfitters the other day and stumbled across a postcard pack labeled “Unbridled Passion” by Franco Accornero. It’s a collection of 30 different postcards from an artist who has painted more than 5,000 romance novel covers (as well as westerns, thrillers and sci-fi books). The postcards are really ridiculous on their own, but I thought for this Valentine’s day I would make them even funnier but adding my own ...

Riffing Todd Conaway’s Riff of David Kernohan’s MOOCs Are People Poster: Sneak preview of tomorrows presentation #designassignment666 #ds106 twitter.com/dkernohan/stat… — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) February 13, 2013 We riff a riff a gif! Leading the riot bus! Rocking the streets of London mayhem! Why? Because we can. And it’s a ds106 Riff a Gif assignment

Two flavors of this story, a series of comic renderings (done via the Halftone iPhone app) or an extended storify. [View the story "#nightAtORD" on Storify] A few thoughts. The whole ideas seemed like a fun way to pass the time via tweets, photos, some audio. It actually is an fascinating experience to observe the flow of a busy place in its off hours, like going to a 24 hour grocery store at 2am. I wonder if travelers know of all the unseen staff at night on carts, pushing carts, pulling carts, cleaning waste bins, mopping, spraying, wiping the escalator walls, etc for the purpose of your passing through. Second, recently in some twitter banter I said something that probably sounded derogatory towards creating things in mobile apps. I did not express it well, but deserved the tweet slap from D’Arcy Norman. I do not imply that you cannot be ...

This week in ds106, my class starts a week of looking at visual storytelling, primarily in working with their own photographs. For me, this is some of my favorite stuff since I love taking photos. I’d like them all to get better at taking interesting photos, moving from snapshot mentality to be composing in their mind. Many have already gotten bit as they are energized by the challenges of the Daily Create. I know in the past is what happens is they start looking differently at the world around them, noticing the patterns of those paving stones on campus rather than just walking over them, looking up, down with their camera, looking for interesting shadows, and objects that are juxtaposed. I am trying a new activity this week- as in years past, I have a collection of resources and shared suggestions on how to beocme a better photographer, I have ...

Angela, in dire need to get medicine for her dying mother, makes some unwise decision on the streets of Naples on how to get the 20 lire- the opening bit of the 1929 silent film, Street Angel. I’m watching this movie, well at least the first bit, as part of the Coursera open course on The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color. In the scene above, she is sentenced by judges who don’t seem to care a whole lot about her or her story, she’s just another on a treadmill, and the guard who brought her in escorts her out. It’s a nice full cycle, perfect for beng GIFfed Given my previous track record of less than one week duration in Coursera classes, I had already let most of the week slip by before showing up for class. I cannot say I am thrilled at the courser design. The ...

Inspired by tonight’s #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It’s a break in the action from grading. No, it’s just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop til you frame it out. I present, what happens when Educational Technology meets a MOOC in a field, you get E.T. The MOOC(ie). This was done in Photnshop CS5 with a bunch of layer hi-jinks, starting with basic images of cow in field, and a PNG file of ET (useful for its transparent background). I separated the cow from the background, and backfilled it with some clone brush of the grass. I used two shades of blue and the Render Clouds to fill in the sky. I had a GIF of a flying saucer from ...

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I rather enjoy spotting juxtapositions, as when I opened a cabinet in Giulia’s kitchen, and noticed a tupperware containeer with a #ds106radio sticker sitting atop a copy of The Joy of Cooking. That’s whats happening in a few hours, when I try out the new radio station platform that Grant Potter put into place recently for the radio station. For those who broadcast, its really just a few settings changed in their apps/software (the server url, and maybe the mountpoint needs to drop a “/”). For listeners, they will have to tune into new urls (see below). There is a stream status page at http://ds106rad.io:8000, but ti does not yet indicate the presence of a live stream nor does the @ds106radio twitter bot. Those recipes will happen in time. But for this week’s #ds106 show, since we are starting ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by NoiseProfessor This still cracks me up, and I had rustling around my iMovie a certain comercial that I wanted to mashup, so here it is, featuring the lonliest edtech repairman (note one f-bomb in the aud...