Fresh off the electronic press, dripping with electronic ink and smelling faintly of dittos, my words are in the Jauanry/february 2013 issue of Educause Review in the New Horizons department (yawn, horizons) (oops). Look ma, a citation! ds106: Not a Course, Not Like Any MOOC: Looking for something different from the current hysteria of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)? A digital storytelling course started by Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), ds106 was set loose as an open course in January 2011. Yet the UMW catalog does not include such a course. Its actual course designation is CPSC 106 (Computer Science)—a small but telling example of how ds106 plays with and questions the norm. Most classes in digital storytelling revolve around the personal video narrative form as popularized by the Center for Digital Storytelling. But ds106 storytelling explores the web as a culture, as a media source, ...

Here is another story demo for ds106, using my Five Card Flickr Stories site to generate a story from 5 random photos drawn from the Daily Create pool. I still find these a lot of fun. Five Card Story: Oh Brother a The Daily Create story created by CogDog flickr photo by Michael Branson Smith flickr photo by JanusAjax flickr photo by Bookhenge flickr photo by b__parsons flickr photo by cogdogblog Mt brother, the big time write. He has one novel published, and his life now consists of running from podunk town book store to another to sign it for 12 frumpy housewives. He is always telling me that writing is the only form of art. He hates my drawings. He refused to even use my sketch for his book cover. Last night when he dropped in for dinner (after visiting OUR podunk town bookstore, hah hah) (and me the ...

This is a demo of a ds106 assignment for my students to get a taste of telling stories with pictures. The task is to use two different photos from recent Daily Create Photo assignments and tie them together with a story, a sandwich if you will. Where am I? Bad dream? Last thing I remember I was drinking my coffee and reading poetry at Hyperion. Someone had done that middle school shoulder tapping thing where you turn and no one is there. Why are my arms tied? And there’s something like an old sock in my mouth. Dingy room. I smell mothballs and some other smells — foul meat and rotting cabbage? And this guy wearing a Buffalo Bills ski cap, is stomping around the room saying again and again “Make The Call! Make The Call! January 31, Make the Call! For the love of Jake, Make the Call.” It’s ...

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Computers have feelings usually not expressed. They have hurt, anger, depression, and in this case, inordinate feelings of inferiority. Today’s Daily Create was to make a blue screen of death message using type only. My screen just wants to die and not come back. tdc.ds106.us/tdc386/ I made this in GIMP. I downloaded the fixed system font to give it that true Windows appearance and modeled it after an example I found on the Google. Opening it in another GIMP window, I used the drop tool to grab the blue color, filled my background. I typed in the word “windows” and put a new layer behind it with the gray box, and then flipped the text color to that same blue background color. By clicking the link icons in the layer palette, I could move them around together. Sometimes when ...

This week in ds106 I give my students the ultimate bootcamp creative challenge – to figure out how to make an animated GIF. The exact wording is “from a favorite movie” but that’s just to get them thinking about topics. Since I do the same work, I needed to step up too- I did two quick demos of GIFfing in GIMP in this week’s Open Lab, so for tonight’s masterpiece I wanted to show some techniques I have been using in doing GIFs in Photoshop. I chose a subject that could reflect what to do when you get into trouble in ds106 – activate the GIF Signal! This is one where I do some dancing around with Photoshop layers and masking out all but the essential bits. One benefit of doing this is your GIF files get dramatically smaller since they have to store less data. I hope I can ...

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You may know Julia Child from her cooking, but few know that in 1960′s she was a secret agent for MI6. She was the only agent savvy enough to track down the culinary killer known as “Dough Finger” who would do his dirty deeds my covering his victims with a thin veneer pf pastry, effectively choking them in thin but tasty cookie shell. This was a more complex than usual daily create assignment- “Design a poster of an action movie starring Julia Child” tdc.ds106.us/tdc381/ The fun part was that this all came about because of a tweet by Joseph MacMahon @cogdog “Make a Poster of an Action Movie Starring Julia Child.” — Joseph McMahon (@pragmanic) January 17, 2013 and that is how Daily Creates happen. This one was of course a bit involved, this is more in line with ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by postaletrice Greetings from ds106! We are in the second week here of the Spring 2013 (yes in Canada, this is a winter semester, sigh) University of Mary Washington course. Last year, the first time through teaching this class in person, I attempted to do audio reflections á la the great Scottlo (where is that dude?). That was interesting, but time consuming. So this semester I will start a series of reflections of teaching the class. I already gushed about the first impressions of my students. The first two weeks is something Martha and I coined last semester as “Bootcamp”, where in week 1 and week 2 we focus on all the logistics and setup they should do to be proficient in their blogging and media producing the rest of the semester. I tried a weak housebuilding analogy – week ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk Last week I wrote about the ideas and content changes I had in mind for the next semester ...

My class of ds106 UMW students are off and running. If anyone sees them, tell them to keep going. The semester start pulls at both ends for me. It’s exciting to ...

(a copy of this just sent to my UMW students) cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by David Reeves Attention ds106 Bootcampers! At ease. Despite how overwhelmed you might ...

(lazily copy/pasted/cross-posted drom ds106) cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by mbecher As another open resource for my UMW ds106 students, but open to anyone who is ...

Now a few clicks over a year old, the ds106 Daily Create is a core part of our digital storytelling class at UMW. Almost a year ago, we discovered an ...

Two years ago. One tweet. Thinking abt starting #ds106 radio station that class runs. 15 week experiment. Start it with a show @brlamb and I should’ve done years ago — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by B_Zedan Ripping the page out of the Jim Groom playbook (again), and as I did when I taught ds106 ...

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A bit earlier I looked into my rear view mirror at last semester’s ds106 class I taught online for ...

Today’s Daily Create may have been the hardest one to date- “Use camera panning to blur the background behind a moving subject” – the idea is to use a relatively slow shutter speed to take a photo of a moving subject. If you pan the camera at about the same speed as the subject, you can achieve a great effect of it being in focus, but everything else is blurred. I don’t think I’ve ever really pulled this one off before, and my streak continued today. But I tried. And that’s the point. I shot about 25 exposures of Gunner, the dog I am watching. He loves to chase tennis balls, so I tried all kinds of vantage points of tossing the ball and trying to get him to run by my field of view. The first challenge is throwing a ball with my left hand and holding the camera ...