cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by habeebee The high water marks of success in ds106 are sometimes the ones that breaks the server. Last Spring, Jim write about what happened when a graphic by former ds106 student Andrew Allingham went big on reddit. The impact of this reddit effect is pushing a lot of traffic to your web host (reddit never hits the content, they link to the sources), and in Andrew’s case, it was so much, his web host suspended his account. Maybe not quite at the insane levels Andrew’s post generated (which to me is still a ds106 classic on its own, reddit or not), we just experienced the reddit effect on a post by one of my students. The problem arose because in reviewing Amber’s last posts, I noted a few days ago this student’s blog was not running. I checked the ...

This is my own riff on the eminent Photoshop RiffMaster, the Noiseprofessor, himself riffing with his own photoshopping of Brian Lamb’s super dog Dexter. I upped the Fonzie with Zack’s face, and even twiddled his thumb a bit ;-) Can ds106 be any more fun when people just play like that, rapid fire? On the surface it looks silly, but there’s something more at play. I’d wax on this, but would rather make more GIFs today. But it did get me thinking about a new assignment to be rolled into what will be (look for details tomorrow) a ds106 GIF Festival, this one known as Riff a GIF: Some of the best parts of ds106 happens when people spontaneously build off of the whacky things others share. Rapid fire style. Your assignment is to riff on someone eles’s ds106 work and make it new in a GIF form. It can ...

I spotted many a grain elevator in my cross country travels, but this one in Lawndale Illinois caught my attention the most, for the faint “Faultless Feed” on the side of the grain elevator, plus as a bonus it was right on Old Route 66. While snapping my photos, I saw the lights down the track. I had to book it and run under the dropping barriers to get a series of photos of a passing Amtrak train. What could be more suited for doing animated GIFs than trains? We need something like this for the upcoming ds016 GIFfest (what is that) (it’s a secret) (shh). So we have the new All Aboard The GIF Train assignment hoisted in a new corner of ds106 “Train kept a rollin’ all night long…” “Down around the corner half a mile from here, see them long trains run and you watch them disappear…” ...

Weeks and weeks had passed by, like listless grass blowing down the dirt lane, since she had returned home. Still, no one was going to challenge Dorothy as the saddest person in Seward County, perhaps in all of West Kansas. Not the moping cows, not even the Rogers family who lost their grain silo, two sons, and a new tractor in a freak silo toppling could compete. “Why was I so gung ho to come back to this puke bucket of a town?” she whispered inside her head. “Auntie Em is nice, but as exciting and dumb as a door post. And Uncle Henry? His breath reeks of wet corn and all he was really interested in was prepping for the winter hunt. Guns, cleaning guns, oiling guns, guns. With seismic sighs, she resolved herself to be a spinster who would watch the world drive past, right on through Liberal, ...

This should be the last piece of media for my Dorothy ds106 story. I have been wanting to the dialog mashup assignment since I heard the first examples from listening to the stellar examples from The Truth’s episode of Movie Mashups: As demonstrated by the Movies Mashup episode of the radio show The Truth, take two different movies and extract the dialogues scenes of actors form each, then re-edit them to create a story as if the characters from different movies were in the same conversation. Listen to examples from the show including The Terminator and Legally Blonde (“Terminally Blonde”) and from the TV shows that become “The Sopranos in the West Wing.” The challenge is to take two different movies, slice up the audio for different characters in each, and then re-edit them as if there were having a coherent dialogue. That should be about 92 stars. I knew ...

Another element I am using in my story is that Dorothy figure ut that to return to Oz, she would need to go shopping and find a new pair of ruby slippers, since you cannot expect to just fall out of the sky again and land on another witch. So she has to go shopping somewhere upscale. For this piece of the story, I used the Wait, Where’d That Guy Come From? assignment (fun because I never dis that one before): Photoshop someone(s) (or something(s)) into a picture that isn’t supposed to be there. I did some searching on photos of high end shoe stores, but somehow the thought of Dorothy shopping for shoes in the Villaggio (located in Doha, Qatar) worked for me- using this Travelblog photo. Here is Dorothy (and Toto too) slyly shopping for magic shoes in Doha: To mix her in the crowd, I would need ...

As part of a ds106 final project story I am doing based on the Wizard of Oz, I have a part where Dorothy decides to go back to Oz. Not knowing how to find another tornado to whip her house (no one in Liberal, Kansas could explain how the house that was whipped to Oz was back in Kansas in tact. Continuity issues at the tourist trap). I decided to to the Storytelling Within the Web assignment hoping to find a travel agency with a hippy theme: From the Spring 2011 ds106 class came the idea of changing up an existing web page to tell a new story ” you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site, but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though ...

In my story of Dorothy getting bored in Kansas, I wanted to have a way for her to go back to Oz, and the easiest way would be via the Play It Backward, Jack ds106 assignment: Things always look super weird when you play them in reverse, don’t they? So take a video of something in your life–someone running, the toilet flushing, the sink dripping, someone spitting, whatever–and reverse it! They not only look weird, but they sound weird. I used the “No Place Like Home” clip from YouTube, already saved as mp4 from my previous work. I brought this into iMovie, and edited the Clip to make it go in reverse. I added a bit of fade out on the end, visual effect of “Cartoon” and Audio effect of “Echo”, all to give it a freaky kind of satanic feel: Just keep repeating that, and you might go back ...

What could be more key and symbolic of the magic of Oz than the red slippers that Dorothy snagged from the Wicked Witch who got mushed by her flying house? The fact that Dorothy always had the magic but did not know it until sparkly Good Witch clued her in. This GIF is done for the classic ds106 Say it Like Peanut Putter assignment Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential. I knew an animated GIF of the shoes would be part of my new story. So I used PwnYouTube to download the video for the “No Place Like Home” clip as an mp4 I opened this in MPEG StreamClip to snag just the 2 second segment of the shoes flopping. I opened it in QuickTime player to then save it as a ...

Why was Dorothy so set n going back to drab, black and white Kansas? Was Auntie Em that much of the life of the party? If the truth were told, she would have expressed her desire to hang out with those wild Munchkins: As part of my evolving Dorothy story, this is the ds106 Truthful Movie Poster assignment Imagine if movie posters told the REAL story about the fillm they’re advertising. Redesign an existing movie poster by changing the text/images to tell us the real story. More examples at http://www.holytaco.com/classic-taco-if-movie-posters-were-honest. Of course, I am making up what is real (cause that serves the higher concept of my story, meh). There are lots of posters out there to work from- I liked the bold motif of a poster for the Tybee Arts Association: The bottom text was easy to clone brush out in PhotoShop. I went for a few more details, ...

Dorothy seems timeless even looking back at the Wizard of Oz from maybe 80 years past its time. But her statue I saw on the streets of Liberal Kansas seemed kind of old, maybe it was just the texture of the metal, but I speculated she might get nostalgic for her own youth (or at least mobility): I made this for my story project as a response to the Then-Now-Together ds106 assignment: Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo! Okay, it was not “me” but my character. And Dorothy is young and innocent enough in Oz to qualify for childhood. I ...

On my trek home earlier this month, I picked off of the map a route in Kansas that would take me through the near Texas border town of “Liberal” – which I read on a plaque has nothing to do with politics– it was in reference to the sharing of water liberally by the first settler. It’s created draw of interest is being where Dorothy’s house (a replica thereof) sits so there is a lot of Oz-ification cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There are a number of Dorothy statues on the streets. I was intrigued of some over the shoulder photos as maybe she gazed wistfully at a fun shriner convention across the street: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This lead me to do a series of rapid shots in succession to get the blur of traffic going by Dorothy, ...

Last night we had an unfortunate outage at umwdomains, the hosting for ds106 students at the University of Mary Washington. With this being finals week, students working feverishly to finish projects and reflections, twitter was never so lit up with activity. Let’s give some appreciation to people like Tim Owens who was working on this late at night or Zach Davis and Cast Iron Coding who keep the ds106 server from falling over. Like Jim Groom has done before in Behind Every EDUPUNK is a Miserable Sysadmin, it’s time to stop what you are doing, and give these folks some rainbow love. Thus a new ds106 design assignment Rainbows And Unicorns In The Server Room: Give some love and recognition for the folks behind the scenes that keep the web servers and internet tubes running- often the only time we contact our server admins is when something is wrong. Twitter ...

Found among the coffee additives at HB’s, a restaurant in Pine, AZ, this little product that was created for the ds106 Re-brand ‘em Assignment: The logo is an important part of a company. For this assignment, you are to choose a company and re-brand them. Take their logo and remix it, or start from scratch and make it your own piece of art. Need inspiration? Here’s a cool site (http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/) that blogs about recent changes in company logos, and posts both the new and old versions. It can really highlight what subtle changes can do to a logo. Once MOOCs get tired of being so massive and unweildy, they will implode and emerge as “mini-moocs” This is the most important dairy product in 200 years. I suggest grabbing a handful of them.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by wester I’ve been asked to write a short case study profile of ds106 for a book someone is writing about online teaching and the question came up about how many people have participated in it. I’ve been tinkering at the main site to compile a semester by semester history. But yes, size and numbers. We know from courses taught at UMW since 2010, about 300 students have participated, and from the other previous classes elsewhere that have had students connect their blogs to ds106 (Temple University, Japan, SUNY Cortland, York College, Kansas State University, Jacksonville State University, Kennesaw State College) might be added another 200 students. Since we subscribe to the blogs of all people who participate, that should be a number we can get at. Currently there are 621 blogs we subscribe to; 63 have been de-activated because ...

Today, Michigan was good for my 106 photographing, I got a store in Ann Arbor, a state highway into Jackson, and a milepost on I-94. It was the latter, while I as broadcasting live to ds106 radio, that I got the idea to take a series of photos as the ...

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by ind{yeah} A rather annoying grain of sand in the ds106 machine of syndication is the loss of web sites when students give up their domains, or just obliterate their blogs after class. It’s a common theme of the distributed web, the stench of link rot – that in our own acts of reorganizing content we manage, that we lose sight that there may be external links into us. Such links are invisible, silent, we do not even know they are there. These has been cropping up more frequently in ds106; for our video assignments, we asked students to review the works of previous students that we (sort of) elegantly syndicate into the Assignment Collection, the ones that appear as Submissions So Far – try the random spinner to take a peek. And that is a thing with a Domain of ...

Some unconfirmed rumors that a new device is coming out soon from Apple, the ultimate ds106 device, the 106pod- its evolution: Okay, this is actually a remix created for the ds106 Remix Generated assignment, Evolution [remixed] DS106-ersizer: This combines an original ds106 assignment: Evolution created by Isaac Thesatus Alot can happen from birth to death. Be creative, show how things; animals, objects, technology, evolve throughout time. This assignment doesn’t have to be precise, your object evolving doesn’t have to evolve the way is expected during the process of evolution. Be creative! played with the remix card: To start, I used the Evolution assignment by kkm32 (this looks like one of Scottlo’s Spring 2012 students), which graphically showed the evolution of iPod nano from 2005-2010. My idea was to insert images of the ds106 site as it evolved over 2010-2012. They are kind fo hard to see in the image, because ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Stéfan I’ve been doing some tinkering over at the ds106 Daily Create site, whose very presence and essence still shines from the approach Tim Owens did when he assembled it in early 2012. The first major new thing is the addition, under a new “Explore” menu at the top, of archives of past daily creates, organized by type – all past Photography, Drawing, Audio, and Video TDCs. This normally would be trivial, since they are merely WordPress categories, but took some poking around with a flashlight and probe because of the construct of the Parallelus Salutation theme we use (maily because we had to alter it to display only 1 post at a time). I was able to make a new template-category.php to control the new layout, and there are some things in there to make it not act ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by recompose Woah. (tap tap tap) [clears throat] Is this thing on? Yes, the red light is on. Welcome back. We took a nap here at cogdogblog for a few hours last night but still had stuff to write about. And we usually tell our students in ds106 that the server being down is not something that should keep them from creating, that there are end arounds, that we need to know how to fish for cache. So I blogged over at my quiet little WordPress.com Laboratory (after tossing on a more modern theme) an example for one of the newest assignments in our two week unit on Remix/Mashups. In some earlier conversations with Jonathan Worth at phonar, we brainstormed the idea of on online media “recycle bin” – a place where students would upload media that was collected/created but ...

No one quite charms it like Frank Sinatra, look at him with his Ronald Reaganish slick poofed hair, here GIFfed from a clip from 1944 in Step Lively. I pulled 3 short segments with MPEG StreamClip, converted to .mov, and used the Photoshop import into Layers to make them each an animation sequence. From the animation palette, I found I could copy one set of frames to another, so I montaged this sequence into one GIF. “Come out, Come out, Wherever you are…” this si the magic of smooth Sinatra, he sugar coats a story, the lady is enthralled, and the next thing you know it is a show tune. And it keeps happening, again and again Who could be a classier recipient for the Oxford Dictionary 2012 Word of the Year? It’s making the rounds, but people, go to the source — It is not the GIF as a ...

If you need the reference… Last weekend, I went on a photo walk in Baltimore with friend/colleague Bill Shrewbridge, and we went to check out something of a Baltimore unique thing- the Patterson Bowling Alley on Eastern Avenue, a mighty emporium of 6 lanes. Built in 1927, it is one of the hubs of a variety of bowling (and many say it originated here) popular in baltimore and a few other east coast cities, duckpins. The pins are much smaller than ten pin, and the ball about the size of a grapefruit, so its harder to make a mark (the top scores in the alley were like 212). I remember doing this as a kid, and of course we had to have a go at at (the scores are not presented to preserve our vanity). We had the stylish shoes going… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by ...

“The future of education is now. This is the single biggest change is education since…” maybe the film strip? Giulia pointed me to a video clip on the Paleofuture site featuring what the future of education would like (from a vantage point of 1967). The full film, “1999 A.D.” was produced by the electronics firm Philco- it was their 75th birthday and they wanted to show the world what it would look like by the end of the millenium. (For trivia’s sake the husband in the film is played by world class actor game show host Wink Martindale). Anyhow, the idea of learning in the home via video lectures and multiple choice tests feels so… 2012. Like now. Like MOOCx now. And the effect on the learner? We’ll see in this little mashup I could not help but create. Not every portion of the unevenly distributed future is worthy dipping ...

We know people love ds106. I love ds106. I know you do. My students this semester are doing some of the best work (especially in terms of representing their work online) I’ve seen since I started teaching this course in January. The UMW Domain of One’s Own greatly streamlined the startup process, Martha and I have made syllabus adjustments (introductory Bootcamp, re-arranging the introduction of audio earlier) that seem to have worked, and having redone the materials now three times, it feels very solid going into my next round (I am teaching it online again for Spring 2013). My focus has been on our sections here at UMW, but we have a good amount of activity as well with Michael Branson Smith’s York College/CUNY section plus Ryan Rish’s class and Darren Crovitz’s class at Kennesaw State University. Yet I cannot help but notice the fall off among our open online ...

During the ramp up Election night i was visiting Bryan Alexander, and found a relevant movie to watch, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Relevant? Heck yes- shape shifting monsters that emerge every now and then from the ice? Watching of the early scenes, we smiled at the retro computer chess game that Kurt Russell’s character RJ Macready curses at when he loses This scene cried out to me to be GIFfed; the first one I trimmed out the segment in MPEG Streamclip where he is just drinking his JBs, the glass up and down is a great repeat, and he has a little bit of q wry smile. Its kind of dark (as is the movie). For tis one, I extracted abut 12 frames and imported into The Gimp, dropped maybe 5 that were not critical. I then used the Groom method, lassoing the key area to animate, set as ...

Last week was the part of ds106 where (cue the John Williams score -ba da ba da ba da) we approach maybe the most treacherous waters of creativity (underwater shot of woman swimming, legs kicking). VIDEO As our teaching of ds106 evolves, I”ve found it useful to start each new (new to the syllabus) media with an observing activity, and so as in years past, we have students cue up Ebert”s essay on How to Read a Movie and ask them to look in detail at a scene from a movie. Notching it up a bit, the twist added this year really worked well, what I called “Look, Listen, Analyze”. We provided links to a few YouTube playlists of “great scenes” from movies, and askd the students to choose one (without watching it). The task was then to watch it 3 times, 3 different ways: Before watching the first time, ...