cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’m fortunate to be visiting the Vermont mountain home (enclave) of Bryan Alexander author of what I call the bible for this class, The New Digital Storytelling. Besides taking walks in the woods, building rock walls, watching sci fi and The Wire with his family, talking bout the demise of education… we sat down last night for a small bit of free form talk about storytelling for ds106radio. Talking Storytelling with Bryan Alexander For my students embarking on their radio show projects, I nudged a few questions that ought to help them plan how to do something that is more drama-like (yay) and less droll book reportish. We delved into some speculating on why audio stories are effective and other things in his radar. Again, if you are in my UMW class of ds106… (ahem) this ought to be useful. ...

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today’s Daily Create is to draw an abstract image of an animal tdc.ds106.us/tdc263/ (most cool since it was submitted this week by one of my students). My idea was to see if I could draw a version of my friend’s Beagle,Annie, in a new style. The dog needed something to play with, so I started to draw a ball, which became a ball of yarn which became unravelled and, um,,, well there you go. Today’s Daily Create is to draw an abstract image of an animal tdc.ds106.us/tdc263/ which is most cool since it was submitted this week by one of my students. While the Daily Creates have been pre-scheduled past the end fo the year, I swapped one out to slip in Brittany’s TDC suggestion. My idea was to see if I could draw a version of my friend’s Beagle,Annie, in a ...

I’ve written or tweeted or just mumbled in my sleep incoherently before about the power of ds106 in challenging our students, of making some things hard to do, or not so cookie cutter 1-2-3 recipe step. This came to my clearly from our 4th week unit on Introduction to Audio. Part of this was introducing students what to listen for in terms of good audio storytelling, but we also gave them two assignments to create audio… and we gave little more than some links. This was another benefit I see now in moving Audio ahead of Visual and Design a we have structure the course in the past, because editing audio is something most students have never done before, and generally one of the harder things they deal with (hee hee until video). But the thing is I see that students generally come to this conclusion having never done audio ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by blentley When I taught ds106 last Spring at University of Mary Washington, one of the effective in class activities Jim Groom and I came up with was giving the students what we called “rapid design challenges” – just quick activities that pressured them to create quickly, and stretch their on the spot thinking. These were things like asking them to find three photos of varying kinds (converging lines, people shots) and posting to flickr, finding design elements in the building, etc. In a similar fashion, Michael Branson Smith started his ds106-like class at York College by having his students photograph and post images of interesting shadows. I can only guess about why this seems effective, it has many of the merits of improv: The adrenaline rush of the time limit makes it exciting. I will not take a word like ...

It must be bluntly obvious that I am infected with ds106 (for readers lacking exposure to the virus or the ability to reach for The Google, ds106 is the open Digital Storytelling course now in its second year of evolution, spreading out of the University of Mary Washington. With MOOC Hysteria continuing an epic rage through the public consciousness, I waver from mild annoyance to blissful yawning to often… “meh”. Today, I could not be more pleased to see that ds106 is not on a list of MOOCs — assuming that it does not “conform to the original format developed by George Siemens and [Stephen Downes]“. The structure and modality of ds106 seems to remain a data point of its own. Besides I’ve never really wanted to be part of things that are so “conforming”. I did have some thoughts about the image Stephen did share with his OLDaily post ...

For the second audio assignment this week for our UMW students in ds106, they are asked to get their toes wet in some audio editing by the assignment for creating a bumper for ds106 radio. Just in case you do not know, ds106 is the only online course, massive or not, that has its own radio station. Take that ya big money MOOCs! As defined in the ‘pedia, a bumper is: a brief announcement, usually two to 15 seconds that can contain a voice over, placed between a pause in the program and its commercial break, and vice versa. The host, the program announcer or a continuity announcer states the title (if any) of the presentation, the name of the program, and the broadcast or cable network, though not necessarily in that order. That gives a lot of room to play with. I played around with a mix of stuff ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by caterpiya In the spirit of Doing the Work We Assign Our ds106 Students, I just made my own Sound Effect Story- the assignment as stated: Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds. I’ve done this one twice before, one a story of keys another of something that might have happened while walking in the woods. For this one I tried to do something that has an action and maybe an ambiguous ending. If you own a pet, its likely you have something that happened when someone left a door open. And I have my own tale of a dog that was lost… For anyone that has dealt with a lost ...

A little over a year ago, someone new entered as an open participant in ds106: I’m working this summer as a grant researcher, and part of the project I’m working with has to do with innovations in education. Partway through my project, I stumbled across a blog called The Tech Savvy Educator, and I continued stumbling onto Jim Groom‘s Digital Storytelling class (Mr. Groom magically found and responded to my first blog post before I’d even told anyone that I was making a blog, I’m assuming through some kind of back-link-sensor or quite possibly MAGIC). Following the discovery of the Digital Storytelling (ds106) class, I proceeded to basically do the class, reading the essays, watching the videos, figuring out how to register and manufacture the blog-object you’re viewing right now. And I started having all of these huge hits for teaching in the fall, like using shared documents to teach ...

People do get excited when things are delivered… @timmmmyboy Hard rain falling here. Got my #ds106 shirt yesterday. THANK YOU @jimgroom What about the socks? :) — Ben Harwood (@BenjaminHarwood) September 18, 2012 @jimgroom Received my #ds106 t-shirt yesterday. Yay! Thank you! :) — linda3dots (@linda3dots) September 12, 2012 #ds106 tshirt! Yay! — David Kernohan (@dkernohan) September 18, 2012 Technicolor #POVme sporting my #DS106 t-shirt.flic.kr/p/dc4Hra — GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) September 19, 2012 Just got my ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS #DS106 T-shirt and stickers for my contribution to their @kickstarter project WAY COOL! @jimgroom @cogdog — Shannon D. Smith (@Smithstorian) September 17, 2012 Yep, one could say that these people are animated about receiving their ds106 kickstarter t-shirts. UPDATE: September 26, 2012 I added some more folks, but my Photoshop file is getting weird, and I am losing older animations- so this new one has additions of David Kernohan, Ben Rimes, and George ...

We are just sampling the success we have had with not only ds106, but many other classes at University of Mary Washington, in getting students going with their own domains and web sites under Domains of Ones Own. One niggling issue is on the wordpress installer, it is set by default to install the blog in an ugly subdirectory named wordpress so rather than having my web presence sitting at my domain, like http://coolestdogevah.me/ I end up with it living at http://coolestdogevah.me/wordpress Butt Ugly Urls. Even worse is that if someone goes to the root URL, they get a default server screen. Martha and I offered this week some extra credit to students that could figure out a way to redirect any traffic from say http://coolestdogevah.me/ to http://coolestdogevah.me//wordpress to fix that issue. There are several ways one could do this, some htaccess redirect, or a redirect in a PHP or ...

While waiting for Michael Branson Smith’s video stream to start, I played with that groovy photo on his splash screen: Why can’t Matt hang on to his balloon? And what is MBS glancing at? A story ro be told… Done by some layering, clo...

In prep for doing next week’s introduction to storytelling for my ds106 class, yesterday’s sequence of events compelled me to try the Tell a Story in Five Frames flickr group, making a story titled “Freed” This are an interesting challenge, it is easy perhaps to illustrate a series of events. The trick to level up is to make the story less literal (which I cannot say I have done here). Like the six word story, this is a great exercise in telling a story within contraints. The story as tweeted (with iPhone autocorrect typos at no charge) @cogdog Flower nectar, and actually a lot of butterflies die at the end of the summer season, especially if it recently laid eggs. — Ma’ayan Plaut (@plautmaayan) September 7, 2012 @doodle_muse will do, up the road out of this grubby town I will look for place to let her go. I’m diabetic so ...

This is the second week of bootcamp for our online ds106 classes at University of Mary Washington; and one of the assignments this week is a challenge. We asked out students to create an animated GIF in response to the Say it Like Peanut Butter assignment– and purposely did not provide explicit instructions. What we are curious to see is how people figure out how to learn something on their own (or if they are clever, they will ask/search). What we want is not for our students to create masterful GIFs (well that’s ok if they do), but to get the hang of creating blog posts that correctly use the tags from the Assignment Collection. Part of our philosophy as teachers is to do the same work we ask our students to do. What should I do? What movie? Hmmm, stay with my dog theme… And I thought of last ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by demandaj One pattern I see repeated in the patterns of new bloggers (and this is aimed at my new batch of ds106 students is that they typically write posts with really general or lackluster titles. “Assignment 1″ “My Introduction” “Week 1″ “Daily Create #345″. It’s not their fault, this is a new space. As students, they are responding as conditioned to writing up assignments, and thus use school language. They have not yet likely grasped the ownership of their own web publication space. I have written before (and will be linking again) to You Fooled Me at The Title, What Magicians Know. But your title is actually, IMHO, one of the most important parts of your blog post- it is what people will see in a link or a syndication feed. It is the first thing a reader usually ...

ds106 is ramping up, and Michael Branson Smith is going deeper in thought with the idea of the animated GIF: I’m a big lover of the animated GIF having created dozens as bits of reflection on cinematic moments, film posters and comic book covers. These animations are all fabulous homages to stories I love. But I’ve also really enjoyed discovering how the animated GIF became an extension of traditional photography using subtle bits of animation. They’re perfect loops of moments in time, animated still lives. Amazing… Watch her hair and dress flow endlessly, while her eyes hold a perfect stare. Don’t blink. Yes it’s an amazing piece of craftsmanship, definitely a smooth Photoshopper behind this animated loop. I credit their ability, but it doesn’t inspire me. This is what I believe the cinem(gram)graph needs to celebrate – this impishness, raucousness. I love the impossible people are discovering in this medium. ...

My keychain is not much different from the last time I did this assignment for the Daily Create The Daily Create for August 28, 2012 told us to make a video: Show us your keychain and tell us a story about the keys or things you have on it. Yes, i still have the scuffed up bike tool whose main function is the bottle opener (well worn). What is more significant now is that I am still carrying my house and mailbox keys from my home in Strawberry, Arizona, although I have not been there for weeks, and will not be there for maybe a long time. It was a short touching reminder of how much I love my little place in the mountains (and after doing this video, I put them away in a safe hiding place… hmm, where was that place?) Unlike many people in the videos for ...

Dear flickr, We have been friends for so long, like since March 2004. I have shared with you over 27,000 photos, and stood up for you when other people were saying you were a has been. I still love you. But you are getting weird o senile and I am getting confused. Our ds106 students are correctly tagging photos for their Daily Create assignments. They are tagging correctly, but their photos are not showing up consistently. And now you are doing it to me. This photo is tagged tdc234 yet when I click my tag for it, it says: Yes this is not true, just look at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/tdc234/, there are four other photos there (?) WTF? I am so confused, so I am mailing you a letter. Please do not let us down. Didn’t you hire that cool Google lady to help tidy things up? Why are you breaking down ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by jurvetson The first day of action for my online section of ds106 could not have been more impressive. A lengthly email went out last night, and as of a little over 24 hours later, 19 out of 25 of my students registered their domains, and most of them from what I have seen have installed WordPress. As a matter of reference, last Spring, when UMW students had to buy their own domains and then set up there oen web hosting, it took three weeks to get to a similar number. This has a lot to do with the genius and energy of Tim Owens who devices and is running the Domain of One’s Own project. From what I see, already 14 of my 25 students set up their twitter account, and they jumped right in (I am keeping a twitter list ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Danforth1 My section of ds106 starts tomorrow, I am teaching a section completely online. I just realized I never reflected much on the summer experience, wich was the first time doing it online. The summer version is even more different, because we have room to play with a narrative for the course. The irony here is I once questioned the need for a narrative which only goes to show the power of blogging and changing your mind later. It is also timely to be doing this since I am part of another open online class, the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class (“POTCERT dude”)– I am taking on this because I want to become a better online teacher. I have to say after the Spring semester teaching the class in person, I thought it made more sense to be ...

Oi, somehow I never published this post, my own answer to my own challenge. I just found it in my unpublished drafts drawer. Bad Dog. The first rule of issuing challenges is be prepared to remix your own dog food. Thus I find myself tonight working at doing my own creation for the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge. You can see the whole series of related posts at http://cogdogblog.com/tag/7daychallengetdc Okay, this is not easy. I scanned the 174 entries that came in (actually there are more now than when I summarized), and downloaded enough media I could use (I had to skip a few flickr photos that were not creative common licensed and some audio that were not set in SoundCloud to be downloaded). A theme somewhat emerged, like something bad that might happen if a flame was turned on somewhere in the world, that triggered a few catastrophic events… ...