I have no idea why I did not think of this before….     PLUS     That is combining the photos submitted for the ds106 Daily Create with Five Card flickr Stories? Now it is in place- if you post your Daily Create photos with the flickr tag dailycreate (along with your regular TDCXXX tag) your photos will automatically go into the pool used on Five Card Flickr Stories — and you can start spinning new stories out! Try making your own five card dailycreate story (which itself might be a daily create and then we get all crazy recursive…) So when you add your TDC stuff to flickr, kindly add another “dailyceate” tag to the mix! This makes both tastes go together.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog On my last day in Fredericksburg, I went to the bank to close out an account, and came across the spectacle above. There was a crowd watching, one person filming with an iPad (that still makes me laugh like a 12 year-old), plus other gawkers like me snapping photos. There is nothing like a little destruction to attract attention, and of course I started hearing music in my head No, no I never was a sinner-tell me what else can I do Second best is what you get-till you learn to bend this rules Time respects no person-what you lift up must fall They’re waiting outside-to claim my crumblin’ walls (lyrics from John Cougar Mellencamp) I’m not saying any of my walls are crumblin down, but it was fun to watch that digger knock away the bricks. So much I ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by hermitsmoores This is a last little bit of code I wanted to bang out today (for more on this statement, see my next blog post). We have over 3800 examples that people have shared for the ds106 Assignment Bank. The way these get here are that people set up their accounts on ds106.us, and once we get their blog feed URL, as long as they use the proper assignment tags, we are able to syndicate the examples in automagically. IN a few cases, people may just do a single ds106 assignment as part of a class or a workshop (e.g. as Dean Shareski’s students have done), but without getting their work on blogs we can syndicate, these one off pieces of work cannot be part of the collection. Or in some cases they use weird platforms (I am looking ...

I could not resist this, even though I really should have spent the last hour doing something productive. But I read Mike Caulfield’s post on True of EdTech As Well, where he latches on to a criticism of the TED technocratic approach to world problems, and this quote from a quote just cried out to be animated: According to the Khannas, “centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven’t lifted Africa’s fortunes the way technology can.” Hence the latest urge to bombard Africa with tablets and Kindles—even when an average African kid would find it impossible to repair a damaged Kindle. And the gadgets do drop from the sky—Nicholas Negroponte, having spectacularly failed in his One Laptop Per Child quest, now wants to drop his own tablets from helicopters, which would make it harder for the African savages to say “no” to MIT’s (and TED’s) civilization. This is la mission ...

That’s right. “They” will be here, keeping you up late at night in front of the blinking screen — rattling their animated chains, broadcasting ghostly noises, spooking you to do things daily, remixing your senses… August...

makes use of cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by bitchcakesny: http://flickr.com/photos/bitchcakes/5187928447/ Now that the 2012 Summer of ds106, Camp Version is over, I spent some time trying to pull some numbers from the machine, given how crazy folks are about analytics and massive. First of all, I want to thank all 172,000 people who registered for the course (just kidding, we want to make the BIG MOOCS nervous). 454 This is the number of blog posts by the 11 registered UMW students over the 10 week course. I first ran a database query to find the number of posts in ds106, where all the aggregation happens, that were tagged for our summer section (umwsum12) SELECT count(p.ID) FROM wp_posts p INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships tr ON (p.ID = tr.object_id) INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy tt ON (tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id) INNER JOIN wp_terms t ON (tt.term_id = t.term_id) WHERE tt.taxonomy = 'post_tag' ...

I thought it was time to try the ds106 Wiggler Spectroscopy assignment: Take two photos of the same subject from slightly different angles. Merge the two photos into a single looped, animated gif to create a wiggle stereoscopic image that simulates 3-D. I decided to use my pal Spike, the metal dog in my front yard, taking about 4 pairs of photos. As ti turned out, my angle of different between each pair was a bit too much, but some of the ones that were similar in angle had enough different to make it interesting: and from the other side… I made mine in Photoshop by using the File -> Scripts -> Import into Stacks command, using the option to align objects- this has the effect of keeping Spike mostly motionless but animating the background. Usually I have to do some futzing back and forth from the timeline view to ...

Time after time the road out of a blog funk is sitting down to make some silly ds106 art. So it was later this afternoon, when this tweet form Cathy Finn-Derecki set me in motion: @cogdog @twoodwar My God. What a load of twaddle! What’s next? Sebastian Thrun on the cover of “Tiger Beat” right next to Justin Bieber? — Cathy Finn-Derecki (@saracup) July 28, 2012 So challenged to put Sebastian Thrun on the cover of Tiger Beat, I got out the old Photoshop clone brush and went to work. Now, one thing that gets me growling is when people send out a link via twitter with something like: This would make a great #ds106 assignment Which to me is a bit lame- if it would make a good assignment, then go ahead and make it so, damnit. Just tossing a link out there is not #4life to me. So ...

Since we are making our ds10r students do it, we really ought to be trying the Remix Generator too. My spin and some play got me: This is the remix of the assignment Brian Metcalfe’s Image with a Message: Demonstrate that “a picture is worth a thousand words” by superimposing a famous quotation over a “Creative Commons” licensed image. remixed via the Bootcamp It card: Whatever the assignment is, it can be made tougher if it is under the tutelage of a tough drill sergeant. Redo this assignment with a military kick to it, as if it was sent to boot camp. Drop down you worthless piece of flab and gimme twenty! Here’s what I came up with: From the original assignment, I started with the example from A Site About Jay: I had the option to maybe use the same image, or quote. I opted for the latter, but ...

Okay, you creative wanna be privates! Many of you got down and followed the drill for a week of doing Daily Create assignments every day. THAT IS AMAZING. I did not think you had it in you. BUT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DONE?? YOU ARE NOT DONE YET! NOW YOU HAVE TO MAKE A STORY. Hang on second Sarge, let’s do a little recap. Over the last seven days, we saw 174 total Daily Creates done (an average of 25 per day) and an influx of new participants (see my summaries, doing that every day was a drill!). The previous week, we had only 71 (average of 10 per day). I think you can do the math on the analytics (which reminds me of something I am hoping to work on is to do this tracking within our site, its tricky, because the content exists elsewhere, so we need ...

I like you, You like me. Let’s make a photo. The last Daily Create of the Seven Day Challenge is to make a photo that illustrates the idea of attraction (this is one we borrowed from our inspiration, the Daily Shoot.) Alas, our crew has dwindled to 15, do you seek more abuse? I will skip. Coming up in a next post will be the challenge wrap up, which is to make some new art out of the pieces we have collected. Here are some I really enjoyed, just a scroll down past the blog fold… Lisa Lane makes a clever metaphorical attraction by dance shoes (leading me to have fun imagining the dancers we cannot see) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogroo All the way from Melbourne, Australia, Rowan Peter has a sticky situation… cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Rowan ...

Your week of Daily Create Challenges is almost over. Are you still in it? Today is another audio one, “Flip the decibels- Make a loud sound soft or a soft sound loud” — and very clever because the creativity is both in the choice and thinking about it, and the execution of it. While 25 people joined the Soundcloud group, as of today I see 12 sounds, which leads me to think people are still working on it (if they do not, the drill sergeant is going to make them run laps all night in the rain). I really enjoyed the variety here, and these are going to be very interesting media used for the final mashup challenge. A few favorites sit below the blog fold. Brushing the teet was VEYR LOUD! I hope I do not get spit upon… Norm lives on a street with an army of loud ...

The Daily Create Seven Day Challenge piles up hard this week, with another video one today (I did not even look to see what was lined up when I made the challenge). For today’s we have 18 Challengers still standing, which is respectable. Where’s the others? preparing to have sand kicked into their faces, I bet? Today was another in a series suggested by @noiseprofessor, a philosophy series, “What technology you cannot live without?”: What can you expect? Mobile phones? Web sites? Computers? Cars? Check out some favorites below the fold… Audrey Watters reminds us of the crucialness of vision, get up close to her contacts This is one I agree with totally, cannot life without the brown magic liquid A beautiful (and philosophical) response by someone in the southern hemisphere! (is this you Malywn?) Melanie cannot live without the technology handed to us by Sir Thomas Crapper (makes a ...

In preparation for this week’s topic for ds106 I opted to put out a question via twitter to get input on how you explain the differences between mashups and remixes (I get sloppy and move somewhere in the vague area between). Probably the best outcome was getting clued into Star Wars Call Me Maybe. Shannon Wiebe gets my vote for the fruitiest metaphor @cogdog #ds106 mash up=different songs together remix=1 song played in new way, mash up=fruit kabob remix=strawberries blended into smoothie — Shannon Wiebe (@MadameWiebe) July 16, 2012 Mainly I got that Remix is a retelling, recasting of a single piece of media, say The Shining, in a new way (think the recut movie trailers, which change the meaning of the content by simple re-ordering and adding of music) — e.g. 2.6 million views cant be wrong While a mashup mixes together media fro different sources, say a version ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Darwin Bell Things are really going super duper with responses to the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge, where last Wednesday I dared y’all (that means you, all 4 billion people in the internet) to do a ds106 Daily Create seven days in row. People are stepping up, some of whom have not done TDCs before, and at least 2 UMW students are in the action. I’ve been doing daily summaries, found at my blog tag 7daychallengetdc. Originally I had said at the end, I would challenge you to make up a digital story from your own work. And you can certainly do that… you make up your own rules (which still makes me wonder when people tweet apologies about not getting it done by midnight or the same day, phooey). After all, its not like anyone is getting graded here! ...

Day 4 of the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge brings you an audio challenge, to record an audio of a really annoying telemarketing call. Obviously many people have gotten these! We have to date 18 of them in the collection. There was definitely some fun with it as people came up with annoying voices or products. Some of the favorites are just below the blog fold. Wes Fryer perfects The Voice in his pitch for a home nasal device Debt collectors figured prominently, such as this gem from UMW student Chanda Martha reveals the telephone pitch that got her the job at Camp Magic Macguffin For those difficult situations in offices with a shared fridge, well there’s a product for that And maybe the most original idea pitched,. Audrey Watters got a call offering the opportunity to pawn for college degree Again I am tickled to see the creativity roll ...

Day 3 of the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge now raises the ante- after day 1 and day 2 of drawing and photographery (easy peasy), we have a video challenge. Will they hang on? Apparently so, I count 23 in the hopper for Day 3, which is Show us what is on cable channel ds106 (or make it up). Now she says it strong, but I agree with Dr Garcia @DS106TDC Dear everyone who FILMED a few minutes of their local cable 106, The only thing you MADE was two layers of crap. #ds106 #tdc187 — GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) July 14, 2012 But hey, anything counts in The Daily Create. The real question will be, at the end of 7 days, what story can you weave from all 7 bits? It shall be interesting. Check ‘em out, some favorites just below el fold… Dr Garcia shows us how it is ...

So it’s the second day of the Daily Create Seven Day Challenge, another photo assignment to take a photo of a natural scene without any human artifacts. It should make you think about how big or small natural areas are… and also, a question of even natural looking areas, aren’t they affected by human activity? Today we photos from 31 participants, down a few from yesterday…. Again we had a good showing and attempts at isolating parts of our worlds that do not explicitly show signs of human imprints. My favorites included: UMW studen Chanda capture this stunning interplay of two bees on an (?echinacea) flower. Melanie’s “Trolls vs Unicorns” really flips the assignment inside out, its not pure nature, but again, not impacted by humans. Ashely’s solitary tree speaks to me, isolation, determination, separation, yeah. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by aforgrave Andy must ...

I could not be more excited then to see all 36 drawings of tornados for the first day of the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge (and I realize my tweets and blog posts may be bordering on annoying in frequency, but hey, go take it up with my Drill Sergeants). I hope to see y’all (and more for today’s challenge: a photo of an outdoor scene without any human artifacts). Remember as you go, that te challenge is at the end to weave all seven into some sort of narrative. Everyone who completed the day 1 gets an “A” (that stands for teh Awesome). Among the many colorful swirls for tornado drawings, some favorites for interpreting the assignment include (and folks, embedding is easier if y’all make ‘em creative commons): A face trace of one of the members of the Texas Tornados Chanda’s swirls are neon, and she used a ...

My diabolical plan to pump up the activity of the Daily Create seems to be working; The first day of the Daily Create Challenge is not even over, and I see already 21 tornados submitted (the challenge was to draw a tornado). I’ve been growling and calling people out, daring them to do 7 Daily Creates in a row, and then weave together in a blog post, make something out of it, and leave a comment on my original post. THERE IS NO SLACKING OFF! I decided to enlist the help of five tough guys, and at the same time complete a ds106 video assignment, One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds. Created by Michael Branson Smith, this is one of the more popular assignments, with over 50 examples listed: Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each. Examples could include: ...

Limited editions of this holistic and cleanly book are available! This is for a brand new ds106 Design Assignment: Weird Book Room: The Abebooks Weird Book Room lists a collection of titles so farcical you would think they are made up, but they are not. “Grandma’s Dead: Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals”, “Beyond Leaf Raking “, and “Goats: Homeopathic Remedies” are all actual book titles — “finest source of everything that’s bizarre, odd and downright weird in books.” Your assignment is to design the cover of a book title so weird that it will look like it will fit right in to the Weird Book Room. Be sure to include a little bit of jacket blurb for your blog post where you include your designed book cover. Go weird! This all started with the tweet: Go to this link andgaze on the titles and be made happy. Trust me. ...

I’m bad ass and am kicking sand in your face. We are just about half way through the first year of the ds106 Daily Create, a site we created to inspire people to do small acts of creative challenges every day. It is something I believed in from the start, from even before we launched the first open section of ds106. People praise it a lot. Nice. But the activity is, well, low on the average. When we launched in January, we were pegging over 100 responses a day. It peaks when we start a new section of ds106 (because it is a student required activity). Today’s challenge was one that required less on the software, creative side, and more on just the imagination- Take a picture of a cloud and tell us what it looks like to you. Seven people responded: I know the excuse train: “I’m busy.” “It’s ...

He’s the baddest cop on the streets in 1908… I felt I was overdue to sit down and do a ds106 assignment, one to do some iMovie work as a demo for our current students. I was called back to do Return to the Silent Era (one I added myself) with the hopes that I could push iMovie a bit farther than the last one I did — 2001 a Space Odyssey set back 100 years. The assignment is: The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track. I was trying to think about what would be interesting to set ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by sebastien.barre For this week’s live broadcast of the ds106 group radio shows I came up with an entirely new contraption for managing different sources, in contrat to my previous methods of using Nicecast. I still prefer using Nicecast, and do so for voice broadcasts or voice mixed with music (DJing)- but in the past I have ran into problems doing it with something like Skype as one of the sources, though I have mixed it in with the application mixer, the missing piece is for someone on Skype to be able to hear back what is on the stream. The new thing in the mix is the free Icecast broadcastng software, Ladiocast. I cobbled together the approach below with a combination of Tim Owen’s Ladiocast tutorial (critical for setting up Ladiocast) and Scott Lockman’s setup for doing his Second ...

Here is a new ds106 video assignment based on the notion of going to Camp Magic Macguffin for summer camp, Send a Camp Movie to Camp: Take one of the movies on the list of movies with camp themes, find a trailer for it, and re-edit the audio to completely change the plot- e.g. make a horror movie turn into a comedy, or make a romantic movie seem like a spooky movie. Send a camp movie to personality inversion camp! I went easy, and selected the trailer for the original Friday the 13th, made in 1980, the first home of Camp Crystal Lake I locked into this when it came out, I was still in high school, and could have easily been one of those wide eyed teens- one of which is a really young Kevin Bacon. Yeah, Jason rises out of the lake and takes his gross revenge, and ...