cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Vijay.. I took a spin on the random button for the ds106 audio asignments and ha ha ha, I got one I had submitted, Character Bird Calls: Like some people use special whistles to attract birds, your task is to create an 30 second or less audio file that might be used to “call” a particular character from a movie, tv, or real life. It cannot feature voices, but sounds only (try http://freesounds.org). Write a description why this sound would be attractive to the character, why it would be effective (be inventive, write a story about it). (Stranglely the example I did, Calling Dr Oliver never got added, hmmmm). So began to consider maybe a pair of characters calling each other, who might that be? My brain mulled back to the childhood TV shows I watched, so here is ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Jumping into the ds106 audio, assignments, I wanted to take on ones that had few takers so far- and I remain stumped why Suess It was not given some ds106 attention: Take a Dr. Suess book, or perhaps the Berenstain Bears, or one of your own favorites, and read it to us. Give me your best Yertle the Turtle, or Lorax, or Mama Bear and have fun! Now just reading a book to me is not really doing ds106 in the “bring us your A Game” style- that would be just following the task literally. I think it should be done in an over the top (or under the bottom fashion). The choice of a book for me was easy, not juts because of my regular inclination to do something dog related, but because truly, Go Do Go was my ...

I’m late with my ds106 design stuff, but you will not catch me saying I am sorry. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I did assemble this for the Postcards from Magical Places assignment, which we had our UMW students with a requirement that the image come from Minecraft. Design the front and back of a postcard that might be sent from the location of a movie or a work of fiction. Both sides of the cards must be created as graphics. The fornt should use graphic design elements that provide a sense of place or use the classic motifs of old postcards (“Greetings from ______”)_, both pictures and text. The back of the post card should contain a stamp and postmark that fits with the theme of the movie, as well as an addressee and a message that fits the plot as well. The inspiration ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog With activity ramping up for me at the Northern Voice conference this week, my window for MADI (Making Art Damn It) is closing, hence here I sit working an hour on a faux book cover for the I Can Read Movies assiognment: Create a film-based book cover using the aesthetic framed by Spacesic See the original images I’d seen people do this one before, but was a first for me. I tried recalling movies I was drawn to as a kid, and the original Andromeda Strain was one I watched a few times, maybe it was the sci-fi escape the suburbs thing, maybe it was the allure of the southwest as a foreign land for a kid on the east coast, maybe it was the mad science angle. The one thing that I did recall, and could not find too ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by photosteve101 Dear Dominoe, I thought I would write since it has been like forever since I last communicated (literally), but who would understand me better than the dog pal who followed me across the country and then some. You might noy be aware, but I have been away for three works helping run a summer camp called Camp Magic Macguffin – the magic meaning that nothing bad happens here and the people who come just want to create, create, create art and funny animations all day long. In a way I wish I was a camper, because then you get to play. But I also have to work .My colleague Martha and I have much to do with orienting our UMW students to things like WordPress, creating course materials and videos, running live camp fire sessions, clearing timber, planning activities, etc. ...

Just one more Slide Guy. Because who would not want to slide on a voyage with Raquel Welch.

I’ve been all day peeking at the different design magic of Stephen Wildish’s site, I think we linked last year to one of his film alphabets, but all of his work has powerful elements of graphic design we are introducing this week to ds106 / Camp Magic Macguffin. The one that got under my skin was the Yoda Ven diagram, which outlines the possible intersections of “Green”, “Small”, and “Poor Grammar”, and when you run intersections of these you get: I knew I wanted to make this a new design assignment, so I did- Venn Pop Culture: In the vein of Stephen WIldish’s “Yoda Venn” (see http://stephenwildish.co.uk/ for all of of his designs), design a Venn diagram of three circles, each representing an attribute, where each overlap defines a figure from popular culture. I had a harder time coming up with three that worked, and gave my all the combinations. ...

Another slide guy attempt and damn, Martha got to Timmmmy in space first. Oh well…. NASA SCIENTISTS IDENTIFY SOURCE OF MARTIAN LANDSLIDES In a press announcement today, NASA scientist Marvin M. Artian released startling photographic evidence of t...

How can we resist Martha’s new assignment, Slide Guy aka Make a Timmmmmy Meme: Slide Guy loves to slide down things! Find a photo of something to slide down and make your own Slide Guy! (You can find Slide Guy! to download and use at http://dl.d...

Martha and I are adding a new element to the ds106 syllabus area on design, we want students to get practice understanding creative commons by seeking licensed media and then doing a design assignment using it- make a creative commons poster Use creative commons licensed images to design a poster about how groovy Creative Commons is! Use a tool like Compfight to find creative commons licensed images in flickr (be sure to select the right option on the search pane), and then use photo editing software to add your message, call to arms, rallying cry, urgent plea. INclude as well a creative commons logo– look to the creative commons itself for ones to use. Most importantly, in your poster be sure to give attribution credit to the source image. Lest you think we want blind allegiance, if you do not like creative commons or want to have fun with it, ...

I’m really worried about our brother Scottlo. It seems he has drunk some weird potion and is mesmerized by some beach front pixel property in Second Life, some place called Conoway Cay or something like that. Over here in Camp Magic Macguffin, we are hacking out a whole new world inside Minecraft, and poor Scottlo is in some sort of trance of the SL Sirens. Therefore, we are planning a Minecraft Scottlo Extradiction Strikeforce (MSES), and I made a few epxloratoary forays into that oversexed virtual world to check things out: I even kindly left him a few toys to play with, because in his broadcasts he seems to lonely. But can you believe it? Scottlo just tossed them in the trash. What happened to my friend of old? Cannot you see how all those SL furries and crazy sales people high on Linden dollars have corrupted him? Since Scottlo ...

This has to stop, but not tonight. I missed the fun of the afternoon shit talking and gif smacking today. With some positive feedback on the last batch, I set out again to see what I could do with GIMP as a tool. For these next two I went for very original material, stuff you cannot get on the internet- some of the videos from the Storybox as my intended purpose was to keep the raw material on the pirate box but allow remixes to float out on the open web. This first one was a barbershop pole spotted maybe in British Columbia- I had some shaky hand held video, but found at least one short segment where there was little jarring for one spin: BUt there was still jiggle. So I made a selection of just the moving pole part, and deleted everything else from 6 of the 7 ...

Ok, Jim asked me to up the game, so I am going to get more particular about frame selection for my animated GIFs. We are working on the ds106 kickstarter awards for people who requested an animated GIF in their honor. I’ve got the task to do the one for Boone Gorges, who requested something “bad ass”. My first neuron went to maybe something from Mad Max, which I might still do, or maybe Tyler Durden who was the baddest because he wasn’t…. never mind. I went to Samuel J as Jules Winfield, those mutton chop sideburns quoting Ezekiel… I’m really happy with this one! Jules just keeps ranting, but the little hand/head motion of the scared kid in the foreground make it complete (IMHO). Plus, by doing these by hand, working with your fingers in the mud and not just using some fricking iPhone app, it comes in at ...

I’m so missing having a copy of Photoshop to work on; my limits now for doing animated GIFs are assembling images– Saving frames from MPEG Stream clip or a series of images form my DSLR, loading as layers into GIMP, and trying to make them flip as needed, I really miss how PhotoShop can try and line things up. These are alll kind of junk, too much jerking and not aligned cleanly. Lazy. First of all, it’s the nervous cop a young punk Robert Blake plays in Electra Glide in Blue: Next, I noticed one night out my window that the horizontal lights on the Vancouver City Hall were flashing on and off to make it look like a ripple moving up and down (?) – it happened right at 10pm so maybe it is like a chime. I grabbed a few seconds of video and made this one in ...

This is a story that uses flickr photos to illustrate a playlist poetry story I created more than a year ago. The original assignment, not exactly title aptly, was Stories Written in Windows Media Player– and is one of my favorite stories about stories because it was one of the earlier ones created by a student in the first open ds106 course (Spring 2011). The neat thing about this was that it sounded kind of ho-hum at first, until we saw other people pick it up and run with it, to date it has been done 29 times. The original assignment was: Write a sentence (preferably somewhat coherent, yet on the nonsensical side), a poem, or a quick story using the titles of songs you have in your Windows Media Player (iTunes may possibly work as well). Print the screen. Paste it in Microsoft Paint (or some higher-end equivalent). Save ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I cannot believe by good fortune to come across the mint copy of the Sid Hammerback group’s groundbreaking introduction album “Let the Rest Go By”; from everything I have read, the last public version of this disc was seen in East Berlin. Not long after the album was released in 1978, lead glockenspiel player Ken Hubbard contracted a crippling bought of whooping cough, and the loss of his sound for ever crippled the band, despite the later infusion of congo virtuoso Bertolt “M.C.” Winkler… Okay, this is my effort at the ds106 Album Cover assignment; after having seen a number of students do this last semester (it has been done 47 times as of this post), and just this week, Jeff McClurken undercovered the cover for the death grunge sound of Swiss Emmigration to Russia and Bryan Jackson reminded us ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This is a fairly literal attempt to draw the shape of the story to one of my favorite all time films, Cool Hand Luke (1967) according to the Kurt Vonnegut approach: In the beginning, since he is drunk and feeling no pain, Paul Newman’s character is doing pretty good at chopping parking meters, although we have no idea why he is doing this. Of course, his track plummets in finding himself in jail. But it is there, among the various characters, that his spirit rises, although he is beaten up in the fight with Dragline (the young but always tough George Kennedy), Luke’s fortune just keeps arcing as his spirit of a fighter is respected by the other prisoners. Although they are given the grunt work of clearing roads and tarring, it is Luke’s leadership that leads them not only ...

The summer online version of ds106 that Martha Burtis and I are teaching is off like a rocket- but there is no reason why you cannot jump on board; just head over to Camp Magic Macguffin and follow the right side link to sign up. There is no worry about coming in later, although our bunk house groups are coalescing and currently bonding, kum bah ya-ing. As a point of notice (or to help me sort out my own blog personality disorder), I will be doing any assignment work right from here, the home blog, under the ds106 tag. However, as part of the storytelling of the storytelling course, I decided to play with a video blog, hosted under tumblr, but mounted here under the subdomain, macguffin.cogdogblog.com: I have noticed, and came across a few references to it elsewhere in the google-verse, that tumblr blogs are rather long cached, and ...

Part of the weekly recaps of ds06 we are asking our participants to do is a letter home from camp… Dear Mom and Dad, Wow, what a first week from Camp Magic Macguffin, it is a lucky thing I packed me favorite, stylish pants. It was one thing to go away to Camp Glyndon in the 1970s… I do remember that the first day I went I was miserable, it was rainy, and I just wanted to go home, but by day 3 I was locked in, and went back for the next 8 years. In fact, I stopped by what was camp just last summer, and those first bunkhouses are still standing cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog But this is now. It was a ton of work that Martha and I did in our role as camp counselors, and we had fun sharing camp ...

The summer of Unicorn Love ds106 Camp Magic Macguffin has started, and our campers seem to be happily making art and stuff. In keeping up with them, here is my weekly run down of Daily Create activity- it is refreshing to see the new surge of activity here, and this is one easy way to participate in ds106 at a regular level. The only required one for our ds106 students at UMW was the Family legend video, and as before, this has become a really interesting way to get to know people in the course/community. May 22, 2012: TDC 135 Video telling a story of an old photo here I talk about a horrible old photo of me that I swore I would never put online May 23, 2012: TDC 136 Video of a Family Legend The story of my sister’s busted nose- what a great showing for this video ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Even before coming to work at University of Mary Washington I carried a large bias towards the force that is ds106; having taught in and doing it again (hey the doors are open for the summer version a la Camp Magic Macguffin), I am in the middle of the MOOC woods not really worrying if there are trees or not. Or maybe, if a Massive Open Online Course falls in the woods… ok, enough useless metaphors. There’s enough static flying in the webs about MOOCs but I was pleased to have caught the conversation at the Digital Campus podcast Ya Big MOOC where Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, Amanda French, and guest Audrey Waters provided interesting viewpoints and recognition of ds106 (not that we need more people clamoring for credit) Ya Big MOOC Some brief notes- Mills praised ds106 for not ...

I’m thinking of Jerry’s note this morning (happy to see him signed up for Camp Magic Macguffin) “@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project. — Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012 With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting slip the time spent creating for class, itself the self-renewal I need as much as oxygen. Seeing Scottlo Warhol his Second Life self in a followup to Leelzebub’s own effort had me eager to try the tutorial. But alas I am photoshopless until the new order comes in, and that was way more than I wanted to bite off and try in GIMP. So I went for the next best thing, doing an animated GIF. When I visited the National Cryptologic Museum on Saturday I enjoyed watching the machine that had a computer controlled arm ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by febbrile This is about as close as I might get to a reflection on my first round of teaching an on site section of ds106 at the University of Mary Washington- the class had barely wrapped and we were off into prep for Faculty Academy, and this week, ds106 cranks up for its summer iteration. I dropped the ball on my audio reflections leaving about 4 recordings sitting high and dry. Not to mention it is 2am and I have an online presentation to deliver at 9am. But if I don’t blog it now, I might lose it all, given (another pending blog post) a summer of travel that starts in less than 48 hours. Enough prelude, get to it, Levine! First of all, this was about the first time since the mid 1990s that I was teaching a ...

Things are shaping up nicely for the summer course of ds106 I am co-teaching with Martha Burtis, we have been super busy supervising and doing a lot of the work at Camp Magic Mcguffin. If you have every mused about trying to take ds106 as an open participant, this is perhaps the best time, during the summer, to come to camp, and let your creativity go wild. Go check out our welcome video and see the special info we provide for online open participants (yes Lisa Lane, we have a tag for you;-). We were excited to hear that canmpers are already getting into the spirit, Lee has already done and created a first camper submitted assignment. So I wandered down to the shored of Lake Macguffin to see how the cleanup was going. It is still off limits while the crews finish the work, after emptying the lake, and ...