On Thursday, February 2 Section 1 of ds106 had a visit from Bryan Alexander via Google Hangout for a conversation about web storytelling. Bryan is a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) where he … Continue reading →

Hopefully the rest of my students whose blogs were messed up by Enre5807 are back to action, and their sites in tact. If not, let me know ASAP. For more on this event, see the report from Detective Kim Droom … Continue reading →

Each time you send an email, and perhaps by extension of the convention, you should thank Ray Tomlinson and his inspiration, @rmando’s Pizza Shop in Cambridge, MA. Tomlinson, a graduate of MIT, started work as a programmer in the mid 1960s at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the firm working with ARPANET to develop the first computer network that evolved into the Internet we know today. The concept of computer messaging had been around a while, but was limited to people sending messages only to other people using the same computer. The program was called SNDMSG, and Tomlinsons idea was to improve it be able to send messages to other nodes on the network BBN was connecting. He typically credits the use of the @ sign to be common sense, of Person AT machine, but BBN insiders know that the idea came from Armando’s Pizzas, which were the favorite snack for ...

Because the new ds106 Daily create is so distributed, and sometime the tags fail to bring content into the main site, I am requiring my students to either blog their efforts as they go (which some are doing), or post a summary at the end of the week. This will not only make it easier for me to track, it will, more importantly, provide them a way to organize all their DCs in one place. I have already created a screencast on how to do this with WordPress Categories but one can also do it with tags. This week is not over, but I wanted to create a demo. On this blog, I am tagging all my posts for this as dailycreate which becomes likable via http://cogdogblog.com/tag/dailycreate The other thing I want them to do is to embed their content in the blog, not link to it or upload it. ...

It was exciting to see the class get engaged in tonight’s discussion from Gardener Campbell’s paper on Personal Cyberinfrastructure and his video recorded talk on this topic. Students should be working on their reflection blog posts, but may want to … Continue reading →

Justin had a good question about organizing his content, wanting a way to easily show just the things he publishes for his Daily Create. This is a job for Categories (to be fair, it could be done jut the same … Continue reading →

In yesterday’s class we made great progress with getting their blogs set up. I’m pleased to see the ones that have already been made their own with different themes.. Now it’s time to fill them up! In the class session … Continue reading →

For students in my section of ds106, here is a little bit to expect for the coming week. The heat just increases every week. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by ?olo Before class, you should … Continue reading →

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Troup1 On the list of question topics that anesthetize me, just below FERPA and Intellectual Property, is the query on an experimental project, “Does it scale?” Scales are fine for lizards. And weighing stuff. Expanding things by scaling them is not the only model of growth. For Massive Open Online Courses, this year’s poster child the Stanford AI course, they grow the same way we enlarge an object in graphic editing software. We grab the corner and pull it outward. This method does certainly provide growth, expansion, and is not wrong in any way– but it is doing so by replication, by aiming to give each participant the same experience, the same lockstep pace. But it was while driving down the mountain roads to Phoenix today, thinking about the forms of nature from rocks by the road to hills, to ...

The ds106 classes at University of Mary Washington are underway this week- I had my first class last night (with assistance from the Reverend), and I have set up a new blog for ds106 teaching posts (and just to go through same steps I am asking students to do) see http://106tricks.net/. I will next start pulling in those posts using FeedWordPress. Maybe. But I will continue to do my assignments here. My students are charged with doing 3 Daily Create assignments a week, and given this first week’s timing, I am having them do only one before Monday. What is this about? Why do this? Doesn’t this speak for itself: 1 Take Tongue Twister: Below is the tongue twister you will recite. Record a video of you reciting it in one take (honor system of course) and upload it to YouTube with the tag tdc011. Remember: BE CREATIVE! Thanks to ...

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Yeah, I am in it #4life and will continue to speak into the ds106radio microphone. Who wants any other sign? (Another example for the ds106 Cropped Sign Assignment) Original sign read "Life Ring"

Ben Rimes has coined a clever new ds106 assignment that plays with visual mashups – in Fantasy TED Talks you are given free reign to: Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their “essential truth” that has come to be known as TED Talks. And Ben has gone that extra A-Game step to provide several starting examples and a template to work from. Power. Who would I want to bring on stage to TED? Hmm, think heavy hitters– Maybe HG Wells? Einstein? Babe Ruth? Lincoln? Moses? Nah, I went for dogs: Lassie on Self Awareness: Lassie looks back at a life in acting (a body of work as a faithful companion) and shares the pain suppressed bue to her having to overcome her gone through a transpecies operation ...

Only because @echoln tweeted her extra large yam comes this un-necessary Yam Yarn assignment for ds106 Yeah, yeah, yam sharks might be a little scary, but nothing is more terrifying than the Great Orange Tuber, the classic story of all times. This was a quick PhotoShop cut and layer job, based on a movie poster borrowed from MovieGoods, and using Joan’s tweeted yam photo. I stared at the photo a bit looking for a shape, and it cried WHALE. I did some cheap substitutes for the fonts on words changed from the poster. My usual approach is to magic brush in background stuff, and then do typography over the top. “Tuber at the top is Arial Black, which is close but not exact. The “YAm” on the bottom was Gil Sans Ultra Bold, again, close enough but not exact. I rendered the type to be bitmapped so O could magic ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by United States Marine Corps Official Page It’s simple. Do something every day, and you get better at it. Easier said than done? Well, let’s look at what’s happening at the ds106 DailyCreate and maybe it will take the pressure off. Jim has already written up how it has progressed so far; this is something we talked about last year before the launch of ds106 as a way of being, of doing small amounts of creativity every day as being something helpful for the creative juices. It is based on Jim’s experiences in previous rounds of ds106 with the now defunct dailyshoot site, aimed at providing small doable challenges in photography. I myself did this more than a year, along side my ongoing daily photography posting. The DailyShoot provided a subtle but important prompt for creativity. When you are doing your ...

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It ain’t her past and it ain’t that Mary we are talkin about, It’s Mary who works night shift at the "1I Dine In" you know, uh, the one by Beavertail highway and the 357. Yeah, looks like the side was hit by a 2 ton pickup cause it was. She is more Mary like the song by the Kix, she’s quite contrary indeed. She’s pouring day old coffee to truckers and losy tourons, but catchin’ eyes with her sad smile from 5 to when take out ends at 3:30. (An attempt at a ds106 cropped sign story) Okay, its not great, but have been trying to find more signs that could be changed via simple cropping in camera. The tags for this ds106 assignment are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments129 I want to emphasize the point when I made this assignment is that the ...

Doing daily photography makes me take note of many more details around me than I did before. I read a lot of signs, and thought over the last few months that it is interesting to find at intersections road signs for names or things that you would not e...

Yam mania defines ds106, and like my first yam yarn, I have space yams on my mind. It’s 11PM and I’m photoshopping yams. — Tim Owens (@timmmmyboy) January 4, 2012 Hah, Timmmmy, I’m photoshopping yams at 12:30 AM, because IT’S A WAR OUT THERE IN YAM SPACE (as well as in the oceans) This is the classic version, not the Spud Cruise one. We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Tuber Smoke all that day and the morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on Sunday evening–a face at a window and moving lights, and later the slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Tuber Smoke drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway ...

Super Heroes, we’ve got them in ds106. In digging the archives of bavatuedays, I recently came across Jim’s post on Cotton Mather, Marvel Supervillian? in which we see the source of his lovely blog icon. Ultimately, this leads to full profile bio of this dude, Cotton Mather. And so I dig back, and find that Marvel has a giant pedia of character profiles, and it occurs to me that it would be fun to do some web page rewriting of characters. Enter the ds106 profile of the dude, Bava Mather: To do this, I make use of an old school HTML technique. I save the source code of the Cotton Mather page as a local HTML file (in Chrome, it is File -> Save Page As and use “Web Page, HTML Only”. Now here is the key part- look at the URL for this page: http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix3/cottonmather.htm Chop off stuff from ...

And the ds106 pre-course assignmnet craze moves into 11th gear. Michael Branson-Smith takes the movie poster into a new dimension with his iteration of American Werewolf in London featuring two different elements of movement life sizing the original page. Next, Jim Groom crams about 5 animated GIFs into one with his version of Jason and The Argonauts, turning the whole poster into an action scene. I pondered what I could do in this vein, and also expand some of my PhotoShop animation chops. I settled on a movie that was a favorite of mine as a kid, for no real reason I can explain, The Bridge over the River Kwai. A battle of World War II wills between a Japanese war camp commandant and his British solider/prisoners put to work building a river bridge that would ultimately hurt the Allies, it features William Holden and a youngish Alec Guinness and ...

This is the infectious handoff nature of ds106 that I love the most. While never really becoming the kind of musician who can truly “jam”, in a way we are doing this with ideas. After posting the contorted how tos for my language tool, John Johnston commented on his own experimentation where we hooked together two web services in a new mashed up way. He pulled random quotes from the I

Star Yam 13: The Final Leftovers is the next series of adventures for Captain James T. Fork of the Starship Yamterprise, it’s 9 year mission, to sek out new plates and new celebrations, to boldly go where no yam has gone before! It’s a Yam Jam Theme, starting with Lisa Lane sailing the Yam Boat, Scottlo showing the Yam Who Would Be King, and next, MBS taking my favorite starchy movie, Cool Hand Yam (goes well with eggs). How could I resist? I’m no spud. Now someone needs to make this assignment for ds106, as this is getting out of yam. It could put a whole now flavor on mashed-up assignments. Ingredients for this image: Star Ship enterprise image from Free Desktop Backgrounds The potato is from Culturally Authenitic Pictorial Lexicon which is becoming a source I like more and more for its creative commons images. The font is Star ...

Here is yet another new ds106 assignment. There are not quite as many for the writing type, so I wanted to add to the bucket. This builds off of the Photo Translation one (I am stoked to see folks playing with it right off the bat) and uses the Words with No Translation tool. I call this one “My Dinner with Toska” – given that Scottlo was the first off the bat to try my last assignment, where he created a personality named Toska, and playing with my utter non understanding of the movie My Dinner with Andre Write the script for a conversation with your long lost friend Toska, who deals with ‘a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning.’. Generate five random words from the Words with No Translation tool and make sure Toska ...

I cannot shake it, there is something magical about experimenting with animated GIFs. There’s a lot to be said about isolating the motion of the eyes- I’d previously played with using video frames in doing the one on Ayn Rand’s eyes, because her eye motion was so mesmerizing in the film. You might have to look at the image above to catch the movement. Less obvious is better in doing this stuff. I’ve also been interested in wqrking to make the animated gif less herky jerky, more subtle, even with the way the one of Edward Norton’s character in Fight CLub sits there almost motionless, and then jerks awake. Hence the experiment above, but done with only 2 photos. I’m enjoying finding ways to capture the raw material for an animated GIF with my own camera. I keep the camera in the mode that shoots continuously when the shutter is ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There are monsters out there, zombies, vampires, aliens, amrching your way, dargginth eir limbs, dribbling their gob, hoisting their sharp implements… What will you do when ds106 knocks at your door? will you just mutter “It’s only a MOOC, it’s only a MOOC…” “You’ll wish it were only a MOOC.” “The assignments are driving him crazy.” “Sometimes GIF is better.” “ds106 doesn’t take no for an answer.” “Sooner or later they will McGuffin you.” “If you’re going to blog the truth, make sure it stays published.” “You’ll wish art was only make believe.” “Your every fear — all in one deadly course.” “…and remember, the next mashup you hear may be your own!” “Be reflective. Be very reflective.” Quotes lifted and recrafted from Match the Scary Movie With the Tag Line! (BuzzSugar) What kind of ds106 horror image can you ...

Having tossed down a gauntlet on assignment creation, I could sit idly without bring some more “A Game”. Here ny example for a new assignment based on illustrating words that have no English translation. Glas Web “A smile that is insincere or mocking. Literally, a blue smile.”cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by babasteve: http://flickr.com/photos/babasteve/3114063323/ Clowns always mock us with their overly expressive smiles. They just want handouts. Background. During our drive to Montreal, I aimed to enterain my driver, Giulia, with reading descriptions of words that have no english equivalent… this all started with my trying to recall that French expression for the phenomenon where you come up with the perfect come back line much later than the situation where it would have counted (which turns out to be “Esprit d’escalier”. I found about 4 different web sites with examples of these words, and it made for some ...