My being inspired to write a story on cowbird is a likely correlation with spending last week visiting Barbara Ganley. Because I urge my students to share the story behind a story, the one I wrote last night A Stranger Rummaged Through My Suitcase came from my unpacking experience. It was hardly the first time I found the TSA paper in my suitcase cc licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Like usually I shrugged it off, tossed the paper, and put the pile of dirty clothes in the basket to be washed. That’s when “it” happened- that diffifult to describe itch when an idea bubbles up. Part of it is how normal this seems, how matter of fact. We just accept the fact that when traveling by airplane, our checked baggage is inspected for Things That Do Not Belong in the Air. Less then that odd realization […]

This internet can be so recursive on itself. Nada Dabbagh, Professor & Director Division of Learning Technologies at George Mason University (she is the person who invited me to teach a DS106 class for GMU starting now) emailed about an ironic event in one of her classes. She has an assignment where her students are asked to compare a constructivist learning environment and compare it to an objectivist learning environment. Without her prompting, one of the student groups had found and selected on their own, DS106 as the former. I asked if they would share their project and was curious how they discovered DS106; she got this response: I’m fine with sharing it with anyone who is interested. I came across it largely by dumb luck. I had been trying to research MOOC’s as a possible option and came across the idea of a Connectivist MOOC. Then I came across […]

If you have been looking for a DS106 experience to join, your boat comes in March 18. That is when an online course I have been invited to teach in DS106 style starts. EDIT 572: Digital Audio/Video Design and Applications is part of a graduate certificate Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) Program at George Mason University. Last summer Nada Dabbagh asked me if I could teach this course with a storytelling approach, even bringing the ds106 mode to it. “Are you sure?” I asked. This class will be 7 weeks long, and is two credits, so I have been paring back a bit of what I typically do in the UMW courses (see the general syllabus). What’s different for this course is that the students are all working employees of a major consulting firm, working on the IDT program at GMU. They have been described to me as “road warriors” […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine For today’s ds106 Daily Create, Got CAPTCHArt? the challenge was to make some art out of those crazy “prove you are a human” devices. Captchas are not quite as easy to find any more with interesting words. I have some in my flickr from the grand old days when you got real jumbled words, and sometimes freaky combinations, including this unlikely combination of names cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I wonder what happens when one puts Cory Doctorow with Alan Greenspan? I used the portrait of Doctorow in his office that Jonathan Worth made available (creative commons) in the For the Remix project. Wikipedia has a public domain portrait of Greenspan, at a very similar pose- in front of bookshelves. Eerie. I brought both into Photoshop and resized Greenspan to overlap […]

Todd Conaway created a masterful animated GIF, riffing from John Johnston. I am concerned for Todd’s safety as seems to be not aware of the consequences of erasing history! I think we’re gonna need a bigger GIF.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine We were excited that SourceFabric asked to stream 2 hours of ds106 radio for their program for World Radio Day. I got a smattering of suggestions interest in the google doc, but a big gold star sticker goes to Dr Jones for sending me 2 great recorded remix sets. I have a lot of archive material, and put it in a playlist. It was 8 hours long I thought maybe we could do some call in stuff too, but since I had so much stuff, I kind of just took it over. Sue me. I put all the files in iTunes, and for the longer clips, I use the setting where you could define where it started playing, so I could have just a sample. My setup was the usual Rube Goldberg iTunes/Skype audio to Soundflower mix in […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine February 13 is World Radio Day and ds106 is on it! Check it out! Tweet it Out! Broadcast it out! It’s your internet! Keep it Free! cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ihave3kids GNA had a good idea for the ds106 Daily Create scheduling… @cogdog just rappin here… How would it be to have the daily create bot tweet out more than once a day? For multiple TZs (lifestyles)? — GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) February 8, 2014 I had been thinking about the timing of when they are published; it has been 10:00 AM EST from the beginning, aiming likely at our students in Fredericksburg, and/or first thing in the morning for the west coast, and something totally inconvenient for people in other time zones. Here is the thing about time zones– no matter what time you schedule something, it will be a crappy time for people elsewhere on the globe. That is a problem I cannot fix. But is a good thing to have the TDC planted in your head early, […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine To cap off a full weekend, after attending the SCC Tech Talks on Friday I headed north to Flagstaff to catch the show by Ira Glass at Northern Arizona University. The great irony is that I found out about this show via a tweet from my friend Grant Potter in Nova Scotia. I ought to brain dump all I absorbed from the show; it was just that good. I have no photos. There is a possible chance I accidentally clicked a button on my phone and opened a ds106 radio stream. I am just not sure. He entered on a dark stage, all we hear is his voice. He was carrying some sort of tablet device he used to control the audio clips he played, and the light from the screen was all we could see. And he […]

February 13, 2014 is World Radio Day a UNESCO Project aimed at making the world aware of the power of radio as a platform for change. Via our friends at SourceFabric (makers of the open source Airtime software), ds106 radio is going to be part of the SourceFabric Radio day long program. What is special about radio? According to the event site: The World Radio Day seeks raise awareness about the importance of radio, facilitate access to information through radio and enhance networking among broadcasters. Radio has to be recognized as a low cost medium, specifically suited to reach remote communities and vulnerable people: the illiterate, the disabled, women, youth and the poor, while offering a platform to intervene in the public debate, irrespective of people’s educational level. Furthermore, radio has a strong and specific role in emergency communication and disaster relief. There is also a changing face to radio […]

Don't Rage around Miss Cicely Alexander! This is a response to the Tate’s call for their 1840s GIF party — they have made images available from selected pieces of art from their 1840s room and inviting anyone to remix as a GIF. That is such a good idea I made it into a ds106 assignment. I chose as my subject James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872-4). I saw movement possibility in the pair of butterflies, but was curious about the item at the base of the window sill… it is just some sort of etching ?? but when I saw the image it reminded me of one of those silly rage faces. The first step was selecting the butterflies and putting each in a layer. On the base layer, I clone brushed in beneath them. To be able to animate the rage head, […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Can You Dig It? (the original call sign) January 23 marks the day in 2011 when a blog post from Grant Potter announced ds106 Radio. I hope people who have been part of the community before, or just have been a listener, or just want to be near something cool, spend some time tomorrow celebrating this birthday. I’m not going to be explaining all about our internet based free form wide open manager-less radio station — see http://ds106.us/ds106-radio I made the image above as one of the pre-cursor bits, today’s Daily Create was to make a birthday card.. I will tip the hat that tomorrow’s is to post an audio birthday greeting to SoundCloud. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Forgrave There are not choreographed organized plans tomorrow, it’s just another day […]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Ben Kilgust But for a curious link click among the flow of twitter Transom » Ira Glass: http://t.co/L3K9xKGU9a — AWooldridge (storyt) (@storytellin) January 16, 2014 As my friend Darren Kuropotwa asked, I do not even know who “AWoolridge” is except I am finding excellent storytelling resources in his/her twitter stream, so thanks. Where this link led was a blog post/article on Transom (a key resource for learning about and teaching audio) that is almost 10 years old. Yeah the web, it’s just about the moment, it is so ephemeral. A post from 2004 really knocked me on the floor with how powerful it is for understanding and teaching key elements of storytelling. This is the web I love. The Transom Review looks like an online version of a journal, this one devoted to Ira Glass, the legend 9at least […]

The Headless ds106 experiment we set up August-December 2013 had many successful points. Most was in the new influx of active participants, but the ending group project (not planned) was in terms of rich collaboration one of my peak ds106 experiences. But it was an experience that was still bound by time. It started and ended. And in discussion with Rochelle Lockridge about her wildly successful efforts in running a parallel ds106 experience inside the 3M corporate world, I felt more that the weekly pace was un-ncessary for a truly wide open ds106. Of Course We’re Open. It’s not completely filled out yet, but in a week, the Open ds106 Course ought to be fully built out. The idea is to take the posts (time based) that made up the headless ds106 course, and put them in a WordPress Page structure (actually page and child pages). This way they can […]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Vanessa Pike-Russell Two years ago today the ds106 Daily Create was launched with its first challenge, TDC1, “Create a Photograph that features a repeating pattern”. In honor of that, this is one of the rare times we repeat the same prompt, for TDC731: We’ve not missed a day in that stretch, a run of 730 creative challenges meant to help you flex those creative muscles. The idea for this site grew out of our experience with The Daily Shoot, a site created by pro photographers Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark. While I had been doing my own (and still do) daily photographs, the power of a photographic prompt gave me something to look for everyday, and often led me to try new techniques. We used the Daily Shoot in the first years of ds106 when we worked on visual […]