cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine Today’s ds106 Daily Create comes from Wikipedia’s page on surrealistic techniques: “Create a Self Portrait Cubomania Style — Cubomania is a surrealist method of making collages in which a picture or image is cut into squares and the squares are then reassembled without regard for the image.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubomania I used a photo I often make my icon, a self portrait shot in a mirror cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I ran this through the Big Huge Labs Hockneyizer tool with the polaroids turned off to get this image, which is somewhat (not exactly) cubed, but close enough for me It seemed like some effects could be done since it is symmetrical, but not perfectly, and putting it into layers might make for some fun… I imported it into Photoshop, made a […]

You don’t [usually] pay for an open course. You don’t depend on it for a grade. You have nothing at stake except your own interest in a topic. “Failure” and “dropout” are words without meaningful meaning here. But we cannot help ourselves, Not reaching the finish line is something we apologize for. We measure ourselves not by what we did but we did not do. Of course my assertions are based way too much on my familiarity with ds106 and all the Coursera courses I failed dropped out of signed up for. Michael Feldstein nicely laid out the complexities of learner motivation in what ends up over simplified- the “Myth of the Unified Course Goal.” Facebook says it better about the student course relationship– “It’s complicated”. We’ve more or less wrapped up a 15 week experiment with a headless ds106 course, culminating in a fantastic final project that was not […]

I have no idea how to even blog what culminated today for headless ds106. Maybe it was because what was in the boxes. Trying to write this up sells it short. But one ought to try. This is in lieu of a more comprehensive it-might-be-blogged-one-day-before-the-sun-burns-out post for what has happened the last 15 weeks since we launched this half baked experience. Today, we ran a live performance of what has emerged over just a few weeks, and completely supplanted the idea of having a final project in the course. The entire GIFaChrome idea (see a narrative of the unfolding) emerged from Rochelle Lockridge’s effort at a remix assignment… and it just mushroomed from there to glitch art in Google plus, John Johnston’s app, an amazon product page, layercake technplogy, dogs giffing, commercials, music, and then it jumped over the shark into a narrative of its own and its own web […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine The ds106 radio has been silent for 2 days. The station doors were locked shut, lights off, and only faint sounds of scurrying and muffled electrical tools were heard. But as reported by Grant Potter, the ice weasels were successful in rebuilding a newer and more flexible system. Some new features in the Airtime software are making me reconsider the previous approach to managing the scheduled content, the stuff that plays if there is no live broadcast. In that approach, I had divided each day into 8 hour blocks, and asked people to go in each week and populate it with content. This has worked well the last few months- I know that Bill Smith, Andy Forgrave, Christina Hendricks (and maybe others) were pitching in. But the tedious part was having to fill in content every week. The […]

I’m not to sure the relevance of that Bill guy or the Mark dude, but take some time out next week for the An Hour of Code project: It’s a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify “code” and show that anyone can learn the basics to be a maker, a creator, an innovator. We’ll provide a variety of self-guided tutorials that anybody can do, on a browser, tablet, or smartphone. We’ll even have unplugged tutorials for classrooms without computers. No experience needed. Watch this “how to” video for more information. Check out the tutorials in beta. I hope ds106 people note the relevant age range: There was a time last year when i was pondering with Jim Groom a possible subsequent class to ds106 that might focus on a code/scripting level, not trying to turn people into C++ programmers or python growers, but just the kind of conceptual […]

While finishing up the code and remix for Cory’s Mood Room it dawned on me that this could be something put into Mozilla Thimble so other people could change the content or even use their own images to do the same colorizing effect (see the original version at http://lab.cogdogblog.com/cory/). Here is a screen shot of the new version hosted on Thimble, meaning you can explore the code and tinker with it via the handy dandy Remix button: Getting this into thimble meant taking two external javascript libraries and two external CSS files and stuffing them into the code (because to link externally requires a https url and that seems not to work on my site). I added fairly explicit commenting to show the places where you can modify: Again the beauty of Thimble is you can edit code on the left and see the changes on the right (and get […]

I was late night tinkering on a current remix effort of For The Remix, an open invitation to generate remixes from Jonathan Worth’s photos of author Cory Doctorow (also a ds106 assignment) For this go around, I wanted to do something in code, and in the web. I cannot remember where the dim light bulb first flickered on, but my idea is a modernization of the 1970′s mood rings which purported to indicate a person’s mood when really it reacted to skin temperature (disclaimer: I honestly owned one) (( never wore it in public). To jump to the final remix chase, my concept reflects that Cory has many things on his mind- books, privacy issues, technology, copyright– and in his private think space he can ponder these and his skin would radiate a mood color. As you mouse over some of these topics, see how his mood color changes. See […]

What feels like a month later, I’m still back blogging some of my experience at Mozfest in London. My ears perked up when someone mentioned something about SourceFabric being at Mozfest. @grantpotter I was told the folks from Airtime are sponsoring the #Mozfest beer tonight, hope to find em to talk about #ds106radio — Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 25, 2013 Why? Because they are the folks that produce Airtime the open source software we use to manage ds106 Radio. I spoke to a few of the folks at the opening night Science Fair, especially Daniel James who works on the Airtime documentation and community. I shared our challenges in having a way to easily signify when a live broadcast is one, and he showed me where in our software is the API we could call, and where in the airtime code this is generated. I got the idea that we […]

UPDATE: later the same day Much of my assumptions here were just that and pretty much wrong. Thanks to replies on the wordpress forum to my request from catacuastic, it looks like WordPress is not doing any native resizing (just cropping the original voa CSS) and its more complicated than I guessed to resize. Best suggestion still is ti upload the proper display size of your GIF (keep this size in mind when you create it). The WordPress media uploader does a lot of work under the hood- when you upload an image, it automatically creates at least 3 different sized versions of your original- a thumbnail (usually 150x150px), a medium size (usually 300px x 300px), and large (1024px x 1024px): plus it keeps your original size. All of these are available when you go to upload and add an image to a post. The medium size is frankly small, […]

If you paid very close, detailed (ahem) attention to the Triple Dog Dare — this is RULE 2 for the current ds106 Headless open course activity of remix– it’s time to break out for creativity in a big way, and remix some photos of author Cory Doctorow. He’s given us his blessing (e.g. boing boing permission). All of the information, details, photos to remix, exmaples, instructions are on the site I cobbled together from Jonathan Worth’s idea. Here, let him say it. Jonathan’s phonar students are on to it now. Hey are we going to let those phonar kids out remix the mighty ds106? (cheap shot appeal to competition) (I’ll resort to any tactic to draw you out of what else you spend time on beside ds106). A few words about the site– when Jonathan and I planned this last Spring, we wondered about thousands of Cory fans, Boing Boing […]

It has nothing to do with the Mothership Google, but Googley Eyes are useful for sock puppets. Via the Firehose of Links Known as Alec Courous, I found myself diverted "Add googly eyes to a GIF" http://t.co/76z5EKhIoX — Alec Couros (@courosa) November 18, 2013 I find Googlify is a sophisticated technological tool (free of “Big Data” and pivoted moocs) for adding this effect to an animated GIF which you cannot enjoy since this is a snapshot. But the site allows you to add this effect to any published animated GIF I decided to give it a go with one I made of axe wielding Bryan Alexander when I visited him in May 2011 Loading the URL for this GIF in the Googlify site, and the site deconstructs the GIF into frames, each allowing you to add a googley eye and change its location, spacing, size, etc. and it re-renders as […]