There seems to be two main components in ds106, one is a freeflow imagination and a willingness to follow ideas. Assignments seem to spring for the participants this one from Yamboat - Lisa's ds106 experiment.Although some of this stuff s...

studying... by fazenAttribution LicenseA couple of days ago I was reading Building the No English Words Translation Tool on Alan Levine's space for barking about and playing with technology he described how he was building a tool for ds106 Words With No English Translation with some JavaScript, as I popped on a comment I was reminded of http://iheartquotes.com/api an API for getting quotes. and had a wee play to produce Pics for Quotes (or a better title) a simple webpage that pulls in a random quote and then allows you to click on it to search flickr for the word clicked on. I wondered if this could be a ds106 assignment.Alan comment back with some suggestions:“Visualize That Quote”- rather than provide choices to pick from Flickr for each word; maybe random generate one image per word. The activity would be to illustrate/explain the quote in pictures with the least number of pictures required. The user could X out ones they did not need (and they would dissapear) and perhaps allow a click to generate a new random image to replace it. They would then do a screenshot to save their work? Perhaps generate a score where there is advantages to lower numbers of pictures and fewer image replacements? I did a bit of work and got a basic implimentation of Alan's suggestions going. Alan then blogged about it again with some more suggestions: See if it can skip unnecessary words like “a”, “the”, “of” Be able to return a word if we accidentally click it closed Tweak the css for thr “attribution” link at bottom (sometimes overlaps the license text) Make it so when you hide the titlebars, it also hides the text of the words and the quote, to make it a true guessing game. I've managed to make most of these changes and have a sort of working page: Visualize That Quote that has become a ds106 Assignment Visualize That Quote — MISSION: DS106 What Visualize That Quote Does Pulls in a random quote of less than 8 characters from the Quotes API and displays it. Searchs Flickr for a creative commons images to go with each word and shows one for each word. Allows you to swap out the images by clicking. You can reorder remove or hide images. Here are a few examples I churned out without much though while testing this: The DS106 Effect It is great to get the quality of feedback and suggestion from a blogger I've read for years. The whole ds106 network is incredibly supportive even before the course has started. I started riffing off Alan's idea and was pushed and encouraged to improve something that started as a slightly pointless exercise to be come almost useful. This reinforces, for me, the power of blogging and commenting in learning. I've spend a few hours polishing something, learning as I went due to the community effect. I'd already had some of this in ds106 related posts. The current exchange has been particularly powerful becasue it was not just a well done, but a you could do thisOnce I go back to work, tomorrow, I am not sure how much of ds106 I'll be able to keep up with as even before the spring course there is a fair flood of posts, but I'll give it a fair try.I'll also be thinking a bit harder about how I comment on pupil blogs, too often it is easy to go for well doen and leave it at that. How it WorksA mix of jquery, php & jQuery UI. Part of the ds106 ethic seem to be to explain how something is done so that others can learn from it. My coding will not stand much of a critical eye, I am no programmer, but some folk might find this interesting or even useful. The Quotes API will send json, but although that worked in desktop test I couldn't get it working on the web due to cross domin problems, I tried setting it to jsonp and that brought it in but I got errors trying to parse it with jQuery. Knowing very little about this stuff I side stepped it by pulling the json in with php so I could get that with jQuery's ajax stuff. Any jQuery/Javascript (and css) is all on the one page and you can have a look if you are interested by viewing the source of Visualize That Quote. It is not a pretty sight, as my method of coding is guess and check and google and guess and check. I have a tendency just to get things going and then push on. This quote is put on the page, next javascript strips out all of the punctuation using:str=str.replace( /[^a-zA-Z ]/g, '').replace( /\s\s+/g, ' ' );Which I got from How can I strip all punctuation from a string in JavaScript using regex? - Stack Overflow. The script then pulls in html to show random flickr image via a php file which uses phpFlickr: randomFlickr you can see the code with some notes. I am recycling this from elsewhere (A flickr CC search toy). One the javascript has the code it puts it on the page. More javascript swaps out the pictures for others when they are clicked.jQuery makes that pretty simple. jQuery UI handles all the dragging:$("#flickr").sortable({ handle: '.drag', revert: true });Which is pretty simple. I just copied that from the jQuery UI site. Most of the other things are deal with my toggling their visibility with jQuery again: $('.attribution').toggle(); in this case this hides or shows the attribution for all the pictures, these are in a span with the css class .attribution. How it could be better The flickr search could return json rather than html, this would give a better logic to building the set of images. I'd need to learn how to produce json with php and to process this with jQuery. Most of the work is done with simple functions, these are called from hard coded onclicks, the more common way to do this with jQuery seems to ad these with jQuery when the pages is loaded. Rather than expect users to take manual screenshots it should be possible to created composite images with the attribution and optionally the text stampled on. I've done a little of this sort of thing before (the stamp function of A flickr CC search toy) but this would streach me and google a bit. Alternativly an embed code that would embed a wee set of thumbnail pics and link to a full viewing of the creation. In both this and the last case I'd need to figure out what to do if a user reorders the images. In this case I might need a database. Given the return to work tomorrow, all the fun I'll have on ds106 and Colin Maxwell's Ed Tech Creative Collective I am not sure if I'll get to this any time soon, but I've had a great time with this so far, if you are part of ds106 I hop you finf the assignment useful, I am very open to more ideas and suggestions.

My first attempt at a ds106 assignment. I was reading Alan Levine's post Building the No English Words Translation Tool about a new DS106 assignment Make The Untranslatable Understood the task is:Use the Random Words with No English Translation tool to generate a word that could be better understood with a photo or image. Find a creative commons image or make your own, and include the word somehow in the image (using a desktop photo editor or web tool like Aviary or PicNIk). Then share it with someone and ask if it makes sense.I click through a few and then got sidetracked (more about that later).Today I reloaded the tool and Uitwaaien popped up. "Literally, this Dutch word means to walk in the wind, but in the more figurative (and commonly used) sense, it means to take a brief break in the countryside to clear one’s head."I slightly disremembered this, thinking of head in the clouds which reminded me of the cover of On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas Harding. This lead me to this (click for larger versions): and this: Checking images for the cover of On Having No Head it seems that my memory was faulty again, not quite how I remembered it. Not to worry.One of the resions I am joining in with ds106 is to learn how to photoshop, having a fairly unused copy on my work laptop, but here I went for my comfort zome of fireworks 8 (the last one with a really good edu discount). I mostly use fireworks for cropping and maybe dropping the odd shadow but Feathered selections and transparent gradients in Fireworks 3 go me on the right track I faded the head a wee bit too much but I know how to do it now. I had 2 photos ofthe same place one with me in it one without (Credit to my daughter Christine). I tool my head area out of the photo without me and cropped it to a wee rect round my head as a layer on the photo of me. I then masked the layer with a graident as per instructuions.

I though with the previous post I'd finished blogging for the year, but this is too good to keep.This morning firing off the EDUtalk bot brought in a couple of new podcast episodes one from iPadio and one from AudioBoo.I is always interes...

I though with the previous post I'd finished blogging for the year, but this is too good to keep.This morning firing off the EDUtalk bot brought in a couple of new podcast episodes one from iPadio and one from AudioBoo.I is always interes...

toggle color I've been reading Jim Groom's bavatuesdays for a few years and though it following ds106: Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year. D...

toggle color I've been reading Jim Groom's bavatuesdays for a few years and though it following ds106: Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year. D...

Edutalk has now been running for over 2 years, we have published over 300 pieces of educational audio. These vary from TeachMeet recording, through to personal reflection by way of pupil podcasts. Hopefully theses provide interesting and educational listens. One of the things that David and I talked about when we started EDUtalk was issuing a CD rom of recordings, this would perhaps have helped to keep older, still valuable, audio playing.One of my thoughts about podcasts is that older episodes get forgotten about in a way that old blogs posts, through searching, do not.REcently I've been reading about and listening to ds106 Radio and Stephen's Downes' Ed Radio. These are Internet radio stations. My interest was also stimulated by my daughter who is currently doing some pro bono work for Airing Pain « Pain Concern a podcast and internet radio. I've alway believed (and gone on about) one of the benefits of podcasting over radio is its asynchronously. The potential audience for internet radio would seem to be less. A few things have made me think again: A comment on Stephen Downes - Google+ about ED Radio: That's the intent of Ed Radio, it's not something you really focus on, it's more background where you listen while you work & where something may or may not catch your attention. Somewhere else, Stephen wrote about the interesting challenge of broadcasting to no listeners. Can't find the quote at the moment. on broadcasting to radio #ds106 | D'Arcy Norman dot net How does the ability to instantly broadcast live audio to a group of people impact what we do? How does this instant synchronous connection effect the sense of social presence? And how does having to make the decision of streaming vs. recording effect the experience of sharing? I've also been impressed by the quality of internet radio when streaming to a phone on g3 as well as wifi. So we though we would give this a go How to There are various posts on the how to set up a station but I basically went to Internet Radio Servers and set up an Icecast server on pay as you go. I then followed CogDog Guide to Nicecasting - CogDogBlog to test Nicecast. You can use Nicecast to broadcast from iTunes or a mix of iTunes and voice or even iTunes, voice and Skype. You can use Nicecast for an hour at a time for free and pay when you have tested it. I am using it on test mode at the moment. I have also tested the AutoDJ set up, where the station just streams from a set of mp3 you have uploaded via ftp. this seems to works well. Instructions on Internet Radio Servers are straightforward.I've briefly tested Papaya Broadcaster a £2.99 iPhone & iPad app this seem to do the trick. allowing you to broadcast on the move. A Plan The costs at the moment £5 a month to host the AutoDJ files and £5 per 10GB broadcast. I am figuring with only a few listeners it will only be £10 a month to broadcast for an hour or so each night, using a variety of sources. We have a few loose ideas of what to broadcast: Broadcasting sets of audio from the Edutalk Archive on AutoDJ 7:30 to 8:30 each night. The hope is that folk will have it on in the background listening for serendipitous educational audio. I've not really worked out the queuing of the audio but will select some and mix then up every day or two. So far I've downloaded and converted to the correct samplerate & bitrate over 60 files. Once a week on Wednesdays David and I will attempt some sort of skpye in show where folk can skype in for a chat, we still have to test this. This can be recorded and fed back into Edutalk as a podcast. Curated sets from the Archive, using nicecast and iTunes, possibly opening it up to guest hosts. Live event broadcasts, for example from a TeachMeet using Papaya Broadcaster. Anything else we can dream up or is suggested... Tech Tips (for geeky teachers) It seems that you need to use files that all have the same sample rate, bitrate and number of channels. I've started off with 60-70 files downloaded from Edutalk , the problem is these do not all have the same sample rate, bitrate and number of channels This can be dome by opening and exporting the files from Audacity, or exporting them from iTunes. This could take quite a while. A quick google found a script for the Lame lib (That is used by Audacity to export mp3s), You need to instal Lame so that it is available for command line use, this sort of stuff can be daunting but worth it as a time saver.What I did was open the Terminal, navigate to the folder full of mp3s (on a mac you can type cd and then drag a folder onto the terminal window), then you just put this int othe terminal window and hit return: mkdir save && for f in *.mp3; do lame -m m -b 128 --resample 44.1 "$f" ./save/"${f%.mp3}.mp3"; done What that does is make a new folder save inside the mp3 folder, then use lame to convert all the mp3s in the folder into new files in the save folder that all have a bitrate of 128, a sample rate of 44.12 and are mono files. Well worth doing if only to avoid having to see asave dialog 60 times. How to listenbetween 7:30 and 8:30 head over to Radio Edutalk - EDUtalk. A flash player should start when the page opens. There are also buttons to listen with winamp, Windows Media player, Real player or QuickTime. Hit the title song to open in iTunes.I'd love to hear what folk think, ideas for broadcasts or cc licensed audio that could be played.

Edutalk has now been running for over 2 years, we have published over 300 pieces of educational audio. These vary from TeachMeet recording, through to personal reflection by way of pupil podcasts. Hopefully theses provide interesting and educational listens. One of the things that David and I talked about when we started EDUtalk was issuing a CD rom of recordings, this would perhaps have helped to keep older, still valuable, audio playing.One of my thoughts about podcasts is that older episodes get forgotten about in a way that old blogs posts, through searching, do not.REcently I've been reading about and listening to ds106 Radio and Stephen's Downes' Ed Radio. These are Internet radio stations. My interest was also stimulated by my daughter who is currently doing some pro bono work for Airing Pain « Pain Concern a podcast and internet radio. I've alway believed (and gone on about) one of the benefits of podcasting over radio is its asynchronously. The potential audience for internet radio would seem to be less. A few things have made me think again: A comment on Stephen Downes - Google+ about ED Radio: That's the intent of Ed Radio, it's not something you really focus on, it's more background where you listen while you work & where something may or may not catch your attention. Somewhere else, Stephen wrote about the interesting challenge of broadcasting to no listeners. Can't find the quote at the moment. on broadcasting to radio #ds106 | D'Arcy Norman dot net How does the ability to instantly broadcast live audio to a group of people impact what we do? How does this instant synchronous connection effect the sense of social presence? And how does having to make the decision of streaming vs. recording effect the experience of sharing? I've also been impressed by the quality of internet radio when streaming to a phone on g3 as well as wifi. So we though we would give this a go How to There are various posts on the how to set up a station but I basically went to Internet Radio Servers and set up an Icecast server on pay as you go. I then followed CogDog Guide to Nicecasting - CogDogBlog to test Nicecast. You can use Nicecast to broadcast from iTunes or a mix of iTunes and voice or even iTunes, voice and Skype. You can use Nicecast for an hour at a time for free and pay when you have tested it. I am using it on test mode at the moment. I have also tested the AutoDJ set up, where the station just streams from a set of mp3 you have uploaded via ftp. this seems to works well. Instructions on Internet Radio Servers are straightforward.I've briefly tested Papaya Broadcaster a £2.99 iPhone & iPad app this seem to do the trick. allowing you to broadcast on the move. A Plan The costs at the moment £5 a month to host the AutoDJ files and £5 per 10GB broadcast. I am figuring with only a few listeners it will only be £10 a month to broadcast for an hour or so each night, using a variety of sources. We have a few loose ideas of what to broadcast: Broadcasting sets of audio from the Edutalk Archive on AutoDJ 7:30 to 8:30 each night. The hope is that folk will have it on in the background listening for serendipitous educational audio. I've not really worked out the queuing of the audio but will select some and mix then up every day or two. So far I've downloaded and converted to the correct samplerate & bitrate over 60 files. Once a week on Wednesdays David and I will attempt some sort of skpye in show where folk can skype in for a chat, we still have to test this. This can be recorded and fed back into Edutalk as a podcast. Curated sets from the Archive, using nicecast and iTunes, possibly opening it up to guest hosts. Live event broadcasts, for example from a TeachMeet using Papaya Broadcaster. Anything else we can dream up or is suggested... Tech Tips (for geeky teachers) It seems that you need to use files that all have the same sample rate, bitrate and number of channels. I've started off with 60-70 files downloaded from Edutalk , the problem is these do not all have the same sample rate, bitrate and number of channels This can be dome by opening and exporting the files from Audacity, or exporting them from iTunes. This could take quite a while. A quick google found a script for the Lame lib (That is used by Audacity to export mp3s), You need to instal Lame so that it is available for command line use, this sort of stuff can be daunting but worth it as a time saver.What I did was open the Terminal, navigate to the folder full of mp3s (on a mac you can type cd and then drag a folder onto the terminal window), then you just put this int othe terminal window and hit return: mkdir save && for f in *.mp3; do lame -m m -b 128 --resample 44.1 "$f" ./save/"${f%.mp3}.mp3"; done What that does is make a new folder save inside the mp3 folder, then use lame to convert all the mp3s in the folder into new files in the save folder that all have a bitrate of 128, a sample rate of 44.12 and are mono files. Well worth doing if only to avoid having to see asave dialog 60 times. How to listenbetween 7:30 and 8:30 head over to Radio Edutalk - EDUtalk. A flash player should start when the page opens. There are also buttons to listen with winamp, Windows Media player, Real player or QuickTime. Hit the title song to open in iTunes.I'd love to hear what folk think, ideas for broadcasts or cc licensed audio that could be played.

One of the things I've been trying to keep up with (and failing) in my RSS reader is Digital Storytelling | We jam econo Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that will begin on January 10th, 2011. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it... About ds106 | Digital Storytelling I've been following mostly through bavatuesdays the blog of Jim Groom. As an aside I first blogged about Jim a few years ago, pointing to the marvellous Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan which seems to have vanished and The Party Line which is still there. One of the things that the ds106 folk have been doing is creating animated gifs from very short sections of movies. I am still not sure if I see the whole point of this, but it becomes a very addictive process. Recently Jim posted: Creating Animated GIFs with MPEG Streamclip and GIMP and pointed to another tutorial Better Animated GIF Tutorial for PS CS4 « Bionic Teaching. This got me playing and thinking a wee bit on a rainy weekend.I've not got Photoshop and have seldom opened GIMP, but was creating animated gifs just last week for a blog post. I used Gifsicle which is a command line application to create animated gifs and works very well indeed on OSX (and is available for lots of other platforms) Gifsicle is © Eddie Kohler.I am only using a very few of the many gifsicle options here, you can see all of its features on the Gifsicle Man Page I wanted to speed up my workflow playflow for messing about in this way and though of SuperCard, my favourite mac application. I've used SuperCard to create a simple application (mac only) that will, load a Quicktime compatible movie, grab a short selection of frames, and create an animated gif with a few mouse clicks. The SuperCard bit grabs the frames and then used the gifsicle app (which it contains) to create animated gifs.I've tested the application only briefly on a few different macs (10.4, 10.5 & 10.6 or tiger, Leopard and mostly Snow Leopard) and it seem to work. On the old G4 10.4 machine there is a wee bit of lag grabbing the frames, but it works out ok. Here is a screencast: You can download Movie2Gif from my dropbox, it is a rainy afternoon project miles away from a polished bit of software but might be useful/fun for someone. If you Movie2Gif and give it a try, let me know how you get on, if it gets any positive feedback I'll do a bit to improve it. Please send any suggestions, bugs etc to me.

One of the things I've been trying to keep up with (and failing) in my RSS reader is Digital Storytelling | We jam econo Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that will begin on January 10th, 2011. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it... About ds106 | Digital Storytelling I've been following mostly through bavatuesdays the blog of Jim Groom. As an aside I first blogged about Jim a few years ago, pointing to the marvellous Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan which seems to have vanished and The Party Line which is still there. One of the things that the ds106 folk have been doing is creating animated gifs from very short sections of movies. I am still not sure if I see the whole point of this, but it becomes a very addictive process. Recently Jim posted: Creating Animated GIFs with MPEG Streamclip and GIMP and pointed to another tutorial Better Animated GIF Tutorial for PS CS4 « Bionic Teaching. This got me playing and thinking a wee bit on a rainy weekend.I've not got Photoshop and have seldom opened GIMP, but was creating animated gifs just last week for a blog post. I used Gifsicle which is a command line application to create animated gifs and works very well indeed on OSX (and is available for lots of other platforms) Gifsicle is © Eddie Kohler.I am only using a very few of the many gifsicle options here, you can see all of its features on the Gifsicle Man Page I wanted to speed up my workflow playflow for messing about in this way and though of SuperCard, my favourite mac application. I've used SuperCard to create a simple application (mac only) that will, load a Quicktime compatible movie, grab a short selection of frames, and create an animated gif with a few mouse clicks. The SuperCard bit grabs the frames and then used the gifsicle app (which it contains) to create animated gifs.I've tested the application only briefly on a few different macs (10.4, 10.5 & 10.6 or tiger, Leopard and mostly Snow Leopard) and it seem to work. On the old G4 10.4 machine there is a wee bit of lag grabbing the frames, but it works out ok. Here is a screencast: You can download Movie2Gif from my dropbox, it is a rainy afternoon project miles away from a polished bit of software but might be useful/fun for someone. If you Movie2Gif and give it a try, let me know how you get on, if it gets any positive feedback I'll do a bit to improve it. Please send any suggestions, bugs etc to me.