We know people love ds106. I love ds106. I know you do. My students this semester are doing some of the best work (especially in terms of representing their work online) I’ve seen since I started teaching this course in January. The UMW Domain of One’s Own greatly streamlined the startup process, Martha and I have made syllabus adjustments (introductory Bootcamp, re-arranging the introduction of audio earlier) that seem to have worked, and having redone the materials now three times, it feels very solid going into my next round (I am teaching it online again for Spring 2013). My focus has been on our sections here at UMW, but we have a good amount of activity as well with Michael Branson Smith’s York College/CUNY section plus Ryan Rish’s class and Darren Crovitz’s class at Kennesaw State University. Yet I cannot help but notice the fall off among our open online ...

During the ramp up Election night i was visiting Bryan Alexander, and found a relevant movie to watch, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Relevant? Heck yes- shape shifting monsters that emerge every now and then from the ice? Watching of the early scenes, we smiled at the retro computer chess game that Kurt Russell’s character RJ Macready curses at when he loses This scene cried out to me to be GIFfed; the first one I trimmed out the segment in MPEG Streamclip where he is just drinking his JBs, the glass up and down is a great repeat, and he has a little bit of q wry smile. Its kind of dark (as is the movie). For tis one, I extracted abut 12 frames and imported into The Gimp, dropped maybe 5 that were not critical. I then used the Groom method, lassoing the key area to animate, set as ...

Last week was the part of ds106 where (cue the John Williams score -ba da ba da ba da) we approach maybe the most treacherous waters of creativity (underwater shot of woman swimming, legs kicking). VIDEO As our teaching of ds106 evolves, I”ve found it useful to start each new (new to the syllabus) media with an observing activity, and so as in years past, we have students cue up Ebert”s essay on How to Read a Movie and ask them to look in detail at a scene from a movie. Notching it up a bit, the twist added this year really worked well, what I called “Look, Listen, Analyze”. We provided links to a few YouTube playlists of “great scenes” from movies, and askd the students to choose one (without watching it). The task was then to watch it 3 times, 3 different ways: Before watching the first time, ...