I got a chance to spread the ds106 mojo at Wordcamp Vancouver today, with my session on Building an Open Course/Community with WordPress, Syndication, and Duct Tape: ds106 is an open course in Digital Storytelling that leverages platforms of open source tools, syndication, and social media in a way that makes it more community than course. At ds106.us is a wordpress powered hub that aggregates and recombines input from 500+ external blogs plus a user contributed assignment bank, daily creative challenges, even a radio station. Built by a team of educator tinkerers, not coders, ds106 is as a model of a community network that is not limited to just courses. This was on the heels of a cross-Canada flight with a 1:30am arrival to our quarters in Vancouver, a little bit more late bight slide fiddling of slides, a trailing cold, and lot of coffee. Hence, GNA’s description feels apt: ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by wilmesmom People (like me) can get upset when the ds106 server goes down, and here is another tip to help you to keep tabs on the Daily Create, so you can know the assignment even if the server is belly up and gagging. At first i was thinking of building a new site on ym own server, and use something FeedWordPress to susbscribe to the Daily Create, but there is an easier solution, something we suggested people use already to keep tabs on the blog sin their class section. Google Reader. And yes, RSS, that technology that supposedly dies every 8 months. All you have to do is to subscribe to the Daily Create Feed (http://tdc.ds106.us/feed) in Google Reader. This works because it continually polls the server, and the feed content is stored in your account, so it will be ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve stilled not gotten very far in learning how to play my harmonica. Maybe, it is like learning… you don’t get far without putting any effort into it. But I can still have fun making noise. Tonight I have about 5 gazillion things to do, what am I doing making a ds106 assignment? I can’ t help it. This one is Make Music DAMNIT: Play the first song you have ever learned through any type of musical medium. Do it in a way that conjures up your memory of learning that song, or somehow fold the song into a larger story. Like almost no other person in the world, at 15 I decided I wanted to be a rock and roll guitar player. It was going to eb tought. Not only did I lack a guitar, I would not know ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by t3hWIT Confused? Don’t know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various “sections” of ds106- these are classes we know of who’s student blogs we are syndicating into ds106; all of these posts that come in carry an extra tag we can use to slice, dice, and make fries out of. After a few variatoions of setting up a random picker in the Assignments Collection, I saw it would be easy to do something for the posts we bring in. The exception here is that we want recent stuff, so these scripts only look for posts published to ds106 n the last ...

I’ve been urging my students to give each other more constructive feedback via blog comments; but this idea if challenge, coming form a student, not me, is soemthing I have to get behind: @cogdog I am issuing a challenge to all my fellow #ds106-ers: 7 comments on 7 different blogs this week! LET’S MAKE THIS HAPPEN. <3 — Haley (@doodle_muse) October 10, 2012 Ok, Haley, let’s ee if this works. The challenge is to make 7 constructive comments on 7 different blogs in a week, anyone in the ds106 mixes blog, but ideally, our lovely section. What is constructive? Well, hmm, what is NOT constructive is “cool” “Awesome audio mix” “this is great”. Constructive is what you’d like to see in terms of feedback yourself, right?- stylistic suggestions, ideas for how it could have been done differently, links to relevant sources elsewhere, tutorial tips, something like you have seen elsewhere. ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As we move into audio week, I wanted to whip together a quick example of a ds106 assignment just in case students are having trouble in Audacity. I hit the random button a few times in the audio assignments and ended up on Theme Verse: Create your own verse from a song! Pick a few lines from a few of your favorite songs that have the same focus. Then, combine them together to make a new verse in a song. Make sure it makes sense and it goes together! So the idea is to put together a verse of a song with selections take from multiple songs, but that are tied together by theme or to make sense, like they are the verse of one song. Here’s my thought process. I opened iTunes and tried to remember the verses of ...