I’ve written or tweeted or just mumbled in my sleep incoherently before about the power of ds106 in challenging our students, of making some things hard to do, or not so cookie cutter 1-2-3 recipe step. This came to my clearly from our 4th week unit on Introduction to Audio. Part of this was introducing students what to listen for in terms of good audio storytelling, but we also gave them two assignments to create audio… and we gave little more than some links. This was another benefit I see now in moving Audio ahead of Visual and Design a we have structure the course in the past, because editing audio is something most students have never done before, and generally one of the harder things they deal with (hee hee until video). But the thing is I see that students generally come to this conclusion having never done audio ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by blentley When I taught ds106 last Spring at University of Mary Washington, one of the effective in class activities Jim Groom and I came up with was giving the students what we called “rapid design challenges” – just quick activities that pressured them to create quickly, and stretch their on the spot thinking. These were things like asking them to find three photos of varying kinds (converging lines, people shots) and posting to flickr, finding design elements in the building, etc. In a similar fashion, Michael Branson Smith started his ds106-like class at York College by having his students photograph and post images of interesting shadows. I can only guess about why this seems effective, it has many of the merits of improv: The adrenaline rush of the time limit makes it exciting. I will not take a word like ...