A Fistful of Western DS106

That’s the classic Man With No Name minimal utterance “Get three more coffins ready” in the clip from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western masterpiece A Fistful of Dollars (I love how after the gunfight scene that follows he says, as holstering his gun, “My mistake, make it four coffins”).

For thinking of a DS106 trailer for Western106, I could not help but want to voice over, “Get three blog posts ready.” I’m still working on the Morricone whistling.

Hence this trailer produced last night, based on some edits and voiceovers of the original movie trailer.

That’s right, I am pitching myself as The Man With No Course after the one I was slated to teach at KSU did not attract enough students. Look out, I now have my own pancho.

The first open DS106 started five years ago, and here we go again with another iteration. This is the thing that makes DS106 like no other open course, x, c, or zeta MOOC– it is no single course. It is a family of overlapping courses/communities convened around the ideas of web-based storytellng, media creation, and publishing your works 9and the work behind the work) on the open web, in your own digital space.

Maybe you’ve read about DS106, or seen it tweeted, or maybe not at all. This is a bag of gold opportunity to join it as an open participant, with no danger of watching lecture videos, clicking through multiple choice tests, or getting any kind of badges beyond maybe a tin star.

It’s time to step off of the sidewalks, out of the saloon, and into the action in the streets of old DS106 Town, since I have been scheming a while to run a version wrapped around the genre of Westerns. There is much to work with, not only films, spaghetti westerns, but also Tortilla westerns, space westerns, also fiction, radio shows, comics, pulp fiction, video games, music… the whole idea is wide open for probing.

There is also a version being taught at UMW by Paul Bond, and I am hoping bring some other students in in February when I will be co-teaching a class at Universad Sagrado Corazon with Antonio Vantaggiati.

There are tons of problems with the genre too. No one here is advocated it, we are here to question the genre, not wave it like a flag

#western106 problem of the #cowboy as a cultural icon and a commercial puppet. #ds106 where alll cowboys white guys?

— profCaritat (@ProfCaritat) January 3, 2016

And the violence, lots of it. So in my videos, I am planning to change all the firing of guns from “BANG BANG BANG to “BLOG BLOG BLOG” – done with some filters in Audacity:

Okay, what is happening? It’s a bit of a scramble, but my plan is to put the “course” materials for open participants on a soon to be retro-fitted theme on my 106tricks site, http://106tricks.net. Based on ym experiences last year, I am going to push out some announcements (besides twitter) via Tinyletter, you can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/western106

I’ve been doing some reworking of the blog signup at ds106, without going into too much, the old form did not handle tag/category feeds, and it had this problem of letting people only add one feed. A new form is now in place (it needs some testing) that is a rework of the one I did for Connected Courses.

One classic problem is that many people already have a blog in the machine, or maybe are not sure. So spent some time last night coding up a new bit that generates a list of all blogs we subscribe to. If you have done DS106 before, check this first, because it works better if we fix an existing feed than if you add another copy to the pile (e.g. if you did DS106 before, I just need to add a western106 tag to your feed setting):

So if you need something adjusted to your feed, or have any other issue, check with us first via the contact form.

All syndicated posts will flow to http://ds106.us/tag/western106 (I have some custom work to do here).

What will the course look like? The content will be much like the Open DS106 course with more activities related to probing the western genre. And there will be spittin’ and cussin’ and rasslin’ and… fun. A lot of creative fun.

There’s already a ton of fun going in the Daily Creates.

There’s a lot still to put together…. like I need a hat to go with my new poncho 😉

It will be a bit crazy (I hope). Especially as I seem to be doing this full bore just for the sheer fun of DS106.