CogBlogged under ‘Blog Pile’

As a fan of Steve Austin I could not help myself in response to today’s news of edX. Hastily and sloppily edited in iMovie, oh well. “Higher education, learning. A concept barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s most massive online course. Edx will be that course. better than it was before. Massive. Open. Online.” Bionic learning is coming.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photo, In the alternate path universes, today I am calling you in Florida to wish you a happy 85th Birthday. You will want more to hear me talk about me than me talk about you. I might be talking about the next trip down I have planned. Instead I am looking through just digital images that are fragments of memories, and I seem to have more of your objects than your face (there are more of those in the boxed photo albums 2000 miles away in a closet). I want to have one more conversation with you, yet the closest I can get is that imprinted memory of your voice. Does it even matter if I can recall it exactly or just more I can tap into it? I hope for anyone whose fill in the blank verb for [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Jim Groom and I are in the last home stretch of ds106 at University of Mary Washington, final projects and last blog posts being due Sunday, and next week being individual review sessions. After an intense semester, as hard working academics we ought to head off to an idyllic summer retreat, a tropical island, the south of Spain… we’ll maybe one of us is moving on. But not this dog- with my colleague Martha Burtis, we are ramping up a summer version of ds106; a 10 week online class for students at UMW, but as always, wide open to the rest of the masses on the internet. Are those monsterous sized moocs wearing you down? Maybe the grind of Udacity is not heating your kettle? Come to camp. Yes, on May 21, Camp Magic Macguffin will open for all to [...]

Bugs are prettier in photos than in code. I spent a few hours last night (and cleanup this morning) hammering some overdue fixes to pechaflickr, my random flickr + pechaflickr mashup If you have not played before, you enter a flickr tag, and the site generates a slideshow of 20 random flickr images in pecha kucha style- changing them every 20 seconds; with the advanced screen, you can specify a different number of slides and a different interval between them. This was partly driven by upcoming demos likely at Faculty Academy and definitely June at Northern Voice. Most of my code fixes are cleaning up my own mistakes, some of which happened last night. What should be taken care of includes: The Mystery Images Turning to a White Rectangle should be gone. This was my bad. This actually happened because the code would run out of images. And this happened [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Curtis This is the last week of my first semester teaching ds106; Jim Groom has reminded my plenty about what a marathon push this is for both student and teacher. Their blogs have fallen quiet as (I hope) they are going full metal on their final projects. Before doing any philosophical ear waxing on tyhe experience, two meta-ish things have bobbed up repeatedly as a means of looking at the work we are all doing. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the assignments or the branded #life spirit of it all. One of the pleasant (or least negative) aspects of this course is that we really do not spend much fi any time teaching software. You would think we’d have to cover a lot of grounds with students doing photography, visual design, audio recording and editing, video work, remixing… [...]

I tried my hand poorly a few weeks ago at the ds106 Kinetic Typography assignment. There is a reason maybe only 3 or 4 people have braved this one. Kinetic typography (“moving text”) is an animation technique that allows a creative entrepreneur to mix text and motion. Your job is to take a speech or bit of dialog (try audiobooks, movies, TV shows, etc.) and animate it like this example from Sherlock Holmes. Consider how you could visually enforce the speech’s underlying themes… or subvert them. Be creative! Without too much fanfare, and a nood to my fellow ds106ers who dig Cool Hand Luke, the classic line by Strother Martin’s aptly named character “Captain”, but more with the lines around it. The whole thing of putting people in their perceived places? What we have here… I got hooked on thie film a year ago, and did a minimalist poster as [...]

I just remembered another gem from today’s trip today to the National Portrait Gallery – a video display showing examples of Presidents on TV from FDR through the present. I just loved this bit of FDR being humorous (but he looks so serious) about his opponents slandering his dog Fala, a Scottie to be reckoned with This whole bit of speech is a classic in terms of they way he presents a story naturally and in joking at the same time. Masterful. And the internet provideth information and then some on Fala- look at the tagged entries from the FDR library (which, hey, runs on WordPress). But wait, there’s more- Fala has his own tumblr (and elegantly done at that). Let that be a lesson, do not pick on any man’s dog, especially if he lives in the White House. And as a good Scot, [Fala] was appalled to hear [...]

Getting back into the ds106 creative mood, I was inspired recently to create not only a new animated GIF but make it a new ds106 Design Assignment. Last week, Jim Groom and I watched The Conversation, a brilliant 1974 movie from the conspiracy genre (the slow slide into craziness of Gene Hackman’s character is brilliantly executed). But it was the menu screen for the DVD that made both of us say “HA!” in the background was a direct on shot of the tape machines that figure in the movie, and it was just all animated GIF- the only moving parts were the reels. Jim stayed up late after the movie pulling out the scene into a clean moving GIF. I had it mind to make this a new assignment Animated The DVD Menu: Convert a key scene from a movie into an animated GIF and include graphics elements to make [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by hey mr glen The worst kind of blog post opens with some sort of apology for not blogging. It’s a good thing I am not doing that correctly? Because the only one I should every be sorry to ius myself, my personal audience of me who reads what I write. And if I don;t read, I think I still know what’s going on. The passage of time being quick, rapid, dizzying, seems an understatement. If you see my lost time, and those 9000 pair of unmatched socks, and the pile of car/house/gate keys, and that 1971 Hank Aaron baseball card, please let me know. One thing that seem to have fallen off my track are photography. The daily habit is hung out on the line. But really, who am I answering to? I more or less did regular daily photos [...]

By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject. It is like saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture, without letting me see it. How am I supposed to be inspired by that? (And of course it’s actually much worse than this— at least it’s understood that there is an art of sculpture that I am being prevented from appreciating). By concentrating on what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their [...]