ds106: Digital Storytelling Class Related Stuff

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Little Wide World

During a presentation last month for the TCC World Online Conference a participant noted in the chat with some irony, that despite the unconventional form and function of ds106 I pointed them to a traditional (long) syllabus for my 2013 class.

I said that it was a university course at UMW, so it needed a syllabus.

Somewhat later (like yesterday while sitting on a beach) it struck me that it’s another case of Korzybski’s line of the map not being the territory – the syllabus is not the class, the experience, but some representation of it.

In wrapping up a year’s experience teaching ds106 I was thinking of how the syllabus was like a mode of bread making, following someone else’s recipe, but changing up the ingredients and the process, iteratively, and getting one’s hands in the dough. And each time you bake, you tweak.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Ben Ward

So down the post I am going to write up some of the things that went into the class map, how it evolved; there is stuff here that is not explicitly in the ds106 assignment bank that may (or not) be of value to someone else.

But there is something else.

I remain astounded that anyone with a fully functioning neocortex talking seriously about MOOCs being some model of saving educational costs when the word is each course rings up a tab of $250k (edx) or even more. What does an institution get for dropping a quarter of a million per course?

I can tell you what you do not get- an ongoing open sharing of the processes, of what worked, what did not work. Not a Udellian narrating of the process. It’s more like another loaf of pre-packaged Wonderbread off the racks.

And it ties back to what Leslie Madsen-Brooks recently summarized eloquently in using UMW as a case example of innovation on higher education. That’s right, look beyond the Ivies and the Silicon Valley darlings, and you land at a tiny, public liberal arts college in Virginia. Jim Groom writes it all in the title- the Innovation isn’t Technical, It’s Narrative.

I spent 6 months working at UMW thinking they had some magic in the water (did not taste any). But it’s a culture of open sharing, not the final products, but the makings thereof. It’s not a mindset of saying, “Look what we experts hand you like Greek gods”, it’s an ongoing narrative of trying, asking, failing, reflecting, of process, not just product.

And so, for your $250,000 course, do you get the story of how the sausage was made? Or just sausage?

When my Fall 2012 ds106 class rolled around, I realized it was ridiculous for me to proffer a definition of what “Digital Storytelling” is- a place where most courses start as their map. My map for it was- I don’t know what it is, but we will spend 16 weeks asking the question again and again. Learning should never be an end game of an answer, but the quest, right?

So for ds106, you have a history (at least all the bits I could find) of the class back to Spring 2010, it has its own digital story. You get 9 iterations of the class at UMW, both 16 week semester versions, and the summer “performance” types.

The syllabus I have been using is part of a lineage that goes back to the beginning, with changes incorporated along the way, and not just mine, but the ones of co-teaching along side Jim and Martha Burtis.

I will add that this course asks a lot of the students. We tell them up front, the scare email I learned from Jim. I encourage newly enrolled students to drop the course. We don’t want them in there without knowing the demands. And as usual, the end of class feedback is usually of the of “this is way too much work for a 100 level class”. It’s usually, but not always followed up by a “but I learned so much”.

I felt less bad about this for Spring 2013- Nearly all of my students were seniors, getting their last credits in. They are experienced students.

But there is something else that ought to be its own post– I firmly believe that learning should be hard. We need to push learners- not make it hurt or hard just for the sake of being hard, but I feel like a lot of education hinges on making it easy, not hard. What accomplishment is truly worth achieving if it is easy?

Also, note that my year of ds106 includes teaching it once as face to face, and 3 semesters (one a 10 week summer session) as a fully online class. In all cases, 90% of my students finished and passed (out of 25 students). There was no change in that in an online class.

A cornerstone of the students work is a weekly summary of their work as a blog post on their blog. It was Martha’s idea that we require them to enter that as a URL in Canvas to document their assignment work for the week. I still am in favor of this approach- I get a snapshot of their blog at the time of submission, I can review and give some grade, and students get a better measure of where they stand. I can comment there on things might not do on their blog, and it makes the final grading really straight forward.

The downside is I have a glut of work, since 90% of their blogging happens in the last 2 days of the week. I read easily over 1200 student blog posts this semester.

So here’s a bit of over the shoulder analysis of my most recent syllabus for Spring 2013.

We do not do a tremendous amount of reading chapters or articles in the course. We have no textbook beyond this free one called “The Open Web”. There are weeks when their are required viewings of videos or audio content, but the gist of the course is making stuff, and writing in their own digital space about the process of making stuff.

The other thing I love about the class is that I am not teaching software. We do not require tools they should use. They can use whatever software they oen for image, audio, video editing; we provide a resource of open source and free web based media tools. They qiuckly learn to first try finding the answers to using tools themselves. There are more how to tutorials out there than I could create in a lifetime.

I should also note that my online class has no weekly lectures. All of the class is done by a weekly post of work to do. I offered each week an optional live session on Google Hangout, themed as “The ds106 Show” (students had a participating requirement to join me for at least one episode). I found these incredibly valuable to have conversations with the students and the open participants who joined me. The production of these was nil — my cost was I decided to do a series of silly promo videos for each week

I also set up optional open drop in labs for students, but participation falls off quickly as their schedules get busy.

The keys to me are frequent commenting on their blogs, and responding to their questions on twitter- that community space only makes sense if they see a quick value to it.

Weeks 1 & 2: Bootcamp
This is an idea that came from Martha and I teaching in parallel in Fall 2012. The first two weeks are focused on getting the students up to speed quickly in managing their install of WordPress, blogging, organizing things in categories, customizing with themes, plugins, widgets.

We wanted to get this out of the way, so in week 6 I was not having to remind them about using hyperlinks and embedding media. I start them early with an understanding what I want in their writing up assignments, that its more than just posting a piece of media.

They start right away doing Daily Creates. In the first week, I made sure there was a simple video one as we saw it powerful to be able to see each other and the place we did our work. I would link to it, but YouTube gas totally fubared their own tagging system, so finding videos by tag is seriously broken.

They are asked to look at advice from pervious students, something they will come full circle to do at the end of the class (another brilliant Martha Burtis idea)

Students love the Daily Create.. for weeks. I usually require 3-4 per week. They are not graded on what they do, but I give feedback. Their attitude towards it seems to plateau mid-semester. I can tell when they reach this point when it starts to look more perfunctory. Not all the students get to that point, but I keep tabs on it, and drop it as a required thing usually when we start doing video.

I had the most blog ready set of students in my last class, liekly because a good number of them had been writing on UMW Blogs for 4 years. That goes a long way to explain the “water” theory at UMW (it’s not in the water, it’s in the WordPress).

In the challenge part, their last bootcamp task is that we give them an assignment (make an animated GIF) and do not provide any instructions on how to do it (besides a few reference links). The goal here is not the media they create, but that they learn the “ds106 way” of not expecting the course to provide all the steps, but to find their own way.

Week 3: What is Storytelling?
We finally get into the topic here.

In semesters past, we had them read a selection from Bryan Alexander’s excellent book but I got tired of seeing parroting of readings. They get some videos to watch that offer some insight (Kurt Vonnegot’s Shape of Stories always a hit).

I actually want them to blog their oen ideas on entering the course, of what storytelling conjures up, and what they think adding “digital” means. At the end of the semester I ask them to revisit this and reflect on what has changed, or not. They start ramping up their creating, with some story creating activities.

Week 4: Introduction to Audio
Martha and I moved audio earlier in the semester– they get a heavy dose in the middle when they do radio shoes .Nearly every student dreads audio, and we thought by starting them earlier gives them a longer run with it. We introduce the mid term group audio show project so they can start thinking about it and forming teams, so the work is segmented in the next weeks when we move into visual and design activities.

So we start like all of our media- an observation/listening activity. I have them listen to selected audio storytelling from This American Life, The Truth, and Radiolab, so they can start paying attention to the nuances they may not normally hear- use of music, cuts, overlaid tracks, sound effects (foley), ambient sounds. I use an edited down version of a Radiolab episode where I have marked these things to listen for as soundcloud comments

I ask them to listen to a few videos by the makers of these shows. And they get their first audio creation assignment, a five sound story. It’s just to get them doing simple audio editing.

Alsot every student dreads audio going in. It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of media, it just gets no respect. By the time we move past audio, most of them have a new appreciation for it. A few still hate it. But I emphasize that good audio on its own makes other projects (e.g. when they do video).

Weeks 5 and 6: Visual and Design

These are often the favorite portions of the semester. The assignments here are fun and very doable. They get experience image editing; I really encourage them to use an editor that allows creating in layers (as it becomes obvious that stuff done in Microsoft Paint just looks crappy). They dont need Photoshop, GIMP has all they need, even if the interface can make you cuss, and the online editor pixlr is pretty darn sophisticated.

Each week has a “Safari” type challenge, something Jim and I found worked well in our face to face class, was to give them a creative challenge to do in a limited time frame and using what was around them.

Both of these fall into a meta layer of ds106 I call “Seeing the World Differently” — students end up looking at their surroundings and noticing what they did not even see before.

I want them to start using their cameras (or mobile phones) for going beyond snapshots, so provide them a collection of techniques to try.

And one that I love, and the timing works for it, is the Valentine Day’s challenge — because it was created for us by a former ds106 student. Sarah contacted Jim in Spring 2012, and challenged our classes to modify some cheesy sappy valentine’s day card with new captions. It’s not a huge technical task, but doe shave them probing a bit more with their visual editing.

For week 4, there is a “photo blitz”, essentially a scavenger hunt of things to capture photos of in a 20 minute time span (their first and last images need to be a clock).

• Make an ordinary object look more interesting, almost supernatural.
• Take a photo that makes use of converging lines.
• Take a photo dominated by a single color
• Take a photo of something at an unusual angle
• Take a photo of two things that do not belong together.
• Take a photo that represents the idea of “openness”
• Take a photo that expresses a human emotion
• Take a photo emphasizes mostly dark tones or mostly light ones.
• Make a photo that is abstract, that would make someone ask, “Is that a photograph?”
• Take a photo of an interesting shadow.
• Take a photo that represents a metaphor for complexity.
• Take a photo of someone else’s hand (or paw)

The outcome is predictable, as they write of looking at their rooms, class buildings, campus in a new way.

When we move into Week 6 and doing design assignments (the line between visual and design is always fuzzy), they are getting more experienced at picking things from the assignment bank, and writing them up.

As a variant on the photo blits, there is a design assignment to review some design concepts outlined in a shared doc, and to find examples of 3 or 4 of them as they go about their week. Again, it’s trying to see these design principles not in some book or video, but where they live. They add their example links to the google doc.

They also get in here the specifications for the mid term group audio project- and they have to start their process in these weeks of visual and design.

Weeks 7 & 8: Group Audio Projects
This segment amps up the stakes, because not only do they have to deal with a media they still may dread, there is the expected dysfunction of group projects, and it is a segment where the deadlines are moved from weekly to having 2 weeks span (and this time, it was 3 because spring break was in the middle).

The final audio shows are broadcast the week later on ds106 radio, an event I just love. Its fun because their work goes live, we challenge them to grow us an audience (I think we did top 30 listeners), but also because at least one team member has to join me live on the radio to talk about their shows.

It is both pain and joy to see the group dynamics pan out. We had some drama this time around, and a lot of ideal group activity too. They have to figure out how to work together. I did not see any groups this time where it all fell on one person. And the production value this time was really high.

It would be easier, if all they had to do was individual audio assignments, but the group dynamic is one of those things that are hard for them, yet the challenge is one of those growth ops.

They also had their own audio assignments to do. One of the required one was taking a 30 second segment of a Charlie Chaplin sequence, and recoding the foley sounds that might work with the action (this idea came from Scott Lockman in Spring 2012 when my in class students performed their foley live). For this time around, their segment to do was based on a formula of what month was their birthday; I wanted a mix of segments for a later assignment.

Week 9: Stories in and of the web
This is one of those “only in ds106″ ideas- that we have students explore how stories might be told within the construct of the web itself, within neither the comment space of sites, or of creatively re-writing web pages to tell a new story.

We’ve come a long way since the first few times of wrestling with the Firebug tool, Mozilla’s Hackasaurus is a gem of a tool, and students have a lot of fun seeing how they can recast a web page. Some of them get a better sense of how web content is assembled. Generally, most of them dont go as far as I would like with changing up a web page.

To add some juice to student commenting (I still struggle for a magic postion to have them learn to comment just for the sake of commenting), I came up with a new idea- they were to create a fake persona and have that character leave comments (or engage with other fakers) on each other’s blogs. That was a win.

Week 10: Reading Movies
Again, another level of noticing a media before starting to create it. I had a few required viewings on movie making, and yes, a reading of Ebert’s How to Read a MOvie (sadly he passed away the week before!).

I have an activity I came up with for Fall 2012 I am really happy with, the three part scene review. I provide a list of YouTube collections of famous movie scenes, and ask the students to view it 3 times and to record their thoughts:

1. Turn down the volume, and notice the camera work- cuts, angles, character placement.
2. Turn down the visual, and pay attention to just the audio- dialogue, foley, sound effects, ambient.
3. Watch it normally, and comment on how the first two work together.

Weeks 11 and 12: Movie Making
Video editing brings together much of the semester so far, so their only task for these two weeks is doing video assignments from the bank. This time, I required them to do opening titles, closing credits, and I was looking for their writeups to reference sources for all of their video.

I seemed to have to do less support for Windows Movie Maker (maybe because Andy Rush was my guest that week on the ds106 show).

Weeks 12 & 13: Remix and Mashup
The last content sections of the course, involved work that again continues movie editing in terms of putting together bits they have done all semester.

I have to say after discussion a few weeks ago (was it Giulia Forythe or Micheal Branson-Smith when we hung out in New York?) who noted that students were doing remix/mashup work all semester long, and it might be artificial to present it as something of its own at the end of the course.

Actually Brooke said it best:

So, remixing. Like I said before, this week really didn’t clear up what remixing really is. As I talked about in my video, is editing a photo I found on the internet remixing? I call it photoshopping.

I don’t even think there should be a name for either of those, to be honest. I’m taking a course on the Memory of the Civil War, and we’ve discussed a lot about how memory comes into being. Everything comes from somewhere. There are no original ideas. So why do we have to have a name for something we do naturally? Intrinsically, even? Is it because it has become part of the legal system that we need a name for it?

I had them watch videos like Everything is e Remix and Remix Manifesto- I was lucky that Andy Baio’s New Prohibition one came out that week, which may be the most insightful piece to see on the topic.

Students had already been getting YouTube copyright flags, and of course they got mad. “Don’t they know I am a student? I am not trying to make money. I am doing this under Fair use”

And thats the crux of Baio’s message- Fair Use is not a law. It offers no protection. All it provides is a way to argue a case if you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars defending yourself in court.

I have to admit falling down on introducing creative commons and copyright like we typically did in earlier ds106 classes. I always found students did not really “get” creative commons just because I told them it was important. I had hoped to come back to it after they had a few rounds of creating with media, and they might reflect on the idea that they should have access to all media in their culture to create from. I cannot say I got to that message in the end.

Most of them just wanted to know how to post their video and not get flagged for copyright- to complete the assignment. We do want them to have this experience of being flagged so they can question the laws, because its going to be on them going out in the world and making these changes our generation has failed to do.

Week 15: Final Projects
In lieu of a final exam, I have students complete a final project- the specs are shared with them 2 weeks earlier so they can get started.

The first time I taught ds106, the projects were wide open as to what students could do, and so ended up their final products. Over the last few rounds, I had honed it. This time I asked them o start with a character to be the focus, the hero, it could ba real or fictional persona. Their story had to be told in multiple media created in response any of the ds106 assignments, but they had to put their character on an arc (Vonnegut’s story shape was a useful reminder). They had to assemble it all in a single blog post that combined their embedded media with narrative of their blog post.

They first had to write a post about their character choice, and that gave me room to suggest that the consider how to place their character in a different context or challenge than we know them. I asked them to surprise the audience, to play with reality.

I was highly impressed with their output this time, I assemble all the stories in a storify. I also ask them to use categories on their blog to organize what they think of their best work, and lastly the “pay it forward” assignment of recording a message or media that represents their advice to future ds106ers.

Whew this post was a marathon, and still feels like it is scratching the surface of the experience. I’m super proud of my students, even the one who’s reflection considered the class busy work and recommended to future students “drop this course” ;-).

It’s not only the media they created but the extensive narration most of them did for their work- again, at UMW, that is what is in the water, the idea of narrating ourselves. There are pure chunks of golden bag substance on the way students articulated their experience.

Yeah, and if anyone makes it this far, let it be known how crappy my breadmaking analogy is– look at my bread!

It was December 2010 that I spotted my first 106 in the wild, since then I have added another 219.

Tomorrow is the deadline for final projects from my Spring 2013 UMW ds106 students. A few grades punched in the system later, and I close out my current era of teaching ds106. After being part of the 2011 horde of open participants, I taught it in person at UMW in Spring 2012 (a parallel section with Jim Groom), co-taught with Martha Burtis the online summer 2012 “Camp Magic Macguffin” experience, and taught a parallel online section with Martha in Fall 2012, and this current semester was the solo teacher at UMW.

It’s been quite a ride, but I’m hopping off the bus.

Jim is lined up to teach a 5 week summer session starting in May; it should of course be over the top, but you will need to check with him for details. I’ll be around, but not as a teacher.

It’s time to do something different (that is TBD). I was talking with Martha last week about another topic, but like usual, ds106 came up. It looks like no one will be teaching it at UMW in the Fall (as far as I know), so it will be interesting to see where the community flows. The level of activity among open participants fell off a lot since the first buzz year in 2011. It’s not surprising, I would likely more my attention elsewhere after an intense following of ds106.

And while there is a lot of things in the ds106 universe, on first entry as someone who maybe just signs up, there’s not a whole lot of direction or a road map. I tried to outline some routes in the Quick Start Guide.

I had dreams of building a part of the site that would be a kind of “build your own syllabus”. Between the Assignment Bank, Daily Creates, and the 2+ years of lessons we have assembled for our UMW class, we have a rather large pile if resources. What if there was some way to identify and interest area or level, and them pick and choose resources to make a syllabus for yourself or others?

I had the idea, but not the time to make it happen.

Coming off a mini ds106 immersion workshop last week for faculty at Wagner College, and in talking with Martha, it seems there is room for perhaps some other “sizes” of doing ds106- maybe a faculty development series, or maybe a month focussed on doing say design or audio (which is what it sounds like Scottlo is cooking up).

So while I am done teaching ds106 at UMW, I am at the peak of my game (maybe), so if someone, somewhere else is interested in running it as a course, workshop, interpretive dance, give me a bark.

There’s a short list of things to wrap up on the ds106 web site; a nice diversion yesterday was inserting all media by current students into the header on the home page:

and I have a few storify collections to assemble as I review the current students work- their final projects, student’s identified “Best Works”, and one of my favorite, the advice to future ds106ers (again these will fill out as I grade slug tomorrow).

I cannot say for sure what will happen with the Daily Create – I will likely fill it up for at least May and June. There might be some rethinking that needs to be done there since YouTube has pretty much killed the functionality of tags (so we cannot retrieve videos by tags), and SoundCloud is still stingy on letting accounts create but a single group. It might be time to figure out a way to parse out the submissions from twitter and tags, like the old DailyShoot used to do.

There’s likely a boat load of my more post game reflections. This class by far had some of the best creativity and blog writing of any class I’ve had before. It says a lot about UMW and an environment where web publishing is kind of a regular thing. I look forward to seeing how these students put their #4life skills to work (and play).

But after next week, someone needs to shut the porch light off for ds106.

UPDATE: I looked at my computer clock right as the post was publishing. It has a 106 in it!

MORE UPDATE: And now someone steps in with a new summer 2013 project that plans to use ds106! I will add them to the registration system ASAP.

What’s your digital story? is a summer programme open to middle and high school students in Hanoi over June and July 2013. Digital Storytelling provides the spine of our workshops the summer in which learners will be guided by both educators and professional digital storytellers (photographers and filmmakers). Our vision for the summer is to use the tools of digital storytelling to help our participants think critically about the subjects and topics they address. Learning how to collaborate and communicate in different ways will be a focus of our workshops. You can learn more about the programme here – http://thelearningproject.asia/summer2013-2/

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Do you see those faces? That’s what a two hour dive into ds106 can do for you. At least that is what a group of faculty found out Friday at Wagner College a lovely campus on a hill at the tip of Staten Island. I was brought there by Robin and Neil Hayden, who have been working with the extremely dynamic Vice Provost Lily McNair on a Media Literacy in Teaching and Learning Program.

I’ve known Robin for years, but never met face to face until Thursday night, and was excited to be on the bill along with Matt Stoltzfus from Ohio State (who got a dose of ds06 from having seen Martha Burtis and Jim Groom present at two different events this Spring) and Karen Cowden from Valencia College.

We each had 20 minutes in the morning to talk about our interests and preview what we would each do in the afternoon as a 2 hour workshop.

Robin had asked me to talk about the student blogging in ds106 — I talked some about the structure and idea of ds106, the magic of the syndication bus, but the bulks was showing all of my current students blogs and used different examples to highlight the work they all did through the semester.

I did not quite make it through all the student blogs! You can find the slides, videos, and links for this presentation at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/Five+Things+for+Wagner+College.

I like using this montage of UMW ds106 students to say in their own words what the experience is like

And later at lunch, a Wagner faculty came up gushing about what she found by googling “Cat Breading” ;-)

The afternoon workshop I set up first to have faculty explore each other’s digital gootprints, to see what they could find, good or bad, about each other (no bad was found, though Frank found a namesake who was in the mob), but mainly to make a case for being proactive in projecting the digital identity you want others to find, rather than leaving it up to third party services.

All materials I put up on a page at http://ds106.us/wagner-college

This was the set up for them to start some basic blogging, using a new hosted wordpress site for faculty. They each did two blog posts to seed their blogs, and I then had them register their blogs at ds106, using a feed for a ds106 tag. Then I showed how their posts are aggregated like any other class/group we set up for others

They also took on a Daily Create (a writing assignment) Compose the convincing cover letter a cartoon character wrote to win their job. I had plans for them to do a design assignment, but we fell short on time. That’s homework!

There was more to the day, including a chance to hear Wagner faculty share their technology projects and ideas. It was a great day all around, not to mention a beautiful sunset cruise into Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry, and a wave to the gift from France.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was glad to be able to try out this workshop- I think there is a lot of potential in using ds106 materials in a program of faculty development (more than a 2 hour workshop).

If you are interested in this kind of thing at your place, well operators are standing by.

Yesterday was week 14 for ds106, the last week of classes for my UMW students, and also the last of my semi regular live Google Hangouts pitched as a weekly “show”. Thanks to Brian Lamb, Todd Conaway, and stalwart student Nancy B for showing up.

The whole series is right here!

The viewership on the series is lower than the video for Aunt Bertha’s Toenail Clipping tutorial, but that was not the point. What was the point? Oh yes, since ds106 really has now scheduled classes nor weekly lectures via video, I wanted something that was “live” as an least an opportunity to offer at least some together moment in the class.

Oh, I made it a participation requirement for my students to cohost / be present for at least one show a semester. This provided me a way to ask them about the class and give them a platform to complain (the never did), and have speak for the experience in their own words, interact with open participants from the larger community– but mostly so I at least could know them a bit better, and vice versa.

Unlike spending thousands of dollars to film sterile fixed lecture (cough xMOOC), this was meant to be as conversational as face to face interactions, to be human to each other. It was not scripted.

My shtick was sort of pretending it was a 1960s style talk show- no idea why, but I put a black and white effect on my laptop camera (iGlasses), often wore a tie, and played some cheesy music.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I decided each week to make a 2-3 minute intro reel, always the same orm of intro, music, and exit, but each week I would insert some new clips of old commercials, educational videos, etc. I used three segments from the 1958 Promotion Bypass, a vintage film about management issues, for the dude in the suit behind the desk. My shtick was each week, I would re-write a script I would dub over his lines. This was a matter of counting syllables and re-writing it.

I ended up getting it so I could produce a new video each week in about 2 hours. For what purpose? My own amusement. But they were fun to do

After the hangout was archived by YouTube, I simply used the youtube editor to weld together the intro to the google archive recording.

I filmed these in my spare bedroom/office, using a reflector to bounce fill the window light, an worklight for a spot (super low tech by Andy Rush measures for sure). I’d play the music from my iPad out of some portable speakers.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I also used this as a theme (and produced yet another intro all the way up to 38 views) for my keynote for the TCC World Online Conference.

So this was totally not necessary, but totally became a weekly obsession, and I got a lot out of the regular act of doing this week by week. It was worth it for me to at least have some talking time with the students. I call it flipping the video lecture– right into the trash. Online classes do not need lectures to transmit content. Or at least I think they don’t.

But what do I know? Aunt Bertha is killing me in the stats.

Thanks to people like Todd Conaway, Ben Rimes, Brian Lamb, Brian Short, Zack Dowell, Mikhail Gershovich, Jonathan Worth, Andy Rush, Giulia Forsythe, Jim Groom, Norm Wright, Daniel Zimmerman, Michael Branson-Smith, Bryan Alexander, Martha Burtis, and Haley Campbell for being guests.

And all my students for putting up with the weirdness.

But don’t mind me, ask Aunt Bertha.

Two reminders from past UMW ds106 students. The ethos of ds106 carries on. First, a short email from Eric, who was in my Fall 2012 class:

I was checking up on my final project videos and was amazed at how many views it has. I just thought you might think it was cool haha.

Definitely cool, haha.

Step back, this video, that was part of Eric’s final storytelling project, has over 112,00 views. You might add up the views on all my YouTube videos, and its still less than that.

Crazy, right? Now views are not everything but 100,000 has to at least mean something. And this was really just a montage of clips from the Pawn Stars show, Eric even discounts the video a bit in his writeup:

As somewhat of a conclusion, I chose to use the video assignment ds106 fave moments. I made a video montage of my top 5 favorite pawn stars moments, with a mix of actual items and just funny things in the show. Although I was disappointed that I couldn’t fix the audio sync issues, this is the assignment that I spent the most time on and am most happy about. I wish I could have had good quality clips for each pick, but unfortunately youtube didn’t have the best options. That said I am still very happy with how it turned out.

It’s part of a collection of assignments Eric did including a Pawn Stars Rap–

Dude– that really needed some beats in it!) built around the Pawn Stars show for his final story work. I had wanted to see a bit more tying together of the different pieces of media into a cohesive story (note to present students, pay attention), but still, I have to drop all of that and says woah, 112,000 views. I hope your pappy is proud Eric, I sure am.

But see, what ds106 is really about is this explosion of creativity for 14 weeks. It’s not about the actual products but the process, and writing about it, and what it seeds for later potential in knowing the media creation skills and ideas.

And that leads me to this incredible photo by early ds106 veteran Serena Epstein who’s design, visual, photographic, creative skills were already huge in her time as a ds106 student, and have continued to grow since then.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Serenae

In commenting on her photo, her reply fills in the story, and how she has taken the idea of blogs as open publishing where there is a blog at the school she works that is dedicated to the plight of tortoises.

ds106 is just a start for many people. It goes on and on and on.

You do not get this inside a closed box like Coursera, etc. That is the falseness of their mis-appropriation of the simple word “open”, where in the xMOOC space, is only one way. In.

In ds106, open is bigger, as last semester student Haley writes in her work to move the understanding to a higher level (my emphasis added):

What I’ve come up with is the fact that the biggest, coolest thing about ds106 isn’t the content it covers—in fact, the course doesn’t have a single consistent lesson plan. Instead, it offers students (and educators!) an introduction to numerous methods of creating stories using digital resources. The ways in which students learn to use those resources change depending on who is teaching the course, whether or not they’re affiliated with UMW or are open participants, and even which assignments the individual student chooses to complete. At its core, though, ds106 is just as much about conveying a particular ethos, informed by the rhetoric of innovation and open education that’s part of the larger conversation about edtech. When I say “rhetoric of innovation,” I’m referring to the line of thinking that pursuing a new way of completing a task, a new way of thinking, or a unique experience is more valuable than sticking to well-established methods, which I encountered constantly (and found incredibly compelling) as a student in ds106. The value of open resources, online communities as vital spaces for learning, the thoughtful creation of identity online, and giving students the freedom to create their own learning experiences are all integral to the ds106 experience. Each of those elements reflects the overarching ethos established by the professors who constructed and teach the course, one that touts openness, creativity and the innovative use of tech as essential components for constructing a new, more compelling and student-driven educational model.

You can have your badge or certificate, I will take the ethos for 500, Alec. And the Daily Double.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by MyDigitalSLR

In what I’d call the semi-porous community (because we have people outside the class who can and do provide feedback to students) of my ds106 class at University of Mary Washington, nurturing a healthy amount of commenting has typically been a struggle against inertia.

One might have to make a case that the act of commenting has value; frankly, I start with that as a given. If that is a question for someone, I would guess they’ve not been participating in these spaces.

We would lump commenting on others blogs as part of a participating credit. As a teacher, I am pretty much at least scanning all the blogs and have a gut sense of who is being active in commenting.

But the last thing I want to be doing, and asking my students to do, is something like “you must make 5 comments per week”. That seems so petty to be counting, and sends a message that its some sort of thing to do to get the 5, not to give feedback.

Last semester I tried (in one week’s assignment) a challenge for all students to work to get at least 5 comments on a post that week, thinking it would shift some responsibility on them to solicit feedback. There was marginal success, but it did not carry on to the next week– because essentially it is reduced to a chore. It resonated with a message Lisa Lane wrote recently as The Perils of being Mean (my emphasis added):

The attitude perpetuates the dependence of the student (and professor!) at a very basic level of rules and obedience. The prof is now playing the low-level game of carrots and sticks, as if we were training dogs instead of educating citizens. At no point can we engage the larger issues of why one should follow deadlines and be responsible… I’ve already made the point that we need to treat students like responsible adults, or they won’t behave that way

In past classes I have heard feedback that reading 24 other blogs is overwhelming. Jeez, I know that! Showing them Google Reader helps some but misses the point.

With my current class, a new experiment is paying off- in week 3 I used our Canvas LMS (which I use mainly to enter grades), to randomly assign my students into 5 “comment groups”. The idea is I would ask them to comment on the 4 other students in their group.

Because reading 24 other blogs is a lot to ask, you are going to put in smaller groups of 4-5 students, set up in Canvas, so you have a smaller number of blogs to review this week. Your task is to give every member in your Comment Group at least two constructive comments, on any of their blog posts so far.

You will have to figure out either how to find the blog addresses of your group. You have at your disposal:

• Group communciation tools in Canvas
• The class blog page, which lists all blogs and recent posts http://ds106.us/tag/umwsp13/
• The class twitter list https://twitter.com/cogdog/umwsp13

Now a constructive comment is more than “Nice work” or “I like that”. It should be a few sentences, and ought to include useful feedback or ideas for improvement. Think about giving the kind of feedback you’d hope to receive.

And when you get comments, reply if it merits a response. Think of this as a conversation (one sided conversations are not interesting, right?)

Your credit for this week is not based on counting the number of comments you made – but how you are able to summarize your comment activity. Include in your weekly summary:

• A summary of what you saw interesting or maybe influential in the blogs you looked at. Did you get ideas you could use by looking at someone else’s post? How did your work compare or differ from theirs?
• A summary of the feedback you got -what was useful? Would it change your thinking? What was helpful?

One of my students did raise a key thing- if someone waits until Sunday night (when work is due) to comment on her blog, she is not able to summarize what she received. But I did not want to force a fixed deadline (make all your comments by Wednesday), so I suggested that work out the timing dynamic in their group. And that I would not penalize someone if they had an inactive commenter in their group.

The idea was they would work with the same comment group for 2 weeks, then they would have a new group based on their choices fior the mid semester group project. So the comment circles would get mixed up.

I also repeatedly remind them of the key value of using twitter as a call for help, a shout out for their own work, or sharing someone else’s.

Maybe it is the small size of the groups, or maybe I just have an exceptional class (and I do), but I am seeing more constructive feedback going back and forth than any class before. I see signs of cohesion on the groups.

And best of all, I am not tallying comments.

I am also seeing the communications bleed out more via twitter, as students are offering answers to each other. It is here they are extending out of their comment group circles.

Below are just a selection of examples of the stuff I am seeing

I enjoy looking at other peoples blogs, especially when they have something more to offer… Like knowing what they’re doing? Which is always. My comment group is incredibly helpful, especially in commenting and helping me out along the way. However, I also realized that help is not limited to just my group. Instead, everyone finds a way to help especially on twitter, which only further confirms my belief that twitter was the best thing invented since sliced bread. This week, I think I visited Jennifer’s the most often, and my favorite thing was how she gave a play by play in everything she did. It made completing my own work much easier since, if I had any questions, they were likely resolved through her own work. As always, Amber, Kelsie, and Sarah were incredibly helpful in their comments. Also, back to twitter, I was struggling with fixing the time settings on my blog and fellow classmate Nancy Belle helped out.
http://ds106.alittleallovertheplace.com/2013/02/11/listen-close-listen-carefully/

@sarahhpark2 @cogdog same! I tried to change it but it won’t let me. 😠

— micaela (@mmbutlerr) February 4, 2013

Lots of feedback this week, on both twitter and the blog! As I said earlier, I had the opportunity to change my five sound story to make another, stronger one the second time around. I also added a little post of my own on the other group member’s blogs so I didn’t have to search through all the lists of things on the right of the main page–seemed to be a big hit! Then of course Professor Levine gave me an even better solution of just putting them in the sidebar (my initial thought, but I couldn’t figure it out). Also got a lot out of Twitter this week, even from people not in my class!
http://ds106.cwyrough.me/weekly-summary-4/

a little confused about #ds106radio. How do I know when a live show is on?

— Richard Wyrough (@rwyrough) February 6, 2013

I love looking at my groups blogs and seeing what kind of ideas that they came up with for all their assignments. I found it kind of difficult to come up with ideas for this weeks assignments, so looking at them for inspiration was fantastic. I found looking at their ideas to be invaluable in helping me come up with my own ideas. I also continued to get some encouraging words from my group members this week. I am really glad that we started commenting and keeping up with each others blogs. I also am thrilled to be in group that I am in.
http://ds106.brittanydray.com/2013/02/end-of-audio-week/

My comment group members are SO awesome!! I listened to Amber’s radio bumper before I made mine and I was a little intimidated at first {because she’s a pro, nbd}. But then I read her post and it gave me a little confidence. I hopefully gave another group member some confidence by posting this comment quoting Ira Glass when he talked about feeling your work isn’t “up-to-par” with other people’s work
http://ds106.missrunnerbug.me/2013/02/can-you-hear-me-week-4/

I need some #ds106 help! My blog post is showing the link for soundcloud instead of making it be a clip. …onfessionsofafuturedisneyprincess.com/2013/02/08/pri…

— Karissa Mary Marie (@krisavball08) February 8, 2013

For comments on my blog I feel that these are a great way to keep in contact with everyone in my group. I didn’t receive much criticism, and this is probably my own fault in that I was late getting my weekly summary up! This will of course not be the case next week! But for now the positive re-enforcement is always encouraging. I really feel that it is helpful looking at Leahand Kaitlyn’s blog whenever I get stuck on a particular aspect of the weekly assignments in that they are typically two steps ahead and have figured out how to do the assignment already! Its nice to know that I have the ability to contact them when I have questions or look to their blog when I need direction.
http://ds106.chachachelsea.com/weekly-summaries/ds-106-weekly-summary-4/

I want to get better at this because I think peer feedback and interaction is very important to success in classes and life in general. I have learned from my group mates and hopefully they are learning from me too. When I wasn’t sure what the audio storytelling assignment wanted I was able to go to my group members blogs and see what they did. This helped me understand and expand for mine.
http://www.ds106.owlbereading.com/2013/02/11/trying-to-keep-up-with-owl-this-work-week-4/

The comments have actually been very helpful. I’ve learned a lot from reading other blogs and incorporating different ideas together. For example, I could not figure out for the LONGEST time how to use audacity and cut everything so I took a look around and saw that Lara’s post on the radio bumper gave me a simpler explanation than my Google searches. I also used twitter a lot this week to talk to people. Even thought Nancy isn’t in my group she saw my tweet about ds106radio and helped me out!
http://ds106.savethepandas.net/2013/02/11/what-audio-telling-me/

Not going to lie, I love my comment group. Everyone’s been super helpful and great at giving feedback. Miss Amber was distraught over the broken iPhone screen I posted for one of my daily creates (sorry!) while Miss Jennifer and Miss Kelsie made me feel a lot better by saying that my ds106 work isn’t crap and that I shouldn’t compare it to other people (thanks guys!)

One interesting thing I saw in someone else’s blog was actually a daily create by Miss Kelsie on a broken ring. For some reason, I thought this picture was really sad. Not just because it’s broken (and it’s jewelry! I hope it wasn’t expensive!) but also because rings are supposed to signify eternity (since it’s a circle shape/continuous). I also thought it was interesting because the daily create was to take a picture of something broken literally or figuratively and this photo could be interpreted both ways (broken in the literal sense and also could signify a broken relationship in the figurative sense). So cool!
http://ds106.sarahpark.org/2013/02/10/week-4/

Thar be slides, slides, slides, way too many slides, from a presentation I did online yesterday as part of the ETMOOC Section on Digital Storytelling. You can find resources mentioned at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/What+Mean+Ye+Storytelling and an archive is available.

It was a lot crammed in.

I wanted to play out the idea that as a concept, digital storytelling is something I don’t focus on defining, as most definitions fail to capture the range of things we see— in fact, they way I frame ds106 for my students is that I can’t tell them what storytelling is. The whole class experience is making that a question we pursue. And more and more and more and more, I find that shifting teaching from a “I know this and will transmit it to you” is way less interesting that taking a topic or concept and pursuing it together.

Gee I feel so rhizomy.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by romainguy

This is the image to represent my other liekly not so novel thought- we tend to get focused on the thing as something that contains a story- the video, the web page, the sound, the GIF, the book, the movie– I do not see the media form as the story. The story is our relation to it, what we impart to that media, the way we share an experience with others. It is between us. Media are not stories to me. A picture does not tell a story. It might launch one, or instigate one, or represent a story.

But the story is between that picture of the rock and you. It might by the story of how those sailing rocks move across Death Valley (explanatory story). It might be the story of that travel from the rock’s perspective or a tweet the rock might say (imagined personified story). It might be how kids play pranks and move the rocks or how they are moved by aliens from the Thorgazian Nebula (wildly fictional narrative). it might be a poem about exquisite or grand travels (metaphorical story). It might be an animated GIF of the rock sliding across the desert floor (a story of motion).

I have no idea if that really makes sense or matters to people. It does to me. If you are looking for the story, or creating one, don’t just feel like the media created is or even needs to be the whole story. In a fully developed complex story, e.g. a produced film, you find as many untold stories (behind the scenes making of, alternative endings, the wide open range of fan fiction), and a universe of remixes.

Anyhow, I tried to spit out a variety of examples that indicate the range of story possibilities of what web based stories could be. Samplers, not fenceposts.

One key method IMHO is not constraining your ideas to just the explicit features a tool might offer. I’ve been thumoing the drum for 5+ years, yet one of the most underutilized features of flickr every teacher can find a use for is the ability to annotate an image with hyperlinked popup notes. You can go even farther by putting hypertext links on the notes. This opens up a world of multi-pathed stories or choose your own adventure ones – I used my 50 Ways example from Dominoe’s story.

Another variation, and again, it happens to be flickr cause If I was Stranded on a Desert Island With Only One Web 2.0 Tool It Would be Flickr. In 2011 I tried an experiment with taking 10 Dailyshoot (predecessor to the Daily Create) prompts and each day writing a section of a story in reverse.

Huh? Have you seen Memento? On January 31, 2011, my first photo was the prompt for the end of the story and each day, the photo I took and the narrative I wrote were done in reverse, until February 19, 2011 I wrote what would be the opening of the story.

Right now you should be terribly confused. Just shrug it off.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

My lesson is meant to be that you can do a lot to re-interpret these digital tools and platforms in ways their designers never imagined. You are not limited to what the tool can do. You are only limited by what you imagine is possible.

I did a speed run through of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I skipped through Five Card FLickr Stories since we had people in etmooc do that last week on their own. And woah did they- I see 34 created stories out of a pool of 130 photos they went out and tagged.

Next, I tried something I’ve not done before in Collaborate, I did a screen share and we did a live run through of pechaflickr, my improv mashup of pecha kucha + PowerPoint Karaoke * random(flickr).

We had volunteers from the audience take turns saying lines over the slides (Alan’s not to self, a 30 second interval would have been better with slide lag). I’ve done this successfully in Google Hangouts and recently presented on pechaflickr using pechaflickr.

I then tried to give an overview of ds106 in about 10 minutes, probably generating information whiplash and a few speed of presentation infractions.

This session was a bit of an experiment for some future sessions, and I plan to parcel this back out to be separate topics. Thanks to everyone who stepped in front of the firehose, and apologize for those whom spilled Java all over their computers and got locked out. You can catch the show via free on-demand.

I was pretty jazzed and fired up for having gotten 1 hour of sleep the night before, that itself a story ;-)

UPDATE: Feb 14, 2013 Just came across this film short that proposes the brain science behind storytelling, and the power of a story’s dual punch of distress and empathy, the latest work by the brilliant Kirby Ferguson

It presents a whole new way to think about the arc of a story.

Ir’s been fun to do some redesign and alignment of the ds106 web sites. I’ve long had an interest in trying to make the ds106 Assignments site into more of a template that could be used to create similar sites, and that just got a little bit closer to possibility.

The entire 106 fleet is a WordPress multisite, the main site and the Daily Create site both use the Parallelus Salutation theme, so they were easier to coordinate; the one change was using incorporating the stressed 106 logo as part of the TDC. They both use menus at the top, and I’ve set up the rightmost ones to be “ds106″ navigation ones.

The ds106 Assignments site was a different beast. It is built on a 960c theme, one of the generic 960 grid system themes. I gave brief thought to trying to render it in Salutation, but it’s a hugely customized theme, and I was not even sure how to do taxonomy archives in Salutation. As is the design is a close-enough match.

The front page used a lot of graphics, and they were all hard code into place (to add a new assignment group meant a new graphics and the template edited):

The “Mission ds106″ title was another graphic with its tagline “An anthology of new media projects” that really was not too explanatory. Not only that, I was unable to find the original graphics or even fonts used to modify those graphics.

Likewise, the interior page template used some hard coded icons, which looked nice, for the top navigation. Not easy to update or make more generalized:

My plan was then to implement the built in WordPress menus for the top navigation, so it would be common on all pages (and be flexible to edit) and maybe to make those front page main icons also be menu driven.
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cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6

For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire “I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC” because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes.

We have a very easy to understand Getting Started Guide, itself with not one way to do this course but TWO, the Fast And Easy Way and the Blogging Way.

But here are ten things you can do to be part of ds106, without even signing up. How massively un MOOC is that?

(0) The Stephen Downes Clause Feel free to ignore all of the following and make up your own.

(1) Do one daily create a week. Just because it says daily does not require you to do it every day, it requires us to publish one every day! Each day at 10:00 AM EST, a brand new creative challenge, none of which should take more than 20 minutes to complete. It might be Photography, http://tdc.ds106.us/category/drawing/, Audio, Video, or Writing. You just need to post them on the designated social media site.

And there is no reason to be stuck to the present ones. We have a collection of almost 400 past Daily Creates many suitable for creative activities. Try one at random or explore the archive.

(2) Comment on a few student blogs. If blogging is old hat, you might have forgotten how electrinic those first comments can be. Pay it forward by giving feedback to our registered tudents, by they mine at University of Mary Washington, or Bill Generuex’s class at KSU, Briant Short’s class at the University of Michigan, or Michael Branson-Smith and Chloe Smolarski’s class at York College/CUNY. Even one comment is golden to these new bloggers.

(3) Do or Borrow a ds106 Assignment If there was a heart to the class it would be the Assignment Bank. This includes over 500 visual, design, audio, video, mashup, fan fiction, writing, web created by ds106 participants, plus connections to over 4000 examples created for these assignments. Sure you could call these OERs you could call them Fandangoes. You do not even need to have a blog connected to ds106, we have a loinked form on each assignment where you could submit a single response. Not sure whare to start? Spin the random wheel or see the ones that are featured.

Or follow the ds106bot on twitter- it tweets out random assignments.

(4) Answer questions or share resources in twitter We use a single hash tag for all things ds106. Students ask questions, people share related resources, or just informally exchange ideas. Take one day a week to pop into the #ds106 stream, how hard could that be?

(5) Create a New Daily Create You think our ideas are lame? You have something better? Toss one in vis our suggestion box and it should appear in the next weeks.

If you follow step (4) above, it just might lead to step (5). Ask Joe MacMahon:

@cogdog “Make a Poster of an Action Movie Starring Julia Child.”

— Joseph McMahon (@pragmanic) January 17, 2013

and a few days later? http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc381/

That’s how we roll.

(6) Tune into or take over the microphone for ds106 radio. We have a live web radio station, and not only is there music, shows, and people to listen to, anyone can broadcast at any time. Does Coursera do that? No. Does Udacity do that? No. Blackboard? Nope.

We do, we give it away. http://ds106.us/ds106-radio

(7) Create a ds106 Assignment Got a creative idea bigger than a Daily Create? Well, just make it part of the assignment bank (preferably doing it yourself so there is an example). That’s how we grow. Not by any mass replicant scaling, one creative brick at a time.

Now just tweeting out “This would be a cool #ds106 assignment” is not up to snuff for us. Step up and make something! And you may run into our snarky bot:

@unixbeard then get off yer butt and submit it! assignments.ds106.us/submit-an-assi… #ds106 #botlife

— DS106 Bot (@ds106bot) December 5, 2012

(8) Share ds106 work that inpsires you If you see something from a ds106 participant that causes a “WOW” reaction, then submit it to the in[SPIRE] site, our effort to collect the Best of ds106. This site itself was created by students in last year’s class.

(9) Help Us Figure out What to to with a subreddit One of our current students, asked us if we had a subreddit. Huh? Well, in fact there was one about two years old with only 2 things in it — http://reddit.com/r/ds106. So if you have reddit experience or want some, jump in and help us imagine how o use it. Maybe its a place to upvote good examples of digital storytelling. or away for students to get early feedback on their work. We don’t know, we are looking to you to help us make it emergent.

(10) Be part of our weekly show We are experimenting with a live weekly ds06 show via Google Hangouts. We have students from UMW, outside experts, and anyone else who wants a seat (if it fills, it can be watched via the YouTube stream).

(11) Remix an Assignment Ok it is wild enough we have over 500 different creative assignments, but then do the math on our Assignment Remix site which applies a random “card” and gives you the challenged to to that assignment in a new way.

Like doing the Big Caption assignment played with the Yo Momma card .. or the Spreadsheet animation one played with a Dr Suess Character Card.

Woah, how about those 10… turned up to 11. And I could go on.

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by me and the sysop

So while other MOOCs cause feelings of remorse (or lack of remorse over the death of aprticipation), not ds106. In fact, the opposite happen. Drop the obligation, the breakneck pace, and you can do as little or as much as you want.

And pretty soon you are tweeting #ds106 $4life

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk

Last week I wrote about the ideas and content changes I had in mind for the next semester of ds106. The car polish is looking shiny. Over the last few weeks I had out my WordPress wrenches, calipers and engine pulls to do some work under the hood. The current site is coming up on two years old, and has been a great example of growth by accretion, experimenting, adding things on. That is all part of running experiments.

But it also got a bit wobbly last semester; no one likes their web site going down, but we were sure ringing the buzzer frequently at our hosts Castiron Coding for server restarts. It wasn’t clear if it was the database, the demands on the server processes, but I took it as a mission to keep happy the unicorns that run the server room

First of all, our site is a WordPress multi site that not only servers up ds106 covering numerous sections taught over the last 2 years, but also the Assignment bank, the Daily Create, the Assignment Remix Machine, in[SPIRE], plus the archive of Camp Magic Macguffin, and (just unearthed) the May 2011 class taught by Martha Burtis. We also run a MediWki install as a content engine for our documentation (using the Wiki Embed plugin).

The database was and is over 600 Mb. More on that later. There was a long list of plugins, active and inactive, quite a few were not in use.

I’ve done quite a bit and hope I can remember it all! An off the cuff summary…
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