My variant of the ds106 Parent-Child Headswap assignment, in this case I take some liberty to swap a photo of me and my icon dog, Mickey. The original photo is from August 2001:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This was done in Photoshop, I am planning try and start doing some work in GIMP so I better understand tools my students are using. I used the magnetic lasso selection to choose each head, cut it and past it to new layers. I flipped each one horizontally to get the orientation right, and then the Transform->Scale and Transform-Distort tools to shape the heads. It took a bit of eraser/brush to clean up the selection fringe, and some magic brush on the background layer to fill things out.

You know what they say about pets and their owners resembling each other…

UPDATE (Feb 11, 2011): I remembered the book Lives of the Monster Dogs someone suggested I read a few years back based on the resemblance of the cover to my (now dormant) Second Life avatar (blogged)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It was a good read, indeed!

Over the summer I did some experiments with using my own photos to generate animated GIFs, and I am making this into a new ds106 assignment.

Photo it Like the Peanut Butter
For this assignment, generate an animated GIF of a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material.

I have already written up a few blog posts with my method; the key is taking a series of photos with little or no movement of your camera – a tripod is strongly recommended, but I have gotten away with ones done with multiple shot mode on my Canon DSLR.

The first one I spotted in Nashville as I was fascinated by the reflections of the Cumberland river in the windows of a building (the how to was blogged as Animated GIFs from Your Own Photos):

Hmm, I seem to have done this more than I remembered –

There is an endless series of log trucks in north Florida:

I caught some flags waving in Cookesville Tennessee

There was the animated dancing GIF Groom spotted in Richmond, VA

I made three of ‘em in Melbourne Australia, and actually got an email from this guy playing the accordian:

These are ones with a lot of movement, in December 2011, I aimed for the more subtle motion of Giulia’s eyes, doing some masking/layering on Photoshop:

And…

I went about this another way this week. Since coming to Virginia and hanging out at DTLT, you get used to the ongoing sound of the MakerBot. The regular motion just begs to be animated:

I was actually trying to do a video using the iTimeLapse app on my iphone (which is mounted to the machine by a holder made in the makerbot) — it grabbed about 400 photos. The video was not quite perfect (but I put a mixed audio version on YouTube), since the motion of the machine shook the phone a little bit and it went out of focus every few shots. But I nabbed about 10 photos from the sequence, dropped them into Photoshop (File -> Scripts -> Load Images into Stack) which puts them in frames. Pop open the Animation window, slide the layers into frames… save.

Whew, long post! The point is to think about how to do animated GIFs from your own photo series.

This started with the almost incomprehensible Cat Breading ds106 assignment:

The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist—each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)”

From this article in Complex’s Pop Culture section

So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat’s face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it.

Now the Cat Bread Purists will likely insist the true art requires real cats and real pieces of bread, no Photoshopping.

Phoooey.

As Jim was describing this assignment to his ds106 class tonight, I was watching on the live stream, and it occurred to me that the most appropriate things to do was to put Jim’s face into a piece of bread. That was pretty easy to do- a bit of lassoing of his mug, shrinking the selection area, feathering, and cutting the hole in the bread, which I tweeted out as this image.

Just for giggles.

But thinking about how to use this in the assignments, do I make a new one for Jim Groom Breading? Nah… I just need to convince the viewer that this is a cat! I just found a photo of a cat:

and placed it on the top layer of my masterpiece. Some removal of the tip half, and then setting the layer style of the whiskers to “Lighten” got me closer to the needed but I still ended up using the eraser tool brush mode to get rid of more cat, and then some levels tweaking made the whiskers pop out a bit more.

That Jim, breaded, and on krazy kat. This assignment is only worth 1 star, which is what a slap a cat into the bread in Photoshop would rate, but I took it up a notch.

What can you bread?

If you want to have a go with this, I am sharing the photoshop file which has the whiskers and other parts in separate layers so you can put someone else into the bread mix.

http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/bread.psd (2.7 Mb PSD)

This audio reflection comes close to the end of my cross country sprint from Arizona to Virginia, as I close in on Fredericksburg Virginia, where I am now, and not planning on driving away from for a while. Maybe it will become Hallowed Ground

Slices of Life 009: 90 miles from Fredericksburg

I had just listened to Scottlo, who inspired me to try this audio reflection, end his Slices of Life with number 47 “End of this Chapter”, his own path. It’s been remarkable to follow him from his start, when he was questioning everything about his teaching, to the torrent of excitement he achieved by number 47.

Many ways to fill in Scottlo’s blank:

Always Be _________ing

I am looking forward to first face meeting with my ds106 students, and plan to meet individually with students and review their blogs, get to know who is who. Tonight’s class plan to be hands on, with a crack “gentle” whip for some who had not yet set up blogs, reminder tneed to embed media rather than linking, and urge the writing in their own voice, not the school voice.

I plan also to how to set up categories in blog for organizing as well as setting up permalinks to have different forms of blog urls.

The next phase is making the space their own, starting with theming, but going into widgets, plugins, etc. As a great example rossannamarie.me has done an interesting restructure by making a landing page, and building a navigational structures to the blog portion and a separate update summary that journals how the blog grows

It is also time to turn up the heat on commenting and need to be linking more in their written posts.

The first round of reflection posts on Cyberinfrastucted were mixed, some just “I think this is cool” when really I want them to reflect on what it means to them,a nd to connect to other ideas, not write the general school report summary. I hope to have them circle back later to their initial Cyberinfrastructure post at the end of the term, to see if the class in which they are actually doing this has changed or evolved their first idea.

There is a fair amount of student pushback on use of technology, probably from Gardner’s quote about “everyone needs a cyberinfrastructure”

Just as the real computing revolution didn’t happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won’t happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment. This vision goes beyond the “personal learning environment”5 in that it asks students to think about the web at the level of the server, with the tools and affordances that such an environment prompts and provides.

I rambled a bit on Beth Kanter’s post on content curation, citing the prolific Robin Good as an example of someone that does this to the nth degree (and I agree with what he does as being a flashlight into the bag of gold). I agree with the value of the recommended tools, but not as a total toolset (e.g. scoop.it) in that they are all *external* Both Beth and Robin exemplify the balance of managing their own digital space, much as the digital locker in Gardner’s talk, and what we are asking students to do in this class.

My last bit was an idea for the next This Week in ds106 live vide show with Jim, with me pretending to skype in, and apologizing for not getting there in time. Jim will get angry, and then I will walk on the set.

(later) We did pull it off that afternoon:

Still catching up on the slices of life audio reflection, this one almost two weeks old. ALways Be ‘Poligizing for being behind? This audio recording is from January 26, the morning I left home in Strawberry Arizona, for the 220 mile express trip to Virginia.

Slices of Life 008: Leaving Arizona

I am going to miss these Big Blue Skies

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

In many ways, this was eerily similar to the day I left on my 5 month odyssey in June 2011, but also very different. At that time was unsure if I could even live the road life; would I hate it? I of course found it I could manage living out of Big Red and being mobile for few months, and that home was always in Strawberry even if I wasn’t. I know now too that if I need to I can do 500, 600, 700 miles in a day.

I reflected on my section of ds106, a class I will be teaching in person at University of Mary Washington. Last night was third session I did remotely via Skypa (a huge Arizona sky sized thanks to Jim Groom who has been present for my students, and set up the two way video liv stream)

This is far from an optimal way to teach this way; It is hard for me to see, hard to hear audio clearly via skype (especially since I had busted m laptop and was using my iPhone- students are tiny!). I cant read body language, and really I am “sort of not there”. But it was just a bridge needed to give me time to get across the country.

So far, 20 of my 25 students have their domains and wordpress blogs set up, done with minimal direction — I agree with Jim that it’s a lesson in not relying totally on the course or the teacher to provide answers, that they will need to figure out things on their own, with their pal. Half of these have already customized their themes.

Last night’s session was the discussion of Gardner Campbell’s talk on No Digital Facelift and paper on Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Stealing/borriwing/co-opting on of Gardner’s own classtoom techniques, I had asked them to think about “nuggets” within reading or video- a key sentence or phrase that grabbed their interest, curiosity as starting points for discussions. I provided Jim a few YouTube links that use the technique to point to a particular timecode to start playing, examples:

• Bag of gold http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=02m50s
• Digital facelift http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=10m15s
• Little big planet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=18m50s
• Small things can be meaningful http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=33m20s

I also had Jim show some examples of how te “bags of gold” became a bit of a viral meme last year. e.g.
Tim’s Kinetic Typography, Tom Woodward audio remix, Giulia Forsythe’s visual notes, Barbara Dieu’s video remox — in all of these, these show visual ways of drawing out different nuggets of the talk.

I tried to start with a discussion of “What is bag of gold? what does it mean to you?” … awkward silence.

But the discussion picked up next when we moved to “what is a visual facelift”.

It was interesting that students felt Gardner was advocating a total technology makeover for teaching, which got into the most active state as they debated what could and could not be taught online. I for one have not come across anyone advocating that surgery could eb taught completely online.

Class closed with an attenmt to describe what Personal Cyberinfrastructure means- asked student to read passage out loud (borrowed again technique from from Gardner):

Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline.

— American Council of Learned Societies,
Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006

We do have an archive of this class

And posts from this assignment are available at http://ds106.us/tag/pci

I then speculated what to do next week with Storytelling- introduce examples of web storytelling?

The slice closed with a personal memory of my trip return to this road in November, where I crossed the 15,000 mile mark and getting an iPod shuffled memory of my Mom, She’s a Rainbow”

Driving north from the Ponderosa Forest into the pinyon pine forest and eventual sage brush high desert terrain near Winslow, I marveled at how subtle wast this transition from forest to high plains, not clear where one begins and other ends — life is gradational

Today would have been my Mom’s 83rd Birthday, and in honor of her memory and love of butterflies, I asked Tim Owens to do a Makerbot print of a butterfly ornament.

If you want to a description of her belief about butterflies, listen to this recording I made last year when I visited her, just a week after her 82nd:

Mom on Butterflies

It’s been a year of thinking back on events that she was here for last year, and probably the sweetest memory was the outpouring of sympathy for cookielove last September

And it was was a year ago last November she was at my home in Strawberry making cookies, and I just felt like there would be many more of these.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This one last photo was a gift that came into the StoryBox this summer. I think I know who it is from, but am not 100% sure, nor does it matter.

Happy Butterflyday, Mom.

Reaching a bit into the past for today’s Daily Create "a photo that represents that happiest or most memorable moment in your life."

As an absolute for "happiest" I find that impossible, so let’s reach into the hat.

Having driven across Texas twice in the last 3 months, I went back to first first Trans-Texas tour, in August 1987, when Dominoe and I drove to Arizona from Baltimore in my 1973 Ford Maverick.

This trip alone was epic for me, a grand aventure, and I had a perfect, non-complaining travel buddy, though she did not do her share of the driving. This is somewhere on US 387 between Dallas and Amarillo.

Dominoe was my first dog I owned on my own, and her story has gone very far with me. Picking happiest is tricky, but this was definitely memorable and rolled around in my mind this year as I went farther on my road odyssey

This was an old print photo (35mm FILM baby) I had scanned into my computer sometime last year, and as far as I recall, has not appeared in my other photos. To give it a memory look, a fiddled with the Paint Daubs filter in Photoshop to make it look more painterly.

A quick one for a new #ds106 assignment created by one of my students:

Comic Book Effect
Take a picture and experiment with the “Halftone Effect” in some photo editing software to create a comic book effect. There are lots of tutorials on Youtube and Google.

This was the original photo, one that Rowan Peter took of me when I visited him in Melbourne and we worked on some lawn art in his back yard:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I did all my edits directly in flickr using Piknic (Using “Edit Photo in Piknic” from the Actions menu). There was no half tone effect there, but I found the textured one worked pretty well. I added the bubble on some next to round it out.

Just a quick try!

(click for the full diagram in all its martian glory)

Inspired by Ben Rimes post today I wanted to take a spin at the ds106 Warning Design assignment:

Lots of things today have warning labels. Create warning labels for things that exist only in movies or your imagination

I felt that as a weapon of planetary destruction, the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator wielded by Marvin Martian would definitely need some warning labels.

That thing is dangerous. The users manual is about 800 pages long. Marvin is lucky he does not blow his Martian head off.

The real device was rather simple, almost just a stick of dynamite. I did a google search on the device and landed on the complex device from a tumblr blog. Building this was just some PhotoShop layering. I placed the device at the center. For each callout, I just copied a selection, pasted to new layer, and resized. Then I overlaid the items with text or graphics.

Danger, Marvin, he lives dangerously.

San Francisco: Flip This Mayor
There must be something in the water at Oakland’s City Hall which makes people stupid.

San Francisco’s unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom.

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Tune in for the drama in city hall, as city officials labor hard to prove their are “creating jobs”. Mayor Stan Usual was elected on a split opposition vote, and has no mandate. He is dealing with a water issue, but it is not stupidity, but lead. As the tech industry dries up, before the tumbleweeds are spotted blowing through SoMa, city council people have developed a new job sceme involving portable structures made from aluminum cans. Who will win this epic community battle for the hearts and minds of the city? Stay tuned….
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photo credits

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by echoman: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80154053@N00/151680058/

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo by slworking2: http://flickr.com/photos/slworking/3875709508/

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by Thomas Hawk: http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2934728223/

Hence a new ds106 assignment, partly inspired by the formula of the Album cover assignment, Really Reality TV The tags for this assignment are DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments342

1. Use the Reality TV Show name generator to get a title for the show.
2. Do a Google search on the show title name.
3. Use the first paragraph found on the 5th result of the search as the first part of the show description.
4. Use the last paragraph found on the 10th result of the search as the second part of the show description.
5. Find three creative commons licensed images to represent a protagonist on the show, the setting, and one example of action. Combine them into a three panel show banner. Be sure to credit the sources in your blog post
6. On your blogpost, write in the elevator pitch for the show, and a tag line for it appearing on ds106 TV.
7. Sit back and wait for Spielberg to contact you. He is into TV these days.

So for my show, I generated this name, “San Francisco: Flip This Mayor”:

My google search results (which who knows if ever are unique?)

Result five was a link to 1st sentence from 5th result “the tattler: Occupy Oakland…Mayor Quan flip-flops! Cops cry foul!” where the first paragraph was There must be something in the water at Oakland’s City Hall which makes people stupid. (that is definitely show material).

The 10th search result was Tech company move boosts SF mayor’s branding push, where the last paragraph was:

San Francisco’s unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom.

That leads me to search terms in compfight for “Oakland City Hall”, “Mayor”, and “Tech jobs”, giving me these three photos:

I set up a blank photoshop document with a black background, and dragged and dropped the downloaded photos (500px size) right in there- you can move and resize them as smart objects, then added some text, and boom! Done.

The last bit was to write the pitch for the show.

Shiznit! Reality TV is done.