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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 [...]

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A bit earlier I looked into my rear view mirror at last semester’s ds106 class I taught online for the University of Mary Washington. Since then I have been deep inide the bowls of the ds106 ship, doing quite a bit of organizing and tuning of the engines, as well as planning the course for the Spring semester class which starts.. today! In this post, I am going to outline some of these changes – a reorganization of the front of the ds106 site, some more orientation/help for people just stumbling into the site as well as some ideas of things I am going to try new with my class. I will beed to do a part 2 write-up on the under-the-hood changes in the wordpress site, database cleaning, plugin purging, which hopefully will make it run more smoothly. [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Here comes the requisite apology for late blogging… I had plans to write up some reflections on the past semester of ds106; this is part 1 of a series, in the next one I hope to look out the front windshield to some ideas for the next iteration of the class I am teaching at UMW starting January 14. Some summary I’ve assembled from my section (I reelly like using Storify for this): Final Projects – this can give future students ideas on how to do (or not do) projects. Best Of – each student was asked to keep a blog category for their favorite creations – and I hope some of you will consider using this as a source of things to nominate for the ds106 in[SPIRE] site. Advice to Future Studens created in any media they chose, video, [...]

We know people love ds106. I love ds106. I know you do. My students this semester are doing some of the best work (especially in terms of representing their work online) I’ve seen since I started teaching this course in January. The UMW Domain of One’s Own greatly streamlined the startup process, Martha and I have made syllabus adjustments (introductory Bootcamp, re-arranging the introduction of audio earlier) that seem to have worked, and having redone the materials now three times, it feels very solid going into my next round (I am teaching it online again for Spring 2013). My focus has been on our sections here at UMW, but we have a good amount of activity as well with Michael Branson Smith’s York College/CUNY section plus Ryan Rish’s class and Darren Crovitz’s class at Kennesaw State University. Yet I cannot help but notice the fall off among our open online [...]

or perhaps the subtitle is “A Funny Thing Happened On My Way Through the Image Search” cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Jin_sama Maybe the philosophical question hinges on how thirsty one is… welcome to what happens when the rabbit hole falls under your foot. So I am wanting to write a blog post about last night’s broadcast of the radio stories created by my ds106 students. I cannot write until I find a creative commons image first. I had in my mind one of those 1940-1950s photos of a family gathered around the radio. I usually rely on Compfight to find ones in flickr, but its less useful for phrase search. I wandered over to Google Image Search on gather around the radio where I get what I sought easy- among 29,000,000 results: Let’s see what I can find to re-use. I flip open [...]

I’ve written some before about a mod I made to the Graphpaper Press Full Screen Theme for my photo showcase site, Barking Dog Studio. I dig this theme for many reasons, it features large photos on single pages, it has an attractive grid on the front. It feels less bloggy: The mod I made was to ingest any of the photo meta data and use it for the body of the post (I get the title, description, and camera XIF info form Aperture exports). So for me to post a photo, I just need to upload the image, write a title for the post, and check categories, add tags. I just posted 11 new photo posts in 25 minutes. I recently made some other mods to this theme; hacking themes is one of my favorite wordpress things to do. The first key to making changes to your theme is to [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Danforth1 My section of ds106 starts tomorrow, I am teaching a section completely online. I just realized I never reflected much on the summer experience, wich was the first time doing it online. The summer version is even more different, because we have room to play with a narrative for the course. The irony here is I once questioned the need for a narrative which only goes to show the power of blogging and changing your mind later. It is also timely to be doing this since I am part of another open online class, the Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class (“POTCERT dude”)– I am taking on this because I want to become a better online teacher. I have to say after the Spring semester teaching the class in person, I thought it made more sense to be [...]

These days you cannot spit without hitting a new MOOC or someone talking about how MOOCs will revolutionize education, etc. If you’ve been following this for anytime, you will know the story of the first ones, the “connectivist” kind in some parlancesactually naming them c-MOOC (David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed, Alec Couros’s EC&I 831. Siemens & Downes CCK08 (which seems to have been vaporized from University of Manitoba and blocked at the internet archive, so much for open), If you check the names, you can sense that the “c” stands for Canada, home of MOOCs on Ice But with the commoditization of courses, the MOOC locus has shifted south of the border, we see the rise of EdUCKA, the big money Blue Suede MOOCs While all the attention has been on North America, in the UK at Coventry University are two open online photography classes that have a lot [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by CarbonNYC Just short of a year ago, I blogged about stepping into the great wide open. I quit my job “in these economic times” and planned at least 9 months of rewind, as well as an epic odyssey loop of travel (which came to be) and I came back from that great wide open. I also spent a few weeks sanding and painting my deck. This time with my own choices of what to do was a gift I can never say enough thanks to my late true life fairy godmother (thanks Aunt Martha!). It was hardly sitting around (besides the deck sanding). And with the passing this year of my Mom, my savings again could allow me another year or two of free living. But it did feel time to get back to a place to do some W.O.R.K. A [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog There are too many reasons to list for me to say why I enjoy hanging out with Gardner Campbell one of them being the regular education he gives me in things like how vinyl records are mastered and the real meaning of revolutions. We did all of that the first night I stayed with him at his new home near Blacksburg, Virginia, and I wrm twisted him to have this conversation on ds106 radio. Here’s the full archive, below some highlights. Gardner Campbell on ds106 radio The first bit of new activity I am now aware is scanning what is in the “dead wax” of LPs. This is where codes are engraved that have meaning to audiophiles, and where the producers often add their own signature in terms of a name or initials. The disc Gardner was eager to play [...]