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cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’m back almost a week from an incredible and intense and fantastic three week trip to Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong — all pretty much enabled by network connections among nice people. So much happened I had to make a spreadsheet to help me organize the sessions I did at least 30 workshops, presentations, consultations, and class visits. Beyond the snafus of US Failways on the trip over, catching and somehow warding off the Cog Dog Cough Wog in week 1, keeping tabs on my ds106 class– the blogging fell off the table. I’m not sure I am ready to be the Roving Presentation Dude. I’m worn flat. A number of sessions were re-purposed, but never carbon copies, and most of them evolved along the way- many variations of Web Storytelling sessions from 20 minutes to 3 hour workshops, [...]

This cartoon is on a card my sister sent me a few years ago; I have kept it on my refrigerator along with the gallery of dogs past. But I’m not that dog, I’m still at the blogging, April of this year is rolling up to the 10 year mark for CogDogBlog. I’m still figuring it out. And that is what I was musing about today for the people in the open #etmooc course/community (were I in the business of making acronyms would I be aiming for “COURSMUNITY”? No) that launched this month. My part so far has been setting up the blog hub, and in verifying the feeds for that site, I have glanced at over 450 blogs. I’ve not seen any alike. Quite a few are new blogs, maybe new for the course but also it seems some educators first efforts. That’s awesome. I tuned in for the [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by postaletrice Greetings from ds106! We are in the second week here of the Spring 2013 (yes in Canada, this is a winter semester, sigh) University of Mary Washington course. Last year, the first time through teaching this class in person, I attempted to do audio reflections á la the great Scottlo (where is that dude?). That was interesting, but time consuming. So this semester I will start a series of reflections of teaching the class. I already gushed about the first impressions of my students. The first two weeks is something Martha and I coined last semester as “Bootcamp”, where in week 1 and week 2 we focus on all the logistics and setup they should do to be proficient in their blogging and media producing the rest of the semester. I tried a weak housebuilding analogy – week [...]

During the ramp up Election night i was visiting Bryan Alexander, and found a relevant movie to watch, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Relevant? Heck yes- shape shifting monsters that emerge every now and then from the ice? Watching of the early scenes, we smiled at the retro computer chess game that Kurt Russell’s character RJ Macready curses at when he loses This scene cried out to me to be GIFfed; the first one I trimmed out the segment in MPEG Streamclip where he is just drinking his JBs, the glass up and down is a great repeat, and he has a little bit of q wry smile. Its kind of dark (as is the movie). For tis one, I extracted abut 12 frames and imported into The Gimp, dropped maybe 5 that were not critical. I then used the Groom method, lassoing the key area to animate, set as [...]

Last week was the part of ds106 where (cue the John Williams score -ba da ba da ba da) we approach maybe the most treacherous waters of creativity (underwater shot of woman swimming, legs kicking). VIDEO As our teaching of ds106 evolves, I”ve found it useful to start each new (new to the syllabus) media with an observing activity, and so as in years past, we have students cue up Ebert”s essay on How to Read a Movie and ask them to look in detail at a scene from a movie. Notching it up a bit, the twist added this year really worked well, what I called “Look, Listen, Analyze”. We provided links to a few YouTube playlists of “great scenes” from movies, and askd the students to choose one (without watching it). The task was then to watch it 3 times, 3 different ways: Before watching the first time, [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As we move into audio week, I wanted to whip together a quick example of a ds106 assignment just in case students are having trouble in Audacity. I hit the random button a few times in the audio assignments and ended up on Theme Verse: Create your own verse from a song! Pick a few lines from a few of your favorite songs that have the same focus. Then, combine them together to make a new verse in a song. Make sure it makes sense and it goes together! So the idea is to put together a verse of a song with selections take from multiple songs, but that are tied together by theme or to make sense, like they are the verse of one song. Here’s my thought process. I opened iTunes and tried to remember the verses of [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by wsilver Last June, before the Northern Voice conference, I spent some extra time in Vancouver at UBC to get insight into their success with UBC Wiki as a community platform as well as a publishing engine (w.g. wiki content being pushed to WordPress). Part of it was talking to the tech wizards behind it, (including Will, The Wiki Gardener™), librarians, and some faculty. I was curious what I could bring back to University of Mary Washington, whether there was an opportunity for the wiki as a similar place in a school where blogging was pretty well established as a publishing platform. The uptake at UBC might be in part due to the science, math, and engineering fields that use it more extensively than other disciplines, or the timing of its start being in place near or before the rise of blog [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My current book reading is The New Kings of Nonfiction, a collection edited by my This American Life hero, Ira Glass (who oddly has no self maintained online presence I can find). It’s a collection of stories that weave in the kind of storytelling and interest TAL conjures, from the published world of reporting where the story elements are often sifted out. .. for a surprising number of reporters, the stagecraft of telling a story– managing its fable-like qualities– is not of secondary concern, but a kind of mumbo jumbo that serious-minded people don’t get caught up in. Taking delight in this part of the job, from their perspective, has little place in our important work as journalists. Another public radio officemate at the time- a Columbia University School of Journalism grad–would come back from the field with funny, vivid [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Kitchen Wench I bet there are bloggers out there who write outlines, and carefully craft their ideas in drafts, and revisions. Generally, I start out withe the classic half baked quarter thought eight pondered idea and see where it goes. This one could be a rambler, but I’m getting cranky at seeing overly simplistic and outright ludicrous ideas about what an educational experience really is. And I can be accused of trying to make a special case because I am part of the system, but the comparison of the demise of the way being for the publishing, traveling, music business by no means makes it a natural conclusion to say education being so easily displaced by the Brave New World. Why? Learning is not a transactional experience. It is way more messy (and hence interesting) than these other industries. They [...]

I’ve been daunted by the ds106 Spreadsheet Invasion assignment where you are charged with creating an animation using the software designed for… sales reports, etc. It is, ironically, the first Design Assignment. And one that is least frequently done. But thankfully, it was my student Tiffany who undertook it bravely in her Tale of a Flower version that pushed me over the hump of inertia to try this. So here, I tell in a rather horribly inaccurate fashion, the process of Geology that form sedimentary rock (invasions of inland seas, rivers, and desert environments over time) and uplift/eroison processes that shape canyons. I did this while idling time yesertday at BWI airport, wine was involved (Malbec, I love relaxing at Vino Vola). A lady at the next time working on NUMBERS in her spreadsheet must have been tsk-tsking me coloring in cells. There is a fair bit of slop, I [...]