ds106: Digital Storytelling Tagged Stuff

I’m thinking of Jerry’s note this morning (happy to see him signed up for Camp Magic Macguffin)

“@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project.

— Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012

With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting slip the time spent creating for class, itself the self-renewal I need as much as oxygen. Seeing Scottlo Warhol his Second Life self in a followup to Leelzebub’s own effort had me eager to try the tutorial.

But alas I am photoshopless until the new order comes in, and that was way more than I wanted to bite off and try in GIMP.

So I went for the next best thing, doing an animated GIF. When I visited the National Cryptologic Museum on Saturday I enjoyed watching the machine that had a computer controlled arm for loading data form a giant circular library system (I cannot recall the name of it), the robot arm seemed to have some good potential.

I shot some video on my iPhone and then loaded it into MPEG StreamClip to do some frame grabs (using the low res 320×240 size). I then used the web based Gifninja site to create the GIF above. It’s basic, and one frame moves a bit more, but I like it, especially the shadowy figure who passes behind.

It’s interesting to note that Gigninja has a new tool (at least since a year more or more ago) for splitting GIFs, might be some fun things to do with mashing up sequences of existing animated GIFS.

This takes me back to my first animated GIF, from December 14, 2011, when I used scenes from Frankenstein to declare ds106 IS ALIVE

It’s almost nostalgic to think of the birth of ds106- I wrote then

So it’s not even place, it’s three weeks out, why are all my colleagues, friends madly in their labs, and doing of all things, retro 1990s techno things like animated gifs?

And so it is with this wild ride that starts next month. It really is under the hand of Dr. Bava, but he is being humble and not wanting to be a mad dictator, but he does have a vision. I was lucky to spend an hour on Skype with Jim, Tom and Martha, just bouncing ideas.

What should unfold will be unlike many of the other MOOC efforts in that it is not hinged on the weekly drum beat drive of the syllabus and synchronous lecture like sessions in Elluminate. There wont be discussion forums (likely). it will be blog based, and very much individually driven. It will be what ever you want it to be- you will be able to follow the structure jim and Martha are doing at UMW as a “regular” class, or you can cherry pick the bits you want to do.

It’s all about a continuous pulse of creativity. Jim is reeally hooked into the notion of The Dailyshoot and Martha has a nifty duct tape and RSS system for crowdsourcing assignments.

My own idea, also influenced my dailyshoot (which you know I love) is that there could be small daily creative assignments available each day. One does not need to do them all, maybe for a class, it would be 2 or three per week. But they would all be small things one could do each do to create something new, maybe a graphic, a fake movie poster, a story played out in Amazon reviews. The thing about Dailyshoot is that it drives you to try new, and challenging, things.

All of these would be things people can do or not, but might feed the larger, conceptual assignments that are the frame of Jim’s previous ds106 courses at UMW.

The, like now, ds106.us .. IT’S ALIVE. Come in and play now, come on over to Camp Magic Macguffin for the summer of ds106.

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

This is about as close as I might get to a reflection on my first round of teaching an on site section of ds106 at the University of Mary Washington- the class had barely wrapped and we were off into prep for Faculty Academy, and this week, ds106 cranks up for its summer iteration. I dropped the ball on my audio reflections leaving about 4 recordings sitting high and dry.

Not to mention it is 2am and I have an online presentation to deliver at 9am.

But if I don’t blog it now, I might lose it all, given (another pending blog post) a summer of travel that starts in less than 48 hours.

Enough prelude, get to it, Levine!

First of all, this was about the first time since the mid 1990s that I was teaching a class; then like now, I am humbled at how much in underestimate the toll it takes. No, let me go one back than first of all- it was a thrilling experience I have no regrets on, and could not be prouder of the work done by all of my students (see the collection of final projects).

Knowing how to do the ds106 work is one thing, being able to assist 25 students in doing it… another. I have to say that they accomplish much on what they learn to and not so much what I teach them; I am there to set the pace, to nudge, coach, cajole.

The biggest struggle was my in class strategies and presence; I do not feel like I developed the “shtick” or way to carry the show in my own way. I have no expectations of doing the class a la Jim Groom, who really ends up generating a frenzy of energy among his students (with his gift of talking smack to people and them loving it). Part of it was perhaps the awkward beginning, the 2 weeks of class when it started and I was coming in via Skype, meaning it took more time for the students and I to get to know each other.

What worked best were sessions where I broke things down into small segments of students doing rapid prototyping or group activities. What worked least best was the sessions where I just got up and talked and showed. It was uphill all the way to engage in discussions (though there were good ones when we discussed YouTube genres).

Some of the best classes happened in February, and the peak was likely the night I had them do Foley sounds for a Charlie Chaplin silent film- here is their final work

The intensity of the work was hard, and I sensed many of my students were so focussed on getting their “30 stars” of video assignments, that doing that superseded the making art damnit goal. I did not think I would have to be explicit in criteria for writing up assignments, but even with commenting, I see posts with thrilling titles like “Mashup Assignment”, no links, and not the kind of “story behind the story” I asked for often.

I should go to the half full glass as I had at least 6-8 students who did really good blog writing and pretty much documented their progress. I think all of us got worn out through the video section, but then again, so many students rose to the occasion who had never done video before.

Assignment wise, the “Return to the Silent Era” may have been the killer one, with over 40 people completing it, and the work of Ben Rimes hitting the crowning achievement of appearing in a British tabloid.

My biggest contribution might have ben creating the assignment remix generator, riffing off of the ideas of Tom Woodward for a mechanism for creating different “card twists” to change up a randomly selected assignment. The unplanned gem was in asking students to go back to the original assignments and identify media from another student’s work to use as a reference for the remix. As of this writing, there were 143 new remix assignments done.

The coding on that was largely on the shoulders of the work Martha Burtis did last year on the assignments site. I’ve been doing some cleanup and improvements on that site as well.

The next add on for the remix site might be a tool to encourage re-writing of existing assignments to work in different disciplines, so you could have a tool that lets the user select, say Math, and they get randomly chosen existing assignment and have to contribute a new way to do it for their selected discipline. It’s pretty much the same engine.

All of this is fraying as I enter into the weird colored zone of the summer section I am co-teaching with Martha. This one is a 10 week course, completely online. As a counter to the “Summer of Oblivion” the theme of this summer is bright and happy camp experience as Camp Magic Macguffin. It is my role to bring some sanity and civility to what was a horror sceme last summer.

Martha and I have done a fun series of weekly videos, playing with the theme– the whackiest part was we set up a swag store before sitting down to tweak the syllabus. But this is the fun part about this class being done in a performance mode- the direction and shape will be driven by the people that show up.

And boy have people been great to sign up to take the class or even hover around as wise experienced camp counselors. For our open participants, see a new guide to participation we set up on the main mother site. The things we’d ask the open folks to do are to play as much as they can with the assignments, as well as keeping the flow of Daily Create going. Mainly we hope you interact with our students via their blog posts and tweets.

Now I getting really sleepy and blog sloppy. The summer course may be a ton of work, but it is going to be some crazy unknown directions as hopefully our participants start changing up our story.

If you have been wavering about being in ds106, now is the prime time to jump in- we already have in the first days some art being create, but mostly a lot of the community stepping in and trying to connect with the students.

I was going to work this into another post, but with the cacophony of blogs going on and on about MOOCs and such- I can say as long as I can have some say, there will be no cheap “x” added to ds106- it is what it is, open participants can ge the full or half full immersion that makes it fomcfortabnle (damn I am tired).

Rocking with ds106 in the summer of Magic. Join in now.

Things are shaping up nicely for the summer course of ds106 I am co-teaching with Martha Burtis, we have been super busy supervising and doing a lot of the work at Camp Magic Mcguffin. If you have every mused about trying to take ds106 as an open participant, this is perhaps the best time, during the summer, to come to camp, and let your creativity go wild. Go check out our welcome video and see the special info we provide for online open participants (yes Lisa Lane, we have a tag for you;-).

We were excited to hear that canmpers are already getting into the spirit, Lee has already done and created a first camper submitted assignment.

So I wandered down to the shored of Lake Macguffin to see how the cleanup was going.

It is still off limits while the crews finish the work, after emptying the lake, and removing all fo the debris with backhoes. Yes, there is a bit of reality distortion that happens in some spots, as you can see, but the water looks great, eh? Martha has been busy working on the new docks (she is handy with those power tools), and today, I took one of the new kayaks out for a spin:

As you can see, there are a lot of interesting nooks and crannies to explore, and the Fish and Wildlife Service has confirmed we are adjacent to the location of some nesting bald eagles. We hope we get a chance to spot some of them soon. Just make sure you stay clear of that fenced off cove at the south end of the lake.

Well, that’s about all the news fro Camp, remember we start on May 21, but if you are an open online participant, heck, just drop in when you can, Just catch the creative fever.

Can’t wait to see you in camp- I’m working on setting up a side blog to post some video updates.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Jim Groom and I are in the last home stretch of ds106 at University of Mary Washington, final projects and last blog posts being due Sunday, and next week being individual review sessions. After an intense semester, as hard working academics we ought to head off to an idyllic summer retreat, a tropical island, the south of Spain… we’ll maybe one of us is moving on.

But not this dog- with my colleague Martha Burtis, we are ramping up a summer version of ds106; a 10 week online class for students at UMW, but as always, wide open to the rest of the masses on the internet. Are those monsterous sized moocs wearing you down? Maybe the grind of Udacity is not heating your kettle?

Come to camp.

Yes, on May 21, Camp Magic Macguffin will open for all to enjoy the ds106 summer of digital storytelling. We will have the same structure of storytelling, visual, digital, audio, video, remnix assignments,, but in a new setting. A new camp space is about to be opened up as a positive environment; unlike last summer which went strangely awry, the new operatiors of the camp have a well crafted plan modeled from the Finnish Hygge Model of Self-Actualization.

How can you be part of this? Just stay tuned to http://ds106.us for more information and a link when the workers have finished omn the remodeling of the camp facility. You can prep by either setting up a blog (preferably of the WordPress flavor), or deciding how to use a current blog for your ds106 work (we can accept your work via a blog feed on a tag or a category, thats what I do here). We will set up a camp enrollment form right away

Get in the creative flow now by practicing The Daily Create.. daily? Give a peek at some of the 365 assignments participants have added to the Assignment Bank; give some feedback/comment love to the final projects that are rolling out over the few days to the streams for my class or Jim’s section.

Go outside and start looking for that perfect marshmallow stick. Go back to your own past summer experiences, and stir up your favorite camp fire stories. Get some camp swag.

Can you feel the camp spirit coming?

Yeah, it just doesn’t matter! But making summer art with ds106 does, damnit.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Andrew Curtis

This is the last week of my first semester teaching ds106; Jim Groom has reminded my plenty about what a marathon push this is for both student and teacher. Their blogs have fallen quiet as (I hope) they are going full metal on their final projects. Before doing any philosophical ear waxing on tyhe experience, two meta-ish things have bobbed up repeatedly as a means of looking at the work we are all doing.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the assignments or the branded #life spirit of it all.

One of the pleasant (or least negative) aspects of this course is that we really do not spend much fi any time teaching software. You would think we’d have to cover a lot of grounds with students doing photography, visual design, audio recording and editing, video work, remixing… But we have been able to avoid worry about whether students can learn software, and putting that on them to figure out. Not in the sense of abdicating this role, but handing it over.

So we never dictate what software to use- they either use what they have, or find the free tools, or find ones we have never heard of, or download the trial versions.

What this means, for something like when we started audio, was maybe a 15 minute overview of importing files, moving them on the timeline, paying attention to wave forms, cutting and pasting of audio like text, using tracks, and exporting. It is the skill of audio production, not the menu items of Audacity we are teaching.

This is where I’d prefer to be- that we focus on the conceptual level. We ought to not be teaching software. Well, I prefer not to.

But what I wanted to write about here was two broad areas I observed that happen in ds106 across the kind of work the students do.

Looking at the World Differently Through a Lens
In the activities we did in class “rapid prototyping” and especially the Daily Creates, I have seen (and heard from) students who describe that they go about their activities looking and listening in new ways. This happens first in photography, where they start to look for details they might have not noticed before, or think about thew way scenes they scene might be “cropped” for a coherent meaning. It is the first act of “noticing”, but not the last.

Would someone every see a stack of CD discs as art or even interesting? It all depends on how you look, and appreciate the light

or just a world reflected in a puddle?

When you go into Audio, they learn the magic of foley art, of how subtle sound effects make audio “feel” real, how music, soft background music, sets themes. The learn how a single scream has wound its way through scores of films. I’d like to think student listen differently, or at least notice the impact of sounds around them. Closing doors. Footsteps in an empty hallway. Water flowing into a sink. Crickets.

We extend this idea of “noticing” as well in video, when we introduce the ideas of “reading” a movie, of noting the use of light, camera angle, the placement of character. Dominant and subservient positioning.

Now I don’t have any analytics on this, but it is a theme that I can see across the course, and one I will continue to pay attention to. We can be better creators, communicators, by getting batter and seeing the world through media and being more conscious of sensory inout we might not have noted prior.

The Power of Layers
As we have progressed through the trail of media, I have been pondering the importance of having students appreciate the use of layers in media- of how meaning is changed, ort effects are created simply by understanding where a set of media is situated in a stack. There is the dimension of time in one dimension and what is visible in the other.

In moving from the simple web based photo editors to tools like PhotoShop or GIMP, students learn how layers not only make their work more organized, but also open a world of creativity in visual form, just be having this sense of media stratigraphy, plus the impact of layer effects.

Layers also come into play in audio editing, as students learn to make soundscapes, voice, effects, music, that when done well, when levels are adjusted that sound has a dimension perhaps not appreciated before.

We did not do much multi track editing for video, but in using even MovieMaker or iMovie, students master it by understanding how layering in the editor allows the mix of image, sound, but also effects, and titles, and again, working in a dimension o time.

Again, I sit here typing these words with nothing more than gut feeling, not data, etc. But to me, we are getting to those key conceptual ideals by having students amp up their world noticing and getting a solid comprehension of how media can be stacked in time and place.

So maybe this cannot me measured, charted, badges, etc, but these meta skills are the realm I’d prefer to be running in.

I tried my hand poorly a few weeks ago at the ds106 Kinetic Typography assignment. There is a reason maybe only 3 or 4 people have braved this one.

Kinetic typography (“moving text”) is an animation technique that allows a creative entrepreneur to mix text and motion. Your job is to take a speech or bit of dialog (try audiobooks, movies, TV shows, etc.) and animate it like this example from Sherlock Holmes. Consider how you could visually enforce the speech’s underlying themes… or subvert them. Be creative!

Without too much fanfare, and a nood to my fellow ds106ers who dig Cool Hand Luke, the classic line by Strother Martin’s aptly named character “Captain”, but more with the lines around it. The whole thing of putting people in their perceived places? What we have here…

I got hooked on thie film a year ago, and did a minimalist poster as well as a Macguffin. It’s just a classic on many fronts, and not just for Paul Newman’s larger than life performance, but many others in the mix. “A night in the box”?

I really fumbled around with this in Adobe After Affects. I swore I had the full version on my old Mac, since I had the CSS 5 full suite, but apparently in some fit of file cleaning, I sapped some key files, and it would not load. So I went for the student approach, the 30 day trial run.

While I ought to give a full blown process run down. I watched a few tutorials, and got the key tip on control scrubbing the audio to match the word entrance. After Effects is not for the feint of software. There are so many settings, effects (duh) and ways you can put key frames and ween things. I did not get as far as playing with the typing effects or the camera effects, so it was pretty much popping the words up in sync with the sound. I did a few position tweens, some with a box blur effect.

It was alos a fumble fest with rendering it. But I bulled through it, and now have some awareness of when I might reach for this large hammer again.

Some men you just can’t reach.

Maybe because they are fiddling with key frames or lost in renderland.

Getting back into the ds106 creative mood, I was inspired recently to create not only a new animated GIF but make it a new ds106 Design Assignment. Last week, Jim Groom and I watched The Conversation, a brilliant 1974 movie from the conspiracy genre (the slow slide into craziness of Gene Hackman’s character is brilliantly executed).

But it was the menu screen for the DVD that made both of us say “HA!” in the background was a direct on shot of the tape machines that figure in the movie, and it was just all animated GIF- the only moving parts were the reels. Jim stayed up late after the movie pulling out the scene into a clean moving GIF.

I had it mind to make this a new assignment Animated The DVD Menu:

Convert a key scene from a movie into an animated GIF and include graphics elements to make it look like the menu screen of a DVD. Be creative in the kind of items that appear on the menu; make it relevant to the plot

Continuing with the use of material from Bullitt, I made my animated DVD menu:

Of course the scene that screamed for the menu was the classic chase scene (although I did pull clips from other scenes- one where Bullitt tells his bosses that Ross was dead- good shifty eyes there, and the other conversation he has with the Jacqueline Bisset character where she is distraught after seeing the kind of work Bullitt does).

But I went back to the chase scene- remembering that in the parts where the Mustang Bullitt drives is chasing the bad guys in the Charger, bouncing through the hills of San Francisco, they cars pass at least 2 times, maybe 3, the same green volkswagen (they re-used clips). The scene I used here was perfect because both cars fly past the green bug, and it makes for a great loop.

So I got the trimmed segment within MPEG Streamclip, saved as MP4. I had to convert to a Quicktime .mov file (I use Quicktime player Pro), si I could import video frames as layers in PhotoShop (In CSS 5 on the Mac, you have to run it in 32 bit mode, which can be done from the desk top by doing a Get Info on the app).

I used the option to grab every 10 frames, giving me 13 frames. In the animation palette, I knocked the interval down to 0.1 second. I then put the movie title in a top layer, as well as the menu items. They persist over the entire sequence then. The final GIF weighs in at 1.1 Mb, not too bad.

For a marker on the menu, I put in the pun symbol of a bullett found at the noun project. It’s ironic, that for a cop movie, for the lead character, guns did not come into play until the end, when Bullit fired the lethal bullet.

For menu items, I played with references to the movies:

• PLAY MOVIE – this is obvious
• CRASH CARS – because this is what goes on on the big sequence, and on a DVD I would want to see even more crashes and chases
• VIEW FROM THE GREEN BUG – what did the driver of this mystery car see with as many times as it got passed by the chase cars?
• CHARGER VS MUSTANG – for the car nuts whos till want to debate the features of the lead cars
• INSIDE THE PINK SUITCASE – a reference to the latter scene that eventually provides the last clue for what Johnny Ross was up to

There it is! A new GIF, a new assignment. This is good medicine for the weary creative soul. Make some (GIF) art damnit!

By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject. It is like saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture, without letting me see it. How am I supposed to be inspired by that? (And of course it’s actually much worse than this— at least it’s understood that there is an art of sculpture that I am being prevented from appreciating).

By concentrating on what, and leaving out why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you deny them mathematics itself. So no, I’m not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in our mathematics classes, I’m complaining about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes.
– Paul Lockart, A Mathematician’s Lament

I’ve tiptoed around how to write up this post beyond having the title in mind. This idea of getting at the craft of learning things by doing, of not having students learn programming, but learn how to think computationally, of a need to have more makers, is all coalescing.

But I’m not writing about math (how could one do better than Lockhart’s essay?), but art and apps that make art, and what we learn to do, and what we let machines do.

This began when Andy Forgrave shared a really well done Silent Movie he had created with an iPhone App (Silent Film Director)

This pretty much has all the elements we had students do for the ds106 assignment Return to the Silent Era, except they had to use video editing software, discover effects, create graphics for title cards, find/edit music.

The app makes it easy.

And damn good- that really looks like a well crafted silent film assignment, the one Ben Rimes maybe took a week off his life to labor over:

and got written up for in Gizmodo and the Daily Mail, a point of ds106 pride to have one of our own featured in a freaking TABLOID!

But I wonder, is it too easy? Likewise there is the Cinemagram app, that takes a lot of the difficulty out of creating animated GIFs. No editing layers, masking holes, fighting GIMP… just an app, and smudge out an area to move (see examples).

One might say with tools that make it easier, the creator can focus more on the story.

But I wonder if the apps make it that easy, does the user lose sight of how it even works? If you don’t get your hands inside the engine, do you even appreciate what makes the car go fast?

I do not have answers.

It reminds me a bit a few years ago when I came across the methods to do the tilt-shift effect in PhotoShop – the method here gives you a sense about what you need to change in a photo to give it that effect– although I know often do this with an app on my iPhone, and have not done it in PhotoShop in a long while. but having done it by hand first, I connect back to those first principles.

I am not disdaining the use of apps for image editing. Heck, I am guilt! I use ToonCamera quite often because I like what it does

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I might know how to do something like this in PhotoShop but I’ve not really learned the steps.

It goes even farther back- I think I started in PhotoShop 2.0 in 1992- there were not even layers in the software. There was the magic of Channel Operations of “ChOps” like Kai’s Power Tips. I recall trying one recipe that was about 88 steps to create a chrome effect on text, something you can do now with one menu item.

So being old school, I find there is a benefit still in learning how to do much of the editing, at least first, by hand, to understand the principles. I worry about an age where we jump first to the easy apps. There is a balanced approach like Michael Branson Smith, who has done some his video efforts by editing first, then running through an iPhone app solely to layer an effect on top with the 8mm app.

I am not criticizing anyone, least of all Andy Forgrave, who guns the gamut in his use of creative tools. And to me, this line of where the doing it the hard way first and using the easy tool later lies, because in fact it moves, and it lies in different areas for different people. I just want to keep an eye on times when we might go for the “easy” way too soon- there is a huge amount of value in that struggling by doing it the hands on way.

Going directly to the app seems… like cutting out the important parts of learning technique.

Back to Lockhart:

A good problem is something you don’t know how to solve. That’s what makes it a good puzzle, and a good opportunity. A good problem does not just sit there in isolation, but serves as a springboard to other interesting questions. A triangle takes up half its box. What about a pyramid inside its three-dimensional box? Can we handle this problem in a similar way?

I can understand the idea of training students to master certain techniques— I do that too. But not as an end in itself. Technique in mathematics, as in any art, should be learned in context. The great problems, their history, the creative process— that is the proper setting. Give your students a good problem, let them struggle and get frustrated. See what they come up with. Wait until they are dying for an idea, then give them some technique. But not too much.

I don’t even have a clear stance here- I am more in curious wondering mode about where it is best to do stuff the hard way by hand and where to let the apps take over.

It’s time I eat my own remix food and do a ds106 remixed assignment assignment. I drew the One Story / Four Icon [remixed]: What’s the Prequel?.

Here’s mine, which I call “Young Whipper” based on the original work done by MC Guirk:

The original assignment, one of the all time classics at ds106, is:

The assignment is to reduce a movie, story, or event into its basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons, four of them. Write your blog post up but do not give away the answer, let people guess! The challenge is to find the icons that suggest the story, but do not make it so easy.

with the remix twist:

or

“What’s The Prequel?”

What is the backstory? Prequels are the Hollywood rage as followups to movies, so for this remix, develop the prequel story and generate it in the same format as the original. Bonus points for explaining a disturbed childhood or an early force of development. Just leave out Jar Jar Binks.

Okay, so I did not purely use Rachel’s original media, but made something that is the precursor to her movie. A young boy is playing in the sand, and discovers a whip and a crystal skull, who does he become?

Actually, this is not so original, as it became a TV series. Alas, that’s the way the remix bounces.

The sources of the icons include:

boy icon
http://www.the-source.info/index.php?section=SRC&link=contact

shovel and bucket
http://thenounproject.com/noun/beach-bucket/#icon-No2017

whip
http://www.veryicon.com/icons/movie–tv/indiana-jones-and-raiders-lost-ark/whip.html

skull (removed the bones)
http://thenounproject.com/noun/skull/#icon-No784

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by carlstr

The photo I chose for this post actually has nothing to do with what (I think I will) write about, but came up in the photostream of something from the compfight search on “unexpected”.

Get it? “unexpected”.

Enough pre-amble.

It’s been exciting to see the student work come in for this week’s ds106 work that uses my experimental assignment remix generator.

We’ve been emphasizing that the focus of this exercise is less on what they create and more on how they go about interpreting and writing up how to do something like One Story/Four Icons [remixed]: What’s the prequel?. What we want is to see/read your thinking on this.

Tow things have come in as questions from students.

(1) How do I do this if it makes no sense? Well one option is to keep reloading the generator until you get something you think will work. But I’d like to see some inventiveness here (which means I better get off my butt and do some assignments) – and write it up saying why it does not work, and offer a different way to interpret it that might work.

The example above might not be such a stretch. The movie/book done as the One Story / Four Icon might not have a prequel, but nothing prevents you from imagining it and doing it as 4 icons. So this is doable. Something like Movie Voice Machines [Remixed]: The Opposer presents something maybe not meaningful- how to you dot he opposite of a voicemail message for a tv/film character? Maybe an email autoresponder? It’s not impossible, and nothing prevents you from changing up the remixed assignment, as long as you can justify it.

The other issue is what sparked me- (2) I can’t do anything with the original assignment media.

This might be if all someone has posted is a final video, or animation without links to any sources. What this would hopefully, sublimely suggest to my students, I hope is an appreciation for assignment writeups that include more than the final work.

What I mean, this is why it is important in writing upds106 materials to cite/link the sources of your original media, the film clip on youtube, the image found at ffffound, the audio from the Internet Archive– e.g. provide the raw materials you used to create the assignment. That would make it so someone else could perhaps do a variant of the work you created.

Doing this makes what you create much more viable to be remixed. It was nothing we stated upfront (as the idea of remixing assignments was a fuzzy dream), but will be wrapped into future ds106 sections I teach as part of the criteria for what an assignment writeup should include.

Remixing has been an interesting creative form; making what you create remixable is to me, the right thing to do, if at a minimum just to cite the sources.

Also there is the variant (2b), “there are no examples to work from”. I made a mistake and told my class that in a worse case scenario they could use their own media, but in hindsight, this is really not a remix, but a re-edit.

As many things ds106, we are building the plane in mid-flight, already in a week, we have 61 66 remixed assignments completed – give it a whirl yourself at http://remix.ds106.us/

And added last week was also a way to directly add new remix cards to the mix. Mix it up (I need to do some myself, damnit).