(click to see a wee bit larger)
It was time tonight to do some ds106 design assignment, this time a Triple Troll Quote. the classic ds106 assignment game of mixup and mis-attribution:
Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure. From the official site: How It Works 1) Get a picture of someone people idolize. Obi Wan Kenobi, Barack Obama, Captain Kirk “” any beloved public figure will do. 2) Slap on a famous quotation from a similar character from a different book or movie. Pick something close enough that a non-fan might legitimately confuse them. If you’re using Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, you’ll probably want to grab a quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. 3) Attribute the quotation to a third character, from yet a third universe. This way, nothing about your image is correct, and you’re trolling fans of all three characters at once.
So what the bleep is my image? I snuck in a Quadruple! This all started with a tweet by Audrey Watters following some twitter banter about Mitt Romney’s debate remark about pawning of Sesame Street to China:
http://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/253726711118704640
The mention of Edward Abbey got me thinking about one of my favorite quotes of the irascible desert rat urban curmudgeon (I miss the words he wrote so much):
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
or a later iteration
They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
And this lead me to thinking about the hysteria of Massive Online Open Courses and it all came together.
So for anyone who actually might still be reading here, the mixups are:
- The quote is from Edward Abbey, who would have given a rats fart about MOOCs
- The photo is of Coursera founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng
- The quote is mis-attributed to the guy who got like 300,000,000 gazillion people to sign up for an A1 course, and for all major newspapers, magazines, is the founder of MOOCs much to the chagrin of our friends in Canada.
- And just for a fourth leg to this troll, I put an edX logo on Ng’s laptop.
Cause as we all know, massive has nothing to do with growth.
“Growth is for babies.” -A former baby
I’ve just gotta chime in to tell ya that I do read your posts. To the end (at least the vast majority of the time). 😉 They always make me smile, and I always appreciate your work, though I don’t always comment.
Maybe it’s a different angle to consider for you (and maybe not), but I feel that, aside from naturally being massively entertaining (*wink*) your posts are a cheat sheet for anyone in ds106 if they care to pay attention. I tend to be an extremely visual learner. I really need to see things in order to understand them. You can talk at me all day long, but all I’m gonna hear is Charlie Brown’s teacher’s noises. *wo-wo-womp-wowo-wo-wo-wo…* (maybe I should have embedded a freesound here, eh?) 😉
Your posts give me a tangible example (which I desperately need), not just of the mechanics of the different assignments, but also the feel to the write-ups. They give an excellent example of how we can put a piece of ourselves into our work, they inspire me, and they give me a sense of ‘okay, I can do this, it’s not so bad.’
And most of all, I feel like seeing your blog, and all these assignments neatly folded into your overall themes, it kind of ties it all together. It’s a great demonstration of what can be done with his stuff, and how you can make all this media work for you, to capture attention, to make a point, to engage readers, and to build an overall online presence, to whatever end, (to use too many commas)…
Anyway. Your blog is a really neat application of the things we learn in ds106, in every way, and really shows the heart of it all, and so is an invaluable example. I just thought maybe you would appreciate hearing how at least one student sees it. And you know I’m not just buttering you up, cuz you’re not even the one who grades me. 😉
So yes, I’m reading, and all the way through. Please keep on posting, from wherever you are at the moment. 🙂
Thanks Crystal, and among my intents are to provide examples to follow, mangle, or ridicule.
It’s a lesson I only borrowed myself but I believe firmly in a creative class that a teacher should be doing the same work he/she is asking students to do.
The fishing for comments was just a cheap shot- your attitude and way of being in ds106 is what we aim for.
I love quadruple troll quotes that take a dig at all the xMOOCs in one fell swoop. Nice work.
Dr. Sarvis (Monkey Wrench Gang) offers up a quintuple troll quote: “When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about.â€