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CogDog The Blog

An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

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Food Closeup Station #5

Today’s daily create was Remix someone’s daily create video from TDC 633 with an alternative sound track The Daily Create for October 2, 2013 was “Create a video that takes a close look at the food you eat.” — see how you can change the mood or meaning of someone else’s story with a new […]

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Cory’s Colorful Moods

I was late night tinkering on a current remix effort of For The Remix, an open invitation to generate remixes from Jonathan Worth’s photos of author Cory Doctorow (also a ds106 assignment) For this go around, I wanted to do something in code, and in the web. I cannot remember where the dim light bulb […]

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Time/People Passing

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I already have a list (a real list! in Evernote!) of topics to blog, and this was not even on it. But… Curse and bless the serendipity of the web. Can someone throw me a rope down this rabbit hole? Never mind, I […]

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For The Remix… NOW!

FTW

If you paid very close, detailed (ahem) attention to the Triple Dog Dare — this is RULE 2 for the current ds106 Headless open course activity of remix– it’s time to break out for creativity in a big way, and remix some photos of author Cory Doctorow.

He’s given us his blessing (e.g. boing boing permission). All of the information, details, photos to remix, exmaples, instructions are on the site I cobbled together from Jonathan Worth’s idea. Here, let him say it.

https://vimeo.com/64019665

Jonathan’s phonar students are on to it now. Hey are we going to let those phonar kids out remix the mighty ds106? (cheap shot appeal to competition) (I’ll resort to any tactic to draw you out of what else you spend time on beside ds106).

A few words about the site– when Jonathan and I planned this last Spring, we wondered about thousands of Cory fans, Boing Boing readers descending on a site, so I suggested we hang it on a WordPress.com site and let them handle the bandwidth. It was a decent challenge working with the limits there, and that was not much of an issue– I am using Modularity Lite, one of the Graphpaper Press themes (I love them). The galleries you get for displaying images are nicely done, they can be randomized (seen on the remix gallery and the page that shows Cory’s book covers).

The front page is a bit of a trick- I am using the theme feature to have a front teaser, and to make space to show the background image, I have snuck in a transparent PNG image (it’s like the old invisible GIF trick!)

ftw

When I ran this for my class before, i had them submit remixes via a Google form; when we went public, I was leery of managing the form submissions, and suggested having all submissions be done via a subreddit. When I met with Jonathan 2 weeks ago, we decided to go back to a form, as we wanted to capture a remix trail (when people remixed a remix) and to ask for a statement about how they define their work as a remix. To be honest, the response has not been that overwhelming (ahem), so we are good for now with form input. I did throw in a second sheet to the google form response sheet, to do some tricks to compose the right HTNL so adding to the gallery and the text list of all submissions a cut and paste step.

We left the subreddit up as a place where people could optionally add their remixes and we can run a popular vote – hey that means you, go to the subreddit and upvote some remixes!

subreddit

I had my UMW students do this last Spring as a remix assignment for ds106 and you can find their work as well as some of the open participants sprinkled in the FTR (For the Remix) (Get it?) Gallery:

Need to see what was remixed already?

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After All These Years: THIS

Twas maybe 1994 and I went to some eLearning conference in Anaheim, probably a Masie event. I was so green (ahem like hardly even qualified to be hired) in my new role as an instructional technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges. What did I know from conferences? But I was horrified. Having traveled from home, […]

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Kirk vs Barney

“Internet: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship ds106. Its multi-year mission: to explore strange new remixes; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no digital story has gone before…” But can the crew of the Enterprise survive something worse than the Klingons, Romulans, and Khan combined? […]

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Googly Eyed GIFs

It has nothing to do with the Mothership Google, but Googley Eyes are useful for sock puppets. Via the Firehose of Links Known as Alec Courous, I found myself diverted "Add googly eyes to a GIF" http://t.co/76z5EKhIoX — Dr. Alec Couros (@courosa) November 18, 2013 I find Googlify is a sophisticated technological tool (free of […]