Have you ever had a pleasant, unexpected surprise happen as a result of having shared something online? I’m building out a new collection of these stories, having done it in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Previously I called these kinds of stories “Amazing”, but I got in a little trouble so now I am re-casting them […]
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Computers have feelings usually not expressed. They have hurt, anger, depression, and in this case, inordinate feelings of inferiority. Today’s Daily Create was to make a blue screen of death message using type only. My screen just wants to die and not come back. […]
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 […]
I’m looking forward to doing a presentation this Friday at Scottsdale Community College on “Imptov-ing Yourself with Pechaflickr” and am hoping to have a few examples of how this improv tool is being used, be it for conference activities or (better yet) educational activities (I have your example, thanks Todd Conaway). So if you have […]
This week in ds106 I give my students the ultimate bootcamp creative challenge – to figure out how to make an animated GIF. The exact wording is “from a favorite movie” but that’s just to get them thinking about topics.
Since I do the same work, I needed to step up too- I did two quick demos of GIFfing in GIMP in this week’s Open Lab, so for tonight’s masterpiece I wanted to show some techniques I have been using in doing GIFs in Photoshop.
I chose a subject that could reflect what to do when you get into trouble in ds106 – activate the GIF Signal!
This is one where I do some dancing around with Photoshop layers and masking out all but the essential bits. One benefit of doing this is your GIF files get dramatically smaller since they have to store less data. I hope I can reconstruct the steps!
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by RickC Opening scene, a frenetic office space, rows of desks of young ambitious clerks on the phone, typing reports, several smoking cigarettes. Young Billy runs into the office of the office manager, clutching a report. Billy: Mr Ritter! I found a violator of our copyright! This […]
Digital stories grow in odd places, not quite limited to 8 minute personal videos. I am very drawn to ones that you find in unexpected places- such as Olivia Judson’s recent New York Times piece. In The Last Calendar, she relates the story that emerges from a shared Google Calendar she and her brother made […]
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You may know Julia Child from her cooking, but few know that in 1960’s she was a secret agent for MI6. She was the only agent savvy enough to track down the culinary killer known as “Dough Finger” who would do his dirty deeds […]
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 1 is putting in the framing and foundation; week 2 is painting it and filling in the decoration touches, in in very short time, the neighborhood will not look at all like one of those cookie cutter housing divisions.
It’s a lot I throw at them and was even asking myself this week if it is too much. Maybe 6 students dropped (4 new ones added). They get frustrated. One thing I wanted them to do is have a better understanding of their UMW Domains control panel. usually once they set up a domain and install a blog, we never go back there. I hope to interject some tasks through out the semester to have them use other things there (this week I had them set up a forwarding email address).
Also in the house building analogy, I am making them set up their ds106 blog as a subdomain- after class, it makes little sense to have this as a primary site. I want them to understand how to create not just one online space, but to know how to do several. I am asking them to install a second copy of wordpress at their primary domain, and throughout the semester to go back and make that one more of a welcome card site (I suggested a few free themes that would work well for that).
By Monday when I was reviewing their sites, i could not be more pleased. Blog posts were titles like “phew” “Bootcamp Game Me the Boot” and “Why I Never Fit inside the Computer Science Department”. But after those first sentences, they all pretty much accomplished the set up, the blogging, the media embedding, using categories.
Unlike the not so wiley Coyote, Martin Hawksey’s coding genius (a) works without anvils falling or explosions and (b) is not focused on bird chasing… well maybe small blue ones. What started as a cool thing when I got and hung online my twitter archive after seeing that Martin got his, he then put out […]
