3228 Posts Categorized "Blog Pile"

Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.

Blog Pile

Havalinas

Today I am driving across a rainy country road in southern Ontario, thinking a little of home, and out of the random shuffle of songs on my ipod comes a lovely, haunting, but lovel song by the Pixies that I mist have neve tuned my ears to before… did they sing “Sedona”? Indeed, after the […]

Blog Pile

Daily Create for Kids?

One of my favorite pieces of the ds106 fleet of awesome is The Daily Create – something we built together last year to provide a platform for regular creative challenges. While we use it within the ds106 courses taught at UMW, it is a low overhead way for people to participate in our (non-bovine) online […]

Blog Pile

Five Card Stories with 8th Graders

I was superexcited when Heather Durnin invited me to visit her grade 8 students in Wingham, Ontario, but the bonus was being able to connect her class with Clarence Fisher’s one up in Snowy River, Manitoba. This came togather over a few emails in the last 5 days, and we settled on a demo and then hands on session with Five Card Flickr Stories done live via a Google Hangout

One of the more fun, but also a bit challenging ways to do this, is as a group, so we had both classes pick the photos for a group story. What is interesting from the times I was inspired this from the demos of Five Card Nancy by Ruben Puentedura, is the discussion of the why for the photo choices, especially as you get to later rounds and need to think about how they are connected.

Our group ended up with a dark mystery involving a strange door, a man perhaps dead or sleeping, and maybe a place to hide a body. But the real interesting part was when the netbooks got passed out and the students started doing their own stories

There was at least 25 new stories added when the class ended, and likely more were done. Heather had set up a google doc with her students where they each entered the URL for their own stories, plus we had them volunteer to share theirs or nominate another students to share with the group (I like How Heather makes it an option for someone to not share out loud if they did not want to)

I see Clarence has blogged this faster then me, awesome!

in addition I saw inventiveness, like how one student incorporated a flickr image not found right into her story. Another student tried going back in the browser, ended up with 6 photos, but was not able to save (aha a bug for me to fix!).

We also looked at the feature where you can see how one photo appears in multiple stories, like the one of a turtle a few students had used which led to seeing a funny story with an ending perhaps not best for the turtle.

I then suggested we create a story space just for the Idea Hive, which took me about 3 minutes to put in place- so the students interested in adding photos just need to tag them in flickr and they can now use Five Card Flickr to tell stories just from this set of photos .

To make sure it worked, I created this one, from which i can be retweeted, cut and pasted into a blog, or retold with a different story for the same photos

Blog Pile

GIFs from the Road

Gotta feed the animated GIF bacteria that lives in my gut. I had a few sets of photos I have taken over the travel span that I took series of things in motion for the express purpose of making them animated. I did these in PhotoShop via the method blogged earlier – essentially importing files as a stack, setting frame sequences in he animation palette, and sometimes masking out to reduce the elements being animated. These will be tagged to end up in the Photo it Like Peanut Butter ds106 assignment.

First up, from the great state of New York, at the small town where I crossed the Hudspn River, I had just hopped out of the truck to take a photo of the bridge when the sound of a train grabbed my attention (I literally ran across the tracks to get the angle) – this one is 549k.

Next up, an animation from a single image. I had stopped to take a picture of Yet Another Crumbling Down Home. I really liked the look of this window and its composition, but it also looked good in black and white (same image, just converted). In this one, I masked just the inside of the frame to isolate a color change, and made the time it spent on the black and white frame about twice as long (and it is only 111k):

Blog Pile

Feed2JS Keeps Chugging Along

It still is going, almost 10 years since fiddling with some PHP script that converted RSS to javascript (and not even sure if proper credit was given to David Carter-Tod who’s earlier Wytheville News service inspired me) – Feed2JS is still motoring along, made available for free and wide open for making RSS content as […]