Writing about teaching the greatest open course on the interwebs.
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Little Wide World During a presentation last month for the TCC World Online Conference a participant noted in the chat with some irony, that despite the unconventional form and function of ds106 I pointed them to a traditional (long) syllabus for my 2013 class. […]
It was December 2010 that I spotted my first 106 in the wild, since then I have added another 219. Tomorrow is the deadline for final projects from my Spring 2013 UMW ds106 students. A few grades punched in the system later, and I close out my current era of teaching ds106. After being part […]
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Do you see those faces? That’s what a two hour dive into ds106 can do for you. At least that is what a group of faculty found out Friday at Wagner College a lovely campus on a hill at the tip of Staten Island. […]
Yesterday was week 14 for ds106, the last week of classes for my UMW students, and also the last of my semi regular live Google Hangouts pitched as a weekly “show”. Thanks to Brian Lamb, Todd Conaway, and stalwart student Nancy B for showing up. The whole series is right here! The viewership on the […]
Two reminders from past UMW ds106 students. The ethos of ds106 carries on. First, a short email from Eric, who was in my Fall 2012 class: I was checking up on my final project videos and was amazed at how many views it has. I just thought you might think it was cool haha. Definitely […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by MyDigitalSLR In what I’d call the semi-porous community (because we have people outside the class who can and do provide feedback to students) of my ds106 class at University of Mary Washington, nurturing a healthy amount of commenting has typically been a struggle against […]
What mean ye storytelling- the #etmooc version from Alan Levine Thar be slides, slides, slides, way too many slides, from a presentation I did online yesterday as part of the ETMOOC Section on Digital Storytelling. You can find resources mentioned at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/What+Mean+Ye+Storytelling and an archive is available. It was a lot crammed in. I wanted […]
Ir’s been fun to do some redesign and alignment of the ds106 web sites. I’ve long had an interest in trying to make the ds106 Assignments site into more of a template that could be used to create similar sites, and that just got a little bit closer to possibility.
The entire 106 fleet is a WordPress multisite, the main site and the Daily Create site both use the Parallelus Salutation theme, so they were easier to coordinate; the one change was using incorporating the stressed 106 logo as part of the TDC. They both use menus at the top, and I’ve set up the rightmost ones to be “ds106” navigation ones.
The ds106 Assignments site was a different beast. It is built on a 960c theme, one of the generic 960 grid system themes. I gave brief thought to trying to render it in Salutation, but it’s a hugely customized theme, and I was not even sure how to do taxonomy archives in Salutation. As is the design is a close-enough match.
The front page used a lot of graphics, and they were all hard code into place (to add a new assignment group meant a new graphics and the template edited):
The “Mission ds106” title was another graphic with its tagline “An anthology of new media projects” that really was not too explanatory. Not only that, I was unable to find the original graphics or even fonts used to modify those graphics.
Likewise, the interior page template used some hard coded icons, which looked nice, for the top navigation. Not easy to update or make more generalized:
My plan was then to implement the built in WordPress menus for the top navigation, so it would be common on all pages (and be flexible to edit) and maybe to make those front page main icons also be menu driven.
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6 For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire “I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC” because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes. We have a very easy […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk
Last week I wrote about the ideas and content changes I had in mind for the next semester of ds106. The car polish is looking shiny. Over the last few weeks I had out my WordPress wrenches, calipers and engine pulls to do some work under the hood. The current site is coming up on two years old, and has been a great example of growth by accretion, experimenting, adding things on. That is all part of running experiments.
But it also got a bit wobbly last semester; no one likes their web site going down, but we were sure ringing the buzzer frequently at our hosts Castiron Coding for server restarts. It wasn’t clear if it was the database, the demands on the server processes, but I took it as a mission to keep happy the unicorns that run the server room
First of all, our site is a WordPress multi site that not only servers up ds106 covering numerous sections taught over the last 2 years, but also the Assignment bank, the Daily Create, the Assignment Remix Machine, in[SPIRE], plus the archive of Camp Magic Macguffin, and (just unearthed) the May 2011 class taught by Martha Burtis. We also run a MediWki install as a content engine for our documentation (using the Wiki Embed plugin).
The database was and is over 600 Mb. More on that later. There was a long list of plugins, active and inactive, quite a few were not in use.
I’ve done quite a bit and hope I can remember it all! An off the cuff summary…
