Inspired by tonight’s #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It’s a break in the action from grading. No, it’s just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop […]
cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by EMSL In the carefully controlled laboratory where I do my coding… no in actuality more like a scene from some ghastly middle school cafeteria food fight. This all started when a friend showed me a creative commons licensed photo that my creative commons attribution […]
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I rather enjoy spotting juxtapositions, as when I opened a cabinet in a friend’s kitchen, and noticed a tupperware containeer with a #ds106radio sticker sitting atop a copy of The Joy of Cooking. That’s whats happening in a few hours, when I try out […]
I get tired of those emails form people asking to blog about their product, or to include their infographic, or to buy ad space (for the latter I sometimes reply that my starting price is $10,000 per url per month, they usually do not reply). The best are people who gush on how they love […]
Somehow I managed to do my homework ahead of time, since my intro video included the story of main main guitar, an acoustic I’ve had since age 15. I thought I would turn this inside out and talk about 2 guitars I do not have, since they have stories too. Once in a year or […]
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by NoiseProfessor This still cracks me up, and I had rustling around my iMovie a certain comercial that I wanted to mashup, so here it is, featuring the lonliest edtech repairman (note one f-bomb in the audio).
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog For many reasons it was exciting today to visit with friends and former colleagies at the Maricopa Community Colleges, visiting Scottsdale Community College today for a fantastic format idea for an event they came up with for TechTalks 13. It is vaguely familair to […]
It’s really late and I need to wake up stupid early, but when I saw Jabiz’s tweet, and his video, and his stack of papers.. I said I’m in. I blabbed a bot in the video, compeltely leaving out that I live in a tiny town in Arizona called Strawberry (yes its real, look it […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6 For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire “I dropped out of another &$*#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 […]
Fresh off the electronic press, dripping with electronic ink and smelling faintly of dittos, my words are in the Jauanry/february 2013 issue of Educause Review in the New Horizons department (yawn, horizons) (oops). Look ma, a citation! ds106: Not a Course, Not Like Any MOOC:
Looking for something different from the current hysteria of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)? A digital storytelling course started by Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), ds106 was set loose as an open course in January 2011. Yet the UMW catalog does not include such a course. Its actual course designation is CPSC 106 (Computer Science)””a small but telling example of how ds106 plays with and questions the norm.
Most classes in digital storytelling revolve around the personal video narrative form as popularized by the Center for Digital Storytelling. But ds106 storytelling explores the web as a culture, as a media source, and as a place to publish in the open. Not claiming to authoritatively define digital storytelling, ds106 is a constant process of questioning digital storytelling. Is an animated GIF a story? What does it mean to put “fast food” in the hands of Internet pioneers? Why would we mess with the MacGuffin? Is everything a remix? Though this is perhaps simply semantic wordplay, ds106 is not just “on” the web””it is “of” the web.
A few weeks (months?) back, I got an email from former Maricopa collegue Vernon Smith who is the new editor for the column, who asked me to write something for them on ds106. His eye had caught the “It ain’t no silly MOOC” tag I had on the site for a while last semester, when it seemed fun to bait MOOCs. Now? Meh. Yawn.
But I did want to write about the things in ds106 that make it special, unique, in my mind. I was happy to fit in some quotes from former students and open participants. It’s a real skim by, but what can you really do in 1500 words?
Thanks to Teddy Diggs for thorough editing. Now when is someone going to convince her to get in her car and drive north two hours to visit me? I’ve been offering to buy beer…
