Last week was the part of ds106 where (cue the John Williams score -ba da ba da ba da) we approach maybe the most treacherous waters of creativity (underwater shot of woman swimming, legs kicking). VIDEO As our teaching of ds106 evolves, I”ve found it useful to start each new (new to the syllabus) media […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by indieink Beyond the unpredictable outages from high usage of the ds106 web site (well not so unpredictable, Sunday evenings are common) students are not allowed “the web site is down” as an excuse. Martha has already covered this from the last time we had […]
I was on the beach recently and found a cute kid to take a photo of: I got the push to make it seeing Before and After Pictures with a Twist on Buzzfeed where some dude inserted modern photos of himself into photos of him as a kid- but its more than cut and paste, […]
I’ve excited that we brought back the within the web storytelling assignment to ds106– the one where we ask students to use a browser tool to “re-edit” the content of an existing web site to give it a whole new meaning. IN many ways this subverts the web in a playful way that says, I […]
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):
This was week marks one of the highlights (for me at least as a teacher) of ds106 where we do a live radio broadcast of the student audio projects. This is where they work in groups to produce a 30 minute radio show, and is likely one of the most challenging projects. The challenge is […]
This week in ds106 we are returning to something we have not done since the Spring of 2011, the idea of telling stories within the web – you can find more information in this week’s assignment. While we have been publishing stories on the web, in our blogs, these assignments are meant to get you […]
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe
DISCLAIMER: This is mostly a brain dump. Little coherent ideas emerge. Typos will occur. You have been warned.
This session I participated in at Open Education 2012 was proposed by Julià Minguillón titled “Analyzing and supporting interaction in complex scenarios: the case of DS106” – the idea as Julià outlined it was to try and find useful patterns and meaning in the large amount of networked activity that happens in this universe.
I’ve been interested in this for a while but ow sure how to wrap my arms around it. Because of the syndication model set up in our site, we have essentially a copy of every blog post that the site has subscribed to since before January 2011 – over 20,000 posts (unlike those other high priced enterprise systems, our open source fueled site actually keeps all of its content).
Within the wordpress database is a lot of key information- when and how often activity happens, what kind of link relationships there might be, possibly an ability to connect to twitter or commenting actions as well. But more curiously, the only way we represent the things that go on here are the old school reverse chronological listing of posts, something that is a river when there are 500 blogs the site attends to. One thing I would like to know is if there is a more visual or meaningful way to represent all of this on the front of the web site?
As Julià wrote in the abstract:
… visualizing all the activity around DS106 is not a trivial issue.
Interaction in such a complex scenario implies receiving information from multiple channels and maintaining a personal collection of resources, as the course has a very flexible structure so students can focus on a particular subject according to their interests (i.e. visual assignments exposed through flickr) and/or enter and leave the course at any moment. Regarding people, maintaining a network of colleagues implies maintaining multiple identities through the ds106 site in itself, but also twitter, blogs, and so. The totality of DS106 is a very complex learning scenario which is the result of hundreds of personal infrastructures hooked up to the ds106 blog.
We would like to discuss how interactions in this networking infrastructure can be analyzed in order to support all the elements (students, resources, comments, assignments, etc.) so additional services can be devised and implemented without interfering with the natural flow of the course.
With only 22.5 minutes, it was a quick journey through this universe- here is the prezi we used
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe It’s been a jam full week of conference and post conference fun at Open Education 2012 – how much cooler could a conference be that has not only a night boat cruise but has a rocking jam session from participants? cc licensed ( […]
I got a chance to spread the ds106 mojo at Wordcamp Vancouver today, with my session on Building an Open Course/Community with WordPress, Syndication, and Duct Tape:
ds106 is an open course in Digital Storytelling that leverages platforms of open source tools, syndication, and social media in a way that makes it more community than course. At ds106.us is a wordpress powered hub that aggregates and recombines input from 500+ external blogs plus a user contributed assignment bank, daily creative challenges, even a radio station. Built by a team of educator tinkerers, not coders, ds106 is as a model of a community network that is not limited to just courses.
This was on the heels of a cross-Canada flight with a 1:30am arrival to our quarters in Vancouver, a little bit more late night slide fiddling of slides, a trailing cold, and lot of coffee. Hence, GNA’s description feels apt:
@cogdog Guess what? You are nice. You sounded both knowledgeable and like a tweaker. So good.
— GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) October 13, 2012
First up the slides, exported from Keynote as a pDF and upped to slideshare
I also broadcast the talk to #ds106 radio, and had planned to record the audio on my ipad… but forgot to click the Big Red Button. Oh well. I also had my keynote presentation doing some auto tweeting (curious? here’s how) (yes, I have to update those instructions a bit).
Ah, but who needs an audio recording when Giulia is doing her amazing visual notes?
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe
I really meant to do a nice web site for the presentation with links and stuff, but alas, this is a WordPress conference and why not just blog it? eh?
A few thoughts- as I guessed most people do not know nor really care about massive open courses. But they do all have the common experience of school, sitting in rows, listening to lectures, whule at the same time being part of the creative aspects of the open web.
People do not really even get or understand syndication. It feels like magic. Maybe it is.
RSS is sure lively and useful for something that is dead.
People were really interested in the Daily Create and the concept of the Assignment Bank. I spoke to people in areas outside of education who quickly saw the application potential.
Maybe I did convince them how much fun this is and I do it for reasons that ahve nithing to do with being a business success or maximizing my SEO.
Now, the links:
