634 Posts Tagged "ds106"

How can you be #4life without over 600 blog posts about ds106?

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The (chess) (gif) Thing

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During the ramp up Election night i was visiting Bryan Alexander, and found a relevant movie to watch, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Relevant? Heck yes- shape shifting monsters that emerge every now and then from the ice?

Watching of the early scenes, we smiled at the retro computer chess game that Kurt Russell’s character RJ Macready curses at when he loses

This scene cried out to me to be GIFfed; the first one I trimmed out the segment in MPEG Streamclip where he is just drinking his JBs, the glass up and down is a great repeat, and he has a little bit of q wry smile. Its kind of dark (as is the movie). For tis one, I extracted abut 12 frames and imported into The Gimp, dropped maybe 5 that were not critical. I then used the Groom method, lassoing the key area to animate, set as a layer mask, and apply to each layer.

So here Macready wonders about the machine, who he thinks he is master of, but it is the machine who really is the better (weighs in at 534k)

But the real scene, again somewhat of a metaphor of how Macready deals with what he cannot control is the end of the scene, where he calls Chess King a “cheating bitch.”

For this one, I used MPEG Streamclip to make a trim, and saved it as MP4. I converted it to MOV with Quicktime player, then and used PhotoShop to import into layers, using every 4 seconds. I dropped about 8 frames that had only small amounts of motion. This one is only 646k.

ds106 Class Notes and Stuff

Not Stuck in the Jaws

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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 […]

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GIFs from the Road

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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):

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ds106 is a Complex Universe Full of Stars

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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