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:
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by wilmesmom People (like me) can get upset when the ds106 server goes down, and here is another tip to help you to keep tabs on the Daily Create, so you can know the assignment even if the server is belly up and gagging. At first […]
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve stilled not gotten very far in learning how to play my harmonica. Maybe, it is like learning… you don’t get far without putting any effort into it. But I can still have fun making noise. Tonight I have about 5 gazillion things to do, […]
Confused? Don’t know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various “sections” of ds106- these are classes […]
I’ve been urging my students to give each other more constructive feedback via blog comments; but this idea if challenge, coming form a student, not me, is soemthing I have to get behind: http://twitter.com/doodle_muse/status/255896877772464130 Ok, Haley, let’s ee if this works. The challenge is to make 7 constructive comments on 7 different blogs in a […]
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As we move into audio week, I wanted to whip together a quick example of a ds106 assignment just in case students are having trouble in Audacity. I hit the random button a few times in the audio assignments and ended up on Theme Verse: […]
There are the paths of links that maketh up the web and then the paths of experience that make up another web. Sometimes it just gets tangled up in a ball of serendipity that really is not all that important in the long run, yet still tickles me. Today’s ds106 Daily Create was contributed by […]
I like how my students are learning how to create their ds106 design graphics in GIMP by no means the easist software to use. Sometimes they get frustrated and revert to ones they know or just drawing things on paper and taking a photo.
The point of this class is for students to become creators, and sometimes this means making a choice between trying some quick and easy web generator graphic tool or doing it the hard(er) way in software. To become a more versatile person with media, in the long run you will be better off knowing how to make your own graphics, because they will do much much more than the one off easy apps.
I saw this morning my student was up agains the GIMP wall
http://twitter.com/laurstray20/status/254954559825403904
Beyond not knowing exactly what the issue was, its not easy to explaining something like GIMP in twitter. And then I fund something that is wonderfully simple in Photoshop (adding an outline stroke to text) takes a few more steps in The GIMP. So I wanted to make sure I knew how to do this and try and explain it (late) to Lauren.
First, one thing I notice in this new version of GIMP that it did not list many fonts, On Mac OS X I found a video that helped (you have to identify your fonts folders in the app prefs).
Okay, so Lauren’s design was to take a cover from Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham and replace the “Eggs” with Viruses– she got frustrated and went back to using MS Paint.
So let’s crack open The GIMP and see if we can walk through the process. First step is locating a base image, using google image search:
What do you do when not sure which ds106 Design Assignment to do? Spin the random chooser. Seems like a good thing to do, hence this little bit of design work. The assignment this is for is Name That Single: Create a design for a favorite song by using just simple designs and NO WORDS…Basically […]
