Assignment #3 for #ds106 crept up on me, so much so I almost missed it. I will keep the text short and get to the actually product? Assessment? Art? Whatever we are calling it for this course. I think someone was calling it “awesome sauce.”

Part A: Readings

• Tim O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0?”
• Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine’s “Web 2.0 Storytelling: The Emergence of a New Genre”

• Seven Things You Should Know about Creative Commons

* Share (a.k.a. blog) your initial thoughts about the above readings and their relationship to one another (tag: web20readings ) and prepare to discuss in class (if applicable) and online in post comments of your classmates—so you best have setup aggregation by this point!

I chose to skip the blogging part of this assignment, as I don’t see the need for me to add more noise to the already existing conversations. I am coming into this course thinking that I want to deconstruct what is already out there and give the ideas new clothes. I did the reading, however, and would highly recommend reading the O’Reilly article. It is a manifesto of sorts for what the term Web 2. 0 actually means.

I took notes while I was reading and  chose to skin the text again and see what was at the core. Here is what I found:

the voice we hear in all of our heads
traditional stories trapped in  beginnings, middles, and ends
a head, not the tail, a center, not the edges.

open-ended stories freed by,
collective intelligence,
reflection of conscious thought,
the global brain as powerful effects.

free exchange fundamental to the common good.

branching out,
a tail, not the head,
edges, not a center.
hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable.
gets better the more people use it.

built-in cooperation,
stronger synapses through repetition and intensity,
connecting the edges
The “echo chamber” as amplifier.
bring your own resources to the party
blur the boundaries…

Then what? I wanted to push myself and move beyond another poem. I wanted to give the words some life, so I opened up Garagband found some Creative Commons licensed music from Trent Reznor, watched Alec Couros’ Ted Talk, grabbed some gold, and started to play.

Part B: Playing

After you have read and consider the above essays, distill a few key points and use one of the well over 50+ tools from Alan Levine‘s “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Digital Story” to try and communicate those ideas in an experimental way using a Web 2.0 tool. Make sure the tool you use lets you embed the project in your blog.

Here you go:

the voice we hear