Tag Archives: ds106

Highlighter

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I am a highlighter. Unfortunately I don’t mean the Evernote, Diigo kind, but the old school grab a book and highlight passages, words, imagery that I think may somehow be useful to me later on. So as I started reading blog posts for #ds106, I was wondering what I would do with digital nuggets I would surely find scatter among the digital material that I would want or need later on. I am sure there are a plethora of tools that could help me store and share my highlight worthy pieces of text better that what I have chosen, but I chose this rather simple system to see if it works.

image by Grace Fell

Here’s how it goes: As we begin to pour through  hundreds of blogs and perhaps thousands of pages of text, where will we store and share important, meaningful, beautiful, mind blowing lines and quotes? I decided to create a simple public Google Doc, which you can access here. I will add all the lines that stick out from what I read and I suggest you add to the list as well.

This way we can cull a growing greatest hits of work from what we read. The material will also be useful for later projects for use as things such as scripts, graphics, brainstorming ideas, and introductions for collaboration. As I mentioned, I am sure that there may be other tools for something like this, and I encourage you to share them in the comments below, but sometimes simple and easy works just fine. Besides participating in a MOOC with so many participates, we need to carve out a small niche and find our tribe. I hope you join me here and share the gold. (The obvious metaphor for this course.) Remeber if you are going to tweet a line or two, add it to our list.

Intro to ds#106

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The day has finally come. Jim Groom’s ds#106 class has officially begun. You can read this for details of this first week, but if you are reading this you are most likely a member of the class. Curious how you introduce yourself to hundreds? of people, but we will see how many and who responds. It still feels like Jim is responding to every post and Tweet which is lunacy, but that is part of the reason why I am here. The guy is nuts and I look forward to seeing how he manages this beast.

Seriously though, the thing that attracted me to this course was more that his Bava persona, like Hunter S. Thompson, Jim is more than his online character. Both Jim and Hunter tend to push envelopes and grate at people sensibilities, but underneath that bravado is complex depth and seriousness to what all this means. And by this I mean art, human beings, technology, film, you name it.  And if next week’s readings are any indication it is going to be one helluva a ride. Not too be out done by Alan “Show off” Levine, here is my intro:

If you are new to my blog and want to know more. Please feel free to follow the crubs around this maze I call my  Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Home page probably best place to start.

Can’t Stop

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I am a bit obsessive. Can you tell? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about animated .gifs since my initial foray last night. Armed with a new tool, I ventured back to try and fine tune my newly acquired skills. Thanks to this great new tool, Squared 5 from new contact @peteschneider I was able to abandon GifNinja. I was looking for something that would give me more freedom to play with still frames, and Squared 5 is just the tool. You simply click and drag the few seconds of video onto the editor and export using image sequence. You can adjust the frames per seconds to determine how many images you work with when creating the animation. I still prefer to use Photoshop instead of a gif creator. This is where the fun starts. This is when the art starts. I am slowly beginning to feel comfortable with the basic routine of this task, which is great because now I can begin to think about and work on the subtle craft of animation.

Working with these frames is a bit like choreographing a dance. I am still not to the level of the Lebowski image, but I am getting closer. Bigger, slower, and clearer images.

I am starting to brainstorm ideas of making a .gif with images I take myself, or thinking about how cool would it be to have an animated comic book, although Comic Life on my Mac does not accept .gifs. Any other ideas? Having lots of fun learning new skills over at #ds106.

Another great side effect of this course is the excitement I am feeling about my learning. I don’t remember being this excited about any single assignment during my entire master’s degree at Columbia. I am thinking a lot about how student must feel, when they are given a task or asked to learn something they truly enjoy. This learning does not feel like a chore, it is an obsession. Now how do I create this kind of excitement in my classroom?

What About You Dad?

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I know this blog has traditionally been used to document my teaching, but starting tonight I want to also use it to document my learning.  Tonight, for the better part of the night I learned how to create an animated .gif. After seeing several great examples on DS106 blog, I was intrigued by the haunting quality of this medium to see if I could do create one myself. So I did, what I do when I want to learn something new- I played and pushed the buttons and didn’t stop till I had at least a first step.

I am not sure if I did it right, and my final product is still rough and needs nuances and lots of work, but I think I now understand the basics. Here is what I did. Please let me know where I went down a wrong path or if there is an easier way to do this any of this:

  1. I downloaded a clip from The Breakfast Club
  2. I shortened it down to about 3 seconds on iMovie
  3. I uploaded it to this site called Gifninja
  4. I opened the new animated .gif in Preview and moved half the clips to Photoshop
  5. I used about nine of them to create my first ever animated Gif! (Tutorial on youtube)

There are a lot of things wrong with it like the pixelated tiny size.  It is moving too fast with too many frames, and not so haunting, but it is a first step. Now that I know what it takes to actually create one, I can focus on finding nuance and the right scene to play more careful attention to. Next time, I will work bigger and slower. Really looking at the piece as a photograoh that barely moves, not just a slowed down film clip. I am also interested in create a animated .gif of images I take myself. Lot’s to think about.

It feels good to start the night never having done a certain thing, and end the night having created something you never thought you could. This is the nature of learning online. Everything is possible if you dedicated the time and attention it needs to learn.

Makin’ Art With The Bava

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I have been a huge fan of Jim Groom ever since the great Edupunk debates of 2008. As he so often reminds us, “Nobody blogs like the Bava! Nobody!” And man is he right. The quality of, frequency of, and intensity of his blogging is enough to leave any aspiring blogger’s mouth agape. The man lives and breaths blogging, and he is doing it a few years into the future. Whichever direction this whole thing is going, I am certain that Jim will be at the front of the line steering the ship.

I cannot count how many times following Jim and his band of Edupunks as they push the envelope, practice what they preach style of educating, has literally saved my stagnant network from the Edublogospshere mired in check out the latest tool retweets and false idol worship malaise that can be Edtech.

So when I saw that he is creating an online digital story telling course, my first thought was I have to be a part of this. I quickly started to doubt my digital merits, and thought twice about throwing my weight around with the big boys and girls. It didn’t take me long till I came around. We are here to learn right? All this talk about pushing ourselves and learning new things, and exploring new ideas, and working with new people, it’s all meaningless if we are not doing it ourselves. I could write about social networks, web 2.0, and the connected classroom till the cows come home, but I will not grow or learn until I step out my comfort zone and rub elbows with the Bava!

So let’s create some art damn it!