Category Archives: ds106

Strangely Captcha

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Today’s Daily Create asks us to create with captcha — the anti-spam words that you rewrite on blogs. The whole notion of captcha is fascinating, I think, as it relates to books and words and crowdsourcing and more. Anyway, I decided to do a search of other Meandering Minds in the blogosphere (we are quite a few, actually) and settled in on Meandering Mind, using Courtney’s blog for generating captcha. I left her a comment, too, to let her know I was borrowing her captcha and connecting our meandering minds together.

I went a bit further than the Daily Create, generating a bunch of captchas and then trying to create a short visual poem.

Captcha Poem

Peace (in the text),
Kevin

20 Steps Around the School

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Yesterday’s Daily Create was to create a “20 Steps” video — in which you record your location, take 20 steps, record your location, take 20 steps …. 20 times. I walked around my school yesterday morning, using a shot of my feet as an anchor for my shots. As I noted on Twitter, this sort of video fits nicely with the #walkmyworld project, too.

Peace (in the documentation),
Kevin

Observing The Writer in The Wild

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This is just goofy, embarrassing but I am sharing it out as part of yesterday’s Daily Create, called Who Are You? The assignment asked us to create a video of us, but using the lens of a scientific television show (I don’t think anyone got mauled by lions as they shot footage, but you never know … maybe that is part of the blooper reel)

I decided to set up the video and capture me “writing” as a sort of “writer in their natural environment” with a voiceover, narrating what the writer is doing. It was strange meta-fun, knowing that I was going to be narrating what I was doing and so as I was writing, I was thinking about what I was going to say as the narrator observing me writing. And poking fun at myself, too.

I even wrote a note to the viewer on the screen in the video in extra large font (I don’t normally write in size 72, by the way)

Odd, right? But that’s the Daily Create for you.

Peace (in the wild),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Inside My Mind

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(This is for the Slice of Life feature at Two Writing Teachers)

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Each day, I receive an email notification from The Daily Create (an offshoot of  DS106) about an activity to get the brain and thinking mind moving in new directions. It’s really such a great idea, these short assignments that push boundaries with humor and creative passion, and every day is something interesting or odd to consider. I don’t mind odd. In fact, I embrace oddity when it comes to digital composition because I think that diving into the odd will push boundaries. Yesterday, the Daily Create assignment was to sketch out an imaginary map of your mind.

This one hung with me all day, as I took my son sledding and as I set up the ping-pong table for some ferocious paddling, and as I read my books, read aloud to my son, checked my email, wrote a few tweets and began the first day of our February vacation (not technically our first day, since we had two snow days to end last week, extending our time away from school). All day, I kept thinking: map my head, map of my head, map it out.

If you know anything about me, you know I can’t draw worth a darn. Which is why I so often turn to digital tools to help me, and finally, as I watched my son and his friend barrel down the huge hill on sleds, screaming the entire way, it dawned on me how I could do this assignment. As a comic. And I would do it in the style of Mad Magazine’s Sergio Aragones, who makes all of those little comics in the margins of the pages, with little characters doing funny things in small spaces.

My Meandering Mind and Me

By the way, today’s Daily Create is to make a video of you or someone unboxing something. Anything. Make it dramatic. Share it out. Odd, right? See what I mean? The Daily Create rocks.

Peace (inside),
Kevin

 

Daily Creatin’ with a Visual Lens

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I’ve been diving back into the Daily Create this week after a stretch of somewhat ignoring the daily prompts to “make stuff.” The Daily Create is still an amazing resource for stretching your mind, and I like the photography angle, since that is not really part of how I see myself.

This morning, the prompt was about pixelating and manipulating an image using an excel-based tool. Pretty strange, but I uploaded an image and toyed around to create this madness. If I had more time and patience, I would have been more systematic about what I was doing. As it was, I was just doing, not planning. (but check out the image pulsates if you toggle up and down very quickly. Odd)

Dog Leash Excelerator

Yesterday, the prompt was about using tape to create household art. I set about making Tapeman, and then (as someone noted, as if he were Flat Stanley), I propped him in various elements of the kitchen. He spent the night drinking our bottle of wine and is now paid out flat on the counter top. Never invite Tapeman to your party.

Tapeman

For Valentine’s Day, the prompt had to do with remixing a set of stock images with snarky comments. I tried to capture the digital disconnect with this one.

False Valentines

And finally, there was the visual palindrome prompt. My mind raced (eh, sorry) to the phrase of “race car” and you would not be surprised at how quickly race cars can be found in a house with three boys.

Visual palindrome

How about you? What’d you create this week?

Peace (in the share),
Kevin

Slice of Life: A Picture of Nothing is Still Something

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(This is for Slice of Life with Two Writing Teachers but is inspired by #ds106’s Daily Create)
Nothing Much
Yesterday, over at the Daily Create (a must-follow, by the way), the prompt asked us to take a picture of nothing. So typical of the Daily Create, to ask us to be creative with the ordinary. But I took the prompt to heart, and turned on my iPad, pointed the lens straight up, and took a shot. Of nothing. Except it was something. Something neat. In fact, this little bit of nothing on the ceiling has some neat compositional aspects to it.

Notice how the support beam moves through the center of the shot, on a slight perpendicular path, and I was really struck by how the light in one room but not the other room completely gave the shot two sides to it (in a strange way that reminds me of Harvey Two-Face from Batman). The speckled paint on our ceilings also give the nothingness a sense of texture that a smooth ceiling would not have done.

So, yes, this nothing turned quickly into something. And here I am, writing about it, giving the nothing more life than it would have normally had. Thanks, Daily Create!

Peace (in the something),
Kevin

SOLSC on TWT

Playing with Fragment and Photos

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I have an app called Fragment that does all sorts of odd things to photographs. I used it this week for two Daily Create assignments over at DS106. The first was to “app up” a silhouette, but I abandoned the shadow idea in order to play around with the “app up” part of things. I took a shot of some art on our walls and created this:

Then, yesterday, the call was for a Cubomania Self Portrait. Alan Levine reflects on how he did his here (using Big Huge Labs). But I realized that I could use Fragment again for mine.

It’s intriguing to play around with composing with images.

Peace (in the camera’s eye),
Kevin

How I fell Off #DS106 and Bumped My Head

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I’m not sure how it happened but sometime around Thanksgiving, I fell off the DS106 Headless Course Wagon Train and bumped my head. Prior to that, I was deeply engaged and deeply involved in the creative storytelling adventures that unfolded, from audio podcasting to gif creation to … well, the gamut of ideas ran far and wide. I’m still proud to be sharing out our Merry Hacksters radio program.

The headless element (no real leaders, although I would not say it was completely headless, as folks were always behind the curtain to some degree). It was an amazing experience that reminded me once again that the technology and the tools are always second fiddle to the stories we want to tell and the experiences we want to share. It reminded about the power of narrative across mediums. It was a blast.

So, why didn’t I stick with it all the way to the end?

An easy answer would be to say that life just got busy, and it did. It always does. That’s not it, though.

There was something about the turn in the headless course towards video in the final few weeks that gave me pause, and then to a gif-related project (see this great storify for more details) that took root and took hold with the DS106 friends when I turned my head to other things (like presenting at conferences), and I could not seem to get caught up again. The thread got lost.  I bumped my head. The video elements were very interesting and tapped into something I am very intrigued about (video as composition), but I soon realized that time and attention to video would be my enemy (or was that only what I thought and not what reality would be?). It also felt as if a natural cycle of an online experience had happened and the course was still running. (We noticed this with the Making Learning Connected MOOC, too.)

Again, I blinked and then I was lost.

So when notices started to come about this past week about a wrap-up event, I thought: I should take part in that and reconnect with the course and my friends there. Then this morning, reading through Alan Levine’s post about the virtual gathering, I realized: Crap, I missed it. It was last night. Drat. I appreciated Alan’s post about the event (I am a fan of pulling back the veil on the technical aspects so I read his reflection with pleasure) and it reminded me of what I most appreciated about the DS106 Headless Course: the open nature, the collaborative spirit, the sense of adventure, and the realization that there are communities of people doing amazing things and sharing them out to the world.

I had heard about #DS106 over the last few years, and even checked out the site from time to time. I couldn’t quite figure it out: was it some kind of real course at a college? Or just another place for sharing out of ideas? Or something in-between? A creative community pushing the boundaries of storytelling? Yep, to all of those, it turns out. Yep to all of that, and more. What you make of it is what it is, and for me, what DS106 was was a chance to push myself in odd directions and compose across media lines. Which I enjoyed immensely.

I absolutely adore the Daily Create, and I would point anyone to the the bank of assignments for digital storytelling as a magical place of ideas. But it wasn’t until I became immersed in the Headless Course that I understood how imagination powers our views of technology, and if nothing else, DS106 reminds us that the agency of creation rests with us, not our machines. We are the ones telling stories to make sense of the world. Our computers, and mobile devices, and whatever else comes along should be examined and evaluated through the lens of “making and creating.” Let’s make sure we hack.break.play with technology.

Have fun out there.

Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin

 

 

Inspired at NCTE: A Documentary MultiMedia Poem

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I attended an interesting session with co-facilitated with friends Ian and Greg (whom I met when they were facilitating the Massachusetts New Literacies Initiative). The session dealt with documentary poems (see Ian’s post about the session), and how to guide students to research a historical figure or time period, write a poem, and then use podcasting for publication. While in the session, I began a poem about Sojourner Truth, who lived for a time in my small city and whose statue is located just off the main road in one of the village areas not far from where she resided.

The other day, I returned to the poem, finished it up and then recorded it.

But I decided to take Ian and Greg’s idea even further, using Popcorn Maker to create a multimedia poem, with images, video and music. I like how it all came together here, even if the tool is still a little wonky at times, as I explore my own thoughts of seeing the Sojourner Truth statue, about the work she did around abolition and awareness of women’s issues, and about the world right now, still in need of the Truth.

Experience: Sojourner Tells the Truth

 

See what you think. I’d love some feedback. Is this doable for your classroom on some scale?

Peace (in the words),
Kevin

 

Video Promo: DS106 Radio Anarchy

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The Daily Create for DS106 was to create a video promo for DS106 Radio. I am still getting used to the updated iMovie, which comes with expanded “movie trailer” options. Here, I took clips from the radio-infused Air Heads and popped it into a trailer template, and created this bit of video anarchy:

Peace (in the radio waves),
Kevin