On Beyond CLMOOC: Stay Connected

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In the final Make Cycle newsletter of Connected Learning MOOC this week, we provided a list of ways members of CLMOOC can stay connected throughout the year. That includes you (CLMOOC is always an open experience and is now facilitated by participants).

Some suggestions for further connections:

  • Remain active on social media (Twitter, G+, Facebook, Instagram, or elsewhere).
  • Curate an eportfolio or a make log of the work you completed this summer.
  • Peruse the Make Bank. Reuse or remix an idea in your own learning environment or consider adding a make, an example, or a tutorial.
  • Participate in Kim Douillard’s photo challenges and #silentsundays (in which you are invited to post an image to a CLMOOC community with no context text).
  • Share out on #WhitmanWednesday of sharing out quotes from Walt Whitman or the #ThoreauThursday or invent your own with some more diverse poets
  • Form an interest group on G+, FB, Slack, Voxer or some other space concerning a shared purpose.
  • Come back to The Daily Connect for ideas and connections (Here is a random post generator.)
  • The Daily Connect is a riff off The Daily Create, a daily prompt for creativity from the fertile and collective minds of DS106.
  • Engage in a “Curiosity Conversations” by interviewing someone.
  • Plan your own Pop-Up Make Cycle or cMOOC experience (and if you do, let us know so we can spread the word).
  • Join the CLMOOC Kiva micro-lending team, and “make a difference” in the world with small donations to worthy projects.
  • Be part of the Goodreads CLMOOC Reading Club. We share books.
  • Join the CLMOOC group on Flickr.
  • Get a CLMOOC badge for your participation and collaboration.
  • Margaret Simon (a CLMOOC community member) often hosts DigiLit Sundays at her blog, where she and others offer up ideas around digital literacies and invite readers to share information.
  • Host a CLMOOC Flash Mob. Or CLMOOC Dance Party. Or CLMOOC Flash Mob Dance Party.
  • Join the #literacies chat for all things contemporary composition and communication!
  • Digital Writing Month often happens in November or December. Look for the possibility of a digital-writing-themed #CLMOOC Pop-Up.
  • The 4T Virtual Conference on Digital Writing is free and online and happens a few times a year. The next one is in October, and some CLMOOCers are presenters.
  • The postcard project continues, and people can sign up to be a part of it here.

Peace (let’s make it happen),
Kevin

 

A SmallPoem for Small Poems

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I’m tinkering around with a visual typography app that Terry and Wendy shared out called TypiVideo. I like the effects of the moving text but I am having trouble with finding the ways that I can set animation and text (I know the controls are there, and I saw a tutorial that indicated where and how I can do more, but I can’t seem to have get to them to work on mine. Might need to reload the app.)

Anyway, the poem above is for another poetry venture elsewhere.

Peace (animated),
Kevin

Book Review: On Tyranny (Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)

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So, I believe this book by Timothy Snyder — On Tyranny — should be required reading for everyone in America. Sure, that statement shows my political bias against the Trump Administration and its visible objective to slowly dismantle all institutions in order to build more power into the president’s hands … so what? I’m biased.

Snyder’s small book (in size and in length) is a powerhouse of ideas, drawing both on the history of the rise of Fascists, Nazis and Communists to remind us that American institutions, and Democracy itself, is always more fragile that at first appears. The “twenty lessons”  in On Tyranny are pivot points for individuals to make small decisions that have larger ramifications of the world.

What I pulled from this book, which I will be re-reading again and then sending off with my son to college with a “read this book!” message, is a reminder that people are what allow institutions to crumble and fall, through small actions that don’t seem consequential in the moment. Tyrants take advantage of those moments (or invent moments, such as “terrorist” emergencies that allow a usurping of the rule of law to change the nature of the state.)

Those of us who would think that the American institutions are strong enough to withstand the moment we are in still need to remain vigilant and active. Change happens suddenly. Elections have consequences.

But the people, and the community you are part of, have a voice, and power, too. Make sure we use it for the greater good of all. Read On Tyranny  and think.

Peace (let it be),
Kevin

 

Fracturing Melody

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There’s a cool, strange project going on with some musical collaborators (Wendy, Karon, Sarah, etc.) that uses the concept of “fractals” as a way to build a musical “round” with a common melody that comes from some data points within the Connected Learning MOOC (CLMOOC) community.

Fractal refers to the mathematical concept of patterns, often mirrored and expanding patterns, emerging from a set of data points, but can be mapped visually. Fractals often emerge in nature, which is pretty intriguing. Or, that’s my understanding of it.

See an example of animation of fractals:

The CLMOOC musical compositional activity — being done in Soundtrap so we can collaborate online — stemmed from some sharing of fractal animations last week. We were chatting about how animation might be used for learning, and better understanding of complex subjects.

Someone suggested the link between the mathematical underpinning of fractals and the weaving melodic possibilities of music … and we were off on another collaboration …

I took a small section of the larger piece of music underway and then utilized a neat animation interactive I found online to create a fractal, and then used iMovie to pull the emerging audio fractal (or a slice of it) with the animation. I think it came out pretty cool. Sort of a fractal teaser.

Peace (mirrored and shared),
Kevin

Sprucing Up the Stopmotion Movie Site

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Making Stopmotion Movies in the Classroom

I realized that my website resource for making Stopmotion Movies had a bunch of dead links and dead videos, so I spent some time this week making sure links worked and that old resources were replaced with new ones, etc.

Check out the Making Stopmotion Movies site. Use it and share it as you like.

As I note on the homepage …

Making movies encourages:

* Project-based learning
* Creativity
* Collaboration
* Story development skills
* Character development skills
* Presentation/Publication experience
* Technology expertise

And here are some links within the site:

We’re exploring animation and gif creation in CLMOOC this week. Come join us for a Twitter Chat today at 1 p.m. EST with the #clmooc hashtag.

Peace (beyond the camera click),
Kevin

Imagination, Animation, and Education

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We had a rich discussion yesterday at the Make with Me Hangout for Connected Learning MOOC (CLMOOC) on the issue of animation and gifs, exploring the notions of learning, explaining and pop culture integration with video loops.

Since it was a Make with Me, I worked on shooting this short stopmotion piece in the midst of the session, using a Google Chrome add-on app called StopMotion Animator (which I learned about via Richard Byrne’s Free Tech for Teachers). I had made my little creature with WikiStix and then converted my video file (from the app) into a gif with an online conversion site.

Here is the full Make with Me, with Sarah, Niall, Terry E., Terry G. and Clare.

Later, I used another Chrome add-one to make gifs of each participant for sharing on Twitter, which Sheri apparently pulled into one larger gif.

 

The question we were considering, why gif and why animation? played out a few ways as Sarah led us in discussion. Niall talked about how using animations in science classes allows for a visual way to teach complex topics (and allowing students to make animations of a science concept would demonstrate learning).

Clare talked about using animation with Lego Avatars with medical students, as an alternative way to spark discussion about reflection of practice. Terry G. and Terry E. both talked about the aspects of fun and being creative with various tools, using short video to make a point or to tap into pop culture. I shared how often I find myself, and my students, “breaking” the technology in order to make it do things it was not necessarily designed to do.

And there’s more in there …

We have a Twitter Chat planned for tomorrow (Thurs) on animation and gifs, so come join the conversation with the #clmooc hashtag. It all starts at 1 p.m. EST

Peace (in forward motion),
Kevin

Animating Text for Kinetic Poetry

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I’ve long been fascinated by Kinetic Text or Kinetic Typography (I’m never quite sure what to call it) in which words and/or letters of words are animated. In the Connected Learning MOOC (CLMOOC) this week, we are exploring animation and GIFs, so animated text has come to mind for me.

You can read about my explorations a bit here, at the new National Writing Project/Educator Innovator site The Current (formerly Digital Is) and in there are some of my reflections on creating the following poem with Powerpoint and its animation features that are built within. (Note: the resource is a few years old now and not every link to resource might be working). You basically have to use a single slide, and make every word you want to animate a different “object” so you can move it independently from the rest.

A Warning: An Illuminated Poem from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.

And there is one, done in similar fashion in Keynote as part of another exploration of technology and poetry:

And last year, during CLMOOC, we kept an open document as a slow chat, and I took the comments in the margins to make this poem in Keynote:

Lately, I have been using an app that Terry Elliott showed me called Legend, which allows for short textural animations.

You can’t get as detailed as some of the above with individual words, so you lose some of the emphasis. But I like the app for what it is and how the limited text and features forces you to focus on the words.

By the way, in Flickr, the way you host and share out animated GIFS (which is not immediately obvious because the site seems to flatten the animated gifs) is to upload your file and then go into the Download/View All Sizes button, and find the “original” and that location will allow you to right-click and grab the link of the animated GIF (that might be another lesson learned from Terry).

Peace (moves in strange ways),
Kevin

Small Moving Parts: Gifs and Animation

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We’re exploring the use of GIFs and animations (including stopmotion) in the Connected Learning MOOC (CLMOOC) this week. If you’ve been wondering how to create small animations, and what the value might be for both creativity and learning as well as the connections to popular culture, come join us during this Make Cycle.

GIF skeptic

There are lots of resources in the post for this CLMOOC Make Cycle and folks will be sharing out work and ideas all week long. We have a Make with Me Hangout tomorrow — Tuesday 1 p.m. EST — and a Twitter Chat — Thursday 1 p.m. EST.

One early share for me is a simple animation, using paper cards (or the corner of a small notebook). We used to make these in school in our books (don’t tell the teacher). It’s a Flip Book, animated by the simple flipping of pages. I made this one a few years ago during a Claymation/Stopmotion Movie Camp that I facilitated, and we had kids make them. It was a lot of fun.

I also created a website resource some years back (and which I try to update as much as possible) for teachers wondering about stopmotion animation movies in the classroom. I used it for workshops and as a clearinghouse for remembering resources for myself.

Making Stopmotion Movies in the Classroom

Check out Making Stopmotion Movies

See what you can make …

Peace (moves along),
Kevin

Book Review: Radioactive (A Tale of Love and Fallout)

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This book … is luminescent. I bet other reviewers have used that word because, well, the cover of the book glows in the dark. I tried it in the dark closet. The book glowed.  Which is perfectly in tune with the theme of Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout about the life and work of Marie Curie.

I’m not sure how to categorize this book by artist/writer Lauren Redniss, and maybe I shouldn’t bother. With a mix of some amazing artwork that uses chemicals and light (she explains her process at the end of the book) and an evocative narrative that shifts from Marie Curie’s life, and loves, to the impact of her work on radium and other radioactive elements in the modern world (hello, atomic bombs), this book is packed with insights and information that could be a neat mentor for non-fiction writing.

Like many, I knew of Marie Curie’s name in the field of Science and I was familiar with some of her work, but Radioactive gave me the fuller picture of a woman struggling against the confines of the male-dominated society, and how her love and partnerships with her husband — and then later, her lover — gave her freedom to change the way we see the world. Her children and many of her grandchildren, and others down the family line, apparently continue to work in the fields of science.

One of the saddest parts of this story is near the end of her life, as Marie Curie suffers from radiation exposure from her years touching and studying isotopes. She wanders through her lab like a ghost, nearly blind and in pain, touching tubes and checking equipment, and making lab notes on her slow cancerous death like the scientist she is. Her spirit inhabits this book, and now my mind. She lives on.

Peace (glowing with wonder),
Kevin

PS — thanks to Andrea Z for recommending this book on Twitter. What a find. I borrowed it through my library, as the cost seemed steep to me. But it is the size of a textbook.