Finishing up Loose Ends with Make/Hack/Play

I just completed the last phase of the Make/Hack/Play mini-course facilitated by Karen Fasimpauer, and earned this nifty badge/certificate. The course had a few activities around making and remixing and reflecting, and I liked that the scale was small and doable. And fun. Karen will be running the course again in January, I believe. If […]

Collaborative Storytelling on a Grand Scale is CrazyFun

I could not spend the entire day yesterday playing with the project known as Read/Make, or Digital Writing MakerText, in which people are invited to create a crowdsourced novel collaboratively in just 48 hours (see premise/rules). But after a lot of writing in the morning, I did periodically pop into the Google Doc where the […]

Book Review: House of Hades

I’ve just finished up House of Hades with my nine year old son, and like the other books that writer Rick Riordan has put out in his Heroes of Olympus series, the sense of action, intrigue and adventure fuels the tales of Percy Jackson and his demigod friends as they seek yet again to save […]

The Genres of YouTube Videos and the Rise of Machinima

As I continue my exploration of video as text via DS106, I was intrigued by a growing collaborative document that was started in a previous DS106 group that examined the various genres of videos on YouTube. Going through the list reminded me again of how vibrant and creative people are in making videos, and how […]

What I’ve Been Writing: Stories, Poems and Kinetic Text

A glimpse at some writing I did this weekend in between baseball games, Halloween parties, assessing student writing, and being a father. The Daily Create at DS106 yesterday asked us to begin a story about the “sky never being the same” and I had this idea of our perceptions of the solar system being upended. […]

Stories Inside the Web: If Owners Oversaw the Front Page

Over at DS106 this week, the theme is telling stories “inside the web,” using tools such as Mozilla’s XRay Goggles to remix websites and retell the news or information. I decided to take three newspapers and tilt the front page towards the owners, sprinkling in news and product names as if the newspapers are being […]

On the (DS106) Radio: Hack the World

On Tuesday night, the collaborative radio show venture that I was part of — The Merry Hacksters — had a premiere on DS106 Radio. I represented our group during the chat with Alan Levine and Christina Hendricks. The collaborative experience was interesting, to say the least, as we worked almost exclusively off Google Docs, Twitter […]

The Merry Hacksters Radio Show Teaser

I’ve been working with three other folks on creating a collaborative radio show for DS106. Our name is The Merry Hacksters and our 25 minute show is about hacking and remixing in the world, for good. We have pieces about toy and game hacking, a view of Minecraft and remixing from a kid viewpoint, how […]

Hacking Education Week: Connected Educator Month Satire

Over at DS106, the Daily Create the other day was to create a fake news story in the vein of The Onion., with satire dripping off the page. How could I resist that? I decided to poke fun at Connected Educator Month, particularly with the idea of technology and what seems to be an overabundance […]