Inspired to Make at the Making Learning Connected MOOC

In the span of just a few days, I’ve come across some amazing ideas for digital “makes” in the Making Learning Connected MOOC that I am helping to co-facilitate. Here are a few of the things I’ve been creating as part of the introductory activities.

Yesterday, a member of the community began to make memes for the MOOC, and she is going to try to set up a system of memes to emerge over the six weeks of work. Memes are interesting, but only if they come viral in a community, and if you begin to try to make them, you realize how difficult it is to wed the right snarky words to the right snarky picture. I gave it a try but I don’t think either of these will be viral. I’m going to keep trying, though.

Using an app called WordFoto, I was able to upload an image of myself and then add in key words that I wanted to layer on top of my image. The result is interesting — it’s as if words become the picture. I liked that I did have choices, and there are just a few tools that can use to manipulate the texture of the image. Still, I wish I had more options in the creating. If I did, I would have pulled the words back a bit as shadows, instead of having the photo be in the way back (the result is a bit like a zombie, don’t you think?)

During the first days of the MOOC, lots of folks jumped into Vizify, which is a graphical biography that pulls data from your social networking connections. You don’t do much, other than allow it access to your streams. But I did find its Twitter tool sort of interesting, as it makes your Twitter data into a video.

I had also used a Mozilla Thimble site that my friend Chad had set up for folks to share out their “last 10 books read” and it came out pretty nifty, but now, my Thimble book site seems to be down (Mozilla did some updates on Thimble and other tools this week and so I am hopeful this is just temporary.) So, I can’t share out the site but I can share out the image of the books that I used as the centerpiece of the site:

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin