This is an amazing resource about Web Literacy ideas. Click on a skill and see a pathway forward towards new skills that connect back to the original inquiry. (nicely done, Laura Hilliger and other folks at Mozilla). Plus, the whole resource is remixable, so you could revise it for your own audience and purpose.
(Thanks to Mike Downes for the screenshot and for Doug Belshaw for sharing this out)
Peace (along the many paths),
Kevin
For today’s Wonder Poem about the Hagia Sophia Mosque in Turkey, I chose an animated acrostic, using a Mozilla Thimble template designed by some National Writing Project friends that makes kinetic text poems. I was looking for a way for text to drop out, leaving only the main word in the margins. I think it worked out OK.
Here is the original poem:
Many people believe
In sacred towers, reaching skyward –
Never truly fallen,
And always put back by the faithful;
Rest assured the same will happen with us
Even though actions and words may be driven by anger
There is always the chance to start over again.
Here is a screenshot of my kinetic text poem (but you will need to follow the link to get there):
And here is the code of the poem itself:
What’s nice about Thimble is you can remix the code yourself, too. At the Thimble file, click “remix” and get started (you will need a Mozilla Webmaker account, I believe, but I highly recommend it for all the cool stuff Mozilla is putting together around web design and web composition).
Peace (in the falling words),
Kevin
The Daily Create prompt yesterday was a “tell your life in seven words” kind of activity. It reminded me of Six Word memoirs, which reminded me of the Mozilla Thimble template created by the National Writing Project, so I dug it up and worked on it for my seven-word-life-story. I was trying to get at the idea that even when I am nowhere near a pen or keyboard, my brain is always working on writing something. I just need to remember later what it was that I was writing.
🙂
Peace (Word!),
Kevin
PS — you can create your own seven word or six word memoir with Thimble, too. Either remix mine or remix the original.
There is the very famous “stay calm” poster that you see variations of just about everywhere. Yesterday’s Daily Create via DS106 was to remix that poster’s saying. I went into Mozilla’s Webmaker tool and did my own version.
What’s cool about Webmaker is that you can remix my project or you can go to the one that I remixed, and do your own. At the very least, check out the hilarious collection of remixed posters.
Peace (in the scream of creativity),
Kevin
A lot of folks are over at Educon, but not me. (again). I tinkered around with Chad Sansing’s Virtual Toy Hack page (which he is using at Educon, I believe — NOTE: Chad is NOT there. Too bad for all them, I say) and created this version of the “all I got was a T shirt” meme. Maybe next year ..
Peace (in the hack),
Kevin
If you missed the NCTE Hackjam, you missed out on some great fun, and some great conversations among teachers (armed with tiny scissors and glue sticks and comics) about how to critically use media for analysis and meaning. It began with some stealthy signs and stealthy tweets, and Hackjam instigator Chad encouraging anyone walking by to take on a secret mission. Our mission was to grab some swag from NCTE vendors and use the materials to create new media. All of this as we huddled on the floor of the hallway off NCTE central.
In a nod to my friend, Anna, who created an Animoto while the HackJam was in progress, here is my own Animoto of the event, with a focus on the collage comic that I created to poke fun at a publishing company.
Chad then showed folks how to use some of the Mozilla Webmaker tools to create online hackjams, including a new Thinmble function for collaborating on a webpage project.
Peace (in the hack),
Kevin
PS — Thanks so much to Andrea Zellner and Chad Sansing for bringing HackJam to NCTE again.
This was more for fun than for anything else. But in Seattle a few months ago (sorry, this post was in my draft bin for a long time, I guess), a friend of mine (Janet Ilko) from the National Writing Project joined some family members who lived in Seattle. She was with some young cousins, who convinced the adults to hang around outside a concert venue where One Direction was playing, so that they could get a glimpse of the singers when they left the concert.
The next morning, as Janet was describing the scene, I suggested we should build a Thimble page on “how to build a pop band” from the template that stretches back the Monkees, and maybe even beyond. Who knows. Certainly Disney and Simon Cowell have perfected the idea.
I started the page in Seattle (remixing it from an existing Webmaker template) and finished it up yesterday. Check it out and feel free to remix it. I’d love to see the “how to build a girl band” version, if you want a challenge. (There is a remix button at the top of the page. Click on that, and get remixing. You will need an account with Webmaker to publish. But the code and hints to change the code, are in there.)
Peace (in the hack),
Kevin
As part of the Make/Hack/Play mini-course I have been participating in, I wrote a song and then created this reflective video of my writing process.
Well, a friend from the summer’s Making Learning Connected MOOC — Bart Miller, who is also a musician — took my song and remixed it with some composition software. I was so grateful to have been hacked by Bart, and the remix took the song (even with computer sounds) in a different direction.
Hacking a Song by Bart Miller
I could not resist yet another remix. So, I downloaded the MP3 of Bart’s version of Put My Anchor in You, and used Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker to create another remix. This time, I found a nature video (Bart’s version had me thinking quiet nature, for some reason) and layered in the remix as the soundtrack.
Meanwhile, another friend of mine (the guitarist in my band, Duke Rushmore) took the same demo and added lead guitar, bass and some other production values to it, given the remix yet a third iteration.
It’s interesting the trail of mixing and remixing that can take place, rather seamlessly, with technology. The song comes out at the other end very different when in the hands of others than when I sat down on the floor with my acoustic guitar and wrote it as a demo.
Peace (in the song),
Kevin
A few weeks ago, after we aired our Merry Hacksters Radio Show for DS106, my colleagues and I agreed that we would also release most of the individual radio files and segments so that in the spirit of the show — which is about hacking for change and remixing for good — anyone could take our files and use them individually or remix the entire show. We’ve even included the pre- and post-show discussions that took place on DS106 with Alan and Christina.
So, here they are. All the files are in this folder and all are downloadable. We hope you might credit us if you do use the files. But feel free to hack and remix, and become part of the Merry Hacksters collective. If you’re here, you’re already one of us.
Peace (in the remix),
Kevin
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. This is what I wrote:
We laugh now to remember the ways in which the world made fun of Galileo for presuming that the Sun was the center of our solar system, not the Earth itself. So long, Copernicus! Who among us hadn’t gazed up at the sky and wondered at the Sun, and how that large glowing orb was keeping us all together, as if the planets were a system of yo-yos set off on an elliptical path?
We laugh now, but not comfortably, because now we all feel like Copernicus, don’t we? We who believed Galileo. We who took it for granted that the largest object in the sky must be the most powerful, the center of the action. No doubt the discovery by Charniegi will forever haunt our imaginations.
How did he see it when no one else did? What was the first spark of doubt that Galileo was wrong?
Charniegi refuses to explain, and only his diagrams are his story, and so we peruse them carefully, wondering how we missed what Charniegi saw. We translate them, talk about them, share them in all of our communication spaces.
There are always those faint lines of history where in hindsight, you realize that you made assumptions and inferences based on incomplete facts. Charniegi did not. He dove in and discovered. He inadvertently made us all look like the fools we were, believing in Galileo.
Now, we look towards Pluto — that misaligned former planet dangling on the outskirts of the solar system — in order to see more clearly. Pluto. The smallest of us really are the most powerful. The sky will never be the same again, will it?
Charniegi made sure of that.
I was also working on some poetry this weekend.
The first piece was inspired by a prose poem by my friend Brian Fay. Brian had this line “Another crease becomes a tear here” that really jumped out at me, so I crafted a poem around that idea.
The second poem was inspired by a group of us on Twitter who seem to get up early in the mornings to write and connect and share. I tossed out the idea of the Sunrise Writing Club, and that name sort of got lodged in my mind a bit. The poem that came out captured the idea of finding things to write about left over from the night.
The third poem was very different, indeed. I have some friends who were over in England for the Mozilla Foundation MozFest, working on ideas for the ever-growing Webmaker space. One friend (Peter) shared out a collaborative document with a Thimble project for kinetic/animated text. I was really intrigued by it, and worked on a poem in the space. Later, another friend (Christina) told me of an update and invited us to go back and rework the poems in the new Thimble.
I just started over new and created Improvise with Me.
What I found fascinating is that I did a bit of reverse-engineering writing. Instead of bringing a poem idea to the Thimble, and animating with the original text in mind, I went into the space with the animation in mind, and built the poem around the kinetic movements built into the Thimble page. This is not ideal for writing, but I still had fun with it, writing about the playing of jazz. (You should follow this link to the get to the kinetic text poem, and then, heck, make your own by remixing mine.)
Peace (as writers),
Kevin