And today, Camp Magic Macguffin is open. Come on in! It’s time to start creating at camp.

All work is due Sunday (5/27) night at midnight (when Macguffy the owl hoots twelve times at the moon). This week is your time to get your accounts set up and your blog site rolling. Below are your camp tasks for this first week.

UPDATE: We updated this post on Tuesday, 5/23. Make sure to read again for the latest update! (It’s at the bottom of the post.)

• Choose the domain name for the web site you will use for this course (UMW Students Only). This is going to be your own managed workspace on the web, so it should be a name that uniquely identifies you. You can check availability at http://namecheck.com/. Just find a name you want to use.
• Set up social media accounts As listed on the packing list, the key sites where you will need accounts in the next few weeks are Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and SoundCloud. On each of these, you should experiment with customizing your profiles, setting an avatar image to represent you, etc. In particular:
  • In Twitter, start by following Alan (http://twitter.com/cogdog/), Martha (http://twitter.com/mburtis/), and the camp account (http://twitter.com/magicmacguffin/).
  • Send a hello tweet to us by including the #ds106 hashtag – you can find all of the activity via the search https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ds106
  • For Flickr, you should seed your account with five uploaded photos (they do not see it as valid until there are at least five photos posted). Get in creative practice by giving your photos interesting titles and descriptions, and add a tag to each photo for “ds106”
• Make sure all accounts and your domain name preference are added to your ds106 profile. Create your account at http://ds106.us/register. If you have an account and need to edit your profile, login at ds106.us and then look at the top menu for Account -> Profile -> Edit.
  
• Install your WordPress blog (UMW Students Only). It is going to take us a few days to get the domains registered and sites set up for you, and we will provide instructions for how to install the software (WordPress) that you will use to create your site. But your site should be up and running by the end of the week.
• Introduce Yourselves via this Wednesday’s Daily Create. Each week, you will be asked to complete a few of our daily assignment challenges at http://tdc.ds106.us/. We will ask that you do the video one on Wednesday (5/23); use it as an introduction and a chance to tell a story. How you do video is up to you; it can be done from your mobile device, or directly into the web cam using a site like YouTube.
• Watch and Review Mike Wesch VideoProfessor Michael Wesch is a leading expert in internet culture; his talk From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: New Learning Environments for New Media Environments was recorded as a keynote at UMW in May 2011. Take notes on the topics he discusses that make you think about what it means to be creating your own spaces online. Once your blog is set up, you will be asked to write a reflection on this talk- how you do this us up to you; for now writing is okay, but in the future we expect you to use media, links, etc to express your thoughts. The main point of this week’s reflection is to connect the concepts described by Wesch to your own experiences on the web, and project how this might play out as you develop your own online space for this class.Part One of Wesch Presentaiton:http://vimeo.com/23913046Part Two of Wesch Presentation:http://vimeo.com/23820500
• Write your weekly summary letter home Each week at camp, you should write home to tell them all the things you did and created this week- this is due on Sunday at midnight. This week, you may include your reflection to Wesch’s presentation in your letter home.
• (Optional) Join the Campfire on Thursday at 4:00 PM EST. If you’re available on Thursday afternoon, join us in a Google Hangout to talk about how camp is going. This will be a great time to meet your fellow-campers and get to know each other. We (Alan & Martha) will both be available to answer questions, too. The first 10 participants can participate via video. Others can listen in and participate in the chat. Alan and Martha will be Tweeting the URL for the Hangout right before it starts on Thursday afternoon.

If you have any questions, you should have emails and twitter contacts for your camp co-directors. It’s time to go making Magic and Camp Magic Macguffin!

UPDATE (5/22): For a variety of reasons beyond our control, construction on the Mechanical Room at CMM has been delayed. As a result, it’s taking longer than we had hoped to get UMW students’ domains/web hosting accounts set up. 🙁 As soon as we’ve got the wires connected, we’ll be in touch!

In the meantime, you should still complete The Daily Create on Wednesday (5/23) and share it on YouTube. We’ll all be able to see each others’ videos on The Daily Create site. We’d also like you to tweet it when it’s up and live. Also, go ahead and watch the Michael Wesch videos and start drafting your first camp letter home/reaction to Wesch (you can just do this in Word or Google Docs for now). As soon as your sit is up, you can post it there. You won’t be able to install WordPress until the wiring issues are resolved, but hang tight. That’s coming!

Remember, on Thursday at 4:00 EST we’ll be having our first fireside chat! If you can join us, watch Twitter. We’ll both be tweeting the link to the Google Hangout session.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2012 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Announcements, Camp Weeklies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.