Alexandra Pickett, who’s having students create an engaging online course space, asked if I would share some quick advice for thinking about how one might approach designing engagement into an online course experience. I can only steal from the best, and Martha Burtis‘ design of the ds106 assignments is probably the coolest thing I’ve seen in this regard. What’s more, it changed the very notion of engagement for the high school ds106ers I taught two weeks ago. As a technical framework it fundamentally changed the way I teach the class. It allows me to personalize instruction, abstract the tools, and let the students choose and create what they want. That’s amazing in my mind. I would write more, but I have a post I am writing hailing Martha Burtis for the genius she is when it comes to ds106.
I created this assignment because I was inspired to do something that had to do with a camp experience due to the fact that I was summarizing my Camp Magic MacGuffin experience all week. So I created my own which has a picture of a rope swing, canoe, and bunk beds which are from my one past camp experience. The other pictures are from movies that I have seen that are camp related. The picture of Ben Stiller and the Blob on the water are from the movie “Heavy Weights” which is a comedy I watched when I was little. The other two are a bit more grown up they are the movie posters from “American Pie Band Camp” and “Wet Hot American Summer” which are both movies I also watched and enjoyed. I had fun doing this little collage I hope others do to.
The first daily create I completed was making a creepy sound. I could have used audio from the internet or something but I chose to use my mouth. Yes, I made this sound with my mouth
The second daily create I completed was drawing a flower with my eyes closed. I always draw roses so this assignment wasn’t too hard for me.
The third daily create I did was to take a picture of the animal you think represents your personality. I chose to do a puppy because puppies are young, innocent, and ready to learn. And that is exactly how I am. I think = )
The last daily create I did was, “you are what you eat” and today I ate chicken.. (go figure). So I guess I’m a chicken.. lol
It all started on May 21, 2012, a young girl by the name of Kavon Johnson was sent to her first summer camp. She had never been to summer camp before so she was very nervous. Along with being very nervous she was questioning why her mother decided to send her to camp this year. Kavon wasn’t a bad child and her mother never had any problems out of her. So why was she being sent away. Even with all of her questions Kavon went on to summer camp.
When Kavon got to camp, it was very new for her. She knew no one, but everyone started introducing themselves and telling each other about their social networking sites. everyone seemed to have a Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, and so on.
Soon the interaction began. One of the most welcoming tweet Kavon got was from Zazzy, a camp counselor. The tweet read..
.. soon Kavon felt more welcome than she did before and she was settling in safely to camp. So she thought. Soon after an uninvited guess came into the camp. No one knew who this person was at first, but the Camp Counselors stepped in and handled the problem. But Kavon felt very weird about it. How did an unknown guest just sneak into camp? Was she really safe here at Camp Magic MacGuffin?
Kavon tried her best to let the unknown man situation go, but for some reason she couldn’t! She felt as if the man was coming to get her. “Maybe that is the reason why mom sent me here?” “Maybe he is after my family?” “Maybe he came here to kill me” All of these thoughts ran through Kavon’s head. She could have been overreacting, but something wasn’t sitting well with her at all.
She wanted to tell someone about her suspicion but she didn’t want people to think she was crazy. If she would be able to tell anyone it would be her bunk mates. Kavon was assigned to Bunkhouse 3 also known as the naked lunch bunch. She was close to a lot of people in her bunkhouse but was especially close to a girl named Marcey.
Marcey is the girl in the pinkish shirt, holding a dog. Kavon then confided in Marcey and told her how she had never been to camp before, how her mom all of a sudden sent her, and how she thinks the strange uninvited guest was there to get her. Marcey believed Kavon but had a few doubts. Marcey told Kavon that if anymore strange people came into camp they would notify the Camp Counselors about Kavon’s suspensions.
For about 2 week camp was going fine. Everyone was beginning to get really close and the fun was really starting. Kavon had soon forgot about the strange uninvited guest and was making herself at home at camp. One night as Kavon was walking back to her bunk house she heard something in the woods. Like someone was walking.
Kavon ran into the bunkhouse as fast as she could and told Marcey that something had spooked her. Marcey explained that they were at camp and a lot of animals come out at night and they should should not be worried. Then Marcey mention how she had heard that Zazzy had gotten sick from food at camp. Did someone know that Zazzy was sharing food with Kavon and tried to poison her. Kavon was really worried now.
The next day a camp there was a new person there. No one knew his name at first but he came out of no where. Kavon told Marcey about this new unidentified man and that it could be someone else there to harm her. This time Marcey was ready to act. But she first had to check out this “new guy” to see what he was all about. They soon figured out his name was “Slide Guy” and Kavon wondered where he got that name from. Slide Guy was seen all over camp, but he never got too close to Kavon. Slide Guy did do a lot of weird things but he seemed so happy. As if he would not harm a fly. Kavon did start to notice that Slide Guy was getting close to Marcey.
During the middle of Camp, all the campers had to come together to do a radio show. Kavon wanted to work with Marcey on the radio show, like always, but for some reason when Kavon went to her bunkhouse Marcey wasn’t there. Kavon wasn’t really worried because Marcey was very busy around the camp. So that night Kavon attended a fire side chat with the campers. She thought that Marcey would be there, but she wasn’t. Again, Kavon didn’t worry about it she just thought Marcey was skipping out on the chat to do something more important. Kavon started asking other people if they had seen Marcey and no one had. Kavon then noticed that Slide Guy had disappeared as well. She ran and told her Camp Counselors about what had happened and they made this video.
Kavon knew for a fact that someone was out to get her now. Slide Guy could not get close to Kavon so he took the next best thing; her camp buddy. Kavon was in a uproar, she was scared to go out of the bunk, she was scared to be alone, she was scared to eat, she was even scared to do assignments at camp. People were out to get Kavon and her family knew about it. They sent her there to protect her, but she ending up bringing harm to a friend. Why were these people after her and why did they want to harm her?
As camp was coming to an end Kavon heard this strange noise in her bunk. This was the noise..
.. the whole bunk woke up to find someone trying to take Kavon. The bunk house fought back and come to find out it was Slide Guy returning Marcey. He was making this noise because he had gotten all of his teeth pulled and couldn’t speak correctly. Come to find out the people were not trying to harm Kavon nor her family. The were a private investigation group trying to get background information on her for a job she had applied for. She was so happy she didn’t know what to do with herself. The Camp Counselors had one more assignment for Kavon to do. It was called Pause [Four] A Moment. Kavon took a picture of herself when she figured out that she, her family, and her friend were safe and she knew she would remember that moment and Camp Magic MacGuffin FOREVER!
I tried to be creative and mix some things in there. I did not just want it to be a simple old blog post, but I wanted to “write” it. So I decided to put it in a movie form with slides. I added music to the background just to make it seem more “fun.” There is also one photo in there. I tried to stay away from the photos because I always use them. Lastly, there is a part of me in there.. you’ll be surprised to hear it.
I really like this topic and was happy to see that we were covering it for a second straight week. First off if I was going to describe a remix I would say that it is a creation of work that uses previous works in its actual composition or the previous work has a strong influence on it. In my opinion the diffidence between a remix and copying is that a remix give artistic credit to the predecessor but also changes it in some way.
The first video I watched was a remix called “Cant Tase This” it uses the song “Cant Touch This” by MC Hammer and actual footage of a college student getting tasered. This video is a good example of a mash up because it meshes them together so you the two videos are completely different but with editing the “Don’t Tase Me” parts do not mess with the flow of the MC Hammer song so it makes the video watchable and extremely entertaing in my opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzkd_m4ivmc
The next video I looked at was “Star Wars Call Me Maybe”, first off I just have to wonder at the amount of time this must have take to put together. This is a a great example of a remix because it is using the music to “Call Me Maybe” and even the lyrics but instead of Carly Rae Jepson singing it the creator took a ton of little clips from star wars and arranged them to sound like the characters were singing the song. I Think that this is an example of how creative even a remix can be, I mean I cant think of many people who would have been creative enough to think of this idea never mind take the time to create it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBM7i84BThE
The final movie I looked at is possibly my favorite because I am a huge Monty Python fan. The video “Star Trek Meets Monty Python” is a classic example of redubing where they take the video from one scene and use the audio from another and they are usually very different types which is often what makes them entertaining. The creative part is choosing the scenes from Star Trek that in some way fit the audio from “Monty Pythons The Holy Grail” which could not have been easy considering the two could not be farther apart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luVjkTEIoJc
In conclusion I think that remixes can some times be as creative as originals, key word in some cases. For example in the videos above they used nothing that the created themselves but what they chose to combine and how they combined it was in its own right original and creative. Now in the video it seemed that Led Zeplin remixed old song but did not stray far from the original which in my opinion was very original or creative but yet still a fan. So finally its not that you re use other peoples work but what you do once you have it that makes the difference in my opinion of course.
Make an alphabetically themed collage. Compile images to represent each letter of the alphabet within a chosen subject area or theme. Create a collage.
The potential themes are endless: items around the house, items in nature, food, flowers, even possibly things that simply make you smile. For the example, used food.
Food A-Z
After collecting photos of food that represented each letter of the alphabet, I simply opened the folder in Picasa…
…and from the “create” menu, selected “create collage”
…to start the photo compilation.
Then, I adjusted the settings–style, page format, background options–and rearranged the photos to be in A, B, C order to get the final collage I wanted. Pressing the button to “create collage”, I had my A-Z Photography composition created!
I can’t wait to see others’ interpretation of the assignment, as well as the individual themes or topics that will be used for the collages. Good luck and have fun!
One of the requirements for ds106 was to create a new assignment for the DS106 Assignment Repository. I’ve been thinking about the possibilities for the past 9 weeks, keeping in mind that I don’t want to closely duplicate an already existing assignment AND I must be able to do it myself. That was the real challenge…my mind envisions things that my talents fall short on bringing to fruition.
This morning, inspiration struck! Zombie mania is spreading like crazy. With shows like The Walking Dead gaining popularity and news stories of people attacking others in a zombie-like fashion, I thought “what would I look like as a zombie?”
My Photoshop skills are greatly lacking so I started looking for other ways to alter an image of myself and zombify it. After some quick internet researching I found there were many online options available for FREE! Halleluiah! I played around with a few finding the Zombify Yourself online app on the Zombieland website is my favorite. Here’s one possibility of what I might look like as a zombie:
Zombie Me
I was having so much fun I did another of Dave & I
Zombie Couple
See the assignment and other examples in the DS106 Design Assignment Repository: Zombify Yourself
I hope other ds106 participants have as much doing this as I did!
The remix assignment this week was to use the remix generator to produce a remix card paired with another assignment from the ds106 assignment repository. The task was to then interpret this as a new assignment and do it. We were instructed to look at the examples that were done for the original assignment, and use media from one of these as the starting point.
The remix generator made for some interesting browsing this week. I’ve randomly been flipping through to computer-generated combinations, looking for something that (a) had examples, (b) was feasible with my limited skills, and (c) was interesting. After a few start and stop trial and errors, I got Remixed Assignments 454 (5 stars), which basically meant I needed to take a time-lapse pic from another ds106er and “Dr. Seuss” it. There was only one example available to use: kimchipizza’s soccer composite.
I then conducted a quick Google search to find a quote or saying from a Dr. Seuss book that included anything about a ball. And I found this one:
“Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all.”
Since this quote is from “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”, I did Google image search for the book, looking for an appropriate image to incorporate into the image, settling on this one of the main character, from Dr. Seuss Wiki:
After accumulating the pieces and parts that I needed, I used Aviary Image Editor to create my remix.
Remixes are everywhere and they are unavoidable. Some remixes are easier to do and others are simple. While watching some of these videos, I got a understanding how HOW TO do some things I never thought of before. It is even more interesting to know just how creative some people are to come up with remix ideas. Several of these remixes take pure creative minds to think of and technological skills to make it happen. I do think that the people who remix an original art should have some copyright to it. Being that they recreated something with their own idea, they should have some share.
The video clips that were listen on Magic McGuffin website were very intriguing. I wanted to blog about all of them, but I chose to do my favorite 3.
The first point that I liked about the remix world is how you can put two different things together and make one. The video I watched was the Buffy vs. Edward. They are two different movies, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Twilight but they have the same concept. Vampires. Now I personally never seen the two movies, but I know of them. It was magnificent to watch how the two movies were mixed into one..
The second thing I liked about the remix world was how you can take a movie, take the dialogue from the movie, and make it into something else. I liked how this particular mix took the Star Wars movie and the song “Call me maybe” by Carly Rae Jepson and basically made a music video. The took clips from Star Wars of the actors/actress saying the words from “Call me maybe” and put it all together into one video. It seems so simple, but I know there had to be some difficulties find the words and chopping them up.
The third thing I liked about the remix world was how you can take current events/news stories and add them into songs to make a remix of the song. I liked how they did “Can’t Tase This” remix of ”Can’t touch this” by M.C Hammer It honestly made me laugh because they took a kind of sad news event and make it into a funny song. This type of remix seemed easy to do and it is actually something that I would like to try myself.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
