I’m thinking of Jerry’s note this morning (happy to see him signed up for Camp Magic Macguffin)

“@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project.

— Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012

With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting slip the time spent creating for class, itself the self-renewal I need as much as oxygen. Seeing Scottlo Warhol his Second Life self in a followup to Leelzebub’s own effort had me eager to try the tutorial.

But alas I am photoshopless until the new order comes in, and that was way more than I wanted to bite off and try in GIMP.

So I went for the next best thing, doing an animated GIF. When I visited the National Cryptologic Museum on Saturday I enjoyed watching the machine that had a computer controlled arm for loading data form a giant circular library system (I cannot recall the name of it), the robot arm seemed to have some good potential.

I shot some video on my iPhone and then loaded it into MPEG StreamClip to do some frame grabs (using the low res 320×240 size). I then used the web based Gifninja site to create the GIF above. It’s basic, and one frame moves a bit more, but I like it, especially the shadowy figure who passes behind.

It’s interesting to note that Gigninja has a new tool (at least since a year more or more ago) for splitting GIFs, might be some fun things to do with mashing up sequences of existing animated GIFS.

This takes me back to my first animated GIF, from December 14, 2011, when I used scenes from Frankenstein to declare ds106 IS ALIVE

It’s almost nostalgic to think of the birth of ds106- I wrote then

So it’s not even place, it’s three weeks out, why are all my colleagues, friends madly in their labs, and doing of all things, retro 1990s techno things like animated gifs?

And so it is with this wild ride that starts next month. It really is under the hand of Dr. Bava, but he is being humble and not wanting to be a mad dictator, but he does have a vision. I was lucky to spend an hour on Skype with Jim, Tom and Martha, just bouncing ideas.

What should unfold will be unlike many of the other MOOC efforts in that it is not hinged on the weekly drum beat drive of the syllabus and synchronous lecture like sessions in Elluminate. There wont be discussion forums (likely). it will be blog based, and very much individually driven. It will be what ever you want it to be- you will be able to follow the structure jim and Martha are doing at UMW as a “regular” class, or you can cherry pick the bits you want to do.

It’s all about a continuous pulse of creativity. Jim is reeally hooked into the notion of The Dailyshoot and Martha has a nifty duct tape and RSS system for crowdsourcing assignments.

My own idea, also influenced my dailyshoot (which you know I love) is that there could be small daily creative assignments available each day. One does not need to do them all, maybe for a class, it would be 2 or three per week. But they would all be small things one could do each do to create something new, maybe a graphic, a fake movie poster, a story played out in Amazon reviews. The thing about Dailyshoot is that it drives you to try new, and challenging, things.

All of these would be things people can do or not, but might feed the larger, conceptual assignments that are the frame of Jim’s previous ds106 courses at UMW.

The, like now, ds106.us .. IT’S ALIVE. Come in and play now, come on over to Camp Magic Macguffin for the summer of ds106.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by febbrile

This is about as close as I might get to a reflection on my first round of teaching an on site section of ds106 at the University of Mary Washington- the class had barely wrapped and we were off into prep for Faculty Academy, and this week, ds106 cranks up for its summer iteration. I dropped the ball on my audio reflections leaving about 4 recordings sitting high and dry.

Not to mention it is 2am and I have an online presentation to deliver at 9am.

But if I don’t blog it now, I might lose it all, given (another pending blog post) a summer of travel that starts in less than 48 hours.

Enough prelude, get to it, Levine!

First of all, this was about the first time since the mid 1990s that I was teaching a class; then like now, I am humbled at how much in underestimate the toll it takes. No, let me go one back than first of all- it was a thrilling experience I have no regrets on, and could not be prouder of the work done by all of my students (see the collection of final projects).

Knowing how to do the ds106 work is one thing, being able to assist 25 students in doing it… another. I have to say that they accomplish much on what they learn to and not so much what I teach them; I am there to set the pace, to nudge, coach, cajole.

The biggest struggle was my in class strategies and presence; I do not feel like I developed the “shtick” or way to carry the show in my own way. I have no expectations of doing the class a la Jim Groom, who really ends up generating a frenzy of energy among his students (with his gift of talking smack to people and them loving it). Part of it was perhaps the awkward beginning, the 2 weeks of class when it started and I was coming in via Skype, meaning it took more time for the students and I to get to know each other.

What worked best were sessions where I broke things down into small segments of students doing rapid prototyping or group activities. What worked least best was the sessions where I just got up and talked and showed. It was uphill all the way to engage in discussions (though there were good ones when we discussed YouTube genres).

Some of the best classes happened in February, and the peak was likely the night I had them do Foley sounds for a Charlie Chaplin silent film- here is their final work

The intensity of the work was hard, and I sensed many of my students were so focussed on getting their “30 stars” of video assignments, that doing that superseded the making art damnit goal. I did not think I would have to be explicit in criteria for writing up assignments, but even with commenting, I see posts with thrilling titles like “Mashup Assignment”, no links, and not the kind of “story behind the story” I asked for often.

I should go to the half full glass as I had at least 6-8 students who did really good blog writing and pretty much documented their progress. I think all of us got worn out through the video section, but then again, so many students rose to the occasion who had never done video before.

Assignment wise, the “Return to the Silent Era” may have been the killer one, with over 40 people completing it, and the work of Ben Rimes hitting the crowning achievement of appearing in a British tabloid.

My biggest contribution might have ben creating the assignment remix generator, riffing off of the ideas of Tom Woodward for a mechanism for creating different “card twists” to change up a randomly selected assignment. The unplanned gem was in asking students to go back to the original assignments and identify media from another student’s work to use as a reference for the remix. As of this writing, there were 143 new remix assignments done.

The coding on that was largely on the shoulders of the work Martha Burtis did last year on the assignments site. I’ve been doing some cleanup and improvements on that site as well.

The next add on for the remix site might be a tool to encourage re-writing of existing assignments to work in different disciplines, so you could have a tool that lets the user select, say Math, and they get randomly chosen existing assignment and have to contribute a new way to do it for their selected discipline. It’s pretty much the same engine.

All of this is fraying as I enter into the weird colored zone of the summer section I am co-teaching with Martha. This one is a 10 week course, completely online. As a counter to the “Summer of Oblivion” the theme of this summer is bright and happy camp experience as Camp Magic Macguffin. It is my role to bring some sanity and civility to what was a horror sceme last summer.

Martha and I have done a fun series of weekly videos, playing with the theme– the whackiest part was we set up a swag store before sitting down to tweak the syllabus. But this is the fun part about this class being done in a performance mode- the direction and shape will be driven by the people that show up.

And boy have people been great to sign up to take the class or even hover around as wise experienced camp counselors. For our open participants, see a new guide to participation we set up on the main mother site. The things we’d ask the open folks to do are to play as much as they can with the assignments, as well as keeping the flow of Daily Create going. Mainly we hope you interact with our students via their blog posts and tweets.

Now I getting really sleepy and blog sloppy. The summer course may be a ton of work, but it is going to be some crazy unknown directions as hopefully our participants start changing up our story.

If you have been wavering about being in ds106, now is the prime time to jump in- we already have in the first days some art being create, but mostly a lot of the community stepping in and trying to connect with the students.

I was going to work this into another post, but with the cacophony of blogs going on and on about MOOCs and such- I can say as long as I can have some say, there will be no cheap “x” added to ds106- it is what it is, open participants can ge the full or half full immersion that makes it fomcfortabnle (damn I am tired).

Rocking with ds106 in the summer of Magic. Join in now.

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by freshwater2006

Tonight we unleashed a new piece of the ds106 fleet of sites- the Assignment Remix Generator. This is an idea that was spawned by Tom Woodward way back in December 2010 as a way of instigating remixes of creative work by the playing of a “card” on someone else’s work.

Keep in mind, this was a month before the launch of the open version of ds106, and 6 months before the development of the assignment bank.

The students would get a variety of cards at the beginning of the course and to use them they’d tag the origin post and link to the person they want to be the recipient of the action.

So, maybe I want to take CogDog’s #ds106 aura photography challenge and assign it to someone else to remix as a drawing project. I’d play my “Change Format2” card in the comments and indicate that person X should do it. They might make something like the design below.

There are lots of possibilities for cards. There are lots of ways this might play out. It might introduce too much chaos but I think it has the chance to change how participants take part in the course. It gives them a degree of control and institutes a degree of randomness that is attractive to me and might be attractive to others. I like how it puts more power in the hands of the participants and changes how they interact.

We circled back to this idea a month ago in a Skype conversation with Zack Dowell where we spoke of the riffing of work in ds106, and the idea planted in my head.

So the idea of the Remix machine is to go from the remixing of media that we’ve had students doing the past two weeks, to the level of remixing the work they have been doing in ds106. The primary part of the machine now is the Generator- it pulls one random assignment from the bank (we have over 300 now), and combines it with one random “remix card“- the cards each describe a different “twist” to apply to an assignment.

This presents a user a potential combo- if they don’t like it, reload (eventually I want to make it more like a slot machine, and load new items via ajax).

By pressing “Remix it”, the code generates a new content type that offers the combination as a remix page (or if it exists, the button merely links to it).

Your task is to then interpret the combination as a new assignment- and do it. Not only that, we want you to look at the examples that were done for the original assignment, and use media from one of these as your starting point.

For example, one combination is combining the Wiggle Spectroscopy (visual assignment) with the Go Emo remix card – so the challenge there would be to create a wiggle visual that features an emo type character. To do this I might download the GIF created at http://www.generousworld.net/?p=101 and try to edit it to change a character.

Okay, chances are some of these won;t make sense. But it’s all about the interpretation.

Tonight in class, I introduced it to my students, and had them in small groups find combinations that would work (or would not) which led to some fun class discussion. I also got some good suggestions from them for new remix cards.

This is pretty much in the spirit of building the course was we go. There are a bunch of things to tweak, fine tune, and maybe plug holes into. I want to add a form that will allow people to submit new card ideas.

And going back to Tom Woodward’s original concept, we want to make a “play this” button on a remix that would allow them to email a card or assignment to someone else to do as a challenge. Or we add a “remix” this button to assignments on the main site.

I’m looking for ideas, and feedback on this monster. There is another long post that should be more on the mechanics, but this is all leveraging the genius of Marth Burtis who build the original assignment bank. I had managed to make a copy of the assignment bank site by cloning the key database tables, and making appropriate changes in the wp_options one. I had to create new custom post types and taxonomies for the RemixCards, the remix assignment combos.

I thought I would have to migrate the functionality back to the assignments site to tap into its info, but managed to find the switch_to_blog() function that allows be to switch to another blog database to run queries when I need to tap into the other site.

This has been pretty exciting both to build but also to see how it pans out. The students tonight seemed intrigued by this idea.

It’s a remix bonanza party at ds106!