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Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Figured it was time I got some DS106 work up here, convincing myself and others that I’m not just at Camp Magic MacGuffin to play about building a British Embassy in Minecraft. Although fundamentally that is a large part of it…

First up: Lyric Typographic Poster (design assignment 529). I knew it had to be Eels, and I chose the opening lines from “Friendly Ghost” on Souljacker. People peg the Eels as a depressing band, but I think not. The background texture is one of a load I downloaded for something else ages ago.

Next: Design an Invoice (design assignment 58) – described as “Create an invoice for a transaction that has happened in a film, TV series, etc”. I chose an invoice from Local Hero, one of those utterly wonderful early 80s Bill Forsyth films and quite possibly my favourite film of all time, ever*. It’s something I find myself coming back to again and again, especially at times when life seems less delightful. I’ve added some handwritten notes to preserve two lines of dialogue that need to be preserved, and I had to hand-create the logo in PowerPoint so have uploaded it as a PNG in case anyone else in the world needs to print out a Knox Industries logo and answer the phone with “Thank you for calling Knox Oil and Gas“.

Knox invoice.pdf
Download this file

Anyway, happy ds106 everyone. #4life

* seriously, watch it some time. Here’s the first bit on youtube.

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Come join the Youth and Beauty Brigade

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

The Decemberists are unparalleled storytellers and the best band that ever lived, so selecting one of their songs to use for a DS106 class project seemed appropriate. For this assignment I decided to use a lyric from “California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade,” which appears on Castaways and Cutouts.

Here they are performing the song:

Castaways and Cutouts was released in 2002. It went undiscovered by me until the winter of 2004. I had just started making friends with some folks in Richmond. One of them was a young hipster who had better taste in music than I did.

“California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade” remains on my list of favorite Decemberists songs for a few reasons. The first half of the song is about driving route 1, which runs along the California coastline, and drinking wine. Who doesn’t like a road trips and wine? And look at these lyrics: “Take a long drive with me on California One” and “Take a long dram with me on California wine.” Clever, Colin Meloy. Effing Clever.

It’s “Youth and Beauty Brigade” that I really adore. I’m neither youthful nor beautiful, but boy oh boy do I relate to the misanthropes and misfits that populate The Decemberists’ Youth and Beauty Brigade: bed-wetters*, ambulance chasers, bored bench warmers, castaways, cutouts, irresponsible library users. Yes! And that brings me to this:

Lyric Typography Poster featuring The Decemberists

Jaysus. I’m looking at the image now, and thinking that I really built that up with the back story.

I also worked in Photoshop too. Photoshop is still a challenge for me. Layers and working within said layers is counterintuitive. I’m thinking it may have something to do with the fact that I’ve spent decades in word processing software built for the “everyman.” I’ll figure it out though. Here’s the Photoshop version:

Photoshopped version

There’s not enough space at the top, and the font type isn’t all that adventurous or exciting (especially after seeing the stuff at Music Philosophy) or uniform, but screw it. It’s a draft.

The police car photo is from Robert Kuykendall’s Flickr stream. I found the image by doing an advanced search in Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed images.

* I am not a bed-wetter, by the way. I don’t chase ambulances either. I’m not much for warming benches, because I don’t play sports. I am notorious for not getting my library books back on time.

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, DesignAssignments, designassignments529, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Come join the Youth and Beauty Brigade

The Slippery Slider Gourmet – Tas T. Buds

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

The Slippery Slider Gourmet -Tas T. Buds (without Tas T. Buds, life would have less flavor and enjoyment) was last seen cleansing his palate in his favorite fashion (refer to the photo above). Tas T. Buds is someone who is a connoisseur of good food and drink. He can usually be found at gourmet restaurants (one’s that are considered to serve the highest quality food) such as the local beer halls, pizza joints, pubs and fast food courts. In between culinary debacles he can be found writing his magazine column “The Slippery Slider Gourmet” also referred to as “The Slide Guy Loves Food”. Currently he is “in the pink” journalistically speaking (which is better than being “in the red”).

This Slide Guy loves to slide down things!

Visual Assignment 595 for ds106.

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Media Mediate Relationships

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Classes are done and reports are written so I finally have some time to do some ds106 work. Yeah!

A few weeks ago, we were asked to watch a video of Michael Wesch speaking at UMW Faculty Academy. After some difficulties (see previous post) I was able to see the whole thing. In listening to him I garnered a few ideas that I would like to include in an upcoming workshop that I am planning for teachers.

I had already planned to start the day with participants reflecting on their personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning by determining how much they agree with some educational theorists (or not!) Our IB programme is decidedly constructivist and inquiry-based so I thought that I would define constructivism and then engage the participants in the type of inquiry that I am hoping they will at some point facilitate for their students. Inspired by Lane Clark, at the moment, I am planning to base the remainder of the day’s activities on:

exploring resources about inquiry
determining what they could do with this information to make a difference for themselves or others
determining what they still need to learn/ find out
reflecting on the skills they used in the process
sharing their ideas with others
selecting their communication tool
creating their product
celebrating their work

As a teacher, teaching in this way is incredibly challenging and I want to acknowledge that with my participants. The rewards are numerous but it is not easy because, according to Michael Wesch:

kids don’t believe this is what school should be
as a teacher you need to start over every year
Tip: “just love your audience and they’ll love you back” – this allows you to you focus on what they need

I thought that I would illustrate one of the video’s messages using a meme. I know that it’s not funny but the picture seemed appropriate for the text – even though I believe the text can also be purely positive and not necessarily negative.

I created this using quickmeme.com Just click on “make a meme“, select a photo and replace the captions. For those of you making animated gifs, you can also upload those.

Posted in bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, inquiry, magicmacguffin, openonline, teaching, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments386, workshops | Comments Off on Media Mediate Relationships

How To: Photoshop Magic Lasso

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I’m not much one for creating “how to” videos, at least not ones that I share publicly on a regular basis, but I felt as though I owed it to some of the people whose blogs I’m following to help out a bit with the monolithic application that is Photoshop. Don’t get too excited though, I am far from being a Photoshop expert, most of my skills having waned since being a heavy Fark.com Photoshop Contest participant in the early 2000s. When I saw Melanie Barker complete the quick, but fun “Slide Guy” assignment (which coincidentally remind me of a lot of the Fark contests), I was impressed. When she said she did it because she was afraid of Photoshop, I wanted to share just a couple of simple tools that I use for cutting and pasting elements from one image to another. Below is the image I created for the ds106 Slide Guy Visual Assignment using a still from a rather famous movie and a shot of Tim Owens joyously sliding down a child’s playground slide.

Look at that slide guy having so much fun trying to crush poor Dr. Jones!

Again, please bear in mind that I am an absolute novice when it comes to Photoshop, and the tools I show may very well be the worst tools to use for cutting, copying, and pasting images as far as a professional graphic designers are concerned, but these tools are super easy to use, and don’t really require that much to figure out, just a bit of practice to master. If it benefits you at all, please enjoy my 6 minute walkthrough of using the magic lasso tool in Photoshop. You can view it below or click here to watch via YouTube.

Posted in Art, bunk5, counselor, ds106, magicmacguffin, multimedia, openonline, Photoshop, slide, software, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on How To: Photoshop Magic Lasso

Slide Guy Meets Carly Rae Jepsen

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

A few months ago a students started playing “Call Me Maybe” in the library. He played it over and over and over again. I thought I was going to kill myself, and I told him as much. His response, “It really grows on you.” And so it does. I went home that night and instead of putting my head in the oven, I pulled up the video on Youtube and listened. Over and over and over again.

It looks like Slide Guy likes Carly Rae Jepsen just as much as the rest of ~~the~~ ~~world~~ teenage America.

There’s nothing better for sliding than a soapy windshield!

I started working on this assignment in Photoshop, but I find it too overwhelming at the moment. I saw GIMP mentioned a few times, so I decided to download and use that. I downloaded “Slide Guy” from the visual assignments page. I downloaded the “Call Me Maybe” video from Youtube. I then imported the video into VLC and found the scene I wanted. I went through the scene frame by frame until I reached the one you see above. To capture the still image, I used the “snapshot” option under “video.” Once I had the two images, I opened them both as layers in GIMP. It took me some time to familiarize myself with GIMP, but it was definitely manageable. I still hope to master Photoshop… or at least become competent in Photoshop… before the summer is over.

Posted in Assignments, bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on Slide Guy Meets Carly Rae Jepsen

Life is Good…

Monday, June 11th, 2012

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
Joseph Campbell

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Unlikely Intersections visual assignment for #DS106

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

I spotted these street names signs and remembered there was a DS106 assignment for this, Unlikely Intersections. Well the combination of street names is not really all that unlikely, in fact they kind of go together. The unlikely part is the survival of the photographer as the only way to get this shot is to stand out in the road.

To round out the story, this intersection is in a mostly residential suburban area, though the corner with the street signs houses the fire department and across the street is a large private high school and convent. The other two corners are private homes. Blossom road is a main feed road from the city and this intersection is about a block from an expressway ramp. Clover street here is residential and there are some very nice looking houses there.

The hardest part of this assignment (aside from taking pictures while standing in the road) is finding an appropriate intersection. So its good to be aware of the assignment in case you come across one. It’s also helpful to have a camera on hand when that happens.

That’s my story. Any Questions?

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Venus Transit Swede Animated GIF #DS106

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

On June 6, 2012 millions watched the transit of Venus across the sun. While millions watched, many others missed this rare celestial phenomenon. Some people missed it because they were looking the wrong way or they live on the wrong side of the planet. Others missed out simply because the didn’t give a hoot, or they were nestled deep underground tunneling through their mine craft worlds.
Whatever the reason, if you missed it, here is a re-enactment based on detailed eyewitness accounts.

I don’t know which ds106 assignment this really belongs under. I used Swede a Scene even though this is an animated gif, not a video.

That’s my story. Any questions?

photo credits
Orange:cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by richard_north
Venus: Wikimedia Commons

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Slow Life Down with Photobooth

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

lazy weekends call for lazy art, right?

It’s the weekend, time for a few errands, grocery shopping, mending a bit of that landscape edging you promised your wife you’d get to a month ago, and spending some time with the kids. Truth be told, our weekends are usually all sorts of busy here in the Rimes’ household, and I’m sure any other family with younger children will agree, it’s far too easy to find yourself working harder on a Saturday than you might have during the week. We’d like to think of Saturday and Sunday as “lazy” days in which we can relax with our family and friends, and just enjoy the brief time we have before heading “back to the edu-coal mines” on Monday. Reality though, typically means that we plan more activities and structure instead of playtime on those two precious days (at least it feels that way in our house many weekends).

So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by capturing a silly moment, and completing a ds106 assignment (yes, even ds106 can feel like one of those weekend chores if you’re trying to “play good” and complete the right number of assignments).

But that’s beside the point! How in the world is this applicable to the classroom? Quite often I see teachers in my district using Photobooth for one of two projects; either photos of everyone at the beginning of the year to go up on walls or special bulletin boards, or “special effects” photos for big projects. It’s a shame that they don’t have access to the Macbooks more often (each elementary only has 2 MacBook carts, the MS and HS 3 carts apiece), because Photobooth would make an excellent visual journaling tool for capturing daily learning experiences, moods, and just the general well-being of learning going on in a classroom. Photobooth does stills and video, so you could switch it up from day to day, maybe even taking subsequent shots to stitch together as an animated gif, or create a series of video reflections from a bunch of students after a rather large project.

Today, I just used it to capture the kids and me being silly around the breakfast table. The “Warhol Effect” was appropriate, and rather than print it out, post it on a nice bulletin board to make the hallways or classroom walls “more presentable” like I see at school, I’m just going to post it here in a quick “this is what’s going through my head right now” manner. No doubt the kids and I will stumble across it in a few years time (I’ve dumped it into my iPhoto album as well) and have a nice memory of this morning.

Posted in Art, bunk5, counselor, digital storytelling, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, visualassignments560, warhol | Comments Off on Slow Life Down with Photobooth