counselor — Camp Magic MacGuffin

Archive for the ‘counselor’ Category

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Big virtual party as we (sorta) gather all the pictures of the Wäbbits for our big group photo.

Listening to the wisdom of my RSS feeds, Ben reminds us that camp counselors should lead by example. Fellow Wäbbit, John saysKeep Calm and Make a GIF. Not sure how to take Bava’s below the belt advice, but since he was inspired by our other Wäbbit Chanda it must be good.

In honor of herding Wäbbits, I have made a special group photo and included a couple of the animated gifs I made this week. Do not adjust your set. This is the technical difficulties assignment!

Special appearance of @dlnorman‘s bathroom shark (from the storybox)

Too much Coke for Bava

and the Gladiator

Please Stand By. Wäscälly Wäbbits are just warming up.

Posted in bunk2, counselor, ds106, magicmacguffin, openlearning, openonline, University, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments2, VisualAssignments590 | Comments Off on Wäscälly Wäbbits Weception

Minecraft Me

Monday, June 11th, 2012

First of all, I had NO idea how FUN Minecraft is. I think being in creative mode makes all the difference. Also using the TeamSpeak server for chatting was so great. It really felt like I was in the same room as Andy, Tim, Shannon, Ben and Allyson.

Being the most experienced of the crew, Andrew Forgrave was especially helpful and patient. He even wrote a great summary of our evening and did some awesome animated GIFs. He assigned us homework to get our own custom skins for the next time we signed in. Et Voila!

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe
One of the best things about DS106 is that when you don’t feel like doing one of the thousand existing assignments, you can just create a new one.
And that’s what I’ve done, right here with Minecraft Me

I used a very roundabout method to make my skin. I found a NERD Skin at SkinDex.

NERD SKIN!

Then I imported into Photoshop and edited the tiny little PNG.

Nerdy G!

Zoom in and it looks like this:

G Magnified PNG

I couldn’t figure out how to see what I looked like so I stumbled upon this cool editor called Minershoes which let me upload and preview my edited PNG. Of course, I see it’s really simple to just edit it right there and perhaps that would have been smarter, faster, better.

I also see that Andy has a whole new amazing post about skins which is worth checking out, especially if you are a Monkey!

Thanks to Martha, I figured out that you can toggle through the Function + F5 key to change your view option and see what you look like in game. I had already dragged Allyson back in with me, bless her, she took some great shots of me.

In fact, I wanted to use the picture that Allyson was nice enough to take for me but, *sniff*, *sniff*, her pics are copyrighted so embed wasn’t allowed.

Actually most new Flickr accounts are set up like this and it’s kind of tricky to find the settings to make it different. So, on the chance that copyrighted is not the desired sharing preference, here’s how you change the settings:

You > Your Account > Privacy & Permissions > Default for New Uploads > Creative Commons

I choose Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike but apparently that prevents some Wikipedia use, so I’ll let you decide what works best for you.

Creative Commons, as you may know, is a really nice way to allow sharing of your content right up front.

Before DS106 I didn’t really appreciate how helpful it could be for me to release my content under creative commons. With all the riffing and remixing we do off each other, I now realize how useful it is when you are trying to write blog posts and make art.

Of course Larry Lessig really explains it best with his TED Talk. I’m repeating myself here, but some things are worth saying every single semester.
END COPYRIGHT ASIDE

Anyway, I hope my Wäscälly Wäbbits bunkmates can organize a time to hang out in Minecraft again sometime soon. And I hope some of you find time to do the Minecraft Me assignment and get some unique looks going in game!

Posted in bunk2, copyright, counselor, ds106, magicmacguffin, openlearning, openonline, VisualAssignments591 | Comments Off on Minecraft Me

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

Our Bunkhouse Is a Treehouse

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Just a quick screenshot from #mONkEyhouse106 in Camp Magic MacGuffin. I’m still mostly hopeless in Minecraft but my bunk mates built an entire tree house. Not everyone came to tonight’s social but those who did learned a ton! Led by Andrew Forgrave, we managed to add basic bunks for everyone, and some nice torches for light, and we began adding on more tree branches while dear Shannon forged ahead alone making a spiral staircase that runs up the trunk of our giant tree from the deck level to the top. At some point Kathleen and I learned how to rid pigs (in our tree!). Unfortunately neither of us could get back OFF so we kind of messed up the house for awhile, but it’s all back in order now, and the pork chops were delicious. Shout out to Tim for turning day to night and doing a few teleportations of lost campers. And to camp director Alan who managed to join our social for a few minutes before heading to dinner – come back and visit anytime!

Posted in #mONkEyhouse106, bunk1, counselor, ds106, magicmacguffin, minecraft, openonline | Comments Off on Our Bunkhouse Is a Treehouse

ds106 Technical Difficulties

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

In honor of Jim Groom, who can’t quite seem to keep the H.M.S. DS106 in ship-shape (it’s hard, all of us passengers are always banging on the hull and tossing vital equipment overboard). As the counselor of Bunk House 5 at Camp Magic Macguffin this summer, I thought it be best if I lead by example. For starters, I’ve invented a new camp game, called “ds106 technical difficulty art” and for this week only it’s worth 36 stars! That’s right, 36 stars, which means I’ve topped Mr. Groom’s star count for this week of Visual Assignments. I will gladly add this to the official ds106 assignment repository once it’s back up and running.

UPDATE

I’ve now added this as an official assignment in the ds106 assignment repository, which means I fully expect a whole heap of ds106 technical difficulty warnings/labels/macguffins by the end of the current incarnation of the course. I really wanted to place this assignment in a “free form” sort of category, as you could easily complete it with a wide range of media (especially given ds106radio doesn’t handle images too well last time I checked). In the end I felt a visual assignment would be best because you can create a still, or the illusion of a video with an animated gif (which is what I did above).

Posted in Art, bunk5, counselor, ds106, GIF, magicmacguffin, multimedia, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments590 | Comments Off on ds106 Technical Difficulties

Hatchet Jack Smashes Some Stuff

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

Well, ol’ Jack has been a bit slow of late. Slow in the head that is. Thick in the head as my pa would say to me. “Son, you got a thick head.”

I heard that a few times.

Every hour.

But you know, kids are resilient and I climbed outta that thick headed thinking about the time I got divorced. The third time, more or less.

So today I was very inspired by our #slaughterhourse4 bunkmate and Camper of the Week @chadsansing. He got to thinking to mash up the daily create and one of the #ds106 assignments. And being a natural blender of things, you know, with the hatchet and all, I figured I chop the heck outta them too. So I did.

I took my #tdc150 Daily Create and smashed it against the #ds106 assignment “an Album Cover.

Here is the original #tdc150 Daily Create

I then and did two of the three required steps in the Make an Album Cover assignment.

In Wikipedia I got this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCO A darn acronym.

For the Quotes page I got this: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The lines are, “adequately explained by stupidity.”

So I made this.

Posted in bunk4, counselor, ds106, Hatchet Jack Stuff, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Hatchet Jack Smashes Some Stuff

Captain America at Work

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Of course, Captain America would choose the BGY-11 as his background. They're both as American as apple pie.

What does Captain America do when not saving the world from crazed Nazi scientists? We know he served his country as a part of the U.S. armed forces, and is an integral member of The Avengers, pontificating on what is or isn’t righteous in a rather old-fashioned Americana way. Most recently he spent a few years thought to be dead, only to be reborn in mid-2009 when it was deemed that a character of his moral fiber was needed once again (translation, he had been dead long enough to capitalize commercially off of it). But what does Captain America do when he’s not busy stomping enemies of the USA and being six feet under?

While I might have a Herculean task comparing what most public school teachers do for a living to Captain America’s exploits, the question I found myself pondering today was what do teachers, much like super heroes, do “behind the scenes” that the public doesn’t get to see? How do we unwind ourselves in such a difficult time (at least here in Michigan), where it seems as though all of our traditional foundational structures are shifting out from beneath us? Captain America and the rest of the Avengers can hang out in cool secret flying military bases for only so long before they must have to seek out something to stave off the boredom in between world-ending evil plots. As the summer looms large for many educators, some already on break, I wonder what my colleagues do in their “off time”.

I know that some tend to small family farms, others do driver’s education (more teaching), and tutoring (ditto), but I’m always curious about the teachers that have jobs beyond what you might expect. I used to work at a small independent children’s bookstore in the summers, which actually complimented my growth as an elementary educators, but I do know a few that have tended-bar, played “dj” for the summer, and one recent discovery was a teacher who has taken a 2 year leave of absence to join the Peace Corps. Those are certainly “un-teacher” like in much the same way that Captain America typing away on a computer doing data analysis or input would seem rather “un-hero” like (even if it is just a tiny LEGO model of him).

I don’t have the luxury of unwinding anymore; I work almost all year long (save for July) in my position as an instructional technologist. The summer is different, where I get to develop and work on curriculum and plan for the coming year, but it’s still in the same environment as the rest of the school year, and I miss that “down time” of being able to turn off teacher-me and do something completely else. Which is probably why I’ve been so enamored with ds106 this past year, and plan to spend a great deal of time this summer learning a lot of new tech tricks and tools thanks to creative assignments such as the “comic book effect” image above. I hope it can get me through the rather lonely weeks of late June and early August when the buildings are close to deserted and I have to force myself to stay on task, with only the clock as my closest reminder of any deadlines.

For those curious about creating the comic effect above with Photoshop, I found a rather ridiculously easy tutorial on YouTube that you can watch below.

Posted in Art, bunk5, counselor, digital storytelling, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments341, Work | Comments Off on Captain America at Work

Just What IS this “CVI”

Monday, June 4th, 2012

DID YOU SEE MARTHA’S SCREWUP? She distributed a memo about Jim Groom by mistake, and it’s sent to the corporate CVI offiices. Now, I am NO internet detective, and I’m no Jim Groom apologist, but this memo, along with Alan’s allusions to visiting a corporate office for CVI (the owners of Camp Magic MacGuffin) in Canada got me scared. So I got to thinking: Why not Google this “CVI + Canada” and see what comes up. Here’s an image of what I got, followed by a little in-depth analysis:

Click for full-size screenshot of search results

Canada Voluntarism Initiative: This site, a seemingly innocuous bit of Canadian pork, has as its tagline “Partnering for the Benefit of Canadians.” Now if this isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing, I don’t know what is. I don’t know about you, but I signed up for a summer of self-actualization, NOT to be the object of some kind of crazy Canuck body snatchers.

Canadian Value Investors: This looks like a ghost company if I ever saw one. They didn’t even get their own domain name — just some cheesy “blogspot” thing. No doubt covering their tracks. They supposedly focus on investing in undervalued assets. Mostly, the site is pretty vague. An interesting “front” for Canadian real estate investors wanting to invade the U.S.? Well you’ll have to get through China first. AND Jim Groom.

CVI Chilliwack: This one is so onnocuous it’s the perfect cover: Equine vault-jumpers from Canada. But read this: “Vaulters learn to have the agility and athleticism of gymnasts, the grace and expression of dancers and the balance and feel of equestrians.” Sounds like they are training an army, and getting us to comply with their rules may be just a way of weeding out the rebels. So Jim is on a private island. Who’s next?

Canadian Home Builders Association of Central Vancouver Island: This professional association supports rampant sprawling building projects. Is this why we are in Minecraft, Martha? Doing their bidding? Letting them not only invade our country with their landscape-destrying monstrosities, but our cyberspace, too? Answers, PLEASE!

Calvalley Patroluem: According to their website, “Calvalley has established a strong base of cash flow and earnings from its exploration success in Block 9.” What’s Block 9 you ask? Yemen, my friends. Is Camp Magic MacGuffin next? I’m wondering if the humming in the blue shed that Alan referred to is an exploratory drill. What better front to send the Sierra Club off its scent than to run a summer camp on a future oil field. Despicable.

CVI Automotive: Sure, it’s disguised as a car service place, but look again at this operation’s fiendishly simple and information-free website. Read this customer testimonial, obviously in code: “They will take the time to go through your van with you and want to keep it running well by educating you.” Is this the training that Alan had to undergo? Did he just pull in for a tune-up, and get brainwashed into smuggling something across the border? Is there an underground bunker beneath those hydraulic lifts? I want answers.

Canadian Value Investing: This is supposedly a blog from a chemical engineer who likes to tinker with his stock portfolio and windbag to others about investing. While it’s a terrible read, it could contain hidden messages that can only be read in code and that may be guiding what’s going on behind the scenes at Camp Magic MacGuffin. I’m no cryptographer, so this one’s just too much for me. Any takers?

Central Vancouver Island Tourism: This one has legs if we want to believe that CVI is merely scoping out the camp to build a new resort. But, I’m not that easy a mark. The people in their web site photos look brainwashed. It’s kind of like watching old episodes of The Prisoner: a supposedly happy, happy life, but no room for dissent of any kind. A sentence disguised as a vacation (much like Club Med — little known fact). Are we going to see a CVI photo of a lobotomized Jim Groom on waterskis soon?

The Chidren’s Vision Initiative: This is an initiative of the Canadian Optometrists Association ensuring that “all children in Canada access and receive appropriate, quality eye health and vision care throughout the developmental years.” Does that mean harvesting corneas from unsuspecting Americans? Is the blue shed an operating room?

That’s all I got. I leave it to any and all of you to pick up these threads, and try to piece together what’s going on here that Martha and Alan seem loathe to come clean about. Something’s up — it’s up to us to find out. Just sayin’.

Posted in bunk4, Camp Magic MacGuffin, corporate espionage, counselor, CVI, magicmacguffin, openonline, what's going on in the blue shed | Comments Off on Just What IS this “CVI”

Hatchet Jack Writes Some Words

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

All our Magic Macguffin campers are engaged in writing weekly letters back home to mom and pop or family they may have. Hatchet Jack, as you might imagine, has no family to write to. And Hatchet Jack really ain’t much of a wordsmith. He is more of a campfire tall tale kinda fellow. So Hatchet Jack is gong to talk like he is sitting around a campfire with some fellow campers on a warm evening by the shores of Lack Macguffin.

This week our campers started on some projects related to the animated Gif. The idea is to really focus in on a moment of time in a short sequence of images that a bit of motion makes stronger, or brings out the essence of the images message, or something like that. I made one with Randle McMurphy trying to lift an impossibly heavy water feature from a psychiatric hospital. He was straining and trying and tying so hard to get that damn thing out of the ground. His effort and determination was what I tried to capture.

This week we also had out bunkhouses assigned campers and we got to know them a little better. We came up with a bunkhouse name. Our bunkhouse 4 is called, “Slaughterhouse 4.” No relation to the word “Hatchet” in my name.

We also sent out a call for bunkhouse monikers or logos. I made one. It is below.

I tried to make it like a badge because at camp you might get badges. So we will be ready to sew on this badge if it should be the selected logo for our bunkhouse.

The administrators added a wonderful feature to our campsite. They added bunkhouse pages to we can see recent activity from just those in our bunkhouse.

This week Hatchet Jack saw as he was peering into the bright white of the internet saw two things. One being that it is commenting that holds the internet together. Some camper from another bunk mentioned that a Dr. Oblivion, who was once employed at this camp, had apparently scrawled that into a tree years ago down by Lake Macguffin. The camper also noted that a Jim Groom has made similar comments, but slightly different language. He is known for saying, “Commenting is the adhesive that sucks the webs together.” Whatever. He appears to be a creepy guy.

In the white light Hatchet Jack also had a revelation similar to the one he had at Camp Counselor training day when the administrator @cogdog said, “There is no guilt in #ds106.”

The white blurted out to Hatchet Jack,

“There is no behind in #ds106, only forward.”

Jack thought that was a bright idea from the bright white light of thought.

So forward it is, and on we go campers!

Posted in bunk4, counselor, Hatchet Jack Stuff, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Hatchet Jack Writes Some Words

Camp MacGuffin – Counselor G Log 1

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

For those of you who haven’t met me at Camp MacGuffin yet, my camper name is Doodle Bug because I’m a hobbiest entomologist and I like to draw stuff.

The first week of Camp MacGuffin has been really exciting. First I moved all my stuff into Bunkhouse 1 but realized I read the Bunk assignments incorrectly and had to move to Bunkhouse 2.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

@Tripper106 is my co-counselor and he’s been rocking the PA system every day on DS106Radio which makes me super happy and productive. You should have seen all the macaroni necklaces I made during his epic setlist. Pics to come, I promise!

Other Bunkhouses have already settled on names, thinking about logos and we’re still in the brainstorming phase. I’m not even sure if we got all the brains to the table yet. But I do know we have a really great group of campers. John Johnston already created a twitter list and an RSS aggregate for us. Yippee!~

A lot of our Bunkhouse2 campers have hit the ground running. Creating assignments & doing them, completing the Daily Creates with fervour but I’m kind of worried about a couple of the campers. The woods and the swamp can sometimes take you through a time vortex and suddenly you come back to the bunkhouse and 3 weeks have passed by without doing a Daily Create, an assignment or even setting up your blog! The swamp, especially, has this swamp monster who is dreadfully boring but to be polite campers will sit down and have a cup of tea and the next thing you know four daily creates have passed!

We also have to remember to take time to comment on the other blogs in our Bunkhouse. I say this but right now I’ve got to run, I was hoping to find time to tie-dye some t-shirts and make some animated GIFs this afternoon but that swamp monster is coming my way!

QUICK UPDATE: happy welcome to @mgershovich who has decided to take the ds106 plunge (he knows it’s #4LIFE)

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe