Archive for the ‘ds106’ Category

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Explore Lake Tahoe

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

“Calling all Explorers”

This past week, I spent time in Lake Tahoe (The California Side) with my boyfriend and his family. Lake Tahoe has endless trails and outdoor activities. One of the video assignments was to explore outside in any way. I went on a 9 mile hike, 9,000 feet in elevation, and completely vertical. This to me, seemed like the perfect opportunity to document the great outdoors. However, I was struggling so hard to not fall over and hallucinate from lack of oxygen that I filmed on the hike down the mountain instead.

 

This was filmed entirely on my iphone 4 … oh how technology is advancing. I also incorporated pictures to replace video segments that were too shaky or blurry because of my (lack) of filming abilities. I used still shots that I took on the hike to make a smoother transition from film to stills.

I used iMovie to edit this video.

screen shot 1 © by katherinekd101

This is how it started out before any editing took place. I imported my video and from there edited away any portions of the video I didn’t want in the final piece. After completing this, I dragged the pieces of video I wanted into the top left hand box that says “drag media here”.

 

Screen Shot2 © by katherinekd101 

If I have

learned one thing from video week is that its all trial and error, edit then reedit then maybe edit again. The first time you put something together is highly unlikely that it is your final product. For the background song I originally used “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. If you have time to listen to you it, you will understand why I didn’t use this song for my final project. It’s sad and discusses that eventually we will all be dust in the wind. Maybe a little too sad for a video that is exploring the beautiful outdoors of Lake Tahoe on a dry warm day.

 

Screen Shot 3 © by katherinekd101

In the end I chose the song “Knee Deep” by Zac Brown Band. It’s one of my favorite songs because of the mood. The song is upbeat and talks about living a carefree life, outdoors. To transition from film to still image I played with different styles of a quick transition pattern. The first one I worked with was “dissolving” but in the end decided to use the “door” pattern. In my opinion it looked cleaner.

Finally I included text for the credits and the title. One thing that I still couldn’t figure out with iMovie is how to make the credits go slower. I’m hoping to figure this out in my next video.

Enjoy :)

Posted in bunk4, ds106, magicmacguffin, umwsum12 | Comments Off on Explore Lake Tahoe

Vintage Educational Video Project

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

This project sounds like great fun to me, and I figured I would mix the old style video with some current cutting edge science and tech. The video will be titled Curiosity: Your Friendly Robotic Explorer. My inital script is below, and the script itself kinda describes the graphics and video that I need to collect. Luckily, NASA and JPL has made it easy to find all this stuff.

I’ll need to find a kid to be Johnny, either one from the camp I am working at, or my own son John (who may be a little young for the part). I’ll just take stills of him to go into the video.

Also, I may right an “alternate ending” to insert in after the spacecraft sucessfuly lands (fingers crossed) so I can use the video with all of my 530 k-5 students when school starts later in August.

Here we go…

Open on starry sky with one unnaturrally bright object.

Narrator: Hey Johnny, did you ever wonder about that bright, red star in the night sky.

Johnny: No, not really.

Nar: Great! That star isn’t really a star at all, its a planet. The planet Mars.

Johnny: Um, ok…

Nar: Johnny, did you ever wonder about life on Mars. Were there living organisims on Mars in the past? Could there be things living on Mars now?

Johnny: No, not really.

Nar: Great! Scientists have wondered about life on Mars for a long time. Long ago, before we had powerful telescopes and orbiting spacecraft to take accurate imagry of Mars, scientists imagined that they saw series of canals crossing Mars’ surface and surmised that there was an advanced civilization of aliens living there. Once the Mariner spacecraft began flying by and orbiting Mars in the late 1960s and early 1970s we learned the truth. Mars’ surface is a vast desert, most likely devoid of life.

Johnny: Ok, good. That’s settled. Can I go now?

Nar: Not so fast, Johnny. There are still many questions about Mars’ past and even its present that haven’t been answered yet. Did Mars have vast oceans in its past, and could these oceans have hosted life? If so where did all of that water go? Is much of it still under Mars’ surface, and could there be life, microscopic or otherwise, living there now? It is these questions that the last two Mars rovers, Spirit and Oppurtunity, set off to begin answering 6 years ago and their big brother, Curiousity is heading to Mars to continue gathering data about now.

Spirit and Oppurtunity found evidence at both of thier landing sites, on opposite sides of Mars, that vast amounts of surface water once existed in the planet’s past. Curiosity will land with better, more powerful instuments that will be able to analize and determine how differnt rocks and soils were formed based on their chemistry.

Curiosity has two main cameras, a high-resolution camera mounted on its mast, and a digital microscope mouned on its arm that can be used to look close up at anything interesting it comes across. It has a laser spectromoter system that will blast rocks in front of the rover and do a quick analysis of their makeup with to see if it wants to do further investigation. Its arm has a grinder and collection system that can pick up samples and deposit them in the rover’s back where it houses a mini chemestry lab, including an x-ray spectrometor, a mass spectromotor, and a gas chromotograph, which will be able to identify any organics if they exist. The whole thing is powered by a small nuclear reactor almost identical to the ones that are still powering the Voyager craft 35 years after their launch.

Johnny: Wow, thats actually pretty cool!

Nar: You bet, kiddo! Now it just needs to get there safely, and that’s the most challenging part of the mission. The engineers who built Curiosity call the entry, decent, and landing sequence “The Seven Minutes of Terror”! The spacecraft will enter the atmosphere and slow itself down with atmospheric drag, shedding its heat shield once it is moving slowly enough. Next a parashoot will slow it down further, but not enough for it to land. It will eject the shoot, and engage landing thrusters bringing the rover almost to the surface. Finally, the landing craft will lower the rover with a crane system, cut the cables once its reached the surface, and then fly safely away from the rover. The rovers systems will wake up and get right to work.

Johnny. Um, that’s all amazing, and just a little crazy. When did you say this is all going to happen?

Nar: On the night of August 4th or morning of Aug. 5th, depending on where you live. You will have to tune into NASATV to watch the action live. Then check out the Curiousity website at JPL to follow the rovers progress and learn Mars’ history and present along with project scientists.

Johnny: OK! I Will!

Closing music, credits, end….

Posted in bunk3, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, preproduction | Comments Off on Vintage Educational Video Project

Rare Book Covers

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

Limited editions of this holistic and cleanly book are available!

This is for a brand new ds106 Design Assignment: Weird Book Room:

The Abebooks Weird Book Room lists a collection of titles so farcical you would think they are made up, but they are not. “Grandma’s Dead: Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals”, “Beyond Leaf Raking “, and “Goats: Homeopathic Remedies” are all actual book titles — “finest source of everything that’s bizarre, odd and downright weird in books.”

Your assignment is to design the cover of a book title so weird that it will look like it will fit right in to the Weird Book Room. Be sure to include a little bit of jacket blurb for your blog post where you include your designed book cover. Go weird!

This all started with the tweet:

And I could not help my curiosity to scan the titles at the Abebooks Weird Book Room

Each of them might be a story unto itself, but I could not help but be happy, Neil. So happy to make this into a ds106 assignment and develop my own book title.

So the premise of Zen and Toilet Cleaning is that the rhythmic and circulations of every day bathroom cleaning are ones the resonate with the holy cycle of spiritual zonoids, as depicted in the A’Alahyak Temple. You can achieve a higher state of wah with a brush in your hand and your minds eye open. Learn these techniques in a simple but aproachable style as writtemn by the author, a leading Flush Master

What book will you put on the shelf?

Posted in DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments605, ds106, Magic MacGuffin, magicmacguffin | Comments Off on Rare Book Covers

Are You Up to the Daily Create Seven Day Challenge?

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

I’m bad ass and am kicking sand in your face.

We are just about half way through the first year of the ds106 Daily Create, a site we created to inspire people to do small acts of creative challenges every day. It is something I believed in from the start, from even before we launched the first open section of ds106.

People praise it a lot. Nice.

But the activity is, well, low on the average. When we launched in January, we were pegging over 100 responses a day. It peaks when we start a new section of ds106 (because it is a student required activity). Today’s challenge was one that required less on the software, creative side, and more on just the imagination- Take a picture of a cloud and tell us what it looks like to you.

Seven people responded:

I know the excuse train: “I’m busy.” “It’s summer”. “I’m teaching.” “I forgot.” “I had meetings” “I forgot my camera” “I never went outside”.

Those are crap. I kick sand in your face. Weak. Do you think you will ever get strong and imaginative if you do not flex a little creative muscle every day?

You do realize I am in character here, right?

This has been on my mind because I have been immersed in filling out the schedule for the rest of the year, doing another 180+ in advance (this was driven by the fact we needed to have a year’s worth to put on the calendars people asked for in the ds106 Kickstarter).

But really, for all the people that comment, tweet about it, I’d think we’d see more than 6 per day.

So in a fit of irrational outbursts, I tweeted this challenge:

So here it is. I dare you. I know what you are thinking. Did e fire 6 shots or 5. In all this excitement I lost track myself (oops, wrong movie).

Starting Wednesday, July 10, I dare you to do the Daily Create for the next 7 days in a row.

To compete, what you should do is write a blog post at te end of the week that embeds all the media for your 7 days, and then write something that draws a connection or makes a story out of all 7. Return here and leave a link in a comment.

What’s the prize? Nothing. The experience is its own reward. Okay, I will amp it up. I will perform a song out of the results of every one who shares their 7 days od Daily Creating right here.

What is the Daily Create?

Each Daily Create is a prompt for you to post a photography or drawing to flickr, a video to YouTube, or an audio recording to Sound cloud, each tagged or grouped in a way that aggregate them to the main site.

We announce the new challenge every day at 10:00am EST, you can check the site, sign up for email, or follow @ds106TDC on twitter. These are all things that should take no more than 15 minutes to complete. They are typically media that you just post, not things you toil away editing. The magic is in how you interpret the challenge, and how you go about your day looking or listening for the creative inspiration that will satisfy it.

This is perhaps the most low barrier way to participate in ds106, but more than that, if you do this on a regular basis (and seriously, non one but Norm does it every day), I can almost guarantee you will see the world differently and your creative skills over time will improve in any or all forms.

So are you up to 7? Do you feel creative…. punk?

And why only 7? Can you do more?

Spread the word, and step up to the challenge. I’m it it.

I will see you at http://tdc.ds106.us/, I am the one kicking sand in your face.

Posted in Blog Pile, ds106, magicmacguffin | Comments Off on Are You Up to the Daily Create Seven Day Challenge?

ds106: The Breakfast Club Edition

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

On Monday I started teaching five students as part of the Summer Enhancement Program for high school age students. I proposed a Digital Storytelling class—surprise, surprise—that spans two weeks and what I figured I would do is have them do an abbreviated, two-week session of ds106 that lasts for 2 and a half hours a day for 4 days over a two week span (“Two weeks Bender, I gotch you!”). The nice part is there are no grades to worry about and the class infrastructure is all set up and ready to go thanks to ds106.us.*

I haven’t taught high schoolers since 2003-2004 when I taught English at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, NY. That was a trip, and to be honest I couldn’t get out of Dodge soon enough. The kids were awesome but the actual institution had more in common with a jail than a school, and I was starting to think more like a warden than a teacher (it was the early years of the Bloomberg/Klein anti-Union trail of terror). I’m no martyr, and the one thing I learned from that experience is monolithic institutions like the NYC Public School System will crush your spirit quickly and mercilessly—especially when run by robber baron financiers.

Anyway, I was already excited to get back in the saddle for this two week session with a whole different breed of students and having wrapped up day two a little while ago I am thrilled at the progress so far. Yesterday I gave them a brief introduction to Digital Storytelling, had them all tell me their own stories, and then headed up to the computer lab and had the lot of them get a WordPress blog site (one of them already had a Blogger blog!). I then showed them the basics of posting, talked about incorporating media around the web (YouTube, Flickr, links, etc.), discussed the importance of their controlling their privacy while working on the web, and that’s all we had time for.

Today we got right into the thick of Visual assignments and I used Alan Levine’s in class exercise for Photography for the first 30 minutes to get them out and about around campus to explore and get in the habit of looking and seeing anew. They were asked to do the following:

  • Make an ordinary object look more interesting, almost supernatural.
  • Take a portrait of a person; have them display an emotion.
  • Take a photo that makes use of converging lines.

And I was pretty impressed with what they came up with, take a look at this one for an interesting object by Emma Rose:

Or this one for converging lines:

I’m pretty blown away by the results thus far, and after this experiment I turned them onto the Daily Create which they will be doing for the next two weeks. Easy as pie—open course architecture that provides a communal infrastructure that works and anyone can tap into? That’s far more interesting to me than MOOCs.

After we shared our photos and discussed the shots, we headed up to the computer lab and I introduced them to the wonderful world of the ds106 assignment bank, which has 372 assignments and over 4000 examples! They seemed to love this whole idea, and I let them know they had ten stars of visual assignments due by Thursday, with another 10 design stars due by Sunday (you must work them hard!). We spent the last hour and a half  discussing Flickr, picking an assignment, and learning the basics of layers in Photoshop (but the concept can be easily abstracted to any photo editing software). We did the Creep on a Movie Scene assignment because it’s fun and it provides a relatively simple introduction to layers in Photoshop. I spent a half hour trying to explain layers using two different images, but I am so out of the habit of teaching a program that it failed miserably. I scrapped it and  just went around from student-to-student and helped them  use the move tools, the magic wand, the magnetic lasso, some layering transformations and opacity settings and we were golden. What’s more, they started helping each other and I was once agin in the comfortable position of not trying to lecture about an application I am only moderately comfortable in :) The crazy thing is their work was good and fun! Only one had ever used Photoshop before—another knew GIMP!—but they all picked it up rather quickly and the fact they were photoshopping a creeper into a scene from their favorite film made them that much more invested. Here’s a couple of examples from their work today:

The Road to WeeGee

Obama creeps on Land of the Lost

Yeah I was there

HEEEEY OBAMA ;)

Anyway, I loved the character weegee (based on Luigi from the Mario franchise) creeping on The Road to El Dorado. A couple of them had Obama as the creeper, which I am fascinated by—Obama love in the younger generations is pretty interesting to me. I don’t think anyone in ds106 at UMW has done any Obama meme art for the class until now. And creeping your way into the Breakfast Club is nothing short of genius!

In less than an hour 5 high school students knocked out some impressive first runs at ds106 assignments using Photoshop and had fun along the way (two stars down!). I think the marker of ds106′s greatness is the way it can adapt across different registers so seamlessly to highlight skills of K12 or college age students alike. I can’t believe more elementary, middle school, and high school teachers aren’t experimenting wildly with models like this (or maybe they are and I just don’t know it). I could care less if it’s ds106, but the idea of an open framework where they can program the assignments, share their work, have fun, and fine tune media creation skills seems like a pretty solid approach to all kinds of web literacies—or whatever we want to call them. I’ll stop preaching now, but jesus stop talking about it and start playing with it—it freaking works!

I’ll stop there because tomorrow we do animated GIFs and I have to do a little prep on the creative GIF I will be bestowing on them ;)

_________________________________________________

* One thing that struck me while running with this two-week course is that when I showed off the assignment bank to these 5 students they were immediately excited about creating stuff—and there is so much great stuff there. With all the talk about MOOCs I think we missed the boat with open, shareable frameworks that anyone can tap into—the key is personal ownership, syndication, and collaboratively created and shareable spaces (green spaces!). Funny how none of these ideas really come up in the larger, popularized discussions of MOOCs—it’s as if the idea of architecture and sharing has all just been re-canned as large broadcast experiences. That seems completely antithetical to the original framework of open, portable experiences, but more and more it’s what the MOOC conversation is evolving into: the focus on consumable product rather than a process of individual ownership and communal exploration with the web as platform.

Posted in bunkx, digital storytelling, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on ds106: The Breakfast Club Edition

It’s a bird… It’s a plane…

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

You’re right, CogDog… How hard is it to take a photo of a cloud on a beautiful summer day?

Today’s Daily Create reads:

Take a picture of a cloud and tell us what it looks like to you

Here’s my original cloud photo:

clouds

It looked a little like a horse to me so I found a drawing of one and downloaded a copy.

from animacat.nata’s flickr photostream

I put both photos in Pages and “instant alpha-ed” away the background for the horse.

How to work with images

How to layer images in Pages

Then I reduced it’s opacity to that you could still see the clouds and here’s the final version:

What do the clouds look like to you?

Posted in bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, dailycreate, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on It’s a bird… It’s a plane…

Video Killed the Radio Star in Week 7

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

This letter home is in video, where I inserted some pictures and text into my video letter home. Still feeling my way through the video editing tools so it’s a little crude. It will get better as the assignments move into production, I’m sure. And I hope I’m looking (and feeling) better as the week progresses. One week of video down, one more to go. I can only imagine what the Directors of Camp Magic MacGuffin will cook up for us as we round out the Summer session of ds106!

Posted in bunk2, ds106, magicmacguffin, umwsum12, Weekly Recaps, weeklyletter | Comments Off on Video Killed the Radio Star in Week 7

Sweet Music on DS106 Radio

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

2 starsAudio Assignment 36: Create a bumper for DS 106 Radio.

I had such a good time participating in the DS106 class radio productions. I think the satisfaction of making something out of nothing but a thin thought wisping through your mind is amplified ten-fold when it melds with those of others to produce something only possible because these individuals came together at this moment in time for one and only one production. You can never step in that same sound wave twice. Then layer on the appreciation for those productions of others and the opportunity to contribute to the live experience and you’ve got great live, interactive radio.

Inspiration

Here’s a bumper that I created for my piece using a kindly contributed “soundtrack of summers past” by Norm. I rely on Norm’s compelling personality and the sweet music of the legendary Mamas and Papas to create kind of a pause that refreshes.

Process and Reflections

I love working with layers of music and voice and had a good and challenging time playing with the rise and fall of the music and Norm’s voice. Norm’s voice as recorded was giving me fits because it just mellowed out below the music and I could not seem to raise it loud enough — and, well, then, I discovered the sound mixer. Who have thought it would be under “View”? Still learning about fades in and out but this sounds pretty good for someone who has always heard horror stories about Audacity.

Thanks, Norm, for the assist!

Aspirations
I’d like to be able to record my own psa’s for the local radio station to promote fundraising events for my community garden. So, would Audacity work for that, if I got really, really good? Thanks for any advice.

Posted in AudioAssignments, AudioAssignments36, bunk3, Camp MacMuffin, crissman, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Sweet Music on DS106 Radio

Video Prep Work

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

Video week is really two weeks! Oh, what fun!

Last week we were doing a lot of prep work, familiarizing ourselves with the available software programs for video editing and starting to plan our assignment completion for the unit of study in ds106. Here are the assignments that I’ve scoped out and started planning:

Video Assignments 376—Return to the Silent Era (5 stars) gave me the challenge of using a modern movie trailer and creating a silent, black and white version reminiscent of the Silent Film era of cinematography. I’m going to use the trailer for Act of Valor, a movie from last year where the “actors” are genuine Navy Seals. I think this trailer will lend itself nicely to this task.

 

For Video Assignment 435—Serenity now! (3 stars), I will make a calming video like those displayed in a spa or used for meditation. I find the beach, especially at sunrise to be a soothing, peaceful environment for me the walk, think, reflect and just exist. On a trip to the Bahamas a few years ago, I was trying to use the time away to put things into perspective and re-prioritize my life. My soundtrack for this vacation was Led Zepplin…mostly because I love the lyrics, the melodies and the instrumentals in the songs. For these reasons, I will create a video of a beach sunrise, overlaying it with at least one Led Zepplin song. The hard part will be choosing which song to use…maybe Kashmir or something similar.

While I would love to go to the beach to film the video myself, my Outer Banks vacation isn’t until September, so I will be using a video from Creative Commons licensed video from YouTube (with the proper credits, of course) like this one:

 

Video Assignment 463—Watching Movies with the Stereo On (3 stars) directs me to take a movie clip and replace the original audio track with a song that somehow fits the movie scene. I picked the arrow roulette scene in the hilarious movie Grown Ups. I’m thinking I’ll dub “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 over it.

Stay tuned for the final products of these assignments!

That’s all for now, but I did get a great idea for a video assignment to add to the repository! I hope I have the time to flesh it out and develop an example later this week!

Posted in Assignments, bunk2, ds106, ds106 Reflections, magicmacguffin, preproduction, umwsum12, video assignments | Comments Off on Video Prep Work

Last week’s Daily Creates

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

Although I did these last week, I’m just getting the blog post done for them. Sorry for keeping you suspense, but I am slightly behind on my blogging due to an injury I sustained over the weekend. Wish it was at least a good story to tell but it’s not. Just a stupid accident at home that left me with a concussion and a massive headache for a few days. Feeling well enough today to get back to the grind, so here we go…

tdc 177—Take a picture that presents wildness.

Wild Butterfly on Wild Flower

I took this beautiful image in my mother’s garden last week. Even with the crazy heat we’ve been having here in Virginia, the flowers are flourishing, attracting wild butterflies and bees. It was amazing to watch them and try to capture a pretty photo. This image was made possible by the incredible zoom on my camera. I was able to watch for a distant and zoom it on the resting butterfly.

 

tdc 179—Make a photograph of a plastic object that you’ve used today.

Plastics Keep Me Cool

My favorite plastic accessory of the past week has been my water bottles! The heat has been nearly unbearable and I am not going anywhere with one! This one was fresh from the frig and immediately formed condensation when I step outside. Simple point and shot image…no fancy imagery here.

Two more daily creates coming next week…

 

 

Posted in bunk2, Daily Creates, ds106, magicmacguffin, tdc177, tdc179, umwsum12, Weekly Recaps | Comments Off on Last week’s Daily Creates

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