This summer, I’m honored to be co-teaching DS106 with my new colleague, Alan Levine. We’re going to be teaching the class entirely online over 10 weeks. In typical DS106-fashion, we’ve invited the Web to participate. The class will be made up of a group of enrolled students at UMW as well as a cohort of open-online participants. We’ve got a lot planned.
First, and foremost, our version of DS106 will be taking place at Camp Magic MacGuffin, a very special summer camp for digital storytelling, creativity, and self-actualization. (I don’t actually know what “self-actualization” means, but it sounds nice.)
For the duration of camp, I’m going to be blogging my entire experience on a shiny, new site. I’ll be feeding those posts to my Twitter account as well as showing them in my sidebar.
Imagine a life where possibilities are opening at a speed that veers unpredictably between exhilarating and terrifying. The familiar, precisely because itâs familiar and safe, still tugs at you, but even so, you want out because your old life constricts as much as it comforts. Besides, your social milieu, which often feels like an endless struggle to achieve, or resist being slotted into some arbitrary nicheâpretty, ugly, smart, dumb, athlete, klutzâis changing fast. You feel drivenâby inner need and outside pressureâto make choices. Meanwhile, the manipulative, often harsh, powers that be, who created the larger world theyâre busy shoving you into, have clearly not done a bang-up job of it, either in their personal lives or as part of society. And they want you to get out there and ?x their mistakesâjust at a moment when worry over the imminent demise of their entire socio-economic structure is never far from the surface. It can be cruel and scary out there. Dystopian, even.
Chances are, anyone not imagining this life, but actually living it, is a teenager.
In some ways, I guess it is natural that the TALONS class would incorporate into its evolving storytelling and myth-making the influences of dystopian literature, fan fiction, and the classic zombie film. In the background of the class’ study of novels, history, and current events, math and science, the approaching Adventure Trip (constituting the class’ Leadership 11 Final Exam), the class blog has become the setting for unfolding video, and literary riffs on the classroom setting, as well as TALONS characters enacting both a five part series of zombie films and an epic, multi-authored fan fiction bringing the Hunger Games to the afternoon corhort.
There is no avoiding the violent nature of the Hunger Games, and each post begins with a variation of the following caveat:
(Warning: The following post depicts scenes of violence, using fictionalized examples of real people. Please do not read if you might find any of this offensive / disturbing. This narrative is for educational purposes only. Any references and ideas taken from the Hunger Games trilogy are the strict property of the brilliant Suzanne Collins).
But what I find remarkable about the TALONS versions of each story – and perhaps what constitute each genre’s appeal with today’s young people – is an awareness and an articulation of the human qualities that perpetuate our survival in desperate times, whether in real life, a zombie movie, or young adult fan-fiction. Each are excellent examples of using an existing structure of genre or plot-line to tell a story that is uniquely personal.
Check them out (and don’t miss the informative ‘Legend‘ to help see into the intricacies of the class dynamic at work in the story):
The platforms stilled, each tribute squinting in the sudden light, trying to adjust to their surroundings. They were standing in the middle of a field of grass, an enormous ancient stone city before them, practically crumbling before their eyes. Behind them was a forest, thick with every kind of tree, green and lush with life. The tributes looked around, dazed by the beauty of their surroundings. For a moment, all thoughts of death and murder disappeared out of their heads, but seconds later, the gong sounded and each tribute shot off their platform, scattering in all directions.
Morning came and Bronwyn wasnât prepared. She had hardly slept that night after yet another cannon had roared, causing her to wonder who had died this time. She exhaled softly and packed up quickly, sliding down the tree ready for day 2. The moment she hit the ground, she heard the sound of feet running. She ran and leapt behind a bush, peering through and seeing, to her surprise, Leanne. She was standing in the middle of a clearing, holding a badminton racquet. Bronwyn frowned. A badminton racquet? What kind of a cruel trick was that? But suddenly, the small hole Bronwyn had been staring through darkened as someone stood in front of it.
Chelsea climbed up the tree, searching for a place to stay. Sean climbed close behind, trying not to look down. He didnât know why he had saved Chelsea, but he had. Shaking his head, Sean called up to Chelsea that he had found a branch. Swinging sideways, Sean landed on the branch and pressed himself against the trunk, closing his eyes and listening for any noises. Instead, the anthem played and Sean blinked and looked up at the darkened sky.
About half an hour later, Alisha was happily roasting several chunks of meat over a spit. She leaned forward and studied them carefully, inspecting them and making sure they were cooked thoroughly. Then, with quick and precise hands, she whipped out a handful of Japanese Yew berries and stuffed them into the meat.
Humming to herself, Zoe loaded up Jonnyâs crossbow, and crouched down, lying on her belly and began to aim. Alisha had been right. Only one could win.
“What we plan for the use of something is not necessarily how people will use it and we don’t necessarily dictate how they use it. We open it up and we hope for the best and a lot of the times we are surprised.”
What surprised me the most was that someone wanted to use to my photograph and use it for a completely different purpose. It’s likely the friendly request to use my photograph by the co-author of the book would not have occurred if I had not been sharing my work out in the open. Sharing this way allowed my photograph to be easily discovered by others and helped to create what Alan Levine calls a potential energy for happy accidents to happen.
Having a calm and relaxing time on Harbour island in Second Life. All is well. In fact, I’ve just come to realize that this virtual world program works great as a word processor. At this moment, I’m sitting on a dock below a rusty crane listening to some soothing electro-ambient music while writing this message. Pretty amazing times we’re living in, eh?
Speaking of amazing times, don’t forget that the Magic MacGuffin summer camp begins in two weeks (on May 21). Alan and Martha recently put a video telling you what it’s all about and what you need to pack in your duffel bag. I’d been hoping to volunteer as a camp counselor but circumstances got in the way and I wound up missing the deadline. Instead, I’ll be take part in this latest iteration of ds106 as an open online participant.
Get in touch if you’d like to meet up in either Second Life or at Camp Magic MacGuffin.
Minimize Your Philosophy: Pick your favorite quote OR make up your own phrase which describes a philosophy that you try to live by. It can be about love, friendship, family, education, culture, health, charity, etc. Design a minimalist poster depicting the concept.
The quote is from a well-known part of a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt. Although the entire speech is called “Citizenship in a Republic,” this famous portion is known as “The Man In the Arena.”
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
It’s a paragraph that has always given me chills, and its sentiments are things I’ve tried to live my life by. I’m a shy and anxious person by nature, and when I was younger I found myself missing opportunities because of it. When I heard this speech, I decided I would never let fear keep me from doing something I wanted. Whether my efforts ended with victory or defeat, at least I would have been in the arena.
I used Adobe Photoshop to manipulate one of the “Gladiator” posters, painstakingly erasing the littlest bits of the image I didn’t want. Then I used a filter to render the image as you see it (sorry, I forget which filter I used), and paintbucket’d the beige background color. I wanted a dirt-color, but not too dark so that it wouldn’t take away from the contrast of Crowe and the arena itself. Then it was a simple matter of putting the text in and adjusting it to the appropriate size.
I tried my hand poorly a few weeks ago at the ds106 Kinetic Typography assignment. There is a reason maybe only 3 or 4 people have braved this one.
Kinetic typography (“moving text”) is an animation technique that allows a creative entrepreneur to mix text and motion. Your job is to take a speech or bit of dialog (try audiobooks, movies, TV shows, etc.) and animate it like this example from Sherlock Holmes. Consider how you could visually enforce the speech’s underlying themes… or subvert them. Be creative!
Without too much fanfare, and a nood to my fellow ds106ers who dig Cool Hand Luke, the classic line by Strother Martin’s aptly named character “Captain”, but more with the lines around it. The whole thing of putting people in their perceived places? What we have here…
I got hooked on thie film a year ago, and did a minimalist posteras well as a Macguffin. It’s just a classic on many fronts, and not just for Paul Newman’s larger than life performance, but many others in the mix. “A night in the box”?
I really fumbled around with this in Adobe After Affects. I swore I had the full version on my old Mac, since I had the CSS 5 full suite, but apparently in some fit of file cleaning, I sapped some key files, and it would not load. So I went for the student approach, the 30 day trial run.
While I ought to give a full blown process run down. I watched a few tutorials, and got the key tip on control scrubbing the audio to match the word entrance. After Effects is not for the feint of software. There are so many settings, effects (duh) and ways you can put key frames and ween things. I did not get as far as playing with the typing effects or the camera effects, so it was pretty much popping the words up in sync with the sound. I did a few position tweens, some with a box blur effect.
It was alos a fumble fest with rendering it. But I bulled through it, and now have some awareness of when I might reach for this large hammer again.
Some men you just can’t reach.
Maybe because they are fiddling with key frames or lost in renderland.
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 theyâd tag the origin post and link to the person they want to be the recipient of the action.
So, maybe I want to take CogDogâs #ds106 aura photography challenge and assign it to someone else to remix as a drawing project. Iâd play my âChange Format2â 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.
The Daily Create (TDC) 29 â Something upside down that is never seen that way – Coffee cup
I have a clean desk.
The Daily Create (TDC) 30 â The place where you lose things in your house – Under the shelves
I always lose things under there!
The Daily Create (TDC) 47 â A photo that features your favourite colour – Red
I like red.
The Daily Create (TDC) 54 â Record the sound of an ordinary thing and make it hard to guess (TDC54)
Can you guess the sound?
The Daily Create (TDC) 55 â A picture of an instrument that measures something – Retractable tape measure
We use the metric system.
The Daily Create (TDC) 60 â Draw or digitally design a circle. Fill in the circle with the colour or colours that reflect the way your body feels today – Black
It’s a black hole.
The Daily Create (TDC) 61 â Make a video of you writing a line from a movie – Fight Club
I took the ‘I want you to hit me as hard you can’ line from Fight Club.
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.....
This summer, I’m honored to be co-teaching DS106 with my new colleague, Alan Levine. We’re going to be teaching the class entirely online over 10 weeks. In typical DS106-fashion, we’ve invited the Web to participate. The class will be made up of a group of enrolled students at UMW as well as a cohort of open-online participants. We’ve got a lot planned.
