magicmacguffin — Camp Magic MacGuffin

Archive for the ‘magicmacguffin’ Category

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

This summer in addition to my regular duties at the University of Mary Washington I’m also pleased to announce that I will be a camp counselor at Camp Magic Macguffin. For the summer iteration of ds106, Martha Burtis and Alan Levine are rethinking how the course is structured to mix things up a bit and I’m really excited. Last year the summer course was built around the narrative of Dr. Oblivion from Videodrome and ended with a massacre at a cabin (amongst other odd side narratives). This year my understanding is that the entire mountain has been swept clean and a new and happy place for students was built in its place.

As a camp counselor I have the unique privilege of following a select group of students, commenting on their work, encouraging, mentoring, advising, and just being a part of the daily life at camp. It’s a great model for open classes! I’m taking on the persona of “Sgt. Pepperstrong” however I’m going to continue to blog about my work here (I already have way too many personalities to add another). You’ll be seeing more ds106 work from me as well as highlights from the summer course appear here. We’ll also be congregating in Google Hangouts as well as building a virtual camp in Minecraft! Sound like fun? There’s still time to sign up and get involved. It might just be the motivation you need to get excited about learning online again and building out a professional learning network. I can’t begin to describe what it has done for my career!

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TDC: The Story of a Photo

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

After putting together The Daily Create earlier this year I’ve been lucky to have Alan Levine refining the backend of the site and loading up a bunch of assignments. The semester got so busy I didn’t end up participating all that much but decided to jump back in yesterday, and I’m glad I did. Yesterday was a video assignment to tell a story about an old photo. What I love about these types of assignments is that you get to see an intimate moment of the other ds106 participants as they tell a story on camera. I only wish we could figure out the Youtube feed, for some reason there are massive delays for some folks and even my video is still on available on the TDC site a day later.

In any case it gave me an opportunity to pull out one of many embarrassing photos from my childhood and talk on camera, plus I got to play around with the video feature of our shiny new camera. Here’s what I submitted:

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Let the demolition begin (Taken with Instagram at Salem Fields…

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Let the demolition begin (Taken with Instagram at Salem Fields Community)

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UMW Faculty Academy

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

I had the honour to be invited to speak at University of Mary Washington’s 2012 Faculty Academy in Virginia. Andy Rush did an excellent job of recording the session.

The thought of talking straight for an hour terrified me that I’d have a room full of sleeping people, so I tried to incorporate some of Cathy Davidson’s advice about encouraging large groups to think, pair, share. I took her idea one step in the doodle direction and asked them to draw. I scheduled regular doodle breaks to punctuate the segments between my agenda of history, brainstorming, planning, teaching, learning. Finally I tried to mash that up with Stephen Brookfield‘s critical incidents questionnaire so I could get feedback about the most engaging/least engaging moments in the session.

The big take away is that DS106 and ds106radio communities have given me the tools and inspiration to unleash my creativity in ways that best suit my learning. I hope I convinced a few folks to take DS106 a spin this summer at Camp MacGuffin

and a few more to pick up a pencil and sketch to brainstorm, plan, teach and learn.

For those of you, who are like me and prefer to skim content, here’s the slide deck you can quickly click through.

Drawing conclusions

I wanted to end with a bang, so I paid homage to Jim Groom’s excellent TEDxNYED talk where he was able to deliver the first 3 minutes of a talk based on animated gifs without the projector working. He improvised and BECAME the animated gif. It was legendary.Below is the animated GIF renactment of McCaule Culkin in Home Alone represented the disastrous act, No Child Left Behind.

Of course presenting was a thrill but in truth, this event was a huge professional development opportunity for me. I learned a ton from so many amazing folks.

This was my second time in Virginia on the lovely UMW campus. This time I got to meet so many more incredible UMW staff and faculty, in addition to the awesome CUNY and Oberlin crews who I have only known online.

The first day was Grant’s really great presentation on Tinkering, Learning & The Adjacent Possible.

I wanted to riff off this concept, so I included my visual note as a first slide in my own presentation the next day:

What a treat to meet Michael Bransons Smith & Luke Waltzer (& see Mikhail again, of course). I loved their presentation on Dreaming about 100 Gadzillion BAzillion posts (we’re not gonna get hung up on the math).

I was pleased to see Shannon Hauser present her blog journey. I cannot express how much I appreciate student voices at these events. Her dashboard was inspiring. It told a story on its own but it was great to have her give a bit of insight into the inner workings.

It was cool to sit in the discussions about The Domain of One’s Own, which thanks to coolest CIO, Justin Webb (who happens to have the coolest CIO name, EVAR) is being made available to 400 students this coming fall.

Another highligh was getting to see the MakerBots in action, thanks to the tinkering of Tim Owens.

Especially after seeing David Darts reach for his source code.

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

David Darts is the artist provocateur / inventor of the Pirate Box, which inspired @Noiseprofessor to build one for Alan. Eventually that adorable little box came to hold thousands of files, affectionately known as StoryBox. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, it’s always awesome to spend any amount of time with Alan too, of course.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by rushaw

Just as I was finishing this post up, GNA encouraged me to think about things I learned from doing this presentation. Good question. I really like the idea of having people graph their attention but I think I could have spent more time explaining or (here’s a radical concept) include a drawing of how I expected the axis to look. One piece of feedback I received from the index cards was that “forced doodling was awkward” and I should have given space for participants to gracefully opt out of drawing if it was out of their comfort zone.

UPDATE: Additional Resources & References
The Art of Changing the Brain, James Zull

Being a Critically Reflective Teacher, Stephen Brookfield

Now You See It, Cathy Davidson

Back of the Napkin, Dan Roam
Gamestorming, Sunni Brown
Visual Teams, David Sibbet
The Shape of Thoughts, Nick Sousanis

Cost of Knowledge. Elsevier Boycott
My Visual Practice Resource Page

Posted in conferences, counselor, magicmacguffin, openonline, umwfa12, University, VisualPractice | Comments Off on UMW Faculty Academy

Fosse animated gifs

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Just getting warmed up for camp by making a couple of Bob Fosse choreography animated gifs. His work seems to lend itself to the format. First, the man himself, from The Little Prince:

This was done by downloading the clip from YouTube, then opening in QuickTime Pro and exporting as an image sequence. The first time was a default of 4 frames per second, which was too choppy, so I changed it to 8. Then I tried the Gifninja site our camp director Alan Levine used, but I didn’t like it. Too fuzzy. So I used Picasion instead, at fast speed.

Then (always a favorite of mine) the Sweet Charity dance hall girls (this one is subtle):

For this one I did the same thing with Quicktime, but then tried Make a GIF instead. It lets you use 20 images instead of just 10 like Picasion, but that made a huge file (over 1 MB) so it wouldn’t play well. I went back to Picasion.

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Hatchet Jack Layin’ Down the Law

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

I’ve been thinking about how I need to run the cabin. What is acceptable behavior and what is not? I have a few ideas of course cuz I done this before. But I am curious just how others might be restricting, or allowing, behaviors of the campers.

I have thought about my mom, and how she raised me. Tall as the redwoods and all that. I have thought about the role if structure in my life and how I have been fighting rules and getting in a word of trouble as a result. What is an old man to do with a pack of rascal campers?

I started a list of some rules I have been thinking about. Pretty strict and strait forward. No jumping on the bunks and stuff like that. I am looking for ideas from other experienced campers and staff members. Reaching out for help is ol’ Hatchet Jack.

Here is where some of my early ideas are. Feel free to add some you think are useful. I best get some ground rules set up before them campers take over, right?

Posted in counselor, ds106, Hatchet Jack Stuff, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Hatchet Jack Layin’ Down the Law

Back to Photography

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Some folks who have only been a part of my network since I began working in instructional technology might not realize my BA is in Studio Art with a concentration in Graphic Design. Since Longwood didn’t have a full Graphic Design program, only a concentration, it meant I was exposed to a wide variety of art forms during my years as an art major, which was awesome. The two standouts for me that had nothing to do with a computer were Screen-printing and Photography. In fact I loved the photography course so much I ended up taking a few advanced courses as electives. These were all traditional black and white photography classes taught using manual cameras and learning the ropes of developing your own film and exposing prints in a dark room.

Even back in 2003 the writing was on the wall for the digital occupation of the photo world. All color photography courses were taught with the film being developed elsewhere and scanned in to a computer due to the high cost of the materials and complex work to develop on your own. I don’t know if they’ve moved completely digital yet, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time before buying the film and materials become too difficult and the line between understanding the original artform and what it has become is crossed (my graphic design courses were completely digital for example as no one in their right mind still practices the art without the help of Adobe CS).

All this to bring me back to last week when some equipment DTLT purchased came in. We own one DSLR already that I’ve never played with, but decided to expand to a second camera kit with a few different lenses. We bought a Canon T3i with a 50mm f1.4 lens and an 11~16mm aspherical wide angle lens along with a 580EX II flash and bag. I picked them up from our secretary on Friday and decided to take them home for the weekend for some “testing”. It’s been like falling in love all over again.

I can remember never knowing what a photo would look like until I dropped the paper into the bath of chemicals and waited. Did I develop the film properly? Had I exposed it long enough? Too long? Were the tongs I was using going to smudge the damn paper and ruin an awesome print? All of these things are no longer an issue as I can simply look at an LCD and immediately see what worked and what didn’t. With a basic 4GB card we had in the office I can take hundreds of photos (did I mention I bought my film in bulk and rolled it into empty canisters, 24 photos at a time? Uphill both ways?). After a weekend of playing I can see why the 50mm lives up to its reputation. It’s amazing to have a tool in your hands that allows you to see the world in a different way. I’m also starting to see how having a good camera pushes you to publish more. My Flickr photostream has been buzzing with new photos all weekend and I’m pretty darn proud of how much of it I love. I think Andy Rush said it best:

@timmmmyboy I love seeing the results of a technology tool meeting up with your creative abilities. #whatitsallabout #godtlt

May 19, 2012 10:27 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@rushaw

Andy Rush

Here is a small selection of some of the shots I’ve grabbed so far of my daughter and around the office. I’m sure there’s more to come as time goes on.

Posted in articles, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, photos | Comments Off on Back to Photography

The Daily Create assignment #135: Make a video of you showing…

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

The Daily Create assignment #135: Make a video of you showing and telling a story of an old photograph.

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Boy Scout Saver: A Video Daily Create

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Today’s Daily Create 135

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Sometimes You Just Have to GIF Yourself Out of a Jam

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

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.