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Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

I found some time over the past two days to sprint through a handful of Mission: DS106 visual assignments. My notes are spread over a few devices (including my favorite red-covered Moleskine), but I’ll try to get my thoughts in order and give a full accounting of each assignment. I’ll present them in asynchronous order by complexity, from what felt like the least complex task to the most complex one.

For these activities, I used a MacBook running OSX 10.6.8 on a 2.26 GHz Intel Core Duo 2 with 2 GB of memory. Chrome is my current browser of choice. When I talk about drawing or coloring something, I mean “drawing or coloring something with a Wacom Bamboo tablet.” (These are like my global variables, thus called.)

Stories Written in a Window – 3 stars

I wrote Still Alive and Climbing the Walls in iTunes. I tried to pick songs that reflected what I have on this computer (which carries only a bit of my poor, neglected-on-an-external-hard-drive music collection). I also tried to include a few songs by friends and friends of friends that I hope folks will go out and find and/or hear on DS106 Radio.

Most of what I listen to is pop of one kind or another, so I wrote a love story. Here it is:

Replay Value – 3 stars

I call this one The Love Triangle. Though the assignment is worth 3 stars, I’ll only claim one here. I’m not entirely satisfied with the result, but something about it’s glaring artificiality defies any further editorial meddling from me.

For this piece, I imagined Steve, Pip Boy, and Journey’s Protagonist meeting in a desert (alas, alack, and rue the day, I couldn’t find any cc-licensed pictures of Lucky Wander Boy).

On Flickr, I found cc-licensed pictures of each of these characters being cos-played. Here are Steve, Pip-Boy, and the
“>Protagonist.

I used Acorn (my trial is almost up, so I am sad) to ditch the backgrounds by using the magic wand to outline and then cut the characters out of the pictures. I then saved just the characters as .pngs with transparent backgrounds.

Then I brought everybody into ComicLife against a desert-climate Minecraft screenshot I took from the DS106 server as viewed from my own computer. I used ComicLife to compose the piece because I wanted to add a witty caption or bit of dialogue. However, after seeing the look in Steve’s eyes, I decided to keep quiet.

Since Steve is armed, I put the characters into a triangle and imagined them embroiled in some kind of emotional struggle with one another – how does one adapt to finding other people where there should be none? What emotional habits kick in once we enter community?

Comic Book Effect – 1 star

I used Photo Booth to grab a silly picture of myself and then headed over to Acorn to throw a half-tone dot effect over it. Once I achieved half-tonality, I opened up ComicLife and set up a half-Dark-Knight-Returns, half-Scott-McCloud, half splash-page layout to show myself sitting the Marvel Way. I look just like my dad looks when he plays video games, but he sometimes sticks out his tongue. Like Jordan. My dad is the man.

Draw it. – 2 stars

I remain drawn to the portrait I used for my Daily Create trace drawing. The amount of detail in the photograph captivates me – it speaks to the part of my brain that has been filling up bookscovers and meeting agendas with cartoon eyes, cross-hatching, flames, flowers, spirals, and stick-figure legs since 1990. I went back to the same portrait for this exercise and the next.

I wanted to find a combination of filters that made the portrait look like a pencil drawing while preserving the volume of the subject’s beard. I clicked through a number of combinations in Photoshop Elements 9, and eventually settled on the pencil cross-hatch effect combined with fully desaturated colors and dust and scratched noise to soften the cross hatching and add volume back to the beard.

Warhol Something – 3 stars

This was the first visual activity I tackled. I found myself using several different programs to get it done. Each program had bits that seemed intuitive to me, and each had bits that seemed obtuse, so I bounced back and forth between them at my whim.

I went back to my portrait and pasted it into SketchBook Pro. I added a layer and colored in different areas with colors that appealed to me in vaguely Warholian ways.

Then I went to Acorn and used the magic wand to prune a copy of the original image so that I would up with a layer of details I could paste over the colored image in SketchBook Pro in hope of creating a silk-screen effect.

I dig it.

An Album Cover – 2 stars

My random Wikipedia search turned up Konrad I, Duke of Glogow. I rolled through his dad’s page and found the Piast Dynasty and its arms.

From there I did a cc-license search for Piast on Flickr and found a sculpture of the arms.

At that point I decided to try something inspired by the work of Rose Chase, a high school drama club pal, who designs for the Lower Dens, a Baltimore-based band.

I am no Rose Chase, but I went into Photoshop Elements 9 and equalized the images of the Piast arms. Next I put a blue photo filter on the image, blurred it five times, and desaturated the colors. To create the band of arms, I threw a 4-panel kaleidoscope effect on the arms, separated out the lower elements, and stitched them back on to the side of the upper elements. I drew, shadowed, and copied a few gold chevrons to represent one of the Piast colors and Konrad’s military victories. Finally, I dropped in the band and album names, adjusting the kerning on “Konrad1″ and the line spacing on “The Duke of Glogow.” I picked Trebuchet MS – a favorite sans-serif font of mine – and pink so that the lettering would conserve some interior weight and pop a bit.

Get ready for the drop:

Picturing Prufrock – 3 stars

I love comic books covers by Brian Bolland and Jim Steranko, and I staggered after them here.

First, I printed and read the poem, marking up lines that spoke to me. Then I started sketching street signs in my Moleskine. Pretty quickly, I decided on iterating a picture of a faceless man whittling a mask while seated on a pile of discarded faces. I gave him some shirt-sleeves because why not?

I went into SketchBook Pro and did a blue-line drawing, which is something I picked up from traditional comic book pencilling – artists sometimes layout a page in blue pencil (which doesn’t photocopy) before drawing “finished” pencils on the page for photographing and inking.

On top of the blue-line sketch I drew a black-line picture of the man and his faces.

After that, I opened Acorn to get rid of the background and keep the figure and faces.

I added a nerve filtered to translucency in a layer behind the figure, and behind that I added a circular patten, coloring every other ring yellow as the fog curling around the house (sorry – couldn’t help it). I also inserted a text layer in a modern font with the lines that inspired the work.

I saved the image and exported it as a .jpg. I brought the .jpg into comic life and added the marquee lettering, which I wanted to be a bit jarring – this would be a Vertigo title, no? I used our bunkhouse logo for the publisher’s imprint and priced the comic according to my ever-loving whim. Finally, I added a lovely portrait called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and pushed it to the back of the image to take care of some of the negative space underneath the circles. I liked using a huge face that someone shot to represent the poem because it fit with what interested me about the poem this time around – the creative donning and murderous abandonment of different faces and identities.

Here is the cover as it stands around, maudlin and modern:

I’m still processing all the work, but I felt delighted and surprised throughout by how some pieces defied my expectations of myself and came out much better – or even much worse – than I imagined. I would like to practice enough visual arts this summer to get a better feel for the kinds of tools and design approaches that can consistently get me into a flow state in pursuit of work that delights me. And I want to connect it all to what I’m learning about coding while noodling about in the shallowest kiddie pools of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and game design.

Posted in bunk4, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, Professional development, Self-directed learning, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments194, VisualAssignments272, VisualAssignments341, VisualAssignments44, VisualAssignments46, VisualAssignments504, visualassignments560 | Comments Off on Mission: ds106 – visual assignment sprint

The New Wave

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

A tribute remix of Yaz(oo)’s (1982) “Upstairs at Eric’s”. Remixed album cover DS106 assignment #211 (by my brother from another mother, Jim Groom). Homage to Bunkhouse X, the new wave of campers–freedom fighters, truth tellers, and lovers. Tell me Bunkhouse X, “Didn’t I bring your love down? All night?”

Bunkhouse X is located in CAMP MAGIC MACGUFFIN, our very own hostile, zombie ridden, summer camp run by Imperialist Squirrels. You should visit. Bring marshmallows. Zombies hate marshmallows.

[Technical bit: I used the free version of plixr photo editor to sloppily manipulate the original album art.]

Posted in Art, bunkx, Digital Story Telling, ds106, magicmacguffin, MashupAssignments, MashupAssignments211, openonline, remix, story telling | Comments Off on The New Wave

Tutorial: Streaming Application Audio into Google + Hangouts

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

This tutorial was created on the iPad with the Educreations Interactive Whiteboard application. It might be of interest to those attempting to redirect application audio on a Macintosh OS X computer into a Google + Hangout.

Two freely available applications are required:

LadioCast – this is an awesome streaming and mixing application
SoundFlower – this tool is used to redirect audio on your computer in fun and interesting ways

Toward the end of the video, I realized there is one complicating factor in all of this. As of yet, it is not possible, so far as I know, to redirect the audio from the Hangout back in to the application you streaming from. For example, the people in the hangout can hear what’s going on in Second Life, but the people in Second Life can’t hear what is being said in the hangout. There must be a work around to that. Please let me know if you find it.

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Reflection: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

I’ve been sitting on these thoughts for a while, sadly. I’d like to say I’ve been reflecting on them, but that’s been pretty sporadic. Reflection, for both teachers and students, has become one of those big ideas that gets in your head and is then everywhere you look. At least for me it is.

Dean Shareski writes about the importance of modeling reflection for our students. I think most teachers do a lot of reflecting, but I doubt their students see it. I know mine don’t typically.

“Imagine if every teacher recorded themselves each day and watched it. Hmmmm. We want our students to be reflective and would love for them to document and describe their learning in detail. Why aren’t we actively modeling this? Not just for the sake of modeling but because it makes us better. Imagine if a movie director or actor never watched their work?”

Another post from Dean caught my attention because of his push to help his students (preservice teachers) reflect but also his own reflection on how that is going. In this instance his focus is on having students give themselves a grade and justify it. My favorite bit, not surprisingly, is the idea that even very young students could do this.

“I suppose in some respects, I’m still assessing, assessing their assessments but my goal was to do two things. First to empower them to think deeply about their learning. While I’ve always advocated for reflection, I tried to emphasize more documentation. I still need to structure this better but that was my intent.”

“I’m thinking that even 6 year olds should be able to assess themselves. If we give them the tools and expectations. As far as trust goes, it seems that it speaks to the climate of your classroom to some degree. I will say that since I was the one submitting the grade, if I felt it to be way out of line, I had the authority to adjust it, I just never did.”

A brilliant teacher in my school, just down the hall from me, really struck me with her thoughts on how she helps her young students reflect on goals they set. Powerful. Simple, in many ways, but very powerful.

“During morning meeting my goal everyday (and sometimes I just forget…) is to read the reminders together with the students. Then each student decides what they want to work on that day – do they want to try to sit with their hands in their lap, do they want to make a goal of sharing, of listening, or of walking safely? They put a sticky note with their name on their poster. At the end of the day (if I 1. remember and 2. have the time) we talk about how their goals went – did they sit quietly, did they keep their hands in their lap, etc. I like that it lets us focus on just ONE behavior a day. During the reflection time one of my kids may have had a rough day but he can at least say, “my goal was to keep my hands in my lap and I did that.” It is a good reminder to me to find the positive even on our most difficult days. Sure you threw your pants in the toilet, but you know what – you did walk safely. Thank you for that. Sometimes I ask them to identify what they did well that day from our posters as a way to get them to reflect on their behaviors. Some of them are not ready to grasp the larger intangible concept of setting a goal and trying to meet it, but the conversations allow us to repeat the language of the expected behaviors over and over again. The more we talk about those expected behaviors the more likely we are to see it.”

Another of my favorite folks, Doyle, also wrote about reflection recently (or somewhat recently). I think this statement really covers what I believe about what I want my classroom to be.

“Schools should be places of reflection, learning spaces helping children see the world, to see their role in the world, the whole world..”

My big take-away from all of this is the versatility of reflection. It is a critical tool for teachers and students in assessment, growth, personal and classroom management, and curiosity and creativity. If students were supported in becoming reflective learners I believe they would grow in all areas.

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Visual Assignment 1 — An Album Cover

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

An Album Cover — DS106 Assignment here

So here’s something fun for everyone to do, should be quick and easy, but try to make it pretty. First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomThe title of the article is now the name of your band.

Swiss Emigration to Russia is my band name

Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album

“Contemplate What Is Happening” is my album title. [Appropriately enough for a digital media course, it's from a line by Marshall McLuhan.]

Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover.

I had several great images, but none of them were creative commons licensed. Given that I was going to be changing it around, I decided I wanted to have something with some clearer copyright. So I thought of the Flickr Commons, the partnership Flickr started with the Library of Congress (though its promise is mostly unrealized still). There I found this image (3rd in the random Commons Sampler). Given my band’s name and album title, it seemed perfect.

Views in Sydney and New South Wales, 1930-40 / by Charles F. Walton

Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

Then I dumped it into Photoshop, cropped it to a square, and used the Sun Faded Photo style to make it a little more yellow so that I could more easily put text on it. I did some new layers with the text of the band name, which I changed to red. I had initially thought I would try to place the title of the album on the hanging clothes, but “contemplate” and “happening” are awfully long words. So, instead I went with this, which I like better in terms of spacing. I also like the way “happening” ends up highlighting the two people just visible at the edge of the album cover. Contemplating what is happening is exactly what I hope this design causes people to do.

Swiss Emigration to Russia (2012)

Posted in Assignments, bunk3, magicmacguffin, openonline, Visual Assignments, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments44 | Comments Off on Visual Assignment 1 — An Album Cover

Warhol Me

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

This is my first assignment for this session of DS106 Warhol Something

Take a photograph, or use an existing one, and create a piece of pop art. You can use something ordinary, like Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can, or do a portrait, like Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. This can be done in Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever photo editing software you have available.

I’ve done something of this sort before, tracing photos with drawing software (the face trace below from 2007) and even did a wee tutorial using the smartboard software to do the same thing, great fun for kids tracing a giant face.

It is even easier to do with photo booth, I am sure there is even an iPhone app that would do the job. But on of ther aims of my ds106ing is to lose the photoshop fear, so I loaded up the recommend Andy-Warhol-Up Your Photographs with this Photoshop Tutorial and followed along. The tut does what it says on the tin. I could have spent a lot longer tweeking the modes of the layers and messing about with colours, but this is enough for one day. (I’ve been ds106ing a lot over the last few days, mainly due to having a couple of days holiday

Posted in Assignment, bunk2, Default, magicmacguffin, openonline, VisualAssignments, visualassignments560 | Comments Off on Warhol Me

Family Legend

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Campire Stories

A little twist on the Family Legend assignment from the Daily Create let me bring this neighbourhood legend to the Camp Magic Macguffin campfire.

They had come from Burnaby, had the MacDonalds that came to reside on Garcia Court, and beyond the neighbouring suburb were from points across the breadth of Canada and back into Europe. Both branches of the family we knew reached the old countries of England and Scotland eventually, but had each traced vastly different routes across Canada to the coast.

Mr. MacDonald’s family had splintered out of a line of Joneses in Ontario and settled in southeastern British Columbia near the American border where towering mountains are ringed by lingering smog of a half-century’s smeltering. Mr. MacDonald’s father had worked in that smelter, and he and three siblings were raised in a narrow two-story house near their elementary school. The family lived above the gouge of the Columbia River and knew well the hoards of river moths that owned the dusks and dawns of summer with a singular and biblical tenacity.

It has struck me each time I’ve heard it told that Mr. MacDonald never passes over the subject of his hometown in conversation without mentioning these moths. His eyes sharpen and he pointedly engages each person within eye and earshot in his narration; there is no mistaking the onus he places on the regular emergence of the hovering pests.

“You have to drive with your windshield wipers on,” I have seen him marvel. “And the town hides itself indoors, sure to seal every window and door – even though you could at best keep only ninety percent of them out!”

Listeners cringe at this image, and Mr. MacDonald relishes their discomfort. “Oh yeah!” He often repeats important details for effect, stalling and indulging brief cul de sacs and dead ends before continuing with the story. These productions never seemed scripted until I began to hear these various narratives told and retold by Mr. MacDonald, and then also by others on the street, word for word.

This particular story of the onslaught of minuscule beasts wobbling as they rise from the Columbia River Valley inevitably meanders to the recounting of the childhood of Mr. MacDonald’s youngest brother, David. (No one fails to mention, in this telling, that Brandon bore such a resemblance to his father’s brother that once Brandon had reached the age of fourteen, they were christened “DavidBrandon” for the duration of several family gatherings that spanned almost a decade.)

It is told that as a child David never harboured the town’s apprehension for the river moths, and would await their nightly coming tide at the crest of the bluffs above the river. Standing bare-chested toward the setting sun, he would watch the air thicken above the flat pools on the Columbia and hear the million hatchlings popping onto air. The hum would drive in a cloud toward him on the hill and his heart reportedly raced as the million moths reached and engulfed him before sweeping over the bluffs like a humming wave. They would fly through his hair and glue their wings to the sweat of his arms and legs, and he would let the ones that could land and begin to crawl, trekking his skin and covering him from head to toe. Only once the night’s flight had subsided would he walk the steep grade of the hillside and descend slowly into the freezing depths of the river. The moths that resisted at the surface of the water would come unstuck once submerged, and David would rise from the water clean, washed with the first boilings of the next night’s hatch.

I heard this story for the first time at a cul de sac barbeque at the end of my driveway. Mr. MacDonald had put his silver beer down to do the telling, and as many as fifteen of us looked on as he reached the dramatic finish, painting his brother as a shining martyr of these moths. Perceiving that I was perhaps the only one present who had yet to hear this tale, he nodded to me for what I assumed was my appraisal of the tale.

I said meekly, “Didn’t anyone ever go out there with him?”

Mr. MacDonald laughed and said, “DavidBrandon always wanted to know the same thing.”

Posted in authors, blogging, bunkx, camp, campfire, camping, canada, collaborative writing, communication, Creative Writing, democracy, ds106, environment, History, human behavior, legends, literature, magicmacguffin, mythology, myths, objectivity, openonline, outdoors, parks, poetry, travel, writing | Comments Off on Family Legend

Remixing Some Sci-Fi Cult Classics

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

While I am already a bit behind and feeling some self-imposed pressure to keep working in DS106, I took on my first visual assignment. I am, after all, still trying to wrap up the school year with my own students … Continue reading →

Posted in Blade Runner, bunk4, Camp Magic MacGuffin, digital storytelling, ds106, ds106 - Week 2, firefly, magicmacguffin, openonline, Photoshop, star wars, VisualAssignments, VisualTutorials24 | Comments Off on Remixing Some Sci-Fi Cult Classics

What I packed

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

You can see here what I packed (except for my unmentionables which are in the Vuitton).

Also folded so you can’t see it is this, my menu from Balthazar in Soho. I know it says they don’t deliver, but they do to me. Just in case.

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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.