Camp Magic Macguffin is the summer version of DS106, a digital storytelling class from the University of Mary Washington. It’s given me a lot to think about in regards to the way I consume tv, movies, books, and music. It’s given me a lot to think about in regards to communicating. It’s also why I’m here. I’ve been thinking a lot about the “domain of one’s own” philosophy and digital identity. Do I have anything eloquent to say concerning the ownership of one’s digital identity? Not yet, but those thoughts are taking shape. Right now I’m interested in figuring out how things work and taking back a little control.
Had I not bumped into Camp Magic Macguffin back in May, I would’ve spent some time this summer researching comic books and working on the section of senior seminar I’ll be teaching in the spring. The senior seminar class focuses on the DIY/Maker ethos in politics, music, art, technology, education, etc. It’s pretty exciting. I’m hoping the kids will be just as enthusiastic about it.
Summer. It’s been a season for kicking around the parks with Joe, visiting the butterfly exhibit at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, grabbing the occasional ice-cream at Bev’s in Carytown. It’s been a season for exploring creativity and tools for creation and interesting subjects like comic books and the maker movement. It’s been day after day of unstructured time. Time. That’s a wonderful thing to have.
Last night Ben Harwood and Ben Rimes joined me to put on a DS106/MagicMacguffin Radio Campfire. We were graced with stories and songs that helped us enjoy our time.
The appeal of Internet Radio is unexpected. I previously hosted a podcast and blog about the doctoral process, so the notion of my voice on the Internet isn’t foreign to me. Being live, though, that was something entirely different.
How did this come to pass?
You’ll remember, that I represented my DS106/Magic Macguffin team’s radio stories a few weeks back with a Zombie Underground Radio themed show. The show was done in a few steps.
Played the uploaded recording while we were on Skype together
Interviewed me live via Skype on DS106 Radio before and after the recording aired
It was a unique experience and one that I hadn’t expected to capture my interest.
Then last week, Martha Burtis (@mburtis) hosted radio panel using a similar setup but substituting TeamSpeak for Skype. This change allowed DS106ers to enjoy a live panel discussion about the strange goings on at Camp Magic MacGuffin. I adopted my alter ego (@theunclehector) and joined some other characters on the show to uncover just what was happening at camp.
This, again, was a unique experience for me and it inspired my next step which was to host a live show on DS106 Radio without on air support from the cadre of expert instructors in DS106/Magic MacGuffin.
So, the idea of having a campfire/pow-wow on the radio was born. I needed some participants who would be willing to pull up a log and weave us a tale befitting a campfire scene. Two Open Online DS106ers answered the call.
Ben Harwood (@benjaminharwood) – who told us some personal experiences about his travels and various run-ins with interesting characters.
Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) – who told us a story about his travel overseas and spectacular experience with fireworks and pyrotechnics
Intermixed in the stories we threw in some campfire songs. Interestingly, our listeners joined in on Twitter with the sing-a-long. The audience made the whole experience even more lively and enjoyable.
The Bens and I came together to make a radio experience for ourselves and the class. It was terrific playing off each other and chatting around our campfire. I always expect wondrous things to occur when educational technologists come together. We are the best kind of nerds, in my opinion.
I didn’t expect how Internet Radio would capture my attention but it truly sparked some thinking about how live interaction and play can generate a community (of any kind really but) of learning in an online course. Opening the airwaves for student, faculty, learner, lurker interplay allows us to give a voice to the class and encourage some different experiences.
This gives rise to how Internet Radio, like DS106 Radio, can be used in all of education. The cost of Internet Radio is nominal unless you opt for a hosting service and higher than needed bit rate, which makes it a viable tool for educational environments. This gets even cheaper if you can re-purpose an internal server for your radio station. Infrastructure.
Now we need some ideas on how to use it. Well, auto-dj is one way to use it and that gives a nice connection throughout a course or set of courses. As DS106 is teaching us, though, live radio is the real magic where unicorns and rainbows meet learning and where real education can take place. Where students, faculty, and administrators can come and interact with the outcome being fun, learning, and excitement for the community.
Ideas could include the basic, and much beloved, college radio stations which are becoming defunct as traditional radio broadcasts to course specific streams broadcasting content to the masses.
It so happened that I was approached by a faculty member about creating some digital humanities experiences centered around the upcoming 2012 election. As part of our thinking, I am forwarding the idea of an Internet Radio series that will host panels, discussions, debates, stories, exposes, etc from our faculty, students, and administrators. Giving students a live voice is where we can propel their thinking beyond the rote to the higher order stuff we really enjoy.
In June 2012, I went to Vancouver, B.C. to speak on Digital Storytelling at the Northern Voice Social Media and Blogging Conference. I gathered quite a bit of multimedia in my basket and put it together as a little “this is my professional development” digital story.
My sister Cheryl R. Long asked me about the same time to speak at her artists retreat on “Digital Storytelling as an Art Form.” I ended up talking about something else, but she had gotten it into my head that I needed to start thinking about how to be more artistic in my digital storytelling. This is my first answer to that question.
With visions of screaming drill sergeants and mean, sand-kickers going medieval all over everyone’s case, I decided the best thing to do was to play along and do my best to meet the challenge, and encourage others to do the same. Alan’s Charles Atlas comic taunt was sufficient to prompt a similar Charles Atlas response.
I was out of town during most of the intervening days, but with pretty much everything I needed in my backpack (with the exception of my USB mic, which was with me in my wheelie bag), the bits and pieces necessary to keep pace were close enough at hand. Tethering to my phone let me post from my non-internet enabled location.
I’ve already written about this one in “Tornado, Revisited,” but here again is the “drawing,” and then my subsequently animated GIF-version of the drawing process.
“Tornado” by aforgrave, on Flickr
Tornado: TDC185 (animated GIF)
Day Two: July 12th: tdc186: Make a photo of an outdoor scene free of any human artifacts.
My little holiday get-away had me hanging out on the south shore of the St. Lawrence river in Québec near Rivière-du-Loup, and walks along the beach during low tide were part of my daily practice. While collections of a variety of items, including “sea glass” and other human artifacts were of interest (a couple great stories to come over the next day or so), there were also wonderful opportunities to get images of nature, undisturbed.
“Nature’s Artifacts” by aforgrave, on Flickr
I snapped this image using my new 50mm lens, and later marvelled at the wonderful detail captured in this pic. Check it out in a larger form. On Monday, while in Ottawa (and dropping by the Rideau Centre Apple Store) I took a moment to view this image on a new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Wow. Amazing.
Day Three: July 13th: tdc187: Make a video of what is playing on channel 106 on your cable? (or make it up).
This one was a natural “make it yourself” opportunity, since there was neither Internet nor Cable (and thus no Channel 106) where I was staying during the week. Although I sorted out an idea (based on a photograph I took on the beach), plotted an outline, gathered the footage, wrote a narration, and started to translate it, there wasn’t time on Friday to complete everything (a short film, entitled “Sur la plage”), and so what I edited together (while on the bus to Montreal on Saturday), wound up being a channel-surfing excerpt entitled “Les Escaliers” — a portion (and actually, only the final paragraph of the thirteen-paragraph narration) of the concept. Good thing my time was limited. The short film would have been waaaaaaaaaaay to much for The Daily Create. As it was, this took hours.
Kudos to Spencer (@robertssw87) for the channel surf inspiration. I switched it up with a bit of a rationalization behind the meaning of the “ds” for Channel ds106 on cable. And waiting for the “static” file to download over my tethered connection while on the bus heading towards Montréal was worth it in the end.
Day Four: July 14th: tdc188: Make an annoying 30 second pre-recorded telemarketing call.
While many of my TDC items early in the week were influenced by my visit to the beach, this one wasn’t. This attempts to include some of the more annoying aspects of recorded messages which I get — most notably a continually received message that always starts in the middle of the message loop. I’ve also incorporated the content from a regular spam text/email notification that my Android phone number (don’t have one, likely never will), was randomly selected as a winner for a free MacBook Air w/2 TB drive (out of stock). I know you can’t get 2 TB notebook HDs yet, and pretty certain you can’t get 2 TB SSDs yet either.
Day Five: July 15th: tdc189: Philosophy series; Tell us about “Technology You Can’t Live Without.”
By the time the prompt for this Create had been posted, I had arrived in Montreal. My initial inclination was to choose from between the iPhone (likely contender), iPad, MacBook, or Sony NEX-5 camera, technologies I enjoy using on a daily basis. But that’s not what I wound up choosing, as Karen (@KarenJan ) was quick to notice:
I’d been spending some time working on learning to make my first cinematic animated GIFs (still working, but a post coming soon), and had been thinking a lot about my once-most-favourite movie, Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner (it lasted as the fav for almost 20 years, and is likely now my second most favourite, supplanted in the early 2000s by Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) When I first saw Blade Runner, I was living in Toronto (now the most populous city in Canada, fifth-most in North America). At the time, the incessant rain in the film, together with the ongoing images of decaying buildings, made me ponder the question, “Where would I (along with the millions of other folks in Toronto) go to get water,” if suddenly one day I turned the tap, and nothing came out? And this was before the modern commoditization of (un-sparkled) bottled water. It wasn’t too many minutes after reading the prompt that I had my “technology I can’t live without.”
Walking around the city of Montréal that day, in an incredible heat, and climbing all the way up the switchback paths to the summit of Mount Royale served to provide wonderful grist for my iPhone video camera. As it turned out, the heat the next day in Ottawa only served up additional images, and so this little Daily Create turned into a bit of a mega project. The spoken commentary at 2:00 minutes was done in one take — I edited it a bit with Audacity to remove a couple “ums” and some slightly-too-long “thinking gaps,” and then layered it back over the original video for that segment back in iMovie.
Having this TDC lens in front of my eyes for the day was a prime example of how The Daily Create can really jump start your creativity. Despite the time spent on this one, I really enjoyed putting this together. The free water handed out by the Vitamin Water folks was pure serendipity (wonderful shirt!), and the contrast provided by the vending machines at the summit of Mount Royale — and that long red hose watering the flowers, presumably pumped all the way up from the river level in the city far below — were moments of pure “found example” joy. The non-functioning “dry” fountain at the end was a great closer to punctuate the message. And the title of ‘s song from Jamendo is just another wonderful little bit to make this work.
Day Six: July 16th: tdc190: Flip the decibels. Make a loud sound soft, or a soft sound loud.
By the time this one arrived, I was back home. And a bit tired. And certainly hot. So it wasn’t much of a stretch to join up Brahms’ Lullaby (I went with an anonymous MIDI version to avoid the potential of hurting anyone’s feelings with the manglement) and the fan, duking it out for the loudest influence on the pending sleeper. Clearly, the sleeper (me) won out in the end.
Day Seven: July 17th: tdc191: Illustrate attraction in a photograph today.
The reality of the pending Seven-Day-Challenge Mashup hit this morning, and I toyed with the idea of returning to the tdc189 “Technology I Can’t Live Without” iPhone “attraction” as a means of tying the week’s work together, as a chunk of it was facilitated by the phone. I also spent some time grabbing some video from Minecraft — scenes of how the critters there are attracted to wheat (it’s fun to run in circles and have a mass of chickens chase you), and how pairs of animals will be suddenly attracted to one another (and make a little baby animal) when you feed each of them a sheaf of wheat. But then I found myself shooting pics of coins attached to the magnets in my pdo iPhone case. And as I moved around the room seeking some better light, I suddenly found the inspiration in shadows and location to create something more than just a photo of some coins stuck to my phone.
“Creative Attraction” by aforgrave, on Flickr
Still, the photo alone seemed like a bit too little effort for the seventh day of the challenge, and I was inspired with @cogdog‘s enthusiasm to generate interest in The Daily Create, and so I spent some time turning the image into a poster, and then a new ds106 Design Assignment, #611: “‘Celebrate The Daily Create’ poster”.
“Celebrate ‘The Daily Create’ poster” by aforgrave, on Flickr
If you’re not yet following The Daily Create, the assignments are posted daily at 10 AM Eastern Time. Check out The Daily Create online and follow @DS106TDC on Twitter.
Seven-Day-Challenge Wrap Up (and beyond)
Given that these items represent the individual The Daily Create elements for Alan’s Seven-Day-Challenge — the next task will be to complete a mash-up of items from the past seven days into some form of narrative, the final stage in completing the Seven Day Daily Create Challenge (and Mashup Thereof).
That, and continuing towards my self-challenged #21daychallenge. As of tdc191, I’m on the 11th consecutive TDC.
Who else is looking to extend their Seven-Day-Challenge towards a consistent daily habit? It’s fun! Unleash your creativity!
These two chapters focus on Identity and Agency. It doesn’t surprise me that language can impact both of these things, but the extent to which the most basic phrases can make a difference is astounding.
Johnston makes a brief reference in chapter three to the importance of the relationship between student and teacher on language (page 24). He writes of it regarding language about behavior but it seems to me that the relationship is a factor in how everything a teacher says is heard.
My take-away from chapter three on identity is nothing major (although there is plenty of major stuff to get from this chapter). Speaking to students and labeling them as readers, writers, researchers, thinkers, however we want them see themselves does make a difference. That’s small and huge at the same time.
In my copy of Choice Words, chapter four, on agency, has a ridiculous number of post-it note flags. The first is on page 30, marking this passage:
To understand children’s development of a sense of agency, then, we need to look at the kinds of stories we arrange for children to tell themselves. For example, I expect that a child who has a history of telling himself stories about being a failure in writing is unlikely to face a new writing challenge with, “Yes, I imagine I can do this.” Similarly, just as we can put ourselves into stories in which we are the protagonists, the ones with agency, we can plot ourselves in the same story and attribute the agency to another, as in, “The reason my poem was good is that the teacher helped me.” Telling such stories in which we relegate ourselves to a passive role is the inverse of agency.
The language around agency should push students to reflect on how they have been successful and plans to continue that way. Not to say that there should never be discussions of things that didn’t go well because that is necessary as well. In addition, students should be pushed to think about problems they faced and how they can tackle problems in the future.
My last post-it note flag in this chapter is on page 39:
Drawing their attention to their effort (“You worked really hard at that”) or their intellect (“You are so smart”) will not generate sufficiently useful narratives.
I have been fascinated by Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, and this pushes it farther. For some time now I have been conscious of my language in the hopes of using phrases that emphasize effort over intelligence. Now I am going to have to work harder to use language that is more specific about their effort to build agency.
I took liberties with today’s Daily Create (tdc192):
No rules, right? Also, I misread (or didn’t read) the DC directions.
Also, I haven’t sorted out my .gif/Wordpress issues, so you have to click on the image to see it move. Sorry. Maybe that’s a project for tomorrow.
Representing the concept of flight through cartoons… So I found this old Superman cartoon at archive.org. I selected a small section and turned it into an animated .gif. Only I can’t really tell that it’s an animated .gif. Probably should’ve just trimmed the 10 seconds or so of the cartoon I used and uploaded that for the daily create. Dumb, Barker. Dumb. Oh well.
I continue to slowly work my way through the four plus hour Northwest Passage fanedit version of Twin Peaks in search of GIF-able sequences. The GIFed scene above is from Dr. Jacoby leaves Conference Room A after a curious conversation with Special Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman and occurs at the two hour mark.
I’m enjoying the combined experience of revisiting these awesome moments of a remarkable TV program while honing my animated GIF assembly skills. It’s kind of a win-win situation. Though there have also been some frustrating moments such as with the image above.
The sequence I originally selected for this loop was 12 frames and included Dr. Jacoby delivering my favorite line from the entire series: “Hang loose haoles.” Jacoby’s gesture and facial expresson looped seamlessly. The only problem was that a slow camera drifting movement caused way too big of a jump between the first and final frame.
The four frames from the GIF above also loop the foreground motion without much seam. But there remains a small version of the background jump.
My preference would be to have Jacoby’s motion isolated against a static background. I’ve gradually been figuring out how to assemble such a background. The Bolger, Hamlisch, and Crosby GIF was my first experiment with this. It is a fairly straight forward process but is also time consuming.
Time permitting, I’ll try to use that same process on some of the Twin Peaks scenes I’ve passed by because of too much background motion.
We are now a third of the way through the Northern Virginia Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute (ISI) and I have not blogged about it at all. I’ve done a ton of writing, of course, but not here. One of my goals on the very first day was to blog about it twice a week. I set that goal to help myself reflect. So far I have failed. All I can do now is to give it my best from here on out.
Yesterday we did a round robin State of the Profession. We moved all the tables back to sit in a circle (more like a really big oval, there are thirty of us) and each person shared their greatest concern or challenge. It could be focused on their school, their district, or even broader. Whatever is speaking most strongly to them.
We’re teachers from first grade through university, private/independent schools and public ones, teaching students from all socio-economic levels, countries of the world, and colors of the rainbow. In spite of all our differences we felt great connections around the group.
Here are some of the comments that struck me most strongly (in the order shared):
fragmentation – lack of ongoing conversations between colleagues and across age levels
negativity – we need to focus on solutions and positive thinking
lack of control professionally and the sense that we’ve relinquished that control
inability to focus on teaching because of the myriad other demands on teachers
need for community in a school, ownership and vision
too much emphasis on grades
inequity for students
national perception of our profession
need for teachers to model life as learners
culture of complaint – complaining about the teachers who taught our students before us
need for meaningful collaboration
need for classroom to be a safe place for students – physically, emotionally, and intellectually
parental expectations for students and for teachers
narrow definition of success in our society
teacher exhaustion
goals constantly changing from administration at various levels
need to support children in our society – food, safety, support in all ways
need to question more, to ask why we do things
student proactivity vs. parent control – students do not take action due to parents doing so for them
It was a powerful time. Everyone listened in silence to everyone else. In spite of the focus on concerns and challenges it was not whiny. In fact, many people included things for which they are grateful about their school or district. I feel blessed to be spending four weeks learning with these amazing teachers. I firmly believe that our profession would be in a much better place if every teacher had the opportunity to engage in this sort of collaborative learning experience with dedicated colleagues.
How about you? What is (are) the greatest challenge(s) facing you as a teacher?
About a week ago, I resolved to do some of the Daily-Creates for ds106. In perfect “make a resolution” style, I promptly failed and didn’t complete the first one on July 9! I was able to do the second and then in my Tweetstream I saw:
Now that I had started I surely couldn’t stop… So, for the past 7 days I have completed the Daily Creates. Most have taken me longer than the suggested 15-20 minutes (usually due to some random software issue or life just calling me to do other things…) However, all have been rewarding in some way and I am going to make it my goal to complete each day’s throughout the rest of my summer (except when I am travelling).
Truth be told I had forgotten that there was also a component to link them all together at the end of the week. Here they are, my 7 Daily-Creates linked into one story.
Take 1: My own work
I went outside to cut some herbs for dinner.
The weather forecast mentioned a risk of tornadoes and, when I looked at the dark sky, all I could think was “there’s no place like home”.
Thankfully, the threatening weather passed and all I could see was a single cloud that looked a bit like a horse.
When I returned to the house, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was an annoying telemarketer.
The only way to react to this was to use their own energy against them, like in karate.
I remember a time before all these impersonal robocalls.
But I certainly wouldn’t give up my iPhone that lets me take photos, make videos, draw, edit photos, record
All kickstarted thanks to ds106
Click image for ds106 logo Anyone know how I can embed just a part of a video here???
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.....
