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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

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!Ā 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 Ā 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 assignmentĀ 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 Ā just went around from student-to-student and helped them Ā 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,Ā I loved the characterĀ weegeeĀ (based on Luigi from the Mario franchise) creeping onĀ 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

Totally Fun and Good Podcast ā€“ 008

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

If this blog were a paper journal, I’d dog-ear this page. That’s because this recording documents the moment I had my first true glimpse of the promised land for the type of internet audio I’ve been imagining from the beginning.

As mentioned repeatedly in the second and third segments, that promised land is represented by The Overnightscape UndergroundĀ project. Begun nearly a decade ago by a prolific podcaster from New Jersey named Frank Nora, the project currently consists of nearly a dozen weekly recordings by an assorted group of audio enthusiasts. Frank remains the shining star of the endeavor who somehow manages to put out quality and thought provoking recordings with unbelievable frequency.

I believe that anyone remotely interested in what I’ve been trying to do with internet audio over the years will want to check out what the folks at onsug are up to. In fact, you’d even have a chance to hear yours truly on the latest installment of Overnightscape Central. Hosted and produced by PQ Ribber, this weekly show features contributions from various regular onsug producers on a single theme. And it is open to newcomers. I took the bait of PQ’s invitation from the previous episode to record a piece for the most recent topic: Free-Parking.

This discovery has been very exciting. It certainly hijacked the second two thirds of this episode. It also runs the risk of jeopardizing the orderly preparations I’ve been trying to make for my looming departure. Speaking of departing, it looks like the posts here will become much less frequent in the weeks ahead. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post some audio under the Totally Fun and Good Banner during the six weeks of further transition between the land of the rising sun and the big desert.

(download audio)

Posted in magicmacguffin, openonline, podcast | Comments Off on Totally Fun and Good Podcast ā€“ 008

Itā€™s a birdā€¦ Itā€™s a planeā€¦

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 Itā€™s a birdā€¦ Itā€™s a planeā€¦

Thoughts from SocialEdCon

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

One of my favorite parts of ISTE has always (well, the four years Iā€™ve attended) been EduBloggerCon, this year retitled to SocialEdCon. Itā€™s a much smaller event and focused on conversations rather than presentations. Itā€™s in an unconference style, people throw out topics and ideas, vote on their interests, and a schedule is made. I participated in threesessions out of the four time slots. I was worn out by the end.
The first one I picked turned out to be a bit over my head. It was about open source, something which fascinates me but for which I did not have anywhere near the necessary background knowledge for the level of the conversation.
Next I went to a discussion about making education trend in the media. The conversation was animated and interesting. I was struck by the fact, that while technology can clearly play a role in this, it was not the main topic of the session. Making education trend in the media is not a technology issue. We went back and forth a bit about local vs. national media. The consensus seemed to be that it isnā€™t that hard to get education as a focus in local media. The difficulty is in making education a national topic in a meaningful, not education-bashing way. I made the argument that education in the local media makes a larger difference than we might recognize. Even simply sharing positive stories on facebook helps people outside of the education world to have a better understanding. Local media, in whatever form, helps to build background knowledge for people and to make it more likely that they will take in national stories with a grain of salt. With that thought, I need to continue sharing on facebook and try to share things more widely in my community.
The final session I participated in was about info-tention, the idea that we have a lot of information at our fingertips and our attention struggles (I think). We seemed to take two tacks in our conversation, one about politeness and one about stamina. Stamina is where our conversation started but it veered around, occasionally returning to this idea. We talked about how well students, and adults for that matter, can read longer, more complex texts. Is our reading on the internet making it harder for us to read other types of text? In the politeness realm, we talked some about connectedness and use of devices around others. When is it okay to be on our computer/phone? When should you shut those things off and focus on other people? Is there a line or does that vary by person and situation? Can others ask that someone turn off or put away their phone and focus on the conversation or presentation? 
I often leave these events with more questions than answers. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing but it sure can be frustrating at times.

Posted in bunk4, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Thoughts from SocialEdCon

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

Kill Bill as Silent Movie

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

One of the current ds106 video assignments challenges us to return to the silent era:

The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form of the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track.

Backstory

To complete this, I looked at several clips that could be used. I started by looking at trailers, as suggested in the assignment. I considered Jaws, Forrest Gump and Pirates of the Caribbean but I found that the trailers either contained too much talking and not enough action or jumped from one scene to the next too quickly to provide enough context. So, I decided to look for a purely action sequence. Since my previous assignment featured Quentin Tarantino, I figured that I might as well return to his work. I found a clip from Kill Bill Vol. 1 that someone posted to YouTube that already contained two fight scenes. I liked the idea of combining this modern, dark, samurai-type of film with some dixieland music. This incongruous combination appealed to me!

Process

I have worked with iMovie quite frequently to document school events but rarely played with many of the features. I was able to easily convert the clip to black and white and sped up the film to produce what I hoped would look like a silent movie but the image still felt too crisp. I decided to Google some advice and found iCreatemagazine.com which I immediately added to my Flipboard! It offered easy to follow tips for making a silent movie look and, I’m hoping, will have a decent feed to follow. One tip that I found there suggested that I should not accept the default of 30 frames per second but instead reduce that to 24 to achieve a jerkier motion. It also explained that the Aged Film effect would add those vertical lines one sees on old films. However, since I had sped the film up, these lines were not visible. I decided that I should speed up the film and make it black and white and then export it. I could then re-import it and add the Aged Film effect. Worked like a charm!

Best:

My original clip was 10 minutes in length. I doubled the speed to seem more like an old movie but, at 5 minutes, it still felt too long. I am hoping that the further two minutes that I edited out are not too obvious. This is where I impressed myself most: I was surprised how seamless the final version appeared! I took out a good chunk of the first fight scene (more obvious) and several sections (mostly amputations) in the second. This allowed me to keep the video to just 3 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised with how the scenes still flowed from one another.

Disappointments/ Ideas for Next Time:

Only the Organic Main template seemed appropriate for a silent movie but the iMovie Titles are a dead give-away to the fact that one has used that software. I wish that there was an easy way to create your own. I suppose that I could have created my own and saved them as jpegs and then inserted them as photos. Maybe next assignment…

Music was a challenge. I really need to do some more audio work. I started to fool around in Garageband but didn’t find the sounds that I wanted to easily create some dixieland music so I opted for the built-in iLife jingles (Gelato, Vino and Tigris). I added these three themes to my movie and left it at that.

Take-Away:

I may have taken some liberties with this task but I did learn more about iMovie than I knew before… if nothing else, the quick keys for splitting a clip (shift-command-s) will come in very useful in the future!

I need to remember to take some in-progress screenshots to add to these posts. In the meantime, enjoy Silent Bill.

Posted in bunk5, Camp Magic MacGuffin, ds106, magicmacguffin, openonline, video, VideoAssignments, VideoTutorials376 | Comments Off on Kill Bill as Silent Movie

Iā€™d rather be weird as fuck than be boring as hell.

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

pinksterhaze:

An ā€œeverythingā€ blog that follows back

Posted in bunkx, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Iā€™d rather be weird as fuck than be boring as hell.

DS106 Confidential 2012-07-09 21:12:00

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

CAMP MACGUFFIN DIRECTOR SPOTTED IN AREA 51 SHED!!!!

The mystery surrounding Camp Magic Macguffin and its parent organization CVI deepened this week as DS106Confidential reporter Joe Beets, on assignment in Arizona, caught Camp MM director Alan Levine far from the camp’s rural location in Virginia.  Mr. Levine, who seems to spend little actual time at the camp, was spotted entering a black helicopter at a small private airport at a secret location in the Southwest.  Beets was able to follow the helicopter for its short trip to the top secret testing facilty in Groom Lake – aka Area 51.  Entering through a hole in the barb wire fence, Joe was able to snap one photo of Levine inside a shed housing a very unusual craft. 

Beets was unable to take more photos, but did catch Mr. Levine at the same airport the next day.  While he was not able to enter the secure area he did get manage to get a picture using his telephoto lens.

It is interesting to note that in this photo Mr. Levine appears to be markedly younger!  Are the rumors of some sort of alien presence at the Area 51 site true?  Could Mr. Levine have undergone some sort of anti-aging process?  What does this mean for Camp Magic Macguffin?  Is there some sort of link between Levine’s youthful appearance and the disappearance of the campers in Bunkhouse X?

And why is it called Groom Lake?  Take a close look at the patch on Levine’s shirt.  Is it just coincidence that the counselor in charge of Bunkhous X is none other than Jim Groom????? 

And the big question —– why does a super hi-tech organization like CVI, with ties to the military and alien visitors, run a summer camp????

Filed by Kim Beets (for Joe Beets who is still on special assignment.)

Posted in bunkx, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on DS106 Confidential 2012-07-09 21:12:00

Random Thoughts from ISTE

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

I noticed a trend at ISTE that I had not seen before (quite possibly because I just wasnā€™t paying attention in the past). The title on most peopleā€™s nametags was long. Sometimes this was because the individual is a central office person with a long title; sometimes the title involved some sort of consulting or educational business title. Others were teachers whose titles were quite specific: Language Arts Teacher Upper Elementary or such. My nametag (and I certainly wasn’t alone) said, ā€œTeacher.ā€
My first reaction when I noticed this was that my nametag was a bit lame. I should have been more specific, maybe First Grade Teacher. As I thought about it I changed my mind. ā€œTeacherā€ is my title, it is my job, it is what I do.
I donā€™t mind the more specific, longer titles. That said, I do begin to wonder if the title of ā€œTeacherā€ is viewed negatively. Do people feel a need to put more elaborate titles because those will be treated with more respect?
The Northern Virginia Writing Project Summer Institute started today so I’m trying to wrap up writing about my thoughts from ISTE, knowing that soon they’ll be lost in the new thinking.

Posted in bunk4, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Random Thoughts from ISTE

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