CogDogBlog

The future of the StoryBox is subject for a new post. Let’s say my new approach is to find ways to release the content by making it available for people to create remixed new works out of the pieces. The original media shall remain in the box, in the time capsule, but can be released by remix.

Here I wanted to share three things I made out of the StoryBox content, as the first public examples.

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creative commons licensed image from joe_x

A mopey audio reflection following my second in person class of ds106, from two weeks ago. Seven minutes and forty six seconds of blah.

Slices of Life 10: Dying on Stage

Recorded walking home after a class that just did not flow well at all. I did not feel in best game form, the students seemed bored, and they had not done readin of the papers and video for tonight’s discussion. I felt like I was dying a slow death on stage, but also I had not really designed the class well. I had hoped to draw them into discussion.

What worked was the ending 15 minute “Rapid Prototyping” activity I saw Jim do the night before in his class, where he challanged the students to create some web stories with whatever they could, about our hacker, Emre5807. And that totally hange the energy. I collected them in a pinterest board – its not about being anythig great, but just being in that creation mode.

Coming up the next week is photography, a topic I feel much more confident handling. I need less of me talking, and I expect to have external guests.

My question is how to raise level of participation, and what is my shtick in class? I am needing to develop my own show.

What was a bit better was working one on one after class with student, helping her add plugins, themes, widgets to her blog.

This is done, and time to get back on horse for monday.

Post Script: Better classes were to come!

Last year in ds106 I built a few of my assignments out of the movie Dirty Harry — and having seen this movie just last night, I am just shifting to another classic San Francisco cop, Bullitt.

I did this for the Bad Guy Business Cards design assignment — and completely missing that it said “bad” guy, cause Bulitt is anything but bad. Oh well, there needs to be a good guys card in the mix:

He is the ultimate of no nonsense cool. He sees the in effectiveness and the preening of the superiors, but doe snot sneer as much as Harry Callahan. Bullitt is his own dude, with his own rules. And he uses his own bad ass car, the 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback.

I was not sure where to start so I began with a base car from PoliceBusiness Cards (actually it said Houston). I found a copy of the San Francisco Badge in Google, and use its colors to change up the theme of the card. I played with fonts to get match using Copperplate Gothic, not exact, but close enough. I added the car image, moving it slightly off screen to make it seem like it was entering the card.

Since he was so effective at it (and not really Bullitt’s fault, the whole deal of the witness he was assigned was rigged), I assigned him to the Witness Protection unit.

The address is actually from the SF Police site for the Mission District, I decide to use the old style phone exchange of a Name in front to indicate the first two numbers of a rotary Phone (the 55 real number did not work, that as “KK” so I made up “Belmont” as a holder).

Of course Bullitt did not have email (heck the cops in the movie did not even have a radio, they had to keep asking to use phones)

I’m going to use this dude again in another assignment.

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/FPd8Qco2iMI?fs=1

Oops, I got in my mind to do a ds106 design assignment, and ended up doing a visual one! Oh well, it’s done. This is for the Four Icon Challenge (which to me should be design!):

This is a movie I just watched (which means I could remember some iconic details). No fair guessing if you saw my tweet last night or were in the same room as me.

NAME THAT MOVIE!

I had dreams of tracing te visuals I found. Hah. So I nabbed some from various places online, reduced them in PhotoShop to fir within a 100px square frame, and layered it on top of or converted with the Note Paper sketch filter. For framing it is just a 4 pixel inside stroke.

I think Jim and I talked about making this a design assignment. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the difference. Visual assignments to me, are more towards the photograph or photo manipulation end of the graphic spectrum, whereas design are ones you create/manipulate from shapes, text, color. So an animate gif from a movie or photos is visual, whereas a animated gif of a poster or a comic book requires more graphic editing, and is design.

Maybe.

Got that movie yet?

This is one of the classic ds106 assignments- the decision you make when making this is- do I go very literal and make it easy to guess? or do I go more abstract? What if people are not familiar with the movie? Those are the challenges.

I’m setting up an example of how I might do my weekly recaps if I were a student in my ds106 class (cough) (cough). I am doing the same work my students are doing.

Daily Creates

Our task this week was to do one every day! I got 7 out of 7. These were challenging as at least two seemed to dwell on the past or required some making rather than taking of the photo- I ended up using old photo for the memorable moment, but re-processed it to make it different. My favorite is the bicycle shot0- the black and white provided by Silver Efex plugin really makes it pop.

For these assignments

Visual Assignments

I completed 6 assignments out of the bank of Visual Assignments, for a total of 11 stars. I added 2 assignments and 1 tutorial to the site.

There were a few more I wished I had tried.

Blog Posts I commented On

I have not been tracking these in any way, so went back to my Google Reader to find ones where I added comments. I am going to try Rosanna’s idea to use the star feature in reader from now on.

I have been wanting to make a good attempt at Annie Belle’s Switch up the Mood ds106 assignment:

Yet I wanted more than just going black and white for a gritty feel. I ended up using as my “pre” image a photo of the Cadillac Ranch, a spot in Amarillo, Texas I visited in November, 2011. It is public art out in a field west of town, set up in 1974 by the Ant Farm dudes (someone recommended I check out their Media Burn performance piece). The Ranch features ten Cadillacs planted into the ground from 1949 to 1963, at the same angle Great Pyramid of Giza.

Back in 1987 when I came through here on my way to Arizona, I completely missed it! So in November, going back that way again, I made it my goal to stop there. It is public art, and you are invited to paint your own spray paint work to it. So the night before I loaded up on 2 cans of yellow and black paint, and made my marks on the cars, one area writing “ds104 4life” and adding a “CogDog” to the hood of one of the caddies.

I played with the image by trying to make it go grittier, like a dusted over post apocalyptic version of the location. I cant remember everything I did in Aperture- cranked the saturation down, turned up the brightness, pushed the tint to the yellows and greens, bumped the shadow zones, and tweaked the luminiance in the histogram. I think it is quite different from the bright colors and light of the original.

When I was looking for the date of the original, I spotted that it was 11/18/11 (SYMMETRY!) and decided by post picture woudl also be in the future, yes 2012, when all the shit goes down, and made the second one a date of 12/11/12, AFTER we have wrecked out world as we know it.

Here we go, pre and post apocalypse:

(click to see the full apocalyptic detail)

And here is a comparison of my sliders

I did return to the spot in january on my way back across texas heading to Virginia, and all my art work was long gone- I am sure the coverage frequency is about once per week!

You have been warned! The world will be much different on 12.11.12. #ds106 is #4life even when the world goes down the tubes.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

My variant of the ds106 Parent-Child Headswap assignment, in this case I take some liberty to swap a photo of me and my icon dog, Mickey. The original photo is from August 2001:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This was done in Photoshop, I am planning try and start doing some work in GIMP so I better understand tools my students are using. I used the magnetic lasso selection to choose each head, cut it and past it to new layers. I flipped each one horizontally to get the orientation right, and then the Transform->Scale and Transform-Distort tools to shape the heads. It took a bit of eraser/brush to clean up the selection fringe, and some magic brush on the background layer to fill things out.

You know what they say about pets and their owners resembling each other…

UPDATE (Feb 11, 2011): I remembered the book Lives of the Monster Dogs someone suggested I read a few years back based on the resemblance of the cover to my (now dormant) Second Life avatar (blogged)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It was a good read, indeed!

Say it Like the Peanut Butter has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment- capture a key moment in a movie in the form of an animated GIF.

Over the summer I did some experiments with using my own photos to generate animated GIFs, and I am making this into a new ds106 assignment.

I have already written up a few blog posts with my method; the key is taking a series of photos with little or no movement of your camera – a tripod is strongly recommended, but I have gotten away with ones done with multiple shot mode on my Canon DSLR.

The first one I spotted in Nashville as I was fascinated by the reflections of the Cumberland river in the windows of a building (the how to was blogged as Animated GIFs from Your Own Photos):

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Get out in front of this meme or get out of the way! Beyond Cat Breading lies the bizarre space of Jim Groom Breading:

This started with the almost incomprehensible Cat Breading ds106 assignment:

Now the Cat Bread Purists will likely insist the true art requires real cats and real pieces of bread, no Photoshopping.

Phoooey.

As Jim was describing this assignment to his ds106 class tonight, I was watching on the live stream, and it occurred to me that the most appropriate things to do was to put Jim’s face into a piece of bread. That was pretty easy to do- a bit of lassoing of his mug, shrinking the selection area, feathering, and cutting the hole in the bread, which I tweeted out as this image.

Just for giggles.

But thinking about how to use this in the assignments, do I make a new one for Jim Groom Breading? Nah… I just need to convince the viewer that this is a cat! I just found a photo of a cat:

and placed it on the top layer of my masterpiece. Some removal of the tip half, and then setting the layer style of the whiskers to “Lighten” got me closer to the needed but I still ended up using the eraser tool brush mode to get rid of more cat, and then some levels tweaking made the whiskers pop out a bit more.

That Jim, breaded, and on krazy kat. This assignment is only worth 1 star, which is what a slap a cat into the bread in Photoshop would rate, but I took it up a notch.

What can you bread?

If you want to have a go with this, I am sharing the photoshop file which has the whiskers and other parts in separate layers so you can put someone else into the bread mix.

http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/bread.psd (2.7 Mb PSD)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This audio reflection comes close to the end of my cross country sprint from Arizona to Virginia, as I close in on Fredericksburg Virginia, where I am now, and not planning on driving away from for a while. Maybe it will become Hallowed Ground

Slices of Life 009: 90 miles from Fredericksburg

I had just listened to Scottlo, who inspired me to try this audio reflection, end his Slices of Life with number 47 “End of this Chapter”, his own path. It’s been remarkable to follow him from his start, when he was questioning everything about his teaching, to the torrent of excitement he achieved by number 47.

Many ways to fill in Scottlo’s blank:

Always Be _________ing

I am looking forward to first face meeting with my ds106 students, and plan to meet individually with students and review their blogs, get to know who is who. Tonight’s class plan to be hands on, with a crack “gentle” whip for some who had not yet set up blogs, reminder tneed to embed media rather than linking, and urge the writing in their own voice, not the school voice.

I plan also to how to set up categories in blog for organizing as well as setting up permalinks to have different forms of blog urls.

The next phase is making the space their own, starting with theming, but going into widgets, plugins, etc. As a great example rossannamarie.me has done an interesting restructure by making a landing page, and building a navigational structures to the blog portion and a separate update summary that journals how the blog grows

It is also time to turn up the heat on commenting and need to be linking more in their written posts.

The first round of reflection posts on Cyberinfrastucted were mixed, some just “I think this is cool” when really I want them to reflect on what it means to them,a nd to connect to other ideas, not write the general school report summary. I hope to have them circle back later to their initial Cyberinfrastructure post at the end of the term, to see if the class in which they are actually doing this has changed or evolved their first idea.

There is a fair amount of student pushback on use of technology, probably from Gardner’s quote about “everyone needs a cyberinfrastructure”

I rambled a bit on Beth Kanter’s post on content curation, citing the prolific Robin Good as an example of someone that does this to the nth degree (and I agree with what he does as being a flashlight into the bag of gold). I agree with the value of the recommended tools, but not as a total toolset (e.g. scoop.it) in that they are all *external* Both Beth and Robin exemplify the balance of managing their own digital space, much as the digital locker in Gardner’s talk, and what we are asking students to do in this class.

My last bit was an idea for the next This Week in ds106 live vide show with Jim, with me pretending to skype in, and apologizing for not getting there in time. Jim will get angry, and then I will walk on the set.

(later) We did pull it off that afternoon: