ds106 - Throw Out The Manual

ds106

A collection of 74 posts

Pixar's Emotion

Pixar's Emotion

Michael Branson Smith is in town for a few days to inspire students in the wonder of the animated GIF as well as an installation in the UMW Console Living Room exhibit to rebroadcast period television over VHF airwaves using a Raspberry Pi and transmitter. While hanging out with him

DesignAssignments

When you think of love

It's been ages since I browsed through the DS106 Assignment Bank and I was feeling the urge to do something semi-creative as a bit of an escape this evening. I chose the [Lyric Typography Poster](http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/lyric-typography-poster/) assignment and found a set of lyrics I liked

This Web Brings Us Closer

This Web Brings Us Closer

I had a very cool moment a few nights ago when I was sitting in my graduate course on learning theory. As a part of the course we've all been assigned a particular theorist and we're asked at some point in the semester to give a short 15 minute presentation.

Rebuilding DS106TV

Rebuilding DS106TV

2 weeks ago DTLT got it's own copy of Wowza Media Server and we loaded on our media server to start experimenting more with live video streaming. Of course the setup isn't new to us, we had used Wowza for DTLT Today extensively, but that was with Amazon EC2 instances

AnimatedGIFAssignments

Together Again

How can I resist the siren call of the animated GIF when Michael Branson Smith tempts me with a Muppet GIF assignment? I cannot. I chose the opening frames from my favorite Muppet movie of all time, The Muppets Take Manhattan. Special tribute to GNA's triumphant return to Fredericksburg less

Failing Coursera

Failing Coursera

Every time one of these new "MOOCish" sites pops up I do my best to play around with the tool before being too hypercritical. Last year when AI Class was all the rage I signed up and managed to make it an entire week I think. The problem there of

Where did the O in MOOC go?

Another day, another MOOC fires up its engines and fills my Twitterstream. And Moocmooc is about as meta as it gets: a one week MOOC that will analyze the form itself. And interestingly they're using Instructure Canvas as the delivery platform, which is the LMS that UMW adopted a year

Why Make?

My work with Makerbots (which I've done the majority of blogging over at 3D Printing @ UMW) this semester has been a catalyst for an approach to the liberal arts that in some ways I think is still being defined. The ideals of a Maker Culture have begun to infiltrate what

Face Trace

Today's Daily Create is a cool one from Darren Kuropatwa who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at this year's Educon. The assignment was to take a photo of yourself and trace over it to create a line drawing of your face. Since I don't have

Under Pressure

The fun of the summer in ds106 has just begun and camp counselor Zazzy has a fun little project for folks that won't take too much of your time. She's putting together a remix of Under Pressure, the classic by Queen, and needs your vocals. More details about the whole

Off to Summer Camp

This summer in addition to my regular duties at the University of Mary Washington I'm also pleased to announce that I will be a camp counselor at Camp Magic Macguffin. For the summer iteration of ds106, Martha Burtis and Alan Levine are rethinking how the course is structured to mix

TDC: The Story of a Photo

After putting together The Daily Create earlier this year I've been lucky to have Alan Levine refining the backend of the site and loading up a bunch of assignments. The semester got so busy I didn't end up participating all that much but decided to jump back in yesterday, and

Back to Photography

Some folks who have only been a part of my network since I began working in instructional technology might not realize my BA is in Studio Art with a concentration in Graphic Design. Since Longwood didn't have a full Graphic Design program, only a concentration, it meant I was exposed

Redefining the Connection between Educational Courses and Community

A few weeks ago over lunch Jim Groom mentioned to me that Zach Davis had moved DS106 to its own server space. On at least three occasions in the past semester it had capped bandwidth usage and it was often having fits of its own being in a shared hosting

Photoshop CS6 Beta

Yesterday Adobe released a beta version of the next generation of Photoshop, their image editing tool (that is quickly becoming a lot more). I downloaded it because I actually don't have a full copy of Photoshop on my work computer and it's great to have a free version that works

The Walking TED

I've got a little "zombie fever" with season 2 of The Walking Dead having started up last fall. If you haven't watched that show you're really missing out on some excellent quality programming for a channel that's available to most cable packages. I decided to give my Fantasy TED Talk

Building The Daily Create

Last year a lot of us in the ds106 group were shocked when we found out the Daily Shoot website would be taken down by the end of the year. Unfortunately the developers of the site were moving on to other things and didn't feel it would be worthwhile to

Citizen Yam

I'm not going to pretend to understand the Yam Yarn but if it's yams the people want, it's yams I'll give them.

Learning at some schools is like drinking from a firehose.

I'm already blown away by the amazing programming chops being show by Cogdog and now John Johnston who created this awesome Flickr Quote Visualization Tool that allows you to grab random images, remove the extra stuff, and visualize a quote in as few as possible. This was my first go

DesignAssignments

The Cooler Animated Movie Poster

The wild mating call of the animated gif has lured me once more to the clutches of ds106. For this assignment I went to http://www.impawards.com/ to check out the selection of movie posters. Although I'm not familiar with this flick the look of the poster was just

Once Upon

Seems like lately I'm coming across more and more featured artwork that could easily be wrapped into a ds106 assignment. Such is the case with these great 1997 versions of popular websites. Google Plus, Facebook, and YouTube make an appearance here (and I love that the artists used Netscape Navigator

Touch of Evil: Cinematic Villains

Alex Prager has a series of video portraits on the New York Times that is absolutely haunting and excellent. I love the idea of using a minute or so of film to capture an idea, a portrait, with stunning visuals. It adds a layer of cinematography to a portrait that

You Are Cordially Invited

### Dear DS106, You are cordially invited to attend a midnight showing of a 1987 Christmas Classic, "A Muppet Family Christmas" in honor of the holidays. IMDB gives the storyline as follows: > When Fozzie and the Muppet Show gang drop in unexpectedly on Fozzie's mother, she is forced to cancel her

This American Life Sex Tape

This is possibly the best parody I've heard, and I think it's a perfect example of how students can use just audio to create a compelling new narrative.

DesignAssignments

Born This Way

The great @scottlo is back on the radio and doing some great things, one of them being timed #ds106 assignment. ~24 minutes where he plays a few songs and challenges you to finish an assignment. Don't think, just make. I saw it this morning and rose to the challenge, another