There is NO AWOL in #ds106

The past two weeks have been devoted to Audio in #ds106 and I feel like I have been unconnected.

Fortunately, there is nothing like AWOL in #ds106, because there are......

...notifications from the group on their Daily Creates, their radio commercials and teasers... or people like Ary Aranguiz who is participating in StoryHackVT and seek our support... or Kevin Hodgson who is always dabbling with some new tool and sharing his incredibly creative work.. or Alan Levine on the road spreading the #ds106 word and looking for stray MOOSE!

Not to mention Mariana Funes who posted a #Phonar that prompted me to record my own... and new member #106 Gail Desler who may be overwhelmed by the fanfare of her auspicious arrival as the 106th member of our G+ group (I had to drop what I was doing to add a celebratory GIF in her honor)....or running into Janet Webster in Stephen Downes online Moodle MOOC2, or wondering where Dave Barr went... All of this makes me feel connected to a community -- a community of learners, of artists, of creators. An open community with no rules or teachers, where you are free to come and go as you please, yet you KEEP SHOWING UP because there is value in these connections.

So, while I was consumed by other work, I was able to find a way to combine some of the key elements of audio into a few key ideas that resulted in the following work.

Because this is audio week, I went back to an idea that I had earlier, but never put together.  I was taking pictures for the Design Safari and took a picture of the wind chimes in the bathroom for "A Good Use of Space."

I realized that I had accidentally switched the setting to video and I recorded the sound as well.  This made me remember an old childhood song that I wrote with a friend (I can't remember the whole song or the friend), but I thought it would be a cool exercise to record as an audio exercise.  Not to mention, it would help me get more familiar with Audacity and Movie Maker.  Here is the result:



Motivated by Mariana Funes'  "What the Hell, I'm doing a #Phonar as a Daily Create", I decided to combine a few elements together, the personal story and the Daily Create #647.

Write a satirical article riffing off a typical news story inspired by the Onion.

The personal story talks about the creation of the news story of the Mendenhall Glacier.

Things would not be complete without a Daily Create "Notice the Ground Beneath Your Feet.Document with an Enhanced Photograph." This opportunity afforded me a chance to bring our community a little closer with the Mosaic above. I took the liberty of using a cool beach sarong to use as my "ground." I then took all of the images posted for the Daily Create and made a mosaic illustrating the importance of our connection, our intersection, and our relationships that make #ds106 the magical place where 'Puff' lives.

"Puff"

Haiku in Haiku

It’s October! Write a haiku about any special October day

When was the last time you wrote a Haiku?  5-7-5?  I am fortunate to live in Haiku, Hawaii and took the opportunity to make a Visual Haiku.  Quite frankly, I need to improve my GIMP skills, so it was a great way to explore layers, typeface and manipulation. Did you know that typography evokes a sense of place?

The papayas were picked on the property.  The background is a placemat that was the perfect backdrop.

I was thrilled that my #designmeld partner +Ary Aranguiz followed my lead with her own visual Haiku.  It's all about inspiring each other to be more creative.

What's your Haiku?

We Are All [Artists]

We started off Design Week with inspiration from Tim Owens @timmmmyboy.  I loved it and used it as inspiration to create a Haiku Deck using all original photographs.  (First time ever!)

We have been asked to reflect on all aspects of design -- "What is design? It is everywhere you look- anything we create or manufacture has key design elements.   This exercise makes you acutely aware of your environment.  You begin to see things in new ways. Even fonts and typography are elements of design.  Are you a Comic Sans Criminal:  Spoiler Alert - I was formerly a CSC)?  Did you know that typography can evoke a sense of place?   

I have become so attuned to design that I spent the week watching TV with no sound.  It really is an eye-opening experience!

We have been given a plethora of Design Resources for review in order to become more familiar with elements of design.  My favorite resources is from Duke University's Lab in Digital Knowledge:   "What Do 21st Century Literacies Look Like?  This is ds106 in action!

"When we expand the digital meaning-making conventions that make up 21st century literacies, we expand our ability to interact and connect with each other. Designing in this new digital medium contributes to the development of an even wider collective effort of understanding and communication."

In order to demonstrate our understanding, we were to undertake a Design Safari.  As I write this summary, I realize I don't follow directions very well, and selected one image from my week's catalog of photographs to illustrate my understanding of the concepts. Since it was a safari, I couldn't resist importing the images into MovieMaker and adding a safari soundtrack (thank you YouTube Downloader/Converter).  What I like best about the piece is that it is a safari in Hawaii.  My granddaughter loves to make dioramas when she visits, so the title slide is her contribution.  (We were supposed to upload to Flickr tagging photos #designblitz and blog about whether the images were effective or not...next task).

Another assignment was to design a poster...These projects all involve some aspect of re-editing existing content to change the meaning or making something new that visually represents an idea.  

I decided to use this opportunity to combine ideas for 2 different classes and the 6 Word Memoir was the perfect opportunity.  I ended up with a poster as well as a slide presentation in order to share the idea of "Promoting Creativity in K-12 Education in multiple ways.  I have already received feedback that the font and placement is too busy on the poster and am working on the revision.

 6 Word Memoir

I have also watched with fascination the development of a ds106 collaborative story writing project started by Ary Aranguiz using gifs to tell a story.  Not having the opportunity to participate as yet, this project is the embodiment of "experimentation with collective design processes combined with the development of the images" that is described in "What Do 21st Century Literacies Look Like? 

As Tim Owens pointed out, a creative environment can foster creativity, and ds106 is giving us that environment."

How Do You Know You Are Learning?

List twenty ways you can document your learning. How many have you done this week?

As you might imagine, because this was a written assignment (no frills, no pictures, no html code) I started to generate a list...and then half way through the exercise, I realized I needed to be more creative [duh, it's a Daily Create, stupid]. So I decided to use words that ended with     -ate. It was kind of fun. Did you know that in chemistry, -ate is used to form the names of salts from acids [acetic acid ..acetate].  Sounds like a transformation to me, doesn't it?

Kevin Hodgson @dogtraxx upped the ante when he created a humorous Haiku Deck to illustrate his ideas. Since I had done a Haiku Deck earlier in the week [I really like Haiku Deck, btw], I decided to illustrate my ideas visually as well. Thanks for the inspiration, Kevin.

1. Write a Story
2. Make a Diagram 
3. Record a Poem
4. Shoot a Video
5. Write a Song
6. Post a Blog
7. Take a Picture
8. Create a Slide Show
9. Make a Movie
10. Host a Google Hangout
11. Create
12. Innovate
13. Curate
14. Narrate
15. Illustrate
16. Annotate
17. Meditate
18. Accommodate
19. Debate
20. Bloviate (I love this word.  It summed up the current discussion of the U.S. government shutdown this week).

(NB:  I intentionally only illustrated 10 of the ways that I document my learning using the words that end in -ate).

How do you know you are learning?  How can you document it?

Digital Creativity: Harnessing the Collective Energy

"It is innate for human beings to create stories and to create art."  ~Jason Eskanazi

In Week 5 of DS106, we were challenged to create stories through our photographs. Using suggestions borrowed from David duChemin in his book Ten:  Ten Ways to Improve Your Craft,  we were asked to be more deliberate in taking photographs.  In an age where everyone takes pictures of everything ALL THE TIME, they are doing just that.  They are taking a picture to record an event, not a photograph -- a creation, a play on words,  light, or perspective.  Not since I took a photography course in college have I been so deliberate about taking photographs.  At the time I had a 35mm SLR that my father bought on a trip to Vietnam in 1965.  We developed our own film.  We captured ideas and translated them to images.

The first exercise was a PhotoBlitz.   The exercise challenges you to think quickly and creatively.  You take 11 pictures given certain key words in 15 minutes that evoke the given idea.  I chose Ho'okipa Beach on Maui's North Shore for the exercise.  Other students expressed feeling awkward taking photographs in public (who is this weirdo)?  Beach goers are more relaxed and I was free to roam.  I chose to create a Haiku Deck on Visual Literacy using my pictures.  Schools focus on Literacy, Digital Literacy, Numerical Literacy and Cultural Literacy.  Rarely do we see focus on the importance of Visual Literacy and how it can be used to draw connections across the curriculum.

We were then asked to select what we considered our five best pictures.  These were my favorites....

PhotoBlitz!

"And we find that people doing this week’s work come away noticing the world around them in more detail." ~Headless #ds106

My next photography exercise was not assigned.  We took a Road Trip to Hana and I decided to try out the suggestions that I learned during the week.  Follow the rule of thirds, change your perspective, get pickier, pay attention to the moment.  No longer was I just clicking, I was actually designing the picture.  Not too bad for an amateur with an iPhone.  I also employed the Fast Tricks for the iPhone to further enhance my skill set.

Road Trips, a set on Flickr.

The final exercise I was able to complete was to "pimp up" my Flickr account.  That included creating a set of my best photos.  I decided that I would select the Blue Ribbon photo for each week of #ds106.  This way I can see the progression of my work (hopefully)!  As you can see above, I was able to embed a Flickr set into my blog and used FlickrSLiDR to embed the Blue Ribbon Photo of the Week in a Flickr Slideshow below.

Blue Ribbon of the Week

Created with flickrSLiDR

I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the work of fellow DS106ers, commenting on blogs, seeing incredibly creative images, methodology, and hard work that has been expended this week by the community.  I am energized by the collective energy that is evolving.  Each idea generated creates a flurry of activity, support and partnership.  Consider Rochelle Lockridge & Christine Hendrick's Audio Week in Review, or Ary Aranguiz's CollaboGiffing Project, Mariana Fuenes's determination to isolate the "eyes" in Ary's animated GIF and John Johnston's Photoblitz App..to name a few.   

DS106 channels the collective energy into the creation of stories, sounds, and art that allow us to make make meaning of our experience.  In Is There Such a Thing as Digital Creativity by Julian Sefton, she suggests that the process of selection, manipulation and decision-making in meaning-making through comparison of editing across media...points to the way that digital creativity – or at least meaning-making in the digital era – brings together in the new ways processes that used to be separate and bound by academic convention.

DS106 showcases the power of digital creativity by harnessing the collective energy of the group.  In eLearning and Digital Cultures: A multitudinous open online course, Jeremy Knox (a co-facilitator of the course),  observes that where work was collected and displayed together, the observer begins to get a sense, not of the individual merit of a single piece, but of the collective energy and intensity of the multitude...a shift away from thinking about individuals to thinking about connections, flows, and relations that exceed us as human beings.

DS106 transforms digital creativity into an engaging (often intoxicating) social experience.  We move from passive participants to active content creators. In the sharing of our individual stories, we contribute to the collective energy of the group.   In his blog, Kevin Hodgson reminds us that  the activity of making shifts consumers away from mass-produced materials and therefore, provides an individualistic sense of creation; and that the social element of digital literacies has the potential to increase engagement and heighten the creative element of making something that will impact the world.

What DS106 exemplifies is the synergistic creativity of the group, the importance of collaborative storytelling,and the opportunity to hone the skills necessary for creating, communicating, collaborating and networking in a digital world.

Communication - A Lost Art

Make a photograph that illustrates an aspect of communication.

I enlisted my granddaughter in this exercise.  We seem to be obsessed with communication these days, our cell phones tethered to us wherever we go.  But are we really communicating?  

My initial idea was that I wanted to use a picture that showed communication devoid of technology, something like this (my granddaughter receiving a lei after her dance recital).  

This exercise made me think about what communication is really about these days.  Is anyone listening, or are we just talking...

Make a photograph featuring a path, road, or trail that leads the eye through the photograph.

Sandy Brown Jensen picked up that these lupines were in full bloom and in Oregon, hers were long gone.  Yes, I cheated just a bit.  This picture is our home in Steamboat Springs Colorado.  This picture was taken in early July, but it is the background image of my computer, so I look at it every day.  You can just barely see the road curving out to the right, but it was just such a great image that fit the Daily Create. 

Make a photograph that features a grid of some sort today.

One thing that DS106 teaches you is that if you look closely, you can see many things.  We move too fast to notice the details.  This is actually the table on our lanai that sits on a tile floor.  I love how the grids intersect.  I also started to play with the Rule of Thirds.  I downloaded Gorilla Cam to my iPhone (I don't have a camera) which overlays the grid for you.  

What is Philosophy to you? Record an audio definition in 30 seconds or less

 

This is my first adventure into Audio in a very long time.  As our Headless Volunteers, Christina Hendricks and Rochelle Lockridge pointed out in their DS106 Headless 13 Audio Week 4 Review, the VoiceOver is too low.  I am just learning Audacity, and spent so long just getting the 3 sounds to work together, I let it go at that.  Fortunately, the podcast was full of great ideas, including the simple AMPLIFY to make it work.  Not sure how I missed this in the tutorial, but that's the great thing about DS106, we are all here to help each other.  They also questioned the use of the echo. I was going for the cellar effect, but I see that it did not exactly work.  I should go back and redo it, but I am already launched into Week 5, so we shall see.

Thanks for listening!

Little Miss Muffet...

I am finally sitting down to write a reflective blog on Week 3:  What Mean Ye Digital Storytelling for DS106. In a recent comment, I described myself as being way behind -- and our Headless Cheerleader +Christine Hendricks  reminds us that "it really doesn't matter if you're "behind." I've heard people say there's no "behind" in ds106, because, of course, nothing is required! You can do what you can, when you can."

I enjoyed describing what Storytelling means to me in my blog Once Upon a Time.  Little Miss Muffet was one of my favorites, and my Dad always used to call me that.  It brings back many wonderful memories of my childhood.

In addition to the stories that make up our cultural literacy, fables, fairy tales, myths and legends, nursery rhymes and the Bible, +Sandy Brown Jensen reminds us of the Hero's Journey.

Kurt Vonnegut gives us the shapes of stories,

Image: visual.ly's infographic-style interpretation of Kurt Vonnegut's "Shape of Stories" theory.

and our High School English teachers taught us there are 7 types of stories summarized in Christopher Booker's, The Seven Basic Plots.

I tried the 5 card Flickr story exercise "Think Globally, Act Locally" which resulted in a rather bleak story about extinction.  +Sandy Brown Jensen commented that she learned this exercise by writing a sentence for each picture.  This exercise clearly indicates that the pictures alone should convey the story with the narrator able to add only a title and description.  The randomness of the pictures selected forces you to think outside the box, but it can also create a somewhat disjointed story which was clearly expressed in the comments by the viewers.  "I understood your visual progression up until the horse, then I lost the mental thread."

flickr photo by keepps

We were also encouraged to view stories created by the DS106 community.  I started out looking at inSPIRE, a community created collection of the best work of past DS106 students.  I was immediately taken by Silent Era's Back to the Future inspired by Ben Rimes, the Tech Savvy Educator, because of the author's comments.  This is the true spirit of DS106.  (It is interesting to note that Ben's original video went viral).

Many times, I see the awesomeness in other people’s work and think to myself, “There’s no possible way I can do that!,” and shy away from the assignment.  But for some reason, Ben’s jaw-dropping “Silent Era” assignment and the genuine and unselfish way he shared his process inspired me.  It gave me that needed push to improve upon what I had already done.  Not only was I inspired to do my own assignment better, but I am also inspired to try and inspire others in the same manner in the future.

As I checked out Ben's Blog, I was fortunate to find the perfect example of a Digital Story that was created by his wife "One Day in 60 Seconds."  There are lots of web sites out there that allow you to create different digital stories over time, but this is so poignant, crisp, and to the point -- all in the span of one minute.  It has a beginning, middle and a perfect ending.  I am inspired to create a similar type of story.

The importance of the daily create discipline is becoming more evident as the course progresses.  Our creativity is like a muscle that needs daily exercise.  I am struggling with being able to technically create the image in my mind, but each with each exercise, the muscle memory is taking over.  It was nice to be able to combine this week's work into a single blog, Creativity - A Daily Exercise.

One of the most important ideas that is conveyed in DS106 is the importance of documenting the process used to create your image.  I am not at the point that I am using any complex design, but looking at +Alan Levine's description of "On the Cover of a DS Book" for Anya Kamenetz's next book is a standard that I will strive for.

In many cases, I wait to view other people's imagery until I have at least the idea of what I would like to construct in order not to be influenced by other's work.  Once I have an idea, or even after it is posted, I will then look at what my colleagues have created.  I am amazed at the talent that is exhibited and am learning many tricks of the trade.

I also appreciated the comments this week for #talkingheadless106.   I tried to provide good feedback and appreciated the comments that I have received.  I think that because I am new to the group, it will take a while to be more comfortable in providing effective feedback.  Steve Wheeler talks about the importance of blogging and feedback in his blog - Blogging as Conversation.  The community of DS106 is constantly evolving, but it provides a safe environment for experimentation that encourages creativity and conversation.

Parting Shot: The important thing is not the camera but the eye. ~Alfred Eisenstaedt

Eisenstaedt reminds us that our films and cameras can only take photos of what we see through our creative vision. It also emphasizes the importance of training the eye to “see” a picture before clicking the shutter.