Letter from camp 1

It is a long time since I’ve been camping and this is a very different sort of camp. There are bunk houses, not tents. There are even toilets and sinks, wifi is good.

I am setting in but finding it hard to sleep at the same time as everyone else, might be jet lag.

There are tons for campers and it is hard to remember who is who and which bunkhouse they are in. I made a list or two but need more information, my facial recognition is never good. Everyone seems very friendly

There seem to be this really weird wide-game going on. I remember when I was wee at camp we played lots of games where we ran about in the wild capturing folk and generally carrying on. This game is much stranger I’ve only played once and was ‘eaten’ straight away. In the game I have to carry a big block of wood around, it was sort of like a nightmare where your feet are stuck to the ground and you cannot move. I took two minutes, two minutes, to look at my iPhone to see if I could find any rules and I was ‘eaten’. They said I could have my life back and play again but I decided to try and get some sleep. (update, I tried again today, met a couple of folk and got killed a few times before minecraft froze, perhaps I should not have been exporting Quicktime, exporting MPEG streamclip and importing into iMovie al lat the same time).

I have been managing to join in the daily chores, if you remember I always liked that bit of camping. I even like washing dishes in the stream, grit is better than squeeze for getting pots shining (not so good for Teflon).

Before I came some friends suggested there was a sinister aspect to the camp that it smelt a little like a cult, I m happy to report that you have no need to worry about brainwashing, although some of the camp songs are a bit strange.

cheers

John

I do realise that the gif could be really annoying. I am also playing with Google Web Fonts which might be annoying too.

Week 1 Summary

First week of the Camp MagicMacMuffin session of ds106. I’ve keep up with the daily create, here is the Flickr evidence:
Bog Cotton in MotionmoonEntrance to my closeTdc137inverse ravens
I aslo sort of did the two video tasks by combining them into one. I also did a wee bit of web dev and created a very simple iPhone web app for checking what the daily create i on the hoof: Remember to Create Daily. I am hoping to expand this a little over the next few weeks.
As an online participant I allowed myself to skip the critical task. I have read a few of the http://magicmacguffin.info/ posts and the ‘camp’ is shaping up. I particularly like the idea of grouping participants into cabins. Should make commenting and keeping up a bit easier.

Update 28 05 12: I noticed that the flickr slideshow didn’t show all 5 photos tagged mmweek1 for some reason. Reverted to copy paste the embed code for each. There must be a flickr grid plugn for wp?

Remember to Create Daily

Last session, I started well but fell away from The Daily Create I want to have a better track record this time. So far, 5 days in I’ve managed to keep up, albeit by using one video to do two days.

I follow @DS106TDC but the tweets are lost in the stream.

I though I might try to make a wee reminded web app from my iPhone. This is pretty simple, I just made a webpage, that grabs the latest item from the daily create RSS feed (I think I am using the atom one). I just show the title as a link to the page. The page has the various meta tags to play nicely with the iphone and looks like this:

The above pulls the page into an iFrame with an iPhone background graphic, so should show todays page. Update 1 June, I’ve added links to the last 5 days and try to show submissions.

I then added a splash screen and an icon, so that I could save the webpage to my home screen:

Should do the trick, if any other ds106 folk would find this useful just visit: http://johnjohnston.info/tdc/ on your iphone and add to the home screen.

If anyone want to make me a better icon, please do.

 

Grandfather TDC 135 and 136

I am hoping to keep up with the Daily Create this class. As part of Camp MagicMacMuffin the task is:

Introduce Yourselves via this Wednesday’s Daily Create. Each week, you will be asked to complete a few of our daily assignment challenges at http://tdc.ds106.us/We will ask that you do the video one on Wednesday (5/23); use it as an introduction and a chance to tell a story. How you do video is up to you; it can be done from your mobile device, or directly into the web cam using a site like YouTube.

Being on the other side of the Atlantic, and too lazy to look up the time difference I am not sure if Wednesday is tdc135 or tdc136, it is Thursday here now but tdc136 sohwed up yesterday about 4pm, so 135 was up on Wednesday too, there are the tasks:
Make a video of you showing and telling a story of an old photograph
Tell us a family legend about yourself or someone else in your family.

I though this video would fit both.

I think that daily creates should not be posted to blogs to stop choking up the main ds106feed, but as this is an intro and a new blog that I’ve set up especially for DS106 I am going to post it here anyway.

Wack a #DS106 Mole

A few days ago I noticed that Alan Levine is mashing up ds106 assignments withThe ds106 Remix Machine. This, briefly, allows you to take an assignment from DS106 and add a filter. Shades of John Davit’s Learning Event Generators.

For example this remix: stop frame photography [remixed]: Uncle Bob — Remix Machine takes this original assignment stop frame photography and adds this remix card:

Uncle bob Remix

Use Existing Media

Remix is using the created media of others – it does not count as a remix if you use your own assignment work. As raw material for your remix, use media from examples created by other ds106 participants for this assignment.

I’ve not ds106ed for a while so, just for fun (is there another reason?), I took one of a series of images from here: ds106: Stop frame photography by Rowan Peter and did this:

Cogmole

Mole photo from Mole Flickr Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This could be a lot better, but it didn’t take long. I am tempted to dust off a copy of flash and make a wack a ds106 mole game;-).

DS106 has been looking very interesting of late, especially the Kickstarter project which has gathered a pile of money for developing DS106 in lots of interesting ways. (I am in for a t-shirt;-)). This looks like making ds106 increasingly interesting as time goes on.

Next time ds106 runs I am going to give it another shot, set up wordpress blog to make my tagging work a bit better. and have some more fun.