The DS106 Tunnel of Gif

Photo It Like Peanut Butter — MISSION: DS106

Rather than making animated GIFs from movie scenes, for this assignment, generate one a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. Bonus points for minimal amounts of movement, the subtle stuff.

Yesterday I saw My Animated GIF Day by Ben and thought a wee bit about his driving gif. His method seemed a wee bit dangerous so I decided to you the iPhone iTimeLapse app to grab my journey home last night. I could then get stills to make an animated gif. I’ve made a few but was not delighted with them. Today I took some more footage including some going through the clyde tunnel. This was hampered by the fact my phone holder dropped off the windscreen so I only got a wee bit. It makes quite a nice gif.

tunnel gif

I created the gif using the wee app I made as a front end to the Gifsicle commandline tool, Movie2Gif while watching a previous episode of DS106. I found that it did not properly play the movies from iTimeLapse so I had to re save then using QuickTime first.

Past DS106 O’Clock

Past ds106 0clock

Ad DS106 get underway I’ve found my Daily Create rate has dropped right off. I was doing ok before the course got underway and then it went a bit pear-shaped. I managed 10 DS106 photos and a few dailycreate sounds. I managed to do the odd full assignment but was quite pleased that I already had a blog. This week I’ve really dropped out of the game. I don’t feel bad about not doing any creates but I feel a bit guilty for not paying much attention to other folks work/play. Only managed one comment his week.

Anyway according to Week 4: Photography and Visual Assignments the next bit is to try and do some Visual Assignments so this is my first the Comic Book Effect.

Method:

  1. iSight Photo at lunchtime in the office.
  2. Added clock and watchstrap in Fireworks, saved as jpg.
  3. Cut trace round in photoshop with magnetic lasso and delete office.
  4. Add background from Mr. Blue Sky – bevevans22’s posterous.
  5. Save jpg to dropbox
  6. on iPad move to photo library via dropbox app
  7. Use Halftone to make halftone effect.

I was hoping something of the rabbit from Alice would come through.

I would like to be make a much better watch, (need a bit of time;-)) and be able to do the halftone in photoshop.

I did manage a couple of photoshop tutorials this week, nice short ones from Matt Gemmell,
Etched effects and Subtle UI texture which I found useful. I found another tip here: Splash The Color from a DS106r.

my web 2.0 trip DS106 assignment 3

The assignment was in two parts:

  1. read: “What is Web 2.0?”, Web 2.0 Storytelling and Seven Things You Should Know about Creative Commons
  2. distill a few key points use one of the “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Digital Story” to distill a few key points from you reading.

I notice that prezi is one of the 50+Ways – Presentation Tools listed on the wiki. As I started thinking about Web 2.0 I got caught up in browsing through my own short history of using ‘this sort of stuff’. Recently impress.js had caught my notice, it is a prezi like tool that uses javascript. It is new and only works in Safari and Chrome at the moment. I think that Firefox 10 should do the trick too.

I am not overly fond of prezi although I’ve seen it used to very good effect, but I though it might be interesting to try out impress. impress in which you create the ‘slides’ by adding attributes to divs in HTML seemed a bit simpler to use than prezi. I found a great post that explains how it works: How To Use Impress.Js | Cube Websites Blog.

So rather than think deeply about Web 2.0 I played with impress. The results are not tasteful but I had a lot of fun.

Web 2triptn

DS106 Assignment 2 A personal digital space

The second assignment for Spring DS106 was to read this: A Personal Cyberinfrastructure and watch this: “No More Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences.” and blog a response.

There is a requirement to read and watch both carefully but as I am taking this course a a college dropin I didn’t feel the need to take much caree_121.

This is one of those videos/podcasts/blogposts that fire off lots of thoughts as you watch as it hits a lot of nails right on the head. I’ll only lazily touch on a couple.

The video is worth watching by anyone interested in Web 2.0 so I am imbedding it here:

Sounds Good

First thing I notices was the rhythm and musicality of Gardner Campbell’s voice. I’ve been listen to Tom Wordward’s remix A Bag of Gold « Bionic Teaching and used on Radio Edutalk a few times (that was a great idea). Gardner Campbell is a powerful, humorous speaker.

I guess the audience is familiar with the argument addressed, the tension between LMSs and the open web in US higher education. I an not but it sounds like the same sort of argument we have had in UK education between NLEs and WEB 2.0/google/open technologies, between systems set up for teaching and learning and more open and general software that can be bent to teaching and learning. Gardner Campbell defends the open with great humour and the marvellous bag of gold metaphor.

A Personal Cyberinfrastructure

In part Campbell is suggesting Students control their own domain, decide what sort of social software to install and manage it from themselves. As someone who has been doing this sort of thing for a while (here on this blog, personal wiki and a bunch of other stuff) I cn see where he is coming from and love the enthusiasm. I do wonder if it is for everybody. I am fairly relaxed about backing up, losing stuff and the like. I also host with someone who I know well and who has dug me out of a hole or two in my time.

If a student sets up, say, wordpress on their on domain they need to make sure they keep wordpress and any plugins up to date to avoid any wee hacking problems (FAQ My site was hacked « WordPress Codex) that can happen. You also might have to worry a bit about being fireballed or slashdotted if you ever write something the rest of the world want to read (More likely you will be hacked).

These are risks I am happy to take, given my host and the fact that I like playing with this stuff and don’t mind the time spent. If you value your time it might be preferable to head over to wordpress.com. (NB I am just using WP as an example, this blog is not a wp one, it runs off pivotx as of 2014 this is wp).

This leads into the though that there would need to be a fair bit of understanding by teachers and time for development if this was extended back into primary & secondary education. There is a lot of positivity about blogging in schools at the moment, this recent wave crested by Mr. Mitchell at Heathfield CPS Blogs in England (see the Heathfield in the News section) and a ton of blog work by the Glow Scotland team. I hope there is an understanding of the amount of knowledge and skill that goes into a good school blogging site, the time and energy needed to keep it going (a lot of support by Creative Blogs. in Heathfield’s case along with Mr Mitchell’s obvious energy and dedication). The pile of abandoned one, two and three post blogs out there suggests it might not be.

43 Minutes In

There is a question from the audience suggesting that this could be started earlier, this goes right primary school territory

there is an authentic version of any concept that can be taught to any child who can read and write. You pitch it to the appropriate level of development and then you keep coming back to it spiralling upwards and upwards and until that magic handoff moment… 45:46

The last section is really powerful pushing the need for teachers to help pupils make the decisions and on how using these techs in school could flow into higher education.

narrating curating & sharing

What learners should be doing.

Danger Edupunk

I have to be careful or it is down the youtube rabbit hole of edupunk videos, mostly of Gardner Campbell debating with Jin Groom, beware the related video…

Standard YouTube License

Be nice if this was a creative commons video.

If I had a bit more time & skill I’d like to popcorn this it would be a great one to some twitter video mashup, perhaps a hashtag could add the tweets as timed comments…

Busker to Beach

The daily create from today/yesterday was Create an audio of two sounds not normally heard together. I took two sounds that I had recorded for the UK Sound Map on Audio Boo. The result is:

While I don’t think the result is particularly creative or interesting I though the workflow was worth recording.

  1. Easiest way to download the mp3s from AudioBoo was to switch to the RSS feed in safari and right click the MP3 link and choose save as.
  2. Open One file in audacity.
  3. Import other file with File -> Import ->Audio…
  4. Fade out the first sound, as the second was so quiet in comparison I just left it in place. Deleted the section of the first track after the fade.

Busker to Beach Audacity 440

Bonus Image Merge

As Both AudioBoo, the source of the sounds and SoundCloud, where we were to publish the results, allow you to add a photo I thought it might be interesting to create an image fade to go with the audio.

Here is the recipe I used:

Opacity Gradient
  1. Open first AudioBoo page in Safari, view the larger image.
  2. Drag image onto FireWorks on the dock.
  3. Open second image and drag onto the first image in fireWorks
  4. Drag a rect in fireworks over the second image.
  5. Make it white and give it an opacity gradient.
  6. Select the gradient Layer & the Image below.
  7. Modify Menu->Mask -> Group as Mask
  8. Adjust the opacity of the masked image so that the image below shines through.

Busker to Beach Firworks 440

The whole process was pretty quick which is quite important as I try to keep up with the daily create.

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