Category: weekly review

A Diverting Week Two

The scheduleHeadless ds106 Week 2: Getting Through Bootcamp / Personal Cyber Infrastructure steps things up a wee bit.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences and watched the video a couple of times (luckly my car was in the garage for an MOT and I was on the train on Thursday). I had planned, in notes and my head a fairly detailed response. As I started to write it up I searched this blog to see my previous response, it turned out I’d not really had any new ideas since DS106 Assignment 2 A personal digital space. I would recommend anyone interested in educational technology to watch this video. It is a wonderful talk filled with rhythm and humour.

I was thinking I’d manages a few daily creates this week, but looking back not as many as I thought:
I did manage a Keychain video. Cris Crissman left a nice comment about liking the line: “I don’t keep my stories locked up in my keychain.” which is what I started with when thinking the video out. Could have been better if I’d tried more than one shot.

Here are my other tdcs on flickr:

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery

My other daily creates ended up diverting me a little. I had commented on Stefanie’s wonderful Animated Skull Chain which provided the first major diversion, blender.org – Home of the Blender 3D I lost a good few hours on that this week, luckily the first tutorial (145 pages of pdf!) gave me the submarine daily create this week, and eventually I finished the project:

I lost most of Saturday morning on tutorial 2, getting stuck quite near the beginning. I think I’ll play with blender a bit more but might wait until I’ve a bit more time.

I also left the tracks with headless ds106 portrait ending up with a gif and now a tutorial on how I did it:

One thing I’ve been aware of this week is how time poor I seem to be. I am making sure any daily creates I do take no longer than 10 or 15 minutes, I would have liked to do Create an exciting movie trailer for your ds106 web site. Use The Voice. but didn’t even have time to think of a good idea.

My final activity was the animated gif I posted earlier today. I might as well add a few gifs I made along the way.

replicant-eye

Belles Arrival 01

great-beauty-party

First Week without a Head

Leave nothing but I took the first step on my headless journey on the 26, with a quick daily create for Make an impression: take a picture of an indentation. Not a particularly interesting photo, but I like the idea of a first step and you cannot get further from your head than a foot. I managed another couple of photos during the week.

The most interesting, to me, create this week was: Edit an existing video clip to include an unexpected object in the story but I missed the deadline. I did post a quick example of using the bluescreen to Google+ – A day late dailycreate, just to show a wee bit of iMovie… as that is the sort of thing I’d want to do given a bit more time.
I deliberately choose daily creates that would not take too much time. I have a strong bias towards photo daily creates, I am not fond of drawing or writing much more than a haiku, but I find that the photo assignments can make me a bit more mindful of the visual environment throughout the day.

Helping?

I had put my name down as a a helper for the first week of ds106 and as part of that I decided to do a short podcast, due to lack of prep I though that one was a bit lacking so I hatched a plan.

So the plan now is:

  • Over the next 2 weeks of bootcamp I’ll do three or four broadcasts, then try for one a week.
  • I’ll aim for 10 minutes, with 10 minutes of planning beforehand.
  • A chicken theme.
  • More information about this in the next episode.

So far I’ve managed a couple, one of general ds106 stuff the second on creative commons.
I am hoping these will be of interest to ds106ers in general and perhaps useful to newcomers.

For pretty thin reasons I decided on a chicken theme for the podcasts, with chicken related music and an accompanied with an animated chicken gif. I’ve managed to hit the 10 minutes prep, 10 minutes broadcast on ds106 radio and 10 minutes post and posting. These are not polished podcasts. It will also give me a chance to play with nicecast. I use this every week over at Edutalk but don’t do much more than fire up skype and record some conversation, adding some iTunes into the mix is a start.

I also posted a short screencast on giffing with fireworks.

Helping Myself

I’ve pretty much got my blog and various services set up, but I’ve now added an about page to the blog and have messed about with the css of the theme a little. I’ve updated the plugins and installed jetpack to keep a check on how few folk are reading this and add the subscribe to comments by email button. I’ve appreciated that on other ds106 blogs.

The hard bit

Of ds106 is, to my mind, the reflecting, I manage to dodge the main idea and have a bit of fun yesterday. I think that found poetry for dodgy auto generated youtube captions could be an assignment.

Joining in and Joining up

As usual one of the most interesting things in ds106 is watch other folk. I’ve been trying my best to keep up with the flow and dropping the odd comment. The difference this time is the google plus community. I feel a wee bit conflicted about this, I can see that some folk love it, it provides another channel for keeping up, discussion and sharing it is also another place to publish media.

But, I think there are a few drawbacks, the comments in g+ are not attached to the post or media they are about. It is hard to keep track of conversations you take part in. Media posted to g+ is difficult, if not impossible to embed in a blog post, G+ is another silo that it is difficult to get out of. Overall G+ is worth going to for the people that are there, but I’d prefer that g+ was a better open web citizen.

Looking forward to week two.