for dropping in on and tumbling by DS106
Create a new you — MISSION: DS106 an easy one for 2 stars, if I was counting. I just took off a couple of year so fairly subtile. Read a couple of googled tuts for photoshop: Removing Wrinkles – Photoshop Tutorials and another one I’ve lost.
more intersting, to me, is the Before After WordPress Plugin. I’d used the Javascript before so was please to find a plugin.
This is my first assignment for this session of DS106 Warhol Something
Take a photograph, or use an existing one, and create a piece of pop art. You can use something ordinary, like Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can, or do a portrait, like Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. This can be done in Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever photo editing software you have available.
I’ve done something of this sort before, tracing photos with drawing software (the face trace below from 2007) and even did a wee tutorial using the smartboard software to do the same thing, great fun for kids tracing a giant face.
It is even easier to do with photo booth, I am sure there is even an iPhone app that would do the job. But on of ther aims of my ds106ing is to lose the photoshop fear, so I loaded up the recommend Andy-Warhol-Up Your Photographs with this Photoshop Tutorial and followed along. The tut does what it says on the tin. I could have spent a lot longer tweeking the modes of the layers and messing about with colours, but this is enough for one day. (I’ve been ds106ing a lot over the last few days, mainly due to having a couple of days holiday
So for week 1 we had to:
Watch and Review Mike Wesch Videos Michael Wesch at UMW Faculty Academy Part 1 and Part 2
The main point of this week’s reflection is to connect the concepts described by Wesch to your own experiences on the web, and project how this might play out as you develop your own online space for this class.
I am not going to reflect much on this here, but I though some workflow/playflow notes might be of interest.
I, like any other teacher interested in Web 2, am aware and have nodded along to Mike Wesch’s famous youtubes. I was keen to watch these ones, but 2 hours seems a long time to spend. I downloaded the videos, ripped the audio, converted to MP3s and stuck on my dropbox:
I then made them favourites on my iPhone so that I could listen to them away from wifi. Yesterday (Sunday now 2 days ago) I was driving an hour to go for a walk, so listen to one on the way there and one coming back. This is one of the reasons that I am a podcasting fan, as a consumer I can multitask. As a producer podcast has needs fewer media skills, so I like that too.
Listen to someone with a powerful presentation that includes video is not ideal, but this worked, I’ve seem some of the material before and imagined the rest. The problem was, it is hard to take notes or mark time when driving (Ideally, I’d like a voice controlled app that I could pause a podcast/audio and record my own audio notes).
One of Mike Wesch’s big points is how learners are disconnected from the classroom, a familiar refrain from lots of educators across the sectors. He clearly demonstrated how he had overcome this by involving the learners more fully in the teaching & learning process. Of course he tells it less baldly than that, his examples are beautiful. This is the way mainstreak Scottish education is developing through the curriculum for excellence. It feels right, there are now lots of great examples (plenty of recent Scots one on pedagoo.org) and on a tiny scale I’ve occasionally seen it work in my classroom.
I am still left wondering if this will work longer term. I do worry that the best example of this depend on really outstanding teacher connecting in unique ways with classes. The proof might be after a few dozen DS106 the question, how many daily creates and assignments do I have to do? no longer exists?
My week 2 daily creates:
Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery
and
That was five tdcs in one week. I find it easier to try and do as many as possible, last session once I slowed down I stopped.
.campletter {font-family:'Over the Rainbow',san-serif;font-size:18px;background:#ee9;
transform: rotate(10deg);
-ms-transform: rotate(11deg); /* IE 9 */
-webkit-transform: rotate(10deg); /* Safari and Chrome */
-o-transform: rotate(10deg); /* Opera */
-moz-transform: rotate(10deg); /* Firefox */
-moz-box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888;
-webkit-box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888;
box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888;
Padding:6px;
Margin:6px;
}
It is pretty easy to get the CSS code for this sort of thing, just google it. The google fonts pluggin settings page has a section for custom CSS SO I didn’t even have to edit the theme.
The other thing I’ve been playing with is the iPhone friendly daily create page I made. Now shows the creations for the last 5 daily creates:TDC Today. I am finding this quite useful, this afternoon I was. Standing right beside this destroyed hut when I checked TDC. The code is now a real mess of php and JavaScript, it seems to work here. Let me know if you try it and it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.
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.