Dear Mom and Dad,

Wow, what a first week from Camp Magic Macguffin, it is a lucky thing I packed me favorite, stylish pants. It was one thing to go away to Camp Glyndon in the 1970s… I do remember that the first day I went I was miserable, it was rainy, and I just wanted to go home, but by day 3 I was locked in, and went back for the next 8 years.

In fact, I stopped by what was camp just last summer, and those first bunkhouses are still standing

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

But this is now. It was a ton of work that Martha and I did in our role as camp counselors, and we had fun sharing camp in our first series of videos. Martha has more experience with summer ds106 than me, and her wizardness with setting up the web site was amazing. I think she is suspicious that I seem to have more communication with the new camp owners, which is even made a tad worse since they insisted I fly to Canada for an orientation to the company the week that camp started. The CVI people are nice, but they did send me out in the woods as some sort of test. Weird.

Okay the really exciting stuff is we have 12 UMW campers, and with the grand help of Tim the Hippiest Hoster, and the new Domain of One’s own project, they all have their own domains and are on their way to being blogging away this week.

But the really killer stuff is having the active participating of our open online participants, we have a good group of newbies and returning ds106ers, especially our elite cadre of counselors, especially ol talk about myself in the third person Hatchet Jack and that Sassy Zazzy who already started her own mashup audio project before camp opened. That’s cool, but I am worried she does not trust me. And we even have people coming to camp from Ghana, how wild is that?

So in week 2, we will be working hard to get our campers blogs going, more daily creates, and some introductory activities to storytelling.

They are all eager or are already playing in Minecraft, a place I am so novice, that I have some homework to catch up to.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

And thanks again for sending my footlocker (and remembering to put the extra lock on it) and using the CVI shipping services (sorry for the scare the black van must have given you). I know it was heavy to ship, but I need those devices inside.

Talk to you next week,

love,

Alan

Here is a super appreciation thanks to Brian Lamb for asking me to do a reprise of Amazing Stories of Openness last presented a year ago at for the CTLT Summer Institute at UBC, part of a panel session called Going Public Into the Great Wide Open.

The best part of this day was getting a chance to pick ideas and contacts from the other panel members. I was super excited to find that Tina Loo was there to talk about her experience with the Wiki Educators Program that Brian recently blogged about.

Her Northern American Environmental History class did a semester long project to author major articles in Wikipedia. Just before I traveled to Vancouver, I read her reflection on the process, spurned by her fatigue of seeing piles of student authored research papers:

For the past two years, a pile of unclaimed HIST 396 term papers has accumulated in the corner of my office, evidence of my failure to engage students adequately. It was as if the energy and anxiety that went into these fifteen- to eighteen-page tomes dissipated completely when they were handed in. The authors of these abandoned papers didn’t, it seems, care how their ideas and arguments resonated with their audience – me. Increasingly, it seemed ridiculous to have students spend time doing something they weren’t interested in and for me to spend time doing something they weren’t interested in; namely writing comments.

Reading this and hearing more about this has me thinking about the possibilities of getting some UMW faculty interested in this kind of project- they already do incredible research in History, English and Historic Preservation that does go public in UMW blogs, but the elevation of scholarly work in Wikipedia comes across as not just a worthy goal of achievement but a contribution to the world of information. Part of my reason for coming here is to be learning of the successes with their UBC Wiki as a content / community system, which I am still doing, but am finding this idea of Wikipedia research/writing/participation as something we can go far with at UMW. I hope to followup with Tina to learn more about what it took for her to weave the WEP program into her course.

I was also intrigued by Julian Dierkes Asia Pacific Memo project, a model where complex academic research is distilled to key, understandable form in the form of 300 word “memos” – what they are doing is making academic research easily understooof and shared:

The perfect Memo is written to be accessible to a reader of any mainstream newspaper. But a Memo is different from a newspaper article because it develops one academic concept rooted in research in very short form (300 to 350 words), while linking to current events when appropriate.

The Memo makes a strong case for an observation/conclusion. That means that phrases such as “my research explains…” are not appropriate. Instead, the Memo should offer the explanation or an element of the explanation referred to here.

And it was real excitement to meet and listen to David Ng describe his outreach methods to make science not only more understood, but accessible, especially with his overview of the Phyllo Game. I’d glanced at this before (likely tipped by Brian), but it basically began with:

Phylo is a project that began as a reaction to the following nugget of information: Kids know more about Pokemon creatures than they do about real creatures*. We think there’s something wrong with that.

Ng’s group has developed a web-based trading card game built around the natural world- the cards are lavishly illustrated (art work is solicited via a flickr group) but also full of facts and a game paramaters that come into play as a game that is played off the computer.

But the thing I had missed before is that they offer the site as a WordPress template (hmm, link in the site footer is not working, but I will follow up with David next week), and I am filing this one away to think about as what other sorts of content could be put into this game engine.

And that’s what I got out of today’s session, but I did have fun doing an overview of Amazing Stories, which has always been a joyous thing to present. The message feels simple– “sharing is good”. The premise I started with was:

These are unexpected things that are the serendipity engine of the web, that happen as an unintended result of sharing your stuff freely. Now while I cannot guarantee that if you share openly, you will get an invitation to travel to Australia or have your photos appear in a book, etc.

But I can guarantee that if you DON’t share, that you will never be a benefactor of an amazing story.

And I have yet to come across a person who has an amazing story because they locked their IP inside a box.

I did a summary of many of the stories, and I was excited I had a new one that Rowan Peter recently shared – he agreed to do a video when I asked:

I also got a chance to talk about ds106, the assignment bank, and the daily create — especially the one this week we set up for summer students to share a family legend:

Again, this ability to get to see people in this community talk from their home about a family story is what makes ds106 more than just some content shoving MOOC, this ds106 place has a heartbeat, a soul, something blatantly lacking in You Da City.

Amazing, indeed.

The only required one for our ds106 students at UMW was the Family legend video, and as before, this has become a really interesting way to get to know people in the course/community.

May 22, 2012: TDC 135 Video telling a story of an old photo
here I talk about a horrible old photo of me that I swore I would never put online

May 23, 2012: TDC 136 Video of a Family Legend
The story of my sister’s busted nose- what a great showing for this video assignment.

May 24, 2012: TDC 137 Make a drawing of a face trace
This was a great new kind of assignment, I followed others and did this on my iPad using Brushes to trace the photo

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

May 25, 2012: TDC 138 Photograph of a front of a building
What would be Vancouver without a visit to the blue house in East Van?

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

May 26, 2012: TDC 139 Take a Photo of (or something that represents) the Moon
There was a lovely crescent spotted at dusk in Coquitlam

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

May 27, 2012: TDC 140 Make a picture that captures motion
Bryan Jackson’s playful pup Vince provided a bit of blur (I did shake the toy to get the motion)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Even before coming to work at University of Mary Washington I carried a large bias towards the force that is ds106; having taught in and doing it again (hey the doors are open for the summer version a la Camp Magic Macguffin), I am in the middle of the MOOC woods not really worrying if there are trees or not. Or maybe, if a Massive Open Online Course falls in the woods… ok, enough useless metaphors.

There’s enough static flying in the webs about MOOCs but I was pleased to have caught the conversation at the Digital Campus podcast Ya Big MOOC where Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, Amanda French, and guest Audrey Waters provided interesting viewpoints and recognition of ds106 (not that we need more people clamoring for credit)

Ya Big MOOC

Some brief notes- Mills praised ds106 for not being the “correspondence model” of Coursera and Udacity (which now I know from the podcast is pronounced “You Da City”) as an old model of distance education. He described this approach as if content goes online and you work through it then you will know something — an instructivist model

On ds106, he said “This is what MOOCs ought to be” that it takes advantage of inherent qualities of the Internet. Audrey waters says it is “of the web and for the web” (hey I thought I coined that) and ds106 stands in contrast to other moocs in that it is really about community of learners,

Audrey’s experience in some of the other MOOCs is that she won’t be missed if she is not in the course, that it is isolating. I should add that despite completing only 1/2 of a first You Da City course, I still get emails congratulating me for making it to week 4:

Congratulations! You’ve made it more than halfway through the course! Unit 4 and homework 4 are both up. This unit is on search and complexity, which I hope you enjoy learning as much as I enjoyed teaching.

I know this course has been challenging, but if you’ve made it this far I have no doubt that you can finish. If you have any questions, or just want to take part in interesting discussion, feel free to visit the forums.

Despite the million dollar infrastructure, they don’t even know where I am at.

The group pondered Why now? for MOOCs, why the fervent interest. They speculated a global demand for the branded experienced, but also questioned whether Stanford, Harvard, MIT will take as value/credit a student entering their institution with MOOC experience- its good enough for us to brand our X version for people to use elsewhere but not good enough for people coming to us?

I can say with almost 100% assurance, ds106 will never have a cheapened x in front of it.

There is a lot that is unique abut ds106, it has kess to do with the structure, technology (which are integral though) and more about its leveraging the social nature of the network that was drawn in from the start. But tio does not mean that there cannot be more courses in this mode and not just the Ya Big MOOC kind.

I’d have more to say, but I have to get back to camp.

pre-post script: On re-reading this is chaotic and not even close to a full wrap experience of an intense event, and I feel like I left more out than I described. Sigh, blogging about blogging or blogging about not blogging well…

It’s hard to blog the experience of last week’s Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington because there is so much to try and encapsulate, and I’m left with “it was teh awesome”. Some here is the random brain dump. Or maybe it will be all photos.

My first experience at faculty Academy was as a speaker in 2007 and 5 years later I find myself on the other side as one of the team at UMW putting on the conference. Then, like now, it is a conference that does not overwhelm you as a conference, there ids a lot of space to talk, and there is this kind of family gathering vibe to it.

And then there is the fact that they put this on for a very small budget amount and at the same time charge the grand total of $0 for anyone to attend- which is why it was only better to have colleagues like the Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Walzter, and Michael Branson Smith travel from New York (do not ask what they are doing in this photo):

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Barbara Sawhill and Ma’ayan Plaut drove all the way in from Ohio, and Britt Batwood and colleagues came from VCU, and Jon Becker was there as well.

I must admit my role was pretty light- Jim Groom of course visions it and pulls in the lead speakers, Martha Burtis runs the Herculean task of managing the program doing magic with the web site (and surviving illness), Lisa Ames corralled the food, Tim and Andy worked madly to makle the video stream work, Tim lugged over all the MakerBot gear. Oops how did Andy escape being in a photo?

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by rushaw

My mini bit was using Red Dog to pick Grant and Giulia from the airport and doing some photography. For me it was also useful to try and be in a lot of faculty sessions to better learn the things wonderful going on here. There was participating of some extremely bright and articulate students, like Kyle Allwine sharing the unusual experience of Jeff McClurken’s History of Information Age seminar where the students created the syllabus. I was super impressed by Krystyn Moon’s three students present in the session on eportfolios who were frank about their experiences, especially one who challenged faculty to be doing the same thing they were askling of their students.

Also worthy was Shannon Hauser’s presentation as a graduated student with 4 years worth of UMWblogs in her dashboard, described as a “strange trip”

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by rushaw

This is pretty relevant considering the next phase of innovation of UMW, where at Faculty Academy Jim Groom described the collaboration with CIO Justin Webb (my vote for one of the coolest and innovative CIOs) on the “Domain of One’s Own” project where in the future, every student will be not getting just blogs, but their own personal domain and web hosting platform provided by the college- imagine 4 years worth of personal cyber infrastructure activity that a student could then export and walk away with after their graduation.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by rushaw

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

(I cannot highly recommend enough the series of session drawings Giulia Forsythe created and published in almost real time)

Beyond all this of course were the headliners, in the 1960s had the British Invasion, in 2012 at Faculty Academy it was the Canadian Invasion. From top photo on this post, awesome was the power trio of presenters, not only friends (good friends) and colleagues, and maybe by accident, but Grant Potter, David Darts, and Giulia Forsythe are all Canadian. Eh.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

These ought to be separate blog posts- Grant Potter was the lead off with an inspiring vision of the power of tinkering and learning, of not always having a clear purpose in experimenting but just making room for the unexpected things that happen in that exploring set. And beyond the talk, just hanging out with Grant for a week, the excitement and music he brings to everything, he is all about putting those tools on the table. Watch his talk at https://vimeo.com/42415690.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Canadian number two was Thursday, when Giulia Forsythe led us on an adventure of understanding what it means to sketch and draw ideas, showing us not only how she thinks visually. I might be slightly biased (big fan), but it was a stellar talk, and it was fun to wander around the room and watch how people were putting into practice the use of symbols, metaphors, and graphs she was asking them to do. It was all I could do not to give away what I knew was in the last slide, she highlighted the presence Jim Groom proved at his TEDxNY talk when the technology failed, and used himself as the animated GIf- the point being the presence we can bring even as ourselves being the visual. Whach her talk at https://vimeo.com/42419735.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

And it was like having a hero come for David Darts to bring his talk “When You Say Culture, I Reach For My Source Code”. Starting with a broad view of the history of openness, and the dangers we face in a regulated future– he brought in the salient example of Cory Doctorow’s Printcrime short story where the future printmaker’s resolve is to not just keep printing, but to make something that will enable everyone to become printers (and thus relevance to the demos Tim set up for the MakerBot, this is all so self referential).

The highlight for me was hearing Darts talk about the PirateBox, so of course I had to get my fan photo

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Catch his entire session at https://vimeo.com/42773056

There is tons more that was on here, the informal connections, the conversations on the back patio, the music in the local bars, it was just 4 days of energy rush.

And boom, it ends. But it really goes on.

So do not miss out on Faculty Academy 2013.

It’s not quite the odyssey of last year but I am starting tomorrow on a string of summer travel- my gracious thanks to Jim Groom and the DTLT crew at UMW for their flexibility in letting me roam and work at the same time.

I am of course over the next 10 weeks co-directing Camp Magic Macguffin with Martha Burtis, the online summer class for ds106. I was brought in by the camp’s holding company to bring some sense of stability to the wackiness that went on last year. There will be no head shaving this year.

So here is the plan….

• May 23-June 14: Vancouver- I am headed there tomorrow, predominantly to spend some time at UBC with Brian Lamb and Novak Rogic’s team to learn more about their successes with the wiki as a community space for UBC, for something to explore at UMW. I am stoked to have 3 weeks in Vancouver, I have never stayed long enough, and hopefully will get to hang out with Bryan Jackson, Jason Toal, Brian and Kiera, Scott Leslie, et al..
• June 15-June 16: Vancouver Northern Voice 2012, the best fracking conference anywhere. Bring it.
• June 18-22: Montreal I am flying back to Montreal with Giula and meeting up with the rest of the crew persenting ds106 radio for the ______ (I forget) conference at McGill. I am not part of the conference, but will hang out, and also explore the city (time off here)
• June 25 – July 1: Fredericksburg Back for a week!
• July 2 – August 1: Strawberry AZ I am going home to work/teach remotely, tend my yard, and see my Arizona friends, and do a crap load of bike riding.
• August 9-12 Attending the Unplug’d 2012 retreat – I am hoping I can drive and maybe do some visits on the way up.
• August 23-27: Calgary I have gr 100 mile bicycle tour with D’Arcy Normanandiose plans of finishing the GranFondo Banff

This little hobo is on the move starting TOMORROW.

Today was the third time I was invited to do a remote presentation of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the Wooster College Faculty Fellows Program. Since Jon and Matt visited UMW a few weeks back, we had a good chance to talk about some different ways to structure the session, and it worked well.

I suggested we try presenting via Google Hangout, but the google docs presenter in there is fine for screen viewing, but too small for projection, so we went low tech, and used Hangout to see each other, and had them advance my slides on a second screen there.

Here’s da slides, with embedded movies

This time I spent much less time talking about the tools, and front loaded with some discussion of the shape of stories, e.g. the Kurt Vonnegut talk

as well as some stuff from Nancy Duarte from her Resonate book section on sparklines, but mainly to make a case for the need for academics (teachers and students) to consider the allure and impact of their communications- like the idea of using what works well n cinema as a “trailer” for work that then can be treated in also a more traditional form, if appropriate.

I also illustrated the brilliant work of Dan Meyers in creating his Three Act approaches to math lessons, which could easily be applied to almost any discipline — see his three act resource for a gold mine of ideas

I’ve been getting a ton of inspiration from Randy Olson’s “Don’t Be Such a Scientist”

Olson was a tenured marine biologist who long harbored to be a film director, and in his 40w he bailed entirely on the academic career to enroll as a student on the USC Cinema School. He opens with his being shamed by a tough acting teacher who scolded him for being too much in his head, and Olson goes on to share what he learned about the effectiveness of the storytelling aspects of film that can make academic communications much more effective.

I used some of his stuff as well as the Wikipedia reference on the Three Act screenplay structure to change up the workshop activity.

Typically I do as an audience participant part a story prompt, something to get them shouting out ideas for a story. I typically do something about “You would not believe who I saw last night at _________” where I pick a locally well known locale. This is all about them brainstorming as a group.

For the Wooster group, I chose as last time, a local landmark restaurant, Matsos. but instead of just a 2 part break in the slide show, I set it up in the 3 act play structure, with prompts for the group to develop a story they would all use later. I created a google doc for each one, set open to edit for the workshop (now read only)

• http://bit.ly/50ways-wooster-act1
• http://bit.ly/50ways-wooster-act2
• http://bit.ly/50ways-wooster-act3

The group was small enough to make this a table discussiom but they also jumped in together. I was surprised how cohesively they came to a pretty solid story concept, if I can paraphrase:

Greg, the local guy who goes around shirtless, goes to Matsos for dinner; the pizza is so hot he burns his chest hair. The owner starts a fight, and in the middle, instead of a screm, Greg belts out an operatic solo, and the owner dude is so impressed, he arranges Greg to get a tryout for the local production company. Greg ends up so successful, he becomes mayor

They certainly followed the 3 act structure to a T. I mentioned the idea (again from Olson’s book) about distilling this into an elevator speech, and even more into the Hollywood High Concept one sentence or phrase (e.g. “Snakes on a Plane” or “What if we could clone dinoaurs?”). i am not sure how to do this story- “even the shirtless sing arias”?

I also had them search for media to put into a shared spreadsheet- the idea was after the 2 hour intro session, they would have 3 hours of work time to each tell that same story in a different tool.

I came back to see the final results, and like my Mom used to say, I was blown away by not only their products, but also how they treated the story each in different ways, but kept its structure. Here are a few of them:

The Matsos Pizza Shirtless Guy Story done in

• Pimpampaum
• Pixton
• Xtranormal
• Google Maps
• Animoto

The more odd thing has the handful (3 or so) who who not make their work public- I got a hint of some concern since the story involved real people, but this lack of interest in sharing disturbs me some. I even heard them say “Well we can always delete it after this workshop” – that is the sword to my gut when people dismantle the web.

That is the only negative I came away with- this was a fun group and I enjoyed the new approach to the workshop.

I still have looming over me a huge mountain of updates to the site, but am also toying with a completely new approach to the site that could make it more portable and localized for interested persons.

Stay tuned- but thanks again Jon and Matt for inviting me back to Wooster- now I just ahve to get there one day and claim that beer and pizza and Matsos

“@lukew: “an artist understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out.””looking at #ds106 as a self-renewal project.

— Jerry Slezak (@jslezak) May 22, 2012

With the startup of our online class, I worry about letting slip the time spent creating for class, itself the self-renewal I need as much as oxygen. Seeing Scottlo Warhol his Second Life self in a followup to Leelzebub’s own effort had me eager to try the tutorial.

But alas I am photoshopless until the new order comes in, and that was way more than I wanted to bite off and try in GIMP.

So I went for the next best thing, doing an animated GIF. When I visited the National Cryptologic Museum on Saturday I enjoyed watching the machine that had a computer controlled arm for loading data form a giant circular library system (I cannot recall the name of it), the robot arm seemed to have some good potential.

I shot some video on my iPhone and then loaded it into MPEG StreamClip to do some frame grabs (using the low res 320×240 size). I then used the web based Gifninja site to create the GIF above. It’s basic, and one frame moves a bit more, but I like it, especially the shadowy figure who passes behind.

It’s interesting to note that Gigninja has a new tool (at least since a year more or more ago) for splitting GIFs, might be some fun things to do with mashing up sequences of existing animated GIFS.

This takes me back to my first animated GIF, from December 14, 2011, when I used scenes from Frankenstein to declare ds106 IS ALIVE

It’s almost nostalgic to think of the birth of ds106- I wrote then

So it’s not even place, it’s three weeks out, why are all my colleagues, friends madly in their labs, and doing of all things, retro 1990s techno things like animated gifs?

And so it is with this wild ride that starts next month. It really is under the hand of Dr. Bava, but he is being humble and not wanting to be a mad dictator, but he does have a vision. I was lucky to spend an hour on Skype with Jim, Tom and Martha, just bouncing ideas.

What should unfold will be unlike many of the other MOOC efforts in that it is not hinged on the weekly drum beat drive of the syllabus and synchronous lecture like sessions in Elluminate. There wont be discussion forums (likely). it will be blog based, and very much individually driven. It will be what ever you want it to be- you will be able to follow the structure jim and Martha are doing at UMW as a “regular” class, or you can cherry pick the bits you want to do.

It’s all about a continuous pulse of creativity. Jim is reeally hooked into the notion of The Dailyshoot and Martha has a nifty duct tape and RSS system for crowdsourcing assignments.

My own idea, also influenced my dailyshoot (which you know I love) is that there could be small daily creative assignments available each day. One does not need to do them all, maybe for a class, it would be 2 or three per week. But they would all be small things one could do each do to create something new, maybe a graphic, a fake movie poster, a story played out in Amazon reviews. The thing about Dailyshoot is that it drives you to try new, and challenging, things.

All of these would be things people can do or not, but might feed the larger, conceptual assignments that are the frame of Jim’s previous ds106 courses at UMW.

The, like now, ds106.us .. IT’S ALIVE. Come in and play now, come on over to Camp Magic Macguffin for the summer of ds106.

This is about as close as I might get to a reflection on my first round of teaching an on site section of ds106 at the University of Mary Washington- the class had barely wrapped and we were off into prep for Faculty Academy, and this week, ds106 cranks up for its summer iteration. I dropped the ball on my audio reflections leaving about 4 recordings sitting high and dry.

Not to mention it is 2am and I have an online presentation to deliver at 9am.

But if I don’t blog it now, I might lose it all, given (another pending blog post) a summer of travel that starts in less than 48 hours.

Enough prelude, get to it, Levine!

First of all, this was about the first time since the mid 1990s that I was teaching a class; then like now, I am humbled at how much in underestimate the toll it takes. No, let me go one back than first of all- it was a thrilling experience I have no regrets on, and could not be prouder of the work done by all of my students (see the collection of final projects).

Knowing how to do the ds106 work is one thing, being able to assist 25 students in doing it… another. I have to say that they accomplish much on what they learn to and not so much what I teach them; I am there to set the pace, to nudge, coach, cajole.

The biggest struggle was my in class strategies and presence; I do not feel like I developed the “shtick” or way to carry the show in my own way. I have no expectations of doing the class a la Jim Groom, who really ends up generating a frenzy of energy among his students (with his gift of talking smack to people and them loving it). Part of it was perhaps the awkward beginning, the 2 weeks of class when it started and I was coming in via Skype, meaning it took more time for the students and I to get to know each other.

What worked best were sessions where I broke things down into small segments of students doing rapid prototyping or group activities. What worked least best was the sessions where I just got up and talked and showed. It was uphill all the way to engage in discussions (though there were good ones when we discussed YouTube genres).

Some of the best classes happened in February, and the peak was likely the night I had them do Foley sounds for a Charlie Chaplin silent film- here is their final work

The intensity of the work was hard, and I sensed many of my students were so focussed on getting their “30 stars” of video assignments, that doing that superseded the making art damnit goal. I did not think I would have to be explicit in criteria for writing up assignments, but even with commenting, I see posts with thrilling titles like “Mashup Assignment”, no links, and not the kind of “story behind the story” I asked for often.

I should go to the half full glass as I had at least 6-8 students who did really good blog writing and pretty much documented their progress. I think all of us got worn out through the video section, but then again, so many students rose to the occasion who had never done video before.

Assignment wise, the “Return to the Silent Era” may have been the killer one, with over 40 people completing it, and the work of Ben Rimes hitting the crowning achievement of appearing in a British tabloid.

My biggest contribution might have ben creating the assignment remix generator, riffing off of the ideas of Tom Woodward for a mechanism for creating different “card twists” to change up a randomly selected assignment. The unplanned gem was in asking students to go back to the original assignments and identify media from another student’s work to use as a reference for the remix. As of this writing, there were 143 new remix assignments done.

The coding on that was largely on the shoulders of the work Martha Burtis did last year on the assignments site. I’ve been doing some cleanup and improvements on that site as well.

The next add on for the remix site might be a tool to encourage re-writing of existing assignments to work in different disciplines, so you could have a tool that lets the user select, say Math, and they get randomly chosen existing assignment and have to contribute a new way to do it for their selected discipline. It’s pretty much the same engine.

All of this is fraying as I enter into the weird colored zone of the summer section I am co-teaching with Martha. This one is a 10 week course, completely online. As a counter to the “Summer of Oblivion” the theme of this summer is bright and happy camp experience as Camp Magic Macguffin. It is my role to bring some sanity and civility to what was a horror sceme last summer.

Martha and I have done a fun series of weekly videos, playing with the theme– the whackiest part was we set up a swag store before sitting down to tweak the syllabus. But this is the fun part about this class being done in a performance mode- the direction and shape will be driven by the people that show up.

And boy have people been great to sign up to take the class or even hover around as wise experienced camp counselors. For our open participants, see a new guide to participation we set up on the main mother site. The things we’d ask the open folks to do are to play as much as they can with the assignments, as well as keeping the flow of Daily Create going. Mainly we hope you interact with our students via their blog posts and tweets.

Now I getting really sleepy and blog sloppy. The summer course may be a ton of work, but it is going to be some crazy unknown directions as hopefully our participants start changing up our story.

If you have been wavering about being in ds106, now is the prime time to jump in- we already have in the first days some art being create, but mostly a lot of the community stepping in and trying to connect with the students.

I was going to work this into another post, but with the cacophony of blogs going on and on about MOOCs and such- I can say as long as I can have some say, there will be no cheap “x” added to ds106- it is what it is, open participants can ge the full or half full immersion that makes it fomcfortabnle (damn I am tired).

Rocking with ds106 in the summer of Magic. Join in now.

Lost in the shuffle of activity last week was a May 18 milestone; that day marked 20 years of my edtech career, the day I started my job as “programmer analyst/instructional systems” at the Maricopa Community Colleges.

Wow was I green, but also a sponge. After my immersion of system culture at an Ocotillo retreat the first weekend, I was off to San Francisco to learn bout this new video technology called QuickTime.

They left me alone that first summer, with my Quadra 900 as I immersed myself learning about HyperCard, gopher, videodiscs, etc. I could go even more Old Man with memories but I will stop.

I do have to say much of what we have now, including a hand held mobile device for publishing to a web (from a taco shop) which was then a future… I might have never guessed to be. That alone gives me a lot to be open to looking the other way.

Closing out the cobwebs, I am thankful for then MCLI director Naomi Story, who saw some potential in the kid (and joked that she hired me because I wore an earring); Vice Chancellor Alfred de Los Santos who was a mentor and showed me the power of provocative questions: colleague Maria Harper-Marinick who alway was and is a dynamo if energy also is now Vice Chancellor, Jim Walters who gave me a disc labeled “Mosaic” in 1993 and changed my life, colleagues Juan Marquez and Vance Williams who were on my hiring committee and still at Maricopa (I think), “mother” Betty Field now retired but always a guiding influence… wow the names are flooding in now.

So what will my next 20 look like (probably sans mullett)