Wire 106: Week 2 “Building the Community”

OK, week 1 is done, and Paul Bond and I have been extremely impressed with what we have seen thus far. The wire106 crew is going to be a crack team of digital storytellers. Paul apologizes in advance for not being part of this video, but he had to work the roofs this Labor Day weekend.

Below is a breakdown of what will be expected for week 2, but be sure to watch the video in its entirety for context, details, and personality :)

Creative Assignments

  • 4 Daily Creates: This week we start the Daily Creates, and folks like Amy, Brittany, and Desa have already started, making them well ahead of the game. If you spent 10 minutes of the Daily Create, you spent too long. This is supposed to be quick and easy. You can choose from any four TDCs during the week, but you have to do it on the day it comes out. Doing all 4 on Sunday will not be accepted for credit. Also, your Daily Creates shouldn’t be old photos, writings, videos, or audio you created previously, unless you add something significant to it that effectively makes it new.
  • tumblr_nb7xjkK6pG1sfub4yo1_400Summarize a Wire Episode in GIFs: You will each be asked to create a GIF Summary of your choice of one of the first nine episodes. The trick is you have to do it in no more than 6 GIFs :) Here is the assignment, and be sure to tag the post you write for this assignment with the proper two tags, i.e., AnimatedGIFAssignments, AnimatedGIFAssignments1352.  Also, here’s a good tutorial for creating animated GIFs with free and open source tools. Don’t wait on this one, it will be a time suck if you’ve never done it before.

Blog Posts

  • Scott Punkett’s “We Can Blog”

    Blog Post Titles: We’ve noticed a lot of your post titles were quite boring. Something like “Week 1 Summary,” etc. This is not the most inviting entry point for your work. It is up to you to make your posts, like all your work, creative and enticing. Which birngs me to the second bullet point….

  • How to Write Up Assignments like a Champion: Alan Levine created an awesome resources for writing up ds106 assignments, learn it, live it, love it! This will be what we expect when you write up the assignments you do for this class, this week’s example being the GIF Summary of a Wire Episode.

Personalizing your blog

  • About Page: You need to create an about page on your blog and let folks know who you are. This is one of your virtual homes on the web, time to decorate and nest :)
  • Exploring Themes: Some of you have already changed your blog theme and made the site your own. Awesome. For those who haven’t yet, here’s a tutorial on how to work with Themes in WordPress.
  • Exploring Plugins: To start, everyone needs to install Akismet to avoid the spam cockroaches, they will come very soon. If you start having issues with spam and you haven’t installed Akismet,  I will cry crocodile tears. Here is a quick run through on installing plugins, and a more in-depth tutorial for installing Akismet. [NB: You don’t have to pay a cent for Akismet, just move the slider to $0 when signing up.]  I also recommend you install Jetpack, which is like 40 plugins in one, and many of them are extremely useful.
  • Moderating Comments: There is nothing more annoying than when someone takes the time to comment on your blog and it never shows up because it is stuck in moderation. It is your job to moderate all comments, although feel free to delete anything you find untoward. You can moderate comments in the Comments section of your WordPress site.
  • Blog Titles: No site shall be called “My blog” by the week’s end, if there is one—we will sacrifice kittens and puppies. A lot of them. You change this in the Settings area of the WordPress Dashboard.

For a more in-depth overview of WordPress check out the documentation we have provided at http://docs.umwdomains.com/wordpress/wordpress

Participation

  • Jack Mulrey’s “Comments Build ds106?

    Commenting:  Commenting is the life’s blood of this class, and it is a large part of your overall work in this course. Read widely and comment freely, Commenting builds community, and from here on out we will take Desa’s lead and  link to all the comments we left over the course of any given week in our Weekly Summary posts. You can find all the course posts on our ds016/wire106 page. We will also setup a hub this week (see Known install below) for aggregating all the work happening in the various sites in one place.

  • Twitter:  A lot of discussion has been happening on Twitter for this class already, and Twitter will be a seminal space for the work we’re doing all semester. If you’re not there, you’re missing the conversation, and that can’t help but affect your work. Follow the hashtags #ds106 and/or #wire106. Also, I recommend using Tweetdeck for searching on specific hashtags.
  • The Wire Video Discussion: This week we will start asking students to join us in the weekly video discussions of episode 10-12. Right now the times are Tuesday 5 PM, Wednesday 5 PM, and Friday 4 PM. We can change these times based on your availability in coming weeks, but if you can make those times this week sign-up and be ready to talk! Each of you will be required to do this at least 3 times over the course of the semester. But the more the merrier :)
  • Wire 106 Lunch (sign-up): Also, as mentioned last week, I will be setting up a Wire 106 lunch starting this week for interested students. We’ll have 3 of us and will pick a spot to get lunch to talk ds106, The Wire, storytelling, and more. This is optional, and we can find other options for those of you who can’t make it. Consider it a free lunch. Sign-up for this Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday here.

Watching:

This week we will be watching episodes 10-12 of Season 1 of The Wire. You should know where to find them.

Exploring New tech:

The application we will be installing this week, Known, is what we will be using to create a syndication hub for all the various media: Tweets, SoundClouds, Daily Creates, Flickr images, etc. Below is a screencast video that will take you through installing this application. I will be sending out specific details for how we expect you to use Known mid-week, for now jsut get it installed and test it out. Also, I recommend each of you installing it in a subdomain called wire106 (here’s how you create subdomains).

Quote of the week:

Brittany pointed out, quite rightly, that Google search is your friend in this course:

I did a little troubleshooting on google and found out that uploading it in an incognito window would work and when I did that it uploaded without any issues.

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One Response to Wire 106: Week 2 “Building the Community”

  1. Pingback: Week 3: Putting the Digital in Storytelling | bavatuesdays

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