You can’t keep a good GIF assignment down 🙂 This rendition of the “Dancing Jim All Over the World” was inspired by Michael Branson Smith’s “Molly Rocks the Force” (which is pure magic!). And, given my last post, I imagine it’s another dream vision of finding myself part and parcel of the cinematic fabric of Star Wars.
The image I used for the background can be found here.
Update: I love that Michael Branson Smith is always willing to hep a GIF brother out:
I felt that Dancing Jim Around the World was way too limiting. So I, like my Vader father before me, am reaching for the entire galaxy!. Also, this GIF is my first entry into the GIF Fight tumblr, I hope it makes sense!
Last semester I worked with UMW Chinese History professor Sue Fernsebner (this was PTF or, pre-Tumblr fame 🙂 ) on her Chinese History through Film course. It was an amazing course that I attended on-and-off throughout the semester. I blogged about it on several occasions last semester, and what I loved about the course is that Sue and I were exploring the possibilities of analyzing film using a seemingly arcane digital format like the animated GIF pretty much along side the students. I really enjoyed making multi-shot GIFs of two scenes from Red Sorghum that corresponded to a particular historical analysis of the film from the readings as a way of trying to demonstrate their possible value. And if you are into film analysis, the idea of incorporating GIFs into a detailed analysis of a scene seems to me an essential visual aid for this predominantly visual medium.
The idea was to experiment with GIFs to capture a moment (or several moments) in cinema in order to replay it again and again to get a sense of how it is working both technically and thematically. Throughout the class Sue was experimenting with GIFs as well (which for me is the tell-tale sign of an awesome faculty member practicing what she preaches!), and as a result she worked GIFs into the course as an extra-credit assignment, which resulted in a GIF-off at the end of the semester in which students voted for their favorites (you can see the submissions here).
I’ve been part of a lot of cool things at UMW over the last eight years, and working with Sue to take the first steps of integrating GIFs into her Chinese Film course curriculum was one of the coolest yet. She even invited Andy Rush and I to her class to do a session on creating GIFs using GIMP–one of the highlights of my career as an instructional technologist. Sue will be teaching this class again in Spring 2014, and I look forward to not only watching the films again, but helping to frame a GIFiculum that marries analysis and animation within a digital frame of film scholarship.
This video gave me an idea for a larger series. Here’s the elevator pitch:
A ds106tv show in which we reach out to for-credit students who took ds106 at UMW (or any other college for credit) and find out what they are doing now and how this class changed their life.
I think it would be fun, and even if it never takes off, we at least have a pilot episode. And, in fact, how smart would it be for any university to have an ongoing series in which you reach out to alum and have them talk about their experience after college on video?
Anyway, recent UMW alum and ds106 creative giant Sarah Kountz sat down with me last week to talk about her year abroad teaching English in South Korea. She is far and away one of the most creative and engaged students I’ve had at UMW, and I am not surprised she is have a blast in the classroom. She returns to Korea in mid-August for another year of teaching abroad, and it was a pleasure to catch up with her to get a sense of where she is and where she is going.
What I learned from this episode is there is no reason to push ds106 so hard, it’s the invisible tie that binds regardless. Throughout the episode I was unclear as to whether this was episode 106 of DTLT Today (which would be numerologically significant) or a separate ds106tv show. And while the blurring of the two is understandable, this was not a show about ds106 or DTLKT per se, but one made possible by ds106—and that’s even better. So, it’s a series made for ds106.tv titled “Where are they now?” —and that’s what we need, some daytime programming!
Having the above video playing as background music while browsing the following GIFs is highly recommended by the editorial board here at bavatuesdays. We appreciate your ongoing patronage.
It all started with John Johnston’s simple assignment “Jim dances around the world” featuring a GIF of me dancing during my OpenEd 2011 Keynote. The rest is ds106 history.
Below are all the versions I could find to date, including the original three from John Johnston in this post and which immediately follow.
One of the earliest renditions of this assignment, Melanie Barker finds me dancing at the UVA Board of Visitors meeting alongside Helen Dragas.
Sean Piachetti had me dancing to the Midnight Sun in the ds106zone (the only for-credit student crazy enouygh to do this one).
I am in Brian Bennett’s yard dancing on his tulips
The creator of this madness, and the man to blame for this post, John Johnston takes another crack at his assignment with Jim groom in the Jefferson Airplane.
Andrew Forgrave markvilles me as a Maniac Maniac!
The CogDog has Jim Groom as unstoppable
Rowan Peter Peter Rowan has me dancing in the streets of Seoul, South Korea
Cristina Hendrick’s “Jim Groom dancing in my fridge”
For a second time on this assignment, Melanie Barker’s watching out for me with “Watch out for the horse Jim”
Sue Fernsebner’s Dancing with Tricky Dick and the Chinese commies
Keeping with the horror/scifi cinematic, Paul Bond has me dancing in the hull of an abandoned spacecraft on the Planet of the Vampires.
Rocky Lou’s had a twofer with Out of this World with joy and Jim dancing the Hula Hot Seat
Bill Smith’s Pipe Dreams of Jim Groom
Todd Conaway’s Jim dancing the #ds106
Michael Branson Smith even throws in some Slide Guy Love.
Or Andrew Forgrave’s Talky Tina’s ds106 poster of Jim Groom dancing around the world, literally.
Update: Sorry I missed Kevin Hodgson’s GIF, thanks for the heads up—I got confused by the popcorn.
I’ve written extensively about the importance of syndication to framing a community for a long time on this blog. In fact, recently I’ve even shied away from writing about it because I feel I’ve beaten that horse to death. Nonetheless, I can’t quit you RSS. So, let’s do that dance one more time.
Last year, just about this time, I wrote about how UMW’s main webpage is poised to become a syndication hub that allows sites all over umw.edu to syndicate content from a wide array of relevant sites. At the same time Curtiss Grymala and Cathy Derecki rolled out the ability for faculty profile pages to aggregate their work from a wide range of social media sites. A year later both these features are that much more important as we start get faculty and students alike to manage and control their web presence on their own domain with Domain of One’s Own.
After writing my last post yesterday about how a somewhat simple, easy solution that allows faculty to syndicate students’ work into a course site is essential to making the syndication hub work, I started to reflect again on the umw.edu setup as syndication laboratory. Almost three years ago the Eagle Eye site was created so that faculty and staff could submit relevant news, announcements, and professional notes to the community at large. What’s more, every Thursday an email-friendly version went out to the entire community. I wrote about this setup over a year ago, commenting on how it was an example of how a model like this can help the UMW community get a “birds-eye view” of what’s happening on campus.
And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that!
Why aren’t we marrying EagleEye and the syndication hub for umw.edu? Fact is, EagleEye has already been ported off UMW Blogs and is now officially part of umw.edu. Given that, how hard would it be to have anyone submitting news, announcements, or professional notes to EagleEye simply publish it directly on their respective department site with a specific tag? If that were the case, which seems logical enough, we tell people to tag any post that they want featured in Eagle Eye with the tag eagleeye. After that, any post within the UMW Webpage tagged eagleeye will syndicate directly into EagleEye as a draft that can then be vetted, edited and published for the Thursday email.
Think about it, a lot of people/departments are regularly posting to Eagle Eye already. With over 3500 posts in the last three years, that’s an average of 3 posts a day, everyday for three years. That’s a lot of solid, relevant content that is specifically focused on our community. Now, what if we allowed everyone in the community to post that relevant content on their departmental site with the knowledge that it will be reproduced seamlessly to EagleEye if they use a certain tag? It’s the Udellian dream of making things easier through syndication come true, what’s more it makes the UMW webpage that much richer because as of now departments and/or individuals are not reproducing the posts they make on EagleEye on their departmental webpages (DTLT is the only one doing this, and as of now we have to do that manually by reproducing the post because the feeds on EagleEye are balking, such as http://eagleeye.umw.edu/tag/dtlt/feed).
I don’t know if this makes any sense at all, but I guess I need to keep on knocking my head against the syndication wall because I don’t have much else. But even more than that, if we like the open, distributed web, this is the best way at it without trying to package the whole thing into an app.
Image credit: Rosefirerising
Note: I spent a bit of time this morning editing and cleaning up this post because upon re-reading it—which as usual was well after I published it—I thought there were a few things I could clean-up and clarify. That said, I haven’t changed any of the ideas or the overall argument which is basically: Y U NO MAKE SYNDICATING RSS EASY.
I don’t necessarily disagree with Alan Levine that ds106 shouldn’t “come in a box,” especially given the bulk of what makes that course/community great is the people—and there is no packaging that. However, in order for others to use the syndication framework that ds106 runs on—and that’s more important for folks not particularly interested in ds106 in and of itself—we still have to try and make automating blog syndication more accessible.
FeedWordPress has been the key ingredient for that in WordPress, and it has been pretty well automated using the premium plugin Gravity Forms and some other hacking by Martha Burtis. That said, without that plugin and hack any faculty member trying to create a syndicated blog for his or her course will end up spending the first few weeks manually adding and tagging feeds in FeedWordPress. That’s just not practical. Making this easier is crucial, even if it is not perfect. In fact, it’s probably more important than a new version of the assignment bank, which I think is a cornerstone of ds106. Providing a simple way for people to sign-up their blog feed (and Twitter, Flickr, etc.) and have it automatically syndicate is the basic model of eduglu we’ve been approximating for years. While it was never gonna be perfect (what is?), I sure as shit didn’t think we would still be floundering around manually adding feeds the way we are.
Without being able to automate adding feeds to a site like ds106, it takes a tremendous amount of labor on the part of a professor to make a syndicated course work—with or without a community. I don’t think this is “in-a-box” as much as it is a necessary streamlining of the syndication framework which is long overdue. Fact is, sometimes a basic structure for shelter, like a box, has its uses in a case where a faculty member wants to experiment with a syndicated course structure but doesn’t want to have to be farming feeds for the first three weeks of class to do it. There is a balance here when it comes to the idea of making a framework like ds106 more usable for a wide-range of people. To suggest it’s all about the community might miss some of the basic elements a faculty member needs just to get started with such an experiment.
Thanks to Michael Branson Smith, my partner Tim Owens and I are really sharpening our brand appeal over at Reclaim Hosting. I think this venture is gonna work! That said, we still need your money (it’s just a short-term loan!) to fund this project! Come on, don’t some rich folks out there wanna help us get this thing off the ground so we can get One Domain per Child (ODPC) off the ground?
Paul Bond and I are rolling again with the Mario Bava film festival. This week we discussed Bava’s only foray into science fiction: Planet of the Vampires (1965). If nothing else, watch this film for the first 18 minutes of leather-clad, gravitationally challenged, analog scifi magic. I have a soft spot in my heart for this film because it’s my first exposure to Bava. I picked this film up in the mid-90s on a lark at a variety store in Borough Park, Brooklyn. After watching the first 18 minutes when the groovily-outfitted crew gets pulled onto the mysterious planet I was sold. I loved the offbeat pacing and analog scifi aesthetic. I mean check out this control panel, it could be something from a 1960s VW bug:
This discussion went smoothly, and we’re starting to dig deeper into to some of the larger themes that recur in Bava’s films thanks to Paul. What’s more, it’s hard to resist the similarities between POTV and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as well as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and we covered this at some length. This was a fun discussion, and I think we got the hang of using Google Hangouts to share our screen, play scenes, and generally share the media we are talking about. And while the quality of the final video is pretty rough, I find it hard to argue with how easy it is do something like this with no overhead.
This has to be my favorite commercial of the 1990s.
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