ds106 Alum Experiences the Reddit Effect

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Reverend

I recently blogged about Andrew Allingham’s video essay for ds106 last Spring,he was a phenomenal ds106er and we have been in contact this last year because he is writing the screenplay for a DTLT sitcom we are planning on doing. More on that in the future, but Andrew’s penultimate post for ds106 before he stopped blogging (WEAK!) went viral on Reddit two days ago.

It’s a brilliant post, and it basically explains the difference between a buttload, boatload and shitload in technical terms in the post, and then creates a very useful infographic.
What’s more, Andrew shared the particular stats of this hit with me before they shut the server down and they are by far the biggest numbers we’ve had yet in terms of ds106 or UMW Blogs going viral, here they are according to Google Analytics:

58,153 Visits
57,781 Unique Visitors
60,389 Pageviews

After which Site5 shut down access to the site and soon after left the Reddit front page as a result. After seeing those numbers I understand why Site5 shut it down. Holy hat! —those are insane numbers and the fact that #ds106 work is going viral is not surprising to me. Andrew’s a genius, and it took the internet almost a year to figure that out, but they finally have because his stuff is still up and he let it go. So I just want to throw a huge congrats to Andrew Allingham, and use this post to ask him formally—why the hell did you stop blogging?!

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Masters of Our Domain Names: UMW to Pilot Domain of One’s Own

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Reverend

What’s gotten lost in all the attention around the ds106 Kickstarter is the fact that on Friday DTLT sat down with UMW’s Chief Information Office, the inimitable Justin Webb, to work out the details for an initial pilot launch of a Domain of One’s Own at UMW for 200 to 400 students starting this Summer and continuing throughout the 2012/2013 academic year.

What does this mean? It means we’ll be providing personal domain names and web hosting for anywhere from 200-4000 students that will be used in a series of courses over the the coming year. This is born out of the idea that we want to help students consider taking responsibility for their online identity, as well as explorE the implications of what it might mean for them to take control of their work and manage their own portfolios (howe ver we understand that term). The idea that we can do this in partnership with the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) just reinforces how important giving students control over their online identity is at UMW. What’s more, none of this could have even been considered on such a scale without Justin Webb’s support and understanding of just how important this is to the evolution of UMW’s vision of teaching, learning and instructional technologies.

What’s more, if this pilot is successful we’ll be considering giving every incoming Freshman in the 2013/2014 academic year their own domain and webhost to experiment with. So this emerging pilot is the test run for a much bigger and more radical approach to make students nodes within a larger network of the intellectual community that in many ways would transform UMW Blogs into a framework not unlike ds106’s site for a variety of classes, communities, etc.

Now this is exciting!

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The ds106 Kickstarter: We’re funded! Now what?

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Reverend

I haven’t even had time to process how unbelievably amazing the ds106 community is based on how fast the Kickstarter was funded (less than 24 hours!), when all of a sudden Michael Feldstein is making a call for bigger donations from LMS companies (and with a little prodding by @timmmmyboy Instructure stepped up and made an unbelievably generous promise of a pledge for $5,000). My mind is still reeling, and make no mistake about it, this project was funded by and for the community, and if more money is coming in I want all of us to think about how we might use it in a way that benefits everyone. So this post will do two simple things: 1) provide a few ideas of how we might use some of the extra money, and 2) ask for more ideas of how to use the money.

First, some ideas on how to use the money:

1) Custom development for FeedWordPress which currently handles all the syndication of over 500+ blogs. I think if we integrated this plugin more cleanly with BuddyPress and make the syndication of participants blog posts it would make the whole sign-up process for an open online class that much more streamlined. What’s more, I would love if it could automatically filter for posts tagged/labelled ds106 as well as auto-discover the author’s account/profile.  (maybe $1000 or $1500?)

2) Fund the ds106radio server for another year. Grant Potter has been sustaining that for too long, and we had some donations for a pledge drive for the Radio that squared us until this October, but why not seal that up for another year?  ($1000?)

3) Fund the ds106 server for 2 years rather than just 1. ($2800)

Image credit: larique's "Gardeners"

4) One of my dreams as the course gets bigger is to provide some specific focus and attention to the open, online students. So, perhaps some kind of ds106 coordinator? I’m not sure how that would look, or the details, but I would love to have a community gardener kinda like UBC has with their Wiki. (I imagine this cost here would depend, but anywhere from 2,000 – 20,000 I would think, and it doesn’t have to be one person.)

5) An instructor for the open/online students—why not? Maybe we could actually pay someone like Gardner Campbell or Bryan Alexander to teach an open, online section of ds106?

Image credit: Alan Levine's "Friendly Guy with an Axe"

Have them re-imagine their own iteration of the course from the ground up. How sick would that be? Also, who else would you want to see teach it? ($4,000 – $6,000? —I would love to see people earn more than our horrible adjunct wages 😉 )

As an aside, what I like about this is it takes into account that to teach something like ds106 demands a ton of time and energy, and that is what the institutions associated with ds106 are paying for now, and it’s critical. This option allows us to introduce someone from outside of those institutions to teach it—which is kinda of interesting.

6) A Makerbot Replicator: I would love to start integrating 3D printing design into ds106 in future semesters, this might be our chance! ($1749)

Second, your ideas on what to do with the extra funding
Anyway, those are just some ideas I was thinking about, none of this is in stone and I’m really not sure if much more money will come in, but with Instructure’s pledge we are up to almost $12,000 already and it only makes sense to let people know what we would be thinking about doing with any extra we get. But what is even more interesting to me is what you think we should do with anything above and beyond the initial pledge target, please let me know in the comments below.

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The ds106 Kickstarter: Classes for and by the Community

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Reverend

At 4 PM yesterday Tim Owens and I launched this Kickstarter to raise money for a more robust server to run the extremely resource intensive ds106 site. The server itself is $2,830 for the year, and the remaining $1400 or so is to purchase the swag that we will be providing for those pledging. As of my writing this post, 8 hours later, the project is 58% funded with $2,471 given by 48 different backers. Crazy! As usual the ds106 community represents, I know #4life gets old for some, but its true in my heart. You rock!

What’s more, the whole experiment of putting together a Kickstarter campaign has been a blast. All credit goes to Tim Owens who had the idea last week and subtly pushed me to try it when I told him I needed to find a way to pay for the ds106 server migration (I am perpetually broke). He blogged his thinking about the whole thing here, and while at first I balked at the idea of a Kickstarter because my first reaction was that money can only invite the Snake into the Garden. But after more conversations around DTLT it became clear that if ds106 is a community course then why shouldn’t it be funded by the community? Currently ds106 has seven colleges using it as a framework to varying degrees, so it’s much more than a couple of UMW classes—and this doesn’t even take into account the open, online students. So why should UMW have to pay for it? Why have CUNY or SUNY or any of the institutions pay? Why not share the costs of the class as a community? This way we can maintain the freedom we currently enjoy without worrying about losing our infrastructure, at least for a year or so.

After we worked through actually doing it, first thing was to make a video to communicate what we needed and what folks would get in return.  And given this is video week in ds106 at UMW, what could be more appropriate? Tim and I worked on the script, the prizes, and the general tone of the whole campaign over the weekend and then shot the video and edited it on Monday and Tuesday. It all came together so very quick because Tim had the whole thing in his head fully formed, and I just went along for the ride. In Tuesday night’s ds106 class I got feedback from students on what worked and what didn’t work in the video we created—and as a result the whole class was dedicated to talking about Kickstarter as an alternative means of funding, as well as thinking about how video can be used to communicate your story and to get your point across. Making the video was fun as hell, and it also marked my first foray into the new Final Cut Pro, which I personally love. I’d love to know your take.

 

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You know what, DTLT is pretty sick right now

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Reverend

Image credit: Kate Geraets "We Rock" (click image for link)

The semester has been flying by, here we are in week 10, two-thirds through and I have to say we here at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies are moving at a pretty amazing clip. It’s as if everything has clicked, and we all “can still jack in and know what do to.” It’s like a team that just starts to hit their stride, and when they do it all just feels so natural. A beautiful sense of peaking where everything around you slows down  and you can just see what’s coming next, and nail it. Working at UMW’s DTLT right now is a rare professional privilege, and I find myself racing to work everyday to ride that high. But all of this might just sound like sugar coated cheerleading, so let me layout what exactly has got me so excited about working at DTLT right now.

UMW’s Online Learning Initiative
Steve Greenlaw is leading up an initiative at UMW that I think is one-of-kind when it comes to online learning. UMW’s Online Learning Initiative, amongst other things, is trying to organize and formalize some of the amazing digitally-based work happening at UMW into the foundation for an approach to teaching fully online courses across the disciplines by focusing on bringing the principles of a liberal arts education to web-based learning, i.e., interaction, community, self-directed-learning, intimacy, etc. We believe that University of Mary Washington is in a unique position to design and teach courses which instill the values of a liberal arts & sciences experience into a fully online environment that are at least comparable quality to our traditional face-to-face courses—and that’s what we’re doing.

Along with Steve,  Martha Burtis, myself, and just recently Alan Levine (but more on him in a bit) are working with a cohort of nine faculty to get at least eight fully online courses up and running this Summer and Fall. It’s extremely exciting, and the approach is in many ways groundbreaking—for the most part these are not just online courses, they are courses that are on and of the web and that for me is where the excitement comes in.

Additionally, the actual process for proposing courses, reviewing those proposals, and sharing ideas and commentary has been happening on a series of sites Martha Burtis designed that are nothing short of amazing. Last Summer, the faculty involved were asked to consider in-depth the value system of a liberal arts community. We then started exploring how these values might be integrated into the online courses they were developing to avoid the all too common problem of trying to graft the face-to-face on the online space.  Their final course proposals  were based around a series of core liberal arts values (you can see the Liberal Arts values I keep referring to here) we were all in agreement on and then each proposal was reviewed by two internal reviewers, one UMW student, and two external reviewers .

The review process was streamlined by Martha’s submission site for proposals here, as well as the ultimate reviewing  and commenting site that was done in digress.it for commentary and feedback for each of the course proposals. You can see two examples of these course reviews here and here. Finally, she has come up with a site that allows the faculty from UMW, and beyond, to share quick teaching ideas with one another based on the core values of UMW’s Online Learning Initiative, it has the potential to be an absolutely amazing resource for sharing ideas around teaching in general, but teaching online specifically. (You can see the repository of teaching ideas here.) The long and the short of the OLI is this: a lot of universities and colleges have gone at online learning as cost saving, convenient, efficiencies for the university (all of which we know we can provide well) —what we are interested in experimenting with in the OLI are the interfacing of the technology and people at UMW to actually make online courses social, interactive, and intimate spaces for teaching, learning, and sharing that augment the face-to-face experience at UMW—and further coalesce the community.

Domain of One’s Own Rebooted

If the OLI wasn’t enough, we also have a project that is near and dear to my heart building some serious steam on campus. Tim Owens came on board in July, and he has been batting about .450 every since. He’s a machine. He single-handedly re-invigorated the group around the Domain of One’s Own project and has owned it since, and if all goes well we’ll be committing to a pilot for this Summer and Fall that will provide anywhere from 200-400 students with a web host and domain of their own for the entirety of the next academic year and beyond (with sites on the whole Freshman class for 2013). Let me say that again, if all goes well we will be committing to a pilot for this Summer and Fall that will provide anywhere from 200-400 students with a web host and domain of their own for the entirety of the next academic year and beyond. How sick is that? What’s more, it will have specific curricular and departmental hooks around campus and across disciplines. It’s not a done deal yet, but just the idea that we are even this close to such a concept becoming a reality on campus is an absolute coup in my mind.

Alan Levine
Oh yeah, and by the way, Alan Levine is now an instructional technologist at UMW. Let me say that again, Alan Levine is now an instructional technologist at UMW! Are you kidding me? How sick is that?! We are rich as kings, and can you imagine being a student at UMW and having Alan Levine coming in to talk to you about using WordPress for a portfolio? —or working with a professor to imagine the possibilities for Digital Storytelling or a PirateBox? —or you name it….it’s an absolute dream come true for me to be able to work so closely with Alan, and I know for a fact I am not alone in this sentiment.

A New Media Shop

Andy Rush has taken a lot of shit from us for years for being the New Media guy here at UMW—what is “New Media” again we constantly ask? But as usual his deceptive searching for his flow and rhythm is purely cover for setting the standard and direction for the group. Not only did he turn us on to the video kit and the initial possibilities for live streaming that Tim Owens ran with for DTLT Today (you remember that quiant little site?), but he’s now collaborating with Alan Levine on top notch video projects like this, developing comprehensive and brilliant resources for our students to navigate the complex work of digital media like working with digital audio and video. He’s got all of us excited about the new Final Cut Pro, and he’s producing regular resources like this awesome guide to ripping, shrinking, and copying DVDs. En fuego.

Canvas
Image of Canvas in ActionOh yeah, did I fail to mention we moved to Instructure’s Canvas as our institutional LMS this year as well? If I failed to mention it, it’s because Lisa Ames has been so amazing at running this transition and seeing to it that our faculty are happy with this new system that we basically introduced overnight as our previous Online Learning Coordinator and LMS administrator took off two weeks befor the migration. A Herculean task that provides yet another source of stability and service on UMW’s campus that allows so much of the innovation to thrive.

UMW’s Website on WordPress
One more thing, before I forget, UMW’s website is now running entirely on WordPress. It is a multi-network setup, and the whole thing is beautiful. It was all possible by the brilliant work of Cathy Derecki and Curtiss Grymala, and this process deserves a whole series of posts and discussions, but one quick thing to take away from: as a result of Cathy and Curtiss’s work we are contributing directly to the WordPress community as state workers. This idea of building the commons as part of our jobs is coming to fruition more and more everyday at UMW, and it is an amazing thing.

And I just know there’s more, but this post is too long already 😉

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If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Reverend

If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

For my video essay assignment I finally completed my long overdue video discussion of the motif of eyes in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). I love how visually lush Blade Runner is when it comes to themes, motifs, and larger ethical questions about the human condition. Where Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was a sterile vision of the future punctuated by a monolithic jump in universal consciousness—Blade Runner is a gritty, retro-fitted struggle over creation. The realities of exploited bodies, exploited labor, and the exploited environment takes on new dimensions when the underlying sanctity of humanity is problematized—and contains the time-honored themes that made the HBO series The Wire so compelling: how our culture has dehumanized the people within it. The film marks the moment of the commerce of the human soul on an industrial scale, one wherein humanity itself is purely a product. And for that reason alone there are few more horrific visions of the future than Blade Runner, but all the while it is laced with poetry and a sense of hope, however meager. Signs of the highest achievement in my mind.

Anyway, I really wanted to keep this video essay short and somewhat conversational. I noticed I pause a lot when talking, and I had to do a bit of editing to work that dead air out. This commentary was a first pass, and it’s really focused on the motif of the eyes. I wasn’t really able to expand out about the replicants as labor, exploitation of the environment, a corporatized future, etc. Nonetheless, I do enjoy how focused this essay can be, and hopefully it brings out how rich film can be when an extended visual metaphor is handled with such subtle brilliance and care throughout the film. The themes in  many ways take over the film through the camera, rather than the narrative or plot. Once you start thinking about the motif of eyes in Blade Runner it is kind of hard to stop, and for me that says something powerful, or does it show something powerful? 🙂

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The Formative Five: Movie Scenes that Changed My Life

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Reverend

Annie Belle submitted an assignment suggesting you talk about 3-5 movie scenes that changed your life. That is right up my alley and I couldn’t resist. In fact, about four years ago I started a formative 10 film series on the bava that I never finished, so I think of this as a kind of continuation of that blog strand, but this time on film rather than all that messy text and broken links. And while I focused on five films that were formative, I have another 15 or 20 for starters I could talk at length about, and I just might given how much fun this was. In this, the first edition of the formative 5, I talked about Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Clash of the Titans (1981), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Alien (1979). And while it’s utterly self indulgent, I won’t apologize because it’s the most fun I’ve had in a long while and I always think of projects like this as love letters to my children.

Posted in digital storytelling, Formative 5, Movie Lists, movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

This Week in ds106: Brief and Imperfect Video Tips

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Reverend

This Week in ds106: A Brief and imperfect overview of some video tools from umwnewmedia on Vimeo.

This is a short video outlining some uses for MPEG Streamclip, a short discussion of DVD ripping tools, a look at basic editing in iMovie with some discussion of moviemaker as well. For more useful resources see Any Rush’s video site here: http://vieo.umwblogs.org

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From the ds106 Video Archive: Andrew Allingham’s The Saragossa Manuscript video essay

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Reverend

In honor of video week I am going to pull a ds106 classic video essay from the archive done by the great Andrew Allingham. This may be one of the most compelling video essays I have yet to see, right up their with Rob Ager’s work, but with a much better sense of humor. It is remarkable to me how much great ds106 work is out on the internet, we are making the web a smarter and funner place people.

The Saragossa Manuscript on IMBD
Made using windows movie maker (because I’m stubborn) in about 11 hours with a break for lunch. I wish I would do this in smaller chunks so I could actually blog about the process, but by the time I finish it I have the overwhelming sense of needing to go outside and/or finally eat dinner.

I tried to rip the dvd with vlc player, but I couldn’t find an individual subtitles file. I think it was broken up into a bunch of different files, and so was the video for that matter. I ended up using opensource camstudio (a screen video capture program), which sacrificed a bit of video quality, but this way I could actually cut only scenes I wanted with the subtitles on top.

Windows movie maker crashes a lot if you don’t get it used to publishing video (which is a weird concept), but after you get through the first 1 or two hangups/freezes, it will publish/save video with ease. Save the project file often!

Magic, pure and utter magic.

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I Fracking Love UMW Blogs

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Reverend

It’s been a wild couple of years with ds106, and I love that little bastard. But sometimes too much fond affection on the baby blinds you to the maturing of your other kids, namely umwblogs. That environment is now 5 years old and has never been tighter, I’ve been blown away by how robust and steadfast it remains. What’s more, the traffic and usage are at all time highs. This week I’ve been enjoying a little UMW Blogs renaissance by picking a class or two and reading and commenting on some of the students’ work. Melanie Szulczewski’s Global Environmental Problems happened on my radar, and I started reading about everything from endangered national parks to water pollution to sustainability, but this post on Fracking by Kelsey Moxey was interesting to me (for more background on Hydraulic Fracturing go here). Kelsey really seemed to be genuinely working through the issues surrounding this practice, and while I’ve heard a bit about Fracking here and there—I even heard some people discuss the possible link between the recent earthquake in Virginia to widespread Fracking on the East Coast—I can’t pretend to understand the subject beyond a surface level (no pun intended 🙂 ). Given that, it was cool to jump into the comments of this student’s blog, let her know I’m reading, share a beautifully designed site illustrating the dangers of fracking with her, and watch a larger conversation unfold in her comments as a result. In turn, I got turned onto the documentary about fracking titled Gasland that I now have to check out. Everybody wins! So much good stuff is shared!

I realized that is what I have missed over the last two years of being sucked into the vortex of ds106, playing the community gardner of commentary, discussion, and interaction around UMW Blogs. It is remarkable to me how something so little as a comment goes such a long way in terms of discussion and reaffirmation of what we are doing at UMW. It has always bummed me out when people don’t take the little time it requires to comment on all the great stuff happening on UMW Blogs—I miss Shannon Hauser in this regard, she was the other great UMW Blogs commentator.

You want to build an intellectual community where students care and are interested in sharing online? You want to foster a culture of questioning, wonder, and comraderie? Well then, comment on someone’s work, give them feedback, and let them know you are reading. It’s actually a very simple equation that has led to the success of both UMW Blogs and ds106, it’s not rocket science, it is just the applied work and attention to other people’s ideas as demonstrated by commenting.

Posted in dtlt, umw, UMW Blogs | Tagged , , | 2 Comments