Gambling is illegal at Bushwood sir, and I never slice…

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Reverend

Ted Knight ruled.

P.S. There is something wrong with the installation of GIMP on this new Mac I am using for animated GIFs that’s making them crappy quality an much heavier, but I am working on it.

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Potty Humor

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Reverend

Another take on this ds106 assignment.

Dépaysement: The sensation of being in another country.

Image credit: Think2Create’s “Squat Toilet”

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UMW Cited as Model for Future of Networked Learning

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Reverend

Seems like UMW, and UMW Blogs in particular, is being heralded in Richard Demillo’s new book Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities as a space of “great educational ferment,” to quote from George Leef’s review of the book here. In fact, Leef’s review not only examines more popular open education mainstays like MIT’s Open Courseware, but when discussing the role of networked culture in re-imagining the future of higher education he focuses on Mary Washington:

Open courseware is not the only way online learning is going to change higher education. DeMillo observes that whereas the traditional college class involves the broadcasting of information from the professor to (doubtfully alert) students, blogs involve rich connection networks where students and instructors interact and share their questions and information.

In that regard, DeMillo points to a little-known school where there is great educational ferment: “At the University of Mary Washington, learning takes place in the digital spaces engineered by Jim Groom and his band of Edupunks. At UMW, learning takes place in blogs.”

I love that Leef focuses on the importance of a networked culture for the future of learning because more than open resources and lectures on the internet, it is the ability to interact and share our ideas and resources that really allows us to bridge the gap between institutions of higher learning and the web.

James Bacon, proprietor of the Bacon’s Rebellion blog that focuses on all things Virginia, not only gave UMW kudos for it’s work with UMW Blogs in his post on the DeMillo book, but also points out what remains for me the most important lesson of UMW Blogs: the open publishing platform is not remarkable because it’s single-handedly transforming higher education (such an assertion would be absurd), but rather it’s how this platform embodies “the process of experimentation” that is still in its infancy when it comes to the future of higher education. To Mary Washington’s great credit, it has been on the bleeding edge of innovation in this regard for more than seven years. What’s more, I’m glad people are recognizing it as a vital investment in not only the institution’s future, but in a larger discourse around the future of educational institutions.

OK, but enough about the reviews because now I have to go and read DeMillo’s book 🙂

Posted in umw, UMW Blogs | 5 Comments

UMW Blogs: A 2011 Snapshot

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Reverend

Here are the number for UMW Blogs for all of 2011.

  • 1,530,580 Visits
  • 1,049,706 Unique Visitors
  • 3,417,021 Pageviews
  • 2.23 Pages/Visit
  • 00:01:48 Avg. Time on Site

The stats never cease to mesmerize me, even though they are plateauing. But if you stop for a second and think about it, we have more than 1 million people looking at, using, or interacting with academic we’re doing at UMW. That is nothing short of amazing by higher ed standards for a school of our size, at the same time the scale is almost laughable for a moderately popular YouTube video.  That, for me, is both the amazing and depressing context for these numbers.

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Lampadato

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Reverend

Lampadato is an Italian term meaning a sunlight tan, but the way Alan Levine’s translation machine get’s at it is much better:

I love this assignment, and it made me go back to an Italian film I watched recently, Gomorrah (2008) , that provides a look at Italy’s mafia which is about anything but respect, honor, and family values. One thing that always struck me on my numerous trips to Italy with Antonella over the last ten years was just how reviled the Mafia was by the average Italian.  There was nothing to be romanticized about it, which is so different from the approach taken by US pop culture over the last century. Gomorrah does a pretty good job capturing that sentiment on film and laying bare the social sickness that is the mafia in Italy. What’s more, it captures a Mike Leigh-inspired abject neo-realism of Naples that is such a far cry from the ostensibly golden innocence of Italian cinema in the 1950s.

The opening scene highlights a massacre in a tanning salon, and the infrared blue of the opening shot immediately came to mind when I read the above untranslatable word, so I was inspired to reproduce it here. I may do another one of these soon, they are fun and very simple. I pulled the image into Picnik, added the text, and voila!

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Tag Feeds for a variety of Blogging Platforms

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Reverend

I have been syndicating in new blogs for ds106 over the last two weeks, and it’s cool to see such a wide variety of platforms syndicating cleanly into the ds106 site. As of now I count seven six different platforms: WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Tumblr, Posterous, Drupal, and a brand new platform to me PivotX. Each Almost all of them provide a feature for filtering a feed by tag, category, or label (blogger’s terminology for category/tag). I’ll outline all the platforms below as kind of central resource to come back to as I continue to add filtered feeds to ds106, because I find myself looking for this information over and over again. Hope it might prove useful to someone else as well.

FYI, all tags feeds in example below are for tag/category/label ds106.

WordPress: http://example.com/tag/ds106/feed —same structure for tag feeds applies to wordpress.com blogs. Also, with permalinks on, if you are using the defaults it’s http://www.example.com/?tag=ds106&feed=rss2

Blogger: http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/ds106 (note, I think labels for Blogger are case sensitive, so if you use label DS106, this feed won’t work—how annoying)

Posterous: http:/example.posterous.com/rss.xml?tag=ds106

Tumblr: http://example.tumblr.com/tagged/ds106/rss

PivotX: http://example.com/index.php?feed=rss2&c=ds106 (keep in mind PivotX has category feeds only, not tag feeds as of now)

Drupal: http://example.com/tag/ds106/rss.xml (Can anyone help me with a formulation here? I think the feeds is rss.xml, but it can vary based on how you setup your taxonomy—am I right here?)

TypePad: They don’t have this functionality out-of-the-box, which is crazy. There was a Yahoo! Pipe for filtering a tag/category from TypePad, but that has some serious issues and we had to stop syndicating the two blogs we had using TypePad. #fail

I haven’t come across any other platforms in ds106 yet, but if you know of others I would love to add them here so I can be prepared in advance.

Also, anyone have a good solution for getting category or tag feeds off of a feed redirected to FeedBurner? I know there are a lot of plugins for WordPress and FeedBurner, but I don’t know any way to subscribe to only categories or feeds through FeedBurner, which is a huge problem with this service if that is really the case.
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Another cool feature of FeedWordPress is not only that is parses all these different platforms thanks to the RSS standard!—but it also allows you to assign the same author to number of feeds. For example, Stephen Downes has two different blogs feeding into ds106. One is his designated blog for ds106 and other creative projects, http://letsmakesomeartdammit.blogspot.com, and that entire blog will feed in. The other is his regular Half an Hour blog, the later will only have certain posts tagged/labeled ds106, and they will be the only one’s syndicating. What’s nice is that both can be attributed to the author Downes on ds106.us so he doesn’t need separate accounts for having multiple blogs feeding in—FeedWordPress has been awesome in so many regards when it comes to a syndication hub.

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1966 Batman Bricked

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Reverend

Via CartoonBrew

This is absolutely beautifully done. Miles, Tess, and I have a shitload buttload boatload of Legos hanging around the house now. I think I have to start getting into brick films with them. Start by recreating simple scenes from films and then getting more and more complicated. And the aesthetic of the above bricked intro to the 1966 camp Batman is simply gorgeous. This should also be a #ds106 video assignment, of course 🙂

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Slave Leia meets the Garbage Pail Kids

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Reverend

Via this post on Super Punch

Slave Leia gets the Garbage Pail Kids treatment from Luis Diaz.

I love the whole idea of mashing up Garbage Pail Kids with some other fan franchise, or even doing your own like the awesome illustrator Luis Diaz. Another assignment idea I need to add to ds106, but I am gonna try this one first, given I’m not an illustrator, to see what I can come up with in terms of appropriating and remixing a few of the originals.

What’s more, this awesome vintage-style Slave Leia action figure has got me thinking about a few ds106 projects for DTLT’s new MakerBot, which is very awesome and we have only just begin to imagine the possibilities.

Note: Given the flurry of posts as of late you might be able to glean at least two things: 1) I am catching up on many an unread feed; 2) I am getting ready for the Sping 2012 ds106 joint—and I am all fired up about what awesome is to come in just under three weeks.

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“The Tuition Isn’t The Only Thing That Will Kill You!”

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Reverend

Why hasn’t someone in ed tech thought of this awesome tagline already? It’s for the forthcoming film Murder University by Scorpio Film Releasing, and Hartter did the art for the teaser poster. Very cool.

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Animated Comic Book Covers

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Reverend

I could have swore I already linked to these awesome animated comic book covers by Kerry Callen on the bava blog, but searching through my archives I can’t find the post I was sure I already wrote. I do this not only to share the wealth, but to remind myself this needs to be made a ds106 assignment. Brilliant stuff.

Found this via a number of sources on Twitter and through the blogs (I think the first mention I saw was from Alan Levine), but the latest reminder was from Cartoon Brew here.

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