I’m getting these messages from YouTube more and more these days—I got four in the last last two days. YouTube seems to be embracing it’s role as copyright constable, and their technology seems to be getting better and better—or else they are just catching up on backlogs. Either way, I wonder at what point, if at all, this will start hurting YouTube as a resource. I am getting a bit more annoyed and the feeling that I am being spanked regularly by YouTube and one of the major networks. I want a project reclaim for our culture—why is it illegal to cut, share, and remix this stuff if we aren’t doing it for profit?
Dear jimgroom,
Your video, Creepshow: Ed Harris dancing disco, may have content that is owned or licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment.
No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.
Image credit: "Live Casting NYC" by Michael Branson Smith
That’s right, we came, we saw, and we kicked the big apple’s ass! An EST extravaganza that was epic in every regard, what’s better is that most of the chronicling has already happened. What I am gonna do here is point to the various dead sea scrolls and then fill in a few gaps, think of it as me carving a few commandments into the stone tablet that is the bava so they can all live on in the annals of awesome. Can you dig it?
And while I lovingly pick on Luke, to be entirely honest it was unbelievably gratifying to see him lay out his response to the presentation, particularly because Luke pulls no punches—and if that post reflects how he sees ds106radio at the moment it buoys me to no end. It is hard to get a perspective on something that has become so integral and intimate a part of my life, so Luke’s ability to extract the implications of the ds106radio experiment outside of that is awesome, necessary, and greatly appreciated—I still love you Waltzer! For the review of the session as well as a video recording of the session (thank you Tom Harbison!) in two parts go to Luke’s post, if you are looking for the ds106radio audio archive, you will find it below.
After that, we all headed out to dinner at Molly’s Pub for burgers, fish & chips, beers, and some great conversation. I spent most of the time catching up with Tom Harbison (where is your blog?) who works alongside Mikhail and Luke at Baruch’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute (BLSCI). He has been the lead on the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool or VOCAT (amongst many other things) —a tool BLSCI is in the process of re-visiting with a bava favorite Cast Iron Coding. VOCAT introduces some powerful ways for students and faculty to share, comment on, and assess web video—and the fact that video assignments and work are only going to get more and more common at the university puts BLSCI in the catbird’s seat here. What’s more, Tom and I got to talking about the work Andy Rush and Tim Owens are doing at UMW with the Kit, DTLT Today, and WOWZA—and Tom is quite interested in what’s possible. Oh crystal ball, I can see a space for a future seminar hosted by BLSCI 🙂
After Molly’s Grant GNA, Michael, and I headed to Brooklyn (my home for more than seven years 🙁 ) and parted ways with GNA at the Jay Street hub en route to Windsor Terrace. And before we called it a night of bad vodka we called the ds106radio 888 number from a subway station to check in with the steraming web. What’s crazier, it just so happens that it worked a treat. Try it, the number is 1-888-720-4178 and it only works in North America at the moment. What’s more, moments after we called ds106radio Scottlo and Cogdog got on the PBX and started chatting with Michael, Grant and I in the 15th Street/Prospect Park subway station. So sick!
Image credit: Grant Potter's Brooklyn subway #ds106radio payphone broadcast
Cut to the next morning when Grant scared me out of bed (I heard rumors of a ds106radio snore cast) by threatening to leave for the Contactcon Conference without me. I jumped up without a shower (actually not as much as much as a wash) and tracked up to thank MBS and his family for their awesome hospitality (save for the vodka) and headed back out into the city in search of more rush. We started with Terrace Bagels (one of Brooklyn’s finer bagel joints) then pushed out to a decommissioned Synagogue in the Lower East Side (you can see the details here) that was probably the coolest conference space I have yet to experience. Grant took some awesome images using Photosynth, check them out here and here.
The conference was interesting, and had a ton going for it. I may write more about it anon, but for now a few quick things. Having people do no more than 5 minute overviews about what they think, are doing, believe, etc. and linking that to the conference is a nice touch. Not all 5 minutes shots were great, and a few even stumbled with the format, but when it worked it was awesome. For example, Steven Johnson, author of Where Good ideas Come From, did a quick profile of Ada Lovelace that beautifully suggested how good ideas are often not born from Athena’s head, but made apparent through the cross fertilization of ideas, concepts, and metaphors from different disciplines—a kind of mashup of fields that leads to a new way of imagining both. What’s more, he pointed out how innovation often comes from rethinking old tools rather than trying to dream up new ones. This was particularly awesome because I think this is exactly what Grant Potter is doing technically with ds106radio. It was a great short talk that really nailed what we might want to think about as we go about imagining new ways of reframing social relations through technology—which was the ultimate purpose of Contactcon. And what I took from Johnson is that we have been doing this all along for the past decade or so when it comes to the socail web. What’s more important is what metaphors we can use to help us marry old technologies to new possibilities that will help us conceptually come to terms with awesome implications of such a cultural shift—we need the poetry of the various spheres to collide so that we can see.
After the talks the conference broke out into a kind of unconfernece comedy of errors wherein Douglas Rushkoff was trying to hone everyone’s session into something that would result in a product at the end of the day. The idea was to make something as a group, or at least have something concrete in mind you want to make before the end of the day. Quite frankly, a majority of the ideas were far too generic to be of any value to this end and the insistence on making them fit seemed unnecessarily painstaking and painful to watch. Despite that, however, the sessions where people sat down and discussed their ideas with one another, generic or not, seemed like a great success. Everyone was engaged, talking to one another, and the room was afire with energy. I sat in on the nodal computing section run by Isaac Wilder, the dude who built and deployed the FreedomTower (through the Free Network Foundation) that is providing free and open wireless to NYC’s #occupywallstreet movement, and who was, come to find out, arrested during the Brooklyn Bridge protest. He was a super smart, as was “The Doctor,” and I learned a ton about mesh networks and how they work. I’m still not ready to take the final exam, but I am really intrigued by the possibilities. His work on the Freedom Tower gained him one of the three $10,000 grants from the conference, the other two were received by the Freedom Box and a library in upstate New York who will build a MakerBot lab. The freedom Box is very much inline with the PirateBox in a number of ways and I will get to that shortly, but what I love about the terminology around the FreedomTower and the FreedomBox is how the re-apporpriate the Bush-era America idea of freedom as a sick virus Americans were suffering under into an open, populist movement of retaking control of our communications, and by extension our communities. There was also a ton of things about new currencies, micro-payments, etc., but none of that stuff really resonates with me at the moment. I know they make sense and there is important work there, but I can’t help but think our vision of currency and payments has not yet escaped the limits of capital.
At about 2:30 Grant and I bolted from the Contactcon conference to meet up with David Darts to talk about his awesome PirateBox project. David was amazingly cool, articulate, and in many ways a true visionary about what this technology might mean to the human condition. We spent almost an hour talking to him (and the session was all the great Grant Potter’s dong) and he really blew me away with his notions of the PirateBox as a pedagogical experiment, artistic provocation, and viral phenomenon that took off around the world. I had been exposed the PirateBox before the meeting thanks to Grant Potter, Zack Dowell, and Alan levine, and in many ways the idea of it, the conceptual framwork of creating your own local network for sharing provided me the conceptual headspace to understand the FreedomBox as well as the FreedomTower. The ideas of mesh networking are really the next wave of re-thinking our relationship to freedom on the web, and I love the whole thing. If you have 50 minutes to spare I highly recommend you dig in for this amazing discussion with David Dart, who needs to be the keynote at Faculty Academy this year. His stuff on digital identity is amazing, take note Martha.
After that Grant and I got some beers at McSoreley’s Ale House, talked life, love, and loss, and then went back to the decommissioned synagogue for the closing DJ party—which was awesome, not to mention the free Brooklyn Brewery beers!
After that, we made a quick stop at the after party for a quick beer and then we headed to the concluding part of this amazing 36 hour trip: the NYC #ds106radio Jam Session. It was nothing short of amazing and thanks to Giulia Forsythe, in all her awesomenes, we have all the audio archived and you can find it here. Mikhail Gershovich orchestrated the whole jam session and deserves major love for that—what’s more he is a solid hand at the animted GIF 😉
What’s more, Michael Branson Smith captured some awesome images of the event and shared them on his Flickr:
And as always Dr. Garcia played the master of Ceremonies and rocker extraordinaire for the event. Keeping us broadcasting, reporting in, and making the whole thing expand infinitely through the radio. Dr. Garcia is truly a sister from another mother–she rocks and her brilliance on the radio is only matched by her generosity off of it!
We also had the great Boone “Control Your Jealousy” Gorges on Keyboard, Bass, vicals, and guitar—he was rad! And @polarismusic shredding the guitar along with Marcello on the drums. Louis Katz stepped in on the drums after Marcello, and brought the punk on—Daniel Phelps busted out the iPad and started infusing the trippy sound effects. It was an awesome evening, and we even picked up another Vancouver-ite from the after party, and he spent part of the jam session rocking out with us—why am I forgetting his name?
I had fun with the Ramone’s “The KKK Took My baby Away” and Grant’s last tune (not sure of the name). So if you want a sample I will offer these up as a testament to the rocking. Enjoy because we sure did!
Finally, at midnight we all headed out, said our goodbyes to Mikhail and Grant, and went to the LIRR station to drink the rest of our beers, eat the horribly great Caruso’s pizza, and relive so many lonely nights I have spent in penn Station;s LIRR. After that we said our goodbyes and some of the best moments of my life receded as I jumped on my train back to Fredericksburg—from where I write these words.
The great Scott Lockman has brought his Cyberspace and Society course being taught at the Temple University, Japan into the ds106 house—and these cats are leaving no prisoners!!! I mean eating up the course like it was candy….well, it kinda is candy and that is what I like about it. What’s more, it’s my theory that candy and gravitas are not nearly as distinct as we might think, take MOME’s brilliant response to Tim Owen’s “We are All Artists” as an example of this:
So let’s get back to the subject of ds106, because what’s really interesting about this is that it’s about trying to put all these ideas into one neat little package. It’s taking the idea of media appropriation, of user-created content and trying to shoehorn that into a classroom setting. So how’s it going? Someone mentioned the following reaction to ds106: Surprise?anger?acceptance?”art”, and if you take a look at that what it tells you is that people are uncomfortable, but that discomfort is what could possibly lead you on to the next breakthrough. Why? Because you can; you can choose to slam the Star Wars Kid’s gyrating motions, or turn it into the next trend (it’s called the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons), or you might be the one putting something out there for the world to evaluate, like we all do on ds106. Or facebook. Or Twitter. Or…
Make some art, damnit! And MOME distills the ideas surrounding ds106 and why it might work so brilliantly. Thank you!
What’s more, I am loving the work by the folks in Tokyo. You can see all their posts here—it’s brilliant stuff and below are a few highlights for me.
If not, BEWARE!!
Coz I NEVER am a female despite of my body born in a female form!
(I actually am a neutral-gender dude, though…)
…WELL, I’m not gonna tell you descriptions of what the words mean, coz
THEY JUST MEAN IT.
NEVER believe the person’s physical gender in respect of perceptions for gender-image.
Just see how the person behaves like, and what the person dresses like.
The physical gender worth for NOTHING but medical scenes and making love with somebody.
You are so lazy cat
When I’m working really hard at school
You are sleeping at home
And thoe are just a few examples of some assignments that came across the ds106 site recently, there are manay, many more. Lock in and give these awesome internauts some feedback.
Every Fall we celebarate my son and daughter’s birthdays together—and I have a feeling this is gonna be the last year for that tradition. Miles is pushing 7 and Tess just turned 5 and I think the shared birthday may get tougher, but there is a part of me that hopes it doesn’t. We have traditionally done the parties at a local farm with a good cake, some pumpkin picking and a hayride.
Image credit: The Flying Circus Airshow by Andy Rush
This year, however, we changed the plan and decided to have the party in Bealeton, Virginia at some of the most beautiful Americana I have experienced to date, none other than a 1930s era barnstorming outfit known as the The Flying Circus Airshow. They have some awesome WWI and WWII biplanes that do some amazing things. Like this…
Credit: Andy Rush
And this…
Image credit: Andy Rush
And this…
Image Credit: Anand Rao
Image credit: Andy Rush
And the whole scene is remarkably intimate and crowd friendly. They know they are performing and the emcee, along with his sidekick the Black Baron, throw candy to kids, setup up elaborate gags, fill you in on the history of commercial airshows, and set the stage for some serious old school fun. One of the things I really hate about the boxstore approach to entertainment is that it has lost any soul and sense of particularity (not unlike CogDog’s lament about highways recently). What’s more, it has lost all sense of experimentation and adventure—our built environment has become increasingly prefabricated which might help explain my escape to the wilds of the internet. But I digress. What you need are some photos of the fun before I hit you with the money shots of why the Flying Circus Airshow is insanely radical when it comes to entertainment and soul.
The Black Baron ruled with his fake German accent. Image credit: Andy Rush
The awesome emcee. Image credit: Andy Rush
Some classic shenanigans with "members of the crowd" flying airplanes away. Image credit: Andy Rush
Tess and Miles even got presents from the crew given it was their birthday and all.
Tess collecting the booty. Image credit: Anand Rao
Miles hits present pay dirt. Image credit Anand Rao
But what might be the most insane part of the Flying Circus Airshow is the wing walker, Joe Bender, who you better not confuse with a wing rider. A wind rider stays stable on the wing which means they don’t walk around like a wing walker. That’s right, wing walkers actually amble around on the wing of a plane flying over 100 mph. This is nuts. Hundreds of feet above the ground at an airshow with a couple hundred people max, Joe Bender is spending his time walking on wings. He may be my new hero. He works on electrical lines during the week (his day job) and he spends his weekends leisurely walking around biplane wings. That’s what is so awesome about the Flying Circus Airshow—Joe Bender isn’t doing this to get rich, nor are all the airplane owners and operators. This is a group of intensely passionate folks who are handing down a tradition, are keeping alive and idea of the past. This is not about erasing our connection to another moment, it is rather a reinforcement to the moment of the 1920s and 1930s that since the Bioshock Infinite trailer and Boardwalk Empire is starting to seem like a point of connection for us in this moment culturally—and given the financial and spiritual hole gaping at the center of our cultural fabric I am not surprised.
Image credit: Anand Rao
Joe Bender riding the wing. Image credit: Andy Rush
Image credit: Andy Rush
Image credit: Andy Rush
Image credit: Andy Rush
Joe Bender autographing posters. Image credit: Anand Rao
The great Joe Bender! Image credit: Andy Rush
All this to say, this was an amazing birthday thanks to a throwback airshow in the middle of rural Virginia—and of course all the friends and families who were cool enough to come out!
Sebastian, jack and Miles hang out. Image credit: Anand Rao
Anand and Thalia enjoying the gorgeous Fall day. Image credit: Andy Rush
Anto and Tommaso enjoying the light. Image credit: Andy Rush
Happy birthday beautiful. Image credit: Anand Rao
Still searching for Dr. Oblivion. Image credit: Anand Rao
Uncle Andy. Image credit: Anand Rao
And of course some delicious homemade cake to seal the deal.
Anto and Carla made some awesome cakes. Image credit: Anand Rao
Very special thanks to Andy Rush and Anand Rao for documenting this day so exquisitely, nothing better than being friends with a good photographer.
Let me just go on record saying how much I love the Triple Troll Quotes assignment now. I must admit when i saw this added to the assignment bank by Joe Proffitt during the Summer of Oblivion I didn’t think too much of it, but after seeing the creative stuff people have done with it I am now sold. What’s more, I am getting better in GIMP everyday!
The entire ds106radio aesthetic has com into its own. It has always only been waiting for #occupywallstreet. Cyrus sings the rap, does the math, and gets us ready for the future. How awesome is Giulia Forsythe latest mashup? I would argue very, very awesome, but see for yourself.
What do i take from this? Revolution is directly linked to culture, and we have been training ourselves for years, whether we realize it or not, how to start taking back the production and sharing around that culture in new ways over the last decade or so. This has not been idle work, making art, mashing up video, producing songs, and generally hanging out and sharing with others might be understood as the virtual labor of change we have all been investing in. And let’s hope the payoff is a system that reinvests in its citizens. because if it doesn’t, we can control the vertical and the horizontal!
On Wednesday Grant Potter, GNA Garcia, Michael Branson Smith, Mikhail Gershovich, and myself will be hosting a seminar about DIY Web Radio, in particular ds106radio. It is pretty safe to say that ds106radio has been a blast for most of those those playing along for the past 10 months, and the community has remianed tight and manageable.
What this seminar might examine (there is no agenda I know of yet 😉 ) is how such a model might be imagined more broadly for teaching and learning in and out of formal educational settings.
Special thanks to Baruch’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Insitute for making this possible. It is the second in a three part series this semester ( I had the honor of being part of the first as well) that showcases innovative teaching, and it’s a thrill to present alongside people who have become core to my personal and professional life, or in layman’s terms friends! What’s more, I didn’t know half of them before ds106radio!
I have to believe this session will somehow find itself streaming on the radio, so if you can’t be in NYC on Wednesday, October 19th then by all means turn on and tun in to ds106radio!
Being in NYC this past Wednesday and Thursday couldn;t have been better. The city was crackling with a powerful sense of disaffection in the face of egregious corporate welfare, the humanitarian limits of capitalism, and the crisis of a democratic consciousness made this trip feel as vital as they come. I was dying to join the scene down at #occupywallstreet, and luckily on the Wednesday before the presentation Mikhail Gershovich and I got the opportunity to check out that rather concentrated and contained beacon of possibility that is fueling imaginations all over the globe (a stone’s throw from 9/11 and in a private park no less). And it must be acknowledged it’s just one in a line of many movements of its kind over the past 3 or 4 years (it starts for me with the #iranelection and then again with the #arabspring, the protests in Barcelona, the rioting in London and Vancouver—and much more I’m sure). All distinct, granted, but all based in what seems to me an international frustration with the sterile global vision of wealth, security, and power that the majority of us feel not only outside of, but victim to. We did a number of radio interviews, videos, and pictures—nothing all the momentous but just more media for the internet fire 🙂 I’ll try and wrangle up any #ds106radio archives out there of interviews we did at #occupywallstreet and post them shortly.
Given my setup of the cultural/political backdrop for the trip in the previous paragraph, what could be better than being in NYC with the commie contingent from the UK. Not only did I finally meet and have the privilege to present with Joss Winn and Mike Neary, but as an accident of history I also got to meet Richard Hall, Graham Atwell, and Doug Belshaw who were all in town for the #mobilityshifts conference. It was an awesome 36 hour tour-de-force for meeting a number of folks who I follow closely online and feel a very deep affinity with (and I haven’t even mentioned Michael Branson Smith—but more on him anon). The presentation on Thursday was part of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute’s Seminar on Innovative Technology series and Joss and Mike discussed there project Student as Producer which re-imagines students role in the design, development, and critique of the curriculum. The process of teaching learning is decoupled from traditional power relationships so students become an integral part of the governance of an institution rather than solely its customer. What’s more, the crisis in higher education in the UK—a crisis we in the US slept-walked through in the US years ago when tuition outran any logical pace of inflation—buttresses the importance of re-thinking a sustainable model that re-imagines the social relationships around the production and distribution of knowledge. What’s so amazing about Joss and Mike (and Richard Hall as well) is that they provide a framework of rethinking curricular and human relationships within and throughout a university—but by no means limited or entirely dependent upon it.
I presented after Joss and Mike, and these days I can’t help but talk about #ds106 in presentations. No one really asks me too, but I do believe it could complement the notions of avante-garde pedagogies in relationship to feeding an approach to Student as Producer in the classroom. I had a heroine joke that died a terrible death, but other than that I think some of ds106 is starting to make more sense to thanks to Student as Producer as a theoretical framework. But, in the end, I have to say I really want other people to present on their experiences with ds106 because mine are almost predictable, I want everyone to frame it and I would love to see many, many more people present on it and talk about what, if anything, it might mean. Anyway, here is my attempt with some major theoretical lifting of Mike Neary and Joss Winn.
Update: I forgot the slides which have the visuals and more importantly the links, which I think I should disaggregate out into this post—I’ll try and work on that.
Special thanks to Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer, Tom Harbo, and Suzanne Epstein for an awesome event, and to Matt Gold, Boone Gorges, Jody Rosen, Maura Smale, and more for coming out—I love CUNY, and it was a blast. And I haven’t forgotten Michael Branson Smith, but that is for another post coming shortly. (I couldn’t find a link for everyone, so send me an update or leave a comment if I missed it.)
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Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
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My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
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Jim Groom is a fiery man.
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“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
