I really enjoyed this mashup which has David Attenborough’s narration of two groups of chimps at war from the Planet Earth documentary laid over Dawn of the Dead (1978). A brilliant idea, and I am pretty certain the student, Jenna Kincaid, used footage I previously re-cut from this film and put on YouTube a while ago. That’s kinda wild to me, particularly if she had no idea that she was re-cutting videos I putoutthere three or more years ago, as she was delivering them back to me with a new, killer concept that actually makes it all that much better. That is the internet for you, while it is so unimaginably immense, it always manages to feels like home.*
*Like I said, I am not 100% she used the videos I cut as her masters, but given my scene selection and what else is out there on YouTube in one video, I am pretty confident. For me it is the ultimate compliment and wild internet serendipity.
Ivan Martinez has been steadily blogging about the fascinating world of the YouTube music communities that have emerged over the last years. He is obviously both a devout fan and follower of this community, and what is fascinating is that much of the music that’s coming out of this platform for sharing. He has been focusing on (but not limited to) the explosion of popular music from distributed communities of young Asians from around North America that may not fit the common pop model vision, but have been taking YouTube by storm, check out his posts on D-Pryde, Joseph Vincent, and Scott Yoshimoto for a few examples of this.
He also link to this awesome video Canon Rock, which features a number of rad Japanese guitarists rocking out together alone.
What has been so amazing about the recent developments in Ivan’s blog is not only that he has been sharing and talking about stuff he’s both passionate and knowledgeable about, but he has started sharing some original work on his blog. Take for example this duet (featured below) wherein he sings alongside his unnamed, yet extremely talented, friend who wrote and plays the music for this song.
This is a model of student blogging in this class as a final project. You share what you love, you teach us about what you know, and you take a risk by getting in their yourself and making art. Bravo! Man, there seems to be so much unrecognized talent at UMW—can’t we do something to fix this?
Back when we were starting the audio portion of ds106 Jason Green did a brilliant remix of the actual assignment that Martha Burtis came up with. What he did was take the text of the assignment here and re-interpret it through alliterative verse—-and it is nothing short of poetry. Chaucer eat your heart out! For me it was one of the most unexpected, playful, and brilliant interventions into the fabric of the class. What’s more, we shared it out for the students while we were doing our live radio show teasers—it just seemed to work so perfectly in demonstrating what open, creativty, and play can afford–so thanks for this jason, and sorry my homage to your genius comes so late.
And below is the text of the assignment if you’d like to follow along 🙂
For the next three weeks, you will be working in small groups to produce a 30 minute radio show to be broadcast on ds106 radio. Here are your guidelines:
Work in groups of 3-4 and come up with a group name (these groups have already been set for UMW face-to-face and online courses, but open course can do this however they like—might be fun for you hippies to group up and start working together).
Pick an overarching theme for your show.
Start playing as soon as possible by producing a short sound effect story. Be sure to blog your results with the appropriate assignment tags.
Your final show needs to be at least 30 minutes, and you can have as many segments as you like. Use the audio assignments on ds106.us as inspiration for segments (although you are NOT limited to these).
If you don’t see an assignment you like on ds106, then submit one for a segment you’d like to do — this is a way for us all to help each other come up with segment ideas.
By February 24th, you must have a segment of your show ready to share with the class. This segment should be 5 minutes long. This can be an entire segment or part of a segment. It doesn’t need to be finalized, but it needs to be good enough to share. You must upload your segment to the ds106 dropbox by 5:00 on the 24th. When you upload your file, make sure the mp3 file is titled “ds106showsegment_YOURGROUPNAME_.mp3?.
On February 24th and March 10th, the ds106 sections will be meeting collectively (location to be determined) and will spend the class broadcasting a live radio show. Martha Burtis and I will host it, and each group will share its five minute segment. We will then interview the group (and take questions from the live studio audience) about the work they’ve shared. Not all groups will be able to present on the first night, but everyone must submit their five minute segment by the first night!
Your final show is due on Friday, March 11 at midnight. You must upload your show to the ds106 dropbox. When you upload your file, make sure the mp3 file is titled “ds106showfinal_YOURGROUPNAME_.mp3?.
Over the course of the following weekend (March 12 & 13), all of the shows will be in rotation on ds106 radio.
You will be evaluated on the following:
how creatively you interpret and present your show theme,
how effectively you tell the various stories you present, and
how your show sounds. We don’t expect perfection, but we DO expect you to grapple with the technology to present the best product you can.
In addition, at the end of the process you will be asked to blog about the entire experience. This will be an opportunity for you to share the challenges you faced and how you tried to surmount them.
Charlie Rocket was not in ds106 this semester, but he was one of the course’s pioneers last Spring, and he still has the homepage and blog to prove it 🙂 This semester he took Zach Whalen’s “Writing through Media” course, and they were charged with creating an infographic. (Writing through Media is another awesome digital media focused course here at UMW that frames the experience for creation and reflection as part and parcel of a student’s framing of their online identity through critical praxis). Charles had the following vision for his infographic in this post about the project:
My goal for this project was to create a small overview of what transgender means, as well as to hit the tip of the iceberg with the rights and protections that transgender people have while highlighting how common it is. There is very little research on transgender people, so it was difficult to find reliable sources.
And you know what, he nailed it, and you can see that for yourself here:
Aaron Clemmer (of Galagon Wagon fame) has finished the video game he created as his final project for ds106. The game is fun to play and what’s even better is how he has blogged his process of creation throughout the last half of the semester, you can find all the posts here. On top of everything else Aaron had going in his life—and this can be said for just about all ds106ers—he decided to take on creating a flash/action script based game as a way of rounding off his working. I applaud both the insane challenge he set himself and the fortitude and dedication he illustrated in getting it done. Bravo! (And let’s remember Aaron is the same cat that programmed the twitterbot to automatically update with the latest song playing on ds106radio.) Amazing!
This is just one of the many posts I will be writing featuring some of the awesome work that has happened around ds106 this semester, let the celebration of genius begin! Now stop reading this post and play “The Beneath.”
Jason Toal (a.k.a @draggin) has been on fire with his mixes for ds106 Radio for a long while now. He has consistently been putting out amazing stuff, and his scratch, cut, and recombination powers are to be envied. And his latest masterpiece, “CAnU Dig it?” is particularly amazing in my mind because it plays with and on the introductory audio file you hear every time you login to ds106 radio, something that is such an integral part of my life these days it is almost iconic. It’s a clip from Walter Hill‘s gangland masterpiece The Warriors (1979) featuring the classic line “Can you dig it?!” from the scene wherein Cyrus is preaching to all the gathered NYC gangs about a truce that will make them the single greatest power in the city. A call to collective action that challenges the power structure at its very core and re-imagines a city run by the disenfranchised. I love his vision, and I have written about this film (and that scene) at length on this blog. The idea of miracles, the “man turning us against one another,” “fighting for our little piece of turf,” and an alternative from the actual reality that takes over that very film—and so much of U.S. political history over the past 60 years: visionary shot by lone gunman and the status quo is not only preserved but more rigidly reinforced.
This all got me thinking about a couple of things while I was bopping around to draggin’s awesome mix. First, I was impressed by how it focused not only on the “Can you dig it?!” line, but the vision of possibility that leads up to that affirmation; he uses the actual speech to contextual the “Can you dig it?!” chorus. Second, it helped me realize that ds106 Radio is, at least for me, that alternative narrative of possibility wherein we both share take culture that is meaningful to us freely as well as re-frame it more personally for one another—we control the vertical and horizontal, which is just another way of saying the means of production. The idea of this platform flying in the face of controlled channels of distribution. Lastly, it seemed to be a brilliant anthem for the groove that ds106 more generally has infused into a sense of online community, connection, and possibility.
So, a couple of more things before I finish. I actually was simultaneously doing a Warriors-themed broadcast on ds106 while writing this, and you can find the archive below. It got me thinking about my own fandom assignment for ds106, and how I would like to rewrite The Warriors to be a film that actually focuses more on the revolutionary rhetoric of Cyrus than the chaos that ensues from his assassination. A film wherein the gangs to maintain the truce and begin to reclaim the city—I will be working on that in this blog (probably as part of this series) and I think it will be fun.
Also, how cool would it be if for the session on ds106 radio for Northern Voice we actually performed out this idea of the radio as that alternative, radical vision that Cyrus articulated and, in fact, it didn’t end in blood like every other revolution. I was thinking we all dressed up as representatives of different gangs and do the presentation straight-faced as if we were at an international summit talking about the truce and our intentions of rethinking turf, power, and the means of imagining our online communities. @draggin’s set can frame the backdrop musically—present a kind of anthem— and we could use the radio and TV as a means to have fun with this theme. I am thinking so something with the TV like pull in @Timmmyboy as an evening news reporter speaking about the ds105 truce and some particular details. It could be a lot of fun, and it certainly would push the whole thing towards a cultural performance rather than a presentation.
Last night Timmmmyboy led us (Dr. Garcia, Noise Professor, Jason Toal, Rown Peter, and Mikhail Gershovich) through yet another Mystery Science Theatre 3000-like show on ds106.tv. The technical setup is actually not as complicated as you might think, we find a cheesy z-quality public domain film on YouTube and play it through Synchtube (a remarkably useful tool for watching videos together, and sharing them in one, synchronous space) so that we all can watch mock it together. We can also chat in there, as well as line-up a series of other clips we might want to discuss after the film is done. It is a genius idea and pretty wild experiment. I’m not sure how good our commentary is (it is actually quite hard to do on the fly), though we have a lot of fun doing it—and like ds106radio karaoke, it’s a really fun way connecting through the evening on an otherwise alienating late night in Fredericskburg.
One quick side note on Synctube, Tom Woodward sent out a link after his session on video with ds106 on video, and Timmmyboy picked up on it for the MST3k experiment and it is brilliant, I would recommend to anyone who wants a “room” for shared viewing of YouTube videos. It hosts up to 25 people, and I will be using it for the online Summer session on several occasions.
I just love the social elements of ds106, and the way this course cum community is actually pushing the boundaries of how to connect around these technologies socially for actually hanging out. it is wild, and for me a different level of the social web—it’s not about followers, subscribers, or number of friends,it’s about an intimate community of folks trying to see just how far the human can be injected into the virtual unknown—and there can be no doubt that a lot of what makes it so compelling for me is that is synchronous. I feel like the groundwork is being laid in all this play for re-imagining this idea of the online synchronous course—-but I may be just hyperbolizing again, but something tells me I’m not. And even if I am wrong, it is a tun of fun.
Last night’s session was on The Killer Shrews (1959) but I don’t think it is up on YouTube yet, so here’s a link to the session we did a couple of weeks back on The Giant Gila Monster (that one with Dr. Garcia, Noise Professor, Grant Potter, Jason Toal, Scottlo (?), Timmmmyboy, and who else am I missing?).
Nash Dongwell, Cheeky Hudson, and Corporal Ace Bessman take their awesome radio show from earlier this semester (I link to the ealrier radio show below in this post) to TV for a half-hour special about their humble, shag carpet smuggling beginnings. I’m thrilled both David Gallagher andd Conor Kantwill were the first of the UMW ds106ers to actually venture in ds106tv land and write and produce their own TV show. A platform only for the bravest and nuttiest—fine work!
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“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.
I really enjoyed this mashup which has David Attenborough’s narration of two groups of chimps at war from the Planet Earth documentary laid over Dawn of the Dead (1978). A brilliant idea, and I am pretty certain the student, Jenna Kincaid, used footage I previously re-cut from this film and put on YouTube a while ago. That’s kinda wild to me, particularly if she had no idea that she was re-cutting videos I put out there three or more years ago, as she was delivering them back to me with a new, killer concept that actually makes it all that much better. That is the internet for you, while it is so unimaginably immense, it always manages to feels like home.* 
