Anyone out there got good audio assignment ideas?

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Reverend

Image of ds106 radio bumper sticker

This is a quick attempt to generate some cool audio assignments for #ds106. We’re moving into a 2-3 week section on storytelling with audio, and various groups of participants will be focusing on collaboratively producing a radio show (see the details here). And as a way to help distributively generate ideas, Martha and I thought it might be useful to push for some more audio assignment submission to get the ds106 internauts thinking about all kinds of possibilities. Especially given how brilliantly the submit and assignment feature worked for the visual and design portion fo the course. So, if you have a good idea for an assignment, we would love it, and as an added bonus you are helping to build this class—put that on your resume!

Check out the audio assignments we have already, and if you have a good one to add submit it here.

Image credit: Lexiosso‘s “sky”

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DS106 Audio Assignment

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Reverend


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.

    • Here is an excellent example from last semester’s ds106 renegades: http://ds106.us/wp-content/audio/audio_story.mp3

  • 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.

Now obviously the online open ds106 folks can riff on this however they like, as with everything.

This assignment was co-authored with Martha Burtis, but like with everything, she did most of the work.

Image credit: Andrew Allingham’s awesome ds106 radio poster/design

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This Valentine’s day I <3 ds106

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Reverend

I have a post coming which is gonna feature some of the intense, mad creative energy that has characterized ds106 thus far—note we are just starting week 6, not even half way through. But in the mean time, check out Sarah Kountz’s awesome superhero Valentine’s Day Cards, which I believe are a riffing off the great Timmmmyboy’s ds06 valentine post over the weekend. This incarnation of ds106 may be the greatest thing I will ever be associated with professionally, and what you see below is just one small example of why. If it’s fit to print on the bava, it has to be art!!! LIKE NOTHING ELSE I’VE EVER SEEN—SO BEAUTIFUL, SO PURE—THAT’S DS106 RIGHT NOW!!


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ds106 Week 6: Bitch ‘n Design, Audio, and Conferences

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Reverend

ds106ers,

Welcome to week 6, we have a few things to cover as we make the transition from visual/design to audio and I have outlined them below. Please take care to read this email/post through in its entirety, and do the various assignments as they are laid out below. Also, if you are not on twitter following announcements and the #ds106 hashtag, then you are missing valuable course information that may or may not be reproduced in assignment emails/posts like this one—it is your responsibility to get in the habit of checking Twitter regularly for updates.

Credit seeking students: Not seeing announcements and assignments on Twitter is no excuse for not having done them!

1) Visual/Design Features
As we finish up the formal part of the visual/design portion of this course—though it will most certainly be come up again and again—it might make sense to take a look back on the work both you and your classmates have done in terms of photography and design. So, to that end, I would ask you all to highlight particular photos and design assignments you enjoyed that others have done in the course. What’s more, take another, separate post to highlight your favorite work that you have done so far. Be sure to provide context and reflection for your choices. These blog posts are due by Friday, 2/18.

2) Bitch n Design
Tomorrow night’s class will actually be held, once again, on ds106radio. I will be in Washington DC for a conference, and will be broadcasting live tomorrow, 2/15/11, from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative from 6:00 PM to 7:15 PM EST. This class period will require all of you to not only listen in on ds106 radio (to do so open this link http://208.82.115.69:8010/stream.m3u in iTunes, WinAmp, VLC, etc.) but be prepared to call in via Skype for a talk radio hour in which I’m inviting students from all sections to engage in some freeform radio. The topic will be “Bitch about ds106” and it is where I take live callers—and tweeters—concerns, ideas, and general impressions about ds106 thus far. I’ll ask you to consider what’s working, what’s not, what do you like, what should we kill, keep, etc. It’s no holds barred radio. I have done this every semester so far at about week 6, and doing it via the radio station is not only expedient, but could be very fun. I expect you all to play along. My Skype id is jimgroom, add me as a contact. And if you don’t have Skype, download it and get it up and running ASAP.

If no one has anything to bitch about—which better not be the case—then we will talk about the visual and design assignments we liked to get a jump on assignment 1. Also, should the audio be impossible from the conference–which sometimes happens with cheap ass hotel wireless—we will abandon the class and post our gripes and bitches via audio—see the third assignment 😉

3) Audio: Up and Running with Audacity
As I asked of you last week, you should all have audacity installed and running on your computer. In the event you don’t, please see this tutorial for installing and setting up Audacity to rectify that immediately. What’s more I would like you all to start playing with audacity in preparation for out in-class audio workshop on Thursday (online students will get the same assignment on Thursday as well). You can consult the Audacity wiki for some excellent tutorials to get you started http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Tutorials. What’s more, if I don’t hear from you on the ds106 radio Bitch session tomorrow on ds106radio (see above), I would like you to record your gripes in audacity (no longer than 2 minutes and make it listenable—bad recordings will be subject to public ridicule!!!) and upload it to ds106 radio by no later than Wednesday at midnight. Keep in min d it has to be in mp3 format and you upload it here: http://www.dropitto.me/ds106 (password is “wejamecono” (no quotes)). Also, be sure to using the following naming convention for your audio upload: ds106bitch_yourlastname.mp3

4) Conferences
All for-credit students in my ds106 classes need to sign-up for a face-to-face meeting with me during week 6 or 7. We will be discussing your progress (assignments, comfort level with class, and your idea for an ongoing digital story). Please sign up for this on the ds106 wiki here: http://ds106.us/wiki/index.php?title=Week_7_Meeting_Sign-Up (make sure you are logged into ds106 before you try and edit the wiki page). The available time slots are from Friday 2/18-Wednesday2/23—the wiki is first come first serve, and you need to meet with me no later than Wednesday, 2/23/11.

That is all 😛

Image credit: The great Andrew Allingham created this ds106 radio logo for his desing assignment, and it rocks.

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The Thing and those crazy Sweders

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Reverend

Martin Weller and I will be talking about The Thing tomorrow on bavathursdays, and I figured out the audio, and now I was just looking around for stuff we might use, and general talking points etc. And lo and behold I found this sweded version of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and I have to say I was pretty blown away by how good it is. Sweding as an art form is always fun, but sometime hit and miss in terms of innovation, and how you can make a lofi production of such an effect intensive film as The Thing is impressive—and while not eprfect, I was blown away by what they did. And, in case you haven’t heard of sweding, it’s defined by the urban dictionary as follows:

The summarized recreation of popular pop-culture films using limited budgets and a camcorder. The process is called sweding. Upon completion the film has been Sweded.

And gets its name from Michel Gondry’s film Be Kind Rewind (which I haven;t seen). Back in 2008 I saw a few sweded films and got a kick out of them, but this sweded version of The Thing really highlights for me how much this is a critical interpreation of the film, an emphasis on certain parts, and elaboration of specific scenes. It just seems that much cooler when fans are doing it because they love the film and want to pay homage while at the same time intervene in the narrative.

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Creative teaching

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Reverend

Gardner may be the most creative teacher I have yet to come across, and his work with social media in the classroom still stands as a model I aspire to. So having the opportunity to talk with him about creative teaching, the joy of learning, and the current state of higher ed’s ghettoization of social media was quite fun. Re-listening to this discussion now puts ds106 in a more focused frame for me, it’s a model to start thinking about in terms of really engaging the internet and to stop ghettoizing the web in higher ed—granted it’s only one model for online learning, but damnit it’s a damn good one. Our courses should have their own radio stations, our students should be creating stuff regularly, we should be interrogating the mediascape right ow (it has never been more crucial), we should be mashing up our culture(s), our assignments should be crowd sourced, and the internet should be our teaching platform—not some fake-ass “teaching and learning centric” LMS. We need more, they want more, and it can and is being done—what the hell are you waiting for? Anyway, here is the audio…

Download “E10 Podcast: Gardner Campbell and Jim Groom Discuss Faculty Attitudes and the Joy of Learning”

Special thanks to Gerry Bayne and Teddy Diggs for getting this in the latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review as well as posting the full audio on the EDUCAUSE site here. What’s more, I was excited to see that my main man Brian Lamb and my own article “Never Mind the EDUPUNKS” was the 6th most popular ER article of the year. Another collaboration that in many ways paved the way for what I think is the next stage of my own thinking about onine teaching and learning as an edtech—how do we make open education in praxis fun, accessible, and basically rock!! DS106 is the beginning of this movement, and it isn’t about me, just look around ds106. I mean people all over the world are doing Colleen‘s Playlist Poetry assignment, she is shaping this class not only by her willingness to create an participate, but by our ability to connect that urge with many, many others who share her desire. That is the beginning of a new dynamic that is not simply transactional. The idea of creative teaching hopefully re-imagines that locus—and I need to spend some more time framing this out more because I know it’s right. I feel it deeply in my heart of heart’s, and as Gardner notes in the discussion above, it is time to reinvest our hearts in the process of teaching and learning—I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment and I want to make it so.

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The Birds

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Reverend

Here is an attempt at the minimalistic movie posters assignment for ds106, the best course in the known universe:

Image of minimalistc The Birds poster

I really like how this assignment attempt came out, and the background color is significant, any Hitchcock fans out there have any idea what it is referring to?

Anyway, the coolest think about this poster is that it was inspired by and actually a modified version of a daily shoot I took today chasing lead lines.

Here is the original image:

Thanks to AJ for the inspiration.

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Design as cultural intervention

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Reverend

Tonight in ds106 I discussed the implications of visual design as a form of cultural intervention. You can listen to the audio below. Note that the first 22 minutes is housekeeping for ds106, talking about assignments, projects, expectations, etc. From minute 23 on I discuss the design projects pictured in the slides below as well as examples done by the ds106 faithful already this semester. You can browse the visual and design assignments submitted to ds106.us which are mentioned at the end of this discussion here and here.

Download ds106 lecture–“Design as Cultural Intervention” (2-8-11)

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Four Icon Challenge

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Reverend

I’ll be doing a number of the visual/design submitted assignments for ds106 in preparation for my talk with Martin Weller this coming week for our online film club bavathursdays. I’m working up to a 80s movie theme here, and I will be covering it from one too many angles in the coming posts—I apologize in advance for the onslaught of bad 80s movie visuals.

So, inspired by Tom, Megan, Alan, Lisa, and D’Arcy here is my attempt at the very fun four icon challenge assignment (thank you Timmmmyboy), keep in mind all my images were found through google search. I took the easy road with found art.

Image sources:
Flamethrower
http://www.roleplaygateway.com/inferi-decretum-t37484.html
Husky
http://www.spirit-teez.com/mascots.htm
Petri Dish
http://www.therpf.com/f9/my-thing-palmer-blood-monster-completed-77660/index2.html
Helicopter
http://www.baotranhuynh.com/vector1.html

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The Hero’s Journey Part 5: The Tunnel

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Reverend

Image of a cave

Image credit: Molly Des Jardin‘s “carter caves hole”

Read part 4 here or parts 1,2, or 3 on the respective links.

And she sat there, motionless looking into the well, placidly watching the seven silver soldiers as they regrouped by the well preparing for another onslaught against me. I moved quickly, grabbed her tiny hand and ran through the forest as fast as we could. My sister couldn’t run too fast given her legs were half their usual size, and we both had trouble navigating the low branches. But we could here the seven soldiers following us adroitly.

In an attempt to evade the soldiers, I pulled my sister quickly and silently into an alcove in the woods and waited tensely while holding her mouth tightly shut. A few moments later the soldiers filed past the alcove and disappeared in the woods. I took my hand away from my sister’s mouth only to find you was asleep. I laid her down and explored the alcove which happened to have a tunnel leading beneath the forest. it had been hidden with dead leaves and random branches, but there is no question this was a passage to somewhere else. What’s more, from the various markings and faint light at the end of the passageway suggested it wasn’t abandoned, rather quite the opposite. So after hiding my sister in the darkest corner of the alcove and wrapped her in a now over-sized jacket while camouflaging her with leaves and a few thickly leaved branches

After that, I found a large branch, wrapped it in cloth and set it to fire. After a few moments of staring into the subtle darkness I entered the tunnel cautiously…

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