cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Next week we start a two week segment of ds106 focussed (get it?) on photography. I’m putting out a request to add your suggestions in an open Google doc at http://bit.ly/ds106-better-photos.

Links to articles are great, but I am really looking for personal strategies and ideas that would help my students refine their approach to visualizing, composing, etc- not just the technical stuff, the things that move one from snapshots to art.

For example, Brian Metcalfe shared this audio narrated slideshow by Darren Kuropatawa:

Maybe I can arm twist Alec or Dean into echoing it, they do well with these Google Doc Tom Sawyer Fence Painting gigs.

Hint. Ahem. The link. http://bit.ly/ds106-better-photos

(click click click for view full sized artistic glory of this work of fine art)

Fine art, indeed, this limited edition original painting is available for auction coming soon.

This is my bit for the Fat Cats Make Art Better ds106 assignment contributed by Annie Belle who is just rocking the class so far. The instructions, if you please…

Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

(Tags for this assignment are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments334)

I use “classic art” in its most literal sense, for what gallery is not complete without a large painting of Dogs PLaying Poker?

For this one, I found the base painting on flickr (search “dogs poker” in compfight.com)

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by allspice1

and then it is rather easy to find photos of fat cats in the same place- here is my subject because he/she is posed in a poker position

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by AlyssssylA

In Photoshop, I positioned the cat in a layer above the base scene. I aplied the paint daubs filter to make it look a bit more textured. Then, I use the selection tool to grab the outline of the chair and table as areas, I flip back to the cat and use to delete so it appears behind key objects. Finally I added (rotated too) a few copies of this playing card to fill out the feline’s royal straight flush.

I am next thinking of a whole series of feline Velvet Elvises….

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

My last stop before arriving in Fredericksburg was an overnight visit with Gardner Campbell, in Blacksburg VA, and what evening of great food and conversation does not get greater when he says, “Do you want to hear some vinyl?”

Is the sky up there?

Of course I do, especially given the bag of gold that was our last conversation in October of 2011.

My question is, how about if I broadcast to ds106 radio?

And thus we go- I have about an hour and forty minutes (see below), but missed recording the first section where he played “Rocks Off” and “Loving Cup: from Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones.

This was timely, considering I had a little audio clip to play back. Over last year, I’ve been working my way through the audio book version of Keith Richards’ autobiography “Life”. I had heard a section I really wanted to come back to, but there is no way to bookmark audio on your iThing while driving.

But the same section had come up again when I was listening while driving across Tennessee. The thing is, the audio book is being red bu Johnny Depp, and this section is where Richards shares a quote from Tom Waits on their musical collaboration. Once more, this is Johnny Depp doing an imitation of Keith Richards imitating Tom Waits talking about Keith Richards.

And this was only recorded by my hand held iPhone in a moving car, and I kept turning it over thinking I had it sitting on ther mic on the cup holder.

Tom Waits on Keith Richards

Everyone loves music… what you really want is music to love you. And that’s the way I saw it with Keith. It takes a certain amount of respect for the process. You’re not writing it, it’s writing you. You’re its flute, or its trumpet, or its strings. Thats real obvious around Keith.

He’s like a frying pan, made from one piece of metal. You can heat it up really high, and it won’t crack. Just changes color.

That is so poetic, and visual. I love it.

And the part about writing makes me think about Gardner as well as the closing bit:

I found some things they say about music that seem to apply to Keith. You know that in the old days, they said that the sound of the guitar could cure gout and epilepsy, sciatica, migraines.

I think nowadays, there seems to be a deficit of… wonder. And Keith, still seems to wonder about this stuff. He will stop and hold his guitar up, just stare at it for a while, just be rather mystified by it. Life all the great things in the world– women, religion, and the sky– you wonder about it. And you don’t stop wondering about it.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

To me, that sense of wonder is something that typifies Gardner Campbell, he has a surplus of wonder. And he shares it so well.

So for the rest of the session, I did record it, and we listened to some Stevie Wonder, played some Guess Who for Brian Lamb, then some Rasberries, and closed, of course, with a few songs by the Who.

More Vinyl with Gardner

I go there for the conversation, the musiuc, the learning of the little codes in the dead wax, to tap into the magic of musical recordings, and the nuances I barely even might notice– where it not for this man of wonder.

Thank you, friend.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I’m catching up on my audio reflections, this one is from before I left Arizona. On January 22, the weekend before I left, I drove down to Cottonwood Arizona to visit Todd Conaway. It’s a majestic drive down Highway 260, falling off of the top of the Mogollon Rim down through Campe Verde.

Slices of Life 007

Most of this slice was reflecting on my first class of teaching ds106 for the University of Mary Washington, albeit remotely from Strawberry, via Skyoe with the help of Jim Groom. The first meeting went fairly well, me introducing the class and the students introducing themselves.

I was pretty darn nervous, and felt the combination of that excitement and the drain of energy after being tuned in for that session. It is hardly the best way to teach, and is only a bridge til I get there.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I enjoyed the time chatting with Todd at his home in Cornville, and as a bonus audio (hah, some bonus), I recorded a conversation we had talking about the StoryBox. I appreciate and am doing some later to be schedule reflection on his interest in what comes out of that experience.

Conversation with Todd Conaway

We then drove over to the town of Cottonwood where I got a tour of main street by Todd and some fine local food.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was a bit frantic at this time to get ready for the upcoming drive to Virginia, but it was well worth taking the afternoon to visit Todd and see a bit of Arizona I’d not been to before.

And all of this being part of the larger slice of embracing the unknown and reflecting on what it might offer.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by michale

Red Dog parked in Fredericksburg, Virginia on Monday afternoon, and has not moved since. It feels both odd and rewarding to not be in motion, yet I am still very much in a place of transition.

Here is the place to insert the standard apology for not blogging. There is a queue of backlog posts, at least 3 or 4 Slices of Life audio to hang here.

For the quick recap, I rushed here to be present in person to teach my section of ds106. I have a teaching blog set up using the same instructions we give students at http://106tricks.net – I was using Feed WordPress to pull posts in here, but noticed they were double posted and thrice tweeted. I might just put a sidebar RSS feed widget.

In some ways my start was a side parallel of the Summer of Oblivion, where the teacher appeared after being present only in video, without the drama and hair shaving. Maybe. I’m definitely quickly trying to find my way in the teaching mode, it is both invigorating and draining.

Then on top of all; the hurdles we give students in setting up their blogs, we suffered this week through a hacking incident that affected all student blogs (and my own) on the host we recommend. Most are recovered, and while it sets a dark, confusing cloud on this, in many ways it helps expose some of the dark underbelly of the internet. To me, you cannot have the shiny bright kum-ba-ya sharing of the net, without having the slimy stuff…

Jim posted examples of how we countered it, by giving our students a 15 minute rapid challenge to work in groups and create a web story about the character Enre5807. My students got much more animated than during our class discussion given this challenge, relying on tools they knew like Meme Generator:

So far Virginia is sporting warm sunny weather I am happy to take credit for brining from Arizona. I owe a big thanks to Jim Groom for setting me up here and for offering me the basement complex at La Maison du Bava, not to mention the warm enthusiasm of the Groom Family, all three kids call me “CogDog”.

I’ve still got a lot to do to get acquainted with the new surroundings.

More to be blogged, just glad to be off the road a while. But I am rather portable…

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by James Jordan

Each time you send an email, and perhaps by extension of the convention, you should thank Ray Tomlinson and his inspiration, @rmando’s Pizza Shop in Cambridge, MA.

Tomlinson, a graduate of MIT, started work as a programmer in the mid 1960s at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the firm working with ARPANET to develop the first computer network that evolved into the Internet we know today.

The concept of computer messaging had been around a while, but was limited to people sending messages only to other people using the same computer. The program was called SNDMSG, and Tomlinsons idea was to improve it be able to send messages to other nodes on the network BBN was connecting.

He typically credits the use of the @ sign to be common sense, of Person AT machine, but BBN insiders know that the idea came from Armando’s Pizzas, which were the favorite snack for programmers doing all night era at BBN– Armando typically arranged his toppings in that swirl pattern of the @ sign, said Armando:

it really was my signature!

Tomlinson envisioned a network of computers at the pizza shop, and the ability to order pies via network messaging.

Although people typically cite the first email message to be the keyboard row QWERTYUIOP, Tomlinson frequently reminded us that he does not exactly recall the first message since it was a test. However, renovators working on a remodel of Armando’s pizza shop have unearthed a tattered copy of this first message that read:

Large pepperoni, mushroom, olive, and, pick up at 11pm, Ray

According to the history, email was not even something the ARPANET directors did not ask for. Why did he create it?

Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea. There was no directive to “go forth and create email”. The ARPANET was a solution looking for a problem. A colleague suggested to my boss I not tell him what I had done because email wasn’t in our statement of work.

See more about the history of email…

This is my contribution for the brilliant Patty Pioneers meme/assignment triggered by Scott Lockmans class in Tokyo. The photo of Tomlinson was found on Photobucket, and the shape of the computer he is holding immediately suggested to me– PIZZA! I found a photo of a pizza box from All Things Pizza.

In PhotoShop, I used the polygon selection tool to trace the shape of the laptop, and used Edit-Paste Special to insert the pizza in place of the laptop. I had to use Edit-Transform-Distort to shape the box, after deleting the white background. It did not quite work, so I lined up the hinge of the pizza box to that of the computer. I selected the top half of the box, and did option-shift to copy the box top and fill the top half. A bit if magic brush smoothed out the seam.

Finally, using the text tool (Marker Felt font) I added the @ sign, using the Vivid Light style on the layer, dropping opacity to 67%.

This assigment makes me hungry for more Patties!

Because the new ds106 Daily create is so distributed, and sometime the tags fail to bring content into the main site, I am requiring my students to either blog their efforts as they go (which some are doing), or post a summary at the end of the week.

This will not only make it easier for me to track, it will, more importantly, provide them a way to organize all their DCs in one place. I have already created a screencast on how to do this with WordPress Categories but one can also do it with tags.

This week is not over, but I wanted to create a demo. On this blog, I am tagging all my posts for this as dailycreate which becomes likable via http://cogdogblog.com/tag/dailycreate

The other thing I want them to do is to embed their content in the blog, not link to it or upload it. For both YouTube and Flickr, this is easily done in WordPress by putting the URL for anyof those item pages on its own line– no copy/paste of HTML, no plugins needed (for soundcloud they will have to use embed codes).

So here is what I have DC’d this week…

TDC 015 make a recording of the most lively laugh you can make someone do
Can I tickle someone via Skype? I tried.

TDC 016 Photograph something ugly and make it beautiful
My compost container smiled at me.

TDC 017 show us your keys
I don’t like a lot of keys, but my bike tool is essential

TDC 018 video of an object in motion
Shot hastily while moving myself (do not try this at home). Relative speed?

This photo is somewhere near the Arizona / New Mexico border. It was fitting to see a sign for Grants Road, since I had been listening to @grantpotter playing a set of road tunes for me on ds106radio.

It was epic, and carried me clear from east of Holbrook AZ into Albuquerque NM.

It’s just a small example of how generous a spirit Grant is, he deserves more than a road, even more than a town, heck they name a new Canadian province for him.

Thanks!

There is no moss on this roving stone. In 30 minutes, me and Red Dog are headed back up this hill on AZ 87 towards Winslow, turning right on I40, and beelining for the East Coast.

A new odyssey.

My destination is Fredericksburg VA, where I am teaching a section of ds106 thanks to the awesome support from Jim Groom, who has been pinch hitting for me in class til I show up Monday. I have been beaming in via Skype, but not all in the vein of Dr Oblivion (I have all my hair and sanity).

Why go? I still have the means, if I choose, to be a bum for another year, but I want to try some new things, like teaching a real class. I am keen to hang out with the DTLT crew if they will spare me a table, cause Tim, Martha, Andy, and Jim do Rick the house. I will also be close to my sisters in Baltimore, and a hop from a favorite spot in Canada.

The truck is almost loaded, including kayak and road bike, and with some sadness, I close up my house in Strawberry, which will wait patiently til I come back down the curve.

The plan is maybe Albuquerque tonight, Oklahoma City Friday (and visit Wes Fryer), then Nashville by Saturday night, and on to Blacksburg Sunday to see Gardner Campbell (and hopefully catch David Carter-Tod for breakfast Monday?). I should get to Freddy by Monday afternoon, and show up for class at 6pm.

Like a rolllllllllllllllllling stone, says Muddy.

Justin had a good question about organizing his content, wanting a way to easily show just the things he publishes for his Daily Create. This is a job for Categories (to be fair, it could be done jut the same with tags, there’s not a significant difference between them).

I wanted to experiment with showing this via an audio screen cast, which demonstrates how to create categories, how to update existing posts to be included in new categories, how to use them on a new post, how to find the URL for you category page, and how to add a menu item to point to your category.

FYI I made this on my iPad with Explain Everything, made screenshots, annotated them, recorded audio, and upload directly to YouTube. That was easy!

In yesterday’s class we made great progress with getting their blogs set up. I’m pleased to see the ones that have already been made their own with different themes.. Now it’s time to fill them up!

In the class session we reviewed quickly the layout of cpanel; you may never return there but it is important to know that you are, as in the readings cover this week, your own system administrator.

Thanks to Jim we have a video archive from this

We did a rather quick overview of the WordPress admin tools– note that above I embedded that video simply by putting on a blank line:

http://vimeo.com/35545353

This works for Flickr, YouTube and a few more services. For your video posts like the DailyCreate, it is easier on the user to view the embedded YouTube than an uploaded video file (and it does not add to your file space quota).

You will find thorough documentation at http://wordpress.org as well as information on plugins and themes. You can install any of these via the WordPress admin area.

Speaking of plugin, the comment spam protection service Askimet comes with your install, so you just need to activate its plugin — note you will have to provide a WordPress.com API code, you should be able to get one at http://askimet.com.

Pages are edited like blog posts but exist as static pieces, they are not part of the chronological flow of blog posts. You should edit your own About page to reflect your own presence. You can add pages, other WordPress content, outside links to your blogs menu via the appearance tab.

Other things to fiddle with are in the settings. Permalinks create more readable urls for your posts. If you turn on XML-RPC in the writing options, you can use other tools to post to your blog (I am using the iPad app to write this post; there is also a way you can write a blog post directly from Flickr).

Explore the widgets in your appearance, this provides ways to customize bits for your sidebars and footers. You can even insert your own text and HTML– my Flickr badge uses the text widget and the code created by Flickr (make your own badge at http://flickr.com/badge.gne.

Look to the ds106 web site for information on this weeks reading, guest speaker, and assignment. We will be having a discussion in class Wednesday on the essay and the video, be ready to talk about your own “nugget”, and you might search the site to find things previous students have done- search for “Bags of Gold”. The speaker will be live on video for a class discussion Thursday. This is optional, but you should refer to the archive in your assignment.

Now go blog, go!

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

She went slow and painfully, my MacBookPro. I’m thinking it was Friday in Phoenix, when I inadvertantly forgot to zip the pouch on my backpack, and she fell hard to the concrete.

She worked fine over the weekend. But last night, the beachballs begain floating more and more frequently. I scrambled to do disk repair, permissions fix. It seeme dokay when logged in as another user, so I tried to do a fresh time mahcine backup, but it failed.

Twice. I did manage to copy my documents and a few more directories to a backuyp drive.

The last fail however, was terminal. Now the disk cannot be mounted.

My version of Disk Warrior is out of date, and with only by 2002 old iBook, I cannot burn a new DVD upgrade; I am fairly sure the Warrior can save the day.

So for the next week or more, I am making do with this ancient laptop, my iPad, and iPhone. I am worried about ther loss of my Aperture library (the masters are all stored external), some financial records, some projects in development…. the last time machine backup was (gulp) November 23, 2011.

She’s dead, Jim, she’s dead.

I had thoughts of running down to Phoenix to get a new one but really don’t have time, with all remaining to get done before hitting the road Thursday. So this will be part of the experience, and it’s interesting to try and get things done without the tools I’ve been used to.

My ancient iBook did have the ConnectedFlow Flickr exporter and it still worked!

And at this point there’s not much use in getting all strung out.

But damn…. Why did she have to die?

For students in my section of ds106, here is a little bit to expect for the coming week. The heat just increases every week.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by ?olo

Before class, you should have at least:

• Create Your account on ds106 site http://ds106.us/register (about 1/3 have done so far). Create a gravatar so you get a custom icon. Join the class group.
• Create your social media accounts. Make accounts in twitter, flickr, youtube, soundlcoud. Add these to your ds106 profile. I created a twitter list that includes all tweets from students in my section- you can subscribe to updates too – https://twitter.com/#!/cogdog/umwsp122
• Do at least one Daily Create. get in the practice now. http://tdc.ds106.us. I will do what I can to track; it makes it easier for me to find (and others) if you tweet or write a blog post with your work.
• Get your domain and blog set up. I see 11 have done this so far, well done. be sure to email me your blog url when it is set up- once added to the ds106 site, you can find all blog posts at http://ds106.us/tag/umwsp122/

For Monday we will be doing a lot of hands on work and be helping those who need help with their domains and blog set up. We will go over some of the cpanel tools and ways to work with WordPress. If you have your blog set up, this will be a chance to start or learn how to customize it more, e.g. work with themes, plugins, settings, widgets. I’ll give some tips on shortcuts for using media in your blog.

On Wednesday we will have a discussion on our topic for this week, wich is on framing your personal digital space- to give some reason why we are making you go through these hijinks of making a personal web site. There will be an optional live video stream Thursday with our guest speaker (this will be archived, as are all sessions), and you will have an assignment to write a blog post about your reflections on his ideas.

Are you creating? yes you are or will be.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by peasap

This weekend marks the one year anniversary of the launch of what has been to me, one of the best shared online experiences in my 20+ years here– ds106 radio. This web radio station was started with a tweet by Jim Groom, that has gone millions of miles since then, thanks to the genius of Grant Potter (the story here).

I’ve mulled over what I wanted to give the birthday box, and I kept going back to one song I always reach for, because it is fun, it’s about radio, and it transports me back to the 19080s when I first saw this wild stuff called MTV- Wall of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio:

I wondered if I could play the song and maybe recast the lyrics, I was pleased to find an easy set of guitar tabs, and I set down my own lyrics. Here is my first draft (insert usual self deprecating I suck statements).

Mexican ds106 Radio

To add some background, I nabbed a loop of the opening electronic noise from the original song (1 second sampled), and made a repeating loop in Garage Band of a drum beat.

So here is the deal- I know I missed some people and stories in my lyrics, so I have set them up as an open Google Doc. If you want to add a stanza or two go ahead, and I will perform it live sometime tomorrow (Sunday).

Just for reference, my first round fo lyrics:

I check the status the server’s okay
Again its only… auto dj
Make a playlist, flip on Nicecast
Talking over making breakfast.

Refresh webpage, listeners three
Must be GNA, up in Philly.
Got Papaya, and the PBX,
from a pay phone live cast.

I’m on d s 106, radio
106 woah oh, radio

Just a year ago, Jim Groom tweeted
Radio station is what we needed.
Over a weekend, up in BC
Grant Potter built it easy.

Rowan Peter or Peter Rowan,
Turned the mic on cicada going.
Way out west from a sblue shed
Its a monocast, all that she said

d s 106, radio
106 woaj oh, radio

Earth was shaking, Tokyo
live reports from Scottlo
Timmmmmy Boy, made it crazy.
with the all night karaoke

We got easegill, South Pacific
Kernohan, apocalyptic.
Riga Stories, Micha’s Momma,
Flowing out, with vodka

d s 106, radio
106 woah oh, radio

Noise professor, circuits humming
Leslie’s got her uke a strumming
I’m a talking while I’m driving
Giilia’s up late, and archiving

Scary stories, February
Live jamming, Sanctuary
Steven Hurley, his dream with us
Bryan Jackson, musical genius

d s 106, radio
106 woah oh, radio

Have a great second year, ds106 radio. #4life is #4life.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by 150hp

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Troup1

On the list of question topics that anesthetize me, just below FERPA and Intellectual Property, is the query on an experimental project, “Does it scale?”

Scales are fine for lizards. And weighing stuff.

Expanding things by scaling them is not the only model of growth. For Massive Open Online Courses, this year’s poster child the Stanford AI course, they grow the same way we enlarge an object in graphic editing software. We grab the corner and pull it outward. This method does certainly provide growth, expansion, and is not wrong in any way– but it is doing so by replication, by aiming to give each participant the same experience, the same lockstep pace.

But it was while driving down the mountain roads to Phoenix today, thinking about the forms of nature from rocks by the road to hills, to mountains, I got to thinking about the way ds106 is already growing by its incarnation a year ago. It might not be massive, but there are almost 400 blogs being pulled into the main site. But it is not growing by replicating; in fact, the growth is more organic, both in a fractal sense and a mutation sense.

At the University of Mary Washington, the growth is by running two sections, one Jim Groom is leading and one I am getting my first crack at. One might say that is scaling, from the 25 students Jim taught last year to the 60+ we have now.

But look at the other ways people, external to us, on their own, are mutating ds106:

• Scott Lockman is tapping into the assignments for his Cyberspace and Society class in Japan
• There are maybe two classes tapping in from the CUNY system.
• Ben Rimes reports a similar use of ds106 assignments in 3rd and 4th grade classes that another teacher in Hernico County in Virginia has done (I’m getting lazy looking for these links).
• Bryan Jackson is running a professional development cohort (at where?? Langley?) using ds106 to tie into their teaching strategies. I also saw where John Johnston had taken the ds106 assignment bank model for a professional development program.

There’s probably a few more examples out there, but they are not all the same- different courses, different education levels, and each one not taking the course as a single product, but reframing it for their own needs. These are not just carbon copies of ds106, but mutants, lovel mutants, and in some sense fractal, especially around the core of the assignment bank.

And I would not be surprised if we see some interesting ways for other educators to tap into the Daily Create.

This growth approach is in many ways, a parallel for the underlying, packet passing distributed structure of the internet we are all riding on. “Does it scale?” is irrelevant here, so I’d like to say, it does not have to scale- it is growing organically. Rather than taking the course as handed out by an entity, people are making it their own, meshing it with their own teaching needs, strategies.

And that is a beautiful thing, let’s make some art damnit, fractally

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Barabeke

I’m thinking this is not quite as well formulated as I’d like to express what I thought of while behind the wheel- there is nothing wrong about growth by scaling, but its not the only method.

And the fractal mutations have only just begun!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Yeah, even in the early days it was all about sex online…

No it wasn’t, that was the unfortunate “special theme” for this September 1996 issue of “the net” magazine. I found this mint copy, along with the CD-ROM, in my Box of Old Job Stuff. The reason I have kept this is not because of the Special 16 Page Report, but because my first web project at Maricopa Community College that got attention was featured in this issue (No, my first web project was NOT abut sex, get yer minds outta the gutter).

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

The magazine had a mention of Writing HTML (still alive at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/), a guide I published on the web back in 1994 and kept piling on for the next 6 years or so.

I had an odd thought looking at this magazine that back in this time, the best way to help people understand what was on the web was not done online, but in print magazines (well there was the NCSA Mosaic What’s New Page which stopped being updated in 1996)).

One more time- the effective way to share resources and interesting web sites was via printed screenshots and URLs. There was likely some online version of this, but the web was just on the cusp of being seen as useful, and still a few years away from being something people knew about widely.

So let’s go back and see what was relevant in 1996 (besides online sex).

• A new web search engine was out, “InfoSeek” to try and compete with Lycos, Yahoo, WebCrawler, excite
• NetNoir has a new interactive storytelling adventure called “African Story Lines”- NetNoir is still around as one of the first African-American web sites. Look at the instructions “You can reach NetNoir via America Online via keyword NetNoir or the World Wide Web at http://www.netnoir.com/) — AOL was seen as the more familiar gateway, and this new fangled thing we just now call “the web” was the World Wide Web.
• Listed under “education” is Cells Alive which was done originally to promote the capabilities of a graphic design company, but is s reference that still lives now at http://www.cellsalive.com/
• “The world waited with baited breath for the release of the World Wide Web Browser Netscape Navigator 2.0″ – the bug new feature was the new plugin architecture that allowed technologies like Acrobat, Quicktime, Java to load in a web page rather than external applications. “Navigator is still a buggy an doften unwieldy creature, though. It hordes memory and it crashes with alarming consistency.” Internet Explore did not even exist; the other browsers were NCSA Mosaic, WinWeb, and MacWeb.
• The Spot was highlighted as a web tv show, what we would call a reality show (it is still up at http://www.thespot.com/) “this site follows the affairs, happenings, and ups and downs pf five hot Los Angelinos. They live in a sprawling, seven bedroom beach house with a 42-year history as a carousing and partying site.”
• There is a feature article on “Web Word Processors: Using the HTMl Extensions of Word and WordPerfeect” The author compared the features of Microsoft Word 7.0 for Windows 95 and Novell’s WordPerfect (version 6.1 for Windows and 3.5 for Mac).
• The first video conferencing tool I recall is described here “A Basic Guide to CU-SeeMe”- software that was invented at Cornell University. “While CU-SeeMe is a cool way to communicate (if nothing else) there are still problems with using video and audio over the net… Even with the high bandwidth of a T1 line, I rarely, if ever, received more than 5 frames oer second of video form other CU-SeeMe users… Modem users will have more problems than those on ISDN or T1 lines. Transmissions can almost be useless at 14.4 modem speeds (and audio won’t work at 14.4) with only a bit of improvement at 28.8″ What a long way we have come!
• The music sites reviewed included CDNow! and EMusic- both front ends for ordering audio CDs- digital music online? hah, not in 1996.
• Microsoft was proposing a standard specification for secure financial transactions, Secure Transaction Technology (STT) – I am not sure if it really exists, as everything now is done under SSL (secure sockets layer) that NetScape developed.

There’s a lot more, but this bit of back browsing is interesting to see the state of the net in 1996- hey is this what you were looking for in terms of turning the clock back, Martha? I have an extra copy of the magazine I can bring out to F’burg if it might be of use to you.

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Were my brother still alive, today would have been his 58th Birthday.

I continue to marvel and wonder about an alternate universe where I had his presence as a functioning older brother- what kind of person would I be now?

(see the story of David’s Chair).

This object is a photo of how I prefer to think of the brother I never knew, wide eyed smile. He looks like any other normal happy kid. The photo is embedded in a block of glass that my Dad kept by his bed side for… forever. I brought it home after cleaning out Mom’s house in November, and now it sits on the table next to my bed.

Among the other milestones this year, the first one Mom is not here to mark this date on her giant kitchen calendar.

All three of them gone, Father, Mother, Brother… something as a kid and an adult I rationally knew could happen, but always thought it would happen much later. Now is later, and later is now.

Birthday thoughts, David. Peace and relief from a life not fully lived, but better than never at all.

The ds106 classes at University of Mary Washington are underway this week- I had my first class last night (with assistance from the Reverend), and I have set up a new blog for ds106 teaching posts (and just to go through same steps I am asking students to do) see http://106tricks.net/. I will next start pulling in those posts using FeedWordPress. Maybe.

But I will continue to do my assignments here. My students are charged with doing 3 Daily Create assignments a week, and given this first week’s timing, I am having them do only one before Monday. What is this about? Why do this?

Doesn’t this speak for itself:

1 Take Tongue Twister:
Below is the tongue twister you will recite. Record a video of you reciting it in one take (honor system of course) and upload it to YouTube with the tag tdc011. Remember: BE CREATIVE! Thanks to Noiseprofessor for this assignment.

Luke Luck likes lakes.
Luke’s duck likes lakes.
Luke Luck licks lakes.
Luck’s duck licks lakes.
Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes.
Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.

Of course, I rushed out and did mine, using the record from the web cam option in YouTube

Are we serious? Hell yes.

As a low minimum, this activity, which should be done in 15 minutes or left, from record to publish, gets you some proactive in basic video recording/uploading (as well as adding description info and tags).

But there is more. In doing this, you are going to be performing. You are going to want to find some original way to represent yourself. It has those elements of improv I think are important, learning how to be a personality in front of an audience (in this case, the internet is your audience).

Yet there is more- this is your community already rising to A-Game status:

We are seeing people in their spaces- with pets or kids. We hear the ambient sounds of where you are (laughter in the background). People are already augmenting the format- doing it graphically, or introducing Mt Bag Man as a speaker.

This is the infectious nature of ds106. I would suggest checking out the assignment when tweeted at 10am EST. You might want to rush out and do it, be first. Get it done. If you have that vision. Sometimes it is better to let it percolate, and be in the background as you go about your day. Or you may want to see what others have done as inspiration.

Copying, riffing, remixing- those are all game in the Daily Create- heck you can even do it as an interpretive dance.

And look, those people in my class that recorded a 20 second video and shared it? Consider your Daily Creatr work done for the week (but nothing stops you from doing it daily- I am at it 7 days a week).

Wednesday was my first appearance teaching a section of ds106 for a class at the University of Mary Washington- the one hitch is that I am still in Strawberry, Arizona (here is an extra riddle for my students- what is the most obscure fact you can find and tell me about this town?).

Below are some notes and resource, but key todos for students are:

• Register your domain and set up webhosting via the information in Assignment 1. You must email me your blog url to get credit for this assignment. Be sure to add it to your user profile on the ds106 site. This must be done before class on Wednesday, Jan 25.
• Join the class group on the ds106 site. Spring 2012, Section 2
• Write an introductory blog post sharing your interests in the course or storytelling. Or write about your dog/fish/cat- just get in the practice of writing. This is the start of your participation.
• Do at least one Daily Create before Monday.

This was my view of class…

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Despite his bravado of insulting his students (see the first in a series of documentary videos series that Lee and Alan) are doing, Jim Groom has been bending over in triplicate to enable me to teach a class at UMW. Until I can arrive on campus (hopefully February 1), Jim is facilitating the session and bringing me in via Skype, as well as broadcasting the class out via DTLT Today - we have an archive of yesterday’s session.

As a first technical note for students, in WordPress, embedding media from sites such as YouTube, flickr, vimeo and more is easier than copy/pasting a pile of code- using its features for Embeds all I had to do was to put the URL for the vimeo page that holds the video on a separate line, and WordPress does all the work from there.

So it was a bit challenging as the connectivity was not optimal, but we got through. I appreciate the students being willing to walk up to the camera and say hello and talk about why they took the course. Nearly half had said that one of their friends/room-mates had highly recommended it.

In the beginning of the course, it is Jim’s (and now my) strategy to front load the experience witha  warning of how intense the class can be- we do not want students later to be overwhelmed later. Jim fires more ammunition, but I will not mince either- if you are not ready to put a lot into the class, or be ready to struggle, or am not comfortable doing a lot of answer seeking online, there is a graceful exit through the Drop Class shop.

Another problem reared its head in that the first day of class was also the day of the internet protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. In support of this, many major sites like WikiPedia (and ds106) implemented public displays of support and either with-holding (or requiring a click through) of that sites information. So our materials for class were not quite available.

But this was a great opportunity to raise attention to the important critical role to ds106 that the open internet its creators designed - in every sense, for this class, the internet is your textbook- and it is not just something for you to read and highlight, but students in ds106 are authors. You do have a stake in this, and it is far from over.

But back to class- to get started ASAP on the first assignment, setting up your domain and webhosting it is likely going to be cumbersome and confusing, but will giver you a sense of what you are in for. Just so I have the same experience, I have done this assignment to set up this blog.

• Register your domain. First you need to think about what name you will use to identify yourself, this is not a small decision as it is your online presence. I was driving to an appointment this morning and knew I wanted to include “106″ in mine, and had  flash back to Trix cereal‘s tagline “Trix are for kids” and I felt “106tricks” would eb good. I went to hover.com and saw the options, I could have had .com , .org. us, and many others but felt that .net worked well. I already had an account on hover, bur if you are new you have to make one. This cost me $15 and I managed to do this on my iPhone while shopping at Safeway.

  The domain is simply the reference lookup for your future internet self- on its own, if you went to the site, yuo would end up at Hover.com

• Set up Webhosting account. I set up my site with Cast Iron Coding but like the assignment says, the web hosting can be any that support what WordPress requires (PHP and mySQL databases). You will want one that provides cpanel or some form of one click installs (unles you like ftp-ing code and doing ti yourself). One student asked about http://asmallorange.com/ – I had never seen that one, but it does offer what is needed.
• Point your domain to your webhost. Once your account is set up, you should get a bunch of information, how to log in to the admin site for your account, how to get to the cpanel or place you can install wordpress. The key thing you need is the addresses for the web hosting Domain Servers, in my case it was ns1.castironcoding,com and ns2.castironcoding,com Copy these down or know where you can copy/paste them.

  Go back to where you registered your domain (in my case Hover.com) and you will have to log into an account you set up there- find the entry for your domain, and look for the place to edit/enter your new Nameserver addresses (they will be set by default to the registrar).  Do not include any http://

Once you do this… you have to wait. It may take a few to hours to a day or 2 (it took mine only 3) for the internet to spread your new domain everywhere so people’s computers can get there.

If you need help, we can take time in class to address your issues, but you will be better off if you can take care of this before Monday- and free yourself to get in practice of doing Daily Create activities (today is an easy one- recite a tongue twister on video and upload to YouTube).

If you need help with getting started on WordPress let us know- see the basic set up instructions at UMW Blogs but note that it is not required to set up a subdomain. I installed wordpress in my main web directory, so my blog is my site.

Some other things you can do to get ahead of the game- set up your social media accounts if you do not have them already. For each one, you should make sure to customize your profile, e.g. add an avatar, link to your blog, explore how to personalize the site.

• Create an account on Twitter. Start following classmates, myself, Jim Groom, the Daily Create. When you share something related to class, include the #ds106 hashtag which makes it easy to find and connect (see https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ds106. You might want to expore mobile twitter clients and desktop ones like TweetDeck
• Create an account on flickr. Make sure your defaults are set for creative commons licensing (open sharing). You will want to quickly upload at least 5 photos to establish your account- your photos will not appear on the Daily Create site until you have done this.
• Create an account on SoundCloud.
• Create an account on YouTube.

Are you ready? Strap on your helmets, even if you feel like a nutcase…

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Tom & Katrien

Keep me posted on your progress, and get ready for a new Assignment that will be out before Monday’s class.

cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Yesterday, within a few hours driving, I went from seeing the highest elevation in the lower 48 states, My Whitney (14,505 feet) to standing at the lowest surface elevation, Badwater Basin in Death Valley (-282 feet).

These two points are about 100 miles distant on a map, from glacial above tree line alpine to desert (It was not today, but in 1989 that I stood at the top of Whitney

How do I measure up to such extremes? Life will tell.

This is for today’s ds106 Daily Create – "Merge two photos of contrasting place together"

Originals:
www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6713415929/in/photostream
www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/6713478105

I stretched the Death Valley to try and align the ridge lines, and the foreground scenes.

This trip was necessary for some reasons not needed to blog about, but ended up being just shy of 2000 miles of travel in 6 days- almost the distance to drive across the US.

I did get to hang out one night with my longest running friendship, my high school friend Kevin who was in Palo Alto for a meeting. We try not to sound like nostalgic old guys.

I also got to pay a return to visit to Zaxk (@noiseprofessor) itself a coming blog post on bringing him the StoryBox he built for me and gave me in May, and also time spent learning about circuit bending. As he says… “Rad”.

The trip back was returning too to places I had been before- I stayed overnight in Bishop, California. I traveled out that way many times when i was doing field work for MS theses in Geology on the drab plateau north of town. I had never stayed in town, had always camped in that valley between the 14000ers of the Sierra Nevada on the west and the White Mountains on the east. The last trip Dominoe spent a week with me in the field (well, she slept all day in the truck while I hiked miles picking up rock samples).

I had also driven through Death Valley a few times, one memorable time in June when it was 105°F at 5:30am.

It was one of my early trips crossing Death Valley when I snapped a 35mm photo of my 73 Ford Maverick next to the sign that says “Sea Level” which ultimately turned into one of my amazing stories of sharing when a German rock band asked to use it on the cover of their CD.

Funny that yesterday I thought I would return to the sign and do a new photo with my current vehicle– I got mixed up and thought the sign was down near Badwater, but later recalled it was one of the signs in crossing the Valley farther north.

In the end, you can go back to memorable places, you can understand how much it stays the same; and appreciate how ironic that you can change so much and not at all in the same being.

Adjacently extreme!