DS106 Will Open Your Eyes

Image based on “24hr open eyes” by Mo Riza (CC-BY-2.0)

Week 5 of Headless DS106 was all about telling stories in photos.  Since staring DS106 I have found that my eyes have been opened and I am now more aware of brooms that look like peacocks and the potential for found objects that can be repurposed.

Visual Assignments

This week we were to complete 10 stars worth of visual assignments.  I completed only two but did post about each of them.  My Colour Between the Lines post is about the Newspaper Blackout Poetry assignment and my That’s a Strange Looking Fish is my response to the Fat Cats Make Art Better assignment.

I poked around Flickr a bit and did some customizing.  I created a set which I was able to embed in my Late September PhotoBlitz post.  One thing I would like to be able to do with the iPhone Flickr app is be able to set the license information for each photo as I upload it.  I think it is possible to do this on a global level, but it would be nice to be able to do it on each upload.  Any ideas?

Daily Creates

I did only two daily creates this week, but did learn about an iPhone app called iMotionHD  which I have been testing to create a stop motion video (as called for in TDC626).

For TDC630 I took a couple of photos.  I am finding the iPhone very handy for these quick assignments as I can take the picture, tag and upload very quickly.  For the picture of the paper bags I applied the Newspaper Filter because there wasn’t much colour in the photo to begin with.

 

For the Central POV daily create (TDC627) I spent some time trying to think of something would benefit from a central focus.  I thought something circular might be appropriate, so I tried to find a circular subject with some interesting features.

Late September Photoblitz

Photoblitz, a set on Flickr.

I did my photoblitz on Saturday morning outside my house and opened the garage for some ideas.  Unfortunately being under a tight deadline does not bring out my best attributes and I didn’t end up with a lot of photos.  Of the few I shot, I chose the above five as the ones I most like.

The shot of two things that don’t belong (a toboggan and a pair of flippers) was made from the selection of summer and winter items in the garage.  Unfortunately I placed the items up against a wall and was not able to back up far enough to properly frame them in the picture.  The photo is not very good, but I hope the subject matter makes up for this.

The second photo is of some money plants that I am drying in the garage. They were lit up by sunlight coming in through a window.   I was trying to capture something with mostly light shades, although there is a fair amount of dark in this picture.  The seed pods themselves are quite interesting.

The picture of the dahlia is blurry and out of focus because just after I took that shot I realized that my camera was on a portrait session (for how long I am not sure)  and I was not able to focus on the flower properly despite using a macro setting.  I was trying for the primarily one colour photo.  I like how the colours are flattened and that there is not much detail.

For the converging lines photo, I was planning to take a picture of a path leading out to the road, but it didn’t work out at all.  While trying to take that photo I noticed the lines on the bricks.  The photo is not very interesting but it does embody converging lines quite well.

The photo I like best is the one I took at the very end of the photoblitz when my phone alarm went off as it tells the story of the blitz.  It indicates that time is up and there is a reflection of me taking the picture framed with converging lines.  Needless to say this was all a happy coincidence.

Colour Between the Lines

The Newspaper Blackout Assignment suggests that you should “grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news”.  I decided to shake this up with a bit of colour.  The original article appeared in today’s Toronto Star “Edward Burtynsky’s bigger picture” (link will probably only work for a few days).  The result wasn’t exactly as I had envisioned.  A shorter article would have worked better as you will need to click on the image to actually read the words.

That’s a Strange-Looking Fish

I heard of this visual assignment, Fat Cats Make Art Better today in the Google Hangout.  It sounded fun, so I looked for two CC images in Flickr and pulled them both into Photoshop.  I resized the cat image to get it closer in size to the Ophelia image.  I used the lasso tool to cut out the cat and place it on the Ophelia image and then used to clone tool to blend the cat into the foliage.

Ophelia image by deflam (BY-NC) and cat image by 2pence (BY-NC-SA)

Sampling the Audio Smorgasbord

This week was challenging and eye-opening as I know very little about audio.  I listened to four parts of Ira Glass’ series on storytelling.  His comment about creating crap for a couple of years before making something good was both encouraging and discouraging.  It is demoralizing to think that it will take that long to create something worthwhile; however, when listening to my two small audio creations I am heartened to think that I’ll get better.

Jad Abumrad’s comments about gut churn made me think of this YouTube video of a girl about to take her first turn on a massive ski jump that was mentioned in ETMOOC earlier this year.  You can play it safe and never experience this feeling, but if you want to do something worthwhile gut churn is a necessary part of the process.

The radio story I listened to was “How I got into College”.  I got caught up in listening to Emir’s story, but I did notice how music was used between segments, how the story was told by multiple people, how some tracks were layered and how Ira Glass editorialized.  One thing I wasn’t clear about was exactly how Michael Lewis fitted into the whole story.  He introduced the story but seemed to drop out pretty quickly as Ira Glass took over and provided the framework for the story.

I watched the live Google Hangout about DS106 Radio as I figured that I should try to learn as much as possible about how DS106 Radio works if I am to have any chance of completing the team radio assignment.  Most of it was way over my head though I picked up the names of some tools to check out – Nicecast, Ladiocast, SoundFlower64 and Broadcast Myself.  On an encouraging note, everyone in the Hangout looked like they were having fun.

Assignments and Daily Creates

This week I created a DS106 Radio bumper and a sound effects story that was neither 60 seconds or 5 sounds long.  These have both been written up in separate posts.   I also did two of the daily creates:

Penguin Postcards Grid by *s@lly*, on Flickr

High Line by *s@lly*, on Flickr

What I learned this week

This week I learned of radio personalities I had never heard, types of actors I had never seen, software I hadn’t used, and ways of listening I had never considered.  The challenges are to quickly learn new things and to just do it.  One thing I want to know about is attribution in SoundCloud.  I jammed all sorts of attribution info for the clips I used from Freesound in the description field on SoundCloud.  Is this the best way to provide attribution information?

Three Squealing Pigs and the Big Howling Wolf

For my story I decided to take a well fairy tale and try to tell it with just sound effects. The sound effects were all downloaded from freesound.org, so some of the effects are not exactly as I envisioned.  The sounds of the pigs running away from the collapsed houses is actually the sound of a running bird and the straw house collapsing is paper debris.

I used Audacity to create the story and did so by using a very few of the program’s capabilities (primarily importing, moving, copying and pasting and trimming tracks).   I was able to copy tracks and paste them, but I wanted to find a way to copy several tracks at once.

As I didn’t read the instructions before creating my story it is twice as long as it should be.  Feel free to stop where you want as you probably know the ending.

First Foray into Radio

A radio bumper, a short advertisement for the radio station itself, sounds like an ideal first radio assignment.  I downloaded a Creative Commons instrumental track from ccmixter to use as the background, then I downloaded and installed Audacity.  With the help of some googling I was able to record my voice and pull in the instrumental track. A little more googling was needed to find out how to cut pieces out of tracks and re-align them.  I exported the result as a WAV file, only to then see that an MP3 file was required.  When I tried to export as an mp3 file I got a message about a missing LAME file.  So I found where to download the LAME files and downloaded them from a site in .ar (Argentina??), virus scanning at every step of the way.  This worked and eventually I created the mp3 file and uploaded it to SoundCloud.

 

Storytelling – First Thoughts

What first comes to mind when I think of storytelling is the oral storytelling tradition.  I think of Icelandic sagas, nursery rhymes, fairy tails, myths, and stories that get passed from generation to generation orally.  I tend also to think of stories as having a narrative.

Next I think of books, both textual and picture books.  I think storytelling is very much associated with children, not because it is primarily for children but because it is such a basic part of childhood and integral to human development.

Beyond the oral and text traditions, there are many other ways to tell stories – paintings, images, moving images, sculptures, collections of items.  It is woven through the entire human experience.

Opening segment from Jackanory television programme

A few story-telling experiences stand out in my memory.  I don’t remember being read to as a very young child, but I do remember having some longer books read to me that spanned several nights.  These included the Paddington Bear books, A Secret Garden and Enid Blyton’s The Christmas Book.  I also remember watching the television programme Jackanory that featured famous luminaries reading stories.  When I was slightly older I recall listening to a storyteller, Dan Yashinsky, who came to the public library in our small town, and being amazed by how he was able to hold the attention of the audience.   Another storytelling memory involves being out walking in a small cemetery with a group of people and trying to create a story by each of us contributing a line at a time to the story.

At this early stage of DS106 I think of digital storytelling as making use of new media to tell a story.  At its most basic a digital story is a collection of bits and bytes with a computing device as its container.

Storytelling has been in existence since the beginning of human kind and has taken many shapes from the pre-literate (oral, cave drawings, petroglyphs) through writing, printing and now on through digital expressions.

Beyond the Digital Facelift

This week, week two of the Headless DS106 Bootcamp, one of our tasks was to listen a recording of a talk that Gardner Campbell gave at OpenEd 2009, entitled “No Digital Facelifts“. Although many great ideas percolated through this presentation, I decided to focus on one small portion – what we need to do to get beyond the digital facelift in education.  At my current place of work we are looking at upgrading or replacing our LMS and, having been involved in a small way in that process, I realize how difficult it is to make significant changes in the way we “educate” students.  I like Gardner Campbell’s ideas and the promise of the “bags of gold”, but can empathize with the resistance he has encountered.  

I also read Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” which provided background for Campbell’s talk and insights into the changes occurring in the realm of newspapers that are also applicable to education.  His comments about scarcity are particularly relevant.  Higher education has benefitted from being scarce and available to a privileged few; however, recent technological developments have made information much less scarce and tools and resources much more widely available.  While we may not yet have figured out the best way to deliver MOOCs and capitalize on other learning resources, we are on the way.

I chose to focus on creating a brief visual presentation based on Campbell’s Recursive Practices.  To do this I used Haiku Deck, an iPad app that allows you to create highly visual presentations using Creative Commons licensed images.

Advantages of Haiku Deck:

• Easy to use
• Visually appealing
• Looks after Creative Commons attribution
• Limited amount of text allowed

Disadvantages of Haiku Deck:

• Only available as an iPad App (Web app coming soon apparently)
• Image search function is basic (no advanced searches)
• Limited amount of text allowed

Haiku Decks are embeddable in WordPress, but unfortunately only if you host your own instance of WordPress, so you will need to use a screenshot and link (as above) if you are using wordpress.com.

Other Makes this Week

Daily Creates

TDC606 – Perspective

This week I did two of the Daily Creates, the Keychain Story and the Perspective Drawing. For the perspective drawing, I drew a traditional road disappearing into a vanishing point which was not particularly original but does show some of the key elements of perspective.

I found the Keychain Story quite challenging as I did in all in one take and didn’t script anything.  It could benefit from a variety of interventions ranging from basic editing to development of a better storyline.

Assignment

This week I also completed the animated gif assignment which has been written up in a separate blog post, Scrooge Discovers Peanut Butter.

Onward to week 3.

Scrooge Discovers Peanut Butter

My first step in this assignment was to google the title “Say it like the Peanut Butter”. What allusion to popular culture had I failed to grasp and what key piece of information was I missing? Now I know how to pronounce the word “gif”.

The assignment was to make an animated gif from your favourite/least favourite movie capturing the essence of a key scene and to ensure the movement is minimal but essential. I may have failed on the “movement is minimal” part.

I used Gifsoup which is a web-based tool to create a gif of Alastair Sim in the Christmas Carol realizing that he has had a bad dream and that he is not dead.

The following steps can be used to create your own gif using the Gifsoup website:

1. Go to gifsoup.com and set up a free account
2. Enter the url of the YouTube video you would like to use
3. Enter the start and end times of the segment you wish to use
4. Click the “Create animated Gif” button
5. Enter metadata – title, tags and category for your gif

Once your gif has been created you can:

• download it in two different sizes
• link to it by url (or a shortened url)
• cut and paste html in your blog or web page

The free Gifsoup account is adequate for an assignment such as this; however, gifs have a maximum length of 10 seconds and there is a GifSoup watermark at the bottom of the gif.