Most of the students within our Study Abroad program are in Paris right now. Two students, my mother being one of them, chose not to go to Paris, and it was my duty to stay behind and lead them on an excursion somewhere in the UK instead. So today the three of us went to York. We had a blast, and some of the sillier travel flubs that my mother and I made will likely wind up as funny stories for #ds106radio in a while.

We spent most of the day wandering around York’s city center and enjoying ourselves. When we got back to Nottingham my mom made up this dessert, pictured above, from ingredients obtained while exploring York, and she decided to call it a York Biscuit. Here is how to make one:

Go to York. Walk up the Shambles to the Little Shambles Tea Room, have an English breakfast for lunch, and then go out into the open air market near the butcher shop and buy some locally grown fresh strawberries and some clotted cream. Tip the purple man so he will move. Have Constantine direct you to York Minster and have a look around inside. Note the health benefits of bile beans. Take a walk on a fortress wall. Enjoy afternoon tea at Betty’s, and buy Chocolate Orange Crisps on your way out. Take all purchased food home with you.

Once home, top a Chocolate Orange Crisp with a generous portion of clotted cream, then top with strawberries, and you have a York Biscuit.

Walking around Nottingham this 3rd July, I noticed someone had dropped and then abandoned this ice cream cone and thought it would make an interesting context for a street photo. I didn’t get it straight, but I didn’t try a second times since I was in the way of many pedestrians. I still love this image because it tells a story, and in a way, I kind of like the slight skew.

I’ve had a hard time keeping up with my faculty duties and #ds106, and unfortunately that has meant not keeping up with #ds106. My heart is with you, you incredible crazy community! I miss you all terribly. I will be trying to keep up a bit. We have no wifi in my classroom or I would try to broadcast one of my class discussions. I may try recording one if it doesn’t freak my students out too much.

Meanwhile, many apologies for my lack of comments on your work. We’ll see if I can begin again.

I will head out to Cardiff, Wales this weekend to see their storytelling museum and meet one of the original Capture Wales team; more on that forthcoming. For now, I’m due in class shortly so I’m off.

#ds106forlife

@DailyShoot – #ds592 – What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word “deadline”? #ds106

This is actually the second thing I thought of, July first, my imminent departure for the United Kingdom, and all the things that must be completed before then.

The first thing I thought of was an EKG flatlined, the ultimate deadline. But I don’t have access to one for photography, so this calendar will have to do.

Smooth, flat, horizontal shapes give us a sense of stability and calm.

Vertical shapes are more exciting and more attractive. Vertical shapes rebel against the earth’s gravity. They imply energy and a reaching toward heights of the heavens.

Diagonal shapes are dynamic because they imply motion or tension.

The upper half of a picture is a place of freedom, happiness and triumph. Objects placed in the upper half often feel more spiritual & important. An object placed there has greater pictorial weight.

The center of the page is the most effective. It is the point of greatest attraction.

White or light backgrounds feel safer to us than dark backgrounds because we see well during the day and only poorly during the night.

We feel more scared looking at pointed shapes. We feel more secure or comforted looking at rounded shapes or curves.

The larger the object is in the picture, the stronger it feels.

We associate the same or similar colors much more strongly than we associate the same or similar shapes.

We notice contrasts. Contrasts enable us to see … through our associations and perceptions.

Try one or more of these out in your next design assignment. Pick on that supports your purpose or intent and incorporate it into your design work.

I kind of cheated, because most of the audio was recorded and mixed by a professional at a real studio back in 2001 (backstory and original audio clip here). Incidentally that was before I ever became a teacher. I don’t ever really sound like that in a college classroom.

All I did was drag that mp3 into a new GarageBand project, plug in my USB mic, and record myself saying “listen to your ds106 radio” on a new vocal track. To get the echo I added the Vocal Reflection to the recorded track. Then it was as simple as selecting Share > Send to iTunes from the menu bar. Since I had pre-set iTunes to import audio as a 64-bit stereo mp3, that’s what I got. In iTunes, I right-clicked the new file and chose Reveal in Finder, dragged it to my desktop and uploaded it at http://www.dropitto.me/ds106. I’ll be stoked if I actually hear it on #ds106radio!

I submitted this as a #ds106 design assignment. This is something I assign to my ART100 students, and I ask them to make it say something about them. Check out their examples. It can be a really fun thing to do. Take pictures of yourself, or your family, or even each other. You can also mix in objects, like metal parts, tools, natural objects, animals, even sketches. Use an image editor to mash up the body parts and objects, etc. Let it say something about your identity. Heck, use it as your avatar. You can make it as goofy or deep as you want.

Hope you like mine.

Oh, yeah, you can get help with the technical details from this great open source textbook that I use with my class, Digital Foundations: Intro to Media Design with Adobe Creative Suite. What you want is Chapter 9, which walks you through step by step with pictures. My link goes to Exercise 3, which is where the Exquisite Corpse instructions start – you’ll just have to ignore the bits about the double exposure layer they have underneath their body parts. Or you could scroll up to Exercise 1 and add the double exposure into your mix. I hope you try it. It takes some time but I think the results can really be worth your while.

Maybe this would be best when we hit video assignment week. But because #ds106 is having this discussion about what media can be, I feel strongly that you should see this same sort of discussion underway in the videoblogging community circa 2005. Two things to view by my friend Michael Verdi, one of the first videobloggers, back before YouTube:

First watch Vlog Anarchy and then if you are fearless, and heeding all warnings, continue on to The Yang of Vlogging.

Here’s my take on the #ds106 “I Can Read Movies” design assignment. I tried to riff off of the work and aesthetic of spacesick as instructed in the assignment, and to me that meant bring in a simple pattern and iconic image from the film. There are so many iconic images in this film I think I could do all four visual assignments just making different book covers for America Beauty.

To do this one, I found the scene of the paper bag blowing in the wind on YouTube and made a still image. I pasted that into Illustrator and traced the outline of the paper bag using the pen tool. I made a large black rectangle for the background. Then I searched for and downloaded a simple free vector brick pattern and brought it into Illustrator and changed the colors. I could have drawn the bricks by hand but this was faster, and I need to go fast today. I used Adobe Garamond Pro in bold for the movie title and Helvetica Neue for everything else. I recreated the little projector graphic from simple shapes (ellipse, rectangle, polygon). Here’s how it looked when I finished in Illustrator.

Here’s an illustrator tip: if you want to draw a triangle use the star or polygon shape tool. Click and drag to begin drawing your shape, and while holding down the mouse button press the down arrow on your keyboard to reduce the number of star points or polygon sides to 3. Tada. Triangle. If you don’t like the triangle shape you get, use the direct select tool (white arrow) to move the corner points to reshape your triangle.

From Illustrator I saved a .png file and opened it in Photoshop. I downloaded Paper Texture 1 by pareeerica and placed that on a layer above my book cover and set its layer blending mode to Multiply to get the paper texture onto the book surface. Then I used the burn tool with a large feathered brush on the book cover layer to darken the edges a bit.

If I had more time today I would have introduced more wear and tear to the cover. But unfortunately it’s time to put most of my tech away and pack it into a bag to carry to England. I start teaching a digital storytelling class on July 4, but I leave on July 1 and there is a lot of stuff I need to do before I leave. I’m afraid my #ds106 participation will have to diminish over the next few days while I’m in transit, but I’ll be joining in as much as possible once I settle in to my temporary home in Nottingham, England.

@DailyShoot – #ds589 – Make a photo around the number three today.

So what are the three? Well in my mind, they are the Devil’s Claw (an Arizona plant I’ve always loved), the dried gourd, and the eye of the sculptor who thought to combine them with stain, carving and painting to make something wholly other.

First, YES. Accept that creativity is a skill, not a genetic or divine predetermination, and that with practice you can get better at it. All you really need are effort and persistence. Persist! Please. I am begging you.

I appreciated hearing Jim talk about why he doesn’t send his kids to school. I can remember being in 6th or 7th grade, maybe even 5th grade. I can remember that once a day we got to go either to art class or music class for an hour. We didn’t get to choose, it’s just that those two activities were deemed not important enough to do both every day. And in those two places, I had a break, and space to breathe, and something joyous that I loved to do, and while I did them, the things I was learning in the more academic subjects got a minute to percolate around my cranium and associate with other things. I am telling you, I knew these things were happening in my head. I could feel it. Art or music hour always went too fast and then we were back listening to lectures or reading out loud from books or drilling our spelling words or pounding chalk out of erasers or whatever else we had to do.

I remember deciding, right in the middle of an economics or civics lesson, when my mind began to wander and I involuntarily started to hum that song we learned in music class, that instead of being a writer when I grew up, I would be an art teacher. Because I could see that I needed more time and encouragement doing creative tasks. I could tell it actually helped me learn the other things faster. And made it all much more fun. I could literally feel the droning on and on killing my soul, that’s what I thought at the time. I could see the solution, and I wanted to help.

I eventually did become an art teacher, sort of, but for college, not for elementary school. I do still feel like I’m helping, especially when students tell me that my class is the one they look forward to because they can play. They have no idea how much I can relate. Anyway, every semester I hear people tell me they aren’t creative, or artistic. My purpose in life becomes proving them wrong.

I liked Tim’s example of the coffee filter box, depicting creativity’s problem solving side. Also his example of the logo he saw in the urinal…. Since he shared that, I can share that he reminded me of my first trip to New Zealand. I had to buy supplies for “that time of the month,” and found that they had done something with sanitary napkin packaging that no one in the U.S. had the sense to do. Maybe the problem the Kiwis were solving was cranky PMS, or maybe they just wanted to make the whole experience more pleasant. The packaging was pretty, boldly colorful and playful, not pastel and clinical (and U.S. products are starting to go that way). And the little protective strip that you peeled off the adhesive was printed with jokes. Hilarious jokes! And the occasional fun fact or bit of philosophy. It made me almost look forward to changing a pad, just to see something new and funny instead of sitting in a bathroom thinking “ugh, ick.” It was like someone had combined feminine hygiene and Bazooka gum. Take notes, Kotex.

I was especially happy to hear Tim and Jim talking about the incorporation of pop culture into #ds106. I admit to being perplexed last Spring as I popped my head up occasionally to look in on what #ds106 was up to. I didn’t understand why people were doing animated GIFs of films, or four icon challenges summarizing films, or mashups of random album covers using images that weren’t theirs. I wasn’t considering that the point might be to practice doing something creative, or to learn how to make an animated GIF. And I wasn’t looking close enough to notice whether someone was actually using a GIF to make a comment on no more digital facelifts like Stella Meme did last week. From a distance, I saw disjointed riffs on pop culture fluff, and, like Tim says of reality TV, I saw no value in it.

Now I see that it’s play, and practice. It’s marks with chalk on paper as you learn technique. And it’s more, if you want it to be. If you want it to be, it can be layer on layer of art and commentary and riffing off one another, call and response in a great chorus. And, this is probably key, our #ds106 work isn’t necessarily supposed to be fully understood out of context and from a distance, the way I was looking at it. It’s a creative community, not a person working in a vacuum.

This is a really different approach to digital storytelling than I take when I teach it. I follow more of a Center for Digital Storytelling model. I spend several weeks helping students scratch a personal narrative out of their heads before starting working with digital tools. We literally sit around a circle and tell each other stories to develop them. We give each other feedback – non-verbal reactions while listening to a story, and verbal feedback afterward. We form a creative community, too, one where lifelong friendships develop sometimes. Then we move on to recording audio, and putting together book and video versions of our stories, supporting each other as much through the technical process as through the creative development. It’s hugely fun. Here is the first digital story I made following this method, in case you’re curious.

I’ll say right now, I don’t think my way is better than what we’re doing with #ds106. But I will say that I do still value the personal narrative aspect. Or maybe that term is too confining, because I also enjoy the personal snippets, the little expressions of the now, the micro stories, even if they last only an instant. I got into this media literacy / digital storytelling / art making stuff because I am mostly sick to death of mainstream pablum produced by people with a lot of money who have something to sell. I am not nearly so interested in watching you make a four icon challenge summarizing a movie like, say, Friday the Thirteenth part 666, as I am in learning more about who you are and watching you explore your interests. The more you that you put into your #ds106 work, the more I will love it.

And that’s the best thing, the thing I love most, about listening to Tim and Jim discuss #ds106. Part of what motivates me to teach digital multimedia classes is that I really want to hear or see something unique for a change. It’s about damn time that higher education, heck, all education, stopped wholesale ignoring that we don’t need gatekeepers anymore. We don’t need some film or music (or whatever) producer with a fat wad of cash and a slew of investors to greenlight what we have to share. We don’t need committee approval. We don’t need anyone but us to decide that it’s good enough, and to make it, put it out there, and let our work find its audience. We just need ourselves. And I really want to see and hear this stuff. Our stuff. Not another vapid sitcom or remade movie. Not another infomercial or staged reality show. Just you, your ideas, your voice, your experience, your art, your stories. Get to it, everybody.

The assignment description is:

Reimagine the scene in a road sign. What is going on outside the iconic depiction in the sign itself? Find a road sign image online or photograph it yourself. Redraw it to show the rest of the scene you imagine, and show us the before/after on your blog.

Before

After

Credit: To create the finished version I used Photoshop and Illustrator to create a mashup of my original photo plus Michael Jackson Silhouette by munchester2cool.

How To

Illustrator purists get annoyed with me for showing anyone how to use LiveTrace, but I don’t care, I think it’s a really useful alternative when you just need to get a quick and dirty vector image. I suggest you don’t rely on this technique as a crutch though, because you can make much cleaner paths by working with the Pen Tool, and it is well worth learning. Also, LiveTrace does not work well in all situations, but for this assignment it is nearly perfect.

Watching the YouTube version is your best bet; it should look good played at full screen (especially if you switch up to 720p). The QuickTime version is included for anyone who subscribes to my podcast via iTunes.

So, this tutorial should be useful for either the Reimagined Road Signs assignment or the Four Icon Challenge. Anytime you want to make an icon actually. And it covers:

• Advanced image searches using Google (to find images licensed for reuse)
• Illustrator: LiveTrace for pasted or placed pixel-based graphics, Rotate, Erase tool, working with Layers
• Photoshop: Quick Select and Magic Wand tools, Threshhold adjustment, Transform (skew) tool
• And much more!

I hope this has been useful. Your feedback on the tutorial would be awesome. Share and enjoy!

@DailyShoot – #ds588 – Make a monochromatic photo.

My mother-in-law’s embroidered rendition of basil.

@DailyShoot – #ds587 – Make a photograph today that illustrates attraction.

My big fluffy cat is attracted to the lap of anyone wearing black.

Then today came Lou McGill’s post Layers, which took the idea to a whole new level. I still aspire to make something as wonderful as the final image of his her dad. But that’s not the direction I went today, though I did push this averaging thing a little further along in a different direction.

It was Tim Owens’ averaging tutorial post that pointed me toward the work of Jason Salavon, in particular his portrait project. I am crazy for these things, these “atmospheric meta-portraits”.

As it happens, I had a ready-made image series to experiment with. In summer of 2009 I took a Drawing I class, and our final project was this: dress up as your alter ego, shoot a bunch of photos of yourself, pick the best one, crop it to the right proportion, print an 8×10, and use that as a reference to enlarge and redraw at 16×20 inches using our choice of media. We could draw black and white or color images. I chose to create mine in color using art markers. So you can see the photos I started with, here is a video I made documenting that drawing assignment.

So from the photo shoot from the drawing project, I had 62 photographs that were of similar composition. I decided to make an averaged portrait. I followed Tim’s tutorial. When I saw the result I was happy with it, but I still wanted to try adding it to another photo, like Lou McGill did. I tried some other photos in my catalog of images but I just wasn’t happy with the juxtaposition for any of them, and then it hit me:

Animated GIF.

I brought my final selection photo, the one I made my drawing from, and masked it using the Quick Selection tool to grab only my skin, feathering the selection about 60px and then turning that selection into a layer mask. I liked the Soft Light blending mode, but you could still see my face too clearly, so I reduced the opacity to 10%. Then I made an animated GIF, playing with the timing and whether the masked photo layer was on or off, varying the opacity when it was on. I only needed eight frames to get what I was after – a sort of flickering in and out of the more discernible version of my face.

So here is my final result, an animated GIF + amalgamated self-portrait using averaging. I’m liking it.

This image is a derivative work based on Chinese New Year by Brian Yap, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. Here is what the original looked like.

My random wiki page gave me “Tellef Wagle” as the band name. The quote I got was All science is either physics or stamp collecting. Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937), in J. B. Birks “Rutherford at Manchester” (1962)

Instead of using the random interestingness Flickr search that the assignment post suggested, I used FlickrCC, because it generates a random search of Flickr Creative Commons licensed images when you load the page. I chose the third image from that search per the assignment, and followed its link back to Flickr to get the full size image and attribution information.

I did a few image manipulations to the original photo in Photoshop:

I made three copies of the image to three different layers. The bottom layer got a Diffuse Glow filter.

For the middle layer I applied a radial blur. But I didn’t want to blur the whole image, I wanted the blur to radiate out from an oval approximating the shape of the umbrella, so the girl’s face would not blur, but the umbrella spokes would blur and extend toward the edges of the picture. To make that happen I first used the shape tool to create an oval and rotated it so that it more or less matched the shape of the umbrella. Then I CONTROL+clicked on the shape to load a selection of that shape, feathered the oval by 80 pixels or so, and inverted the selection. Then I hid the oval layer, selected my middle image layer, and applied a radial blur with zoom. Then I set the opacity of the middle layer to 50% so it would allow some of the bottom layer to show through – it just looks prettier that way.

For the top image I applied a gaussian blur of 10 pixels and set the blend mode to soft light. This softened the image but allows detail from the two bottom layers to show through.

Once I was happy with the image I worked on the text. The font I chose is called Defused. I sampled purple from the girl’s sleeve and used that to write the album name. Then I sampled lighter purple to make the stroke. I used my CONTROL+click trick on the text layer to select just those pixels, then used Edit > Stroke and applied a 3 pixel stroke using the lighter purple color. I like!

By the way I picked purple to contrast against the yellow and green color up there in the corner.

For the album title I added the text in four stages so that I got four separate layers. I rotated each one using transform and moved them where I wanted them. I sampled red from the girl’s clothing for the text color. I liked the stroke effect so much that I did it again for the album title, but this time I sampled near-black from the girl’s hair.

For completely random elements to start with I think it came together in a nice way. This was a fun assignment.

@DailyShoot – #ds586 – “Make a photograph of two complementary objects arranged to show their relationship to each other.”

My daily shoot today isn’t all that visually. I admit to being tired, cranky and possessed of a terrible headache. But I’m really excited about the two objects!

I made my study abroad students this little pocket sized field notebook to use for brainstorming and sketching during our trip to the UK. It contains digital camera tips, digital photography tips, and a bunch of writing prompts, drawing prompts, photo assignments and even a few audio assignments. I also had these “Trust Your Story” silicone wrist bands made. They can be used to keep the notebook closed or worn as a reminder to create every day.

You may be wondering why I made a physical paper notebook for a digital storytelling course. I could give several but I think it comes down to the fact that our brain is hardware in our physical body that is out there experiencing the world. Sometimes writing or drawing is a great way to get past creative block, and it will work even if there is no power outlet nearby. Any drawings or collage work done in the book can be photographed or scanned later and become digital.

@DailyShoot – #ds585 – Work the angles today. Make a photo that gives us a unique perspective on an otherwise ordinary scene

A tree I see from a distance most days on campus. So I got up close, personal and low to the ground.

Please download and print this flyer (PDF) and post. The #ds106 course must go on.

Update (June 23, 2011 8pm MST):

I noticed earlier that Teddy Broosevelt appropriated the image I made for this poster design in his design assignment. Now that’s fine with me, but I noted I would appreciate credit for the inclusion of my work. But of course I can’t escape how that immediately made me a hypocrite since I didn’t acknowledge the video from which I pulled the still image of Dr. O’Blivion in the first place.

And that reminded me that I need to also include my process when submitting assignments. At least that’s what I think Dr. O’Blivion would have wanted.

So here is the video still attribution:

This poster features a video still from “Dr. Oblivion Day 3 Broadcast” by timmmmyboy, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Now for my process

I played back the video from YouTube and used the full screen playback option. When I found the still image I wanted, I paused and took a screen capture by pressing COMMAND + SHIFT +3 on my Mac. I took the screengrab at full screen because my monitor is pretty large and this gave me more pixels to work with, even though they were at low resolution and had been stretched to fit my screen. I selected this particular frame of video because Dr. Oblivion’s pose calls to mind the myriad portraits throughout art history depicting scenes of benediction. I thought it would be fun to play with that idea.

Next I opened the screengrab in Photoshop and cropped it to a square image. I made several copies of the original image on new layers. I took some time with the pen tool to create a mask that isolated Dr. O’Blivion and the lower third from the rest of the image. I applied different filters on  different layers.

I added a radial blur with a zoom to the background books. Then I set that layer’s blending mode to Lighten to give the impression that Dr. Oblivion is actually emanating light, like a halo. I applied a Distort > Diffuse glow filter and used the mask to isolate the glow to the Doctor, again supporting the idea that he is somehow glowing. I added a gaussian blur to yet another layer to soften the books and make them recede more into the background. I used a brightness/contrast adjustment layer to enhance the still image contrast a bit, since some of the filters I employed started to make the image look faded.

I mixed the layer order and played with blending modes and opacity until I got more or less what I wanted.

I guess I didn’t write about this before for two reasons. First I kind of wanted to see if anyone would pick up on the benediction idea since I didn’t make it extremely overt. Second because I want to play with the idea more in light of the tone of some of Dr. Oblivion’s tweets and micro blog posts.

Anyhow, I hope I have now righted my own hypocrisy. I think it was obvious that I used a video still but I should still attribute the sources I include in my mashups so as not to present the work as though I made it without the benefit of the efforts of my fellow learners.

Then I ran out and got fresh clean copies of WordPress and all my plugins. And on a complete whim I just nuked my old theme since I knew WordPress was giving me a clean copy of TwentyTen, and my old theme wasn’t widget aware.

I’ve done some minor customization involving grabbing a pretty tiling background from Webtreats, creating a header image to match using Illustrator and a font I like called Lady Rene, and making some minor CSS tweaks to the theme so that the navigation menu picks up the header image colors. I also re-added some sidebar items using widgets instead of editing the sidebar.php file like I had to do with my crusty but trusty old theme.

This isn’t really the look and feel I intend for my site yet, but it will suffice until I really get rolling on a new design. Meanwhile I’m learning that two other sites I maintain have the same evil hack in them (sigh), so I will have to devote some significant time tomorrow to fix them. And I also need to check and see if code has been injected into my database, but after almost deleting all my site files I am a little gunshy considering that it’s 1:25am and I’m even more tired and prone to errors than I was earlier. So the database check will wait until after I sleep.

I’ve been following guidance from Smackdown on cleaning up the hack. Next up will be Hardening WordPress. But between bouts of this unpleasant business there will be the fun of creating art for #ds106, and for that I’m grateful!

@dailyshoot – #ds584 – Make a photo of a pair of subjects today.

Why these Things? I’m thinking about taking them to the United Kingdom with me as my travel buddies for July. They don’t eat much and they fit in my suitcase. And they make me smile.

Plus there is something tickling my brain about duality and identity. And culture, otherness. They might need to represent the dissonance I sometimes encounter in my own head. Of two minds.

What do you think, can they help me figure out who I am?

If nothing else, it will be fun to pose and photograph them around London.

While under the hood I removed the laurel from a 2007 “first annual” film festival that has never been repeated and nixed the delicious.com badge. There is much more work to do, but I thank #ds106 for starting me on the road to recovery over here. I don’t want this site to to say I don’t care, but that’s what it’s been saying. I may not be able to get it the way I want it before I have to leave for a month in England, but I can at least get started.

I completely freeze up when I’m asked to read an essay or watch a long talk and respond to it. I don’t really understand it. Part of me just doesn’t want to say something stupid that proves I missed the point. Part of me has too much to say and gets lost in how to decide which is the most important bit.

So I decided to make the graphic above instead.

As a teacher I’ve tried to pull away from what Gardener Campbell referred to as higher education’s “digital facelift”, finding Blackboard / Blackborg / BlackBored oppressive and restrictive. Learning Management System? Whoever invented that term has never seen the way I take notes. And something in me has always rebelled at the thought that anyone other than me could create a system I could use to manage my own learning, much less anyone else’s. Each learner has to learn, their way.

I’m really passionate about media literacy / digital literacy / information literacy – can we just pick a term at some point? I get really bummed when I hear Michael Wesch talking about how most new media is still a one way conversation, despite the immense participatory potential, because our collective skills are so low. I like the idea of moving toward “meta-media fluency” and “digital citizenship.” But I’ve often been dumbfounded at how often people block themselves from moving in this direction because they think they can’t or that it’s too hard.

I guess my graphic above is my takeaway from the whole round of reading and video-watching assigned. Don’t hesitate. Make something and share it. Talk about stuff someone else made. With them. Make something together. Just jump in and pull. Pull like hell.

Make a photograph of water in one form or another today. #ds583

I know some would call me out for shooting something easy/obvious, but the point is to shoot something, right? If I start mucking around picking just the right thing, I’m back to not getting it done and moving on to the rest of my homework.

This is a video response to Dr. Brian O’Blivion’s video intro to #ds106. It’s also the story of how I got my new social media avatar, which you’ll see popping up everywhere shortly. And don’t go thinking this means I’m not enthusiastic about the #ds106 class. That was just a really long lecture. Really, really, really long.

To contextualize, I recorded video of myself while I watched Dr. O’Blivion’s lecture. Then because it was an ungodly long lecture I chopped up bits of my video and sped it up. So before, where you could distinguish his words, I have now turned Dr. O into Oblivion the Chipmunk. You can argue that lecturers who can see their audiences are more in touch with audience response. That’s one thing Dr. O is missing by only existing on TV, audience reaction, so I’m trying to help him out.

Of course, my response was not the first and most awesome, but it’ll have to do.

Via Flickr:
@DailyShoot – #ds582 – Illustrate heat in one of its many forms in a photograph today.

This candle has been lit since Father’s Day. The knight and pipe represent my father in law. My mother in law is pictured in the photo. We have a place for our ancestors in our home.