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!

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!

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.

My laptop battery has begun expiring with no “low battery” warning, somewhere between 30-40% power. This means my laptop shuts down completely no matter what I’m doing, with no warning at all, and I lose work if I’m not paying very close attention. When I charge the battery back up, it never just stays at 100%, instead exhibiting the utterly annoying behavior of bouncing back and forth between 99% and 100% capacity. Very visually distracting.

Now I have to decide if I can live with it until summer, when hopefully new MacBook Pros come out. I guess whoever I sell this laptop to would appreciate a shiny new battery, so I may as well buy one.

I’ll try recalibrating it, but I’m not optimistic.

Mr. C. opened this bag of cat kibble around breakfast time to give the outdoor cat some food. It took until noon for our indoor cat to figure out the bag was open and learn how to help himself. I’m impressed enough to document this for two reasons. One, that he can get the food out without knocking the bag over and spilling the contents. Two, that he can eat hard dry kibble with no teeth.

It’s been hours since I’ve eaten it. I’m not dead yet, and no stomach ache.

I guess tofu is indestructible. Or, my stomach.

(Actually I think what he’s doing is astonishingly cool. I can’t wait to see what he ultimately builds. Drawing a circle is just a test for being able to cut a circle from a piece of metal.)

I will be returning to spend a good four or more hours in the Experience Room. I’ll shoot better video then, I promise. But in the meanwhile, Janice’s expression sums it up. Playing music with friends is pure joy.

Bonus points if you can name that tune.

What I forgot to say in the video: Email from the Guardian gives brief article summaries and links to the full articles on the Guardian web site. If the full article text came in my email, I’d be happy to get the email. But I have to read the articles on the web site whether I get the email or not. So why can’t I just skip the email?

Update

I guess at least one other person has looked into this. These are not the results I’m looking for:

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20325811564

http://twitter.com/robb1138/status/20326282271

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20326514198

http://twitter.com/robb1138/status/20326898286

http://twitter.com/cherylcolan/status/20327785699

And by “this” I mean, of course, the “Modify Your Subscription” statement at the bottom of every email stating that my account preferences are in my control and can be changed, which I linked to as a screenshot.

Anyway, many thanks and a follow to @robb1138 for at least replying. Still nothing from the Guardian. This isn’t going far to convert me to a paying subscriber. Why pay $30 a month when that comes with daily emails you don’t want to receive?

About a month ago my husband asked if I needed a watch repair. It was on his list of errands. So I gave him two that had stopped running for battery replacements. Off he goes on the errand running, and I forget all about it because I rarely wear a watch (I just look at my mobile phone).

Today, more errands are happening. Usually he tells me where he’s going in case I need anything from there too (see above). But today not so much, which I thought was very mysterious, but nothing to be concerned about. So I’m minding my own business when hubby bursts in and presents me with:

The Starkist 25th Anniversary 1961 – 1986 Charlie Tuna Watch

I think I got this watch by sending in a bunch of tuna labels or something. In 1987 I wore it every day on a month long tour of England, Scotland and Wales, along with my normal watch. My normal watch was set to local time wherever I was, and Charlie always told me the time at home. So I have odd associations of comfort and home attached to this otherwise silly branded item.

Evidently the watch had to be sent to Hong Kong to get a new movement put in it. I have no idea how much this cost. I hope it wasn’t much, but these days, it probably was much.

Love

Today I can’t think of anything sweeter my husband could have done than have this stupid thing fixed because, even though it’s stupid and silly, I love the thing.

Thanks, honey.

Kath published some intriguing thoughts about time, the data-body, and outsourced memories along with her video. Her piece begins with a quote from “Time Squared,” a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Which is kind of funny because when I think about time, I always come back to Delmore Schwartz’ poem Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day, which, of course, provides a big theme for the Star Trek Generations film: Time is the fire in which we burn. And I also come back to Don Charles’ song, “Little Pieces,” performed by D-Squared, which I used as the soundtrack. As Charles says, we’re all just “walking, talking, burning little pieces.” And for the origin of both, you can always look back to Heraclitus.

I can’t help it, friends. He’s still new to us, and it’s a delight getting to know this little guy. I may as well share my delights. I hope you understand.