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I’ve been pondering one of the early readings in CMC11 which stated “Multicultural experience enhances creativity.” Being immersed in cultures other than the one a person was born into, does allow the mind to embrace alternate frames of reference. And … Continue reading
What a difference personal interaction makes in distance learning! Hanging out with Carol Yeager in G+ tonight inspired me to quit waiting until I had time to do it perfectly, and just write the blog post.
I told Carol how my preconceived notions about creativity (either you have it or you don’t, and, I don’t) were being challenged by CMC11. I can’t tell the difference between volume and pitch. All I can draw are straight lines. No art. No music. Ergo, not creative – and no need to risk looking silly. Did someone say MOOCS are subversive? CMC11 is sneaking doubts past these guardians of my self-protective dogma. What I failed to realize is that creativity is not limited to creators. Innovators are creative too. We think we are just applying common sense to solving problems and fail to see the creativity.
I stumbled upon a lot of things because something else wasn’t working. I didn’t consider it particularly creative to use Wikispaces with my students. Someone mentioned it in a MOOC, so I went there because I was too busy to learn Dreamweaver. I wasn’t sure if it might not be considered moderately shirking my duty to invite a fellow MOOC-er to co-teach a grammar class over Skype. Creative? It’s not like I invented Skype or even a minor app for it. I was surprised when our head IT guy told me I was considered cutting-edge by my colleagues. Isn’t everybody doing what I’m doing, and probably doing it better because of all their training and degrees? I’m just a missionary retraining as an educator. I don’t know if half the things I’m trying will even work (but they’re sure fun). And that’s just where CMC11 is sneaking past my guard and taking away my excuses. I do have a passion for learning with my students. Perhaps I will look silly. I’m becoming less worried about that risk, and more concerned about the risk of not trying it – of not finding out what might be possible.
Still no art or music, but I had this enlightening conversation with a teen about rap the other day…
Somewhere in lurking through #CMC11 I stumbled across Gordon Lockhart’s CCK11 blog posting, Man! This MOOC is Something Else! It’s the kind of delightfully tongue-in-cheek dialog I enjoy. When I asked him via a comment, if he’d considered animating it with Xtranormal, he was kind enough to encourage me to go ahead with it. Sure, just copy and paste the lines, I thought. What was I thinking?
Xtranormal does a pretty fair job of animating characters to speak any dialog you can type. But it also has a half-dozen controls you can creatively drag and drop into the text to tailor it more finely. After looking at Gordon’s previous Xtranormal creation, I realized I had a hard act to follow. Xtranormal on automatic wasn’t going to do him justice. So here’s the animated version of Gordon’s blog post, completed at 2:00 AM Monday morning at the point where my creativity and my perfectionism finally reached equilibrium.
Thank you Gordon. It was fun.
Man! this Mooc is Something Else
by: upNorth
If your browser has trouble with the embedded viewer, you can watch it here, or on YouTube.
What happens when 63 eager MOOCers get kicked out of BigBlueButton on their individual derrières? Well, first there’s a big bang as they are ejected to the farthest reaches of the Twitter/FB/G+ multiverse. Then, as gravitational attraction overcomes the energy of expansion, entropy begins to slow and then reverse the direction of the particles. Very rapidly (in far less time than it took me to dream up this analogy) they coalesce and implode on Fuze and a new supernova is born. (Dare we name this new stellar object “MOOWe” for Massive Open Online Webinar?)
Never mind that the presentation wasn’t the most riveting example of engaging interaction we’ve ever seen. Hey, at 1:00 AM I’d want to read my presentation too. The fact is,
WE DID IT!
We weren’t stuck out in the void. We tapped our alphabet soup of connections – PLE/PLN/VLE/PKM whatever – and reconvened almost as fast as you can say “Winnipeg sucks, let’s go to Timbuktu.” And because most of us had pre-read the materials for the presentation, we could pay attention to tackling the audio problem in a half-dozen creative ways on the backchannel. I sure enjoyed the ride. Kept explaining the rush I got to all my puzzled non-MOOC-ing friends the rest of the day. Gotta be some rich deposits there for the researchers to moil through as they analyze what the internet rats without cages did this morning. (Hey, that sounds like a name for a Google group, a MOOC, and a Gospel bluegrass band, “Rats-Without-Cages”. Maybe even a new educational NGO.)
OK, for those of you who haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, I’m sure there are plenty of other #change11 blogs that render a more rational account. Check it out and see what happened in our very first live session of Change: Education, Learning, and Technology.
After feasting on the riches from PLENK 2010 for a whole year, I’m looking forward to the upcoming Change MOOC.
This spring my College made official the tongue-in-cheek “Computer Geek” award they gave me a year earlier. This one, titled “Innovation and College Improvement Award” is a classy-looking plaque in walnut and brushed aluminum. I got it mainly for doing stuff I learned in PLENK. I’ve been amazed at how positively colleagues and administrators have 
responded to my pushing the boundaries of what’s been tried in the north.
I owe a huge acknowledgement of indebtedness, not only to Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Dave Cormier, but to all the people with whom I’ve networked as a result of PLENK, especially Glen Gatin, Tony Radcliffe, Susan Grigor, Carol Yeager, Susan O’Grady, and, in spite of my short-lived participation in ds106, Jim Groom, Cogdog, Noise Professor to name a few. (In ds106 I learned to make animated GIFs, obtained my own domain, installed WordPress with plugins, discovered The DailyShoot, and got on ds106 Radio, all in just one month.)
Then there’s Nellie Deutsch and the participants in Moodle 4 Teachers , including Mal who promises to interact with my students this winter. I also sampled Mobi MOOC, but without cellular service in our area, chose to drop out – still, I learned what QR codes are and how to generate them – there’ll be one on my next set of business cards.
None of this would likely have happened without PLENK. Now I’m looking forward to a new round of connecting and learning with #change11. This time I’m inviting some of my colleagues to join me in the adventure. I’m hoping my previous experience will enable me to guide them through some of the more frustrating aspects of a new learning paradigm.
I’m a virtual attendee at the Canadian Moodle Moot in Edmonton. Connecting via Elluminate from my classroom in the NWT.
First day of http://moodlemoot.ca was a pre-conference. Great prezi re on-line learning by George Siemens and Terry Anderson this morning from AU “Soft is Hard & Hard is Easy”. Here is, greatly condensed, my take. Hard-coded technologies are constrictive, relatively easy to program tightly structured learning. Once students have learned navigation, they are generally comfortable for the duration. Soft is open, offers vast options, does not lend itself to defining linear progression, and tends to be difficult to design. Soft allows learning to be responsive, go in any direction learner needs, and relies more on open tools and resources than “hard” LMS. Students are constantly faced with adaptations and new tools and technologies that interlink, however the affordances are much more numerous with this approach.
In the afternoon I joined the Social Media Boot Camp with a few people sitting by my computer to see what we could learn. Think Boot Camp as in military. In rapid succession we rushed through a whirlwind tour of Several Things Google, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and Delicious to name a few. Right off the top we were sent off to create a new Gmail account – to pretend we didn’t already have one – and shown how that gave access to Calendar, Reader, and Blogger. By the end we’d covered an awful lot of social media sites, to my delight FB was hardly mentioned. Impossible to do it all at once, but a great eye-opener to what’s available. The last part of the session turned to a discussion of moodle plugins and 2.0 migration.
To borrow a phrase from the Canadian Prime Minister, we greet the news of a Conservative Majority with “somber satisfaction”. – yes that has nothing to do with Moodle. Just goes to show how twitter got it wrong.
My original understanding of the term “Digital Storytelling” was much too narrow.
Here’s how I originally saw it.
This was my contribution to the October 2010 (10-10-10) One Day On Earth project. It is Web 2.0 by virtue of it’s collaborative nature and world-wide participation. However, I did not know about Alan Levine’s 50 free tools in October, and relied instead on my ancient Pinnacle Studio which cost a hundred bucks (including a PCI card for analog input) back in 2005.
The One Day On Earth Global Video Map is now live.
This screen shot from their map shows my location in northern Canada
Mashable has a writeup about the project at http://on.mash.to/hVevP4
I still think ODOE is a great digital storytelling project, but the term is acquiring a much wider definition for me since jumping into the deep end of ds106. I’ve had far less time to participate than I hoped when I signed up. Can’t even keep up with my Google Reader feed, much less contribute for each assignment. Still it’s a worthwhile education in the sheer breadth of ideas. Looks like I didn’t miss much though, by being a young dad in the ’80s – and too busy to keep up with pop culture. Were the movies and the music actually that bad? Has it really all gone downhill since 1970?
Sucked into the vortex of WordPress plugins, permalinks, pingbacks, and Google Accounts, I’m listening to Tommy Roe’s 1969 hit “Dizzy” and trying to get back up out of the whirlpool.
I dutifully installed and activated the recommended Askimet – no problem. Google Analytics was a different story. I needed a second search window just to read the descriptions of the bewildering array of plugins listed on the first page of search results. What the heck is “asynchronous tracking code” and do I need it? What’s the point of tracking “outbound clicks”? I narrowed it down to a choice between “Analyticator” and the unimaginatively named “Google Analytics for WordPress”, then spent even more time watching videos and reading author blogs before taking the plunge. I finally decided on GAforWP, downloaded and extracted the zip – only to find that WordPress would automatically download and install it for me. (At least I didn’t fire up filezilla to upload it to my cPanel file manager!) The next challenge was trying to figure out why I couldn’t authenticate. Finally I realized I had to actually add Analytics to my Google products, then when I still couldn’t authenticate, clicked the “add UA manually” box and pasted in my code. Even that required a second try because at first I didn’t realize “UA-” was part of the code. I resigned myself to waiting a few days before I could know if it would actually harvest any data, only to discover to my delight that I could change Google Analytics settings to show today’s date. A big thanks to the ds106 blogger who posted about having to view the results on the analytics site. At least I didn’t have to discover that on my own. That was about the time I started singing “I’m going ’round in circles all the time” and chose the title for this post. I could have spared myself a lot of time and frustration if I’d found Tenisha Minor’s link to WP beginner’s guide before doing this the hard way.
Twitter Tools sounded like a trip to the dentist; and until I begin doing more with tweets, it just doesn’t seem worth the effort. I decided to cast about for a more useful tool to play with. What I settled on was reCAPTCHA. I’d heard about a service that helped with digitizing books. Sure enough, on the second page of my search I found it. After Google Analytics, it was a comparative breeze to activate and helped restore a sense of cause-and-effect to my universe. ReCaptcha distributes the task of deciphering scanned text from old publications which OCR cannot solve. It seems appropriate to be assisting in digitizing old stories on my ds106 blog.
The other day I was doing some shredding when inspiration hit me. Why not build a hidden scanner into a shredder and send copies of all these secret documents to someone’s email address? I figured someone must have already thought of that, and sure enough, a quick search took me to a tongue-in-cheek discussion about shredder/scanners on a delightful website called the halfbakery. And half-baked it was. I spent the next hour reading one goofy proposal after another, commented and disected in all aparent seriousness by anonymous people with a cereberal sense of humor. It’s a valuable waste of time which I highly recommend to just about everyone whose blog I’ve read in ds106.
Here’s the rest of my story, which illustrates why a self-directed PLE requires a good deal more discipline than I like to exercise.
My 30 second story for ds106 from Jim Stauffer on Vimeo.
On the other hand, I found the domain I wanted was available, and with advice from an on-line friend I found a place to buy it and a place to host it. (Thanks Tony) If I knew it was this easy and cheap I’d have done it years ago. Wow, my own landscape to fill! Well, this blog is the beginning, now to conquor the world…
Some day I’ll figure out how to import my Blogger postings into this site without having all my old posts re-syndicated – which would be aggrivation rather than aggregation. For now I’ll leave them at http://linkjim.blogspot.com
Sure hope this only gets pulled into the site one time – I somehow managed to get the blog on my new domain listed 3 times in the ds106 homepage.
