Step right up on August 26, the launch date for the Headless Open Digital Storytelling course from your freaks and friends at ds106. The idea is to create an experience for people who are interested in participating in a digital storytelling open course that has:

• no video lectures.
• no superstar professors… in fact there is no proferssor, no teacher.
• no sprawling discussion forums.
• no grades, badges, or certificates.

What we are going to do is to publish every Monday a suggested set of activities and creative assignments that you are free to do as you see fit or interested. These are republications of previous materials from ds106 courses taught at the University of Mary Washington since 2011, but this time around, there are no registered students, just the open folks.

You will set up and learn how to manage your own digital space- it can be a Domain of Your Own (Reclaim one now!) or a hosted blog from any of a handful of free services. You don;t have to do this now, it is the task for the first 2 weeks of ds106 bootcamp to get your site set up and customized.

But if you do want to jump in early, register your site at http://ds106.us/signup. A group of folks is getting warmed up with IamTalkyTina’s August GIF Challenge, and we are going to coordinate some more of these during the course with the folks from GIFfight (Stop cringing, Sandy Brown Jensen, the class will not be all GIFs)

You can see the syllabus now- for an idea of what might be on a week’s list, see the ones from the Spring 2013 UMW class.

A group of volunteers has signed up (and its still wide open) to be a “helper” for a week– not a teacher, but just present and public sharing, recognizing the work that is going on that week. They may choose to run a Google Hangout, a twitter chat, a live radio show, or just blog and tweet alot.

Want to help out? Lots of ways:

• Be active and share in the #ds106 Twitter stream and/or the new Google+ Community
• Do some Daily Creates– better yet, put some new challenges into the hopper
• Help us cull some of the less stellar assignments from the bank- contact me to let me know of one that is a duplicate or not worthy. Or make some new ones
• Would you like to help add to /manage the ds106 Handbook? We can always user new tutorials.

What we hope happens from people who have done ds106 before is that you convince, persuade, arm twist your colleagues, friends, enemies, students into joining this brigade with you. Let’s expand our base of ds106 newbies. Bring a group along.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Vern Hart

As a related issue, we heard today from high school visual arts teacher Shaun McMillan:

Hello, I begin my second year of teaching Graphic Design at Hargrave High School next week and I am very happy to have come across DS106. I will definitely have my students do some of these assignments as soon as they get up to speed on using the production tools (mostly photoshop). There are two issues/question though that I would appreciate some guidance on.

Q1: High schools, or at least mine, block social networks. They did unblock my hosted wordpress page drawalot.com but they block most blogs, twitter, facebook, and G+. I would still like for my students to be a part of the community and communicate but will they be able to participate much if they are limited to posting and commenting on my hosted site (except of course from their data plan mobile devices or from home)?

Q2: Open could be a poisonous word in a high school atmosphere. They much prefer the walled gardens of creativity stifling administration approved LMS’. What kind of warning or parent letter opt in or paper work should I have students/parents sign to both A) introduce the idea of students participating in an open community and B) cover my lower exterior?

Got ideas? leave Shaun a comment

This is a good chance to emphasize that there is no “right” or “must” way to do ds106. It is perfectly fine for Shaun’s students not to be all in the twitter mix– more important is getting them into a mode of creating and writing about their work on the shared blog he is going to use.

So if you come along on your own or with a group, you are free to modify or customize the experience as you see interesting or useful– we are not here to tell you how to do ds106. We will offer some suggestions for what to do to improve your digital creation and expression tools, but you can bend.fold, spindle,etc the experience to be a better fit for yourself or maybe students. There is no One ds106 Way.

The experience is what you craft, not us. It can be colorful

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Patricia van Casteren

But do not look for us to tell you what to do. Except start doing it August 26.

You may never stop. Ask Shannon, who took ds106 as a student at UMW who is back doing this on her own. Or Rochelle, a 3M Professional, who has been lit on fire with her ds106 creative work. We have a Talking Doll who will encourage you.

This video should explain all of it

Or not.

But if you have looked at ds106, heard about it at a conference or from a colleague, and hesitated to put time into it, now is the time. There is no obligation, no shame. Just be there.

Be headless. Starting August 26- look for first announcements at http://ds106.us/category/the-site/fall-2013-headless/

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Maria

What the handheld video left out was a just before he started gyrating, he was got his moves from the Bava

This is a few days late for the ds106 Month of GIF mania suggested as a prelude to the headless ds106 course starting on the 26th. This is totally not required, you will get plenty of chance to be GIFfing in the first two weeks of class.

This is a ds106 assignment, Dancing JIM All Around the World:

Take the template gif of Jim Groom dancing and add a background and foreground, to make him dance in an interesting place.

Ti make this, I used my pwnYouTube bookmarlet to download the YouTibe video clip. I then brought this into PhotoShop CS5.5 with File – Import -Video Frames to Layers… one small trick is to before I do this, I changed the video’s extension from .mp4 to .mov so PhotoShop would allow me to import it. I selected just a portion of the clip that had the dude dancing alone on te green grass, to give some background to work with, and grabbed every 8 frames.

This put the dancing man in an animation, open the animation window. I tossed a few frames not needed and dropped it to nine frames. I then opened in PhotoShop the Dancing Jim GIF John Johnstone created. It’s a lot bigger then I needed, so I cropped it and then resized Jim to be about 500px wide. In the animation palette of the dancing Jim gif, i select all frames, then use “Copy Frames” from the little menu in the top right of the Animation pallete.

In the dancing man one, I go to the last frame, and used the same animation palette to paste frames (after current frame). This is merely to get the layers in the file, I then delete these animation frames.

Going from frame 1 to 9 of the dancing one, I selectively make visible one Jim at a time, and if those layers are on top, he is dancing over the other guy.

My next idea was to get rid of the dancing guy, so in each frame of the original video, I clone brushed him out of the scene. O then positioned Jim’s GIF to be over the head of the man in front. For each frame, I made a selection around the people, and subtracted it from Jim’s frame, to make hime appear to behind the crowd.

Lastly, I went to one unused layer of the dancing guy where he was standing, and just copied him, and then pasted him in a layer above the animation ones but below Jim’s.

This is whey I live using Photoshop because of the control I have in layers. I could probably figure it out in GIMP, but,,,, well I like my way.

FYI, I am posting my GIF here since my blog has been under some DOS attacks lately and I cannot even get to my login. Sign. The open web makes me feel less like dancing. Thankfully we have GIFs..

It is not going down the drains, and despite outcries of technologies being dead, syndication based ones are at the heart of what makes the web works. An understanding of how distributed web-based publishing sources can reconfigure and aggregate information in constructive ways is the lesson at hand.

The future of learning conference shall be syndicated. And this dog is going to see that it happens.

Okay, this looks and acts and is a blog post, and is the first test of a syndication based conference web site. This one will rely on the use of tags/keywords in posts or post titles- we will accept either hgsepzfol or fol2013 as keywords in a blog post to syndicate into the new site at a blog hub http://futureoflearningpz.org/info/hubs/blog.

My latest video watching was Clint Eastwood’s western Hang “em High (1968), his first non spaghetti one. The story of the honest guy done wrong, his quest for revenge, is also played out on the balance of power and justice in the opening of the Oklahoma territory, as well as the seemingly public interest in displayes of punishment.

Plus you have Alan Hale Jr as a bad guy (Oh Skipper), Bruce Dern as well (who you expect in that role), and even Dennis Hopper in a minor role.

I am watching movies now for GIFfable moments, and have several lined up. But it was my reading of the numerous continuity errors that i started looking at that title sequence for the white car in the background. I did finally spot it, wow, it could not be more than a few pixels, but with a bit more analysis and image processing, there are quite a few more problems that seemed to have slipped into the print.

I would think a big production would be a bit more careful.

I will slip this into the ds106 GIFfest as a Goof GIF, an assignment added by Emily Strong.

I’ve got some more scenes to do!

The opening animation sequence would be fun to do as well, see the trailer:

PS You can catch the entire movie in 10 minute clip segments on the YouTube, pretty good quality too.

So without much more ado, my story about a cat:

This story was driven by the primarily the “flames and woman’s scream sound” which lef me to the grill one, and from there, well. this.

So we have a cat who is missing. Dad just tries to say “it’s ok” (he does not care about the cat). The little kid passes the blame. And now there is meat sizzling on the barbecue (insert wilhlem scream). What about that cat? Where is it?

The media used included:

• Fur
• Hand
• Cat
• Innocent Kid
• Three empty bowls
• Meat on a Grill
• Shining GIF (note I had to open this in Quicktime movie player and save it as a .mov to import into iMovie)
• Ahhh audio (with Jaws theme music)
• Fire with Woman Scream audio
• Pouting Girl

I replicated the short “Ahh” sounds 3 times by option click dragging the audio track. I also copied and pasted 3 more times the short Shining Clip. From there it was a matter of overlaying some titles

This was a second edit, I added a bit more because the first one was a tad morbid.

Someone tell me.