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

Last June I was approached by Justin Reich f ]]> Future of Learning Institute, that is part of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education- he was looking for the syndication/aggregation features I had created for the ETMOOC site’s blog and twitter hubs. Apparently, their local CMS (iSites) was a bit cumbersome before to use, but it also sounded like they wanted to extend people’s participating in social media (read more from Justin on the needs for the site).

Harvard calling?

Oh yeah. They wanted to be on the Syndication Bus (Magic Bus! Magic Bus!)

Groovy.

Syndication seems to be in the air, given the amazing stuff Mike Caulfied is doing with Water106. There was also I understand today a ds106.tv episode with Jim Groom, Tim Ownes, and the hatted one, Howard Rheingold, going over how syndication bus works with WordPress (drats to Gila County for having me inside all day for jury duty).

I have grand plans here to document how the Future of Learning site was built, and as I pulled through my notes and the theme code, I got depressed as there are a lot of parts, so I hope I cover everything:

• Theming the site and customization steps, features added (“Can we have a Discussion Forum?”)
• Shopping list of plugins, most key being Feed WordPress
• Setup for the aggregation with Feed WordPress, wrestling with feeds (ahem Twitter) (ahem Flickr). Deploying the super cool Twitter analytics tools by Martin Hawksey.
• Implementing Quick Posts, the way participants could contribute to the site via email

A difference for this event from the previous syndication projects I have done is that it was for a shorter time span (a week institute) rather than a course. Since I was brought in to build the site, not be part of the institute, I did not see much directly of how the site was used and presented.

This is one giant ever scrolling post. You have been warned.

Some Recap Stats

The institute was a week long (July 30-August 2, 2013), but I also provided an overview of the site for the Faculty Leaders. For the syndicated in content:

• 932 total items, everything in the main “flow”
• 66 syndicated blog posts from the 13 blogs the site subscribed too
• 122 Quick Posts, content sent to the site directly via email.
• 566 tweets (but note that Feedword Press often manages to repeat tweets in its feeds) But then again, the Twitter Summary archive captured over 1000 tweets, so I am a little leery of relying on the syndication method for capturing twitter – especially when you see below the end around one needs to get an RSS feed for twitter. 185 people tweeted at least once, but its a long tail distribution, 13 people had 20 or more tweets, with the top person tweeting 179 times.
• 72 photos were syndicated in from flickr (38) and Instagram (34)
• Only 3 sites were syndicated in from diigo (and these were all the test bookmarks from before the institute). It probably was not as actively promoted as the others
• The site recorded 47 comments.

This is not huge or massive, but is commendable given that institute participants had many other activities going on that week. From the Jetpack stats, the site has recorded 17,800 views, with a peak activity on July 30 of 2787 views:

Now one could jump to conclusions about how few people used social bookmarking, or maybe that is a low number of blogs. Since I was not a part of nor at the event, I am not quite sure how all of these were integrated. I surmise the institute has a full program of activities

Design and Theme

When I was asked to do the project, they already had it set up on bluehost with a stock Twenty Eleven theme. One of the Harvard staff was creating the header and the static content. I was fine to use this theme, its basic, but solid, and plays well on mobile. There is a funky issue on mobiles where this theme does not display the menus correctly; it has to do with CSS on where it places the search box in the header- if you include this in the style sheet, it fixes the problem:

 @media handheld, only screen and (max-width: 767px) {
 
 #searchform {
 display:none;
 }
 

But I jump ahead a bit. I set up a child theme for Twenty Eleven- you can find this code on github.

The structure of the site is a fair number of Pages with institute information authored by the Harvard folks, and then the syndication portions I worked on under the “Hubs” menu:

A series of instructions for each kind of syndicated content is set up as pages under the.. How to Participate menu.

As I brainstormed the site with Justin, we wanted a means to highlight content among the flow in a section called “Spotlight”. This is merely a category, and the institute staff monitored the flow to add this category to syndicated content so it would be added to the Spotlight.

There is a trick to this- because we have Feedwordpress syndicated to link externally to the source of content, it is not easy to modify the post to add a category. I merely added an “Edit/Categorize’ link that would only show for people logged in with editing roles. This is done in templates with

 <!-- edit link for admins so they cane categorize syndicated posts -->
 <?php edit_post_link( __( 'Edit/Categorize', 'twentyeleven' ), 
 '<div class="edit-link" style="text-align:right">', '</div>' ); ?>
 

This makes it easy for editors to pick items from the flow and just edit it to add a category.

As an experimented, I set up a system where participants (or site visitors) could indicated content they found noteworthy by favorting it- this is done with the WP-PostRatings Plugin, but using a simple like instead of a star rating. I made this appear on all syndicated content.

A widget in the bottom lists the most favorited content. I created a custom page template to generate the 30 most favorited items. This was not hugely used either, with the top item getting 4 favorites.

The team wanted a simple front page, but hinted at wanting to have the newest spotlights appear. This means setting the WordPress options for the front page to be a static page. I customized the front page theme, front=page.php to include extra code to fetch the latest spotlight and display it.

 <div id="spotlight" class="entry-content">
 
 <h2>SPOTLIGHT: curated relevant Institute information...</h2>
 
 <?php 
 // set up query to get most recent spotlight
 $spotlight_query = new WP_Query( array('posts_per_page' =>'1', 'category_name' => 'spotlight') );
 
 while ( $spotlight_query->have_posts() ) : $spotlight_query->the_post(); ?>
 
 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr( sprintf( __( 'Permalink to %s', 'twentyeleven' ), the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) ) ); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
 
 <div class="entry-content">
 <?php the_content( __( 'Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&rarr;</span>', 'twentyeleven' ) ); ?>
 </div><!-- .entry-content -->
 
 <?php endwhile; ?>
 
 <p class="more"><a href="/info/spotlight/">See all Spotlights...</a></p>	 
 </div>
 

to create this:

Because the syndicated flow content can grow quickly, I like to add paged navigation (Prime Strategy Page Navi plugin) to the category archive template (this is what displays the syndication hubs). There is some code to get the count of the total number of items in a category.

 <?php
 
 $current_category = single_cat_title( "", false ); // current category name
 $current_category_id = get_cat_ID( $current_category ); // current category id
 $post_count = get_post_count($current_category_id); // number of posts in this category
 
 ?>
 

Plugins

A rundown of the plugins used on the site:

• Akismet – essential for every site to stomp spam
• JetPack — another one I use on most sites, for the stats, the social buttons sharing buttons. Also, this was essential for the Post By Email functionality discussed below. One thing to be aware of is that Jetpack gets associated with the WordPress account (mine) that authenticates it. So when I tried to use the Contact form, it was not useful because the emails came to me. Therefore, I use the Grunion Contact Form plugin — it is basically the same thing, but I was able to set the destination email to a Harvard staffer. It gets added to the page as a shortcode, so its easy to set up (see the contact page)
>Linit Login used to fight the brute force login attacks that WordPress seems to be attracting.
• Links Shortcode added to a page can list all of the items in a link category. I use it to show the Subcribed blogs – Since Feed WordPress stores these as links, I can display all of the blogs. Because there is an option to exclude links, I am able to prevent the links for feeds from flickr, instagram, twitter, etc to be shown.
• Page-List creates a short code to display pages, or child pages. I use this on the How to Participate page to list all of the specific sub pages (which are child pages). The entire block below then is rendered via:

 [pagelist_ext show_first_image="1" sort_column="ID" image_width="80" image_height="80"]
 

• Prime Strategy Page Navi – creates the paged navigation links on archives
• SimplePress About a week before the institute, the staff asked if we could have a private discussion forum for group leaders. I looked at a few such plugins, and SimplePress seemed to do the job. I am not too enthusiastic about their model- you get a basic free plugin, but any addons or documentation requires paying a fee. This did work well- I set ti up so forum participants were created as WordPress users with Author role, and I set in Simplepress that this role would not see the WP dashboard (anyone who needed to add content were set to be Editors), so they just could log in to the forums.
• Styles The planners wanted to change some colors of the menu and headings, and since this plugin works with Twenty-Eleven, I used it to make changing the menu colors, fonts, etc a bit easier.
• WP-PostRatings added the favoriting feature to syndicated content
• WP Category Post List Widget is handy to add to a sidebar just the posts from a category (c’mon wordpress, make this built in, willya?). Within the institute were 12 learning groups, each with a static info page. The plugin is used to list the most recent posts to a category archive for that group, for example see Learning Group 9

• Display Widgets – I use this on almost every site, it adds to each widget check boxes so you can include o exclude it from pages, categories, etc. This way you are not stuck with the same widgets on every page, you can really change it up. The Hubs have a lot of sidebar content related to the syndication bits, but we kept the main conference info pages simpler with just a simple one of random flickr images (example)
• Awesome Flickr Gallery – used to add random flickr photos tagged hgsepzfol to static pages and to add a full display on the photo gallery. For some reason the developer has an unstable version in WordPress (it wont display gallery), I get the 3.3.6 version from github and install manually
• Instapress does the same for photos tagged #hgsepzfol in Instagram
• diigo widget – added to hub pages the latest tagged resources

And for syndication….

• Feed WordPress this is the syndication bus engine, that drives all of the hubs.
• Feed WordPress Add Attribution – use this every time- it creates the options to add to each syndicated post a clear indicator of the source and a link back.
• Ada FeedWordPress Keyword Filters – adds features ti be able to filter syndicated items by keywords/hash tags (see below) used for the blog syndication.

Speaking of Syndication…

Yeah baby, that’s what you came for, right? Now I try to outline the setup of Feed WordPress and the hijinks needed for some of the syndication sources.

One key for FWP is setting up the defaults that are applied for every feed. Thats a nifty part of the design, because you can overrode for specific feeds as needed, but your work is easier if you get the defaults done first.

For Feeds and Updates, the only setting I change is Feed Scheduling- the default is to use a cron script, but for a site with regular visitors, it seems to be safe to set the option to check for updates after page loads- this means that user visits prod FWP to look for new content according to its staggered schedule:

Under Posts and Links, the main defaults are okay (I make sure that permalinks are set to The copy on the original website

Now we make some important setups- I am using the Ada Keywords plugin to solve an issue for blogs- dealing with user submitted blog URLs for tags and categories is messy. It’s easiest if all you have to ask for is the main URL of a blog as its feed is nearly always discoverable. I borrowed this strategy from Martin Hawksey, we tell participants for their posts to syndicate, they have to use a keyword in the title or body of a post, essentially a hashtag. This way, they can use a general blog they might use for other purposes.

The settings for Ada Keywords specify those keywords- I set up two options for this FOL2013 for Future of Learning 2013 and hgsepzfol which we use in most social media:

If we later have a feed where we want to syndicate everything, regardless of this, we can simply turn off this filter per feed.

The other setting is the boilerplate for the attribution text, this is added to all feeds to give credit to the source blog. I used the setting to put it before the content:

In the blog hub, you can see how the attribution is displayed:

For feeds like flickr, twoitter, instagram, the source was not needed. The only way I found to override that was to put a blank space in the same boiler plate per feed.

In the Authors settings I keep the default, where FWP creates a new user for each feed to attribute it to:

This may seem odd, but we are not addig users to the site. but this means that the author can be used to display all posts syndicated from that blog. I did a little template edit to make the link text for author to read “see all syndicated posts from this source” — see this post:

and that link goes to all syndicated posts from the feed for Rainbow Country School — it is sort of using the author archive as a category one.

For Categories and Tags I set things up to move any categories or tags from the source blog into just WordPress tags (this allows me to cleanly use Categories for site organization. For this site, we did not plan to use user categories/tags at all, but at least we have them.

A tricky and confusing thing is that in the parlance of Feed WordPress and RSS in general, anything in a blog that is marked as a “Category” “Tag” “label” (blogger) in RSS comes in via a Category RSS item. Read that again- all stuff comes in as one kind fo data, so I set the defaults to funnel them all to tags:

Also, I do set two categories added to all incoming feeds- I mark all as the Syndicated category (so we can display a flow of all syndicated content), and I make the default category also Blog Hub:

This means for blog feeds, I do not have to override any settings. Below I show you the overrides made for the social media feeds.

Blog Hub

http://futureoflearningpz.org/info/hubs/blog/
How to Participate via your own blog

While we hope one day to set up ways to make this more streamlined, for the Future of Learning site where the blog number was small, I opted to used a Google Form embedded into a site page to get blog URLs. I set the spreadsheet to notify me when new submissions are received, but yes, it becomes a manual cut and paste to add a feed to the engine.

In some ways its not bad, because I like to check each feed, and it gives me a quick sense about the blogs people are submitting. Again, this was a really small number (13) of blogs in the mix

Quick Post Hub

http://futureoflearningpz.org/info/hubs/quick-post/
How to Participate via Quick Posts

Technically these are not syndication, but it does count as a way content comes into the site- via email. This uses the JetPack Post By Email feature. When activated, it generates a random email address that looks like

xxxxx888yyyy@post.wordpress.com

This enables anyone to post to the site by sending an email! The subject becomes the post title, the formatted email the body of the message, and any attachments get uploaded (well the ones that wordpress allows as an upload). I had an early fail, because the max upload size on the site was set to 10Mb and the staff was trying to email 30Mb PDFs of presentations.. I had to make some config tweaks to fix the max upload size to something like 64 Mb.

You do not want to put this address on the public site, since anyone can post content! I set up a password protected page that provided this email address (it was sent to participants by email as well) as well as a downloadable vcard and CSV file for importing as email contacts.

Now one hitch is that when these arrive, they are not assigned to a WordPress category, so to be able to organize them by category, by semi brilliant idea was to make the Quick Dispatch category the default category, meaning that anyone creating other content had to make sure they used a category for their post. That seems to work fine.

The benefit of the Quick Post is that participants can easily add to the site w/o having to make them use the wordpress interface (does anyone remember this cool site called “Posterous”?). Everyone knows how to use their email, right? And it also means people can post from their mobile device.

We did use this as well for our Learning Groups, where participants where sharing the work their group as doing. For this case, we had to let group leaders and participants know that they could associate a quick post for group 4 by including in their email:

[category learning group 4]

And their posts would be assembled via a category archive

I did not hear of any problems with people being able to post this way. I see it as a worthy feature to have in a site.

One thing to keep in mind is that all posts that come in this way get attributed to my WordPress account, since I authorized the JetPack plugin. I snuck around this by changing my display name to “The Future of Learning is Here”.

Cheap fix.

Twitter Hub

http://futureoflearningpz.org/info/hubs/twitter/
How to Participate via Twitter

We saw good use of the #hzsepfol hash tag and we brought the activity into the site. Now there was a huge wrinkle- When Twitter flushed their 1.0 API, they flushed as well public RSS Feeds.

I found the solution at labnol, which has a google script that converts the API json feed to RSS which gives me a URL I can add to Feedwordpress.

This seemed kind of shaky, but has worked solidly.

Now when you get tweets in via Feedwordpress, their display is ugly since the Tweet text is both the title of the post and the body. I have a nifty solution, use the WordPress automebed feature to make the tweets look like… tweets.

This means some extra checks for the content.php template, we check if the category is what we use for Twitter (I override the Feedwordpress defaults to assign a category of Twitter to this feed), and if so, rather than doig a normal blog display, it is as simple as using the permalink to the tweet:

 <?php if ( is_category( 'twitter' ) or in_category( 'twitter' ) ) : ?>
 
 <?php echo wp_oembed_get( get_permalink() ); ?>
 
 <?php else : ?>
 
 <!-- normal content code -->
 
 <?php endif?>
 

There can be a slight delay as the site does embeds for a page full of tweets.

For the sidebar widget, I just generate the code from twitter itself; it seems like un-needed overhead to have a plugin do the same thing.

But wait, we are not done!

For every project that uses a twitter hash tag I use Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet TAGS v5 developed by Martin Hawksey. This not only creates an archive of all tweets, we get a summary of activity, a dashboard, a neat visualization, and a searchable archive.

I embedded all of these in the site with iframe tags- these are great analytics to provide your project.

Photo Hub

http://futureoflearningpz.org/info/hubs/photo/
How to participate via Flickr and Instagram

I found out almost by accident that Instagram has RSS feeds, and it is clean to see how ti works — http://instagram.com/tags/hgsepzfol/feed/recent.rss so I combined in the photo content from these 2 photosharing sites. I have to say that photos tagged in Instagram showed up within a minute in its RSS feed- flickr has always been inconsistent, and sometimes it takes more than 24 hours for a participant’s photos to show up in the feed for a flickr tag.

In Feed WordPress, I overrode the default categories to apply the Photo Hub one.

The funky thing about Instagram is the permalink just points to a JPG image, not to a web page that contains it (example).

And the disappointing thing about flickr’s RSS is that it embeds a tiny size, 320 pixels wide. I tried a few end arounds, before digging and finding a Yahoo Pipe that takes a flickr tag RSS feed, and returns one that has a bigger sized image in it.

This worked for a while, then stopped. I found the pipe had been deleted. I found another one, and made my own copy of it!

Compare the size of images we get from flickr’s RSS feeds to the ones we get from the Yahoo Pipe. I always feel like Yahoo Pipes will vanish on short notice, but they are an incredible tool to bend to your whim.

diigo hub

http://futureoflearningpz.org/info/hubs/diigo/
How to participate via diigo

This is straightforward since diigo readily provides a feed for a public tag… but no one used this during the institute (Justin said they pulled back to not overload; people were sharing resources through the other tools)

I’m thinking for possible future work to see if I can mix the feeds from say diigo, delicious, Scoppit into a yahoo pipe to have one social bookmarking feed.

Maybe.

This is the End

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Davi Ozolin

I wonder if anyone will get to the bottom of this crazy long post. I tried to cover all of the key parts in building the Future of Learning site. It was made from a foundation of the work I did earlier this year for ETMOOC, but as always refined.

IN a later post, I will show how pretty much a similar structure and set of tools played out in the rMOOC site but has a very different look and feel.

The pieces come together easily, but this is by no means perfect. Setting up a form for blog subscriptions to go tight into Feedwordpress is needed (extending some of the code that Martha Burtis did for ds106), but it needs as well to be done in a way that people can change/add feeds them selves via the WP interface.

And Feed WordPress, as wonderful as it can be, can sometimes just go a little bonkers. SOmetimes it marks feeds as unreachable or invalid that are fine. When I added the plugin that is supposed to prevent duplicate posts, I found that the feed from Instagram would be processed, but all items wew skipped.

You can find all my posts related to these kinds of sites via http://cogdogblog.com/tag/building106.

More to come!

Before I took on some coding projects today I was compelled to GIF. I hope someone other than me can explain it to Sandy Jensen Brown (you get a daily create chance for that on August 21).

As often, I was motivated by Michael Bransom Smith’s response to something called GIFfight

Dark Side Around the World http://t.co/wI5icoMVpL #giffight @ryanseslow @abelincolnjr @generalhowe @jimgroom CC: @cogdog join in!

— Michael B Smith (@mbransons) August 12, 2013

I love the concept, its in the vein of ds106 Daily Creates – simple. Go to http://giffight.tumblr.com/. The rules are pretty complex:

GIF FIGHT!! presents a JPG or PNG each week for you to animate the crap out of. Send us Tumbler links here or via Twiitter #GIFFight.

This week presented a Darth Vader pose:

I first thought making him croon like an opera singer, but then again, I saw hime playing a mean wicked guitar, doing some Pete Townsend windmill chops. I had found previously in west texas the source of the action:

So a little dissection of making Darth Vader try on his response to Tommy Smothers “That’s a pretty…. wild style of playing guitar, how did you learn that?”

This was all done in Photoshop CS.5 in 5 frames:

click darth for full size

The starting point is to figure out what parts are going to move and move them to separate layers. I used magnetic selection (I need to start using path based selections like Michael taught me) to extract the arm cut it out and paste to a new layer. The same for his head, cause his head needs to bob.

I hide these layers to go back to the base, and use the clone tool to fill in the empty space behind. This is the key key tool for this work, getting good at using it to copy elements from nearby to make the background look coherent. For the guitar, I searched google images for Gibson Guitar PNG (cause a background transparent PNG is easier to work with). I felt like Darth definitely needed a black flying V (hah its an Epiphone, oh well).

In the animation window, I use its own menu to do New Frame 4 times so I get 5 copies of the frame.

To animate the arm rotating, I had to make copies of the “arm” layer. For each subsequent frame in the animation, I would make a copy of the layer, then rotate it to a new position (keeping the previous layer visible to I got it positioned right), with ultimately a 360 rotation of the arm -here they are all visible

(see all the arms)

I did some touchup with the eraser on the shoulder to remove a few artifacts.

For the head and guitar movement, I don’t need to make copies of the layer- I can go to each frame and nudge their positions with the arrow keys, and having them move up and down.

That’s pretty much the effort. If you want to explore the file, download it from the doghouse (6.6 MB Zipped PSD)

I love the idea of GIFfight and it was cool to see RockyLou, Michael, and that Groom Guy join in as well.

We are definitely looking at rolling GIFfight into the ds106 Daily Creates and likely the headless ds106 syllabus.

Get yer GIF on!

There it is an assignment created in the new ds106 Assignment Bank template I am building out- t ]]> ds106 Assignment Bank as a wordpress theme, that could be customized easily for other types of collections. It is quite far from looking and acting like the ds106 site, but I had to work out some things conceptually and under the hood before painting the living room.

To provide a flexible framework and design, I am using as a base the WP-Bootstrap theme, an implementation of Twitter Bootstrap for wordpress. Bootstrap offers both responsive features, media handling, and also a flexible grid system for the layout, and a lot of integration built in. So thi would give someone ways to build out a site with options for say, a rotating banner graphic, or a swap out new looks with addons like Bootswatch.

Wp-Bootstrap is mostly decipherable, but seems to have a particular load order of CSS which makes doing a child theme funky. Now I am all about doing child themes, it’s my standard MO for nearly every project, though I think the need for the latest version of themes overrated (this very site uses an ancient wordpress theme). And while Bootstrap 3 is imminent, what I briefly read is it might be a complete overhaul. So for this project, its going to be built now on the current version of Bootstrap which is more than solid.

But I do want to build things so custom code is separate from the core theme. My first steps today where to create the custom post types and taxonomies needed, but rather than mingling my code with the themes’s functions.php file, I am putting all my library code in a ds106 code directory in the theme, and the core functions.php brings it in as needed:

 // ds106 Assignment Bank Functions, set up content types, taxonomies, etc
 require_once('ds106code/106functions.php');
 

The other development decision was to start this site form scratch rather then importing the data from ds106 or cloning the site and trying to revamp its design. It deserves a ground up build.

The part I got done today is setting up the custom content types- this is WordPress’s powerful feature to create content that has basic features of blog posts (title, content, tags, categories) but also add extra fields or ttypes of information needed to fully describe it.

Each “assignment” in ds106 is a type- I still use “assignment” under the hood and as a slug — but it could be for your case “Lessons” “Challenges” “Tasks”. I call them “Things to Do” for the assignments and “Examples Done” for the responses people do for the, (this is an homage to the original creation of the ds106 assignment bank where Martha Burtis coded them as “Stuff to Do” and “Stuff That is Done”). This both have associated taxonomies of classifications similar to WordPress category and tags, but they are specific to certain needs- such as a Taxonomy for Types of Assignments (like a category) that define the kinds of groupings you might have, like on ds106 “Design” “Visual” “Animated GIF” etc.

On the ds106 site, we used a plugin that made it easier to set up custom post types and taxonomies- Custom Post Type UI. I’m looking to do with as few plugins as possible, and it is not that much heavy lifting to code this in– and as I found out, there is a lot more I can manage.

I used as a starting point Stephanie Leary’s Beginning WordPress 3- I saw her speak a few years ago at a Wordcamp in Phoenix, and actually got a copy of her book then. Its got a lot of useful code explanations and examples. But I also got a lift from the WordPress codex for functions like the one that creates post types.

It was there I found a useful tidbit- a hierarchal post type (more like pages than posts) can cause overhead:

Note: this parameter was planned for Pages. Be careful, when choosing it for your custom post type – if you are planning to have many entries (say – over 100), you will run into memory issue. With this parameter set to true WordPress will fetch all entries of that particular post type, together with all meta data, on each administration page load for your post type.

which I can save in this newer version. O’m not laying down a lot of code in this post, and when I get a bit more hung on the tree, I will pop the working stuff into github for sure, but the code to create the assignments type is not so hairy:

 register_post_type(
 'assignments', 
 array(
 'labels' => array(
 'name' => __( 'Things to Do'),
 'singular_name' => __('Thing to Do'),
 'add_new' => 'Add New',
 'add_new_item' => 'Add New Thing to Do',
 'edit_item' => 'Edit Thing to Do',
 'new_item' => 'New Thing to Do',
 'all_items' => 'All Things to Do',
 'view_item' => 'View Thing to Do',
 'search_items' => 'Search Things to Do',
 'not_found' => 'No things to do found',
 'not_found_in_trash' => 'No things to do found in Trash', 
 ),
 'description' => __('Tasks, assignments, lessons in the bank'),
 'public' => true,
 'show_ui' => true,
 'menu_position' => 5,
 'supports' => array(
 'title',
 'editor',
 'custom-fields',
 'revisions',
 'thumbnail',
 'comments',
 'trackbacks',
 ),
 'has_archive' => true,
 'rewrite' => true,
 'taxonomies' => array(
 'assignmenttypes',
 'assignmenttags',
 'tutorialtags',
 //'category',
 //'post-tag',
 ),
 
 )
 );
 

I define the language used on how it appears in the admin interface. The menu_position lets me move it up higher in the left side of the dashboard menu. The things listed in ‘supports’ defines the features from a typical blog post that I want in th assignments, so here I am going to enable the comments feature (which we do not have). For now I am, commenting out attaching regular category and tags to this type. I thought it might be useful for some sites to have other means to organize assignments, and it would be easy to toggle it on (or make it a theme option later).

What i have now are the basic containers for the content, and I tossed in some dummy content I can start using to style the site:

Next steps will be setting up the templates to display as we need them, add in the plugins for ratings. A bigger task is to come up with the code to have a submission form to add assignments that does not rely on Gravity Forms as a plugin (this will be a feature that can be turned off if you don’t want an open submission site)- I’ll start with this tutorial from WP-Tuts

Then it will be some work to add some interface elements to make customizing the theme via the dashboard – I will be leaning then on Incorporating the Settings API in WordPress Themes.

You can poke around as I go at http://bank.ds106.us its going to change a lot this week to look and act more like the ds106 site. And further development notes here as http://cogdogblog.com/tag/building106

FYI, the inspiration for the dummy assignment above is, of course, from twitter banter:

@NancyWhite @grantpotter @AmyLarkinNYC Hey write an ed tech musical!

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) August 13, 2013

Inside the Photo

Creation by deletion, now that is an interesting idea.

If you have seen my photos on flickr recently, you will have seen a lot of recent ones of sunflowers. While beautiful things, I have found photos of them are tricky for doing closeups. I am typically using a spot meter for focus/exposure, and if you pick a spot in the middle of the dark eye, you get an exposure too light. For this photo, in the original I was trying to poit the focus point on the inner edge of the yellow petal.

The resultant image was less than stellar, the focus is off, and the whole flower does not look that special to me.

Original image

But I did notice that the little spikes coming off of the center of the floor seemed to be in really good focus, so I decided to see if I could crop in tight on that, and placed the flower on the far left lower corner of the image. The direction of the opening of the flower ends up being mirrored in the direction of lightening of the sky behind.

By cropping this detail out, we are drawn into an aspect of the photo we might not have seem in the original composition.

See what you can create by using your cropping tool to remove something.

Barking Dog Studio » Inside the Photo is the part of my photo gallery site where on selected photos I write about what went into creating the image, sort of like DVD extra!.

Inside the Photo

This photo is from a store in Flagstaff Arizona that sells kitchen stuff. I was sightseeing with my sister, and she wanted to check out the store. I had not much interest in shopping (though I admit I bought a fancy apple coring knife), but this rack of colorful cookie cutters. The afternoon light was shining on it through the store windows, and I felt my photo radar go up.

Other elements that I was noticing was the repeating of shape, and it looked even in person a bit surreal. By going to an open aperture (f/1.4) I thought I would get an interesting effect. It does! In a way it looks a little like a computer generated image. It might have been better to hold the focus better on the front cookie cutter, especially at such ope apertures. I should have done a manual focus.

I am not claiming I have a magic power to pre-visualize a great photo, but I do have this sensation that I know now to listen to and take photos when I hear it calling.

Listen to the place.

Barking Dog Studio » Inside the Photo is the part of my photo gallery site where on selected photos I write about what went into creating the image, sort of like DVD extra!.

Alas the rodent urchins of the web have been pummeling Hippie Hosting in a relentless DDOS attack, ending a long problem-less spree since Tim moved the server in the beginning of the year. It’s also taken down ds106. The hippies are slumbering

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by abby chicken

And pity poor Tim who is supposed to be on vacation at the beach as he scrambles to find a fix in a low bandwidth zone (though his abs are looking good here):

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Giorgio Montersino

What to do? I am left to using this WordPress.com blog cause a dog has to blog

@jimgroom @jonbecker @gardnercampbell after 2 spins of Diver Down vinyl last night, I'm hearing "Where Have All the Good Blogs Gone?"—
Alan Levine (@cogdog) August 07, 2013

And if when CogDogBlog.com rises, this post will syndicate itself in.

CogDogLab is a Wordpress.com blog I used to experiment with that platform and as a backup blog just in case this one is misbehaving!

DS106 makes sense.  Running with bulls does not.  But running with bulls is exactly what’s going to be happening near Richmond August 24th.  Fools.

If you visit Melanie’s blog, you will find (I am guessing) a ds106 Icon Story inspired header graphic.

So why are educators who stereotypically in a Turkle fashion would be off on the beach reading Milton or Sarte, deeply reflecting on their existence– instead using their summer days making animated GIFs for a course they are not enrolled in nor will get any credit?

If you need me to explain, I won’t, except to say– get ready for the bulls. You can with the lowest of risks, join a recasting of the syllabi of previous UMW ds106 courses starting August 26 as the “Headless ds106″ course — check out the details.

You do not have to do anything right now, starting August 26, you will find a weekly suggested set of things to do for each topic. There is no obligation, no concept of dropping in or out, no grades, no certificates, no discussion forums, no video lectures,… and you choose how deep you want to swim with the bulls. The “headless” part is not a required theme of decapitation, but suggests the idea that no single person is responsible for teaching the course, and in fact, it is an experiment to see how a community can teach itself.

We have a signup doc for people who are interested in being weekly helpers – not teaching, but doing whatever they see fit to help others try the week’s work. And feel free to fill your name in (again risk free) to a week that you’d like to help out. These are suggested (nut not all) ways you can help:

• introduce the topic and write about it in their own blog
• encourage and connect people via twitter, G+
• run a google hangout, ds106 radio broadcast to discuss the topic
• do the assignments and share them
• make tutorials
• help us identify assignments we should remove
• share resources, tips, tutorials (looking at some delicious tagging too)
• highlight the work of others
• nag and tease Jim Groom

What we’d really like people who have already been infected with ds106 to do is, encourage a few colleagues, students, friends, creepy uncles, neighbors, strangers– to join you in the experience. Bring some new people into the fold.

To de-emphasize my role, I am stepping back a bit in August, especially as I focus some energy on building the ds106 assignment bank template, and letting others kick it into gear- just see how a talking doll has laid down a fabulous month of GIF challenges. Others are getting active in a Google Plus ds106 Community– again, I keep an eye there but am purposefully leaving space for others to step in and foster that space.

So what do you do? You actually do not have to do anything.

You can start be setting up your ds106 blog space, and if it is not in the ds106 site, sign your blog up – and select the “Headless 2013″ as your affiliation. If we already syndicate your blog, just let me know and I will make sure your feed is properly tagged. All blogs we are syndicating in are listed at http://ds106.us/tag/headless13.

But that can even wait, and you can join at any time. No deadlines, get it? Pick your own pace. The first two weeks of the course, ds106 Bootcamp, are really about getting your site in ready shape, so there is plenty of time to work at it.

If you have just linked to ds106, or looked at it from across the fields, or wandered what those lunatics are doing… this is a great time to get some direct experience.

You may have more fun then ever, and we guarantee you will keep your head attached.

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Travis Nep Smith

I understand why people are expressing an interest for something like “ds106 in a box”

@cogdog @jasongreen @holden Once @cogdog finishes those WP Themes, I hear it's all push-button. Solution in a box.

— The Russian Apts. (@rusapt) August 1, 2013

After all it is definitely the best thing since ___________. Cult status notwithstanding.

But for reasons which hopefully gush out below, I’d really like to eradicate that “in a box” expression- it’s the kind of mindset in the early web years that got us AOL instead of the open internet, that has educators locked in LMSes rather than open systems, that has “everyone” posting statuses and liking in Facebook rather than their own space, that has higlhy educated people lathering over mass produced machine graded learning video lecture as a learning experience.

First of all, we are excited that people are growing interested in using what ds106 has evolved for other subjects. Mike Caulfield framework of a multi-class experience around issues of water … water106, and Jason Green is trying to get something going for a music class, based on the ds106 approach

@_valeriei At the moment I'm thinking through how to apply #ds106 model to music appreciation. Not sure I can pull it off.

— Jason Green (@jasongreen) August 1, 2013

But to be clear the site is not the course. The basic ingredients is a platform where there is some coordinating information, and the use of an RSS feed aggregator to collect, and maybe tag, re-organize content that people publish in their own spaces.

:
:
:

The ds106 site itself is a bit of a monster of accretion, and we’ve pretty much built it in the air as we flew the plane, using our open source WordPress platform, plugins, but a lot of custom code that is a hard wired jumble.

We definitely want to make it available in a form that others can use, and its my goal to have a workable version of the ds106 Assignment Bank as something like a WordPress theme (with maybe 3 required plugins) that could be readily customized for other kinds of collections.

I am working on this August 2013 (a.k.a. now) and it should be unrolling in a viewable version at http://bank.ds106.us (bank does not refer to recent money raising efforts). I will be tagging the progress here as http://cogdgoblog.com/tag/building106 (and have include past related posts on building syndication hub sites)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Chris Mear

A key pillar of ds106 is its core aggregation of content from participant’s own sites using Feed WordPress as the engine of the syndication bus. Doing this is something I have been extending out to other uses, an engineering design class in the Netherlands, ETMOOC, last week’s Harvard Graduate School of Education Future of Learning Institute, and the currently ongoing Art+Reconciliation MOOC.

Others have figured out this architecture, see Martin Hawksey’s brilliant work on the octel course site. And Martin Weller’s open H817 course. And what EDC MOOC did (for a course cemented in Coursera). And pretty much every Original Canadian Flavored MOOC powered by Stephen Downes’ gRSSHopper.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Magliery

It is not quite giant quick push button (and frankly never should be), it’s doable by someone with an understanding of feeds and syndication. I know Martin Weller wanted the big That Was Easy button for H817. It seems reasonable- Syndication is based on RSS which is standard so it should be easy to have an automated system.

When you dig a bit deeper into feeds, you kind all kinds of variances how they are constructed and delivered. What those are is a post for another day, but I have seen this since for more than a decade of running Feed2JS– it’s kind of tricky to automate the proper feed identification. Or maybe someone smarter than me needs to take a crack at it.

Yet it could be made relatively easier with more models, sample code, mote templated setups, documentation== but to me, it should always take some elbow grease, because little that is that easy to do seems worth doing. And also, again, the course site is not the course experience.

Think of any teacher you fondly remember as being inspiring– I am back in high school Calculus class with Mr Witts. His power as a memorable teacher was not the textbook nor some off the shelf lesson plan, it is what he brought to the course by personality, passion, and challenge– which somehow managed to make high school calculus something I wanted to engage in, for more than the grade.

Good learning experiences do not happen from piles of OERs/ Learning Objects, web widgets, course packs- they are what happens when integrated by teachers.

Yet there’s more. I am hoping Brian Bennett is able to pull out a tight edit of a great conversation Jim Groom and I had with him last week about some of this topic. And the thing is, even if we could hand you a push button crank it out ds106 in a box– it would in no way offer all that has become ds106– because most of the secret sauce is stuff that is not in the box.

The magic of ds106 is not the web site, it is the people who came when Jim asked, and people who came later. It is the stuff between the sites that is the elixer, the social connectivity. Why would people be investing precious time in August doing daily animated GIFs? It is how waves of people come in, like recent ds106 infected souls such as Rochelle Lockridge, Christina Hendricks. We even have a talking doll encouraging creative action. Then there is Mariana Funes who come to ds106 vis Martin Weller’s H817 open course.

When you dream of “ds106 in a box”, what you will get is actually just an empty box, a potential. What has happened in ds106 has not been because of the software, but the people, the community, all of the things which are not in some wordpress template. If you are creating an expectation that ds106 is something you can bottle and mass distribute, well you are doing us and the ides a disservice.

For an industry where the cliché is “thinking outside the box”, I am a bit baffled why people would pine over something magic “in a box”. I will push against this phrase.

The box is empty.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Erich Ferdinand

If ]]>

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..

CogDogLab is a Wordpress.com blog I used to experiment with that platform and as a backup blog just in case this one is misbehaving!