When Tom Woodward tweets something “might be a good #ds106 assignment”, he usually does not stop there

http://t.co/oXnzUDewTQ #ds106 illustrating strange google autocompletes

— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) November 30, 2013

He goes ahead and tries it

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward

and makes it into a ds106 Assignment (and blogs it, natch) Illustrating Odd Autocompletes:

Google Autocomplete is an oracle with strange powers to bring oddities into your life. This assignment asks you to seek out that randomness. Start with a strong phrase (things like “I hate . . .” or “I love . . . ” seem to work well.) and run through the alphabet looking for really odd autocompletes. When you find a good one, screen capture it and create an illustration that represents the search string.

I tried a number o false starts, and got what I wanted by starting with “why do they” and got to starting “pi”, when I spotted “Why do they pierce cows”– my MOOCmocking radar went on.

So I found a creative commons licensed image of a cow (now too hard, used google image search with advanced image for “free to use share modify”), but I wanted a closeup of the nose, Cow 0945 was perfect.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Lars Pistasj

A similar search for “nose piercing” got me one from Wikipedia licensed the same

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, photo by User:Nicor

I decided to update the cow’s tag to a relevant “106″.

Meaning? MOOCs are all pivoted and beleaguered these days, so we can expect UdaXsarians to try anything to bling up the “lousy products”

Kudos to Tom for following through, and keep in mind the many ideas like the ds106 Assignment Bank, the Remix Machine, and many of the classic assignments came from his cranium.