I create this GIF image by using the Adobe Fireworks to import as an Animated GIF. The frames were set as loop forever. The media is from the movie “Game of Death” where Bruce Lee uses his Nunchakus for a swing.
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I create this GIF image by using the Adobe Fireworks to import as an Animated GIF. The frames were set as loop forever. The media is from the movie “Game of Death” where Bruce Lee uses his Nunchakus for a swing.
The consumption of a horse’s heart.
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/say-it-like-the-peanut-butter/
I made a fast moving gif of my favorite clip from my favorite movie Hot Rod. First I got the video from youtube opened it on mpeg streamclip ad trimed it. After I Imported it to photoshop CS6 where i changed the size and made it faster. The assignment was to ” Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene.”
I. I have created my first GIF! I found a video on Youtube and i downloaded it using deturl.com . After downloading it i cropped that part of the video i wanted to use, then i exported it. After Exporting it, i imported it, into Photoshop. There, i cropped the gif down and re-sized and it saved it for web and uploaded it onto my blog! (:
II.
There’s a lot to like about the EDCMOOC currently running in Coursera. It’s probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a cMOOC on an xMOOC platform. That said, the platform hinders its greatness. This course would be just about perfect if it existed entirely on the open web. Indeed, much of it does.
I like that the organizers decided to focus their attention on curation so they have more time to provide thoughtful prompts and meaningful engagement. While scanning the work of tens of thousands of people is impossible, I feel like I have all the information I want from the facilitators.
In truth, I had no intention of even participating in the course. Like many of the other xMOOCs I’ve signed up for, I had just planned on skimming. So far the majority of xMOOCs follow the pattern of Video, Quiz. Yawn. Video, Quiz. Stimulus. Response. Stimulus. Response.
Yawn.
When Gardner Campbell incited T.S. Eliot, “That is not what I meant. Not at all” he was pointing at this structure, labelled as Bateson’s first level of learning (at best!).
![Ecology of Yearning [visual notes] @gardnercampbell keynote #opened12](http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8335/8094652826_cd883deb08.jpg)
We have a wealth of genius on the open web, we don’t need to reduce it to a pavlovian response test.
But the EDCMOOC hints to me of the opening that Gardner yearns for. The mere fact that his lecture was included on the resources page speaks to it for me.
I love that EDCMOOC is entirely comprised of creative commons material and publicly available resources. I don’t love that the content locked behind a password. Though, I realize that Coursera can offer analytics, accountability, marketing and recruitment more than the open web currently can.
Of course it’s highly practical to want these things, I mean we’re talking about education in the 21st century and apparently, that’s broken. But other than a lot of PR (and consequently thousands of students) Coursera has not brought a lot to this already really great course.
It’s actually a bit fascinating to see that the use of publicly available course materials is out of devious necessity rather than ideological design. That’s the kind of opening of education I like to see.
A lot of the course lends itself to meta contextual critique and this layering of theory onto itself is helpful for me, in that there are no assumptions made that THIS is the BEST way or that there even is a best way.
The resources are visually rich, which is important to me. Even the text resources about metaphor are dense with visual language. I probably need about 4 more posts just for the Johnson & Lakoff article alone.
The videos were great to watch; they ranged from clever vignettes to deeply metaphorical animations to being just downright creepy. I chuckled at a few of the character names pulled from famous-for-surveillance philosophers, Benthem & Foucault to the bureaucratic victim in the film, Brazil- Harry Tuttle.
I’m not sure if I’m naturally drawn towards pessimism or I just like making fun of Microsoft but I had a hard time watching their utopian future advertisement videoand the Corning one without scowling. I know that if any of those things worked like that for me, I’d definitely consider it utopian. But honestly, if my wireless connection can keep three of us in the house connected for an evening, I’d consider THAT utopian.Technology just fails and we deal with it.
I thought it would be interesting to snip parts of the video out and play around with what would happen during the inevitable crash or unintended consequence occurs.
At the beginning of the film, we see a woman, late at night in a foreign land, donning some babelfish translating shades getting ready during her cab ride to check into her hotel. Murphy’s Law would definitely indicate this exactly when you’d get an exception error.
The next day, this woman will have a meeting with some locals, who for some reason are really far away. In the future everything will be whitish blue and very sterile so any odd odours will be very noticeable. Be careful if you wave your hand about trying to clear the air, as you might swat all your data out onto the table in front of you. Sploosh. Oops!
This could lead to the AI in your data analysis app to come to some alarming conclusions for you and your colleague.
At the end of a long day, finally when tele-baking with your family your uber intelligent fridge does an analysis of the ingredients and finds you in breach of the homeland food security act.
That combination of foods may be deadly
I realize that’s all very silly, especially when the other videos are really actually quite good and already full of their own dystopian views but I like to add a bit of dystopia to the utopia every once in a while.
As for my utopian view, it’s been great watching Sheila engage in the course content. I’m drawn to her wonderful musings and love how she tries new things like the data analysis and her clever reference to The Ghost in the Shell, which I used as my animated GIF for my first #Change11 post.
Ghost Typing in the Shell
It’s these grand harmonies of the spheres where the you find resonances across the globe of people who fascinate and teach you, mostly without them even knowing it (except maybe on a WordPress ping?) and there’s a little bit of excitement because they like things you do too.
That’s what connectivism is to me and though I’m surprised to find it sprout from unlikely xMOOC sources, I must remember that when these things happen rhizomatically that’s when they are best.
“So Long…” animated GIF by aforgrave, from The Princess Bride 600px at 32 colours,
This is one of my favourite moments from Rob Reiner’s classic, The Princess Bride, released in 1987. It comes right at the end, in an incredibly touching scene, when the Grandfather (wonderfully played by the late Peter Falk), uncomfortable with what to say as he is leaving, fumbles to make sure he has everything (is he checking for his glasses?) before departing. In the end, he just throws up his arm, already looking away, and says, “So long.”
What doesn’t show in the GIF is what comes immediately after, where, at the door, he pauses as his grandson (Fred Savage), initially dis-interested his grandfather at the beginning of the film, stops him to say, “Grandfather, you could come back, and read it to me again, sometime, if you want.”
The grandfather’s final words, so telling after we’ve just seen the story, are priceless.
“As you wish …”
I GIFfed this over a month ago, originally intending it to be part of a larger series of GIFs from the film. That will still happen, at some point, but other GIFs came along in the interim as a result.
However, this was one of the first GIFs I worked at reducing in size through the use of a mask. The file size, at 32 colours, when saved at 280 pixels wide, is on the order of 450 KB. This one, at 600 pixels wide, is larger. While the number of frames is high, that is intentional because each one highlights a decision point in Peter Falk’s movements — leaving out any one would make his movements seem less detailed, less absent-minded than he intended. About the only thing better than seeing this as a GIF, is seeing the actual clip, with his, ongoing utterances “alright, …. okay ……, alright, ….. okay, ….. so long…”
So good.
After several failed attempts at joining previous iterations of the DS106 online course, I’m making a more focused, disciplined effort this time around. Don’t know about DS106?
“Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington… but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer, a hardy internet connection, preferrably a domain of your own and some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster.”
For my first magic trick–er–assignment, I give you a meticulously hand-animated1 gif from one of my favorite films…
I like to imagine some silly, cartoon-y music playing in the background while I watch this.
Alright, to start things off, welcome to my summary of my second week of DS106, and the final week of DS bootcamp. Can’t say I’m sorry to say goodbye, as we head off into the real deal 
I’ve made an email address for this blog, so if you have questions or comments or pictures of cats, send them to [email protected] please.
Check out the other class blogs; I have, and they’re really cool. PS, mine is totally listed there–score, I did something right!
As you can see, I changed the theme of the blog to something that I really like–I’ve used this theme before, on a different blog that I used for a creative writing class. If you go there, you can still read some of the (terrible) stuff I wrote. I’m a huge fan of the theme, because it mixes just the right amount of whimsy, fantasy, and monstrousness, and hey, that’s exactly what a Chimaera is–a mishmash monster. Of media! As you can tell by my username, darlingchaos, I’m a fan of the ecclectic and strange, the creative, crazy, and chaotic. So brace yourself.
Under the new skin, I’ve got a happy new plugin whirring away. A wild Akismet approaches! It is extremely effective against spam! I seriously hate spam, it’s the worst ever and should die in a fire. For some WEIRD reason, apparently I had some random plugin called “Hello Dolly” running on my wordpress, which did nothing but display random song lyrics. So I banished that. Didn’t have any trouble with anything, because I’ve done this before for other classes, and it felt like diving back into familiar waters, even if it’s been a while. I’ll warm back up to it eventually, but for now I’m happy to just paddle around and make sure all my bases are covered and that everything is operating as it ought to. Soon, I’m sure i’ll be overdoing it and spamming you all with my creative thought-vomit. Or something. For right now, I’m happy making sure that my blog reflects my digital identity, and I feel like that I’ve achieved that pretty well. Right now I want the blog to be a place to house my assignments, not just for the sake of the class but so that I can be more experienced with this kind of platform-building and organizing, so I can make and display a portfolio of cool stuff to future grad schools/job interviews/aliens from Mars. I dunno. I’m excited to further customise and utilise the space.
If you didn’t notice, the “home” site to this sub-site is now colourful and no longer has a bus on it. Whee! Customising it was easy–install WordPress and a happy little theme. Nothing to do with it right now, apparently we’re just placeholding, so it feels a little stark and excessive to have the ds106 site as well as the home site–but I know we’ll flesh it out later.
This week we did two daily creates and I sort of feel like I took the lazy approach, doing two writing assignments, but hey it was fun and I had a horrible, busy, feel-bad-y week so it was a bit nice to take it easy. Anyways, writing is something I ENJOY and the prompts were strange and weird and wonderful, things I never would have thought of. I actually went back and read every single daily create prompt since class began, and I’m so happy that they’re all unique and inspiring. I kind of want to submit a few assignments for review, just for fun.
Here are the two things I did–go forth and read! That’s at the actual daily create website. I’ve archived the full text of those daily creates on my own site HERE and HERE.
Anyways, as far as process/equipment… well, I just wrote, didn’t do a video or take any pictures, so all I used was my brain, my hands, and about five minutes on my macbook. Honestly, I just do the first thing that comes to mind, so it’s not even like I have a fun brainstorming process to describe.
HA! I MADE A GIF. For the first time in my life! I’ve been wanting to make gifs for like, MY ENTIRE LIFE (at least as long as I’ve been on the internet) but never bothered to do it, or find out how to do it. Now that I know how easy it is, I’m terrified that my life will become possessed by gifs, because gifs are–I swear to god–how the internet expresses FEEEEEEEEEEEELS. And I have so many feels. ALL the feels. My amount of feels is inversely correlated with my ability to can, of which I have DELIGHTFULLY LITTLE .
The process was pulling up a youtube clip of Tangled, one of the greatest movies Of. All. Time, taking a couple of screen shots with my mac (Command + Shift +4) and then using the online gif-maker at makeagif.com (you can’t make that up. It really is that easy). It was essentially a three step process to take the pictures, upload them, and then click “make it!” and boom. Gif. The end. Prooooooobably some kind of copyright infringement but hey, who cares, we now have a gif of a horse and a princess playing tug of war with Flynn Ryder. And that’s worth the litigation.
Overall week two was pretty easy and fun. I’m really digging it. Bootcamp was terrifying, but I made it through thanks to my profs and support from fellow classmates and other members of the teaching-ranks. I’m looking forward to biting off more than I can chew, and then chewing it. And then waxing poetical about it online.
Oh, I do have one question–why is it that we’re embedding the “assignment” of making a gif in our weekly summary, and not making an individual post for it, and then tagging that post with visualassignment, visual assignment 2—didn’t we make a category for Visual Assignments? Am I just confused? I went ahead and placed this post in both categories, “Weekly Summaries” and “Assignments, Visual” but was just wondering if I should have made a separate post for the gif and included a link to THAT post in THIS post. Bwah, confusement.
This week brought .GIF’s, tears, and laughs. The tears and laughs were brought on by watching awful and some amazing movie scenes. It is hilarious how BAD some movies actually are!
Seriously, Gigli??? Max and Me??? Glitter??? Worst of the worst really. That said I d
![Hot Rod](http://<a href=http://jasmineenimsaj.com/wordpress/?p=45 src="http://jasmineenimsaj.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/dancedance-300x169.gif" alt="dancedance" width="300" height="169" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-43" /></a>){kind=link}