The Puffin Fairy Flock gave a fascinating Ted Talk on the new Speed Learn technology they acquired from The General over at the #Prisoner106 Village. With Speed Learn you can trust us that you will learn an entire three year course of material in … Continue reading 
Probably the most well received talk at TED Tea Party City was Alien Woman, who shared her personal and moving story of thwarting the alien invasion.
(click for full sized glory image)
This Fantasy TED Talk assignment is brought to you by the ds10zone:
Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their “essential truth” that has come to be known as TED Talks.
Week’s 1 assignment suggested using one of my all time favorite episodes, The Invaders, which in typical TZ fashion, leads you into an assumption of character that gets flipped in the end. A power of this episode is is spareness, one actor (A pitiful “victim” played by Agens Morehead), almost no dialogue, and music that builds the suspense. The woman’s contortions, moans, and screams draws us into seeing her as the victim of an invasion from beyond.
The “essential truth” here is one of presumption, ignorance, language barriers, and use of violence over reason.
When Jim Groom discussion re-filming episodes of the Zone, I speculated a redo of this episode using my mountain remote home in Strawberry AZ, which, of course carries a bit of side meaning given my home states rather regressive attitude towards immigration (IMHO). Before Arizona SN 1070, when I told people where I was from, they would respond with “Oh yes, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Tombstone” nut post 1070, it was more of a odd query of, “What is going on in your state?”
So just like Alien Woman, we may have some confusion/assumptions/predispositions towards people from other countries, we paint as invaders,
And thus TED, in reaching beyond its liberal bias, may someday have talks for spreading ideas that don’t matter. Alien Woman would be perfect as a speaker.
I have to admit working with the video from the UMW media server, was a bit of a struggle to use- since I could not pawn it, and getting a still was though if the movie was paused. But I grabbed my images ok. I downloaded the PSD template Ben Rimes created initially for this assignment. The poster shown on screen was borrowed from the It Makes Sense Blog (a site I feel dirty just looking at). In Photoshop I used the distort tool to stretch the image to the corners of the screen. I pasted in a few copies of the alien non aliens from the episode, and then did some erasing to make them appear to be behind the sign and the dude’s head.
I do like this creative challenge of finding assignments from ds106 that could be done with this episode.
I did not do anything classy for this assignment. Instead, I decided to do a take on an old meme that refuses to die.
Eminem at his TED Talk, available for use under the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 Unported License
“Eminem knew he had one shot to make himself relevant again. It clearly had him nervous after his absence from the lime light. He needed to be taken seriously, but his downfall was that he just couldn’t stop talking about spaghetti. The audience was expecting him to speak in-depth about how his experiences growing up and as a rapper could inform better education plans nation-wide. Instead, he began his presentation by wheeling comically oversized sized bulk packages of spaghetti onto the stage. He ignored them for the rest of his time onstage, and rapped his presentation about to the beat of “Lose Yourself” while his powerpoint ran in the background. Admittedly, this was a well-rehearsed and passionate performance. He turned an otherwise boring introduction to molecular gastronomy touching through the story of his mom’s spaghetti. His rhymes were in synch with his slides. But none of this makes his performance any less baffling. Even after watching the recording multiple times, we’re still not entirely sure what it was supposed to be about…besides of course, different kinds of spaghetti. The only thing clear after this debacle is that Eminem’s passion for spaghetti may be better suited to a chain of Italian restaurants than to improving the American educational system.”
External Images used:
“Making of” after the break.
I cleared original presenter and slide out of the image by carefully selecting them and using content-aware fill. I pasted eminem in and used quick-mask mode and the eraser tool to do the majority of the extraction work. I used the burn and sponge (in desaturate mode) tools to reduce the strength of the red light reflections on Eminem’s clothing.
I made the pie chart myself through a combination of the Google Docs Spreadsheet and Photoshop. The powerpoint slide was a mostly transparent image once flattened. I used skew and scale transforms to make it line up with the screen, and then set the layer to Screen mode at partial opacity to get it to blend nicely. The cans of spaghetti were cut out in the same manner as Eminem. I then bent them into shape with a combination of skew, perspective and warp transforms and a reversed sphere distort filter (Filter > Distort > Spherize at -42%) to correct for some perspective and lens distortions.
I also enlarged Eminem relative to the original scale of the presenter on stage to make him more recognizable. I’m not entirely sure if that’s possible since he’s no longer as relevant as he was a decade ago, but I’m hoping the “Mom’s Spaghetti” meme should be enough of a cue for people to recognize him.
I watched the most incredible TED talk last night. It was led by this super-intelligent Japanese high school student named Ami Mizuno. She was talking about the superheroine group the Sailor Senshi and how they reflect a more feminist, egalitarian and shame-free view of femininity, especially in the ways that femininity relates to literal power and personal agency.
Needless to say I was floored.
Crafting my Fantasy TED Talk ended up being really fun. : D I’ll take any excuse I can get to return to a favorite story.
To say that Sailor Moon was a formative show for me is kind of an understatement. I idolized those characters as a kid, I drew them constantly, tried to figure out which of the girls I’d get along with the best. It was my gateway anime, and from there I devoured every other anime and manga I could get my hands on. As I’ve grown older Sailor Moon has only become more fascinating and important to me (although I can no longer listen to the English dubs without crying). There’s the fact that Sailor Moon teaches girls that there’s no “right” way to be a woman, that all kinds of girls can be friends with each other. It teaches girls that love, supportive relationships and dogged determination in the face of challenges are essential to a successful life. There’s the fact that the princess rescues her prince nine times out of ten and everyone treats it as perfectly acceptable because duh, Sailor Moon is the moon princess, of course she’s more powerful than Tuxedo Mask. That’s a pretty major reversal from… oh, every other story ever. There’s the fact that Sailor Moon includes fully-developed queer characters and constantly plays with the idea of gender (to the point of having characters who can change their physical sex in the anime).
And then there’s the final, ultimate awesome thing about this show: it clearly broadcasts the message that girls’ feelings, their relationships, and everything that makes them girls is powerful. Powerful enough to save the entire galaxy, and without ever taking on an affect that is ascribed to “masculinity.” The Senshi fight painful, bloody battles and die for the people they love, they face impossible odds again and again, and they do it in heels and miniskirts (which none of them are ever shamed for wearing). In a culture that frequently tells women that the only way for them to be “powerful warriors” is by developing a sudden aversion to anything feminine, that anything a woman feels should be monitored in case she’s being “hysterical” or a “crazy bitch,” that viciously criticizes what they wear or how they look no matter WHAT they look like, Sailor Moon stands up and says, “You’re a girl and you are AWESOME.”
Obviously, I have a LOT of feelings about this show. My dream TED talk would have to be someone going into detail about all the points I made earlier, as well as Sailor Moon’s shortcomings (body image, anyone?), and ends by discussing what it can teach us about how we write stories for and about women and girls.
When I had to choose a fictional character to lead the panel, I of course went with Ami, the brains of the Sailor Senshi. While computers and mathematics are her strong suit, I’ve no doubt she would be amazing giving a talk on anything, including feminism in pop culture–and of course, nobody would ever guess that she’s really talking about her best friends and fellow warriors.
Those of you who know me from way back know that in a previous life I had a minor obsession with Gertrude Stein. Still do in many ways, since the philosophy of her poetics and her experimentation with the material and the ideal, in influencing the way I think about the representation, have influenced my view of the wold and sparked my interest in Freire and education (the short version).
So, even though I really abhorred the Woody Allen interpretation of Stein in Midnight in Paris (along with so many other things about that film), I would be tickled to see Ms. Stein reincarnated in the flesh to deliver a Ted Talk. I have no doubt that she’d still rock our world today.
As for my process, I struggled mightily to produce this, though I’m sure it doesn’t show. Initially, I was inspired by the “How to Get Your Vader On” tutorial on ds106 by Thomas Ella. But, I don’t have Photoshop, so I figured, it should be fairly easy to find a free version. Right? Well, not so much. Finally, I found GIMP and would recommend it highly for Mac users since it is compatible and has a lot of functionality. However, the program is not self-explanatory or easy to use, so I found myself Googling questions as simple as “How to fill a selected area with color?” Perhaps if I knew how to use Photoshop, those skills would have transferred, but I don’t know Photoshop (that well) either.
So as you will see, I cut out a photo of Stein from this image (by searching Google Images, of course):
Then I did a random search for Ted Talks and came up with this one given by Jill Bolt Taylor, which was curious, of course, since Stein was so interested in “the mind,” too. The camera angles seem right, so I used 
Grab to get this still (on right). Then, several Gimp tutorials later, I managed to cut the image of Stein from the photo and paste it into the Ted Talk still.
As you will see, I also replaced what is on the screen at Ted with a corner of the famous painting that Picasso did of Stein. Like other Ted Talk speakers, Stein was a woman before her time. Author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein understood that all representation is self-representation well before the emergence of post-structuralism or discourse theory (though Bakhtin was a contemporary). I thought it would be apt, therefore, that her moment in the Ted limelight would not only include the most popularized and iconic images we have of her, but that the talk about something else (i.e., “Stein on Picasso”) would ultimately be all about her (hence the portrait of her).
To that end, I also tried for quite some time to insert the intro to Ted Talks into iMovie and then add then audio from the UPenn archives of Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (a deliberately funny title, since the story about Picasso’s portrait of Stein is that the face remained uncompleted for ages while the friends discussed how Picasso should finish the work). I was too ambitious, it seems: not only could I not convert the .swf video file of the Ted intro from Jing into something that my iMovie ’09 would recognize, but I also don’t really know how to lay in .mp3 files into iMovie (I am a “just-in-time-learner” par excellence and frankly just lack the time right now).
So if any of the ds106 tech braintrust out there can offer any insights into the errors of my ways, I’d be ever so grateful. And, speaking of ambitions, I’m wondering if I anyone knows of a way to possibly animate Stein’s mouth? So it looks as if she’s speaking as the audio is running? I’m thinking of Vokis here and am wondering whether there’s any way to do a similar thing…with a free and relatively easy to use app, of course?! Thanks in advance for letting me know, if you know. I am hoping to resurrect this project for a future ds106 assignment.
(Project completed for the Fantasy Ted Talks assignment in the ds106 Visual Assignments collection: ”Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their “essential truth” that has come to be known as TED Talks.”).
I’ve got a little “zombie fever” with season 2 of The Walking Dead having started up last fall. If you haven’t watched that show you’re really missing out on some excellent quality programming for a channel that’s available to most cable packages. I decided to give my Fantasy TED Talk a go with a rather young zombie teaching about effective diet balancing. The young undead are our future innovators in this space! Thanks once again to Ben Rimes for not only creating this awesome assignment but providing the perfect Photoshop template to get folks started!
I’m spending this weekend all alone, and taking advantage of the peace and quiet to explore some new #ds106 assignments.
Here’s my fantasy TED talk:
I can’t explain it, but I went through a period in my mid-20′s when I was totally addicted to the Teletubbies. I found the show fascinating — and watching it was a way of completely zoning out. And I was always intrigued by the damn baby sun. What the hell was it?!
Ben Rimes has coined a clever new ds106 assignment that plays with visual mashups – in Fantasy TED Talks you are given free reign to:
Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their “essential truth” that has come to be known as TED Talks.
And Ben has gone that extra A-Game step to provide several starting examples and a template to work from. Power.
Who would I want to bring on stage to TED? Hmm, think heavy hitters– Maybe HG Wells? Einstein? Babe Ruth? Lincoln? Moses?
Nah, I went for dogs:
Lassie on Self Awareness:
Lassie looks back at a life in acting (a body of work as a faithful companion) and shares the pain suppressed bue to her having to overcome her gone through a transpecies operation having been born a cat. She shares the eternal beauty of knowing your inner cat.
Think of the struggle of having to rescue Timmy from the well knowing that internally, her natural instinct would be to lick her claws.
The tags for this assignment are VisualAssignments & VisualAssignments316. Put yourself or your hero on the TED stage and craft their 18 minute opus.
For the making of this one, I found in flickr quite a few Lassie like dogs, using this one because of her elegant tie:
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by tehzeta
I actually found the perfect image by searching compfight on cat dog for this image of a dog wearing a cat costume:
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by NiteLynx
To make it more in line with the store, I inserted a collie with a face in the right direction into this graphic (using the lasso selection tool and using Edit-Paste Special->Paste Into, making the canvas larger, and adding some text:
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by prendography
On Ben’s template, I used the magic brush to paint out the speaker on stage, and inserted my collie. For the screen, I used the polygon selection tool, again the Paste Into command, and then Image-Transform-Distort to reshape the image into the corners of the blank screen.
This is a post that doesn’t know whether to be a podcast episode or a ds106 assignment. Those who take the time to listen might get a sense of just how perfect it is to do it as both. As this is the first Slice I’ve recorded since registering the Scottlo Radio Blog for the latest round of ds106.
The audio was recorded at several points throughout the first day back in the classroom for 2012. I think if I ever do get a chance to give a Ted talk or even a Ted Jr. talk, I’d just take the mp3 of this slice and play it through the sound system while doing my Star Wars kid routine for the $8,000 a seat audience.
As for the Fantasy Ted Talk assignment, the moment I saw Ben’s post announcing the latest ds106 Visual Assignment, I knew I had to do it. His perfectly executed version featuring The Dude on stage blew me away. I spent every idle moment for the rest of the day imaging the image above.
I also thought this would be a perfect ds106 assignment in the early weeks the Cyberspace and Society class which begins next Wednesday.
And then there’s the matter of the audio recording. I’m still not sure what to make of it. It felt good to be recording in this manner again. I remain pleased with the directions this process has taken me. But I’m also looking forward to wrapping up this chapter at the end of month.
TED talks are passe, TEDx events are small potatoes, and TED-ED hasn’t really taken off yet. So why not create your own Fantasy TED Talk? Well, you can at least visualize your own ideal fictionalized TED Talk with the help of a few images and your favorite image editing software (like Photoshop or GIMP).
Created as a ds106 visual assignment, making your own fantasy TED Talk can be as comical or solemn as you want it to be.
The idea for this freshly created ds106 visual assignment came from a rather interesting take on TED Talks by cosplay artist and photographer David Dorn. For those not in the know, cosplay is the Halloween-like ritual of dressing up as your favorite cartoon, movie, video game, comic, or other fictional character while at a large convention or gathering to show your “fandom” for your fiction in much the same way “cheeseheads” and other sports fans paint and dress themselves in support of their team. David created a fictional TED Talk as delivered by Samus Aran, the heroine of the Metroid video game franchise. Apparently, she’s espousing on the revolutionary ability to turn oneself into a ball for more energy efficient and protective travel.
you can view the original Samus TED Talk in it's full size glory here – http://daviddorn.deviantart.com/#/d4l4n17
The original creation by David was marked with a Creative Commons license, encouraging people to share. However, he restricted his artwork with a “no derivatives” license, so I had to create a completely new one from scratch rather than simply Photoshop over his, which was a great experience as I learned how to turn any image into a black and white version in Photoshop, and broke the rust loose on my clone stamping skills (although they are still very rusty).
I choose The Big Lebowski because I figured it would have a pretty comical effect on the whole TED Talk script, which is usually to pontificate on some mind-blowing, yet startlingly simple truth that has the potential to change the world for the better. The first few TED Talks I watched were quite inspirational, but after watching a half dozen or so, I became a bit dissullusioned with them. Platforms for motivational speakers are typically in good supply, and when good intentions start becoming derailed by corporate money (Bill Gates HUGE support for Khan Academy), it takes the magical “I could be next” feeling out of the lectures, and starts me to looking in other places for inspiration.
This assignment doesn’t necessarily have to be used for comedic purposes though. While “The Dude” lectures on about his “dudeness” and bowling, you could very well use something similar to this for students to create visual representations of important themes and settings from a narrative being read in class, or for students to highlight and single out an achievement of some famous mathematician, scientist, or poet that is being studied in class. The point of the TED Talk is to focus with laser-like accuracy on one profoundly articulate idea, and it serves as a great way for people to connect, relate, and understand many topics which would otherwise be much more complicated and convoluted.
TED Talks have a tendency to strip away the complications, the “grey” areas, and bring a better understanding to the world’s more complex systems (for better or worse), and with a few strokes of a keyboard, and a couple of images, you could do the same with your students to help bring visual clarity to more complicated understandings (the importance of quarks in particle physics, Shakespeare’s use of meter to convey feeling, or why estimation is such an important skill). Perhaps I’m stretching this idea a bit thin, but for good measure I’ll attempt an actual example. What is J.J. Thomson, the man who discovered the electron, had been able to command a platform for as TED and the internet to spread his idea. Would it have looked like this? His idea of the “plum pudding model” for how atoms worked was flawed, but followed the basic format of a TED presentation in that it took something terribly complex (particle physics), and tried to apply common place understanding to how it worked in an attempt to better understand how the world works.
If you’re interested in creating your own Fantasy TED Talks with your students, or just one for yourself because you happen to be geeky enough to want to try it out, you can download a PSD format file that includes the template I created with the stage, a blank screen, and the crowd looking on eagerly.
