"I went to the woods because I wished to photoblitz deliberately!"

I am guilt ridden, although we've been told not to feel guilty if we fall behind in ds106. I have yet to summarize and reflect on weeks 3 and 4, but it's all in my head just waiting for some time to sit down and either write or record what I learned and accomplished during those weeks.  

For now, here is week 5's photoblitzing exercise we were challenged to do within a 15 minute timeframe. Timeframes make me nervous, so I kind of broke a few rules, on purpose. First we had to spend no more than 15 minutes taking random shots wherever we wanted to show our visual interpretation skills. Honestly, I probably spent about 15 minutes taking all of these shots but I forgot to take a picture of a clock, and anyway I could easily fake this, so you'll have to take my word for it. I spent more or less 15 minutes, I swear! 

Next, "I went to the woods because I wished to photoblitz deliberately" and in peace. We were given a list of 12 photo possibilities to show how we capture and interpret a place, people, things, ideas.  I chose the Adirondacks because this is where I live.  The experience was divine! I always enjoy taking time to see with new eyes and immerse myself in nature, breathing in, and taking in my surroundings slowly and deliberately looking for new ways of experiencing and understanding nature's beauty. There's always something new to see and discover even upon returning to the same path, brook, or trees.  

To be honest again, when I took these pictures, I did not read or check the list of 12 photo possibilities. I decided to just GO and take pictures, and luckily what I photographed with my droid camera phone managed to address 8 of the 12 possibilities. I love and hate checklists so I felt I could not enjoy the photoblitzing process if I carried a list with me of what shots I needed to take. I needed to be free of lists if I was in the woods, in nature. So what was most inventive turned out to be the fact that I went out to the woods with no preconceived ideas of what type of pictures I needed to photograph. I was inspired to capture whatever caught my eye, and these images, honestly, just appeared to me naturally. Some are fitting for more than one of the photo categories. I also learned, as we were encouraged to do, how to embed a Flickr slideshow. I added the photo category descriptions under each picture.  So here is my first ds106 photoblitz...hope you'll like it!
   

 

ds106 Photoblitz , a set on Flickr.

This was my favorite of all the pictures I took because its potential for storytelling is wide open. Someone left their bike leaning against a tree just waiting for me to photograph it. Abandoned for a moment, I wondered who the bike belonged to and if they were waiting for someone, or why they were alone in the woods, like me. I walked around and took some more pictures and when I came back to this spot minutes later, the bike was gone.  Without a sound, or a trace, the owner of the bike vanished, but he/she provided me with an opportunity to take a picture for both the blitzing and a daily create 627. I loved the sunlight over the open space, the shadows and the tree and the bike in the center.    

This week has shown me how much I prefer to begin using my own photographs to enhance my blog posts rather than borrow someone else's! I would love to juxtapose these nature images with some from NYC. This is John Johnston's photoblitz app for more inspirational ideas too, but when I visit in the next few weeks, I will definitely photoblitz, and see what images come naturally to me in the Big Apple to juxtapose with these. I will be more deliberate about light, balance, depth, perspective, and I will be ready to capture those moments(this is why the camera phone is a godsend) which will express a thousand words!  (Santa also knows I want a new camera now!) 

We are also supposed to choose at least 3 of what we think are the best pictures in the pool of ds106photoblitz. That's tough because they're all so good! Not just saying that either! There's so much talent, creativity and beauty in so many different forms. I can't pick just one, two or three!  There was an image of Starbucks and cityscapes that did catch my eye because... although "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,"city life always beckons with its unique beauty too! 

  

Created with flickr slideshow.

i.am.ary. and i.am. ds106!

DS106 has been chosen as a top innovator in the open education movement so for Saturday's daily create, the ds106 cult faced the task of creating a short video to give audiences at the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium on September 27th a sense of who or what the cult people of ds106 are all about. 

We had certain rules to follow... or break, such as 

1. a 5,4,3,2,1 countdown---check! 
2. saying "I am ds106" in my most emphatic voice---check!
3. creating something creative to represent a cut---check! (I think.)
4. cults are all about brainwashing, community building and "reiterating" so we had to also include  "We  are ds106"----check! (We's are critical in open learning; there is no "I" in open learn".) 
5. this one I kind of broke--leave space at end and wave goodbye! :-(  Oh well! 

So here is my daily create for Saturday, September 21st, 2013. I used iMovie, and GarageBand to record my voice/voices you hear emphatically claiming "I am ds106/we are ds106". I chose the Will. i. am. Sesame street clip for several reasons. First, the whole idea of " i am ds106" made me think of how Will.i.am spells his name. I searched YT to see what songs or clips were available related to "being" and lo and behold, I found Will.i.am's Sesame Street song called "What I Am".  Since ds106 is all about fun, creativity, imagination, play, sharing and often the daily creates help us return to our inner child, Will.i.am singing with Cookie monster and other Sesame characters was rather fitting in my mind. Daft Punk's catchy "Around the World" was meant to emphasize just that, ds106 is global. I also included my first daily create, my ds106 tattoo and my metaphor for "the daily create idea of regular exercises of creativity."  I used MPEG Streamline to clip the Will.i.am video and the headlessds106 "about ds106 video".  Hope you enjoy watching how i.am. ds106 as much as I enjoyed making it! 

                 

ds106 Week 4 Audacious Audio

Week 4 is all about experimenting with sound by listening, creating radio bumpers, and stories using sound effects. Here are two radio bumpers I created for #ds106 Radio using Garage Band along with my first Sound Effect Story.

What Story Means and How It Matters

There's a high school chemistry teacher I know. He's unsatisfied with his job and his life. He can't afford to support his family on a teacher's salary, so he has to work a part time job at a car wash where his boss belittles him everyday. Just when he thought life couldn't throw him anymore curve balls, he's diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. His wife is 8 months pregnant, and he has a 16 year old son with cerebral palsy. He leads a pretty normal middle class life. He and his wife own a decent size home in a decent middle class suburb. But the cancer diagnosis will change everything for him and his family. They can lose it all because he can't afford to pay for the medical care he needs. It's criminal that his insurance company won't cover his surgery. He will die if he doesn't get the surgery and treatment! So, what can he do? His son Walt, Jr. set up a web page so people can donate money to help pay for his dad's surgery and treatment. They are such a loving family! My heart just aches for Walt, his wife and children! But...Walt has tragically chosen to become a meth cook and drug kingpin. 

Breaking Bad's main character Walter White
"I am the danger!" 

If you don't know, this is the story of Walter White, a fictional character from AMC's drama series Breaking Bad. I don't know this teacher because he doesn't exist in real life, or perhaps he exists in all of us. I hope not. When asked this week to think about what I associate with the word storytelling, and what storytelling means to me the first word that popped into my mind was emotion. Then I thought about the emotional roller coaster Breaking Bad creates for me and its millions of viewers each week.  Writer Vince Gilligan's story line has the classic elements of being a tragedy because of the main character's hubris, but it's fresh and original too, especially for TV. Never in the history of television, has there been this type of storytelling where the audience can be both deeply repulsed by the monster Walter White has become, yet empathize and root for him when he "kills with impunity to care for his family." What I associate with storytelling are story lines like Breaking Bad's, that are believable, relatable, haunting, and now and again, make us question our own moral integrity. During the act of storytelling, the narrator makes the characters so true to life, you forget you are listening, reading, or watching fiction because these characters remind us of ourselves; they make us wonder what we would do under the same circumstances, how far we would go, and thinking those thoughts take us into uncomfortable territory. Good storytelling is about evoking this type of intense emotional response in the audience. Vince Gilligan's storytelling style reaches deep down into our soul and creates this morally ambiguous world we can't make up our minds about. 

What comes to mind visually when you think of the word? 

Images, places, people, sounds? 

Who do you recall as telling you memorable stories?

However, storytelling is not always fiction based, and my parents and my grandfather come to mind when I think of the word as well... my grade school teachers, and my daughters too. These people have been riveting storytellers for me. I can still recall the moving stories my parents and grandfather shared about their childhood, their experiences as exiles to the U.S., family stories about relatives I never met and the family narratives we all rehash during holidays. Why is it that these stories never get old even when we've heard them a million times. Somehow the older we get the more we want to hear these old family stories to remind us of the good old days when life seemed so simple.

I also remember the first time my 7th grade English teacher Mrs. Williams read "The Cask of Amontillado" out loud to my class, and the day she told us a very personal story. She told us she had cancer, and she would not be returning for the rest of the year. She died before school ended that year. To this day I remember I hugged her before she left us, and how much I looked forward to her class because she was the best storyteller.

My daughters are in a league of their own as storytellers. These girls can spin a story at the drop of a hat that will bring a tear to your eye, and make you wonder where in the world they come up with such madness. When I need a laugh, their stories are funnier than any writer's on Saturday Night Live...at least they're funny to me. On very long car or plane rides, we have a family tradition of storytelling. It involves writing potentially sold out Broadway musicals with a specific storyline related to our destination. One of our lines and the recurring conflict is: "We're stranded on the streets of ..., but we're lucky we've got..." What comes out of their little heads... well, they're not so little anymore, is pure fun and imagination! Anyway, now that I've shared that publicly, when I have writer's block, I turn to either of them for inspiration. My daughters have told me stories of school bullies, broken hearts, true love, future dreams. I always listen attentively, and offer them my own stories as advice, guidance and solace in knowing I love them unconditionally forever. Storytelling achieves all of this too.

How would you describe the idea of storytelling to someone else? 

If an alien race invaded the earth tomorrow and enrolled in ds106 because they wanted to learn what storytelling entails I would say storytelling involves making other humans feel what someone else is feeling. It's about making another person or a group of people see that we are not alone in the feelings we feel. Storytelling is universal, and our being human makes it so that our stories may change time, place, or character type, but the conflicts, the emotions remain the same for every single human being on Earth.   

Expand on what it might mean to introduce the word digital. 

What changes? What is different? the same?

The digital in storytelling invites audiences to actively participate rather than passively consume the story. Because of the digital, stories on television, movie theaters, or online invite audiences to take an active role. We use    social media and networking to discuss the story with people around the world, with digital tools we can remix any aspect of the storyline we want, and share our original remixes digitally. The digital has redefined what it means to be the audience. If we choose we can even use the digital to connect with the storyteller to ask questions, offer praise or criticism. What remains the same is our storylines will always be about the human condition.    

Walt White's temporary partner Dale recites Walt Whitman's poem
to Walt to express his disillusionment with the world.  

       

What do you see or think when we say digital storytelling? 

When we say digital storytelling, I see endless opportunities for self-expression and connection. I think about how the storyteller manipulates images and sounds without relying on the written or spoken word to express his/her message, to evoke emotion and to invite us to participate in the act of storytelling. The digital storyteller develops a relationship with the audience and allows us to share the story within our digital network, or remix it as a gesture that the story inspired us to retell it in our own way. So with the spirit of digital remixing and storytelling in mind, here's my digital story of Walter White's Breaking Bad...Song of Walt! From the days of Robert Young (aging myself here..used to watch the reruns as a kid) as Father Knows Best to Walter White as the father of Walt, Jr. and surrogate father to Jesse Pinkman, our society's narratives have changed dramatically. Digital storytelling helps us express and perceive the reality of life in ways we never could before.

*Production Process---I used iMovie, MPEG Streamclip to clip the scenes I needed from YT.

                            

Nurse Ratched's Digital Nips and Tucks No More! - Week 2's #ds106 Reflection

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy (Personal Cyber-infrastructure) VS.
Nurse Ratchet (Public Ed Infrastructure)

Week 2 in #ds106 was tough because life got in the way, but nevertheless I learned how to make GIFs using some of my favorite movie scenes, and I managed to learn so much from Gardner Campbell through the assigned videos and article. As I watched, I had many strong emotions regarding the bags of gold because I am a former high school English teacher, and I know exactly what he meant. I taught for 20 years and decided that my health came first so I needed to pursue a new line of work. However, whenever I try to separate myself from the bizarro world of education, I have this "yearning" to continue being a teacher. It's who I am, what I'm good at, and always wanted to be since I was 5. Through the internet, I stay connected to this world, and like Gardner Campbell, I believe that "we can do better and we need to encourage that". This is why I MOOC and blog to collect and share the bags of gold as I build my personal cyber-infrastructure. Friends often ask me the same question a student asked Dr. Campbell in his video address to the ds106 class at University of Mary Washington: "What's the reason for blogging? What's the incentive for creating a personal cyber-infrastructure?" For me, it's exactly what Dr. Campbell explained. When I first discovered the "surprise generating machine" of the internet, although I did not know exactly what everything was, (and sometimes still don't) or how it all worked, I felt the only way I was going to figure it out was to delve right in and participate, to engage in the act of "bootstrapping". As Dr. Campbell explained, I needed to "proceed as if the doing in the dark will actually lead you to a mode of knowing" which is "the secret to all real open learning". Ironically, now that I'm outside the system, I have been able to globally network with hundreds of kindred spirits, so many like minded educators who have no problems sharing great ideas and resources with a stranger. Unfortunately, I had never experienced the authentic learning partnerships in face to face life I have formed digitally with complete strangers/fraingers as I like to call them. In face to face life, my PLN consisted of two or three teachers within my school, and a few former colleagues. Online, I collect and share bags of gold with hundreds of K-12 educators and professors from around the world. 

                    
Bag Of Gold from Tim Owens on Vimeo.

Why do people not want a bag of gold? 

Whenever I picked myself up by the bootstraps, and experimented, successfully, with podcasting, digital storytelling, blogging and other acts of content creation I faced resistance. Too often, there was no value recognized in any bag of gold I shared, or my students created. I persevered nonetheless. The problem is as Dr. Campbell stated with such finesse, people don't want bags of gold for a variety of reasons. To paraphrase him, when people are asked to use the digital, it "unlocks a realization, something about the act of asking people to establish an interesting and inquiry driven presence on the web that quickly exposes the parts of the community that aren't going to be authentic learning partners. People feel challenged because they aren't used to doing that in their professional lives." Some people do feel challenged being "substantive", even more so in a public global space that is the internet. But this mindset, this bad "habit of mind" is what we must fight to eradicate in our K-12 schools, so students can be successful globally networked citizens in HE and in life since our democracy is at stake.   

“Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we’ve already made for them won’t do. Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged.” – Gardner Campbell, A Personal Cyberinfrastructure

What are the potential benefits/drawbacks of personal cyber-infrastructures? 

"We should be teaching fundamentally and offering opportunities fundamentally for students' ability at a conceptual and practical level to knit together a meaningful network of their own within this larger space we cyber space we inhabit." - Gardner Campbell

Sadly, in some (generalizations are always dangerous, including this one) K-12

schools, students and teachers who develop personal cyber-infrastructures threaten to destroy the Nurse Ratched led infrastructure of public education. In some school districts, digital infrastructure is designed as either a weapon of mass distraction and/or destruction. Some districts claim in their double speak mission statements to have retrofitted schools with cutting edge tech to meet the needs of 21st century learners. However, there are no signs of "Narrating, Curating or Sharing" among staff or students. The retrofitting and training are led by Nurse Ratched's key players, distinct personality types, bureaucrats, who nip and tuck to maintain the status quo through control of the digital infrastructure. Computers, i-Pads, smart boards, laptop carts and other tech equipment often languish in storage closets because training is unavailable or costly; someone forgets to buy software, the purchasing process takes months or standardized test prep takes precedence over creation and critical thinking practice using the digital. When tech is used, it denies students the opportunity to create their own content, or equipment is obsolete, or too slow to effectively integrate in a lesson. Wikis so students can log on to static pages to answer multiple choice questions for standardized test prep is one of many examples of K-12 digital nip/tucks. Sometimes digital bags of gold are used for punishment too. Fall out of the principal's favor, all access to tech is denied! When Nurse Ratched's in control of the digital infrastructure, community building, collaboration, reflection and creation threaten her power because personal cyber infrastructures make others' incompetence and mediocrity very public...like frogs. 

Being John Malkovich "Dance of Despair and Disillusionment"

For me, it becomes a criminal offense when teachers and students are forbidden to become "contributors to the project of civilization" because they are forced to passively deliver and consume content through scripted teaching, common assessments, standardized test prep, multiple choice questions, timed writing tests which receive no feedback, required paper based activities and assessments in worksheets and workbooks. These practices suck the life out of students and teachers! As Dr. Campbell said in a democracy we need permission-less innovation. We need to "harness that potential so folks understand what it means to knit own network within the network independent of the conglomerates." What if students and teachers were asked "What would you like to have happen?"  

But, enough about Nurse Ratched, I root for a Chief Bromden/McMurphy escape, and the Rainbows and Unicorns, and not the crisis and aPOPcalypse Jim Groom speaks about in his TED talk! There's a ds106 bus on a freakin' world tour handing out bags of gold, and "Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Networking" is happening in many public K-12 schools who have effective leaders. Bags of gold in the hands of effective leaders make teachers and students billionaires! Through social networking sites so many K-12 educators have managed to escape Ratched's system to connect globally with brilliant and passionate educators and administrators who are not afraid to be public like really smart frogs. Educators are building their personal cyber-infrastructures to reflect on their practice, and obtain feedback from global peers. Web 2.0, featured on sites like freetech4teachers.com, and learning communities like Edmodo, Collaborize Classroom, KidBlog, Teachertube and hundreds of others, including MOOCs for professional development, allow K-12 educators and students to safely engage in Narrating, Curating and Sharing. 

What does this mode of communication say to you about the way ideas spread in a place like ds106?

The yearning for learning spreads like wildfire in learning spaces like ds106 and others because these are safe digital learning communities where as Jim Groom explained "discursive practical application of the personal cyber-infrastructure constantly reinforces and re-informs one another."  Learners and teachers aren't afraid to take creative risks, to share and riff others' brilliant ideas, and make them their own, or to receive and give feedback. Creativity becomes contagious and learners feed off each others' creations.  Good teachers, even before the birth of the internet, have always known, all learners need the freedom for self expression, and deserve opportunities to voice who they are, what they think, what they can do, what they want to learn, etc. Learners need opportunities to connect learning with real life experiences, to be exposed to a variety of print and non print texts to stimulate thinking, and to be a member of a thriving community where sharing is encouraged for continual growth and reflection.    

Some day in the near future, passive learning, like lobotomies, will be remembered with horror, shame and disgust! Personal cyber-infrastructures will be the norm. The days teaching and learning in Nurse Ratched's society are numbered because the bus is headed to everyone's town and the Reverend's driving!   

 
              

                                 

#ds106 "Disruptive Wonder" for Growth- Week One in Retrospect

Headless #ds106 has, as artist and designer Kelli Anderson puts it, "opened a humble backdoor into understanding a reality that is infinitely surprising." In one week, Headless #ds106 Bootcamp has challenged me to create daily, take risks, find my visual voice and digital identity, and fearlessly build my personal cyberinfrastructure so I can share my story with those who care to hear it. With 15 more weeks to go, I've got so much to learn, overcome and create! Reflection is necessary for growth, and encouraged in #ds106 participants, so here's my week's experiences as I faced bootcamp head on!

After I tattoed #ds106 on my arm, the most important lessons I learned this week are to:

1.) Continue to create my personal cyberinfrastructure, an expression coined by Gardner Campbell. 

2.) Disrupt, as Kelli Anderson urges, the "order that doesn't deserve my respect" through the creation of my personal cyberinfrastructure. 

3.) Leverage my personal cyberinfrastructure to create order out of life's chaos.

4.) Play, laugh, be goofy because life is way too short! 

5.) Daily create art for creation's sake. 

Sergeant Headless commanded #ds106 recruits to watch 3 videos during our initiation week, among them Kelli Anderson's Disruptive Wonder for Change. 

             

Headless Sarge asked us to think about:

What is disruptive wonder? What did you get out of the designs she shows? 

Disruptive wonder as defined by Kelli is the ability to see the hidden talents in everyday things and to confound the expectations we have of these small everyday objects and situations. When we repurpose or make small things that come "out of left field", we are "reassessing our complacent expectations about reality".  DS106's Daily Creates do just that! These exercises challenge us to use technology to create, re-contextualize, repurpose, remix, redefine, explore the "everyday" to make art for ourselves and for others to enjoy. By experimenting with various media, sharing and connecting on social networking platforms we experience a "surprising reality" of our lives. 

I enjoyed the makeshift record player invitations, the designs for the environmentally conscious popsicle truck, etc., but I was left disruptively wondering...

What if Kelli Anderson, and people in her position, "tinkered with the everyday" to disrupt "the order that doesn't deserve our respect" in those institutions that undermine, sabotage and kill our creativity and "exert an invisible authority over our brains" everyday in subtle, yet destructive ways.  For example, what if, as Kelli states, "we did something better with the basic pieces of our experience" to achieve education reform. We have a so called participatory culture because of technology, but are we leveraging all of its potential to bring about radical ed reform. 

So what if we could make art and engage in some subversive fun by:

• Designing a bogus standardized test, emailing it to school leaders, and demanding they pass it, or else they lose their positions. 
• Or, much like Kelli's intriguing phone calls to paper vendors, what if we called public schools across the country to ask school leaders: 

1. ...if they've been nice to their teachers on a particular day. 
2. ...if they recognize the worth of their teachers, and 
3. ...if they are helping students to discover their hidden talents. 

Kelli's "Believability Team" could become "The Morale Checkers Group"or "The Critical Thinking Enforcers!" Imagine uploading the telephone conversations to Soundcloud! 

Flash mobs stopping traffic as public service announcements about any of society's ills could also work...you never know, check out the link?! 

Aren't greeting cards, wedding invitations, ice cream trucks, and fake newspapers just mild disruptors of authority? Could we pull off radical acts of disruptive wonder for change to achieve all different types of reform?  

How can disruptive wonder of change improve the quality of life for hundreds, thousands or millions of people? Here's a real life example that's changing the lives of children. The bogus paper made international news, but then what? It's all highly creative, but is it disruptive? What changed for the better as a result of these exercises in disruptive wonder? Isn't change for the better what we want through these subversive acts? 

In terms of this learning experience, the video is fitting because it helps us think of why and how we need to "think outside the box", and the potential of cultivating ideas by examining the absurdity of some of society's rules. Kelli is recognized for her highly creative ability to do this. Yet, so many of us may be afraid to be creative, or never bother to explore that aspect of ourselves. She's telling us to think about our individual potential to be disruptive in small yet significant ways. Sometimes we avoid thinking of alternatives, or the hidden talent in the ordinary because it requires us to move out of comfort zone,  or even scarier yet, to be different and stand out among the crowd. Humans are weird that way; we prefer to do what everybody else is doing, and deal with what's familiar and known. Luckily there are people who are not afraid to be different. Kelli Anderson, just like this ds106 experience/ event, is not afraid of being different. She's encouraging us to try to "do something better by doing something unexpected" and seemingly absurd. Ultimately, it's up to us to discover how the unexpected and absurd should not be overlooked or dismissed in effecting change for the better. 

Opportunities like ds106 are moving us in the direction to challenge the status quo in education, but instead of calling it disruptive wonders of change, many aspects of our society first need disruptive wonders for growth. Headless ds106 is a disruptive wonder for "growth" project. It's experimental nature is helping participants gradually spread the word worldwide that learning can be headless for self directed learners willing to take risks, and we need not be afraid to move out of our comfort zones. There are still many growing pains as people get used to the idea of a headless learning experience, so it will take time for change to occur. 

Headless Sarge also encouraged us to consider why art is important after listening to art critic Robert Hughes

                            

Hughes' belief that only children have the ability to create and see art unburdened by society's expectations reinforced some of the same themes presented in Kelli Anderson's "The Disruptive Wonder of Change". Hughes' opinion about the absurdity of the avant-garde movements of the 60s and 70s supported Anderson's concept of disruptive wonder in the sense that many modern art movements created art that was expected to be countercultural but in their attempt to "confound expectations", these artists conceded to the "complacent expectations of that time period's reality." They created art that avoided feeling and conformed to expectations. Hughes tells us art is important when it genuinely evokes feeling which passes to meaning enabling viewers to "mediate between a sense of history and the experience of the world." "The lost paradise that art wants to give back to us as adults not children" is this relationship between feeling and meaning. 

And one more...consider the style and message about creativity in his RSA Animate video by Stephen Johnson from his book Where Ideas Come From 

     

I wondered why Steven Johnson's question about what are the spaces that have historically led to unusual rates of creativity and innovation is not one asked within the educational community more often. Of course, people talk about innovation in education all the time but our educational bureaucracies spend their time planning, "paralysis through analysis", instead of creating and innovating. Bureaucracies have no interest in innovation. The danger is we don't have 10, 20, 30 years to wait for an idea to catch on. By that time, an entire generation has been "moronitized", and then they "moronitize" the next. 

The video's style and message also helped me think about my own creative process, and how good ideas need time to incubate, and how I can use technology to build my creative spaces, or personal cyberinfrastructures. He talks about the patterns he's discovered in environments that are unusually innovative and what he's found is that ideas usually emerge as slow hunches which then collide with smaller hunches to form the big innovative ideas that bring about change. Sometimes people have half an idea and stumble upon the other half serendipitously. I find that it also depends on the individual. Steve Jobs comes to mind. Some individuals are born visionaries, and are gifted at seeing the potential of even the smallest ideas.      

More Questions for Reflections posed by Sergeant Headless: 

• How well do you feel you completed the requirements of the week's assignments?

I had fun completing this week's assignments with the exception of Saturday's challenge which I had no time to do. I plan to catch up tomorrow. I kept up throughout the week because my creative juices were flowing! I didn't let the fact that I can't draw keep me from creating. I didn't feel intimidated, embarrassed or judged by my inability to draw. I just put my dailycreates out there because the ds106 community made me feel welcomed and safe to take this type risk.    

• What gave you trouble? What did you enjoy most? What did you learn?

Time is always a factor. It's been a challenge to make the time to learn the digital tools to create, and then write blog posts about the production process. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed every aspect of daily creates, from production to sharing, but I admit I've neglected some people and responsibilities in F2F life to fully dedicate my time to my digital life. I learned how to make basic GIFs this week, how to use OneTrueMedia to edit existing video and add images. I also learned that there's hope to learn to draw!  

• What would you do differently? What questions do you have?

I need to consider creating a separate blog on Wordpress or Tumblr dedicated solely to #ds106 so I can learn all of the features, create categories and an "About Me" page. I also need to create a Soundcloud account. I have lots of questions about how to create sophisticated GIFs, video editing and badges like Talky Tina's for my fraingers. I asked her today, and she was very nice and said she would. I need to make time to read the ds106 handbook where I'll learn about more of the tools and will probably find answers to a lot of my production questions.  

I also need to remember to include the process I used to create a product and include a narration of the story behind it and my inspiration. I think I did that for the most part for all of my dailycreates this week. 

• What are some of the larger issues surrounding your work? Cultural/Societal implications?

The largest issues surrounding my work are being pressed for time and unfamiliarity with the digital tools to create a better, polished product. Can't think of any cultural or societal implications except my strong opinions about the need for educational reform...

DS106 has been a pleasurable disruption in my life! 

I'm ready to go head on with Bootcamp Week 2! 

Shoes, Anniversaries, and Wonder Woman!

So, yesterday was Giulia's birthday in ds106 world. Today Google said it was Rochelle's, (someone who submits a lot of the daily creates, I've noticed), and #ds106  is celebrating the 600th anniversary of the Daily Creates! We also can't forget it's the last day of the first week for #ds106 new recruits!  Wow, what a week of celebrations and accomplishments! Can you believe it? Seems like only yesterday we lost our heads!  

To commemorate today's momentous occasion, we are celebrating the 600th anniversary of Daily Creates by expressing 600 in a drawing without using numbers.  

Cleverly, Maddie thought of calories, Cathleen thought of a symbol to express longevity. I thought of shoes! Actually, at first I didn't! I thought of DC Comics, and then I screwed up because I didn't pay attention when I Googled, so I mistakenly drew a shoe logo.  I thought, grrreat! There goes my whole Superhero themed post I wanted to do! But...superheroes wear shoes too...really cool ones! I wear shoes...when I have to! And this week, the daily creates have made me feel like Wonder Woman in cool superhero shoes!  I've only experienced one week's worth of Daily Creates, but now, I don't think I can ever go back! The experience has unleashed my creative powers! I hope to be around to celebrate the 1000th anniversary, and if challenged again to express 1000 without numerals, maybe my drawing skills will have improved by then, and I'll be able to draw Judi Dench, (or is it Ralph Fiennes now?)...wishing Daily Creates a very happy anniversary.