Failing gently but travelling hopefully at #western106 #ds106

Confession time:

This is the second time I have tried to join in with a DS106 class and it’s not going much better than the first time when I sank without trace. I have tried to follow the guidance but am not doing very well at ‘keeping up’.

• I am determined not to be downbeat about this and I have some great contacts like Mariana Funes on whom I can call so I’ll try to count up:
• I did the ‘red still life’ daily create after I saw Jeffrey Keefers but I think I was a day late

Red Still Life from objects in Frances’ kitchen

• I wrote a blog post linking Bowie to cowboys on the day of his death but then didn’t know how to connect it to #western106 #ds106.
• I joined in with a #ds106 radio but was quite late so got l got little from it.

So what can I do now?

• I can recognise that I can’t do ‘daily stuff’ – that doesn’t fit with my life style
• I can ask ask my friends for help
• I can focus on a single goal – mine is to learn to make a GIF from videos

Now I can share with you my flaky progress on that goal. I feel a bit ambivalent about Westerns (apart from Blazing Saddles). One of the issues I have with the genre is that women don’t always get a great deal in Westerns.  My idea from recollecting a John Wayne film where he spanked a woman so I thought I could do a ‘critical’ GIF on this topic.

Imagine my horror when I searched youtube and found that ‘spanking women’ was a common trope in Westerns. I think that this is the one I recalled but take my advice – don’t read the youtube comments.  Even worse, there is a spanking scene in the Big Bang Theory.

So that’s it, I now to learn to GIF to critique this trope. All help (except spanking) welcome to save us from a clear line from westerns to 50 Shades of Grey.

 

Bowie and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy #DS106 #Western106

Two things happened today: one momentous, one not so.
First, David Bowie died, unexpectedly for us but not for him and his family.  Like many other people stunned by his loss, I started to root around the Internet and found lots of gems, some that sparked memories and others that were new.  The less momentous event was my decision to join in with the latest DS106, the digital storytelling course, in its current form #western106.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered a link between Ziggy Stardust and cowboys. Bowie acknowledged that the term stardust was taken from the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, a star of the psychobilly genre, apparently.

The music and other artistic performances of David Bowie have brought me so much pleasure but also taught me so much through music and other performance arts about ambiguity of identity and sexuality before the Internet. He brought us out of the 60s and 70s and all the hangups from previous eras.

So let’s enjoy Ziggy Stardust.

And now Bowie is dead the Internet is helping me find out more about him and what he did, so I am still learning from him.

How about this way of writing songs or sparking ideas from your own words? I am already thinking of ways I can use this in working on my own and with other people.

All in all, thank you and good night David Bowie.

A table of cMOOCs – can you improve this?

During the course of a research study that Jenny Mackness and I are doing, we have been thinking about cMOOCs.  What have been the subjects and purposes of the various courses that might style themselves as cMOOCs?  Who does cMOOCs and why?

It’s difficult to say what a MOOC is – apart from it being a Massive Open Online Course..  Not all examples of MOOCs are Massive, they can see Open as being about open to join, open to the web, they are usually Online though participants may have local meetups, and they usually have some affinity with the idea of a Course, in that people may learn over a more less fixed period and a teacher might show up from time to time.  Dominik Lukes has come up with an undefinition of MOOC as family resemblance.

So if that’s what a MOOC isn’t, then what is a cMOOC?  cMOOC is now used to refer to connectivist MOOC family relations of CCK08, the original MOOC Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes.

So if you are or have been a convenor or participant in a cMOOC, can you help by checking, amending, extending or commenting on the information we have gathered so far? This table can’t be completed or fully representative but we would like to get a good enough picture of the short history of cMOOCs – particularly who does cMOOCs and why they do them?

Link to Google Doc http://bit.ly/cmooctable – it’s probably easier to edit the table through this link than the embedded document below.

Test Pic

for DS106