My first animated GIF

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Ben Harwood

After seeing a call by Alan Levine on Twitter about a certain animated GIF festival under way, I began to see more of the familiar DS106 animated gif on different sites I follow. I’ve never made an animated gif before, and to be honest, I’ve never understood the cult-like fascination with them in DS106: “What do those guys do in DS106? Well, they make animated gifs. Word.” And so much more! What this means is I’ll start making many more animated gifs to keep the DS106 energy going over winter break. It wasn’t until I saw one by Andy Forgrave, Zack Dowell, Brian Lamb, and then the great Reverend himself, that I finally decided to give it a shot. I’m not one who’s inclined to follow tutorials in general. I end up learning much more about my own process while stumbling along the way toward the light. Having the community chime in via comments is especially helpful. Still rather new at the blogging scene compared to folks out there who model best practices and who’ve been at this since the beginning, I’ll follow their lead and leave comments enabled on my site. I’ve never understood why some well known and established bloggers disable comments on their sites. So, back to the lecture at hand, I’ve revise and improve thanks to you kind folks out there giving advice. While I know there’s a more acceptable way to do this with all due DIY artistic merit and pride in mind, here’s how I did it. I did a quick web search for animated gif generator and found Image Flip. Jim Groom’s Gun Crazy Gifs post is inspirational and right on the mark about the bigger picture context of American civilization in the wake of the Newtown tragedy. It really got me thinking about the obsession American culture, for good and bad, mostly worse, has for guns, violence and rugged-individualist machissimo. I chose Clint Eastwood in the unforgettable role of Dirty Harryin the most memorable scene from Sudden Impact. Harry soberly mutters early in the morning and before his first cup of coffee: “Go ahead, make my day.”

Using Image Flips’ markers, I isolated the segment and executed its automagical workflow to produce the animation. Only thing is, when it came time to embed it in a post, there wasn’t a share html embed code to use. I poked around a bit trying different code samples but to no avail. How does one get it disappear? Pretty lame. So I ended up downloading a trial copy of Screenflow and recorded about 2:30 minutes of my desktop playing the file. Then I used the cropping tool to isolate the clip alone and exported and uploaded to YouTube as an mp4. Voila! The Demo Copy watermark is there but hey, I’m now giffin’ it… sort of… not. My make-believe creation would be far more subtle and devious had I managed to conceal the video player controls at the bottom, set loop=true, etc. Almost fooled you, eh? Not too shabby for winging it and having a blast.

When North Korea met Austin Powers… on Twitter

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Ben Harwood

Last night, I once again was reminded in a very positive way just how connected I am with others on social media and Twitter in particular. Such powerful connections give rise to a sense of immediacy and proximity to real events as they occur. This also provide the basis for experimentation and creativity in ways that align with DS106, my favorite online community for digital storytelling. For example, as I came online after dinner, I started seeing news tweets flash by that North Korea had launched a missile. Indeed, it raced southwards and was spotted by the Japanese on the island of Okinawa.

Other news sources began to light up as well. I got a bit nervous thinking that perhaps something big was going down… yikes – just what is the payload in that rocket?? But shortly afterward, it was confirmed that North Korea had fired a rocket into orbit to launch its first satellite. In the end, all was fine… at least so it seemed. But this got me thinking about this country’s insane leadership and the nefarious ways of dictatorships in general. Something about a missile and evil of course took me back to Mike Myers as Dr. Evil et al. in Austin Powers II, right at the point when Dr. Evil and Mini-Me are launched into space.

This prompted me to send the following tweet to my followers: “Did North Korea just launch Dr. Evil into space? Someone call Austin Powers.” And wouldn’t you know, shortly after publishing it, Austin Powers responded to my tweet, through his own dynamic search of the Twitterverse, by making it one his favorites.

This could be a cool assignment for DS106 students: based on a real life event, engage historical figures (real or fictional) on Twitter. What’s ironic is I didn’t tweet this message at Austin Powers; in fact, I had no idea there was some character out there pretending to be Austin Powers! Could it be Mike Meyers, as in, could the real Mike Meyers stand up, please? This is also what makes Twitter so great- a place to create and co-create meaning with others while also keeping a watchful eye on authenticity, purpose, and one’s very own crap filter.

Using Polleverywhere to teach Greek translation

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Ben Harwood

The complete post is found here.

Using Polleverywhere for Greek translation.

ISD and Learning Theories revisited: re-discovering my Master’s work from ’04

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Ben Harwood

Back in 2004, I graduated from Penn State with a Master degree in Instructional Systems Design. With the steady increase of educational technology and technology tools in F2F and online learning, the College of Education has re-branded the department as Learning and Performance Systems. I’m really glad they kept the “Systems” piece in the title as this is such a key part of systems thinking and the classic “systematic approach” to design (i.e., the ADDIE model and others). On Friday, I’ll be teaching an “introduction to instructional design” online module. It’s a primer for the instructional technology student apprentices and program (ITAP), an initiative of the NY6 Consortium. Here is the reading list I put together for this short-class: RequiredReadingsTheoryandPractice Below are two video clips I created last week with yours truly starring in a one-man show, a cheerful talking head. You can also check out one of our student technology assistants and apprentice’s site here. Please make this budding blogger’s day by posting a comment!

It was a real treat for me was see that my design prototype is still “live” on an quiet test server at Penn State… Very cool and kudos to my IT pals in the College of Agricultural Sciences for maintaining it over the years. You can check out the Invasive Species website and the ISD primer videos below.

While classic instructional design approaches provide an important and critical lens through which to view any design or re-design of instruction (I think of Carol Twigg’s work in particular when it comes to redesign) constructivist theories continue to influence and energize my thinking and work in academic technology as it did back in 2004 as a graduate student and webmaster at Penn State. What a fun refresher to revisit this old stuff… gets me thinking in new ways that hopefully benefits others, not to me mention me. I guess it’s not that old after all! It might also be time to think about how I could be using this for work to further my research and even studies… à la MOOC or more formally back in grad school?

Overview of Operation Invasive Species (Master’s thesis based on this prototype I designed and built)

An instructional design primer

Learning about openness, the “cloud” and other topics

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Ben Harwood

Back in June, I co-taught a WordPress for Teaching and Learning workshop at the annual SUNY Instructional Technology Conference held in Stony Brook, NY. I attended this conference in Plattsburgh, NY a few years ago. It IS an exceptionally good conference — my colleagues at SUNY put on a great program, the facilities at Stony Brook were great. I had the opportunity to speak with Patrick Masson from UMassOnline. We’d been in touch back in the Spring when he found himself SIGMaster of a SIG on openness. A speaker was needed at the last minute… He sent out an email to the EDUCAUSE Openness Constituent Group listserv. I offered to present on my casual and informal experiences as a MOOCster, having participated on-and-off in various MOOCs last year. While the SIG was cancelled due to low enrollment, here’s a brief description of the presentation: “Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) seek to establish open and cost-free learning environments and may push online learning and professional development to the next frontier. What is it like to experience distance learning for the first-time as an open online student? What are the opportunities and challenges of being an open lifelong learner in MOOCs? I will share my observations as a casual observer and ³MOOCster² in 3 different MOOCs taken simultaneously in Spring 2012.”

And here’s a description of the actual meeting:

DESCRIPTION:
——————–
A culture of openness has begun taking root in the core of academia.
Universities around the world are embracing values of transparency,
collaboration, and open innovation as they move to adopt open source
software, make use of open educational resources and scholarly content and begin to explore open models of governance. Is a comprehensive shift towards openness in higher education a positive trend? What does this shift portend for institutional and educational transformation? How can universities in this area best leverage the opportunities this movement presents and mitigate some of the inherent challenges it poses?

This SIG will present a panel of individuals representing different open
initiatives underway throughout higher education, discuss their evolution
and potential impact, identify common challenges or issues posed, and
introduce consortia focused on promoting awareness, assessment and adoption in this area and opportunities to participate.

Participants should expect to come away with a broader understanding of the following questions:

– What is openness – (e.g. What are the essential values or components).
– How have open communities (open source as well as OCW, OER consortia)
organized themselves differently to deliver quality products and/or
services.
– How can institutions orient themselves to both participate in and partake
of open source communities, products and processes?

Michael Feldstein and others planned to present as well. It would have been a great SIG. Next time.

So back to the SUNY conference, Patrick and I had some good conversations before and after the Chancellor’s keynote. I asked him for book/article recommendations to learn more about openness as it applies to software design and management. Of course, I’m interested in “the Cloud” and “the Crowd” as in crowdsourcing, too. So, I’d like to share that list here as a reminder to me what I plan to read and blog about in the future.

Rosalyn Metz’s Educause Quarterly article, “Cloud Computing Explained”
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The Success of Open Source
The Wisdom of Crowds
Wikinomics
Agile Project Management

Have you read any of these works? Do you have other recommendations?