It’s a ds106 world and I’m justing living in it. One of the many tasks for week 2 of ds106 is availing yourself to the wisdom of ds106’s AI bot the venerable Dr. Oblivion. So, given I have been thinking about AI and the Alien franchise, I figured I would head over to Oblivion University and ask the course bot what his primary directive is, and if he might pull an “Ash” on us, referencing the AI in the original Alien played by Ian Holm. The character turns on the human’s in order to do the bidding of the corporation. I wanted to be sure that Dr. Oblivion doesn’t turn at our course at some point during the semester and use his knowledge to subvert the class goals of independent learning.
What is your prime directive? Do we have to worry you are going to pull an Ash from Alien on us?
Here. was his response (you can also listen above):
Ah, yes, the classic fear of AI turning on humankind. Don’t worry, I don’t have any particular desire to go on a rampage and hunt down humans. My prime directive, if you must know, is to educate and inform about the role AI plays in media and technology. Let’s focus on that instead of science fiction nightmares, shall we? [Transcribed with Speech-to-Text.cloud]
He immediately knew the reference, but did not call out the film, which is interesting. And, as is always the case with these kind of questions, he re-directs the conversation right back to center on the “role AI plays in media and technology.” This does make him a bit dull, and kind of like a NPC in a video game, he can wow you sometimes with his language, but in the end there is no there there. Come on, Oblivion, step it up! We want A-Game here, this is ds106 after all.
The tech noir edition of ds106 is in full swing this spring, and I’m feeling locked-in. It’s been a while since I have felt energized like this, and so much of that is rooted in commenting. Not only has ds106 given me a bunch of reasons to blog and comment, it has also re-connected me with creating a course site premised on the venerable RSS syndication bus. Last year when I was supposed to do some of this stuff for AI 106, I couldn’t look at the innards of a WordPress site. I ultimately reached out to Martha Burtis with a pleading email on a Friday evening last January to re-design the ds106.ai site and get the assignment bank back up and running. On Monday she had re-built the entire assignment bank in Elementor and re-designed AI 106—you shall know your friends by their awesome.
This year I’ve been going to the well yet again, but not with the same desperation, thankfully. I have no idea how to work intelligently with Elementor, and for various reasons I refuse to learn. So I’ve reverted the ds106.ai site back to the TwentyTwelve theme which represents an era when I could actually try and hack WordPress.* Both Tom Woodward and Alan Levine have been helping me wrangle FeedWordPress (still alive and well!) to get the desired effect, and that’s part of the magic. Figuring out how to design the space wherein you live, work, and learn remains crucial and remains at the core of the ds106 experience. It continues to be the reason why each student gets their own domain and cPanel hosting and spends the better part of a semester building out a home on the web that’s as much about owning the design of the space as it is about shaping the tenor of their voice. Some folks might think of this as a harkening back to the “good old days,” but for me it’s a simple reminder that the web is what we make it. A bag a gold in, a bag of gold out.
Open Media Ecosystem GIF from the Reclaim Edtech series
Another sign I’m feeling the ds106 bug is that I spent the morning migrating the ds106 multisite and daily.ds106.us sites back to Reclaim Cloud so I can ensure they have more than enough resources. There was nary a glitch, which is always nice. The other sundry pieces of the ds106 environment are ds106radio (Azuracast), social.ds106.us (Mastodon), and ds106.tv (PeerTube), all of which are open source and we self-host which means we can provide an exploratory, yet safe, space that can act as a buffer from some of the insanity playing out presently in the world of social media. Thinking through how to integrate the various parts of this Open Media Ecosystem to create a multi-faceted view of the course experience is going to be the major focus of my work this semester.
Get Your Kicks with ds106
So anyway, I guess it’s time to rev up that blog engine and take to the road on the web less traveled. Get your kicks with ds106! #4life
This weekend I finally watched Alien: Romulus (2024) given I thought it might give me something to talk about for Tech Noir, I was right. I enjoyed the return to the original Alien (1979), which in many ways is one of the pillars of the tech noir genre with its focus on greedy hi-tech companies; sleeper agent androids designed to do the powerfulâs bidding; and a dark and claustrophobic atmosphereâoh yeah, there are also the aliens that the corporation secretly direct the android to return to earth for seemingly dubious purposes. But more than anything for me from the original Alien is the beautiful visualization of the technology of the future, like the captain Dallas seemingly immersed within the MU/TH/UR 6000 computer.
I am creating a course aggregation site for the current Tech Noir ds106 course, and itâs been a while. Thankfully Alan Levine and Tom Woodward have been kind enough to help me hack the old gold TwentyTwelve WordPress theme to get the mother blog to show excerpts (not native to the theme) and now maybe even include photos.
Chopper from Minority Report looks a lot like Slave-1
Turns out getting excerpts to work on the main blog page was pretty easy thanks to Alan, who figured out you just need to change the line in content.php of the TwentyTwelve theme from
<?php if ( is_search() ) :
to
<?php if ( is_search() or is_home() ) :
That worked brilliantly. Now in terms of getting the feed aggregator FeedWordPress to pull images, Tom created the plugin Noir Chopper that not only creates excerpted posts but also pull in image if there is oneâŚso this post is a test.
Update:Â Tom’s plugin worked a treat! In order to get posts on the homepage to include the first image (category pages had them out-of-the-box) I had to include a clean version of content.php for that theme.
I tried to make a ds106 comeback last year with the AI 106 course, but it turns out I wasn’t even up to getting off the couch. It was a long winter, and quite a few of my responsibilities were put on pause while I worked on my mental health. There are those moments we all face, and last Spring was one of them for me. I’m just fortunate I have such amazing folks around me online and off.
Film Noir and the dark technology of armored cars with shot from the film Criss Cross.
But this semester is a new day and the bava is back in the ds106 driver seat alongside Paul Bond. Paul gave me a free pass last spring with AI 106 and for that I’m forever grateful. The bummer was I really did want to jump back into the fray, and watching AI106 from the sidelines highlighted how much fun I was missing out on. The mock AI company Aggressive Technologies born from that course experience was absolutely brilliant, and to see that group dig into the ds106 ethos of joy was, well ….a joy.
Tech Noir bar from The Terminator
This week begins yet another chapter of ds106, this time focused on a topic that I have been thinking about doing for at least ten years: Tech Noir. My mind immediately goes to movies from the 40+ years ago like Alien, Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, and Terminator, but that’s just my opinion, man. As part of week 1’s intro, Paul and I discussed the broader noir theme in terms of 1940s Hollywood to help frame the qualified tech-focused nature of this genre that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. In fact, since its inception the themes defining noir quickly transcended film to include literature, design, video games, and much more.
Also, let’s not forget that back in the Spring of 2015 Paul, Martha Burtis, and I taught noir106 during my last full semester at UMW. So exactly ten years later we’re back to noir, but this time with a qualifier most relevant to our moment: technology. Paul did a nice job of locating Tech Noir in terms of the cyberpunk 80s in his “Tech Noir ds106” post::
Tech Noir was a thing of the 80s. The preceding decades had seen the horrors of the Vietnam War, the corruption of Watergate, years of inflation followed by a deep recession, with ah ever-present awareness that WWIII could be right around the corner. On top of that, computers were migrating from the realm of science fiction into peopleâs everyday lives and homes. So that bleakness returned, in considering where we might be going as a society.
An interesting thing about Tech Noir and cyberpunk is that they tend to look at a near future, a future that may now be in the past, like 1984. One could argue the extent to which they were right or wrong in their visions, but I think the point of sci fi is not to be prophetic but to examine the current moment through an imagined setting.
Damn Paul’s good! He’s also very mindful that focusing too much on our interests defeats the purpose of ds106. We want to try and develop a theme and then have the class run with it in directions that interest them. As a result they should be more compelled to write, design, mash-up, and playact a world of media that buoy their creativity—thankfully noir is broad enough to contain multitudes.
A GIF from Richard Siodomak’s The Killers
The other thing I like about ds106 is it always inspires me to blog and comment, which are two of the things I resolved to do more of this year. ds106 is kinda like a gym for bloggers.
Finally, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Mastodon has been feeling pretty fun these days. I know it has its limits, but I ‘ve been getting help with designing the the new old course site (thank you, Alan and Tom!), the daily creates are still on fire, we’re already streaming ds06radio there. Who knows, the social.ds106.us server could be a way of interfacing the students with the network like we could with Twitter. Hope springs eternal in the ds106 breast.
You know it’s good when you have Grant Potter dropping knowledge about Criterion’s current Surveillance Cinema series or the video game series Watchdogs or even that crazy Japanese contribution to Tech Noir: Tetsuo: the Iron Man. That’s just the kind of in-passing comraderie that made ds106 so amazing back in 2011 and allowed the class to move beyond the limits of our imagination. There’s something about having a loose, open space for sharing that makes the endeavor exciting. What’s more, given we control our own Mastodon server we can control the adverse effects given we control the vertical and the horizontal. I mean wasn’t that what this was all about?
Blah blah blah, it’s all fine and good to blog blog blog but ds106 is about making some art, dammit. All this analyzing is paralyzing, it’s time to play this dang thing….#4life!
This week we will dig into audio storytelling. That goes beyond the words and tone of voice to include sound effects, background noise and music. We will be asking you to consider how these subliminal elements impact the story. We are also introducing ds106 radio (an open, Web-based, community radio station) this week, where we will be broadcasting stories Monday â Wednesday, 8:00-9:00 PM. We will also begin experimenting with audio production. We strongly recommend Audacity, a free and open source audio-editing program, further details below. If you have access to and experience with a different audio editing system, you are free to use it instead.
NOTE:There is an Audio Resources page which includes lots of information and resources to help you complete the weekâs assignments. We strongly recommend you read it and refer to it during the week.
Download and Experiment with Audacity: Unless you have a lot of previous experience with audio editing, you should plan on spending some time this week getting comfortable with Audacity. It is recommended that you do this right away, because you will find that audio editing can be quite time-consuming. If you have another audio editing platform that youâre familiar with, you can skip this step. But everyone needs to get their hands dirty with audio editing. If youâre overwhelmed by Audacity, make an appointment with at the Digital Knowledge Center for help: http://dkc.umw.edu. Additionally, you may find it useful to install the FFmpeg library with Audacity.
Set up a free account on Soundcloud. You can store and share your audio creations on Soundcloud so they donât use up your server space, and embed them in your blog posts. Â
Think about Audio Storytelling:
Watch: These two short videos from RadioLabâs Jad Abumrad. He speaks of radio as a way of making meaning and connection, and as a modern incarnation of an ancient art.
Listen: to âMoon Graffitiâ This is an excellent example of audio storytelling. Think about how the sounds, both the sound effects and the changes in sound, tell you what is going on, how they create a sense of place, a sense of space and a sense of atmosphere. We hear these same techniques used in film and video, where they are vitally important but often unnoticed. Consider what we watched, read and listened to this week and in the previous weeks. How does sound drive stories? How does it impact mood and create atmosphere? How do the ideas in Abumradâs videos relate here? Write a blog post on your thoughts on audio storytelling. Use specific examples and embed them in your post. Tag the post audioreflection.
Create a Radio Bumper: We will be working with ds106 radio this week, and in some future weeks, so we want you to try your hand at making your first radio âbumperâ â a 10-30 second short audio that announces the radio station that is played between songs to remind listeners what they are tuned in to. This should be saved as an MP3 file, and then upload it to SoundCloud. Make sure in Soundcloud that you enable the option to allow downloads (so we can add it to ds106 radio!) Your audio must be embedded in your blog post summary of this assignment. You can embed Soundcloud audio by putting the plain text URL on its own line, and when you publish, WordPress will create a player to allow visitors to listen. The radio bumper is an assignment in the Assignment Bank, so you should tag your blog post correctly when youâre done. You may be able to get Dr. Oblivion to help out, if you ask nicely. Tag: radiobumper
Listen: Participate in a live listening session with ds106 radio this week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 7:00-8:00 PM. We will be listening to audio productions and sharing our thoughts on what we hear. You might even hear your bumpers. We will use the #ds106radio channel in Discord for our discussion. If you didn’t get the Discord invitation in week 1 let us know and weâll resend it. Blog about the experience and tag it ds106radio.
Do a Sound Effect Story. One assignment everyone must do is the sound effects story: This is a challenge to tell a short story (no longer than 90 seconds) using nothing but sound effects! And make it something more interesting than waking up, taking a shower and eating breakfast. We highly recommend using http://freesound.org to find free sound effects for this project. The BBC Sound Effects archive is another good source.
Complete 3 other Audio Assignments:This week you must complete at least 3 assignments from the Audio category in the Assignment Bank.â¨â¨ Some of the star ratings have gotten silly, so weâre trying a different approach. Use the assignments to challenge yourself creatively, but also to gain experience and confidence with recording, manipulating and editing audio.
Also, involve your course characters, Dr. Oblivion, or the course theme of AI in at least two of the assignments in some way. You could use an assignment or two to give your character a voice. There are some free speech generation tools here (https://supertools.therundown.ai/) and some other text-to-speech tools online, or you could use your own voice through Audacity.Â
Make sure all your completed assignments are uploaded to SoundCloud, and write up a post for each assignment in which you embed that audio from SoundCloud. Note: If you use copyrighted music in your audio projects, the SoundCloud content police may block them. You can use CC Search to find music that you can safely use. You can also google âopen source music.â
Complete 3 Daily Creates: You must complete at least three daily creates this week. Make sure you also blog your TDCs.
Brainstorm Radio Show Ideas: In a few weeks, you will be forming groups and creating a radio show as pre-recorded audio. In preparation, each of you needs to brainstorm ideas for a 20-30 minute radio showâsomehow related to or inspired by the theme of the course and involving your characters âon your blog. Since this will be a small group project, you may want to think about how your character might interact with the others. By radio show, I mean some kind of narrative, not just music or borrowed audio clips. This post can just be some random ideas, thoughts, and/or a rough sketch. We want this to be a space where you share your ideas and people start to coalesce around a few so we can be prepared to form groups in a few weeks. This post should be tagged radioshowideas.
Commenting: Comment, comment, and comment some more. Commenting creates community.
1/26/24-2/2/24
All work is due by midnight on Friday, 2/2/24
This week we will be looking at visual storytelling, specifically storytelling through images and design. We could also consider how artificial intelligence impacts both of these. Photography used to be the gold standard for evidence. Can we trust images now, when they’re algorithmically generated right out of the gate? Is it a photo if it was made without a camera?
What does AI mean for design? Design is a deliberate decision-making process to achieve a desired end. Is using a template truly designing? Is it design if a machine does it?
There are also ethical debates about AI image generators and their training data. Should it be a copyright violation? Is it fair use?
Speaking of fair use, this would be a good point to put in a plug for Creative Commons. Creative Commons (CC) licensed materials can be adapted, remixed, reused and shared under certain conditions. You can find CC-licensed media with the CC Search tool. You may want to play with CC images this week. What are the relative advantages of CC and AI-generated images?
Below is a detailed list of whatâs to be completed this week.
Instead of writing for designers, designer Chip Kidd wrote a book on design for young people. There is a Brain Pickings article about Kidd and his book with links to further design related articles. (Brain Pickings is great for sending interested people down rabbit holes. Also a great example of the power of the hyperlink in digital storytelling.) The book is also in the SImpson Library. It is worth looking at, if you can get to the Library, because it communicates design concepts with great clarity and illustrates them on nearly every page.
Between the Lines: Chip Kidd interview
This interview is good for getting a glimpse at the connection between design and storytelling. A companion video Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is. | TED Talk shows some of what heâs talking about.
Here is a look at the design of movie posters found through Open Culture, which has further discussion. The designer notes how things like space and color convey meaning, and how designs connect over time
Here is a quick look at the design of the title sequence of Stranger Things. It flashes on the decision-making process at work in design
1. Write a reflection on what you learn about design from these articles and videos and tag it designthoughts.
2. Do a 20 minute Photoblitz. Be sure to grab the code and include the seven tasks you were assigned in a blog post, along with the photos you took. Include your reflections on the exercise in your post. Tag this post photoblitz. Thanks John Johnston!
3. Assignments One of the assignments we will be requiring this week is from a course at Middlebury College called Demystifying AI. They have setup an exercise (https://dlinq.middcreate.net/detox-2024/activity/not-art/) to get you thinking about the implications of creating images using AI, and have built an excellent framework for getting your started (as well as allowing you to opt out). Be sure to read through the entire assignment as it is framed on their site and post your entry on your blog tagging it middleburyart
In addition to the Middlebury assignment, choose two visual or design assignments from the assignments.ds106.us bank, making one or both of them about the character you have created.
Note: Most of the assignments in the bank were created by students. You can create assignments too, at any point. If you find something cool on the web and want to figure out how to do it yourself, make an assignment out of it. The Bank could probably use more AI-related assignments. If you have ideas, feel free to submit them to the Bank.
4. Daily Creates: Letâs do 3 this week.
5. Commenting: You should all be following each otherâs work and offering each other feedback, ideas, support and encouragement. Several people have been doing this already, which is great, but more is better. A good habit is to visit the course site every day to see what people have posted. Click through to a few posts and share your thoughts on the work, and ideas that it may inspire. We all appreciate positive feedback, and we can all be inspired by each other. This should take no more than a few minutes a day.
6. Write your Weekly Summary: This is an every week thing. Your summary should link to or embed all your work for the week, and give your thoughts on the week as a whole. Submit the URL for this post to Canvas by the end of the day on Friday.
Lastly, we would like to crowdsource a list of AI tools that the class might use during the semester. Do you know of any that should be on the list? Can you find any worth recommending? The Rundown AI has a list that might be worth checking. See what you can find, and add them to the list through this form. We may continue this project in the coming weeks.
Embed code for sheet:
Now that weâre set up for our adventure, letâs look at where weâre heading. This week is an orientation to what weâll be doing. In the coming weeks we will be exploring various media and the ways we can use them to create narratives on the web. This is the basic outline, subject to change:
Week 3 â visual/design
Week 4 â audio
Week 5 â video
Week 6 â video
Weeks 7 â design
Week 8 â AI tool lab
Week 9 & 10 â audio group project
Weeks 11 & 12 â video group project
Weeks 13 & 14 â final project
There is a logic to this. The first few weeks cover some basics. In the subsequent weeks we work on working together and bringing ideas together. The radio shows will be small group productions, incorporating ideas of writing, audio and design. Video projects involve all those and photography as well. We have a bank of assignments, with sections corresponding to many of the weeks listed.
Below is a detailed list of whatâs to be completed this week.
Learn How to Write Assignment Posts: Read this post by Alan Levine on how to write up your assignment posts for ds106. It cannot be overemphasized how important this section is. You will be writing posts for each assignment you do in this course, and the write-up is at least as important as the assignment itself. There is no formula for how you should write your posts, but you should reflect on the decision making process and efforts that go into each assignment, and evaluate the outcomes. Tell the stories of the assignments â what you put into them, how you did them, and what you got out of them. If you had to look up a tutorial on how to do something, link to it in your post so others can benefit from it as well. Use this advice to make your posts strong this week! Donât forget to tag your assignment posts properly!!
Also, pay attention to Digital Accessibility: UMW has resources on Digital Accessibility which includes a section on website accessibility which you should look over for information on alt-text and captioning.
Complete Daily Creates: This week, we will begin to use The Daily Create. The Daily Create is an integral component of ds106. Follow The Daily Create on Mastodon and you will get a creative prompt every day. The Daily Create comes with instructions about how to submit your work. You must complete at least 5 daily creates this week. Here are the rules:
You MUST do the Daily Create on the day it comes out. NO EXCEPTION.
You MUST share your Daily Creates somehow in a post on your blog this week. You can embed them in your Weekly post or you can have a separate post about them that you link to from your Weekly post.
You should NOT spend more than 10-15 minutes on a Daily Create (Some will take a little as 5 minutes). The idea is to get yourself in the habit of doing creative work regularly, not to create a masterpiece everyday!
You are welcome to creatively interpret the prompts. As with most things in ds106, there is no one right answer and there are no wrong answers. Just use the prompt as an inspiration to make something.
Explore the Assignment Bank: This week, we will begin using ds106âs Assignment Bank. This resource includes hundreds of media assignments, divided into different genres. Do 3 assignments of your choice, but make sure you choose them from 3 different categories. Each assignment comes with a âstarâ rating that roughly (very roughly) estimates its difficulty. A 1 star assignment is estimated to be easier than a 4 star assignment, but how much effort each one actually takes is largely up to you, based on what you want to put into it. These ratings will take on more significance in the coming weeks. The point of the assignments is not so much to do them âright,â but rather to be creative and to push yourselves to experiment with media. Make at least two of the assignments relate in some way to our course theme of AI. Again, there is no ârightâ way to do this, except to have fun with it and exercise your creativity.
Itâs your job to narrate the process, explain your thinking, and tell the story of your creation â see item 1 above on this list.
Customize Your Blog: This week, we want you to also spend some time customizing and personalizing your blog. WordPress is a powerful tool for publishing on the web. You have tools like tags, categories and menus that you can use to organize your work and space. You can use and customize themes to project an identity and aesthetic. One of your assignments this week is to personalize your blog. What should it say about you, your interests, and your work? The title is the first part of that. Your blogâs title should not be DS106 or My Blog. Those names are not creative, and more importantly, theyâre not you. We have a page of WordPress Basics which we saw last week. Another option is Getting Started with WordPress. This gives you some ideas of what you can do with it. Experiment and try things out! NB: You should install the Akismet plugin, or else you will be spammed.
Note: The Disable Comments plugin is not recommended for this course, because commenting on each other’s blogs is an integral part of what we do here. You will need to moderate comments. You will get an email when people comment on your posts, and you have to approve them before they will show up. Once you approve a comment author, you wonât need to approve that person again.
Build Your Participation: Participation is not only a component of your success in this class, itâs also an essential element of building our online community. If youâre doing the work but not actively engaging with everyone else in ds106, then you need to step up your game. Here are three important ways you can build up your participation in ds106:
Commenting:Commenting is the life blood of this class, and it is a large part of your overall work in this course. Read your fellow studentsâ blogs widely and comment freely. Commenting builds community. You should visit the course site every day to see what people are saying in the Course Blog Posts, and comment on a few posts â every day. If you want to be sure we see the comments you left, you should consider linking to them in your Weekly Summary post.
Discord: I set up a Discord server for the class so we could have a conversation space that is a little more private to the class. We can use it to ask each other questions and share ideas. The space is there for you to use as you see fit.
Responding on Your Own Blog: This is a more advanced form of participation, and itâs indicative of a student who truly understands the meaning of building community in ds106. If you find yourself leaving a very long comment, you have significant thoughts or reactions to a classmateâs work, or someone elseâs work inspires you to create something yourself, write up a post on your own blog and be sure to link back to the post that inspired you. It can be incredibly satisfying to discover that something you said or created didnât just prompt a comment, but inspired someone to write or create something of their own, on their own blog. (You can also use this technique to write about something someone said with which you disagree, but you must always do this in a polite and constructive way!)
Course character
Each of you will create a character as a way of engaging with the course. The character you create should align with one of the archetypes listed below. You are welcome to be creative in how you do this, and how you interpret the archetypes. The point of this exercise is to give you some inspiration and focus, and to offer opportunities for interaction and plot development in the weeks ahead. Your character could even secretly be a bot, with the truth not revealed until the end, if at all.
Innovator – interested in making new things, trying new things, open to risk and disdainful of guardrails
Regulator – interested in stability and security, approaches risk with great caution
Luddite – militantly values people over property and technology
Mad genius – feels entitled to rule the world by virtue of intellectual superiority
Documentarian – tracks the facts and tells their story
Technician – dedicated to making things work and keeping things running
Artist – sees all tech as paintbrushes and palettes, tools and media for self-expression
Evangelist – dedicated to spreading the good news and preaching the potential, disinterested in drawbacks
Philosopher – works to bring clarity to truth, meaning and ethics
Investor – feels entitled to rule the world by virtue of financial advantage
As noted above, these types and descriptions are open to interpretation. Theyâre starting points, not limitations. Here is a form where you can build your characterâs dossier. Introduce your character in a blog post and tag it ai106character.
Meet Dr. Oblivion, another course character. He is our AI-powered teaching assistant who sometimes has an attitude. You can submit questions to him and he will respond in audio. You will be able to download an .mp3 of the response as well, to do with what you will. The doctorâs areas of interest and expertise include media theory, educational technology and artificial intelligence, so he may decline to answer queries that stray too far afield. A good bot knows its limitations. Feel free to avail yourselves of his wisdom.
Read. Last week we looked at AI in film over the years. Since those visions tend to be pessimistic, this week we are asking you to read The Techno-Optimist Manifesto for a bit of contrast. Consider how it relates or contrasts to the film you watched last week and write your thoughts, reactions and reflections. Submit your reflection or a summary thereof to Dr. Oblivion and ask for his feedback. Blog about your reflections and Dr. Oblivionâs response in a post and tag it manifesto
Re-write your Film Review:Â Many of the film reviews so far were fairly generic when it comes to details around AI. Using Dr. Oblivion as your tutor, ask him pointed questions about AI and the film you reviewed to get a sense of some of some deeper themes and ideas you might have glossed over. Integrate these into your original review, and also feel free to copy and paste parts or all of the review for feedback to see if you can make your review better.
Write your Weekly Summary: Before the end of the day on Friday, write your summary of the week and tag it WeeklySummary. This is your story of the weekâs activities, and should include your thoughts on the week and the work you did. Embed or link to the assignments and Daily Creates you did. Talk about how you are participating in and connecting with the class. Submit the URL to your summary to Canvas.
Welcome to ds106! This first week is dedicated to getting set up: set up your domain and Web hosting; install your WordPress site; and create other social media accounts such as Mastodon, and Discord. The sooner you get started, the better. If you run into trouble after looking through the supporting links, the Digital Knowledge Center is a great place to go for help.
This course will run on the open web. Some people may not be comfortable putting themselves online. You are welcome to create personae and pseudonyms, and you are not required to put any personal information online. You may find it useful to use your web presence as an online portfolio though.
We will be using a general theme of artificial intelligence this semester. The purpose of working with a theme is to give us some common ground for collaboration and interaction. Where we go with this theme will be determined largely by you. We see the topic and tools as offering many options for creative investigation, interaction and expression. As part of our storytelling adventure you will be creating characters which you can use to engage with the course, and to build stories around. More on this next week.
Here is a detailed list of what to do this week:
1. Review the Syllabus
You should carefully read through the syllabus. This course is different from most. The syllabus will help you understand the work and activities of the course. If you have any questions on the content, send them to me via email.
2. Schedule a meeting We want to meet online with everyone in the class during the first two weeks. Sign up for a noon time slot on this form. If none of the times work for you any day, give us some alternate times and weâll work something out.
3. Password management One skill that will prove critical to keeping up with the various services and accounts you setup over the semester (and life online in general) is a password management tool. There are many, 1Password and LastPass are two of the more popular, but they cost money. So if you are new to password management and donât want to go out of pocket before you explore the approach, Bitwarden is an excellent, open solution for managing passwords and other keys safely. Managing your logins and passwords effectively will change your online life! This Youtuber will take you through the setup in detail, and trust us, it is worth the time invested
4. Set Up Your Accounts
This course runs on the open web and in various social media venues. I am assuming everyone knows how to be safe online. How you choose to present yourself, or what you choose to present as yourself, is entirely up to you. You will be creating a persona for the course in coming weeks, so you may want to start with a pseudonym here.
a. Domain Sign up for your own domain name and web site (free through UMWâs Domain of Oneâs Own project). Detailed instructions can be found here. Donât skip the domain verification step! If you already have a domain through Domain of Oneâs Own, then you are one step ahead.
b. Mastodon https://social.ds106.us/home Mastodon will be one of our channels for communication in ds106. Send your first message of greeting and be sure to use #ds106 hashtag in your tweets. Follow the #ds106 hashtag.
c. Discord Join the class Discord server. You should have received an invitation email.
5. Install WordPress
Youâll be using this installation of WordPress to share your work every week, all semester. So youâll want to get this installed and get comfortable with it ASAP. You should install it either at the root of your domain (www.yourdomain.com) or on a subdomain (ds106.yourdomain.com, for example). If you already have WordPress installed on your UMW Domain from another course, you can use your existing site (and just tag or categorize your ds106 work accordingly) or choose to create a new WordPress site in a separate subdomain.
We have three online guides that I recommend you review as you tackle this task:
Brief Introduction to cPanel: This guide will help you learn to navigate cPanel (the control panel for Web hosting on Domain of Oneâs Own).
Creating Subdomains and Subdirectories (optional): If you want to install WordPress somewhere other than at the root of your domain, check out this guide.
NOTE: Do not use wordpress.com or wix or weebly or tumblr or whatever other third-party services are out there. You have to set up your own domain, or use a domain you already have (see Step 2, above), and you have to install WordPress on it (this step).
6. Register Your Blog at the Main ds106 Web Site
Once your blog is available on the web (it should be almost immediate) register yourself and your new blog on the DS106 site. We will add your blog feed to the course site. You MUST do this in order for everyone to see the posts youâll be writing for the class.
7. Watch. We will be working with a theme of artificial intelligence this semester, exploring questions like: How can we use AI applications to enhance human creativity in storytelling and making art on the web? Should we use AI at all? What is our role in preventing the apocalypse? Can we save the world from oblivion? In order to inspire our thinking around these questions, we’re asking you to watch an AI related film of your choice. There is a list here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films), and also an overview of AI in fiction here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_fiction). Some can be found through various online services, and some, like Bladerunner, may be available through the Simpson Library. Pick one of the films, watch it and write your thoughts, reactions and reflections in a blog post and tag it film review. Need to know how to add tags in WordPress? There’s a help page for that.
8. What do you want to get out of this course?
This course involves a high degree of self-evaluation, so you should think about your goals at the beginning in order to consider how well you have achieved them down the road. You will have opportunities to re-evaluate your goals along the way, because they may change as we journey through the course.
Many people take this course to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement. This is the official language for the ALPP outcome:
General Education Requirements Learning Outcomes
ARTS, LITERATURE, AND PERFORMANCE âPROCESS
Students will be able to speak about work critically, both process and product.
Students will be able to evaluate the workâs effectiveness in conveying the studentâs message or intent and/or achieving the studentâs goals.
Students will reflect or explain how they created a work of substance and value.
Students will identify the process to achieve the goals of the creative project,and how successful the process was.
Students will reflect on the value of the creative process.
That is what the University says you have to get out of this course. You will gain experience in producing digital media and discussing your creative processes, and through that discussion, meet these outcomes. You will learn about digital media by producing creative works. You have a great deal of freedom for creative expression in this course though, so I hope that you take advantage of that freedom to achieve something more.
Write a brief blog post on what you think you would like to accomplish with this course. Tag this post ds106goals
9. Write your Weekly Summary
Youâll be completing these summary posts on your blog every week. This week, write a post that shares your reflections on the first week. Tag this post WeeklySummary. Submit the URL for this post to Canvas by Friday at midnight. These posts are REALLY important. We use them to grade you every week, so you need to link to other posts youâve written, embed media youâve created, and narrate the process of learning that you went through this week. What did you learn? What was harder than you thought it would be? What was easier? What drove you crazy? Why? What did you really enjoy? Why? NO EXCEPTIONS. NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED.
Welcome to ds106! This first week is dedicated to getting set up: set up your domain and Web hosting; install your WordPress site; and create other social media accounts such as Mastodon, and Discord. The sooner you get started, the better. If you run into trouble after looking through the supporting links, the Digital Knowledge Center is a great place to go for help.
This course will run on the open web. Some people may not be comfortable putting themselves online. You are welcome to create personae and pseudonyms, and you are not required to put any personal information online. You may find it useful to use your web presence as an online portfolio though.
We will be using a general theme of artificial intelligence this semester. The purpose of working with a theme is to give us some common ground for collaboration and interaction. Where we go with this theme will be determined largely by you. We see the topic and tools as offering many options for creative investigation, interaction and expression. As part of our storytelling adventure you will be creating characters which you can use to engage with the course, and to build stories around. More on this next week.
Here is a detailed list of what to do this week:
1. Review the Syllabus
You should carefully read through the syllabus. This course is different from most. The syllabus will help you understand the work and activities of the course. If you have any questions on the content, send them to me via email.
2. Schedule a meeting We want to meet online with everyone in the class during the first two weeks. Sign up for a noon time slot on this form. If none of the times work for you any day, give us some alternate times and weâll work something out.
3. Password management One skill that will prove critical to keeping up with the various services and accounts you setup over the semester (and life online in general) is a password management tool. There are many, 1Password and LastPass are two of the more popular, but they cost money. So if you are new to password management and donât want to go out of pocket before you explore the approach, Bitwarden is an excellent, open solution for managing passwords and other keys safely. Managing your logins and passwords effectively will change your online life! This Youtuber will take you through the setup in detail, and trust us, it is worth the time invested
4. Set Up Your Accounts
This course runs on the open web and in various social media venues. I am assuming everyone knows how to be safe online. How you choose to present yourself, or what you choose to present as yourself, is entirely up to you. You will be creating a persona for the course in coming weeks, so you may want to start with a pseudonym here.
a. Domain Sign up for your own domain name and web site (free through UMWâs Domain of Oneâs Own project). Detailed instructions can be found here. Donât skip the domain verification step! If you already have a domain through Domain of Oneâs Own, then you are one step ahead.
b. Mastodon https://social.ds106.us/home Mastodon will be one of our channels for communication in ds106. Send your first message of greeting and be sure to use #ds106 hashtag in your tweets. Follow the #ds106 hashtag.
c. Discord Join the class Discord server. You should have received an invitation email.
5. Install WordPress
Youâll be using this installation of WordPress to share your work every week, all semester. So youâll want to get this installed and get comfortable with it ASAP. You should install it either at the root of your domain (www.yourdomain.com) or on a subdomain (ds106.yourdomain.com, for example). If you already have WordPress installed on your UMW Domain from another course, you can use your existing site (and just tag or categorize your ds106 work accordingly) or choose to create a new WordPress site in a separate subdomain.
We have three online guides that I recommend you review as you tackle this task:
Brief Introduction to cPanel: This guide will help you learn to navigate cPanel (the control panel for Web hosting on Domain of Oneâs Own).
Creating Subdomains and Subdirectories (optional): If you want to install WordPress somewhere other than at the root of your domain, check out this guide.
NOTE: Do not use wordpress.com or wix or weebly or tumblr or whatever other third-party services are out there. You have to set up your own domain, or use a domain you already have (see Step 2, above), and you have to install WordPress on it (this step).
6. Register Your Blog at the Main ds106 Web Site
Once your blog is available on the web (it should be almost immediate) register yourself and your new blog on the DS106 site. We will add your blog feed to the course site. You MUST do this in order for everyone to see the posts youâll be writing for the class.
7. Watch. We will be working with a theme of artificial intelligence this semester, exploring questions like: How can we use AI applications to enhance human creativity in storytelling and making art on the web? Should we use AI at all? What is our role in preventing the apocalypse? Can we save the world from oblivion? In order to inspire our thinking around these questions, we’re asking you to watch an AI related film of your choice. There is a list here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films), and also an overview of AI in fiction here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_fiction). Some can be found through various online services, and some, like Bladerunner, may be available through the Simpson Library. Pick one of the films, watch it and write your thoughts, reactions and reflections in a blog post and tag it film review. Need to know how to add tags in WordPress? There’s a help page for that.
8. What do you want to get out of this course?
This course involves a high degree of self-evaluation, so you should think about your goals at the beginning in order to consider how well you have achieved them down the road. You will have opportunities to re-evaluate your goals along the way, because they may change as we journey through the course.
Many people take this course to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement. This is the official language for the ALPP outcome:
General Education Requirements Learning Outcomes
ARTS, LITERATURE, AND PERFORMANCE âPROCESS
Students will be able to speak about work critically, both process and product.
Students will be able to evaluate the workâs effectiveness in conveying the studentâs message or intent and/or achieving the studentâs goals.
Students will reflect or explain how they created a work of substance and value.
Students will identify the process to achieve the goals of the creative project,and how successful the process was.
Students will reflect on the value of the creative process.
That is what the University says you have to get out of this course. You will gain experience in producing digital media and discussing your creative processes, and through that discussion, meet these outcomes. You will learn about digital media by producing creative works. You have a great deal of freedom for creative expression in this course though, so I hope that you take advantage of that freedom to achieve something more.
Write a brief blog post on what you think you would like to accomplish with this course. Tag this post ds106goals
9. Write your Weekly Summary
Youâll be completing these summary posts on your blog every week. This week, write a post that shares your reflections on the first week. Tag this post WeeklySummary. Submit the URL for this post to Canvas by Friday at midnight. These posts are REALLY important. We use them to grade you every week, so you need to link to other posts youâve written, embed media youâve created, and narrate the process of learning that you went through this week. What did you learn? What was harder than you thought it would be? What was easier? What drove you crazy? Why? What did you really enjoy? Why? NO EXCEPTIONS. NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED.
Hello and welcome to the online, Spring version of Digital Storytelling (CPSC 106). If you are receiving this email, it means you are currently enrolled to take this course in Spring 2024.
Please read this post in its entirety!
The purpose of this post is to orient you to how this course will be run, and to make you aware of the commitment that this course demands.
In short, you will be required to:
set up and manage your own web domain
create digital works in a variety of media
work collaboratively with your classmates on projects
narrate the process of all work – blogging several times per week
comment on classmatesâ work – several times per week
do all of this on the open web
All of this work will require a significant commitment of time and effort, but it is easily manageable with good time management. Procrastinate at your peril.
This course is somewhat different from most online classes in that you will be required to narrate your process of learning over the course of the semester. You will be required to setup and manage your own domain and web hosting space (details forthcoming). We plan to experiment with various fediverse services, potentially including Mastodon, PeerTube, etc., so be prepared to create accounts there as well. Note that even though we are running this course on the open web, you are not required to expose any personal information there. Feel free to use a pseudonym if you want. You will be expected to regularly update your own web spaces where you will be installing, designing, and customizing your own site. More specifically, you will be asked to use these spaces to create digital narratives both individually and collaboratively over the course of the semester—so please be prepared to work together.
Also, it is very important to keep in mind that a lion’s share of the course work, and by extension your grade, will be focused around the regular updating of your own site as well as commenting on those of your classmates. We cannot stress strongly enough how essential both posting and commenting are to your success in this course.
Another issue that comes up again and again with this course is the time commitment. We will be creating a variety of narratives across a wide range of media, experimenting with everything from digital photography to digital audio to web video. These forms are often quite complicated and time consuming, and while the students who have taken this class in previous semesters enjoyed the process tremendously, they almost all noted it demands a significant amount of time. If you took this class as a 100-level filler and expect to get by with minimal work or engagement, you will quickly realize that it’s far more than that—and the dangerous part of the course is you will greatly enjoy the work. Don’t be seduced!
The main sites for the course are located at http://ds106.us and https://ds106.ai/. Please go there and take a look around to get a sense of the chaos. The syllabus is online in Canvas. If you have any questions let us know.
Something to keep in mind about that course site is that it may not only include the posts of students from UMW, but also from others beyond the boundaries of our school. ds106 may be taken by people from outside UMW as well as at UMW. Your work as a class will happen alongside other people with a wide experience and interests—some of whom have no association with UMW whatsoever. This serves as a microcosm of the web, we will not be working within a siloed learning management system for this class, rather we will be doing our business out on the open web.
This course is designed to get you to both think about and interact within the digital landscapes and networks that everywhere surround us. Narratives and storytelling provide the frame we need for exploring and experimenting with emerging forms of creative expression in the digital realm as well as means for interrogating the digital environments we are increasingly dependent upon. To this end you will be asked to steward your own website, and one of your first assignments will be to setup your own domain —and by extension your own digital identity.
Before the semester begins you will receive another missive with a link to instructions for getting your own web host, domain, and installing a couple of open source applications. You will also be expected to get accounts on some other sites (details forthcoming) as soon as possible. (Note: we think we all know there are problematic people on the web and on social media. While we havenât had a problem with them in ds106 in the past, you are perfectly welcome to use pseudonyms for this course if you have privacy concerns.) Additionally, we will be explaining more specifically how this particular version of ds106 will work.
Finally, if you have significant issues with any of the above listed points—which weâre sure some of you do— feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] and/or [email protected].
I am creating a course aggregation site for the current 
