Category Archives: 4life

Revving Up the ds106 Engine

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

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*It is also a symbolic return to an era when the idea of working collaboratively online with others using one’s blog as the starting point and source of an online identity was not as crazy as it seems thirteen years later. Some of us are still believers.

Here’s the windup, and here’s the pitch

a baseball pitcher throwing ballsYou can see everyone’s AI pitches here: https://ds106.ai/category/aipitch/. I recommend looking them over because you may find a tool you can use in the upcoming weeks. I noticed some people didn’t link to the tools they promoted, which is surprising for a couple reasons. One, it’s like trying to sell a car without letting the customer see it, let alone take a test drive. And more importantly, hyperlinking is a fundamental element of digital text. This is the web, people! Without links, a post is just a strand of silk floating in the breeze.

I asked the great and wise Dr. Oblivion for his thoughts on this, and he responded in full attitude:

I didn’t specify that the pitch should link to the product because, to me, that’s just common sense. But maybe it’s not. Also, I suspect people have been trained to look for rules and rubrics and may not be used to the kind of freedom of interpretation they have here. But in any case, links to the tools are on the Week 8 page,  and there is a good variety so take a look and see if you can make use of any of them in your creative endeavors.

One tool I’ve been using regularly is the MP3 to TEXT tool from Converter.app. It saves me the trouble of transcribing Dr. Oblivion, which is great for adding grammatically correct captions to Youtube videos. It’s a great timesaver on podcasts too, when they don’t offer transcripts. There are a lot of other converters, but converter.app gives you something the others don’t: Free sentences! For example, at the end of Dr. Oblivion’s response above, it added “At this point we have some scenarios that are interested in producing the vision of the AI’s team.” I have no idea where that came from or why it did it. Does it hallucinate like ChatGPT? Does it go a little off the rails every once in a while like Dr. Oblivion? It’s an AI tool that goes above and beyond the call of duty.

Speaking of above and beyond, in a conference call the other day with Dr. Oblivion’s creator and inspiration, I shared the Aggressive Technologies website that Feli created. They were as impressed as I was. When we say ds106 is it is because people get inspired to go above and beyond and create amazing things like this. Now the challenge for the rest of the class is to see if there are ways to tie the site to their stories. Not that anyone has to, but it would be wonderful if they can.

AI106, DS106 & GITS – it’s about friendship and love

Discovering AI106 (DS106) was running again in 2024 gave me pause for thought. My pause wasn’t just on its theme of artificial intelligence or the Week 1 assignment of getting some inspiration by watching AI related films or reading AI-themed fiction. It was also Paul Bond’s Ghosts of future past blog post.

You had me at GITS

I’m a long time fan of 90s Ghost in the Shell (GITS) film and the later standalone sequel, Innocence. The two television series that make up Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex are also great.

Paul’s astute observations of AI in our current era and in the synthetic world of GITS and the big questions around what it might mean for our future all ring true. Yes, to this. Absolutely.

An enduring friendship

There’s another theme in GITS that really resonates with me (along with all the futuristic tech stuff). Friendship and love – the enduring friendship between Batou and Major.

The enduring friendship and love shared by Batou and Major is not dissimilar to the friendship and love (along with all futuristic tech stuff) shared by DS106 participants throughout its rich history spanning over a decade – it is #4LIFE, after all.

DS106 is back for 2024 in the synthetic-full-body-prosthesis-augmented-cybernetic form of AI106. And, I’m here once again.

But, as long as I’m here and we’ve come this far, I might as well stay awhile and see how it turns out.