Category Archives: ds106

Living in AI Oblivion

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.

Always Be Commenting

Jim and I had a discussion on the wonders of blog commenting earlier, and the recording is above. Commenting really is the glue of ds106, what makes a collection of bloggers into a community of creativity. It’s how we inspire each other and learn from each other and how we connect.

For comments to appear, they need to be moderated and approved, so we take a quick look at one way to do that. You can also approve comments, or not, in your WordPress dashboard. Akismet may be a useful plugin to add. It may ask for payment, but for personal use you can pay $0.

There is also some discussion of our friend, Dr. Oblivion, if he can be trusted and if his directives have been altered. This may need to be investigated further.

Gettin’ Medieval

Friend of Tom Woodward shared his discovery of an AI-generated rap based on The Canterbury Tales. That inspired me to ask Dr. Oblivion:

An Ask Dr. Oblivion notecard saying, "How might we envision AI through a rap mixtape of Chaucer?"

and his response:


Dr. O seems to think “We don’t need Skynet records taking over the charts,” but perhaps that has already started.

I was curious though. How would Dr. Oblivion handle archaic English? So I asked:

Please recite this verse so I can hear it in your voice:
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende

I had to ask a couple times before he would do it. I dare say his pronunciation is a little better than Suno’s, but what do I know. on a barely related note, I wonder if Suno could give a Middle English ska punk version of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto?

I’m sure to suffer in musical purgatory for that. I was trying to relate this to the Dr. Oblivion Intro assignment, but it went a bit off the rails. These AI generators can be fun in that they easily produce weird stuff, but then the challenge is to make something out of it. Sometimes it’s just a dead end.

Collect the whole set!

an array of trading cards

I saw Bryan Mathers’ Trading Card Remix on Mastodon:

 

View on Mastodon

 

and I thought, “This could be a cool way to visualize course characters.” Is there a trading card assignment though? If there wasn’t before, thanks to the magic of the Assignment Bank, there is now! It’s an easy and fun way to

Collateral coincidences

I watched the Michael Mann neo-noir classic Collateral last night. I was thinking about the idea of noir characters, and how this film shows a great example of the Innocent Bystander, a cab driver, a man with a plan, whose life is turned upside down by a random fare.

This segment, starting at 1:23 of the video, struck me as a metaphor for customizing our blog spaces: Taking the standard ride, seeing how the controls work, closing the door to focus, and adding the personal touches. As Jim put it:

Figuring out how to design the space wherein you live, work, and learn remains crucial and remains at the core of the ds106 experience.

How’s that for an unexpected coincidence?

I also wanted to do a visual or design assignment using the film. I told myself I would go to the fifth page of assignments and do one I found there. I was taken with the initial cab ride scene with Jamie Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith and thought it would be good for the Storytelling Collage assignment. Pinkett Smith does an impressive job of communicating with eyes and expressions, so I tried to capture some of that. Here are the shots I used:

  1. She tells him how to do his job
  2. He suggests a better route
  3. She barely gives him attention as she responds. The plexiglas partition is a concrete symbol of the divide between them
  4. But she thinks about it. Note that she’s no longer behind the partition.
  5. Exterior view of the tangle of roadways
  6. There’s a seriousness and depth about him that she finds attractive
  7. Another exterior, would not be out of place in a tech noir film
  8. There’s an openness and connection between them – closer together horizontally and also depth-wise. Note how the background is completely out of focus, All that matters is the tow of them.
  9. Love this shot, with the noir feel of shadow and light and the symbolism of the green light ahead of him and the red light behind

And here is the collage:

an arrangement of shots from the movie Collateral, illustrating a conversation leading to personal connection between a cab driver and passenger

I was thinking of it in terms of a page from a graphic novel, so the layout is a little more formal than the average collage. I pondered cropping images, but the director and cinematographer had them framed so perfectly that I thought it better to use them as is. I did try to use the arrangement to show them coming closer together.

Fortunately for me the scene was on Youtube. I used yt-dlp to download the video. At first the command didn’t work, so I looked up some directions.  They weren’t exactly what I needed, but they gave me the idea to put single quotes around the video URL, and that did the trick. I imported the video into iMovie and selected about twenty frames from the scene. Then I used PowerPoint as a canvas to arrange the stills, and exported the final arrangement as a JPG.

I think it works. I’m not sure if it says collage, but it conveys a version of the story. I’m not sure if the decision not to crop was the right one. I could have been more creative and expressive with design and arrangement otherwise, so perhaps I will consider revising it later. It was worthwhile though to give the scene a close reading and look at how the shots work internally and in combination.

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.

You Can’t Go Holm Again

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 powerful’s bidding; and a dark and claustrophobic atmosphere—oh 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.

Continue reading →

First Week Done…

This was an experience to go through, but luckily, I had fun! I learned that, unlike work, I do indeed need to work in posts, not pages (thank you, Maddie). I also learned about themes, got a better idea of tech noir, and that watching this type of content is incredibly existential yet entertaining. Until I realized that I needed to work on posts and not pages, I was very confused about where I was supposed to put my tags. I was happy with the fact that I had already learned how to use the majority of WordPress basics. This definitely helped me to quickly build pages in how I imagined them. Still, I am excited to explore more and get a better bandwidth of skill with everything.

So far, knock on wood, nothing has totally driven me crazy yet. I know that if I had been clueless about the basics, I definitely would have struggled a lot more. I have really enjoyed looking through designing themes and figuring out more ways to apply different blocks through my posts.

Mostly Relevant Goals!

Actually relevant goal

I really hope to get more used to WordPress controls as I use it for work as well. I am a Lab Aide in the Psychology department and while I know how to use the basics of WordPress, I trust that this class will allow me to have much more creative liberties with my designs! For work, we have designated hero blocks that we design around. I am excited about this class because I get to choose my own themes, designs, prompts, and can be more silly-goofy than professional.

School goal in general

I would like to start getting these tasks done earlier in the week, not just for this class. I didn’t quite realize the extent of the work I wanted to put into the different classes I was in. Now that I have been in it for a week, I feel more able to properly time manage my assignments; especially whatever these ones might include!

Helping hand goal

I would love to be able to learn more technological/creative feats to help my mom in her website endeavors.

Definitely a star critic

I would like to figure out more of what it’s like to truly review something. At least much more than the simple point of something was just good or bad. Hopefully, this will provide more practice in this endeavor!