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It’s been 12 or 13 years since its inception and I must say it’s kind of wild that ds106 won’t die. That’s gotta say something about how awesome it was/is/will be, right? I guess it really is #4life!
Few people have done more over the past decade to keep this course chugging along than the great Paul Bond. So, when Paul approached me with the idea of putting ds106 on trial at Reclaim Open, I was in. Paul and I have worked together over the years on a few classes, and ds106 was just one of them. We co-taught the True Crime course as well as the Internet Course at UMW, both of which were laboratory experiments in the spirit of the hallowed ds106. So when Paul framed the session as a trial we immediately went back to our True Crime roots.
Paul decided to frame the session as a sensational trial using the Aesthetic of the colonial American trials often predicated on a public display of shame and condemnation. Paul wrote the script, created the awesome trial poster above, and essentially did all the work. He was to be the accused, Martha Burtis the ornery judge, I was type-cast as the boisterous prosecutor, and the audience played the jury. It was really quite fun.
To promote the talk, Paul not only hung the poster in the main conference area during the art fair, but we also staged a short, impromptu performance wherein Paul was seated near the poster and I gathered the attention of the group loudly and started listing his crimes against ds106, while imploring attendees to join the session later that day to find this miscreant guilty of….
I mean, that list of abuses is pretty awesome, no? Paul is pretty awesome, and once again he delivers for ds106 because he’s definitely guilty of being #4life! You can see the entire session below:
Both the impromptu public shaming and the official trial were loose, rough, and a total blast, much in the spirit of ds106. But what was even cooler was the response from the audience calling for more art, dammit. It was even floated that the whole trial was just a ruse to re-engage some of the original ds106 crew to get the band back together. I can neither confirm nor deny any of this, but I will say after seeing what Michael Branson Smith did with the A.I. Levine session at Reclaim Open Paul, Martha, and I decided we are interested in creating a class for Spring 2024 that would essentially be a ds106 course focused on AI. Any folks interested in collaborating on such a project? Any schools willing to throw a course at it? Or have us teach a course for your campus? Let us know.
Dr. Oblivion!
A ds106 focused on AI means we may be able to coax Dr. oblivion out of hiding to run this course. He was always a staunch champion of interrogating the contested future of digital storytelling, so it may be high time!
Not that anyone is keeping score… well I am! For 2023 my double daily habits, the DS106 Daily Create and my Daily Flickr Photo routine have notched another perfect month, bringing both to 90 completions at the end of March, the 90th day of the year.
This follows my streaks for both January and Feburary. Can this blistering pace be maintained? Welcome to March,in like a daily creator and out like a daily photographer, celebrated in the images above of both challenges on the third day of the third month.
For Flickr on March 3, my daily photo….
And my Daily Create response for March 3 covers my new outlet of “AImocking”.
@ds106dc s #dailycreate #tdc4067 #ds106 Prove that you are human… good thing you did not step in it! pic.twitter.com/cfFlYBaFQj
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 3, 2023
Not sure who cares to see what I am doing here, but given the reduction of creativity to what pops out of a black box after entering the 34th version of a prompt… all of these are generated by”CI”– CogDog Irreverence. For this month, maybe just a few more pairs of responses by date.
The Daily Creates this month featured a nifty range of challenges using web generators or randomizers I’ve not seen before. The prescription generator for TDC4075 was one that did on small thing well:
@ds106dc #tdc4075 #ds106 Listen to Dr. Hackenbush, not a hack in the bush at all… pic.twitter.com/WthLPhfhpC
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 11, 2023
My photo for the same day? My favorite prescription for making use of those bananas that have been out a bit too long.
The photo for this day was easy to pick as it was the first day we spotted our local fox dad named Watson standing guard outside the den where we know/hope the pups are coming out soon. Spotted out the window with the telephoto lens.
I can only arm wave a connection to the Daily Create for that day (I posted a day late) to “Write (in blue font) a one-liner, wish, wise-crack, proverb (a.k.a Old Dutch Tiles) on a blank tile” Yes, I did a wisecrack about asking ChatGPT to describe themselves in 4 words (“modest” did not make the cut).
@ds106dc #tdc4082 #ds106 Tegeltje-LeegGPT, empty in, empty out. But why not assert your own intelligence? pic.twitter.com/Gs27DvddFw
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 19, 2023
Here is a secret…Daily Creates are maybe more fun to make than do. I rather like it when I can pull one from a colleague’s online post like today’s to make a “goofy” face in response to a Mastodon post by @ResearchBuzz (showing off a bit by embedding in the Daily Create but not showing off as I still have not coded the site to accept Mastodon responses) (soon?) (maybe?).
I already had a goofy photo of me following the end of a full Open Education Week doing 14 live webcasts but took the next step to graft on to my head my dog and cat.
@ds106dc #ds106 #dailycreate #tdc4088 A goofy face for @ResearchBuzz and her granddaughter.
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 24, 2023
This was me celebrating and energetic after doing 14 live webcasts for #OEweek with my pals Felix and Maggie.
Looking forward to your feedback on the goofiness level. pic.twitter.com/Uw9FLUN1nW
My photo for that same day? Just about as opposite from goofy as on can get- it was a black and white rendering of a foggy morning view of our eastern end of the property, which looks rather spooky.
This habit of monthly recaps is one more self-imposed obligation atop doing these daily acts. They still do as they always have done, gives me a small creative outlet, a chance to see how quickly I can make a response with my own mind, tools, and memory.
I wonder about the DS106 Daily Create, it keeps humming along in its 11the consecutive year but as the leaderboard shows, participating has fallen in 2023 to only 14 participants, of which half have been doing it at like a 90% level.
Is it worth doing?
Hell yeah.
Line me up both daily doubles for April.
Featured Image: Screenshot of my flickr daily photo for March 3, 2023 combined with a screenshot of my tweeted response to the DS106 Daily Create for March 3,2023. Heck I made them, call this licensed CC BY.
Despite the apparent demise of blogs the flat line of the RSS-ograph blips with a pulse from David Kernohan “on chatbots.” FOTA is alive!
Unsure if my comment gets through the gate (a first one generated a critical WordPress error, sorry, David), but I have to at least assert my assertion, as if it blips anywhere in the raging discordant discourse, “Intelligence might be based on pattern recognition as Stephen [Downes] asserts, but it should not be mistaken for intelligence.”
So when David passes a linked reference to the Colossus as the dawn of pattern guessing to decrypt war time messages, my pattern recognition goes to where no GPT can fabricate:
This photo was taken on my own visit to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, that being a memorable day when Dave and his partner Viv drove me all the way from Bristol where I visited them to Milton Keynes where I spent a week at the Open University.
Maybe a machine could mine the facts from my blog posts and photos, but it would never make connections, the feelings, to the experience of being there that are not digitized or accessible to wholesale scraping. Never.
Or is this my own flailing effort to raise a pitifully tiny flag of I am Human in front of the advancing, inevitable horde of machines? For an image I could have plopped a prompt into a DALL-EMidJourneyStable Diffusion but why, when I can deploy one of my own making?
I could try my best to weave more words around my emerging thought patterns, yes ones that I generate from my own sum of vast experiences. And truly, I could say that I myself, with this nerve network plugged into a 3 pound skull enclosed non-battery powered device, merely have been training 50+ years on written, visual, auditory media,much of which I did not ask explicitly to use, from which I generate through some mystical process, my “own” words? my “own” imagery?
Who better to turn to than Kirby Ferguson to wisely delve into Artificial Creativity?
Stop, watch the whole thing. I mean the whole damn series. I can only yank quotes
Of all Humanity’s technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. it has the potential to create either a Utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get? Just like everybody else I do not know what’s coming but it seems likely that in coming decades these visions of our imminent demise will seem campy and naive because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naive.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
He takes AI to “court” on three counts, and makes a point that many don’t want to accept, that harvesting all of the “stuff” readily available is maybe not the point of ethics to hang the purveyors. If you buy into his theme that everything is a remix, that means everything is available, as he has done in his video.
But do not take this as suggesting there is a free ticket to just grab content for the classic “because you can” reason. Follow Kirby Ferguson’s statement about all the media he has remixed into his video:
On some videos about AI the big reveal is that this video was actually made by AI. But this video and this series is the opposite. Nothing has been AI except where I cited AI art. This is entirely human made, the words are all mine but they’re merged from the thoughts of countless people. Everything you’ve seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists. All these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new and yes I did it all without permission.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
The big difference is that this filmmaker provides credits / attribution to he sources. It is very clear what was used. There is no mask of source content or how it was used hidden behind a facade of a commercial purveyor whose very name has washed open with techno-clorox.
Also, lost in the court section is a very valid question-
Training AIs on individual artists work does seem wrong everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets and maybe AIS should simply not train on images from active art communities. Also some company should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images which would avoid this Hornet’s Nest entirely. Somebody please do this.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
Why is there no ethical entity out there creating training from public domain or openly licensed materials? Or why does quote/unquote “OPEN” ai DOT com, which already trains its machines on Wikipedia amongst everything else, just create a version limited to truly open content? About the only thing I found was an image generator on hugging face that looks like it does this, but I am not clever enough to make it do anything.
There is a free idea for anyone to pick up.
Finally, Kirby Ferguson ends with a compelling (to me) assertion of the essence of creativity.
AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and inventive by chance. Computers can now create but they are not creative. To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you’ve done. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate.
Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art, living, AIs don’t know what it’s like to be a child, to grow up, to fall in love, to fall in lust, to be angry, to fight, to forgive, to be a parent, to age, to lose your parents, to get sick, to face death. This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling. Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it’s not because of what the AI did it’s because of what a person did.
Art is by humans for humans.
:
Everything is a Remix is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular it’s a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual it is shared.
Everything is a Remix Part 4 (emphasis added by me)
Please watch this video! All of them!
But it’s not as clean as just going John Henry and making an untenable slice of human versus machine. Artificial Intelligence “stuff” is a tool, but it’s not “just a tool.” I am reaching back to something I often rely on from Gardner Campbell’s explanation of Marshall McLuhan
“There is no such thing as “just a tool.” McLuhan wisely notes that tools are not inert things to be used by human beings, but extensions of human capabilities that redefine both the tool and the user. A “tooler” results, or perhaps a “tuser” (pronounced “TOO-zer”). I believe those two words are neologisms but I’ll leave the googling as an exercise for the tuser.
The way I used to explain this is my new media classes was to ask students to imagine a hammer lying on the ground and a person standing above the hammer. The person picks up the hammer. What results? The usual answers are something like “a person with a hammer in his or her hand.” I don’t hold much with the elicit-a-wrong-answer-then-spring-the-right-one-on-them school of “Socratic” instruction, but in this case it was irresistible and I tried to make a game of it so folks would feel excited, not tricked. “No!” I would cry. “The result is a HammerHand!”….
http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/doug-engelbart-transcontextualist/
So no “just a tool,” since a HammerHand is something quite different from a hammer or a hand, or a hammer in a hand. Gardner has given me more directly, in email:
I got to that in part because of McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message.” Most folks appear to think he meant that the medium shapes the message. If you read the piece in which the phrase appears, however, you can see that’s not what he meant. Instead, McLuhan thought of every medium as a message about what we are and desire as human beings. He said the electric light was a message. Every medium should tell us something meta about itself, and something vital about humanity. A medium is not just a channel for transmitting stuff. A medium is also itself a message, a transmission. Can we understand the medium’s message about itself, and thus about us? That’s why the book is called Understanding Media. What is the message these media convey about themselves? and about mediated experience generally?
So with that, I built on Alan Kay (and I think others as well), who said “we shape our tools, and after that our tools shape us,” bringing in the idea of man-computer symbiosis, putting it all within the context of Engelbart’s integrated domain, and then re-reading McLuhan to find a way to express what I took to be something essential about his ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience, and I came out with hammerhand.
Gardner Campbell, personal communication
Much of the educator reaction to ChatGPT (which to me is narrow as there is much more we should be wrapping our heads around), so focused on the fear/worry/change factors rather than ” ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience.”
Going back to where I started, with David Kernohan’s On Chatbots post, he gives just a short bit at the end to maybe the larger idea of his two, under the heading “A Matter of Semantics”:
I want to close my argument by thinking about the other major strand of artificial intelligence – an associative model that starts (in the modern era) with Vannevar Bush and ends with, well, Google search. The idea of a self-generating set of semantic links – enabling a machine to understand how concepts interrelate – is probably closer to the popular idea of artificial intelligence than toys like ChatGPT.
http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/on-chatbots/
meaning (I think) that the interconnected web of ideas imagined by Bush that influenced Engelbart and actually was instantiated by Tim Berners Lee, is the connectivist idea that the web itself, changing with every new bit linked on to it, offers more potential for making something akin to intelligent than chatbots that are merely regurgitation parts of it in a way that just parody intelligence, not embody it.
So this happened today. It is of no significant to any discussion threading out in the ghosted public square of twitter or the de-aggregated butvibrantcorners of Mastodon, certainly not dead to ne where I will never vention spew pots of (f*** it I cannot call it “Meta” its always Facebook),or the iteration of the America Online is to the real Internet as Linkedin is to ______________… Oh I might have lost my thought completely, as it humanly happens.
Can I get help?
This is what people have their undergarments wadded about? Seriously? I push back
Okay, I am left to my own story making.
Today I sat down to catch up on a few DS106 Daily Creates, it being the very essence of acts of human creativity assisted by tools (using a “TDC HAND”). This was one challenge from a few days ago which in true TDCness, gives a nudge, and opens a door to respond in almost any way.
Lots of ways to run with this, so I just start with the random names generator that suggests possible names from different countries. Cool! I love random stuff and never saw this one. There’s 12 countries listed, each with 10 names. I just decide to be quick and use the first names in the middle row:
Before getting to where / how they meet, I decided I need pictures. Before everyone got wrapped up in Generative text posing as intelligence, there was the phase of all the generative adversarial network (GAN) tools making realistic photos of people and thing that do not exist. If you want a real diversion, see This X Does Not Exist. But I went for the one I remember for generating people, thispersondoesnotexist.com but that now seems gone and only goes to some AI outfit.
But I did find a similarly-URL-ed version at https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/ that was interesting,as there are a few more options to choose from (gender,age range, a few ethnicity options, so I generated 4 non-existent people for Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor. I imported into Photoshop using one of the Panorama collages which spread them out like photos on a table.
Then I tried to think if where to place these non-existent people. I first reached for a new browser window thinking of some sort of technical image, like a computer circuit board. This is when unexpected-ness happened.
You see I use the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser extension that puts a random public domain image in my screen each time I open a new browser tab. I was fully intending to open an image search, but there, but random chance here was my answer, a road sign for Hanks Coffee Shop, even better, because it was from Bensen Arizona, a place I have been before.
So now it all came together, these people who do not exist, met up for coffee at Hanks in Benson. A bit more Photoshop editing to make a cloud background, superimpose the names of the four, and I was done.
@ds106dc #tdc4081 #ds106 Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor materialized at https://t.co/DKTTg3iMq5
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 19, 2023
Through magic randomness of LOC Random image in a new browser tab, met at Hanks Coffee Shop, in Benson, AZ, which *does* exist, see https://t.co/MDHKBoI7h3 pic.twitter.com/WLDN6ucC5M
“So what?” is certainly a reasonable response. Couldn’t I save time and just type into an image prompt box, “Photos of 4 people displayed under an old time coffee shop sign”? And maybe iterate a few times until it’s “good enough”? Yes, but is making art about the process or the product? Maybe sometimes it is just getting the thing done, turn it in, as they say.
But what is the connection to it? Would an AI remember driving through Benson, AZ on a memorable road trip to camp in the Chiricahua mountains? Would it remember a completely un-related connection from these photos in the Flickr Commons and that there was a call a while ago for examples of galleries of themed images from the commons? And would it then decide, for no productive reason, to search for other Arizona road sign images in the flickr commons, create a gallery, and then share it back?
I’d say, plausibly, eff no. I want to be doing stuff described as “Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it’s not because of what the AI did it’s because of what a person did.”
I’m not saying at all don’t do AI. And I absolutely intrigued by what it might offer, we have hardly even scratched the surface. But it does not always mean we have to just line up as robot servants to the AI Industrial Complex.
If we lose our ability, interest, to be non stochastically human in our tasks, then we end up being “derivative by design and inventive by chance.”
Never. But I am hoping maybe to see before not too long, another just thinking blip from FOTA.
Featured image: Humanly created and selected, mine
How often do we get to participate in small group open discussions of our practices? I am not talking about blipping in social media. Last, I chose to to be organize/be in 18 of them, and energized more energetic than any zoom webinar.
That week was full on for my organization, Open Education Global with the annual celebration of and awareness raising for Open Education Week.
As it has been done every year since like 2014, OEWeek promotes institutions, organizations, inspired individuals, to plan events/activities during the first year of March that are organized into a single calendar (255 total this year). The goal is to make visible a world wide attention to open education through events and it also collects assets (aka resources, 173 of them this year) to it’s library.
So it’s a completely distributed event. There is always of course too many things to take in, but that’s okay. I’ve tried a few things to encourage people to share back what they experienced in our OEG Connect community, even offering open badges for sharing.
In thinking of some ideas for generating more excitement, connection between events, I naturally fell back to previous experiences, and as often it goes, I draw upon my DS106 experience.
What comes back again and again, is the voice of Jim Groom in that very first year of the open DS106 course and likely around the concept of DS106 radio, or maybe it was just the exuberant days of early twitter as a fresh concept- what Jim described as trying to create a sense of “eventness.” This is when there is a hub of excited energy, be it a group of people in a conference hall lobby, or a hashtag on twitter, that emanates outward, that there was something exciting going on. That others would notice it and say to themselves,”I want to be part of that.”
To me, I find it energizing to do unscripted live broadcasts, be it for DS106 but also later doing it for Virtually Connecting.
So I came up with a crazy idea- to do twice a day live webcasts during Open Education Week. Partly to give updates and highlight what was happening, but more so, to ask people to enter a virtual studio and be more or less like a live radio show. On the web.
My colleagues were very supportive of the idea (as they seem to be for a long list of previous ones) though I sense they did not understand the concept. Likely I had it more in my head than I could put into meeting notes.
So I just did it, I created a web-based show– OEWeek Live! Without writing out all the details few care to read, I plotted a schedule, created a google signup form, sent out requests, and responded with calendar invites. The production was done using Streamyard which provides a studio space for participants; viewers watch on YouTube, but can send comments/questions to the studio, which can be put on screen. The livestream URL becomes the recorded archive, automatically. I really like what you can do during a live stream to switch layouts, put other messages on screen, and anyone in the studio can screen share.
It’s rather refreshing in feel and form than the dreaded wall of zoom bricks.
Okay, enough, blather, on to the conversations.
The full slate was posted in our OEG Connect Community space (a big bonus of Discourse is that event times can can beentered to display in the viewer’s local time). A quick recap (is quick possible with me?)
But the real joy was so many open, in all ways, conversations that happened in the sessions. After people shared projects/activities, we ended up getting into conversations that crossed between what might seem as separate focuses. We got to topics like finding the joy in learning, the ever present hanging cloud of unknown about AI, and also wha emerged maybe Thursday from a tweeted question, a fantastic round of sharing of what gives people hope.
Even as I write this, I am falling short of really describing what these were like. Perhaps you can get a sense from the recordings, all available linked from the main event list, but also as a playlist.
But wait there were more open conversations!
Another element I have added to Open Education Week is doing two recording sessions during the week for the OEG Voices podcast. The open part is extending invitations to any interested in sitting in to listen or participate, keeping seats open for 8-10 extras in the zoom studio. In many ways it’s not much different from the way these podcasts are run year round, but I feel like the idea of having more people present maybe changes the atmosphere?
I aim for all of the OEG Voices podcasts to be conversational, but the topics do revolve of course around the work and interests of guests.
This year included two beyond outstanding sessions:
I honestly have been eager to meet/talk to Delmar Larsen, the dynamo behind LibreTexts for a long time. His human character comes through on cross twitter/OEG Connect exchanges, and even more in this conversation. The excuse was that LibreTexts won 2 OE Awards for Excellence, but what a joy to learn more about Delmar, the origin story of LibreTexts, how he manages to run a company while at the same time teaching as a full professor of Chemistry, and his humble plans of “world domination.”
I did not think it was possible to top that session, but one that we were able to arrange for Wednesday, that in full synchronicity coincided with International Women’s Day, was maybe the most inspiring conversation I have been lucky to be part of:
I was also eagerly waiting to record a podcast about the OE Award for Excellence in Open Resilience that recognized Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies for the efforts made just a year ago using open education resources and practices to support education under the war conditions of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
My idea to do this emerged maybe twos prior to Open Education week when I reached out to Paola Corti, the SPARC librarian who helped coordinate a stunning collaboration. The phrase “long shot” was in my subject line. Paola responded almost immediately. She volunteered to organize not only the participation of her European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) colleague Mira Buist-Zhuk, but also to arrange to have Tetiana herself in the conversation “if she has sufficient electricity.”
Read that line again? Look up resilience in my dictionary, and it links to Tetiana.
“Amazing” would be a major understatement for this open conversation, especially heroic was Mira’s deftness and translating between English and Ukrainian.
I apologize that you will have to wait for my slow podcast editing to bring you this recording, buti short,know first that Tetiana and her colleagues have been supporting and promoting Open Education at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies since 2009. But beyond that, after the bombing started in Dnipro in February 24, 2022, from their basements and bomb shelters, this University implemented the crisis plan already in place. And while courses were disrupted and students dispersed to safety, Tetiana was back in the library supporting educators just 3 weeks later.
This conversation was __________________ (fill in any synonym for amazing and then emphasize it much more).
Stay tuned to voices.oeglobal.org for both of these episodes.
As synchronicity happens, my long time friend and colleague Todd Conaway invited me to participate in another open conversation session that he runs to support faculty as part of the University of Washington-Bothell’s Teaching & Learning on the Open Web— specifically sessions called Epiphanies where he invite in– oh let him explain it:
At the start of the 2021/2022 school year our learning community decided to invite monthly guest speakers to share “epiphanies” they had experienced in the field of teaching and learning. It turns out that the epiphanies they had helped us have our own.
From December through May, we spend an hour each month with some really remarkable educators. We used a Google dic to write some reflections on the topics discussed and then posed them here on the website. The writings are filled with resources and examples that others can see and share. That is of course the ethos of our learning community. To be open in our work and to share our ideas. Is there anything more useful?
https://uwbopenweb.com/epiphanies/
Todd invited me and more importantly two of my former colleagues from Maricopa Community Colleges, Alisa Cooper (still innovating in teaching at Glendale Community College) and Shelley Rodrigo, currently the University of Arizona. The ask was to share with Todd’s colleagues the story of Shelley’s creation while we all were at Maricopa of the “CyberSalon.”
This happened in a time after the end of a key system wide effort at Maricopa to coordinate faculty and technology staff to brainstorm and collaborate on educational technology (the thing once called Ocotillo, hey look and seem Martin Weller, an old metaphor). Mmissing this means of convening and sharing, Shelley proposed to her network to go outside the system, and meet once a month in a local restaurant or bar that had wireless, and anyone interested would come with their laptops (this was the era pre-smart phones) and “geek out.”
It was one of these sessions that Todd, who worked at a different community college 2 hours north of us, showed up, and eventually became a life-long friend.
This (open, unstructured) conversation seems timely for what Todd has been trying to organize at UWB, as official support for what was a university learning community, has been removed. But they are looking to keep going, unofficially (I hope I am getting the story right).
As much as this (unrecorded) conversation was looking back, it really meant to get at what a participant driven/organized community could do simply by convening (maybe around food?)
Todd agreed in turn to appear on the OEWeek show the day before his session, where he shared this concept. I reminded Todd of his description of the Yavapai College 9x9x25 Writing Challenge (which was replicated in the other formulations, e.g. Write 6×6 active now at Glendale Community College)– as a response to observing that faculty have so few opportunities just to sit down and have open conversations about pedagogy. His concept was to aim for that through networked open reflections in blogs, with a formula geared to provide prompts for regular writing.
Again, it is refreshing to have unstructured open conversations. But the flame is on at University of Washington-Bothell.
But, wait there was one more conversational gathering last week… an impromptu serving of #educoffee.
Here was another version of unstructured gatherings for conversations spawned during the pandemic by another good friend and colleague, Ken Bauer, professor of computer science at Tec de Monterey in Guadalajara. He opened for a long time weekly drop in sessions for local colleagues and students plus distant ones to an open zoom room shared as #educoffee.
Hey, I just remembered that I asked Ken and participants to record a session in 2021 to be used as an OEG Voices podcast:
When Ken posted in Mastodon how busy he has been (his teaching load is unreal) and how much he misses community
I of course could not resist replying with my Google Translated Spanish suggesting an educoffee session. And he opened one up, on Friday of Open Education Week.
Often these are small groups, but what a joy to open to a screen of 9 others in the room! Here is a peek in featuring people from Mexico to Oklahoma to me in Saskatchewan to Windsor and even to the U.K.
Nothing more than an hour of coffee and conversation. How simple is that?
The answer is much more than 14. I am hopeful to continue more of these live “shows” at OEGlobal (my colleagues may be shaking their heads).
And it goes back to Jim’s idea of live energy and “eventness” mattering even more in 2023 with the added noise of social media (which looks like conversations, but it’s a poor substitute) and schedule saturation of structured video meetings.
This photo I used below was a very early live bit when Jim, myself, and Martha Burtis were attending an EDUCAUSE conference in Washington DC, and he went live on DS106 radio for a conversation in his open DS106 class.
Where does all this land for you? Is unstructured conversation time valuable? Or is it madness? I add up 14 and 2 and 2 and get a “hell yes”.
Featured Image: The “madness” of going live for Open Education Week!
With grand intentions to stick to a schedule of daily challenges, by skin of my calendar teeth I am 31 for 31 days in both daily flickr photos and ds106 Daily Creates.
I’ve held this pace before maybe 2 months? Does it really matter to get a perfect score (no)? But parsing some time to try something new even if not to the daily metronome I will always maintain is valuable. More so than scrolling through ___________ (fill in any social media stream).
Sometimes there is a 2-3 day catchup, but the photos have been taken every day. Lots of snow, sunsets, dog, the occasional taco, this is maybe the most compulsive habit I have aimed for now for the 16th frigging year.
For fun I made a spreadsheet to make some stats and chart gunk. Since I started there have been 5510 days and of those I posted a daily photo 5205 times for a 94% percentage. For years, I have batted as low as 62% in 2012 and hit the 100% buzzer in 2009, 2015, 2016, 2017, and so far, 2023.
Charts!
I feel like I am nothing but [frozen] net
But the fans are dubious.
They are saying… “Show us your charts in February!”
Game on.
I’ve spouted and presented and yowled about how great the DS106 Daily Create and while I have done (and created) many of them since 2012, I’ve never sustained a run at the top of the leaderboard.
Well for 2023, I am running 31/31!
I just love this bit of data tracking (the good kind) that runs in the now rather old, but despite the Musky One’s Meddling, still works via the Daily Blank WordPress Theme. Even more, everyone who ever participates has their own archive built in– mine is at https://daily.ds106.us/hashtags/cogdog/
That makes my batting percentage 581 / 2710 days or a .214 hitter. Maybe not so impressive after all. But it’s still fun to see what I can conjure in about 20 minutes–
@ds106dc #tdc4031 #ds106 I'm flying far with Helene Dutrieu, next stop…. MARS! pic.twitter.com/OjJoFYdfLH
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 26, 2023
@ds106dc #tdc4029 #ds106 Depluralised the entire PoTA franchise… can't even squeeze a sequel from this much less 5. pic.twitter.com/3REubDu45N
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) January 25, 2023
It’s been a good mix of challenges in 2023.
For more stats and people to be in awe of, see the all time leaderboard. Heck,even Todd Conaway is ahead of me!
This year the pool of players is only 14. Without a current or recent ds106 class, theparticipation has fallen. But also the sagging spirit of twitter may be at play.
I do have the site posting to Mastodon at https://social.ds106.us/@tdc but admit I am sluggish at getting my head into some code to pull mastodon responses into the site (and the board). The main task is finding or thrashing some PHP code to fetch replies to that account.
If you want that, keep bugging me.
I may not keep this pace, but I am going to be at it as much as possible, as this is more valuable use f time than venting about ChatGPT.
What are you doing for a daily constructive habit?
I’m doubling down on the dailies! Bring it on, February.
Featured Image:
FreshRSS 