Ode to Timmmmyboy!

By mbransons in Digital Identity, Teaching and Learning 2 Comments Tags: , ,

Thanks to Tim Owen’s Streaming for Pennies post that has been powering DTLT Today’s live stream, I now have an internet broadcast channel of my own without ads, for pennies. Daniel Phelps and I are really excited about the possibilities (above is an illustration of how easily we are entertained). We’re going to start by using the stream to broadcast York College’s graduation on Friday (bit of a snooze cast, but we’ll see). But I’m particularly interested in the CUNY Academic Commons using the stream allowing members to share presentations, for teaching, and for exploring anything else they can imagine as a live broadcast. I know that we’ll be able to get CUNY DHI and Blogs@Baruch involved right away.

Timmmmyboy you should check out an iOS app Daniel Phelps discovered, Livu, which allows you to stream directly to a Wowza server from your phone. Right now it only allows you to tap into the videocamera on the phone, but there are plans for the app to stream previously recorded audio and video. Kind of like a Wirecast on your phone. How crazy is that!

Vertigo, Dizzing Educational Awesomeness at UMW

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Personal, Teaching and Learning 2 Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Yes this post is an excuse to show another Alfred Hitchcock animated poster which I made while at UMW’s Faculty Academy (with Rear Window & North By Northwest this makes three, nine to go). But I’m not going to write about the film Vertigo and the designer of this poster Saul Bass. Ok one thing, how much does the man spinning in the middle remind you of the Don Draper silhouette tumbling in space in the opening titles of Mad Men.

Actually the feeling of dizziness comes from the time spent at UMW two weeks ago. Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer and I were lucky to have the opportunity to represent CUNY and our dream of a bazillion posts if we’re able to take the ideals of the CUNY Academic Commons and the campus projects like Blogs at Baruch and City Tech’s Open Lab to scale (300,000 students blogging would be truly insane). Guilia Forsythe was present at our talk and we were fortunate to have her document our talk with this image (the bearded guy with arms raised at the bottom is Mikhail):

100 Bazillion Posts A Year. CUNY Federation, Curriculum & Management #Umwfa12 @mgershovich @lwaltzer @mbransons

Faculty Academy is principally a professional development conference for faculty from the University of Mary Washington with many of them presenting projects of their own. And man there are so many amazing things happening in the classrooms at UMW. It’s incredible to see so much buy-in on a single campus. There are dozens of courses being taught out of UMW blogs, and many, many innovative pedagogical strategies. Here were some of my favorite sessions:

There was Michael McCarthy’s Literary Journals class which has, “students conceptualize, build, and design their own web-based literary journal.” I loved how he polled his students about their interests in non-fiction, fiction, poetry, art, and design using a hotness meter to help him create groups. His students solicited for work using old fashioned flyers on campus, but also Craiglist and by directly soliciting MFA programs around the world. McCarthy showed us a spreadsheet of over 192 entries being tracked and curated by one group of students. You should check out the journals Husk and Jolt, they’re really impressive.

Zach Whalen lead us through his electronic literature class sharing a ridiculous number of digital tools and resources that his students engaged with. (This list is for you Luke). HypeDyn, Bloomengine, Undum, Inform 7, Twine, Jason Nelson digital art and poetry, Curveship, Scratch, inklewriter, Adventure Cow, and Playfic.

And Jeffrey McClurken reflected on building a syllabus collaboratively with his students in a History of the Information Age course. He set-up a framework for the class and released the syllabus to the students as a ’0.9 beta,’ which was taken to a 1.0 version and then a 2.0. Students had the opportunity to steer both the content focus of the class (choosing readings) and the types of projects they would complete. This included students choosing to make documentaries, despite McClurken warning that they were long and hard to work on (great teaching Jedi mind trick).

Faculty Academy also featured three speakers – Grant Potter, Giulia Forsythe, and David Darts. I’ve heard Grant and Giulia talk a lot on ds106 radio, but they really take it up to another level for a live show. I hadn’t known about Grant’s work in Northern Canada where he re-purposed an underused FM transmitter to ‘bring the school to the community’ distrustful of public institutions by getting students to broadcast their work in the classroom. And Giulia had the entire audience doodling reaction graphs to her talk on visual thinking. Her ability to literally draw together her understanding of a talk into a single image that is coherent and playful is extraordinary.

And finally there was David Darts (below) who’s talk felt more like listening to someone muse about a topic over dinner than a formal presentation. His work on the Pirate Box, was something I’d know about through Jim Groom and Grant Potter’s ds106 radio interview of Darts in his NYU office. But I’d never heard of Cory Coctorow’s Printcrime which imagines a world 3D printer bootlegging. That story and Tim Owen’s thoughts about makerspaces has me hooked on the idea of getting a Makerbot for the York’s CT program.

David Darts at UMW Faculty Academy 2012

Overall, Faculty Academy 2012 was a fabulous experience and I’m sure CUNY will return and represent next year. Thanks so much to Jim, Martha, Tim, Andy, and others for having us!

Reorienting My Compass, North by Northwest?

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Old Artwork, Personal 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

It’s been over a year since I first discovered ds106 and it’s amazing to me how much creative energy I’ve discovered since then – I’ve made more work in the past year than I have in the previous ten, seriously.

Ok this isn’t exactly true, I’ve made many things over the past decade, but they’ve principally been of the industrial sort – client work mostly. There’s a lot I’m proud of, particularly media materials for my wife’s non-profit Row New York (videos like Monique and Because I Row (with Daniel Phelps) as well as photography and design).

But in the last year I’ve begun to make work that reminds me of the work I used to make. Back then I made lots of stuff, all sorts of stuff, but when I made it, I was just creating, and creating and never reflecting. Despite that fact that I was in an MFA program, I was prickly about critiques, always evasive about why I made this or that. And it wasn’t because I thought ‘my art should speak for itself,’ it was because I didn’t have any confidence or sense of how or why to describe what the heck I was doing.

So probably more important than the creative energy that I’ve rediscovered is the feeling that I can and should describe my work. I falter at this effort (it’s taken two weeks to write this post and only a few hours to make Cary Grant into a track star), but it’s one I realize I need and want to work on. I want to be more confident and comfortable describing my work, not just making it.

This summer I’m hoping to focus my energy toward a bigger project. One that’s inspired by the ds106 mashup, pop culture, ‘make art dammit‘ mantra. Above is an animated movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. I previously created one  for Rear Window, and I love making these. So I’m thinking I should commit to a series, six? A dozen? I’m not sure.

But I’m also thinking about something else. Earlier this semester I read an article in the New Yorker about Christain Marclay’s mashup masterpiece ‘The Clock.‘ Marclay assembled thousands of clips from films that referenced time into a 24 hour mashup movie, that when viewed it would reference the present moment in time. So if you happened to start watching at 11AM, the clips you’d see would reflect that time.

How crazy is that? A T-W-E-N-T-Y F-O-U-R H-O-U-R movie, about time. It apparently took Marclay 2 years of slaving over his computer to create it. And its supposed to be amazing. You can only see it in galleries or museums. And I’m dying to see it, here’s a BBC story about the piece to give you some sense of it.

So besides animated GIFs I’m thinking about something else – it’s not a 24hr movie – I could never. But it’s a mashup that would require help. I’m thinking about telling a story about education through the innumerable portraits created of teachers and students in movies. I feel like there might be something we could learn from these portraits of schooling.

I’m picturing a mashup of scenes that portray high school and the interactions between students, teachers, parents, and principals. I want to see what will happen if I create interactions between characters from the Blackboard Jungle and the Breakfast Club. Too crazy?

Anyway that’s where I’m thinking of pointing my creative efforts – Hitchcock GIFs and/or a high school mashup. I’m excited and anxious at the same time. It’s been a while since I’ve felt ready to do something like this.

It’s all about the X

By mbransons in Digital Identity, Personal 4 Comments Tags: ,

I hear by announce my plan to bring together my various personal and professional identities – Michael Branson Smith, mbransons, mbsmith, msmith, MBS, and any other combination(s) imaginable or not, using my name’s letters to create anagrams, homonyms, heterographs, heteronyms – as a non-for-profit until a profitable subsidiary is formed with the eXtreme, eXtraodinary, eXistential brand of MBSx.

This transformation will make accessible for the first time the eXclusive brand of me to an even larger audience. This X factored personification of myself should not be confused any of the following types of X branding:

edX – A revolution brewing in Boston and beyond. It does not have to do with tea. It does not have to do with the Boston Harbor. It does not have to do with guns. And it does not have to do with the sword.

MITx – Briefly a revolution.

TEDx – Making a bookish, nerdy, hip, brainiac members only event full of expressions of brilliance, transformation, and integration available to a more bookish, nerdy, hip, brainiac members. And never to be confused with The Endocrine Disruption Exchange.

Super Bowl X – Known as the ‘one-for-the-left-index-finger’ when counting Pittsburgh Steelers championships sequentially starting with the left pinkie (the preferred way for a man to wear a ring in the 70s) continuing across the hand to the ‘one-for-the-(left)thumb’ and to the present quest (with 7 digits bejeweled) ‘one-for-the-right-middle-finger.’

Occupy X – A whack-a-mole search filter in China.

FedX – TravelplansIneedtobeinNewYorkonMondayLAonTuesdayNewYorkonWednesday
LAonThursdayNewYorkonFriday. Got it?

X-Men – A description of individuals with the X-gene which is known to trigger the use of aberrant expressions such as ‘Welcome to die.’

X Factor – An event that turns people into idols and assholes.

Factor X – Too little of it and you’ll get nosebleeds.

X8 – A less daunting Scrabble letter if you know your five twos (AX, EX, OX, XI, XU) and 36 threes.

.xxx – No not that atrocious Vin Diesel movie and it’s only voluntary.

And finally never, ever to be confused with Generation X because there is nothing more fascinating than going up in the 80s and myself.