I pictured this particular Jules as a faculty member or instructional technologist finally freaking out on the administrator that is pressing him and the college to hurry up and join the future of higher education. Yes the MOOC craze could lead to gun violence. Believe it.

Here’s another kind of MOOC crazy that I thought I’d share. This one comes from the Overlook Hotel where a number of higher-ed administrators went on a retreat to discuss MOOCs and plan for the future. A curious faculty member stumbled upon a draft of their white paper. To her horror this is what she discovered.

So the conversation about the future of 3D Printing is being highjacked by a man that is proselytizing that real openness only exists if we can have access to ‘things that institutions and industries have an interest in keeping from us – things like access, drugs, goods, guns.’

Yes guns! We need to print guns! Libertarians will see 3D printing as the ultimate solution for the citizenry to defend itself against ‘regulations in all its forms.’ 3D printers will become ubiquitous and then everyone will start printing guns.

Eventually we’ll be able to print enriched uranium. Then we’ll all be able to print a trigger and encasement for this fissible material. Small enough that every human being on the planet will be able to carry a concealed nuclear weapon. The football will be in everyone’s hands and that will create the perfect level playing field.

I think I get what Jim’s going after with this new animated GIF assignment, At Least It’s an Ethos. At first I thought I should just discover a well articulated life philosophy and Spicolli’s renouncing the material life is well, perfect. But then there was the thing about attaching an -ism to this ethos. So I did the best I could to find one.

This animated GIF is built using another graphic gift I made from a 1983 Montgomery Ward Catalog of the boy on a three wheeler. Once I cleaned up the PNG, I was trying to think of how I might race this three wheeler. But before I decided to run down Bambi, I first set out how to animate the wheels, as it would look silly if they stayed static. This GIF of a wheel was a good resource as it basically illustrated that some motion blur and a couple of different versions would likely do the trick.

I think the front wheel did alright, but the back wheel looks a little static. The funny thing was once I chose the clip from Bambi, I didn’t need to worry about the wheels anymore. They ended up getting covered by the snow.

I love the old animation techniques where there are clear background, character, and foreground. Typically the background and foregrounds are static paintings and only the character is animated. But in the case of the snow scene there are these beautiful painterly splashes of snow in the foreground animated.

Fortunately these splashes of snow were fairly easy to select with the magic wand. These became new foreground mattes over the three wheeler as it trucked across the frame.

These mashups end up taking a lot longer than I expect, but I’ve really enjoyed pushing myself to get better and better with animation. Hope you dig it.

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I recently came across via BoingBoing this graphic designer that hosts a site Phil are Go! where he occasionally posts ‘graphic gifts.’ These are pieces of clip art that he’s created by lovingly extracting a particular graphic from a vintage advertisement.

This exercise would be a great ds106 assignment for a couple reasons *UPDATE now a ds106 assignment. One it’s a great for working on digital imaging skills. A good graphic gift would require a student to work with selections, the eraser tool, image touch ups (via contrast, sharpening, and possibly the clone stamp to remove scratches), and image resizing to create different versions. Also to maintain transparency and post to the web the image should likely be a PNG file.

The second benefit is that students would be creating interesting clip art that could be used by other students (or anyone on the web actually) for design and remix.

As for discovering good resources to work from, I like Phil are Go’s approach which is to look for vintage ads as a resource. I had actually downloaded a number of images of ads from Flickr a number of months ago, intending to use some elements for remix projects. It’s important to start with an image that’s fairly high resolution like this old ad for televisions that I found.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Wishbook

I decided to work on the top television with the feet. The two versions of the TV below are both PNG files where the screen is transparent. The idea is that some one could put anything in the tv (even a GIF) and use it as an old fashioned TV. At the top of the post I used the TV to put the Beastie Boys on a TV the way I originally saw music videos in the 80s.

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With its atomic bomb-sized shock wave, the meteor that struck Siberia instantly caused end-of-the-world fears and has spawned a likely fleeting interest toward increasing our vigilance of the heavens above. But Slim Pickens knows how to ride out the end of the world:

Now let’s get this thing on the hump – we got some flyin’ to do!

*UPDATE – This is actually a ds106 assignment too! Where did the Soda Go?

I thought I might give the corporates a look at what a proper GIF advertising campaign’s assets might look like. Your lovely video has me wondering how I might spray your lovely solution over every surface of my home to keep it free from dirt, marks, and/or stains. But these little GIF nuggets are the real viral bits to slather all over the internet.

I’ve been really enjoying the week long creative challenge that my commtech juniors and seniors have been undertaking as part of our portfolio class. They’ve shown me new sides of their work including a lot of drawing, mashups, and a particular meme in which someone has me throw a student out the window for asking the wrong question. I promptly let him know how serious I am about lazy students.  But as soon as I saw DarkLordDre’s cartoon of Bugs Bunny vs. Mickey Mouse I was ready to try out a little remix based on the GI Joe Explodes GIFs by General Howe. The GIF is also a consideration of the scene from the Untouchables in which Sean Connery’s character is setup by a knife wheeling hood, only to be gunned down on his fire escape. Connery’s famous quote, “Isn’t that just like a wop? Brings a knife to a gun fight,” has been part of a regular trope in fiction:

A character comes into the scene armed with what he thinks is sufficient, only to find out he is severely outclassed weapon-wise, because he brought the entirely wrong type of weapon (usually the superior weapon is revealed after the first person has committed to a fight).

It’s possible though that I could say to my students, ‘Never bring a JPG to a GIF fight – or I’ll animate the crap out of you.’

Mashable History of GIFs

The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF)

Early 8Bit GIFs

Signage – Early Vernacular of Navigation

Pointers and Construction pages

Welcome to My Site

Hobbies and Personal Interests (animated clip art)

Tools, Music, Pets, Cars, Flag-Waving

Early Cultural Remixes

Hammer Time!

Chicken Explodes

Bill Gates is the Devil

Bill Clinton – Under My Definition…

Mona Lisa Frown Face

Dancing Baby

Screen Captures

If We Don’t, Remember Me. – Walkabout & A Clockwork Orange

RealityTVGIFs – Superbowl Beyonce & Simon Cowell

Three Frames – Valhalla Rising & Muscle Man

Photography

Slingshot Camera GIFs of San Francisco

Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg Cinemagraphs

Design

Kerry Callen – Animated Comic Covers!, More Animated Comic Covers

Mr Whaite – Neon Sign Animated Movie Posters, North By Northwest, The Seven Year Itch

MBS – Hitchcock Film Posters Animated, North By Northwest, The Birds

Rhetoric

#WHATSHOULDWECALLME

WHEN I SUDDENLY REALIZE MY FAVORITE SHOW IS STARTING

WHEN I’M WALKING AND LISTENING TO MY IPOD

TRYING TO DO WORK IN BED

Mashup and Art

General Howe – Animated Murder Maps & GI Joe Redux

Thunderpaw – Animated GIF Comic Book

Flux Machine – Old Photographs Remixed Comidant Eduard & Decoy Howitzer

ZBags – Grotesque Calliopes

lulinternet – Burgers & #1

OZNEO – Flying Saucer Lift-off

Homevideo

 Animalygifs

Cinemagr.am – Breakdance, Peter Pan, Jumping Through Hoops

Presentation

Maxgif.com

So now the focus can be more on overcoming the early learning curves associated with understanding the daily create, aggregation, embedding images, hyperlinking, commenting, and the many aspects of web writing to be discovered in this class. So this first week I thought I’d be a good ds106 student/instructor and summarize my daily creates for the week.

The Daily Create as described on the ct101.us site is meant to be a simple creative exercise. You follow the prompt’s request to make something and post it to the particular space described. This usually entails posting something to your own account on Flickr, Youtube, or Soundcloud. Or in the case of a writing assignment you post directly to the the dailycreate site.

Here’s my week with the TDC:

Last Monday on the first day of class the daily create asked you to, “Make a blue screen of death message using type only.” Those unfamiliar with the Windows BSOD (are lucky) and could find examples doing a simple search. System failures are annoying, and somehow I got Breaking Bad’s final season on the brain. Walter’s ability to dodge all his pursuers appears to be coming to an end, and there will likely be a blaze of glory scene somewhere in the final eight episodes. Hence the ‘say hello to my little friend’ idea.

The next day’s ‘Draw a picture of a new invention‘ did not come quickly, but at a certain point I got the idea of using a dry erase marker to draw on my office window. I tried a few different markers, but they were all too spent. I finally was able to get my hands on a new marker. Drawing with it was still unsatisfying leaving too faint an image. So I decided to bust open the marker and experiment with the filament inside. Squeezing out the marker ink while drawing proved hard to control, but led to some great textures. The invention was as much how to draw thick dry erase lines as much as the bridge from my office to the LIRR.

On the third day, a daily create writing exercise asked that you to, ‘Finish the sentence, “My biggest fear is…” What is the story of overcoming this?‘ I actually hadn’t ever done a writing exercise on the tdc and noticed this is the only type that has you submit your response directly on the site. It was a mixture of parenting and professional fears, but you should read it yourself.

And the last daily create I completed last week, which happened to be four days in a row was the photography prompt, ‘Take/make a photo that represents math at work in the world.‘ This one took sometime to figure out. I had measuring on the brain for most of the day when I thought about this assignment. I actually took a few photos of an old slide ruler that I have in my house but wasn’t satisfied.

But while sitting in my kitchen with my kids, I caught a glimpse of a big glass of water and thought, ‘I wonder if I could get a photo of two different fluids come together in a glass right at the moment when they first come together, before they are mixed completely.’ The photo definitely gets at that moment, though it definitely looks a little gross.

So that’s my first week, domains for everyone YES! Four Daily Creates, pretty good. And a lot of commenting on them as well. Here are links to my various social media accounts:

Site: michaelbransonsmith.net
Twitter: @mbransons
Flickr, Youtube, Soundcloud

And looking forward to week two.