Renovations made easy

The beautiful thing about being a zombie is that we're not house proud. We'll live in anything and anywhere.
We'll live down here quite happily, as long as we're fed regularly. And we're equal opportunity eaters. We'll eat everyone. Hoping to make your renovations part of my memories!

Zombie Living

While most of you think of us as undead, zombies do have a sense of style. Since we require human flesh to survive we often find ourselves living on the edges of society.
In places like this:

Not very pretty is it? No wonder we want to move in with you. Nice home, good food, loving family. We welcome the opportunity to share space with you! Invite us in.

And death? Death comes to us all my friend.

#overrun

Zombies think of little else than food. How to get food, where to get food and how to get food. We need the flesh of a living human to survive, but not only that, we need their souls. For a few brief minutes as we slowly suck on the warm fresh heart of our dinner, we feel the warmth and joy of life that we have surrendered unwillingly to the zombie horde flood back into our bodies. It is ecstasy.

We did not ask for this. We are the product of humanity's hubris in tinkering with the code of life. An aberrant mutation, improperly stored resulted in Patient Zero and from his slavering mouth spread the infection that threatens you. This is simply a re-balancing of nature.

I crave warmth, I crave your memories of laughter, kisses, chocolate and love. Open the door, so I may run my tongue over the sweetness of your flesh and let your blood coat my throat as your very essence is absorbed into mine. I love you. I hunger for you. Be mine.

Gravatars and Blogger

So now I know why DS106 wanted me to use Wordpress instead of Blogger. It's because of the gravatar, a relatively simple thing to set up for Wordpress (which I have done) but a horribly convoluted mess in Blogger. I was working my way through reading other Headless13 blogs, when I came across one of my posts. Why no gravatar? But I let it go because I was intent on reading a post by Christina Hendricks. As I was writing a response to Christina's post it hit me why my gravatar wasn't showing up. It's because Wordpress uses a different email account while I use a separate email address for this blog. So I have spent half of the day (off and on) reading far more than I would care too about how to add a gravatar to Blogger. Needless to say there was differing advice, some good and some bad.

Now this is why I love the ds106 community so much. I hopped on over to Twitter and asked my gravatar question and lo! verily! within 2 minutes there was an answer from Ben Rimes kindly sent me a website to help through the process. Much better resource than I had found.

Of course with typical luck, half way through the process we had a fire in the building and I had to vacate. I shut down the computer and hoped that this morning all would be well, and it was. I started the process from midpoint and then it got scary. Why? Because I goofed up the directions a bit (I downloaded my template instead of saving it) and I was replacing code. For some reason, I have an unreasoning fear of mucking about with html, probably because of my near legendary ability to inadvertently destroy programs. (Hard to believe I actually have a degree in Instructional Technology sometimes, which I achieved by being extremely persistent- some might say stubborn!) I have no idea if I was successful or not in moving my gravatar to this blog and won't until I publish this article (especially since Blogger kept saying that I had unsaved changes that I would lose if I left the page). And if I haven't attached my gravatar I guess I'll just start again (if I can!)

What storytelling is to me.

So DS106 Headless has asked me to reflect on the idea of what I associate with the word storytelling? Um, that's tough because I basically tell stories all the time. Someone asks about my day and the next thing I'm doing is conveying a story. "Fine, how about you" rarely leaves my lips unless you're walking down the hall. If you're stationary I'll have you pinned against the wall and be weaving a story about something before you realize you've been ambushed. A little embellishment here, a little emphasis there and before you know it I've told you a tale. And guess what? I'm waiting for your tale back!
I usually associate storytelling with laughter because if you know me you'll know that most likely I'll be telling you about something I or a member of my family has done that I find humorous. I was lucky to be raised with a family with a sense of humour and aunts and uncles with a zest  for telling stories. And while I do not have the same brilliant way with words as some of them, I do, I believe, have a gift for recognizing the absurd. And because I do, perhaps I am lucky that it finds me. Regularly.

"So I went down to the Outer Banks for the first time last week. I hadn't been to the sea in over a year and last time it was along the north shore of Prince Edward Island, unfortunately during the time of the jelly fish. Lots and lots of jelly fish. Jelly fish bobbing along the shore, jelly fish in the small tidal pools, jelly fish dying on the shore. And it's not like you're going to pick them up and rescue them is it?

The Outer Banks are gorgeous with beautiful beaches and big waves, which means riptides (not something I had to worry about in Prince Edward Island!). There are pelicans and I was shouting out pelican! pelican! like a demented two year old for the first few days every time I saw one. And they were fishing off the shore and flying in formation. I didn't know pelicans flew in groups like that.

Now I was determined to get into the water everyday I was there because I don't often have a chance to swim in the ocean so even though there was a brisk wind and waves I coaxed my friend Cindy into the water. We're swimming and it was quite deep for the first few feet and then we hit a sandbar so we were walking in the water, first below our knees and then to our thighs and then above our heads. The swells were great, the water was warm and it was wonderful. As we headed back to the shore the waves became more forceful and I got hit and tumbled a few times before I made it back to the beach. Since I was wearing my glasses (yes I know! I took them off after that and didn't wear them into the ocean,) every time a wave crashed over my head, I had one hand on my glasses and one on my hat.

We climbed to shore and for some reason my swimsuit was tugging at my waist but I thought it was the wind. I grabbed at my swimsuit a few times and then proceeded to watch the waves, swim again and then finish off in the salt water swimming pool before heading up to change for dinner. I stepped into the shower, removed my swimsuit bottoms and out drops a silver fish about three and half inches long, quite, quite dead. Obviously the wind had not been tugging at my knickers to get out. Yes, while other people need to get a lure and a line, I can just catch fish with my pants."

Now how could this story have been improved? Digitally of course. I didn't even think of taking a picture and I don't have a waterproof camera, but wouldn't a picture have been awesome? I should have gotten dressed and grabbed my camera! That way I would have had proof!

Sometimes an image can stand alone, sometimes it needs words to put it into context. Images, because they require no translation, are very powerful. However, would the image of a dead fish laying beside my swimsuit bottoms really convey much of the story I just told? Not really. But they would have made my fish story even better. A picture with a caption helping define the context would also work. Maybe a caption like: New fishing method delivers startling results! But still, I do like my story. I think I am a much better writer than I am photographer.

But digital can mean any medium and we shouldn't be constrained by the idea of just words and images. It can be sounds, movies, drawn art, anything that conveys our ideas.

P.S. Look! Pelicans! Pelicans!

Why I am Headless this fall

Yesterday I posted about Design Thinking Action Lab on the last day of that particular course. I didn't get as much out of it as I had hoped. However, I have enormously high expectations of Headless DS106. Why? Because I've been mucking about on the sidelines of DS106 even before I took ETMOOC. I try to do the Daily Creates when I have the opportunity as it's fun, stimulates my creativity and I'm always amazed and delighted at the creativity of others. I do the writing assignments, I occasionally do the photo assignments and I rarely do the video assignments. This is a reflection of both my access to the tools for these various creates and my level of comfort with each of the methods of creation. And I have no clue about how to do radio but I will learn! (I'm still figuring how to take/make video with my new laptop for example and my desktop computer is still sitting in pieces. I don't even have my desk up yet let alone my clothes in my drawers. And please let's not talk about my kitchen and bathrooms-I'm still waiting for countertops!)

I've been dipping in and out of the DS106 daily creates and assignments off and on this year, flirting with making the commitment to an actual course, but after reading and watching Christina Hendricks have such a blast with DS106zone, I knew that I would sign up for the next offering of DS106. At this point, with my house still in shambles, I can't guarantee how much time I can put into the course but that's the beauty of open education- I won't have to feel guilty for not getting everything done, nor am I constrained by set deadlines. It's very liberating. And that makes learning much more pleasurable.

So here's to being headless for the next few months!

Design Thinking Action Lab

Well I enrolled in Design Thinking Action Lab offered by NovoEd (the new name for Stanford's Venture Lab) thinking it would be a similar experience to Designing in New Learning Environments (DNLE) which was the first MOOC I ever loved and led me to really immerse myself in the MOOC universe.

Well I don't love this one for a number of reasons. Some of it is the way it is organized, some of it is the number of technical glitches and some of it is attitude (mine and theirs.)

First, browser issues. If you're using Firefox as your browser (which I do), you can't do the assignments attached to the lectures. They just don't load. So you have to use Chrome. Not that they stated this upfront. No, I had to rely on fellow students for the answer. (Not that it's a problem to rely on fellow students but when this is still an issue for other students into the third week of the course, it's a problem.They finally have fixed this.) To me this is just arrogant. In the world of online learning, you need to state up front what you need to complete a course. If you want to see online learning done right, check out DS106. They explicitly state what  programs and interfaces you need upfront.

And I know this sounds ridiculous but for some reason, the spellchecker for part of the site was switched off. I know how to spell. But when you're typing quickly, that little red squiggle makes sure you find your errors fast. Instead, I was having to cut and paste (and it didn't like that too much when I tried to insert it into the frame.)

Second, organization. The first week was housekeeping tasks ( as usual.) And we needed to organize ourselves into groups as one of the tasks. After much rushing around (digitally) I joined a group. (Exactly like it was structured in DNLE.) Unlike DNLE, we never used our group for anything other than to share examples of our workspace. Excuse me? I didn't need to organize into a group to interact with other people, that's what the forum is for. There was an expectation of teamwork implicit in forming a group. When the design assignments came, we were expected to do them individually, not as a team. So why did we form a team? It felt like busy work, like an artificial expectation being met. People in teams, check.

Now let's talk about the assignments. The ones attached to the lectures were interesting and got you to think about design as a creative process, which was excellent. But the major assignments were poorly thought out which, when you think about it, is bizarre. The builders of this course were designers and they didn't create a very good template for learning about design! These major assignments were to help us understand the design process. This would have been a wonderful opportunity for us to choose a problem as a group and then work together to achieve a solution. Instead, we were told what the problem was (a single problem for all of us: Students are graduating from school without being able to find work) and we were told to go out and interview people about their views on the issue as the first part of the process.

I'm not sure how anyone else dealt with this issue, but I am at work all day and do not have access to the people I was expected to interview at night. (Thank goodness for previous conversations I have had about this issue with my son and for email.) So was this course only for those of us not chained to an office desk? For this portion of the task we had a week.

But, and this is a big but, they also included in the empathize portion of the assignment the define portion (Stanford uses empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test as their design template.) These are two separate stages, at least in my book. So in a week, we were to interview three or four people, write down all their ideas and then define the problem and submit.

In the next week, we were to peer review at least five assignments (not a problem, except many were in Spanish and I don't speak Spanish so it took a while to translate) but also complete the next assignment of ideate and come up with 50 ideas.

Now this is an online course. Why such a short timeline? DNLE was much better organized in regards to how time much time assignments might take.  We worked through all the lectures and small assignments first and  then worked on the larger problem as a team. In other xMOOCs, where time became a factor (due to technical issues or work load)  they actually made the course longer so that people could complete their work and be successful. So why did Design Thinking Action Lab not change to meet the needs of their students? I know that in the first two weeks frustration was being expressed in the forums.

And speaking of forums, the NovoEd forum remains its normal, clunky self. If xMoocs ever solve the forum issue (perhaps just move to Google +, Facebook? I don't know) they may become a force to be reckoned with. However, on the positive side the professor was regularly on the forum site and initiated many interesting discussion threads. There were also Google + hangouts once a week, which were recorded for us to watch at any time. So the lectures were short but to the point, the Do Now assignments interesting (but until the browser problem was dealt with impossible to view/do) and the resources offered in support were great (but the short teasers from "Extreme by Design" were driving me crazy as I want to know how the story ends.)

Now where do I fit in as a student in this mix? This is were I step up to the plate and admit I've dropped the course and am only auditing it now. I moved from one province to another during the course and I just could not see pouring more of my energy into the course when it was not meeting my needs. And that is the beauty of online MOOCs.  I engage as much or as little as I feel like and what I was being offered was not enough for me to say "I will continue."

DNLE changed my perspective on learning. Design Thinking did not.