This kind of small act of near random #ds106 connection will not increase enrollments, will not “fix” education, will not improve institutional metrics… yet I just cannot let it slip by without a small “wow”.
And the ironic thing is that the tweet in which I saw it came into my view about 5 minutes before I had to jump into a video call to Cape Breton University by invitation of Grant Potter. I was asked to say some encouraging things about openness to a faculty group there.
While I am still musing on the takeaway from Catherine Cronin’s OER16 keynote caution about “amazing stories” not being enough to convince people to share openly… I did so anyway because I do believe we have a case to make about shifting teaching to a place where the audience is more than the teacher giving out grades.
But let’s rewind back to a #ds106 Daily Create from January 25, 2016, when I was still casting most of them in a western theme. In consideration of feedback I heard about westerns being such a male dominated genre, I had been looking to find female western figures, but in fiction, history. I cannot remember the exact search path, but I was rather jaw dropped in reading about an early 20th century rodeo bronco riding star named Bonnie McCaroll:
Bonnie McCarroll, born Mary Ellen “Dot” Treadwell (1897 – September 29, 1929), was a champion rodeo performer and bronc rider most remembered for her death at the Pendleton Round-up in Pendleton, Oregon. She also excelled in steer riding, bulldogging, and automobile jumping.
In 1915, her first year of rodeo competition, McCarroll attracted national attention from a photograph taken of her being thrown from the horse named “Silver” at the Pendleton Round-Up. In her career, she performed before kings, queens, such dignitaries as U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, while he was vacationing in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1927, and before countless rodeo fans worldwide. After her death, rodeo officials instituted safety regulations and eliminated bronc riding as a women’s sport.
Ann is a bronze sculpture artist from Bridgeport Texas who specializes in works depicting cowgirls (see her web site at http://annayresbronzes.com/).
It’s not a total fluke, I would guess Ann does some regular searches on the figures she uses in her art, but still, here we go again, with an unexpected connection, however small, generated because Ron shared his art in the open.
It would not be possible without an open web.
Keep that in mind was other mega entities are praised for “eating the internet“.
Thanks Ann for finding out little corner of the web.
A screenshot of the sculpture “Bonnie McCarroll 1915 Pendleton Round-Up” by bronze artist Ann Ayres, from her web site http://annayresbronzes.com/
The post “The Small Random Things That Openness Affords” was originally emerged from the primordial ooze and first walked on land at CogDogBlog (http://cogdogblog.com/2016/04/openness-affords/) on April 27, 2016.
There is a new blogging platform, one that I think is better than WordPress, and I am moving there for future posts. I will add pointers here, but the content will be there.
Why am I releasing total control over my feed here, with my own domain name and wordpress installation? Two factors, curation and convenience.
Medium was developed by one of the co-founders of Twitter. Understanding social media and applying it to content, Evan Williams put together a platform that allows any user to blog, limits the format options to make the content the draw, and allows for readers to decide easily what should be highlighted and promoted each day. Add to that paid authors of note, like Steven Levy on Crypto War Redux, to draw the public.
There are other alternatives to Medium, outlined at Lifehacker, but they don’t put the author at the center, supported by the readers, in a symbiotic relationship that is an evolution from what publishers used to do. Medium acts as a medium, but is, in its current state, almost invisible. Something I like.
As an occasional blogger in the days of fading RSS use, I cannot expect people to come to my domain to read what I have to say; it gets lost in the shuffle of a million other blogs. With Medium, I have a chance that they may get linked or looked at more often. As well as the convenience of web-based posting. Find me at https://www.medium.com/@tokyokevin
UPDATE: about a year later. Medium is going through some changes. I am back here. Sorry about the leave.
When I hear folks in my stream sharing stuff for Open Education Week, my inner cynic wonders what they do the rest of the year. Or speculate a world where we do not have to draw attention in this way to Openness.
I get it. The whole idea is to raise awareness, and most of the people I hang put with are truly Year Round Open Education people- the week is for a broader swath of people. I am not criticizing the week. Ok?
And as open gets washed and wrapped around commercial products, we do and should do, develop our own definition, rather than abiding by someone elses. It takes time and experience.
So I think of it as that light being always on, all night long, heck all day long.
I am not saying that everything open needs to go on for ever, but in a lot of Certain Open Courses That Usually Start with an X, once the last item on the syllabus / schedule passes on the calendar, the tent goes down and the lights are turned off. Do people really hang around their past Coursera/Udacity/EdX MOOCs? Why would they?
The Open Stuff that I am interested in, is not just that anyone can walk through the door, as there are often ONLY IFs. They can walk through the door ONLY IF they create an account and login. They can walk through the door ONLY IF they are in certain parts of the world (geographic limits on media). Openness is not just a door.
And even if the door is open, what good is it if you walk in the door, and no one is there? That’s the Field of Dreams approach of Putting it On the Web and Calling it Done.
Okay, so I am not taking this post in the direction I thought I was in the beginning. That happens.
Rather than trying to say what open is / isn’t, I’m talking about the kinds I personally think are important.
The kinds of things that carry it’s own momentum above, beyond, outside the “course” or even the people who launched it. The ones where people participate in that maybe you do not even know about. That do so sometimes without you even knowing about it.
Of course, in my case I am taking about DS106. I am a proud Cult Member.
ds106 poster by Jim Groom http://bavatuesdays.com/theyre-here-2/I think Martha Burtis made this? And yes, Stephen, we are a cult.I made this one, the faces are Tim Owens, Jim Groom, and Martha Burtis
If folks are spontaneously creating posters, songs, GIFs, videos to celebrate your Open Thing, and it’s not any kind of assignment, you’ve done well.
But this allegiance/affinity thing is not at all limited to ds106. I’ve had a personal theory that you are most rooted/connected to the first cMOOC you experienced a mind-blowing, connecting-around-the-world experience. Others had it with CLMOOC. ETMOOC. MOOCMOOC. The various rhizo14,15,16 gardens.
It’s almost a tribal thing, and sometimes we playfully tease each other
Really we are much more together, in an affinity of “not being like all that other crap.”
And a question becomes, in what ways do you design your open experiences to allow for the kind of serendipity you do not anticipate? Do you leave room/space for that? Because serendipity, the unintended things that happen are, to me, the sources of Great Potential Energy of Goodness – this does not usually happen when you have a strict structural objective compliant design where people are there to collect a certificate or a badge.
There is a lovely undertow of people playfully riffing on ideas and creations; but that is not limited to DS106. I’ve seen it in CLMOOC, rhizoXX (see recent example from Simon Ensor)– this is stuff you cannot plan for, all you can do is spread some fertilizer, sunshine, water, and a few seeds (to use the metaphor).
There is no boundary to it.
I thought of this recently in watching activity in the #ds106 hashtag in twitter. The lovely thing in this space is, that quite often, you do not always know who is there with what class, or on their own. The boundaries of a “course” or “class” are completely blurred and smeared.
In the last weeks, I notice a lot of daily create tweets with the tag #diglitclass. I thought it might be the group from CUDenver, but that’s a PD class and they sort of have a tag.
So I asked… and when you ask, often you get an answer.
Now I know more. There is a class there in Digital Literacy using part of ds106, and we have no idea why, how. They did not need to ask permission to use the Daily Create.
This is a porch light being on, the door being open, and people freelt coming and going from inside and outside.
This is open.
Have nice week.
Top / Featured Image: The metaphor I sought for this post (I don’t write until I have one and an image) was the Motel 6 ad line “We’ll leave the light on for you” (for some reason I thought it included “porch”, so my metaphor is “wrong”?). But I was hoping for an image of an outdoor porch light on at night.
A Google Images / Licensed for Reuse search for “porch light” was dismal. There are musical references, and about 3 rows down all you get are porches. Compfight too was slim. Then I thought, “I have a porch light and I bet I have taken photos of it” — the obvious of search your own photos. And BOOM! a perfect image I did not even envision, this from a box of switch plate covers at a thrift store near me, with the “Porch Leave on Label”. I did not even see this one in my mind; that’s what I love about digging for metaphor images.
The post “Open is The Porch Light Being On (and more)” was originally pulled like taffy through a needle’s eye at CogDogBlog (http://cogdogblog.com/2016/03/open-is-the-porch-light-being-on-and-more/) on March 11, 2016.
eCampus Ontario News! University of Toronto has nine collaborative project proposals that have been approved for the 2016 round of the MTCU-funded provincial Shared Online Course fund. Each of the following will receive between $40,000 ~ 60,000 with a deadline … Continue reading →
eCampus Ontario News! University of Toronto has nine collaborative project proposals that have been approved for the 2016 round of the MTCU-funded provincial Shared Online Course fund. Each of the following will receive between $40,000 ~ 60,000 with a deadline … Continue reading →
If the web was designed for you, then you might never enjoy the Museum of Endangered Sounds. But because much of the web is designed by us, we get gems like this that are weird, quirky, open to all and has a personality of it’s own.
This site exists because someone like Charles wants it to exist.
Right at the intro (below the exhibits) we get jagged pixelate font, and the fact that the creator of the site has (and publishes) his own AOL address? Priceless.
Brendan’s description does it better than I could do, and says a lot about the spirit of the Open Web.
I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it’s a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered. But, as streaming playback becomes more common in the US, and as people in developing nations like Canada and the UK get brought up to DVD players, it’s likely that the world will have seen and heard the last of older machines like the HR-7100. And as new products come to market, we stand to lose much more than VCRs.
Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads? Tell me that. And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I’m gone?
These questions and more led me to the undertaking that is The Museum Of Endangered Sounds.
My ten-year plan is to complete the data collection phase by the year 2015, and spend the next seven years developing the proper markup language to reinterpret the sounds as a binary composition.
If you don’t understand my passion and the significance of my work, you probably never will. But if you do, then you’ve come to the right place.
Oh my, “Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine.” Imagine, indeed.
The site does what it says, you click the icons and hear the sounds of old technology. They just loop and loop and loop. What is fun is that you can click multiple ones and now the web page is some kind of bizarre instrument.
My best surprise was when i went to add it to my pinboard, it was already there!
The Web Designed by Business Executives would never have room for Charles, nor for you, nor me to put our personality out there.
(Yes I did click the link, Charles does have eight gerbils).
The post “The Open Web Makes Possible a Museum of Endangered Sounds” was originally slapped on the butt by a cigar smoking doctor yelling “It’s a post!” at CogDogBlog (http://cogdogblog.com/2016/02/endangered-web/) on February 9, 2016.
Last year I developed and taught a new LEGO-themed freshman seminar. Turns out I’ll be teaching it again this coming fall, so I have added motivation to take a critical look at successes and failures of my new course. While I don’t want to dwell on failures, fact is I made a big gamble in …
“From the Sage on the Stage to the Guide on the Side” is now about 20 years old. A little shopworn, but still a…how shall I put it….goal, of some teachers and how they adapt to technology. It is the gist of an Atlantic article by Michael Godsey, a K-12 teacher witnessing the “progress” right before his eyes. Another (and earlier!) way to look at it is John Higgins’ differentiation of teacher as Magister, the German cloak-clad lecturer, and the pedagogue, a poor wise man following around the son of a rich client to explain things to him. Find this in articles from 1983 and 1984, but also in his book from 1988.
I have been in meetings all day, discussing the curriculum for next year. One area of contention is control of the part-time teachers (adjunct staff). I felt a palpable want, almost a need, to put restraints on behavior to standardize content among students and classes. And I think that is just because we can. Some adjunct staff even prefer to come in, teach the text, and leave. Labor rules here in Japan now promote this system of itinerant labor by capping any part-time contract at 5 years, requiring the university to make them full time, or let them go. So now we have churn.
But the attitude toward teachers (no, not adjunct staff), even though most are highly qualified to deliver a quality course, even when asked to provide their own materials. And yet…that desire to make sure they are doing not just anything they want is still there.
Which brings me to an article at one of my favorite websites, Hybrid Pedagogy. John Rees asks How long will your class remain yours? Here is the first paragraph.
The late labor historian David Montgomery wrote famously about workers’ control in America during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. “At times the story involved little more than silent and opaque resistance to the demands and innovations of employers,” he suggested in 1979. “At other times, workers in skilled crafts adopted and fought to enforce collective work rules through which they regulated human relations on the job and wrestled with the chronic menace of unemployment.” When I first read those words, I was in graduate school. I never thought they’d actually apply to me. Now, I believe that the working class in academia at all levels of employment are beginning to move from the first set of times that Montgomery described to the second.
He goes on to paint a very dark picture, but does leave the doorway open a crack with the following: “However, the key takeaway here should be that every professor should adopt only those tools that best fit their style of teaching (perhaps including parts of the LMS if they meet a particular need).”
The problem is, that most teachers today don’t know how to use many tech tools for teaching and thus will be at the mercy of those who do, the programmers and instructional designers. So if you don’t start putting some online tools in your toolbox, and learn how to use them in a class, or even outside a class, online, you will have to learn tools assigned to you.
I had my last graduate school class of the academic year (we start in April, end in February), and my student was worried after we went through the Atlantic article (link above). She was worried that she would be out of a job. I told her first, not in Japan. The horizon of change you can see in the US, but here, not even a hint. She is still trying to get a projector and laptop for her high school classroom, all she has now is a blackboard. Second, language learning is like learning a sport, or a musical instrument. Really difficult to put online. So we are safe, as long as we learn how to adapt the tech to us, before the admins try to make us adapt to the tech.
The western landscape is full of emptiness, vast stretches of drab land, interrupted by deep canyons or sheer mountains, and infrequent water. My reasons for recently watching The Painted Desert was largely because it was set in an area close to where I live. I had it queued on Amazon Prime; a lesser quality version is available on YouTube.
It’s hardly a great movie, and in many ways left me puzzled (or more “Meh”), a lot to things that seemed missing or inconsistent. But that said, if you cannot find something of interest to write about, well…
Western pardners Jeff and Cash find a baby boy in an otherwise deserted emigrants’ camp, and clash over which is to be “father.” They are still bitterly feuding years later when they own adjacent ranches. Bill, the foundling whom Cash has raised to young manhood, wants to end the feud and extends an olive branch toward Jeff, who now has a lovely daughter. But during a mining venture, the bitterness escalates. Is Bill to be set against his own adoptive father?
Sound (and not)
I noted it was an old movie (1931) and frankly in the first few minutes, I was wondering if it was a silent movie. Nothing is said as Jeff and Cash come across an abandoned wagon. I almost expect Chaplin gesticulations and cue cards.
Actually the only sound seems to be the spoken lines and what was recorded on the set. There is no music. There are parts where between dialogue is a ghostly static, no wind blowing, or ambient sounds.
One might chalk this up to being an old movie, but somewhere I read someone mentioning earlier movies that did much better with audio.
Two Notes and Thats It?
The movie opens (1:05) and I think there is one more scene (9:05) where a notebook with handwriting is used to fill in the plot.
The notebook is used t indicate the passage of time at 9:05
It feels like it was an idea that just got dropped. Or maybe after the gap in time as brought to the present, it was not necessary? It feels like a rickety bridge built over a plot gap.
Gaps in Character Development
Since this is the part of #western106 that we think about characters, I found most of the ones in this movie stiff, thin, or just not built enough for me to care or be interested in.
The movie is built on this conflict between Jeff and Cash, apparently they traveled together to the West, apparently with a joint plan to work together (never hinted at). The whole scene where they find the baby feels fill of gaps too.
They come up to a wagon, hear a baby crying, they take him, and are riding off in like 4 minutes. It’s left to wonder what happened at that site, they did not even investigate. The timing feels wrong. This is a hinge for the characters in the movie, their fighting over Bill in their lives (the grown man from the baby).
They have some comedic moments with the baby, and then there seems to be no comedy in the rest of the movie.
Then they have this big blow up near the water hole, that just seems to come out of nowhere. Up to this point there was nothing to indicate these were not best buddies, and now they are viscously bickering (over whether to stay at the water hole?, and Cash rides off with the baby as a shield.
Then we get a note, and a return to the water hole. Because the lighting is exactly the same, there’s not much sense of time passage except for there are a lot fo buildings around the watering hole, and Jeff is there with a young lady. Somehow we have to figure out it is her daughter. The mother? maybe I was not paying full attention, but how these two people came to live there? We just jumped 20 years.
In her first scene, Mary Ellen Cameron (played by Helen Twelvetrees seems like a rootin’ tootin’ wester gal, she pulls out her shotgun ready to defend her Dad’s land, but a few minutes later she is more or less pushed aside from the action by Brett, and the rest of the movie, she’s more of a eyelash bashing bimbo. Brett makes a big move on her, for some reason she takes up with Bill; there is no lead up to that as a romance. It just sort of happens out of the blue).
The Gable Effect and Boy oh Boyd
Clark Gable as Rance Brett
This movie seems to be most well known for being the first talking movie role for Clark Gable, and is said to be the role that rocketed his career. His is the character that seems to have the most oomph and feel to it, and the most western grizzled cowboy type. Jeff and Cash seem to speak more flatly.
I lost track of where I read it, Gable had no horse riding experience before this movie.
The Brett character does work for being a man of mystery, he’s “from Montana” on his way to New Mexico, but for what? He’s got this affection for Jeff’s daughter Mary Ellen. He makes a strong flirting move early, but then he is never that bold later. This is important because it creates the tension with Bill (the grown found baby)
I was not even sure who the actor was til I looked it up, but Gable does have a strong screen presence.
The bigger role in the movie was William Boyd playing Bill Holbrook (wondering if Holbrook as chosen for the name of the town closest to the Painted Desert?). His character is potentially the most interesting, because he turns agains Cash you raise him and made efforts to try and broker piece with Cash’s old nemesis, Jeff. Why Bill wants this is not clear.
The mystical watering hole (made up I think) is a key element, as well as the presence of mine-able minerals. There are a few scenes out in the landscape, but it does not feel as much of a presence as the films of John Ford.
They seem to be in a really remote location; Jeff’s refusal to let Cash water his cattle a the watering hole requires a 27 mile re-route, but for being remote, they sure seem to be very close to a populated town (which I do not think is named).
There is the complete mine set build and destroyed. Apparently some crew were injured during the blasts done for that scene. Oops.
The Unexpected
For a western this movie is missing the tropes of Really Bad Guys, bank robberies, gunfights, fistfights, jumping from trains, and dealings with Indians.
In the scene where Jeff and daughter get ready, they do the classic putting their ear to the ground. This is where it should turn to a marauding band of Indians, but surprise! It’s cattle.
Then we have this rising tension of Cash bringing his cattle in, but as a suprirse there is a whooping band of horsemen who drive the cattle away. The sounds they are making sound like Indian war cries, but ti turns out tis just Bill and (??) we have no idea who else helped him.
No Indians appear in this movie. No Mexicans either. It’s a White and White movie.
Really the movie is just this long lived (and little explained) animosity between the men in the beginning who found a baby. It’s almost more of a family drama, just set in the Painted Desert.
There’s Probably More
I lost some interest and attention over the last 1/3 of the movie, and maybe even noticed the credits rolling before I knew it was over.
The gaps and things that feel missing from this movie seem to have more to do with the behind the scenes actions of the movie studios and production companies. From one of the reviewers on IMDb, titled “It’s Not All There”
The Painted Desert was one of the last features to be produced by Pathé in 1930 before being taken over by RKO, and one of the first to be released by the emerging RKO-Pathé Distributing Corporation. After its initial release it was put back on the shelf, supposedly never to be seen again. During this time four key action sequences were removed to be used as stock footage in later RKO films, among them the 1938 re-make also titled The Painted Desert. In 1955 the RKO library was sold to C&C Television Corporation for TV syndication, primarily on CBS affiliated stations, and both versions of The Painted Desert were in the package. 35MM source material for these 16mm television prints was missing all of the deleted footage, so that what remained, and all that viewers have been able to see for the last fifty years, was a lot of talk, and practically no action. The sequences which are missing are most of the cattle stampede at the beginning of the film, a wagon hi-jacking and subsequent stampede into the canyon mid-way into the film, an attempted, but unsuccessful wagon hi-jacking soon afterwards, and the big mine explosion and resultant landslide that destroys the mining camp further on. (Two very impressive shots from this last sequence can be found in Republic’s Red River Valley (1936).) Frustratingly, the results of these events are shown, and much talked about, but the events themselves are nowhere to be seen. The version shown on Turner Classic Movies, though of superior visual quality, having been derived from the surviving original 35MM material, is still missing these key sequences, though no mention is made of it on the air.
It makes sense now that it’s not even clear what the “movie” is as it can get picked over and re-arranged by movie studios. It even gives some pause to think all that happens to get that movie on the screen, and it has as much to do with the business as the writing, directing, etc.
Not a great western, but still found a few things worth looking into.
I am just all the time appreciating IMDb more and more. It looks like any other web site, but when you peek under the corners, there is a whole raft of things it is doing with data. Like the Connections section where I note that The Road to Perdition makes a reference to this movie.
Let’s start first with credits. Specifically movie credits. Arguably, the website my wife, Katie, goes to most often is the International Movie Database (IMDB) website. When we watch a movie, 20 minutes into the film, without fail, she will whip out her phone and pull up the IMDB page for the movie.
Most recently, we were at the movie watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens (I promise, no spoilers). A scene comes on with the General Hux character. She thinks she’s seen him somewhere so she’s searching on IMDB. A-ha! Domhnail Gleeson. He was in a Black Mirror episode, she tells me. My facial-name recognition is about as good as a goldfish, so I have no idea what she’s talking about, but she goes on to explain the exact episode that he was in.
And suddenly we have pulled this information together as network; something in which we can relate to and empathize with based off of our previous relationship with other texts. Arguably, the number one value to the user in the social network is this: a way to organize and interact with their network which is made up of these disparate connections that have taken place over time.
So those in the film industry, including actors, gather credits and over time these credits start to build up a collective body of work. I can interact with these credits and try to put together my own interpretation of who this actor is and how they have developed over time based on different variables. Box office smasher or flop? Lead role or supporting? Who was the producer? Was it an independent film? Is this actor more dramatic or comedic? These are all a bit of judgements on my part, as the interpreter, because, ultimately a credit is a credit is a credit. The credit is fairly neutral.
It’s like being a web archeologist. I am gently dusting off the fine dust on this page with a soft brush, and there it is- the first time this great site went on the web, it was on a server at Cardiff University in Wales:
The first web version of the database went live on the servers at Cardiff University in Wales. There is a fun bit of e-mail dating back to those days between web interface author, Rob Hartill, and Col Needham, both impressed when the web interface got 100 accesses in a single day. In recent years, the IMDb website has been serving over 2.5 billion accesses from over 57 million visitors every month.
Imagine that, another huge internet innovation birthed in higher education. Back when it really was an internet frontier, the Wild Wild Web.
Top / Featured Image: Screen capture from The Painted Desert (1931) found on YouTube – this is the early scene where Rance Brett (right, Clark Gable) meets Jeff Cameron (left, J. Farrell MacDonald)
As part of our ongoing exploration of the potential of Massive Open Online Courses, Online Learning Strategies in conjunction with the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation recently held a community event, MOOCapalooza: Purposes and Potential of Massive Open Online Courses … Continue reading →
