Category Archives: ds106

Like a Car Chase

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This project was inspired by a Sklar brothers bit that I heard on the VA Beach AM comedy channel the other day. An edited and condensed version of track 16 is here.

Now on to the assignment . . .

Take any video.1 Add your voice over as if you were a local TV news anchor attempting to provide color commentary without stating anything as a fact or with certainty. Add all the hedge words and banalities that exemplify this kind of coverage.

If you’re looking for the DS106 tag/aggregation for the assignment go here (AudioAssignments, AudioAssignments1085).

The basic idea is this is almost the opposite of what we want students to do with writing. We want them to be specific, to eliminate hedge words, to make a strong argument, and to take a specific stance. In a class, I might flip it both ways. Have one understated version with no definite statements and then do another version which overstates things (like this Daily Show clip description which I may dig up the video for at some point). Or you could simply give them the option to either understate or overstate the commentary.

This is a quick and dirty example where despite my efforts I accidentally say a few facts. For instance, there’s no way I could really know that humanoid is small, nor that the utensil is plastic. Allowing for an editing cycle based on other people calling out facts might be possible depending on time.

1 The worse the video, the easier this is. Look for something with virtually no action. If it’s exciting, you’ll never keep up.

Twilight Zone Titles Poetry

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This is the first #ds106 assignment I’ve done in a long while. The challenge is to write a poem using only the titles of Twilight Zone episodes. It’s an easy one for any English teacher to use as is or to adapt to whatever restricted set they want – chapter titles from a book, band names, Top 40 song titles, scientific names for animals etc. etc. I think more and more that a major part of English class ought to be encouraging students to play with language and then to figure out why they like what they like. Maybe that’s obvious.

Thanks to Todd Conaway for the assignment (official assignment in the repository) and for the work getting the titles in one place. I also took his Word doc and put it in a Google Docs table to help me see more/most of the titles at once and because I dislike having to open programs on my computer these days.

Is The Apocalypse Upon Us?

Mr. Denton On Doomsday

The Fear
The Fever
The Last Flight
The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street
The Four Of Us Are Dying

And When The Sky Was Opened
I Shot An Arrow Into The Air
The Last Flight
The Purple Testament

Dust
Static

The Silence

Pop Culture Omnibus

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An aggregation of strange things that interested me in one way or another.

tl;dr and government communication in the age of the hipster

SPD seized a bunch of my marijuana before I-502 passed. Can I have it back?
No.

Seattle PD’s information on marijuana legalization is an interesting piece with a tl;dr reference and an embedded Lord of the Rings “finest weed” video clip.

Compare the voice and audience of this government communication to other state communications.

We will kill you so fast

We need doctors because people grow up and you fall down and go boom. Everyone’s going to need a doctor. Let’s have 3 doctors per floor of every apartment building in this town. How about that as a good idea? Like that is a good idea. OK.

So let’s make college tuition either free or really low. And if you have a country full of whip-crack-smart-people, you have a country the rest of the world will fear. They will not invade a country of educated people because we are so smart. We’ll build a laser that will burn you, the enemy, in your sleep before you can even mobilize your air force to kill us. We will kill you so fast because we are so smart.

–Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins gives a whole new side of STEM education that I missed from all of the other experts. Let’s thank Big Think for helping to clarify the issue with helpful videos from experts in the field.1

The Maginot Line For Cursive

I’m not really interested in arguing about cursive either way. I just don’t care but this article claiming to argue for keeping cursive does about the worst job I can imagine. Seriously, it makes me sad. Basically the article breaks down to -

  • One PTSD flashback to a nun who threw the author’s work away because apparently nuns can’t read print and really like being mean to kids for no reason.
  • The next argument seems to indicate we should spend time teaching cursive because it’s now being used in CAPTCHAs. I think this is a case of putting the monkey2before the cart.
  • That’s followed by a double-summarized reference to printing (rather than cursive) resulting in “adult” like brain activity. This was also compared to saying the words rather than typing them- which might have actually been a useful comparison for this article.
  • Finally, there’s a half-joking (I guess) reference to students not being able to read the Constitution because it’s written in cursive. So writing vs reading, the many, many versions of the Constitution in typeface3aside, let’s look at the ability of our cursive educated students and adults ability to read and understand the Constitution right now. Then I’d like a conversation about where we are failing our students and where we need to place attention.

The essentials


This was an old screenshot I took of a middle school student’s computer. Apparently these were the phrases she needed for daily success.

Please do not come again


Some people are more serious about shutting down their blogs than others.

GNU?


Strange message in a spam Google Form URL. Oddly the URL worked and I can’t figure out anyway the message could have been customized, nor any reason to customize it given this was a phishing attempt.

Nothing is safe


1 Alternate titles for this section included sharks with laser beam references, lines from Marky Mark’s Fear movie and other even more obscure things.

2 The horse left in disgust earlier.

3 It’d be totally impossible to alter the original because it’s in cursive,right? RIGHT?

Seeking a Blessing

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I’m semi-happy with how this turned out. I lost a track twice thanks to not paying attention and some help from my kids. You might think hitting save a lot is a good idea but it also wipes out your undo options. It might have been better but waiting for good enough is the reason I have several hundred draft posts on this blog. It’s all in good fun anyway.

Anyway, here is mashup of Gardner Campbell’s Open Ed 2012 keynote and Tighten Up by the Black Keys. It is not necessarily representative of Gardner or the The Black Stripes but it ought to encourage you to check out both.

GCRemix20122

Thanks to Grant Potter for encouraging me to do something other than nothing.

Police Beat

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I was listening to “Ain’t too Proud to Beg” coming to work this morning. I’m always surprised what songs actually say when you really listen to the lyrics. Essentially, a number of the things advised by songs can be highly questionable- even in innocent seeming songs from The Temptations. Given that and the predilection of stars to get in legal trouble I came up with this idea. 1

Essentially, identify an innocent seeming song that advocates some odd/criminal behavior and reformat it as a police report style article. My example based on “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” is below. 2

January, 22, 2012 – Resisting Arrest/Violation of a Restraining Order

Eddie Kendricks, 46, was arrested at his former residence, 12 Jones street, at 4:37AM. Kendricks is accused of stalking and violating an order of protection filed by his former wife, Angela Berry, after their recent divorce.

Kendricks is accused of sleeping on the doorstep of the residence they previously shared. Kendricks is also accused of actively preventing Ms. Berry from leaving her home. Witnesses report that Kendricks often appeared incoherent, at times sobbing and begging at the door of Ms. Berry’s residence for hours at a time.

“At first, it was funny,” reported Berry’s neighbor, Ron Paxton. “We’d laugh at him, a grown man, behaving like that. But then he just wouldn’t stop. Poor Angie couldn’t even leave the house. Something had to be done.”

Prosecutors say more charges may be pending for Kendricks who has defied previous restraining orders and was out on bail at the time of his latest arrest.

Ain’t Too Proud To Beg

I know you wanna leave me,
But I refuse to let you go,
If I have to beg, plead for your sympathy,
I don’t mind ’cause you mean that much to me.

Ain’t too proud to beg and you know it,
Please don’t leave me girl,
Don’t you go,
Ain’t too proud to plead, baby, baby,
Please don’t leave me, girl,
Don’t you go.

Now I’ve heard a cryin’ man
Is half a man with no sense of pride,
But if I have to cry to keep you,
I don’t mind weepin’ if it’ll keep you by my side.

–chorus about begging

If I have to sleep on your doorstep all night and day
Just to keep you from walking away,
Let your friends laugh, even this I can stand,
’cause I wanna keep you any way I can.

–chorus about begging

Now I’ve got a love so deep in the pit of my heart,
And each day it grows more and more,
I’m not ashamed to call and plead to you, baby,
If pleading keeps you from walking out that door.

–chorus about begging

1 In other news, I’d love to compare when words like “gun” are censored from songs on the radio based on the music type. For instance, Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got A Gun has no censoring but pretty much any rap song has “gun” censored (Even semi-rap like- Everlast’s What It’s Like gets censored.).

2 Bonus points if you can find a song from a singer/rapper actually arrested for that activity (Bobby Brown and a few others come to mind). It is probably too easy to use rap songs about drugs and killing people but set your own bar as high or low as you’d like. I think it’s much more fun if the song seems totally innocent.