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Open Participants 2018, The Network

Upon Reflection, Part Two: Creating a Virtual Gallery of Digital Art

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Yesterday, I posted the first of a few reflections on the collaboration and thinking, and making, that went into the building of the online NetNarr Alchemy Lab of Digital Objects. This post is the follow-up, with more reflections on things that seemed to work and things didn’t seem to work (as well as I would have liked). One more post tomorrow will look at potential next steps and following up with the Alchemy Lab experience. Visit the NetNarr Alchemy Lab […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

Upon Reflection, Part One: Creating a Virtual Gallery of Digital Art

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Ideas and Inspirations This all began when I had a crazy, inspired thought that I decided not to keep to myself (because how much fun would that be?): What if the (open and university) folks dabbling in Networked Narratives together created a collaborative piece of transmedia artwork together? I had recently been thinking more about transmedia storytelling — about how to try to tell a story that unfolds across different digital media and mediums, each piece with the ability to […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

Technology as Art/ Art as Technology

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Will, drop my brass panties – you feel my text up flickr photo by LastHuckleBerry shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license “… we can try out completely different ways of (art) expression.” — Douglas Eck. Douglas Eck – Transforming Technology into Art In another video from an interesting series I have found on digital storytelling, Douglas Eck looks at how technology is transforming art, but also notes the human influence on technology. Eck work at Google, on a project […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

Get Your Alchemy On (The Lab is Open)

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For the past two months or so, a group of us open participants in the Networked Narratives have been working behind the scenes on the construction of an immersive, virtual Alchemy Laboratory of Stories. (Officially, NetNarr is a university course being taught in the US by Alan Levine, and in Norway by Mia Zamora, with some intersections with Maha Bali in Egypt, and with open doors to the open learning community — that’s where I am). Many folks in various […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

View from the Seats: Watching Ready Player One

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via Warner Brothers Ready Player One could have been worse. A lot worse. It also could have been better. A lot better. Split the difference? It was an entertaining movie with, as my older son noted afterwards, “more holes in the plot than you could poke a stick through.” My younger son, who has read the book by Ernest Cline at least six times in the past two years, added, “The book was better.” I was more charitable with the […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

NetNarr: Getting My Alchemy On

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Each day, I continue to use the prompts from the Daily Arganee of Networked Narratives to write a short poem or piece as a creative exercise. I am more apt veer off-topic than to stay on-topic with the prompts, but I aim to go where the muse takes me. Periodically, I’ll go in and gather and curate them into a short video.  The one above is my recent collection. These down below are some of the past collections of the […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

#NetNarr: Hacking/Remixing the Game of Chess

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A few years ago, for DS106, I was part of a group that did a collaborative radio project that centered on the art of remixing. My segment centered around an activity I do with my sixth grade students, remixing and hacking the game of chess to create something new altogether. It is part of our Game Design Unit. Here is the radio segment I did: Peace (hacked for greater good), Kevin PS — here is the entire Merry Hacksters Radio […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

Six Word Slice of Life: From Design Flow to Interactive Story

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(For this month’s Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers, I am aiming to do Six Word Slices most days, with some extended slices on other days.) Context: I wrote the other day about the ways my sixth graders were making design plans to create Interactive Fiction stories inside Google Slides. Since then, they have been working hard to bring the stories to fruition, and by yesterday, many were finishing up the writing and proofreading of their stories. I enjoy […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

#NetNarr: GameLoop GameSounds GameOver

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This week, in Networked Narratives, the theme is on games and one of the challenges is to use audio to tell a story, and the audio should be game-themed. I decided to try to make a short song loop, with game sounds. No story except, there’s always a “game over” moment in a game. By the way, if you want to join me in annotating the video hangout session that the NetNarr folks and guests did on the topic of […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

#NetNarr Post-Hangout: Sending Gifs

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via GIPHY I could not attend the online Google hangout the other day for Networked Narratives, which featured guests Amy Burvall and Michael Branson Smith on the art of the animated gif, and the possibility for expression with the social media photo formatting. My friend, Wendy, suggested on Twitter that we make gifs from the hangout video, and well, that sounded like a fine idea. I did all of this within Giphy itself, which has stickers (which I keep forgetting […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

#NetNarr: Patent Entertainment With Animated GIFS

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Original Patent: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/16972882 The folks over at Today’s Document surprise me now and then when they slip an animated gif into their RSS feed, usually in the form of an item about one of the patents in the Library of Congress. (They also will regularly convert video archive moments into animated gifs, but I find these illustration remixes to be the best to enjoy). Original Patent: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6277655 I’m always fascinated by the old drawings in the patent applications, so the […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

#NetNarr: Getting a Bit Crazy, Making GIFS

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Over at Networked Narratives, the theme is now shifted into GIFs, and all the wacky things you can do with them. Alan’s assignment calls for a GIF storm of sorts in the #NetNarr hashtag, including GIFs that connect with the Digital Life underpinning and finding narrative points in the clip from the Western movie The Big Country to pull out as animated moments. So … First, I went in to the clip and found the dramatic scene where the rider […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

#NetNarr Discovery: Lost In Hyperland (A Fantasy Documentary)

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Hypermedia flickr photo by Dominik W. Neuffer shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license Thanks to some sharing of an article by Wendy in Networked Narratives a few weeks ago, I stumbled on this 1990 film about where hypertext might be going, with novelist Douglas Adams. The Internet Archive site explains a bit more about Hyperland: In this one-hour documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

In Celebration of Reading and Writing: Mobile Storytelling

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In a time when so many of us bemoan a seemingly apparent decline in writing and reading in young people, this video reminds us that maybe we are looking and observing in all the wrong places. Check it out. Candice Faktor shows us where and how young people are engaged in stories and fiction. This is part of a cool video series I found that dovetails nicely with my thinking of how to use technology to transform writing and literacies. […]

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Open Participants 2018, The Network

Inside the #NetNarr Alchemy Lab: An Open Invitation to Collaborate

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A group of us who are in the Wide and Wild Open Community of Networked Narratives decided we want to put into practice the elements of those networks and narratives with a collaborative transmedia project. Transmedia concepts involve various forms of digital media, and digital platforms, connected together into one larger story thread. We’re calling this project “MediaJumpers”, and our tagline is “Every Object Tells a Story.” We’re using the concept of the magical “Alchemy Lab” as the setting for […]

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