Sharing to Learn – Learning to Share

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Reposted from a June 24, 2014 3M-DS106 Salon Blog Post.  All proprietary information has been deleted from this public version.

Internal 3M Spark Post to R&D Community:

Rochelle Aug_07_Hand

Sharing to Learn – Learning to Share
Posted by 3M-DS106 Salon Patroness Rochelle Lockridge

The @3mds106salon continued our June topic discussion on data visualization.  Having a bit of fun I showed up and shared a chart I’d made for the children’s story “Goldilocks and The Three Bears”. The chart was harder to make than I expected.  Receiving feedback and hearing what others would have done provided a tremendous amount of learning directly relevant to my job.  Check out the original & revised version as well as an animated GIF heat map by @Justin.  Play is good!

Today’s 3M-DS106 Salon was visited by 4 of us:  Rochelle, Justin, Tony  & Sharon

We continued our discussion on data visualization which was our topic of focus for June.  (See list of links below.) As the patroness/host of the 3M-DS106 Salon I had been pondering how I could more effectively bring the digital storytelling aspect into our group. (After all, that’s what the DS stands for. :)) I knew from my experiences with the external DS106 that I had learned a tremendous amount of very relevant digital literacy skills by playing and having fun with the DS106 community  But it’s a tough sell these days to get people to play here at 3M.  We feel play is a waste of time.  That we should be doing something more productive with our time.

  “Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that the fixation on making everything productive and rational cuts us off from the world of the spontaneous that is home to real knowledge..Play isn’t a character defect; it’s the builder of character, developing persistence, competence, mastery and social skills that take us beyond perceived limitations.” [Source] 

I am here to report that my supposedly non-productive activity (even I was questioning it.) of creating a data visualization for Goldilocks and The Three Bears was not a waste of time -for me or today’s Salon attendees.  Sure I learned more about struggling with Excel and formatting a slide that was informative and attractive. (See my process below.) When I shared it with my colleagues I learned even more as they easily shared their suggestions on how to improve my slide by limiting the amount of text, making things more visually simple so that at a glance a viewer can get most of the information and changing from a solid fill to an image fill on my bars.  However, it wasn’t until the rest of the group started to share how they would visualize the data and story that a deeper layer of learning emerged.  I got it that DS106 and the 3M-DS106 version we’ve been building isn’t just about creating digital artifacts and sharing them with others, it is also about the learning that occurs when others share with us.

When I heard how Sharon might adjust the bar chart, how Tony would display the data as a color coded cross table, and Justin’s idea for a heat map and an animated GIF, Well I was blown away.  Wow.  This is where the power is.  I was “playing” to learn more about a subject I was interested in – In this case data visualization and effective Power Point slides. I bravely shared what I had made with the group. Because of the relationships we have been building there was a comfort to continue sharing thoughts and suggestions with one another. I learned how they would do things differently than me, and knew  that I would use that knowledge the next time I had a 3M project that required data visualization.  I also walked away today with a deeper understanding of why I created the 3M-DS106 Salon; why I continue to do the assignment preparation work; why I hold meetings every Tuesday;  and why I attempt to write a summary post following our gatherings.  I am promoting a safe place for others to learn to share and their sharing is helping us learn more  together.  It’s all good for 3M.

Amenity/Hospitality Ratings for The Three Bears Cottage

What I assumed to be a slam dunk creating a chart in no time at all, turned out, when I actually set down to make it,  to be quite a bit more difficult than I had imagined.  I had several variables and labels:

  • The three bears- Poppa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear;
  • Porridge- Initially too hot for all three bears then: Too hot, too cold, just right;
  • The chairs and beds:- too hard, too soft, just right.

I tried creating bubble charts, x-y scatter plots, different styles of bar charts.  I finally settled on a basic horizontal bar chart.  Defining which data would represent the series and which simply data was tricky.  I kept ending up with the data points on top of one another.  It was frustrating that I couldn’t get it.  I don’t know if I was just tired or what.  Once I had the basic chart I wanted to make the slide readable and appealing. I added an informative title,  I increased the font size on the axis labels to 18pt. I found some graphics on the web to illustrate the amenities being rated. With the addition of a text box on the side, “Baby Bear was Just Right”, I wanted to communicate the final result of the “data analysis”.   My final touch was the addition of evaluation comments for each bar, such as Too Hard, Too Soft, Just Right.. I agree with the group that adding the individual evaluation comments was too much for this slide.

Tony suggested uncluttering with the replacement of the solid fill on the bars to images- for example 6 beds for Baby Bear’s ratings and 1 bed for Mama Bears.

Select data point bar => right click => Format Data Options => Fill => Picture or Texture Fill =>Insert picture from computer  file => Choose file from computer => Stack and scale with 1 unit per picture.

This would allow for removal of redundant text.  I’ve revised the slide with their comments in mind and created a new version below with more graphics and less text. Also using color coding more effectively by matching the clothes of the bears to the amenities.

Then Justin showed us quickly how he would make a GIF that could illustrate more of the unfolding story as well.  Take a look at it below.  And he’s posted the how and why of making the GIF on his blog too. How might you create an effective data visualization for Goldilocks and The Three Bears.  If you actually make something, you might learn a bit yourself. If you do, I’d really appreciate it if you’d share it with us so we can learn from you too.

VERSION 1:

Goldilocs-ThreeBears-Small

REVISED

Less text, more graphics, color coding, removal of axis. I’m still not sure if this works yet or not.  Is it clear that I am using a 1-6 rating system, with 6 being the best?

goldilocksratings_revised

Justin’s Animated Heatmap Example:

3m-ds106_goldilocks_quick_gif_concept_

Comments: 

I had another commitment and was not able to attend. I hope the following is useful. Looking at either of the two slides above, I found myself struggling with confusion interpreting the length of the bar chart, or the number of objects (representing hardness or temperature). I started out with the idea that the charts showed the hardness or temperature of the objects, rather than the goodness of fit.

To me, it would have been much easier to interpret a chart that put the ‘value to the customer’, or ‘match to Goldilock’s preference’ as a dependent variable on the Y axis and the independent variables (hardness, temperature) on the X axis, and you could even estmate a bell-shaped value curve to show the ‘sweet spot’ where she preferred to be. If I get time later today, I may try to give an example, but perhaps the text is sufficient.

Hoping this input is as welcome as you usually are to my thoughts. . .

BD

Here are the charts referred to in my comment on Rocky’s earlier post re Goldilocks.

GoldilocksCharts_BDower

JUNE DATA VISUALIZATION TOPICS AND LINKS

Data Visualization:

Writing References. YUCK!

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OER14 3M-DS106 Trailer

Collaboratively writing a paper and presenting at a conference with two people I’d never met in person was a fantastic learning experience from start to finish. It is totally amazing to me what can be accomplished within the digital realm I’ve landed in with the DS106 community.  I didn’t really experience anything different from doing something like this in person, except that when my ego or perfectionistic habits flared up I had a chance to step back, breathe and get myself focused back to what was best for the paper.  I’m sure each of us had that experience at one time or another, and our higher selves always won out. (The time zone differences helped with that too. 😉 ) I can’t express my appreciation enough to my co-authors Alan Levine and Mariana Funes for their skills, professionalism, creativity, and sense of adventure we’ve shared the last 6 months.

“This case study explores how DS106 tools, methodology and philosophy were adapted into the corporate world at 3M to build community, collaboration, and effective global communication skills. Our hypothesis was the pedagogy and assignments of the DS106 open course could be modified for delivery on a corporate intranet, using internal creation and communication tools standard for 3M employees. We hoped to learn how the course experience could work within cultural and technological constraints of a corporate environment.”

Lockridge, R., Levine, A & Funes, M. (2014). A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum. In Proceedings of OER14: building communities of open practice. Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

But what I wasn’t planned on learning, and wished that I could take back those 6+ hours of tedious OCD inducing labor back in February, was how to write the required (and admittedly very important) references for our OER14 paper to conform to the styles of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (http://www.apastyle.org).  What kind of sick personality makes these things up?

Conform to the styles of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (http://www.apastyle.org). Citations in the text appear in parenthesis as (Author, year) or (Author, year: page). If the author’s name appears in the text, as Author (year) or Author (year: page). Full citation of literature referred to should be given in References. Arrange the references alphabetically by first author’s name, rather than by the order of occurrence in the text. Punctuate and capitalize as in References of this document. Do not use numbered references or footnotes. References should use the style “reference-list”.

Ku, G. (2008). Learning to de-escalate: The effects of regret in escalation of commitment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105(2), 221-232.

For further examples see a summary of APA guidelines provided at http://www.library.cornell.edu/resrch/citmanage/apa 

Seriously

******************

From: Rochelle Lockridge 
Date: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 11:48 AM
Subject: Re: attached are my final edits.
To: Mariana Funes 
Cc: Alan Levine

Spent another 4 hours formatting those stupid references according to the American Psychological Association, 6th ed.  What kind of personality makes this stuff up? By the time I do this again it will probably be outdated and everything I’ve learned this morning will be a waste of time.  GRRR!  I’ve actually compiled the links to the references I used to learn how to create the references. Do I need to make references to those in our paper too. <maniacal insane laughter>

  • When and when not to use italics (boy is that a can of worms)
  • In-text citation verses reference formats (Those commas, periods, spaces, & semicolon placements are a bitch to get right.)
  • Formats for different media, e.g. video, blog posts, newspaper articles, on-line articles, publications by corporations, websites,   (Still a little fuzzy on the formatting for the DS106 website. I say put it back into the text of the document.  We know how to use it correctly there.)
  • The new addition says they favor [blog post] over [weblog post]
  • Citing a personal communication. “DO NOT include in reference list, only in text”
  • Do not include retrieval date unless the source material will change over time (like a wiki page) or it’s a link to a corporate website that doesn’t have a date listed on the source page.
  • Citing & alphabetizing multiple references in the same year from one author.
  • Multiple references from the same author but different years do not use the a, b, c designation.  The year is all you need.
  • Retrieved from not From

Link to paper A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum. Do me a big favor and at least read a couple of the painstakingly formatted citations at the end of the paper.  I need to know that someone out there found them of value, other than the entertainment value had by the person or persons who create these insane style formats.

 ****************

Here you go. My links to references about formatting references in case you ever, like me, naively decide to write an academic paper that requires the apa style format.

Postlude:

After doing all this work and whining about it to my daughter, she tells me there are computer programs out there that will do this type of formatting for you in a snap.  And once you have the basic information entered, you can very easily ask it to reformat for another style, say the Harvard Reference Style for example. She just happens to have a quality paid version on her computer that I could’ve used had she known what I was doing.  AAAHHH!!!!

Gah

GIFing with Jean-Claude

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JCVD-Sheep_ShootSlink

“Oh Sheep! This is gonna look bad.” – The directors cut.   (Created by Rochelle Lockridge  for the JCVD #GIFFight)

My latest round of creativity induced OCD started with a new GIFFight challenge from Michael B Smith (@mbransons)

There’s also a DS106 Animated GIF Assignment 1190 for any of the GIFFight projects to post to.

After downloading 1.1GB of short .mov clips of Jean-Claude Van Damme from Funny or Die JCVD Make My Movie Challenge there was no turning back.  I was riding the dopamine wave.  There were some new learnings and tricky bits with the Adobe Elements software I was using that I’ve included below in the process portion of this post.

My first GIFs used downloaded images from the Tate Collectives which I had been introduced to through a previous GIFFight Challenge. Animate the crap out of 1840’s Tate Artworks as part of the Tate Museum 1840’s GIF Party. (There’s also a DS106 Animated GIF assignment 1248 for this too.)

Two of my Tate 1840’s GIF Party entries:

 

JCVD-Vesuvius

JCVD Erupts With Mt. Vesuvius

Vesuvius In Eruption from the Tate Collectives

JCVD-TatePastPresent

JCVD To The Rescue. “I’ll protect you.”

Past and Present No. 1 from the Tate Collectives

The continued ride on that dopamine wave resulted in me making the following JCVD gifs to give a few of my DS106 mates a giggle.

Wanting to celebrate John Johnston’s hitting 106 likes on his JJGifs Tumblr site I searched through his posts and found a GIF of sheep running past that I thought would work well. Due to Tumblr size restrictions I was forced to shorten the “directors cut” version you see at the top of this post.  I just thought having him shooting the place up then realizing it was just sheep passing by added another layer of absurdity. The shortened version below is still funny watching JCVD slink away with the sheep though.

JCVD-SheepSlink_Short

“Oh Sheep! This is gonna look bad.” Shorter version due to Tumblr size restrictions

Sheep GIF from JJGIFs

The GIFaChrome corporation recently posted that Colin’s new body guard, Jean-Claude Van Damme may need to tone down his enthusiasm somewhat.  He’s going to scare everybody off…. not just the bad guys.

JCVDRun_ColinToy

JCVD is the new bodyguard for Colin the Dog (@GIFaDog). The GIFaChrome mascot.

A crazed Jean-Claude Van Damme freaked out on Twitter. His overactive testosterone levels blinded him to the fact that DS106 doesn’t need protecting from @clhendricksbc.

JCVDRun_Christina

Jean-Claude freaks out over @clhendricksbc Twitter thumb.

Remember the DS106 Headless ’13 Riff-a-GIF spontaneous collaboration Riffs Sprouting Up Overnight? Which started out as a doctored photo of my grandson “DJ at Stonehenge“, Glad Jean-Claude wasn’t in the picture back then “protecting us”.

JCVDRun_DJStonehenge

Stonehenge under attack – “Run for your lives! I’ll cover you!”

The How I Did It portion

I’m thinking it would be helpful if I were to create a screen cast tutorial for this process.  Like I said above, it’s a little tricky and has taken a fair bit of effort on my part to learn how to do it. Future project……

  1. Downloaded the 1.1GB (yes Gigabytes) of .mov clips from Funny or Die JCVD Make My Movie Challenge.
  2. Imported the clips into Adobe Premeire Elements 12 and added them to the time line.
  3. Added the still image onto a track under the JCVD clip. Premiere Elements knew that the movie clip was formatted so that it should have a transparent background and automatically created a video merge effect.
  4. Render, Publish+Share as Computer files => Scroll down to choose JPEG
  5. => Advanced => Basic Settings Click “Export as Sequence”
  6. To easily make the GIF in PSD from many images without having to drag and drop each. (A very painful process when you have 82 frames.)  The easy way…. File=>Place
  7. File => Save for web => make sure to check the “image sequence”.  Check for compliance with Tumblr size restrictions max 500px wide and must be less than 1MB

Going one step further, so that I or others (or me 🙂 ) could use the JCVD transparent images for their projects I produced a GIF and accompanying layered PSD file.

To create transparent background of JCVD for use in PSD files.

  1. Added JCVD movie clip to time line.
  2. This time our background will be a solid color that we can delete when it gets into Photoshop.
  3. Open project assests => New Item => Color Matte => pick color (I used green screen)
  4. Render, Publish+Share as Computer files => Scroll down to choose JPEG
  5. => Advanced => Basic Settings Click “Export as Sequence”
  6. Save
  7. Open jpg series in Photoshop Elements with File=>Place.
  8. click on layer changing it from background to layer
  9. Select a portion of the green. Select Similar. Select Inverse.
  10. Refine Edge. Output decontaminate Colors – amt 100% – Output to New Layer
  11. Smart Radius = 2.1 , Smooth = 1
  12. Edit => Cut (or ctrl-X)
  13. Delete original layers with the green background
  14. File => Save for web => make sure to check the “image sequence”.  Check for compliance with Tumblr size restrictions max 500px wide and must be less than 1MB.

JCVDRun_Template

 

20 Steps Til He!! Freezes Over

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20 Steps til He!! Freezes Over At least that’s all it takes in Minnesota this year.

20StepsTilHe!!Did you know that your iPhone will shut down if it’s out in 8°F for less than 10 minutes? I do… For DS106 Daily Create TDC 780 it was easy for those of my fellow DS106ers to create a video by stringing together 20 clips taken every 20 steps.  That it was a little harder for me to complete this vimeo weekend challenge in the middle of winter in Minnesota would be an understatement. (We have 20″ of snow on the ground this year.) While I wasn’t able to do a 20-20 I did end up with 14 clips. Half of which were taken inside the house before I even opened the door to the arctic winter wonderland called Rochelle’s front driveway.  

Not only did my phone shut down, my freezing fingers were close to frost bite by the time I made it back into the house.  I  think it’s time for me to invest in a pair of those cool gloves that let you use your touch screen controls.  BRRRR!!!!! Once I safely made it back in, my fingers warmed, and my poor little phone came back to life, I downloaded my video clips with the Phototransfer app. There I imported them into Adobe Premeire 12 for video editing.  I had talked about doing this project last night with my daughter Amber who recommended the song I used…

“I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

It took some creative problem solving to use all 20 seconds of each of the clips and end up with a completed video sequence that was only 3:20 min verses 4:40 min. The trick was to use the time stretch effect.  I kept a few clips inside the house at normal speed. The outside clips were sped up by 150% to 200%. From experience taking panoramic shots by hand, I knew I how to pan relatively smooth and slow.  So when the video sequence was sped up you didn’t feel like “hurling” from motion sickness.

And I learned a new technique today.  To reverse the video you put in -100%.  That allowed me to create a better flow of the camera pan to be in one direction instead of the back and forth way that I had taken the original video. I chose not to talk while shooting the video.  Glad I did.  I was able to add two sound effects at the right places: Footsteps in Snow and Arctic Wind Blizzard Snow Whistle made available for easy use with the in program audio effects on Premiere Elements.

That’s it.  Post completed while I waited for the video to render and upload to YouTube.  I apologize to those of you, like Stefanie Jeske in Germany, who won’t be able to see the video because I chose this time around to use a third-party copyrighted song.  I rarely go that route, but the song fit so well.  It gave me a giggle and having my little dog Abby be my love keeping me warm put me over-the-top.

DS106 Rocks!

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DS106 ROCKS! 3M-DS106 Salon Patroness admiring the work of her co-collaborators for their OER14 paper.

If you’ve been following my communications out to the world over the last few days you know that the OER14 paper, “A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum” that Alan Levine, Mariana Funes and I were writing was joyfully submitted on 2/27/14.  We’ll be presenting our 3M-DS106 Salon work at the end of April in Newcastle, UK. (Link to keynote speakers and panel members) For more see my post 3M+DS106+P2PL=OER14+M2M,  which includes a video I created from interviews with the 3M participants and the original abstract for the paper.


The Art used for making the “art”:

With my focus on writing the paper (and my paying job at 3M that is making all of this possible) I haven’t taken much space to create something just for fun.  As soon as the paper finished I jumped back into the “art” game and used the opportunity to show my appreciation for my ‘partners in crime’:  Alan Levine, Mariana Funes, and Giulia Forsythe. (Who at our hopeful request in the final week, does what she does best, doodled a wonderful image to capture the paper beautifully.)

OER14-GiuliaForsythe

“A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum” illustrated by Giulia Forsythe (@GiuliaForsythe on Twitter)

As usual, ideas emerged and morphed as I was in creation mode.  The first image created was of the three of us enjoying our time in the Salon. It was sparked by an innocent comment from Mariana on the final draft of the paper and the resulting Twitter DM exchange.

MF: This is now icing on cake – but did you not have a wonderful photo of the Patroness in the days of yore in one of your posts? Could we add it here? And gif it? No. Kidding.”

RL: Thx for final comments. Especially reference comments at end. Are you truly serious about inserting the Salon GIF into our paper?

MF: I would love it. You think it is too much? It would be still for printing but could be a lead in to gif 4 work? or the 1 with work process? would be nice to have something stand out in the dull dull proceedings 🙂 it is a work thing for u so yr call!

There were many layers and tools used in re-making the paintings.  All were produced in Adobe Photoshop CS5.  The more advanced transformation tools available over Photoshop Elements allowed me to do things like warp the little red 3M on the envelope on the side table and Giulia’s doodle seen in the lap of the Salon Patroness, Madame de 3M106 .

I was fortunate to already have Colin the Dog (seen at our feet), and our three heads cut out from previous projects. The biggest issue that took A LOT of time futzing around was matching the color and texture of the new heads to the rest of the painting.  With these two projects I’ve (rather painfully) moved beyond the novice stage of applying layer mask effects. It’s easy once you get it – sort of like making a GIF. But up to this point it was more of an accident than a purposeful action.  See that little check box (Which pops up when you are creating a new layer.) next to “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask”? We are now best friends.

LayerMaskWindos

Not yet totally familiar with all of the layer effects and filters, I just kept trying stuff out until it looked sort of like I wanted.  I’m not 100% satisfied with the results, but it’s a long way from when I first started. (Nana-Tina-Little Alan REDO) I still need more practice.  Look closely and you’ll also find DS106 on the back of the couch on the left side of the portrait and an OER14 on the right side of the mantle. 

But I really like the efffect of the rocking DS106.  This was one of those instances of serediptity.  I wanted to turn the still image into a GIF.  Nothing in the new image stood out as a piece that could be GIFed without what looked to me a lot of work.  I decided to try making the DS106 flash.  Again, playing around with the layer style effects I ended up with some modified images that would give the original flashing illusion I was intending. But stepping back and taking another look, I noticed something I wasn’t expecting. It turned out that creating the animation frames by turning off and on the layer effects of drop shadow, satin and emboss, it gave the DS106 the illusion of rocking in 3D behind my head. I love it when these things happen.

Mariana explains this well in an early draft of our OER14 paper.  (We had to reduce the word count from 6,000 down to 3,500. A lot of good stuff was left on the cutting room floor.)

Default open cultures generate the environment needed for innovation and creative thought. Zweig (2011) suggests that generating an environment that enables ‘structured serendipity’  may help us be more creative. From a cognitive perspective, Funes (2003) research suggests creative thought has at its core ‘bridging’ activity; creativity happens at the point of discontinuity when bridging from one domain to another. DS106 teaches bridging through an environment of structured serendipity via its focus on what Rheingold (2014) describes as ‘product orientation’ but is referred to in the DS106 open community as ‘Just make art, damn it!’

Credits for DS106 ROCKS!

Original painting: ‘Madame de Pompadour’ by François Boucher

Madame de Pompadour by Francios Boucher

Wall Painting Riff:

I cut out the center section of this original painting by Jean François de Troy (Paris 1679 – Rome 1752), “Reading from Molière” around 1728 found on Salon (gathering) Wikipage

Jean François de Troy (Paris 1679 – Rome 1752), “Reading from Molière”

I use a riff of this painting as the 3M-DS106 thumbnail image.

DS106 walkers small

Side Note:

I was formatting references for the paper for 6+ hours all told.  I’m going to get as much mileage out of that tediously boring work as I can.

 

Headless ’13 – The End

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DJ-Headless-V1Without an instructor how would we know when to stop? When would we see “The End”?  Thanks to Mariana Funes for realizing that the UMW Fall semester ended on Friday, December 13th, 2013, the DS106 Headless ’13 course was given an end date. #DS106 is #4Life, but the Fall 2013 DS106 “headless” experience came to as close to an official close as a headless course can on 12/13/13.

The final project specs asked Headless ’13 DS106 participants to produce a story around a character that explores at least three of the media forms we’ve investigated this semester: visual/design, audio, video, web, remix/mashup, with the idea of creating a narrative arc for a character that is played out in the products of ds106 Assignments, and woven together with context and writing as a standalone blog post.

GAC-Poster

As per the DS106 culture (The ‘DS’ stands for Digital Subversives, right?), we went rogue and our final project turned out to be a collaborative creation of a GIFaChrome Camera which included a website, blog posts , “employee” profiles that included links to DS106 projects they created during the semester, prototype images, and a live product launch on DS106 Radio. For me it provided an opportunity to showcase the work done by all of us. Mariana captured what she could in her Storify Collection.  And this whirlwind adventure culminated my own intense 6 month learning curve in digital storytelling on the web. In less than two weeks my part in our final project had me practicing and honing my skills with everything I’d learned – and then some. Fortunately, I had a week’s vacation that I needed to use or lose.  I used it!

A few examples:

I’ve been trying to finish and post my wrap-up comments for the course for over two months now, without success.  If it ever gets done it’s entitled ‘GIFaChrome – A DS106 Practicum’.  This “abstract” of that post is really being written so that I can publish my fun little animated GIF at the top of this post, DS106 Headless ’13 – The End.

Making the GIF:

Using Photoshop CS5 I used the selection tool to copy and cut out the DS106 foam letters, which were individually placed into seperate layers.  I then used the clone, band-aid, and blur tools to cover up the holes left behind and make the back one continuous layer.  The additional text, Headless ’13 and The End, used the Stencil font which I’ve found is pretty close to the font used on the DS106 site.  With the animation feature in the full version of Photoshop it was easy to add the letters and text without the need to merge layers.  This allowed me to play around with a couple of different scenarios before I settled on the version posted above.  The final touch was to add drop shadow layering effects to the letters and text.  Increasing the distance for the text lines made them stand out even more- giving the GIF a bit of a 3D look.

Ewww Brain… Now in 3D!

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My DS106 maxim of Reduce, Riff & Recycle has once again resulted in a fun, creative morning project.  Ewww Brain… Now in 3D!

3DGIF_SharkBoy_Lines-fb

Last August,  DS106’s Talky Tina created daily GIF challenges to keep our creative juices flowing while we were waiting for the DS106 Headless ’13 course to begin.

Talky Tina’s DS106 animated GIF challenge August 2013 GIF Challenge #10: Monster Chiller Horror Theatre 3D Style GIF  was to:

…look for a part of a scene in a 3D type movie where the thing comes right out of the screen at you.  Find a way to emphasize the moving of the thing out of the screen and into your face in a GIF.

 Ewww…Brain! was my answer to the challenge taken from a  Sharkboy & Lava Girl- May The Best Dream Win movie clip on YouTube. (Link to original blog post for the ‘how it was made.’) Today while trolling my Twitter home stream a DS106 exchange about how to make a 3D GIF with the use of white lines caught my eye. (See twitter feed below.) The illusion reminded me of John Johnston’s GIFaChrome Layercake technology  that I hadn’t tried yet. I decided to give it a go andd watched the video tutorial recommended by Mariana Funes.

Using the original Photoshop CS5 file from the Talky Tina challenge I created one white (two seemed excessive) mask line.  I’ll be honest.  I’m not sure how I managed to create a layer mask instead of the intended solid white line demonstrated in the video tutorial.  But who’s going to complain? It made things much easier in the Studio B production department this morning.  Lucky me!

Next, all I had to do was erase the portion of the line where the brain was popping out of the screen. Hmmm…. What to do with the brain goo as the brain slides down the screen?  That presented a creative challenge all its own. It looked way cooler if I adjusted the erasing opacity to 50% instead of 100% to enhance the illusion of sliding down a glass surface.  One final visual feature was to use the lasso tool to cut out a brain and have it slide down over the black border of the movie trailer clip.

Looking forward to using this technique in the future.  Below is the Twitter conversation that sparked this project.


My dad died…

11 Replies

Thurs. Jan 30, 2014
ring… ring…. that’s strange… my sister rarely calls…. Is Mom in the hospital again?….

“Hi Lee.  What’s up?”

“We just found out that Dad died on January 11th.”

“What? That long ago? How come nobody told us?”

“I called around to the funeral homes to see if anybody had him. I ended up calling the coroner’s office and found out he’d died on the 11th of COPD and lung disease from all his smoking all these years. They said his daughter, Heather, had him cremated. ‘You mean his STEP daughter’, I told them.  I can’t believe how !#$%&@ up this whole thing is. They could have at least contacted someone in his original family to let us know.  It’s not like they didn’t know who we were.  Both Mom and I had gone to visit him not too long ago.”

“I can’t believe this. I’d heard from Mom that he was really sick when she went to see him, that he was small and frail and couldn’t even talk. I think 1997 was the last time he and I had spoken.  When I questioned his assertion that dinosaurs and man were living at the same time, he never talked to me again. And strangely enough earlier this month I’d had a surprising dream that he had come to talk with me.  I was even seriously considering calling him.  I wonder now what the actual date of that dream was.”

…. beep…. silence… click…

“Hello? Are you still there? The phone is cutting out.  We are driving through the mountains to get to town and see if we can find out where he is now. I’ll call you later tonight.”

RochelleAndDad-6mth

Dad and 6mth old Rochelle (I refinished that rocking chair and it sits in my living room today.)

As with most of us, my relationship with my parents was and is complicated.  My dad was a very narcissistic, self-centered and selfish man.  And he did it all with a smile on his face.  He was manipulative and proud of it- especially the seductive power of charm he had over women.  Then when I was in my early 20’s my Mom had enough and they divorced.  Within a few years he found another family.  Telling my sister when she asked why he wasn’t coming around to see his grandson anymore,

“No need to feel bad. I’ve found a new family now and I don’t talk with any of you kids anymore.”

Ouch….. But it was also from my dad that I got my love and passion for projects… my creativity to figure stuff out and make things out of what I have available around me… my curiosity as to how things work. I learned how to be an invaluable assistant, to follow directions, to learn quickly, and not to be “in the way”.  And I learned about photography using his old Pentax 35mm camera that he eventually gave me.

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Rochelle (age 15) playing guitar at a family reunion

But the biggest gift was playing guitar.  I’d heard him joking for years about trading in my aging mom for two young hot hippie chicks who played guitar. (A common site along the roadside in Northern California in the late 60’s, early 70’s) Then at the age of 12 I signed up for guitar as an elective at school.  He told me the best way to learn was to teach somebody else, and he let me teach him what I’d learned almost everyday after school.  Then he helped me to buy my first guitar by paying half of the $110 I needed to buy that coveted Suzuki Kiso W-150 12-string guitar from the Maxon’s Music shop.  Guitar playing was eventually brushed aside by Dad as he moved on to a new more exciting project.  But it stuck with me, and was my savior growing up in a dysfunctional family as a teenager, and opened several doors of opportunity then and as an adult – even today.  (You can listen to a bit of my playing and singing with my daughter, Amber, joining me, and see some of my video storytelling projects here.)

Taylor12String-Duluth

Rockylou’s current guitar is a Taylor GA3-12

I still own that original guitar and have upgraded only twice in 40 years of playing. I bought a Seagull 12-string for $500 to celebrate getting my first job working for 3M in 1990.  And just a few years ago, I felt I could afford upgrading once again to my current guitar, a beautiful Taylor 12-string, model GA3-12.  Not gonna talk price at this point. 😉

 

 

My grieving process will most likely be as complicated as my relationship was with my dad. I am sad and sometimes angry at his selfishness and abandonment of his family and me. He met his granddaughters less than ten times in their lives.  And yet I am sincerely grateful for the gifts I received from him.  Parts of who I am that I love the most are because of my dad.

I don’t have many pictures of him, and most of them were scanned with poor resolution over 10 years ago when the technology wasn’t so great.  Here’s what I have.

Remembering my dad… Herbert Samuel Rogers:  Nov 26, 1942 – Jan 11, 2014

 

UPDATE 2/9/14: The following day from receiving the news that my dad had died, my sister located his lawyer, who expressed his appreciation at being informed of his client’s death.

“I intentionally omit to provide for my three adult children.”

OUCH… One last time we were merely pawns in his twisted game of life. Out of spite and anger towards our mother for divorcing him, he left everything to his now deceased second wife’s rumored illegitimate granddaughter. We could care less about any money or possessions.  It’s the “intentionally omit” that hurts.

Fri, Jan 31, 3:59 PM (text message exchange)

Too upset to talk. Got Will & it says ‘I intentionally omit to provide for my 3 grown adult children’.  He left everything to Cheyene, (Linda’s grand daughter)

Message received

Oh you mean a big $@#% you again from dad!!!

Yep

Sun, Feb 9, 2:48 PM (text message from sister)

Ironic…. Dad worked so hard to spite mom & now she’s getting his social security.  $700 month more than she was getting on SSI.  Woooooohooooo!!!! LOL.  That’s retribution!!!!!!!

Rockylou – A 4H Winner

1 Reply

In 1972 a little 4th grader, named Rochelle, and her mutt dog Charlie won the Top Junior Exhibitor dog obedience title at the Humboldt County dog show.  This was an exciting day.  I had been diligently training Charlie all year long in our local 4H dog obedience chapter under the tutelage of my best friend’s mother, Mrs. Nichols.  I trained for hours and hours, trying to get in at least a little everyday.  During the final show performance I felt we had done a great job.  They called out honorable mention…. nope… then 3rd place…. not us… then 2nd place runner up…. my heart dropped.  I thought we had done at least well enough to get a ribbon.  Then they announced the 1st place winner… #23.  It was us!  We had won 1st place!!! Wow, what a day that was.

Top JR Exhibitor
1972 Humboldt Dog Show
Rochelle Rogers

4HAward-Charlie

Rochelle and “Pooh Bear” Win 1st Place

The trophy was proudly placed on the mantle in the hallway of my childhood home on Elk River Court, on the outskirts of Eureka, California,  until I moved away at 18.  It has been on display in my own homes ever since.  But the tail was broken off before it came to rest in my sole care. (See larger image on Flickr)

Below are a couple of photos I found of Charlie (who we fondly nicknamed “Pooh Bear”) and I growing up.  He was my dog, my friend.  He slept with me, shared an occasional Reese’s Peanut Butter cup with me, and loved to run along side the car as we got closer to home. (I now know from direct experience that the chocolate and running next to a car were not good ideas.)

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The Rogers’ children in their Easter fineries with Charlie at Rochelle’s side.

Sadly, Charlie only lived to be about 4 years old. On our way home from a trip to town we let him jump out of the car window as usual to run.  But this time he didn’t land correctly and rolled under the car. I held his trembling body in my arms as we rushed him to see Mr. Lochtie, the vet. But it was too late.  He was dead.  I was broken hearted and cried and cried.  My dad and I buried him down by the Elk River creek under the tree house you see below.

CharlieTreehouse

Treehouse on the banks of the Elk River Creek behind my childhood home.

The trophy photo was taken with the Camera+ app on my iPhone for DS106 Daily Create TDC 751: “Take a photo of something that is sentimental. Explain your choice.” I apologize for the poor quality of the childhood photos. They were scanned many years ago by my sister when the technology wasn’t so great.

 

3M+DS106+P2PL=OER14+M2M

5 Replies

 

At the end of April 2014 I’ll be attending the industry’s largest global M2M (Machine to Machine) conference in London as part of my strategic analyst job at 3M. But what’s that got to do with DS106 or OER14? And what’s with that P2PL in this post’s title? Let me explain.

At 3M I get paid to study companies and technologies relevant to the Electronics and Energy business group that I work in. That’s how I discovered DS106. I was asked to look into this new phenomenon called MOOCs and see if there was anything of interest for the group.  What I eventually learned was that DS106 was no MOOC. But it was, at its best, a peer-to-peer learning (P2PL) experiment where we learn from and teach one another skills that can help us to maneuver and communicate more effectively in the social media and digital world. Dare I say it? …by playing and having lots of fun in the process.

3M-DS106-GoldGuys_ShakeHands-4My initial foray in the summer of 2013 into the open on-line Digital Story telling course DS106 out of University Mary Washington, led me to organize an internal version of the “course” at 3M (3M-D106) to run in parallel with the loosely organized DS106 “Headless 13” session (Aug 26th thru Dec 13, 2013). My intention was to modify the open on-line course materials and methodology for use behind the 3M Firewall to help myself and my fellow technical 3Mers become more fluent with the digital communication platforms provided by 3M.  There is a need and expressed desire to improve the effectiveness of our communication, especially with our global colleagues.

3M-DS106 Final Project:

As a final project for 3M-DS106 I created a short video of participant experiences. “3M-DS106 is Open For Business”

yu garden cropped

Bill Dower 3M-DS106 Participant

To make it easy and time efficient for scheduling and editing I recorded Skype conversations from five participants, then reduced 3+ hours of audio down to 8 minutes using GarageBand 11 on my Mac. Achieving a logical flow to the storyline of the audio was a bit of a challenge. I had originally intended to break it into sections with snippets from each person, but that turned out to be too choppy and disjointed. Organizing by person provided a better overall feel to the audio.  But I did choose specific topics to emphasize and made sure to include important points each interviewee themselves was emphasizing during our conversation: Like the concept of having tools in your tool box, participants teaching and learning from one another (the P2PL (peer-to-peer learning) reference in the title), and Bill Dower’s passion for more effective global communication where English is not the first language for all parties involved.

At this time 3M does not have a good way to stream audio.  We do, however, have what would amount to an internal version of YouTube. I could easily post a video that would be readily accessible by all 3Mers using the my video editing software Adobe Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac.  And since it was now in a video format, it was a logical extension to add a few images to liven it up.  I could add images of their projects and their photos.  I started out with photos taken from their 3M on-line profiles, but the resolution was very poor.  When I asked for higher resolution images, to my surprise people started sending me more personal shots of themselves out in the world. The interviewees also suggested the addition of the 3M division they worked for and their location. These were delightful additions that I hadn’t planned or anticipated.  They made for a better end product that could reach a wider audience internally and externally.

Jenna-Text

Jenna Sander: 3M-DS106 participant (Link to a sample of her 3M-DS106 projects.)

OER 14 & M2M Conference

And the whole experiment was successful enough that Alan Levine, Mariana Funes, and I submitted an abstract to present a short paper at the OER14 (Open Education Resources) conference on April 28-29, 2014 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.  Our abstract was accepted with flying colors (See below) and hopefully all three of us will be in attendance.

This brings me full circle to how I have found myself attending the M2M (Machine to Machine) conference in London from the 24th-25th.  When I am traveling I try to find a conference nearby that may also be of interest for 3M.  In my usual fashion I went to Google and started a search for energy and electronics related conferences in Europe around the dates of OER14. Believe it or not, the first one that popped up was the M2M conference. I made some inquiries around the web and with people in the know in this area at 3M. (More peer-to-peer learning) It turned out to be a premiere conference and I was easily supported to attend.

3M + DS106 +P2PL = OER14 + M2M

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oer14_logo_web_HQ

OER 14 Abstract (Reviewer comments included at end.)

Newcastle, England 28-29 April 2014

Title: A DS106 Thing Happened on the Way to the 3M Tech Forum

Authors:
Ms. Rochelle Lockridge, Strategic Analyst, 3M
Mr. Alan Levine, Educational Consultant, CogDog It
Dr. Mariana Funes, Cognitive Coach

Introduction:
DS106 (http://ds106.us) is a computer science course in digital storytelling at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), framed on principles of the web as a platform for storytelling. Students learn to manage their own digital domain in the process of understanding storytelling and creating media. In 2011, ds106 opened up to a global community of online participants.

This case study explores how DS106 tools, methodology and philosophy were successfully adapted into the corporate world at 3M to build community, collaboration, and effective global communication skills.

Participants in 3M-DS106 were based in Minnesota, Texas and California. A majority were active members in the 3M Technical Collaboration chapter, a subset of the 3M Technical Forum (12,000 plus global members), which fosters communication across a diverse technical community.

Our hypothesis was the pedagogy and assignments of the ds106 open course could be modified for delivery on a corporate intranet, using internal creation and communication tools standard for 3M employees. We hoped to learn how the course experience could work within cultural and technological constraints of a corporate environment.

Methods:
The open ds106 course evolved from years of undergraduate courses at UMW. With no course offered for Fall 2013, a teacher-less open online version was built from previously offered classes.

3M-DS106 began with an open invitation to several hundred users on Spark (3M’s Twitter equivalent for their technical community). As a network connector, Rochelle Lockridge customized and re-published assignments from the open ds106 class and shared back to the open community the activities of the 3M participants.

The 3M-DS106 structure included weekly online web meetings held over lunch, to discuss assignments, which were done independently using 3M blogs and Spark as communication tools.

Results:
The 3M participants were interviewed at the end of their experience. Their blogs record their growth and reflective practice. In narrating their processes, they found value in giving and receiving feedback via comments, and were developing a greater capacity for relationship building. With more comfort in using creation tools and 3M’s social networking platforms, they increased their effectiveness for technology transfer.

Participants identified a need and desire for integrating the course experience into their technical work. Using tools in real time on 3M related projects within a community of learners to provide support, was deemed a highly effective practice.

Discussion:
The global 3M environment demands a quicker flow of information/ideas in a mode that is more conversational than the corporate norm, with the added challenge of consideration and protection of proprietary intellectual property.

With the success of this experiment, the 3M Technical Collaboration chapter will sponsor a yearlong 3M-DS106 course to provide participants more time, flexibility and practice with a monthly focus on topics, and incorporation of more communication tools specific to 3M.

This experiment shows that an open course can be adapted in a business environment, but more importantly a community that is larger than a single course enables success when the boundaries between groups are blurred.

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REVIEWER COMMENTS: Our abstract rated excellent for communication and overall impression for 2 of the 3 reviewers.

REVIEWER 1: I couldn’t imagine from the title what to expect from this abstract, but reading it gave me several moments of pure, unadulterated OER joy. I imagine this will be a VERY popular talk at the conference as it exhibits a rare – and highly successful! – interaction between an online, open course and an unrelated major corporation. This looks to have been a *very* important experiment and one of which the OER community needs to be aware, as OER segues into the mainstream. I wholly endorse acceptance of this paper for OER14.

REVIEWER 2: Excellent, this is a unique and engaging study that will attract large participation at the conference. Challenging corporate and open education norms with insights from participants working across groups and pedagogies, this abstract offers an unanticipated angle on the much loved DS106.

REVIEWER 3: I am very interested to see how these techniques translated to the corporate world and what 3M perceived value is as well as the participants.