Tag Archives: work

CLMOOC Central: My Personal Dashboard

Posted on by

Curation is a tall ask when engaging engaging in any large scale, online community/course like CLMOOC. With so much activity being generated by so many individuals, it is easy to feel both overwhelmed and overwrought with remarkable rapidity. One of the ways I like to bind multiple streams into a manageable means of content control is through the power of RSS and a digital dashboard.

There are still a few digital dashboard services, despite the loss of some heavyweights, like iGoogle and Pageflakes, both of which were really good products actually. I settled on Netvibes some time ago and continue to use it.

The advantage of using a dashboard like Netvibes is that you can easily run a number of data streams onto a single page in the for of widgets, allowing for quick scanning of multiple information sources in a single page view with minimal scrolling. Widget sizes can be altered to fit, as well as page layouts to reduce the need to scroll or accommodate more widgets. While I am making this page public and available to anyone with the address, it is a fairly easy set-up.

  1. Begin by registering for a Netvibes account.
  2. Once logged in click New… in the Dashboards drop-down menu in upper right corner. Enter the keyword(s) that you wish to track (I entered CLMOOC 2014).
  3. A number of pre-defined widgets will appear on the page (alter as desired).
    • Click the arrow-head to the right of the tab title for a drop-down menu that includes the page layout, how the widgets will be displayed.
    • Clicking the Green +Add button in the upper-left corner will reveal a all kinds of widget possibilities, many leveraging RSS.

I added the webpage widget along the top of the tab, partly because it looked cool with the logo, but also because I can scroll within the widget frame and see announcements quickly and easily.

I ran the Twitter and Google+ feeds off to the right, along the top to instantly scan the the most current information. What is really nice is that Netvibes has already done the work for collecting a Google+ stream, despite it not generating an RSS feed. So no extra work required there.

Below the fold, requiring some scrolling, I added the image feeds from Flickr, Picasa, and Instagram to browse the various memes and visuals created as part of the CLMOOC experience. Additionally, I paired the images with a widget gathering all the videos tagged in YouTube and Vimeo.

I can add other RSS feeds later, say like Diigo or Delicious if that proves to be a highly used tool for collecting sites and resources. I can even add a blogroll like widget if I like to track posts from select participants once things get rolling.

The one drawback is that the widgets are stuck streaming in reverse chronological order, so there is no real filter other than the most current content rising to the top. Still, a dashboard like this is great when you want to take the temperature of a highly active effort. A quick scan can help you get up-to-date in a hurry. This example will no doubt evolve as CLMOOC unfolds.

Lastly, I can’t say that I completely came up with this idea on my own. It is actually a bit of a hack based on something I learned from Steve Hargadon in the earliest days of the Classroom 2.0 Ning (way back in the olden times of 2008). Still, this seemed a pretty easy early How to Guide for creating something that can be a useful tool in the sometimes chaotic MOOC experience.

DS106 Week 4 – Design: A Sansing Sprint

Posted on by
4

Inspired by my Slaughterhouse IV bunkmate Chad Sansing, I composed a Design Assignment Sprint. I spent a lot of time in tinkering in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, which always leaves me wishing I could do more than I actually can.

Originally, I was eager to do the Minimalist Travel Poster Based on a Movie. The samples were so good. I was inspired. As I was thinking of places, I grew a little ironic and thought I would use the TARDIS from Doctor Who. While not exactly a travel destination, in and of itself, it is definitely a means to travel anywhere. That put me on a bit of a Doctor Who kick as I began playing around with different images.

I started working in Illustrator on the Minimalist Television/Movie Poster idea, working in simple block colors and trying to get essentially silhouette like blocks. To do this I snagged an full front image of the TARDIS from the web and used it to trace a series of rectangular shapes on another layer. Most of the work was using shapes occasionally switching to the pen tool for the mullions in the windows. Once I got the top third of it looking good, I was happy since I already had a layout idea.

Doctor Who Television Poster

For this piece, I wanted to keep things limited to as few colors as I could. The obvious color was the TARDIS blue, which required a little trial and error, because I wanted something a little greener with a distinctly unmistakable quality. Then I opted for a dark grey, not absolute black for the background, mostly because I thought it softened the contrast nicely.

It was at this point that I thought it would be kind of slick to have the light atop blazing. That just required some quick work with the one tool. Then I screened the opacity to make it actually look more like light projecting.

I considered adding some clever text, like “It’s bigger on the inside” or “Will take you anywhere in time and space,” but then scrapped the idea, liking the stark look like the example. Plus, I wanted it to be instantly obvious what the show was, but present in an interesting way.

From there, I completed my partial TARDIS in Illustrator so that I had a good block image of the whole thing from the front. I considered using a slightly turned view, with two visible sides, for the Travel Poster. However, that was going to be a whole lot more work, considering all multiplicity of angles that would be involved. I am sure that if I had more skills it would have been a lot faster and easier, but I am still working at that.

As you can see, I actually built a simplified Illustrator version of the poster, almost like a sketch. It also gave me a lot of the raw material that I would need to use in Photoshop. So, I kind of completed this assignment twice, as seems to be a habit of mine. It’s good practice, so I don’t mind so much.

TARDIS Travel Poster (sketch)

Once I had the completed Illustrator version, I started porting items over into Photoshop. For the Travel Poster, I wanted to have a much richer, textured quality than the stark version of the Television Poster look. To achieve the look, I started playing around with spray brush settings to splatter and dirty up the TARDIS image, which I dropped in as a primary layer. I also wanted there to be a sort of thematic visual continuity that echoed the stars.

TARDIS Travel Poster

For the background, I actually did a quick Google search for “cosmos,” grabbing a simple star-filled image. I imported it into Photoshop, stripped it of color, and tiled the image across the entire background layer. Once I had the starry look, I went back to the TARDIS and touched it up a little so that it didn’t disappear into the background. These two layers served as the primary components of the image.

This piece was definitely going to incorporate text, and I definitely took my inspiration from the Star Wars example. I tried to keep the font as clean and simple as I could, going with a sans serif like the Police Box lettering. The Police Box font was just Myriad Pro, which looked near perfect. Yet for the poster lettering at the bottom I chose Franklin Gothic Medium. It has a bolder and beefier look for the larger size I needed. I made sure that the spacing for both lines of text matched up in terms of length and used a simple horizontal line to break the text up clearly.

After pasting them from Illustrator into Photoshop, I used the wand tool to select all the letters by color so that I could use the same brush technique to splatter the letter fill. I switched between an orange and red, warmer colors to compliment the TARDIS blue I used. The coloring is even inspired by the recent show logo that was used for the newer series. The logo got a TARDIS-like makeover since Matt Smith took over the role.

One minor issue I toyed with was messing about with the background behind the lettering a little. I am not sure that it made that much difference, but I was trying to diffuse the starts and lettering some.

The last thing I did was throw off the symmetry, tilt the TARDIS to the right and arbitrary amount. I thought it was funny, in a supremely nerdy way to set the arbitrary amount at pi, 3.14.

If I count the two versions of the travel poster, that left me in need of another assignment. So I opted for more minimalism with an attempt at Iconic You.

Icon of Me

Although I have recently shaved at my daughter’s request, I generally have a beard or goatee. The goatee made for a better iconic look. Again, I used Illustrator, just some basic oval shapes and the pen tool. At this point I was getting a bit better using them. This ended up being a little more Homer-ish than I intended, but it got laughs from both my wife and daughter. My wife was the one who suggested I throw in the frown lines that are deep and seemingly permanent in my fivehead.

Chasing the Daily in DS106 Daily Create

Posted on by
4

It was a bit of a challenge, but I have successfully completed at least five Daily Create items this week. With the school year ending, I am just racing trying to finish things while still attempting to keep pace with DS106 and be a good camper. Camp Magic Macguffin has definitely been occupying a lot of my brain space. That’s for sure.

My first photograph for the week was an shot incorporating water, stone, and clouds. It wasn’t actually the most original or creative of approaches, but it was the first of the week, and I just wanted to take a first step. I shot this with an iPad on a wet morning at the end of a street where a stone wall separates a cul de sac and cemetery. It was pretty gray, so the clouds were not quite as vivid as I might have liked, but I just wanted to get the first shot quickly and easily without going to any locally exotic locations.

View From a New England Street

One day this week, my co-teacher and I took our journalism students on a walk down through the main street of town and, I brought one of our digital SLRs. I took this shot while waiting for a few students to order pizza. The camera was pretty unfamiliar and I was using a lot of automatic presets. Still, I was able to get these flowers in a flower box with only the closest in focus, although I am not sure how obvious it is. That makes this a pretty but not necessarily completely successful shot, even though most of the frame is out of focus.

DSC_0004

Just a few feet from the previous shot, I changed the angle and captured this antique storefront. While there are plenty of interesting things outside the shop, I liked the weathered sign, despite it not being all that old, especially considering how old the town is. I was trying to work with thirds in this image on a basic level. Then I started playing around some in Photoshop. I settled on the cyanotype option with a hue/saturation adjustment layer. I just liked how it wasn’t black and white or sepia, but still gave the image an old-fashioned look.

Country Store Cyanotype

Again faced with nothing but an iPad as a capture device, I snapped this image of the city hall. It might not be the oldest building, but it is definitely old. Plus, a lot of the oldest building in the old New England factory town where I live were actually made of wood. Consequently, there are a lot of buildings that are no longer extant. Plus, many just don’t always look quite as old as they actually are, either from remodeling or the simplicity of their design.

The hardest thing about this shot was getting the angle where the tower would appear without being chopped at the top. I had to flip portrait style shot, to make it fit, even though I tried landscape from a number of different angles. One of the problems is that there just isn’t enough room on the other side of the street to get the whole building in a landscape frame.

Since, it was shot on an iPad and the quality can be lacking, although the light was really strong in this shot, I decided to mess about with it to mask any weaker aspects. I used a forgotten tool on the iPad, the app Pixlromatic. With a handful of simple filters and effects, I used the Bob filter, which washed out the color a little, giving that steely, blue hue and saturated quality. Additionally, I added the scratches effect to cover any imperfections in the shooting. Lastly, I framed it with the Cornered option, which adds that roughed-out negative carrier look.

City Hall - Aged

Lastly, rope wasn’t really an easy option, but considering an everyday knot in a different context was workable. So, I chose a close-up on the knot of my Liverpool FC shoes. The Liverbird medal ended up proving a counter-balance to the knot at the top of the frame. Since rediscovering some of the cool effects of Pixlromatic, I opted to use it again to compensate for some of the low lighting and noise that can be present in iPad photography.

This time I used the Antonio filter which blackened out the edges a little, although adding the Vignette lighting effect also enhanced the central focus. Then in a contrasting effort, I framed everything with the Peri effect, which made provided a white frame with a messier print edges.

In Knots Over LFC

More than anything, this weeks photography material and the increase in Daily Create requirements has made me consider common, everyday things in a far more interesting and visual way. I am actively trying to see things in a slightly different and mindful way.

Plus, I have been trying to work with any limitations of the the original shots. If the original shot is not as great, I like the challenge of looking for solutions with some of the tools in a way that still amplify some creativity. Sometimes errors, mistakes, or imperfections can be a springboard for artistic solutions.