Knitting for friends

Posted on 12th July 2015 by NomadWarMachine

IMG_20150524_132332737[1]At some point during rhizo15 I decided it would to start knitting for online friends. I started with a hat for Kevin (@dogtrax). This is a Klein bottle hat based on a pattern from here.

 

 

 

Susan(@EatcherVeggies) liked that, so I made her one as well, with an added VP badge for being Vice President of all the things.vp hat

 

 

autummI’d also being playing around with Mobius strips, and made a couple of those. I send one to Autumm (@autumm)

 

 

And another to Helen (@hj_dewaard)helen

 

 

IMG_20150630_193906686[1]

Then Wendy (@Wentale) liked my latest pair of socks, so they are on their way over to her. The pattern for these is “Necker” by Stephanie van der Linden.

 

 

I’m enjoying knitting for friends. 🙂

Posted in #CLMOOC, #rhizo15, knitting | 4 Comments

Remediation

Posted on 3rd July 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Humpty Dumpty and Alice. From Through the Looking-Glass. Illustration by John Tenniel.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

 

Remediation, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary,  comes from the stem of the Latin remediare, and remedy comes from the same root. It’s been educational jargon since about 1975 and means to set something straight, or put something right. It implies that there is a fault or deficiency that needs to be addressed. In some circles remedial is a synonym for stupid.

Unless you are taking part in #CLMOOC. In that case, we are told, the word is being used differently:

Remediation—as we’ll be thinking about it here—is unrelated to another use of the term in education: we are not talking about “remediating kids” as in “remedy”-ing them. Here, the focus is on media, and ways in which moving from one medium to another changes what we are able to communicate and how we are able to do so.  Email

Ok, so I get it. It’s a play on words. Except I don’t think it’s a very clever one. I think that whoever came up with the idea of using remediate this week didn’t really think it through. I tried to ignore it, but it’s been bugging me more and more as the week has progressed. Kevin tried to convince me in a comment on an earlier post of mine, but I am digging in my heels, sticking to my guns, folding my arms firmly and saying just gonna NO.

This is reminding me of folk who try to “reclaim” words like b**** and c*** However they choose to use them within their circles, there are going to be others who are not party to their use, and it is going to confuse or upset. So either use one of the many words we already have for the purpose: remix, repurpose, hack … or make up a new one.

By Goldmund100 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Unless you’re Humpty Dumpty. And we all know what happened to him.

Posted in #CLMOOC | Tagged , | 3 Comments

My poem as a book

Posted on 3rd July 2015 by NomadWarMachine

I’m still playing, in odd moments, with my little poems written as a response to Sheri’s Identity Shattering challenge. Today Kevin used Storybird to make a story about his poem so I thought I’d try it as well. I think that when it’s approved by the Storybird gods, I’ll be able to embed it, but for now the link is here.

storybird

Basically you flick through and choose an artist you like, then create a book. All of their artwork appears around the edge for you to select. I was drawn to the elephants coz my bruvver loves them, and this is his birthday week.

I still think that “remediating” is not the right word to use for what I am doing.

Posted in #CLMOOC, Poetry | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Breaking poems

Posted on 2nd July 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Yesterday I broke Kevin’s poem for him. I didn’t mean to, but I put it through QuotesCover which uglified it and broke the line spacing. Kevin responded with this.

I’d already been playing with Susan’s challenge, so I thought I’d break things even more and mash everything together.  Here’s the (not perfect result. Note that it won’t work in Chrome 🙁 Here’s screen shots to show what is meant to happen:

bacon 1 bacon 2

Posted in #CLMOOC, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Posted on 2nd July 2015 by NomadWarMachine

catapin crunch bacon

Susan threw down the gauntlet.

I’m rushing off to meetings and the like today, but as I was doing this it occurred to me that someone with skilz could put this tache and beard onto the Captain there.

Any takers?

 

Susan’s response was this: small crunch 2

 

 

 

 

 

So I put them both together and made this:

It’s a lot more fun doing this with others 🙂

Posted in #CLMOOC, Technology | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Who is Simon?

Posted on 1st July 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Earlier I wondered what it would sound like if I played all of the embeds in this blog post of Simon’s at once by clicking play on each of them, so I tried. Interesting, I thought. So I recorded my efforts using Audacity (didn’t need something that powerful, but I had it open on my PC anyway) and uploaded the results to Soundcloud.

Next I used Kevin’s curated list of Tech Tools to choose a Gif Maker (I’d been working on my own curated list copied from here earlier, so I knew roughly what I wanted). I chose EzGif and uploaded a few pics from my hard drive.

What next, I wondered … of course, Popcorn Webmaker (sadly, dying slowly, but I will keep using it while I can). I uploaded the Gif, added a link to the audio from Soundcloud, tweeked it and published.  Here’s the result:

Who is Simon? Remix and show me what you think.

Posted in #CLMOOC, Editing, Technology | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

ReMEDIAte my poem again

Posted on 30th June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Another attempt to manipulate my poem into an image. This time I’ve used Tagxedo – another tool I’d never used before (note: uses Silverlight, so I had to use Firefox, not my beloved Chrome – hmmm, I wonder if folk will be able to view this?). You can either add a url or past in text – I pasted in the 6 words from Sheri’s challenge again.  If the first image does not load, I have taken a screen shot and added it at the end.

There’s a good selection of shapes to select – I chose a cat as one of my little darlings is peering through the window watching me. Another cool feature of Tagxedo is that mousing over words and clicking on them takes you a Google search about that word.

Now I need to think about remixing this poem further.  Any suggestions?

Tagzedo

Posted in #CLMOOC, Poetry, Technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

ReMEDIAte my poem

Posted on 30th June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s #clmooc challenge is to take something done in one media and convert it to another. My first attempt uses one of the poems written for Sheri’s challenge.

poem First I copied and pasted the text of one of them into Visual Poetry.  Then I used that to draw an image. I’m not great at drawing, especially when using a mouse with my right hand (I’m left handed, but always use a mouse in my right hand, for reasons).

The image on the left is the result. I couldn’t work out how to save it, so I took a screen shot and edited in Paint. Such skilz 😛

Think you can do better?  Show me what you can do!

Posted in #CLMOOC, Poetry, Technology, Writing | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Klein bottle hat

Posted on 28th June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

I don’t know how it started, but somehow Terry promoted Susan and me to Vice President and President of all the things. I was already making Susan a hat, so I told her she’d get a badge as well. Here is – a klein bottle hat made from remnants of aran yarn left over from jumpers and cardigans I’ve made.

IMG_20150628_154344327[1] Side view

 

 

 

 

With added felt badge pinned on

IMG_20150628_161527041[1]

 

 

 

 

 

IMG_20150628_161606368_HDR[1]What the inside looks like.

Posted in #CLMOOC, knitting, MOOC, Rhizomes | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

A weekend of making for #CLMOOC

Posted on 21st June 2015 by NomadWarMachine

#CLMOOC doesn’t “really” start till tomorrow but some of us were eager to get going so I guess we started early. We started by remixing some Webmaker Thimble memes, and then Greg (@jgmac106) upped the game by sharing a riff on the Star Wars scrolling theme. Kevin (@dogtrax) remixed it, and then I remixed his.

Then Terry (@telliokuwp) asked if anyone wanted to collaborate on a poem to share our thoughts about Mother Emanuel and I found some words. We’re now in the middle of recording that, and Terry is doing a wonderful job of editing it together.

Love hanging around with such creative folk – it’s infectious.

Posted in #CLMOOC, Learning, MOOC, Poetry, Rhizomes | Tagged , , | 4 Comments