@Prisoner106 the village shrink on the news! What Is that hospital up to? #prisoner106 pic.twitter.com/1okK3u9yXY
— Mariana Funes (@mdvfunes) June 28, 2015
Author: DS106 on the couch
Village here we come!
Over the next few weeks I will be on a special mission at Prisoner 106 Village. I have been hired as the Village Shrink to work at the hospital there. In order for you to follow some of the wild posts that may be coming you will need to be familiar with The Prisoner TV series. If this is not your thing, then I suggest you ignore all the posts coming up when you see the #prisoner106 tag. If this is your thing, my employers have provided a some handy information that has enabled me to create a page that will have all my work for the Village Committee.
I also have an assignment at the Bovine Village Fairy Tale Festival where I have been asked to support the Burgeron Family as they create tales of wonder from all over the world for the festival. I will be helping the matriarch of the family NanaLou to tidy up the family home to get ready for the festival – she is also concerned about the mental health of some in the family and so my shrink talents will be needed as well as my WordPress coding non-talents. I will be posting about this assignment under the tag #burgeron106.
Well, my new avatar is a requirement from the Prisoner 106 Village. Have you got your Jim Groom’s yet? This is a challenging assignment requiring me to ‘ease’ village visitors into the ways of our village. I will be using the Blue Dispenser technique to ensure everyone is fully cooperative in the Village. You can see one of the residents drinking from the Blue Dispenser in the photo of me at work. Nothing to be afraid of.
I just popped into the office to get my registration card. I think the Jim Groom’s make the photo. Don’t you?
Well, I have been told by the committee that once I resigned I need to produce…I spent the afternoon trying to turn this animated gif into my Twitter avatar for the start of DS106 Themed The prisoner. All the workarounds I tried failed. APIs that promised to do it did not, brute force ( just change the extension and upload) did not work. I am swimming like the blazes to get away from the village, production here is hard. Where is the beach? And what does the new Photoshop mean with Save For Web (Legacy)? All the other new options don’t seem to have preview or allow me to play with colours. WE WANT INFORMATION! Update: if this Save for Web glitch matters to you. Complain!
Gearing up for a busy summer of DS106 I decided to turn today’s daily create into my first proper assignment. It is called Splash the colour and I had a little help from the lovely Jack Hylan to get it done. He made a tutorial to make it easy and enjoyable.
The prompt for the daily create asked us ‘see beyond the buildings’. I looked out of my office window to see the beautiful roses outside. I wondered if I could take a photo from the inside that would show the window (building) and focus on what was beyond it (the flower). I did that.
Then I wondered if I could make one of those photos where everything is black and white and only a splash of colour. I used to have a cheap camera that did that automatically, I still miss that camera.
Then I remembered Jack and his towel. All I did was follow his tutorial exactly and then add my tacky pink frame, I could not help it. I wanted the pink to highlight the roses.
Well, that is me dusting the blog up for this DS106 summer!
Wrote an article about online pedagogy on Medium and made this video to highlight the importance of relationship in teaching online or offline. This is the DS106 version with spooky music added. I played with video actions on ScreenFlow to get the effects. Fun! And I made an infinite loop with it too because I can.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
I am not feeling like work today, so I made time for the daily create. Spent a long time looking for images and was shocked at how many sites are charging big bucks for images that are as old as time. And they site I did use to find this lovely poster to edit ‘cannot guarantee this is a public domain poster’. As it is a 1942 poster, I will took a wild risk and used it. We really need to sort out copyright law people. I also reflected on how I struggle to do ‘easy’. I thought the poster looked just right with minimal changes. The Daily Create today asked us to do a poster to elect a class president. I decided the only president should be DS106 #4life. So there we have it. A few layers and blending in Photoshop and it was cooked.
Koinonia in DS106
<before I get going here, I hate the new editor. Tumblr sort it>
So we were chatting at the splendiferous pre-show for our radio show and Jim asked us why we do it – ‘it’ being DS106 #4life. We said for fun and he joked he was talking to a bunch of fun junkies. It was hard to have a serious conversation as we laughed at Uncle Jim futzing the log in to DS106 Radio’s servers, we had so much fun and the show rocked. Please ignore unfounded reports that DS106 is an immortality cult, we just make art. This post is not about that, though. This post is about this: is it something bigger than fun that makes us collaborate across continents and work hard at producing something nobody is asking us to produce?
I have been reflecting on this question for the last few days, it is something bigger than just fun. I have spent a lifetime supporting groups in various contexts become a ‘team’ ‘work collaboratively’ ‘manage a virtual teams’. I can, and often do, drone on about best practice in group facilitation.
Yet, this question echoed to the learner in me not just the educator.
I could go to my usual space of creativity theory and the environment that makes creativity possible to answer the question. Or the place of ‘hard fun’ a la Papert and say DS106 is all that and more and paraphrasing Papert’s kid say: "It’s fun. It’s hard. It’s DS106.“
All the above would speak to the why, but there is more.
Today I was grading papers on Bohmian dialogue; one of my students answered the question for me as she quoted Bohm on Koinonia,
And perhaps in dialogue, when we have this very high energy of coherence, it might bring us beyond just being a group […] Possibly it could make a new change in the individual and a change in therelation to the cosmic. Such an energy has been called ‘communication’. It is a kind of participation. The early Christians had a Greek word koinonia, the root of which means ‘to participate’ – the idea of partaking of the whole and taking part in it; not merely the whole group, but the whole .
The other day, with another group of students, we talked about how hard it was to collaborate virtually when your team is spread out around the world. In the context of business, this seems almost impossible to do and people mostly complain about it and pay consultants to help them do it. For the first time, since I have been involved in DS106, I thought about DS106 in the context of my work in my business school – in DS106 we sign up on a Google doc and make it work.
The holly grail of large businesses – what is the difference that makes the difference? My students and I had a conversation about DS106 and they immediately said: Well, but that is not work! There are no problems likely to arise in that situation. I disagreed, but I could not put my finger on why. I took it to my reflection space.
rockylou22 and I were talking about the show this week, as we discussed work and play and expectations, Frame Analysis and Goffman came to mind. We use unconscious frames as a way of explaining "what is going on” and determining salience in a given experience. We filter important information, discard noise and build basic cognitive structures to guide us in our understanding of what is going on in a given situation. We do not manufacture these ‘life frames’ but adopt and adapt them depending on the situation. As we receive the email ‘shall we do a Radio Show?’ we put one frame around it: This is play. When my students get an email ‘shall we collaborate on this project?’ they put a different frame around the event ‘This is work and will be hard’.
Play carries with it a very different set of expectations than work. We treat people differently in one context or the other. Problems do not arise because there are no expectations, we ask unconditionally for what the end result might need and somebody may or may not step up to help. We marvel at the potential for partaking in the whole. In the pre-show with Jim we kept saying we had no idea how it would all come together. We are genuinely creating in the unknown space of possibility. As Bohm said, we participate to create not to impose our view or idea on the situation. We attend to the situation, and notice how ‘it’ is shaping. We support and participate within that. There is a sense of connecting to something that is even larger than Jim’s ego 🙂 – there is a sense of participating in a whole larger than the group and larger than individual ideas.
Why do we do it? Because it is a place where we can create together without expectations. What is the difference that makes the difference? The play frame we put around it allows us to check the ego at the door and work together in the service of something more. What? Making art, damn it!
For those of you wanting a clear how-to, the google obliges: The spirit of Koinonia offers some steps to follow, but this is beyond steps and skills – it is a way to be in the world that is truly precious. #4life
Talky Tina laid down the challenge and I have been wanting to try another gif the portrait for a while. So I looked for high resolution portraits of our jimgroom on the google, as Tina suggested. Then got to work as per Ryan Seslow’s excellent tutoring on this lovely way of making gifs last semester in CT101. I think that there is the ghost of another in this gif though….