Category Archives: Open Online Courses

Open and free

For week two of the Why Open? course I’m helping to facilitate, one of the things we asked participants to read and think about is similarities and differences between “open” and “free,” as these terms are currently used in discussions about openness. Of course, this just adds to the complexity, for now we have two terms that are used differently by different communities, and whose meanings are disputed.

One problem with the word “free” is that it can have many meanings (well, same problem with “open,” of course). Among them, there is “free” in the sense of no cost, or “gratis,” versus free in the sense of freedom, or “libre.”

Gratis with or without libre

Wifi Gratis, flickr photo shared by Daniel Lobo, licensed CC-BY.

An example of something that is “open” mostly in the sense of “gratis” is at least some ways of thinking of open access publishing of research articles and books. Most of what one hears about in terms of fighting for open access for scholarly research has to do with being able to read, download, and distribute articles and books without cost–hence the emphasis on “access.” Here’s a quick and clear overview of what “open access” means, that focuses only on access.

But there are also arguments for making open access works at least somewhat libre, in the sense of allowing derivatives to be made. See, for example, the Bethesda and Berlin statements on what counts as open access works (I found these from this overview of open access by Peter Suber). An editorial in PLoS Biology by Catriona J. MacCallum entitled “When is Open Access Not Open Access?” delineates between free access to scholarly articles (without cost) and open access (derivatives are allowed). Why would allowing derivative works be important for scholarly articles? At least to allow unrestricted translation into other languages without gaining permission, but also things like using diagrams and figures in other works.

There is also the “How open is it?” guide put out by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), PLoS (Public Library of Science) and OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), which describes a spectrum of open access for research in terms of reading rights, reuse rights, copyright, authors’ posting rights, and more. This combines gratis (free access to read) with some elements of libre (such as posting on other sites besides the journals’ website, allowing derivative works). So proponents of open access for research need not be focused on gratis only.

Libre with or without gratis

“Libre” often denotes an ability to reuse, modify, remix things: the four R’s in the definition of open content by David Wiley, for example, might count as a description of “libre.” Chris Sakkas describes a “libre” work as one that can be shared and adapted by anyone in the world, possibly subject to some limitations, such as attribution of the original source and copyleft, or share-alike provisions. The Free Software Foundation defines free software as having four freedoms that fit “libre” rather than “gratis” (note that the four freedoms of the FSF and of Wiley’s “open content” are very similar; it’s just that Wiley makes a separate category for “remix,” or putting content together with other content to make something new, and the FSF separates distribution of the original and of revised versions into two categories). The definition of free cultural works by freedomdefined.org is very similar to the FSF’s definition of free software, but applied to works other than software.

In these discussions of “libre,” there is no requirement that works be free as in “no cost.” Indeed, the FSF definition of free software explicitly states that free software must be allowed to be revised and the original and revision distributed, with or without charging a fee for such. The FSF has a page explicitly explaining that and why it’s okay to sell free software, and also explaining that software given away without cost may or may not be “free software,” depending on what freedoms users have once they have it. So “libre,” at least in some discussions of it, seems to have little to do with “gratis.”

Which is interesting, because in our survey of meanings of open for this course, quite a few people mentioned that openness has to do in part with accessibility without barriers, including cost barriers. And it seems to me that the ability to reuse, revise, redistribute something depends fundamentally on the ability to access it in the first place, so if something is libre but not gratis it may allow for quite a bit of freedom, but not for everyone (though, of course, the definition of free software says it must allow users to distribute the original or derivatives, gratis or for a cost, so gratis versions may be available…or not). And even going beyond cost, there are of course other kinds of access barriers, such as technological ones, that make the “libre” freedoms unusable by some.

Some definitions of “free” and “open” and how they approach access

The FSF does address the issue of access to some degree in its definition of free software, by pointing out that

In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you must have access to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source code is a necessary condition for free software. Obfuscated “source code” is not real source code and does not count as source code.

“Presentation: Free Content for a Free Societey! 7/12” by Matthias Mehldau, licensed CC-BY

So even if a software program can be sold, the source code (if it is to count as free software) must be accessible. It’s not clear from the definition of free software page whether or not the source code must be accessible as in gratis, or if it can be accessible for a cost. I had to go searching a bit to find out. The last section of the article on why it’s okay to sell free software from the FSF says that nevertheless, there should be a limit on how much one can charge for the source code, or else one could say the source code is available in theory, but practically it may not be. So the GNU General Public License does include restrictions on how you can provide the source code (see section 6). This section of the GNU GPL FAQs was helpful too. From these documents I think the situation is this: for free software, at least for the GNU GPL license, you have to make the source code available to those to whom you distribute the software. So if they pay for the software, they get a copy of the source code along with that, for no extra cost. If you distribute it without cost, then you must also distribute the source code for no cost. So let’s say one person pays for a copy of the software and gets the source code. If they then distribute it for free on a network, they must also provide the source code in one of several possible ways, for free. So either way, the source code must be made available, without (extra) cost, to people who have a copy of the software.

This means that the four freedoms of free software may or may not be available without cost, because the source code may or may not be available without cost–that is, if I’m understanding all this correctly. Of course even if the source code costs nothing, some of the freedoms are still only available to some people–to those who can actually understand and edit the source code–but there will likely always be some restrictions in place in terms of use and adaption of “free” or “open” works.

The definition of free cultural works also includes something similar to availability of source code, for other kinds of works:

Availability of source data: Where a final work has been obtained through the compilation or processing of a source file or multiple source files, all underlying source data should be available alongside the work itself under the same conditions. This can be the score of a musical composition, the models used in a 3D scene, the data of a scientific publication, the source code of a computer application, or any other such information.

So according to the definition of free cultural works, the sources used to create a free work must themselves be free/libre in the same way as the works themselves are required to be. There isn’t much clarity here on how this should work (unlike for free software and the GNU GPL license), but perhaps it means that works can be sold but still be free as in libre, and the source files and data must be given to the recipient along with the final work (similar to source code for software, above). So whether you pay for it or can access it without cost, you must have access to the source data as well (for an extra price okay? included in the price of the original work?).

Here, too, the question about accessibility due to price could be mitigated by the fact that free cultural works (like free software) can be distributed by anyone who has a copy, to anyone else, with or without charging a fee. So it’s possible that there will be a copy available somewhere that can be accessed without cost. Or maybe not.

The Open Knowledge Foundation has a definition of open data and open content that includes a focus on access and price:

The work shall be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The work must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.

While not quite gratis, this allows for distribution of works to recoup (reasonable) costs for that distribution, which could make sense in the case of physical copies such as on paper or on digital media like a thumb drive. It does raise the question whether it makes sense to charge people who download from the internet a fee for hosting information on a site (hosting data on a server does cost some money!).

A theoretical tension

Interestingly, this raises a bit of a potential paradox, as can be seen from this part of the Open Knowledge definition of open content:

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the work either on its own or as part of a package made from works from many different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale or distribution.

The point here is that while a work that counts as open under this definition must not have a fee attached greater than a “reasonable reproduction cost,” that work must also permit users to sell the work for their own monetary gain.

I don’t have a problem with this provision, it’s just that it raises the issue that Stephen Downes has talked about quite a bit (see, e.g., here and here): views of openness that allow the user wide freedom to do whatever they wish with the open artifact can lead to that artifact being enclosed and no longer open (or free) in the sense of widely accessible. Downes argues here that we can think of freedom from the perspective of what the person who already has a work is free to do with it, and from the perspective of the person trying to access a work, and works that cost money may be free in the former but not the latter sense (because there may be quite a lot of people who can’t afford to access the work).

Of course, the counter to that is that the original must remain open and low- or no-cost (and other copies can be distributed for free too), so there should be at least one available without cost. Whether that one can be effectively hidden in internet searches through Search Engine Optimization practices, however, is an important question–which Scott Leslie addresses with an example, here.

What I want to emphasize here is the theoretical tension going on: the wide freedom of those who possess and use a work or program to do with it as they will could (theoretically, at least, though the degree to which it has or could happen in practice is debated) lead to fewer people being able to access the work, and wide freedom to access could limit freedoms of the user/possessor to do with a work what they want (e.g., by not allowing works to be sold for a profit, or by requiring they be in formats accessible by many, among other things).

I understand that the free software and free cultural works and other views of “libre” attempt to strike a balance by requiring that works be allowed to be distributed freely, with or without cost, but this may not ensure wide accessibility (e.g., if few distribute for free or if free copies are buried in search results). And I understand that proponents of requiring only “non-commercial” uses of works (such as Downes) attempt to strike a balance by restricting user freedoms in favour of wider accessibility (since, for those without access, user freedoms are moot).

Which balance is best? Is there a better balance to be struck than the ones we’ve come up with so far? I do think this is a difficult issue, which I’ve wrestled with before, when talking about CC licenses in particular. So far I’ve decided in favour of the balance that focuses on user freedoms, but I’m curious what others think of this issue.

I wanted to include another section of this post, talking about the language: “free” vs “open”–what are the benefits/drawbacks to using one or the other of these terms? But it’s late and I’m tired, and so that will have to wait for another post.

Results of survey on meaning of “open”

Why Open Brainstorm, by Laila Le Guen, licensed CC-BY. This image was done by a participant in the Why Open? course, a brainstorm mixing her views on why openness is important with those gathered from the survey discussed in this post. Laila shared it on Twitter on the #whyopen tag.

As part of a Why Open? course I’m helping to facilitate, we sent out a survey to gather different people’s views of what they think “openness” means–we were hoping to get answers from people in various professions. As part of the course, we asked participants to respond to some of these definitions in the discussion area for week 1, at the bottom of this page. But my comments are going to be so long that I think they’ll be easier to read in a blog post! So I’ll post a link to this blog post in that discussion area.

We got 30 responses to the survey, which is quite a good number from something sent out for a couple of weeks on email lists, Twitter, and other social sites! You can see all the results of the survey in a couple of formats. Here you can see the answers to each question listed out under the question, and here is the spreadsheet where you can link question answers to the person who gave them (if they gave a name) and their profession.

There’s another, similar survey focused on teachers/faculty and what openness means in the context of research and teaching, here, done for another purpose. It also provides some interesting results, but I’ll focus here just on the survey we did.

I thought about trying to see if there were patterns amongst people with similar professions, but I’m not sure we have enough data to do that, really. There are quite a few different types of professions represented, so there aren’t that many people in each type of profession (except education and educational technology–there are a significant number of people in those fields). So I decided to keep track of some common answers, and then comment on some of the uncommon ones that I hadn’t considered before or found interesting for some other reason.

Question on what people think “open” means, whether in general or in a particular field/practice/activity

Our first question was: What does “open” mean to you?

Common answers to the meaning of “open”

I did not do a super careful job of coding the answers, so others may come up with different numbers if they try to put answers together into similar categories! It was kind of a rough coding/categorization.

And I’m not attaching any great significance to these results–e.g., not suggesting that since these showed up quite often in our survey then it must be the case that most people who try to state their view of the meaning of “open” are going to have these in there. This was not at all a random sample. I include these just to give an idea of what one might often hear when people are talking about openness.

17 of the 30 respondents said that open had to do with allowing things to be reused, revised, changed, remixed, and the like.
- A number of people mentioned open licensing as a way to make this possible (I counted about 3-4)

16 of the 30 said something about openness being related to accessibility, without barriers in the form of cost, bureaucratic hurdles, or other obstacles.

13 said something about openness involving collaboration, ability for many people to participate in a practice or in creating a product.
- E.g., government being open in part by allowing for public input, public decisionmaking in some aspects; students being involved in open education, being consulted in how courses go and being able to have their own goals, paths through courses.
- A couple of people talked about institutions or practices being open to changing through feedback, and one noted that openness blurs the line between producers and consumers.

8 people said it had to do with sharing work, products, activities or process–one said it was a different form of file transfer than that done legally when there’s copyright and pirating.

8 people said something about transparency, or openness in communication, such as when governments are transparent about their processes, or that a practice is open if publicly documented.

A couple of answers that were not common, but that I found particularly interesting

One person said that an important part of an open resource is that it makes clear that things are accessible, shareable, revisable, etc., and explains what those things mean in easy to understand terms (or links to a place that does so)–see dkernohan’s answer, here. Good point. Just because something is open and openly licensed for reuse and revision doesn’t mean people can easily find that information. I often see blogs that don’t clarify the license they have for their work, and without giving it an explicit license to the contrary, the default is copyright. If people want to share, they must be sure that a license and/or words stating so are prominent on their sites/artifacts.

One nice thing about Creative Commons licenses is that they have versions of the licenses that are in somewhat easy-to-read language (easier than the full legal code, anyway). So, for example, the CC-BY license that I use has a more “readable” version, with a link to the full legal version. Other licenses may have similar–I haven’t looked into many licenses.

I do think it’s important to not just say you’re using a license, but to link to it so people see the full terms, and if possible, to link to a version that explains it in somewhat clear language. And to make it prominent on your site. For those using CC licenses, this page is helpful for best practices in marking your work as CC-licensed.

A nice plugin I’m using for my blog, that you can use if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog (can’t add plugins on WordPress.com blogs, I think), is Open Attribute. It allows you to put a site-wide license on, as well as different license for different posts. There is also a web browser plugin called open attribute, that does something different–it puts an icon into your URL bar that allows you to easily cite information, images, videos from pages that have CC licenses (you can copy and paste in plain text or html).

Another person said that openness has to do (in part) with a “hacker ethic” (see @wiltwhatman’s answer, here). Though this may not be what that person had it mind, to me, a “hacker ethic” means that things are open to change, to being remade. But it being an “ethic” means a bit more than that. To me, it means that the more things that are open to remaking, remixing, the more likely it is that more people may eventually move from passive consumers of information and knowledge to active makers and sharers themselves. It there are a lot of things open to changing, and inviting people to use and change them, then perhaps this could encourage those who didn’t participate in making things as much in the past to start doing so. Especially if it doing so is fairly easy.

For example, if an (open) educational resource like some slides from a presentation, or a digital animation that explains some process or concept is just available to reuse as is (so it’s open in that sense, but not in the sense of revision), then I can post it on a website for a course, or link to it, but I won’t be involved in adding or changing anything. And if most educational resources are like this, then I’ll be rather passive when dealing with things other people have made. But if there are a lot of OER’s that invite revision, remixing, then I may be inspired to change them so they fit my course better. And in this way I might make more things myself because while starting from scratch may be too much work, changing something someone else has created may not be. Again, depending on how easy it is to revise such things, and whether I have the right software knowledge, etc. It won’t be enough in itself to encourage more people to make things, but it might help.

Answers to why people participate in open culture, or why they think openness is valuable

We also asked people: “Why do you participate in open culture? Or, why do you think openness is important?”

Some common answers

15 people said that openness is valuable because it allows for participation/collaboration, and that this is important for various reasons
- e.g., 7 people said engaging in dialogue with others helps them work better in their fields, and create better things
- a few people mentioned that collaborating is important because it helps build solidarity, altruism, teamworking skills
- one pointed out that there are always more smart people outside your community/workplace than inside, so best to go outside these to share/discuss ideas

7 people noted that openness can help create new and better knowledge, products; can help promote creativity and innovation
- one said that we always build on the work of others when we create things, so the more work is closed off the less chance there is to build on it
- one said that opening his/her work up may help to solve problems down the road that s/he isn’t even aware of it
- a couple said that openness is helpful to bettering the world generally, solving common problems

4 said openness can provide access to things that some people might not be able to afford otherwise, such as educational materials

Related to the above, 2 people mentioned that openness is part of promoting inclusivity, and one said that it spreads power and resources more widely

4 talked about the value of transparency, that public institutions shouldn’t be able to hide what they’re doing, that it promotes accountability, publicizes and helps to prevent abuse

Some answers that weren’t common, but that I found particularly interesting

One person said, “I want to share to increase the expectation of others to share too” (see Timothy Vollmer’s answer, here). Good point. I hadn’t thought of that consciously, but sure…if I am sharing some things I do, some people might find value in them and then decide that what they do could be valuable to others as well, and maybe they’ll be willing to share. If the norms in one’s field or activity are to not share, then few will do it. But it seems that if some people start sharing, others might begin to think perhaps it’s a good idea. I know if I benefit from something someone else has done, it

Another person asked an interesting question: “I share because I believe it to be a good thing. Is sharing innately open? Not so sure.Not so sure” (see Pat’s answer, here). I guess I just assumed sharing is open, but it probably depends on what is shared and how. And on what “sharing” means. Because if, let’s say, offering a free version of an app is “sharing,” but it’s not open to revision, then that’s not terribly open. And also if the free version is there mainly to get you to try it and then buy the paid version. That may not be what this person meant, though. I’m curious–can you think of ways in which sharing might not be “open”? Please respond in the comments, if you’d like!

Links to open projects/sites

We also asked in the survey if people wanted to provide us with links to a project or site that exemplifies their views of “open.” It’s best just to go to the survey results themselves to see these, because some have nice explanations attached! Some great resources there.

Thank you to those who took the time to fill out our survey!

[Why Open?] What does “open” mean?

I made this animated GIF using a mobile phone and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program.

For the next five weeks, I’m helping to facilitate an open online course at the School of Open called Why Open? The course starts today, and we’ve asked participants to start by writing a blog post on the following:

What do you think “openness” is? Focusing on your own field or context (if you wish), describe what it means to do work openly, or to make one’s activity or artifacts open. Alternatively, you could talk about what you think “openness” means generally, what sort of definition might fit all open activities or works.

I thought that after having read quite a few things about openness, and helping to put together this course, I’d have a clearer idea of what openness means. But instead, I recognize just how complicated the issues are surrounding openness, and so I have a hard time coming up with a clean, neat definition.

I could write a blog post that links to a bunch of resources on openness and see what they have to say, then respond to that, but that would be jumping the gun at this point. We’re starting off giving our own views, so let me try to put together some of my various thoughts about openness, as they stand at the moment (recognizing that things will change by the end of this course experience!).

I’ll be focusing on openness in my profession, higher education and research (I teach Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver).

My earlier views on openness in education and research

A friend (Pat Lockley) recently did a survey of academics to find out their views of openness. The results, and a slideshow presentation on how he and a collaborator used these results, can be found in one of Pat’s blog posts. My response is #3 on this spreadsheet (I tried to copy and paste it here, but I don’t think I have permission to do that).

Summarizing that, my view on openness in the context of teaching and research, at least when I answered this survey, was:

One part of openness is allowing something to be freely viewed, such as open access research and publications–anyone can see these without having to pay for viewing. Putting up one’s teaching materials on a freely-accessible website would count here too.

But that’s only one small part of doing academic work openly; to be more “open,” one would make one’s materials and research not only available for free viewing, but also for use by others, and for revision–adding to, subtracting from, mixing with other things, etc. So, for example, I could not just put up a syllabus or lecture notes or teaching video for others to view, but would give these things a license that would allow for reuse, revision, remixing (e.g., a CC-BY license). The same could go for research articles–it would be nice if parts of these, such as tables, diagrams and graphs, could be reproduced in other places, altered and posted elsewhere, etc. But a license allowing such use is helpful, as copyright doesn’t allow it without getting express permission from the author.

Another important thing to think about is the format in which you’re posting your materials. For example, PDFs aren’t easily editable by most people, so putting things up in PDF form makes them freely available, but not easily accessible for revision and reuse. I don’t know much about video or audio formats, but it’s possible that some are better than others for this sort of thing as well.

Courses are “open” not only if they are free to participate in (like MOOCs), but also if the materials are available for reuse, revision, repurposing. Some MOOCs don’t allow anyone to use their materials for other purposes. Here is a quote from Coursera’s Terms of Use, for example:

Permission to Use Materials

All content or other materials available on the Sites, including but not limited to code, images, text, layouts, arrangements, displays, illustrations, audio and video clips, HTML files and other content are the property of Coursera and/or its affiliates or licensors and are protected by copyright, patent and/or other proprietary intellectual property rights under the United States and foreign laws. In consideration for your agreement to the terms and conditions contained here, Coursera grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and use the Sites. You may download material from the Sites only for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify or create derivatives works of the material.

Udacity’s Terms of Use have a similar provision, as do those of FutureLearn. By contrast, the license on P2PU materials is CC-BY-SA.

Also in that survey I started trying to think about openness in education more broadly, and began to feel my way towards that by saying that we could open up education further if we didn’t just think of it in terms of formal institutions and courses. Learning happens in many different ways, every day, and if we could come up with some way to recognize and value that (rather than only giving credit to what people have learned at formal institutions), that might be a way to make education more “open.”

I think that’s a good thing to pursue, though I’m not yet sure how I’d fit it into a defintion of openness. Perhaps ensuring that education is more open in the sense of being more available/accessible to more people? If we restrict credit for learning to formal institutions, then only those who can get into and pay for those can get credit.

What I’d add now

What I’ve focused on above are things like free and easily-available access/viewing, licensing so as to allow revision and reuse/reposting, and allowing many people to be able to take courses, as well as get credit for learning in more informal ways. That latter is like access to some degree, so so far: access, reuse, revision.

Now I’d also add something about transparency, mostly of process, but perhaps of other things as well. So in education, the process used to reach students’ marks should be transparent, for example.

I’m not sure if this fits “transparency,” exactly, but I’m trying to be more open about my processes of research, in the sense of blogging about research as I go along, from my first thoughts about research questions and possible methods, to finalized research projects, to results. I do this because it’s a good way to get feedback from others who are interested in similar things, and, since I’ll be taking notes anyway and they might be useful to others, why not put them up in public?

Similarly, I’ve started blogging in the past few years about my teaching (that’s why I started this blog in the first place)–talking about what I’m planning, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and why. Again, I can get feedback from others, and my experiences can hopefully be useful to others as well.

I’m putting all of this sort of stuff under “transparency,” though perhaps there’s a better word for it.

Summary

So at this point, I’d say openness, at least in education and research, has to do with at least the following: free and easy access (including for reading/viewing/listening to works, as well as access in the sense of being able to attend courses or learn in other ways), ability to revise and reuse works created by others, and transparency (in the sense of letting others in on your process).

Now, I’m sure there are things I’ve left out here, and I’m also sure that this view will change. In addition, none of this is to say that these things are always beneficial, or that there are no potential problems associated with being open. We’ll discuss some of those later in the course!

I also want to point out that simply putting things online for free viewing and licensing them for revision and reuse doesn’t mean they are actually generally accessible. There are many people who do not have stable, fast internet access, and making materials available to them is not simply a matter of putting them on the internet. That’s an issue I haven’t looked into carefully enough. I too often think I’m being plenty open when I post things online and let others revise and reuse them. But it’s only a subset of people who can do so.

Let me know what you think…have I missed anything that you think is important about openness?

My first (but certainly not last) ds106 experience

A recent ds106 creation of mine, playing off of one by another participant, and off of an earlier assignment. See here for an explanation!

The title of this post is not entirely true. Before I took a synchronous version of ds106, I did some daily creates, which certainly counts as a ds106 experience!

But, I did have my first full, synchronous course experience with ds106 in May and June of 2013, when it was being given as a summer course at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia (USA). This particular iteration had a “Twilight Zone” theme, focused around the US television series of that name that ran from 1959-1964. Thus, it was called the “ds106zone.”

I wanted to write a post explaining a bit about this course and why I found it such a great experience. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it justice, but I’ll try. Sometimes these things are hard to put into words, or explain to those who haven’t had the same experience.

If you don’t know anything about ds106 and want a few basics, you could take a look at the “about” page for ds106, and/or this blog post I wrote a few months ago, before doing ds106 myself. I was looking at it from a more outside perspective, trying to figure it out, and it gives a fairly decent overview of how it works. That’s important for understanding what follows, I think.

The basics–themes and instructions for each week

Here is the syllabus for the students enrolled for credit in Summer 2013. As an open online participant, not much of this applied to me!

This was a five-week course–a very compressed schedule, since usually it runs for about 12 weeks or so when students are taking it for credit (as they were during the summer course as well). So for the enrolled students, each week had a whole lot of things to do. For those of us who were open online students, of course, we could pick and choose what we wanted to do.

You can find links to each weeks’ instructions and assignments here, which provides a good sense of the kinds of things we did during the course. We began with visual projects, then moved to design, then audio, then video, and then mashups. For each week we were all to watch a set of 3-4 The Twilight Zone episodes, and, if we wanted, we could base some of our work on those (for the UMW students, a certain number of their projects had to be focused on the week’s Twilight Zone episodes.

You can see from each week that the students had to do a certain number of “stars” worth of assignments in a particular category from the assignment bank. So, for example, for week 2, UMW students were required to do 15 stars of design assignments, at least 8 of which had to be based around one or more of the Twilight Zone episodes for that week. These stars refer to the number of stars on each assignment in the ds106 assignment bank.

You can click on any category of assignments in the assignment bank and see all the possible assignments there, along with the number of stars attached. Where do these assignments come from? From the community of participants and instructors–more from the former than the latter. During each iteration of ds106 the students registered for credit have to submit new assignments for later students to choose from, and anyone is welcome to submit an assignment at any time, here. (linked at the bottom of the assignment bank page)

The stars refer to the perceived level of difficulty of the assignment, and they come from the person who created it. However, Jim Groom, who was the main instructor for the ds106zone, made it clear that students could argue for a particular assignment being worth more stars, with evidence showing what they did and how complicated it was.

We were also asked to blog about each assignment we did, explaining not only what we did and why (what sort of story we were trying to tell), but also how we did it–the particular process we engaged in to make it happen. For me, this was one of the most valuable parts of the course–I not only had to remember and document what I did, which made me pay more attention to what I was doing and why, but I learned so much from what others did and their explanations of how they did it.

My ds106 projects

I put a couple of my works on this blog, here and here, but most of them ended up on another blog on Tumblr, which is devoted only to my ds106 work.

My favourite parts of the course had to do with audio…I’m not sure why I was so excited about audio, but I really got into it. Perhaps it is because I used to be a college radio dj, and did a fair bit of audio editing in those days (e.g., creating station and event announcements, by cutting and taping actual, physical tape!). Here are a few of my audio assignments: a commercial for ds106, a ds106 radio “bumper,” and a “bird call” for a character from a Twlight Zone episode. My absolute favourite part was collaboratively writing, performing and editing a radio show with other open online participants, all within seven days! You can hear it here, as well as read a blog post about our process.

What I found especially intriguing about ds106

First of all, the course really gives a lot of space for students to guide their own learning. Yes, there are themes and certain kinds of assignments to do each week, but which of those assignments students do, and how, is really up to them. There is quite a bit of leeway in many of the assignments, which of course makes sense for a course that thrives on creativity. And the fact that students create the assignments themselves really adds to the student-driven nature of the course.

In fact, overall, I found and really loved how the course was community-centred. By that I mean that the instructor was not the main or only person driving the course forward. Sure, he provided the main structure in the sense of telling the for-credit students what they had to do each week, and he also had open office hours on Google Hangouts or Skype that anyone could join. Further, he provided a presentation each week that gave some tips and ideas for one or more of the assignments for that week (e.g., here is a broadcast by Jim Groom and Tim Owens about photo editing tools, and here is one where they talk about design).

I don’t want to suggest that Jim Groom’s presence wasn’t that important–far from it. I learned a lot from his presentations/tutorials, and what he created himself for the course. In addition, getting thumbs-up comments from him was extremely motivating. As I noted in the podcast linked towards the end of this post, he was a very, very supportive instructor, even when he was smack talking! Rather, I want to say that Jim was part of a great community that worked together to help make this course a success.

One thing that struck me as great in this regard was that Jim Groom was not only the instructor, he also did as many of the assignments as he could during each week. So he, too, was posting assignments on his blog and counting starts to get up to the requisite number. He thereby played a participant role as well as that of an instructor.

The course was also run in part by Scottlo, who, on his own, decided to start doing a daily podcast for the course, in which he gave some tips about various assignments and also played student audio work. You can hear his podcast, called the LoDown, on his radio blog (see archives from May and June 2013). Jim Groom made this daily podcast required listening for the UMW students, and I never missed an episode. I learned a lot about doing audio from Scottlo’s examples of different ways to do a podcast, and from his specific advice for doing audio and other assignments. In addition, it was so exciting when your own work gets showcased in a forum like this!

For various reasons, Scottlo had to stop doing the podcast before the course finished, and some of us wanted it to go on…so, in what to me really exemplifies ds106, we just continued it ourselves! Rochelle Lockridge (Rockylou) did a number of podcasts (e.g., here and here), Alan Levine did one (here, though he did one earlier in the course as well) Jim Groom did one (and also an earlier one too), and I did one in conversation with Rockylou. Editing that podcast was a really fun and valuable experience.

In addition, a character named Talky Tina showed up (though actually, she had had her own blog for months by then), and started to become a very big presence in the course. She helped immensely, partly by encouraging the UMW students to update their blogs with useful information like an “about” page, to Tweet out their blog posts/assignments, and more. She also created a storyline to the course itself, managing to get into fights with those who called her “creepy” (especially one Mr. Savvy, who went back and forth with her a few times on Twitter and on assignments, such as discussed here).

Her identity was (and remains) a mystery (though one or two claimed to know it fairly early on), so of course at one point several people claimed to be her (documented here). Alan Levine continued to claim to have been her, (and still might if you ask him) and then to have exorcised her from his mind, and thereafter would not acknowledge her tweets or allow her to comment on his blog (according to Talky Tina).

Things really came to a fantastic head when Tina started doing audio assignments, such as her “Tina Don’t Like the Mean Word“ song, which is brilliant, and her podcast calling out all pretender Tina’s and engaging them in a rumble (part 1 and part 2), which was over the top.

In the end, many of us ended up doing assignments about Talky Tina and her creepiness or lack thereof, such as here and here and here, among others. And many of us still do not know who is “playing” her! Further, she is continuing her storyline, having added a “puppetmaster” and a “brother” to the cast of characters. I expect she will continue to play a role in the upcoming Fall 2013 ds106 course (more on that below).

Not to mention the most important thing of all–all those participants who helped move the course along by creating great art, and playing off each others’ works, and encouraging each other with comments on blogs and Twitter, which kept us all excited and encouraged us to work even harder. The best part for me was when someone picked up on an assignment I did and tweaked it, did something new with it, such as when Vivien Rolfe added music to one of my first gifs! And this sort of “riffing” was encouraged and valued, and people often created things specifically for others to use and play with (as Brian Short did with a meme template, and as Andrew Forgrave did with ds106zone trading card templates).

I found in ds106 a group of extremely engaged, extremely supportive people who love to do this stuff and love to provide help and advice to others. All it takes is a Tweeted question on the #ds106 hashtag and someone will answer pretty darn quickly. Or a blog post asking for help. It’s amazing.

An acephalous ds106, Fall 2013

It is not surprising, then, that the Fall 2013 ds106 course will be “Headless,” meaning it will have no particular instructor, but will be run by a community of volunteers. As Jim Groom notes, this is quite fitting for how ds106 runs anyway. See an explanation of the Fall 2013 headless course here, a syllabus here, and a sign-up sheet for volunteers here. I am really, really excited about this, though sad that I won’t be able to participate this Fall as much as I could during the Spring, as I’ll be back to teaching full time (no longer on sabbatical!).

Why don’t you join us for this acephalous course starting in a few weeks? There is also a new Google+ group in addition to the #ds106 hashtag on Twitter, if you want to get announcements about it and meet some people before it starts. As with my other favourite online course experience, etmooc, the best part of ds106 has been the people involved. I got hooked on the creativity, the creations, and most especially the community.

I can’t quit ds106–I am still creating things whenever I can, including daily create assignments. I found it incredibly addictive and so, so much fun. I now understand how it’s #4life: not only do you continually learn more and more as you do these things, but it’s quite possible you’ll love it so much you’ll want to continue #4life. And the community will, I think, be there with you. My podcast discussion with Rockylou acts as a final reflective piece for my ds106 experience, in which I try to explain just why I loved it so much, even though it’s hard for me to see a direct link to my everyday teaching and learning in philosophy.

Why not give it a try? You can do as much or as little as you’d like. Just start!

Hello, Why Open? course!

My name is Christina Hendricks, and I’m helping to facilitate this course at the School of Open called “Why Open?” in August, and I’m writing this post to introduce myself to the participants (and to get at least one post onto our shiny new blog hub we’re creating–will link to it when it’s ready).

A bit about me

I teach philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC (here’s my main website, and here’s my About.me page). I also teach in an interdisciplinary program for first-year students in the Faculty of Arts called Arts One. This is a team-taught, full year course for which students get 18 credits: 6 each in English, History and Philosophy. I think Arts One is a fantastic liberal arts program, and I dearly love teaching in it. We’ve recently started putting some of our lectures, student blogs, and Tweets online at “Arts One Digital,” which can give you a good sense of the sort of things we read and discuss in the course. If you want to read a bit more about my work in Arts One, you could click the “Arts One” tag on the right menu.

My first foray into doing work openly was this blog, which I started four or five years ago, but I only recently began to really blog on a regular basis (in large part because I had time to do so during a sabbatical in 2012-2013!). Over the course of the past six months, I’ve gotten more and more interested in “openness.” How did that happen?

How I got here

While on sabbatical last year, I decided to investigate these MOOC things, these Massive, Open, Online Courses. I looked into some from the major providers like Coursera and others, but ended up deciding to really get involved with one that was organized and facilitated by volunteers, entirely on the open web called “ETMOOC” (Educational Technology and Media MOOC). That course was run similarly to the Why Open? course (though it was 10 weeks long, if I remember correctly): we had synchronous sessions, plus suggested activities and blog posts, plus Twitter chats each week. There was a blog hub where we could easily see each others’ blog posts, and we were encouraged to comment on each others’ work to get conversations going and start making connections amongst us.

We were already engaging in open learning, through writing public blog posts and public comments on them, engaging in Twitter updates and Twitter chats publicly, and participating in synchronous sessions that were open for anyone to join and view later.

Still, we had a specific section of that course called “The Open Movement,” and I found myself especially excited about such things. I began doing some research on my own into openness, and found the School of Open! I also found another online course, specifically on open education, from the Open University, which I participated in. If you happen to be interested, all my blog posts for that course are under the “h817open” tag on the menu at right.

I had seen on the School of Open’s site that there were a list of courses that were being developed, or courses that people had expressed interest in having, and a call for volunteers. The “Why Open?” course was one of them, so I volunteered to help with it, along with the other organizers/facilitators. And here we are!

How I participate in openness

Well, so far it’s mostly just this blog:

I have opened up my research by writing about it step by step, taking notes on research articles and giving my comments to those, thinking out loud about how I might design research projects and asking others for suggestions (which has been very helpful!)
I have opened up my teaching by writing about planning courses, issues I run into while teaching courses, ideas for courses, and more

But I also have been trying to make a habit of reading numerous other blogs on things I’m interested in (mostly teaching and learning, plus openness generally) and commenting on them when I can. It’s a great way to learn through conversation!

In addition, I’ve become quite active on Twitter, sharing resources on teaching and learning or other topics through links to articles and blogs, asking questions and getting and giving advice. I have found that there is a great community of people in the world I can discuss teaching and learning with, in addition to my colleagues closer to home. It’s a fantastic way to expand my ideas and practices, by hearing from people I might never otherwise have talked to.

Finally, I am, starting now, beginning to help develop and facilitate open online courses. The “Why Open?” course is the first one I’m helping with, and I’m also part of the organizing team for another online course that is much longer–a 10-month, professional development course for teachers and faculty (K-12 and higher ed) in educational technology. Here’s our main site as it stands so far!

I hope to do more in the way of teaching openly online in the future, and to help develop the Arts One Digital site further. I may even open one of my on-campus courses to outside participants who could join for free (without earning credit, though). That’s an idea for the future that I haven’t worked out yet!

I look forward to meeting you all and discussing openness!

A map of influence of #etmooc

I’m marginally participating, here and there, in #clmooc: Making Learning Connected MOOC. I would participate more, but for the past few weeks I’ve been: (1) finishing up ds106 (and yes, I know it’s never really finished! Most of my ds106 projects are posted on a tumblr, here), (2) moving out of my apartment in Melbourne, Australia where I’ve lived for a year on sabbatical, (3) travelling, (4) making the journey home to Vancouver (I’m still on #4 right now, waiting in an airport with a delayed flight).

At any rate, one of the projects in #clmooc for this week is to make a map–a map of anything you want. I chose to make a mind map of what I’ve been doing over the past few months, as a result of my participation in #etmooc, the Educational Technology and Media MOOC that took place Jan-March 2013. #etmooc had a profound impact on me and my work, which I wanted to capture in a mind map.

After doing a search for free mind mapping software, and finding ,this Wikipedia page I decided to give Mindmup a try. I liked that it is open source and free, and that it seems pretty easy to start using. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it’s quick to learn how to use and to make a map. You can include links just by typing in the URL, and it automatically turns it into a link. Apparently you can add attachments too, though I didn’t try that.

The one thing I wanted to do but couldn’t was to add a “parent” to the main parent in the middle, which is #etmooc itself. I wanted to just say that I heard about #etmooc through Twitter, through my PLN. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Oh well; I’m happy with it otherwise.

You don’t have to create an account to create a map, though I don’t know how you can save it on their site w/o an account. I saved it to Google Drive, but you can also save it to GitHub if you want.

You can get an embed code for your site if you save it on Mindmup (which you can ALSO do after saving it on Google Drive or GitHub). That’s what I used below. I like how it works on the blog–you can resize it and move around it…nice!

#ETMOOC: Educational Technology and Media MOOC, Jan-March 2013 http://etmooc.org on MindMup

ds106–audio assignments

In case any readers of this blog are interested in what I’m doing for ds106 lately, all my audio work from the last week can be found here, including a radio play written and produced by a great group of open online participants in ds106!

“I can read tv” book cover–Time Enough at Last (ds106zone)

For the second week of ds106zone, the Summer 2013 edition of ds106, we were working in part on design assignments. I had a few ideas of things I wanted to do, but only managed to get one thing done because it took me so long. I decided to take on a difficult assignment, knowingly, because I wanted to force myself to learn about more things in GIMP to do it. That definitely worked–the learning about stuff part. The final product is not quite what I wanted, but it’s pretty close, which I’m happy about.

I thought about doing the “Wait, where’d that guy come from?” assignment, which I thought I could do fairly easily in GIMP, or the “Lyric typography poster,” which would give me a chance to play around with fonts, but decided that what would be most challenging, and therefore would push me most to learn lots of things, is the “I can read movies” book cover assignment. That requires looking at & choosing fonts, as well as adding things into images, and more, so it is a bunch of things I wanted to learn rolled into one. It is also quite difficult to pull off well.

I looked at Spacesick’s original “I can read movies” covers, and most of the ds106 versions on the assignment page, and decided I wanted to go with a black background with a couple of colours. It reminded me of a kind of 60s/early 70s aesthetic that I thought would work for my idea to do a Twilight Zone episode version.

Here’s the finished product.

What I was trying to do:

I wanted to capture an idea, a feeling, or a scene in 2-3 images, and when I first thought of this assignment what came to mind was the scene where Bemis’ glasses have just fallen off and broken, and he is reaching down to them. He doesn’t yet know they’re broken, and his vision is completely blurred, just like it will be for the rest of this life. It’s the moment just before he finds out, and I find that powerful. I originally created the rectangles to represent rubble–I was thinking of those skeletal remains of buildings you sometimes see in rubble, with just some beams left over. But later, I thought they could also be book spines, perhaps–a jumble of them.

I included “Series 1” and the number “8” to fit the season/episode.

I wanted to include a tv icon on the top left, instead of the movie icon that Spacesick used for the book covers.

I wanted to make it look old and worn, and somewhat “paper-y,” as it’s supposed to be a paperback, and one that was printed decades ago.

What I’m happy with

The design of the three images–hand, glasses, rubble–turned out almost exactly as I meant it to. It’s what I pictured. Except for some details, as noted below.

I like the fonts I found for the “I can read tv” (Dream Orphanage) and the “Time Enough at Last” (Diamante Fresko). I wanted them to look like they’d fit a book from the 60s. I’m not 100% happy with them, but I think they work all right. I tried to find one that fit The Twilight Zone original font, and the closest thing I found was I Still Know. It’s pretty good, but “The Twilight Zone” on the book doesn’t quite look how I wanted (see below).

I think I managed to make the book look dusty and a bit worn, which I’m happy with. I wanted to do some other things to make it look more worn, though, as noted below.

What I’m not happy with

There are a number of things I’d like to change, but I just needed to finish this so I could move on to week 3!

The thing I worked hardest at was dealing with the pixelation of the glasses and hand. As you can see, I didn’t end up managing to fix it. The rubble ended up pixelating too, which was weird b/c I drew that myself. Saga on all that below.

I’m not happy with the colour of the tv icon at the top left. I struggled with what colour to make it, as I wanted this to have only a couple of colours beyond black/white/grey (given the b/w of the original show). I didn’t want anything really bright, as again, I wanted to stick fairly close to a b/w feeling (that’s why the colours that are there are pretty dark). The problem was I had to colour this thing by hand, as discussed below.

I think the font for the “Series 1” at the top, and the “A story created from the original script” at the bottom (both are Liberation Sans) doesn’t really fit the rest. It’s too modern-looking.

I’d like to have more spacing between the lines of “The Twilight Zone,” so the three words are separated a bit more. But when I hit “return” after each word in the “text” tool, the spacing was too large. Beyond putting each word on a separate layer and moving them, I don’t know how to fix this. I decided not to put each on a separate layer and move, but just leave as is.

I didn’t manage to make the book look as old and worn as I wanted, nor to look like it was made of paper. I like the look of the one on the assignment page for this assignment, with the light pixels on the edges that makes it look like the top part of the paper is flaking off a bit. See below for how I tried to do this, without a lot of success.

The process

Since this was a complicated process, the discussion will be a bit long. As with my post on selective colourization, mostly I’m documenting this in such detail for my own future reference, and for anyone else who is very new to GIMP like me.

Creating the hand and glasses

I got the hand and glasses from The Noun Project site. They were svg (scalable vector graphics) files, as are all the files on that site. I had watched the presentation on design for ds106zone and learned that svg files are useful because they don’t pixelate when scaled. So I thought: hey, great! I’ll put them in my image and scale them up a bit and they’ll look fine.

No. I didn’t watch the presentation carefully enough. Tim Owens and Jim Groom noted that when you import svg files into GIMP they get turned into something else (jpegs, I think), and so when you try to scale them up they DO pixelate. Tim suggested we could import them into GIMP as bigger images (you can choose the pixel size when you open them in GIMP) and scale down, and they’d look okay. Which I did, and they did.

But the problem came when I tried to colour the svg files from The Noun Project. They were black to begin with, and I needed them white. It was when I coloured them that they pixelated. I used the “fuzzy select” tool and then the bucket tool to colour them white, and I got weird pixels. I don’t know any way to fix this except to use an svg editor like Inkscape (thanks to Brian Bennett for suggesting that to me via Twitter). But I just didn’t want to try to figure out a new image editor at this point. So I lived with the pixels.

I drew an arm to attach to the hand with the lasso tool and filled it with with with the bucket tool. I then wanted some kind of colour on the glasses, so I tried colouring them entirely red, but I didn’t like the look. So I used “stroke selection” to do an outline on them, Which was also pixelated b/c they were pixelated. I used the pencil tool, I think, to draw in some “cracks” on the glasses lenses.

To break the glasses in half, I selected one half of them and used “cut” and then “paste” to get a floating layer. Then I created a new layer and anchored the floating layer to it (if I remember correctly). Then I could move that half of the glasses separately from the other half. I know Henry Bemis’ glasses didn’t break in half in the episode, but I did this to emphasize their brokenness.

Creating the rubble

I drew rectangles with the rectangle select tool, and filled them in with grey. But they were all vertical, and I wanted them rotated a bit. This turned out to be difficult, because when I used the rotate tool I got white where the bars used to be. I didn’t know what to do, so I started trying to paint black over that white part, which was a pain. I can’t remember exactly where the bars were–I think on the background layer, rather than on their own separate layer. I did an extensive web search to solve the problem, and finally found an answer here. I discovered I could put the rectangles on a floating layer and then move them, either using a combination of key strokes or “cut” then “paste” to create a floating selection. I can’t recall if I could rotate them on the floating selection or whether I had to anchor them to a new layer first.

I originally made the rubble just grey (to fit the b/w show, and grey seems a good colour for rubble), but it looked really flat. So I used the “gradient” tool in GIMP to add a darker/lighter gradient–picking the foreground and background colours and making the gradient go from one to the other.

Creating the top of the image

I just used the rectangle select and bucket fill tools to do the red lines at the top. The tv icon was also from The Noun Project, and was also black to begin with. When I used the fuzzy select tool to try to recolour it, the pixelation was really, really bad. It looked awful. So, I used the lasso tool and selected around each part of it and then used the bucket fill to change the colour. I tested a few colours and decided on grey. It took awhile to hand select and colour in the whole icon, so when I was done and didn’t like the colour I couldn’t bring myself to do it again.

Adding the dust

At first I tried the following. I first downloaded some new brushes, from the Deviant Art site. I downloaded some texture brushes and some “grunge” brushes. Then I created a new layer and coloured it white, lowering the opacity. Then I used the eraser tool and played around with some of the texture and grunge brushes to erase away parts of the white layer. This looked pretty good, except that there was then no “dust” on the white parts of the image. I realized I needed to add grey “dust” to make the white parts look a little old and worn as well.

So I used some of the texture and grunge brushes and painted on a grey colour. I played around with the colours and the opacity, as well as the brush characteristics, including size, spacing, dynamics, and more. Here is a nice tutorial on brushes that I found very helpful.

As noted above, I wanted to try to make the book cover look like parts of the paper were flaking off because it was old. I tried to do this with the “dissolve” mode on various brushes, playing with the colour and opacity, and the best I could do is at left and below. I used white at first, but it just looked weird, so I went with grey. It’s okay, but it looks like grey speckles rather than flaking paper.

I tried a few different ways of doing the speckles, with different colours and opacities, and here’s one with brighter speckles. I still don’t think it looks like paper flaking off. Not sure what else I could have done.

Well, I think that’s it for process. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, but it took me a LONG time because I still don’t know that much about GIMP. But doing this project taught me a whole lot of things I didn’t know before, so I’m very happy about that!

Cmdr Hendricks’ final transmission

I have not been doing any ds106 “daily creates” for a few days, so I figured it was time to get back to them. Today’s was a lot of fun. Here’s the text of today’s daily create (actually yesterday’s, for me here in Australia…by the time I get the daily create announcements (the next day here) it’s already much of the way through that day over in N. America!):

Review the photos fromthe Daily Create of May 21, 2013 “Take a picture of where you are right now from a weird point of view, like an ant, an alien, or a ghost.” Pick one image, and write up a report to headquarters from the creature that was observing one of these humans. Be sure to include the URL of the image so HQ can verify your observations.

You can see all the submissions here, including mine. But I goofed bigtime. I pasted the link to the wrong image! Or rather, I pasted a link to a blog post I had in my “clipboard,” and didn’t realize I had failed to copy the link I wanted into the clipboard until after it was submitted. And you can’t edit post submission.

So here it is, with the correct image link. It will make more sense if you go look at the image!

—————————————————————-

Investigation file #562-9945x-00y

Regarding the disappearance of Cmdr. Hendricks

Contents:

transcript of Cmdr. Hendricks’ last transmission
last image sent by Cmdr. Hendricks before transmission ended: http://www.flickr.com/photos/71428177@N00/8776588388/

[This is a selection of the last transmission, showing the last few minutes before the transmission ended abruptly. The entire transmission can be found in file #562-9945x-00z]

HQ: Sorry, we couldn’t hear that; too much interference. Please repeat. Over.

Cmdr. H: [speaking softly] I have somehow been beamed into an extremely hostile area. Coordinates must be mistaken. This is not, repeat, NOT the experimental garden. It is full of artificial structures, not plant life. Over.

HQ: We triple-checked the coordinates and are doing so again as we speak. We need to figure out where you are. Please describe your surroundings. Over.

CH: [speaking softly] I just escaped from a huge, round metal structure with steep sides. There was a hostile inhabitant who was using an enormous stream of water that is pushing me towards a hole in the bottom of the metal structure. I managed to climb out using a long, wooden, cylindrical item that resembles a log with the bark stripped off. I am hiding at the moment behind a giant, black box. Over.

HQ: Stay put, Hendricks, until we can lock onto your position. Over.

CH: Damn, I think the creature has seen me. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOO [muffled sounds]

HQ: Cmdr. Hendricks? Cmdr. Hendricks? Do you copy? Come in, Cmdr. Hendricks. Over.

[there are a few moments of radio silence]

CH: [out of breath] [whispering] The creature grabbed hold of me and tried to stuff me inside the giant black box through a swinging door on the front of it. It had several buttons and dials. I have no idea what the box does, but given the hostility shown me so far I can only guess the creature meant to do away with me by putting me inside. I wriggled free and am hiding near a large metal field with a grid across it. I am going to try to cross the beams on the grid. Over.

HQ: We just checked the coordinates and someone forgot to account for leap years. You’re in the right place, but the wrong time. We are firing up the transporter and just need to get your current coordinates. We’re working as fast as we can, but it will take 5 minutes. You need to find a way to keep safe. Over.

CH: [whispering] I am crossing the black beams over the metal field. The field is strange…it has circular patterns with holes… Oh *&#$!!! This is a death trap! The creature has ignited flames in the holes, heating up the entire grid! I’ve got to make a run for it! [3 seconds of breathing hard] Okay, I’m safe for the moment behind a tall, shiny metal box. Over.

HQ: Just 4 more minutes and we’ll have you. Hang on. Over.

CH: Wait; I’ve climbed up the tall, shiny box to get a look inside, and I think I can shut this whole area down. It’s just like HAL in here, and if I can get it powered down, the creature can’t use any more of these weapons until you get me out. I’ll just climb in for a closer loo…[end of transmission]

Street art — selective colourization (#ds106 assignment)

I’m participating in ds106 at the moment, as an open, online participant. It’s a crazy, compacted summer course for students taking it on campus at the University of Mary Washington–just see what they need to do for week 1 (which has just finished). Here’s the full syllabus for the on campus participants.

As an open participant, I’m free to do what I want (a lot) and have time for (not much). I’ve managed to do two assignments so far, an animated gif assignment and the one discussed here. Plus, I did quite a few “daily creates” from last week, which are posted in my daily create set on flickr. But this is a tiny fraction of what many people are doing. I have to cram all my ds106 work into 2-3 hours after my son goes to bed at night, and I’ve been staying up pretty late to get even these things done. Having a blast doing them, though.

The image below was done for the “Focus on one colour” assignment: “Either in your room or a room in your house [take a photo] and use gimp or any other photo editor to focus on one color in the room.” Well, looking around the apartment I’m renting in Melbourne, Australia right now, most of the rooms are really dull in colour–white, grey, brown. Not much colour happening here. So I decided to use a photo of some street art I had taken earlier and do selective colourization on that. I realize it doesn’t quite fit the assignment, but I doubt anyone will mind much.

Here’s the original image:

Street art in the Fitzroy neighbourhood, Melbourne, Australia

And here’s the selectively colourized version:

Street art selectively colourized

There were quite a few colours in the image, so first off I had to choose which one to focus on. I picked the yellow first, because: it was spaced pretty evenly over the image, there was enough of it to stand out (not so with some of the colours), there was not too much of it (which was important too, because it woudn’t stand out from the greyscale as well if there were a lot of it; this would have been the case if I did all the shades of blue, for example), and I thought it would look pretty nice against the greyscale image. Of course, the pink could have worked too, or just the light shade of blue alone. I didn’t do red because there just wasn’t that much of it.

I was just going to do the yellow, but thought the orange would look nice with it as a colour (and much of the yellow was close to an orange shade anyway). Plus, doing the orange too would highlight a couple of other areas in the image that I thought would provide a nice balance. So not only did I not follow the assignment instructions for taking a photo of a room, I also didn’t follow them for picking one colour.

Process

I did this the hard way, I think. I used GIMP and wanted to work a bit more with layer masks, which I had only tried once before. So even though there are lots of tutorials like this one about how to do selective colourization with GIMP using the eraser tool, I thought I’d try to do it with a layer mask. Which meant I came up with a process on my own (partly because I couldn’t easily find a tutorial on selective colourization with layer masks, and partly because I wanted to see if I could figure it out on my own). If there are easier ways to do this with a layer mask, or better ways for some reason, please let me know!

I’ll be explaining in detail, because I don’t yet really understand all this and need to explain it in detail to firm it up in my own mind. It might also be helpful for other total novices like me!

First I created a duplicate layer of the original image; actually, I created two duplicates so I always had the original image without touching it, just in case I messed something up with the two layers I was going to use (most people won’t need to do this, and it’s probably unnecessary, but I wanted to make sure I could always go back to the original easily, w/o having to do “undo” a bunch of times). I turned off the original layer (or whatever it’s called: I clicked the “eye” button next to the layer so it’s not visible) so I just had two layers with the same image.

On the top layer I created a layer mask. I’m pretty sure I did this backwards: I had the top layer coloured and the bottom layer greyscale (I used Image>desaturate to make the bottom one greyscale), and then I used a layer mask on the top image to make transparent all the colours except the yellow and orange–thus the greyscale from beneath would show through and the yellow/orange would stay from the top layer. Here’s a screenshot of my layers:

It would have been more intuitive, probably, to have the top layer greyscale and create a mask so that the only the yellow/orange parts were transparent and thus showed through from the bottom image. But it ended up working fine.

Here’s a screenshot of my layer mask, with white for the stuff that’s opaque (the yellow and orange) so that the greyscale from beneath doesn’t show through, and black for the transparent stuff that ends up greyscale.

I could have used the paintbrush tool to paint white all of the stuff I wanted to be coloured–the yellow & orange bits–or I could have used the lasso tool to select those bits. But I wanted to play around with the fuzzy select and colour select tools, so I used those instead. The colour select selects everything in the image that is the same colour as what you click on, and the fuzzy select selects everything that is that colour that is also contiguous to that colour. That was a LOT of work, as it turned out, because what seems like one colour is actually many different colours, so when you use either of these tools you only get a small portion of the “yellow” or “orange” sections. There was a whole lot of clicking going on to get all of it, and I still missed some of the edges of the colours. So really, the paintbrush or lasso tool would have been better. But I’m not yet proficient at using the lasso tool with a mouse for detailed work.

I would have liked to have selected some of the yellow right below the street sign in the original image, near the tree part of the painting, but it was really fuzzily blended with the pink on top of it. I didn’t know how to do a fuzzy selection where it blends into the next section. I would have gotten this hard line where there isn’t a hard line. Can anyone help me with getting a more fuzzy line for my selection? Or is that only possible if I used the paintbrush to paint the white parts rather than a selection tool?

I then created a layer mask on the top, coloured layer and set it to “selection.” It automatically made the selection white and the background black, which is what I wanted, but I think you can invert that pretty easily if you want it to be the opposite (haven’t tried, so not sure how–anyone know how?).

And that was it, really–I had two layers, coloured on top with a mask that had white on the yellow and orange bits so they were opaque, and black for the rest so the greyscale image below showed through.

Happy to hear any comments on the image or process!