The prompt this morning asked us to explore the word “combobulate” — the name of our collective space for this week’s Reclaim Open conference — and I said the word a few times, and realized it made the phrase “Come, Bob, You’re Late,” which had me laughing since I have a friend named Bob, who is often late to things.
Then I got to thinking of one of the early mantras of the CLMOOC project, in the first years when we realized we would never really know who was participating and in what space since it was all so dispersed. We decided to make the “Whenever your arrive, you’re right on time” the messaging so that no one arriving midway through activities would feel it was too late to start.
It was during the early MOOC years when a maker/educator friend of mine, Karen F., via our own CLMOOC (Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration) hosted by the National Writing Project, let me know of this cool online site that featured daily invitational prompts for making art and writing.
Then she mentioned it again. Maybe even a few times.
It was, she explained, something called the DS106 Daily Create. She told me that each day’s prompt could be done in about 10 minutes or less. Karen suggested I should check it out.
I’d like to say, I jumped right on Karen’s thoughtful advice, but I think it took a few weeks to even remember to take a look at the original DS106 Daily Create site, and I initially thought it was only for university courses. I didn’t quite realize then that it was all intentionally created to be open and hybrid, to be used by university professors and by anyone who stumbled by.
I soon became one of those stumblers from the open web, and once I started in September 2015 (ten years ago!), I kept on going. I’m still going. I’ve made digital art, and filtered photos for effect, shared audio files with music and sound effects, produced short video files, done my share of dumb memes and odd GIFs, created comics and more comics, and remixed all sorts of things along the way.
It’s been a blast.
There may have been some skipped days early on but it wasn’t long before the Daily Create became part of my regular morning routine (make a cup of coffee, write a poem, make a Create) that continues to this day. In the old days, the site would be able to track how many Creates you made (via the Leaderboard) but with the collapse of Twitter and the re-jiggering of the site by Alan Levine, that feature is no longer functional, and that’s OK.
It was never about the numbers. It is always about creating things, and connecting with others.
I’ve also made a point of trying to send in new prompts on a regular basis, so that whoever has the keys to the site (these days, it’s Sarah and Alan) have something new to choose from on a regular basis. I see myself as a collaborator as much as a participant in the site.
At one point for something called Connected Courses and then later for CLMOOC,, I even created a rip-off (but not nearly as good) version of the Daily Create for people to use and called it The Daily Connector. Re-visiting that site now, I am thinking I should port it into my new domain site from where it is, if only to archive it and maybe re-use it at some point in the future.
One lesson many of us learned from the Age of MOOCS is that bigger, dispersed networks are not what ultimately have lasting impacts – it turns out that smaller, engaged networks make more of a difference. So as my various education and digital maker networks have splintered or fallen apart, the people in groups like DS106 and CLMOOC have remained vital to me as an online presence.
A bunch of are creating a series of different posts for the Reclaim Open festival and our writing and creative output is syndicated over at the Combobulating blog.
The prompt for this morning’s DS106 Daily Create was to create a wanted poster for someone who used to do the creates but has been noticeably quiet. I chose my good friend, Terry, but turned the Wanted Poster into a Shout Out to him.
