In the last post, I exhibited some of the work I’ve produced this week in connection with the Daily Create challenge. It is now time to reflect on this experience of open practise.
How was your activity an open practice in your view?
I shared my daily create artifacts under a creative commons attribution license (CC BY), with the intention of empowering anybody to pick up my piece and make something new and creative out of it. Perhaps nobody ever will, but I want to leave all doors open for this to happen.
Reading through Alan Levine’s entries, it occurred to me that I could have been more open about the process leading up to the artifacts I shared, both in terms of technology and inspiration.
Did you run into any problems or barriers?
I did not feel confident enough to contribute to the video and gif assignments suggested this week. When I opened the daily create page, there were already a couple of gif submissions and I just felt overwhelmed by my incompetence. It froze any idea of things I could do at my own level.
I haven’t overcome this barrier so far: all I did was avoid the obstacle…and I’m not particularly proud of it.
Was this process beneficial to you in some way?
While I wasn’t able to respond to each prompt, the daily create assignments introduced a routine of thinking about ways I could express myself creatively. My preferred medium has always been words and I tend to refrain from venturing publicly into unfamiliar territories such as photography because of how harshly I judge my own output.
Daily Create had a liberating effect on me because the act of creation is repeated every day so failing once doesn’t bite away at your enthusiasm for the next day’s creative assignment. You can check out what others have made, maybe find out how they did it, fiddle with GIMP as time allows. In the worst case, you’ll have spent 20 minutes of your day struggling with a software you can’t bend to your will. You get up the next day, ready to take on a new challenge, knowing you have people around to support you.
Two things happened from there:
- I made my first (very imperfect) animated gif
- I joined the headless ds106 course starting tomorrow
So, I say ‘yay’:
Smiley face with nails by moonlightbulb. CC BY license.
What did you learn through this process about openness, or about anything else?
On the technical side of things, I tried out GIMP which was a bit frustrating at first, tough well worth the effort. I can’t say that I master all the nuts and bolts of the software but I’ve got the basics down at least.
I also played around with the back-end (CSS) of my Tumblr theme to add the Disqus comments widget, which I am glad to report was a successful operation.
Comment thread on Tumblr. 25th August 2013.
More importantly, I learnt that no matter how lousy you think you are at photography/animation/telling jokes/*insert activity*, that’s no excuse to limit your self-expression to media you’re comfortable with.
Practice makes perfect.
Practice + sharing + community feedback + more practice = still imperfect but a lot better.
Why Open by @hardcorekancil 
I understand what you mean by being intimidated by what others have posted in a daily create. While my medium of choice and experience is with video, my tough spot is with the writing assignments – your strength. I know DS106 is the space where we can inspire one another instead of feeling intimidated. Glad to have you on-board and looking forward to learning from you.
Hi Rockylou22! Now I know who to go to for tips on video assignments 😉 As you rightly pointed out, the beauty of the course is in the diversity of the participants supporting each other. One person’s weak spot will surely be the other’s strength !
I love this post! I think partly because I really relate to many of these things myself. I have always been most comfortable in writing, and I had a lot of trepidation about doing other things. But I decided to do ds106 precisely to force myself to overcome this, and just try things out. Wow, has it worked. I now have no concern about trying things and having them fail, because even if they do I learn a LOT from that. And a good bit of the time they work out just fine!
I do agree with your point about possibly including more openness about your process, but to be quite honest, I don’t think that’s necessary with daily creates. Those are supposed to be things you can do fairly quickly, and blogging about the process takes a fair bit of time…which could lead to people not doing as many. So I say, blog about the process for the longer assignments in ds106. I find it really, really helpful when people do that (and Rockylou is a master at giving details on her process!) because I get new tips and ideas that way.
And I wouldn’t worry about leaving aside the animated gifs for now. Some of these daily create assignments are 15-20 minute projects for people who already know how to do these things!. I put animated gifs and video projects in those categories. If you don’t already know how to do those, then it’s going to take you a lot longer than 15-20 minutes. Which doesn’t mean don’t do it if you want to, but it does mean, to me, don’t worry that you ought to try. Daily create is about things you can do quickly so they don’t become too much of a burden on time and you’ll want to do more later! That’s how I approach them, anyway.
Love your gif! And I hope we’ve constructed the course so that if you miss one assignment, it doesn’t preclude you from doing the next one. Feeling like you are overwhelmed doesn’t do anyone good! I like that approach of it being ‘ok to fail’.
Yes, being open to fail is a great open lesson to learn. I like the idea of Daily Create because a daily creative project sets them up as low stakes projects. If it isn’t one big project but every day you can make something creative, then failing at some of them doesn’t feel that intimidating psychologically. It is also a great way to think about the creative and learning process. It works best when one is open not only to success but particularly to failure.