The First 24 Hours

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Tim

I feel like I just finished a sprint, the race is still going but we’ve already won. I had no earthly imaginations that when I drafted yesterday’s post about our DS106 Kickstarter project I’d be able to write an update saying we were fully funded just 24 hours later (19 hours actually). What has happened is a true testament to the power of the community and the commitment to keep this thing not only alive but strong. To build and grow and connect in new and greater ways. You all kick some serious ass.

I should also take a moment to mention the large number of “unknowns” out there. It seemed like every 15-30 minutes we’d throw out a name of a recent donor to see if anyone knew who they were. I expected the DS106 community to step up (and they went above and beyond), but I never could have imagined that strangers who believe in what we’re doing would come forward to give generously.

Before we began this I was excited to see what was going to happen, to analyze to death the stats, the momentum, the psychology of donors, all of it. Perhaps it’s a bit tacky to talk about this stuff before it’s over, but I think the last 24 hours represents a pivotal moment for the campaign so I wanted to break out some of those stats while they’re fresh.

When Jim and I began brainstorming reward tiers and how to price things we planned on a graph that would look very much like the one above. The t-shirt was going to be the most popular item and although we originally had the calendar at $25 and the shirt at $50 we decided to swap those two. Because of that I assumed we’d have a high number of t-shirt orders, but lower numbers of the higher tiers. What did throw me off was how strong the $50 and $100 tiers are. We were conservative in our estimates but you all have blown those away. At the moment the average donation is $48.78

Social media has played a huge role in the momentum of this campaign. $2,421 of the total given so far was backed as a result of people who came from Twitter alone, making up a little over 40% of donations pledged. Facebook, Google Plus, and a few blogs made much smaller marks with 1-3 donations each. Another notable driver appears to be the Chronicle article, which has brought 18 donations making up 10% of the total money earned. Press never hurts in a Kickstarter campaign but I had more expected folks from the Chronicle article to tell others rather than directly donate.

So where do we go from here? We have 16 days remaining on our Kickstarter campaign. In hindsight we may have made that length too long (or maybe our goal was too small?) but at the time it made sense to give folks on a biweekly pay schedule some time to come up with money for a donation. Jim and I have talked a bit about what we could do if the campaign continues to bring in new donations. At the time of this writing we’re already almost $2,000 over our initial goal so some of those dreams will become realities.

The DS106 Radio server is just one opportunity. That has been funded in part from the telethon we held last fall, but I have no doubt Grant Potter may be footing much of that project still. It will be great to give him the money to run it for the next year, and maybe build on it with some new and interesting developments. Imagine if we hired someone to develop iOS and Android apps to broadcast directly to DS106radio bypassing any need to put settings in. iOS users comfortable in Papaya are used to this, but Android users are still left a bit in the dark and for both sets of users there is a long list of settings to get that going. Just one possibility.

Heck, speaking of mobile apps what about a mobile app for DS106? What would that look like? Could we develop a fluid way to view digital storytelling work that feels like Flipboard?

Another area of DS106 that sorely needs attention is the whole process of signing up and getting fed into the site. We use FeedWordpress and Buddypress in conjunction to build that community architecture, but the two don’t play together and setting it up is a manual process that we could pay a developer to make more seamless. And of course those kinds of things benefit not just DS106 but the larger open online community of learners because we can open source those changes and help build a better framework for running these types of courses.

I know Jim has a lot of amazing ideas for what’s possible and will likely blog about them soon, but all this is to say to those that have given “You guys are amazing, incredible, generous, and kind people” and for those still deciding if it’s necessary “Yes, we can use you to do some incredible stuff in the next year. Your donation would not be a waste.” The last 24 hours has been a wild ride and I’m blessed beyond belief to get to play along with you all. Thank you thank you thank you. Let’s keep making art and magic.

Redefining the Connection between Educational Courses and Community

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Tim

A few weeks ago over lunch Jim Groom mentioned to me that Zach Davis had moved DS106 to its own server space. On at least three occasions in the past semester it had capped bandwidth usage and it was often having fits of its own being in a shared hosting environment with the rest of Jim’s smaller sites. It was time for DS106 to graduate to a dedicated server, and Zach Davis did an amazing job of making that transition to a cloud-based server seamless. Unfortunately it came with a cost of almost $3,000. For anyone that runs their own server it’s probably right in line with a normal hosting cost for something as big as DS106 has gotten (it comes out to around $250/month). But it was certainly a cost that Jim wasn’t going to be able to bear on his own. Reaching out to certain departments and resources within UMW was one option, but funding is tight and we’re all lucky to have jobs with benefits. $3,000 for a single course website could have been a tough sell for an administrator. I had another idea, and it’s never been done before.

I’ve always wanted to do a Kickstarter project as I’ve watched that space grow in the past year or two. Their focus on music, art, design, and technology limits the avenues that I or we as a group could participate. But I wondered if perhaps this wasn’t the perfect test of the model: a crowd-funded course community of digital storytellers. Certainly we all played a part of building what DS106 has become. Could we all play a small part towards the success of something greater. I’m stoked to find out. Our Kickstarter page is live as of this morning and it’s the result of much preparation and planning. A balance between covering the costs for DS106 for the next year and also printing and making some great things to ship out to people in the process we’ve set out a goal of $4,200. We were honored to have Giulia Forsythe make some amazing artwork for the limited edition t-shirt, which I already think will be the most popular item. But I also think we’ve approached some of the rewards in a creative way where it might entice folks to think about carving out their own space on the web. It’s going to be fun to watch it progress.

We’ve got 18 days to raise the funds. If we don’t meet the goal by the deadline we’ve set (April 16th) no one will owe us anything and we’ll try something different. If we go above and beyond the initial funding we will be able to do some really incredible things by paying for development of the code that powers DS106 and the WordPress framework that feeds everything in. In reality you’re not just contributing to DS106, you’re playing a part in building an alternative model for open online communities and courses that can and will extend far beyond what we’ve done thus far. To say that the office has been abuzz as of late is a bit of an understatement. We’re excited to finally get this off the ground and give people an opportunity to join together towards this common goal. Now quit reading my blog and go grab your reward. Let’s make art…and history.

Photoshop CS6 Beta

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Tim

Yesterday Adobe released a beta version of the next generation of Photoshop, their image editing tool (that is quickly becoming a lot more). I downloaded it because I actually don’t have a full copy of Photoshop on my work computer and it’s great to have a free version that works as a trial. Even if you downloaded Photoshop as a trial previously the beta will work (they haven’t announced how long the trial will work but we can assume probably at least as long as normal trials, 30 days). Adobe put out a great video with a handful of the new features and if you can get past the guys odd personality there’s some great stuff here.

Some of my favorite features shown off in the video:

Content-Aware Move Tool

This is the real mind-bending one. Draw a selection around an object and move it and you no longer get a white background where the object used to be. It will use the surrounding content to automatically fill in the area that it used to be. It looks futuristic and it’s awesome!

Enhanced Video Editing

iMovie has always been my preferred video-editing tool but Windows users are usually left to poor tools unless they pay. Obviously Photoshop isn’t free but if you grab this beta you’ll be getting a much better video editing tool. It can split clips, add transitions, audio layers, and you can even use text and image layers and manipulate them in the video just as you would with a still image (something that even iMovie doesn’t offer). It’s no replacement for a full-featured video editing solution like Premier or Final Cut but as an additional feature of a great image editor it’s awesome.

Speed and Performance

After just a half-hour of playing with it I can already tell they’ve squashed a bunch of bugs and really streamlined performance of the software. It’s fast, fairly stable for a beta, and doesn’t have that legacy bloated software feeling that previous versions of Photoshop have had. On newer computers it will take advantage of the extra horsepower your CPU and video card are packing.

For DS106 folks who are struggling to find good tools this would be a great (albeit somewhat temporary) solution to play around with a full-featured product. There are no limitations in the trial other than the fact that at some point the trial will expire (likely when the software goes on sale).

Just stop with the QR Codes

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Tim


Photo credit: Scott Blake

Look, I know this sort of “feels” like cool new technology and you want to believe that it might have applications for everything from your conference program and website to your 3rd grade classroom. But stop. Please. You’re trying to turn a barcode into a revolution and it’s just really confusing. It’s not just that normal folks not into the tech scene like you or I don’t get QR codes (they really don’t, nor do they need to), it’s that by taking this thing you’ve found and trying to mold it into some applicable use for your classroom you’re putting the cart before the horse and forgetting what you’re trying to accomplish.

Someone asked me the other day if it made sense to put a QR code on a rotating PowerPoint presentation that plays before a lecture. To their credit they didn’t really even know why they were asking the question, only that they thought they should (see a problem here?). Let’s look at the actual scenario of what will happen in this case:

  1. QR Code appears on PowerPoint slide. We can assume it probably links to a website.
  2. The slide probably has some information about what the user should do. “Scan this with your iPhone or Android to ‘Like’ us on Facebook”.
  3. The user pulls out their phone. If their quick they manage to open the camera application and snap a photo.
  4. Waiting…
  5. “Did it work for you Ethel? I don’t think I did this right. Oh I need an app? I can download one.”
  6. Open App Store
  7. Search QR Codes
  8. Click to download 1st app listed on search
  9. Enter Apple account password
  10. Wait for download…
  11. Open app
  12. Tap “scan”
  13. Look up and realize the slide is not on the screen
  14. Wait…
  15. Slide appears again. Scan
  16. Browser appears and opens up www.whatever.com
  17. Success?

People, this is madness. Can we please stop assuming this makes any sense for anyone? Search has come a long way and it’s built into both browsers and many sites. If I need to find you on Facebook all I need is your name, not a link. If I need to find your website it’s probably quicker to search for it than type it in, but both are still quicker than what we just accomplished above. Let’s stop pretending QR Codes are worth the time and effort and move on to something that has real value. As a bonus I now have a new favorite Tumblr blog.

Update: I take it back, I have a new favorite Tumblr.

3D Printing on Campus

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Tim

Got news today that an article George Meadows had been interviewed for about our 3D Printing initiative is online at Campus Technology. I thought it was really well written and I love the way we’re approaching this new technology as a form of empowerment for students. It is really transformative to see students recognize the power and shift that 3D printing provides, and we’re just getting started.

The fascination instructors have with the MakerBot recalls an era when humans did more for themselves, muses Meadows. “Like we used to do with our cars. You’d go in and take things apart and fix things. With computerization it’s difficult to do that. Now we’re getting back to the idea of making something, building something, testing it, fiddling around with it, and rebuilding it. It goes back to that hands-on DIY ethic.”

The article also reminded me that although I’ve talked a bit about the Makerbot here before it might not be readily apparent just how much time I’ve spent lately getting these things working and doing some incredible stuff with it. I decided rather than clog the tubes here with it all I’d start a blog over on UMW Blogs to detail some of that so if you’re really interested in what we’re doing make sure to follow our progress there!

A domain of one’s own: rebooted.

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Tim

UMW and in particular the folks at DTLT have a long history of talking up the idea of “a domain of one’s own” which basically is the philosophy that there is great power in putting responsibility for getting a domain space and in some ways becoming a sysadmin of webspace in the student’s hands. It’s a philosophy that we’ve put in to action semester after semester at ds106 and Martha continues in her digital identity course this semester. UMW Blogs provides a powerful first step in giving faculty, staff and students the power to publish to the web with ease, but the limitations of running just WordPress, a specific subset of themes and plugins, makes the space…well limited. A student can buy a domain name and map it to UMW Blogs but ultimately when they leave UMW they’re going to have to buy web hosting elsewhere and migrate all that data off. WordPress doesn’t make this terribly difficult, but what if there was a better way?

It’s funny how life repeats itself. After a powerful conversation over lunch today with my coworkers I started doing some research about where we’ve come and came across Jim’s post all the way back in 2008 of the same title which details a vision for which the energy is now renewed. Technology, products, and services are sufficiently advanced to realize this dream once and for all, and it’s time for UMW to make waves by becoming what might be the first university to issue domains to students upon enrollment. Now I’m not talking something like umw.edu/student/~whatever, I’m talking about the possibility of creating a system whereby students receive a gift card to Hover or some similar domain registrar where they get to claim what will be their space and then we provide the hosting completely free of charge for them to start building their digital identity online.

Sound like an IT nightmare? It’s easier than you think. After talking about the idea of a hosting plan that could support multiple users with a few others in my network we came upon MediaTemple’s DV servers which offer the ability to not only host regular domains and provide space/bandwidth/etc but they can also be setup as a reseller that can offer domains their own control panel and segregated space. After talking about this for a few days we jumped the gun and went for it and Hippie Hosting was born. For me to be able to setup a site that can accept orders for hosting that automatically creates a webspace with control panel and all the bells and whistles of popular hosting provides….well that’s incredible! I’m not even some IT sysadmin guru. I’m learning a lot already but this is something the university could easily provide. I’m sure we could find a domain registrar who would love to partner with us on it and maybe Media Temple would get in on the action as well. It would be incredibly powerful.

And I see this going beyond simple web hosting. As Jim implies in his blog post and what has become even more apparent over the past few years at UMW is that providing students the path to create a digital identity and space online has huge academic implications that are much more far reaching than simply a place to put your files. This is exactly the discussion that people are having about the idea of “e-portfolios” redefined for the modern web. UMW can lead the way by providing students free of charge the ability to create their online identity and space, guide them through the process, support them every step of the way, and build it directly into the academic discipline of the curriculum taught here. This is an idea that has far-reaching implications and its time has arrived.

For now if you’re interested in being a part of the process and you’re looking to stop supporting companies that suck, you can join our small band of merry misfits at Hippie Hosting. I’m waiving all fees and overriding all invoices when you sign up so we can get plenty of people involved and figure out a reasonable amount of money to keep it alive. Perhaps a pricing scheme could be worked out where people pay what they can and are willing to. How’s that for a different kind of hosting provider? I’m excited for the possibilities this provides for UMW, DTLT, and beyond!

Educon and Bridging Communities

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Tim

This weekend I have the pleasure of heading up north towards Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to visit the Science Leadership Academy and be inspired by the many folks I follow and converse with on Twitter. It’s my first year at Educon and I love their philosophy of focusing on “Conversations” rather than traditional sessions that have a tendency to take the form of standard lectures. Mostly I love it because it means instead of preparing weeks in advance I get to ask you for help and input.

Educon is heavily focused in K-12 which is interesting because while I don’t work in K-12 I’ve always had a vested interest in it both because of my work with VSTE as well as the connection from my wife who teaches Kindergarten. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with plenty of great folks doing work in the public K-12 school system. Folks like Tom Woodward, Frank Fitzpatrick, Tim Stahmer, Ben Rimes, and surely many many more I’m forgetting. I strongly believe that for folks like me that want to see higher education succeed and grow, we’ve got to continue to collaborate with fellow educators in K-12. Often that relationship has been tenuous and forced.

This year I’ll be speaking at a session conversation along with Tim Stahmer, Martha Burtis, Tom Woodward, and Jeff McClurken entitled Building Bridges – Communities of Practice from K-16 where we hope to talk about these relationships between the two sectors and how we build them. And here’s where I’d love to have you involved.

We want to bring in voices from our personal network and beyond. To that end if you have a few moments I’d love for you to head over to this Google Doc and add your experiences having collaborated across these sectors. We welcome both positive and negative contributions recognizing that it’s a little of both (probably with a bias towards the negative). We will use information in this Google Doc to guide the conversation on Saturday. If you’re coming to Educon I look forward to meeting you, if not I hope you’ll participate and be engaged through these online lenses.

Can I get that unicorn in another color?

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Tim

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnlpnsk/235597944/

I’m truly honestly sick of the town mob grabbing their pitchforks as soon as anyone holds a press conference for any new educational offering. Is there a more thankless job than the people who dare to try to change any aspect of education? Mozilla got shit on for taking a hard look at our outdated idea of credentials. Apple is even worse because if you’re not with the hate mob you’re a fanboy that hates freedom and “openness”. What is it about educators in that we ask our students to think critically but then we’re absolutely justified to voice our uninformed opinion half way through a keynote announcement of a product?

Today Apple announced a few things specific to Education and textbook publishing in particular (although the tools have a broader reach to interactive texts of any genre). We have a new pricing model that drops the barrier of cost for textbooks to $15 (compare that with the ~$60/semester I priced when the iPad came out and I looked into digital textbooks, not to mention those would expire). We have updated books that include interactive elements that few publishers outside of PushPopPress have been capable of producing. And we have a new authoring tool that allows you to create these interactive books. It removes yet another barrier of self-publishing by giving any person the power to create visually stunning books and publish them to the iBooks store. It has the potential to do for indie writers what the App Store did for independent developers.

But there wasn’t all gold in today’s announcement and I don’t mean to write it in rose-colored glasses. The iBooks marketplace remains iOS-only and these new textbooks would be no different. The authoring tool is only available on the Mac. Export formats are limited to iBook, PDF, or TXT, no sign of ePub and no way to import a Pages or ePub document into the authoring tool. It appears right now there is language in the EULA that indicates all books built in iBook Author and sold in the iBookstore must be exclusive to that marketplace. I’m sure I’m missing many other criticisms but you get the idea.

And here’s the thing: I’m not discounting these arguments. Do I want these books to have HTML5 publishing capabilities? Hell yes. Do I want to be able to grab an ePub version of any of these $15 textbooks for my various devices? Of course. Is that EULA language bullshit? Absolutely. I want it all to change. But am I disappointed in what I heard today? Nope, not even a little bit.

With every new product announcement by Apple we here the chorus of people that wanted “Revolution”. They read the rumors and came expecting the multicolor unicorns to fly in from the rafters pooping gold coins. Turns out the unicorns are limited to a few colors and pooping currency may or may not be coming in a later update. And they’re all pissed. How dare you attempt to change the status quo without consulting us first? $15?! We want it all for free. You mean these won’t load on the $75 Lookreader I got on sale at CVS? Greedy pigs!

When the iPhone first launched (and it strikes me this post is very Apple specific but hey, it’s Soup du Jour. Insert any company doing anything to disrupt education) many people were highly critical of it. No MMS, crappy camera with no flash or autofocus, no ability to run flash, no Bluetooth stereo audio headphone support (yes people are actually very specific about these things), no support for Exchange, no ability to publish native apps, etc. It was a laundry list of reasons why this phone would fail. Over the years Apple has checked off a ton of things on that list (every single one I mentioned there and that’s just a small sampling). But let’s take native apps for example. When Apple launched the phone they told people they believed in the power of the web and HTML would bring enhancements to make amazing web apps. They even made a few impressive ones themselves to get folks started. Awesome, right? They were crucified. You’re locking us out of native app development because you want to control your device! You have access to things like the camera and GPS that we can’t get! This isn’t fair! So they build an SDK and the ability for developers to create and publish applications. And now the token line is that they’re creating a walled garden ecosystem that you can only be a part of by developing for iOS and dammit this unicorn still doesn’t come in my favorite color, which is brown.

I’m not saying don’t fight for what you believe in. I’m not even saying you’re wrong. What I’m asking you to do is to look at these things not as a zero sum game, but rather as parts of a whole. Instead of expecting Apple to save education, why don’t you appreciate the waves they’re making in the water and use that momentum to keep the conversation focused and moving? We got a lot of interesting things today and all I hear are people unhappy. When we set the ship on fire before it has even made it out of the dock we’ll never get to sail..I don’t know where this metaphor is going but thanks for reading.

The Walking TED

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Tim

I’ve got a little “zombie fever” with season 2 of The Walking Dead having started up last fall. If you haven’t watched that show you’re really missing out on some excellent quality programming for a channel that’s available to most cable packages. I decided to give my Fantasy TED Talk a go with a rather young zombie teaching about effective diet balancing. The young undead are our future innovators in this space! Thanks once again to Ben Rimes for not only creating this awesome assignment but providing the perfect Photoshop template to get folks started!

Building The Daily Create

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Tim

Last year a lot of us in the ds106 group were shocked when we found out the Daily Shoot website would be taken down by the end of the year. Unfortunately the developers of the site were moving on to other things and didn’t feel it would be worthwhile to release any of the code for others to build on. What a waste. I don’t want to go on a rant here but I can find no reason for a developer who has no plans on ever updating a line of code again to let a popular website die on the vine like that, and then to stubbornly claim that the code is worthless to anyone else and therefore would not be released. I had great respect for the developers of that site, and then I watched them kill that community that was built around their site and they lost that respect from me. But that’s another blog post for another time perhaps. This is about something new.

Last semester when the Daily Shoot closed its doors a few of us talked for a bit on Twitter about how we needed to build our own clone. Obviously we have plenty of people in the WordPress community with the chops to make it happen. And the great thing is we wouldn’t be restricted to photography, it could house multiple disciplines. We talked and ruminated but nothing really came of it until early this year when I started talking in earnest with . He had seen how I was pulling in Twitter posts to DS106 via the hashtag using FeedWordpress and combination of restricted tag searches and started thinking this would be a good method to pull in info for the daily create. As happens most of the time all I need is permission to run with an idea and I’ll do it, and so I started working.

I initially thought I’d do a lot with FeedWordpress for this, grabbing RSS feeds from the various third-party sites like Flickr, YouTube, and SoundCloud. I had also played around briefly with IFTTT (If This, Then That) which is an incredible site that makes it easy to hook up channels that apply actions to certain triggers like posting a photo to website when you favorite it on Flickr. But it turns out IFTTT was too restrictive and I had issues with pulling in RSS feeds with FeedWordpress and getting all that content to look proper. And then I realized I was making things too difficult.

I’m not a programmer, I’m more of a “hack away at something and make it work” type of guy. In the end The Daily Create is very simple in how it works. I’ll break it down here for anyone else that wants to build a similar site, as I’m sure the idea of pulling in visual and audio content based on tags has a lot of potential for a lot of people. Here’s the nuts and bolts that make it work.

The Homepage


The homepage is a WordPress loop that is restricted to a certain category called “TDC Assignments” and only displays 1 post along with a link to the previous post underneath. The rest of the homepage is static content blocks describing what the project is about. We have schedule these assignments to automatically post each day at 10AM EST. When the new one is posted, the old one becomes the previous link and Twitter Tools fires off a tweet to the TDC Twitter account. Basically it’s all automated and makes it look like there’s someone behind the scenes doing a lot of work.

Photography


For photography assignments we’re restricting people to using Flickr. I’m perfectly OK with this because we’re not programmers and Flickr is extremely simple for people to use. We use a plugin called Awesome Flickr Gallery and despite the hyperbole it lives up to its name. You can create multiple galleries, restrict them to a specific tag, and control how they display. Each assignment gets its own gallery which gets put into the post as a shortcode. The only edit we made to the plugin was Alan figured out how to link back to the original Flickr photo so folks could go there to comment. The feed for this pulls in very quickly, with the longest I’ve seen taking no more than 15 minutes and many times photos showing up instantly.

Audio


For audio we decided to use SoundCloud which I have a love/hate relationship with. They’ve built a great social network around sharing audio and they’ve got a dead simple widget for groups that we’re using on The Daily Create. We create a group, anyone can upload an audio file and add it to that group, and the widget automatically puts them in the playlist. If you play audio on the Daily Create site it will automatically move to each new file when the previous is finished. What I hate about it is SoundCloud is very restrictive with free accounts and very expensive for paid features. Free users only get 120 minutes of audio total and can only create 1 group. This means I have to find folks to create these groups for each assignment. Ultimately it may not be sustainable but for now we’re using it and it works really well.

Video


For video YouTube was an obvious choice since so many people already use it and I just needed to find the best way to visualize a tag. The answer to that was TubePress with allows you to build shortcodes with TONS of options. Each video comes in as a thumbnail that uses Lightbox to display the video in an overlay. It looks and works perfect with the only exception being that YouTube apparently has incredibly long and random delays on their tag search. Not only is it not immediate, there were times that users videos took 14 hours to show up on the site. The annoying this is this part of the process is completely out of my control. I experimented with Vimeo to see if that would be a better option because TubePress supports it, but Vimeo had similarly long delays. We’ll work through the long delays because ultimately the site is archiving these posts and keeping them available anyway, so if it takes awhile to feed in that’s not the end of the world for now.

Submissions

The last piece of the pie was allowing folks to submit suggestions for new assignments. Normally people would probably go to a Google Form for something like this, but we’ve already found a better solution which we currently use on the DS106 Assignments Site. We use a plugin called Gravity Forms which I’ve raved about before here that allows us to create a form whose submission automatically creates a new post in draft. The user assigns it a category. All we have to do is decide when it should be published, add the widget/shortcode for visualizing it, and give it a tag. The more submissions we get the more posts will be scheduled in advance and there’s very little turnaround work for us. It’s yet another amazing way we’ve taken advantage of Gravity Forms. Obviously if someone didn’t want to invest in that plugin and wanted to do this on the cheap Google Forms would be a decent alternative and just require you to manually copy and paste the submission into a new form.

After a lot of testing this past week and a fun weekend of people participating in telling jokes to each other, the site is now live and rolled back to Assignment #1 for today. I’m excited about TDC as a way for daily creative prompts to allow us all to quickly find some inspiration in the world and work with it. I hope you’ll consider joining us (no registration involved, just read the assignment, complete it, and tag it) and maybe consider submitting a few ideas for future assignments that people could complete.