I made it though week one, ‘YEY ME!’. Doing this course kinda makes me feel like I’m back in high school or college rather, only this time around, there’s no lecturer to guide me through things, just a set of instructions and a great ds106 community to help me figure my way through things. I have to say, Unit 1 feels like the first day of school after a long semester break, everyone is still in holiday mode so they don’t hit you with too much work. They nicely ease you into the program and I like that.
The week has gone by fast but it has been memorable. The videos are unbelievably helpful. For someone who isn’t social media savvy and new to most of this stuff, the boot camp videos are super insightful. The initial video by Neil Gaiman is by far best motivational speech I’ve ever listened to. Not only does he tell it like it is but he does it artistically and humorously but he makes it memorable. People rarely encourage you to make mistakes and beautiful ones for that matter and above all to learn from them. And I guess in some weird yet obviously possible way, all the videos in my opinion bring out the same message which is to make mistakes and that mistakes make good art as they are raw and show creativity, ” Disruptive Wonder” as it was eloquently put by Kelli Anderson. Matter of fact, my first daily create was a beautiful disaster I feel, I had no idea what I was doing but I had a daily create to make and I remember in the advice from previous students page, and the student said, “when you get one idea just, just run with it no matter how crazy it seems”.
My First Daily Create
My favourite answer to the question what is art came from the ‘Good Mythical Mornings’ video and they defined art as “Something that has purpose and is intentional and it sparks some kind of response or a reaction”. That definition got me thinking of when I took a sculpture class back in 2006 and our trips to museums in Chicago. Every sculpture has a story or thought behind it and most if not all us had some kind of reaction to every art piece we saw.
All in all, its been an insightful first week. Unit 2 here I come.
Cheers!
chixie89 
We are excited to see you moving through ds106 and participating in the ds106. It looks like you are following the Open Course at http://ds106.us/open-course which is a fine thing to do.
I am running a slightly different version starting Monday based on a genre of stories from the Western genre (cowboys and such, not just American, but also Europe, Mexico, etc- a perspective from your place in the world will be awesome). You are welcome to jump in there too, and you are already ahead of the game by doing bootcamp. This course info will be at http://106tricks.net
If you want to be part of #western106, let me know via twitter (@cogdog) and I can tag your posts to be part of the gang at http://ds106.us/tag/western106
But again, you are more than welcome to keep moving through the course you are on, just keep tweeting.
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Hey, sorry my response is a little late, was having trouble accessing WordPress on my phone over the weekend. I am interested in joining the course but mostly for learning purposes because we don’t have those kinds of stories in my part of the world, so I mostly follow them in movies.
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