In week 3 of the #TeachtheWeb MOOC, we were asked to find someone to collaborate with and create something together. The theme for the week was the open web and that was the inspiration for our collaborative work.
I loved the guiding blog post that was written for this week because it succinctly and accessibly covered some of the most important issues around openness: decentralization, transparency, hacakability, ownership/authorship, collaboration and remixed derivations. Although many of these topics were ones that I had examined and discussed in both #ETMOOC and the #MediaLabCourse (openness seems to be a MOOC hot-topic!) I appreciated the focus on webmaking and looking at openness through the lenses of “technical implementation as well as the social and cultural usage of the Web.”
After Kevin posted in the G+ group asking if anyone wanted to create a comic, I join him and two other collaborators, Chad and Hayfa, in using a new tool (Bitstrips) to make something together. We slowly worked out the technical details and each took turns adding one frame of the comic and then Kevin added some closing frames (he wrote more about it here). I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn and test out a new tool. Bitstrips was pretty intuitive in terms of comic-creation (maybe a little less so in terms of collaboration) and I appreciated how many options were available to create life-like avatars and manipulate their movements.
The theme of our comic was a play on hacking the web and somewhere along the way, we also started a train metaphor. It was fun to be part of a co-created product and exciting to wait and see what the next person would add and find out how the story/comic ended. I think the project would have had a different feel if it had involved real-time collaboration but I appreciated the suspense of this approach and opportunity for us each to leave a mark individually while still being part of a larger whole. You can check out our final product below:
Next, Kevin actually created a remix of our collaborative comic. I love the idea of being able to continue building, layer upon layer, on a collaborative project. This allows each of us to learn from each other and spark innovative design/creation ideas that we might not have come up with on our own. It also reminds me of a collaborative Google Presentation that came out of #ETMOOC where people added slides about connected learning. As more and more people joined in, the slides began to get more complex and detailed as people inspired one another and led participants to realize new ways of using the tools and expressing ideas.
During the #TeachTheWeb Twitter chat this week, we talked about how transparency can motivate others to innovate and make/create. The transparency that’s possible in a shared Google Presentation, where you can see others working in real-time openly making changes and letting their work and inspiration be seen, is really motivating. This same transparency in code – the ability to use the X-Ray Goggles or other tools to see how someone created a website, has pushed me to experiment and try new tags and edits to make new web creations.
Although we didn’t have as much transparency in the making of our comic, we did have another vital component that we also discussed during the Twitter chat – a willingness to try and to fail. Without necessarily knowing the tool, the collaborators, the end-goal or product, we all responded to Kevin and said, “I want to try.” This mentality of openness goes a long way in helping to create open products and build an open web and also encourage others to join you or remix your work to make more open creations. So in the spirit of being inspired by others’ openness and an interest to continue our momentum, here’s my remix of Kevin’s remix of our collaboratively created Hack the Web Comic!
Margaret A. Powers 
You must be logged in to post a comment.