A Netvibes page for our Remix Culture course is in progress – obviously there aren’t many blog posts or Diigo links yet, but these things will feed in as we go. There’s a “wall” thing where you can leave comments – feel free to leave suggestions for us there!

In today’s class we’re going to do this:

• I’ll give a tour of how to use Diigo, and show how the Netvibes page works
• We’ll look at examples of remixes students have brought to class
• We’ll brainstorm ideas for projects: what are students interested in?
• I’ll demonstrate how the database for gathering research and other articles works. Here’s the form where you enter data, and here’s the spreadsheet that generates.
• We’ll talk about the schedule ahead and tasks that’ll be due in the next few weeks – we’re going to the library on Tuesday, to get ready for gathering our sources, and we’ll be starting work on our videos as well.

I’m using Google Docs for the database. It’s really easy to create a form that feeds data into a spreadsheet – I’m not sure how to make the data in the spreadsheet more easily readable though – if you know, please tell me! Here’s the form (I like that you can even embed it in a blog!)

This way of collaboratively creating a reading list is lifted from Mike Wesch, of course, although he made the database in Zoho Creator (which I didn’t like when I tried it) and a member of the research team somehow generated a slick presentation of it.

I really hope it all works out and that students are completely overloaded by all this stuff at the start of the semester. I’ve actually given them nearly twice as much time as Mike Wesch gave his students, and I’ve estimated time use so there shouldn’t be more than the 17 hours a week they’re supposed to be spending on the course – and it will be so awesome to have a good solid grounding for the rest of the course!

Update after class: Spent 40 minutes on Diigo! I think we needed it, but it meant we had too little time for examples and brainstorming. Examples shown included a very long collaborative image, a remixed interview that went viral and spawned other remixes, I like turtles, a Markov chain text remix, and a remix of Clinton’s “I never had sex with that woman” that Sissel had made for a drama group performance.