Newspaper Blackout Poetry

The educators I follow on twitter have seemingly endless bounds of creativity.  Their incredible work has inspired me to participate, at least briefly in @jimgroom‘s #ds106.

First there was the remix of Gardner Campbell’s Bag of Gold, then it was amazing digital story telling: Until that Moment, and now, #ds106 radio. All have been really inspiring and fun. I should note that if you mapped as a venn diagram, it would look something like this:

While I am not following the course linearly, I found a section called assignments and have cherry-picked an assignment that I could do quickly and would be fun. I opted for a visual assignment, since I am still experimenting with visual notetaking using the iPad and SketchBook Pro. I really like the rough-edgy nature of Tim Owens‘ Assignment 11: Newspaper Blackout Poetry: “Grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news.”

I decided to use the term “newspaper” liberally and use the Google Reader #ds106 feed in Flipboard instead. I took a screen capture of that page, imported it into SketchbookPro on the iPad and scribbled away. It was fun.

So, thank you, Jim Groom and Grant Potter and all those who have contributed to ds106 radio that have gotten me blogging again. I feel like I just found a bag of gold.