Week 1

BerkeleyX (23.1.2014, 5 weeks)

ColWri2.2x Principles of Written English

Week 1 additional Homework

Choose three new words that you discovered doing this week's assignments and create one sentence for each. Be creative. Post them in the discussion area in this unit. 

New adds to my vocabulary:

a dandelion 

Lilypads

scathing

minted purer silver and gold coins

coinage

to be ascertainable by assay

I chose to write a short text, where I could have some fun  merging in the new words and expressions. Such a pleasant activity while I enjoyed  a coffee and the fact that the weekend just had started. 

To write a text and not just separated sentences forced me to look up more words, at least to ensure myself that the words in my mind actually existed in the real world. Being a Dane living in Brussels I mix up the languages and often I create my own expressions. 

This has been a fun activity and I look forward to the second week of the course. 

Story

The glimmering sunlight penetrated the water surface  and hit the sunken treasure. It made it  look like the coins emitted a golden light. A light that reminded him of the dandelions in the fields next to his grandpa's house. Ooh that well known feeling spread as waves throughout his body. Grandpa's fields.  It must have been in another life time. In another world. Light years away from his life as a gold smith. The kings specialist in minting coins. 

The silver coated fish were playing or hunting (he was not the one to tell) among the stems of the lily pads. Their bodies too were flashing bright glimpses in this almost supernatural underwater light. He had enjoyed the ride. He had liked the purity and accuratesse  in the work with the metals. He gained high leveled skills in both the production and in the processes of assay. Small bubbles of his last breath escaped from his ironic smile as he reminded himself that it was that very thoroughness that brought him here. His scathing critic of the deception in the use of alloys for the coinage had brought him into the deep water. Literally. 

Another media to check out: oil painting

I have started to play around with oil paint. This is so much fun. 

Thursday last week I went to my first art class. It was an IRL or OFFLINE class in the evening in an old beautiful house near Montgomery in Bruxelles. 
No MOOC thing. Just 10 students :)

We had to practice color blending by making a copy of a "real" picture. We were given red, yellow , blue and white acrylic paint. 

I found it a little hard as I prefer more colorful pictures and the one I was given was very soft and pale. Anyway. After two hours we were told to stop and this was the result:

As you can see the course is not a waste of money. There's plenty of room for improvement :)

Of course I couldn't help it. Had to use it with a gif: 

The unicorn is from http://www.animateit.net/data/media/27/unicorn-running.gif

We were told to buy our own paint for the rest of the course, and our teacher advised me to buy oil paint. So I did.

Yesterday afternoon I began a new painting. Colorful. Painted wet in wet. Still not finished.

It´s incredible how the painting shapes and grow out oft the colors in a way I didn´t predict. 

I´m used to work on the computer, where I control every step of the picture. If anything goes wrong you always have the undo button. In the wet oil I had to deal with all my errors in another way, so I was certainly not in control in the same way.

And when I stand back, look at it and thinks " Wauw, I did this". 

It´s fantastic to have this feeling in an age of 47 :)

CIC week 1. My life ring

Assignment:

Draw your Life Ring. You can use the template above, or create your own template. Focus on roughly 5-9 major life arenas where you will invest your time, with self, family, work, and community (SFWC). Put your “master in the middle”; this is the primary driving force behind all your decisions – and in every life, there can only be one master. If you try to have more than one master, eventually your Life will intersect events so that you have an “identity quake”, and must choose your primary master. Under each arena bubble, list those most important habits that you will commit to each day or each week.

Here is my life ring. I chose to make it as a Thinglink image, where the sub points shows up, when you click the "touch" mark. I prefer this sort of "more clean" image.

VideoNot.es

During my holiday I attended the first Scandinavian Google Summit in Copenhagen. One of the new tips I could bring back home, was the VideoNot.es.

As the name indicates, it's a tool to take notes synchronized with videos. And the best part is, that besides functioning with Youtube and Vimeo, it's designed to work with the four big MOOC platforms Coursera, edX, Khan and Udacity.

VideoNot.es connects to your Google drive, and it gives you the same possibilities for sharing and collaboration.

Have a look at this 3 minutes tutorial.

L3 number 5

L3 number 4

L3 number 3