Apparently A Man Without A Map for #Western106

By Man With No Course Posted in - Western 106 Dispatches on January 8th, 2016 0 Comments

There shure is plenty of whooping it up out there in the riding pen, with all these folks coming in with all shiny intentions of doing Western106 with this outfit.

Lots of that action is with the Daily Creates, where these riders are doing all kinds of tricks. Like that wild Groom Kid (“Jimmy The Groom”?) he takes a simple challenge and turns it into a full on rodeo horse show.

That is a darn good thing.

But here I am in the ranch office looking at what is built up and mebbe ready for this here course to start moving Monday, and it looks not much more than what was left after the fire in Tombstone

Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Image

But don’t be thinking I’m in here worried with my knees a knocking. I’ve run this route plenty of times, in different terrains.

Lots of the folk coming in have done some or a lot of DS10 before. I’m a counting on them to help me with some ideas. You see I could go back to the map of the Open DS106 and put some Western flair on it. And I will leverage that as a general structure (much of what you see in the Syllabust is from that).

And we are sticking to a schedule that parallels the one for the gang of students Paul The Bond is running from the UMW Ranch way out East. That makes for good timing. Paul’s got some other kind of self-building approach I’m not too sure I can figure out. And am not sure how that will play differently in an open course where not everyone is on the grade chuck wagon.

Much of the structure, assignments, etc comes form the more usual ways of doin’ DS106 – two weeks of learnin’ stuff in camp, then riding out with visual (the photo safari), listenin’ to audio, some looking for design in the world, radio shows, etc.
What will be new, ‘specially for yours truly, is interjecting exploration of the genre of Westerns. To me, I’d like to start pretty traditional, the cowboy US Westerns, John Ford, John Wayne, Lone Ranger, Bonanza, etc, and then move out to Spaghetti Westerns, outlaws, and ultintely probing issues of women and peoples of color in the westerns, and even to modern stories that are westerns.
SO there will be some readings and maybe some videos to be a’ watching. I can handle some ideas (hint).
Another ideer that has been swimming in my noggin, is maybe we do some collaboration to build out our own reference guide to the genre. I started out with posting to the sheriff’s office wall a document with categories and things under it. Heck it is open so any fool can scribble on it (I am Fool #1). But that document is already unwieldy. I had some wild thoughts to gettin; folks to work together with that github gizmo, but I could just as well set up a series of documents in a Google Drive box anyone can edit.
Paul has done this thing asking his students to do blog posts where they cite “Best of DS106” work from others in their class. It’s a way to shine some light on what your pardners are doing out on the trail. In the first years we used the DS106 inspire for this, but I like how Paul has done it by having students do it as posts in their own blgos, with a tag.
I also like the things Paul has done over the waves of air on DS106Radio with “tweet alongs” of radio shows. Maybe we could do some scheduled “watch alongs” with a movie each week. Ask everybody to start watching a movie at say Tuesday after dinner (and after them beans have died down).
Or Maybe we can run a regular live radio show too to summarize what we are all doing. It would be fun to rustle up some guests.

I dunno. That’s a lot of ideas. It ought to be not too much for open participants to do, cause they might just ride off into the sunset never to be seen blogging again.

But mebbe you got some ideas? What would you like to see happen for a structure and level of activities for Western 106?

Because, this ain’t no real job for the Man With No Course…