We will be doing a more-or-less weekly best of ds106, This Week in ds106, this semester. We’ve done something like this in the past, but now I’m trying out some new things. I’m using the PressForward WordPress plugin to manage it. This has a syndication function, so I’m pulling in all the feeds from both the UMW and KSU contingents. With the plugin, editors on the site can nominate, comment on, and discuss posts from the group. There’s also a bookmarklet for nominating posts, which is what I used this week as I was going through everyone’s summaries. The way I envision this working going forward is that the members of the group of the week, like the writing group for example, will be made editors for the week. They will monitor what people do and nominate work to highlight. Over the weekend after their week, they will publish their selected posts along with a commentary or editorial post on the week, and all of this will show up on This Week in ds106. Seems simple enough to me. All it requires is a little online interaction, and the group deciding how they will produce their commentary post.

I’m doing it myself this week. I picked out four posts to highlight. The first is Ashleigh’s Oreo O’s commercial. I’m known to some as a cookie monster, and I have a thing for Oreos, so for my own good I really shouldn’t know about Oreo breakfast cereal. But Ashleigh went all out, writing a commercial, enlisting others to add their voices, and editing everything together with background music. The next is Ashley’s Eyemation – another example of extraordinary effort yielding extraordinary results. I especially like the way it combines the physical and the virtual into a hand-drawn GIF. Another piece of GIF work comes from Megan, with her To-Do List. The GIF is cool in itself, but the post is what makes this one. She goes through the different things she tried, what worked and what didn’t work so well, and what she learned from it. And that means the rest of us can learn from it too – which is what this is all about. The last one I picked was Kelsey’s rock n roll Triple Troll. I love this particular assignment. I think I’ve done variations of it a few times. This is an inspired take on it. I feel like I could picture Johnny Cash doing something like this.

So that’s my This Week in ds106. No one needs follow my format though. Put your own stamp on it. It’s your course too.