Thursday, June 29, 2017

Week 4 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories - Remix Culture

For this week's reflection, we are doing something a little different. The theme is remix culture. In the spirit of #remixweek, this reflection will be media-based and using as little written text as possible.


This timeline was made using TimelineJS.


My feelings on remix culture and #remixweek will be portrayed through a series of gifs. Think of this as digital charades.





via GIPHY


via GIPHY


via GIPHY


via GIPHY


via GIPHY


via GIPHY


via GIPHY


via GIPHY

Links for reflections on this week's assignments 



Assignment 4 - Artifact From the Near Future

For this assignment, I decided to try using Animatron again. This site is very useful for making videos.


The first time I used it was for my remix of Shyna's "Me in 30 Seconds". For this project, I decided to make a video clip for a fictional evening news show, highlighting a technology we may be seeing more of in the near future, which is the use of 3D printing for organ transplantation. It took me a while to think of a fun artifact from the near future to make, but I finally settled on 3D printed organs. I was definitely inspired and influenced by Fernando Barbella's Signs From the Near Future. My case study of Barbella's project can be found here. There was a bit of trial and error with layering the audio and video, but since this was my second go at using Animatron, making this video wasn't too bad. I think I'm actually starting to enjoy using Animatron. And I'm sure I've only scratched the surface on what Animatron is capable of. Here is my final product.




Maybe someday soon, every hospital will offer 3D printed organ transplantation and live organ transplants will be a thing of the past. Sure, perhaps there may still be some instances where we will still need living tissue for transplants, but I can realistically see a near future in which we save more lives by using 3D printed organs made of cells and microchips. Bioprinting is a growing field, and results over the years continue to be promising. Scientists are developing tissue scaffolds and organs-on-chips, and this can have a profound global impact. Imagine a world where dialysis is no longer necessary for people with kidney failure. Imagine not having to be on an organ donor waitlist after a near-fatal accident. These advances will likely happen within our lifetime according to a number of researchers and engineers, some optimistically projecting that the bioprinting of organs and their transplantation will become mainstream within the next decade. Check out this article from The Economist that came out early this year for a brief overview of what is to come. Just last year, a group of researchers at Harvard developed the first fully 3D printed heart-on-a-chip.

Postscriptum -- The 3D printed heart in the video is just a plastic model 😉 You can watch a heart-on-a-chip being made here. This fully-functioning 3D printed heart-on-a-chip looks nothing like a human heart. I was taking an artistic liberty by putting a picture of a 3D printed plastic heart. I don't want to lose my science "street cred" 😁

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

#remixweek - Shyna in 30 sec - Assignment 3 and Week 4 Case Study

This week, we are remixing the work of another student in class. I was assigned Shyna Gill. It has been good a good experience so far. I went through Shyna's work and settled on her "Me in 30 Seconds" assignment. For this remix, I decided make an animated video with her story. I decided to keep her original audio "as is", since I wanted to make sure I was still telling her story in her own voice and her own words. I used Animatron.com to create my video and added her audio to it. My idea for this was to really stay true to Shyna's original work while still making it into something new and different. Instead of writing about her, I will instead allow her to tell you about herself. Making animated videos is very new to me, and this was my first try at it.



I appreciated from reading her weekly reflections that she is honest and genuine in talking about her experiences in INTE5340. She is able to draw from real-life examples due to her extensive work and educational experience. As someone still learning the technological ropes, I appreciate that she shares how she creates her media. For her "Me in 30 Seconds" project, she is open about the challenges she faced when creating her audio clip. This is taken from her blog:

"Because of the time limit, I had to rewrite and rerecord a couple of times to get it right. This project was challenging as it forces one to be concise in their words, and also to be a proficient editor to remove any unnecessary silence, mouth clicks, etc. I encountered some issues with my sound and ended up learning how to use some of the effects that Audacity provides to attempt to resolve some distortion issues. After figuring out that some of the problems were unfixable, I ended up recording it over again but with different settings, which solved the problem."


It's good for a technology newbie like me to learn about how a person with extensive media communications experience still finds ways to both challenge herself and struggle with more unfamiliar territory such as audio. Her blog is a good reminder that we are all here to learn and push ourselves out of our comfort zone.

CC BY-NC 2.0. Oklanica on Flickr.
I can definitely relate to her "trial-and-error" struggle with making the audio, having to re-record and play with different settings. In creating my "remix", I also had to first learn how to use a new tool like Animatron to do the things I wanted it to do. Even before that, I had to figure out how to pull her audio off SoundCloud to put into Animatron.


The method I used is probably considered "barbaric" by techie standards, but it seemed to work. I used QuickTime to record the audio from SoundCloud. Then I used Audacity to clip the beginning and end of extra sounds and background noise. (I bet I have already used one too many steps here). Then I put that into Animatron and started playing with the various settings on Animatron.

Shyna, I hope you like my remix!



via GIPHY

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Week 3 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories




Here we are at the end of week 3. Almost halfway through! Almost. This week, I've found a good rhythm for this class. Usually, when I get up, I go and check what the Daily Create challenge is for the day. I think about it, look at what others have done so far as a source of inspiration and ideas, and then decide whether or not I will tackle it. In this course, we are required to do 1 challenge a week, but to make that challenge really count. For me, I recognize that I am still unfamiliar and uncomfortable making media, and as with most things I've tried to get better at, what really helps me is to practice. Practice leads to familiarity and proficiency. What was once frustrating slowly but surely becomes fun because I've forced myself to keep trying, even if the result isn't as impressive as what others are posting on Twitter. This reminds me of when I was a kid, and I was forced to practice playing the piano every day. At the time, I hated being forced to practice. I am by no means a natural pianist, nor do I consider myself a talented musician in any way. But I've learned that because of this forced practice with the unfamiliar, I learned a new "language". And after years of forced practice, I was able to play the piano pretty decently. I was able to read sheet music, take what can look like hieroglyphics and translate it to emotive sound -- sound that was my personal expression and interpretation of an otherwise nonsensical series of dots on paper. And the skills I picked up along the way, I was able to transfer to other musical pursuits, such as being a part of numerous choral and acapella singing groups in high school, college and post-college.  The lessons learned from "forced practice" have carried over to many non-musical aspects of my life.  I see my journey in INTE 5340 in a very similar way.

CC0. Pexels.com

CC0. Pexels.com


Daily Create Challenges

I started the week with a Daily Create on Monday. We were asked, "What animal would you be?" I have always said that I wish I could be a house cat, just like my little guy, Oscar. I took one of his photos and gave it a fun look using Prisma.


The next Daily Create asked us, "Can you impress someone in 5 words?" I thought I would take this as an opportunity to practice making graphics. So, I first had to think of 5 words. I settled on, "Enthusiasm without purpose is fleeting." I took a photo of the table I was working at and filtered it so that it could perhaps relay the feeling of something fleeting.

Wood table photo before playing around with it

The 3rd challenge I took on was, "A band without??? Let's see your band's name and an album cover." Another graphic. That's ok, I need more practice, and these are starting to become fun. I decided to go "minimalist" with my album cover.


4th Daily Create was to write a lune. A lune is sort of like an American "remix" of a Japanese haiku. For our assignment, we were to write a very short 3-line poem of 3 words, 5 words, 3 words. I know, a graphic again. But like I said, with multiple days of practice, this was starting to become fun, and I found myself wanting to take the opportunity to practice some more. We were steered towards using @johnjohnston’s Lune Maker. I had to think about something along the lines of creating and being a creatorist. This is the final result.


The 5th and final challenge I took this past week was to name a new planet. Another graphic, you ask? Yes, no, maybe? For this one, I decided to play around with successive tweets. The first tweet included an audio clip of an inhabitant of my new planet, Mrow.





First of 3 tweets
This was a multistep process. I took a picture of my cat, Sabrina, and then used the app Space FX One Touch. Then I used my smartphone to record myself meowing. I took that recording and then used the Voice Changer app and used the "duck" voice. Finally, I uploaded everything to SoundCloud and tweeted it.

Then I followed the first tweet up with more information about my new planet. Because why not?

Tweet 2. #planetmrow

Final tweet was a graphic. Yes, another graphic. Practicing, remember? 

Tweet 3. #planetmrow #newlifeform

Copyright, Fair Use and Creative Commons

Ok, so you're probably asking yourself, what happened to the theme of this week? Well, this week, we discussed Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://cmsimpact.org/code/code-best-practices-fair-use-media-literacy-education/. The initial response to this week's topic was 


via GIPHY

But I am one to trust the process, and as I started to read and annotate this week's reading, I came to realize that I really don't know anything about copyright laws, and because of that, I have probably limited myself in what I choose to use in what I create and what I use in my classroom as a teacher. My big takeaways from this week are:

1. sharing is good


2. under the protection of fair use rights, we educators should feel empowered to use, remix and create media


3. since our students live in a media-intensive world, we educators must adapt by encouraging our students to create their own media as a part of their educational experience as well as teach our students about media literacy


Ok, so let's start with #1 - sharing is good. As we dug into our second reading, State of the Commons (2016), Creative Commons. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from https://stateof.creativecommons.org/, I was struck by many examples of how sharing doesn't just increase accessibility to information or art. Sharing goes beyond that and can have global impacts on society as a whole, helping us all advance together. I am reminded of the old proverb:

"If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together."


Whether or not this is an old African proverb will not be debated here (for context, see this NPR article). But I will say that as we move more towards open access, we are helping each other advance. We are giving access to educational materials to populations that would not otherwise be able to use them. In science, we are making our data sets available outside of our labs so that we can "go farther together." We are sharing our designs so that others can use them for "transformative purposes."

#2 - under fair use right, we educators should feel empowered to use, remix and create media. Admittedly, in the past, my use of media has been primarily in the form of playing a YouTube video of an experiment/demonstration we can't do in the lab. Or I have my students use their laptops (in my school, every student is given a laptop to use) to look at a website or to try out a computer simulation of something we're studying. This course has opened my eyes to the many ways I could be using media in our classroom that go beyond just "consuming" media. In creating materials for my classes, I can take existing material and transform it, remix it and make something brand new with it. And this is something I can bring my students into. And this brings us to #3.

#3 - we educators must adapt to the reality that our students have been born and raised into a media-intensive world. This is our students' reality, and we should embrace it by encouraging our students to create their own media, their own "artifacts" of their learning, just as Papert proposes. I had my first opportunity to try this out this past week. Timing is everything, isn't it? In the beginning of the week, I was contacted by one of the summer school teachers at my school. I am not teaching summer school this year, but I still remain accessible to the summer staff since I am still the chemistry teacher of my students who are in the process of credit recovery. A teacher assisting 2 of my students in recovering enough credit to pass my chemistry class emailed me asking about a project they could do together as a final project of sorts. I thought about what we've been learning over the past 3 weeks, and while the "old" me would have just assigned a "cookbook-style" experiment to conduct and then a formulaic lab report to write out, the "INTE 5340" me put her foot down. I wanted to give these students a real chance to discover something for themselves, to study something they were genuinely interested in, and to create something that was an artifact of that learning, something that would allow my students to be creative. Creativity in chemistry? Sure, why not? I'm embracing the "curriculum in beta" lifestyle this summer.

I came up with the following assignment for my 2 students. My students are to choose 1 concept or phenomenon in chemistry that they would like to learn more about. Their job is to research this topic and search online for an experiment or demonstration they could conduct on their own using everyday household items. They are to each pick their own topic to examine and to each conduct their own experiment. But I didn't have them stop there. I want them to create something new -- to remix something old (like a known phenomenon) and transform it into something that is of their own. So, I am having them each make a 5-min video. The video should first explain the phenomenon/concept they are studying and give the viewer some context. Following this they are to include actual recorded footage of the experiment/demonstration they conducted. Finally, the video must relay to the viewer what each of them learned from conducting the experiment/demo. I kept my directions at a minimum and encouraged full creativity. I am hoping that by giving my students voice, choice and full creative license, my students will deepen their learning and understanding of the phenomenon each of them studied and made a video of. Their final product is to be uploaded to YouTube, and they are to submit a link to their video so that I could evaluate their work.


Assignment 2 - 30-Second Radio Commercial - Is This Legit?

My full reflection on this particular assignment can be found here. I made a 30-second commercial for a fake radio talk show titled, Is This Legit? This is purported as a show where the host and its guests examine "copyright laws and fair use rights on a case-by-case basis." I made the commercial using iMovie and couple of smartphone apps.




Case Study #2 - Signs From the Near Future

I decided to study Fernando Barbella's Signs From the Near Future. My full write-up of this case study can be found here . I found this particular project interesting as we dug into copyright laws, fair use, and creative commons licensing. Barbella takes already existing things and remixes them to include his vision of our near future that involves incorporating a new technology. His work is realistic and makes us think about how we as a society will need to adapt to new technologies as they become a part of our daily lives.


Final Thoughts

When we first started examining this week's theme, I initially felt confused. Information that was meant to empower us initially made me frustrated at all of the "gray area" with fair use. 


via GIPHY

But as we continued to discuss these ideas and further develop them as a class using Hypothes.is and Twitter, I started to feel empowered, as I recognized that many times, our purposes for using media in the classroom would fall under fair use rights. I was encouraged by our study of creative commons licensing and how sharing can produce positive, global effects on society. I am excited to see what types of projects I will take on with my students in the coming school year.



via GIPHY

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Case Study #2 - Signs From the Near Future



For this week's case study, I chose the work of Fernando Barbella. He is a creative director and designer who started the tumblr page Signs From the Near Future. Here he has photographs that have been altered to create his vision of our future. These photographs are his interpretation of how we as a society deal with our continually evolving technology. He uses current technological trends to guide his work. In an article on Fast Company, Barbella is quoted saying, 

"New materials, mashups between living organisms and nanotechnologies, improved capabilities for formerly ‘dumb’ and inanimate things . . . There’s lots of awesome things going on around us! And the fact is all these things are going to cease being just ‘projects’ to become part of our reality at any time soon." 


His work shows us how we as a culture may struggle to incorporate some of this new, exciting technology into our current infrastructure. He says,

"On the other hand, I chose to express these things by signs deployed in ordinary places, featuring instructions and warnings because I feel that as we increasingly depend on technology, we will probably have less space for individual judgment to make decisions"


His work takes an aspect of our current reality that is "remixed" with a piece of technology we may encounter and have to incorporate into our everyday lives. For example, we are getting closer and closer to having self-driving cars become available to the public. Barbella imagines our future with cabs that are self-driving. So, again, he is taking something that currently exists and incorporating a new technology that will be a part of our future. He takes a photo of a NYC cab and adds text to help us imagine how a future with self-driving cars could look like.




Another technology that has already been developed but has not made the mainstream are "smart glasses." Here is a sign from the future taking the incorporation of this new technology into account.




As we share more and more of our lives online, we as a society have to deal with the reality of "oversharing." In this photo of a smartphone (a current technology), he shows us what we may start doing to safeguard against oversharing and putting too much out there online.




Synthetic meat is something that has already been developed but is continually being developed to mimic real meat more and more. Here, we see a market that is selling synthetic meat. In Barbella's future, synthetic meat makes the mainstream.




Overall, I enjoyed studying his work, which is a "remix" of our present with the near future. I like how his work is realistic and uses technology that is already developed but not yet mainstream, or is very close to being developed in our near future. Barbella takes something already existing and makes it into a new creation, very similar to what is asked of us in this course, INTE 5340. This week, we are discussing copyrights and fair use. Some of his work features logos and brands we currently use and what results from the "remix" is Barbella's interpretation of our future with the addition of new technologies. This seems -- from what we've learned this week -- that his work falls under "fair use." His work was created with a "transformative" purpose -- as an artistic expression and social commentary on what our very near future could be like as we incorporate newer technologies into our present-day lives.

One thing I would have liked to learn more about is his creative process. I would have liked to learn more about how he made his work, what inspired him, and what continues to inspire. There is very limited information online about him as an artist, and I was only able to pull a few things about him from the interwebs. It seems his main work is in creating advertisements, and his Signs From the Near Future started out as a fun side project and has now been made into a book. Since his work is now published as a book, I think it is safe to say that his photographs are protected by fair use rights.




Week 8 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories - Final Reflection

So, here we are. Week 8. The final week of INTE 5340. And what a fun ride this has been. Even in my final days in this course, I have bee...