Week 2 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories

The theme for this week is multimodality. We explored different platforms for digital storytelling. This week, we also completed our first assignment from the assignment bank and dug into our first case study. We read about audience archetypes. We created and posted a Daily Create on Twitter. And by the end of the week, we had discussed the learning theories of Piaget, Papert and Siemens/Downes. 

I started the week with a Daily Create. The first one I did was of the building density of my hometown, Jersey City, using Map Stack. My first thought was, "Cool! New tool!" At first, I had some trouble figuring out how to use Map Stack. I even watched a short video tutorial and still was confused about how to make map art using this new tool. Finally, I just decided to keep playing around with it through trial-and-error. With each mistake, came something new I learned. Finally, I was able to make a map I was pleased with, using the layers in the way I wanted to. I was reminded of a quote from Bob Ross, "We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."

From http://www.todayifoundout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/bob-ross.jpg

Except that initially, my accidents were more frustrating than happy. This put me in the shoes of my students. Sometimes learning can be frustrating and uncomfortable. But it is from our "happy little accidents" that we grow and learn.

This is my final map that I tweeted.

I like that the Daily Create challenges give me practice being uncomfortable trying new things and making "happy little accidents." It's helpful to not just share our own creations but to also learn from other people's creations. I'm always interested in seeing how someone else interpreted the challenge and made it his/her own. It inspires me to be more creative in the things I create.

The next challenge I did was to type a modern tweet for a piece of classic art. We were to use the Creative Commons search site to choose something that was open licensed. I quickly found myself going down a rabbit hole of lots of beautiful art and couldn't settle on which one to make into a modern tweet. I finally did a search for "Last Supper" and settled on "Last Supper" by Bartolomeo Schedoni.

The final result was a 4-panel meme with the tweet: "TFW all your bros are having more fun than you are 😐" I used PixMeme.com to make the meme on my computer.

The last Daily Create challenge I did was simply titled, I Am Nervous. This one didn't give us much direction. I took a photo taken at an olympic weightlifting meet I competed in a couple of years ago, filtered it and added text using the app InShot. I chose this photo because I thought about what makes me most nervous, and it is when all attention is on me, and me alone. At a weightlifting meet, each individual lifter attempts to lift a particular weight, and no one else is going at the same time. Everyone watches. There are judges who decide whether or not the lift is good. For less than 60 seconds, every little muscle movement is observed and analyzed. It's just you and the barbell, and everyone is watching.

This week I tried my hand at my first assignment. There were so many to choose from, and I finally decided to try my hand at creating a graphic. I chose the Posterize It assignment, and tried my hand at making a minimalist poster of one of my favorite TV shows, Breaking Bad.

This was my first time using Canva. There was definitely more trial-and-error learning and creating "happy little accidents," but in the end, I was pleased with minimalist poster I created. The real challenge for me was to keep it minimalist. I wanted to keep adding and adding to it but had to settle on the elements I thought were iconic and essential to the show I was representing.

As a class, we read and discussed an article comparing and contrasting Piaget's Constructivism to Papert's Constructionism. We had some good discussion of this article in hypothes.is. Piaget and Papert are both constructivists. However, Papert takes this a step further, emphasizing the importance of creating something new from the learning. We "transform the input" and from this transformation, an artifact of the learning is the result.

This week we were challenged to think about which of these 3 fits the pedagogy of our class, INTE 5340: constructivism, constructionism, or connectivism. 

I would like to say it is a combination of all 3, but we were asked to choose one. If I were to choose only one, I would go with constructionism. For me, this week was focused on making things. This idea goes beyond "learning by doing" or sharing ideas with others. It was about taking everything we were learning to create something new and to make something of our own. We created our own pieces of media and shared them with each other. We looked at other people's work through our first case study and made something new from that case study.

Speaking of case study, this week I chose to look at anth101.com . I loved how this was such an interactive and multimodal way to teach and engage students. And not just engage students but have them create something with each lesson. Again, this very much ties into Papert's constructionism.

I think I will end here. It is getting late, and I just got back from a weekend camping trip in the Guanella Pass. It was refreshing to be "off the grid" for a couple of days, and the time away from my digital devices allowed for me to unplug and recharge my mental batteries. These were the only 2 things I documented from the weekend, the view from my seat around the campfire -- the burning logs and the trees around me as the sun was completely setting. Then my smartphone was shut off for the rest of the weekend. It was time to experience things "in the moment."