Wednesday, July 26, 2017

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 been met by technological challenges.



But that is ok, because I have come to expect challenges. Through a lot of "playful tinkering" and trial-and-error learning throughout these 8 weeks, I have found that I can deal with pretty much any wrench thrown at me.

via GIPHY


Before we go any further, in the words of the great Oscar Hammerstein II, "Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start."


Prelude. Spring 2017. With only 1 course needed to complete my Education and Human Development Master's in Teaching in Diverse Contexts (EDHD MA TDC, for short) at University of Colorado Denver, I spent some time looking at the course catalog for the Maymester and Summer terms. I was going to sign up for  SCED 5350 Issues and Trends in Science Education, but then thought about all of my end-of-year deadlines at my school. I decided that teaching full-time, having to meet all of those deadlines, AND taking a Maymester course would be the end of me. So, I looked at what courses were offered this summer that could be counted towards my degree program. The only course out of the bunch that sounded mildly interesting was INTE 5340 Learning with Digital Stories. But what exactly is this course?


Huh? What does this have to do with teaching? Well, I figured it couldn't be too bad. I had a summer off from my full-time teaching job, so I may as well finish up my master's degree already. What did I have to lose?


Call to Adventure. So, I signed up and received my first welcome email from our course instructor on June 1.

Refusal of the Call. We were asked to check out the Get Started module of the course and set up all of our "stuff", i.e., Twitter, hypothes.is, and a blog. Ok, I have had a blog before for another course in my program. But the other 2 were foreign to me. I had heard of Twitter but had been very reluctant to sign up and use it. And hypothes.is was something I posited before beginning an experiment as a scientist, so I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. My initial reaction was, "Twitter? Really?" But I was in this to learn, so I kept an open mind and signed up for Twitter. 
I was skeptical and reluctantly jumped into the Twittersphere. I tried my first Daily Create challenge and posted it. I wasn't even sure if I was tagging everything correctly but hey, this was only tweet #2!

I got through the syllabus and encountered my first "easter egg".

I finished Week 1 and thought, "Ok, this isn't so bad."


Meeting with the Mentor. At the end of Weeks 1 and 2, I received probably the most detailed, helpful and encouraging feedback on the work I had produced thus far. Seriously, this set the bar for how I should be giving feedback to my students. I was starting to get the hang of things and even started to feel confidence in the work I was producing. Not bad for a technological dinosaur!

Tests, Allies, Enemies. The first test I encountered came shortly after week 3, just when I was starting to get into the groove.


Remix week?!? Oh, this is getting really interesting.

via GIPHY

So, here we were, remixing each other's work. I was assigned to remix Shyna Gill's work and critique it in a case study. After reviewing her work, I settled on remixing her "Me in 30 Sec" project.



Over the next couple of weeks, I found help and support from fellow classmates. And I was able to help out a few classmates as well. The culture created within our INTE 5340 class was very supportive and encouraging, and a lot of times, we found that we were all having similar struggles.


Ordeal. More wrenches and challenges were met. But we met them together.




We shared "horror" stories.


 All horror stories can be found here: https://twitter.com/i/moments/883400911967502336


Seizing the Reward. Together, we overcame our challenges. We shared a LOT of great ideas on hypothes.is. We encouraged each other on Twitter. And now as the course has come to an end, we have come out with new skills, new tools, and a fresh perspective on how storytelling, and in particular, digital storytelling fits in our educational landscape. We ended the course with an article on the culture of creativity:

Gauntlett, D. & Stjerne-Thomsen B. (2013, June). "Cultures of Creativity." The Lego Foundation. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2tQorpI

This was a good way to bring together all the ideas we had shared over the past several weeks. It brought back our conversations on Piaget's Constructivism, Papert's Constructionism, and Siemens'/Downes' Connectivism.
From our Week 2 Module
We also circled back to what it means to have/use an open pedagogy. This is something that was not only modeled for us in this course but it was also something we were able to experience and participate in firsthand. Here, we learned by doing. More than that, we learned by making and sharing. We put our work out into the public using our blog and posting it all on Twitter. We received support from our instructor and fellow classmates, and we also received feedback from the greater online community via Twitter. We found that digital storytelling is a powerful means of learning and growing.

The final article gave us this model to work with.
A model of culture (adapted from Sørensen et al., 2010). Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2tQorpI
When the processes of playing, sharing, making, and thinking are part of the ethos of the culture of a given community, members of the community are supported and encouraged. The creative mindset is allowed to flourish in a supportive culture. In order to develop creative thinkers, members of the community need to make things. And this culture of making things is supported through the dimensions of having, doing, being, and knowing. The members of the community are given the environment, tools and materials to create their artifacts of learning. There is inspirational activity within the community with the support of the mentor and peers. Members' identities, traditions and roles are honored within the community. And meaning is made through the process of making. All these parts of the pinwheel interact with one another. I think of this as being similar to Schrodinger's electron cloud model of the atom. In contrast to Bohr's model where the electrons circle around the nucleus in set orbits, in Schrodinger's model, the electrons are moving all over the place within the electron cloud. So, instead of having very set positions of each dimension of culture in the pinwheel model above, those dimensions move around more fluidly and interact with each other in multiple combinations and ways.

Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Bohr-atomic-model


Electron Cloud Model of the Atom: https://goo.gl/pHyWty

The electrons move around the nucleus somewhat similarly to how the blades of an electric fan do. When the fan is running, you can't really tell where a single blade is at a given time. This is how I think of the pinwheel model of culture of creativity.

Retrieved from: https://www.ck12.org/book/CK-12-Physical-Science-Concepts-For-Middle-School/section/2.44/

Sørensen et al.'s model has been expanded to show that we can be members of multiple cultures and that these cultures interact with one another as well.  And the cultures can be connected on different dimensions or multiple dimensions.

Three cultures connected by different dimensions. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2tQorpI

However, I still see this model as being limited, since Culture 3 may also interact with Culture 2, or Culture 1 may interact with Culture 3 on more than one dimension. So, let's go back to the electron cloud model for the creative mindset across related cultures.

2 atoms have overlapping electron clouds. Retrieved from http://www.uq.edu.au/_School_Science_Lessons/TWFig4.GIF

So, if we go back to the 3 pinwheels interacting together, instead of connecting at single points, i.e., Culture 1 connects with Culture 3 through "Doing", Culture 1 connects with Culture 2 on "Having", we can have the 3 cultures overlap, similarly to the two atoms above and as shown in the diagram below. Each atom symbolizes each pinwheel from Sørensen et al.'s model, and the electrons symbolize the dimensions of culture. The nuclei in my updated model symbolize the cultures from the Sørensen et al.'s model. 

Remix of pinwheel model with electron cloud model

Homecoming. So here we are at the end of INTE5340, summer term. I have learned a lot over the past 8 weeks and will be starting back up at the school I teach at very soon. I will be returning to my classroom with a whole new perspective on learning and plan to incorporate the creation of digital learning artifacts in my classroom. My students will not only conduct chemistry experiments in the classroom but will also create digital media as part of their learning process. I am excited to put into practice what I've learned in this course. I hope that by doing so, my students become more engaged in authentic and meaningful ways.

As a recap, here is a timeline of my journey through this course, which I created on TweetDeck. There were many ways to go about summarizing the work I have done here in INTE 5340, but in the end, Occam's razor won out. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. 

Click here to view my timeline on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dr_yap/timelines/889545853404192768

Finally, for those of you keeping score at home (ok, really, I know none of you are keeping score), here is my media scorecard.



This course may be over, but for me, now the real work begins. It's been real, folks. #seacrestout
at No comments:

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Week 7 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories - Dialogue and Soliloquy

This week we are starting to wind down as we bring INTE5340 to a close. Can you believe it? Just one week left! And some of us have already finished the course and have posted their final reflections.


Just minutes ago, I posted my case study on Do Not Track. So, I'll start there, since it is still fresh in my mind. I thought Do Not Track went along great with this week's theme of "Dialogue and Soliloquy in the Digital Space." First let's define these two things. A soliloquy is classically thought of as a mechanism in literature and theater through which a character shares his/her own thoughts with the audience, usually in the form of a speech. A classic example of this is Shakespeare's use of soliloquies in Hamlet.

By Lafayette Photo, London [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Again, using literature as our backdrop, a dialogue is a conversation between 2 or more characters. While a soliloquy is one character speaking, a dialogue is two or more characters speaking with each other.

Odd Couple. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Karl Lender on Flickr.
How does this apply to the digital space? I think that a lot of digital storytelling is a combination of both soliloquy and dialogue. There is a component of the storyteller sharing her thoughts and sharing her story with others that parallels soliloquy in literature. But then there is also an ongoing, open-ended conversation online that parallels dialogue in theater. A good example of this is the blog as an interactive form of storytelling. While the soliloquy comes with the content presented by the blogger, a conversation is started in the comments section and continued on social media. And with the conversation may come edits or new entries to the blog.

Now let's go back to Do Not Track, which I mentioned earlier as being a good example of being both soliloquy and dialogue. The majority of the site's content is a sharing of information through the eyes of the storyteller, the filmmakers. The content is not merely meant to be consumed by the viewer. The viewer is an active participant in the documentary series. Within each episode, the viewer is given prompts to answer. The viewer is given choices in how to view the content through the sharing of her own personal information. So, soliloquy becomes a dialogue between storyteller and viewer. After viewing each episode, the viewer can click on a link to comments posted about each episode, continuing the dialogue outside of that given episode. The viewer is also given additional resources to read, watch or experience the content, again giving the viewer an active role in the telling, interpreting and  propagating of the story. And I think that is how I define soliloquy and dialogue in the digital space. It is the sharing of stories and ideas using media and inviting others to add to the story. The storytelling experience is interactive and allows for multiple voices to be heard, instead of from just one person or viewpoint. In the digital space, we experience both soliloquy and dialogue, and this gives us not only exposure to diverse viewpoints but also allows us to connect with people we may not otherwise be able to interact with. Dialogue in the digital space allows for conversations to be ongoing, and those conversations will continually change and evolve over time.

Ok, now let's get to this week's media work.

Daily Create Challenges

This week, I did 4 daily create challenges. One involved a little bit of coding, which was fun to play with. Another was an audio sound created using a number of layered sounds on iMovie and the addition of my own voice modified to sound scary. The last two challenges were graphics. 




Probably the most fun and challenging one for me was the creation of a horror sound. I first started with my voice and then thought of adding the sound of rain with thunder. Then I added the sound of footsteps with the sound of a heartbeat. I am happy with the final product because when I look back to when I first started this course, I don't think I would have thought of tackling this challenge in this way. Over time, I feel like I have become more creative. The audio clip was uploaded to SoundCloud and can be accessed below.




Assignments

This week, I tackled 3 assignments to round out the required 10 for the course. Since I was only missing a graphic assignment from my media scorecard, I made 2 graphic assignments and 1 social assignment that included graphics. Again, I am proud of the work I produced this week, especially since I've been feeling a resurgence of creativity this week. Last week, I felt like I was in a bit of a creative slump, especially with the daily create challenges. 


Understanding Comics - Part 1

Understanding Comics - Part 2 - Final Product






I feel like I'm really starting to get the hang of this digital media thing!


via GIPHY

Case Study

For my final case study, I chose Do Not Track. This went well with this week's theme.

Phew! One more week!

at No comments:

Case Study - Week 7 - Do Not Track


Do Not Track is an interactive documentary series available for free online. In addition to being something to be viewed, we viewers provide Do Not Track with our own personal information as part of an ongoing experiment. We give Do Not Track information in order for us to better understand ourselves. The creators of the documentary series claim to collect data in order to personalize your viewing experience. Sure, that's true, but I think the bigger reason is so that they can learn more about their viewers. The site asks you to enter you email address and it also uses cookies to track your information. It also asks you for access to one of your social network sites for the sake of personalization. Truthfully, I felt uncomfortable giving all of my information to Do Not Track, but I did it anyway to see how it would personalize the experience for me.



There are 7 interactive episodes, and each episode has a specific theme and aim. Each episode goes through how our information is tracked online, what is done with those data, and how these data can affect us both individually and as a society. The interactive nature of the episodes keep viewers engaged and make you feel like your experience is truly being personalized for you and the data you are providing. Within each episode, you are given prompts in which you either answer questions or click on various parts of a graphic to learn more.


This was all fine and good until it asked me for my Facebook login information. I begrudgingly gave it, and then was "rewarded" by not having sufficient information to make any assumptions about my character and personality, which algorithms and mathematical modeling based on our "likes" on Facebook should be able to do. Part of me was relieved that they couldn't find enough info online about me to personalize the assumptions made about what type of person I am, since that probably means that I am not that active on social media. But another part of me was annoyed because now they had my Facebook profile information but there was no real "reward" for giving them my log in information. Since there wasn't enough information from my profile to make any assumptions or show me how my data could be used to figure out general personality characteristics of mine, they gave me information based on a 42-year-old male. 


The example above llustrates how our "likes" on Facebook tell data scientists about our personality and can be used by companies to evaluate the risk in either giving us a mortgage, a life insurance policy or healthcare plan. Being married to a data scientist, this is not news to me, but I can see this as being eye-opening to many viewers. Computer modeling, experts tell us, does a way better job than we do at making predictions about ourselves. Algorithms of how you behave online tell businesses about your character and how likely you are to use/spend money, whether or not you are obese, if you are a smoker, and what your level of sexual promiscuity is, for example.

The series does a good job of bringing in experts and evaluating the pros and cons of all of this information being collected on us. Yes, there are pros.


 But of course, there are also cons. 




And there are many factors that drive the continued tracking of all of us online. I don't want to give too much away, since I think it is worth it for all of you to view the episodes for yourself. You have the option of viewing the episodes anonymously. Whether or not you want to give your information up to Do Not Track is up to you. Most of these data are used as statistics at the end of the documentary series.









It is an interesting time we live in when most of us get our news and information from our social networks, which contributes to a filtered version of our news that goes along with our "likes", the people we follow, and the types of posts we interact with. The news we get from social media backs up and justifies our beliefs instead of challenging them, and this puts us in an echo chamber where we end up having conversations online with like-minded people. What's more, the methods used by various companies and social media outlets to collect and analyze our information are also used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to track, profile and make assumptions about all of us. Edward Snowden brought to light just how much information our government collects on us and how, and allowed us to question whether or not that surveillance is constitutional. Following the Patriot Act, The USA Freedom Act was passed, which addressed the phone tapping concerns raised by Snowden's whistleblowing but didn't address the NSA’s collection of foreign internet content from U.S. tech companies or the NSA's exploitation of technology for the benefit of U.S. intelligence. Our government watches us under the guise of better safety and protection. Yet currently there is no evidence to support the notion that all this extra surveillance has made us any safer. Based on how viewers of Do Not Track have answered, we are faced with 3 possible ways our future could go. 


Based on how I answered, it categorized me as someone who finds internet governance and digital privacy important.


And at the end of the series, we are given ways to take action and various websites and organizations to check out.


Also, with each episode, there are links to a blog and other online resources that go along with the particular topic of that episode.


Overall, I thought this documentary series was highly informative, and I thought the interactive nature of the website and each episode was great. I still was a little creeped out about sharing my information with Do Not Track (ironic, I know, given the name of the series), but thought it wasn't too big a price to pay. Otherwise I would have stayed anonymous. And I guess that's what it is really all about. How much of our data are we really willing to give up? If we are truthful with ourselves, the answer is "a lot." We use lots of free online services, and we pay for that with our personal data. Do Not Track makes you really think about that. At what point are we going to push for more privacy and be willing to pay for services out of our own pocket instead of with our data? At what point will we say that government surveillance has gone too far?


at No comments:

Friday, July 21, 2017

Assignment 10 - 10 Ways to Maintain Real Relationships in the Digital World


For my last assignment (can you believe it?!?), I chose to do the "10 Ways" assignment from the assignment bank. Most graphics were remixed using Prisma and Canva. The graphic above was a free template on Canva. Tweet 1 was created using io7text.com , which is a neat online fake iPhone message generator. Tweet 8 was created from a series of photos taken of my husband, Brian, at Chatfield Reservoir and made into a gif using Google Photo's Assistant. Tweet 10 was created by taking a picture of Cookie Monster and removing the background using the Background Eraser app. Then the meme was made on Poster Maker with a wood-panel background and the Cookie Monster quote. All tweets were tagged with the hashtag #10wmrr, which is short for "10 Ways to Maintain Real Relationships."

This was a fun last project for this class. I thought I'd mix social media again with a bit of writing and creating of graphics. Interestingly, one of the challenges I faced was making sure I wasn't saying the same things over and over again, but instead had 10 distinct ways written and tweeted. The fun part was creating graphics to go along with my 10 ways. I really like how cleanly Twitter Moments keep your tweets organized, so after publishing all 10 ways via Twitter, I created a Twitter Moment. That moment can be viewed below. It's been a fun ride. One more case study and then we are on to the final week!


at No comments:

Monday, July 17, 2017

Assignment 9 - Vintage Futurism - Vintage Social Media Ad

After taking a break from INTE 5340 this weekend, I feel creatively refreshed and thought I'd ride the creativity wave and complete another assignment from the assignment bank. I thought I'd work on a graphic for this assignment. I've been really enjoying using Canva, so I settled on creating a vintage social media ad. This is inspired by this blog post by Joanna Behar featuring work by a Brazilian ad agency called Moma Propaganda. I looked through tons of vintage ads on Flickr.


I finally came across this one and thought that this could be remixed as a fun dating service app.

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Isabel Santos Pilot. Flickr.
Then I decided to remix this as a Tinder ad. Tinder is a smartphone app used to make potential matches with others. It is known for giving the user the ability to "swipe" on someone's picture to either "like" that person or skip over him/her.


This was fun to make, and using Canva has gotten pretty intuitive over time. Doing a remix project like this one could be fun for students. They could probably remix vintage artwork or vintage advertisements to reflect a phenomenon or product related to chemistry. Knowing my students, they probably already have apps on their phones that they like using to modify or remix pictures. But I think Canva is straightforward to use, and my students can pick up how to use it rather quickly if given the time and space to tinker with it. I like that projects like this one would allow my students to be creative and think outside the box. And it would give students another way to express their learning in a way that is a different from a traditional quizzes or tests. 

Here is the final product.




at No comments:

Assignment 8 - Understanding Comics

Based on my scorecard, I thought I'd try my had and making my own comic strip. At first, I decided to try Canva, since it has easy ready-to-use templates.


Template Options

I looked through the free templates and settled on this one below.

Original template

I modified the text to reflect something relevant to our course, INTE 5340. I title this: "I Got 99 Problems But hypothes.is Ain't One..."

"I Got 99 Problems But hypothes.is Ain't One..."

But then I thought, "Ok, that was a little too easy. What if I want my students to make a comic strip that was science-related?" Then I decided to check out Pixton. It is a website that allows teachers to not only create their own comics but also assign projects through their website. A subscription for teachers comes in at around $9 a month. However, anyone can try it out and play with it. It has a ton of backgrounds and characters to choose from. There is a brief tutorial you can go through to become familiar with using Pixton, and then you can try making your own. In general, Pixton is very user-friendly, and I could see myself assigning projects to my students using Pixton. Pixton allows you to try making up to 9 panels for free. It won't allow you to download the completed comic without a subscription, but you can share your comic using a link. This may be one way for me to have students use this site for free (without having to get my own subscription). As a science teacher, I don't see myself assigning making comics more than a few times a year, so I don't think I can justify a monthly subscription. However, I could have my students make a comic in the "free" mode, and then they could share the link to their comic with me, and I could assess their comics that way.

What the site looks like logged in as a teacher. You can create groups and assign activities using Pixton.

Some of the body positions you can choose from

Once you are done with your comic, you can publish it to Pixton. You can also click on a box to allow others to remix your comic.


Pixton gives you the option to allow others to remix your comic

The link to the comic I made is: https://Pixton.com/ic:z3kh40vn

I wanted to make a "hard copy" for myself, so I decided to take screenshots of my comic strip from the Pixton website, and then I put them into a poster on Canva. Sorry, Pixton! Maybe if I find that I will assign comics to my students on a regular basis will I spend the extra $9/month on a subscription, but as I mentioned before, if I only assign it a few times a year, I won't spend the $100+ per year on this. I can just have my students send me the links to their comics. A subscription however, unlocks some really nice features and allows for the use of more than 9 panels. So, if you are a teacher who intends to assign comic-based projects on a regular basis, I think the $9/month subscription is worth the investment.

I think using comics is a great way to build writing and literacy skills while also incorporating scientific content. Pixton is easy to use, and I can see students using this website in my classes. Comics are a great alternative assignment to a typical lab report or Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER) assignment. I'm not one to do away with those more traditional writing projects, since primary scientific writing skills are important for my student to develop if they intend to move on to college, which most do. But I think this would be a fun assignment to give my students to work on every so often, or in conjunction with a lab report or CER. 


Try it out for yourself! Pixton is a fun online tool to use that I think students will enjoy playing with.

Postscriptum - I have had to modify and edit my comic multiple times. I just kept finding grammatical errors and typos. I will need to keep this in mind when assigning this to students. I will want to have students proofread each other's work before submitting a final version to me.

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

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...