Sunday, July 16, 2017

Week 6 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories - New Literacies

This week's reflection was again made using Plotagon. I thought I'd take this as another opportunity to play around with Plotagon and become more familiar with using it.



Daily Create Challenges

I have come to really enjoy the daily create challenges. Although, this week, I felt like I was in a creative slump and had to force myself to create. This experience reminded me of having to force myself to write every day as an academic, even when (and especially when) I don't feel like it. Due to deadlines and time constraints, we can't always wait for inspiration to strike. So, this week, I completed 4 challenges, and I forced myself to make media. One of the things I struggled with was keeping my daily create projects fresh and interesting, even when feeling not-so-inspired. All challenges were completed on a smartphone as a means for me to become more familiar and proficient with using the apps I have on my phone. Apps used include Aviary, Desygner, Poster Maker, and Overlay.




Assignment 7 - INTE5340 Horror Stories

This week, I conducted a social fiction experiment on Twitter. I used the Twitter handle @inte5340horror  and curated all of the crowdsourced tweets using a Twitter Moment. My write-up of this assignment can be found here. This is probably the most fun I've had completing an INTE 5340 assignment. And admittedly, I enjoyed the burst of confusion after my first few postings with the hashtag #inte5340horrorstory.





Case Study - Ignite Boulder

This week, I chose to study Ignite Boulder as an example of how storytelling can take on a social and community-building nature. In my write-up of this case study, I have included interviews with people involved with Ignite Boulder. My case study write-up can be found here. I thought for this case study, I would talk to people about their experiences and involvement with Ignite Boulder. With everyone's crazy schedules, it was easiest to email my interviewees a list of questions, and they could then email me back with their answers at their earliest convenience. One thing that is out of my comfort zone is soliciting people for interviews and bugging people for their interview responses. I had to send out a few reminders this past week, and I hated feeling like I was bothering people. Overall, it was a good experience, and I ended up with 3 great interviews.

Final Thoughts

What are some of the new literacies that you believe you have developed as a result of new technologies? What are some of the new literacies you recognize you lack?


I think back to when I first became a scientist. I had a background in psychology, but had to learn various new literacies -- how to understand and conduct molecular biology assays, understand how to read and analyze genetics articles, pick up a whole new vocabulary covering pharmacology, and finally basic coding. Yes, coding. A lot of the behavioral experiments I ran involved using recording and analysis software. And I had to learn to code in order to tell my operant conditioning boxes what I wanted them to do, the data I wanted to record and for how long. In other words, I had to learn how to give my computer programs the parameters by which I wanted to run experiments. Today, as a teacher, I've had to learn how to use various online data tracking tools, and through this course, learn the basics of media literacy in order to be able to teach my own students about media literacy. I still think I still have a ways to go on this, but through continued "playful tinkering," I hope to continue to build my computer and media literacy proficiency over time. This will help me to make my classes relevant and authentically engaging for my students who already spend a lot of time on their smartphones and computers.

How can schools support all members of their community — teachers, administrators, students, parents — in developing these new literacies?


I think the single thing schools can do to help develop these new literacies is to give both students and teachers the freedom, time and space to playfully tinker with new technologies. I believe this will be more powerful than a 2-hr professional development (PD) session. I'm not saying to do away with PDs, as this is a good starting point for helping teachers figure out where they stand on the technology literacy spectrum. But I think that once teachers are given this gauge of where they stand, they are given the time and freedom to continue to tinker and expand their understanding of the new technologies. For students, I think that by assigning more projects that involve playful tinkering, students are then given the ability to increase their problem solving repertoire and become more technologically proficient.

On to Week 7!


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Case Study - Week 6 - Ignite Boulder



Ignite Boulder is a volunteer-run event held approximately every couple of months at the Boulder Theater. At each event, there is a line-up of a diverse group of speakers. Each speaker give a 5-minute talk with 20 slides. Each slide moves every 15 seconds, and the slides don't stop. This keeps the talks moving at a quick, energetic pace. The range of topics is broad. The rules for speaking are that the talk teaches something of social value; the presentation is original (not a talk you've given elsewhere); the slides do not include video, audio or gifs; and the talk does not promote a business or is used as a "pitch." Talks are similar to TED talks, except that they can be on the geekier and goofier side. Think "fun geek party" instead of a night of formal presentations. Sometimes there are issues with the slide deck or speakers get stuck, but the crowd is always supportive.




Ignite Boulder is modeled after Ignite Talks. Ignite Talks originated in Seattle and was started by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis in 2006. The idea was to show that PowerPoint presentations could be fun. Ignite's mission is: "Everyone speaks." The topics are based on what the speaker is passionate about. Ignite is meant to be a geek night celebration, where the speakers share what is truly important to them, and attendees learn something new by being exposed to topics they may not normally encounter on a daily basis. And through this sharing of stories, a community is built. Ignite Boulder was started in 2008 by Andrew Hyde. The first Ignite Boulder was in the Atlas Building on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. The next Ignite Boulder event will be #33 at the Boulder Theater. It has grown tremendously over the years, and it is great to see how the diversity and professional quality of the talks have evolved over time. There is a big difference in the production quality and vibe when comparing Ignite Boulder 1 to the last event, Ignite Boulder 32. There are Ignite events all over the world today, showing the popularity of this event that allows anyone to share a passion of theirs with a supportive community that is eager to learn. This shows me that the Ignite events tap into our universal desire to share stories with each other. Starting with the original Ignite Talks in Seattle, this model has spread throughout the U.S. and into Europe, South America, Africa and Asia.





In Colorado alone, there are 6 Ignite locations: Grand Junction, Gunnison, Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins, and Boulder.


I was able to get a quick interview with Andrew Hyde, founder of Ignite Boulder.


I was also able to chat with Kath Brandon, the volunteer organizer at Ignite Boulder.



Finally, I caught a quick interview with Jason Cole, someone who has presented at Ignite Boulder multiple times.



The geeky nature of the event allows for diversity of voice and many different types of stories to be told in one night. All of the talks are posted on their website and on YouTube. Here are some talks to give you an idea of the kinds of stories that are told at an Ignite event.

"Eliminating Gay as a Pejorative from our Lexicon"



"Chicks Hate Assholes" -- The slides here are hand-drawn, which add to her ability to tell her story about online dating.



"This is the Power of Intentional Giving"



"The Drug War Sucks"



"How Stories Change Your Brain"



This is from Ignite Boulder 1: "From the Mic to the Meetup"



Here, Ef tells his story of dating women over the years, including during the social media age, using his electric guitar.



Ignite events happen in 6 locations in Colorado. Check one out! Or if you're in another state, find the Ignite location closest to you. It's good fun, and usually there are fun entertainment acts during intermission to break up the string of talks. Learn something new, talk to people, and then head to the Ignite after party and continue storytelling. By the end of the night, everyone has the realization that while we may all have inherent differences, there are things that make all of us human that bind us together. It is those things that we relate to, allowing us to authentically connect with one another.



Postscriptum: This week's theme is Coding as a New Literacy. In creating the interview graphics, I was on the struggle bus with making my interview graphics the same size for this blog post. At first, the graphics were different widths, and seeing one much wider than the other, no matter what settings I clicked on, drove me crazy. I had to figure out how to manually code the graphics properly into this webpage, since this time around, choosing "original size" or "X-Large" didn't result in pictures of the same width. A lot of trial and error, and numerous attempts later, success! Well, at least for the full website. The mobile version is a different story 😒 


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Thursday, July 13, 2017

Assignment 7 - INTE5340 Horror Stories - Social Fiction



For this week's assignment, I thought it would be fun to compile a bunch of horror stories from classmates. This was definitely inspired by Dead End Fiction on Twitter. I also started noticing some friends from my academic circles tweeting with the hashtags #shortacademichorrorstory, #shortacademichorrorstories,  #academichorrorstory and #academichorrorstories. I think #socialfiction of this nature is popular on Twitter because people from that field/area of interest can relate to the horror stories and probably have experienced them themselves. All of us taking this course have shared both joy and frustration about our course, INTE5340, on Twitter, and within a few minutes of posting my first tweet as @INTE5340horror, I started getting other students in our class to tweet their horror stories. I also posted a few of my own horror stories to get people started and to provide a template for the types of tweets I was looking for. As @inte5340horror, I retweeted other people's #inte5340horrorstories. And as people's feeds got flooded with tweets with this hashtag, I think I stirred up some confusion over what this was. But with that confusion came more tweets, so causing a bit of a buzz was beneficial for my collecting of stories. As people posted their stories, I added them to a Twitter Moment, since this is a clean, easy way to curate and post related tweets. I also like how Twitter Moments can be embedded rather easily into your website.

One of the challenges I faced this week was keeping track of which Twitter account I was posting from! There were times I meant to "like" something as myself but was using the @inte5340horror profile. And vice versa. Another challenge was keeping people interested in continuing to post horror stories throughout the week. I got a lot of buzz in the first 2 days, but then interest died down. When that happened, I would tweet a new horror story to "remind" people of the project. The most tweeted horror stories revolved around using hypothes.is and finding Easter eggs. Overall, I think this was a successful social project. I was able to get a decent level of class participation, and I loved seeing everyone's creativity. I like that for this project, most entries were crowdsourced. In my last social media based assignment , all of the content was produced by me. In this project, storytelling was collaborative and participatory, adding diversity of content, media and voice. Check out all the horror story entries in the Twitter Moment below! INTE5340, you guys are awesome!


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Sunday, July 9, 2017

Week 5 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories - Finding Voice

This week's reflection is made using Plotagon. This is a great resource for making animated videos using text to speech technology. You can also upload your own voice, but for this, I thought it'd be fun to have my characters speak with the robotic voices. In keeping with my theme of this week of creating media from the road, I have my 2 characters reflecting from the car.




Assignments

This week I completed 2 assignments. Their write-ups can be found here.

Assignment 5 - Creating an Interactive Story Using Inklewriter: http://yapinte5340.blogspot.com/2017/07/assignment-5-inklewriter.html

Assignment 6 - Building a Story using Twitter Moments: http://yapinte5340.blogspot.com/2017/07/assignment-6-twitter-moment-building.html

Case Study

I also completed a case study of 18 in the Bay: http://yapinte5340.blogspot.com/2017/07/case-study-week-5-18-in-bay.html

Daily Create Challenges




All Other Media Can Be Found In This Twitter Moment



See you next week!

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Case Study - Week 5 - 18 in the Bay



I decided to do this as the case study for this week's module on Finding Voice. I got the idea from fellow classmates on hypothes.is. It was suggested that this goes along great with this week's theme. And they were right. 18 in the Bay is a series of projects put together by Matter and a group of high school seniors in the San Francisco Bay area. Here they are given a wide variety of ways of sharing their personal stories and having their voices heard.  I love that through a series of assignments, we get such a rich set of stories, each uniquely their own but each sharing a common themes. I love the authentic quality of their stories, down to the hand drawn artifacts collected from students.

How I spend my free time

How I spend my free time

Time at school

My mood

Daily mood

Timeline

Timeline

Timeline

Things I care and think about

What's important to me

How I've changed how I feel about people's perception of me and vice versa
The variety is types of assignments is great. I particularly liked the use of SnapChat for one of the assignments, Snap That. Here you can see glimpses of a day in the life of a student from this school. You see what they find interesting, what they think is important and what they consider share worthy.

https://medium.com/18-in-the-bay/snap-that-a715143eea93

The assignments given to students really allow students to explore their creativity and share their stories in many different ways. An assignment could be to create a "mix tape" and upload it to SoundCloud. It could be to write an essay or poetry. Or it is like the assignments listed above. Through participatory storytelling, we get a rich and intricate picture of the life of an 18 year old in the Bay area. All students are different individuals who share common emotions and experiences. And through their stories, we can relate to their feelings as teenagers entering adulthood. There is excitement and anxiety all at the same time, and from this series of projects we get to experience that with them. The students are given the freedom and space to tell their stories from a place of authenticity -- real life experiences of hurt, fear, sadness, joy and excitement. A great example of this is the essay "Fucking Cops Man..." Here is an excerpt:

"They aggressively but cautiously walked towards us and told us to put our hands up. Since I was the first anybody could see they checked me and my friend first. "


I would love to incorporate projects like the ones in 18 in the Bay in my chemistry classroom. It might be tough since I teach chemistry. But maybe I can incorporate some of their storytelling projects and combine that with how they see chemistry all around them. Students could record little snippets of chemistry they see throughout a given week and tie that to the current unit. For example, in a unit looking at gases and pressure, students can take photos or videos of examples of various gas laws in their everyday lives. A student could take a picture of a potato chip bag that is inflated from the increase in gas volume due to an increase in altitude. I will definitely need to keep thinking of ways to incorporate participatory collaborative storytelling into my classroom, and 18 in the Bay has definitely sparked some ideas. If you haven't checked this out yet, this really is such a good example of how to use collaborative digital storytelling in the classroom.
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Thursday, July 6, 2017

Assignment 6 - Twitter Moment - Building a Story on Twitter

Map created on Tweeted Trips: http://tweetedtrips.com/map/940/inte5340-east-coast-road-trip
This week, I have been on the road taking a trip from New Jersey to Washington DC and then down to North Carolina. My intention was to document my trip -- to collect and create artifacts along the way. The idea was to capture a bunch of experiences and with each experience create a microstory. Through the sharing of numerous microstories, I would bind them all together with a Twitter moment at the end of my week. This is something I've never tried before, and I thought this would be an interesting way to keep all these artifacts together and share on social media. I wanted to create a mix of media on this trip -- video, audio, graphics, dialogue, photos, links, daily create challenges and tweets used to crowdsource information from others in the Twittersphere. In some ways, this is similar to creating a story map or interactive timeline with the added dimension of having (and keeping track of) social interactions on Twitter. I guess this is also similar to doing a Twitter essay. This essay is a personal one, sharing more than just content pertaining to digital storytelling. The experiences shared on Twitter are small glimpses into different aspects of my life. Some of the tweets are meant to give a sense of place -- to show a place from my eyes via photographs or video clips. Others are meant to share a familiar experience or share aspects of a road trip that seem universal. And then other tweets are meant to share my experience of creating media while traveling. All these short media-based vignettes are meant to evoke feelings of familiarity, curiosity and a sharing of common ground.

I created media primarily with my smartphone and Android apps. For videos, I tried using Alive, Boomerang, and GoPro Quik. To prepare and record interviews, I used the StoryCorps app. To edit photos and create graphics, I used Photo Lab, Aviary Photo Editor, Instagram, Desygner and Prisma. To create gifs, I used the Assistant on Google Photos. Audio clips were uploaded to SoundCloud and then shared on Twitter. A map of my tweets was created using Tweeted Trips. One of the biggest challenges I faced while creating media from the road was trying to do everything from my phone. I had my laptop with me, but only accessed my laptop in the evenings. Since I was tweeting throughout the day, I used my phone to capture and edit the artifacts I was creating. Not being able to use a screen bigger than a few inches or a trackpad/mouse made editing graphics and videos a bit challenging, but I was able to figure out how to do everything I wanted from my phone. It just took a little bit of researching online with a sprinkling of trial-and-error learning. In the end, I was able to identify and use an app for everything. I guess the saying is true: "There's an app for that."

This was a fun week-long project that allowed for me to try creating a number of different forms of media. It gave me a chance to become more familiar with using my smartphone to create and share my microstories. Having the intention of sharing media throughout the week gave me a fresh set of eyes for what I was seeing and experiencing. This intentionality made me really think about what I wanted to share and how I wanted to share it. It made me think about ways to keep what I was sharing fresh and interesting to me, as well as to anyone viewing my Twitter moment. Throughout the week, I tried to post a mix of photos, graphics, videos, audio, dialogue/interviews, daily create challenges, and social interactions on Twitter. Every day, I would find things I wanted to play with or remix, and I ended up creating a lot from the road. But this creative burst was a labor of love.



Creating a Twitter moment is relatively straightforward. After clicking "Create New Moment," you can start building your moment by adding a title, description and whichever tweets you want to be a part of this moment. Any work put into the moment can be saved until you are ready to hit "Publish." Once published, you can share your moment, and you also have the ability to embed the moment into your website, just as I have done here. I like how user-friendly and intuitive it was to add or delete tweets from the moment. And I like how the end result keeps all related/relevant tweets in one place. You can arrange the tweets in any order your like, giving you extra control over how you tell your digital story. I can definitely see myself creating more Twitter moments in the future, since this was a nice way to categorize, organize and share tweets of a single theme. If you haven't tried creating a Twitter moment yet, give it a shot!
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Sunday, July 2, 2017

Assignment 5 - Inklewriter


Inklewriter is a free web-based tool that allows users to create interactive stories. I grew up loving those Choose Your Own Adventure books, so I wanted to give writing my own a try. This type of storytelling allows the reader to be an active participant in the story, having control over the direction in which the story goes. This also seems like a fun tool to use with students, since using this is a good way to mix computer skills with creative writing. I was thinking that perhaps I could assign this to my chemistry students to examine and write about a particular chemistry phenomenon. Or they could write an interactive story involving at least 2 different chemistry phenomena woven into the story. The phenomena don't have to be the point of the story, but their use of the 2 phenomena should be scientifically sound and go along with known laws of chemistry. In other words, the things that happen in their stories should happen in a way that we would expect based on known scientific principles. For example, let's say a student wants to write a story about a person accused of murder. Through a few twists and turns through interactive storytelling, the person can either be found guilty or innocent, depending on which options the reader chooses. One direction may lead the reader to find out that the person is innocent because it would be scientifically impossible for the person to have committed the crime based on the evidence presented. The other direction may lead the reader to find the person guilty. So, the main focus wouldn't necessarily to be an explanation of scientific principles but would be a part of the story.

Screenshot of Inklewriter in "Write" Mode

For this assignment, I decided to write a story about a fictional student taking our INTE 5340 course. Using the website was relatively straightforward. Coming from someone whose computer skills aren't terribly advanced, I found Inklewriter to be extremely user friendly. You begin by creating a login. I read from other users that if you do not do this first, your story cannot be saved and shared. So create a login first!

It is easy to go overboard with all the different directions the story could go. With each section, you can either join it to an existing paragraph, add options or end the story there. Story writing can quickly go out of control and in many different directions if you add too many options at each section. And you can easily lose track of loose ends, meaning that you have an option that doesn't lead to anywhere.

Once you are done creating your story, you click on "share" and receive a link to your story. When you click on the link, it looks like this.

Screenshot of Inklewriter Interactive Story


Want to give my story a shot? Click here.

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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...