Assignment 2 - Radio Commercial

This week in INTE 5340, our theme is copyright and left. We have been reading and discussing copyright laws and what is and isn't "fair use." For this week's assignment, I decided to try my hand at a radio commercial, since last week, I focused on making a graphic. I made up a fake radio talk show and used iMovie to make my commercial. "Is this Legit?" is a talk show examining copyright laws and fair use rights on a case by case basis.

I scrolled through my iTunes library, which probably hasn't been updated in about 8 years. With services like Pandora, Spotify and Amazon Prime Music, I haven't felt the need to buy music in a very long time. I started at the A's and landed on Herbert's "Audience".  As you can see, I didn't get very far in my library, but I thought "Audience" was an appropriate song for a radio talk show. I hadn't used iMovie in a long time, so it took me a while to become reacquainted with it. I recorded audio clips for the commercial using my phone and using a Voice Changer app. I used the "Old Man" voice for the guest's voice, and the "Chorus" voice for the show title at the end of the commercial.

Here is the final result, which ended up being approximately 30 seconds long.

The commercial was also made into an audio file and uploaded to SoundCloud.

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."

Case Study #1 - anth101.com - Anthropology for Everyone

For my first case study, I decided to explore anth101.com . This is an online anthropology course run by Michael Wesch, Ryan Klataske, and Tom Woodward. What got me interested in this particular website to study was a tweet from @thingkering.

I clicked on the podcast link and was brought to a Soundcloud account and Episode 1: Professor's Night Out.

I started the episode on my phone while going through my usual morning routine of feeding my cats, making breakfast and making coffee. From the beginning of the recording, I was hooked. A college anthropology professor was playing the role of the student, studying the culture of his students by spending a night out with them. He starts off by literally jumping off a ledge with his students, starting in a place that is uncomfortable for him and no longer familiar to him. He hangs out with his students from midnight to 2 am in 3 different contexts -- climbing buildings, a college frat party, and dancing in the college bar district. Throughout his relaying of his night out, he interviews the students he's with, allowing them to tell their own stories. As he lets them tell their stories, he gives his insights and commentary on what he's learned. We the listeners follow him on his journey of discovery and wonder, and through it all, we learn what it means to be human and that even in the most unfamiliar circumstances, we can find common ground.

Something a student shared from when she took his class struck me: 

"You don't know who you are when you are surrounded by people who don't know who you are."

The student continues by saying that her college experience is very much like that. You come to a new place filled with new people, and it's easy to feel lost. And college is a time of self-discovery and learning where you discover who you are in this brand new context. That got me thinking about this course, INTE 5340, and who I thought I was and where my journey of self-discovery is taking me. This course is a brand new, novel environment for all of us, and together we are creating new experiences. And with new experiences come new stories and insights about ourselves and the world around us.

Following the podcast, I went on to the anth101.com main website. There I found a very clean, user-friendly layout. This is a course that you can take online, even if you are not enrolled in Michael Wesch's class. He provides an online textbook and a syllabus to follow. There are opportunities online for students who are enrolled in his course to communicate with one another. The course is experienced through 10 lessons and 10 challenges.

10 Lessons

10 Challenges

Within each lesson, there are multiple ways to engage with the learning material. This ties well to our theme of multimodality this week in INTE 5340.

I started with Lesson 1: People Are Different. Within Lesson 1 is a link to the relevant textbook chapter, an embedded video, the podcast link, and then the challenge tied to that particular lesson. The video is approximately 16 min long. This is Wesch's introduction to his course, telling us 3 lessons he learned from his trip to New Guinea. It is a video mixed with footage he shot from a lecture he has given, pictures from his trip to New Guinea, and new video clips. And his lessons are told through storytelling. 

Then there is a link to read the first lesson in Wesch's book, The Art of Being Human.

Lesson 1 in the book gives us an introduction to anthropology through Wesch's relaying of his own personal introduction to anthropology. He takes us through his very first anthropology class as a student 20 years ago. Very much like this course, INTE 5340, he focuses on the essence of anthropology (which is also the essence of learning through storytelling). Our learning comes from a place of connection and creation of new experiences.

One insight in particular made me think more deeply about INTE 5340 and the telling of digital stories.

A lot of the technological tools I have been exposed to in weeks 1 and 2 of INTE 5340 started off as "exotic oddities" to me, things I didn't quite understand. But then we started to dig deeper, ask questions of each other and ourselves, and connections began to form. Over the course of 2 weeks, "exotic oddities" became "exciting possibilities." We were a part of this ever-changing, ever-evolving beast of experiences, conversations, creations and connections. And from this we are creating the course week after week, hypothes.is comment after hypothes.is comment, tweet after tweet. We are sharing our stories with each other, bringing the course into interesting directions, and opening our world to many exciting possibilities for growth.

Everything is then tied together with a challenge, which is similar to our assignments in our assignment bank. The first challenge is to talk to strangers and document their stories. This is an opportunity to make connections and create, an opportunity to tell someone else's story and make it part of your own personal story. With each challenge ,the student is challenged to "live it" -- to live and experience the theme of the lesson.

anth101.com models for me what a living, breathing course can look like. When I look back to when I taught Drugs and Behavior and Intro Psych, I see the classes I taught as boring and lifeless. We as a class didn't create our own stories together, and we lost the opportunities to make connections. I really like how well-integrated all the various media for each lesson and challenge are on the website. And the more I dig into this site, the more I am personally challenged​ to design my classes to have more of an open pedagogy behind them and being okay with my classes being in the "beta" stage every week.

Assignment 1 - Posterize It

Today I decided to try my hand at one of the assignments in our assignment bank. The bank has 20 assignments, and by the end of the course, we are to have completed and posted 10 of them. I really like the flexibility given to us in choosing which assignments to do. Within each assignment there is additional flexibility, where inspiration and examples are given, but the choice of what and how to do the particular assignment is up to us as students. It took me a while to peruse through the various assignment options in the bank. I thought I would take the opportunity to try out Canva to make a poster, so I chose to do the "Posterize It" assignment. Here we are to create or remix a poster for an idea or concept explored this week. I looked through multiple examples and ideas posted, and settled on doing a minimalist poster of one of my favorite TV shows, Breaking Bad. I chose this because last week's theme was context, and time was spent getting to know each other online and sharing about ourselves. Breaking Bad was a series I really related to, being a scientist turned high school chemistry teacher (minus the illegal manufacturing of methamphetamine and becoming a drug lord...although in my last career, I did work with methamphetamine and other drugs of abuse).

This was my first time trying out Canva after it was recommended by our course instructor, so I thought this was a good place to start making my poster. I began by taking an online photo of a blue crystal that was sort of head-shaped and making it more cartoon-like using Cartoonize.net. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to do this using Photoshop or Illustrator, but I thought I'd try using a quick online tool.

Cartoonized version of blue crystal

Then I uploaded that into Canva and flipped it so that it looked more like a human head. Next, I played around with the shapes tool and made a hat to put on top of my crystal head and uploaded clipart of sunglasses to add to my face. Finally, I added some text -- the show title and my favorite quote from the series -- and uploaded a picture of a crystal meth molecule and played with the transparency so that the show title could be superimposed on top of the molecule. Here is the final result.

There was a lot of trial-and-error learning using Canva in order to make the poster look the way I wanted, but I think I'm generally pleased with the result. The only thing I didn't like about Canva is that I couldn't figure out a way to free draw if I wanted to. Maybe there's a way to do that in Canva, but I didn't find it. I will definitely continue to play with Canva to become more familiar with it.

Week 1 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories

Here we are at the end of week 1. This is a course that has already introduced me to new technology and ways to use them in learning. We started the week with getting set up on the various platforms we will be using throughout the 8 weeks of this course.  The first thing I met with initial dread was having to finally cave and open my own Twitter account.

It's not that I'm anti-social media or anything like that. It just feels like there's so much activity going on at once on Twitter that I don't know where to focus. It is overwhelming at first (and still is for me after week 1). But once over my initial skepticism and having a starting point of the Daily Create to channel my attention towards, I took the plunge and tried out my first challenge, posting a Sgt Hulka selfie. It felt silly, but I think that starting these Daily Create challenges helps build community among fellow digital classmates through regular exposure and interaction. It also starts the practice and habit of just making something every day. Or at least thinking about making something every day. Finally, getting started on the Daily Creates helped me get more familiar using my smartphone as more than just a rectangle that receives and sends text messages, emails, and pictures.

My first Daily Create got me used to the selfie camera on my phone, and I got to practice posting on Twitter, tagging the appropriate people and using the appropriate tags. Afterwards, I dug into the syllabus and got my first exposure to using Hypothes.is. My initial impression was a very good one. I liked how integrated everything was. Being able to annotate, comment and reply to others' comments was all intuitive, and it makes having an online class discussion easy to have and easy to follow, since all the comments and highlights are directly on the document being discussed. This week we used Hypothes.is to go over the syllabus together, go over the Week 1 module's introduction, videos and Soundcloud announcements. And then we got our first article to discuss.

As I continued to work on the course content on Canvas and started to check off things from my "to-do" list for this course, I started using Twitter a bit more to get acquainted with it and tried my hand at a couple more Daily Create challenges. The next challenge was to create a "Ridiculous Latte." Here, we were to put a latte in an unexpected place. As someone who likes to take pictures but rarely edits or modifies them (except for maybe the use of a hipster filter on Instagram), I had to think about how I could get a picture of a latte into a different container. I decided to try to do this on my smartphone since it seems like my students are always making funny pictures using their phones. I took a virtual trip to the Google Play store on my Android device and found a free cut and paste app aptly named Cut Paste Photos. The app name seemed to fit my needs, so I started there. I took a photo of a grumpy cat latte online, cut the latte part out and pasted it onto a photo of a bird's nest (also taken from online).  There was some trial and error in making this, but it was a good experience overall of trying something new.

 

Third challenge was to use Talk Obama to Me to have Obama say something about the Daily Create. I tried it out, used an Orson Welles quote, and posted it on Twitter. 

I have to say that I wasn't very pleased with the result. I don't think that it was necessarily a bad challenge. If anything, it got me to try yet another new way to make something. What I didn't like is that the final video wouldn't embed into my Twitter feed. And it looked like 80% of people who did this challenge had the same issue, as the majority of my feed that day looked like what I posted above. Admittedly, I didn't really spend much time looking at other people's work on that Daily Create because almost all of them required to click on the link to be brought to the Talk Obama to Me site. And what you got when you got there was the original text with the video on top. It's more steps than I wanted to take to view other people's work, and I'm sure others probably felt the same way as well and just skipped over mine since it wasn't an embedded video. Plus, the videos became monotonous, since they were all pretty much made in the same way.

Last challenge I tried out was to use a photo of the Nordic Prime Ministers and have them summon something. I thought I'd have a bit of a laugh with this one, so I took a photo of the Nordic Prime Ministers all holding a ball and had cats pop up all over the photo. The app I used was Add a Cat . This app is very similar to an old app I had on my old iPhone, CatPaint. 

After week 1, I am still learning the ropes on Twitter and getting used to having my posts be completely public. So far, I've only really posted things related to this course, and will probably only use it for that for the next 7 weeks. In using my computer and smartphone more, I've definitely had head-scratching moments due to my lack of technological proficiency.

But I'm definitely giving it a shot. I'll undoubtedly make mistakes, but over the course of the next 7 weeks I hope to at least become more comfortable and proficient in using technology in this course, and in turn, in my own brick-and-mortar classroom. 

The theme for Week 1 was Context. This week set the stage for what the rest of the course would be like. And this technological dinosaur is excited to continue learning and growing. I'm using my time in the course to think of ways to integrate more technology into my classes and allow my students to use their creativity to tell their own digital stories. It may be tricky with high school chemistry, but I'm already getting ideas of how my students could use Hypothes.is to peer review each other's work or analyze a news article. Or how they can use Twitter to do something like a Daily Create on a weekly basis by finding chemistry all around them and posting about it once a week. Or have them do some sort of weekly reflection to stamp in their learning. It's only Week 1 and I've already gotten some good ideas. I'm excited to see how those ideas develop over the next 7 weeks. Plus, I really can't beat my summer classroom.