I guess the one question that keeps resurfacing over and over again as I do research is why did the US become so obsessed with the idea of the Mafia and Organized Crime? It seems strange that they became so popular since they made money off of what was illegal. (And still do!) However, it also makes sense because many people opposed prohibition to begin with so if they could defy the system, they did. When prohibition ended and the Depression came in full force, the memories off bootlegged alcohol and speakeasies still lingered. A memory of better times perhaps? So Hollywood began making movies about the Mafia in the 30′s and well…. it turned into a pop-culture phenomenon. This is all speculation from reading up on secondary material. I think to really look into the mind set of the time I would have to, not just watch a couple of movies. But branch out into newspapers, magazines, books, and anything else which might provide a personal opinion about the Mafia.

However that is a lot to cover in a semester, I cannot feasibly look through every article in every newspaper ever published. (However, if I had a time turner…..)So I was thinking about looking at 2 national Newspapers at least. Magazines are a little easier however I am not sure how much easier. For magazines I think I will focus on the educationalish/political ones such as Time and National Geographic. (Mostly because I am curious to see what they have written) Books… well are prob the easiest to find. I already stumbled across a few which I can use as a primary source. (Herburt Asbury) However, books are also difficult because in some cases I can use them as a secondary source. Actually the same might even go for magazines….  I think this means I will be taking a couple of trips to the Library of Congress, I mean it is there I might as well use it. =D

However, the 30′s itself is an interesting time because of everything that happened. It is interesting to look at how people coped during difficult times. (kinda like now ) I think the US (and probably other cultures) has always harbored a fascination for what is unlawful (Wyatt Earp?) or criminal. However just as the Wild West became America’s symbol for expansion, one has to wonder what the Mafia was the symbol. Maybe I can answer that

Like I said this is just a rough sketch of what my proposal will be, I just wanted to get ideas written and to begin actually thinking more about what my paper will be about. To begin to tie up the loose ends basically.

And this is the actual castle:

There were some trails around the castle but we agreed that they pretty much just looked like  woods so we headed back to the city.  We found a bar/restaurant in town that had yummy yummy sandwiches, we were starving at this point, and then we went to the bus station and caught the 3:30 bus back to cork.  I think it was a successful first adventure to another town in Ireland. We also got to see the suburbs of Ireland, which I had never really seen before.  Here is a little shot of them:

So that about sums up our trip to Killarney.  We just finalized a lot of travel plans with out two closest friends here, we are probably going to Galway next weekend and Edinburgh the weekend after that.  After mapping out our entire 5 months here, it is surprising how many of our weekends are already accounted for.  We pretty much have all of our weekends planned out until May which is really weird and makes it seem like it is going to go by so fast! But in a good way.

But in the end, for some reason, the tucked-away-in-the-corner-pieces of the house meant the most.

Small things that kept life consistent.

The things we missed in the rush.

Once everything else was out.

When we had nothing left to do but leave.

I saw the beauty in what was left.

The paint for mending.

The structures that stood the test of time and temper tantrums and sleepovers and morning routines and parties and youth.

They’ve aged, those structures.

So have we.

Moving shines a light on both of those facts.

Big girls do cry.

Boxes. Upon boxes. And then.

More.

There were also life-threatening stunts.

And then there’s the issue of what to do without blinds or curtains.

(okay, well that one wasn’t an issue for long)

Please don’t get me wrong– we’ve had oodles of fun and quite spirited laughter. Enough, even, to make this new house feel like home. If just for the 6 months of our lease agreement. That’s right, boxes and I might meet again very soon.

And I will say, with a nod, “Boxes. We meet again.” Mom, Dad, Luke, Emily, Steph, and I (and possible a more mobile Truett along with a posse of moving company men) will then bust a move on the heaps again.

This is not to say that I look forward to it, per se.

Honestly, it hasn’t been that bad. Especially because I am apparently able to sleep through the morning in the middle of the room that boxes are being stockpiled in. Useful life skill, folks. Also because, hey, boxes upon boxes of crap or not, I cannot lose sight of the privilege that is basic shelter.

But the moving thing is time consuming and brain zapping and that is why I’ve been a failure of a DS106 internaut alum for a solid month now.

Suffice it to say, I now understand the forewarning, pitying eyes.

And I’m back in the game.

I’m taking 5 classes, all held on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Another thing that can be quite confusing is that classes that are on 2 separate days, such as Tuesday and Thursday, are also at different times on those days, for example on Tuesday it could be at 1 and on Thursday it could be at 9,  and sometimes in different rooms.  Anyways we finally got it all figured out and my classes are: Irish Folklore, Irish History, Irish Government and Politics, Geography of Ireland before 1960, and Introduction to International Food Policy.  The last one is obviously just a fill in, I was simply looking for a 100 level class that fit into my schedule and sounded easy, so International Food Policy it is.  Not to mention I do love food, so maybe I’ll actually enjoy it.  I’m a little sad no math or computer science classes could fit into my schedule, but my nerdy side will just have to survive a semester without them.

We went out pubbing last night.  It was a big night because something called “little Christmas” was being celebrated.  It’s the last official day of the Christmas holiday here in Ireland and all the women go out to relax and hang out because they have been cooking and cleaning and working really hard for all of the Christmas holiday.  So it’s a day designated for the women to wind down and relax a bit.  We didn’t go any pubs that had a lot of women there, we went to the ones that are mainly populated by students, but those were really crowded also.  I wore black ankle length heels out for the first time, I’d say they are 2 to 3 inches high (so really high for me) and my feet were hurting as soon as we walked out the door.  But luckily we got a taxi to the first pub we went to, it’s called Bailey’s, we stayed there for an hour or so, I was standing still most of the time so I didn’t notice the heels too much.  Bu then we decided to go to another pub, which was a good 5 minute walk and I knew I couldn’t make it the heels.  Of course I had brought my sperrys because it was highly unlikely I would be able to make it through an entire night in heels considering I haven’t worn them since prom.  So I put on my sperrys and the excruciating pains in my feet subsided a bit.  I’m being a bit dramatic, but it was painful.  I was told that after I wear them out for two complete nights I should be used to them at least a little bit, so I am going to persevere and keep on trying to walk in those heels.

We are pretty much done with all of our initial shopping, we just have some little things we would like to get, like an ice tray and a dish towel.  We want to travel somewhere this weekend, probably somewhere else in Ireland via the train. We haven’t decided yet.

One more thing, last night at the pub I was asking this guy about soccer and if he knew of any teams I could join and he was “oh yeah there’s actually an American league here!” And he went on to say that is called the Patriot league (I think) and how it’s competitive and a great league and blah blah blah. And then he says “Oh but it’s only for men.” WHAT?! Way to get my hopes up and then just shoot ‘em down.  And he went on to say that I should just play handball, or frisbee.  Big help he was.

The second revolution formed largely in Southern Italy because of the oppression the peasants faced under the Bourbon Regime. The leader of the second revolution was Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian military figure. The revolution succeeded, the Bourbons were overthrown, and Garibaldi put a new government in place. However this new government turned out to be even more oppressive because it completely ignored the needs of the peasants. Taxes skyrocketed and their was a loss of industrial protection, which in turn led to the closure of many factories. ³ Tariffs were raised which helped northern Italy but actually hurt the South. In turn the peasants lost faith in this new government and began supporting others. This lead to a period of violence where, “the government sent some 60 battalions of crack combat soldiers to teach a lesson  to the Southerners.” ⁴ Here an agricultural Depression set in and southern Italy began losing more faith in their own government.

This is only a condensed version of why many of the immigrants who immigrated to the US were from southern Italy. I think that it is interesting to note that the origins of the Mafia are believed to be in Southern Italy. So I think from here I will research more about the origin of organized crime in Italy. Maybe it will help answer why the Mafia became a popular culture phenomenon in the US and not in it’s country of origin, Italy. But here is a quote to end with, which I found interesting.

“If the legitimacy of the new Italian government was now to be assessed in terms of the degree to which the new government (in contrast to the old) secured respect for the basic rights of human dignity and harnessed political power to justice and the common good, it was fundamentally defective.” ⁵

We know a girl from Mary Wash that is here and she lives in a place called the Spires which is very close to UCC so we found the Spires and met Kelly, the girl from Mary Wash, and her roommate Sarah.  We all went to UCC together and looked around the campus and then we took them to the city and showed them around a bit.  We got dinner and then went to a pub that is right across the street from our apartment.  Kelly and I got a Guinness, and I liked it a lot more than I was expecting to, and Leigh and Sarah drank a cider beer called Bulmers.  The pub was completely dead considering it was 7 o’clock on a Monday, so we just hung out and talked, and we are planning on going out to the real pubbing scene tomorrow night!

Orientation tomorrow, where we will pick our classes and I will hopefully create a schedule that consists of me going to class twice a week and never having to think about it on my 5 day weekends.  We will see how that plan works out for me.

This is city centre (Cork city) at night. It is all lit up and beautiful and there are always a good amount of people walking around, I love it already.

This is the quad of UCC. Nice and green! We walked around a little today and ran into 2 other groups of American students doing the same thing. Those Americans, so typical.

I’m gonna bust out my camera tomorrow and try and post some pictures soon!

I have two text widgets on each page-an about box and internship experience sidebar. I may change these once I figure out how I want to incorporate my resume, but for now this will work. I created a blog post that links to each section of my portfolio with a brief description.

Each page links to my work around the web.

The special projects section includes links to Aisle 2 Bin 36 and Apropos Literary Journal.

I’m still looking into other themes and might change to one with a featured post slider. I also want to incorporate some of the work I completed in Digital Storytelling and a few other classes somehow.

Now as these stories go, it doesn’t end there. Just yesterday I was going through my Mom’s jewelry when I cam across a black box. It turns out that this black box contains all of my Grandma’s jewelry, which was given to my mom for safekeeping after she passed away. Imagine my shock when I came across this!

The Front:

The Back:

Needless to say I immediately ran to get the teacup to confirm that they are in fact the same picture. I don’t know much about art, but I did notice some differences. Mostly the color scheme and the fact that the teacup appears to be some kind of water color painting.

Why am I posting about this? Well besides the fact that this is just really a strange occurrence… I mean I just happened to be obsessed with THAT tea cup and then happen to stumble across THAT brooch a couple days later??? It amuses me…. So I want to know if anyone else recognizes the painting and if they can provide more information. Unfortunately the teacup doesn’t have any sort of markings, all that I found was on the back of the brooch. And well, that really isn’t that much to go on. But I really want to figure out if this was a popular painting used on porcelain, probably from the early to mid 20th century, and who painted it in the first place.

9 AM: Now we don’t have a small family, there are 5 of us. As it happens, my 2 brother go through a ridiculous amount of clothing. (No wonder my mother is sick of doing their laundry) There have been repeated attempts to get them to do their own laundry in the past, but to no avail. This is actually another reason why I can’t stand doing my families laundry, BECAUSE I ALREADY DO MY OWN LAUNDRY! So really, I find it unfair that I have to do their laundry too. But yes. Middle-sized family actually amounts to lots of clothes.

9:30 AM: I do attempt to organize the clothes ahead of time, (Dark, Colors, and Light) to make it easier on myself. However I still feel swamped by the sheer amount of clothing that can be fit into that tiny room. Also my dog doesn’t make organizing any easier because she seems to be on a mission to undo everything that I have done. Why? Because of her blasted Tennis Ball. I am sure it appeared in many photos.

11:45 AM: I am 3 loads in and still have yet to see anything of my own laundry. Because of this I am doing everything I can to speed up the process. I just put a load of sweaters in; technically I should change the setting to Heavy. However that takes 58 minutes to wash. So instead I change it to Normal. Now we are at a reasonable 48 minutes.

12:00 PM: So many socks! Now when I am folding things, I admit I do have some problem differentiating clothes between my brothers and father. However, I usually take style into consideration and that does most of the sorting for me. Except for the one area where it really doesn’t apply… that would be socks. More often than not, I am left confused wondering which pair belongs to whom. Because they are all the same style, and size. Most of the time I just guess. Nobody has complained so far.

1:00 PM: Also, my dog seems to think that running in circles around me and messing up the laundry will make me play with her. She doesn’t realize I just get angry, because I have to refold all of those clothes.

2:00 PM: There comes that point while doing laundry that you realize that you are over halfway done! This is happening to me now. However, I also just realized that I spent the last 4 ½ hours doing laundry, so I am not as happy as I could be.

2:15 PM: Next load isn’t done for another 30 Minutes… that means nap time….

2:45 PM: After I fold this load I declare myself done. I can get to the other 2 loads another day…. I am exhausted.

I don’t really know what the point is, to be ranting about laundry. But I am sure that there are other fellow laundry haters like me out there too. So you can relate. It is obviously a necessity, but sometimes I feel like it can be made a bit easier on people. Really the only reason why I agree to do laundry when I come home for the holidays is because I know that it is normally my Mom doing all the laundry. I am sure she gets sick of it to, so to make it easier on her I consent to do laundry. And if anyone actually enjoys doing laundry, kudos to them! Care to do mine?

We move out tomorrow. Like all of our things.

As in there are no random bottles of shampoo for me to squeeze by with. No 21 years worth of toiletries stowed haphazardly in corners or cabinets or drawers. No towels even. Just barely any toilet paper left.

And we aren’t going to the store to buy more.

(at least not to bring back here.)

There are no pictures on the walls for the track lighting Dad installed to illuminate. There are just boxes. I get that they’re leaving.

But me? I don’t guess I very well grasp the idea of never fumbling through that red door with groceries or kicking off my shoes in that very convenient corner in the foyer. I’m laying in my bedroom, the same one from all those years– the twin bed, the tree house bed, this bed; the grey walls, the pepto-bismol striped wallpaper, the fresh coat of teal paint. My Dad used to climb the little pink steps to the top of the house he built me to kiss me goodnight. Mom would say prayers with me, asking God that I might wake up “happy! in the mornin’.” Emily read Precious Moments stories to me or kept me company when we watched a few too many detective shows. Luke and Stephanie used this as their office when they lived here for a year as newlyweds.

I get that the things are going.

But no amount of before and after pictures from over the years prepares me for what I know to be true: this is the last night.

Maybe it’s supposed to feel this way for a reason. Like the inability to wrap my mind around the situation is a safeguard. It won’t really seem like my last night here until I’m spending my first night away for good. And by then it’s past. A rip the bandaid sort of thing. Tomorrow night looking back this might feel a momentous night. But tonight feels like any other.

So I’ll go to sleep tonight like it is any other– thankful for the many nights past. For the 21 years of waking up in this home, if not happy, then healthy.

And on this, the last one, I look forward to the first.

These fifteen weeks have been great, I feel like I haven’t done my part though. I started off well with my digital story making posts on Photoshopping, but after a few, I could not think of what to do a tutorial on. I only had limited knowledge about Photoshop and I think it showed in my lack of posts at the end. Also, my other courses decided to bombard me with work at the end of the semester for some reason which did not help my blog. I feel bad that I slacked off in the end because I got behind on the assignments and they kept coming, then I did less work on my Photoshopping. I feel like I did not do the class the justice it deserves, but being less formally structured than all the others somehow it got put on the back burner. At the end when I was about caught up on assignments, my computer decided to format itself and start anew…great. If I were to make suggestions on this class I would say that you should hold people to their digital stories more, and make them post at least once a week. I think if I knew that my grade would drop every post I did not do, I would make more of an effort to do them. I’m not saying that my grade won’t drop because I did not do some posts, but you did not express it as much. I would also suggest that the syllabus be longer and more detailed. I would also suggest a few less assignments or at least let them choose let’s say 8 or 10 out of the 12 you will assign. That way people will be able to take one off when they may have a lot of work in their other classes.

Regrets

I feel like I did my part in this class, but only just getting by. I did not go beyond what I had to do with my blog. It may be because blogging isn’t my thing or because I ran out of ideas. Either way looking back I should have done more and put more time into my blog. I also regret that my computer formatted itself because it made me look like I was slacking more on my blog than I really was.  I feel like I did not show you how on point of a student I can be and I will be looking to sign up for some of the other classes you teach in the future.

Hearing about it so much makes me wish DS106 were part of a two-course sequence, because after 15 weeks, I only want more. I’ve never been in a college class that encourages students to think so creatively about developing content and gives such freedom to create a digital identity. In my reflection paper for my literary journal class, I said the phrase “you’ll get out of it what you put into it” is an appropriate why to put that class in context, and I think the same applies to Digital Storytelling. Yes, the workload was heavy, but you warned us about that on day one.

As a student I tried to approach assignments with the mindset that because of the heavy workload, I was picking up skills that would not only help me create a better final project, but also be useful in my future career field. In hindsight, none of the assignments actually felt like “an assignment” to me and I think that’s because with each of them, we were allowed to explore what interested us rather than being told specifically how to approach the task. You always gave suggestions to get us thinking, but made it clear we could go beyond these.

With some classes I think it’s easy to approach an assignment with an attitude of “How quickly can I get this done?” or “Why are we even doing this?” and I never associated those outlooks with DS106 because of the way the course is largely focused on the students’ process of creating, sharing and discussing content that is significant to them.

The assignments, projects and tools I enjoyed most were the ones I knew little about prior to taking the class, but craved to have more experience with in their use. I think knowing how to use tools like Audacity and work with video will help me a lot in the field I hope to pursue in the future. It was always helpful when you went over the tools in class and had us experiment with the tools in groups first. I know the both might be sacrificed to an extent in the online course, but there are ways I think that can be substituted, especially through the use of video tutorials. I know someone suggested filming the sessions of the class that meets, but honestly, that would probably make me drop the online course. I wouldn’t want to watch a 75-minute video of a regular class each week if I signed up for an online course. I’d be more interested in shorter video tutorials or screencasts walking me through a specific tool. For example, I think a screencast (or even just a post of screenshots) guiding us through switching to new webhosts at the end of the semster would have been helpful. Obviously meeting with you was a huge help, which I appreciate, but as I tried it on my own prior to meeting I had trouble following the directions and knowing where to go, click and download within cPanel.

To echo what was said in class last week, I agree a schedule of assignments would have been helpful early in the semester in addition to the syllabus, even if it were just as simple as “Week 1-Daily Shoot, Week 2-Uninteresting Audio Story, Week 3-El Mashup…” so we would have maybe known what to expect timing-wise in relation to assignments in other courses.

I really appreciated the feedback you gave all of us in our blogs and individual meetings. Honestly, I’ve never had a professor who gave the level of feedback to every student that you gave to each DS106er, and I think this is one reason why the class is such a hit. Your enthusiasm about our blogs and the course content was contagious. It was always great to receive feedback and your highlighting of classmates posts and projects always sparked my interest to explore their content more or reflect on it differently that I might have on a first reading. I know you’ve said you want to highlight individual work more next semester, which I think is great.

One area where I could have improved was in commenting. In the beginning of the semester, I was doing well with keeping up with posts and responding to their work. However, as my assignment load increased in school and work, I didn’t budget enough time in my schedule for commenting. I was visiting the site frequently and reading the majority of posts (skimming others), but my mouse didn’t always meet the comment link in the last few weeks.

Overall, I consider my experience in the class was a positive one, because I enjoy assignments that challenge me to be creative. What’s nice about ds106 is that because of it’s digital nature, the class gives students exposure to several different types of tools that at first might seem unconnected, but can really all be incorporated into one piece (like our final digital storytelling projects). The Daily Shoot Project…El Mashup…Uninteresting Audio Story…the tools associated with these are different-photography, video, audio-but each can become one component of a larger project on the web. This is something I was trying to do with my own digital story.

The Final Project was my favorite project, because for me, it gave me the opportunity to do something I love and incorporated so many of the tools we were introduced to in smaller assignments. Given such freedom to pursue and present a topic of my choice also was motivating. I constantly asked myself, “How can this story be told digitally-what tools does the digital environment provide that I might not be able to use elsewhere?” and from blogging about it to the final project itself, I think my digital project shows I put a lot of time and thought into sharing the Swope’s story.

Season 1 Trailer

In season 2, a church group starts to train a group called “soldiers of the Sun”, in which they are going to try to use to kill off vampires. The most powerful vampire alive allows them to capture him to see what they wish to do, knowing he can escape at anytime. After puting an end to the group he decides that there is no reason for him to go on living, 2,000 years was enough. He stays on the roof of a building past sunrise and burns. There is also another powerful being that is introduced, a maenad. There isn’t a very clear explanation of what that is but vampires cannot hurt her. I don’t want to give away too many details but they eventually get rid of her.

Season 2 Trailer

Another reason why I like this show is for its amazing cliff hangers at the end of every episode. It leaves you wondering for a week “what the hell?”. In season 3 the fight between the humans and vampires gets really heated when one of the oldest and strongest vampires kills a news anchor on national television. This starts a huge uprise from the humans thinking that if one vampire is that crazy, then they all are. We also gain more insight into what Sookie is and that she may even have the power to stop the strongest vampire. Werewolves are also introduced into the story in season 3, and they are even used to do vampires bidding as long as they are given V. Vampire blood, called V, is a drug in the show that helps you heal and makes you stronger for a certain amount of time, so the werewolves trade their services for V.

Season 3 Trailer

Season 4 airs this summer and I can’t wait.

I am writing this post in a great mood! The reason? I am done! Yes I am also exhausted, mentally and physically, but I am done. And I am going to enjoy this moment because I come tomorrow I will begin to worry and fret about my grades. It is inevitable.

It is always a strange feeling being done with exams, you feel kind of relieved knowing that for at least the next month all that will be expected of you will be to eat massive amounts of food. Yes the holidays are looming, or the consumerist version of the holidays is. In some ways that almost destroys the actual tradition of each individual holiday. Although I expect I will write more on that later. Instead I will leave this post short and remind everyone to relax. Even if you have finals tomorrow, it is almost done.

And here are some pictures from this past week.  :)

nobody blogs like the bava. nobody!

So, if D’Arcy Norman isn’t already doing sick mashups featuring yours truly as the “Mad Men” poster–which is brilliant!—then Tom Woodward is laying down assignment after assignment already on his bionic blog—and I quote:

Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.

All I can say is—are you kidding me? I know who my masters are, and I’m ready to bow down before them already—how sick is this digital storytelling course going to be? Every minute I just get more and more fired up, this is truly what I’ve needed for a while, and now it’s coming together.

What’s more, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, Bonnie Stewart, and Alexander McAuley have produced some really compelling and succinct video explanations about what a MOOC is, what to expect, and how you can be a successful part of one. The later video really helps frame my thinking for the whole thing—and gives the course some essential guidelines to start designing around. I can’t thank them all enough. Again, Canadian edtech crew FTW! When is someone gonna give me a job in Canada? Preferably Vancouver

And let me add to the title of my post the following qualification:

As far as criticism of the class goes, I have a couple. While we were actually in class, I honestly felt like I took very little away from most of the discussions. This isn’t because I wasn’t interested in the topics; this class actually touched on subjects I am genuinely interested in many times and usually multiple times in a class. More of my problem was that most classes were a lecture, and that at certain times people would almost engage in discussion with you as class was going on. I had no real problem with this in class (I would just do something stupid like play Hanger on www.addictinggames.com) , but it did take away my interest and got me going on to things that really had nothing to do with class. I believe in such thing as a follow up question in class, but if it turns into a one on one discussion it’s a little bit excessive. I would also have liked to have had more group projects. The fun thing about working with the same group all the times we had to do something (which I think was four) is that we would all know our roles and what we would have to do. This really helped us during the making of our projects and these were the most fun times I had in class. They were also the times when I learned the most about what I could do with the materials at my disposal, which I think was the entire point of the class (or maybe a side point).

All in all, I really enjoyed the class. I enjoyed my classmates, the content, and the professor. Keep teaching it.

And the dumbest video yet:

After a little trouble getting the picture links fixed, I think everything is working properly.

As I mentioned in my last post, a number of folks have offered to help with the design and execution of ds106. In fact a few have already publicly pledged their undying loyalty—and that’s a party right there! I’m eternally grateful, and the only way to show true gratitude is to actually give folks some more work for no pay—the neo-liberal way! So below is a quick Santa Claus Wish List, very much in the spirit of the season. You give, I take. That said, I plan on adding to this list regularly, and please feel free to do the same via your own blog or the comments.

• The syndication and republishing of comments represents a particular issue, part of which is solved. All posts tagged ds106 from the contributing blogs will republish on the ds106.us site using FeedWordPress. And as Cogdog notes here, we can use FeedWordPress and the way it turns tags into categories as a way to come up with a more structured tag taxonomy for each assignment so we can represent all the different projects/assignments visually and contextually using tags and categories Given that, each post will be syndicated and categorized, but the permalink and “leave comment” link will both point back to the original post so people can comment on the source.

  What we need is a way to represent the number of comments on the actual blog on the syndicated post showing up in ds106.us. Moreover, we need a way to feed out comments from all the different blogs to a recent comments widget (or something like it) in the ds106.us sidebar. So, in short, the same old issue of syndicating and aggregating comments like we do posts. This is kinda like getting the Lego Death Star for Xmas, probably not gonna happen, but why not dream big. or at least let folks tackle one aspect of this problem—like maybe Slave 1?

• I would love to see some idea around integrating Wikipedia into this course effectively. My initial idea was to open up discussing the Wikipedia article on Digital storytelling, which I have each time I started this class, and for the first week try and generate so ideas around making the article better. Or at least dealing with some of the issue Wikipedians have pointed out exist. There are a lot of missing sources and citations. Can we come up with some? Can we read through the article and tighten it up as a way to get a sense on how one of the most powerful sites on the internet works—all the while highlighting that we make it so. So, in short, a little help on editing Wikipedia, Jon Beasley-Murray and Brian Lamb taught us this years ago, and I would love to see some resources, citations, sources etc (and I need to get on this) so that we can keep this as a distributed, ongoing project over the course of the semester. And it can obviously branch out. The other idea I had was everyone take one an article, or adopt one and just track the process of editing Wikipedia. In every Wikipedia article their is a cultural story, and no one has made this clearer than Jon Udell in his Heavy Metal Umlaut screencast.

• Ideas for assignments of all kinds. What comes to my mind immediately is the need for a graphic design assignment. I talked abut the Megashark infographic and the Boba Fett invoice during this semester, are more than a few students bemoaned the fact we didn;t play more with graphic design in the space between images/photography and audio. I think we could do that this time around, and I would love ideas/assignments. Tom Woodward introduced me to the Superpunch blog, and I think this might need be the “text” for this section of the course You are required to follow that blog regularly all week —all 400 weekly posts!

• Tutorials for setting up a web hosting service, a WordPress blog, subdomains, etc. I have some of this already, but I am thinking that perhaps turning the ds106.us into a more comprehensive space to document the process of setting up your own web host, mapping your domain, and generally managing and manipulating the options in CPanel might serve many an educator, student, and everyday web citizen well in the future. And while I don;t want to reinvent the wheel, I think such documentation is something I will be working on anyway for those coming on with no experience in these matters, and I would love to work with others on this. I am one of the odd people that really enjoys writing support documentation, and of you other nuts out there?

• Some recommendations for plugins and ways to make the ds106.us site more user friendly and perhaps a plugin I can use to send registered members of that blog email updates using a specific category or tag only. Like announcement. Also, what sucks about the site, how would you do it different? Ideas for using the wiki more powerfully? Some general ideas, thoughts, visions I am not seeing? The syllabus is up and kinda raw, it’s from my last two semesters, and hasn’t changed much. Any ideas for that—feel free to edit it, just register on the ds106.us log and you can edit away? I put < a href="http://ds106.us/category/assignments/">6 or 7 assignments up, which were voted the best from this past semester, any ideas, thoughts, or recommendations for those? Better ideas to replace them? Tom Woodward mentioned the idea of having folks submit assignments at a given time and let people choose what they want to do, a kind of real life choose your own assignment/adventure based upon the particular theme we ar covering, i.e. video, audio, images, design, fan fiction, etc. How would this work? What would allow for this to be integrated into the experience?

That’s all I got for now, but I know there is much, much more. And if you wanna help there is no better time than now. Whadya got?

1. The first one I guess will be the obvious. As students,, we hear our Professors tell us this All The Time. It’s pretty simple. Don’t try to cram everything you need to know for an exam into 3 hours of intensive studying. It won’t work. Our short term memory is not that great. However, I do realize that most times we find out self short on time for studying. How to compensate for that? I recommend about 3-4 days ahead of the exam, just set aside an hour to go over the notes and articles you have read. Really you spend the same amount of time studying but because you spread it out, you have time to review everything you went over. Helping you remember. This video is just interesting, however accurate it may be….
2. The second point is kind of related to the first one. However this one is more about how to study vast amounts of information, rather than when to do it. This is just something that has worked for me in the past, and maybe it will work for others. One thing that I like to do when studying for a history exam is to create a story out of all the dates and terms and people. Rather than memorizing each individual event, I try to make a story in my head about how each event leads to the next. This also works for people. Instead of memorizing everything about one person, then moving onto the next person and so on. I first look at how these people link together. This is especially the case for memorizing all the people involved in Watergate….
3. The third point is something that I am sure has happened to everyone. Have you ever taken a test and come to a question that you don’t know the answer to, but you know EXACTLY where it is on a specific page in a book? Yes? Well that is our lovely photographic memory at work. This is why I recommend you multiple mediums to help study. Because quite frankly, why just use a book when you can also use video, or images, or audio to help you understand a topic? This is why I think the idea of Digital Humanities is pretty cool, because it brings all of that to you through the web. So I recommend hopping on Youtube or even the Internet Archive to find such things.
4. Also, it is always helpful to study with a group. This does go along with the previous point about processing information, because it is another way in which you can re-learn the information you need for the exam. It is one thing to read about it, but it is an entirely different thing to talk about it. Also by talking with fellow students you will learn more and have a good time. ^^
5. My final point makes me wish I took my own advice, but it is quite simple. Don’t forget to take care of yourself. That means sleeping, eating healthy, and also making sure your mind isn’t too overwhelmed by all the stress. The first one is simple, you need sleep otherwise you feel like crap. (There was a reason why most of yesterday was spent in my bed.) The second one is also simple, if you don’t get enough vitamins and nutrients then it really does hurt your body. (There is a reason why we are always told to rest and eat before big exams) And the final point? Well quite frankly there are times where your brain just needs a mind dump. So I recommend doing something not exam related. Something that you enjoy or helps you relax. For UMW students I do recommend the Stress-Free Zone. However, just doing something as simple as playing Tetris or going for a walk also helps.

That’s all I have for now. There are plenty of other ways to help study for exams and I am sure everyone has their own methods. These are just what works for me. If anyone else has any suggestions just comment! And Happy Studying

I was first hesitant to take this class because of the work load, but what hooked me was the fact that the work had to do more with creativity than reading and regurgitating information from powerpoint lectures.  But I’m already a Junior, and so far here at UMW I have never taken a class that I truly wanted to take just because it sounded interesting (and wasn’t a requirement for my major). Speaking for myself, I thought that the work load in this class was a lot to handle. With the exception of the Dailyshoot Assignment, the assignments generally took 2-3 hours depending on the quality of the work I wanted to post. There was a lot of creative pressure that I’ve never had in a class before, and the most difficult part of this was that I never knew how many hours I should set aside to do these assignments. But the creative pressure was definitely new and exciting. Some of the assignments was that sometimes it was a lot to take in at once. We would have an assignment due and then immediately move on-to a new creative project and was a lot to handle.

When I first came to Professor Groom with my Audio Mash-Up Assignment, I was under the false impression that audio mash-ups were going to be as fun as the audio story that we did as an in-class assignment but I was definitely wrong. I had never used Audacity before this class and it took me quite a while to finally understand the cutting of song clips, how to layer, how to utilize the effects, etc. Although the Lady Gaga Mash-Up was a hit, not all of the other song ideas came together as well as I would have liked it to. For instance, one of my goals was to mix two songs of different tempos. I arranged Ingrid Michaelson’s Parachute and B.o.B.’s Magic. I had the two songs in my head because I thought it had similar tempo qualities that I thought could go together. But similar to my other audio mash-up attempts, I don’t have the technology for being able to extract simply the vocals or melodies out of a song, so my only chance of getting the song clips that I needed was by searching through youtube- no such luck. It was frustrating to have these great ideas for mash-ups and in the end not being able to continue with it because I just didn’t have the proper tools (at least, with my budget) that I could have had.

So about half-way through the semester, I had the idea to just post about mash-ups that have already existed through other artists and DJ’s that I’ve listened to, and just comment on their work; such as the layering, use of vocals, melodies, etc. A few weeks into it and I had realized that my project, as well as some of my assignment posts, were only being saved into drafts and not up on my blog so it didn’t develop into the project that I had hoped for it to be. And had I known that a lot of the assignments for the class itself was going to require a lot of time/mash-ups as well, I probably wouldn’t have chosen an audio mash-up for my final project.

So here is my last post about my project: I watched a documentary on the problems with mash-ups and issues involving copyrights and who, if any, should be prosecuted for “stealing” songs. I had watched on Rip! A Remix Manifesto about Girl Talk- an artist who’s known for making some really amazing audio mash-ups averaging 20 song samples per song. In the documentary, 4 arguments are made: 1) Culture always builds on the past. 2) Past always builds on the future. 3) Our future is becoming less free. 4) To build free societies, you must limit the control of the past. The documentary builds on the history of how ideas started becoming business driven and how our society is getting punished for building on culture from the past. I think that copyrights shouldn’t apply for mash-ups because it’s not taking the entire idea (a song) melody, lyrics, and all and re-selling it as his/her own, it’s simply a marriage of different ideas which is still a new creative idea. There are only so many notes on a piano, or beat patterns that can exist before everyone starts suing for “copying a song”.

Ok I think I have finally finished up with everything. I didn’t realize until now all of my youtube videos that I embedded broke, but I think I went back and fixed all of them. At first  I was having trouble backing up my information because I wasn’t using cast iron coding, instead I was using Fat Cow. Eventually after talking with Professor Groom and some of the people from Fat Cow I figured out how to back up the information even though I wasn’t able to back it up fully due to the limitations with Fat Cow. I would not go with Fat Cow again if I had the choice, but it was certainly a learning experience. Otherwise last Thursday’s class helped me figure out everything else I needed to know about how to put my blog onto UMW Blogs at http://hiddenjemblog.umwblogs.org.  I am sad to see this class come to an end, but alas all great things come to an end.

Now to briefly explain some of the assignments that I both really enjoyed and some of the ones that weren’t on the top of my list. The class started out relatively slow with several online articles about the web and internet that we later discussed in class. I personally wasn’t a huge fan of these assignments as I found them somewhat dry and not a true representation of what was to follow. We blogged about them and even after the discussions I still didn’t have a full understanding of the difference between the web and the internet. I feel like they only related briefly to our semester long project and the rest of what we learned. The progression of the class from then on gradually picked up pace and workload increased. We had to create a flikr and twitter account for the next couple of assignments where we learned about photography and working to create interesting images. We took daily photos with different prompts and really encouraged us to be creative and capture images of objects/our environment in a new way. I loved this assignment, although many of my photos often weren’t comparable to other students’ my class. This was a great way to discover the world in a new way and capture it on film. Professor Groom emphasized the value in telling stories through images and how powerful the meaning behind them can be. They do always say, “a picture is worth 1000 words.”

The uninteresting story was weird. Several students in my class did an exceptional job with this assignment and captured the audience with their ability to make it interesting. However, I would say that the outstanding stories were that way more because of the story-teller than simply the sounds added to the narrative. I feel like this assignment was hit or miss, but we did learn about what makes audio interesting and how to make it powerful and make an impact on those listening.

Video commentary…yep the description/title of the assignment pretty much says it all. This assignment was time consuming and the final product really wasn’t that exciting. It was interesting to see what movies my classmates chose, but actually listening to what they had to say about the movie…not so much. More or less this assignment was to teach about video and all the complications that come along with it. This assignment was efficient in doing this job and really helped me understand about codecs and the other things Professor Andy Rush discussed with us. Professor Groom told us several times that our video assignments wouldn’t be easy and he was right, but I think they were an excellent learning tool and very useful outside of the classroom (and potentially in future jobs…a skill not everyone can say they have!). We learned both simple video editing and how to analyze film (which can be learned through a film studies class, however, this is a much better way to get the same education) and was a good prerequisite to our future video assignments.

El Mashup was my FAVORITE. I had a rough time coming up with what I wanted to do, but once I did I went a little overboard. I love being creative with gifts for friends and family and cutesy girlfriend ideas, but I typically have a harder time being creative in the terms of class assignments. That was one thing I really liked about both this assignment and the class. It caused me to think outside of the box and dig deeper into myself. I ended up spending a lot of time on this assignment because I had issues with using iMovie and getting my video trailers into the program. Andy Rush helped me out immensely with this assignment and I was relatively proud of my final product. As pointed out by Professor Groom, I could have cut it a little shorter and left out some things, but I got really excited once I figured out the logistics of the software.

Our Google-street-view assignment was actually fun too. I enjoyed this because I knew from where I lived that you couldn’t see the street view, but it was cool to see the satellite images that I didn’t know were so visible. Professor Groom told us that 5 minutes probably wouldn’t be enough and it is so true! I liked this assignment so much that I even created a short one for a friend of mine.

The biggest part of this class was creating our own “digital story” project and allowing for a way to express ourselves and our interest to the class/and the world. It helps to be able to share things that we are interested in and learn from what others had to say as well. For my digital story, I chose to outline the progress of my Economic Analysis and Research class as well as writing about my Summer Study Abroad to Spain. This was a way to kill two bird with one stone and also write about something that I thoroughly enjoyed and could keep my interest throughout the semester. Writing about Spain helps me to document my adventures and experiences and keep them for years to come. It is also a good way to encourage other students to look into the program through sharing what I gained from the trip. As far as blogging about my Economic Analysis class and research project, I was able to keep track of the process as well as share the methods that I used which can be used by future students in the Econ department. This project has taken me all semester and has been challenging throughout the whole process. I am going to continue to finish blogging about it as I finish up my final paper this week and make it available for students in Dr. Greenlaw’s ECON 300 class in the future. I did my best to regularly blog about both aspects of my project and feel I did a pretty good job at keeping up with this process. As far as my classmates go, I’m not sure how interesting my blog was, but I enjoyed reading the comments they left and trying to respond to them as well. I took my time writing each of my posts and what each of them said and presented, so this was very time consuming. My biggest critique in this class is that it is extremely time consuming and has quite a large workload for a 100 level course. I want to make it clear that I really enjoyed this class and all that it had to offer, but I wish I had either taken it as a freshman when my workload was lighter or even next year once I’ve finished almost all of my major courses. My biggest downfall was probably the commenting on everyone else’s blogs, especially compared to several students in my class who commented on almost everything. I enjoyed reading and learning from what my classmates posted and commented weekley (except for the last couple of weeks where I just didn’t have as much time as I needed to comment the way I should have). I commented on things that I was interested in, but often found myself commenting just to comment. I really didn’t like that commenting regularly was a requirement for this course, on top of our own project and regular assignments (often twice a week). I would have enjoyed commenting more if I could comment when I found something that I really liked, then trying to make sure I commented on the majority of the blogs in the class. I think a more efficient way to prove that we were reading each others work would to be to weekly create a post and highlight our classmates work and why we enjoyed them. This would not only recognize people for the hard work, but also generate conversation both inside and outside the classroom.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class and definitely do and will recommend it in the future to other students. Each of the assignments helped me learn new things about computers, the internet and telling a narrative to others. I plan on continuing to blog in the future and will use what I’ve learned in other classes to think about assignments in a different light.

Anyway, the blog is getting struck down a notch, but will not be destroyed. There’s too much work herein to say goodbye forever!

This blog will live on (and on) at http://sadielastinglonger.wordpress.com/.

My project blog is survived at http://archivelastinglonger.wordpress.com/.

I’m referencing one of my favorite childhood movies here– three men and a baby. Check the scene.

In many ways, this class feels like all of our baby. Sometimes stressful and a lot of work, but SO worth the end result and ultimately a fun ride. I hear that’s parenting for you. And that’s been my relationship with DS106.

I loved the unique design of this course that allowed us creative space and control of our own product. The freedom involved in sending us off with an assignment that simply asked us to do our best to produce something of quality really made me, personally, not want to settle for less. Much more so than if there was a strict rubric applied to every assignment. I just think that when literally all a teacher is looking for is a student’s best, the student is more inclined to give it. That’s what Jim Groom did for us. And I think it paid off– specifically, in my opinion, with the mashups and the homages. People just do well with things they’re passionate about. After all, real life is about finding a passion and pursuing it. If anything is worth a grade, it’s the ferocity of that pursuit.

Online, we had a great community going. I loved the emphasis on commenting on other people’s work. On some level it was a lesson in common courtesy and respect of the work others put into do a job well. We weren’t expected to comment on everyone’s blog– just those posts we felt were well done. In this way, we got to grade each other. If you had comments, you could feel that you’d done well long before any official grade came from the professor. Having 20 people grading might sound more difficult, but for me it provided that much more reason to do well. It’s one thing to fear a “C” and another issue entirely to think of just not doing well in front of an online audience. Commenting is a huge part of my enjoying this class so much.

The only critique I have regarding this is that we knew each others blogs so well. We did not know each others’ faces quite so well. Online we were best friends, but we couldn’t pick each other from a lineup in class. For this reason, I suggest that once everyone establishes their project blog in future (though not as awesome… couldn’t resist) courses, there be a 20 minute portion of class dedicated to each person having a minute or so to pull up their homepage and literally stand next to the “face” they create online, while explaining to the class why they chose that project.

Regarding the assignments themselves, I actually really enjoyed the articles and videos at the beginning of the semester. Well, that’s only half true. I liked the content, but I think scattering them over the course of the semester would be a better fit. I know much of the reading assignments in the beginning is because we’re gathering our bearings and getting our blogs online and it isn’t yet feasible to do the projects that require being posted to blogs, so I’m not sure if it can be helped. Still, I would’ve enjoyed during all of the producing we did in the second half of the semester a break to just take in some information and I think I would’ve understood especially the Web 2.0 if it’d come later in the semester.

I personally was not very good at the webcasting assignment, I know. This is mostly because I found street view difficult to navigate. Ultimately, I just think we could’ve done the captioning to get a sense of what google is doing with street view, but then we would’ve lost the screencasting aspect of the assignment, which I found very helpful to learn. Maybe a better assignment (here I go making up assignments instead of helping Jim Groom decides which ones to cut!) for screencasting would be to ask us to include each other on some sort of creative process we engage on the computer, not just street view. This could be a small tutorial on video-making, picture-editing, blogging tools like the footnote plugin, etc.

As for my personal project, I did not keep up with the regularity I expected of myself. I feel disappointed by that here at the end, since I am switching to regular (free!) wordpress and will not have the same creative control as I currently enjoy and, I think, took for granted. Still, I take a certain amount of pride in my work, knowing what it will mean to me and my family in the days to come when we will not get to re-enter through that red door with the “4.” This is such a raw experience, and I hope I conveyed that in the posts I did manage to get up. I will keep paying through December in order to keep updating through the move once I return over Christmas break. I did not take the time to figure out a recording of video through skype, either, so there was never an interview to post on my project– I think having the voices of my family members would’ve greatly enhanced the blog and I do plan, again, to work on this over the break.

I know full well that that work will not count towards my final grade. But I want to do it anyway. This brings me back to my original point. The stuff we did– though sometimes hard and occurring at inopportune times that conflicted with other class work, etc–we ultimately completed because we wanted to. We wanted to take care of this baby, difficult as it might be at times.

I give major credit to Jim Groom for creating that environment and allowing that space for us to realize that more than anything, most of us just really wanted to get more acquainted with the internet and the tools needed to produce material for sharing on the phenomenal medium that is the web. We are, for all intents and purposes, internauts.

I really hate to leave you, DS106, but I really must say, goodnight sweetheart goodnight.

So, a reflection.  We started talking about this in class a little on Thursday, but Professor Groom asked us if we thought that the class was, overbearing.  I thought that all of the assignments were doable, but sometimes we us 106ers were lost in the dark in how to do an assignment.  But fortunately, Professor Groom was helpful if we could not figure it out on our own.  I know for me, I had to get a couple extensions when we had a cluster of assignments due.  But this was partly due to my other classes and with stuff I had to do for them.  Trust me, I would have much rather been working on the ds106 assignments than doing a research paper on squirrel populations on the UMW campus.  True story.  I already voted on my favorite assignments, which included: The Daily Shoot project, the fan fiction homage, the movie video commentary, the all soul’s day video, and to round them off, the mash up.  Personally, I also liked the Google video assignment as well.  I don’t remember who said it during class, but I agree with them in that the Google Maps was fun to do, but it was not easy to listen to other people talk through a 10 minute video.   I love photography, so the daily shoot was right up my ally.  I believe I did pretty well with that assignment overall.  My favorites were the Green Foliage and The Reflective Shades pictures I took.  The fan fiction was AMAZING.  We already had free reign in this class, but this assignment gave us permission to do something that we were obsessed with.  My homage was to Lord of the Rings, as you can see in two of my posts.  The movie commentary was a lot of fun because, again, it was something that we already loved.  The Halloween project was challenging because it was a group project, but it was still a blast.  If you were lucky, you could work with someone you didn’t really know before in the class.

Which brings me to another thing about the class: not knowing who people were.  The very first class we each told a short story and kind of introduced ourselves, but then we got lost on the internet and then I know I did not know who’s blog I was commenting on or viewing.  I personally think this is hilarious, the beauty of it is being able to hide behind the internet and the web through our websites.

There were a few different tools that gave me headaches and then there were others that I love and still use.  I really did not enjoy the audio projects, I don’t know if they just happened to be assigned at a hard part of the semester for me, or if my computer problems added on to it, or who knows maybe I’m just incompetent when it comes to it, but bottom line I was not thrilled.  I think audacity is great for a few uses, but after a while it seems to crash on me constantly, and that’s frustrating.  But, programs that I love are the youtube fastest converter, VLC Media Player, and Camtasia Studio.  Unfortunately, Camtasia will expire soon, but it was definitely fun using it over Windows Movie Maker (which a whole other can of worms).  I used the VLC Media Player for a large chunk of my DS106 project, and it was fairly simple to use in general.  I have used the Youtube converter a few times for the project as well as assignments that were given in class.

My DS106 project did not turn out how I expected it to when I first thought about what I was going to do for the class.  In fact, I like it even more.  I used my video camera built into my laptop to record myself drawing things that I felt like drawing, and then through a time consuming process, sped it up and posted it to my website.  My original concept was trying to draw animals, and you can see I tried to do that through the snake.  But then we dove into video projects and I just could not spend that much time on one thing with everything going on this semester ( in all of my classes).  I still like my snake drawing, but it just took too long, and then I discovered I could speed up video on VLC.  That’s all she wrote from there.  Besides, it became more of a digital story than my original idea.  A video tells a story in itself, but a drawing shows the process of the artwork, and that’s why I love it.

I think my downfall was trying to keep up with everything in the class and commenting and keeping up with my other classes.  But I’d like to think I kept up for the most part, nothing like some people in the class.  I had a blast this year, it was strange, but I actually enjoyed going to class.

Song By Girl Talk; Get It Get It

The following videos are one I come to every finals week. I watched them last spring and last fall, and for some reason these videos never get old! Megan had already done a post on these, so I feel like it would be best to visit her page. However, if you are to lazy to here is an example of BBC’s Walk on the Wild Side:

The second video is kind of fitting because we are in the middle of Hanukkah. My friend sent me this video and honestly it cracks me up. It is really well done. However the only downside is that I am overcome by a sudden urge to spin Dreydels…

This final video is just another treasure of youtube I ran across. It definitely relates to Exam week, and it has a nice message. Plus it makes me wish I was in a class that would do this.

I hope I distracted you all enough! Time to pick up the books and start studying again!

Alec Couros has been blazing a path with this for years, and his recent EC&1 831 course is a model I will be shamelessly aping in terms of featuring work and allowing for an open platform for one and all. And then there’s the fearless Canadian triumvirate Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes that are now working on their third iteration of a totally open and online course—not to mention massive! But lest you think all the innovation in edtech is coming from Canada, David Wiley had some fun with this back in the day (so not all just 99.9% of the innovation—damn Canadians! ). And even closer to home, Gardner Campbell has been experimenting with a model for his New Media developmental seminar that he frames brilliantly here—it’s an exciting time for imagining new ways of using social media to rethink online education, and there are no shortage of great examples. I point to a few here, but I am sure I’m missing many, many more.

So what I want to do with ds106 is by no means new, and I have the examples to steal from and hopefully build on. That said, I’m still a bit nervous because I’m totally unorganized, and I don’t really see myself as a leader of such a class. I don’t necessarily want people to sign-up and then be like, “Hey. what’s next?”—though I know there will be some of that. I’d rather people get into the idea of creating and sharing narratives using digital media as a way to interrogate this space, while all the while producing something on a regular (or irregular) basis. I’m not thinking of this so much as a course as I am a series of prompts, possibilities, and people sharing their process within a specific period of time.

I think the “break through” I had—if you can call it that at all—happened when I used Alan Levine’s idea (isn’t everything an Alan Levine idea?) to build the Daily Shoot assignments/prompts as an entire week of my class this term. It was an amazing week of learning and sharing in that it all had so little to do with me, but everything with having a guy like Alan in my network recommending stuff to me on a daily basis. I loosely organized the assignment by saying:

You have to take a different picture everyday for the next 8 days, and you will find the prompts here. Be sure to post the photos on Flickr, use these tags, and then blog it. Also, you need to comment on each others work you philistines!

Or something to that effect, the whole thing simply piggybacked on the dailyshoot assignments that other people created—none of which was mine, but at the same time it was the favorite week of the semester for so many students—and was generative in helping them decide on their digital story project for the semester. Even if I wanted to pretend I had something to do with it, I can’t, and what’s more I didn’t. I went ahead and took the daily photos just like them, and I shared my process just like them. And it worked beautifully!

Being part of the creative act and the ongoing distributed commentary between and amongst the class on each others photos for that week changed the way I approached the course for the rest of the semester, and in many ways continues to inform my idea for the totally online and open version of this course. The Daily Shoot is the model I want to use for the online course for each and every assignment—I think it is brilliant, and there is no question that it uses the best elements at the heart of the generative, distributed and collaborative web, in other words the social web. This class will try and marry the social to the creative in an entirely online environment, and Daily Shoot is the model. But here is my plea, who wants to help run/develop this? I can offer no money, and to be clear I am being paid by UMW to teach this course as an online course. What I am looking for is people who want to set aside a protracted period of time to create, explore, and comment on the work of others, and hopefully help me design from this course shell something that looks like this for each of the assignments:

I am fortunate enough to have Martha Burtis teaching her own section of ds106 this semester, and she has already given me a ton of ideas. More than that, she is building a site that will aggregate examples of digital stories based on a given assignment using tags, etc. It will become a resource for featuring the examples students are finding of any given examples/theme we might be talking about. Now what we need is a way to provide a space like Daily Shoot so that we can see the work of all participants for a particular assignment on a given day. I want it to be visual like DailyShoot, and I know a bunch of people have offered their expertise with this, so I am now calling those offers in. Who wants to form a working group and see how we might do this in about one month?

Finally, I know what it is like to get excited about an open course and not actually do it. I did that for all three open course I signed up for. That said, I followed along at my own pace and did my own thinking and blogging as a direct, or at times indirect, response to those courses. So I am not looking for anything in the way of commitment, just the willingness to create things you might be interested in.

I’m obviously not done thinking this through, and I need all the help I can get, but this is a good beginning, and given I have but a brief “About” page and 6 or 7 assignments up on the new ds106 home (not to mention I themed MediaWiki for the TwentyTen theme) I believe it is a good start. It can be done, and it can be done in a way that is creative, part of our daily work flow, and, most of all, a way to bring together a community of folks to encourage the act of producing stories in all kinds of forms. I hope you can help.

Now looking for some hanukkah and Kwanzaa mashups

Discovered via this post on BoingBoing.

I thought after all of our discussion about archiving our work this was interesting. I admit it, I am curious about what my year was like. However it would be nice to see what my other years on Facebook were like too, namely because I want to see how much having a blog has influenced the frequency of my status update. I feel like as long as there is a personal space for me to go more in depth about my thoughts I don’t really care about the quick blurbs I send out to people. Yet these quick blurbs still end up saying a lot about me and this past year. I think the status that really defines that really defines this year is actually the first one. This is the first year where I became more involved in digital media. So seeing, “blogs are fun ” really adds to that. Strange that in just this year alone my voice has grown from, “blogs are fun ” to me actually sitting and writing a post about it.

Unfortunately, as is the way with Facebook, this is clearly not all of my statuses from this year. I think they probably picked a random few from each month. To gain access to that I will need to figure out how to get Think up working. Though that is a problem for another day, when I am not consumed by finals.  I guess it is time to get back to work….

The assignment that were assigned challenged one creativity, and this is something I really like. We were able to create what we wanted, without much guidelines. Guidelines is much what we get in any other glass, but we had freedom here. The daily shoots was fun, even though mine didn’t look as interesting or well taken a some others. I still had good time thinking about how to do the prompt of the day. I also enjoyed the mash-up I thought looney tunes and scarface went well together, wish I had a bit more time so I could of smooth some things with that. I also had much work for my other classes so the time I wanted to put into that assignment I couldn’t. I think most of the assignments, we learned how to use a new program or how to use different techniques when developing our work for a particular assignment.

For my digital story, I was able to showcase sneaker art and try to show people that their is a whole community just dealing with sneakers. Sneakers arn’t just things on your feet with no meaning but are able to tarnsform into art, like I showcased. No other class I can think of would of let me express myself like this one did.

Overall the class was fun. I just would of like to have a set schedule of assignment so I could of known when things were due ahead of time. Yet the class I think was well done. Professor Groom carried the class in a fine manner because he was passionate about material and this gave a since that the assignment are one creations. Because they are ones creations and some were very well done I just wished in class we would of showcased more of peoples works. We could have discussed them in class and also made suggestions on different techniques on certain assignments. Yet I can’t complain much because it was one of my favorite class here at UMW by far.

I’m keeping each of my domain names as-is. Media Megan is where I’ll continue to blog and Aisle 2 Bin 36 is where the results of the project I’ve been working on and blogging about in ds106 will be posted shortly.

As I think back to the first day of class, I can see why I decided to brave it and stay for the semester. When I registered for the class I pretty much thought I was shooting myself in the foot. What do I know about computer science!? With a pessimistic outlook for the semester, I arrived at the first day of class and was, well, enlightened!

In the same way that the movie The Social Network had nothing to do with Facebook and everything to do with friends, so to was this class something quite unexpected. Although the course title puts ‘Digital’ in front of ‘Storytelling,’ I soon realized that at its core, this class was about storytelling. The ‘Digital’ part was simply the medium we would be using to tell our stories.

Admittedly, I took this class to fulfill a general requirement for performance where something is created. I wasn’t really sure how it would fulfill anything, but I soon understood after about the first week just how much we would be creating… a LOT.

Honestly, I was hooked in with our JAWS discussion of the first day. But as each of the early assignments progressed, I began to question my judgment. We still hadn’t started our projects and all we did was read and comment about Web 2.0! Just as I was beginning to get anxious for what the rest of the semester held, we did the “Film in 6 Frames” assignment and all my fears were allayed. The class momentum really picked up after the Daily Shoot, and I don’t think I was the only one to feel a little blue to say goodbye to that assignment.

The assignments really stepped it up after that, and I honestly don’t think I was really ready. (Maybe I was still mourning the loss of the Daily Shoot.) I think I kind of dropped the ball a bit on the “Uninteresting Story” and I think that was simply brought on by a total lack of focus working at home. I still liked the idea for the story, but dissatisfied with my own final product. The video commentary proved to be a bit frustrating for me, but I blame my computer.

Honestly the idea for that project is one of my favorites, because I’m always the one watching all of those movie extras with directors’ and actors’ commentary. After using the Ultimate Mac of all Macs to solve my commentary problems, my assignment was finished. Thinking back, I think I would have chosen a different movie to comment on; despite my fondness for it, I don’t Dead Poets Society was the perfect choice for this class. The Mashup was, well, challenging. I’m certainly glad I did it, and don’t regret my choice, but this was the first time I felt truly limited by my own technology. Upon completion I felt good, satisfied even. However, after viewing and commenting on everyone else’s videos, my video felt, well, amateur. (Which makes sense, because that’s what I am!) Still, I’m glad we did something so challenging, and it gave me a newfound respect for artists like POGO. I loved the idea of the “View from the Street” assignment, and I’ve shared the technology we used for that assignment. But in the end I didn’t feel like we had enough time for that assignment, or maybe I just didn’t have the time. The fan fiction was certainly fun, but I had difficultly seeing how it connected to the rest of the semester. I think it would have done well  being introduced earlier on.

The only assignments I can really look back with any degree of satisfaction, is my semester project. My semester with the Korean exchange students was a blast, and I hope this showed in my Tooth posts. (Of course I took any opportunity to fit sharks into my blog.) I’m also really grateful that this class offered an opportunity for me to record my thoughts and reflections during such a meaningful semester.

Despite the overwhelming workload, the hours spent riddled with frustration and anxiety, and the persistent urge to hurl my laptop across the room, I would definitely take this class all over again.

:]

First Image. Illusion. Our brains are tired, so this probably works better than it normaally would work.

If you click the image it takes you to the actual page. But I spent 10 min staring at this trying to figure out how it worked, and then I realized I should be doing something more productive. I guess that is the problem with the internet. It is just there, waiting for people to find stuff like this. However, in case this makes your head hurt more and now you just want to hate me, I bring you my:

Second Image. A Comic.

It’s by a fellow named Morten Ingemann. Unfortunately (or awesomely?) he is Danish, and all the information I could find about him was in Danish. So I am really left with nothing else to share. I hope that was enough thinking and quietly laughing to yourself for today. Back to studying! Or cramming, typing, and editing….

Drum Roll

AND NOW!

………

The Moment You’ve All (I’m Sure) Been Waiting For

………

THE OFFICIAL KOREAN MUSIC BLOG!!!

Now, before we begin, I think it’s a good idea to take a quick review, a listen down Musical Lane if you will! I’ll go through some of the videos I’ve shared with you over the semester, just as a nice warm-up as we crescendo to the heart of this post…

First I started out with a soft, simple selection so as not to SHOCK and awe, but rather to inspire. I said this simple piano piece from Epitone Project  would set an easygoing, contemplative tone for my blog, and I hope it has.

Second, I used a very different strategy. This time I tried very hard to SHOCK and awe you guys. I needed to grab your interest! So here, back for an encore performance, is the Korean Lady Gaga, Boa!

Third, and sadly last, I posted a video reminiscent of the Age of Boy Bands, AKA the 90′s. Here, the group Shinee bravely returns to that epic time where choreography and costuming were more important than lyrics.

After reviewing all of these videos, I’m sure you’re wondering, “Ok…What next!?

Well, nothing actually!

Here comes the REAL shock of it all…that’s it!!! With all of my research and illegally downloaded Limewire, I’ve come to an interesting realization. All of this music I was listening to, it all had one thing in common….and that was language. Strangely enough, I don’t mean the Korean language! If you notice, from song titles to lyrics, none of these songs did without English!

What’s even more fascinating, is that as I went through the semester asking the Korean students about what kind of music they listened to, I realized that they knew more American pop music than me! That’s the music that they listen to in Korea, so that’s what they know! It seems strange, and from an American perspective, almost unthinkable! And yet my collection of Korean music didn’t grow as quickly as I originally imagined it would. Instead, my library of today’s big Grammy nominees broadened, because that’s what they knew! 

When asked what one of the student’s FAVORITE song was, this was the resulting video:

With the group name, song title, and lyrics being in English, I don’t have to tell you I was a little thrown! Still, as glad as I am that their music is so accessible, I find it frustrating that it’s our language that has become so dominant. I suppose it’s just a result of globalization, but I don’t think that’s a very good excuse.

I think we’re quickly coming to an age where we need to begin to meet in the middle, or, God-forbid, bend our American ways a bit. I’m not saying we should all stop speaking English and learn Mandarin for when the Chinese take over, but I am saying that it’s time we look out to others as real equals from whom we have a great deal to learn.

If anything, at least we’ll learn ourselves a bit better!

So for my final Tooth vocabulary word, and word of farewell, I chose the phrase “Id da ba!” Instead of saying a permanent goodbye, I hope, just with the Korean students, that this is not our last meeting. “Id da ba” means, “See you later!” and of course I figure that I will, “Id da ba!”

:]

P.S. Quick side note! POGOjust posted some new mashups….PLEASE check it out!

P.P.S. My posts title is totally referencing Aladdin when, at the very end, Genie picks up the film reel and says, “Made ya look!” as if he’s tricked us…..Yes, I spent about 35 minutes looking for the video on Youtube…..No, they don’t have it. But that doesn’t make it any less of a classic catch phrase!

About the course itself, elaborating what I’ve previously said, many classes in college are taught straight from the textbook, with weekly quizzes and readings. The repetitiveness of it all can seem monotonous and sometimes I feel a lot of it is useless in a real-world environment. But sometimes, you can find a class that break from the mold and teaches you not just vocabulary or formulas, but experience. This is the kind of class where DS106 operates under. I found the lectures of the class incredibly interesting, because they were so realistic. Professor Jim Groom would often talk about real-world things that we all knew of, and increase our understanding of it despite the fact that it was something that we were so used to. For example, I especially enjoyed his lecture on Twitter and how the simple website had a huge effect of international affairs. He would also discuss intuitive ideas that were built upon things on the web, such as the website that can tracks who is away from their houses at any given time by using Facebook statuses. Though these examples can’t cover an entire semester worth of lectures, every discussion Jim Groom had brought something new to the table that wasn’t just a new chapter in a textbook, but rather an actual part of the real-world.

Continuing with the realism the class brought, much of the classwork was managing our own web-spaces. In DS106, one of the first assignments of the semester was to creating own own blog and domain. We added to them, we broke them, we changed them, we customized them, but most importantly, I feel that these web-spaces reflected who we are in some ways. We were asked to build a theme around our blogs and asked to create our own “digital-story”. At the time I had no idea what Jim meant by this but through the development of our blogs over the course of the semester, I s0on understood what mine was (and I will talk about it later). We then shard our own ideas and productions, commented on others, and then produced more. Through all of this posting or commenting, I soon saw why Jim is so enthusiastic about the Web. It is a reflection of who we are, and It is ironical that I am fully realizing this now when our first assignment of the class was to read an article called “We are the Web”. Again it is not often in a college class when you are asked to express yourself freely, and not bound by essay topics or parameters. We were asked literally to blog about whatever we wanted, and I found this freedom liberating.

That being said, the class had its difficulties and short-comings. My biggest complaint: the workload. Since from the beginning of the semester we were given assignments, some almost twice a week that involved long readings/audio or mini-projects that potentially could take a few hours, and on top of this our own website’s blog posts and projects we chose to do. I would spend many hours on DS106 assignments and many times stayed up to wee hours of the morning, cursing the name of “Jim Groom”. I tried very hard on these assignments and all they counted for were participation grades it seemed. So for those who did not try so hard on the work, they weren’t losing too much. However I will say that Jim gave just credit to those who have worked hard on them. Despite this, I feel that there was a lot of work in class and that matched with the work from my other classes, it really felt unbearable at times. Lastly, the cherry on top of it all was commenting. Yes, in theory it all seems very simple but many of the things people would write and create would be soooo long! For example the Google Street View assignment and the video commentaries were so hard to comment on just due to the sheer length of them (though mine were probably some of the longest). It was just too much to do just because the class assignments, our own posts on our blogs, and then commenting on the work of everyone else just took an incredible amount of time for one class. Lastly, I feel you need to tell and remind students at least during a few classes to look at the class syllabus, because last class when we were participating in a group reflection of the class we came to this topic and everyone sitting around me whispered to each other “We had a syllabus?”. A more advertised syllabus might keep the workload to be more manageable to students if they could know their assignments ahead of time and complete them early.

I also felt that the class time spent looking over people’s work in the class to be unbalanced from assignment to assignment. For example, we really drilled Web 2.0 into the ground we went over it so much, which despite the lengthy readings I liked. We also looked over everyone’s daily shoot photos everyday during that week, which was great to see some of the productions that I’d missed earlier. However, I feel that a lot of the cooler stuff in the class we didn’t go over nearly as much. For example we didn’t look over a single fan fiction project from anyone in the class, and I thought there were a lot of really cool ones. We also hardly looked at the Google Street-View presentations from some people, which was understandable to a degree because some of them were quite long (mine included). I know we had talked about the Google Street-View presentations in class, and I also thought the 9eyes website was really cool as well, but I still would have liked to have actually seen some of the presentations.

Lastly, I feel that there were some problems with the main medium of communication in the class, which are computers, and I feel these will increase since you plan to make your class almost entirely web-based next semester with no actual class time. I had a hard time in with the blog actually knowing “who was who” when I looked at work made by them or received comments from them on my own. I had a hard time linking the faces of my class mates to their blogs. The ones I knew were from the people who I had worked with in group projects, so maybe next year you should assign different groups for each project so people in the class can know each other and their respective blogs better.

Now to critique my own “digital story”, I would first like to say that I had a lot of fun with my assignments, and I think that as reflected in the quality of work that I produced. From the Power Rangers Recut, to the Dish-Washer story, to the Star Wars Techno Remix, I was very proud of all of the work I did for this class and I tried the hardest I could on each mash-up. Despite the quality of work I produced, the fact that I spent so much time on those mash-ups had downsides. One of the downsides was that I did not complete everything I promised. Along with the mash-up projects, I was supposed to produce posts relating to copyright laws and how they limit the read-write culture that remix-ers, such as myself, thrive in. Save one post, I didn’t really fulfill this obligation. The fact that it received no comments also discouraged me from writing them, and I found creating my own mash-ups much more interesting. This brings me to my next downside, which is that I had a lack of comments. This is for the same reason, that I just spent so much time on my class assignments and mash-ups that I really had no time to comment after it all. I stayed up to the wee hours of the morning multiple times throughout the semester creating these mash-ups and class assignments and by the end of it, I was so tired I was physically unable to comment. However, I feel that the effort that I put into my mash-ups more than makes up for the short-comings of my work. In retrospect, I don’t think I would have tried any less of my mash-ups but maybe I would have bought a little more coffee for myself to write about copyright laws and comment a little more.

All of this said, I’d like to bring my reflection back to what I first said about DS106; that it is an awesome class. If I had the choice to take this class again, I would say yes in a heartbeat. I truly have enjoyed myself in this class and I had lots of fun creating my own mash-ups and doing the class assignments. I feel that much of what we have learned in this class can be applied to a spectrum of disciplines because it is just so useful to know about our online culture that is so prevalent in modern society.

I just thought I’d start my blog on Korean hair by posting a video that I recently shared with my roomie, Sunyoung. She was busy writing a paper on African American women’s hair trends reflecting white women’s styles, when I so thoughtfully interrupted her to share this video. We began talking about the different standards of beauty, how things have changed over time, and how we need to redefine what we see as beautiful.

But that’s not actually where the idea for this post began. It all started several months ago at the beginning of the semester when, after taking a shower, I emerged from our bathroom with a head full of very wet hair. Not thinking anything of it, I went about getting ready when Sunyoung suddenly surprised me with a cry of exclamation. She stared, wide-eyed, at my hair which had turned a shocking color of dark brown. She couldn’t believe my hair had changed color simply by getting wet! When she asked me how this was possible, I had absolutely no idea. I mean, this was something that my light hair has done since I was a baby, and I’ve never thought to ask why!

Which brings me to Korean hair…

So I know this is totally a stereotype and certainly doesn’t apply to everyone, but Koreans have amazing hair. (I mean, Asian hair is awesome in general. Come on! Tell me you didn’t want Mulan’s hair!!??)

But that’s besides the point! Where I’m getting at is this: just as the video showed the progression of our idea of beauty in the U.S., we can see how Korean standards of alter as well. In Korea it’s very rare to see someone with naturally wavy or curly hair; everyone just has straight, dark brown/black hair. So it’s now very fashionable to perm one’s hair. Now, at first that kind of surprised me, mostly because when I hear the word “perm” a woman with a frizzy mess of  late 80′s early 90′s curls comes to mind. But that’s just me! For them a perm is a bit of a wave to their hair, just enough to stand out.

And that’s what leads me to the main idea of the Hair Rainbow. In Korea, where the majority of the population is Korean, everyone looks very similar. By changing their natural hair, the Koreans look different enough to really stand out in the crowd. I’m not going to post any pictures here, but all you really need to do is tune into channel 79 on the UMW cable, and you’ll see MBC America, the Korean American network. Here you’ll get a taste for Korean news, drama, and game shows. Now not everyone is going out dyeing their hair, but it’s certainly no surprise to see someone both men and women with spiky blonde hair, or a bubble gum-pink wig. Just the other day one of the Korean Exchange students came to my room to ask where she can get her hair dyed…..orange-brown!

I mention all of this, not in an attempt to look at how different we are, but to point out a funny cross-cultural paradox. In making themselves look different from one another, the Koreans of course stand out, especially against an ethnic backdrop that is so alike. However, in this self-expression they also come together. They make themselves outwardly dissimilar, but through their choice for their own personal taste and fashion comes a bond with the rest of the world and its constantly changing style.

SO! This week’s Korean vocabulary word, due to the SHOCKING surprise of the crazy hair, will be an expression of surprise that the Korean students use daily. “Hore Tayba.” It took me about a month to realize, after a heavy sigh of relief, that they weren’t saying “whore.” This phrase is often used like, “Wow!” or “Oh my gosh!” But I think it’s more fun to say than both of those!

:]

Today, after several hours of work, I completed a 1:19 second audio slideshow in iMovie that will go live on my project site in the next few days.

My process over the past month went something like this:

1. Insert photos in iMovie (November).

2. Record audio during interviews with Andy using GarageBand (Early and Mid November).

3. Transcribe audio (Mid November).

4. Think about what I wanted to quote in writing and what I wanted to save for an audio slideshow (or two). Take notes on the location of the quote in the audio file for quick reference later. (Late November).

5. Begin locating that audio in GarageBand, which is what I used to record the interviews. Curse myself for shuffling my paper a few times in the interview, making for points where a great audio quote will have to be used in print instead because the background noise was impossible to edit out. Lesson learned! Export audio as an mp3 to desktop and open with Audacity because I have more experience with Audacity (last week).

6. In Audacity, begin cutting audio into shorter clips, export them as mp3s, to insert them into iMovie (this week).

7. Insert audio into iMovie with just images. Study for other finals, realize I’d be happier still working on the slideshow. Go to sleep (last night.)

8. Wake up, play slideshow, realize I’m not happy with it. Spend four hours working on it. Add text. Return to audio interview. Delete the quotes I have in iMovie. Listen to portions of the interview again and insert a new quote, along with reinserting the quotes I just deleted (hmm, a lot like my writing process). Add text slides. Realize iPhoto 11 has slideshow options with themes. Use it to create a portion for my iMovie slideshow, export it as a .m4v file, and import it to iMovie. Play the audio slideshow; it feels complete (today).

It was time-consuming, but it didn’t feel like a chore. I like creating; it was fun to work on, and if I have time after completing the articles (goal: tonight or tomorrow night at the latest), I plan to create a second one. Edit: I’m going to alter that idea a bit. I was playing around with plugins on the site and came up with something I think will be more interesting, more interactive and fun for me to experiment with using images and audio.

-KC Masterpiece

I tried to make a chicken pot pie using a combination of what I vaguely remembered my dad telling me about cooking one and the knowledge I had gained this semester. What I got was a soupy mess that my boyfriend tried to fix when I was in class and even with his help, it wasn’t very good. I think I had a few problems:
1) Apparently I should have added flour to the milk before I added it to the mix, so that the filling would would thicken up.
2) I think I put too much filling in the pie and it made the dough soggy.
3) I should have tried to cook the vegetables/chicken broth/milk in a large skillet (which we didn’t have anyway) rather than a pot. But, there wasn’t much I could do about this anyway.

So you can understand what happened, I am going to leave a series of pictures and the advice to not try to make chicken pot pie with little to no help. =] As this is the only recipe this semester that came out as less than stellar, I feel this project could rightly receive a 13/14. =D

First I microwaved a big bag of semi-sweet morsels for about 4 minutes in a bowl, then stirred it up.

I poked each fruit with a toothpick, dipped it in the chocolate, sprinkled nuts if desired, and then set it on wax paper to harden.

The fruit hardens much faster (and better) if put somewhere cold, like a refrigerator. Or, since it is the arctic outside, I put one tray in the car. ahaha.

You guys seemed to love these, I guess they were a hit! =]