Over the past couple of weeks, we were assigned a certain set of ‘stars’ that we had to complete for any given category of assignments. This week was Audio Assignments. To be honest, I would have to say that I didn’t enjoy doing as many audio assignments. It’s not that I didn’t like doing the assignments, I just wasn’t too fond of the audio assignments idea in general. Since we were doing the Radio Show, a lot of the time that I was spending in DS106 was either collaborating with my group or creating my own audio story. It just seemed like a bit of overload. I would have rather the audio assignments not really been on the same due time as the radio show. It just seems like a bit much.
Daily Creates – Since we had to do six daily creates over the past two weeks, I actually enjoyed being able to have a bit of choice in terms of which ones I wanted to do. I really liked being able to do six in one week or three in each week. It was just nice to be able to have some sort of choice in how many I wanted to do from each week. I like being given the freedom, especially for the daily creates. They are always fun, but sometimes on the weeks that we have four due, it’s hard to find four that you really enjoy. Out of 14 days, it was really easy to find six that I found compelling enough to take the time to do.
These four pictures are the unused media that I uploaded to the recycled dropbox. The first one is to take a picture of a bald person. The 2nd picture is a dominating color which is white. The third picture is two things that do not belong together. I figured that the car being upside down on the road kind of stood for that idea. The 4th picture is a group of three things. All of these pictures came from daily creates. It was a lot easier to find media that I didn’t use from daily creates rather than from assignments that we were assigned for homework. I don’t think that I got rid of many of the assignments that I used for the stars that we had to complete or something like that.
The Radio Show assignment directions says that we need to include a reflection on the radio show but the weekly summary also says that we need to have a reflection on the radio show so I’m going to go ahead and include the reflection here rather than in two different places. I hope that’s okay! So, our radio show was actually a lot of fun creating. Minus having to do the audio assignments on top of the radio show, I would say that this was probably the most fun for an assignment that I’ve done this semester. It was difficult at first trying to find a way for all five of us to get together to meet but after we got in to a rhythm, it worked out really well for us. I believe that we had a very balanced group.
Choosing a theme was actually really easy. I thought that it would be great to have a show based around halloween since it’s fall and I thought that telling stories would be the best way to go about doing that. Since it wasn’t on the list of things that we could do, we got permission from our professor and she said that it would be a good idea so long as we incorporated sounds and sound effects into the show as well. Organizing it was really easy. Our group just got together and we all talked about the different things that we could each contribute. It worked out really well because we had a different genre of story for each of the people. One was a love story. One was a funny story. One was the history of Halloween. One was a scary story. We had a 5th as well, but I just wanted to share about how balanced the radio show was.
The easiest part of the show was figuring out who did what and then working on that individually. The hardest part of the show was for us to get together to meet and then decide on what we would be doing at the meetings. Getting five people together and figuring out when the schedules and times would work out was difficult. We all had to work around our own schedules and figure out what times worked best. I’m sure that we could have communicated via web chat, but we all agreed that it would be best for us to meet in person so we could collaborate more easily. Also, since we were working on the project together, it made it a bit more personable.
For picking what I wanted to contribute to the show, I just went with my own comfort zone. I feel that I’m pretty great at being the tech guy, so I put the show together at the end. I made sure that it flowed accordingly and that the order was the way that it needed to be. I guess that I could have pushed myself in a new direction, but I figured it would definitely benefit the group if I worked on the project in a way that I knew I was comfortable with and that I knew I could be the best at.
Our show, as I mentioned previously, is really well balanced. There isn’t a feeling inside of me that is worried. I know that we created something amazing and I hope that everyone else likes it as well! I didn’t think that the show would turn out the way that it did because I wasn’t sure what to expect when I heard we would be creating a radio show, but I’m glad that it turned out the way that it did. I’m sure that most groups will be acting more as a radio show with a DJ or a host and then having guests come onto the show. I like that ours is more personable. Watching NPR, I know that the audience will feel more connecting to the show if they feel like they are being spoken to, rather than listening.
Working with audio in general wasn’t really what I expected it to be. I thought that we were going to be doing more recording than we did. For the most part, a lot of the audio work that we did had to do with either mashing something together or editing some piece of audio. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, I just didn’t expect it to be that way. I’m definitely happy with the way things turned out though. I just wish we didn’t have the audio assignments with the same time that we were working on the radio show. It just felt like an audio overload! All in all though, I would say that the radio show and the audio section was a success. I’m glad to be moving on to something else though. I’m kind of audio’d out.
Add a comment