This week was full of moments of frustration, excitement, entertainment, and then maybe a little more frustration.  Social networking sites and blogs tend to confuse me beyond description at first, and while I almost always (I have a running 97.2% success rate with these things) catch on after about a week or two, I am always forcefully reminded of all the reasons I was horrible at computer science (my first major at UMW).

Anyway, since we’re still in the midst of the first “week or two” period, I was totally lost for about 2/3 of this week and there were a lot of new things for me to learn and to sign up for.  Watching the videos on the DS106 boot camp page got me really pumped up for this course though.

Kelli Anderson’s TED Talk was by far my favorite and her innovative ways for using every day objects and materials really inspired me to try to get more creative with the way I think about things.  Admittedly, I spent the rest of the week floundering around online trying to make sure I was doing all the assignments and watching all the videos for the course and forgot about being creative, so I haven’t been able to put that new inspiration to work yet.  I’ll probably have to watch the video again tomorrow to kickstart my week.

My attempt at being creative fell miles short of Kelli’s work, but it was still a lot of fun and I got to do several things I don’t normally do:  actually use my webcam, lie to everyone on the internet, upload a video to youtube.

Here’s what I came up with:

This was really awesome to make.  It took me the most time to find an object to use, but the story was pretty easy to come up with.  And yes, Dr. Levine, it’s fabricated!

Steven Johnson’s video about where creativity comes from didn’t really “inspire” me in many ways but it did give me a new appreciation and understanding (or rather, a ‘renewed’) for the potential of this class.  I took a course freshman year (which was a while ago – I’m a fifth-year senior) entitled “Mash-up and Remix:  The Future of Creativity in Cyberspace” which seems now like a precursor to this course in which I was introduced to a lot of these things like Creative Commons and the potential for the internet to be a meeting ground for millions of different ideas that other people can interact with and add on to to create new things.  I then spent the next four years reading and writing non-stop and forgot to appreciate the other things the internet can do.  It was nice to be reminded.

The Teacher-Student rules list was probably good to have at the end because it provided good tips and put an optimistic spin on the commitment this course requires but also made it clear that a lot of work will be required to succeed.  It was a reminder after those videos that this will be hard work but also made me feel strongly that it would be worth it.

The less complicated part of my week was creating accounts for the various social networking sites.  I’m excited to finally have an excuse to use my Twitter, which I’ve had for a while but have never actually posted to until this week.  You can now all get in touch with me in the following ways:

• http://coffeedogsandactivism.me
• http://ds106.coffeedogsandactivism.me
• @KristenLamb2 on Twitter
• flickr.com/coffeedogsandactivism
• youtube.com/users/klamb912
• soundcloud.com/klamb912

I’ll admit, I’m pretty nervous about the soundcloud site.  I’ve had to make mashups before, and I wasn’t so great at it.  We’ll see how it goes this time around, I guess!  This was my first tweet EVER:

@cogdog This is my “hello message!”#ds106

— Kristen Lamb (@KristenLamb2) January 15, 2013

I’m all set up now though and ready to go with DS106.  This week was full of a lot of new information, a lot of new sites to become a member of, and lots of fun, (mostly) fake childhood stories to hear.  I became familiar with several new sites and learned a lot of new names and faces. Can’t wait to see how this next week turns out!

You can find out a little more about me by visiting here.