This week was way better than last week. WAY better. I mean, yeah, it’s 11:25 and I’m just now doing my weekly summary, but that’s better than the midnight last week, and I spaced out most of my assignments this week as well.
According to all ya’ll (I’m from the south, and my online vocabulary is a bit looser than my day-to-day vernacular), I came up with a not-too-shabby definition of what I thought a digital story was. That was a pretty fun assignment, but it also probably took me the least amount of time to accomplish and took the least amount of creativity.
My interpretation of the Vonnegut story arc assignment (show the arc of a story of my choosing) might not have been the same as what was expected. The story I chose to tackle is as non-fiction as it gets: I chose history. In this narrative, women are constantly pushing uphill, but even at the alleged top of the hill (today! gender equality! hurrah!), there is still a significant gap between the arc of women’s lives and those of men’s. Using the arc as a way of describing a story makes a lot of sense, especially when comparing the shapes of different stories to find similarities. As Vonnegut said, everyone has heard these stories, and they are most recognizable when they are reduced to their most basic shapes.
This is the other form of a digital story I chose for the assignment. It showed how people can use social media, images (in this case a .gif), words, and real-life events to work together and create a collaborative story. This example, which criticizes general lack of concern for the living situation of the millions of low-income racial minorities, made something of a joke out of the reaction to the power surge during the Super Bowl tonight.
My favorite assignment by another student from previous DS106 classes was a preview for a surfing movie made by someone whose name I think is Grace. I found that my definition of digital storytelling helped me decide whether I thought this counted as a digital story. Multiple forms of media? Check. Connecting people to one another? Check. Creating an emotional response? Check!
In short, it ‘checked’ out as a digital story. Get it?
Daily Creates
LOVING THESE. Loving these so much. Here’s my work from this week:
“An Invention!”
This was my cyclocopter. Pretty self-explanatory.
“Something Broken”
Something broken? In my opinion, this piece of crap legislation represents some of what is “broken” about our society.
“Boring Drawing on an Interesting Surface”
This is a drawing of a peace symbol, which is one of the most cliché and over-used symbols ever, in my opinion. What I drew it on, though, is a piece of the Berlin Wall. (deep, right?) (just kidding)
*Disclaimer: I drew on tape on the surface, took the picture, and then removed the tape. No damage done.
My Favorite Assignment of the Week:
My favorite assignment this week was the five-picture flickr story. Strangely, I don’t have much to say about it. It was just a lot of fun and was a bit challenging. What I ended up with was a very short story about a hallucinating hawk named Horus.
Group Activities:
By getting to take a look at other people’s blogs this week, I was able to see how other people were interpreting and accomplishing different assignments. What I really liked was everyone’s ability to keep their blog themes consistent and reflected in each of their posts. My favorite was Tiffany’s – she’s putting princess stories (maybe just one on-going one since there are recurring characters) into the beginnings of some of her posts. I really like that idea! I feel like I’m doing a similar thing with my theme, although I’d like to incorporate more of the “dogs and coffee” part soon.
Overall I feel like I’m getting a lot more comfortable with this class and with my blog. Getting to see what other people thought about what I was doing was also really encouraging – I wasn’t sure how my voice would come across in my posts, but people seem to like it. The “activist” part of my blog title is actually a really huge part of who I am – I’m not “angry” (okay, well maybe kind of), I just really really care about a lot of things that tend to slide under people’s radars. I’m trying to stay true to that and use this blog to demonstrate that when I can. I’m having a lot of fun doing it though, so I’m really happy about that. What I need help with the most I think is embedding things into these weekly summaries. My photos keep showing up blurry and I have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get different things to show up.
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