What a week.

When I first clicked on the link to see this week’s assignments I was thinking, wow this is a ton to do! But while I was completely the tasks I never felt overwhelmed and I didn’t find anything to be overly difficult. Yay!

So what all did week 3 involve?

First I shared my thoughts on what storytelling and digital storytelling meant to me. Feel free to read the in depth post and read my thoughts on storytelling. I even talk about the time my great grandma told me a story about her hair clip getting pinned to a cow’s tail!

I found that digital storytelling involved a lot more than I originally thought it did. I didn’t realize a single picture could be considered digital storytelling, but now I see why that is the case and I completely understand. The name of this course is digital storytelling so I know that I will continue to learn and expand upon the concept throughout the remainder of this course.

Next I watched a video by Kurt Vonnegut’s approach to storytelling. I really liked the video and his idea of using shapes to describe stories. I had never thought of stories in this manner, but it makes complete sense to me.

Here is the link to my blogpost on Vonnegut’s ideas. I created a drawing of the movie “How to Lose a Guy in 10 days” and I also made a video that discusses my drawing in more detail if anyone wants to view it. I chose this film because it was the “Boy meets Girl” story line that Vonnegut discussed, though not using those terms, and Maya Eilam drew. I felt that my picture (seen below) shows the basic plot of the storyline and my video provides a bit extra. I know see why my picture is considered digital storytelling, because it includes a media outlet (in this case a picture) and there is a story behind it.

(Doesn’t Youtube pick the best faces to have as the video opener? NOT!)

After creating my own digital storytelling piece, I got to review two pieces of work from former ds106 classes. We had to pick one piece from in[SPIRE] and another from the best work of last semester’s students.

I really enjoyed looking a former students’ work and furthering my knowledge in digital storytelling based on the examples I got to see. I really loved the two pieces I picked for this assignment. From in[SPIRE] I picked the following picture from a former ds106er named Candice.

This piece made me laugh and I see how this is considered digital storytelling, because this added statement on the movie poster allows a viewer to contemplate where this movie might go and what will happen.

For the best works piece I chose the following video from former ds106er Lauren. 

I can tell how much time and effort she put in this video. The use of movie/TV couples and this song formed a great piece of digital media. I knew most, if not all the couples so I new their “stories.” However, I feel that one can imagine and picture the stories behind each of these couples without much difficulty.

Daily Creates

This week we stepped up the game and had to complete 3 daily creates. These assignments are by far one of my favorite activities to complete! I love looking at the daily create website everyday and seeing what it’s about.

Want to see which daily creates I did this week? Here’s a separate post all about them!

Storytelling through pictures

Another assignment this week was to create a story with pictures, there were 3 options to chose from, but I decided to pick two picture from the daily create photography bank and create a story and connect the two pictures in some way.

Using the two picture from the photography bank, I created the most ridiculous story ever. You can read it and see the picture in this blog post. This activity allowed me to be creative and think outside of the box. While I do like to be creative, I’m not the best at it because I get stressed out if I can figure how to do something immediately. But this class is showing me that if I just take some time and figure out everything I can come up with a very corny and silly story using just two photos!

Community Group Activity

First off I thought it was great that we had were split into groups to comment on one another’s blogs. My group consisted of Leah, Kyle, Chelsea and me (of course) but since we only had 4 members total, we got to comment on CogDog’s blog as well! So I went around to everyone’s blog (minus Cogdog) and commented on Wednesday on everyone’s past week’s work. Yesterday I knocked out both of my comments for the week on Cogdog’s blog and I was hoping to take care of my second comments on everyone else’s blog. But no one had anything up yet. Today, I was able to comment on a new post from Chelsea, on Leah’s blog I just commented on another old post and I commented on the only two posts Kyle has. I was really hoping to be able to comment on both new and old work, but that’s okay.

As I am writing this, I have only received comments from Chelsea and Kyle. Both of them were very kind and had nice things to say about my blog! It’s always nice to have affirmation that your work is good and looks nice. I think everyone in my group has really unique and different styles of writing and blog customization, which is really awesome! I think as the semester goes on we will be able to learn more from one another and do great things together as ds106ers!

Generally speaking

This week was a lot of fun! I believe I am getting a better understanding of what digital storytelling really means. Additionally, I feel that I am becoming more creative with my work (at least for me). I’m feeling good about the blogging and I’m really loving my blog’s background.

Bring on week 4!