What is Storytelling-

This week we were asked to blog about “What is Storytelling?”  I thought this was going to be an easy thing to talk about but as I got going I realized that storytelling is a lot more complex of a topic that I had previously thought.  Storytelling is an ever changing and evolving idea.  You can read more about what I had to say about storytelling here.

Shape of Stories-

Kurt Vonnegut’s idea of the Shape of Stories was very interesting and totally made sense. After thinking about every movie or TV show that I had ever seen, I realized that this could easily apply to each of them.  I decided to analyze the season one finale of Friday Night Lights entitled State. Here is the picture that I made using Kurt Vonnegut’s ideas for this episode

You can read more about my analysis here.

Review of Past Students-

Looking back at past students and their best work was probably my favorite of all of the assignments that we had to do this week.  I loved looking at all of the super creative ideas that students had in the past.  It made me a bit stressed to think that I was going to have to try to make things like they did, but then again I didn’t think I would be able to do as much as I have up to this point three weeks ago either.

My two favorite assignments that I saw were Doodly Doo by Emily DelRoss on the in[SPIRE] website.

and the Toy Story MashUp by Kiersten off the website for last semesters students best work.

You can read more into why I choose each of these here.

Daily Creates-

This week we changed to our daily create requirements to three.  Here are the three that I choose for this week.

1. Make a picture of something broken. Literally or figuratively.

2. Take/make a photo that represents math at work in the world.

3.Make a blue screen of death message using type only.

I explained these a bit more here.  I am really enjoying doing these daily creates.  The pictures ones are my favorite (as you can tell by which ones I picked this week).  I’m thinking about trying to pick ones from different groups next weeks.  We’ll see how that goes.

Telling a Story with Pictures-

Another one of our assignments this week was to tell a story using five pictures.  For my story I decided to show a count down leading up to my trip to Disney World over spring break.  I made a paper chain count down a couple weeks ago which shows how many days that I have until my trip.  For this assignment I took the chain apart little by little to show the time passing and it getting closer to my trip.  I ended with a picture of Cinderella’s castle showing that I had made it to Disney.  Here is a sample picture of what the chain looks like today.

You can see the story and all five of the pictures here.

Group Activity-

I really really really liked being assigned a group for this week.  It was fun for me to look at everything that my group members had posted and to get ideas off of what they had made themselves.  I can’t decide if I should look at their stuff to get ideas before I do mine, or wait so I don’t accidentally copy all their good ideas.  Each of my group members had something that I thought stood out about their blog. Karissa does an incredible job with her theme.  Even though it seems little I love how she closes each of her posts with the same sign off (I feel a little bit like shes a future gossip girl, xoxo). Tiffany has an incredible voice that she uses throughout her site.  You genuinely feel like you are reading some magical fairy tail each time you read her blog posts.  Jazmin does an awesome job making her blog easy to follow.  She links to everything that she talks about so you always know where everything came from.  And Kristen comes up with the best post titles ever.  Like seriously I don’t know where she comes up with them but they are always so stinking creative. It was awesome to see how different each of our blogs were while each of them were all still really good.

I loved getting feedback from the rest of my group as well.  First off they were incredibly nice.  It was nice to get some validation for all the hard work that I had put into this class so far.  I also got a couple of ideas that I plan on using going forward.  It’s nice to have an extra set of eyes looking over everything that you’ve done and giving you some helpful ideas to us int he future.

Reflection on Third Week-

Overall, I thought my third week of ds106 went really well.  I got a bit behind and had to do most of my work at the end of the week (which I wouldn’t recommend) but it was still a pleasant experience.  I am feeling comfortable with everything that we have done so far (and I am getting more and more comfortable with the things that we do every week).  I’m interested in seeing what we have coming next week!

See y’all then!