Hi ds106er’s,

So, here it is: the last weekly summary of ds106. I’m relieved that I’m done with all my schoolwork, and hopefully GRADUATING (after three longgggg years… I don’t know how people can stand four years of college!); but at the same time, I feel as if this huge blanket has been yanked off of me and I’m standing in the cold with nothing to keep me warm. Thankfully, I do have two internships to keep me occupied, and make me feel like I’m doing something post-undergrad. So yay (:

Okay, so now that I’m done blabbering on about my thoughts and insecurities, here’s the last rundown of everything I’ve done this last week (and semester!):

What is Storytelling 2.0

Okay, so back in the day, I used to literally put all of my work into one weekly post, so my definition of digital storytelling is linked here along with all my work from that week. Have fun trying to find it haha.

Anyways, I don’t think my definition of storytelling has changed. Especially after two semesters of creative writing in different courses, I really do believe that stories are what allow us to sleep at night. They help us fill in the gaps, clear up uncertainties, and erase worries we have. To refer back to the wise words of Joan Didion, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Final Project

So, for my final project, I ended up taking Mulan and putting her in a new context: high school. At first, I wanted to bring her completely into the 21st century, but I thought it would be fun to have the story take place in the time period right after she gets back from defeating the Hun army.

In general, I’m super pleased with my work! I had a lot of fun putting my all-time favourite Disney character into a different context and seeing how she would deal with problems that normal people experience (although they probably aren’t as dramatic as trying to save an entire country.) Here are the components and posts for my final project:

“What They Might Have Done in Social Media” Assignment- design

“Say It Like the Peanut Butter” Assignment- visual

“Animated Music Video” Assignment- video

“Cartoon You” Assignment- design

“My Favourite Lyric” Assignment- visual

If I could have changed something, I wish I could have done one audio assignment. But to be honest, I think I ended this class way more comfortable with video and design. If we didn’t have to have a huge array of different types, I probably would have done my entire project with video assignments! They are so much fun to do

Contribution to ds106 Community

So, I think I used Twitter A LOT for this class. It was mostly to beg for help, but also to interact with other students, and ask about their experiences with assignments. Kaitlyn and I bonded over how ridiculously horrid Popcorn was (I’m still having nightmares from that assignment!), and I looked to Kelsie for inspiration on assignments (since she was a model example of a ds106 student by doing assignments early) as well as for ideas and comments about real-life stuff (like running shoes.)

The ds106 show… I’m trying to remember how that went since I co-hosted the second or third one of the semester. I think all I remember from that was all the trolls! I think that really affected my participation in the show. Also, I think I got really camera shy and felt really inferior since we had professors from other universities tuning in that knew a lot more about this material than me.

In terms of the radio project, I thought it was super interesting to meet everyone in real-life, outside of Google+ hangouts and blog comments. I would definitely recommend that future groups meet in person, because I think it helps everyone focus (and it’s just a really interesting experience… I wonder if people on Catfish feel like this?)

And with blog comments… I think I did a great job of doing comments towards the beginning of the semester, but once the workload started getting bigger and heavier for our class, I think I would only comment on one or two people’s blogs per week. I think it’s because a lot of people did a great job on the assignments so I never really had anything to say.

My Tutorials, Assignments, and Daily Creates

I made a post last week here about these. To be honest, I wish I had remembered that I needed to do these. I completely forgot about them until about two weeks ago. Whoops!

Best Work

There are only a few things I consider my “best work” from this semester:

One of them is definitely my “Streetview Story” assignment. I think I really liked this one because I was able to showcase my writing abilities (if you haven’t noticed, I’m an English major!) in this assignment.

The second one is the “An Album Cover” assignment. I just really like how we had to randomly select different components and try to make them fit together and create one cohesive image. Also, mine turned out pretty well surprisingly!

The third one is my part of the ds106 Radio Show project. I feel like I put in a lot of effort to my section (especially the John Mayer interview) and it really challenged me to try different things with audio. If anything, I think someone should make the interview part that we did for our radio show into a mandatory audio assignment, because it really did make me learn how to use Audacity.

The penultimate assignment is the “Google Map Trip” assignment. It not only made me think more about web assignments, but also taught me how to use Google Maps in a different way. Plus, I was able to reminisce  about my childhood through my old houses.

And finally, the last assignment I chose as one of my best works is probably my best work in this class so far, and it was for the “A Day in Your Life” assignment. This assignment not only made me really comfortable with using iMovie and other movie editing software, but it also taught me that planning ahead really does help make your work turn out better. After ds106, I’m thinking about making some videos on YouTube as a hobby now that I know how people do them. And I have this assignment and this class to thank for this newfound knowledge!

Pay It Forward to Future Students message

Final Thoughts, Comments, Reflections, etc.

Overall, I had a really fun time in this class. There were moments that I felt like throwing my computer out the window, but I really do appreciate being able to play around with different programs and software and interacting with a bunch of different people through the internet. I hope my work inspired people in some way, (even though some of it was pretty bad in hindsight). But I feel like I learned a lot about myself and about telecommunicating (especially since I think my future careers are going to be mostly telecommuting.) So yeah, thank you for giving me this experience (: