With Those We Love Alive (Bhagavad Gita: Better to live on beggar’s bread with those we love alive, than taste their blood in rich feasts spread, and guiltily survive) (we see all of these images in the poem to come – beggars surviving in spite of their surroundings, others that have become inhuman, alien by thriving on the … Continue reading With Those We Love Alive & The Cape (The Final Post)

Separation I liked this poem a lot.. I felt it was e-literature in the sense that it had a message, even a moral for the reader. Unfortunately, much of what I didn’t like about it was contained on the very first page. I felt that making it clear that this was a work based on … Continue reading Separation & Sooth

My best description of “Hobo Lobo of Hamelin” would be as an interactive fable… set up almost like a storyboard, with the scenes as static animated images, moving from one point in the story to another. The creator, Steve Nivadinovic, says it’s meant to “do its own thing”..  He also points out that it’s meant to … Continue reading Hobo Lobo Gets Revenge

Alternative history is a fascinating field – it explores what would happen if certain events played out differently than they did in real life. What if the D-Day invasion had failed? What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War? These opportunities to explore alternate worlds open up untold possibilities for authors and storytellers. That … Continue reading First Draft of the Revolution

This unprecedented gathering of “thermophiles in love” an entertaining, although at times frustrating, adventure into role-playing and online “dating”. I would even go so far as to call it e-literature, due to the fact that the world was almost entirely built on the contributed writings of its participants. I took the name@acido_melioristicus. As an acido, … Continue reading Thermophiles In Love

Jason Nelson’s “This is How You Will Die” is described as digital fiction and poetry, but I found that the imagery and the sounds are just as responsible for the haunting and confusing aura around this piece.  I agree that it can be considered e-lit as the prose and poetry inform the experience that we … Continue reading This is How You Will Die

This story is about how a father and teenage son communicate (or fail to communicate). It is important because it will illustrate how music and lyrics can both separate the generations but can also bring generations together. It will also show how music and lyrics can help speak for us, can help us channel our … Continue reading E-Lit Storyboard

“Pieces of Herself” is an obviously feminist e-lit narrative that utilizes multimedia (still imagery, moving video and audio clips) to illustrate different ways that women see themselves against a backdrop of an idealized American culture. I felt that this was a unique way of exploring the female character, in that it allowed me to go … Continue reading Pieces of Herself

Inanimate Alice is a digital novel that incorporates visual, sound and interactive elements. In one description I read, it is called “transmedial” – a storytelling technique that utilizes multiple digital platforms and formats. It even includes a game within the game for the player if they choose. The overarching theme of this story for me … Continue reading Inanimate Alice

I actually looked at High Muck a Muck initially for my own project and I am glad to get a chance to play. The phrase itself means an important or influential person, especially one who is pompous or conceited. It comes from Chinook Jargon in the period (later 1800’s) and area (Pacific Northwest) in which the … Continue reading High Muck a Muck

Tailspin is a fascinating interactive text that uses sound to tell the story with sparse text and striking images as supplements for the story. It is focused around a father/grandfather figure that is suffering from tinnitus and reflects the way he communicates (or fails to communicate) through a haze of chaotic and discordant sounds. The … Continue reading Tailspin

I have not encountered much of this kind of writing, but it strikes as a fascinating way to use the senses to communicate a story beyond text on the page. Upon first looking at it, it struck me a bit like ee cummings who tried to defy conventional writing styles to give the aesthetic quality … Continue reading E-Lit: The Beginning

After participating in Air-B-N-Me, it allowed me an opportunity to reflect on how it was a microcosm of my experience with digital media as a whole. It was daunting at first, fun and creative once I got into it and yet included some technical obstacles that frustrated me and left me wondering if it was […]

I wasn’t too sure about this project at first. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all good with the creative aspect and the idea of inhabiting someone else’s life actually inspired a few interesting story ideas that I tucked away for future use. But in this case, it was the technological part of this that made […]

Before We Began The primary reason that I chose Instagram as the media platform I’m exploring is that my kids wanted to try it. In this blog, I explain how I went about exploring this medium and then how my kids did. Both said they were “excited”, although Frank also said he was “nervous” and Jackie […]

I found the idea of Jenkins’ “civic imagination” intriguing – and I would imagine that for the majority of us, we never emerge from that state. Imagining a better world is a dream for all of humanity but, as is pointed out, the difficulty is in taking up the mantle of change agent.The report that […]

My turn to present this week and I found this to be quite a challenge. There are so many different aspects to the way we participate online that it’s difficult to get your arms around them all. The authors themselves found themselves butting heads over how to define the problems they saw – the solutions, […]

Chapter 2 As a parent, I had a strong reaction to many of the arguments put forward in the first chapter and spent the bulk of my time on that. The intro states that adults fail to recognize or appreciate the ways in which youth use tech to connect with others, learn and participate in […]

Chapter 2 Filtering our images and ideas is inevitable, initially because of cultural sensitivities and preconceptions and increasingly, because of technology. As Jill Walker Rettberg puts it, “We filter our images, our email and our newsfeeds.” I think often we see selfies as particularly revealing. I believe that it gives us the chance to filter ourselves and direct the way […]

Racism and particularly the way racism is reflected in our society is a tough subject – something I’ve explored in my private and professional life as a member of the media, trying to ensure that I see as many points of view as possible. I helped cover the Ferguson unrest and remember the case well. I agree 100% […]

((I will start this blog by declaring that I was taking selfies long before I was posting online, simply by focusing a regular camera at something an arm’s length away, then turning it around. I was doing that as far back as 1999.  The proof is somewhere in a shoe box :)) Back to the […]

I have to admit that this class and this book have opened my eyes to the dramatic shifts that online social networks are already making in our society. At the same time, it has made me realize how little of that shift has impacted my own life. In talking to my wife and kids at […]

The best way to start to discover this site is with the page describing its mission. Mozilla’s web literacy blog describes itself as an attempt to cultivate a global network of leaders who teach and learn the skill of participating in the digital world. The image on the page indicates that this effort is directed towards […]

As I read through Chapter 4 of “Net Smart”, there was much of it that I appreciated: particularly the encouragement to dive into the participatory side of the Web – something that  have been hesitant to try. I am one of those peopel that still views with suspicion the time-sucking aspects of social media and […]

Identifying context and crap are critical to what I do every day as a journalist, just as they are critical to my kids as they do their schoolwork or us as we do research to buy a house or a washing machine. As a newswriter, I’ve come to realize that while getting rid of the […]

Going forward, this will be the space for blogs relating to ENG 5085 – Composition Theory and New Media Studies under the tutelage of Dr. Zamora

For this post, I wanted to sum up my experience with DS106. Definition of Storytelling First of all, my definition of digital storytelling (and storytelling in general back in Unit 3) was that it’s an effort to convey the experience or a kind of firsthand account on behalf of the storyteller. I still believe that, […]

Remixes/Mashups Upon watching the videos, the one main thing I’m nervous about is remixing photos. I had a terrible time just trying to figure out how to trim pictures out of background scenes. I have no idea how I will manipulate them to get them into a different form of media. We shall see. That […]

Making Movies I’m working with Windows Movie Maker. It took me a while to figure out the editing tool because stupidly I was reading it as if what I clipped was removed and of course its what is between the in and out points that remains. Because of that I have to reload the video […]

Reading Movies In readying my tools I discovered that my computer does, in fact, have Windows Live Movie Maker. I had no idea it was there. I just messed around for the last ten minutes with a video of my son, adding captions, music, an effect and some kind of a dissolve open.  I;m having […]