As part of my coursework in Professor Remi Holden’s INTE 5340 Learning with Digital Stories Summer 2015 course at the University of Colorado Denver, I’ve included below, a written reflection on my experience as a learner with (digital) storytelling given my participation throughout the semester. This reflection is complementary of my final portfolio and builds on my seven prior weekly… Read more →

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Earlier this week, one of my Digital Storytelling classmates, La Dawna Minnis tweeted out asking if anyone was interested in writing a collaborative story. Hey #ds106, anyone interested in writing a collaborative story with me over the next couple days? http://t.co/asF0g6a2U9#writingassignments — La Dawna Minnis (@llminnis) July 21, 2015 Taking the initiative, she started working in Google Docs and once… Read more →

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Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a real thing. We all are affected by the weather that comes with the change in seasons in some capacity. Growing up in Pennsylvania I always hated the winters. The sun doesn’t shine much from November through April in South Eastern Pennsylvania and the shortened days created the perfect recipe for a case of SAD.… Read more →

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The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. — Alvin Toffler. After getting through the first few pages of the final chapter of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knoble’s New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning, I nearly dropped the book on the floor! Had I… Read more →

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With regards to the timing of our course, I’m skipping over chapter six and jumping right into chapter seven where Colin Lankshear and Michele Knoble take us further into the realm of social practices associated with new literacies— examining participatory and collaborative approaches to learning online (L&K 2011, p.209). This includes social learning and some everyday practices, the paradigm shift… Read more →

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Last fall I volunteered after school with Colorado High School Charter (CHSC) helping students complete their past due classwork. Many times we had to read through old literature from American authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and answer comprehensive questions, which many students (including myself) struggled with. Carrie Patterson and Dina Denis from East Bronx Academy For the Future are… Read more →

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Another daily create for your viewing pleasure… Take a photo that shows us magical light. We all have our stories from September 11th. I was living in PA at the time but these photos were taken at ground zero during my days in NYC (2010)– before the new One World Trade Center was built. I don’t know if they still… Read more →

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I’m sure by this point in time, many of you have felt the effects of digital loss in one form or another. Maybe you forgot to save the Word document and your computer crashes. Maybe you all the footage you thought you recorded on your trip abroad never processed. Or, may your iPad suffered heat stroke because you left it… Read more →

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Today’s DS106 daily create: Make a support poster for The Public Domain Review using one of their images and asking people to support the project. The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit online journal dedicated to promoting and celebrating work under public domain. Learn more here. To create this support poster I first found a quote from the testimonial page… Read more →

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I haven’t felt much of a connection with this week’s selection of daily creates. I’m glad I waited until today instead of forcing one just to get it done. Today’s DS106 daily create is another writing assignment titled: The dream of the Dragonflies – A death poem. Details: “Write a serious poem, ideally a haiku or tanka, from the point… Read more →

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I have to say, I struggled a lot with our week five DS106 Mashup Assignment. I probably spent entirely way too long sifting through the assignment bank in search of something that felt like a good choice and related to my focal theme of emotional expression through creativity. I kept coming back to the music mashup assignment, Opposites Attract so… Read more →

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So far, we’ve been learning a great deal about the notion of “new literacies” beginning with concepts and theories to some everyday practices. In chapter five, Lankshear and Knoble discuss blogs and wikis as they relate to participatory and collaborative literacy practices. For the purposes of this post, I’d like to discuss the relationship between participation in an online space… Read more →

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Playing off this week’s DS106 mashup assignment in combination with Lankshear and Knoble’s “remix practices” and “literacy dimensions” highlighted in chapter four, I will be critiquing a fun little mashup movie trailer I found on trailercuts.com titled “Goonies of the Caribbean” posted by Steve Concotelli (I don’t know if he created it or just posted). I chose this movie trailer remix… Read more →

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#PenATweet Day was July 1st, 2015 and DS106 is keeping the momentum going through today, July 6th. Today’s daily create assignment encourages us to remember the importance of handwriting. Details here. My take: does your handwriting ever change with your mood? Mine sure does! You can tell a lot about a person and how they are feeling from their handwriting–… Read more →

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Another photography daily create! Yay!   Embed history of art in the everyday Do a creative edit in the spirit of Alexey Kondakov. Embed a famous painting in an everyday setting. For anyone who doesn’t know, Alexey Kondakov is an Ukrainian Art Director who Photoshops classic art heroes into modern day situations. I call my rendition, “Girl with the Slot… Read more →

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Your favorite day with your best friend   Draw an image of the best place or thing to do with your best friend(s)! …is today’s DS106 daily create assignment. My favorite place with best friend is at her family’s beach house on Oak Island, NY. We’ve been friends for about 10 years and have many memories there! My drawing is… Read more →

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It’s crazy to think we’re halfway through our Learning with Digital Storytelling coursework and I’ve written six critiques thus far. Time is flying! As I deepen my understanding of digital storytelling through my weekly social learning practices, I’ll be taking a new approach to critiquing. For the next three weeks, I’ll be focusing on just three critiques, instead of six,… Read more →

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Continuing the drumbeat of the term “remixing” as a social practice of new literacies, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knoble go into greater depth discussing cultural and digital remixing and the types of practices involved. At its core, the concept of remix as a culture practice is a “necessary condition for cultural sustainability, development, enrichment, and well-being” (L&K 2011, p.97). America… Read more →

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Having virtually no design experience, I thought this week’s DS106 Design Assignment would be challenging. To my surprise, I was able to find an assignment, come up with an idea, complete my design in one afternoon. I discovered, Minimalize Your Philosophy at random and it all sort-a fell into place from there. The instructions were to: Pick your favorite quote… Read more →

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Silence is…   For today’s DS106 daily create writing assignment, I created a graphical Haiku using canva on what silence means to me.  Read more →

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After last week’s experimentation with audio as a medium for digital storytelling, I wanted to explore it a bit further through one of my social learning practices of critiquing. After quite a bit of searching, I finally found something that I could relate to my focal theme of emotional expression through creativity:   Emotional Expression 1 By Ross Black The… Read more →

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I thought long and hard about what I would construct for this week’s video assignment. My original idea went to sh*t after shooting (thankfully it wasn’t terribly time consuming) and I struggled with making this coincide with my focal theme of emotional expression through creativity. I really wanted to do some form of stop motion for the 30 second documentary… Read more →

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In this chapter, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knoble spend a great deal of time talking through the technologies and values of “new” literacies—specifically the interrelationship between “new technical stuff” and “new ethos stuff.” In short, Lankshear and Knoble argue that the “new technical stuff” of new literacies or, types of applications/sites we use to create meaning (i.e. Machinima) is the… Read more →

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23 Feelings in Dance When we watch dance what do we “see”? By Peter Lovatt My mother told me once I danced in utero. Whether I was actually dancing it up for debate. However, for as long as I can remember, dance has always been a creative form of emotional expression. I can remember the highs and lows after competitions… Read more →

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  Today’s daily create: Little People Go to the highest place you can find and take a picture of people being small This photo was actually taken a few years ago when I first moved to Denver. It was taken at dusk, some time early January from the top of a parking garage at Auraria campus. It’s one of my… Read more →

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When I was in elementary school, a girlfriend and I use to play this game where we’d have an on-going conversation about how we couldn’t understand why we never saw each other at piano lessons, even though they were always at the same time. It was silly and I’m not sure why it has stuck with me but, the memory… Read more →

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