This week, I was a bit of a scientist, because scientists like to experiment. This past week included a lot of experimentation, most notable with my ds106 audio assignment, "Negative Affirmations." I also experimented a lot with my first daily create "...

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a journalist.

Every day in college, I worked and studied to attain this goal.

But, one day, a financial crisis struck, and the economy took a tumble.

Because of that newspapers found it difficult to be sustainable.

Because of that newspapers cut wages, eliminated jobs, and even folded.

Because of that I was boxed-out of the industry.

Until finally I found a job in e-learning.

And ever since then I’ve worked and studied in the e-learning industry.

My e-Learning Story

The Daily Create Assignment:
A memoir with Pixar Story Spine

I decided to tell this story using the Pixar Story Spine because, in my transition to my new job, this subject seemed to come up often; how did you end-up in instructional design? Using the Pixar Story Spine, I was able to describe the plight of my situation as a young aspiring journalist, but like any good Pixar story, I find hope and purpose in the end. This is the first written daily create project I have done yet, they other three being visual assignments. I think written assignments require an extra element of candor, whereas when creating a visual assignment, you can disguise or withhold honesty using graphic design.

   Negative Affirmationsds106 Audio Assignment:Spooky Dialogue"Negative Affirmations" continues my focal theme of suffering from writer's block. As a follow-up to the visual assignment, "Blocked" (also used as the image for the audio file), i...

RecedeThe Daily Create Assignment:See beyond the buildingsOkay, so whether a sidewalk is part of a building's architecture is up for debate. As I interpreted the assignment, we were meant to create a dichotomy between artificial structures and nature. ...

Digital Story:
NYTimes - Punched Out: The Death of Derek Boogaard
Link
Alternate Link (YouTube)

Punched Out: The Death of Derek Boogaard is a 35 minute documentary produced by the New York Times, which four years ago released a string of articles, videos, and interactive graphics surrounding Boogaard’s death, hockey head trauma, as well as head trauma in sports in general. Boogaard died of a drug overdose, a lethal mix of oxycodone and alcohol, at 28 years old. I remember watching and reading this content when it was originally released in 2011 during a strange summer full of hockey player deaths, including Rick Rypien’s and Wade Belak’s  suicides, which were also attributed to depression and drug addiction, and a horrific plane crash that killed an entire Russian hockey team, Lokomotiv Yaroslavl.

Most notably, Boogaard’s, Rypien’s, and Belak’s deaths all occurred in the four month span, and all were associated with fighting in hockey, brain trauma, depression, and addictions to pain killers. Because Boogaard, a.k.a the “Boogeyman,” was one of the most popular enforcers in the NHL, and because he split his professional career playing with the Minnesota Wild, and then the New York Rangers, The New York Times profiled his rise and fall to expose the danger of fighting in hockey, addiction to pain medications, and ultimately, head trauma in sports.

Because the documentary intended to profile the hockey life of Derek Boogaard as well as draw attention to the dangers of the enforcer role in hockey, I intend to assess Punched Out on Jason Ohler’s criteria of Story, Research, and Sense of Audience.

Story
The documentary starts with a teaser, giving a brief summary of Boogaard’s fate before rewinding all the way back to his childhood, as if to say “where did this all start?” The documentary travels through Boogaard’s life and career, from the awkward teenage years, the uncertainty of making it into the NHL, and the popularity as a fighter, to the the struggle to stay relevant, the downward spiral from brain trauma, and drug addiction, which culminated in his death. We are then introduced to the research of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, as well as a defense of fighting by the NHL commissioner. The documentary ends on a sobering quote by researcher Chris Nowinski who breaks down the whole story and asks the major question, “do we want to start trading money for brain cells?”

I don’t know that there is any other way to profile a person’s life or career, but from start to finish. I think journalist Shayla Harris did a fair job at telling Boogaard’s tragic story objectively, without judgement, at least from her perspective. That isn’t to say we do not witness interesting, subjective perspectives in the documentary.

For example, early on, Matt Sommerfeld, Boogaard’s fighting rival, asserts that sacrificing the health of his brain was not worth the chance to make it to the NHL, saying “I don’t know if it’s worth it. It wasn’t for me.” Sommerfeld never did play in the NHL. Later, Todd Fedoruk, the player whose career Boogaard ultimately ended, reveres Boogaard, saying “he was hands-down one of the best.” Boogaard’s father, Len, says “I should have been watching over him.” Finally, at the end, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman says of the CTE research “the conclusions they reach at a very preliminary stage is great for headlines, but not necessarily advancing the research.” I think through the interviews and quotes, the audience sees many different angels of Boogaard’s story, and the issue of head trauma, and can draw their own conclusions.

Research
The New York Times is one of the last bastions of quality journalism because, as we expect as readers, they definitely do their homework. To get many perspectives of the story, The New York Times interviewed a few relatives, and friends of Derek Boogaard, other hockey enforcers (including one of his early rivals), the scientists at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, and the commissioner of the NHL. They even referred to his journal, which serves as a voice for Boogaard posthumously. The archival footage was expansive, ranging from NHL broadcasts, to home videos of his teenage years. The Times even showed old rosters and photographs.

Sense of Audience
Part of strong journalism and storytelling is making sure that audience will recognize and be “up-to-speed” on certain subject matter before progressing forward toward the story’s conclusion. The Times did a good job of using narration and interviews to initiate the uninitiated to some of the more esoteric concepts in this documentary, for instance the “enforcer” role, or CTE.

Referring back to my entry about James Paul Gee’s definition of Discourse (with a capital D), there are a couple different types of Discourse in this documentary; the one which took the most time to define was the hockey enforcer role. I think The Times spent a good amount of time presenting the practices of this enforcer Discourse to an audience who may be unaware of the role of fighting in hockey, and who the fighters are.

This week, the magic word is “Discourse.” Discourse, with a capital D! Discourse, according to James Paul Gee, is a major component of understanding literacy (last week’s magic word!). This notion of “Discourse” was defined by Gee as coordination of who we are, and that coordination is how “we humans become recognizable to ourselves and to others, and recognize ourselves, other people, and things, as meaningful in distinctive ways” (Lankshear, 2011, p. 44). More simply, Discourse is how we “’do life’ as individuals.”(Lankshear, 2011, p.43).

These coordinations of are defined by human and non-human elements. For example, the human elements include ways of thinking, feeling, moving, dressing, speaking, believing, and valuing. The non-human aspects include tools, objects, institutions, places, vehicle, locations, etc. So, as Lankshear describes, a "football player Discourse" includes the human elements of “patterns of bodily activity… patterns of mental activity: distinctive forms of ‘know-how,’ of interpretation (e.g. interpreting what other players are doing as a basis for anticipating and acting), aims of purposes… emotions, feelings desires… and so on” (2011, p. 34). The non-human elements would be the football, the helmet, the pads, the field, the team logo, etc.

Think about what Discourse you belong to. We participate in many. For me, I’m in an instructional designer Discourse, a student Discourse, a skier Discourse, a hockey player Discourse, and many others. Discourses give us a sense of identity. To identify yourself in a certain Discourse means you are “able to coordinate elements of that Discourse competently and to be coordinated by them competently” (Lankshear, 2011, p. 45).

Much of this is probably experimented with in high school as teenagers identify with different cliques. Imagine the Breakfast Club; the jock, the geek, the criminal, the princess, and psycho, each in their own Discourse. Of course, we all leave high school and find more meaning in other things (or at least some of us do). We travel between different Discourses. Once we graduate high school, we no longer identify ourselves in the high school student Discourse. Some may still identify with their specific clique Discourse, while others may not.

The human and non-human elements within each Discourse creates a “social practice,” or the way people “’perform’ in their bodies and their minds, their desires and ends, their emotions and values, in certain ways" (Lankshear, 2011, p. 34). And, as Lankshear notes, these performances of social practice develop a social structure or order.  So, to continue my Breakfast Club analogy, imagine how each member of the Breakfast Club carries out their social practices and how this develops the social order of high school.

Anyway, to bring it back to literacy, literacy represents these social practices and Discourse in, as Lankshear describes “encoded texts.” These encoded texts are “frozen” or “captured” and can “travel.” Being literate means you can translate or interpret these texts in the context of your Discourse.

To identify in a skier Discourse, and to be skier literate might mean interpreting a green run as easy, a blue run at intermediate, and a black run as hard, and determining which can be handled. This begs me to question, how granular can Discourses become? Referring to my skier Discourse, I personally ski black runs for fun, however, to a beginner skier, a black run may seem impossible. Does this categorize me as into an expert skier Discourse, and the other into beginner? How much do we deconstruct Discourses?

The War of Art, Pages 30-60
I admit this isn’t the first time I’ve read The War of Art. It’s actually my third. But, as what Lankshear calls an “encoded text,” I can revisit Steven Pressfield’s wisdom as many times as I need to instill philosophies of combating Resistance.

Like the first 30 or so pages, these 30 pages listed the ways that Resistance (Pressfield’s deeper term for writer’s block) can manipulate and prevent you - the aspiring artist - from accomplishing your work. After reading Chapter 2 of New Literacties, I could see how in these 30 pages, Pressfield is establishing the social practices and human elements of a Discourse. This Discourse is a prolific writer, artist, musician, or whatever role that creates, and therefore most likely suffers from Resistance.

Pressfield also makes references to other Discourses as well, noting the triumph or flaws that exist in each of their social practices. Between the lines, this also creates a social order of which is considered better than the other. In one example, Pressfield makes a distinction between an “amateur” and a “professional.” He wrote “grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like” (Pressfield, 2003, p. 43). The human elements of these two Discourses being the “grandiose fantasies” of the amateur and the hard-working focus of the professional.

He also compares the Discourses of a fundamentalist and an artist. Pressfield argues that the fundamentalist, when facing Resistance (or as a fundamentalist might express as sin, the devil, or evil), looks backwards, into the past, into scripture, and faith. He then likens the artist to a humanist, who “believes that humankind, as individuals, is called upon to co-create the world with God,” (Pressfield, 2003, p. 36) and that “each individual has value, at least potentially, in advancing this cause”(Pressfield, 2003, p. 36). He asserts that the artist therefore has a better ability at governing himself or herself, than the fundamentalist, who wants to be governed by old laws and philosophies rather than progress forward. The artist becomes “the truly free individual… free only to the extent of his own self mastery”(Pressfield, 2003, p. 37). This self mastery is part of the literacy that I referred to when I thought of “Resistance-literacy” last week; a practice of understanding how to combat writer’s block, and create.

But, what is the encoded text of this self mastery, or Resistance-literacy? As noted in New Literacties, “literacies are ‘socially recognized ways in which people generate, communicate, and negotiate meanings, as members of Discourses, through the medium of encoded text’”(Lankshear, 2011, p. 50). Well, as I suggested earlier, I suppose a book like The War of Art could be one of these encoded texts, or Stephen King’s On Writing, or William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, or Julia Cameron's The Artist’s Way. But it could also be the works of authors, artists, musicians, etc. Knowledge about each Discourse can be gleamed from their creations too.

Digital Story:
Song Exploder – RAMIN DJAWADI (“Game of Thrones”)
Link

As I explained last week in my first digital story critique, I love it when I can find behind-the-scenes knowledge about something I love. This week, I found a short podcast that profiles the creation of the hit television show Game of Throne’s theme song. I think by examining these insights into the creative process and construction of different mediums, I can garner something that could contribute to my understanding of writer’s block, the focal theme in my ds106 projects. This particular podcast teaches me how one composer utilizes sound to tell a story in a musical fashion, which may also help me in my own effort in creating a ds106 audio assignment this week.

The Song Exploder podcast is short and sweet. Lasting only about 10 minutes, it profiles the development Game of Thrones theme music - a composition becoming as recognizable as the Star Wars, Jurassic Park or Harry Potter themes – through dialogue from the composer himself, Ramin Djawadi. The producer of the podcast, Hrishikesh Hirway, appears on the fringes of this podcast, providing only an introduction and a conclusion. Ramin describes how he became involved with Game of Thrones, his intended goals for the song, the instruments he used, and the parodies it produced.

Because this podcast combines the dialogue of Ramin as well as some clippings from the composition, I am assessing this digital story on Jason Ohler’s criteria of Story, Flow, Organization and Pacing, and Originality, Voice and Creativity.

Story
The story of this podcast was very simple. The composer, Ramin, describes how he became involved in the project when he was approached the the creators of the show D. B. Weiss and David Benioff. After watching two episodes, he was told about how this composition must last for about two minutes, an uncommon request when most television theme songs are much shorter. Ramin was told about how the show’s intro would look, and how the creators wanted a sense of  “journey.” From here he describes his methods and intentions in each section of the song.

What also stood out about Ramin’s story was how the song was recorded in Prague, and he as somewhere different (he does not disclose where exactly), and much of the back-and-forth communication was done through the internet. This felt very relatable to me as much of what I do at work with clients, and in school, is communicate and produce content through the Web. This also made me think about all the complications that must have arose with this style of communication.

Lastly, I enjoyed the part where he described the parodies posted on the internet. This shows how the internet has become a tool of creation, fan-dom, and playfulness. Ramin too showed some playfulness by reciting the South Park parody of his song. Overall, by leaving the story to the composer, I think Song Exploder does a nice job of keeping the story original in its voice.

Originality,  Voice, and Creativity
The host, Hrishikesh, takes a back seat in his podcasts, and allows the composer of the song to describe his story. I think this is a really cool way of keeping the podcast’s originality and voice fresh, because it changes with each composer/musician. Ramin does a good job of describing his music in layman’s terms. I love music, but I have little understanding of how it is written, and then produced. Nevertheless, Ramin described his composition in ways that allowed me to understand what he was trying to accomplish. Coupled with clippings from the song itself, you don’t become lost in his descriptions either. You get to hear exactly what his is talking about.

Flow, Organization, and Pacing
The flow and organization of this podcast more than satisfied my expectations. The story of becoming involved with the show was a nice introduction, but the flow and organization shine the most during the breakdown of each section of the song. Key portions of the song were explained by Ramin, then the clippings of those parts were played, sometimes isolated so the listener could hear a better impression (i.e. the cello, and the women’s chorus).  Finally, at the end, you are exposed to the song in its entirety, but after listening to Ramin tell his story and describe his intentions, you hear the song with a new perspective and appreciation.

The next 60 days are going to be crazy. I’m leaving one job, starting another, moving, and during all of this, I am squeezing a 16 week semester into eight weeks. It shows too. Looking back on Week 1, I realized I produced some form on content every single day of the week, whether a response to the course’s text, a daily create assignment, a critique, etc.

Looking ahead at the remaining seven weeks, I can’t help but be a bit worried. But, as the sayings go, “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and “the show must go on!”

For me, the most profound concept this week was dissecting the term “literacy” in Colin Lankshear’s and Michele Knobel’s book New Literacies: Everyday Practice and Social Learning. As I described in my reading response, previously my notion of literacy was whether or not a person could read or write. Terms like “computer-literate” were simply a turn-of-phrase. My understanding of literacy has expanded to include the “three dimensional model,” which I find the most fascinating definition, as well as the “multiplicity of literacy.” Furthermore, as I read more of my selected scholarships for the course, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, I see myself accumulating literacy in defeating writer’s block, or as Pressfield calls it “Resistance.”

My biggest challenge this week was critiquing two digital stories. Both of mine came from the same source, Radiolab. I critiqued a behind-the-scenes video, and a podcast about Facebook. Both were incredibly engaging and interesting, which made them so difficult to critique. Because Radiolab produces such amazing content, I felt a bit like an impostor using Jason Ohler’s criteria to assess their digital stories when I have only produced a few examples so far this week.

Nevertheless, I was very surprised and pleased by the stories I created, all of which happened to be visual images. The story that surprised me the most was my first daily create, “Dearest,” which I created using only Microsoft Paint. I think the outcome was rather gorgeous. Initially, I had a different vision of what it should look like, but I was able to produce the final product through some experimentation with colors. A close second (only because the end product wasn’t as surprising) is my visual assignment “Blocked.” As I am days removed from finishing this image, the back-and-white color scheme I was so afraid of doesn’t seem nearly as bad as I thought. And finally, my last daily create “Wet Spring,” was a nice surprise as the added element of rain made the picture of a flower more interesting.

Despite feeling a tad overwhelmed at times during Week 1, I think this week was a swift kick in the ass to create, and jump into that mode of creation. As Pressfield described in the prologue of The War of Art, starting to create something comes down to just sitting down, and putting in the time.

Wet Spring

The Daily Create Assignment:
Send flowers to DS106 people!

If you live in Colorado, you know that this has been a very wet Spring. This morning, I wasn't sure I could produce a very good flower picture with the stormy weather. But around noon, the clouds dissipated, the sun started shining through, and I was able to capture this great photo of a purple flower (sorry, I’m not good with flower names). “Wet Spring” represents this unprecedentedly rainy season in Colorado. The dew clinging to the flower pedals indicates a fresh rain, while sunlight shines in the background. I think this image really captures the elements of Spring: lushness, beauty and rejuvenation.

LG G2 Smartphone camera
Gimp (cropping only)

Flickr

Digital Story:
Radiolab - The Trust Engineers
Link

I selected Radiolab’s podcast profiling Facebook’s “Trust Engineers” (now renamed “Facebook Protection and Care”) because it covered social media, a technology being trusted to innovate education. The teaser described that “Facebook has created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen.” To summarize, Facebook conducts social experiments on users and gathers data, which was, and may still be, unbeknownst to said users. One example of these experiments was manipulating the News Feed of users to see if it could affect their emotions.

This particular episode of Radiolab was apparently years in the making, and because of this I will assess it on Jason Oher’s criteria of Story (of course), Research, and Digital Craftsmanship.

Story
The story structure of this podcast reminded me a lot of the sort of story structure of the movie The Matrix. Like most journalistic feature stories, or documentaries, Radiolab starts out with a small point (as I describe in my last critique). This starting point is profiling the collection of reported photos on Facebook. Then, as with a typical diamond structure, it moves outward, more broadly, going to Facebook’s campus, and talking about the Trust Engineers. Finally, when Robert Krulwich asks the question about social experiments being conducted unknowingly to him, we have a sort of red pill/blue pill moment. Once one of the Trust Engineers says “100 percent,” the hosts and audience, like Neo in The Matrix, realize that they have secretly been part of a larger system they had no control over. As Radiolab aptly put it, we are their lab rats.

From here, there is some rejection of Facebook’s Trust Engineers. The public finds out about the experiments, and the backlash begins (as in The Matrix when the humans fight the machines). The term Trust Engineer is then treated with disdain. The episode ends with a discussion about whether the Trust Engineers’ experimentation, manipulation, and monitoring of emotions are ethical or not. Can Facebook improve how people interact online as online interactions yet do not have a complete set of social norms as face-to-face interactions do? Or is Facebook using its data for marketing purposes to make money?

I think the story was super intriguing despite its slow start. And I may be saying it had a slow start because of the hangover of discovering the massive social experiments. The small facts during the first few minutes about how using the word “please” or “do you mind” in pop-up messages really pales in comparison to the larger notion that people were manipulated without them knowing by a seemingly open and friendly social media network.

Research
This episode took some time to create, starting in 2011, as the hosts mentioned. So, kudos for the perseverance to create a 30 minute episode based on years of research. The hosts first interviewed one member of Facebook, but then ended up on the Facebook campus talking to a staff of Trust Engineers discussing the social experiments and asking the right questions; the most poignant one which changes the whole tone of the episode asked by Robert, “What is the statistical likelihood that I have been a guinea pig in one of your experiments?” (See above.)

Digital Craftsmanship
What I really enjoy about Radiolab is its fantastic use of ambient sounds, as well its clippings of dialogue. The ambient sounds and music engages the listener to elicit emotion. In a couple projects I did in my Creative Design for Instructional Materials course in Fall 2014, I also included ambient music into my videos because music affects the amygdala in the brain, which also manages emotions. Evoking emotion can increase engagement. Thusly, music can elicit more attention. In this particular episode of Radiolab, perhaps the most effective use of ambient sound and music was when the hosts described the influx of photos of Facebook during Christmas time. While describing this, sleigh bells could be heard in the background, a sound so commonly associated with the Christmas time, it amplified my visualization of the season.

Throughout Radiolab podcasts, the dialogue between the hosts and the interviewed subjects is constantly clipped and reassembled to convey the story. On paper, this might sound like a bad idea. Clipping so much could potentially lead to a jumbled mess of disjointed phrases. But Radiolab does it so well. This method really keeps the listener entertained and engaged without losing the plot or flow of the podcast.

Blockedds106 Visual Assignment:Multiply YourselfThe focal theme of my digital storytelling assignments for the University of Colorado Denver is examining (and perhaps overcoming) writer's block. "Blocked" was inspired after I was perusing some of the v...

Reviewing the term “literacy” was an interesting study because I only knew it, as Colin Lankshear expressed, as a word that “came to apply to an ever increasing variety of practices” (2011, p. 12). I had no concept of the term’s history and evolution into becoming such a commonly used word to define a person’s proficiency or mastery of a practice. Nevertheless, Lankshear points out the criteria for literacy is deeper than proficiency, or mastery, or experience, et cetera-et cetera.

Early on, literacy was a term used to identify whether a person could read or write, and read or write well enough to perform proficiently enough in their daily work. While minoring in Economics as an undergrad, I learned that one of the criteria of a growing or high-performing nation was its literacy (the strongest performing countries having high rates among women). Lankshear notes that literacy is associated with “a country’s ‘readiness’ for ‘economic take-off’”(2011, p. 7). If you peruse through the CIA World Factbook (which I commonly used to analyze economic statistics and indicators), you can view country’s literacy rates – which the Worldbook defines as appropriate for people ages 15 and above who can read and write.

What was eye-opening to me, was the deeper notion of literacy explained in the “three dimensional model.” Beyond the operational dimension (the read/write proficiency of literacy), the meaning-making aspects of the cultrual dimension, and the value-defining elements of the critical dimension were new concepts to me, and made me wonder how these standards would apply to war traumatized countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. What kind of literacy do these nations have under the three dimensional model? At what rate are people able to, as Lankshear wrote, “speak up, to negotiate and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives” (2011, p. 19).

Aside from the larger, global view of literacy, I wondered about my own literacties when Lankshear wrote about the multiplicity of literacy and how literacy now means “to ‘be on the inside’ of a form or field of knowledge” (2011, p. 21) and “being able to ‘speak’ its language” (2011, p. 21). In my own experience, as with many people, I’ve had to adjust to new literacties when changing jobs, or changing industries; even getting into new hobbies, such as sports, or music, come with their own literacies. Yet, when Lankshear wrote about digital literacies, I thought about my experience joining Twitter as an assignment in my Social Media and Digital Cultures course in the Spring 2014 semester. More broadly, I’ve adjusted to the many digital literacties since enrolling the University of Colorado Denver Learning Technologies Master’s program. I remember when joining the program I was more concerned about learning the ideas and concepts ` instructional design, or as Lankshear wrote “a critical, action-oriented ‘academic approach,’” (2011, p. 23) rather than learning how to build a e-learning module with Dreamweaver (the “skills based vocational approach” (Lankshear, 2011, p. 23)) as I thought these concepts would be more beneficial long-term because technology changes so rapidly, and I feared a more vocational education may become quickly irrelevant.

Lastly, there are two other concepts I felt were important to understanding digital literacy, or “new literacies.” As a proponent of Connectivism, I enjoy Lankshear’s idea of the ethos of the internet, and that new literacies are “more ‘participatory,’ more ‘collaborative,’ and more ‘distributed’” (2011, p. 29). However, when sharing or collaborating, people should also have what Howard Rheingold called “crap detection” (Lankshear p. 25.). Crap detection, or more eloquently called “critical consumption” is an ability to know what is “worth attending to in terms of quality, relevance, and the like” (Lankshear, 2011 p. 25). This notion of deeming what is relevant is also present in Connectivism: what is correct now, may be incorrect tomorrow because of shifting realities, and learners must comprehend these shifts when analyzing incoming information.

Chapter 1 of Lankshear’s New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning provides cultural context, definition, and critical analysis to the term “new literacies” before we dive further into the subject matter, which is a nice meta cognitive practice of providing literacy. Now I could say I am more "new literacies literate."

Citations
Lankshear, C. (2011). New Literacies: Concepts and Theories. In New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (3rd ed., p. 7, 12, 19, 21, 23, 25, 29). New York, New York: Open University Press.

DearestThe Daily Create Assignment:Shapes Picture"Dearest" is my first Daily Create assignment I have done for ds106, and as part of my Digital Storytelling course at the University of Colorado Denver. The idea came to me rather quickly as I was thinki...