CUNY Weeks 13 to 15 – Final Stretch

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Teaching and Learning 6 Comments Tags: , ,

In the last three weeks you will be working on your final project for ds106 which will be posted to your blog and presented to the class on Monday May 21, exam day. Last week you were to focus on a proposal for your final project, and for the next two weeks be sure to post an update illustrating your progress. Make sure each of these posts is tagged ‘finalprojectupdate’ (no quotes). When you post your final project, tag it ‘finalprojectfinished’ (no quotes).

Also you will need to post a final reflection about this course and to start it off, you should complete the 106th TDC and embed it in this post. Your thoughts about the course should include an updated impression of Gardner Campbell’s No More Digital Facelifts talk, a description of which assignments you liked the most and why, what it was like to take a class that did not always tell you how or what exactly you had to do (remember the assignment bin and the bring-your-own technology approach), and anything else you’d like to talk about with respect to the course. Here are some good reflection ideas from Alan Levine as well:

  • What does storytelling mean to you now?
  • What did you gain the most from this course?
  • Talk about your best work on assignments and dailycreate- talk about why you picked them.
  • What would you say to future students about this class?
  • If you were in charge of this class, what would you change?

Last, you will need to make an appointment with me for a final review of your blog meet with me in class on Monday May 14th for a final review of your blog. We will spend approximately 30 10 minutes going over it talking about what you’ve made, what kinds of reflections you wrote about how and why you made things, and how you’ve managed to integrate tags, categories, plugins, and anything else WordPress like. I’m going to post a digital signup soon, and realize that you will not be able to receive a final grade if you do not come to this appointment. If you’re not in class on Monday, you will need to make an appointment with me for the final review of your blog.

CUNY Week 12 – How I Remember I Was There

By mbransons in Digital Identity, Digital Storytelling, Teaching and Learning 1 Comment Tags: , , ,


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Howdy, I’m H. Michael Karshis

Do you keep a box of your old ‘stuff’ somewhere? What’s in it? Why did you put it in that box? How often do you look through it and reminisce? I keep quite a bit of stuff tucked under a table in my office – old artwork, ephemera from my past including paychecks from jobs and even notes passed in high school. Why keep a personal archive like this?

I tend to rummage through these pieces of my past a few times a year, and usually it’s prompted by a new project idea or a ds106 assignment I’m trying to complete. Recently I digitized a small collection of 90s band posters that are interesting to me and tried to give them some context. I was able to find digital traces of all the bands, examples of their music, and even a video recorded back in the 90s.

It’s so amazing to me how these digital artifacts exist out there and can be discovered and recombined into something new. But these digital ephemera will not all likely last and the Myspace playlist of these bands is surely to go dark at some point (I don’t see them surviving the next ten years). So what to do with our personal digital archives? Leave them to a social network like Facebook from which there is no easy export for backup?

I want you to watch Jim Groom’s talk about digital archives and their impact on the self and culture.

Make a reflection blog post and talk about your digital self and what you do to archive it. Is it important to you? Why or why not? Will you maintain your blog (and services like Twitter, Flickr, and Youtube) after the end of the semester to support your archiving? Why or why not? Tag this post ‘ds106archives’ (no quotes).


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Eva the Weaver

Over the last three weeks of class you will be working on a final ds106 project of your choice. I want you to think about assignments and daily create activities you’ve worked on and likely expand on one of those for your final project. But if you have something else completely in mind, you can pitch that as well.

To get started, this week you need to make a blog post pitching what your final project will be. Include a description of what you plan to make and link to any relevant posts and work that informs your choice. Tag this post ‘ds106finalprojectpitch’ (no quotes).

Come In, Make Art

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Teaching and Learning 10 Comments Tags: , , ,

Come In, Make Art

This past Friday I had a chance to spend some time with artists Ryan Seslow and Jeffrey Allen Price at their show, Energetic Fusion in the York College Art Gallery. The two have collaborated to create not just a show but an event, which involved them creating new work throughout its run as well as showing older work. But most importantly this show-as-open-studio invited all visitors to participate and create art with them. Here’s the first few lines of the description of the show:

Welcome, you are now a participant. It is our intention to activate the creative awareness of the York College Community. You may ask, what is your creative human potential? What can we learn from creatively collaborating with each other? What do we see and retain when there is a public display and means for collaborative creative expression?

The questions about learning from ‘creatively collaborating’ and having the ‘means’ to express this collaboration are really exciting to me as they remind me a lot of the questions DS106 is trying to answer. DS106 community has at it’s heart the goal to develop the ‘creative human potential’ using blogs for ‘public display’ and the ds106 site as a means to share work and foster collaboration.

It was so wonderful to find in this gallery basically an analog version of DS106 – so much energy, art, collaboration, sharing, and more.

Energetic Fusion Artists At Work

The first person I noticed when I walked in was a student working with a Dremel tool carving out her first wood cut for block printing. She later got help from another student as she used the block to make her first print.

A Student's First Wood Cut Students CollaborateFirst Wood Cut Print

Meanwhile both Ryan and Jeffrey were working on pieces in the gallery as well.

Ryan Seslow Painting in the Show Jeffery Allen Price At Work

There was tons of other activity going on which I tried to capture in this set of photos and I was able to talk with artists in the video below as well.

Ryan and Jeffrey thanks so much for allowing me to participate in your amazing art event, and I hope to get back in there next week and contribute some more work!

DS106 The Movie – It’s Pink

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling 3 Comments Tags: , , , ,

It's Pink

This remix assignment – ds106 the movie [remixed] pretty in pink wasn’t created by the generator (I wanted to pick my own!), so there isn’t an official remixed assignment link.

I really like Linda3dots It’s Alive ds106 movie poster and wanted to express my appreciation for her good work (and the fact that she created the assignment) by doing a remix.

So here’s a little pink to make that ugly baby a little more pretty, and a little dressing up of ds106 community with some 80s thrift store style (care of Molly Ringwald).

For this remix I worked with the It’s Alive Poster and tried to stay with the spirit of Linda’s idea about a class with something to be wary of (ds106 isn’t all rainbows and unicorns you know as you can see by this poster students can die). All of the erasing of text was done in Photoshop, but the layout of new text and coloring was done in Illustrator, my favorite digital tool.

I’m feeling like I should have done more, possibly given the deformed claw a nice vintage straw hat with a scarf wrapped around it to hold onto, or made the baby carriage pink? But it’s up and the remixing of other students work is so much fun.

 

 

We’ve Got Our Top People On The Job

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Norm Wright  drew a Where’s Waldo? It remix card on the Messing with the MacGuffin assignment. It’s been quite some time since I’ve Messed with the MacGuffin, so I couldn’t resist a quick Messing with the MacGuffin [remixed]: Where’s Waldo? It.

The final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark is famous for illustrating bureaucracy’s ability to lose something as important as an all powerful Ark of the Covenant filled with spirits bent on melting the faces of sinners.

The mountain of crates seemed like a perfect Waldo environment, but because he’s not surrounded by similarly colored objects per normal, he sticks out sorely. So I decided this MacGuffin, would be best if Waldo were the finder of the Ark, which would not change the plot of the film as much as change the fate of humanity.

CUNY Week 11: Who’s Behind That Original Story?

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling No Comments Tags: , ,

Lurking behind the Lorax

Over the past few weeks you’ve been creating work often built on others’ work. Is that ok? Taking digital pieces of copyrighted work and remixing to make something of your own? Or how about recording a commentary over movie scenes as you did in a your video essay about a film? A number of videos created for the video essay assignment were taken down automatically by YouTube. Why does that happen for some videos and not others that have copyrighted material?

For the next week we are going to be thinking about these issues and others as we look at remix as a cultural phenomena and as an artistic practice. Kirby Ferguson is a filmmaker that produced a four part video essay series, titled, “Everything is a Remix.” Through examples and narrative Ferguson talks about the origins of creativity and the controls that copyright have placed over our ability to be ‘creative.’ I suggest you watch Jim Groom’s discussion with the UMW class about the Ferguson videos as well (he’s gets apocalyptic!).

Remix Reflection Post: Watch the four part series, and create a blog post reflection. In that post I want you to find and embed two piece of media and juxtapose them one which is the newer ‘remix’ and the other which was ‘sampled.’ What if any relationship exists between the two creators? How do you know that one is inspired by the other? What did you find out? How does it fit in with what you discovered in Ferguson’s video essays? Tag this post, ‘everythingisaremix’ (no quotes.) And if you’re really interested in the legal politics around remix and hip-hop, I suggest watching  Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod’s Copyright Criminals which takes you through the origins of sample culture and how courts courts put constraints on musician’s creative impulses.

Remix Ten Stars Assignments: For the second half of this week’s assignment, you are going to use the remix generator created by Alan Levine for this week’s ten stars worth of work. The premise for the generator is to take a ds106 assignment and apply a ‘remix card‘ to it. Each remix card will offer a new method to interpret an existing assignment. For example, the Informercialize It card asks that you:

Redo an assignment to be like a bad infomercial. YOU SHOULD SHOUT OUT HOW WONDERFUL IT IS! You should be calling 1-800-BUY-JUNK to order it! But wait, you get more…

This student remixed the movie fortune (cookies) assignment to create, this set of Infomercial Fortunes. In this case the assignment was worth two stars and the remix card was also two stars making the remixed assignment now four stars.

You want to rework a particular student’s completed assignment with the new remix card applied. Be sure you link back to the original student’s post so they’ll receive a pingback which will let them know you’ve remixed their work. It’s typically flattering to have your work remixed, so hopefully the student will comment. If you use the remix generator be sure to use all tags that are generated in the new remix assignment. But if you wish to make your own combination of remix card to a particular assignment, please use the original assignment tags, plus ‘RemixAssignments’ (no quotes.)

And please be sure to describe why you chose the particular student’s work to remix and how you think its meaning was changed by your interpretation.

 

Honeyglazed + Photocopied in Color

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Personal 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Honeyglazed at Bill's Bar

One of my favorite books about design Fucked Up + Photocopied Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement showcases the history of punk band flyers from 1977-1985. The art principally created by the bands, then photocopied, and staple-gunned to walls and street posts all over town represented the DIY, mashup sensibility of the punk movement.

During the mid to late nineties I spent time at the Museum School working toward my MFA, living in Alston, MA. I mostly biked throughout the city and whenever I came across cool band flyers I’d pull one down and keep it. These flyers were usually color photocopies of collages, which like the punk flyers were likely created by the bands themselves. Color photocopies were really expensive back then (a buck per 8.5 x 11!) and usually it was a friend that worked at a Kinko’s who’d hook you up (something I did for my mini-comics).

I didn’t make it to many shows (I did see Biohazard at The Rat) while I lived in Boston, most of my money when to art supplies and digital media (think about this dead media sequence SyQuest, Zip, Jaz). But it was interesting to try and figure out who was who, and mostly it included looking at a MySpace digital graveyard. I resurrected a barely used account so I could make a playlist of these 90s Boston Bands.

Shoot the Hostages, Black Fork, and Steadfast sponsored by Lookout Records at the Rat was probably a kick-ass hardcore show.

The Common Ground was a bar right around the corner from where I lived, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I actually saw Joint Chiefs. The Dirty Doctors look like an acid tripping band in the 1999 show below.

And the band that would have probably been the most fun to see was Honeyglazed. The Boston based music magazine Lollipop did a review of their album ‘The Trouble with Girls’ which describes their sound:

Honeyglazed’s low end rumbles and shakes its fat ass while kinda sci-fi/poppy keyboards (without being like Cyndi Lauper, thanks) skitter and skate through melodies as often as they offer rhythmic support.

I guess they didn’t survive long enough to enter the Myspace era of music, but you can preview their tracks on Amazon (as well as buy the CD for under a buck).

Honeyglazed at Bill's Bar

I doubt there are many collectors of band flyers from this era, but if there are it would reveal an interesting transition between black & white photocopies and the all digital era that soon took over. I’m not so sure all the music would be as awesome as punk though.

Guest Lecturing Documentary as DS106

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Teaching and Learning No Comments Tags: , ,


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by SimonQ錫濛譙

Tonight I guest lectured Daniel Phelp’s Documentary Production class at York College. The students came to class with story ideas for their final projects which were to include a link to an article online.

My job was to help the students discover which stories they should pick to produce for the remainder of the semester (only 5-6 out of 16 will be chosen). So I decided to use some ds106 assignments to help them focus their story pitches. I also decided that I should do each assignment as well to represent my ds106 teaching style (pedagogy of uncertainty maybe?)

First up was Haiku it Up – I asked students to tell the proposed beginning (5 syllables), middle (7 syllables), end (5 syllables) of their documentary in a three line haiku. My haiku represents my hope for this exercise:

Tell your story in a
Few words that ring truth, passion
I want to feel it.

Next in the same post I asked students to create a fantasy dialogue between two characters in their proposed film. They used the Phake Tweets assignment and the Twister Tweet generator to illustrate the dialogue. Here’s my interpretation of a conversation with a student tonight:

Third for the evening of ds106 documentary, we did a riff on Alan Levine’s five card flickr assignment. There was a lot more flexibility for the students (no random generator) as they could choose any five cc licensed images they could find in flickr to represent their story. Here’s my five images for class so far, based on these five terms (teaching, documentary film, ds106, discover, story):


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Cali4beach


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by sean dreilinger


cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by umjanedoan

Finally we did a version of the un-scene stories fanfic assignment. Students were asked to think of a moment in their proposed film in which a character behaves a certain way or does something specifically. Then they were to describe an imagined history before and after that moment. This one was pretty hard for me to do for my teaching, but I thought I would imagine myself guest lecturing for this course before ds106 and now after.

Before: If I were asked to teach this class a couple of years ago, I would have been excited at the prospect of hearing all the various students’ proposed documentary ideas. I would have asked each student to read their pitch to the class and asked everyone for feedback. Likely a number of students would not give feedback, notes may or may not have been taken. I would have pitched a lot of my own ideas, and wondered whether the students believed they were interesting or useful.

After: The students in the class created a number of artifacts reflecting new perspectives on their proposed documentary. They discovered themes, dialogue, images, and back stories that can be used to better understand each student’s sensibility about the proposed documentaries. Whether the artifacts become part of the documentaries chosen, hopefully more informed choices can be made by students regarding which films to produce for the remainder of the semester.

Homework: We were to narrow down the number of proposals, but I’m not sure I should do that without Daniel here. I did follow through with his request to have students create a blog post by next class.

Everyone has worked on a post in class, but students should do a little ‘tidying’ as well as reflect on how this process has informed interest in their stories. Please refer to specific artifacts you created in class as part of this reflection. Also describe which kinds of storytelling techniques you might use and how you might tell the story.

Do not create a new post, just edit the existing post and write the reflection at the end. And please link to your original pitch for reference in this post.

Finally comment, comment, comment on each others work.

CUNY Weeks 9-10: Video Assignments, They’re Here…

By mbransons in Digital Storytelling, Teaching and Learning 1 Comment Tags: ,

Last week we got off to a good start with an in class video assignment to create a five second video of one archetype from five different films. I went on to turn this into an assignment for ds106 and it’s been cool to see it completed by a number of students outside of CUNY. Below are some of my favorites so far:

‘Stoners‘

http://youtu.be/DlSCKGI7lDk

‘Five Femme Fatales‘

‘Principals‘

http://youtu.be/E9RSSnKWiDM

‘High School Bullies‘

We’re to continue video assignments for this week and through the break. Look the the ds106 assignment page for additional details and resources, but our class specifics are as follows:

You are to do a total of 25 stars worth of video assignments by the end of spring break. You’ve started a number of assignments and planned others so now’s the time to complete them. These are the must do assignments:

  • Finish your five archetype video mash-up if you haven’t yet.
  • You should complete the two assignments you planned on from week 8.
  • Also you did a write up analysis of one movie’s three scenes in week 8 as well, now you are turn that analysis into a video essay for one of your video assignments.

See everyone in class today where we are going to do a quick five minute conference to discuss your progress on your blog. Spring Break starts this Friday, but the lab will be open for the entire week, so please come in and get help if you need it!