CUNY Week 4 – Visual Assignments Charge!!!!

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Tom Olliver

This week begins the our first trip to the ds106 assignment bin, which is filled with dozens of digital media project assignments contributed by people in the ds106 community.

For this week we will be working on visual assignments, and you will need to do ten stars worth of them. Each assignment has a number of stars that represents a difficulty level. For example Splash of Color is worth two stars, do the assignment, do the math and you’d have eight stars worth left.

Also the details of each assignment includes a description and a list of links to everyone that has completed the assignment and a number of tutorials for the assignment as well. Take some time looking at others work for inspiration and often advice as well on how to do it. The main tools you’ll be using for the next two weeks to edit your images will be Photoshop (you can find in the 4M03 lab), GIMP (free downloadable image editing software), and Pixlr (a free web based image editor). Look for tutorials for these tools by searching the internet, or by looking in the work of other students.

Four big things to remember for each assignment you complete and post to your blog:

1. Always embed the image you’ve created for the assignment, and make it as big as your WordPress theme allows. You may need to adjust the image size in the post, just click on the image and click this icon   to make the image fit best. We want to see that great work!
2. Narrate your process! Describe how you made the image, what tools you used, link to resources you found and used to make the image. Consider including some screencaps to show your process as well. Also describe why you chose the assignment and why you made what you made.
3. Tag your posts correctly. Each assignment has two tags that you must include for your assignment to show up in the list. For example the Splash of Color assignment needs the tags VisualAssignments and VisualAssignments340.
4. Create links in your post. Link back to the original assignment and provide a link to anyone’s work that may have inspired you. Links to others work in your post provides a pingback (like a comment to the original post). This will let that person know about your inspiration and link to your work.

I hope you have fun this week making some cool stuff. It’s really my favorite part of ds106 and I’ll be making a lot of stuff too.

And even though The Daily Create has drifted toward audio, you need to keep up with those as well. Do a minimum of three a week, and provide a weekly summary of your Daily Creates in a single blog post. Please don’t blog each daily create you make, just one post each week of the work you’ve made.

And remember to check out all the great resources for this week’s assignment on the DS106 Week 4 assignment page.