My Podcast

The podcast was another assignment that I found out took more work than I was expecting. Going into it, I was expecting to just hit record and talk about the book. I tried that and then made a check list using the rubric. I realized I missed a whole lot of stuff. So I thought I would have the rubric out while I recorded. The recording ended up sounding fake and just not very fluid. So I wrote a list of things to talk about and went off of that. That is what ended up working the best.

Also, writing the podcast forced me to do more research than I expected. But because I love the book, doing research was not a hard for me to do. Over all, good assignment. I definitely think I could work stuff like this into projects I do on the side.

A Video Project

I always have a similar hesitations when I hear about assignments with videos. First off, when I had to do a video assignment in middle school, we didn't have digital recording (or at least I didn't have access to it). So for a video project, we did each scene in one take, in order, and had no way of editing or refining the project. So when I got the assignment I thought of all of the cool things that I could do with it and how it awesome mine was going to be. Then, when we watched through it, I discovered the sound was really different for different scenes, and the quality was NOTHING like the movies (which I kinda expected, not knowing better). Now I know technology has come a long way, but that might heighten the expectations of students.

Next, there is the issue of participation. In large projects, its easy for students to assume a more minor role and still receive credit for an assignment. A solution to this is to make a set of jobs for the movie and divide the work load. So the writer writes the script, the director makes artistic decisions on how the scenes should be shot, and the actor investigates the motivations of why the character they are portraying acts the way he/she does. All members of the group would be required to do research on the subject of their video. So, after the project is complete, each student would write a paper presenting what they discovered in their research and how that effected decisions. Along the lines of participation, what if the writer doesn't do his job? Do you penalize the other members of the group? How can you grade the other members of the group?

My final hesitation is the time factor. Students finding time just to get together for filming can be a huge challenge. On top of that, they have to wait on the writer to write the script, find extras, and edit the video. Your students will have other assignments going on and it is hard to imagine devoting that much time to just your project.

Emotional Catharsis

As I recall (it has been a while) highschool was a bit of a turbulant time for me emotionally. I was not popular in any sense of the word and because of that, I went through my fair share of ups and downs. I have always been a fan of writing anonymously or under a fake name. It is a way to let out your emotions while not feeling like you are under a microscope. The military has trained the "talk about your feelings" almost completely out of me to point where talking about them to a person makes me feel like I am being judged or observed. I have found that writing as someone else or anonymously allows me to be 100% honest and put anything out there yet still feel safe and comfortable behind my veil. If students start blogging in class, they may find that they can utilize this tool in there personal lives. Getting your feelings into print or another for of media is extremely theraputic. For me, I think though the detail and motivations of my feelings before I can write about them. Then after I write, I can edit the writing so that it best refects what it is that I am trying to say. Then once the writing is done, I finally feel like I have dealt in a real way with what I was feeling. For me it may be writing, for others it may be music composition or art. Regarless of the media, web tools explored in this class and later in the classroom can help students to express themselves in different ways. (why I am still loving on this whole Tumblr thing.)

Never a dull moment

So I was doing the reading in Wilber chapter 3. It was slightly monotonous because I have a pretty good understanding of blogs and wiki's (though learning the origins of the terms was pretty interesting). Then I came to digital stories. Have you ever had an awesome idea and then told someone about it and discovered what you thought of already exists? That is what happened.

About 2 years ago I came up with an idea for a book. I wanted to write a horror novel because I seem them as the most challenging media in horror. With a movie, you have the cheap scares of a monster jumping out and saying boo. You also are watching something on a screen and tend to be able to distance yourself from it. The few horror epics I have read that were truly scary suck you in. You immerse yourself in the story. So I said "challenge accepted" and began brainstorming. What I realized was that words on a page was deep enough for me. I was the reader to feel like they were killer in my story or at least knew him intimately. So, I decided that what I wanted was the killer's logs of his murders as he develops his "craft". So, I wanted each chapter to be a log of the entire process of each victim. It would start out with hand written notes about who the victim is, where they live, what their habits are, who they live with, ect. Then he would decide the mode of killing them and experiment with it. If it was a knife, there would be anatomy drawings with notes about effective places to stab or cut. (sorry if this is freaking you out. I really wanted this thing to be scary.)

So cutting to the chase, I realized this had to be a digital media project so I could include photos, hand written notes, and other items. I came up with this ground breaking new form of what a book could be! Then I realized that the internet beat me to it and these already exist. Damn.