Category Archives: Writing & Digital Technology

WordPress for GTC

WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the web. It started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as a full content management system and so much more! Join us in this session for an overview of WordPress    

What is Word Press?

  • blog?
  • website?
  • service?
  • software?
  • content management system?
  • learning management system?
  • public?
  • private?

WordPress.org :: Where you go to host your own site on your own or someone else’s domain.

WordPress.com :: Where you go to have Word Press host your blog for you.

  • posts, pages, media.
  • yourblog.wordpress.com

Today:

  • what do you want to use WP for? think of a purpose and audience!
  • Start a blog or play with one on my server (admin/gtc42314)
  • write a post, add a photo, and a YouTube video
  • leave a comment on someone else’s blog
  • add sidebar content (links, text)
  • create an “About” page with a brief bio
  • create a category for your posts
  • create a menu with a page for that category

WTCS General Studies Conference: Multimodality and multimedia in composition

A presentation given by Skype on 11 April 2014.


Photo sources: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dr_morel/galleries/72157643802291205/

Coming soon: PDF of assignment sheets

Lynda Barry Multimodal Rhetorical Analysis sequence:

Assignment 3.2 Assignment 3.1 Assignment 3.3

Radical Remediation:

136 3.5

 

Prezi Workshop

Two important assumptions:

* Technology is not neutral. “The medium is the message.” – McLuhan

* Prezi isn’t a magic bullet; it has problems and concerns that are both similar and separate from SlideWare.

 

Perks and drawbacks (the “Why Prezi?”)

* NASA analysis by Tufte

 

What Prezi is capable of (the “How Prezi?”)

 

Good design principles

* Watch/play with the following:

What is Prezi?

Thoughts on Using Prezi as a Teaching Tool

The How to Make a Great Prezi Prezi

Fun examples:

Playing to Learn?

Now that we’ve discussed, watched, and played with some examples and thought about best practices, let’s start to build our own.

Think of a simple lesson plan (or presentation topic you might be responsible for). Try to limit yourself to 3-5 “points” or steps.

 

 

Next, give it a brief spatial outline on a piece of paper. Try to roughly mimic how you might design it in prezi.

 

 

Now, we’ll look for some media to accompany the presentation:

 

Pictures: Flickr CC search; reminder on copyright use for educational purposes http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

 

Video: YouTube – or convert to a FLV or SWF

 

Get to know Frames:

visible vs. hidden

zoom

 

Get to know Paths

 

New Features

Play!  …and as a challenge, see if you can incorporate pictures, video, zooming, and (only) 2 or three font colors!


 

Why Prezi?

In mid-October, I had the opportunity to lead an hour-long workshop for my colleagues about the use of Prezi in the classroom. It was a wonderful time, and I received enthusiastic feedback from both of my capacity sessions of about 20 faculty and staff members. In fact, I received so much interest about Prezi, that I’m now going to be leading a 3-hour extended intro and training with Prezi.

To talk about Prezi productively, I want to start a conversation that asks why we might use the form in certain contexts, as well as reveal its limitations. Basically, what advantages might Prezi offer in the classroom, but when might we resist using it just because it’s the “new” or “cool” tool?

In leading this workshop, I’m making two assumptions:

  • Prezi isn’t a magic bullet that immediately remedies the problems with presentation software or style. Allowing for conversation between presenter and audience–or for collaboration that further destabilizes those roles–isn’t something built into Prezi.
  • Technology is not neutral. Prezi allows and encourages us to structure the delivery and representation of information in specific ways. Some of these affordances are advantages in comparison to slideware.

Here’s where you come in.

I’ve listed out some of my reasons for preferring Prezi in my Prezi about Prezi (see below).(And, meta- much?) But, I’d like to know what you like about Prezi. In what circumstances do you prefer it to slideware or Pecha Kucha-constraints or anything else? Do you have any favorite examples of effective use of the form of Prezi with the content of a presentation?

I’d love to read your notes and incorporate them into my workshop.

 

Re: re-/mix and (res, rei)/mix

One of my prelim exam committee members pointed me towards Mark Amerika’s new work at remixthebook.com (@remixthebook) last week. I have previously read–and read about–Amerika’s work, but that isn’t necessarily the focus of the thoughts to follow in this blog post.

Mark Sample has a (great) guest post on the blog this week, in which he deconstructs “remix” a bit, arriving at some questions and conclusions I thought interesting. And that’s what I’d like to hash out, ineloquently, here.

Sample writes:

What’s wrong with simply mix? Why the prefix? Why remix? Why use to describe some of the most innovative and startling work of our generation a prefix that evokes return or restoration?

To remix suggests that pieces are tossed and turned and tumbled and reassembled into a whole that more or less resembles the original in structure. Like a kaleidoscope, the parts shift, but they’re always contained and framed by the shaft of the scope.

These, I think, are pertinent questions, especially for someone who has thought about remix, appropriation, interactive narratives, simulations, participatory readers, blah, blah, blah. In my own understanding of how these pieces fit together (perhaps peek at my prelim rationale for a brief overview/context), there is always something that comes first, a ground state: whether it’s a context or mission in a simulation or game; a rabbit hole or puzzle in an ARG; a texton in ergodic lit, etc. The ground state is something supplied by the “author,” sometimes with the express purpose of making it available for derivative works and/or semiotic sequencing (or re-sequencing).

Admittedly, that’s a bit of a daft, simple response.

What really gets me excited by Sample’s post is the smart etymology of “re.” I’d like to move it a step… somewhere: I’m not sure if it’s further, closer, in a different direction, or whatever the appropriate spatial metaphor in relation to the “ground state” of the post.

I want to offer the Latin res in response to the Latin re- — more specifically and perhaps in the spirit of Derrida’s différance, the ablative of res, re. Continue reading

UnAvailable Designs: Remixing Lynda Barry in the FYC Classroom

This is the text of my presentation to CCCC11, 8 April 2011, in Atlanta, GA. My fellow panel members were Dale Jacobs (Univ of Windsor) and Andre Buchenot (IUPUI). As I’m mostly a reader (gasp!) when it comes to presentations, the text below reflects almost perfectly what I said. I’ve also pasted my Prezi at the bottom of this page.

In this presentation, I will propose that Lynda Barry’s comic “Common Scents” provides an opportunity for students to engage with multimodal rhetoric in a manner that introduces them to an expanded set of rhetorical strategies and possible ethical perspectives. I will then detail a sequence of in-class activities that I have successfully used in the first year composition classroom to facilitate those aforementioned opportunities.

Why Comics?

[I] call for a “new medium-specificity, one based on what is specific to a work or practice… a new materials-ism.. [in] response to attempts to assign a single aesthetic to ‘the digital’ (information aesthetics, code)” [or, in our case here, the products of multimodal production.]

– Sean Cubitt

“An exclusive emphasis on digital literacies is not what most advocates of technology-rich composition advocate. Such an emphasis would limit students’ access to other modes of expression.”

-from the NCTE’s Strategic Policy Goals on Multimodal Literacies and Technology

Many, if not most, of our classrooms are influenced by the constraints of the printed page. Thus, when we seek to explore multimodal pedagogy, we are subsequently limited. These limits apply to both multimodal analysis and multimodal production, though unequally so.

Yes; most of us may have or can arrange to have digital networked projector technology in our classrooms, so we can explore animations, games, videos, and other multimodal communications from a single source–or ask our students to explore these on their own time with their own technology, in front of their own home computers or digital media devices. But, if we project multimodal communications for mass viewing, we often limit individual students interaction with the object of analysis; for instance, students don’t have the agency to individually explore games and interactive animations, they can’t pause or replay sections of a video.  (Displaying one object for all is also potentially boring, as you might know if you’ve watched someone else play a game like Animal Crossing). If we remove the object of analysis from the classroom, we limit our ability to interact simultaneously with both student and object; we can’t facilitate more critical understandings for ourselves and individual students. It’s harder to ask and answer questions when those texts aren’t in our students’ hands.

These limits are even more severe when it comes to production. Chances are we (both teachers and students) are not well versed in composing with Flash, even if we had wide access to the application (which most of us likely do not). Though, the lure of simplistic notions of “digital nativism” might try to convince us otherwise, there are barriers to the tools required to produce animations, videos, games, and other digital multimodal compositions.

Comics, however, make many of these limitations less imposing. We can distribute them widely with little technological barrier: all we need is a standard office tool, the copy machine, or a scanner and printer. Our students are familiar with them; they’re likely to have picked up the comics section in a newspaper or a comic book–or maybe even have had a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.  They are usually produced with pen and paper, not through more complex code-based or GUI-based design/production software, such as Illustrator, InDesign, or Photoshop–common tools used for producing a typical infographic.

In a sense, comics are available and accessible. Continue reading

Editing Agents

When someone spreads false information about you, shouldn’t your first action be to correct the “false” information by, say, publishing accurate information with references and citations?

———-

Literary Agent Sues Sites for Ruining Her Reputation
By Lynn Andriani — Publishers Weekly, 7/1/2008 7:40:00 AM
Literary agent Barbara Bauer is suing 19 bloggers and websites, including Wikipedia, YouTube and AbsoluteWrite.com, claiming they are ruining her reputation, the New Jersey Star-Ledger reported yesterday. Online critics call Bauer one of publishing’s “20 Worst Literary Agents,” claiming she charges clients high fees for little work, and is a “scam agent.”  Bauer did not return PW’s calls for comment.

Bauer’s web site says the New Jersey literary agent established her firm in 1984, and that she has helped get numerous books by award-winning authors published in multiple languages around the world.

Bauer also sued the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America web site. The case has caught the attention of free-speech groups and online activists.

The two sides are scheduled to argue the motion before a Monmouth County, NJ, judge today.

Good News about GoodSearch

linky

Like Blackle, a derivative (GS is Yahoo! powered, Blackle is Google powered); instead of saving energy with Blackle, GoodSearch donates ad $ to a charity you get to pick.  Pretty awesome.  

Now, if only GoodSearch came in energy-saving black…

 

www.goodsearch.com 

(PS  I’m officially coning the term “in-activism”, which will mean “internet activism” a large umbrella combining social networks, web apps/search engines, Netroots communities and general new media used for social activism.  The play here is with the homophone “inactive” and the sometimes-held (but fading) assumption that “virtual” action has little or no bearing on “real” world results.)