Thursday, December 1, 2016

Promoting Pecha Kucha on VR Research

As CM410 Students make final tweaks and edits to their Pecha Kucha presentations, they will use this event as an opportunity to experiment with promoting themselves and their work on social media, and around campus. Here are examples of some of the ways students will promote their December 6 Student Symposium Pecha Kucha talks:

Students may create "Digital Ads" like this through Canva

Or like this one through Spark
And they will post on their Facebook Wall and Pages as shown in my HootSuite Dashboard

And they may post on their LinkedIn Wall and Groups

and, of course on other social media, like Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.

Students will also design, print and post (in real life) around campus Posters that advertise their Pecha Kucha talks - like this one:

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Getting Ready for Student Symposium Pecha Kucha

Our CM410 students will practice, rewrite, revise and practice again their Pecha Kucha presentations in preparation for The Student Symposium on Tuesday, December 6 at 10:30 in the A.J. Eastman Library. For their final touches, students will:
    http://goqr.me/#t=url
  1. Create a QR Code (by using GoQR.me) that links to the student's VR Research Pinterest Board.
  2. Create a "Finale Page" with speaker contact info, image, and QR Code to the speaker's Pinterest Research Board.
  3. Create an 11x17 Event Poster that highlights the speaker's presentation at the Symposium (with title, date, time, location, etc.) Students may use spark.adobe.com to assist with the design.
  4. Students will Print and post posters to promote their event - and will post ads, links, announcements and news about the event on social media using their HootSuite dashboard. Students may use Canva.com to design their social media visuals.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Recreating & Remediating Photography

CM410 Students will add one more step to remediating photography: They will recreate their sample photos in 360 using Google Cardboard and https://sphcst.com/upload ! One possibility is below:

In Winogrand's photo, visitors to the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, NY are seated on some of the plentiful public seating provided that is arranged side by side to allow traffic to pass. Visitors look and lean across the seats to interact with each other on the bench. This side by side arrangement is suggestive of classical Greek friezes. 
In this recreation a small group of students gather around a bench on the campus quad. The students arrange themselves in a circle, rather than in a line. This arrangement is mostly likely influenced by the arrangement of the seating and walkways in the campus quad, which differ significantly from the longer seating, built to accommodate more people and allow for greater pedestrian traffic, at the World's Fair
R. Nichols, Limestone Girls, 2016
When shooting the same scene in VR/3D/360using the Theta S camera, I chose to shoot from inside the circle of friends, a perspective not allowed by 2D photography. When I asked the subject if I could take a snapshot of them, they said "Sure," and began to move into place beside one another. When I explained that they didn't need to move at all, but could say where they were because this was a different kind of photo, they were intrigued. As I sat the camera in the center, some asked, "Is this a VR camera?" and "Does the camera move around in a circle?" This indicated, that, though none of the subjects had used or been photographed in VR, they did have an awareness of the emerging medium.
Sample for cm410 class on "remediation photography" #theta360 - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Monday, November 14, 2016

The Power of A Picture

Professor Brett Schenning presented on "The Power of a Picture" (see below) and assigned our CM410 students a project to shoot:

  • Re-photograph a famous photograph
  • Think About the Composition
  • Post the photos on your blog
  • Accompany the photo with your comments on how you made the photo, what compositional considerations came into play, the results of your photography experiment, etc.



Thursday, November 10, 2016

Slide Designs, Pecha Kucha and Avoiding Death by PowerPoint

Students in CM410 have been researching Virtual Reality and how this emerging technology is shaping communications across such diverse fields as Psychotherapy, Sports Training, Travel Industry, and Entertainment. They will present their findings at the December Student Symposium  - but in a special presentation format: Pecha Kucha! (**Before the November 22 class, students will post their planning sheet or notes, and a working bibliography or works cited page for their resources.)

This format allows a student to accompany their talk by displaying 20 slides for 20 seconds each, thereby combining concise, clear and compelling writing and speech with rhetorically intentional visual composition. Students will find a wealth of material to work through our Knowing, Making, Doing process on our class website: Limestone Digital!


Rather than using the standard "templates" in PowerPoint, students will start from a blank slate to create their own slide designs. Students will explore these sites for ideas on slide design:
  1. SlideShare
  2. Canva
  3. Adobe Spark
  4. PechaKucha.org
Students will GO BIG on visuals, but may incorporate a few different slide designs in their presentations for variety or emphasis, as illustrated in this presentation:

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Building Your Personal Website

CC0 from Unsplash via Pexels.com
Students will apply their research and reflection from investigating other personal websites (see last blog entry,) and their consideration of their own strengths and opportunities, and will plan their personal website using "wire frames" for their web pages and to illustrate their web sites in "wire frame site map graphics." (Examples here.) They will make notes of the content and features they want to include to illustrate their strengths as addressed to their potential audiences, and of the images, colors and other factors to represent their "brands" (personas) on the web. These sets of sketches will serve as their guides as they begin to build their web sites.

Each student has been assigned a Weebly Student Account, and will begin web-building over the weekend. Students will watch and work through the Weebly Beginner's Guide Video, and are free to sign up for the live tutorials that will be help Oct. 27 or Nov. 8.

Each student will incorporate the following into their website:
  • Home/Landing Page
  • About Me/Bio Info
  • Resume (Note: Resume Workshop in class on Tuesday, Nov. 1)
  • Portfolio (various work by student: writing, design, art, photography, research, experience, etc.)
  • VR Research Page (with Pecha Kucha slides)
Students may also add:
  • Special Interests Page
  • Hobbies Page
  • Job-specific Page for potential employers
  • Community/Issues Page
Students will bring to bear all their previous knowing, doing and making as resources for the site, including original photography, use of freegal images, New Media writing and research, etc.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Preparing Your Personal Website

Students will prepare a personal website using their existing knowledge of design and communication principles, as well as new materials developed in interactions with current research.

KNOWING:
Students will read Forbes "Why Every Job Seeker Should Have a Personal Website"

DOING:
Students will review "best practices" by looking at other college students' online resumes:
http://www.auburnmedia.com/wordpress/2015/04/27/auburn-student-digital-resumes-fall-2015/

Students will also review the Muse's "35 Best Personal Websites We've Ever Seen."

MAKING:
Students will compose a checklist of "Things I want to include in my website" and post it on their blogs.


Monday, October 24, 2016

Preparing your Personal Digital Profile

This week, CM412 Students will be preparing to build their own digital presence - or personal "brand" via a number of avenues like websites, blogs, social media, etc.

http://limestonedigital.weebly.com/cm410-resources.html

They will use the resources in the class website to KNOW (read) and DO (work through their personal profile info) as they prepare to MAKE their personal websites and tailor their existing social media.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

DEFINE YOUR TOPIC: What Can VR "Mean?"

Consider your research reading (and viewing) so far - and identify a SPECIFIC TOPIC on what VR can "mean."

Here is an example of VR applications for the future:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064380/change-generation/bringing-virtual-reality-to-a-population-that-needs-it-most


Your Topic will be a focus of your multimodal presentation, your research project, and part of your website. You should think of this as something you can "publish" or "present" in an official capacity and a professional setting.

What are you thinking? Let's discuss in class!

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Look at This (VR/360) Photograph!

Knowing: Each of our colleagues contributed an article from their research on Virtual Reality to this weekend's reading assignments.Students will read each of the articles, and post a brief blog entry on insights gained from each article.
Doing: Students will try their hand at VR photography with the Cardboard Camera App for Droid or iPhone. They will
  • shoot both 2D and 3D/VR shots of their colleagues, 
  • shoot both 2D and 3D/VR of an assigned building on the Main Campus Quad, and 
  • re-shoot 4 shots in VR similar to the ones they shot in 2D for the photo composition assignment.

Making: Students will "publish" their VR photos to their blogs (via links and embedded interactive imagery) using the SPHCST site.Their blogs will contain he images assigned above, and will serve as the basis for our discussion on "remediating" new grammars and rules for the emerging medium of VR photography. This publication will establish the sudents as "pioneers" in the field.


Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Look at this Photograph (Is it Legal-use?)

This image is a single frame from the video "Photograph" performed by Nickleback, copyright holder SMG 2007. This image is used for educational purposes in a class that examines copyright issues, and its use will have no bearing on the value or commercial use of the work from which it was taken.
Students in the Digital Literacies Class at Limestone have been working in various ways with images: rules of composition, lighting, digital publishing, intellectual property licenses, and more. They are finding "freegal" (free and legal-to-use) images, and identifying the licenses from a range of CC, Copyleft, and Public Domain permissions. They are even drafting a "Fair Use Statement" for their use of an image in a class project.

 copyright licenses

What's next? Hmmm... well, students will tackle two significant exercises:

  1. They will explore semiotics in imagery and color - and try their hands at Making a Movie Poster with "freegal" images. 
  2. They will experiment in (brand) new media composition by re-shooting some of their shots in 3D VR! (They will learn one way to "publish" VR photos in the RhetoricSoup Blog HERE.)  or direct link to the site here: https://sphcst.com/upload
Watch for their work - in which they will post their 3D photos in their blogs - just as I did this image taken by my granddaughter:

Thursday, September 22, 2016

More Fun with Photos!

Over the weekend, Digital Literacies students will have a little more fun with images!

Knowing: Students will engage a few lessons, workshops and tips from these sites:
  1. National Geographic Photo Tips
  2. Morguefile Classroom
  3. LifeHacker Phone Camera Tips 
Doing: Students will take more photos, using the information from previous lectures and the new sources above. (Focusing on things like indirect light, magic hour, and camera movement.)

Making: Students will:
  1. Create a blog post with 6 new photograph samples - including at least one "Magic Hour" shot.
  2. Make 4 "image memes" and post a blog entry describing the memes - and how they might be used.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Photography: Knowing, Doing, Making

Keeping in mind the principles from our classroom workshop on Photography Composition Tips, grab your smartphone, tablet or digital camera and dig into photography:

  • Knowing: Click through Getty's "12 Rules to Win with Digital Images." Click deep and glean more photo tips!
  • Doing: Take photos! Lots of photos! Take from different angles, using different perspectives, etc. Try out the principles from our class lecture and the Getty article.
  • Making: Post a mini-gallery of at least 12 photos in your blog - incorporate at least 3 "places" pics, 3 "people" pics, 3 "object" pics and 1 "group photo." Beneath each pic, describe which principles you are demonstrating in the photo, and how this affects the picture.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Untangling the Web: Digital Aggregation and Curation


https://about.flipboard.com/tutorials/One things that makes "New Media" new is that these media have not yet formed all their rules, grammars, best practices, etc. That is to say, that even though students explore these media without dear, they are, indeed, pioneers - blazing trails adn discovering paths of literacy. 

In this digital curation project, students learn to design meaning in, and through, digital media. The goal of the project is to help students develop, not a specific grammar or a taxonomy, but rather a workable approach for forming grammars, methodologies, heuristics, etc. where none exist as standards. A set of methodologies that handles the flood of information in the digital age will be in much demand. 
https://help.pinterest.com/en/guide/all-about-pinterest 
Students in the Digital Literacies class will use Flipboard as a tool of aggregating (gathering) information on a specific topic "Virtual Reality." They will use Pinterest as a tool of curating (organizing and displaying) their findings from the research in Flipboard.

Students will share their Flipboard findings (Magazine) - as well as their Pinterest collections (Board) in their blogs. These examples will serve as example for them on how to use such tools for research on other topics in contemporary digital publications.

Here is an example of my own VR Research Magazine in Flipboard.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Drinking from the Digital Firehose

"The scarce resource is the human attention needed to make sense of the enormous flow of information, to learn, as it were, how to drink out of the firehose." -Richard Lanham
I hope you're thirsty.
Students in Limestone's Digital Literacies class are experimenting with tools to help them manage the floods of digital information and distractions that are inherent in our digital age. They will work in our "Knowing, Doing, Making: framework as follows:
  1. Knowing - students will read excerpts from Lanham's "The Economics of Attention," along with this Interview with Lanham.
  2. Doing - students will explore the possibilities of "managing" digital resources by playing around with the interface and functionality of HootSuite.
  3. Making - students will: 
    • blog about their experience with HootSuite (and, optionally, Altomail) and how tools like these address the issues raised in Lanham's comments.
    • create a useful and functional HootSuite dashboard to handle their social meia interactions (for at least 3 social media.)

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Shows How New Media Breaks the Old Media

Sure, "Video Killed the Radio Star," but New Media also breaks Old Media.

"When the Net absorbs a medium, it recreates it in its own image." -Kevin Kelly

Consider the popular Netflix series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

First - it is Emmy-nominated, even though it is not a "television show." (It is an internet streaming show.)

Second - the theme song is a Songify mash-up meme - see the formation and final result.

Formation:


Final Theme Song:


Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Rick Rollin', Rollin' Stone, and Screen People

This week, our students will be tackling these assignments:
  • Knowing - Reading Kevin Kelly's "Becoming Screen Literate"
  • Doing - Playing around with Bob Dylan's ROLLING STONE INTERACTIVE(Get a good desktop computer and a fast connection and wait for it to load completely - it may take a while to load - be patient. If it doesn't load for you - at least you can see what it would have been like with this YouTube video.)
  • Making - 
    1. Posting a blog response to the article by Kevin Kelly. Discuss any points on which you agree, disagree, question, etc.
    2. Posting a blog response to the BobDylan.com song. Deal with coding, interactivity, production, entertainment value, or other issues of interest.
    3. Rick Rolling someone! Be creative in using hyperlinks and setting up your victim. Record the experience and be prepared to share in class on Thursday!

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Really?

This week, our students tackle Nicholas Carr's seminal article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
They will also learn to link to this blog, too - AND the blogs of their colleagues!

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Putting It All Together: Website, Blog, Portfolio

Students will end the term with attention to their own personal websites. Students will refer to earlier work and previously supplied references, and will attend to course requirements for content. (See below.)

(Students, consider the advice and guidelines from the Forbes article, "Why Every Job Seeker Should Have a Personal Website, And What It Should Include." Before you begin to finalize the website, make a "finishing touches checklist" for your website from this material. Then, implement the changes and improvements while including the course-required content. Need inspiration? Look at this list of "The 3 Best Personal Websites We've Ever Seen" from MUSE.)

Students' sites will contain:
  1. Links to blog entries (in Blogger and Weebly.)
  2. Resume / About Me / C.V.
  3. Portfolio(s) which will include each of the following, with contextualizing commentary:
    1. Samples of Video Production
    2. Samples of Digital Design
    3. Samples of Presentation Design
    4. Samples of other work, such as writing, art, 
    5. Appropriate connections to other social media and online resources

Monday, February 29, 2016

Mid-term Reviews

Students will prepare three (3) blogs to review their work thus far in CM412:

  1.  "Baseball" Sample and learning digital editing software (SHOW/EMBED the VIDEO)
  2.  Storyboards, Planning and Shooting for a project (SHOW/EMBED the STORYBOARDS)
  3.  "Artifacts from the Future" Project (SHOW/EMBED the VIDEO)
Each blog/presentation will answer the following questions thoroughly:
  • What did you DO?
  • How did you apply class learning to your work?
  • What did you learn that you might apply to your communications practices in the future?
We will share our findings IN OUR BLOGS and in discussion in Thursday's class before Spring Break.


Monday, February 15, 2016

A Project of Their Own!

Students will be writing, directing and producing a short 3-piece video on the "Artifacts from the Future" Exhibit. Their productions will each contain: an interview, a scripted selection performed by "talent," and a performance piece from the director!

In preparation for Tuesday's mixing/post-production session, students will have completed the following:

  1. Complete a storyboard, and take a photo of the finished storyboard and post in ON THE BLOG, along with reflections of the planning process.
  2. Use the storyboard to Make out a SHOT LIST, and post this on the BLOG, too!
  3. Using the shot list as a guide, students will shoot all the video you will need for the production. (including B-roll, establishing shots, etc.)
In class, students will work on importing the video, mixing your clips to make the storyboards "come to life," and even choosing bumpers, stingers, and background music. (Students may find sound ideas here: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ )


Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Mixing it up: Video Editing

Students will use Premiere Pro (and provided video, audio and photos) to recreate the 25-second introduction to a fictitious documentary called "Baseball: America's Pasttime."

https://youtu.be/qwddMTOztoU

In doing so, students will demonstrate their learning of the program interface, importing collateral, using photos, layers, timeline, transitions, effects, editing clips before and after insertion to the timeline, titling, the Ken Burns effect, and exporting to various video formats (in this case, a format suitable for YouTube.)

They will upload their videos to YouTube and embed them in their blogs (or upload them directly to their blogs) with additional prose commentary on the process.

Students will build on the instruction in the classroom, but can find additional support at sites like these:

Adobe has some helpful links to instructions and video tutorials to help you get started HERE.

A couple of tutorials you might have particular interest in are these:
  1. Managing & Viewing Assets
  2. Dynamic Slide Shows (aka the "Ken Burns Effect")
MORE HELP Available at the Course Website!

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Lights, Camera, Direction, Production, Action!

This week, CM412 students will have completed their storyboards for the "Artifacts from the Future" shoot - a project in which they will:



Next week, they will enter post-production to edit, enhance and deliver a finished video highlighting a part of the "Artifacts from the Future" exhibit.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Planning the Video Composition

http://www.equalpayday.com.au/Resources/Pictures/video_icon.pngThis week, CM412 Students will write and storyboard a short piece they will do based on the "Artifacts from the Future" exhibit in Winnie Davis Hall of History. Students will research one of several options (Jetsons, Star Trek, Back to the Future, Isaac Asimov) and will plan a short video feature that highlight some interesting facts about The Future of The Past.

Keeping in mind the Rule of Thirds, the 180-degree Rule, and considerations of lighting and framing, students will plan their shoot, and will take photos to build a storyboard for production. They will post their photos in their blogs, and will use captions to indicate narration, script, effects, music, etc. in each scene.

A scene from the Spielberg "one-r"
As a bonus, they will search for my favorite "one-camera shot" by Spielberg that precedes the unusual line "That's one bad hat, Harry." Clues were given in class, and should not be discarded. Images are important. Since we are not Spielberg, we will use a number of shots to tell our video story - and we will plan them by using storyboards!

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Getting Started in 2016!

This weekend Digital Literacies students will accomplish the following:

  1. Set-up a Blogger Blog (blogger.com) and do the following:
    1. Post an introductory blog entry.
    2. Post an entry that contains a photo AND an embedded video.
    3. Add a Blog List Gadget with the blogs of the instructor and each of your colleagues.
    4. Play around with the design and template options and be ready to show your "first-look" on Tuesday.
  2. Read the "Basic Camera Shots" handout distributed in class and take a photo representing each of these four shots: Long shot, Medium shot, Close-up, Extreme Close-up - using the location assigned in class.
  3. Post these 4 photos to a blog entry, with descriptions of the shots.
You can see their first posts by clicking on the top links to the right>>>