Monthly Archives: December 2014

Annotating a Connected Song

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The other day, I shared out my tribute song to my various communities, in the form of an animated music video of sorts. It is my way of saying thanks to people who inspire me all year in various online homes.

I decided to show a bit of where the song writing came from, and used my comic app to annotate the original piece of paper. My songwriting process is very messy, musically and physically. I am constantly scratching on and scratching out words, drawing lines to show movement of phrases and verse/chorus, and yet, I often take photos of the paper later, to keep a trail of the song.

Annotating a Connected Song

So, if you are interested, I tried to reconstruct the writing of the song with annotated notes before I forget it all (which I am bound to do). Thanks for being part of my network as a visitor here. This song is for you.

Here is the audio-only version, too. Feel free to remix.

Peace (in the script),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Tiny Tiny Writing from a Digital Native

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(This is a Slice of Life, a regular writing activity facilitated by Two Writing Teachers. Come write with us.)

SOL

I’ve often harped on and on against using the dichotomy of the digital natives versus the digital immigrants. It’s a false dichotomy to say that young people “get” technology and adults don’t.  All of us are in the middle, depending on the situation and context and technology. And yet, every now and then, a student will do something that has me scratching my head, discovering some workaround they figured out that I would not have thought about.

This one from yesterday had me scratching my head, and also giggling out loud.

A little pretext: my students are working on a persuasive piece of writing in which they review a video game. It was due yesterday, and one of my students was on a family weekend ski trip, so she worked on her paragraph in the car on the way North. Apparently, all she had was an iPod, so she found one of the Art/Drawing Apps, and used the text feature to write her paragraph that way (Can you get that picture in your mind? This kid in the cramped back seat of the family car, huddled over an iPod, tap-typing in a program designed for drawing?)

She could not figure out how to print it out, so her mother emailed me the file and asked that I print it out, which I had gladly do if necessary. But when I opened up the file, this is what I saw:

tiny writing

 

Yes, tiny tiny type. If anything, my screenshot does not do justice to how small those words really are. So small, in fact, that when I held it in my hands, it was like looking at a collection of ants on the page. (Granted, I have old eyes … digital immigrant eyes?) It reminded me of that famous scene in Spinal Tap, with the tiny Stonehenge on stage. You know what I’m talking about, right?

‘This Is Spinal Tap’ – ‘Stonehenge’ from filmc3ption on Vimeo.

Anyway, the student and I were both amused at the paper I printed out. She even declared, “I can read it just fine, Mr. H,” and then bent down, eyes very close to the paper, and started to read it to me …. before bursting out laughing.

Last night, they tried a few ways to get the text bigger but of course, the app converted the text into the drawing itself, making the text un-editable, so it is final. In the end, they took a screenshot of the writing and sent that to me, and that’s just fine.

Peace (in the tiny tiny writing),
Kevin

Video Game Design: Sara’s Into an Animal Cell Game

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One of my students has published her video game that we have been working on as a collaboration between my ELA classroom and the science classroom. The topic of the game is cells, and you can tell that the mentor texts we used (Magic School Bus) had a big influence on Sara, who has emerged as one of the top video game designers in the sixth grade.

Give Inside an Animal Cell a try and see what you think.

sara Into an Animal Cell game

Peace (in the cell),
Kevin

Words Upon the Wall: A Gift of Song

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For everyone who is in all of my various online networks and communities and adventures, I thank you. Here is a song, with some animated words, as my humble thanks for all the inspiration and support you give me throughout the year as I write and explore and learn.

Peace (with words on the wall),
Kevin

Book Review: The Moor’s Account

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I love this line right near the end of The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami, in which our protagonist — Estebanico — remarks about how those who tell the stories of history shape the history itself in the collective memories of those who come afterwards.

Moors Account

If only …

The Moor’s Account is a engrossing telling of the exploration of the Americas by the Spaniards, through the eyes of a Muslim slave — Mustafa al-Zamori, but whom the Spaniards named Estebanico. This hook by the talented Lalami gives the reader insights into the New World, in all of its wonders and all of its hardships. Lalimi notes in her acknowledgements that the story is fictional (thus, that quote I shared is sort of a meta-narrative anchor point), and that there is nothing known about the real Estevanico, who only gets mentioned in one line of one of the explorer’s own stories.

From that mention, Lalami spins a story of his life, and his travels, and finally, his freedom that comes from his wits and understanding of what freedom from enslavements — both physical as well as spiritual — means. Her story gives the Story of the America’s a new point from which to view history, and if that is not one of the purposes of writing, I don’t know what is.

Peace (in the explore),
Kevin

Video Game Design: Playtesting and Feedback

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Playtesting Peer Review 2014
In designing games, as in writing, a valuable step to the process is to gather feedback from someone outside of your own head. During our science-based video game design unit, we play-test each other’s games, and work on giving feedback to what is noticed. While this happens quite a bit informally (“Hey, anyone want to try my game?” – a pretty common refrain in my classroom these days), I do try to formalize it a bit. The form we use comes from a new book on systems thinking, but I also had a similar form that I had made on my own.

I like how this new form incorporates the warm/cool feedback concept, and allows for reaction notes from the game designer. Obviously, this activity began with a mini-lesson on giving constructive feedback to other game designers, and how to use warm/cool feedback on someone else’s work.

It’s still interesting how some students read and accept the feedback, and ask for clarification from the play-testers, making adjustments to their projects, while others just shrug and go on as if the process never happened. They can’t get out of their own heads, and see the game objectively (“Well, I BEAT that level. You should, too. It’s easy.” — a student said this to me the other day. Me: “Well, you BUILT that level, so you know it inside and out. It’s not easy at all if you don’t know it.”). This is part of the learning process.

Peace (in the game),
Kevin

 

On the Hunt for Words (A Poem of Found Poetry)

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Found – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

I am taking part in a small, open MOOC through some friends in San Diego, using an education book called The Writing Thief as its anchor text (and the book itself is about mentor texts). There is a roll-out of Make Cycle activities and the most recent one asks us to do a word scavenger hunt in the world.

I decided to use an online random poetry line generator, just to see what it would spit out, and whether or not I could pull lines of a random poem together into something with structure (sort of). Interestingly, I think it works, particularly when you add visual media to the lines.

What helped is that the reference to a poet happened twice for me, so I used those lines as bookends.

Peace (in the hunt),
Kevin

Video Game Design: Storyboarding the Game

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Cell Video Game Storyboard Collage 2014

One of the things I force my students to pay attention to (some resist) is the concept of storyboarding out their science-based video game projects. But I know, from experience, how important it is to have a map forward, even if you abandon the map along the way for more creative terrain.

As a teacher, the storyboard also provides me with a way to see what they are thinking as they begin the design phase, as well as gives us discussion points on which to talk through the game design, science concepts and story ideas in a workshop-style mode.

You can read more about what I wrote about storyboarding, including the sharing of resources, over at the Gamestar Mechanic teacher site, from a few years ago.

Peace (in the boards),
Kevin

Book Review: The Peripheral

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This book — The Peripheral — really requires the reader to dig in. You need to wrap your head around some pretty complex ideas about Time and Technology. William Gibson, whose books have supercharged our thinking (or at least, mine but probably yours, too … you just might not know it) around digital media, cyberspace and interactive media, does not write down to the reader.

What I am saying is that I am almost gave up on The Peripheral — and even had a post about reading frustration playing out in my head at one point — but I am now glad that I didn’t. But, yeah, I was angry at Gibson for the first few chapters because the story immerses you into something that you need to sort of figure out for yourself as you go along. Background knowledge? Not really activated. Gibson does not hand the story to you. Your brain will be firing on all cylinders here, trying to find some anchors to the world he has imagined.

I know I needed a quiet space (not easy in my household) for an extended stretch to allow this story to wash over me, to draw me in, and when that happened, I was hooked, line and sinker. Unfortunately, every time I put it down for a spell, I’d be lost for a bit when I got back into the story. Again … brain working.

I won’t give a full synopsis here, but the story centers on two characters — one from the future (or present) and another from the past (or present) whose time trajectory has been altered by the future (or present). Someone sees something they should not have seen while inside a game (or is it a game?), and someone else now wants that person dead. From this plotline, the story unfolds. Peripherals are live avatars of sorts that people use to interact in spaces in other times … oh heck … you’ll have to read it to understand it.

The upshot: Gibson is in fine form here as a writer whose visions of the possibility of technology create a fictional landscape where things are possible that you never thought were possible. It’s a wild ride in The Peripheral. And if you are lost and disoriented at times, blame Gibson, not me. It’s part of the story, I suspect.

Peace (in the peripheral),
Kevin

PS — here is an excerpt from the book.

New Yorker: Hollywood and Vine

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Clockwise from top: the digital stars KingBach, Tyler Oakley, Brittany Furlan, Joey Graceffa, and Cam and Nash.

(ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX WILLIAMSON via New Yorker)

Did anyone else read the article in New Yorker called Hollywood and Vine, about the emergence of viral video sharing and how frightened Hollywood is becoming of where young people are watching video? I was intrigued, and wondering how folks are using the 6 second Vine app (and the slightly longer Instagram video sharing) to create small movies with vast and young audiences, and then I realized: it’s becoming all about audience and profit.

It’s not about art.

Duh.

But, darn it, it should be. Our media tools have opened up some amazing possibilities, and yet, as writer/reporter Tad Friend follows some famous “Viners” around, he notices that every shot for the Vine flick (all 6 seconds of it) is done with hopes of garnering a larger audience of followers and likers, and that is done in hopes of getting commercial ventures (like Taco Bell and others) to pay the Viners for using products in their flicks. The Viners do voluntary product placements. They reach out to corporations. They aim for the paycheck.

Ack. Gag. Repeat (or loop, maybe).

Is this what we are moving into now? Hybrid media making as hybrid advertising? I am not naive. I know businesses look to trends and then dig their claws in. They entice media makers. They sometimes “remix” (in a bad way) close enough to resemble the original, and hope no one is noticing. And I know people need to make a living.

But I can’t help but be dismayed and worried that the shift into this powerful movie-making culture is really about an “all eyes on me now” mentality, where the art that is made is not made for art, but for commercial sensibilities. This is not a knock of the selfie-generation. Plenty of people are making interesting movies that focus the lens on the self. This is a knock against using the self to sell stuff to those who are watching your self.

I’ll end this bloggy diatribe of a middle-aged, middle-class white male  (ie, probably out of the loop, so to speak, with the culture featured in the article) with this belief:

I want my students, and my own children, to see the possibilities of creating media the way I see it: an ocean of possibilities that allow you to express yourself in new and interesting ways, with (yes) a potential audience that can connect and further your art. Let art be the center of what you do.

Is that too much to ask?

Peace (in the wonder),
Kevin