Category Archives: Technology Resources

#DigiWriMo #CLMOOC: Making Simple Animation with Para Para

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Here are steps to making and sharing a simple stopmotion animation with Para Para Animation (part of Mozilla’s Webmaker family … I think …) Warning: The site is kind of funky at times and not always completely stable. And I am not sure how well it works on mobile devices. Just warning you. But I have used it with students and they LOVE it for the simplicity and easy entry point. You will, too.

Here is the Para Para Animation Site

Using ParaPara Animation1
Using ParaPara Animation2
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Using ParaPara Animation7

Well .. good luck. Share your art out at #clmooc or #digiwrimo or wherever you find yourself.

Peace (framing it one at a time),
Kevin

 

Our Text: A Kinetic Poem Found in Comments of an Open Document

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CLMOOC DigiWriMo Slow Chat

I was reading and commenting and enjoying the discussion that has been unfolding in both the body and the comments of this Open Document/Slow Chat format centered on the nature of images as digital writing as part of the CLMOOC Pop-Up Make Cycle last week. You should read it. And contribute.

I was wondering how to make sense of the various threads, and decided to try my hand at a Found Poem. I narrowed my reading to just the comments off to the side. As I dug around, some common themes and phrases began to emerge, and I assembled and then re-assembled them in another document, tinkering with the flow — adding a few words here, changing some endings there — until a poem emerged. Of sorts.

Now what?

I decided, in the interest of Digital Writing, that I wanted to do something different with the poem, so I opened up Keynote and began constructing the poem as Kinetic Text, using the animation feature within the slideshow to have parts of the poem appear and disappear. I could have gone fancier, I suppose, but I wanted to keep things simple so the words would not get lost for the flash. (I’ve done this kind of piece before. See my resource at Digital Is.)

See what you think:

One of the themes of this second week of the CLMOOC Pop-Up Make Cycle is animation, and animated text certainly is a challenge. It’s an intriguing way to compose with technology and words and presentation.

Peace (here, and then not),
Kevin

#DigiWrimo: Unfolding Conversations in the Margins

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Writing in the Margins: Annotate Troy

The CLMOOC Crowd has opened up a conversation about Digital Writing in the margins of this interview of Troy Hicks, and you are cordially invited to come on in and add your thoughts, questions, observations about digital literacies. Troy has graciously joined in the conversation, too. We’re using a tool called Hypothesis (see below on how to use it) to crowd-annotate and crowd-discuss the theme of Digital Writing and the teaching of digital literacies.

Won’t you join us?

The annotation activity is all part of the CLMOOC Pop-Up Make Cycle for what used to be Digital Writing Month. Along with the Crowd Annotation, there is a call for the Alt-CV/Alt-Resume by Sarah and a collaborative photo project by Kim in which you are invited to take an image of “down on the ground” and share it out. And more activities are to come.

Here are a few tutorials about using Hypothesis that might get you started so that you can add into the conversations of the margins with Troy Hicks.

and here.

Peace (here and there),
Kevin

#DigiWriMo #CLMOOC: Vertices, Edges and Digital Nomads

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Network Analysis Study

I don’t claim to understand all of the data analysis that goes on when people research and examine all of the elements of our social interactions in places like Twitter and beyond. Here, for example, is what the Innovator’s Mindset MOOC looked like from a data analysis viewpoint.

IMMOOC Network Analysis

I grapple with making sense of it all, but it fascinates me just the same, particularly when a visual is teamed up with writing that dives into the data points. So this recently published piece by some friends in my social networking circles — Aras, Autumm, Maha B., Sarah and Dave, and Apostolos  — caught my attention.

I’m still reading it (the title alone is a mouthful: Community Tracking in a cMOOC and Nomadic Learner Behavior on a Connectivist Rhizomatic Learning Network) …. and learning the vocabulary of research.

definitions

Some of the elements explored here about hashtags and the wandering spirit of those in networked spaces in this research article certainly caught my eye. I am one of those people. And I wander around quite a bit, hoping to connect with people and picking their brains about writing, teaching and more. The insight of how hashtags are connector points makes a lot of sense to me.

Network Analysis Study

I am intrigued by the term of “nomadic learners” — those of us who skirt and toggle between open educational spaces. In fact, that term is more fluid than the “lurker” terminology that is often used, and debated in online spaces. A nomad is forever on the move, but not just transient — they stop, talk, chat, share, gather and then bring what they have learned to other spaces.

Or so, I hope.

Network Analysis Study

 

As CLMOOC hosts a taste of DigiWriMo this week and into next (with an open invitation to make and create and collaborate and explore), I hope we all become rather nomadic in our wanderings and in our creations, and in our connections. I’ll see you on the edge of the vertices.

Peace (on the compass of imagination),
Kevin

Fake News about Fake News

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Fake News about Fake News

(created via Mozilla’s XRay Goggles Remix tool)

I’m not on Facebook, so I don’t know the extent of the “fake news” filtering into feeds there during the US presidential election. But I have seen more than a few articles in which Mark Zuckerberg is defending the algorithms that might have allowed some made-up news to come into the system, and worries that such items might have influenced voting.

I could not resist taking one of Zuckerberg’s denials and popping it into Mozilla’s XRay Goggles for a bit of a remix myself. Yep. Fake news about fake news. In mine, he owns up to Facebook’s role and admits that Facebook itself is behind the fake news (it’s not true, as far as I can tell … just to be upfront).

Still, even if some of what he defending is true — that the automated system still allows items with no veracity and tilted political bents into millions of people’s feeds — the issue of fake news in feeds has larger ramifications about how a social networking site can play a role in elections, and … perhaps even more importantly … it raises the question: why aren’t more people getting news from multiple and reputable sources?

Good lord.

Who relies on Facebook for all of their news? I know. I know. Many people do. It reminds me of the need for us, as teachers, to double down on teaching media literacy, and rhetorical moves, and determining the surface truth and the deeper slants of everything we read, whether it is the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Facebook or your local newspaper (do you still get your local newspaper? Is there still a local newspaper to get? My old journalism hackles get raised here. I hope you still have a local newspaper).

Check out this report from Pew Research, which indicates that almost two-thirds of Americans get our news from social media. What? And that report is from the summer. Who wants to bet that the number went up during the election?

About 6-in-10 Americans get news from social media

Peace (but check the source),
Kevin

#DigiWriMo: Home Poem

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The Young Writer’s Project in Vermont (an amazing organization supporting student writers) is taking on the unofficial hosting of some themes for what used to be and still is #DigiWriMo as way to help its writers keep writing in a digital way. Each week, they will offer up a theme. This week’s idea is: Home.

I went into MapStack and created a few versions of my neighborhood with its coloring layering tools and then pulled those images into Adobe Spark on my iPad, writing a poem as the narration, and ended up with a digital poem.

I like how the map layout doesn’t change, but the layered effects does, and the words are inspired by each image, to some degree.  In other words, the writing of the poem came AFTER I had created various versions of the maps, not the other way around.

I also used the Fused app, which does double exposures of images, to pull maps together to make something slightly different. By keeping the layout exactly the same, the blends gave a slight twist to the originals. Subtle, even.

Peace (at home and beyond),
Kevin

When the Algorithm is the Writer

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As an experiment, some folks turned over scriptwriting for a short film to an algorithm. You can read more about it in detail at this post, and/or watch the opening credits on the movie embedded above. It explains how and what they did. The film itself? It makes no sense, and yet, it is intriguing as an experiment.

And it reminds of the very human nature of writing. Maybe someday, computers will be able to write (or, in an educational connection, assess writing) but I don’t think we are there yet. I know we are not there yet.

There are complexities that come from subtext, from story, from character motivations, and other elements that can’t (yet) be replicated by machine.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting to see what a machine will do. Check out SunSpring and see what you think.

Peace (it’s with us),
Kevin

#DigiLitSunday: #WhyIWrite Digitally

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(This is a post for DigiLitSunday, a regular look with other educators at digital literacies. This week’s theme is connected to the upcoming National Day on Writing, which takes place on Thursday with the theme of Why I Write.)

I write digitally to find the grooves between the spaces. Digital writing does not replace the other ways I write. It accompanies it. It harmonizes with it. I have notebooks brimming with lyrics, poems and stories. Sticky notes dot our fridge.  I am always an arms length away from a pencil. Pens of all colors take up residence in the pockets of my jacket. But digital writing gives me another venue to consider the intersections of media and words, and how they might mesh or even collide together into something new. I have yet to find the perfect moment — that ‘aha’ spark when it all works just as I envisioned —  but knowing that moment might yet be possible gives me hope and inspiration to keep moving forward. I write with images as words and words as image, sound as image and image as sound, and video as platform for alternative paths to break down the wall between reader and writer. My ideas for digital writing collapse as often as they work. Beneath all that I write digitally, I seek to keep my words and language and stories as the foundation. Words still matter, no matter how glossed up they look and how interesting they sound. I’m still finding myself as a digital writer, and still helping my students find themselves as digital writers. I write digitally because the possibilities hint at something just on the horizon, and I can’t wait to write it into realization.

So, for example:

Peace (in theory),
Kevin

The Power of MultiModalities (4TDW)

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MultiModality: 4TDW Session

I’m wishing I had sat in on this discussion session in last week’s 4T Virtual Conference on Digital Writing (a free series of workshops and discussions that take place each Sunday through October .. I am a keynote on the last Sunday of the conference, exploring the nature of Digital Writing), but I am also grateful the sessions are being archived.

This week, I have wandered through Jeremy Hyler’s presentation on Grammar and Digital Writing (and moving from one audience to another with code-switching); and through Jianna Taylor’s talk on moving towards Digital Writing Notebooks; and through Lindsay Stoetzel’s work on Design Thinking in the Digital Writing Classroom. I am hopeful my friend, Anna Smith, will have her slides up there soon, as her work around Learning with New Media is a topic of interest to me.

But it is the panel discussion entitled MultiModal Moments and Making Composition(s) Move —  with Cassie Brownell, Matthew Hall, Rohit Mehta and Jon Wargo —  that got most of my attention. I was intrigued by the humanist approach and the social justice element of the presentation — of how students using multimedia to make their voices heard in the world have a chance to effect change in the world. Tapping into the elements of different modalities (image, video, text, audio, etc) empowers young writers, and engages them in the act of composition for a purpose.

As educators, understanding the different media attributes, and unveiling the forms and potential of each to our students, seems to be a critical way of giving our students not just permission, but authority, to move beyond traditional writing. Making videos and sharing images … this is what young people do in the world outside of our schools. Tapping into that interest may open up engagement on a whole new level. Connecting those interests to the larger world? That often is more powerful that one can imagine, until you try it. (See Connected Learning ideas)

A whole bunch of interesting presentations are on tap again this coming Sunday, including using online sources for crafting argument, weaving digital writing into the elementary classroom, and various looks at the power of blogging. I’ll be digging in. How about you?

Peace (not just digital),
Kevin