umwfa12s2 – Assignment Bank

Where Am I?

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This was so much harder to do even though I had a Video Creator to use.

The Make A Story Out of Search two-star assignment (Use Google Search Stories Video creator to create a narrative out of a search.) was really testing my limits on storytelling. I feel a bit dry after taking in so much over the weekend that my output of information seems limited. I searched, ha, a lot about my own identity as a believer in Christ and am finally finding out a lot of things that I need to work on, but one thing is for certain: I am enough and I am loved.

This has been a weird week where I have just been bombarded by self-reflection and it’s been a trying week to dig through my past, present and future and trying to distinguish the essence of my actual self. Who am I really? Where am I really? What reality am I going to be living in?

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RARE Wolf Lamp Found!

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The Power of Diamond: 4 Stars Web Assignment

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I decided to be the first to try the “Three Moon Wolf Stories” assignment from the ds106 assignment database. I remember when the three moon wolf shirt became a little meme on the internet and decided to find other products in the same vein. I had read an askreddit post where they discussed how HDMI cables could be ridiculously priced (I bought mine for $0.50).

Here is the AudioQuest “Diamond” HDMI cable.

I used the X-Ray goggles tool to modify an existing amazon review on the product’s page and just edited each individual part. The other reviews on that page are great as well and I highly recommend you all read them.

4/5 Web Stars down. This is by far my least favorite thing we’ve done this year. Looking forward to next week, though!

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Mountain Lion Ad

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Hurricane Sandy Bypasses East Coast, Baffles Meteorologists

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Storytelling within the web! This assignment would have been really fun if I didn’t have a massive case of writer’s block when I decided to get down to it. I decided to remix a cnn webpage as if the coming hurricane-apocalypse mix was going to miss the east coast.

That’s just part of the work I had done. I used the hackasaurus X-Ray Goggles tool that was suggested on the assignments page. From there, I just made all of my changes (which were all text). Here’s the actual page. I followed @cogdog’s post for guidance in uploading the actual page.

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What every entomologist needs…

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… an awkward ladybug costume.

An assignment to create another Three Wolf Moon shirt? Really? I’m getting GRADED for this? My life could only get better if I’d started my work on Monday like a sane, sensible human being.

I was excitation to give this assignment a try, although initially I wasn’t certain I’d be able to capture the essence of the glorious Three Wolf Moon reviews. There’s something about that sort of spontaneous moment of communal absurdity that’s difficult to recreate, and generally results in a terrible forced meme that never gets off the ground. The stuff that makes great memes great is, in part, their unpredictability, and how organically they arise from the depths of internet subculture.

However, in attempting to find something weird and different to review on Amazon, I found that the majority of obscure items (like unicorn meat, wolf urine and real uranium) already had a plethora of silly reviews attached to them; apparently the three wolf moon shirt spawned not only that one meme, but an entire tradition of leaving ridiculous reviews on odd products. In a similar vein, the mundane items I looked at mostly had at least a few real reviews already, meaning my review would hardly stand out.

At last, I found it. A Halloween costume so dumb and awkward that itneededa stupid review. In keeping with many of the story-reviews I’d read as I trawled through the weird underbelly of Amazon.com, I went with a hyper-serious tone, and even went so far as to use the persona of a scientist to really make the point. The trope of the crazy scientist living with the animals they’re studying is a well-known one, so I had a lot to work with in terms of cultural background. ~~While my review hasn’t generated any other reviews in kind,~~ I have a second review! And possibly a third later on! And folks are seeing it—as of writing this, ~~11 out of 12~~ OVER FORTY people found it “helpful.” Granted, ~~that might be due to the fact that~~ it is absolutely because I advertised what I was doing on a knitting forum I frequent that’s full of weird, awesome people who appreciate this kind of thing and who were willing to jump in and help me out (it’s not cheating, it’s generating traffic!).

In case you don’t want to head over to Amazon to view my story in all its absurdity, here’s the text of my review:

Excellent for research! Entomologist approved October 28, 2012

By H

As an entomologist specializing in Coccinellidae, I have been searching for a suitable disguise that would help me conduct up close research on new species of lady beetle that I have discovered. They are a fascinating breed, having established a colony that is similar in structure and function to that of a beehive a termite mound. I had purchased an inferior costume for my first attempt at studying this colony, and the results were unpleasant; apparently able to detect the faults in my disguise, the lady beetles swarmed and began to gnaw on my face. After a brief recovery period, however, I was determined to find a better costume and try again.This costume proved nearly faultless, and has served my needs admirably. I had to sew on an extra pair of legs and supply my own black unitard beneath the ensemble to complete the look, as well as modifying the wings so they sat beneath its outer shell, but otherwise its sturdy construction bright coloration, perfectly mimicking the iconic red elytra of the Coccinellidae, were just what I needed. I chose this costume over the others advertised on this website because the spots it boasts are more proportional to the garment’s overall size; others I looked into tended to present in a smaller polka dot pattern, which may have been the fatal flaw in my first disguise.I write this now from the outer limits of the Coccinellidae colony. They have accepted me into their ranks, and I have begun living as they do, setting out each morning before dawn to collect aphids and other scale insects for more sedentary colony members. Their behavior is utterly unprecedented, and seems almost intelligent. Soon I hope to catch a glimpse of the center of their colony, possibly a queen-beetle of some sort. I live in hope, and all thanks to this excellent costume.

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Summarization #9

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The evaluations of The Despicables and Road Trip Radio were actually kind of interesting to do. The criteria really made me focus on how the actual show was put together rather than just the story. I don’t know that if some of the criteria (transitions, effects) weren’t mentioned to me if I would have recognized them on my own.

The Storytelling with in the web assignment was much easier than I thought. The hackasaurus tool made this assignment really easy.

I really enjoyed the web assignments. However, I felt that the choices were very limited. I had a few rough patches with some of the assignments. But, I did find two that were fun and I could accomplish well. One of my favorite assignments of the class was in this section. The google web adventure assignment was very intriguing to me.

Back in time: 2 stars

A Web Adventure: 3 Stars

For the daily creates this week we had to link them in a story. I briefly had the story in the links between the photos/sounds. But this is the real story…. As I was walking through my squeaky apartment,

frustrated and overwhelmed with work, I came across a dollar bill.

I looked at the back and saw the pyramids and pondered about their significance for a while. As I was think, I thought I needed a vacation. I decided that this dollar bill was going to be used for a trip to the beach to see the shells and the ocean.

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Who’s That Cute Kid on The Beach?

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I was on the beach recently and found a cute kid to take a photo of:

I got the push to make it seeing Before and After Pictures with a Twist on Buzzfeed where some dude inserted modern photos of himself into photos of him as a kid- but its more than cut and paste, he carefully considered the pose and details like shadow.

My first reflex- “This would be a cool ds106 assignment”

I am thinking of creating a twitter auto responder then when anyone tweets a message like that it responds with something like:

So this is now an assignment Then-Now-Together:

Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo!

Based an example of Before and After Pictures with a Twist spotted in Buzzfeed

And now my example- the source image is of me at a beach in Ocean City maryland, digging one of my improbable and unsafe holes:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Combined with a photo taken of me last week by @windsordi on your trip to Point Pelee, Ontario:

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by windsordi

It was a matter of cropping out the background. To make it match the color tone, I mucked with the levels and come color correct, and added a Fim Grain Effect to try and match the original. The trickier part was creating a shadow – I found some clues in a tutorial from PhotoShop Essentials. MOre or less you make a selection of the original figure, create new layer below the original, fill with black, use distorts and rotates to move the shadow, add some Gaussian blur, and lighten the opacity.

And there it is- me on a beach taking a photo of me on a beach, then, now, together.

How about you?

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YouTube in An Alternate Universe of Niceness

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I’ve excited that we brought back the within the web storytelling assignment to ds106- the one where we ask students to use a browser tool to “re-edit” the content of an existing web site to give it a whole new meaning. IN many ways this subverts the web in a playful way that says, I can make this web page tell any story I want:

From the Spring 2011 ds106 class came the idea of changing up an existing web page to tell a new story ” you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site, but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though you can photoshop particular images on the site. Essentially you alter the content of a web page (content, images) to make it tell a new story.

Because this is a new one (or has not been done in a while) and I know some of my students have gotten tripped up on this, I wanted to do an example. I also think it is important to try and alter almost every page element you can, alot of students do the headlines and some text, but the adds, menus, and footers are rich fodder for mucking.

I am not sure the exact path of my thinking of what I could flip on its head (political sites where candidates say honest and humble statements was one thought, but I hate politics). Then I thought about the banality and tripe of YouTube comments, and found my spot- I wanted to recast a YouTube video into one that represented a piece of fine art, where the comments were thoughtful, well punctuated, and… well nice.

In looking at sites that document some of the worst in YouTube commenting it took but a few clicks to land at Sneezing Baby Panda 17 glorious seconds of silly animals caught on video. The stream of comments include:

Wow… The mother panda even got? a fright.

fake

i guess? it’s cute

Haahahhahaaaahhaha?

Why u gotta? say it fake just laugh and shut ur face!!!!

Fake?

How sad, cryptic, and juvenile are tose comments. So here is my remade version of how this video might play ins some alternate universe, Panda Sneezes in E-Minor (that’s the web version)

I found a bunch of art and theater reviews to use as some of my fake comments. I changed the commenters names as well, inlfated the views, and made it have 0 dislikes. Who could dislike a panda? C’mon….

I am super impressed with the versatility of the Hackasaurus tool – activate it as a javascript bookmarklet, and any web page becomes editable. You hover over portions of the page to find elements you can edit, like the title of the video:

Clicking it makes the element editable:

(click for full size version)

Here I can not only change the text that appears on the screen, the html attributes (“alt”) are also available for messing with.

I like that it gives you a sense as to the structures of a page, the divs, etc and how they are fit together. I changed the comments, the commenter names, a few hyperlinks, menu items,. buttons, almost everything in the YouTube interface I transformed. The only thing I could not change was the iframe (clicking it opens the iframe, but I could do that in raw HTML were I so inclined.

The trick then is to hit the “P” button bottom left, this is the publish button.

It is not really publish, but gives you the full HTML to generate the page in one file. What you have to do is copy all of this, then open a plain text editor (meaning NotePad in Windows or Text Edit in the Mac, and paste that sucker in). It should then be saved as HTML (Not sure if this is an option in NotePad, but it is critical in Mac, a few seemed to save their as RTF which then took a big search and replace to get rid of spurious / characters).

Note for Mac Users: Uh oh, we had left off a ket step… After you paste your code into TextEdit, be sure to select Make Plain Text from the Format menu. When you save, use the “.txt” file name it provides. Then go to your desktop, and change the extension to “.html” If you do no do this, all you will see in the browser is code!

These HTML files are a bit big, a few hundred K because Hackasaurus wraps all of the external CSS, JS files a web page might have and folds it into one. You should test loading this form your desktop in a web browser (double clicking should do it). If you see something that looks like the web page you made, good. If you see HTML code, you gotta go back.

From here you can upload directly to your wordpress site via the “Media Upload” button just above the editor box. You select the file, like they way you upload an image. Whatever you enter for Title becomes the linking text, the key is for Link URL to check the box for File URL:, this uploads your HTML file and creates a hyperlink to it

So there you go, with this tool you can bend any web page to be your slave, to be lord and master of its content. Feel the power?

UPDATE Oct 27 As Stephen noted in a comment, the video did not actually play in my mucked page, must be something about the embed code Youtube uses makes sure it is from its own server. This was an easy enough fix with a dive into the HTML, I removed all of the code in the css div

<div id="watch-player">...</div>

and replaced it with the embed code set to the width of that div (700px)

<iframe width="700" height="525" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FzRH3iTQPrk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Now you can haz sneeze!

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The Despicables: A critique

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Since I was on RoadTrip Radio, we had to critique The Despicables:

Quality of audio sound -e.g. is the volume appropriate? are the levels even? Is the sound clear, and free of noises not needed (e.g. mouse clicks, background)?

The levels of sound in the beginning were a bit uneven. I kept having to change my volume levels throughout to try and compensate for the unevenness. Sometimes the background noises (effects) were a bit overwhelming and overtook the voices.

Quality of audio editing – use of effects, transitions, are the edits clean?

I really enjoyed the Halloween effects and spooky music used for a “caller calling in”. The transitions they used were music playing and I thought it was really effective. I knew when they were going to switch over. They also had the hosts say that they were switching hosts. The last transition (after Thriller) was a bit confusing. I had thought the show was over and then someone started interviewing again.

Use of sound effects- how are they used? Is it effective?

The sound effects fit into the story, however sometimes the volume of them overtook the speaker or you couldn’t hear them. They were used randomly throughout the show, but I think they were in effective place to give the show a bit of drama.

Use of music- how is it used? Is it effective or distracting?

Since this is a radio show, they did play some music just simply as music (not necessarily a transition) which I really enjoyed. It was Halloween music too so it fit nicely into the show.

Does the show have a structure? Is it cohesive or does it feel stitched together?

There is a structure to the show with hosts having listeners call in and discuss fall events and then play music. They did a really good job of structuring the show off of a morning type radio show. I do feel it was a bit broken up. It seems they had different members of the group interview different people and the sounds were different which kind of broke the show up.

Does it tell a story effectively? Is there a sense of drama, unknown?’

It was a mix of stories from different people about Halloween, however I feel it lacked a bit of drama. The hosts were not very enthusiastic. However, some of the stories were really funny and interesting!

If you would star this radio show, how many stars out of five would you give to the show?

I would give the show a 3.5/5 for the uneven volume and the transition mishap at the end. I really enjoyed listening to the stories and I thought transitions were used very well. I also really liked how they played actual songs like it was actually on the radio. Overall a very good job on creating the radio show!

P.S. No hard feelings to anyone! This is supposed to be constructive criticism!