“ 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.”
For this assignment I made a google search about cooking up kittens. Before you think I’m totally crazy.. there is a story. I got a kitten this summer, 8 weeks old and all of 2 lbs on a fat day. I’m sure you’ve seen him in my pictures and previous posts. He is adorable, but definitely a bit of a menace, so all summer while I was home my dad would joke that he was only still around because he was too small to eat yet (strange sense of humor in my family I know). Hence the idea of kitten recipes.
I made this site my google searching chicken recipes and then changing the word chicken to kittens throughout the page with the X-Ray Goggles program. Then I copied the raw HTML code for the site, went to my UMW domain site, created a sub-domain, went to files and edited the index file inside the new sub-domain to create the site. I don’t know if this was the way I was supposed to do it, but it worked!
This is one of my favorite places to type into google maps. Why? because that must be i need directions there. I love Wrightsville beach. My Aunt and Uncle first started taking me there with my cousin when I was just a kid. The “B” on the map shows where we’d first enter the island. That is after breakfast at Causeway Cafe. I always get the banana nut bread french toast. MHHMM!! soo good. Then we’d take a right and drive down to that pier. We would stay in a hotel close by. And it’s on of my favorite surf spots! the water is so clear, almost tropical. The waves are much better then Virginia beach. After a long day of surfing, we’d drive back down by the entrance to each at Tower 7. That place is the bomb. It’s a mexican food surf shake restaurant. They have the most delicious burritos. Perfect for the after ocean starve!
What if Twitter and Facebook were around back in the day of exploration?
You know Lewis and Clark would have taken advantage of that. I mean they traveled away from all their friends. They’d defiantly want to keep in contact. So i made a page for William Clark. If he was to tweet hears one thing he’d say.
I also made a Facebook account for William Clark. He would be a little offended because they didnt have his birthday date. The earliest was like 1905. Poor Clark. But he can pretend he’s excepted. Check out His facebook page
The assignment, Google History Maps Story, turned out to be by far one of my favorite assignments! I have no idea why… There wasn’t much to it. I went to Google maps and created my own map of destinations. I was trying to think of a historical/literary figure that traveled a lot. It was then I remembered the book/movie Around the World in 80 Days. I thought this was perfect for the assignments. I couldn’t find a good schedule/remember what happened exactly in each place so I just did the proposed schedule. It was simple to do just finding the places on the map and linking them.
Too bad Facebook was not around for most of history! Use the Fakebook tool to make a Facebook profile for a historical figure and make a fake tweet for the same character using the Twister tool. See for Abraham Lincoln the example of a fake facebook profile and what he might have tweeted.
Make sure what you create is coherent with the person’s background, and explain what it might have meant for that person to use Facebook and twitter “way back then”. Include screen shots and links to what you created, and elaborate on what their use of social media might have been like if it existed for them.
This is a 3 star assignment.
I really have enjoyed this assignment. For this assignment I decided to use the historical figure of Susan B. Anthony. I choose her because she really fought hard to give woman the right to vote. To find more information on her I went to wikipedia as well as this biographical website that I used to verify my facts that I found on wikipedia. I then took screen shots of what I created with Jing. I believe that if social media was around when Susan B. Anthony was alive she would’ve gotten so many supporters as well as she would’ve been able to get a right to vote so much sooner. It’s too bad that she died before the 19th amendment was passed that gave women the right to vote. But if there was social media around in her time there would’ve been a lot more petition and avocation for women’s rights.
Here is a link to Susan B. Anthony’s facebook page that the images below are of.
“Use Google Maps to tell a story! It can be the story of a trip you took, a trip you would like to take, a strange occurrence, a war, anything you like!”
This is a story of the trip I took to Italy last Spring. I started by flying into “A” Munich International Airport. I went with a friend who had cousins there, so they picked us up from the airport and showed us around Munich. They lived about an hr outside the city in “B” Augsburg, Germany. We spent a day there then took the train to “C” Venice, Italy, where we were dyinggg to eat Italian food. The typical tourists we are, we went to the first restaurant we saw outside the train station and had the worst pizza I’ve had in my life.. You have to find the hole in a wall place where the townies go to get the real good stuff. After a day in Venice we took the train to “D” Florence. Our friend who was studying abroad in Rome surprised us when we got to our hostile and had taken the train up for the night! Supresa! He showed us around a little, I think the most awesome moment of Florence was walking past the Duemo on our way home from the bar that night. The phrase of the night was “This isn’t real life” hahaha. Florence is pretty small so we took day trips to “E” Tuscany, “F” San Gimignano (Named Medieval Manhattan) and “G” Pisa. Then we headed to “H” Rome, which is a HUGE city that takes 2 busses and a train to get anywhere, but obviously a can’t miss if you’re going to Italy, I would just suggest a guided tour. From Rome we were ready to fly home and plan our next adventure!
I made this story by typing all the cities into google maps, hitting get directions and taking screen shots!
I chose for this assignment to get Google to translate Sony’s Japanese website. This actually didn’t yield as much as I’d thought–it turns out most of the Japanese on the site was actually embedded in images, but it did result in some strange textual failures.
For example, does anyone here know what a “seg” TV is? Also, it resulted in a lot of the Engrish that one often encounters in Oriental translations. MP3 players let everyone experience the power of “good sound” (with the quotes there). Perhaps Google is better at translating technical features on commonly used websites?
Also, the primary failure Google seems to experience translating Japanese is the fact that Japanese reverses sentence order–predicate first, then subject.
“Use theFakebook tool to make a Facebook profile for a historical figure and make a fake tweet for the same character using the Twister tool. “
Here are the screen shots of Amelia Earhart’s Facebook:
I love the idea of this assignment. Not being a history buff at all I see how using these fake social media sites could make it fun for younger children learning about not so interesting historical figures. I made my site by going to Fakebook.com, and inserting the information I found on this bio site about Amelia Earhart.
It is a bit scary how social media has taken over the world, I can tweet about Barack Obama and have it show up on the nightly news or in a political speech. History is being made on Facebook and Twitter, I wonder if our children will even need history textbooks, or just Twitter archives.
This week in ds106 we are returning to something we have not done since the Spring of 2011, the idea of telling stories within the web – you can find more information in this week’s assignment.
While we have been publishing stories on the web, in our blogs, these assignments are meant to get you thinking how you can have stories exist in the spaces of other web sites, or reshaping web sites to tell a snew story. It is stories not ON the web, but within it, tangled with it:
Over the next week we’ll be playing with storytelling within the web. What does this mean? Well, Martha Burtis lays out the idea nicely in this post here about the idea behind this assignment (read it!), but to briefly summarize: 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 (if you can), but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though you can photoshop particular images on the site.
Thus we have a small set of Web Assignments with the required one we want students to do is Storytelling Within the Web. IN this go around, we are having our students use the new Mozilla Hackasaurus tool, which is very elegant about using the browser as means to alter the content of existing web pages. The harder part is getting students to save the HTML as text, but as Martha discovered, the HTML can be direct uploaded yo WordPress, making it easy to link to it from a blog post.
But woah, I am straying from the topic. We’ve been trying to add a few more assignments to the mix. I’ve been liking Storify as a nice tool for aggregating content from various social media sites- it allows you to search in flickr, twitter, youtube, soundcloud, or just grab a URL, and drag and drop it into a timeline. You can re-order items, and even add text in between the segments. I really like the way Audrey Watters has been using this to take notes and mix in other media from conferences she attends.
Given the use of Story in Storify, I thought, we cannot we just make narrative out of the bits and clips and stuff of these spaces? Hence the Storify It assignment.
Storify is a tool that allows you to pick and chose content from multiple social media sites- flickr, facebook, youtube, soundcloud, instagram, or just from a URL — and to assemble it in a narrative. Often it is used to capture the highlights of an event, but there is no reason you could not use it to create a story constructed of bits that exist elsewhere on the net.
See if you can tell an original story (or re-tell a known one) in the Storify site, and then embed the results in your own web site.
So here is the second one I did.
It really started with just a title. I wanted to see if I can get most of the dialogue from tweets- it is kind of hit and miss, but after some stabs I got a lot fo the lines I wanted, but then some of them led to a YouTube clip that a 12 year old did as a trailer for a book! (Bigger than a Breadbox) — it pretty much evolved as I went. Maybe I will see if you can figure it out- Here it is embedded:
I kind of enjoyed doing this organically and not sure which way it would go. I wanted it to not be literal.
The first time around I played with this, well, I was stuck. So I thought of seeing if I could retell something that was already a story. SO I searched on “parables” and ended up on a list of Aesop’s Fables and after clicking through a few, decided to take on Lion in Love- it is short, lends itself to media, and definitely has a moral at the end.
I am not sure if this is any more interesting to doa literal story. The fun part is seeing what you can find to represent the story elements. I used the text to insert the story in between.
Yes, Love can tame the wildest — or only a cat would be dumb enough to give up its attributes for a chick? Who knows.
I thought this assignment was going to be very difficult and decided to take it on at the beginning of the week. Like most things about this class, I was wrong. Hackasaurus makes it so simple to do!
I got the inspiration for this ad during a halloween costume search. I came across the cutest dog dressed up in a dinosaur costume and couldn’t stop laughing. It popped back in my head when I saw the website was hackaSAURUS. I decided that was the obvious thing for me to do. I found the two picture of the Boston Terriers using google images and just changed some of the information on a Craigslist ad.
