Create A Pinterest Board Of Your Dream Vacation
This is an assignment for dreamers!

If you don’t already have a Pinterest account, create one! Next, take a moment and contemplate where you would want to go. A vacation does not necessarily mean you have to select one place to travel to. It can involve a variety of locations.

Start off by creating a “board” for your dream vacation. All you have to do to create your board is click the “create a board” option on your main profile page. You could title it “My Dream Vacation,” like I did, or come up with something more personalized. You can select a category, such as “travel,” if you want, but neither a category, nor a description, are necessary to continue.

Next, try plugging keywords into the search box on Pinterest for cities, countries, specific landmarks, attractions, etc. and “pin” your favorite images/travel blog links/recipes/etc. onto your new board! To pin, hover your mouse over the image and a red “Pin it” button will pop up in the top left corner. Go ahead and click on it.

**The purpose of these pins is to give Pinterest subscribers access to a variety of recipes, photography, travel guides, blogs, literally EVERYTHING digital.

Next, Pinterest will ask you which board you would like to pin it to. Make sure you select the board you created for this assignment. You can either keep the description the pin came with, or create your own! Completely up to you. And lastly, just click the red button again, and you will have successfully added your first pin! Congratulations!

Keep searching and adding pins until you have developed a solid amount of things to do/see/eat on your dream vacation!

Next, embed a link of your “Dream Vacation” Pinterest board in to a blog post and write out a brief summary of the trip you desire. It’s up to you what you want to write about, but some ideas would be:

– Talk about if you feel like this trip will be possible for you someday, why or why not?
– What is required for your dream vacation to come true? (Don’t just say money, do your research.)
– Do the place(s) you plan to go have a different native language? If it’s an exotic trip, are there legal requirements, such as shots, visas, etc.?

Really get to know your dream vacation– maybe it’ll happen someday!

Here is a link to mine. You can use it as an example or simply enjoy it!!
http://www.pinterest.com/hayleyjoe/my-dream-vacation/pins/

Choose a color and then take 20 minute walk in which you take a 5-8 pictures of the color as you encounter it. Then upload the photos to Flickr and create a time line using TimeLine JS. 

Use Twine http://www.gimcrackd.com/etc/src/ to create an interactive story.

Examples:

Myriad by Porpentine

The Temple by Luna

Rat Chaos by J Chastain

At the Bonfire by finny

Brooklyn Trash King by Ben Esposito

Host your interactive story on your site and share it out.

Build a Pinterest page of at least 20 pins for a character of your choice. Search for pins that relate to your character and things that he or she would want to pin for themselves. Use X-Ray Goggles from Hackasaurus to modify the board further to personalize it for your character. Bonus points if you build a page and have visitors to your blog guess which character you picked!

Using a free online quiz service (I used PollSnack), create a quiz that shows off your knowledge of a particular story. Try to make it interesting enough through the questions you choose and the way you phrase your answers that someone taking the quiz is able to see that there’s a larger narrative informing the questions. Your quiz should have at least three outcomes and at least five questions.

Wouldn’t webpages be more interesting if the author provided commentary on the contents and went on tangents about entirely unrelated subjects? Or if a story suddenly appeared in the middle of the page? Or what if a website became self-aware?

The concept for this assignment is simple: Insert a story into an existing webpage. You don’t need to replace anything or remove anything. Just add your own content in whatever way is appropriate to the story. You can easily do this with Firebug (https://getfirebug.com/), or download the page and open it in a text editor. This shouldn’t require modifying formatting or layouts, unless you want to use a specialized font to make the story contents stand out (e.g. http://wp.me/p2IgNY-2K).

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.

Originally we recommended doing this using the Firebug extension in the Firefox browser, which does work, but is unfortunately easy to lose your work. We currently recommend Mozilla Hackasaurus — install the X-Ray Googles in any browser and use it to re-cast the content of any web page.

When you blog it, include both a screen capture in your post, but you will also need to upload the web files (HTML and media files) to your own site so it can exist as a stand alone URL. (see our older Firebug Tutorial)

Consider using news sites, social media profiles, product pages, movie review pages etc. The simpler the design of the page, the easer it will be (think Craig’s List).

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 Abaraham 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.

Your challenge here is to inject a story into the comment space of a product a web site such as Amazon or ebay much in the vein of the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt on Amazon (see the back story). More examples include the BIC for Her pen reviews or the Diamond Braided HDMI Cable

Find an item that is ordinary and has not been given this treatment by anyone else. The point is to see if a comment can carry the essence of a story and if others will feed into it. Now when you do this, do not be a jerk, the comment needs to be subtle, ironic, but have a real feel to it, and really be added to the original site (not marked up as a copy web page). Include a link to the product, what you added, and describe how it acts as a story embedded into another web site.