Week 8
Daily Creations
Final Reflection
Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this course was that, though I have a lot to learn about digital media and literacy, at least I now know that I can learn. Before taking Learning with Digital Stories, I’d posted 6 tweets in my 28 years, all school related. As week 8 draws to a close, I have a new total of 83 tweets displaying various works. A mosaic visually depicts most of them:
This course forced me not just to express myself through new media, but to do so on a deadline. Fighting the clock and writer’s block, it sometimes felt as though I had to exorcise ideas out of my head, and to submit imperfect products. And while I cannot claim that any single assignment or creation of mine turned out completely “done” or “perfect,” I can attest to how gratifying it is to play, make, and share on the interwebs. Because my academic work until this summer consisted almost exclusively of reading, writing, and talking, this class was a refreshing departure in which I could instead sublimate my creativity into the various required media of audio, video, social, dialogue, web and graphics. A complete scorecard in my course assignment guide offers a quick reference of met requirements.
Missing the Starting Gun
As this trite first daily creation above suggests (left), I got off to a clunky start in my “call to adventure.” In Week 1, this hero was caught flat-footed by the various demands of the class, failing to produce more than a single Daily Creation. Still convinced that my Google Site could be retrofitted to contain course content, I included mere hyperlinks and no embedded work. Week 2 was my “weakest,” because I felt unwell, but it was also a personal turning point for me. For week 2 I received dismal feedback from a wise, old man, after which something inside me clicked: I realized what I was doing wrong and that recovery was indeed possible with a fundamental shift in my habits and attitude. I grasped the opportunity to creep my way back from this week 2 nadir. In week 3, I took action to repair my failing grade by immersing myself in the class for hours on end — discovering tests, allies, and enemies (namely time itself) along the way. I became much more diligent about producing daily creations, engaging with classmates in hypothes.is, and putting my heart and soul into assignments. As compared with 3/10 for week 2, in week 3 I earned a 10 out of 10. Within these first 3 weeks, my work also became markedly better. For example, notice the difference in quality between my insipid Google Slides image for week 1 and the more thoughtful projects from week 3, below. The last two represent different media getting at the same idea: that Scott Pruitt is bad for our planet.
Audio
In a much later example from week 7, I synthesized two medias (audio/graphic) into a single posting. This audio remix also came with a remixed thumbnail:

Memes and GIFS examples
Meme and GIF generators were other early tools with which I fooled around. The following two examples of memes, both from week 2, drew on existing and original photography.
Between weeks 4 and 6 I played with GIFs in making Daily Creations, and here again one may see qualitative differences in complexity. The first GIF was simply found online and shared, while the second involved a multi-step process including Google Slides, Photoshop, and a GIF generator.
gif (found and posted)
gif (original, made and shared)
Zee InterWebs
Contrast my fulfillment of web media requirements. My strongest work from week 2 is followed by assignments from weeks 5 and 7. While all three required troubleshooting, the latter projects involved much more because of longer workflows, thus demanding a greater degree of digital literacy that could only be achieved through lots of play and practice in the intervening weeks.
Lights, Camera, Action!
The following four examples of media projects draw on audio/video, produced in weeks 4 and 5. The first three I made during Remix Week, building on work done by my classmate, @jrichardsucd. The fourth video, my DIY project from week 5, stands out from preceding examples in the painstaking hours I invested in front of Final Cut Pro X.
Retracing my steps
While I’d overcome the ordeal of facing a perilously low grade, I was not yet in the clear. And so, in order to recoup credit lost during week 2, it would be necessary for me to make up for a neglected discussion using new media choices in lieu of posts on hypothes.is. In Week 6 I decided upon the idea of “Hypothes.is Live.” I first perused the discussion I’d missed, then took comments from others and recorded them with some simple voice-acting. For the next step, I created the illusion of having classmates “call in” to contribute to an unfolding discussion planned in advance. In this discussion, I muse over emails and calls, and make use of a Venn Diagram graphic to help delineate major points of connection and departure between Piaget and Papert. With some bargaining after the fact, it was agreed that my resulting video discussion was substantive enough to meet one needed dialogue requirement. The second was met by an impromptu interview with my dad about how technology and digital literacy has evolved since the age of dinosaurs.
Curating my Vintage Remixes
The three graphics below, posted on Twitter, constitute my second Graphics/Social media requirement (I request that my DIY project count as one of my social media assignments). Think back to my first graphic in week 2, of the bikini-clad man on the moon, and contrast it with these graphics that demonstrate much greater proficiency with Photoshop, the result of many hours of practice and gleaning tips off Youtube.
Play, Make, Share, Do, Be, Have, Know
The question of whether or not we the students “stretched” our own abilities in this class is worth considering for at least two reasons. The first is that because this class was entirely online, the onus was really on us to complete and submit work. Although there was plenty of discussion, collaboration, sharing, and remixing along the way, we never physically “met” to conduct class — meaning that much of the time we had to be our own boss. The second reason reflection on our “stretch” is important is that, like our students, we bring to this class different funds of knowledge. A task that might take one person hours of genuine effort could take someone else knowledgeable of a work-around mere minutes. Facility in computers would hypothetically give one an enormous advantage. And so ultimately we are the only ones positioned to candidly reflect on our own effort, and how much we kept ourselves within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.

From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able
I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection that my education up to now had included reading, writing, talking and very little development of digital literacy. In reality, this liberal arts experience was more exciting than I’ve given it credit, especially compared to the countless joyless classrooms of secondary public education resulting from accountability era teaching to the test and the frenzy over standards. Learning with Digital Stories exposed me to vast expanse of new options and tools for expressing ideas; however creating products was only the beginning. The playing and making was followed by sharing, and in turn knowing about others’ products. To use John Seely Brown’s image, this was whitewater rafting, not a voyage on a steam liner. The opportunity to share online provided a wide audience that could relay us feedback and encouragement, as opposed to a single person reading and remarking on our latest paper. Being in this space, particularly being seen, was the impetus for my creativity — particularly when I was feeling unmotivated or uninspired. Remix week serves as the ideal example of when I fed off of someone’s energy in a symbiotic series of relationships.
Similarly, this class more than any other pushed me in the direction of becoming “knowledge-able,” in Micheal Wesch’s words. This means having facility in tapping into, navigating, and filtering through infinite new information networks. Being knowledgeable to me also means exercising good digital citizenship, or acting as an “effective world changer” in this new media environment. As a teacher, being knowledge-able means leveraging new technologies in my classroom so as to increase equity and access to all students since, according to Dr. George Siemens, “the way we define literacy also defines children as competent or incompetent.” How can I include this more expansive definition of literacy, which encompasses a fuller range of human communication? How can I maximize opportunities for my own students to demonstrate and build on existing funds of knowledge? And how can I teach them how to learn and ask questions on their own, in the moments I don’t happen to be hovering over them?
Greatest Hits from My Classmates
Final Comments
I would say that this was one of the most fun classes I’ve taken in quite some time, and that there’s little I’d change, though it’d have been nice to try to do an all-class meet-up with Zoom. My biggest takeaway was coming away knowing that I could in fact learn on my own how to use digital media. Thanks for showing me I could do it, too!
