3/15/19 – 3/22/19
Everyone worked through major projects these past weeks, so we’re going to reflect on what the class has accomplished.
Radio Shows Broadcasting Schedule
Monday: Girl Power, Rogue Agents
Tuesday: Secret Agent Power Hour, Secret Agent Hip/Hop hour
Wednesday: Super Secret Opinions, Spies: Reality or Fiction?, I Spy: How Well Do You Know Spies
The radio shows that were created last week will be broadcast live on ds106radio (you can listen here) this Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights from 8:30 PM – 10:00 PM. Members of the groups should be on hand to talk about the behind-the-scenes work for their shows. If technology wants to cooperate (and that’s a big if), I will offer people the opportunity to discuss their shows on air via Google Hangouts.
Everyone should be on twitter during the shows to share feedback real time using the #ds106 hashtag.
Everyone should reflect on at least one radio show they listened to and were not a part of creating. Describe the experience of listening, the various sound elements employed, what parts worked, what parts didn’t, etc. Be thoughtful, critical, and most importantly respectful. Tag this radiolisten.
Web Storytelling
For this week’s other adventure, we’re going to play with web storytelling. This should be fun. I am going to quote extensively from the Open ds106 Course:
In this unit we move to a different kind of storytelling, one that uses the space of existing web sites as a place for you to assert your own stories. They are not just stories on the web, they are of the web. They use the affordances of the web as its own genre.
This might be a subtle distinction, but so far you have been using media (images, design, and audio) to create stories in the web spaces you publish to- this is writing stories ON the web. In this week, we play with this idea in a new way, in that you will be asked to use the affordances of other web sites to change their intent, meaning, or purpose to tell a story in those spaces.
Inspiration: Not Your Grandfather’s Resume
Rather than doing a standard textbook resume like the teach you in school, Philippe Dubost created a site to feature his skills and experience formed and functioning as an Amazon product page where he himself is the product:
If you examine the page, every bit has been re-crafted to fit the story of Philippe as well as both the style and features familiar to Amazon shoppers.
A resume not ON the web, but OF the web. Get it?
This week we’ll be playing with storytelling within the web. What does this mean? Well, 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.
Perhaps the most well known examples take place on Amazon pages such as The Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee where people have intervened just in the product comments to make this ordinary t-shirt have magical powers. It becomes a way of making a political statement as read in the comments of a children’s aircraft toy. These are ways in which an ordinary web page is fictionalized in a creative way simply through comments.
You are not being asked to code web pages; but use tools that you can use in a web browser to modify the content of an existing web page, change the text, images, and links, so that it has different content and meaning. You do not have to worry about defacing another web page, you are just recrafting a copy of it (remember the old saying about imitation as a form of flattery?)
The creative part requires that you find an existing web page to work with as raw material. Good candidates are newspaper stories, product entries in sites like Amazon or eBay, movie/book reviews — in fact, simpler pages like a search result or Craigslist are easy to work with.
The tools you can use allow you to, in a web browser, actually modify the content. The end goal is to have both a screen shot image and a real working web page you created that you can link to in your unit summary blog post (and heck why not tweet what you did?)
We recommend the Mozilla X-Ray Goggles tool (NOTE: use Firefox for this project) which is meant to help you see (like an x-ray) how web content is structured:
X-Ray Goggles allow you to see the building blocks that make up websites on the internet. Activate the goggles to inspect the code behind any webpage, then remix elements with a single click, swapping in your own text, images and more.
What you should do is review the X-Ray Goggles instructions and install the tool in your browser bar. This can be invoked directly on any web page you want to explore and change Goggles provides an overlay interface to change text, formatting, even images — essentially to rewrite any web page.
When you are done, you’ll need to save your changed code – click “P” in the bottom right when the X-Ray Goggles are activated. The easy way is to publish it on the Hackasaurus site, from which you will get a URL.
Your work then is to do a Storytelling Within the Web assignment, but make it about your character in some way. Write a blog post with the usual writeup components, and include both a screen shot of your reworked page and a link to a live web version of your retold web story page. Tag this webstorytelling.
Connected Daily Creates
We’ve had a lot of great work on the Daily Create assignments, so we are going to try something a little different. Do at least three Daily Creates this week. After you’ve done them, look at them and find a way to tie them together in a story. You could put them together in one blog post, but if you can hyperlink them together, even better! That would mean constructing a story that jumps across media sites in a way that works as a single story. If you really can’t make it work with the Daily Creates that come up, you can reach back to this past week, but no further. You can make it easy on yourself by starting early.
Web Assignments
Do 8 stars of Web Assignments. As always, you are welcome to make some up and add them to the assignment bank. See if you can use one or more of these assignments to build on something from your radio show in some way.
Revisit Your Work
This week, you should pick one 3, 4, or 5 star assignment you’ve already completed and significantly revise it, improve upon it, or remix it with something else. This is an opportunity to spend more time on something you might have rushed through before or to bring a new twist to an assignment you’ve already done and enjoyed. Share your revised work and tell us why you reworked it, what you reworked, and how you feel about the process. Tag this ds106rework.
Posts of the Week: What is the Best of ds106 this week? Pick your top three posts and enter them in this form.
And of course, the usual commenting!