Final Project: From ds106 with love

Our agents have done some digging. We had an initial round of reports, and a follow-up review. Some pretty grave situations have been uncovered. In broad strokes, it appears that there is a major threat/villain out there, which must be countered. It could be the Directorate. On top of that, we have reports of agents missing, agents compromised, and possibly, moles in our agency. The threat is likely too big to handle solo, so cooperation is advised.

Here is some of what has come to our attention:

• Agents have been compromised and need a new cover story
• Some of your fellow agents have gone missing. You need to find them.
• There is a need for recruiting and advising new agents. If people want to do this, I may use what they make next fall. The theme will be different however.
• Save the world from destruction. Save the animals from extinction. Who is the mysterious villain behind this?
• The Directorate must be stopped! They’ve already tried to entice some of our agents over to the other side. Who did they get? How can we tell?
• We are also concerned about red herrings and misdirection. Break through the propaganda and disinformation
• Agents Assemble! Normally it’s a solo job, but this time the threat is too big. You need to team up to save the world.

Personally, I’m suspicious of this guy. With all the concern over fascists and nazis in recent times, somehow no one noticed a commie in our midst. Even if he’s not up to no good, he’s been popping up since the beginning, so he probably knows too much. You don’t need me to tell you what to do.

Parameters

For your final project, you are going to tell a story across multiple categories of media. You’ve done writing, photography, audio, video and design. You’ve remixed and mashed up. You’ve done big projects and group projects. You’ve connected different stories. Now we’re going to bring it all together in a transmedia extravaganza.

We’ve been working with a general theme of secret agents, and we have our characters, so we should use those as a basis for the final project. You final project should involve the character you created and the course theme in some way, but you are free to determine how to do that. In other words, the story can be whatever you want to make it, but you can use what we’ve done so far as a starting point. You can use the prompts above for ideas, or you can choose to do something different. If you have an idea and you’re not sure if you should go with it, send me an email to get the greenlight.

Your final project will be to build a story in multiple interconnected media. What do I mean by interconnected media? We have used several different types of media over the semester – visual, design, audio, video, web, and remixing and mashing them up. Your project will use at least three of these media. For example, part of your story might be a video, another part might be a series of images, and a third could be an audio production. You would connect the three in a blog post. Or maybe you would pin them on a Google map that gets embedded in a blog post which explains your story. The purpose here is to show that you have mastered several different types of digital media and that you can bring them together in a coherent story.

You are encouraged to work together on your projects, but this is not a requirement. Due to the nature of the assignment, it will not be necessary to meet up in person to collaborate. If you work together you can bounce ideas off of each other and share the work. You can look out for each other and raise each other’s game. Everyone has to blog their own write-ups, of course. You can see each others character creations at http://ds106.us/category/characterdossier/, and everyone’s blogs at http://ds106.us/tag/spring19bond/, if you want to find people to work with.

How big should this be? How long of a story do you have to write? That’s hard to quantify. This is a major project, so treat it as such. Think about the work that went into your radio shows – it should be comparable to that. Think of the kind of effort that would go into doing about 30 stars worth of assignments.

By Friday, 4/19, at midnight, you need to post a progress report. This should, at the very minimum, outline your project and plan. That is, it should show that you’ve started working on the project and that you have a solid idea of where it’s going. If you are working with a team, indicate who they are. This report could function as your weekly summary.

Post the project by 4/26. Your final project should be in a blog post. You will submit the URL of that to Canvas. It can link to other posts, if it makes sense to run it in multiple parts. All media – images, audio, video, etc. – must be embedded (not linked) in the post(s). The final project needs to be accompanied by a final summary, in which you discuss and reflect upon the project – what you put into it, what you got out of it, how it ties the course together, etc. This could be the same post as the project, or a separate one, depending on what makes sense for your project.

If you have any questions, let me know.