Individual New Media Project Plan

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Going Academic on Turkle (Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #9)

Alone Together, Chapters 11-end: 

I have to admit: Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #8 is a much more satisfying post -- I really enjoyed that week and enjoyed capturing it in a new blog form for me.  This week it is a return to academics.  Ultimately, I will present this book to my class, so I want to start getting my head around what Turkle says about our core course concepts (garnered from New Media: The Key Concepts and Lingua Fracta). Here go the ones I have played with so far, and I have found constant overlapping in the robotic and digital environments Turkle is studying.

Striking Out on My Own (New Media Project Proposal)

Rhetorical Situation

My goal is to create a class site for my high school freshmen on Google Sites with CSS coding within the pages to personalize them.  My students will use this site throughout the year to share work with each other and a larger audience (for example, they will present original poems and recorded recitations of them) and to complete group projects (for example, they will work with partners to research and create a page on the site about a Holocaust topic).  I will also research the implications of FERPA for an online classroom for minors.

My Life Collides: Grad Class, Colleague, and Church (Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #8)

Alone Together, Chapters 7-10:
 Let me tell the story of my week in this post.  I learned as I finished reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand that what draws me to nonfiction is the existence of a narrative, something Hillenbrand is a master of. So let me try to draw you into my nonfiction life as I lived the very things of which I was reading.

Children Dream of Electric Furbies (Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #7)

The Gray Furby

Alone Together, Chapters 1-6:

As I move deeper into this course, I am finding the connections fascinating.  I was assigned to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I got my second choice when I read Understanding Media, and I am now reading my first choice, Alone Together. None of these were assigned to me or selected by me with any thought to the others, yet they fit into a thought-provoking single picture of our current society.

Final CSS Exploratory Outing and Reflection

Explorer Nobles reporting in from week four. Lost bearings on third outing. Ended up mired in the CSS Language Swamp. Have regained footing. Repeat: have regained footing.  No longer feeling smug but know upcoming trip into the Coding Canyon of CSS will not be a disaster ... most likely anyway ...

Canonical Texts Wikipage Review

The two wikipages I reviewed are Manovich's The Language of New Media and Baudrillard's Simulcra... and  The Illusion ...

Baudrillard, McLuhan, and Bolter ... oh my!

My fascinating reading for this morning comes from: Diane, Suzanne, Sarah, and Jennifer. 

The physical remediation so prevalent in our society and laid out with incredible visual power in Diane's post really had me thinking about the struggles of women to meet the unrealistic expectations of beauty in our society ... and who knew I was channeling Baudrillard as I thought about this! Suzanne and Sarah explain well Baudrillard's concept of simulcra, and I was struck most by his point that society has gotten to where the real and the simulated can no longer be distinguished.  At its most basic level, this is speaking to the women's magazines Diane writes of and the video on plastic surgery she shares.  When a reader of Cosmo feels she needs to look like the models, she is seeking to make a simulcrum into a reality ... and the damage that comes with such an effort is enormous. Sarah and Jennifer then offer the final link in today's cycle of thoughts -- McLuhan's thoughts on how media affect messages.

CSS Exploration #3

As I am in the midst of understanding CSS vocabulary and not yet done, I need to stop and let these foundational terms sink in before I go further. Here is my key terms list for today (all taken from the Mozilla CSS tutorial site):

CSS Exploration #2

Photobucket

Today I took the advice I read last week that nothing is better than just jumping into playing with coding. This CSS tutorial recommended by Wil Laveist is a great start for beginners like me. After working through the first four modules, I succeeded in getting coding into my browser and adjusting the style. This is the me who did not know before tonight how to get coding into a browser let alone how to code. Thank you, Mozilla Developer Network for your excellent beginner's guide -- you have me feeling like a real Stage 2 Programmer!

CSS Exploration #1

Explorer Nobles reporting in from week one. Not lost. Repeat not lost. In fact, feeling rather smug that this first foray into the unknown terrain of coding went so well. Must remember though that tougher terrain lays ahead ...

It's Not Disney World, but CSS ... Here I Come!

For my individual tutorial I am going to explore CSS, which means I am also going to explore HTML. After hearing about all of the languages last night, I have decided that, as a newbie to this whole world, CSS/HTML, since it is so widely used, is a good entry point that will lead me in the right direction for my future work. I am attending the 2012 DMAC, during which I will explore video and audio editing a great deal. I hope to take that experience and apply it to the basic of website building that I will learn through my explorations this semester with the ultimate goal of creating my digital portfolio for my PhD language requirement.