Examples of Media/Visual Literacy Project (Due June 30)

So are you struggling with ideas for your Media-Visual Literacy Project? Check out this Wiki on Bigtimers: Trojan Condoms. Now that made you look!

Check out this blog to make you think about energy drinks! Thirsty yet?

Memes and Web Phenomenon

Memes and Web Phenomenon

• A meme is an idea or behavior that evolves socially and culturally by being passed from individual to individual. Blogging is a web phenomenon that does a lot to propagate memes. Any aspect of popular culture, such as science and politics, can be viewed through a memetic lens.

• Lolcats are a good example of an online phenomenon, and are quite popular; there’s even a wiki site devoted to a Lolcat translation of the Bible. The corollary for lolcats may be Faildogs.

• Digital Scarlet Lettering:

• • Several examples of the “Scarlet Lettering” of individuals exist online. Typically an average person is identified as breaking some cultural code (i.e., he or she is caught on film doing something rude or impolite), the deed is publicized via the Internet, and suddenlythe person gains notoriety—which may include email harrassment, the publicizing of personal information, and other negative consequences of “Trial by Internet” or “Internet vigilantism.”

• • Other examples include Star Wars Kid and raise issues of privacy, ethics, etc.

• Digital Hubris: Similar to Scarlet Lettering, “digital hubris” involves pouring mockery and scorn upon an individual who has presented a false, inflated, grandiose, or pretentious version of him- or herself online.

• • Aleksey Vayner’s video resume “Impossible is Nothing” is a good example.

• • An example you may remember from local media a little over a year ago is John Fitzgerald Page’s publicized email from Match.com and the negative public response it received as he was labeled “The Worst Person in the World.”

• There are many resources for exploring memes on the Web. As you explore these sites and learn more about memes, pick one specific meme to write about on your own blog. After writing about a specific meme, consider and respond to how you can use memes to promote writing and critical use of technology with your own students.

• Wikipedia also features a comprehensive list of Internet memes. Important: a number of such phenomena are adult-themed and are thus not appropriate examples or texts for a secondary setting. Be aware of your own guidelines for appropriateness if you plan to explore such phenomena.

Storyboarding

A storyboard is a sketch or guide to help you shape your final story. It is a plan. However, your storyboard will address more than just the story. Because your final project is a multimedia presentation, you must consider visuals (pictures), sound, narration, motion, etc. when planning your digital journal. Here are some tips to consider when creating your storyboard:

1. Your story will not be linear. Try not to think about sharing it as first this happened, second was this, then third was this, and so on. Think about dividing your story into nonlinear parts such as:

• A lead slide, essentially addressing why this story is important in your development and thinking as an ELA teacher
• Profiles of the main person or people in the story
• The event or situation
• Any process or how something works
• Pros and cons
• The history of the event or situation
• Other related issues raised by the story

2. Divide the contents of the story among the media. Decide which aspects of the story will work best with which media.

• Which aspects work best in video or motion? Video or motion are good for depicting action and taking the reader to a place central to the story.
• Which aspects work best in still picture? Still photos are excellent for emphasizing strong emotion, for staying with an important point in the story, or for creating a particular mood.
• Does the audio work with video or motion or is it best combined with still photos? Good audio can enhance the story, but bad audio can really detract from it and make it seem worse than it is – a lot like the role of mechanics in writing a formal essay.
• What part of the story works best in graphics? Graphics go where the camera cannot. When used appropriately, graphics can be a story’s primary medium with still photos and/or video or motion playing a supporting role.
• What part of the story belongs in text and/or narration? Text can be used to describe the history of a story (sometimes in combination with photos); to describe a process (sometimes in combination with graphics); or to provide first-person accounts of an event. Think of text as something that is left over when you cannot convey the information with photos, video/motion, graphics, or audio.
• Make sure the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant.

3. Now that you have broken your story down into elements, you need to reassemble it in to a rough storyboard. On a sheet of paper, sketch out what the lead slide will look like and the elements it will include. What is the essential point of the story? How does this connect to other elements in the story? What multimedia elements do you want to include on this slide for establishing visuals, audio, etc.?

4. Now do the same for the following slides in your story. Consider the same questions. Consider what the main element for each slide is and what other information should be included there. What multimedia elements best tell this aspect of the story?

What storyboarding should do for you is help to point out the holes in the story for your digital journal. It should also help you to identify the resources (time, equipment, assistance, etc.) that you will need to complete your digital journal or how you will have to modify your digital journal to adjust to your resources.

References
Stevens, Jane. A Story from Start to Finish. Knight Digital Media Center, 2007. Available online at
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/reporting/starttofinish/storyboarding/. Retrieved January 10,
2007.

Demonstrating How to Embed Media

If you are on Facebook, you can keep up with me outside of class there. I love FB and adding students as friends because I get a sense of your interests beyond class and learn cool things about you! We will talk about Facebook and social networking later this semester.

Summer classes are difficult becuase here in the hot, humid, sweltering south, most of use would rather be sitting by our swimming pools at 4:00 p.m.

Sometimes when I am stuck in class in the summer, I need a good laugh. Donkeys always make me laugh!

Donkeys

Visual Rhetoric Presentation

Use the following rubric to respond to and analyze an interesting image you find on the internet. As you respond, choose a couple of elements from the rubric that particularly apply to your image and discuss those. Remember to embed the image you discuss into your post!

Reading Photographs

Subject Matter

1. Cropping—how the photograph’s reality is framed

Photographers create exclusionary borders in deciding where to point their cameras. But the photograph can also be physically cropped later to edit out unwanted material. As with the other concepts on this handout, the single most important question you might ask of a particular photograph is how things might be different. How would it change the photograph to include what is excluded (imagine, for example, the same shot shifted five feet higher, or 90 degrees to the right), and what is gained by its exclusion?

2. Visual cues—how the photograph directs the eye within the frame

Photographs direct the eye through a number of well-tested techniques. These include blocking (see below), depth-of-focus, color contrast, the rule of thirds (which assumes four privileged points at the intersecting lines of an imaginary tic-tac-toe board laid across the photo), and the tendency to read in a “Z” pattern: horizontally from top left to top right, diagonally from top right to bottom left, and horizontally again from bottom left to bottom right. Some photographs will make use of virtual arrows or frames within the photograph created by doorways, guns, gazes, the horizon, etc.

3. Aestheticization—the effect of art as opposed to the effect of fact.

I’ve suggested that news photography presents itself as a transparent window onto reality, simply recording and passing on the day’s happenings to us. But, on occasion, news photographers aim for more artistic, aesthetic effects: blocking, cropping, or posing their subjects to create patterns, repetitions, frames, dramatic visual imbalances, color harmonies, etc. This aestheticization can exist in tension with the illusion of reality. Simply to freeze a moment—as all photographs do—is to aestheticize it, taking its subject out of its social and historical context. (Theorist Walter Benjamin once criticized photography’s inability to say anything other than “What a beautiful world!” [“Author” 262.])

4. Characterization—the photographed subject’s surrounding environment

Surroundings imply the social world of the photograph, suggesting a relation between the figures and their neighborhood, workplace, leisure activities, natural environment, etc. That relation might be friendly, conflict-ridden, indifferent—moods that can be emphasized through such things as blocking, relative size and distance, and color (warm, bright, filthy, high contrast, infinite shades of grey, etc.).

5. Costume

Even more directly, subjects are characterized by their neat suits, glamorous gowns, ragged overalls, ironically worn hats, etc. Costume (and its absence) provides a wealth of information about occupation, class, age, regional origins, religion, and political attitudes. Consider also how figures are characterized and typed by the objects (props) that surround them: work tools, furniture, food, animals, wallpaper, protest signs, etc.

6. Framing—how the photograph’s subjects are positioned within the frame and in relation to one another

Each given figure or object in the shot might be centered (or not), solidly in the foreground, out of focus in the background, partly obscured, isolated or interacting with other figures, visually balanced against other elements of the photograph. As in theater, staging often works as a kind of metaphor: the figure at center stage (frame) is presumed to be central to the action and its cultural significance. This likewise can work for photographically/culturally marginal, isolated, or obscured figures.

Camera Work

7. Camera Distance—where the camera is located on a horizontal axis in relation to the subject

Importance is often implied by the percentage of the total frame taken up by a given figure or object. A human figure is a small part of an extreme long shot, a full body fits in a long shot, knees-up in a medium long shot, waist-up in a medium shot, chest-up in a medium close-up, face-up in a close-up, a single feature in extreme close-up. Closer shots emphasize individuals; longer shots emphasize surroundings.

8. Camera angle—where the camera is located on a vertical axis in relation to the subject

A shot taken from the same height as the subject is a straight-on shot; a shot from below, a low-angle shot; a shot from above, a high-angle shot; a shot from straight above, a bird’s-eye view. High-angle shots can suggest the subject’s vulnerability; low-angle shots can suggest power (this is, of course, not always the case).

9. Lighting

Whether natural (sun) or artificial (flash), the lighting in news photography generally aims at realism, as though simply presenting the subject as we ourselves might find it. But lighting—particularly shadows—can aim also at expressionist or presentational effects, suggesting the subject’s or scene’s psychological state or social condition.

The Scene of Representation

10. The camera’s presence—the camera as narrator

News photography generally takes a third-person stance: an outsider’s eye viewing the scene objectively, unnoticed by the subjects (who look at each other or somewhere off-camera). Occasionally, the camera might take a first-person stance: a character in the scene acknowledged by the subjects, whose attitude toward the camera—friendly, hostile, humorous, indifferent—then becomes an important part of what’s represented.

11. Genre—the type of image, as recognized by the viewer

News photography will sometimes use traditional images or types of scenes, sometimes from the news photography tradition (e.g., mass demonstration, head-shot with microphone and podium, political handshake, dead child with a grieving parent, etc.) and sometimes from another visual arts tradition (e.g., painting, film). Genres include landscapes, still lifes, family portraits, madonna and child images, stereotypes, and others.

12. Representing representation

News photographs will sometimes turn the camera on other acts of representation: billboard advertisements, painted signs, other photographs, a subject’s performance, etc. Often the point is ironic, a montage (juxtaposition) of two visions of the world: the one the photographer sees versus the world depicted in this “found art.”

Photographs in Their Institutional Place

13. The photograph’s setting—where and how the photograph is viewed

A photograph derives much of its meaning from its physical context. It may or may not appear with a caption, a byline credit, a headline, its own or other news stories (and other photographs), advertising, etc.—all contexts which can reinforce, qualify, or even contradict the meaning of the photograph alone. Consider the photograph’s size and placement

This rubric is reprinted from Ryan Jerving’s “Thirteen Ways of Seeing a Black and White Photograph,” from Carol David and Anne R. Richards’s Writing the Visual: A Practical Guide for Teachers of Composition and Communication.

Creating a Visual Response to a YA Novel (Due Wednesday, June 17)

You are reading ONE of three young adult novels from the following choices:

M.T. Anderson’s Feed,

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games,

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.

Your visual response to your YA novel is due Wednesday, June 17. You will post your response to Voice Thread and invite me to view it there.

If you are having trouble conceptualizing of what a final product might look like, take a look at this example created by a previous student. It is his response to M.T. Anderson’s Feed :

The student explains his process:

To begin the creation of my visual response, I took several digital photographs

of my daughter. I selected the one I thought would work best with PhotoPlus,

one that had the elements I needed for this project. I uploaded the image to my computer for manipulation. I then used PhotoPlus to swirl and color the picture.

After that, I took a photo of just the eyes. I cropped the image and took just the right eye. Slide 4 I captured two images from the web, one of the earth and another of binary code. I took cropped the images and applied them to the images of the eye. I manipulated one of the eye images to be softer and to have a slightly glowing effect and changed the image of the earth to look like a photonegative. The other image I left unaltered, save for replacing the iris and pupil with the image of binary code. These eye images I added to the altered image of the face to produce the final product you see below. I cropped the lower image of the eye to appear oval rather than rectangular. It just made sense to me to do so. I also rotated the background image 90 degrees.

As it would have not been cost- or time-efficient to take my my own photograph of Earth, I found it necessary to use one already in existence.

Technology Survey

Surveys are a terrific means of gathering information on your students. You might collect information ranging from their needs to their attitudes about a topic or text you want to incorporate into your ELA curriculum.

Survey Monkey is a semi-free online survey collection tool. By semi-free, I mean that there are small surveys you can create with it by opening a free account; however, to create longer, more complex surveys, you have to subscribe to the service. Survey Monkey also collects and analyzes the data for you, saving you some work in the process of gathering information on your students.

To explore and practice with Survey Monkey let’s do the following:

1). Take the survey I created for this course

2). Create your own survey on anything you want (consider interesting things you might want to learn about me and your classmates.)

3). Send the link to your survey to five classmates and to me. To do this, copy the link by highlighting it and right clicking on it, then select “copy.” Either through Vista or through a web-based email service, create an email message. Select the five classmates you are exchanging surveys with and me as recipients of your email. In the subject line of your email, write your last name and 3241 Survey (i.e., Dail 3241 Survey). In the body of the email, greet your classmates and me and kindly ask us to complete your survey. Then right click with your mouse and select paste; that should drop the link to your survey into the body of your email. Sign your name, and send the email.

4). Once you receive emails from your five classmates, follow the links (you will likely have to copy and paste them into your browser and then hit enter) to their surveys and respond to them.

5). Once everyone you sent your survey to has responded to it, log back into Survey Monkey and select my surveys, then select the analyze results tab.

6). In a Word document, write a brief reflection about how you might use this tool in your instructional practices in your classroom. Save the file to your flash drive.. When you create your blog later today, you will copy and paste your Word file to create your first post! If time does not permit you to post this today, you will have an opportunity to on Tuesday, June 2 as we contine to work with blogging. Be sure to bring your flash drive with the saved file to class then, too!