Featured videos: language, literacy, writing

Reading Together

Perusall logoWe’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. Link here to Perusall. Instructions for joining on the Assignments page.

Calendar: link here

Author: Marie Cuenca

Final Multi Modal Project: Board Game

Final Multi Modal Project: Board Game

Sorry this was really late, but I had to go back and fix a lot of the cards for the game. Of course, I’m sure I wasn’t able to catch all of them so forgive me if any grammatical errors ( or otherwise) made it past me.

 

Anyway here it is.

PDF of the rules: TheLastYear

PDF of the cards and the board: you can get them here

–I set up a wordpress site for the game. It’s a pretty bare bones but it works for the most part. The post on How to Play is password protected so if you want to refer to it on the wordpress site for whatever reason, you can just type in: eng431

There are no capitals or spaces in the password. This will most likely be the password for all future posts if there happens to be any. The PDFs for the cards and board game aren’t password protected so feel free to just download them.

 

I’m glad that the few who got to try it had fun with the game I made. For those who didn’t get the chance to, I’ve compiled the rules and all the main components ready for you to use.

The rules are kind of a long read and I would understand if anyone wouldn’t want to read all of them, but I tried to explain and cover what I thought was necessary to know how to be able to play.

It’s not a difficult game to pick up. I tried to streamline it in a way that would be easy to understand and be able to play in a short amount of time. If you’e played games like Munchkin then you’ve got somewhat of a head start since Munchkin was a big influence for this project. If you haven’t played Munchkin before, don’t worry. The game I made is it’s own thing and you aren’t required to have played the games that influenced my game to play it.

 

That said, if you do have any issues or the rules are confusing or whatever, feel free to contact me through the wordpress site I set up specifically for the game. The contact info is available at the bottom of the homepage.

Other than the rules and the printouts, all you’ll need is a pair of two 6 sided dice for each player and you’re ready to roll.

I hope you guys have fun with it.

It’s been a great semester and I learned a lot in this class.

Good luck with any remaining finals and I wish you all an amazing summer.

-Marie C. ヾ(・ω・。)シ

Idk Man, Just Ideas and Stuff

Idk Man, Just Ideas and Stuff

 

So I have some ideas about what I want to do for this multi modality project but no real set goals in mind. It all really has to do with if I have the time and capability to pull any of my ideas off.

One of my first ideas was to make a first person perspective video using a GoPro and creating something like this or at least the execution of it. I was thinking of incorporating something like a video game inventory that the “player” could pull up and use “tools” to solve different kinds of problems. Could even do just a day in the life of a student or through the eyes of a student as well and incorporate certain ideas from different readings that we’ve read through the semester. It just sort of depends if I plan everything out well enough.

Another idea was to make a type of board game based off a lot of the ideas around multi modality and what students can do with it. I was thinking of using certain games like PandemicHarbour, and/or others as an inspirations and a basis for some of the game play elements that I would want to incorporate. (Videos are kind of long but the first few minutes show how the game is played).

My idea was for this to be a game in which there are four players or four students and their job is to cooperate together to complete a final class assignment and to use different skill sets, strategies, and tools to accomplish that. The idea would be to have certain cards that would pose hindrances, challenges, or be helpful or hurtful items that could be used to take on the big assignment. That was just one of the things that came to mind of a type of game I could possibly make.

I was also thinking about simply making a simple video game myself using something like RPG maker or the like but what it would be about I’m not sure plus there is the difficulty of trying to code everything and the issue of time. Like the board game idea, I was thinking of following a similar approach but it would be a more individual experience rather than a collaborative one.  
Obviously I won’t be able to do all of these but these were just some of the things that have been running through my brain.

@Myself: Why Did You Attempt to Do This???

@Myself: Why Did You Attempt to Do This???

I honestly don’t know what I was doing or what I was talking about. I don’t even know what possessed me to do a vlog. The video editing software I was using was giving me hell and even crashed once making me lose all my progress. Having to start over while being forced to listen to myself speak, is a special kind of hell that I don’t want to endure again anytime soon so I’ll probably be avoiding doing vlogs for a while.  I think all the trouble I was having with this vlog was the universe’s way of saying that I shouldn’t have done this but well it can’t be helped at this point. So it’s kind of a mess and I apologize for this disaster but here it is, I guess.

 

Let’s Mix It Up With Some MultiModality

Let’s Mix It Up With Some MultiModality

I do have some experience with some form of multimodal composing. Though I’m glad most of my more embarrassing videos I’ve made when I was younger have been erased off the face of this earth. I do still have some recent non class related videos floating around, though I don’t intend to share them. They’re pretty terrible in all honesty.

 

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what Kress was talking about making meaning through different uses of modes. The blogs are also a good example of how I’ve used images or gifs to invoke that I couldn’t be able to simply describe with words. It’s so interesting to me how, not just words, but in combining images, sounds, and the like, it creates a form of synergy. Like Kress pointed out, each mode must work in conjunction with one another to work in an effective manner. But even in this connected form, there is so much room for flexibility.

As someone who is more of a visual learner, I tend to like projects that allow me to tackle an assignment creatively and visually, not just with my words. Two of the examples I will share come from Professor Laura Sparks rhetoric class. The first one is a music mix that was supposed to be connected to one of our rhetoric readings by Kenneth Burke (The Definition of Man). I can’t remember what the exact details were for assignment but I think it had to do with making or creating something that aligned with the reading. So I took Burke’s ideas about the self and his animal analogies and made music out of those ideas. I don’t think I accomplished what I was actually supposed to do.

Just want to point out that I’m no DJ. It was my first time trying to mix music so I didn’t really know what I was doing but I wanted to challenge myself and see what I could come up with. Listening to it again after so long, not gonna lie it’s not great but I liked the challenge that it had presented at the time. Password: class

(Sorry had to make it a private video because Soundcloud kept deleting it. Same thing for the second one only it was Youtube that kept taking it down щ(ಠ益ಠщ))

The second video here was also for Professor Sparks Rhetoric class. It was our final project and I worked with another classmate to create imagery and visual representation of one of our readings. It was almost similar to the assignment mentioned above. The reading that we had to dissect was one by Gloria Anzaldúa that had a theme of language as well as Chicano/a culture in it. I created the audio and music while my classmate created the art at the beginning of the video. It’s pretty rough video quality wise to the point where it’s kind of embarrassing but it’s not the worst thing I’ve made,which is saying something. Password: class


I’m kind of excited to see where this multi modality project will take us. If anything, it certainly be an interesting challenge.

Of Vague Professor Notes and Even More Vague Instructions

Of Vague Professor Notes and Even More Vague Instructions

 

R.I.P

There aren’t a lot of papers whose process were memorable for me. But there was one that stood out, when I was a freshman in my community college. I had to do research about Mesopotamian River or something, I can’t really remember all the details. I just know that it involved a lot of time and research. What I do remember clearly though, is the big, red F I got on that essay and much like Kate’s professor, my own instructor’s left a “come see me” note on my paper.

I tried following her instruction but every time I would show her my intro and thesis, she would make vague comments about how my intro wasn’t right and that I kept using the wrong tenses. For some reason, she was really focused on that particular grammar problem, but still not giving much commentary on other aspects or what she was really looking for.  I essentially gave up on that particular paper but tried my best to mold my future papers into her liking, which is easier said than done when I didn’t really know what she wanted.

Unlike Kate, I didn’t choose to seek other sources of help out. Which is a foolish move on my part, but I’ve never really been the type of student who goes to tutoring help (and to that extent, professor help) unless required to. Maybe it’s pride or maybe it’s stubbornness, regardless, it tends to be my weakness. Eventually, I did ask a couple of classmates to see how they fared in their papers and through that I was able to get a better sense of her expectations. In the end, I passed that class with a C, which given my struggles with that class, I honestly considered it a blessing. After all, it was better than failing out right. I had never really failed a paper as badly as I did before that class. But in realizing that the professor’s vague instructions, a part of me didn’t find much reason to put effort into my work. My freshman self saw no incentive to try and do better when I had no way of knowing the proper steps to take to get to where I needed to be.

I think about Nelson’s “school culture”, and the ways that students adapt to vague instructions. I like this quote she brings up about how,

“students attempt to manage the ambiguity and risk of academic tasks by focusing on the products they are required to produce instead of on the intellectual processes they are being asked to engage in and by inventing coping strategies that allow them to circumvent the demands of particular assignments. In other words, students find shortcuts for producing acceptable papers” (417).

I’m no stranger to those shortcuts. I imagine we all have paper(s) that we’ve BS’d,  and if not, you are all better people than I am. But short cutting becomes a way to survive the class, a way to get by. It’s not a great coping strategy because it doesn’t really get a person to think about the “intellectual process”. But when the grade is all that matters, what is the incentive then to extend beyond creating content only for a passing grade? I think that’s an important question to think about especially when school culture relies so heavily on a strict guideline to determine the worth of our work and not always on what we as students are learning or getting out of that work. So then it becomes this thing we’re your stuck between a rock and hard place. Do you take the riskier and harder road like Helen in Nelson’s reading? But have a higher chance at failing to meet the criteria or even failing the course entirely? Or do you take a more Kate/Art/Debra approach? Not really that thought provoking or engaging but at least you can fly under the radar with a passing score. For me, looking at it through that light, it becomes easier to see why shortcuts are the more viable option. Maybe not the “right” option, but in the culture of school it can become a way to adapt to a system that sometimes doesn’t really care about what your opinions are, only how well you can follow a format.