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: Elisa Preston

👴🏻 Multimodal Project 👴🏻

👴🏻 Multimodal Project 👴🏻

So this was easily the least upsetting assignment I’ve had all semester. Putting it together was actually pretty enjoyable and I learned how to use quite a few programs & apps that I was previously unfamiliar with. Also first video I’ve ever edited, so that was fun!

Here’s the process I went through, which probably would have gone more smoothly if I had planned it out: 1. Drew crappy slow-moving picture “animation” in Animation Desk program (laptop) with digital drawing tablet 2. Saved it to my desktop 3. Wrote a summary/explanation/not-really-sure-what-anymore in the undeletable Notes app on my tablet 4. Took a pic of it and cropped it 5. Emailed it to myself 6. Put the video and image on a track in WeVideo 7. Found some elevator music, hold music, and school music on YouTube 8. Used a voice recorder app on my phone to record the sound as it played through my tablet (seriously didn’t attempt to figure out a simpler way for some reason) 9. Played this from my phone as it recorded through the laptop mic 10. Copy & pasted the summary thing from Notes and texted it to myself 11. Copy & pasted it into the Text to Speech app and chose the cool British Daniel voice to read it 12. Put those sounds into tracks for music and voice over in WeVideo 13. Decided to go back to Animation Desk and add a short, vaguely creepy quick and awful animation at the end 14. Saved this to my desktop 15. Emailed it to myself as a Doc 16. Used GDrive to save that to my camera roll. The end, but I probably skipped something.

Almost everything in this super weird video with preschool-quality drawings was included for a reason. I chose this elevator music because it seems as though such sounds almost slow time, like you’re waiting on something. In this, it’s kind of boring and you can’t wait for it to be over. This, to me, is similar to a class that is unnecessary and doesn’t accomplish any realistic goals. You just want it to be over, hoping for time to move more quickly each class. The kids’ song, “This is the Way We Go to School,” or something to that effect, was chosen for potentially obvious reasons; taking FYC and other courses that often don’t transfer the required skills of specific majors or occupations is “just the way it’s done.” That song is all about “how” to do things, but it never actually tells you how, or perhaps more importantly, why. Why is this the way we go to school? Why is this the way we do anything?

I mostly relied on Hall’s “Some ‘Givens” for this. I wanted to use each of his “Givens” originally (and call it The 25 Commandments or something), but holy crap there are so many.

Anyway, good luck out there~

ヽ( ̄д ̄;)ノ=3=3=3 <— Can Someone Explain This to Me? Is It Running or What??

ヽ( ̄д ̄;)ノ=3=3=3 <— Can Someone Explain This to Me? Is It Running or What??

I’m still not 100% sure about my multimodal project. So here are some of my ideas:

– Use a combination of apps to make an animation with audio (Sketchbook Motion & whatever that robot voice maker I have is called).
– Make webcomic(s)… perhaps with the robot voice maker reading the text because I think it’s that amusing.
– I always try to find a way to use tumblr for school projects, so I won’t rule it out completely but it’s unlikely to happen… I think.

I would take a similar approach with the first two options: depict a student writing process, illustrate challenges, ideas from the texts, attempt to define “writing” unsuccessfully, ending in my theory of writing. This sounds super long, but I’m sure it can be condensed. What’s most important to me is that it conveys some sort of message while not being extra boring. With the first option, I’d draw some really awful pictures on Sketchbook Motion, then use the animation tool. Then I could email it to myself and record it on one device while using the robot voice thingy on another. I want to add text too, but I won’t be sure about where until I get there. <— This sentence is looking really messed up to me right now 😔 no matter how I rewrite it.

So, in summary, I’ll be drawing some stuff somewhere & adding text and/or audio to it. Oh! Maybe I’ll post it to tumblr and somehow manage to incorporate all three ideas. And “ball-handling” absolutely has to come up, of course.

If You Lurk Hard on The Webs, You Like Multimodal Things

If You Lurk Hard on The Webs, You Like Multimodal Things

I didn’t want to make a vlog because I don’t like my face, but then I came across this Tellagami app on my tablet whilst making room for even more cat pics. “Sucks you have to use your actual nails-on-chalkboard voice,” thought I… “Oh shit, no you don’t,” uh, remembered I… ‘Twas time to use one of those cool voice synthesizers that makes everything 99% more amusing. So I used two different apps and found some somewhat relevant images via googling, voila — a multimodal approach to a boring yet speedy presentation, while keeping the boring aspect intact. 👌✨

Please watch these awful videos in order:

1. https://tellagami.com/gami/P8L5RI/

2. https://tellagami.com/gami/GMRQLX/

3. https://tellagami.com/gami/GV6Z1H/

Papers… Papers Everywhere

Papers… Papers Everywhere

What I Know So Far Paper~

As soon as we started talking about this paper, I thought that it would be a good opportunity to conduct interviews with people from other countries. This is mostly because I just love doing that shit. I did something similar with Zach for our final project in Kittle’s 478 and I really enjoyed the responses that I received. Due to the nature of one of my very few hobbies (video games, often online), I talk to people from other countries a lot. I’ve gotten to know some these people well enough that I’ve actually met

El Tepozteco (Tepoztlán, Mor., Mexico) – I failed to reach the top of this mountain due to supreme hangoverdness. My friend Laura carried a 32oz cup of Corona up the thing just fine though wtf. 

up with a few of them before and ended up getting a free place to stay and a super great guide in Mexico. Sooo last semester when I came up with some questions regarding learning English through video games and such, everyone responded pretty quickly and some provided quite a bit of detail. I’d like to do something similar with this paper if I can. I’d like to refer to Russell’s “Activity Theory” a lot in this paper, as I think it would be cool to focus on what learning writing is like for people in other countries (what worked, what didn’t, etc.). (In the beginning, Russell mentions that composition courses are US-exclusive.)

As I kind of, maybe plan on teaching ESL (potentially), I think that this could provide me with some insight.  In addition to conducting interviews, gathering information, and really thinking about composition courses, I’d like to weave in some of the ideas from the readings to create some sort of teaching goal. That’s all I’ve got right now!