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: Destiny Valencia

There has to be SOME kind of creativity up in there…. right??

There has to be SOME kind of creativity up in there…. right??

Its our lastttt blog post! It’s kind of sad but relieved that we finish our blogs now because I really liked this idea. I might continue up with my own kinda blog thing. I mean why not? But for other purposes of course.

I was dumb enough to think that the keyword project was the same thing, or at least the same part of the multimodal project and it seems that I am wrong. I am wrong and now hopelessly behind and I don’t know what I’m doing. But I suppose I am doing just fine.

Anyways, for the keyword thing, I chose inclusivity. So for my multimodal project, I was thinking I could make a cool looking video thing showing how inclusivity is super important in our society and how it relates to writing. I’m not completely sure of what exactly I’m going to include, but there’s some kind of ideas up in that brain of mine!

If that doesn’t work, I was also thinking of making and interactive website kinda thing and use my cool skills of things I know. When I say interactive, I mean interactive. I would include clickable links all over the page and show how inclusivity connects with what we do with writing.

AND POSSIBLY?? Just make a photo-shop thing?? I really like messing around with photo-shop and its fun. I would clip images and make a cool collage story kinda thing showing inclusivity and all that fun stuff. But who knows what I’ll come up with? We’ll just see…

What Even Is Life Right Now?

What Even Is Life Right Now?

So, as  much as I enjoy creating blog posts for this class, I really didn’t want to do this one this week… I’m going to be very honest and say that I’m completely at a loss and I have no idea how to make sense of this multimodal stuff. All I know is that multimedia is a thing that deals with media and its creation. I’m not entirely sure either of how or what I am actually misunderstanding, or if its just the fact that I am disgustingly overwhelmed with this semester and I just want it to END.

Would it be bad if I ranted? I thought so.

So, I guess for this multimodal thing, I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t read Baron’s piece and I’ve only read bits of Shipka’s. I have a mountain of reading to do for one other class, but I suppose that isn’t my problem. I feel like reading for me since I began college has been a complete nightmare… I  never had this much trouble reading EVER until I started here at Chico state. It’s like I became illiterate overnight and whenever I read anything I read sooooo slow. I take probably 3 hours to read thirty pages and I cannot focus if my life depended on it. This strange issue has made it the absolute hardest for me this semester because reading…

I wasn’t going to rant but as a matter of fact, I did anyway.

Any way, so this multimodal business is interesting. In my times of photoshop and what I see happening with videos and media now these days, its incredible. I wish I was more attentive to all the changes that have been happening in the past 10 years, but it all happened so fast I couldn’t keep up. I love the idea of learning with different types of multimodal texts and modes because (especially for me) for people who just aren’t very good with the reading thing, I feel like using these tactics are exceptionally better to push out needed information and get it straight to the main point.

That is all I will say about this because I still have no clear sense…

Mulimodality? More like Multicreative-aesthetics!!

Mulimodality? More like Multicreative-aesthetics!!

I’m really glad we are writing blogs again because it’s my favorite part of this class! Its definitely not an essay which is great. So the meaning behind my title for this blog is actually what I’ll be talking about because I feel that when I do multimodal projects, the multicreative-aesthetics is more where I lie in the spectrum.

So, in the multimodal world, I decided to make up my own subcategory of multimodality per say as to how I view it. In the world of blogs and media, I feel like I have definitely made my fair share. I’ll start with these blogs actually and how I think they fit into multimodality. When I start a blog I make sure to have a good title and image to grasp readers attention. There aren’t many other ways on this specific site to do that. Another thing I do is incorporating hyperlinks on my posts which keeps readers engaged. I’m not too sure the text itself on many things count for anything multimodal, but I try to make it that way.

When I used the word aesthetic here, I’m using it as an adjective because knowing myself, I like to make sure things look nice when I do them. I like to think a lot of my multimodal projects are seemingly aesthetic to my liking… especially on blogs! Another project I have done before was a video project for my senior year in High School. If I remember correctly, we had to recreate a scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I was acting director and I recall making absolute sure that I made everything look perfect and right up to par with what needed to happen! For the video content, it was really dark and gloomy, and I also filtered the footage to make it black and  white. I was very proud of the outcome and felt that my group had the most visually pleasing outcome.

I hope this all made sense since I feel like I didn’t… Also, I’m not entirely sure if I answered the main point of this weeks blog? But then again, I’m never happy with these.

Welp I guess I can’t write my paper because I forgot what exactly a paper is oh no… shame

Welp I guess I can’t write my paper because I forgot what exactly a paper is oh no… shame

Sorry in advance for the interestingly innovative title Kim. I’m a Jon Snow.

In all honesty however I can say I’m about as completely stumped as a tree stump… As I have said in my previous blog post, the only format I have really actually learned was the 5 paragraph essay format. So when we were discussing in class about the type of paper we were going to write, I had no idea…

I still have no idea.

I had thought about copying the same idea Jedidiah had, writing in as a narrative type form, but then Kim says, “I’d rather you not do what Jedidiah did.” So, there went my only hope of finding out how to go about writing this paper. But its okay.

I feel like once I figure out what format to use, I won’t be clueless about how to start off. I remember people in class saying how a newsletter format or other things would be a good idea, and I just kept thinking to myself, “oh my goodness I don’t belong here I don’t know what any of them are talking about.” I have an idea of what to write so I was thinking that I’d write here and brainstorm a few things to settle myself down a bit.

In reading these articles I noticed that I have a lot… no TONS to learn. If any of these specific things had ever even crossed my mind, I would have been better mentally prepared. However, everything is new to me. I feel like I’m in a sort of advanced style Elementary school where everyone else around me is just a level higher and I’m simply to far behind.

However, in the readings we have done so far, I feel like writing is just full of rules that really restrict the way we think about writing. I mean yes it’s important to understand that language is grammar but we also have to remember that it isn’t easy for everyone especially ESL students. It’s always hard to explain grammar to anyone, even if it is your native language. For example, a few times in my internship, we had helped students with their papers and its always a re-occurring problem with the students. Whether they’re Japanese, Korean or Chinese, etc. they all seem to have a problem with tense. I mean, even I have some problems with tense at times.

So, seeing how writing for them is an issue helps us understand and help us formulate hypothesis. We then go figure out how we can help them in different ways to allow clarification. The entire experience so far has been relatively interesting and I hope that continuing with this class and finding out what it really means to write helps me to finally learn and also to become the good English teacher I hope to be.

Experiences or rather…. hamburgers?

Experiences or rather…. hamburgers?

Okay so I’ve had a pretty unusual and crummy weekend which stopped me from doing this blog up until now, but hey, its Sunday and I’m expecting the day to go much better than the past two.

Believe it or not, but I was locked out of my room for hourrsss by my own roommate Friday night… but in my kitchen?? Yes you heard correctly, in my kitchen. Apparently the dorms are seriously into safety and I couldn’t even “break in”. I was going to call the lock out people in the front office but I decided I would wait because I had another option. Option 2 was simply waiting for my other roommate to get home so I can get back into my room through a shared restroom. Sadly enough, I waited until 4 a.m. until she got home to finally get into bed. PHEW! I was locked out with only my phone and a dead laptop. My phone proved to be useless for the blog site..

Now Saturday night, I was prepared to write the blog post but the internet was out all night. “This is just great!” My literal exclamation.

 

Okay well, now to start off the blog post. I decided to just write out my experience with the 5 paragraph essay and my writing experiences throughout college and such. I haven’t written an actual essay of any kind in so long. But I always say that and I feel as if I might be lying. I actually have written a 5 paragraph type essay in my Junior college which I feel is probably the worst thing since I have no experience in any kinds of other writing. I took a prerequisite English course my first semester and then English Comp (ENGL101) my 3rd semester. In the first class, we were still following the 5 paragraph system which I was fine with since I was just out of high school. We did learn different types of writing paper styles such as analytical, persuasive, etc. Except for the very fact that I didn’t realize that that class was very fast paced because it was an 8 week course. Yea I was happy I got over it faster, but not much stuck.

Now a crazy story about my English Comp class, we all sort of just passed that class by default because the teacher was really going through a rough patch and was getting fired by the end of the semester. We did probably one essay and it was a book review of sorts on the book Fight Club. So what did I learn there you ask? Possibly nothing at all.

Now that I’m in university here at Chico State, it’s so weird because my Junior college didn’t help me set up for anything! So my first semester here which was only last semester, (Fall’16) I found myself following guidelines very strictly, looking up HOW TO’s on google and ways to write and Analysis paper on a book. That’s the only paper I have written so far.

I feel like everyone in this class is so much more experienced with English papers and formats than I am because I had a crappy education with a somewhat flawed system. This is technically my first actual English class since I just decided to add on the TESOL and Linguistics minor. I hope I can learn more about writing in general so I can become a better writer and sound more inclined to be part of the English family here on campus.

Sorry for the ranting! But those are really all my experiences.

“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” -Hamilton