We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. 
Mighty Morphing Multimodal Rangers Go!
I never really thought about how many multimodal projects I have made. Now being pressed to do so I have learned two things: I have much more experience than I originally thought and NONE of it has been for school. I feel the best way to show what I’ve done is through a list.
-Photoshop and Gimp usage (example can be found in videos I made)
–Blog
Wow, those are some embarrassing things I just shared, but a lot of good experiences.
I started making videos at an early age with my brother. We would often go skateboarding and make videos of us and our friends skating. However, we both forgot the channel and names of the videos so I can only share some of the bad ones we made, but granted we were around 13 years old so the quality makes sense. Later in high school me and my friends made a card game channel and would go over our decks…which is something I wish I could forget about. I am really proud of the beginning of my latest two projects which was my YouTube channel and my recently formed blog website. I liked how the YouTube channel was going….but I felt like the program I used took the joy I had of making the videos out of it. Also I needed to spend more time on them but simply couldn’t with how much I had to study in Japan. The blog is too new to really say much about it, but I just needed a space to write about things I like so I went for it. I liked making all of these things when I made them, but thinking back on it now I would change a lot about them. In my mind successful multimodal projects are so much more fulfilling than say like an essay. There is just something about the creative process for them that is so different than school work that really just makes the experience of making these projects so fun.
I really do not know how to extend this blog, but if you have follow up questions based on some of the stuff I produced, let me know. Oh and all of these different modes of media in which we use to produce these different multimodal projects all have their own unique experiences and techniques, so in that sense it is similar to writing and writing skill acquisition.
3 Replies to “Mighty Morphing Multimodal Rangers Go!”
I really enjoyed watching your travel vlog! So I was wondering about your vlog, how did you balance feeling like you covered the trip but also conveyed what the trip was like for you through video? It seemed a lot easier for you to discuss “adventure” days while being in school really took over a lot of your time. You also talked about how the editing program kind of ruined vlogging, would you do anything differently now? Was it hard to continue vlogging your trip towards the end? I always feel like it gets hard to maintain the drive to finish either a vlog or blog. Hope this made sense!
Zach! Thank you so much for sharing all these examples! I loved watching episodes from your travel vlog and was thinking about how cool it would be for our study abroad office to curate these for students. Your insights about doing these outside of school really lines up with the research about youth culture: young people are often creating amazing multimodal projects outside of school settings and then have limited experience inside school. Mimi Ito and others wrote about this phenomenon in a book called Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out after studying youth uses of multimedia. Their book turned in to a movement called HOMAGO: https://dmlcentral.net/resources/homago-a-guidebook/
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hanging-out-messing-around-and-geeking-out
Thanks for sharing these artifacts!
I agree!! I definitely think that multimodal projects are more fulfilling than essays which is (in my opinion) why I like doing these blogs. I like that you actually talked about your channels and things because even if they are embarrassing, its cool to see that you have the experience with different things. Nice blog!