Go Ahead, Make a Choice

Daily create today is to illustrate a choice. Well, I found myself needing to choose a new profile pic for something work-related (it’s a members only place, can’t tell you any more). I decided to use it for a new Twitter profile pic, too! Two birds, one choice. I looked for cool pics of bikes (I like bikes). I looked for comic book heroes and cowboys. But I decided to go ahead and use words to illustrate myself. So here’s my speech bubble. It represents my willingness to help.

 

Shakespearean Chuckleheads

Daily create = take some Shakespeare and put ‘er into Ol’ West speak. Done, with some accidental reverb. I will live with my mistake and get on with my day.

 

What’s the Story with Stories?

No Googling, no cheating. It’s time to just use what’s currently stored and available for recall in this here brain of mine to answer the question: What is Digital Storytelling?

Let’s focus on the first part of the second word: Story. And here’s my brain’s in-depth analysis: Story, is like, what happened. What happened to the thing to get that thing where it is today. And by today I mean whenever the present of the story is, which could be in the past or future. And by what happened I mean that it didn’t necessarily happen for real. Someone might have made it up. Even if it’s a true story there’s probably some embellishing for fun. So yeah, that’s story: the things that happened, are happening, will happen, or will have been happening (ah, you never get to use the future perfect continuous tense!)

The second part: Telling. The telling part is where the magic happens. And by magic I mean effort and enthusiasm. The more oomph you put in your story, the better. A mundane story about picking up your dry cleaning can be made great (or, to be more realistic, listenable) by some ooomph in your telling. How do I oomph, you may ask? Well, oomph it up with details, background, emphasis, passion, whatever. Hey I’m at the early stages of learning about digital storytelling. Someone else is going to tell me how to oomph. I’ll get back to you on that.

That takes us to the fancy part: Digital. We say it first in the term Digital Storytelling, but it’s more logical to describe it last. The digital part is where we get to cheat. A picture is worth a thousand words so other fancy things are worth extra free words too. Sounds (+500 words), GIFS, (+1750), videos (+500-10000). These numbers are approximate. When we tell a story in person with our voice and body, we can add oomph with gestures and intonation and expressions. The digital part, when we want to throw this on the Internet for the whole cosmos to see, is how we can oomph online. So, wish me luck learning to oomph. I’ll need some.

 

The Retired Prospector

Levi spent his 40s, and the ’40s (1840s that is) panning, digging, clawing, mucking and chucking for gold in them hills, them dales, them vales and them northern, western and southern climes. Everywhere. He found enough to get by, if still being alive means he ‘got by’. But he’s down enough fingers and toes to be counted as statistically significant. And a bit of earlobe. And he ended the decade 45 pounds lighter. Let’s just say he wasn’t the best or luckiest prospector. So what did he get out of it? Stories. Stories that started in the Yukon and ended in Mexico. Started with a fortune, and ended in tragedy. And ones that went the other direction. That one’s not his though. His started near average and ended well below that. The graph looks mountainous. Not Himalayas though, more like Appalachians. And the end state of his story is not up any hill but down on the prairie. He spent his retired days telling them stories to anyone’d listen and buy him a round. You could tell he hadn’t given up the hunt for gold yet though. He was always hinting at that.  I’ll tell you more about Levi’s retired days later.

Broncos aren’t just for Super Bowls

1915, Oregon. Bonnie McCarroll didn’t have any trouble with the Broncos. Must not have been a Patriot.

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Week 2 Roundup

Week 2 is in the past. It’s now been a fortnight. What did I learn, you may ask? Or you may not. Either way, keep reading to find out.

Well, GIFfing ain’t easy to do as I blindly stumbled through figuring out GIMP and other GIF making things. But the results are fun so I’ll try it again sometime.

A little bit of western kindness was sent out to the Syrian Refugees settling in to our area quite nicely. Almost don’t really need any words to tell that story. Just need to see the smiles on their faces.

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A couple of Daily creates involving cows kept me up and running. These are the lifeblood of the experience for me. Baby steps for me.

And the biggest step forward, almost a grown up step, was what I learned about building your own Personal Cyberinfrastructure.  It was a great big realization for me. An epiphany even, if that’s not too strong a word. I work in a place where learners are trying to become more independent, adult learners. Putting the building of their own infrastructure into their own hands is a great big, key idea. The ideas and tools put forth in the lectures and article made a big shift in my thinking about how to achieve this. Thank you for that #Western106!

Let’s see where next week takes us! See you out in the wilds!

 

Say it Like The Peanut Butter

First ever GIF here for Western106 assignment and I went ultra complex using two whole images making the results worth two thousand words. Although lots of those words are the same so if you cross reference, eliminate remainders and carry the zero, it’s worth about 1150.

I fear I did not quite capture the essence of this scene, but this visual from Trainspotting always stuck with me. From Holy S%^t to S%^t-eating grin in 100 milliseconds. GIF is a hell of a drug.

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