Category Archives: daily create

How Was France Born?

daily create, drawing

This is a response to today’s Daily Create prompt, how was France born? Oddly enough, with a name like Genereux, I should know more than I do about France. However, I know that early humans were making art in France over 10,000 years ago. We can still see those images in the Lascaux caves.

Pen drawing of Lascaux Cave Painting

 

Childhood Fort

cartooning, daily create, drawing

When I was about eight or nine, the neighborhood kids and I built a fort made from items we found in a pile of junk not far from my house. It contained discarded construction materials like lumber and corrugated tin, some broken household appliances, tires, scrap iron, and other suitable materials that a group of boys could work with.

I was one of the younger kids involved in the project so I was elected as the one to test our fort’s strength against attack. I sat in the fort while the bigger kids hurled dirt clods at me. As it turned out, the fort was not a good defense at all against dirt clods and I caught one in the eye. I came out bawling and was certain that my eye was a useless pile of mush.

They continued improving the fort, while my mom doctored me up, and fortunately, I suffered no permanent damage.  This incident would have happened a couple of years before I was diagnosed with myopia and have been a wearer of eyeglasses ever since. I’m not sure if wearing eyeglasses would have made things better or worse in the fort incident.

I don’t know who the next “guinea pig” was, but I didn’t serve as a “fort tester” going forward with our building project.

Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head

Audio Assignments, daily create, , ,

 

Today’s Daily Create was to make a mashup. I decided to do one of music and an image. Then I decided to record my own music and use my own photograph. My New Year’s resolution was to make more things and write more on my blog, so this post is a daily create activity that sort of got out of hand. Daily Creates are typically done in 10-15 minutes or so, but this one took considerably more than that. But that’s ok. That’s the whole idea of doing daily creative activities. Sometimes it leads to something more substantial.

I used an app on my iPad called Voice Record Pro by Dayana Networks. I love this app. It is the Swiss Army Knife of audio recording apps. I sometimes use it in my Hardware and Networking class to demonstrate the concept of a server. Voice Record Pro is so versatile, it includes a web server feature that turns your iPad into a web server so you can easily download your recordings. There are about a dozen other ways to get your files as well. For example, you can upload directly to YouTube in video form, you can send it to your other Apple devices via AirDrop (my favorite way). If you are a user of Apple devices and don’t use AirDrop you are missing out. It is the simplest of ways to transfer files from one device to another but only works on Apple products.

I recorded the ukelele part, then I recorded myself singing as well and mixed these files together in Adobe Audition. I think when I get more confidence, I’ll play and sing at the same time. Finally, I brought the audio into Adobe Premiere and added some pictures and simple animations to be rendered as a video that I then uploaded to YouTube.

Daily Create – Create a New International Friend

daily create, Uncategorized

Daily Create number #tdc2502 is to create a new friend from another country. This might be the most challenging Daily Create activity ever, but I wanted to throw it out there to see what people would do. To me, one of the most exciting aspects of having internet access is the chance to make friends with people in places you would never otherwise meet.

I actually managed to pull it off. But the only way I could think of to make it go in a single day was to scour the list of followers/following on Twitter of an existing international friend and work from there.

Daily Create

daily create

Daily Create is a daily exercise in creativity. Each day, a new challenge is shared and we have 24 hours to respond. I usually ask my digital media students to complete at least 3 of these per week. Lately I have been making a few each week myself. Daily Create is a part of the DS106 Open Course on digital literacies, and it can be viewed at http://daily.ds106.us/.

Here are some of the recent Daily Creates I have made:

 

For this first one, I simply used a photo I had on hand from a trip to my aunt’s farm and uploaded it to the Japanese old photo generator website recommended in the assignment.

For this one, I just looked through the various safety posters the assignment mentioned and picked one out. I used Photoshop to remove the old text with the healing brush. I then picked an appropriate typeface and put in my silly admonition about how going outside can be dangerous.

 

For this one, I took a photograph I had of myself and my dog Daisy, and I removed the background from it using Photoshop. I normally use the pen tool to create a working path, then use the path to make a selection. I use the pen tool because it gives such fine control over the selection. I used to try to use the lasso tool and other methods, but for me the pen tool is best. In another layer, I added the Forbidden Planet scene and put it in the background.

 

For this one, I downloaded and printed the music staff as advised in the Daily Create assignment. I used a marker to draw dog paws on the staff. I was trying to make it look like the dog was playing Jingle Bells. I also linked to that dog barking Jingle Bells song.

Why Mom Was Right About Internet Stupidity

daily create, Media Literacy, philosophy, storytelling,

Today, out of curiosity I searched Google for ‘Kansas State University’ and the screencap shown below are the very first results I saw:

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Unfortunately, a K-State student was recently expelled over a very distasteful post she made on Snapchat. This student had attended K-State for three years (a pre-med student), and boom, just like that she was out, three years of college and no degree. Here are some things I don’t know. I don’t know what other school will admit her and let her complete her undergrad degree. I don’t know if she has accumulated debt while in college. I don’t know what she was thinking. There are a bunch of things I don’t know about this story.

One thing I do know. I know that it is possible to earn a degree at K-State without ever taking a class in digital literacies. It is possible in the 21st century to still earn a degree without experiencing any special emphasis on the do’s and do-not’s associated with publishing digital media online. Yet every single K-State student, if they so choose, can publish something that the entire world can see in an instant, by simply pushing a button or two on a pocket-sized machine that they carry with them everywhere they go.

Yes, I will grant, that many of our courses address this topic, along with many others. Perhaps even the core courses that every undergraduate student must take such as expository writing, takes a hard look at this topic. But I find it interesting that digital literacies are not at the center of what we teach in our general education.

A class like what my second-year digital media students are doing in digital storytelling would be an ideal learning experience for all K-Staters. Not only are we looking at the how of creating media, but we also are discussing the whats and whys of digital media. I think a class like what we are doing could fit very nicely right beside the traditional writing and math classes that everyone must take to graduate.

But every curriculum is jam-packed, and many would argue there is no room for another course. But what if such a course was put in place, and we are able to reach many more students early on about the good, the bad and the ugly about online activities? Learning from a bad experience, Kansas State University could ultimately serve as an example of what can be done in the area of digital/media literacy.

Acknowlegements: The idea from this post came from today’s Daily Create activity; an assignment from our digital storytelling class using Portent’s Title Generator.

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