iMovie Class Activity

Enjoy!

Unfortunately, I was not able to make nearly as much progress as I had hoped on my project by this point. I had a busier week in my other classes with a few papers coming up to work on, so I didn't have a good chunk of time to commit to my project.

On top of that, we had to put down my cat Dumpling yesterday. We've had her since I was 8 and she was just a kitten, so I knew her time was coming soon but it's still hard. I actually featured her in my LOLcat earlier in the semester. I thought I'd repost it in her honor. The picture really captures her feline spirit... she was the queen of the house no matter how hard you tried to make it otherwise.




Going back to my project... I ended up buying Indigo dye, which is different from what the tutorial I was planning on going off of uses. I went to Utrect on Farwell, and they had a very limited supply of dyes. Indigo seems a little more maintenance that what they used, but a little more versatile. The vat of dye can be kept for multiple uses along as it is sealed tightly to keep oxygen out. Also, Indigo is used to dye blue jeans. I'm hoping to be able to try that out in addition to dip dyeing t-shirts.

I'm also trying to sort out the logistics of the dyeing before I actually get started. I don't want to risk spilling on the floor which could stain and cost me my security deposit. I'm hoping the weather will be nice enough at some point this weekend to be able to do the dyeing on my back porch.

DIY Definition Prezi

Still a work in progress, but feel free to check it out!

DIY Definition on Prezi

DIY Definition

DIY at its simplest is an acronym, replacing the words “do it yourself.” In practice, it replaces as well. It replaces buying a product. It replaces the work of another person. It replaces the work of a factory full of people. It replaces the work of a machine. It replaces poorly used spare time spent in front of the TV with something creative and productive. It can be just a hobby, or a way of life.

DIY can take many forms. It could be a craft like knitting a sweater, refinishing a coffee table, or creating homemade birthday cards. It could be a little more complicated than that… like fixing up a used car. It could be growing fruits and vegetables and herbs in a backyard garden instead of buying produce from the supermarket. It could be making your own “frappuccino” or ranch dressing or peanut butter. These forms don’t necessarily have to result in a physical object… DIY is digital as well. It could be creating your own LOLcat. It could be editing a video. It could be creating your own iPhone app.

DIY is a process. It can require research, special skills, tools, materials, time, effort, trial and error. The skills could be a physical process like learning a knitting stitch or a painting technique. Your craft could require you learn how to use a tool like a power drill or pottery wheel. Digital craft requires a set of skills and tools as well, like learning how to use Photoshop or learning how to write the code for your own website. It could even be a mixture of both physical and digital processes, like covering a popular song from the instrumentals to the vocals, then shooting and editing a music video for it. Sometimes a project takes a lot of time, like restoring a vintage trunk. Sometimes the steps of a project or the materials or the process will effect the time it takes to complete a task, like having to put your project on pause so paint or glue can dry. There are times you’ll make mistakes and hit some proverbial road blocks- that’s part of the process. You’ll learn and grow and gain skills as you go. DIY is an experience.

DIY is a movement. It can shape lifestyles. It can be a platform for activism, commonly referred to as Craftivism. That might mean making as much of your daily essentials as possible in an attempt to free yourself from consumer culture- from growing all your food in a backyard garden to making your own soaps and shampoos. It could be making quilts for victims of a natural disaster halfway around the world. It could be creating moss “graffiti” with a message about your cause. Education can be DIY. A movement called Edupunk works on the idea of taking your education into your own hands. This could be teaching yourself software or a foreign language through online course and tutorials. It could even go as far as creating you own “college curriculum” using free resources.

DIY is a lot of things… it has many interpretations. But they require just one simple thing- that you do them yourself.

GUZZETTI et al. and ANDERSON/BALSAMO

It’s always interesting to do a little internet research about the writers and their work, but it was great not to have to this time- the writers did that for us by including self-authored bios in the preface. These were especially useful because they were written with the context of the article in mind.

Barbara Guzzetti has worked as a professor of literary education for over 20 years. She is a baby boomer, and therefore did not come into contact with computers until her 20’s. Diana Welsh is a library assistant in the teen center at a public library. She has been creating DIY media of all sorts since elementary school- everything from playing in bands to writing fan fiction. Kate is a full time grad student. She actually went to school with Diana and created a zine with her. She has used zines as a way to speak up on ideas that are important to her, like social justice. She uses online media to make her voice heard.

One great point they brought up was the need to make school interesting to adolescents. This is a time of constant change for these students in so many aspects of their life. They suggest that this fact be celebrated. We should tailor education to the student, not the other way around. A great way to do so is through digital media. Why write on the chalkboard when you can show a powerpoint presentation with pictures, videos and diagrams? Why assign students a paper, when they could present their work as a video or in a blog?

I also liked the terms “digital native” and “digital migrant” (pg. 1) to describe those who grew up with computers and those who were born before that time and adopted the technology later. I am definitely a digital native. My family got our first computer when I was about four years old. I remember playing games on floppy discs, crazy! One of my favorite games was a drawing game of sorts that came as a trial version on our Apple computer. I first used the internet in elementary school. A friend of mine had AOL and I would “play” with it at her house until me and my sister finally convinced my mom to get a dial up connection at our house. I remember creating a little profile for my instant messenger account, which I guess would be my first experience with social media. Then MySpace came around. I remember spending hours designing my page, having no idea that I was actually sort of learning how to code html.

Throughout my college career, I have been given all sorts of DIY media projects. My first semester, I remember having to make a website-ish thing to supplement a research paper. In the past year or two especially, I have had classes with creative research projects instead of papers. Many of them encouraged me to pick a medium that I am not familiar with. Because of this, I discovered great tools like Prezi, which has become my presentation method of choice. I think these have been very beneficial, but shouldn’t completely replace formal academic writing.

Although I don’t completely love having to write all these blogs for class, I can definitely see their importance. It helps us to get familiar with a new medium to present our work, but also encourages us to produce higher quality work because it is a public forum and people will see it.

Edupunk

From what I gather, edupunk is both a movement and a type of person. As a movement it is the exploration of non-traditional forms of education. A person that is an edupunk is anyone who chooses a non-traditional route to education. As you can imagine, there are countless different variations on education within the edupunk movement.

Anya Kamenetz, the writer of DIY U as well as the edupunk website seems to be a major player in the movement. She is a writer by profession and in turn a speaker and an activist. She has written two books, Generation Debt and DIY U, and currently writes a column called “Life in Beta” for Fast Company Magazine. I would say all of the edupunks featured in the “Stories” section of the website are major players as well. By allowing their stories to be published, they serve as role models to aspiring edupunks and success stories to those who are cynical about the whole movement.

So what is edupunk working towards? I can see a few things stick out from the readings. I think one of the most important tailoring education to one’s personal needs. They stressing knowing how you best learn and choosing a course of study that compliments that. I feel like a lot of people my age end up picking a major because they know they can make a good living when they graduate. This may not necessarily fulfill them, but our society has us thinking we need to choose what is practical over what we are passionate about. Edupunks believe that following you passion can absolutely be practical.

Edupunk is also working towards a reducing the frequency of student debt. By educating students on alternative options, they can borrow money more wisely and use it more efficiently.

Finally, edupunk aims to break the misconception that education only happens in a school or university. As we saw in the resources section from DIY U, there are plenty of options online for independent study. Internships are not only a great resume builder but usually very educational.

Multiliteracties

The New London Group is a team of ten academics concerned about how the ever changing technologies of our current world effect our languages and how they are taught and used. The group came together in 1996 and are most famous for the article we just read. It is hard to find information on them as a whole, but it appears that they are from a variety of universities in both the US and the UK. Their focuses include education, linguistics, educational psychology, and technology.

As the title suggests, the main idea of this essay and theory is multiliteracies, or the idea that in our current society we need to be able to understand language in a few different contexts. These contexts can be related to social and cultural conditions, but also to the integration of technology into our lives. It is important to point out that literacy here is more than just learning how to read and write, it is a broader collection of skills and experiences necessary to function in multiple areas of society.

One thing I found really interesting was how diverse our “common global language” of English has become. It’s something you know, you just don’t really think about. There are the obvious dialects like the English they speak in the UK or Australia, but also different versions spoken in different parts of our country. There are even different versions of written English, such as the abbreviated used when text messaging or tweeting. There are versions specific to certain industries, to academic communities and to cultural communities.

I also liked that they considered curriculum and lesson planning a “design.” The teacher designs a learning experience. They use the tern “redesign” instead of “reform.” The term “reform” has a more intense connotation, like the whole thing needs to be recreated from the start in a completely different way. “Redesign” seems to imply change as a state of evolution.

My post is late and we have already discussed this briefly in class, but if we had more time to discuss this reading I would be interested in the class’s learning experiences throughout the years. How has each of our individual education systems prepared (or failed to prepare) us for college, work, etc.?

Lessig and Ito

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard University, as well as the author of five books on law and technology. I have actually read his work before; I was assigned to read Free Culture in its entirety last semester for my New Media class. It is written in a way very similar to Free Culture, with plenty of well developed and explained real world examples. A common theme to these examples is the exploitation of copyright by the copyright holders themselves, using their power to intimidate the little guys. His main issue is the collateral damage caused by these copyright wars, that being limits to creativity. The people starting these wars are only concerned about money, but money is the least of most of these “offenders” concerns.

Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist, based at the University of California-Irvine. She was born in Japan and grew up back and forth between the US and Japan, before pursuing higher education at Harvard and then graduate work at Stanford. Most of her work focuses on digital media and how it changes relationships and communities. The piece we read was really fun, I really liked that it was originally a presentation. It was a very nice balance to Lessig’s piece, showing the products of the creativity from the remix culture Lessig hopes to protect.