The Final Event – A Special Thanks

A special thanks to all those who came to support us in our final project showcase!! It was a blast and I felt like it was a huge success. Thank you for all your love and support!

I want to thank my group for all the hard work and effort they put into the project. They have been a fantastic group, and making this video has been a great experience!

Also, I would like to thank my sisters. It turns out that four of my seven sisters helped in some way in our project. Whether it being interviewing their kids or kids in their ward, helping play with kids, or helping give advice in editing, they have all been there patiently and lovingly helping us.

Lastly, I would like to give a special thanks to Dr. Burton and Dr. Zappala for all their efforts in organizing, planning, and doing substantial amounts of heavy lifting in order to get the class and event going! This class has been a great learning and growing experience for me! I feel much more equipped and enabled to become a contributing digital citizen.

Final Project Showcase!

For our Digital Civilization class, our culminating activity isn't the final examination; it's a public showcase, a special event for which we are now all anxiously preparing. We call it "Digital Revolution: Upgrading Education for Digital Civilization. See event preview

It should be super exciting! Our group just finished our Mormon Messages Video and we are really happy with how it turned out. It'll be both fun and educational! I hope to see you there!

Here are the details:

Mormon Messages – A Real-time Adventure

So I am excited to share my adventure and journey that has been designing, filming, and editing a Mormon Messages video for our class final project. I am going to provide a further narrative of the process and I thought it’d be good to start off with some numbers for our group project:

One of the little boys we interviewed

220 – miles driven to perform all interviews

15 – number of kids interviewed

19 – numbers of spent filming and traveling to film

25 – number of hours spent editing

6 – average hours of sleep (David) last week

It’s been an awesome, yet challenging experience at the same time. We have been mountains of technical and hardware glitches which have slowed down our progress. However, we are determined and will succeed! (We also feel like there has been quite a bit of Divine help helping us to overcome the numerous obstacles we have confronted).

We are in the process of doing the final edit right now and it has been an adventure. I’ll keep you updated on how it’s going!

Blog Nominations!

CONSUME!!! BOOLEAN SEARCHES - Jeffrey did an excellent digital literacy post on Boolean Searching post because he explains very simply, verbally, and visually how Boolean searches work and how they can help you to better consume information. I liked this post because I feel like it can help you to significantly improve the way you consume material and can help you to become a more effective self-directed learner.

Master (Almost) Any Software with Lynda.com – In this Alex’s post, he does a great job of explaining what is and how to use Lynda.com. Alex does a screenshot-by-screenshot tutorial to show you how to use Lynda.com. I feel like this post is extremely useful as it can help increase your skillset in all of the self-directed learning digital literacy areas (Consume, Create, Connect).

Hindsight – 20/20 Foresight – This is a powerful, yet commical, post by Kristi about the Digital Revolution. She talks about how, what were normal days to the people of the time, now stand as history-changing days for us (e.g., Germany invading Poland, the invention of the cell phone). I feel like this post does a good job explain the impact of digital culture and the digital revolution.

Web 2.0 and User Generated Content

I loved the quote,  'I have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create.' Tim Berners-Lee, 1999, from our readings.

The process of doing our group's final project of a Mormon Messages video has definately been a process of creation.

A screen shot taken in Final Cut pro of an interview with my niece

Additionally, in the readings, I loved the quote,  "Today’s generation are pressing ‘record’ on their video cameras and hitting their mouse keys. With a few clicks of the mouse a user can upload a video or photo from their digital camera and into their own media space, tag it with suitable keywords and make the content available to their friends or the world in general." This is exactly what our group is doing.

It has been exciting. We have been able to create near professional-quality video with the digital tools that are available to us. We have used an HD camera to conduct several interviews with different kids. Later we used Final Cut Pro in the Multi Media Lab in the campus library to begin editing the video.

The ease of the creating of video (e.g., the developement of cheap hardware and software) is similar to the development of the laser office printer and a desktop word processor that Paul Anderson mentions. Both series of developments have allowed former spectators to now be part of the creative process and conversation. I love it!

CREATE - Darwin's Adventures

For this digital literacy lab I learned how to create and created an online comic book. It was fun! I found that there are several websites available to do this. I used one called Pixton.com. I think Pixton was the most advanced (you could do the most things on it) comic book website I found.  

Final Project - Our Plan of Attack

For our group’s final project we are creating a Mormon Messages video. After much thought, planning, and discussion we have decided to create a video in which we interview little kids (ages 3-8) about their families.

We want to do interviews similar to the style of Out of the Mouth of Babes, however we want to ask them questions like,

• Why do you love your family?
• How does your family show that they love you?
• How does your mom/dad show that they love you?