Plans for a Digital Portfolio

What audience, specifically, do you hope to attract with your digital presence / portfolio? A potential future employer (if so, what organization)? Readers who share a hobby, passion, or interest of yours? A certain age group or other demographic?

With my portfolio, I hope to attract two types of people: future employers and fellow teachers. For a future school district to which I may be applying for a job, I hope to showcase my abilities utilizing technology to apply language arts concepts. Also, I hope to give inspiration for activities that other English language arts teachers can use.

Digital Presence: Inspirations for Creating an Online Identity

To conclude my Writing For Digital Media class, my classmates and I are assigned with creating a digital portfolio. In this portfolio, we are to construct a version of ourselves that we want to portray. First, I will talk about my inspirations for my online-persona, and then I will detail what that persona entails.

Forest Lawn: A Locative Narrative Experiment

Originally, when I was first assigned to create a locative narrative in my Writing for Digital Media class, I thought I wanted to write a poem using pictures of words that I would take while tagging my location. However, I kept returning to thoughts about the cemetery, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, that is located near my house. I could not stop thinking about the many stories that must lie there. Thus, “Forest Lawn” was born. I was inspired by the many stages of life that can be connected to this one location. Unsurprisingly, the one overarching theme of most of the stories is death or loss. (Disclaimer: A majority of these stories were completely made up, and the others were only very loosely based on real-life events.)

A screenshot of my locative narrative, “Forest Lawn.” Click here to view.

Hidden Stories: Using Geo-tagging to Create Location-Based Narratives

To complete an assignment for my Writing for Digital Media class, I worked with a partner, Carley. Our task was to create a digital story that was accessible solely through Twitter and could be found using geo-hashtags referring to the location in which we took the picture. We were to refrain from writing a complete narrative and, instead, write small pieces of a story. This was not to be a straight-forward, linear tale for two main reasons. First, Twitter’s character limit strictly confines the amount of text one can use to write a narrative. Second, these tweets could be found and read in, theoretically, any order. Also, we were to hide hints or clues in either the text or pictures that pointed users toward another part of the story.

“Why locative narratives?” — Comments on Location-Based Stories

Locative narratives (otherwise known as location-based narratives) depend on a physical space in order to tell a story through a digital method.

The value of such stories are linked to place by their nature. The narratives exist because of that location, whether this is because it can only be accessed there, it is appropriating that space (e.g., Shelley Jackson’s “Snow”), or it occurs there (e.g., Miranda July’s “Somebody”).

Song Title Poetry: A Generative Literature Experiment

I created the following five poems as a generative literature experiment for my Writing for Digital Media class.

Poem 1

Mr. Tamborine Man,
higher love,
moonlight serenade,
shake, rattle, and roll:
“Make me.”
Smile:
“Who are you?”
We didn’t start the fire working for the weekend.
Elenore,
what becomes of the brokenhearted?

Poems for Generative Literature Activity

The following three poems are for an in-class generative literature activity.

Exploring Generative Literature

Just as Bill Gates is not immune from stealth mountains, we too are vulnerable to being involved in generative literature. In his article, Jean-Pierre Balpe defines generative literature as “a literature where the texts are produced through a computer by means of a set of formal rules, the use of any kind of algorithm, specific dictionaries and eventually knowledge representations.” This reminds us that authors of these narratives are often the aggregates of information that is collected from everyday internet users who share their data publicly – individuals such as you or me. This idea is revolutionary in terms of how written works are viewed and consumed.

Into the Library: An Interactive Narrative Experiment

My interactive narrative hosted on philome.la

For my third project in my Writing for Digital Media class, I planned on using an interface called Twine to create an “interactive”-puzzle game in which users collected items to explore a story. I wanted this narrative to be able to be used in a classroom for students to explore various classroom texts (this could be done either as a pre-reading exercise or as a post-reading review). The goal of the narrative is to help students connect the stories through main ideas and themes in order to gain a deeper understanding of the texts. The path through all of the stories would be up to the user.

Learning Digitally

Access to the internet has allowed individuals to learn in ways that were either impossible or very difficult to achieve in the past. Online services such as Khan Academy and Duolingo are just two examples of resources aimed at educating learners while capitalizing on the innovative techniques for which the web allows.