This week was another week of smooth sailing for me. I was able to accomplish all of the Week 2 assignments that were posted and really enjoyed completing them. A lot of the assignments allowed for some creative magic which was interesting and fun to take part in. The first thing I started with this was actually the Daily Create for Monday. I wanted to see what kind of exercises were going to get posted and so I was able to login onto Mastodon and finish the first Daily Create. This one involved me creating a Fibbonaci poem where I talked about the dramatic nature of a tennis match and you can find that post here. I also did a daily create on Tuesday, which was to create a unknown language that you only know kind of like the Voynich Manuscript and that post is located at think link. Once I was able to figure out how the Daily Creates worked and what kind of exercises would be shown to us on a daily basis, I decided to get going on the some of the assignments that were on the board for this week. The first thing I did was read the article that talked a little bit about how to write our blog posts and what kind of information we should include in them to make them the most appealing to others. I also set aside some time to go in and comment on other people’s post to make sure that they were knowledgable that other people were reading and enjoying their work. I then moved onto the next task for the week which was to customize our blog so that it was more appealing to others and not everyone had the same default look to their blog sites. I really enjoyed this task for the week because I was able to go in and change my theme and make it more techy and something I enjoyed looking at and if you want to take a look at that, you can find it here. I also was able to come up with a new, more enjoyable and fun title for my website, “Creative Bytes: Exploring the World of DS106” which was better than just “Rishi Shankar’s DS106 Blog.” Once I finished customizing my website, I moved onto completing my assignment bank assignments which were assignments that we were free to choose whichever one we wanted and complete three of them from different categories while relating two of them to the field of AI. I created a animated gif which is located here, created a sports poster using AI here, and finished off this part of the week with a AI poster with a contradictory statement located here. Following this, then came probably my favorite assignment of the week; creating my course character. I have a formal introduction to Xander Neoteric on my blog site, but i would like to take another moment to introduce everyone to Xander, a tech genius and the CEO of Xander Technologies. Moving on, I met with Dr. Oblivion to talk about some AI topics that were in the Iron Man film to which I was able to come up with some more ideas to add to my film review and really enjoyed getting his thoughts on my ideas as well as the ideas in the film related to AI. While talking to Dr. Oblivion, I decided to also complete my summary and reflection on the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and I had a nice conversation with him about my analysis of the article as well as getting his thoughts on the matter. He seemed very impressed with my analysis and was point out all of the important points I made and explaining why they were important so that was nice to hear. He also made some points that I may have missed out on and he really like my connection of the manifesto back to the Iron Man film. You can read that blog for yourself at the link given above. Finally, I was able to complete my Weekly Summary, which is being finished as I write out this final portion of the assignment.

I did not encounter too many issues this week when completing my assignments. The only issues that I did encounter were very small, such as my WordPress site not loading and Mastodon not letting my login to my account. But each of those issue were 5-minute issues that were resolved pretty quickly and did not really hinder me in any way. Like stated before, my favorite assignment from this week definitely has to be the course character. I am not sure what it is but something about creating a persona around someone that no one knows exists in an artificial world and being able to create everything about him/her was really interesting and enjoyable to me.

I definitely think that I accomplished all of the requirements for all of the assignments for this week and I think I did them to the best of my ability. Like stated before, I enjoyed most of the assignments for this week and really allowed me to be creative and intentional with the work I was doing. I did learn that in order to complete the daily creates, you could not sit and think about them for a while because they were so simple that there was not much to think about to begin with. It was more just of a whatever came to your mind kind of situation. I would not do anything differently for the work that I did this week as it was completed with effort, time, and creativeness and there is no need to change anything in my opinion. I was able to get all my questions answered during the group talk that I had with Professor Bond and Professor Groom, so I currently do not have any questions about the course of its assignments. I believe that there are no larger issues at hand with my work and that they were done properly and with effort.