The Multicultural Fair of 2023 had many events on campus. The food was delicious and the people with different crafts and unique menus were a delight to talk to. I was in a class group of three others, but they could not attend the fair. One girl was getting married and went home to plan, hire the cake maker, etc. The other girl had just gotten a job that started the day of the fair. I barely knew how to use the video camera! Some footage was blurry and I deleted it. Amazingly, this video turned out this good.
This week was the final week for the class and so we were tasked with creating a short, less than two minute video that allowed us to reflect on the class as a whole and individually. We were asked to talk about what the favorite thing that we saw in the class was along with what our favorite individual assignment was. For the class in the general, I talked about the radio shows and how they represented the creativity in the class and the opportunity for people to come together to create such an appealing project. It added a nice touch to the class since at the beginning it was all by yourself and to allow groups to come together and work together and allow themselves to experiment with different ideas with the different course characters and the various topics that were discussed in class was nice to see. It also allowed the students to create fun and creative projects out of it. For the individual part, I talked about how my day in the life video was the best thing that I did all semester. This is because it was my first assignment in which I needed to use various visual applications that did different things. I had to use all of these different applications for the first time and so I was proud of how I was able to steer myself through the creation of the video and allow myself to create a final product that I was happy with. I really enjoyed how it was so open ended and I got to choose what was and was not included in my video and so I enjoyed that part as well. Finally, we had to include a section that talked about why Aggressive Technologies should support DS106 and so I chose to talk about how DS106 is working to make the world a better place for everyone and allows the world to become a better place with the incorporation of AI as well. I argued that with both the help of DS106 and Aggressive Technologies, we can change the world for the better and ensure that everyone is better off. Another reason they should support us is that we have done nothing but good for the world and so there is no reason not to trust us and we would put in a good word with the public for them so that they reputation does not continued to be ruined. I enjoyed my time in this class over the course of the semester and would recommend it to anyone that is thinking about taking this class. For the final time, Rishi signing off! Have a great future everyone!
For my final project, I made a blog for my course character Andrea which you can find here. While I have created subdomains before, this one made me use all of the skills I learned during this class.
First I came up with the concept of what she posts about, the pages she has, and the comments that would have to be under each one. I made a resume for her and rebuilt the business card I made for her earlier. It then took me forever to find a blog theme, font, color scheme, etc. that worked for Andrea’s personality I built over the semester. Sadly once I found things that worked there were of course many problems with how they looked that I had to fix. This is where what I learned this semester really was used.
A lot of the time making this site went into the CSS coding on the backend. First I had to solve the problem of the post slider. Whenever you reloaded the site or just opened it for the first time there was a huge glitch where the photo size was normal but there was double the white space beneath it that wouldn’t go away until the next post came in. This disrupted the flow of the site and since Andrea is a software engineer I couldn’t just leave that error in. So after many hours over a few days of troubleshooting, I figured out how what element was causing the problem, how to override the original code (since I couldn’t find the line in the actual theme files which there are many), and then I added specific code to fix it based on the device you were on. The mobile device especially needed this slider fixed as the original theme cut off the image and the text was unreadable without this fix. Next, to really sell that this blog has been posting for a year I had to get rid of the comment post dates because, unlike post dates, those could not be changed. I then added a hover effect like I have on this blog to reduce the static look of the home page. Finally, I edited the size of the site’s title and description because they were way too small to read, and I added a bit more space between the top of the site and the title. The images below show how I did all of this and you can also see the difference between how it looks on different devices.
Obviously, it is not the smoothest fix as I am nowhere near becoming a computer programmer, but over the weeks of this course, these are all the skills I learned in CSS coding so that my site can look exactly how I want it to. After all I’ve done this semester, this project took the most time and frustrated me the most (especially the individual comments I had to do under different names) but in the end I really enjoyed the final product.
First, I want to explain why it is a little late. I was working on this all week, then lost the video halfway through making it. I remade it as quickly as I could, but editing takes a while and I have a tendency to overcomplicate things, which means it takes even longer. In any case, the video is done now!
Here are some of the tools I used to make this video:
I used the 4K Video Downloader to download all of the clips (and some of the audio) off of YouTube.
I recorded myself using an audio kit from the HCC.
This video brought all of the skills I’ve developed throughout this semester. Here’s that breakdown:
Video editing. I’ve always been interested in video editing but found it too tedious to enjoy. After the week where we had to make several videos, I was no longer afraid of it. I’m still a fan of my simple software, but have begun to master it, so maybe I will upgrade to the real stuff soon. I also heavily used 4k Video Downloader, a program that I learned how to use because of this class.
Sound editing. This video used my voice, sound effects, music, and video clips. It wasn’t as much sound editing as we had to do in previous weeks, but definitely still involved it. I even browsed through a free sound website that I got to know a few weeks ago, even though they didn’t end up having what I needed.
AI discussions. This video doesn’t use AI in any groundbreaking ways, which I think makes it especially interesting. Because of this class, I started to look at the softwares I was using in a new way. What actually counts as AI? And, off of that, is all AI harmful? This class got me thinking and made me recognize that AI can mean a lot of different things.
Computer organization. After weeks of organizing different clips, images, audio files, and more, I developed a pretty good system that made this video much easier. I did make one mistake that caused some big problems, but that issue had less to do with me and more to do with my computer. Long story short, practice makes perfect. This is especially true for the editing process. I tried a few things over the various videos we had to make and now I know what works for me. I haven’t edited a lot so I’m still not very good, but I am significantly better than I was at the start of this semester.
All things considered, I am very proud of this video. I wanted to look at AI in a unique way and try not to get too serious about everything. AI includes a lot of different programs. While AI is an issue, I think people have a tendency to overreact.
AI may be able to replicate some human thought patterns, but it cannot, and probably never will, be able to predict human spontaneity. One of the fun things about humans is we don’t think in exact patterns. AI can create something technically perfect, but that isn’t what humans do. I have concerns about how people chose to use AI, but I don’t think AI will ever be able to replace humans because there is no way to code thought processes that humans themselves don’t understand.
For this week our main goal was finishing this video project. It was great to work with Andrew Poon and Andrew Johnson. Collaborating with Jonathan and Leo Storm once again was amazing. I think they are a great addition to Himothy. After working on the radio show with these partners I thought it would be nice to run it back with them because we worked so well together. I am excited to hear what everyone thinks about our video. For this assignment we used the voiceovers on iMovie. Since we are not able to work on iMovie on multiple computers, we just used Andrew Johnson’s computer. We ran into some issues during this assignment due to the audio. There was multiple overlapping with the audio’s as well as lost audio. We had to do multiple retakes when doing this. Another issue I ran into was uploading this video to my computer. Due to the file being so large, I will link Andrew Poon’s assignment where the video is linked.
In the end it was great working with these partners. We worked through our issues in a timely manner through our busy schedules to get this project done.
This week I finished up my final project! I decided to do a long format interview show like 60 Minutes with ads in between different interviews. This project showcases what I have learned this semester, which is way more than I thought I would ever be able to digitally comprehend. I built off of my group radio show the last two projects and I’m happy with how it turned out.
My process was pretty simple. First, I wrote scripts for the entirety of the show and the advertisements in between the segments. Then I recorded the parts I needed to and had some AI voiceover for others since I couldn’t convince my friends to help me out.
I was hoping to create a video with the audio as well, but I ran into many difficulties putting it together and decided to spend more time making sure the audio was as good as I could make it with what I have learned this semester.
Overall, I think this represents what I have learned pretty well since I was able to incorporate AI voice recordings, Freesounds, my own recordings, Audacity, and my newly acquired audio editing skills into this final project. I feel as though I took an audio focused approach to most of the assignments in the course, but if I did it again I would probably work more on video editing so I could have included that in the final project. Unfortunately, my skills aren’t advanced enough to incorporate that aspect, but I am really proud of the work I put in to use all of my skills in this final project.
For week 14 our main objective was our video project. Below I have attached a link to view our final video project. For my project I decided to work with Andrew Johnson and Jackson Beale. We incorporated our created AI characters as well as Dr. Oblivion. Our video explains the pros and cons of using AIs from the perspective of Leo Storm, Himothy, Johnathan, and Dr. Oblivion. Alongside our pros and cons, we also include our overall opinion on AIs and the usage of them. To create our video, we used iMovie. Our first step was to find pictures to incorporate into our video. Once we found our pictures, we laid out the sequence of when each picture would appear. After we had all of our pictures laid out, we recorded our audio in iMovie talking about our opinions and pros and cons of using AIs. We did have some trouble when making our video. One main issue was overlapping of audio, to solve this we had to go back and space out each different audio piece, so that there was no overlapping. Another issue was uploading our video to WordPress. The file was too large to upload, hence why we had to revert to using a link to display our video. However, despite this trouble I think our finished product came out great in the end. Overall, this project was a great learning experience. I got to use all the different skills I’ve learned throughout the course of DS106 such as working with audio, images, and many more. I hope y’all enjoy the video as we worked really hard to create this. Until next time!
What a crazy last 6 hours it’s been. I just finished my final project and it definitely did not go as I expected. Last week for my weekly summary, I detailed how I was going to do a commentary video on some aspect of AI and the advantages / disadvantages. While doing the rest of my piled work for the week before finals, I thought about topics that I wanted to hone in on, and it was definitely the use of ChatGPT and other forms of AI assistance in assignments. I did not have any time until today to knock it all out, so I prepared myself to finish my creation in one sitting starting at noon today. Not the greatest decision, but it has been a trend during my DS106 career, and I have made some of my best works with this last minute sprint towards the finish line, so I was expecting the same here (spoiler, it did not go as expected).
While watching some YouTube this morning, I stumbled upon an edited video full of jump cuts and memes that I used to enjoy watching back in high school. I drew some inspiration from this blessing from the YouTube algorithm and decided to make one of my own. My intent was to create a POV story about a student who doesn’t have a job lined up, and is looking for his first opportunity. However, he stumbles upon ChatGPT and uses it throughout his schoolwork and his interview prep, which leaves him with no actual knowledge and coding ability. It was meant to be a commentary on harmful AI use in computer science students. At the end, I was going to add 3-4 minutes of recorded commentary answering the question of whether or not AI is beneficial or harmful to students.
Around 8pm, I started to write up a script for this 3 minute commentary at the end of my video that would tie all of the knots up and bring the audience to a good conclusion. By 9:30pm, I’d written up a solid few pages on this topic to be read into my mic, recorded, and then overlaid with some various clips that relate to the topic.
This was when I messed up.
I was writing on my Windows Notepad, the default one that is preloaded on every Windows computer. I usually never do this and write all of my documents on Google Docs, but since I had so many tabs open for ClipChamp, OBS, downloading music and clips, along with other programs, I didn’t want to open another tab for Google Docs, and thought that since I’d just be reading off of it and discarding it, I would just write it on the Notepad.
Of course, my computer gave me the blue screen of pain and suffering for the first time in my ownership of this PC, and wiped all of my tabs, and most importantly, my script. My edited video was saved into the Cloud via Clipchamp, but the script for my commentary was completely wiped.
I tried various methods to restore the lost text file, but it seemed as though the system cache was already wiped due to the reset. I tried to rewrite all of it, but with my 4 hours of sleep and the deadline fast approaching, I had no willpower left to recreate a script that I’ve been writing for almost 2 hours, and I didn’t want to give the SparkNotes version in my final video, either.
Completely demoralized, I came to the conclusion to publish my video as is, and detail these events in my summary post instead. I think that narratively, my project is missing a conclusive answer and purpose due to not having the commentary at the end. I was going over some DS106 examples of how a few of my daily creates were AI generated, and how many aspects of DS106’s topic of the semester being AI contradicted the entire essence of the class, as well as going over some other computer science examples of how AI is used in classes as a distraction to student learning.
While I cannot share these insights anymore with the limited time that I have remaining, I will go more in depth about the video and audio editing that I that made me jog my creative digital skills that I accumulated throughout the semester.
I used OBS to record myself going through a scripted sequence of searching on Reddit for advice and using ChatGPT to solve a LeetCode problem, which is just a practice website for coding interviews. I made sure that each click towards the next phase wasn’t too hasty, as I needed some time to overlay memes and audio clips to create the edit.
I then added this clip as the main background, and searched up various small videos and images that would add comedic effect to the story. A lot of the memes are from the mid 2010s, and the background music choice was also free music from Kevin Macleod that dominated YouTube for a long time.
The most difficult part about this was layering each clip and audio file to match the timing of each sequence. Also, having to track all of the different files in my arsenal became a bit of a hassle when the end product became almost 30 different files put together.
Most of the apps I used throughout the semester were used for this project. Without all of the experience I gained throughout DS106, this video probably wouldn’t have been possible.
I’m a little jumbled in the head right now from all of the stuff going on right now, but hopefully this was a comprehensive enough summary about my process. Looking forward to my conclusion to DS106 next week.
