I am usually a little bad about procrastination in my schoolwork. I always think it won’t be so bad, I can deal with it the evening of and make it out just fine. I would be lying to say that I didn’t feel a little pressed for evening this time around. Every time I looked at the Week 2 to do list it seemed to get longer somehow? I’ve definitely learned my lesson as I rapidly type out the assignments I’ve simmered on this week and the ones I discovered more recently.
Using Dr. Oblivion was definitely my main savior this week. As an honor council member and someone that is generally concerned about the environment, I have weird and more negative feelings about using AI, but it was very helpful to receive feedback so quickly that I could immediately implement into my work.
Creating two assignments was really fun. In retrospect, I did not really connect the second one to tech noir or cyberpunk. But you live and you learn and you fix those mistakes next time. I feel like I’ve really gotten a better idea of what this class will look like and how I can benefit from it. I think in college most people go through a constant circle of learning curves, I can only hope that I will grow from them.
For time’s sake (a mistake I will fix in the future), I regrettably cannot go into good detail about every assignment I worked on, but I will list the ones I did and share about one or two sentences.
Day 1: Show us your secret spy weapon. I didn’t think taking a picture of my prescription of Zoloft would be something to post on the internet, so you can use your imagination here.
Day 2: Make some kind of art about unexpected coincidences. I drew two people connected by a red line with a bow in the middle.
Day 3: Make bad art. This was difficult. I drew a photo of a house on a hill. As the prompt assigns, it wasn’t very good.
Day 4: Your Longest / Tallest Shadow Selfie. My longest shadow was on Thursday, around 5pm, pretty soon before the sun set, taken as I walked to the UC for dinner.
Day 5: Emoji Poem
Here is the poem:
I really feel that needs no explanation.
In retrospect, I ought to have posted my replies on the Mastodon page, but I got nervous and distracted and did not.
Talk about a week where my brain felt fully juiced! Getting started with The Daily Creates was certainly difficult at first, especially having to be okay with creating art that wasn’t polished due to the time constraints. However, I found myself beginning to look forward to seeing what kinds of new things I would be asked to make each day. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t still have trouble with TDC, though!
Along the same lines, I had a ton of fun creating my course character. I’m interested to see how our work with our characters will continue throughout the rest of the semester, as well as how they’ll interact with the class. The writing process was tough at first, but I got a lot of inspiration from a character name generator. It spit out “Bethany Smith (Smithy),” and I just had to make my character a good girl by day/mob boss by night with that kind of name! Being able to create a collage to further create a 3D person was quite fun as well! I haven’t done “creative writing” in years, so this was a welcome break from typical writing expectations.
I enjoyed my interactions with Dr. Oblivion, too. I find him a little unnerving, but I could say that about all AI! I think his voice adds another level to his persona, and I like being able to feed him prompts.
Looking back on this week, I know better how to manage my time in this class going forward. I think the first week of the semester spoiled me, and the workload this week surprised me. I also need to get in the habit of commenting on others’ posts, as I don’t feel like I did enough of that this week.
In addition to the two Wikipedia articles, I decided to read Joseph Hurtgen’s article Sci-fi Noir: The Terminator and Tech Noir | 10 Updates to Film Noir. I’ve seen The Terminator before, but I can’t say that I remember much of the movie besides the major beats and iconic moments.
I think the part in section 2 where Hurtgen discusses the lack of trust in the police force was interesting, especially as many people currently are unable to trust or rely on the police. I think it is somewhat ironic that a crucial aspect of a genre that portrays an “unwanted” or “dystopian” future shares such direct similarities to our present society.
“Consider also that the police are not who you can turn to in The Terminator and you have pretty well laid out this aspect of the noir. If you can’t turn to those who are supposed to serve and protect you, who can you turn to? Who can you trust?” – Joseph Hurtgen
I watched an episode of Black Mirror to satisfy the watching of technoir media, and I enjoyed it! I think the episode I watched felt less blatantly “sci-fi” than what I’ve heard of other parts of the series, which I appreciated as I’m not always the biggest fan of that genre. Maybe that won’t bode well for me in this class, but I might not like the genre just because I’m unfamiliar with it.
I also had my intro meeting this week, and I’m looking forward to the class! I’m excited to dig in to assignments and see what different applications are involved in this class. Overall I didn’t have much frustration this week, especially since I’m familiar with DoOO/Wordpress.
Hello, and welcome to my blog. In all honesty, this is the most technologically advanced thing I’ve ever done. When I was younger, I wanted to have a blog, but my mom wouldn’t let me. Similar to Ryan and Creed, from The Office, my mom allowed me to share my thoughts on a Word document. I guess the world was not prepared for whatever I had to say.
(Me, 2007) What would she have had to say?
Beginning this class was definitely anxiety inducing for me, as I have little-to-no experience in terms of anything related to tech. Maybe in my younger years, I’ve changed the color of a Tumblr blog or figured out how to use Minecraft, but those days are not representative of my current skill set.
I was able to guide myself through creating this website; however, pretty much immediately I hit a wall: I realized I had no idea how to edit the website or even access WordPress. I ended up booking an appointment with the Digital Knowledge Center. I met with one of the students working there named Feli. They were very helpful and I was able to give my blog a little theme which was very exciting! This was very helpful for getting started and learning the ropes. I do not have a crystal ball, but I see many DKC appointments for this class in my future.
(The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
I feel much less nervous and much more prepared for the class after that visit. I am now excited and intrigued for what the rest of the class will look like. I’m still waiting for the aha! moment for the name of my blog title, only time will tell, I guess.
I decided to watch Black Mirror (S3E4, San Junipero) for my Tech Noir media choice. I really enjoyed this episode and connected with some of the considerations about eternal life and whether or not to upload one’s consciousness into a cloud (side note: I probably wouldn’t). It was very beautiful and I really appreciated the LGBTQ+ representation.
I’m kind of running out of things to talk about, so this is where I will end it. I feel really good about this so far and hopefully I will continue using my resources and find a sense of confidence within this sphere.
This class has been very fun. I have enjoyed being able to do research into the digital world. Going to the Digital Knowledge Center has been fun to do to learn more about the digital world. I will look to continue learning more as I feel there is still so much to learn. I liked how we we able to do an assignment like this as I was able to get more creative opposed to a boring test.
So, for my final post, it took me all week to decide what to do. I could do it or I could do it as Kevin, but how would I do that if he was being attacked by AT in his last video? So, I decided to do two things to answer the prompts. A fun thing with Kevin and a real thing with me. So, the first thing I did was make a video with “Kevin” and his new opinion on AT after their last encounter. Here is the last encounter and see below for the new opinion.
And to answer the two questions:
What is the best thing you saw in the course? Explain why it was good.
What was the best thing you made in the course? Explain what you got out of making it.
For these I made a free form audio clip of myself just speaking my mind. Listen below.
Again, I had a really great time in this class, and I hope it keeps going like this. This is a must-have class experience and i am going to recommend it to everyone. Here is my final review/thoughts on the course if you want super details, but as the post says, the juice is worth the squeeze.
We have finals and then summer break. It is going to feel so weird not having projects and deadlines for a few months. I tried to watch and comment on my classmates’ final video projects and the AT conference posts. I still have a few I really want to see.
I did a quick last post. It is sad having it all be over. I know I am free to continue as I please, but it still won’t be the same. I plan to keep my blog. I put a lot of thought into the name and the layout. It is mine now. I look forward to keeping it going. I will probably move over to posting on the main site instead of the ds106 sub domain unless it is a daily create.
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.
One of our headlines in the AI takeover final project is “AI-Powered Healthcare Innovations Transform Patient Care”. On Tuesday evening, I created a poster of nurse robots in a hospital and wrote about it https://gretahammen.com/ds106/progress-report-fp/.
Each of us in the group contributed by individually making videos and posters that would fit together like a puzzle at the end. We communicated on Discord and after completing any steps, we updated the Google doc for our final project.
It’s Friday and the final project is complete https://gretahammen.com/ds106/final-project-%f0%9f%8e%a5/. I appreciate this group and all that was done for the final. So far, it has been the most responsible group at UMW, that I have been in. My memory is strong and I will always remember this experience.
Hello, and welcome to my blog. In all honesty, this is the most technologically advanced thing I’ve ever done. When I was younger, I wanted to have a blog, but my mom wouldn’t let me. Similar to Ryan and Creed, from The Office, my mom allowed me to share my thoughts on a Word document. I guess the world was not prepared for whatever I had to say.
