Mad Libs Creature

Right now I am working on my newest project for my Structural Enrichment II class. We first had to create a mad libs for a creature that we are making. My mad libs is a follows:
Who am I?
Some would say that I have very gargantuan (size) fangs (features). I think that they only think that because my movements are clumsy (movement). The outside texture of my body hairy (texture) which leads some creatures to believe that I am stressed (personality), maybe it’s true. People think I taste like chicken because of my fuscia (color) skin but I am more of a creamy (taste) consistency. I have 6 (number) fangs (features) and ¾ of a claw (feature).

The assignment is: The above mad libs is giving you hints to your creature’s looks and personality. It is your job to breath life into this creature. I want you to create a creature with lots of personality. It could be a stuffed animal or a hand puppet. It is important that you capture all of the creatures traits listed above. Please feel free to add any attributes to your creature that you think are important. As always think about rich interesting textures and color combinations. This project has wonderful possibilities for working with movement and I encourage you to do so. Keep in mind that this is a three-dimensional work so all sides need to be finished and contribute to the success of the piece. This is a fantastic project to make your own embellishments!! Have fun.

Right now I am still trying to decide if I should make a puppet or a stuffed animal. My professor wants me to make a puppet to emphasize the fangs but I am having trouble figuring out how to actually construct a puppet. For some reason my mind doesn’t understand the construction of puppets. When I am finished with the project I’ll try to post a picture of it on my blog. We will also receive 15 extra credit points if we make our creature into a food to share with the class (the class consists of 7 students).

Double Top-Stitched

On Thursday we discussed The Moment of Complexity, Ch. 1: From Grid to Network by Mark C. Taylor. Taylor is trying to explain how society has gone from a grid format to a network format. He also explains the difference between chaos and complexity. To understand the change from grid to network we first need to understand chaos and complexity and then how these two concepts work in grids and networks.

Chaos is things blown up into unrecognizable forms. It is the butterfly effect of small changes producing effects not specific to their cause, it is chaotic. Complexity is self-organizing because it has more order than chaos. An example would be the formation of an ant hill. There are ants running around, pursuing their own path and direction, and then as they start to make connections with each other they come together. Eventually, together, they start to make the ant hill and a community. They are self-organized because through the connections they made with each other they were able to come together and achieve the same goal, make a home.

Furthermore, grids are like walls where networks are like webs. An example would be the “transition from the Cold War system to network culture.” The Cold war system was established to simplify “complex relations and situations in terms of a grid with clear and precise oppositions.” With this system the grid, with its structure, provided security. However, “grids offer no protection from spreading the web; as the webs grow, walls collapse and begin to change.” So as society changes and becomes more of a network culture the grid formats collapse, as this change accelerates, it brings “everything to the edge of chaos. This is the moment of complexity.” The moment of complexity is understood as “the shift from a world structured by grids to a world organized like networks.” It is the moment where “self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of relation.” To me this means that without the “moment of complexity” society can’t change from grid formats to network formats.

Rolled Hem

On Tuesday we discussed Understanding Media, Ch. 1: The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan. I had a difficult time understanding this reading because of McLuhan’s complexity in his thought process. However, through our class discussion I started to understand McLuhan’s argument. He states that “medium is the message.” To fully understand this statement we have to understand what he means by medium and what he means by message.

To begin with, if you think about a movie, what part of a movie do you think is the medium and what part the message? The medium would be the act of seeing the movie or becoming engaged in the movie. It could also be the film making process. I interpret it as everything that goes into making the movie, the speech, the acting, the special effects, etc. The message would then be what happens in the movie, the actual script. Another example to further understand medium and message is blogs. The medium of blogs is everything that blogs can do: upload pictures, u-tubes, writing in html, being able to write on a blog, etc. So the content, what you write in your blog is then the message.

I think that McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message” is validated with the examples I have listed above. Using the blog example, without the ability to write on a blog, upload pictures, etc, we wouldn’t be able to get our message across, the content. The message of a blog is what we write and without this ability, the medium, we can’t write our “message.” So, the medium is the message because without the medium we can’t have a message.

However, there is one example that he talks about that doesn’t have a message, the electric light. “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.” To explain this he goes on to say that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print and print is the content of the telegraph.” What he means is that the medium enables other things to happen so that is its content. You could argue, though, that the content of the electric light is what it is being used for like night baseball or surgery, however he says that “it could be argued that these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that ‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” I’m not convinced that the electric light has no message because everything can have a medium but not everything can have a message because the medium “shapes” the message. If the medium chooses not to “shape” a message, like the electric light, then there is no message.

Cording

Our original assignment for today’s blog was to do exercise #4 on pg. 22 in the book Writing About Cool by Jeff Rice. For the exercise we had to link all of our classes together that we are taking this semester through their readings and discussions. Since I only have one class with readings and discussion time (English 201) I chose to do a different exercise (with permission from my TA). The exercise that I am going to write about is #1 on pg. 12. It says “Construct a museum of cool Internet sites. By this, we don’t mean find sites you consider to exemplify ‘cool’, but rather construct an inventory of as many sites that you can find using cool in their title, content, or lists.”

Here are some websites that I found.

http://www.coolsiteoftheday.com/

http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/

http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool/

http://www.coolmath.com/

http://www.coolhunting.com/

http://www.coolarchive.com/

http://www.coolworks.com/

http://www.metacafe.com/tags/cool/

http://www.coolhomepages.com/

http://yucky.discovery.com/flash/

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/cool/

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/

http://www.thecoolhunter.net/

http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/bytopic/disasters/

http://www.hhmi.org/coolscience/

http://www.coolsavings.com/home.aspx?SessionID=d683be6a-e1f6-4232-a17b-7662a624b837

http://coolwallpaper.com/

http://www.ams.usda.gov/COOL/

http://www.adobe.com/special/products/audition/syntrillium.html

http://www.coollist.com/

http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu//

Flat-Felled Seam

On Thursday we discussed a reading titled “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog” by Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd. The reading discusses the different genres that weblogs have and why society is so interested in everyone’s lives. In the reading they say that in order to understand blogs as a “new genre” we first have to “understand the Kairos that makes this genre possible” and second how mediated voyeurism has played a role in the emergence of blogs as a genre.

Kairos is defined by Wikipeida as “the ‘right or opportune moment,’ ‘a time in between’, a moment of undetermined period of time in which "something" special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word.” It is also defined in rhetoric as "a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved." For blogs, Kairos means the opportunity for people to write or react at any moment, whenever it is convenient and to anticipate what people are going to say.

Mediated voyeurism played an important role in the emergence of blogs as a popular genre. Mediated voyeurism is looking at what is going on in other people’s lives. It has three parts that help define and explain it. The first is “the pursuit of ‘truth’ in an increasingly media-saturated world.” This explains that our society is focused on knowing the truth no matter how it is achieved and that knowing the “truth” is one of the most important things. I think that society is so intrigued by blogs because we think that if it is written in a blog then it must be true. We need a sense of reality and blogs makes this reality more “authentic.”

The second part of mediated voyeurism is “the desire for excitement.” An example would be watching an “amazing home video.” The excitement makes us feel that we were actually there. In that moment we “vicariously experience challenges that give meaning to life.” By reading people’s blogs, exciting as it is, we want to experience what the person in the blog experienced.

Finally mediated voyeurism is “the need for involvement, the desire to be part of the world around us, even though voyeurism by its very nature can provide only the illusion of involvement.” By creating your own blog and blog roll one has satisfied their “need for involvement.” Blogs have helped to satisfy one’s “need for involvement” by creating this community within the blog realm. A blog makes ordinary people feel like it is the National Enquirer. It is the idea of making “real” people “Celebrities.”

French Seam Finish

My previous experience with “academic” writing is pretty basic. Any time that I did writing for classes the topics were always on a book or an academic topic. For example, I took English 167 and every paper that we wrote for that class was about a book that we had just read, have it be explaining the symbols in the book or comparing and contrasting two different books. Although in high school writing was a little different. I had a writing class my junior year titled “College Writing.” We had a big research paper for the basis of the class and my topic was how the roman goddesses’ cults and the Roman Empire helped Christianity evolve. We could pick whatever topic we wanted (I’m Jewish by the way). I think the best part about the class was that it was intended to prepare us for writing in college. The class has in a way prepared me, for example I know how to write compare and contrast papers and research and write large research papers, but I haven’t really done a lot of writing while at college. I have taken English 100 and 167, but that’s about it. In the classes for my major we don’t write a lot. What we do is pick a topic and then portray it in a way that doesn’t involve writing, like through printing and dyeing or fabric manipulation and embroidery.

I think that media challenges the concept of academic in writing based on how people research topics, how they go about writing and how their writing is made available. How one researches a topic has changed from when I was in high school. In high school we weren’t allowed to use sources from the internet, they all had to come from books. Now people source almost anything, like Wikipedia. By having the internet more available and many people having their own computer we have changed the way we research topics. Even one of my professors today told me to start researching on the internet first before trying to start at the library.

I think that this way of researching could be good, but does have some consequences. By starting with the internet we can get information fast and easy and will most likely start to understand our topic more so when we go to the library we can start looking for more specific books or articles. However, sometimes by starting with the internet and not looking at scholarly websites we might get the wrong idea for our topic or obtain false information.

Learning how to create a web page is an example of how we write academically has changed. In this class we will learn just that. I think that this is a great benefit of how new media has changed the standard “academic” writing. I may not write a 20 page research paper once I graduate but I will definitely use the skills of making a web page. For certain people knowing how to write a research paper will help them in their career, but for me personally I most likely will not use those skills.

“Academic” writing used to be available to professors, TAs or teachers and the public if it was published but now it could be available to anyone. This class is a great example. All of the “academic” writing that we are doing for this class is made available to anyone who would like to read it by posting it on our blogs. I think that this is also a benefit because I seem to be able to write. Writing, for me, has always been hard, difficult and stressful. By having a blog to post all of my class work on has created this aura of ease. The blog makes writing seem less strict and freer. When we write a post we can write more casually but it still needs to have the academic touch. Writing this way creates less stress, which I think is good because writing shouldn’t be stressful. I think that it is a benefit that “academic” writing has changed with the new media, but we just need to be careful to not take it too far.

Serging

What does Writing Mean?

Mock French

In class on Thursday we read an article about Middlebury College banning students from citing Wikipedia as a source in papers. The article goes on to explain that the web site is not a great source when writing a paper because there could be and are errors in the research. Sandra Ordonez says that “there is no guarantee an article is 100 percent correct” but thinks that it is a good starting point when researching. I agree with this because you have to start research somewhere, even if it isn’t a source one will use when actually writing a paper and the website does supply good starting information. Also, the website does have a bibliography for each topic, which is a great resource because then one can look at the sources the writer of the website used to further their research and may even find great primary or secondary sources. So, I agree with Middlebury college in banning the use of Wikipedia as a source when writing a paper, but I think that it shouldn’t be completely disregarded.

Another thing that I was puzzled by when reading this article was that college students in the history department thought that it was fine to site an encyclopedia in a paper. I was taught to not do that in high school so I was a little confused as to why college students thought that it was ok. Which brings me to another point, Middlebury didn’t specify what the punishment was going to be if a student violated this rule of not citing Wikipedia in papers. I think that when the college presents this topic to the students or receives another paper with Wikipedia cited, the faculty should educate the students on why Wikipedia isn’t a good source to use and why there could be false information, instead of punishing the students on the first offense. Perhaps picking a Wikipedia site and showing by example the error that are found would help educate students on the discrepancies. Through education, instead of punishment, students will learn proper research procedures.

Additionally, we read another article by Lester L. Faigley titled Rhetorics Fast and Slow. This article explained the difference between fast and slow rhetorics. For example, text messaging is a fast rhetoric, while a slow rhetoric would be writing multiple drafts of a paper until you have the final draft. I think that Faigley would say Wikipedia is a fast rhetoric and would agree that if Middlebury wants to ban the use of citing Wikipedia than the faculty should educate the students first because he thinks that “the fate of future generations will depend on how well the students we teach can use slow rhetoric.” This is another example of how students need to be taught how to research in a scholarly manner.