Ah Creativity

For starters, I am absolutely loving these Ted talks! I’ve seen a couple before, but never as an assignment for a class. They are such a wonderful example of what I believe this entire class to be about: using digital mediums to influence people and ideas. Also, from the Education Revolution talk, 53 different language translations were supported on the video player. 53! That’s a huge number when it comes to languages. So many people are hearing about these ideas put out by Ted talks. To me, that’s super awesome and a little bit world-shrinking at the same time.

Education Revolution

This video was my favorite thing from this week. He had so many interesting things to say that were truly awesome. I’m a lover of good quotes and this guy sure had quite a few to add to my ever-growing 15 page word document of quotes. When Robinson said, “We don’t need evolution of education, we need revolution”, I was instantly intrigued. He then went further into how education shouldn’t be mechanized. People need to be allowed to release their creative sides and not stick strictly to conformity of society. While this is true so we don’t have a homogenous society, I think this could cause some problems. I don’t think we need to go all Hitler Nazi with conformity, but I do think that standardized education is necessary. It makes sure that we each know basic things about our world and immediate environments. If we just let everyone do whatever they wanted in being “creative”, we would have world chaos. This is where I think arts in schools are super important. However, I’m not a teacher and don’t plan on becoming one, so I may have this all wrong.

Seeing the Text

The next thing that I really enjoyed was the Bernhardt essay. One of the very first things that the author said got me thinking before I could even move on to the next sentence. He wrote, “…writing heightens awareness of categories and divisions, changing the ways people conceive classificatory relations.” This definitely related back to the Education Revolution video for me in the sense of creativity. Writing is truly an art. It can be used to spark interest, opinion, influence thought, perceive beauty, and so many other things. A skilled writer must know the audience and, generally speaking, how they will respond to their writing. Bernhardt went into 4 laws of gestalt that really seemed to make sense to be in any sort of writing, whether I’m the writer or the reader. Writing has to be formulaic, and a good writer will see where it’s going and what it will be doing. That is basically how I translated the author’s points.

The Thomas Goetz video and the Godin videos were also equally amazing. Everything that we’ve read for this week have certainly related back to creativity. This theme has been really fun to explore and all of our readings and videos have been awesome. I’m really excited to go through these discussions and blogs with all of you for this week!

critical photo essay proposal

So, I was unaware that we had this due tonight and I haven't really looked into what I will be doing research on. I do know that I want to develop a website for it and it will be fabulous.

I've really been interested in the evolution of ITexts and the historical implications and processes of writing in general. I know that these are both very broad subjects, but both have definitely sparked my interest throughout our discussions. If anyone has any suggestions on these topics, I would love some input.

Until then, I will probably be updating this soon when I think on what my question will be.

Ciao!

Pencils, Pixels, and Perplexities

Pencils to Pixels was my favorite and most influential reading for this week. I really like reading about things in a historical context and this reading did not disappoint. While reading this, I was really struck with how at first, technology was only for the elite. Just like writing! Writing and literature were once reserved specifically for the elite because they had the most access to it. I liked how the author moved through writing as a technological advancement. He literally went from pencils to pixels. This Baron text was really cool to me and actually made me nerd out a little bit when I realized just how intrigued I was by it.  

The Michael Wesch video and blog were totally fascinating to me. I love when people use visual anthropology in an influential way. While this video was fascinating, it kind of made me sad because I could really relate to many things that the students held up on their pieces of paper, especially the one about buying a hundred dollar textbook and never opening it once. In my opinion, technology can be good or it can be bad. Technology is good in the way that it can connect us to the world and information that people could have never even imagined 10 years ago. However, it can be bad because it can consume our time. However, I don’t think technology should be eliminated, especially in schools. In college, we each as students are responsible for controlling our actions. If we choose to spend an entire class period on Facebook instead of listening to a professor’s lecture, that’s our own choice. It takes responsibility to be able to use technology wisely, and frankly, not many people have sense of responsibility.

I have to say it; most of these texts for this week were entirely over my head. I never have had the “technology brain” like my sister does. With this material, I am really really trying to understand it. It’s just a struggle. The ITexts concept is really what threw me for a loop. How is this any different than just standard email communication? I will be watching blogs for someone to hopefully clear up some of my confusion on this text. :)

Video Introduction Success!!!

After many hours of struggling with the internet and technology winning, I have finally conquered! Please excuse all of the the "yeah's" and "um's" in this video. I'm not used to being in front of a camera or even talking that much around people at all. So, I'm learning :)

Video Introduction?

Ok, I've been struggling with this for 6 hours now. Yeah, I'm not even joking, it's been awhile. I can't seem to get a video uploaded on here! How is everyone else doing theirs?

Rhetoric?

First of all, Eric Whitacre is the man! That was so cool! I’ve never seen anything like that. Yet again, TED talks find a way to absolutely blow my mind. I was very pleased with those videos.

I have never studied rhetoric to this extent before, so all of these readings have been both a great challenge and a great reward at the same time. Many of the questions that I had while reading Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents were actually answered within the text. I love reading things like this that don’t send me on a wild goose chase for the answers to the questions! In the beginning, I originally thought that we, the rhetors were actually the audience. I soon learned that the audience of a rhetorical situation is meant to be influence and the rhetors are the analyzers. I also wondered why the author portrayed constraints as being bad. But then, it was mentioned that there are both positive and negative constraints that tend to “lead the audience to be either more or less sympathetic to the discourse”.

An Introduction to Rhetoric was definitely the text that I understood and gleaned from the most. The most interesting concept that I noticed was the concept of potentially active texts. These are the types of texts that the rhetor intends to do something with. It is meant to inspire and spark a change of some sort. It seemed to be a way of intentional persuasion. These active texts can also be used to change the actual audience itself. Active texts seem to me to be the easiest form of trying to accomplish a certain goal with writing. I feel like Eric Whitacre is a fine example of active rhetoric. Through his call for singers on YouTube, he was able to influence a very specific group of people (the musically inclined) in participating in a huge project that was his “brain child” of sorts. He used rhetoric and media to make this possible and it turned out to be a huge success for him.    

The reading section on intertexuality was definitely the most difficult for me to follow. After about an hour of my brain literally writhing in pain because of the complexity of this, what I got out of the intextuality reading is that authorship is incredibly important in relation to the audience, relating texts to each other are crucial to understanding them, and intertext constrains the writing. These were the main points I got, but I didn’t realize why this text was even necessary or important at all. Aren’t these all things that we have been learning since high school? This text and intertexuality definitely stumped me on its purpose for sure.

Introduction

Well hello there!


My name is Molly and I am a Junior double majoring in Anthropology and English Writing. Here's some things about me: I love basically anything outdoors: climbing, hiking, camping, biking, and any other -ing words you can think of in relation to outdoor activities. I love languages! Being fluent in 4, I have seen a lot of the world and talked to a lot of people. Traveling is my life. My faith in God is very important in my life, I love music, I have a fascination for laughter and smiles, and I've been bit by a rattlesnake. I am also convinced that the cure for human absurdity is humor, rather than art.


As you may have noticed, the title of this blog is not in English. Passami il panino is actually Italian for "pass me the sandwich." I'm terrible at naming things, so this was the most recent thing my roommate said to me this afternoon. I wanted an incredibly witty and awesome title, but that didn't happen, so there ya go!


I will be seeing you all around and I am very excited to get to learn about each of you!


Until then,


peace and blessings ya'll, peace and blessings