Thursday, May 31, 2007

Do I have to explain myself?

After being away from the blog for so long, I wonder--did anybody miss it / me? Do I have to explain myself? Apologize? Naaah. Summer is here, high tide for blogging, so I might just start gettin' a little busy.

Just read/ watched Daniel Anderson's "Prosumer" multimedia piece from Kairos--very humbling he does such fine work, technically and intellectually. Heard him speak at C&W too; wow, great stuff. Don't know why I haven't sought out his work before now.

The idea that I wanted to record was his segment about getting students to work with still images from film as part of their literary analysis class. Made me think about the rhetorical analysis assignment I want to re-vamp this coming fall semester; I was planning to get students to do some screen capturing as part of their analysis in order to increase the visual literacy component of the assignment, but Anderson's piece made me realize that if the thing being analyzed (a segment from MTV Think) also included a video of some sort, doing a screen capture of a still would be a great addition. He mentioned quickly that he showed students how to capture a video from the web and then work with it in iMovie or another video editing program; that is a powerful little skill that untir recently had escaped me, so I might consider working that into the project as well, or maybe adding that into the commentary follow-up assignment.

Okay, there it is, back in the blogosphere, looking forward to a summer of brain flatulence. But no more than 10 minutes a day!