Project Progress sort of

I will admit that I'm very disappointed in myself this week. I had plans of getting plenty of work done on this project but then other school projects and then terrible weather for my drive home for Thanksgiving and rainy weather for my drive back up to school made it so I didn't get what I wanted done. I know those aren't very good excuses but they are the truth.

As far as the project, I still think it's mapped out and I've had several ideas during the week that I wrote down. I feel as though now I just need to transfer those to the Wix and I will have a solid project. As far as questions, I guess I was wondering if there was a certain amount of videos or pictures we needed in our final project? And whether we even need a video in the project.

More Project Progress

With the end of the semester and the holidays approaching, the workload is becoming very heavy. The best thing I did for this project was to take care of projects for some of my other classes. Now I only have this project and one other paper to worry about so I can devote more time to this project than I have been.

That being said, I did find several pictures and videos that fit in nicely with my theme of smoking and addiction. I was surprised when I saw some of the videos. I didn't think I'd find any, but the links we talked about in class were helpful. The only problem is that a lot of the videos are quite long. A lot longer than I wanted. If I have videos in my project, I want 30 seconds at the most. So I guess if I had a question, it'd be how to shorten videos? Or if it's too complicated, I can definitely find pictures that will do the trick.

Project Progress

I met with Dr. Kilborn on Friday and the meeting was very helpful in kickstarting this project for me. She approved the project and gave me even more ideas to build upon. I used the weekend to search the internet for images involving smoking, specifically celebrities who do it. It really surprised me how many pictures there are of Jonny Depp and Robert Pattinson smoking cigarettes, and most of the pictures aren't like the gross anti smoking advertisements you see on television, but instead they are in almost sexy poses. It makes smoking look cool not gross.

I haven't encountered any questions just yet but I'm sure I will when I get farther into the project. I've never used Wix before so I'm sure some questions will pop up when I start trying to mess around on there. Right now though everything seems okay.

Final Project Ideas

For my final project I want to use a piece that I wrote for my nonfiction class called "Thumbprint." I describe my addiction to sucking my thumb when I was a little boy and the process my parents had trying to get me to quit. It's going to be kind of tough because it is five pages but they are double spaced which makes it basically 2 and a half pages.

I want to try and make a Wix for my project. I liked the Prezi but the fact that I could only use that on Mac computer's made it so I didn't want to do it. Wix is accessible on the Internet so it doesn't quite matter where I am when I do it. I want to tie in the theme of addiction, which is what I was trying to emphasize in writing this project. I was addicted to sucking my thumb, I couldn't stop. It also was a sort of childhood thing and the fact that quitting was kind of like growing up. A sort of right of a passage for me.

Technology Literacy Narrative Prewriting

I'm not sure when we first got a computer, but for as long as I remember, we've had a computer in our house. My favorite activity on the computer as a young kid was playing games. I'd play the latest hockey game for hours, sometimes with my brother, but mostly by myself because I didn't like it when he beat me and he always beat me. My mother didn't want my brain to go to mesh, though, so she also participated in some activities with me using our computer. She would open Microsoft Word or whatever the word processing program before that was, and we would type up the names of all of my favorite hockey players, trying to spell their names correctly. Even though this was a kind of schoolwork, I loved doing it because it involved hockey and I liked seeing the players' names pop up on the computer screen.

The three technologies that I carry with me all the time are my phone, my ipod and my laptop. None of the three are very fancy or advanced form of their technologies. I had the same cell phone from sophomore year of high school all the way up til my sophomore year of college before I finally got a phone with a keyboard. I've also had my ipod for years and years and haven't had any interest in upgrading. I got my laptop at the beginning of college four years ago and it's held up for me pretty well. I also have the basic in video gaming technology in the very outdated PS2, which has lasted me over ten years. I really don't have a "technology wishlist", although every time I see a commercial with a touch phone or an ipod touch, it makes my mouth water a little, but with how I treat my phones in terms of dropping and losing them, I don't feel as if an iphone would last very long in my possession.

I remember my first encounter with a cell phone. It's kind of funny because I never really wanted one. In high school, a lot of other people were getting them but I never really gave in to the peer pressure. "Who am I going to call that I can't just call their home?" I always thought. The pressure I had to give in to was from my mother. She basically forced a cell phone on me because she wanted me to use it for keeping in touch with her and telling her when I needed to be picked up from school. After a while, I did discover texting however, and that made my phone a lot more fun than I first thought.

Maybe this is just because I haven't had a lot of practice on them and that I've grown up using PCs, but Mac computer's give me a lot of frustration. The fact that there is only one button on the mouse always drives me crazy. When I'm typing something in Microsoft Word, I try to right click to see if the word the computer underlined in red is really spelled wrong but i can't get it because the mouse doesn't have a right click option. The minimize and maximize buttons always used to give me fits as well until I finally realized which was which and burnt that into my memory.

I'd still consider myself now as an amateur in terms of computer literacy. In the prewriting questions there are a lot of options for this question and I'm embarrassed to say that I only know what one of them is. I do spend a lot of time on my computer but it's mostly just on Facebook or other Internet sites such as ESPN and CNN and the St. Cloud State site. I don't really play games online and I don't have my own website. This class was the first time I uploaded a video onto Youtube and I've never heard of a wiki or a standalone computer. In terms of my computer literacy, I know what I like and how to do that, but things I don't like or have never experienced, I don't know how to do.

I'd definitely fall under the category of a late adopter in terms of technology. I still have a PS2, which at the time I bought it might have made me an early adopter, but the fact that I haven't updated in ten plus years doesn't help my cause. Having the same phone for as long as I had definitely made me a late adopter in terms of the flip or the keyboard phones. The fact that I still don't have a phone with a touch screen or Internet access makes me a late adopter of technology. Like I said before, I find things that I like and that I get comfortable using and then I don't feel I have any reason to change unless I get one as a present or my piece of technology breaks. I've had incredible luck with my pieces of technology (knock on wood) that none of them have really broken and I haven't been forced to upgrade.

Texting has actually had a pretty good effect on some of my relationships. It really helps a shy guy like me express myself in ways that I might not be able to in person. I got to know my girlfriend mostly through emails, Facebook and texting. We lived in different places and so over the summer, we'd send lots of texts to each other and that really helped us bond and get to know each other. I know there are plenty of drawbacks to texting, including the fact that it's impossible to tell if someone is being sarcastic or if they are angry at you, but in my life it's been a great tool to help build relationships.

My literarcy narrative video

I chose these topics to speak about in my video because they were important to my development as not only a writer and a student but also a person. I talk about my writing assignments in fifth grade and how they taught me to show my work to an audience and how rewarding that can be instead of just keeping it selfishly to myself. I also talk about my playwriting once I got to college and how I enjoyed that, especially with the audience watching me. Both of these situations gave me confidence in the classroom as well as outside the classroom as a person.

The process of doing this assignment was really difficult and frustrating. Rick and I recorded our videos and that wasn't very difficult but getting them onto the computer didn't work very well. We spent two and a half hours waiting for it to upload on either the MAC or PC computers but they kept saying the files were too large. Finally, after emailing Dr. Kilborn I uploaded the video onto Youtube and that made it easier. Overall, though, it wasn't tough thinking of what to say in the video and it wasn't tough to make the video long enough. I was nervous talking in front of the camera but the fact that there were only two of us in the room made it easier.

Literacy Narrative Prewriting

I've had a few significant writing experiences in my lifetime and those experiences have led me to where I am in my schooling today. I remember as soon as we got a laptop computer at home and my mom let me use it, I would sit on there and type little stories. Most of the stories would revolve around myself as the main character, an attractive girl as my love interest, and me being the hero, usually with sports. I would score the game winning goal even after I got knocked unconscious five minutes before Mighty Ducks style by the big and ugly thug on the other team. I always wrote for myself. If I shared my stories with anyone else, they would have been bored and not as impressed as I was. I was impressed everytime I'd hit a page milestone. Ten pages! Horay! Twenty...thirty...fourty...fifty. Looking back, my longest one is almost 200. A bunch of poorly worded sentences with bad grammar and incomplete ideas that only I have seen. And that's how I like it. I wrote those stories for myself because they were fun and because it kept me entertained. It gave me a sense of accomplishment to see all of the pages piling up at the end.

Another exciting writing experience I had was in fifth grade with Mrs. Smith. She was going through a rough divorce outside of the classroom but that crept in to the classroom and really effected her teaching. She didn't do much and didn't teach us a lot, but the best thing she did was open us up to the writing process. She allowed us to create stories, starting from the brainstorming to the rough draft all the way to the Final Draft which we read in front of the class. I remember sitting in class, the blood rushing through my body as I waited for my turn to read my clever bit of prose in front of the class. Again, the stories centered around myself as the main character, but she gave us different situations to do so I couldn't always be the sports star I wanted. Since it was boring hearing everyone else's story, I brought my unique sense of humor into my stories and really entertained the class. I'm not sure if this is how it happened but in my mind, everyone was on the edge of their seats to hear my witty banter between dialogue and clever description of a bunny being blue instead of white.

My most significant milestone as a writer came about last semester when I took my second playwriting class here at St. Cloud State. I really took a liking to playwriting after the first semester and so I kept going with it and even wrote plays in my freetime. First of all, the first milestone I over came was my shyness as a writer. In fifth grade when the stories were all for fun, I wasn't afraid of sharing them with everyone. But as I became more of a serious writer in college, I was very scared to open up my work to others. It's a vulnerable thing and for a shy kid who doesn't take criticism too well, it could cause some problems. But in playwriting, we had to share our work with the class and I did it. But the biggest milestone I accomplished as a writer was after playwriting class, when my professor told me to enter some of my plays in a competition. This scared the heck out of me. THe thought of sharing my work with a panel of judges made me hyperventilate. But after a long time thinking about it and a lot of editing, I finally made the decision to submit the play. I'm sure the judges reading my play laughed their heads off at how awful it was but that doesn't matter. The point is that I sucked it up and submitted my play to the competition and I've been very proud of that milestone.

My life as a reader has always been effected by one outside element: My family. I often times feel out of place in my family because my dad got his doctorate in geography only to become bored and go to medical school and get his P.H.D. My mother also got a doctorate in geography and my brother skipped fourth grade and probably could have skipped all the way up to high school if the social skills had been anywhere near his IQ. And then there was me. Normal old Tim who was nice and liked sports but wasn't nearly as smart. But my parents loved to read and they loved to read in their free time! Same with my brother. He would stay up late and finish a book in one night! I always felt guilty when they would talk about books they read and I didn't have anything to add to the conversation. So, I started reading novels and mysteries just to be able to contribute something to the conversation. Once I started reading, however, I had to read more so that I could keep up with them and one up them. I started writing for myself but I started reading for my parents and my family so I could fit in better and appear as though I wasn't adopted!