I’ve been using an iPad for several semesters, mainly as an individual, personal organization tool that keeps my notes and research for many classes all in one place… but thanks to the visit from the Apple people I have a new appreciation for the iPad, specifically as a collaborative tool, by using the app called BaiBoard:
We experimented with this app a bit in class and it facilitates interactive brainstorming and creative dialogue. I’d like to experiment with this app for some group projects in the near future to confirm my intuition that this can be a effective tool for improving effectivity in group projects and team work. There doesn’t seem to be that much of a learning curve in terms of the features that the app offers.
For #CDT450 I tweeted this article about Martese Johnson – he was brutally beaten up by police in front of a bar near the campus of the University of Virginia, where he is an honor student.
Part of the title to the article in the Daily Beast asks: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? The article addresses issues of prejudice, racism, and the unproportionately high levels of violence that are unleashed on African Americans by police officers. Hopefully, we are becomeing more aware of this systemic injustice thanks to people using social media to get the word out and create an infuriated buzz about it.
What does this have to do with how Twitter can shape my identity? The first thing that comes to mind is that my choice of tweets says something about who I am. Why do I want people to know this story? Why is it important to me? I tweeted this article after reading Cole’s post about how UVA students reacted to this act of brutality, and it reminded me that we need more dialogue about race relations on college campuses in America. We have an excellent opportunity at Stony Brook to open up discussions about race because we have such a diverse community here. Hopefully Twitter, FB, Yammer, blogs, and other social media tools can be useful to help start conversations and to create opportunities for people from different ethnicities and backgrounds to get together and get to know each other and improve race relations through social interaction – online and face to face. #Integreat
Twitter can have a huge effect on shaping our identities. I believe that everyone has many selves and one of them is how we act on social media. People are usually either much more open on social media or much more reserved. For me, I used to be a lot more open and probably a little too open on Twitter to be completely honest. I would tweet almost every single thought I had, regardless of how appropriate it was. I think people are usually more open on Twitter than they should be. For me, Twitter was a way to say things that I usually was too shy or reserved to say out loud. I ended up getting into some trouble for my tweets, which is why I was apprehensive to even make a twitter again for class. Your identity is determined on Twitter by who you interact with, what you say, and how you say it in such a small amount of available characters. Your identity is also defined by whether or not you are an anonymous account, the topics that you tweets about, your follower/following ratio, and if you only interact with friends/people you know IRL, or you reach out to tweeters that you have never met.
I learned a lot of interesting things about the iPad that I didn’t even know were capable of doing with only a tablet. We used a few different apps to create interactive presentations. We used BaiBoard to have a shared whiteboard space where you can add text, writing, clip art, send and receive messages and even have a live voice conference. We also used Keynote to create Powerpoint-like presentations. We used interactive links to link photos and texts to other parts of the presentation or links to the web. What we learned in class from the Apple team definitely altered my appreciation for the iPad. I’m much more aware now of all the things I can do with just an iPad, much more than I previously believed it was capable of. I thought the idea of creating an iTunes U class with all the necessary applications and pdfs that we need for class was a really interesting idea and I’d like to make my own for fun or even for a future project. I loved that we just downloaded the iTunes U package and it automatically downloaded all the Apple Apps we needed in one place.
A couple of weeks ago when Apple came to visit our class, I was very excited to really jump into creating content on the iPad. I was disappointed, however, when much of the class was spent on “lecturing” about identity. I was personally taken aback by this as I must have been confused about the reason of their actual visit. It was occasionally disconcerting because of the inevitable Apple advertising.
Eventually we did get into creating some content–that being said, we did not do much creating, ourselves. For me, the most beneficial part of this presentation was the discussion about Keynote. I was surprised at how “perfected” this PowerPoint app really was. I was especially impressed at its ability to create a mock app. As a hyperlink-driven application, I see Keynote acting more as an interactive presentation rather than one say, for an actual keynote or other address. Another app that I would be curious to look at more for actual presentations is Quip. The representatives from Apple did not do a full walk-through, but did mention that it was a very effective app. I hope to eventually explore this one further.
Over all, the effectiveness of Keynote harkens that the iPad be considered further in terms of using it in education. I appreciate the fact that students can create an accessible overview of a project while on the go.
Technically Yours,
R.
P.S. Why yes, yes I did use the word “harkens,” and although Google does not accept it as a modern word and insisted on underlining it with that nasty, squiggly red line, it is the perfect word as it can be read into further.
About two weeks ago Apple came to visit our humble class. Here is a short summary of what I learned.
Keynote
If you are anything like me you grew up using Microsoft Word and its cousins Excel and PowerPoint. While Keynote cannot replace word or Excel, it does a whole lot more for you than PowerPoint ever could. Adding links to your presentation and accessing links is both easy and smooth. Creating a dynamic and professional presentation is all at your finger tips. You can even use Keynote to design a UI for apps or make a mock Web page. You can do what you want but if there is ever an option between Keynote and PowerPoint, I’m picking Keynote.
Quip
Quip is an app our visitors asked us to use. I did not fall in love with it, but other people seemed to like. Quip made it easier for us to follow along with the lesson plan Apple had for us. Perhaps I need more experience with it to truly appreciate what the app can do.
GarageBand
GarageBand on the iPad is very easy to use. I can see myself spending countless hours making a song for a video using the drum pad interface. I also never realized how easy it was to include a song made on GarageBand in a movie or trailer made in iMovie. In my future YouTube videos I’ll be sure to check out GarageBand before searching the Web for royalty free music.
There were other great apps Apple showed us but these are the free that stood out to me. If you have an iOS device give Keynote a try, make a song in GarageBand, make use of Quip. There are so many tutorials online!
I’ve learned a whole lot about Apple’s native apps. I suggest you check them out. For more on my reaction to Apple’s visit to CDT 450 two weeks ago, check out my weekly iPad Reflection here.
Using the iPad to create this was an over all positive experience. I shot the footage using the native photo app as well as iMovie and a short segment using the “stop motion” app. I made slides using the Phoster app and compiled it in iMovie and added some of the stock music as well as voice recording done in the app. As someone who works with video editing and animation frequently I found several pros and con
pros-
-basic video capture and organization of the iMovie is good for general use. Cutting video was simple. When I think back to classes I’ve taken, I could see this being used to support assignments in most subjects.
-easy to import video and photos from other apps
-sound is decient and easy to record. I liked that I could have several tracks and though it took me a moment, they were simple to move around.
– being able to crop the image and videos
-uploading I will put under pros but at first it was not so simple. In order to up load to YouTube I had to Chang my settings in my YouTube account to allow interaction with “less secure” apps. Though this took some time to figure out and get past it constantly asking me to sign in I know I will not have this issue again and things will go smoothly.
cons
– as someone who works with video editing I wish there were more features such as better filters and lighting adjustments to make it look more professional. I would have liked more control over the text and title features since there was no ability to move them on the screen and change other aspects including the timing and duration of their appearance So I could have had a text overlay/captions. I would have liked more control over the transitions and audio transitions. I also wish it was possible to change how much a video is cropped over time- zoom in and out.
Over all though I think it’s a great app and it can be limited only by a lack of creativity however I would be even happier if those ther features existed.
Early on Wenger mentioned “We define who we are by the ways we experience ourselves through participation as well as by the ways we and others reify ourselves.” Far too often people say nobody affects who they are as a person. To which we would argue is not true. The way we define our identity has a lot to do with the world around us and how we react and respond to other people asserting their identity.
In the Wenger reading I got caught up in the way trajectory was defined. The world is more networked than it has ever been before, so it makes sense how we, as people identify become networked as well. Wenger suggests trajectory in not a fixed path nor is it a fixed destination but continuous motion. The former definition of trajectory falls more in line with past definitions of identity, static and rigid. Thinking about how you can have “multiple” identities thanks to the power of anonymity on the Internet a more fluid definition of identity works. A definition where you are not only identify with your physical characteristics, but also your interest, your thoughts, and the content you create.
An interesting part of Youth, Identity, and Digital Culture was the dichotomy between Giddens’s and Foucault’s views. The true nature of identity probably lies somewhere in between these two opposing philosophies. The individual is shaped by societal norms and constricted by society’s expectations, which can be both good and bad. Society deems what is acceptable behavior, which can act as a chilling effect on undesirable behavior but also any behavior at all that deviates from the norm. The Internet just accelerates this process by providing a more effective feedback loop.
A pop up WordPress site from students at UVA in the wake of the Martese Johnson incident. That’s a terrible word, incident, to describe what happened to this young man. Even in the absence of an appropriate word I felt it was an important site to share for lots of reasons. Through the lens of both community and identity I feel there is much to discuss. What in these words can you relate with?
In class on 3/19/2015, our class discussion touched on the lack of support students feel from faculty in the aftermath of the brutalization of Martese Johnson and at other times of crisis here at UVA, especially when those crises center around race. We took the last ten minutes of class and wrote out what we wanted to tell our faculty. These comments are excerpted from those 27 students’ in-class responses. Who are we? We are women and men. We are Asian, black, Latino, white and multiracial. We are from a variety of cultural, national, ethnic, socioeconomic, gender and sexual identities and backgrounds.
I understand last week was a very positive experience … I’m thrilled about that and I look forward to hearing more next week when we get together. I am not going to assign anything new this week, but I will remind you to wrap up the assignments by the posted due dates.
Out of Class — All Due 3/24/2015 by 5 PM
Weekly iPad Reflection — what did you learn from the Apple visit and what did you create? Did what you learn alter your appreciation for the iPad?
Weekly Create — Time to Tweet! Everyone needs to Tweet something interesting about this class using the hashtag #CDT450. I’d then like you to post about what Twitter can mean to shaping your identity and embed your tweet in the post.
I was inspired by the RadioLab Podcast “Voices in your head.” I used Ableton Live software to create music accompanied by several Apple voices (and my own), reciting the closing section of Wenger’s chapter 6 on identity, from Communities of Practice.
Earlier on in the semester I mentioned how the iPad native keyboard needed some kind of swipe function. After doing some research I found SwiftKey. SwiftKey is a nice keyboard. It functions how it’s supposed to. It connects with your facebook to learn the words you use and learns from there. There have been times where I needed to delete words and reswipe them. Some things this app could improve on is the insisting autocorreit.
Overall. 8/10
If you want a swipe I keyboard on your iOS device SwiftKey could be the app for you.
I decided to try it a 3D modeling software on my iPad called Sunny 3D. The interface is very minimalistic so it seems very easy. Actually creating shapes is a different matter. I think my model came out pretty good considering I’m a novice.
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