After reading Bryan Alexander’s introduction, I never thought of a blog as a diary. New Media, and specifically blogs really are amazing… they’re a forum that you can share with the entire world. Which brings up another point of censoring your information because, again, the whole world can see it. Employers are talking about starting to discuss whether or not it may be acceptable to go onto candidate’s Facebook profiles.

I was thinking about this, and the idea of sharing your life online with the whole world, and so long as you manage what you say and don’t put up pictures of yourself doing anything super illegal, you should have nothing to hide. A Facebook or a blog that you can be proud of can act as a supplement to your resume, which is limited to one page.

On Bryan’s site, I found a thing about political digital-storytelling, and Obama’s use of the web to branch out and reach a broader audience. Julia’s Story is very easy to read, interactive, and has lots of information without crowding the viewer.

Based on Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Shape of Stories“, and being a sucker for romantic comedies, I chose to focus on the most recent movie that I saw, The Five Year Engagement with Jason Segal and Emily Blunt.

Watch this video on YouTube.

An adorable movie, the film starts out with a picture perfect couple living in San Francisco, until Violet gets an offer she can’t refuse in Michigan. The two move up and both try to tolerate the situation until they can’t anymore, and you can see the relationship falling apart.

Then, after their split, they get their lives on track individually and work their way back into each other’s lives. A lovely happy ending for the lovely couple. A lovely, typical, but awesome ending.

Weekly Letter Home

Dear Parents,

First I would like to say I have survived week 2. The pace is fast and keeps me motivated. A care package would just be lovely!

It is now the second week of camp, and does time fly by (too) fast. Our camp counselors ramped up the amount of daily creates we do this week. I took a picture of the sky one day on a very dark and gloomy day. I uploaded this to my Flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/79114434@N05/. The other daily create I took apart in was take a picture of something relative to “destruction.” The third daily create was repeat DS106 ten times on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/user/TDC136fatherthelegen can be found on my channel.

I watched an interesting video on the summary of story telling, instructed by Kurt Vonnegut. He pointed out that most stories; movies, books, and so on all follow a few types of different plot lines. I worked on a plot line that is based on a hero who lives an ordinary life but then embarks on an epic journey in order to save something or fulfill something. This not only is good for the world (typically) but it makes the hero grow as a person too. The hero usually has a moment of weakness but then overcomes it with the help of a sidekick. The hero then fulfills their duty and returns back to their life, but have grown as a stronger person. I decided to do a comic strip of the Lord of the Rings. It is skimpy on details but shows the adventures Frodo goes to in order to destroy “the one true ring.” This comic strip can be found on my word press site J .

The campers, including myself also read works from Bryan Alexander. He wrote about digital storytelling through the years. A blog is a form of an online diary. This is something I’m going to try and work on during my next few weeks at camp!

Miss you both! Can’t wait to bring back blogging knowledge!

Katie

I attached 3 images of a comic strip I made based on Kurt Vonnegut’s story telling techniques. I did mine based around Lord of the Rings. It’s skimpy on details but you may ( or may not) get the point.