Week 15: April 21 and 23

Tuesday, April 21

In-Class Activities

  • Discuss submission procedures for individual and group projects.
  • Work on processing ebooks for the Individual Book Project, including Kindle and iBook formats (45 mins.).
  • Meet in collaborative book project groups to complete the project (30 mins.)

Multimedia Case Study

Our work doesn't speak for itself, says Austin Kleon. In this project, you'll work with your book project teams to create the story of your team's DPS App or Atlas project. Your case study eventually should be presented (and presentable) in multimedia formats including text, audio, video, and other forms of interactive media. Your audience for this project will be book publishers, industry specialists, Clemson faculty, students, and staff, and the wider public. Each collaborative group will be responsible for producing a case study documenting its component of the larger project and the results. 

Because both platforms are new technologies designed to solve a real world problems, you'll need to do some background research on the applications and how they may have been used by others (including interviews). Your finished case study will tell the story of how you approached these problems or challenges and the steps along the way and your decisions as you addressed them. There should be two main components of the finished case study: 1) ~5-minute video; 2) print- and web-based document with visual, aural, and animated content embedded in text. Together, the case study components will provide background information on the problem or challenge, a description of the current challenge and your goals, a detailed overview (supported by visual content and verbal content) of the steps taken to address the challenge or achieve the goal, and then a discussion of how well your solution has worked. You'll be asked to complete a Collaborative Project Evaluation Form at the end of the project. (Collaborative; 20% of course grade.)

Oops We Did it Again

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In Clive Thompson’s book, Smarter Than You Think, the chapter on The Connected Society explores the concept of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance occurs when people’s beliefs about public opinion make them alter their own behavior. It reminds me of a bizarre case that happened back in the 1960’s. Thirty-eight people witnessed a woman, Kitty Genovese be attacked and stabbed by a man in front of her apartment. And not a single one of them called the police. They all believed that somebody else would do it and in doing so something truly horrible happened.

Human Spam

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Don't be human spam.

Austin Kleon could not have used a more effective word.

Nobody likes spam (nobody normal anyway) whether its in this form

or this form

and especially not this form

Spam in all capacities is terrible, and don't trust anybody who tells you differently. It all belongs in the trash and there it is nothing but something that hopes to be something else.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

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The book GO by Chipp Kid was by far the most visually pleasing book I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. The effort and thought that went into making such a delightful book is apparent. With design on the brain I looked around Cooper library to see how else design is impacting the world around us.

This image is of the call numbers on the side of a bookshelf. The design used for it is quite straightforward to match its straightforward purpose. It is used to find books, so it is used as directions, a sort of map. To mirror this purpose the design is minimalistic and easily readable. It is practical in nature.

Spamalot or Not (Also Known as "My Obsession with Coffee Shops")

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When Austin Kleon advises us not to “turn into human spam” he is saying that we need to be productive contributors to the community we are in. We can’t just bombard others with our work and not offer up anything to them. We can’t do the opposite either though. We can’t simply comment on other people’s work without offering our own up. There needs to be a balance of give and take between you and the community you are interacting with. We can’t expect people to help us if we don’t help them.

Show Your Workspace

Human Spam

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According to Urban Dictionary, human spam is "Individuals who approach one on the street with unsolicited literature or requests, such as free newspapers, The Big Issue, flyers, requests for money, 'Charity Muggers', religious apologists, petition carriers, etc. These individuals in Britain have replaced the now banned practices of cold calling, email spamming and junk mailing, as the only thing charities/companies don't need permission for any more is invasion of personal space and public harassment." This focuses on the in-person aspects of human spam but it can also be related to online.

Shut Up and Listen

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I'm not sure about you, but I think being called "human spam" would probably be one of the most interesting yet insulting insults I could receive. When you think of spam, you think of the pesky, annoying, and unwanted junk that fills your inbox (or that nasty ham stuff that comes in a can). No one wants to be human spam.

Pitbull

The Facebook Narcissist

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I think it was one of my friends who once told me that they no longer used Facebook because it was for narcissists, and I think sometimes I definitely agree with this mentality.

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Austin Kleon says that "They don't want to listen to your ideas; they want to tell you theirs...At some point, they didn't get the memo that the world owes none of us anything" (124). I think what Kleon means by this is that technology, especially social media in particular, is sometimes overused.

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