Sunday Funnies #3: Visual notes

sunday funnies #2

I’ve always took notes on a notebook, with mostly texts. I’ve never really have thought of arranging my notes with drawing representing concepts in notes. It was interesting to create a visual note, but I’ve face several problems in the creation of it. First of all, I struggled to decide on how I should format the note, so that it looks the best. I also had to think thoroughly on how to visually represent concepts and ideas, like using a padlock to represent of Java being a secure programming language. It also took me quite some time to actually draw and include all the materials I’ve learnt in one class. On the bright side, however, taking effort to visualize concepts and drawing them out really made me think through them, and allowed me for a deeper understanding of the materials. In conclusion, it was interesting and a fresh approach of note-taking for me. It greatly facilitated in helping me understand the concepts more easily. However, as a college student with a busy schedule, I think visual note-taking isn’t the best way to create notes.

 

Assignment link

 

Sunday Funnies 3: Visual Note Taking

http://eng101s15.davidmorgen.org/2015/01/sunday-funnies-3/

Scan

While making this doodle, I noticed a few things about myself. It was somewhat easier than expected and sort of relaxing to get to draw for homework. However, I did not particularly feel like I better grasped the material because of the doodling. I picked to draw my calculus notes because my options were not the best–I don’t take notes in Health 200 or French 203 and I could’ve drawn out my chemistry notes, but I felt like that would be confusing and challenging. So math was my only viable option, which felt a little bit like a terrible option because most of my math notes are just practice problems. However, I cheated a little ad used notes from several different days and chose really basic calculus topics. That being said, I feel like these notes only make sense to me due to my lacking artistic skills, but I guess that is okay.

Sunday Funnies 1

English Badge

The picture shown is one of my art pieces done in pen. I chose this image because I thought it shows my identity as well as giving some background information on how the way I view things may be different from others. Although not shown in the picture, the black and white patterns in the back portray images from the folk tales of Korea and America. The cards in the picture show a traditional Korean Card game, Hwatoo, and playing cards. I drew this picture to show the confusion and difficulties of myself as a Korean-American growing up in both countries from the East and West and how they ended up merging together throughout the years creating who I am today.

 

Announcing drop-in studio hour

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Starting this week, the Domain team will be hosting a studio drop-in hour for students working on web projects.

When: Fridays, 10-11am (immediately after our class)

 

Where: Callaway N203 (immediately next door to our classroom)

The idea for this hour is not so much that you come in and ask questions instead of going to the Writing Center, but that you can stop in, use the computers in the room to work individually or collaboratively with your group, and there will be someone staffing that hour who can help out with questions as they come up.

At least one of the people staffing that hour will be me on most weeks.

Which means I’ll need to adjust my scheduled office hours. I think going forward, I’ll have office hours on Wednesdays instead of Fridays, but I’m not 100% certain of that time yet.

“If you’re interested in the model of education, you don’t start from a production line mentality”

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Screen cap of Dan Pink's RSA drawing

I mentioned in class today RSA Animate, which is produced by The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is an “enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative and creative practical solutions to today’s social challenges [by …] empowering people to be active participants in creating a better world.” Since 1754, RSA has sponsored various sorts of events intended to further this goal, including public lectures, talks, debates, and screenings. The organization developed the idea of an animation series in order to allow these events to reach a much broader audience. A team of fellows at RSA selects lectures, edits down the audio to about 10 minutes, and then sends them to an animator named Andrew Park at Cognitive Media to be turned into animated video.

Here are two of my favorites from RSA Animates:


In “Changing Education Paradigms,” Sir Ken Robinson critiques our educational system for being “modelled on the interests of industrialism and [designed] in the image
of it.” He calls, instead, for an educational system that strives to help students achieve an aesthetic experience, where their “senses are operating at their peak, [they’re] present in the current moment, [they’re] resonating with the excitement of this thing that [they’re] experiencing, [they’re] fully alive.” Such a system, he argues, will value divergent thinking and collaboration.


Dan Pink, in “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us,” argues that the traditional model of incentivizing work (reward desired behavior and you get more of it) only works when that work is strictly mechanical; as long as tasks require even rudimentary cognitive skills, that reward system not only fails to incentivize work but actually leads to poorer performance. Pink proposes instead that, once employees are paid enough to meet their basic needs, there are 3 factors that lead to better performance as well as personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and performance.

Pages and/vs. Blog Posts

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A photograph of a book with post it flags stuck in its pages.

In this class, I make a clear distinction between blog posts and pages: all of your major, formal projects will go onto your sites as pages. The Sunday Funnies assignments and all of the other shorter, low-stakes, reflective writing that you do will go onto your sites as blog posts. Pages can be edited just as posts can be, but in general they are meant to serve as static, completed, more or less self-contained pieces of writing. Blogs are meant to go up onto the posts page in descending chronological order, so built into the function of a blog is that you write something and publish it, then if you have more to say on the subject or want to revise what you wrote in a major way, you do so by just writing a new blog post rather than going back to the original and restructuring it.

Here’s another clear distinction between posts and pages: posts syndicate but pages do not (because syndication is predicated on the idea of a frequently updating and changing posts page–static pages don’t need to syndicate because, well, they are more or less static). We are relying on syndication to the course site as the means of collecting all of the work that you do on your sites into a central location, but if your major projects go onto pages and pages don’t syndicate then how will they be included? When you complete one of the major assignments, you will write a blog post, linking to the landing page for the assignment. I’ll generally ask you to write something reflective about the work that you’ve done in those blog posts. Sometimes I might ask that you provide a summary or abstract of the argument, perhaps framing the post as an announcement meant to entice readers to check out what you’ve done akin to a teaser in journalism.

One last point: for the purposes of this class, at least, all blog posts and all pages should be multimodal and should include multiple media. You should not publish a page or a post that is composed entirely of text.

faq

(image credit: “231 by Flickr user Jay Peg)

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