Digital Story: Stop Cyberbullying

Maddie's story was the people's choice in last week's competition.

I'd not followed this story and, despite a lifetime of being jaded, am amazed at human cruelty. There's some cold comfort that the perpetrators could get prison time for doing what they did, though even there the penalty may be less if a proposed settlement of the case becomes reality.

Whatever happens, on a day when some very different justice was done in Pakistan, I'm reminded that most of the time, evil gets its comeuppance.

Digital Story: "Transhumanism"

Take this Ray Kurzweil!

Carly is a techie, like her teacher, but as with many in the class she sees how technology can "bite back."

This one is a stunner...hope you enjoy her techniques with digital audio. Do not have your audio on full-blast, however!

Digital Story: "Cogita"

Brett really dug in his heels, and coding skills, near midterm to explain why it would be so difficult for a computer to become an AI. I lack his mathematical skills, so I'll take him at his word about Ackerman's Function.



For the digital story, he returned to this theme and provides a twist on an old warhorse of the SF canon.

Digital Story: "Dirty Internet"

Minds out of the gutter, please. Mike's runner-up entry in the competition talks about how dependent we all are upon these "always on, always on you" technologies (the term is Sherry Turkle's).

We use the Net as we do air. And what would happen were the service to be interrupted? That, readers, is perhaps the one aspect of the technology that frightens Mike--and me--more than does our addictive usage.  On to the story!

Mike got no extra credit for pandering to my Clint Eastwood obsessions.

Digital Story: "I Facebook, Therefore I Am"

I want to congratulate my student Tyler, one of the runners-up in my digital-story competition.

As a reluctant and recent Facebooker, I found myself drawn into a narrative by a student who really enjoys her social networking with friends and, notably, family.

Small irony: for a guy who really does not bother much with social networking, I'll note this post at not only Twitter but on my Facebook Wall.

But for Tyler and many of my other students, social networking is like breathing, and her story provides eloquent testimony to the power of those connections. And now...roll the film!

A Week of Digital Stories Starts With "The Last Text"

Location: On the virtual set

My students have a pizza-and-film-festival event tonight, showing their digital stories that were the final project for my course on the history and culture of cyberspace.

All week I'll feature student stories, but today I'll begin with my own, done to test the technology I expected students to use. Speak shout outs to Ken Warren of Richmond's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology and my Writing Consultant, Korine.

As one might expect if you know me, some student-composers explored dystopian, Neo-Luddite, and cyberpunk themes. I hope they were not being so dark to pander to the professor, since this project gives them freedom to create anything as long as it relates to our course themes.

Doing a story with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker is a laborious process. I decided to do one myself; it took 10 hours to gather or take the photos, more to put them with a narrative. I did record it in one take, the only part of the process that was quick.

Here's my piece, inspired by the utter addiction to constant contact I see around me. Perhaps we should pay more attention to events beyond the horizon of the self, before that is the only horizon we have remaining.