Last Wednesday I tuned into ds106 Radio. I started listening a couple minutes late and since it was my first time tuning in I was sort of confused by what was going on. After reading some of the live-tweets that others were sending out I figured out we were all listening to a podcast that was making excellent use of sound to tell a story. With every sentence the narrator spoke the background noise reflected the setting and gave me a better understanding of the scene.

I also listened to part of a podcast called This American Life. The section of the podcast that I listened to was telling a story about a man named Michael Larson and how he won a lot of money on the game show Press Your Luck. The use of sound in the storytelling was very good. The ambient noise used during different parts of the story fit the atmosphere and helped me visualize the scenes in my mind.

Both of these listening experiences were a great help in understanding how using just audio can be a great way to tell a story.

This week was a pretty good one. Photography has been a skill that I have known a little bit about but have yet to really get into it. Overall, I enjoyed the assignments for this week and here’s my work:

A Day of My Life: https://gannonradenberg.home.blog/2019/09/25/a-day-of-my-life/A Day of My Life:

ds106 Photo Assignments: https://gannonradenberg.home.blog/2019/09/25/a-day-of-my-life/ds106 Photo Assignments:

Photography Tips: https://gannonradenberg.home.blog/2019/09/25/photography-tips/

While I’m by no means a pro at photography, there are a few basic tips about photography that I know are extremely helpful when trying to get good photos.

The first tip is using the Rule of Thirds. I learned this back in high school when I started taking a video production class. The rule is simple: break your shot into 9 different equal sections and where the lines meet is where the focal point of your shot should be.

The second tip I know is to use backgrounds that don’t distract from the focus of the photo. If things are going on in the background of the photo, then the viewer will be distracted by that and not focus on the main point of the photo.

My last tip would be practice. Buying an expensive camera or new lenses won’t make your photos better. The only way to get better with any skill is to practice it and try new things. Most people have cameras built into their phones and if you’re new to photography then using a phone camera will work great for your needs.

This week I was tasked with completing 8 stars worth of assignments involving photos on the ds106 assignment bank. Here’s my results:

9-Step Photo Collage (3 Stars)

Cropped Signs (2 Stars

Create A Game of Thrones House (3 Stars)

For this day of my life I used photos to represent my average weekday. Most days i go to work, school and come home to do homework.

This week had pretty simple tasks but they still kept me busy.

For starters I went onto Twitter and participated in some Daily Create activities. My twitter handle is @gannon1980s

After that I watched a couple videos. One was over good forms of storytelling and the other was over how we use the web and the web uses us. Both of these videos were good tools to help understand storytelling and using the web for storytelling. The first video had Kurt Vonnegut talking about how people like structures of stories. This helped me understand that a lot of good stories are structured in a way that appeals to people. The second video showed how the web uses us to categorize everything on it and we use it and it’s categorizing to find things on it.

Next I visited the ds106 writing assignment bank and did 10 stars worth of assignments and made a blog post with my results. That can be found here:

ds106 Writing Assignments

Finally, I located a couple resources for improving writing. I made a blog post about them here:

Writing Advice

Overall, I think this week’s assignments have helped me and the way write quite a bit. Researching and finding advice helped me find better ways to make writing.

This week I have been tasked with finding a couple good resources for advice on writing. I myself am not great at writing but am trying to get better so researching advice should also help me as well.

For my first resource I found an article from Goins, Writer:

How to Be a Good Writer (If There Is Such a Thing)

The main takeaway that I got from this article is that practice makes perfect. If you write and keep writing often, you eventually get better and better as time goes on. Another piece of great advice for writers from this article is getting ideas and help from other people. The article suggested getting someone to help you edit your writing. Someone else may be able to find errors in your writing that you may not notice. Getting ideas from anything and everything is a great idea too. We can draw inspiration from just about anything in our lives and use it to influence our writing.

My second resource was an article from buffer:

https://buffer.com/resources/6-of-the-most-important-aspects-of-successful-writing

This article suggests 6 ways to improve your writing. The main takeaway here is that while you should write often, you should keep things short, use small words and write in a way that is reflective of you.

Overall, I thought these articles gave some good advice and should be helpful for anyone new to writing.

One of my assignments this week was to complete 10 stars worth of assignments in the writing section of the ds106 assignment bank.

This week I completed:

assignments.ds106.us/assignments/instagram-is-done-describe-your-lunch-to-me/ (3.5 stars)

For lunch today I made a sandwich. This sandwich was made with rotisserie seasoned sliced chicken breast, pepper jack cheese, mayonnaise and lettuce on two slices of wheat bread. I made the sandwich in this order: slice of wheat bread, mayonnaise, sliced chicken breast, pepper jack cheese, lettuce and finally topped with the second slice of wheat bread. The bread was the standard brown color of wheat bread. The chicken breast slices were white in color with the edges being red/orange due to the rotisserie seasoning. The lettuce was a nice green and white color. The pepper jack cheese was white with spots of peppers.

assignments.ds106.us/assignments/haiku-about-you/ (2.5 stars)

Creativity

around every corner

ideas are made

This haiku is about my ability to think of many creative ideas.

assignments.ds106.us/assignments/best-assignment/ (2 stars)

My favorite assignment from ds106 is the daily creates. They are a fun way to interact with the community. The best thing about them is that they don’t take much time to complete and it engages you with the community of others that enjoy doing the tasks. The 80s ones are a great way to discover media that others have seen from that era that you haven’t.

assignments.ds106.us/assignments/your-last-words/ (2.5 stars)

I would imagine when I die it would be from some disease that my body would be too old and weak to fight off anymore. I would be in a hospital bed being treated for the disease. I would be surrounded by friends and family and I would want my last words to be about how much I care for them. I would like to let them know how great they have made my life.

This week covered a very important topic for anyone that wants to create: copyright.

Being aware of copyright laws and what you’re allowed to do is important if you’re going to be creating anything. There were many great resources to help understand copyright in this week’s assignment. I wrote reflective blog posts about them here:

Copyright, Remixing and Digital Editing

Everything is a Remix Reflection

Show Your Work Discussion

This week I also participated in a few Daily Creates over on Twitter. You can find those replies here:

https://twitter.com/gannon1980s/with_replies

Lastly, I completed 3 assignments from the ds106 assignment bank. Those can be found here:

ds106 Assignments

I did a few of the ds106 Assignment bank assignments and here are the results

A Star Wars haiku:

A long time ago

in a galaxy far away

light and dark balance

and finally, I took a closeup photo of something. See if you can guess what it is.