Joseph+McCaleb


 * Personal History with DMAL **

Stage 1 in the evolution of Digital Media and Learning in the UMdWP has already been represented in digital media (vimeo.com/8208058) and can be viewed there. So I’ll just summarize my digital media history by saying that my first digital production happened in our second Summer Institute, 2008, when Ann Marie’s TIW led us into PhotoStory. Seeing daily logs that were produced with that platform also caught my imagination. In the workshop, Matt, Natalie, and I (as I recall) were in a group dragging in photos and attempting to record voice over. The product was pretty horrible but I still connected with something powerful.

Now two years later with about ten productions under my belt, mostly involving Pinnacle Studio, I can begin to articulate why I lit up. Making my most recent production (posted below) helped me find my way back down memory lane about twenty-five years ago to when I attempted to represent especially meaningful moments of life. As I just mentioned, now I’m producing in Pinnacle which has about five tracks to mix with audio (voice, music, & sound effects), video (film and stills), text, and transitions. I’m also able now to imagine the representation through the capacity of Glogster and Prezi. Prezi offers visual representation in conceptual space along with directional mapping. I don’t quite understand it, but it seems my capacity to imagine and to articulate relates to these digital media with their different displays of representational forms. You might have to “play with” the platforms in order to understand what I’m trying to say.

Twenty five years ago, I was using a slide projector, an audio cassette player, and live narration. As I recall, the show was appreciated or at least tolerated by family members (and my daughter even remembered it recently when I visited her in Denver), but it was also very frustrating because the elements weren’t brought together in the fidelity and clarity that I knew should be possible.

Two years ago, my semi-conscious longing and vision for being able to produce a synthesis of these representational forms must have seen the possibility in what was tasted in our PhotoStory experience. Attempting to read the text above, you might sense how frustrating it has been to me and how confusing it is for readers in my attempts to constellate the richness of multi-sensory experience with the multiple layers of linguistic meaning and interpretation as well as multiple points of view without the resources of digital media. While being a bit overwhelmed with the array of choices for representing experience in digital media, I’m also breathing a sigh of relief that these resources are now available to support the sharing and deepening of understanding that symbolic expression allows.

__ Textual Lead-in to the Videos  __ Bits of memory shattered on the asphalt when unconsciousness swept down like one of Tolkien’s wraiths to devour the six-year’s worth. Doctors failed to make the eyelids flutter. True to the core of fairy tales, only a mother’s love knows the call home this side of heaven. Even then and for long after, bits of memory scattered everywhere: yellowing in scrapbooks, almost lost in cracked cassette tapes, in slide cases somewhere, scribbled on a card in an old book, scratched over notes in an old journal, and even buried in My Photos files. These two videos which I’ve somewhat arbitrarily divided into “text” and “context” begin an exploration of the meaning of the experience around a return from the unconscious. For persons particularly interested in the production aspects, the abstracts give some of that detail.


 * First Story: Text & Context **

Abstract: The three and a half minute video gives the context surrounding the first story in my memory. Images taken from a mapping platform (Prezi) are also used to show text and context elements connected with my memory and exploration of this story. Other images came from photo albums, digital photography I’d taken, and a screen capture using Jing of a Google map satellite camera shot of a place in Texas where the critical event in the story took place. I decided I wanted the audio to have no music but only my voice which was recorded on a digital audio recorder. The production was done in Pinnacle Studio and processed on Vimeo.
 * Joseph McCaleb **


 * Mom Telling Epaminon **

Abstract: The five and a half minute video features a recording of my mother telling the story to my then three year old daughter on October 9, 1982 which was about thirty years after she had told the “first story” to me. I also used a photograph of them taken during this telling. Other images include shots of pages of a variety of texts of the story which show some important variations in the story. These images were taken with my digital recorder. Text over the image was added to indicate the particular book and publication date for the page that is shown. Other images came from “My Pictures” folder. I deliberately chose not to add any music because I wanted the sound to represent the conditions of that moment of telling.
 * Joseph McCaleb **

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 * Digital Media and Learning** have allowed me to sort out and vision the composing in ways that extend well beyond the limits of "print consciousness."

Click on the following link to see how the layout and directional capacity of __Prezi__ supported the composing process involved in identifying the "text" and "context" features related to the First Story Remembered.

https://prezi.com/secure/37b962b806035f0d94bad0e166580c4218693c21/

In concert with this outline on Prezi, I worked in digital composing with __Pinnacle Studio__. The project ballooned to over 8 minutes which seemed too long. By referencing and using the map from Prezi, I was able to divide the project into two segments with one featuring contextual elements and the other emphasizing one version of the text but showing other variants also.

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Here is[| link to the glog created by Maggie Peterson]

This is a page to display DMAL produced by Joseph in relation to ISI 2010, particularly exploration of additional technologies, readings about DMAL, and reflections on my own and other person's digital media.

How's goes it with you partner? Bonnie