For two weeks now I’ve been trying to capture creativity or at least freeze it in time for a moment so I could hold it up to the light and study it before it melted away.

Actually my quest began much longer ago. I began the Daily Creates with #138 back in June when I enrolled in DS 106′s Camp MacGuffin. I’d had some experience with the Daily Shoot the year before and devoted my required Daily Shoots to creating a gallery of shots taken in Second Life — The Heresy Series: Virtual Reality Photography. I learned that virtual worlds afford great opportunities to manipulate light and perspective to learn about making good photographs.

Since them I’ve obsessed through over 235 Daily Creates — not to set a personal record but because I wanted to begin my new course, ECI 509, with a portfolio of digital creations and because I know no better way to keep my skills with Audacity, GIMP, and iMovie fresh. It’s so easy for me to forget something vital if I don’t use these tools regularly.

So what have I learned about what creativity looks like?

It looks like procrastination . . . so much that it scares me at first. I’m a champion procrastinator, so when I first hear that internal conversation start about maybe I’ll think of something better then I’m all for waiting for inspiration. I know that’s John Cleese’s advice — to wait it out; hold out for the good stuff. But I also know that if I don’t begin and begin boldly that I may just get stuck in neutral. So it’s a continual struggle to balance the procrastination with the need to let the ideas incubate because maybe the last one to hatch is the prizewinner.

This is a good example. I immediately had this image of a calendar page with 15 minutes-a-day marked in red. But it seemed too simple so I staged a fake birthday cake with a candle that looked like a question mark to represent a long, happy future for The Daily Create. But my first idea seemed best to me so I chucked the birthday cake. I procrastinated my way into my original idea.

January 8 — TDC 366 — The Daily Create is one year old! Share a photo of a gift you have for us.

It looks like something totally unique . . . I have trained myself to squash any idea that I think seems too predictable. For example, when it comes to taking a picture of my favorite place to work, I did a twist on work to think of the kind of work I’d rather do than the mental work that seemed implied. My Daily Create compatriots, Norm the King of Daily Creates in particular, have inspired me to think different.

January 14 – TDC 372 — Take a picture of your favorite place to work (desk, comfy chair, etc.)

It looks like a way to preserve personal history or one’s place in the overall history. Oftentimes I will make the most of a Daily Create to tell a story that I don’t want to forget. I’m lousy at keeping a journal or scrapbooking, so the Daily Creates I’ve created about family and friends are some of the precious few times I’ve documented some parts of my life.
January 12 — TDC 370 — Create a video about an item you own that has an unusual story attached to it.

JoJo’s Soapbox. I’ve ambitions to write a book about JoJo but until then this video tribute will have to do.

It looks like an open space to play . . . Hey, if I like the idea of the Top Ten List of the Uses for a Banana rather than 20, then I have the freedom to go with the Top Ten. I can even opt to choose another Daily Create or design my own. I do play well with others, but I first have to be true to myself.

January 18 — TDC 376 — List 20 uses for a banana.

It looks like an opportunity to go to the edge . . . the edge of my incompetence. I so wanted to tell sort of a “back-to-the-future” story about a digital tool that I used growing up. Did I succeed with “learning to draw on my mother’s knee with an iPad?” Well, it’s corny enough but I had to do it three times before I got everything I held up in the Flip’s frame. It wasn’t as easy as I though it would be.

January 15 — TDC 373 — Find nearest over-looked everyday object. Fabricate a story about it being a key part of your childhood.

So what does creativity look like? It’s like love and it’s in the eye of the beholder.

January 19 — TDC 377 — The Daily Create for today is “Capture love in a photograph. Give it a title.”

I’m sure there are many of us who feel she was tweeting directly to us.

I’ve got another bit of advice — multitask or create as many “twofers” as you can. That’s my approach and I tried it out today by completing DS 106′s Daily Create and my hello EdMOOC video in one fell swoop.

Oh, the challenge was to create a story about an everyday object.

Introduction-wise, I’m Cris and I’m teaching a brand new grad course this semester which I shall obsess completely over and so there won’t be enough hours in the day or night but I know Sharon is right and so I’m going to give it a go and enjoy EdMOOC!

Looking forward to meeting more crazy multi-taskers out there!

My Daily Create Roll now monopolizes the ECI 509 course trailer but I plan to gladly replace with student work soon.

Somewhere between the panic of getting my new course site ready for the final meeting with my course developer and tech guru tomorrow and making my prolific list of notes, I came up with the idea of a “twofer.” Love when that happens! So here’s my Daily Create and a graphic that works well for this, my first course blog post. I call it the “Edge of My Incompetence” graph and the theory belongs to a terrific young philosopher-playwright-actor-writer Ezra Brain.

So The Daily Create challenge #361 was to “Draw something that shows how happy you are today.” On My Incompetence Chart I can report that I’m happy to have aimed high and achieved a lot for today. I’d not be nearly as happy if I’d aimed lower and achieved less.

So let that be the first lesson of Daily Creates, at least for me. It’s far better to have ambition and be a risk-taker than to grasp the first idea that comes to you and play it safe. to be continued . . .

Pedagogical patterns, as I understand them, are combinations of strategies that transcend disciplines to offer teachers building blocks that they can use to build their own patterns, try them out, and then release them back into the community for feedback and the next round of modification and use. Consider them mental Legos.

My first degree was in reading instruction, what now would be literacy education, and reading in the content areas captured my interest and imagination. I thoroughly enjoyed learning new strategies, remixing, and mashing up, as my students and the teaching context required. Looking back, I can see that actively collecting strategies and creating new combinations as well as new strategies gave me a lot of creative expression and encouraged my innovative spirit.

Haviland calls for teachers to share their creative pursuits with their students; to serve as models of creative individuals. She gives some impressive examples of art teachers who share their art and craft work, English teachers who are published authors, and a science teacher who began and operates his own school in Ghana. One could feel a bit left out, but, fortunately, Haviland also suggests that teachers can share how they teach creatively. I smile when I think that this is what I’ve delighted in doing all of these years with my pre- and inservice teachers.

For my FSLT12 (Massive Open Online Course offered on university teaching) microteaching, I shared a mash-up that includes Luis Moll’s Funds of Knowledge, Jim Cummins’s and Dennis Sayers’s collaborative critical inquiry, blogging, VoiceThread, and Second Life. Inspired by my other summer MOOC, Digital Storytelling 106, I’ve created a video to share the story of this pedagogical pattern that I’ve tested multiple times in my online teaching of ECI 521, Teaching Literature for Young Adults.

Previewing
In true reading in the content areas tradition, I have a question for you to reflect on prior to viewing the video.
Do you use collaborative inquiry small group work with your students? When, why, and how? Please view the video and consider how your approach, pedagogical pattern, is similar or dissimilar. Jot down a few notes.

During Viewing
View the video and jot down any questions you have as you watch or, perhaps, connections that you make to strategies/activities that you have found successful.

Post Viewing
Pause briefly to reflect on how the Waves of Change pedagogical pattern is similar or dissimilar to your own for inquiry-based small group work. Please bring feedback and questions to our session on Tuesday, November 27. Thanks in advice for your feedback.

If you’d like to interact with a VoiceThread, here’s the Waves of Change from this semester . . .

and here it is in context . . . Waves of Change, Fall 2012

And if you’d like to try your hand at adding comments, here’s a test VoiceThread, an Open Mic, for questions, comments, testimonials if you’ve used VoiceThread, ideas for how you might use it, whatever . . . Just click on “Comment” and you’ll be prompted to create a free account.

References

Cummins, J. and Sayers, D. (1995). Brave new schools: Channeling cultural illiteracy through global learning networks. Retrieved from http://us.macmillan.com/bravenewschools/JimCummins

Haviland, M. (2012). Encouraging teachers to teach creatively. Retrieved from http://plpnetwork.com/2012/06/05/encouraging-teachers-teach-creativity/

Laurillard, D. (2010). Investigations of elearning patterns: Context, problems, and solutions. Christian Kolis (ed.). Retrieved from http://www.lybrary.com/investigations-of-elearning-patterns-p-101195.html

Moll, L. (n.d.) Explanation of Funds of Knowledge. Video retrieved from http://www.tolerance.org/tdsi/asset/explanation-funds-knowledge.

This is the biggest shocker of the course. I’m open to lots of technology, but I entered the course thinking that having a class in Second Life was the STUPIDEST thing I’d ever heard of. What can I say? I’m a complete convert. It’s sheer brilliance. (That doesn’t mean I’ll be pursuing SL in my spare time, but I think it’s the perfect way to conduct an online class.)

It isn’t all rosy — 2 of the 16 students don’t like meeting in the Bookhenge but they also don’t approve of scheduled times for synchronous sessions for online courses. And a few cited technical problems, typically caused by low bandwidth. We always stream the sessions live on UStream so students have a backup way to participate in class. It’s great to have these archives when the unexpected happens and students must miss a class. You can take a look at the archives at http://bookhenge.wikispaces.com/ — see Archived Classes on the navigation frame.

Part of the appeal for ELA teachers is that we can easily meet in book clubs and small groups as well as whole group seminars. And beyond the seriousness of discussing the Common Cores State Standards and issues like censorship, the Bookhenge encourages a kind of playfulness that helps us feel more connected. There’s nothing like a good laugh together when someone does something a bit embarrassing like standing a little too close to the fire. Here’s a “slam” group presentation that’s a good example of a casual and yet effective kind of activity that can happen in the Bookhenge:

Video streaming by Ustream

Bunny and vampire avatars? Note I’m the Superwoman avatar in the clip above — we were discussing sequential art/graphic novels so I dressed the part. We begin to learn about each other through the avatars we choose. There’s a lion who is strong in his advocacy for urban minority kids who need a break and believes he can help provide one through his teaching. And someone really interested in gender issues who quite possibly created the most “hard-favored” avatar I’ve ever seen. Our “Avatar Makeover” session at the beginning of the semester is always great fun.

What more can I say? Just Tuesday I presented with two other online teachers who use Blackboard Collaborate and send students to different rooms in the big house. I think that’s fine. But I’ve also found that many of us English Language Arts-types really enjoy a bit more informal, egalitarian environment where the mic is always open and you can take your avatar for a spin around the island.

POTcert participant Jim Stauffer visited the Bookhenge in September. Read more and see the comments here — “Time to Get Real.” The invitation to the Bookhenge is always open . . .

And for more on learning and teaching in the Bookhenge, please see my post after the POTcert11 class visited — “Being There.”

Pedagogical patterns, as I understand Diane Laulliard’s concept, are combinations of strategies that transcend disciplines to offer teachers building blocks that they can use to build their own patterns, try them out, and then release them back into the community for feedback and the next round of modification and use. Consider them mental Legos. Or, perhaps, a better metaphor — arranging the pattern’s elements in a riff or a melody within a melody. I suggest better because there’s a lot of improvisation involved in adding riffs to new melodies.

A pedagogical pattern, Laurillard insists, must be cross-disciplinary and that adds a bit of a challenge. I’ve written about a teaching and learning pattern, collaborative critical inquiry that I believe could be used across disciplines and to help encourage others to give it a try I thought I’d try to focus in on the elements.

You’ll see in the mindmap that this inquiry pattern both begins and ends with reflection. It begins with a bit of scaffolding, through prompt/question, that leads the learner to take stock on what he or she already brings to the learning experience. Officially, it’s called activating prior knowledge.

Then the learner begins to explore various resources to gather information relevant to the inquiry. Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos (2012) suggest that rather than begin with a shotgun approach collecting web sites via Google that the learner search for a well-researched “anchor” book that can provide “deep” reading from which the learner can then expand the exploration. The exploration and conceptualization are, of course, occurring simultaneously and recursively with one feeding the other until the learner is ready to express that conceptualization in some form.

The form of expression could be written as in posted to discussion forums or blogs or it could be recorded as an audio file with tools such as VoiceThread or SoundCloud. The VoiceThread simply makes it easier to have all of the audio recordings in one central location (see sample Collaborative Critical Inquiry). The SoundCloud recording could be pasted in a blog (see exemplar). SoundCloud also has a group function that would work well for collecting expressions in one spot. I’ve also been exploring video tools like Intervue, much like VoiceThread with multiple recordings on a page, and Eyejot that can be embedded in a blog. Or video blogging/vlogging is so easy that iMovie/MovieMaker could be used. Here’s an exemplar . . .

There’s really no limit to the form that these expressions might take. Timelines? Checkout TimelineJS using a Google spreadsheet. Mindmaps? There CoSketch for individual or collaborative efforts. Performance art (performative writing, slam poetry, dramatic readings or acting), just use audio tools like Audacity (for editing) and then posting to SoundCoud or iMovie/MovieMaker/Photostory to create video or audio slide shows from video.

Once the expression is shared then the collaboration begins with other learners reading/listening/viewing the expressions, conceptualizing, synthesizing, and responding in turn. Again, this can happen in a more teacher-directed, central location with tools like discussion forums, VoiceThread and Intervue, or on individual blogs that are tagged and/or tweeted.

I prefer to cap off the collaboration stage with a live, synchronous seminar and so my classes meet in the Bookhenge, our virtual seminar space in Second Life (use SL url in navigation frame). If the course is online, then webinars would also suffice, though it’s not as easy to do synchronous small group work leading up to the seminar or to “pass around” the mic.

Finally, we’re back to reflection only this time it’s critical reflection (Merizow, 1990) with learners examining how their assumptions may have been challenged over the course of the inquiry and forming a position on what they now believe.

So, please take these elements and create your own riffs. And let me know how it goes. Again, I’m hoping this pattern is cross-disciplinary potential.

References

Aronson, M. and M. Budhos (2011). Sugar changed the world. New York: Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Learn more at http://sugarchangedtheworld.com/

Laurillard, D. and Ljubojevic, D. (2011). Evaluating learning designs through formal representation of pedagogical patterns. IGI, Global. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=aaU6Lb5X9RkC&oi=fnd&pg=PA86&dq=diana+%2B+laurillard+%2B+pedagogical+%2B+pattern&ots=5d9jp0dVjl&sig=EApKVo7K7C-HO7z3UZ9nGKT_Quw#v=onepage&q=diana%20%2B%20laurillard%20%2B%20pedagogical%20%2B%20pattern&f=false

Merizow, J. (1990). Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. Retrieved from http://www.graham-russell-pead.co.uk/articles-pdf/critical-reflection.pdf

That’s how I ended my brief tribute to my senior English teacher, Barbara Benson, and her bold choice “to teach” Richard Wright’s Black Boy for the Journey Book VoiceThread, ECI 521: Learning Through Literature with Young Adults).

I have to marvel all the more about Mrs. Benson’s bold choice because she was fresh out of then High Point College and we were her first senior English class. She was a mere four years older than us but in many ways a lifetime ahead. I do believe that she “opened a mind” – mine – and is directly responsible for how I teach this course and my encouragement for my students to make the bold choices and make them wisely. Standards-wise, I see Mrs. Benson’s influence in my efforts to develop a framework for learning through literature with young adults. She probably gave me my first lesson in social justice as we read and discussed Richard Wright’s plight as a black man in the segregated South. I’ve endeavored to place social justice and critical literacy at the heart of the “Learning Through Literature with Young Adults” Framework by beginning with a review of crucial literacy, literature, and learning theories so that we can all envision how literature can serve to “open minds.” And because of my lifelong interest in creativity, I was thrilled to see the social justice/critical literacy and creativity link through Dan Pink’s inclusion of empathy as an element of creativity. I think beginning with the theoretical basis for how to create the conditions for students to become more conscious of social justice and critical literacy has led naturally to connections made throughout our collaborative critical inquiries, particularly in our inquiry into negotiating diverse cultures through multicultural literature.

I’m excited about trying something different this fall by working with an essential question, “”What does social justice look like and where am I in that picture?” as a way to explore how we might learn through literature to effect positive social change and work towards social justice. We’ll call this “The Change Project.” I mentioned my interest in creativity and I do believe that to create is a drive not far behind food, thirst, and sex. I’ve really enjoyed Dan Pink’s latest book, Drive, and his theory that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are necessary to encourage creativity. I’m working to build in more opportunities for these in the activities I design. I’ve been so impressed by ECI 521 students’ bookcasts and their Action Learning Project multimedia reports, both by the meaning (one of Pink’s creative elements) and the storytelling (another of Pink’s creative elements).

The question I’m living as I teach these days is how can we evolve online learning so that it’s available to everyone who wants to learn? I’ve participated in several MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that are totally free — educators simply get together, decide to create a course, and invite the world. My first, PLENK 2010 (Personal Learning Environment and Knowledge) attracted over 1600 participants. I learned so much about the value of social media for networking that I decided to design my courses so they are more network-based. I also decided to “open up” my courses so that anyone can take the course at no charge. We are fortunate this fall to have several librarians join us and share their perspectives on encouraging actively literate teens. If you have colleagues who would like to participate in our course in any way, please invite them to join us. All of our work is open to the world and it’s great to have guests join us around the Bookhenge firepit.

In terms of my own literacy development, the luckiest break I’ve had was meeting Teresa Brantley, the then Newberry Club facilitator at Eva Perry Regional Public Library (Apex), through Frances Bradburn. It just occurred to me that Frances is ECI 521’s fairy godmother. Teresa’s Newberry Club began partnering with our class each year and morphed into a Printz Club when Frances chaired the first Printz Committee. And Valerie Nicholson became the Printz Club facilitator – a mom, trained medical professional, and book talker-extraordinaire. She really knows how to keep a group of fun-loving teen readers engaged and well aware of their power as literary critics. Here’s a group shot of the Eva Perry Mock Printz Club taken at the Melinda Awards — our huge, Oscars-themed event where we talk about the books we’ve selected as most distinguished of the year and announce awards/superlatives for everything from best cover to lifetime achievement award.

The 2012 Melinda Awards for Young Adult Literature

I never had the chance to read YA lit as a teenager. Didn’t know it existed. I don’t think I would be teaching this course now if I’d not met Teresa and the amazing teens from the Eva Perry Printz Club. They’ve kept me green and growing and up-to-date on the latest and greatest. It’s the best job in the world that requires that I read YA lit. I do think that YA lit is at the cutting edge of literature. As well it should be. Young adults are just beginning to ask the tough questions about issues that challenge society and humanity. Literature can be a cognitive tool for thinking critically and creatively as well as empathetically.

Now about the virtual self. You’ve met 2B Writer in the introductory video. She’s my avatar in Second Life – the one with the hot pink streaked hair. She’s my virtually immersive self and she is fearless in Second Life. There’s something about speaking to a live audience and not seeing the whites of their eyes that makes you selfless and intent on “the moment.” My online virtual identity is someone I’m working to evolve. Basically, that self is one borne of text and not image and voice. But my work in the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Digital Storytelling 106 (the infamous DS 106) has given me a whole new set of tools to use to develop my virtual self. One of the things I enjoyed most about the course is The Daily Create If you take a look at my Flickr Photostream,YouTube Channel , or my SoundCloud channel, you’re likely to see some pretty curious pieces of “art” — all inspired by The Daily Create challenges to do something creative daily. A goal to accomplish by next year will be to figure out how to archive these on my blog. btw you need not take DS 106 to participate in The Daily Create. You should check it out!

You may have sensed that I enjoy integrating a great deal of technology in this class. I do this not to challenge you or myself but make sure we have the opportunity we need to learn new literacies and new competencies that we’ll need to model for our students.

I’ve hinted at my goals for the class. I hope that taking this course open will lead to a more global focus on young adult literature. My dream would be to have participants from around the world meeting in virtual book clubs. I also want to use the open Web tools to encourage all of us to expand our personal learning space/environment so that we develop those new literacies/competencies that we need. Finally, I want to share what you all teach me this fall about virtual book clubs and bookcasts so that online courses for middle and high school students can become more compelling. There are at least 30,000 students in North Carolina alone taking online courses, and we need to make certain that these students learn about social justice/critical literacy and creativity through literature and I don’t think that’s possible in the traditional, transmission style-online course.

Whew! I got pretty inspired there by my goals. I’d not really written those out before. It always surprises me when I complete a piece and learn something new or realize something through the focus and reflection that was just below the surface. I think I learned through this writing that my efforts to make the course open really fit into the unspoken overall goal of creating a space where educators interested in young adult literature from around the globe could meet and talk about books and learning through literature with young adults. And that we can then share this type of connected learning with our students.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. — Rollo May

  by  Randy Griffin 

In this post I’m throwing my weight on the side of creative constraints. I know creative constraints sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s that tension between what you expect and what may be hidden just beneath the surface that often produces quite a bit of cranial energy.

I first started thinking about the relationship of creativity and constraints when I was introduced to the infamous (and rightly so) MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), DS106 (Digital Storytelling) in January, 2011. I learned that the whole idea of assignments was to present parameters that challenge the creator to come up with something new and different. No parameters — no creativity.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of thinking about creative constraints (and many “Daily Creates”) and collected some really compelling quotes from some of the most creative people the world has ever celebrated. btw these three I picked up in a Pilobus performance for kids.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit. –Igor Stravinsky

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom. — Da Vinci.

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed. — Henri Matisse

So it’s with a lot of trepidation that I approach this challenge of writing the expectations for blogging in ECI 521: Teaching Literature for Young Adults. I’d like to hit that elusive target somewhere between “here’s a rubric” and “everything goes”.

I’ve done a lot of soul-searching about blogging before, “Hands Off My Blog: Affirming the Right to Blog.” And about creativity: ” . . . though I believe that constraints inspire creativity; I also know that all the joy of creativity can be sucked out if you don’t have some freedom and space to realize your vision” (from Creativity for Hire).

When I think back to my efforts to balance the creativity and constraints within assignments, I remember two graduate students who taught me a lot about creativity. First student was Michael who made the most of my challenge to be creative in the weekly minipodcasts on VoiceThread. Michael was religious about the constraints and he timed his pieces down to the second to meet the two-minute limit. But he was free as a bird when it came to his design for his minipodcasts, always pushing the limit to create tiny, witty, compelling, and, yes, deeply meaningful pieces. He even sang his response once when I pointed out that he may have done everything but sing. Here’s an example of Michael’s creative VoiceThreads. He’s first up.

These VoiceThread responses to our collaborative critical inquiries remind me that offering students a variety of ways to structure their responses is imperative if I would model differentiation and encouraging learners to explore different ways to express their learning. In my POTcert experience, I was so impressed by Nacho, one of my mentees (or was I the mentee?) who used Eyejot to perfection. I’m encouraging students this semester to follow their bliss or at least their communication preference and use audio as Michael did (SoundCloud is a great tool for this) or video as Nacho did (Nacho made the most of Eyejot) — or to mix it up as the assignment/topic moves them.

Michele did not stray far from the written word as she blogged in ECI 521 but every post was as imaginative as it was insightful. Again, she set a goal of blogging creatively, and she succeeded swimmingly. I’ll share her blog, Magistra et Lector, and her response to the topic of boys and nonfiction, “How to Get Boys to Read.”

Chapter 3: Make It Challenging in the “Right” Ways

How many times in the past few months have I heard about our Christian, moral founding fathers? My students have no idea what our founding fathers were like. I also look at their glazed expressions as I giggle over the fact that Petrarch (and a host of other Catholic dignitaries) had children despite his inability to marry. Yes, he was the namesake for the Italian sonnet my students now dread, but he was a complicated man. Ben Franklin was a complicated man. George Washington was a complicated man. I bet even Rosa Parks had her skeletons. Rather than allowing our students to experience the complexities inherent in real peoples’ lives, we gloss over the specifics and generalize…founding fathers=perfect government collaborators, Petrarch=ideal humanist…Rosa Parks=civil rights savior. We think that if we stop sharing cute anecdotes about wooden teeth and instead focus on the realities of these figures’ lives, we will somehow lose our audience or overwhelm them with too much information. Maybe if we added some of the shades of gray, we might actually teach them something that will help them avoid becoming the punch line of a bad Jay Leno skit

Finally, let me share Ashley’s soul-searching post about how difficult it is for her as a teacher to resist responding to every item/question in the blog assignment because that is good academic writing.

Once I realized my block, though, I actively worked to adapt. I always teach my students that they need to mold their writing to the expectations of the discipline or genre. That is a part of writing. So I took my own advice and tried. Turns out, I love it! This is a good example of how far I’ve come.

— Ashley, “On Interconnectivity (and My Compartmentalization Tendencies.”

So Ashley reminds us that writers we must “mold their writing to the expectations of the discipline or genre. That is a part of writing.” What are the expectations for blogging in ECI 521? That you compose (in text, audio, video, graphics, or a mashup) in a creative way that engages your audience and compels them to think deeply about your response to the reading and sharing of resources that you’ve experienced on a topic. And remember that other classmates can be part of that mix as we weave their creative contributions into our comments and possibly our posts.

The constraints? Keep on message, stay focused, and make the composition tight. Edit judiciously to be sure your points are clear and compelling. Use Pink’s creative elements and more to engage and hold your readers’ interest. Above all, say something. Throw your weight.

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It’s not that the expectations were high. The professional association to which I have belonged since I became a teacher decades ago is doing a website makeover and wanted a video to promote the annual conference coming up in March 2013. Specifications were that I use the Ken Burns effect to bump up the visual interest from a plain slide show.

So bump it up, I did. The conference theme, “Investigate That Story,” was inspired by a quote by David Coleman, one of the authors for the Common Core State Standards:

Read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.

And the conference logo has a bit of film noir going for it. At least that’s what I see with the kid in the trench coat and fedora.

So I enlisted the help of a dashing young friend from my teen book and writers’ club who fancies himself an actor and taped a simple opening and close that I made black and white, found some film noir-like music, and then simply added some author promo shots and book covers.

Biggest lesson was creating a lead-in to my actor’s “hot tip” line. I’m sure public library patrons thought I was “casing the joint” as I attempted pan after pan on different library shelves trying to find the perfect or at least less Blair Witch-like move. I wanted to set the mood with music before I came to the actor so I needed a rather long visual sequence. Adding the Coleman quote gave me a chance to lengthen the lead-in purposely.

So here’s my completed video:

I’m not sure my educator-friends know quite what to make of this but they seem okay with it as long as I got the Ken Burns moves on the images going. What if they had hated the film noir effect? Glad I didn’t have to face that because, though I believe that constraints inspire creativity; I also know that all the joy of creativity can be sucked out if you don’t have some freedom and space to realize your vision.

I’m definitely not ready technologically or emotionally for commissioned work.

Got a question for you iMovie fans. Can I insert an image and add text? I resorted to PowerPoint to create the brief bio slides for each author but, surely, I can accomplish this in iMovie.