Final Reflective Blog Post

Alright so this is my last time that i will be blogging for 1101. This class has been interesting and very fun. I was skeptical at the beginning of the year about how I was going to feel about doing blogs, but it actually wasn't that bad. I am not sure if i am going to continue to blog or if this will be it, but I do see that it is an interesting way to say how you feel.

This class has had many different things that other English classes have not. There have been many times this semester that I have felt a sense of "wobble". One of the biggest things that we did was that gave me wobble was the improve every morning. We would do simple tasks that would require you to think in a different way, but even though it was simple, it gave me some trouble. Different events would include us to say the first word that came to our mind and even though that sounds easy, sometimes i couldn't think of a word. A complete mind blank. I didn't know how to describe it.

There was another time that i felt "wobble" and this was when we would write to a prompt in class and spend about five minutes and then take a break. After that we would "go deeper" and write in more detail. This was something that would give me trouble because i would have to think about it in a different way to write in more detail.

All in all, i feel that this class has taught me to think in more detail and to think in a completely different way. It was very interesting and i had a great time working. I really enjoyed working with my writing group and enjoyed getting to know them. I hope you all have a great rest of your year and enjoy your holiday break.

Ethnography Blog Post

• What it was like for you to figure out what to write about.
• 
  
• It was interesting to see how our ideas changed throughout the project. This project was very interesting because there was really not too much guidance to it. Basically we were supposed to come up with all of ideas on our own and figure everything out.

• What it was like for you to revise your work.
• The way that we revised our work was based on what worked for us as a group. As we started the project, we had ideas of what we wanted to do, but they were not practical. So we ended up changing our ideas and then if that didn't work, we changed it again.

• What it was like for you work in a collaborative group.
• It was difficult for us to work as a group because both of my partners did not live on campus and there were many scheduling conflicts. What we had to do was work on everything in class and then divide it out and come back next class period and work on it again. I usually do not like to work like this, but it seemed to be the only way.

• What was it like for you to create an untraditional (not an essay) piece.



• I thought creating this project was a lot of fun and it opened my eyes to different ways of creating a project. Usually i will create some sort of a paper because that is easy, but for this project, we created a video. This project helped me to work on my editing skills in iMovie which is a mac product.

• What else do you want to say about this assignment
• I really enjoyed doing it. It was a lot of fun and i am glad that we had the opportunity to work on it. Not every group is perfect, but i feel that we were able to divide and complete the project.
• Everywhere is some of the inspirational ideas that we used for our video which you will see on Tuesday
• 

The Final Stretch of School

We are getting to that point where everyone is going to the library and studying up for their final exams. This is my first year with college finals and from what everyone tells me, it is going to be very difficult and i will be taking lots of energy drinks. I am not to sure if i believe this because ever since i have gotten to college, i have been spending a lot of my free time in the library studying. I feel like i know the information really well and i don't think i will be cramming everything in the final weeks of school. For two of my classes, i have to make some sort of presentation and present it to the class. Those two classes are English and my UCOL class. Both of those projects are completed and all i have to do now is present them. One of my classes is having a chapter test and i already have two of the three chapters memorized and then my last two classes have cumulative finals. Those two classes are math and chemistry. They are probably my strongest subjects. So i am not really to sure how hard this is going to be but i feel that i will be very prepared. Its hard to believe that school will be over in two weeks. I feel like this semester has flown by. I hope that everyone else has had a good first semester experience.


One of my friends took this picture of me in the library when i wasn't paying attention.

I don't know what to call this

I am not quite sure if anyone will see this other than my group but I need another blog and so I figured I would talk about it on here. I had kind of a bad weekend. I know its only Saturday, but I feel like my weekend starts on Thursday. This blog is going to be very vague, but in a way i feel that this class has changed me. It sounds kind of stupid to say that because it is an entry level freshman class, but when i got home last night, i was very sad. I want to talk about the full story with someone but i don't know who to do to. All the things I want to say, i type out and then realize that this will be permanent and then i mash my delete key. The only safe way for me to figure out my thoughts at the time was my writing into the say journal. I am not much of an emotional person and i am not much for writing my feelings, but i figured it was the only safe, judgement free place that i could write. I ended up writing a poem that expresses my feelings and is meant to go to someone, but i can't decide if that is a good choice. I spent so much time writing it and it felt like ten minutes. Its is the most true and to the heart thing i have ever written and i am too afraid how it will be taken. I know this blog does not have to much to do with you, but i just wanted to get a little bit on my problems off my chest. I don't know what kind of picture i want to end this with. I was going to post a picture of my day book but that is just a composition notebook. So in an attempt to lighten to mood a little, here is a funny picture i found a few weeks ago.

Also i have realized that when you are happy, you enjoy the music you listen to. When you are sad, you understand the lyrics. Kind of  a weird thing when you listen to a song that has been on you phone for over a year and just now you understand the lyrics.

We are making a video!

Alright, so with our ethnography project, we have had many ideas about what we were going to do with it. Our first idea was to make a simple PowerPoint/Prezi. When we thought about Prezi, we thought that we might be able to make some kind of kinetic text thing (Where the words fall onto the screen). We thought that would be an interesting way of talking about our "journey" because they are not boring like a typical PowerPoint. This led us to doing research about making kinetic texts and we found out thy are actually very hard to do. Not only that, but they take a lot of time. So that kind of ruined that idea. Back to the drawing board. We started to think about other things that we could do that would be interesting. Oh and our topic was Objects, which is very vague. When we met on Thursday morning, we came us with the idea of walking around campus and filming us finding hidden texts and literacy's. We already knew of a couple places that we wanted to include in the video, so we just started to walk. When we did this, we came up with a 25 minute video and we were going to fast forward the parts where we are walking to the next destination. In thought, this would make about a 5 minute video. Well the program that i am using for this cant take a video that long and speed it up in a smooth way. This makes our video very rough and choppy; however, it looks exactly like a stop motion movie. I am using this idea and running with the ball. We are going to act like we made a stop motion movie which is when you take thousands of pictures and play them in a way that it looks like a video. It is really cool and very effective if done correctly. I am going to talk to Lacy about it to make sure that she approves, but i think we have made a big move in the right direction this week.

This is a video of one of my favorite stop motion videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ8ZWMlObGE

Ethnography Project Ideas

In class, we were asked a bunch of questions about our project that was meant to get us thinking about how we were going to go about doing this project. The questions and answers that were asked are listed below

1) What is your issue/message.... the so what of your project:
-We are going to talk about how this project will bring awareness to UNCC students about objects that hold literacy meanings on campus that they would normally not notice.
2) What are we definitely going to use
-Woods(House, Rock, Grave, Blacksmith Building,) Belk Tower, Echo Circle.
3) Who else cares about this or should care about this?  Where are they?  What public spaces do you find them in?

-New students, prospective student, current students, and visitors. They can come from anywhere and the  objects are placed in the center of public spaces to bring people together.

4) How can you infiltrate this space with your project? Be CREATIVE and don’t worry about if it is actually doable yet.

-Our project is the space and the space is inviting for anyone to enjoy. It is owned by nobody and anyone can use the space.

5) Now plan an enactment of the scenario to share ideas with the class.

-We can give a tour or add these locations to the already created tour of UNCC and show off all of these hidden locations/symbols to anybody that wants to go. We can also make a YouTube video. Have a chalk arrow that is drawn into the ground and don't say what it is for. Let curiosity take control of the students and then when they get to the end of the trail have the fact written into the ground.

Below is the picture of the grave site that I talked about in my last blog. This is in the woods by the east deck parking garage.

 

Annotated Bibilography

For out ethnography project, we went out and took a bunch of pictures of things that we saw around campus. There were all supposed to relate back to "Objects". We had no real direction to go about finding these things, so we just went and walked around until we found different things. We were looking for just abstract objects and things that most people would usually over look.

Belk Tower, Charlotte. 30 Oct 2012. Personal photograph by author. JPEG file

We all met up at Belk tower because it was something that everybody on campus knows and a central spot. We heard that the Belk tower was supposed to be a old style pen and an inc tray. We took a picture of this because we though that it was something that not many people would think about.

A Building that looks like a Camera.

There is another spot on campus that is a building. we walked around looking for this building but unfortunately  we couldn't find it. Supposedly is you look at this building from Google maps,  it looks exactly like a camera. We are going to continue to look around for this one.

Grave Site, Charlotte. 30 Oct 2012. Personal photograph by author. JPEG file.

Inside the garden by east deck there is a burial site that holds the founder or UNCC. I believe he name was something cone? i want to say Bonnie. I never would have though that this would be on campus and it was something very interesting, at least in my mind. 

As we continue to work on this project we find that there are a lot of hidden things on campus and we think that we are going to go about finding a lot of them and show them in our project.

It happened

So, I missed the due date. This was the first time i have missed the due date on my blog assignment. I went home over the weekend and it was really boring because nobody was in Greensboro and I just sat at home and did homework. I did the next three weeks of my math homework and two weeks of math. I felt really good about getting so much done and then I realized that i forgot this.
Anyways, today i met with my group for our ethnography project and we walked around campus and found some really cool stuff. I found out that the founder of UNCC has a grave site in the garden by east deck. We took a bunch of pictures, but they are not on my phone.My mind is scattered and i have a really bad headache.... So im sorry that this is so short. If i get up to it, i will get back on tomorrow and make it a little better.

Literacy Narrative Project Reflection

It's another Sunday night and some how I forgot about this blog again. I don't know how I always remember to do this at 11:45 every Sunday, but I think I will make it. Anyways, my weekend was very awesome. I had  a lot of fun hanging out with my friends and I went to a soccer game on both Friday and Sunday. We won.... by a lot.
So our narrative project is slowly coming around to that due date. Lacy has decided to do what she like to call it, "A Rolling Due Date." I'm not really sure what that means, but i'm sure that she we let us know on Monday. I have already worked on my paper and it is currently in the third draft stage. I feel that it has come a long way from my first draft and at this point, I want to work on it and make it as good as it can be. This paper has gone from a simple project in class to a personal reflection. I actually care more about how well the paper is and how well it is expressed than getting the grade. Now don't get me wrong, i still want to get a good grade, but thats not the main goal. To be honest, it is a little weird how much i have gotten into this assignment.
I hope that this wasn't too poorly written; i am watching The Social Network on FX. This movie is really good. I want to leave you with a cool little fact i just heard during a commercial.

Did you know in one year Americans eat enough popcorn to fill the empire state building.... 18 times.
That's a lot of popcorn and yes..... I made it before 12:00. :)

Fall Break and Lots of Work

It was a wonderful fall break for most of the 49ers, including myself. I went back to Greensboro and spent the weekend with my family and some friends, but inevitable it had to end and we had to come back to school. My school schedule is actually pretty nice because I don't have any classes on Friday. So the thought of a two day week wasn't too bad. It started out with Pre-Calc on Wednesday and then Chemistry. Now normally I have to go to Communications, but lucky for me it was cancelled. Thursday I went to English where we wrote in our notebooks about possible names for our midterm project. I am not very good at coming up with names for things so this assignment actually was a little hard. We also did this really cool assignment were we had to rant about grammar. It was a fun way to wake up our minds and get the juices flowing. After English i went to UCOL.

Finally..... My short week of four classes is over. One of my friends was going back to Greensboro on Friday so I figured why not. Since I got back i have been spending my time to finish my homework and read. Every week, I have Chemistry homework due at 11:59 on Sunday. Usually this does not take me that long, but this week we had a lot of questions. Each question have between 5 and 10 parts to it and so i found myself spending quite a little bit of
time on it.

Anyways, I have been doing my homework and now I am working on English. I just started so I have not done any of the reading or the mapping the essay activity. I opened the assignment and saw that it was 14 pages with semi-small print and i came to the conclusion that I will hold off until tomorrow.
I don't know what the weather was like in Charlotte today, but it was amazing in Greensboro.

Midterm Project

This is where we ended up finding the book

A description of all the floors
 on the elevator

So this week, instead of going to our Monday class for English, we all got to go to the library aka "Club Atkins". I had a hard time finding my group because they said meet them on the second floor and I thought the basement was floor number one. Anyways, we started off by reading the assignment out loud and deciding on a book. Bryan came up with the idea of using a Dr. Sues book because a lot of his work can be interpreted different ways. We went online and checked to see if they would have any and where they would be. We didn't think they would because its a children's book, but to our surprise they had a lot by him. We found the book's call number "LU M1997 P745 C4" and started on our journey. Kelsey and Bryan went looking first while Nikki and I watched the laptops. After a little bit of time they came back and said they couldn't find it. They said the librarian said it was on the fifth floor. So now it was Nikki and my turn. We got up and walked to the Elevator and I asked Nikki if she had ever been to the tenth floor. 

Nikki looking for the book
(Its right behind her)

I figured we were supposed to explore the library and that was one of the coolest floors with all of the book and especially the view. She said no, so we took a quick pit stop and then were back on our mission. When we got on the fifth floor, there were so many books. We didn't know where to start. We had to have Bryan text us the call number because we forgot the paper. 

The rare books collection on the
10th floor

Once we received the text, we started to walk down the rows. Thinking it would be easy we wandered and then wandered some more. Quickly we found out that this wasn't going to be easy. We ended up finding the book and took it back down to the 2nd floor to talk about it. We talked as a group for a little bit of time then a few of us had to leave to go to our next class. I came back to my room after a long day and wrote into my day book.  I have a few pictures that were not able to make it in the slide show. Our slide show is on this website http://share.snacktools.com/A55A79EC5A8/bunaom9t.

My "write beside the text"

The page I used from the book.

Literacy Narrative Project.

So this week, we had to write out first "Paper" for English class. There wasn't much to it, mostly we were supposed to just stay on topic and answer the question from the prompt. This was all for our literacy narrative project. I wrote mine using the "Memory Story prompt". I wrote about my 11th grade English teacher and if i recall, I wrote one of my blogs about her as well. She was a very hard teacher that inspired me. She changes the way i look at school and taught me to set higher expectations about myself. That is basically the summary for my paper. I have not had to really write that much this year from any of my classes which is weird because i was told that this was all i was going to be doing in college. I have a feeling it is because all of my classes are freshman classes. But anyways I hope you all enjoy reading my paper and hopefully it will get better. My first draft was a little rough i found out after looking over on it.

A Web Cam and a Paper.

Alright, so it is time for another blog and I am starting to realize that this isn't as hard as I originally thought it was going to be. I might even go as far as to say that I am having fun doing this. The only thing that really bugs me about this is that I have noticed that I take Microsoft Word for granted. This website does not change the I to a capital I like word.... Just something to work around I guess.

But anyways, this blog is going to be about the assignment that Lacey assigned to us for homework after class on Tuesday the 18th, where we were supposed to go back and record ourselves writing a paper of some kind. Lucky for me Unlucky for me, I had a paper due Thursday that has received a lot of attention yet. So I got onto my computer and started to type with my webcam recording myself. As time moved on, i forgot that I was being recorded and at the end I walked away. When I came back after eating a bowl of soup, I remembered that it was recording still. So, I stopped the recording and watched it. It was very interesting because it made me thing about what I do when nobody is watching. I thought that it was a very cool and interesting assignment.

I wish I could put the video on the website but its pretty long and it wont upload.

Another Day Another Blog

This week in class was very interesting. We were given five index cards and on the first index card we were told to write about a bunch on significant events in our life that relate to writing. I came up with a lost of about five events that I felt were significant.

On the Second card, we were to pick one of the events and elaborate on it and describe it in detail. I talked about how when I was younger, my mom and I always read together. It started with her reading to me when i couldn't. Then as I got a little older and was learning how to read, I started to read back to her. Now that I can read we dont read to each other; however, we still do read in the same room. This was very interesting to me because i never really thought about how much my mom helped me learn to read. The next two card I continued to elaborate on that. This is all building up to a project that we are supposed to do where we have to write a literacy narrative project.

Writing Timeline

So for homework this week, we had to create a writing time line. This assignment was pretty open to what we were allowed to put on it, but we were required to have five significant writing events on it. As we shared are time lines in class, I noticed that a lot of students used events from school because they do not have many writing evens outside of school. Will this class change that?

Like the other students, mine were all based off of school events and for the most part, they were based around the writing tests that we had to take in 4th, 7th, and 10th grade. A few things that were different were the teachers and my teacher in tenth grade was Mrs. Blackburn. She was a teacher that taught both honors and AP; however, she treated each class as if it was an AP Class. I absolutely regretted getting her as as a teacher because she created impossibly hard and long assignments. To make a long story short, when i look back at that class, i realize that I have learned so much and that she was probable one of the best teachers i have ever had. She changed my ideas and views on writing and has been a person to motive me.

Themes for English B

I feel like this article by Langston Hughes is sort of what we are required to do on this first post. The essence of this article is that an instructor would like us to go home and write about whatever we think about. The author used the article to describe a little about himself. So this is a little about me.

From my daybook

My name is Michael Shaw. I am from a small town north of Greensboro named Summerfield. I have always lived here and have never moved. I have two pets. A cat that is named Prime Time and a dog named Marcello. I love both of my pets and miss them as I start my first few weeks of college. I am very new to the idea of blogging and for the most part, I have never thought that I would like to do this; however, I am keeping an open mind and see where the next few weeks takes me.