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.