Reflection 7: Digital Audio & Closed Captioning

The latest projects for my 4300 class at California State University, Los Angeles with Kimberly Rubal were a lot of fun. I feel like this class has been created for a person like me, and my skillset. My last three assignments (sans this reflection) have been on a production level that speaks to me (LOUDLY!!!), and could be the reason why I love my graduate program. I'm going to to express this reflection by providing the end result of what I had to do for this class for this reflection, with a summary.

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Assignment 1: Digital Audio

Download Digital Audio File

"It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good" –Paula Scher

Paula Scher, The goddess of graphic design, is one of my all-time favorite graphic designers. If you have ever seen her Abstract episode on Netflix, it really says a lot about her thinking and approach - typography. So amazing!

While finishing this blog post, I'm listening to the the Netflix episode, Just listening to the episode is mind-blowing, and super nerdy - I'm fine with that

Assignment 2: Screen Casting

This is a Computational Thinking integration to my lesson plan on Low Poly Portrait. Gareth David has a really great tutorial on Low Poly portraiture, but I think with the Grid Hack, a student in my class can really excel with this project.

Assignment 3: YouTube Close Captioning

I know what you're thinking, this is boring work. I definitely agree because eons ago, I had to add closed captions to a Flash project for a bullying campaign, and it was extremely painful. Like Comic Sans painful. 

However, YouTube's tools for closed captioning is light years ahead of where I was at in 2010. If you are doing short, chunked, video production that could use extra articulation to enhance understanding, this is a really great tool. Even if you have the application close caption the video for you - I highly recommend it, especially if you live in an area where multiple languages are used. Last I heard there were over 120 language dialects in California alone. WHAT!?! Check the facts, please.

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Thank you for reading. And I hope you played the Paula Scher Netflix episode for background noise during this read because I'm still gushing over it. It's a great listen, even if you can't watch it. 

Reflection 6: 01000011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01110101 01110100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01100001 01101100 00100000 01010100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111

Computational Thinking in binary, and that is the topic of reflection for this post.

For Part I of Computational Thinking in 4300 we used a binary language to write our favorite color in binary code, and submit it to a class Google Doc. I chose Aqua as my favorite color, and when translated for Part I it looks like this: 10011110 10001110 10001010 10011110.

After decoding twenty student responses for Part II, out of 20 respondents, two students chose pink as their favorite color, blue got majority of votes, and lavender is the name of a plant.

Google Sheets: 4300 Binary Favorite Color

Reflection 5: Integrating Computational Thinking

I recently took on the task of integrating a Computational Teaching micro lesson into my lesson plans for the Low Poly Portrait project I assign at the beginning of the semester for my second year students. The lesson includes a brief Google Slide presentation with an introduction to why using a grid could be helpful. It also has a couple videos that explain grids in detail and shows students how access the grid tools in Adobe Illustrator.

Overall I just want the students to realize there is a Grid Tool in Illustrator and that it will make their Low Poly Portrait come out with better results. 

I hope the information in the presentation helps lead to a Grid Systems discussion going forward with the class. I liked this assignment (aka task) because I could build on this small presentation, and incorporate it into more lessons I have planned to reinforce the Grid System theory in Graphic Design.

This lesson integration is versatile, and the lesson seems more meaningful. I feel that integrating this simple presentation into more lessons is going to help improve results with the final composition and give the students more confidence when they approach layout design, helping them organize their visual communication.

• Lesson Plan
• Google Slide Presentation