In my experience when people do kind things they want their name attached to it. The converse appears true with the Colgate Yik Yak story. I decided to release some anonymous positivity in my college residence hall with these signs.
Update: 2/7/2015
The signs I posted seem to be really popular with the people that live in my college residence hall. I checked yesterday and only one tag was left.
This is my creation of the week made with the iPad camera and sketchbookx app. I saw this group of ducks in the ice storm the other day and it reminded me of a community and how nicely they got along despite some of them not matching the rest. The caption was inspired by the thinking that one should not just use social media in the way it has been used all along but to find new ways to apply it to our community. Why not try quacking?
For this weeks media create I played around with a music production app on the iPad called Auxy. The app has 4 different sections where you can change the sounds of the drum, bass, and 2 synths. The app was relatively easy and fun to use and very user-friendly. Auxy also allows the user to adjust the tempo, swing and major/minor aspects of the song.
The only trouble I ran into when posting this was saving the audio directly to the iPad. Auxy allows a user to export the recording in a number of ways including emailing, itunes, and using apps like AudioCopy or Airdrop and DropBox. I tried emailing the sound file to myself but found I was unable to save it directly from my email to my iPad. I also tried installing AudioCopy but could not figure out how to use it. I eventually gave up and ended up posting this from a sinc site since I couldn’t upload the file directly from the iPad.
I was inspired to make this image after learning about the recent events at Colgate University involving Yik Yak. I used the app PhotoFusion for iPad to juxtapose the troll face on the Yik Yak logo.
Picture It. London, 1963. You see an iPad lying around…what do you think it is? Is it a one-page book? A secret government spy gadget? Or perhaps something to put under wibbly-wobbly table leg stuff?
Or…
Maybe it’s an Etch-a-Sketch from Gallifrey?
New technology is always happening. It’s up to us to think about things differently. In 1963, Londoners could have just asked for a faster Etch-a-Sketch, but someone imagined great worlds, great characters, and great technology. Each of these have left a legacy in the sci-fi world, and Doctor Who has a following like never before. I happen to watch the series on this Etch-a-Sketch.
This app idea is inspired by the podcast about the racism that was revealed on the Colgate campus through the app YikYak. After listening to this disturbing story, I tried to imagine what kind of app could be useful for improving race relations on college campuses.
I’m convinced that one of the main causes of racism is ignorance, fueled and perpetuated by segregation. I’m sure there are plenty of college students who are interested in getting to know people who are different from themselves, but they don’t know where to find opportunities to interact with a variety of people from different ethnicities and backgrounds. My solution is to create a social networking app that makes it easy for people from different backgrounds to meet.
For now, I’m calling this app InteGreat. Hopefully it will help people from different backgrounds get to know each other, which will erase ignorance and diminish the segregation that perpetuates racial tensions that exist on college campuses today.
Think: MEETUP + FOURSQUARE + FACEBOOK
Basically, InteGreat is a social media platform focused on helping people from different backgrounds get together and hang out.
Three main features of the app:
1 – EVENTS – People from different clubs and groups on campuses post events that are open to people outside their group.
2 – NEWSFEED – People post stories, articles, art, memes, WHATEVER, as long as it is related to the theme of integration and improving race relations.
3 – CHAT / MESSAGING – People get to know each other.
Anything. I want you to make stuff … take a picture, make a gif, make a meme, record sound, shoot some, video, or write something. My goal is to get you to stretch your creativity and make digital things. They need to be posted to the course blog and you need to write something about what you made. Here are some questions to consider … How did you make it? What was the motivation for making it? What did you use to make it? Did you enjoy making it? Was it difficult? What does what you make say about you? Does it shape your identity? Are you happy with it?
At the end of the day, I just want you to spend some time thinking about creating digital artifacts. You will do one each week and we will build the rubric together, but for the most part anything goes!
