Final Thoughts on Online Education

I created a PREZI presentation, reflecting on the digital storytelling course I have taken online for the past couple of months. Check it out...feedback is much appreciated as always ;-)

Going Through Emotions with Digital Story Telling

yet another DS project. This is an audio digital story which I have created using Garage Band on my Mac. I previously always ignored Garage Band as I did not really know what to do with it, but now I completely fell in love with it. It is a great tool for creating simple songs or projects like the one below.
I don't really want to give away a lot of the story I had in mind when putting the sounds together, rather I want the listeners to reply to this post and let me know what pops into your head when listening to this short track. Just a small hint: its all about emotions.

Going Through Emotions - Digital Story by Lixi-Falk

Digital Poetry

"Blackout Poetry" is this method of digital story-telling called. I love the idea, not only because it looks cool but also because it is a lot of fun to find sentences in a text that is talking about something completely different. For this project, I took a page from the first chapter of "Alice in Wonderland" (scanned by Google Books). The challenge with this really is to come up with a sentence and to find the sentence. But nevertheless it is a lot of fun to play around with the word you have. If you find something cool, simply blackout the other words with a drawing program such as Windows Paint.

Digital Footprints of Apples

As I personally love design and changng things I decided to check out how one of my favorite websites has changed over the years. Or lets say....one of my favorites. I have to admit that I am a bit of an APPLE...MAC...whatever you wanna call it geek, so I frequently check the site to check whether there are any new products, software, designs etc. I love Apple because I love design in general and I think it is amazing to see how not only the internet but technology evolves over time. So here is the digital story of Apple in screenshots:

1997

1998

2000

2001

2004

2004

2007

2009

2010

As you probably have noticed, I did not post shots from each an every year, only the ones with major changes. By the way, all these screenshot were taken from the Way Back Machine (www.waybackmachine.org/)

Shooting Daily

so far I have been struggeling with these daily shoots. I often did not like the assignments. Oh well...better late than never I thought. Yestersay's assignment was to shoot someting from ground level. so here it is:

I took this photo around noon at a fruit stand in Berlin, where a friend of mine was working all day.

Live Your Goals

so I created my first real story-telling project....yea it's about soccer...don't blame me...I'm German.
I found the assignment for this on the ds106 website. I loved the idea of using as little as 7 Google search results in order to tell a short story. It was actually a quick project that I have created in only about 10 minutes, which made the whole thing even better since you get really fast results. Anyways, see for yourself and give me feedback ;-]

P.S. if you want to create one of these stories yourself simply go to http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories ...the instructions are right there.

"The Girls of Facebook" or "Digital Storytelling Part 1?"

so, since I have complained about the poor Facebook illustrations in one of my previous posts I quickly put together some new designs, which hopefully come closer to the silhouette of a girl and are less Vadar-esque. I am so old-school that I designed these images with Microsoft's Paintbrush (...on a MAC). It's actually fairly easy since basically all you have to do is get a copy of the original and then change the look of the silhouette with white shapes. Well have a look and let me know what you think...

Women, Soccer, and North Korea

  on Google Maps, North Korea is nothing but a blank spot

So right now I am watching the Women's Soccer World Cup, which is held in Germany this year. It's Sweden vs. North Korea. It's the 87th minute and Sweden is in the lead with 1:0. Just a regular match? Well what is really interesting about this match is that for the North Korean team it is by far more than just a game. Sport Journalists report that the players are hardly ever seen outside of the soccer field or their hotel and even though they live in the same hotel as their opponent Sweden, the swedish players have not seen the North Korean players at all prior to the match. Apparently they are not allowed to talk to the press, or anyone else outside the team. In an interview with the press the North Korean trainer Kim Kwang-min only answered one question: "What do the members of the team do in their free time?" To this he then replied: "Well, they are allowed to leave the hotel for a little while and walk around for a bit, but not too far."

By the way, the match is now over and Sweden won. This is the second match North Korea lost (the first one was against the United States) so they are now out of the competition and have to fly back home early. As usual, there are no interviews or press statements, but reports about possible punishments for the players back home have been made public after previous World Cups.

I must say I feel really sorry and strange about this whole thing. Why does North Korea even compete in these kinds of sport events when they still hold their people captive even in foreign countries. And how must the players feel when seeing the world, especially countries like Germany for the first time?