The Unveiling of a Writer/Composer/Editor

Throughout the past semester you have been discussing the process of composing and your identity as a composer. For this last (!) blog post, I want you to discuss who you believe you are as a writer, composer and/or an editor (note the "and" so you can be all three and not just one or the other). To do this I want you to have a little fun, so I'm not looking for you to do a traditional 500 word response. What I want is you to think about how you could represent the characteristics that define you as a writer/composer/editor that you have developed and honed this semester (and those that you came in with).

Some suggestions for ways to create this:
*A job wanted ad or a personal
*A persona poem
*Through a series of images
*an obit
*a short short (short fiction piece)

The options are open. You can respond back to this post OR you can create a new post.

This should be as long as it needs to be to get your point across. I should see elements of you----so I should be able to get a sense of who wrote what without even looking at the author's name.

And remember: have fun with this---it's your last one for this class. Heck yes!! ;-)

The Good, the bad, the ugly

For your second to last journal (yah!), please provide a detailed update of your portfolio dealings...that includes what is going well, what isn't, what needs to be done, what you like, what you don't like, how the revision process is going, feelings towards creating a space which showcases your work as a composer, etc. Basically, I'm looking for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This is due by Tuesday, November 23 11:00am otherwise it will be considered late.

Guidelines: well...you know what to do. ;-)

Convergence Culture

"Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1" Leaked Online

This headline from Google News Tuesday morning picks up on a massive trend in our culture. Using just Harry Potter as our example the HP phenomenon has spread to video games, fan fiction, home-made trailers, Facebook/MySpace pages, mobile applications and countless more ways in which fans can fully immerse themselves in the wizarding world. Things like Kinects allow you to become the controller in a Harry Potter video game (http://harrypotter.ea.com/NA/?the-game). Media in one form is being distributed in many different forms and today are highly influenced by audience (that’s you!) participation.

(Trailer for the Harry Potter video game)

Why is this Harry Potter craze important to you? It is a part of a series of trends in our culture today that we can succinctly define as convergence culture.

Henry Jenkins is a professor from the University of Southern California. In his book, Convergence Culture, he defines this progression of society. He uses the term "convergence culture" to refer to two main ideas: a much greater degree of audience participation and profoundly active and influential fan-base and an extremely wide range of ways that things like our music and movies are made available to us.

While some people have taken this concept and made it into pirating and copyright infringement, there are many positive (and legal!) ways that you can become involved with convergence culture. How YOU consume media plays a direct part in what will come next in media. Bands are now uploading music to their websites as opposed to making CDs. Political figures have Facebook pages. Books are available online with mediums like Kindle and Google Books. You wanted interactivity and Apple came out with the iPhone and apps ("There's an app for that!").You have a distinct voice and power. 

Jenkins closes his book with these inspiring words... "Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. Convergence culture is the future, but it is taking shape now. Consumers will be more powerful within convergence culture--but only if they recognize that power as both consumers and citizens, as full participants in our culture."

By Sammi and Melissa

The Anatomy of the Knowledge Community of a Colege Student

     As a student at FSU I have a very broad and diverse knowledge community. If I had to describe what it’s like I would say that it’s a combination between a blog and an internet search engine. There are elements of both that make it into the system that college students use to search for, gather and interpret the knowledge.

     As a blog my knowledge community is very vast. Each topic page is a new idea that I post to the community. Every comment thereafter is someone in my community responding to the topic. People I have never met or spoken to before will post what they believe about the topic. Soon there are multiple comments from a  variety of sources, my peers, professors and graduate students, laid out on the community page. People read through the previous posts then comment on what they think or believe or even just their own interpretation of an idea. At the end though it has been seen that each person who participated has changed, each of them has added onto, taken away from or rethought what they believed the topic to mean. After looking at the post and posting or commenting the first time the person may speak to others who will go and contribute their ideas or the person’s ideas may have change after discussing the topic with friends and family and return to the community to share their new thoughts. This is how ideas evolve, and change in my knowledge community through shared thoughts of participants even participants that I might not have direct contact with. It’s a mobile changing community set up like a web blog.

     My knowledge community as a student is also like an internet search engine. The search page like the question that is presented to the community as a whole and the pages that pop up with different options the people who step forward to offer their interpretations and answers to the presented question. The links represent the process of picking a person or multiple persons to hear the information from. Just like a search engine the first person you can get the information from is not the best person, so it’s best to look at multiple peoples answers to get the best one. The information may be presented by other students, professors or any number of others. When I need information on a topic or when I’m not sure what a word means I can search the minds of my peers. Asking students in my classes or major or the professors of my department is the search engine used to get information.

     As can be seen as a college student I my knowledge community is set up as a digital community. Elements from both blogging and search engines are present in its makeup and it makes it easier to find the information I or other students like me may need.

Communication String Theory

Upon reading the Jenkins piece about “knowledge community,” I knew I should write about my work at Onyx Group. Not only is our staff a knowledge community, there are also many communities within the design and marketing industry that I interact with on a daily basis. Jenkins’s defines a knowledge community’s collective intelligence as “no one knows everything, everyone knows something.” This is especially true in the workplace. Everyone is there because they bring something different to the table. Our diverse cultural and educational backgrounds help to reinforce the concept that everyone brings a unique perspective to the table.

Within our office we exchange ideas constantly. With Skype I can communicate with coworkers down the hall or ask my colleague in California for web design advice. We share inspiration with our team through Facebook and Twitter links. To initiate a new brainstorm we send out company wide emails and everyone comments back with inspiration and creative insight.

In the design community this constant multi-platform communication is even more apparent. With site’s like Behance the creative community can share work they’ve done and receive feedback. And in forums like OpenIDEO design becomes an open collaborative process allowing multiple creators to contribute toward a single project. I both agree and disagree with Jenkins’s concept of an “expert paradigm [resulting] in an ‘exterior’ and an ‘interior’ […] there are people who know things and others who don’t.” Yes there are tricks of the trade which designers and marketers keep to themselves, however through blogs and tutorial most of their knowledge is made available to the community at large.

Within the industry there are even more knowledge communities. From industry bloggers who share their knowledge through tutorials to designers who update their twitter feeds with inspiration, the design community has astoundingly broad reach. For example two of my favorite sources of inspiration are companies located thousands of miles away. I love Bruce Mau Design’s tumblr, the Canadian based design studio shares inspiration and design industry news. And my other favorite blog is the Behance fostered think tank the 99% which provides industry insight and organizational advice.

This reading from Jenkins’s book has made me consider which knowledge communities I am involved in and how they are all intertwined. My theory of a knowledge community a ‘web of string theory,’ individuals are connected through many sources at all times. Each social media link, blog or email is a string tying the community together and regardless of distance knowledge is transferable at the speed of light.

Greek Life Knowledge Community

While reading through how Jenkins define knowledge communities and knowledge culture I was trying to look for those communities in my life. Slightly confused as to what exactly a knowledge community was at first I wasn’t sure if going greek and greek life fit into that definition. However, after reading “The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined.” Only made it clearer that Greek Life is its own knowledge community.  Within Greek Life are 4 different knowledge communities; each council has its own knowledge community. We have different things we can bring to the table as well as learn from one another. For example, each year they have a meeting among the 58 different chapter presidents so that we can feed off each other’s knowledge. In the article Jenkins quoted Pierre Levy by saying “no one knows everything, everyone knows something” when referring to collective intelligence of the knowledge community and that fits perfectly for Greek Life.

Theta Nu Xi (My Personal Knowledge Community)

Within each organization is their own knowledge community where many of the ideas you share may be similar to your brothers/sister but you still vary on opinions on how matters should be handled. That would be the simplest of the knowledge communities within Greek Life. This knowledge community branches off into your prospective council, as for my organization we are members of Theta Nu Xi but on a larger level we are members of the Multicultural Greek Council (MGC). In the MGC the knowledge community is larger because we are combining 13 other knowledge communities to form one. In the MGC we discuss the future for our organizations as a whole and the future for them at Florida State, not just nationally. Being part of a Greek letter organization allows many of us to bridge out into other knowledge communities on this campus, Order of Omega for example. Order of Omega is an honor society for students at FSU that are members of social Greek communities. Greek Life at Florida State truly is an example of knowledge community is its rarest of forms; its one huge knowledge community web. While others outside of Greek life do not see the benefits of going Greek the benefits members receive are countless. Those on the outside looking in on Greek life just don’t understand. Even within the Greek communities, other council members don’t really get it. For example, every Union Wednesday at FSU different organizations, Greek and non-Greeks, set up a table to display their cause and/or organization as a whole. The Greek organizations that do table are typically members of the Divine Nine (the 9 historically black fraternities and sororities) or the MGC. However, when members of the Pan-Hellenic or IFC table they most often don’t understand why members of the Divine Nine or MGC put on a spectacular each Wednesday. Which only displays that within large knowledge communities are smaller knowledge communities.

Members From Each Greek Council (An Extended Knowledge Community) 

The knowledge community for Greek Life extends beyond that of the undergraduate level. My brother got his job because a brother from a different chapter than where my brother pledged worked for the company; only to show that these knowledge communities can expand pass their current state. I personally feel I am involved in several different knowledge communities either because of Greek Life and the people it has allowed me to meet. 

Union Wednesday (A display of Greek Knowledge Communities interacting with each other and the FSU campus as a whole) 

Photography

Photography.

It’s been a part of my life since the day I could hold a camera, well technically before then. 

Before I took up photography, it was common throughout my family. My dad owned a film Nikon SLR and had the equipment to set up a studio. He took photos of the family, my brothers, mom and I. Before my dad, this hobby and passion was down from his father and also to his sister Nan.

After hundreds of disposables and a few small digital camera's, his nikon was then passed down to me. Attached to my hip, I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. As a matter of fact I still have it to this day. I took photography in high school and I fell in love with the red room, and the process of developing your own film. 

I felt a passion in photography, it brought me ALIVE.

In photography, LIGHTING is EVERYTHING. You can’t just pick up a camera point and shoot and BAM you’ve got yourself a great looking photo. Don’t get me wrong, technology these day have made it possible to do so, but to really master the art, you must first understand the basics.

How do you accomplish this? Welcome to my Knowledge Community…

Jenkin’s said that in order for information to make it’s way around the knowledge community, an emotional connection to the consumers needs to exist.

Anyone who experiences and enjoys photography feels emotionally connected to their work. Just like any art form, for most people photography is an outlet and a way to express oneself emotionally.

It’s quite obvious how I am emotionally connected to photography because of my family, but there are many other factors that come into play. Photography is able to capture moments that may never happen again. Every photograph has an emotional connection to it, depending on who’s hand it lies in. One glance at an old photograph can bring back a thousand memories.

I think that photographers are always looking for new ideas and ways to approach photography. There are so many different forms, for example fashion vs. nature, or sometimes a mixture of both. 

The beauty of photography is that there is so much leeway to be creative.

New technology over the years has been so beneficial to photography. Porgrams such as photoshop and lightroom have open up so many mew things to photography. Chat rooms and tutorials are available on the internet so that photographers all over the world are able to collaborate and share ideas.

As a photographer, I look to more experienced photographers and their work to learn from them. I try to stay updated on the latest techniques and fads with photography, but it isn’t much different from fashion. Just like clothes, different styles of photography (angles, composition, saturation, etc.) all come and go in seasons. This is why it is so important and beneficial to keep yourself involved in your knowledge community. 

Renowned photographer, Steve McCurry

Photography is always evolving and ever-changing. Jenkin’s mentioned that it is impossible for one person to know it all, “none of us can know everything, but each of us know something.” By sharing information and tools within the photography knowledge community, not only are we helping ourselves, but helping others. Without this community the technology and art of photography could have never come this far.

Photography…

It all begins with a passion.