We're all heroes for taking INTE 5340 this Summer!
Well fellow classmates, looks like we’re not in Kansas anymore, at least not for the next 7 weeks. We’ve been challenged by our illustrious instructor to stretch ourselves, dig a little deeper, and connect with the creative part of our soul to create and share the stories that resonate inside of each of us. I think our yellow brick road journey is going to be ah-mazing!
Something happened to me earlier this week that I was not expecting -- I was moved to tears of sadness and then joy because of this class, which frightened me at first because I thought to myself, what did you get yourself into.
I’ve got 2 young kids out of school and we’re travelling like gypsies this Summer. I barely have time to get the family laundry done let alone deal with the unexpected waves of emotions that are already coming out of me like I’m in some type of group therapy, lol!
And then I saw this tweet and everything just started making sense why I'm here taking this class with all of you:
heads-up #inte5340 - ANTH101 is in your Case Study list - #awesomesauce https://t.co/VOVdH654sW
— Brad Hinson (@THiNGkeriNG) June 8, 2017
After listening to some of the content on life101.audio, things have just started clicking for me and I’ve been walking on sunshine instead of eggshells.
I feel inspired and excited about this opportunity to create digital stories and share my crazy ideas and life events with people I’ve never met. Just think, not knowing each other allows us the freedom to take greater risks in the content we create/share during this course. Pretty cool, right? My soul is awake this summer and I'm ready to take risks in the name of being original with the content that I'd like to share with all of you.
I don’t have a graphics or multimedia background so getting settled for this course has felt at times like driving down a busy road with a learner’s permit, but I don’t plan on wrecking anytime soon. What I do plan on doing is ah-latte (get it?) night crash course learning to figure out the best digital tools to use for this course.
I'm part of the older GenXer group who's going back to college to switch careers, so I haven't been a student for a very long time. In fact, the last college term paper I wrote included research I gathered off microfiche so I'll let you guess my age. I hadn't even heard of hypothesis.is until earlier this week, but I've really enjoyed annotating with this tool and gaining a fresh perspective about things from my fellow virtual classmates.
As for social media, while I do understand its value in today's digital world, I have to force myself to use it because I didn't grow up with it. So herein lies another awesome opportunity to be more proficient and savvy when it comes to social media and creating tweets/posts/blogs, etc.
I got my 13 year old son involved in helping me create a Ridiculous Latte for the #DS106 Daily Challenge. He rolled his eyes at me at first but I convinced him to help him in exchange for a Dragon Frappuccino. Here's what we came up with using eggs from our backyard chicken coop:
Hey you...lego my eggooo-latte! Ridiculously served in an organic egg chair #mork #nanonano @ds106dc #tdc1976 #ds106 #inte5340 pic.twitter.com/3GeJHeyvJE
— Monica Avila Beal (@MoBeal13) June 7, 2017
Finally, I feel that I rose to the challenge this week of "stretching" by not submitting my post last night. Instead, I decided to stretch a little more and create a "spoken word" digital story to include in this weekly reflection.
In a nutshell, after consuming 1/2 bottle of red wine at dinner last night, about 12:30am I decided to sketch out a script and then woke up at 4:50am to record it outside using just this handy little red voice recorder made by Zoom that I've been using to collect field recordings for a music project that I'm currently working on:
I'd like to give you a quick overview about the intention behind my spoken word story. It's a real time raw recording that captures the elemental sounds all around me while I'm sharing my thoughts about the unsung heroes that have made a great impact in my life.
I hope that you will agree with me that I was successful in my attempt to create something authentic and original. In addition to the sounds of mother nature at dawn, you'll also hear the sound of a passing car and then an airplane above, which I think adds an interesting layer of dimension to my spoken word track.
https://soundcloud.com/monica-avila-beal/unsung-heroes
While I do have some limited experience working with digital recording tools, I decided against using them this time around but I intend to use these tools and some of my field recordings for upcoming stories that I'll create for this class. I hope you'll follow me on my Soundcloud channel and stay tuned!
Finally, here's a song from Alesso/Tove Lo that I think ties in nicely with this week's class playlist.
Remember, there's an unsung hero that beats inside all of us 
Heroes (we could be) (Official Video) by Alesso & Tove Lo on VEVO.
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