Autobiography Project

I am almost finished with my autobiography and I'm pretty satisfied with it. I have pictures, captions, music, some narration, and some video. I'm trying to make some some of my own music to put i but that's probably the last change I'm going to make.

Digg is an interactive website with articles, pictures, and videos about,entertainment, science, gaming, sports, and other things. You can give articles thumbs up or thumbs down like Youtube, and it tells you how many an article has by saying how many "diggs" it has. It has other interactive features like the most popular articles for the day, week, month, and year.

Inside the Teenage Brain

This Frontline video on the teenage brain talks about things like sleeping, learning, and relationships with parents. I didn't like it too much. The kids they picked were supposed to be average teenagers but I think that any kid that volunteers for this kind of thing is not average. Most teens I know would never do this, so if you don't look at those kids then you can't say the same thing is true for every kid. Also, they say all these things like teens need more sleep and don't learn the same way adults do, nobody ever does anything about it.

On the Boston.com education section there are many interactive features. They have a lot of stories that you can look at and go through the different parts, and for many of them there are videos to accompany them. There are also slide shows of for stories like the English High one.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/gallery/022108_englishhigh/

NY Times Videos

We watched several videos on the New York Times website and looked at the shot composition, narration,and editing.I picked one called America's Disappearing Forests http://video.on.nytimes.com/. It's about a tree epidemic caused by the mountain pine beetle. It has lots of different shot like one zoomed up on a worker cutting a tree and then it zooms back out as the tree falls. It has a narrator almost the whole time and some interviews like one where the camera is focused on something he's holding instead of his face.

New York Times- The Election

The New York Times web site has many different features for it's coverage of the 2008 election. It has time-lines for Obama's and McCain's lives that you can click on and look and videos of them and read about their lives and accomplishments. My favorite feature is a map of all the states that show which ones were won by which candidates. If you click on a state, you can zoom in and see which counties voted for which candidate. It also shows the same thing for the past four elections.

History of Halloween

Halloween started with the Celts 2,000 years ago. Their new year started on November 1st and they thought that the day before, the living world and the dead world came together and ghosts of the dead came back to Earth. This holiday was combined with two others when the Romans took over most of Ireland. One was Feralia, to commemorate the passing of the dead, and the second was to honor the goddess of fruits and trees, Pomona. Later Christianity spread to the Celts and the Pope made a holiday, All-Saints day to honor saints and martyrs and to replace the original holiday with a more Christian one.

Robert Swan

Robert Swan is the is the first person to walk to the north pole and the south pole. He is also the creator of 2041, a group that raises awareness about global warming. 2041 is the year that the Antarctic Treaty, which prevents mining in Antarctica, will be reviewed. He now leads expeditions to Antarctica and has a sailboat that goes around the world so he can give educational talks to people to raise awareness.

Elaine McArdle

A journalist named Elaine McArdle came to visit our school yesterday. Since she is a journalist, and this is interactive journalism, we went to see her. She talked about her job and I had known what a journalist was before but I had never heard one talk about it. It made journalism seem a lot more interesting and real to me. Before, I thought that it was just being given a topic and writing about it but now I know that you can look for your own story to submit. Also there is a lot of interaction with other people, doing interviews and finding out information . It's not just sitting alone in a room late at night, writing.

autobiography

To be a good journalist you have to understand other people and how they think.  But to do that you have to know yourself first.  One of the best ways to do that is to write an autobiography.  That's what  we're going to do in my interactive journalism class

soccer

Yeah we have a winning streak now.  2 games in a row.  The only two we've won all season.  It feels pretty good because I thought we were going to go the whole season without winning a game.  Its not going to last long though.  We have to play Lexington today so we're pretty much screwed.

The "Merchants of Cool" Documentary

We finished watching the documentary on the hunt for cool.  In the last couple segments, it talked about the midriff, the female version of the mook, and how teen rebellion is just another product.  A midriff is a sexualized character created by industries to be like an icon for teenage girls so that they will be more interested in the product.  An example of a midriff is Brittany Spears.

They also talked about Insane Clown Posse and Limp Bizkit and other "rage rock" bands that are really commercialized and made to make kids feel like they are understood, like they have something to rebel against.  They feel like they are they are the only ones listening to the music even though it has become mainstream. 

my weekend

Not too exciting.  I slept for most of it.  That was probably the best part of it.  On saturday I got up at about 3:30 and then went to the Revolution game about a hour later.  We got burgers and drinks in the parking lot which were pretty sick even though I had just eaten a big breakfast.  We sat in the second row behind one of the goals and had a good view of the game.  If you're sitting higher up, it's like watching it on tv so there isn't any point in going.  it was a pretty good game with 4 yellows in the first 20 minutes.  One was complete bs, the ref called Smith for a dive and somebody from the crowd threw a beer bottle on the field and the security got stepped up after that.  The Revs were behind  2-0 and then came back and tied it so that got the crowd pumped.  But they couldn't win and we left quickly because it was cold

what's cool

In my Interactive Journalism class, we watched a documentary on PBS about "cool".  You can't really define cool.  An industry like Sprite can't make themselves cool or put out a product that is meant to be cool.  You can't really predict what will become popular whether you're part of the culture or are 40, work for a big company and don't know anything about teenagers at all.  Even if you find out what is cool you can't explain how it got to be cool or understand why it is.  You should probably give up.

my weekend

This weekend was very boring.  I did almost nothing.  I mostly slept and listened to music at my house.  I went out friday night but it rained and it was terrible.  I spent a lot of the time standing under a tree and watching my friends break an umbrella.  I also did my summer reading for history.  It's a little late but at least I'll get some credit.