I’ve had 3 snow days so far this week. That means I’ve had plenty of time to answer lots of emails, work on non mission-critical projects that have been piling up, have a bunch of fun with some media and digital storytelling, and catch up on some good old fashioned TV watching. Which would bring us to Adventure Time, a comically strange yet hypnotically hilarious cartoon that airs on Cartoon Network here in the United States....

Last week I introduced myself to the #ETMOOC course with a rather whimsical poster of me enjoying a snack and a few tid bits of information. This week? I thought I’d tackle a few of the thoughts and ideas that came out of the Elluminate Live session last night. One of the ideas that seemed to be at the forefront of the conversation was digital storytelling, and how to define it. I didn’t participate in that session, as I was...

My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Piraino (you can imagine the nicknames we had for her), was a teacher that loved creativity. Every year she transformed her entire room into Santa’s workshop, letting her students build life size reindeer out of cardboard and decorate the walls with paper-crafted strings of garland. During the small group novel studies, she encouraged students to build dioramas, even entire set pieces for scenes from her...

I’m a huge fan of the Seinfeld TV show. Despite being in middle school when the show first aired, as I began to understand the world with a bit more cynism and farce as I entered high school, Seinfeld came to be the lens through which I perceived the world of hypocrisy, people behaving poorly, and observational comedy. There was a particular episode during the last season, in which one of the main characters, Frank Costanza, had...

This past Thanksgiving break was one of the most relaxing, peaceful, and downright memorable holidays I’ve had in a long time. Among the highlights of the break were homemade cranberry sauce, Thanksgiving Skype session with relatives in South Carolina, crepes for brunch, driving around Chicago with my brother while car shopping in the rain, and raking the yard with my kids (who are both old enough now to enjoy the raking and the...

A couple of week ago I posted a video I created about my average daily commute….only sped up to about 1200 mph. The result was quite interesting, and an excellent study of how to create a certain “mood” or convey a particular type of experience to the viewer. I was able to turn my daily 40 mile commute into a video game (at least I felt as though I did), with the right music and some serious acceleration of the...