MashUp

I made my mashUp movie using iMovie and just cutting and editing clips from the Lion King movie.  When I first started this assignment, I didn't really know what a mashup was, but after doing a little research and watching a few of them, the ones I saw were pretty funny.  I think the best one I saw was a Simpsons remake of The Departed movie trailer. Not only did the scenes go together, even the lip movements were coordinated with the dialogue. It was pretty impressive. Mine isn't that detailed but I think I did a good job of putting it together.  The hardest part was getting all of the scenes to be the right length and then fit them properly with the music.   

Flickr, ImageLabeler

I know this post is kind of late, but I decided to post it anyways since I already did the assignments.  I created a Flickr account and uploaded ten pictures. They're all old pictures that I've had for a while, but I tried to pick out a diverse array of them.  Although Flickr is a good site that makes it easy for people to post pictures, I feel like more people would probably use sites such as Facebook andMyspace where they can upload pictures, videos and links and do many other things as well.   

I also played the Google ImageLabeler game and I thought it was a very innovative, fun and competitive way for Google to get a lot of people to be (or just feel) involved with the way they solve problems and actually do things.  It took a while to get used to the game, but after a few tries I started to do alright.  The frustrating thing about the game is trying to get the same words as the other anonymous person that you're playing with.  The game will restrict one person from using some of the easier key words associated with the picture, so there's the challenge of attempting to get the same words that may not be that obvious. The highest score I got was 570, which is probably not very good, but whatever... 

AutoSummary, WordCount

I just used the AutoSummary option in Microsoft Word to summarize a history paper I wrote last semester. Here is the original version, and here is the summarized version. I thought that the summary was pretty accurate at choosing the main points of the paper, but it also made me wonder how the program determines this since it wasn't able to discern the difference between the actual text and the Works Cited at the end of the paper.

I then ran the essay through an online word counter and these are the stats I got for the first ten words with the highest frequency:

Unique words:413 Total words:1005
Freq. Word
75 THE
40 OF
30 AND
28 IN
24 TO
23 A
19 THAT
16 IS
14 AS
12 AL

It wasn't too surprising to see that the operational words like "the", "of" and "and" were at the top of the list, but maybe that is suggesting that I should develop a more diverse vocabulary. Oh well, I've gotten by so far with it...

Concept Map

To the left is a concept map of some notes that I took during a History class lecture about how and why fortifications were built in France. The concept map is a very useful tool because it really helps to connect ideas and easily analyze and make sense of information that may otherwise be difficult to sort out. The only downside is that they take a while to make, and me being a visually oriented person, I would probably spend way too much time on the design and structure of the map instead of focusing on the information.  However, it would be a really good tool to use to study for tests.