Teacher
Teacher
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My name is Kirill Shabalin. I give laboratory classes in Digital Culture. On this page, I and Elena will share class materials with you.
The course consists of ten laboratory classes. The first four are about some digital tools that, when used in your projects, ensure that you meet the basic exam requirements. The five labs following them develop soft skills: design, planning, teamwork, etc. The last lab is the pre-defense and assessment of project readiness.
Lab 1
Lab 1
Website Builders
Website Builders
One of the main requirements for your project is that it must be available online to any user 24/7. The easiest way to implement your project is to build a site. On the site you will post materials and links to the results that need to be downloaded. Therefore, our first lab is about websites.
Sites are files that are stored on a server. We usually access them through a web browser. At the first lab we use a website builder, an online service for creating web pages without programming. Website builders have an intuitive interface in which you select text boxes, buttons and other elements and simply drag and drop them to the desired place on the page. You can also choose a template, theme and other design options.
In my labs we start with Google Sites as it is completely free. To understand its basic functionality, you can go through the manual.
Unfortunately, Google Sites are very limited, so in your projects you might realize that this resource is not enough. Below is a link to an article that describes more powerful website builders. The article is posted on the Russian resource Lifehacker which is a well-known blog that specializes in software and hardware news for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It translates well into English with Google Translate. Or, in Chrome, right-click anywhere on the page and choose "Translate".
Be prepared that Website Builders are often shareware, that is, at a certain point you will have to pay for tools and in no case should this be done for your project in our course! You can use only free-of-charge functionality or a trial period.
Lab 2
Lab 2
Infographics, Databases, Interactive Maps
Infographics, Databases, Interactive Maps
The second lab is not just about infographics etc, but about handling data using various web tools.
One of the most important topics in this lab is search of visual content, which includes website and browser search tools and stock sites. The term stock (assortment) means a collection of images based on a common feature, for example, a theme. Stock photo hosting services allow artists to upload and organize their photos, and clients can search and buy them there. At the same time, hosting services offer their own system of identification marks so that the client understands on what conditions they can use the image. For example, Flickr puts the license under which it is distributed under the image. Another way is to offer a subscription under which the client can download a certain number of images like it is done in ShutterStock. It is important to first determine that you deal with a stock and not, for example, a social network like Instagram that has its own rules for content distribution.
A huge and very popular photo hosting. One of the earliest services of this kind.
This one focuses on free of charge high resolution and quality content. Also, it offers its own license.
An icon is a small simplified image of an object or action. This hosting offers millions of them.
Canva
Canva is the best for creating your own graphic content. It's intuitive and offers templates for ainmated infographics, diagrams, collages, presentations and more.
Tineye
It is a search platform that helps you find images similar to the one you already have. It also helps find copyright violations.
In many projects, students create interactive maps on which they not only add geomarks, but also upload a photo, add a text description, vizualize data about locations, build a route, etc. There are many services for interactive custom maps using ready-made templates.
Google maps
Storymap
StatPlanet
Сhartsbin
Animaps
Zeemaps
Lab 3
Lab 3
Multimedia Content
Multimedia Content
The third lab is devoted to creation of your own multimedia content. It includes original (your own) texts, images (including collages and infographics), audio and video files (including podcasts, screencasts), 3D models, animated elements (preferably no more than one in sight on a page), gifs, animated presentations etc. There are many free and shareware resources to create such content. In some of them you can sign for a trial period.
Online service for creating and editing videos. There are also lots of templates for a free slideshow.
Online "multitool". It can be used to create YouTube video intros, instructional animations, animated symbols, promotional videos, music visualizations, slideshows, invitations, corporate presentations, infographics, and much more. However, the free videos will only be up to three minutes long and will have watermarks.
Animaker is ideal for beginners as it is quite simple. It also has a free-of-charge rate.
This is a cloud service for creating and editing videos. You can record audio and video from computer, import and store files in Google Drive and other services. Also, there are lots of audio, video and graphic templates, but, unfortunately most of them are not free-of-charge. Although you can create slides and GIFs in Canva and use them here.
Lab 4
Lab 4
GameDev
GameDev
GameDev, game development) is a vast topic. Today, it is not only a form of pastime but an entire industry: cybersport. You can take courses in cybersport at universities; thousands of players participate in world video game tournaments; not to mention how much time people spend playing video games everyday.
Not all games are created for playthrough or competition. "September, 12" makes you think about the consequences of the war on terrorism.
The following are a few game creation tools that you can easily use in your projects. These instruments are for mini-games, learning games and quests. Although, you can create most of them with what you already learnt at the previous classes, e.g. Google Forms, Google Slides, Google Sites. So, first check if their functionality is not enough for your idea.
Kahoot!
A quiz is a competition in which one or more participants compete in answering questions. This technology is good for teaching, as it tests knowledge in an entertaining way and students can compete individually and in teams. One of the sophisticated but effective quiz tools is Kahoot! This tool ensures fair play and rating, but it is not very easy to use. Registration is required. Also, check out Plickers!
There are also free online tools to create a more complex game: a platformer, a racing game, a role playing game and even a VR game. The first tool that is completely free is Scratch. It is a block programming language that allows you to create mini-games and interactive videos for your projects. Here you can go through tutorials and quickly start a new game project. Or you can use an existing game in Scratch as a template and modify it for your purpose. A Scratch-like language is also used in MIT App Inventor, an online platform for creating web applications for Android OS.
CoSpaces is a similar block programming language for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). You can create 3D objects and animate them in a video or a game. Or you can add these objects to the real world locations, and they will show in gadgets like Pokemons in Pokemon Go.
To create a Role-Playing Game (RPG), you don't need programming if you use an RPG-maker. In such games, there are usually a number of typical characters that can perform certain actions, including fights. You can set up locations and dialogues, create tasks that characters should perform to finish the game. RPG Playground helps you create and share your own games online for free.
Project. Week I
Project. Week I
The first four weeks of the course have passed. For the remaining six weeks, you need to implement a group project in the disciplines "Russia and the World" and "Digital Culture" in the form of a digital product. Usually during the fifth week, teams still have no idea what exactly they want to produce. To get over this period of uncertainty, you can use the method of brainstorming.
The essence of the method: get together in a circle, relax and start generating ideas. Everything that comes from the participants must be recorded, even if it is strange, funny and incomprehensible. How to brainstorm:
Choose a moderator to record your responses.
Formulate a question for brainstorming, for example: "What digital shell do we want for our project (an online encyclopedia, game, database, etc.)?"
Write down all the voiced options.
After brainstorming, you need to analyze everything that was recorded and try to systematize, cut off and evaluate the feasibility of different options. The most valuable ideas will lead you to results in the end.
Project. Week II
Project. Week II
Including this class, you have five weeks to get your project ready for exam. At the previous seminar you observed what you already have done and thought what else can be implemented. Now it’s time you organize your plans.
As a method of planning, we recommend you to visualize your tasks in form of diagrams, schemes, charts etc. You can work with your team, using online services such as Trello, Jamboard available on Google Drive, or Miro (formerly RealtimeBoard). These are infinite virtual whiteboards, where you are able to work with any visual content (images, diagrams, graphs, icons, collages) individually or with a team. For a start, I suggest that you try a Kanban board. It is an easy way to organize tasks.
With a project board, you can not only visualize tasks, but also distribute duties among participants and track your progress. If you want to go further in project management, then you should try Gantt chart. For a small project just like yours, it can be easily drawn in Excel.
While distributing tasks, keep in mind this draft of project activities for the rest of the course:
Week 6: Start creating a digital product and its landing page, if it's not a website.
Week 7: Create multimedia content for the project.
Week 8: Create interactive content for the project.
Week 9: Go through my checklist and work on requirements in boxes that you haven't checked.
Project. Week III
Project. Week III
During the third week of work on the project, we expect you to build a website or project page available to users 24/7. Even if you are working on a game or an app which needs to be downloaded or installed, your client, the person who you are creating the project for, must somehow find out about it and find a link on the Internet. The project page can be a page in a social network or a GitHub repository. The main point is that it should present your project to users.
This week your job is to fill projects with multimedia content. This content should be match with what has already been done. Also, please, keep in mind that the purpose for which you post your content and tools/technologies that you use work together well. For example, low-quality gifs or stereotyped background pictures that you decorate your project with can create noise and make your page look schoolish.
When a user opend your webpage, the first things they see are a banner, header, and logo. In the second lab you worked with Canva, but perhaps you want to impress the user with something even more amazing. Consider learning some basic webdesign with the free vector graphics editors like Inkscape or Google Web Designer.
Project. Week IV
Project. Week IV
In the fourth week, you have to pay attention to whether your project uses interactive technologies. It means that the user can actively interact with your project, not just passively watch a video or read a text. Interaction is important because it lets users choose how to use your content, i.e. change a color of an element or navigate to a certain place in an iamge, in other words – interation personalizes your project.
Your job this week is to fill the websites with interactive content. It includes original (your, author's) polls, tests, quizzes, mini-games (text quests; learning games such as crosswords, puzzles; games on Scratch; RPG games), interactive maps, chat bots. Interactive content should match with all the previous content. And again the purpose and tools/technologies should work together well.
Knowledge tests, sociological surveys, opinion polls, etc. can be done easily and quickly in Google Forms. With psychological as well as personality tests like "What Winx fairy are you?" it is more complicated. You can try the following resources.
Project. Week V
Project. Week V
The second to last week before pre-defense. Check by the check-list that your project meets the basic requirements. See the link to the check-list below. The first section enlists formal requirements that your project must comply with. These requirements are 'must do' for the pre-defense.
One of the points that causes difficulties is copyright. Be sure to include all the links to sources of texts and other content you have ever used. The UTMN website contains examples of the bibliographic references. Also while working on the project, you created your own content. What about it? By what rules should it be distributed? It’s you who give the answer to this question. We recommend you to do the thing we did on this site: to embed a Creative Commons license html-code on your page or website. You possibly learned how to do it from our online course of lectures, but if you suddenly forgot it, we offer a tutorial.
кейс_5.2.mp4Project. Week VI
Project. Week VI
Pre-defense
Pre-defense
You are now at the finish line. For pre-defense you earn up to 18 points. There is still a little while left before the exam to finish the project or even bring something new into it. Maybe you decide that the project itself and its page are not enough, and you would like to make a presentation. For example, Prezi allows you to create original presentations where slides change by approaching each one of them on a large map with slides. By the way, if you have read this text beforehand and the pre-defense in "Russia and the World" is still to come, then you can surprise your professor with an unorthodox Prezi presentation ;)
And for last, if you have not yet created a project page, but the digital product itself is ready (for example, you have developed a very cool game, and all that remains is to present it to the user), then you can make it even more ingenious and use the website builder from the GitHub repository. This code repository offers not only turning your html pages into a static website, but it also has interesting data visualization tools (example). Or maybe you want to create a page by translating a plain text document on the Google Drive cloud into a pub file type. After all, this is your project.
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