Putting the moo into mooc

Well I’ve finally reached the fifth and final week of The University of Edinburgh’s E-learning and Digital Cultures course via Coursera.

While I’ve found it demanding, I’ve also loved every minute of it.

The assessment for this course is a digital artefact which “expresses, for you, something important about one or more of the themes we have covered during the course”.

Since I have been blogging my learnings and extrapolations of thought along the way, I decided to use that content as the substantive foundation of my artefact. I also wanted to comply with the course’s instructions to use a mix of multimedia, in addition to honouring the subject matter’s debt to popular culture.

In order to meet all of these criteria, I have created an artefact comprising four images that relate to key concepts covered by my blogs, whilst giving a nod to the king of pop art, Andy Warhol.

Each image has two links associated with it: On the right, a link to my corresponding blog post; and on the left, a link to Wikipedia to shed more light on the esoteric Warholian angle.

If you are wondering how I created this artefact, my steps were as follows…

After deciding which images I would use, I needed to source them. I secured the banana from the fruit bowl in my kitchen, I discovered the can of soup at the back of my pantry, and I bought the toy gun for $2 at a bric-a-brac store.

I originally intended to source a bar of Milka chocolate because its wrapper features a delightfully purple cow. However, despite scouring every corner shop and supermarket across the city and the burbs, I could not find a single vendor of this brand in Sydney. I even posted a call-out to Milka’s 234,000 Facebook fans – but to no avail.

Running out of time, I borrowed my wife’s beloved cow statuette.

The next step was to take photographs of each of object with my iPhone. I cut the backgrounds out with a graphics editor, played around with the brightness and contrast, and adjusted the colour balance of the cow to bathe it a Warholian purple.

After combining the four images into a single PNG file, I uploaded it to ThingLink. I used the software to “tag” each image, then I published the interactive media to my channel.

I then tried to embed the media into this blog post, but unfortunately WordPress.com doesn’t allow plugins that contain JavaScript code. So I took a screenshot of the media, uploaded it to Flickr, embedded it into my blog, and linked it to ThingLink.

I hope you like it!

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Tags: #edcmooc, Andy Warhol, blogging, Coursera, digital artefact, E-learning and Digital Cultures, MOOC, pop art, pop culture, popular culture, Reflections on the EDCMOOC, ThingLink

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