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!
E-Learning Provocateur 