Write a letter to or from your future self in which you praise yourself for your imagination, resilience, and perseverence.
Guidelines:
Use a direct quotation from each of the following sources:
1. Churchill’s “Never Give In” speech.
2. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—”
3. STJ School Song.
Start your letter with “Dear…” and don’t bother with the addresses.
You stumble upon a random letter on the path. You read it. It affects you deeply, and you wish it could be returned to the person to which it’s addressed. Write a story about this encounter.
Watch closely two people playing a board/video game.
Write a poem about your experience.
Create a radio diary.
Anyone can make a radio diary. Try your hand at making radio. Whether you’re interviewing a neighbor, or a grandparent, or someone you’ve never met, a microphone is a passport into their lives. If you or someone in your community has a story to tell, get a microphone, a recorder, a pair of headphones, and get started.
The Teen Reporter Handbook has been used in schools across the United States, as well as in Russia, Israel, South Africa, and even in a journalism training program in Southern Afghanistan.
Write a short story with the first line – “He was terrified of small spaces and she knew” – and containing some sort of direct reference to each of the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality
https://www.edx.org
Analyze your current experiences with some feature of the Interent using McLuhan’s ideas.
Marshal McLuhan died in 1980.
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” Marshall McLuhan
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” Marshall McLuhan
“Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.” Marshall McLuhan
Read about Rabindranath Tagore. Read something from the writings of Rabindranath Tagore.
Read the Introduction to Gitanjali by W.B. Yeats. Read Gitanjali.
Write a post in which you explore the idea that “children gather pebbles and scatter them again.”
Create your own photo-poster from a brainy quote of Rabindranath Tagore.
Write a futuristic story in which you present your vision of life twenty years from now.
Read an interview with Derrick de Kerckhove, author of The Augmented Mind.
How will people in the future be “always on” or “plugged in”? What will “cloud computing” look like in twenty years? What “next big thing” will replace Facebook?
How many “degrees of separation” will exist between you and your friends, your family, your children, your spouse?
How will people use their imagination twenty years from now? Will they still have one?
Kerckhove says we exist in “the era of the tag” and “tagging … is the soul of the Internet.” What remains to be tagged in the next twenty years? What will the Internet be like in twenty years?
Will one of the oldest forum threads on the Internet still exist in twenty years? “I am lonely will anyone speak to me”?
Using a Monty Python script as a template, create a humorous dialogue in which one party is trying to accomplish a serious end, while the other is distracted by inconsequential details. Make your arguments as absurd as possible. Record your dialogue as a podcast.
Newspapers have changed considerably in the past 30 years, specifically in response to other media, such as television and the Internet. Using a recent copy of a newspaper as a resource, compare and contrast the advertising and visual techniques of the newspaper with those in other media forms such as magazines and the Internet?In what ways have other media forms influenced newspaper advertising? In what ways have newspaper advertisements remained unique?