Monthly Archives: February 2016

From existing to excelling, The story of a lost and found single mom

This is an archive of my non fiction Twitter story. Below are the tweets in order detailing my journey from aspiring cop to single mom to college drop out to college graduate.

REFLECTION:

For my twitter story I had two particular audiences in mind. One being young moms and the other being moms who juggle work and school with motherhood both who may doubt their abilities or that the goal is attainable. I crafted the story originally to be very detailed but soon realized that would make the story entirely too long for a character limiting platform such as twitter. I then reorganized my story to include necessary detail but concise to where it wasn’t overwhelming on a timeline. I believe my story was a success because not only do the numbers (over 2,000 impressions in 24 hours) support that but I got excellent feedback from my professor as well as my peers. Mariah (@mariahraj) said “ your strength and go getter attitude is inspirational” and Jodie (@jodieannstephen) quoted one of my tweets saying “Life goals “. Professor Ellis also applauded my delivery of the message as did Pam who can personally relate as a mother herself. I feel that I got wholly positive feedback and my story was relatable to people with or without kids. I sought to deliver a message of inspiration and encouragement and based on the replies I believe I have. It was challenging but rewarding to deliver a story on this platform because not only do I love twitter I enjoy discovering new ways to use it. From these tweets I got mentions, likes and follows from things I mentioned or hash tagged. Using keys terms and tags helps to reach a specific community and that was my main goal for crafting this story.

ANALTYICS:

On Wednesday my twitter got 2,473 engagements. This consists of retweets, likes, and mentions or times people opened the tweet. The most highly trafficked tweets were the closing to my twitter story with 116 and tweet 16 of 16 with 79. The topic in general garnished a lot of attention because its in line with one of the genres of my twitter feed regularly.

Project 1, Execution

During today’s live tweet of each person’s Twitter story, we will model networking at a distance–meaning we will engage only through Twitter for responses, retweets, and likes. After each person has a chance to run her story, everyone will come to OpenLab, create a comment beginning with the person’s name who just live tweeted on this post, and write a brief comment about the story focusing on what worked and what could be improved upon. Then, we can talk about the story in a regular class discussion.

Project 1, Structure

Before our class on Wednesday, Feb. 17, copy and paste your structure document into a comment to this blog post. It should include your Twitter story and bookend tweets. We will run these on Twitter during class on Feb. 17 and have a discussion after each.

Project 1, Details

During today’s class, create a new document for your selected story idea. Focusing on your selected story, create a list of events from the beginning to end. Each event, thought, decision, and action should be a separate entry on your list (using a numerical list will be fine for this part). Think about and describe as many details of each point as you can. For example, how did you feel, what were you thinking about, what made you choose one thing over another, what physical details can you include: colors, sounds, place, people, etc. The goal here is to include as many details as possible. In fact, include more details than you might use in your final deliverable on Twitter. The idea is to give yourself as many options to choose from before you craft your digital story. When you put more into this stage, it saves you time and energy later, because if you have to fill in the blanks later, you are trying to make details fit into a structure that you have already decided on. Instead, give yourself the story and details first and you will discover a structure that works for your specific story. There is no one always correct way to tell a story, so you should rely on your story to help you figure out its way of being told. Include this list of details in a memo, which you copy-and-paste into a comment to this blog post. Keep your original document safe with your other files.

Reading: Miller’s Digital Storytelling, Chapter 1

During the first ten minutes of class, gather your thoughts about the reading for today’s class: Carolyn Handler Miller’s Digital Storytelling, Chapter 1, and very quickly write a summary memo of the chapter with an emphasis on the differences between traditional storytelling and digital storytelling. Your memo should include a header with the subject being this post’s title. It is better for you if you write your summary from memory, but if you get stuck recalling something, feel free to refer to the book. These beginning of class writing assignments are graded on best effort and are meant to help you solidify concepts from reading your memory.

Project 1, Planning

During today’s class, you began working on Project 1’s planning module. Before leaving class, copy-and-paste your planning memo into a comment to this blog post. Also, make sure that you have a Twitter account to use for the assignment, and with that account, you have followed the other students in class and followed the professor @dynamicsubspace.