The Joys of Digital Photo-Editing

For our digital photo-editing assignment, I chose this photo of a dying star as my jumping off point:  

Credit goes to NASA Goddard Photo and Video, the contributors were listed as NASA, ESA and A.Zijlstra (UMIST,Manchester, UK). Here's the stable link to the photo.

The first online photo editor I used was Picnik: 

I ended up using the Temperature, Contrast, and Rotation tools, as well as adding some text, rounding the corners of the image and adding a matte and frame. Overall I just found that Picnik was too simplistic for me and didn’t allow me to be as creative as I would have liked, although I can see that people would find it helpful for simple adjustments. However, since most operating systems come with some free software which allows you to crop and rotate photos, and even Paint will let you do a lot of  these things, I'm not sold on Picnik. I'd rather use a computer program because I find it to be faster than visiting a website.   

Next, I chose Splashup, and although I found it to be a frustrating experience, the end product was pretty cool: 

I used a Filter to invert the colours of my photo, making it a very “cool” image.  I like how when you invert it, you notice aspects of the dying star more than you would have in the original. For example, we can see the action happening in the center of the dying star much more vividly. I decided to use another filter, “Emboss” to give the image a sort textured aesthetic. Splashup has good filters but the other, more basic tools just refused to cooperate. Also,  it’s basically a program that runs on Flash, and it just couldn’t handle even saving my edited photo, so I resorted to using a screen capture.

All in all, I just find online photo-editing to be far more problematic than any photo-editing program than one can download and use on their computer. Both Picnik and Splashup were lacking in the reliablility and ease of use categories, something I've never found to be the case in iPhoto, Paint or Gimp.

I hope my classmates had a more pleasant experience than I did!

Twitter

Well, I have to say, prior to the class on Twitter, I had an extremely negative opinion of the medium. I thought it was just another forum for people to publish every thought that came into their heads, without consideration or critical thinking.  I signed up for it because I felt that I needed to give it a fair chance, and that I should better understand how it can be used in the classroom.

At this time I would say that Twitter does have some positives: it allows many points of view to be expressed simultaneously without the usual ensuing cacophony, it transmits more information (about the opinions, knowledge of others) in a shorter amount of time, and provides an easy way for the teacher to keep track of who's paying attention and who isn't, who's struggling and who isn't. 

Basically, I think Twitter is like a lot of things, useful and good in moderation.

Brevity is the soul of wit

Ever since Shakespeare breathed life into these words through his character Polonius, the world has tended to agree.

Why, then, are we up in arms over the way young people write nowadays? I'm sure it hasn't escaped anyone's attention that traditional orthography and punctuation have pretty much gone the way of the dodo bird when it comes to teenagers' use of the written word. The natural inclination of teachers, parents, and curmudgeonly people everywhere is to despise such a writing style as being indicative of a lack of a good education and willful ignorance. 

As a descriptive linguist, it's not my desire to go on about how language should be, but rather to observe and contemplate how language really is. Language doesn't come from the dictionary, it comes from the people and is recorded (belatedly) in things like dictionaries and books!

Here are some reasons for truncated texting norms and alternative spellings that defy adult logic:

1) There are character limits on text messages, the primary form of communication for adolescents.
2) These indecipherable text messages provide privacy from parents and other adults.
3) It's a good way to express their personal pronunciation of different words, which helps set the tone of the message they're sending.

I could go on, but I'd be walking into a pit of hypocrisy, considering this post's title.

Next time I'll discuss the implications of "txt spk"  (text speak) on the education of our children and the evolution of the English language.


*Disclaimer

My personal and professional opinions on the matter may differ drastically.