Possibly useful
This is an article in First Monday on blogs in the classroom (found via weblogged-ed). This is useful for the knetlit project, as well as the paper I’m finishing up on blogs as reflective, disruptive practice as part of EdMedia 2004.
Archived entries for
moops
Aisling Kellher and co at MIT are working on a Nokia interface for vogging. They’ve got a mupe server up and running and some test movies to have a look at.
Videoblog email list
At http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging you can join a video blog email list. jay Dedman in Manhattan has set it up, and when I subscribed there were ten on the list. Its charter is broad, largely to facilitate discussion about video blogs with particular interest in things like compression problems and those sorts of things. Sounds geeky? I guess so, but compression and bandwidth is to vogging what leading and kerning is to typography.
Old Genre, New Tricks.
McNeill, Laurie. “Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet.” Biography 26.1 (2003): 24-47. (This is available via JHUP’s Project Muse if your library subscribes – subscription only link.) The abstract:
This article examines the diary’s transformation from print culture practice to online phenomenon, considering the implications of this change for the diary as a literary genre and as life writing. This discussion explores the challenges the online diary represents to traditional concepts of the genre as private and monologic, investigating the ways in which online diarists attract readers, build communities, and create identities in cyberspace.
thunder cuts
Talking at dinner I asked if funding cuts had caused staff redundancies where a friend worked. Jasper interrupts anxiously and asks “What are thunder cuts?” obviously wondering what aspect of violent nature he hasn’t yet been told about. How big could the world be when you’re five?
EdMedia on blogs
I’m participating in a symposium on blogs at EdMedia 2004, in Lugano later this month. It is about blogs as disruptive technologies, and I’m feeling rather intimidated by the collection of panellists assembled. This is my abstract, though as the piece develops it is mutating appropriately:
A commonplace observation in education is that students ought to learn how they learn because understanding the processes of learning facilitates the development of deep learning. Undertaking and documenting this reflective practice in humanities disciplines has been unclear, to date, for the student and the evaluator because the ideology of writing has always presumed an idea of interiority and reflection. Weblogs combine writing as introspection and networked literacy as ‘extraspection’ to provide a model for a reflective writing practice that encourages the development of discursive ‘knowledge objects’. These knowledge objects weblogs provide an outstanding methodology for reflective practice, and document this for the learner, and the evaluator.
ecto and qt
Ecto has done it! A red letter day for vogging. The ecto client now supports uploading of QT, this includes recognising the poster frame of a movie, writing an embed tag and so on. This rocks. Unfortunately, though I’ve installed the new client it isn’t working for me. Must be karma.
pulp rss
Am trying out PulpFiction , I just don’t read other blogs properly so am going to rely on RSS and Atom to do this better, if not properly.
what you learn from public exhibition
I’ve got work in a large retrospective show that is being run by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The show is 2004 Australian Culture Now and apparently I’m one of the one hundred and thirty artists represented in what is supposed to be (from the pr): “one of the most ambitious surveys of contemporary Australian art in recent history”. All I’ll say to that is they are ambitious if they reckon my minor video sketches ought to be in it.
So, I went to view my work in this exhibition context, where it is being delivered into their space from its usual server location, and realised several things.
Having the controller visible is a good idea because it provides very simple visual feedback to your users about what is happening (since the controller provides a download bar). Very simple I know, but in a gallery context where they are pushed to the media rather than surfing not providing that feedback means the public have no idea of what might be happening. Embedding download bars where you have child movies is probably a good idea, for the same reason, which is something I’ve added to the Danish Snow + Sound vog so that as the child movies are loading viewers understand, hopefully, that data is being downloaded. Finally, by having the controller visible it makes very apparent the activity of child movies, simply because you can pause the playback of the parent movie but, in the case of the Danish Snow + Sound work, the embedded child movies keep playing. So, though I’ve been recalcitrant when it comes to interface stuff in the vogs I’ve seen that this does cause many more problems than it solves.
Snow from the Train, again.
I’ve repeated the Snow from the Train vog, but unlike the original one this version now has a soundtrack. I had originally intended to load and play the soundtrack as a childmovie track, but since the two video panes are already running as child movies the playback I was getting on my overburdened 550MhZ tibook just didn’t seem that impressive. So I’ve just included the soundtrack as a part of the parent movie and looped it.
Of course, this could just be imaginary on my behalf, I don’t know enough about QuickTime to be sure if childmovie tracks do produce as significant a performance hit as I notice, but to my non-programmers mind it makes sense that it would – you’re asking the QuickTime Player, which is optimised to play ‘traditional’ content, to load, display, and manage external content from several other sources. I imagine you could write a custom player application that was dedicated to playing childmovie content, but the generic QuickTime player is just that.
So, the new vog. It is identical in structure to the earlier iteration, except a single narrative voice over has been added. This has been included because I wanted to make a version where additional context was provided through the traditional model of narrating. This is from a wish to return to a more discursive series of vogs that continue the recent themes and also narrate the world. No, that’s not right. Also narrate my world. Though here narrate looks more to the essayist style inaugurated by Chris Marker rather than the voice over associated with instructional documentary.