vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

blogs and teaching

I’d mentioned here that we’ve started using blogs throughout our Media Studies program. They are to be used throughout the three years of their program, and not just as an adjunct (or more) for one particular course. They’ve been introduced into the second semester, largely because first semester introduced across most of their subjects the practice and discipline of journal writing (traditional journals).

Because it is integrated across the three years of the curriculum they have been introduced ‘gently’. Which just means this semester they are to use their blogs more as traditional journals. We did set up blog rolls, turned on trackback, but there is no assessment or other expectation that they would have to read each other’s blogs, comment on each other’s writing, and so forth.

In second year blogs as social emergent networks will be foregrounded, amongst other things (wikis and more general social software networks), and it is at this point that inserting themselves very specifically into blogging as a specific practice will be expected.

Well, more fool I. Ducks to water. What is happening in their blogs is similar to what used to happen years ago when I first introduced students to email lists. Many are prolific writers, they are all reading each other’s blogs (a conversation in class yesterday, I ask “How would you do x?” One student replies “Nico wrote about that in his blog” and proceeded to find the entry), linking to each other, and so on.

At the moment, as Ali observes (remember this is a first year student):

Which does seem to be the case. There is a flurry of reading and writing that is impressive. Yes, it is primarily social, but remember, this is first year. This is helping develop community in the group, which is important as by third year we expect these students to be doing a lot of collaborative research and production work. It is also letting them own this space, and helping the students to develop their blog voices. There have been some issues, offensive or rude material, but to date I have not had to intervene and they have successfully negotiated these issues themselves. Which is as it ought to be.

Using blogs so broadly within an entire course is proving to be an interesting experiment, and to date certainly supports my initial hunches about its relevance and use.

ecto beta

Ecto, the best blog client out there, now has a public release for the beta for version two. There are a heap of differences between ecto 1 and the new version, and it is beta software. Follow the instructions, keep backups, and try it out.

quicktime media links

Last week I wrote a crude guide to how to write a QuickTime media link file. This is something you could make in QuickTime Player Pro and it provides a file that you can then use as a text link to put on your web page. Clicking the link has the effect of launching QuickTime Player, loading your movie, and if you set the preferences the right way, it will play full frame.

(The whole point of QuickTime Media Link files is so that you can provide a text link to play a QuickTime movie from, but in the usual way of such things in QuickTime it also lets you do quite a few other things too.)

So, as promised, here’s the next bit of information about qtl files. If you use a text editor to open the .qtl file that you generated using QuickTime Player you’ll see that it is just plain old xml:

What this means for practical (very practical) purposes is that instead of having to use QuickTime Player to generate your .qtl files you can just use this script. Substitute urlofmovie.mp4 for the url of the video that you want to play, and the above script, if written in a text editor and saved as .qtl will work just as well. That is seriously cool. It also makes it trivial for anyone to generate movies that play full screen (but don’t confuse full screen with ‘all of the screen’, full screen can mean that QuickTime player takes all of your screen, but still presents your movie in its original size – it’s up to you).

dear john

From Lisa:

an abstract

Jeremy and I are writing a paper about network literacies and education for the European Journal of Higher Arts Education. We’ve just put the abstract up in knetlit.

qtvr to dv

QTVR recorder is a shareware application for OS X that takes a QTVR panorama and then lets you export it to DV for editing in your video program. What would be really nifty would be to go the other way, though I guess if you took a 360?? pan you could slice that up pretty easily to make a pano….

open access journals

Directory of open access journals is hosted by the University of Lund (Sweden) library and lists academic journals that have an open access policy. This means that they do not charge for subscription, and they do have to meet academic criteria of peer review.

Academic journal publishing is big business. But weird. Academics traditionally write material for free, review it for free, then pay a lot of money for the publication. As academics we provide most of the intellectual property (for free) but seem to think it is ok for publishing houses to then make money from this. Once upon a time there wasn’t much choice – you needed printing presses and the like to publish academic work. Now with the net we don’t need books or journals. We can print it online. It is cheaper, faster, easier. It also means that we don’t need publishers. Hence initiatives like this.

time based media references

University of New South Wales – Library Home – Time-Based Art Subject Guide – Journals is the brief (!) title of a page put together by the College of Fine Arts in Sydney which lists a pile of references for time based media. Has extensive list of journals including links.

Pageot

PAGEot is a very simple and beautifully realised application for writing QuickTime embed tags. Where it shines is that it writes the object tag required for Internet Explorer on Windows, including all the parameters that are needed. It also provides access to most of the attributes that QuickTime recognises in the embed (and object) tag. So you can write an embed tag that not only does the generic things like making the controller visible, autoplay etc, but things like href (ideal for poster movies), ahref, full screen mode, hidden (useful for small midi soundtracks) and so forth. One of those small incredibly useful utitlities that becomes the swiss army knife for QT embedding in HTML. (Found via Steve Garfield.)

into the blogosphere

Been here a while ago but apparently didn’t note it down. Into the Blogosphere is an online publication about blogs that issued an open call for papers and then developed a panel of reviewers around the received submissions. And of course it is published as a blog publication. Very good collection of useful material.

Will be returning here shortly as I’ve got some research around blogging that I need to do.