vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Workshop on Blogs

Tomorrow morning I’m running a workshop with a lab full of secondary teachers introducing them to blogs. I’ve set up temporary blogs for each of them, and we’ll run through blogging 101. I’m covering logging in, posting, editing, categories, some blog nomenclature, images, uploading files, templates, and anything else that crops up.

I’ve written an outline for the day, which is available below as a PDF and these are the links included in that document, in no particular order:

• First year Media Studies student blogs
• Educational weblogs portal
• EduBlog
• Sebastian Fiedler (webpublishing for learning and education)
• James Farmer
• Globe of Blogs
  
• Blogdex
• Bloglines
• WordPress
• Blogger.com

Work shop notes (pdf)

Podcasting and vogcasting

Well, podcasting is all the rage. Clients, casts, commentary (this is the main introduction, but check out podcaster.net for casts and help. and engadget for an excellent how to).

Don’t have a pod, so can’t really play, though obviously it works with any other content too, just make sure the mime types of the enclosure are correct, but my knee jerk (or jerk knee) reaction is in empathy with Andreas‘ when he notes:

Yes, it is brilliant in that it offers a very impressive and kewl way of letting people produce and distribute content that elegantly (and elegance is what is missing from those of us trying to vog, the tools are anything but), slips into things like iPods. So you can make, distribute and now people can listen in the way that they prefer to listen. But the content model is old media. The methodology is old media. A url should be, as Andreas notes, live so that it can be clickable. Or visible, or something. Otherwise it is nonbroadcast radio and the revolution is that community access is now equivalent to network access.

The Fictions of Deleuze and Guattari:A Fictional Poetic Biography:Clifford Duffy.

Was an email waiting for me this morning from Clifford Duffy introducting his The Fictions of Deleuze and Guattari:A Fictional Poetic Biography..

I think I remember Clifford from several years ago on the Deleuze-Guattari list, which I gave up on many moons ago (there are only so many raves parading as lines of flight you can endure). It is a fictional philosophy blog (now that could be an interesting genre). This is from the opening page:

Self Assessment Outcomes

I routinely (these days) require all my students to assess their participation. Everyone contributes ideas about what things they think they will have to do to learn through the semester, and I collate these, tidy them up, and this forms the basis of an assessment diary that they complete each week. At the end of semester they use the same form to determine their participation across the semester, and to award themselves their final mark.

The list of things is pretty constant, with interesting variations. For example my third year students in an applied research subject just completed included “getting grubby” as one of their activities, by which they meant they should get their hands dirty in thinking, making, that they should get out of their academic comfort zone.

Once they’ve decided their final mark they present to the class, briefly noting what they’ve done well, what they’ve learnt to do better, and what they could have done better. One day I will videotape this exercise, as the results are just outstanding. They are articulate, even, and do a brilliant job of describing what they have been able to develop and why. The highlight is, I think, that the terms they use are entirely their own, what has been significant for them, not me.

An activity like this supports the sorts of teaching we need to do for those who are going to work in the creative industries. It lets students learn how to identify what tasks may need to be done, how to evaluate their relative importance, and to then be able to reflect on these in contextually appropriate ways. I’ve done this in my first year teaching this year, and in their second year this will change so that rather than the entire cohort defining what counts as participation, it will be done individually. It encourages confidence and independent learning.

Finally, and this should not be underestimated, activities such as these reduce my assessment load, as students are defining and assessing their participation. This is sensible, largely because unless I introduce quite a few different activities any attempt by me to judge participation can only become little more than making participation equivalent to attendance, and possibly saying something in class. This is not participation. Individual’s know what is required and what they’ve done, and they’re the best placed to judge this.

Dogs and Daughters

We’ve got an addition to our family. Jersey, rumoured to be a fox terrier, Chihuahua cross. Rescued from a local pound as an 8 week old puppy.

She’s now 14 or 15 weeks old, pretty much has decided she owns us, so there is not quite enough training going on. This is a snap from puppy school. It’s a whole different world out there. The vet sends reminders for vaccinations, the puppy school teacher remembers all of the dog’s names but owners never introduce themselves.

Next we’ll become one of those people in the park who knows all the dogs by name, and has conversations with other dog owners about their dogs, and I’ll refer to them as “you know, Rover’s mum”.

MT-Enclosures, vogs and RSS

Blogging and personal publishing was the first wave. The second wave is syndication, aggregation, and viable metadata.

This is a plug in for Movable Type (the blog system I’m currently using, though WordPress is starting to tempt me) that lets you add audio enclosures to your RSS 2.0 enclosure, presumably it works with QuickTime too (my Dad’s in hospital today and has just had a stent inserted after an angioplasty, other more important things to do in a couple of minutes).

What this enables is for people to view your video via their rss aggregators, it also means that others can collate video more easily to do more interesting things with it (all the video’s today that are about joy…).

RMIT – Academic Operating Procedures

RMIT – Academic Operating Procedures:

http://www.rmit.edu.au/course-admin/operating-procedures

Well, dull but I guess it would be good to document this somewhere for when I need it.

FOUND Magazine

FOUND Magazine:

http://www.foundmagazine.com/

Got this via a student who emailed it to one of our subject lists. Basically it is a site where you send images of found objects and annotate them when you submit them. It is a bit basic, and the use of frames is appalling, but it is a good idea with an OK start.

What could you do differently? Well get rid of the frames to begin with. Some metadata and RSS feeds like flickr has been pioneering. This would mean I might view material collected by time, place, or key terms. Imagine all the love letters found. Or broken shoes.

Magnatune: MP3 files and music licensing (royalty free music and license music).

Magnatune: MP3 files and music licensing (royalty free music and license music). :

http://magnatune.com/

Got this via the videblogging email list (thanks Mr Gilligan). It’s a shareware music label and so it applies the shareware licence model from software to audio. Listen, if you keep listening and like it, then pay for it at a nominal cost. If you listen and don’t like it, don’t worry about paying and don’t worry about keeping it.

I don’t think it will be long before quite a few books are published electronically on this model.

Lugano Variation Three

Another Lugano Variation, joining one and two. Lugano Variation Three continues the same series of three repeated clips. This time they’re arranged left to right, though now with more dead space above and below. It works the same as the previous clips in that mousing in to the clip area toggles the soundtrack for that clip but it now also toggles the video itself. Mousing in makes the sound audible and the video visible, mousing out reverses this. As you mouse across the movie you get each of the clips visible then not.

What I was interested in making in this work was something where what you did disclosed the video. It isn’t as elegant as I wanted it to be, though I might return to that for another variation, so for instance mousing in would allow the video to fade in, and fade out, so that the experience of the disclosure would be much more grounded in an experience of being revealed and disclosed. However, at this point just making this one is a step and sketch along the path.

Technically this is done just by using a black jpeg as a stage to the entire movie and all three video clips are playing in the background behind this black image. Mousing in to the relevant sprite simply shifts the layer of the video to the front so that it now appears over the black (this is on the mouse in event), and mousing out returns the video to behind the black layer. It does not perform as well as I would have anticipated, so I’ve dropped the idle rate to half a second. This just means it only checks to see where the mouse is every half second, so it will ‘respond’ slolwy.