Archived entries for

The Beginning

From the videoblogging list I found about this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/squaredcircle/show/. It is a ‘movie’ made up of photos that have a common metadata tag attached. This is exactly the sort of thing that we need to start doing for video blogs. The url was sent by Ryan Shaw, the email conversation is cited below.

Adrian Miles wrote:

>if you want audience, serialisation, and ‘shows’ go for it, use
>syndication. i think using aggregation to achieve this is 1000% more
>interesting than centralising which is what the above sort of models.
>blogs work because they’re decnetralised. why reintroduce old media
>structures into a distributed network that works because *all* bits are
>distributed?
>
>this is where the rss/aggregation stuff is critical. imagine we all made
>a 60 second bit called “Christmas” and then aggregated that. that’s a
>show. that’s a new sort of show and that is what we ought to be worrying
>about
>

I totally agree. It is very close, I think. Today I found this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/squaredcircle/show/

It’s a collaborative movie. A very abstract one, but that’s what the tools are limited to now. But it’s amazing what can be done even given the limitations we have now.

So, let’s do this. We should work out a theme and invite contributions and aggregate those. This is certainly a project that I’ve already planned to do with students in 2005. Let’s invent a new genre of video come vog, the aggregated program.

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Because Otherwise I’ll Loose It

http://www.wotif.com.au/ is a site that accesses cheap accommodation at hotels around Australia. Seems to provide standby rates, and there are excellent bargains and it’s a good way to find cheaper somewhere to stay when travelling, etc. Stuck it in the blog otherwise I’ll just lose the bloody thing.

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GNEE – Watch 3G camera phone 3gp video uploads. 3G Video Vidbloggers promote your video blog.

GNEE – Watch 3G camera phone 3gp video uploads. 3G Video Vidbloggers promote your video blog., which is lifted straight from the header of their page… This is a new project that lets you email or upload 3g video from your mobile phone and post it. There seems to be a rating system to rank content, and (I haven’t checked) a system to allow the content to appear in your own blog.

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Transparent Assessment

I’m currently trying to assess quite a lot of student work (from three different subjects), and to make this easier for me and better for the students I’m preparing an assessment feedback form. This is a list of check boxes that indicates what qualities or properties the work expresses. This frees me up from having to write a lot of comments, and also makes explicit to the student just what they’re being assessed on. While writing this for Network Media it struck me that not only should this have been presented to the students (I already do do this for other assessment tasks) but that some parts of it should be either defined or discussed explicitly with the students.

For example, they’ve all just finished writing HTML based academic essays. These essays are a response to extracts from the three key theoretical readings from this semester. The essays are to be academic, but to be multilinear, exploratory, and to respond to this proposition:

Imagine if the Web was the original place for writing what you know, rather than the page. What would your writing become? What could your writing become?

(Remember, they’re only in their first year.) In writing up the assessment outline proforma thingiemajig I was writing a criteria that more or less says “Does the essay express academic knowledge? Yes | Partially | No”. This is a key criteria for me, as it helps the students understand that what they’re being invited to do is to not be designers or just respond in some sort of open subjective opinion led manner, but to construct academic knowledge. The rub is that they’re understanding of this is via traditional essay writing, and so the requirement that it be multilinear and interlinked, at least by the number of questions I was fielding, seemed to work well in getting them to begin to reconsider academic writing as a practice. So, what do I mean by ‘academic knowledge’. This is implicit to me, though probably as much a result of having taught academic hypertext writing since 1995, and so I realised, in one of those in-retrospect-so-obvious moments, that I should have just asked them to define what they thought I meant. And taken it from there.

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