vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Head Out of Place

I have not written nearly as much as I should’ve. This year, last year, the year before. No doubt next year. It is not that I don’t have things to write or ideas to get out. It is probably the opposite. I feel like I have a fury of ideas in here. Linked, wandering, all over the shop. It is all soupy noise. Gets in the way. I start thinking about how I should write about this, or that, or that other thing, and then I stumble over what I should (in a normative, traditional good essay sort of should) do, and then how that idea also grows out of this other one, so perhaps that one should be done first. Except there isn’t really a priority or a prior here. So I stop. Stutter. Start. Again, and again. And again.

Hypertext. Real, glorious, lascivious hypertext was my first solution to this. It remains probably the best. But I have also realised that I need to stop the struggle of fighting my thought to an other (external, highly rational, linear, carefully elaborate and preplanned structures of the good essay) and begin to develop an academic vernacular of my own. If it doesn’t work, change it. If it works, use it, break it, make with it. After all, I’d like it to be about ideas and the dialogic flows these participate in and produce rather than ensuring filial soverignity.

Blogs in Media Education

Have just put up an essay I wrote for Metro on blogs and media education. It is intended to be introductory and aimed for those in the edu sector.

Halls Gap Day Two

As a group we all went to Flat Rock, an expanse of rock at the very northern tip of The Grampians (not to visitors, it seems there is no longer signage indicating flat rock but it is now the Mount Zero picnic ground). Regardless, it is a shelf of rock that is an easy walk, and at the top you get wonderful views southwards over the ranges, and across to Mt Stapylton and its ampitheatre of cliffs.

I made sound recordings, recording some commentary on the way up, as well as some sound effects from the location (wind, birds, steps, breath, possibly the sounds of the conversations distant rock climbers were having). I used my mobile phone as a still camera and took some very soft photos, which I may or may not use. Laurene was doing some interesting work, I think photographing lichen and other fine patterns as lace. Some of the students gathered quite a lot of material, others seemed pretty burnt out and since we didn’t spend time looking at work, or going over it, the context of what was going done, and their contribution, was probably starting to feel thin.

As the first such trip I think I’ve learnt quite a bit from it. The first is to ensure there are formal (ie structured and scheduled) debriefs at the end of each day where a discussion is held about what has gone on, what worked, what didn’t. A sort of critique which is about working out a new or altered set of practices (where relevant or needed). Would also be good to have a data projector set up and to get everyone to show work.

The second might be to get a house. The YHA at Halls Gap is stunning, but a single location which is smaller, more controllable, and more ‘owned’ could be more productive (if productivity is the aim). On the other hand if the emphasis is on developing collaborations more generally, the hostel is fantastic as it comes predefined with rules for cleaning up, washing, up, scraps, compost and communal spaces. (This is handy because as a hostel it is defined as a space for others to need to be able to share so common and explicit rules are necessary.)

The third is to be able to begin to see how the work is contributing to a project as you go. I think seeing the work at the end of each day, and having a discussion around it, and then using that to start to think about how the larger project (the map) might develop, would have achieved this. I suspect for the students it was a bit too much like collecting media in a vacuum, it just isn’t clear enough for them the ‘why’ of what is going on. This will change shortly, as we build the atlas, so perhaps a second session might be of value?

Halls Gap Day One

Drive up to Halls Gap (it’s north of home so by default it is up) went well with a nearly one C. The labsome students arrived yesterday, as had Seth and family, and have seemed to spend a reasonably productive day collecting media samples. Big kick ass bbq which the students put on, then the evening became cards, conversation and scotch. We had a quick conversation about how their constraints worked during the day (all needed to change their practice in situ) and then decided that for the second day we would, as a group, all go to the same location and document it intensively.

I like this, since I can then work with the students to help them develop their particular practices in this context, and the idea of an intensive practice appeals to me greatly. I think I’ll be using a video camera recording people at work, possibly some vox pops.

Waiting for a Train

In amongst organising a trip to Halls Gap for honours students, trying to get on top of end of semester assessments, writing a 3500 paper for a design education conference, the baby, bigger kids, and going for a bike ride every now and then, found time to photograph the beautiful cold sky this morning.

Social Media Introduction

Trevor Cook has updated his pdf about social media. It is designed for those in various professional media fields as an introduction to the relation of all the Web two point oh developments to existing communications professions. Free download, get it while it’s hot.

Conference Extended

The IE conference has just announced an extension of deadlines:

• Full Papers (max 8 pages): 23 July 2007
• Short papers (max 3 pages): 23 July 2007

Interruption to Broadcasting

Dropped the PowerBook today. Fractured the screen (pictures coming later). Might interrupt things a tad.

Vlog Razor

Aggregation site that brings together daily vlog related news (via RSS) into one location.

Cruxy Live

Cruxy is now live. Sort of Blip for audio, video, it uses the ‘ablums’ terminology to think about collections (you create an album and upload it, so a collection of videos, or audios for example, would be an album) and has hooks into Second Life too. 70% of revenue goes to content creators, and the revenue model for creators seems to be that you can charge for your content and so Cruxy manages this on your behalf (nice). Presumably, but I haven’t checked, there is a minimum payment required to cover their processing costs. I think they are aiming to do the next step for rich media creators what Kagi did for shareware developers. Kagi undertook to manage all the back end financial transactions and management for shareware you wanted to sell, making it viable for individual developers and providing both with an income stream. Cruxy is the same, though they are also offering at the front end a media management resource to boot.

This is a very positive next step from the carnivalesque noise of YouTube. Rights are retained, if you have material worth paying for then you might get a return, and it recognises that this is about media, not video or audio, but both. (At the end of the day I can’t help experiencing YouTube as being about users not creators, my kids go there to find funny clips all the time, but certainly don’t think of it as a place to create work or to publish work. They use their blogs for that – and currently treat blogs as entirely disposable – YouTube is their online video library, and that’s all it is.)