April 22, 2005
Internet TV
Participatory Culture Foundation
From the site "Announcing a new platform for internet television and video. Anyone can broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost, using BitTorrent technology. Viewers get intuitive, elegant software to subscribe to channels, watch video, and organize their video library. The project is non-profit, open source, and built on open standards. Today we're announcing the project and releasing our current sourcecode. The software is launching in June."
This is turn key system the combines video, blogs and torrents. This could be a really powerful system for the easy distrubution of video content. I can see a huge amount of use for this, not just in teaching !!!
April 21, 2005
April 17, 2005
April 16, 2005
X Media Lab: Professional Day Conference scans of notes
Last October got to the X Media Lab: Professional Day Conference in Melbourne. After coming back I gave talks to my students about the day, but I also dreamed of writing up the notes below into a written report, instead what I have finally the time to do is to upload the scans of the mindmaps I made during the sessions, which isn't a great solution. While I love pen and paper, I really wish for good digital paper at times like this.Opening and Introduction
Brendan Harkin
X|Media|Lab
KEYNOTE - Navigating Through New Media
Dale Herigstad
Founder & Creative Director, Schematic (USA)
New Media Now
Philip Cronin
CEO, Intel Australia
Matthew Liebmann
Pricewaterhousecoopers
Author, Australian Media and Entertainment Outlook
Martin Hoffman
CEO, Nine MSN
Whither Television?
Marcia Zellers
American Film Institute Enhanced TV
Chris Winter
ABC's Digital Channel Manager
Jonathan Overall
Two Way TV
KEYNOTE - The Future of Personalised Media
Gary Hayes
Former Senior Producer, BBC Internet, Interactive TV, and Emerging Platforms
Making the Broadband Connection
Landry Fevre
IDC
Author, Broadband Content Development and
Business Models
David Rooney
Australian Creative Resources Online
James Grant Hay
Managing Director, In Shot
Advertising: "And Now, No Word from Our Sponsors."
Stuart Simson
CEO, eMitch
Simon O'Day
CEO, eServices
David Whittle
Head of Digital, M&C Saatchi
KEYNOTE - Information Appliances: How "Appliance Thinking" Can Transform the Design Of Media Products and Services
Peter Thomas
Director, Appliance Design Network
The Mobile Juggernaut
David Kainer
Director and CTO, Viva La Mobile
Theresa Mascarenhas
Vodafone
Brad Keeling
Slice Wireless
Computer Games
Mark Ollila
Telegames (Europe and Asia)
Theresa Eyssens
Head of Digital Media, IBM Australia
Geoff Lowe
Freeserve (UK)
KEYNOTE - Design and Technology: The Liberation and Divergence of Computational Thinking
Tom Roope
Co-Founder, Tomato Interactive (UK)
Cross Platform Design
Martin Freeth
Martin Freeth and Associates (UK)
Leisa Reichelt
Massive Interactive
Richard Adams
Creative Director, Yoomedia (UK)
Regime Change
Malcolm Long
CEO, Australian Film, Television, & Radio School
Domenic Carosa
CEO, Destra Corporation
Hael Kobayashi
Group Head of Production, Animal Logic
Victoria Minister for innovation
Stories - Flash to Video
In the past I've used lots of my own "war stories" in my teaching and also once used stories to communicate to students how I expect them to behave. Last week I tried a bit of a different approach to giving students technical information. I told a story, (here is the powerpoint file for the story) It felt really weird doing this, and it was put together late a night because I seem to have a crazy about of admin work to do at the moment. But it felt really good to do, and the students seemed to respond really well it. What was really different to personal "war stories" was the fact that I didn't feel like it was focussed on me personally as much and I could use stories for areas of teaching where I really don't have a failure story.
I would really like to more of these !!!! partly because I had fun doing it.
Head First
I've been a reader and fan of the Creating Passionate Users blog for a while. Thru their writing I had a strong sense that they where interested in design and learning but I had never really hunt out any information on what exactly do they do. They write a series of technical books called the "Head First" series. I don't actually own a copy of one their books yet, so I don't know if I'm really in a position where I'm able to comment on them. What I have done is downloaded a somes copy of sample chapters as .pdf's. My first reaction was "I wish I had seen these when I was working on ID project last year". They are a really great example of a re-working of the standards ways to deal with technical information in a print form. I feel inspired about the whole area of technical teaching again because of them !!!!!
Why are they different ? they are visual and use lots of stories about real uses of things, quite often these stories are debates about different viewpoints and different ways of doing things. There is lots of flow charts, lots of photographs with captions that are sort of funny in really unpolished way. The informations is applied, situation, vague but clear, and visual. All things most technical books are not. These books look like a major break thru in the area of technical books !!!!
I have their next book on pre-order from Amazon and I'm looking forward to reading it.
Students making resources
I personally would really like to explore how this idea of student made resources could work, I keep on having a barrier in my head which is that students will not be interested because it's not a "real" job. But some of them might realise that it's a really powerful way to learn and be come more confident.
April 15, 2005
Photoshop tutorials
Planetphotoshop.com - Photoshop Tutorials - great selection of Photoshop tutorials. Suggested by one my students.
April 13, 2005
ELGGS
About ELGG Another opensource LMS system that has a the features for the current buzz words, personal learning, weblogs, portfolios etc
Flash View Source
Flash View Source Finally a way to enable the sharing of flash content easly !!!! including this script means the user can write click on the flash file and download a zipped version of it.
The Art Meetings
creativepro.com - The Art of Business: Leader of the Pack this could be great to give the students when they start their client projects !!!!! It's really gear to towards creatives but it's a good summary of meeting best practice.
April 10, 2005
Free stock
stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site - over 100,000 images by 9,000 people. In the past I've always hated stock art and stock photography but at the moment I can see a real use for it. Maybe it's got something to do with time.
Meeting the Acute Need for Entrepreneurial Skills
Meeting the Acute Need for Entrepreneurial Skills
Pollards puts forwards a model for teaching entrepreneurial skills that is not based around a classroom space. A bit more like a guided informal learning experience. I wish when I had personally done a commericalisation course that the focus of it was more like this. I found the biggest challenges in the course related to my own attitudes and work view and that is really hard to work with when someone is just standing at the front of the room and talking.
April 08, 2005
Doors of Perception 8
The site now includes some of the proceedings some of which look really interesting.
QUALITY PERSONAS
From the site: “The best personas will also go the extra step to describe key behaviors such as a decision making process, an information browsing approach, or a shopping mode—the drivers that affect how people approach a given solution.”
http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/articles/
April 06, 2005
Flash video tutorials
FreeFlashTutorials.com Presented By CartoonSmart.com These are some tutorials that a student used that help the idea of timelines inside of graphic symbols. I haven't watch these yet but it look good.
April 04, 2005
Jabberwocky
From the site "Jabberwocky is a freely available mobile phone application designed to promote urban community connections and a sense of familiarity, anxiety, and play in public urban places. It takes advantage of current Bluetooth device proliferation. The application does not require seeding the population with initial users of the social network to function. Even today in most urban cities, the existence of even the current Bluetooth mobile phones is enough to gather meaningful and useful data for visualizations of place and urban strangers."
I'm not quite sure where I should blog this, eg in my installation projects blogs or teaching blog. What looks really interesting is the next stage where, objects/things/places can have tags that network to bluetooth phones.