I gather this has been around for a month at least, but I thought this mash of The Simpsons and Star Wars by Rich Cando (of Dude Films fame) was too good not to share:
Monthly Archives: August 2007
links for 2007-08-31
Posted by Tama
on August 31, 2007
No comments
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Lectopia’s new website, having moved on from UWA now that they’re part of Echo360 along with Anystream.
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A “Spider-man” suit that enables its wearer to scale vertical walls like the comic and movie superhero could one day be a reality, according to a study.
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“The academic union has launched Federal Court action against Curtin University of Technology over alleged censorship and blocking of union emails to staff. “
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G’day Gawker: “Allure Media, which next week will launch its fourth blog since April, also has the licence to launch local versions of the Gawker Media portfolio of high-profile US blogs such as tech blog Gizmodo and celebrity gossip blog Defamer.”
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Examines the body as a boundary concept in science fiction films on the 90s: mainly the Alien and Star Trek franchises.
Australian Blogging Conference: 28 September 2007
Posted by Tama
on August 29, 2007
5 comments
The big news of the day is that The Australian Blogging Conference, a fabulous-looking free one-day event exploring everything about blogging in Australia (including education and Creative Commons!) now has a date: Friday, 28 September 2007 in sunny Brisbane! All of the details are here. I’d write more, but I’m now running around to see if I can get myself from Perth to Brisbane for the day of the conference!
Update: I’ve successfully organised flights and my benevolent university has agreed to part with me for the day (yes, the day, so I’ll be on red-eye flight at midnight Thursday flight!) so Aussie BloggerCon here I come! 
links for 2007-08-29
Posted by Tama
on August 29, 2007
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A case against Blackboard: It’s slow; has a clunky instructor interface; isn’t easily extendable; leads to a homogeneous student online experience; doesn’t talk to the world outside the university well; and costs too much.
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“Video-sharing website YouTube has met with harsh criticism in Germany for hosting clips that incite racial hatred, according to a news report due to be broadcast on German public TV late on Monday.”
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Wonderful fictional website for the Yamagato coroporation, featuring a mini-documentary on the “Sword Saint”, narrated by John Rhys-Davies, promoting the TV series Heroes. [Via]
US Tweens and Teens Talk Education while participating in Online Social Networks
Posted by Tama
on August 28, 2007
2 comments
JD Lasica points to an interesting new report from the US National School Boards Association entitled Creating & Connecting /Research and Guidelines on Online Social — and Educational — Networking. The report focusing on ‘tweens’ and teens, and has some really important notes about the role of social networking in forming learning communities and even casual connections between online presence and learning.
As this graph shows, more than half US tweens and teens have discussed education in online social networking:
Likewise, many tweens and teens are not just discussing and downloading, but also creating, uploading and participating in creative projects:
Again we are reminded that education in the twenty-first century has to think about the digital literacies of students and how to allow those literacies to develop in our curricula.
links for 2007-08-28
Posted by Tama
on August 28, 2007
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Lectopia, the enterprise-level presentation capture and delivery system developed at the University of Western Australia (formerly know as iLecture) has been purchased by Anystream Apreso. Sad to see it go, but good luck to the Lectopia team!
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The next Adobe Flash player will support H.264! Bring on the high-quality YouTubery!
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Light-weight but interesting profile of the three guys behind The Pirate Bay, the web’s #1 stop for illegal bittorrent files! [Via]
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“… IBM’s 9,000 workers in Italy, is planning a most novel form of industrial action – a strike on Second Life – and it wants as many avatars as possible manning the picket lines.”
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“Education Minister Mark McGowan will introduce new guidelines to ban the use of mobile phones in Western Australian classrooms.”
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“A bid to create a new world record and have the biggest number of people dressed up as daleks in one location has taken place in Manchester.”
links for 2007-08-27
Posted by Tama
on August 27, 2007
No comments
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Blogger blogs now support free-hosting of videoblogs: “Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading.”
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“A New Jersey teenager has unlocked the iPhone, opening the way to Apple’s iconic mobile telephone being used by non-US networks. The Associated Press news agency confirmed George Hotz, 17, had unlocked the iPhone …”
links for 2007-08-25
Posted by Tama
on August 25, 2007
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“A 21-year-old man from the western Sydney suburb of Prairiewood faces up to five years’ imprisonment after he was charged with uploading a pirated copy of The Simpsons Movie on the internet.”
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The Australian Government’s “NetAlert” website and free internet content-filters for all Australian families is finally released. This addresses symptoms, not causes. Even the filters themselves don’t actually work!
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A “corrupted blood” disease infecting World of Warcraft avatars is being used as a model of real-world behaviour in the case of a viral pandemic!
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“A new study conducted by Nottingham Trent University …found one in 10 players who regularly played online games had started a physical relationship with a fellow gamer, and most had made good friends while playing. “
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“Internet addiction’ doesn’t exist. It can’t, because it’s a logical impossibility … ‘Internet addiction’ researchers conceive of the internet as if it were a set of activities when, in fact, it’s a medium for communication.”
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A combination of successful radio-based podcasts and newer TV-based ‘vodcasts’ have Australia’s national broadcaster serving over 5 million downloads per month.
Australian Politicians … editing Wikipedia and spending big on redundant Internet filters
Posted by Tama
on August 24, 2007
4 comments
(I’m back in Perth, and …) All over the world the WikiScanner has been uncovering interesting trails and tails of previously unnamed Wikipedia editors. PerthNow quickly jumped on the bandwagon and discovered the the Office of Australia’s Prime Minister has been busy:
The Prime Minister’s staff has been editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the Government in the lead-up to the election. Staff in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have made 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer Peter Costello, Fairfax reports.
So, too, has Australia’s Department of Defense, although they’ve gone into Wiki lockdown while the Department figures out exactly who was changing what (or working out how to spin that story, at any rate). The PM’s office have supposedly launched an internal inquiry, but I’m sure any interesting findings (whatever that might entail) won’t quite surface until the 07 elections are done, anyway!
At the same time, the long-awaited Federally-funded NetAlert website, which is supposed to educate and arm parents, children and teachers to the dangers of life in a networked culture, has finally been released. Sadly, though, the keystone of NetAlert are free family internet filters, which have been poorly received and for the most part, don’t appear to work.
PS Running WikiScanner past the University of Western Australia IP Address is far less exciting; there is one big Portishead fan, a few rants about masturbation, but that’s the juiciest we’ve got!
Update: Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer takes the cake with his thoughts on Wikipedia:
“My sort of recollection of Wikipedia sites is they are a bit, sort of, a bit anti-government, they are sort of a bit negative about people in the government,” Mr Downer said today. “That is my recollection of them, so maybe we should fire people up to edit them – but I know they have editorial control at Wikipedia so it probably wouldn’t help.”
It’s such a delight to have such informed politicians leading this country. *sigh*
Off the Grid!
Posted by Tama
on August 16, 2007
No comments
I’m on leave, and Emily and I are away, until August 24th. More to the point, we’re going to be completely without internet connectivity (partially by choice, more by circumstance), so I’m going to be completely off the grid until we get back to Perth. So, please don’t take offence if emails go unanswered or moderated comments don’t appear in the meantime … I’ll get to most stuff within a couple of days after August 24th. Until then, enjoy this little picture I took of a little memento from our honeymoon …
The image shows a few rocks and pebbles that made their way from a park in Venice to our bedroom in Perth!
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