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24 Hours of Flickr
Today 05.05.2007 (which is one of those lovely dates which makes sense on both US and normal people’s calendars), photography sharing and community building uber-site, Flickr, is running an event called 24 Hours of Flickr. The details:
To celebrate this global community, we invite you to join us in “24 Hours of Flickr” – a day-long global photo project. On May 5, 2007, grab your camera and whatever else you need, and chronicle your day in pictures. The group’s photos will be featured at Flickr events around the world this summer and in a companion book, which will contain a selection of photographs chosen from the group…
While the day is just beginning in the US, it’s well into the night here in Perth. I’ve remembered to carry my camera some of the day, but a lot of what I did wasn’t photography-friendly (I didn’t think taking pictures in the screening of Spider-Man 3 would be overly well received!). I’ve taken a few shots of my day in a set here. Thankfully, the paucity of shots today meant is was rather easy picking my one decent shot for the Flickr pool. The only better candidate was a photo of Emily’s work-in-progress painting of Tulips, but I it seemed wrong to post a photograph of a painting for a photography pool! So here’s the image I settled on …
It’s called Wrecked Angles (oh, I do love a good pun); it’s all rectangles, unfinished painted walls, security-wired windows and cracked glass. And yet, in black and white, aesthetically quite fascinating. (It was taken in Subiaco, Western Australia, but by no means indicative of the suburb!) It doesn’t really look that impressive scaled down, but take a look full-size and see what you think.
I can’t wait to see what other photos emerge during the day! 🙂
Apparently I’m in Vogue
You’ll forgive the title to this post, I’ve never been able to let a good pun go and I doubt I’ll ever be able to use that one again. It’s true, though: I was interviewed about a month ago by Cathrin Shaer, a New Zealand-based writer for Vogue Australia who was writing a piece on life online. She was trying to do an awful lot in one article (talking about MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, etc.) but somehow my name came up and I ended up talking with her for almost an hour about the complexities of interaction in different online modes. Clearly the bit that stuck was about Second Life. Here is the snippet from that interview which appeared today in ‘A life less ordinary’ (Vogue Australia, May 2007):
Tama Leaver, a lecturer at The University of Western Australia whose research interests include exploring how humans interact with technology, has used Second Life for business meetings: “Most of the people working in my field are spread across the globe. I’ve participated in teleconferencing, but it’s better of have a conference in Second Life because you’re all in a room together, rather than just disembodied voices.” Apparently, even if you’re meeting with a bunch of serious academics, it doesn’t matter if you look like a cartoon character. “There’s a great parallel in animated films,” Leaver explains. “We understand what’s going on in an animated character’s face — most people understanding what Shrek was saying.”
Not exactly mind-blowing stuff on my part. Also, I suspect there are a few sentences Shaer could have left in since there was somewhat more space and substance between talking about academic discussion in Second Life and Shrek (for the record, I’ve never met anyone online or offline who looks like Shrek – while the facial features might be there, no one I’ve met was actually green). That said, it’s interesting to see interest in social software spreading as far as Vogue. (Although I was a little surprised that they didn’t use any Second Life screenshots for illustration – and what they did use seemed like a bad high school art collage – perhaps the Vogue graphics people didn’t actually make it in-world).
Welcome to TamaLeaver dot Net!
I’ve been testing and tweaking this blog for almost a month now, so I thought it was time to declare Tama Leaver dot Net open for blogging business! In the coming months (or years … or maybe more) I’ll be writing here about my thoughts on digital culture (whatever that might mean). I’m very interested in the world of blogging per se, as well as social software more generally from podcasts to YouTube, del.icio,us, Flickr and so forth.
In my professional life I’m currently working as an Associate Lecturer (Higher Education Development) at the University of Western Australia’s Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and have previous worked in both Communication Studies and English and Cultural Studies also at UWA.
This blog is the successor to Ponderance, my previous Blogger blog, so if you’re after something before March 2007, it’s probably archived there. I blogged at Ponderance for almost four years, but I decided to migrate here in order to use my own WordPress installation and customise everything more fully that Blogger could allow.
I thought I’d also use this welcome entry to signpost my other current activities and collections so they can be easily located if you were actually looking for something more specific:-
[X] My del.icio.us bookmarks – Each day at 8am Perth time (or 9am during daylight saving; midnight GMT) a post is automatically generated and appears here with a list of my annotated bookmarks from the previous 24 hours. To explore my full bookmark collection, either scroll down on the main blog page and there’s a clickable tagcloud (a list of the frequently used tags I’ve added to my bookmarks) or go to my del.icio.us page.
[X] My Flickr photos – My latest five photos posted to Flickr appear on the right sidebar under my blogroll or you can explore them all in my Flickr photographs.
[X] Tama’s eLearning Blog – Part of the wonderful edublogs.org network, this blog is focused on issues about issues about using technology, web2.0 and other ‘eLearning’ ideas as part of a range of learning and teaching tools and strategies in higher education. Occasionally I’ll cross-post items both here and to my eLearning blog, but for the most part my eLearning thoughts will be posted in my edublog.
[X] Tama Talks Blog – Which is part of the UWA postgraduate community social software system MyResearchSpace. The blog is written primarily for that community and explores why blogging matters to postgraduates.
(If you’re subscribed to the feed from my previous blog, Ponderance, I’ve automatically updated feedburner to re-direct the to the feed from Tama Leaver dot Net, which is replacing Ponderance. If you’re still confused, see Ponderance’s retirement announcement.)
Any questions or comments? 🙂 They’re always welcome.