Creative Juices
During the last semester, I’ve been coordinating a fun little honours unit which was called ‘Creative Selves’. One of the main ideas we explored was the ways in which ‘creativity’ is defined and deployed so differently across all sorts of areas from the creative industries to education and marketing. I wish I’d had this little video to start off that conversation:
[Via]
Annotating YouTube
Even thought Viddler already does it, and does it better, I’m still quite excited by YouTube’s addition of annotation tools. I’ve got 28 groups of students creating Digital Media Projects at the moment and one of the stipulations was that they have to examine the videosharing websites out there and select one to host their work: 27 of 28 groups selected YouTube (most of them rely on the simple point that YouTube gets the eyeballs … and, for now, they’re right). From an educational perspective, critically engaging with digital video becomes a lot more fun when annotations, references and links can be added to existing video! Even though they’re pretty crude at this point, the annotation tools for YouTube also mark a shift from treating YouTube as slices of TV (in video terms) toward an environment where the hypertextuality of digital video comes to the in to play. A bit like what Quicktime already facilitates so brilliantly.
Of course, YouTube’s annotations are all in beta at this point (and proper, not perpetual, beta … you can’t embed annotations in external sites yet, and I’m presuming that eventually YouTube will allow optional viewer annotations, too), so the toolkit may very well evolve. Until then, I can’t wait until I’ve got a cohort of students annotating away to critique and comment on digital video … what fun could be had with speak bubbles, I wonder?
Five Years!
I realised today that I’ve passed one of those blogging milestones: about a fortnight ago, I crossed the birthday barrier and have now consistently spent Five Years Blogging! Sure, it hasn’t all been here … like many people I started out on Blogger because it was free, easy and I had no idea what I was doing. This probably should be a moment for reflection, looking at how much has changed (now I think I know what I’m doing), but as I’m preparing for my last day of teaching for the semester tomorrow, I thought instead I’d refer back to October 2006 I wrote a ‘Why I Blog’ post as part of the Reconstruction special issue on blogging. Largely, my reasons for blogging remain the same. I wonder if I’ll still be going in 2013?
A Floating City
A simply beautiful design for a future Floating New Orleans as noted by Inhabitat:
It’s been almost three years since New Orleans weathered Katrina’s wrath, and debate still rages over plans to reconstruct the sunken city. Myriad options have surfaced ranging from rebuilding the levees to designing storm resistant structures to not rebuilding at all. Here’s an approach that endeavors to ride the river rather than stem it’s course. Harvard Graduate School of Design students Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner have conceived of a Floating City that will “rise safely in an Archimedean liquid landscape.”
So elegant, so well designed and such a good way to work with the natural demands of a place rather than fortify against it. [More] [Via]
Links for June 2nd 2008
Interesting links for June 2nd 2008:
- It Really Looks Like Ice on Mars [Universe Today] – The Phoenix Lander on Mars may have uncovered ice. As anyone with a passing interesting in Mars science fiction will know, actually finding water/ice on Mars is the single either makes or breaks the possibility of terraforming Mars! 🙂
- ABC Earth [ABC Online] – “The ABC Earth content layer (to be viewed using the Google Earth 4.3 application) is a trial that consists of video, images and content developed by the ABC. The layer includes National News and video …” (Fun way of engaging with news!)
- Facebook ban for PM’s staff [Australian IT] – “Staffers working in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s office and on his household staff have been asked to remove their Facebook profiles.” (A move sure to reinforce the image of Australia’s PM as something of a control junkie!)
- Town forces Google to scrap street images [The Age] – “The small, private community of North Oaks in Minnesota enforces its trespassing ordinance, and Google Maps is no exception. The mapping service’s Street View feature allows users to see what a certain address or intersection looks like …”
Videogames, Storytelling and Sex … all in 10 minute animated lectures!
Thanks to Boing Boing, I’ve just discovered two excellent animated mini-lectures from Daniel Floyd looking at story-telling and sex in videogames. The first one argues that videogames have an extremely exciting potential to be story-telling spaces, but that potential is rarely fulfilled and, at present, is largely discouraged by game distributors:
The second animated min-lecture is sure to prove a little controversial as it argues that in order to be taken seriously as an artistic medium, videogames need to have more sex in them. Floyd isn’t arguing for more sensationalised and sleazy games, but in contrast points out that every notable artistic medium is full of explorations of sexuality. If videogames normalised sex as part of character development and stopped using extremely large-breasted women killing things as a marketing tool, then sex would become part of the fabric of games, normalised not demonised (Floyd also reminds us that many gamers are adults; he’s not suggesting sex has to be part of all games):
I really like these videos: they’re an accessible and entertaining entry point for thinking about some big concepts in relation to videogames and they’re creative ways of engaging students on a topic beyond the traditional lecture style.
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