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A Very CC Year …
As the Creative Commons movement celebrates a birthday this week, I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on my year in CC terms, as well as showing off some very impressive CC-licensed work by my honours students. It has already been a pretty big year in Creative Commons terms for me and the students I teach; in the first semester my Digital Media class experimented with Creative Commons licenses on a lot of their output, including many of their Student News reports and almost all of their outstanding Digital Media Projects; I’ve also enjoyed being part of an education panel at the Building an Australasian Commons conference in July, as well as presenting on my talk ‘Building Open Education Resources from the Bottom Up’ at the Open Education Resources Free Seminar in Brisbane in September.
As the year’s drawing to a close, I’m delighted to highlight one last effort, this time from the honours students in my iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture course. The course, as in past years, has been a collaborative effort between the students and myself; I’ve provided the framing narrative and opening and closing weeks, while the students, in consultation, have written the central seminars in the course. Moreover, all course content from the seminars to the curriculum, from the students’ audio podcasts to their amazing remix videos, has been released under a Creative Commons license as both an exemplar of their fine work and an Open Educational Resource which, hopefully, will be something other teachers, students and creative citizens can draw upon for their own purposes. Moreover, given that I first ran iGeneration in 2005, this year’s students already built upon the work of that first cohort, learning from their peers and, hopefully, sharing so future peers can build on this work, too.
I also thought I’d take this opportunity to showcase some of the specific media projects created this year. The first is a really impressive podcast by Kiri Falls which looked at the Babelswarm art installation in Second Life …
[audio:http://igeneration.edublogs.org/files/2008/09/babelswarm.mp3][Full Sources & Exegesis] [CC BY NC SA]
Kiri’s final project for the unit, this time a remix video, takes quite literally the idea that creativity builds upon the past, with this enjoyable video which mashes together a plenitude of videos and photographs …
[Full Sources & Exegesis] [CC BY NC SA]
The second remix project I wanted to showcase is by Alex Pond; Alex has created a short but very poignant video which takes issue with the monolith that is copyright law, but celebrates the freedoms which are shared via the Creative Commons …
[Full Sources & Exegesis] [CC BY NC SA]
The final remix I wanted to highlight is a bit different. This one, by Chris Ardley, includes art and music from creators who’ve explicitly given Chris permission to re-use their work and share it under a CC license. This animation, created in Flash, explores remix more metaphorically, and tells a tale of worldly creation …
[Full Sources & Exegesis] [CC BY NC SA]
I think all of these projects are quite impressive, and I was delighted at how seriously this year’s students took the idea of remix and how many of them embraced everything that the Creative Commons has to offer, as well as giving back something of their own. I’ve also finally written iGeneration up as an educational example in the CC Case Studies Wiki, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while!
So, Happy 6th Birthday to the Creative Commons! In the next six years, I hope you’ll consider sharing work under a CC license if you haven’t already; a shared culture can help us all be a lot more creative. I know my students have benefitted from the generosity of the Creative Commons, and have, in turn, added a few quite impressive ideas and artefacts back into the creative stream.
Annotated Digital Culture Links: December 9th 2008
Links for December 9th 2008:
- Australia’s census going CC BY [Creative Commons] – “In a small, easy to miss post, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has made a very exciting announcement. They’re going CC – and under an Attribution-only license, no less. From the ABS website…
- Texting Turnbull catches the Twitter bug [The Age] – “As the Opposition’s popularity slips back to where it was under Brendan Nelson’s leadership, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull is bringing digital intervention to the fore. The digits in question are his thumbs. Having witnessed the power of the web in the US presidential election campaign, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Mr Turnbull are engaged in a high-tech arms race to win the hearts and minds of switched-on Australians. While some politicians including US President-elect Barack Obama are content with older model BlackBerry handsets, Mr Turnbull owns one of the latest releases, the BlackBerry Bold. And he showed off the speed of his thumbs as he settled once and for all the question of whether he writes his own Twitter updates. “I love technology,” he told online journalists in Sydney as he added another “tweet” via Twitter as they watched.” To his credit, more personal than a lot of Kevin07 stuff: http://twitter.com/turnbullmalcolm
- Virtual world for Muslims debuts [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “A trial version of the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community has been launched. Called Muxlim Pal, it allows Muslims to look after a cartoon avatar that inhabits the virtual world. Based loosely on other virtual worlds such as The Sims, Muxlim Pal lets members customise the look of their avatar and its private room. Aimed at Muslims in Western nations, Muxlim Pal’s creators hope it will also foster understanding among non-Muslims. “We are not a religious site, we are a site that is focused on the lifestyle,” said Mohamed El-Fatatry, founder of Muxlim.com – the parent site of Muxlim Pal.”
- Facebook scandal shames students [The Age] – “A Facebook network of senior students from two of Sydney’s most elite private schools have offended the Jewish community with anti-Semitic slurs. Students from The Scots College in Bellevue Hill created a Facebook site called Jew Parking Appreciation Group which describes “Jew parking” as an art which often occurs at “Bellevue (Jew) Hill”. The site, which has 51 members, contains a link to The Scots Year 12 Boys, 2008, and The Scots College networks, and is administered by Scots students. It is connected to another network created and officiated by Scots College students with postings that include “support Holocaust denial” and a link to another internet address called “F— Israel and Their Holocaust Bullshit”.” (Racist rubbish, but also another example of supposedly ‘digital natives’ misunderstanding how much of their juvenile digital behaviour will be visible and recorded forever online.)
- Jean Burgess, Joshua Green – YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture [Polity Press] – “YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.” (Potential textbook material for the Digital Media unit.)
- Learn at Any Time – The Open University [Podcasts] – The Open University podcasts website is a very well made example of university-based podcasts that DO NOT rely on hosting via Apple’s iTunes platform.
New Media Literacies
Check out this articulate, straight-forward and succinct little video highlighting the key skills which are part of digital literacy (or, as the producers prefer, new media literacies):
An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
Michael Wesch, an anthropologist focused on digital culture and YouTube (famous for the the videos The Machine is Us/Ing Us and A Vision of Students Today) has released (on YouTube) an excellent presentation he gave about YouTube’s history and cultural impact called An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube:
While much of the story Wesch presents will be familiar, this 55 minute package is an excellent overview and will no doubt prove an excellent resource for getting students thinking about the place of YouTube in digital culture. Beside which, it features a whole bunch of old favourites which should make it enjoyable viewing for almost everyone. (If a 55 minute YouTube clip is a bit much, Wesch has posted a timeline for the video in his blog, so pick up the story wherever you’re most interested.)
Links for June 11th 2008
Interesting links for June 8th 2008 through June 11th 2008:
- Change Congress – NCMR keynote [Lessig Blog] – Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at the National Conference for Media Reform arguing for a mobilisation of talent to try and end (or, at least, decrease) the corruption in the US Congress.
- J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement [Harvard Magazine] – Rowling gives a really delightful and heartfelt commencement talk at Harvard, rather frankly talking about the importance and benefits of failure, hitting rock bottom, and working out what’s really important in life.
- 280 Slides – Create & Share Presentations Online – Nifty online version of powerpoint/keynote software. A lot more elaborate than Google Docs, but still a long way from Keynote or Powerpoint. A very good, simple and accessible way to do the basics. (I wonder when Google will try and buy this little startup?)
- Sex and the City: A Product-Placement Roundup [vanityfair.com] – The product placement in the Sex and the City movie makes the producers of the James Bond films look like amateurs!
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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