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Everything is a Remix–Part 3 – Creativity
Kirby Ferguson has followed up the episode on film with another fabulous offering in the Everything is a Remix series. This one looks at creativity and debunks the myth that creativity is the product of a few (arguing, instead, it’s always the product of many):
Three Big Pigs: Angry Birds/Disney Middle East Mashup
As Ethan Zuckerman says: “There’s something very 2011 about a Russian video using a soundtrack from American cartoons and characters from a Finnish mobile phone game (based on an English fairytale) to satirize North African politics.”
Understanding Creative Commons for Education
Late last year I was interviewed about online teaching by the team UNSW’s COFA team for their Learning to Teach Online project which aims to build a rich library of resources for teachers working online in various forms. You can find my talking head peppered throughout a number of their video episodes, but the main one, and one I’m really pleased to see up, is all about Understanding Creative Commons for education. I’ve embedded the video below, but you can also get a printable resources hand-out over and the Learning to Teaching Online page.
Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning that this video is about both how teachers and use Creative Commons licenses, but also, and quite importantly, about how students can use CC licenses when producing their own worth, be that text, photos, video or other combinations of media. If you’re an educator interested in this area, you might also enjoy the short paper I wrote a few years ago called ‘The Creative Commons: An Overview for Educators’.
Digital Culture Links: September 23rd 2010
Links for September 22nd 2010 through September 23rd 2010:
- Zotero Everywhere [Zotero Blog] – The big announcement from Zotero is that the reference management system is growing up from a Firefox-specific plugin to plugins for many browsers and even more importantly, a stand-alone desktop application. That’s the death of Endnote you can hear! The announcement: “Today we are announcing support for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer, which account for 98% of the web’s usage share. Plugins for these browsers will soon allow users to add anything they find on the web to their Zotero libraries with a single click, regardless of the their browser preferences. Rather than use the Zotero pane in Firefox, users will have the new option of accessing their libraries via a standalone desktop version of Zotero, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.”
- Google’s Chief Defends His Privacy Comment — or Joke [NYTimes.com] – In an interesting on his infamous comment that teens should be able to change their names when they become legal adults in order to escape their online histories, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told The Colbert Report that then comment was intended as a joke and his intention was simply to emphasise the fact that once something is online it’s potentially there forever. This is either a very clever sidestep by Schmidt to get around one of this most legendary gaffs, or the slowest retraction ever not-quite-issued. See the video:
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Eric Schmidt Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News - Announcement: Dissertation, “Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Self-Branding in Web 2.0,” now available [tiara.org] – Alice Marwick has generously shared her 2010 Ph D dissertation, “Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Self-Branding in Web 2.0.” under a Creative Commons (CC BY NC ND) license (PDF link). This is a must-read for those interested in social media, the way Web 2.0 is used (Marwick does a great job contextualising the term) and obviously social media more broadly. (Strongly recommended for Web 101 and Web 207 students.)
- A Better Games Experience [Facebook] – Facebook moves to reduce the number of people annoyed by social game feeds in their news, while making the game news more central for social/casual gamers: “Previously, you’ve had the ability to hide an application story, or block it completely. Now, we’re putting changes in place so game stories only post to your feed if you’re playing them. This means people who play games can post stories to their Wall without worrying about overwhelming their friends who aren’t playing, and people who don’t play games won’t see irrelevant stories in their feed for which they have no context.”
- Twitter patches hole after cyber attack [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Twitter has fixed a security flaw on its popular social media website after a cyber attack sent some users to Japanese porn websites. […] It said no user information was compromised. A tweet from Twitter’s safety chief said the attack had been “fully patched” and that hackers could no longer exploit the flaw. “We don’t believe any user info was compromised,” the tweet said. Twitter’s website was hijacked by users who exploited a security flaw that allowed messages to pop up and third-party websites to open when a user moved their mouse over a link, security technology company Sophos said. Sophos, which has no formal business relationship with Twitter, says the messages spread without users’ consent.” Twitter’s Official Response
On the Rise of Apps …
A neat visualisation from Flowtown on the back of a recent Pew report on US-based mobile and App use.
Ping: It Just Doesn’t Work
Amongst the hoppla about Apple’s revamped-once-more iPod updates this week, something slightly different emerged: Steve Jobs announced the release of Apple’s new music-based social network Ping. Given Apple’s reputation for designing hardware and software with the philosophy “It Just Works”, you’d imagine Ping would be worth exploring. At this stage, at least, though, you’d be wrong: as a social network, Ping is dead on arrival. Perhaps that’s because Jobs originally wanted to connect Ping with Facebook so users could populate their friend connections easily. Apparently that hasn’t happened because Apple and Facebook have their own terms and conditions for playing in their walled gardens, and the two aren’t compatible (the New York Times is now calling the two companies ‘frenemies’).
In Dave Winer’s wrap-up of Ping, he highlights the major problems: no one’s using it yet, it’s really hard to actually find other users, it only runs in iTunes (not traditional browsers), and it’s based on your purchase history – not your listening history – with no option to add non-purchased music to your own interests. In short, Ping’s all about your iTunes store purchases; clearly Apple’s motivation is to build more interaction and recommendations between users, but unless you’re a big iTunes store purchasers, I can’t see how this service will ever ‘know’ enough about you to be useful (and, no, I wouldn’t take the trouble to list my interests even if I could now, since the only way for people to find me is to string search for names or emails). Beyond that, spammers are already moving in.
Apple have implemented pretty simple privacy controls, but given your Ping identity has to be the name associated with your iTunes Store account, it’s unclear whether anyone can use nicknames (I can’t find a way) which leads to its own privacy issues. Sure, this is the first iteration of Ping, and it’s likely to be improved, but there’s a long way to go and releasing this minimal a social network really doesn’t do Apple any favours. While Mashable suggested Ping would be the last nail in MySpace’s coffin, the amount Apple got wrong with Ping actually reminds us that MySpace really wasn’t (and for many people, isn’t) that bad! Ping: it just doesn’t work.
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