I have a wish from a student in my Språkkonsult (Language Consultancy) course who wants to learn to build websites. I have been teaching them to use wordpress + tools to create an integrated (albeit fragmented) online web presence. I wonder if building a site, say from Dreamweaver, is a useful skill in a course that only goes three weeks and tries to cover a lot of ground? How useful are sites that are built outside of content management systems? Of course these sites are useful – but to give these students who are not online a lot of the time a course in website building instead of the cultural and discourse/linguistic aspects of online tools (+ the popular, social media) seems to me to be the wrong way to go. What do you think? Is there some kind of tool that will let the students build a presence online (it does not have to contain a blog), but that looks nice and contains relevant, professional information?
This first week of 60 posts seems to be a lot of planning posts, but at the beginning of the term planning can be a beneficial and time-saving thing. A few days ago I charted out how much of my thesis was done. Like done-done – not needing to be reworked done – and it was much less than I had thought.
To keep track of all the different projects I have going this semester, I started using a program called Curio. It seems like a good overall program, although there are more powerful task-specific programs for tasks such as mind mapping, outlining, and task management. The strength of Curio is that you can do all of these things in the same program – and it also syncs with Evernote (which I already use a lot and love). Unfortunately, Curio has a steeper learning curve than the screenshots and pretty colors would lead you to believe – at least for keeping track of the status of completed tasks, which is the feature I am most interested in.
I will try to implement this program into my task planning this term and see how it goes. Another feature I am excited about trying is the full screen mode. When planning with students (in front of a class for a final project, for example), the program can be a great visual way of planning together. Going full screen may be interesting for other teaching tasks, as well.
Trying out a new iPhone app for blogging. Forgot what it is called. I use wordpress to run this blog but have never been able to blog from that app. Hope this one works better. This week I really start on the aoir writeup so I am sure there will be mote posted here soon!
I am an avid YouTube user, and often use videos in my teaching. Not so recently there was a Pork and Beans Dance contest that I was using in a class as an example of remediation, but when I tried to show the video in class – whoops, gone.
And while some are trying to help by filming their screen and putting back online, the crack down at YouTube is causing more and more of these accounts to be suspended.
Are we in the middle of a war between old-fashioned copyright and the remix generation. But what seems to be escaping many of these old-copyrightcarpetbaggers is that remixing often spreads their artists’ music better than all their expensive publicity. Users have experienced the creativity of the remix and don’t want to go back to passive reception of media.
In the video above, the CNN corespondent mentions that grassroots media (bloggers, twitter, facebook) played an important part in the Obama race. This election was not only about this great man, but about a renewed feeling in the American dream. The feeling that together we can make informed decision, that we can effect change, and that when we believe that mistakes have been made we can come together and, well, make a change.
Go through the site, Obama in 30 seconds. You will see this meme reflected over and over in the videos.
Jenkin‘s was right. These videos were not about the candidate, rather the spirit of participatory culture transposed onto participatory democracy. Participatory democracy may seem like an oxymoron on the surface, but if you look at the historically low voter turn-outs in comparison with this election voter turn-out then democracy has been far from participatory for a long, long time. Has new media been the catalyst? I would venture no – not by itself. Blogs were widely used in the last election. I think it is a combination of factors. The mix of weariness of the current regime, the ease of new media tools, and a candidate that was perceived both as an underdog, but also an ‘everyman’. So yes, grassroots media was important in this race, and the youth using this media was important (see video below), but this is not nearly as much a reflection of the affordances of new media as a reflection of the sentiment of the everyman in America. We wanted change, and in the mantra of the Obama campaign we knew that change was just a matter of saying ‘Yes we can’
Have you heard of Bubblare? It is a Swedish video sharing site. I have had a quick look, and what I found striking about the front page is the amount of American media content foregrounded. Granted, there is a lot of Swedish content as well, what plays when you open the site is Elvis’ ‘Hound Dog’. The following video was also very prominent…
It will be interesting to look at this site as a compliment to my YouTube research. Are there more Swedish youth here, or are they located on the more international YouTube, or somewhere else entirely?
They are playing with video streaming in HUMlab’s island in Second Life and my lecture, introducing blogs to Museology students, will be streamed in about 15 minutes to this SLURL, http://xrl.us/HUMlabSL (will activate closer to lecture time).
Trying to post from my new phone. Having a little trouble getting used to the keyboard. But so worth the effort. I can see this for quick and dirty posting, but for longer more creative posts I would want my laptop :-)
This site is one researcher's wanderings through participatory media. Focusing on youth created media, I will use this blog to document my study of YouTube and related video hosting sites.
You can contact me through email stephanie (dot) hendrick (at) humlab (dot) umu (dot) se. Or through comments on this blog...
This site is one researcher's wanderings through participatory media. Focusing on youth created media, I will use this blog to document my study of YouTube and related video hosting sites.
