Archive for September, 2009

Ramblings on the ‘Film Festival’

After haing seen all films of the film festival series I have to be careful not to get too depressed.
Clearly the gloomy outlook of dystopia dominates over utopia in most of the clips illustrating a widespread fear of mankind/creative artists of what the technological future holds.
And even where individuals do have a different degree of perception what is going on as in Elephant’s Dream, dystopia seem to come out to in the end.

The clip Take off represents a truly Orwellian representation of a future world where the existence of a green landscape is only a distant memory.

Luckily the dominant negativity in most clips is ameliorated by some light hearted animations as expressed in  The Internet is for Porn or Social Network for Two, the latter a virtual expression of love.

Overall an interesting though somewhat disturbing experience.

In at the deep end

This is the end of week 1 summary:
And in all honesty this has been a rather busy week.
Dabbling ainto nd acclimatizing oneself to WordPress, setting up the Livestream and Twittering, all this was very new to me and certainly not recommended for the uninitiated.
In all honesty I was missing at times the ease, cosyness and comfort of the VLE!
The syndication of the Livestream though seems to be working ok; I managed to pull in resources from the QuickPress blog (easy), Twitter hashtags, Vimeo (Flip video), del.icio.us bookmarks and picasaweb photo/ image. That should do for the time being.
I may be tempted to include my Blogger site and possibly Flickr later. Pity though that my Fliggo video site would not syndicate.
And then there were the two readings of Hand (difficult) and Bell (easier). I also tried the Poster article but got destracted.
And finally the Film festival; good idea to make students aware of, recognise and appreciate digital artwork (in this case movie clips) on the Web.
Conclusion: breathtaking stuff using cutting edge tools – e-learning of a different kind.

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Film Festival – Part 1

What a good idea to start the first two weeks with some light ‘online entertainment’ fittingly within the constraints of the module learning outcomes.
The week one set consisted of four rather different mvies from some creative artists work (one of which a movie excerpt).
These male up a lively mixture consisting of a thought-provoking cartoon (based on the popular Eastern-European genre of the 1970/80s), a sinister clip from the movie Space Odysee, a humorous irony on the use of online porn using familiar WoW characters and a musical-type video discussing the lateral effects of a computer virus.
I am still trying to work out how these films fit into the theoretical framework of our reading material but on the face of it they provide a innovative and light-hearted addition to our learning experience.

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Reflections on M. Hand

‘From Hardware to Software to Everyware’
Hand tries to dissect and analyse the divergent views on the meaning of ‘Digital Cultures’ and its relationship to and meaning within current society.
In essence there are conflicting views as to whether within a digital culture there are opportunties for a more participatory (and perhaps even more decocratic) society or whether it represents a move towards total commodification and surveyance of the (mindless) citizen consumer who will continue to be manipulated by the organisations in control of information.
My fear is that the default situation is the latter (driven by capitalist market forces) whilst theire will be opportunities for critical minds across the globe to have a fringe existence online to practice alternative digital cultures, tolerated by the establishment as a playground.

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Amplify testing

I have just been testing the new Amplify (Amplify.com) tool to highlight and post relevant content onto Twitter.
At present only available for Firefox; works by putting your text onto the Amplify server and placing a link from Twitter to it; a bit clunky; would be better if it went straight onto Twitter.
IE?Chrome versions pending

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Film Festivals

I have mixed feelings about the four videos as they convey quite different genres. Personally I liked the light-hearted ironic approach of ‘The Internet is for Porn’ with its rudiculous political incorrectness.
The Bendito machine provides a reflective insight into huan affnity for mindless workship and leadership, including technology.
The ‘Stop Dave’ movie is too dystopian and dehumansed for my tasting and the ‘Computer Virus’ rather banal if not irritating.
Will read the recommended texts tomorrow to detect any clarifications.

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A sobering experience

As part of the IT/e-learning induction event I have been running today for our PG-student freshers I was surprised to find out that a clear majority have not experienced a VLE/CMS as part of their past learning experience.
My intial response was disappointment on the lack of technological awareness of these (mature) learners.
On deeper reflection though this could be interpreted as an opportunity to let these learners bypass the limitations of the VLE and move them on to the freedom of Web2.0 – but would they cope?
The entire scenario appears to be analogous to the Third World countries bypassing the experience of a landline phone infrastructure – instead they will leapfrog straight into the world of mobile connectivity – and it appears to be they have little difficulty in mastering this technology.
So would the same apply to these learners – do we trust them enough?

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HD Flip Demonstration

A little snapshot of two friends talking to each other at ALT-C2009 using a handheld Flip HD video recorder 2009

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Day 0

Tomorrow, 22 Sept. the Digital Cultures module is meant to start – activity is building up gently as the Wallwisher page is filling up and also the first Twitter following messages arer bouncing to and fro.
Still not quite sure how the official launch will look like but I’m sure Sian has sorted something out.
Is she slightly nervous too?

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Getting ready

After haing spent a fair junk of Saturday to get a feel for tools and interfaces today is a day of rest – just a quick blog.
However on reflection I’d say that I find the interconnection between Blackboard and WordPress somewhat confusing in particular in regards to the Discussion Board. There appears to be unnecessary complexity within the system.
It will also be interesting to see how the livestream setup will work.
Overall some apprehensive excitement is building up

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