edublogs

Internet Memes - the timelines

So you've done your YouTube anthropology class, you now need to spend a bit of time brushing up on history's internet memes with these delightful, entertaining and "was it really that long ago?" moments. A nice way to start rounding off the year...

The fascists' names are leaked... crowdsourcing finds its place

Earlier this week the UK's very own "Nationalist Party", the BNP, had the misfortune to leak its member list, showing the names and addresses of racists, fascists and those who "don't want that kind of person taking our jobs". It's been citizen-created mashups of this data that have made the news.

To republish the list would be illegal, so newspapers such as the Guardian printed the numerical stats on line-art maps. Far from breaking the law, it was crowdsourcing that came up with a better solution, both allowing us to see how many BNP-ers are on our doorstep without revealing their names and exact locations. Cue the anonymous, but powerful, BNP member Google Heatmap, which has since allowed our Government ministers to realise the pockets where local politics lets people down.

These are some of the subversive uses of technology that keep an eye on money and power that we are keen to support further through 4iP. We've got a few on the boil, so keep your eyes peeled for them.

Thanks to Stuart on the 38minutes blog for highlighting it.

World War One in colour

It's a week late, perhaps, for some topical teaching but astounding nevertheless. Der Spiegel has published several collections of old colour photos, but this set of WW1 trench warfare in colour just reminds us that the world wasn't played out in black and white before the 50s.

Ewan in Derbyshire on Media Lit, Visual Storytelling

I've been reading the superb Henry Jenkins and some of his wonderful points in a recent paper, if not a little too complex to get across in one small talk, were included in this teacher's small talk this morning - and contributed to my wee overrun (wrist duly slapped).

The main thrust of what I was saying can be seen in video from my New Zealand conference appearance, with accompanying links and notes here, and the gaming for visual storytelling is fairly well summed up in a previous post, too.

Digital Storytelling: Winton wins

Neil Winton, Scottish edublogger, great writer and highly respected teacher (I know, because I've read his students' Bebo pages) has won the Me In 4 Slides competition. Congrats!

Me In 4 Slides is a great example of a digital autobiography, a story told through, in this case, digital photography, much in the same way as A Story In Five Frames or Six Word Story. dy/dan, the competition curator, picked up on the concept, though, based on the recent news that the Chicago Graduate Business School requires all applicants for it to produce a four slide Powerpoint presentation as part of the entry requirements. You can view the finished entry on Slideshare, below.

How about we ask those giving a seven-minute talk at TeachMeet07 to introduce themselves this way? Would be a turn off or a turn on? It'd certainly make introductions more fun.

Scoopt... again

  The headline - Citizen Journos 
  Originally uploaded by Edublogger

Social citizen journalism site Scoopt resold one of my photos today for a centre fold feature (hold it...) in The Independent, talking about this new generation of citizen journalists, or rather, citizens, who snap the news as it happens.

Scoopt is a real darling of the Scottish social media set which I discovered in the early days and introduced to Shel Israel and Rick Segal on their book creation tour. To be honest, we were pretty skeptical of this fairly tabloidy idea for selling images but, after meeting the founder of the company, Kyle Macrae, we were much more sold on the idea. So much so that as we came back into Edinburgh an hour later I saw the photo opp that I am still peddling today.

Earlier this year image giant Getty bought Scoopt out, but keep the citizen created content at the heart of the business.

Now I'm shooting a little less of the newsy stuff with the large SLR, finding that Scoopt's partnership with ShoZu means that in one click I can take and send the photo automatically for publication.

I've put the Independent spread in a Flickr tour which starts here so you can have a look and a read of the story and you can see the original set of pics there, too, as well as the original Sunday Times spread from late last year.

Tim Rylands on... something? ;-) Myst for learning language

Tim Rylands is great. His voice is captivating, his anecdotes and questions (why has Mr Walkie (his walking stick) got holes all the way down it?) help set your mind open to new and maybe slightly crazy possibilities.

We're going to take a wee look at how some computer games in imaginary worlds can set the minds of our youngsters free: Riven, Myst III - Exile. What a shame it is that they haven't done a test run through his presentation, since we're running into all sorts of problems exploring these worlds through the eLive projector. Damn... I feel really bad for Tim who's now been asked to 'carry on'. I don't think people get it. If you've planned an hour and ten minutes, and then you get an hour because of the lengthy introductions, and then the projection screws up... well, you can't just carry on. Tim does anyway. Some guy...

Digital flipbooks
Make up one slide in PowerPoint, copy and paste and change a detail, copy and paste, change another detail and so on, until you get a series of pics which appear to animate a character as you flip through the images. Export as JPEGs and you can add them to your iPod to give a takeaway output to your students. It's animation on paper, with the nice touch of an iPod turn wheel to sweep through the images.

Flight of fantasy, mystery photo stories
Using PowerPoint and photographs Tim has had kids hyperlink within pics to kead people on a story, much in the same way as I've been suggesting by using photos with hyperlinked notes in Flickr. There's a lot in here for speaking skills as kids need to self organise and discuss who is going to take photos, add notes, storyboard...

Using Myst or Riven for creative thinking
In the game you have the opportunity to look up, look down, walk around or stand still and explore landscapes which seem so real. The teacher's role is to make the kids think metaphorically while actually 'being in the game'. "Take your shoes off, put your feet in the sand..." As you walk down the steps at the beach at the lagoon, make sure you go slowly. Go too fast and the two headed monsters run off to hide and you don't get to look at them.

This is great stuff for exploring speaking skills with an amazing, changeable structure. But it's also great for writing and reading, since there are some excellent examples of writing in the games. Learning logs with wonderful sketches of these landscapes and written descriptions help keep those memories and experiences. Verbal jazz, where one pupil makes up language to describe what their pal is revealing as they tour the land. Constant writing, as every experience is noted in the learning log.

All of this is done  with the kind of kit I'm used to working with: one computer, one projector and 30 sparks.

We need to take our time in learning
We do tend to make kids do a heck of a lot in a day, rushing things instead of taking pleasure in taking time to do things better. We need to take time to 'be there', to get into the mood for writing in this way, being one of the characters for empathetic writing. We need to slow kids down. One practical example: kids don't get paragraphs. But of you're describing the movement of the character in the game, when they turn, there is a pause (and a new paragraph, or a comma, or a full stop). In the right hands, with some time and thought, these worlds can be used to teach grammar (yawn) but in the most exciting and immersive of ways (yay!).

This is exactly the kind of thing that we've been suggesting for our own English departments in East Lothian. I wonder if they're up for discovering some magical worlds with their children, worlds with which their kids can identify.

It's PhotoShop, but it's online and free

There's nothing better when you're giving a workshop on a Mac and people sigh: "That's just brilliant, but what do you do if you own a PC?", to which you reply: "This is online. It's for both PC and Mac. And it's free."

FauxTo is just that, for those looking for a free (as in beer) online version of Photoshop. You can bring up images from your hard disk, from your webcam or from a URL (so a Flickr pic, for example) and then edit away to your heart's content. Best of all, as Steve noted when he tipped us off about it, you can start layering up images, something most other online photo and design apps miss out but which allows you to create much more original graphics.

Being a cheapskate I think I might now use this to tweak the images in my own masthead, to stop me looking quite so "depressed", "large shouldered" and full of "weird expressions" (your kind words, people). On a more serious note, this might become the subject of a more advanced version of our TeachMeet training over at eduBuzz.

Where have I been? Now on MyMaps and GoogleEarth

I'm sick today.

A chest infection that, in English, makes me sound like a Glasgow hardman, 60-a-day, ready to break your neck with just a flick of my pinkie, and which, in French, makes me sound like a film star from the nouvelle vague. I'm just relieved that tomorrow's speaking engagement is only 30 minutes long and that I can then spend the rest of the day eating and drinking silently to celebrate the retirement of Professor Dick Johnstone, the man who really opened the first vital door to me having the best job I could imagine.

From my sickbed (wifi is useful for this) I've finally been getting round to having a good play with Google's MyMaps. What I hadn't realised was that it automatically creates KML files which you can then click to launch exciting overlays in GoogleEarth.

KML files, for those who don't know, are small files which create different ways to view the earth through Google Earth, the amazing application on your desktop which, for free, brings the planet alive.

With this in mind, my first effort seems a little tame: a world map of where I've been recently and where I'll be heading later this year. If I start putting in some photos and videos from past dates this could be quite entertaining, for me at least.

At the beginning of the week, when I was showing some of our East Lothian teachers the power of just searching in Google with the additional word "kml" and/or "kmz", they were amazed at what they could find:

• "Roman times" kml
• "Holocaust" kml
• "Darfur Crisis" kml

I just didn't realise at the time how easy it would be for them to create their own overlays of local geography, stories, travel reports from kids' holidays etc... all in wondrous Google Earth 3D, just by plotting images, text or whatever on MyMaps first!

How can this be useful?
This could be used for creating tours that match a project the students are doing, to show your worldwide visits or country research. It could map out every Scottish school (something that's on the list for someone to do if someone out there doesn't do it first ;-)). If you're an organisation with links or clients all over the place you could help them see your global reach that much clearer and in a more realistic way by using video and images from their locations to bring Google Earth alive with your organisation's activities.

In the meantime, welcome to my current world through the goggles of my Speaking MyMap and the accompanying mcintosh_on_social_media.kml if you have GoogleEarth installed.

What would walking do for your carbon footprint and your waistline?

I've been spending a fair bit of time in London of late and, while I love the city, I've been facing the same conundrum I had while living in Paris: when is it better just to walk between points instead of taking the Underground?

The London Underground is superb (well, for a tourist it's very practical and there's no snob factor in terms of who uses it, like you find in the Paris métro). But often, where a trip between Embankment and Convent Garden would require a change and lots of steps, for example, a walk would get you there quicker (which TFL already lets you know), in a more pleasant atmosphere and in a way which impacts less on the environment.

Walkit.com, another discovery from Mike at the Edinburgh Coffee Morn, lets you see what route would be most interesting for your to take, tells you how many calories you'll burn and how much less your carbon footprint will be. It's just superb.

As Mike says, it would be great for Education authorities around the world to have something similar for their localities. However, after spending time with those computer studies teachers, it seems to me that this is a worthwhile database, spreadsheet, graphics and web project, all in one. Is it something an Advanced Higher student might undertake, Mark?