I’m not going to pretend to understand the Yam Yarn but if it’s yams the people want, it’s yams I’ll give them.
Learning at some schools is like drinking from a firehose.
I’m already blown away by the amazing programming chops being show by Cogdog and now John Johnston who created this awesome Flickr Quote Visualization Tool that allows you to grab random images, remove the extra stuff, and visualize a quote in as few as possible. This was my first go at it and it’s a ton of fun, not the least of which because everything loads almost instantaneously.
The Cooler Animated Movie Poster
The wild mating call of the animated gif has lured me once more to the clutches of ds106. For this assignment I went to http://www.impawards.com/ to check out the selection of movie posters. Although I’m not familiar with this flick the look of the poster was just begging for that neon to go live. Process was your basic Photoshop animated gif adjusting the saturation of the red using the sponge tool on a few frames and then doing a freeform selection on the eyebrows and rotating them for a single frame. Here’s the result.
Mobile karaoke on the streets of…
Mobile karaoke on the streets of Fredericksburg last night was a blast!
2011 Online Venice Exhibit
We talk a lot about livestreaming and broadcasting at DTLT. It has quickly become one of the core focuses of our group through projects like DTLT Today and the purchase of our own Kit. We made the proposal to the Teaching Center at UMW to have a kit that would allow us flexibility to go into a classroom and broadcast that action live, bring in folks from around the world to engage and interact with the students. Yesterday we got the first opportunity to do just that.
Professor Marjorie Och has led a group of art history students at UMW through the creation of an exhibit on Venice that is completely online. You can probably guess based on that URL that we helped them build it on top of WordPress with UMW Blogs and between the work they did and some tweaking we did to the Autofocus+ theme the site is gorgeous.
The opening of the exhibit was yesterday and Andy and I brought the whole setup down to the room to stream it live. I made the announcement on Twitter that we’d be broadcasting and even though there wasn’t a live chat involved with this particular project, I knew from feedback that folks were watching.
@timmmmyboy I feel so much smarter. Learning about traditional artists while writing a blog post on street artists.
@FJFitz
Frank Fitzparick
Because of how great Wirecast is we were able to easily install Desktop Presenter on the instructor station and pull that in as a feed source for the video. The result is a mix of straight camera shots of the student’s presenting their work combined with a live view of them showing PowerPoints and displaying their sections of the site. You can catch the full video at their exhibit site at http://venice11.umwblogs.org/opening/.
What’s also great is that they’ve chosen to leave comments open on all pages of the site. This isn’t a static product that they’ve created, it’s an exhibit that invites discussion and they’ve kept that channel open. It’s a beautiful model for how a collaborative group project can come together and the students of UMW along with Professor Marjorie Och have much to be proud of. Of course I couldn’t let this moment go without talking a bit about it on DTLT Today yesterday so you can watch that for some more background.
Pro Bono Web Design
Before I got into instructional technology, even back before I was doing IT work, I went to college for graphic design. I have a Bachelors degree in Studio Art with a concentration in Graphic Design for whatever that’s worth, but mainly I had been focusing on web design near the end of my studies. I did quite a bit of freelance work in the years afterwards when time permitted. I miss it and want to start doing it more.
I like the idea of taking on a few clients because it mixes things up. I love working with faculty, don’t get me wrong, but the idea of playing with a restaurants website, or a musician, is pretty appealing and helps me to recognize the challenges of designing in different spaces. Problem is my portfolio is practically bare. I could show you some screenshots of previous sites I’ve done but to be honest I’ve learned a lot since I was in college and I’d rather have a fresh start.
So here’s the deal. I’m going to do some classic “pro bono” web design work. That’s right, no charge whatsoever. There are a few terms and conditions, mainly that you promise to work with me instead of expect a handout and that you have an existing site already. But I’m looking forward to helping some people out, and in the process growing my portfolio a bit. If you’re interested, or you know someone that might be, send them to http://owensdesigns.com/offer for the full details where they can submit their information. I can’t promise to take everyone on obviously, but I’m hoping to do a few over the next few months.
Twitter and the 140 Character Limit
❖ From the blog: Twitter and the 140 Character Limit http://t.co/apWsFXL2 #restrictions #limits @timmmmyboy @twitter Let’s fix this eh? ####
@timmmmyboy
Tim Owens
Twitter has been around for several years now and iterated constantly during that time. In some cases they have made changes to core features that folks have used for a long time. For example when they saw that people were “forwarding” tweets or agreeing with them by “retweeting” them with the style “RT: ….” they decided to build in a mechanism for retweeting that wouldn’t require any typing, just a single click and it’s pushed to others streams verbatim with credit. But one glaring issue that has been present since inception is the 140 character limit.
Don’t get me wrong, many say that the 140 character limit is partial to Twitter’s success. It was born of the idea that most people would use Twitter via SMS on their phones, which has a 160 character limit. They dropped it to 140 in order to accommodate for the user’s name in the tweet. And a lot of people are big fans of this limitation and I can understand why. If you’re going to write a post, write it on your blog. Twitter was meant for quick status updates. At one point the site even prompted you when you composed a new tweet “What are you doing?”. But there are a few things that could at least help make this limitation less frustrating.
Conversations
At the #vste2011 Tweet Up with @greenae @timmmmyboy @timstahmer @aliharper20 @twoodwar @chad_the_itrt
@BeckyFisher73
BeckyFisher73
I use Twitter a lot for interacting with other folks. Many times it’s not only one person but several. The more people I include on a conversation, the less I can actually say! This causes me to constantly revise my messages, curating both what I say and who I say it to because of this limitation which exists because of the artificial and incorrect reality that I might be using it via SMS. Twitter needs to build in a way for us to add multiple people in on a tweet without it affecting the character count.
URLs
There are a proliferation of URL shorteners on the web, and many exist primarily because of the popularity of Twitter as a service for sharing information with the necessity of brevity. This summer Twitter rolled out their own URL shortener (t.co) that is used automatically on any link added to Twitter. This causes several issues:
- By wrapping any and every link with a shortener not only is Twitter putting a potential point of failure between a tweet and the story it mentions, but in many cases the links we share on Twitter are already shortened (with perhaps a shorter URL) and Twitter continues to insist on wrapping it again in their URL shortener.
- By using a URL shortener I lose all context for the link I’m about to click. Twitter says this is so they can check all URLs and protect us from harmful activity. Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather know exactly where I’m headed when I click a link, and that goes for all URL shorteners.
Links take up quite a bit of space too. The t.co domain is up to 13 characters now and grows rapidly as the userbase of Twitter grows everyday. The solution to this issue is to stop counting URLs against the character count. It’s a simple solution, albeit one that again flies in the face of people that love the restriction that 140 characters provides. Please let me add a URL to my tweet without limiting my message by at least another 13 precious characters.
Hashtags
I want to believe there’s some way that I can include my message in a separate stream of related tweets without having to tag that message with even more characters. Hashtags are yet another relic of a system of tagging that users developed early on. Twitter built in the ability to search against them and filter but wouldn’t it be even better if I could just tag my tweet without it yet again limiting what I can type? By reducing the character count when adding hashtags I’m less likely to submit my tweet into multiple streams of conversation. Again, the more I want my voice heard, the less I get to actually say.
Restrict the 140 character count to actual message body text while opening up tweets to include URLS, images, other Twitter users, and be tagged essentially “for free”. The only people this hurts are those that rely on SMS for Twitter. I’m ok with giving them a dumbed down experience. We’re literally talking about users who don’t have a smartphone. What’s the likelihood they’re going to be able to access any of that non-textual data on a dumbphone anyway?
Remix culture is the new Prohibition
Andy Baio (who you might remember from the big Kind of Bloop copyright mess) has written an excellent piece on copyright in a culture that legitimately does not see this as a legal issue. He points out that under current law every cover song, mashup album, and fanfic story are all illegal and there is mass confusion from a younger generation that doesn’t understand why the art they created is getting pulled. We see this all the time in higher ed and it’s a constant issue in courses like ds106 where students are actively encouraged to remix content and publish it. He closes with a compelling thought that I truly believe will drive copyright reform in the next several years:
Here’s a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.
What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office?
Once Upon
Seems like lately I’m coming across more and more featured artwork that could easily be wrapped into a ds106 assignment. Such is the case with these great 1997 versions of popular websites. Google Plus, Facebook, and YouTube make an appearance here (and I love that the artists used Netscape Navigator to frame them!) but I think we could take it one step further. What would ds106 and the idea of a massive open online course look like in the 1997 web? How about Twitter or WordPress? I’m going to give it a shot next semester, or maybe during the break, and I’m adding it to the assignments now.
Adding Tweets in WordPress
I’ve become pretty accustomed to taking screenshots anytime I wanted to talk about something someone posted on Twitter. Of course there’s Storify which is cool in its own right, but I can’t say that creating a new “story” and searching for tweets, putting it all together, and publishing, and then moving to the blog to embed and try to make it look clean is at all user friendly. Then I happened to come across a plugin called Twitter Blackbird Pie today. It makes it easy to paste a tweet into a blog post by just grabbing the permalink of the tweet and pasting it into the body of the post. But what’s really great is that Twitter announced today a new embed API that makes it a lot more interactive. You can reply directly to a tweet from these embed, as well as favorite, retweet, etc. Pretty awesome actually! I could see this being incredibly useful to tell stories in a blog post. Grab a list of links and paste and you can narrate a particular story. The recent shootings at Virginia Tech are happening as a right this post and I can document some of what I’m reading in realtime right on my blog as demoed below:
Gun shots reported- Coliseum Parking lot. Stay Inside. Secure doors. Emergency personnel responding. Call 911 for help.
@vtnews
Virginia Tech News
A VT Alert was just sent, stating that gun shots were heard near Coliseum parking lot.
@CollegiateTimes
Collegiate Times
Suspect described as white male, gray sweat pants, gray hat w/neon green brim, maroon hoodie and backpack. On foot towards McComas. Call 911
@vtnews
Virginia Tech News
RT @VTmorrison: Picture from Coliseum lot 5 mins ago http://t.co/7JEvV7yw
@CollegiateTimes
Collegiate Times
Reports of recent sounds ID’d as gunshots and suspicious activity on campus have been investigated and are unfounded. Stay where you are.
@vtnews
Virginia Tech News
Another shooting at VA Tech. Good gracious. I pray for anyone affected. They need to evaluate their campus culture, again.
@jeffhalliday
jeffhalliday
Thoughts and prayers with all my friends and colleagues at Virginia Tech. Praying for your safety. #virginiatech
@GardnerCampbell
Gardner Campbell
RT @jamiechung: @CollegiateTimes Photos from the Cage: http://t.co/NA3GmMc2
@CollegiateTimes
Collegiate Times
Anderson: state police, local police, campus police, swat, other nearby cops at least on standby, FBI is either here or en route.
@umwbullet
UMW Bullet
RT @HuffingtonPost: WATCH: Press conference on Virginia Tech happening now http://t.co/rjr649Yj
@umwbullet
UMW Bullet
On the backend that is just a list of links but it displays beautifully and each tweet is completely interactive. Seems like a great way to visualize messages from a service I use more and more everyday and that demo highlights for me again how important Twitter has become as a mechanism for gathering breaking news. I’m not a cheesy “change my avatar/we are all hokies” kinda guy but I’m definitely keeping them in my prayers right now.
