Technology and Creativity
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Video and Blogging: the chatter increases
It’s been a while between drinks here on Spinning … . I’ve been engaged in a blogging and life-activity sense elsewhere. Not that I haven’t been busy in the world of e-learning, but it’s been the Clayton’s blogging (blogging you do when not blogging) i.e., tweeting, instant messaging and so on which has been occupying me. The whole Twitter universe seems to have expanded incredibly in the past week; I am being followed by hordes of people suddenly (hmm … another spammy manifestation which makes me feel as though I am being ‘collected’ randomly). Quite a few of my colleagues are suddenly ‘getting’ the point of Twitter. Me, still not sure, though good for a quick notification, help me out here, late night roundups of activity sort of thing.
Continue reading ...Tiny, wee movies and moving postcards
From today, the fabulous Flickr photo application allows pro users ($US24.95 a year) to upload up to 90 secs of individual videos to their site. Formerly users could submit still shots only. I’ve been shooting and collecting images in a ‘theatres’ set on my Flickr page for a few years now. This morning I added
Continue reading ...The State of e-learning in Early 08
Image from WikipediaOne of my favourite sites is The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies which contains a link to Jane Hart’s blog. Jane keeps a finger on the pulse of e-learning and she’s doing some great longitudinal research into who is using what tools and where. I’ve been signed up via her blog this
Continue reading ...Moving Postcards
photo credit: Leo Reynolds
I’m on holiday, so I’ve been playing with Animoto again today. I produced a short animated postcard on life around my place, here on a ridge in southern Queensland. It’s called Yarrawonga, which in the language of the indigenous people means ‘place of trees.’ I took the shots from the Project 366 set I’ve created on Flickr.
Continue reading ...When the creative juices dry up …
photo credit: gl0ri And they do! This morning a few little tips to unblock the dries came in an e-letter that I subscribe to. It was addressing photography specifically, but hey … creativity is creativity. Tip # 5 resonated for me. It’s one of my own tactics when prepping for a show. Music especially seems
Continue reading ...PD, Twitter and Me
I stopped by a PD session for educators online this morning. It was run via ustream.tv on the wiki site Open pd and was not without its glitches (sound drop outs etc but this is almost mandatory in sessions like this). This truly open, global professional development session demonstrated a very useful way for individuals’
Continue reading ...Improvisational Magic: a TED Inspiration
I often use improvisation with my students in acting classes. It is never entirely ‘free-form’ as is often thought. Improvisation bears fruit when allowed free rein within a ‘cage’ of understood rules … what we tend to call in acting the given circumstances or GCs … the who, where, when and what of a scenario.
Continue reading ...Organisational Change and the Power of Collegiality
There’s been something of a theme running through the last half dozen or so posts here. I guess it’s a function of the time in the new academic year … beginnings and the raising of issues that are challenging us all. I was at another faculty meeting last week where e-learning was discussed. You could feel spines stiffen a bit as the topic went round the table. The conversation went something like this: ‘People won’t (make an effort/change their way of doing things/appear to be even slightly interested in innovation or … add your own phrase here) unless they are made to.’ Now the ‘people’ being referred to are academics. I’m moved to ask what happened to the spirit of intellectual inquiry and the desire to develop one’s scholarly practice? Well that’s another matter, but for now there’s a management imperative that has to be addressed by individuals in the faculty collective, and fast.
Continue reading ...Digital natives and the class blogging blues
It’s been quite a week and a bit getting a new class of students signed up and into blogging on a group project. I’ve written before on the apparent e-learning challenges to students, and on some of the roadblocks I’ve encountered with their digiphobia. This time round, very few found the process of signing up with edublogs … the platform I’d chosen for the class blog … to be a trial. It seemed that following the instructions and getting themselves signed in with user names was just too complicated to bother persisting. Keep the approach simple, but no simpler (thanks Einstein).
However, I’m wondering after the past 10 days whether, rather than the unfamiliar navigation in a new environment being the stumbling block, that it’s not the actual process of reading online that is the real problem.
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Another 31-Day Challenge!
Image: Thanks Stephen Downes Last August, and along with a smallish but hardy group of bloggers, I took the 31 Days to a Better Blog Challenge, led by the energetic and insightful Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project. As I’ve written elsewhere, this was a seminal event in my development as a blogger. (Use the
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