CogBlogged from ‘November, 2007’

presentation by Joe Lambert at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. This session will discuss a range of approaches from the field of media arts in capturing stories, from creative writing prompts, to interview techniques, to place-based recordings, and talking into images and film. Come learn what works, what doesn’t, and what might be best suited to your project. Short writing exercise… storytelling is mainly about desire, an arc of reaching what you want. Write 10 things that you really love. Flip side, write 10 things that make you furious. One word each. Read the list of likes in normal voice, but read the second list slowly with feeling. Asks them to ask for which ones were surprising that they wrote down. Asks each of us to pick the one word on either of our lists and describe the moment when we felt that emotion. Joe shows digital story about New [...]

Not the Sunday Funnies: Lessons from Webcomics presentation by Ruben Puentadora at NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. It all began in 1993 with a one-panel comic called “Doctor Fun,” published on the University of Chicago Library website. Others soon followed, and today the webcomic is a flourishing medium, with thousands of authors uploading their creations worldwide. Webcomics have evolved rapidly over time, generating new and unique narrative approaches to digital storytelling. We will examine the history of the medium, the new languages it has created, and its uses in learning environments. Ruben was nfluenced to digital storytelling by session (following a really bad day at a conference) with a Dana Atchley session on digital storytelling – Ruben sees potential for expression in web comics. History of genre – “it would take 5 days to do it all– and there are grey areas, who did what, etc.” Doctor Fun by David [...]

Opening keynote for the NMC Regional Conference at Tulane is Words and Music, Crafts and Costumes, Ritual and… Radio: The Power of Old Media in New Orleans by Nick Spitzer, of American Routes “the radio program from New Orleans devoted to the sources and symbols of blues and jazz, country and gospel, roots rock and soul, as well as related ethnic, regional, popular and classical styles of the music and musicians that define the landscape of American vernacular culture.” Spitzer presenting in image and music- In a conference devoted to the wide and dazzling array of new media in relationship to intimate community life in New Orleans and elsewhere, much of what may be extended in the classroom, broadcast or global networks comes from original human forms of expression. The implications of which are: pre-modern forms of artistic communication still speak to us, old modern forms like radio offer time-tested [...]

Hands Off My Beignets! posted 6 Nov ’07, 10.27pm MST PST on flickr Cafe du Monde, the famous spot in New Orleans for coffee and sugar piled on dough fried in fat! As the resident diabetic, I could only photograph the carnage. It’s the night before another great NMC event- the New Orleans Regional Conference at Tulane.

Evening on Bourbon Street posted 4 Oct ’05, 9.51pm MDT PST on flickr I really like New Orleans. And I miss it. I’m off tomorrow early early for a flight to New Orleans- this week is the 2007 NMC Regional Conference hosted by Tulane University. C’mon down to the Quarter! (also trying desperately to see if there is any chance that technorati actually picks up a *#&^ing tag)

Aw shucks, it’s like Navin R. Johnson discovering he is listed in the phone book, I find I am small icon listed on TwitterPoster: Can you find me? I am three rows below Justine, who with 5226 followers, is supersized. I swear she is looking at me. I think she likes me…. Ego-googling is expired- subscribing to technorati feeds of your own stuff is tired…. and twitter poster is wired! WTF? Why do I have 440 followers? Who are you? Why are you following me? Creepy! Some of you have bad breath! I’m sorry, but I rarely even look at all the twitter bacn that comes to my inbox, and I usually dont follow back. I’m not being snobby, and its not that I am disinterested in your own twittering, its just… well, if I did follow 500 people I would end up reading them all. Okay that is a [...]

Cooking with Bee posted 1 Nov ’07, 9.11pm MDT PST on flickr Although I’ve been home from my Australia Tour, I’m glad I still have opportunities to hang out with my colleagues Down Under. Last night, I joined them via Second Life for the New South Wales (NSW) Learnscope finale, E-Learning07 . This is the showcase of 2007 NSW LearnScope projects and Flexible Learning Framework projects based in NSW. I liked how they had all of their projects submit summaries as slidecasts- see http://www.slideshare.net/tag/nswlearnscope07.. The conference was a 2 day face to face event in Sydney, but included parallel components in Second Life on the jokaydia sim. It closed with a panel session organized by the versatile Bee, Barbara Dieu which she poetically set up with a culinary theme of Cooking Up a Storm in Education. I was honored to be invited as one of Bee’s panelists, along with Josie [...]

Waiter! There’s Prim Hair in My Soup posted 1 Nov ’07, 9.10pm MDT PST on flickr Look for the bald avatar And people call Second Life silly….

I don’t spend much time with OS X widgets, and I prefer not to load up as the eat RAM, but I just found a very useful and free one worth the RAM. TimeScroller allows you to enter 8 different cities around the world. Now here is what’s cool, the scroll bar allows me to slide time to see how it matches up in different cities, so it can help you schedule meetings with people in other zones, or to deal with trying to plan things in Second Life, where time is referenced to Pacific time. But it gets better- when you click the icon in the lower left, it launches a new email message wth the times listed so you can send them to your colleagues. Did I mention this was free?

Doing productive work today exploring identity and perception via web 2.0 technologies… nah, I am just messing around at BeFunky. More or less with a limited tool set, you can create a “Uvatar” a mashup of “You” and “Avatar” – when I set up the account as a beta tester, it claimed to create these animation type graphics from an uploaded photo (i sent mine but it never got done) and now it seems that is a $4.99 service charge. So I just used the preset Barbie like choices, to make me a leather dude in a bar. Yeah right. I did have Jennifer Lopez on my arm, but swapped her out when I found a black lab. You can upload, or take a web cam shot with the Cartoonizer- it creates those kind of images that blur video and animation like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life